Father, Father, What Have You Done?
A man straddling the apex of his roof cries, giddyup. The house rears up on its back porch and all its bricks fall apart and the house crashes to the ground.
His wife cries from the rubble, father, father, what have you done?
Russell Edson
This piece was my first encounter with the writer Russell Edson, whom I’ve written about before. It was my first M.F.A. fiction workshop with John Wideman, and he wrote it out from memory on the chalk board in a cramped seminar room at UMass, Amherst.
He asked, “Is this a story, and if so, why?”
Some argued of course not. There was no steadily building “rising action,” not enough development of characters, not enough delving into the inner emotions of the characters, just not enough at stake for it to fit the definition of a story, no denouement…. Others argued it was a poem, a prose poem, that only poetry can be so truncated and abrupt.
During the discussion, John would offer things like: “But who made those rules? Are there rules? Might that kind of thinking confine the way you approach your own writing?”
We quickly turned from talking specifically about the writing on the board to having a long and exhilarating conversation about our preconceptions of what constitutes “good literary writing,” which was especially moving for me, delighted to be surrounded by so many smart people and to have my preconceptions of even the basic concepts I thought I had a grasp on upended.
But I also couldn’t help being haunted by Edson’s words. I wrote them down in my notebook, returned to them later, then rediscovered Edson in the more recent past—and there was this piece, this story/poem/prose poem…call it what you will.
The obvious thing that hits you first, and I’m sure we talked about this plenty during that long-ago workshop, is the overt allusion to Christ on the cross, his famous plea to heaven in his final mortal moments. Even before we’ve read the story proper, we are asked to place that image in our mind’s eye.
The story then moves into a classic, Edsonesque world of bizarre, surreal imagery and events.
The man’s cry of “giddyup” emerges from the act of “straddling” the apex of the house (“house” a word just one letter away from “horse”) that apex a kind of saddle (the word “straddle” very nearly “saddle”), and hence the man’s cry and playful gestures and Edson’s own word choice are linguistically and physically associative with the act of riding a horse.
All these playful associations take an unexpected turn when the house “rears up on its back porch and all its bricks fall apart and the house crashes to the ground,” as if the man’s and the writer’s metaphorical associations magically conjure an actual consequence—the house acting for an instant—just long enough to implode—like an actual horse.
At one level, the story celebrates the human capacity for associative reasoning and expression, for seeing the interconnectedness of things—that someone sitting atop a house roof appears like someone sitting atop an enormous horse even as the words “horse” and “house” look so nearly identical. And then the ever-creative, ever-inventive, ever-associative human mind is able to envision the house trying to behave in a horselike manner; we can see it lifting up as best it can “on its back porch” its closest approximation of hind legs—and then our human capacity for logic steps in, and that house-become-a-horse must, of course, fall apart and collapse on itself.
Here, Edson perhaps invites us to consider those moments when imaginative play is arrested by the physical realities of the world, a moment of utter invention and rich association incapable of sustaining itself.
His wife’s words from the rubble, those of the title, very nearly those of the crucified Christ in the throes of mortal death, suggest a gravitas to what otherwise might appear as simply a playful and dreamlike story. Christ’s lament, “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me,” is a quote from Psalms 22:1-2, which continues, “Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.”
Theologians argue that these words and this allusion to the Psalms speak to Christ as ultimately being a Jewish man who knows his scripture, not a God at the time of his death, his death a human death—and how essential this all is to the fundamental concept of Christianity (that Christ took on the sins of humanity in the moment of his death).
The final words of the story retain the mysterious provocation of Christ’s final human words, suggesting the man’s act of creative play, which has somehow caused a moment of magic and then ruin, is akin to God’s decision to intervene in human affairs, incarnating an essential part of his essence (the son) as a flesh and blood human being. The house has been incarnated here too, has become real and alive, the otherwise ethereal imaginings of the man somehow become like flesh and blood when he proclaims “giddyup.”
For me it’s not too big a leap to argue that the story works to connect what Christians will argue was God’s ultimate moment of creative inventiveness with the human capacity for poetic invention/creation. The story also speaks to how the best literary inventions do become “real,” do rise up and leave their mark on us—no matter how impossible that is. We willingly suspend our disbelief, fully aware of their impossibility and falseness even as tears run down our cheeks and we are left emotionally changed.
Edson reminds us of the transformative power of literature, and perhaps even its potential to save us as it shifts in our own imaginations into something real and alive and vital. The wife’s cry to the father might even be read in a positive, celebratory tone, an acknowledgment that the creative imagination is worthy of our deepest praise.
I’ve compiled some of Edson’s books in my Bookshop.org shop. Your purchase will help to support local bookstores (and me). Click Here
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