55 pages • 1 hour read
Wallace StegnerThe Spectator Bird
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Myth
Content Warning: This section contains references to rape, incest, and eugenics.
The Spectator Bird uses tropes lifted from legend and myth to deepen the psychological resonance of the story’s themes and events—particularly The Dangers of Tampering With Nature. The novel’s central mythological trope is that of the “Fisher King,” a legend associated with King Arthur’s knights and their search for the Holy Grail. The “Fisher King” has thematic roots that reach as far back as Greek myth, and many modern writers have alluded to it in their works—e.g., T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Most commonly, the Fisher King is described as an old man with a grievous wound that will not heal. His kingdom is a “waste land” afflicted with disease and famine, with the implication that the land’s fertility is linked to the king’s health. Sir Galahad, one of Arthur’s knights, arrives at the castle and, while feasting in the hall, watches the king’s servants carry a radiant cup into the hall and out the back. This cup is the Holy Grail, but Galahad does not recognize it and does not think to ask the king about it. That night, the king’s wound grows much worse, and only then does Galahad learn that if he had asked about the Grail, the evil spell would have been broken. Not until much later does Galahad finally succeed in “winning” the Grail, restoring fertility to the land.
The saga is an archetypal one of aging, death, and rebirth. Stegner uses it to signal a renewal in the married life of his two protagonists. The novel opens on a cold day in February, replete with portents of foul weather and death. Joe, the Fisher King figure, describes his many aches and ailments, as well as his stagnant career and tedious retirement. That night, Joe and Ruth look back on their visit, 20 years ago, to a Danish castle owned by Astrid’s family. During the visit, Joe takes on the symbolic role of Galahad, rooting out the castle’s dark secrets. Both the “mechanized” sterility of Eigil’s factory-like estate and the infertility that threatens his inbred bloodline suggest the Fisher King’s kingdom. In this context, the Fisher King is evoked by Astrid and Eigil’s ailing grandmother, who dies during Joe’s visit, possibly as a result of his mention of the name “Sverdrup.”
Before their visit to the castle, Joe and Ruth have an ominous meeting with the Danish writer Karen Blixen, whom Joe describes repeatedly as “witchlike.” In this, she evokes Morgan le Fay, the witch who sought to mislead Galahad on his quest for the Grail. She speaks in riddles, telling him that evil has its “attractive” side and that she finds Eigil Rødding “fascinating.”
The sequence with Blixen also reaches back to the story of Oedipus—a Greek myth with some parallels to the Fisher King story. Blixen first appears in a photo as an old woman holding up an ancient stone carved with runes. Describing her, Joe mentions lions, which she used to hunt in Africa, and birds, which her ravaged face somewhat resembles. This connects her with the Sphinx, the ancient monster that was part woman, lion, and eagle: a hybrid, like Eigil’s creations. The runes she holds suggest the riddle proffered by the Sphinx to Oedipus. The curse of Oedipus, which laid waste to his kingdom, was due to incest—the sin that has disgraced the Rødding family and doomed Astrid’s prospects.
It is only after revisiting these events and discussing them in full for the first time, that Joe and Ruth finally put the past firmly behind them and restore their loving bond. The Grail is Joe’s journal, and the two of them have “won” it at last. After sharing a passionate kiss on the driveway, Joe notices birch trees “lacy with the first tiny formings of leaves” and that the air is “sweet with the smell of daphne” (203). Life has returned to the waste land.
Irony
As a conflict between expectations and reality, irony is often temporal: A person anticipates one thing but then receives something else. This links it to The Spectator Bird’s examination of regret, which likewise unfolds in retrospect; it also heightens the juxtaposition of American Deracination Versus European Gothic.
The novel’s central irony is the disparity between Joe’s fanciful expectations of what he will find in Denmark, which he imagines to be a close-knit community of ancient families with well-documented lineages and few secrets, and the disturbing reality. Many of his illusions are the result of wishful thinking. The son of an orphaned Danish immigrant, Joe grew up with family mysteries that he saw as typically American: a family tree that was largely blank, no stories or lore about ancestors, no lengthy genealogy records or family estates, and no generations-old stomping grounds.
This sense of deracination is part of what draws Joe to Denmark in 1954. Meeting Eigil Rødding, the scion of an ancient family that reputedly has occupied the same tract of land for six millennia, he can hardly contain his envy. The irony of this still haunts him 20 years later, as do the revelations about Eigil’s true past, “a real Grendel of a lesson left over from the time of trolls and demons” (20). Instead of the warm embrace of relatives, Joe finds a family riven by incest, treason, and sexual exploitation.
Joe speculates that the Bertelsons might have faced an irony of this sort since the straitlaced Sweden they left a half-century before was no longer the austere paradise of their dreams. Mr. Bertelson’s death on the ship, Joe reflects, at least spared him this realization. Moreover, Bertelson’s death and burial at sea rubs Joe’s face in yet another irony: how he cast off his literary ambitions in exchange for the financial solvency to raise a family, only to see his only child drown—depriving him of both a literary and a filial legacy.
Literary Quotes and Allusions
Joe, a once-aspiring writer who envies the successful authors he has promoted in his long career as a literary agent, says he “drifted” into his profession like a fly landing on flypaper. It is a significant image, as he feels trapped and stymied by paper (i.e., writings) not his own. He toys with writing a “namedropping” tell-all memoir, and if The Spectator Bird is not that book, it is a quote-dropping one. Over its 200 pages, Stegner’s novel either quotes or alludes to scores of writers, from ancient times to modern.
Besides enriching his story with a dense weave of literary, historical, and philosophical context, the incessant quoting perfectly reflects Joe’s somewhat passive relationship with the world of letters. His erudition, which includes ancient authors such as Horace and Marcus Aurelius, is much deeper than that needed for his former job, and its constant deployment here suggests a vicarious substitute for the tomes he never got around to writing himself. Moreover, the quotes may also be his way of grounding himself with some mighty ballasts from the past since he feels incurably “deprived” of a past of his own.
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By Wallace Stegner
