(urth) Trial summer project short story: Easter Sunday

[Marc Aramini]

I thought I would try an apocryphal Wolfe from 1951 to begin the project and see what sections I should include in the opening.

Easter Sunday is from the first published year of Wolfe's work, and it is fairly straightforward, so I think this would be a great trial.  


Here is a link with the entire story.  The best part of this is the Reverend's COMPLETE LACK OF RECOGNITION of the devil and the Devil's limp.

http://www.revolutionsf.com/fiction/eastersunday/01.html

This is the set up I was thinking about:

SUMMARY (especially included for uncollected stories): Reverend Dobson stops for a break in the park while he is thinking about preparing for Easter Sunday and the picnic.  He sits next to an aristocratic and distinguished gentleman with "superior" features and tries to start a conversation.  The gentleman reveals that he was a revolutionist and asserts that the only unforgivable crime peasants can commit is to doubt the "master".  Reverend Dobson asks if he is a Trotskite, and the stranger smiles and asserts that he is a revolutionary far older than Trotski. Of course as the stranger departs he has a limp, and his left foot clatters like a hoof.  Dobson concludes that it was due to an artificial limb.

INTERESTING DETAILS: Dobson's inner thoughts are key to the true state of his faith.  "He momentarily forgot Mrs. Albright, who acted so superior and left a dime in the collection plate, the worries of the coming Sunday School picnic" ... "He was a religious man with no hint of fear in his love of God."

Dobson is so obsessed by the petty concerns of ire over a woman who believes herself to be superior but does not truly give and the stresses of preparing for Easter that it is only in the park that he can forget that "momentarily".  The devil is described as a noble and superior being full of dignity.  He describes God as someone who plans on his son following him, but who runs a bizarre system that will forgive any atrocity except doubt.  

It is unclear whether Dobson is a Protestant or Catholic Reverend, but he is never called "Father".


ALLUSIONS: of course this summons the rebellion in heaven and the devil appears to have sustained a leg wound.
In literary terms, this seems a pretty clear descendant of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories or the Pilgrim's Progress - in which the clergy are faced with manifestations of the devil as in Young Goodman Brown in a fairly benign setting - the difference being that the civilized veneer never leaves this short piece.

FUTURE ECHOES: Talking of the Master and the son that will replace him as a real world leader with unreasonable expectations echoes some of the talk about Pas in Long Sun and the argument that Thecla makes against religion in the cell with Severian.

The limp that Severian and Silk acquire is here present on the devil, though he is a noble pragmatist who rebelled KNOWING that he would fail, but did it anyway at the cost of losing paradise.

RELIGIOUS SYMBOLS: Here the collection plate and the actual idea of Easter Sunday are pretty big: Easter is the day on which Christ rises from the dead and defeats death, and it is the day on which Catholics can once again leave their lenten fasting behind. [This section will be MUCH more useful in later stories]