Sunday, January 31, 2010

Notes on "Lost in the Funhouse" (author, John Barth)

In reading this layered collection for the first time, I'm struck by how much more I'll be able to get from it if and when I deepen my grounding in both critical theory and the works to which this book alludes. I'll have some questions and comments on which of the theory books to read at the bottom of this post.

The author's explicit intention seems to be to have us file this book under “meta-fiction”: the book is as much about the many layered process of continual story creation as it is a collection of stories. I'm struck by the structure of the collection as a whole and it's thematic drive, the way in which all of the entries in the collection return to the same images and themes. One image is the image of things swarming towards a goal, be it the protagonist-as-sperm-cell in “Night-Sea Journey”, the honey bees in “Ambrose, His Mark”, or the crowds of people swarming to Ocean City. In “Lost in the Funhouse”, one of young Ambrose's epiphanies, rightly or wrongly, is that all of the sights and sounds and doings of Ocean City are either funhouse misdirections from, or funnels to, the essential sexual experience that most of the people are really there to have.

There is a recurring theme of paternity and authorship. In the Ambrose stories, there is an implied triangular relationship between Ambrose's mother and his father and uncle. Who really is his father? Who really is the author of a story? If there is an author telling a story, who or what is telling the story that contains the author? Barth gets into that theme right away in “Night-Sea Voyage”. There is a narrator sperm cell who gives us his experience of this voyage, and even a “prophet” sperm cell who senses the purpose and probable futility of their urgent voyage, and perhaps the similar futility, occurring at a higher level, of the “God” who created the sperm cell, himself created or produced by larger forces which in turn, etc, etc. (I noticed just now why it is such a convenience for Barth to cut his sentences off...)  The prophet sperm cell is - of course - put to death by the others.

Barth returns to this kind of recursive thinking throughout the book, although it is expressed most directly in the first story and in "Menelaiad". In "Menelaiad", Barth nests the narration of the story more and more deeply in the quoted voices of one character recounting what another character has recounted. Barth divides this story into subsections, each numbered according to the level of the recursion they are in, so that when Menelaus talking to himself (1) tells Telemachus and Peisistratus (2) what he told then-Helen on the ship heading home from Troy (3) what Proteus (4) has asked him, etc etc. (Prior sentence cut off intentionally, a la Barth.) The effect seems to be to strain the mechanisms of story telling so much that we can begin to see cracks in the funhouse wall of written language, we can see its own pulleys and levers (as Ambrose does in the title story). This was a striking effect for me, because having had that particular image implanted in “Lost in the Funhouse”, I saw it arising naturally as a metaphor in my experience of reading “Menelaiad”.

Barth has a field day whenever a moment arises when all characters, at all levels of the nesting, make the same comment or express surprise at the same time. There is no convention for this, so Barth makes up his own, trying to solve the problem differently each time. Barth hilariously deals with the all-levels-exclamation one time by bracketing quoted exclamations together so that characters within the same level are grouped together. Another time, he simply nests an exclamation point in seven levels of quotation marks, throwing in (I'm not sure why) parentheses, also. At one point he backs out of the nesting the old-fashioned way: I cried”'”, I cried'”, I cried”, I cry.

In the story “Lost in the Funhouse”, it is unclear to me whether I am reading an author intentionally breaking into the narrative with meta-fiction asides to his reader, or whether I am meant to read this as the sensibility of the closely followed protagonist, Ambrose, or whether I am meant to see Ambrose as the author. This fuzziness I take as an intentional effect produced by Barth, for soon after, in “Title” he writes of “the obvious possibility that the narrator and his companion may be mistaken for the narrator and his companion".

Also, as I began to see it, just as the funhouse is shown as a metaphor for the creation of stories, the language and culture based reality in which both the author and his protagonist operate is also shown to be a funhouse, a funhouse filled with misdirections, leanings, and distortions in perception. Barth does sell me on this endless layering of levels of story telling, so that you do sense how the author himself is in a story, the story told by, at the least, his culture and language, with probably the additional layers of the forces that produce language and culture implied behind other layers as well.

Another theme is of course the protean nature of stories and Barth gives us Proteus, himself. But he doesn't stop with just form-changing in stories: he returns to the brackish waters that contain story and storyteller and listener and melts the boundaries between them. The climax of the Menelaiad is when Menelaus realizes that Proteus may have changed into Menelaus-holding-Proteus and thus caused both to cease to exist. But yet, a "Menelaus" is still there, telling the story (and wondering about this).

I'm interested in how Barth is able to shift from one level of attendance in a story to another – to speak first to a reader, and then to a meta-reader about the methods he's using to speak to the first reader - without having us lose the thread of his stories themselves, but I can't say I can point to a specific technique he employs. It seems he chooses different techniques for different entries in this collection. In the title story, he has his narrator talk about how one might write the story about the incidents described, while in Menelaid, he doesn't speak directly to the reader but still changes this “level of attendance” using the nested narrators. I find the approach used in the title story the most effective, and the ambiguity around who's doing the “meta” talking (is it the author or is it Ambrose in free indirect style?) gives the experience of reading the story more texture.

Language was something else that stood out for me. The narrator of his Ambrose stories creates new comparative adjectives by adding “er” to roots. Thus, his face grew “ashener” or a fortune telling booth was “dilapiter”. In the Menelaiad, all narrators, Menelaus (who ultimately tells us the story), Menelaus with Helen, Proteus, and so forth all seem to speak in the same voice. There is, for one thing, a propensity for words compounded into new word forms by dashes (e.g., “whisked in a dream-dark boat, sleep-skippered”). The dashed compound words create striking rhythms and in some ways they recall Gerard Manly Hopkins. Could it have been an intentional reference to that poet's work and style? More likely, may it have referred to the style of “The Odyssey”?

Which brings me to the need for more grounding in theory on my part. I have several decent books, one of my favorites is “In Search of Authority” by Steven Bonnycastle, although that is more of a survey, I have found it to be extremely useful. How would I approach bringing critical theory into my studies as a writer?As for the Odyssey, I've gotten into some Ovid, have been through the Iliad more than once, but not the Odyssey. Which classics are the most important? That one, of course, is unavoidable, but what others?  (I think here, the Google ranking algorithm, which ranks links by what links to them, makes sense: the most important classics are those that the greatest number of other important works allude to and/or are influenced by.)

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Note for Jess Row

Jess,

I've done most of my critical reading for this packet-month but haven't posted my comments yet (except for on O'Connor). I'll expect I'll be able to get a post up on Barth's "Funhouse" collection tomorrow, and plan on getting a post on Gustaffson's "Stories of Happy People" up on Saturday.

Both have been useful. I wasn't crazy about Gustaffson's prose (as translated) but I had to admit his stories had a powerful kick to them that snuck up on me. Both collections had a definite influence on how I wrote for this packet, but the O'Connor essays (so far) had more of an influence.

It's redundant to ask, but if you have a chance, do send a link or comment here on where I can find links to your past students' good blogs so I can see examples of how this can work.

best, Rimas

Monday, January 18, 2010

Frank O'Connor "The Lonely Voice" (Two introductions and lecture on "Quixote and Hamlet")

"The Lonely Voice" by Frank O'Connor

I'm commenting on the Russell Bank's introduction, the author's introduction, and the first essay, "Hamlet and Quixote".

Banks's introduction was useful - it helped me avoid getting fixated on whether what O'Connor was saying was consistent or "true". Banks describes how these lectures happened and the great anticipation with which they were greeted, people crowding in to what were normally half-filled lecture halls to see them, a generation of gifted writers in attendance as students. He notes that O'Connor's approach was intuitive, and that these lectures must also be read intuitively. For me, reading the book in this light, it becomes a thoroughly enjoyable ramble through the subject with O'Connor. Banks places O'Connor's book in the company of two acknowledged masterpieces of criticism, E.M. Forster's "Aspects of the Novel", and Ezra Pound's "ABC's of Reading".

O'Connor's voice to me has the same easy authority that Forster's does in his great, great lectures (listening to these lectures in an audio book years ago might be one of the reasons I decided to write) but - not to detract from O'Connor's achievement here - he doesn't approach these with Forster's sardonic humor, or with Forster's great gift for the telling image.  Yet, if anything, these lectures may be even more useful.

O'Connor offers a telling epigram to this book, a quote translated from Blaise Pascal: "The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me".

For O'Connor, the short story directs our attention to our fundamental loneliness, and offers characters so particular in their loneliness that readers will not be able to draw comforting generalizations from them. The novel, which he asserts is "ideologically" different from the short story, instead does comfort us, it implicitly posits a "normal" society which, over time, a more generalized protagonist must either "gain mastery of or be mastered by".

This need of the novel to operate on the protagonist over time is what finally leads to its different form and length. It stands to reason that, in O'Connor's view, some short stories can be longer in length than novels (he cites the example of "The Duel" by Chekov being longer than several novels by Turgenev). But in the short story, O'Connor would say that - ordinarily - we will not see a protagonist over time, but at one particular time. What particular time to illuminate is the most crucial choice the short story writer must make in writing it. O'Connor writes, "since a whole lifetime must be crowded into a few minutes, those minutes must be carefully chosen indeed and lit by an unearthly glow, one that enables us to distinguish past, present, and future as though they were all contemporaneous."

This quote brings to mind an essay in the New York Times by Milhauser on the ambitions of the short story - to hold the world in a grain of sand. Although Milhauser's emphasis is different from O'Connor's, in this one crucial aspect, both writers agree: in a single moment, one can find all of the essential truths of a character's past, present, and future. And this focus gives us greater clarity and insight than the sprawling, throw-everything-in approach of the novel.

Another point, made by Rust Hill in his own book on the short story, is that what is of the essence in a short story is that we illuminate a particular time when a character either changes, or a great opportunity for change presents itself and is lost. The particular moment chosen is thus given an additional focus, and again, O'Connor raises the same point. O'Connor, writing about "The Overcoat", says, "If one wanted an alternative explanation for what the short story means, one could hardly find better than that single half-sentence, 'and from that day forth, everything was at it were changed and appeared in a different light to him.'" (For me, this seems somewhat orthogonal to his first essential truth of the short story, but it is O'Connor's style to move fluidly into the different facets of his subject.)

O'Connor suggests that readers could not bear the intensity of the dramatic writing of short stories if carried over the length of a novel. For O'Connor, an "inferior writer" may be a great novelist, and he even suggests that this inferior writing is an advantage for the novelist, but he can only think of only one great writer of short stories, Sherwood Anderson, whom he would consider an "inferior writer". (O'Connor does not elaborate on this in the intro. But neither did he fully explain "conte" and "nouvelle" until the first chapter, so I assume he'll get back to this in later essays.)

O'Connor, in discussing the superior writing needed to pull off short stories, then discusses how this becomes a problem. He writes, "...it is only too easy for the short story writer to become too much of an artist." By way of illustration, he offers us Hemingway's "The Hills Have White Elephants". O'Connor acknowledges the brilliance of the story and then turns that adjective into a metaphor: it is so brilliant that the light it shines can cast no shadows. Hemingway, anxious to avoid giving us too much exposition, winds up giving us too little. "Our moral judgment has been stimulated, but our moral imagination has not been stirred..." O'Connor's analyses of other stories, and reader responses to them, suggests where, in other cases, authors have not given the readers enough to allow them to fully inhabit the stories.

For me as a writer, all of this suggests that perhaps my method of approaching short stories has been wrong-headed. I've tended to follow the trope of inventing characters and then seeing what they do - this might, in face, be more novelistic. I'm thinking instead to create characters, then look for that essential moment in their lives and write about that moment. I may sketch out who they are and what they do, but in the end the task seems to be to find the essential moment.


Some important terms from O'Connor (so far - more will follow):

"submerged population group" - generally speaking, that group of characters that short stories tend to find, those for whom society can never be normal, those who are somehow forever on the fringes.

"essential (vs) organic form" - the novel has an essential form, the examination of a protagonist over time, but the short story offers its would-be writers no form, just what "organically might spring from a single detail".

"conte/nouvelle" - these terms are important to O'Connor. From the introduction, I could not make out their meaning, but having read the first chapter, largely focused on Turgenev, it would seem the "conte" boils the piece down to a moment. O'Connor refers to the "nouvelle" as a "novellette" - it is something which may have a more linear development, but still be too short to be a novel.

"physical body" - by this, O'Connor refers to what a story, given too much to art, might lack. He cites a little known Russian author, Leskov, as being a writer whose stories do not lack a physical body. Since O'Connor is writing intuitively at this point, he doesn't offer more in the way of explanation, although he does offer an interesting discussion on how Leskov would handle a flogging scene and how his handling would differ from that of Chekov or Turgenev. Leskov would be interested in the complex reactions of both the person doing the flogging and the person receiving it. O'Connor writes that Leskov's "floggee" would derive some satisfaction from this brutal incident, and Leskov helps more to put us in the mind of that character than would Chekov and Turgenev, who would simply find the social fact of the flogging itself so repellent they would only be able to write from their own political sensibilities.

The chapter "Hamlet and Quixote" explores the psychological pattern O'Connor feels Turgenev most often wrote in: the ineffectual but exquisitely sensitive poet, portrayed with some self-loathing and some self-regard by Turgenev (the "Hamlet" in this case) and the man of action, often illiterate (the Quixote).

I haven't read the Turgenev itself. It seems very modern and vital as O'Connor describes him (so much unlike the printings I've seen which almost entomb Turgenev in their presentation of his work) and O'Connor is very convincing in describing how Turgenev's subtle and brilliant sensibilities have been a great influence on writing up to this day.

I was surprised to see such a modern technique as the telescoping O'Connor describes in "Yamolai and the Miller's Wife". The wife has had a lover whom she has lost to exile and has had to marry a man she doesn't love. Yet, since the story is boiled down to one moment, Turgenev never gives us the exposition, except when the exile is mentioned in passing by other characters. The miller's wife reacts, and in that reaction an astute and alert reader knows what has happened. And other readers may know it subconsciously (maybe even more powerful, though).

It's not news that a writer reveals far less about the facts of his characters' lives to the readers than he or she knows. But I would never have guessed that a writer could get away with revealing so little, and O'Connor discusses how Turgenev makes this work, but also what it costs him. It is a matter of what the author wants to focus on, it seems. The choice to write this as a "conte" is a choice that puts the focus on the forces operating internally in the characters rather than the external episodes. We see only the results of the episodes, or the momentary responses that reveal character and tendency, with the facts that might have been revealed in a more episodic form instead telescoped into brief comments or flashbacks. But I'd have to read the Turgenev to make more sense of this chapter than I have. Still, O'Connor makes Turgenev's writing seem transcendant, ecstatic. I can't wait to read it, but, alas, it's not on my reading list this term!

Saturday, January 9, 2010

lightness

Italo Calvino's essay "Lightness" on the flight home - reading it in the afterglow of the first residency. He goes into a beautiful riff on the classical myth of Pegasus, how Perseus, floating on the most delicate substance of air and cloud, killed the Gorgon by viewing it in a mirror, then with tenderness preserved the head which he was able to use as a weapon under dire circumstances. There is no need here to repeat Calvino's words, but I love his injunction to not impose any idea of what these myths mean on them. Rather he implores us to pay very careful attention to the images, to allow these images to wash into our memories where they will wait to release whatever meaning/light they will as conditions arise for us. This particular myth has such striking images, and some so surprising, that the injunction feels wise.

Three authors who embody "lightness" come to mind for me: Szymborska, Doctorow, and (I know he's commercial, but) Nick Hornby. Why would I include Doctorow? It's because his prose itself is light, even when his subject matter isn't. I remember listening to "Ragtime" (I had read it years before) and marveling at never once having to rewind/repeat passages because he wrote in a prose style that just poured in.

This is more of a test post, I'll be posting more.