In the past seven years that I have been
writing this blog, I have discussed what I consider to be the distinctive
generic characteristics of the short story form, have tried to evaluate new
short story collections published during that period, and have commented on the status of the short story
in the general and the academic reading public.
However, what I always enjoyed most when I
was teaching short fiction was attempting a "close reading" of an
individual short story and then trying to encourage my students to enter into a
dialogue with me about my reading vs. their reading. I miss that dynamic engagement
with students and lament the fact that I cannot replicate it on this blog.
At least I can share my "reading"
of some stories that I admire in hopes that my readers might admire them too,
and maybe even enter into a dialogue with me about them. Here are my thoughts
on two such stories:
David
Means, "Assorted Fire Events"
“Assorted Fire Events,” the title story of
David Means’ second book of short stories, which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times
Book Award for fiction, is a poetic meditation on the universal fascination
with fire, describing and pondering the significance of several events in an
attempt to explore what drives people to “play with fire” or “follow the fire
truck” to a burning building.
The first event does not focus on the
person who started the fire, but with the boy’s fascination with the effect of
fire on a house. What he likes is the
way the fire makes its way from the inside out until there is no more inside,
only outside. He also likes the way the
pine trees around the cottage are reduced to brittle towers. The skeletal remains after fire has ravaged a
house and its surroundings create a poetic image of something being stripped to
the bone.
The narrator introduces the second fire
event by saying that the sound of fire, like popcorn in hot oil just before the
kernels explode, makes him laugh. He
tries to find a metaphor for the sound, noting it was like a “huge hunk of
brittle cellophane crumpled by the hand of God.” However, he says he will never use that
metaphor, but rather the metaphor of a giant weed whacker. The ironic
juxtaposition of this sound against the sound of his children whooping and
hollering with joy is what interests him in this event. When he finds out that the fire started from
spontaneous combustion from varnish-soaked brushes, he creates an additional
metaphor of sound in which the brushes sitting in the hot sun begin to sizzle
and talk to each other, until “drunk with the elixir” of the varnish, they are
ready to “burst forth in the song of fire.”
The next two events focus on the burning of
living flesh, first by a boy named Shank who burns a dog and then by his aunt
who burns herself alive. The previous
metaphor of the singing fire is extended to a metaphor of dance; the dog’s body
writhes in a heat wave and no one is sure if the movement is the dog’s or that
of heat distortion; it is like the monks “doing their sit-down self-immolating
dances during Nam.” The narrator muses that the plot of fire is both wildly
fanatic and calm at the same time, taking its own sweet time and then becoming
logarithmic, until it “sings sweetly the fantastic house-burning lament.”
The final and most extended fire event
combines the horror and beauty of fire.
When a young boy named Fenton tries to launch his homemade rocket ship
with gasoline, the fire quickly gets out of control and engulfs him. The ironic juxtaposition of horrible
destruction and comic effect is then suggested by a description of Fenton on
fire, looking like an actor in a fire suit, a stunt person like a Chaplin
tramp. This image of opposites is echoed
at the end when the boy is so scarred that people try not to look at him for
fear of laughing out loud. The narrator
says he looks like a clown whose goofy smile is painted over the face of the
saddest-looking, most pathetic clown-school dropout.
Ultimately, the narrator sees Fenton as
like Christ who has walked into the fires of hell to suffer for all
humankind. Thus, the fire is a holy
event, for the boy has experienced that extreme mystery that he cannot explain
and that the writer can only create assorted fire events to try to capture.
“Assorted Fire Events" is an example of a writer’s attempt to use
language to explore the basic paradoxical mystery of fire as a powerful force
that can burn away the extraneous and reduce one to pure essentials. David Means’ method for achieving this
exploration is to reject linear narrative altogether and describe various fire
events in such a way that even as they are horrifying they are somehow eerily
beautiful. If one is concerned with
images rather than physical actuality, what is horrible becomes abstractly
beautiful. If one focuses only on the
sound of the fire, it is “lively and spunky” like popcorn. Consequently, although there is nothing particularly
funny about fire, if one divorces the sound of it from the destructive power of
it, it is comic. And if one perceives
the immolation of a dog or indeed a human being as being like a dance, then
that too, divorced from its physical horror, can be beautiful.
In this way, the narrator moves from one
fire event to another, describing them as purely aesthetic objects. The aunt’s
first-person note written from the point of view of the gas can serves as a
grotesque parallel to the aunt’s body and mind; the narrator thinks of the
meaninglessness of the can’s life, as it is used for mundane tasks, all the
while the vapors inside it pushing against the roof of its mouth, “singing,
making little arias to the instability of their bonds.”
The final event of the burning of the young
boy, as terrifying as it may be in actuality, is transformed into an emblem of
paradox, like that of the mythic transformation of Christ from mere body into
spirit. Although it seems cruel to laugh
at the scarred face of the boy, what one is really laughing at is the mystery
of the sadness that underlies the painted smile. Thus, the basic technique of the story is to
use the essential methods of poetry, which, like fire itself, transforms the
merely physical into the aesthetically meaningful and beautiful.
Ron
Carlson, "At The Jim Bridger"
Although he has published two novels, Ron
Carlson is one of those rare writers who has remained true to the literary form
he seems to love best and at which he excels—the much-maligned short story. “At
the Jim Bridger” is the title story of his fourth collection.
Echoing many short-story writers before
him, Carlson considers each story he writes an investigation and a
surprise. For example, he has said that
when the woman in the story tells Rusty he has heard the wonderful story about
him he was surprised, for he did not know that he was writing a story about
stories. And in many ways, the nature of story is one of the predominant themes
of “At the Jim Bridger.” The story
Donner tells the woman who is not his wife about being caught in a snowstorm
and saving Rusty by keeping him warm, is what began their affair. And the story that Rusty tells Donner about
losing his girl to his boss is a story that bonds them in the sleeping bag in
the snow.
The woman’s love for Donner results in part
from the story he tells her. However,
when he sees Rusty’s pickup in the parking lot, he senses something false in
his relationship with the woman, something not as genuine as the night in the
sleeping bag with Rusty. That the erotic
experience with Rusty seems more real than his sexual experience with the woman
does not suggest that Donner has homosexual longings. His lying down flesh to
flesh with Rusty is a life or death experience, and the erotic nature of the
encounter is not narrowly sexual, but rather broadly mythically.
Whereas Donner told the woman the story to
seduce her, he now feels that this use of the story has cheapened it. At the end of the story, as Rusty and the
woman dance in the New Year and he goes outside and watches the magnificent
moose across the lake, he thinks that to use the story as he had, “to show it
to her, burn it like a match, had led to this new darkness and the longer
night.”
It would be easy to oversimplify Donner’s
encounter with Rusty either by reducing it to the perhaps meaningless term of
latent homosexuality or by putting it in the category of masculine bonding
typical of locker room banter and towel-slapping. However, Carlson risks this, and by his
no-nonsense style and the very seriousness with which the describes the
encounter, succeeds in suggesting that an erotic experience can occur between
two men that is not narrowly sexual, but rather can lead to a profound realization
of what it means to hold someone else as if it meant life or death. “At the Jim Bridger” suggests that genuine
stories about such bonding encounters, regardless of the gender of those
engaged in them, are all we have to protect us from the cold that surrounds us.
Ron Carlson says that the title story of At
the Jim Bridger is his tribute to Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” However, its tight-lipped style, its focus on
doing things with care, and its emphasis on telling a story well makes it a
more likely descendent of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” Donner is a Hemingway character who does
everything with care, with a kind of exactness that borders on ritual. He tells the story of his encounter with
Rusty with the same kind of precision that he uses in the wilderness to build a
fire. When he tells the story well,
“something in him knitted up taut and he felt centered and ready.” This sense of exactitude, of getting it just
right, is part of the Hemingway style that dominates the story. Moreover, there is here the same sense of the
significance of being “alone in real places,” often suggested by
Hemingway. The tight-lipped style in
which the story is told reflects the masculine bonding theme that holds it
together.
The
Hemingway style can most clearly be seen in Carlson’s description of the
physical encounter between Rusty and Donner in the sleeping bag. After Donner takes Rusty’s hands and puts
them in his own groin to give them warmth, “he felt himself stirred, a reflex
he gave in to.” Donner identifies Rusty
with his son and wants to rescue him with his own body, for as he talks to
Rusty he also talks to his son. As Rusty falls asleep in Donner’s arms, “Donner
knew that Rusty had taken him into his hands and they were together that way in
the mountain tent.”
The story that Rusty tells Donner makes him
sick, for he imagines the boyish Rusty being betrayed by his boss, an older man
he saw as a father figure. The seemingly
irrelevant story of Donner’s son running away is actually a reflection of
Donner’s seeing Rusty as a son who has been betrayed by a father and who now
can be rescued by another father. These
parallels, like the parallel of the two fishing trips, create a balanced
structure of significance for the story.
Thanks for a good reading!
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