Startle and Illuminate

by Carol Shields

  It may be that The Love Story has lost credibility because we’ve gone back to the notion of the self who is endlessly in conversation with the self, imprisoned in the flesh of the self and denied by biology and logic the redemption of love, the comfort of the embrace of another. The Venerable Bede, the seventh century historian and theologian, once compared a human life to a swallow that flies by accident out of the darkness and into the lighted banquet hall, then swiftly crosses the brilliant beamed space, and darts out the other end, back into the night. This is a compelling and reasonable image; it sings beautifully to the tune of our own sad times. But how much richer in potential is the notion of that bird flying side by side with another, their wings almost but not quite touching, the two of them guided by an inexplicable binary radar, and an instinctive wish to join their lives together.

  I wanted to see what was possible, and so I wrote A Love Story, The Republic of Love, set in Winnipeg.

  In Brief …

  • The Love Story may have lost credibility, but consider the notion of a bird flying through life side by side with another, their wings almost but not quite touching, the two of them guided by an inexplicable binary radar, and an instinctive wish to join their lives together. That is a story worth risking.

  * We have no idea which daughter this might have been.

  ~ 10 ~

  THE SHORT STORY (AND WOMEN WRITERS)

  WHEN ROBERTO CALASSO’S BOOK The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony came out it was interesting to watch editors squirm as they tried to figure out which list to put it on. Fiction or non-fiction, this mix of folklore, history, poetry, narrative, commentary. Which was it? All of the above? Or none of the above?

  The confusion was affirming rather than disturbing for someone who’s loved literature from childhood, but has never felt comfortable with its forms and definitions. Consider how we define prose: writing that is not poetry. And what is poetry? Writing that is not prose, of course. Consider that puzzling non-name-brand: non-fiction. A short story as everyone knows is a prose narrative that can be read in a single sitting, never mind what that quaint abstraction, a single sitting, means. A novel is the same thing except longer, like several sittings presumably. How long is a novel or a story? About as long as a piece of string. A narrative is, well, a story, and a story is—a narrative, of course.

  There are other problems besides definitions. Every detail in a short story must contribute to its total effect; Chekhov and Hemingway said so, so it had to be true. A story had to have conflict, that old word. It took some time to understand just what a set-up the ascending storyline was, and how little of the texture and boldness of life, of women’s lives in particular, could be shaped to fit its contours.

  In my attitudes toward fiction, one shoe dropped, then another, then a shower of shoes. A very large shoe fell the day I heard Helen Buss, an academic from the University of Calgary—this would be 1983 or so—dismiss the binaries of tragedy and comedy as relics from the patriarchy (and I promised myself I wouldn’t use that word). At a literary conference, I listened to a number of very serious academics discuss whether Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush was a novel or a series of sketches or a memoir or what? Needless to say, nothing was concluded at the end of this discussion, and it seemed to me that those learned souls who were fretting about the genre of Mrs. Moodie’s work were missing the whole book, which makes its own shape, makes it up as it goes along, inventing and rearranging and pushing toward something new.

  I began in the early eighties, while writing a series of short stories called Various Miracles, to swerve away from the easy comfort zone of so-called epiphanies that accounted for the traditional rondure of short stories, those abrupt but carefully prepared-for lurches toward awareness, the manipulative wrap-up that arrived like a hug in the final paragraph.

  Resolution in itself began to feel false, the Grail, the Goal (with capital Gs), large noble gestures, sudden blinding insight, an exaggeration and level of heat that is the equivalent of hurled crockery or a burst of sunlight.

  Instead I wanted stories that soared off into mystery and disruption, not mere flat openness but a spiralling into space or a melting into another narrative as happens at the end of a story I wrote titled “Home.” Or I would fast-forward the final paragraph into the future, something that occurs in another story called “Flitting Behavior.” Or dive with it into the past, which is the kind of ending that occurs in a piece called “Scenes.” I wanted these endings to hold an aesthetic surprise that spun off the narrative, but wasn’t necessarily generated out of it.

  I tried in the short story “Scenes” to dislocate the spine of a traditional story, that holy line of rising action that is supposed to lead somewhere important, somewhere inevitable, modelled perhaps on the orgasmic pattern of tumescence followed by detumescence, an endless predictable circle of desire, fulfillment, and quiescence. I was for some reason drawn to randomness and disorder, not circularity or narrative cohesion. In fact, I had observed how the human longing for disruption was swamped in fiction by an almost mechanical model of aesthetic safety.

  I had an argument with Matt Cohen about how long a book of short stories should be. He thinks 150 pages is about right (and that’s what he’s doing) but I want more than 200 pages, a real book feel to it.

  —Letter to Anne Giardini

  I had started in the early eighties to pay attention to the way in which women, sitting around a table for instance, tell each other stories. I noticed that they dealt in the episodic, and tended to suppress what was smoothly linear, to set up digressions, little side stories, often of a genealogical nature, which were not really digressions at all but integral parts of the story, to throw into the kitty. One time such a conversation was about the dolls we had played with as girls. Every anecdote we exchanged had a different structure and feel to it, but afterward I wondered if they didn’t add up to a larger, more complex image, an image that commented in its prismatic way on the nature of women and their ability to care for something beyond themselves, and in their concern create a strategy for survival.

  Out of that discussion came a story called “Dolls, Dolls, Dolls, Dolls,” the title nodding, I hoped, to the collective nature of stories. John Barth makes the point in his 1994 novel Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera that the central narrative question for the fiction writer is not “what happens?” but “who am I?” Many women would modify that statement slightly, framing it as “who are we?”

  In 1984 I wrote a story called “A Wood” in collaboration with my daughter, Anne Giardini. She was visiting; we wanted to spend as much time together as possible, but I had a deadline for a book of stories. I suggested we try to do one together. We agreed on a procedure. I would write one page and hand it over to Anne, who would write the next page, then hand it back to me. We were allowed to make two or three small changes to each other’s pages. After seventeen days we agreed that we had a sort of story, and we sat down together to edit it. The story is not a seamless whole—that seemed beyond us—but is broken instead into seventeen related segments. It is an odd and slippery story and has something of the linguistic roughness you see in translations. I included it in the manuscript I submitted, thinking they would probably see it as an authorial anomaly and delete it from the book. But the issue of joint authorship never came up, and the story appeared along with the others, along with a note that it was written “With Anne Shields.”*

  We’re always hearing (to deal with a major myth) that there are more women writers than men around, as though women were somehow engaged in an aggressive conspiracy to take over. It’s interesting that no one ever goes around saying how odd it is that there are so many male writers around. This has been going on for a long time. In 1853, J. M. Ludlow advised his British readers, “But we have to notice [regard the coercion] the fact, that at this particular period of the world’s history, the very best novels in several great countries happen to have been written by women.” And a CBC producer apparently remar
ked to Margaret Atwood a few years ago, “A number of us are upset because we feel women are taking over the Canadian literary scene.” Is this paranoia? And what is it based on? There are still plenty of men writing and being published but somewhere there is a tide turning, and it may just be here.

  And if this is so, let me move quickly to the question of quality. Why does it seem—and again this is difficult to prove—that the Canadian short story is flourishing around the world and that women are contributing to that flowering? Some of it must be put down to a random dispensation of talent, which makes it presumptuous to speculate on the why and how of an Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant: we just have to be grateful to have them. On the other hand, we’re all familiar with the history of the short story as we know it. It began with Poe and Hawthorne, and is a child of the New World. It’s almost as though newly opened regions clamour, not for old tales and myths, but for an account of present moments of experience. Maybe now the frontier has shifted, shifted northward and westward, but shifted most dramatically to that previously unfranchised half of the human race whose experiences were mostly buried in journals and letters, and in that perverted but courageous old creature, the potboiler.

  There are a few myths about women’s writing that can be put under the sod. That women excel at the short story because they write out of fragmented experience, between batches of biscuits or tubs of laundry. That women write short stories because they’re forever signing up for creative writing courses down at the Y that concentrate on the short story form. That something diminutive about the size of women, and something unspoken and fluffy predisposes them to shorter forms and prohibits them from diving into more epic work. That the precision, dexterity, compression, and frugality of the female imagination serve the short story form, as does something else called the female voice in literature.

  The female imagination is problematic because it brings to mind something monumental and eternal when in fact it is only what is concerning women at a particular time, a constantly changing and developing pool of ideas or images or whatever, which some women, in general, from time to time, may share.

  And I would be happy to embrace the altogether attractive myth of the feminine voice. It is tempting to believe that delicacy, fluidity, subtlety, and elegance are more pronounced in the writing of women. We would be gladly served by the belief that women are masters of rich language patterns, intricate clustered metaphors or a syntax that is artful, supple, and suggestive—but can we prove it?

  What we do often find in women’s work is worth paying attention to. A time that we may describe as present and personal and urgent. Often too, the emotional range is wider. There is perhaps less exaggeration, less mythologizing. Settings tend to be simple but universal: enclosures, rooms, houses. Crossing borders, in any direction, we can find a commonality of subject matter, subject matter made accessible by the fact of its being rooted in the lives of women and easily translatable from one culture to another. It is a universal truth, for example, that the majority of women have been mothers and therefore witnesses to the growth and development of human personality. Until recently, there has been the universally shared problem of confinement and expectation. Cut off from the world of affairs and from a history of their own, women have turned instinctively to the present moment and to the immediate concerns of what it means to be a woman, of sometimes surrendering power in order to remain human.

  But do these writers of universal themes find a universal audience? Are they taken seriously? Some years ago, a Canadian reviewer described a novel that illuminated the subject of motherhood as a diaper novel. With this term, he attacked not the way in which the novel was written, but more basically, the validity of the experience and its rightful place in literature. It has been a struggle for women writers to persuade themselves that their experiences are relevant. Other people who must be persuaded are the following: publishers, editors, Canada Council juries, teachers of creative writing, reviewers, booksellers, and finally, readers—those readers who sometimes shuffle their feet and apologize for the fact that they mainly read women writers.

  Women writers—everywhere—share what Isak Dinesen called the “business of being a woman,” those demands that cut into a woman’s time. It is only, women often think, at the expense of others that they can give themselves permission to write. Listen to Katherine Mansfield writing about the early days of her relationship with John Middleton Murry: “The house seems to take up so much time.… I get frightfully impatient and want to be working.… Well, someone’s got to wash dishes and get food.” Washing dishes may seem a feeble whine, but the key words in Mansfield’s complaint are “frightfully impatient,” because impatience leads to frustration, and frustration to anger, and if we listen to Virginia Woolf, anger often creates a distortion in a work of art, robs it of wit, blurs its edges, provides nothing but a dumping ground for the emotions.

  It seems to me we’re at an interesting period here on the frontier. A certain amount of dumping has taken place and a certain amount of permission has been given. Women are feeling more secure in the literary world.

  It could be that women are not necessarily writing better novels, but novels about the kinds of things readers are anxious to know about. Or it could be that serious women novelists are in ascendancy around the world. The novel, after all, is the one literary form whose birth took place at a time when women were, for the first time, being educated in large numbers. And women, denied the novel of action, the novel of ideas, fell heir to the novel that reflected the daily life of ordinary people. This kind of novel was once shuttled off into a corner called domestic fiction, until it was realized, and not that many years ago, that everyone, men as well as women, possess a domestic life.

  Or the current interest in women’s fiction could be—and I think this is more likely—because some seventy percent of those who read novels are women—so the booksellers tell us—and that these women want to hear other women’s voices. Perhaps they’ve always wanted these voices, but we needed Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan to come along and tell us we were smarter than we thought, and then Kate Millett told us—I think it was in 1970—that we didn’t have to take Henry Miller seriously any longer, and what a relief that was! Women spread the word, helping each other along, and there really is—ask publishers—a network among reading women: “You’ve just got to read this book,” they say, and often it is a book by a woman writer.

  Virginia Woolf (like one of the characters in one of my novels, I have a Woolfian bias) invoked in me an impulse to be serious. And then Margaret Laurence said to me, through her writing, “Serious, yes, but watch out for earnestness.” Mavis Gallant shows how it is possible to be intelligent on the page without being pedantic. Margaret Atwood, who is, I suppose, Canada’s first international star, is just plain brave—she’ll tackle any orthodoxy and almost always with wit. Alice Munro describes in one of her stories what real work is. It’s not just housework or looking after the husband and children; my real work, the narrator says, is “wooing distant parts of myself.” These distant parts, these concealed layers of existence, shame or ecstasy or whatever, are what every writer works to get to the heart of.

  Part of the appeal of women writers may be the intimacy of voice. I often think how women writers sitting at their desks are speaking not to the ages or to Humankind, but to individual readers, as though those readers were in the same room, and what they are speaking of is the texture of their own lives. Women writers often seem willing to engage with vulnerability, including themselves in that vulnerability. As a woman who has elected a writing life, I am interested in writing away the invisibility of women’s lives, looking at writing as an act of redemption. In order to do this, I need the companionship, the example, of other women who are writing. This makes us, in some ways, braver.

  It may be that women’s writing today is more aware of itself, more inclusive, less oppressed by male patronizing or erasure, less in danger of its substance falling off the edge
. Helen Buss has questioned the missing mother in our literature, and Canadian poet and scholar Di Brandt has asked why angry women are absent from our pages. At one time women characters in fiction were expected to be resourceful and cheerful. To confront real life was to become a whining victim. As recently as 1988, one of our finest writers, Bonnie Burnard, was taken to task by Globe and Mail critic William French. Her book Women of Influence was unacceptable to Mr. French: “The melancholy tone is unrelenting,” he wrote, “and we want to escape the emotionally frigid world she portrays with such power.… Burnard has undeniable talent, and the women’s problems she explores in these stories undeniably exist, but I hope in her next collection, she can make me laugh, at least once.”

  No wonder women’s books became a refuge for women readers. There they found themselves; there they could be themselves. There they felt the distance shrink between what was privately felt and universally known. Women, I think, were hungry for their own honesty, and both readers and writers were relieved to know that the disparagement they had suffered at the edge was undeserved. You can tell, a male critic once wrote of a beautifully cryptic Alice Munro story, just where Ms. Munro knocks off for a cup of tea.

  It was Muriel Spark who broke the spell for me, finally, in a novel called Loitering with Intent, with her stirring sentence: “How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century.” I’d known all along it was true, but to see it bravely centred on the page made it real, and this utterance encourages me to frame a paraphrase and bring it home: how wonderful to be a woman living and writing in Canada.

  In Brief …

  • Women writers in particular may find the following in the short story form: