The 11th International Conference on the Short Story in English was held at York University, in Toronto, Canada, June 16-19, 2010. Of the 11 Short Story conferences over the past 22 years, I have attended nine. Now that I am retired and no longer eligible for the modest travel funds my university once provided when I presented a paper or participated on a panel, this is the only conference I am willing to scrape up personal funds to attend. Here are some of the values I received from the conference.
1. Getting together for good conversation with old friends. I always look forward to talking with my colleague of many years, Susan Lohafer, from the University of Iowa, who works tirelessly to set up the academic side of the program, reading proposals for papers, communicating with academics from around the world, arranging the papers in numerous panels. Other friends I only get a chance to see every couple of years when the conference meets include Morris Grubbs, from the University of Kentucky; Per Winther from the University of Oslo, Michael Trussler, from the University of Regina, Canada; Rob Luscher from the University of Nebraska, Kearney; Philip Coleman from Trinity College, Dublin; Ailsa Cox from Edge Hill University, England; Alan Weiss; Mercedes Penalba, University of Salamanca; Farhat Ifekharuddin, University of Texas, Brownsville, Bill New, one of the best-known critics of Canadian literature. All of these folks and many others who attend the conference regularly have made substantial contributions to the study of the short story around the world. I am happy to call them my friends.
2. Meeting, talking with, and listening to readings by favorite authors. One of the most valuable distinctions of this conference is that it not only provides academics the opportunity to share ideas about the short story, it also creates a forum for short story writers to get together with some of their most dedicated and engaged readers—the academics who teach their stories in classrooms and publish articles and books about their work. My favorite author at the conference was Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod, who read a story entitled “The Boat,” from his Collection Island. If you have not read MacLeod, who I have talked about in an earlier blog, you have a rare pleasure awaiting you. Don’t hesitate. Order Island today. McLeod’s stories are, in my opinion, mysterious miracles.
Also at the conference was Margaret Atwood, who, along with that other mysterious miracle, Alice Munro, is one of the top three Canadian writers still writing. I was very sorry that Munro did not attend. She was invited, you can be sure of that. Once before, she was scheduled to attend this conference, in New Orleans. I was eager to meet her, but she cancelled at the last minute. I don’t blame her. I understand she is somewhat shy. But Atwood, whose writing I do not admire as much as I do Munro’s, was a rare treat. Lively and funny and full of energy, she participated in an interview with Canadian writer Clark Blaise and read some light and entertaining short pieces at an evening reading at the Toronto Public Library.
Also in attendance was Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler, who has attended several Short Story Conferences in the past. Butler is a whirlwind of energy and activity, a true professional writer who experiments with prose style and narrative structure without fear. I particularly like Butler’s willingness to participate in all the activities of the conference, sitting in on small panels, talking with young academics, encouraging new writers. Also reading at the conference and participating in several activities were old favorites: Bharati Mukherjee, and her husband Clark Blaise. I have never appreciated those writers who come to the conference like privileged celebrities, do their reading, collect their fees, and take off. I remember several years ago when Joyce Carol Oates floated in like a diva, read a piece she had published earlier, and jumped in a cab for the airport immediately afterward. This year, it was Sandra Cisneros who never showed up at any conference sessions except the one where she gave a reading. Somehow, I missed her reading. Never did like her work much anyway.
3. Discovering new writers. A number of relatively new writers always have an opportunity to read their stories at the conference. Two that I had not read before but plan to read now that I have heard them are: Christine Sneed, who had a story entitled “Quality of Life” in the 2008 Best American Short Stories and has a collection of stories coming out in a few months, and Mark Anthony Jarman, a Canadian writer who is not well known in the states, but has published a couple of collections of stories in Canada. Although I reserve judgment until I have read more of their stories, I was impressed by the stories they read at the conference.
4. Meeting and talking with young academics who plan to join the profession I have loved these many years: Lloren Foster, from Western Kentucky University, who is working on a study of the poetics of Black short fiction during the Black Power movement. Katy Leedy, who presented a paper on the Irish short story and who has been accepted into a Ph.D. program for the fall; Patrick Prominski, who presented a paper on Irish identity and the short story and who is also entering a Ph.D. program in the fall. I know how difficult and stressful graduate programs can be. So I try to encourage young folks entering the profession, especially those who are dedicated students of the short story.
5. Getting “warm fuzzy” ego boosts. Because I have spent my academic life teaching and writing about the short story, this is the one conference where I am relatively well known. Why deny the pleasure of being thanked for my work? When a young assistant professor tells me he or she was encouraged to enter this field because of a book or an article I published years ago, it assures me that I have made a difference. When someone comes up and shakes my hand, saying how much my work means to them, it is a delight. To have my name in the title of a panel, along with the names of Edgar Allan Poe and Erich Auerbach—what could be a greater ego boost? On that panel, a young woman, Michelle Hardy, from University of Regina, used an article I published years ago entitled “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction” as an approach to Canadian writer Mavis Gallant’s story “Remission.” Although Michelle made me sound a helluva lot smarter than I am, I am happy that my approach to the short story seemed meaningful to her. It is the kind of thing that keeps me reading and writing about short stories for this blog.
Next week I plan to write about the New Yorker’s summer fiction issue: 20 under 40.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Monday, June 14, 2010
Alice Munro's "Passion": Summary and Key Quotes
The story begins with Grace, who is now in her 60s looking for the Traverses’ summerhouse in the Ottawa Valley. Why she is looking for it is not mentioned. She has not been here in many years, and there are changes; roads that used to go straight now have curves. There seem to be too many roads with names they did not have before. She looking for the past, but is lost in the new. There is a village now or a suburb with some vacation houses and some for year-round residents. She is about to turn back when she sees the octagonal house of the Woods, an old couple, old as “Grace is now,” and the house has a “mistaken look.” She finds the Travers house with its wraparound veranda, like houses she saw later in Australia.
“What was Grace really looking for when she had undertaken this expedition? Maybe the worst thing would have been to get just what she might have thought she was after. Sheltering roof, the screened windows, the lake in front, the stand of maple and cedar and balm-of-Gilead trees behind. Perfect preservation, the past intact, when nothing of the kind could be said of herself. To find something so diminished, still existing but made irrelevant—as the Travers house now seems to be, with its added dormer windows, its startling blue paint—might be less hurtful in the long run.
And what if you find it gone altogether? You make a fuss. If anybody had come along to listen to you, you bewail the loss. But mightn’t a feeling of relief pass over you, of old confusions or obligations wiped away?”
The Travers family: Gretchen—28; Neil—mid-30’s; Maury—21. Neil is not a Travers but a Barrow, for Mrs. Travers’ first husband is dead., but we do not know how at this point.
When Maury asks her out, she asks him if it is a dare, and he doesn’t know what she means. She wonders if it is a pickup to take it out to park, which is considered “rather shameful, rather had up, for a girl to agree.” When he asks “What?” painfully, she looks at him. “It seemed to her that she saw the whole of him in that moment, the true Maury. Scared, fierce, innocent, determined
They see the film Father of the Bride, and she hates spoiled rich girls of whom nothing was ever asked. Maury thinks that if she had that kind of wedding, she would have to spend years saving for it and he is “stricken with respect for her, almost with reverence.”
Because she wears a ballerina skirt and a blouse through which you can see the tops of her breasts, “There was a discrepancy, no doubt, between the way she presented herself and the way she wanted to be judged.” (How does she want to be judged? Not like the girl in the movie, but then she dresses to be seen a “bit ragged around the edges, in fact, giving herself gypsy airs.”
She falls in love with Mrs. Travers the way Maury had fallen in love with her.
Grace’s background: Mother died when she was three; father moved to Saskatchewan and had another family. She is raised by great aunt and great uncle; Great uncle canes chairs and teaches her how to do it. She has just finished high school, is twenty, has finished later than others because she takes extra classes, especially hard subjects for girls, like Geometry, Trigonometry, Physics. Does not plan to go to college, so principal asks her why she is doing this: She says she wants to learn everything she can learn for free before she starts a career of caning.
She gets the job at the Inn because both her aunt and uncle and the principle use the same language, believing she should get a “taste of life” before settling down.
Only Mrs. Travers seems to understand that learning has to do with life in some way other than earning a living. Mrs. Travers, who had been sent to business school was told she had to be useful, but wishes she had “crammed her mind instead, or first, with what was useless.”
Grace’s memories of parking sessions with Maury “proved to be much hazier than her memories of sitting at the Traverses’ round dinning table…”
The family plays a definitions game called Balderdash or Fictionary. Someone finds an obscure word that no one knows; each player writes a definition and gives it to the one who picked out the word. The picker writes down the correct definition. The definitions are shuffled and the picker reads them. Each player, except the picker, votes for what he or she think is the correct definition. A player gets a point if he or she guesses the correct definition and a point for each one who guesses his or her definition.
Mavis gets into an argument with Wat (Gretchen’s husband) over a definition, but when the dictionary proves it acceptable, she says, “Oh, I’m sorry. I guess I’m just outclassed by you people.” When she leaves, she says “I have to give you an Oxford dictionary next Christmas” with a “bitter tinkle of a laugh.” When Mrs. Travers asks Gretchen to make a pot of coffee, she goes in to the kitchen muttering, “What fun. Jesus wept.”
Mrs. Travers brings Grace to the house when she has a break of a few hours and often leaves her alone, during which time she reads. She sits in a leather chair in shorts and her legs become sweaty and stuck to the leather. “Perhaps it was because of the intense pleasure of reading.” (This line was not in the New Yorker version, but added by Munro for the book version.)
On the ride back to the hotel, Mrs. Travers waits until Grace’s thoughts get loose from whatever book she had been in and then might mention she has read it herself. The example given is Anna Karenina, which Mrs. Travers has read many times. First she sympathized with Kitty and then with Anna, and then with Dolly. She speaks of Dolly trying to figure out how to do the washing, and the problem about the washtubs. “I suppose that’s just how your sympathies change as you get older. Passion gets pushed behind the washtubs.”
Maury starts talking about marriage, taking it for granted, but the only thing Grace is delighted with is the idea of traveling to Peru, Iraq, the Northwest Territories, etc. She is more delighted with this than with what he spoke of with pride as “our own home.” “None of this seemed at all real to her,” but the idea of being a chair caner in the house and town where she grew “had never seemed real either.”
She has had fantasies of getting married, “and in exactly in this way, with the man making up his mind immediately.” He would be handsome like Maury. Passionate like Maury. Pleasurable physical intimacies would follow.”
“This was the thing that had not happened. In Maury’s car, or out on the grass under the stars, she was willing. And Maury was ready, but not willing. He felt that it was his responsibility to protect her. And the ease with which she offered herself threw him off balance. He sensed, perhaps, that it was cold—a deliberate offering which he could not understand and which did not fit in at all with his notions of her. She herself did not realize how cold she was—she believed that her show of eagerness must be leading to the pleasures she knew about, in solitude and in her imagining, and she felt that it was up to Maury to take over. Which he would not do.”
“These sieges left them both disturbed and slightly angry or ashamed, so that they could not stop kissing, clinging, using fond words to make it up to each other as they said good night. It was a relief to Grace to be alone, to get into bed in the hotel dormitory and blot the last couple of hours out of her mind. And she thought it must be a relief to Maury, too, to be driving down the highway by himself, rearranging his impressions of his Grace so that he could stay wholeheartedly in love with her.”
Mrs. Travers says Maury is a “dear uncomplicated man, like his father. Not like his brother. …Neil is—he’s deep. “Deep unfathomable caves of ocean bear.” She says for a long time she and Neil only had each other. “so I think he is special.” She says she does not worry about Maury, she worries a bit about Neil. Gretchen she does not worry about at all. “Because women always have got something, haven’t they, to keep them going? That men haven’t got.”
Now we find out two things: That Neil’s father had killed himself and that Mrs. Travers gets into trouble now and then with her nerves and has to go in hospital for a couple of weeks until they get her “stabilized.” Neil’s father killed himself because he was “unstable.”
Now we have the bit at Thanksgiving about no cranberry sauce, and Maury wants Grace to go with him, but the two little girls want her to swing with them. She breaks her sandal strap and takes her shows off and when she gets in the swing, she cuts her foot on a clamshell that Dana was going to use to make a house for her snail, Ivan.
When Neil arrives, Mrs. Travers says, “Now, that is what I call opportune.” Grace recognizes smell of liquor edged with mint on his breath. His hands do not feel drunk.
He suggests going to hospital for an anti-tetanus shot, which is for him a good excuse to leave. As they leave, Mrs. Travers, with that “look of hazy enthusiasm that seemed natural to her” says “This is good…This is very good, Grace, you are a godsend. You’ll try to keep him away from drinking today, won’t you? You’ll know how to do it.”
Grace heard these words, but gave them hardly any thought. She was too dismayed by the change in Mrs. Travers, by what looked like an increase in bulk, a stiffness in all her movements, a random and rather frantic air of benevolence. A weepy gladness leaking out of her eyes. (This sentence added in the New Yorker version) And a faint crust showing at the corners of her mouth, like sugar.
Now begins the final section of the wild ride.
“There was a highway overpass above the railway tracks, and they took this at such speed that Grace had the impression, at its crest, that the car had lifted off the pavement and they were flying. There was hardly any traffic, so she wasn’t frightened, and anyway there was nothing she could do.”
And Neil said to Grace, “You didn’t want to go home yet, did you?”
“No,” Grace said, as if she’d seen the word written in front of her, on the wall. As if she were having her eyes tested.
“Describing this passage, this change in her life, later on, Grace might say—she did say—that it was as if a gate had clanged shut behind her. But at the time there was no clang—acquiescence simply rippled through her, and the rights of those left behind were smoothly cancelled.”
“Her memory of this day remained clear and detailed for a long time, though there was a variation in the parts of it she dwelled on. And even in some of those details she must have been wrong.”
“In Grace’s recollection, there was not another car on the highway, and their speed approached the flight on the highway overpass. This cannot have been true—there must have been people on the road, people on their way home from church that Sunday morning, or on their way to spend Thanksgiving with their families. Neil must have slowed down when driving through villages, and around the many curves on the old highway. She was not used to driving in a convertible with the top down, wind in her eyes, taking charge of her hair. It gave her the illusion of constant perfect speed—not frantic but miraculous, serene”.
And though Maury and Mavis and the rest of the family had been wiped from her mind, some scrap of Mrs. Travers did remain, hovering, delivering in a whisper and with a strange, shamed giggle, her last message. You’ll know how to do it.
“Grace and Neil did not talk, of course. As she remembers it, you would have had to scream to be heard. And what she remembers is, to tell the truth, hardly distinguishable from her idea, her fantasies at that time, of what sex should be like. The fortuitous meeting, the muted but powerful signals, the nearly silent flight in which she herself figured more or less as a captive. An airy surrender, her flesh nothing now but a stream of desire.”
When they stop at a hotel, it is not for the bed, but for the bar. Everyone fulfills her fantasies. The bar is as she would have expected. When Neil is recognized by the barman, “Grace believed it would be like this—everywhere they went, there would be somebody Neil knew already.”
Neil asks her if she minds being dragged into any old place, and she says no. He says, “I need your company.” But why does he need her company? When licks her palm, he asks, “Did you think I was adducting you for fell purposes,” she says “No,” but she says she is lying. He says there was a time when you would have been right, as if she had said “yes,” but, he says, not today. “You’re safe as a church today.” Grace thinks the word “fell” is so like his mother.”
“The changed tone of his voice, which had become intimate, frank, and quiet, and the memory of his lips pressed to, then his tongue flicked across, her skin, affected Grace to such an extent that she was hearing the words but not the sense of what he was telling her. She could feel a hundred, hundreds of flicks of his tongue, a dance of supplication, all over her skin. But she thought to say, “Churches aren’t always safe.”
“It seemed that they were up on top of the world here or on one of the tops. The field fell away on all sides; the trees around being only partly visible, because they grew on lower ground.”
“Who did he know here, who lived in this house? A woman? It didn’t seem possible that the sort of woman he would want could live in a place like this, but then there was no end to the strangeness that Grace could encounter today. No end to it.”
All this strangeness is part of the fictional world she has entered.
She thinks it is a bootlegger and thinks of the bootlegger as a raddled, skinny old man, morose and suspicious, sitting on the porch with a shotgun on Halloween.
Not that she had ever been inside a bootlegger’s house, but the partitions were thin, at home, between some threadbare ways of living that were respectable and some that were not.
Neil asks, “Tell me about what interests you, then. What interests you?”
She said, “You do.”
“Oh. What about me interest you?” His hand slid away.
“What you’re doing now,” Grace said determinedly. “Why.”
“You mean drinking? Why I’m drinking?” The cap came off the flask again. “Why don’t you ask me?”
“Because I know what you’d say.”
“What’s that? What would I say?”
“You’d say, ‘What else is there to do?’ Or something like that.”
“That’s true,” he said. “That’s about what I’d say. Well, then you’d try to tell me why I was wrong.”
“No,” Grace said. “No. I wouldn’t.”
When she’d said that, she felt cold. She had thought that she was serious, but now she saw that she’d been trying to impress him, to show herself as worldly as he was, and in the middle of that she had come on this rock-bottom truth. This lack of hope--genuine, reasonable, and everlasting. There was no comfort in what she saw, now that she could see it.
Neil said, “You wouldn’t? No. You wouldn’t. That’s a relief. You are a relief, Grace.”
“She had thought it was touch. Mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. Inflammation. Passion. But that wasn’t what she’d been working toward at all. She had seen deeper, deeper into him than she could ever have managed if they’d gone that way. . [Change to book version: “But that wasn’t what had been meant for them at all. That was child’s play, compared to how she knew him, how far she’d seen into him, now. ]
What she saw was final. As if she were at the edge of a flat dark body of water that stretched on and on. Cold, level water. Looking out at such dark, cold, level water, and it was all there was.”
“It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. Drinking, needing to drink—that was just some sort of distraction, like everything else, from the thing that was waiting, no matter what, all the time.”
[Change to book version: “It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. The same thing was waiting, no matter what, and all the time. Drinking, needing to drink—that was just some sort of distraction.”]
When night comes, it becomes clear to her that “they were still in the world after all. That she had to get back to Bailey’s Falls.”
She drives back, lost, and disoriented, not having come into Bailey’s Falls in this unfamiliar way. She becomes more frightened. “ It was one thing to drink in unknown territory, another to turn in at the inn gates.”
He told her to slip her foot out of its sandal, and he pressed it here and there, before saying, “Nice. No heat. No swelling. Your arm hurt from the shot? Maybe it won’t.” He walked her to the door, and thanked her for her company. She was still amazed to be safely back. She hardly realized that it was time to say goodbye.
As a matter of fact, she does not know, to this day, if those words were spoken or if he only caught her, wound his arms around her, held her so tightly, with such continuous, changing pressure that it seemed as if more than two arms were needed, as if she were surrounded by him, his body strong and light, demanding and renouncing all at once, as if he were telling her that she was wrong to give up on him, everything was possible, but then again that she was not wrong, he meant to stamp himself on her and go.
She hears of the car crash. It has gone directly into the bridge abutment, rammed right in, totally smashed. It is obviously not an accident.
She did not have to deal with Maury face to face. He wrote her a letter.
Just say he made you do it. Just say you didn’t want to go.
She wrote back five words. I did want to go.
She was going to add, I’m sorry, but stopped herself.
The last paragraph. after Mr. Travers gives her a check for a thousand dollars, recalls the phrase earlier about her getting a taste of life.
"The check was for a thousand dollars. Immediately she thought of sending it back or tearing it up, and sometimes even now she thinks that that would have been a grand thing to do. But in the end, of course, she was not able to do it. In those days, it was enough money to insure her a start in life."
“What was Grace really looking for when she had undertaken this expedition? Maybe the worst thing would have been to get just what she might have thought she was after. Sheltering roof, the screened windows, the lake in front, the stand of maple and cedar and balm-of-Gilead trees behind. Perfect preservation, the past intact, when nothing of the kind could be said of herself. To find something so diminished, still existing but made irrelevant—as the Travers house now seems to be, with its added dormer windows, its startling blue paint—might be less hurtful in the long run.
And what if you find it gone altogether? You make a fuss. If anybody had come along to listen to you, you bewail the loss. But mightn’t a feeling of relief pass over you, of old confusions or obligations wiped away?”
The Travers family: Gretchen—28; Neil—mid-30’s; Maury—21. Neil is not a Travers but a Barrow, for Mrs. Travers’ first husband is dead., but we do not know how at this point.
When Maury asks her out, she asks him if it is a dare, and he doesn’t know what she means. She wonders if it is a pickup to take it out to park, which is considered “rather shameful, rather had up, for a girl to agree.” When he asks “What?” painfully, she looks at him. “It seemed to her that she saw the whole of him in that moment, the true Maury. Scared, fierce, innocent, determined
They see the film Father of the Bride, and she hates spoiled rich girls of whom nothing was ever asked. Maury thinks that if she had that kind of wedding, she would have to spend years saving for it and he is “stricken with respect for her, almost with reverence.”
Because she wears a ballerina skirt and a blouse through which you can see the tops of her breasts, “There was a discrepancy, no doubt, between the way she presented herself and the way she wanted to be judged.” (How does she want to be judged? Not like the girl in the movie, but then she dresses to be seen a “bit ragged around the edges, in fact, giving herself gypsy airs.”
She falls in love with Mrs. Travers the way Maury had fallen in love with her.
Grace’s background: Mother died when she was three; father moved to Saskatchewan and had another family. She is raised by great aunt and great uncle; Great uncle canes chairs and teaches her how to do it. She has just finished high school, is twenty, has finished later than others because she takes extra classes, especially hard subjects for girls, like Geometry, Trigonometry, Physics. Does not plan to go to college, so principal asks her why she is doing this: She says she wants to learn everything she can learn for free before she starts a career of caning.
She gets the job at the Inn because both her aunt and uncle and the principle use the same language, believing she should get a “taste of life” before settling down.
Only Mrs. Travers seems to understand that learning has to do with life in some way other than earning a living. Mrs. Travers, who had been sent to business school was told she had to be useful, but wishes she had “crammed her mind instead, or first, with what was useless.”
Grace’s memories of parking sessions with Maury “proved to be much hazier than her memories of sitting at the Traverses’ round dinning table…”
The family plays a definitions game called Balderdash or Fictionary. Someone finds an obscure word that no one knows; each player writes a definition and gives it to the one who picked out the word. The picker writes down the correct definition. The definitions are shuffled and the picker reads them. Each player, except the picker, votes for what he or she think is the correct definition. A player gets a point if he or she guesses the correct definition and a point for each one who guesses his or her definition.
Mavis gets into an argument with Wat (Gretchen’s husband) over a definition, but when the dictionary proves it acceptable, she says, “Oh, I’m sorry. I guess I’m just outclassed by you people.” When she leaves, she says “I have to give you an Oxford dictionary next Christmas” with a “bitter tinkle of a laugh.” When Mrs. Travers asks Gretchen to make a pot of coffee, she goes in to the kitchen muttering, “What fun. Jesus wept.”
Mrs. Travers brings Grace to the house when she has a break of a few hours and often leaves her alone, during which time she reads. She sits in a leather chair in shorts and her legs become sweaty and stuck to the leather. “Perhaps it was because of the intense pleasure of reading.” (This line was not in the New Yorker version, but added by Munro for the book version.)
On the ride back to the hotel, Mrs. Travers waits until Grace’s thoughts get loose from whatever book she had been in and then might mention she has read it herself. The example given is Anna Karenina, which Mrs. Travers has read many times. First she sympathized with Kitty and then with Anna, and then with Dolly. She speaks of Dolly trying to figure out how to do the washing, and the problem about the washtubs. “I suppose that’s just how your sympathies change as you get older. Passion gets pushed behind the washtubs.”
Maury starts talking about marriage, taking it for granted, but the only thing Grace is delighted with is the idea of traveling to Peru, Iraq, the Northwest Territories, etc. She is more delighted with this than with what he spoke of with pride as “our own home.” “None of this seemed at all real to her,” but the idea of being a chair caner in the house and town where she grew “had never seemed real either.”
She has had fantasies of getting married, “and in exactly in this way, with the man making up his mind immediately.” He would be handsome like Maury. Passionate like Maury. Pleasurable physical intimacies would follow.”
“This was the thing that had not happened. In Maury’s car, or out on the grass under the stars, she was willing. And Maury was ready, but not willing. He felt that it was his responsibility to protect her. And the ease with which she offered herself threw him off balance. He sensed, perhaps, that it was cold—a deliberate offering which he could not understand and which did not fit in at all with his notions of her. She herself did not realize how cold she was—she believed that her show of eagerness must be leading to the pleasures she knew about, in solitude and in her imagining, and she felt that it was up to Maury to take over. Which he would not do.”
“These sieges left them both disturbed and slightly angry or ashamed, so that they could not stop kissing, clinging, using fond words to make it up to each other as they said good night. It was a relief to Grace to be alone, to get into bed in the hotel dormitory and blot the last couple of hours out of her mind. And she thought it must be a relief to Maury, too, to be driving down the highway by himself, rearranging his impressions of his Grace so that he could stay wholeheartedly in love with her.”
Mrs. Travers says Maury is a “dear uncomplicated man, like his father. Not like his brother. …Neil is—he’s deep. “Deep unfathomable caves of ocean bear.” She says for a long time she and Neil only had each other. “so I think he is special.” She says she does not worry about Maury, she worries a bit about Neil. Gretchen she does not worry about at all. “Because women always have got something, haven’t they, to keep them going? That men haven’t got.”
Now we find out two things: That Neil’s father had killed himself and that Mrs. Travers gets into trouble now and then with her nerves and has to go in hospital for a couple of weeks until they get her “stabilized.” Neil’s father killed himself because he was “unstable.”
Now we have the bit at Thanksgiving about no cranberry sauce, and Maury wants Grace to go with him, but the two little girls want her to swing with them. She breaks her sandal strap and takes her shows off and when she gets in the swing, she cuts her foot on a clamshell that Dana was going to use to make a house for her snail, Ivan.
When Neil arrives, Mrs. Travers says, “Now, that is what I call opportune.” Grace recognizes smell of liquor edged with mint on his breath. His hands do not feel drunk.
He suggests going to hospital for an anti-tetanus shot, which is for him a good excuse to leave. As they leave, Mrs. Travers, with that “look of hazy enthusiasm that seemed natural to her” says “This is good…This is very good, Grace, you are a godsend. You’ll try to keep him away from drinking today, won’t you? You’ll know how to do it.”
Grace heard these words, but gave them hardly any thought. She was too dismayed by the change in Mrs. Travers, by what looked like an increase in bulk, a stiffness in all her movements, a random and rather frantic air of benevolence. A weepy gladness leaking out of her eyes. (This sentence added in the New Yorker version) And a faint crust showing at the corners of her mouth, like sugar.
Now begins the final section of the wild ride.
“There was a highway overpass above the railway tracks, and they took this at such speed that Grace had the impression, at its crest, that the car had lifted off the pavement and they were flying. There was hardly any traffic, so she wasn’t frightened, and anyway there was nothing she could do.”
And Neil said to Grace, “You didn’t want to go home yet, did you?”
“No,” Grace said, as if she’d seen the word written in front of her, on the wall. As if she were having her eyes tested.
“Describing this passage, this change in her life, later on, Grace might say—she did say—that it was as if a gate had clanged shut behind her. But at the time there was no clang—acquiescence simply rippled through her, and the rights of those left behind were smoothly cancelled.”
“Her memory of this day remained clear and detailed for a long time, though there was a variation in the parts of it she dwelled on. And even in some of those details she must have been wrong.”
“In Grace’s recollection, there was not another car on the highway, and their speed approached the flight on the highway overpass. This cannot have been true—there must have been people on the road, people on their way home from church that Sunday morning, or on their way to spend Thanksgiving with their families. Neil must have slowed down when driving through villages, and around the many curves on the old highway. She was not used to driving in a convertible with the top down, wind in her eyes, taking charge of her hair. It gave her the illusion of constant perfect speed—not frantic but miraculous, serene”.
And though Maury and Mavis and the rest of the family had been wiped from her mind, some scrap of Mrs. Travers did remain, hovering, delivering in a whisper and with a strange, shamed giggle, her last message. You’ll know how to do it.
“Grace and Neil did not talk, of course. As she remembers it, you would have had to scream to be heard. And what she remembers is, to tell the truth, hardly distinguishable from her idea, her fantasies at that time, of what sex should be like. The fortuitous meeting, the muted but powerful signals, the nearly silent flight in which she herself figured more or less as a captive. An airy surrender, her flesh nothing now but a stream of desire.”
When they stop at a hotel, it is not for the bed, but for the bar. Everyone fulfills her fantasies. The bar is as she would have expected. When Neil is recognized by the barman, “Grace believed it would be like this—everywhere they went, there would be somebody Neil knew already.”
Neil asks her if she minds being dragged into any old place, and she says no. He says, “I need your company.” But why does he need her company? When licks her palm, he asks, “Did you think I was adducting you for fell purposes,” she says “No,” but she says she is lying. He says there was a time when you would have been right, as if she had said “yes,” but, he says, not today. “You’re safe as a church today.” Grace thinks the word “fell” is so like his mother.”
“The changed tone of his voice, which had become intimate, frank, and quiet, and the memory of his lips pressed to, then his tongue flicked across, her skin, affected Grace to such an extent that she was hearing the words but not the sense of what he was telling her. She could feel a hundred, hundreds of flicks of his tongue, a dance of supplication, all over her skin. But she thought to say, “Churches aren’t always safe.”
“It seemed that they were up on top of the world here or on one of the tops. The field fell away on all sides; the trees around being only partly visible, because they grew on lower ground.”
“Who did he know here, who lived in this house? A woman? It didn’t seem possible that the sort of woman he would want could live in a place like this, but then there was no end to the strangeness that Grace could encounter today. No end to it.”
All this strangeness is part of the fictional world she has entered.
She thinks it is a bootlegger and thinks of the bootlegger as a raddled, skinny old man, morose and suspicious, sitting on the porch with a shotgun on Halloween.
Not that she had ever been inside a bootlegger’s house, but the partitions were thin, at home, between some threadbare ways of living that were respectable and some that were not.
Neil asks, “Tell me about what interests you, then. What interests you?”
She said, “You do.”
“Oh. What about me interest you?” His hand slid away.
“What you’re doing now,” Grace said determinedly. “Why.”
“You mean drinking? Why I’m drinking?” The cap came off the flask again. “Why don’t you ask me?”
“Because I know what you’d say.”
“What’s that? What would I say?”
“You’d say, ‘What else is there to do?’ Or something like that.”
“That’s true,” he said. “That’s about what I’d say. Well, then you’d try to tell me why I was wrong.”
“No,” Grace said. “No. I wouldn’t.”
When she’d said that, she felt cold. She had thought that she was serious, but now she saw that she’d been trying to impress him, to show herself as worldly as he was, and in the middle of that she had come on this rock-bottom truth. This lack of hope--genuine, reasonable, and everlasting. There was no comfort in what she saw, now that she could see it.
Neil said, “You wouldn’t? No. You wouldn’t. That’s a relief. You are a relief, Grace.”
“She had thought it was touch. Mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. Inflammation. Passion. But that wasn’t what she’d been working toward at all. She had seen deeper, deeper into him than she could ever have managed if they’d gone that way. . [Change to book version: “But that wasn’t what had been meant for them at all. That was child’s play, compared to how she knew him, how far she’d seen into him, now. ]
What she saw was final. As if she were at the edge of a flat dark body of water that stretched on and on. Cold, level water. Looking out at such dark, cold, level water, and it was all there was.”
“It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. Drinking, needing to drink—that was just some sort of distraction, like everything else, from the thing that was waiting, no matter what, all the time.”
[Change to book version: “It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. The same thing was waiting, no matter what, and all the time. Drinking, needing to drink—that was just some sort of distraction.”]
When night comes, it becomes clear to her that “they were still in the world after all. That she had to get back to Bailey’s Falls.”
She drives back, lost, and disoriented, not having come into Bailey’s Falls in this unfamiliar way. She becomes more frightened. “ It was one thing to drink in unknown territory, another to turn in at the inn gates.”
He told her to slip her foot out of its sandal, and he pressed it here and there, before saying, “Nice. No heat. No swelling. Your arm hurt from the shot? Maybe it won’t.” He walked her to the door, and thanked her for her company. She was still amazed to be safely back. She hardly realized that it was time to say goodbye.
As a matter of fact, she does not know, to this day, if those words were spoken or if he only caught her, wound his arms around her, held her so tightly, with such continuous, changing pressure that it seemed as if more than two arms were needed, as if she were surrounded by him, his body strong and light, demanding and renouncing all at once, as if he were telling her that she was wrong to give up on him, everything was possible, but then again that she was not wrong, he meant to stamp himself on her and go.
She hears of the car crash. It has gone directly into the bridge abutment, rammed right in, totally smashed. It is obviously not an accident.
She did not have to deal with Maury face to face. He wrote her a letter.
Just say he made you do it. Just say you didn’t want to go.
She wrote back five words. I did want to go.
She was going to add, I’m sorry, but stopped herself.
The last paragraph. after Mr. Travers gives her a check for a thousand dollars, recalls the phrase earlier about her getting a taste of life.
"The check was for a thousand dollars. Immediately she thought of sending it back or tearing it up, and sometimes even now she thinks that that would have been a grand thing to do. But in the end, of course, she was not able to do it. In those days, it was enough money to insure her a start in life."
Friday, June 11, 2010
Alice Munro's "Passion": Some Theoretical Contexts
Abstract for my presentation at the 11th International Short Story Conference in Toronto, June 2010:
“The Short Story’s Way of Meaning: Alice Munro’s ‘Passion”
In response to that perennial question, “Why do you write short stories,” which means, course, “Why don’t you write novels?” Munro once said that originally she planned to write a few stories to get some practice and then to write novels, but “I got used to writing stories, so I saw my material that way.” What I wish to explore are the generic implications of Munro’s conviction that there is “a short-story way” of seeing reality. The basis for my approach is primarily formalist, argued by, among others, Bakhtin and Medvedev, who claim that every genre has its unique “methods and means of seeing and conceptualizing reality, which are accessible to it alone.... Every significant genre is a complex system of means and methods for the conscious control and finalization of reality.” Every author who practices a certain genre “learns to experience the world in the genre's way.” Munro has said, “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…. What happens, as event doesn’t really much matter.
Some theoretical concepts that have helped me formulate ideas about "Passion."
I will post some significant summaries and quotes from “Passion” early ext week.
From: Jacques Derrida, "The Law of Genre," Critical Inquiry, 7 (Autumn 1980): 55-81.
65-He submits the following hypothesis: "a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging."
From: M. M. Bakhtin/P.N. Medvedev. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. trans. Albert J.Wehrle. Johns Hopkins U.P., 1978. "Poetics should really begin with genre, not end with it. For genre is the typical form of the whole work, the whole utterance. A work is only real in the form of a definite genre. Each element's constructive meaning can only be understood in connection with genre."
Every genre has its own orientation in life, with reference to its evens, problems, etc."
"Each genre is only able to control certain definite aspects of reality. Each genre possesses definite principles of selection, definite forms for seeing and conceptualizing reality, and a definite scope and depth of penetration."
"If we approach genre from the point of view of its intrinsic thematic relationship to reality and the generation of reality, we may say that every genre has its methods and means of seeing and conceptualizing reality, which are accessible to it alone. Just as a graph is able to deal with aspects of spatial form inaccessible to artistic painting, and vice versa, the lyric, to choose one example, has access to aspects of reality and life which are either inaccessible or accessible in a lesser degree to the novella or drama.... Every significant genre is a complex system of means and methods for the conscious control and finalization of reality."
"The artist must learn to see reality with the eyes of the genre. A particular aspect of reality can only be understood in connection with the particular means of representing it."
From: Paul Ricoer, "Narrative Time," Critical Inquiry, 7 (Autumn 1980): 169-190: Every narrative combines two dimensions in various proportions, one chronological and the other nonchronological. The first may be called the episodic dimension, which characterizes the story as made out of events. The second is the configurational dimension, according to which the plot construes significant wholes out of scattered events."
From: Erich Auerbach. Mimesis. Distinction between Homeric and Hebraic narrative styles: “On the one hand, externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground…On the other hand, the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary fro the narrative, all else left in obscurity…time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background.’” The first contains no secret meaning, can be analyzed, but not interpreted; the second makes concrete in the sensible mater of life their sole concern with moral, religious, and psychological phenomena.
From Eudora Welty, "The Reading and Writing of Short Stories": "The first thing we see about a story is its mystery. And in the best stories, we return at the last to see mystery again. Every good story has mystery--not the puzzle kind, but the mystery of allurement. As we understand the story better, it is likely that the mystery does not necessarily decrease; rather it simply grows more beautiful."
From Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners. “If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted. Such a writer will be interested in what we don’t understand rather than in what we do.”
“The peculiar problem of the short-story writer is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible. He has only a short space to do it in and he can’t do it by statement. He has to do it by showing, not by saying, and by showing the concrete—so that his problem is really how to make the concrete work double time for him.”
From: Frank Kermode, "Secrets and Narrative Sequence," Critical Inquiry, 7 (Autumn 1980): 83-101. "Secrets are at odds with sequence which is considered as (88) an aspect of propriety; and a passion for sequence may result in the suppression of the secret. But it is there, and one way we can find the secret is to look out for evidence of suppression, which will sometimes tell us where the suppressed secret is located.
From Hamlet:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
From: Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answers the fundamental question of philosophy.” Camus says everything else are but games.
From: Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 1940. “Happy love has no history. Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself. What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering. There we have the fundamental fact.”
“Events happen thus because otherwise there would be no story… A reader pays no heed to distortions or to twistings of the ‘logic’ of current observations so long as the license thus taken produces the pretexts necessary to the passion which he longs to feel.”
From: Northrop Frye. The Secular Scripture (1976): “Romance is the structural core of all fiction; being directly descended from folktales, it brings us closer than any other aspect of literature to the sense of fiction, considered as a whole, as the epic of the creature, man’s vision of his own life as a quest.”
“The Short Story’s Way of Meaning: Alice Munro’s ‘Passion”
In response to that perennial question, “Why do you write short stories,” which means, course, “Why don’t you write novels?” Munro once said that originally she planned to write a few stories to get some practice and then to write novels, but “I got used to writing stories, so I saw my material that way.” What I wish to explore are the generic implications of Munro’s conviction that there is “a short-story way” of seeing reality. The basis for my approach is primarily formalist, argued by, among others, Bakhtin and Medvedev, who claim that every genre has its unique “methods and means of seeing and conceptualizing reality, which are accessible to it alone.... Every significant genre is a complex system of means and methods for the conscious control and finalization of reality.” Every author who practices a certain genre “learns to experience the world in the genre's way.” Munro has said, “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…. What happens, as event doesn’t really much matter.
Some theoretical concepts that have helped me formulate ideas about "Passion."
I will post some significant summaries and quotes from “Passion” early ext week.
From: Jacques Derrida, "The Law of Genre," Critical Inquiry, 7 (Autumn 1980): 55-81.
65-He submits the following hypothesis: "a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging."
From: M. M. Bakhtin/P.N. Medvedev. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. trans. Albert J.Wehrle. Johns Hopkins U.P., 1978. "Poetics should really begin with genre, not end with it. For genre is the typical form of the whole work, the whole utterance. A work is only real in the form of a definite genre. Each element's constructive meaning can only be understood in connection with genre."
Every genre has its own orientation in life, with reference to its evens, problems, etc."
"Each genre is only able to control certain definite aspects of reality. Each genre possesses definite principles of selection, definite forms for seeing and conceptualizing reality, and a definite scope and depth of penetration."
"If we approach genre from the point of view of its intrinsic thematic relationship to reality and the generation of reality, we may say that every genre has its methods and means of seeing and conceptualizing reality, which are accessible to it alone. Just as a graph is able to deal with aspects of spatial form inaccessible to artistic painting, and vice versa, the lyric, to choose one example, has access to aspects of reality and life which are either inaccessible or accessible in a lesser degree to the novella or drama.... Every significant genre is a complex system of means and methods for the conscious control and finalization of reality."
"The artist must learn to see reality with the eyes of the genre. A particular aspect of reality can only be understood in connection with the particular means of representing it."
From: Paul Ricoer, "Narrative Time," Critical Inquiry, 7 (Autumn 1980): 169-190: Every narrative combines two dimensions in various proportions, one chronological and the other nonchronological. The first may be called the episodic dimension, which characterizes the story as made out of events. The second is the configurational dimension, according to which the plot construes significant wholes out of scattered events."
From: Erich Auerbach. Mimesis. Distinction between Homeric and Hebraic narrative styles: “On the one hand, externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground…On the other hand, the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary fro the narrative, all else left in obscurity…time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background.’” The first contains no secret meaning, can be analyzed, but not interpreted; the second makes concrete in the sensible mater of life their sole concern with moral, religious, and psychological phenomena.
From Eudora Welty, "The Reading and Writing of Short Stories": "The first thing we see about a story is its mystery. And in the best stories, we return at the last to see mystery again. Every good story has mystery--not the puzzle kind, but the mystery of allurement. As we understand the story better, it is likely that the mystery does not necessarily decrease; rather it simply grows more beautiful."
From Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners. “If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted. Such a writer will be interested in what we don’t understand rather than in what we do.”
“The peculiar problem of the short-story writer is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible. He has only a short space to do it in and he can’t do it by statement. He has to do it by showing, not by saying, and by showing the concrete—so that his problem is really how to make the concrete work double time for him.”
From: Frank Kermode, "Secrets and Narrative Sequence," Critical Inquiry, 7 (Autumn 1980): 83-101. "Secrets are at odds with sequence which is considered as (88) an aspect of propriety; and a passion for sequence may result in the suppression of the secret. But it is there, and one way we can find the secret is to look out for evidence of suppression, which will sometimes tell us where the suppressed secret is located.
From Hamlet:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
From: Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answers the fundamental question of philosophy.” Camus says everything else are but games.
From: Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 1940. “Happy love has no history. Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself. What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering. There we have the fundamental fact.”
“Events happen thus because otherwise there would be no story… A reader pays no heed to distortions or to twistings of the ‘logic’ of current observations so long as the license thus taken produces the pretexts necessary to the passion which he longs to feel.”
From: Northrop Frye. The Secular Scripture (1976): “Romance is the structural core of all fiction; being directly descended from folktales, it brings us closer than any other aspect of literature to the sense of fiction, considered as a whole, as the epic of the creature, man’s vision of his own life as a quest.”
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
International Short Story Conference: Toronto, June, 2010
I will be attending the 11th International Conference on the Short Story in Toronto, Canada this month, speaking on a Plenary Session panel entitled “Theoretical Approaches to Alice Munro’s “Passion” with other short story theorists and critics. Michael Trussler, University of Regina, will speak on “Melancholy and Metaphysical Solitude in ‘Passion’.” Per Winther, University of Oslo will speak on “Munro’s Handling of Perspective and Descriptive Detail in ‘Passion.’” Michael Toolan, University of Birmingham, will speak on “Engagement Via Emotional Heightening in ‘Passion’.” Susan Lohafer, from University of Iowa, will speak on “Entering ‘Passion’ Empirically.” The topic of my own presentation is: “The Short Story’s Way of Meaning in ‘Passion’.”
You can find the program for the four-day conference at: http://www.yorku.ca/shortcon/
During the month of June, I plan to post blogs on my own presentation on Munro’s story “Passion,” and on the events at the conference, including summaries of the other panel presentations on the story. If you are interested in following along and making your own comments, the New Yorker version of “Passion” is available at http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/03/22/040322fi_fiction
The story is in her 2004 collection Runaway.
The Society for the Study of the Short Story has been around for a number of years. I have made presentations at nine of the eleven International Conferences. It is the one conference I try to attend regularly, not only because it focuses on the area of my special interest, but because it is the only chance I get to see old friends from around the world.
The conference, which is held every two years, began twenty-two years ago in Paris, France. Since then, it has been held in New Orleans, Lisbon, Cork, and several times at the University of Iowa, home of the famous Iowa Writers Workshop. What is unique about the conference is that it is not only a platform for literary critics to discuss the short story as a form, it also provides an opportunity for short story writers to read their stories and meet with their most dedicated readers.
Over the years, I have met John Barth, Anne Beattie, Isabelle Allende, Rudolfo Anaya, Ellen Douglas, Francine Prose, Judith Ortiz-Cofer, Leslie Marmon Silko, Amy Tan, Tobias Wolfe, Bharata Mukherjee, Clark Blaise, Edna O’Brien, Richard Ford, and many others.
Writers reading and mingling this June in Toronto include: Robert Olen Butler, Sandra Cisneros, Alistair MacLeod, Margaret Atwood, Helena Maria Viramontes, Olive Senior, Bharata Mukergee, Clark Blaise, and others.
Panels will feature presentations on Canadian short fiction, metafiction and postmodernism, the relationship between short fiction and nonfiction, flash fiction, postcolonialism, Irish short fiction, fairy tale, etc.
One panel title that gave me a laugh and that I will be sure not to miss is:
“Theory and the Short Story: Poe, Charles E. May, and Erich Auerbach”. What a hoot!
I will post some work I have done on my presentation on "Passion" in a few days. I hope you get a chance to read it before then and join with me in a discussion of it.
You can find the program for the four-day conference at: http://www.yorku.ca/shortcon/
During the month of June, I plan to post blogs on my own presentation on Munro’s story “Passion,” and on the events at the conference, including summaries of the other panel presentations on the story. If you are interested in following along and making your own comments, the New Yorker version of “Passion” is available at http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/03/22/040322fi_fiction
The story is in her 2004 collection Runaway.
The Society for the Study of the Short Story has been around for a number of years. I have made presentations at nine of the eleven International Conferences. It is the one conference I try to attend regularly, not only because it focuses on the area of my special interest, but because it is the only chance I get to see old friends from around the world.
The conference, which is held every two years, began twenty-two years ago in Paris, France. Since then, it has been held in New Orleans, Lisbon, Cork, and several times at the University of Iowa, home of the famous Iowa Writers Workshop. What is unique about the conference is that it is not only a platform for literary critics to discuss the short story as a form, it also provides an opportunity for short story writers to read their stories and meet with their most dedicated readers.
Over the years, I have met John Barth, Anne Beattie, Isabelle Allende, Rudolfo Anaya, Ellen Douglas, Francine Prose, Judith Ortiz-Cofer, Leslie Marmon Silko, Amy Tan, Tobias Wolfe, Bharata Mukherjee, Clark Blaise, Edna O’Brien, Richard Ford, and many others.
Writers reading and mingling this June in Toronto include: Robert Olen Butler, Sandra Cisneros, Alistair MacLeod, Margaret Atwood, Helena Maria Viramontes, Olive Senior, Bharata Mukergee, Clark Blaise, and others.
Panels will feature presentations on Canadian short fiction, metafiction and postmodernism, the relationship between short fiction and nonfiction, flash fiction, postcolonialism, Irish short fiction, fairy tale, etc.
One panel title that gave me a laugh and that I will be sure not to miss is:
“Theory and the Short Story: Poe, Charles E. May, and Erich Auerbach”. What a hoot!
I will post some work I have done on my presentation on "Passion" in a few days. I hope you get a chance to read it before then and join with me in a discussion of it.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Short Story Month 2010--Best American Short Stories: 2009 and O. Henry Award Stories: 2010
The Best American Short Stories 2009 came out in Oct. last year; The Pen/O.Henry Prize Stories: 2010 came out in April of this. With twenty stories in each volume and priced on Amazon at about ten bucks each for the paperback, they are the two best bargains out there for any lover of the short story form. You may not like every story in the collection, may even shake your head in wonder that a given story was chosen as one of the ”best” of the year, but you will find God’s plenty in these two books, and I guarantee it will be twenty dollars well spent.
While celebrating May as Short Story Month, doubling my blog efforts by reading the Atlantic Special Issue and commenting on stories for Dan Wickett’s Emerging Writers blog from Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy and Alyson Hagy’s Ghosts of Wyoming, I have also been reading the new Best and the new O. Henry. I will only comment briefly on my favorites among these forty to whet your appetite, while trying to avoid spoilers.
Annie Proulx’s “Them Old Cowboy Songs” from her third (and final, she says) Wyoming Stories volume, Fine Just the Way It Is, was chosen for both volumes. Proulx bookends the stories in her book by citing its title in the first and last tale. In “Family Man,” Ray Forkenbrock, wasting away in a home for the elderly, tells his granddaughter about his past, which she records for posterity. Even though his life was marred by hardship and a secret betrayal by his father, he is adamant that “everything was fine the way it was.” In the heart-scalding final story, “Tits Up in a Ditch,” which focuses on Dakota Lister, who loses more than her arm while serving in Iraq, her grandmother’s husband Verl dismisses outsider criticism of the state by insisting that “Wyomin is fine just the way it is.” The way it was, and often still is, is vicious. Whether the story takes place in the late 19th century or the early 21st, one slip-up in the rugged outback of Wyoming can kill you. In “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” Archie and Rose, aged 16 and 14, try to make a go of it on a modest homestead. However, the winters are bitter and jobs are few, and Archie’s decision to leave pregnant Rose in their rough-hewn little house to find work results in disaster.
Ron Rash’s “Into the Gorge,” which originally appeared in The Southern Review, also makes it in both volumes. Rash says the story combines a family tale of his grandfather leading a search for an old woman who wandered away from her mountain farm in the 1930’s with an image of a man running from something, although he seemed too old to be running. Rash says he soon began to understand that the man was running from a world he no longer understood. “Into the Gorge” is a short, relatively simple story, told with just enough restraint to suggest legend, without laying on too strongly the social theme of the Appalachian Mountains being invaded by the restraints and regulations of the modern world.
One advantage the O. Henry collection has over the Best volume is that it contains a story each by the two very best short story writers still practicing that underrated art--Alice Munro’s “Some Women” and William Trevor’s “Woman in the House.”
Although Alice Munro has insisted in more than one place that she does not write as a novelist does, many critics and reviewers have tried to give her fiction the dignity they think belongs only to the novel by suggesting that her stories are “novelistic” and therefore more complex than short stories. In a story entitled “Fiction” in her new book, Too Much Happiness, Munro cannot not resist a wily jab at all those critics who have trivialized the short story as a genre and chided her for not writing something more serious, namely novels. Joyce, the central character, buys a book written by a woman she has met briefly at a party. When she opens it, she is disappointed to find out it is a collection of short stories, not a novel: “It seemed to diminish the book’s importance, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside it.” After climaxing a distinguished career of numerous awards with the Man Booker International Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2009, Munro must have had a sly smile on her face when she wrote those words.
“Some Women” begins with the narrator saying how amazed she is sometimes at how old she is, but focuses on her experiences when she was thirteen-years-old and hired to help care for a young man named Bruce, a veteran of the war, who is dying of Leukemia. He is staying in the house of his stepmother, Old Mrs. Crozier. His wife, Sylvia, a schoolteacher, seems to be living on the fringes of his life and his illness. Old Mrs. Crozier’s masseuse, Roxanne, bursts into the house like a dynamo and takes an interest in Bruce, who plays the role of a kind of ailing Fisher King, a sort of sacred prize in the center of the women. A usual with the short story, “Some Women” amasses its weight on its ending when Bruce turns the tables on Roxanne and Mrs. Crozier, finding the comfort he needs in his neglected wife.
Alice Munro’s short stories are complex and powerful not because they are “novelistic” and not so much because of what happens in them, but because of what cannot happen except in the mysterious human imagination. More 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.
William Trevor, by universal critical agreement, is one of the best short-story writers practicing that underrated art form. The twelve stories in his most recent collection, Cheating at Canasta, reaffirm that he has a profound understanding of the complexity of what makes people do what they do and an unerring ability to use language to suggest that intimate intricacy.
As in all great short stories, from Chekhov to Carver, there is mystery and not a little menace in the stories of William Trevor—secrets so tangled and inexplicable that efforts to explain them with the language of psychology or sociology or history are either futile or absurd. This is not accidental, but part of the short story’s historical and generic tradition, for the form originated in primitive myth, which, by its very nature, was concerned with mystery, for which story was the only explanatory model available. Moreover, the short story is often concerned with the enigma of motivation. Part of the reason for this is the short story's close relationship to the romance form, which, allegorical in its nature, develops characters that, even as they seem to be like real people in the real world, act as if they are obsessed, propelled by some mysterious force.
“The Woman of the House” is about silence, about not saying, about the basic mystery of human personality, about Chekhov's famous comment that in the short story, it is better to say too little than too much, even though he admitted he was not sure why that was true. The story is a fine example of the short story form's focus on basic and universal human characteristics, even though I know that the word "universal" is not appreciated by postcolonial and other cultural critics, who seem more concerned with what separates us than what unifies us as human beings.
These are not cultural examinations of either the old Ireland of legend or the new Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, but rather profoundly wise explorations of individual, yet universal, secrets and mysteries of the heart. Luminous, restrained stories, every one of them deserves to be read and reread, their motivations marveled at, their sentences savored. They fill the reader with awe at the complexity of the human experience and the genius of William Trevor.
Daniel Alarcon has stories in both collections, “The Idiot President” in the Best and “The Bridge” in the O. Henry. I liked “The Bridge” best for its haunting exploration of the death of a blind man and his blind wife in Alarcon’s native city of Lima, Peru. Alarcon says that the story began with an anecdote of a fallen pedestrian bridge and the accidental death of a blind person, but that as he began the story he had no fixed sense of where it was going or where it might end, which, he says, he has found to be the most exciting way to write. It’s an interesting observation about the writing process that I wish others would comment on, for I have heard many writers say the same thing.
One story in the Best collection that I had read earlier is Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s “Yurt,” from her elegant little collection Ms. Hempel Chronicles. Caught between two worlds, Ms. Hempel is young enough to understand the lyrics of her students’ favorite songs, but old enough to feel she should be shocked by them. Although she loves her job and her young charges, she fears she may be doomed to always repeat the seventh grade.
Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum is another one of those precocious Iowa Workshop graduates, who, like her alter ego, served a brief term teaching seventh and eighth grade before moving on to graduate school. The publishers of this, her second book, know better than to use the label “short stories” on the cover or in the promotional material, hoping readers will assume this too is a novel. But make no mistake. Ms. Hempel Chronicles is a collection of very fine stories, tightly organized, lyrical in style, metaphoric and mysterious, linked by their focus on the pains and pleasures of the young schoolteacher who gives the book its name. Ms. Hempel’s relationships with her students, her fellow teachers, her brother, and her father are all delicately drawn. Her efforts to be a good teacher, although she is never quite sure this is what she is meant to do, are heartfelt and convincing. She will make readers remember fondly one of those teachers they loved.
I thought the O. Henry volume was stronger this year than the Best volume, or maybe I just liked more of the stories in the O. Henry volume. “The Headstrong Historian” by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is wonderfully told tale in the accents of the traditional storyteller, and “A Spoiled Man” by Pakistani writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, is a powerful story about a favorite subject of short fiction-the little man—told with such consummate control that what is classically causal sounds everyday casual. I posted a couple of blogs about Mueenuddin last year when his debut collection Other Rooms, Other Wonders, which has won or been short-listed for several awards, came out.
Being the old Kentucky boy that I am, I can never resist a story by Wendell Berry, and, his Atlantic story “Stand By Me” is, as always, a pleasure. It’s also a pleasure to discover a new writer, who has been around a while. James Lasdun has published several books, but for some reason I never had read him before. His story “Oh, Death,” from his most recent collection It’s Beginning to Hurt, may not have the same elegiac power as the Ralph Stanley song from which it gets its title, but it makes the heart tighten a bit for all that. That opening stanza of the Stanley song never fails to make me fear that inevitable “good night,” against which I fully intend to rage.
O, Death
O, Death
Won't you spare me over til another year
Well what is this that I can't see
With ice cold hands takin' hold of me
Well I am death, none can excel
I'll open the door to heaven or hell
Whoa, death someone would pray
Could you wait to call me another day
The children prayed, the preacher preached
Time and mercy is out of your reach
I'll fix your feet til you cant walk
I'll lock your jaw til you cant talk
I'll close your eyes so you can't see
This very air, come and go with me
I'm death I come to take the soul
Leave the body and leave it cold
To draw up the flesh off of the frame
Dirt and worm both have a claim
Lasdun, born in England, but living now in upstate New York, says that one element he brought to the story to give expression to the powerful emotions the event on which it is based aroused in him was the “mountain music” the narrator has become infatuated with, concluding, “I hope something of the wild energy and pathos, the joy and melancholy, of that music has found its way into the story.” I think it has. I just ordered a copy of It’s Beginning to Hurt and look forward to reading all the stories in it. That’s another wonderful thing about reading the stories in Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Award Stories—the discovery of great writers you somehow missed, an error that you want to correct right away.
While celebrating May as Short Story Month, doubling my blog efforts by reading the Atlantic Special Issue and commenting on stories for Dan Wickett’s Emerging Writers blog from Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy and Alyson Hagy’s Ghosts of Wyoming, I have also been reading the new Best and the new O. Henry. I will only comment briefly on my favorites among these forty to whet your appetite, while trying to avoid spoilers.
Annie Proulx’s “Them Old Cowboy Songs” from her third (and final, she says) Wyoming Stories volume, Fine Just the Way It Is, was chosen for both volumes. Proulx bookends the stories in her book by citing its title in the first and last tale. In “Family Man,” Ray Forkenbrock, wasting away in a home for the elderly, tells his granddaughter about his past, which she records for posterity. Even though his life was marred by hardship and a secret betrayal by his father, he is adamant that “everything was fine the way it was.” In the heart-scalding final story, “Tits Up in a Ditch,” which focuses on Dakota Lister, who loses more than her arm while serving in Iraq, her grandmother’s husband Verl dismisses outsider criticism of the state by insisting that “Wyomin is fine just the way it is.” The way it was, and often still is, is vicious. Whether the story takes place in the late 19th century or the early 21st, one slip-up in the rugged outback of Wyoming can kill you. In “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” Archie and Rose, aged 16 and 14, try to make a go of it on a modest homestead. However, the winters are bitter and jobs are few, and Archie’s decision to leave pregnant Rose in their rough-hewn little house to find work results in disaster.
Ron Rash’s “Into the Gorge,” which originally appeared in The Southern Review, also makes it in both volumes. Rash says the story combines a family tale of his grandfather leading a search for an old woman who wandered away from her mountain farm in the 1930’s with an image of a man running from something, although he seemed too old to be running. Rash says he soon began to understand that the man was running from a world he no longer understood. “Into the Gorge” is a short, relatively simple story, told with just enough restraint to suggest legend, without laying on too strongly the social theme of the Appalachian Mountains being invaded by the restraints and regulations of the modern world.
One advantage the O. Henry collection has over the Best volume is that it contains a story each by the two very best short story writers still practicing that underrated art--Alice Munro’s “Some Women” and William Trevor’s “Woman in the House.”
Although Alice Munro has insisted in more than one place that she does not write as a novelist does, many critics and reviewers have tried to give her fiction the dignity they think belongs only to the novel by suggesting that her stories are “novelistic” and therefore more complex than short stories. In a story entitled “Fiction” in her new book, Too Much Happiness, Munro cannot not resist a wily jab at all those critics who have trivialized the short story as a genre and chided her for not writing something more serious, namely novels. Joyce, the central character, buys a book written by a woman she has met briefly at a party. When she opens it, she is disappointed to find out it is a collection of short stories, not a novel: “It seemed to diminish the book’s importance, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside it.” After climaxing a distinguished career of numerous awards with the Man Booker International Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2009, Munro must have had a sly smile on her face when she wrote those words.
“Some Women” begins with the narrator saying how amazed she is sometimes at how old she is, but focuses on her experiences when she was thirteen-years-old and hired to help care for a young man named Bruce, a veteran of the war, who is dying of Leukemia. He is staying in the house of his stepmother, Old Mrs. Crozier. His wife, Sylvia, a schoolteacher, seems to be living on the fringes of his life and his illness. Old Mrs. Crozier’s masseuse, Roxanne, bursts into the house like a dynamo and takes an interest in Bruce, who plays the role of a kind of ailing Fisher King, a sort of sacred prize in the center of the women. A usual with the short story, “Some Women” amasses its weight on its ending when Bruce turns the tables on Roxanne and Mrs. Crozier, finding the comfort he needs in his neglected wife.
Alice Munro’s short stories are complex and powerful not because they are “novelistic” and not so much because of what happens in them, but because of what cannot happen except in the mysterious human imagination. More 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.
William Trevor, by universal critical agreement, is one of the best short-story writers practicing that underrated art form. The twelve stories in his most recent collection, Cheating at Canasta, reaffirm that he has a profound understanding of the complexity of what makes people do what they do and an unerring ability to use language to suggest that intimate intricacy.
As in all great short stories, from Chekhov to Carver, there is mystery and not a little menace in the stories of William Trevor—secrets so tangled and inexplicable that efforts to explain them with the language of psychology or sociology or history are either futile or absurd. This is not accidental, but part of the short story’s historical and generic tradition, for the form originated in primitive myth, which, by its very nature, was concerned with mystery, for which story was the only explanatory model available. Moreover, the short story is often concerned with the enigma of motivation. Part of the reason for this is the short story's close relationship to the romance form, which, allegorical in its nature, develops characters that, even as they seem to be like real people in the real world, act as if they are obsessed, propelled by some mysterious force.
“The Woman of the House” is about silence, about not saying, about the basic mystery of human personality, about Chekhov's famous comment that in the short story, it is better to say too little than too much, even though he admitted he was not sure why that was true. The story is a fine example of the short story form's focus on basic and universal human characteristics, even though I know that the word "universal" is not appreciated by postcolonial and other cultural critics, who seem more concerned with what separates us than what unifies us as human beings.
These are not cultural examinations of either the old Ireland of legend or the new Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, but rather profoundly wise explorations of individual, yet universal, secrets and mysteries of the heart. Luminous, restrained stories, every one of them deserves to be read and reread, their motivations marveled at, their sentences savored. They fill the reader with awe at the complexity of the human experience and the genius of William Trevor.
Daniel Alarcon has stories in both collections, “The Idiot President” in the Best and “The Bridge” in the O. Henry. I liked “The Bridge” best for its haunting exploration of the death of a blind man and his blind wife in Alarcon’s native city of Lima, Peru. Alarcon says that the story began with an anecdote of a fallen pedestrian bridge and the accidental death of a blind person, but that as he began the story he had no fixed sense of where it was going or where it might end, which, he says, he has found to be the most exciting way to write. It’s an interesting observation about the writing process that I wish others would comment on, for I have heard many writers say the same thing.
One story in the Best collection that I had read earlier is Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s “Yurt,” from her elegant little collection Ms. Hempel Chronicles. Caught between two worlds, Ms. Hempel is young enough to understand the lyrics of her students’ favorite songs, but old enough to feel she should be shocked by them. Although she loves her job and her young charges, she fears she may be doomed to always repeat the seventh grade.
Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum is another one of those precocious Iowa Workshop graduates, who, like her alter ego, served a brief term teaching seventh and eighth grade before moving on to graduate school. The publishers of this, her second book, know better than to use the label “short stories” on the cover or in the promotional material, hoping readers will assume this too is a novel. But make no mistake. Ms. Hempel Chronicles is a collection of very fine stories, tightly organized, lyrical in style, metaphoric and mysterious, linked by their focus on the pains and pleasures of the young schoolteacher who gives the book its name. Ms. Hempel’s relationships with her students, her fellow teachers, her brother, and her father are all delicately drawn. Her efforts to be a good teacher, although she is never quite sure this is what she is meant to do, are heartfelt and convincing. She will make readers remember fondly one of those teachers they loved.
I thought the O. Henry volume was stronger this year than the Best volume, or maybe I just liked more of the stories in the O. Henry volume. “The Headstrong Historian” by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is wonderfully told tale in the accents of the traditional storyteller, and “A Spoiled Man” by Pakistani writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, is a powerful story about a favorite subject of short fiction-the little man—told with such consummate control that what is classically causal sounds everyday casual. I posted a couple of blogs about Mueenuddin last year when his debut collection Other Rooms, Other Wonders, which has won or been short-listed for several awards, came out.
Being the old Kentucky boy that I am, I can never resist a story by Wendell Berry, and, his Atlantic story “Stand By Me” is, as always, a pleasure. It’s also a pleasure to discover a new writer, who has been around a while. James Lasdun has published several books, but for some reason I never had read him before. His story “Oh, Death,” from his most recent collection It’s Beginning to Hurt, may not have the same elegiac power as the Ralph Stanley song from which it gets its title, but it makes the heart tighten a bit for all that. That opening stanza of the Stanley song never fails to make me fear that inevitable “good night,” against which I fully intend to rage.
O, Death
O, Death
Won't you spare me over til another year
Well what is this that I can't see
With ice cold hands takin' hold of me
Well I am death, none can excel
I'll open the door to heaven or hell
Whoa, death someone would pray
Could you wait to call me another day
The children prayed, the preacher preached
Time and mercy is out of your reach
I'll fix your feet til you cant walk
I'll lock your jaw til you cant talk
I'll close your eyes so you can't see
This very air, come and go with me
I'm death I come to take the soul
Leave the body and leave it cold
To draw up the flesh off of the frame
Dirt and worm both have a claim
Lasdun, born in England, but living now in upstate New York, says that one element he brought to the story to give expression to the powerful emotions the event on which it is based aroused in him was the “mountain music” the narrator has become infatuated with, concluding, “I hope something of the wild energy and pathos, the joy and melancholy, of that music has found its way into the story.” I think it has. I just ordered a copy of It’s Beginning to Hurt and look forward to reading all the stories in it. That’s another wonderful thing about reading the stories in Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Award Stories—the discovery of great writers you somehow missed, an error that you want to correct right away.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Short Story Month 2010: Pinckney Benedict's "Zog-19" and Alyson Hagy's "The Sin Eaters"
Alyson Hagy, “The Sin Eaters”
I enjoyed “The Sin Eaters” but not in the way I enjoy short stories, rather in the way I enjoy a chapter in a novel. Short stories generally are more often structured around theme, rather than around plot or character. I know this is a generalization for which everyone can find exceptions; however, I still suggest it is “generally” true. I enjoyed the journey Revered Porterfield makes, the characters he meets along the way, the country he discovers, the plot in which he becomes involved. I would like to know more about his adventures in Wyoming. However, this is the kind of loose narrative verisimilitude I enjoy in a novel, not the tight thematic structure I enjoy primarily in a short story.
I would like to suggest two common characteristics of the short story as a form that Hagy does not seem to be concerned with here. That is certainly her prerogative; one can write a piece of fiction in any way he or she can get successfully get away with. I’m just saying that this piece of fiction is more like the chapter in a novel than a short story
First, there is the possible thematic significance of the title. Margaret Atwood has a story entitled “The Sin Eater” in her book Bluebird’s Egg that seems more typical of the short story. Here is part of the second paragraph:
“In Wales, mostly in the rural areas, there was a personage known as the Sin Eater. When someone was dying the Sin Eater would be sent for. The people of the house would prepare a meal and place it on the coffin…. According to other versions, the meal would be placed on the dead person’s body, which must have made for some sloppy eating one would have though. In any case the Sin Eater would devour this meal and would also be given a sum of money. It was believed that all the sins the dying person had accumulated during his lifetime would be removed from him and transmitted to the Sin Eater. The Sin Eater thus became absolutely bloated with other people’s sins. She’d accumulate such a heavy load of them that nobody wanted to have anything to do with her; a kind of syphilitic of the soul, you might say. They’d even avoided speaking to her, except of course when it was time to summon her to another meal.”
Atwood’s story centers on the thematic interrelations between sin, guilt, and psychological transference revolving around the psychiatrist who provides the above background on sin eating and the narrator of the story. Atwood’s “The Sin Eater” is not a very good story, but it does try to work the way a short story generally works. Hagy may be interested in social scapegoating in her story, but most of the detail of the story does not cohere around that theme the way it does in the Atwood story. Hagy uses a lot of detail that is perceptive and interesting, but it is more verisimilitude than it is thematic.
Second, there is the importance of the ending. The Russian critic B. M. Ejxenbaum suggests, “By its very essence, the story, just as the anecdote, amasses its whole weight toward the ending.” Whereas Atwood’s story concludes with an extended dream that suddenly pulls its various thematic threads together, Hagy’s ending deals with a plot issue involving rustlers and ranchers and the Rev. Porterfield’s future missionary work with the Shoshone.
Hagy’s “The Sin Eaters” reads like a chapter from a highly stylized late nineteenth-century novel told by an all-knowing Victorian novelist (albeit from the perspective of the Rev. Porterfield) who speaks as follows:
“His duty was to the north, with the downtrodden Red Man.”
“He asked a young street arab for directions, and the scamp agreed to guide him to the parsonage.”
“Langston was all surety on the surface.”
“He was well forged for solitude”
“It took that ministration to clarify the fact that he was actually perched upright in a wooden chair.”
Even the characters talk in this formal, highly stylized, way:
“They are stimulating individuals and eager to converse with learned travelers,” Langston noted.
“We are honored, sir. You will forgive our crude frontier ways.”
“The thing is afoot. Laws must be obeyed.”
“One month on the Popo Agie River with those wretches will gut you or temper your steel forever.”
“I’m under advisement to avoid all politics,” he said.
I like this kind of talk. I grew up reading novels in which the novelist and his or her characters talked this way. However, I am not sure anyone ever really talked this way except if he or she lived only in a Victorian novel.
Pinckney Benedict, “Zog-19: A Scientific Romance”
In his “Contributor’s Note” to the 2001 O. Henry Awards Prize Stories, Pinckney Benedict says this is the “first love story” he has ever written, as well as his most “autobiographical story.” He says he feels like McGinty/Zog—that he is out of place and out of time, “that I’m intended for some task that I don’t clearly understand and that probably has little importance—pretty much constantly. I loved writing this story. I often wish that I could just go on writing it for all time….”
I taught this story several years ago when I used the 2001 O. Henry Awards Prize Stories in my American Short Story class. I checked my teaching notes and found this: “Some funny sophomoric stuff here about belching and farting. I like this story; it is fun and works because Benedict is having so much fun with it.”
George Brosi, editor of Appalachian Heritage, where Benedict has published a couple of stories, did a profile on Benedict a few years ago which opened with: “Pinckney Benedict is a gleeful writer. He digs writing and takes a kind of boyish pride in the work he has created. His writing is deep and complex, yet the delight that goes into it is obvious to most readers.” He quotes Benedict as saying: “It fundamentally makes my day when something I’ve written gets up the nose of some stodgy academic or critic. That’s when I know I’m in the ballpark.”
Well, I sure as hell don’t want to be thought of as a “stodgy academic or critic” by Benedict or anyone else. I think “Zog-19” is the most fun I have ever had reading a postcolonial story, even more fun than watching Avatar in 3-D. It is what George Brosi called the one story I have ever published—“a hoot.” And I can see how Benedict would think it autobiographical, since as a kid his favorite reading matter, according to Brosi, was a comic book series called Weird War. Benedict claims he has been influenced by comic books, science fiction, horror writing, movies, tv, video games and computer simulations.
If there is any thematic significance to Benedict’s sophomoric satire on colonialism (and God forbid that there may be), then it has to do with storytelling being primarily a lot of gas, like a fart in a crowed room.
A stodgy academic who nevertheless likes a good laugh as much as the next man, I published a scholarly essay several years ago entitle “Literary Masters and Masturbators: Sexuality, Fantasy and Reality in Huckleberry Finn.” I was trying to settle an academic debate about the common critical opinion that the last quarter of Twain’s great novel, when Tom Sawyer comes back on the scene, undermines with fantasy the so-called reality of Huck’s journey down the river with Jim. I thought that was nonsense.
In trying to prove my point, I got involved with Twain’s sophomoric satire entitled “1601,” a conversation at the social fireside in Tudor England that focuses on witty sexual repartee and stories about the sexual behavior of various individuals. The bulk of the narrative is concerned with Sir Walter Raleigh's powers of breaking wind and the Pepysian narrator's disgust with the "wyndy ruffian" and the whole "brede" of all those that "write playes, bookes & such like." The other members of the conversation include Bacon, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, and Shakespeare. That Twain identifies with the narrator's scorn for the storytelling windiness of these writers might be further suggested by the fact that he once said that Sir Walter Scott was full of "windy humbuggeries" and that James Fenimore Cooper's characters talk like "windy melodramatic actors."
It is not necessary to go into the Freudian relationship between what is produced by the anus and what is produced by the artist; Twain makes the connection quite clear in "1601" itself. For example, in the beginning of the piece when "it befel that one did breake wynde, yielding an exceeding mightie and distressful stinke," Queen Elizabeth demands that the "author" of the fart confess it; Bacon refers to it as a "great performance"; Shakespeare compares the flatus with the divine afflatus by noting that the angels had foretold the coming of "this most disolating breath, proclaiming it a work of uninspired man"; and finally, when Raleigh confesses, he dismisses it as a mere clearing of his "nether throat." Moreover, that storytelling is just so much flatulence is suggested at the conclusion of the piece. After Lady Alice delivers a long grandiose and windy speech, the Queen concludes it by commenting, as much in the imperative as in the exclamatory, "Oh Shitte."
If ever the Internet acronym lol is worth using, then it is worth applying to Twain’s “1601” and Benedict’s “Zog-19.” Toot toot, Mark Twain. Toot toot, Pinckney Benedict.
I enjoyed “The Sin Eaters” but not in the way I enjoy short stories, rather in the way I enjoy a chapter in a novel. Short stories generally are more often structured around theme, rather than around plot or character. I know this is a generalization for which everyone can find exceptions; however, I still suggest it is “generally” true. I enjoyed the journey Revered Porterfield makes, the characters he meets along the way, the country he discovers, the plot in which he becomes involved. I would like to know more about his adventures in Wyoming. However, this is the kind of loose narrative verisimilitude I enjoy in a novel, not the tight thematic structure I enjoy primarily in a short story.
I would like to suggest two common characteristics of the short story as a form that Hagy does not seem to be concerned with here. That is certainly her prerogative; one can write a piece of fiction in any way he or she can get successfully get away with. I’m just saying that this piece of fiction is more like the chapter in a novel than a short story
First, there is the possible thematic significance of the title. Margaret Atwood has a story entitled “The Sin Eater” in her book Bluebird’s Egg that seems more typical of the short story. Here is part of the second paragraph:
“In Wales, mostly in the rural areas, there was a personage known as the Sin Eater. When someone was dying the Sin Eater would be sent for. The people of the house would prepare a meal and place it on the coffin…. According to other versions, the meal would be placed on the dead person’s body, which must have made for some sloppy eating one would have though. In any case the Sin Eater would devour this meal and would also be given a sum of money. It was believed that all the sins the dying person had accumulated during his lifetime would be removed from him and transmitted to the Sin Eater. The Sin Eater thus became absolutely bloated with other people’s sins. She’d accumulate such a heavy load of them that nobody wanted to have anything to do with her; a kind of syphilitic of the soul, you might say. They’d even avoided speaking to her, except of course when it was time to summon her to another meal.”
Atwood’s story centers on the thematic interrelations between sin, guilt, and psychological transference revolving around the psychiatrist who provides the above background on sin eating and the narrator of the story. Atwood’s “The Sin Eater” is not a very good story, but it does try to work the way a short story generally works. Hagy may be interested in social scapegoating in her story, but most of the detail of the story does not cohere around that theme the way it does in the Atwood story. Hagy uses a lot of detail that is perceptive and interesting, but it is more verisimilitude than it is thematic.
Second, there is the importance of the ending. The Russian critic B. M. Ejxenbaum suggests, “By its very essence, the story, just as the anecdote, amasses its whole weight toward the ending.” Whereas Atwood’s story concludes with an extended dream that suddenly pulls its various thematic threads together, Hagy’s ending deals with a plot issue involving rustlers and ranchers and the Rev. Porterfield’s future missionary work with the Shoshone.
Hagy’s “The Sin Eaters” reads like a chapter from a highly stylized late nineteenth-century novel told by an all-knowing Victorian novelist (albeit from the perspective of the Rev. Porterfield) who speaks as follows:
“His duty was to the north, with the downtrodden Red Man.”
“He asked a young street arab for directions, and the scamp agreed to guide him to the parsonage.”
“Langston was all surety on the surface.”
“He was well forged for solitude”
“It took that ministration to clarify the fact that he was actually perched upright in a wooden chair.”
Even the characters talk in this formal, highly stylized, way:
“They are stimulating individuals and eager to converse with learned travelers,” Langston noted.
“We are honored, sir. You will forgive our crude frontier ways.”
“The thing is afoot. Laws must be obeyed.”
“One month on the Popo Agie River with those wretches will gut you or temper your steel forever.”
“I’m under advisement to avoid all politics,” he said.
I like this kind of talk. I grew up reading novels in which the novelist and his or her characters talked this way. However, I am not sure anyone ever really talked this way except if he or she lived only in a Victorian novel.
Pinckney Benedict, “Zog-19: A Scientific Romance”
In his “Contributor’s Note” to the 2001 O. Henry Awards Prize Stories, Pinckney Benedict says this is the “first love story” he has ever written, as well as his most “autobiographical story.” He says he feels like McGinty/Zog—that he is out of place and out of time, “that I’m intended for some task that I don’t clearly understand and that probably has little importance—pretty much constantly. I loved writing this story. I often wish that I could just go on writing it for all time….”
I taught this story several years ago when I used the 2001 O. Henry Awards Prize Stories in my American Short Story class. I checked my teaching notes and found this: “Some funny sophomoric stuff here about belching and farting. I like this story; it is fun and works because Benedict is having so much fun with it.”
George Brosi, editor of Appalachian Heritage, where Benedict has published a couple of stories, did a profile on Benedict a few years ago which opened with: “Pinckney Benedict is a gleeful writer. He digs writing and takes a kind of boyish pride in the work he has created. His writing is deep and complex, yet the delight that goes into it is obvious to most readers.” He quotes Benedict as saying: “It fundamentally makes my day when something I’ve written gets up the nose of some stodgy academic or critic. That’s when I know I’m in the ballpark.”
Well, I sure as hell don’t want to be thought of as a “stodgy academic or critic” by Benedict or anyone else. I think “Zog-19” is the most fun I have ever had reading a postcolonial story, even more fun than watching Avatar in 3-D. It is what George Brosi called the one story I have ever published—“a hoot.” And I can see how Benedict would think it autobiographical, since as a kid his favorite reading matter, according to Brosi, was a comic book series called Weird War. Benedict claims he has been influenced by comic books, science fiction, horror writing, movies, tv, video games and computer simulations.
If there is any thematic significance to Benedict’s sophomoric satire on colonialism (and God forbid that there may be), then it has to do with storytelling being primarily a lot of gas, like a fart in a crowed room.
A stodgy academic who nevertheless likes a good laugh as much as the next man, I published a scholarly essay several years ago entitle “Literary Masters and Masturbators: Sexuality, Fantasy and Reality in Huckleberry Finn.” I was trying to settle an academic debate about the common critical opinion that the last quarter of Twain’s great novel, when Tom Sawyer comes back on the scene, undermines with fantasy the so-called reality of Huck’s journey down the river with Jim. I thought that was nonsense.
In trying to prove my point, I got involved with Twain’s sophomoric satire entitled “1601,” a conversation at the social fireside in Tudor England that focuses on witty sexual repartee and stories about the sexual behavior of various individuals. The bulk of the narrative is concerned with Sir Walter Raleigh's powers of breaking wind and the Pepysian narrator's disgust with the "wyndy ruffian" and the whole "brede" of all those that "write playes, bookes & such like." The other members of the conversation include Bacon, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, and Shakespeare. That Twain identifies with the narrator's scorn for the storytelling windiness of these writers might be further suggested by the fact that he once said that Sir Walter Scott was full of "windy humbuggeries" and that James Fenimore Cooper's characters talk like "windy melodramatic actors."
It is not necessary to go into the Freudian relationship between what is produced by the anus and what is produced by the artist; Twain makes the connection quite clear in "1601" itself. For example, in the beginning of the piece when "it befel that one did breake wynde, yielding an exceeding mightie and distressful stinke," Queen Elizabeth demands that the "author" of the fart confess it; Bacon refers to it as a "great performance"; Shakespeare compares the flatus with the divine afflatus by noting that the angels had foretold the coming of "this most disolating breath, proclaiming it a work of uninspired man"; and finally, when Raleigh confesses, he dismisses it as a mere clearing of his "nether throat." Moreover, that storytelling is just so much flatulence is suggested at the conclusion of the piece. After Lady Alice delivers a long grandiose and windy speech, the Queen concludes it by commenting, as much in the imperative as in the exclamatory, "Oh Shitte."
If ever the Internet acronym lol is worth using, then it is worth applying to Twain’s “1601” and Benedict’s “Zog-19.” Toot toot, Mark Twain. Toot toot, Pinckney Benedict.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Short Story Month 2010: Pinckney Benedict's "Mercy" and Alyson Hagy's "Oil and Gas"
Pinckney Benedict, “Mercy” (Miracle Boy and Other Stories)
Sure, this is a simple story. But it is a hard story for me to resist. I tried, but after three readings I gave up and gave it to it.
When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather, who tended a stony farm on the slope of a steep hill in Eastern Kentucky. He was a tough old feller and, like the father in Benedict’s story, never spoke directly to me. I have been thinking about him this spring as I plant tomatoes, Kentucky Pole Beans, potatoes, onions, and squash in whatever plots of soil I can carve out of our narrow Southern California backyard. I hear him say: “If you can’t eat it, no use growing it, no matter how purty you think it is.” Like the father in Benedict’s story, the worst thing my grandfather could say about any thing was that it was “useless.” I cringed when he aimed that epithet at me, spitting tobacco juice at my feet, especially when the accusation was “useless as tits on a boar hog,” the closest thing to poetry he seemed capable of.
I never really understood my grandfather, never really thought he had any inner life, never knew what he loved, or if he loved anything. I never saw any break in his stony approach to reality, never heard him laugh except derisively at somebody. So I liked Benedict’s story, knew from the beginning that it was going to be one of those rare moments when a boy secretly sees a breakthrough in the hard veneer of his father.
I have spent my life teaching short stories to university students, and practically every semester, some of them would whine about how short stories were always such downers, never ending happily. And every semester, I would haul out my old canards about the sloppiness of sentimentality, the toughness of complexity, the slyness of subtlety, etc. etc. The smartest students would nod sagely; the average ones shake their heads sadly.
And while it is true that “feel good” stories that end happily often lapse into the simplistic and the sentimental, the artistic question is whether the happy ending is earned or given away. Sure, “Mercy” illustrates the cliché, “All work and no play….” But I don’t find it a simple illustration. When a man makes a living off the lives of animals, he can’t give them names. When they are Angus cattle, they cannot be seen as more than huge slabs of flesh—potential steaks, roasts, and Big Macs. But that doesn’t mean that when they are all loaded on the trucks and on their way to the abattoir, the man who raised them has no feelings about it. The boy sees the father’s face go slack and his shoulders slump. “And for a brief instant he stood still, motionless as I had never seen him.”
And those miniature horses! If you have never seen one, take a look at some of the videos on Face Book. Yeah, the comments are all: omg, lol, cute, adorable, etc. But the miniatures seem to exist for no other reason than to play, to gambol, to roll over, to scamper. Less 34 inches high, between 55 and 100 pounds, they are not ponies; they are horses. But horses no bigger than a good-sized dog. You gotta love em. Especially in this story, you do, since their owners neglect them, pen them in, let them go hungry, leave them out in the cold. They want out, want to play. So I like that scene when under the weight of the bunched-up horses, the fence gives way and the posts go over one after another like gunshots. (Harmless gunshots are my favorite kind) And the horses shake off the snow and bound out like great dogs through the gap in the fence and head for the bales of hay. “The scene had the feel of a holiday.”
When the father shows up with the .30-06, the boy knows what is coming; after all the father has said if the horses came over into his land he would shoot them. So for a few moments, the reader is not completely sure if the boy knows what is going to happen. The mare dares to play with the father, just doesn’t know any better, dragging him gently forward until, in the cliché classic comic slapstick bit, “He fell right on his ass in the snow, my old man, the Remington held high above his head.”
So is it a well-earned pleasure when we see that the gun is not loaded and that the father is laughing, or is it a sentimental give away? The thing is, a boy may think he knows his father, but does he really? Sometimes the old man may just feel like playing. Unlikely. But possible. And although in the next minute, life may go back to the way it has always been, it may never quite be the same again. I like a story that ends with an “I’ll be damned” moment. But then, maybe I’m just getting old and soft.
Alyson Hagy, “Oil and Gas” (Ghosts of Wyoming)
This story wears me out, for Hagy absolutely refuses to give me any help by identifying the characters and specifying their connections. I know all the events take place in Campbell County, Wyoming, in and around the town of Gillette. I know the latitude/longitude coordinates of all the characters, except for those in specific buildings, like the emergency room in Gillette and the Red Dawg Bar off route 16 in Clearmont. Hell, I can even locate every one of them on online maps.
But the point of the story seems to be that they are all lost; no matter how close together they are, they miss making connections. The theme is announced emphatically at the end of part 1: “Found and Lost. I’d like to write that up as the damn Wyoming state motto.”
Then there’s the story of the day at the hospital that they lost a patient. Not that he died, but got lost, like misplaced. Lora Van Tassell found the old feller up on Fortification Creek, and while he was being treated for dehydration, he just wandered away.
And then there’s Andy Josling who took a wrong turn in his blue Toyoto 4x4. Phil Triplet saw him turn around, “just another fool that got hisself lost on these roads.”
And Prentiss just wandered away from his crew when their rig broke down, and no one has seen him since.
It’s all just another day in “Wild, Wonderful Wyoming—the last place in America to get ahead, except the getting don’t last.”
But then in the last section of the story, two people actually find each other: Lora and Andy are having a five-hour lunch at Debbie’s Restaurant. Neither is young, but Phil Triplet is full of admiration for the “sheer balls” it took Andy to stop looking over his shoulder and to move ahead. “I’d pay a lot to be able to see a good road into the future…. make sure it’s not another backbreaking mirage. A real future. Goddamn.”
I kinda liked this story after I got over being aggravated by it. On the one hand, it seems too much like a show-off indie film in which we are given several separate episodes that finally come together at the end if we work at it hard enough—a Hagy tour-de-force of monologue and dialogue capturing voices that ring true. On the other hand, it seems like a significant effort to capture something about being lost in the changing world of Wyoming, even while you are at home there, because no matter how big the sky is, the earth seems to be altering.
Sure, this is a simple story. But it is a hard story for me to resist. I tried, but after three readings I gave up and gave it to it.
When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather, who tended a stony farm on the slope of a steep hill in Eastern Kentucky. He was a tough old feller and, like the father in Benedict’s story, never spoke directly to me. I have been thinking about him this spring as I plant tomatoes, Kentucky Pole Beans, potatoes, onions, and squash in whatever plots of soil I can carve out of our narrow Southern California backyard. I hear him say: “If you can’t eat it, no use growing it, no matter how purty you think it is.” Like the father in Benedict’s story, the worst thing my grandfather could say about any thing was that it was “useless.” I cringed when he aimed that epithet at me, spitting tobacco juice at my feet, especially when the accusation was “useless as tits on a boar hog,” the closest thing to poetry he seemed capable of.
I never really understood my grandfather, never really thought he had any inner life, never knew what he loved, or if he loved anything. I never saw any break in his stony approach to reality, never heard him laugh except derisively at somebody. So I liked Benedict’s story, knew from the beginning that it was going to be one of those rare moments when a boy secretly sees a breakthrough in the hard veneer of his father.
I have spent my life teaching short stories to university students, and practically every semester, some of them would whine about how short stories were always such downers, never ending happily. And every semester, I would haul out my old canards about the sloppiness of sentimentality, the toughness of complexity, the slyness of subtlety, etc. etc. The smartest students would nod sagely; the average ones shake their heads sadly.
And while it is true that “feel good” stories that end happily often lapse into the simplistic and the sentimental, the artistic question is whether the happy ending is earned or given away. Sure, “Mercy” illustrates the cliché, “All work and no play….” But I don’t find it a simple illustration. When a man makes a living off the lives of animals, he can’t give them names. When they are Angus cattle, they cannot be seen as more than huge slabs of flesh—potential steaks, roasts, and Big Macs. But that doesn’t mean that when they are all loaded on the trucks and on their way to the abattoir, the man who raised them has no feelings about it. The boy sees the father’s face go slack and his shoulders slump. “And for a brief instant he stood still, motionless as I had never seen him.”
And those miniature horses! If you have never seen one, take a look at some of the videos on Face Book. Yeah, the comments are all: omg, lol, cute, adorable, etc. But the miniatures seem to exist for no other reason than to play, to gambol, to roll over, to scamper. Less 34 inches high, between 55 and 100 pounds, they are not ponies; they are horses. But horses no bigger than a good-sized dog. You gotta love em. Especially in this story, you do, since their owners neglect them, pen them in, let them go hungry, leave them out in the cold. They want out, want to play. So I like that scene when under the weight of the bunched-up horses, the fence gives way and the posts go over one after another like gunshots. (Harmless gunshots are my favorite kind) And the horses shake off the snow and bound out like great dogs through the gap in the fence and head for the bales of hay. “The scene had the feel of a holiday.”
When the father shows up with the .30-06, the boy knows what is coming; after all the father has said if the horses came over into his land he would shoot them. So for a few moments, the reader is not completely sure if the boy knows what is going to happen. The mare dares to play with the father, just doesn’t know any better, dragging him gently forward until, in the cliché classic comic slapstick bit, “He fell right on his ass in the snow, my old man, the Remington held high above his head.”
So is it a well-earned pleasure when we see that the gun is not loaded and that the father is laughing, or is it a sentimental give away? The thing is, a boy may think he knows his father, but does he really? Sometimes the old man may just feel like playing. Unlikely. But possible. And although in the next minute, life may go back to the way it has always been, it may never quite be the same again. I like a story that ends with an “I’ll be damned” moment. But then, maybe I’m just getting old and soft.
Alyson Hagy, “Oil and Gas” (Ghosts of Wyoming)
This story wears me out, for Hagy absolutely refuses to give me any help by identifying the characters and specifying their connections. I know all the events take place in Campbell County, Wyoming, in and around the town of Gillette. I know the latitude/longitude coordinates of all the characters, except for those in specific buildings, like the emergency room in Gillette and the Red Dawg Bar off route 16 in Clearmont. Hell, I can even locate every one of them on online maps.
But the point of the story seems to be that they are all lost; no matter how close together they are, they miss making connections. The theme is announced emphatically at the end of part 1: “Found and Lost. I’d like to write that up as the damn Wyoming state motto.”
Then there’s the story of the day at the hospital that they lost a patient. Not that he died, but got lost, like misplaced. Lora Van Tassell found the old feller up on Fortification Creek, and while he was being treated for dehydration, he just wandered away.
And then there’s Andy Josling who took a wrong turn in his blue Toyoto 4x4. Phil Triplet saw him turn around, “just another fool that got hisself lost on these roads.”
And Prentiss just wandered away from his crew when their rig broke down, and no one has seen him since.
It’s all just another day in “Wild, Wonderful Wyoming—the last place in America to get ahead, except the getting don’t last.”
But then in the last section of the story, two people actually find each other: Lora and Andy are having a five-hour lunch at Debbie’s Restaurant. Neither is young, but Phil Triplet is full of admiration for the “sheer balls” it took Andy to stop looking over his shoulder and to move ahead. “I’d pay a lot to be able to see a good road into the future…. make sure it’s not another backbreaking mirage. A real future. Goddamn.”
I kinda liked this story after I got over being aggravated by it. On the one hand, it seems too much like a show-off indie film in which we are given several separate episodes that finally come together at the end if we work at it hard enough—a Hagy tour-de-force of monologue and dialogue capturing voices that ring true. On the other hand, it seems like a significant effort to capture something about being lost in the changing world of Wyoming, even while you are at home there, because no matter how big the sky is, the earth seems to be altering.
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