Literary Barbed Wire
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/steinbeckreview.10.1.0012
ISSN1754-6087
Autores Tópico(s)Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature
ResumoIt was a nun they say invented barbed wire.—James Joyce, Ulysses Barbed wire has been an important motif in American literature since Mark Twain's 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, published only fifteen years after the invention of the paradoxical fence that protects and controls animals by threatening injury. The motif of barbed wire is common in works about control of the American West (and of the half-wild cowboy), notably in Owen Wister's The Virginian, in which barbed wire, like civilizing women, is both lamented and welcomed as inevitable, and in Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang, in which “cuttin' fence” is a monkey wrencher's imperative. Barbed wire appears in the Wyoming stories of Annie Proulx's Close Range as a necessary (if vicious) ranching tool that lends itself to metaphor, as in “I'm goin a fight John I might as well have some a that liquid bobwire first” (174) or as the claustrophobic and homophobic antithesis to the open mountain where Ennis had hoped to scatter Jack's ashes: “the country cemetery fenced with sagging sheep wire, a tiny fenced square on the welling prairie” (282).In what follows, we discuss the motif of barbed wire in a set of texts that includes John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, Brian Evenson's “Contagion,” and Jeff Mann's “The History of Barbed Wire.” Cruel control is the specialty of barbed wire, and the barbed fence emerges in these texts as an instrument of Christian flagellation (a variant of Christ's crown of thorns1), as a means of protection and coercion, as an object of religious veneration, and as an enforcer and/or enabler of identity.Following a motif through various works of literature not only highlights the nature and history of the motif itself but can also focus attention on aspects of a work that might otherwise go unnoticed.2 Addressing problems in the analysis of painting and sculpture, Erwin Panofsky lays out a process related to our investigation of the motif of barbed wire in literature: “Iconographical analysis, dealing with images, stories and allegories … presupposes a familiarity with specific themes or concepts as transmitted through literary sources” (11, italics in original). The question of what the image of barbed wire means in any specific context can only be answered in the larger context, and, of course, the larger context arises only out of the individual works.Barbed wire, invented in 1874, has a relatively brief but rich cultural history,3 beginning with the imaginative advertising through which early manufacturers attempted to construct an image of the wire that would attract buyers who might well be put off by the fact that the new fence works because it is dangerous. This advertising often played on the prejudices of prospective buyers, as does the cartoon entitled “Peek-A-Boo” published in the 1885 edition of The Glidden Barb-Fence Journal shown here, and as do various ads that promoted barbed wire as a tool to subdue the “savages” of the American West.4 That potential ability of barbed wire to control humans led almost immediately to its use in warfare.5 A Google Ngram survey of print usage of the term “barbed wire” shows a huge upturn during each of the world wars. As a result, any reference to barbed wire since the First World War necessarily carries echoes of vicious trench warfare, and since the Second World War, of Nazi concentration camps. And finally, there is no escaping the connection between the “thorny fence” and the Christian “crown of thorns.”three-foot shag of bobwire—The Grapes of WrathCasy sighed. “It's the bes' way. I gotta agree. But they's different kinda fences. They's folks like me that climbs fences that ain't even strang up yet—an' can't he'p it.”—The Grapes of Wrath It was an exchange between Jim Casy and Tom Joad about the conflicted workings of the “Holy Sperit” that first drew our attention to the motif of barbed wire in Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath: “An' I thought how some sisters took to beatin' theirselves with a three-foot shag of bobwire. An' I thought how maybe they liked to hurt themselves, an' maybe I liked to hurt myself” (31). We'll return to that passage shortly, but we will first take a look at the motif of barbed wire and related notions of control elsewhere in the novel.As the novel begins, barbed wire is simply part of the Dust Bowl landscape: “In the morning the dust hung like fog…. It settled on the corn, piled up on the tops of the fence posts, piled up on the wires” (6). Returning home after four years in prison, Tom Joad passes fences that reflect the poor men who erected them, hard-working men without the means to acquire better materials: “The right of way was fenced, two strands of barbed wire on willow poles. The poles were crooked and badly trimmed. Whenever a crotch came to the proper height the wire lay in it, and where there was no crotch the barbed wire was lashed to the post with rusty baling wire” (24). Although the Joad family and other farmers have been forced to become sharecroppers after banks loaned them money in hard times and then foreclosed, the land still feels like their own, and the fence is a symbol of their pride: “Joad pointed to the boundary fence. ‘That there's our line. We didn't really need no fence there, but we had the wire, an' Pa kinda liked her there. Said it give him a feelin' that forty was forty. Wouldn't of had the fence if Uncle John didn' come drivin' in one night with six spools of wire in his wagon. He give ‘em to Pa for a shoat. We never did know where he got that wire’” (39).The people working the land identify with it (Grampa and Muley, in fact, refuse to leave); but their awkward, largely symbolic, and probably stolen fences have no power in the world of foreclosures and profit margins. The two strands on willow poles are ineffectual markers against implacable capitalist systems and their Caterpillar tractors: “Snub-nosed monsters … across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses” (47–48). The fences erected to mark forty acres of hard-won property are simply swept away.Even though they are made of barbed wire, the Joad family's fences are harmless. In the comprehensive economy of Steinbeck's socialist novel, however, other fences are less benign.6 Jim Casy, for instance, thinks about changes going on in the country, the economic conditions that are driving thousands of families westward, and an inevitable broad uprising against the responsible system, and he frames this complex set of issues in terms of fences. His forward-looking responses contrast with Tom's more pragmatic approach (although by the end of the novel Tom will take Casy's place as a breacher of exploitative fences): “They's gonna come a thing that's gonna change the whole country.”Tom said, “I'm still layin' my dogs down one at a time.”“Yeah, but when a fence comes up at ya, ya gonna climb that fence.”“I climb fences when I got fences to climb,” said Tom.Casy sighed. “It's the bes' way. I gotta agree. But they's different kinda fences. They's folks like me that climbs fences that ain't even strang up yet—an' can't he'p it.” (237) Casy already anticipates the legal and vigilante barriers the migrants will encounter: fences they will have to climb if they want to escape the brutal greed of exploitative landowners and the unfair nature of the economic system as a whole.Just a few pages after this exchange, Tom and his brother Al are talking about Tom's time in prison, and Tom, true to form, backs away from contemplating the idea of prisons and their control of human beings: “Somepin screwy about it, somepin screwy about the whole idea a lockin' people up. Oh, the hell with it! I don' wanna talk about it” (241). They approach a wrecking yard enclosed with barbed wire: “The truck drove to the service-station belt, and there on the right-hand side of the road was a wrecking yard—an acre lot surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence…. In the grassy lot the wrecks lay … a mass of derelicts” (241–242). Derelict refugees of the Dust Bowl find their counterparts in the derelict cars surrounded by barbed wire.7 The fences that failed to protect their own property here enforce the rights of the boss who has left a much-abused, one-eyed man in charge. As opposed to the resourceful Joads, however ill-fated they may be, the man in the wrecking yard is simply pitiful. Tom advises him to put a patch over his eye socket and to leave: “Whyn't you roll on? Got no guards to keep ya here.” The man responds: “Yeah, that's easy to say. Ain't so easy to get a job—not for a one-eye' man … and then he went … to his shack, … and he stretched out and cried in his bed, and the cars whizzing by on the highway only strengthened the walls of his loneliness” (244, 247). Subjugated by fences that have invaded his mind, there will be no rolling on for this man.Whether internal or external, walls, fences, guards, prisons, laws, and inhibitions restrict change by inhibiting motion. In the right hands, fences can also protect the working families banded together in the government camp the Joads find after being chased out of an unprotected Hooverville: “A high wire fence faced the road, and a wide-gated driveway turned in” (389). “Some nights the boys patrol the fences, ‘specially dance nights” (393), explains the watchman, because the landowners resent and fear the migrants who have organized for their own well-being. But later, when the Joads end up behind the fences of a landowner's camp, they encounter the fence and the attendant armed men who are posted there to control both the migrant laborers and the angry picketers. Tom decides to investigate but is stopped by a guard with a gun and a flashlight who asks where he is going. Tom replies, “Well, I thought I'd take a walk. Any law against it? … Can't I even get out of here?” (518–519). This is a fence that Tom has reason to cross, and he circles through a field: “At last he came to the wire fence, five strands of taut barbed wire. Beside the fence he lay on his back, moved his head under the lowest strand, held the wire up with his hands and slid himself under, pushing against the ground with his feet. He was about to get up when a group of men walked by on the edge of the highway. Tom waited until they were far ahead before he stood up and followed them…. Tom climbed a fence and moved down into the ravine through brush and dwarf willows; and in the bottom, beside a tiny stream, he found a trail” (518–520).Jim Casy is camped beside the stream with other strikers, inhabiting a liminal space beyond two fences, in accord with his earlier thought: “Yeah, but when a fence comes up at ya, ya gonna climb that fence” (237). He and Tom have climbed these fences to enter a dangerous but potentially transformative place. Beyond the fences they are free—but they are also unprotected. Moments later, they are struck down by men carrying ax handles. Tom fights back, killing one of the assailants, and then escapes, recrossing the boundaries into the camp: “Ahead he saw the bushes that bounded the field, bushes along the edges of an irrigation ditch. He slipped through the fence, edged in among vines and blackberry bushes. And then he lay still, panting hoarsely” (528).The Joads spend the rest of the novel outside of organized camps, with Tom in hiding and the rest of the family in a boxcar until they are finally flooded out. Fleeing the rising water, they cross a final fence to get to the barn where the novel leaves them: “‘Le's go through the fence here. It's shorter. Come on, now! Bear on Rosasharn.' They half dragged the girl across the ditch, helped her through the fence” (616). Beyond this fence lies the mythical opening into shared spirit that Jim Casy preached and Tom embraced: “Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain't got a soul of his own, but on'y a piece of a big one” (572). Rose of Sharon, having just given birth to a dead child, breaches a psychological fence, baring her breast to nurse a starving man: “She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously” (619).As the Joads and Jim Casy climb the various fences meant to exploit them, they risk their lives to keep moving. They leave the various restraints of prison, jail, Hooverville, and the landowner's camp to arrive at a powerful solidarity calculated to change the conditions that have made them desperate. They also climb internal fences. And here we return to the initial barbed wire, as Casy asks: “I says, ‘Why is it that when a fella ought to be just about mule-ass proof against sin, an' all full up of Jesus, why is it that's the time a fella gets fingerin' his pants buttons?’ … I says, ‘Maybe it ain't a sin. Maybe it's just the way folks is. Maybe we been whippin' the hell out of ourselves for nothin'.' An' I thought how some sisters took to beatin' theirselves with a three-foot shag of bobwire. An' I thought how maybe they liked to hurt themselves, an' maybe I liked to hurt myself” (31). These three-foot shags represent a “different kinda fence” (237), an internal fence Jim Casy is eager to transcend. Casy, of course, decides to quit preaching, announcing that he doesn't know anyone named Jesus but that he does know plenty of real people who need his help. The ecstatic self-mortification and emotional excess linked to the “Holy Sperit,” however, occur repeatedly in the novel and are tied to the double reasoning Casy lays out here: the people beating themselves do so because they feel they are the sinful causes of their miserable conditions and thus must beat the literal hell out of themselves and/or they like to hurt themselves.In contrast, Ma Joad repeatedly rebuffs the Jehovites and similar howlers and jumpers who choose excesses of the “Sperit” over pragmatic human solidarity. When Granma is dying in the tent on the California border, a Jehovite pushes her way into the tent and announces that she will “hol' a meetin'—a prayer an' grace” for the “soul here ready to join her Jesus. Praise God!” (287). Ma Joad says coldly that they “ain't gonna have no meetin' in this here tent” (288), and the Jehovite returns to her own tent where she and her fellows raise exhortations that become commands that become feral howlings and screams and slapping and thudding (288–289). Ma Joad graciously questions her own decision to turn the Jehovites away but then tells Rose of Sharon, “Maybe it's him [Jim Casy] made me tell them people they couldn't come here” (289). The ecstatic howlers may make themselves feel good, but they do nothing to change the conditions that have forced the Joads from their home.In the government camp, Ma Joad confronts another religious fanatic who has frightened Rose of Sharon and who gloats that she “went out to a meetin' in Weedpatch las' night. Know what the preacher says? He says ‘They's wicketness in that camp.’ He says, ‘The poor is tryin' to be rich.’ He says, ‘They's dancin’ an' huggin' when they should be wailin' an' moanin' in sin'” (438). When Ma Joad threatens her with a stick, she begins to howl and drool and shudder and falls to the ground in a fit. A watching man attributes these happenings to “the sperit. She got the sperit” (438). Ma Joad will have none of that, saying,“If she comes back, I might hit her” (439).Uncle John, also obsessed with sin—“Nobody don' know my sins, nobody but Jesus. He knows” (377)—has his own version of mind-numbing religion, the attendant spirit of which is alcohol. Two chugged bottles of whiskey bring him down as surely as the woman felled by the “Sperit.”Aroused by sin and sorrow, the “Sperit” brings on fits, feral howling, self-loathing, and self-flagellation with shags of barbed wire. But maybe, Jim Casy muses, “it ain't a sin. Maybe it's just the way folks is” (32). Rather than whipping themselves with shags of barbed wire, rather than numbing themselves to the conditions under which they suffer with alcoholic spirits, Jim Casy argues that the enemy is an unjust and oppressive economic system and the people who enforce it. Only by abandoning inner fences and turning to the forces of human solidarity can a battle against external fences be won.8Marx, of course, referred to religion as the inverted consciousness of the world and argued in terms that resonate in The Grapes of Wrath: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the spirit of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people” (115). Georges Bataille describes the process similarly: “Religion thus does not at all try to do away with what others consider the scourge of man. On the contrary, in its immediate form, it wallows in a revolting impurity that is indispensable to its ecstatic torment. The meaning of Christianity is given in the development of the delirious consequences of the expenditure of classes, in a mental agonistic orgy practiced at the expense of the real struggle” (126). That's precisely Jim Casy's argument. Self-flagellation with barbed wire is a “mental agonistic orgy practiced at the expense of the real struggle.”“All the way evil,” she said, going under the barbed-wire fence.—Wise BloodMrs. Tate had to tell me once that there was no such thing as bob-wire. It is barbed wire. Isn't that silly? My mother says, “You talk just like a nigger.”—Flannery O'Connor When she says “bob-wire,” Flannery O'Connor talks like the common people in The Grapes of Wrath. Beyond that linguistic similarity, there is surprising congruence between Steinbeck's antimystical novel and Flannery O'Connor's grotesquely mystical Wise Blood. The most notable parallel is the mortification of the flesh by barbed wire that is featured in both works: The Grapes of Wrath begins with Jim Casy's renunciation of the ecstatic Christianity that leads women to whip themselves with barbed wire, and Wise Blood ends with Hazel Motes's vicious self-cleansing, a rite which includes wrapping his chest with barbed wire. These are important scenes, and we shall return to them. But first we shall examine a set of parallels that will lend credence to our reading of the barbed-wire scenes in conjunction.In a 2004 Steinbeck Studies article, John Seelye traces similarities between the two novels by noting that both Tom Joad and Hazel Motes are returning from “regimented and repressive ordeals” (42)—Joad from prison and Motes from the U.S. Army. Seelye doesn't notice that both men have been away for exactly four years, a fact that adds further weight to his comparison. He reminds us that they both return to empty family houses—Joad going on to join a fiercely united family, while Motes has no family left whatsoever. Seelye is primarily interested in the role of religion in both novels, arguing that “Protestant fundamentalism with its earnest, self-invested, self-denying evangelistic zeal … holds out hope for society's salvation” (45) in The Grapes of Wrath, whereas the radical Protestantism into which Hazel Motes retreats is destructively solipsistic (44). Although the fundamentalist Protestant parallel is interesting, we see Seelye's reading of evangelical religion in The Grapes of Wrath as fundamentally flawed. As we have argued above, Steinbeck's novel features a profound renunciation of ecstatic mysticism, including the version that leads to self-flagellation by barbed wire. While Seelye has critical company in his view that Motes's ending is destructively solipsistic, the gruesome ending of Wise Blood elicits a reading shared by many, including Flannery O'Connor herself, of Hazel Motes as a self-mortifying Christian saint.9Seelye ignores other parallels between the antithetical novels. Like the Joads, whose newly acquired but hard-used truck carries them to a new, if brutal, life, Hazel Motes buys a decrepit automobile that is his own means to a new life. He preaches the Church Without Christ from the car's bumper and then attempts to flee in the car to a new town, where he plans to preach the message of this church to a new audience.10Most critically, characters in both novels are haunted by sin. Hazel Motes's obsession with sin is related to Steinbeck's self-hating, barbed-wire-wielding women and the sin that haunts the Joads' Uncle John. At a carnival as a boy, Motes witnesses his father leering at a lively naked woman in a silk-lined coffin. He tries to atone for having seen that moment by putting rocks in his shoes. In the army, he adopts a different approach, reasoning that if he doesn't sin, then a threatening Jesus can't get him. (This sense of divine violence comes in part from his grandfather, a preacher, a “waspish old man … with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger” [9–10].) Out of the army, he takes a different tack: if there is no Jesus, he decides, then there is no sin: “You are clean without Jesus” (30). The blasphemies Motes utters, his fornication with a whore and then a young girl, and his running over the false prophet with his car are sinless acts if there is no Jesus to call them sin. But finally, his car gone and his deeds done, he succumbs to “the wild ragged figure” (11) that has flitted the whole time in the back of his mind. He pays for his sins by blinding himself, wrapping his torso with barbed wire, and lining his shoes with gravel and broken glass.11 One morning, his landlady finds him breathing heavily: The old shirt he wore to sleep in was open down the front and showed three strands of barbed wire, wrapped around his chest. She retreated backwards to the door and then she dropped the tray. “Mr. Motes,” she said in a thick voice, “what do you do these things for? It's not natural.”He pulled himself up.“What's that wire around you for? It's not natural,” she repeated.After a second he began to button the shirt. “It's natural,” he said.“Well, it's not normal. It's like one of them gory stories, it's something that people have quit doing—like boiling in oil or being a saint or walling up cats,” she said. “There's no reason for it. People have quit doing it.”“They haven't quit doing it as long as I'm doing it,” he said.“People have quit doing it,” she repeated. “What do you do it for?”“I'm not clean,” he said. (126–127)Whether Hazel Motes has become a saintly believer in harsh penance or whether he has proven that he is crazy is a disputed topic among critics.12 But by the internal logic of the novel, he has moved from a childhood fear of a sharp-stingered Jesus to an attempt to establish a “Church Without Christ” (and thus without sin and its attendant penance) and finally to an extreme sense of his own sinfulness that requires extraordinary punishment (quicklime in his eyes, barbed wire around his torso, and rocks and glass in his shoes).13 The landlady sees these acts as unnatural, comparing them to gory stories from the past. Jim Casy, by the way, similarly relegated talk of Jesus and penance to stories from the past: “No, I don't know nobody name' Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people” (Steinbeck 32). Motes, believing that Christ is not a character in a story but a real being who demands penance for his sins, sees such acts as absolutely natural. O'Connor herself saw the Christian stories as real. Gooch describes a conversation at the New York apartment of novelist Mary McCarthy during which McCarthy spoke of the host taken at communion as a symbol and O'Connor replied, “If it's a symbol, to hell with it” (174).There remains, for readers alerted to the motif of barbed wire in the novel, the odd scene in which Motes finds Sabbath Hawks in the backseat of his car. He had earlier decided to seduce her in order to show her father, who had supposedly blinded himself for Jesus, that he was serious about his Church Without Christ. Sabbath has intentions herself, having decided to seduce Motes in order to get away from her father. As they drive, she announces that she is a bastard and thus “can't enter the kingdom of heaven” (67). Motes is dumbfounded: “You couldn't be a bastard…. Your daddy blinded himself” (67). By his reckoning, blinding oneself is full recognition of and payment for sin, and a man who could do that could never be the father of a bastard. They get out of the car and start toward some trees while continuing the troubling conversation: “‘Was he a very evil-seeming man before he came to believe,’ he asked, ‘or just part way evil-seeming?’ ‘All the way evil,’ she said, going under the barbed wire fence on the side of the road” (68). Inside the fence, Motes thinks about the bastard question while Sabbath takes steps to seduce him. She playfully looks at him from very close range and says, “I see you” (70). In response, Motes jumps up and returns to the car. Then, “Sabbath Hawks came running up to the fence. She got down on the ground and rolled under the barbed wire and then stood at the window of the car, looking in at him” (70). Enclosed by barbed-wire fences, potentially “seen” in his wickedness, Motes flees back to his wreck of a car and his Church Without Christ. He refuses to be seen. And thus he remains, for some time, outside the barbed-wire bonds of Christian dogma.If the act of blinding, barbed wire, and sharp glass and rocks are the means to Motes's purification—a self-crucifixion of sorts—then the earlier appearance of the instruments of penance in the novel might be seen as stations of the cross foreshadowing the final horrors. At station number one, Motes puts rocks in his shoes as a child. At station number two, he encounters the man who supposedly blinded himself. At station number three, he crosses and recrosses the barbed-wire fence with Sabbath. And finally, after the preliminary stations, he raises himself on the cross of quicklime, barbed wire, rocks, and glass.There is an echo here, in the wire and glass, of Jim Casy's admission, after discussing the “Sperit” and self-flagellation with barbed wire, that he puts on his canvas sneakers because “I ain't got your confidence…. I'm always scared there's wire or glass under the dust” (Steinbeck 37). Motes's embrace of wire and glass is a reversal of Casy's fear of injury. Unlike Moses before the burning bush, Casy puts on his shoes to approach the people who embody holiness for him. Motes puts on his shoes to do harm to himself as penance.Whereas Jim Casy moves away from God and the “Holy Sperit” (“Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus?” [Steinbeck 32–33]), Motes returns to Christ with a vengance. Jim Casy says the sins are not real; that they come from stories that need to be superseded; that self-flagellation is unnatural; that human solidarity against economic exploitation is natural; and that the “grapes of wrath” turn us away from Jesus, who “died to make men holy,” and toward another kind of sacrifice that will “make men free.” Hazel Motes decides that the sins are real; that the stories about Jesus and his penitent followers are real; and that self-flagellation is, therefore, “the fateful lightning of his terrible quick sword.”Whether it is a “three-foot shag of bobwire” or “three strands of barbed wire, wrapped around his chest,” the “thorny fence” lends itself readily to metaphors related to Christ's crown of thorns and then to reification of the metaphor on the bodies of ecstatic saints, for better or for worse, depending on your point of view.Words must serve in the stead of a fence.—“Contagion”You shall know the fence and the fence shall make you free.—“Contagion” Brian Evenson's “Contagion” (2000)14 continues this masochistic religious theme in a sadistic context replete with the history of barbed wire and focused on the way metaphors are made and then reified. The story begins with a paragraph about the initial task: “They were to travel due South, checking fenceline for $2/day to territory's extreme, and then to cross over and observe conditions beyond. They rode by horse, seeing only perfect and secure fence to either side of the road until, near the border, the landscape grew ribbed and strange. It was not merely stony but gnarled all through like a brain” (75).From the beginning, then, the world of the fence and its landscape and the world the riders construct in their brains are so interwoven as to be indistinguishable. Like much of Evenson's work, “Contagion” is about what goes on in the brain, about phenomenology and epistemology.15 In this case, the phenomenon to be apprehended is the contagion (the most terrible of which, the story's epigraph from Artaud informs us, is the contagion that doesn't reveal its traits). Hunt, for instance, “reads” the entrails and hide of his skinned horse in an attempt to decipher the cause of the horse's death, an early version of the task Haish and Grenniger pursue throughout: to read the source of the contagion in the barbed wire that may itself be a contagion.The three company men bear the names of protagonists in the historical development of barbed wire—Haish, Hunt, and Grenniger—and Haish's notebook becomes a catalog of historical barbed wire. After Hunt joins his horse as a victim of the inexplicable contagion, the company orders Haish and Grenniger to continue: “pursue contagion along fenceline stop else all monies forfeit stop” (80).Haish begins to contemplate the meaning of the fence, even while continuing to make a simple record of what he sees: “The fence changed and Haish promptly recorded it in his book. Double-strand undulate wire, coldweather, armatured with Glidden's coil…. What are we searching for exactly? he wrote. What might we have to learn from wire? Is it better here, across the border, among new varieties, hand-patched? What is the connection between wire and contagion, if any? When will
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