POEtic Justice
by Brittany Hanson and Hannah Holst
Exquisite
Corpse
The basic idea of the Exquisite Corpse in and of itself was a
large factor in the creation of this project. The initial idea was someone
else’s, taken from another source of inspiration and shared on the board in
class. The simple “I didn’t mean it when I ran over your cat with a lawn mower”
triggered the response to write the next part, influenced in large part by
Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat. The dialogue is continued, “…anyway, I
found a new cat, and it looks just like the old one, but he’s got this white
patch. And I might be crazy, but it’s kinda shaped like a lawn mower.” Each of
these elements directly impacted the resulting text conversation, each in its
own unique way, adding to the bigger picture even if they seem unrelated on
their own.
The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe tells the dark story of the relationship
between a man and a black cat, assumed to have “seduced [him] to murder”. Many
of the characteristics of the story were influenced by this narrative, though
there are still a lot of differences. The original makes it clear the cat was
hanged by its owner, whereas reference to the cat being killed by a lawn mower
is only implied in the text conversation. In both, the cats each come back, the
only difference in their appearance or temperament being a white splotch which
eventually grows to look like the object by which they faced death.
Using the
Medium of Texting
It
was a fun challenge to tell a story purely through dialogue without the use of
imagery. We had to make sure all of the details necessary to build the story
and frame Edgar were in place without sacrificing the impromptu feel of a
texted conversation.
Something
interesting that we discovered while working as partners on this assignment was
that the dialogue flowed naturally when we just started texting. We’ve had so
much practice with this style of communication that after we planned the
structure of the story and established our characters, we were better able to come
up with the dialogue by simply texting back and forth. Texts are often spur-of-the-moment
and rather thoughtless, so after deciding the direction of the story, we let
the specifics of the wording mostly just happen as we responded to each other,
editing as necessary.
However, we made sure that both
characters referenced the afternoon, connecting the time Edgar borrowed the
lawnmower to the disappearance of the cat, thus implying that the events are
related.
We also intentionally juxtaposed the
writing styles of Edgar and his neighbor. While Edgar is oddly formal, the
neighbor responds with a lack of correct punctuation and spelling more typical
of the medium. So when Edgar makes a typo, initially saying that “your cat must
have certainly shred a lot,” instead of “shed,” it’s a true Freudian slip,
further suggesting that something terrible went down between the cat and the
lawnmower when Edgar borrowed it.
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