Levels of Perception in Michael Fillerup's
Visions and Other Stories
Robert M. Hogge1
MICHAEL FILLERUP'S Visions and Other Stories is an impressive collection of nine artistically wrought stories, each one presenting Mormon protagonists who struggle to understand their relationship to many of today's perplexing issues: sterility, birth control, adultery, abuse, abandonment, insensitivity, and the limits imposed by time. In each story, the treatment of these issues is substantial, not simplistic; value-centered, not didactic; sensitive, but not overly sentimental. Fillerup is an insider, one who intimately knows the inner workings of the LDS Church, the relative vision or blindness of his characters, and the American Southwest in which most of them live.
But in this collection, Fillerup is doing much more than telling nine separate stories. As in William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses (New York: Modern Library, 1955), a later story, "Visions,'' is the thematic center of a carefully organized collection divided into Here (white communities) and There (Navajo reservation) subsections. Dave, the central character in "Visions," has a first name, but no family name. He's a nominal father obsessed by photography, his profession, his focus in life, but his family is carefully shunted off stage. His one link with family is a conscience-soothing phone call he makes to his wife Jenny and his daughter Cassie. Rationalizing his need to stay all night on the job, Dave speaks the right words to them, but the emotion behind the words is sterile. Dave has no valid reason for staying at work except his misguided quest to develop a photograph he has taken of an Indian medicine man. However, Dave is not perceptive enough to realize that the Navajo's supernatural image cannot be developed rationally by the white man's advanced technology: the developer tray, film, and fixer. At the same time, Dave rejects prayer, the nonrational solution. A surface Mormon always ready to argue his beliefs, he finally listens to Eddie Tom, a Navajo coworker, who shares with him his vision of the living Church:
The first time it worked for me, it was the morning after a meeting. My wife, she was bringing in the water. There was a light, like a big spotlight on her. There was a little circle, and then there was a little person. He had brown hair--long brown hair--and blue eyes, and he was wearing a white robe. He came out and put his hand on my wife's head. Then I
knew. He blessed her That was right before we got our son.2
Eddie Tom showed Dave what pure religion is and can be, a family-centered vision, focusing on husband and wife and children. But Dave doesn't see it. He returns to work, reaffirms his rational religion, and rejects the Navajo's vision as undoubtedly peyote-induced--rejects, that is, until later when he experiences his own epiphany, looking out at the newly fallen snow and seeing three Indians in spontaneous worship: "One old man crossed himself. Another dropped to his knees and kissed the snow. A third raised his arms to the frozen sun'' 177). Now Dave sees enough to destroy the undeveloped negative, opening himself up to a new way to perceive
In the next two stories, "Ultimatum" and "The Orchard,'' Fillerup explores diametrically opposed visions of religious truth. "Ultimatum,'' the puritanical story, is written in a minimalist style reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants'' (The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway [New York: Scribner's, 1938]). Like Hemingway's story, Fillerup's description is suggestive, and is as valuable for what it doesn't say, for the meanings that lie beneath the words.
In the story, Dave Adams and Bob Howells, two white religious leaders of an LDS Navajo congregation, drive to a hogan, exchange small talk with Norman (a member of their congregation), hand him a letter, wait for him to read it and acknowledge its contents, and then begin the drive home, leaving Norman and his family to ponder the letter's message. Though the message is not specifically identified, it constitutes an ultimatum, probably a letter of excommunication from a Church court, charging Norman with fathering a child through incest. Dave Adams, the father of the congregation, is painfully aware of the message and is justly concerned about Norman's possible reaction to it. But the insensitive Bob offers these comforting words: "You've got to say no. Especially out here" (187). Bob articulates the theme of negation--negation of Navajo customs and values--mandating instead a Mosaic enforcement of Church law. The imagery complements the story's harsh theme, suggesting suicide (of an individual) and murder (of a culture). Similar to the way the narrator and Maria in James Joyce's "Clay" use words,3 Dave's repeated use of "fine," when mentioning his own relationship with his wife, undercuts that relationship, showing how fragile it is. "Ultimatum" ends as it begins, in superficial dialogue.
An effective thematic counterpoint to "Ultima-rum" is "The Orchard," a legendary tale of affirmation, consummation, and cultural synthesis. Rich with mythological undertones, "The Orchard" brings together names, images, and words from sacred Navajo legends and Mormon ``genesis" myths, a retelling of``the Navajo creation story, of First Man and First Woman, of beginnings and endings and re-beginnings" (207). Mel and Dottie are the two central characters. Mel is a white school teacher of fourth-grade Indian students, well-read in both cultures, a bachelor embittered by women. Through his eyes, we see Dottie Littlesunday, one of his former students, but now a university professor. She invites him to hike with her into a sacred canyon in Navajoland, a restricted area where only Navajos and ``certified" whites may enter. The lush imagery, allusions, and dialogue, however, suggest that the story is more than a hike; it is the Navajo tale of a woman selecting her mate, initiating him to her ways. Mel too sees that their walk suggests larger issues. When Dottie asks him, "Would you like to see my grandmother's hogan?" Mel reflects, "The uncalculated innocence. Like a script from a fairy tale" (205). "The Orchard" is an inter-cultural tale, blending diverse mythologies, synthesizing white and Indian, the antithesis of "Ultimatum."
But the parable in the There subsection that most poignantly depicts Fillerup's vision, taking one character from negation to affirmation, is "Hozhoogoo Nanina Doo." In this story, Max Hansen experiences his own Gethsemane as he alone finishes painting the beams on the ceiling of a Church gymnasium, his final act before leaving the reservation. Fasting, almost delirious at times, he reminisces, in a stream-of-consciousness mode, as he paints, trying to make sense out of the key events of his ten-year stay on the reservation: his ambivalent feelings for the Navajo people, his own spiritual vacillation, and his gradual discovery of what the living Church is. In one crucial day, his daughter is killed in a freak accident; he punches a medicine man in the mouth; and he is called as the ecclesiastical leader of the Tsegi Branch. But as he now reflects on his ministry, he feels he has been a failure, at least by outward signs.
He began as one interested in the Navajo people and culture, but gradually became consumed by statistics and standards. He negates, driving the people away from him, causing them to hate him. Then ever so gradually he sees. An Indian woman with breast cancer asks him for a blessing and is healed, even though his overly qualified prayer never stated she would be healed. Another Indian woman is injured and freezing in a desolate area. She prays for help, and two missionaries respond, not Max. A drunken Chester Deswood asks Max to pray for him, but Max, thinking he is being conned, preaches, through prayer, rather than comforts. When he finally realizes Chester's request is genuine, Max feels ashamed of the worthless prayer he has just offered, experiencing his own epiphany: "I could have done the only thing that makes me worth my salt, out here or anywhere, brought a little comfort to a troubled soul" (154).
Once he has made that discovery, Max moves from negation to affirmation, discovering who the Navajo people really are: people of faith and vision--people who accept and expect miracles. At the end of his ministry when he is giving his final address in Church, Max feels an overwhelming love for the people and speaks the great cliche, knowing it is a cliche, but, nonetheless, feeling genuine emotion: "I just want you to know that I... I love each and every one of you" (124). Then the miraculous happens to him. After the meeting, an old Indian woman comes up to him, touches the back of his arm to get his attention, and speaks to him in Navajo, as if he could understand every word. For a minute, Max is interrupted by another person; when he looks back, the Navajo woman has vanished. He can only remember a fragment of what she has told him--hozhoogoo nanina doo--an expression a friend later translates for him: "May you go in beauty, harmony, and happiness" (125). It is this visionary message Max takes with him when he leaves the reservation to join his family in Tucson, hopefully beginning a new and more perceptive phase of his life.
As Max Hansen moves from the Navajo reservation to Tucson, so too does Fillerup move thematically from the There to Here subsection with its five stories exploring both vision and fatherhood. In "Family Plantation Day,= Dave Peterson recounts the story of Floyd Fairbanks's bizarre accident, driving a John Deere tractor erratically into an irrigation canal. Dave sees what happens and interprets, but his Perception, though entertaining, is valueless became it fails to motivate him to act.
In a gushy and engaging way, Dave tells us how perceptive he is: "You see, I notice things. I look, I observe .... Am I looking for foibles, cracks in the dike? . . . Whatever, I look, I listen, I see and hear things I maybe ought nor" (4). Dave sits in sacrament meeting observing others, detecting a look, an action, a snip of dialogue--and then creates in his mind interesting stories, embellishing surfaces into realities. With all of this perceptivity, however, Dave fails to act in important ways: he views his children more as stereotypically cute Mormon kids than as people worthy of his attention and thought; he has wildly fluctuating perceptions of his wife and never does engage meaningfully with her in her struggle over the issue of birth control; and he allows insensitive Church leaders to prate publicly about fertility and to organize family-mandated work projects, even though the key participant, Floyd Fairbanks, is childless. Dave is Perceptive, but his vision is barren.
In "The Renovation of Marsha Fletcher," Marsha's vision is both barren and hostile. Though observant and imaginative, she's a misanthrope consumed by bitterness, the perceived victim, at all echelons, of a male-dominated universe. Like many of Flannery O'Connor's females, Marsha is a grotesque obsessed by appearances: her husband Robert flirts with "a chesty redhead" (42), but she married him in the temple three years later even though she still suspects him of infidelity. She is obsessed with cosmetic surgery, rejects a mastectomy to be performed by male surgeons, and rejects God himself, feeling that only a woman can understand her feelings. She sums up her perverted sense of self by writing to her daughter (another man-hater): "Woman is the nigger of the world= (34). It's through Marsha's distorted vision that we see her husband Robert, a person she describes as both abused and abusive: abused by his hypocritical father and abusive of his own sons. However deserved her status is as a victim in a male-dominated world, Marsha herself shrivels, retreating from anything and everything male, inviting her own death, both physical and spiritual.
Another story of male negation is "The Bowhunter." Jack Robinson, the protagonist, is an absent father, an isolato, a backslider. He's a misanthropic FBI agent, disillusioned with society, an escapist whose life is the hunt. The antithesis of William Faulkner's young Ike McCaslin, Jack too gets lost in the woods, leaving behind the accouterments of civilization, a necessary prelude to his vision. Then wandering, stricken by a virus, sufficiently stripped of his pride, he eventually experiences his epiphany: he sees two elk, a father and son, embuing them with mystical significance. Immediately after the encounter, he sees the way home. But the sign is barbed wire, and the imagery suggests hell, not paradise. The imagery, coupled with Jacks earlier reminiscence about the spiritual influence he felt at his baptism, an experience that gradually dissipated until he became a Sunday Mormon, leaves us skeptical that this second epiphany will have any enduring effect.
The final tale of fragmented vision is ''Daddy-Daughter Date." On the surface Mitchell Kerns is the ideal LDS father, a person concerned about and interacting with his four daughters. In this story, he takes Kristin (his eight-year-old daughter) out for the evening. First they take a wedding gift to Bill and Suzanne Swenson. There the Swensons let Kristin hold their pet ferret, and Mitchell sees Kristin in a new light, capturing the sounds, smells, and sights of the moment, wishing, as a sentimental father, "to freeze the moment forever" (88). But the vision doesn't last. He and Kristin later visit a nursing home and talk to Jessie Walker, a person Kristin has been writing to. After the visit, Kristin asks her father some difficult questions, forcing him to confront his own mortality and a childhood memory of being abandoned by his father. The memory precipitates a tense and frightening scene as Mitchell and Kristin spontaneously join a sixties street dance, and he becomes, for one irrational moment, the projection of his own father.
"A Game of Inches," the final story in this section, moves us from fragmentation to wholeness. Flirting with cliches (such as "football is the game of life"), Fillerup's wit and irony make them work. Jim Peterson, a man of empathy and vision, strives to achieve the ever-i11usive "golden mean." But Jim doesn't live in an ice-cream-and-cake world: his young son Davy is plagued by nightmares; Jim himself is an overworked university professor and an active Church member. Coping with a myriad of problems, Jim also finds time to extend himself to others: to Steve Boyak, a friend who is having marital problems, a person Jim describes as "a godless man with a godlike heart" (111). Jim also befriends Derek, an introverted member of his Sunday School class, small, fatherless, abused, a victim with permanent bruises on his forearms. Jim spends time with them both, comforting two troubled souls. Then he returns to his family: his two-year-old son playing in the sandbox rushes to greet him; Jim smells the enchiladas Carla is cooking, his favorite meal; and, as he enters the home, he hears "the shuffle of excited feet, the shouts, 'Daddy's home!'" (116) Jim Peterson is perceptive enough to realize that all homecomings are not as idyllic as this one; but at the same time, he basks in the light of those he loves, achieving that delicate balance between vision and wisdom.
Michael Fillerup's Vision and Other Stories is an invaluable collection. Each story is carefully wrought,
artistically conceived, and fully developed. Together the nine stories echo T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1943), effective in their thematic counterpointing, striking in their
imagery, masterful in their exploration of theme.
Notes
1Robert M. Hogge is an assistant professor of English at Weber State University and a member of the Association for Mormon Letters's executive board. He is the author of two texts on technical writing which are used at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs where he taught for ten years. With three coauthors, he produced The Stone Rolls Forth: A History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Southeastern Colorado, and has authored poetry, essays, and short stories published in Weber Studies, BYU Studies, the Ensign, Rough Draft, and Innisfree. His academic specialty is Hemingway. This paper was presented at the
annual meeting of the Association for Mormon Letters, 26 January 1991, at Westminster College, Salt Lake City.
2Michael Fillerup, Visions and Other Stories (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1990), 175. Additional quotations this work are cited parenthetically by page number.
3Dubliners, edited by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (New York: Viking Press, 1969).