Like ffitch's "Seeing Through Maps," which was in last year's Best American Short Stories collection, "Stump of the World" is just jam-packed with symbolism, double meanings, and pregnant clauses that lend themselves to multiple readings. Rather than mold all of this into one grand reading like I normally do, I'm going to work through the story based on questions that popped up while I was going through it, hoping they're similar to questions you readers out there might have had.
Summary
But first, a quick synopsis. It's always a good start, when dealing with a slippery story that's hard to pin down, to try to retell what's there. This might be a bastardization of the complex into the simple, but it can help reveal patterns as well as how the difficult parts fit into the whole.
Emma doesn't know what to do with her 17-year-old son Teddy. He's a senior in high school, but he's been skipping class, and it doesn't look like he's going to do well on his statewide assessment exam. Also, he's been shoplifting. His favorite objects to swipe are facemasks, which he claims not only help his cystic acne, but also "behind his face, his brain." Emma finds it difficult to be as hard on Teddy about shoplifting--and everything else--as she thinks she really should be.
Meanwhile, Emma's mother, who lives with them because her hours at her library job were cut and she can no longer afford her own rent, has adopted another grandchild. This grandchild is a sort of doppelganger for Emma, because her name is Jessica, which was the same name Emma used as a child when she briefly created an alter ego. Emma's mother first found Jessica through the community bulletin board at the library. The bulletin board is mostly full of sidehustling charlatans selling questionable goods and services, but Jessica's ad had been only asking for a grandparent or grandparents to adopt her.
It's possible the world Teddy and Emma inhabit is a somewhat futuristic place with an altered climate. They drive at one point through "the kind of rain previously called a downpour," suggesting that the climate of the story is different from the climate of now. We are frequently told that "there is no city" and also that there is no state, perhaps alluding not only to a change in the weather, but a change in political reality. Otherwise, it's a very recognizable world, though. Emma works in a grocery store stocking produce.
Emma and her mother both try to convince Teddy to straighten up and fly right, to think about how he's going to make a living, but Teddy isn't interested. He thinks making a living is a scam the world foists upon people, and that most jobs, like the ones advertised on the bulletin board, are themselves just scams. The biggest scam is Gallo painting a crack in the road so drivers can see it and then asking for donations to maintain the road.
The crack turns into a sinkhole, and the sinkhole keeps growing. Teddy goes missing a lot. He finally goes missing for a long time, and Emma asks Gallo, who has now expanded operations to warn drivers about a growing sinkhole instead of a small crack, to put Teddy's picture up. She then discovers that Teddy has been apprenticing with Gallo, and he's down in the sinkhole, exploring. He and Gallo plan to set up tours into the sinkhole. Emma is furious, and follows him into the sinkhole, thinking to drag him home and punish him, but instead, she follows him all the way "to the center of the earth."
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| Technically, you can't argue that the appearance of a sinkhole isn't a sign that you have a sinkhole. |
Questions that occur to me
What does Teddy mean when he says the facemasks help his brain?
Teddy has cystic acne, so it's understandable why he would want to use facemasks to control his acne. It isn't just embarrassing for a teenager, it's also a little bit painful and uncomfortable. But Teddy claims they also help "behind his face, his brain."
Teddy might be a full-of-shit teenager, but full-of-shit teenagers have a point. The world they're about to enter doesn't seem like a great deal. Teddy doesn't want to enter this world. His insistence that he not "be interpellated" means he shouldn't be given a social identity. Wearing a mask allows him to hide his identity for a while.
His habit of leaving the used masks everywhere is curious. It's almost like an animal that has molted leaving its old skin. Teddy's desire to steal things is described at one point as a desire to "exfoliate" them. Teddy's habit might be "annoying" to his grandmother, but he's also literally growing in front of our eyes. Each time he escapes interpellation and removes part of himself, he comes out a little closer to his fully grown form, although it may be hard to see him growing while it's happening.
Why does Emma find it difficult to be stricter with Teddy?
In the first place, although Emma is vexed by Teddy's behavior, she is also a doting parent. She looked in on him with anxiety when he was young and sleeping. She thinks of herself at one point as "thousands of roaring fans in an enormous arena and Teddy was the only one on the field."
She also can relate, because some of Teddy's foibles are her own. She also stole when she was young. Emma's mother made her take the stolen paper clips back to the store and apologize, but Emma, although she intended to explain to Teddy why stealing was wrong, "figured she could do it later." It's possible she has a hard time explaining it to Teddy because she doesn't quite understand it herself. At one point, when she picks Teddy up from stealing, she brings him an apple, and it's an open question whether she paid for that apple or took it from work, since when she stacks tomatoes, she almost "forgets they were for sale."
Emma and Teddy are alike in a lot of ways. Teddy ultimately seems to find satisfaction in going into the sinkhole, where he can see beneath the roots of grass. Having been dissatisfied with the phony face of the world, he is happy to get to its real core. When Emma first found her love of fruits and vegetables, it was growing a variety of tomato called the "Stump of the World." That's a pretty unusual name for a varietal, and it suggests that Emma, too, was interested in what lay at the bottom of everything.
Does the bulletin board represent something more?
The bulletin board is one of the best touches in the story. In our real world, community bulletin boards were kind of the precursor to the informal economy of the Internet, where people hawked goods Etsy-style or services influencer-style to the people in their community. In "Stump of the World," the bulletin board seems to be standing in for all of the tomfoolery that takes place on the Internet. Talking about influencers and Internet scams is overdone, so instead, the story replaces the Internet with something that came before it. When everyone is shouting, sometimes, you get noticed more by whispering, so this story doesn't talk about influencer culture, but an abstract signifier that suggests it.
Teddy sees the bulletin board as the symbol of how nobody really makes a living and how all work is parasitic, a circular process in which everyone feeds off each other. (Compare this to Emma's complaint about circular logic concerning signs of sinkholes.) The bulletin board could have been something that held the community together, but because "there is no city," it doesn't. It's the symbol of all that Teddy is trying to avoid.
Speaking of that, what does the repeated claim that "there is no city" mean?
I think we can read "city" and "state" as terms that more or less mean "community" here. There has been a breakdown of community, and in this sense, I don't think the story is set in the future much at all. All that's left of the community are the parts that discipline people. This reminds me of the concerns I've read for the decline in civic engagement. People don't join organizations or clubs as much as they used to. "The city" to us is just the things we call 911 for. It's a last resort when something has gone very wrong. The bulletin board seems like it might fill this void, but other than Jessica, asking for grandparents to adopt her, it's overrun by shady businesses. "There is no city" is a reference to the atomization of our own world. This decline in human relations is reflected in Jessica's quest for "roots" in the sense of ancestors, a quest Emma's mom can only fill by making up ancient recipes like "ethnic stew."
What's up with missing parents?
Teddy's father is never mentioned, nor is Emma's father. When Gallo talks about his son, he never mentions a mother. Why is everyone seemingly a single parent? In part, I suspect this is part of the issue above, the atomization of society and the breakdown of traditional familial and community relationships that held it in place.
It may be that part of what Teddy was missing was the oft-cited "male role model." When he gets to know Gallo (a name that means "rooster" in Spanish and so pretty clearly seems to have a masculine energy), they share a "secret side-hug handshake of men." Gallo seems to awaken something in Teddy that Emma, in spite of her unquestioned love for him, couldn't. A lot of what Teddy (and Emma) were missing was something that only a traditional community could give them. It takes a city to raise a child, because sometimes, it's just hard to find someone on the right wavelength for a kid, so you need a big pool of candidates, but since there is no city for Teddy, it took him a long time to find that person.
What's with all the fruit and vegetable imagery?
I know I've complained before about when characters in fiction are completely defined by their occupations. I hate when a brewer in a story sees the whole world in terms of yeast and fermentation, so that the author can wax poetic and show off all the research they did about brewing. So why don't I find Emma's frequent references to fruits and vegetables irritating? I think because Emma isn't doing it in any deep and profound way. She works all day stacking oranges, and so she sees oranges in things outside of work. She compares her son's skin to that of an avocado, or Gallo's face to an overripe banana. Emma's occupation affects how she sees things on the surface, not her deep psychological states.
Speaking of fruits and vegetables, there's a nice double meaning in her occupation. We chide kids on the cusp of adulthood that they need to be "productive." Emma works with "produce," pronounced with an emphasis on the first syllable, but the word is spelled the same as pro-DUCE, meaning to do something that contributes. Her job is symbolic of the adult productivity that she is trying to get Teddy to buy into.
There is a lot of change in the story, and Teddy remarks on how change is the only constant. Does this story uphold this cliché or challenge it?
The story is probably commenting on change as much as it is doing anything. It's hard to write about this subject without getting eyerolls, because ideas like "the only constant is change" are such clichés, they invoke instinctive revolts from readers. That's why the story introduces the cliché as a cliché by having Teddy mouth it.
The thing about many clichés is that they're true, though, and nobody comes to accept the truth of the only constant being change as much as Teddy. It's Emma who fights it. When the crack, which "had been there as long as Emma could remember," first begins to widen to a sinkhole, she denies it. "That crack has been the same my whole life," she insists.
There is an inversion that takes place roughly halfway through the story. Emma began by trying to convince Teddy to find a job, and Teddy insisted that the whole notion of making a living was a farce. But when Emma complains about people getting paid for writing circular arguments, it's Teddy who says that everyone has to "get by." This incites Emma's response to Teddy of, "You've changed." Of course, evidence that he's been changing has been literally left all over the place, as every time he discarded a mask, he was leaving parts of his old self behind, but here, "You've changed" is an accusation.
Teddy later accepts his own change, when his mother comes down into the sinkhole with him. "People change," he says.
The story is almost a parable of what it takes for a parent to successfully help a child navigate into adulthood, especially when that child is resisting the change. You work and work to get them to change, but when the change finally comes, it might come from unexpected sources and it might express itself in unexpected ways. Emma meant for Teddy to be "productive," but he's gone one better by getting below the level where produce happens. It's so disorienting for Emma, she ends up completely changing roles at the very end, becoming the child who needs Teddy to lead her into his future. He offers her his hand, and she takes it as she follows "her son to the center of the earth."
Teddy needed to change to find his own happiness as an adult, and Emma wasn't able to guide him into it. We often talk about the need to send children off on their own in adulthood, but that's not the image at the end of "Stump of the World." Instead, Teddy still needs the company of his mother, but she needs him to show her how the new relationship will work. It's not so much a child going off into the world as it is a role reversal in which the child now needs to show the parent the outlines of the new relationship.
Aside: my own job troubles and the future of the blog
As I wrote about a few months ago, I left my long-time job in early March. Since then, I've returned to Ohio, where I grew up, found a home, and looked for work. And looked. And looked. I finally found something, and I start tomorrow. I'm terrified of going to this job. It's a stressful job with a lot of responsibility, and if I do it wrong, bad things could actually happen. In my early fifties, I don't know if I'm still mentally dexterous enough or physically tough enough for long hours of a stressful job. I need to do something, and after months of looking, this was the best option I found. It's possible I'll actually like it and be good at it, but it's going to be a tough adjustment. I'm going from a job where I was supremely confident I knew what I was doing to a job where I'll be the dumbest guy in the room as well as one of the oldest.
With this adjustment going on, I don't know if I'm going to be able to keep blogging for the foreseeable future. With twelve-hour shifts that will sometimes be longer, and with having to learn a lot of new material, I don't foresee a lot of time to spare for reading literary fiction and writing about it.
In spite of all the times I gave up blogging in despair, this has also come to be a comforting constant in my life. Especially since I changed from blogging about the travails of writing life to focusing on literary criticism of short stories, it's been nice just to have a clear assignment to do. Feeling like I occasionally do a good job has been a bonus.
Since moving back to Ohio, my own son, like Teddy from the story, has sort of been figuring his life out. So like Emma, I'm going to look to him to guide me as I go to a job I'm frankly very afraid to go to tomorrow. I don't know when I'll be back here, but I have really enjoyed posting about short stories for the confused and consternated these past many years.
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