Walter Mitty: Behind the Fantasies

Charlie Chaplin once said, “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” This may also be true in the case of James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”. So much of the reader’s attention is drawn to the fantasies and their humorous intersections with the everyday world that it is easy to overlook textual clues as to the personas of Walter and Mrs. Mitty. Rob Pope addresses this on pages 168 and 169 in the Common Topics section of The English Studies Book. After defining the problem and the terms, Pope provides a possible procedure: “1 – Identify the presumed centre of the text: …2 – DEcentre it so as to draw attention to marginal or ignored figures, events, and materials…3 – Recognize that you have thereby REcentred the text. Weigh the implications of what you have done for an understanding of the text as you first found it. Also notice that you have produced another configuration which can in itself be challenged and changed, and further de- and recentred in turn.” If the fantasies were no longer central to the story, what would the text reveal about Walter Mitty’s life?

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” was first published in a 1939 volume of “The New Yorker”. It is the story of a man who constantly takes refuge from the everyday world by indulging in fantasies that feature him as a larger-than-life heroic figure, only to ‘wake up’ and find that he cannot even park a car without help. This short fiction centers on the fantastic daydreams of the main character, Walter Mitty. The word count of the full story is 2083. Without the fantasies, the word count drops down to 1004.

In his first fantasy (with which the story opens), Walter Mitty is the Commander of a Navy hydroplane, respected by his subordinates because of his fierce courage: “The Old Man’ll get us through,” they said to one another. “The Old Man ain’t afraid of hell!”…” In his next fantasy, he is the brilliant Dr. Mitty, called upon to treat a V.I.P., who manages to fix a machine that “there is no one in the East who knows how to fix” before performing surgery the other doctors are too craven to attempt. In Mitty’s next fantasy, he is a murder suspect who admits that he could have murdered the victim firing the pistol with his left hand, shelters a beautiful brunette, and when the District Attorney behaves badly, “Mitty let the man have it on the point of the chin”. In Mitty’s next fantasy, he becomes a world-weary, cynical, hard-drinking Captain of the Royal Air Force, departing the base to fly “forty kilometers through hell”. As the story closes, Mitty’s last fantasy is of his heroic self facing a firing squad “erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the undefeated, inscrutable to the last”.

Meanwhile, in the real world, as Commander Mitty guides his crew, Walter Mitty is driving an automobile (and increasing his speed). While he imagines himself saving the expensive machine and the millionaire friend of Roosevelt, he is still driving an automobile through busy traffic to reach the parking lot (where he nearly hits a Buick). Fortunately, while he imagines being questioned by the District Attorney, he is only walking along the sidewalk, trying to remember what his wife told him to pick up while he was out. His imaginary stint in the RAF occurred while he was safely ensconced in an armchair. The only danger involved in his final fantasy would be lung cancer (from the cigarette he smoked outside the drugstore).

So, there’s a lot of misdirection. Mitty’s fantasies are more exciting than remembering puppy biscuits or leafing through magazines. Everyone daydreams, so it is also a common thread, used to garner sympathy for the character. His wild imagination is funny, so much so that a film adaptation of the short fiction was made (starring Danny Kaye as Walter Mitty). The daydreams also keep the focus on Walter Mitty as he imagines himself.

That’s where this gets tricky. There are actually two main characters named Walter Mitty. One of them is the henpecked husband who can’t remove the chains from his tires; the other is his idealized self, the Walter Mitty he wishes he could be (or thinks he should have become). Still, the fantasy and reality of this story is all seen through ‘Mitty-vision’ and is therefore suspect. Walking in his shoes, there is much that the reader does not see.

The center has been identified and examined. The next step is to remove the fantasy sections of the text and center what remains. What does the real world text reveal about Walter Mitty? When his wife asks about his gloves, he exhibits passive-aggressive behavior. “He raced the engine a little…He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into the building and he had driven on to a red light, he took them off again.” He is forgetful, despite multiple reminders. “Walter Mitty began to wonder what the other thing was his wife had told him to get. She had told him, twice before they set out…” He worries how others perceive him. “The next time, he thought, I’ll wear my right arm in a sling; they won’t grin at me then. I’ll have my right arm in a sling and they’ll see I couldn’t possibly take the chains off myself.”

Mrs. Mitty is more prominently featured in this newly centered text. What does the text reveal about her? Mrs. Mitty does not like to ride in a car moving faster than forty miles per hour. She has a solid routine, one that includes a weekly trip to town to run errands and get her hair done. She tells Walter what to do, often phrasing it in the form of a question, using words and tone one expects in a mother addressing her child. “”What are you driving so fast for?”…”Why don’t you wear your gloves? Have you lost your gloves?”…”Why do you have to hide in this old chair? How did you expect me to find you?””

Mrs. Mitty, like so many women who marry dysfunctional men, is a control freak. She has to micromanage her husband, tell him what to do, where to go, and what to wear. This level of behavior is often fear-driven. Mrs. Mitty panicked when Walter went fifteen miles over her personal speed limit. Why? Was she aware that he wasn’t paying attention? Had they been in car accidents before, and she was trying to make sure they were never in another one? She panicked again when she didn’t see him in the hotel right away. Why? Did he have a tendency to wander off and get lost, or forget to take her home? Mrs. Mitty has motives, but James Thurber isn’t telling.

What does Walter leave out of his own narrative? He leaves out quite a bit, actually. The subtext (or absence) reveals a side of Walter Mitty that is considerably less than flattering or funny. He does not pay close attention to his surroundings. Three times in the narrative, he is snapped out of a fugue state and told to concentrate on his driving; once he goes fifteen miles faster than he intended, once he misses the change of a traffic light, and once he almost hits a Buick in a parking lot. Is he simply a bad or incompetent driver? Not according to the text: “He drove around the streets aimlessly for a time, and then he drove past the hospital on his way to the parking lot.” He only gets in trouble when he daydreams, but he obviously prefers the fantasies to his real life. When his wife snapped him out of his initial fantasy, “She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd.”

Walter seems capable of doing things right, if he can only stay in the moment. But is that entirely accurate? It is easy to lose track of how fast one is driving, or the color of a traffic light. However, in the parking lot he drives in the lane marked ‘Exit Only’ and begins to cautiously back up, but the attendant intervenes, insisting on putting Mitty’s car away. Why? Walter Mitty the narrator never addresses the issue, but the attendant doesn’t call Mitty by name, so my best guess is that the attendant saw Mitty come close to causing a collision as he backed up; otherwise, why would he bother parking the car when he didn’t have to (and it meant leaving his station)?

Walter doesn’t know what he may or may not have done wrong because he didn’t care enough to pay attention. He also doesn’t know how he managed to hook his chains around the axle. He doesn’t ever seem to get his errands right on their weekly trips to town. His fantasies are full of meaningless words and glaring inaccuracies. Why? Why should Walter bother to learn from his mistakes when it is so much easier to escape them, occasionally surfacing long enough to resent the competency of others? His priority is not to learn how to take off chains, but to appear physically incapable of taking them off, which shows that Walter Mitty values image over content.

Without the comedic interplay of fantasy and mundane reality to distract the reader, the gaps in the text are glaringly obvious. A reality-centered text belies the initial impression of the henpecked husband whose sole means of escape is a rich imagination. This new center reveals Walter Mitty as a man who cannot be bothered to live his own life, learn from his mistakes, or take responsibility because daydreaming is much easier and he knows his wife will take charge. Mrs. Mitty is depicted as less of a harridan than a fear-driven control freak who has likely been commanding by default and cleaning up her husband’s messes for years. Close reading of the text proves Chaplin right, as the lives and personas of Mr. and Mrs. Mitty seem tragic close-up.

Epitaph Two Ties Loose Ends on Dollhouse

Joss Whedon's Dollhouse aired it's series finale January 29, 2010 with an episode titled "Epitaph Two". He ended the first season with "Epitaph One", an episode only aired online. "Epitaph One" took place ten years in the future of the series and showed the consequences of the technology that was the show's construct. This technology, called Active Architecture, Wiping, and Imprinting, was used to replace a human being's original personality with a custom-designed persona. In the series proper, it was used to make the Actives, or Dolls, into fantasy lovers for rich clients. The Epitaph episodes explored the results of using the technology for military and medical applications. Wireless signals wiped the personalities from anyone not shielded; other signals imprinted people with the command to kill. The Epitaph episodes included the main cast from the series, but were not centered on them. It allowed for a wider scope and a natural ending to a well-written, engaging series. I will miss it.

Facebook Confessionals

Why do people do things they know are wrong and/or shameful and then post about it on Facebook and think it will stay a secret?

Do they not realize that Facebook is a public venue? Do they not remember that the people they are worried about knowing the secret are friends who can view the posts?

I have a friend, call her Tara, who doesn't want her family to know that she is dating. She posts on Facebook about her anticipation, who she likes, and what she's done. She thinks that she has kept her secret by replacing the names of her dates with types of food. The problem is it makes it seem like she is either using food as a euphemism for oral sex or that she is developing an eating disorder.

On other fronts, I have seen posts from teenagers who announce that they are grounded and then post updates on their success at sneaking out to do fun things. I will give kudos to two of this group for staying silent, but then I have to deduct points for being in the pictures posted on another friend's Facebook page.

“Let It Go”: A Writer Looks at Jack McDevitt’s novel Infinity Beach

Emily Brandywine went on an expedition to attempt to find proof of extraterrestrial intelligence, accompanied by Tripley, Kane, and Yoshi. The mission failed – or so they claimed. Emily was never seen again after the mission, leaving a younger clone-sister to grieve. A disastrous 'accident' involving the remaining three crew members made a small town unlivable and added Yoshi to the list of missing persons. Tripley and Kane kept their silence, taking their secrets to the grave. The next generation, comprised of Tripley's son, Kane's daughter, and Emily's clone-sister, deal with the fallout when Yoshi's last living relative starts asking questions and sharing his concerns with Kim Brandywine. What the expedition really found and what they did in response could potentially cause an interspecies war if the status quo is maintained. Yet, the only character who seems to consistently want to resolve the problem is Kim.

"Let it go."

These words are spoken by nearly every character with lines of dialogue in Infinity Beach. Every forward motion in pursuit of a goal is preceded by someone's request to drop the line of inquiry. The main protagonist, Dr. Kim Brandywine, wants to know what happened to her clone sister Emily after the woman disappeared. She also wants to fulfill their mutual dream of achieving first contact with an alien race. These are ambitious goals for a single person and they seemed to have consumed Emily's life, possibly even causing her death.

Kim, however, takes a more passive stance at the start of the story. She has the background and credentials of a physicist, but chooses to use her talent for persuasion as a fundraiser for the institute responsible for underwriting SETI expeditions and outreach projects. In this way, McDevitt shows her intense passion for the dream of confirming the human race is not alone in the universe (most of the rest of humanity is giving up on the idea), while providing an rationale as to why she has not started an investigation prior to the beginning of the narrative. When her old professor, Yoshi's relative, calls her and asks her to visit the deserted township where Yoshi went missing during the 'accident', she is reluctant to get involved. As far as she knew, Emily disappeared after taking a taxi from the spaceport and was the victim of street crime.

Once Kim and her pilot friend Solly visit the scene, she is no longer sure the old man is mistaken. She decides to investigate. After that decision, a minor one at this point, Kim encounters resistance. She gathers evidence (the record of the last voyage, a mural depicting an alien spaceship, and a sighting) and conducts interviews with Tripley's son and Kane's daughter. Kim meets resistance at every juncture. Kane's daughter wants to bury the past, Tripley's son wants to protect his father's reputation, and Kim's bosses at the Institute are feeling pressure to end this inquiry from powerful authorities, so they pile censure upon censure until she is fired and facing criminal charges.

Everyone has reasons for wanting to bury the investigation into what really happened on Emily's last voyage, even after finding definitive proof of Yoshi's death, alien artifacts, alien AI, and the original records showing a violent encounter with an alien microship. Only Kim, reluctant at first, but rediscovering her reasons for wanting to make contact in the first place, regains her clarity.

It is unusual to see the down-to-Earth lives of individuals in hard science fiction. Kim wants to keep her job, have a boyfriend, see her name in the history books, stay out of jail without going on the run, and find closure for her sister's death. She's even attracted to one man while in love with another – very human. Her opponents don't want their lives to change, so they see her investigation as a threat to the status quo. They ignore the flaws in their logic. Kane and Tripley suffered more for their silence than they would have had they reported the incident upon their return to Greenway; by covering up their unfortunate accident, they only highlighted the cover-up itself, creating an atmosphere of suspicion that followed them the rest of their lives. The authorities who learned of the alien encounter rationalized that no one was likely to travel through that specific sector of space again, so why should they warn anyone? They refused to consider that they did not know where the aliens came from, nor could they truly guarantee no future encounters with aliens who were going to regard humans as hostile.

Let it go. Ignore it and it will go away.

The only thing Kim let go throughout her journey was the alien artifact. She and her crew return the microship to the aliens with an apology and an offer to have a nonviolent first contact. It wasn't perfect, but it did work. Kim used the skill she knew best, persuasion, to reach her goal and take her place in history. The world moved on, resuming a variant of the status quo, with Kim regaining her job and freedom, getting a new boyfriend, and learning about the aliens. McDevitt ends the story with this restoration of order in everyday life and I think it works better than a grand sweeping statement of how the world changed.

“Not With a Bang”: A Writer’s Look at Greg Bear’s 1987 novel Forge of God

"This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper"

• T.S. Eliot "The Hollow Men"
  

One lovely July evening, a scientist named Arthur sets up the telescope for his son Marty to view the stars. Before he has the chance to take a look, he gets a call from an astronomer friend, Chris Riley, who says Jupiter is missing a moon. His son tells him the same thing. He looks for himself, sees the hole where Europa belongs, unmistakable. Later that evening, Arthur's wife Francine asks him if the disappearance of Europa frightens him. He says it doesn't, though he is sympathetic about Francine's obvious fear. She compares it to a mountain suddenly missing, which Arthur says would scare him (because it is close to home).

That is the opening of Bear's apocalyptic story of alien judgment and subsequent destruction of Planet Earth. Arthur Gordon, the main protagonist, is the President's Science Advisor, but that is not his primary role. He is first and foremost a family man. His friend Henry, another renowned scientist, is a cancer patient who loves his wife and is heartbroken that she must watch him die. The geologist who finds the desert cone is with friends; they spend their time together, from initial adventure to forced confinement by government agents to staying with Stella when they could have gone their separate ways. Trevor Hicks, a former science writer turned novelist, starts his journey alone, but becomes involved with groups of scientists and government officials when he learns about the Guest (dying alien construct). Reuben, the 'spider aliens' representative, is also alone, but has strong ties to his family (he is grieving for his dead mother).

The only loner is the 'mad' President of the United States, who loses his advisors, his friends, and his wife when he succumbs to despair far too soon. In fact, it plays out like ritual shunning, in that he is only left alone after interventions by the people who leave him.

There are no riots, no screaming to the Heavens, no global anarchy. People try to figure out what it means that two alien objects, each containing a communicating life form, land less than three months after Europa disappears; they do this by talking it out with each other.

There are no right or wrong answers. Some people accept their fate with dignity, while others seek revenge. Both reactions are human.

We never find out why aliens who had no difficulties destroying a planet-sized moon in less than one week draw out Earth's destruction. The reader can only speculate as to the motives for designing biological machines to create a diversion while the planet-destroying fuse burns. Bear creates a mystery without solving it.

Yet, when I finished reading, I did not care about unanswered questions. I cared about the pacifists facing their doom in Yosemite. I cared about Marty's helpless rage, when he vowed to give Earth's destroyers a reason to fear humanity's children. The story starts with a father and son looking at the stars with unaccustomed fear and ends with a boy looking closer at the stars with a familiar fear. The world has ended, not with a bang but a whimper. Earth is gone, but humanity will never forget.

Bear jumps from viewpoint character to viewpoint character, yet he forges a strong emotional connection with each one. This way, he creates a global story that is also personal. I will remember this when I write.