"It came to me then: a memory of how Mr. Carmichael had puzzled our class one day 'demonstrating infinity' on the blackboard. With surprising precision he'd drawn a circle, and halved it; this half circle, he'd half; this quarter circle, he'd halved..." (129).
One of the reoccurring images in Joyce Carol Oates' "The Beating" is that of infinity, particularly being trapped in a moment, a memory forever. Literally speaking the story itself is trapped in a repeating loop just because of the way Oates chose to write it: by beginning the story and ending the story in the same moment "Still alive!" (107 and 135). In retrospect, the reader can see how Madelyn is trapped in this moment in her life were everything that could go wrong has. The first quotation appeared to me quite out of place in the story until I saw the way Oates points to Madelyn's memories and the loop that they play. While the reader is pointed to a past and a future, none of that can be brought to the present because of the way the hospital pools her memories.
Did Oates use the metaphor of the hospital pooling her memories forever as a dramatically ironic tool because Madelyn's memory of that day is literally trapped forever in the writing of the story?
I was also struck by the structure of the story. Does it begin at the end, or end at the beginning? Mr. Carmichael's infinity exercise calls into question the idea that there is ever really a beginning or end at all, and the non sequential nature of the story works to ask a similar question. Madelyn's reading of The Time Machine suggests that she is similarly jumping through her own personal chronology, her memory, nonlinearly. The assault narrative is a memory inside a memory, complete with it's own vagaries, and before this there are strong parallels between the car ride with Mr. Carmichael and her father, which suggests a merging or blurring of these two memories all together ....Perhaps the disruption in the sequence of time in memory has obscuring effects for the narrator? Her anxieties about the "door" being "locked against you" could be read as an anxiety about the accessibility of truth or wisdom via memory.
ReplyDeleteIf it is all a jumble, and ends right where it begins, what are the implications?