“Mr. & Mrs. Duck Dinner”

I’ve been reading Russell Edson’s “Mr. & Mrs. Duck Dinner” and realizing just what a hit American arts and letters took when we lost Edson this April. The prose poem challenges the ordinary as it commits to a novel scenario:

An old woman with a duck under her arm is let into a house and asked, whom shall I say is calling?

Mr. and Mrs. Duck Dinner.

It’s not allegory, exactly. It’s not dark humor, exactly. But it is, as it is nowhere else in literature, an interspecies couple who hire themselves out as a duck dinner. “My husband will need plucking; I can undress myself” announces Mrs. D. “We’ll have the kitchen girl defeather your husband,” offers the butler. The absurd? The farcical? I taught this poem recently, and we all agreed that it’s a scene a certain British comedy troupe would have made short work of. The Python crew, however, would have missed the pathos, quickly cutting to Terry Jones nude at the piano as soon as the weirdness started to loop back upon itself.

Edson doesn’t take the easy way out here. In spite of – perhaps because of – the absurdity, we get the wiriness, the hurt. I suspect it’s the civility with which the woman carries out her unusual task that breaks my heart in the end. She carries out her duties within the erudition that comes from too many servants, too much culture, too many careful ways of saying things. There are those who can hire out just about anything, and the rest of us who endure our lot. There are intimacies that need to be addressed and worked out. When the whole business of defeathering and “rather pretty” kitchen help gets addressed, our heroine reminds us that we’re not fooling around. We’re all “professional duck dinners.”

                                                                                                   – G. F. A.

Words Work

'Words don't need to be dressed up.  Words do the work themselves.'  I thought this as I heard a speech recently where affect was used heavily in order to 'help' the words along.  But words usually don't need help -- it just depends what the words are. 

When all else fails, it's sometimes thought, insert pathos.  But following Aristotle, as I was taught him, pathos emerges as a result of logos rather than added on as another strategy.  (Same goes for ethos.)  Why sometimes do we think words need help?

Well, sometimes they do need help, but if we're in the word business then the first attention really should go to letting words and combinations of words do their work.  Perhaps from the weakness of some particular word combinations we're then tempted to play a 'pathos' card or cash in on 'ethos' as if these aren't already bound up in the 'logic' of our words.

And by logic here I don't mean syllogisms necessarily (nor even enthymemes) but whatever structure of words one strings together in such a way that works.  Part of 'what works' is how these words (in any given situation) relate to other words we know.  And part of what works is how these words relate to our experience -- what we feel and think.  

I think of Dickinson again.  She doesn't need my help in reading her -- e.g., as I read her aloud.  She's done (almost) all the work, and I mostly need to get out of the way so her work can do what it does.  Can we trust that the words will do their work?  -bbc