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Her Work: Stories by Texas Women ed. by Lou Halsell Rodenberger

1984; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1984.0026

1948-7142

Nancy Owen Nelson,

Archaeology and Natural History

Reviews 63 Mexican folk history focuses events into the lives of individuals, families and locales. If this history produces heroes, they are immediate and of the people: Benito, Pancho, Joaquin — in this case, the young padre. Candelaria’s account opposes conventional historiography, which celebrates remote heroes who are distant from the preservers of an oral tradition. That distance begets abstractions, not the stuff of actual life. The oral tradition of Mexican folk is a participation activity for the hearer, as well as for the narrator. It demands a conversational mode. As narrative, folk history, told thus, develops and preserves cultural identities. History, to Candelaria, is what is constant in human experience. His title, Not by the Sword, indicates a position which appeals to Americans, both Latin and non-Latin: A heritage is preserved and transmitted by living it, not by imposing it upon an enemy militarily. The careers of his lineal ante­ cedents, Padre Tercero and soldier Carlos, demonstrate Candelaria’s alterna­ tives and illustrate the validity of his preference. Candelaria’s objectless title suggests that an action commenced by the sword isof no productive consequence. Furthermore, the title’semphasis upon what the author considers not to be the source of history builds an automatic suspense. The expectation of a positive alternative to what is refuted in the title generates a mystery that is unravelled only by reading the entire book. Such development occurs regularly as a defining criterion for fiction. Cande­ laria makes it work for history, as he exploits literary style as a powerful tool of folk history telling. Whether the reader would consume historical fact, enjoy structured narrative or tease out stylistic puzzles, he will find Nash Candelaria’s Not by the Sword a book well worth his attention. The unusual blend of Candelaria’s experiments should keep the book under the scrutiny of critics for a long time. ROBERT LINT California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo Her Work: Stories by Texas Women. Edited by Lou Halsell Rodenberger. (Bryan, Texas: Shearer Publishing, 1982. 335 pages, $16.95.) The reader who opens this volume of contemporary short stories by Texas women expecting to find tales of conventional cowboy lore will be dis­ appointed. The thirty-one stories contained in the collection defy any definite categorization of theme, content, or motif. They can be defined only in a broad sense, as editor Lou Rodenberger puts it, as explorations of the “mys­ teries and the complexities of human life.” Rodenberger explains the rationale for collecting stories written strictly by women who have lived in Texas: the nature of the state itself encourages breadth and diversity of vision. These stories certainly fulfill this description, since they vary widely in several respects: geographical locale — from urban chaos to rural loneliness;social class — from middle-class dilemmas to lower- 64 Western American Literature class minority concerns; point of view — from child to adult (including four stories in the masculine point of view) ; theme — from family and femalemale relationships to women’s individual concerns. Because of this variety, the reader will necessarily find some stories more amusing, interesting or edifying than others. Yet this variety of response is not, I think, due entirely to personal perspective, for the stories definitely vary in quality. For instance, I was able to identify strongly, on the one hand, with Rico’s point-of-view in Estela Portillo Trambley’s “Village,” when, as a private in Viet Nam, he shoots his sergeant in the arm to prevent the massacre of a village of innocent Vietnamese citizens. On the other hand, I found equally convincing and realistic the story of a young girl Ann and her first encounter with death — the child’s attempt to understand the rules of the adult world (“Rules” by Ann Marable Sparks and Betty Marable Flowers). Yet other stories such as Ruth Brodsky’s “The Shamus and the Shikse” and Carolyn Osborn’s “Wildflowers I Have Known,” were less accessible either because of a strong and specialized cultural perspective or a rather unconven­ tional technique. The volume itself is well-bound and attractively printed, and its dust cover carries a painting by Ancel E. Nunn of a woman, presumably in a rural Texas...