Eudora Welty once said in an interview that a writer's creative work should be read instead of an account of his or her life, adding that she did not think anyone would be interested in her own private life. However, she changed her mind when Harvard University asked her to deliver the William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization on the subject of what made her become a writer. Although never before having written about herself as herself, Welty has said she became interested in the idea and began to draw on memory and develop a structure that would hold her many reminiscences together. The result, she has said, was so much fun, so enlightening, that she advises everyone to do it.

One Writer's Beginnings (1984), the book that grew out of the lectures Welty delivered, stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for almost a year, easily countering Welty's modest assumption that no one would be interested in her private life. However, the book is not an autobiography in the traditional sense, for it focuses mostly on her early childhood and only briefly deals with her life as an adult. Instead, it is a memoir or meditation, a lyrical recollection of how one writer learned to see the world in such a way that she could recreate it in stories.

The three 1983 lectures that make up the book are entitled "Listening,""Learning to See," and "Finding a Voice." The first, the longest of the three, deals with Welty's childhood relationship to her parents. Instead of being strictly chronological, it is structured on what Welty calls the "pulse" of childhood, for childhood's learning is not steady, she argues; rather it consists of separate yet connected moments. Welty's emphasis in this section is on her discovery of the magic of sounds, letters, words, and talk; consequently the focus is on teachers, books, music, and films--all of which fed her hunger for the sound of story.

"Learning to See" takes Welty out of her small hometown of Jackson, Mississippi to describe her summer trips to Ohio and West Virginia to visit the families of her parents. In small anecdotes that could be short stories, Welty tells of her mother running into a burning house to retrieve her precious set of the novels of Charles Dickens and of her mother, at age 15, taking her own father to Baltimore because of a ruptured appendix and then bringing his body home alone on the train. Because, as Welty says, her mother brought some of West Virginia to Mississippi with her, Welty brought some of it with her also

The final section of the book, "Finding a Voice," deals with Welty's leaving Jackson to go to college in Wisconsin, taking her first job with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a publicity agent, and writing her first stories, such as "Death of a Traveling Salesman,""Livie,""A Still Moment." It was these stories that quickly gained the admiration of the so-called New Critics of the influential journal The Southern Review. Because this is a book about "beginnings," it says nothing of her writing career after these early works.

The charm and magic of One Writer's Beginning can largely be attributed to the personality of Welty herself, the model of the genteel Southern lady--gracious, kind, hospitable, and therefore irresistible. But it is also a memorable little book because of its ability to recreate the feel of small town American life in the first two decades of the twentieth century--a time when home libraries were filled with Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and the Book of Knowledge rather than a time when family rooms were filled with televisions and computers. Welty's ear for the dialogue of the small town South, her eye for the telling detail, and her vivid memory for the look and feel of the first two decades of the twentieth-century era make the book a minor classic.

The central purpose of One Writer's Beginning is Welty's exploration of what it is that makes a writer become a writer and what it is that sets a writer apart from others. Welty tries to answer these two questions in two basic ways: by describing the actual events and details of her life that she transforms into the stuff of story and by her own meditative consideration of the meaning of these sources of her fiction making. The central key to the secret of the writer, Welty seems to suggest, is his or her ability to determine the difference between mere events and "significant" events. A relation of mere events may be simply a chronological retelling; however, significant events follow what Welty calls a "thread of revelation." And that phrase perhaps is the best description of the structure of One Writer's Beginning, for the book develops a continuous related thread of individual moments of revelation and meaning.

Some of the central points along this thread involve Welty's gradual awareness of what she calls "the voice of story." She recalls hearing her mother read stories to her, but it is not her mother's voice she hears; she says that when she writes she hears her own words in the same voice that she hears when she reads. Welty also recalls when neighbors were invited to go on a Sunday drive in the family car and she would sit in the back seat between her mother and a friend and say, "Now talk." It was in this way that she learned the wonderful language she recreates in such stories as "The Petrified Man" and "Why I Lived at the P.O."

The section of the book entitled "Learning to See" is more unified in time than the anecdotal first section, for it deals with Welty's annual summer visits to relatives in West Virginia and Ohio. Although she never lived in these areas, she feels a strong sense of place in them, particularly the mountains of West Virginia where her mother was born and raised. She takes obvious delight in telling stories of her mother's family, for such family stories are usually a child's first introduction to the roots of story--those revelatory moments of reality worth remembering. If life is a series of revelations, as Welty claims, then each trip she made to her parents' roots constituted a particular revelation for her.

In the last section, "Finding a Voice," Welty talks about the specific sources of some of her most memorable stories, usually some image, character, or phrase from which the story grows. For example, the story "Livie," a mythical piece about youth and old age, springs from her seeing trees throughout the South that people beautified by putting brightly-colored bottles on the ends of limbs. Her first story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman," originated with a phrase she heard from a traveling man--"He's gone to borry some fire"--that took on mythological meaning for her.

Although many experiences are too indefinite to be recognized alone, Welty says, in a story they come together and become identifiable when they take on a larger shape. Writing develops a sense of where to look for these connections, how to follow the threads, for nothing is ever lost to memory. Memory is a living thing, urges Welty, and all that is remembered joins and unites the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.

As slight as One Writer's Beginningseems on the surface, it is a profound document about the beginning and the development of a writer's consciousness. Although its stated purpose is to delineate what makes a writer different from other people, the book also implicitly deals with what makes a woman writer different from a man. Several reviewers and critics of Welty's book have noted that in order to write, women must very early see themselves as both "subject and object" and that for Welty becoming a writer began with the discovery that language is the means by which one moves from passive object to free subject.

The Collected Stories of Eudora Weltycontains forty-one stories--the distinguished southern writer's complete short fiction corpus. It includes four earlier volumes--A Curtain of Green (1941), The Wide Net and Other Stories(1943), The Golden Apples (1949), and The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955)--and two New Yorker stories previously uncollected, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" (1963) and "The Demonstrators" (1966). In her Preface, Miss Welty, always the model of graciousness, briefly expresses her gratitude for the fact that her early stories, beginning with "Death of a Travelling Salesman," were welcomed by influential southern critics and writers, such as Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and Katherine Anne Porter.

Stories from Welty's first two collections are generally better known than those from the last two, having frequently been anthologized in numerous college literature anthologies since the 1940's. In them, Welty focuses brilliantly on the Mississippi milieu she knows so well, creating enigmatic characters and symbolic situations that combine the ordinary and the mythically meaningful in a way that has become characteristic of her best work.

It is in these first two collections that we meet the following gallery of unforgettable women: Ruby Fisher, who mistakes herself for an abused woman of the same name she reads about in the newspaper ("A Piece of News"); Leota and Mrs. Fletcher, who, medusa-like in a beauty parlor, metaphorically turn men into stone ("Petrified Man"); Sister, the postmistress of China Grove, who laments the return of the prodigal daughter and tries to justify her own exile ("Why I Live at the P. O."); Clytie, who ends up upside down in a rain barrel, her black-stockinged legs hung apart "like a pair of tongs" ("Clytie"); Phoenix Jackson, a never-say-die grandmother on a sacred journey to seek relief for her scarred grandson ("A Worn Path"); and Livie, who finally dares to leave the control and order of Solomon for the raw life of Cash McCord ("Livie").

Stories in Welty's last two collections, while no less magical than the first two, are less well known because they are more heavily linked to their mythical sources and therefore less accessible to the average reader. For example, it helps to know, when reading "Shower of Gold," that Welty draws from the myth of Zeus's impregnation of Danae by visiting her in a shower of gold; and her story "Circe" will make no real sense to the reader unfamiliar with the story of Ulysses' brief stop at the island of that sorceress on his famous journey home. Furthermore, in The Bride of Innisfallen, Welty uncharacteristically moves out of her home in the South; for example, the title story deals with a group of travelers on the way from London to Cork in Ireland, and "Going to Naples" focuses on a band of Italian-Americans on a journey to Naples. Because these stories seem less linked to the power of place, an important element in all of Welty's best fiction, they are less magical and memorable.

Because of historical tradition and the aesthetic conventions that adhere to short narrative, short stories are less apt to focus on characters defined by their stereotypical social roles than they are by their archetypal metaphysical roles. The short story deals with situations that compel characters to confront their essential isolation as individual human beings, not as social masks within a particular cultural context. As a result, the women in Welty's short stories do not so much confront their social roles as women as they reveal what Welty sees as their essential roles as isolated human beings. Such an approach, which eschews the social and the polemical and instead explores the symbolic and the metaphysical, does not lend itself to that brand of feminist criticism concerned with the wide range of social traps in which women find themselves.

For example, in "A Piece of News," although Ruby Fisher is caught in a marriage in which she is most likely abused and which allows her no sense of herself as an independent social entity, this is not Welty's concern. When Ruby sees a story in a newspaper describing how a woman named Ruby Fisher was shot in the leg by her husband, her recognition, "That's me," followed by her elaborate, self-pitying fantasy of her death and burial, is an effort to find a sense of identity in a basic and primal way. When her husband comes home and points out that the newspaper is from another state and swats her fondly across the backside with it, both Ruby and the reader feel a puzzling sense of loss.

In the story "Clytie," although it is true that Clytie is a stereotyped old maid, exploited by her family and laughed at by the townspeople for her eccentricity and addled demeanor, it is not social criticism Welty focuses on here, but once again a search for primal identity. Just as Ruby recognizes her self in the newspaper story, so does Clytie when she looks down into the mirrored surface of the rain barrel and sees her own face recoil from her look of waiting and suffering; she can think of nothing else to do but thrust her head into the "kind, featureless depth" of the water and hold it there. It is not social isolation that Welty's women suffer from, but rather a more basic sense of separateness; and it is not social validation that they hunger for, but, as Robert Penn Warren noted several years ago in a famous essay, love that will heal the separateness and magically give them a sense of order and meaning.

The fact that Welty's short stories do not focus on social issues as such has been one source of criticism of her short fiction and one reason why her stories have sometimes been characterized as women's writing in a pejorative stereotyped sense. Welty's stories seem to spring more from the world of myth and story than from the real world, and the language in which they are written is often highly symbolic and allusive, therefore susceptible to being called, especially in the mid-twentieth century when such so-called masculine writers as Hemingway and Faulkner dominated literary life, somewhat "precious" and overly self-conscious. However, as heavily loaded with metaphor and allusion as Welty's language is, and as resonant as her characters are of the world of myth, still her stories seem rooted in a strong sense of place, even if they seem eternally out of time in what she has called a "season of dreams."

The first thing one notices about the short stories of Grace Paley is the voice that narrates them. It seems unmistakably the voice of a woman talking to other women. Paley once said in an interview that it was "the dark lives of women" that made her begin to write in the first place, adding that at the time she thought no one would be interested, "but I had to illuminate it anyway." In a preface written especially for The Collected Stories, she says that in 1954 or 1955, when she first felt the storyteller's need, she was not sure that she could write the important serious stuff that men were writing. Consequently, she says she had no choice but to write about what had been handed to her: "Everyday life, kitchen life, children life."

Usually, the women in Paley's stories are either unwed, widowed, or divorced; although they often have lovers and children, they are not defined either by marriage or the desire for marriage. This focus on the female without men has resulted, say some critics, in stories that are feminist in point of view, language, and theme. And in her new preface, Paley says she agrees, at least to the extent that every woman writing during the decades of the 50's, 60's, and 70's had to "swim in the feminist wave." Paley's stories are often unified by her focus on the voices of women engaged in conversation, gossip, jokes, intimacies, and above all, storytelling.

It is the power of this talk and storytelling, Paley insists, that bonds women together into a unified, collaborative force to make their voices heard. In an interview, Paley once said, "Our voices are, if not getting a lot louder, getting so numerous. We're talking to each other more and more." Paley believes that women banding together and talking to one another, especially mothers, constitute a powerful political force for social change. When you have kids, you get involved in community affairs, Paley says, for your concern is for protection of the children. Indeed, in many Paley stories, the community of mothers on the playground constitute a central source of social consciousness.

Although Paley's stories show a concern for community and social responsibility, they are far from solemn social tracts or feminist polemics. Instead, they are characterized by an earthy awareness of urban folk culture combined with an often bawdy sense of humor. For example, the women in Paley's stories rebel against the traditional role of woman as passive partners in sexuality, and at the same time they reject the egoistic image of men as the answer to all woman's needs. As Mrs. Luddy tells the character Faith Darwin in the story "The Long Distance Runner," men thought they were bringing women a "rare gift," but it was just sex, "which is common like bread, though essential." As Faith and Mrs. Luddy talk, like many other women in Paley's stories, we begin to realize that such collaborative talk among women fosters community and freedom.

Faith Darwin, Paley's alter ego, was first introduced in a pair of early stories in The Little Disturbances of Man categorized as "Two Short Sad Stories from a Long and Happy Life." The first one, entitled "The Used-Boy Raisers," begins with the typical Paley ironic voice--"There were two husbands disappointed by eggs"--and then continues with Faith's voice characterizing her husband and former husband, who are dissatisfied in the way she has fixed their eggs, as Pallid and Livid as they quarrel about the future of the Jewish race. At this point in Faith's life, she rarely expresses her opinion on any serious matter and says she considers it her destiny to be, "until her expiration date, laughingly the servant of man." But as the two husbands go off to face the "grand affairs of the day ahead of them," Faith's voice has managed to gently ridicule the pretensions of these "clean and neat, rather attractive, shiny men in their thirties."

In many ways, the various situations of Faith Darwin reflect the central thematic concerns of Paley's fiction. As Faith moves from egoistic self pity to a broader identification and sympathy with women in general and women as an oppressed group in particular, she embodies Paley's own growing conviction that fiction can serve a powerful purpose in affirming community, hope, and love. Faith reappears in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute in the story "Faith in the Afternoon," where, recently abandoned by her husband, she visits her parents in a retirement home. Although she is very much aware of her family history, she holds herself aloof from family in this story, rejecting union and connection.

Another story, "Faith in a Tree," finds Faith still holding herself aloof, this time symbolically sitting on the limb of a sycamore tree above an urban playground. However, by the end of the story, she is brought out of her lofty perch by her eight-year-old son's sympathetic identification with the purposes of a peaceful antiwar march and decides to change her distanced perspective to one of social and artistic involvement. In the final Faith Darwin story inEnormous Changes, "The Long-Distance Runner," Faith jogs to her childhood neighborhood on Cony Island. Finding the area now populated by African Americans, she retreats to her old home place and stays for three weeks, uniting both with her past and with the black woman Mrs. Luddy who now lives there.

In "Friends," in Paley's third collection, Later the Same Day, Faith goes with her friends Ann and Susan to visit another friend Selena who is dying. The story is a Paley experiment in creating a collective narrator; she has said in an interview that it is based on her own female friends with whom she had a kind of collective existence. "Ruthy and Edie," also in Later the Same Day, begins with the relationship between two young girls who talk about the "real world of boys" and fight their fear of a strange neighborhood dog, then shifts to a period many years later at Ruthy's fiftieth birthday when she invites three friends, including Faith and Edie, to her apartment for a celebration. The story ends with Ruth's anxiety about her success as a mother as she struggles with the hopelessness of protecting her granddaughter from the hard world of "man-made time."

Faith appears again in "The Expensive Moment," in which the network of women, a frequent theme in Paley's stories, broadens to include a Chinese woman who Faith and Ruthy have met at a meeting of a women's governmental organization sponsored by the UN. Over tea in Faith's kitchen, the three women wonder whether they were right to raise their children as they did.

A number of Paley's stories are so short that they seem carefully crafted situations symbolic of the circumstances of women. For example, "Love" is an inconclusive episode in which a man tells his wife about his past loves, one of whom is a fictional character in her own book. "Lavinia: An Old Story" is a brief monologue in which a black woman tries to talk her daughter's suitor out of marrying her. "At That Time, or The History of a Joke" is, in itself, little more than a joke in which the virgin birth becomes the source of several satiric jabs at the Christian religion. The story "Anxiety" consists primarily of a woman's warnings to a young father taking his daughter home from school; "In This Country" is a two-page prose-poem in which a female child tries to understand whether her maiden aunt has a life of her own; and "Mother" is a two-page memoir brought on by a woman's hearing the song "Oh, I Long To See My Mother in the Doorway." The two short pieces, "A Man Told Me the Story of His Life" and "This is a Story about My Friend George, the Toy Inventor," are more like brief parables than fully-developed narratives. In one, we hear of a man who, unable to fulfill his dream to be a doctor, saves his wife's life because of his diagnostic ability; in the other, a man invents a pinball machine that is a poem of the machine, its essence made concrete.

"Wants"--a three-page piece in which a woman meets her ex-husband at the library when she returns books she has had checked out for eight years--effectively expresses a woman's basic desire to be the kind of person who returns books in two weeks, stays married to the same person forever, and addresses the Board of Estimate on the troubles of urban centers. In "Living," a woman friend calls Faith to tell her she is dying, but Faith says she is dying too, for her menstrual bleeding will not stop; the story is a poignant but restrained exemplum of female sympathy and identification. "Northeast Playground," another three-page story, deals with a typical Paley social concern as she describes going to a playground where she meets eleven unwed mothers on relief who band together in a kind of playground.

When asked about these very short stories, which seem to challenge the limits of narrative structure, Paley said that a story is more often apt to be too long than too short, arguing that stories should deal with more than the simple dialectic of conflict. "I think it's two events or two characters...bumping against each other, and what you hear, that's the story." And that, she says, can happen in two pages.

Grace Paley is very much concerned with the nature of storytelling in her stories, for her narrator is often self-consciously aware of the fact that the characters in the stories are fictional creations. One of her most frequently anthologized stories, "A Conversation With My Father," is Paley's most explicit treatment of her view of story and its relationship to hope for the future of women. The protagonist of the story, a writer, is visited by her eighty-year old dying father who wants her to write a Chekhov-type story for him, one with a plot, a concept she despises because, she says, it takes away all hope. In order to please her father, she tells two versions of a story of a woman who becomes a junkie so she can remain close to her son, who has become a junkie. Although the father sees the situation of the woman in the story-within-the-story as tragic, the narrator sees it as comic. As a result, the story is, as many of Paley's stories, both tragic and comic at once.

What Paley rebels against in "A Conversation With My Father" is the inevitability of plot, which, because it moves toward a predestined end, is a straight line between two points. A basic difference between fiction and "real life," Paley suggests is that whereas real life is open and full of possibility, fiction moves relentlessly toward its predetermined end. A basic difference between the father's reaction to the woman in the story-within-the-story and the author's reaction is that whereas the father takes her situation seriously, as if she had a separate existence in the world, the author knows that the woman is her own creation; thus, although she feels sorry for her, she never loses sight of the fact that as the author she has the power to alter her destiny.

The key words in the titles of several of the stories in Later the Same Day are "telling,""listening,""hearing," and "story," for the nature of narrative talk is central to all of them. As a storyteller, Paley's central concern is the basic characteristics of story, specifically, the characteristics of oral narrative specifically associated with women. In "Listening," at breakfast, Faith tells her husband Jack the two stories "Anxiety" and "Zagrosky Tells," stories which she neglected to tell him in the story "The Story Hearer." Jack complains these are stories about men and urges her to tell him the stories told by women about women. Although Faith says they are too private, many of Paley's stories are indeed about the very private talk between women.

Paley's concern with the nature of story moves many of her narratives into the realm of self-reflexive fiction or metafiction, for they are about reality as a language construct. Although her stories lack the kind of tight intentional patterning of the well-made short story since Poe, they are not "realistic" in the usual "slice-of-life" sense. Paley is too self-conscious a writer to be content with straightforward mimetic treatments of real people in the real world. As a result of her refusal to build her stories around a clear conflict and thus move them toward am emphatic sense of resolution and closure, a number of critics have often been puzzled about how to discuss her stories about women.

Paley's very brief stories have also been the source of many critical reservations, for they are so short and seemingly inconsequential that they seem to challenge the lower limits of storyness. Paley has sometimes been classified among those contemporary short story writers known as "minimalists," although her minimalism has been more accepted than that of Ann Beattie, Mona Simpson, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison because of her subject matter focus on the urban Jewish community and the community of women. In spite of the politically correct nature of her characters, she has been criticized for self-indulgently engaging in meaningless memoirs and desultory dialogues that, although they contain socially significant ideas, are not really stories at all.

However, this is the same kind of criticism that once was lodged against Anton Chekhov, the originator of the tradition of short-story "realism" to which Paley belongs. Although her stories seem like mere slices of life without intentional pattern, they are actually quite carefully crafted narratives in which simple objective description takes on symbolic meaning by a careful structure of repetition and interconnection of motifs. Paley believes that stories should be "like life," at least the way life should be--that is, open-ended, full of hope, promise, and possibility. Stories should not be governed by the inevitability of plot, particularly plot determined by the goal-directed nature of male culture. If life is like a story, then Paley insists that we should all be story tellers, each writing his or her own stories and forming communities of stories with others.

Writing for Grace Paley is a collaborative, social act, not merely in the obvious sense of centering stories on social issues, but in the more complex and profound sense of writing as the creation of a community of speakers and listeners sharing the same values. Not content to remain the prisoner of a language system based on the dominant male culture, Grace Paley has devoted her art to the creation of a language-based community made up of talk by women to women.

As in all great short stories, from Chekhov to Carver, there is mystery and not a little menace in the stories of William Trevor—secrets so tangled and inexplicable that efforts to explain them with the language of psychology or sociology or history are either futile or absurd. This is not accidental, but part of the short story’s historical and generic tradition, for the form originated in primitive myth, which, by its very nature, was concerned with mystery, for which story was the only explanatory model available. Moreover, the short story is often concerned with the enigma of motivation.

This mystery of motivation is as true of Trevor's first collection The Day we Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories, 1967 as of his last collection forty years later, Cheating at Canasta, 2007. In honor of one of the two best short-story writers in the world today, I offer a few comments on the stories in that last collection. I only hope there will be another.

In “The Dressmaker’s Child,” Cahill, a nineteen-year-old Irish man takes a couple of young Spanish tourists, seeking a blessing on their marriage, to a statue that was once thought to shed miraculous tears. However, the miracle of the statue has since been discredited, and the Dublin man who told them about it was only lying to get them to buy him drinks. Cahill knows all this, but wants the fifty euro he charges to drive the couple out to the statue. On the way back, a young female child, who has a habit of doing such things, runs out in the road and into his car. Cahill does not stop.

When the child’s body is found in a quarry half a mile from her home, the mother, a dressmaker, who has borne the child out of wedlock, begins to stalk Cahill, hinting that she saw him hit the girl. Cahill imagines that he walked back to the site of the accident and carried the body of the child to the quarry, but he knows that it was the mother who has done this. The mother urges Cahill to leave his girlfriend and invites him to come home with her. Cahill, afraid, without knowing what he fears, cannot dismiss the connection between him and the dressmaker. When he tries to understand this, he is bewildered, but he knows that one day he will go to her. The story suggests that it is possible that death and guilt, as well as birth and love can unite two people.

Guilt, secrets, and obsession also dominate “Folie À Deux.” Wilby, a divorced man in his forties, is in Paris, indulging in his interest in rare stamps. At a café, he sees an employee who looks like a man named Anthony who Wilby knew as a boy, a man who disappeared years before and who everyone assumed was dead. Wilby recalls a significant event that has bound them together in guilt. Once the two boys, out of curiosity, put Anthony’s old dog Jerico in a small boat and pushed him out to sea, just to find out what he would do. They hear the dog howling and later see its body when it is washed up on shore.

Although this does not seem to affect Wilby so much, it profoundly changes Anthony, who becomes quieter and more withdrawn. Later when Wilby runs into Anthony again at school, he discovers that Anthony is even more remote and strange; Wilby does not befriend him again, even though he feels guilty about this. Like Cahill in “The Dressmaker’s Child,” Wilby’s guilt is muddled by bewilderment. When he goes back to the café and realizes that it is Anthony, Wilby knows that he will return to his own safe, tidy world, but this morning he likes himself less than he likes his childhood friend.

The mystery of motivation and secrets of the past also energize “The Room.” A forty-seven-year-old woman named Katherine is engaged in an affair, perhaps in revenge, for her husband’s involvement with a prostitute, who was murdered and for whom he was a suspect, nine years before. Katherine lied for her husband then, in partial repayment for her inability to have children, providing him with an alibi, although it seems quite clear that he did not kill the woman.

When the man with whom she is having an affair asks Katherine why she loves her husband, she says that no one can answer that question and, in a statement central to Trevor’s success with the short story, asserts that most often, people don’t know why they do things. For the nine years since the murder, she has not asked her husband about the girl, but knows that her alibi for him has given her release from any restraint. The story ends with her knowledge that the best that love can do is not enough, for what holds people together is often guilt, debt, secrets.

What makes people do what they do and the mysteries of what holds them together or tears them apart is also central to “Bravado.” Five young people are on the way home late at night—the leader Manning, his cohorts Donovan and Kilroy, Aisling, his girlfriend, and a second girl named Francie. When Dalgety, a boy they scorn as a geek, urinates in someone’s yard, Manning, who always likes to play the big fellow, knocks him down and kicks him. The next morning the boy is discovered dead. Donovan and Kilroy are sent to jail for eleven years, getting off easy, for they did not know that Dalgety had a weak heart.

Manning disappears, but writes to Aisling several years later, telling her he has changed. Aisling finishes school and gets a job but never marries. At Dalgety’s grave, she begs for forgiveness, for she knows that the beating was done to impress her, to deserve her love, and watching it she had felt a momentary pleasure. She sometimes thinks she will run away from the shadow of bravado that hangs over her, but she is also now a different person and feels that she belongs to where the act took place.

Guilt and the mysteries of the past have a wider compass in “Men of Ireland.” A fifty-two-year old man, Donal Prunty, returns to the small village in Ireland where he was born after having spent several years in England “on the street.” Prunty goes to the parish priest, Father Meade, for whom he served Mass when he was a child and tells him about hearing the old stories of priest abuse with other men--the “hidden Ireland.” When he accuses Father Meade of abusing him, the priest knows he is lying and wonders if he is confusing him with another priest, his brain addled because of methylated spirits. Although he insists that no finger has ever been pointed at a priest in this village, still he goes to a drawer and takes paper notes and gives to him.

After Prunty leaves, the priest does not blame him because you cannot blame a hopeless case, and he feels guilty for not being able to reach him as a boy as his mother has asked of him. He knows that no honorable guilt and no generous intent have made him give Prunty the money, but rather that he has paid for silence. He accepts that the petty offense of Prunty is minor beside the betrayal by the Church and the shamming of Ireland’s priesthood.

The inexplicable nature of love and human need dominate such stories as “An Afternoon,” in which a young girl meets a man in a chat room and then arranges to meet him in person. She obviously needs the attention of the man and seems to trust him, although the reader is suspicious of his thoughts, discovering gradually that he has met young women like this before. He is solicitous of the girl, winning a necklace for her in a carnival type game and giving her drinks.

However, his plans, whatever they are, are foiled, when his aunt, with whom he lives, drives up, telling him to remember that he is on probation. The girl goes home, and hears her mother and the man she lives with having a fight. In face of this, the girl, even though she now knows the man planned to take advantage of her, still thinks of him tenderly. She kisses the necklace he gave her and promises she will always keep it with her.

“The Children” begins with the perspective of Connie, a child of eleven, whose mother has just died. It then shifts to a woman named Teresa, forty-one, whose husband left her several years before. Two years later Robert, Connie’s father, asks Teresa to marry him. Connie takes her mother’s books up on the roof to read them, although it is really pretense, for she is too young to understand them. She worries that all her mother’s books will be sold, so she wants to know what every single one of them is about. Five days away from the wedding, Teresa comes to see Robert and they decide to cancel the wedding. Realizing that nothing is as tidy as they had thought, and that no rights cancel other rights, they both know they have been hasty and careless. Robert accepts that time will gather up the ends, and that his daughter’s honoring of a memory was love that mattered also.

"Cheating at Canasta" opens with a man named Mallory, an Englishman in his middle years, at Harry’s Bar in Venice, famous as a hangout of Ernest Hemingway. It has been four years since he was last here with his wife Julia, who is now afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease. As a last request, she has made him promise to go back to Harry’s, but he is not sure if this trip is really meaningful. However, when he hears an American man ask his younger wife why she is crying, he becomes interested in their quarrel. When they leave, he tells them the reason for his trip, feeling ashamed that he has come close to deploring this tiresome, futile journey. He recalls letting his wife win at canasta, even though she was not sure why she was happy when she won. As the couple leave, the man smiles, hearing his wife’s voice say that shame isn’t bad, nor is humility, which is shame’s gift.

These are not cultural examinations of either the old Ireland of legend or the new Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, but rather profoundly wise explorations of individual, yet universal, secrets and mysteries of the heart. Luminous, restrained stories, every one of them deserves to be read and reread, their motivations marveled at, their sentences savored. They fill the reader with awe at the complexity of the human experience and the genius of William Trevor.

I go to Ottawa tomorrow to join my Canadian colleagues in a celebration of the work of Alice Munro. Professor Robert Thacker, author of the excellent biography of Ms. Munro, Writing Her Lives, and I share the honor of giving keynote addresses. Professor Thacker will speak on Friday afternoon, and I will speak on Saturday morning. Many fine writers, critics, and scholars will discuss various aspects of Munro's work over the three-day weekend. I will give you a summary of the celebration when I return.

Since I will be taking a break from my blog for a few days while in Ottawa, I though it only appropriate that I post a brief discussion of her work before I left. I have written many blogs on Alice Munro over the past several years, but for some reason have neglected her most personal collection, The View from Castle Rock. Munro says that as she put together the material in this bookover the years, not surprisingly, since she is, with little or no argument, the best short-story writer currently practicing that underrated art, the material began to shape itself into “something like stories.” The combination of the words of her ancestors and her own, she says, resulted in a re-creation of lives about as truthful as the past can be.

In addition, Munro says, during this same period she was also writing a special set of stories that she had not included in her last four books of fiction because she felt they did not belong. Although they were not memoirs, they were closer to her own life than other stories she had written. She says in her previous stories, she drew on personal material, but then did whatever she wanted to with it, for the chief thing she was doing was “making a story.” However, in these new pieces, she knew she was doing something closer to what a memoir does—exploring her own life, although not in a rigorously factual way.

The View from Castle Rock is made up of these two separate sets—five family chronicles that Munro says are “something like stories” and six pieces drawn from her own life that she emphatically declares are “stories.” Munro describes them as two separate streams that flow into one channel.

The first story, “No Advantages,” is the most historical, least fictionalized, of the five pieces of “family history.” The narrator is Munro, in her sixties, traveling alone in Scotland. When she finds the gravestone of her great-great-great-great-great grandfather, born at the end of the seventeenth century, she enjoys that familiar human experience of imagining her ancestors existing in time and space. Discovering he is the last man in Scotland to have seen the fairies, she envisions him as a sort of Rip Van Winkle who encounters little people, about as high as a two-year-old child, calling his name. She draws conclusions and forms hypotheses about him and those who follow him. She identifies a trait of her Scottish ancestors that forms her own attitudes generations later--the reluctance to call attention to one’s self, the opposite of which is not modesty, but rather a refusal to turn your life into a story, either for other people or for yourself--a curious trait for a storyteller who has all her adult life transformed her life into story.

The title story of the collection moves closer to fictionalized narrative. Its imaginative spark derives from a received story of one of her ancestors, a young boy, being taken up to Edinburgh Castle by his father, who points out a grayish-blue piece of land showing through the mist beyond the waves and pronounces gravely “America.” The boy knows he is not looking at America, but rather an island off the coast of Scotland, but this does not lessen the force of the illusion of a land that does have “advantages,” so far away, yet so close—a combination of fiction and reality. The story focuses on the actual journey the family makes to Nova Scotia. Although Munro says she depends largely on a journal kept by one of the family members, whereas he merely records events, Munro speculates and humanizes, inventing actions for which she has no historical basis and creating motivations based on her imaginative identification with her ancestors.

“Illinois” deals with an event that must have been irresistible to Munro, who has written previous stories of tricks and cross-purposes. A young male ancestor steals his baby sister and hides her; two silly young girls who like to play jokes steal the infant a second time to tease another boy. It is a comedy of errors that ends well when the father finds the baby. “The Wilds of Morris Township” has less drama and little comedy, focusing on the quiet intentions of an ancestor who builds himself a house and lives out his life in a brotherly-sisterly relationship with a second cousin. Munro’s recollection that her father said he had seen the odd couple at church when he was a child brings the chronicle of the family closer to her own life.

“Working for a Living” recounts how Munro’s father begins his adult life as a fur-trapper and seller of skins for the commercial market and how he meets her mother. After her father stops raising animals for fur, he gets a job at a foundry as a night watchman; when Munro, as a young girl, goes to visit him there, she sees him as someone other than just her father. In this story, we are introduced to Munro as a future writer. While her father provides her with particular explanations of the foundry, she is more interested in the general effects--the gloom, the fine dust, and the atmosphere of the place. Munro leaves this first half of The View from Castle Rock with her father listening to his grandfather and other men speaking in the dialect of their own childhood---an appropriate transition to the second half, which begins with a fictional account of Munro’s early understanding of the complex relationships that daughters have with their fathers.

“Fathers,” the opening piece of the second part of the book, brings us closer to the kind of story that has made Munro famous. Describing the relationship that two different girls have with their fathers, it is structured around theme rather than event. First, there is Dahlia, who hates her father for his brutality and would kill him if she could. Secondly, there is Frances, whose parents try to encourage their daughter’s friendship with Munro. However, when Munro sees Frances’ father squeeze the mother’s behind, she feels some sort of “creepy menace” about them. Not used to this open display of attention, she feels cornered and humiliated. She recalls once when her father beat her for some back talk to her mother, the probable source of “Royal Beatings” one of Munro’s most famous stories. However, she does not compare her situation to Dahlia’s, but she knows that her father hates the arrogance in her. “Fathers’ is a story about two kinds of father/daughter relationships, neither with which Munro completely identifies, but both of which she intuitively understands.

All the stories in this second section point to Munro’s future as a writer. In “Lying Under the Apple Tree,” she is thirteen and has a secret poetic idea about looking up through apple blossoms, which has an irresistible formality for her, like kneeling in church. She has her first erotic feelings for an older boy, but when they are interrupted in what Munro expects will be her first sexual experience, she realizes that the boy is having a relationship with the woman who owns the farm where he works. Once again, the story ends with a presage of Munro’s future life as an author, for she says for the next few years it is men in books who become her lovers, sardonic and with a ferocious streak in them; her preference running to Heathcliff rather than Edgar Linton, Rhett Butler rather than Ashley Wilkes.

In “Hired Girl,” Munro, 17, takes a summer job with a family. When they have a party and friends come to stay the weekend, Munro thinks they are glamorous, like the people she has read about in magazines--people who drink a lot, have affairs, and go to psychiatrists. When the visiting husband suggests she go swimming without her bathing suit, the next time she is in the water she pulls her top down and thinks of him touching her, feeling both a sense of pleasure and repulsion. When the summer is over, the husband for whom she works gives Munro a copy of Isak Dinensen’s Seven Gothic Tales. The fictional takes precedence over the merely real, for as soon as she begins to read, she loses herself in the book, believing that this gift of literature has always belonged to her.

In “The Ticket,” Munro is 20 and preparing for her wedding with her first boyfriend. The family is glad someone wants her, for she has always scared men off with her intelligence and her arrogance. More and more, Munro sees the world in terms of language. As if they were stories, she studies three marriages as a way to prepare for her own—that of her parents, which is the most mysterious because like many children she cannot imagine them in any connection except the one through her; that of her grandparents, which she knows from reports from her mother; and that of her Uncle Cyril and Aunt Charlie, who warn her about marriage. Munro makes a rare confession in this story by saying that her first husband deserved better than what she gave him; he deserved a “whole heart.”

The last three stories in the collection bring events closer to the present. In “Home,” Munro is in love with a man other than her husband, her mother has died, and she comes to visit her ill father and her stepmother, a woman good at sniffing out high-mindedness and superiority. In “What Do You Want to Know For?” she is married to her second husband and has been told she has a lump in her left breast and must have a biopsy. Over sixty now, she does not think her death would be a disaster. It is at this time in her life that she begins to think more about her family and to become interested in imagining them in the past.

In the Epilogue, entitled “Messenger,” Munro ponders the impulse to investigate one’s family history, sifting untrustworthy evidence, linking names, dates and anecdotes--determined to be joined to death and thus to life. Alice Munro’s most personal book ends appropriately with a metaphor, a huge seashell, which she holds to her ear to listen to the pounding of her own blood and the roar of the ocean. This metaphor of listening to the self and the sea brings the book full circle, echoing the young ancestor so many years ago, gazing from Castle Rock across that misty ocean which held the future and now holds the past.

Five years ago today I took the advice of a friend who one day off-handedly said, “You ought to start a blog.” Setting up the blog was so simple I had done it before I realized it. A few key strokes, and there it was: I was “on-line."

When some folks retire, they say they experience a void and do not know what to do with their lives. Writing essays for Reading the Short Story has solved that potential problem for me. I continue to do everything I did during the forty years of teaching at University. I read, I study, I think, I write, I communicate with others.

Although I do miss the personal contact with students, I have no desire to impose the image of my aging body on their consciousness and resist the temptation to go back into the classroom. My mind, which, so far, refuses to age, (I hope) is always what I had to offer.

In my first blog, I said that I have been called the short story’s most enthusiastic cheerleader. I can ask no more than to remain a spokesman for the form.

I offer my gratitude to all those who have read my essays these past five years. I hope to make it worth their while to continue reading them. I have no intention to cease.

You may be wondering why after rapid-fire postings at the beginning of May (Short-Story Month, according to some bloggers), I once again disappeared for a few weeks.

The reason being:

After returning from the Canadian Literature Symposium on Alice Munro at the University of Ottawa campus, my wife and I rushed down to Tucson, Arizona for my younger daughter's being hooded for a Ph.D. degree in English, and two-weeks of helping her pack up her house for a move back to Southern California, where her husband has landed a full-time job at Saddleback College teaching math. No job yet for my daughter, for literature is not in such demand as math. Go figure!

A few words about the Ottawa conference, where I had the honor of delivering one of the keynote addresses on Alice Munro:

The conference was held over two and a half days at the University of Ottawa campus, where the two organizers of the Symposium, Gerald Lynch and Janice Fiamengo, make their academic home. It was attended by sixty or so academic scholars, critics, writers, and editors familiar with Munro's work over the years,

Among the highlights was the other keynote speaker, Robert Thacker of St. Lawrence University in New York state, author of the authoritative biography Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. Bob Thacker knows more about Munro and her work than anyone. His presentation, focusing on the arc of her work from the story "Walker Brothers Cowboy" to her final collection Dear Life, regaled the audience with information and insights that only Bob Thacker would know. He was consulted many times during the weekend as a dynamic resource for all things Munro.

Bob was invited because he is the expert on Alice Munro. I was invited because I know a bit about the short story, and, as I suggested to the audience, when you talk about Alice Munro, inevitably you talk about the short story—which I did.

Among the many interesting and provocative papers presented during the weekend, another high point for me was a panel on the career of Munro, featuring Virginia Barber, Munro's long time agent and friend; Ann Close, a senior editor at Alfred Knopf Publishing; Douglas Gibson, another long-time Munro friend and her Canadian editor; and Daniel Menaker, one of the editors at The New Yorker for many years when Munro was publishing there.

Although these four provided some interesting factual information about Munro's career, including contracts and sales, the most engaging part of the panel was hearing from the four people who were the most important in helping Munro establish her career. Barber said she and Close were working on preparing a second Selected Storiesof Munro's work. Barber said that Munro's final collection Dear Life got a big boost after the Nobel Prize award, selling 400,000 copies and being licensed in forty different countries. Ann Close added that the new uniform paperback series put out by Vintage after the Nobel win has sold over 400,000 copies, and Dear Life has sold an additional 200,000 copies in paperback. I was grateful that four such important people, people who affectionately call Munro "Alice," were willing to attend and share personal anecdotes about their relationship with her.

Some other observations and reactions to the presentations: The opening panel of "Writers' Appreciations" featured Steven Heighton of Kingston, Ontario; Robert McGill of U. of Toronto, Lisa Moore of St. John's NL, and Aritha Van Herk of U. of Calgary. I particularly liked Heighton's description of Munro's stories as being "holographic," that is, not linear and not flatly two-dimensional, but rather viewable from multiple in-depth angles simultaneously—metonymic in the sense that the whole was embedded in each part.

Other presenters discussed the stories Munro wrote when she was a student at U. of Western Ontario; her use of multiple points of view; The View from Castle Rock as a story cycle; the theme of invasion; teaching Munro's stories in Slovenia; the use of letters in her stories,; and the use of memorized poems. The latter was particularly interesting to the audience, for it evoked issues of recitation as a means of linking generations, as well as the significance of embedding rhythms in the mind. One of the final presentations was a provocative piece by well-known Munro expert Magdalene Redekop of U. of Toronto, about Munro's stories "Lichen," in which Munro is seen as the prototypical storyteller—Scherazade.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the presentations of two professors from the U. of Toronto who are well-known for their light-hearted approach to the serious business of studying and teaching great literature—Dennis Duffy and Tim Struthers. Dennis did a lively presentation on Munro's story "Too Much Happiness," and Tim did what he called a tribute to "the only voice" of Alice Munro, ending with a memorable quote from the Kentucky writer Wendell Berry.

It was a pleasurable conference, with no rancor, no posturing, no academic egos—just genuine love for the work of a Canadian—indeed an international—treasure, who if there is any justice in the world, should singlehandedly rescue the short story from its second-class status.

As I mentioned some time ago, I am working on a critical history of the British short story, focusing on the generic characteristics of the form as reflected in major short stories since the eighteenth century. In this post and one next week, I discuss what I consider to be the crucial generic issues in four stories by Rudyard Kipling. Works Cited will appear at the end of Part II.

Hardly anyone talks about Rudyard Kipling's fiction any more, especially his short fiction. However there was a time when Kipling received quite a bit of attention, much of it negative. I suggest it might be worth noting that the caustic criticism Kipling's short stories once received is precisely the same kind of criticism that has often been lodged against the short story form in general--for example, that the genre focuses only on episodes, that it is too concerned with technique, that it is too dependent on tricks, and that it often lacks a moral force.

Henry James noted that the young Kipling realized very early the uniqueness of the short story, seeing what chances the form offered for "touching life in a thousand different places, taking it up in innumerable pieces, each a specimen and an illustration." In a word, James argued, Kipling appreciates the episode" (l8). However, it is just this appreciation for the episode, according to influential critic Edmund Wilson, that prevented Kipling from becoming a great novelist: "You can make an effective short story, as Kipling so often does, about somebody's scoring off somebody else; but this is not enough for a great novelist, who must show us large social forces, or uncontrollable lines of destiny, or antagonistic impulses of the human spirit, struggling with one another" (32).

Moreover, it is not simply because Kipling could not "graduate," as it were, to the novel that critics have found fault with him. Irish short story great Frank O'Connor confesses his embarrassment in discussing Kipling's stories in comparison with master storytellers like Chekhov and Maupassant, for he feels that Kipling has too much consciousness of the individual reader as an audience who must be affected. C. S. Lewis also recoiled from Kipling for similar reasons. Complaining about what he calls the excess of Kipling's art, he cites how he constantly shortened and honed his stories by blotting out passages with Indian ink. Ultimately, says Lewis, the story is often shortened too much and as a result "the style tends to be too continuously and obtrusively brilliant" with no "leisureliness."

Lewis's criticism is similar to Edmund Wilson's, for it suggests displeasure with Kipling's stories because they are not based on the same assumptions as the novel. Lionel Trilling notes that the words "craft" and "craftily" are Kipling's favorites, and Wilson says that it is the paradox of his career that he "should have extended the conquests of his craftsmanship in proportion to the shrinking of the range of his dramatic imagination. As his responses to human beings became duller, his sensitivity to his medium increased."

Such remarks indicate a failure to make generic distinctions between the nature of the novel and the nature of the short story; they either ignore or fail to take seriously Stevenson's realization that the tale form does not focus on character, but rather on fable and on the meaning of an episode in an ideal form. Bonamy Dobree has noted this fabular aspect of Kipling's stories, suggesting that as Kipling's mastery of the short story form increased, he became more and more inclined to introduce an element of fable. "Great realist as he was, it is impossible to see what he was really saying unless the fabular element is at least glimpsed" (l67).

However, the fabular element, so common to the short story form, is often criticized as being limiting in Kipling, as indeed over the years it has been a central cause of criticism of short fiction generally. For example, W. W. Robson has suggested that Kipling's desire to have complete possible control of his form and medium, while it can lead to impressive achievements in fantasy and fable, "can also lead to a simplification and distortion of human character" (260).

Such a judgment assumes that human character in fiction is constituted solely of conduct, that character is created and revealed by the actions of man in time and space, in the real world. And indeed, such an assumption is typical of the expectations we have about character in the novel form. However, such need not be an assumption of character in the short story. As Isak Dinesen has suggested in her story "The First Cardinal's Tale," the tale or short story form is one that focuses on an idealization-- not man and woman seen as they are in the everyday world, but rather transformed by the role they play in the story itself. In the short story, it is the fable that is the focus; the characters exist for the sake of the story rather than the story existing for the sake of the characters.

In this post and one more, I will briefly discuss four of Kipling's best-known stories--"The Man Who Would be King,""Without Benefit of Clergy,""Mary Postgate," and "The Gardener" in an attempt to identify the essential short-story characteristics of Kipling's work. I do not claim that these stories are not highly crafted, that they do not involve unrealistic character, that they do not depend on artifice. For in many ways, they must stand guilty of such charges.

What I do wish to suggest is that such charges are not necessarily damaging, for they indicate that Kipling was perhaps the first English writer to embrace the characteristics of the short story form whole-heartedly, and that thus his stories are perfect representations of the transition point between the old-fashioned tale of the nineteenth century and the modern twentieth-century short story--a transition, however, which Joseph Conrad, because of the profundity of his vision, perhaps was better able to make than Kipling.

One of Kipling's most Conrad-like stories is one of his earliest pieces, "The Man Who Would Be King," which Henry James called an "extraordinary tale" and which many critics have suggested is a typical Kipling social parable about British imperialism in India. Walter Allen calls it a "great and heroic story," but says that Kipling evades the metaphysical issues implicit in the story and refuses to venture on the great generalizations forced upon Conrad in "Heart of Darkness" (67-68). In perhaps the best discussion of the story, Paul Fussell, Jr. calls "The Man Who Would Be King""a zany exemplum" in which fantastic burlesque events cloak a sober theme. However, Fussell does not carry this notion of burlesque very far, contenting himself with a discussion of the Biblical and Masonic allusions in the piece.

Fussell suggests that much of the plot of "The Man Who Would Be King" constitutes a "virtual parody of Biblical history," but he does not understand that such a burlesque and parody tone and structure might be the basic motivation of the story. Instead he concludes by suggesting that although the story embodies a Christian-Masonic commonplace moral that a man who would be a king must learn to rule himself, Kipling ennobles the theme and rescues it from being obvious by giving it an ironic treatment. The story, says Fussell, has a tone of serious playfulness stemming from Freemasonry which must have struck Kipling as both profound and silly at once. "It is precisely this knowing Masonic tone which provides 'The Man Who Would be King' with the paradoxical comic-pathetic quality which is the major secret of both the brilliance of its narrative technique and the rich humanity of its ethical import."

While I agree with Fussell that the secret to the story is its tone, I feel that Fussell's concern for theme prevents him from seeing that indeed tone and style are everything in the tale. The story primarily focuses on the crucial difference between a tale told by a narrator who merely reports a story and a narrator who lives a story. The frame narrator is a journalist whose job it is to report the doings of "real kings," whereas Peachey, the inner narrator has as his task the reporting of the events of a "pretend king." This situation reflects a basic fictional problem: The primary narrator tells us the story of Peachey and Davrot, which although it is fiction, is presented as if it were reality. The secondary narrator tells us a story of Peachey and Davrot in which the two characters project themselves out of the "as-if" real world of the story into the purely projected and fictional world of their adventure.

The tone of the tale reflects the journalist narrator's bemused attitude toward the pair of unlikely heroes and his incredulity about their "idiotic adventure.""The beginning of everything," he describes, was his meeting with Peachey in a railway train when he learns that the two are posing as correspondents for the newspaper for which the narrator is indeed a real correspondent. Role-playing is an important motif in the story, for indeed Peachey and Davrot are always playing roles, for they are essentially vagabonds and loafers with no real identity of their own.

After the narrator returns to his office and becomes "respectable," Peachey and Davrot interrupt this respectability (characterized by the narrator's concern for the everyday reality that constitutes the subject of his work) to tell him of their fantastic plan and to try to obtain from him a factual framework for the country where they hope to become kings. "We have come to you to know about this country, to read a book about it, and to be shown maps," says Carnehan. "We want you to tell us that we are fools and to show us your books." The mythic proportions of the two men, or rather their story-book proportions, for mythic sounds like too serious a word here for the grotesque adventurers, are indicated by the narrator's amused awareness that Davrot's red beard seems to fill half the room and Carnehan's huge shoulders fill the other half.

The actual adventure begins with more role-playing as Davrot pretends to be a mad priest (an ironic image that he indeed is to fulfill later) marching forward with whirligigs (playful crosses?) to sell as charms to the savages. The narrator again becomes "respectable" and turns his attention to the obituaries of real kings in Europe until three years later, Peachey returns, a "whining cripple" to confront the narrator with his story that he and Davrot have been crowned kings in Kafiristan, and "you've been sitting here ever since--oh, Lord!" Peachey's inserted story is thus posed over against the pedestrian story of the narrator's situation and is contrasted to it by its fantastic, story-like nature in which indeed Peachey and Davrot have set themselves up as fictional kings in a real country.

The story-like nature of the adventure is indicated first of all by Peachey's frequent confusing of himself with Davrot and by his frequent reference to himself in the third person. "There was a party called Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan that was with Davrot. Shall I tell you about him? He died out there in the cold. Slap from the bridge fell old Peachey, turning and twisting in the air like a penny whirligig, or I am much mistaken and woeful sore...." As Peachey tells his tale, he insists that the narrator continue to look him in the eye, thus becoming an image of the Ancient Mariner who holds the wedding guest by his glittering eye and thus links the listener and teller in a story-made bond.

As Paul Fussell has suggested, the events that Peachey tells suggests a parody of Biblical history, and indeed Peachey and Davrot often speak to the people Davrot calls the "lost tribe" in Biblical language. The purpose of these Biblical allusions is to give Peachey's tale an externally-imposed story framework, indeed the most basic and dignified story framework in Western culture. The progress of Davrot's becoming king moves from fighting to craft via masonic ritual, a ritual that reaffirms Davrot's superior position and controls his followers.

However, since Davrot has projected himself into the role of god as king, and thus assumes a position in the kingdom as the fulfillment of prophecy and legend, he is bound to this particular role. It is only when he wishes to escape the pre-established role and marry a native girl that his world falls apart. When he is bitten by his frightened intended bride, the cry, "Neither God nor Devil, but a man," breaks the spell and propels Davrot and Peachey out of the fictional world and back into reality again.

The fact that Peachy and Davrot are really only over-determined doubles of each other is indicated not only by Peachey's reference to himself as suffering Davrot's fate, but also by the fact that if Davrot is the ambiguous god-man, Peachey is the one who must be crucified. Kipling finds it necessary of course to make this split, for he must not only have his god-man die, but he must have him resurrected as well. Peachey is the resurrected figure who brings the head of Davrot, still with its crown, back to tell the tale to the narrator. Peachey's final madness and death and the mysterious disappearance of the crowned head are the ironic fulfillment of a final escape from external reality.

It seems clear from the serio-comic tone and the parody use of Biblical story and language that what Kipling is attempting in "The Man Who Would be King" is a burlesque version of a basic dichotomy in the nature of story itself. The narrator, who deals with real events in the world, tells a story of one who in turn tells a story of fantastic events in which the real world is transformed into the fabular nature of story itself. Davrot/Peachey project themselves into a purely story world, but once accepted there, they cannot break the code of the roles they have assumed.

When they do make such an effort, the story they have created, and thus the roles they have played, become foregrounded as roles only and crumble like a house of cards. The man who would be a king can only be a king in the pretend world of story itself, and then only as long as story-world or story-reality is maintained. A story character cannot be human, for when he attempts to become real, i.e., when he begins to take his story status as true reality, the story ends.

It is little wonder that "The Man Who Would be King" has such a comic tone, for truly what Kipling is playing with here is not the nature of empires, but the nature of story. If one wishes to read the story as a parable of the tenuous and fictionally-imposed nature of British imperialism, then such a reading is possible, but only because the story primarily is about the essentially tenuous nature of the fable world itself.

I love a good love story. I don't mean those "date movie" bits of fluff and/or coarse carnality that parade as love stories nowadays. If you have ever checked the background info on my blog, you probably know this, since my favorite book is The Great Gatsby and my favorite movie is The French Lieutenant's Woman—both love stories about the mad complexity of being seized by love. I just finished rereading the ultimate love story Wuthering Heights because in doing the research for my recent presentation in Ottawa on Alice Munro, I was reminded that it was her favorite book as a young woman—that she read it numerous times—not a healthy thing to do, she once admitted to an interviewer.

So, when I got my recent issue of The New Yorker and saw that they were devoting their Summer Fiction issue to "Love Stories," I was excited. Well, maybe not excited, but itchingly intrigued. The double issue includes five short "memoir" pieces on the subject of "My Old Flame" by the likes of Rachel Kushner, Joshua Ferris, Colm Toibin, Miranda July, and Tobias Wolff. These pieces seem to have been written at the request of The New Yorker editors, and like many such "why don't you write us a few hundred words about…." they don't seem particularly inspired—just ordinary jobs of work by competent writers.

The four short stories in this issue on the subject of "Love" are by David Gilbert, Ramona Ausubel, Haruki Murakami, and Karen Russell. I read them all four straight through today in a morning of what in California we call "June Gloom"—early morning low clouds that conceal the sun until about 3:00 in the afternoon. You wouldn't think that June would be such a depressing month in California, but there you are, or rather, here I am, feeling gloomy, not only by the weather, but by these silly, cynical, bland, and boring stories ostensibly about love.

Good stories, as you perhaps know, I read more than once. However, after reading these four fictions in the Summer 2014 New Yorker, I just can't bring myself to read them again. Here are my first-reading impressions:

Ramona Ausubel's "You Can Find Love Now" is an oh so clever bit of silliness about the Cyclops (you know, the one-eyed giant from Odysseus) looking for love in all the modern places by seeking advice for online dating from an online service. Two page fillers of advice, such as "Know who your target is," followed by sophomoric responses such as "I like fat girls, old girls, tall girls, tired girls. Girls who lack adequate clothing, girls whose best idea for getting my attention is to send a photo of themselves holding suggestive Popsicles, their fists covered in red melt." (snicker, snicker).

Karen Russell's "The Bad Graft" is about a young couple who take a honeymoon type road trip to Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California, where she gets "pricked" (get it) by a thorn on a Joshua Tree and is invaded by the spirit of the tree. It's a bit more ambitious than Ausubel's trope, but not by much. In her "This Week in Fiction" interview, Russell tries to give the story mythic significance by talking about transformation, metamorphosis, etc., etc., but the fact of the matter seems to be that she just got a case of tourist fascination with the twisted trees while on a trip to Joshua Tree and wanted to demonstrate her Internet-based erudition, as she has done in her stories in the past. I appreciate she is having a good time here—she says part of the "weird fun" of the story was trying to imagine what a plant might articulate to itself if it were suddenly folded into human consciousness—but the fact is that the story tells us more about plants than about human love. It plants are your passion, you might have fun with it too.

David Gilbert's "Here's the Story" starts off with two people on an airplane holding hands. Anyone who has ever read an airplane love story in their lives will know by the end of the first paragraph that the damned story is going to end with the plane crashing. And sure enough—spoiler, spoiler, with no alert)—it does.

In his "This Week in Fiction" Interview, Gilbert said that this is his first attempt at doing "historical fiction," noting he was always too lazy to do the research. However, now because the Internet makes it so easy for someone who knows nothing about a certain historical milieu to appear as if he knows everything, we must wade through a lot of historical detail about an Easter Love-in at Elysian Park and the final game of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1967 before we can get to the fatal plane crash. It does not make the story any more interesting to have our suspicions confirmed by Gilbert, who admits that the "idea" for the story came from a response to the question of "What really happened to the original lost parents of the Brady Bunch children—you know the first wife of a "man named Brady and "the lovely lady's" first husband. Well, if you read through this tedious context-ridden story, you will know.

The least gimmicky story in the bunch is Haruki Murakami's "Yesterday," although it too depends more on the trick title allusion (Beatles) than any real understanding of love. (I sought the song out on my i-pod and played it this morning; it did not make the June gloom go away.) The story is a triangle piece about two guys and a girl—one who wants the girl but not really, and another who realizes he wants the girl too late. No reaching for cleverness here, as in the other three stories—but it is just bland and flat—lots of dialogue that does nothing but fill up pages (The New Yorker pays by the word, you know), nothing much about the mysterious complexity of love, just a quickly forgettable story about the one that got away, or what might have been, or something like that.

O.K. call me a romantic and be damned. But a love story should be about love—like those crazy adolescents of Shakespeare, those explosive forces of nature of Emily Bronte, like that clumsy coming together of Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons in front of the fireplace, like Fitzgerald's crazy Gatsby who does it all for that silly irresistible Daisy. Good Lord, New Yorker, don't give me uninspired blandness and sophomoric cleverness. Give me love!

When I posted Part I of my discussion of Kipling's short stories last week, I really wasn't sure anyone would be interested in him in this day and age. But the post, which included a discussion of "The Man Who Would Be King," received a fairly large number of views. Thank you. What follows is the conclusion of a draft of the chapter on Kipling in the book I am working on entitled A Critical History of the British Short Story. I would appreciate comments and suggestions.

The tenuous world of fable is also the subject of Kipling's other well-known India tale, "Without Benefit of Clergy." This story has already been analyzed thoroughly by Eliot L. Gilbert who offers an existential reading of the tale, suggesting that in its depiction of an absurd universe it is very much like the conclusion of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Gilbert says that the threat of disaster broods over the story and that the "sense of the irrationality of life is always lurking in the background." The basic theme of the story, says Gilbert, is the futility of ritual and conventions as a hedge against disaster. However, he suggests a moral interpretation of the characters' need for order; for the need implies a distaste for the world as it is and a great longing "to substitute for the disorganized reality of today, the perfectly structured artifice of tomorrow." Eliot suggests that Kipling is saying here that the untidy reality of today is the only reality there is and that life has a law of compensation which decrees that provision for the future must be made at the expense of the present.

Such a reading, although perhaps justifiable in terms of the content of the story, ignores the fabular structure of the tale and insists that the story exists in a cosmic reality of external "justice" or "retribution." However, what the story actually depicts is the typical "double life" of fiction itself in that John Holden lives in two worlds--the world of everyday reality of his government job and the self-created fantasy world of his life with Ameera. The first is a world governed by the rules and laws of society, whereas the second violates all rules and laws of the first by attempting to set up purely aesthetic laws of its own. In the social world, Holden must conceal all traces of both happiness and sorrow in his fantasy world where Ameera is all the world in his eyes and exists only for him: "When the big wooden gate was bolted behind him he was king in his own territory, with Ameera for queen." The child that is expected when the story begins is a symbol of the bond that exists between them, an embodiment of their complete devotion to one another.

Throughout the story, Ameera is aware of the external world that threatens to impinge upon them as she worries about the white mem-log who might take Holden from her. When the child is born, the baby becomes "a small gold-coloured little god" and is named Tota, for the parrot who is regarded as a sort of guardian-spirit of native households. And indeed he is a symbol of the little house that serves as Holden's fantasy world. It is only when the child begins to develop individuality, when he tells Holden that he is not a spark but a man, that abruptly he becomes ill and dies. Holden must then turn his mind to his work; and indeed the focus of the story shifts to the everyday world when Holden discovers that the "old programme" of "famine, fever, and cholera," which soon takes Ameera, has reestablished itself. Holden's cry, "Oh, you brute! You utter brute!" is a cry against brute reality itself. The story ends with Holden's return to the house three days later to find it looking as though it had been untenanted for thirty years. The owner of the house says he will have it pulled down "so that no man may say where this house stood." The end of the story marks the end of the fantasy itself, for with the reassertion of reality the story itself inevitably must end.

Just as in "The Man Who Would be King," although certainly here with a different tone, the fabular nature of "Without Benefit of Clergy" is characterized by Biblical language and poetic talk, talk which Ameera characterizes as "very good talk." Indeed, it is talk that perpetuates the fantasy situation, for dialogue is the central means by which the story is told. The story opens with dialogue about the impending birth of the child and continues throughout with Holden and Ameera speaking in "thees" and "thous" and trying to live within a world of "good talk," even though Ameera finds that with the birth of the child, she must have "straight talk" and "very hard talk" in a way that she did not have to think of before.

It is not that the child must die in order to prove that ritual is not a hedge against cosmic reality, but rather the child must die because he is a concrete symbol of the intangible fantasy world that holds Holden and Ameera together. However, the problem is that the child is not only symbol but also external reality; that is, he is heir to the rules that govern the external world, rather than a creature solely of the "good talk" that governs the fantasy world. In the terms of the fable, when Holden asserts his individuality he escapes the realm of symbol, and thus his death destroys the fantasy world itself. The death of Ameera is only the ultimate objectification of the death of the fantasy world which is finally objectified in the destruction of the house so that the fantasy world becomes as if it had never existed at all. Just as in "The Man Who Would be King," the fantasy world can exist only so long as external reality is not allowed to intrude, only so long as the participants of the fable can maintain their separation in a world of their own making.

"Mary Postgate" has been singled out by Boris Ford in his discussion of Kipling as representative of many of Kipling's shortcomings as an artist. The story is "internally quite bogus," says Ford, "manipulated from the outside and for preconceived purposes." Ford accuses Kipling of creating the story purely for the purpose of indulging his own feelings of revenge and hysteria, thus making the central character a vehicle for his own vicarious enjoyment. ( "A Case for Kipling," p. 7l). This is a harsh criticism typical of critics who refuse to look at Kipling's short fictions as stories which exist in their own right, preferring instead to make moral judgments on Kipling himself. The conclusion of the story, when Mary Postgate allows the fallen enemy pilot to die, is indeed a shocking one, but should be understood in terms of the character that Kipling creates. The most interesting aspect of the story is that it focuses on a character who is only known from the outside and who only exists in relation to other characters. As her mistress says to her at one point, "Mary, aren't you anything except a companion? Would you ever have been anything except a companion?" Mary's response is, "I don't imagine I ever should. But I've no imagination, I'm afraid."

However, it is precisely Mary's imagination, an imagination that is never revealed to us until the shocking conclusion, that is the subject of the story. To Miss Fowler, Mary is but a companion; to young Wyndham Fowler, she is an "unlovely" orphaned nephew--"Gatepost,""Postey," or "Packthread," his "butt and his slave." When she cannot master the charts he brings home from the war, he says, "You look more or less like a human being.... You must have had a brain at some time in your past.... You haven't the mental capacity of a white mouse." Whatever Mary thinks of Wyndham is not directly revealed, for we never know what she thinks. "What do you ever think of, Mary?" Miss Fowler demands at one point. The reader can only guess.

And the only guess the reader can make is based on her reaction to news of Wyndham's death. "The room was whirling round Mary Postgate, but she found herself quite steady in the midst of it." Passivity is indeed Mary's primary characteristic, passivity and what Miss Fowler recognizes as her "deadly methodical" nature. Mary's true imaginative relationship to Wyndham is indicated by her preparations to burn all of his things. The extremely long list of items that fill almost a page of text indicates, without sentimentalizing, Mary's devotion to Wyndham. But it is the death of the child in town by a bomb that more fully objectifies Mary's relationship to the dead young man. After she sees the ripped and shredded body of the child, she uses Wyndham's words about the enemy: "'Bloody pagans!' They are bloody pagans. But,' she continued, falling back on the teaching that had made her what she was, 'one mustn't let one's mind dwell on these things.'" By the time she reaches home, the affair seems remote by its very monstrousness.

However, as she prepares the sacrificial oil to burn the remaining possessions of Wyndham, the images of Wyndham and the child return in the person of the downed enemy pilot. As the pilot asks for help, she cries, "Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn." And the dead child she has seen is of course not only the child in the village, but also the image of Wyndham, the only child, in her passivity, she has ever had. As the pilot cries for help, she screams, "Stop that, you bloody pagan" in Wyndham's own words. Consequently, the pilot becomes not a human being, but a thing responsible for the death of Wyndham and the child in the village. As she hums and tends the fire, she thinks, "if it did not die before [tea-time] she would be soaked and have to change."

Mary's primary characteristics of passivity and method serve her well here as she thinks with a secret thrill that she can be useful in the war effort. As she waits for the man to die, "an increasing rapture laid hold on her. She ceased to think. She gave herself up to feel. Her long pleasure was broken by a sound that she had waited for in agony several times in her life." When the sound of death does come, she says, "That's all right," just as she has said when she found out that Wyndham had fallen from four thousand feet. After she goes to the house and takes a luxurious hot bath before tea, Miss Fowler finds her relaxed on the sofa, looking "quite handsome!"

Mary Postgate, solid and unknowable as her name implies, is the kind of character that Katherine Mansfield often singles out later on in British short fiction. "Mary Postgate" is a tacit story of Mary's hidden life in which she lives only in her imaginative relationship with others. What the story provides is the ironic single opportunity for Mary to act, by refusing to act, thus creating a bitter epiphany for the reader. Her secret thrill and final transfiguration result from her sense of being allowed to act in the world that she previously has only read about in the newspapers. The dropping of the pilot from the sky is like the magical breaking in of the external world into her previously hermetically-sealed world of passivity. It allows her to perform what she understands to be useful work in the world. The fantasy world becomes momentarily real and thus Mary finds a release for her previously unexpressed desires.

Like "Mary Postgate," Kipling's most famous story, "The Gardener," also depends on concealment of an inner life for its effect. And Like "Without Benefit of Clergy," it depends on the notion of a double life, a split between external reality and a tenuous inner reality. Both Edmund Wilson and Frank O'Connor call "The Gardner" Kipling's best story, even a masterpiece, but, as so often the case with Kipling criticism, they do so with reservations. Edmund Wilson believes that the story is not of the highest quality because of the fairy tale properties of the ending. O'Connor also has serious reservations about the conclusion of the story when Helen goes to the cemetery to visit the grave of her illegitimate son and meets a man she supposes to be the gardener, thus echoing the mistake of Mary Magdalene when she goes to the tomb and meets the resurrected Jesus.

The impact of the conclusion of the tale depends, of course, on the fact that Kipling has concealed the truth about the boy being Helen's son throughout the story. O'Connor accepts the argument that such a concealment might be justified by the fact that Helen herself has concealed this knowledge from the village, but still he does not believe that this rescues the story. O'Connor says that had he written the story he would have revealed the illegitimacy at the beginning. The result would be to remove the story from the world of celestial gardeners and place it in the real world, thus indicating throughout that "The Gardner" is a story of Helen's heroism in bringing the child home in the first place (l0l-l03).

Eliot Gilbert has tackled these objections to the story directly and has suggested that Kipling is not guilty of trickery here, but instead has concealed the facts of Helen's case as an essential echo of the theme of concealment which prepares the reader to experience the same shock that Helen does at the end. He argues that the supernatural ending "represents the final intensification of the author's vision, too compressed and cryptic to find expression within the realistic framework of the rest of the tale." However, as excellent as Gilbert's discussion is in rescuing the story, it still would not dismiss O'Connor's misgivings, nor does it clearly explain why Kipling's vision requires the so-called supernatural conclusion.

The basic technique of the story depends on a gap between details that are "public property," that is, details which the village is aware of and which in turn the reader knows, and unwritten details which are private property, known only to Helen herself. What is public is a lie and what is private is the truth. Furthermore, what is ugly in the public eye is revealed as beautiful in the eye of the reader at the conclusion. The basic question is: what makes the truth beautiful at the end? Even at the conclusion, Helen does not accept the young man as her son, still referring to him as her nephew, thus continuing the protective lie she has perpetuated throughout the story. The irony, however, lies in the fact that Helen's heroism depends precisely on this concealment, for it is obviously done not for her own sake, but for her child's.

Earlier in the story, when the boy wants to call Helen "Mummy," and she allows him to do so as their secret only at bedtime, she reveals the secret to her friends, telling the boy that it's always best to tell the truth. His reply--"when the troof's ugly I don't think it's nice"--constitutes a revealing irony in the story about the nature of truth and its relationship to beauty. What the boy calls "ugly" is the truth Helen tells that the boy calls her "Mummy," even though she is not his mother. The truth that she is his mother is however the beautiful truth that cannot be revealed within the profane realm of everyday society, for that truth would indeed be ugly from that profane point of view.

The death of the boy and his mysterious spontaneous burial under the shelled foundation of a barn marks the psychic death of Helen also, for in her double life, she truly has lived, like Mary Postgate, only for her son. The resurrection of his body marks a parallel resurrection for her as she makes her trip to visit the grave. Mrs. Scarsworth is, as other critics have well noted, an embodiment of Helen's split self and thus echoes her previous position. Mrs. Scarsworth tells Helen that she is tired of lying. "When I don't tell lies I've got to act 'em and I've got to think 'em always. You don't know what that means." Helen of course knows precisely what that means, but even though she is the one most able to directly sympathize with Mrs. Scarsworth, still she cannot tell the truth, for that truth is ugly within the profane world.

However, what is ugly to the profane world is finally revealed as beautiful within the realm of the sacred. Helen, who is both Mary Magdalene, the fallen, and Mary the mother of Christ, goes to find the grave of her son and savior and is directed to it by the ultimate embodiment of the sacred. It seems inevitable, in a story which deals with a double life-- the life of public property and the life of private emotion--that the ultimate incarnation of spirit within body in Western culture should be the means by which the secret of spirit is revealed to the reader. The secret revealed at the end of the story is the same as the one revealed when Mary comes to look for the body of Christ--that is, that he is not here, but has arisen--that is, that he is not body but spirit. The true reality of the story is the reality of the sacred and always hidden world, which is sacred precisely because of its hidden nature.

As is usually the case in short fiction, it is the world of spirit, the world of the sacred that constitutes the truth, and that truth, regardless of what it appears to be within the profane framework, is always beautiful. It is not so much that Kipling plays a supernatural trick at the end of the story, but rather that he needs an ultimate embodiment of spirit within body to communicate the ironic reversal of the apparent lie being the most profound truth. The not-told of the short story is more important than what is told, for what cannot be told directly always constitutes the ideal nature of story itself.

Works Cited

Allen, Walter. The Short Story in English. Oxford: Clarendon, l98l.

Dobree, Bonamy. Rudyard Kipling: Realist and Fabulist. Oxford UP, l967.

Fussell, Paul. "Irony, Freemasonry, and Humane Ethics in Kipling's 'The Man Who Would Be

King."English Literary History25 (1958): 2l6-33.

Gilbert, Eliot L. The Good Kipling: Studies in the Short Story. Athens: Ohio UP, l970). 21-49.

James, Henry. "The Young Kipling."Kipling and the Critics. Ed. Elliot L. Gilbert. NY UP, l965.

Lewis, C. S. "Kipling's World."Kipling and the Critics. Ed. Elliot L. Gilbert. NY UP, l965.

O'Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice. Cleveland, Ohio: World, l963.

Robson, W.W. "Kipling's Later Stories."Kipling's Mind and Art, Ed. Andrew Rutherford. Stanford UP, 1964.

Wilson, Edmund. "The Kipling that Nobody Read."Kipling's Mind and Art. Ed. Andrew

Rutherford. Stanford UP, l964.

Lionel Trilling's essay from The Liberal Imagination is reprinted in Kipling and the Critics, pp.

89-98;

Edmund Wilson's essay from The Wound and the Bow is reprinted in Kipling's Mind and Art, pp.

17-69.

Dorothy Johnston, a valued reader (and a very fine writer) has asked me whether I plan to talk much about the Romantic poets in my new book. A Critical History of the English Short Story. With the exception of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which I take to be a classic short story, and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, I do not plan to forage in the exquisite gardens of the Romantic poets, although I have taught them many times. However, I do talk a bit about origins of the short story in the Romantic period, and include a draft here about that connection. Thanks, Dorothy, for the conversation.

From the very beginnings of short story criticism, literary historians have attempted to account for the common judgment that the short story began in America in the early nineteenth century by distinguishing short fiction of this period from that written previously in England and Europe. For example, in l90l, in the first extended formal discussion of the form after Poe, American critic Brander Matthews attributed the difference to a new sense of "compression, originality, ingenuity, and fantasy." The following year, critic Bliss Perry denied this distinction, arguing that the tales of Boccaccio and Chaucer exhibit the same characteristics. Instead, Perry claimed, the nineteenth century short story is distinguished from earlier stories by the "attitude" of the story writer toward his material. A few years later, H. S. Canby made this emphasis on the attitude of the teller more specific. In the nineteenth century short story, argued Canby, there is a more vivid "realization for the reader of that which moved the author to write, be it incident, be it emotion, be it situation.... Thus the art of the short story becomes as much an art of tone as of incident."

Because tone rather than plot or character has frequently been cited as a distinguishing characteristic of short fiction, perhaps this feature signifies the best place to more clearly establish what is uniquely new in short fiction in the early nineteenth century. One source of the focus on tone in early short fiction can be found in the eighteenth-century personal essay, which added a sophisticated reflective voice to the exemplum, the basic form of short narrative previously predominant. In the early nineteenth century, this personalized voice was further combined with the new romantic interest in folktale and legend. For example, in America, although Washington Irving took his "story" from folklore, it was his "voice" that set his sketches apart from the Germanic models he used for "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." In an 1824 letter to Henry Brevort, Irving said, "I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials. It is the play of thought, and sentiment and language; the weaving of characters, lightly yet expressively delineated; the familiar and faithful exhibition of scenes in common life; and the half concealed vein of humour that is often playing through the whole--these are among what I aim at."

It is obvious that Diedrich Knickerbocker, the voice of Irving's two most famous tales, is more like the eighteenth-century voice of the Spectator's English squire Roger de Coverly than he is like the anonymous storyteller of folk tale and ballad. The basic difference is that whereas in the folk tale the personality of the teller is backgrounded, the "town talker" depends on his own personal impression of that which he narrates. If Irving's Sketchbook, especially the "Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle" stories, mark a new departure for short fiction, that innovation lies in the uniting of folklore story with the individualized teller and thus, while maintaining interest in the story, adding a subjective interest. Another well-known example of this combination of the spooky tale with the sophisticated teller is Gogol's "The Overcoat," an often-cited candidate for the honor of originating the short story in the nineteenth century in Europe.

For the folklore teller, it is the story that is important, not the characters as individuals nor the personality of the teller. With Chaucer and Boccaccio (where of course we have dramatized and individualized tellers, even very famous ones in Chaucer), although the tales may reveal something about the personalities of the tellers, either as to their type or as to their social milieu generally, the tellers do not significantly take part in the story itself, nor do they reveal in any engaged way how they feel about either the stories they are telling or the characters in them. It is only after the romantic shift that the feeling of the teller gives importance to the action of the tale.

Although neither Bliss Perry nor H. S. Canby specify what the change in attitude in the teller or the new emphasis on tone means for the short story, it might be suggested that it marks a loss of "faith" in the supernatural content of the story once held by the old folk teller and the consequent adoption of a new ironic view by the sophisticated teller. However, this new sophisticated attitude is also marked, as is suggested by Boris Ejxenbaum in his famous 1918 essay on Gogol's "The Overcoat," by a nostalgia for what has been lost. The secularizing of the supernatural in the short story in the nineteenth century means that the drama of the clash between the sacred and the profane no longer takes place in the cosmos or in the lives of the saints, but rather in the psyches of individuals, as Hawthorne and Poe's stories so amply show.

This secularizing and internalizing of the sacred is a basic Romantic view, outlined by M. H. Abrams as "natural supernaturalism. However, the implications of this shift, although discussed by Abrams, Robert Langbaum, and others in terms of the poetry of the period, have never been explored in short fiction, for short fiction's relationship to Romanticism has itself seldom been examined.

The only extended discussion of the romantic element in the short story is Mary Rohrberger's book on Hawthorne and the modern short story. By citing from Hawthorne's prefaces as well as from the comments of various contemporary short story writers, Rohrberger argues that both Hawthorne and modern short story writers share the romantic notion of a reality that lies beyond the extensional, everyday world with which the novel has always been traditionally concerned. Consequently, the form shares characteristics with the romance in being symbolic and romantic. "The short story derives from the romantic tradition," argues Rohrberger. "The metaphysical view that there is more to the world than that which can be apprehended through the senses provides the rationale for the short story which is a vehicle for the author's probing of the nature of the real. As in the metaphysical view, reality lies beyond the ordinary world of appearances, so in the short story, meaning lies beneath the surface of the narrative.

Although Rohr Berger is surely right in claiming that the short story is closer to the romance form than to the novel in its basically symbolic nature, she treats the form as though it were identical to the romance, failing to consider either the new emphasis on tone in short fiction in the nineteenth century or the unavoidable influence of the "objective" and "realistic" conventions of fiction pioneered in the novel during the eighteenth century. The short story cannot be considered a "new" form in the nineteenth century if it is simply a resurgence of the old romance. What must be examined is the result of the combination of the symbolic romance form with the new emphasis on the teller and the new focus on the "real," as opposed to the "ideal." Only then can we understand how reality can be shown to lie beneath the ordinary world of appearances even as the details of the story focus on the external world.

I would like to suggest three basic implications of this shift that influence the short story form throughout the nineteenth century. First of all, the shift of emphasis from the sacred as a transcendent realm to taking it to be a human projection places a new focus not only on the imagination as the source of the sacred, but on the theme of the imaginative construction of reality itself. Consequently, short fiction of the nineteenth century often presents a situation that is ambiguously both real and imaginative. Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" is the classic example. Second, the supernatural figures of the old romance story, which were formerly taken to be symbolic of transcendent values, are transformed into projective fictions of either the teller or the central character. Melville's Bartleby is such a seemingly supernatural yet ultimately metaphoric projective figure. Third, the teller, even though he still focuses on the formerly supernatural subject matter of the old romance and folk tale, does so without belief in the supernatural or transcendent. The result is that he often is transformed into an ironic voice. As Boris Ejxenbaum has shown, Gogol's "Overcoat" is an experiment with this combination or folk tale and ironic voice.

One way to approach the short story's romantic nature is to examine the question of when and where the short story form thrives and blossoms--the kind of social situation and cultural milieu wherein the short story seems more relevant to the concerns of a society than the novel. For example, George Lukacs has suggested that the short fiction form appears in either a phase of "a Not Yet" (Nochnicht) or in a phase of the "No Longer" (Nichtmehr). Boccaccio's tales appear in an era before the modern bourgeois novel, before there was a totality of human relations and behavior as interpreted by bourgeois society.

Lukacs says that fiction withdraws from the novel into the short form when "the social basis, the social milieu of the novel disappears, and the central figure must hold his own against a pure natural occurrence. Lukacs might have added that this natural rather than social conflict does not come from the outside only. The inward turning of fiction begins in the romantic period and reaches such heights in the later nineteenth century that the internalized, secularized, and projective romance form vies with the novel form for predominance. The modern return to this mode began with the Romantic period when character "revelation" rather than character "evolution" became most important and when the notion of epiphany replaced socially established value as the source of meaning. When external values are lost, then the short fiction form seems most appropriate to the milieu. The short story has always been an antisocial form, either in its adherence to mythic relationships or in its adoption of secularized psychological replacements for the lost myth.

The short narrative form in the modern world, regardless of what sophistication it has received at the hands of contemporary artists, remains close to the presocial modes with which It began. In a Kenyon Review Symposium several years ago, writers from all over the world testified to this fact. For example, Erih Kos of Yugoslavia said that since his country has only recently emerged from a peasant economy, it also has only recently emerged from the period of myths. The short story is a popular form in Yugoslavia, says Kos, because the people are "still under the influence of myths, whose magical lights give fateful significance to all everyday happenings, even apparently insignificant ones."

Because the short story does not deal with unified social values, the form seems to thrive best in societies where there is fragmentation of values and people. This fragmentation has often been cited as one reason why the short story became quickly popular in early nineteenth century America. In 1924, Katherine Fullerton Gerould said that American short story writers dealt with peculiar atmospheres and special moods, for America has no centralized civilization. "The short story does not need a complex and traditional background so badly as the novel does," argued Gerould.

Wendell Harris and Lionel Stevenson have suggested somewhat the same reason for the predominance of the novel in English literature. Stevenson points out that as soon as a culture becomes more complex, brief narratives expand or "agglomerate" and thus cause the short story to lose its identity. The fragmentation of sensibility did not set in in England until about 1880 at which time the short story came to the fore as the best medium for presenting this fragmentation. Wendell Harris also reminds us that the nineties in England were known as the golden age of the short story and notes how with the fragmentation of sensibility, perspective or "angle of vision "becomes most important in fiction, especially in the short story in which, instead of a world to enter as in the novel, the form presents a vignette to contemplate.

Harris has also noted that from Fielding to Hardy, fiction was defined in England as "a presentation of life in latitudinal or longitudinal completeness." This concept of narrative paralleled man's intellectual concern with society; thus the short story was thought to be insignificant in England until late in the nineteenth century when the appropriate vision for it arrived. The "essence of the short story" says Harris, "is to isolate, to portray the individual person, or moment, or scene in isolation detached from the great continuum at once social and historical, on which it had been the business of the English novel, and the great concern of nineteenth century essayists, to insist." As Frank O'Connor has noted, whereas the novel can adhere to the classical concept of a civilized society, "the short story, remains, by its very nature remote from the community romantic, individualistic, and intransigent."

In the most generalized sense, then, the basic development of short narrative, from its origins in mythic accounts up through the beginning of the nineteenth century, can be summarized in the following way: Beginning with the first major shift from the old romance story of the middle ages when Boccaccio secularized the tale form and made a human comedy out of a previously divine one, continuing on up through the eighteenth century, the history of the form is one of a developing movement away from the metaphoric parable toward the realistic in which, although the "end" of the story was still to focus on a moral purpose, the "means" of the story was to appeal to verisimilitude and reason and to depend on the involvement and attitude of the individual teller.

With Horace Walpole's experimental combining of the romance story with novelistic characters in "The Castle of Otranto," we see a self-conscious effort to return to the old metaphoric romance form while using the methods of verisimilitude of the novel. The result was that gothic fiction became projective, dealing not with external values, but with subjective values, with dream material and psychologized reality. Mrs. Barbauld's experiment with the gothic fragment "Sir Bertrand" further emphasized the projective origins of short fiction by detaching character and event from any semblance of social framework and presenting story as the embodiment of dream. With the gothic writers and the romantic poets of the early part of the nineteenth century, we see a shift away from a concept of language as referential and the art work as imitative to a view of language as constitutive and the art work as creative.

The Romantics demythologized the old tales and ballads, divesting them of their external values and remythologized them by internalizing those values and self-consciously projecting them outwards. The Romantics wished to preserve the old religious values of the romance and ballad forms without their religious dogma and mythological trappings. By perceiving the origin of the old story mode to be within basic psychic processes, they secularized the myth by radically foregrounding the subjective and projective nature of story.

This effort to return to the old religious perception of the world discarded by the eighteenth century was spearheaded by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Lyrical Ballads. The ballad story, which had previously existed seemingly in vacuo as received story without the influence of the teller, now became infused with the subjectivity of the poet and projected onto the world as a new mythus. Value existed in the world outside, but as the Romantics never forgot, only because it existed first within the imagination of the artist. This basically romantic view infused the epoch- making Lyrical Ballads and underlies an important distinction between the romantic lyric and eighteenth century poetry before it.

The Romantics' fascination with medievalism and folk material sprang from their realization of the basic religious or spiritual source of both the old romance and the folk ballad. Their return to the old ballads was part of their effort to recapture the primal religious experience without received dogma. This is indeed the focus in Wordsworth's "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads" and in Coleridge's discussion of his and Wordsworth's dual tasks in The Biographia Literaria. As Robert Langbaum has argued, the uniting of the old ballad material with the lyric voice of a single individual perceiver in a concrete situation gave rise to the romantic lyric. The positioning of a real speaker in a concrete situation encountering a particular phenomenon which his own subjectivity transforms from the profane into the sacred is the key to the Romantic breakthrough.

As Coleridge says, his own task was to focus on the supernatural, "yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to choose subjects from ordinary life and "excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us." Clear examples of this dual project are Coleridge's lyrical story, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Wordsworth's lyrical story, "Resolution and Independence." In the Lyrical Ballads, the ballad or "story" element, the hard outlines of the event, are subsumed by the lyrical element, which is foregrounded. However, in America, for Hawthorne and Poe, it is the story element that is foregrounded. The lyrical element is primarily reflected by the personal voice of the teller.

Consequently, while America is usually given the credit for originating the short story, it is clear that the basic impulse for the form began in England with the Romantic poets. Because the new subjective narrative impulse was fulfilled by Romantic poetry and fiction in England was identified with the realistic impulse of the novel, the short story did not develop in England during the Romantic period. However, this is not to say that one cannot find examples in short narrative during the period of the conventions which later dominate the short story.

In next week's post, I will discuss three well known and often cited short narratives from the early nineteenth century in England to point out how they make use of, although perhaps not with the same facility as stories in America and on the Continent, the same devices and assumptions that underlie the more accepted beginnings of the form with Poe and Gogol. I choose Lamb's "Dream Children" because of its focus on the tension between reality and imagination; John Polidori's "The Vampyre," because of the projective nature of its character configuration; and Sir Walter Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale" because of the relationship between its narrator and the traditional ballad story. I will provide footnote documentation at the end of Part II of this discussion.

T. O Beachcroft suggests that Charles Lamb's most famous essay, "Dream Children," from Essays of Elia (1822), because of its narrative movement and its management of time between the present and the past, is a central example of the emergence of the short story from the essay. However, the piece is typical of basic short story conventions in more intrinsic ways in that it is a story about the telling of story as well as a story about a purely imaginative event. It also anticipates the short story in depending upon a surprise ending in which storytelling itself is revealed to be reverie. On a first reading of "Dream Children," one has no reason to doubt the actuality of the dramatic event described: that of the narrator's children sitting around him to hear about their great grandmother and their uncle, that is, until the very end of the piece when the narrator awakes and finds himself in his bachelor arm chair.

The mode of the story does not make it clear whether it is a pure dream tale or whether it is a combination of dream and reverie, a kind of hypnogogic state. The latter seems the most likely, both because of the subtitle, "A Reverie," and because of the specificity of the events recalled from the past. The story is a combination of both dream and memory; the tale the narrator tells to the children is memory, but the children themselves are a product of projective imagination. The entire story is told in terms of the telling of the telling; the present time is that of Elia writing about his telling the story to the children. The imagined events, because they correspond so closely to reactions of the children to the story itself, so convince us of the irreality that we are affected by the sentimental nature of the whole of the tale until the conclusion when we discover that the teller is an old bachelor and that the children are only those who might have been.

No one really exists in the piece except the teller himself; all are shades of those who have been or those who are never to be. "Dream Children" is an interesting experiment in the creation of ideal fictional listeners who respond to the separate events of the tale. Thus, the truly narrative mode of the work lies not in the memory that is related, for that indeed is only reverie, but in the narrative of the telling of memory events, in the creation of the listeners to the story. The structure of the piece consists of the alternation of long passages of discursive recollection, beginning with the phrase, "Then I told them how..." with short descriptions of the children's reactions, beginning with such phrases as "Here Alice put on one of her dear mother's looks,""Here John smiled, as much as to say...,"'Here the children fell a crying...." The climax comes when the teller, talking to the children about their dead mother, looks at the child Alice and "the soul of the first Alice looked out of her eyes with such a reality of presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me."

While the narrator gazes, the children grow fainter and recede until only their "mournful features" are seen in the distance, "which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech: 'We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all.... We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams.'" Because the piece depends so much on the revelation at the end that the "as if real" children listening to the reminiscences are dream children only, the story bears some resemblance to other stories later in the nineteenth century in which a supposedly real character is revealed at the end to be a product of the imagination. Thomas Aldrich's famous American short story "Marjorie Daw" is the most obvious example, but this motif is a common one in the short story in the nineteenth century and is part of the general romantic emphasis on responding to the imaginary as the most significant real.

Although John Polidori's "The Vampyre: A Tale" (1819) cannot be said to have had a direct influence on the development of the short story in English literature, it deserves mention as the first vampire story in English, which gave rise later to Sheridan LeFanu's "Carmilla" and many other gothic stories in the latter half of the century. The manner of the story has often been criticized as pretentious, convoluted, and prolix, although the plot idea and many of its details have been said to derive from Byron, most directly from "A Fragment" which Byron appended to Mazeppa in 1819, and from his earlier verse tale, "The Giaour."

It is not clear that "The Vampyre" is the story which Polidori started on that famous night on Lake Geneva, for Mary Shelley in her introduction to Frankenstein says that Polidori had in mind some "terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole." It is more likely that after Byron dismissed Polidori from his service as a physician, Polidori made use of both Byron's public image and Byron's work to create the prototype of the Byronic vampire, Lord Ruthven. Thus, the story is important in the history of gothic romance, and since the gothic is the predominant form of the English nineteenth-century short story, it is important for a study of short fiction in that period also. However, it is significant for my purposes in a more intrinsic way, primarily in the manner with which it deals with character.

Indeed the most interesting aspect of "The Vampyre" is the character of the central figure Aubrey and his relationship to the larger-than-life figure of Lord Ruthven, for it is truly Aubrey's story that is central here. Lord Ruthven, a mysterious figure who inspires awe in those who see him, is more an objectification of Aubrey's own conflicting desires than he is a folklore vampire figure from European myth. His arrival in London is coincident with the arrival of Aubrey, a young gentleman who "cultivated more his imagination than his judgment." Aubrey's central characteristic is that he thinks "the dreams of poets "are the "realities of life." However, discovering that there is "no foundation in real life for any of that congeries of pleasing pictures and descriptions contained in those volumes, from which he had formed his study," he is about to relinquish his dreams when he meets Lord Ruthven, who becomes indeed a figure of the imagination made real.

In a sentence that both reflects the awkwardness of Polidori's style and the focus of the relationship between Aubrey and Ruthven, we see a central theme of short fiction in the nineteenth century: "He watched him; and the very impossibility of forming an idea of the character of a man entirely absorbed in himself, who gave few other signs of his observation of external objects, than the tacit assent to their existence, implied by the avoidance of their contact: allowing his imagination to picture everything that flattered its propensity to extravagant ideas, he soon formed this object into the hero of a romance, and determined to observe the offspring of his fancy, rather than the person before him." In the last half of the century, this projection of an imaginative state outward and then the response to it as if it existed in the external world is a dominant short fiction motif.

The narrative thrust of the story, as it is for many stories later in the century, is Aubrey's desire to "break that mystery, which to his exalted imagination began to assume the appearance of something supernatural." When Aubrey decides to leave Ruthven in Rome and to travel alone to Greece, another common nineteenth century short story motif is introduced--the projection of the desire for the spiritually beautiful on to an object in the external world. The Greek girl Ianthe becomes an embodiment of the mystery of pure innocence for Aubrey, "a vision of romance," a "fairy form." After Ianthe is killed, presumably by Ruthven, Aubrey, in his delirium and despair, calls upon Lord Ruthven and Ianthe as if "by some unaccountable combination he seemed to beg of his former companion to spare the being he loved." The combination is "unaccountable" only in the manifest level of the story. On the unconscious level, it suggests that Ruthven and Ianthe are Manichean projections of Aubrey's own imagination. Indeed, Ruthven's very existence depends on Aubrey's projection of him.

As the events of the story come full circle, Aubrey is constantly haunted by Lord Ruthven; he withdraws to solitude and deteriorates both physically and mentally because of his obsession. Aubrey is finally considered insane and confined to his chambers. Ultimately, because his rage cannot be vented against Lord Ruthven (in the manifest story because of an illogical and unmotivated promise, but in the latent story because Lord Ruthven is indeed his own projection) Aubrey breaks a blood vessel. When the hour of midnight strikes, marking the end of his promise, Aubrey "frees himself" by writing the story we have been reading and dies immediately afterwards.

"The Vampyre" is a flawed version of the kind of story which Robert Louis Stevenson later perfects in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," but it is a typical romantic gothic story, for just as Mary Shelley in Frankenstein develops the monster as a projection of Victor Frankenstein's own repressed nature, so also does Aubrey project his own desires on Lord Ruthven, creating out of him a creature of his own imagination. What seems highly implausible in the tale--the fairy tale figure of Ianthe, the promise that Aubrey makes to Ruthven, the illogical companionship of the two men, the marriage of Aubrey's sister to Ruthven—can be accounted for by understanding the image of Ruthven as the active double of the passive and imaginative Aubrey. The story is an interesting, if primitive, version of a quite common romantic short fiction convention: the mysterious evil figure, projected as an embodiment of the imagination of the central character--a figure who seems more a denizen of story reality than of external reality.

Poe, of course, develops this motif to its most polished extreme in "The Fall of the House of Usher," although other examples of the theme can be seen in tales throughout the nineteenth century. Aubrey is the typical romantic searcher for that which is supernatural, i.e. that which is a product of the pure imagination. The romantic notion of the quest for the purely spiritual (which then ironically is reduced to the merely physical), or the corresponding quest for the spiritual in the physical, can be seen later in the gothic fictions of Hawthorne, Poe, Le Fanu, Bulwer Lytton, and others. It is also a common theme in the stories of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Hoffman, Gautier, and Nerval. I am not suggesting that Polidori is responsible for these themes, but rather that he serves as the clumsy transmitter of romantic motifs which become common devices in short fiction later in the century.

The best known example of the oral folk tale in the early nineteenth century is Sir Walter Scott's insert tale in Redgauntlet which is often anthologized as "Wandering Willie's Tale" (1824). Told by the blind fiddler Willie Steenson, the story has been called by Wendell Harris and Julia Briggs Scott's "only fully successful brief narrative" and "almost a textbook example of the well-told tale as opposed to the short story." The story differs from the previous pieces I have discussed in that it is oral rather than written and thus more radically foregrounds the character of the teller. Because the tone of the tale takes on such importance, the story manifests a self-conscious ambiguity as to whether the events recounted are supernatural or psychologically realistic. The story has much the same oral ironic tone as the famous tales by Washington Irving and much the same ambiguity concerning the tension between dream reality and external reality as the tales of Hawthorne.

"Wandering Willie's Tale" forms an interesting bridge between the traditional folk tale in which confrontations with the devil are the stock in trade and the later British mystery story in which the supposed supernatural is accounted for in a grotesque but naturalistic way. Thus, there are both folklore elements as well as literary elements in the story, although the literary is not as pronounced as in the works of Washington Irving who subsumes the folk tale by a more sophisticated style of the teller. Although the Scottish dialect of Willie's telling and the somewhat trivial crux of the missing money and rent receipt on which the story depends undercut the seriousness of the supernatural and make the story a cause for chuckles rather than horror, what primarily makes the story more interesting than the old fashioned ghost story is the foregrounding of the theme of the supernaturalizing of the natural which lies at the very heart of the folk tale impulse itself. As is evident from his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, Scott was familiar enough with this impulse to play with the conventions that underlie it.

Both the supernatural and the natural are presented side by side in the tale to create a pattern of motifs which mocks the Lord of the manor, Sir Robert, even as it also lightly mocks the supernatural explanation of mysterious events. The central events in the story are the mysterious disappearance of the rent money which Steenie pays to Sir Robert just before his death and Steenie's consequent visit to hell to obtain the receipt he needs to prove he paid the rent. The basic manifest motivation of the tale is to clear Steenie's good name, even as the satiric thrust is to lay disrepute on the name of Redgauntlet and thus register a triumph of the lower class over the higher.

Sir Robert is presented as a powerful figure so hated and feared that he is made mythical by the folk as one who has a compact with Satan. This fearsome image is undercut when Steenie goes to pay the master his rent, for Sir Robert dies in grotesquely comic struggle with the gout, screaming for water to put his legs in, all the time being mocked by his pet Jack an'ape. The Jack an'ape plays a crucial role in the story not only in providing the naturalistic explanation for many of the seemingly supernatural events, but in being presented as a grotesque "familiar" for Sir Robert, both of whom bear the image of the fiend in the folk imagination "a fearsome couple." At the end of the story, Willie notes that many feel that the shape of the fiend that the butler saw on Sir Robert's coffin was the monkey, as it was the monkey who blew the master's silver whistle which summoned the butler to his death from fright. It is of course the ape also who is responsible for hiding the money in the old turret called "Cat's Cradle." Thus the monkey serves as a crucial naturalistic explanation for supposed supernatural events as well as a metaphoric image of Sir Robert himself.

Stennie's trip to hell to get the receipt is seemingly motivated by his drinking of brandy and his calling upon Satan to help clear his name of being a thief and a cheat. However, it is also an objectification of Steenie's exasperated reply to Sir Robert's son's question about the whereabouts of the money: it is "in hell! with your father and his silver whistle." The stranger who meets Steenie in his ride through the dark forest is a typical figure of folklore which both Irving and Hawthorne use in their tales of Sleepy Hollow and Young Goodman Brown. Steenie responds to his journey to a hell like image of the Redgauntlet castle filled with ghastly revelers as if he were "like a man in a dream." After receiving the receipt from Sir Robert and being ordered to return in one year, Steenie calls on God's name and immediately finds himself lying in the old churchyard of the Redgauntlet parish. "Steenie would have thought the whole thing was a dream, but he had the receipt in his hand."

The explanation of the mystery of the money is provided very quickly, as Sir John finds the Cat's Cradle, kills the jack an'ape, and urges Steenie to say nothing about his "dream" in the wood of Pittmurkie. Thus, the central ambiguity of the tale, whether the events took place in the realm of superstition and folklore or whether they took place in the real world depends on whether it is the Lord of the manor's good name that is to be preserved or whether it is Steenie's reputation that must be secured. Thus, because of the ambiguous tone of the teller, "Wandering Willie's Tale" marks a transition from the supernatural tale of the folk to the modern short story in which the supposed supernatural has either a naturalistic or a psychologized explanation. In the next phase of the British short story, with the quasi-scientific mystery stories of Wilkie Collins and Edward Bulwer Lytton, this ambiguity becomes the central concern of the narrative.

The nineteenth-century short story differs from earlier short fictions because it combines the following previous separate generic conventions: the basically sacred and symbolic tale of romance and folk ballad; the personal voice of the eighteenth century essay; the focus on everyday reality of the realistic novel; and the sense of reality as an imaginative projection of Romantic poetry. The result of the union of these seemingly incompatible conventions is a new tradition of short fiction that first comes to full flower in America and Europe at mid-century, but whose traces can be found in short fiction in England a generation earlier.

Works Cited

Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., l97l.

Beachcroft, T. O. The Modest Art . London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 86.

Briggs, Julia. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber and Faber,1977), p. 101.

Canby, H. S. The Short Story in English. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., l909), p. 303.

Exjenbaum, B. M. "The Structure of Gogol's 'The Overcoat'," trans. Beth Paul and Muriel Nesbitt, The Russian Review, 22 (Oct. 1963): 377-99.

Gerould, Katherine Fullerton. "The American Short Story," Yale Review, 13 (July 1924), p. 645.

Harris, Wendell. "The Short Story in Embryo," English Literature in Transition), 15 (1972), 261-268.

Harris, Wendell. "Beginnings of the True Short Story in England,"English Literature in Transition," 15 (1972): 269-76;

Harris, Wendell. "English Short Fiction in the l9th Century," Studies in Short Fiction) 6 (Fall 1968): 1414.

Kos, Erih. Kenyon Review, 30 (1968): 454.

Langbaum, Robert. The Poetry of Experience. New York: Random House, l957.

Lukacs, Georg. Solzhenitsyn, trans. William David Graf (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), pp.7-9.

Matthews, Brander. "The Philosophy of the Short Story. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., l901.

O'Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice. Cleveland: The World Publishing Co.,1963), pp.20-2l.

Perry, Bliss. A Study in Prose Fiction. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., l902, p. 303.

Rohrberger, Mary. Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story: A Study in Genre. The Hague: Mouton; Co., 1966), p. 141.

Stevenson, Lionel. "Vision and Form: The English Novel and the Emergence of the Short Story,"Victorian Newsletter, No. 47, (Spring 1975) : 8-12.

The death of South African writer and Nobel-Prize winner this weekend is a sad loss to lovers of brilliant fiction—both short and long. Obits in major newspapers will inevitably focus on her social activism and political novels about Apartheid. For example, the obit headline in The New York Times today read "Nadine Gordimer, Novelist Who Took on Apartheid, is Dead at 90." The opening paragraph of The Guardian reads: "The South African Nobel-prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer, one of the literary world's most powerful voices against apartheid, has died at the age of 90, her family say."

Recognition of Gordimer in the world press as a political voice and the author of socially-significant novels is to be expected. However, it underrates her talent to suggest that her fiction should be valued primarily as polemical. Indeed, she often decried the polemical and said that had she not been born in a country where racial strife was a significant fact of life, her fiction would probably not have been political at all.

Although she published twenty collections of short stories, I expect most commentators will talk about her novels this week, for indeed, they are the most obviously political. As I have suggested many times before, the short story form does not lend itself to the social and the political, for it cannot tolerate the kind of broad context and discursive argument often necessary for the polemical.

Gordimer had a great deal of respect for the short story. When I was editing my first book Short Story Theories, reading everything I could find on the form, I discovered a wonderful Symposium on the Short Story published by The Kenyon Review in 1968 and 1969, featuring discussions and opinions on the short story by writers from all over the world. One of the most pertinent and powerful pieces was the essay by Nadine Gordimer, which, with her permission, I reprinted in my book with a title taken from her essay, "The Flash of Fireflies."

Gordimer noted that literary critics consider the short story as a "minor art form," but that "like a child suffering from healthy neglect, the short story survives." She argued that if the short story is alive while many are dissatisfied with the novel as a means for "netting ultimate reality," it is because the short story as "a kind of creative vision must be better equipped to attempt the capture of ultimate reality at a time we are drawing nearer to the mystery of life or are losing ourselves in a bellowing wilderness of mirrors."

Here is the most important passage from Gordimer's essay:

"Short-story writers always have been subject at the same time to both a stricter technical discipline and a wider freedom than the novelist. Short-story writers have known--and solved by nature of their choice of form—what novelists seem to have discovered in despair only now: the strongest convention of the novel, prolonged coherence of tone, to which even the most experimental of novels must conform unless it is to fall apart, is false to the nature of whatever can be grasped by human reality. How shall I put it? Each of us has a thousand lives and a novel gives a character only one. For the sake of the form. The novelist may juggle about with chronology and throw narrative overboard; all the time his characters have the reader by the hand, there is a consistency of relationship throughout the experience that cannot and does not convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be pure of—the present moment."

There, my friends, is one of the most perceptive statements every made about the short story. Gordimer knew the magic and mysteries of the form very well indeed. It is in her short stories that the political is backgrounded and the complexity of human beings facing universal conflicts and tensions is made the true subject of narrative.

One of my favorite Gordimer short stories is from one of her best-known collections, the 1952 The Soft Voice of the Serpent, which I bought in the mid-sixties as a 25-cent paperback with a garish cover. The story is "The Train from Rhodesia," which focuses on a young woman on a train with her husband traveling through Africa. I liked the story so much I included it in my textbook collection Fiction's Many Worlds.

The challenge for the reader is to understand the relationship between the personal conflict within the young woman and the events of the story--the train stopping for vendors to sell their wares and her husband's purchase of a carved lion. At first this seems less a story than a picture, albeit a moving picture full of dynamic and picturesque action, until we enter the mind of the young woman and realize that she is the central consciousness, that this is her story.

We discover on our first entry into her thoughts that she has recently been married, that this trip into the African bush (maybe her honeymoon) seems curiously unreal, and that she has some difficulty thinking of her husband as being "for good" and not part of that unreality. Although no explicit conflict is suggested by these thoughts, they prompt the reader to be alert for a clash between her and her new husband.

After the young man haggles with the artist/peddler and buys the lion for his wife for one-and six rather than the three-and-six the vendor asked for it, the expected conflict erupts; however, the reader is no more prepared for it than the hapless husband, nor any better able to understand the cause of the young woman's anger. The only explicit clue we have is when we enter the woman's mind one more time and discover that she feels shame for her husband having purchased the lion for so little. However, that this has made her discover a weariness, a tastelessness, and a void in her very being seems like an extreme over-reaction. What must be determined, to use the phrase coined by T. S. Eliot, is how the purchase of the lion is an "objective correlative" for the young woman's sense of existential emptiness.

Although Nadine Gordimer is often concerned in her novels with the conflicts between Whites and Blacks in South Africa, it would be an oversimplification to read this story as a social criticism of the way Whites have exploited the culture of the region. Although indeed this situation may be the social context for the story, the conflict has to do with more basic issues: the difference between the creative and the commercial, the real and the unreal, the cheap and the valuable, and consequently, the meaningful and the meaningless.

The young woman wants the lion to be a work of art, not a commercial product; she wants it to be expensive, valuable, meaningful. When the old peddler sells it so cheaply, it is as though she has lost some rare embodiment of the unreality she has experienced in the past few weeks. That her new husband buys it at such a small price makes her despair and loneliness all the more painful, for she thinks he should have known how she would feel. Like many of her short stories, this is not a political story, except in the broadest understanding of that term.

I have read Gordimer stories throughout the years. Some of my favorite collections are: Livingstone's Companions (1970), A Soldier's Embrace (1980), Jump and Other Stories¸(1991), Loot and Other Stories (2003), and Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black. (2007). I wrote reviews of these last two and include excerpts from those reviews below:

Loot And Other Stories (2003)

Because some of the freedoms that Nadine Gordimer has always bravely fought for in South Africa have been realized, the stories in this collection may not seem so politically pointed as her previous works. However, the brief title story is still perhaps a cautionary parable of the danger facing the post-apartheid world of South Africa. When an earthquake tips a continental shelf and draws the ocean back, revealing secret treasures, people rush in to loot, only to have the sea sweep back to add them to its treasury.

The two most conventional stories in the collection have nothing to do with racial tensions in South Africa, but rather examine in Gordimer’s usual tight ironic style, familiar themes. “The Generation Gap” explores how grown-up children react when their sixty-seven year old father leaves their mother for a much younger woman. It’s a wonderfully wistful and cleverly comic exploration of the hard fact that whereas young people cannot imagine what it is like to be old, older people can never quite forget what it was like to be young. “The Diamond Mine” is a story that has been told many times before, about a sixteen-year-old girl who is surreptitiously seduced in the back seat of her parents’ car by a young soldier they are taking to camp. Concealed by a blanket, while her father, oblivious as fathers often are, prattles on about diamonds, the soldier’s exploring hands are invasive but not entirely unwelcome.

In the novella-length “Mission Statement,” forty-six-year-old Roberta Blayne, who works for an international aid agency, falls in love with a Deputy Director of Land Affairs, who happens to be a native African. Rather than a simple polemical story of racial divides in a post-apartheid world, this syntactically demanding fiction concludes with an abrupt reminder of cultural divergence as she turns down his proposal that she become his simultaneous second wife.

“Karma,” defined as “the sum and the consequence of a person’s actions during the successive phases of his existence,” is another novella-length piece that examines the Eternal Return of a single existence in five different reincarnations--male and female, young and old--to atone for previous errors, right past wrongs, and complete acts previously left undone.

Although she is optimistic about South Africa’s future, Gordimer is not so naïve as to think that the fall of apartheid signals a rosy utopia. She knows that the residue of racial intolerance and the clash of disparate cultures cannot be eradicated by a simple regime change. A collection of stories by a committed writer, for whom politics is inevitably part of the human condition, is always welcome, especially if she is such a fine artist as Nadine Gordimer.

Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black. (2007)

Now that her old subject, South African apartheid, is history, Nadine Gordimer seems to have made history her new focus. In the title story of her tenth collection, a biology professor hears a radio presenter announce that Beethoven was one-sixteenth black, and ponders that while once blacks wanted to be white, now there are whites wanting to be black. Exploring his own anti-apartheid past and his possible black ancestry, the man recognizes that the past is valid only if the present recognizes it.

In “A Frivolous Woman,” when “a grandmother who had never grown up” dies, her family finds a trunk filled with fancy dress costumes she brought from Berlin as a refugee from Nazi extermination. Although they laugh at her frivolity, Gordimer knows that the costumes are not her whole story, quoting L. P. Hartley’s memorable line, “The past is a foreign country.” “Beneficiary” also examines haunting remnants of the past, beginning with the warning that caches of old papers are graves that one should not open. When a woman’s actress mother dies, she discovers a letter revealing that she is the child of an actor with whom her mother had an affair. At the end of the story, when the man she thought to be her father hugs her, she knows that love has nothing to do with DNA.

The dangers of exploring the foreign country that is the past is also central to “Allesverloren,” which means “everything lost,” in which a history teacher whose husband has died, searches out a man with whom he had a homosexual affair years before. Not all these stories are serious explorations of the past. Gregor,” with apologies to Kafka’s dung beetle, is a lighthearted jeu d’esprit about a writer finding a small cockroach behind the plastic window of her word processor, until it consumes itself and becomes a hieroglyph to be decoded. In “Safety Procedures,” when the narrator experiences terrifying air turbulence, he is astonished when his calm seat partner assures him that he will be safe, for she has tried to kill herself three times this year and failed. These are just mischievous finger exercises, concept pieces. But then, even a Nobel-Prize winner has the right to fool around a little.

Gordimer’s literary playfulness is more serious in the three stories collectively entitled “Alternative Endings,” which she self-reflexively introduces by announcing that she wishes to try out three different endings to basically the same story . Somewhat artificially structured on the senses of sight, hearing, and smell, each explore her favorite non-political subject—love affairs and infidelity. Although this is more a miscellany than an even-textured short story collection, even when she is playing around, Gordimer is always a pleasure to read.

My thanks to Nadine Gordimer for her brilliant understanding and mastery of the short story.

Magdalene Redekop, author of the very fine book, Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro (1992), was one of the presenters at the Alice Munro Symposium I attended in Ottawa in May of this year; she talked about "Lichen," from The Progress of Love (1986). The title of the story refers to a close-up polaroid photograph of a woman's genitals, which the central female characters thinks looks like lichen, or moss on a rock: "The legs are spread wide--smooth, golden, monumental: fallen columns. Between them is the dark blot she called moss, or lichen. But it's really more like the dark pelt of an animal, with the head and tail and feet chopped off. Dark silky pelt of some unlucky rodent."

Redekop spoke about how densely allusive the story is, how each time you read it, different chords "resonate." But the allusion Redekop cited that struck me most profoundly was to the primal collection of stories 1001 Nights, in which the archetypal storyteller Scheherazade tells different stories each night for three years to save her life.

Redekop said what echoed for her in the story. Because she just happened to be reading a review of Marina Warner's book on the Arabian Nights, Stranger Magic at the time, she was most taken with the phrase the central male character David in the Munro story uses to describe the way he dumps women—"the big chop." The sentence from Warner's book that makes the connection for Redekop is this: "The power of stories to forge destinies has never been so memorably and sharply put as it is in this cycle, in which the blade of the executioner's sword lies on the storyteller's neck." Thus, the "big chop."

Redekop makes a number of valuable suggestions about the implications of seeing Munro as a kind of Scheherazade, who, unlike other magical storytellers influenced by 1001 Nights, such as Rushdie, Calvino, and Marquez, Munro stays with the realism of the frame story, using its stability to "take liberties in the stories within stories—where, as in the Arabian Nights, 'heads are lopped off' and 'no shape stays constant for a second'."

Having recently read a new translation of Thousand and One Nights, I was quite taken by Redekop's image of Munro as Scheherazade, but during the question and answer period following her presentation, when I tried to explain why it had such an impact of me, I ended up blathering on about how I loved Alice Munro—which sounded banal since everyone at the conference loved Alice Munro. However, I did not mean simply that I loved her writing or the image of her as a grande dame of the short story, but that when I read her stories, I fell in love with her. Redekop's citation of the Scheherazade connection somehow justified that confession of love, which I have since been trying to articulate for myself.

As it happens, Bob Thacker, author of the highly respected authoritative biography, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, who was my fellow keynoter at the Ottawa Munro Symposium, asked if I would be interested in contributing an essay to a new collection of studies of Munro to be published by Bloomsbury Academic publishers for their series, "Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction." The series usually includes three essays each on three of the chosen author's most recent books; it used to be called Continuum Studies in North American Fiction and has featured such authors as Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Erdrich.

I always get most energized on a subject that obsesses me when I am aiming toward a final, finished essay or book, so Bob Thacker's invitation was the ideal excuse to once again immerse myself in the stories of Alice Munro. The three Munro collections to be featured in the book Thacker is editing are: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), Runaway (2004), and Dear Life(2012). I chose to write about the Hateship volume and sent the following proposal to Bob for his consideration:

"The Key to the Treasure":

Sex and Storytelling in Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

In her review of Alice Munro's collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, American writer Lorrie Moore praises Munro's genius as a storyteller, arguing that the "birth and death of erotic love" is her timeless subject. In his review of the same collection, Irish writer John McGahern, also applauds Munro's mastery of the story form, insisting that no one writes as well as Munro about "the hardhearted energy of sex." This essay focuses on the relationship between erotic love and storytelling in five stories from the Hateship collection—"Floating Bridge,""Nettles,""Post and Beam,""What is Remembered," and the title story. The Thousand and One Nights and John Barth's exploration of the relationship between storytelling and Eros in his novella Dunyazadiad, provide a context for this essay's examination of the significance of "what is remembered," and thus narrated, about erotic love, as well as the magical means by which Munro's seemingly realistic stories communicate their complex and ambiguous meaning.

I wrote Bob and told him that I would be using my blog to post my "work in progress" on the essay. I also sent a copy of the proposal to Maggie Redekop and told her the same. I will not be posting the final essay on the blog, for that might possibly infringe on Bloomsbury's first serial rights, in the event they publish the essay. What I will be posting are citations from stories, criticism, theories, reviews, and other literary works, as well as exploratory ruminations. If at any time Bob Thacker thinks I am coming too close to preempting the publication of the essay in the book he is editing, I will cease and desist.

I just thought it might be interesting for readers to follow my progress. (I always come up with about ten times the amount of primary and secondary material than I actually use in the final essay; my blog readers might appreciate the overflow). It might also generate some additional interest in the book, which would be good for Bloomsbury and for Alice Munro. Let me know if you think this is a good idea or a bad idea. Barring any serious objections, I will begin posting my progress on the project next week.

A long time ago, when I was much younger and considerably more daring than I am now, I taught a course for a few years entitled "Love and Sex in Literature." My students and I read and discussed a number of books and stories that have been called pornographic, e.g.: Fanny Hill, De Sade's Justine, Henry Miller's Sexus, The Story of O, etc. I got into a bit of trouble for teaching the course, with one of my colleagues bringing charges of unprofessional conduct against me. However, I had presented research papers at a number of professional conferences and had published several scholarly essays about erotic literature. International scholars judged my research significant and valuable, and I was declared "innocent" of the charges against me.

But that was another time and I won't dwell on it at this time, although I will come back to some discoveries I made about sex and storytelling while teaching the course. I bring it up simply to indicate that I have been thinking about the relationship between sexuality and storytelling for some time now. My interest actually began when I read John Barth's "Dunyazadiad" in his collection of novellas entitled Chimera(1972). The story is Barth's tribute to his long-distance love affair with the iconic storyteller Shahrazad.

Barth's version of the famous frame tale of Thousand and One Nights is told by young sister Dunyzade. During the thousand and one nights while Shahrazad engages in multiple ways of making love and myriad ways of telling stories, she and the genie John Barth,(who appears to her from the future when both utter the same magic words at once, "the key to the treasure is the treasure") theorize about the relationship between these two "life-saving" phenomena. Barth/genie tells Sherry that in his own time and place, there are scientists of the passions who maintain that language itself originated in infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse, by which "magic phrases" they seem to mean that "writing and reading, or telling and listening," are "literally ways of making love." Whether this is actually the case, neither the genie nor Sherry care; yet they like to speak "as if" it were (their favorite words, Sherry's sister observes).

This theory "accounted thereby for the similarity between conventional dramatic structure—its exposition, rising action, climax and denouement—and the rhythm of sexual intercourse from foreplay through coitus to orgasm and release." Even more basically, Sherry and the genie talk "as if" the relationship between teller and told is basically erotic, in which the good reader is as involved as the author:

Narrative, in short—and here they were again in full agreement—was a love relation, not a rape: its success depended upon the reader’s consent and cooperation, which she could withhold or at any moment withdraw; also upon her own combination of experience and talent for enterprise, and the author’s ability to arouse, sustain, and satisfy her interest—an ability on which his figurative life hung as surely as Shahrazad's literal.

Just to refresh your memory about the frame tale of Thousand and One Nights: There are two brothers—King Shahrayar of India and Indochina, and his younger brother Shahzaman, who rules Samarkand. After Shahzaman catches his wife having sex with a kitchen boy, he kills both and, grief-stricken, goes to visit his brother. One day he sees Shahrayar's wife having sex with a slave along with twenty other slave girls and men. He tells Shahrayar, who cuts off the head of his wife and all twenty-one slaves.

Shahrayar declares that each day he will marry a virgin, have sex with her, and then order his Vizier to kill her in the morning. After many girls have died, the Vizier's daughter Sharazad, a refined and intelligent young woman, tells her father that she wants to marry the king so that she might find a way to save the girls of the kingdom or else die. She instructs her younger sister Dunyazad to stay with her and after the king has had sex with her, to say, "Sister, tell us a story." Shahrazad's plan is to finish the story in the middle of the night and then, at her sister's urging, begin another one that she cannot finish by morning. The king, wanting to hear the end of the story, postpones Shahrazad's execution each morning for over three years.

Hanan al-Shaykh, one of Egypt's best-known novelists, who has often been called "the new Shahrazad," said in an address entitled "The New Shahrazad" at Virginia's Sweet Briar College in 2000, that she was not pleased at this designation, for she felt the archetypal storyteller was the epitome of oppressed Arab women—traditionally only good for sex and entertaining men.

However, al-Shaykh says that after reading One Thousand and One Nights, she realized that Shahrazad was not just telling stories to save her life, but rather to take risks--to assume the role of the artist, creating a mosaic that concealed her own power, thus ceasing to be a victim. Her greatest discovery was that the women in these stories were not passive and fearful, but rather strong and intelligent.:

Shahrazad took the role of the artist, the creator, the story-teller who would test her own ability and rise above common artistry. She would penetrate every insight in order to tell stories that would excite, provoke, thrill, educate, and persuade indirectly, like transparent spiders’ threads continuing without taking breath, without finishing her story, fully aware that if she stopped to take that single breath between stories, she would be offering her neck to the sword, and she would be giving the king a chance to remember his twisted logic and his dark emotion."

I recently read Hanan al-Shaykh's new translation of Thousand and One Nights, subtitled "A Retelling. I have a ten-volume set of Richard F. Burton's famous translation of Alf Laylah Wa-laylah, and over the years, have pulled a volume off my bookshelf to randomly read a story, that always compelled me to read another and then another. But, if you are daunted by the multi-volumes, I recommend al-Shaykh's new one-volume translation.

Al-Shaykh has stayed away from children's stories of Aladdin and Ali Baba , saying she preferred to stick with stories about marriage and sex and love and power about misogynists who killed their wives or lovers and women who had to become cunning and manipulative to save themselves. She has restored the sexuality that the famous English version by Edward Lane in 1838 deleted. The need to tell stories is the underlying driving force of Thousand and One Nights, beginning with Shahrazad who has the most powerful motivation of all—to tell stories or to die. Stories lead to stories, which lead to other stories, until the reader is drawn so far away from the originating story that it begins to seem that only stories exist, and that the reader may never find his or her way back to reality. Indeed, the "word "reality" becomes increasingly problematical.

In a piece in The New York Timesentitled "Narrate or Die," on April 18, 1999, A. S. Byatt said:

"The stories in Thousand and One Nights are stories about storytelling without ever ceasing to be stories about love and life and death and money and good and other human necessities. Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood…. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narrative, with beginning, middles and ends."

In an interview in The Atlantic, (Joe Fassler, "The Humanist Message Hidden Amid the Violence of One Thousand and One Nights, June 25, 2013), Hanan Al-Shaykh says that Shahrazad is working on the King through the stories, educating him, maybe even brainwashing him, as the stories slowly teach him to give up his bloodlust and his blanket condemnation of women. She says the book indicates a role for literature to make us more human—not polemical, not political, but on a human level. The stories humanize us and make us better, she says. How a story can do this is something the cognitive psychologists are trying to determine in their study of what is called Theory of Mind.

Some Remarks about Sensate Focus and the Suspension of Disbelief next week. Also some remarks about Marina Warner's 2012 book Stranger Magic: Charmed Stories and the Arabian Nights.

Last week I talked a bit about how John Barth's 1972 novella "Dunyzadiad" in his collection Chimera suggested a relationship between sex and story. This week, I want to call your attention to another novella of that era, William H. Gass's Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, which appeared in Triquarterlyin 1968 and in hardback in 1971. It was reissued this past spring by Dalkey Archive Press.

The extended metaphor that Gass uses throughout the book is that the lonesome wife is the book itself, that very subjective object which we hold in our hands when we read and enter with excitement, pleasure, joy, and yes, even fear. As love/literature, she speaks to the reader as she seduces him with her body, the page:

"how I love you now I have you here…I've got you deep inside of me like they say in the songs, fast as a ship in Antarctic ice, and I won't need to pinion your arms, lover, butt you or knee, you'll stay, you'll want to, you'll beg me not to go and take my myth, my baffling maze, my sex, my veils, my art away…and I shall shave you so close and sand you so sensitive, so scarce and smooth, that when I put you at last up in public in the light of my lights, then anyone—anyone who's paid his buck in—will be easily able, just by looking, to lick the sweet heart out of your heart, the life from your living, and the daylights out of your cage."

At the conclusion of the book, however, when the reader has left her, the lonesome wife complains:

"he did not, in his address, at any time construct me. He made nothing, I swear—nothing. Empty I began, and empty I remained…. These words are all I am…. Oh, I'm the girl upon this couch, all right, you needn't fear; the one who's waltzed you through these pages, clothed and bare, who's hated you for your humiliations, sought your love…. Could you love me? Love me then…then love me…. Yes, I know I can't command it. Yet I should love, if ever you would let me, like a laser, burning through all the foolish ceremonial of modesty and custom, cutting pieties of price and parentage, inheritance and privilege, away like stale sweet cake to sick a dog. My dears, my dears…how I would brood upon you: you the world; and I, the language."

I used Gass's William Masters Lonesome Wife and John Barth's "Dunyazadiad" as an introit to a presentation I made many years ago in Los Angeles at the annual meeting of the California Association of Teachers of English. Both novellas explore a basic relationship between sex and storytelling suggested by the frame story of Thousand Nights and a Night—a relationship between what Coleridge called "Suspension of Disbelief" and sex researchers Masters and Johnson called "sensate focus."

In chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria Coleridge explains the division of responsibilities between Wordsworth and himself in The Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge says that Wordsworth was to focus on the things of everyday life and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural "by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us," a world that had been covered over by "a film of familiarity and selfish solicitude."

Coleridge says that his own task was to direct attention to persons and actions supernatural "so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith."

Critic Norman Holland in his book The Dynamics of Literary Responsedevotes a chapter to the relationship between art and sex, citing many artists and critics who use the language of sexuality to describe the aesthetic response. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard, for example, talks about the poem's "possession" of us completely; director Tyrone Gutherie says that a good director does not so much try to create the illusion of reality as he tries to interest the audience so intensely that they are "rapt" and "taken out of themselves"; and aesthetician Bernard Berenson says that the aesthetic experience is a brief, timeless moment when the spectator is "at one" with the work and the two become one entity."

All of this suggests that the reading experience assumes a dual notion of reality that has been noted by many different thinkers. For example, psychiatrist Arthur Deikman has discussed the difference between what he calls "the action mode," which is a state of striving toward achieving personal goals; and "the receptive mode," which is organized around intake of the environment instead of its manipulation. Because the action mode has been developed for insuring survival, we have been led to assume that it is the only proper adult mode and to think of the receptive mode as being pathological, regressive, or childish. Deikman suggests that love is experienced in the receptive mode.

Deikman uses the terms "automatization" and deautomatization" to suggest this bimodality--terms that echo Coleridge and Wordsworth's purposes in The Lyrical Ballads. For Deikman says what happens to the notion of reality during these periods of deautomatization when one has suspended disbelief is that stimuli of the inner world become invested with the feeling of reality ordinarily bestowed on objects. Through what might be termed "reality transfer," thoughts and images become real.

Philosopher Ernst Cassirer notes a basic difference between practical or theoretical thinking and mythical thinking. He says that in our habit of dividing lie into the two spheres of practical and theoretical activity we are apt to forget that there is a lower substratum that lies beneath them both:

"Primitive man is not liable to such forgetfulness. All his thoughts and feelings are still embedded in this lower original stratum His view of nature is neither merely theoretical nor merely practical; it is sympathetic…. Primitive man by no means lacks the ability to grasp the empirical differences of things. But in his conception of nature and life all these differences are obliterated by a stronger feeling: the deep conviction of a fundamental solidarity of life that bridges over the multiplicity and variety of single forms."

When one is under the spell of mythic thinking, says Cassirer, "it is as though the whole world were simply annihilated; the immediate content, whatever it be, that commands his religious interest so completely fills his consciousness that nothing else can exist apart from it."

This, it seems to me, is the paradigm of the suspension of disbelief and sensate focus. It takes as its prerequisite, continues Cassirer, the "focusing of all forces on a single point." In applying this theory to literature, Philip Wheelwright has noted that such experience is "most incontestably evident" in one's relationship "at certain heightened moments" with another person. "To know someone as a presence instead of as a lump of matter or a set of processes, is to meet him with an open, listening, responsive attitude; it is to become a thouin the presence of his i-hood.' It is, of course, this sense of "presence," Wheelwright says, that poetic language hopes to capture.

It is Norman O. Brown's interpretation of Freud that John Barth's genie has in mind in his analogy of sexuality and literature, for Brown says language itself has its base in infantile erotic play—that all art is actualized play, and that behind every form of play lies a process of the discharge of sexual fantasies. "Original sense in nonsense," says Brown, and "common sense a cover-up job."

Rollo May in Love and Will notes that creativity is always an intense encounter which involves being absorbed, caught up, for which sexual intercourse is an appropriate metaphor.. Jose Ortega y Gasset in Love: Aspects of a Single Theme says that for the lover, the mystic, the artist, attention is so focused on the object that for the moment attention is withdrawn from everything else and the sense of union is created. And Denis de Rougemont in Love in the Western World, notes that love is both the best conductor and the best stimulant of expression.

What does all this have to do with my examination of the relationship between sex and storytelling in Alice Munro's stories? I am not completely sure yet. I am just following a line of thought and teasing out connections. I think it has something to do with the distinction between "realist" fiction and "fantasy" fiction.

Critical response to Munro's first few collections focused on her realism, seeing her stories as relatively transparent depictions of the lives of the people of rural Ontario. However, the more stories Munro pubvlished the more critics began to sense the "artifice" in her work. My colleague Dorothy Johnston said in a recent comment on this blog that the relationship between the "realist" frame of 1001 Nights and the fantastic stories that Shahrazad tells is of particular interest to her. It is of particular interest to me also, and is related, I think to the study of Alice Munro's stories I am working on.

My reading of Marina Warner's book on Thousand and One Nights has further emphasized the distinction between the realistic and the fantastic in my mind and has reaffirmed my long-held notion that, at least as far as the short story is concerned, there is no such thing as "realism"—that the short story maintains its allegiance to its ancestry in fantasy and fairytale, that it has always been more aligned to the mythic view of reality as Ernst Cassier and others delineate it, than to the so-called practical world of the everyday. It has always been more akin, to use Mircea Eliade's terms, to the "sacred view of reality" than to the "profane."

And Alice Munro is, first and foremost, a short-story writer. No matter how ralistic her stories seem, they are always highly patterned artifices that communicate by "storytelling" devices rather than realistic devices.

More about this next time, when I talk about Marina Warner's book Stranger Magic and the issue of that "realistic" frame and the "fantastic" stories interrelated throughout The Arabian Nights.

Marina Warner's generously big book Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (540 pages with illustrations) is a thoroughly researched examination of the influence of The Arabian Nights on western thought, beginning with its introduction of magical imaginative stories on the so-called Age of Reason in the eighteenth century. I read it recently because I had just read the new translation of Thousand and One Nights by Hanan Al-Shaykh and heard Magdalene Redekop refer to Alice Munro as a Shahrazad in a presentation at the Munro Symposium in Ottawa.

In his review of the book in the New York Times, Harold Bloom says that Warner "persuasively redefines The Arabian Nights as an overgrown garden of the delights and hazards of desire." Bloom says that one of the important things Warner does in the book is to remind us of our "sore need for another way of knowledge," a kind of knowledge, for want of a better term Bloom calls "literary knowledge."

I have talked about this before in blogs on Jerome Bruner, who in his influential 1962 book, On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand, argued that to understand human cognition, one needed an approach that went beyond that provided by the conceptual tools of the psychologist, an approach whose primary medium of exchange was the way of the poet, for poet’s hunches and intuitions create a grammar of their own. I also talked a bit about this last week in my references to the philosopher Ernst Cassirer who talked about the difference between theoretical and mythical thinking. As Bloom says about Warner, she "shows some of the ways in which storytelling is essential to the kind of knowledge we associate with the so-called Counter-Enlightenment.

In what follows, I will simply cite some of the passages in Warner's book that seemed the most helpful to my own study of the relationship between sex and storytelling in the stories of Alice Munro, commenting briefly on their possible usefulness to me.

Warner: "The power of stories to forge destinies has never been more memorably and sharply put as it is in this cycle, in which the blade of the executioner's sword lies on the storyteller's neck: the Arabian Nights present the supreme case for storytelling because Shahrazad wins her life through her art."

Me: Most everyone who has read Alice Munro knows that one of her primary themes is the importance of story—that is, recalling the past and creating narratives about it, using stories as a way to come to terms with mysteries of human behavior and thought. She has talked about this in several interviews, which I will pull together later, as well as in many of her stories, which I will refer to in another blog.

Warner: "This is a literature that intends to produce open mouths, shaken heads and inward chuckles. Hyperbole, wild coincidence, arbitrary patterning and illogical chains of cause and effect, all contribute."

Me: This reminded me of one of the great short story writers of the twentieth century, Raymond Carver. Here is a quote from an essay I did on Carver a few years ago: One of the most familiar images of Raymond Carver recalled by his friends and acquaintances is his participation in storytelling exchanges and his wonder at the mystery of story. Describing Carver’s love of telling and listening to stories; Stephen Dobyns says Carver would scratch his head and lean forward with his elbows on his knees and say, “You know, I remember a funny thing.” And when someone else told a story, says Dobyns, Carver would “burst forth with oddly archaic interjections like ‘you don’t say’ and ‘think of that"’ Then he would shake his head and look around in amazement."Tobias Wolff describes Carver’s almost “predatory” curiosity when a story was being told, his vibrancy and breathlessness, “as if everything depended on what you might say next. He let his surprise show, and his enthusiasm, and his shock. “No!’ he’d cry, ‘No!’ and ‘Jesus!’ and "You don’t say!’"

Warner: Naguib Mahfouz says Shahrazad's stories are "white magic." "They open up worlds that invite reflection."

Me: This notion of inviting reflection is important to the short story, for the form began as a means of illustrating moral lessons, which has evolved in a form that is concerned with exploring universal themes. In both cases, the stories do not exist merely to engage readers in a narrative, but rather a narrative that "means" something that bears thinking about.

Warner: She reminds us that the fairytale does not explore individual psychology or interiority.

Me: The focus in Munro's stories are not a Jamesian exploration of interiority, of examining one's motives, but rather the creation of characters who do things for reasons they cannot themselves understand. There is some mystery of motivation that denies psychological exploration.

Warner: "The arabesque intrinsically involves a pattern efflorescing on all sides….Endlessly generative and cyclical, arabesque embodies vitality, resourcefulness and the dream of plenitude (no surface left bare) towards which the frame story and the ransom tales themselves are moving…the stories themselves are shape-shifters."

Me: One of the primary innovators of the short story was, of course, Poe. And Poe was a great admirer of the "Arabesque." He even once wrote a story about the 1002 Night. At the Munro Symposium, Steen Heighton, a writer, notes that Munro's stories are seldom linear and seldom merely functional. Says her stories are like a hologram—an image fractal like, not limited by the frame. This "dream of plenitude" in which no surface is left bare echoes Poe's fantasy of totality, explored most fully in his long prose poem Eureka, 'but underlying his theory of the short story in which everything is essential to the overall unity of effect.

Warner: "The experience of reading the stories and reflecting upon them is open-ended; surprise is an essential trait, but as we, the audience, quickly learn that surprises must be sprung, it becomes more difficult for the story to catch us off guard."

Me: This reminds me of the fact that the most important point in the short story is the ending. In the O. Henry type story, the ending was a surprise. In the Chekhov type story, it was open-ended.

Warner: She says the narrative wheel of the book parades a variety of narrative forms: proverbial anecdotes, riddles, lyric songs, love poems, epigrams, jokes. "There is really no rhyme or reason for the unfolding of plots. When a motive drives the action, envy rules. Besides envy, lust is the principal catalyst."

Me: Well, no question that lust is a "principal catalyst" in many Munro stories. But lust is not a simple matter of the physical, but rather is tangled up with the notion of adventure, freedom, assertion of self, etc.

Warner: "The stories do not obey internal rules about character, motive, verisimilitude or plot structure; they do not easily fit existing theories about fiction, history or psychology."

Me: This relates to the problem of motive in Munro's stories. It is also true that Munro's stories do not follow the traditional rules of the short story (whatever those are). At least, many recent critics and reviewers has suggested that her stories are not typical short stories (whatever that is). More about this later.

Warner: "Given the intricacy of the rules, as you lose yourself in the labyrinth, the prosody resembles something fiendishly patterned, more terza rime than heroic couplets."

Me: Losing yourself in the labyrinth is always possible in the Nights. But, it is also always imminent in the stories of Alice Munro—readers often get lost in the intricacy of the structure of her stories.

Borges has said that all great literature becomes children's literature. Warner says this paradox depends on the deep universal pleasure of storytelling for young and old: stories like those in the Arabian Nights place the audience in the position of a child, at the mercy of the future, of life and its plots, just as the protagonists of the Nights are subject to unknown fates, both terrible and marvelous." Borges has said that the greatest literature displays "reasoned imagination."

Me: I need to examine more the implications of Borges' notion of "reasoned imagination." For the short story often exhibits the paradox of being a fantastic story that is meticulously controlled. See Poe for the most important influence on this in the 19^th century.

Warner: "The intricacy and system of a woven carpet imply a strong degree of predictability; the symmetry and recursive repetitions work like oracles: the patterns must come out in a certain sequence, so discerning them becomes paramount but not quite patent. It needs finesse to read a carpet's complexities." She quotes Nabokov, who said in Speak, Memory: "I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another."(p. 125)

Me: I like this. It not only reminds me of Henry James' story "The Figure in the Carpet," but, more generally, it reminds me of the intricacy of the short story form that requires a careful close reading, for the short story always works more as a language pattern than merely a temporal plot.

Warner: "The Nights inspires a way of thinking ab out writing and the making of literature as forms of exchange across time—dream journeys in which the maker fuses with what is being made, until the artefact exercises in return its own fashioning force. Both of these principles draw away from the prevalent idea of art as mimesis, representing the world in a persuasive, true-to-life way, and emphasize instead the agency of literature. Stories need not report on real life, but learn the way to changing the experience of living it." p. 29.

Me: This is a key passage in the book for me, especially the notion that the principles of the stories in Nights draw away from the idea of art as mimesis and move more toward the idea of art as being self-reflexive. If you take a look at the history of criticism of Munro's stories, you will notice that early critics focused on her stories as simple realism. Later critics have tended to focus more on their structural artifice.

Warner: Talking about Giambattista Basile, Italo Calvino says: "A reading in which metaphors, rather than being considered an ornament that adorns the fundamental interweaving of plot, subplots and narrative functions, move them forward into the foreground, as the true substance of the text, bordered by the decorative arabesque threadwork of fabulous vicissitudes," the weaver conjugates structural motifs in infinite combinations within a basic structure of frame, ground and figure, and then inflects each one differently through variations of color, dimensions, quality of material.

Me: This is good, for it emphasizes that metaphor is the very heart of the story, that metaphor is constructive, constitutive not merely ornament. William Gass talks about this as "model-building" and Walker Percy talks about the constructive process of metaphor as mistake. The notion of the story as being like a carpet woven of various motifs to create a meaningful pattern is crucial.

Warner: "According to a fairytale principle, mystery rules human drives."

Me: This echoes my frequent observation that motivation in Munro stories is always ultimately mysterious, driven by the demands of the pattern and the story.

Warner: She says some of the marks of oral storytelling are: multiple reprises and repetitions, doublings of characters, generations and incidents."

Me: Yes, I see this in oral storytelling; it aids the memory process for the teller. But it also carries on in the written story as well. I wonder why.

Warner: "The dream quality of the Nights depends on a feature of the storytelling mode itself, more fundamental than its optical magic. When the stories use language to institute impossible realities, images become reality and metaphors' status is dissolved so that any referent becomes fact. This mental slippage, turning the figurative into the literal, is typical of the dreaming mind, which happily—and often amusingly—makes puns, especially on homonyms and proper names."

Me: This notion of images becoming reality and the figurative becoming the literal reverses our naïve assumption that story is mimetic. Instead of the story imitating reality, reality imitates story. Need to refer back to Oscar Wilde's famous discussion of this in "The Decay of Lying." Why is it important to a study of Munro's stories? Because it reverses the naïve assumption that her stories are mimetic with realistic plots and real characters.

Warner: "The inner life of characters in the Nights flows into their outer circumstances without resistance, and it is not always clear what is dream and what is not. What you dream looks ahead: perhaps the pattern of all things lying ahead has been set and can be descried in the right conditions." She says Proust aspired to the dream-like qualities of Nights.

Me: We like to think that we can easily distinguish between dream and reality; really, all it takes is a pinch, right to wake us up to reality—as if reality were as certain and secure as all that. I think Munro's stories depend more on dream than many critics have believed.

Warner: She says Borges'Circular Ruins is an allegory of writing; it "demonstrates how imagination at work in literature forges the impossible through language and opens up meanings to depths beyond sense: the not-sense that magic unfolds." She talks about magic in Nights in which common artefacts are ages of wonders and riches—the marvelous in the banal. "Magic in the stories is by definition capable of imbuing lifeless things with vitality, which often endows single objects with power to affect the group and the whole society—the collective as well as the personal." Hugo van Hofmannsthal once asked, "Where is depth to be found? And answered, On the surface." She discusses the "slippage between object and metaphor, as occurs in the case of talismans and other magical devices in the Nights, where the literal materiality of a thing dissolves into the virtual reality of its powers."

Me: This reminds me of one of Raymond Carver's comments that I have quoted before: "It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things--a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring--with immense, even startling power."

Warner: "Observation, imaginative projection and interpretation transform objects of attention and can stimulate them to move and utter—subjectively." . She refers to Jonathan Lamb's book, The Evolution of Sympathy. Lamb uses the term realism to characterize the ability to be as if "I were you." She says Hans Christian Andersen was the write most influential in adopting techniques of sympathy from the Nights. Warner: She says that Coleridge's "Suspension of disbelief" is related to the notion of sympathy through identification.

Me: This ability to take oneself out of the self and project into the other is related to "Theory of Mind" that I have discussed in an earlier blog. See also Cassier on mythic thinking, and Eliade on sacred transformation.

Warner: "Lyric combines words and music to create a tempo that readers and listeners experience physically, as in dancing; poetry here struggles to free itself from constraints of reference and meaning, to reach a wordless state of transport (even of self-annihilation."

Me: Since the short story is more closely aligned with poetry than with novel, there is something in the form of this need to break free of the constraints of reference—using language to transcend language.

Warner: She talks about Freud's couch: "The relation between couch, confession, erotics, daydreaming and storytelling reverberates wonderfully in the figure of the most famous daybed in modern culture, and a prime site of modern fantasy, the couch which Sigmund Freud covered with oriental rugs and cushions."

Me: This is the oriental rug motif again--the figure in the carpet, the notion of the story consisting of interrelated patterns of language that create a form that in itself has meaning.

This has gone on so long, but Stranger Magic is, after all a long book, and, as it is, I have only modestly raided it for material that I think might be helpful. There is much more in Warner's book than I have been able to suggest. But I am in a hurry now to get to the stories. As always, for me, it is the story that must dominate my discussion, not the historical or theoretical context that I might use to ground that discussion.

Whenever I plan to write an analysis of a certain literary subject, I always do a "review of the literature," checking to see what other critics and reviewers have said about the subject I am undertaking. It is a result of old graduate school training that has stayed with me for fifty years (I started graduate school in 1963 at the age of 22). I always encouraged my students—graduate and undergraduate--to do the same when they wrote papers for my classes, for I told them that there was absolutely no point in their writing an analysis or interpretation that just repeated what someone else had already discovered or devised.

So, I offer in this week's blog post the results of my review of the literature on Alice Munro's collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Most of it comes from reviews published in newspapers and magazines when the book was published in 2001, for it often takes at least ten to twelve years after a work appears for academic critics to get around to writing and publishing a full-length analytical paper of said work.

In what follows, I will cite those critical comments that I think might be helpful—those that support my argument, those that serve as straw men/women with whom I can argue, those that provide me with thought-provoking ideas I can further develop. After each citation, I will make a brief comment on how I might use the comment:

John McGahern, "Heroines of Their Lives."Times Literary Supplement. Nov. 9, 2001. PP. 23-24.

Any time an important fellow writer reviews a book, I pay particular attention, because it has been my experience that other writers are much more perceptive about good short stories than newspaper reviewers, who often underrate the form.

McGahern says, "I know of nobody who writes as well as Munro about 'the hardhearted energy of sex.'" He says in Hateship, desire has become "in part, memory and reflection." He says the "marvel of the volume" is "Floating Bridge."

Me: What is it about sex that Munro writes about? Although the physical is important, sex is something more in her stories. It seems to have some to do with the nature of desire, but more than orgasmic desire. Sex has something to do with freedom or control. Desire is not just something you do, but something you think about and something you recall. It always seems to be more important in the past and in the future than in the present. Why does McGahern like "Floating Bridge" so much? It has something to do with the importance of metaphor, I think, and the complexity of the story's theme and its stylistic restraint.

Mona Simpson. "A Quiet Genius." Review of Hateship. The Atlantic Monthly Dec. 2001: 126-35.

Mona Simpson, like most writers, admires Munro's fiction. Although she says it has the simplicity of the best naturalism "in that it seems not translated from life but, rather, like life itself," she says "at the heart of all great naturalism is mystery, an emotional sum greater than its technical parts."

Me: How is this possible? If a fiction focuses on the physical surface of things, how can it be mystery, greater than the sum of its parts. Only mystery if there is some sense that inherent in the physical there is meaning. Marina Warner talks about the mystery of "things" in Arabian Nights.

Simpson quotes the writer Allan Gurganus who said "Munro is our greatest and most subtle surrealist. The plainest of surfaces ignite with the fugitive erotic undertow. After sex, even a readymade supermarket lemon cake can feel like a miracle." Simpson adds: "The shock and credibility of the sexuality (alluded to more than rendered) derives –like Chekhov's—from its absurd, yet dead serious, collisions with the mundane, tactile elements of her characters' lives."

Me: There is something quite paradoxical about sexuality in Chekhov and Munro, something incongruous about the triviality of its physicality and the excessive power it has over those possessed by it. What is a fugitive erotic undertow? What does sex do?

Simpson says the title story is a "love story, perhaps the hardest spell to cast in 2001.""It is as though Munro has set for herself the challenge of writing credible love stories for a culture that usually satisfies its romantic cravings at the movies and turns to fiction for the hard, ugly truth about marriage."

Me: I like this, for while I agree that the title story is a love story, it is surely an unlikely love story, given its central characters—grotesque Romeo and Juliet and a devious teenage Iago—and then ending, ironically, not as melodrama or tragedy or pathos, but comedy. Can there be such a thing as an accidental love story?

Simpson says there is something she has always hoped for in fiction that has no literary term but is best explained by an analogy. She notes a painting by Degas of a woman drying herself after a bath with one foot on the rim of the tub, her body leaning over. "Seeing that image, one might recognize a human position common in life but never before seen through the bending lens of representation… Munro gives us such recognitions."

Me: This is very good, for it gets to the heart of the mystery of art. It has something to do with an ordinary gesture that is caught in such a way as to embody its essential form. We see it, although we have never seen it before, we recognize it, for it is not its content or "stuff" that makes it alive, but its form, its gestalt in space—things coming together in an inevitable way that makes it feel that it had to be just that way and no other way.

Lorrie Moore,""Artship."The New York Review of Books. Jan. 7, 2002, pp. 41-42.

Moore says: "The birth and death of erotic love, and the strange places people are led to because of it…is Munro's timeless subject." She says that Munro knows that the "arranging of love…and the seismic upheavals of its creation and dismantling…is both a kind of pornography of life as well as the very truth of it: it is often the most pervasive and defining force in the shape of individual existence and individual fate." She says one of her signature themes is "the random, permanent fate brought about by an illusion of love." She says title story is an example of this theme.

Me: Lorie Moore is still another fine writer who greatly admires Munro's stories. I am glad that she singles out erotic love as the central Munro subject and that she recognizes that Munro is fascinated by the "illusion" of love. What is an illusion of love? All romantic/erotic love is an illusion, isn't it? It is most powerful at its beginning and at its end. In between, there is often merely reality.

Gail Caldwell, Review of Hateship. The Boston Globe. Nov. 4, 2001, p. C3.

"She is so thoroughly a master of both structure and plot that the crafting of the work is nearly invisible; he stories often feel like effortless, half-conscious slides into another universe."

Me: The theme of the sometimes wrenching shift into Another Country is a common one in the short story. It is a common observation that Munro's stories are so well-crafted that they seem like no craft all—the essence of art being the concealment of the art.

Sebastian Smee, Review of Hateship. Prospect. Oct. 25, 2001.

Smee says Munro's "great theme is sex. No one alive writes as well on the vicissitudes—the pleasures and aches—of relationship between men and women, nor with such a balance of detachment and compassion." "For Alice Munro, desire is never just unruly and destructive. It is also expansive, creating room for experience."

Me: When you think about sex, sex loses its riotous passion, and becomes an object of contemplation—Wordsworth's recollections in tranquility. Love stories are usually told by one of the lovers when the story is over—death, desertion, etc. Or else it is told by a sympathetic or envious observer. Seldom is it told by one of the lovers in the very midst of the passion, for there is really little one can say about the passion, except when one can recall it.

Michael Ravitch, "Fiction in Review." Oct. 2002, vol. 90, Issue 4. Pp. 16070.

Ravitch says, Munro's stories attain the strangeness and exhilaration of perfectly realized dreams." He says she "embraces all that her contemporaries repudiated: exposition and analysis, plot and character….Yet while her concerns may be old-fashioned and humanistic, Munro is also an acute aesthete. Her narratives are as elusive as they are satisfying."

Me: The questions is: how can the stories be so realistic and so fantastic at once? Carver did it by paring down; Munro does it by amplifying. How? How are the stories surreal and yet real at once? This is only possible by transforming the real into an aesthetic object, a formal structure that means something.

Ravitch says the drama in her stories is not merely in what happened, but in how it is remembered and explained."

Me: Yes, this is true; Munro says the same thing—"how" things are recalled and how the story is told.

Ravitch says: "Her cardinal principle is surprise. She plays with exposition as other writers might play with sentences, always coming up with new ways to perform the trick of concealment and discovery. Just when we think we have understood the story line, the narrative emphasis shifts, logically and yet magically. The stories seem spacious at first, organically growing, digressing down haphazard paths. And yet, by the end, all the disparate elements have been fused in rigorous and meaningful ways.""Her stories are like spokes on a wheel, stretching out in all directions at once, opening themselves up to an endless range of interpretation. Their rich ambiguity converts them from mere fact into fable."

Me: This is a key concept What is ambiguity in a Munro story? Something that is not seen clearly, something that could be one thing and at the same time another thing. When this happens, the thing becomes an object of contemplation and thus an element in an art work, part of a formal pattern, a gesture, a thematic suggestion. Munro's characters wish to remove themselves from the everyday.. Ultimately it does not matter if that "other country" they seek is true or false, real or fantasy. Randall Jarrell once said, we have to reckon with what is true and dreams are true also.

Ravitch says: "What most interests Munro about adultery is the drama of the self-divided." Says her women do not swallow arsenic or thrown themselves under trains but find new sources of happiness; "their imaginations sustain them.""One thing Alice Munro teaches is to interrogate stories, always to ask: What is the motive for speaking? She presents storytelling as an act of power, an assertion of meaning, a way of taking control of ourselves or other people."

Me: Ravitch's review is the best review I have found of the collection Hateship. I might go back and take another look at the psychologist R. D. Laing about the divided self theme, for I found it helpful in an essay I once did on Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O." He is right in noting that Munro's women are not like Anna Karenna or Emma Bovary; they are too smart for that, too imaginative. And he is also right, I think, about how important the power of storytelling is for Alice Munro.

Ann Beattie, "Alice Munro's Amazingly Ordinary World."The Globe and Mail [Toronto, Ont] 29 Sep 2001: D.2.
Beattie says, Munro's" selectivity and her ability to transform something mundane into metaphor are truly astonishing. Beattie adds that Munro's accomplishment "is to make the ordinary magical: tree limbs, rocks and water almost alarm us by their viscerally tactile quality. Under her delicate touch, they are transformed; as we connect, we are drawn in to deeper meanings, as in a fairy tale."

Me: Beattie makes a valuable point here. Too often we try to read Munro's stories as if they were realistic, as if "stuff" in them were merely stuff to stub your toe on. But instead, like the stories in Arabian Nights, they are magical and metaphoric and meaningful.

David Crouse, "Honest Tricks: Surrogate Authors in Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage." In Critical Insights: Alice Munro, ed. Charles E. May. Salem Press, 2013. Pp. 228-41.
Crouse says: "Munro deemphasizes physical action in favor of the mind in action. In her stories, the central action is almost always the act of perception itself; other actions, what we might normally consider to be the plot, are subsumed or transformed to this end." He argues that her techniques run counter to those used by other realistic writers. In fact, he says, her stories are also indebted to those of John Barth and Robert Coover in the sixties who made the process of writing their subject. He argues that one of the central conflicts in Hateship is the "conflict between reality and meta-reality, the authentic and the manufactured." He says her narratives are often in conflict with each other, "possessed of a designed messiness that asks the reader to assemble them, jigsaw-like."

Me: I think Crouse is right to "correct" our usual assumption that Munro's stories are simple realism, rather than self-reflexive explorations of storytelling itself. He most convincingly argues that in the title story, Edith, the young girl who engineers the lying letters to Johanna, is actually a "surrogate" author of Johanna's story and that her plot succeeds only because she grows more empathetic with Johanna. I agree. Johanna's story is created by Edith, much as Othello's story is created by Iago. You don't have to love the neighbor as your self to "know" the neighbor as if he or she were yourself. Johanna's story is "created" by Edith's storytelling.

Next Week:

Time to talk about the five stories from Hateship I have chosen to write about.

I tried to teach students how to read fiction, especially short stories, at California State University, Long Beach for forty years. Every time I went into the classroom, I had read the assignment for the day at least four times—once straight through to orient myself to the characters, plot, and style; the second time highlighting those passages that seemed to me to be more than verisimilitude, e.g. motifs that were repeated, passages that seemed to emphasize theme, allusions to other works, passages that puzzled me, etc.; the third time making annotations in the margins about connections and emerging patterns. Finally, I would go back through the story a fourth time, typing up my notes, e.g. quotations, annotations, connections, developments.

The following comments on "Hateship, Friendship" are an example of those notes—notes that would sometimes later lead to the development of my "reading" of the story into an essay. I have developed these notes in preparation for my essay on five stories in the Hateship volume.

Since, this "reading" represents a fourth time through the story, what understanding I have of the early events are conditioned by my knowledge of the later events. I already have in mind the events as they occur in time; my task now is to determine what kind of meaningful pattern they make. The most basic patterning device in a story is, of course, repetition of motifs that create a "figure in the carpet."

The story opens with a variation of the "once upon a time there was a woman" fable device : "Years ago, before the trains stopped running on so many of the branch lines, a woman with a high, freckled forehead and a frizz of reddish hair came into the railway station and inquired about shipping furniture." There is a bit of the stylized grotesque about the woman's physical appearance. I am prepared for a fable.

The story establishes its central theme of "great expectations" (repeated throughout) at the beginning with the introduction of this unnamed woman planning for the future because she expects certain important things are going to happen, although the reader does not know what those expectations are. She seems so certain about the future, when the ticket agent asks if someone is coming to meet her, she does not hesitate, but says "Yes," although she has no knowledge that this is true. I know this is going to be an important theme in the story, for I know that the story ends with the young woman Edith translating the following Latin passage from Horace's ode "Carpe Diem": "You must not ask, it is forbidden for us to know what fate has in store for me, or for you."

In the second scene, when the woman, who is now given the name Johanna, goes to a dress shop to buy her wedding dress, she thinks that when she was younger, she could not have contemplated such "expectations," could not have had the "preposterous hope of transformation, and bliss." Thus, the story begins with what was once traditionally the most important expectation a fair young maiden could have—marriage. However, this woman is neither young (just under forty) nor fair--"No beauty queen, ever." She reminds the agent of a "plain-clothes nun" he had once seen on television. But there is nothing mild nor gentle nor pious about this woman The first description we have of her is that her "teeth are crowded together in the front of her mouth, as if they were ready for an argument." (another grotesque image—kind of like Maria in Joyce's "Clay")

Johanna has come to the shop prepared, even having "rehearsed" her request for the green dress in the window; she has worn clean underwear and put fresh talcum powder under her arms. However, she has no illusions about herself, calling herself a "sow's ear" regardless of the "silk purse" dress she tries on.

The sales woman identifies with Johanna, creates a "bond" with her, and has her try on a different dress that does not make her look as she has been "stuck into the garment for a joke." Since we know that the crucial events of the story are created by a "joke" that two young woman play on Johanna, we have here the first intimation of the theme of a joke that has motivated Johanna's expectations; we learn that it is indeed a "great expectation" when she tells the woman, "It'll likely be what I get married in."

Although Johanna seems absolutely "sure" when she says she will only get married once, she recalls that marriage had not been mentioned, even in the "last letter." She regrets that she has revealed to this woman "what she was counting on." (This is another intimation of the game that gives the story its title, a children's counting game about the inevitable movement toward marriage. Another allusion to expectation.)

Another fable/fairy tale allusion occurs when the sales clerk refers to the Western Fair and "she could have been saying 'the Castle Ball.'" Even the minor detail of the woman giving the package ribbon a "wicked snip" suggests a fairy tale motif.

The sales woman's lament, "Ah, well. Maybe the man in the moon will walk in here and fall in love with me and then I'll be all set!" could be a simple bit of verisimilitude, characterizing a minor character, but since this is a short story the repetition of this motif makes us expect that this is indeed a story about expectation, hopes for what might happen. It's the classic fairy tale love story motif of "someday my prince will come."

We now get the background of Mr. McCauley, for whom Johanna works as a housekeeper, an elderly man, who walks about with his hands behind his back like a "kind landlord inspecting his property or a preacher happy to observe his flock." (another fable/fairytale motif). We are also introduced to Sabitha, his granddaughter, for whom Johanna was the closest thing to a mother since her mother, Marcelle, died (the stepmother motif—not wicked, but certainly not likeable) We also meet Edith, the daughter of the shoe repair man, Sabetha's great friend.

Now we are introduced to the important motif of letters, as we read Johanna's letter saying she is sending a (yet unnamed) man his furniture, adding that she is also coming with it to "be of help" to him. This is the first letter she has sent directly to him, having sent earlier ones via Sabitha's letter to her father (now given the name Ken Boudreau). Gradually, we learn that Boudreau is Mr. McCauley's son-in-law and that McCauley has loaned Boudreau money in the past. All this gradual revelation of information creates an illusion of plot mystery. Alice Munro has noted that this story depends more on plot than many of her stories. However, since this is a short story, in spite of its novella length, it is not what will happen that interests us, but rather what the pattern of those events actually mean about human experience.

We now get the background, via Mr. McCauley's recollection of the past, of Sabitha's dead mother, Marcelle, who was always sneaking out of the house to run around with carloads of boys. "The house was full of a feeling of callus desertion, of deceit."

The next section of the story focuses on Mr. McCauley, who goes about the town telling anyone who will listen about his being wronged by his son-in-law conniving with his housekeeper who has stolen furniture and gone west with it. This introduces the "Ancient Mariner" motif of the man who stops the wedding guest and compels him to listen to his misfortune.

It also introduces Herman Schultz, the father of Edith, who creates the plot to "catch" Johanna. Herman's shoe shop is like a cave and McCauley who has not reflected on it before now sees Schultz's whole life in the cave. "He wished to express sympathy or admiration or something more that he didn't understand." (Any time I run across something that a character tries to understand but fails, it strikes me as something important, for short stories are often about mysteries.)

This also introduces Edith, a "childishly thin "girl who slides in and out of the house when she came to visit Sabitha. "You never got a good look at her face." (Edith is thus introduced as a mysterious figure who slides in with no definite identity) The introduction of Edith is important. Now that Sabitha has gone, Edith has "reverted to being the person she had been before Sabitha came here. Old for her age, diligent, and critical." She is getting past what is called "silliness" with Sabitha (We do not know what this is yet). But when she thinks about Johanna going out west, which she has heard from old Mr. McCauley, "she felt a chill from her past, an invasive alarm. She tried to bang a lid down on that, but it wouldn't stay."

It seems appropriate that she would be reading a Dickens' novel, David Copperfield, for Great Expectationswould have been too obvious). She identifies with David and dramatizes her own situation, feeling she might has well have been an orphan like him "because she would probably have to run away, go into hiding, fend for herself, when the truth became known and her past shut off her future." (This is the expectation motif again—fear that the past will condition the future). She is now worrying that her past trick on Johanna will affect her future.)

The whole joke began when Sabitha tells her on the way to school that she has to send a letter to her father. The two girls create a sort of secret bond, talking in nonsense language or walking with their eyes closed—mostly ideas of Edith. Sabitha's only idea is the child hood game of predicting the future by playing the Hateship, friendship game, in which you write down your name and a boy's name and then strike out all the letters that appear in both names. Then you tick off the remaining letters on our fingers, saying "hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage until you get the verdict of what would happen to you and that boy, sort of like the "He loves me, he loves me not" game with daisy petals. (I did the game using my name and my wife's name. The result was "marriage.")

The game or joke on Johanna begins when she writes to Boudreau to thank him for taking her to the Fair with the girls and giving him the background of her uneventful life. The girls open it and read it and laugh about it, with Edith mocking it, as if it were from a sentimental Victorian novel. When Boudreau writes back to Sabitha and makes no mention of Johanna, Edith decides she and Sabitha will write for hi. While Sabitha is silly in her suggestions, Edith says she is going to be serious. Her letter to Johanna is indeed typical of melodrama and fairy tale, Boudreau supposedly lamenting that he has no friend, but that now Johanna is his friend. Thus begins a correspondence of letters between Johanna and Boudreau, both of which are written by Edith

The next section of the story is about Sabitha's return from visiting her cousins and the changes that have taken place in her. She is plumper and now has breasts, which Edith notices and thinks they seem to indicate a "completely unearned and unfair advantage." Sabitha tells Edith about her visit with her cousins, about how they played games in which they pull down a girls' pajama bottoms to show if she had hair. They told stories about girls at boarding school who did things with hairbrush handles, and how once a couple of cousins put on a show in which one girl gets on top of the other and pretends to be the boy, and they groan and carry on.

Sabitha tells how her Uncle Clark's sister and her husband game to visit on their honeymoon and he was seen to put his hand inside her swimsuit. Sabitha says they were at it day and night, saying "People can't help it when they're in love like that." She says one of her cousins had already done it with a boy and then she puts a pillow between her legs and says, "Feels so nice."

Edith knows about these "Pleasurable agonies" but once when she went to sleep with a blanket between her legs, her mother tells her about a girl who did such things and had to be operated on for the problem. (Clitorectomies were sometimes performed in the nineteenth century because it was felt that girls should not have pleasurable sexual feelings—certainly none self-induced).

Later when they write another letter, Sabitha suggests her father should say he imagines Johanna reading his letters in bed with her nightgown on and that he would crush her in his arms and "suck on your titties." Edith does not write this, but does end the letter with Boudreau saying he imagines her reading his letter in bed with her nightgown on and crushing her in his arms. As a result of this letter, Johanna decides to send the furniture and go West with it. All this girlhood initiation into the mysteries of sex seems to play a role in Edith's attitude, for her thoughts about her future are becoming increasingly important in the story. However, the key effect of the sexual references is that Johanna makes a crucial decision to go to Boudreau after reading Edith's letter (supposedly from him) about wants to crush her in his arms. Female romantic/sexual notions are an important part of the story.

The story now shifts to Johanna arriving at Boudreau's hotel, and appropriately it is painted blue, a reference to Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel" in which fantasy leads to a reality, albeit in a tragic way, when the Swede in that story imagines he is going to get killed and then acts in such a way as to make that happen. It is a story of a game becoming a reality, when fantasy becomes fate.

It is an interesting shift that Johanna, who has come to Boudreau's home because of a romantic fantasy, as soon as she sees he is ill and that his life is in disarray and that he needs her, she shifts from romance to reality immediately--checking the color of his phlegm, wiping her hands on her new brown dress, changing into old clothes from her suitcase, seeing him as being like a "delicate, stricken boy." Checking her bankbook, Boudreau is impressed enough to let her take care of him. We now get his background financial problems and his realization that Johanna is a solution to his problems. She takes control, makes decisions, and begins using the plural first person pronoun, seeing them as a couple. All this is based not on romantic illusions, but on pure practicality.

Because she decides never to mention the letters in which she thinks he had "laid himself open to her," neither one of them ever know how this has come about. She thinks there is nothing in him that she cannot handle and is taken up with all the commotion of this relationship, all this "busy love."

The story might well have ended with this phrase, but since the story has to do with expectation and making things happen, the future must be projected in some way that relates to Edith's concern for the future. This takes place when ;Mr. McCauley dies two years later and the death notice in the paper says that he is survived by his granddaughter Sabitha, his son-in-law Ken Boudreau, and Mr. Boudreau's wife, Johanna and their infant son Omar..

The story ends with Edith, who is no longer afraid of being found out, although she does not know why she has not been found out. Then there is this judgment by the narrator/storyteller:

"And in a way, it seemed only proper that the antics of her former self should not be connected with her present self—let alone with the real self that she expected would take over once she got out of this town and away from all the people who thought they knew her. It was the whole twist of consequence that dismayed her—it seemed fantastical, but dull. As if it was an inept joke or clumsy sort of warning, trying to get its hooks into her. For where, on the list of things she planned to achieve in her lie, was there any mention of her being responsible for the existence on earth of a person named Omar?"

The last line of the story is Edith's translation of the first line of Horace's famous ode "Carpe Diem: "You must not ask, it is forbidden for us to know what fate has in store for me, or for you."

I am not going to try to pull these ideas together and write an analysis of this story until I have given the other four stories the same kind of fairly thorough reading. Next week, I will "read""Floating Bridge."

When I was teaching the short story, I prepared for each class thoroughly, taking more notes than necessary to help me remember the most important themes and tropes in the story. However, I did not simply go over each section of my notes to establish my interpretation. Rather, I used my notes as the basis for asking my students questions. I seldom made a judgment about the meaning of a passage until I had given my students an opportunity to suggest their own interpretation or understanding of the passage.

Sometimes they came up with better suggestions than the ones I had in mind, and sometimes they provided answers for questions that had me puzzled. And sometimes their suggestions would prompt me to come up with ideas I did not have in mind beforehand. In short, most of my class meetings were learning sessions for me. I can only hope they were learning sessions for my students as well. All this give-and-take was what made teaching a real pleasure for me. My students and I did not always agree, but I only challenged their interpretation when it oversimplified, sentimentalized, or trivialized the story, or when their interpretation could not be supported by argument based on the rest of the story.

If I were teaching Alice Munro's "Floating Bridge," I would try to encourage my students to see the complexity, even universality, of Jinny's situation as a woman who has faced death, felt liberated by that knowledge, and then been brought back to life, with not a little resentment, to face the demands that life makes on her. I would urge them to identify with both Jinny and Neal, (especially to resist the temptation of dismiss Neal as a silly man) and to see the importance of the young man Ricky at the end. I would try to get them to appreciate the significance of the central metaphor that ends the story and gives it its name--a bridge that floats.

The story opens with Jinny sitting in a bus stop shelter where she has gone after her husband and a couple of the Young Offenders (from a correctional institute where he is a teacher) have "gobbled" up a gingerbread cake she had made for a meeting that evening. This is a childish irresponsibility typical of her husband. The fact that it opens the story suggests that Jinny's relationship with her husband is an important part of the story's complexity.

Jinny is reading all the graffiti on the walls of the shelter, a "barrage of human messages," and indeed they do seem like a "barrage"—sexual attacks, verbal assaults. She wonders if people were alone when they wrote these, and she imagines sitting here waiting for a bus alone, wondering if she would be compelled to write things down. "She felt herself connected at present with the way people felt when they had to write certain things down—she was connected by her feelings of anger, or petty outrage…." She is considering leaving her husband Neal, but she changes her mind and goes home, and the experience becomes a joke she later told company. This juxtaposition of jokes and seriousness appears later in the story. The theme of feeling a need to write things down is common in Munro's stories. It is not just a need expressed by writers, but by many who feel that the way to deal with a problem is to express it in language. One is compelled to tell a story to control the experience, or at least to redeem it from meaninglessness, to give it significance.

We get some bits and pieces about Jinny's visit to an oncologist, but we don't know what the visit means yet, although obviously we suspect Jinny has cancer. When she goes out into the parking lot, the cars and pavement seem to "bombard" her (another reference to an attack like "barrage.") Ironically, as we soon find out, the oncologist has told her there are good signs that the cancer has shrunk.

The narrator, reflecting Jinny's mind, says she does not take change of scenery well these days and wants everything familiar and stable; she doesn't like changes of information either, although it seems she has received such a change. Neal's van has hippy type stickers on it. He wears costumes, as in a "masquerade," e.g. bandanna headband, rough grey ponytail, small gold earring and shaggy outlaw clothes. She does not tell him the news, for he has brought a young woman who they may hire to help care for Jinny, and when he is around another person than Jinny, his behavior becomes animated, enthusiastic, ingratiating.

Jinny (age 42) and Neal (age 58) have been together 21 years; she has become more reserved, slightly ironic, while he has become more animated, enthusiastic, ingratiating. This contrast in their approach to life is emphasized throughout the story.

Neal has been making preparations for Jinny's confinement, renting a hospital bed, for example. But the one item that the narrator singles out for Jinny's opinion are the heavy curtains Neal has hung up that have a pattern of tankards and horse brasses, which Jinny thinks is very ugly. (Horse brasses are bridle decorations). "But she knew now that there comes a time when ugly and beautiful serve pretty much the same purpose, when anything you look at is just a peg to hang the unruly sensations of your body on, and the bits and pieces of your mind." I'm not sure what the relevance to the story's theme this observation has, but it seems too well expressed to be mere "stuff." It may have something to do with how this story intersperses ugly things with beautiful things. There is something beautiful and romantic about the final scene of the floating bridge under a starry sky, just as there is something ugly about the opening scene of the graffiti in the bus stop. Both have sexual connotations.

Jinny thinks about death, not her own, but Neal's, recalling holding his hand in bed just before sleep and thinking she would hold this hand at least once when he was dead. "And she would not be able to believe in that fact. The fact of his being dead and powerless. No matter how long this state had been foreseen, she would not be able to credit it. She would not be able to believe that, deep down, he had not some knowledge of this moment. Of her. To think of him not having that brought on a kind of emotional vertigo, the sense of a horrid drop." This is a curious kind of statement. When Jinny refers to "this moment," what moment is she thinking about—the moment she is holding his hand or the moment of his death? What is the "horrid drop"? and the "emotional vertigo"?

We now learn for sure that she has cancer, but the disease gives her a feeling of an "unspeakable excitement, "for this "galloping disaster promises to release you from all responsibility for your own life. Then for shame you must compose yourself and stay very quiet." If you learn you are going to die soon and this gives you a release from all responsibility for your life, why would this make you feel shame? Because facing death should not suggests freedom?

This seems to be the central theme of the story—dealing with death—knowing it is inevitable, the sense of freedom that knowledge gives one, the difficulty of accepting its reality. (Munro had a cancer scare and had to receive treatment in 1991; this story appeared in 2000. She has published another, more personal story, "What Do You Want to Know For?" in View from Castle Rock about a woman with breast cancer). I am not sure whether this story reflects Munro's own feelings of possibly facing death, nor am I sure if this is important to a "reading" of the story, for a writer may begin with a personal experience, but when exploring that experience, the story, if it is any good, exceeds the merely personal to embody the meaningfully universal.

Helen, the young woman Neal has hired to help care for Jinny has, thinks Jinny, a "fresh-out-of-the-egg look,""as if there was one layer of skin still missing and one final growth of coarser grown-up hair." Jinny thinks she has "an innocent and…a disagreeable power" because it seems that everything "must be right at the surface with her." A curious image—this fresh out of the egg look of a new born, which is picked up later by the image of the corn looking like a baby in a shroud. Is there some submerged story going on here about Jinny's not having a child? Not sure. And is it Jinny's confronting death that makes her resent Helen's innocence, with everything on the surface—no hidden complexity.

The story now features a sort of comic episode in which Helen climbs up a fire escape to go into a hospital to get a pair of shoes her sister was supposed to bring her, and Helen goes through a lot of difficulty trying to find her sister, and the sister forgot the shoes, and it all makes Neal laugh and say, "What a tragedy." This ironic judgment—calling a comedy a tragedy—seems a common kind of juxtaposition in this story—like the pretty/ugly, joke/serious juxtaposition.

Neal is aggravating in his insistence on taking Helen to get her shoes at the trailer where her sister lives. Even though Helen protests, he just keeps laughing and insisting: "On his face there was an expression of conscious, but helpless, silliness. Signs of an invasion of bliss. Neal's whole being was invaded, he was brimming with silly bliss." (Here is still another reference to a military battle—"invasion—like "bombard" and "barrage." Not sure about these references. It is all a bit of silliness, and he knows it but cannot seem to control it. "He was trying hard to get his voice under control, to get some ordinary sobriety into it. And to banish the smile, which kept slipping back in place no matter how often he swallowed it." This also reminds me of the Katherine Ann Mansfield story "Bliss."

In the next section of the story, they get to the trailer of Matt and June Bergson near a gravel pit. (Munro uses this gravel pit in a later story entitled "Gravel." I have posted a blog entry on the story). The gravel pit suggests a dark hole or void into which there is always the danger of falling.

The man who comes out of the trailer is fat enough to have breasts "and you could see his navel pushing out like a pregnant woman's. It rode on his belly like a giant pincushion." June, who is also fat, tries to get them to come in, "laughing at the idea of their not coming in was a scandalous joke." Jinny does not want to go in, but Neal says they will hurt their feelings if they do not. "It looks like you think you're too good for them." I like this gender bending image of a man who has breasts and looks pregnant. Not sure what it means or why it works yet. It is the kind of question I would ask my students and hope they come up with something or make me think of something. I don't mind questions for which I do not have an answer, when it is possible to come up with or invent an answer.

Jinny thinks she has seen Neal like this a few times before. "It would be over some boy at the school. A mention of the name in an offhand, even belittling way. A mushy look, an apologetic yet somehow defiant bit of giggling. But that was never anybody she had to have around the house, and it could never come to anything. The boy's time would be up, he'd go away. So would this time be up. It shouldn't matter. She had to wonder if it would have mattered less yesterday than it did today." (This passage seems important, but not sure why. Jinny wants things not to matter. It is not clear what effect the young girl has on Neal). My students might have suggested that Neal has some sexual desire for Helen, but that would be the obvious, too easy, answer. I think it is more complex, but I am not sure why yet.

Jinny thinks about death again, about all the detritus around the trailer and all the letters, photos, minutes of meetings, newspaper clippings she had been in charge of and that might end up being thrown out. "As all this might, if Matt died." It is not unusual to think of all the "stuff" that sticks to you if you think you are going to die and leave it up to someone else to have to clean up. All stuff is "trash," when facing death, I guess.

While Neal is in the trailer eating chili and drinking beer to show that he is not "too good" for them, Jinny goes into the cornfield, thinking she will lie down in the shade of the large coarse leaves. A striking image here of each stalk having its cob "like a baby in a shroud." I can see this image, as the tip of the corn sticks out of the shucks slightly with the corn silk like fine baby hair, but I wonder why Jinny would see it this way—like the notion of a still birth.

If I were to bring this up to my students , they might think that perhaps Jinny has had a stillborn child, but nothing in the story suggests such a literal interpretation. It is more apt to suggest something about Jinny's own unexpressed desires. Jinny thinks she will not come out of the cornfield until Neal called her, perhaps not even then. "But the rows were too close together to permit that, and she was too busy thinking about something to take the trouble. She was too angry." This lost in the cornfield image is a spooky one, for cornfields suggest scarecrows and the rustling sound of something coming through the rows. Halloween stuff, echoing the reference to Neal's being dressed as in a masquerade earlier in the story.

Jinny remembers a party where they were playing one of those psychological games that is supposed to make you more honest and resilient, in which you say what comes into your mind when you look at someone. A woman friend of Neal's says to Jinny, "whenever I look at you all I can think of is—Nice Nellie." Jinny resents people thinking they know her, for they were all wrong. "She was not timid or acquiescent or natural or pure." Again we have the ever-present death theme: Jinny thinks, "When you died, these wrong opinions were all there was left." (This is common in Munro, for on the outside the woman appears bookish and timid, but in her imagination she is riotous and wild. So which one is she? The woman she appears to be or the one she feels to be?)

When Jinny gets out of the cornfield, the fat man with the female breasts and a bulging navel like that of a pregnant women tells her a dirty joke about a woman's genitals. As he tells the joke, she recalls the doctor telling her that there has been a favorable sign. The joke has to do with a man going out and getting a horse with horseradish and a duck with duct tape. When he goes out with pussy willows, his dad says, "hold on, I'm coming with you." The doctor's information about a significant shrinkage is interspersed in the telling of the dirty joke.

It is not clear why this man would tell such a dirty joke about trying to get pussy to Jinny, except that he is coarse and vulgar, and Munro wants to contrast this with Jinny's news from the oncologist. Jinny says, "It's too much," meaning that the news makes her have to go back and start the whole year over again. "It removed a certain low-grade freedom. A dull, protecting membrane that she had not even known was there had been pulled away and left her raw." What does she feel she needs protecting from? Is it Neal? Or the mistaken image people have of he? This is really all we know about her.

When Jinny has to urinate, she gets out and lifts her wide skirt and spreads her legs, which is easy for she has been wearing big skirts and no panties because she cannot control her bladder after the cancer treatments. "A dark stream trickled away from her through the gravel." This seems to be a gratuitous image, except that it suggests her vulnerability and simultaneous freedom because of the lack of underclothes. And the dark stream of urine disappearing in the gravel suggests the dark tea-colored water at the end of the story.

When the eighteen-year old boy, June's son, arrives, Jinny does not know how long she has been waiting for Neal, for she does not wear a watch; nor does the young man. He recognizes Jinny is in kind of a muddle. This establishes the timelessness of the encounter about to take place. He tells Jinny that his mother June is probably reading her husband's hands, for she can tell fortunes. (This reminds me of the problem of trying to determine the future, which is a central theme in the title story of this collection, and, of course, plays an important role in this story as well, for Jinny's future has been manipulated beyond her control.)

When the boy drives Jinny home, there is no one on the road, so the out-of-time feeling is sustained. The boy, whose name is Ricky, stops and she realizes she is on a narrow bridge without railings with still water underneath. Ricky tells her they are in Borneo Swamp. When she says there is an island called Borneo, halfway round the world, this suggests the "In Another Country" motif, a common theme in the short story, creating a dream reality or the reality of the unconscious. Freud once said that the unconscious was in "another country." When the young man says he is going to show her something like she has never seen before, she thinks if this were happening in her old normal life, she would be frightened. "If she was back in her old, normal life she would not be here at all." But, it is precisely the point of the story that Jinny is not in her normal life—that death and life and disarray have put her outside normality.

Ricky wants to show her the floating bridge, surrounded by swamp, looking like black tea. "Tannin, he said, sounding the word proudly as if he'd hauled it up out of the dark." She walks on the planks of the bridge which are like the deck of a boat, which rises and falls—not from waves, but from their footsteps. I like the image of hauling a word up out of the dark; it suggests reaching down into the unconscious, down into the primeval swamp. The central metaphor is her feeling that the trees and reed beds around her are on saucers of earth and the road is a floating ribbon, underneath which was all was water. This notion of being afloat—being on something that seems solid, but that the solidity is an illusion—that all is shifting and insecure.

She suddenly realizes she does not have her hat and her bald head is bare. And it is in this moment of vulnerability that Ricky slips his arm around her and kisses her on the mouth. "It seemed to her that this was the first time ever that she had participated in a kiss that was an event in itself. The whole story, all by itself. A tender prologue, an efficient pressure, a wholehearted probing and receiving, a lingering thanks, and a drawing away satisfied." A great description of a kiss, it seems to me—a kiss that does not have to lead to anywhere, that does not have to have a motivation, a cause, a purpose—a kiss that is a kiss solely.

When Ricky says it is the first time he has kissed a married woman and she says he will probably kiss more, he sighs, "Amazed and sobered by the thought of what lay ahead of time. Yeah, I probably will." This brings up the theme of the future again. She thinks of Neal back on dry land giddy and doubtful having his fortune told, "Rocking on the edge of his future." She feels a "lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given." For, of course, she now has the possibility of a future.

This ending is a classic short story encounter, for it is for itself only, unmotivated and unexpected, promising that which will not occur, making one aware of the ultimate possibilities that exist only in the imagination. She has experienced the freedom of facing death and miraculously been given back her life, and this joy of not being anchored but pleasantly adrift, between one place and another, gently swaying on instability is a great example of how the short story often resolves the unresolvable by metaphor.

Next: Reading Alice Munro's story "Nettles"

In honor of the great Gabriel Garcia Márquez, who died this week at the age of 87, I post the following discussion of his last work of fiction, the novella Memoria de mis putas tristes, (Memories of My Melancholy Whores), published in 2004. A novella, rather than a novel, it has many of the characteristics of those forms from which the short story is descended—the fable, the fairy tale, and the romance.

The plot of Gabriel Garcia Márquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores is quite simple, summed up in the initial sentence, in which the unnamed first-person narrator says that on his ninetieth birthday he wants to give himself the gift of a riotous night of lovemaking with an adolescent virgin. The remainder of the book recounts the results of this decision by the narrator, a journalist in a Colombian town. The most important result is that the elderly hero does not engage in a night of sexuality with a young girl, but instead sits by her bed, watching her as she sleeps. For the remainder of his ninetieth year he returns to the brothel night after night, continuing to watch the girl sleep, hardly ever touching her and hearing her voice only once. However, he falls helplessly in love with her, and as, improbable as it may seem, she ultimately falls in love with him, and they finally come together as a most unlikely couple on the last page.

Some critics chastised the author and the novella’s hero as dirty old men who have no social conscience about the exploitation of young women in third world countries, but it is a misunderstanding of the tradition of Memories of My Melancholy Whores, as well as Garcia Márquez ’s obvious intention, to label this a perverted book about an old man’s wicked lust for a teenage girl. As Garcia Márquez has suggested in previous works, visiting a brothel does not have the same unsavory aspect in Colombia as it does in America. Indeed, the author of the classic One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) has praised the brothels of Bogota, where he studied law, even though he was once beaten up there for failing to pay a prostitute.There is no hint of criminal exploitation in the book, no sordid reality of young women made chattel to men with money. Rather the story is about enrapt attention, fantasy, the romantic dream of pure ideal love.

Although the protagonist realizes that sex is merely a consolation for not having love, he has never been able to experience love; indeed has never had sex with a woman unless he paid for it. That the final object of his desire is a fourteen-year-old girl has nothing to do with the social issue of preying on the helpless and innocent. Neither love nor sex in this novella has anything to do with social reality; the story is rather a complete romantic idealization of the art-like object of desire.

The romantic nature of the old man’s silent observation of the girl as he watches her each night can be compared to the famous metaphor that opens the quintessential romantic adoration of an untouched object—John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” For the young girl in Garcia Márquez ’s novella is a frozen work of art, not to be approached if the true nature of ideal romantic love is to be sustained. She is indeed Keats’ “still unravished bride of quietness,” a ‘foster-child of silence and slow time.” The protagonist knows that he does not want her to awaken, does not want to hear her voice, does not want to see her in daylight, but rather wishes only to watch her in silence.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores has been compared to Vladimir Nabokov’s paean to passion for a child, Lolita (1955), but it is Dante’s celebration of a similar love for his Beatrice that invented this kind of romantic love story. Gustave von Aschenbach’s tragic love for the young Tadzio in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) is perhaps the most famous twentieth century model.

The most immediate comparison is suggested by Garcia Márquez’s opening epigraph from Yasunari Kawabata’s “House of Sleeping Beauties” (1926), another classic story of idealistic love of an older man for a young girl. “House of the Sleeping Beauties” centers on a brothel visited by old men who can no longer perform sexually. Forbidden to have sex with the young women, and thus free of sexual expectations, they lie down with beautiful young virgins who, under the influence of a sleeping potion, are unaware of their visits. The central character is a man who does not tell the madam that he is still able to function as a man, and his visits are tormented by the fact that he desires more than the girls are allowed to give. As he lies by different girls each night, he remembers his youthful adventures and contemplates his own future impotence as he grows older.

The difference between Kawabata’s story and Garcia Márquez ’novella is that whereas Kawabata is concerned with the inevitability of growing old and the longing for death, Garcia Márquez holds out for the romantic ideal of never being too old to fall in love. Memories of My Melancholy Whores is not a fairy tale for the aged, but rather a fable for the romantic.

The unlikely her says he is ugly and shy and seems proud to admit that he has never gone to bed with a woman he did not pay. He was even voted client of the year two different times in the red-light district he frequents. He says by the time he was fifty, he had slept with 514 women. Then he simply stopped counting. He lives in an old ancestral mansion, has no wife, no children, no kin, no pets. He is cultured, surrounding himself with great literature, listening to classical music. Each week he writes in longhand a weekly column for the local Sunday newspaper, and he is fairly well known in the town. At one time in his youth he was engaged to be married, but at the last minute he hid from his bride and never again made a commitment to a woman.

The virgin the madam arranges for him to visit is a poor girl who works by day sewing buttons in a clothing factory. She lives with her crippled mother and provides for her brothers and sisters. She is afraid of sex because a friend once bled to death when she lost her virginity. The madam gives her some bromide and valerian that makes her sleep during the protagonist’s visit. Each night he lies beside her, listening to her breath, imagining the blood flowing through her veins. Neither he nor the reader ever sees her awake. He sometimes speaks to her in her sleep, but she does not respond. Her only sentence is the sleep-laden cryptic remark, “It was Isabel who made the snails cry.”

On one other occasion, she writes an enigmatic sleepwalking message on the mirror when she goes to the bathroom about the tiger not eating far away. He reads to her from “The Little Prince” and “The Arabian Nights” and eventually begins to write love letters to her that he publishes as his columns. It is appropriate that the protagonist reads fairy tales by Perrault to the young girl, for she is the classic Sleeping Beauty, untouched and untouchable; to waken her would be to make her merely human, and that is not what the protagonist falls in love with. Realists may say that it is immature to fall in love with a child, with someone you can never have, with someone you have hardly spoken to; however, most great love stories in western culture, from Tristan and Iseult to Romeo and Juliet, share such characteristics.

The old man’s idyll is interrupted by an intrusion from the real world when an important banker is stabbed to death in the brothel, and the investigation and bad publicity shuts it down for months. The protagonist watches for the girl on the street, even though he knows he would not recognize her dressed and in daylight. He imagines her in what he terms her “unreal” life, caring for her brothers and sisters, sewing buttons at her work. He feels he is dying for love, but he also knows that he would not trade his suffering for anything in the world. During this separation from his beloved, the protagonist happens to see his long-ago bride-to-be, aged and infirm. He meets with an old sexual companion who advises him not to die without knowing the wonder of having sex with someone he loves.

He is anguished by jealousy, thinking that the madam RosaCarbacas has sold his loved one to someone else, and he flies into a rage when it seems that his romantic fantasy love has been contaminated by sordid reality. But he cannot stay away from his “Delgadina.” On the morning of his ninety-first birthday, he and Rosa Cabarcas make what they call an old people’s bet--that whoever survives keeps everything that belongs to the other one. The madam says instead that when she dies everything will belong to the young girl, which will amount to the same thing, for, she tells him in the final improbability of this most romantic novella, that the poor girl is head over heels in love with him. Radiant, he feels that finally he is experiencing real life, with his heart condemned to die of happy love. Garcia Márquez thus ends his romantic fable in the classic fairy tale manner, leaving the reader hopeful that the couple will live happily ever after.

Short Story Month 2014: Eudora Welty

Short Story Month 2014: Grace Paley

Short Story Month 2014: William Trevor

Short Story Month 2014: Alice Munro

Fifth Anniversary: Thank You, Readers

The 2014 Canadian Literature Symposium on Alice Munro

Rudyard Kipling and the Craft of Fable: Part I--"The Man Who Would Be King"

The New Yorker's 2014 Summer Fiction Issue of Love Stories

Rudyard Kipling and Craft of Fable: Part II: "Without Benefit of Clergy,""Mary Postgate,""The Gardener":

Origins of the Short Story in the British Romantic Period: Part I

Origins of the Short Story in British Romantic Period: Part II: "Dream Children,""The Vampyre,""Wandering Willie's Tale"

A Tribute to Nadine Gordimer: 1923-2014

Alice Munro: Sex and Storytelling in Selected Stories in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Some Preliminary Remarks about Thousand and One Nights, ala John Barth and others

Sensate Focus and the Suspension of Disbelief: Some Tentative Suggestions

Marina Warner's Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights

Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: A Review of Commentary

Reading Alice Munro's story "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage"

Reading Alice Munro's "Floating Bridge"

Gabriel Garcia Márquez--Memories of My Melancholy Whores