Jan 172014
 

 

A clear representation of character emotion does not necessarily mean writing things like “Bob is sad.” Actually, “Bob is sad” can work just fine as a starting point. But we generally expect a text to go further, to let the reader know not only that Bob is sad, but how sad Bob is, why Bob is sad, and how that affects Bob and his place in that particular story. The examples I’ll be using in this essay will provide a better understanding of what techniques can be used to accomplish all of these tasks simultaneously.

Before looking at those examples, I want to clarify exactly what it is I’m talking about when I say “character emotion.” I’ll start with the most concrete definition of emotion from Merriam-Webster: “the affective state of consciousness.” When that is applied to the writing of character emotion in fiction, it means placing the reader within the character’s consciousness and explaining how a character’s emotional state affects his behavior. This allows a character to act in a rational or irrational way without confusing the reader; the motivation is not just coming from a place of logic and reason, but rather from a well-defined emotional state.

Techniques and Definitions

First, there is direct reporting. With the direct reporting technique, a narrator (first or third person) describes the way a character is feeling, or a character identifies his or her own emotions. Characters report their emotions in dialogue. Of course, dialogue reports are only as trustworthy as that character may be. When direct reports come from a narrator, the reader is left with a concrete understanding of what the described character is feeling. The example I used earlier of “Bob is sad” is a simple example of direct reporting. The reader knows what the character is feeling and applies that knowledge to any actions that follow.

In her story “Nettles,” Alice Munro employs a first-person narrator to explore the feelings and thoughts of a woman struggling with her definition of love. The story begins with a flashback to the narrator’s childhood and her first encounter with love as a young girl, which unwittingly set the standard for love that would last her whole life. The story then moves ahead to the narrator’s divorce and her finding her first love again after many years. The narrator uses the direct reporting technique to describe both her emotions as an innocent child experiencing love for the first time as well as an adult searching for a fulfilling relationship following a failed marriage.

Recalling the first love she felt for a traveling well-digger’s son, the narrator describes the relationship in adult terms, but makes clear how the emotions felt as a little girl: “We were like sturdy and accustomed sweethearts, whose bond needs not much outward expression. And for me at least that was solemn and thrilling.” Although she is looking back on her time with this boy, the narrator is directly telling the reader how she felt thrilled by the relationship, which then, in the following narrative, serves as a contrast to what she experiences with her husband as an adult. It is a powerful emotion because it is one she longs for long after she has grown up. The technique of direct reporting tells the reader exactly what the narrator’s motivation is.

The story goes on to describe her adult life after she’s left her first husband, and the narrator uses direct reporting to describe the emotions she feels for a lover in this passage:

We exchanged news—I made sure I had news—and we laughed, and went for walks in the ravine, but all I really wanted was to entice him to have sex with me, because I thought the high enthusiasm of sex fused people’s best selves. I was stupid about these matters, in a way that was very risky, particularly for a woman of my age. There were times when I would be so happy, after our encounters—dazzled and secure—and there were other times when I would lie stone-heavy with misgiving.

First, she describes scenes that took place with her lover and the conflicting experience of casual discussion while wanting sexual gratification. By the time the narrator gives a direct report of the emotions “happy” and “stone-heavy with misgiving,” the reader is already caught up in a well-defined, conflicted situation, so the clear statement of the narrator’s feelings helps to anchor the reader in that emotional state.

The second technique I’d like to discuss is the indirect reporting of character emotion. Indirect reporting is the technique of having the narrator or a character guess, judge, or intuit the emotion of another character based on an interpretation of actions or statements. The difference between direct and indirect reporting is that the emotion being expressed is interpreted; it is not presented as a factual emotional state, but rather a perceived one. With this technique, the narrator, or more commonly, another character comments on a character’s possible emotional state or motivation. This allows the reader to simultaneously see that emotion from an outside perspective and gain further insight into how the commenting character is seeing and processing those around him or her.

A good example of this technique is found in Andre Dubus’ story “The Winter Father,” where the protagonist is a divorced man learning to be a part-time father to his children who live with their mother. The story begins with the couple’s divorce and then follows the first few months of their separation, focusing on the father’s relationship with his own children with whom he no longer lives. The first time the man goes to pick up his children after moving out, he sees his ex-wife and makes the following observation: “Her eyes held him: the nest of pain was there, the shyness, the coiled anger; but there was another shimmer: she was taking a new marriage vow: This is the way we shall love our children now, watch how well I can do it.” This excerpt contains both indirect reporting of character emotion and thought. The third-person limited narrator is observing, interpreting, and reporting both emotion and thought that the father deduces from the expression on his wife’s face.

A third technique is character emotion depicted via physical manifestations. A writer represents a character’s emotion, say, sadness, in action, say, crying. When I first began studying this technique, I was looking for physical manifestations of emotion that stood on their own. And while those certainly do exist, I came to the conclusion that the most effective examples are often used in conjunction with direct reporting. This discovery had a particularly strong impact on me because I have found through personal experience as a learning writer that the emotion I believe I am clearly depicting with only physical manifestations is almost never clear to the reader. These exclusively physical manifestations, I’ve found, are almost always lacking in terms of revealing character emotion because they are just too subtle. The benefit of using the physical manifestation technique coupled with direct reporting is that it creates a visual to go along with the emotion being expressed.

I found a good example of this technique in Carson McCullers’ story “Sucker,” which is told from a teenage boy’s first-person perspective. The narrator tells the story of how his relationship with his younger brother Sucker blossoms and is then destroyed in tune with the narrator’s blossoming and then failing first romance. The story ends with the narrator lamenting the loss of a relationship with his brother following a frustrated outburst one night. This example uses direct reporting with a great amount of physical manifestation to show the younger brother’s reaction to an angry outburst from the narrator: “He sat in the middle of the bed, his eyes blinking and scared.” Here, the physical manifestation is given with a single-word of direct reporting: scared. However, that single word is enough to establish the young boy’s emotions and place the following passage into context for the reader, allowing the narrator to use exclusively physical language without sacrificing information:

Sucker’s mouth was part way open and he looked as though he’d knocked his funny bone. His face was white and sweat came out on his forehead. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and for a minute his arm stayed raised that way as though he was holding something away from him.

I’ve given these few short examples just to illustrate the techniques in practice. These were all stories I read early in my time as a graduate student at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and they stuck with me as some of my favorites. It was only in going back in my reading in preparation for this essay that I began to notice things that I had skimmed over while focusing on other craft aspects the first time around. Now I want to look at two more short stories that utilize all three techniques and set a great example for all writers to follow.

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The Dead

The first of the two stories I’d like to examine is “The Dead” by James Joyce. In this story, Joyce uses a third-person limited narrative in Gabriel Conroy’s point of view. The story follows the protagonist through a night of encounters at an annual celebration. Throughout the story, Gabriel has three different encounters with women that affect his mood and cause him to grow self-conscious before he can assert himself and move past it. As the story moves forward, each encounter grows in its respective influence on Gabriel’s mood. As the story progresses, so does the insight into Gabriel’s emotional state.

“The Dead” focuses on Gabriel’s relationship with women in his life, moving from the rather inconsequential (a maid at the party) to a female journalist, Miss Ivors, a colleague whom he respects, before ending with his wife. During the party, Gabriel’s conventional patriarchal social assumptions are exposed through successive conflicts with the three women. Most of the story action takes place during the party, but the significant action with his wife takes place after the couple returns to a hotel room for the night. Gabriel mistakes his wife’s moodiness for sexual passion then becomes angry when she doesn’t react to him. Suddenly, she begins telling him about a lover, Michael Furey, who died many years before, died of love, and Gabriel is left mourning the fact that he had never loved anyone, even his wife, the way this ex-lover had loved her.

After each plot event (with the maid, with the journalist), the narrative always returns to Gabriel’s internal state, and as such, his emotions are paramount to the tone and meaning of the entire piece. Each encounter makes him gloomy and self-conscious until he engages in various ritual behaviors such as focusing on his speech or making condescending jokes that help to discount the women and make him feel better. Only when he has the plot conflict scene with his wife does Gabriel find that his habitual practices do not work; he is unable to render the encounter insignificant. Finally he has to see himself and his wife as they really are.

I’d like to now look at some examples of the techniques I’ve already discussed asthey are used to represent the emotional aspect of “The Dead.”  In the first scene, Gabriel makes a slightly off-color remark to one of the maids working at the party. To show Gabriel’s response to the maid’s retort, Joyce uses direct reporting of emotion:

He was still discomposed by the girl’s bitter and sudden retort. It had cast a gloom over him which he tried to dispel by arranging his cuffs and the bows of his tie. He then took from his waistcoat pocket a little paper and glanced at the heading he had made for his speech. He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning, for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. Some quotation that they would recognize from Shakespeare or from the Melodies would be better. The indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.

This passage contains a great amount of information about Gabriel, and most of it is emotional. It begins with the direct reporting of his emotional state following the conflict with the maid: “He was still discomposed by the girl’s bitter and sudden retort.” The paragraph continues with another example of direct reporting: “It had cast a gloom over him which he tried to dispel.” This continuation of direct reporting by the narrator gives another emotion to Gabriel’s reaction to the incident. His thoughts, affected by the gloom cast over him, then turn to his upcoming speech, and the narrator continues to employ the direct reporting technique: “He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning, for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers.” Although the language in the passage then changes to express more character thought than emotion, the entire paragraph serves as a perfect example of direct reporting and clearly establishes the internal condition of Gabriel.

Later, Gabriel has a social conflict with Miss Ivors, a woman who is essentially his equal and a friend. The conflict begins when Miss Ivors needles Gabriel for writing a column for a paper not as pro-Irish as she would like, a charge that confuses Gabriel: “When their turn to cross had come he was still perplexed and inattentive.” The scene continues with more chiding from Miss Ivors as Gabriel grows more flustered: “Gabriel tried to cover his agitation by taking part in the dance with great energy.” The scene also contains outbursts from Gabriel, a brief example of direct reporting in dialogue, such as proclaiming, “I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!” in response to Miss Ivors’ accusing him of being a West Briton (an Irish insult something like an African-American being called an Oreo). However, following this more rattling conflict, we again see the other side of Gabriel.

Once Miss Ivors has left the party, before dinner is served, Gabriel is able to forget all about the encounter: “He felt quite at ease now for he was an expert carver and liked nothing better than to find himself at the head of a well-laden table.” This example contains two different descriptions of Gabriel’s emotional state. The first describes him as “quite at ease” and the word “now” following that description adds the element of a change in emotional state, so it is clear to the reader that he has overcome the previous emotional struggle that was causing him to feel agitated. This is not only a good example of the technique, but it is also very important to the momentum of the narrative; this scene repeats the conflict of the earlier scene with the maid with increased dramatic intensity. More is at stake in this encounter for Gabriel than with the maid.

Near the end of this story, Gabriel’s emotions swing again when, instead of making love to his wife as he desires to do, he listens to her talk about a former lover. Joyce uses the direct reporting technique to show how, in an instant, Gabriel’s rush of giddiness comes to a halt: “The smile passed away from Gabriel’s face. A dull anger began to gather again at the back of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to grow angrily in his veins.” As far as emotional language is concerned, this is perhaps the strongest description in the entire story. Both the mental and bodily representations of this sudden anger are first described as dull before growing almost uncontrollable. The scene continues with Gabriel’s wife telling him the story of her relationship with Michael Furey, including how he had died for her. The tale of Furey’s death inspires this last example of direct reporting, which shows, I think, perfectly the intensity of Gabriel’s internal struggles and the realization that he has failed to love his wife as much as his wife’s dead lover once did:

A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer, as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world. But he shook himself free of it with an effort of reason and continued to caress her hand. He did not question her again, for he felt that she would tell him of herself.”

Joyce doesn’t use indirect reporting as much direct reporting in “The Dead,” but there are still some fine examples. Joyce’s focus on Gabriel’s internal state leaves little room for indirect emotional commentary, but he uses the technique increasingly near the end of the story where, instead of primarily reacting, Gabriel begins looking at his wife and trying to interpret her mood.

First, here is an example from earlier in the story when in the second act, so to speak, after his conflicted exchange with the journalist, Miss Ivors, on the dance floor, Gabriel becomes self-conscious and tries to figure out why she suddenly wants to leave the party: “Gabriel asked himself was he the cause of her abrupt departure. But she did not seem to be in ill humour: she had gone away laughing.” In this description, Gabriel is attempting to exonerate himself from blame, but he is attempting to do so by indirectly reporting the emotional state of the woman just before she leaves. I’ve found that indirect reporting can also contain information about the character commenting on the emotion, and here is a good example. Although he is providing emotional information about this woman, the narrator is also showing the reader Gabriel’s frame of mind and how that affects his interpretation of the woman’s emotional state.

But to return to the end of the story — once Gabriel and his wife have gone to their hotel room, he feels a sudden afflatus of love and sexual attraction for his wife and he thinks she is feeling attracted to him. Gabriel’s emotions in this scene swing wildly as I’ve already shown in my discussion of direct reporting, but here, Gabriel also attempts to read his wife’s emotions. When she has not reacted to his affection the way Gabriel hoped she would, he asks himself why. “Why did she seem so abstracted? He did not know how he could begin. Was she annoyed, too, about something? If she would only turn to him or come to him of her own accord!” Although he is not making a clear statement about what he believes is bothering his wife, the questions Gabriel poses internally do provide commentary on the woman’s emotional state. From those questions, the reader knows she is distant, perhaps hesitant, and emotionally unresponsive to the love Gabriel is attempting to display. Like the first example of indirect reporting, this commentary also supports the emotional representation of Gabriel himself. He poses these questions internally, as well as hoping that she will do something differently, without ever speaking directly to her.

Joyce’s story provides many examples of how the third technique of physical manifestation is almost always informed or aided by direct reporting. Going back to my first example of direct reporting, in the passage which shows the gloominess that Gabriel experiences early on in the narrative, the narrator expands on how Gabriel attempts to dispel the gloom by “arranging his cuffs and the bows of his tie.” This example provides a strong outward manifestation of Gabriel’s emotions, but the action of rearranging his cuffs and bow-tie would not be as effective without the clear purpose behind the action: dispelling the gloom that comes over him. Tying such clear emotions with a character’s natural physical reaction to those emotions creates an extremely successful bit of characterization in only a few words.

Finally, I’d like to return again to the end of the story where the narrator gives an intimate view of Gabriel’s relationship with his wife. After an agonizing back-and-forth inside his own mind about wanting to be affectionate with his wife and alternately wanting to possess her violently, Gabriel finally reacts to a kiss she gives him: “Gabriel, trembling with delight at her sudden kiss and at the quaintness of her phrase, put his hands on her hair and began smoothing it.” This is really a good example of how a strongly physical scene, or sentence really, is aided so much by the inclusion of a small example of direct reporting.

When I first selected this text, I was attempting to use it as an example of pure physical manifestation, primarily because so much of the description is physical. But it was also this example that informed my decision to focus on how physical manifestations are informed by directly stated emotions. If the directly stated emotion of delight were removed, the reader would be left with Gabriel trembling at his wife’s kiss and smoothing her hair. Although it would remain a touching moment, with all of Gabriel’s emotional conflict, the reader might be left wondering if he was in fact nervous or overwhelmed or even feeling guilty. But much like the previous scene where Gabriel was about to carve the goose, this is a brief moment of reprieve, and the inclusion of that delight tells the reader that Gabriel believes his wife has felt his adoration and that all is well. The act of smoothing her hair is the continuation of that adoration and, in light of the story’s ending, perhaps Gabriel’s most admirable attempt at loving his wife as well as dead lover had before.

This final excerpt stands on its own as an example of this third technique, but in reading the story as a whole with a focus on the emotional elements, I really began to see how the constant, consistent inclusion of clear emotional language and motivation builds a foundation and then an entire structure that manifests in a character who is wholly understandable, regardless of how irrational his behavior or thoughts may seem on their own. And as a writer, that certainly sounds like an achievement I would welcome in my own work.

 

Good Country People

The second story I would like to discuss is Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People.” In this story, O’Connor uses a shifting third-person limited narrator and a healthy dose of irony to show how false perceptions and assumptions can have unforeseen consequences. The story is about an unassuming mother, Mrs. Hopewell, who seems to find the best in people, and her cynical daughter Hulga who is handicapped by a childhood accident that left her using a prosthetic leg. The action of the story really begins when a naïve, seemingly simple-minded boy visits the house selling Bibles. After being invited to dinner, Hulga agrees to meet him the following day for a picnic with plans to take advantage of the young man, who she assumes is a dumb, backwoods Christian. As their date progresses, Hulga is tricked by the boy into removing her prosthetic leg, which he steals, leaving Hulga helpless in a barn loft. In this story, character emotion is especially important because it sets up the dark humor and irony that are trademarks of O’Connor’s work.

One of the first examples of direct reporting in the story does not describe either of the two primary characters, but rather the nosy and stubborn Mrs. Freeman whose husband works for Mrs. Hopewell. The description of Mrs. Freeman comes from the third-person narrator, but it is given from the daughter’s point of view:

Mrs. Freeman would take on strange resentments and for days together she would be sullen but the source of her displeasure was always obscure.”

This example of direct reporting clearly describes the emotion Mrs. Freeman would take on, that of being sullen, but also adds a bit of emotional characterization; not only does she exhibit her sullen mood in her behavior, but it can come from unexpected sources and even last for days. At the beginning of the essay, I used “Bob is sad” as a simple example of emotional reporting, and O’Connor’s line here a perfect example of how an author can say exactly that: “Mrs. Freeman is sullen,” but also how sullen — “for days” — and why (in this case, she directly states that the reason for the sullen mood is not always clear).

After the young Bible salesman has been introduced, the narrator provides the first bit of information that suggests some contradiction to Hulga’s cynical demeanor. After the young man stays for dinner, she agrees to meet him the following day for a picnic, which is a surprising turn in itself since the young salesman seems like a person Hulga would normally avoid or spurn. Her agreeing to meet him is surprising enough, but the larger surprise comes when the narrator introduces the reader to a vulnerable side of the young woman by directly reporting her emotions when she believes she has been stood up:

She looked up and down the empty highway and had the furious feeling that she had been tricked, that he had only meant to make her walk to the gate after the idea of him.

Here, we get the direct use of the noun “feeling” to accompany the emotion of fury. She is not only upset or angry that the boy she agreed to meet with, a boy she would normally mock, has stood her up, but she is furious. The passage has the added bonus of expressing her insecurity with the accompanying exposition and shows the reader that Hulga may actually be more defensive than gruff and impatient.

Although O’Connor shifts her third-person point of view throughout the story, the reader gets very little information about the young salesman aside from what is given by other characters. In one example of indirect reporting, the emotional impact of Hulga’s statement of atheism on the young man is described: “At this he stopped and whistled. ‘No!’ he exclaimed as if he were too astonished to say anything else.” Hulga’s perspective here provides what she imagines the young man’s emotional reaction would be.

O’Connor uses direct reporting quite a bit, but very often she combines it with physical manifestation. In my first example, Mrs. Hopewell is reacting to the young Bible salesman’s pitch. He presents himself as simple, doing the only thing he’s capable of to help provide for his family. He mentions that he has a physical defect that prevents him from other opportunities, which has a strong effect on the mother.

He and Joy had the same condition! She knew that her eyes were filling with tears but she collected herself quickly and murmured, “Won’t you stay for dinner? We’d love to have you!” and was sorry the instant she heard herself say it.

There is a great deal of emotional information in this example. First, the thought that the boy has a similar physical condition to her daughter is informed by multiple direct reports of the mother’s emotions toward her daughter’s ailment earlier in the story. The physical manifestation of this emotion comes in her eyes filling up with tears. The reader understands that her tears are coming from both her sadness about her own daughter and sympathy for this young man and possibly tears of joy because her daughter has found a co-sufferer. However, there is more direct reporting that follows this to better depict the woman’s exact emotional state. The fact that she collects herself, asks the young man to dinner, and then is instantly sorry she extended the invitation shows her struggle with her own emotions.

Now, finally, I’d like to show how O’Connor uses physical description to represent emotion in a complicated and calculating character like Hulga. Unlike her mother, Hulga is the type of character who does not express her emotions in a direct or (connected) physical way; however, it is still important for an author to be able to describe both the internal and external simultaneously for effect, and that is exactly what O’Connor does in this example:

She sat staring at him. There was nothing about her face or her round freezing-blue eyes to indicate that this had moved her; but she felt as if her heart had stopped and left her mind to pump her blood.

“She sat staring at him” is the kind of line I used to use in my own work. But O’Connor goes further. Whereas I would leave that line alone and beg the audience to make an intuitive leap, O’Connor’s narrator gives a deeper physical description (stoic face, freezing-blue eyes), as well as the emotional reason behind this description because there was nothing in her stare or her eyes or her face that suggested she was moved. Then we get the key word but, and we know there is a shift. Then the narrator gives us a direct report of Hulga’s contradictory, but powerful, emotional response. Although the description is of her heart stopping and her brain pumping her blood, the narrator uses the verb feel — “felt as if”, telling the reader immediately that this is not a physical reality, but rather an emotional reaction to the young man’s words. This emotional information supports the final scene of the story when the young Bible salesman, who has moved Hulga to trust and vulnerability, removes her artificial leg and steals it, revealing himself as a fraud and a rather twisted individual.

— Walker Griffy

Walker Griffy received his MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches composition and literature at Santa Monica College.

Oct 102013
 

As if you all didn’t know by now.

For the first time in history, the Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to a Canadian. Alice Munro, one of the world’s most respected and admired writers, was announced this morning as the winner of the prize in an especially notable year: one in which she has announced her retirement.

The 82-year-old author of 14 books of short stories is only the 13th woman to win the world’s most prestigious literary award. Earlier this year she announced her intention to stop writing, stating that her most recent book, Dear Life, would be her last.

via Canadian Alice Munro makes history with Nobel Prize win for literature – The Globe and Mail.

I published an essay, “The Mind of Alice Munro,” in Attack of the Copula Spiders. It had appeared in the magazine Canadian Notes & Queries and is still on the 0nline site there. I published here as a reading aid my marked up and annotated copy of the story.

“The Mind of Alice Munro”

Alice Munro — “Meneseteung” annotated

Just in care you’re interested.

dg

Aug 182013
 

Ann Ireland

Part way through the opening chapter of Ann Ireland‘s novel The Instructor, the narrator remarks that her putative lover (and art teacher) is like “a scout for some enemy camp, logging facts for a future ambush.” To me, this is about as exact a description of love as I have ever come across. La-de-dah romantics tend to ignore the fact that two people are distant countries, speaking foreign tongues, and that the progress of love is a sort of invasion that is always followed by hasty translation, colonization attempts, power struggles, and, often, retreat. Alice Munro, who wrote the jacket blurb for the novel, gets the picture. The Instructor, Ireland’s second novel, has just been reprinted by Dundurn Press, and we have the honour of publishing the first chapter here for the occasion. The novel tells the story of how 19-year-old Simone Paris falls for her much older art teacher, Otto Guest, on the first day of classes — and what ensues. Ann Ireland is a sophisticated observer of human affairs (of all sorts), and she is deceptive: she tells a good story, sure enough, but she also eschews relationship stereotypes by drilling into the complex undercurrents and finds uneasy answers.

dg

Chapter One

MY DEAR OTTO:

See my hand shaking like crazy? It’s not because I’m scared, not in the least. Though two hours ago I was so damn nervous and fidgety I scurried to the outhouse every ten minutes, then worried you’d choose that instant to roll up the hill. There I’d be, popping open the door of the little pagoda, while you leaned against the door of your car, grinning.

I jammed crackers in my mouth, thinking I needed the salt.

Why was I in such a state?

After all, you were history.

The phone call had come out of the blue. “Let’s have tea, just the two of us,” you said, your voice so low and intimate I glanced over my shoulder just to make sure you weren’t standing there.

My own voice, when it found itself, was guarded.

“Late afternoon is best. I’ve got meetings.”

That sounded important.

It is important. We’re running through the slate for next year’s program and I’ve been fighting for that New Music trio to be given the residence position.

“Why do you want —” I said, too late, into the dead phone. As was your habit, you’d hung up without warning. I was shaking then too … for this was my chance to show you what I’d become, how I’d devised a life of my own.

To begin with, the vehicle was all wrong. Come on, Otto, a brick-coloured Honda? It had to be a rental.

When you slipped out of the car, legs first like some starlet, I let out a sigh. For it was you, in the flesh and life-size. You strolled up the dirt path jiggedy-jog, legs bent at the knees, hands thrust deep into your pockets, so loose-limbed I swore you were about to keel over. Your face, grinning widely, so sure of its welcome, grew bigger and bigger — and still I didn’t move a muscle. I was nailed to the position I’d decided on since yesterday’s phone call: arms crossed, back sloped against the doorjamb of the cabin, wearing a black tank top that bled into the darkened interior. Like some Walker Evans photo, I decided, most of my hair drawn back with an elastic, the rest sweeping over my face in the lake breeze.

“Very nice, Simone,” you nodded, missing nothing. A cigarette dangled from your lips. I let you come right up until our toes touched.

“Hello, Otto.”

Of course we embraced, though perhaps a little stiffly. My face got buried in the base of your neck and it seemed to me I’d spent a lot of time gazing into the hollow of your throat where the pulse tapped silently. My fingers curled around the cloth of your collar — threadbare, soft denim — and I was whisked without warning to the hill outside San Patricio: hard earth and scrubby cactus, burros grazing. The heat and dryness made our skin crack and fissure, mimicking the landscape. We’d hiked all afternoon toward the peak where the cross stood, passing only gruff men in straw hats tending goats, then, as we neared the top, no one at all. It was your idea that we couldn’t look down till we reached the summit.

“No cheating, Simone.”

You wanted the vista to hit us in one overwhelming stroke — no dribs and drabs, no gradual seeping in. I scrambled up ahead the last few feet and touched the wooden cross, then turned to look. I felt myself teeter toward the land, which rolled out in all directions, a vast tanned skin of parched mountain and plain declining toward the horizon in minute gradations of brown. The town, with its clay roof tiles, sprawled up the walls of the valley. The sounds were more precise in distance, less cluttered by our own noises: dogs yelped and howled in the endless loop of call and response, while ancient buses groaned up the hills. A woman was calling to her children, her voice spinning effortlessly through the miles of open space. For once I forgot you were there until suddenly your arms swooped around my waist and tugged me in: this same shirt, I swear, my eyes batting against this hollow of a throat.

“I would hardly have recognized you.” You reached up and pulled off your cap, regulation New York Yankees model. Your hair, always bushy, had been flattened, and when you ran your hand through it I saw extra streaks of grey.

“Come on, Otto, it hasn’t been that long.”

“Four or five years.”

“Six, actually.”

“Really?” You seem genuinely astonished. “You look fantastic.”

I had to smile.

Of course you’ve got twenty-five years on me — and look it. What’s happened to your eyes that used to be so clear and sharply focused? And I have to say this, Otto, your jawline is starting to ripple toward the neck. You seem thinner, more brittle, though I felt the little pot belly when our bodies pressed together. An unexpected squish.

“I look like hell, I know it.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“But you were thinking it, dear.”

Dear. That rankled.

We continued to stare at each other, you jiggling change, me stock-still. And I thought, nothing’s happening. The butterflies that had been charging through my stomach all morning seemed to have been drugged. Do you understand what I’m saying, Otto? You stood a foot away and I felt a big fat zero.

“Going to let me in?”

“Of course. Sorry.”

You pushed past and I let you poke around the cabin, lifting objects off the mantel: the cracked coil pot, an Indian basket, the black-and-white photo of Father digging the outhouse hole. The woodstove received special attention, and you lifted the burner and peeked inside. I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d reached in and touched the ashes, but you just looked, as if deciding whether I’d chucked something in there to burn. After, you strolled past the coffee table, picked up the book of feminist film criticism, flipped through, and I got the distinct impression you knew it had been selected for display. My cheeks heated up. Your hand swept over the tops of chairs and bookshelves, leaving streaks of shiny wood. Why did I feel you were a scout for some enemy camp, logging facts for a future ambush? I stiffened; the nervous feeling kicked in again. It was almost a relief; this was how I expected to be with you.

I decided to make tea and handed you the kettle so you could fetch water from the outside pump.

“This place is great!” you enthused on your return. “Your dad made it?”

“With my mother.”

“It’s like …” You tilted your head. “The house where the seven dwarfs lived. A cartoon cabin.” You hunched under the door frame. “Bet your old man is exactly five foot six. Everything’s scaled to that height.”

Right as always.

I found of box of lemon biscuits and tossed them on the table. You began to make short work of them, knocking two at a time into your hand, while crumbs scattered down the front of your shirt.

“Where’s your mother now?” you said, dropping onto a chair.

“She moved into a condo in Etobicoke. Nice view of the lake. She loves it.”

“And your dad?”

“He died three and a half years ago.”

“I’m so sorry.” You winced and briefly shut your eyes. “I didn’t know.”

“Of course not: how could you?” I pulled away from your reaching hand and watched you swing your legs so you could follow my movements around the room. You didn’t speak, and I knew you were hoping I’d say more about him. Your face waited, creased in sympathy. I measured tea into the Brown Betty pot and rinsed out two mugs. I collected the plastic honey jar from the shelf, then poured milk into a tiny pitcher. I would not give you this chance to pry me open. The spoons received a quick wipe on the towel.

You watched each gesture avidly.

“Then will you at least tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself?”

I let out a breath, staring at the back of my own hand as it closed over the teapot handle. You could still do it, make me achingly visible to myself.

“What do you want to know, Otto?”

“Everything. The works — every second since you left me.”

“You think I’ve been writing it all down, waiting for the day you’d turn up again?”

You smiled quickly. “Haven’t you?”

I flushed, because in a way I had. Lived my life and at the same time wondered what you’d make of it, anticipating your comments, your chuckles, and of course, the withering asides that had the effect of turning whatever I was doing — or whoever I was with — into something faintly comical.

“Well?” You leaned forward, following the motion of my fingers as they wrapped around the copper tray. “There must have been plenty of men sniffing around.”

You wanted all the details, fixing me with your eyes until I’d find myself describing the colour of the sheets, the texture of skin and hair. I set down the tea tray, the smell of Earl Grey a consoling presence, and pulled up a chair.

“Anyone serious?” you persisted.

“What’s this all about, Otto?”

“Curiosity.”

“Is that all?”

You hesitated only a second. “Of course.”

I stared into your face looking for signs: irony, amusement … but could read only the wide-eyed innocence you’d chosen for display.

I could tell you about Raymond, the dancer — but stopped just as I saw the edges of your mouth tighten. Already I was turning Raymond into a story, a series of tiny tropes to make you howl with delight and commiseration.

I shook my head, half laughing at my narrow escape, trying to shake that eager stare, at the same time bathing in its intensity.

“No, Otto, it’s my turn.”

“Your turn?”

“That’s right. My turn to ask questions.”

“Ahhh,” you exhaled noisily and pushed your chair away from the table. You lifted your chin toward the window and a glazed look came over your face that I instantly recognized: the Shift. The moment of withdrawal. Suddenly, with the practiced move of an old-time actor, you launched, full-tilt, into a monologue.

Something about light refraction that you’d read in a scientific journal. “Great diagrams, and a nice sequence of time-lapse photos …” Your legs splayed and you crooked an arm over the back of the chair.

The room shrank.

“… This guy’s theory knocks away all our notions of how we see, how our eyes gather and process light.”

I was supposed to lean into every word.

Instead, I gazed at you in amazement; you’d known, hadn’t you, exactly what I’d been about to say? The more you blabbed, underlining every third word with your finger on the tabletop, the sadder I felt.

And I was bored, Otto.

That was a first.

“… So you just change the angle of dispersal.” You hiked a cigarette from the package and positioned it just so on the table. “What appears to be pigment is really nothing more than mirrors!” You giggled with delight.

“Otto —”

“Think what could be done —”

“Ot-to —” singing it now like “Yoo-hoo.” Nervy. You weren’t accustomed to being interrupted in full flight.

Finally you tugged your gaze away from the open window and looked at me.

“I want to know why you’re here.” I was proud of that, the simple declarative statement.

Our stares hooked for an instant, then, incredibly, you drop-ped right back into the soliloquy as if I’d never uttered a word.

“… bombard them with photosensitive materials …”

I saw exactly what was going to happen, how you’d leave with nothing said and that it would drive me crazy and I’d spend the next six months berating myself, reconstructing the scene. So I pushed my chair back and brazenly set my face close to yours.

“Why are you here, Otto? Don’t natter on about goddamn light refraction — mail me the article!”

Your cheek muscles worked up and down. Your stare was flat, as if you were overhearing some foreign language. Then you chuckled, flicked an ash off your cigarette, and said, “You haven’t yet told me what you’ve been up to.”

You weren’t going to be snared by an amateur.

“It’s been six years, Otto.”

“So work backwards.”

Of course. Time is a fluid concept, its direction determined by a tilt of the glass.

“I’m director of the Summer Arts Festival.”

A quick smile. “Good for you.”

“As of two years ago.”

“Still making art?”

“No time.” I made a dismissive gesture but felt the familiar pang.

“Of course not. You have a real job. Someone has to run the country.”

“It’s a big operation,” I heard myself insist. “We cram two months full of chamber music, author readings, dance performances, workshops, and classes. Our budget’s doubled in two years and most of that is local money.” I sounded like the Chamber of Commerce.

You nodded. Smoke drifted from your nostrils and made its languid way toward the ceiling rafters. You were enjoying this. And why not? I was right where I had always been: desperate to please and impress you.

“I’m on a roll,” I declared. “They do everything I want. When Krizanc, chairman of my board, starts to rant about ‘market-driven programming,’ I tell him we have to create our audience. Not let the audience create us. Make them drowsy with something familiar — then kick open the gates. Blow them away!”

Who was this talking?

All these years of careful filtering, reclaiming my voice — and now this: the mimic reborn.

Late-afternoon sun pressed through the window and I leapt to tug the curtain. “It’s all in the presentation. Make them think they’re on the cutting edge right here in Rupert and it becomes a point of pride. They expect art to be tough; they want it to be.”

Your word, as in “tough-minded,” “tough-thinking.”

“Bravo.” You hooked a chair with the toe of your boot. “Sit down, Simone, you’re very flushed.”

I obeyed, hating the way I felt, overheated and sticky, pulse racing.

“My half-dozen years haven’t been nearly so fruitful.”

I forced myself to look straight into your face. “What have you been doing?”

One of your famous pauses.

“I stayed on,” you said at last.

“In San Patricio?”

You nodded.

“What on earth did you do there for six years?” I was shocked; it never occurred to me that you might have stayed on. All this time I’d been walking down Spadina Avenue in downtown Toronto every chance I got, glancing up at your studio window, wondering if you were in there with your ripped-up magazines and glue stick.

“Got drunk most days. Made a truckload of bad drawings. Then one morning I got sick of the sun and the smell of rancid cooking oil and started to drive north.”

“And?”

“That’s it.”

“What about your ex —”

“Wife? Carmen’s out of the picture, except where Kip is concerned.”

Your son. He’d be twenty-one by now. Older than I was when I stepped on the plane to come home. “What’s he up to?” You always loved to talk about your son.

Your fingers wrapped around your teacup, the nails chewed to bits. “I saw him this morning. Not so good, Simone. Not so good.”

I stared.

“They’re adjusting his medication. Makes him screwy, his equilibrium is shot. The kid can hardly walk.”

“Medication? What are you talking about?” My self-consciousness vanished.

“He gets seizures.” Your eyes scanned the room without focusing. “It began five or six years ago. Of course, you’d have no way of knowing.”

“What kind of seizures?”

“He goes months without any problem, then suddenly, keels over wherever he is: the gym, a crowded subway.”

“Jesus, Otto, I had no idea.”

“Of course not.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with” — I struggled to sound casual — “that time he fell off the boat?”

“What?”

You sound genuinely mystified.

“In San Patricio, on the lake.” I prodded, already wishing I hadn’t brought it up.

You stared at me, fully engaged for a few seconds. “I don’t see how. He wasn’t under more than a minute.”

Right.

“The worst of it isn’t the seizures,” you went on. “Which happen maybe three, four times a year. It’s his attitude that stinks. Yesterday, at the hospital, he made his neck go all floppy, then titters, ‘What a shame your kid’s a crip.’ Crip my ass!”

The table shuddered as you smacked it with your hand. “Ninety-five percent of the time he’s perfectly okay. There’s guys a lot worse off than him — blind! Imagine being blind, or deaf! But you don’t see them hanging out on Queen Street, playing skinhead, cadging cigarettes and spare change. He snorts PAM out of a goddamn baggie …” You took a deep breath and snapped open the top of your shirt. “He’s quit three schools, got caught boosting a pair of Doc Martens from the Eaton Centre …”

Had you driven two hours to spout off against your son, ask my forgiveness for being such a lousy father?

“I’m sorry, Otto.”

“So am I.” Your tone was aggressive, as if you were determined I’d know the worst of it. “I thought if I stayed far away in some hill town everyone would be better off, that I was so fucked up it would overwhelm them. Pure ego.” You laughed. “Which I’ve never been short of.”

I didn’t deny this. “He lives with you, or Carmen?”

“He’s in a halfway house for kids who screw up. They huddle out on the sidewalk most of the day, smoking, or they’re taking courses in something called ‘Life Skills.’” You snorted. “He asked after you, just as I was leaving today.”

“Me?” My mind was racing.

“He wondered if you were ‘still on the scene.’”

“What did you say?”

“That I hadn’t seen you for years. That it wasn’t meant to be.” Your knee pressed against mine. “He’s convinced you saved his life, that time he pitched overboard.”

I reddened. “That’s absurd.”

“Even so, he likes the idea that you pulled him from the brink.”

“But it’s not true!”

“He thinks it is.”

First your knee, now your thigh. Uneasy, I shifted, but didn’t move away.

You reached for the cookie box and shook it. Empty.

This wasn’t the scene I’d be picturing, far from it.

Hell, I was feeling sorry for you. I’d been prepared for anger — even desire, but not this.

“Sometimes I used to feel you two were conspiring against me.” You spoke with studied casualness. “When you came in from riding those underfed nags, Kip was so flushed and healthy-looking — I used to wish I had that power.”

Power? I had to laugh. So you were jealous, Otto. This notion would have pleased me once. Now I just felt drained. The numbness crept back. Here we were again, using Kip as our topic, and I was supposed to pretend I cared. I reached for the tea things and scraped cookie crumbs onto a saucer.

A long time ago I was reaching for you to tear the world open. Now, in your presence, I felt hemmed in, claustrophobic.

“I need to live in Toronto again, to be near Kip.”

“That makes sense.” I didn’t hide a yawn.

“Last Saturday I picked up the newspaper and who did I see but you — with this most professional smile planted on your face. Very impressive, Simone.”

“You saw that?” I couldn’t help feeling pleased. The Globe had done a feature in the Arts section, underlining how the Summer Festival had “revitalized” the area and pinning much of the success of its “fresh, young director.”

“I thought, She looks so damn competent — pretty too.”

I crumpled the cookie box and tossed it toward the trash.

“I’m flat broke, Simone. Benny says the art market’s shriveled, nothing’s moving, nothing he can do for me.”

Benny — your dealer.

“There’s a recession, Otto. Even in San Patricio you must have heard about it.”

“I need a job.”

“Right.” I still didn’t get it.

“So —” You followed me to the sink with your saucer and cup. “You’re running this nice little festival. You could fit me in, as a teacher, artist-in-residence. I’m flexible as an old shoe, and more to the point, I’m desperate.” A smoke ring escaped from your mouth and hung in the air.

“As a teacher,” you continued, “I’m the best there is. You, if anyone, should know that.”

I dumped the leaves into the compost bowl. Now I understood why you’d come.

“We always got along well.”

I stared, mouth open.

You were jiggling a set of keys: Budget Rent A Car. At least I was right about that. “Think about it. Drop me a line, or call, as soon as you get a moment. I’ve got my old studio back.”

* * *

The little Honda bucked down the hill until its muffler scraped highway asphalt.

Then you cranked your window down and shouted into the hot still air: “You must feel very safe here!”

I opened my mouth to protest — “Who the hell wants safety?” — then remembered: they were your exact words, uttered years earlier.

It was a scruffy copy of Lassie Come Home, borrowed from the Rupert Public Library, and as I turned each page my fingers buffed scabs of peanut butter and petrified snot.

I didn’t even notice the sun was falling and I was losing my light. I simply tilted the book a little more every few minutes — until a word stopped my eye mid-sentence.

What was this word?

She.

Lassie, I’d just discovered, was a “she.”

The book dropped between my knees. Lassie, the hero of the tale, was actually a heroine. That was like those other despised words: poetess, actress, cowgirl — images of women in fringed skirts, riding sidesaddle, squealing with terror. How could I identify with the girl version of the real thing? How can fantasy be populated by underachievers?

—Excerpted from The Instructor

Copyright © 2013, Ann Ireland. All rights reserved. www.dundurn.com

———————-
Ann IrelandAnn Ireland is the author of four novels, most recently THE BLUE GUITAR, which has been getting excellent reviews all across Canada. She coordinates the Writing Workshops department at the Chang School of Continuing Education, Ryerson University, in Toronto. She teaches on line writing courses and edits novels for other writers from time to time. She also writes profiles of artists for Canadian Art Magazine and Numéro Cinq Magazine (where she is Contributing Editor). Dundurn Press will be re-publishing Ann’s second novel: THE INSTRUCTOR over the summer of 2013.
May 282012
 

Book News, Reviews, Orders

“…a master of narrative structure” (Wall Street Journal)

“…every literate person in the country should be reading Glover’s essays.” (Globe and Mail)

———–

Order Attack of the Copula Spiders

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April 25, 2013

Brendan Riley review in Review of Contemporary Fiction:

This is not literary craft reduced to statistical formulae and write-by-the-numbers word-bytes. Glover’s admirable ability and patient willingness to cast a careful—not cold—eye on what makes sentences hum and flow is fueled by a vital, infectious fascination with words, enabling him to reveal the inspired, alchemical, verbal concatenation at work in the most alluring and memorable fiction writing.

Read the whole review here.

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March 30, 2013

3 Canadian Writers with Buzz @ The Reader

 

 

attack

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March 9, 2013

A Canadian author’s book on writing went viral on social media recently, leading to thousands of would-be fiction writers searching their manuscripts for “Copula Spiders.”

Douglas Glover’s book Attack of the Copula Spiders (Biblioasis) coins the term to refer to the multi-appendaged mess created by circling and linking all of the variations of the verb “to be” in a paragraph. (Copula is a term for the link between subject and predicate of a verb.) Excessive use of sentence constructions like “he was happy” or “the building was unassuming” lead to “flaccid and uninteresting prose,” he writes.

Joe Ponepinto, book review editor of the Los Angeles Review, brought Glover’s ideas to the literary world in a much-circulated blog post subtitled “Why I’ll never write (or read) the same way again.”

via Cameron Dueck’s arts column – Winnipeg Free Press.

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March 2, 2013

from Joe Ponepinto @ The Saturday Morning Post

I reviewed a book a while back that has stayed with me for many months and has affected the way I write and read, and it’s opened my eyes to a weakness in much creative writing, even in published books. Douglas Glover’s Attack of the Copula Spiders (Biblioasis, 2012) criticizes many aspects of fiction, but saves its most withering scorn for the rampant and indiscriminate use of copulas.

The Secret of Maimonides-Submission for 2-26

I hear you asking, “What’s a copula? I admit I had to look it up. Webster’s definition says: “the connecting link between subject and predicate of a proposition.” In most cases, this refers to a form of the word “be.” But what does that mean to us everyday writers? It means banal, didactic, often passive sentences, almost completely lacking in action or depth.

As Glover says: “A copula spider occurs when a student uses the verb ‘to be’ so many times on a page that I can circle all the instances, connect them with lines, and draw a spider diagram. Now there is nothing grammatically wrong with the verb ‘to be,’ but if you use it over and over again your prose is likely to be flaccid and uninteresting.”

via The Case of the Copula Overdose, or, Why I’ll Never Write (or Read) the Same Way Again by Joe Ponepinto @ The Saturday Morning Post

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December 9

From Chapman/Chapman’s Favorite Longreads of 2012.

“‘A Scrupulous Fidelity: on Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser’ by Douglas Glover, The Brooklyn Rail

Close reading doesn’t get much better than this. Glover expertly unpacks the logorrheic hilarity of Bernhard’s text without ruining any of the fun.”

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November 24

Attack of the Copula Spiders named one of the top non-fiction books of 2012 by The Globe and Mail.

“[By] by the time I reached the penultimate chapter, a brilliant examination of, among other things, the catastrophic meeting of the 15th-century book cultures of Europe and the oral cultures of the new world, I had decided that every literate person in the country should be reading Glover’s essays.” — Charles Wilkins

via Non-fiction books from this year that are worth a read (or two) – The Globe and Mail.

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November 9

Governor-General Podcast Interview with Sky Hornig in Calgary during Wordfest in mid-October.

The Governor-General Podcast Interview – Douglas Glover

via Douglas Glover – CJSW – Calgary’s Independent Radio 90.9 FM.

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September 29

A few months ago I read a book by Douglas Glover titled Attack of the Copula Spiders. At the time, I didn’t even know what a copula was. Once I understood, I spent days fixing copula-laden writing, and sweated over every sentence I wrote to make sure I was using more active verbs. In time, though, those fixations fade into the subconscious, which is where they belong. The key to good writing, I believe, is not to ignore rules and not to obsess over them. It’s to incorporate the ones you believe are true into your writing psyche so that you are aware of them without thinking about them. — Joe Ponepinto, Book Review Editor at LA Review. Writer, editor, teacher. Occasional curmudgeon. Dad to henry, the coffee-drinkin’ dog

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September 29

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September 5

If I had to guess what events will sell out first, my money would be on the Douglas Glover Master Class. He’s a spectacular Canadian writer who has kindly agreed to do a three hour class on the mechanics of good creative writing for WordFest patrons. The best part about it? It’s only 30 bucks per person. What are you waiting for? Follow this link and buy tickets now!

via Post-Launch Blog: A Response | WordFest Blog.

 

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July 17

Shelagh Shapiro interviews dg on his new book Attack of the Copula Spiders at Write the Book, Shelagh’s long-running radio show, which, by the way, is fast becoming an institution in its own right, a vast trove of writerly advice and experience. Listen to the interview on Shelagh’s site or download the podcast — it’s also available at iTunes.

Douglas Glover – Interview

Award-winning Canadian author Douglas Glover, on his latest book: a collection of essays on writing, Attack of the Copula Spiders, published by Biblioasis.

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July 15

Douglas Glover and How to Write a Novel

by Jane Eaton Hamilton

I’m reading “Attack of the Copula Spiders” by Douglas Glover. i remember him trying to drill the matters in his first piece, “How to Write a Novel,” through my thick brain back in Saratoga Springs in the early 90s. It was the best advice I had ever gotten on making a novel. Really, it still is, and I’m glad to see it again in other than my own scrambled notes. 

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July 6

Vivian Dorsel interviews Douglas Glover in upstreet 8.

upstreet with Douglas Glover

Dorsel:  What do you emphasize in your teaching of writing?

Glover: Reading. The first thing I give students is a reading rubric and an analytical check-list to begin to reform their reading skills. As I say in Attack of the Copula Spiders, we live in a post-literate age. On a certain level that book is about the act of reading. I am pushing a critical aesthetic that is a bit like New Criticism and a bit like Russian Formalism; but, to my mind, as a writer, it just seems reasonable and immeasurably expands comprehension. You read a story and pay some attention to how it’s put together and, beyond the illusion of fictional narrative, you suddenly engage with the text on a whole other, rather exciting, level of grammar, rhythm and meaning. You begin to see connections that hitherto you vaguely passed over supplying your own dreamy connotations (as you’re taught to do in high school). We’re at a moment in our culture when differences in the ability to read and comprehend a text are critical.

I can’t remember the moment when I actually invented the phrase “copula spiders,” I only foggily recall circling over and over again all the “to be” verbs and then noticing that I could make a diagram on the page and that the diagram resembled a spider (with far more legs than it should have). The real issue, the shocking point, is that when you teach writing you are basically teaching the same student over and over again. It doesn’t matter whether the student is writing nonfiction or fiction or that the student thinks the burning piece of paper in his hand is the next War and Peace because he has put his heart into it and it comes out of his own original personal thoughts and is different (he believes) from anything ever written before (or in the future). The shocking thing is the uniformity of mediocrity. The shocking thing is that intelligent adults can’t think of another verb to use (actually most students jog along with a verb repertoire of about five: to be, to look, to sit, to stand, to see—absolutely the most popular verb choices).

The crucial connector here is to realize that part of the reason proto-writers don’t notice they are doing this is because they don’t know how to read. Eighty percent of what I do every semester is teach students how to read like writers, that is, with attention to structure and the felicities of well-written prose. So the two aspects of my book are necessarily joined: you can’t teach people to write simply by telling them what they are doing wrong; you have to show them where it is done right, that is, you have to show them how to read.

Once you learn to read you can teach yourself how to write. Literature is an encyclopedia of technique.

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June 5

“The best essays in this collection come further in as Glover, like a physicist dissecting atoms, breaks down the prose of several great writers of the past few decades. A successful fiction writer in his own right, he wants not only to identify the techniques of stylists such as Alice Munro, Mark Anthony Jarman, and Thomas Bernhard, but to understand the grand logic behind the structures, the God-like plans that such geniuses hatch to produce their greatest works. Although this is not specifically a “how-to” book, Glover’s analyses in Copula Spiders prove far more insightful than traditional criticism, and by extension far more helpful to writers who are serious about approaching perfection in their craft.” — Joe Ponepinto @ The Los Angeles Review

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June 5

It’s a great book. Look for my review in the next issue of Broken Pencil. — Nico Mara-McKay @ nicomaramckay.com

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June 3

The first bad review; always a landmark. DG taken to the barn and whipped with limp squibs by Daniel Evans Pritchard at The Critical Flame, a young man apparently lacking a sense of humor and a delusional optimist who seems to think all those e-books coming out are worth reading. Without a trace of irony, he quotes, um, a Gallup poll to tell us the state of literary culture in America. At least he spelled my name right (although he didn’t manage to copy Mark Anthony Jarman’s name with the same accuracy — Mark suddenly becoming French in the translation — Marc Anthony Jarman). Tiresome as it is, I herewith issue my usual challenge to a duel.

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May 21

Such was the pace of my conversion, that by the time I reached the penultimate chapter, a brilliant examination of, among other things, the catastrophic meeting of the 15th-century book cultures of Europe and the oral cultures of the new world, I had decided that every literate person in the country should be reading Glover’s essays and was fixing to present them to my eldest daughter, who is about to begin literary studies at UBC.

Glover is at times rather detached in his assessment of the value of storytelling. And yet there is a subtext to his work, a sense that if a story is to have life beyond the intrinsics of its existence, it must, sooner or later, ease up to the imponderables at the heart of what it is to be human. As Joni Mitchell said of songwriting, if at some point a song’s lyrics don’t extend themselves into a larger orbit, “it’s all just complaining.” Charles Wilkins, The Globe and Mail

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May 13

His sortie on the verb “to be” in “Attack of the Copula Spiders” is particularly brilliant. Mark Sampson at Free Range Reading

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April 28

Attack of the Copula Spiders is a practical guide for anyone interested in writing. Glover’s first chapter, “How To Write A Novel,” alone is worth the price of the book. Telegraph Journal SalonBooks

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Caroline Adderson, author of A History of Forgetting: “Just ordered it. The essay on “Meneseteung” alone is worth the price.”

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April 13

“These essays are not just for writing students, however. Whatever heightens student awareness of craft also sharpens the awareness of the general reader who has no desire to try his or her hand at writing but would like better to understand literature. Glover has an essay on Alice Munro that is of value to any short story writer but also should be required reading for anyone interested in Canadian fiction.” Philip Marchand in the National Post

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April 10

“You should have a look at Douglas Glover on what may be the Mexican classic, Pedro Paramo, which was once described to me as “Mexico’s Joyce.” (The essay appears in Glover’s recent Attack of the Copula Spiders, which looks to be a great book of literary essays.)” — Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading

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April 9

“Thoughtful and erudite books such as Attack of the Copula Spiders are always useful as roadmaps for developing better readers and writers. Now if we could only get the world to read them carefully.” George Fetherling review in Quill and Quire

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“I’m a few chapters into reading it a second time. All of it is wise and clear and exciting. The book is chock-full of good stuff, but the first and third chapters are especially brilliant. And the first paragraph of your essay on the Rooke novel is itself worth the price of the book. ” — Jack Hodgins, Governor General’s Award winning author of The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne and The Invention of the World

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March 25

Douglas Glover interview re Attack of the Copula Spiders on The Danforth Review.

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Douglas Glover’s Craftwork talk on the novel at the Center for Fiction — based on “How To Write A Novel,” one of the essays in Attack of the Copula Spiders

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March 14

Craftwork: Douglas Glover — Wednesday, March 14, 2012, 7:00 pm, at

The Center for Fiction
17 E. 47th Street
(between Fifth and Madison)
New York, NY 10017
(212) 755-6710
info@centerforfiction.org

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March 15

Douglas Glover Read at Celebration of The Literarian

The Center for Fiction
17 E. 47th Street
(between Fifth and Madison)
New York, NY 10017
(212) 755-6710
info@centerforfiction.org

Thurs

day March 15, 2012
07:00 pm

Come join us for drinks and micro-readings in celebration of our online magazine, The Literarian, featuring contribs Alan Cheuse, Anne Landsman, Barbara O’Dair, Carmela Ciuraru, Christine Schutt, Diane DeSanders, Douglas Glover, Elissa Schappell, Jane Ciabattari, Kim Chinquee, Leigh Newman, Leopoldine Core, Terese Svoboda, Tracy O’Neill, and Victoria Redel.

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February 9

The Thomas Bernhard essay in Attack of the Copula Spiders quoted in The New Yorker online Book Bench.

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Among the essays included in the book:

  • How to Write a Novel (dg’s famous Novel Lecture)
  • How to Write a Short Story: Notes on Structure and an Exercise (see examples of student stories written from the exercise here and here)
  • The Drama of Grammar
  • The Mind of Alice Munro
  • Novels and Dreams
  • A Scrupulous Fidelity: On Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser

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February 5

UK Guardian reviewer and columnist and editor of the magazine 3 a.m. Andrew Gallix quotes from Attack of the Copula Spiders.

(This is in his Phantom Book category, related to language theory and a modernist aesthetic. dg is up there with Walter Benjamin, George Steiner and Herman Melville.)

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February 1

Essay excerpted from Attack of the Copula Spiders in The Brooklyn Rail

Linked on A Piece of Monologue, ReadySteadyBook, and wood s lot.

“…excellent essay” — @ Who Killed Lemmy Caution?

“…excellent essay” — @ Three Minutes’ Chewing

“…a great essay by Douglas Glover about Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser (it is serialized from Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing, published by Biblioasis. The essay makes a fine rundown of the various rhetorical devices that makes Bernhard Bernhard. So if you ever wonder how he manages to attain those typically Bernhardian effects, look here.” Scott Esposito @ Conversational Reading

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Attack of the Copula Spiders Book Signing at Vermont College of Fine Arts booth, AWP ChicagoThursday, March 1, 2-3:30pm. Books available. Bring cash or checks.

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Attack of the Copula Spiders Party at AWP Chicago Friday, March 2, 7-8:15pm, Hilton Chicago Hotel Dining Room 4. Invitation below.
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Invitation Flyer

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Visit the NC Bookstore.

Buy books here and a percentage comes back to NC for the upkeep of the magazine.

Apr 042011
 

Here is a gorgeously bittersweet new poem by Sydney Lea whose ninth collection of poems, Young of the Year, has just been published by Four Way Books. Syd is an old friend from my early Vermont College of Fine Arts days (see my introduction to his fine essay “Weathers and Places” published earlier on NC). I also interviewed him when I had my radio show, The Book Show out of WAMC, the Albany, NY, public radio station. Somewhere in the Black Hole of a crawl space accessed through my sons’ bedroom there is a box of tapes I saved from that show. I always mean to dig out the interview and replay it—lovely talk of dogs, birds, hunting and nature. Syd tells me he wrote this poem after watching the movie Away from Her which is based on an Alice Munro short story called “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” The movie stars Julie Christie and the Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent whom I have always admired, especially his great and underrated movie The Rowdyman. Pinsent plays the bereaved husband of a woman who suffers from dementia, forgets him and, in a mysteriously touching reversal, finds new love in the home where she is kept. In my mind, Sydney Lea and Alice Munro have a great deal in common; they are both achieved artists in whose hands even the most difficult things are elaborated with force, delicacy and apparent ease. Syd’s poem captures beautifully the wistful mystery of lost memory and love, the strange turn (just sailing away, it seems) of the long-loved one into the open sea.

dg

Forever

By Sydney Lea

 

She wonders if it’s cliché to think of the husband
with whom she’s lived for decades,
most of which she’d call, all things considered,
a pleasure — if it’s cliché to imagine her partner
a ship at the lip of a clouded horizon.

In fact he’s sailed the whole way over.
And then she wonders why she should wonder this,
why it would make any difference, trite or fresh?
And what does she know about ships?
Early on, as they sat one morning together,

he felt in his pocket for his car keys,
held them up against the kitchen’s skylight,
whispering “Bullet. Bullet.”
It passed, they embraced, both a little uneasy,
but he left for work as always.

For what seems to her now quite a while they kept it away,
that morning, unmentioned, conspired into absence.
After all, there seemed nothing
that either could do about it then, and nothing
of course to be done today.

What does she know about ships, about sailors?
No, nothing either,
though once as a girl she was carried out on a bay
in a rich friend’s yacht. The cold white spray
flew gunwale to gunwale. And there’s more she remembers:

they all could have slept in the boat’s tidy cabin
in comfort, if that had been part of the outing’s plan.
And the tiller wheel was made of such dark lovely wood,
and everything else on board
showed some sort of glass or some bright brass fitting

and the life-rings that hung on the taffrail
were stenciled Claire C., the name of the boat.
It all made her feel she could never want anything more
when it came to beauty. That gleam. That air.
He had beauty as well.

back when he was the young man she chose
to live and sleep with ever after.
They made children together. They said they were blessed.
The beauty, which changed of course with the decades, was nonetheless
beauty. She still supposes it so,

though it swamps her soul
to watch him sink out of reach, unheeding.
Why can’t she call him up? Why can’t she call him to her?
Her mind shifts back to her girlfriend’s father,
who kept inspecting a tiny crack in the sleek sloop’s hull,

no matter his pretty wife’s counsel
that he relax, that he live for this day
of wheeling seabirds, foam and speed,
sharp-edged, slam-bang clouds,
heady squeaks and snaps from mast and mainsail.

The husband worried, the husband
insisted it might be only a matter of time
before that inconspicuous fissure turned into much more.
He was looking for something to do about it there
and then — as of course he couldn’t.

He said he hated to think of his treasure,
his own Claire C., beyond recall, to imagine the day
when off it might be
— he used the cliché —
to Davy Jones’s locker with her. Forever.

—Sydney Lea

Jun 212010
 

This is the opening of an essay on Alice Munro just published in CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries 79, in a special Short Story Issue to coincide with the biennial convention of the Society for the Study of the Short Story in English, currently taking place in Toronto.

The Mind of Alice Munro

by Douglas Glover

 

Alice Munro’s constant concern is to correct the reader, to undercut and complicate her text until all easy answers are exhausted and an unnerving richness of life stands revealed in the particular, secret experiences of her characters. She does this in two ways. First, she has a sly capacity for filling her stories with sex, thwarted loves, betrayal and violence while self-presenting (somehow, in the prose) as a middle-aged Everywoman with only the faintest hint of a salacious gleam in her eye. And second, she deploys an amazing number of intricately interconnected literary devices that ironize and relativize meanings while conversely revealing (unveiling as in “apocalypse”) an underground current of life that seems all the more true because it is hidden, earthy, frank, and shocking. In her story “Meneseteung,” for example, the truth has something to do with menstruation, bloating, diarrhea and opium. That this truth is called into question at the story’s close is pure Alice Munro whose message may only be that life is never what you think it is.

“Meneseteung” advertises itself as faux amateur biography of a forgotten and forgettable local poet, a spinster named Almeda Joynt Roth, who lived at the end of the 19th century in a small Ontario village just inside the advancing frontier. In 1879, Meda is drifting toward middle age when a salt well entrepreneur named Jarvis Poulter moves into town and half-heartedly begins to court her. One night Meda hears a drunken commotion in the street outside her house. Ignoring the ruckus, she manages to fall back asleep, but in the morning she discovers a woman’s body in her backyard and runs to Jarvis’s house, two doors down the street, for help. Jarvis nudges the body with his toe, pronounces the woman drunk and wipes his hand off on a leaf after shaking her roughly by the hair. Then, apparently aroused by Meda’s nightgown (suddenly seeing her in a sexual light), he invites her to walk with him to church later in the morning (a decisive signal of interest in the world of the story). Meda is in a tizzy. She has taken a sleeping drug the evening before, her period is starting, she has diarrhea, she’s making grape jelly; now she doses herself with nerve medicine (probably laudanum). Just before Jarvis shows up she pins a note to her front door; Jarvis retreats in silence. Meda spends the rest of the day in a drug haze, imagining the townspeople as gravestones toddling down the street. Then life returns to normal; only Jarvis is no longer interested in paying court to Meda. In 1903, village louts chase the eccentric old biddy into a nearby swamp. She catches cold and dies, leaving behind a slim volume of poems entitled Offerings.

That’s the story action, the bare bones. But with Alice Munro the difference between the bare bones of the story and the way she organizes the bones and flesh of her text is…

 

2010 © Douglas Glover

Apr 262010
 

Though I’ve known and admired Jack Hodgin‘s work for ages, we actually hadn’t met til we ended up on the same judges’ panel for a literary award three years ago. Usually, these things are tense affairs, but Jack, our third panelist, the novelist Joan Barfoot, and I had such an agreeable time together we became internet friends, a tiny community of three sending group emails back and forth. Joan lives in London, Ontario, and Jack lives far, far away on Vancouver Island. He has been known to complain ruefully, upon finding a sequence of emails from Joan and me, that everything happens in the rest of the world before he even wakes up in the morning.

Jack has been a huge and beneficent presence on the Canadian literary scene for a couple of generations now. You can find all this for yourself by exploring his website (which, incidentally, contains a generous amount of writing advice). I love the list of prizes he’s won; it’s almost as long as the number of books he’s published. I am also fascinated by his real life relationship with the fictional character Dr. Jack Hodgins in the TV series “Bones.”

This little essay is just a taste. I like it because it reminds me of all the friends who have made the pilgrimage to Oxford–so many of us loved Faulkner and yet had to fight our way out from under his stylistic shadow.

Jack has a new novel coming out in May. It’s called The Master of Happy Endings. This is what Alice Munro says about it: “From one of Canada’s master storytellers comes a powerful new novel about memory, belonging, helping others, and the vagaries of the human heart. It is also a compelling story about how a man in his later seventies manages to conjure one more great adventure for himself.” Buy the book.

dg

FAULKNER MISSISSIPPI:  April 1982

Walking up the pathway towards the front steps and white pillars of the house known as Rowan Oak, I was aware of a chill that lifted the hairs at the back of my neck. William Faulkner had lived here, had written most of his novels here, had walked up this pathway, perhaps had even laid this herringbone brickwork in the pathway himself. The man would not be inside, of course – he had been dead for several years – but the house was open to visitors, with a resident guide from the nearby university.  Still, I was about to reach the destination in what was really a sort of pilgrimage.

We had spent a few sunny April days in New Orleans before driving the little rented car north, pausing only briefly in Baton Rouge before passing into Mississippi. We’d visited the ante-bellum houses in Natchez and toured the 16 miles of Vicksburg battleground before driving on up the highway through pine forests in the direction of Oxford.

In the direction, that is, of the town where once lived the man whose books had thrilled and inspired me, and whose powerful voice and vision had so invaded me as to destroy all my earliest attempts at writing – two bad novels and several stories, all rejected and abandoned — before I’d eventually found my own place and my own voice. Still, though I may have shaken off much of the power I’d once allowed him to have, I had not abandoned my admiration for the man and his work.

Of course the first indication we were entering Faulkner country was the little signpost naming the Yocana River, which was just a narrow yellow creek barely moving at the bottom of a muddy ditch.  It was not easy to imagine this “Yoknapatawpha” in anything like flood, or to believe in the difficulties it gave the Bundren family when they crossed it with the mother’s coffin, heading, as we were, for the town where “Pa” would get a new set of teeth, bury his wife, and find himself a new one. I hoped this was not a hint of more disappointments ahead.

Read the rest!

Apr 102010
 

Desktop46

I see some terrific essays now and then from students—critical essays, critical theses, and lectures. Sometimes they find a home, sometimes the AWP Chronicle picks them up. But often they just languish because they’re too long for a lot of magazines, or too craft oriented for general magazines, or not academic enough for scholarly magazines. That’s a shame because they are full of insights and real hands-on instruction in the art of writing. So it’s a great opportunity not to be missed for Numéro Cinq. Julie Marden’s essay is a wonderful analysis of Chekhov’s stories and an explication of the narrative structure I call “thematic passages.” It fits in especially well since we have had a run of Chekhov posts, including David Helwig’s translation of Chekhov’s story “On Love.” See also Julie’s short essay on Chekhov and Alice Munro.

dg

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None other than Flannery O’Connor has warned against a consideration of literary theme at a technical level. “I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme,” she says, in her essay “Writing Short Stories,”  “is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.” I take her point. We expect theme to arise naturally from the details of our stories, not to be something we should work at specifically.  But later in the same essay, O’Connor says this: “I prefer to talk about the meaning in a story rather than the theme of a story. . . The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it . . . the meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully. Which brings me to my subject: the different ways Chekhov makes statements about meaning in his stories “Grief” and “Gusev.” Personally, I would like to get better at making such statements in my own fiction, and have concluded that expecting theme or meaning to arise naturally from my stories’ details can be unproductive.  In doing so, I may neglect to write the very passages that make those details significant, passages that might bring me, while writing, into deeper contact with my story’s potential, and that might help readers, while reading, experience that potential more fully.

Douglas Glover, in his essay, “Short Story Structure: Notes and an Exercise” in Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing, picks up where O’Connor leaves off by defining such statements as “thematic passages.” According to Glover, “a thematic passage is any text in which the narrator or some other character questions or offers an interpretation of the action of the story.”  This definition provides technical clarity to O’Connor’s idea, since by questioning or interpreting a story’s action a narrator or character renders that action more available to a reader’s experience and understanding.

Let’s quickly consider the two distinct ideas of action and interpretation.  Suppose I wrote, “One spring afternoon I gave up my job and enrolled in an MFA program for fiction writers.” That’s action. Then say I wrote, “what a reasonable thing to do.” That’s interpretation. Of course, it’s just a quip, but nevertheless it holds up the action to further inspection, making it easier for a reader to relate to than if it were merely stated and then abandoned.  By addressing its readers, the comment invites them to participate in the action.  In fiction, thematic passages can open our stories to greater ideological depth and allow them to develop with increasing psychological and or mythic resonance. Thematic passages also bring life to our stories, making them seem aware of their own implications. They are a way for us to declare intent.  In reading the two Chekhov stories as well as other fiction I’ve come to believe that writing them well requires and therefore helps develop a suppleness and control with respect to voice and point of view.

Anton Chekhov’s story “Grief” is about a talented turner (or woodworker) and abusive alcoholic named Grigory. He’s a poor Russian peasant and has been married for 40 years, coming home drunk and beating his wife every night, until the night before the story begins (yes, there’s a flashback).  That night, Grigory comes home drunk and is about to beat his wife when she gives him a look that scares him so much he doesn’t beat her.  Instead, first thing next morning he borrows a neighbor’s horse and sledge to take her to the rural district hospital to cure her of whatever is causing the funny look that scared the shit out of him the previous night.  But a terrible blizzard slows him down, no matter how hard he whips the borrowed horse.  His wife dies before they reach the hospital. Grigory thinks he should head to the cemetery but for some reason keeps heading to the hospital. He gets lost. Night comes on.  He starts to freeze. His hands become so numb he can’t control the reins.  The horse goes on unguided until it stops in front of a building, which Grigory can just make out in the dark and through the snowstorm.  By this time, Grigory’s so cold he can’t even move his feet, so he decides (as if he has any choice) to fall asleep in the sledge, not even minding that he might die in the process.  But he doesn’t die.  The next day, he wakes up in the hospital.  He recognizes the doctor – the one he’d wanted to take his wife to.  He wants to get out of bed and fall on his knees to thank the doctor or beg him for help – he’s quite confused.  But he can’t move.   He has lost all four of his limbs to exposure.  The doctor tells him not to complain – he’s had a good, long life – and leaves the room.  The end.

“Grief” is short – about 2,000 words – and is told by a third-person narrator, limited for the most part to Grigory, who delivers a long muttered monologue in the first half, which doesn’t really end until he falls asleep but which is interrupted mid-way through by the narrator.  (The other character who speaks in this story is the doctor, but just for a few lines.)

“Grief” was written in 1885, fairly early in Chekhov’s writing career. It is considered pivotal to that career for its emotional depth and its blend of comedy and tragedy, which are remarkable considering the story’s length.  The story’s thematic passages have a lot to do with that depth and blend.  I wouldn’t be surprised if “Grief” appeared just as Chekhov was getting good at writing these passages, discovering his own way to mine his stories for meaning.

In “Grief,” the four main thematic passages appear fairly close to each other in the center of the story. Of course, as Flannery O’Connor has reminded us, almost no word or phrase can ever be given completely to one function or another, so I’ve put text that I feel is especially thematic in bold.

He let his tongue run on mechanically, so as to stifle as much as possible the feeling of heaviness in his heart.  Grief had taken the turner unawares, like a bolt from the blue, and he was still unable to recover from the blow, he was still unable to come to his senses, to think clearly.  He had till now lived a carefree life, in a kind of drunken stupor, knowing neither grief nor joy, and all of a sudden there was that terrible pain in his heart.  The lighthearted tippler and idler found himself for no rhyme or reason in the position of a man who was busy and worried, a man in a hurry, struggling against nature herself.Grigory remembered that his grief had started the night before. When he had come home in the evening, drunk as usual, and from old habit had begun to swear and brandish his fists, his wife had looked at her bully of a husband as she had never looked before.  Usually the expression of her old eyes was martyred and meek, like that of a dog who is beaten a lot and given little to eat, but now she gazed sternly and fixedly at him, as saints do from icons, or dying people. It was this strange disturbing look in those eyes that made him conscious of his feeling of grief.

See how Chekhov persists at describing the look in Matryona’s eyes until he can open it up into that third, almost sweeping thematic statement – “it was this strange disturbing look in those eyes that made him conscious of his feeling of grief.” The next passage occurs after Matryona dies.

And the turner wept. He was not so much sorry as vexed. His grief had only just begun, and now it was all over.  He had not really begun to live with his old woman, to open his heart to her, to feel sorry for her, and now she was dead. He had lived forty years with her, but then those forty years had passed as though in a fog. What with drinking, fighting, and poverty he had not noticed how life had passed. And, as though to spite him, his old woman had died just when he was beginning to feel that he was sorry for her, that he could not live without her, that he had wronged her terribly.Forty years ago, he remembered, Matryona had been young, beautiful, gay.  She had come from a well-to-do family. . . Everything pointed to a happy life, but the trouble was that, having flung himself dead drunk on the stove after the wedding, he had not seemed able to wake up properly. He could remember the wedding, but what happened after it he could not for the life of him remember, except perhaps that he had been drinking, lying about, and fighting.  So forty years had been wasted.

What these passages do and don’t do is clear.  They don’t provide much action or setting or even character.  Instead, using a little summary and past history, they provide the moral and emotional core with which those particulars – the characters, actions, and setting — can engage.  Over and over, in these passages, Chekhov reiterates the idea that his story is about a moral, emotional awakening after a wasted life, an awakening brought on by the specter of death.

But before discussing these passages in detail, let’s look at what precedes them.

Whenever I read the first paragraph of “Grief,” I always feel as though I’m looking at an oil painting – or a snow globe.

Grigory Petrov, a turner, who had long enjoyed a reputation as an excellent craftsman and at the same time as the most drunken ne’er-do-well in the whole Galchino district, was taking his wife to the rural district hospital. He had to drive about twenty miles, and yet the road was so terrible that not only a lie-abed like the turner Grigory but even the postman could not cope with it.  A sharp cold wind blew straight in his face. The air was full of whirling clouds of snowflakes, and it was impossible to say whether the snow came from the sky or from the ground. Neither fields, telegraph poles, nor woods could be seen for the snow . . . The feeble aged mare dragged herself along at a snail’s pace.  . . . The turner was in a hurry.  He jumped up and down on his seat restlessly, now and again whipping the mare across her back.

Chekhov holds us at a distance, in an observer’s role, even as he shines a spotlight on Grigory and presents us with Grigory’s desire, action, conflict, and setting, all in one paragraph. We continue as observers as we hear Grigory speak.

“Don’t cry, Matryona,’ he muttered. “Put up with it a little longer!  We’ll soon be at the hospital, and, God willing, you’ll be all right in time.  Pavel Ivanych will give you some drops, or tell them to bleed you . . . He’ll shout a bit, stamp his feet maybe, but he’ll do his best for you.  .  .  .  A nice gentleman he is, very obliging, bless him.  Soon as we’re there, he’ll come running out of his room and start cursing.  “What’s all this?” he’ll shout.  “How did it happen? Why didn’t you come earlier? Am I a dog, to be looking after you all day, damn you? . . . Get out!  I don’t want to see you. . . . But I’ll say to him, “Your honour, sir. Pavel Ivanych, sir.”

Clearly, this is a character study, depicting Grigory as a stock, comic figure, at whom we laugh even as we become aware of his panic.  As his monologue continues, Grigory reveals his simple peasant religion  (“But how could I get here in time, sir, if God – the Holy Virgin – got angry and sent a blizzard like this?” ), his emerging guilt (“Your honour, sir, what do you take me for?  A heartless villain or a heathen?  My old woman’s giving up the ghost, she’s dying, she is, and me run to the pubs?  Really, sir!  May they all sink to the bottom of the sea, the pubs I mean, sir!” ) and his physical talents (“I’ll do everything for your honour. A cigarette case, if you like, of Karelian birch.  Croquet balls. Skittles.” )

On top of this, the monologue also offers a completely dramatized comic version of the entire story, a hypothetical, imagined, and future scene in which Grigory barely gets his wife to the hospital, uses his peasant wits to persuade the doctor to cure her, and everything works out for the best.  Like any stock comic peasant, he boasts.  “Well, old woman, you see I know how to talk to the gentry!” He’s the Russian Ralph Kramden. This entire comedy, though, is layered over the darker action of the present journey to the hospital, to which Grigory’s mind can’t help returning (“Only God grant I don’t lose the way.  What a snowstorm! Can’t see a thing for the snow!”) right before the narrator steps in with the story’s first thematic passage.  (Another great effect of the monologue is that the fiction of Grigory’s imagined scene makes the fiction of the “real” scene all the more real.)

Thematically, things get pretty interesting in these four passages, as Chekhov reaches into his story and changes its and our perspectives, so that instead of looking at Grigory from the outside, we now see him from within.  The narrative voice becomes more subjective and bold, as Chekhov repeats the title word four times in these passages, (at least in this translation by David Magarshack), starting with: “Grief had taken the turner unawares, like a bolt from the blue, and he was still unable to recover from the blow, he was still unable to come to his senses, to think clearly.” This is not subtle language.

Note  how far apart in consciousness the narrator and Grigory are in the first passage.  The narrator articulates things about Grigory that Grigory is unable to say for himself, because, as the narrator tells us, he is “unaware.”  In fact, Grigory is still delivering his monologue – staving off these new emotions, unable and unwilling to “come to his senses” – but the narrator presses Grigory’s mute button and tells us what’s going on.

And what happens to this stock comic figure, this wife-beating drunk? To our horror – because it makes us identify with him – Chekhov gives him dignity.  With this first thematic passage, Chekhov begins to process both Grigory and us as, here in the middle of the story, the comedy turns tragic.  Perhaps Chekhov was discovering his signature style of interpretive writing, discovering that narrative voice in which he manages to be, all at once, respectful, attentive, unpretentious, and emotionally honest.

Finally, Chekhov uses this first passage to bring his exposition to a close.  When he restates the conflict (“The lighthearted tippler found himself. . .  in the position of a man in a hurry, struggling against nature herself”), we don’t know what will happen but we understand the story’s internal and external parameters.

Now let’s look at the second thematic passage.  Two important things happen here.  First, Chekhov attaches it to a one-sentence-long scene, a flashback scene that dramatizes the moment described more abstractly in the first thematic passage, the moment when grief strikes Grigory “unawares.”  We learn that Grigory’s pain was already there, but that he’s only now becoming “conscious” of it.

Secondly, the narrator no longer gets sole credit for the interpretive work here; Grigory himself is “remembering.” A look ahead at the next two passages shows that they repeat this pattern: in one the narrator explains, in the next Grigory “remembers.”  Chekhov makes these subtle shifts in perspective as Grigory begins to emerge from his long “drunken stupor.” Grigory and the narrator become closer, even as we the readers begin to experience the story from the inside, no longer peering into it as we might a snow-globe or painting.

In the third thematic passage, the narrator describes Grigory’s despair at Matryona’s death, extending our view of Grigory’s past from the events of the night before to the general quality of his forty years of marriage.  (“What with forty years of drinking, fighting, and poverty, he had not noticed how life had passed.”) Chekhov again uses that simple, authoritative, and respectful voice to reveal Grigory’s growing moral awareness of himself, his tragic discovery that he can’t live without Matryona, that “he had wronged her terribly.”

The fourth passage shows Grigory remembering the previous forty years more specifically, recalling his wedding day and subsequent inability “to wake up properly.”  This passage offers the most damning interpretation of Grigory’s situation yet. It ends with the final, reverberant thematic statement:  “So, forty years had been wasted.”

Now the story has reached its lowest point, with Grigory recognizing that he must wake up from these forty years of sleep with the pain of his wife’s death as part of the bargain.  At this point, the narrator’s, Grigory’s, and the reader’s perspectives are all fairly unified, through the work of these four passages. We are fully experiencing this story by now, even before it’s over. The story has become a weird palpable force that is leading us and Grigory through itself.

In “Short Story Structure: Notes and an Exercise” Douglas Glover describes the function of thematic passages in a way that not only summarizes clearly what I’ve just attempted to demonstrate but also provides an excellent bridge to a look at the rest of “Grief.”  Here, Glover talks about a specific thematic device involving rhetorical questions, but since by nature all thematic passages pose questions, this applies to the more or less direct, interpretive passages I’ve discussed so far in “Grief,” too.

The truth is that good stories often open themselves up to readers by reading themselves. . .   The act of questioning is more important here than the act of answering. . . by asking the question in the text, the author creates a sense that the story is aware of the larger mysteries of its own existence.  A story that does not ask its own questions often seems to be fatally unaware of itself, unintelligent and inhibited.  It cannot develop any moral or psychological depth.  By asking questions the story generalizes its own meaning, opens up thematic depths, and, more importantly, creates new possibilities of action.

So what “possibilities of action” has Chekhov created for himself at this point in “Grief?” With Matryona now dead, the conflict becomes one of Grigory fighting against nature to get home and do what is right: to bury his wife and lead a better life.  He still wants a happy ending, but he also wants to finish the process of waking up.  He wants redemption. He first expresses this desire just before the fourth thematic passage, muttering “If only one could start life over again . . .”

Then, afterwards, as the night grows darker, he repeats his wish. “ ‘Live my life all over again,’ . . .   ‘Get a new lathe and get new orders.  I’d give the money to the old woman, I would!”

But the reawakening Grigory receives is not the one he has in mind.  The irony is that just as he begins to wake up to these internal nobler yearnings, he falls asleep. And the next thing we know about Grigory is this:  “He woke up in a large room with painted walls.  Bright sunshine was streaming through the windows.” Consider the contrast between the darkness of the night before and the painted walls and bright sunshine.  That combined with Grigory’s twice-stated desire to “live life over again” makes it hard for anyone faintly familiar with the Russian orthodox Christian tradition (in which Chekhov was steeped — and not always pleasantly) not to think of Easter, of the resurrection of Christ. Even if you don’t think of that, the contrast is vivid.  And at this point we identify so thoroughly with Grigory that Chekhov, brilliantly, doesn’t bother letting us know how Grigory even got to this room. We don’t even know if the hospital is the building in front of which he fell asleep the night before.  So when he opens his eyes to the painted walls and the streaming sunlight, he and we may as well have woken up in heaven.  It seems miraculous. We only begin to realize that we’re still on earth when other people enter, at which point Grigory tries to appear, as Chekhov and his translator say, “sensible,” an apt word, given Grigory’s struggle to come to his “senses,” not to mention his yet-undiscovered sensory loss.

‘Must order a funeral service for my wife,’ he said.  ‘Tell the priest…’  ‘All right, all right,’ a voice interrupted him.  ‘Keep still there.’

When Grigory sees the doctor, he wants to go down on his knees, and when he can’t do this, he asks the doctor why. To which the doctor kindly replies:

‘You can say good-bye to your arms and legs.  You got them frozen.  There, there. . . What are you crying for?  You’ve had your life, haven’t you?  You must be sixty if a day – isn’t that enough for you?’

Talk about a blend of comedy and tragedy. As Douglas Glover himself has noted, “It’s Monty-fucking-Python!”  It’s hysterical and horrific.  But within this blend, Grigory experiences his final and fullest moment of recognition, saying, “‘What a thing to happen to a man, sir.  What a grievous thing!’”

This line is the story’s ultimate thematic passage.  It ties everything together: on the surface, Grigory refers to his newly discovered state of quadriplegia, but because of all the work of the four earlier thematic passages, this epiphanic line means so much more. It applies to Grigory’s entire life and, by extension, to our lives, to our emotionally and morally if not physically or economically impoverished condition in general.   Most importantly, the line comes directly out of Grigory’s mouth; the narrator no longer needs to speak for him.  Grigory has awakened. And when the doctor curtly dismisses him and walks out of the room, (“Goodbye to the turner!” is how Magarshack translates the last line of “Grief”), we wake up too.

Written in 1890, five years after “Grief,”  “Gusev” is known for its somber, sleep-and-silence-studded atmosphere and above all, for its ending, which has led Richard Bausch to call it the most “audacious . . .  story in the world.” Bausch attributes this audacity to “the radical way [the point of view] shifts, in the last paragraphs, from the limited omniscience of Gusev’s consciousness, to an omniscience that includes the sea and sky.  The way it leaves the province of human thought and action . . . and enters the animal kingdom.” Reading those words helped explain the disorientation I encountered the first time I read the closing scene of “Gusev.” My reaction was almost physical, as though something had dropped away from me.  I am sure, also, that my reaction was intended, for, as Bausch says, Chekhov’s aim in “Gusev” is to “lead us into a perception we do not want: the enormity of the world and the universe and to our puny place in it.” (Not altogether unlike “Grief,” come to think of it.)  The profound effect of this “radical” shift in “Gusev” is achieved to a great extent because of the way the story’s thematic passages prepare us for it.  (Also not altogether unlike “Grief.”)

“Gusev” is about a Russian peasant who is sailing home after five years of military service in the Orient, while dying of tuberculosis. From his hammock in the ship’s sick-bay, he gets to know Pavel, an educated cynic with an ecclesiastical background, who is also dying.  With a few other sick or dying soldiers playing cards in the background, Gusev and Pavel compare their lives and opinions and religious ideas.  They also sleep a lot. Both men want to get home. (Again as in “Grief,”  the central conflict is one of a journey to a specific destination being thwarted by nature and illness.)  Gusev longs to see his village and family, who occupy his many fevered dreams; Pavel wants to ignite a revolution.  But neither of them makes it. In a three-act progression, first one of the card players – a character named Stepan — then Pavel, then Gusev die and are buried at sea.  The story ends as Gusev’s corpse descends through the ocean and is released from its sailcloth coffin by a shark. Meanwhile, the sky bursts into a sunset whose colors are reflected in the water.  The story is about fifteen pages long and is divided into five numbered sections. It is told by a third-person narrator, mainly from Gusev’s perspective.

As opposed to “Grief,” whose major thematic passages appear close together in the middle and are presented by the narrator, but whose final thematic passage is presented in dialogue, by Grigory, the thematic passages in “Gusev” occur throughout the story, delivered first in the speech or thought of either Gusev or Pavel, and then, at the end, by the narrator. Thus, in “Gusev,” there are three thematic threads, as opposed to only one in “Grief.” The first two appear right away in the story’s opening dialogue, in which Pavel scoffs at Gusev’s naïve belief in a story about a fish that “came smack against a ship and tore a hole in the bottom” as well as his observation, after a jug falls off a table, that “the wind must have slipped its chains.”

Is the wind, then, an animal that it breaks loose from its chains?” Pavel asks.  Gusev acknowledges that this is indeed his understanding, and Pavel says, “You should have a head on your shoulders and try to reason things out. You don’t have any brains!” This leads to the subsequent passage coming from Gusev, as translated by Robert Payne:

What was strange or astonishing in the story about the fish or the wind slipping its chains? Suppose the fish were as big as a mountain, suppose its backbone was as strong as a sturgeon’s, and then suppose that far away, at the end of the world, there were great walls of stone and that the furious winds were chained to these walls.  If the winds had not broken loose from their chains, how do you account for the fact that they fling themselves across the sea like maniacs, and struggle to escape like dogs?  If they were not chained up, what became of them when the seas were calm?

Through Gusev’s rhetorical questions, Chekhov carves open a thematic vein, helping us experience more fully something central to the meaning of the story: the mystery of nature’s power. Gusev’s embrace of this mystery is simple and folkloric, but still his questions comment on or interpret a huge part of the action of the story, which is quite simply the action of nature or, more mythically, the cosmos. And by asking what is “strange or astonishing” about it, Chekhov begins to prepare us for the astonishment we experience at the end. This passage isn’t the only one in which Chekhov connects Gusev to the natural and cosmic world.  Again and again, Gusev blurs distinctions not only between himself and nature, but also between the imagined and the real.  When Gusev becomes drowsy at one point, he feels as if “all of nature was falling asleep.” At another point, he wakes up from a dream of his family so happy to have “seen his own people” that “joy made him catch his breath, shivers went up and down his spine, and his fingers tingled.”

Pavel, on the other hand, is more cynical and enraged, obsessed with human injustice.

Dear God!  You tear a man from his home, drag him out of his nest, send him ten thousand miles away, let him rot with consumption, and . . . You wonder why they do it! . .  It doesn’t make sense!  .   .  .”

He points out the immorality of Gusev’s meaningless years in service and the insanity, not to mention political expedience, of putting people on board the ship in such bad health. Gusev counters with:

“Of course, Pavel Ivanich, a bad man is never well treated, either at home or in the service, but if you live right and obey orders, who wants to do you harm?”

But Pavel is all scorn and protest. With him, Chekhov makes ranting a type of thematic passage device. Pavel’s most heated diatribe appears in the third section, after the death of the card-player Stepan.

“In Kharkov I have a friend, a man of letters.  I’ll go up to him and say: ‘Come, brother, put aside those abominable subjects you write about, the loves of women and the beauties of nature, and show us the two-legged vermin.  There’s a theme for you. . . You people are in the dark, you are blind and beaten to the ground;  .  .  .  They tell you the wind breaks loose from its chains, that you are beasts, savages, and you believe it.  . . . You are outcasts, poor pathetic wretches.  .  .  I am different.  I live in full consciousness of my powers.  I see everything, like a hawk or an eagle hovering over the earth, and I understand everything. When I see tyranny, I protest.  When I see cant and hypocrisy, I protest.  I cannot be silenced: no Spanish Inquisition will make me hold my tongue.  No! If you cut out my tongue, I will still protest – with gestures.  Bury me in a cellar, and I will shout so loud they will hear me a mile away, or else I will starve myself to death, and thus hang another weight round their black consciences. . . . Yes, that’s life as I understand it.  That’s what is called life!”

Of course, neither Gusev nor Pavel are portrayed as two-dimensional characters. Within Pavel’s ranting we hear his compassion, which causes him in a quieter moment to lament that “life only happens once and must be taken care of.” Gusev, despite his innate sweetness and capacity for joy, is an uneducated bigot.  He refers to the “crazy Jew” in his village, says he would never jump into the sea to rescue a non-Christian or a German, and admits to having beat up two “Chinamen” who brought firewood into his yard during his years of service. At one point while in harbor, Gusev looks out the ship’s porthole and sees another Chinese man standing on a boat, holding a bird in a cage, and singing.  This blissful image inspires Gusev to wish to slug the man (possibly out of jealousy and possibly because he can only relate to the bird in the cage).

It’s notable that – unlike Gusev – neither Stepan (the card player) nor Pavel recognizes the approach of his own death. Chekhov isn’t afraid to be funny at these moments, either.  Stepan’s last words – he lies down in the middle of a card game – are, “I won’t be a moment, fellows,” and Pavel, mere hours from dying, boasts: “My lungs are healthy – what I’ve got is the stomach cough.  I can stand hell and that goes for the Red Sea. . .”

Gusev, in contrast, faces his death knowingly, yet another example of his uncanny affinity with the incomprehensible.  To be sure, he is warned by the deaths of Stepan and Pavel, not to mention the nameless wounded soldier who carries him on deck and tells him:  “you, too, Gusev, you’re not long for this world.  You’ll never reach Russia.”

This anonymous wounded soldier, very interestingly, whispers these words to Gusev just before, again as in “Grief,” Chekhov slows the tempo and allows his narrator – as the story’s own consciousness – to emerge. This is in the middle of the fourth section, closing in on the end.  With the appearance of this anonymous soldier, the point of view begins to widen.  First, stepping around the countless bodies of sleeping soldiers, all on their way home (is it becoming clear that sleep is a constant refrain – and metaphor – in this story?), Gusev and his companion make their way to the ship’s prow.  As they gaze out at the night and sea, the point of view quietly shifts – almost slips – to the narrator.

“. . . The deep sky lay over them, the clear stars, stillness and peace, and it was exactly as it was in the village at home” – this is still Gusev observing – “while below them lurked darkness and chaos.” Here the narrator is starting to enter the language, the voice. “Great waves were booming; no one knew why.” Suddenly, “no one” steps behind the point of view. Then, in a moment, “you” will, as again, distinctions and identities are blurred.  “Every wave, whichever one you looked at, was trying to climb over the rest, hurling itself on its neighbor, crushing it down; and then there would come a third wave with a glint of light on its white mane, as ferocious and hideous as all the others, with a full-throated roar.”

Now comes a crucial shift, where the narrator, with one bold, subjective, declarative sentence, takes control. We forget that Gusev is there. This is the story’s central thematic passage, in which we feel addressed by the story itself.

The sea is senseless and pitiless. If the ship had been smaller, and not made of thick iron plates, the waves would have crushed it without the slightest remorse and devoured all the people, making no distinction between saints and sinners.  The ship itself possessed the same cruel expression, devoid of any meaning.  This beaked monster pressed forward, cutting a pathway through a million waves, fearing neither darkness nor winds, neither space nor solitude – all these were as nothing, and if the ocean had been populated, the monster would have crushed its inhabitants, making no distinction between saints and sinners.

This passage does so much. It unifies and makes moot all of Gusev’s and Pavel’s ideas of morality and life, and it opens the story to “new possibilities of action,” providing a hinge by which the story pivots to its audacious conclusion. To begin with, Gusev emerges from this trance having unblinkingly absorbed the truth of his mortality.  His last words, after the nameless soldier asks him if he’s afraid of dying, show no denial and are anything but naive: “Yes, I’m afraid.  I’m full of sorrow for the farm.  My brother at home, you know, there’s nothing sober about him – he’s a drunkard, beats his wife for no reason at all, and doesn’t honor his parents. . . . But my legs won’t hold me up, brother, and it’s suffocating here. Let’s go to sleep!”

After Gusev’s funeral, his body, sewn up in the sailcloth, slides into the air off of a “tilted plank” and tumbles into the sea.  The point of view has by now broadened to the soldiers on board, who, chorus-like, share this rather lovely, timeless, and all-inclusive observation and rhetorical question:  “Strange that a man should be sewn up in a sail cloth and then tossed into the waves.  Was it possible that such a thing could happen to anyone?”

And then, with the scene that provoked my disorientation, the mood picks up:

. . .  he fell among a shoal of pilot fish. When they saw the dark body they were astounded and rooted to the spot, and they suddenly turned tail and fled.  In less than a minute they came hurrying back to him, quick as a shot, and they began zig-zagging round him in the water.

This is the scene Richard Bausch talked about, where the point of view enters the animal kingdom. It’s comic-strip-like.  In its next “frame,” the shark appears and swims “below Gusev with dignity and reserve.” Then, mimicking that fish in Gusev’s opening story, the shark tears the sailcloth from head to toe and Gusev and an iron fire bar drop out.  Chekhov, with his own dignity and reserve (it can be hard not to discern certain doctor-like qualities in his depiction of the shark), guides us away from what happens to Gusev, and diverts our attention first to the fire-bar as it sinks to the bottom of the sea and then to the sky and the top of the sea, ending the story like this:

Meanwhile in the heavens clouds came and massed themselves against the sunset . . . There came a great beam of green light transpiercing the clouds and stretching to the center of the sky, and a little while later a violet-colored beam lay beside it, and then there was a golden beam, and then a rose-colored beam.  The heavens turned lilac, very soft. Gazing up at the enchanted heavens, magnificent in their splendor, the sea fumed darkly at first, but soon assumed the sweet, joyous, passionate colors for which there are scarcely any names in the tongue of man.

I consider the last line a thematic passage, which ever so slightly mitigates the effect of the longer one preceding it.  For what has happened to the senseless and pitiless sea?  Like the fish and the shark, it has taken on human characteristics, even as Gusev has relinquished them.  As David Jauss points out, “by personifying impersonal nature, Chekhov depersonalizes Gusev, and further emphasizes the meaninglessness of both his death and life.” Yet Chekhov –just barely – spares us and himself from total starkness by honoring Gusev even while emphasizing his insignificance, by describing the “scarcely” nameable colors in the sea and sky as “sweet,”  “joyous,” and “passionate,” qualities specifically attributable to Gusev when he was alive.

Finally, it’s been fascinating and illuminating to compare the thematic passages of “Grief” and “Gusev” side-by-side.  Whereas in “Grief” these passages lead us from the nameless narrator’s voice to Grigory’s individualized epiphany, in “Gusev” we travel from specific, individualized, human thought into something more nameless and vast, an “unconscious” consciousness alluded to by the title of the hymn sung at Gusev’s funeral, “Eternal Memory.” Whereas in “Grief” we wake up, in “Gusev” we fall asleep.  We surrender what is characteristic. We die and vanish.  No wonder it’s disorienting.

—Julie Marden

 

Mar 012010
 

Here’s a note Julie Marden sent me in an email. Julie is a former student, a VCFA graduate. You can see her lecture on Chekhov in the Class Resources folder. dg

Alice “Antonovna” Munro, a note on echoes and influences

Doubtless I’m not the first to notice this connection ( I know everyone likes to call Munro a modern Chekhov, and didn’t Cynthia Ozick even call her “our Chekhov”?), but I couldn’t help being struck by a particular relationship between two passages — one by Chekhov, one by Munro — a few days ago, driving to visit some cousins in Maine and listening to a cd of The View From Castle Rock in my car. Maybe the Munro-like aspects of my trip  had something to do with my imagination taking up with this.  Night had fallen.  I was driving on a paved, country road, passing through the outskirts of small towns, on my way to visit rural relatives, with the words of The View From Castle Rock‘s title story filling up the darkness.   The day after I got home,  I rushed to the library to get the actual book, only they didn’t have it, so I had to take dictation from the cd (hence any spelling  or punctuation mistakes).  I also looked up the Chekhov.

Here are the passages that struck me:

They sewed him up in a sailcloth and to make him heavier they put in two iron fire bars.  Sewn up in a sailcloth he looked like a carrot or a horse-radish; broad at the head and narrow at the feet. . .
The seaman on watch tilted the end of the plank.  At first Gusev slid down slowly, then he rushed head foremost into the sea, turning a somersault in the air, then splashing.  The foam enclosed him, and for a brief moment he seemed to be wrapped in lace, but this moment passed and he disappeared under the waves.

He plunged rapidly to the bottom.  Did he reach it? The sea, they say, is three miles deep at this point.  Falling sixty or seventy feet, he started to fall more slowly, swaying rhythmically, as though hesitating, at the mercy of the currents, sliding sideways more quickly than he sank down.

Then he fell among a shoal of pilot fish.  When they saw the dark body they were astounded and rooted to the spot, and they suddenly turned tail and fled.  In less than a minute they came hurrying back to him, quick as a shot, and they began zigzagging round him in the water.

Then still another dark body appeared.  This was a shark.  It swam below Gusev with dignity and reserve, seeming not to notice him; and when he, descending, fell against the back of the shark, then the shark turned belly upwards, basking in the warm transparent water and lazily opening its jaws with their two rows of teeth. The pilot fish were in ecstasy; they stopped to see what would happen next.  After playing around with the body for a while, the shark calmly laid its jaws on it, tapped it with its teeth, and ripped open the sailcloth along the whole length of the body from head to foot; one of the fire bars fell out, frightened the pilot fish, struck the shark in the ribs, and sank rapidly to the bottom.

— Anton Chekhov, “Gusev”

‘There was a child had died, the name of Ormiston, and its body was thrown overboard, sewed up in a piece of canvas, with a large lump of coal at its feet.’

He [Walter Laidlaw, Munro’s Scottish forebear, fictionalized version of] pauses in his writing to think of the weighted sack, falling down through the water. Darker and darker grows the water, with the surface high overhead, gleaming faintly like the night sky. Would the piece of coal do its job?  Would the sack fall straight down to the very bottom of the sea? Or would the current of the sea be strong enough to keep lifting it up and letting it fall, pushing it sideways, taking it far as Greenland, or south, to the tropical waters full of rank weeds, the Sargassos Sea?

Or some ferocious fish might come along and rip the sack and make a meal of the body before it had even left the upper waters and the region of light.

He has seen drawings of fish as big as horses, fish with horns as well, and scores of teeth, each like a skinner’s knife. . . .

-Alice “Antonovna” Munro, “The View From Castle Rock”

It’s interesting how these passages differ in length, detail, and function.  In “Gusev,”  the scene is part of the climax; in the Munro story, the passage appears early on and offers a quick first glimpse of a child’s death (quite a few more to come in this story) and in this case it’s a child we never  knew, whereas Gusev – the character, of course —  we come to know intimately.  Also, in “Gusev,” the underwater scene actually happens; there’s that oft-noted POV shift away from the people on board the ship right after the body goes underwater.  In the Munro story, the underwater scene is all conjecture, the narration continues from the mind of the observing passenger (Walter), who has been writing in his journal. The story itself does not go underwater.  Still, Munro seems to have absorbed “Gusev,” not only the main detail of the sea-buried corpse itself,  but especially the questions (compare Chekhov’s ” Did he reach it?” to Munro’s “Would the piece of coal do its job? Would the sack fall straight down to the very bottom of the sea?), the descriptions of the current, and the mentions of predatory, sharp-toothed fish.

I’ve also been wondering about the character Walter as a kind of literary stand-in himself. Certainly he’s an explicit example of one of Munro’s real ancestors who took to the pen.  She says so.   But could she also have been thinking of a more figurative ancestor — Chekhov himself — when she gave to Walter this experience of observing the burial? It’s hard for me to believe that she wouldn’t be aware of the famous letter Chekhov wrote after witnessing a passenger’s dead body being tossed overboard, on his journey back to Moscow from Sakhalin.  He wrote “Gusev” shortly after this trip.  At any rate, whether she deliberately meant for Walter to channel Chekhov or not,  it’s almost impossible for me to believe she wasn’t deliberately thinking of  that passage from “Gusev” when she wrote the passage quoted above. She seems to play with the Chekhov a bit like the current, in her variation, plays with the child’s corpse.  I think of it as an homage that is completely original.  And momentary;  Munro sticks to her necessities and moves on.

Julie Marden