Issue 5

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Essays

Morphology of the Hit by Leslie Jamison

Morphology of the Hit
by Leslie Jamison

We begin with the first function.

I. One of the Members Absents Himself from Home. (Definition: absentation.)

I didn't exactly leave home for Nicaragua. I'd been leaving home for years, felt like, living in Boston, Iowa, Manhattan. Nicaragua was just the furthest I'd gone.

Near a city called Granada I taught Spanish to kids who knew their language better than I ever would. I worked in a school with two concrete classrooms sometimes invaded by goats or stray dogs. The dogs were skinny. Some of the kids were too, though they were always buying treats from an old woman who sold bags of old potato chips and bright pink cookies from huge straw baskets. She sat in the shadows under their rusty swings.

I liked the kids. They touched me--literally my arms, legs, my whole body--more than anyone else I'd known. I knew their families by sight and sometimes by name. Many of their mothers sold chewing gum and cashews in the parque central next to the bus station. Their fathers and brothers called out "Guapa chica!" every time I passed. I should have been offended. I wasn't.

I turned twenty-four in bar called Café Bohemia. I made sangria with local fruits and wrote notes from the internet café that said: I made sangria with local fruits! I told everyone I was enjoying the easy commonality of being a foreigner amidst foreigners: None of us are where we usually are! I said. We are lost together! The keyboard was strangely arranged under my fingers. I still hadn't gotten used to it. It made me confuse certain punctuation marks. Fruits from the market? some notes said. We are lost together?

*

I never know how to start this story. I just don't. That's why I need functions. That's why maybe we need to go back further. What about here? Vladimir Propp was a man who lived in Russia through the Revolution and two wars. He wrote a book called Morphology of the Folktale that no one talks about much these days, except to disagree with it. It's basically a map for storytelling, a catalog of plot pieces arranged into thirty-one functions: commencements, betrayals, resolutions.

They compose an elaborate system of classifications--letters, numerals, headings, sub-headings--that peg these plot-points like animal species, taxidermy specimens with teeth bared above their nameplates: trickery, guidance, rescue. They mark moments where the action takes a different direction. Propp claims that you can break any story into an accumulation of these parts, shuffled into constant rearrangements. Essentially, he is making a claim about disruptions. He says everything proceeds from losing our place.

Leslie Jamison lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Her essay "In Praise of Saccharin" appeared recently in Black Warrior Review, and her story "Quiet Men," which was first published in this magazine, was included in Best New American Voices 2008.

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Read more in Issue 5

Fiction Cattle Haul by Jesmyn Ward
Off the Page and onto the Sidewalk
I Don't Burn
At-Talifoon
The Rat Ship
Secessionville
Essay Morphology of the Hit by Leslie Jamison
The Old Man
The Revenge of the Angry Black Artist
Shark Means Knife