Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature II

Chicago Literature/ Chicago in Literature

Session Coordinator: Marilyn J. Atlas

Department of English

Ohio University

atlas@ohio.edu

The Chicago that is Palimpsest: Mary Morris’ Nonfiction

Mary Beth Pringle

Wright State University

marybethpringle@wright.edu

In all three of her memoirs—Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone, Wall-to-Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail, and Angels and Aliens—Mary Morris presents Chicago in palimpsestic terms. In Nothing to Declare, the Chicago Morris describes is a barren, pre-urban one: all bluffs and trees and lake, along with a host of troubling family relationships. In Wall-to-Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail, contemporary Chicago is again erased or forced to the background. This time Morris focuses more on memories of her Polish grandmother’s downtown apartment than on the public images of Chicago one might expect to see. Instead, we are swept from the grandmother’s apartment to Eastern Europe where Morris is unhappily traveling. Once again, the Chicago of the Loop, of museums and grand architecture are subsumed by the personal images of Morris’ childhood and, as with any palimpsest, “old words can be read beneath the new.” Ultimately, all layers of words lead readers to conclude that Chicago for Morris represents absence more than presence, homelessness more than home.

Parking Roxinante in River Forest: Rewriting the Quixote in Andrew M Greeley’s The Search for Maggie Ward

Patricia W. Manning

The University of Kansas

pwmannin@ku.edu

In Chicago writer Andrew M. Greeley‚s 1991 novel The Search for Maggie Ward, returning World War II veteran Jerry Keenan takes a road trip across the country. During a pit stop at an Arizona coffee shop, the former military pilot meets a young woman; after she disappears, Keenan begins a quest to find his lost love. The narrative incorporates a variety of cultural products -- including the legends surrounding the maritime Flying Dutchman and Jacob Walz’s buried gold at the Lost Dutchman mine -- as well as frequent references to literary characters, especially Sherlock Holmes and Don Quixote. My paper will analyze one aspect of these Cervantine intertexts: the manner in which the text transposes signifiers from Miguel de Cervantes’s text into 1940s Chicago. Although Keenan and his Sancho describe their Chicago adventures as titling at windmills, they comb the city for Keenan’s missing lover. In typical post-modern fashion, identities that were fixed in Cervantes’s narrative float in Greeley’s. For example, on several occasions Keenan decides that he is Don Quixote and subsequently renounces his quixotic personality. By using Fredric Jameson’s theories on pastiche and Gérard Genette’s concepts of palimpsests and paratexts, my paper will posit that while Greeley’s novel

explicitly resecularizes the Quixote after Graham Greene’s overtly religious version, the happy ending, Quixote finds his Dulcinea and they settle down to a pleasant life in River Forest, contains implicit religious undertones.

Saul Bellow and the Wind off the Lake

David D. Anderson

Michigan State University

atlas@ohio.edu

Saul Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for l976, was born on June 10, l915, in Lachine, Quebec, to Abraham Belo and Lescha Gordin, Russian Jews and recent immigrants to Canada. He died on April 5, 2005, at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, after having lived, written, and set his works in places as diverse as New York, Mexico, Paris, and Israel, as well as the Chicago of most of his works, including his first novel, Dangling Man (1944), his best known, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), and his last, Ravelstein (2000). Bellow was not only the international writer of his Novel citation and ultimately of his obituaries, but he was above all a Midwesterner, a Chicagoan, a writer of the place of most of his life and his work. This paper examines Bellow’s Chicago, as he lived it, knew it, and wrote it. His move East in l993 was perhaps as necessary to his life and work as his father’s move to Chicago was in l924; but, as he commented to me a short time before his death, “I sure miss the wind off the Lake. “ I hope to explore the closeness of Bellow, the man and the writer, with his Chicago home, and one of the world’s great literary places.