Mark Richard's "Tunga Tuggo, Lingua Dingua": Puzzle the Prof Contest for Short Story Month 2011

Mark Richard, whose first short story collection, The Ice at the End of the World won the 1990 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award and whose second collection Charity received a lot of praise, once told an interviewer that he prefers short stories over novels because there’s not a lot of room in them for slop or bad writing. And indeed most reviewers have praised Richard’s stories for the care with which they are written.

However, Julia has posed a “Puzzle the Prof” query about the longest story in Charity, “Tunga Tuggo, Lingua Dingua” that may suggest some diffuse writing. She says she thinks it is written beautifully up until the last few pages, “and then the train wrecks.” She wonders what happened and what I think about the ending.

Truth to tell, this is not one of my favorite Mark Richard stories in Charity. I prefer “Gentlemen’s Agreement” and the title story, for they seem economical, tight, and lyrically pure, whereas “Tunga Tuggo, Lingua Dingua” seems loose and rambling.

If Julia is dissatisfied with the ending when the two brothers Cyphus and Samuel finally find their lost father, I suspect it is because of the kind of story this is. In an archetypal “Quest for the Father” story, of which there are many in world literature, searching for the father is always more engaging than finding him. The search focuses on the heroic adventurer who makes the quest; when the quest is over, the emphasis shifts to the father. And since the father is often some numinous image of the ineffable and divine, and therefore impossible to adequately objectify, the climax of the story is often apt to be diffuse and unsatisfying.

Of course, “Tunga Tuggo” purposely deflates the “Quest for the Father” story. The two brothers--Cyphus, who prides himself on his ear for accents, and Samuel, whose distinguishing characteristic is that he is clubfooted—are antiheroes rather than young adventurers. And their quest is not for some elevated father figure, but rather for the body of a disreputable father, from which they wish to retrieve a wallet. Their means of transportation is not a noble steed, but rather the father’s old limo. Their tool in the search is not a sword, but a cheap leaf rake. Although the wallet is not the traditional magic wallet of myth, it does contain some unidentified “family papers” that the two seekers need to recover—both for themselves and for the rest of the family.

This is all great fun for the reader, for Richard seems to be enjoying a self-conscious play with the elements of the Quest for the Father archetype. Thus, it strikes me as a bit strange that when in an interview on KCRW, Michael Silverblatt suggested to Richard that several stories in Charity seemed to be about the search for the father as a search for redemption, Richard seemed surprised and said that he would have to take another look at his stories from that perspective.

However, segueing from the word “redemption,” Richard did say that he thought the best art embodied what he called a “striving toward the divine,” a striving for what is just out of reach. This is an expression of what philosopher Philip Wheelwright in The Burning Fountain: a Study in the Language of Symbolism (1954) and Metaphor and Reality (1962), has termed a “liminal ontology”, a “metaphysics of the threshold,” whose basic proposition would be “we are never quite there, we are always and deviously on the verge of being there.” As Robert Browning has the artist in his great poem “Andrea del Sarto” express it, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?”

According to Wheelwright, the only way to even approach the “liminal” is by the plurasignative language of literature: “To try to deal with all matters by logico-scientific language is as self-defeating as to try to capture water in a net, or a breeze in a bag. Meanings always flit mockingly beyond the reach of men with nets and measuring sticks.” Wheelwright concludes Metaphor and Reality by noting, “A person of intellectual sensitivity is plagued by the sense of a perpetual Something More beyond anything that is actually known or conceived… The mythic and the fictive should not be dismissed from consideration simply on the ground that they are philosophically impure…The truest explanation of anything is not necessarily the one that is most efficient… The metaphoric and the mythic are needed elements in the life of the individual.” Wheelwright says we must deal with proposed answers to he mysteries of human life with the Hindu gurus of the Upanishads, “neti neti”—“not quite that, not quite that.”

Mark Richard would, I think, agree with all this. His story’s focus on language—the hodgepodge of the title with words from Swedish, Old Icelandic, and Gothic, Cyphus’s expertise with words, the father’s glossolalia or speaking in tongues—all suggest some reality beyond what can be reached by what Wheelwright calls “logico-scientific” language.

Perhaps Julia’s dissatisfaction with the ending of “Tunga Tuggo” is because throughout most of the story we are in a familiar realm of parody and antiheroes. Two guys digging through twenty-two thousand acres of sand with a leaf rake, looking for the body of a man for whom they seem to have no love or respect in order to retrieve some mysterious family papers, the importance of which is never quite clear, a park ranger who is trying to protect the sea oats grass that grows along the Gulf Coast—all this seems aimed toward a comic satiric treatment—like something George Saunders might write, that is, if he were from Louisiana.

Then in the last half dozen pages, the story shifts somewhat. Although the world of the conclusion seems somewhat similar to the comic parody we have been enjoying throughout, it also seems somehow different. The park ranger has been transformed into a keeper of the threshold for the Father who ushers the two men into the presence of “The very corpulent Darrell Dontell Boyd, “swaddled in enormous Fruit of the Looms,” lying in a manger, with a large black plastic trash bag over his shoulders. “And what rough beast” is this, we might ask, “its hour come round at last,” slouching toward Bethlehem to be born? While the park ranger and Samuel fall to their knees when the Father speaks in tongues, Cyphus seems determined to use the rake to send him back into the sea. And the story ends with just this possibility.

By introducing the father as THE Father, i.e. a grotesque baby Jesus, who speaks in tongues, the reader may feel somewhat torn as to how to respond to this revelation. Certainly, we cannot take the Father seriously here as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. A quick check of 1 Corinthians, Chapter 14 would seem to suggest that the Father in Richard’s story does not possess the true charismatic gift that is a bestowment of God’s grace. Even though Richard has often been compared with Flannery O’Connor’s grotesque misfits, none of the characters in Richard’s story have the gravitas of even the most comic figures of O’Connor:

1 Follow after charity, and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy.
2 For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God: for no man understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries.
3 But he that prophesieth speaketh unto men to edification, and exhortation, and comfort.
4 He that speaketh in an unknown tongue edifieth himself; but he that prophesieth edifieth the church.
5 I would that ye all spake with tongues but rather that ye prophesied: for greater is he that prophesieth than he that speaketh with tongues, except he interpret, that the church may receive edifying.

So perhaps Julia reacted to the end of the story the same as I did: with mixed emotions about how to respond to the father. I was having a lot of fun, not taking the other characters very seriously until the end when I come face to face with the object of the quest. Then I am not sure who or what he is. Is Richard after something serious here, or is he just having fun with the conventions of this kind of story? I have no way of knowing.

I hope Julia, or any other reader, will comment further on the story.

Denis Johnson's "Emergency": Puzzle the Prof Contest--Short Story Month 2011

During the first two weeks of Short Story Month, I have received several contributions to my whimsical Collection Giveaway contest “Puzzle the Prof.” During the last two weeks of May, I will respond to some of them before awarding two books, Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson and my own The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice to the contestant whose query was most challenging to me.

The first query is from Nathan, who is puzzled about why Denis Johnson’s well-known story “Emergency” is acclaimed as a “great” piece of fiction. He says he was born and grew up in a foreign country before moving to the U.S., which, he says, may be part of the reason he doesn’t "get" contemporary American short stories sometimes. Nathan says, “We often talk about conflict as the basic building block of a dramatic scene: somebody wants something and is having trouble getting it. I can't really tell what it is anybody wants in this story, let alone what's getting in the way to fulfill that. Seems like random things just keep happening to them (guy with knife in the eye, pregnant bunny, hitchhiker, etc.), and there's not much cause-and-effect (another element we're always told to have). I don't really sympathize with any characters, and there's nothing much in the story I look forward to finding out. The ending leaves me unsatisfied.”

I can sympathize with Nathan’s response to “Emergency.” The first couple of times I read it, I too felt puzzled about its popularity. I also could not really sympathize with any of the characters and did not care much about what happened in the story. I should add that, as a guy whose only experience with drugs is a couple of shared joints in the sixties, I have never been very much interested in “druggie” stories. Some may think “Emergency” is so popular because, as Tobias Wolff once said on the New Yorker’s fiction podcast, that it “caught the fag end of the sixties,” but as soon as Wolff said that, he quickly added that the story is a “classic,” which “everyone” seems to have read because of “the art.” (Wolff included the story, which originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1991, in The Vintage Book of American Short Stories, which he edited)

The story may be popular because it reflects a certain period in American culture, but that does not make it a great story. On the surface, the story may appeal to a certain group of readers who relish the antics of young drug-taking males who seem sometimes to live in a comic alternate reality, especially when they triumph over the more cautious representatives of sober reality. It’s a pleasure when Georgia pulls the knife out of the guy’s eye without thinking about it, while the wimpy doctor on duty says he is not touching the guy because he knows his limits. In reality, it’s stupid, of course; but in a fiction, it’s a pleasure.

And, since we accept the drug-induced alternate reality of the story, we think it’s funny when we read the line, “Around 3:30 a.m. a guy with a knife in his eye came in.” It just seems comically right when the nurse says “”We’d better get you lying down,” and the man says, “Okay, I’m certainly ready for something like that.” Denis Johnson himself plays the guy with the knife in his eye in the film version of Jesus’ Son and delivers a great comic deadpan line when he nurse asks him if he wants to call the police: “Not unless I die,” he says after thinking about it a few seconds. The slapstick surreal nature of the story is emphasized when the doctor on duty comes in, sees the knife sticking out of the guy’s eye, and asks, “What seems to be the trouble?”

Another reason the story is so well known is because it is one of several stories in the collection Jesus’ Son which focuses on the central character known as “Fuckhead,” who is continually drugged-out and thus always slightly on the fringe of reality. Because readers prefer to read continuous novels rather than short, abrupt stories, a collection that seems to be made up of connected chapter-like stories is often attractive. Readers get the continuity appeal of the novel, but because the story-like sections are often more concise and carefully written than novel chapters, they also often get the pleasure of carefully controlled prose and a tightly controlled structure.

However, on a deeper level, the story is not a good short story only because of anti-establishment comic unreality and novel-like continuity, but because of the way its prose explores a universal theme using strategies that are common to the short story as a genre.

The story opens with the orderly Georgie, who is obviously already stoned, mopping the emergency room floor, complaining, “Jesus, there’s a lot of blood here,” asking, “What the hell were they doing in here?” When Fuckhead says they were performing surgery, Georgie cries, “”There’s so much goop inside of us man, and it all wants to come out.” When Fuckhead asks him why he is crying, Georgie says, “What am I crying for? Jesus. Wow, oh boy, perfect.” Georgie, whose shoes seems to squish with all the blood and can never seem to get it all mopped up, has, of course, seen what others refuse or fear to see—that we are always in the midst of an emergency, that we are all born to die, that the blood inside our bodies is bound to come out; no one can escape that inevitability. And that, indeed, is something to cry about, or laugh about.

It’s a nice irony that Georgie sees what others do not, since “seeing” or “not seeing” is a theme that repeats throughout the story. After all, the man with the knife in his eye has been stabbed by his wife for seeing something he should not see—peeping at the lady next door while she was sunbathing. And of course, the stabbed eye is his good eye, since his other one is made of something artificial. When the doctor on duty comes in and asks what the trouble is, he obviously cannot see anything.

A related theme in the story has to do with spiritual reality versus ordinary reality. When Fuckhead and Georgie go outside to lie in the bed of Georgie’s pickup truck, Georgie wants to go to a church, saying, “I’d like to worship.” Fuckhead wants to go to a county fair, which they do, or maybe they don’t. Given the drug-induced hallucinatory nature of the story, it is not always clear what is happening and what is being imagined. While on the road, they get lost; Georgie cannot remember the rides at the fair and hits a jackrabbit. Given one of the story’s themes, Fuckhead asks Georgie, “Are you completely blind?”

The theme of death introduced at the beginning by the blood-drenched emergency room is continued here with the dead rabbit. To emphasize this theme even more, the rabbit is pregnant—suggesting death-in-life or life-in-death. (Katherine Anne Porter has a wonderful story entitled “The Grave,” in which a young boy skins a rabbit, only to find unborn rabbits inside.) Fuckhead becomes a sort of surrogate mother to the rabbits that Georgie has saved by putting them under his shirt against his belly.

Once again the theme of seeing is evoked when the two men cannot find the truck in a snowstorm and Fuckhead says, “Georgie, can you see?” To which Georgie replies, “See what? See What?” The spiritual reality theme is further emphasized when Fuckhead seems to see a military graveyard filled with row after row of markers. On the other end of the field, he seems to see angels descending out of a brilliant blue summer sky, “their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity.” But Georgie says, “It’s the drive-in, man…They’re showing movies in a fucking blizzard.” This spiritual reality versus artificial reality theme is related to the comic/horrible, birth/death, seeing/blindness dualities that run throughout the story.

All these themes culminate in three different possible endings of the story. The first one is meditative, when Fuckhead thinks about all these events and wonders if he is remembering them correctly. But, he says, that doesn’t matter. He remembers the next morning when the snow melted off the windshield of the pick-up and he feels the beauty of the morning, thinking, “I could understand how a drowning man might suddenly feel a deep thirst being quenched. Or how a slave might become a friend to his master.” Fuckhead feels a sense of reconciliation and acceptance of life and death, comedy and tragedy here, as he sees a bull elk standing in the pasture “giving off an air of authority and stupidity. And a coyote jogged across the pasture and faded away among the saplings.”

The second possible ending has the two men back at the hospital, listening to the Twenty-Third Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer over the intercom, and running into the man with the knife in his head, who has been released from the hospital. “It could have been worse,” says the nurse. “It’s just a miracle you didn’t end up sightless or at least dead.” When the man shakes Georgie’s hand, Georgie does not know him, asking, “Who are you supposed to be?” It’s a great question, perfectly phrased, since it is a question none of us can ever really answer. We don’t know who we are, much less who we are supposed to be.

The final ending comes earlier when on the way back to the hospital, they pick up a hitchhiker named Hardee, a boy Fuckhead knows. When they stop the truck, he climbs “slowly up out of the fields as out of the mouth of a volcano.” (Great image, it seems to me, of resurrection from the depths of the inferno). Hardee says he has been working on a bee farm. When Fuckhead asks, “Do those things sting you?” he replies, “Not like you’d think. You’re part of their daily drill. It’s all part of a harmony.” And indeed, the whole story has been about an overall harmony—the kind of harmony that integrates all the dualities of the story—the acceptance of death in the midst of life, the comic in the midst of the grotesque, he pain in the midst of the joy of life. That all sounds corny as hell when expressed so flatly, but it seems embedded deeply within every detail of Johnson’s story. The story ends with a punch line that unifies the story: When Hardee says he is AWOL and needs to get to Canada, Georgie says, “We’ll get you there…. I think I know some people.” Maybe he does and maybe he doesn’t. But it’s a good goal. After a while, when Hardee asks Georgie, “What do you do for a job,” Georgie replies, “I save lives.”

It’s the only job worth having.

I thank Nathan for getting me to read “Emergency” again. I confess I have never really cared for Jesus’ Son in general or “Emergency” in particular. But that is my fault, not Denis Johnson’s. After spending some more time with it, I now better understand the tension in the story between the sacred and the profane, the comic and the grotesque, sympathy and judgment. What I first saw as merely a self-indulgent story of drugged-out and uncaring clichéd characters, I now see as a story of thematic complexity and stylistic precision. I think “Emergency” is a fine example of how short stories often require careful and repeated reading and close and concentrated attention. I hope this discussion leads Nathan back to take another look at the story.

“Pride” Alice Munro, Harper’s, April 2011.

Munro's "Pride": A Life Well-lived

Alice Munro will be eighty in July 2011. Since the 2009 publication of Too Much Happiness (her twelfth collection of short stories), she has published (at least as far as I can determine) three new stories: two in The New Yorker (“Corrie,” Oct. 11, 2010; and “Axis,” Jan. 31, 2011), and one in Harper’s, “Pride,” April 2011. I have been told that Harper’s is holding one more story that will be released in the next few months. Given the timeline that Munro has maintained throughout her career of releasing a new collection of stories every three or four years, we should expect, God willing, a thirteenth collection from her in 2012 or 2013.

I have posted blogs on the two New Yorker stories. I have now read the Harper’s story “Pride” several times and, after postponing for a few weeks, think I am now ready to essay a brief discussion of that story.

“Pride” is something of a departure for Munro, for it is told by a first-person male protagonist and narrator. I can recall one other story, “Thanks for the Ride,” in her first collection Dance of the Happy Shades, that uses a male narrator. But in spite of the male teller, in that early story, as well as in this last one, a woman is introduced immediately and usually assumes the focus of the story. In “Thanks for the Ride,” it is a teenager, Lois, who initiates the male narrator into sexuality. In “Pride,” it is Oneida, the daughter of a well-to-do family who lives in the same town as the male narrator. The story begins in the thirties and continues up to recent years. The action, such as there is, centers on the life of the narrator, who has a harelip, becoming a bookkeeper for a company in the town, and Oneida, a young woman he knows.

As in any first-person story, the first question I ask is: Why is the narrator telling the story and what stake does he have in it? Although the narrator (never named) is not a highly educated man, he is a thoughtful man. He ruminates on things and ponders them, as we can determine from the first paragraphs of the story, in which he divides people into two types: those who, regardless of their mistakes, prove themselves hearty and jovial, claiming they would not want to live any place but where they live, and others, who don’t get away from where they live, but you wish, for their own sake, that they had. “Whatever hole they started digging for themselves when they were young…they kept right on at it, digging away.” This bit of rumination establishes the general motivation for the narrator’s telling of the story. The reader is led to expect that the two main characters of the story might be representative of these two types.

Although he is driven back and forth by Oneida, the narrator notes that she did not look unhappy at the arrangement, nor did he, that he had “dignity” and plenty of it. What Oneida had was something different, he says, a kind of flustered graciousness, ready to laugh a little at her situation. The narrator says he felt sorry for her, “the way she was all on the surface of things, trusting.” Then he adds, in reference to his harelip impediment, “Imagine me, sorry.”

The next section of the story moves to the 1940’s—the war years. Because the narrator was exempted from service, he feels cut off from men his own age, although he says that is nothing new. He wonders why his harelip, which has been “decently if not quite cleverly, tidied up,” has kept him home. However, he says he doesn’t miss a father (who died before he even saw him) or a girlfriend, or “the brief swagger of walking off to war.” He spends time listening to the BBC radio and going to movies with his mother. When a ferry sinks off the Canada coast, he thinks of the people who went down and ponders that death makes everyone equal.

In the next section of the story, the narrator’s mother dies, as does Oneida’s father. When she comes to ask his advice about selling her house, he cautions her against it, but she sells it anyway and is later sorry for her action, even though she moves into an apartment later built on the site of the house. The narrator begins to spend time with Oneida in the fifties, inviting her to his own house to watch his new television. They do not go out because meeting new people is an ordeal for him. When he slips and calls her “Ida,” which is what her father called her, he apologizes, but she notes that he always preferred to call people by their old school nicknames. He feels “huffy” about this because, “The implication was that I somehow preferred to hang on to my childhood, that I wanted to stay there and make everybody else stay with me.” This implication refers to the narrator’s opening rumination about those people who stay and make the best of it and those who should have left. He says that all his school years were spent getting used to what he was like, and he considers it a triumph of sorts to have managed that feat and to know that he could stay here and make a living without having to continually break new people in to the way he looks. “But as for wanting to put us all back in grade four, no thank you.”

During the Sixties and Seventies, he thinks about Oneida, “There was still that strange hesitation and lightness about her, as if she were waiting for life to begin.” One evening he becomes ill and she settles into his mother’s bedroom to care for him. He comes to depend on her and has “spells of feeling like a small child again.” However, he realizes she is not his mother and is embarrassed that she has cared for his intimate hygiene needs, feeling that she was able to do so because of the way he looked, because he was a “neuter to her, or an unfortunate child.” He wants her to leave, and she does so, but sometime later, when she comes to watch television, she says she would like to move in with him, for she does not like living in an apartment, and if he became sick again, she could care for him. “We had a certain feeling for each other, she said. We had a feeling which was not just the usual thing. We could live together like brother and sister and look after each other like brother and sister, and it would be the most natural thing in the world. Everybody would accept it as so. How could they not?”

The narrator feels “angry, scared, appalled” at all this, “as if I had been thrown down a cellar and a flat door slammed on my head.” He does not want to let Oneida know how he feels, but to get out of this dilemma, he says he has already sold the house. Then, of course, he has to sell the house, and, because there is nowhere else, finding an apartment on the ground floor of the building where Oneida lives. When he goes to sign the lease, he meets a man who he has known for years but does not immediately recognize. When the man asks the narrator if he plays the card euchre, intimating a future companionship, the narrator ruminates about the following:

“Just living long enough wipes out the problems. Puts you in a select club. No matter what your disabilities may have been, just living till now wipes them out, to a good measure. Everybody’s face will have suffered, never just yours.”

This makes him think about how Oneida has aged. He thinks if he had ever had the right to choose, he would not have chosen her, but a college girl he once knew who worked for the company that employed him. Once the girl told him that he could now get a better plastic surgery job on his face. He thinks:

“She was right. But how could I explain that it was just beyond me to walk into some doctor’s office and admit that I was wishing for something I hadn’t got.”

The story ends when Oneida shows up at his house while he is packing. Suddenly she laughs and points out the window to a birdbath that seems full of black and white birds, dashing in the water. But they are not birds, but a group of young skunks. He thinks how beautiful they are, splashing in the water, so many you could not tell how many there were. Here is how the story ends:

“While we watched, they lifted themselves up one by one and left the water and proceeded to walk across the yard, swiftly but in a straight diagonal line. As if they were proud of themselves but discreet. Five of them.
“My Lord,” said Oneida. “In town.”
Her face looked dazzled.
“Have you ever seen such a sight?”
I said no. Never.
I thought she might say another thing and spoil it, but no, neither of us did.
We were as glad as we could be.”

Other things that lead us to expect that the story means something are its title and its author. That it is titled “Pride” leads us to expect that its meaning is somehow related to that human quality; that it is by Alice Munro (if we have read her stories before) leads us to expect some thematic significance, not merely a realistic account of an historical event.

The opening two paragraphs of the story, which begins, “Some people get everything wrong,” and then reflects on two different types of people in live in towns like the one in which this story takes place, also suggests to us that the teller of the story has something in mind he wishes to explore and perhaps illustrate. The opening rumination ends this way:

“Life is harder for some, we’re told. Not their fault, even if the blows are purely imaginary. Felt just as keenly by the recipient, or the non-recipient, as the case may be.
But good use can be made of everything, if you are willing.”

Just as such a ruminative opening suggests some thematic significance, so also does the ending scene in which small skunks are playing in a birdbath. The incongruity of the skunks in the birdbath, combined with the fact that the sight dazzles Oneida and pleases the narrator, making them both as glad as they could be, suggests that the scene has symbolic or metaphoric significance that should make us reflect back on the whole story. The fact that the skunks, which are usually thought to be repulsive smelly creatures, here look beautiful and seem “proud of themselves” makes us reflect back on the meditative passages at the beginning, as well as the references to “pride” throughout the story. It is hard to be a skunk, one might think, hard to have any pride in yourself if you smell bad and people run from you.

I recall back in the late forties and early fifties a Warner Bros Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoon character named Pepe Le pew, a male French skunk who was always amorously stalking a young female cat (who accidently got a white stripe painted on her back) who ran from his attentions because of his vile smell. But no matter how repulsive others thought Pepe to be, he was blissfully indifferent and took great pride in what he thought to be his amorous appeal.

If one were an observer of life in this small Canadian town, one might wonder why these two people never got together. Granted, the narrator’s face is marred by a cleft lip, while Oneida’s face is beautiful; she comes from wealth and privilege, while he comes from a lower middle-class background. But then this kind of difference is the very stuff of romance—Heathcliff and Cathy in Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, for example.

Although we can understand why the narrator and Oneida do not get together when they are young, we might wonder why they do not get married, or at least live together, when they are older. Part of the mystery involved here is why people ever get together. As the narrator says, “good use can be made of everything, if you are willing.” The narrator does not feel slighted or snubbed; he is so used to being exempted by his looks and the way he talks that he takes it for granted and he therefore does not miss what he might have had if he had looked differently. He spent his school years getting used to what he looked like and how other people responded to his looks, and considers it a “minor triumph” to have managed to do this, to survive, make a living, live a satisfying life.

We might be temped to say that his life could not have been satisfying, for he only had his mother and then this woman who mothers him when he is ill. But if nothing in the story suggests that he is lonely or self-pitying or deprived—either sexually or emotionally, who are we to say he must have been unhappy? Does one have to love someone to live a good life? Does one have to have sex to live a good life? Does one have to have children to be fulfilled? Obviously, the answer to all these questions is “no.”

Why does the narrator react so extremely when Oneida suggests moving in with him? She does so because she thinks they need each other; he could depend on her; she could depend on him. However, this very notion terrifies and appalls him, for he has always lived his life with enough hard-earned self-pride that he does not need anyone else. To be made to feel at this point in his life that he does need someone, that he cannot live alone, would somehow suggest that all his life’s work overcoming adversity, earning self-pride, would have been wasted. Remember, when a woman suggested that he go see a doctor to get a better repair job done on his cleft lip, he says it was just beyond him to go in some doctor’s office and admit he was wishing for something he didn’t have. To be able to say, “I don’t need” to change my appearance to be accepted. To be able to say, “I don’t need someone else to depend on and reflect a positive image of me.” Both require hard-earned self-pride.

When he meets the man he did not recognize because the man has aged and thinks of Oneida growing older, he comes to realize that if you live long enough, earlier problems are eradicated. No matter what shortcomings you may have had earlier, just living long enough wipes them. When you get older, everybody’s face suffers, not just yours.

Alice Munro has lived a long, productive creative life, developing a wisdom about human nature that she will, God willing, continue to share with us for many years to come. It is well that she would write a story that reflects a life well lived. As the English metaphysical poet George Herbert once famously said, “Living well is the best revenge.”

Short Story Month--May 2011--Puzzle the Prof Contest

A couple of years ago, Larry Dark, of The Story Prize suggested it might be a good idea to promote the month of May as National Short Story Month. Last year, Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network tried to further this idea by posting responses by various writers, reviewers, and bloggers to two new books of short stories. This year, Erika Dreifus, a contributing editor at Fiction Writers Review has taken up the banner to promote May as Short Story Month by making it part of FWR’s Collection Giveaway Project, urging bloggers interested in the short story to participate.

Erika has suggested that bloggers post an entry on our blog recommending a recently published short story collection. The post can be long or short, a review or merely a rave. The one requirement is that the blogger, has read and loved the book in question. Then the idea is to offer a copy of the book as a giveaway to one lucky person. Bloggers would announce their winner on May 31, 2011, and arrange to send out copies of any books they are giving away. Bloggers can choose the winner through a drawing, or by the wittiness of his/her remarks, or by whatever criteria they choose.

Several bloggers have already pledged to participate in the Short Story Month Collection Giveaway, including Dan Powell at Dan Powell-Fiction and the good folks over at The Short Review.

Always happy to promote reading the short story in any way available, I plan to participate in Short Story Month 2011 as follows:

I have a nice new extra hardback copy of Antonya Nelson’s collection Nothing Right, which came out last year. I am posting below my review of the collection. I am also including, as part of the prize, a hardback copy of my own critical book, The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice.

Here is what I propose on the Reading the Short Story Blog as a competition for the two books:

Readers frequently complain that whereas novels are usually satisfying, complete narrative experiences, short stories are often hard-to-understand, inconclusive, or just plain puzzling. If you have read a short story that you feel is mystifying or hard to understand—a story that still nags at you because you can’t figure what’s it all about, I invite you to submit the story to me, along with a one-paragraph query about what puzzles you about the story. I will select the most challenging and interesting queries and try to pose reading suggestions or interpretative solutions to the problem. At the end of May, I will award the two books to the reader who has submitted the most challenging puzzle for me to solve. If the story is a fairly well-known one, I probably have a copy, so you just need to provide the title in your one-paragraph query. If it is online somewhere, tell me where I can find it. If it is a relatively unknown story, you will have to scan it and send it to me at my email address: cmay@csulb.edu


Below, I try to suggest what I liked about Antonya Nelson’s collection Nothing Right, which I hope to award to some quizzical reader at the end of Short Story Month, May 2011.

Nothing Right. By Antonya Nelson. Bloomsbury. 296 pages, 2010. $25.00.

Eudora Welty, a great reader and writer of the short story, once said that all of an artist’s stories tend to spring from the same source within him or her, that however one’s stories differ in theme or approach, they all carry a “signature” characteristic of the writer’s gift. The signature of Antonya Nelson’s stories in her fifth collection, Nothing Right, can best be determined by the answer to the question, “What is wrong?”

All of Nelson’s characters, mostly women, are lost, disengaged--looking for a mate, a child, or a family to give themselves an identity, a sense of belonging. Some succeed in finding themselves; some do not. In the title story, Hannah feels lost and alone after her divorce, especially since her favorite son went with his father and she is stuck with fifteen-year-old Leo, who is always getting into trouble, and whose ugly transformation to manhood disgusts her. However, his latest shenanigan, getting an older girl pregnant, gives Hannah an unsuspected source of identification.

Perhaps the most isolated character in the collection is Abby in “OBO,” (a classified ad acronym for “or best offer,”) who weasels her way into her professor’s home for the holidays to try to seduce his wife. In a similar story, “Or Else,” David, and a woman he has met, break into a Telluride vacation home of a family that once welcomed him but with whom he is now alienated. Both David and Abbey are “liars by nature,” but even as you disapprove of their behavior, you cannot help sympathizing with their desperation.

Two stories focus on sisters, one of whom needs the help of the other. In the most poignant, “Party of One,” Emily, suffering from cancer, goes to a cocktail lounge to appeal to a married man who is breaking her sister’s heart. In “People People,” Elaine provides a refuge for her brilliant, antisocial, obese sister when her attempts to have an affair with a married colleague fail. In “Shauntrelle,” Constance, recently divorced, looks for a home and finds it temporarily with a roommate named Fanny Mann, who is in Houston for plastic surgery procedures. They constantly receive phone calls and visits from strangers looking for previous lost residents, such as Shauntrelle, a name that Fanny Mann gives to Constance.

Although one may worry that Nelson is following a formula of her own making in these stories, as Eudora Welty has wisely said, a pattern in a writer’s stories is subjective, lying too deep to be consciously recognized, a pattern of which a new story is not another copy “but a fresh attempt made in its own full-bodied right …with its own pressure, and its own needs of fulfillment.”

Bearing her own unique “signature,” Nothing Right powerfully reaffirms Antonya Nelson’s mastery of the short story, which has been widely recognized since her first collection, The Expendables, won the Flannery O’Connor Award in 1990.

Toby Litt and the Freudian Fort-Da

For me, one of the pleasures of attending literary conferences on the short story is being introduced to a writer whose work is, for whatever reason, unknown to me. Toby Litt, who shared with me the charming title “Guest of Honour” at the recent International Symposium on “The Figure of the Author in the Short Story in English” at Universite de’Angers, is the author of several books—both novels and short stories—but with whom I was unfamiliar because his work has been largely limited to publication and promotion in the UK.

His short story collections include Adventures in Capitalism (1996), Exhibitionism (2002), and a “novel in stories” entitled I Played the Drum in a Band Called Okay (2008). He studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury and was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists in 2003.

Toby and I had lunch together on the second day of the conference and enjoyed a long, leisurely talk about writing in general and the short story in particular. Like many writers I have met, Toby is a complete professional, devoted to, even obsessed by, his work. He is a highly versatile writer, trying his hand at several different genres. If you take a look at his titles on his website in order of publication, you might notice that they are in alphabetical order, e.g. Adventures in Capitalism, Beatniks, Corpses, etc. I think he is up to the letter “L” now. He has plans to go through to “Z” and then… I don’t know.

Toby read a story at the conclusion of the conference that I would like to comment on briefly because I think it illustrates two different ways to read short stories. The story was written “to order,” as it were, for reading on UK radio to commemorate Bob Dylan’s birthday. Here is the basic plot situation: A young man’s entire record collection is destroyed by party-going vandals, with each lp record broken neatly into two pieces and replaced in its sleeve. However, one record has seemingly escaped the debacle—a prized Bob Dylan recording, for the broken record in the Bob Dylan sleeve—an exercise recording--was placed in it by mistake. The action of the story follows the young man’s efforts to recover the Dylan lp that has been loaned to someone. The story is feverishly paced, and the voice of the narrator is ideally suited to a radio presentation, as the listener sympathizes with the young man’s efforts to find his prized recording, the only one left after experiencing the worst thing that could possibly happen to him.

Finally, at the end of the story, the young man does succeed in retrieving the lost Dylan recording. He takes it home but before placing it in its original sleeve, he neatly breaks it into two pieces to match the other records in his destroyed collection. It is the best thing he has ever done.

When Toby finished reading the story, I immediately put a question to him. I told him that as he finished reading the story, I imagined myself listening to it on the radio with my father, an uneducated truck driver from the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. I imagined that as my father listened to the story, he too became caught up in the young man’s efforts to get back the lost Dylan record. However, when the boy broke the record, my father was outraged, puzzled—looking at me, the English professor, and asking, “Now why in the hell did he do that for?”
And I, the know-it-all English professor could only smile my knowing smile, certain that it was inevitable the boy broke the record, but not knowing how to explain my reaction. So I asked Toby, “What do I tell my father?”

As the members of the audience laughed and talked about the ending of the story and the difference between wanting the boy to rescue the record and being somehow happy that he broke it, I suddenly came up with a possible answer, and, being the old professor that I am, it was an academic answer. I raised my hand to get Toby’s attention and shouted, “I got it! I got it!”

The story is about a young man experiencing something he sees as the worst thing that has ever happened to him—the loss of his prized record collection in a meaningless attack. There is no explanation for the attack. It’s just that “shit happens.” There’s meaningless evil in the world. You can’t protect yourself from it. The only thing you can do is find a way to make it seem that you are in control of what you are never really in control of.

Think of a small infant in a crib. The child wants the mother to stay with it. But the mother has to leave. The child is helpless to make the mother stay. However, when the mother leaves, the child develops a game in which it throws a toy at the departing mother, saying, “gone.” The child repeats the game over and over, and by this play convinces itself that it is responsible for the mother’s leaving, thus creating the illusion of control. Sigmund Freud developed this theory, which in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle he called the “Fort-Da,” by observing his grandson throwing a toy after his departing mother, saying, “gone” and retrieving it, saying “here.”

Here is the quote from Beyond the Pleasure Principle:

This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out "o-o-o-o," accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word "fort'" [gone]. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play "gone" with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied around it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive "o-o-o-o." He then pulled the reel again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful "da" [there]. This, then, was the complete game�disappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act. The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child's great cultural achievement -- the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting.

The young man in Toby Litt’s story does something similar at the end. By breaking the record the way the other records had been broken, he in effect says to the mysterious evil culprit, “You screwed up; you missed one. You did not succeed. Here is the way you do it. I am in control of what happens. I can play this game better than you ever can.”

Now, I am not sure I could ever convince my father of this explanation of why the young man’s destruction of the Bob Dylan record is so satisfying to me, but it does, I think, account in some way the difference between a puzzled reaction to a short story’s ending and a satisfied reaction.

Check Toby’s web site at http://www.tobylitt.com/

“The Figure of the Author in the Short Story in English”: Angers, France, April 8&9, 2011

“The Figure of the Author in the Short Story in English” Conference last week at the University of Angers in France was a real pleasure for me. I was honored to be the keynote speaker, opening the conference on Friday morning with a presentation entitled, “Why Many Authors Like Short Stories and Many Readers Do Not.” The Journal of the Short Story in English, published by Presses de l’Universite Angers plans to publish the essay, so I cannot post it on this blog. However, the citations from which I developed the essay have all been posted in the past month. I will let you know when the issue of the journal featuring presentations at the conference is available.

Sponsored jointly by the University of Angers and Edge Hill University in England, the conference also featured British writer Toby Litt, who read one of his most recent stories to end the conference on Saturday afternoon. A number of scholars from England, America, Canada, Belgium, Iran, Poland, Ireland, Romania, and elsewhere gave presentations on the relationship between the author and the work, focusing on stories by Ali Smith, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, John Fowles, Katherine Mansfield, George Saunders, and others.

I usually have at least one confrontation at these conferences, for my own approach to studying the short story differs from the trendy cultural/social approach nowadays. It was the following comment that kicked off some negative reaction from one academic: “Many current literature students have been taught to read for social themes, political issues, and cultural contexts. My hope is that my colleagues, especially those just now entering the profession, will move past the jargon of their graduate seminars, rediscover their love of literature, and teach with passion how artists create human interactions that no other speech acts can, especially in that most beautiful, but most underrated literary genre—the short story.”

The hosts of the conference, Michelle Ryan-Sautour, of University of Angers, and Ailsa Cox, of Edge Hill University, made all the participants most welcome. It was one of the most cordial and intimate conferences I have ever attended. The wonderful French food and wine contributed not a little to the pleasure, as you might imagine. The banquet on Friday night as a special treat, held at a unique restaurant called LES CAVES DE LA GENEVERAIE, which is actually in a series of interrelated caves in a farming area outside of Angers. You can read about it at http://genevraie.troglodyte.infor

It was a pleasure to have my eldest daughter on the trip with me. We spent four days in Paris after the three days in Angers, seeing the usual sights. I am posting a few pictures, one of me in front of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, which is only a few blocks from our hotel on the Left Bank in the Latin Quarter, near the Sorbonne and Notre Dame. Pardon the inevitable postings of a tourist.

I will post an entry next week on the guest short story writer at the conference, Toby Litt.

Authors on the Short Story--Part V--Best American Short Stories Introductions

The Best American Short Story collection has been around now for almost 100 years. It was started in 1915 by Edward J. O’Brien, who also wrote two pretty good history/discussions of the form: The Dance of the Machines: The American Short Story and the Industrial Age (1929) rants against machine-like standardization of the industrial age and argues that the short story of his time shares with the machine the characteristics of being impersonal, standardized, speeded-up and cheap. The Advance of the American Short Story (1931) surveys the development of the American short story from Washington Irving to Sherwood Anderson. O’Brien edited what was then called Best Short Stories of, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story for a quarter of a century.

Volume 7 of Critical Survey of Short Fiction, which I edited for Salem Press in 2001, includes the table of contents of all the Best American Short Stories volumes from 1915 up through 1999. It is interesting to note how few writers in the early volumes are still remembered, or are remembered as popular rather than literary writers, e.g. in the 1915 volume, Ben Hecht, Fannie Hurst, Wilbur Daniel Steele. But who today remembers Walter Muilenburg or Will Livingston Comfort?

Martha Foley took over the editorship in 1941 and continued in that position until 1977, sometimes co-editing with Joyce F. Hartman or David Burnett. In 1978, Shannon Ravenel took over, but that year also started the tradition of having someone else, most often a fiction writer, making the final choice. Usually, Ravenel would choose 120 stories and then send them to the guest editor who chose the final twenty. The titles of the remaining 100 were listed in the back.

Over the years, guest editors have included Joyce Carol Oates, John Gardner, Anne Tyler, John Updike, Gail Godwin, Raymond Carver, Anne Beattie, Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich, Annie Proulx, and Amy Tan. However, in the last few years, Houghton Mifflin has chosen guest editors who are not short-story writers and do not seem to appreciate the form, for example, Alice Sebold in 2009, who does not write short stories at all, and Richard Russo in 2010 who does not write them well. Their introductions are rambling generalities and personal anecdotes that add nothing to our understanding and appreciation of the short story. However, many of the other authors who have guest edited over the years have made interesting and helpful comments on the short story, the best of which I include below with the dates of the volume.

I hope these five sets of authorial comments have been helpful to you. Over 100 different authors are represented. I have organized many of the comments in what I think are significant categories and tried to show their relationship to each other for my presentation in Angers, France later this month entitled “Why Many Authors Like Short Stories and Many Readers Do Not.”

I have raided my own copies of Best American Short Stories for the following authorial comments on the form to complete this series. Any comments or additions are appreciated. Not all volumes are represented because not all authors commented on the short story as a form.

1981, Hortense Calisher: “If poetry has the direct line to the highest laurel—or the noblest life—and the novel is sometimes cock-of-the-walk conversationally, then the short story, somehow frozen or immured between them, is everybody’s prize orphan, of whom one speaks tenderly, if not for long. It’s the chamber music of literature and has the same kind of devotee. Besides, it doesn’t sell well. There’s often that confusion between the commercial fact and the Parnassian one.”

1984, John Updike: “The suspicion persists that short fiction, like poetry since Kipling and Bridges, has gone from being a popular to a fine art, an art preserved in a kind of floating museum made up of many little superfluous magazines.”

1985, Gail Godwin: “The paradox I have discovered, in writing and in reading the writing of others, is that the more you respect and focus on the singular and strange, the more you become aware of the universal and the infinite.”

1990, Richard Ford: “Short stories, like lyrics, are invented new each time they’re tried, becoming attached to the name-made-form only as a convenience for would-be-students and syllabus makers.”
“Unarguably, writing short stories is something most people can’t do very well. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s harder than it looks, and wonderful stories do seem like little miracles.”
“Abstractable standards of form will not very reliably predict or often inspire a first-rate short story…a good short story is not good because it conforms to or rejects doggishly some pre-existing conceit.”
“Good stories perform what wonders they do using wise standards all their own, discovered often in the private vicissitudes of being written.”

1993, Louise Erdrich: “The best short stories contain novels. Either they are densely plotted, with each line an insight, or they distill emotions that could easily spread on for pages, chapters.”

1995, Jane Smiley: “The short story is an elusive, paradoxical form, not easily mastered, yet some of the best are written by beginning writers.”

1996, John Edgar Wideman: “Stories that don’t acknowledge the mystery at the center of things, don’t challenge the vision f reality most consenting adults rely upon day by day, are stories that disappear swiftly into the ever-present buzz of entertainment.”

1997, Annie Proulx: “The short story is a difficult literary form, demanding more attention to control and balance than the novel.”
“In the short story there lingers a faint sense of example, a trimmed, useful tautness implying a function for the reader beyond entertainment… The reader comes to the short story subliminally expecting enlightenment, that is, we accept the idea that there is some nugget of embedded truth in a short story, and this acceptance partially sponges off the label of fiction in a way that does not occur with the novel in its detailed examination of character.”

1999, Amy Tan: “For me the rhythm is in the beats of the first sentence, in the way the story’s pulse quickens or evens, lulls, or leaps. And by the end the story breaches and exhales with a certain tempo and force…. Disruptions can cause me to lose the story’s focus or its essence, and at the very least its momentum. For that reason, I feel the short story is more akin to a poem than a novel in how it should be read.”

2000, E. L Doctorow:”The story as a particular kind of fiction may not be definable by its construction or its length, but what is critical is its scale. Smaller in its overall dimensions than the novel, it is a fiction in which society is surmised as the darkness around the narrative circle of light. In other words, the scale of the short story predisposes it to the isolation of the self.”
“Here in the year 2000 we lack a proprietary critic of the short story as, for example, Professor Helen Vendler is a proprietary critic of the lyric poem.”

2001, Barbara Kingsolver: “I have often wondered why short stories are not more popular in this country. We Americans are such busy people you’d think we’d jump at the chance to have our literary wisdom served in doses that fit handily between taking the trash to the curb and waiting for the carpool…. Most Americans would sooner read a five-hundred-page book about a boy attending wizard school or how to make home décor from roadside trash or anything than pick up a book offering them a dozen tales of the world complete in twenty pages apiece…. It may be that most Americans don’t read short stories because…a good short story cannot be Lit Lite; it is the successful execution of large truths delivered in tight spaces.”

2004, Lorrie Moore: “There is no thoroughly convincing theory of the short story—it is technically a genre, not a form, but resists the definitions that usually cluster around both…in lieu of a truly winning overriding theory, we should rely perhaps on simple descriptions, in which case the more the merrier.”
“As for their oft stated affinity with poetry, short stories do have in common with poems an interest in how language completes one’s understanding of the world.”
“Unlike novels or poems, but more akin to a play, the short story is also an end-oriented form, and in the best ones the endings shine a light back upon the story illumining its meaning with both surprise and inevitability.”

2006, Anne Patchett: “The first thing the short story needs to think about is casting off the role of The Novel’s Little Sidekick, the practice run, the warm-up act.”
“Short stories are often better written and make fewer demands on our time than novels. Why haven’t we made a deeper commitment to them? I am afraid it has something to do with the story’s inability to cause a stir…. It doesn’t really matter what the short story chooses to do, but it needs to do something. Fast. The story needs hype. It needs a publicist. Fast

2007, Stephen King: “The American short story is alive and well. Do you like the sound of that? Me too. I only wish it were actually true. The art form is still alive…. But well? That’s a different story.”