My MSN Nickname is “Yves is on a date with Yates. (And it’s not even William Butler.)”
I’m a creative writing student and one of the jokes (not really, ha-ha funny) that makes its way around the workshops is one that goes, “Students ask me, ‘Where should I start my story?’ I usually say ‘A title is a good place to start!’” *groan* As bad as that joke is, I think that works for story analysis, though. If you don’t know what’s going on try and figure out the relevance of the title to the rest of the piece.
I did a little digging and found out that Yates started a publishing press called “Sono Nis”. Sono Nis happened to be the name of a character from the first book the house published called “Man in the Glass Octopus” which was also written by Yates. So let’s back it up a second: He started a publishing house called “Sono Nis” named after a character in the first book the house published which happened to be Yates’ own novel. Hmmmm—No comment.
Sono Nis is, itself, very interesting. “Sono” comes from Modern Italian and it means “I am”, while “Nis” comes from Anglo-Saxon and means “Are Not.” I Am, Are Not—Existentialist? I think so.
So then, we can read the title of this piece to be “The Passage of I Am, Are Not” That doesn’t make any sense at all and therefore doesn’t help, but it is nonetheless and interesting tidbit. Perhaps this short piece of fiction is supposed to read as a prequel to “Man in the Glass Octopus” Who knows? Surrealism is pretty wack.
Okay so what’s this story about? The inevitability of death? The uselessness of living? Is it a commentary that doing something is better than doing nothing? Is it Darwinism? Is it a reaction to John Donne’s Meditation XVII where he proclaims, famously, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent”?
The easy answer? Yes. Yes it is.
But obviously you didn’t come this far just for that. Read on faithful reader, read on.
So what did I say first. Right, inevitability of death. So what is this story about? We have this thing in the creative writing stream we call “glossing”. Glossing is something we do when we want to explain a story idea, simply, to the point, no details just fact. Here’s the gloss.
Guy wakes up and hears people running outside his apartment, he goes down to find millions of people running, 5 already dead on his door step. He decides he’d better run too or he’ll starve in his house. So he runs and never finds out why and we never know if he stops. We are left to assume he doesn’t.
And that’s a glossing. TA-DA!
Anyway… How do I see The Passage of Sono Nis as being a commentary on death being inevitable? Well… if we look at the running as an allegorical pun for the human race, and that when two streams of runners intersect as being when two civilizations clash, well… then it’s easy as pie to say that this is a commentary on the inevitability of death, not to mention the futility of warring. By the way, I like the integral “punning” of the whole “human race” and the “human’s racing”. It sort of begs the question, why are we here and what is the race for? Puns. God love em’.
The uselessness of living? Can we check that off? The whole idea that we are here but for what purpose? I think we can call that a check.
Darwinism. Well, think about it. Those that can run continue to live; those that can’t run either revert to animalistic instincts like eating the dead or they get trampled to death or shoved into walls. Darwinism? Check.
Ahh… I’ve saved the best for last. John Donne. My favorite poet. Makes old Billy Shakespeare read like Dr. Seuss. Here’s the whole poem:
No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.
This poem is the opposite of this story. Let's take a look at the lines.
No man is an island, entire to itself
In The Passage of Sono Nis, nearing the beginning of our narrators joining to the running, he says,
“When I veered suddenly toward a wall with its stone blades, my insides seemed to come loose and entangle and I kicked and lashed for my life. At last, just two runners from the deadly wall, my fingers found the long wiry curls of a flaming read head. Both my hands dove for the roots at the center of that isle of hair.”
Okay, maybe I’m grasping at straws, but the imagery can’t be ignored. He calls the persons head an isle of hair, and each person there is therefore an isle that he uses to get himself into the race. To bulk up this point a bit—take a look at this:
“Once again, I don’t know how much later, I attempted to communicate with a fellow runner: when I nudged him, he struck me back so sharply with his elbow that I stumbled and would have fallen, surely, had I not grasped the shirt of the runner ahead of me.”
There a sense of isolation within a large crowd of bodies here that speaks volumes against Donne’s humanist interpretation of society. We are, in opposition to Donne’s interpretation, physically close, but emotionally and verbally detached even though we are struggle for the same thing: To live and go on living.
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
While running our narrator inadvertently causes the runner beside him to fall and be trampled to death, yet unlike in the poem the continent is not diminished. The space beside our runner is immediately filled. No one makes an effort to help him, he is trampled and forgotten. While our narrator does feel horrible, he says, “How could I have known how long, how far the man had run? And I began to sense how tenuously we balanced there, for all of our thundering running.” He goes on, a little shaken, but still undiminished, and within a few lines no mention is made of the man he killed.
Of course we can’t omit the famous last line:
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.
In Donne’s poem this line serves to drive the point home that we are all connected. One death diminishes us all; the inverse is the case in The Passage of Sono Nis. We have:
By the time I was quite sure the same sequence of signs appeared again and again overhead, I was beyond anything like horror or despair.
And I was not surprised to feel we were no longer running on the pavement.
Obviously what they’re running on are the bodies of the dead. The whole “same sequence of signs appeared again and again…” reveals that they aren’t running for a purpose or towards a destination. They are running in circles. No one stops to respect, or even remove the dead from under their feet, they just keep going. They keep running. This is the stark view of life and society that Yates wants the reader to feel.
Okay, so I don’t know if this is necessarily what Yates was going for, but there seems to be a connection to the Donne poem. Maybe that’s just a connection I made, or maybe it’s intentional, or maybe it’s just coming through me from the celestial wireless. Whatever, it is what it is.
FIN.
I did a little digging and found out that Yates started a publishing press called “Sono Nis”. Sono Nis happened to be the name of a character from the first book the house published called “Man in the Glass Octopus” which was also written by Yates. So let’s back it up a second: He started a publishing house called “Sono Nis” named after a character in the first book the house published which happened to be Yates’ own novel. Hmmmm—No comment.
Sono Nis is, itself, very interesting. “Sono” comes from Modern Italian and it means “I am”, while “Nis” comes from Anglo-Saxon and means “Are Not.” I Am, Are Not—Existentialist? I think so.
So then, we can read the title of this piece to be “The Passage of I Am, Are Not” That doesn’t make any sense at all and therefore doesn’t help, but it is nonetheless and interesting tidbit. Perhaps this short piece of fiction is supposed to read as a prequel to “Man in the Glass Octopus” Who knows? Surrealism is pretty wack.
Okay so what’s this story about? The inevitability of death? The uselessness of living? Is it a commentary that doing something is better than doing nothing? Is it Darwinism? Is it a reaction to John Donne’s Meditation XVII where he proclaims, famously, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent”?
The easy answer? Yes. Yes it is.
But obviously you didn’t come this far just for that. Read on faithful reader, read on.
So what did I say first. Right, inevitability of death. So what is this story about? We have this thing in the creative writing stream we call “glossing”. Glossing is something we do when we want to explain a story idea, simply, to the point, no details just fact. Here’s the gloss.
Guy wakes up and hears people running outside his apartment, he goes down to find millions of people running, 5 already dead on his door step. He decides he’d better run too or he’ll starve in his house. So he runs and never finds out why and we never know if he stops. We are left to assume he doesn’t.
And that’s a glossing. TA-DA!
Anyway… How do I see The Passage of Sono Nis as being a commentary on death being inevitable? Well… if we look at the running as an allegorical pun for the human race, and that when two streams of runners intersect as being when two civilizations clash, well… then it’s easy as pie to say that this is a commentary on the inevitability of death, not to mention the futility of warring. By the way, I like the integral “punning” of the whole “human race” and the “human’s racing”. It sort of begs the question, why are we here and what is the race for? Puns. God love em’.
The uselessness of living? Can we check that off? The whole idea that we are here but for what purpose? I think we can call that a check.
Darwinism. Well, think about it. Those that can run continue to live; those that can’t run either revert to animalistic instincts like eating the dead or they get trampled to death or shoved into walls. Darwinism? Check.
Ahh… I’ve saved the best for last. John Donne. My favorite poet. Makes old Billy Shakespeare read like Dr. Seuss. Here’s the whole poem:
No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.
This poem is the opposite of this story. Let's take a look at the lines.
No man is an island, entire to itself
In The Passage of Sono Nis, nearing the beginning of our narrators joining to the running, he says,
“When I veered suddenly toward a wall with its stone blades, my insides seemed to come loose and entangle and I kicked and lashed for my life. At last, just two runners from the deadly wall, my fingers found the long wiry curls of a flaming read head. Both my hands dove for the roots at the center of that isle of hair.”
Okay, maybe I’m grasping at straws, but the imagery can’t be ignored. He calls the persons head an isle of hair, and each person there is therefore an isle that he uses to get himself into the race. To bulk up this point a bit—take a look at this:
“Once again, I don’t know how much later, I attempted to communicate with a fellow runner: when I nudged him, he struck me back so sharply with his elbow that I stumbled and would have fallen, surely, had I not grasped the shirt of the runner ahead of me.”
There a sense of isolation within a large crowd of bodies here that speaks volumes against Donne’s humanist interpretation of society. We are, in opposition to Donne’s interpretation, physically close, but emotionally and verbally detached even though we are struggle for the same thing: To live and go on living.
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
While running our narrator inadvertently causes the runner beside him to fall and be trampled to death, yet unlike in the poem the continent is not diminished. The space beside our runner is immediately filled. No one makes an effort to help him, he is trampled and forgotten. While our narrator does feel horrible, he says, “How could I have known how long, how far the man had run? And I began to sense how tenuously we balanced there, for all of our thundering running.” He goes on, a little shaken, but still undiminished, and within a few lines no mention is made of the man he killed.
Of course we can’t omit the famous last line:
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.
In Donne’s poem this line serves to drive the point home that we are all connected. One death diminishes us all; the inverse is the case in The Passage of Sono Nis. We have:
By the time I was quite sure the same sequence of signs appeared again and again overhead, I was beyond anything like horror or despair.
And I was not surprised to feel we were no longer running on the pavement.
Obviously what they’re running on are the bodies of the dead. The whole “same sequence of signs appeared again and again…” reveals that they aren’t running for a purpose or towards a destination. They are running in circles. No one stops to respect, or even remove the dead from under their feet, they just keep going. They keep running. This is the stark view of life and society that Yates wants the reader to feel.
Okay, so I don’t know if this is necessarily what Yates was going for, but there seems to be a connection to the Donne poem. Maybe that’s just a connection I made, or maybe it’s intentional, or maybe it’s just coming through me from the celestial wireless. Whatever, it is what it is.
FIN.
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10:26 PM
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