tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31611368854622625252024-03-13T23:17:20.678-07:00Reading the Short StoryThoughts on reading and studying the short story by a guy who's read and written about a lot of short stories.Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.comBlogger485125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-71773448377171157562021-09-17T09:53:00.004-07:002021-09-17T09:53:59.802-07:00Thank you for visiting my blog.<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Today (September 17, 2021), my blog ”Reading the Short Story”
marked 2 million page views.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know that
is not a lot in the Internet world, but it pleases me that so many people are
reading my thoughts on the short story, even though I have not posted any new
essays for the past three years, when, without any notice or explanation, I
just stopped writing. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">However, today, I thought it might be a decent gesture to
make a few remarks about my decision to stop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I have been reading stories since I first discovered Edgar Allan Poe when
I was growing up in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have read thousands of stories and written
about hundreds of stories in books, articles, essays, reviews, and blog posts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It amuses, rather than amazes me, to confess
that as of today, I have not read a single short story in the past three years,
much less written about any.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Why?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Even my doctor at my last physical exam a year ago asked me
that question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No real reason.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I just turned my attention to other things—more
time with my wife, children, and grandchildren. And more time returning to my
pre-reading roots on my grandfather’s hardscrabble farm, in honor of which I
tend a garden in my back yard (great tomatoes this year), I tend four healthy
hens, who faithfully deliver a couple of dozen delicious eggs each week. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also bake bread, make soup, cook meals, and
enjoy watching British detective television on Britbox with my wife, who beats me at Gin Rummy regularly.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In the past three years, I have been invited to contribute
criticism and literary theory essays by several of my colleagues in Canada, Europe,
and America.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although I much appreciate
the honor of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>these invitations, I have
respectfully declined them. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In short, as I<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>sit
here surrounded by hundreds of books and four filing cabinets of drafts, notes,
and ideas about the short story, I just feel that I have said enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I turned 80 a few months ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other than the usual glitches that the body
experiences at this age, I am basically healthy, and my mind, with the
exception of the usual <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>lapses in memory,
seems, if not keen, at least capable.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I will continue to read comments that readers of my blog
make to my posts and to respond to them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>However, I have no plans to post any more full-length essays—unless, of
course, I get wind of something that gets my goat or piques my pleasure.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I hope that students and admirers of the short story
continue to find my blog essays useful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Thank you all for your support over the years.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I remain, as always, the strongest cheerleader of the short
story that I can possibly be.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">----Cheers, Charles<o:p></o:p></p>Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-27773043864992871242018-07-02T14:48:00.003-07:002018-07-02T14:55:41.836-07:00Why Cynan Jones's "The Edge of the Shoal" Won the 2017 BBC National Short Story Award<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The 2017 BBC National Short Story Award (the 12</span><sup style="text-indent: 0.5in;">th</sup><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> year the £15,000
has been awarded to a single short story) went to Welsh writer Cynan Jones for
a story published in</span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> The</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">New Yorker</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> entitled “The Edge of the
Shoal.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Jones has said that the story began as a 30,000-word short novel but
was shaved down to 11,500 words because, as he said, “it didn’t work.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he sent it to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New Yorker</i>, they liked it but said it was still too long and
asked him to cut it in half. Jones says he only had 4 days to pare the story
down to 6,000 words, working frenetically to strip out anything that was “decorative.”
The halving of the story was fortunate for Jones, since the BBC contest is
limited to stories under 8,000 words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
am not sure of the sequence of events, but it appears that after the story was
shortlisted for the BBC Prize, Jones decided the original 30,000-words might work
after all. Granta published <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it as a
novella entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cove,</i> which then won
the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Lucy Popescu of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Financial
Times</i> put <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cove</i> in the category of
survival narratives, such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Robinson
Crusoe</i> and Cormac McCarthy’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Road</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She says the novella’s “terse lyricism” makes
much of it read like a prose poem—a “haunting meditation on trauma and human
fragility.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Peter Adkins argues in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Glasgow
Review of Books</i> that Jones combines the mythic and the modern, the sacred and
the mundane, the poetic and the technical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Adkins says it is at times hard to tell the difference between the
imagined and the real in the novel, for it <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>reaches a point where reality blurs with the
fantastic, situating itself on the “threshold between the active, observing
mind and the brute thereness of the sea.” An admirer of the recent academic
trend toward so-called eco-criticism, Adkins calls <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cove</i> “profoundly ecological.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Eileen Battersby of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Irish Times</i>
is not so sure. She calls Jones’s style forced <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and “quasi-poetic” and argues that the main
character’s struggle to survive never becomes more than a “stagey,
choreographed mood piece rife with symbolism.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The few comments that have been made about the story
come mainly from the judges:<span style="color: #333333; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> of the BBC Contest: </span>Jon McGregor called “The Edge of the
Shoal” “a genuinely thrilling piece of writing with a completeness of vision
and execution that made it an inevitable winner.” Di Speirs said the story is “a
perfect illustration of the transporting, utterly absorbing power of a great
short story.” And Eimear McBride even went so far as to rave that it is “as
perfect a short story as I’ve ever read.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Claims that the winning story is a perfect short story, a great short
story, an exemplary short story <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>have
often been made by judges of the BBC Award over the past twelve years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have commented on such claims for the
previous eleven winners of the contest on this blog and on the TSS Publishing Website
because, although I have no right to second-guess the choice of the judges—they
are, after all, the only ones, I presume, who read all the entries to the
contest-- when they claim that the winning story is perfect, doing what the
short story does best, they imply that they actually know what the
characteristics of a “perfect” short story are. I am not always sure their
choices bear this out.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoBlockText" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: 5.75in 6.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
The short story
has often been characterized as a form in which everything not absolutely
essential to its central effect or unifying theme must be mercilessly cut. William
Trevor, one of the greatest short-story writers, has said that the short story’s
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“strength lies in what it leaves out
just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total
exclusion of meaninglessness.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
result of leaving things out is often a cryptic sense of mystery that many
short story writers insist is an essential characteristic of the short story. Flannery
O’Connor, another undisputed master of the form, once said, "The particular
problem of the short story writer is how to make the action he describes reveal
as much of the mystery of existence as possible.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
However, I wonder if the mysteries suggested by “The Edge of the Shoal”
are intentional thematic mysteries or the accidental result of the cuts Jones
had to make to get the story published in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
New Yorker. </i>For example, there are frequent passing references to the
central character’s father, whose ashes he has in the boat, presumably because
he plans to scatter them at sea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Moreover, there are several scant references to a “her” or “she,”
who<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the story suggests is pregnant and
who the central character left at home while he has made this trip to catch
some fish for lunch. These cryptic references to the father and the pregnant
woman are more clearly identified in the short novel. Although it might be
suggested that these contextual allusions reflect the story’s theme of being
caught between birth and death, there is nothing else in the story to support
such a justification for the allusions.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I have written about the relationship between the short story and the
novella on this blog previously, arguing that the novella is more closely
related to the short story than to the novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Jones seems to agree that the short story and the novella are closely
related, for in an interview in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Los
Angeles Review,</i> he says he likes the novella form because the “level of
engagement” has to be strong and it relies more on implication than explanation,
“adding that <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>short novel is a “moment,
not a journey.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jones is quoted
elsewhere as saying that he likes the short story form for the very same
reasons that he likes the short novel form: “Everything counts.” You have to
create emotions and judgements, rather than describe them, Jones says, adding, “A
short story is a moment, not a journey.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I have suggested on this blog and other places that it is not content
that makes a short story a short story, but rather technique.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In what follows I would like to suggest some
of the short story techniques Jones makes use of in “The Edge of the Shoal”—techniques
that, if they do not make it a “perfect” short story, at least make it a
representative example of the form.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The most predominant short story technique in “The Edge of the Shoal”
is its frequent use of metaphoric language, particularly the simile, of which
there are fourteen in the story, e.g. “The jaw splits and the gills splay, like
an opening flower.” Another typical short story characteristics derives from
Jones’s frequent use of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the “as if”
trope, of which there are sixteen in the story, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>e.g. “Flecks of blood and scales loosen, as if
turning to rainbows in his hands. Most of these metaphoric comparisons take
place after the man is struck by lightning—primarily to suggest a metamorphosis
in the man’s perception of reality.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Another short story technique is the frequent reference to the
archetypal nature of the man’s experience. For example, in the first paragraph,
the man thinks the sound of the fish thumping in the boat is like a drum beat--“Something
rapid and primal, ceremonial.” The primal is also suggested when the man picks
up the container of his father’s ashes, and it feels warm from the sun “as if”
the ashes were still warm from cremation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The man is suddenly afraid when he unscrews the lid that he will release
some jinni, or ghost. He thinks of reinvesting the ashes with memories, to
remind them of moments and thus to “make them the physical thing of his father.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
In a simile that is as close to a statement of the story’s theme as
Jones will risk, he man sees a fish jump out of the water, like a silver
nail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“A thing deliberately, for a brief
astounding moment, broken from its element.” The simile echoes what happens
with the lightning strike—an “astounding moment” when the man is thrown out of
his everyday element into an alternate reality for which he can no longer
easily find a familiar context with which he can identify himself. He sometimes
“slips off the world” for a time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His
consciousness is a “snapped cord,” and he asks who he is. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The man confuses external reality with his perception, having forgotten
that other life “puppets” around him. He is not sure if a butterfly he sees
actually exists in the world or whether it is his own eye. This echoes the
familiar Taoist parable of <em><span style="background: white; color: #282828; font-style: normal;">Zhuangzi, who dreamt he was a
butterfly, but on awakening, did not know whether he was a man dreaming he was a
butterfly, or whether he was a butterfly, dreaming he was a man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></em><em><span style="font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<em><span style="background: white; color: #282828; font-style: normal;">The man experiences several moments when he cannot
tell the difference between what is happening in the external world and what
his imagination creates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, he
feels the warm sun on his neck and thinks it is someone’s breath.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He either sees, or thinks he sees, people on
the beach and feels he is in a dream, asking “Where am I?” He hears a child
crying and thinks, “This is not real,” but it is the cry of a dolphin calf.<o:p></o:p></span></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The man reaches a point when he understands that to gain control of his
life and return to everyday reality he must establish a rhythm of familiar reality,
since that is what has been disrupted by the lightning strike.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The story’s focus on the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>man’s
efforts to gain some control, to overcome his pain and disabilities to feed
himself and get back to shore, have caused some reviewers identify the story
with the survival efforts of Robinson Crusoe. However, whereas Crusoe is a
classic example of how the novel deals with physical details in the world, “The
Edge of the Shoal” is more like Hemingway’s use of physical detail in such
stories as “Big, Two-Hearted River” and his novella <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Old Man and the Sea, </i>for the physical details in Jones’s story
are transformed, as they are in Hemingway’s stories, to significant, thematic
details. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I have suggested in other places that he novel form usually gains the
reader's assent to its reality by the creation of enough realistic detail to
give readers the illusion that they know the experience in the same way they
know external reality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, in the
short story, realistic details are often transformed into metaphoric meaning by
the thematic demands of the story, which organize the details by repetition and
parallelism into meaningful patterns. For example, the hard details of the
external world in<i> Robinson Crusoe</i> exist as an external resistance to be
overcome.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, in Hemingway's
"Big, Two-Hearted River," the extensive details exist primarily to
provide an objectification of Nick's psychic distress and his efforts to
control it. Thus, at the end of the story, Nick's refusal to go into the swamp
is a purely metaphoric refusal, having nothing to do with the real qualities of
the swamp, only its aesthetic qualities.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-hyphenate: none; text-indent: .5in;">
It is the short story that transforms the physical
world into meaning, not usually the novel. As Raymond Carver once observed, <span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">"It's possible, in a poem or a short story,
to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise
language, and to endow those things--a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a
stone, a woman's earring--with immense, even startling power." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<br />Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-24483493791762108822018-06-24T13:56:00.005-07:002018-06-24T13:56:46.561-07:00Caroline Taylor's collection "Enough"<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
When I began this blog almost ten years ago (My, my! Has it really been
that long?), I announced that my intention was to discuss the characteristics
of the short story as a literary genre, even though many of my colleagues have
always insisted that the form <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">has</i> no
unique literary characteristics, for “fiction is fiction is fiction” whether it
is a short story or a novel, or so I have been told countless times.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Nevertheless, I stubbornly persisted. Over the years, whenever I have discussed
individual short stories or collections of short stories, my aim has <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> been to write “reviews”-- although I
have written many newspaper and periodical reviews during my career—but to use <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>individual stories and collections as a basis
for discussing general issues about the short story form.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
However, occasionally, I get requests from publicists to write a “review”
of a new collection of stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I never
turn these requests down, for, as I said in my first blog almost ten years ago,
I am, if nothing else, a “cheerleader” for the short story and am always happy
to encourage both writers and scholar/critics who have an interest in the form.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I recently got a request from the publicist for JKS Communications in
Nashville, to “review” a new collection by a writer named Caroline Taylor, who
I had never heard of before. The collection is entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Enough,</i> which is also the title of the opening story, and subtitled
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thirty Stories of Fielding Life’s Little
Curve Balls</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ms. Taylor is the
author of three mystery novels and numerous short stories in various online and
small press venues—many of which are reprinted here.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Ms. Taylor did not purposely write thirty stories on the theme of “fielding
life’s curve balls”; in a public relations interview, she said that without
intending to, she just seems to have written a number of stories about “people
confronting the unexpected and the unwelcome,” adding that she selected those stories
that “best reflect the myriad ways people handle life’s life surprises.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
This might very well be a description of a great number of short
stories I have read during my career as a teacher and critic. The short form is
one that lends itself to “unexpected” and often “unwelcome” “surprises.” The
issue that concerns me as a reader and critic of short stories is how
mysterious are those surprises and how complex are the means by which human
beings react to and deal with them.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I read all thirty stories in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Enough</i>,
and then, as is usual for me, I went back and read them all again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, I don’t think that most readers will
read them more than once, for truth to tell, they do not require reading more
than once—as stories by great short story writers, such as Alice Munro and
William Trevor—most always do.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
But then, all short stories do not have to be stylistically complex or
metaphorically mysterious, do they?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although
these are not the kind of stories I usually taught in the classroom or have
written extended analyses of, I did enjoy reading them. They seem to me to be “entertaining”
stories--brief enough to read rather quickly and straightforward enough to<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>grasp without a great deal of soul-searching
thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the perfect collection
of stories to take to the beach or on vacation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>You can read one of these stories while filling up your gas tank and not
be distracted by it while driving on down the Interstate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are stories that may make you smile
wryly and nod your head knowingly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
are the kind of stories that filled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Saturday
Evening Post </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Colliers</i> many
years ago when short stories were the entertainments that television took over
for later on and made couch potatoes out of us all.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
These stories are not brilliant, but they are intelligent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are not poetically precise, but they are
well written.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are not
psychologically complex, but they are psychologically perceptive. I liked
reading them. I just would not feel the need to “study” them. But then only
guys like me always feel the need to “study” stories.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I will summarize and comment on only one story to give you an idea of
what they are like.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Maude’s Makeover”
begins with the first-person voice of the titular character saying, “Life would
be so much easier if I were a cartoon character.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She hurriedly amends her statement by saying
she does not mean a cartoon character like a hapless rabbit flattened by a
falling piano, but rather a woman from a graphic romance novel—with “shoulder-length
golden hair, huge tits, a narrow waist, and long, curvy legs.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But alas, she says, her name is not Paris or
Angelina, but Maude—with all the homeliness that the name suggests.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So Maude decides to go to the beauty parlor and get a make-over to try
to be like the kind of cartoon character she aspires to, telling the credulous
receptionist at the salon that she is one of the finalists in the “Miss
Eighteen Wheeler” contest at the National Long-Haulers Association convention.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The National Long Haulers get wind of this and apologize for leaving
her name off the list of contestants, and, as you might expect, Maude wins the
contest and goes down to the courthouse to get her name changed. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The story is a lot more fun to read than my summary can give it credit
for, for Miss Taylor adopts the voice of Maude quite convincingly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And not all the stories are this flippant and
facile.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But they are all entertaining
and clever. Once you accept them as this type of story, you can just give
yourself over to them while lying on the beach before putting on your sun
screen and taking a nap with a smile on your face.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-91736619155960944482018-05-23T13:39:00.000-07:002018-05-23T13:39:06.792-07:00Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint Almost Got Me Fired<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">I
was sorry to hear of the death of Philip Roth this week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have been reading his work ever since his
collection of stories, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Goodbye, Columbus,</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>won the National Book Award in 1959 when I
was a senior in high school. I have particularly enjoyed his creation of Nathan
Zuckerman throughout the years. However, my favorite Roth book is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Portnoy’s Complaint</i>, a book that,
indirectly, almost got me fired from my university teaching job. It was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Portnoy’s Complaint</i> that inspired me to
create a course in the English Department years ago entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Love and Sex in Literature</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In my course proposal, I argued that novels
like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Portnoy’s Complaint</i> were works
of art that had to be taken seriously, but that because readers were so
unaccustomed to reading graphic descriptions of sexuality outside of
pornography they lacked any historical/critical context for taking sex
seriously in literature. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wanted to create
a course that would “teach” students how to read about sex intelligently.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">After
teaching the course for a year, one of my colleagues challenged the validity of
the course and my authority to teach it—resulting in a charge of unprofessional
conduct that lead to an “investigation” by administrators and fellow
faculty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, by this time, I had
made a respected name for myself as an expert in the study of sexual fantasy in
literature and had delivered scholarly papers at a number of professional
societies and had published several academic research articles on the
subject.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My colleagues found the course
to have academic validity and found me “qualified” to teach it. It was an
interesting period in my career, and I thank Philip Roth for indirectly
encouraging me to engage in it. Consequently, today, although it means a
momentary departure from my usual discussions of the short story, I pay tribute
to Philip Roth by making some comments about one of his most famous novels—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Portnoy’s Complaint</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Portnoy’s Complaint</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">
depicts one long quest in which Portnoy uses sexuality as a weapon to rebel
against repression, even as he is victimized by sexuality itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Caught by what Freud calls "The Most
Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life," Portnoy cannot unite the
two currents of feeling--the affectionate with the sensuous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only when the sexual partner is degraded can
he freely feel his sensual feelings--which explains his preoccupation with, and
his ultimate rejection of gentile women.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When he meets Monkey, who seems the complete embodiment of his
adolescent sexual fantasies, he ridicules and humiliates her until he drives
her away, for he can neither accept her as a real woman nor be satisfied with
her as a sexual fantasy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Throughout
the novel, Portnoy recounts his obsessive masturbation, his constant
preoccupation with a pornographic fantasy object he calls Thereal McCoy, and
his unsuccessful romantic and sexual experiences with various gentile women.
However, he also spends equally as much of his confessional monologue to his
complaints against the repressions placed on him by his parents and his Jewish
culture in general--which primarily amounts to the constant message that
"life is boundaries and restrictions if it's anything, hundreds of
thousands of little rules laid down by none other than None Other."
Finally, when he goes to Israel on a sort of pilgrimage to atone for his transgressions
and to come to terms with his cultural roots,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>he meets and tries to have sex with a Jewish woman, only to find he is
impotent with her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The novel ends with
Portnoy's drawn-out howl at what he calls the disproportion of the guilt he
feels, followed by a "punch line"--Dr. Spielvogel's only words in the
novel--"Now vee may perhaps to begin Yes?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">In
a sense, the entire novel is Portnoy's character, for he not only is its
central and entirely dominating<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>figure,
he is its only narrator as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because
of his Jewish childhood, particularly his desire to please his mother, Portnoy
says at one point that his occupation is being "good." He wants to be
a good little boy, but he cannot control the demands of his own physical body
as a child, and thus suffers disproportionate guilt for his masturbation and
for his adolescent sexual fantasies about every female he meets. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Portnoy is the living embodiment of what Freud
defines as "civilization and its discontents"--a walking
personification of the Oedipus complex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Moreover, he is representative of what many refer to as the
"self-hating" Jew, which is what the Jewish woman Naomi calls him in
the novel's final section.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He presents
himself throughout as both the teller of and the butt of an extended Jewish
joke.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is intelligent enough to know
himself well, to know who and what he is, but he is not strong enough to free
himself from his dilemma of being torn between his desire to be
"good" and his obsessive sexual desires.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Portnoy's
mother and father, Sophie and Jack, are less real people than they are
stereotypes of the Jewish mother and father in America, with Sophie complaining
to her friends that she is "too good," and warning Portnoy about
eating gentile junk food, and Jack complaining about his constant constipation,
both literally and metaphorically. Portnoy sees them both as the greatest
packagers of guilt in society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Having
read Freud, Portnoy sees the Jewish woman, Naomi, whom he unsuccessfully tries
to have sex with, as a mother-substitute, and cries out to Doctor Spielvogel,
"This then is the culmination of the Oedipal drama, Doctor?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More farce, my friend!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Too much to swallow, I'm afraid <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oedipus Rex</i> is a famous tragedy,
schmuck, not another joke!" Although Portnoy wishes he could have
nourished himself on his father's vulgarity instead of always searching for his
mother's approval, even that vulgarity has become a source of
shame--"every place I turn something else to be ashamed of." <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">The
Monkey also is less a real character than she is the embodiment of Portnoy's
adolescent fantasy of the sexual woman, the "star of all those
pornographic films" he produces in his own head. Uneducated hillbilly
turned high-fashion model, she is an aggressively sexual creature instead of
the reluctant puritan gentile women he has known before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although she has her own needs, Portnoy can
focus on the needs of no one but himself. Kay Campbell (Pumpkin), Portnoy's
girlfriend at Antioch College, represents his yearning for Protestant middle American
values, while Sarah Abbott Maulsby (Pilgrim) embodies New England respectability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, as Portnoy himself recognizes, he
does not want these women so much as he wants what they represent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">The
most basic thematic interest in the novel centers on the Freudian tension
between human desires for controlled civilized behavior and the discontent that
results from having to give up<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>impulsive
behavior to establish civilization. Portnoy is the extreme embodiment of modern
man self-consciously caught in this war between necessary control and desired
freedom. However, such a theme sounds much too academic for the means by which
Roth's novel embodies it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the novel,
serious as its theme is, is one of the great comic masterpieces of American literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">It
is hard to take seriously the Portnoy voice agonizing about locking himself in
the bathroom to engage in masturbation while his mother stands outside asking
him not to flush so she can examine his stool. Portnoy describes his penis as
his "battering ram to freedom," and cries out, "LET'S PUT THE ID
BACK IN YID. Liberate this nice Jewish boy's libido, will you please?"
However, although Portnoy longs for the uninhibited sexual attitude of his
boyhood classmate, Smolka, at the same time, he asks, "How would I like my
underwear all gray and jumbled up in my drawer, as Smolka's always is?" <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">What
Portnoy cannot tolerate is the fact that he cannot have both his toll house
cookies and milk which his mother supplies, as well as the sexual experiences
that Smolka enjoys. Since sexuality is the central taboo impulse which civilization
seeks to control to assure its own stability, the nature of sexuality itself is
a primary theme of the novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"What
a mysterious business it is," says Portnoy, "with sex the human
imagination runs to Z, and then beyond."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Because sexuality itself is so inextricably bound up with fantasy, the
very style and tone of the book combines the realism of Portnoy's experience
with the surrealism of his sexual fantasies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">The fact that Portnoy is Jewish is less important in its own right than
it is to embody the extreme insistence on "self-control, sobriety,
sanctions" which society says is the "key to human life."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The non-Jewish society which Portnoy often
yearns for is no less banal and crippled in its restrictions and recriminations
than the values which his Jewish heritage attempts to instill. Thus, the
primary themes of the book are both psychological and social, but the medium
for both is the hilarious self-satirizing voice of Portnoy, which is alternately
sophomoric in its humor and sharply critical of social absurdity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Portnoy's Complaint</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">
is somewhat of a cultural milestone in fiction of the 1960's, for, although its
obsessive focus on sexuality and its constant use of taboo words seemed to
align it with many of the conventions associated with pornography, it was a
serious novel with a serious theme. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consequently,
its publication forced many cultural critics to reevaluate their previous
assumptions about sexually-explicit literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It was hailed by many reviewers, made the best-seller list, and became a
topic of cocktail-party conversation in an era in which "pop porno"
became acceptable. Not since the works of Henry Miller had autobiographical
fiction and explicit sexuality been so forthright and engaging.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Although
much of the criticism of the book has focused on its Jewishness, many have
recognized it as typically American as Mark Twain's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Huckleberry Finn</i> (1884) and J. D. Salinger's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Catcher in the Rye</i> (1951)--as a comic masterpiece of the cultural
and personal conflicts of growing up in American society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-68008507669576919112018-05-15T13:42:00.001-07:002018-05-15T13:42:13.909-07:00Best American Short Stories: 2017--Five on the Light Side--Short Story Month<br />
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<br /></div>
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I am reading stories in this year’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Best
American Short Stories </i>randomly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They are fun, but rather lightweight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s not often that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">BASS</i> is a
book you can take to the beach and read without worrying about being
distracted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But these stories don’t take
much concentration. Here are some comments on the first five. Maybe the next
five will be more challenging.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">T. C. Boyle, “Are We Not Men?”<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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T. C. Boyle is the consummate professional writer, always on the
lookout for subjects that might “make a story,” and that’s what he is good at—“making
stories.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The subject of “Are We Not
Men?” as he makes clear in his “contributors’ notes” to the 2017 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Best American Short Stories</i>, is
gene-editing technology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The title is
from H. G. Well’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Island of Doctor
Moreau</i>, which is about a doctor who experiments with combining animal
species, often with humans, resulting in such creatures as hyena-swine,
dog-man, leopard-man, etc. In this story, Boyle gives us “crowparrots” and “micropigs”
and explores lightly the human use of CRISPR technology which allows the main
character and his wife to choose from a menu how their chromosomes can be matched
up to create a daughter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story
reminds us that Boyle is primarily a satirist, not a short story writer--an
entertainer, not a powerful artist.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Danielle Evans, “Richard of York
Gave Battle in Vain”<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The title is an acronym for the
colors that make up a rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
Evans says the first thread of the story came from hearing a sermon on Noah’s
Ark, which perhaps lead to the first sentence of the story; “Two by two the
animals boarded, and then all of the rest of them in the world died, but no one
ever tells the story that way.” The rainbow, of course, is a sign of God’s
promise never to destroy the earth again with water—which the narrator says
seems like a “hell of a caveat.” The story centers on the wedding of Dori, a
pastor’s daughter, who has her bridesmaids wear the seven colors of the rainbow.
Evans says the real loneliness of the story lies underneath the opening
sentences—understanding that “every triumphant story of the things we survive
is also the story of the losses haunting it.” However, the reader has to wade
through lots and lots of plot stuff to get to this payoff—involving Rena and JT
detained in a small hotel in Africa because of the threat of a biological
warfare agent, Rena’s sister Elizabeth being shot by her husband because her
suspected infidelity, JT disappearing when he was supposed to be marrying Dori,
Dori and Rena searching for JT and ending up at a water park, etc. etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a cluttered story that tries my
patience.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Sonya Larson, “Gabe Dove”<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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Sonya Larson’s “Contributors’ Notes” about this story seem to me more
intriguing than the story itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She
recalls a period a few years earlier when she found herself suddenly single;
trying to date again, she discovered that many men were most interested in her
race, which is half Asian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It occurred
to her that the dating world may be one of the last remaining realms in which
people openly expressed racial preference. Larson says that although we tend to
think that attraction is a mysterious, deeply personal force, we often find
that forces of history, stereotyping, even public policy may shape what we
think is simply personal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She wondered
if what we think is our gut feelings may have a racial bias.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So she set out to write a story that “houses”
these ideas—resonating like a bell tower around a bell.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She concludes that although “Gabe Dove” may
seem like a simple dating story, what is actually at stake is “nothing less
than who we make available to ourselves to love.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sounds like complex stuff, but I am<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>not sure the story can carry this much
weight.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fionel Mazel, “Let’s Go to the
Videotape”<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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And here’s another story whose originating idea seems more complex than
the story itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mazel says the story
arose from her thinking about the influence of social media on children because
rather than worrying about its detrimental effects, she thought social media
was very helpful, finding herself in a community whose shared interest was
parenting, but then finding herself uncomfortable with feeling this way. She
asked the following questions: Is camaraderie necessarily fake simply because
you don’t know the people you are exchanging ideas with?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Does publicizing personal details mean the
end of real friendship?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She said the
story arose from her desire to find a framework for thinking through how all
this stuff might play out in the life of a man “hobbled by grief.” The result—a
story about a man who enters a video in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">America’s
Funniest Home Videos</i> of his son being thrown over the handlebars while
learning to ride a bike--seems less about a complex human issue than it is an
opportunity for Maazel to create some funny scenes and dialogue.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Jess Walter, “Famous Actor”<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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I posted an essay on Jess Walter’s short story collection <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We Live in Water´</i> when it first came out.
My conclusion then was as follows:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; color: black;">Jess
Walter is a professional writer, a guy who makes much of his living
writing—first as a journalist and now as a fiction writer, who has cranked out
a political mystery novel, a 9/11 suspense novel, a social satire, and a movie
romance epic, and this collection of popular, entertaining, but certainly not
literary, short stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If Jess Walter
signifies the “modern American moment,” then the moment is about fiction that
pleasantly passes the time but does not significantly stimulate the grey
matter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><span style="background: white; color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt;">Just the kind of
disposable stories your Kindle was made for.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt;">My
opinion of his story “Famous Actor” in the 2017 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Best American Short Stories </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is pretty much the same.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Walter is clever, with lines like: “First sex
is like being in a stranger’s kitchen, trying all the drawers, looking for a
spoon.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He invented a “famous actor”
because he wanted to write a story about a romantic encounter with a famous
actor, adding that he can tell if a story is going to work if he is having fun
writing it. Indeed Walter does seem to have fun inventing story lines for the
movies and tv shows the famous actor has made. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The result is entertaining, but that’s all. Is
that enough?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-58247717352929512032018-05-12T16:03:00.002-07:002018-05-12T16:03:34.338-07:00Novelistic Stories in 2017 O. Henry Prize Stories--Short Story Month<br />
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Michelle Huneven’s “Too Good to Be True,”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Several stories in this year’s <i>O.
Henry Prize Stories</i> raise for me the issue of the difference between the
pleasure we get from reading novels vs. the pleasure we get from reading short
stories—an issue which may be related to the question of plot vs. form or
reality vs. artifice.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The author of four novels, Michelle Huneven calls herself a “novelist
by nature” a designation she does not define, although she says she had to
“prune” some “virulent digressions” from “Too Good to Be True” resulting from
her “novelistic nature.” Laura Furman, the editor of the <i>O. Henry</i> collections, who chooses all the stories included each
year, says Huneven’s story exhibits the writer’s skill to permit the “reader to
ride on the narrative current without noticing form or technique”-- a novelistic
characteristic that is often more focused on reflecting the so-called “real
world,” rather than creating a formal world of thematic significance. <o:p></o:p></div>
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David Bradley, the author of two novels, chose “Too Good to Be True” as
his favorite story in this year’s <i>O.
Henry Prize Stories</i>, admitting that
he has always loved the “long, not the short” of a story and that as a teacher
of creative writing, he struggled to conceal this prejudice from this students.
He says that while he teaches Poe’s insistence that no word should be written
that does not contribute to the story’s one pre-established design, he has
always found undue length less exceptionable than undue brevity. Bradley says he has never thought a tale “more
elegant just because I could read it between or during bathroom breaks.” He
says that what he wants while sitting by a roaring fire with a glass of bourbon
and a book was an “old-fashioned story, a la Chaucer, Rabelais, or Balzac, with
a beginning, middle, and ending.” Huneven’s story was his favorite because it kept him sitting longer than he wanted and
haunted him even after his glass was
empty and the fire was out. That all sounds very “novelistic by nature” to me.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So I asked myself, one again as I have for lo these many years: What is
“novelistic” and what is “short storyistic” by nature—willing to accept all the
while that a novel can have short story characteristics and a short story can
have novelistic characteristics. If I ask myself what “Too Good to Be True” is about, I would say it is about a young woman who is a drug addict and her family’s pain at their inability to help her escape that habit. The story is novelistic rather than short storyistic because it does not “mean” anything; it is rather "about" "as if" real characters in the real world. </div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Here are some other stories that I would
characteristic as “novelistic” rather than “short storyistic” in the 2017 </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">O. Henry Prize Stories</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">:</span></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Genevieve Plunkett, “Something for a Young Woman”<o:p></o:p></div>
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There is something of a mystery in this story of a young woman who
works for a shop owner who gives her a necklace. She marries someone else,
wants to play the viola in a symphony, has a baby, separates from her husband,
is drawn back to the shop owner, but makes no contact with him, wears the
necklace to his funeral, and cannot make up her mind about returning to her
husband. This could go on and on, much
as a novel can go on and on—never coming to a thematically meaningful ending.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Mary LaChapelle, “Floating Garden”<o:p></o:p></div>
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A young boy and his mother escape from an unnamed country in
conflict. He becomes separated from his
mother, but continuing on his own, boards a ship and ends up in Oakland. He is
taken in by a woman who raises him and goes to a Southern California college on
a scholarship. This is a straightforward journey story, told in first person,
and could have been a novel had the details of his escape and his new life in America been more elaborated
detailed. But it has no thematic meaning
other than the “as if” real events in the boy’s escape.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Keith Eisner, “Blue Dot”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Although this story begins in fairy tale fashion with “Once upon a
time,” it is actually a realistic story about young people hanging out and
taking drugs. They talk a lot, but not about anything of thematic significance.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Lesley Nneka Arimah, “Glory”<o:p></o:p></div>
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This story is from Arimah’s <i>What
It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky</i>, a debut collection that received
good reviews and stirred up some publicity. It is a story about a young Nigerian
woman whose parents named her “Glorybetogod.” But she seems to have come into
the world resenting it. When she meets a young man, who seems to have been born
lucky, her parents think Glory’s fortunes have changed--that her life will
“coalesce into an intricate puzzle.” However, when the young man offers her a
ring, she knows she must make a decision. She could go on and on having
encounters like this, chapter after chapter.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Manuel Munoz, “The Reason is Because”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Munoz says in the comments at the end of the <i>O. Henry Awards</i> that the character in his story named Nela, who
gets pregnant and drops out of school, reminds him of girls he grew up with. He
says he does not see characters like Nela in American fiction often and that
the story was a way for him to deal with what has been a long standing problem
in his fiction—“how to name the violence that shapes the people I write
about—the people I love—without veering into stereotype.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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</div>
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<br /></div>
<br />Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-74016146167580771452018-05-09T11:25:00.000-07:002018-05-09T11:25:10.087-07:00Kevin Barry, "A Cruelty" and Heather Monley, "Paddle to Canada"--O. Henry Prize Stories--Short Story Month<br />
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<br /></div>
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<b>Kevin Barry, “A Cruelty”</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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A few years ago, I did a series of blogs on the six shortlisted
collections for the 2012 Frank O’Connor. <span style="color: black;">Kevin
Barry’s collection <i>Dark Lies the Island</i>, was my favorite of the six
shortlisted books, but I quickly admitted that it was my favorite for personal
reasons, not necessarily for critical reasons.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">I enjoyed Barry’s <i>Dark Lies the Island</i>
because:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">*I have lived in Ireland and love the people.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">*My wife, whom I love best of all people, is
Irish.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">*I love Jameson, Bushmills, and Guinness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">I also liked Barry’s story “A Cruelty.” I
found the story simple and <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>irresistible.
You know from the very first sentence that the story is about the power of
obsession: “He climbs the twenty-three steps of the metal traverse bridge at
9:25 a.m., and not an instant before.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>After a page and a half of obsessive observation, we get the background
of the main character Donie, who was first allowed to make the short train
journey from Boyle to Sligo on his sixteenth birthday.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has now made the run every working day for
twenty years, and it is his belief that if he is not on the 9:33 train, the
9:33 will not run.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ritual is his way
of controlling his limited life; he experiences a 100 percent day when
everything falls into place just as it should.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">But of course, as is the nature of a short
story, this is an account of a day when things do not go on in the smooth
ritualistic way that Donie thinks they should, for as he eats his usual
sandwiches on his usual bench, a man appears who manifests an inexplicable
cruelty—calling him a “poor dumb cunt” and saying that it looks as though <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the best part of Donie “dribbled down the
father’s leg.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The man reminds Donie of
a picture of a hyena he once saw in a coloring book, and the image haunts him
even after he escapes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The day is
spoiled, of course, and it is not clear if Donie will ever feel at home in the
world again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is his first encounter
with motiveless malignancy—there is no accounting for it. All he can do is go
home and retreat into the arms of his mother. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">I remember once when I was in a department
store with my daughter, a sweet trusting child of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>two or three. A woman stood close by looking
at clothes with her son, also about the age of two or three.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When my daughter reached out to greet him, he
suddenly pushed her away with a frown. I have never forgotten <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>her face as she looked up at me for an
explanation. I had none.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>Heather Monley, “Paddle to Canada”</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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This is another simple story about a family who, while on holiday, get
caught in a thunderstorm while paddle boating on a lake.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Heather Monley says the story originated from
a memory of when she was four or five and her family were similarly caught in a
storm. However, the event is not the story, but rather it serves as the center
of a story about telling stories, for the fictional family members never forget
the event and often laugh about it. When the father goes back to the boat
rental to get his driver’s license, the owner challenges his failure to make a
deposit. The father laughs at the idea that the rental required a deposit: “What
do they think we’re going to do?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Paddle
to Canada?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
But later the story becomes a point of contention after the parents get
a divorce.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The mother uses it as an
example of the father’s carelessness and selfish stinginess.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The father uses it as an example of the
mother’s ineptitude, hysterically shrieking and being no help on the
paddleboat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The children’s memories of
the event become “muddled with what they had been told , and what they wanted
to believe.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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In her comments on the story, Heather Monley says it is about the
nature of stories, a subject she finds herself returning to often.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I like stories that question themselves,”
she says, stories that “point out the tenuous connection between narrative and
truth.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the children the event becomes
an occasion for trying to understand-- “as if thinking hard enough or in the
right combination would lead somewhere, would form a pathway to a world that
had been lost in the confusion of their lives.” This is a thematically tight
story. The peril in the boat, the fear, and then the joy of surviving, and telling
the story over and over creates a kind of bond between the family--that is,
until the divorce, and the two children get different sides of the parents
blaming each other. A broken family is a complex experience for children.
Heather Monley has found a story way of dealing with that complexity.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-69528213844546756212018-05-05T11:57:00.001-07:002018-05-05T11:57:13.480-07:00Shruti Swamy's, “Night Garden”--O. Henry Prize Stories 2017--Short Story Month<br />
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Shruti Swamy, “Night Garden”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Shruti Swamy <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>says that her story
“Night Garden-- about a woman who watches her dog stare down a cobra and drive
it away--told itself to her very simply and she wrote it down, noting that
every once in a while “a miracle happens, and a story is started and finished
in the space of an evening.” She says this has only truly happened to herr once,
adding “ it is the sweetest feeling I know.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The discovery of a story to tell is partially that which grabs the
artist and makes him or her need to tell it; it is something that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>involves him with the nature of its latent significance
that is compelling. Sherwood Anderson once said, “having, from a conversation
overheard or in some other way, got the tone of a tale, I was like a woman who
has just become impregnated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Something
was growing inside me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At night when I
lay in my bed I could feel the heels of the tale kicking against the walls of
my body."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This involvement of the
teller with the tale, this need to give it life and form, says Anderson, grows
out of the materials of the tale and the teller's relation to them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"It was the tale trying to take form
that kicked about inside the tale-teller at night when he wanted to
sleep."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Katherine Anne Porter once said her stories spring from a tiny seed and
that she always writes a story in one sitting, "one single burst of
energy."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes the story is so
unified around this central impulse or tone it seems that the writer must have
written in one go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Critic T.W. Higginson
said of De Maupassant's stories that they seem to have been done in one
sitting, "so complete is the grasp, the single grasp, upon the
mind."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And William Carlos Williams
has said that the short story consists of one "single flight of the
imagination, complete:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>up and
down."<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Hemingway once said that he wrote "The Killers" and "Ten
Indians" in one day, and Franz Kafka supposedly wrote the
"Judgment" in one night. This is not to say that the story that the
author ultimately published and that we read is what was written in one
sitting—but rather that the story was completed in its wholeness in one burst
of dominating impulse, one single flight of the imagination or involvement.
This suggests something about the short story that does not hold true for the
novel—that the form springs from a writer involvement in the story that
corresponds in some ways to the lyrical impulse of the poet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Elizabeth Bowen has said that the "first necessity for the short
story, at the set out, is necessariness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The story, that is to say, must spring from an impression or perception
pressing enough, acute enough, to have made the writer write... The story
should have the valid central emotion and inner spontaneity of the lyric; it
should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure--of however disturbing,
painful or complex a kind.” Bowen also argued that the story should be as
composed, in the plastic sense, and as visual as a picture.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Shruti Swamy’s “Night Garden” is indeed a picture, but it is also a
story about a woman’s creation of that picture—her fascination by <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a form manifested in the world outside her
window that stands for something mysterious; the story charts her efforts to
understand the significance of that spatial form, which draws her in and makes
her part of the form she observes.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Although she first is drawn to the shape the dog makes, his tail taunt
and his head level with his spine, “so his body arrowed into a straight line,
nearly gleaming with a quality of attention,” the snake also catches her
attention, for there seems something “too perfect about her movements, which
were curving and graceful. Half in love with both, I thought, and it chilled
me.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As night falls, the two animals
look like “unearthly, gods who had taken the form of animals for cosmic
battle.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The story ends with the dog winning the frozen battle with the cobra
and the woman carrying her exhausted pet into the house.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
O. Henry Prize Story editor Laura Furman suggests that there is more at
stake for the narrator than her dog’s life, for in watching the silent
confrontation she’s “bearing witness as well to the failure of her marriage and
the question of how she will face the rest of her life.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, I see nothing in the story to
suggest this personal backstory, except perhaps the narrator’s general
statement that “everyone’s marriage is unknowable from the outside.” <span style="background: white; border: none windowtext 1.0pt; color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; padding: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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There is nothing personal about this story; it is the creation of a
form in space, a picture that means something, which only the
picture itself can embody.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-9003794386932172702018-05-03T09:37:00.003-07:002018-05-03T09:37:42.245-07:00Fiona McFarlane’s “Buttony”--O. Henry Prize Stories 2017-Short Story Month<br />
<br />
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I wrote about this story when it first appeared in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Yorker.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></i>Here are some of my remarks:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
In McFarlane's story, the central characters are a school teacher named
Miss Lewis, a student favorite named Joseph, and the twenty-one other students
in her class. On the day of the story, the kids want to play
"buttony."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They form a circle,
hold out their hands, and close their eyes, while Joseph, who has been sent in
to get a button from Miss Lewis's desk drawer, walks around the circle and
touches each pair of hands, saying at the same time "buttony."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After he goes to all twenty-one students,
they are told to close their hands and open their eyes; each student is given
the chance to guess who's got the button. The one who has been holding the
button—not the one who guesses correctly-- gets to "hide" it the next
time.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
On this particular day that the children play the game, something
different happens—as it must, or else there would be no story: When Joseph gets
the button on a subsequent round of the game, he walks around the circle but
does not hide the button in anyone's hand, but rather puts it in his
mouth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only Miss Lewis has her eyes open
to see this action. When the children guess everyone and still cannot find the
button, they begin to kick and shout and rebel against Miss Lewis—opening her
hands, looking up her skirt, and pulling the pins from her hair to look for the
button.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
In her interview with Deborah Treisman, McFarlane says as the wrote the
story she was interested in the "strange ritualistic way in which the game
plays out so many childhood fears—of rejection, of being overlooked or lied to
or tricked."<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
And indeed, if you put yourself in the game, you can imagine its
potential for significance. The twenty-one kids have their eyes closed and thus
live in darkness during the game's duration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They hold out their hands in supplication, waiting for an undeserved
gift, something to be presented to them by a powerful giver, waiting to be
chosen—feeling the disappointment of the giver touching their hands but putting
nothing in it, and then the joy of feeling the button in the palm. <o:p></o:p></div>
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And when it is time to guess who has the button, all you really know is
that you do not have it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As in a
combination of poker-face and counting cards, the players watch the faces of
the rest of the players to see if they give themselves away and try to keep
track of all those who have played their hand by saying they do not have the
button.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Farlane's point is that the game, as it is played in her story, is not
merely a child's game, but something more powerfully latent with meaning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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The key line, one that McFarlane cannot resist using, is: "They
were like children in a fairy tale, under a spell." And yes, the story has
all the elements of a fairy tale—a hero with special powers, an adult who is
somehow mysteriously guilt and must be punished, a ritual or ceremony, a magic
object, children spellbound, a secret, a trick, a childhood rebellion against
the adult, and a last-minute rescue. <o:p></o:p></div>
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"Buttony" creates the kind of seemingly trivial, yet
ultimately magical encounter with alternate reality that the short story has
always done so well. And as usual, it has something to do with the tension
between the sacred and the profane—between the spiritual and the trivial—between
innocence and experience.<o:p></o:p></div>
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McFarlane handles these traditional short story elements quite well in choice
of detail and in storytelling syntax. For example, "All the children
handled the button with reverence, but none more than Joseph. He was gifted in
solemnity. He had a processional walk and moved his head slowly when his name
was called—and it was regularly called."<o:p></o:p></div>
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We know that something must be at stake for one character, and we know
it is Miss Lewis, for the story is told from her perspective, and it is she who
is "responsible." McFarlane tells us:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>"Miss Lewis wanted her children to live in a heightened way, and
she encouraged this sort of ceremony."<o:p></o:p></div>
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So it is really no surprise that Miss Lewis is the one who is attacked
at the end of the story, for even though the button is secretly hidden in
Joseph's mouth, it is she, the children suspect, who has the button. Children
always know there is a secret, and who else must have it except the adult, the
teacher?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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When one child looks up under her dress, as if there is where the
secret must lie, and another tears through her hair, as though it must somehow
be in her head, Miss Lewis cries out and sees one of the other teachers running
toward her with Joseph behind him, "not quite running, not altogether, but
like a shadow, long and blank and beautiful." For Joseph is not so much
real as he is a supernatural or spiritual embodiment of forces that we suspect
lie around us, but that we can never really verify.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We don't know what they are, but we know they
mean something.<o:p></o:p></div>
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At the end of her interview with Deborah Treisman, McFarlane says:
"Most of all, I'm drawn to those moments when people do things that are
mysterious even to themselves."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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McFarlane could not come up with a better characterization of the short
story form than that.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-54946268022819364072018-05-01T13:27:00.000-07:002018-05-01T13:27:28.118-07:00Wil Weitzel's "Lion"--O. Henry Prize Stories---Short Story Month<br />
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I feel guilty for neglecting my blog for the past several months.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can only plead a variety of the usual
reasons: other work commitments, family responsibilities and pleasures, a few
health issues common to my age, etc. etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But now that it is May 1, the beginning of Short Story Month--a
celebration that has never really caught on with writers or readers, but one to
which I feel bound to contribute—I will try to compensate for my neglect by
taking another look at the stories in the two collections that I have always
read and commented on in the past—the 2017 issues of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The O. Henry Prize Stories</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Best American Short Stories</i>. I will comment on as many stories from the two
collections as I have time for this month—focusing on those that I thought were
the best of the best and also commenting on those that did not engage me--trying
to explain the reasons for my responses. The first is:<o:p></o:p></div>
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Wil Weitzel, “Lion”—originally appeared in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prairie Schoone</i>r—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O. Henry
Prize Stories</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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I like this story about a young graduate student who lives with an old
retired professor. Instead of the old man telling the young student a story, as
we might expect, the student tells the teacher a story--about a boy whose
family has a lion for a pet until it grows too powerful and has to be released
back into the wild. <o:p></o:p></div>
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As we often expect from a story within a story, there seems to be a
parallel--between the student’s relationship with the old man and the boy’s relationship
with the lion. I have been thinking about the story this week as my wife and I
take our 3-year-old grandson to his preschool in the morning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He often wants to hear a recording of Peter,
Paul, and Mary singing “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and he wants to hear it repeated
over and over again; it is a great pleasure to watch him in the rear view
mirror, nodding in time and singing along. As I sit here and read and reread “Lion,”
I am reminded how important it is to hear a rhythmic pattern repeated over and
over—a chant, a prayer, a mantra, a poem, a short story—until the pattern seems
to get synchronized with your mind—pulling loose things inside of you together
and becoming <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>magically meaningful.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In his comments on the story at the end the O. Henry collection, Wil
Weitzel says he<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>wrote the first version
of the story fast because he did not want to think too hard about it or get
tripped up by the words—as if it was the rhythm of the story rather than the
individual words that mattered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he
worked on the revision, he said the tried to add logic and clarity, but it did
not seem right, so he gave up trying to rationalize the story.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The result is a story that works the way short stories—especially very
short short stories—often work—by transforming the characters and events into
emblems of something that transcends the everyday.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the story begins, the old man has died
and the young man bathes him and prepares him for burial--completing the
process that had already begun when he began to live with him. The old
professor seems “as old as old trees, their bark haggard and worn.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know that image.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once, I paid a visit to an old writer/teacher,
who had a powerful influence on me when I was young.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He lay in a hospital bed, and I placed my
hand on his—a hand that was supple and translucent, as if he had already begun
the process of being transformed from mere flesh into spirit or monument, or
relic, or manuscript. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He died two days
later.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I did what all students try to
do: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wrote about it, and the tribute
appeared in a Kentucky journal called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Appalachian
Heritage</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And this is what Wil
Weitzel does in “Lion”—trying to work his way through to the significance of a
young man’s search for the lion, trying to tell the story.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-82901511315810686182018-04-27T07:53:00.003-07:002018-04-27T07:53:54.120-07:00Elizabeth Strout's Anything is Possible Wins Story Prize, But Does One Read The Separate Pieces as Stories or Chapters?<br />
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Elizabeth Strout’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anything is
Possible </i>recently won the Story Prize, <span style="background: white; color: #5c5c5c;">an annual book award “honoring the author of an outstanding
collection of short fiction" with a $20,000 cash award. However, if you check
the Amazon page for the book, you will see that Random House has subtitled the
book “A Novel.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #5c5c5c;">I realize that I am
probably one of the few readers who gives a hoot about the genre issue of whether
a book is called a collection of short stories or a novel made up of related
chapters. However, in my opinion, whether one reads a piece of fiction as a stand-alone
story or as a linked chapter does make a difference.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Random House subtitled Elizabeth Strout’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anything is Possible</i> “a novel,” emboldened perhaps by the success
of her 2008 collection of stories, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Olive
Kitteridge, </i>which they subtitled simply “fiction.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a common commercial ploy, since
publishers know readers do not particularly like anything labelled “short
stories.” I read and commented on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Olive
Kitteridge </i>when it came out, for <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it won
a Pulitzer Prize that year, and they don’t usually award the prize to short
story collections, even those parading as a novel.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The recurrent appearance of the grouchy schoolteacher Olive sometimes
seemed to me to be a gimmick to justify the “novel” designation. She is the
central figure in some stories in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Olive
Kitteridge,</i> but is only referred to in others. Strout’s idea <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>for the book was to present her in
relationships with several different people—her husband, her son, her
neighbors, her colleagues, etc.—and thus reveal her to be more complex than any
one person thinks she is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes this
device works; sometimes it seems forced, especially when extreme events are
invented to reveal Olive’s hidden nature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Sometimes you like her; sometimes you think she is a bitch. You never
really know what makes her do the things she does.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All you can say is, “That’s just Olive.”
Although <i>Olive Kitteridge </i>has been compared to <i>Winesburg, Ohio,</i>
in my opinion, it did not take the kind of chances, either in style or content,
that Sherwood Anderson’s collection did in 1919.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anything is Possible</i> also has
a linking gimmick to justify its “novel” designation—the recurrence, occasionally
in person but usually by reference by someone who knows her--of Lucy Barton,
the central character in Strout’s 2016 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">My
Name is Lucy Barton</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I posted a blog
on that work, commenting on the genre issue of the difference between novel and
novella. Here is a quote from that blog:<o:p></o:p></div>
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Many readers and critics
may very well fuss that generic terminology matters little or not at all,
noting that “a rose by any other name” blah, blah, blah. I would argue that it
matters a great deal in terms of what kind of experience readers are in for
when they pick up a book called “short stories,” “a novella,” or “a novel.” I
agree with C. S. Lewis, who once said, “The first qualification for judging any
piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is – what
it was intended to do, and how it is meant to be used!” If one does not
formulate some means of knowing this, then one can say nothing to the purpose
about it, and indeed may run the risk of misunderstanding, or misjudging, it
entirely.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Reviewers have called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anything is
Possible</i> a novel, a “necklace of stories,” a “story cycle,” a linked group
of “chapters,” a “tapestry of tales.” One reviewer said the book exists
somewhere between a short-story collection and a novel, while another said it
was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">both</i> a novel and a collection of
interlinked short stories., but most agree with the reviewer who said while
each “chapter” can be enjoyed as a stand-alone short story, if you read them in
order, you will see they fit together like “tiles in a mosaic.” Andrea Barrett,
who has written brilliant short stories often linked together by recurring
characters, said in her <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times</i>
review that if you read A<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nything is
Possible</i> as a collection of linked stories like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Olive Kitteridge</i> or like Sherwood Anderson’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Winesburg, Ohio</i>, with which she and several other reviewers have
compared it, you would be missing a lot, observing that in this new book the character
Lucy Barton is the “emblematic writer whose work reflects their own lives back
to them.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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When I read Elizabeth Strout’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anything
is Possible </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>last year, I liked the
first stories: “The Sign,” “Windmills,” “Cracked,” and “The Hit-Thumb Theory”
better than the last stories: “Mississippi Mary,” “Sister,” “Dottie’s Bed and
Breakfast,” “Snow-blind,” and “Gift.” It was only after I had finished the book
and sat there staring at it that I realized why.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first stories I read as short stories;
the last stories I read as chapters in a novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Why? Because the last stories made me aware that the characters I read
about in the first stories were interrelated, and thus I began to focus on the
whole book as a tissue of interconnections rather than the individual stories
as unified pieces of fiction.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“The Sign” is about Tommy Guptill, who lost his dairy farm in a fire,
for which he thinks he is responsible because he neglected to turn off the
milking machines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lucy Barton is
introduced in this story as Tommy drives by the old Barton house with the sign
that read “Sewing and Alterations.” Tommy remembers Lucy as a student when he
was janitor at the junior high school after he lost his farm. He sees her book
in a bookstore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We also meet Marilyn Macauley
and her husband Charlie, who we encounter in other stories later on in the
book. Tommy goes to visit Pete Barton, Lucy’s brother, who still lives in the
old house. Tommy is a good man who has shown understanding and empathy with
Lucy and then much later with her brother Pete. <o:p></o:p></div>
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“Windmills” focuses on Patty Nicely, who hears about Lucy’s book and
buys a copy in the book store where she runs into Tommy. She talks to Lila
Lane, who is the niece of Lucy Barton, and at the end apologizes for calling
her a piece of filth. Her sister is Linda Peterson-Cornell, who is wealthy and
lives near Chicago. Patty loves Charlie Macauley, who is old enough to be her father.
The story ends with an emblematic scene of Patty and Charlie sitting on the post
office steps talking. Patty says that Lucy’s book makes her feel much less
alone. The story embodies this sense of empathy when Charlie opens his mouth to
say something, but does not, and Patty feels, “without knowing what it was—that
she understood what he was going to say.” She simply touches his arm briefly, “and
in the sun they sat.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“The Hit-Thumb Theory” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>focuses
on Charlie Macauley waiting for a prostitute named Tracey in a motel, who needs
10,000 dollars, which her son, who is on drugs, owes to a pusher. The title
comes from a discovery Charlie once made as a child when<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>if, while hammering, he hit his thumb, there
was a split second when you thought, “Hey, this isn’t so bad, considering how
hard I was hit.” After that moment of false relief, there comes the crush of
real pain. Charlie gets Tracey the money and goes to a B&B. While sitting
watching television with the proprietor, Dottie, he thinks that more
frightening than pain are people who no longer feel any pain at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He sits there and waits and hopes and prays,
“Sweet Jesus, let it come. Dear God, please, could you? Could you please let it
come?”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Sister” is the story in which
we meet Lucy Barton in person when she <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>comes to visit her brother, Pete, whom we have
already met.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Vicky, their sister, shows
up and they take Lucy back to Chicago and then drive back home; at the end Pete
asks Vicky if she wants the new rug he <o:p></o:p></div>
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“Gift” brings back Abel Blaine, Dottie’s brother, in a kind of
“Christmas Carol” story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Abel<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>has a conversation with the actor who has
played Scrooge in Dickens’ famous tale.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Abel has a heart attack and at the end thinks of his granddaughter
Sophie and her stuffed pony named Snowball. The big woman who comes to get him
in an ambulance he sees as his friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This, the final story in the book, ends with the title of the book:<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Like his sweet Sophie
who loved her Snowball, Abel had a friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And if such a gift could come to him at such a time, then anything—dear
girl from Rockford dressed up for her meeting, rushing above the Rock River—he
opened his eyes, and yes, there it was, the perfect knowledge: Anything was
possible for anyone.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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I have some reservations about focusing on short stories as parts of a
whole rather than as complete artistic entities in themselves. My worry is that
because of the notion that bigger is better, focusing on the sequential nature
of stories inevitably throws the focus on the novel side of the formula rather than
on the short story side.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The question of
what makes a short story sequence something other than a group of randomly
assembled stories and also something other than a novel is worth
examining.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I certainly do not want short
stories to be read as if they were sections of a novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, by the same token, I do not want
them to be read as “part” of an overarching sequence, a tactic that may result
in neglecting the unique characteristics of short stories as individual works
of art.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It troubles me that some critics have argued that readers have
misinterpreted individual stories because they did not take into account that
they have a book-length intertextual context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The very word “misinterpret” suggests that one cannot really read a
story from, say <i>Winesburg</i> or <i>Dubliners, </i>individually, but only
within the overall context of the sequence in which they were ultimately
published.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I admit there is a certain pleasure involved when you read a story and
run across a character you have met in a previous story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such character reappearances create pleasurable
little shocks of recognition for the reader, a sort of “wow” factor that these
characters actually live outside the fictions in which they exist and have been
hanging around just waiting for another story in which to pop up.<o:p></o:p></div>
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However, in the Dec. 1, 2003 issue of <i>The New Yorker</i>, Louis
Menand, in a long review essay on John Updike’s <i>The Early Stories,</i> says
that if you try to name the sensation that an individual story delivers, you
might call it a general sense of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“<i>Whoa</i>,”
which, he admits, is not exactly a term of art, but you know it when you feel
it--that shiver of recognition of the “whatness of a thing” being revealed when
you read “Snow was general all over Ireland.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Basically, I guess, I prefer this “whoa” feeling when a single story
comes completely yet inexpressibly together over the “wow” feeling of running
across the same characters, settings, or themes in several sequentially
arranged stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-25173597813010295352018-04-04T13:37:00.000-07:002018-04-04T13:37:00.740-07:00"Cat Person" and "Beauty and the Beast"<br />
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One of my readers recently wrote: “I’m looking forward to reading your
review of ’Cat Person.’ Will you write it?”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Well, now that it has been over three months since the story appeared
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New Yorker</i> and started a
flurry of reader response and literary criticism on the Internet (usually
called “going viral”), I reckon it is safe to make a few comments. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Josephine Livingston, the “culture staff writer” at the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Republic</i>, wrote that many readers
wove the story into the ongoing conversation about sexual harassment, as if it
were a personal essay, noting that “as an approach to criticism” this turns the
story into a tool for “digging in the hole of reality, rather than an imagined
world that has its own rules.” I agree. And the rules that govern Kristen
Roupenian’s “Cat Person,” I suggest, are the rules that govern the genre known
as the short story, and that is what I feel somewhat qualified to talk about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
In the “This Week in Fiction
Interview” with Deborah Treisman, Roupenian said the story was based on an
incident with a person she met online and it got her to “thinking about the
strange and flimsy evidence we use to judge the contextless people we meet
outside our existing social networks, whether online or off,” adding that our
initial impression of a person is “pretty much entirely a mirage of guesswork
and projection.” </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Roupenian, who seems to me to be pretty smart about her story,
says that much of dating involves an “interplay of empathy and narcissism: you
weave an entire narrative out of a tiny amount of information, and then, having
created a compelling story about someone, you fall in love with what you’ve
created.” I am certainly no expert on dating, but having some knowledge of the
short story, I recognize this as what underlies all love stories. You never
fall in love with the person, for you never really know the person; what you
fall in love with is the image you have created.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Constance
Grady notes <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>on the website <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vox</i> what we well know—that the short
story is a medium granted “precious little respect — and now people barely
acquainted with it are holding up “Cat Person” as exceptional rather than
typical. Hackles rose, says Grady, not necessarily at the story’s readers, but
at the literary culture that makes it so easy to skate by on knowing the three
short stories everybody reads in 10th-grade English, and to treat the great
short stories that are written every year as afterthoughts.” Grady concludes, “regardless
of whether or not “Cat Person” is a great short story or just an okay short
story, whether it’s deeply subversive or highly problematic, it has been
exciting to see the cultural discourse revolve around a short story for a
spell. It’s a reminder of how immensely powerful and valuable fiction can be,
and why it’s worthwhile to pay attention to it and learn from it.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Yes,
indeed, it was good to see so many people reading a short story and finding it
engaging enough to want to talk about it—something I (but very few others) have
been doing for years. I only hope it leads them to reading more short stories
for the riches they provide.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Cat
Person” is, of course, about attitudes and behavior that lead two people to
move from being strangers to having sex. The primary perspective is the young
woman Margot, whose mind the reader is allowed to enter. The reader knows Robert
only by his behavior and Margot’s observations of him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Although
many readers have been so impressed by Roupenian’s perceptiveness and <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the accuracy of her description of dating
attitudes and behavior in the story that they<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>thought it was an essay about real life rather than a fiction about
invented life, I suggest that readers familiar with the conventions of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>fiction, especially short fiction, will
recognize that Roupenian has modelled her story as much, or more, from her
internalized knowledge of those conventions than from personal experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Think of “Cat Person” as a variation of the
classic Beauty and the Beast story or the Frog Prince fairy tale, in which the
beast is, after all, still a beast, and the frog, even after the kiss,
stubbornly remains a frog.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">There
is something “magical” about Margot’s willingness to become intimately involved
with Robert.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She surprises herself by
giving in to his abrupt demand, “give me your phone number”; When he says “stop
fooling around and come now,” she puts a jacket on over her pajamas and goes
out to meet him. After having sex with him, she marvels at the “mystery of this
person who’d just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Afterwards, although she wants to “ghost”
him, instead of sending her breakup text, she says she will get back to him
soon, thinking, “Why did I do that?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
she truly didn’t know.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Margot
is the point of view of the story because she truly does not know why she
allows herself to become involved with Robert, although she thinks it has something
to do with his initially treating her like a young daughter, kissing her gently
on the forehead as though she were something “precious.” The fairy tale mystery
continues when she is turned away from the club for being under aged and begins
to cry, creating a kind of “magic” as Robert wraps his “bearlike” arms around
her. She sees him as a big lovable animal, sensitive and easily wounded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">However,
when the sexual encounter begins, she sees his soft, thick belly covered with
hair and recoils from it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he makes
demands, she complies and when he looks “stunned and stupid with pleasure, like
a “milk-drunk baby,” she feels her power, thinking this is what she loves most about
sex. However, she finally sees him as a fat old man with his finger in her, and
her revulsion turns to self-disgust and humiliation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I
think what Roupenian has done here is to competently capture the archetypal
encounter of how a young woman (Beauty) plays seductive roles with an older man
(Beast)—allowing herself to have sex with him, even though she does not desire
him. The spin on the mythic story here is, of course, that the Beast remains
the animal that he is—that all physical bodies who are merely human are ultimately—and is not transformed,
as in wish fulfillment fairy tales, by love.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Cat
Person” is smoothly, transparently, written. It is smart and perceptive.
And, of course, it is timely, even as it is universal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it does not have the mystery and
complexity that great stories have, even though it has the familiarity that has
captured the attention of many people who recognize Margot’s feelings and
behavior and even understand Robert’s anger at the end.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-24242129512675959612018-03-23T12:14:00.001-07:002018-03-23T12:15:06.602-07:00Charles Holdefer's Reading of George Saunders' Pastoralia<br />
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<span style="color: black; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I recently read a book-length discussion of George Saunders’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pastoralia</i> by Charles Holdefer, the
author of four novels and a collection of short stories entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dick Cheney in Shorts</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although Holdefer currently lives and teaches in
Europe, he is originally from Iowa and graduated from the Iowa Writer’s
Workshop. He has published short stories and essays in many places, including
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New England Review, The Antioch
Review, </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The North American
Review.</i> I met him a few years ago at a conference on the short story in
France.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Holdefer’s book on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pastoralia</i> is one of a series of books
called “Bookmarked” published by the Independent publisher, Lg Press; the
series is described as a “no-holds barred personal narrative detailing how a
particular work of literature influenced an author on their journey to becoming
a writer, as well as the myriad directions in which the journey has taken them.”
Earlier books featured in the series include John Knowles’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Separate Peace</i>, Kurt Vonnegut’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slaughterhouse Five</i>, Malcolm Lowry’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Under the Volcano</i>, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Great Gatsby, </i>and Raymond Carver’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It is unusual to encounter an entire volume devoted to one’s personal
engagement with a book of fiction, especially a book of short stories. When an
interviewer asked Holdefer <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>about the
structure of the book—which devotes separate chapters to an analysis of each of
the stories in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pastoralia</i>,
accompanied by a related personal story and some reflections on relevant social
or philosophical issues—Holdefer said he thought the “personal readings”
premise of the Bookmarked series was a good one, “because when you love
literature, it is first and foremost personal. Not professional, not some sort
of exercise.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">George Saunders is one of my favorite short-story writers, and I
have posted several blog essays on his stories and his essays. </span>In many ways,
one of the most perfect examples of the short story as a form in <i>Pastoralia</i>
is "The End of FIRPO in the World," in which a young overweight and
disliked boy named Cody takes imaginative revenge on classmates and neighbors
who torment him by putting boogers in their thermos and plugging their water
hose to make it explode.<span style="color: black; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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In an interview with Charlie Rose, Saunders said he
used to think that the artist had an idea he or she wanted to get and then sort
of dump it on the reader.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, he knows
that really doesn’t produce anything; it is condescending. When you study
writing, Saunders said, there’s this intentional fallacy that the writer has a
set of ideas and the story is just a vehicle for delivering those ideas. He
says his experience has been totally the opposite. “You go in trying not to
have any idea of what you are trying to accomplish, praying that you will
accomplish something and respecting the energy of the piece and following it
very closely. Saunders says he always starts off earnestly toward a target;
however, he self-deprecatingly notes, "like the hunting dog who trots out
to get the pheasant," I usually comes back with "the lower half of a
Barbie doll."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I very much like Saunders' ideas about the essential short story
characteristics of mystery, ambiguity, the process of discovery, and human
sympathy in the title essay to his collection <i>The Braindead Megaphone</i>.
Consider the following:<o:p></o:p></div>
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“The best stories proceed
from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised
extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us
slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to
empathize with people we don’t know, because they help us imagine these people,
and when we imagine them—if the storytelling is good enough—we imagine them as
being, essentially, like us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the
story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or
is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable,
inscrutable, incontrovertible.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I like the way George Saunders talks about short stories, and I also
like the way Charles Holdefer talks about short stories. Consider the
following:<o:p></o:p></div>
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Appeals to history, cause
and effect, verisimilitude: those are the novel’s bread and butter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But a short story operates in a different
economy. Some weird or terrible event (there are plenty of them in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pastoralia</i>) is not naturalized or
expanded in the novelistic manner; there simply isn’t the space to do so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But rather than feeling like less, the result
can feel like more, with an immediacy that is not possible in the spongier,
discursive narrative dough of a novel.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
A finely wrought short
story is more than a miniaturist artefact, a cute little piece of scaled craft.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s a trip to another
space, another way of seeing.<o:p></o:p></div>
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If you appreciate the short story as much as Saunders, Holdefer, and I
do, you will find Holdefer’s reading of Saunders’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pastoralia</i> a pleasure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
is not an academic engagement with Saunders’ short stories--although it is a
profoundly intelligent one--but a deeply personal interaction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as you read it, you might sometimes feel that
you are learning as much about Holdefer as you are about Saunders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, as much as I value sticking close to the
work when I write about short stories, usually refusing to wander about in contexts,
I have to admit that when I was teaching in the classroom, I often tried to
interest my students by giving them an example of my own personal identification
with a story. And indeed, if the teacher or the reader/critic does not have a
passionate personal encounter with the work, then what the hell’s the point of
reading fiction and then talking about your experience with others? Why should
they care?<o:p></o:p></div>
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I recommend <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">George Saunders’
Pastoralia: Bookmarked</i> to you. I have read it with pleasure, for it is
always a pleasure to read good writing about good reading. <span style="color: black; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The book is
available in a Kindle edition on Amazon for $9.85<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>and in a paperback edition for $10.37.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-75930230134099602192018-01-26T15:23:00.000-08:002018-01-26T15:24:27.142-08:00Thank you, Ursula le Guin<br />
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In her speech on receiving the National Book Foundation Medal in 2014, Ursula
Le Guin, who died this past week at the age of 88, scolded publishers for
giving over their responsibility to support good writing and great literature
to the sales department, which often promotes authors as if they were deodorant.
Books ae not just commodities, Le Guin argued, and said that now that she was nearing
the end of her career she did not want to watch American literature get trivialized,
for, she proudly insisted, the name of the beautiful reward writers seek is not
profit, but freedom.</span></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>La Guin called her most famous short story, “The
Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a variation on a theme by William James. In
her introduction to her book <i>The Wind's Twelve Quarters</i> (1975), she
cites the following passage from James's essay "The Moral Philosopher and
the Moral Life" as the ideological source of the story:<o:p></o:p></div>
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[If] the hypothesis were offered us of a
world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all
be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition
that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of
lonely torment, what except a specific and independent sort of emotion can it
be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us
to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its
enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain."<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Indeed, the
story is geometrically neat in its exploration of the nature of human
happiness. The first half presents the familiar convention in science fiction
and fantasy of the futuristic utopia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
However, the
narrator, aware of the perfect utopian nature of Omelas and of the human
skepticism about such complete happiness, chides readers for the bad habit,
encouraged by sophisticates and pedants, of considering happiness as something
rather stupid and only evil interesting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To belie these very words, the story inevitably reaches a point at which
the narrator says that if we do not believe the joy of the beautiful city, then
one more thing must be described.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At
this point, the narrator shifts to a description of the hidden child, which is,
as Collins suggests, the classic image of the scapegoat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The magic of the scapegoat depends on the
willingness of the people to rationalize the existence of evil as something
that exists outside of themselves, for which they have no responsibility.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The people of
Omelas are not happy because they are ignorant of the child, but precisely
because they are aware of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ones
who leave Omelas may be the weaker ones because they cannot live with the
knowledge of evil, and thus they leave for some place where they think there is
no evil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the narrator says, such a place
may not even exist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<i>Changing Planes, </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">one of
her last books, before she decided that her fiction inspiration had dried up,<i>
</i></span>is a classic example of the “what if” school of literary creation. “What
if” you took the most tedious hiatus of modern life—the mind-numbing wait in an
airport between changing planes—and transformed it into a marvelous opportunity
to change planes of reality?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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After a brief introduction describing the method of one Sita Dulip of
Cincinnati, who discovered that by an imaginative twist she could go anywhere
“because she was already between planes,” Le Guin “what ifs’ her way through
fifteen Gulliverian and Borgesian explorations of “interplanary travel.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Although these playful pieces make no pretense to the biting satire of
Jonathan Swift or the profound epistemology of Jorge Borges, Le Guin seems to
have great fun here puncturing some of the pretenses of modern society and
examining some of the paradoxes of the human condition. Among the Swiftian
satires are stories about the Veksi, a species of angry people whose social
life consists of arguments, fights, sulks, brawls, feuds, and acts of
vengeance; the Ansarac, a migratory race whose elegant birdlike beauty is
intolerable to more “civilized” planes; and the Hegns, all of whom are members
of a Royal Family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The Borgesian explorations include tales of the Asonu, a profound
people who have no language because transcendent knowledge cannot be expressed
in language; the Hennebet who, because they make no split between body and
spirit, have no need for religion, dogma, or formulated metaphysics; and the
Frin who all dream the same dreams and thus experience a true communal bonding.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
This “what if” method of creation, although sometimes satirically
scintillating and occasionally philosophically profound, runs the risk of every
so often becoming merely sophomorically silly. For example, if there is an
actual Easter Island and an actual Christmas Island, “what if” there were a
Halloween Island, a July Fourth Island, a New Year’s Island, etc.? And what
about Wake Island?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What would life and
reality itself be like if there were a people who never slept at all?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Would they all be geniuses because they did
not waste time in idle slumber, or would they only be able to live in mundane
fact because the way to truth is through lies and dreams?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The great nineteenth-century poet and thinker Samuel Taylor Coleridge
once made an important distinction between Fancy and Imagination.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Creative products of Fancy, he suggested, are
clever composites of disparate things that may amuse and edify, but creations
of the imagination are genuinely new entities that exceed the mere sum of their
parts. Although Ursula K. Le Guin has succeeded in the past in creating
provocative works of true imagination, in <i>Changing Planes</i> she is mostly
just having some fanciful fun.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are
not masterful satires that will alter your view of society, nor are they
profound parables that will change your notion of what reality is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But they are amusing “what ifs” with which you
can pleasantly pass some stale time while you are waiting to change planes in
an airport, which Le Guin describes as a “nonplace in which time does not pass
and there is no hope of any meaningful existence.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Ursula Le Guin, thank you for the profound sense of a meaningful existence
you gave us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We will miss you.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-52781181104387920382017-12-08T14:51:00.001-08:002017-12-08T14:51:09.965-08:00William H. Gass: the Significance of Form and The Beauty of Language<div class="WordSection1">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">I was sorry to hear of the death
of William H. Gass this week. He has been America's most important
philosophical novelist, not in the discursive sense by which we identify other
novelists with a freight of ideology to illustrate, but rather as a philosopher
of language who is also a powerful fiction-maker with the courage of his
convictions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In his fourth collection of
essays, <i>Finding a Form</i> (1996), Gass remains one of the last unashamed
advocates for the great Greek ideal of form, exploring with the precision
usually reserved for poetry, the relationship between language and mind and the
tension between nature and culture. His
every sentence carefully carved, Gass is the best example of his own belief
that there is music in prose and that language must be carefully crafted so
that it can be heard. Throughout the
book, Gass returns untiringly to his central conviction--that the artist's
fundamental loyalty is to form, not ideology or content. "Every other diddly desire can find
expression; every crackpot idea or local obsession, every bias and graciousness
and mark of malice, may have an hour," says Gass, "but it must never
be allowed to carry the day." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Gass has been singing this song
since his first collection of essays, </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Fiction and the Figures of Life</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">
(1970), in which he established his primary premise about fiction: "that
stories and the places and people in them are merely made of words as chairs
are made of smoothed sticks and sometimes of cloth and metal tubes."</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">His formalist conviction that a novel or short
story is ideally a self-contained meaning system is his most controversial
principle, one that he explores with equal fervor in his other two collections
of essays, </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">The World Within the Word</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> (1978) and </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Habitations of the
Word</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> (1985).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Gass's first novel, <i>Omensetter's
Luck</i> (1966), was met with almost overwhelming critical success. Reviewers praised its lyrical beauty and its
intellectual depth, calling it an important contribution to the literature of
its time, even the most important work of fiction by an American writer of its
generation. The plot of the novel is
simple, for Gass has never been interested in mere plot. It deals with an old man who tries to tell
about Omensetter, a craftsman who settled in a Ohio town in the late nineteenth
century. However, this voice is less
important than the voice of the Reverend Jethro Furber, Omensetter's
antagonist. A parody of folk legend, the
novel is about how to represent the world in words, the theme of all of Gass's
fiction. A verbal duel between the two
main characters, it explores basic philosophic conflicts between mind and body,
human and object, reason and feeling. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Two years later, Gass published
his second work of fiction, </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">In the Heart of the Heart of the Country</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">,
containing a novella, </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">The Pedersen Kid</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">, a hallucinatory detective story
and quest romance about coming of age in the midst of madness and death, and
four short stories.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Gass has said that
the best of these pieces is "Order of Insects," a story about a woman
who limits her vision so obsessively that she transforms insects into
metaphoric, mythic, creatures.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Her
fascination with the insects centers on their order and wholeness in death,
for, unlike humans, their skeletons are on the outside; thus they retain their
form.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Never seeming to decay, they are
perfect geometric shapes of pure order.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The best-known story in the
collection is the title story, a lyrical meditation of thirty-two sections,
that, in between its Yeatsean beginning--"I have sailed the seas and
come...to B...a small...town fastened to a field in Indiana"--and its
transcendent conclusion of "Joy to the World" explores the narrator's
efforts to pull himself together poetically after a failed affair that makes
him feel he has "love left over" that he would like to lose. The story has become a classic anthology
piece, a representative of experimental short fiction of the 1960s, often
placed alongside the stories of Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and Robert Coover
to illustrate the self-reflexivity of post-modernism.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Gass's most thoroughly experimental,
self-reflexive fiction, however, is his novella <i>Willie Master's Lonesome
Wife</i> (1968), a work that seeks to create the illusion that the book the
reader holds in his hands is indeed the lonesome wife herself and that the
reading process is a sexual encounter--a metaphor Gass calls our attention to
by using different paper textures, photographs, and a variety of typographical
devices to suggest that words are sensuous objects that must be encountered
concretely and not merely transparent lens through which we perceive
"reality."<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The Tunnel</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">, Gass's master work, on which he
labored for twenty-five years, creates the voice of William Frederick Kohler, a
history professor, who while trying to write a simple, self-congratulatory
preface to his own magnum opus, <i>Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany</i>,
becomes blocked and writes about his own life instead. Filled with bitterness, hatred, lies,
self-pity, and self-indulgence, Kohler resents his hard-fisted father and his
self-pitying mother, loathes his fat, slothful wife, and has nothing but
contempt for his nondescript adolescent sons, his pedantic colleagues, and his
superficial lovers. However, in spite of
such an abhorrent personality, because the voice of Kohler is expressed in
Gass's highly polished prose, wonderfully sustained for over six hundred pages,
the novel is not a self-indulgent diatribe, but a complex philosophic
exploration of the relationship between historical fascism and domestic
solipsism. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">William H. Gass has been the most
articulate and forceful contemporary proponent of the importance of aesthetic
beauty and artistic structure, even as critics and writers around him have
caved in to reading literature as a carrier of social message.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-82399098718821325132017-09-21T15:16:00.000-07:002017-09-21T15:16:00.054-07:00Annie Proulx Will be Awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters<div class="WordSection1">
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<span style="background: white; color: #606060; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The
National Book Foundation has just announced that it will award </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><a href="https://mail.csulb.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=6goRbonim58zxMA-SXu5M5BBeuPjcAqzrXgmCuyMTx0Kecj9OwHVCA..&URL=http%3a%2f%2fnationalbook.us9.list-manage.com%2ftrack%2fclick%3fu%3d8120eb79bde996c5a76e8f595%26id%3d527957bb37%26e%3de9744eb723" style="word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank"><span style="background: white; color: #333333;">Annie Proulx the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American
Letters</span></a></span><span style="background: white; color: #606060; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">--a $10,000 prize--at the 68th National Book Awards Ceremony
and Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 15, 2017. I have always admired
Proulx’s short stories. Here are some comments about her three “Wyoming Stories”
collections:<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Close
Range: Wyoming Stories 1<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In <i>Close Range: Wyoming
Stories</i>, Proulx focuses on the rural west, where her characters are ragged
and rugged, but where, either because of her increased confidence as a writer
or because she was inspired by the landscape and the fiercely independent
populace, are compellingly caught in a world that is both grittily real and
magically mythical at once. Claiming
that her stories gainsay the romantic myth of the West, Proulx admires the
independence and self-reliance she has found there, noting that the people
"fix things and get along without them if they can't be fixed. They don't
whine."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Place is as important as the
people who populate it in <i>Close Range</i>, for the Wyoming landscape is
harsh yet beautiful, real yet magical, deadly yet sustaining. In such a world, social props are worthless
and folks are thrown back on their most basic instincts, whether they be
sexual, survival, or sacred. In such a
world, as one character says in "Brokeback Mountain," "it's
easier than you think to yield up to the dark impulse." Annie Proulx's
Wyoming is a heart of darkness inherent in place and personality at once.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The most remarkable thing about
"Brokeback Mountain" is that although it is about a sexual
relationship between two men, it cannot be categorized as a homosexual story;
it is rather a tragic love story that simply happens to involve two males. The
fact that the men are Wyoming cowboys rather than San Francisco urbanites makes
Proulx's success in creating such a convincing and emotionally affecting story
all the more wonderful. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are
"high-school drop-out country boys with no prospects" who, while
working alone on a sheep-herding operation on Brokeback Mountain, abruptly and
silently, engage in a sexual encounter, after which both immediately insist,
"I'm not no queer." Although
the two get married and do not see each other for four years, when they meet
again, they grab each other and hug in a gruff masculine way, and then,
"as easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came
together."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Neither have sex with other men,
and both know the danger of their relationship.
Twenty years pass, and their infrequent encounters are combination of
sexual passion and personal concern. The
story comes to a climax when Jack, who unsuccessfully tries to convince Ennis
they can make a life together, is mysterious killed on the roadside. Although officially it was an accident, Ennis
sorrowfully suspects that Jack has been murdered after approaching another
man. Although "Brokeback
Mountain" ends with Jack a victim of social homophobia, this is not a
story about the social plight of the homosexual. The issues Proulx explores here are more
basic and primal than that. Told in a
straightforward, matter-of-fact style, the story elicits a genuine sympathy for
a love that is utterly convincing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Chosen by John Updike for <i>The
Best American Short Stories of the Century</i>, "The Half-Skinned
Steer" creates an hallucinatory world of shimmering significance out of
common materials. The simple event on
which the story is based is a cross-country drive made by Mero, a man in his
eighties, to Wyoming for the funeral of his brother. The story alternates between the old man's
encounters on the road, including an accident, and his memories of his father
and brother. The central metaphor of the
piece is introduced in a story Mero recalls about a man who, while skinning a
steer, stops for dinner, leaving the beast half skinned. When he returns, he sees the steer stumbling
stiffly away, its head and shoulders raw meat, its staring eyes filled with
hate. The man knows that he and his family are done for.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The story ends with Mero getting
stuck in a snow storm a few miles away from his destination and trying to walk
back to the main highway. As he
struggles through the wind and the drifts, he notices that one of the herd of
cattle in the field next to the road has been keeping pace with him, and he
realizes that the "half-skinned steer's red eye had been watching for him
all this time." In its combination of stark realism and folktale myth,
"The Half-Skinned Steer" is reminiscent of stories by Eudora Welty
and Flannery O'Connor, for Mero's journey is an archetypal one toward the
inevitable destiny of death. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Annie Proulx has said that
"The Mud Below" is her favorite story in <i>Close Range</i>, for
"on-the-edge situations" and the rodeo interest her. The title refers to the mud of the rodeo
arena, and the main character is twenty-three-year-old Diamond Felts, who, at
five feet three has always been called Shorty, Kid, Tiny, and Little Guy. His father left when he was a child, telling
him, "You ain't no kid of mine."
His mother taunts him about his size more than anyone else, always
calling him Shorty and telling him he is stupid for wanting to be a bull rider
in the rodeo.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The force of the story comes from
Diamond's identification with the bulls.
The first time he rides one he gets such a feeling of power that he
feels as though he were the bull and not the rider; even the fright seems to
fulfill a "greedy physical hunger" in him. When one man tells him that the bull is not
supposed to be his role model, Diamond says the bull is his partner.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The story comes to a climax when
Diamond is thrown and suffers a dislocated shoulder. Tormented by the pain, he calls his mother
and demands to know who his father is. Getting no answer, Diamond drives away
thinking that all of life is a "hard, fast ride that ended in the
mud," but he also feels the euphoric heat of the bull ride, or at least
the memory of it, and realizes that if that is all there is, it must be enough.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Like most of the stories in <i>Close
Range: Wyoming Stories,</i> "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" is
about surviving. As Old Red, the ninety-six-year-old grandfather says at the
end, "The main thing in life was staying power. That was it: stand around long enough, you'd
get to sit down." Picked by Amy Tan
to be included in the 1999 <i>The Best American Short Stories</i>, it is one of
the most comic fictions in the collection.
A story about a young woman named Ottaline, with a "physique
approaching the size of a propane tank," being wooed by a broken-down John
Deere 4030 tractor could hardly be anything else.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Ottaline's only chance for a
husband seems to be the semiliterate hired man, Hal Bloom, with whom she has
silent sex, that is, until she is first approached by the talking tractor, who
calls her "sweetheart, lady-girl."
Tired of the loneliness of listening to cell phone conversations on a
scanner, Ottaline spends more and more time with the tractor, gaining
confidence until, when made to take on a cattle trading responsibility by her
ill father, she meets Flyby Amendinger, who she soon marries. The story ends
with Ottaline's father getting killed in a small plane he is flying. The ninety-six-year old grandfather, who sees
how things had to go, has the powerfully uncomplicated final word--that the
main thing in life is staying power.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Bad
Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2. <o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In <i>Close Range: Wyoming
Stories</i>, one of Annie Proulx’s narrators says ominously, “Friend, it’s
easier than you think to yield up to the dark impulse.” Well, if that book
painted the desperate side of rural big sky life, then <i>Bad Dirt: Wyoming
Stories 2</i> is largely a light-hearted companion volume. Made up of six very
brief tall-tales and five longer stories, <i>Bad Dirt</i> (which refers to
rough country roads)<i> </i>is, by and large, a snort-out-loud hoot. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Most of the action takes place in
and around Elk Tooth, Wyoming, pop. 80, only worth visiting for three bars, the
most popular of which is Pee Wee’s, where such stories are best told and most
enjoyed. Take for example “The Trickle
Down Effect,” in which Fiesta Punch, one of the area’s many desperate women
ranchers, hires Deb Sipple to drive to Wisconsin to pick up some hay. But Deb stops for too many drinks and tosses
too many cigarettes out the window on the way back. When he rolls into Elk Tooth late at night,
it is the closest thing to a meteor the folks have ever seen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">And what about “Summer of the Hot
Tubs”? When Amanda Gribb, who tends bar
at Pee Wee’s, hears about Willy Huson’s using an enormous cast-iron cooking pot
for a hot tub, she grabs some frozen corn and a can of chili powder, declaring,
“If he’s goin cook hisself let’s get some flavor in there.” Then there’s “The Hellhole,” in which Game
Warden Creel Zmundzinski’s contempt for poachers is made clear by a fiery
fissure that opens up under the obnoxious culprits he catches. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Although the longer stories are
somewhat more culturally complex, they still have a wry, tongue-in-cheek tone.
In “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?” Gilbert Wolfscale, born and
raised on the family ranch, is “caught in the downward ranching spiral of too
much work, not enough money, drought.” His wife leaves him and his two boys
want nothing to do with him. But he has
a “scalding passion” for the ranch. He knows exactly what kind of furniture
Jesus would pick if he owned a place in Wyoming.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In “The Indian Wars Refought,”
Charlie Parrott, a reservation Sioux, marries the widow Georgina Brawls, and
his 20-something daughter Linney, a real hellcat, comes to live with them. In the process of cleaning up an old commercial
building, she finds letters from Buffalo Bill Cody about making a movie of the
battle at Wounded Knee and becomes suddenly fired up on learning of the
massacre of her people. In “Man Crawling Out of Trees,” when Mitchell Fair and
his wife Eugenie retire from the East to Wyoming, he buys an old pickup truck
and drives around the prairie on his own.
She gets more and more lonely, until a man crawls toward her out of the
woods and she breaks the cardinal rule of the country.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In “The Wamsutter Wolf,” Buddy
Millar moves right next door to Cheri, an overweight hellcat from high school,
and the bully who once broke his nose. Well, things just go from bad to worse,
culminating with Cheri sneaking over to Buddy’s trailer and climbing into bed,
late night runs to the emergency room, fear of jealous reprisals, guns at the
ready, and so on and so. But it is not just the imaginative plots and the
cantankerous characters that make these stories so irresistible; it’s the
rhythm of the prose and the tone of the teller. Proulx is a tough, smart lady
who doesn’t miss very much. And she’s
flat-out funny.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Fine
Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3</span></i></b><b style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">.</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Annie Proulx bookends the third
volume of her “Wyoming Stories” series by citing the book’s title in the first
and last tale, thus locating them in time and space. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In “Family Man,” Ray Forkenbrock,
wasting away in a home for the elderly, tells his granddaughter about his past,
which she records for posterity. Even
though his life was marred by hardship and a secret betrayal by his father, he
is adamant that “everything was fine the way it was.” In the heart-scalding
final story, “Tits Up in a Ditch,” which focuses on Dakota Lister, who loses
more than her arm while serving in Iraq, her grandmother’s husband Verl dismisses
outsider criticism of the state by insisting that “Wyomin is fine just the way
it is.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The way it was, and often still
is, is vicious. The five strongest pieces are better characterized by the title
of the final story, which refers to a cow that tried to climb up a deep slope
and slid back down in the ditch and died. Whether the story takes place in the
late 19<sup>th</sup> century or the early 21<sup>st</sup>, one slip-up in the
rugged outback of Wyoming can kill you. In “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” Archie and
Rose try to make a go of it on a modest homestead. However, the winters are
bitter and jobs are few and Archie’s decision to leave pregnant Rose in their
rough-hewn little house to find work results in disaster.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In “Testimony of the Monkey,” a
silly argument over whether to wash the lettuce splits up Marc and Catlin, two
rugged outdoors enthusiasts. When in
anger and spite, she takes an ill-advised trip into harsh territory alone and
catches her foot in the crevice of a rock, the rest of the story, which
alternates between her painful efforts to free herself and her hallucinations
about rescue, is predictable, but none the less agonizing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Proulx indulges herself here in a
couple of playful fables about the devil in “I’ve Always Loved This Place” and
“Swamp Mischief” and a couple of more serious legends about a Bermuda Triangle
sagebrush and an early Indian buffalo hunt in “The Sagebrush Kid” and “Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">However, the most powerful
stories are those that reverberate on the final page of the collection when
Dakota Lester tells the parents of her husband, who has lost both legs and half
his face in Iraq, “Sash is tits up in a ditch.” And so are they all in this
scrupulously written Annie Proulx collection.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">Congratulations to Annie
Proulx on her newest honor, which she will add to <span style="background: white;">her Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, National Book Award, and PEN/Faulkner
Award for Fiction.</span></span>Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-8780615450768807972017-09-19T12:18:00.000-07:002017-09-19T12:18:23.631-07:00Best British Stories: 2017--Part 4--Are These Pieces Stories?<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>Are These Pieces Stories?<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
One might very well respond to the question that heads this commentary,
“Who cares?” “What difference does it make?” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I can only say that, having very carefully read thousands of stories
throughout my career, I guess certain expectations come into play when I read
what someone has labelled a “short story.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The following four pieces have been labelled “short stories,” but for
reasons I will try to explain, they do not seem like short stories to me. They
may be well written pieces of prose that I enjoyed reading, just not short
stories. Does that make any difference?
I think so. It makes a difference in how I read them.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>Courttia Newland, “Reversible” <o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The first two paragraphs of this story depict a sadly familiar picture—a
black man has been shot by police and a protesting crowd gathers around his
body while the police stand by with guns ready. The first sentence of the third
paragraph shifts this realistic picture into the literary: “The blood beneath
the body slows to a trickle and stops. It makes a slow return inwards.” And we suddenly realize that this is a clever
piece of prose that reverses reality. The body begins to stir, then lifts, and
the fallen baseball cap flips from the ground onto the man’s head. Then we see the shooting in reverse: “Tiny
black dots leap from his chest like fleas. Three plumes of fire are sucked into
the rifle barrel.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Then we watch the man backing into his car, the wheels turning
counterclockwise, listening to a tune on the radio he does not recognize (for
it plays in reverse?), and entering his house (walking backward, we assume),
being greeted with a hug by his mother, throwing his jacket on a chair, and
sitting down.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Knowing that we are witnessing an act in reverse that cannot be reversed,
we may be interested in the cleverness of the technique and be horrified by an
act we read about in the newspapers every so often, but I am not sure that we
can do both at the same time. The story spends so much energy maintaining, not
always successfully, the reversing technique that the reader, while trying to
visualize the technique, may lose empathy with the human character.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>James Kelman, “Words and Things
to Sip”<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
James Kelman may be the most familiar writer in this collection; at
least he is to me. I posted a blog essay on his short stories a while back,
after having read <i>Busted Scotch</i> and <i>The Good Times. </i> Most critics have argued that Kelman is a
better short story writer than novelist, and Kelman himself once told an
interviewer that if critics looked at his short stories they would not be
asking him questions about his novels.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
However, I am not sure Kelman is writing a short story in “Words and
Things to Sip,” the title of which seems to reflect its technique—that it is
less a story than a rambling monologue by a man waiting in a bar for his female
friend, a man who passes this time by thinking about, and at some point
transcribing, whatever comes to his mind.
This kind of stream of
consciousness can be effective in a novel, if the writing is good enough, but
it does not necessarily make for an effective short story. Joyce did it very
well in <i>Ulysses</i> but did not attempt
it in <i>Dubliners</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Kelman pretty much just writes about whatever comes to mind; for
example, when he mentions a newspaper named “something <i>Planet</i>,” he is reminded of Superman at the <i>Daily Planet</i> with Clark Kent and the irascible editor, what was his
name, who knows, who cares, Perry Mason or some damn thing. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Sometimes the voice we hear ruminates on ideas, e.g. “The only reliable
method of knowledge is literature,” opining that we cannot trust “internetual
information.” At one point the voice
thinks, “Life is strange. Context is all. Without context where would we be?
Where would the world be? This question is the most real.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
When the narrator’s female friend finally arrives, he thinks “The whole
of life was too good to be true and I was the luckiest man in the whole world
and that is the God’s truth so help me my Lord God, the one bright star in the
dismal night sky.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
A lot of this is interesting thinking and good talk, but I am not sure
we would tolerate it if it were not talk by James Kelman, for after all, it is
less a story than just a lot of blather.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>David Rose, “Ariel”<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I also know the work of David Rose. I wrote a blog essay about his
story “Flora,” which appeared in the 2011 volume of <i>Best British Short Stories </i> and immediately ordered a copy of his collection
<i>Posthumous Stories</i>. I thought “Flora”
was the epitome of what makes the short story so fascinating to me. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
However, I am not so sure that “Ariel” is a short story, although the
writing is very fine. I have no idea if the young male narrator in this story
is a persona for Rose himself or if the
young man named Keith he so admires, who owns a white Ariel motor-bike, was an
actual person that Rose knew when he was sixteen. But this piece reads more like a brief memoir
than a short story. Nothing really happens in it; it seems to have no
significant meaning. It ends with the narrator getting married and buying a
house--what he calls a “very ordinary story”--and mentioning a story far from
ordinary, albeit clichéd, of his heroic model getting killed in a car accident.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The writing is good, but it just does not seem to be a story.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>Deirdre Shanahan, “The Wind
Calling”<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
This piece has more context than Rose’s piece, but still, it seems less
a story than a memory—this time the persona is a young woman who is strongly
attracted to a young man named Colum Brady, with whom she has her first sexual
encounter. She has a brother two years younger than she named Jem, who simply
disappears one day. Years later she runs into Colum and asks him if he knows
what happened to her brother Jem. Colum tells her that Jem had seen them having
sex and threatened to tell her father if he is not given money for whiskey, but
Colum tells him to “head off.” And that
is the last he saw of him. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I have read this piece several times, looking for the story in it, but
I am just not sure there is one. It is a
memory of childhood, much of it spent on the road, and an account of the woman’s
father and siblings disappearing, but the story of her first sexual encounter,
which seems one important event in the
piece, does not seem to be meaningfully connected with the other important even—the disappearance of her
brother. It is a piece about things that
happen, but the things that happen do not cohere into a story. <o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I suppose a story can be anything a writer wants to make it, but if it
does not meaningfully hold together, the reader does not respond to it as a
story—just an interesting piece of prose.<o:p></o:p></div>
Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-38245118539507465582017-09-13T14:46:00.004-07:002017-09-13T14:46:33.678-07:00Best British Stories 2017: Part 3: From Realism to Magical Realism <div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>Vesna Main, “Safe”<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Perhaps because they are usually based on the mimetic notion of a “mirror
in the roadway” reflecting the “real” world, realistic stories often seem to
have some “ripped from the headlines” social issue embedded in them. Vesna Main’s
story “Safe” focuses on a young woman who finally rebels against being abused
by an exploitative boyfriend and stabs him while he is deep in a drunken sleep.
The boyfriend has compelled her into doing a strip for two of his
acquaintances, who pull her clothes off and rape her. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
This is a realistic story—no symbolic language or transition into a
magical realism world. The only metaphoric language focuses on the notion of
some “force” that takes over the woman and compels her to stab the boyfriend: “Her
hand moved as if someone was directing it, pushing it with a long stick as if
she were a puppet.” After she has killed the boyfriend, the “force” releases go
of her and she is “safe.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
While she is in a holding cell, her lawyer keeps asking why she did not
just leave, suggesting a common view that she was “asking for it.” The lawyer
says her best defense is to present herself as a confused young woman who
killed her violent boyfriend in self-defense. The focus of the story is on the “force,”
although it is not clear what that force is, other than a kind of just rebellion against male domination of
women.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>Sophie Wellstood, “The First
Hard Rain”<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
After a first reading of this story, you are apt to say, “There’s
nothing going on here.” After a second
reading you are apt to say, “There’s something going on here, but I’m not sure
what it is.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Nothing much suggested by the first scene, in which the central
character Rachael, accompanies her ex-husband Peter and Peter’s mother Val to
dump the ashes of her father-in-law Terry over the M6 because it was his
favourite motorway. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The second scene takes place at the King’s Head Hotel where the three
go for drinks, where we learn from the waitress Lorrelle that the
father-in-law, Terry Hastings, was a teacher and that her niece was one of his
pupils. Lorrelle says she recognizes
Terry’s wife from her picture in the
papers and refers to as a “poor cow.” Why the wife’s picture was in the newspaper
is not clear. However, something seems to be suggested by Lorrelle’s comment
that the niece “passed first time. Surprise surprise.” We can only guess that
Terry has had sex with the niece and
that he has been arrested. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
After Peter and Val leave, Rachael stays to have a drink with Lorrelle
and asks her, “Your niece, how is she now?” After a paragraph describing seagulls over the landfill, “rising and
dipping crazily in their unknowable world,” Lorrelle takes a deep drag of her
cigarette and lets the smoke leave her mouth and nostrils “like a ghost leaving
her body.” She replies, “She’ll be OK. You know. She’s going to go back to
college. She’ll be OK.”: Rachael sees tears on Lorrelle’s eyelashes.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The only metaphoric context for the story is introduced in the first
paragraph. And concludes the story. Rachael thinks a tempest of Biblical proportions has occurred over the
Irish sea, causing a flock of hundreds of seagulls to be driven miles inland,
making her doubt if they can ever find their way back to “their desolate ocean
home.” But then she thinks the real reason for the screeching was “unromantic
and mundane”—it is the city’s landfill and the gulls are swooping over hillocks
of human waste.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Short stories often are reluctant to provide explanatory information or
background context for their mysteries, but usually there is a reason for such
reticence. I am just not sure that there
is any reason in “The First Hard Rain” for leaving out story information that actually makes this a
story.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>Giselle Leeb, “As You Follow”<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
In this second person story, the focus is on the narrator at an
Octoberfest celebration in London, who cannot keep his eyes off a young
blue-eyed, blond-haired boy who he thinks is too young to be there—a boy who, dressed
like the men, is happy, happy, pure joy. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The narrator feels he is in a magic place and recalls when he was young
and the world was pure, full of “beauty
and truth.” The narrator thinks he is young again, at his first wedding, and he
cannot believe that this life he has waited for all those years when he was
growing up has finally arrived.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
At the end of the story, he looks into the river Thames and cannot take
his eyes off his own reflection, a boy in shirt sleeves, “bursting with pride
and with joy.” The narrator follows the
boy, that is, his reflection into the water, and as he reaches for the light
above his head, a small hand drags him into the darkness of the water and as he
is pulled down as the waves whisper and move on.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
This story begins realistically, but the Octoberfest creates a magical
context that moves the narrator from reality into an identification with the
boy and a return to his own past, until he becomes the boy/man and is drawn Narcissus-like
into his own reflection. The reader is not given any explanation for the events
in this story, but the context of a magical, metaphoric world is so pervasive
and the identification between the narrator and the boy is so emphatic that the
reader is ready to accept the Narcissistic fall into the self at the end.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>Francoise Harvey, “Never Thought
He’d Go”<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The question that preoccupies this story is announced in the first few
lines. A boy named Norm has been found at the edge of a graveyard with a broken
arm, three broken ribs, a black eye, a broken collarbone and lots of bruises. Three
friends have three different theories about what happened to him: He fell off
the church spire says Davi, a gravestone fell on him says Davitoo, he was trampled
by cows says Saz. The question of what Norm was doing in the church at night is
more easily answered: his friends have dared him to do it. The title comes from
the narrator’s notion that none of them ever thought Norm would do it, since
they warned him the church was haunted.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Made uneasy by guilt, the narrator cannot sleep and sees a light
flashing from the church bell tower. “Flash and gone. Flash and gone.” And then
“Flash and hold” as if the light had spotted him. All members of the “gang”
have seen the light and agree to meet at midnight in the cemetery, although now
they worry it will be Norm’s ghost who shows up for revenge. Then Davitoo is
found just as Norm was--with a broken
wrist, jaw, two broken ribs, a broken nose, and lots of bruises. The story ends
with the mystery of what happened to the two boys still unsolved and the light
in the church going flash and gone, flash and gone, until it stays on. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Is this a story about kids involved
in pranks or a supernatural story in which the church really is haunted? In either case, the injuries of the two boys
are never motivated in any meaningful way. How did they happen? Why did they happen? What is the point of this story?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>Daisy Johnson, “Language”<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
“Language” is from Johnson’s book <i>Fen</i>
which has received good reviews both in England and America. The stories are fantasy/reality stories of
the kind that American writer Karen Russell got a lot of buzz for a few years
ago, although they do not have the self-consciously flippant language of
Russell’s stories.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
“Language” opens as a kind of female sexual initiation story focusing
on Nora Marlow Carr, at age sixteen, a big girl, perhaps a bit overweight, with
childbearing hips and milk-carrying breasts, a “natural woman,” or what some
called big boned, in love with a big guy named Harrow Williams. Nora is a kind
of a nerd, smart in the ways of math and string theory; Harrow not so much.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Nora seduces Harrow into sex and convinces him they are “entangled.” They
get married and she says she wishes someone had told her what a messy affair living with a man was. Then abruptly Harrow
dies and Nora takes care of his mother, who, it seems knows a bit of magic and
manages to bring Harrow back from the dead.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The final gimmick of the story is that when Harrow speaks, he creates a
physical pain in Nora and Sarah. For example, a single syllable can cause Sarah
to vomit, while a sentence an cause her to have nosebleeds.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Nora tries to fix this by having Harrow try out different words to see
what effect they have. Some of her attempts to “cure” Harrow are religious in nature,
others are linguistic, but nothing seems to work. It reaches a point when even
Harrow’s thoughts cause Nora and Sarah physical pain. The story ends with this
sentence: “And though there were someone else’s thoughts hooked and barbed inside
her, she saw the dark passage of where she was going: not a rescue at all, only
a stripping away, a cursing back into nothing.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The problem of the story is that there is no causal or metaphoric
connection between the female initiation theme at the beginning and the return to life zombie story at the end. Even
more important, there is no meaningful connection between language and physical harm. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Johnson has said in an interview that the Fen, where her stories take
place, is a liminal landscape with one foot in water an d one on earth, which
seems to “resonate” with certain themes in the stories, such as the “fluid
boundaries between myth and reality.” However, if we are to accept a merging of
reality and myth, there should be some justification—not simply that it
meaninglessly occurs.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>Claire Dean, “Is-and”<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Once again, we begin with a realistic story: a woman goes with her recent husband to visit
his mother who lives on an island. Nothing much happens; he seems a taciturn
lout and she is lonely. The house is haunted by the memory of the man’s first
wife. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The story seems to center around a mysterious package that the postman
brings the husband, although it does not have his name on it. The wife opens
the package, which contains a baby board book of nursery rhymes with panels a
child can push to play different tunes, e.g. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “Mary
Had a Little Lamb,” “Three Blind Mice,” etc.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Significantly, some letters have been blacked out in the book, e.g.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
w…e…w…a…n…t…t…o…c…o…m…h…o…m…e<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
It seems clear that the missing letters are not important, but that the
remaining letters spell out: “We want to come home.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The wife goes to a bookstore and talks to the owner about stories with
blacked out letters, and he tells her about the lhiannan shee, an undead
vampire female who is drawn to bards.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The story ends with the husband leaving the house, the mother whipping
up broken eggshells, and the wife hearing someone whistling the tune she heard
from the book the first time she opened it.
She turns to yell at him, but “everything within her stopped. The
stranger held her there with his gaze. She took his outstretched hand and let
him lead her away.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The realistic first part of the story does not lead to the unrealistic
last part of the story for any meaningful purpose. Are we supposed to believe
that the first wife was a lhiannan shee and that the taciturn husband is a bard
who lures the second wife into his fairy tale world? Was there a child in the
first marriage? What happened to it? Nothing really seems to justify all this.
And nothing seems to suggest that such a transition from the real world into a
magical world really signifies anything.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
It is not enough, it seems to me, that stories are interesting in their
various parts. They must be unified in
such a way that they coherently signify something about the human condition. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-80808906527642340442017-09-05T10:39:00.000-07:002017-09-05T10:39:04.775-07:00Best British Short Stories 2017--part 2--The Simple, Well-made Story<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Back in the day when short stories were popular in America (yes, there
was such a time, during the forties and fifties, when a lot of people read
short stories and writers could even make a decent living writing them), there
were two kinds of short stories: relatively
simple, plot-based commercial stories featuring everyday people caught in
common dilemmas, and relatively complex language-based literary stories
featuring everyday people caught in subtle,
hard-to understand dilemmas.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
There are not so many of these popular, commercial, plot-based, simple
stories—either pulp or slick--in America anymore—television and now the
Internet having largely taken their place, providing entertaining,
non-challenging, time-passing, simple stories. The short story in America today,
in the relatively few places it appears in print, is largely “literary.”
Occasionally, a simple, straightforward storyteller will appear and get a bit of buzz,
but not often. People don’t read short
stories for entertainment very much in America any more. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
However, it may very well be that people still read short stories for
entertainment, or listen to them on the radio, in Great Britain. And it may also very well be that some of
these simple, straightforward, plot-based stories, might be considered very
good stories, even among the “best” stories published in print or heard on BBC4
in a given year.<b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I suspect that Nicholas Royle, editor of <i>Best British Short Stories, 2017</i>, was mindful that<i> </i>he not only had to choose the “best”
stories of the year, but also to create a book with some variety that would
appeal to as many readers as possible. Consequently, of the twenty stories he
chose, some had to be simple and straightforward, with clear, transparent prose
and enough background explanatory context to be easily accessible to the
reader, while others were inevitably elliptical and puzzling, drawing attention
to the language itself, experimenting with form, and refusing to help the
reader understand the significance of the story.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I suggest that the following four stories are of the first type: relatively
conventional, primarily based on straightforward plot and character, pleasingly
accessible to a wide range of readers.
It is not surprising that two of the four first appeared on BBC4, for if
a story is going to be read on the radio and listened to by a broad audience,
it usually must be understood on the first reading/hearing, since this first
encounter may be the only one the listener/reader will have—no pausing to
ponder over the language, no second reading to allow the ending to clarify the
beginning.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>Peter Bradshaw’s “Reunion</b>
“is an old fashioned story that exists primarily for the “surprise “ending—a form
so popular that, at least in America, it once was the norm for the commercial
short story. The first person point of view is that of a man named Eliot who is
trying to “work something out” about the events of the past twenty-four hours
while attending a conference at a hotel. He provides some context, largely
irrelevant, that he has been in love three times in his life: once with his
mistress, once with his ex-wife, and once, when he was eleven, with an
eleven-year-old named Lucy Venables. He then “recalls” for the reader the night
before when he went out for a smoke and sees a woman whose name tag reads “Dr. Venables.
Recognizing her as his childhood love Lucy, he recalls when he met her and she
invited him in for a Carona lemonade. After falling deeply in love with her, he
asked her for a kiss. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Lucy sets up a test for Eliot to earn the kiss, positioning her little sister Chloe up against a shed
door, drawing an outline around her about twelve inches distant from her body
and challenging Eliot to throw three darts inside the outline without hitting
Chloe. He succeeds in the first two throws but his clumsy third throw makes
Chloe flinch and the dart goes in her ear. The father comes out and smacks
Eliot, sending him home crying. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
We flash back to the adult encounter, with Dr. Venables inviting Eliot
to her room to get the kiss he never got when they were eleven. As he pulls her
clothes off, she gasps, “O Elliot,” call me by my name. Say my name.” He sweeps
up her hair to kiss her neck, which reveals her injured ear, and “complies with
her request” saying, “Chloe.” When we flash back to the opening of the story,
the man at reception asks Eliot if he would like a drink from the bar. The last
line of the story is: “I think I shall ask for a Corona lemonade.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
As you can see from this synopsis, you don’t need to hear it or read it
again. The story is quite conventional, giving the reader a wry smile at the little surprise at the end. There is even
a bit of poetic justice—the kind of justice that surprise ending stories used
to specialize in—for it seems only fair that Chloe should be the “target of
Eliot’s love, the one who took the risk, got injured, and coincidently shows up
years later to rightfully fulfill the promise of the kiss.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>Niven Govinden’s “Waves”</b> was
commissioned by BBC4 for a series of stories about sleep and rest. BBC4 listeners knew this assignment context when
they first heard the story on the radio; thus primed, they could listen to listen
for how the story actually explores the importance of sleep and rest. However, readers of the story in this book,
not knowing that the story was written to fulfill a thematic specification, may
not be sure what point the story has. All the reader knows is that a man is in
a hospital dreaming that he is surfing in Hawaii. The primary emphasis, aside
from the assigned dream/rest theme, is that the man is growing older and
lamenting his lost youth, strength, and power. A central sentence is: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
“Far greater than his pride
is his impatience to demonstrate strength or knowledge with those a generation
or more behind him, and how this grows with age. The swagger of young manhood a tipping point
for his antagonism, which shrinks as his waistline swells.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The doctors tell him he must rest, suggesting that rest and sleep cures
all—that the real work of healing is something like magic, that sleep holds a
promise of recuperation. However, he feels “useless and old” and longs for
those days in the past when a combination of authority and pure heft could
right things. Although Govinden’s story is well written, it seems a bit too
much like an MFA workshop assignment.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>Laura Pocock’s “The Dark
Instruments” </b>is a “Twilight Zone” type story, in which a guy builds a model
of his town; when a neighbor sees the model one night, he discovers that one of
the model houses that is burned is a replica of an actual house that burned a
year ago. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
There is something here about connection between artifice and reality,
but the problem is that it is not clear
which comes first—the model or the actuality.
Which causes which? The first clue is the broken church window of one of
the models, which mirrors a real church window that has been vandalized. The key word in the story is “coincidence.”
The issue is: how do the two things coincide? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The man wonders if he can show his neighbor the town without revealing
its secret. But the reader does not know
what the secret is. And we don’t know what it has to do with the fact that the
builder was injured when he was in the army—a gunshot wound to the knee.—an
injury that has no physical basis. Is this a post-traumatic stress syndrome
story in which the breaks the church window and burns down the house as a way
to control reality? We just don’t know. We just know that some kind of sympathetic
magic seems to be going on in the commercially successful world of the twilight
zone.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>Lara Williams’ “Treats”</b> is a
simple, genre-style “woman’s” story about Elaine, a 50-year-old woman who says
she was made for menopause, a woman whose husband used to treat her, but now
her treats are reserved for her birthday. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Elaine likes to perform secret good deeds and sometimes imagines secret
good deeds being done for her. The title comes from the notion of treats or
gifts, like the ones she used to get from her husband, but now they are
reserved only for her birthday.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
She has no children, only a solitary goldfish. She is often
disappointed. Her boss points to a brown
parcel on her birthday and says “that’s for you,” but when Elaine thinks it is
a gift and starts unwrapping it, the boss says, “What are you doing? That needs couriering. Tonight.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; tab-stops: 336.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Then her husband cancels taking her to the movies, so
she goes alone and treats herself to popcorn and a hotdog and “her heart did a
little leap on its own; you could do that, to your heart, you could be so kind
to yourself you could make your own heart leap.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; tab-stops: 336.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The last line of the story is: “After all, she
thought, what goes around comes around.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; tab-stops: 336.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I have been able to find only two reviews of <i>Best British Short Stories 2017</i> on Internet
websites; both like “Treats.” Tamim Sadihali on<i> Bookmunch</i> calls “Treats” pretty much short story perfection.” And Eleanor Franzen on <i>Litro</i> says it is her favorite story in the book and that she has “no
trouble at all in believing that it’s among the best British short stories of
the year.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
It’s a pleasant story, written in likeable language about a likeable
character. Once you read an opening sentence like the following, you are well
disposed to take pleasure in the rest:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
“It was one of those
sneaky summer days, one that lounges around a chilled August, making a wild and
unpredictable cameo, hoodwinking you into knits, swindling you out of sandals.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
You have to like someone who writes in such a facile way as Williams,
just as you have to like the central character, Elaine, who at age fifty, feels
she was made to protect and watch over people. But to suggest that this is “short
story perfection” and that you have no trouble believing it’s one of the best
stories written in Great Britain in 2017 may be to underestimate the short
story as a form.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Next time I will talk about some more challenging stories in <i>Best British Short Stories 2017</i> that
move from realism to magical realism.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-22264214492015393802017-09-01T15:21:00.003-07:002017-09-01T15:21:34.976-07:00Best British Short Stories 2017: Intro<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I would like to make a couple of prefatory points about yearly
collections of short stories that label themselves “Best of” before I begin my discussion
of the 2017 editions of the three best-known such anthologies: <i>Best British Short Stories</i>, <i>Best American Short Stories</i>, and <i>O. Henry Prize Stories.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
First of all, you probably already know that such collections seldom
get reviewed in the big circulation newspapers, e.g. <i>New York Times</i>, <i>Washington
Post</i>, <i>Guardian,</i> etc. Why is that?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
One of the reasons is that book review editors do not want to waste
space on works of fiction that have been previously published in periodicals. They want something new and newsworthy.
Previously published stories are, after all, not really news at all.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Moreover, whereas reviewers can focus on some unifying theme or style
when reviewing a collection of stories by a single author, they find talking
about twenty different stories by twenty different authors a daunting task, and
editors just don’t want to use precious space on unfocused thumbnail notices. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The best a reviewer can do is to try to find some “trend” in a
collection of what is presented as the “best” stories in a given year. And let’s face it, short stories are just not
trendy—at least not since Raymond Carver.
And if some promising young author suddenly appears, editors and reviewers
will wait until a publisher brings out a whole book of stories by said author
and pumps enough money in promotion for readings, interviews, adverts, and
NPR/BBC appearances to give book review editors and reviewers a news “story.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I could go on about this for some time; indeed, I have gone on about
this for some time—at least for forty years of my career as a professor/critic.
But enough whining.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The second prefatory point I want to make has to do with the issue of “Best
of.” Says who? What makes a story one of
the “best” twenty stories published in a given year? Who decides and on what
basis does that judge decide?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I won’t go into the history of the top three “best of” collections. <i>The Best American Short Stories</i> has been
around for over a hundred years. And since
1978, each issue has had a series editor and a guest editor. The series editor is now Heidi Pitlor, who,
she says, reads thousands of stories every year and then picks 120 of those she
considers the “best.” She then turns
those over to a guest editor—always a fiction writer—who then chooses those he
or she thinks are the best twenty stories, which then appear in the yearly
volume, usually in the fall of the year.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<i>The O. Henry Prize Stories</i>,
which has been around almost as long as <i>BASS</i>
(1919), has one editor only—currently Laura Furman—who chooses all twenty
stories in the yearly volume and then sends them to three different fiction
writers who choose their favorite and write a brief essay about it that appears
at the end of the volume.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
The new kid on the
block is <i>Best British Short Stories</i>,
now in its seventh year, which is edited by Nicholas Royle, who chooses all
twenty stories in each yearly collection. (There once was a series called <i>Best English Short Stories</i> that ran for about
ten years between 1986 and 1995, edited by Giles Gordon and David Hughes.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
One of the main
problems the editor of these three volumes must face, that is, beyond the task
of trying to read every short story published in America, Canada, or England in
a given year, is balancing between choosing what he or she thinks are the very
best stories out of all the stories published, and then making a book out of
them. The two demands are often not the
same.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
Choosing the “best”
stories necessitates, we assume, some understanding and appreciation not only
of fiction in general, but the unique characteristics of the short story in
particular. It does not necessitate, we assume, depending on personal taste,
obsession, or author collegiality. It means choosing the very “best.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
However, making a
book out of twenty stories depends on giving the reader some variety. I mean, the editor would risk alienating his
or her reader were he to choose twenty stories that were all similarly
realistic or surrealistic, experimental, traditional, etc., even if he or she
thought those were the very “best” stories he or she had read that year.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I have read all
twenty stories in this year’s <i>Best
British Short Stories</i> twice, as I always do, and I find that Nicholas Royle
has, as he has in the first six volumes (all of which I have discussed on this
blog), put together a book with a variety of different kinds of short stories.
I cannot make a judgment on Royle’s judgment that these twenty stories are the “best”
published in England this year. No one
can second guess Royle on this matter, for, I would wager, no one has read as
many British stories as he has this year, and consequently no one is able to
make the kind of comparative judgments he has.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
However, during the
month of September, I will offer some opinions about the stories in <i>Best British Short Stories 2017 </i>—what kind
of stories they are, how significant they seem to be, how well they appear to
be written, and what might conceivably have earned them a place as among the “best”
stories published in England this past year. In some cases I might even say, “surely
not,” and try to justify my judgment. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
During the month of
October, I will try to do the same for <i>O.
Henry Prize Stories: 2017</i>, and during the month of November, I will make
comments on the stories chosen for <i>Best
American Short Stories: 2017.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-indent: .5in;">
I hope you will purchase copies of all three
books and join me.</div>
Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-48818081165701716782017-06-18T10:35:00.000-07:002017-06-18T10:35:26.926-07:00Ambrose Bierce, "Chickamauga"<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-hyphenate: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-hyphenate: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-hyphenate: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Once a week, the
Library of America sends subscribers to its website a “Story of the Week.” This week, the story is Ambrose Bierce’s “Chickamauga,”
a tightly controlled fiction with a meaningful trick at the end. I discussed the story with my students many
times over the years and included it in my textbook <i>Fiction’s Many Worlds</i>. Here
are some of the discoveries I made about the story with the help of my
students.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">This is the Library of America’s headnote for the story: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">“<i>Armed with a toy sword, a little boy treks through the forest and
fights off imaginary enemies—not realizing that, nearby, a very real battle was
being waged.”</i></span><!--[if supportFields]><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'><span style='font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span>PRIVATE </span></i><![endif]--><!--[if supportFields]><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span></i><![endif]--><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Ambrose Bierce, </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Chickamauga</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The
anti-war theme of Bierce's story depends on the basic tensions between child
world and adult world and between fantasy and reality. The boy's fantasy world of playing at war is
his only reality; consequently, when he encounters the genuine external reality
of war it seems curiously fantastic to him; thus he is able to integrate it
effortlessly into his fantasy play world.
Bierce develops the story on the ironic realization that the adult view
of war often springs from child-like views in which men glorify battle, only to
find out too late that the reality of it is horror and death. The primary communicators of this fantasy
image of war in Bierce's story are books and pictures which glorify war, for
the boy has been taught "postures of aggression and defense" by the
"engraver's art." Thus when he
encounters the actuality of war, the boy responds to it as if it were merely
the fantasy pictures he has seen or the world of play-reality he has known.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">As is
typical of many Bierce stories, style and technique are practically everything
in "Chickamauga." Although
Bierce was writing during a period of American Literature characterized by
realistic depictions of external reality, Bierce maintained his allegiance to
romanticism. Often compared with Edgar
Allan Poe, Bierce focuses not so much on external reality but rather on the
strange dream-like world that lies somewhere in between fantasy and reality. Thus, the genius of his stories depends not
so much on the theme, which is often fairly obvious, but on the delicate and
tightly controlled way that Bierce tells the story and creates a nightmarish
world that involves the reader emotionally.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The
fact that the boy is a deaf mute emphasizes his childish fantasy world detached
from external reality and makes more plausible the primary device of
contrasting the child's view of war as a game with the adult's view of it as a
horrifying actuality. It enables Bierce
to set up a strange dreamlike effect as we see the events primarily from the
boy's point of view. However, even as
the story depends on Bierce's developing the perspective of the child, in which
the reader is made to see the maimed and bleeding soldiers as circus clowns and
child-like playmates, this point of view is counterpointed by that of an adult
teller--sometimes in a developed background exposition, sometimes in a flat
declarative statement. For example, when
the boy seems to see some strange animals crawling through the forest, the
narrator simply says: "They were men." When the boy sees men lying in
the water as if without heads, the narrator simply says: "They were
drowned."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">This
narrator is not named in the story, but is presented as a disembodied presence
who not only sees what the boy sees, but also sees the boy and draws
conclusions about the boy's responses. The boy's mind is as inaccessible to him
as it is to the reader. This technique
enables the reader to respond both to the boy's point of view and to the adult
teller. As the narrator says about the scene witnessed by the boy, "not
all of this did the child note; it is what would have been noted by an elder
observer." And indeed it is the elder observer who establishes the ironic
tone at the beginning of the story which mocks the warrior-fire, the heroic
race, and the notion of a spirit of battle in the boy which make him born to
"war and dominion as a heritage." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">It is
indeed the subtle tension between this adult point of view and the childish
perception of the boy that creates the story's impact and reflects its
theme. At one point in the story when
the boy (because of his deafness) sleeps through the battle that rages nearby,
the adult narrator says he was as "heedless of the grandeur of the struggle
as the dead who had died to make the glory." Because of this structural
counterpoint the narrator has no need to make any more explicit comment on the
action. For the juxtaposition of the two
perspectives creates a tragic irony of war as something more than an heroic and
childish game, even as it makes us see how war depends on just such a childish
point of view to persist. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">A
film version of this story, part of a trilogy of Bierce stories by French
director Robert Enrico, begins with pictures of fighters behind the opening
credits. The film is eerily silent, with grotesque images of men crawling
across the ground as the camera pans the area disclosing more and more wounded
and silent soldiers. Visual images in
the film are not as violent and graphic as those described in Bierce's story;
however, the anti-war theme is stronger in the film than in the story because
of the stark juxtaposition of images of childlike "playing at war"
and adult reality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-83570566164601144032017-05-30T10:39:00.001-07:002017-05-30T10:39:27.042-07:00Short Story Month: 2017—Part 13: The Short Story as a Literary Form<div class="MsoBlockText" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: 5.75in 6.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>Short Story
Month: 2017—Part 13: The Short Story as a Literary Form</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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Lorrie
More: “The commercial slick story has
largely died out. The stories we are
left with are almost always all serious art.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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William
Boyd: “The well-written short story is
not suited to the sound bite culture: it's too dense, its effects are too
complex for easy digestion.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Joyce Carol
Oates: She has said she doubts the 21st
century will be as hospitable to the short story as the 19th and 20th, since
the short story, unlike the novel, is "invariably literary."<o:p></o:p></div>
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Bret Anthony
Johnson: “I think the reason short story collections don’t sell as well as
novels is because they’re much more difficult to read. Novels might require a longer commitment, but
stories demand a deeper concentration and a more intense focus, and a lot of
people would rather not exert themselves in that way”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Robert
Stone: “The short story is like a pitch
in baseball. It’s one continuous
movement that ideally has to, like a pitch, break and then with a kind of
retrospective inevitability end up in a catch’s mitt. It’s a beautiful form when it works, but it’s
very difficult.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Claire Keegan: “
It’s very difficult. It’s very challenging. The level of intensity is very
high. You’ve got to leave most of what could be said, out. It’s a discipline of
omission. .. One of the things that is most difficult about the short story is
that it seems easy. People think because it’s short, it’s minor, but if you
take up your pen and try to write one you will find that it is otherwise. It is
not a comforting genre. It’s not a comforting read. Often it can be quite a
disturbing read. So, as Frank O’Connor said, there is something
train-journey-ish about a novel, you can sit back and get into it, but the
short story is more about holding your breath than breathing.”<o:p></o:p></div>
Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-52308278530923915132017-05-28T08:34:00.002-07:002017-05-28T08:34:36.139-07:00 Short Story Month-2017 part 12: The Unified Writing and Reading Experience<div class="MsoBlockText" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: 5.75in 6.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
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<b>Writing the Story in One Sitting<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Lorrie Moore: To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night. To read it all in one sitting and at some point see the whole thing through in a rush is part of the process. There’s urgency and wholeness in stories.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Hemingway said he wrote “the Killers” in one day. Katherine Anne Porter said she always writes a story in one sitting, “one single burst of energy.” Kafka wrote “The Judgment in one night.<o:p></o:p></div>
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V. S. Pritchett says a good short story writer knows he is putting on a personal individual act, catching a piece of life as it flies and making “his personal performance out of it.” Katherine Mansfield said that what is essential for the short story writer is to “penetrate one’s subject ..feelings, and objects as well, must be contemplated—or rather-submitted to—until one is truly lost in them.”</div>
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<b> Reading One Story at a
Time<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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George Saunders:<b>
</b>When I get the stories together, I wish I could put a disclaimer at the
front: Please read no more than one or two a day. Otherwise it feels to me like the contours
that I put in there when I was working on just that story get lost in the
reading process.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Short-story
readers are a special kind of reader, like readers of poetry. Many novel
readers don’t like collections of stories—I think that they dislike the
frequent change of time, place and people. Of course, stories should not be
read one after the other.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Lorrie
Moore: There’s a lot of yak
about how short stories are perfect for the declining public attention span.
But we know that’s not true. Stories require concentration and seriousness. The
busier people get, the less time they have to read a story. (Though they may
have a narcotizing paperback novel in their purse. This is not their fault.)
Shockingly, people often don’t have a straight half hour of time to read at
all. But they have fifteen minutes. And that is often how novels are read,
fifteen minutes at a time. You can’t read stories that way.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-66750364221074156642017-05-25T08:55:00.001-07:002017-05-25T08:55:34.485-07:00Short Story Month 2017-Part 11: Dream and Desire in the Short Story<div class="MsoNormal">
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<b>Short Story Month
2017-Part 11: Dream and Desire in the
Short Story<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Jarrell,
Randall: “Reading stories, we cannot
help remembering that ‘We have to reckon with what exists, and dreams,
daydreams, too, are also facts; if anyone really wants to investigate
realities, he cannot do better than to start with such as these. If he neglects them he will learn little or
nothing of the world of life.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Joyce Carol
Oates:<b> “</b>The short story is a
dream verbalized, arranged in space and presented to the world, imagined as a
sympathetic audience: the dream is said to be some kind of manifestation of
desire, so the short story must also represent a desire, perhaps only partly
expressed, but the most interesting thing about it is its mystery.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Christina
Stead: "The belief that life is a
dream and we the dreamers only dreams, which comes to us at strange, romantic,
and tragic moments, what is it but a desire for the great legend, the powerful
story rooted in all things which explains life to us and, understanding which, the
meaning of things can be threaded through all that happens."<o:p></o:p></div>
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Alice Munro: “We
can hardly manage our lives without a powerful ongoing narrative. And
underneath all these edited, inspired, self-serving or entertaining stories
there is, we suppose, some big bulging awful mysterious entity called THE
TRUTH, which our fictional stories are supposed to be poking at and grabbing
pieces of.<br />
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Robert Olen
Butler: “Fiction is the art form of human yearning.” Butler cites Joyce’s
famous theory of epiphany--that moment in the story when something about the
human condition shines forth in its essence.
Butler says this is the result of the yearning present in all the
separate organically resonant moments in the fiction accumulating to a critical
mass. It is just that because of its
brevity, these two moments typically occur at the same time in the short story.
“The final epiphany of a literary short story is also the shining forth of the
character’s yearning.” <o:p></o:p></div>
Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-52239162557310840072017-05-24T06:03:00.001-07:002017-05-24T06:03:49.448-07:00Short Story Month 2017-part 10: Short Story Writers on Thematic Significance<div class="MsoBlockText" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: 5.75in 6.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
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<b>Short Story
Month 2017-part 10: Short Story Writers on Thematic Significance<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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V. S. Pritchett:
The short story wakes the reader up. "It answers the primitive craving for
art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic
pattern and significance in our experience, the desire for the electric
shock."<o:p></o:p></div>
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Sherwood
Anderson: “The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without
apparent purpose, whereas in the artist’s imaginative life…there is
determination to give the tale form—to make it real to the theme, not to
life. Often the better the job is done,
the greater the confusion.<o:p></o:p></div>
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C., S.
Lewis: To be stories at all they must be
series of events: but it must be understood that this series…s only really a
net whereby to catch something else. The
real theme may be and perhaps usually is, something that has no sequence in it,
something other than a process and much more like a state of quality… It may be
asked why anyone should be encouraged to write a form in which the means are
apparently so often at war with the end…. I suggest that the internal tension
in the heart of every story between the theme and the plot constitutes, after
all, its chief resemblance to life. . In real life, as in a story, something
must happen. That is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and fond only a succession
of events in which the state is never quite embodied.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Frank
O’Connor: The greatest essential of a
short story is a theme, a story to tell.
A theme is something that is worth something to everybody. You grab
somebody and say, “Look, an extraordinary thing happened to me yesterday—I met
a man—he said this to me—”and that, to me, is a theme. The moment you grab
somebody by the lapels and you've got something to tell, that's a real story. The moment you say this, you're committed<o:p></o:p></div>
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Raymond
Carver: It is possible, in a poem or a
short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace
but precise language, and to endow those things--a chair, a window curtain, a
fork, a stone, a woman’s earring--with immense, even startling power.<o:p></o:p></div>
Charles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.com0