A Shape of Light by William Goyen
"A Shape of Light" by William Goyen is a poignant narrative that explores themes of grief, obsession, and the pursuit of the unattainable. The story centers around Boney Benson, a man deeply affected by the tragic loss of his wife Allie and their unborn child, who is said to haunt the graveyard where they are buried. Boney's life revolves around an enigmatic light that he feels compelled to follow, which symbolizes both his longing and the unresolved trauma of his past. The tale unfolds through two sections, "The Record" and "The Message," and delves into the haunting legacy of Boney's story as it continues to captivate the imagination of others, including a kite-maker who embodies the relationship between the artist and their creation.
As Boney pursues the light, he experiences surreal visions and encounters that reflect his inner turmoil and the complexity of human emotion. The narrative invites readers to reflect on the nature of memory and the challenges of expressing profound feelings of loss and desire. Goyen's prose intertwines the mystical with the mundane, creating a rich tapestry that highlights the quest for understanding and meaning in the face of grief. Ultimately, "A Shape of Light" serves as a powerful meditation on the ways in which stories can arise from personal pain and the eternal search for connection beyond the physical world.
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A Shape of Light by William Goyen
First published: 1952
Type of plot: Coming of age
Time of work: Long ago and many years later
Locale: There, in a southern town, and here, in a city
Principal Characters:
Boney Benson , a seeker after the mysterious shape of lightAllie Benson , his forsaken wifeThe narrator , a later seeker, and a shaper of the record of Boney's questYou , a counterpart of the narrator, "kite-maker and kite-flyer," to whom part of the story is addressed
The Story
Boney Benson, a man obsessed with a singular quest, lived in a town where it was his job to flag the midnight trains with a red lantern. Wizened, scary, almost ghostlike in appearance, but gentle, he awakened the imagination of the town. The people would whisper his story, passing down what they knew to the younger generation. Some said he spent his days in the graveyard, sprawled on the earth over the place where Allie, his wife, and their unborn child lay buried. It was said that the baby murdered Allie, that in the last month of her pregnancy the child had risen in her body until it lodged beneath her heart and nested there, a kind of vampire, until Allie could not breathe.
Allie died in terror, fighting for air without knowing what was strangling her. It might have been her husband, for all she knew, for he often left her without warning, to pursue "a lighted shape, much like a scrap of light rising like a ghost from the ground." They might be sitting at the supper table when the powerful urge to follow the light would strike him, and then he would rise, go saddle his purple horse, King, and be off, to wander over the countryside all night long, until, at daybreak, the light vanished into the ground.
In a fit of conscience, Boney turned against himself and mutilated his body; he buried his severed member in the grave with his wife and child. It was said that the child was born in the grave and lived underground, like a mole, but rose each night in the shape of a ball of light. Mexicans who lived at the edge of the graveyard first saw the specter. Fishermen and campers also reported an eerie shape of floating light. When Boney heard about the haunting, he attempted to seal the light in the dirt with a slab of slate, holding it down with the weight of his body. Finding it impossible to contain the light, he began to wait in the graveyard each night, mounted on King, for the light to rise. Then he followed it wherever it led. Three young men, who went with Boney on one of his nightly journeys, reported having followed the shape of light to a field of grave-children, and beyond, through a phantasmagoric landscape riddled with nursing mothers, martyrs, hermits, "wings and limbs of a lost son falling from the sky," and lovers mating like strange insects. They followed Boney, who followed his light, into another country, where the wearied young men turned back, and Boney died. He was returned home and buried alongside Allie, but the destructive-creative light continued to rise for someone to give his life over to following it.
This skeleton of Boney Benson's tale can be pieced together from the two sections of "A Shape of Light": "The Record" and "The Message." However, to exhume a plot from William Goyen's poetic narrative hardly conveys the archetypal force of the story or its haunting effect. At the heart of "The Message," in a city, long after the life and death of Boney, his image surfaces from the past, through the retelling and fabulation of his tale, to claim the imagination of a "kite-maker and kite-flyer," addressed only as "you." This character replaces the narrator of "The Record" and seems at times to be both author and reader, or a figure for a type of messenger-message relationship, like that of writer and story.
Boney appears, "his face, swimming and dipping and bowing and rising and darting, looking down at you . . . his kite face . . . send up a message! You had built kite and kite had taken his message and delivered it. Now you must shape him, like kite, and send his message back to him." This writer's story attempts to give shape to something essentially inexpressible through the quest of Boney Benson and the appearance of the light. It seems to have been written, in part, to exorcise ghosts of memory that would overshadow the artist if the story could not be told. Not only the kite-maker but also the kite itself, the artist must look down and confront his mooring, the power holding the string, which is his own past: "You turned and called out, man now and no longer child, speaker now and no longer listener, asking man's question, crying man's cry. . . . Now Boney Benson was all your question and all your pain; and tell it." Out of grief and guilt, out of what has been forever lost to memory, out of the failure of language to communicate, the messenger must find the perfect vehicle for his message. The obsession of the kite-maker to shape a story out of the wreckage of memory and words parallels the seeker after the light who must surrender himself and live separate from the world in order to fulfill his quest.