Ambrose Bierce, "Chickamauga"—Short Story Month 2016-Day 4

The anti-war theme of Ambrose Bierce's story "Chickamauga" depends on the basic tensions between child world and adult world and between fantasy and reality.  The boy's fantasy world of playing at war is his only reality; consequently, when he encounters the genuine external reality of war it seems curiously fantastic to him; thus he is able to integrate it effortlessly into his fantasy play world. 

Bierce develops the story on the ironic realization that the adult view of war often springs from child-like views in which men glorify battle, only to find out too late that the reality of it is horror and death.   The primary communicators of this fantasy image of war in Bierce's story are books and pictures which glorify war, for the boy has been taught "postures of aggression and defense" by the "engraver's art."  Thus when he encounters the actuality of war, the boy responds to it as if it were merely the fantasy pictures he has seen or the world of play-reality he has known.

As is typical of many Bierce stories, style and technique are practically everything in "Chickamauga."  Although Bierce was writing during a period of American Literature characterized by realistic depictions of external reality, Bierce maintained his allegiance to romanticism.  Often compared with Edgar Allan Poe, Bierce focuses not so much on external reality but rather on the strange dream-like world that lies somewhere in between fantasy and reality.  Thus, the genius of his stories depends not so much on the theme, which is often fairly obvious, but on the delicate and tightly controlled way that Bierce tells the story and creates a nightmarish world that involves the reader emotionally.    

The fact that the boy is a deaf mute emphasizes his childish fantasy world detached from external reality and makes more plausible the primary device of contrasting the child's view of war as a game with the adult's view of it as a horrifying actuality.  It enables Bierce to set up a strange dreamlike effect as we see the events primarily from the boy's point of view.

 However, even as the story depends on Bierce's developing the perspective of the child, in which the reader is made to see the maimed and bleeding soldiers as circus clowns and child-like playmates, this point of view is counterpointed by that of an adult teller--sometimes in a developed background exposition, sometimes in a flat declarative statement.  For example, when the boy seems to see some strange animals crawling through the forest, the narrator simply says: "They were men." When the boy sees men lying in the water as if without heads, the narrator simply says: "They were drowned."

This narrator is not named in the story, but is presented as a disembodied presence who not only sees what the boy sees, but also sees the boy and draws conclusions about the boy's responses. The boy's mind is as inaccessible to him as it is to the reader.  This technique enables the reader to respond both to the boy's point of view and to the adult teller. As the narrator says about the scene witnessed by the boy, "not all of this did the child note; it is what would have been noted by an elder observer."

And indeed it is the elder observer who establishes the ironic tone at the beginning of the story which mocks the warrior-fire, the heroic race, and the notion of a spirit of battle in the boy which make him born to "war and dominion as a heritage."

It is the subtle tension between this adult point of view and the childish perception of the boy that creates the story's impact and reflects its theme.  At one point in the story when the boy (because of his deafness) sleeps through the battle that rages nearby, the adult narrator says he was as "heedless of the grandeur of the struggle as the dead who had died to make the glory."

Because of this structural counterpoint the narrator has no need to make any more explicit comment on the action.  For the juxtaposition of the two perspectives creates a tragic irony of war as something more than an heroic and childish game, even as it makes us see how war depends on just such a childish point of view to persist. 

A film version of this story, part of a trilogy of Bierce stories by French director Robert Enrico, begins with pictures of fighters behind the opening credits. The film is eerily silent, with grotesque images of men crawling across the ground as the camera pans the area disclosing more and more wounded and silent soldiers.  Visual images in the film are not as violent and graphic as those described in Bierce's story; however, the anti-war theme is stronger in the film than in the story because of the stark juxtaposition of images of childlike "playing at war" and adult reality.

Tomorrow:Chekhov's "Grief" (also translated as "Lament" and "Misery")

Sherwood Anderson, "Hands"--Short Story Month 2016--Day 3

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) appeared almost exactly one hundred years after the publication of Washington Irving's The Sketchbook.  In that hundred-year period the short story form changed from primarily a folktale and fable genre to a form that focuses more on lyric moments of realization than linear events. 

The notion of sympathy and identification, a complete loss of authorial self, is an important key to the success of Winesburg.  Hart Crane once said of Anderson:  "He has a humanity and simplicity that is quite baffling in depth and suggestiveness."  The most frequent remark made about the characters in Winesburg is that they are psychic deformities, cut off from society, adrift in their own consciousness, unfulfilled, metaphors for American estrangement.  In his book The Lonely Voice, Frank O'Connor uses Winesburg as a central example of his notion of short story characters representing not individuals, but a submerged population group.  The image of isolation is important in Anderson's stories for isolation is a central concept of the short story.

Anderson's suggestion in the story that the secret of Biddlebaum's hands is a job for a poet is part of the basic change in the short story signaled by Chekhov.  Anderson struggles with the problem of the prose writer trying to communicate something subtle and delicate, feeling the words are clumsy, for all he has are the events and the explanation.  What he needs is a way to use language, the way the poet does, to transcend language.  This is why the central metaphor of this story is "talking with hands"?  However, what one aspires to is not hands but wings, that enable one, like the poet, to fly.  The use of hands as a central image also suggests many other implications, such as the magic of "laying on of hands," "keep your hands off," maintaining "clean hands," etc.  Biddlebaum wants to transcend the physical, but the only way he can touch someone is with hands, which by their very nature are physical.

The problem is trying to express the kind of love Wing has for the boys without it sounding crude or being misunderstood.  The issue, of course, is that it is not flesh but spirit that is at stake, and spirit is difficult to communicate.  Motifs throughout the story suggest this counterpoint between the spiritual and the physical: dreams becoming facts for the half-witted boy; doubts becoming beliefs for the men of the town.  The metaphor of hard knuckles versus fluttery hands suggests the force of life being diffused rather than centralized.

In his study of Anderson, Rex Burbank notes the influence of impressionism and post-impressionism on the stories in Winesburg, Ohio. (Burbank, Rex.  Sherwood Anderson  Boston:  Twayne Publishers, 1964.).  He points out that the narratives stem from the flow of feeling and impressions rather than according to time; their structure is psychological rather than chronological.  What holds them together is a series of disconnected images that unite because they are thematically and symbolically related.  In his Memoirs Anderson said "There are no plot stories in life." Burbank calls "Hands" is one of the best tales in the collection and one of the most influenced by the post-impressionists;  He notes the central image of the hands and how incidents charge the image with meaning. 

Sister M. Joselyn discusses "Hands" as a central example of Anderson's development of what she terms the lyrical story.  "Normal time sequence is almost obliterated as Anderson penetrates with the reader further and further into the mysterious recesses of Wing Biddlebaum's mind."  She points out that the events of Biddlebaum's life are presented neither straightforwardly nor in a conventional flashback but rather by means of a box-within-a-box structure; Biddlebaum is revealed first through the eyes of the townspeople, then through the eyes of George Willard, and finally through his own sense of himself."  All these perspectives, she argues, are so thoroughly suffused with Biddlebaum's consciousness we are not aware of any awkward juncture between sections. (Sister M. Joselyn, O.S.B.  "Sherwood Anderson and the Lyric Story," The Twenties/Poetry and Prose, Eds. Richard E. Langford and William E. Taylor.  Deland, Florida:  Everette Edwards, 1966. 70-7)

David Anderson says that what Anderson achieves in "Hands" is the transformation of a "poor little man, beaten, pounded, frightened by the world in which he lived into something oddly beautiful." (Anderson, David D. Sherwood Anderson:  An Introduction and Interpretation.  New York:  Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967).

At the end of "Hands," when Wing Biddlebaum is performing the mundane task of picking up crumbs, the gesture is transformed into a spiritual act.  This technique is similar to the stories of Chekhov, Mansfield and Joyce, in which intangible spiritual desires and feelings are either contaminated by the material, or the material is used to communicate them. 

Tomorrow: Ambrose Bierce's "Chickamauga"

Poe, The Cask of Amontillado--Short Story Month 2016--Day 2

Perhaps the basic problem for readers of Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" is how to discover the complexity of this seemingly simple story?  A typical first response may be that it is a relatively straightforward revenge story.  And readers do usually enjoy sharing the glee with which Montresor "plots" his revenge.  However, this may be an opportunity for teachers to make students more aware of how "plot" is often a function of point of view, as well as how a narrative that may at first seem like a mere recounting of events is actually conditioned by complex rhetorical devices. 

Although story events seem merely to move through time, they actually move by means of a calculated plot, and a plot must be based on motivation--the underlying causes of the action. To move, a story must have a direction, an end toward which it progresses.  Poe's story, which seems primarily to be made up of Montresor's "plot" against Fortunato, physically moves toward the blank wall to which Fortunato will be chained as it emotionally moves toward the successful fulfillment of Montresor's revenge. 

That this "end" actually precedes the beginning of the series of events that seem to make up the story becomes clear when we look at the rhetorical devices that constitute the plot.  (After all, Montresor has his "plot" in mind before the events begin.)  First, there is the fact that the action begins one evening when, as if by accident, Montresor meets Fortunato at the carnival.  However, nothing is ever accidental in a story; everything is motivated by Poe's "plot."  For example the fact that the two meet at carnival time, when nothing is as it seems, is meaningfully motivated, as is the fact that Fortunato's name means "fated" or, ironically, "fortunate" and that he is dressed, appropriately, as a fool.

Another element of the story's structure that, even as it seems to be casual, is actually causal, is the way Montresor maneuvers Fortunato to where he wants him by making him think he is acting on his own free will.  This theme or motif is established when Montresor tells his servants not to leave the house, knowing that this will assure their absence.  The illusion is that Fortunato "willingly" goes into the catacombs, not that he is compelled to.  At several points along the way, Montresor tries to get Fortunato to go back, knowing that by seeming to try to control him Fortunato will try to act on his own free will and thus be ironically be controlled.  

At several points along the way, as any good plot-maker must, Montresor gives Fortunato clues as to the "end" or "point" of the plot.  First there is the portent of the coat of arms with the foot crushing the serpent and the motto that no one harms the Montresor family with impunity; secondly there is the trowel, which even as it suggests the secret brotherhood of the Masons, is the tool of Montresor's ultimate denial of brotherhood which will seal Fortunato's fate. 

If we ask what happens in this story we may say:  "Montresor gets his revenge by killing Fortunato."  However, if this were all there was to it, Montresor might simply have hired some thugs to kill Fortunato; we know that would not have made the story what it is.  Montresor must get his revenge in a "specifically meaningful" way.  We need to think about why Poe chose these specific ways?  Coleridge once noted that the pleasure of the art work lay not in the "end" of the journey, but rather in the pleasures of the journey itself.  Readers make the journey with Montresor not just to get to the end, but to enjoy the journey along the way; and the pleasures of this journey are the pleasures of the "plot"; that is, how Montresor "makes things happen."

As other critics have noted, the story has a thoroughly ironic pattern.  If the "you who know so well the nature of my soul" mentioned in the first paragraph is a priest, then Montresor may be making a deathbed confession of his crime of fifty years ago.  If so, this may mean that Fortunato has fulfilled Montresor's revenge criteria more effectively than Montresor himself, for Montresor has not achieved his revenge with impunity; nor did he make himself known as such to Fortunato when he walled him up, whereas Fortunato, like the serpent that Montresor has trampled on, still has his fangs embedded in Montresor's heel. 

But, the irony may cut even more deeply.  If Montresor is making a deathbed confession, there is little indication that he is genuinely remorseful.  On the contrary, Montresor seems to relive the events with the same glee with which he performed them fifty years before.  Thus, even as he confesses, he "sins" again.  For what seems such a simple story, "Cask of Amontillado" has wheels within wheels that just seem to keep spinning.

Tomorrow: Sherwood Anderson's "Hands"

Short Story Month 2016: How I Read Short Stories

May 1, 2016 is the first day of Short Story Month—an unofficial designation that has no corporate, government, or public foundation support—just the interest of a number (Lord knows how many!) of bloggers and readers who love the short story..

I have been celebrating Short Story Month on this blog since it began.  This year, I plan to post a brief daily discussion during Short Story Month focusing on how I "read" a single short story.

It has always been my opinion that when we asks students to read stories for a literature class, we do so not merely to get them to find out what happens next, but to try to understand the stories.  And to understand stories, we must have some idea about how they work.  And learning how they work means making the important distinction between what we take to be actual incidents in the world and what we actually have before us when we read a story—that is, a teller's narration of events that have already taken place.

I often had to remind my students that the story is not the events, but rather a structure made up of language that somehow replicates the events.  A famous expert on language, Alfred Korzybski, expressed the different in his book Science and Sanity (1933) by using the analogy of the relationship between a map and the territory the map replicates.  "A map is not the territory it represents," Korzybski reminds us, "but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness."  Similarly, he continues, "all language structures must be considered only as maps, for a word is not the object it represents."

Of course, maps follow certain conventions or rules for depicting territories, rules that we conveniently forget so that we can maintain the illusion that they are actual.  However, in order to understand how this illusion is created, and thus understand how fictional depictions work, we must remember that all we can know of the territory is the map.  That is, all we can know of the events is what is filtered through the rhetorical devices and literary conventions that make the telling or relating of the story possible.

C. S. Lewis once said that for stories to be stories they must be a series of events; yet at the same time it must be understood that this series is only a net to catch something else.  And this "something else," which, for want of a better word, we call theme, is "something that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state or quality."

Whenever students are asked to read stories for a class, they probably do so in a straightforward, linear way. They scan the letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs, translating them into mental images—watching things happen, hearing people talk—trying to get to the end of the story.  And the "end" usually means merely the conclusion of a series of events that occur "one damned thing after another."  However, when they are asked what happened in a story and begin telling the events, one thing after another, a teacher may say, "No, that's not what I meant" and then spend the rest of the class period pointing out that something else "happened" in the story which they did not see.

How can this be? Given a fairly attentive reader who can summarize the story events accurately, how can it be that he or she did not see the same things "happen" that the teacher did?  The problem arises, of course, with the assumption that the story has "meaning."  The problem is trying to find out how a mere series of events communicates meaning.

The primary way that any information is held together and communicated is by redundancy or repetition, particularly repetition with variations. Redundancy is the sending of more messages than are necessary to communicate information, and indeed, the repetition, often with variations of the elements of the message is what creates the one essential characteristic for information to be communicated: a system or structure, that is, a pattern or a map.

Looking at narrative in terms of its systematic structure rather than merely in terms of the events it seems to recount is as old as Aristotle.  However, this approach got its most influential boost when it was adopted by the Russian Formalists in the 1920s and was then taken up by the structuralist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.  According to the formalists, when approaching narrative fiction, one must make an initial distinction between the series of events that a writer takes as his or her subject matter and the specific structure that results when the writer presents the completed narrative to the reader.  Whereas the first is merely the aggregate of the events in a casual-chronological order, the latter is the organization of the events in strategically justifiable ways that the Russian Formalists called "motivation." Basically, what they said we must do is perceive the story as a narrated story dominated by rhetorical devices and thus all laid out at once, as if in space, rather than a series of events happening one after the other in time.

The earliest and still the clearest statement of this basic tactic of reading was made by Northrop Frye in the 1960s: "In the direct experience of fiction, continuity is the center of our attention; our later memory, or what I call the possession of it, tends to become discontinuous.   Our attention shifts from sequence of events to another focus: a sense of what the work of fiction was all about, or what criticism usually calls it theme." However, by theme, Frye does not mean a conceptual statement but rather what Aristotle called dianoia, the mythos of plot understood as a simultaneous unity.  The elements of the plot are of interest not in relation to a sequence or suspense but rather in relation to a structured presentation for a rhetorical purpose.

A few years ago, Denis Donoghue lamented that his students do not want to talk about literature, but rather large-scale public themes independent of the work. ‘They are happy to denounce imperialism and colonialism rather than read “Heart of Darkness,” Kim, and Passage to India in which imperialism and colonialism are held up to complex judgment.  They are voluble in giving you their opinions on race and its injustices, but nearly tongue-tied when it is a question of submitting themselves to the languages of The Sound and the Fury, Things Fall Apart, and A Bend in the River. They find it arduous to engage with the styles of Hard Times and The Wings of a Dove, but easy to say what they think about industrialism, adultery, and greed."

I sympathize with Professor Donoghue.  In my last semester before retirement, I taught a postgraduate course on the twentieth-century short story in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, as well as several Africa and Caribbean countries. I told my students at the beginning that we were going to engage in close readings of the stories, analyzing and evaluating them on the basis of their human complexity and aesthetic excellence. When my students ignored the texts and insisted on talking about general political issues of race and postcolonialism, I realized that ‘close reading,’ ‘human complexity,’ and ‘aesthetic excellence’ were strange and unfamiliar concepts to them. 

For Short Story Month, 2016, I plan to post suggestions on I "read" thirty different short stories, starting tomorrow with Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado."

Colin Barrett's "Anhedonia, Here I Come"

Colin Barrett's first book, the collection of short stories, Young Skins, won  the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.  I commented on my favorite story in the collection on this blog when the book first came out in America, but I did not really care for the other stories. Barrett's characters--mostly men—are uneducated, drink, shoot pool, screw around, and do drugs.  I have no objections to any of those aspects of life as the subject of fiction, but they do tend to get flat and tedious after a time.

What bothers me most about Barrett's most recent story, "Anhedonia, Here I come" in The New Yorker, April 18, is the language—not the language of the dialogue, but the language of the narrator, whosever he is.

The action of the story recounts the journey of a man named Bobby to buy some marijuana from his young female supplier. Bobby is a poet, so he says, although we don't have any evidence of the nature or quality of his poetry. At a pub he discovers that a man he has been trying to get to publish his first book of poetry has already published a collection by someone else.  Bobby goes home depressed and tries to light a joint with a cigarette lighter in his apartment building which is filled with gas from a leak.  What happens then is anyone's guess, if anyone cares.

Barrett obviously thinks language is important. In his March 3, 2015 Paris Review Interview with Jonathan Lee, Barrett says:

"If you get the language, the story follows, and in Young Skins the language flowed out of the concept of the town, somehow. What’s a vernacular, a dialect? It is language, weathered and textured and defined by time and geography, the same way a wind-eroded mountainside or a listing, flaking fence post is. I follow the language back to the mouth out of which it is being spoken.

What I look for in sentences is a gnarl, a knuckliness. It’s textural, like a striae or a burr, some embedded trace within the sentence where the register changes or shifts. It’s hard to explain, of course, because it sounds like damage of a kind, but it has to be the right kind of damage, and it may be visual or mental as much as it is aural. Sound in prose is important, but it is not everything. I like a sentence that does exactly what it needs to, just not in the way one would have thought it needed to do it. I like a sentence that booby traps its cadence if required. I like sentences that go on, and ones that end before you think. 

The kind of writing I don’t like is the stuff I call lethally competent. Language that takes no chances, that seeks to efface itself as language, as a material, and offer the clear windowpane on reality, et cetera. The kind of prose a review might call pellucid, or limpid. Pellucid, limpid is the biggest insult there is, to me. In every genus of art, the stuff that has lasted has made a demand."

The following is a definition of Anhedonia from Medinenet.com

"Anhedonia: Loss of the capacity to experience pleasure. The inability to gain pleasure from normally pleasurable experiences. Anhedonia is a core clinical feature of depression, schizophrenia, and some other mental illnesses. An anhedonic mother finds no joy from playing with her baby. An anhedonic football fan is not excited when his team wins. An anhedonic teenager feels no pleasure from passing the driving test. "Anhedonia" is derived from the Greek "a-" (without) "hedone" (pleasure, delight). Other words derived from "hedone" include hedonism (a philosophy that emphasizes pleasure as the main aim of life), hedonist (a pleasure-seeker), and hedonophobia (an excessive and persistent fear of pleasure).

In the New Yorker "This Week in Fiction" blog, Barrett says this about anhedonia.

"If Bobby is to some degree self-aware, he is still dunderingly oblivious in many respects. He thinks he’s sincere but deep down worries he’s a fake. Even though he’s a malign grotesque, there is, I think, that poignant core to him. How do you know you really love the things you think you do? That your concept of self is sincere? The question, despite his own virulent assertions otherwise, is whether Bobby had, or is, succumbing to a state of anhedonia."

 If you look up "Anhedonia," you might want to look up some of the words in the following sentences from Barrett's story:

"one hand broodingly ensconced within a pocket"

"no noise but the late-night dysphagic groans of the elevator's recurringly jammed doors"

"Bobby's peregrinations tended to bring him, as now, into intermittent contact with this body of water"

"He noted the tarry density of its bilious murk"

"[He] took a spumous dump in a toilet cubicle"

"he felt that every other poetic topic of concern was an obfuscation, an eschewal, or a bald retreat from this theme"

"Bobby's psychic sturdiness was, he feared, a manifestation of a submerged but profound and pullating narcissism."

"Becky's caman-wielding cohort lounged on a nearby wall, observing with studied wrath."

"He picked his nose, unseated a gratifyingly intact clump of dried matter, palpated it between his fingers, and flicked it away."

"Then he realized he was abandoning an infant to a vehicle under the operation of a man kneading tinctures of a patently illicit substance into his face.."

"Bobby could feel himself, in her spectral, incipiently canonical gaze, being transubtaniated, molecule by molecule, into obscurity."

I have not found many talking about this story online, but one reader, a man named Dan on GoodReads says:

This is, potentially, the worst short story ever written. It’s bad, it’s dreadful, it’s poorly written, it has no point, it’s not clever. This story is so bad it is an insult to the man who chopped down the tree that was turned into the paper the story was printed on. This story is so terrible the woman who drives the truck that delivers the printing ink to the New Yorker is considering holding the next shipment hostage until the editors apologize personally to her and her family for their incompetence. She works too hard, puts up with too much traffic and back pain to waste her time allowing the staff at the short story department of the New Yorker to waste all that ink on something this bad.

(And he goes on for another five paragraphs)

This is a bit extreme, it seems to me.

However,  it just is not clear why Barrett uses the language that he does in this story.  It does nothing to encourage the reader to identify or sympathize with the central character. Indeed, it does nothing but draw attention to itself and irritate the reader—at least this reader.

Ann Beattie's "For the Best"

Ann Beattie's short stories began to appear in small quarterlies while she was a graduate student in the early 1970s.  When, after many rejections, The New Yorker accepted one of her stories in 1974, she devoted herself to writing full time.  Critical reactions to her early collections--Distortions (1976), Secrets and Surprises (1978), The Burning House (1982), Where You'll Find Me (1986), and What Was Mine (1991), was pretty much split between those who admired her pin-point portraits of the yuppie generation of the 60s and 70s and those who accused her of psychological vacuity and sociological indifference.  Seen as the spokesperson for her generation, Beattie was alternately praised for her satiric view of that era's passivity and criticized for presenting sophisticated New Yorker magazine versions of the characters on television's Seinfield, unable to understand themselves or others.

Park City (1999), was a sort of retrospective summation of her short-story career--containing many Beattie favorites that are entering the canon as anthology selections in college and trade texts, such as "Dwarf House," "A Vintage Thunderbird," "Shifting," "The Lawn Party," "Jacklighting," "Greenwich Time," "The Burning House," "Weekend," "Janus," and "What Was Mine."

Beattie's early stories reflect a keen awareness of how the modern short story since Chekhov explores complex human relationships while seeming on the surface merely to be anecdotal events.  For example, in "Janus," a classic of the so-called minimalist genre, the central character is a real-estate salesperson who uses an elegant bowl as a sort of trick to get buyers interested in a house.  The bowl not only has a personal meaning for her because her lover gave it to her, it also has a mysterious symbolic significance, for it seems to be both practical and spiritual at once.  Every house she puts it in becomes the home that she and her lover never had.  When she refuses to leave her husband, her lover asks, in an obvious reference to the title of the story, "Why be two-faced?"  However, like most Beattie characters, she is unable to make a break, a decision, a commitment.  The dichotomy of the bowl is emblematic of how Beattie makes use of concrete details in  her stories.  For even though it is ordinary, practical, even mundane, it is simultaneously subtle, significant, and shimmering with meaning. 

In contrast to her earlier stories, the eight more recent short fictions in her collection Park City seemed to be moving more toward length and elaboration, making more use of novelistic techniques of character exploration and realistic, non-metaphoric, detail, for example in Going Home with Uccello" and the title story "Park City."  In the former, a woman on a trip to Italy with her sometimes boyfriend has a realization about why he has taken her there when he flirts with a Frenchwoman about an Uccello painting.  She understands that he has taken her to Italy not to persuade her to join him in London forever, but to persuade himself that he loved her so much that no other woman could come between them.  The story ends in a typical Beattie ambiguity about whether the man in the story can commit himself to a relationship or whether he is continuing, as so many of Beattie's male characters, to look for some ineffable dream.

In "Park City," the central character spends a week at a Utah ski resort during the off-season looking after her half-sister's daughter, Nell, who is three, and half-sister's boyfriend's half-daughter, Lyric, who is 14.  The story is filled with dialogue between the three females in which it seems increasingly clear that the woman is more naive than the precocious 14-year-old.  In one particular encounter, the girl spins out a long invented tale to a stranger about having had breast implants.  The story ends when the central character tries to get on a ski lift with the child Nell and the two almost fall off.  They are saved by a man who, significantly, tells her, "the one thing you've got to remember next time is to request a slow start."

In her last collection of "new" short stories, Follies (2005), Beattie left realistic minimalism altogether and just seemed to have a good time writing parodies and creating comic voices.  Several stories in the collection are light experiments with various academic and literary conventions.  In “Duchais,” a graduate student fills in for his sick roommate, taking a job as a professor’s research assistant. However, he is actually made to do a variety of household chores--going to the dry cleaners, mixing drinks, serving as a butler and houseboy at the professor’s home.  Years later, after he has become a lawyer and has returned to Virginia for a twentieth class reunion, he stands in front of the old professor’s house and remembers himself as a young man who had tried to prove he could face difficult things, but instead had felt like a helpless child.

“Apology for a Journey not Taken,” subtitled “How to Write a Story,” is a playful literary game in which a woman has to postpone a planned trip over and over again because of a variety of unexpected events.  The story begins with the narrator saying she could explain why she was not where she should have been, but that perhaps the story should itself evolve.  In fact, the story--perhaps an illustrative exercise for one of Beattie’s creative writing classes--is about the basic narrative truth that stories are, by their very nature, postponements of completion, for if there were no postponements, the story would end immediately. 

“Find and Replace” is based on the metaphor of the word processing function by which a novelist can immediately change the names of her characters by finding all instances of the name and replacing it with another immediately.  The protagonist returns to the home of her childhood in Florida to be with her mother after the death of her father six months earlier.  However, she finds that, in a seeming immediate “find and replace” fashion, the mother is planning to marry another man.  The story is energized by the flippant voice of the daughter narrator, who at first is distressed by her mother’s precipitous action, but, because of a serendipitous encounter with a young man at a car rental agency, realizes how things change, even in a very short time.

Finally, after ten years of short-story silence, Beattie published Maine: The State We're In (2015), which contained fifteen stories she said she wrote all in the summer of 2014—pretty rapid-fire and slap-dash work from a writer who made her reputation writing constrained and crystalline stories of precise prose. I reviewed the collection for Magill's Literary Annual and, for copyright reasons, cannot repeat any of that review here.  I will simple say I was disappointed in the stories. I thought they were loose, rambling, and unfocused—poorly written and careless in syntax and word choice.

Consequently, when her most recent story, "For the Best," appeared in The New Yorker on March 14, 2016, I did not look forward to it.  I have read all of Ann Beattie's stories and have taught many of them before I retired.  I always treasured them because they were such tightly constructed and glowing examples of what has always made me love the short story as the finest fictional form.

However, like most of the stories in her last collection, Maine: The State We're In, "For the Best" is just not anywhere near up to Beattie's best. I have read it three times now, and just cannot find the story in it.

It begins with a 79-year-old man, Gerald, who has just received an invitation to an early Christmas party, warning him, as it were, that his ex-wife Charlotte, who he has not seen since their divorce thirty-one years ago, has also been invited.

The day before the party, Gerald runs into an old acquaintance named Ned on the street and has coffee with him, which provides the opportunity for some back story about Gerald's earlier modelling work and also a dream he has about he and Ned swimming in waters where a shark was "lurking Nearby." Not sure of the relevance of this encounter or dream, that is, if "relevance" is even an issue in this piece of writing.

We meet, briefly, several people at the party, none as interesting as those at the most famous short fiction Christmas party in literature in James Joyce's "The Dead."  And we also learn that this particular day is the same day as the terrorist shooting in San Bernardino, California.

The ex-wife Charlotte, which the first paragraph has alerted us to expect, does not arrive until Gerald is leaving, when she jumps out from behind a Christmas tree in the lobby and says "Boo."  Why does Charlotte do this?  Beattie says she personally would love to jump out from behind a Christmas tree that way—which would even be more fun than writing such a scene.

They walk toward Rockefeller Center, chat about their son, the past, etc., and he puts her in a cab to take her home. Then he runs into, "of all people," Tod Browne, a gay acquaintance who was at the party and who takes him home in his limo.

Gerald's final encounter is with Alonzo, his doorman, and they talk briefly about being a foreigner in America and about Alonzo's wife who has died.  Gerald is guiltily puzzled that he did not know about Alonzo's wife, but finally manages a bit of social consciousness when he scolds a young woman from the penthouse of his building who asks Alonzo to walk her dog.

The story ends with Gerald thinking back about his ex-wife, catching sight of himself in the mirrored wall of the elevator and realizing that he had grown old.

If you lay this story alongside Joyce's "The Dead" and carefully analyze the language, I think you might find what makes one a brilliant short story with all the attributes of the form in subtle arrangement and the other just a lot of stuff that happens one night in New York just before Christmas.  (I have talked a bit about "The Dead" in a couple of places on this blog. You can search for those discussions if you are interested.)

Certainly there are similarities between Joyce's Gabriel and Beattie's Gerald, but Gerald does not have the insight that Gabriel does, and Beattie does not establish a thematic pattern of self-deception that Joyce does.  Everything that happens in Joyce's story leads up to Gabriel's recognition in the hotel room mirror, whereas a helluva lot of "stuff" happens in Beattie's story that seems just "stuff that happen—not all of which leads to any recognition for Gerald, except "I grow old, I grow old."

In her interview with New Yorker editor Deborah Treisman in "This Week in Fiction," Beattie even admits that much that happens in this piece is just stuff that seemed to happen when she was writing it or thinking about writing it.  For example, she says she just "happened" to be in New York on the day on the San Bernardino shooting. Although she says she knew that her being there and what happened in California might not have any inherent place "literarily" in her story, "Still, that's what happened, and sometimes when I'm writing I just go with the givens of a situation."

Going with the "givens" does not describe writing a good short story.  It is not something that Chekhov or Joyce or any great short story writer would give in to.

Granted, Gerald seems to have gone through life rather oblivious to the lives of those around him—God knows where his mind has been all these years—but this rambling and crowded account of the night of the Christmas party does not clinch together with meaning to give any human or literary significance to his realization in the last words of the piece that "he'd grown old."

 I miss the Ann Beattie of my youth.

Fiona McFarlane's "Buttony"

I have been a subscriber to The New Yorker for many years, primarily for the fiction (which is usually a short story, but sometimes--sad to say--a chapter from a novel. They pay the best for stories, and thus can demand the best, which often, but not always, works out well for both writer and reader. 

However, since the mag comes out once a week (mostly), I sometimes do not get a chance to read the stories right away. So after scanning through the cartoons and the poems and reading a compelling article, I stack them on my desk, promising myself to "get to them" soon. Stories, although they may be shorter, just take me longer to read than nonfiction—after all, I am not just questing for content--I want to have some time to read slowly, with my lips moving, and read again and again.

Today, after neglecting the stack on my desk for the past six weeks, I decided to "do my duty" and catch up a bit. I share with you my reading experience of Fiona McFarlane's story from the March 7, 2016 issue, "Buttony."

McFarlane, an Australian writer, who has spent some time in the U.S., is the author of one novel—The Night Guest (2013) and a collection of short stories, The High Places, which is due out in May of this year. She is in her mid-thirties and has a Ph.D. from Cambridge and an M.F.A. from University of Texas, Austin.  She published one previous story in The New Yorker, entitled "Art Appreciation" (May 13, 2013), which I somehow missed.  I dug it out and will read it later.

In the magazine's usual "This Week in Fiction" blog, McFarlane talks with fiction editor Deborah Treisman about the story, which centers on a child's guessing game involving a hidden button. Treisman asks her if she has ever played the game or whether she invented it.  McFarlane says she ran across the game in a book by Steven Connor entitled Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things, but cannot remember ever playing it. (Connor is a literature professor from London; I just ordered the book—which is why I am being crowded out of my office by books, even though quite a few are now stored in that mysterious place called "the cloud" accessible by my Kindle Fire).

I don't know if this game, which McFarlane calls "buttony," is played in Australia, but I remember it as a popular game from my childhood—I am surprised that Treisman did not know it—called "button, button, who's got the button?"

In McFarlane's story, the central characters are a school teacher named Miss Lewis, a student favorite named Joseph, and the twenty-one other students in her class. On the day of the story, the kids want to play "buttony."  They form a circle, hold out their hands, and close their eyes, while Joseph, who has been sent in to get a button from Miss Lewis's desk drawer, walks around the circle and touches each pair of hands, saying at the same time "buttony."  After he goes to all twenty-one students, they are told to close their hands and open their eyes; each student is given the chance to guess who's got the button. The one who has been holding the button—not the one who guesses correctly-- gets to "hide" it the next time.

On this particular day that the children play the game, something different happens—as it must, or else there would be no story: When Joseph gets the button on a subsequent round of the game, he walks around the circle but does not hide the button in anyone's hand, but rather puts it in his mouth.  Only Miss Lewis has her eyes open to see this action. When the children guess everyone and still cannot find the button, they begin to kick and shout and rebel against Miss Lewis—opening her hands, looking up her skirt, and pulling the pins from her hair to look for the button.

In her interview with Deborah Treisman, McFarlane says as the wrote the story she was interested in the "strange ritualistic way in which the game plays out so many childhood fears—of rejection, of being overlooked or lied to or tricked."

And indeed, if you put yourself in the game, you can imagine its potential for significance. The twenty-one kids have their eyes closed and thus live in darkness during the game's duration.  They hold out their hands in supplication, waiting for an undeserved gift, something to be presented to them by a powerful giver, waiting to be chosen—feeling the disappointment of the giver touching their hands but putting nothing in it, and then the joy of feeling the button in the palm.

And when it is time to guess who has the button, only you really know is that you do not have it.  As in a combination of poker-face and counting cards, the players watch the faces of the rest of the players to see if they give themselves away and try to keep track of all those who have played their hand by saying they do not have the button.

The game has been mentioned in several places, such as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland, but perhaps the most important reference is from Robert Frost's 1922 "The Witch of Coos," that begins with a witch saying:

Folks think a witch who has familiar spirits

She could call up to pass a winter evening

But won't, should be burned at the stake or something.

Summoning spirits isn't "Button, button,

Who's got the button," you're to understand.

 However, it is precisely McFarlane's point that the game, as it is played in her story is not merely a child's game, but something more powerfully latent with meaning. 

The key line, one that McFarlane cannot resist using, is: "They were like children in a fairy tale, under a spell." And yes, the story has all the elements of a fairy tale—a hero with special powers, an adult who is somehow mysteriously guilt and must be punished, a ritual or ceremony, a magic object, children spellbound, a secret, a trick, a childhood rebellion against the adult, and a last-minute rescue.

"Buttony" creates the kind of seemingly trivial, yet ultimately magical encounter with alternate reality that the short story has always done so well. And as usual, it has something to do with the tension between the sacred and the profane—between the spiritual and the trivial—between innocence and experience.

McFarlane handles these traditional short story elements quite well in choice of detail and in storytelling syntax. For example, "All the children handled the button with reverence, but none more than Joseph. He was gifted in solemnity. He had a processional walk and moved his head slowly when his name was called—and it was regularly called."

We know that something must be at stake for one character, and we know it is Miss Lewis, for the story is told from her perspective, and it is she who is "responsible." McFarlane tells us:  "Miss Lewis wanted her children to live in a heightened way, and she encouraged this sort of ceremony."

So it is really no surprise that Miss Lewis is the one who is attacked at the end of the story, for even though the button is secretly hidden in Joseph's mouth, it is she, the children suspect, who has the button. Children always know there is a secret, and who else must have except the adult, the teacher? 

When one child looks up under her dress, as if there is where the secret must lie, and another tears through her hair, as though it must somehow be in her head, Miss Lewis cries out and sees one of the other teachers running toward her with Joseph behind him, "not quite running, not altogether, but like a shadow, long and blank and beautiful." For Joseph is not so much real as he is a supernatural or spiritual embodiment of forces that we suspect lie around us, but that we can never really verify.  We don't know what they are, but we know they mean something.

At the end of her interview with Deborah Treisman, McFarlane says: "Most of all, I'm drawn to those moments when people do things that are mysterious even to themselves." 

She could not come up with a better characterization of the short story form than that.

 If you have not read the story and still have the March 7 issue of The New Yorker lying in your "gonna get to it" stack, then you might enjoy this little two-page tale. Let me know what you think.  One of the things I most miss about teaching—maybe the only thing—is talking to other readers about what we have read.

I will try to get to the Ann Beattie story "For the Best" in the March 14, 2016 issue next.