Flute Solos and Songs that Make You Shatter: Simple Melodies in Jacob Have I Loved and Come Sing, Jimmy Jo

In Katherine Paterson's first collection of essays, Gates of Excellence (1981), she compares writing fiction for children to playing a musical instrument. She feels that one of the few limitations of her choice of audience has to do with the intricacy, density, and design of what she writes. She compares great novels for adults, such as Mary Lee Settle's Blood Tie, Anne Tyler's Celestial Navigation, and John Fowles's Daniel Martin, to "a symphony orchestra." On the other hand, she calls her own Bridge to Terabithia "a flute solo, unaccompanied." Even when she is dealing with complicated situations, "through all the storm and clamor" of her books, she hears "a rather simple melody" (36).

The notion that her books are "simple melodies" is also an important concern of several essays in The Spying Heart (1989). In her first essay, "The Story of My Lives," Paterson concedes that she has a "limited gift" when it comes to writing fiction, one which prevents her from exploring other genres (12). She goes on to admit that, as she tells one of her editors, there is a sameness about her books; they all have kinship with Joseph Campbell's monomyth in which a "hero ventures forth from the ordinary world into a realm of wonders. There he is met by a supernatural guide who aids him as he confronts and defeats fabulous forces and returns a victor, able to bestow boons on his fellows" (9).

Both in the collection's title essay and in "Sounds of the Heart," Paterson confesses that she often revises her simple melodies to obscurity, at least in part due to the adage that "what is left out of a work of art is as important as . . . what is left in" and because of her love of form (53). She feels, however, that her stories, like the old, traditional tales, take us back to basic archetypal images, providing "no one has scrubbed them up . . ." (66). In "Stories," she further makes her case for "simple melodies," once again resorting to musical images. She discusses a lunch she had with the composer Alice Parker, who "loves melody—the more primitive the better." Parker condemns music which has become "intellectualized" and both composers and novelists who despise "story." "These are the writers," she contends, "who spend their time performing intellectual tricks . . ." (140).

In these and other essays, Paterson is careful to make the point that she does not write down to her readers, that simplicity is not a matter of readability. She also maintains that simple melodies can strongly affect the listener and reader, once again using music to talk about literature. It requires, however, some effort on the part of the audience. She quotes Frances Clarke Sayers, who talks of "the shattering and gracious encounter that art affords." But, Patterson goes on to explain, it is "only when the deepest sound going forth from my heart meets the deepest sound coming forth from yours—it is only in this encounter that the true music begins" (Spying Heart 37). Continuing with her musical imagery, Paterson explains that she wants to be one of the "scarlet tanagers, who . . . rise up, sing, and fly free" (171).

Critics of Paterson's work have often commented on the "simplicity" of her books and her interest in form. Patricia Craig maintains that her second novel, Of Nightingales that Weep (1974), "has something of the formality and simplicity of a retold folk tale" (66). Writing about Jacob Have I Loved (1980), Sarah Smedman argues that it is a "tightly woven novel; each character, each episode, each speech, each image helps to incarnate what the author is imagining" (181).

Since Paterson views herself as a musician, a flute soloist who provides "shattering encounters" for her readers, it should not be surprising that her fiction is filled with descriptions of powerful, yet simple songs. For example, Okada, the blind writer of puppet plays in The Master Puppeteer (1975), is said to sing his plays to those who transcribe them. In The...