• time as present and personal and urgent
• a wider emotional range, and less exaggeration, less mythologizing
• simple but universal settings: enclosures, rooms, houses
• a commonality of subject matter; subject matter made accessible by being rooted in the lives of women and easily translatable from one culture to another
• The choice of the short story form may reflect that women have been cut off from the world of affairs and from a history of their own, and so have turned 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.
• Women readers want to read about women’s lives.
• In writing, speak not to the ages or to Humankind, but to individual readers, as though those readers were in the same room.
• Be willing to engage with vulnerability, including yourself in that vulnerability.
• Now, as never before, it seems important that men and women understand each other’s experience.
* “I think it will give the book that special touch of weirdness I’m becoming so fond of,” Carol wrote to Anne that year. “Why, I wonder.”
~ 11 ~
WRITING WHAT WE’VE DISCOVERED—SO FAR
WHEW! FOR A WHILE THERE I WORRIED ABOUT THE FUTURE OF fiction, which resembled nothing so much as an invalid thrashing and writhing on an ever narrowing bed. But the threat of other media—films, video, and particularly television—each wanting its own slice of narrative, has brought to the novel and short story a flush of health, perhaps even the beginning of a new default tradition in which the written word does what only the written word can do.
It was a close call. The patient nearly died. There was that lengthy period in which we endured a crisis of meaning so traumatic that we began to think that since words could mean anything, they could also mean nothing. Luckily, the world kept intruding, and linguistic skepticism remained a theory. Besides, only a few writers seemed able to squeeze any juice out of the thing. On the whole, postmodernism is a far too forgiving mode, and during the plague a great deal of fast-food ambiguity, in love with its own muscle tissue, passed itself off as the real thing.
Just as serious, because it came at about the same time, was the apparent exhaustion of realism, already badly nibbled away by other media that could often do it better. The old problem-solution track began to seem like a set-up, and people started asking how much realism was really in realism. The experience of women, for example, was insufficiently represented and honoured. And valued and listened to and published and read and respected. Most of what we call realistic fiction looked like a photo opportunity for catching people in crisis. Only think of that so-called realistic novel Ordinary People, some years back, with its wealthy families, its suicide attempts, drowning, neurosis, guilt and family breakdown. And if you think divorce statistics in our society are alarming—half of all marriages doomed—you should look up the figures in contemporary fiction. Look, too, at the angst quotient and measure it against the people you know. Look at how the historical background is shaded in—another set-up. And the way those big, heavy themes reach for the innards of folks and remind us that, listen, this is a serious book by a serious and very thoughtful writer.
People got scared, or else exasperated, and retreated for a time into a minimalism so restricted that entire novels were composed of media syntax, brand names and infantile expletives. Writers, it seemed, were always out buying cheap underwear at Sears or else they were down at the 7-Eleven, hanging out. Cynical, we lost faith in our culture and decided to diminish the language as well.
The next slightly more refined version of realism opened its arms to cliché, cliché of language and substance. I never again want to read a story that starts out: “Lily set the table with her best china and a pair of tall tapering candles. Tonight was going to be special.” Reading this, or listening to it rise in my own consciousness, I also hear a second voice, whispering lewdly in my ear and saying: “Who cares.” I’m not going to be bought off by mere novelty, but I might pay a little more attention if Lily sets her table in a tent or on the 300th floor or if she invites six blind priests to dinner, or three ex-husbands or an unemployed organ grinder, or if she prepares a centrepiece of dead fish and a handful of pearls. At bottom, though, we know Lily is about to experience one of those moments when she will step forward and say: “And then I realized …” I no longer want to read about selfish, weak people whose weak, selfish marriages have come apart, and I am distrustful of those writers who can’t trust their own fantasies, or who use mental aberration as the sole motivating force.
Some time ago, judging a short story competition, I was momentarily buoyed up to find a story that opened with this line: “One morning I woke up and found I had turned into a pencil.” The story continued, the character admiring his nicely shaved point and bouncing along happily on his rubber eraser, but the whole thing collapsed when we were told this person was only having a nervous breakdown, and only thought he had become a pencil.
The new new new fiction—for what do you call what comes after postmodernism—seems to me to be letting in some of the particles of the world, but hanging on to the boldness and linguistic daring that the best postmodernists showed us, a new spoon of grammar stirring its bowl of words in a different way. A return to realism, yes, but a reality that is enormously expanded so that those private areas of human consciousness have found a way into our fictions. We spend, after all, nine-tenths of our lives submerged in a kind of watery silence, which is almost never reflected in literature. It gets forgotten, it gets overlooked, even while it whispers and snuffles and nags and informs us of what we share. Take the writer Nicholson Baker, who published a whole story about that weightless, helpless, surprising sensation of breaking a shoelace, how it comes flying loose in the hand—a sensation we all recognize, but when have you seen it in words, and furthermore, it can’t be done on television.
We were persuaded for a while that the world was so senseless, the gap between language and meaning so wide, that we could only make our observations ironically—and most of us during that time came down with a severe case of lockjaw. As was said of Henry James, he chewed more than he bit off. But the new new new fiction does the double trick of looking ironically at irony, so that it doesn’t paint itself into that cramped corner which is so sharply angled with its own cuteness that it pinches the spirit.
Characters are returning too, not those loveable, cagey eccentrics, those gruff crazy grouches, those wise-cracking waitresses who never did exist, but people who in their cortex or hearts or genitalia or hips or tongue celebrate the fact that we are all a little crazier than anyone ever thought or dared to write down. The new new new fiction lets the reader in, and—writer and reader—we live in our own creaturely dust, our own cracks in the world, thinking our unclassifiable, irreducible thoughts, and wanting now and then to sit down and talk the whole thing over and tell each other what we’ve discovered—so far.
In Brief …
The new new new fiction is characterized by
• the boldness and linguistic daring that the best postmodernists showed us
• expanded depictions of reality that include private areas of human consciousness
• looking ironically at irony
• people who celebrate the fact that we are all a little crazier than anyone ever thought or dared to write down
• the sharing of what we have discovered—so far
~ 12 ~
OPEN EVERY QUESTION, EVERY POSSIBILITY
April 8, 1996
I thought I might talk about the human need for narrative, and how our available narratives don’t always match our experience. Perhaps I could call it “Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard.”
And describe it as: “High on the list of human needs, along with food, shelter, clothing, and contact, is our hunger for stories. Narrative provides us with links to the past,
and the means by which to weigh our stories beside those of others, so that we can apprehend our place in the world. But for one reason or another, a large proportion of human experience fails to make the narrative record. Who do we choose to be our chroniclers, and why? What becomes of our suppressed or ‘lost’ stories? And how can we rescue more of the world’s storyboard, so that when we open the narrative cupboard we will find enough to sustain us?”
Let me know if this will do.
—Letter from Carol Shields to Lou Hurckes, a Chicago
supporter of the arts, oncerning the subject of an upcoming speech
I REMEMBER ONCE, IN PARIS, WALKING PAST A STREET PERSON, sitting on his patch of pavement with a sign around his neck that said: “J’ai faim.” When I saw him again an hour later he was eating an enormous ham sandwich, and it occurred to me that the sign around his neck should have been corrected to read “J’ai eu faim.” Here, to be sure, was a man momentarily satisfied, but conscious of further hunger to come, possibly an enlarged or existential hunger—for a coded message, a threaded notation, an orderly account or story that would serve as a witness to his place in the world.
If literature is not about the world, what is it about? Luckily all the world is up for sale. Unluckily, a good part of the world falls through the narrative sieve, washing through the fingers of the recorder’s hands, and is lost. It is this simultaneous abundance and loss that I want to talk about—how, while the narrative cupboard is full to bursting, the reader is left fed, but still hungry. There is so much that lies out of reach, so much that touches only tangentially on our lives or confronts us with incomprehensible images.
Everyone recognizes that narrative hunger is a part of the human personality. Why else have our newspapers been filled with advice columns, for golden-agers, for adolescents, mid-lifers, parents, consumers, patients and professionals? It’s not, I think, for the solutions that we devour this daily stream of print, but for a glimpse of human dilemma, the inaccessible stories of others.
Even the smallest narrative fragments have the power to seduce. The obituaries in our local newspaper speak of the late departed Elvira Martindale, who, besides being devoted wife to, beloved mother of, was also Manitoba Ladies’ Lacrosse champion in the year 1937. Writers of film scripts would designate Elvira’s victory as Plot Point A in Ms. Martindale’s life-movie. What a day it must have been, what a triumph!—to be carried in the memory for fifty years! And then fifty years of anticlimax?—is that how we are to read this notice? (I used to be ashamed of reading the obituaries, and then I discovered that everyone else did too, and that they read them not only out of morbidity, but out of a natural, and I like to think healthy, longing to expand their own lives.) Here’s another. John Jay Trevor, we read, has fought his affliction bravely, and, in death, asks that in lieu of flowers, friends and family send contributions to the International Society of Button and Buttonhook Collectors. On the same page: Ross and Judy McGowan of Calgary perish in a car accident after “a great day of powder skiing.”
Years ago I belonged to a small writing group, and the leader of our group, a woman named Gwen Reidman, advised us to read obituaries because they carry, like genes packed tight in their separate chromosomes, tiny kernels of narrative. These little yelps of activity—Gwen always referred to them as putty—are so personal and authentic and odd that they are able to reinforce the thin tissue of predictable fiction and bend it into unlikely shapes.
—Unless
Telephone companies have learned to pitch their TV ads in emotional narrative context. You’ve all seen them: the tense lonely father anxious to hear whether his son has passed his bar exam. An elderly woman awaiting news of the birth of her granddaughter. These are weepies, little melodramas, bad art perhaps, but packaged like appetizers, hors d’œuvres, to appease our narrative hunger.
The manufacturers of Dewar’s Scotch Whisky know how much we need the seeds of stories and how we need, too, to place our own stories beside those of others, to compare, weigh, judge and forgive, and to find an angle of vision that renews our image of where we are in the world. Their advertisements, usually on the back covers of slick magazines, profile the beautiful and rich, telling us when and how they made their first million, what book they are presently reading, what is their favourite meal, their favourite restaurant, and of course, favourite drink, their philosophy for success—the same life-bites, in fact, that novelists seize upon.
Family video adventures. Anecdotes swapped at lunch or overhead on a bus, sidewalk, café. Newspaper fillers: an item in the Globe and Mail, for instance, noting the fact that thirteen people are killed annually in North America by overturned vending machines—a narrative nugget I was able to use in a novel.
TV sitcoms. Song lyrics. Jokes. Urban myths. Comic strips. Such a wealth of material to draw on, but never … quite … enough. And never quite accurate either, glancing off the epic of human experience rather than reflecting it back to us. And provoking, at the same time, that contradiction: that narrative hunger is very often a perverse pleasure to the overfed.
We may not know exactly what a novel is, but there are certain characteristics of the novel as we know it and write it—that is, the novel that went off like a firecracker in 1740 and that continues to be, in our society anyway, the literary form of choice. Some of these characteristics include: 1. A texture that approximates the world as we know it; 2. Characters who in their struggles with the world resemble ourselves; 3. Dilemmas that remind us of our own predicaments; 4. Scenes that trigger our memories or tap into our yearnings; and 5. Conclusions that shorten the distance between what is privately felt and universally known, so that we look up from the printed page and say, “Aha!”
But how relevant are these definition points, and how close to our lives have our narratives ever come?
We can start, maybe, with the admission that both real events and their accompanying narratives are conveyed to us by words, and that words, words alone, will always fail in their attempt to express what we mean by reality. We cannot think without words—or so many believe—and thus the only defence against words is more words. But we need to remember that the labyrinth of language stands beside reality itself, a somewhat awkward, almost always distorted facsimile or matrix. Experience, reality that is, possesses immediacy; language plods behind, a rational or irrational tortoise. It may take pages of print to reproduce a registered vision, a shooting star, an uplifted ocean wave, an uplifted eyebrow even. What if we were to estimate that half of felt experience falls away in our efforts to describe or contain or conserve a moment in time? If you were to imagine that a circle represents the well-stocked narrative cupboard, and that it is diminished by that estimate, we can cut our circle down by half.
Think of the naïve tourist who records in his diary a description of the crier in a mosque, believing he would recall with his written artifact the notes of the call to prayer. Language that is so useful in the province of the intellect is a relatively clumsy vehicle in the expression of emotion and narrative movement. Even the finest brush strokes of Henry James, or Marcel Proust or Alice Munro are dabs in the darkness. The weightiest, most detailed description of the storming of the Bastille—to take an instance—forms a papery, speculative rustle beside the actual event. Reality smells better than words, tastes sharper, presses on the skin more compellingly.
“Writing is mere writing,” Annie Dillard says, and “literature is mere.” “An ordinary reader picking up a book,” she says, “can’t yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing’s modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.” Every unwinding story relies on language parts, its only assigned building material, to give it permanence and shape.
I hope I can begin with this shared notion: that both “reality” and literature are joined in the need for language and that they labour under the crippling limitations that language imposes. And I hope you’ll agree with me, too, that language is not disinterested, that it flows from a ban
k of cultural references, both private and shared. It flows with purpose, with, shall we say, an agenda. The crier in the minaret has an agenda too, no doubt, but the man jotting his notes into his travel journal, or perhaps pulling out his video camera, is moved by completely other forces.
Narrative that questions experience, repositions experience, expands or contracts experience, rearranges experience, dramatizes experience, and which brings, without apology: colour, interpretation and political selection, has been with us since the earliest stirrings of the human tongue. The primal narratives are believed—though how can we be sure?—to be accounts of fallen heroes or adventures of the hunt. Imagine a small colony of an early culture, then, seated around a fire and discussing the capture of, say, a male bison. Someone will begin the tale; but who is that someone and how has he been selected? Is it because he captures the details accurately or because he is able to speak vividly? I’m using the “he” pronoun deliberately, since it was mainly male narrated stories that entered the literature before the eighteenth century.
Even as late as 1957, Northrup Frye, that good and humane scholar, was able to announce, authoritatively, that there are precisely four forms of fiction. (This, by the way, may have been the last time in our history that such definitive summations were possible.) Frye lists dozens of male fiction writers (and one woman named George and another named Jane), a disproportion of writers and of women’s experience that radically diminishes the narrative pool, making it look something like our imaginary circle halved once again.
But I’d like to return for a minute to the primitive storyteller relating the story of the hunt. Does he know the value of a narrative pause? Does he know how to lead up to the bison’s death, how to keep his audience waiting, how to bring a scene into focus by a telling detail or by the use of metaphor? Is he able to release himself from the tyranny of authenticity and, with the full complicity of his listeners, heighten his narrative with a small exaggeration, perhaps even a gross exaggeration, perhaps even the breaking of an important sequence, or the insertion of an invented incident or character, or the substitution of one event for another? Perhaps he’ll turn the male bison into a female, give it an extra horn or a set of wings. What if the storyteller had never seen a bison, what if the hunting grounds had lost their promise and nothing remained but an old inherited narrative of the storyteller’s forebears—would he be forced to relinquish his place around the fire, would he be silenced, mocked for his distortions and inventions and roughly dismissed? Or would he find a place of honour in his society, a society that admitted, openly or tacitly, that our own lives are never quite enough for us, and that had a hunger for narrative, for storytelling that is probably about 40,000 years old.
Startle and Illuminate Page 12
