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72 3 DREAMING POURED CREAM CURTAINS IN THE WIDE NET, AND OTHER STORIES Robert Penn Warren’s landmark 1944 defense, “The Love and the Separateness in Eudora Welty,” still occupies a central position in criticism devoted to the study of Welty. Bristling at Diana Trilling’s harsh assessment of The Wide Net in her 1943 review in the Nation, Warren defuses the accusations leveled at Welty’s excessive style and obscurity. He does so by advancing his thesis that despite the fact that A Curtain of Green and The Wide Net showed a “good deal of the falsely poetic” (21) and some “hocuspocus ” (27), both works fundamentally conform to a pattern derived from a conscious method and a developing narrative technique that provides for the realization of the author’s ideas. For Warren, the “fact of isolation” (22) creates the “basic situation” of Welty’s writing:“The drama which develops from this basic situation is either of two kinds: first, the attempt of the isolated person to escape into the world; or second, the discovery by the isolated person, or by the reader, of the nature of the predicament.” This influential essay has shaped the critical response to Welty and for good reason . Warren illuminates a key preoccupation of Welty’s: how to minimize the cost and maximize the gain that life’s isolation and intimacies afford. Although Warren basis his opinion only on “two volumes of stories” (21), the situations he alludes to and the ideas he finds examined in the narratives remain a useful guide to Welty’s output—particularly that of the thirties, forties, and fifties. Like any critic of generous spirit,Warren strives to express the purpose, meaning, and quality of his subject’s art, while minimizing distortion and avoiding the danger of misrepresentation. And, in this seminal essay, he comes closest to achieving that end when he reports on Welty’s writing philosophy: dreaming poured cream curtains in the wide net, and other stories 73 It is a method by which the items of fiction (scene, action, character, etc.) are presented not as document but as comment, not as a report but as a thing made, not as history but as idea. Even in the most realistic and reportorial fiction, the social picture, the psychological analysis, and the pattern of action do not rest at the level of mere report; they finally operate as expressive symbols as well. (27) Here, Warren marginalizes documentary presentation and diminishes the degree to which Welty’s fiction supplies a realistic account of events that rests “at the level of mere report.” In the first instance, Warren places emphasis on her method of presenting reality, a subject on which she would dwell at length in “Writing and Analyzing a Story” and “Place in Fiction,” two essays from the fifties that are central statements of her writing practice . In the second instance, he accents the picture, the analysis, and the pattern as operating like “expressive symbols.” Since Warren’s remarks appeared, legions of critics, armed with New Criticism’s theoretical bias toward constructing well-wrought urns, have written about Welty the Anglo-American modernist, a writer whose narratives reach an almost metaphysical unity in their dispersal of symbol, myth, and motif, creating symbolic networks of allusion and reference.1 However, the stress placed on Welty the symbolist and her primary progenitors in the English-speaking world, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, obscures our view of Welty the avantgarde surrealist, a characterization Warren gestures towards with his analysis of her treatment of objects and the form their representation takes. In fact, the gesturing and reaching toward surrealism that Warren’s article shows may originate in Trilling’s review, at least half of which is devoted to establishing and exploring a parallel between Welty and surrealism’s commercial exploitation by Dalí. Reaching a peroration, Warren observes, “If anything, the dreamlike effect in many of the stories seems to result from the author’s undertaking to squeeze meaning from the item which, in ordinary realistic fiction, would be passed over with a casual glance” (28). Rarely casual, Welty creates totally believable fictional worlds layered with strikingly unexpected and fantastic imagery obtained from her adoption of an essentially surrealist viewpoint. Like the narratives in A Curtain of Green, the stories of The Wide Net demonstrate surrealism’s influence not only in terms of choice of subject but in matter of style. “A Still Moment” offers a starting point...

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