Rolf asked, vis a vis The Experimental Short Story: Part I, if I had considered Lydia Davis’s short fiction. I have read several of Davis’s stories in various places, but have not yet had a chance to read her Collected Stories that was on several “Best Books of the Year” lists for 2009. Sorry to say I have not got to J. G. Ballard’s Collected Stories either. So much to read! So little time! So I will have to content myself with four “experimental” writers that I have read—two of which are my favorite writers, and two that I find thoughtful and clever. Lydia Davis and J. G. Ballard join several others on my "must read; get the lead out" list of short story collections.
David Means
Although David Means’ Assorted Fire Events (2000), won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, was short listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and received rave reviews both in America and England, still, for many critics, it was just a collection of short stories. His most recent collection of stories, The Secret Goldfish, reaffirms that like Borges, who once said that a short story may be, for all purposes, “essential," or Andre Dubus, who said he loved short stories because “they are the way we live," or Alice Munro, who once told an interviewer that she doesn’t write novels because she sees her material in a short-story way, David Means-- like Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, and Grace Paley--sees the world in a short-story way.
To understand that “short-story way,” pick up The Secret Goldfish. But don’t rush through the stories. Read one, put the book by and meditate on the mystery of the human condition the story explores. Then wait a while before reading another. The short story is often misunderstood and underrated because readers read it the same way they do sections of novels. Don’t go to David Means for plot that rushes to its inevitable end or for easily recognizable character, like the folks you meet every day. Go to David Means for some scary, sacred, sense that what happens is not as important as what it signifies and for the shock of recognition that those you thought you knew you don’t really know at all.
You go to Means for mystery and the paradox understood by the great short story writers from Poe to Chekhov to Carver--that if you remove everything extraneous from a scene, an object, a person, its meaning is revealed, stark and astonishing. The first paragraph of the first story in Secret Goldfish, “Lightning Man,” makes clear that the realm of reality that matters for Means is sacramental, ritualistic, miraculous--a world in which the old reassurances, such as lightning never strikes twice in the same place, are shown to be nonsense. Here a man is struck seven times throughout his life by a powerful revelatory energy until he becomes a mythic creature, waiting for the inevitable eighth.
In the short-story world of David Means, a mundane tale of infidelity and divorce gets transformed by the metaphoric stillness of a neglected goldfish in a mucked-up tank, surviving in spite of the stagnation around it. Means’ short stories are seldom satisfied with linearity of plot and thus often become lists of connected mysteries. “Notable Dustman Appearances to Date” is a series of hallucinatory manifestations of famous faces in swirling dust kicked up by wind or smoke: Nixon, Hemingway, Gogol, Jesus. “Michigan Death Trips” is a catalog of catastrophic disruptions, as people abruptly disappear beneath the ice of a frozen lake, are suddenly struck on the highway, or hit by a stray bullet from nowhere. “Elyria Man," lays bare mummified bodies found lying beneath the soil, as if patiently waiting to embody some basic human fear or need.
In each of his stories, David Means reveals the truth of our lives the way great art always has—by making us see the world as it painfully is, not as our comfortable habits hide it from us. David Means is a brilliant master of the short story who fully understands and respects the form’s power.
Stephen Millhauser
While most short-story writers in the last three decades joined the realist rebellion against the fabulism of the seventies, Steven Millhauser has stayed true to the fantastic tradition that extends from Poe, to Kafka, to Borges, Barthelme and Barth--playfully and powerfully exploring the freedom of the imagination to reject the ordinary world of the merely real and explore the incredible world of purely aesthetic creation.
Steven Millhauser's short fictions are often basically "suppose" stories. Suppose someone built the ultimate shopping mall? Suppose adolescent female mystery was really caused by witches? Suppose there was an amusement park that opened the door to an alternate reality. However, Millhauser's most obsessive "suppose" is: "Suppose you took an ordinary entertainment, illusion, or metaphor and pushed it as far as it would go." One could say that all of Millhauser's stories go "too far," that is, if the intensive "too far" existed in his vocabulary. His favorite personae are the impresario, the maestro, the necromancer, the wizard, Prospero on his island, Edison in his laboratory, Barnum in his circus ring. Whether his stories focus on magic carpets, men who marry frogs, automatons, balloon flights, or labyrinths that lie beneath everyday reality, Millhauser embodies one of the most powerful traditions of short fiction--the magical story of the reality of artifice.
Although the thirteen stories in his most recent collection, Dangerous Laughter, are divided into three categories--Vanishing Acts, Impossible Architectures, and Heretical Histories—they are united by the romantic quest for transcendence. Even the opening cartoon, which uses fast-paced present-tense to create the illusion that you are watching a Tom and Jerry animated short, concludes with erasure of the physical and reinstatement of illusion.
The stories in the first group are the most intriguing in their transformation of the mundane into the miraculous. “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman” is not a simple crime story. When the narrator and his former high school classmates look Elaine Coleman up in their yearbook, they cannot recall her, finally understanding that she did not suddenly disappear but rather gradually became more and more invisible. That the drive to transcend can begin in the most ordinary ways and lead to the most terrible results is explored in “Dangerous Laughter,” a story of how, pushed to extremes, any activity can become both obsessive and powerfully significant. It begins with adolescents laughing at little until the laughing becomes an end in itself, part of the “kingdom of forbidden things.”
The stories in the “Impossible Architectures” group,” although like previous Millhauser stories about artificial and enclosed worlds, are less compelling. “The Dome” begins with transparent domes to cover houses, which then develop into larger domes to cover neighborhoods and then towns, until the entire country and then the world is transformed into a giant mall. And if you encounter a Millhauser story entitled “The Tower,” you can guess that the issue is “how high?” Millhauser’s trope means to explore the complications and implications of religious desire, but it’s just too mechanical a metaphor.
The “Heretical Histories” section gives us stories about two “might-have-been” inventions that could have transformed the way we experience “reality.” In “A Precursor of the Cinema,” Harlan Crane, a late nineteenth century painter creates a pigment that reproduces the object so faithfully that it actually moves on the canvas--a forerunner to current experiments with holographic images. In “The Wizard of West Orange,” one of Thomas Edison’s researchers creates a device called a haptograph, a wired suit which, when put on, simulates various sensations of touch and, more significantly, creates new ones. However, the device’s promise of revelation, transformation, and transcendence dooms it, for the ever-practical Edison knows it will never bring in profits.
Millhauser’s stories are not mere ingenuity, although Lord knows, they are devilishly clever. No, Millhauser is motivated by the same obsessions that drove Blake--to see a world in a grain of sand, to affirm that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. In my opinion, he is our most brilliant practicing romantic, for whom surface reality is merely an uninteresting illusion and ultimate reality is always sleight of hand.
Steven Dixon
The most frequent terms used to characterize the short fiction of Stephen Dixon are: "experimental," "fabulous," quirky," and "tour de force." Previous writers with whom he has been compared include Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. However, the problem with so many of his stories is that, as imaginative and inventive as they may be, they largely seem to be just that--bloodless experiments with devices and techniques rather than real human events.
Many of Dixon's stories are experiments with traditional narrative structures. For example, "Man of Letters" makes use of the epistolary form in which a man named Newt, who features in a number of Dixon stories, writes a series of letters to a woman he has been seeing. Although he begins the first letter with the sentence, "I don't want to see you anymore," by the time he has verbally examined the relationship and justified his decision by writing a whole stack of letters, he ends by saying, "No matter what I'll be seeing you Friday night." It is as if the very act of writing has so self-consciously engaged the protagonist that he cannot state his feelings; he is too busy trying to impress instead of saying simply what he wants to express. Many of Dixon's stories convey this sense of becoming bogged down in verbal and narrative cleverness and thus never quite expressing a truly human experience.
A more radical narrative device is attempted in the story "14 Stories," in which a potentially tragic central event of a man trying to commit suicide is presented as a kind of comically botched job in which his attempt affects a number of people around him. The story begins with a graphic description of the bullet smashing the character's teeth, leaving his head through the back of the jaw, and then crashing through a window in the hotel room. As the story focuses on the man's effort's to try to get help, it simultaneously describes the reactions of a young boy on the roof at whose feet the bullet finally rests and a chambermaid who discovers the body and, at the end of the story, must clean up the bloody room. Although such an emphasis on characters on the fringes of a central drama is a common short story technique, in Dixon's treatment, the reader remains uninvolved in either the central tragedy or its incidental ramifications for other characters.
Such a transition, within a single story, from the realistic to the absurd, is an example of Dixon's favorite technique--what some critics have called "experimental realism," in which stories seem grounded in solid everyday reality and at the same time completely fantastic in their plots and character configurations. This narrative method was of course made famous in the early twentieth century by Franz Kafka in such stories a "Metamorphosis"--a fiction that seems absolutely realistic in its most minute details--that is, once the reader accepts the fantastic initial premise that the central character is a giant dung beetle. It is also similar to what has been called "magical realism," as practiced by South American writer Gabriel García Márquez, in which fantastic and fabulistic events are described as if they were taking place in a specific real world instead of within the once-upon-a-time world of fairy tale or the purely imaginative reality of folktale and parable.
"Darling" is a typical example of a Dixon story that begins realistically enough with the male protagonist describing his care for an elderly invalid woman. As she asks him to turn her over in bed, to give her medicine, and to bath her, he does so in routine fashion, until the very repeated requests and her constant reference to him as "Darling" begin to irritate him, and the reader, so much that when he starts tormenting her by pouring her drinking water on the floor, turning on the light when she wants it off, and finally dumping her out of bed, all this seem not only normal, but inevitable.
Dixon can narrate the most shocking and horrifying events in such a flat, deadpan style that the event becomes transformed into a kind of surrealistic and highly stylized set of gestures that the reader accepts, only to become appalled at that very acceptance. "The Intruder," perhaps the most extreme example of this technique, begins with a man entering his apartment to find his girlfriend being raped by an intruder who is threatening her with a knife. The story describes in graphic detail the intruder's forcing both the woman and the man to engage in sex acts with him. However, it is the stripped-down and matter-of-fact style with which the acts are described that creates the strange unreal effect the story has. As horrifying as the events are, they seem to take place in a world without emotional response.
George Saunders
When George Saunder's first collection of stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline appeared in 1996, it received rave reviews, with well-known writers such as Garrison Keillor and Thomas Pynchon calling Saunders a "brilliant new satirist" with a voice "astoundingly tuned." Based on that one book, Saunders was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award, and New Yorker magazine named him one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. In fact, that prominent periodical was so impressed by Saunders that it originally published all six of the stories in his new collection, Pastoralia. If that were not encouragement enough, three of the stories in Pastoralia have won O. Henry Awards prizes: "The Falls" in 1997 (which won second prize), "Winky" in 1998, and "Sea Oak" in 1999.
The reviewers of Saunders' two collections have called him variously "a cool satirist," "a savage satirist," and a "searing satirist." Typical of the satirist's need for an object of attack, 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," he usually comes back with "the lower half of a Barbie doll." Comparing Saunders to Vonnegut, Pynchon, and T. Coraghessan Boyle, critics have praised his demented black comic view of modern culture that showcases Americans' fears, shames, and their need to be accepted.
A primary way Saunders creates this view is to zero in on our pop culture entertainments. Whereas the focus of the title story of Saunders' first collection is a virtual reality theme park that simulates America during the Civil War era, the locale of the title story of the new collection is a museum in which two people pretend to be a cave man and woman for the entertainment and edification of the public. The protagonist "caveman" is paired up with a woman who does not perform her job with sufficient commitment; she often speaks English instead of inarticulate grunts, and she quarrels with her son who visits her on the job. Although the protagonist, who must fax reports to management about his fellow worker, tries to protect her, he is soon discovered and she is forced to leave. When a new woman assigned to the cave is more scrupulous than he; the story ends with the reader's suspicion that it won't be long before she has him replaced.
One of Saunders’ most problematical story--so absurdly pop-culture gothic it is not surprising that one of the judges who picked it for the 1999 O. Henry Award Prize Stories was Stephen King--is "Sea Oak." The story focuses on a man who works at a male strip club called Joysticks and who lives with his aunt, sister, and cousin in a subsidized apartment complex called Sea Oak, where there is no sea and no oak, only a rear view of FedEx. Saunders evokes some funny bits here: the Board of Health who visits the club to make sure the men's penises won't show, a television program of computer simulations of tragedies that never actually occurred but theoretically could. However, the story becomes most absurd when aunt Bernie dies and returns from the grave as a zombie who urges the narrator to show his penis so he can make more money.
The ostensible satiric point of the story is Bernie's expression of the unfulfilled longings of all the losers who die unheralded. However, what the reader most remembers is the grotesque image of Bernie's ears, nose, arms, and legs decaying and falling off. If there is a central thematic line in the story, it occurs when the narrator puts what is left of Bernie's body in a Hefty bag, thinking maybe there are angry dead people everywhere, hiding in rooms and bossing around their scared relatives. The story ends with Bernie's voice in the narrator's dreams crying the anthem perhaps of every pathetic, and somehow sympathetic, loser in Saunder's collections--"Some People get everything and I got nothing. Why? Why did that happen?"
The short story as a form seems a natural for so-called “experimentalism.” If the experiment fails, then not so much is lost, since short stories are so, well, you know, short. And because the short story is short, it is more apt to focus on technique than mimesis, more apt to use language in a self-conscious way than simply as a clear glass through which to gaze at “reality,” whatever that is. Poe knew this at the beginning of the form, and many narrative writers who like to “play” with language have paid tribute to Poe. Although some critics like to draw contrasts between “traditional” or “realist” short story writers, such as Chekhov, Hemingway, Munro, Trevor, etc and the experimentalists I have discussed in these two blogs, in my opinion, Chekhov, Hemingway, Munro, and Trevor are no less experimentalists than Borges, Barth, Barthelme, Millhauser, etc. All great short-story writers are more enamored with language than with what some folks confidently call “reality.” As a result, all great short stories must be read with close attention to how style, technique, form, language creates the “reality of artifice,” (if I might be so bold as to quote the subtitle of one of my books on the short story).
It seems to me that there are two basic kinds of “experimental” short story—the “what if” stories of Barthelme and Saunders and the “alternate reality” stories of Barth and Millhauser. Of the two types, I prefer the latter, for the former often seem to me to be merely satire. And satire, for my taste, too often focuses on social issues rather than individual human complexity. And social issues, it seems to me, are not dealt with in a very complex way in short stories. The experimental stories of David Means and Stephen Millhauser interest me more than the satiric stories of David Saunders and Steven Dixon because they explore individual human complexity in subtle and penetrating ways.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
The Experimental Short Story--Part I: Caponegro, Evenson, and the Experimentalists of the Sixties
Mary Caponegro and Brian Evenson are often characterized as “experimental” writers. I had only read their stories occasionally as I ran across them in the journal Conjunctions and in trade anthologies such as Ben Marcus’s The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. However, I recently read their new collections All Fall Down by Caponegro and Fugue State by Evenson (both published by Coffee House Press).
If you have never read Caponegro, this new collection may be the one to begin with, since the four stories in it are somewhat more traditional than her usual “experimental” style. The two novellas in the book are closer to the challenging syntax more often associated with Caponegro. “Ill-Timed,” the longest piece in the collection, is challenging, if for no other reason than its lengthy repetition of banter between two women. However, the witty dialogue makes it relatively more porous and comprehensible than the final novella, “The Translator,” in which self-conscious literary monologues about language threaten to mire one down in the inky print on the page.
I enjoyed Evenson’s stories even more than Caponegro’s, for no one pushes the envelope of the Poe/pulp tradition with more bravura than he does. In “Mudder Tongue,” chosen for the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories, the central character loses his ability to communicate with others when the words he speaks are not the ones the thinks. In “Dread,” a graphic tale illustrated by Zak Sally, a man’s identity crisis is caused when he is haunted by a phrase--“He no longer resembled me”-- from Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. “Ninety Over Ninety” is a laugh-out-loud satire on the publishing industry, while the title story is a Borges-like nightmare in which dissociation is a contagion that causes characters to morph from one to another. Fugue State is an irresistible mélange of the comic and the terrifying. I recommend both Caponegro and Evenson to you.
However, what the two books got me to thinking about was the meaning of the term “experimental,” especially when used to describe a type of short story. I remembered that the debate about experimental fiction made some literary news a few years ago and dug out an old issue of Harper’s (October 2005) and reread Ben Marcus’s essay “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It.” Marcus, whose penchant for “experimental” fiction can be seen in his own work, as well as the choices he made for The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, takes on Jonathan Franzen for his attacks on James Joyce, William Gaddis, and other nontraditionalists.
Franzen has said that praise for Ulysses as one of the top ten books of the century “sends this message to the common reader: Literature is terribly hard to read. And this message to the aspiring writer: Extreme difficulty is the way to earn respect. This is fucked up. It’s particularly fucked up when the printed word is fighting other media for its very life.” In another place, Franzen calls Gaddis “unreadable, needlessly obtuse, and frequently indifferent to his reading audience.”
Marcus argues: “If reading is a skill, with levels of ability, and not simply something we can or cannot do, then it’s a skill that can be improved by more, and more varied reading. The more various the styles we ingest, the better equipped we are to engage and be moved by those writers who are looking deeply into the possibility of syntax as a way to structure sense and feeling, packing experience into language, leveraging grammar as a medium for the making of art.”
I align myself with Marcus’s argument that fiction writers use syntax to explore human complexity, but would further argue that writers such as Alice Munro and William Trevor, who are often called “realists” or “traditionalists,” use language in this self-conscious way, as well as so-called “experimental” writers such as Evenson and Caponegro. If you are interested in this debate, you can find Marcus’s essay online, as well as the various pieces by Franzen that he refers to. I would be happy to discuss the issue with anyone who wants to resurrect it. However, as a student of the short story as a genre, I am more interested in what kind of short fiction is often called “experimental.” I went back over a number of writers I have read and written about in the past to see what is characteristic of the “experimental” short story, if there is such a thing.
I will mention briefly four writers from the late sixties who were called “experimental” (Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and William H. Gass) and four writers from the nineties who have likewise been dubbed something other than traditional (Stephen Dixon, Steven Millhauser, George Saunders, and David Means). I will make a few comments about the Sixties writers in this blog and discuss the four Nineties writers in next week’s blog. I will then try to draw some conclusions about what is the typical “experimental” short story.
Robert Coover's first collection of short stories, Pricksongs and Descants (1969), consists of a number of stories based on fairy tales, legends, folktales--all of which are made more earthy and "real" than their mythic originals. "The Door" is an erotic, self-reflexive retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood," while "The Magic Poker" is an elaborate exploration of fictional creation, ala Shakespeare's The Tempest, and "Seven Exemplary Fictions" is an homage to Cervantes. However, the most popular story in the collection is "The Babysitter," a complex play with the shifting intermixture of fantasy and reality. "The Babysitter" ultimately asks the basic question "What actually happened?" for as you read the story you are never quite sure at any given point if you are reading a fantasy or a description of so-called reality. Although the story seems filled with ominous events, nothing actually happens, except in the sexual fantasies of the participants, which predominate over ordinary reality. At the end of the story, when a television program enters the mix of fantasies, it seems no less real than the character fantasies throughout. Few stories have gone as far as "The Babysitter" in undermining the easy assumption that reality refers merely to external events in the physical world.
When Donald Barthelme's first collection of stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, appeared in 1964, critics complained that his work was without subject matter, without character, without plot, and without concern for the reader's understanding. For Barthelme, the problem of language is the problem of reality, for reality is the result of language processes. Because so much contemporary language has become trash, dreck, Barthelme takes as his primary task the recycling of language, making metaphor out of the castoffs of technological culture. For Barthelme, the task is to try to reach, through metaphor and the defamiliarization that results, that ineffable realm of knowledge which he says lies somewhere between mathematics and religion "in which what may fairly be called truth exists."
Barthelme has noted that since films tell a realistic narrative so well, the fiction writer must develop a new principle. Collage, says Barthelme, is the central principle of all art in the twentieth century, the point of which is that "unlike things are stuck together to make, in the best case, a new reality." One of the implications of this collage process is a radical shift from the usual temporal, cause-and-effect process of fiction to the more spatial and metaphoric process of poetry.
The most basic example of Barthelme's use of this mode is "The Balloon," in which a large balloon has encompassed the city. The persona of the story says that it is wrong to speak of "situations, implying sets of circumstances leading to some resolution, some escape of tension." In this story there are no situations, only the balloon, a concrete particular thing that people react to and try to explain. The balloon is an extended metaphor for the Barthelme story, to which people try to find a means of access and which creates varied critical responses. To plunge into a Barthelme story is to immerse oneself in the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary society, for his stories are not so much plotted tales as they are parodies and satires based on the public junk and commercial media hype that clutter up and cover over our private lives.
In 1967 and 1968, John Barth made his alignment with the postmodernist focus on fiction as a self-reflexive art form explicit. First he published a controversial essay in the Atlantic entitled "The Literature of Exhaustion," which, although it has been much misunderstood to have argued that contemporary fiction writers have "run out" of a subject for their work, actually urged more of the kind of self-conscious experimentation practiced by the South American writer Jorge Luis Borges. Secondly, he turned from the novel form to the short story, publishing Lost in the Funhouse, an experimental collection in which the stories refused to focus their attention on their so-called proper subject--the external world--and instead continually turned the reader's attention back to what Barth considered their real subject--the process of fiction-making.
Barth insists that the prosaic in fiction is only there to be transformed into fabulation. The artist's ostensible subject is not the main point; rather it is only an excuse or raw material for focusing on the nature of the fiction-making process. Great literature, says Barth, is almost always, regardless of what it seems to be about, about itself. Perhaps more than any other American writer Barth made fiction intensely conscious of itself, aware of its traditions, and of the conventions that make it possible. If, as the main currents of modern thought suggests, reality itself is the result of fiction-making processes, then John Barth is truly a writer concerned with the essential nature of what is real.
A philosopher particularly interested in the fictional nature of reality, William H. Gass's contribution to the postmodernist short story came in his 1968 collection, In The Heart of the Heart of the Country. Gass, as well known for his philosophical literary essays as for his fiction, has always reminded readers that "stories and the places and people in them are merely made of words." A character in a story, Gass insists, is not an object of perception, and "nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be said of him."
"Order of Insects," which Gass thinks is one of his best short fictions, charts the growth of a woman's obsession with a species of insects that inhabit her home. By limiting her vision obsessively, she transforms the insects into mythic creatures, ultimately feeling as though she has been entrusted with a kind of "eastern mystery, sacred to a dreadful god." As opposed to humans, the insects, whose skeletons are on the outside, retain their shape in death. They are beautiful in the ideal sense with a fierce joy in their very composition, a joy of stone that lives in its tomb like a stone lion. Never seeming to participate in decay, they are perfect geometric shapes representing pure order.
The title story of Gass's collection is a lyrical evocation of being in "retirement from love." The voice of the narrator, who has come to a small town in Indiana because he has "love left over" which he would like to lose, mixes his response to the inhabitants of the town with his meditations and memories of a past love, who was, as all romantic lovers are, a fiction. "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" is the narrator's attempt to organize himself, pull himself together by means of the language of poetry.
I will try to draw some general conclusions from all this next week when I discuss four major nontraditional short story writers from the nineties.
If you have never read Caponegro, this new collection may be the one to begin with, since the four stories in it are somewhat more traditional than her usual “experimental” style. The two novellas in the book are closer to the challenging syntax more often associated with Caponegro. “Ill-Timed,” the longest piece in the collection, is challenging, if for no other reason than its lengthy repetition of banter between two women. However, the witty dialogue makes it relatively more porous and comprehensible than the final novella, “The Translator,” in which self-conscious literary monologues about language threaten to mire one down in the inky print on the page.
I enjoyed Evenson’s stories even more than Caponegro’s, for no one pushes the envelope of the Poe/pulp tradition with more bravura than he does. In “Mudder Tongue,” chosen for the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories, the central character loses his ability to communicate with others when the words he speaks are not the ones the thinks. In “Dread,” a graphic tale illustrated by Zak Sally, a man’s identity crisis is caused when he is haunted by a phrase--“He no longer resembled me”-- from Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. “Ninety Over Ninety” is a laugh-out-loud satire on the publishing industry, while the title story is a Borges-like nightmare in which dissociation is a contagion that causes characters to morph from one to another. Fugue State is an irresistible mélange of the comic and the terrifying. I recommend both Caponegro and Evenson to you.
However, what the two books got me to thinking about was the meaning of the term “experimental,” especially when used to describe a type of short story. I remembered that the debate about experimental fiction made some literary news a few years ago and dug out an old issue of Harper’s (October 2005) and reread Ben Marcus’s essay “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It.” Marcus, whose penchant for “experimental” fiction can be seen in his own work, as well as the choices he made for The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, takes on Jonathan Franzen for his attacks on James Joyce, William Gaddis, and other nontraditionalists.
Franzen has said that praise for Ulysses as one of the top ten books of the century “sends this message to the common reader: Literature is terribly hard to read. And this message to the aspiring writer: Extreme difficulty is the way to earn respect. This is fucked up. It’s particularly fucked up when the printed word is fighting other media for its very life.” In another place, Franzen calls Gaddis “unreadable, needlessly obtuse, and frequently indifferent to his reading audience.”
Marcus argues: “If reading is a skill, with levels of ability, and not simply something we can or cannot do, then it’s a skill that can be improved by more, and more varied reading. The more various the styles we ingest, the better equipped we are to engage and be moved by those writers who are looking deeply into the possibility of syntax as a way to structure sense and feeling, packing experience into language, leveraging grammar as a medium for the making of art.”
I align myself with Marcus’s argument that fiction writers use syntax to explore human complexity, but would further argue that writers such as Alice Munro and William Trevor, who are often called “realists” or “traditionalists,” use language in this self-conscious way, as well as so-called “experimental” writers such as Evenson and Caponegro. If you are interested in this debate, you can find Marcus’s essay online, as well as the various pieces by Franzen that he refers to. I would be happy to discuss the issue with anyone who wants to resurrect it. However, as a student of the short story as a genre, I am more interested in what kind of short fiction is often called “experimental.” I went back over a number of writers I have read and written about in the past to see what is characteristic of the “experimental” short story, if there is such a thing.
I will mention briefly four writers from the late sixties who were called “experimental” (Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and William H. Gass) and four writers from the nineties who have likewise been dubbed something other than traditional (Stephen Dixon, Steven Millhauser, George Saunders, and David Means). I will make a few comments about the Sixties writers in this blog and discuss the four Nineties writers in next week’s blog. I will then try to draw some conclusions about what is the typical “experimental” short story.
Robert Coover's first collection of short stories, Pricksongs and Descants (1969), consists of a number of stories based on fairy tales, legends, folktales--all of which are made more earthy and "real" than their mythic originals. "The Door" is an erotic, self-reflexive retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood," while "The Magic Poker" is an elaborate exploration of fictional creation, ala Shakespeare's The Tempest, and "Seven Exemplary Fictions" is an homage to Cervantes. However, the most popular story in the collection is "The Babysitter," a complex play with the shifting intermixture of fantasy and reality. "The Babysitter" ultimately asks the basic question "What actually happened?" for as you read the story you are never quite sure at any given point if you are reading a fantasy or a description of so-called reality. Although the story seems filled with ominous events, nothing actually happens, except in the sexual fantasies of the participants, which predominate over ordinary reality. At the end of the story, when a television program enters the mix of fantasies, it seems no less real than the character fantasies throughout. Few stories have gone as far as "The Babysitter" in undermining the easy assumption that reality refers merely to external events in the physical world.
When Donald Barthelme's first collection of stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, appeared in 1964, critics complained that his work was without subject matter, without character, without plot, and without concern for the reader's understanding. For Barthelme, the problem of language is the problem of reality, for reality is the result of language processes. Because so much contemporary language has become trash, dreck, Barthelme takes as his primary task the recycling of language, making metaphor out of the castoffs of technological culture. For Barthelme, the task is to try to reach, through metaphor and the defamiliarization that results, that ineffable realm of knowledge which he says lies somewhere between mathematics and religion "in which what may fairly be called truth exists."
Barthelme has noted that since films tell a realistic narrative so well, the fiction writer must develop a new principle. Collage, says Barthelme, is the central principle of all art in the twentieth century, the point of which is that "unlike things are stuck together to make, in the best case, a new reality." One of the implications of this collage process is a radical shift from the usual temporal, cause-and-effect process of fiction to the more spatial and metaphoric process of poetry.
The most basic example of Barthelme's use of this mode is "The Balloon," in which a large balloon has encompassed the city. The persona of the story says that it is wrong to speak of "situations, implying sets of circumstances leading to some resolution, some escape of tension." In this story there are no situations, only the balloon, a concrete particular thing that people react to and try to explain. The balloon is an extended metaphor for the Barthelme story, to which people try to find a means of access and which creates varied critical responses. To plunge into a Barthelme story is to immerse oneself in the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary society, for his stories are not so much plotted tales as they are parodies and satires based on the public junk and commercial media hype that clutter up and cover over our private lives.
In 1967 and 1968, John Barth made his alignment with the postmodernist focus on fiction as a self-reflexive art form explicit. First he published a controversial essay in the Atlantic entitled "The Literature of Exhaustion," which, although it has been much misunderstood to have argued that contemporary fiction writers have "run out" of a subject for their work, actually urged more of the kind of self-conscious experimentation practiced by the South American writer Jorge Luis Borges. Secondly, he turned from the novel form to the short story, publishing Lost in the Funhouse, an experimental collection in which the stories refused to focus their attention on their so-called proper subject--the external world--and instead continually turned the reader's attention back to what Barth considered their real subject--the process of fiction-making.
Barth insists that the prosaic in fiction is only there to be transformed into fabulation. The artist's ostensible subject is not the main point; rather it is only an excuse or raw material for focusing on the nature of the fiction-making process. Great literature, says Barth, is almost always, regardless of what it seems to be about, about itself. Perhaps more than any other American writer Barth made fiction intensely conscious of itself, aware of its traditions, and of the conventions that make it possible. If, as the main currents of modern thought suggests, reality itself is the result of fiction-making processes, then John Barth is truly a writer concerned with the essential nature of what is real.
A philosopher particularly interested in the fictional nature of reality, William H. Gass's contribution to the postmodernist short story came in his 1968 collection, In The Heart of the Heart of the Country. Gass, as well known for his philosophical literary essays as for his fiction, has always reminded readers that "stories and the places and people in them are merely made of words." A character in a story, Gass insists, is not an object of perception, and "nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be said of him."
"Order of Insects," which Gass thinks is one of his best short fictions, charts the growth of a woman's obsession with a species of insects that inhabit her home. By limiting her vision obsessively, she transforms the insects into mythic creatures, ultimately feeling as though she has been entrusted with a kind of "eastern mystery, sacred to a dreadful god." As opposed to humans, the insects, whose skeletons are on the outside, retain their shape in death. They are beautiful in the ideal sense with a fierce joy in their very composition, a joy of stone that lives in its tomb like a stone lion. Never seeming to participate in decay, they are perfect geometric shapes representing pure order.
The title story of Gass's collection is a lyrical evocation of being in "retirement from love." The voice of the narrator, who has come to a small town in Indiana because he has "love left over" which he would like to lose, mixes his response to the inhabitants of the town with his meditations and memories of a past love, who was, as all romantic lovers are, a fiction. "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" is the narrator's attempt to organize himself, pull himself together by means of the language of poetry.
I will try to draw some general conclusions from all this next week when I discuss four major nontraditional short story writers from the nineties.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
My J. D. Salinger--Master of the Short Story
Like many others of the pre-baby-boomer generation, I was quite mad for the fiction of J. D. Salinger. I don’t remember how old I was when I first read that Signet paperback with the picture on the cover of the young guy with a suitcase, a long coat, a red scarf, and a red baseball cap, presciently and rebelliously worn backward. The cover claimed: “This unusual book may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart—but you will never forget it.” And of course, I didn’t. I still have my tattered paperback copy of Catcher in the Rye, or rather I did until recently, when I bequeathed it to my daughter who is working on a Ph.D. in English (getting into the family business, as it were) at University of Arizona. The paperback came out in 1953, when I was twelve. I probably read it a few years later at fifteen. During high school, I also read Nine Stories and, like many other “literary types,” was hooked trying to hear the sound of one hand clapping.
When I got to college, I had “graduated,” as it were, to the Glass family-- Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker, Franny and Zooey. In the short story class I had with the wonderful Kentucky writer James Still, we had to write a long “term” paper—about 20 pages—the longest paper I had ever attempted. Mr. Still did not like Salinger—thought he was too slick, too citified, too much a show-off. But, thanks to Holden, ever the rebel, I decided to do my paper on the short stories of Salinger. I had read his four books, but wanted more. In our modest Appalachian library at Morehead State College, I was able to find fifteen or so Salinger stories in Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, and Story—The late forties and early fifties were good times for short story writers. After the term ended, James Still sent me a brief note, written on stationary from a Louisville hotel, that he liked the paper and was willing to admit that where there was so much literary smoke there had to be some literary fire. I never got the paper back, but I did get an “A” in the course.
When I was in graduate school, the New Yorker published Salilnge's last story (took up almost the whole June 19, 1963 issue) entitled “Hapworth 17, 1924.” Introduced by Buddy, the story is a long, rambling letter from Seymour to his family when he was at Camp Simon Hapworth. Seymour, Buddy reminds us, committed suicide in 1948 when he was thirty-one in that great Bananafish story. As you might expect, it is a very precocious letter for a seven-year-old.
I did not teach many of Salinger’s stories during my forty-year stint at California State University, Long Beach. Salinger did not allow his stories to be anthologized in college texts. The only two that slipped by in trade paperback editions were “For Esme, with Love and Squalor” in Milton Crane’s Fifty Great Short Stories (1952) and “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut” in Warren and Erskin’s Short Story Masterpieces (1954), both of which I taught. I remember when I taught “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut” I picked up a copy of Howard Garis’ Uncle Wiggly Stories and read some of the to the class (At bedtime, I read them to my kids, who loved Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, the Police Dog, and the Bad Chaps.” Their favorite bittersweet part came at the end of the stories with teasers like these:
“What happens next will be told in another story, if the star on top of the Christmas tree doesn’t twinkle so brightly that it shines in the face of the clock and stops the hands from playing tag.”
“And another story soon, if the eyes of the Christmas doll don’t wiggle around so fast she can’t see to play the piano.”
“Something is going to happen in the next story, if the egg beater doesn’t take the stopper out of the vinegar cruet and pour the stuff into the milk to make it so sour the goldfish won’t drink it.”
So, it was with a wry sad smile that I picked up the L.A. Times in the driveway this past Friday and read on the front page that J.D. Salinger had died at age 91. Of course, the first thing I did after reading the long obituary that filled almost one and a half pages of the L. A. Times was to go to my book shelf to find Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. And being the literary packrat I am, I searched through my filing cabinet and found the New Yorker copy of “Hapworth 16, 1924,” that, ever the Salinger fan, I rushed out to buy in 1965.
I have just finished reading Nine Stories and am happy to say they brought a gratified smile to my face. I was not startled this time when Seymour went back to his hotel room and blew his brains out, for I knew that he knew there would never be anything better than Sybil’s seeing the bananafish. I sympathized with Eloise’s desire to live in the world of Uncle Wiggly instead of the world of Connecticut. I understood why Billy Walsh cried when the Laughing Man’s last act was to pull off his mask before turning his face to the bloodstained ground. I felt for De Daumier-Smith’s desire to reach out to Sister Irma during his blue period. And I nodded in recognition when I read about Teddy’s first mystical experience, for I had used it many times in my classes as an example of the kind of epiphany the short story often made its own: “It was on a Sunday, I remember,” said Teddy. “My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean all she was going was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.”
Nine Stories has always had a powerful influence on my theories of the short story’s unique thematic obsession. Salinger’s best stories—“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” For Esme—with Love and Squalor,” and “Teddy”—all deal with the gap between “love”(in the basic religious sense of loving the other to such an extent that there seems no separation between the self and the other)-- and “squalor,” which derives from the Latin word “squalere,” which means “to be dirty from neglect.”
I have referred in an earlier blog to a presentation I made at the International Short Story Conference in June 2008, at Cork, Ireland, in which I argued that the basic theme of the short story as a form was the confrontation between the profane reality of separation and the longing for the sacred reality of union. If you read Salinger’s four greatest stories with this theme in mind, I think you will see where I must have got a significant impetus to my ideas. I quote a few paragraphs from my Cork presentation below:
I believe that the central focus of the short story as a genre is the basic primordial story that constitutes human beings existentially--their basic sense of aloneness. The human yearning that this would be otherwise is best expressed by Martin Buber. "In the beginning," says Buber, "is relation as category of being, readiness, grasping form, mould for the soul; it is the ”a priori of relation, the inborn Thou." Studies in anthropology and child psychology support Buber's assertion that both phylogenetically and ontogenetically the “Thou” relation precedes the “It” perception, but only in a primal undifferentiated universe from which the adult civilized human is excluded except by means of an aesthetic or religious "As if.” Buber describes the event phylogenetically in terms that suggest its metaphysical and moral implications. "This actual event is the separation of the human body, as the bearer of its perceptions, from the world round about it...whenever the sentence `I see the tree' is so uttered that it no longer tells of a relation between the man and the tree, but establishes the perception of the tree as object by the human consciousness, the barrier between subject and object has been set up. The primary word “I-It,” the word of separation, has been spoken." Thus arises, says Buber, the "melancholy of our fate" in the earliest history of the race and the individual.
If the “I-Thou” is inborn, as Buber says, it exists in that realm of the individual and the race that predates consciousness, and therefore can exist for conscious human beings only as an ideal, for which we yearn. Humans are continuously possessed by this desire for unity, which our very reason makes impossible, which is why the romantics, of course, decried the deification of reason in the eighteenth century and wished to substitute imagination in its place, imagination that transcended reason and made strange that which was so seemingly familiar. And since imagination is the leading aesthetic idea of the Romantics, love or sympathy became the leading moral idea—a basic yearning for the underlying unity of all things that springs forth in moments of what Abraham Maslow called peak experience, or what Wordsworth in the Prelude called "spots of time."
The human dilemma is that we are always caught between the demands of our deepest wish and the demands of our social self, which is the battle between the sacred and the profane, between union and separation. The unconscious is where "reality" resides, says Eliade. The human search to know it is equivalent to the desire of the religious man to live in the sacred, which is, "equivalent to his desire to take up his abode in objective reality… to live in a real and effective world, and not in an illusion."
The important distinction that must be made is between narratives that strive to make the realm of value seem temporal and graspable by experience and reason and narratives that strive to transform the temporal into the spiritual. What I wish to suggest is that the novel is a form dominated primarily by the first impulse, whereas the short story is dominated by the second. The first process requires temporal development, a slow process of "as if" lived experience in a world of objects, social relationships, and conceptual frameworks. It must have the bigness of the comprehensive theory of the whole man facing the whole world. The second process, on the other hand, requires only the moment, an instantaneous single experience that in its immediacy challenges social and conceptual frameworks.
There are therefore two basic modes of experience in prose fiction: the one that involves the development and acceptance of the everyday world of phenomenal, sensate, and logical relation--a realm that the novel has always taken for its own--and the other that involves single experiences that challenge reality as simply sensate and reasonable--a realm that has dominated the short story since its beginnings. The novel involves an active search for identity that is actually a reconciliation of the self with the social and experiential world—a reconciliation that is finally conceptually accepted, based on the experience one has undergone. The short story takes a character who has reached, or is in the process of reaching, for such a conceptual identity through reason, experience, or a combination of both, and confronts him or her with the world of yearning, which then challenges his conceptual framework of reason and experience.
All this perhaps explains why Sybil can see the bananafish, why Eloise prefers Uncle Wiggily to Connecticut, how Esme’s letter of love saves Sergeant X from squalor, and what Teddy means by saying you have to vomit up the Edenic apple of logic if you want to see things as they really are. It is what Sergeant X understands when he inscribes the Dostoevsky quotation on the flyleaf of the Goebbels book: “Fathers and Teachers, I ponder, ‘What is hell?’ I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
J.D. Salinger: January 1, 1919—January 27, 2010-RIP
When I got to college, I had “graduated,” as it were, to the Glass family-- Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker, Franny and Zooey. In the short story class I had with the wonderful Kentucky writer James Still, we had to write a long “term” paper—about 20 pages—the longest paper I had ever attempted. Mr. Still did not like Salinger—thought he was too slick, too citified, too much a show-off. But, thanks to Holden, ever the rebel, I decided to do my paper on the short stories of Salinger. I had read his four books, but wanted more. In our modest Appalachian library at Morehead State College, I was able to find fifteen or so Salinger stories in Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, and Story—The late forties and early fifties were good times for short story writers. After the term ended, James Still sent me a brief note, written on stationary from a Louisville hotel, that he liked the paper and was willing to admit that where there was so much literary smoke there had to be some literary fire. I never got the paper back, but I did get an “A” in the course.
When I was in graduate school, the New Yorker published Salilnge's last story (took up almost the whole June 19, 1963 issue) entitled “Hapworth 17, 1924.” Introduced by Buddy, the story is a long, rambling letter from Seymour to his family when he was at Camp Simon Hapworth. Seymour, Buddy reminds us, committed suicide in 1948 when he was thirty-one in that great Bananafish story. As you might expect, it is a very precocious letter for a seven-year-old.
I did not teach many of Salinger’s stories during my forty-year stint at California State University, Long Beach. Salinger did not allow his stories to be anthologized in college texts. The only two that slipped by in trade paperback editions were “For Esme, with Love and Squalor” in Milton Crane’s Fifty Great Short Stories (1952) and “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut” in Warren and Erskin’s Short Story Masterpieces (1954), both of which I taught. I remember when I taught “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut” I picked up a copy of Howard Garis’ Uncle Wiggly Stories and read some of the to the class (At bedtime, I read them to my kids, who loved Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, the Police Dog, and the Bad Chaps.” Their favorite bittersweet part came at the end of the stories with teasers like these:
“What happens next will be told in another story, if the star on top of the Christmas tree doesn’t twinkle so brightly that it shines in the face of the clock and stops the hands from playing tag.”
“And another story soon, if the eyes of the Christmas doll don’t wiggle around so fast she can’t see to play the piano.”
“Something is going to happen in the next story, if the egg beater doesn’t take the stopper out of the vinegar cruet and pour the stuff into the milk to make it so sour the goldfish won’t drink it.”
So, it was with a wry sad smile that I picked up the L.A. Times in the driveway this past Friday and read on the front page that J.D. Salinger had died at age 91. Of course, the first thing I did after reading the long obituary that filled almost one and a half pages of the L. A. Times was to go to my book shelf to find Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. And being the literary packrat I am, I searched through my filing cabinet and found the New Yorker copy of “Hapworth 16, 1924,” that, ever the Salinger fan, I rushed out to buy in 1965.
I have just finished reading Nine Stories and am happy to say they brought a gratified smile to my face. I was not startled this time when Seymour went back to his hotel room and blew his brains out, for I knew that he knew there would never be anything better than Sybil’s seeing the bananafish. I sympathized with Eloise’s desire to live in the world of Uncle Wiggly instead of the world of Connecticut. I understood why Billy Walsh cried when the Laughing Man’s last act was to pull off his mask before turning his face to the bloodstained ground. I felt for De Daumier-Smith’s desire to reach out to Sister Irma during his blue period. And I nodded in recognition when I read about Teddy’s first mystical experience, for I had used it many times in my classes as an example of the kind of epiphany the short story often made its own: “It was on a Sunday, I remember,” said Teddy. “My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean all she was going was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.”
Nine Stories has always had a powerful influence on my theories of the short story’s unique thematic obsession. Salinger’s best stories—“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” For Esme—with Love and Squalor,” and “Teddy”—all deal with the gap between “love”(in the basic religious sense of loving the other to such an extent that there seems no separation between the self and the other)-- and “squalor,” which derives from the Latin word “squalere,” which means “to be dirty from neglect.”
I have referred in an earlier blog to a presentation I made at the International Short Story Conference in June 2008, at Cork, Ireland, in which I argued that the basic theme of the short story as a form was the confrontation between the profane reality of separation and the longing for the sacred reality of union. If you read Salinger’s four greatest stories with this theme in mind, I think you will see where I must have got a significant impetus to my ideas. I quote a few paragraphs from my Cork presentation below:
I believe that the central focus of the short story as a genre is the basic primordial story that constitutes human beings existentially--their basic sense of aloneness. The human yearning that this would be otherwise is best expressed by Martin Buber. "In the beginning," says Buber, "is relation as category of being, readiness, grasping form, mould for the soul; it is the ”a priori of relation, the inborn Thou." Studies in anthropology and child psychology support Buber's assertion that both phylogenetically and ontogenetically the “Thou” relation precedes the “It” perception, but only in a primal undifferentiated universe from which the adult civilized human is excluded except by means of an aesthetic or religious "As if.” Buber describes the event phylogenetically in terms that suggest its metaphysical and moral implications. "This actual event is the separation of the human body, as the bearer of its perceptions, from the world round about it...whenever the sentence `I see the tree' is so uttered that it no longer tells of a relation between the man and the tree, but establishes the perception of the tree as object by the human consciousness, the barrier between subject and object has been set up. The primary word “I-It,” the word of separation, has been spoken." Thus arises, says Buber, the "melancholy of our fate" in the earliest history of the race and the individual.
If the “I-Thou” is inborn, as Buber says, it exists in that realm of the individual and the race that predates consciousness, and therefore can exist for conscious human beings only as an ideal, for which we yearn. Humans are continuously possessed by this desire for unity, which our very reason makes impossible, which is why the romantics, of course, decried the deification of reason in the eighteenth century and wished to substitute imagination in its place, imagination that transcended reason and made strange that which was so seemingly familiar. And since imagination is the leading aesthetic idea of the Romantics, love or sympathy became the leading moral idea—a basic yearning for the underlying unity of all things that springs forth in moments of what Abraham Maslow called peak experience, or what Wordsworth in the Prelude called "spots of time."
The human dilemma is that we are always caught between the demands of our deepest wish and the demands of our social self, which is the battle between the sacred and the profane, between union and separation. The unconscious is where "reality" resides, says Eliade. The human search to know it is equivalent to the desire of the religious man to live in the sacred, which is, "equivalent to his desire to take up his abode in objective reality… to live in a real and effective world, and not in an illusion."
The important distinction that must be made is between narratives that strive to make the realm of value seem temporal and graspable by experience and reason and narratives that strive to transform the temporal into the spiritual. What I wish to suggest is that the novel is a form dominated primarily by the first impulse, whereas the short story is dominated by the second. The first process requires temporal development, a slow process of "as if" lived experience in a world of objects, social relationships, and conceptual frameworks. It must have the bigness of the comprehensive theory of the whole man facing the whole world. The second process, on the other hand, requires only the moment, an instantaneous single experience that in its immediacy challenges social and conceptual frameworks.
There are therefore two basic modes of experience in prose fiction: the one that involves the development and acceptance of the everyday world of phenomenal, sensate, and logical relation--a realm that the novel has always taken for its own--and the other that involves single experiences that challenge reality as simply sensate and reasonable--a realm that has dominated the short story since its beginnings. The novel involves an active search for identity that is actually a reconciliation of the self with the social and experiential world—a reconciliation that is finally conceptually accepted, based on the experience one has undergone. The short story takes a character who has reached, or is in the process of reaching, for such a conceptual identity through reason, experience, or a combination of both, and confronts him or her with the world of yearning, which then challenges his conceptual framework of reason and experience.
All this perhaps explains why Sybil can see the bananafish, why Eloise prefers Uncle Wiggily to Connecticut, how Esme’s letter of love saves Sergeant X from squalor, and what Teddy means by saying you have to vomit up the Edenic apple of logic if you want to see things as they really are. It is what Sergeant X understands when he inscribes the Dostoevsky quotation on the flyleaf of the Goebbels book: “Fathers and Teachers, I ponder, ‘What is hell?’ I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
J.D. Salinger: January 1, 1919—January 27, 2010-RIP
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Michelle Cliff, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Postcolonial Criticism
I recently read Everything is Now by Michelle Cliff, which includes stories from her first collection, Bodies of Water (1990), and her second, The Store of a Million Items (1998), as well as fourteen new ones, some of which deal with growing up in a colonial country, being torn between identifying with the white colonizer and the colored colonized, triangulating from Jamaica to England to America, and coping with issues of immigration. Cliff was born in Jamaica but grew up in the United States, receiving her education in New York City and London. She is the author of three novels, Abeng, No Telephone to Heaven, and Free Enterprise, which have been well received for their focus on growing up in a postcolonial culture and on the dehumanizing effect of the international slave trade. Because her short stories are more poetic and less focused on history, politics, and culture, they have received less attention.
As I have noted before in this blog, the short story seldom succeeds when it serves primarily as a vehicle for political ideas and social commentary—no matter how humane the ideas are. As a result, the current, but slowly waning, academic infatuation with all things multicultural and postcolonial, has not been kind to the short story form.
There are, of course, exceptions, such as the very fine stories of Jhumpa Lahiri, which academic critics have received warmly, but usually for the wrong reasons. The stories in Lahiri’s most recent collection, Unaccustomed Earth, focus on immigrants who “must strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.” However, Lahiri develops her theme more deeply than that, using geography not as a social message but as a metaphor for crossing borders.
The title story is paradigmatic. Ruma, a mother at age 38, has left her job in a New York law firm to follow her husband to Seattle to raise their child. Her father, at age 70, has retired after his wife’s death and now spends his time taking European tours. The story takes place during the father’s visit while Ruma’s husband is out of town. For sixty pages, nothing much seems to happen as Ruma tries to come to terms with her father’s newfound freedom and he comes to know and love his young grandson. Then in the last few pages, because Lahiri knows how to manage the rhythm of the short story almost as masterfully as her mentors William Trevor and Alice Munro, the story tightens as a secret is revealed and the daughter realizes her father is also a man. Because of their realistic detail and their casual narrative flow, many critics have erroneously called these stories “novelistic,” but make no mistake, when that flow tightens into a vortex at the end and the seemingly irrelevant details become transfigured into significance, you will know you are in the hands of a master of the short story.
In the spring semester of 2006, my last term as a teacher, I conducted a graduate seminar on the postcolonial short story. My students and I read stories from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Africa, and the Caribbean. As usual, my focus was on formal excellence and thematic complexity. However, my graduate students, who had been trained by my younger colleagues to value political and social subjects, did not read the stories closely and wanted to talk about social and cultural issues in general rather than the thematic and formal qualities of the particular stories we read. For them, the only important stories were those that lamented the plight of people of color in the third world and the history of political domination. For me, what made a story important was its truth about the human individual and its formal beauty. It was a battle every day. By the end of the term, I was weary of fighting for the power of art over politics.
I have three major objections to postcolonial and multicultural criticism—all of which, in my opinion, lie at the heart of the teaching of literature:
First, by focusing on the “what” of fiction, rather than the “how,” postcolonial critics and teachers often make facile generalizations about history and politics that ignore the qualities of the particular work they are considering and have little or nothing to do with literature as art. Thus, they encourage cursory reading calculated to elicit general concepts and polemical ideas, after which they discard the actual language and form of the work like an empty husk.
Second, postcolonial critics often create a jargon language and a convoluted syntax to make their often-simplistic ideas sound theoretically profound. Tagging on to the dense and oblique prose style of the now defunct deconstructionists, they try to make mere propaganda sound philosophically complex. Note the following from an essay on Cliff’s fiction by Jocelyn Fenton Stitt: “Contextualizing the work of Jamaican-American writer Michelle Cliff within this literary tradition demonstrates that many of the dominant forms of rhetoric used to establish authentic national subjects contain within them the gendered and raced legacies of Romantic nationalism.” Or this one from the same essay: “Referencing the (black) mother in Caribbean postcolonial discourse as the point of origin displaces more complex notions of national identity, which take into account racial, sexual, and cultural hybridity.”
Third, postcolonial critics, compelled to read third world literature as political allegories about the domination of the Empire and the revolution of those marginalized, drain the individual humanity out of the people that populate fiction, making them mere two-dimensional figures representing general qualities of poverty, ignorance, hunger, and deprivation. Francoise Lionnet calls Michelle Cliff an “autoethnographer,” arguing that her stories belong to a new genre of contemporary autobiography, “by writers whose interest and focus are not so much the retrieval of a repressed dimension of the private self, but the rewriting of their ethnic history, the re-creation of a collective identity through the performance of language.” Well, I for one believe that the truth and beauty of the short story derives from its emphasis on the “private self,” not a “collective identity,” whatever that might look like.
I liked many of the stories in Michelle Cliff’s Everything is Now, but not because they gave me allegories of “raced” populations. The best stories in this collection, as is true of all great stories, result when Cliff successfully controls the raw obsessive stuff of her life with the consummate care of her art. I recommend the book to you.
As I have noted before in this blog, the short story seldom succeeds when it serves primarily as a vehicle for political ideas and social commentary—no matter how humane the ideas are. As a result, the current, but slowly waning, academic infatuation with all things multicultural and postcolonial, has not been kind to the short story form.
There are, of course, exceptions, such as the very fine stories of Jhumpa Lahiri, which academic critics have received warmly, but usually for the wrong reasons. The stories in Lahiri’s most recent collection, Unaccustomed Earth, focus on immigrants who “must strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.” However, Lahiri develops her theme more deeply than that, using geography not as a social message but as a metaphor for crossing borders.
The title story is paradigmatic. Ruma, a mother at age 38, has left her job in a New York law firm to follow her husband to Seattle to raise their child. Her father, at age 70, has retired after his wife’s death and now spends his time taking European tours. The story takes place during the father’s visit while Ruma’s husband is out of town. For sixty pages, nothing much seems to happen as Ruma tries to come to terms with her father’s newfound freedom and he comes to know and love his young grandson. Then in the last few pages, because Lahiri knows how to manage the rhythm of the short story almost as masterfully as her mentors William Trevor and Alice Munro, the story tightens as a secret is revealed and the daughter realizes her father is also a man. Because of their realistic detail and their casual narrative flow, many critics have erroneously called these stories “novelistic,” but make no mistake, when that flow tightens into a vortex at the end and the seemingly irrelevant details become transfigured into significance, you will know you are in the hands of a master of the short story.
In the spring semester of 2006, my last term as a teacher, I conducted a graduate seminar on the postcolonial short story. My students and I read stories from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Africa, and the Caribbean. As usual, my focus was on formal excellence and thematic complexity. However, my graduate students, who had been trained by my younger colleagues to value political and social subjects, did not read the stories closely and wanted to talk about social and cultural issues in general rather than the thematic and formal qualities of the particular stories we read. For them, the only important stories were those that lamented the plight of people of color in the third world and the history of political domination. For me, what made a story important was its truth about the human individual and its formal beauty. It was a battle every day. By the end of the term, I was weary of fighting for the power of art over politics.
I have three major objections to postcolonial and multicultural criticism—all of which, in my opinion, lie at the heart of the teaching of literature:
First, by focusing on the “what” of fiction, rather than the “how,” postcolonial critics and teachers often make facile generalizations about history and politics that ignore the qualities of the particular work they are considering and have little or nothing to do with literature as art. Thus, they encourage cursory reading calculated to elicit general concepts and polemical ideas, after which they discard the actual language and form of the work like an empty husk.
Second, postcolonial critics often create a jargon language and a convoluted syntax to make their often-simplistic ideas sound theoretically profound. Tagging on to the dense and oblique prose style of the now defunct deconstructionists, they try to make mere propaganda sound philosophically complex. Note the following from an essay on Cliff’s fiction by Jocelyn Fenton Stitt: “Contextualizing the work of Jamaican-American writer Michelle Cliff within this literary tradition demonstrates that many of the dominant forms of rhetoric used to establish authentic national subjects contain within them the gendered and raced legacies of Romantic nationalism.” Or this one from the same essay: “Referencing the (black) mother in Caribbean postcolonial discourse as the point of origin displaces more complex notions of national identity, which take into account racial, sexual, and cultural hybridity.”
Third, postcolonial critics, compelled to read third world literature as political allegories about the domination of the Empire and the revolution of those marginalized, drain the individual humanity out of the people that populate fiction, making them mere two-dimensional figures representing general qualities of poverty, ignorance, hunger, and deprivation. Francoise Lionnet calls Michelle Cliff an “autoethnographer,” arguing that her stories belong to a new genre of contemporary autobiography, “by writers whose interest and focus are not so much the retrieval of a repressed dimension of the private self, but the rewriting of their ethnic history, the re-creation of a collective identity through the performance of language.” Well, I for one believe that the truth and beauty of the short story derives from its emphasis on the “private self,” not a “collective identity,” whatever that might look like.
I liked many of the stories in Michelle Cliff’s Everything is Now, but not because they gave me allegories of “raced” populations. The best stories in this collection, as is true of all great stories, result when Cliff successfully controls the raw obsessive stuff of her life with the consummate care of her art. I recommend the book to you.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Colm Toibin's Brooklyn: A Novel To Be Read Like a Short Story
Colm Toibin’s novel Brooklyn was awarded the Costa Novel of the Year award a couple of weeks ago. Through no fault of Toibin, the novel will always evoke a sadness in me. It is the last novel that I listened to while walking my dog Shannon each morning in the neighborhood. As I have mentioned before, the only time I “read” novels is when I “listen” to them on my Ipod. Since I don’t think novels require the kind of close reading that fine short stories do, I usually get bored with them on the page, but enjoy listening to someone read them as Shannon and I stroll for a half hour each morning.
I am sad to say that Shannon died Saturday night, January 16, about 15 minutes before midnight—fifteen years to the day after we brought her home from the animal shelter and made her part of our family. My wife and I had been nursing her for the past couple of weeks while she grew weaker and weaker from kidney failure and a weak heart. She could not walk any more, and she refused to eat, except when I got some homemade chicken broth down her with a turkey baster. All we could do was make her comfortable, keep her hydrated, and watch over her. We were sitting with her when she died.
Different people have different attitudes toward their pets. I grew up on a farm where dogs were only as good as they were useful—for hunting, herding, and guarding the house. They were fed scraps, were not allowed indoors, and were not particularly mourned when they died. My wife, whose heart is so tender she would not step on a bug, has taught me different ways. Shannon, our second dog in our thirty years of marriage (Ollie, our first also died at age 15.) was indeed a member of the family and treated as such. I will miss my morning walks with her. I will continue walking, for the sake of my heart, and listening to novels, for the sake of my education, but it is just not the same on the treadmill or walking alone.
I have been thinking about my experience listening to Brooklyn. It is a relatively short novel, at 250 pages, but, as usual with novels, I got very impatient with it, damning it for the endless details and verisimilitude that I could have done without. It is a simple and formulaic story of Irish immigration—Ireland’s favorite story since the Potato Famine. The central character is Eilis, a young woman who lives in Enniscorthy, a fair sized town in county Wexford, south of Dublin. It is the 1950’s and Eilis lives with her mother and older sister. She has a poor-paying job in a store, but has goals of becoming an accountant. However, she cannot find a decent job and the young men of the town are not very interested in her. A priest who now lives in New York, but is visiting his hometown in Ireland, helps her immigrate to America and finds her a job and a place to live.
With the financial help of her sister, this is accomplished with a lot of detail about her preparations, her journey, her job, her housemates, her landlady. She meets a young man, Tony, of Italian descent, begins dating him, attends night school to study accounting, and generally begins to settle in. Then she gets word of her sister’s sudden death, but before she leaves for Ireland, Tony convinces her to secretly marry him in a civil ceremony. As with most things in Eilis’s life, she agrees to this more out of passivity than out of passion. When she returns to Enniscorthy, she slowly begins to settle in at home again. A young man who ignored her before now pays her much attention. An employer that turned her down before now offers her a better paying job as an accountant. Her mother seems to assume that she will settle down in Enniscorthy. She puts off her return to New York again and again, in spite of Tony’s letters urging her to come back.
This all seemed quite pedestrian and predictable to me as I listened to the plot details and character concerns. The major attractions of the novel as a form—a sympathetic character with which the reader can identify, a fully realized geographical and social world the reader can recognize and live in, a plot with enough unpredictability to keep one turning the page—all seemed to be lacking in this novel. Quite frankly, it bored me. Just another immigration story.
But then, suddenly, as the story concludes, everything seems to tighten and pull together—not like a novel, but like a short story—and I was thrown back to the whole of the story and made to see everything in a new light. I began to realize that I had been listening to Brooklyn like a novel, while I should have been reading it like a short story. What I had missed in the listening, I would have caught in the reading—the precise, poetic style of the work, the careful creation of a literary world with a rhythm of reality all its own. The story is not a realistic novel about a particular woman in a particular time and particular place, but rather a lyrical tale about the universal dilemma of anyone who is displaced, tries to go home again but cannot, returns to the displacement, and finds out that neither the old home nor the new home feels like “home.” Brooklyn is a classic story of homesickness, a story that does not simply give a particular example of homesickness, but rather explores and defines the complexity of what that kind of sickness. As such, it is in the tradition of one of the most famous Irish stories, George Moore’s “Home Sickness.”
Frank O. Connor, in his great little book The Lonely Vlice, singles out "Home Sickness" as representative of the direction that the Irish short story would take in the twentieth century, arguing that it has the "absolute purity of the short story as opposed to the tale.” Although O'Connor says that as a piece of artistic organization, "Home Sickness" is perfect, one's first impression of the story is of its structural simplicity. James Bryden, an Irish immigrant who works in a bar in the Bowery, goes back to Ireland "in search of health," and for a short time considers marrying a peasant girl and remaining there. What unifies the story beyond its simple narrative structure is the understated but sustained tone throughout of Bryden's detachment from the reality of Irish life and his preference to live within a sort of reverie of nostalgia that he is disappointed to find unrealized in reality. He takes no interest in the life of the people and does not so much decide to marry Margaret Dirken as he passively allows the impending marriage to be announced.
Although Bryden finds himself longing for the Bowery as he contrasts the "weakness and incompetence of the people around him with the modern restlessness and cold energy of the people he left behind him," and although he blames the ignorance and primitive nature of the folk who cling to religious authority as his reason to return to America; the conclusion of the story suggests a more subtle and universal theme by unifying the detached dream-like mood of reverie that has been counterpointed throughout against Irish village reality. For the story is truly about the unbridgeable gap between restless reality and dream-like memory.
The style of the story shifts in the penultimate paragraph from what at first seems like a straightforward realistic presentation of Bryden's detached disappointment with Irish life to a compressed summary account of his ordinary and uneventful life in America. After his wife has died and his children are married, he sits in front of the fire, an old man, and "a vague, tender reverie" of Margaret floats up to his consciousness. "His wife and children passed out of mind, and it seemed to him that a memory was the only real thing he possessed, and the desire to see Margaret again grew intense."
The final lyrical paragraph of the story seems in sharp contrast to the realistic style of what has preceded it, in a way that is very similar to the contrast between realism and concluding lyricism that characterizes Joyce's "The Dead": "There is an unchanging, silent life within every man that none knows but himself, and his unchanging, silent life was his memory of Margaret Dirken. The bar-room was forgotten and all that concerned it, and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes around it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue line of wandering hills."
However, as in "The Dead," the concluding lyrical style is not so much in contrast to the former style of the story as it first appears, for what Moore has accomplished is what characterizes the so-called "modern" style of Chekhov, Anderson, and Joyce. What seems to be mere verisimilitude in the story actually is a subtle development of a unified tone of reverie and memory that dominates the description of everyday reality. Although the story on the surface seems to focus on external reality, the real emphasis, as is so often the case with Chekhov and Joyce, is on inner life, for which the details of external reality are significant either only by contrast or as images of subjective reality. Although the concluding revelation of the "unchanging, silent life" of Bryden at first seems unprepared for, much as the lyrical evocation of Gabriel's life does in "The Dead," a closer look at the story reveals that the entire story is dominated by images that suggest the predominance of the subjective life of reverie and imagination over the ordinary life of the everyday.
Moore’s story is a classic of the short story as a genre, tightly wrought around a complex universal theme in which character and plot are in service of something larger than just “stuff that happens.” It is a talent that Colm Tóibín’s short stories seem to lack. His novel The Master won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and almost won the Booker in 2004, but his one collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons (2007) is comparatively flat and flaccid. He suggested in a London interview that it may be his last collection of stories, confessing, “I can’t write short stories.” Tóibín is not only a good novelist; he is also a good critic.
Although I was charmed by his restrained treatment of five challenging years in the life of Henry James, I was disappointed that Tóibín has not learned the “lesson of the master,” to wit, that the short story demands succinctness, that “it should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form.” With the exception of the final story, “A Long Winter,” a fine example of what James called his ideal, “the beautiful and blest nouvelle,” most of these stories suffer either from Tóibín’s underestimation or misunderstanding of the short story form. One problem may be the casual and calculated way the book originated. Tóibín has said that after the fluency of The Master he felt for a time that he had nothing; then some stories came to him: “A Song,” about a young man who hears his mother, who abandoned him as a child, sing, and “A Priest in the Family,” about an elderly mother whose son, a priest, is accused of abusing a young man.
Recovering a story he wrote in 1979, “A Journey,” about a mother driving her depressed son home from the hospital, he realized that the common theme of mother-son relationships might very well hold a book together. He then added the mother angle to two unfinished sketches--“The Name of the Game” and “The Use of Reason” to provide them with a conflict. All he needed now were a couple of new pieces: “Famous Blue Raincoat,” about a woman recalling her youthful experience singing in a band when her son discovers some of her old records, and “Three Friends,” about a young man who, after the death of his mother, attends a beach rave and has a homosexual experience with a friend.
In spite of the book’s overall intention, the individual stories fall short as individual stories. “The Song” focuses on a potentially powerful encounter, but since the reader cannot hear the song the mother sings and Tóibín’s prose here is too ordinary to capture the magic of that moment, the story lacks emotional impact. “The Name of the Game,” about a woman who has a gender and generational conflict with her son after salvaging a failing business left her by her husband, simply has no emotional core to sustain it. The issues at stake—the social pressures of a small Irish town—are too general and novelistic, and the story simply goes on too long about the specific steps the woman takes to make an economic success of the venture.
“Famous Blue Raincoat” tries to suggest the difference between old Ireland and the new economic Celtic Tiger—but lacks any compelling thematic or emotional connection between the past, which dominates most of the story, and the present, which serves as merely a convenient hook. “Three Friends,” another story about modern Ireland, also fails because it creates no compelling connection between the grief of the young man who has lost his mother and the sexual encounter he has with his friend. “A Priest in the Family is too obviously “ripped from the headlines,” featuring a thoroughly modern mother, age 80, who has learned to handled a VCR and email, but must find a way to face those who know that her son the priest is a pedophile.
“The Long Winter,” occupying one third of the book, is the best story here, and not just because of its length. Taking place in a rural village in the Pyrenees in Spain, it focuses on a young man whose mother has disappeared in a snowstorm. Based on a true story told to Tóibín by a man who sold him a house in Spain, the story has the formal control of folktale, ballad, myth. Tóibín, his own best critic, has called this his most powerful piece, recognizing that its purity of line and clarity of emotion places it in a different realm than the other stories. Tonally flawless and emotionally compelling, “The Long Winter,” a perfect example of James’s “beautiful and blest nouvelle,” alone is worth the price of Mothers and Sons.
If you have read Brooklyn, please let me know what you think.
A FOOTNOTE: Perhaps this is what bloggers with open blogs have to expect: I have received three or four "comments" that were links to porn sites and other such nonsense on some of my blogs. Consequently, you will see: "Comment deleted by moderator" on some of my recent blogs. Anyone have any advice on what else I can do to prevent this?
I am sad to say that Shannon died Saturday night, January 16, about 15 minutes before midnight—fifteen years to the day after we brought her home from the animal shelter and made her part of our family. My wife and I had been nursing her for the past couple of weeks while she grew weaker and weaker from kidney failure and a weak heart. She could not walk any more, and she refused to eat, except when I got some homemade chicken broth down her with a turkey baster. All we could do was make her comfortable, keep her hydrated, and watch over her. We were sitting with her when she died.
Different people have different attitudes toward their pets. I grew up on a farm where dogs were only as good as they were useful—for hunting, herding, and guarding the house. They were fed scraps, were not allowed indoors, and were not particularly mourned when they died. My wife, whose heart is so tender she would not step on a bug, has taught me different ways. Shannon, our second dog in our thirty years of marriage (Ollie, our first also died at age 15.) was indeed a member of the family and treated as such. I will miss my morning walks with her. I will continue walking, for the sake of my heart, and listening to novels, for the sake of my education, but it is just not the same on the treadmill or walking alone.
I have been thinking about my experience listening to Brooklyn. It is a relatively short novel, at 250 pages, but, as usual with novels, I got very impatient with it, damning it for the endless details and verisimilitude that I could have done without. It is a simple and formulaic story of Irish immigration—Ireland’s favorite story since the Potato Famine. The central character is Eilis, a young woman who lives in Enniscorthy, a fair sized town in county Wexford, south of Dublin. It is the 1950’s and Eilis lives with her mother and older sister. She has a poor-paying job in a store, but has goals of becoming an accountant. However, she cannot find a decent job and the young men of the town are not very interested in her. A priest who now lives in New York, but is visiting his hometown in Ireland, helps her immigrate to America and finds her a job and a place to live.
With the financial help of her sister, this is accomplished with a lot of detail about her preparations, her journey, her job, her housemates, her landlady. She meets a young man, Tony, of Italian descent, begins dating him, attends night school to study accounting, and generally begins to settle in. Then she gets word of her sister’s sudden death, but before she leaves for Ireland, Tony convinces her to secretly marry him in a civil ceremony. As with most things in Eilis’s life, she agrees to this more out of passivity than out of passion. When she returns to Enniscorthy, she slowly begins to settle in at home again. A young man who ignored her before now pays her much attention. An employer that turned her down before now offers her a better paying job as an accountant. Her mother seems to assume that she will settle down in Enniscorthy. She puts off her return to New York again and again, in spite of Tony’s letters urging her to come back.
This all seemed quite pedestrian and predictable to me as I listened to the plot details and character concerns. The major attractions of the novel as a form—a sympathetic character with which the reader can identify, a fully realized geographical and social world the reader can recognize and live in, a plot with enough unpredictability to keep one turning the page—all seemed to be lacking in this novel. Quite frankly, it bored me. Just another immigration story.
But then, suddenly, as the story concludes, everything seems to tighten and pull together—not like a novel, but like a short story—and I was thrown back to the whole of the story and made to see everything in a new light. I began to realize that I had been listening to Brooklyn like a novel, while I should have been reading it like a short story. What I had missed in the listening, I would have caught in the reading—the precise, poetic style of the work, the careful creation of a literary world with a rhythm of reality all its own. The story is not a realistic novel about a particular woman in a particular time and particular place, but rather a lyrical tale about the universal dilemma of anyone who is displaced, tries to go home again but cannot, returns to the displacement, and finds out that neither the old home nor the new home feels like “home.” Brooklyn is a classic story of homesickness, a story that does not simply give a particular example of homesickness, but rather explores and defines the complexity of what that kind of sickness. As such, it is in the tradition of one of the most famous Irish stories, George Moore’s “Home Sickness.”
Frank O. Connor, in his great little book The Lonely Vlice, singles out "Home Sickness" as representative of the direction that the Irish short story would take in the twentieth century, arguing that it has the "absolute purity of the short story as opposed to the tale.” Although O'Connor says that as a piece of artistic organization, "Home Sickness" is perfect, one's first impression of the story is of its structural simplicity. James Bryden, an Irish immigrant who works in a bar in the Bowery, goes back to Ireland "in search of health," and for a short time considers marrying a peasant girl and remaining there. What unifies the story beyond its simple narrative structure is the understated but sustained tone throughout of Bryden's detachment from the reality of Irish life and his preference to live within a sort of reverie of nostalgia that he is disappointed to find unrealized in reality. He takes no interest in the life of the people and does not so much decide to marry Margaret Dirken as he passively allows the impending marriage to be announced.
Although Bryden finds himself longing for the Bowery as he contrasts the "weakness and incompetence of the people around him with the modern restlessness and cold energy of the people he left behind him," and although he blames the ignorance and primitive nature of the folk who cling to religious authority as his reason to return to America; the conclusion of the story suggests a more subtle and universal theme by unifying the detached dream-like mood of reverie that has been counterpointed throughout against Irish village reality. For the story is truly about the unbridgeable gap between restless reality and dream-like memory.
The style of the story shifts in the penultimate paragraph from what at first seems like a straightforward realistic presentation of Bryden's detached disappointment with Irish life to a compressed summary account of his ordinary and uneventful life in America. After his wife has died and his children are married, he sits in front of the fire, an old man, and "a vague, tender reverie" of Margaret floats up to his consciousness. "His wife and children passed out of mind, and it seemed to him that a memory was the only real thing he possessed, and the desire to see Margaret again grew intense."
The final lyrical paragraph of the story seems in sharp contrast to the realistic style of what has preceded it, in a way that is very similar to the contrast between realism and concluding lyricism that characterizes Joyce's "The Dead": "There is an unchanging, silent life within every man that none knows but himself, and his unchanging, silent life was his memory of Margaret Dirken. The bar-room was forgotten and all that concerned it, and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes around it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue line of wandering hills."
However, as in "The Dead," the concluding lyrical style is not so much in contrast to the former style of the story as it first appears, for what Moore has accomplished is what characterizes the so-called "modern" style of Chekhov, Anderson, and Joyce. What seems to be mere verisimilitude in the story actually is a subtle development of a unified tone of reverie and memory that dominates the description of everyday reality. Although the story on the surface seems to focus on external reality, the real emphasis, as is so often the case with Chekhov and Joyce, is on inner life, for which the details of external reality are significant either only by contrast or as images of subjective reality. Although the concluding revelation of the "unchanging, silent life" of Bryden at first seems unprepared for, much as the lyrical evocation of Gabriel's life does in "The Dead," a closer look at the story reveals that the entire story is dominated by images that suggest the predominance of the subjective life of reverie and imagination over the ordinary life of the everyday.
Moore’s story is a classic of the short story as a genre, tightly wrought around a complex universal theme in which character and plot are in service of something larger than just “stuff that happens.” It is a talent that Colm Tóibín’s short stories seem to lack. His novel The Master won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and almost won the Booker in 2004, but his one collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons (2007) is comparatively flat and flaccid. He suggested in a London interview that it may be his last collection of stories, confessing, “I can’t write short stories.” Tóibín is not only a good novelist; he is also a good critic.
Although I was charmed by his restrained treatment of five challenging years in the life of Henry James, I was disappointed that Tóibín has not learned the “lesson of the master,” to wit, that the short story demands succinctness, that “it should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form.” With the exception of the final story, “A Long Winter,” a fine example of what James called his ideal, “the beautiful and blest nouvelle,” most of these stories suffer either from Tóibín’s underestimation or misunderstanding of the short story form. One problem may be the casual and calculated way the book originated. Tóibín has said that after the fluency of The Master he felt for a time that he had nothing; then some stories came to him: “A Song,” about a young man who hears his mother, who abandoned him as a child, sing, and “A Priest in the Family,” about an elderly mother whose son, a priest, is accused of abusing a young man.
Recovering a story he wrote in 1979, “A Journey,” about a mother driving her depressed son home from the hospital, he realized that the common theme of mother-son relationships might very well hold a book together. He then added the mother angle to two unfinished sketches--“The Name of the Game” and “The Use of Reason” to provide them with a conflict. All he needed now were a couple of new pieces: “Famous Blue Raincoat,” about a woman recalling her youthful experience singing in a band when her son discovers some of her old records, and “Three Friends,” about a young man who, after the death of his mother, attends a beach rave and has a homosexual experience with a friend.
In spite of the book’s overall intention, the individual stories fall short as individual stories. “The Song” focuses on a potentially powerful encounter, but since the reader cannot hear the song the mother sings and Tóibín’s prose here is too ordinary to capture the magic of that moment, the story lacks emotional impact. “The Name of the Game,” about a woman who has a gender and generational conflict with her son after salvaging a failing business left her by her husband, simply has no emotional core to sustain it. The issues at stake—the social pressures of a small Irish town—are too general and novelistic, and the story simply goes on too long about the specific steps the woman takes to make an economic success of the venture.
“Famous Blue Raincoat” tries to suggest the difference between old Ireland and the new economic Celtic Tiger—but lacks any compelling thematic or emotional connection between the past, which dominates most of the story, and the present, which serves as merely a convenient hook. “Three Friends,” another story about modern Ireland, also fails because it creates no compelling connection between the grief of the young man who has lost his mother and the sexual encounter he has with his friend. “A Priest in the Family is too obviously “ripped from the headlines,” featuring a thoroughly modern mother, age 80, who has learned to handled a VCR and email, but must find a way to face those who know that her son the priest is a pedophile.
“The Long Winter,” occupying one third of the book, is the best story here, and not just because of its length. Taking place in a rural village in the Pyrenees in Spain, it focuses on a young man whose mother has disappeared in a snowstorm. Based on a true story told to Tóibín by a man who sold him a house in Spain, the story has the formal control of folktale, ballad, myth. Tóibín, his own best critic, has called this his most powerful piece, recognizing that its purity of line and clarity of emotion places it in a different realm than the other stories. Tonally flawless and emotionally compelling, “The Long Winter,” a perfect example of James’s “beautiful and blest nouvelle,” alone is worth the price of Mothers and Sons.
If you have read Brooklyn, please let me know what you think.
A FOOTNOTE: Perhaps this is what bloggers with open blogs have to expect: I have received three or four "comments" that were links to porn sites and other such nonsense on some of my blogs. Consequently, you will see: "Comment deleted by moderator" on some of my recent blogs. Anyone have any advice on what else I can do to prevent this?
Thursday, January 7, 2010
The Novella: Some Tentative Suggestions
As a lifelong student of the short story, I have always been interested in its closest narrative neighbor, the novella, which began with Boccaccio’s innovative short form in The Decameron and became quite a different fictional form when it was expanded by Romantic German writers in the nineteenth century. Several years ago, I created and taught a seminar in the novella form, focusing on classic examples of the genre from Europe and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the request of one of the readers of this blog, I have gone back to my notes about the novella and have developed the following tentative suggestions about the form that may or may not be helpful in situating the novella somewhere in between the short story and the novel.
In the Jan/Feb, 2010 issue of Poets and Writers, the editors note that there are precious few places writers can place a story that is too long for a literary magazine and too short for a traditional book publisher. They mention One Story and Melville House Publishing as two such places and then call attention to a new publisher, Madras Press (www.madraspress.com), founded last fall in Brookline, Mass. This nonprofit press publishes individually bound novellas in paperback originals, at about five or six dollars each, with proceeds going to a charity of the author’s choice.
The critical problem of the novella is that it is a genre with many names, but little or no description. Variously called the short novel, the novelette, the nouvelle, the novelle, and the novella, with no real distinction between these terms except perhaps country of origin or personal preference, its usual (not very helpful) definition is that it is longer than a short story and shorter than a novel. Those who dare a more prescriptive definition usually place its length between 20,000 and 50,000 words.
The most cogent comment on the form, often cited by critics with much agreement but little elaboration, is the famous remark made by Henry James in his Preface to The Lesson of the Master. Calling the novella, on the dimensional ground, for length and breadth, “our ideal,” James says that its “main merit and sign is the effort to do the complicated thing with a strong brevity and lucidity—to arrive, on behalf of the multiplicity, at a certain science of control.” The comment has led to the (also not very helpful) observation that the novella has the novel’s complexity and the short story’s control. But is the “complexity” of the novel the same kind of complexity in the novella? And is the “control” of the short story the same kind of control as the novella? Does the novella deal with a type of subject matter unique to it, or does it make use of a unique kind of control, or both, or neither?
Although generic criticism is distrusted by many readers who fear the critic will try to delimit the work and dictate the shape future works may hold, the fact of the matter is when a reader comes to a work of literary art he or she already has certain expectations based on past experience. A reader does not read a novel expecting the same kind of experience he or she has when reading a short story. When reading the hybrid form called the novella, the reader is not quite sure whether to bring to it the expectations he or she has always brought to the novel or the expectations he or she has always brought to the short story.
Without going into the convoluted and esoteric pros and cons of genre theory, which I have studied for years, I simply assert that 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 it entirely. Furthermore, I simply assert that basically I agree with the great Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset that genres are “certain basic themes, mutually exclusive, true aesthetic categories.” For example, according to Ortega, the epic is not so much a poetic form, as it is a “basic poetic content that reaches fulfillment in the process of its expansion or manifestation.”
Based on my own inductive study of many of the classic nineteenth and twentieth century novellas, I have tentatively formulated the following hypotheses about the typical plot, character configuration, and setting of the novella form.
Plot: The basic action is that an ordered situation broken up by disorder. Dostoevsky’s ”Notes from Underground” illustrates this tension, as does Unamuno’s “Abel Sanchez” and Conrad’s “The Duel.” See also Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” D. H. Lawrence’s “The Fox,” Gide’s “Pastoral Symphony,” Wright Morris’s “Love Among the Cannibals,” Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Carson McCuller’s “Ballad of the Sad Café.” In all these works, a character is leading a normal life, until one day something enters that life and breaks it up. A crisis is initiated; something has to be done; someone has to make a choice of nightmares. In initiation stories such as Conrad’s “The Shadow Line,” Alberto Moravia’s “Agostino,” and Turgenev’s “First Love,” one is introduced to the irrational. In James’ “The Pupil,” one is drawn into the irrational, but steps back. In James’ “Beast in the Jungle,” one realizes too late. In Conrad’s “Typhoon,” one confronts it and deals with it. In Katherine Ann Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,’ one wants to escape into an absolute of death/eternity.
What is this irrational invasion? In “Bartleby the Scrivener,” it is Bartleby himself. In Bellow’s “Seize the Day,” it is Tamkin the magician. In Mann’s “Mario and the Magician,” it is Cipolla. In Mann’s “Death in Venice,” it is Tadzio and Venice itself. In Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer, “ it is Legatt, the second self. In Faulkner’s “The Bear,” it is the bear. In Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” it is the great fish. In Porter’s “Noon Wine,” it is Hatch and Helton. In Joyce’s “The Dead,” it is Michael Furey.
Character: The number of characters in the novella is almost always limited to two or three. Additional characters usually function as choral response for the interactions of the two or three major characters. In many cases there is only one character caught in a dialectic with other aspects of the self. The action then is almost always an internal one, a lyric action in which emotional or psychological states are objectified in dramatic characters. Ivan Ilych is alone of course, for in facing death one is always ultimately alone. Gregory Samsa’s sister represents a side of himself that he fails to incorporate. The same can be said of Tolstoy’s “Master and Man” and Unamuno’s “Abel Sanchez,” both of which depend on the Cain/Abel “Am I my brother’s keeper motif?” Other dualities include: Lennie and George in Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” Tommy and Tamkin in Bellow’s “Seize the Day; Nick and Gatsby in “The Great Gatsby”; the captain and his double Legatt in “The Secret Sharer”; Neil and Brenda in Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus,”
Triangular relationships are also common. In “Benito Cereno,” it is Delano, Babo, and Benito. In “The Fox,” it is March, Banford, and Henry. In “Ballad of the Sad Café,” it is Macey, Lyman, and Amelia. In Turgenev’s “First Love,” it is the son, the girl, the father. In Gide’s “Pastoral Symphony,” it is the pastor, the wife, and the girl. In “Billy Budd,” it is Vere, Billy, and Claggart. In “The Dead,” it is Gabriel, Gretta, and Furey.
.
Setting: The setting is usually a microcosmic, closed world, somehow cut off from the everyday world of normal reality. Or else no physical setting is actualized at all. For example in “Notes from Underground,” the first part simply asserts it is from a mouse hole, but no physical description from which the underground man speaks is given. In “Metamorphosis,” the only outside world there is a bleak view of a hospital and the lighted drawing room of the family to which Gregor is drawn o three significant excursions from his room.
A social or historical setting seldom plays a direct role in the novella. The physical setting of “The Shadow Line,” “Typhoon,” “Benito Cereno,” “The Secret Sharer,” “Billy Budd,” and “The Old Man and the Sea” is of course that shifting amorphous source of the primitive, the sea itself. Physical, social, and historical settings play little role in “The Pupil,” “Beast in the Jungle,” “Pastoral Symphony,” “Abel Sanchez,” “Death of Ivan Ilych.” Actual place settings play symbolic roles in “Heart of Darkness,” "Mario and the Magician,” “Love Among the Cannibals, and “Ballad of the Sad Café.” This is also true of the hotel in “Seize the Day,” Wall Street in “Bartleby,” Venice in “Death in Venice,” the party and the hotel room in “The Dead,” the prison camp in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” East Egg, West Egg, and the Valley of Ashes in “The Great Gatsby.”
Tentative Conclusion: Based on my reading of hundreds of novels and novellas and thousands of short stories, I believe that the novella is closer to the short story both in theme and technique than it is to the novel. So, for me the question is not what makes the novella shorter than the novel, but what makes the novella longer than the short story. The central issue is what kind of “complexity” is involved in all three forms. To run the risk of oversimplification, I would hazard the following distinctions. The complexity of the novel is social, historical, and cultural. The complexity of the short story is psychological, mythical, and lyric. The complexity of the novella is psychological, mythical, and philosophical.
In the Jan/Feb, 2010 issue of Poets and Writers, the editors note that there are precious few places writers can place a story that is too long for a literary magazine and too short for a traditional book publisher. They mention One Story and Melville House Publishing as two such places and then call attention to a new publisher, Madras Press (www.madraspress.com), founded last fall in Brookline, Mass. This nonprofit press publishes individually bound novellas in paperback originals, at about five or six dollars each, with proceeds going to a charity of the author’s choice.
The critical problem of the novella is that it is a genre with many names, but little or no description. Variously called the short novel, the novelette, the nouvelle, the novelle, and the novella, with no real distinction between these terms except perhaps country of origin or personal preference, its usual (not very helpful) definition is that it is longer than a short story and shorter than a novel. Those who dare a more prescriptive definition usually place its length between 20,000 and 50,000 words.
The most cogent comment on the form, often cited by critics with much agreement but little elaboration, is the famous remark made by Henry James in his Preface to The Lesson of the Master. Calling the novella, on the dimensional ground, for length and breadth, “our ideal,” James says that its “main merit and sign is the effort to do the complicated thing with a strong brevity and lucidity—to arrive, on behalf of the multiplicity, at a certain science of control.” The comment has led to the (also not very helpful) observation that the novella has the novel’s complexity and the short story’s control. But is the “complexity” of the novel the same kind of complexity in the novella? And is the “control” of the short story the same kind of control as the novella? Does the novella deal with a type of subject matter unique to it, or does it make use of a unique kind of control, or both, or neither?
Although generic criticism is distrusted by many readers who fear the critic will try to delimit the work and dictate the shape future works may hold, the fact of the matter is when a reader comes to a work of literary art he or she already has certain expectations based on past experience. A reader does not read a novel expecting the same kind of experience he or she has when reading a short story. When reading the hybrid form called the novella, the reader is not quite sure whether to bring to it the expectations he or she has always brought to the novel or the expectations he or she has always brought to the short story.
Without going into the convoluted and esoteric pros and cons of genre theory, which I have studied for years, I simply assert that 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 it entirely. Furthermore, I simply assert that basically I agree with the great Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset that genres are “certain basic themes, mutually exclusive, true aesthetic categories.” For example, according to Ortega, the epic is not so much a poetic form, as it is a “basic poetic content that reaches fulfillment in the process of its expansion or manifestation.”
Based on my own inductive study of many of the classic nineteenth and twentieth century novellas, I have tentatively formulated the following hypotheses about the typical plot, character configuration, and setting of the novella form.
Plot: The basic action is that an ordered situation broken up by disorder. Dostoevsky’s ”Notes from Underground” illustrates this tension, as does Unamuno’s “Abel Sanchez” and Conrad’s “The Duel.” See also Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” D. H. Lawrence’s “The Fox,” Gide’s “Pastoral Symphony,” Wright Morris’s “Love Among the Cannibals,” Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Carson McCuller’s “Ballad of the Sad Café.” In all these works, a character is leading a normal life, until one day something enters that life and breaks it up. A crisis is initiated; something has to be done; someone has to make a choice of nightmares. In initiation stories such as Conrad’s “The Shadow Line,” Alberto Moravia’s “Agostino,” and Turgenev’s “First Love,” one is introduced to the irrational. In James’ “The Pupil,” one is drawn into the irrational, but steps back. In James’ “Beast in the Jungle,” one realizes too late. In Conrad’s “Typhoon,” one confronts it and deals with it. In Katherine Ann Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,’ one wants to escape into an absolute of death/eternity.
What is this irrational invasion? In “Bartleby the Scrivener,” it is Bartleby himself. In Bellow’s “Seize the Day,” it is Tamkin the magician. In Mann’s “Mario and the Magician,” it is Cipolla. In Mann’s “Death in Venice,” it is Tadzio and Venice itself. In Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer, “ it is Legatt, the second self. In Faulkner’s “The Bear,” it is the bear. In Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” it is the great fish. In Porter’s “Noon Wine,” it is Hatch and Helton. In Joyce’s “The Dead,” it is Michael Furey.
Character: The number of characters in the novella is almost always limited to two or three. Additional characters usually function as choral response for the interactions of the two or three major characters. In many cases there is only one character caught in a dialectic with other aspects of the self. The action then is almost always an internal one, a lyric action in which emotional or psychological states are objectified in dramatic characters. Ivan Ilych is alone of course, for in facing death one is always ultimately alone. Gregory Samsa’s sister represents a side of himself that he fails to incorporate. The same can be said of Tolstoy’s “Master and Man” and Unamuno’s “Abel Sanchez,” both of which depend on the Cain/Abel “Am I my brother’s keeper motif?” Other dualities include: Lennie and George in Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” Tommy and Tamkin in Bellow’s “Seize the Day; Nick and Gatsby in “The Great Gatsby”; the captain and his double Legatt in “The Secret Sharer”; Neil and Brenda in Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus,”
Triangular relationships are also common. In “Benito Cereno,” it is Delano, Babo, and Benito. In “The Fox,” it is March, Banford, and Henry. In “Ballad of the Sad Café,” it is Macey, Lyman, and Amelia. In Turgenev’s “First Love,” it is the son, the girl, the father. In Gide’s “Pastoral Symphony,” it is the pastor, the wife, and the girl. In “Billy Budd,” it is Vere, Billy, and Claggart. In “The Dead,” it is Gabriel, Gretta, and Furey.
.
Setting: The setting is usually a microcosmic, closed world, somehow cut off from the everyday world of normal reality. Or else no physical setting is actualized at all. For example in “Notes from Underground,” the first part simply asserts it is from a mouse hole, but no physical description from which the underground man speaks is given. In “Metamorphosis,” the only outside world there is a bleak view of a hospital and the lighted drawing room of the family to which Gregor is drawn o three significant excursions from his room.
A social or historical setting seldom plays a direct role in the novella. The physical setting of “The Shadow Line,” “Typhoon,” “Benito Cereno,” “The Secret Sharer,” “Billy Budd,” and “The Old Man and the Sea” is of course that shifting amorphous source of the primitive, the sea itself. Physical, social, and historical settings play little role in “The Pupil,” “Beast in the Jungle,” “Pastoral Symphony,” “Abel Sanchez,” “Death of Ivan Ilych.” Actual place settings play symbolic roles in “Heart of Darkness,” "Mario and the Magician,” “Love Among the Cannibals, and “Ballad of the Sad Café.” This is also true of the hotel in “Seize the Day,” Wall Street in “Bartleby,” Venice in “Death in Venice,” the party and the hotel room in “The Dead,” the prison camp in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” East Egg, West Egg, and the Valley of Ashes in “The Great Gatsby.”
Tentative Conclusion: Based on my reading of hundreds of novels and novellas and thousands of short stories, I believe that the novella is closer to the short story both in theme and technique than it is to the novel. So, for me the question is not what makes the novella shorter than the novel, but what makes the novella longer than the short story. The central issue is what kind of “complexity” is involved in all three forms. To run the risk of oversimplification, I would hazard the following distinctions. The complexity of the novel is social, historical, and cultural. The complexity of the short story is psychological, mythical, and lyric. The complexity of the novella is psychological, mythical, and philosophical.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Alice Munro's TOO MUCH HAPPINESS
Alice Munro once insisted, “I don’t understand where the excitement is supposed to come in a novel, and I do in a short story.” On another occasion, she used a metaphor to describe this short-story excitement. “I can get a kind of tension when I’m writing a short story, like I’m pulling on a rope and I know where the rope is attached. With a novel, everything goes flabby.” Munro says she doesn’t seem to be able to write in any other way. “I guess that’s why I don’t write a novel. God knows I still keep trying. But there always comes a point where everything seems to be getting really flat. You don’t feel the tension…I don’t feel this pulling on the rope to get to the other side that I have to feel.” Munro added, “People have suggested this is because I want to be able to manage everything and that I fear loss of control…. I have to agree that I fear loss of control. But I don’t think it’s anything as simple as that.”
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. 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.” “What I like is not to really know what the story is all about. And for me to keep trying to find out.” What makes a story interesting, she says, is the “thing that I don’t know and that I will discover as I go along.
I have written about Munro in more detail in another place, especially the common critical view (mistaken, I think) that Munro’s stories are “novelistic’ (“Why Does Alice Munro Write Short Stories?” Wascana Review 38 (2003): 16-28. I did a blog entry on the story “Wenlock Edge” in this new collection last February). I will thus only raise one issue about this new book—the thematic significance of the title, which originated with Munro’s discovery of the 19th-century Russian mathematician and novelist Sophia Kovalevsky while looking for something else in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The title story focuses on the last few days before Kovalevsky died of pneumonia contracted during a cold wet trip from Paris to Stockholm, where she held a chair in mathematics, the first woman to hold such a professorship in European history. Kovalevsky’s seemingly contradictory talents led Munro to a biography by Don H. Kennedy and his wife entitled Little Sparrow: A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky (1983), which quotes Kovalevsky’s last words at four o’clock in the morning on February 10, 1891: “Too much happiness.” Kovalevsky has been looking forward to the future, having received recognition for her work in an era when woman were not thought to be capable of higher mathematical thinking. She is also happily anticipating her forthcoming marriage to Maxsim Kovalesky, a distant relation and a professor of law--a great bear of a man who offers her comfort and security. Although the title of the story may suggest that Kovalevsky has so much happiness her death is a tragedy, it also may suggest her acceptance of the fact that happiness cannot be separated from unhappiness.
Indeed, the inextricability of happiness and unhappiness may be the thematic web that Munro weaves throughout many of the stories in this collection, especially since several reviewers have already suggested that there is much more violence in these stories than in Munro’s previous work: Two young girls murder an abhorred playmate; a man kills his children because he thinks his wife has walked out on him; a woman dying of cancer is threatened in her home by a man who has murdered his family. However, in keeping with the theme of “too much happiness,” or happiness bound up with unhappiness, the horror in these stories is often balanced by some compensatory acceptance. For example in “Dimensions,” although the central character’s insane bullying husband has killed their children, she understands that he knows their life and their children better than anyone else and goes to visit him in an asylum. Moreover, the story ends with a random rescue and a kind of personal salvation that seems somehow poetically just.
“Free Radicals” is also about a bittersweet confrontation that ends with poetic justice. The central character who has cancer and whose husband has recently died, has her home invaded by a man who shows her pictures of his parents and sister that he has recently murdered. In spite of the fact that she knows the cancer will kill probably her, she clings to life and tries to gain the intruder’s sympathy by telling him how she has been guilty of a crime in her past. However, the story is a lie, a fiction in which she takes on the role of her husband’s wronged first wife who is going to poison the other woman. Telling her that what he did was not so underhanded as what she did, the murderer leaves, only to be killed in a car accident.
Although in the last forty years the short story has been characterized first by experimentation and then by attenuation, Alice Munro has continued to go her own way, so confident of the nature of the short story and her control of the form that she needs to observe no trends nor imitate no precursors.
ore polished and profound than she has ever been, Alice Munro is the preeminent practitioner of the short story--and one of the most brilliant writers in any genre—in the world today. If there is any justice and judgment in matters literary, she should redeem the short story from its second-class status single-handedly.
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. 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.” “What I like is not to really know what the story is all about. And for me to keep trying to find out.” What makes a story interesting, she says, is the “thing that I don’t know and that I will discover as I go along.
I have written about Munro in more detail in another place, especially the common critical view (mistaken, I think) that Munro’s stories are “novelistic’ (“Why Does Alice Munro Write Short Stories?” Wascana Review 38 (2003): 16-28. I did a blog entry on the story “Wenlock Edge” in this new collection last February). I will thus only raise one issue about this new book—the thematic significance of the title, which originated with Munro’s discovery of the 19th-century Russian mathematician and novelist Sophia Kovalevsky while looking for something else in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The title story focuses on the last few days before Kovalevsky died of pneumonia contracted during a cold wet trip from Paris to Stockholm, where she held a chair in mathematics, the first woman to hold such a professorship in European history. Kovalevsky’s seemingly contradictory talents led Munro to a biography by Don H. Kennedy and his wife entitled Little Sparrow: A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky (1983), which quotes Kovalevsky’s last words at four o’clock in the morning on February 10, 1891: “Too much happiness.” Kovalevsky has been looking forward to the future, having received recognition for her work in an era when woman were not thought to be capable of higher mathematical thinking. She is also happily anticipating her forthcoming marriage to Maxsim Kovalesky, a distant relation and a professor of law--a great bear of a man who offers her comfort and security. Although the title of the story may suggest that Kovalevsky has so much happiness her death is a tragedy, it also may suggest her acceptance of the fact that happiness cannot be separated from unhappiness.
Indeed, the inextricability of happiness and unhappiness may be the thematic web that Munro weaves throughout many of the stories in this collection, especially since several reviewers have already suggested that there is much more violence in these stories than in Munro’s previous work: Two young girls murder an abhorred playmate; a man kills his children because he thinks his wife has walked out on him; a woman dying of cancer is threatened in her home by a man who has murdered his family. However, in keeping with the theme of “too much happiness,” or happiness bound up with unhappiness, the horror in these stories is often balanced by some compensatory acceptance. For example in “Dimensions,” although the central character’s insane bullying husband has killed their children, she understands that he knows their life and their children better than anyone else and goes to visit him in an asylum. Moreover, the story ends with a random rescue and a kind of personal salvation that seems somehow poetically just.
“Free Radicals” is also about a bittersweet confrontation that ends with poetic justice. The central character who has cancer and whose husband has recently died, has her home invaded by a man who shows her pictures of his parents and sister that he has recently murdered. In spite of the fact that she knows the cancer will kill probably her, she clings to life and tries to gain the intruder’s sympathy by telling him how she has been guilty of a crime in her past. However, the story is a lie, a fiction in which she takes on the role of her husband’s wronged first wife who is going to poison the other woman. Telling her that what he did was not so underhanded as what she did, the murderer leaves, only to be killed in a car accident.
Although in the last forty years the short story has been characterized first by experimentation and then by attenuation, Alice Munro has continued to go her own way, so confident of the nature of the short story and her control of the form that she needs to observe no trends nor imitate no precursors.
ore polished and profound than she has ever been, Alice Munro is the preeminent practitioner of the short story--and one of the most brilliant writers in any genre—in the world today. If there is any justice and judgment in matters literary, she should redeem the short story from its second-class status single-handedly.
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