Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life by Jerome Bruner

Before making suggestions for reading short stories in the book on which I am currently working, I need to develop a foundation for understanding the literary form by exploring the basic nature of story—why we tell stories, why we listen to, or read, stories, why stories are, or, are not, necessary to human beings. In order to do that, I am reading, or rereading, several books about the nature of story by philosophers, literary critics, psychologists, and anthropologists.  

For the next few blog posts, I will report on what I am discovering from this research. I begin by summarizing and commenting on Making Stories:  Law, Literature, Life, based on a series of lectures given at the University of Bologna by cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 2003).

         Bruner begins by reminding us that our intuitions about how we make stories or understand them are so implicit that we do not know how to explain them. The purpose, he says, of his present book, is to get beyond implicitness, something he says most theorists have previously failed to do. He begins his account by returning to the earliest known effort to explain the structure of narrative, Aristotle’s concept in the Poetics of peripeteia, that sudden reversal in circumstances that turns a routine sequence of events into story.

          Drawing on characteristics of story discussed by narratologists ever since Aristotle, Bruner reminds us that story differs from a sequence of actual events by having a sense of ulteriority, some purpose or intentionality frequently concealed beneath the mere sequence of events.  An important implication of this characteristic of story is that, contrary to common sense, story is not merely a transparent glass through which the reader perceives external reality, but rather a highly convention-bound, thematic form that shapes and alters external reality.

          One of the most important theoretical sources of Bruner’s theories are the Russian formalists of the 1920s, who argued that the purpose of story was to make strange or to defamiliarize ordinary reality by transmuting the declarative into the subjunctive, focusing not on what is, but on what might be or could be. Narrative is a dialectic between what was expected and what actually happened, for without something unforeseen taking place there is no story.  

         Consequently, one of the chief purposes of story is to forewarn us, to prepare us for the unexpected, give us abilities to cope with the new.  Echoing the Russian formalists and the literary theorist Morse Peckham in his 1965 book Man’s Rage for Chaos:  Biology, Behavior, and the Arts, Bruner says that story is thus a way to “domesticate” human error and surprise by conventionalizing the common forms of human mishap into genres, such as comedy, tragedy, irony, romance, etc.

          Bruner begins his chapter on the relationship between the law and literature by comparing the formalist literary notion of conventions clustering together to create genres with the legal concept of precedent, for tradition is embodied both in literary conventions and in legal precedent. A lawyer (what Bruner likes to call a legal storyteller) appeals to a similarity between his or her own interpretation of the facts in the present case to similar cases in the past, much the same way a writer or reader creates or interprets a present literary work within the context of previous similar works. 

A law story therefore prevails not just by its rhetoric, but also by making it clear that there are precedents that match it.  Another important element common both to literature and law, says Bruner, is ritualization, for ritual makes the message seem uncontestable, suggesting that the message is inherent in the way things are and therefore beyond debate.  Rituals seem so deeply embedded in a culture as to seem completely at one with common sense.

          Although law often seems to be based on logic and reason, with lawyers and judges trying hard to make their stories seem factual rather than storylike, by “pleading” their case, lawyers often create drama.  Moreover, law stories are more like literary stories than logical arguments in that they focus on the particular.  Common law, says Bruner, looks for continuity in particulars rather than for universality by deduction from abstract rules, and this, he says, is why law cannot do without narrative.

          In his third lecture, Bruner tackles the puzzling issue of self, asking the age-old question of whether there is some essential self inside us or whether self is in a constant state of creation.  Bruner quickly aligns himself with the latter, stating categorically that there is no such thing as an essential self, but rather that the self is constantly constructed as a narrative to meet the needs of situations human beings encounter.

          Bruner lists twelve characteristics of the self, derived from a number of psychologists:  the self has intentions and aspirations; the self is sensitive to obstacles and responsive to success; the self alters aspirations in response to success or failure; the self engages in selective remembering; the self is oriented to “significant others”; the self adopts beliefs and values without losing continuity; the self is continuous over time and circumstances; the self is sensitive to where and with whom it finds itself; the self formulates itself in words; the self is moody; the self tries to maintain coherence.

He then compares these characteristics to twelve characteristics of narrative: a story needs a plot; a plot needs obstacles; obstacles make people rethink; stories are only concerned with the relevant past; characters have to have allies; characters must grow; characters have to maintain their identities and manifest their continuities; characters have to exist in a world of people characters have to explain themselves; they inevitably have moods; and characters must make sense.

          Selfhood, says Bruner, is a kind of verbalized event that makes the chaos of experience into a coherent and continuous whole.  It is not just language that accomplishes this, but narrative in a delicate balancing act in which the self must create a sense of autonomy with a will of its own, while at the same time it must make a commitment to the world of others. Freud discussed this concept in terms of the radically autonomous Id struggling to keep balance with the culturally demanding Superego.  In literary criticism, T. S. Eliot defined the balancing act as that between Tradition and the Individual Talent, for new literary works cannot escape the controls of the traditions within which they are created.

          Bruner concludes his third lecture by emphasizing the importance of being able to make stories about the self, citing a neurological disorder called “dysnarrativia,” an inability to tell or understand stories associated with such problems as Alzheimer’s disease. As one psychologist says, people who cannot construct narratives lose their concept of self.  The concept of dysnarrativia seems related to a now famous study of Alzheimer’s by scientist David Snowdon, called the Nun Study.  Charting the personal and medical histories of several hundred nuns, even dissecting their brains after death, Snowdon discovered that the way people express themselves in language has an effect whether they might develop Alzheimer’s in later life.  Examining autobiographies of almost 200 nuns, Snowdon found that those nuns who expressed themselves in complex narratives, packing a great number of ideas into their sentences, were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s than those who has less “idea density” in their writing.

          In his short summary chapter, entitled simply, “So why narrative?” Bruner reiterates what he stated in the introductory chapter—that narrative is not only a human delight, it is also a serious business, the essential means by which we express human aspirations.  Stories are important because they impose a structure on what we experience.  Stories help us to cope with surprises by making them less surprising.   This “domestication” of unexpectedness that story makes possible is a crucial way our culture maintains its coherence. 

          Bruner refers to common characteristics of language in general in the concluding chapter to suggest that narrative constitutes a kind of language itself.  He discusses the two basic features of language—its remoteness of reference, i.e. its ability to refer to things not present either to speaker or listener, and its arbitrariness of reference, which frees it from pure mimesis in which signs have to resemble what they refer to. The third essential feature of language, Bruner reminds us, is its syntax, which reflects the relationships between agent, action and recipient of action.

            Although Bruner makes no original contribution here to the study of literature, law, or the self, nor does he introduce any new ideas about their interrelationships, for other theorists, psychologists, and critics have explored all these issues before, his voice is a well-known one that commands respect.  Consequently, here he performs the valuable function of introducing important ideas about the seriousness of story to a larger audience more effectively than more academic studies from which he draws.

T. C. Boyle’s “Birnam Wood, “Raymond Carver’s “Chef’s House,” and Ian McEwan’s “First Love, Last Rites”—Memory Piece vs. Meaningful Story

In his brief  “This Week in Fiction” chat with New Yorker fiction editor, Deborah Treisman (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/this-week-in-fiction-t-c-boyle.html), T. C. Boyle says that his current story in the magazine, ”Birnam Wood,” is based on a remembered event: ”I lived in that shack and I lived in that mansion with the pool table, too. This is fiction, but there are autobiographical elements here as well. I think of it as a memory piece.” Indeed, “Birnam Wood” may be a “memory piece,” but is it a story?”

In response to my blog post on Alice Munro’s recent New Yorker story “Amundsen” last week, I am happy to say that several of my readers joined the discussion with comments.   T.C. Boyle’s new story provides me with an opportunity hopefully to advance that discussion with Jon, Steve, and Jay--which seems to center basically on the issue Jon’s argument for “maintaining that basic sense of the author having created characters we respond to in a flesh and blood sort of way. Otherwise, it seems like we become one of those types who read fiction, not as an inherent pleasure, but as a necessary chore just to offer an object for dry analysis.”

Well, I certainly would not like to think of myself as “one of those types” who read fiction not for pleasure, but as an onerous opportunity for a “dry analysis.”  Jon says that he has “met people who say they don't really like to read, but only do it because they enjoy analysis (they're usually coming from the perspective of one of the "isms.”)  And certainly I am aware that in the world of academic criticism today, there are those who are more interested in theory or social issues than in literature, but I have never been accused of that.

Jon seems to advocate that we should relate to characters as if they were real people engaged in actions that simulate actual events in the real world.  And indeed, this is what T. C. Boyle seems to suggest about his recent “memory piece,” that is, that “Birnam Wood” recounts something that happened to him--after a fashion.  Boyle is a natural old-fashioned storyteller; as I have noted in this blog before, he knows how to tell a plotted tale in an engaging and entertaining way.  I have sat in a theatre full of people and watched him hold the audience spellbound as if they were huddled around a fireplace in an old Irish cottage.

However, in this new piece in The New Yorker, he seems to have chosen to write something less like a story and more like a remembered event.  I would like to compare “Birnam Wood” to a couple of well-known stories by Ian McEwan and Raymond Carver that also focus on a male/female couple in a certain place at a certain time experiencing both union and conflict. 

“First Love, Last Rites,” the title story of Ian McEwan’s debut collection (his master’s thesis, by the way, supervised by Malcolm Bradbury in the MA program in creative writing at University of East Anglia) generated quite a bit of buzz and controversy when first published in 1975, when he was twenty-four.

“Chef’s House” first appeared in Raymond Carver’s third book, Cathedral, after, we presume, he had broken away from the insistent editing of Gordon Lish, although not, obviously, from the taut style Lish had taught him. 

I have no idea if “First Love, Last Rites” is based on an actual event in Ian McEwan’s life, but clearly “Chef’s House” is based on an actual event in Carver’s life—a temporary reunion with his estranged wife Maryann.  In fact, Maryann has said that when she read “Chef’s Wife,” she was “almost offended that the could call it fiction.  All he was doing was writing an account of what happened there.” However, this may only indicate that Maryann was unaware of the importance of style in transforming something that merely happened into a fiction that means something.

David Means, a very fine short storywriter, whom I have discussed before on this blog, reads “Chef’s House” and talks about it with Deborah Treisman on the New Yorker podcast at http://www.newyorker.com/online/2010/10/18/101018on_audio_means

David Means, a Carver fan, disagrees with Maryann’s assessment.  Regardless of what actually happened when Carver and his wife made one final effort to reconcile, “Chef’s House” differs from that remembered event by being a story, not a “memory piece,” like T.C. Boyle’s “Birnam Wood.”  And what makes it different than a “real event,” involving characters in a “flesh and blood,” way is what David Means calls the story’s “style,” that is, all the language choices the writer makes about what to include and what to leave out that creates a meaningful form or pattern with significance, theme, meaning.

I would argue that Raymond Carver’s “Chef’s House” and Ian McEwan’s “First Love, Last Rites” are short stories because they create a meaningful thematic pattern, whereas T.C. Boyle’s “Birnam Wood” is simply a “memory piece” because it has no meaning at all, but is just about “flesh and blood” people in an “as-if-real” event.

Rather than offering extended critical analyses of the style, language, form, and theme of the Carver and McEwan stories, I will simply make a couple of brief comments on what I think makes them stories rather than “flesh and blood” “memory pieces” and urge the reader to read them or reread them and compare them to T.C. Boyle’s “Birnam Wood.”

McEwan establishes a metaphor at the beginning of his story that persists throughout of a creature scratching behind the wall.  During sex, the male narrator has fantasies of making a creature grow in his girlfriend’s belly—not a child but a creature “growing out of a dark red slime”—eggs, sperms chromosomes, features, gills, claws.  He is caught like an eel in his fantasy of this primeval force, feeling that he and his girlfriend are also creatures in the slime.  When they finally encounter a large rat, the narrator associates it with the smell of his girlfriend’s monthly period.  When he splits the rat open, five small fetuses fall out, and he sees one quiver, as if in hope. His girlfriend carefully folds them back into the rats’ womb and closes the flesh over them. Many early readers of the story were repulsed by “First Love, First Rites,” but McEwan has said that he has always thought of it as an affirmative story about pregnancy.

And indeed, the story does end on an affirmative note as the couple decides to pull themselves out of the slime, clean up the room and go for a walk, and the narrator presses his palm against her belly and says, “yes.”  Birth and death are inextricably intertwined in the story—a story of life in all its hopeful beauty originating in the slime of the primeval swamp.

In contrast to McEwan’s thickly textured story of blood and creatures, slime and sex, Raymond Carver’s “Chef’s House” is lean and clean, depending only on a single metaphor of the house itself and the delicate and difficult borderline between hopeful stability and a fall into the abyss.  Carver’s first New Yorker story, “Chef’s House” is also one of the few Carver stories told from a female point of view.  The first-person narrator, named Edna, receives a phone call from her estranged husband, Wes, who has rented a furnished house north of Eureka, California from a recovered alcoholic named Chef; Wes tells Edna he has stopped drinking and wants her to join him so they can start over.

The idyllic summer, during which Edna and Wes only drink soda pop and fruit juice, takes three paragraphs of the story, but is enough to suggest it is a romantic return to the old Wes, the Wes she married.  When Chef tells them his daughter’s husband has left and that she needs a place to live, Wes gets “this look about him,” a look that Edna knows well and knows the summer is over.  When Edna tries to get Wes to accept this and “go easy,” she finds herself talking about the summer as if it were something that happened years ago.

The central thematic point in the story occurs when Edna tells Wes:  “Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time.  Just suppose.  It doesn’t hurt to suppose.  Say none of the other had ever happened.  You know what I mean?  Then what?”

But Wes says he does not have that kind of “supposing” left in him.  When Edna says she did not throw away a good thing and come six hundred miles to hear him talk like that, he says he cannot talk like somebody he is not. “I’m not somebody else.  If I was somebody else, I sure as hell wouldn’t’ be here.  If I was somebody else, I wouldn’t be me.   But I’m who I am.  Don’t you see?”

As Wes sits patting his chin, like he was trying to figure out the next thing, Edna looks around at Chef’s living room, at Chef’s things and thinks, “We have to do something now and do it quick.” But given who Wes is, there is nothing to be done.  The fact that it is Chef’s house and Chef’s things and not theirs is brought home to Wes, and he must give up the fantasy of the summer that it all belonged to Edna and himself.  Wes goes to the window and pulls the drapes, “and the ocean was gone just like that.” Edna goes to the icebox for the last of the fish they had caught and she things, “We’ll clean it up tonight…and that will be the end of it.” 

As David Means says, “Chef’s House” is an “incredibly intimate story” that evokes a painful sense of loneliness.  It suggests Nick Carraway’s realistic reminder to Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s brilliant novel that you cannot repeat the past and Gatsby’s incredulous response—“can’t repeat the past.  Of course you can.”  The fact that the reader feels so sympathetic to Edna and Wes’s effort to repeat the past is a result of Carver’s quiet, restrained style.

T. C. Boyle’s “Birnam Wood” has neither the metaphorically thick thematic significance of Ian McEwan’s story, nor the tautly restrained thematic significance of Raymond Carver’s story.  It is simply is a “memory piece” about a couple who move from a damp shack to a lavish apartment the size of a basketball court, but whose relationship falls apart because of the male narrator’s foolish bit of bravado with another man.   Boyle’s follow-up to Deborah Treisman’s question about why he chose the name “Birnam Wood,” with its Macbeth allusion for the story—that just as all seems well for Macbeth since Birnam Wood could never come down to Dunsinane, all should be well for the couple since they have such a great place to live—seems shallow and unconvincing.

Why the couple break up seems primarily due to the narrator’s resentment of his girlfriend—anger that she will not get “off her ass and find a job,” anger that she did not keep her eyes open to find the house while he was driving and she was bitching, condescension that she might not be able to hold down a job as a hostess.  He says he wants to break down her strong-willed nature, maker her dependent on him, but at the same time hold up her end.

When he meets the guy in the bar who is attracted to his “old lady,” he says his feelings were complicated when he says, “She can be a real pain in the ass…. Sometimes I think she’s more trouble than she's worth.” But it is not complicated—just ego-proud guy talk.  When the man shows up at their place with a bottle of tequila, the narrator says he wants to do something right for a change, to confess, tell her that he loved her, but he does not; she takes one look at him and knows that he has betrayed her. 

The story ends predictably when the girlfriend, in revenge for the betrayal, welcomes the stranger and the narrator walks across the frozen lake and looks in the window of a couple getting ready for bed.  What he feels is probably what Gatsby felt when he looked in the window and saw Daisy and Tom Buchanan in an intimate conversation.  Boyle’s narrator knows he is on the outside looking in at a relationship that he, by his own immaturish behavior, has lost.

“Birnam Wood” is a story about “flesh and blood characters,” a “memory piece” about something that perhaps actually happened, but that does not make it a story—just something that happened to real people, something that Boyle has failed to transform into a meaningful fiction.

Alice Munro's "Amundsen" and The Stories in Her New Book, Dear Life

The novel form usually gains the reader's assent to its reality by the creation of enough realistic detail to make readers feel they know the experience in the same way they know external reality.  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 Robinson Crusoe exist as an external resistance to be overcome.  However, in Hemingway's "Big, Two-Hearted River," the extensive details exist primarily to provide an objectification of Nick's psychic distress. As opposed to Crusoe, Nick is not concerned with surviving an external conflict but rather an internal one.  In "Big, Two-Hearted River," the story's obsessive focusing on the external world does not derive from the compulsion to combine details linearly, but the metaphoric need to select, repeat, and thus understand the essence of the experience that the details create.   Thus, at the end of Hemingway's 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.

Alice Munro’s new story, “Amundsen,” which appears in the August 27, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, may be misunderstood, and thus unappreciated, by some readers, if they read it as if it were a simple realistic story about a particular woman who has a brief affair with a particular man, who decides at the last minute not to marry her.  Perhaps it might be well if we remember what Munro herself has said about how she reads a story and how she tries to write one.

Munro has said that when she reads a story she does not take it up at the beginning and follow it like a road “with views and neat diversions along the way.”  Rather, for her, reading a story is like moving through a house, making connections between one enclosed space and another.  Consequently, Munro declares, “When I write a story I want to make a certain kind of structure, and I know the feeling I want to get from being inside that structure.”   She admits that the word “feeling” is not very precise, but that if she tries to be more intellectually respectable she will be dishonest.

Munro uses the term “feeling” again when interviewer Geoff Hancock asked her if the meaning of a story is more important to her than the event. “What happens as event doesn’t really much matter,” Munro replied. “When the event becomes the thing that matters, the story isn’t working too well.  There has to be a feeling in the story.”  Rather than being concerned with character or cause-and-effect consequence, Munro says she wants the “characters and what happens subordinated to a climate,” by which, she says, she means something like “mood.” 

Daniel Menaker, editor-in-chief at Random House, once said about Munro:  “You get the feeling she’s trying to help you get at some true emotional psychological insight, but that often takes the form of a kind of philosophical surrender to the unknowability of people’s motives and characters, a dark existential uncertainty about what makes people tick.  And this, it seems to me, is very important and very abstract—but doesn’t do justice to the liveliness and richness of her characters.” 

I have read “Amundsen” three times—first in a purely temporal fashion, responding to the characters as if they were particular and real and the plot as if it were made up actual events occurring one after another; second highlighting all those points in the story that seem to mark a specific authorial choice of language, detail (e.g., when she describes something metaphorically or cites something in a way that might very well have been described in a different way; and third, commenting in the margin on the repetition of those details. Then, following Munro’s suggestion, I have tried to see what “feeling” or “climate” the story creates, from combination of the details—resulting in what Daniel Menaker calls the story’s “true emotional psychological insight.”

One of the most predominant details repeated throughout the story is emphasized when the first person narrator, Vivien Hyde, because a coffee shop does not have a “ladies room,” must go past the entrance to a beer parlor to use the facilities in a hotel.  The loggers there pay little attention to her, for they were “deep in a world of men, bawling out their own stories, not here to look at women.” This “world of men” theme is introduced early in the story when Hyde, a teacher on her way to a new post, waits on the train while a group of men burst out of a building, jamming on their caps and banging their lunch buckets against their thighs, and dash to the train. 

The theme of a “world of men” culminates at the end when Vivien and her lover, Dr. Alister Fox, sit in the car, and he tells her he cannot go through with the wedding. They are briefly interrupted by a man, trying to park a delivery truck in front of them, who asks them to move to make room. Vivien says that although what Fox has been saying to her is terrible, his attitude after he had spoken to the truck driver changes. “He rolls up the window and gives all his attention to the car, to backing it out of its tight spot and moving it so as not to come in contact with the van, as if there were no more to be said or managed.”   He has a new tone in his voice, almost jaunty, a tone of relief.  He takes her to the train station and leaves her in a special “ladies’ waiting room.”

A number of details in the story accentuate a dichotomy between male and female worlds, as when Vivien sees the girl Mary in a snowball fight involving “girls against boys.”  On their way out of town to get married, Vivien is “aroused” by Fox’s “male awareness,” which she knows can quickly change to its opposite.  She fantasizes that she would lie down with him “in any bog or mucky hole” or feel her spine “crushed against any roadside rock, should he require an upright encounter.”

This is a new world for Vivien, who, until her sexual encounter with Fox, was a virgin, although her passion surprises both of them.  It is a world she is introduced to on the train when she smells raw meat a woman carries in oilpaper parcels. Since the school where she is to teach is in a TB sanitarium, she is also introduced to the world of death, as Mary tells her quite nonchalantly that her best friend Anabel is dead, for that is “something that happens a lot around here.”  If it is a world of flesh, therefore death, it is also something of an aestheticized world.  Vivien tells Fox that the landscape makes her think she is living in a Russian novel.

Susan Sontag talks about the metaphoric significance of tuberculosis in her 1977 book, Illness as Metaphor, reminding us that in the fiction of the nineteenth century, TB was associated with a “spiritualization of consciousness,” elevating one above earthly physical existence.  Because TB was associated with the lungs, the penuma or spirit, it was supposed to make one more sensitive and passionate, its pallor suggesting melancholy.  Death, which occurred easily, was “aestheticised.”

However, the aestheticised world in which Vivien lives, a world of the fiction of Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann (In Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp makes a transition from a mundane world of the flatlands to a spiritualized introspective world of a mountain TB sanitarium.), is not the world of Alister Fox, whose books suggest his desire to “possess great scattered lumps of knowledge, and who thinks characters in The Magic Mountain are windbags. 

Although Fox is a surgeon and lives a life of “minimal but precise comfort that a lone man—a regulated lone man—might contrive,” he is capable of what, to Vivien, is a male coarseness.  Mary tells of his shooting a dog and his ability to “tear a strip off you if he felt like it” (a Canadian expression for giving someone a harsh scolding). He lives the life of a simple bachelor, serving Vivien a modest dinner of pork chops, instant mashed potatoes, canned peas, and an apple pie from the bakery.

The questions that may puzzle many readers—why Vivien agrees to marry Fox and why Fox decides at the last minute not to marry her—cannot be answered by appealing to any simple psychology of the two characters as if they were particular people in the world, but rather by referring to what Henry James once said about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s concern with a “deeper psychology”--what Daniel Menaker has said about Munro’s trying to help the reader “get at some true emotional psychological insight, but that often takes the form of a kind of philosophical surrender to the unknowability of people’s motives and characters, a dark existential uncertainty about what makes people tick.”

Vivien’s attraction to Fox is derived from her romantic, fiction-based, fascination with his mysteriousness maleness. His decision not to marry her derives from his desire to maintain his own concept of maleness apart from any female involvement.  Ten years later, when she passes him crossing a crowded street, “going in opposite directions,” they share a brief, perfunctory greeting and the story ends as follows:

“No breathless cry, no hand on my shoulder when I reached the sidewalk.  Just the flash that I had caught when one of his eyes opened wider than the other. It was the left eye—always the left, as I remembered.  And it always looked so strange, alert and wondering, as if some crazy impossibility had occurred to him that almost made him laugh.
            “That was all.  I went on home.
            “Feeling the same as when I’d left Amundsen.  The train dragging me, disbelieving.  Nothing changes, apparently, about love.”

 What is the story about?  Perhaps it’s about the mysterious nature of the dichotomy of the physical and the spiritual, the male and the female, the romantic and the realistic. The attraction between male and female, what brings people together and keeps them apart, is always a mystery.  Love stories never change; they always end in separation and thus perennially exist in the world of the imagination.

Alice Munro’s New Book, Dear Life

Alice Munro usually includes between eight and ten stories in her collections, for example:

Open Secrets, 1994, eight stories

The Love of a Good Woman, 1998, eight stories

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,  2001, nine stories.

Runaway, 2004, eight stories

The View From Castle Rock, 2006, eleven stories/memoirs

Too Much Happiness, 2009, ten stories

To the best of my knowledge, the following twelve stories are those published in periodicals by Alice Munro since her last collection, Too Much Happiness, which came out in 2009.  

“Corrie,” The New Yorker, Oct. 11, 2010.

“Axis,” The New Yorker, Jan. 31, 2011.

“Pride,” Harper’s, April 2011.

“Gravel,” The New Yorker, June 27, 2011.

“Dear Life,” The New Yorker, Sep. 19, 2011.

“Leaving Maverley,” The New Yorker, Nov. 28, 2011.

“Haven,” The New Yorker, March 5, 2012

“In Sight of the Lake,” Granta, Winter 2012.

“To Reach Japan,” Narrative, Winter 2012.

“Train,” Harper’s, April, 2012.

“Dolly,” Tin House, Volume 13, Issue No. 52, 2012

“Amundsen,” The New Yorker, August 27, 2012.

Her new book, Dear Life, which is due out on November 13, 2012, will probably include eleven of the stories listed above. I am not sure about the most recent, “Amundsen,” which may have been written too late to be included in the new book. She will surely include the piece “New Life” (although it was identified as a memoir rather than a story when it appeared in The New Yorker), since it provides the title for her new book. 

I have posted blogs on many of these stories in the past two years and will discuss the rest of them when Dear Life comes out in November.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Stephen King: The Story as Joke

“It’s all about structure,” Phyllis Diller once told a Chicago Sun-Times interviewer.  “If there’s one thing I can do, it’s write a joke.  Too many comics today ramble.”  Diller, who died recently in her sleep, reportedly with a smile on her face, has reminded me that short stories, like jokes, are also highly dependent on structure.  Her comment rang especially true to me after having just read a recently discovered short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The New Yorker (8/6/12) entitled “Thank You for the Light.” It’s a one-page story, found among Fitzgerald’s papers, written in 1936, but never published.  Lacking the complexity of Fitzgerald’s most famous stories, such as “Winter Dreams,” “Babylon Revisited,” and “Absolution,” it is representative one of his popular (as opposed to literary) stories that made him lots of money in his heyday.

There once was a time, when big slick magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and Good Housekeeping published many “easy-read,” plot-based stories and paid good money for them.  And lots of people read them, making the short story a very popular form for a period of time from the twenties into the fifties. William Peden, in his 1964 book The American Short Story (quaintly subtitled Front Line in the National Defense of Literature) has noted that “technical adroitness has always characterized the slick story,” and to make a buck F. Scott Fitzgerald knew how to structure successful popular short stories.

One of the differences between the development of the short story and the novel in American literature is that whereas the popular, sometimes sensational, novel has always remained a big seller (Need I mention Fifty Shades of Grey?), the serious literary novel has managed to stand its own ground and survive alongside best sellers. Most folks can usually tell the difference, although I once had a fierce argument with a woman who resented the fact that I called The Bridges of Madison County (which she thought was great writing) pulpy and pretentious.   The popular short story, on the other hand, has virtually disappeared, and the serious literary short story has mainly survived in small circulation university-sponsored or independent mags. (Thanks goodness, there’s still The New Yorker and Harper’s, which mainly publish literary stories.)

Fitzgerald’s little story “Thank You for the Light” is, a pop piece and, as Phyllis Diller has said about a joke, “all about structure.” Here is a brief plot summary:

Mrs. Hanson, a 40-year-old corset and girdle salesperson, has recently been transferred to a route that covers Iowa-Kansas-Missouri.  Whereas in her old big-city route, she was often invited to have a drink and smoke with a buyer, now, in the so-called American Bible-belt, such actions are frowned upon.  Smoking, the narrator tells us, is important to Mrs. Hanson, a widow with no family, having “come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.”  However, she must now deal with clients who “are hatchet-faced men who did not like other people’s self-indulgences.”

One day, walking to see her last client, and longing for a smoke, yet knowing that, as a woman, she cannot smoke on the street, she sees a Catholic cathedral and has “an inspiration: If so much incense had gone up in the spires to God, a little smoke in the vestibule would make do difference.”  In the church, discovering she has no matches, she thinks she will get a light from one of the votive offering candles, but an old man extinguishes the last one to avoid wastefully leaving them burning all night.  When the old man, says, “I guess you came here to pray,” she kneels and prays for her employer and her clients.

She sits down in a corner pew below an image of the Madonna six feet above her head and imagines/dreams that the Madonna comes down and sells corsets and girdles for her.  When she awakes, she smells a familiar scent that is not incense, and her fingers smart.  She then realizes the cigarette in her hand is burning.  She takes a puff and looks up at the Madonna, saying “Thank you for the light.”  But sensing that did not seem to be enough, she kneels down, “the smoke twisting from the cigarette between her fingers.  ‘Thank you very much for the light,’ she said.”

It’s a simple little story, like a joke, with a “punch” at the end, although Fitzgerald obviously also had a bit of meaning in mind.   Finding herself in a Bible-belt world filled with hatchet-faced men who do not like other people’s indulgences, the increasing difficulty of having a smoke has made her feel the weight of her “sin,” thinking “Perhaps I ought to give up cigarettes.  I’m getting to be a drug fiend.”  But when she thinks about smoking in the church, mingling her cigarette smoke with incense from votive candles, she considers the broad spirit of Christianity rather than narrow rules, thinking “How could the Good Lord care if a tired woman took a few puffs in the vestibule?”

The “punch” comes, of course, when Mrs. Hanson is granted a transcendent “indulgence“ for her “self indulgence” by being given a light.  She responds initially with an everyday “thank you,” but then realizing the spiritual nature of the indulgence, she bows and offers a prayerfully sincere “thank you.”  It’s the kind of story that may bring a nod of recognition and a wry smile as the incongruity of the profane and the sacred are momentarily reconciled.  There are many such “joke” or “punch” stories in the history of the short story, some of them famous for their so-called “surprise ending.” O. Henry was, of course, a master at such “stinger in the tail,” joke stories.

There are many theories about both the structure and significance of jokes, from Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious to Victor Raskin’s Semantic Mechanisms of Humor, and I have no time here to discuss them.  If you are interested, there is a good summary of contemporary linguistic theories of humour at the following site: http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol33/kriku.pdf

Many of the theories of joke structure focus on the notion of what Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation (1964), called “bisociation,” which refers to the juxtaposition of two different frames of reference that either oscillate back and forth or collide with each other in a puzzling or revelatory way.  Jokes often set us up to expect one thing and then surprise us by giving us another.  Many of the most famous “punch” short stories, such as O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Frank Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger,” and Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl reek Bridge” do the same, although the end result is sometimes not a laugh but a shock.

Stephen King’s recent story in Harper’s, “Batman and Robin Have an Altercation” (September 2012), although about the serious subject of Alzheimer’s, is no less a joke story than Fitzgerald’s little piece, for it is not the subject matter that makes the story/joke, but the structure and tone.

Told in third person by an omniscient narrator, the story is about a middle-aged man named Sanderson who goes each Sunday to pick up his Alzheimer’s impaired elderly father at his nursing home to take him out to lunch.  The story recounts, in comic fashion, many of the most common symptoms of Alzheimer’s—even the most familiar jokes, e.g. “The good news is that you meet new people everyday.”  The father is apt to “cut up rough” sometimes, using language not suitable for the situation, e.g. he stands up in the restaurant and says aloud that he is about to “piss so bad he can taste it”; he is going through a kleptomaniac phrase, stealing things for no reason; he gets confused about which son Sanderson is and is capable of “random cruelties.”  He mixes up events from the past, prompting the narrator to say ponderously, “Memory is such a mystery.” 

Indeed, King often throws out pretentious phrases to suggest a seriousness that the story itself does not support, e.g., When in the restaurant the father asks his son if they have been here before, the narrator says: “Sanderson briefly considers the metaphysical possibilities inherent in this question.”  No such metaphysical possibilities are explored in the story; this is just a pretentious phrase that probably occurred to King at the moment he wrote the question.

One memory Sanderson and his father recall is of a Halloween night when Sanderson was eight and his father took him “Trick or Treating,” dressed as Batman in some old grey pajamas with a cape cut out of an old bed sheet and a leather tool belt in which his father has filled with screwdrivers and chisels.  The memory is a hurtful one to Sanderson because the father says of a woman they visit, “That woman had tits like pillows.  She was the best loving I ever had.”

The story moves toward the “punch” when Sanderson is cut off in traffic by a stereotype—what the narrator calls a “south Texas staple,” wearing jeans and a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off at the shoulders, a chain running from a belt loop to his back pocket, and “tats on his arms.”  This encounter, of course, leads to the “altercation” of the title, when “Tat Man” begins beating up Sanderson.  Then suddenly, there is the “punch” when Tat Man cries out and Sanderson sees blood dripping from the side of his neck, “which has sprouted a piece of wood.”  When he recognizes it as the handle of a steak knife from the restaurant, we are reminded of the kleptomania mentioned earlier—Chekhov’s gun hanging on the wall.

The father, knowing only that the man was beating up on his son, begins to cry, and “Sanderson smells shit.  His father has just dropped a load.” It’s a coarseness that the story does not call for—just another Stephen King self-indulgence. The story ends with a reference to the title, as Sanderson “helps the eighty-three-year-old Caped Crusader into the car” while a police car pulls up.  “The sixty-one-year old Boy Wonder, hands pressed to his aching sides, shuffles back to the driver’s side to wait.”

The title, “Batman and Robin Have an Altercation” is an echo of the title of Sherman Alexie’s story “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” although there is no similarity between the content of the two stories—just a similarity in quasi-clever coarse tone.  At least Alexie's title illustrates a cultural conflict. The relevance of King's title is unclear.

In spite of focusing on a serious human problem—Alzheimer’s and the demands placed on children whose parents suffer from the disease—this is not a serious story, but a self-indulgent Stephen King joke about a father who “redeems” himself by rescuing his son from a bully, surprising the reader with a "punch" at the end.

What Actually is the New Formalism? Why is It important to the Short Story?

I apologize for neglecting my blog for the past two weeks, but I have been on a jury in California involving a criminal case and have had little time for little else. 

One of the reasons I have waited so long to write a book on what I have learned over the years about reading short stories is that the dominant approach of literary criticism--at least since the late 1980s--has focused less on literature itself than it has on the political/cultural/social/historical content and context of literature—none of which has ever been that important to short stories.

Several years ago, I had a contract with a prominent publisher to write a book on the generic development of the short story.  However, when I submitted about half of the manuscript, the academic readers to whom the publishers sent it for evaluation complained that it did not take into account the new trends in criticism toward cultural and political content, that it did not take a sufficiently Marxist or Postcolonial or Multi-cultural approach—that it was, in short, too focused on the generic development of short stories themselves.

Unwilling to give in to pressures from the cultural critics, I cancelled my contract with the publisher and put the manuscript away until a more sensible critical climate developed.  Perhaps that time has arrived.  At least, with the advent of the so-called “New Formalism,” I hope so. I may even go back and finish that academic magnum opus history of the form after completing this book on Reading Short Stories.

The term “New Formalism” began to be used in the late 1980s, not in reference to a critical method or movement, but rather to a revival of formal verse among young poets. In “Notes on the New Formalism” (The Hudson Review, Fall 1987) Dana Gioia (former Chair of the National Endowment of the Arts), says the first signs of the revival can be seen at the end of the 1970s, when such magazines as Paris Review began publishing sonnets, villanelles and rhyming poems.  Gioia notes that this revival has occurred in spite of the stubbornness of some old threadbare clichés from the sixties, to wit, that form is “artificial, elitist, retrogressive, right-wing, and (my favorite) un-American.” Gioia summarizes the schism between academics and the public brought on by theory and cultural studies as follows:

With the best of intentions the university has intellectualized the arts to a point where they have been cut off from the vulgar vitality of popular traditions and, as a result, their public has shrunk to groups of academic specialists and a captive audience of students, both of which refer to everything beyond the university as ‘the real world.’ Mainly poets read contemporary poetry, and only professional musicians and composers attend concerts of new music.

However, he says that young poets have rejected this split between their art and its traditional audience and hope to reaffirm poetry’s “broader cultural role.” Gioia thinks that the central debate in the future will focus on form in the wide, elusive sense of poetic structure: “How does a poet best shape words, images, and ideas into meaning? The important argument will not be about technique in isolation but about the fundamental aesthetic assumptions of writing and judging poetry.”

I think the important task for me is to find a way to bridge the gap between the academic reader and the general reader by examining how a short story writer uses language to transform an “experience” into meaning.  I think all writers and readers are interested in learning how to participate in that extremely important and vitally human process.

The most greatest impediment I face writing this new book on Reading Short Stories aka, How to Read Short Stories, is my own determination to be both conscientious and comprehensive--coupled with my desire to direct the book to three related, but often estranged, audiences: the engaged general reader of the short story, the dedicated professional writer of the short story, and the committed academic teacher/student of the short story.  The problem is figuring out how to write a book that is not opaque to the general reader, simplistic to the academic reader, or alien to the artists who create short stories. I do not think this can be done without focusing on what Gioia suggests the New Formalism seems to herald: understanding form in the inclusive sense of how writers shape language into meaning. 

In an essay in Philological Quarterly (June 2007) Thomas DiPiero says, “Virtually every discussion of the new formalism, whether remonstration or encomium, mentions some variant or synonym of the word ‘return’, which should cause us to wonder what the ‘new’ in the ‘new formalism’ is.”  He notes that advocates of the new formalism study the language, genre, structure, and aesthetic nature of the literary text and encourage readers to identify textual patterns and repetitions, as well as acknowledge the aesthetic pleasure derived from literary form.  Many have joined the ranks of the new formalists because they believe that “literary criticism has overstepped the bounds of its discipline, that it has become too politicized, and/or that it has simply lost use of some of the most fundamental tools at its disposal for the analysis of literary works.”

DiPiero is interested in the means by which a text’s formal features encode the social circumstances surrounding the systematization of those features into conventions or genre.  He says, “We need to arrive at a fuller understanding of how form signifies in order to grasp how prose—the apparently formless form—conveys meaning beyond the level of literal signification.” This is indeed a crucial point for my own studies—how a short story conveys meaning beyond its literal referential function.  When DiPiero uses the word “prose,” he, of course, means the novel, for no critic ever thinks of the short story as deserving of serious consideration.  And although the novel may often be thought of as a “formless form,” this is just not true for the short story.  This is one of the main reasons why the emergence of the so-called “new formalism” is important to me.

Kelcey Parker, in her essay, “Reading Like a Writer: A Creative Writer’s Approach to New Formalism,” soon to appear in a new collection of essays on the New Formalism, says that a New Formalist approach attempts to uncover just how language artificially constructs a ‘reality’ that gets mistaken for the Real.” “A New Formalist approach to literature,” Parker says, investigates a text’s formal devices and structures (how an author communicates with a reader), and it also examines form at the level of content (what the text assumes, questions, and communicates about ‘reality’).

In her essay, “Form and Contentment” (Modern Language Quarterly, March 200), Ellen Rooney says that form is a “reading matter: the real terror is the terror of formlessness, and it has erupted because reading has lost its place.”  Neglect of the study of form in recent years, says Rooney, has resulted in the tendency to reduce “every text to its ideological or historical context, or to an exemplar of a prior theory.” She says that history, sociology, anthropology, and communications are all disciplines that “have long since mastered the art of reading-as-summary, reading sans form.”  However, she also notes that literary studies over the past forty years have “diluted the will to form” and made “thematic analysis” the sole mode of formal analysis.”  She looks to the new formalism as a matter not of “barring thematizations but of refusing to reduce reading entirely to the elucidation, essentially the paraphrase, of themes—theological, ideological, or humanistic.”  

Caroline Levine  (“Strategic Formalism:  Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies.”  Victorian Studies, Summer, 2006) is another of those critics, like Ellen Rooney, Susan Wolfson, and Heather Dubrow, who recognize the inevitable return of formalism and want to integrate it into cultural studies--to see form “as part of a politically aware historicism.”  Levine says the new formalism suggests a “reevaluation of the force of the major cultural-political categories we have long recognized, such as gender, race, and class.”  She urges a broad redefinition of form.  Not the formalism of the New Critics, she says, or of their detractors, but of both:  Levine defines “form” as follows:

Form, in my definition, refers to shaping patterns, to identifiable interlacing of repetitions and differences, to dense networks of structuring principles and categories.  It is conceptual and abstract, generalizing and transhistorical.  But it is neither apolitical nor ahistorical.  It does not fix or reduce every pattern to the same.  Nor is it confined to the literary text, to the canon, or to the aesthetic.  It does involve a kind of close reading, a careful attention to the ways that historical texts, bodies, and institutions are organized—what shapes they take, what models they follow and rework.  But it is all about the social: it involves reading particular, historically specific collisions among generalizing political, cultural, and social forms.  One could call it ‘social close reading’; I prefer to call it ‘strategic formalism.’

Is the New Formalism the critical wave of the future?  If it is integrated into the currently popular cultural studies, will it be merely an adjunct, an admission that culture cannot be studied with studying the nature of form?  In the introduction to a special issue of the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, (March 2012), Nicholas Birns begins by saying, “ Formalism had to come back in literary criticism.  The question was only how.”   Noting that the New Formalism has made important contributions to the way we read literature, it has not “commanded the field; nor has it overthrown or even seriously vexed the historicist consensus.  Indeed New Formalism in academia today is somewhat like a tolerated opposition party in a relatively mild dictatorship that is allowed to exist simply because there is no way it will ever have the popular support to seize power.”

As Marjorie Levinson pointed out in the PMLA essay I referred to a couple of weeks ago, the new formalism might be “better described as a movement than a theory or method.”  However, one could say the same thing about cultural studies, gender studies, new historicist studies, etc.  What is important for my own book is that the short story is, like poetry, more dependent on form than the novel, which is often referred to as formless.  Moreover, the short story is less focused on exploring social and political issues than the novel is.  Consequently, a critical climate that shows some respect rather than scorn for the importance of aesthetic or formal issues is a climate in which my book on the short story might at least find a hospitable publisher and perhaps even an interested audience.

In the weeks ahead, I will increasingly focus on my developing plans for Reading Short Stories, aka How to Read Short Stories.  I would appreciate any suggestions you might have for what you would like to see in such a book.

Part IV: Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies, Postcolonial Studies, The New Historicism, and other Anti-formal Approaches

In writing this brief generalized survey of twentieth-century literary criticism, I am giving short shrift to the cultural/historical literary approaches that have dominated academic study from the decline of Deconstruction to the rise of New Formalism.  In its focus on the historical/cultural context or the polemical/political content of the literary work, in my opinion, postcolonial and new historicist criticism, not to mention women’s studies, gay studies, and studies devoted to the writings of Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, etc. have shown more concern for social issues than for the art work.  Consequently, they have shown very little or no interest in the literary short story, which has seldom emphasized social issues.

In his 1986 Presidential Address to the Modern Language Association, J. Hillis Miller called attention to the fact that in the early to mid eighties, the study of literature had a sudden, almost universal turn away from an orientation toward language to “history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context….”  Miller attributes this shift to the academy’s demand to make itself “ethically and politically responsible” in its teaching and writing—“to grapple with realities rather than with the impalpabilities of theoretical abstractions and barbarous words about language….”   To which Stanley Fish responded in his own polemical 2008 book, Save the World in Your Own Time.

It is not surprising that academics became fed up with theory, for as Frank Kermode pointed out in his 1988 review of Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations and Steven Mullaney’s The Place of the Stage--two early and influential examples of the so-called New Historicism--literary theory had reached a point that university teachers of English only seemed to be talking to each other, publishing works with such obscure titles that external observers probably gave up hope. Furthermore, says Kermode, the techniques of deconstruction seemed to have become “indistinguishable from the older kind of formalism only by the use of the patented jargon and by an interpretative liberty that some old fogeys cannot distinguish from license. Thus, the academic call for a return to what “really mattered” in society, or a “return to history,” gave rise to ethnic studies, multicultural studies, postcolonial studies, and the new historicism.

The first and most prominent of these various social or content approaches--Feminist Criticism—was generated out of the so-called Women's Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Feminist Literary Criticism as an academic field of study began with several primary projects. First of all, feminist critics focused on the sexist biases male writers were often guilty of embedding in their works that became unquestioned paradigms of belief in our culture. Secondly, feminist critics argued that the established "canon" of so-called great literary works in Western culture was developed and maintained by males and therefore needed to be expanded to include valuable but previously ignored works by female writers.  Another important project for Feminist Criticism was the establishment of female writers as a "counter-tradition" of literature characterized by a radically different consciousness and value system than those embodied in the so-called "great tradition" of male writers. 

Such critics as Patricia Meyer Spacks in The Female Imagination (1975) and Elaine Showalter in A Literature of Their Own (1977) argued that women writers have often been concerned with matters considered peripheral by men and that they have thus expressed the values of a subculture within the framework of society at large. Perhaps the best-known and most-influential study to focus on what has come to be known as a female literary tradition is The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who argued that the very idea of authorship and thus literary authority has always been unyieldingly paternalistic.

Whereas Feminist Criticism marked a divergence from modern theory's predominantly formalist approach to literature simply because it was more interested in the social content of the literary work than its form, a group of critics loosely termed the New Historicists mounted a direct assault on the formalist tradition and urged a return to approaches which focus on the authorial "intention" of the work, its socially human referent, and its socio-historical context.

The New Historicism's basic attack against modern literary theory was outlined by Berkeley professors Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in two articles published in 1982 and 1987 in the journal Critical Inquiry, entitled "Against Theory" and "Against Theory II: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction."  The philosophic basis of Knapp and Michaels' arguments and assumptions are primarily derived from German thinker Hans-George Gadamer, who argued that criticism cannot find a basis for an absolute meaning in a literary work unprejudiced by history; and from his best-known follower, Hans Robert Jauss, who argued that the literary work must be studied in terms of the various historical moments of its reception.

However, the most dominant figure of the New Historicism is Stephen Greenblatt, who introduced the term in an introduction to a special 1982 issue of the journal Genre, entitled “The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance.” Basically, the New Historicists scorned literary formalism, especially for its neglect of the social and political “context” of literary works.  D. G. Myers, in a 2001 essay in the journal Academic Questions, summarizes the basic principles of the New Historicist method as follows:  (1) Literature is historical; it is not the record of one mind, but a social construct shaped by multiple consciousnesses; “the proper way to understand it, therefore, is through the culture and society that produced it.” (2) Literature must be assimilated to history; (3) There is no such thing as a human nature that transcends history, just as there is no such thing as a literary work that transcends history. (4) No one can rise above his or her own ideological upbringing; since no modern reader can ever read a work as its contemporaries read it, one can only try to reconstruct the ideology that gave rise to it. 

The problem with such an approach is, as Frank Kermode says in his review of Greenblatt’s Shakespearian Negotiations, is that while it unearths a great deal of peripheral detail about a work, it does not seem to evince much interest in the work itself.  As Kermode has it, “There is a great quantity of sexological or political sack, but only a pennyworth of interpretative bread.”  Or as Terry Eagleton says in a November 3, 2011 review of two new historicist studies of the novels of Daniel Defoe:  “Both writers add to our understanding of the social context of Defoe’s writing, but neither would spot a shift in tone, an unreliable narrator or a pattern of imagery if it leapt into their laps.”

Postcolonial Studies, which has been described as part of a larger multicultural educational reform, is said to have originated with the 1978 publication of Edward W. Said’s book Orientalism, which argued that the predominant western approach to what was then called oriental studies, had the effect of maintaining power over Arabs and Islam.  Homi Bhabha, a critic of Commonwealth literary studies, made use of the work of the activist Frantz Fanon to continue the attack against a “Western mode of thought.”  Postcolonial studies became a continuation of sixties and seventies Multiculturalism in America, for the disenfranchisement of racial minorities was called a form of colonization.  While faculty began developing departments on university campuses to teach writings by women, African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and gays, scholars began to be hired to teach the writings of so-called Third World, i.e. Postcolonial, counties.  The first introduction to the new postcolonial studies, pop- culturally entitled The Empire Strikes Back.

In a brief essay in PMLA in 2003, playfully subtitled “Still Crazy After All These Years,” W.J.T. Mitchell admits that the concept of “form” seems to have outlived its usefulness in discussions of literature. However, in spite of the fact that so many literary scholars and academic critics think they have moved beyond formalism into “more capacious arenas like history, culture, and politics,” Mitchell thinks that formalism, like other discredited notions such as imagination and beauty and spirit, keeps returning.  Mitchell concludes that although the old notion of form “some new notion of form, and thus a new kind of formalism, lies before us.”

And that “new notion of form,” for lack of a more imaginative term, is beginning to be known as the “new formalism.”  Perhaps the best-known review of the new formalism is the long essay by Majorie Levinson in the “changing profession” section of the March 2007 issue of PMLA, entitled “What is New Formalism?” [An even longer version of this review, which is the version I have read, is available online at:  sitemaker.umich.edu/pmla_article 

Levinson begins by suggesting that new formalism (she does not capitalize the phrase) is “better described as a movement than a theory or method.”  She divides new formalist studies into two groups: those who want to restore to historical criticism its original focus on form (which she calls “activist formalism”), and those who wish to bring back a sharp division between history and literature (which she calls “normative formalism”) Both kinds of formalism, however, she says want to “reinstate close reading,” which she defines as a “multilayered and integrative responsiveness to every element of the textual dimension.”  The central work of new formalism, Levinson says, is “rededication” to the idea of form, noting that words common to several of the essays are “commitment,” “conviction,” “devotion,” and “dedication.”

Next week, I will try to provide a brief history of the new formalism, evaluate its significance, and discuss why it may be important to my book-in-progress.

New Formalism and the Short Story--Part III: Structuralism, Reader Response Theory, and Deconstruction

My thanks to Tim Love for raising an important issue about the relationship between literary criticism and literary fiction.  Tim wonders if theory influences student writers directly, or if it affects the zeitgeist, making editors more likely to take on certain types of writing.

It’s a good question, especially now that there are so many creative writing/MFA programs alongside literature departments in American and British, universities, making the connection between criticism and creative writing all the more possible.  Kelcey Parker, in her essay (which I mentioned last week) on the relationship between the rise of creative writing programs and the concurrent rise of the “New Formalism,” discusses this issue, and I will come back to it next week when I attempt an examination of links between the “new formalism” and the “old formalism.”

However, as I think about the relationship between what has been taught in university literature classrooms in the twentieth century and what has been written by short story writers, at least in America, I do see a general correlation, although I am not sure which came first—the theory or the story.  For example, during the 1940s and 1950s, when Formalism or New Criticism was the dominant academic approach to literature, the dominant short story form was the so-called “traditional” or “well-made” story, e.g. the stories of John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, Katherine Anne Porter, Bernard Malamud, etc. When structuralism and deconstruction were enjoying a brief heyday in the 1960’s, the self-reflexive stories of William H. Gass, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and John Cheever interested academics. I am not sure what brand of criticism can be correlated with the so-called minimalism of Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolfe, Ann Beattie, etc. in the 1970s. But when cultural and ethnic criticism became popular in the academy, a number of writers representing various cultures also became popular, e.g. Sandra Cisneros, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, Aleksandar Hemon.  I will come back to this question next week when I make a leap over culture criticism to the “new formalism.”   But, for now, indulge me in an admittedly oversimplified summary of Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Reader Response criticism.

Taking its initial cue from Russian Formalism, Structuralism began as a reflection of the need to understand literary criticism as a unified scientific field of study rather than the practice of the explication of individual works of art.  Concerned not with meaning but more generally with what makes meaning itself possible, Structuralism gets its most powerful and immediate impetus from the methods of modern linguistics as developed primarily by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. The seminal document of modern Structuralism is Course in General Linguistics, a collection of Saussure's lecture notes edited by some of his students, originally published in 1915 but not translated into English until 1959.

The central ideas of Saussure that have proven most useful to literary theory by the Structuralists are fairly easy to summarize, although their implications have proven highly complex and controversial.  Saussure's basic assertion was that "language" should not be thought of simply as a horde of those words we use with which to communicate.  Instead, language is made up both of individual utterances (which Saussure called parole) as well as the general system of language that makes such individual utterances possible (which Saussure called langue). Although individual utterances make up the governing system of language, they do so not as an aggregate of utterances, but rather as an elaborate system of generative principles. 

Furthermore, the individual "sign," such as designated by a single word in a language, is also made up of two parts.  First, there is the sound that we make when we utter the word "house"; then there is the concept we have in our minds when we utter such a word.  The sound image Saussure calls the "signifier," whereas he calls the mental concept the "signified."  What is important to remember about these two notions is that there is no intrinsic or "necessary" relationship between the two.  There is no essential quality of "houseness" inherent in the sound we make when we say "house."  The relationship between the two is purely arbitrary and conventional; it results from the tacit agreement of those who belong to a certain speech community that such a sound image will signify such a concept.

The final distinction Saussure made that has become important to the study of literature is the distinction between studying a phenomenon, such as language or literature, as it develops over time, (which Saussure calls a "diachronic" study) and studying it as it exists at any one given moment in time (which Saussure calls a "synchronic" study).  These two approaches for studying a cultural phenomenon are related to the realization that all utterances and other examples of sign systems communicate simultaneously in two different ways: first along the linear, time-bound axis, as the sentence, "the dog bites the boy" communicates by the syntactic relationship between the signifiers "dog," "bites," and "boy"; and second along a vertical, spatially-fixed axis that exists tacitly for each of the signifiers in the string on the basis of similarity of function.  For example, the signifier "dog" could be replaced by "cat," "snake," "lion," in short anything that might plausibly perform the same function as the signifier "dog."  The linear relationship between the signifiers in the string is called the "syntagmatic" relationship, whereas the spatial relationship is called the "paradigmatic" relationship.  The first is governed by the principle of contiguity or combination of signifiers, whereas the second is governed by the principle of similarity or substitution.

In Fundamentals of Language (1969), Roman Jakobson suggests that the distinction between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic corresponds not only to the two basic ways that simple linguistic chains signify, but also two basic means by which larger units of linguistic chains such as literary works signify.  All discourse, says Jakobson, communicates along two lines of meaning: one topic may lead to another through the process of combination based on contiguity, or else a topic may lead to another through the process of substitution based on similarity.  The first corresponds to the trope known as "metonymy," whereby something is suggested by something else contiguous to it; for example a doghouse may "stand for" a dog because a dog lives there.  The second corresponds to the device known as "metaphor," whereby something is suggested by something else that can be substituted for it; for example a dog can be referred to as an animal, a pet, man's best friend, a pest, etc.

The first significant attempt to use the linguistic approach to apply to a signifying phenomenon other than language itself was the effort by French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to understand myth. In his most familiar discussion, "The Structural Study of Myth," a chapter from his 1958 book Structural Anthropology, Levi-Strauss laid out an approach to myth that has since been used for the study of literary fictions.

Myth is story, says Levi-Strauss, made up of basic constituent units or distinctive features that share similar functional traits.  However, these units are larger than the units of phonemes or morphemes that make up language; thus Levi-Strauss calls them "gross constituent units," and terms them "mythemes."  After breaking down the myth into mythemes, or units based on similarity of function, Levi-Strauss then determines how these units are related to each other in what he calls "bundles of relations."  He then reads the myth not in terms of one event after another in a causal-chronological relationship, but rather in terms of the logical relationships between the various sets or "bundles."

In this way, Levi-Strauss breaks down the syntagmatic flow of the myth based on contiguity, groups the resulting motifs together into paradigmatic sets based on similarity, and then reads the paradigmatic sets in terms of their logical relationships.  The result is, as Roman Jakobson stated in his famous 1958 "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," similarity is imposed onto contiguity and thus equivalence is made the constitutive device of the sequence. In other words, the syntagmatic, which is "just one thing after another" and therefore meaningless, is transformed into paradigmatic sets made up of units based on similarity which communicate by logical relationships.  Levi-Strauss's method has served as the model for further studies of literary narratives as if they were structured the same way language is.

Structuralist critics have been primarily concerned with various ways to extrapolate from the study of language a method for the study of literature.  The most basic way they attempted to do this in the 1960's was to treat literature as a second-level language system above language itself.  Although a poem or a story is made up of language and thus can be broken down into such units as phonemes and morphemes, Structuralists made use of Saussure's ideas of the distinction between langue and parole to refer to a distinction within literature itself between the individual work of art (parole) and the system of genre (langue) to which it belonged, or else between the genre (parole) and the larger system of literature as a whole (langue). Carrying this approach even further, they suggested that literature was not only made up of language, it was "like" a language in many other ways as well.  The field of study that has made the most extensive use of such linguistic approaches is the field that Structuralism may be said to have invented--narratology.

Drawing their inspiration initially from Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, such narratologists as A. J. Greimas, Claude Bremond, and Tzvetan Todorov were concerned with identifying the fundamental elements of narrative and their laws of combination.  Perhaps the most familiar to Anglo-American readers is Todorov, whose collection The Poetics of Prose, translated in 1977, made his approach easily accessible.  Basically, Todorov reduces the action in individual stories to a basic syntactic summary and then analyzes that summary by focusing on active verb forms in the stories such as "to change," "to transgress," "to punish," etc.  It has often been pointed out that whereas such an approach works most effectively with highly formalized works such as stories and tales, it works least effectively with more "realistic" works such as the novel.  The Structuralist approach to narrative, claim many of its critics, drains the human content out of literary works and then deals only with their mathematically pure, linguistic-like, structure.

Reader-Response Theory

 Because of this refusal to deal with the human origin of the work, its human content, or its human effect on the reader, the Structuralist approach was challenged almost as soon as it began by critics concerned with the "subjectivity" of literature, particularly with the subjective involvement or response of the reader.  However, there are two distinct sources for literary criticism that focuses on the reader--the phenomenological theory derived from Edmund Husserl and the psychoanalytic theory derived from Sigmund Freud.  The first has often been called "Reception Aesthetics," whereas the second has been termed "Transactive Criticism." 

The Phenomenologists criticize such linguistically-based approaches as Structuralism because they try to fix invariant patterns in literary works and thus abstract the human being out of the work's concrete experience.   The subtlest spokesman of Phenomenology's interest in understanding the subjectivity of literature from the inside rather than objectively from the outside is philosopher Paul Ricoeur.  However, Ricoeur's discussions of how meaning is created in The Rule of Metaphor (1977) and how history is like narrative in Time and Narrative (1984) have had less effect on literary criticism than European Reception Theory introduced in German in the late 1960's by Hans Robert Jauss.

Making use of Husserl's basic notion that one perceives reality through an abstract structure of expectation (termed "horizons"), Jauss argues that to study literary history, the focus should be on the reader's literary horizons, that is, the structure of generic norms the reader has internalized as a result of all previous texts he or she has read.  Following this same approach, Wolfgang Iser, the best-known spokesman for Reception Theory now in the United States, focuses on reading as a dynamic process during which the reader continually fills in what Iser calls "gaps of indeterminacy" in the text--gaps which are there because the art work never completely corresponds to real objects.  Iser's reader is not one who brings his or her unique experience to the reading experience, but rather is what Iser defines as an "implicit reader," one who alters the self to fit the kind of reader that the work requires.  This simply means that the reading experience is a dynamic interchange with the text, not a passive experience; the person you are for the time you are reading Huckleberry Finn, for example, is not quite the same person you are when you read The Scarlet Letter.

Another well-known advocate of reader-based criticism is American critic Stanley Fish, who has called his approach to literary texts "Affective Stylistics."  Like Iser, Fish's notion of a reader is not one who brings to the text all the individualities that define him or her in everyday life, but rather is what some have called a "superreader” who interacts with the text in a highly-sophisticated rhetorical way.  Fish says that the so-called "objectivity" of a text is a dangerous illusion; reading, and thus the text itself, constitute a temporal, not a spatial, experience, as Formalists, Myth Critics, and Structuralists say that it is.  A sentence, for example, argues Fish, is not an object, but an event, something that happens to, and with the participation of, the reader.  Fish says that in his method of analyzing a work, he monitors the temporal flow of the experience as it is structured by what the reader brings with him or her, and thus he can chart reader response as one that develops in time.

In contrast to Phenomenologically-based Reader Response Theory, which focuses primarily on the reader's general and rhetorical expectations as he or she reads the work, psychoanalytically-based Reader-Response Theory focuses on the reader's specific response based on his or her unique personality or identity.  The best-known advocate of this brand of criticism, sometimes called  "Transactive Criticism" or "Buffalo Criticism," because it originates from State University of New York, Buffalo, is Norman Holland.

Holland's first major theoretical book, The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968) came at a time when new Criticism's explication of individual poems was beginning to pale on critics and students and when much psychoanalytic criticism up to that point, influenced both by Formalism and Myth Criticism, had degenerated into the simple interpretative task of searching for dream or myth symbols in literary works. Holland argued that Freud's theories, particularly in his study of wit and jokes, offered the basis for a general theory about the dynamic transaction between reader and text in which basic interests or themes in the reader's personality "constructed" themes in the text.

Thus, like Fish, Holland urges that texts should not be studied as objects but rather as dynamic transactions between readers and texts. Holland argues that by means of literary form, (which works like defense mechanisms in human beings) and by means of literary meaning (which works the way sublimation does in human beings), literature can transform unconscious desires in the reader into a higher aesthetic, intellectual, and moral unity.  This unity, which exists not just in the text, but which is created by the needs of the reader, is what the critic should focus on.

The second most familiar critic within this psychoanalytic-based reader-response tradition is David Bleich, whose first book, Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism (1975) had a major impact on the way literature is taught in the classroom, particularly the high school classroom, in the United States.  His more substantial theoretical book, Subjective Criticism (1978), criticizes Holland for focusing too much on the objectivity of the text, as the New Critics did, and instead offers a radical new "subjective" paradigm of thought which is based on epistemological issues of how one "knows"; consequently, he connects psychoanalytically-based Reader- Response Theory with some of the issues that have dominated phenomenologically-based theories about the reader.

Deconstruction

 It is an interesting irony of modern criticism that even as Structuralism was being introduced to American critics in 1966 at a conference at Johns Hopkins University entitled "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," a relatively unknown philosopher named Jacques Derrida delivered a paper entitled "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" which was already seriously challenging Structuralism.  In this milestone essay, Derrida challenged the basic assumptions of Structuralism as illustrated by Claude Levi-Strauss; then in a series of important, but often dense and unreadable books published in the following year, On Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena, he further undercut Structuralism's philosophic foundations as established by Ferdinand de Saussure. His approach, which has come to be called "deconstruction," is to analyze such thinkers as Levi-Strauss, Saussure, and Edmund Husserl in such a way as to show that their own arguments undermine themselves and thus create a basic contradiction which itself is the key to understanding.

As a result of Derrida's critique of Structuralism, the movement never really got started in America.  Moreover, by the time it was introduced to English-speaking critics, its most influential advocate in Europe, Roland Barthes, had already begun to offer his own challenging critique primarily in his work S/Z (1970).  Whereas in his earlier critical statements Barthes, like other Structuralists, had appealed to a general structure, something equivalent to Saussure's notion of langue from which one could derive an analysis of an individual text or parole; in S/Z Barthes analyzed a short novel by Balzac as being a work which instead of having a single parole-like system governed by its dependence on a large langue-like system, is a system in and of itself.  Barthes argued that there is no transcendent or primary model equivalent to langue, but rather that each text is traversed by numerous codes which constitute its meaning.  The implication of this shift is that if that the text does not have a meaning determined by a transcendent code it may have numerous meanings which are created by the reader as he or she applies the various procedures demanded by the multiple codes that traverse it.

However, it is Derrida's challenge to Structuralism's assumptions of a transcendent code that has had the most powerful impact on contemporary literary theory.  In his 1966 presentation at the Johns Hopkins Conference on Structuralism, Derrida challenged the methodology of Levi-Strauss on the basis of what he called Levi-Strauss's tacit nostalgia for a central and transcendent "presence" or "fixed origin."  Derrida exposes the Kantian basis of Structuralism and dismisses as a fiction, albeit a functional fiction, the apriori mythic consciousness on which all forms of Formalist criticism, from the Russian Formalists to the Structuralists, had depended.

In referring to Saussure's influential distinction between signifier and signified, Derrida argued there was no transcendent signified to which a signifier referred, but that a signifier referred only to other signifiers in an endless play of signifiers.  Derrida insisted that the Structuralist endeavor was based on what he called a "metaphysics of presence," that is, some hypothetical mythic moment when signifier and signified were intrinsically related and indivisible. Derrida has claimed that this illusion is damaging, for it allows us to avoid dealing with the reality of our fragmentary reality on the assumption that there is some unified, pure meaning or reality that can be grasped.  According to Derrida, everything is a mediated "text"; there is nothing outside of the text, and all that texts can refer to are other texts.

In a related move, Derrida dismissed the assumption of linguistics that writing was secondary to and derivative of oral speech, for this, he said, was just another version of the "metaphysics of presence."  To believe that writing is secondary to speech is to believe that although writing is a highly-mediated sign system that one must interpret, its source is in speech, which, by comparison is unmediated, and thus its truth is immediately knowable.  Derrida argues, however, it is an illusion to think that truth is apparent at the moment of speech.  In fact, once it is shown that speech is susceptible to the same distance and difference from meaning as writing itself is and thus not a primary source of truth, then writing can be studied as the model of what Derrida calls a "metaphysics of absence," which allows for the "free play of signifiers."  According to Derrida, there has never been an original source; there has never been anything but a string of substitutional signifiers in a chain of differences on to infinity.  The most basic implication of Derrida's approach for literary criticism is that if a work can have no ultimate meaning it can have limitless meanings.

It is this basic implication that American followers of Derrida, primarily the so-called "Yale School," which includes Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Paul De Man, and Harold Bloom, most took to heart.  Although these critics differ in many particulars in terms of their engagement with the ideas of Derrida, basically they all proceed on the assumption that the notion of referentiality is an illusion.  A sign, says J. Hillis Miller, marks not the presence of, but the absence of, an object.  All the world is a text in which there are not facts, only interpretations.  Similarly Paul De Man argues that what reading reveals is the confrontation with a language that always vacillates between the promise of some referential meaning and the rhetorical subversion of that meaning.  Only Harold Bloom differs in his approach by focusing on the problem of literary history from a psychoanalytic point of view.  Although he agrees that every text is an intertext, he argues that literary history is the history of the clash of the strong personalities of young poets in conflict with powerful previous poets or precursors.  Literature develops by means of purposeful "misreadings" by present poets of previous ones.

Structuralist and Deconstruction theories about the nature of literature have also been integrated into two of the most pervasive and powerful models for the analysis of human experience in Western culture--Marxism and Psychoanalysis. Although both of these models were guilty of reductionism when first used by literary critics in the early part of the 20th century, more recent approaches to Marxism, derived primarily from the so-called Frankfurt School of social theorists, and more recent explorations in psychoanalysis, derived from the work of French analyst Jacques Lacan, have attempted to make use of the linguistic revolution to better understand Marx's critique of society and Freud's creation of the unconscious.

The best-known Marxist theorists of the Frankfurt School are Theodor Adorno, its chief aesthetician, who argues that the greatness of the art work is that it allows those things to be heard which ideology conceals; and Louis Althusser, who urges that critics lay bare the author's "problematic," that is, the unconscious infrastructure or base of his "potential thoughts" which make up the existing "ideological field" within which he works.  Pierre Macherey makes the connection between Marxism and Structuralist and Post-Structuralist theories even more obvious in A Theory of Literary Production, originally published in Paris in 1966 and translated into English in 1978.

For Macherey, criticism is not explication, nor is literature mimetic.  Criticism is a form of knowledge; its object is not the literary work, but rather a product of literary criticism itself.  Whatever phenomenal reality is revealed by the literary work has no prior existence but is rather the product of the laws of the work's production; the task of criticism is to reveal these laws.  In an effort to connect the concept of "ideology" with linguistic theories about structure, Macherey argues that ideology cannot be reduced to a set of concepts; ideology is, in fact, the tacit internalized realm of structures itself.  It is this realm of the unsaid and the unsayable that makes the said possible.  For Macherey, the task of criticism is not to try to articulate the unsaid, the so-called latent meaning, but rather to lay bare the laws of the production of the said.

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, strongly influenced in his reading of Freud by Saussure and Levi-Strauss, argues that the unconscious is structured like a language and therefore needs to be understood linguistically.  However, he begins to sound more deconstructive than structuralist in his approach when he argues the signifier is privileged over the signified and that the child's early ego development is based on an illusion of wholeness and totality which obscures the reality of one's fragmentary self.  Rivaling Derrida in the complexity and density of his ideas and his prose style, Lacan's theories, which have been termed "French Freud," have had a profound influence on psychoanalytic approaches to criticism in America.   The journal Yale French Studies has been most instrumental in disseminating the views of Lacan primarily in the writings of such critics as Shoshana Felman, Peter Brooks, and Barbara Johnson, who have offered new Lacanian psychoanalytical approaches to Henry James, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Throughout the 1970's, the American Deconstruction critics, Hartman, DeMan, Bloom, and Miller carried on a vigorous defense of deconstruction against more traditional critics, primarily in the most important journals of modern literary theory, such as Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, and Diacritics. As might be expected, traditional critics have accused deconstructionists of being subjective, relative, unreadable, and perversely contradictory.  And indeed, if one follows Derrida's line of thought and rejects any ultimately absolute meaning, then literary analysis becomes justified not on the basis of its truth-value but rather on the basis of whether it is interesting.  Deconstruction critics do not strive for some final reading of a work, but rather attempt to present an engagement with the work that indeed rivals the work itself for its fictionality and imaginative structure.

It is this ultimate divorce, not only from historical and social referentiality but also from any responsibility either to the world or to the text, that has lead to a reaction against Deconstruction in the 1980's that marked a return, although a return with a crucial difference, to the view of literary works as cultural documents of political and historical significance—a reaction to which gave rise to the Formalist or New Critical revolution the 1940s and 1950s in the first place. 

Finally, whew!  an examination of the “New Formalism” next week