Alice 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.”
I have always argued that there is a short story way of seeing “reality” that is different than the novel’s way of approaching “reality.” But, as my current research on authors’ views of the short story suggests, the only ones who seem to agree with me are short story writers. Readers, by and large, especially academic readers, seem reluctant to make generic distinctions between the two forms.
Frank O’Connor once suggested that the short story does not deal as the novel does with problems of the moment, but with what John Millington Synge calls “the profound and common interests of life." The short story, claimed O’Connor, is a “lyric cry in the face of human destiny.”
I have suggested in other places that one of the reasons for the short story’s focus on the “profound and common interests in life” is the form’s origins in myth and folklore, which Mircea Eliade has argued, narrates, “primordial events” in consequence of which human beings became what they are today. Myth, says Eliade, teaches human beings the primordial stories that have “constituted them existentially.”
I argued in my previous post that Stephen Millhauser’s story “Getting Closer” was quite clearly a story that dealt with a primordial, universal event about the nature of “happening,” not just a story of the moment about an obsessive young boy who goes on a outing with his family.
My colleague Lee commented on my previous post that he thought “Getting Closer” was a poor story because, as he says:
1. It blasts its message at us.
2. The sensibility at the heart of the story is inauthentic. Nine-year-olds don't perceive the world in this way, seeing death under the 'shining skin of world' (ugh - trite!).
I would agree with Lee if Millhauser meant the story to be a realistic account of the boy’s mind and experience. However, as I tried to show by referring to Keats’ Ode, Melville’s Moby Dick, and Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (as well as Millhauser’s own opinions about the nature of the short story form), “Getting Closer” is a profound and subtle exploration about the basic notion of things taking place in time—something human beings, both through religion and through art—constantly combat.
Alice Munro’s story seems much more realistic than Millhauser’s. The characters think and act like real people in the real world; the story moves along in time quite naturally, once we move back in time to an event that occurred fifty years before. On a realistic level, “Axis” seems simple and straightforward, recounting an event of some consequence experienced by the two young women in the story.
However, it is my opinion that Munro’s story, in spite of its realistic appearance in contrast to Millhauser’s fantasy, is also about a primordial, universal event that constitutes human beings existentially. One of the things the story is about is the primordial experience of “time,” of which Munro has said:
“Time is something that interests me a whole lot—past and present, and how the past appears as people change.” “Memory,” she says, “is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories—and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories. We can hardly manage our lives without a powerful ongoing narrative. And underneath all these edited, inspired, self-serving or entertaining stories there is, we suppose, some big bulging awful mysterious entity called THE TRUTH, which our fictional stories are supposed to be poking at and grabbing pieces of.”
“Axis,” which appeared in The New Yorker on January 31, 2011, is, in my opinion, a good example of what Alice Munro calls a “short story way” of perceiving reality; it is also a good example of Munro’s typical short story concern with “the profound and common interests of life,” a primordial event, as Eliade says about story that constitute human beings existentially—a “lyric cry in the face of human destiny.”
The story begins by locating two young farm girls—Grace and Avie--in space and time--fifty years in the past, waiting for a bus to take them home from college for summer vacation. They are defined by their gender and their social class—young women, who have enrolled to find a husband, but who may become teachers, which would be a defeat. Grace is fair and voluptuous; Avie is lively and challenging
On the bus Avie tells Grace about a dream in she had a baby that cried and cried until she took her down in the basement and forgot about her; she then has another baby who is easy and delightful. When grown, the second child knows about the abandoned one, but can do nothing about it because the first child has known no other life.
Whereas Avie wants to have sex with her boyfriend Hugo because she thinks it would make him more manly, Grace keeps her virginity intact in order to keep her boyfriend Royce interested in her. Grace is in love; Avie is not. Avie is more interested in Royce.
During the summer, Royce visits Grace on her parents’ farm. On the bus he goes through the town where Avie lives and sees her on the street. She has quit college and Hugo has graduated and got a teaching job; they plan to marry. Royce sees her as lively and pretty and has the urge to get off the bus and not to get on again. But he knows that would get him in a lot of trouble.
Grace has told her parents that Royce has graduated, but the truth is, he walked out on his last exams because he through the questions idiotic.
Royce is obviously not in love with Grace. When she tells him that the Acacia is her favorite tree, he sneers, thinking, does she have a favorite fence post? He is primarily interested in getting her to bed. Royce wonders why she is willing now when earlier there were many opportunities and she drove him crazy with her “vaunted virginity.”
When the family is away from the house, Grace goes to bed with Royce.” He plans to be easy and gentle with her, but, “This notion was on the point of being left behind. She didn’t seem to require such care. When they were “far enough advanced” not to have heard the car, the mother comes into the bedroom and is shocked, but Royce tells her to shut up, gets dressed, and leaves. Grace asks him to take her with him, but he acts as if he does not hear her.
On the road, Royce thinks of what he calls the “insanity” of Grace’s family and how he let himself be drawn into it. He sees a tower of ancient looking rock, which he later learns is the edge of the Niagara Escarpment and is captivated by it. “Why had he never been told anything about this? This surprise, this careless challenge in the ordinary landscape. He felt a comic sort of outrage that something made for him to explore had been there all along and nobody had told him.” At that moment he decides to forgo philosophy and political science and take up geology. Later, he tells people how the sight of the escarpment had turned him life around and only vaguely remembers he had been there to see a girl.
In the Fall, Avie comes to school to pick up some books and runs into a young classmate named Marsha. Both Avie and Marsha had sent Grace letters but had heard nothing from her. Marsha says: “Somebody said she had colitis. That’s when you get all swollen, isn’t it? That would be miserable.” Hugo and Avie had gone camping on Civic Holiday during the first week in August, and she has become pregnant.
Now the story shifts to the present fifty years later. Avie, now in her late sixties, is on her way to visit one of her six grown children. Hugo has been dead a year and a half. Avie has led a domestic life, having skipped all the women’s liberation movement and the liberation of the sixties. “She was what she was, and reading Leonard Cohen wouldn’t be any help to her.”
She runs into Royce on the train. He has never married, is retired, and is on the way to a little fort, about which has written a book. He tells her he remembers that bus trip on the way to see Grace when he saw her on the street and she looked “irresistible.” When he tells her he wanted to get off the bus, Avie keeps repeating, “I never knew.” Royce asks her if she had known, would she have agreed to meet him, and “without hesitation,” she says yes. He asks, “With the complications and all?” and she says yes. His response is: “So it’s a good thing? That we didn’t make contact?” She does not even try for an answer. He says “water under the bridge.” He says he wants to show her something and to wake him up before they reach Kingston. “Not so far off from giving her automatic orders, like a husband.”
As they leave Kingston, Royce tells Avie that there are great slabs of limestone one on top of each other like a grand construction. But in one spot, this gives way and you can see something else. “It’s what’s known as the Frontenac Axis. It’s nothing less than an eruption of the vast and crazy old Canadian Shield, all the ancient combustion cutting through all the limestone, pouring over, messing up those giant steps.” He tells her to remember to watch for it when she comes this way. She says “Thank you. I’ll remember.” He nods again and doesn’t look at her. “Enough.”
In the last section, we move briefly back in time to when Avie’s first pregnancy was well advanced, and she got a brief letter from Grace. In the letter Grace says she has heard that Avie is married and pregnant. Grace says that she dropped out of college, “due to some troubles I have had with my health and my nerves.” She says he remembers the dream Avie told her about the cast-off baby: “It still scares the daylights out of me.”
Avie remembers the conversation with Marsha and the story about Grace’s colitis. “The tone of Grace’s letter seemed off kilter, with some pleading note in it that made her put off answering. She was feeling quite happy at the time”
She asks Royce if he has heard anything from Grace, and he says, “No, why should I?” She says she thought he might have looked her up, but he says “Not a good idea.”
The last paragraph reflects Avie’s understanding of Royce’s response:
“She has disappointed him. Prying. Trying to get at some spot of live regret right under the ribs. A woman.”
I apologize for summarizing the story in such detail, but unless you subscribe to The New Yorker, you may not have read it.
Alice Munro does not title her stories randomly. So after reading the story five times now, I have tried to understand how the title reflects the significance of the story. The usual dictionary definition of an “axis” is a straight line through a body on which the body turns. The axis mundi would, therefore, be the center of the world.
The Frontenac Axis that interests Royce in Munro’s story links the Canadian Shield with the Adirondack Mountains in New York. The Canadian Shield is part of a huge area of water, forest, and igneous rock that occupies 50 percent of Canada’s total land area, stretching in a huge crescent from the Labrador coast, through Québec and Ontario, into the Prairie provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, all the way north to the Arctic Ocean. The most notable topographical feature of the Great Lakes Lowlands is the Niagara Escarpment, a high ridge of limestone cliffs that runs about 250 miles north from Niagara Falls through the Bruce Peninsula to the Manitoulin Islands in Lake Huron.
Archeology is, of course, concerned with spatial layers that reflect temporal events. Stories are temporal actions that reflect spatial significance. As C. S. Lewis once said, for stories to be stories, they must be a series of events; yet at the same time it must be understood that this series is only a net to catch something that has no sequence, but rather something more like a state or quality. As Victor Hugo once said, "Nothing sequential is applicable to God."
Munro is too smart not to be aware of the contrast between time as being marked by a series of solid layers stacked on each other in space and time being something that constantly moves. The paradox of this stillness that continually moves reminds us of the paradox of the word “still” in Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Thou still unravished bride of quietness.” The literary critic Murray Krieger in a famous essay entitled “Ekpharasis and the Still Movement of Poetry” has pointed out that the word “still” means both “not moving” and “still going on.” In the artwork, a “here-and-now” unique concrete action, by means of aesthetic pattern, echo, and repetition, becomes a "forever-now motion." Thus, in the artwork, we perceive both motion and stasis at once.
Although we are temporally caught up in the turn of time, we are trapped like fossils in the spatial layers of the past. It is the short story, in the hands of great artists such as Alice Munro, who, like Stephen Millhauser, takes her cue from William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand.” As Millhauser says, “think of it: the world in a grain of sand; which is to say, every part of the world, however small, contains the world entirely. Or to put it another way: if you concentrate your attention on some apparently insignificant portion of the world, you will find, deep within it, nothing less than the world itself.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Steven Millhauser, "Getting Closer"
I have always had this nagging notion that if I could figure out what makes a short story by a great short story writer so…well, you know…great, I could come close to figuring out what the basic characteristics of a great short story really are.
I know, I know, it is not that clear-cut. After all, in seeking to find out the generic qualities of the short story generally, one first has to admit that there are many different sub-genres of the form. There certainly seems to be significant differences between the short stories of that great short story writer Alice Munro and that great short story writer, Steven Millhauser. The former seems bound to some notion of realism (whatever that means) and the latter seems more aligned with the imaginative. This does not mean that Munro’s stories lack imagination or that Millhauser’s stories have no contact with reality. After all, the conventions of realism are no less literary conventions than the conventions of irrealism (whatever that means). It just means that knowing how to read a story by Alice Munro does not necessarily mean one knows how to read a short story by Steven Millhauser.
Or does it? Because they are short stories, regardless of the seeming difference of their “reality assumptions,” do the short stories of two seemingly different short story writers, such as Alice Munro and Steven Millhauser, have qualities that are common to the short story generically but that are not common to the novel?
At least one thing that Munro and Millhauser have in common: The New Yorker is willing to pay them a fairly decent fee for the right to publish one of their stories. Good on you, New Yorker, good on you! I have read Steven Millhauser’s story “Getting Closer,” which appeared in The New Yorker on January 4, 20111, five times now, and I have read Alice Munro’s story “Axis,” which appeared in The New Yorker on January 31 five times as well. I like both these stories very much and could, with pleasure, read them several more times, and I probably will. They do indeed seem radically different. I will try to understand the Millhauser this week and the Munro story next week.
Steven Millhauser, “Getting Closer”
Millhauser’s “Getting Closer” is quite short, taking up about two and a half New Yorker pages—about seven columns. The central character is a boy, “nine, going on ten.” The point of view is third-person limited, meaning that the narrator is inside the boy’s mind, but not inside the mind of the minor characters—the grandmother, the sister Julia (13), the father, the mother. The event is a Saturday family outing to Indian Cove to go swimming in the river there. Those are the characters, the point of view, the setting in time and space. The question the reader asks next, of course, is: What happens?
But “happens” is precisely what Millhauser’s story is about. This is not a story about a particular happening, but rather a story about the essential significance of “happening.” The story begins with the boy’s readiness to begin the day’s activity. But as soon as the narrator (who is not the boy, but who stays within the mind of the by reflecting his thoughts in a much more sophisticated way than the boy could express) says the boy is “ready to begin,” the narrator reflects, “Though who’s to say when anything begins really?” After considering the various possibilities of when the day begins, the narrator reflects that the boy knows that it will truly begin when he enters the water. But the boy is not eager to rush into things; he enjoys prolonging the excitement of moving toward the moment he enters the water.
The story then shifts to the activity around him—his sister, Julie, age 13, splashing in the water, his mother telling him to run along, his grandmother sitting in a chair under a pine tree, the details of the physical world around him, his memory of the way his father and grandmother talk to him. The boy stands in a specific place in space and thinks that behind him lies the entire world and before lies the entire world. He likes standing there thinking such things. As he moves toward the water’s edge, he feels everything has led up to this moment when the day will officially begin. But he wants to hang on.
“He’s shaken deep down, as though he’ll lose something if the day begins. If he goes into the river, he’ll lose the excitement, the feeling that everything matters because he’s getting closer and closer to the moment he’s been waiting for. When you have that feeling, everything’s full of life, every leaf, every pebble. But when you begin you’re using things up.”
The boy begins to feel nervous that when the day begins, things will rush away from him, and he sees everything ending, that ending is everywhere, embedded in the beginning. Via the narrator, the boy reflects: “They don’t tell you about it. It’s hidden away in things. Under the shinning skin of the world, everything’s dead and gone.” He thinks that the sun is setting, his grandmother is dying, his mother is growing old, Julia’s dying, his father is dying. But he thinks if he stands still, maybe he can keep it all from happening, things will stop and no one will ever die. Again through the narrator, he reflects:
“You can’t live unless there’s a way to hold on to things. He can’t go back because he’s already used it all up, he can’t go forward because then it all begins to end, he’s stuck in this place where nothing means anything, it’s streaming in on him like a darkness, like a sickness he’s seen something he isn’t supposed to see, only grownups are allowed to see it, it’s making him old, it’s ruining everything, his temples are pounding, his eyes are pounding, he feels a scream rising in his chest, he’s going to fall down onto the sandy orange earth.”
But his sister calls to him and with a “wild cry that tears through his throat he steps over the line and begins his day.” And with this the story ends.
So what is this story about? Apparently not much of anything, but essentially about the ultimate meaning of everything. It’s about what all stories are about, about life in its quintessential movement in time, about the basic human desire to escape time, to defeat death. It’s why we have religion, why we write poetry, what constitutes the essential heroism of humanity. The boy experiences the ultimate anxiety, the sickness unto death.
Melville’s Ahab expresses it best:
Fitzgerald’s Gatsby also defies it. When Nick tells him he can’t repeat the past, his response is: "Can’t repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
At the end of the novel, Nick reflects:
Nick survives and so does Ishmael, but they are not heroes. They do not attempt what mere mortals say cannot be accomplished—defeat time, defeat death, which is, of course, the secret of Christ’s message.
What the boy experiences in Millhauser’s story are intimations of mortality. It is what Ishmael discovers about the whiteness of the whale:
It is what Keats understands about the Grecian Urn’s ability to stop time and achieve immortality:
Stephen Millhauser has a perceptive understanding of the short story’s unique qualities, which he expressed well in an essay in the New York Times a couple of years ago. Here are a few excerpts. The URL for the essay is listed below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/books/review/Millhauser-t.html
Next week, I will make an effort to understand Alice Munro’s “Axis.”
I know, I know, it is not that clear-cut. After all, in seeking to find out the generic qualities of the short story generally, one first has to admit that there are many different sub-genres of the form. There certainly seems to be significant differences between the short stories of that great short story writer Alice Munro and that great short story writer, Steven Millhauser. The former seems bound to some notion of realism (whatever that means) and the latter seems more aligned with the imaginative. This does not mean that Munro’s stories lack imagination or that Millhauser’s stories have no contact with reality. After all, the conventions of realism are no less literary conventions than the conventions of irrealism (whatever that means). It just means that knowing how to read a story by Alice Munro does not necessarily mean one knows how to read a short story by Steven Millhauser.
Or does it? Because they are short stories, regardless of the seeming difference of their “reality assumptions,” do the short stories of two seemingly different short story writers, such as Alice Munro and Steven Millhauser, have qualities that are common to the short story generically but that are not common to the novel?
At least one thing that Munro and Millhauser have in common: The New Yorker is willing to pay them a fairly decent fee for the right to publish one of their stories. Good on you, New Yorker, good on you! I have read Steven Millhauser’s story “Getting Closer,” which appeared in The New Yorker on January 4, 20111, five times now, and I have read Alice Munro’s story “Axis,” which appeared in The New Yorker on January 31 five times as well. I like both these stories very much and could, with pleasure, read them several more times, and I probably will. They do indeed seem radically different. I will try to understand the Millhauser this week and the Munro story next week.
Steven Millhauser, “Getting Closer”
Millhauser’s “Getting Closer” is quite short, taking up about two and a half New Yorker pages—about seven columns. The central character is a boy, “nine, going on ten.” The point of view is third-person limited, meaning that the narrator is inside the boy’s mind, but not inside the mind of the minor characters—the grandmother, the sister Julia (13), the father, the mother. The event is a Saturday family outing to Indian Cove to go swimming in the river there. Those are the characters, the point of view, the setting in time and space. The question the reader asks next, of course, is: What happens?
But “happens” is precisely what Millhauser’s story is about. This is not a story about a particular happening, but rather a story about the essential significance of “happening.” The story begins with the boy’s readiness to begin the day’s activity. But as soon as the narrator (who is not the boy, but who stays within the mind of the by reflecting his thoughts in a much more sophisticated way than the boy could express) says the boy is “ready to begin,” the narrator reflects, “Though who’s to say when anything begins really?” After considering the various possibilities of when the day begins, the narrator reflects that the boy knows that it will truly begin when he enters the water. But the boy is not eager to rush into things; he enjoys prolonging the excitement of moving toward the moment he enters the water.
The story then shifts to the activity around him—his sister, Julie, age 13, splashing in the water, his mother telling him to run along, his grandmother sitting in a chair under a pine tree, the details of the physical world around him, his memory of the way his father and grandmother talk to him. The boy stands in a specific place in space and thinks that behind him lies the entire world and before lies the entire world. He likes standing there thinking such things. As he moves toward the water’s edge, he feels everything has led up to this moment when the day will officially begin. But he wants to hang on.
“He’s shaken deep down, as though he’ll lose something if the day begins. If he goes into the river, he’ll lose the excitement, the feeling that everything matters because he’s getting closer and closer to the moment he’s been waiting for. When you have that feeling, everything’s full of life, every leaf, every pebble. But when you begin you’re using things up.”
The boy begins to feel nervous that when the day begins, things will rush away from him, and he sees everything ending, that ending is everywhere, embedded in the beginning. Via the narrator, the boy reflects: “They don’t tell you about it. It’s hidden away in things. Under the shinning skin of the world, everything’s dead and gone.” He thinks that the sun is setting, his grandmother is dying, his mother is growing old, Julia’s dying, his father is dying. But he thinks if he stands still, maybe he can keep it all from happening, things will stop and no one will ever die. Again through the narrator, he reflects:
“You can’t live unless there’s a way to hold on to things. He can’t go back because he’s already used it all up, he can’t go forward because then it all begins to end, he’s stuck in this place where nothing means anything, it’s streaming in on him like a darkness, like a sickness he’s seen something he isn’t supposed to see, only grownups are allowed to see it, it’s making him old, it’s ruining everything, his temples are pounding, his eyes are pounding, he feels a scream rising in his chest, he’s going to fall down onto the sandy orange earth.”
But his sister calls to him and with a “wild cry that tears through his throat he steps over the line and begins his day.” And with this the story ends.
So what is this story about? Apparently not much of anything, but essentially about the ultimate meaning of everything. It’s about what all stories are about, about life in its quintessential movement in time, about the basic human desire to escape time, to defeat death. It’s why we have religion, why we write poetry, what constitutes the essential heroism of humanity. The boy experiences the ultimate anxiety, the sickness unto death.
Melville’s Ahab expresses it best:
“Look ye, Starbuck, all visible objects are but as pasteboard masks. Some inscrutable yet reasoning thing puts forth the molding of their features. The white whale tasks me; he heaps me. Yet he is but a mask. 'Tis the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate; the malignant thing that has plagued mankind since time began; the thing that maws and mutilates our race, not killing us outright but letting us live on, with half a heart and half a lung.”
Fitzgerald’s Gatsby also defies it. When Nick tells him he can’t repeat the past, his response is: "Can’t repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
At the end of the novel, Nick reflects:
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Nick survives and so does Ishmael, but they are not heroes. They do not attempt what mere mortals say cannot be accomplished—defeat time, defeat death, which is, of course, the secret of Christ’s message.
What the boy experiences in Millhauser’s story are intimations of mortality. It is what Ishmael discovers about the whiteness of the whale:
“When we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues--every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper…. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
It is what Keats understands about the Grecian Urn’s ability to stop time and achieve immortality:
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
…….
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
……..
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Stephen Millhauser has a perceptive understanding of the short story’s unique qualities, which he expressed well in an essay in the New York Times a couple of years ago. Here are a few excerpts. The URL for the essay is listed below:
Steven Millhauser, “The Ambition of the Short Story,” New York Times, Oct 3, 2008
The short story — how modest in bearing! How unassuming in manner! It sits there quietly, eyes lowered, almost as if trying not to be noticed. And if it should somehow attract your attention, it says quickly, in a brave little self-deprecating voice alive to all the possibilities of disappointment: “I’m not a novel, you know. Not even a short one. If that’s what you’re looking for, you don’t want me.” Rarely has one form so dominated another. … The novel is insatiable — it wants to devour the world. What’s left for the poor short story to do?
……………………………………..
Of course there are virtues associated with smallness. Even the novel will grant as much. Large things tend to be unwieldy, clumsy, crude; smallness is the realm of elegance and grace. It’s also the realm of perfection. The novel is exhaustive by nature; but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the novel, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains.
…………………………………….
Can it be that the little short story dares to have ambitions of its own? … I imagine the short story harboring a wish. I imagine the short story saying to the novel: You can have everything — everything — all I ask is a single grain of sand. The novel, with a careless shrug, a shrug both cheerful and contemptuous, grants the wish.
………………………………………
But that grain of sand is the story’s way out. That grain of sand is the story’s salvation. I take my cue from William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand.” Think of it: the world in a grain of sand; which is to say, every part of the world, however small, contains the world entirely. Or to put it another way: if you concentrate your attention on some apparently insignificant portion of the world, you will find, deep within it, nothing less than the world itself.
………………………………
The short story believes in transformation. It believes in hidden powers. The novel prefers things in plain view. It has no patience with individual grains of sand, which glitter but are difficult to see. … The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of its hand — lies the universe.
……………………………….
Therein lies the immodesty of the short story, its secret aggression. Its method is revelation. Its littleness is the agency of its power… The short story apologizes for nothing. It exults in its shortness. It wants to be shorter still. It wants to be a single word. If it could find that word, if it could utter that syllable, the entire universe would blaze up out of it with a roar. That is the outrageous ambition of the short story, that is its deepest faith, that is the greatness of its smallness.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/books/review/Millhauser-t.html
Next week, I will make an effort to understand Alice Munro’s “Axis.”
Monday, February 7, 2011
Authors on the Short Story--Paris Review Interviews: Part II
This completes my survey of the Paris Review Interviews. I plan to collect more author comments on the short story from interviews and essays in a later post. My goal is to synthesize all these comments to discover if there are significant unifying author notions about the form.
How does “form” arrive at, or discover, or create, “truth”? Barthelme’s notion seems to be based on the postmodernist assumption that reality is a process rather than a product, that is, reality is a construct, a fiction, not some “stuff” that you stub your toe on, regardless of Samuel Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley’s idealism by kicking a stone. The focus of formalism has always been on “how” rather than some dubious “what.” The short story, it seems to me, has, since Poe, always been more concerned with process rather than product, with formal unity rather than mimesis.
Paley refers to something more common to short story writers than novelists—what she calls the “storytelling impulse.” This probably stems from the short story’s debt to oral storytelling. Many short story writers, like Caldwell, for example, talk about a “kind of fever,” a compulsion to tell the story; this perhaps has something to do with the kind of event that storytellers feel compelled to tell, as well as the obsessive sense of unity of the short story. Salter seems to suggest that the compulsion of the teller to tell is matched by the compelling nature of the story. Salter also is right, I think, to suggest that the story must have “significance”; it cannot just be “something that happened.” Brodkey’s citation of Maxwell’s notion that the story should be written in “one sitting,” one “single flight,” has been echoed by may writers and speaks to the sense of unity that the short story requires. Cortezar’s sense that the short story possesses him is related to this notion of compulsive unity.
Carver, a short story writer rather than a novelist (and not just because he did not have the time to write novels) reminds us that the short story does not have “to do anything,” does not have to have a social message (although it may have moral meaning). As I have noted before, the short story has never been concerned with social/political ideas. I like Carver’s notion of the writer’s “fierce pleasure” and the reader’s appreciation of something beautiful in and of itself, that has a steady glow. Eudora Welty talks about this idea of a “glow” of the short story, as does Joseph Conrad. Trevor, who admits that he is a short-story writer first, who just happens to write novels, emphasizes that the short story, unlike life, or the novel that tries to imitate life, excludes “meaninglessness.” Borges has talked about this “essential” nature of the short story. And Trevor, like Salter, reminds us that a short story must have “significance,” must have a “point.” Peter Taylor, another short-story writer who happened to write novels, talks about “compression” in the same way that Trevor talks about excluding meaninglessness. And, as Gordimer says, short stories urge the writer to exclude the extraneous. And what is extraneous? Everything that is meaningless.
Pritchett argues that the short story has a different vision of reality than the novel, which involves “isolating the incident.” George Lukacs has also talked about the difference between detail that describes and detail that is integrated into the significance of the story. Banks echoes Poe’s notion about the story being just so long that the ending keeps the beginning in sight. With the novel, you can forget where you began; with the short story, you cannot. Ford thinks that novels are harder to write, but only because they contain more “stuff.” The short story has never been as interested in “stuff” as the novel; the short story is only interested in “stuff” that is transformed or transcended into significance. Flannery O’Connor talks a great deal about this. Llosa, like Ford, reminds us that the novel is omnivorous, constantly devouring stuff, or perhaps spewing out “stuff.” The ultimate novel would be one that contains all the “stuff” of the world. The ultimate short story would be one that eliminates everything but essential meaning—“Blake’s “the world in a grain of sand.”
Amy Hempel, 2003
Annie Proulx, 2009
Amy Hempel echoes many short story writers, particularly Flannery O’Connor, on mystery and the short story. I will come back to this later. I have written about it in some detail in another place. I will also come back to Lorrie Moore’s notion about the paradox that the busier people are the less time they have to read short stories, for it gets to the heart of my central idea that short story writers like short stories more than readers do. Annie Proulx is surely right that the short story deserves more honor and attention than it gets. And she is surely right that the general reading public has no idea about what goes into a short story (and therefore does not know how to read short stories, thus often underestimating them).
Donald Barthelme, 1981
The change of emphasis from the what to the how seems to me to be the major impulse in art since Flaubert, and it’s not merely formalism, it’s not at all superficial, it’s an attempt to reach truth, and a very rigorous one.
How does “form” arrive at, or discover, or create, “truth”? Barthelme’s notion seems to be based on the postmodernist assumption that reality is a process rather than a product, that is, reality is a construct, a fiction, not some “stuff” that you stub your toe on, regardless of Samuel Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley’s idealism by kicking a stone. The focus of formalism has always been on “how” rather than some dubious “what.” The short story, it seems to me, has, since Poe, always been more concerned with process rather than product, with formal unity rather than mimesis.
Erskine Caldwell, 1982
[To transform a simple incident into a story] you get a kind of fever, I suppose, mentally and emotionally, that lifts you up and carries you away. You have to sustain this energy you’ve gotten to write your story. By the time you’ve finished, all your energy, your passion, is spent. You’ve been drained of everything.
James Salter, 1993
Above all, [the short story] must be compelling. You’re sitting around the campfire of literature, so to speak, and various voices speak up out of the dark and begin talking. With some, your mind wanders or you doze off, but with others you are held by every word. The first line, the first sentence, the first paragraph, all have to compel you. Further, I think, it should be memorable. It must have significance.
Grace Paley, 1992
There’s an equal amount of adherence to craft in both [poetry and the short story]. I would say that I went to school to study poetry, that’s how I learned to write. I got my courage for the way I write stories from first writing poems. … Still, there’s always that first storytelling impulse: I want to tell you something . . .
Harold Brodkey, 1991
There are about nine hundred million aphorisms about writing that are true, and one of them comes from Bill Maxwell—all short stories should be written in a sitting. As I understood it, that meant that you could spend weeks, months, years writing drafts, outlines, notes, sections, but sooner or later you ought to take all that and sit down and write a draft in a sitting, in a single flight—which might take days or weeks but without interruptions—so that the broad elements and the nuances cohere, certain echoes, certain resonances fit together, and there is real motion in the narrative—not a false motion linguistically grafted onto the story. Words have a strangely changeable, contingent kind of meaning, and as T. S. Eliot said in one of his famous essays, the music of language carries more of the realer meaning than the literal meaning of words does. A shift in the mind, in the mood, and you lose control of that music.
Julio Cortezar, 1984
It’s like improvising in jazz…. I’m a bit embarrassed to sign my stories sometimes. The novels, no, because the novels I work on a lot; there’s a whole architecture. But my stories, it’s as if they were dictated to me by something that is in me, but it’s not me who’s responsible.
Paley refers to something more common to short story writers than novelists—what she calls the “storytelling impulse.” This probably stems from the short story’s debt to oral storytelling. Many short story writers, like Caldwell, for example, talk about a “kind of fever,” a compulsion to tell the story; this perhaps has something to do with the kind of event that storytellers feel compelled to tell, as well as the obsessive sense of unity of the short story. Salter seems to suggest that the compulsion of the teller to tell is matched by the compelling nature of the story. Salter also is right, I think, to suggest that the story must have “significance”; it cannot just be “something that happened.” Brodkey’s citation of Maxwell’s notion that the story should be written in “one sitting,” one “single flight,” has been echoed by may writers and speaks to the sense of unity that the short story requires. Cortezar’s sense that the short story possesses him is related to this notion of compulsive unity.
Raymond Carver, 1983
Good fiction is partly a bringing of the news from one world to another. That end is good in and of itself, I think. But changing things through fiction, changing somebody's political affiliation or the political system itself, or saving the whales or the redwood trees, no…. It doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it, and the different kind of pleasure that's taken in reading something that's durable and made to last, as well as beautiful in and of itself. Something that throws off these sparks—a persistent and steady glow, however dim.
William Trevor, 1989
I think [the short story] is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art….. I like the inkling, the shadow, of a new short story. I like the whole business of establishing its point, for although a story need not have a plot it must have a point. I’m a short-story writer, really, who happens to write novels. Not the other way around.
Nadine Gordimer, 1983
Short stories are a wonderful discipline against overwriting. You get so used to cutting out what is extraneous.
Peter Taylor, 1987
The short-story writer is concerned with compression, with saying as much as he can in a short space, just as the poet is. So he has to choose the right dramatic moment for the presentation. If he can do that in writing a story, he can have as big a canvas as he would with a novel. That’s the genius of the short-story writer—finding precisely the right moment in the vital interplay between the characters.
Carver, a short story writer rather than a novelist (and not just because he did not have the time to write novels) reminds us that the short story does not have “to do anything,” does not have to have a social message (although it may have moral meaning). As I have noted before, the short story has never been concerned with social/political ideas. I like Carver’s notion of the writer’s “fierce pleasure” and the reader’s appreciation of something beautiful in and of itself, that has a steady glow. Eudora Welty talks about this idea of a “glow” of the short story, as does Joseph Conrad. Trevor, who admits that he is a short-story writer first, who just happens to write novels, emphasizes that the short story, unlike life, or the novel that tries to imitate life, excludes “meaninglessness.” Borges has talked about this “essential” nature of the short story. And Trevor, like Salter, reminds us that a short story must have “significance,” must have a “point.” Peter Taylor, another short-story writer who happened to write novels, talks about “compression” in the same way that Trevor talks about excluding meaninglessness. And, as Gordimer says, short stories urge the writer to exclude the extraneous. And what is extraneous? Everything that is meaningless.
V.S. Pritchett, 1990
The short story appealed to me straight away because of its shortness, and I preferred it to the novel. It represents a certain vision of reality that consists of isolating the incident. The great thing about the short story is the detail, not the plot. The plot is useful, but only for supplying the sort of detail that is not descriptive but which pushes the action forward.
Russell Banks, 1998
[The short story and the novel] are very discontinuous. For me, they each bear greatly different relations to time. The novel, I think, has a mimetic relation to time. The novel simulates the flow of time, so once you get very far into a novel, you forget where you began—just as you do in real time. Whereas with a short story the point is not to forget the beginning. The ending only makes sense if you can remember the beginning. I think the proper length for a short story is to go as far as you can without going so far that you have forgotten the beginning.
Richard Ford, 1996
Novels are a lot harder to write [than short stories]…because they hold so much more stuff, and the stuff all has to be related and make one whole—at least the way I do it. And from my experience with writing both, I do think writing a long novel is just a larger human effort than writing a book of short stories—assuming that both are good. I used to say that a novel was a more important, a grander literary gesture than a story. And when Ray Carver would hear me say that he’d vigorously disagree, and then I’d always cave in. …. Forms of literature don’t compete. They don’t have to compete. We can have it all.
Mario Vargas Llosa, 1990
I think the novel as a genre tends toward excess. It tends towards proliferation; the plot develops like a cancer. If the writer follows a novel’s every lead, it becomes a jungle. The ambition to tell the whole story is inherent in the genre. Although I’ve always felt there comes a moment when you have to kill the story so it won’t go on indefinitely, I also believe that storytelling is an attempt to reach that ideal of the “total” novel.
Pritchett argues that the short story has a different vision of reality than the novel, which involves “isolating the incident.” George Lukacs has also talked about the difference between detail that describes and detail that is integrated into the significance of the story. Banks echoes Poe’s notion about the story being just so long that the ending keeps the beginning in sight. With the novel, you can forget where you began; with the short story, you cannot. Ford thinks that novels are harder to write, but only because they contain more “stuff.” The short story has never been as interested in “stuff” as the novel; the short story is only interested in “stuff” that is transformed or transcended into significance. Flannery O’Connor talks a great deal about this. Llosa, like Ford, reminds us that the novel is omnivorous, constantly devouring stuff, or perhaps spewing out “stuff.” The ultimate novel would be one that contains all the “stuff” of the world. The ultimate short story would be one that eliminates everything but essential meaning—“Blake’s “the world in a grain of sand.”
Amy Hempel, 2003
I don’t like having anything spelled out. Of course, mystery is not vagueness. Mystery is controlled. It involves information meted out only as needed. Tim O’Brien used to say that stories are not explanations. Certainly if you teach writing you see that some students think they are. They feel they haven’t made their point clearly enough so near the end of the story there will come an extremely spelled-out emblematic section. I not only don’t want the explanation, I want the mystery..
Often I’ve started a story knowing the beat, the rhythm of the first line or first paragraph, but without knowing what the words are. I’ll be doing the equivalent of humming a tune over and over again and then this tune will be translated into a sentence…. There’s something visceral about the musical quality of a sentence
Lorrie Moore, 2001
[The short story is] a more magical form. Who knows sometimes where stories come from? They are perhaps more attached to the author’s emotional life and come more out of inspiration than slogging. You shouldn’t write without inspiration—at least not very often. As I’ve already said, in discussing writing one shouldn’t set the idea of inspiration aside and speak only of hard work. Of course writing is hard work—or a very privileged kind of hard work. A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. (Story writers working on a novel are typically in pain through the entire thing.) But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.
There’s a lot of yak about how short stories are perfect for the declining public attention span. But we know that’s not true. Stories require concentration and seriousness. The busier people get, the less time they have to read a story. (Though they may have a narcotizing paperback novel in their purse. This is not their fault.) Shockingly, people often don’t have a straight half hour of time to read at all. But they have fifteen minutes. And that is often how novels are read, fifteen minutes at a time. You can’t read stories that way.
Annie Proulx, 2009
I think the short story is a superior form. It’s definitely more difficult than writing a novel, and a novella is an unwieldy length. The challenge is to make something that could be a novel but that works better as a short story, and to know the difference. So yeah, some stories could have been stretched out into a novel, but they would have been weaker and certainly not as interesting to write.
The short story deserves more honor and attention than it gets. It can be a powerful reading experience. One can go back to a good one over and over and always learn something new about technique. I sometimes think it would be better in creative-writing programs if students cut their writing teeth on novels instead of short stories. Short stories are often very difficult and demanding, drawing on deep knowledge of human nature and the particulars of pivotal events. Every single word counts heavily. The punctuation is critical. Finding the right words and making honorable sentences takes time. The general reading public has no idea of what goes into a short story because it is literally short and can give the impression that the writer sat down and rattled the thing out in an hour or two.
Amy Hempel echoes many short story writers, particularly Flannery O’Connor, on mystery and the short story. I will come back to this later. I have written about it in some detail in another place. I will also come back to Lorrie Moore’s notion about the paradox that the busier people are the less time they have to read short stories, for it gets to the heart of my central idea that short story writers like short stories more than readers do. Annie Proulx is surely right that the short story deserves more honor and attention than it gets. And she is surely right that the general reading public has no idea about what goes into a short story (and therefore does not know how to read short stories, thus often underestimating them).
Monday, January 31, 2011
Authors on the Short Story--Paris Review Interviews: Part I
In preparing for my presentation at the April Angers conference, “The Figure of the Author in the Short Story in English,” I have thought it well that I should consult short story writers who have spoken of their own experience with the short story: their love of the form, their theories about the difference between the short story and the novel, their notions about short story technique.
The Paris Review, which has been publishing interviews with writers under the title “The Art of Fiction,” since the late 1950s, has been generous enough to post these interviews in an archive online. The URL address is: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews
Although I have been collecting writers’ comments about the short story form for years, I have so far scanned the Paris Review interviews for the fifties, sixties, and seventies, looking for ideas that I might be able to develop and use in my presentation. I list below those writers’ remarks about the short story I think most helpful, followed by brief comments of my own. Next week, I will post a second set of citations, with my comments, of Paris Review interviews from the eighties, nineties, and the first decade of the twenty-first century.
[Side note: I have read Alice Munro’s new story, “Axis,” in the January 31 issue of the New Yorker four times now and think I may be ready to talk about it soon. I have also read Steven Millhauser’s story, “Getting Closer,” in the January 3 issue of the New Yorker five times, and hope to be capable of making some remarks on it soon also. These things take time, you know.]
I like Capote’s take on the importance of getting training in writing fiction by first writing short stories—not that stories are mere finger exercises, but rather than they are more demanding, at least on the microcosmic level, than the novel is. I also like the idea that short stories depend on a certain rhythm. Some short story writers think that rhythm is as important as content. More on this later.
This, of course, is Hemingway’s most famous statement about leaving things out. He probably gets it from Chekhov; later Raymond Carver got it from him. More on “leaving things out” later, as I cite other writers who believe in the power of omission.
Frank O’Connor is certainly not the only writer who has said that the short story is the closest thing to lyric poetry, especially in its detachment from circumstances. And there is more to be said about O’Connor’s insistence on the importance of theme—i.e. that the writer has something to say—not just an event, but an event that “means” something.
The first self-conscious theorizer and practitioner of the short story, Edgar Allan Poe, was the first to emphasize the importance of beginning with the ending. There are many important implications of this notion, which I will talk more about later.
Singer is not the only writer of short stories who has felt that the form has something to do with the idea that “this world and this kind of life is not everything.” Probably the most famous is Flannery O’Connor, whose work I have reread in its entirely these past few months. Religious truths, in the broadest sense of that term, may have some inherent connection to the short storm form. I have explored this issue in many places and will talk more about it.
John Steinbeck, 1969
This is that idea that Frank O’Connor talked about—the writer’s need to tell the story. It might be called “The Ancient Mariner” compulsion. I have written about this before and come back to it later.
Here is the poem/short story connection again. And Malamud is wise to remind us that the short story can convey the “complexity of life,” can have the effect revealing “profound knowledge” by reconciling opposites.
Welty emphasizes an aspect of the short story that others have discussed, and that I will return to: that whereas life does not have a resolution, there is something that might be defined as aesthetic resolution—something communicated not by content, but by form. Also important, I think, is Welty’s notion of “mood,” what other writers have called “tone”—a unifying rhythm or glow holding everything together in a meaningful way.
The Paris Review, which has been publishing interviews with writers under the title “The Art of Fiction,” since the late 1950s, has been generous enough to post these interviews in an archive online. The URL address is: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews
Although I have been collecting writers’ comments about the short story form for years, I have so far scanned the Paris Review interviews for the fifties, sixties, and seventies, looking for ideas that I might be able to develop and use in my presentation. I list below those writers’ remarks about the short story I think most helpful, followed by brief comments of my own. Next week, I will post a second set of citations, with my comments, of Paris Review interviews from the eighties, nineties, and the first decade of the twenty-first century.
[Side note: I have read Alice Munro’s new story, “Axis,” in the January 31 issue of the New Yorker four times now and think I may be ready to talk about it soon. I have also read Steven Millhauser’s story, “Getting Closer,” in the January 3 issue of the New Yorker five times, and hope to be capable of making some remarks on it soon also. These things take time, you know.]
Truman Capote, 1957
When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium…. I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence— especially if it occurs toward the end—or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation…. Joyce, our most extreme disregarder, was a superb craftsman; he could write Ulysses because he could write Dubliners.
I like Capote’s take on the importance of getting training in writing fiction by first writing short stories—not that stories are mere finger exercises, but rather than they are more demanding, at least on the microcosmic level, than the novel is. I also like the idea that short stories depend on a certain rhythm. Some short story writers think that rhythm is as important as content. More on this later.
Ernest Hemingway, 1958
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.
This, of course, is Hemingway’s most famous statement about leaving things out. He probably gets it from Chekhov; later Raymond Carver got it from him. More on “leaving things out” later, as I cite other writers who believe in the power of omission.
Frank O’Connor, 1957
[The short story] is the nearest thing I know to lyric poetry… A novel actually requires far more logic and far more knowledge of circumstances, whereas a short story can have the sort of detachment from circumstances that lyric poetry has…[The greatest essential of a story] is you have to have a theme, a story to tell. You grab somebody and say, “Look, an extraordinary thing happened to me yesterday—I met a man—he said this to me—”and that, to me, is a theme. The moment you grab somebody by the lapels and you've got something to tell, that's a real story.
Frank O’Connor is certainly not the only writer who has said that the short story is the closest thing to lyric poetry, especially in its detachment from circumstances. And there is more to be said about O’Connor’s insistence on the importance of theme—i.e. that the writer has something to say—not just an event, but an event that “means” something.
Katherine Anne Porter, 1963
If I didn’t know the ending of a story, I wouldn’t begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph, my last page first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I’m going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God’s grace.
The first self-conscious theorizer and practitioner of the short story, Edgar Allan Poe, was the first to emphasize the importance of beginning with the ending. There are many important implications of this notion, which I will talk more about later.
I.B. Singer, 1968
In each story, I try to say something, and what I try to say is more or less connected with my ideas that this world and this kind of life is not everything, that there is a soul and there is a God and there may be life after death. I always come back to these religious truths although I am not religious in the sense of dogma.
Singer is not the only writer of short stories who has felt that the form has something to do with the idea that “this world and this kind of life is not everything.” Probably the most famous is Flannery O’Connor, whose work I have reread in its entirely these past few months. Religious truths, in the broadest sense of that term, may have some inherent connection to the short storm form. I have explored this issue in many places and will talk more about it.
John Steinbeck, 1969
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced that there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes but by no means always find the way to do it.
This is that idea that Frank O’Connor talked about—the writer’s need to tell the story. It might be called “The Ancient Mariner” compulsion. I have written about this before and come back to it later.
Bernard Malamud, 1975
I like packing a self or two into a few pages, predicating lifetimes. The drama is terse, happens faster, and is often outlandish. A short story is a way of indicating the complexity of life in a few pages, producing the surprise and effect of a profound knowledge in a short time. There’s, among other things, a drama, a resonance, of the reconciliation of opposites: much to say, little time to say it, something like the effect of a poem.
Here is the poem/short story connection again. And Malamud is wise to remind us that the short story can convey the “complexity of life,” can have the effect revealing “profound knowledge” by reconciling opposites.
Eudora Welty, 1972
I don’t think we often see life resolving itself, not in any sort of perfect way, but I like the fiction writer’s feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art, however imperfectly and briefly—to give it a form and try to embody it—to hold it and express it in a story’s terms... A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story—you can work more by suggestion—than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps.
Welty emphasizes an aspect of the short story that others have discussed, and that I will return to: that whereas life does not have a resolution, there is something that might be defined as aesthetic resolution—something communicated not by content, but by form. Also important, I think, is Welty’s notion of “mood,” what other writers have called “tone”—a unifying rhythm or glow holding everything together in a meaningful way.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
The Figure of the Author in the Short Story Conference--Issues
It is my honor to have been invited to be the plenary speaker at the conference, “The Figure of the Author in the Short Story in English,” April 8 and 9, 2011, in Angers, France. The conference will be co-hosted by the CRILA short story research group (Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires en Langue Anglaise) of the Université d’Angers and Edge Hill University, England. Primary organizers for each group are: Michelle Ryan-Sautor, of The Journal of the Short Story in English at Angers, and Ailsa Cox, of Short Story in Theory and Practice at Edge Hill. The website address for the conference is:
http://www.univ-angers.fr/ACTUALITE.asp?ID=1087&langue=1
I will be speaking on the topic of why writers like short stories better than readers do. I will be posting my progress on this keynote presentation over the next two months, focusing on issues involving the relationship of the author to the short story form.
The first two issues I intend to explore were suggested to me by two of my readers—Cathy and Dex.
Issue 1. Do young writers write short stories rather than novels, not because they like the form, but because the workshop format of universities compels them to write short stories? If university workshops disappeared, would the short story disappear also? Do writers move away from the short story to the novel as soon as possible because (a) they like novels better or (b) because novels are the only fiction that makes money? Why didn’t Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, or Andre Dubus write novels? Why do Alice Munro and David Means not write novels? Why does William Trevor keep writing short stories?
Cathy has posted a piece on The Millions at http://www.themillions.com/2011/01/the-story-problem-10-thoughts-on-academias-novel-crisis.html in which she argues that most fiction workshop instructors use the short story rather than the novel as the primary pedagogical tool because it is a more manageable form for both student and instructor: The student gets an immediate reward for a completed job, and it is easier for the instructor to critique a short work than a long one. The result, Cathy says, is that a lot of what comes out of creative writing programs are stories that really want to be novels, but novels are discouraged from being writing, for the rhythm of school semesters and quarters encourages writing small things, not large things. She concludes: “Do students write stories because they really want to or because the workshop model all but demands that they do? If workshops are bad for big things, why do we continue to use them?”
It’s an interesting argument and has received a number of responses on The Millions. I recommend it to you. I responded to Cathy as follows:
Cathy kindly replied:
I hope Cathy and I can talk more about these issues. I certainly do not think that such writers as George Saunders, Alice Munro, and Andre Dubus (not to mention Raymond Carver, William Trevor, David Means, and many others) wrote short stories because they were not “mature” enough to write novels. Indeed, why they continued to write short stories when their publishers probably begged them to write novels is something I intend to explore as I prepare my Angers presentation during the next two months.
Issue 2: Craft vs. Passion—Are these contradictory characteristics in fiction? Can you have messiness and careful control at the same time in fiction? Are short stories too often too well crafted? Is the messiness of many novels more like “real life”? Is it the task of fiction to mirror “real life” with all its messiness?
My friend Dex sent me a recent review of Charles Baxter’s collection Gryphon: New and Selected Stories. The review, by Bart Schneider, was laudatory, but ended with this paragraph:
Dex asked me what I thought about Schneider’s comments about passion, messiness, and the MFA story.
As everyone who is kind enough to read this blog well knows, I cannot resist it when someone asks me “what do you think about….?” And I have thought about the issue of craft vs. passion, tight control vs. messiness, and whether the short story can be taught in an MFA program ever since I have been teaching the form. The issue has a history as long as the reach of Edgar Allan Poe, who was the first champion of the short story as a form and the first champion of tight artistic control. I will be coming back to this issue in the next couple of months as I prepare my Angers presentation.
And speaking of a writer who insists on continuing to write short stories, in spite of the accusation that short stories are for the beginning, immature writer, the January 31 issue of The New Yorker has a new story by Alice Munro, entitled “Axis.” I have read it once and plan to read it twice more before posting something about it next week. I guess by this time, Munro’s book publishers have given up trying to talk her into writing a novel.
http://www.univ-angers.fr/ACTUALITE.asp?ID=1087&langue=1
I will be speaking on the topic of why writers like short stories better than readers do. I will be posting my progress on this keynote presentation over the next two months, focusing on issues involving the relationship of the author to the short story form.
The first two issues I intend to explore were suggested to me by two of my readers—Cathy and Dex.
Issue 1. Do young writers write short stories rather than novels, not because they like the form, but because the workshop format of universities compels them to write short stories? If university workshops disappeared, would the short story disappear also? Do writers move away from the short story to the novel as soon as possible because (a) they like novels better or (b) because novels are the only fiction that makes money? Why didn’t Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, or Andre Dubus write novels? Why do Alice Munro and David Means not write novels? Why does William Trevor keep writing short stories?
Cathy has posted a piece on The Millions at http://www.themillions.com/2011/01/the-story-problem-10-thoughts-on-academias-novel-crisis.html in which she argues that most fiction workshop instructors use the short story rather than the novel as the primary pedagogical tool because it is a more manageable form for both student and instructor: The student gets an immediate reward for a completed job, and it is easier for the instructor to critique a short work than a long one. The result, Cathy says, is that a lot of what comes out of creative writing programs are stories that really want to be novels, but novels are discouraged from being writing, for the rhythm of school semesters and quarters encourages writing small things, not large things. She concludes: “Do students write stories because they really want to or because the workshop model all but demands that they do? If workshops are bad for big things, why do we continue to use them?”
It’s an interesting argument and has received a number of responses on The Millions. I recommend it to you. I responded to Cathy as follows:
“I agree with you, of course, that fiction workshops in MFA programs are more conducive to the short story than to the novel. But I am sure you would agree that the short story does not differ from the novel merely, or even primarily, in terms of length, but rather in terms of technique--i.e. language use, thematic focus, emphasis on the ending, importance of unity, etc. etc. all that familiar stuff. I tend to think that a writer trained in the writing of the short story has a better chance of writing a good novel than a writer trained in the writing of a novel has of writing a good short story. What do you think? I am working on a keynote presentation at a short story conference in Angers, France in April on the topic of why I think short story writers like short stories more than readers do. Sometimes I think writers write short stories because they love the form, but write novels because they have a better chance of publishing them, because readers (and therefore publishers) like novels better than they do short stories.
Cathy kindly replied:
Questions I'm asking myself:
--Some people are saying the short story is a better pedagogical tool, better way to teach craft, because young writers aren't "ready" or mature enough to attempt a novel. Well, then does that mean George Saunders and Alice Munro and Andre Dubus are immature?
--What would happen if the taxonomy of creative writing programs (undergrad and grad) with regards to prose was governed not by genre but by form? Short-form Prose WORKSHOPS (where the essay and short story are studied and emulated) and Long-Form Prose STUDIOS, where process is emphasized over product.
And, rightly, you ask about the practicalities of the publishing market, where novels are preferred, how much that is driving this discussion. As someone who is working on her first novel (not a novel in stories, not a nonfiction novel), I ask myself that question often. Am I writing this book for the right reasons?
I hope Cathy and I can talk more about these issues. I certainly do not think that such writers as George Saunders, Alice Munro, and Andre Dubus (not to mention Raymond Carver, William Trevor, David Means, and many others) wrote short stories because they were not “mature” enough to write novels. Indeed, why they continued to write short stories when their publishers probably begged them to write novels is something I intend to explore as I prepare my Angers presentation during the next two months.
Issue 2: Craft vs. Passion—Are these contradictory characteristics in fiction? Can you have messiness and careful control at the same time in fiction? Are short stories too often too well crafted? Is the messiness of many novels more like “real life”? Is it the task of fiction to mirror “real life” with all its messiness?
My friend Dex sent me a recent review of Charles Baxter’s collection Gryphon: New and Selected Stories. The review, by Bart Schneider, was laudatory, but ended with this paragraph:
“Readers will find much to admire in this collection by one of our best storytellers. If I have one criticism, it’s that the stories often wind down in tasteful denouements that come across more as elegant triumphs of craft than satisfying conclusions. The fact that a generation of MFA students have mastered that method inevitably colors my view. As many of the stories drew to a close, I found myself wishing for a bit more messiness, a bit more passion.”
Dex asked me what I thought about Schneider’s comments about passion, messiness, and the MFA story.
As everyone who is kind enough to read this blog well knows, I cannot resist it when someone asks me “what do you think about….?” And I have thought about the issue of craft vs. passion, tight control vs. messiness, and whether the short story can be taught in an MFA program ever since I have been teaching the form. The issue has a history as long as the reach of Edgar Allan Poe, who was the first champion of the short story as a form and the first champion of tight artistic control. I will be coming back to this issue in the next couple of months as I prepare my Angers presentation.
And speaking of a writer who insists on continuing to write short stories, in spite of the accusation that short stories are for the beginning, immature writer, the January 31 issue of The New Yorker has a new story by Alice Munro, entitled “Axis.” I have read it once and plan to read it twice more before posting something about it next week. I guess by this time, Munro’s book publishers have given up trying to talk her into writing a novel.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Huckleberry Finn, the word "nigger," and The Importance of Teaching Reading
What, you might ask, does the current flap about an English professor’s replacing the word “nigger” with the word “slave” in a new edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn have to do with the subject of this blog—The Short Story? Because, it seems to me, the controversy has to do with the other word in the title of this blog—“Reading.” And the importance of careful and attentive reading is what this blog has always been about.
According to various newspaper reports (and practically every newspaper in America, Ireland, England, and Canada has weighed in on this issue), Alan Gribben, chairman of the English department at Alabama's Auburn University, had become so frustrated teaching Huckleberry Finn because the word “nigger” is used over 200 times in it that he went to a small publisher, NewSouth, with the idea of replacing the word. Gribben told Publishers Weekly, "I was sought out by local teachers, and to a person, they said we would love to teach ... 'Huckleberry Finn,' but we feel we can't do it anymore. In the new classroom, it's really not acceptable."
The founder of the press immediately saw she could sell a lot of copies with this idea, admitting that “if we can get [Twain’s] book back into American schools, that would be really great for a small publishing company like ours.” Honest enough. However, Gribben’s justification for his decision is more than a little suspicious. He has said that Mark Twain was a notoriously commercial and populist author. “If he was alive today and all he had to do was change one word to get his book into every schoolhouse in America, he couldn’t change it fast enough.” That’s pretty damned presumptuous, it seems to me.
A few days ago, David Ulin of The Los Angeles Times (which is the paper I read every day) commented: “On its website, NewSouth notes that this new edition of "Huckleberry Finn" will not supersede previous editions of the novel: "If the publication sparks good debate about how language impacts learning or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain's works will be more emphatically fulfilled," the publisher declares.
“I don't know how that happens,” Ulin declared, “how debate is stirred by sweeping what disturbs us under the rug. Gribben ought to understand this; it's supposed to be in the nature of his academic work. As for NewSouth, with its politically correct agenda, it might be useful to go back to Twain.” It seems to me publicity and profit is more on NewSouth’s agenda than political correctness.
I grant you that “nigger” is a powerful word that refers to a shameful era in society’s past, not just in America, but in other parts of the world. There is no way to justify the treatment of an entire race that the word reminds us of. And we should be reminded. However, it is not just that horrible treatment the word references, but the taboo nature of the utterance itself.
Several years ago at the university where I taught, an older woman had returned to school to get her elementary teaching credential after the death of her husband, because she said she always wanted to teach. One day while doing her student teaching, she was engaged in a classroom activity in which one student had to be picked out of a group. To pick the student, she used the old counting rhyme, which goes:
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,
Catch a (many variations here, e.g. tiger, monkey, baby) by the toe.
If it hollers, let him go,
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, you are it!
Without even thinking about it, she used the phrase she had heard in her own childhood, “catch a nigger by his toe.” When this was reported to the principal by an outraged parent, the woman was not only jerked from the classroom, but also forced out of the teaching program at my university. I often wonder what happened to her.
Recently, one of my favorite high school teachers, who writes a regular column for my hometown newspaper, which she sends to me, was reminiscing about childhood Christmases, and mentioned that one of her favorite stocking stuffers among the oranges and apples were large chocolate drops, which were referred to as, she could not say it, “nigger toes.” Growing up in Eastern Kentucky, I admit to using the same terrible term. My only excuse is the one folks I grew up with often used: "I just didn't know any better." I am sorry for it. We all know better now. But I am not sure it is helpful to be so frightened to admit our past mistakes that it seems as though we are trying to deny that they occurred. We should no more try to change history than to change literature to fit our current notions of what is "correct."
The fact that you cannot even use the word when you are talking about whether you should use the word is illustrated in a recent court case, in which a U.S. District Court judge has ruled that Tom Burlington, a former Philadelphia television news anchorman, can proceed with a lawsuit against WTXF-Philadelphia, Fox29, claiming he was a victim of reverse racial discrimination when he was fired in 2007 for uttering the word "nigger" during a newsroom editorial meeting.
U.S. District Judge Barclay Surrick wrote: "Plaintiff portrays himself as a victim of political correctness run amok, while defendants portray themselves as employers who made the only choice they could in response to an employee who repeatedly uttered 'the most noxious racial epithet in the contemporary American lexicon. Whether plaintiff was a victim of discrimination or his own poor judgment is for a jury to decide."
According to a newspaper account, here’s what happened: A Fox journalist was preparing a report on a local high school chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People holding a mock funeral to bury the word "nigger." Participants at the demonstration reportedly uttered the word "at least a hundred times or more." During the meeting to discuss the story, Mr. Burlington asked: "Does this mean we can finally say the word 'nigger'?"
The reporter said she wasn't going to use the word in her report and one of the three African-American journalists in the eight-person meeting objected to Mr. Burlington's use of the word. In his lawsuit, Mr. Burlington said he argued using the word would add credence to the news report. He said he "wanted to make the point that I felt if we're going to refer to the word 'nigger,' we should either say the word 'nigger' or refer to it as a racial epithet or a slur instead of using the phrase the 'n-word'. "
He later became involved in a heated discussion with Joyce Evans, his African-American co-anchor, who was not at the news meeting. She allegedly told him he could not use the word because he was white. Over the next few days, Mr. Burlington tried to discuss the issue with employees who were at the initial news meeting and repeated the word about a dozen times. In his lawsuit, the TV anchor said he did not use the word in its pejorative sense and had no intention of belittling or hurting anyone. But when he used the word again, when called in by the station's managers to explain himself, he was immediately suspended and ordered to take sensitivity training.
I have taught Huckleberry Finn many times. (N.B.: I wrote an article about the novel several yeas ago in which I tried to defend what critics call the weak ending when Tom Sawyer comes back on scene and trivializes the book’s social message, and I will be happy to send it to anyone of my readers who is interested; it was fun to write because it argues for the fantasy nature of the novel, citing a crypto-masturbation scene that Twain must have known he was creating) Anyone who has read Huckleberry Finn knows that Huck’s central conflict in the book is between his personal loyalty with Jim and his cultural and religious heritage that a slave is the property of his or her owner and that to protect Jim from being captured would not only mean he would be socially outcast himself, but that he would risk eternal damnation. In the most powerful scene in the book, Huck wrestles with this issue, but his friendship with Jim is more powerful than his cultural heritage, so in a declaration, the power of which must be understood in all its Bible Belt force, Huck decides in favor of the person rather than the policy and says: "All right, then, I'll go to hell,"
Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times this morning (January 8, 2011) called Professor Gribben’s replacing the word “nigger” with the word “slave” and the word “Injun” in the name Injun Joe with “Indian” an “offensive idiocy of vandalism masquerading as sensitivity” and said it was one of those ideas “utterly breathtakingly off the mark.”
Rutten then cited a Twain scholar, Judith Lee, who was this week quoted as saying she found nothing objectionable about the change, arguing that Twain’s use of the term was meant to be read ironically, but that an appreciation of irony was an advanced interpretative skill, and that for a general audience a bowdlerized versions would do just fine. To which Rutten rightly replied: “In other words, reserve the classics for sophisticated readers and give the masses Twain-lite. If you can’t imagine what Mark Twain would made of that dichotomy, you’ve never read him.”
Rutten also discussed a similar censorship issue at Monrovia high school, which has a highly regarded drama department, directed by a professional actor and teacher Marc Segal. This year Segal proposed the students put on Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer Prize winning “Rent” as their spring musical. Last month, the school’s principal asked to see the script and then consulted with the district’s superintendent, after which she told Segal that “Rent” would have to be cancelled because: the play was not “family friendly” because it features “characters who have some dark issues they were dealing with.” Rutten, of course, pointed out that such a criteria would eliminate just about every play from “Oedipus Rex” (incest) to “Romeo and Juliet” (teenage sexuality). We can’t have students reading literature that deals with “dark issues.” Let them read about Lindsay Lohan and watch reality TV.
In the kind of newspaper serendipity that I love, The Los Angeles Times also ran a story this morning on the current meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) the largest professional association of literature and foreign language teachers in the world, 8000 in attendance this year). Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA noted that the humanities are under greater pressure right now than they would be in economically better times. The problem may partly be the result of the misconception, she added, that English and foreign language studies do no prepare students for a range of careers, arguing that humanities are just as practical as any other major, especially during hard times when people need to be nimble about switching jobs. Well and good, but I agree with a Dartmouth American literature professor at the conference who argued that literature classes should not be justified only with arguments about student employability. “If you don’t begin with the assumption that literature itself is a repository of human values that human beings need, then we lose everything.” I would add to that, if we don’t begin with the knowledge that reading literature is a powerful skill that enables us to see through the superficiality and silliness of much of modern culture, then, yes, we could lose everything.
And then one more bit of serendipity, A few days ago, the LA Times ran a review of John Lithgow’s one-man show currently running in Los Angeles entitled “Stories by Heart.” In the show, Lithgow reads and “acts out” two stories: P.G. Wodehouse's funny bit of fluff, "Uncle Fred Flits By" and Ring Lardner’s darker satire “Haircut.” I discussed “Haircut” many times in my classes by way of teaching the concept of irony, a concept that critics of Twain’s use of the word “nigger” should be aware of. I wrote a short article about “Haircut” several years ago in which I tried to argue for the importance of a careful reading of the deeper irony in the story. I suggested that Lardner’s story is even more savage than we have heretofore thought, that his attack is not just on the horrible practical joker Jim Kendall and a small town’s lack of moral sense (as represented by the narrator, the barber), but even more on the reader’s willingness to approve of the extreme penalty for Jim as his just deserts for his practical jokes. The reader becomes as morally implicated in the death as the barber and the townspeople by accepting what was obviously their own use of the feeble-minded Paul to rid themselves of a troublemaker and prankster that they hated and feared. It is unfortunate that so many high school teachers fear they do not have the ability to teach irony to students, it is doubly unfortunate that a university professor would be willing to cater to that fear.
In my opinion, reading good literature is not easy, nor was it meant to be. Because literature is not life, but an artificial construct that makes use of language conventions to create some understanding of life, reading it carefully and correctly requires some training and knowledge of how language and literature work. To change a great work of literature because it makes some people uncomfortable is, of course, absurd. Literature should make people uncomfortable, and if high-school teachers are afraid to teach a great work of literature, then we should change the teachers, not change the work.
According to various newspaper reports (and practically every newspaper in America, Ireland, England, and Canada has weighed in on this issue), Alan Gribben, chairman of the English department at Alabama's Auburn University, had become so frustrated teaching Huckleberry Finn because the word “nigger” is used over 200 times in it that he went to a small publisher, NewSouth, with the idea of replacing the word. Gribben told Publishers Weekly, "I was sought out by local teachers, and to a person, they said we would love to teach ... 'Huckleberry Finn,' but we feel we can't do it anymore. In the new classroom, it's really not acceptable."
The founder of the press immediately saw she could sell a lot of copies with this idea, admitting that “if we can get [Twain’s] book back into American schools, that would be really great for a small publishing company like ours.” Honest enough. However, Gribben’s justification for his decision is more than a little suspicious. He has said that Mark Twain was a notoriously commercial and populist author. “If he was alive today and all he had to do was change one word to get his book into every schoolhouse in America, he couldn’t change it fast enough.” That’s pretty damned presumptuous, it seems to me.
A few days ago, David Ulin of The Los Angeles Times (which is the paper I read every day) commented: “On its website, NewSouth notes that this new edition of "Huckleberry Finn" will not supersede previous editions of the novel: "If the publication sparks good debate about how language impacts learning or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain's works will be more emphatically fulfilled," the publisher declares.
“I don't know how that happens,” Ulin declared, “how debate is stirred by sweeping what disturbs us under the rug. Gribben ought to understand this; it's supposed to be in the nature of his academic work. As for NewSouth, with its politically correct agenda, it might be useful to go back to Twain.” It seems to me publicity and profit is more on NewSouth’s agenda than political correctness.
I grant you that “nigger” is a powerful word that refers to a shameful era in society’s past, not just in America, but in other parts of the world. There is no way to justify the treatment of an entire race that the word reminds us of. And we should be reminded. However, it is not just that horrible treatment the word references, but the taboo nature of the utterance itself.
Several years ago at the university where I taught, an older woman had returned to school to get her elementary teaching credential after the death of her husband, because she said she always wanted to teach. One day while doing her student teaching, she was engaged in a classroom activity in which one student had to be picked out of a group. To pick the student, she used the old counting rhyme, which goes:
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,
Catch a (many variations here, e.g. tiger, monkey, baby) by the toe.
If it hollers, let him go,
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, you are it!
Without even thinking about it, she used the phrase she had heard in her own childhood, “catch a nigger by his toe.” When this was reported to the principal by an outraged parent, the woman was not only jerked from the classroom, but also forced out of the teaching program at my university. I often wonder what happened to her.
Recently, one of my favorite high school teachers, who writes a regular column for my hometown newspaper, which she sends to me, was reminiscing about childhood Christmases, and mentioned that one of her favorite stocking stuffers among the oranges and apples were large chocolate drops, which were referred to as, she could not say it, “nigger toes.” Growing up in Eastern Kentucky, I admit to using the same terrible term. My only excuse is the one folks I grew up with often used: "I just didn't know any better." I am sorry for it. We all know better now. But I am not sure it is helpful to be so frightened to admit our past mistakes that it seems as though we are trying to deny that they occurred. We should no more try to change history than to change literature to fit our current notions of what is "correct."
The fact that you cannot even use the word when you are talking about whether you should use the word is illustrated in a recent court case, in which a U.S. District Court judge has ruled that Tom Burlington, a former Philadelphia television news anchorman, can proceed with a lawsuit against WTXF-Philadelphia, Fox29, claiming he was a victim of reverse racial discrimination when he was fired in 2007 for uttering the word "nigger" during a newsroom editorial meeting.
U.S. District Judge Barclay Surrick wrote: "Plaintiff portrays himself as a victim of political correctness run amok, while defendants portray themselves as employers who made the only choice they could in response to an employee who repeatedly uttered 'the most noxious racial epithet in the contemporary American lexicon. Whether plaintiff was a victim of discrimination or his own poor judgment is for a jury to decide."
According to a newspaper account, here’s what happened: A Fox journalist was preparing a report on a local high school chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People holding a mock funeral to bury the word "nigger." Participants at the demonstration reportedly uttered the word "at least a hundred times or more." During the meeting to discuss the story, Mr. Burlington asked: "Does this mean we can finally say the word 'nigger'?"
The reporter said she wasn't going to use the word in her report and one of the three African-American journalists in the eight-person meeting objected to Mr. Burlington's use of the word. In his lawsuit, Mr. Burlington said he argued using the word would add credence to the news report. He said he "wanted to make the point that I felt if we're going to refer to the word 'nigger,' we should either say the word 'nigger' or refer to it as a racial epithet or a slur instead of using the phrase the 'n-word'. "
He later became involved in a heated discussion with Joyce Evans, his African-American co-anchor, who was not at the news meeting. She allegedly told him he could not use the word because he was white. Over the next few days, Mr. Burlington tried to discuss the issue with employees who were at the initial news meeting and repeated the word about a dozen times. In his lawsuit, the TV anchor said he did not use the word in its pejorative sense and had no intention of belittling or hurting anyone. But when he used the word again, when called in by the station's managers to explain himself, he was immediately suspended and ordered to take sensitivity training.
I have taught Huckleberry Finn many times. (N.B.: I wrote an article about the novel several yeas ago in which I tried to defend what critics call the weak ending when Tom Sawyer comes back on scene and trivializes the book’s social message, and I will be happy to send it to anyone of my readers who is interested; it was fun to write because it argues for the fantasy nature of the novel, citing a crypto-masturbation scene that Twain must have known he was creating) Anyone who has read Huckleberry Finn knows that Huck’s central conflict in the book is between his personal loyalty with Jim and his cultural and religious heritage that a slave is the property of his or her owner and that to protect Jim from being captured would not only mean he would be socially outcast himself, but that he would risk eternal damnation. In the most powerful scene in the book, Huck wrestles with this issue, but his friendship with Jim is more powerful than his cultural heritage, so in a declaration, the power of which must be understood in all its Bible Belt force, Huck decides in favor of the person rather than the policy and says: "All right, then, I'll go to hell,"
Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times this morning (January 8, 2011) called Professor Gribben’s replacing the word “nigger” with the word “slave” and the word “Injun” in the name Injun Joe with “Indian” an “offensive idiocy of vandalism masquerading as sensitivity” and said it was one of those ideas “utterly breathtakingly off the mark.”
Rutten then cited a Twain scholar, Judith Lee, who was this week quoted as saying she found nothing objectionable about the change, arguing that Twain’s use of the term was meant to be read ironically, but that an appreciation of irony was an advanced interpretative skill, and that for a general audience a bowdlerized versions would do just fine. To which Rutten rightly replied: “In other words, reserve the classics for sophisticated readers and give the masses Twain-lite. If you can’t imagine what Mark Twain would made of that dichotomy, you’ve never read him.”
Rutten also discussed a similar censorship issue at Monrovia high school, which has a highly regarded drama department, directed by a professional actor and teacher Marc Segal. This year Segal proposed the students put on Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer Prize winning “Rent” as their spring musical. Last month, the school’s principal asked to see the script and then consulted with the district’s superintendent, after which she told Segal that “Rent” would have to be cancelled because: the play was not “family friendly” because it features “characters who have some dark issues they were dealing with.” Rutten, of course, pointed out that such a criteria would eliminate just about every play from “Oedipus Rex” (incest) to “Romeo and Juliet” (teenage sexuality). We can’t have students reading literature that deals with “dark issues.” Let them read about Lindsay Lohan and watch reality TV.
In the kind of newspaper serendipity that I love, The Los Angeles Times also ran a story this morning on the current meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) the largest professional association of literature and foreign language teachers in the world, 8000 in attendance this year). Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA noted that the humanities are under greater pressure right now than they would be in economically better times. The problem may partly be the result of the misconception, she added, that English and foreign language studies do no prepare students for a range of careers, arguing that humanities are just as practical as any other major, especially during hard times when people need to be nimble about switching jobs. Well and good, but I agree with a Dartmouth American literature professor at the conference who argued that literature classes should not be justified only with arguments about student employability. “If you don’t begin with the assumption that literature itself is a repository of human values that human beings need, then we lose everything.” I would add to that, if we don’t begin with the knowledge that reading literature is a powerful skill that enables us to see through the superficiality and silliness of much of modern culture, then, yes, we could lose everything.
And then one more bit of serendipity, A few days ago, the LA Times ran a review of John Lithgow’s one-man show currently running in Los Angeles entitled “Stories by Heart.” In the show, Lithgow reads and “acts out” two stories: P.G. Wodehouse's funny bit of fluff, "Uncle Fred Flits By" and Ring Lardner’s darker satire “Haircut.” I discussed “Haircut” many times in my classes by way of teaching the concept of irony, a concept that critics of Twain’s use of the word “nigger” should be aware of. I wrote a short article about “Haircut” several years ago in which I tried to argue for the importance of a careful reading of the deeper irony in the story. I suggested that Lardner’s story is even more savage than we have heretofore thought, that his attack is not just on the horrible practical joker Jim Kendall and a small town’s lack of moral sense (as represented by the narrator, the barber), but even more on the reader’s willingness to approve of the extreme penalty for Jim as his just deserts for his practical jokes. The reader becomes as morally implicated in the death as the barber and the townspeople by accepting what was obviously their own use of the feeble-minded Paul to rid themselves of a troublemaker and prankster that they hated and feared. It is unfortunate that so many high school teachers fear they do not have the ability to teach irony to students, it is doubly unfortunate that a university professor would be willing to cater to that fear.
In my opinion, reading good literature is not easy, nor was it meant to be. Because literature is not life, but an artificial construct that makes use of language conventions to create some understanding of life, reading it carefully and correctly requires some training and knowledge of how language and literature work. To change a great work of literature because it makes some people uncomfortable is, of course, absurd. Literature should make people uncomfortable, and if high-school teachers are afraid to teach a great work of literature, then we should change the teachers, not change the work.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Haruki Murakami's After the Quake
One of my readers, who just happens to be my daughter-in-law, Ean, asked me if I had read Haruki Murakami and, if so, what I thought of him. She also asked me about a Colorado science fiction writer, whose work I have not read. I am always happy to respond when readers ask me, "what do you think about....?" So here is a post of a review I wrote several years ago of Murakami's collection of stories After the Quake.
AFTER THE QUAKE: STORIES
First Published: Kami no kodomo-tachi wa mina odoru, 2000
Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin
In the early morning hours of January 16, 1995, a 7.2 earthquake hit the port city of Kobe, Japan, killing over five thousand people, causing billions of dollars worth of damage, and putting 300,000 out of their homes, including the parents of Haruki Murakami. Two months later, the radical Aum Shinrikyo cult carried out a gas attack on the subway system in Tokyo, killing eleven and crippling many others for life. Because of these twin terrors, Murakami, who had lived in the United States for several years, returned to Japan to research and write a nonfiction book entitled Underground: The Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (2001) on the terrorist attack, filled with accounts of the lives of both survivors and cult members. In Murakami’s book, after the quake, (the small case letters of the titles of the book and the stories) are intentional) six stories explore the seemingly tangential, yet very real, effect of the earthquake on several Japanese characters in February, 1995, the month between the two disasters.
The first story, “ufo in kushiro,” begins with a woman who has spent five days after the quake in front of the television. On the sixth day, when her husband Komura, a salesman at a hi-fi-equipment store in Tokyo, comes home, she has disappeared, leaving him a note saying that although he is good, kind and handsome, living with him is like living with a “chunk of air.” As usual with Murakami’s characters, Komura does not make any emotional reactions to his wife’s departure. When he takes a week off from work, one of his colleagues says that if he will deliver a small package for him to his younger sister in the city of Kushiro he will pay for his airfare and hotel.
When the sister, Keiko, along with a friend Shimao, meet Komura at the airport, he has the strange impression that he is witnessing some moment from the past. He also feels he has not come far even though it was a long journey. These impressions create a transition from everyday life into a mysterious realm of reality typical of many of these stories. When Kieko says he does not think his wife’s departure had anything to do with the earthquake, Shimao says she wonders if things like that aren’t connected somehow. When Komura and Shimao try to have sex, he fails several times because he has been seeing images of the earthquake. He tells her about his wife’s note, and she asks if it is true that there is “nothing” inside him. When he asks what “something” inside of him could be, she tells him that the box he brought contains the “something” inside of him and that he will never get it back. At the end of the story, the most pessimistic in the collection, Kieko understands the emptiness inside himself.
The second story, “landscape with flatiron,” focuses on Junko, a young woman and an older man named Miyake building bonfires on the beach. As Junko watches, she thinks of Jack London’s story “To Build a Fire,” about a man traveling alone in the Alaskan wilderness who cannot get a fire started and freezes to death. She is convinced that the man actually wanted death, even though he had to fight to stay alive. Junko has always felt a “certain something deep down” as she watches the bonfires. Miyake, who is obsessed with the fires, tells her that if you get such a feeling while looking at a fire, it shows the deep, quiet kind of feeling inside you.
Like Komura in the first story, Junko says she is empty, to which Miyake replies that he is an expert on emptiness. After talking about committing suicide together when the fire goes out, Junko goes to sleep and Miyake tells her that when the fire goes out she will feel the cold and wake up whether she wants to or not. In spite of the sense of emptiness, characteristic of other stories in this book, there is also a sense of communion, between the two characters at the end. This mutual understanding thus suggests that it is possible that when the fire goes out, the two will still have each other.
“all god’s children can dance” begins with a man named Yoshiya following a mysterious man with a missing earlobe. Interspersed with accounts of Yoshiya following the man are flashbacks to his childhood, when his mother told him that his father was the Lord, and that one day he will show himself to him if he keeps his faith. Yoshiya is convinced the man with a missing earlobe must be his biological father. When the man gets off the train in an industrial area, he walks like a mechanical doll being drawn by a magnet. The fact that there is no sign of human life and the place looks like an imaginary stage set in a dream is another indication typical of these stories that the main character has entered some alternate dream reality. When Yoshiya follows the man into an empty baseball field, he disappears, and Yoshiya’s acts seem to have no meaning to him; in fact, meaning itself seems to have broken down, never to be the same again. Kneeling on the pitcher’s mound, Yoshiya gives himself up to the flow of time, saying aloud, “Oh God.” Once again, Murakami’s story ends with a sense of emptiness and loneliness; however, because Yoshiya calls out the name of his absent father at the end, there is some ambiguity about whether his discovery is positive or negative.
In “thailand,” a woman named Satsuki goes to a professional conference in Bangkok, Thailand and decides to vacation there for a week with the help of a limo driver and guide named Nimit. The alternate reality theme is introduced when the limo arrives, looking like an object from another world, as if it had dropped from someone’s fantasy. When Nimit asks Satsuki if her hometown of Kyoto, which is not far from Kobe, was much damaged by the quake, she thinks that an unnamed “he” lives in Kobe.” Nimit takes Satsuki to a poor village to meet an eighty-year-old woman fortune-teller who tells Satsuki that there is a stone inside her body and that she must dream of a snake that will remove it or she will die. The old woman also tells Satsuki that the unnamed man in Kobe, obviously a man who has jilted Satsuki in the past, is not dead. Satsuki now recognizes that it is she who is headed toward death. She even thinks that the earthquake may be her fault because she wished for it to kill the man who. As she flies away, she sits in the plane wishing for sleep so her dream will come. Once again, a character is reminded of the emptiness inside the self, but once again also there is some ambiguity about the implications of this realization. If Satsuki has her dream, will she be saved from the hardness of her heart?
The most surreal story in the collection is “super-frog saves tokyo,” which begins Kafka-like with a man named Katagiri finding a giant frog in his apartment who tells him he has come to save Tokyo from destruction from an earthquake. Frog says that he and Katagiri must go underground to do mortal combat with a creature named Worm that gets larger as he absorbs hatred. Frog, quoting Nietzsche, says Katagiri must cheer him on, for fighting is not something he likes to do. When Katagiri tells Frog that he is even less than ordinary and does not see how he can help save Tokyo, Frog says he is trying to save Tokyo for good, ordinary people just like him. However, on the day they are to go underground Katagiri is shot by a man in the street and wakes up in a hospital only to find out there has been no earthquake and that he was not shot at all. Like other characters in these stories, Katagiri has no idea of what is true anymore. When Frog comes to the hospital and tells Katagiri that he did a great job in his dreams, the strange creature begins to break out in boils, out of which come maggots, centipedes, worms and bugs, which fill the room and crawl all over Katagiri. When he wakes up, he knows that Frog saved Tokyo at the cost of his life, for he went back to the mud and will never come again. Then Katagiri falls into a restful, dreamless sleep. Although this is certainly the most Kafkaesque story in the book, it is also one of the most optimistic, for it ends with Katagiri no longer troubled by strange dreams, peaceful in his very ordinariness.
“honey pie,” perhaps the most hopeful story in the book, begins with a man named Junpei telling a story to a child named Sala about a bear named Masakichi, who has no friends and is especially hated by a tough bear named Tonkichi. The child’s mother Sayoko has called Junpei, a writer and a friend, to come and help her because Sala has had another hysterical fits because she believes someone called the Earthquake Man is trying to put her in a little box.
When Junpei, Sayoko, and her husband Takatsuki were close friends at university, Junpei felt that Sayoko was the girl he had been looking for, but because he could never bring himself to express his feelings to her, Takatsuki was the first one to declare his love. After graduation, Junpei becomes a successful short story writer, while Takatsuki gets a job with a newspaper and marries Sayoko. Just before Sala’s second birthday, Takatsuki and Sayoko get a divorce, and Junpei thinks about asking Sayoko to marry him but cannot make up his mind. When Junpei and Sayoko take Sala to a zoo to see the bears, he tells her a story about Tonkichi who trades salmon with Masakichi for his honey, eventually making them best friends. When the salmon disappear, Tonkichi ends up being sent to the zoo.
That evening after dinner Junpei and Sayoko embrace as if nothing has changed since they were nineteen. During the night Sala comes into the bedroom and says the Earthquake Man came and told her that he has a box for everyone. Junpei sleeps on the sofa and looks at the TV, thinking they were inside the TV waiting for the box to open. He thinks that as soon as Sayoko wakes up he will ask her to marry him. He also thinks of a conclusion for the story for Sala; he has Tonkichi bake honey pies, which Masakichi takes to town and sells so they can live as best friends forever. Thinking he now will keep watch over this woman and little girl and never let anyone put them in that crazy box, not even if the earth should crack open, Junpei decides he wants to write stories different from what he has written so far; he wants to write about people who dream and wait. And indeed, this final story in Murakami’s collection is precisely that kind of story--a story that ends with fullness and unity instead of emptiness and separation. Thus, although these stories seem distinct entities, they are interconnected not only by the effect of the Kobe earthquake, but also because they move from meaninglessness to final hope.
AFTER THE QUAKE: STORIES
First Published: Kami no kodomo-tachi wa mina odoru, 2000
Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin
In the early morning hours of January 16, 1995, a 7.2 earthquake hit the port city of Kobe, Japan, killing over five thousand people, causing billions of dollars worth of damage, and putting 300,000 out of their homes, including the parents of Haruki Murakami. Two months later, the radical Aum Shinrikyo cult carried out a gas attack on the subway system in Tokyo, killing eleven and crippling many others for life. Because of these twin terrors, Murakami, who had lived in the United States for several years, returned to Japan to research and write a nonfiction book entitled Underground: The Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (2001) on the terrorist attack, filled with accounts of the lives of both survivors and cult members. In Murakami’s book, after the quake, (the small case letters of the titles of the book and the stories) are intentional) six stories explore the seemingly tangential, yet very real, effect of the earthquake on several Japanese characters in February, 1995, the month between the two disasters.
The first story, “ufo in kushiro,” begins with a woman who has spent five days after the quake in front of the television. On the sixth day, when her husband Komura, a salesman at a hi-fi-equipment store in Tokyo, comes home, she has disappeared, leaving him a note saying that although he is good, kind and handsome, living with him is like living with a “chunk of air.” As usual with Murakami’s characters, Komura does not make any emotional reactions to his wife’s departure. When he takes a week off from work, one of his colleagues says that if he will deliver a small package for him to his younger sister in the city of Kushiro he will pay for his airfare and hotel.
When the sister, Keiko, along with a friend Shimao, meet Komura at the airport, he has the strange impression that he is witnessing some moment from the past. He also feels he has not come far even though it was a long journey. These impressions create a transition from everyday life into a mysterious realm of reality typical of many of these stories. When Kieko says he does not think his wife’s departure had anything to do with the earthquake, Shimao says she wonders if things like that aren’t connected somehow. When Komura and Shimao try to have sex, he fails several times because he has been seeing images of the earthquake. He tells her about his wife’s note, and she asks if it is true that there is “nothing” inside him. When he asks what “something” inside of him could be, she tells him that the box he brought contains the “something” inside of him and that he will never get it back. At the end of the story, the most pessimistic in the collection, Kieko understands the emptiness inside himself.
The second story, “landscape with flatiron,” focuses on Junko, a young woman and an older man named Miyake building bonfires on the beach. As Junko watches, she thinks of Jack London’s story “To Build a Fire,” about a man traveling alone in the Alaskan wilderness who cannot get a fire started and freezes to death. She is convinced that the man actually wanted death, even though he had to fight to stay alive. Junko has always felt a “certain something deep down” as she watches the bonfires. Miyake, who is obsessed with the fires, tells her that if you get such a feeling while looking at a fire, it shows the deep, quiet kind of feeling inside you.
Like Komura in the first story, Junko says she is empty, to which Miyake replies that he is an expert on emptiness. After talking about committing suicide together when the fire goes out, Junko goes to sleep and Miyake tells her that when the fire goes out she will feel the cold and wake up whether she wants to or not. In spite of the sense of emptiness, characteristic of other stories in this book, there is also a sense of communion, between the two characters at the end. This mutual understanding thus suggests that it is possible that when the fire goes out, the two will still have each other.
“all god’s children can dance” begins with a man named Yoshiya following a mysterious man with a missing earlobe. Interspersed with accounts of Yoshiya following the man are flashbacks to his childhood, when his mother told him that his father was the Lord, and that one day he will show himself to him if he keeps his faith. Yoshiya is convinced the man with a missing earlobe must be his biological father. When the man gets off the train in an industrial area, he walks like a mechanical doll being drawn by a magnet. The fact that there is no sign of human life and the place looks like an imaginary stage set in a dream is another indication typical of these stories that the main character has entered some alternate dream reality. When Yoshiya follows the man into an empty baseball field, he disappears, and Yoshiya’s acts seem to have no meaning to him; in fact, meaning itself seems to have broken down, never to be the same again. Kneeling on the pitcher’s mound, Yoshiya gives himself up to the flow of time, saying aloud, “Oh God.” Once again, Murakami’s story ends with a sense of emptiness and loneliness; however, because Yoshiya calls out the name of his absent father at the end, there is some ambiguity about whether his discovery is positive or negative.
In “thailand,” a woman named Satsuki goes to a professional conference in Bangkok, Thailand and decides to vacation there for a week with the help of a limo driver and guide named Nimit. The alternate reality theme is introduced when the limo arrives, looking like an object from another world, as if it had dropped from someone’s fantasy. When Nimit asks Satsuki if her hometown of Kyoto, which is not far from Kobe, was much damaged by the quake, she thinks that an unnamed “he” lives in Kobe.” Nimit takes Satsuki to a poor village to meet an eighty-year-old woman fortune-teller who tells Satsuki that there is a stone inside her body and that she must dream of a snake that will remove it or she will die. The old woman also tells Satsuki that the unnamed man in Kobe, obviously a man who has jilted Satsuki in the past, is not dead. Satsuki now recognizes that it is she who is headed toward death. She even thinks that the earthquake may be her fault because she wished for it to kill the man who. As she flies away, she sits in the plane wishing for sleep so her dream will come. Once again, a character is reminded of the emptiness inside the self, but once again also there is some ambiguity about the implications of this realization. If Satsuki has her dream, will she be saved from the hardness of her heart?
The most surreal story in the collection is “super-frog saves tokyo,” which begins Kafka-like with a man named Katagiri finding a giant frog in his apartment who tells him he has come to save Tokyo from destruction from an earthquake. Frog says that he and Katagiri must go underground to do mortal combat with a creature named Worm that gets larger as he absorbs hatred. Frog, quoting Nietzsche, says Katagiri must cheer him on, for fighting is not something he likes to do. When Katagiri tells Frog that he is even less than ordinary and does not see how he can help save Tokyo, Frog says he is trying to save Tokyo for good, ordinary people just like him. However, on the day they are to go underground Katagiri is shot by a man in the street and wakes up in a hospital only to find out there has been no earthquake and that he was not shot at all. Like other characters in these stories, Katagiri has no idea of what is true anymore. When Frog comes to the hospital and tells Katagiri that he did a great job in his dreams, the strange creature begins to break out in boils, out of which come maggots, centipedes, worms and bugs, which fill the room and crawl all over Katagiri. When he wakes up, he knows that Frog saved Tokyo at the cost of his life, for he went back to the mud and will never come again. Then Katagiri falls into a restful, dreamless sleep. Although this is certainly the most Kafkaesque story in the book, it is also one of the most optimistic, for it ends with Katagiri no longer troubled by strange dreams, peaceful in his very ordinariness.
“honey pie,” perhaps the most hopeful story in the book, begins with a man named Junpei telling a story to a child named Sala about a bear named Masakichi, who has no friends and is especially hated by a tough bear named Tonkichi. The child’s mother Sayoko has called Junpei, a writer and a friend, to come and help her because Sala has had another hysterical fits because she believes someone called the Earthquake Man is trying to put her in a little box.
When Junpei, Sayoko, and her husband Takatsuki were close friends at university, Junpei felt that Sayoko was the girl he had been looking for, but because he could never bring himself to express his feelings to her, Takatsuki was the first one to declare his love. After graduation, Junpei becomes a successful short story writer, while Takatsuki gets a job with a newspaper and marries Sayoko. Just before Sala’s second birthday, Takatsuki and Sayoko get a divorce, and Junpei thinks about asking Sayoko to marry him but cannot make up his mind. When Junpei and Sayoko take Sala to a zoo to see the bears, he tells her a story about Tonkichi who trades salmon with Masakichi for his honey, eventually making them best friends. When the salmon disappear, Tonkichi ends up being sent to the zoo.
That evening after dinner Junpei and Sayoko embrace as if nothing has changed since they were nineteen. During the night Sala comes into the bedroom and says the Earthquake Man came and told her that he has a box for everyone. Junpei sleeps on the sofa and looks at the TV, thinking they were inside the TV waiting for the box to open. He thinks that as soon as Sayoko wakes up he will ask her to marry him. He also thinks of a conclusion for the story for Sala; he has Tonkichi bake honey pies, which Masakichi takes to town and sells so they can live as best friends forever. Thinking he now will keep watch over this woman and little girl and never let anyone put them in that crazy box, not even if the earth should crack open, Junpei decides he wants to write stories different from what he has written so far; he wants to write about people who dream and wait. And indeed, this final story in Murakami’s collection is precisely that kind of story--a story that ends with fullness and unity instead of emptiness and separation. Thus, although these stories seem distinct entities, they are interconnected not only by the effect of the Kobe earthquake, but also because they move from meaninglessness to final hope.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
