Denis Johnson's "Train Dreams" and the Importance of Genre

Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, published in a whopping 128-page hardcover (with lots of white space) by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux two months ago, originally appeared, according to the book’s copyright page “in a slightly different form” in the Paris Review in 2002. The story only took up about 50 pages in the O. Henry Prize Stories: 2003 (where I first read it). It was chosen by O. Henry jurors Jennifer Egan and David Gutterson as their “favorite” of the 20 stories in the volume (Juror Diane Johnson chose A. S. Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest” as her favorite.”)

The Library Journal review said that Johnson “has skillfully packed an epic tale into novella length” and Publishers’ Weekly praised Johnson’s “epic sensibilities rendered in miniature.” So, one might ask, what is a “miniature epic?” Aren’t those two terms contradictory? And why is Train Dreams a novella rather than a short story or a novel? Often these generic terms are a matter of marketing. For example, Jennifer Egan’s very successful book A Visit from the Goon Squad is marketed on its cover very prominently as a “novel.” However, I read it as a collection of short stories. Any time a writer puts together a collection of stories with some links--ala Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, e.g., a shared place or shared characters--publishers are eager to label it a novel and critics are eager to discuss it as a short story-cycle.

It will come as no surprise to those of you who have read my blog even occasionally over the past three years that I have little patience with attempts by the publishing industry to try to make the short story more appealing or the academic industry to make it more worthy of discussion by calling individual stories (like those of Alice Munro) “novelistic, or by calling a collection of stories a “composite novel.” As for what Henry James called the “blest nouvelle,” the kind of fictional narrative that lies in length somewhere in between the “world in a grain of sand” that is the short story and the “bulky monster” that is the novel, I think it is a closer relative to the short story than to the novel. I posted a blog on that form in January 2010, in which I tried to lay out the characteristics that distinguished it both from the short story and the novel.

Many readers and critic may very well argue that such generic terminology matters little or not at all, noting that “a rose by any other name” blah, blah, blah. Whereas publishers will probably say that terminology matters a great deal to how they market their books of fiction, I would argue that it matters a great deal in terms of what kind of experience readers are in for when they pick up a book called “short stories,” “a novella,” or “a novel.” On this point, I would quote again what I cited in my earlier blog on the novella: I agree with C. S. Lewis, who once said, “The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is – what it was intended to do, and how it is meant to be used!” If one does not formulate some means of knowing this, then one can say nothing to the purpose about it, and indeed may run the risk of misunderstanding, or misjudging, it entirely.

Genre is, for me, an important issue because knowing the “kind” of story we read establishes a certain “horizon of expectations” that guides our reading. Certainly, a great writer will not merely follow the conventions of a genre, for then we would call him or her a “genre” writer, the way, for example, Stephen King is a genre writer. Certainly, a great writer will often defeat our expectations, thus extending our previous understanding of what kind of story we are reading. On the other hand, a great writer will seldom completely ignore the tradition from which he or she draws.

Many reviewers have already noted the importance of the genre issue when reading Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. For example, in his comments on why he chose the story as his favorite in the O. Henry volume, David Gutterson reminds us that the short story does indeed have a tradition, from Poe and Gogol to Borges and George Saunders; he places “Train Dreams in a line of descent that includes tall tales, supernatural yarns, and magical realism—a homage to Bret Harte. He says he admires Johnson’s “skilful blending of forms and traditions.” “Is it a short story?” Gutterson asks. “That’s difficult to say. Perhaps there’s no longer such a category.” Gutterson admires Johnson’s attention to detail in the story, but says its greater power lies in “its visitations, its haunted moments of sadness and yearning in which the world appears otherworldly and aggrieved even while infused with comedy.”

Jennifer Egan also calls attention to the “density of historical detail in the story,” but adds that the story’s “real power lies in its mystery, its reluctance to reveal itself. What is this about?” she says she kept asking herself as she read. David Ulin’s review in The Los Angeles Times also focuses on the key generic issue of the book, calling it a “stoic miniature,” a “portrait of containment, of compression and restraint.” Ulin says that although Johnson evokes the stuff of novels--“the slow passage of time from rural to commercial, the commodification of our collective soul,” he thinks Johnson has something more “elusive in mind, something more fundamental and intense.” What the books evokes, says Ulin, is “the fluid divide between spirit and substance, his sense that the metaphysical is always with us, even if we can’t decipher what it means.” And this, as I have suggested many times in this blog, is the sense of the spiritual that has always been the special realm of the short story and the novella.

Anthony Doerr’s review in The New York Times isolates the generic source of the story’s power most incisively. Doerr says he read the story almost ten years ago when it first appeared in The Paris Review and has read it several times sense. Like Jennifer Egan and others, he has said that the story seems to haunt one long after it is read. He attributes this haunting power to the story’s brevity, citing Poe’s famous statement that, second only to poetry, the form most advantageous for the manifestation of the highest genius was the “short prose narrative” that one could read in one sitting. Novels, Poe felt were objectionable because they necessitated taking breaks in the reading, with “worldly interests” intervening that “modify, annul or counteract” the impressions of the work. Doerr emphasizes that short stories and novellas “offer a chance to affect readers more deeply” than novels because the reader “can be held in thrall for the entirety of the experience,” giving them, in Poe’s words, “the immense force derivable from totality.”

James Wood’s reading of the story in The New Yorker is less incisive that those of Ulin and Doerr, but he also finds himself caught in two different realm of reality in “Train Dreams.” First there is what he calls a kind of “clean American simplicity in prose” reminiscent of Hemingway, but he complains that sometimes one longs to “bathe in impurities” of a more abundant style. In other words, he thinks “Train Dreams” is a bit too short, “as if the protagonist’s lack of inwardness were itself a literary virtue.” Doerr, on the other hand, while praising the story’s brevity, complains that occasionally “tufts of seemingly irrelevant material stick out here and there.” But Doerr suggests that the story’s “imperfections somehow make the experience better, more real, more absorbing.” James Wood is able to forgive the clipped style reflective of the protagonist’s unreflective view of the world by noting that his spiritual visions “seem fit compensation for the unreflective, bounded, wordless, and bookless solitude of his existence.”

So what makes Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams” work and what makes recognizing its genre as a “blessed nouvelle” important for the reading experience? Just this blend of Poe-like spiritual visions and Chekhov-like precise detail and language. Just this combination of the realistic and the supernatural, the sacred and the profane. Just this seamless linking (and blurring of that line) of the stuff of everyday reality and the stuff of that mysterious world that always exists in our dreams. In short, just the permutation that the short story and its close generic relative, the novella, have always made their own. Go back and re-read Gogol and Turgenev, Poe and Borges. Reread what has been called the “nightmares at noonday” in the stories of Ernest Hemingway. Read Steven Millhauser and Alice Munro. Read Joy Williams, Edith Pearlman, William Trevor, and many more great short story writers. They will all remind you of the importance of the generic tradition of the “short prose narrative” and how Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams” both confirms and expands that tradition.

"Nawabdin Electrician," "Slumdog Millionaire," Genre

In August, 2007, when “Nawabdin Electrician” was first published in The New Yorker, at least two bloggers singled it out for discussion. Andrew Colom in his blog http://everythingbutthefiction.blotspot.com/ talks about the cultural signs in the story, how it reflects our global world consisting of both first-world digital modernity and third-world indigence, with Nawab acting as a median between the two extremes. He says Nawab represents a segment of Pakistani society that wants to clog the wheels of progress: “What happens to an individual like Nawabdin in the post-industrial, digitalized world? His stature would slip away like his motorcycle almost does.”

However, Colom’s misunderstanding of the kind of story this is is reflected by his suggestion that the story’s most glaring flaw is that it does not have a clear thread of connection between the first and second half when abruptly the real conflict of the story is introduced with the encounter with the man who tries to steal the motorcycle. Colom says here we see Nawab’s divided loyalties—between poor men like himself and superior man as he has become. Colom says the first part of the story—the back-story—is not really relevant to this—the actual story.

Robert Lennon’s discussion in his blog, http://wardsix.blogspot.com/ is, perhaps because Lennon is a very fine writer himself, more perceptive. Lennon notes that it is a common problem for writers to be condescending when they write about working-class characters, especially colorful ones; the result is often a “patronizing cuteness that mars the authority of the narrative.” He says that Mueenuddin, however, creates a tone that is both serious and funny, creating a character that might have come off as ridiculous in less skillful hands. “As written, Nawab is a fascinating figure, a goofy person whom Mueenuddin entrusts, at the story’s conclusion, with a difficult decision. Nawab makes the decision swiftly and mercilessly, revealing a deep hardness to his character only hinted at before.”

In the 2008 Best American Short Stories, edited by Salman Rushdie, Mueenuddin provides in the “Contributors’ Notes” the background for his story, saying he first heard it from the “incomparably salty mouth of—Nawabdin Electrician, now aged, but during my childhood the most colorful though certainly not the most crooked employee on my father’s farm in South Punjab. Yes, a robber put six bullets in him, and yes, he survived.”

So if the second part of the story is based on an actual event told to Mueenuddin by the person to whom it happened, then what is the first part based on? Is it the invention of the writer, and if so, how does it relate to the second part? Why does Colom think it has nothing to do with the “actual story”?

Well, as is often the case, a misunderstanding about genre, at least in my opinion, is the reason for Colom’s finding fault with the story. A better understanding of genre underlies Lennon’s more perceptive appreciation of the tone of the story as both serious and funny, and the central character as a fascinating figure who is goofy, but who is given a serious decision.

Genre misunderstandings are often the cause of controversy about a work. The film that is being touted as a highly likely candidate for Best Picture at the Oscars this year, Slumdog Millionaire” has been the center of a genre confusion/controversy recently. Many bloggers have called the film “poverty porn.” In the February 4 edition of the Los Angeles Times, the Indian author Chitra Divakaruni says this accusation reveals a misunderstanding about the nature of art. Challenging the claim that the film is filled with clichés and exaggerations about India’s poor while ignoring the real modern India of economic success—that the film reinforces stereotypes about India, Divakaruni says those who make these accusations forget that the film is fiction, not a documentary.

Divakaruni says the film follows the convention of the picaresque, a genre that depicts with energetic abandon the many misadventures of a hero, usually of low social class, who ultimately triumphs over a corrupt society by using his wits.” Yes, indeed, Divakaruni is right. Those who ignore the genre conventions used by the director of Slumdog Millionaire are bound to misunderstand it. And sure enough, on February 10, someone wrote to the LA Times taking issue with Divakaruni, insisting that the film does not deal with the subject of rags-to-riches in an artful way. “It offers a fantasy solution to the horrors of children’s exploitation—a poor boy winning millions by being a TV contestant. Art should offer new ways of seeing, not just present graphic images of an old vision of poverty. Too often Hollywood movies offer us sensation instead of moving and insightful material.” --Peggy Aylsworth Levine, Santa Monica.

Levine’s argument suggests that only realistic depictions constitute art--that fantasy, by definition, is not art. She also seems to think that it is the purpose of art to offer a “solution” to such social issues as child exploitation. Both of these assumptions suggest misunderstandings of the nature of art and the importance of genre.

I have no way of knowing what Mueenuddin had in mind when he wrote the story, other than what he tells us about the “real” Nawabdin in his Best American Short Stories notes. Would it help me read the story more pleasurably and profitably if I did know what he had in mind? As Mueenuddin suggests in the previous entry, my reading of “The Singers” may not represent what Turgenev had in mind when he wrote the story. Is that important? If an author does not have any particular meaning in mind when he writes, then how does meaning get into the story?

Well as usual for me, my reading of “Nawabdin Electrician” is guided by my reading of previous stories, by my understanding of the short story genre, and by my expectation that a reader should have some knowledge of genre conventions in order not to “misread” a story and therefore judge it unfairly.

What intrigues me about the first part of the story—the part that Colom finds irrelevant to the “actual” story—are as follows:

Nawab “cunningly” performs his magic to slow down the electric meters.

His discovery eclipses the philosopher’s stone (which supposedly turned base metals to gold).

His tools are relatively simple, primarily a ball peen hammer, which dangles like a savage’s axe, and with which he delivers a “crafty blow.”

His twelve girls, whose demand for dowry might have defeated other men, act as a spur to his “genius.”

By his “superhuman” efforts, he maintains the comfort of the landowner he works for.

The motorcycle increases his status and when he hits a bump, he seems to flap small “vestigial wings.”

All of these characteristics suggest that Nawab belongs to the convention, so common in North American Indian folk tales, of the “trickster.” He succeeds by cunning, craft, and supernatural abilities. The second part of the story, which begins “One evening, a few weeks after his family’s festival of sugar,” is a trickster tale in which the hero refuses to die. A potent man, his sexuality even survives the fact that the bullets hit him low, but, as the pharmacist says, “Not even that, thank God.”

When the robber pleads for Nawab to tell the pharmacist to fix him, or at least not to let him die unforgiven, Nawab smells the good strong smell of disinfectant. “The floor seemed to shine. The world around him expanded.”

When the robber dies, crying, “It’s not true,” Nawab’s mind catches at the man’s words and death, “like a bird hopping around some bright object, meaning to peck at it.” But instead, he thinks of the motorcycle saved, and the glory of saving it. “Six shots, six coins thrown down, six chances, and not one of them had killed him, not Nawabdin Electrician.”

A wonderful little story about the triumph of life over death, the triumph of the right way over the wrong way, the triumph of cunning over crassness. Let the dying man beg, for all the good it will do him. Let the living exult in life. It’s a universal fable, not a political statement.