Assignment #4:Summary of Part 1 of "Tinkers" by Paul Harding and it's Relationship to my Current Body of Work

Sarah Zuckerman

October 4, 2013

Research Methodologies AVT 600

Assignment #4

Summary of Part 1 of "Tinkers" by Paul Harding 

and it's Relationship to my Current Body of Work

Paul Harding’s “Tinkers”, a Pulitzer Prize fiction novel, explores the mindset of a man eight days before his death. George Washington Crosby recalls memories of his life including, and predominantly of his father Howard. Within the structure of this novel, Howard also recalls his memories, and the two become intertwined as father and son inducing their life experiences and how they relate to each other, their life’s work, and their love of tinkering, mostly for George, with clocks. The idea of time is prominent as George’s last days approach and as his life of being a horologist shapes how he remembers his personal time. This novel relates to my work through the use of memory, loss, and parent child relationships. Through my work I recall memories and work through the idea of loss as it relates to my parent child relationship. As George tries to evoke his father he has a more difficult time doing so the longer the years have been. Also he struggles with the idea of being forgotten. As I work to act in a way to remember my mother, I see the truth in his words,

“…be mingled with in endless ways of other people’s memories, so that I will remain a set of impressions porous and open to combination with all the other vitreous squares floating about in whoever else’s frames, because there is always space left in reserve for their own time, and to my great-grandchildren, with more space than tiles, I will be no more than the smoky arrangement of a set of rumors, and to their great-grandchildren I will be no more than a tint of some obscure color, and to their great grandchildren nothing they ever know about, and so what army of strangers and ghosts has shaped and colored me until back to Adam… But it doesn’t stop; it simply ends. It is a final pattern scattered without so much as a pause at the end, at the end of what, at the end of this” (pages 65,66 Tinkers, Paul Harding).

This passage illustrates how I think of memories of persons past and my concern for how they will be remembered. I want to remember them but also live my life in the present. I feel it is important to have a collection of memories, shared, so that future persons know who you are, and also that at this point in time I can look to remember those to make up my past and influence who I am today.

Throughout the novel there are many facets of memory that are explored. Some rely on keepsakes; that at their sight remind people of things they had long since forgotten. Some are of sounds George hears, particularly the silence while in his deathbed, and ponders this silence until he realizes that all the clocks have wound down, due to his inability to get up to wind them, as he is bed ridden. His wife comments that she finds the ticking of the clocks an annoyance but there is a realization later that the sound actually came as a comfort after her husband’s death, and reminded her of him. This idea of different sensory perceptions accumulating to produce and induce memories I think is interesting to take into account – the effect that a number of these senses can have one you can in one moment be profound and in another disturbing.

Also encased within this novel is the idea of items passed on from one human to another as they know they are entering or have passed the stage of death. In one portion, Howard receives an old book from a man he helped for many years as he delivered goods to him while he lived as a hermit in the nearby woods. Before the hermit died he left a personal token, the novel The Scarlet Letter signed by the author a personal friend of his, for Howard. The things people leave us before they die, or things that happen upon us because of death are reminders and confirmations of who those people were. I think that keepsakes are independent of people but of comfort, sometimes, to those who are left behind. All of these ideas culminate in my work of memory and relationships in conjunction with death.