Ciuciu Andreea

ANALYSIS ON “QUIET MEN” BY LESLIE JAMISON

The reason why I chose to make a close analysis on Leslie Jamison’s Quiet Men is that I
had absolutely no clue what the text was about; at the first glance it seemed to me to have a lot of
dialogue and to be a love story, but as I actually got into reading her short story, I realised I was
in deep trouble because I had no idea on how should I penetrate the text and reach its meanings.
On the first reading I also had the impression that it was just another lame story about a girl who
finds the love of her life, with whom she does things out of ordinary like stealing free samples of
bread and going into road trips, then they separate and she starts to sleep with many men in order
to forget him, up to the moment when she finds a silly, nice man that does not care about her past
and does whatever she wants in order to please her and thus she remains with him and live
happily ever after. But it was not like that. In fact, the story may seem just like I have already
described it to the untrained eye, but it hides a series of features that I have discovered gradually.
I looked upon some fragments from a psychoanalytical, structuralist or feminist perspective and
analysed a bit the language as well, in order to decipher the meaning of the text, which is anyway
full of symbols.
First of all, Leslie Jamison’s Quiet Men is the story of precarious communication, the
inability to express ourselves and sex as an instrument of self-injury. The main character,
Marianne, casually talks about a hard break-up and her many adventures with men, but behind
this casualty is to be found lot of pain that she tries to supress by self-injuring herself with
reckless sexual adventures. As the author herself, Marianne tries to record not only feelings, but
also exterior events in order not to get bored when she replays the episodes in her head. Also the
little descriptions of the environment or of the random objects, makes the reader more interested
in the storyline, because as the author herself says in an interview given at Claremont McKenna
College in California, describing only feelings it is boring.
They seem very deep in love with each other and make even the reader feel that their
love would never end as they even hint to getting married, “Which (both of them say) wouldn’t
be so bad.” (Jamison 52). But when they decide to take a trip to L.A. and stop to buy some
strawberries, she starts to feel that their relationship wouldn’t last and struggles to memorise as
many details as possible “to remember precisely” (52) later on. This sentence, “which wouldn’t

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be so bad”, is yet another time repeated, when they were talking about the prizes given for whale
sighting. She says that the people have to be trusted in order to receive the prize; otherwise it
would be just a competition for telling stories that could have never happened, bringing to the
light the issue of feeble trust among people. In the last presented episode of their month
together, in the scene of the lifeguard station conversation during the night, she feels herself
more open than ever and starts to confess in front of him about her past eating disorder. This is a
very sensitive subject to her, as she presents it as such to him and to the listener too – she
suffered of anorexia and worked very hard in order to recuperate and thus was very sensitive on
the subject. But the moment she is caught in makes her open and talk freely about it and about
herself because she seems to have given him the fullest trust she was capable of. But when the
silence falls upon them, she realises that this one is different from the calming and bonding ones
they had before. Her confession had raised the wall of precarious communication between them,
as they couldn’t understand each other anymore. In a desperate attempt to fill in the expanding
gap between them, she starts to talk about silly things from her childhood, but fails and a result
he breaks up with her two days later. So another issue brought up to the light in Jamison’s short
story is trust.
At some point, in a bar, she finds a jukebox and the bartender warns her that “the
jukebox had something against monster ballads” because it gets stuck on them, but Marianne
confesses that “In equal measure I wanted the machine to play and I wanted to see it break.”
(52), showing towards the machine the same feelings as towards her relationship with the poet.
Why that? Because the machine would stick only on the big hits and play them in a continuous
loop, just like her later on, getting stuck in the memories with the love of her life, the poet,
replaying them in her mind like a broken hearted-person. Even the ballad’s name that was given
as an example by the bartender gives the reader a hint on how her memories were for her when
she was replaying them: “Poison”. She mentions this jukebox because this machine symbolises
her and the way it malfunctions can be seen as an allegory to Marianne’s own way of functioning
after the split.
On a number of times in the story she mentions that she liked silent relationships
because she senses the incapability of communication to transmit the essence of self and
moreover she senses language more like an impediment in integration and making bonds with
other persons. Many words, but very few important things transmitted. The incapability of words

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to express the true mind is a recurrent motif; on page 53 Marianne tells the poet “I wish there
were more words for what I feel with you.” And on many occasions she struggles to express
herself, but realises that words do not compress what she wants and in her later relationships this
is reflected as well. At some point when they were in the bar, she says that “From the jukebox,
we could hear Slash launching into his solo. A small, secret side of me had always hoped this
part could last forever, that the lyrics may never return” which can be again interpreted as
incapability of words to transmit anything from within us. Together with the poet discovers that
the nonsense is a sort of broken language for joy, as the poet himself says it.
From a Lacanian psychoanalytical point of view, desires come from a lack that the
person continuously tries to fill. This may be the reason why Marianne tries to make bonds with
so many men, because the poet left an unoccupied space in her life after their break-up and now
she was trying to fill it in with another man. But even so, she seeks relationships that are doomed
from the very beginning because more than filling in the empty space the poet left in her life, she
tries to hurt herself in order to forget about him; or maybe she tries to follow the principle of
creating a greater pain in order to forget about the one she has at the moment.
The language she uses is to be looked upon with attention because one may notice that
even though she is not openly talking about the feelings she has, they are all hidden underneath
the words she uses. It all starts with the presentation of the relationship that broke her heart. She
falls in love with a man that she never calls by his name; he’s always named “the poet” or simply
“he” or “him”, while all the other men that later appear in her life are particularised with names.
This may be a clue to either the fact that at the moment she recalls the story she may have passed
over or that she still tries to supress it - maybe. The first thing to remark though is the fact that
when she talks about the time she spent with the poet, she uses metaphors and words that are
generally charged with emotions; she uses rather poetic phrases like "He had an evident lisp, a
thin wet breeze running through his words" or "the desire to touch him felt like a kind of
humidity in the air".
From a structuralist perspective, in Quiet Men is to be found a pattern upon which the
whole story is built: In the beginning the reader faces the installation of peace in the
protagonist’s life, then this peace is broken and the character tries to restore it, which she seems
to succeed in the end. There is a certain instability that installs immediately after her first story.
Marianne’s relationship with the poet is represented as an equilibrate sequence in her life and

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when this is broken, chaos starts overwhelming her - she’s confused, in a trance of self-hatred
mood and finds no reason for existence and pain caused by it. One can see the relationships that
she has with the other five men as an attempt of restoring this balance, an attempt that fails in
four of the cases. In the fifth case, Maurice is looked upon by the protagonist as a real possibility
of finding this stability. And even though the story is finished abruptly, with no further
development of the story between the two and no certain description of this, in the last
paragraph, Marianne leaves us with the impression that she found the one to heal her wounds and
thus restore the equilibrium.
Activating the feminist perspective, one may spot that Jamison’s writing is up to a
certain extent degrading the main character, as even nowadays a woman that sleeps with many
men is looked upon differently compared to a man. If the fact that a man sleeps with many
women can be easily looked over or not that drastically judged by some, in the case of a woman
the perspective is different – she may be called all sorts of insults and resurrect various negative
feelings in the head of the judger. In Quiet Men is to be noticed such a behaviour in the
procedure Trait is applying before having intercourse with Marianne – he is handling her a small
metallic placards that had engraved on it the word slut.
In the end I would like to say a word about this replica Marianne mentions from a
cartoon she has seen on TV: “You don’t know what is like to be human!” (Jamison 51) - it
reminds me of a line I vaguely remember Brad Pitt uttered in the movie “Troy”, where he played
the role of Achiles. He said that gods envy humans because we can die, and thus our life is more
savoury, whilst theirs is plain and dull because they do not have a limited time that forces them
to value every second, or something like that. This makes me think that we somehow should
enjoy this painful experiences which the separation brings to us because they make us feel alive.
I do not say that one should hurt himself on purpose because that would be masochistic, but to
transform the already existing pain into something positive by thinking that this is also an
essential part of our life, just like joy is.

Bibliography
Jamison, Leslie, Quiet Men, New American Voices 2008, ed. Richard Bausch, John Kulka,
Natalie Danford. A Harvest Original, Harcourt, Inc. Orlando, Austin, New York, San Diego,
London

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Jamison, Leslie, interview on Compassion and Confession, Claremont McKenna College,

California, 2017