31 Days of Short Stories: Day 19. “Two Gallants,” by James Joyce

Posted 19 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories | No comments

From Dubliners

Those familiar with James Joyce’s writing only through the high modernism of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake may be surprised at the naturalism of the stories collected in Dubliners, which, according to Joyce’s letters, is influenced not by Anton Chekhov, as might be expected, but by Ibsen. In the book Joyce and Ibsen: A Study in Literary Influence, B.J. Tysdahl notes Joyce’s favourable response to Ibsen’s “defiant realism.” Both those words bear equal weight in the use that Joyce put them in his collection of short fiction, which was first published in 1914.

The stories in Dubliners collectively form a carefully realized, minutely detailed portrait of a city and its inhabitants. They are studies in the poverty of the people and the institutional forces — especially political and religious forces — that prevent them from bettering themselves.

“Two Gallants” features a pair of characters — Corley and Lenehan — who seem content with their lot in life, and actively resist trying to better themselves. Corley tries to avoid paid labour; Joyce writes that “[w]henever any job was vacant a friend was always ready to give him the hard word.” Lenehan, for his part, is something of a drifter, and comes by his money in ways that remain mysterious, although may be tied into gambling: “No one knew how he achieved the stern task of living, but his name was vaguely associated with racing tissues.” (Lenehan reappears in a similar context in Ulysses: “Lenehan came out of the inner office with Sports tissues.”) Lenehan does not live the high life; when he stops off at a café for a bite to eat, he is able to afford only a plate of peas and a ginger beer.

The plot of the story, such as it is, involves Corley and Lenehan attempting to bilk a “slavey,” or maidservant, who Corley previously picked up “under Waterhouse’s clock” and who is now “on the turf,” making money on the side as a prostitute. Joyce portrays these two conmen (the word “gallants” in the title is bitingly ironic) in a manner of comedic debasement that wouldn’t be out of place in a Martin Amis novel. Lenehan is “squat and ruddy,” and “his figure fell into rotundity at the waist”; his hair is “scant and grey” and his face carries a “ravaged look.” Corley, for his part, has a “large, globular and oily” head, which “sweated in all weathers,” and his “large round hat” appears “like a bulb which had grown out of another.” They are presented as anything but an attractive pair, such that Corley’s boast that the slavey fancies him “a bit of class,” is rendered patently absurd.

The slavey herself comes off no better, having “blunt” features that include “broad nostrils, a straggling mouth which lay open in a contented leer, and two projecting front teeth.” When the two first spot her, on Hume Street, she is wearing “a blue dress and a white sailor hat.” In Catholic Dublin, the colours blue and white would immediately conjure up associations with the Virgin Mary; here the connection is obviously meant ironically, but Joyce is also implicating the Church in the venality and desperation of the city’s denizens.

What transpires might at first seem like a dramatic cheat, since Corley goes off with the slavey and we are left to wander the city with Lenehan, who buys his meagre dinner at the café before hurrying to rendezvous with his partner in petty crime. But it’s important to note the route that Lenehan takes, beginning at Stephen’s Green, which is where the two first lay eyes upon their mark, passing through Capel Street, Dame Street, and George’s Street, eventually arriving at Merrion Street, where he spots Corley and the slavey, who he then follows to Baggot Street, the location of the slavey’s employers, only to reconnect with Corley at Stephen’s Green. In other words, he has negotiated a circle. This, and the fact that the final encounter between the two gallants occurs on Ely Place, which is a dead end, is indicative of the paralysis that plagues their lives, a paralysis that is only underlined when Corley opens his palm for Lenehan and displays the small gold coin that he has acquired from the slavey, having clearly convinced her to steal it from her employers.

“Two Gallants” is a grimly comic story about small-time thieves who nonetheless seem to stand in for the general populace of Joyce’s Dublin, a populace that has been placed in a similar state of paralysis as the two thieves by the pernicious influences of the Catholic Church and the state. The former is criticized symbolically in the story, through the association of the slavey with the Blessed Virgin, and the reference to Lenehan as Corley’s “disciple” at the story’s close. The critique of Anglo-Irish state subjugation, however, is more pointedly direct: when Corley and Lenehan come across a harpist outside the Kildare Street Club, a bastion of English Protestant influence, the harp, a traditional symbol of Ireland, is described as seeming “weary alike of the eyes of strangers and of her master’s hands.” The word “strangers” is certainly not accidental: this was the term of reference for English interlopers on the Emerald Isle at the time. And the coin that the two eventually procure is a gold sovereign, symbolic of state power and influence.

As Terence Brown asserts in the Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Dubliners, in “Two Gallants” Joyce “reveals to us the full parasitical horror of … colonial degradation.” It is also a grim and trenchant portrait of urban paralysis and malaise, which has lost none of its impact or symbolic resonance.

31 Days of Short Stories: Day 18. “The Happy Prince,” by Oscar Wilde

Posted 18 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories | No comments

Today, your humble correspondent rests. In my place, however, TSR is delighted to have a piece by novelist, poet, and short-story writer Emily Schultz, who provides a brilliant and sensitive analysis of something we haven’t spotlighted here so far this month: a children’s story. Enjoy.

**

Although it was published in 1888, and although it is a children’s story, Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” has been one of the most influential stories on me. In university, one of my close friends confided she had loathed reading since childhood — dreaded and feared it; her mother had begun her with the collection The Happy Prince and Other Stories (not to be confused with Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s The Little Prince). As far as children’s literature goes, Wilde’s are some of the most cynical tales penned, exploring death, poverty, unfulfilled potential, the pettiness of people, and the injustices of society.

And yet “The Happy Prince” begins with the love story of a swallow, who remains behind when his bird buddies take flight for winter. He’s in love with a tall, slim reed. Yes, a reed, one that waves to him in the wind. It doesn’t take long before he realizes their love is impossible. He departs, but only gets as far as the next town where he beds down at the feet of a statue, who — over the course of the story — he will also come to love. (Was it the author’s queerness that inspired him to write a character that falls in love with the “wrong” things … things not even people? Was it this same little-bit-of-queer that drew me to the story even as a girl?) Already you probably know that the bird will stay too long into winter and expire, but from this point on it’s the statue that actually becomes the protagonist.

Cloistered away from the town in his lifetime — which was indeed luxurious and happy — this gold, bejeweled monument to a man now stands on a column that allows him to see the entire town with his sapphire-stone eyes. The statue, who was prince in the Palace of Sans Souci, tells the bird: “Happy indeed I was, if pleasure be happiness. So I lived and so I died. And now that I am dead they have set me up here so high that I can see all the ugliness and all the misery of my city, and though my heart is made of lead yet I cannot choose but weep.”

There is a delicious hypocrisy in the story, not only in the reader being shown the “happy” prince who weeps as well as being an inanimate thing that can love, but also in being shown the townspeople and the things they say about the statue as they pass by. A mother scolds her son for making a fuss, telling him, “The Happy Prince never dreams of crying for anything.” We are given evidence almost immediately that this is not true, that things are seldom as they appear.

Wilde also utilizes the open-dollhouse style of storytelling, where both the statue and the reader are able to peek into many rooms of the town and hear the stories of the people from afar, with vivid immediacy. There is a beauty and a poetry in peering into so many lives — the playwright with his swollen lips and dreamy eyes (not unlike Wilde’s) who hasn’t eaten and cannot finish his play, or the seamstress through her window with her fevered son who is asking for oranges. Like so, Wilde constantly couples beauty and despair in one breath. “Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow,” says the prince, “will you not stay with me for one night and be my messenger? The boy is thirsty and the mother so sad.”

As you might guess, the story turns socialist when the prince requests the bird to pluck out his jewels and carry them to the poor, even his eyes, rendering him blind. The politics are part of what attracts me to this morose-yet-quirky tale. The other part is the theatrical perspective from which the story is told, and its movement between settings and characters. In my own work, I am always hoping to capture this brightness of the sky and the decay beneath it. In Wilde’s story, the poor are rendered tenderly, the petty quickly and frankly, without malice but similarly without much gloss. My novel, Joyland, although it claims to be about video games, is (for me anyway) a story revolving around the issue of class. When I grew up, the most interesting building in our town was a small museum with rusted farm equipment in its yard. Unconsciously, I mimicked Wilde by placing the young female protagonist of Joyland, Tammy Lane, up in a tree witnessing the comings and goings of the town. She sees what is lacking in the lives of her neighbours, but also all that is sad, tender, tremulous, and beautiful. It wasn’t until I revisited “The Happy Prince” that I realized the eyes of the story are similar. Wilde’s statue has a tall column and is made of stone; Tammy Lane has a tree and is made immobile by her youth. Of course, it wouldn’t be possible to come close to achieving Wilde’s grace.

The ending of “The Happy Prince” is saccharine reading for an adult — God and an angel are dredged up to deliver the final message (that charity and self-sacrifice are beautiful), but in the otherwise Oz-coloured world of childhood the story offers such a vast realm of emotion that it cannot help but seduce. Perhaps having always leaned toward the depressive, to me the sadness of “The Happy Prince” is so intense, it feels akin to joy — a kind of singing. There is a rapture that arrives with the perfectly delivered feeling. The short story form, more than the novel, makes its mission the delivery of swift, sharp emotion. If it is to be memorable, it must. A story must be remembered because, unlike a novel, it isn’t always shelved and can’t always be returned to. Some of the best short stories are published in small places, little-known magazines and anthologies and slim softcover volumes that tend of get tattered. Short stories hover like little dreams, and are called down occasionally to return to their chosen humans.

Emily Schultz is the author of the short stories Black Coffee Night and the novel Joyland. She is the Toronto editor of the website of the same name, Joyland.ca, which is “a hub for short fiction,” a place that regularly posts stories from writers in four different North American cities.

31 Days of Short Stories: Day 17. “The Proud Selenographer,” by Natalee Caple

Posted 17 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories | No comments

From The Heart Is Its Own Reason

selenography: n. the study or mapping of the moon.

Natalee Caple’s short stories are sharp, often brutal excursions into the hearts of people who are hurt and damaged, frequently due to violence at the hands of others. In “Two Empty Chairs,” a seventy-one-year-old prostitute who may or may not have syphilis catches the interest of a psychotherapist, who becomes obsessed with uncovering the secrets of the woman’s past. In “The Trouble with Killing Someone You Know,” the protagonist and his wife plot the murder of the protagonist’s brother, who killed the couple’s eight-year-old child.

These stories inhabit Barbara Gowdy territory, in the sense that they feature characters living on the margins of society and engaging in behaviours that are not traditionally sanctioned, but Caple’s voice is unique, and her understated, almost minimalist prose provides little in the way of explanation of motive for the actions of her characters. As an interpretive agent, the reader is on her own.

“The Proud Selenographer” is arguably Caple’s most technically ambitious story, narrated in the first person by a woman speaking to her dead husband, who has shot himself in the head. Running a brief five pages, the narrative is broken up into short bursts of prose that are arranged in an almost collage-like fashion. Rather than providing readers with a traditional narrative, commencing at point A and moving causally through points B, C, and D, Caple here offers short scenes and images from the couple’s brief marriage; the story accumulates its force and meaning in the way these scenes abut one another, such that they cumulatively provide a complete picture of the doomed relationship at their heart.

“I’m not being difficult,” the narrator insists at the beginning, “I’m only trying to find a way to talk to you.” The inability of characters to find modes of communication or to reach any kind of understanding is central to many of Caple’s stories; towards the end of “The Proud Selenographer,” the narrator confesses, “It’s very hard to describe you. I can’t seem to hold on to your face.”

The difficulty the narrator experiences in describing her dead husband is indicative of her lack of connection with him when he was alive; the middle sections of Caple’s story take up the first few days following the couple’s marriage, when their sexual encounters were awkward and unsatisfying:

I bent down and kissed your mouth and took your warm bottom lip between my teeth. I pressed my chest against the soft black mat of your chest and my stomach against your stomach and I rocked gently over you, my hair a shroud against your face.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t want to come.”

“How can you not want to come?”

“I just don’t. Please get off me.”

This description is almost the antithesis of erotic; it highlights the couple’s sexual incompatibility and the distance in understanding between the narrator and her partner. This distance is mirrored in the distance between the narrator and the reader, who spends most of the story searching for motives that are never provided, rationales that remain at one remove. This is not indicative of an unfinished or unsatisfactory structure, but rather of an authorial sensibility that is given to withholding easy explanations or providing pat closure.

After the narrator’s husband kills himself, the narrator vows to sleep with all of his friends in an act of revenge. She says: “I broke all your dishes. I never liked them.” In the face of such violence and loss, breaking her husband’s dishes and planning to sleep with his friends are the only solutions available, the only actions that will provide some kind of solace, some indication that life goes on. The juxtaposition of the two images is also central to Caple’s approach: something relatively quotidian (breaking the dishes) and something fairly substantial (the narrator’s plan to sleep with all of her dead husband’s friends) are here equated, with little distinction drawn between them in terms of their relative import.

The final image in the story is of the narrator recalling Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, and thinking of her husband’s contention that the figure in the painting “wasn’t screaming — he was reacting to hearing someone else scream.” Caple’s story is a powerful distillation of the effect that our actions have on one another, and of the damage we do in the course of trying to define some meaning in our own lives. Caple’s artistry resides not in providing answers to the questions her narrative raises, but in dramatizing a sexual relationship in all its irreconcilable conflict and friction.

31 Days of Short Stories: Day 16. “Dog Days of Love,” by Barry Callaghan

Posted 16 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories | No comments

From Between Trains

If, as has widely been suggested, Alice Munro is Canada’s Anton Chekhov, then Barry Callaghan is Canada’s Ernest Hemingway. (The comparison is apt, given that Callaghan’s father, Morley, wrote about boxing Papa Hemingway in his classic memoir, That Summer in Paris.) Like Hemingway, Callaghan writes in a spare, terse style about tough guys in a tough world. His characters in Between Trains are gangsters and snipers, ageing blues musicians and concentration camp survivors.

In many ways, “Dog Days of Love” is atypical, since its protagonist is an octogenarian Catholic priest, Father Vernon Wilson, who, we are told “led a quiet life.” This story is more muted and personal than some of the others in the collection, but it is no less affecting and emotional for that.

Basically, this is the story of a man and his dog. Now in his eighties, but still “spry,” Father Wilson inherits a two-year-old golden retriever from a local veterinarian as thanks for the ease at which the priest put the animal doctor in the confessional. The pastor of Father Wilson’s church is initially skeptical about keeping a dog around the rectory, but the diocesan doctor convinces him that animals are healthy diversions for the aged, who tend to live longer in the company of a dog, “maybe because all a dog asks is that you let him love you.” Father Wilson names the dog Anselm, “After the great old saint … who said the flesh is a dung hill.”

Anselm and Father Wilson quickly become boon companions, going on walks together and visiting those parishioners who don’t mind having a dog in their homes. Anselm “listen[s] attentively” as Father Wilson talks about the brutalism of the design of Robarts Research Library in Toronto, which he sums up perfectly as “the triumph of the architecture of condescension.”

But it is when Father Wilson is at prayer just before retiring to bed that he feels closest to Anselm. The dog sits beside the priest as he says the Apostles Creed beneath a replica of the Shroud of Turin that hangs on his wall. The priest then climbs into bed and Anselm takes up a perch by his feet, such that “the old priest was comforted not just by the heat and weight of the animal in his bed, but the sound of his breathing.”

There is a real tenderness in the way Callaghan dramatizes the relationship between the old man and the dog, their deepening companionship and the love that each feels for the other. The dramatic turn in the story comes when Father Wilson returns home one day to find that Anselm has chewed up the Shroud that he so prizes and in a moment of blind fury he raises his fist to strike the dog. Anselm retreats in terror and as the aged priest realizes what he was about to do the only thing he can manage is to collapse onto his bed and repeat, “Oh my God, oh my God.”

Looking into the terrified eyes of his dog, “he thought that must have been the real look in Christ’s eyes as He hung on the cross.” There is real irony here, because one recalls Father Wilson lecturing his young pastor about Saint Anselm:

Most people get Saint Anselm all wrong. He was like the great hermit saints who went out into the desert, they renounced everything that gave off the smell of punishment and revenge, and so they renounced the flesh, but only so they could insist on the primacy of love over everything else in their spiritual lives … over knowledge, solitude, prayer … love, in which all authoritarian brutality and condescension is absent …

In moving to strike Anselm out of a sense of “punishment and revenge,” the old priest forgets the very tenets that the dog’s namesake espoused. By refusing to beat the dog, Father Wilson evinces “the primacy of love over everything else,” and he exemplifies the condition “in which all authoritarian brutality and condescension is absent.” Father Wilson’s realization forms a kind of Joycean epiphany in the story, a recognition of his humanity — his fallenness — but also his essential compassion. But its relatively traditional structure should not detract from the subtle emotional power of Callaghan’s story, which effortlessly demonstrates that it is not necessary to engage in literary pyrotechnics to create a potently affecting ficitional experience.

31 Days of Short Stories: Day 15. “Dogs in Winter,” by Eden Robinson

Posted 15 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories | No comments

From Traplines

Eden Robinson’s story “Dogs in Winter” announces itself right from its first two sentences: “Aunt Genna’s poodle, Picnic, greeted people by humping their legs. He had an incredible grip.” The message: this ain’t your grandmother’s CanLit. Robinson’s writing is tough and sinewy, shot through with violence and moments of unexpected humour. Gail Anderson-Dargatz nailed the uniqueness of Robinson’s authorial voice nicely when she said that Robinson will “tickle and slap you with the same hand.”

“Dogs in Winter” is the story of Lisa, the daughter of a sociopathic woman who kills pit bulls and moose, and graduates to humans, eventually murdering seven people, including her husband, in a serial-killing spree for which she is convicted and jailed. Lisa’s teen years are spent trying to outrun her mother’s malevolent influence, but she is haunted by her childhood and its violent past. She dreams of the lake where her mother used to take her camping; in the dream, her mother calmly shoots a moose between the eyes. The moose collapses into the water, and Lisa follows it, wading in up to her waist:

I see the moose surfacing. It rises out of the water, its coat dripping, its eyes filled with dirt. It towers over me, whispering, mud dribbling from its mouth like saliva. I lean toward it, but no matter how hard I try, I can never understand what the moose is saying.

For Lisa, the moose simultaneously represents strength and her mother’s irrepressible violence. Female moose are able to defend themselves from grizzly bears and wolf packs, and during mating season, the male moose is “one of the most dangerous animals, frenzied enough to inflict death or dismemberment on those who stand between him and her and incapable of distinguishing between friend and enemy.” This quality of not being able to distinguish friend and enemy, which Lisa associates with the moose and with her mother, is symbolized in a picture Lisa purchases, which shows a moose giving birth to a human baby, while in the background stands a woman holding a drawn bow.

When the young girl helps her mother kill a deer by the lake where they camp, her mother smears the animal’s blood on her daughter’s cheeks and hands her the animal’s heart, saying, “Now you’re a woman.” This unexpected association rears up in Lisa’s memory when, as a teenager, she has dinner at the home of her high school lab partner’s well-to-do parents. Lisa vomits red wine on the handwoven tablecloth, eliciting a withering response from her friend’s mother: “I have a Persian carpet in the living room. Perhaps you’d like to shit on it.”

The comment is indicative of Robinson’s ability to hold humour and outrage in a single moment; she makes her readers laugh while dragging them through unremittingly dark material. Lisa’s dispassionate first-person narration adds to the level of discomfort; she calmly relates her mother’s crimes, including the murder of Lisa’s beloved Aunt Genna, as well as her own various suicide attempts.

In addition, “Dogs in Winter” evinces an ambitious structure, which shuffles back and forth in time, unfolding the events in an achronological manner, heightening the dreamlike feel of the story, and lending deeper associative meaning to the various incidents within it.

Richard Ford, in the introduction to The Granta Book of the American Short Story, wrote:

As we read, we can sense the precarious nature of any literary construction, its barely containable excitation of words which mimics our own suffusion in experience, and whose eventual style, like a ballerina’s line, is an expression of the manner by which chaos is conditionally and beautifully held at bay.

I can think of no better way of describing Eden Robinson’s achievement in “Dogs in Winter.” The construction of her literary edifice is indeed precarious, held in place by the author’s absolute control over her materials, and by the “barely containable excitation” of her words. The style and vigour with which Robinson relates her story is at once potent and redemptive — a mechanism whereby, for its duration, “chaos is conditionally and beautifully held at bay.”

31 Days of Short Stories: Day 14. “The Motor Car,” by Austin Clarke

Posted 14 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories | No comments

From Choosing His Coffin: The Best Stories of Austin Clarke

The rhythms of Austin Clarke’s prose dance to a calypso beat, to the music of the Caribbean and to the distinctive patterns of West Indian speech.

Clarke’s subject in “The Motor Car,” as elsewhere in his short fiction and novels, is the immigrant experience in Canada. Rarely has this experience been rendered with such precision and such unsentimental candour. We like to think of ourselves in Canada as colour blind and devoid of racist impulses, but the difficulties many immigrants face upon arriving in this country might suggest that something other is the case; that the institutional racism that pervades Canadian society is a more deleterious strain than the overt kind, if only because it is so easy to sweep under the rug and ignore.

The protagonist in Clarke’s story is Calvin, who, like his Protestant namesake, is “a God-faring man.” A native of Barbados, Calvin is determined to emigrate to Canada. He is convinced that Canada will provide him with more opportunity than what is available to him in Bridgetown, where he spends his days washing cars “till his back hurt and his belly burn.” It is 1968, and to Calvin, Canada represents a kind of El Dorado, a land of wealth and opportunity where he will be able to free himself of his wage-slave shackles and live well. When his best friend, Willy, suggests that Calvin will be able to get better salt fish in Canada, since that is where they are imported from, Calvin replies with indignation, “Be-Jesus Christ, when you see me leff this blasted backwards place call Barbados, that is the last time I eating salt fish. I eating steaks!”

Naturally, the reality that Calvin encounters is far removed from the fantasy he has concocted in his mind. The early promise that his journey holds out for him — the white stewardess on his Air Canada flight calls him “sir,” “first time in Calvin life a white woman ever call him that, that way” — is quickly dashed. He has to work three jobs simply to keep his head above water, and his landlady charges him double the rent she charges her white tenants.

Nevertheless, Calvin works hard and saves his money, all in the service of realizing his dream: buying a brand new motor car, a Chevy or a Galaxie. With his white girlfriend (the “Canadian thing” who lives in the apartment above his) in the passenger seat, he will “go for a spin down Bloor as far as Yonge, swing back up by Harbord, turn left at Spadina, take in College Street, and every West Indian in Toronto bound to see him in his new motor car before he get back home.”

But the chasm between his Barbadian upbringing and his current life in Toronto continues to plague him. He tries to distance himself from the militant Black Power movement for fear that it will frighten the whites around him, particularly his landlady. When Willy sends him a post card signed “Willy X,” he is terrified that his landlady has read it and will evict him, until his “Canadian thing” tells him that the landlady is herself an immigrant who can’t read English. Even his girlfriend’s well-intentioned comments evince a lack of understanding about Calvin’s situation in his adopted country. She suggests he get a job at IBM, and he responds incredulously, “Doing wha’? Cleaning out the closets?”

Ultimately, Calvin is required to fall back on his Barbadian machismo as a coping mechanism; when his girlfriend begins singing along to a calypso song on the car radio, “wukking-up and enjoying sheself so,” he gets “vex as hell,” remembering how his own mother forbade him to sing calypso when he was a boy. Calvin reacts violently, hitting the brakes on his car so suddenly that his girlfriend slams into the windshield, breaking her neck.

Calvin’s final two encounters are indicative of the pervasive otherness with which he is branded. The policeman who arrives on the scene of the accident believes Calvin’s trumped-up story of what happened to the girl in the passenger seat and loads her into his cruiser to drive her to the hospital. His comment to Calvin — “Wish our native coloured people were more like you West Indians …” — is meant as a compliment, but in fact testifies to a kind of unstated racism that operates under the surface of daily experience. As Calvin tries to move his stalled car out of the road, he encounters the more overt kind of racism, as other drivers shout at him to “get the fuck out of the road, nigger.” Calvin is left standing by the side of the road, having rifled his girlfriend’s purse for money, “wondering how much a taxi would cost, and if one would stop.”

Clarke’s story casts a clear gaze on the realities of the “cultural mosaic” that Canadians so often trumpet, but that may exist more as wishful thinking than reality. In 1968, Trudeau’s official policy of multiculturalism had yet to take effect, but there is every indication that the immigrant experience in 2008 is no less arduous for being officially sanctioned. It is frequently artists to whom we turn to expose the painful truths that society does not wish to face. In “The Motor Car,” Clarke has done this bravely, exposing the levels of prejudice — both acknowledged and unacknowledged — that too frequently plague our putatively tolerant society.

31 Days of Short Stories: Day 13. “The Night Window,” by Bill Gaston

Posted 13 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories | No comments

From Gargoyles

Bill Gaston’s characters are mostly flawed, not in the grand way of classical tragedy, but in more modest, everyday fashion. They are often deluded or self-deceiving, like the mother of Tyler, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of “The Night Window.” Tyler’s mother, a librarian, talks incessantly about her years “back then,” her young adulthood when she was a drug-taking hippie surrounded by mystery and danger. She talks about life “back in the daze,” and quotes Beatles lyrics in answer to quotidian questions about her past.

But her son suspects that his mother’s tales are more legend than fact. “Real hippies,” he thinks, “were too damaged to read. She went to university, she’s a librarian with staff under her.” Although she talks about her wild days, all Tyler sees in the present is “a librarian who’s still trying to be someone she never was.”

Tyler has a conflicted relationship with his mother, and with “her new sexual partner” Kim Lynch. Tyler’s mother doesn’t love Kim, at least not to the same degree she has loved previous boyfriends, around whom she was “as obvious as a puppy panting over doggy-dish dreams of a nice nuclear family.” But when she and Kim go camping, she decides to take Tyler along, so that the two men can bond and so that she can spend time with her son as friends. “Three friends, going camping.” Gaston writes, “Tyler wonders if anything could be more naive.”

The entirety of the action in “The Night Window” hinges on Tyler’s mother’s desire to be friends with her son, and on her inability to recognize that it is impossible to dissolve the barrier between parent and child. There are indications that she is unable — or unwilling — to dissolve this barrier in practice: when Kim offers Tyler a beer after they go fly-fishing together, she gives him permission to have one, but one only. This despite her past suggestion that he “have a couple and relax” to alleviate his social awkwardness whenever he goes to parties. Tyler’s mother pretends to be a free-spirited ex-hippie, but she can’t quite bring herself to avoid censuring her son when the chips are down.

This sliding tension between her perception of herself as her son’s parent and as her son’s friend leads to what is “by far the worst thing” she has ever said to Tyler. After the three people have dinner, when they are all “quite jolly” and the two adults “have been trading repulsive romantic glances and such,” Tyler’s mother tells him that he should take a walk in the woods. The clear implication is that she wants to get Tyler out of the way so that she and Kim can have sex.

As Tyler meanders through the darkening woods, there are indications that the surroundings might be more malevolent than they first appear. Kim’s joking shout — “Cougar!” — as they walk back from fishing gives way to Tyler’s acknowledgement of actual predators hiding in the forest: “He likes the idea, the threat, of a predator. A predator keeps you alert.” Of course, Tyler assumes that any predators in the woods will be animals; he doesn’t consider the possibility of human predators.

The story of a boy in the woods coming across a spooky cabin and its owners is a fairly standard trope in horror fiction, but Gaston’s story is not a horror story, and one of its great pleasures is that it doesn’t play out the way you expect it to. He takes a stock situation and turns it on its head, finally allowing his protagonist to exact a measure of revenge on his oblivious mother. As always in Gaston’s fiction, the characters are treated with a great deal of empathy; the author does not shy away from portraying them as flawed and self-absorbed, but he is not condemnatory. Instead, we are given a group of characters who seem to be plucked from life, who manifest our best and our basest instincts, and who have been set on the page bodily, by a careful and consummate artist.

31 Days of Short Stories: Day 12. “Night March in the Territory,” by Mark Anthony Jarman

Posted 12 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories | 2 comments

From My White Planet

In the introduction to the new edition of Mark Anthony Jarman’s debut collection, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, John Metcalf identifies the signal feature that sets Jarman apart from the vast majority of his CanLit contemporaries: “Jarman had the talent and wisdom to understand from the beginnings of his career that words and their deployment were his answer and salvation. He had the insight and courage to sacrifice grammar and punctuation and tradition to grab immediacy.” Metcalf takes issue with critics who liken Jarman’s prose to that of Kerouac, stating — rightly, in my view — that “Kerouac is a rather flabby writer.” By contrast, there is nothing flabby about Jarman’s writing, which is honed to a razor’s sharpness. Rather than Kerouac, Metcalf detects associations between Jarman and the Cormac McCarthy of Blood Meridian.

“Night March in the Territory” sees Jarman inhabiting McCarthy country — the unmapped northwestern American territory during the Indian Wars of the 1860s. (Jarman doesn’t identify the specific war in the story, but there are clues sprinkled throughout: the “savages” use Henry repeater rifles, there is a reference to General Custer “feeding meat to his posse of dogs,” and the narrator refers to a compatriot of his drowning “in the river up north in Assiniboia over the line” — a fairly clear reference to the 49th parallel.) The action of the story involves a group of soldiers — many of them wounded — who must traverse dangerous and uncharted territory to reach safety following a particularly vicious battle with “hostile” natives.

Out of this premise, Jarman creates an impressionistic wordscape, an hallucinogenic trek across the bloody battlefields of a ravaged, inimical land. The story’s very first sentences set the scene, and the tone:

Post-battle march, stormy sky, no light. The weary surgeon pores over our bloody wounds, pours himself another drink. We hear our orders travel down the slope: Bury the officers, but not the enlisted men. A blunt message to us peons.

The first sentence is actually a fragment, a clipped, brusque series of words that drop the reader bodily into the story’s setting, into the blackness, the storm. In the second sentence, the ironic punning of the surgeon who “pores” over the soldiers’ wounds then “pours” himself a drink, as well as the rhythmic elision of the conjunction “and,” is pure Jarman. And the order to “[b]ury the officers, but not the enlisted men” alerts the reader simultaneously to the brutal realities of the soldiers’ environment and to their relative places in the military hierarchy.

Possessing no stretchers to transport the wounded, the soldiers improvise; they “scissor strips of skin” from their dead horses, “flensing their pale liquid flesh” to fashion makeshift litters and bandages. “These skins holding the wounded were live flesh-and-blood horses today,” the narrator thinks. “Horses ran or stopped to eat — then they had no skin.” As if in reparation, on a steamer ferrying the wounded home, a “huge horse steps on a sleeping man’s skull, his brain pushed, moves, alters shape, and he’s jerking like he’s trying to kick in a new door.”

The man’s head that “alters shape” is more wordplay, following as it does on the narrator’s statement that a number of the company’s men have been “altered” by being declared insane and thus unfit for service, and are to be transported back to “the soot-dark east.” “Who knows what awaits these newly created people,” the narrator wonders, ironically imbuing the military conflict itself with generative powers.

Ironically, because it is clear throughout that the legacy of the battles the soldiers wage will be wanton devastation and destruction. The images that catch the narrator’s attention — the prickly pear, “hellish to march through,” a tomahawk “with flesh on it: someone’s brains,” the officer with one side of his face scalped — are images of peril and death, and there is even the question of what will remain once the soldiers have finally abandoned the field. “No one will want this country the dead fight over,” the narrator thinks ruefully.

Darkness pervades Jarman’s story, from the stormy sky with no light at the opening, to the blackness that causes the marching soldiers to trip over cacti and prickly pear, to “the soot-dark east” that awaits them upon their return home. The darkness is ubiquitous, and perilous: “No path for our way, our way is dark, stumble into cactus in the dark, drop our wounded.” And again: “It’s dark. The idea of someone fishing in a sunny river seems very funny to me.”

In the midst of the battlefield’s horrors, the only available succor is a memory the narrator has of a woman in a long skirt who brought the company fried doughnuts one Christmas. By contrast, when the narrator returns home, he is haunted by the sound of the company’s “poor flensed horses,” and he finds that having come back to the land of “women walking in swaying skirts and beautiful words and white blouses and milk,” he no longer “care[s] all that much for it.”

“Night March in the Territory” is about the horrors of war, and the merciless toll that battle can exert on a person’s psyche. It is brutal and despairing, but if the characters in the story fail to find redemption or uplift, the same cannot be said for the reader, who is left to bask in the brilliance of Jarman’s prose, the absolute wonder of his literary pyrotechnics. The creation of this story, with its rigorous concatenation, its tense, powerful control and compression, its unexpected images and clarity of vision, can only be described as an act of hope, and we readers are its lucky beneficiaries.

31 Days of Short Stories: Day 11. “Oranges and Apples,” by Alice Munro

Posted 11 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories | 1 comment

From Friend of My Youth

Well, of course Alice Munro — what did you expect?

A critic — I can’t at the moment remember who or in what context — once said of Mordecai Richler words to this effect: I love his book; I read it every time he writes it. That is a fair summation of your humble correspondent’s feelings about Alice Munro, but it is nevertheless impossible to talk about Canadian short stories without acknowledging her influence, or her importance. She is the standard bearer for many readers who would otherwise never have picked up a book of Canadian short stories. We can argue about the consequences of this, but it is impossible to deny Munro’s place in the pantheon of Canadian writers.

“Oranges and Apples,” from her 1990 collection Friend of My Youth, exemplifies what is best and what is worst in Munro’s writing. Set in the 1960s, it tells the story of Murray Zeigler, who runs a lodge in the “rough and hilly” land of southwestern Ontario — the geography that has come to be known as “Munro country” by CanLit aficionados. Murray lives with his wife, Barbara, and their two children. Barbara is a former “looker” who has changed in appearance over the years of her marriage: “She did not get really fat, but she put on twenty or twenty-five pounds, well distributed over her tall, never delicate frame.” She is described as “heavy,” and her formerly black hair has gone white around her face, “as if a piece of veiling had been thrown over it.”

Murray has also changed. He has turned his back on his desire to become a United Church minister, the ambition that prompted him to pursue a sociology degree in university, and has become “a busy loudmouth on the municipal scene.” Barbara, by contrast, has never been to college, and there is the suggestion throughout that the Zeiglers tend to look down on her as being common. “I’m sure she is really a nice girl, but I’m not sure she has been very well educated,” is how Murray’s mother puts it, and Barbara is described at one point as going out into the streets of town dressed in “one of the styles of the time, the style not of Audrey Hepburn but of Tina Louise.”

Barbara’s lack of sophistication is contrasted with that of Victor Sawicky, Murray’s Polish friend, who is “tall and light-boned and looked polished” (that last is an example of Munro’s often not-so-subtle humour). When Victor first appears to Murray, at the Zeigler family store, which Murray will inherit from his father and summarily run into bankruptcy, Murray immediately puts him “into the same class of human beings as Barbara” — that is, people he is attracted to. There are notes of sublimated homosexual longing in Munro’s description of Murray’s reactions to Victor: despite the fact that he makes a distinction between Victor and Barbara, with whom he “wanted to sleep,” he nevertheless feels drawn to the European man in ways that are not entirely platonic:

Victor drew his attention as a sleek and princely animal might — say, a golden palomino, bold but high-strung, shy about the stir he created. You’d try to say something soothing but deferential and stroke his shining neck, if he’d let you.

When Murray invites Victor and his wife, Beatrice, over for dinner, Barbara’s lack of sophistication annoys him. He is critical of the food — the potatoes “seemed greasy … and slightly on the raw side,” the vegetables “were overcooked,” and the pecan pie “was too rich a dessert for the meal, and the crust was too brown” — and when Victor compares Barbara to Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtsev, Dimitri Karamatzov’s fiancée from Dostoevsky’s novel, she responds by saying that she thinks Katerina is a pain: “Murray knew by the abrupt halt of her words that she had been about to say ‘pain in the arse.’ ”

The shift in the story occurs when Murray returns home unexpectedly one afternoon and witnesses Victor spying on his wife sunbathing. From this he surmises that Victor and Barbara are having an affair. Munro is never explicit in this, and she effects an almost Jamesian subtlety in the way she moves her characters around like chess pieces; we see them now in one relationship to one another, now in a different relationship. This is intensified by the complex time structure Munro has imposed upon the story: most of the story takes place in flashback prompted by a glimpse of the Sawickys’ old farm, which the Zeiglers pass on their way to the hospital to have a tumour that Barbara has discovered biopsied. Far from feeling artificially imposed, this structure heightens the reader’s awareness of the enduring nature of the Zeiglers’ relationship, and lends Murray’s suspicions a greater element of danger and potential for disaster.

When Murray witnesses Victor watching Barbara, he is unable to comprehend the full import of the scene: “He said, My life has changed, my life has been changed, but he did not understand it at all.” The subtle shift in voice from the active to the passive in Murray’s thought is a testament to Munro’s care in delineating the complexities of her characters’ psyches; she refuses to reduce her people to a set of bald oppositions, but allows them to exist in all their tangled humanity. Murray alternately responds to the notion of Barbara leaving him by thinking that he is “being robbed,” and that he is “being freed of his life.”

The class conflicts and sexual assignations in the story are subtle and delicately rendered, and testify to Munro’s total mastery over her materials. However, it is the materials themselves that threaten to come off as somewhat stale. Philip Marchand has referred to Munro’s fiction as “a ballad with minor chords,” and this seems like a fitting description of a story such as “Oranges and Apples.” It is not merely the story’s domestic situation that accounts for this. Contrast Munro’s story with, for example, Carver’s “Gazebo”: both stories address the subject of marital infidelity, but the former appears in the sepia tones of an ageing photograph, whereas the latter is vibrant and jarring. Rather, the effect results from a kind of cumulative sameness that develops over the course of the author’s entire output, a sense that, as with the quip about Richler, she continues to write the same story again and again.

Michael Darling, addressing a story by Munro in the current issue of Canadian Notes and Queries, writes: “What the story establishes is both the placid surface of small-town respectability and the violent undercurrent of passion and violation that wells up naturally in the ‘underclass’ but is kept appropriately repressed …” This would be an absolutely fitting description of “Oranges and Apples” but, as it happens, Darling was talking about another story altogether: “Meneseteung” (from the same collection).

There is nothing wrong with an author returning to the same subject or themes over the course of a career. Flannery O’Connor did this, although her output was much more limited than Munro’s. What would be unfortunate is if the near-universal praise that has been lavished on Munro were to give readers the impression that hers is the only kind of Canadian short story that should be treated with validity.

31 Days of Short Stories: Day 10. “Dreamer in a Dead Language,” by Grace Paley

Posted 10 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories | No comments

From Later the Same Day

In the story “Conversation with My Father,” Grace Paley includes a line of dialogue that points ineluctably to her own method as a short-story writer: “ ‘I would like you to write a simple story just once more,’ [my father] says, ‘the kind Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.’ ”

Paley’s stories are, on the surface at least, all about “recognizable people” and “what happened to them next.” They take up quotidian subjects: mothers and daughters, lovers and spouses, family and work. Paley’s spare, elliptical prose style has led some critics, notably Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, to suggest that her characters often lack development, and Vivian Gornick of the Village Voice once wrote that Paley’s “successes are intermittent, unpredictable, often unshapely and without wholeness,” but such criticisms largely miss the point. Paley’s writing is clipped and focused, and her stories are whole in themselves, just not “whole” in the way that we often think of novels as being whole. She exemplifies Rebecca Rosenblum’s distillation of how short stories operate:

Short stories give the intensity of single moments and incidents — a playground game, a barroom brawl, a cigarette break — that would have to be contextualized into a life in a novel, pared down into pure language in a poem. Sometimes, you just need what happened, right there, right then — he said, she said, the chandelier crashed down and I took the puppy into the street. You need every detail and dialogue tag, but maybe not the how and the why and the what happened next.

“Dreamer in a Dead Language” is a good example of Paley’s affinity for “the intensity of single moments and incidents.” The story is broken down into three parts. In the first, Faith Darwin, the protagonist, is speaking with her lover, Phil (who we later discover is one of three lovers she maintains), about the poetry of Faith’s father, Sid. Faith’s mother and father are residents at the Coney Island Branch of Children of Judea Home for the Golden Ages, which is where the central second part of the story takes place, during a visit by Faith and her two sons, Richard and Anthony. In the third part of the story, the boys and their mother retreat to Brighton Beach, where Faith asks her sons to bury her in the sand.

Now, granted, a bare-bones summary like the one above does make Paley’s story sound amorphous and like something resembling a low joke, but any such summary will necessarily elide one of the most important features of her writing: the musical tenor of the Bronx voices. “Dreamer in a Dead Language” features a great deal of dialogue, but Paley has chosen to leave out the quotation marks and most of the dialogue tags. The result is that the reader is able to surrender to the musical cadences of the voices as they pluck and thrum, hum and vibrate.

Plot was never a huge concern for Paley, but there is quite a bit going on in “Dreamer in a Dead Language,” particularly with regard to the way in which the author places Faith and her father in opposition. Paley was a staunch feminist, a compatriot of activists such as Betty Friedan, and her feminism often bleeds over into her fiction. Some critics have found this too polemical and didactic; “Dreamer in a Dead Language” is an instance of Paley’s feminism weaving naturally into the flow of the fictional narrative.

Specifically, Paley’s feminist concerns arise in the course of a conversation between Faith and her father, during which Mr. Darwin tells his daughter that he is thinking of leaving the nursing home, and thus Faith’s mother, who enjoys being in the home, considering it, in the pointed words of Mr. Darwin, “a nice quiet kibbutz, only luckily Jordan is not on one side and Egypt is not on the other.” But Faith’s father feels differently: “I can’t live here anymore. Impossible. It’s not my life. I don’t feel old. I never did.” He tells Faith that he and her mother are not like their daughter: “We were idealists.”

It is this comment that prompts Faith to reveal to her father that she is currently sleeping with three different men, a notion that horrifies him. When she tells him that she too is an idealist, he accuses her of poking fun at his expense. She replies:

Fun? What fun? Why did Ricardo get out? It’s clear: an idealist. For him somewhere, something perfect existed. So I say, That’s right. Me too. Me too. Somewhere for me perfection is flowering. Which of my three lovers do you think I ought to settle for, a high-class idealist like me. I don’t know.

Faith allows that her father’s notion of idealism, which would prompt him to leave the home, was also what spurred her husband, and the father of her children, to run off on her, and if such a notion is acceptable for those men, why should it not be for her? When her father reacts by suggesting that her version of idealism is to keep three lovers so that they might support her financially, she reacts with scorn: “Oh sure, they pay me all right. How’d you guess? They pay me with a couple of hours of their valuable time. They tell me their troubles and why they’re divorced and separated, and they let me make dinner once in a while.”

Faith finally abandons her father in the home, saying, “This is probably a comedy, this crummy afternoon.” The final scene of the story sees her and her sons on the beach, Richard chastising his mother for leaving: “Mom, you have to get them out of there. It’s your mother and father. It’s your responsibility.” Faith responds by lying in the sand, “flat as a corpse under the October sun,” and asking her children to bury her. This causes Richard to immediately retract what he had said, claiming that he was only joking. In the end, the two boys bury “most of her” in the sand, making sure to leave “lots of room for wiggling and whacking.”

Notions of responsibility and selfishness, of stasis and movement, of freedom and imprisonment pervade Paley’s story, but remain unresolved at the end. On the beach, Faith’s initial response to her son is to scream and scream, but she doesn’t do this, asking instead to be buried in the sand. The fact that she asks only to be buried to her arms, “so I can give you a good whack every now and then when you’re too fresh,” indicates that she has not abdicated her responsibility to her family, nor does she intend to. But Paley’s refusal to provide neat closure on the problems raised in the story mirrors life and its similarly intractable refusal to provide closure in our daily existence. This is not, as some have suggested, an example of an unfinished or partial fiction, unless one’s idea of “wholeness” is predicated on the trajectory of television sit-coms. Paley’s story is complete in itself, requiring nothing more in the way of clarification or resolution than what the author has chosen, in her wisdom, to provide us.