Guiseppe Flashcards
1
Q
Evil, cruelty and dehumanisation
A
- In “Giuseppe,” a speaker listens in horror to their uncle Giuseppe’s nightmarish tale from World War II-era Italy. Alongside a crowd of other starving men, Giuseppe remembers, he butchered “the world’s only captive mermaid” for food—a surreal killing that he clearly still feels guilty over. He remembers in hideous detail how the mermaid “screamed like a woman in terrible fear,” how he and the other killers “took a ripe golden roe” (or fish egg pouch) from her body, and how they “put her head and her hands / in a box for burial.” The only way that Giuseppe can cope with his awful deed is to tell himself the mermaid wasn’t a person at all, but an animal—or at least something subhuman, a “simple” creature whom it was perfectly reasonable to butcher for food.
- His fellow killers make the same justifications. When they extract the mermaid’s roe, for instance, they tell themselves that “an egg is not a child,” and that this mermaid is of course “just a fish.” Clearly, however, none of them completely believe this. From the mermaid’s screams to her “wedding ring,” there’s plenty to suggest that she’s a sentient, suffering person. Nevertheless, these men manage to go through with the killing by insisting, in the face of all the evidence and of their own consciences, that the mermaid is just an animal.
- More than that, the poem’s surrealism suggests that such evil isn’t confined to one time, place, or conflict. The first step toward atrocities, this poem says, is an insistence that another person’s difference from you makes them less of a person than you—or not a person at all.
2
Q
Guilt, Shame, and the Horrors of Human Nature
A
- The speaker of this nightmarish poem is horrified and fascinated by their uncle Giuseppe’s tale of murdering a mermaid during World War II. Giuseppe does his best to justify the killing to the speaker and to himself, insisting that he and the other killers were starving and that the mermaid was “just a fish,” really. However, the details of the murder—and the killers’ obvious guilt—make it clear that the mermaid was much more than a fish, and that Giuseppe knew it.
- Yet Giuseppe’s squeamish, evasive guilt is pretty cold comfort. Human beings, this poem suggests, are capable of truly hideous crimes—and a guilty conscience isn’t always (or even often) enough to stop them. The poem’s wide-ranging cast of murderous characters, from the aquarium-keeper Giuseppe to a priest to a doctor to a fishmonger, further hints that the same potential for evil lurks in everyone, no matter how ordinary, civilized, or caring they might appear.
3
Q
My Uncle Giuseppe …
… and certain others.
A
- The poem’s speaker recounts how their “Uncle Giuseppe” once told them a story from his life in Italy during World War II. While Giuseppe himself isn’t the speaker here, his niece or nephew retells his story in his voice, a technique known as free indirect speech. This free verse poem, without meter or rhyme, thus presents itself as a conversational true story, just one of old Uncle Giuseppe’s anecdotes. That unobtrusive form prepares the way for a terrible shock.
- Look beyond the dark humor of the “fishmonger” coming along to help in the butchery as well as the “doctor”—a specialist for each half of the mermaid, one supposes—and notice Giuseppe’s evasive language. Rather than starting by naming the butchers themselves, he simply says the mermaid “was butchered”—and rather than listing all the butchers, he trails off into vagueness: besides the doctor and the fishmonger, “certain others” were there too, he hedges. Giuseppe’s hands, readers can guess, are not clean, and nor is his conscience.
4
Q
She, it, had …
… in terrible fear.
A
- The speaker goes on telling Giuseppe’s story in Giuseppe’s words. Just as in his vagueness about those “certain others” who participated in the mermaid’s murder, Giuseppe sounds self-protective here. He revises “she” to “it,” for instance, playing down the mermaid’s humanity. Then he notes that she hadn’t “learned to speak,” as if in attempted justification for the murderers’ actions: Well, if she could speak, we wouldn’t have killed her. Some unnamed parties, he reports, said that she was “simple,” incapable of learning—and some, like the “priest” in attendance at the butchering, argued that she couldn’t learn because she was “just a fish.”
- The enjambment there prepares a nasty little surprise. At first, it seems as if the priest might be performing his traditional deathbed function and consoling the dying person, holding her hand to comfort her as she goes. Then the sentence picks up on a new line, and it turns out that he isn’t holding the mermaid’s hand to comfort her, but to restrain her: he pins “one of her hands” while someone else pins the other.
5
Q
And when they …
… offered to him.
A
- In this stanza, the real butchery begins. The mermaid’s killers, Giuseppe recalls, carved up her body and pulled out a “ripe golden roe”—a fish’s egg sac—“from her side.”
- The intense, specific imagery of that shining egg pouch suggests that the sight stayed vividly in Giuseppe’s memory. If it was “ripe,” it was bursting with life, plump as fresh fruit. And its “golden” gleam underscores its value. These are the eggs of the “only captive mermaid in the world,” remember.
- This moment reveals why the killers are butchering the mermaid. They’re hungry. If they can persuade themselves this mermaid is “just a fish,” then they get to do what you do with a fish and eat it for dinner. But the killers’ self-delusion, this moment suggests, is incomplete. Insist though they might that all they’re doing is carving up a fish for supper, they can’t talk their bodies into belief. No matter how hungry he is, the doctor can’t bring himself to eat what some part of him sees as a dead fetus.
- Notice, too, that Giuseppe singles out the “priest” and the “doctor” in these stanzas—figures meant to embody compassion and healing. There’s a horrible irony in their role here, and a terror. Civilized society and human compassion, in this story, aren’t holding together, or perhaps never meant much to begin with.
6
Q
Then they put …
… ring stayed put.
A
- The killers, Giuseppe has recalled, were not what you would call totally confident that the mermaid they butchered was “just a fish.” Their hypocrisy becomes even clearer in this stanza. The burial might seem like a relieving answer. At least the killers didn’t just eat the mermaid’s face. But on reflection, this moment might be even more chilling for its macabre parody of respect. The killers don’t eat the parts of the mermaid that are most obviously like them, most clearly human. Had they fully convinced themselves that she was fish and fish alone, it seems unlikely they would have gone to the trouble; nobody holds a funeral for a fish head.
- The image of the mermaid’s “wedding ring” summons up a whole underwater culture, a past life, a tragedy even before the butchery: where is this mermaid’s poor spouse now? It also makes it transparently clear that this being wasn’t “just a fish.”
- Again, the fact that someone stopped a thief from taking the ring is perhaps more (or differently) disturbing than the alternative. The murderers have already completed an act of dreadful cruelty. In stopping the ring from being stolen, they try their best to preserve a veneer of decency; it’s their own consciences, not the mermaid’s dignity, that they’re protecting here.
7
Q
The rest they …
… on the beach.
A
- After all the unease and hypocrisy and dark irony of the past stanzas, Giuseppe presents the fate of the mermaid’s body in a matter-of-fact reporter’s voice: and that’s what happened. Matter-of-fact, or perhaps traumatized: at this point in the story, it’s obvious that Giuseppe is deeply ashamed by his part in this grisly story.
- The killers claimed, Giuseppe remembers, that “a large fish had been found on the beach,” a line that makes it clear the killers are guilty of murder, and know it. If they ever truly believed the mermaid was a fish, they could have blithely told the troops: Oh, yeah, we butchered that mermaid we’ve been keeping in the aquarium—dig in!
- That the mermaid’s body went to feed the “troops” also grounds readers in the setting once more. This is Italy in World War II, and those troops are fascist forces, allied with the Nazis. These men’s murder of a partially and squeamishly dehumanized victim is only one among many.
8
Q
Starvation forgives men …
… I thank God.
A
- In the final stanza, Giuseppe’s story winds up, and the poem’s lens changes. Readers have been immersed in Giuseppe’s perspective through free indirect speech: the speaker has retold Giuseppe’s story in Giuseppe’s own words.
- They also reveal that Giuseppe is desperate for forgiveness, but can’t quite ask for it directly. Trying to justify himself, he can only say, in general terms, that when people are starving they do all sorts of terrible things they shouldn’t be held accountable for—an indirect plea that his listening niece or nephew might understand and offer some sort of absolution. Even the fact that Giuseppe is telling this story rather than hiding it suggests he can’t bear to carry his memories alone. He’s making a confession.
- Here at the end, readers might pause to think about what the mermaid in particular gives to this poem. History, after all, is full of real-life atrocities that an old Uncle Giuseppe might describe with a similar mixture of self-justification, horror, and shame. But by presenting the victim as a mermaid, Ford implies that every life, rightly seen, is distinct and miraculous, as astonishing as “the only mermaid in captivity.” The poem’s central image—the gutting of a wonder—brings that reality to life with the awful symbolic clarity of nightmare.
- The image of the mermaid also suggests that humanity latches onto difference to justify cruelty. The mermaid’s commonalities with her killers are far more meaningful than her differences; their funeral for “her head and her hands” and solicitude for her wedding ring reveals as much. People who want to use or destroy other people, this poem suggests, will begin by looking for reasons that their victims aren’t people—reasons that will always be spurious.
9
Q
The Mermaid
A
- The mermaid can be read as a symbol of all those who have been persecuted over a perceived difference—and as an image of the intrinsic value of human life.
- Much about this mermaid seems very human. She has a woman’s voice, face, and hands, and she even wears a wedding ring. In order to persuade themselves she’s not a person like them, her persecutors have to tell themselves she’s “just a fish”—that the fishy parts of her outweigh her obvious humanity. This, the poem hints, is just what people do when they decide that it’s their right to abuse another group: they focus on what makes that group different from them rather than paying attention to the more important matter of their shared humanity.
- Ford’s use of a mermaid in this role also suggests that there’s something precious and magical about every human life. The mermaid’s wondrous rarity—she’s the “only captive mermaid in the world”—parallels every individual’s irreplaceability.
10
Q
Form
A
- The first five stanzas tell Giuseppe’s tale, episode by awful episode. The first stanza introduces a nightmarish scene: the world’s “only captive mermaid” laid out for butchery behind a Sicilian aquarium. Each new stanza thereafter captures a stage in that murder
- “Giuseppe” is written in 29 lines of free verse divided into six irregular stanzas. In this form, the speaker recounts their Uncle Giuseppe’s story of murdering a mermaid in Italy during World War II.
- The final stanza switches its lens. Emerging from Giuseppe’s story, the reader now watches as Giuseppe finishes telling his tale to the speaker, unable to look them in the eye—and hears the speaker “thank God” that at least Giuseppe feels guilt over what he did.
- The poem’s movement from storytelling to the aftermath of storytelling invites readers to consider the long afterlife of atrocities. No dreadful act, the poem’s shape suggests, stays in the past: Giuseppe and the speaker will both have to reckon with the mermaid’s murder and the questions it raises about humanity’s capacity for evil.
11
Q
Rhyme scheme and meter
A
- “Giuseppe” is written in free verse, so it doesn’t use a regular meter. Instead, Ford uses methodical line breaks and enjambments to create a steady, sinister pace. The poem’s speaker seems to be recounting his uncle Giuseppe’s story with creeping horror.
- Written in free verse, “Giuseppe” doesn’t use a rhyme scheme—a choice that only makes the poem feel more like a nightmare. The poem’s unadorned, naturalistic language makes it sound as if the speaker is telling a true story. But this conversational tone butts up against images of surreal horror. If Ford had used meter and rhyme here, the obvious artfulness might have given readers a little room to breathe; as it stands, the speaker’s almost ordinary-sounding voice makes the mermaid’s demise feel terribly strange and terribly real at exactly the same time.
