I recently read a book-length discussion of George Saunders’ Pastoralia by Charles Holdefer, the
author of four novels and a collection of short stories entitled Dick Cheney in Shorts. Although Holdefer currently lives and teaches in
Europe, he is originally from Iowa and graduated from the Iowa Writer’s
Workshop. He has published short stories and essays in many places, including
the New England Review, The Antioch
Review, and The North American
Review. I met him a few years ago at a conference on the short story in
France.
Holdefer’s book on Pastoralia is one of a series of books
called “Bookmarked” published by the Independent publisher, Lg Press; the
series is described as a “no-holds barred personal narrative detailing how a
particular work of literature influenced an author on their journey to becoming
a writer, as well as the myriad directions in which the journey has taken them.”
Earlier books featured in the series include John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
It is unusual to encounter an entire volume devoted to one’s personal
engagement with a book of fiction, especially a book of short stories. When an
interviewer asked Holdefer about the
structure of the book—which devotes separate chapters to an analysis of each of
the stories in Pastoralia,
accompanied by a related personal story and some reflections on relevant social
or philosophical issues—Holdefer said he thought the “personal readings”
premise of the Bookmarked series was a good one, “because when you love
literature, it is first and foremost personal. Not professional, not some sort
of exercise.”
George Saunders is one of my favorite short-story writers, and I
have posted several blog essays on his stories and his essays. In many ways,
one of the most perfect examples of the short story as a form in Pastoralia
is "The End of FIRPO in the World," in which a young overweight and
disliked boy named Cody takes imaginative revenge on classmates and neighbors
who torment him by putting boogers in their thermos and plugging their water
hose to make it explode.
In an interview with Charlie Rose, Saunders said he
used to think that the artist had an idea he or she wanted to get and then sort
of dump it on the reader. Now, he knows
that really doesn’t produce anything; it is condescending. When you study
writing, Saunders said, there’s this intentional fallacy that the writer has a
set of ideas and the story is just a vehicle for delivering those ideas. He
says his experience has been totally the opposite. “You go in trying not to
have any idea of what you are trying to accomplish, praying that you will
accomplish something and respecting the energy of the piece and following it
very closely. Saunders says he always starts off earnestly toward a target;
however, he self-deprecatingly notes, "like the hunting dog who trots out
to get the pheasant," I usually comes back with "the lower half of a
Barbie doll."
I very much like Saunders' ideas about the essential short story
characteristics of mystery, ambiguity, the process of discovery, and human
sympathy in the title essay to his collection The Braindead Megaphone.
Consider the following:
“The best stories proceed
from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised
extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us
slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to
empathize with people we don’t know, because they help us imagine these people,
and when we imagine them—if the storytelling is good enough—we imagine them as
being, essentially, like us. If the
story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or
is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable,
inscrutable, incontrovertible.”
I like the way George Saunders talks about short stories, and I also
like the way Charles Holdefer talks about short stories. Consider the
following:
Appeals to history, cause
and effect, verisimilitude: those are the novel’s bread and butter. But a short story operates in a different
economy. Some weird or terrible event (there are plenty of them in Pastoralia) is not naturalized or
expanded in the novelistic manner; there simply isn’t the space to do so. But rather than feeling like less, the result
can feel like more, with an immediacy that is not possible in the spongier,
discursive narrative dough of a novel.
A finely wrought short
story is more than a miniaturist artefact, a cute little piece of scaled craft.
It’s a trip to another
space, another way of seeing.
If you appreciate the short story as much as Saunders, Holdefer, and I
do, you will find Holdefer’s reading of Saunders’ Pastoralia a pleasure. This
is not an academic engagement with Saunders’ short stories--although it is a
profoundly intelligent one--but a deeply personal interaction. Indeed, as you read it, you might sometimes feel that
you are learning as much about Holdefer as you are about Saunders. But, as much as I value sticking close to the
work when I write about short stories, usually refusing to wander about in contexts,
I have to admit that when I was teaching in the classroom, I often tried to
interest my students by giving them an example of my own personal identification
with a story. And indeed, if the teacher or the reader/critic does not have a
passionate personal encounter with the work, then what the hell’s the point of
reading fiction and then talking about your experience with others? Why should
they care?
I recommend George Saunders’
Pastoralia: Bookmarked to you. I have read it with pleasure, for it is
always a pleasure to read good writing about good reading. The book is
available in a Kindle edition on Amazon for $9.85 and in a paperback edition for $10.37.
