Short Fiction 2015 Weeks 6 & 7: Englander & Lawrence

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I’m writing weekly about my Short Fiction class this fall. The first installment is here.

The semester has more than caught up with me, and I’ve fallen behind with the Short Fiction project. In the past weeks, I did manage to complete a writing project, assemble and file my dossier for my first post-tenure review, advise a pile of students on their Fulbright and Watson applications, teach my classes, and more or less keep up with my grading. So it’s not like I haven’t been doing anything. But I’ve missed keeping up with this blog. In the interest of catching up, I’ll combine the last two weeks into one post.

Last week, we discussed three stories: Kay Boyle’s “Life Being the Best” (I actually haven’t been figure out the exact year of publication, but it’s late 20s or early 30s), Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover” (1945), and Nathan Englander’s “The Wig” (1999). These are wonderful stories: I’m particularly under the sway of the Boyle, which I only discovered this summer. Although its milieu—a community of poor refugees from Mussolini’s Italy in Southern France in the late 1920s—was completely foreign to the students, the subject matter—an orphaned child, an erudite, sensitive, but clueless teacher—seemed to resonate, and we had a reasonably lively discussion about the subtle ways the story undermines its teacher protagonist. I definitely have more to learn about this story, but it’s a keeper and I look forward to doing more justice to it next semester.

After that, though, the week went downhill fast.

I adore Bowen’s ghost story set during the Blitz, and I’ve taught it successfully many times. This time, though, I had a hard time getting the students to say anything useful about it. I even tried some group work, since we hadn’t done any in a couple of weeks, but, unusually, that tatic only took the air out of the room even further. Things reached a low point on Friday with the Englander story, another one I’d not taught before. I was lucky enough to host Englander on a visit to campus last year, and found him as funny and intelligent as his stories. I actually usually dislike meeting writers, it usually makes me like the work a little or even a lot less. But Englander was different: a total prince, and a smart reader of his own work. (Also, incredibly manic and charmingly neurotic.)

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One of the reasons I assigned “The Wig” is that it is written in present tense, a tic of contemporary fiction I usually despise, but tolerate here because the story is so interesting. It’s about Ruchama, an Orthodox Jewish sheitel macher, a wig maker, who meets a Manhattan deliveryman with the most exquisite hair, hair she buys with money a client has given her and uses to make, in secret, a wig for herself, the wig of her dreams. I don’t have much interesting to say about first person narrative—it increases our sense of immediacy, I suppose—but what I like in Englander’s story is the way that immediacy, that connection with the reader, is undone by the story’s careful distancing techniques.

I started by asking students to look at the description of Ruchama’s frustration with her husband’s grudging performance of even the most modest household chores: “He trayfs up her kitchen to spite her. He is forever putting meat silverware in the dairy sink.” What does trayf mean, I asked? Only one student knew it meant food that doesn’t conform to Orthodox dietary laws (he had looked it up). I half-threatened, half-pleaded with the class to do the basic diligence required of them as students and look up words they don’t understand. (I’m about ready to assign some kind of basic vocabulary exercise to this class: they simply refuse to look words up). I continued by asking the students how they could have come close to knowing what the word meant by using its context. It took longer than I’d hoped, but I eventually got them acknowledge that the sentence about the meat silverware and the dairy sink could provide a clue, though admittedly one that is more meaningful if you know about the prohibition on mixing meat and milk.

Since I’d been expecting the students wouldn’t have looked up unfamiliar words, I had already prepared the next exercise. I had the students take out their phones and look up six words from the story. One side of the room took narishkeit, sheitel, and macher, and the other took gabbai, bimah, and Pesach. We discussed how Englander gives just enough context to help readers basically understand these words, as when he describes the fashion magazines Ruchama surreptitiously studies: “The magazines are contraband in Royal Hills, narishkeit, vain and immodest, practically pornographic.” The phrase “vain and immodest” modifies “narishkeit” as much as “magazines”; even if we don’t know the Yiddish word for foolishness, we sense it means something disreputable. Note that Englander doesn’t italicize these words. Why, I asked the class, are these foreign words in the story? For authenticity, one student finally replied. (Actually, she said: It makes it more real. I translated to the concept I wanted.) What, I continued, is the relationship between authenticity and comprehensibility, a question I had to rephrase as, Why doesn’t Englander give us a translation of the word or a glossary or something? I imagined they would say something like: The people the story is about would know the meaning of the word. To which I would say two things: (1) those (Orthodox) people wouldn’t read this (secular) story and (2) what about you—you don’t know the meaning. But the class couldn’t get there, and so I was left simply to assert my idea, namely, that these words make it clear that the story might not be for every reader. (Who the ideal audience for this story might be is an interesting question: I think the answer is, Jews, more particularly, Jews like Englander himself, who have grown up Orthodox (especially Hasidic) but aren’t any more—a small audience indeed.)

My point was that literature isn’t in any simple or straightforward way universal. One of its pleasures is its ability to offer us a glimpse into a world very different from our own. In other words, the story deliberates sets out not to be relatable, that term so beloved of students today. I suppose the students picked up on the implied chastisement in this reading, and maybe I was unconsciously assuming they wouldn’t get the story and had put myself in the position of being the only one in the room who knew the right answers. (Generally, I prefer to arrange our discussions so that I can pretend they have come up with answers of their own—which, in fact, on good days they do.) At any rate, that’s the most generous reading I can give of the discussion that followed, which was halting and stilted and left me frustrated at the students’ apparent inability to appreciate the story’s ambivalent but not defensive or accusatory portrayal of its Orthodox world. I like, for example, that Ruchama is a savvy and successful businesswoman, and that the vanity she ultimately succumbs to is evident in the story’s secular characters too. Ruchama is an enamored with fashion advertisements that depict a world so shallow and ridiculous that we’re led to ask: isn’t that world—of laughing models bobbing for apples or hailing taxi cabs, with star-struck men at their feet—much more preposterous than the Orthodox one? But the story isn’t holding Orthodox society up as better than a secular one. It’s not even that the woman who wears a wig to protect her hair from the eyes of anyone other than her husband is less oppressed than the woman who has to model her sense of self on impossible standards of beauty—because the Orthodox woman is herself under the sway of those standards.

I thought this accessible but not simplistic story about the relationship between the secular and the religious as figured through ideas of female appearance and empowerment would be a hit with students. But I was wrong. And so I approached the next class, this past Monday, with trepidation—especially because one of my colleagues would be coming to observe me.

I was also excited because we would be reading D. H. Lawrence, the writer closest to my heart. But mostly I was nervous, because I’d never taught the story before, and because I’d been so disappointed with the students’ performance the past few days.

Tate; (c) Was Luke Gertler - now out of copyright; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Tate; (c) Was Luke Gertler – now out of copyright; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Lawrence initially called the story “Fanny and Annie” (1922), but at the last minute asked his agent to change it to “The Last Straw.” The agent responded that it was too late, he’d already sold the story. And for decades the story went under the original; only with its publication in the authoritative Cambridge Edition in the 1990s was it finally published under Lawrence’s preferred choice.

Here are the quintessentially Lawrentian and very striking opening paragraphs:

Flame-lurid his face as he turned among the throng of flame-lit and dark faces upon the platform. In the light of the furnace she caught sight of his drifting countenance, like a piece of floating fire. And the nostalgia, the doom of the home-coming went through her veins like a drug. His eternal face, flame-lit now! The pulse and darkness of red fire from the furnace towers in the sly, lighting the desultory, industrial crowd on the wayside station, lit him and went out.

Of course, he did not see her. Flame-lit and unseeing! Always the same, with his meeting eyebrows, his common cap, and his red-and-black scarf knotted round his throat. Not even a collar to meet her! The flames had sunk, there was shadow.

The woman arriving at this phantasmagorically lit train station in the English midlands—the flames are from the local industry, an iron foundry—is Fannie, returning home after twelve years as a lady’s maid. The job is no more, for reasons we never learn, as are Fanny’s hopes to have married her dashing cousin. The man meeting her at the station is her first love, a foundry worker named Harry, who she has strung along for all the years she’s been gone.

After having a student read these paragraphs, I had us list the oppositions that structure the passage. I’ve found this a pretty fail-safe exercise for generating conversation and for forcing students to think more abstractly and analytically. We began with light and dark, of course, and eventually managed to add seeing/blindness, expectation/disappointment, individual/crowd (Fanny v the throng), and him/her—I used that last opposition as a way to think about the class differences evident in the passage and the story as a whole. Here industry is implicitly contrasted to gentility, an opposition made even clearer on the next page. That allowed the class to note Fannie’s superiority. Yet it’s hard to know what the story thinks about that superiority.

From this initial exercise, I asked students to look at characteristic elements of Lawrence’s style, particularly his use of those more or less unusual compound adjectives “flame-lurid” and “flame-lit” and the sentence fragments, all of which place us firmly within Fanny’s perspective. (We’ll return to this moment when we think about free-indirect narration in a few days.) The class really struggled to make sense of these attributes, though, and I had to drag every piece of information from them. I asked them what lurid meant and what its presence at the very beginning of the story suggested. Eventually we got to the shocking or sensational connotations of the word, which allowed me to ask whether Harry was in fact lurid in any way. That didn’t go anywhere, but when I asked what Harry looks like, thinking now about things we learn elsewhere in the story, students admitted he is repeatedly described as physically attractive. Fanny’s superiority clashes with her frank admiration for that beauty but her equally insistent shame at those feelings.

Eventually we turned to the final sentence of this opening passage. How does its tone compare to what’s come before? It seemed more ordinary to them, less strange and exalted than the earlier sentences. Absolutely right, I agreed, though I noted that even here Lawrence wasn’t giving us an entirely simple sentence: the parataxis (a fancy way of describing the comma splice) places the two clauses on equal footing, even though the register of the first is more literal than the second. (“There was shadow” comes to seem metaphorical or symbolic, in the absence of an article or modifier that we might have expected: a shadow or some shadow, or the shadow of the now darkened train station. That “there was” makes shadow into a kind of entity or force.) But the final sentence is less dramatic than earlier ones, and I argued that this suggests Fanny’s exalted life is coming to an end, as she returns to the ordinariness of home repeatedly and ominously described as a kind of doom.

Whereas the opening passage sticks closely to Fanny’s perspective, the final sentence doesn’t, or at least much less obviously so. This change is representative of the story’s trajectory which privileges Fanny’s voice less and less as it goes along.

To show students what I meant, I had us look at a later passage, one of the more dramatic moments of the story. Harry is a soloist in a concert at the local church:

But at the moment when Harry’s voice sank carelessly down to his close, and the choir, standing behind him, were opening their mouths for the final triumphant outburst, a shouting female voice rose up from the body of the congregation. The organ gave one startled trump, and went silent; the choir stood transfixed.

‘You look well standing there, singing in God’s holy house,” came the loud, angry female shout. Everybody turned electrified. A stoutish, red-faced woman in a black bonnet was standing up denouncing the soloist. Almost fainting with shock, the congregation realized it. “You look well, don’t you, standing there singing solos in God’s holy house—you, Goodall. But I said I’d shame you. You look well, bringing your young woman here with you, don’t you? I’ll let her know who she’s dealing with. A scamp, as won’t take the consequences of what he’s done.” The hard-faced, frenzied woman turned in the direction of Fanny. “ That’s what Harry Goodall is, if you want to know.”

And she sat own again in her seat. Fanny, startled like all the rest, had turned to look. She had gone white, and then a burning red, under the attack. She knew the woman: a Mrs Nixon, a devil of a woman who beat her pathetic, drunken, red-nosed second husband, Bob, and her two lanky daughters, grown-ups as they were. A notorious character. Fanny turned round again, and sat motionless as eternity in her seat.

I’d seized on this passage because of this careful reading that I’d found in my class preparation. It’s such a rich passage, but this post is already too long and class-time was getting short. So I had to move quickly past the ironic replacement of one outburst (the choir’s) with another (Mrs Nixon’s), past the passive voice that defers naming her and offering any sense of her subjectivity for a long while, past the seemingly unnecessary description of the congregation “realizing it,” a redundancy that performs for us the very shock of belatedness that the scene is describing, and past the oblique suggestion that Fanny and Mrs Nixon might not be as different as Fanny, at least, would like to think, given that both, whether in direct dialogue or in indirect speech, use “as” to introduce a modifying or characterizing clause (“a scamp, as won’t take the consequences of what he’s done,” “ground-ups as they were”), thereby suggesting Fanny is indeed of this place she has spent so long keeping away from.

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Instead I focused on the topic of perspective. Where, I asked, is Fanny’s perspective here? Only in the sentence beginning “She knew the woman” and the one following (the clearest indicator of her perspective, and a return to the fragments of the opening.) But why would we get less of Fanny’s perspective the further we get into the story?

Another way to ask that question, I said, is to ask about the story’s two titles. What’s the difference between them? Is one better than the other?

Annie, it transpires, is pregnant and has named Harry as the father. Harry doesn’t deny having been involved with Annie, but won’t admit to being the father, saying that it’s no more likely to be him than six or seven other men. The title “The Last Straw” suggests frustration and final consequences. And at the end of the story, Fanny decides not to return to the second concert but to stay at home with Mrs. Goodall, who she calls “mother” for the first time. She will, it seems, marry Harry. But when we say that something is the last straw, we are usually talking about something that pushed us over the edge, into an extreme position. What then would it mean to say: That’s it, you were involved with another woman and maybe are the father of her child, I’ve had it, it’s the last straw—I’m going to marry you”? How does that make any sense? Wouldn’t “The Last Straw” work better if Fanny were going to leave Harry?

And what about Lawrence’s first title, the one the story was saddled with for so many years? To me it’s just as intriguing. It promises a relationship that we never see. Annie, in fact, is only spoken of, and then only in the last few pages; she never appears directly. Wouldn’t it make more sense to call the story “Fanny and Harry”? As one of my better students pointed out, the title “Fanny and Annie” makes Harry the most important figure: these women are linked only through him. That would be yet another way of undermining Fanny’s importance. In both cases, Fanny is made lesser. Perhaps the story’s use of “doom” to describe her feelings at coming home isn’t as exaggerated as it might first appear.

Even after having been a teacher for more than ten years, I don’t find it easy to have someone else in my classroom, especially someone who is evaluating me. My colleague was very nice about the class, in the brief conversation we had on our way to our next obligations (we’ll talk more at a formal meeting with my Area Chair in a few weeks). “It’s really like pulling teeth with these kids,” she noted. And that has absolutely been my feeling the whole semester. My colleague was kind enough to say, “It makes me feel better to know that you have classes like this too.” The class wasn’t a disaster, we got through some useful material, and they warmed up by the end, a little, when we talked about the different titles. But I’m really not used to having to coax so many observations out of a class, so my mood as we arrive at the midway point of the semester is a little bit somber and a whole lot discouraged.

The rest of the week’s classes were devoted to writing exercises in preparation for the first longer paper, due next Wednesday, just before Fall Break. I’ll say more about that next time.

Short Fiction 2015 Week 5: Rachel Seiffert

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Earlier posts can be found here, here, here, and here:

Week 5 was another short week because I was observing Yom Kippur on Wednesday. I warned the class that their string of Jewish holidays had run its course and we’d resume meeting for our allotted three times a week. (Actually it’s now the harvest festival of Sukkot, in some ways an even more important holiday than the High Holidays, but I’m not cancelling class for it.)

We discussed two very good stories this week: Malamud’s heartbreaking “The Lady of the Lake” on Monday and Rachel Seiffert’s “Field Study” on Friday.

Since we’ll be returning to Malamud later in the semester, I’ll concentrate here on “Field Study.” I can’t remember how I came across this story. I think it was when, newly hired at Hendrix, I was preparing a course on contemporary British Fiction. (I taught that class a couple of times but gave it up. Too dispiriting to find that books I’d really liked didn’t hold up to the scrutiny of teaching.) Seiffert was listed in the 2003 version of the Granta Best Young British Writers. Born in Australia, she grew up in England and lived for a while in Germany. Her first novel is about fascism in Germany and meant to be quite good. She has a few other novels now, too, though my sense is she’s fallen off the radar a bit. The only thing of hers I’ve read is the collection to which “Field Study” gives its name (2004). From the first I liked this story, drawn to it in some way I couldn’t explain. And now I’ve taught it probably four or five times, and it’s always a winner, by which I mean both the students and I like it.

“Field Study” came through for me yet again, even though this group continues to be reticent; it’s always just the right side of pulling teeth with them. There was a point about a third of the way through the class period when I thought, Jesus, it’s like I’m just doing this for myself, good thing I like the damn story, but then something broke, some resistance melted, and I felt good will and, more importantly, that hard to define but highly desirable sensation of things falling into place, light bulbs going off, you name the cliché.

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“Field Study” is about Martin, a graduate student researching water pollution in a country next to his own. As he methodically takes samples from a river, he sees a young woman and her eleven-year-old son bathing. Later at the restaurant in his guesthouse, he recognizes the woman as his waitress. Her son is doing his homework at the bar. He strikes up a friendship with them, the boy, Jacek, translating between Martin and the mother, Ewa. The next day the boy comes to the river to help with the samples. The initial results show high levels of a dangerous chemical. Martin warns the pair not to swim in the river anymore. On the last night of the field study, Ewa invites Martin for dinner. Jacek translates until the wine loosens Martin and Ewa’s tongues; it gets late; the boy falls asleep at the table. Martin leans forward to kiss Ewa, but she says no, apologizes, covers her mouth and laughs. The next morning, as he is packing up, the final results come in from the lab back home. The new data contradicts the old. The chemical’s concentration is normal. Martin thinks about telling Ewa and Jacek it’s ok to swim again, but then he doesn’t. The road home follows the river; soon he is at the border. “His chest it tight with shame, but the border guard is waving him through now, and he is driving on again.”

I started by asking the class: What’s a field study? That was easy: It’s a way of researching where you collect data outside the lab and where the subjects are in their natural habitat. Why then is this story called “Field Study”? The guy is on a field study. And what is the guy studying? Pollution. Levels of a chemical that builds up in the human body and causes mortality. Right, I said. What else is Martin studying? A slight pause, but not too long. He’s studying another culture.

Good, I said. What is that culture? In other words, where is this story taking place? Pause. Then: Russia. How do you know that? The names. They’re like Russian. Also, there used to be Communism there. Not bad, I said. The names sound Slavic, don’t they? And the Communism is important. We’ll come back to that. Then I added: What do we know about Martin’s country? There’s a university there. Okay, what else? Silence. What about its geography, I prompted. It’s on a river. What river? The same river he’s studying. Okay, so Martin’s country is next door to Ewa and Jacek’s. That’s important, I said, because the story is very interested in the ideas of connection and interdependence. The factory that produces the chemical as a byproduct and flushes it into the water is in Ewa and Jackek’s country, but the river runs into Martin’s. We know Martin’s university has lots of sophisticated equipment. It seems prestigious, wealthy. What’s a big, prestigious country in Central Europe? (Here I was really leading them along, not especially jolly work or good form, but I had somewhere I wanted to go with all of this.) Germany, said a rising, tentative voice. Right. So if Martin’s from Germany, and the country with Slavic names is right next to it, Ewa and Jacek could be from the Czech Republic or, more likely, Poland.

But then why doesn’t Seiffert ever name these countries? It would be easy to do. Why make it at once fairly obvious and yet still obscure?

Now there was a longer pause. Finally one student—one of those smart but careless students that are for me the hardest kind to teach—said something like: The place doesn’t matter, it could be any place. I’d anticipated this response—“it makes it more universal” being a favourite of undergraduates everywhere—but I found it as unsatisfying here as I usually do. But if that’s true, I said, then why do we learn about post-Communist life, the difficult transition to capitalism exemplified by the “cartons of cigarettes and cake mix piled high along one wall” in the entrance to Ewa’s building. (Jacek explains the landlord gives them a break on the rent in exchange for letting him store goods that have presumably come from further west: “Every week is something new coming for him to sell.” Why the names pointing to a particular geographic and linguistic region, if not an exact place?

The story’s reticence, I suggested, is part of its exploration of cross-cultural communication. Borders in this story are at once porous, meaningless (they can’t stop pollution) and impermeable, effective. Jacek tells Martin about his Tata, who is in Martin’s country: “He is illegal. Too much problems at the border, so he don’t come home.” The father never appears in the story, but his effects are felt, both in the Jacek’s physiognomy (studying him, Martin realizes he doesn’t look much like his mother) and in Ewa’s memory (presumably he’s one of the reasons she rejects his overture). As the scenes of refugees from Syria and Iraq playing out on the news each day remind us only too vividly, borders are meaningless or artificial only for the privileged. For others, they are all-too powerful, able, for example, to separate families.

It’s a luxury to be waved through borders, as Martin is in the story’s final sentence. And in the end it suits Martin rather well that the border effectively shuts out Ewa and Jacek (who is learning Martin’s language as a way to better himself, and presumably become someone like Martin). That sentiment fits with Martin’s other attempts to seal himself off from the world, as in his insistence on wearing hip waders and rubber gloves while collecting samples and in his predilection for voyeurism. When Ewa and Jacek first come to the river, he keeps himself hidden, even abandoning the protocols of the study, which say he should take a sample every hundred meters, so that he can give them a wide berth. Of course, he can’t avoid them, on the contrary, he runs into them at every turn, until eventually he wants to encounter them—until he doesn’t.

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But Martin’s wish to keep himself apart—to be only the perceiving eye, an image for the idea of scientific detachment—is continually foiled. (We looked at a scene in which Martin takes a day off from collecting samples to organize data; he is calling his lab from a phone booth when a distraught Jacek finds him and presses his face to the glass.) The difficulty of sealing oneself off from the world fits with the idea that borders don’t matter. But the motif of watching in this story isn’t simply directed outwards, at others. It’s also directed inwards, at the self.

Here I returned to the question of what Martin is studying. To the list of pollution and a foreign culture we had to add Martin himself. The story is full of examples of second-order awareness on Martin’s part. Here he is, catching himself staring at Ewa in the bar: “He looks away. Sees his tall reflection in the mirror behind the bar. One hand, left, no right, moving up to cover his large forehead, sunburned, and red hair.” Or here he is packaging up samples after the first results have come in: “His fingers start to itch…. He knows this is psychosomatic, that he has always been careful to wear protection, doesn’t even think that poisoning with this metal is likely to produce such a reaction.” No matter how objective Martin tries to be—reminding himself that what he sees as his left is really his right—no matter how clinically he diagnoses his own reactions, he can’t overcome his body or his emotions. Awareness doesn’t stop feeling. Martin is often flushing and blushing, lowering his eyes, feeling the tightness of shame well up in his chest.

Seiffert doesn’t believe in the so-called objectivity of science, but her point isn’t to discredit science as cold or dehumanizing. Rather it’s to undermine the certainty of those, like Martin, who persist, against the evidence of their own bodies, to believe in that objectivity. The story pursues this criticism through its use of the motif of measuring and observing. (One of the first things we learn about Martin is that he “has a camera, notebooks, and vials.”) These activities seem neutral, the “mere” description of the world. But as Martin’s data suggests, measuring tells contradictory stories. It can also be influenced by confirmation bias, as when Martin, knowing Ewa and Jacek swim regularly in the river, thinks they look healthy enough, but “perhaps a little underweight.” Even a seemingly healthy person, he adds, can carry malignancy hidden inside, the toxins imperturbably doing their sinister work: “nothing for a decade or two, then suddenly tumors and shortness of breath in middle age.”

This criticism of what we can call a scientific world-view so long as we agree that this is a naïve definition of science might make us wonder about how we’re supposed to feel about Martin. In the last part of class, students considered their feelings about him. Why doesn’t he tell Ewa about the new, inconclusive results? Why, when he remembers the expression of sadness on her face at the river, later explained when Jacek says his mother often used to go there with his father, is Martin “shocked at the satisfaction the memory gives him”? Is it, as some students suggested, simply that he’s angry with her for “shutting him down”? (Students tittered a little the first time one of them used this expression; they repeated it as often as they could.) Is he revenging himself on her, and by extension on her country? Is this why he feels shame for at the end? Would that shame be a sign of remorse? If so, would that make us feel better about him? And what, at the climactic moment in the apartment, does Ewa laugh about? Is she laughing at him? If so, would that legitimate his otherwise petulant revenge? Or is she laughing with him, at the absurdity or bittersweet piquancy of the situation? (The story sympathizes strongly with Ewa, making a joke of the possibility that she could be a temptress: she sends Jacek to Martin with a present of apples.)

I left the students with one last thing to think about, pointing out five examples of the story’s most characteristic stylistic quirk. Here’s one of them; it’s the story’s first sentence: “Summer and the third day of Martin’s field study.” Students correctly noted that the examples were all sentence fragments. (Interestingly, they didn’t note the present tense narration, which was fine with me; we’ll study that soon enough with Nathan Englander’s story “The Wig.”) Often these fragments are quite obstreperous, separated from the previous sentence by a period when they could easily, and more correctly, have been added to it with a comma. Sometimes they are disorienting, as in this description of the boy’s shoes when he mother carries him piggyback through a field: “Brushing the ears of rye as she walks, bumping at her thighs as she jogs an unsteady step or two.” These seem at first like dependent clauses, the beginning of a description of Ewa’s action, but then we realize they’re fragmentary descriptions of what the shoes are doing.

Why are there so many fragments in “Field Study”? It’s like a lab report, one student immediately said That’s how you write them, in shorthand. Direct. To the point. Indeed, I agreed. That would make the story itself a kind of field study. And its conclusions would be as provisional as Martin’s. By eliminating “to be” from so many of its sentences, the story reminds us of the very thing it is questioning: the notion of identity. I can’t decide, I told the class, as the hour came to an end and the murmuring of the calculus students waiting to come into the room grew louder, whether the fragments break up the text or actually, paradoxically, only tie it together more cohesively, by reminding us of what they separate. This consideration of connection and disconnection returned us one last time to the idea of borders and separations, communication and miscommunication. The story can’t seem to decide which of these opposed terms is more powerful. But it’s much more at ease with that uncertainty than its protagonist.

There was more to say—there always is—but it was time to stop. So I will too. Next week: Kay Boyle, Elizabeth Bowen, Nathan Englander.

Short Fiction 2015 Week 4: Mueenuddin & Saunders

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Click here to read this series from the beginning.

Thanks to Rosh Hashanah, it was another short week in Short Fiction. We studied two stories, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s “Nawabdin Electrician” and George Saunders’s “The Falls.”

“The Falls” was new to me, one of those last minute syllabus-making decisions to which I’m so fatally prone. (Does that happen to anyone else?) I’d been meaning to read Saunders for a while, especially after his Tenth of December got such good reviews. But when I got around to looking at the collection, the stories all seemed so long. Some rudimentary online searching led me instead to this much shorter piece. “The Falls” is an interesting story, and one the students seemed to enjoy. But I’m unconvinced I’ll teach it again.

It seems to pander to young people’s ideas of what it’s like to be older—maybe why the students liked it so much—and I can’t find a satisfactory explanation for what one of the two main characters is doing in the story, other than to make us sympathize more with the other. That’s a good enough reason, I guess, except that the other character was already fairly sympathetic to begin with: adding the other seems like unnecessary special pleading. (For those who have read it, I’m talking about Aldo Cummings—what’s he doing there? Morse is plenty interesting all by himself.) I often need a second or third teaching to really get a handle on a text, but in this case I don’t feel compelled to give it another try. Saunders lovers, tell me why I’m wrong!

“Nawabdin Electrician,” on the other hand, is a winner. I can’t remember if this is the second or third time I’ve taught it. But it keeps getting better. Mueenuddin grew up in Pakistan and the US; he published his first and so far only collection, Other Rooms, Other Wonders, in 2009. I think I first read “Nawabdin” in The New Yorker. I really hope Mueenuddin is working on something new.

The story is set between Multan and Firoza in the Punjab province of Pakistan at an unspecified date, probably in the 1980s or 90s. I don’t know anything about this place, which doesn’t reflect well on me, but the story explains it’s an arid region where water matters a lot and tube wells run continuously to provide for the crops. Nawab, the story’s first sentence tells us, “flourishe[s] on a signature capability, a technique for cheating the electric company by slowing down the revolutions of electric meters.” Additionally, he fixes the motors on the pumps and ensures that the home of the region’s largest landowner, K. K. Harouni, who lives mostly in Lahore, remains a cocoon of comfort. Nawab thrives under Harouni’s patronage, even convincing the man to give him a motorcycle. Mueenuddin is a warm writer, not above poking fun at his subjects. People are rightly, if predictably always comparing him to Chekhov. Some of his humour comes from his syntax: his sentences often have a sting at the end. Here the narrator reflects on the effect of the motorcycle on Nawab’s prestige:

The motorcycle increased his status, gave him weight, so that people began calling him “Uncle,” and asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he knew absolutely nothing.

The joke here is as much on Nawab as on everyone around him.

The first half of the story is a bit aimless, setting up Nawab’s life, his devotion to his large family, composed, and this is the great tragedy of his life, of thirteen daughters that he cannot hope to ever provide dowries for yet for whom he works indefatigably. I use the word “aimless” advisedly, because that’s the one the story uses to describe its protagonist’s movements:

Nawab’s day, viewed from the air, would have appeared as aimless as a that of a butterfly… the maps of these days, superimposed, would have made a tangle; but every morning he emerged from the same place just as the sun came up, and every evening he returned there, tired now, darkened, switching off the bike, rolling it over the wooden lintel of the door leading into the courtyard, the engine ticking as it cooled.

We can see here Mueenuddin’s genius with the long sentence, his way of unfurling clauses in leisurely but consequential fashion. The idea of the difference between a life viewed from above and from within reappears in the story’s dramatic shifts in perspective, most famously in this description of the trees that line one of the roads Nawab tears along on his bike:

Some hundred and fifty years ago one of the princes had ridden that way, going to a wedding or a funeral in this remote district, felt hot, and ordered that rosewood trees be planted to shade the passersby. He forgot that he had given the order within a few hours, and in a few dozen years he in turn was forgotten, but these trees still stood, enormous now, some of them dead and looming without bark, white and leafless.

We considered this passage for a while, lingering over its magisterial irony: the whim of the potentate that can make such a mighty and extraordinary thing come to pass even as he himself is as soon forgotten as his initial whim. Only the narrator remembers, and this move to omniscience—there’s no attempt to tie the information to Nawab’s consciousness—suggests that individuals are insignificant in the sweep of time, an idea that casts the end of the story in a new light.

Halfway through, the story switches gears, as it were, and narrates a single incident in detail. Nawab is riding home one night when a man steps out on to the road and motions for him to stop. Nawab takes pity on the man and offers him a ride. Half a mile later, the man pokes a gun in Nawab’s side and orders him to stop. Nawab loses control of the bike, the men go flying and land in a heap, but when Nawab tries to take the man’s gun the robber shoots him in the groin. After another tussle, the man fires five shots at Nawab from point blank range: they all miss. The commotion brings two other men running; one of them shoots the robber. The injured men are taken to a pharmacy. Only Nawab has the money for medical care, and he refuses the robber’s pleading: “Have mercy, save me. I’m a human being also.”

Nawab counters with a lofty, self-serving judgment—“At every step of the road I went the right way and you the wrong”—and the man dies after whispering, “It’s not true.” Then this, the story’s remarkable final paragraph:

Yet Nawab’s mind caught at this [the referent is unclear—perhaps the man’s final words], looking at the man’s words and his death, like a bird hopping around some bright object, meaning to peck at it. And then he didn’t. He thought of the motorcycle, saved, and the glory of saving it. He was growing. Six shots, six coins thrown down, six chances, and not one of them killed him, not Nawabdin Electrician.

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I had begun class by referencing E. M. Forster’s classic distinction between round and flat characters. Surprisingly, Forster begins by describing flat characters at length and only then goes on to define round characters—and then mostly in opposition to flat characters. Flat characters, says, Forster, can be summarized in a sentence. We went on to consider the relation between flat characters and stock characters of types (quite similar, but not, I think, the same). Flat characters are static, maybe even simple, but they’re not dull. I asked the class for an example of a flat character in “Nawabdin Electrician” and was pleased when the immediate answer was Nawabdin’s wife. (I also offered the example of the pharmacist, whose ruthlessness about only exchanging his services for cash reminds us of certain aspects of Nawab’s character.) We briefly discussed Nawab’s wife, concluding that what best characterized her was her long-suffering attitude to her husband. I wanted students to see, though, how warm and moving a portrait of a “flat” character can be. We see that her life is hard, she always comes last in the family, but she isn’t entirely put upon, she’s shrewd and funny and seems to love her husband as much as he evidently loves her. And we learn all this in only a single scene.

I proceeded to offer a riff on what the names of character can reveal, whether through allusion (Ishmael in Moby Dick, as exiled and wayward as his namesake in Genesis) or through description, (the evasive and obfuscatory lawyers Dodgson and Fogg in Pickwick Papers: I nicked these examples from a textbook I’ve lying around my office.) Then I turned to the most interesting thing Forster says about round characters: they surprise us. Their motivations are complex, sometimes inscrutable even to themselves.

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Having given this background, I suggested that Nawab was a perfect example of a round character. The ending, students readily agreed, surprised them. Did they like Nawab, I asked? The class was split, and this naïve question sparked the most open, back-and-forth conversation we’d had so far. Some students were taken by Nawab’s devotion to his family. Others were impressed by what a bad ass he turns out to be. But still others disliked him for that same reason, pointing out how judgmental and cruel he proves in the end. Indeed, I suggested, to call him a bad ass is to believe his own propaganda, which we see at work in the free indirect discourse of that brilliant final sentence. This is aggrandizement of a different sort than the prince’s whim that led to a forest. This is a man given the opportunity to reflect on his actions and simply choosing not to (“And then he didn’t.”) Moreover, though I forgot to mention this at the time, to judge the robber as harshly as Nawab does is to ignore another surprising narrative shift when we suddenly, via narrative omniscience, learn that the man had never used guns before and couldn’t bear to point at the head or the body.

There’s much more to say about the subtle ambivalence of Mueenuddin’s characterization of his protagonist. I’ll end simply by citing the passage we looked at in the last minutes of class, with time running down and still so much to say. It’s a passage from early in the story, when we are still being introduced to Nawab, still inclined to look kindly on him as a Robin Hood type. Nawab has been called in to fix the pump on a well:

Hammer dangling like a savage’s axe, Nawab entered the oily room housing the pump and electric motor. Silence. He settled on his haunches. The men crowded the door, till he shouted that he must have light. He approached the offending object warily but with his temper rising circled it, pushed it about a bit, began to take liberties with it, settled in with it, drank tea next to it, and finally began disassembling it. With his screwdriver, blunt and long, lever enough to pry up flagstones, he cracked the shields hiding the machine’s penetralia. A screw popped and flew into the shadows, He took the ball-and-peen and delivered a cunning blow. The intervention failed. Pondering, he ordered one of the farmworkers to find a really thick piece of leather and to collect sticky mango sap from a nearby tree. So it went, all day, into the afternoon, Nawab trying one thing and then another, heating the pipes, cooling them, joining wires together, circumventing switches and fuses. And yet somehow, in fulfillment of his genius for crude improvisation, the pumps continued to run.

The backhandedness of that last sentence is wonderful: is that honest praise for genuine skill, however crude, or is it a testament to an unchanged reality (not even Nawab could break the machine)? Over and over the passage undermines Nawab: his “cunning blow” fails with a thud echoed by the unusually short sentence in the midst of these glorious, sinuous lists of Nawab’s efforts, which range from brute force to tender solicitation. (Am I the only one to hear “genitalia” in that obscure “penetralia”? Not to mention his “taking liberties” with the machine.) Nawab is a master, wielding his carefully described tools with precision. Nawab is a charlatan, throwing everything at the wall and hoping something, some piece of leather dripping with mango, sticks.

The precision of Mueenuddin’s description, his genius with tempo and rhythm (we really feel Nawab’s desperation in those lovely lenthy sentences), and his through-going ambivalence about Nawab’s character: in these ways the passage offers in miniature everything that is so good about this terrific story.

In past entries, I’ve expressed some doubts about this group of students. This week was certainly our best so far. It seemed as though the students were starting to get a handle on what I’m asking them to do. Some still have that half-puzzled, half-terrified look. But in general the week was characterized by a kind of looseness and joy that our conversations had usually been lacking so far. Here’s hoping that atmosphere continues next week, when we discuss the concept of place/setting/locale in stories by Malamud and Rachel Seiffert.

Short Fiction 2015 Week 3: Nabokov & Malamud

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Labour Day made for a short week. Wednesday saw us conclude the first unit of the course on narrative event with Vladimir Nabokov’s wonderful, too-little known story “The Fight” (1925). Today saw us begin a unit on character with the first of several stories we’ll be reading by Bernard Malamud, the enigmatic “The Mourners.”

Once again I’ve assigned Malamud’s third book, The Magic Barrel (1958), one of the few story collections ever to win the National Book Award. We’ll be returning to it regularly this semester. I love this collection and I was really pleased last time I taught the course that students liked it a lot too. I really wasn’t sure that would be the case. They’re very Jewish, these stories, and my students are not. That last group was much more Humanities oriented than this one seems to be, but at least reading a single author in some depth will help them as they prepare for the final essay, in which they’ll examine the formal and thematic preoccupations of an author as they are manifested in four or five stories from at least two collections.

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I spent some time at the beginning of class telling the students a little about Malamud. Normally I don’t do this, we just don’t have time, but it seemed worth doing today. The result, however, was that, after describing Malamud’s childhood in Brooklyn with parents who had escaped Tsarist Russia—real Fiddler on the Roof stuff, I said, and was shocked by the sea of blank faces: only two students had ever seen it—a childhood that was poor, the parents working long hours at a small grocery of the sort that appears so often in Malamud’s fiction, and difficult, the mother institutionalized after a failed suicide attempt (she was found by Malamud himself) and a brother similarly plagued by schizophrenia, a childhood that Malamud escaped by becoming a teacher, an occupation he continued through his marriage to a Catholic (bitterly contested by both families), a stint at a land-grant university in Oregon, and a fellowship year in Rome before landing a permanent gig teaching college writing at Bennington College in Vermont, where he painstakingly worked on his highly polished sentences, a determined, almost monastic life made famous in Philip Roth’s lightly fictionalized, and overtly hostile representation of Malamud in The Ghost Writer (1979)—after saying all this we only had about 40 minutes left to discuss the story.

Moreover, we spent so long analyzing the first sentence—“Kessler, formerly an egg candler, lived alone on social security”—that we didn’t have time to say everything I wanted to about the story. But I thought it worth lingering on that sentence for two reasons: one, I always love beginnings, and two, I think this one is quintessential Malamud. His economy is evident, as is his lack of patience with extended exposition. We considered two things in this sentence that are present at the beginning of almost all his stories: the use of last names, and the reference to occupations.

I was relieved that most students had found out what an egg candler does. (I hate it when students don’t look up words.) When I asked them what images came up in their google searches, they described various machines, devices, or contraptions that involved a light source. Not, I observed, any pictures of guys looking at eggs. This led them to conclude that egg candling must not be done by people any more. Which might mean what? Maybe that it’s boring, repetitive, the kind of thing people don’t do as well as machines. Kessler, on that reading, would be a superfluous man. That proves to be true, in a way, yet we also learn, in the next sentences of the story, that Kessler had been fired by “more than one egg and butter wholesaler” not because he was a bad worker—“he sorted and graded with speed and accuracy”—but because he was “a quarrelsome type and considered a trouble maker.” There are plenty of quarrels in the story (one reason I wanted to pair it with the Nabokov), but Malamud’s phrasing leaves open the possibility that he might not really be a troublemaker, he might just be mistaken for one, and thus perhaps not a bad guy, or as bad a guy as he seems.

At any rate, we learn here in passing something important: that the job of egg candler, which might seem dull and repetitive, actually requires discernment, even finesse (all that sorting and grading). Those qualities are important to keep in mind, since they might make us feel more kindly towards Kessler later on. For our opinion of Kessler quickly takes a nose dive, since we learn that thirty years ago he suddenly abandoned his wife and children, merely because he is “unable to stand” them—they had been, the story chillingly tells us, “always in his way.”

The distance we soon feel towards Kessler is intimated already in the use of last name, which students pointed out removed the characters from us—and from each other. Through my prompting, they noted that this story—set almost entirely in a single tenement building in which people live on top of each other—is filled with characters who hardly know each other, and don’t seem to like each other much when they do.

Kessler gets into a fight with the janitor in his building; the janitor tells the landlord, one Gruber, a big sweaty man with high blood pressure caused from his desire to wring as much money out of his run-down building as possible. Gruber gives Kessler notice, but Kessler won’t leave. Gruber has Kessler evicted, but Kessler sits in the snow on the sidewalk until his neighbours take pity and file the lock off the door and carry him back upstairs. Kessler asks Gruber plaintively, “‘What did I do, tell me? Who hurts a man without a reason? Are you a Hitler or a Jew?’” As he does, he is all the time hitting his chest with his fist, an allusion to the prayers of atonement Jews offer on Yom Kippur, the striking of the chest with the fist metaphorically suggesting how much we must take the task to heart.

The next day—after the landlord spends a restless night worrying over how to get Kessler to leave, just one of several references in the story to Melville’s marvelous “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853)—Gruber ascends the stairs of the building only to find Kessler still in the apartment. Now Gruber sees Kessler as a mourner, and indeed we learn that Kessler is thinking about what he has apparently been thinking about ever since being evicted to the sidewalk, namely, his having abandoned his family.

At the end of the story, Gruber, who has a sudden vision of falling down the stairs that are referenced so often, becomes convinced that Kessler is mourning him. The final paragraph reads:

At last he could stand it no longer. With a cry of shame he tore the sheet off Kessler’s bed, and wrapping it around his bulk, sank heavily to the floor and became a mourner.

What exactly the two are mourning, and why they mourn rather than, say, repent, is just one, though perhaps the most important, of the story’s many enigmas.

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As a way to solve those mysteries, I asked the students to free write for a couple of minutes in answer to the question: “Who does the story ask us to sympathize with?” (I later introduced the term “identification”—a fancy way of describing our tendency to model ourselves on others, which involves looking for others that we want to be like.) I thought this was a good question to ask of “The Mourners” because it has no obvious answer. I’ve often found that asking students to write for a bit half way through class leads to good results: sharper thinking, more nuanced answers. That was true this time, too, as became evident when I asked a few of them to read their responses. Most answered Kessler, one Gruber. No one, I noticed, but only to myself, there just wasn’t time, though I see now it would have been helpful to bring it up, said the old Italian woman, Kessler’s neighbour, who shrieks and shrieks when she sees Kessler on the street without pause until her grown sons carry him back up to the room. I don’t understand this moment, really, but it’s one of the only times when someone in this story cares for somebody else.

Perhaps the old woman sees her own fate in Kessler’s. After all—and I regret that I didn’t say this in class—the other piece of information in the story’s opening sentence is that Kessler lives on social security, an unremarkable fact to readers today, especially eighteen-year-olds, but more remarkable given the time of the story’s writing and its setting, which is never directly named but seems to be a few years earlier. But social security only dates to 1935, and it wasn’t offered as a regular monthly sum until 1940. This historical fact connects to the story’s interest in what it means to care—or not to care—for others. One way to understand social security is as an affirmation that we will all care for each other, even those we don’t know (by “all” I mean Americans: proving one’s bona fides as an American is an abiding concern in these stories, filled as they are with Jewish immigrants). It’s a way of generalizing responsibility. I don’t think the story disputes that social security is good, even very good, but I think it might be suggesting it’s not enough. Maybe the idea is that each of us must take responsibility for our friends, loved ones, and neighbours. Perhaps this failure is what is mourned. For the accusation Kessler levels at Gruber—“Who hurts a man without a reason?”—could be asked of Kessler himself. After all, that’s what he did to his family.

Things got rushed at the end of class, just as they are here. We didn’t have time to really grapple with these ideas of responsibility. The period didn’t feel wasted, but it didn’t feel as satisfying as I’d have liked. “The Mourners” is remarkable, though, and I urge you to read it, especially now, on the eve of the Jewish High Holidays.

I haven’t time or energy to say much about “The Fight,” the other story we read this week. It too is wonderful. Nabokov’s stories are underrated, especially the ones from his time in exile in Berlin in the 1920s. “The Fight” has an odd structure. It begins with a lengthy description on the part of the first person narrator—an émigré in Berlin, presumably someone like Nabokov himself—of the excursions he regularly makes to a lake on the outskirts of Berlin, perhaps some place like the Wannsee, which would later take on such a sinister associations because of the decision taken at a villa there in 1942 by top Nazis to exterminate European Jewry. At the period of Nabokov’s story, though, the lake is merely a place to swim and sun. The narrator regularly sees an older man there, a man with whom he can only haltingly converse, but who seems genial and pleasantly anarchic. For example, he warns other bathers of the arrival of the hated dogcatcher with a piercing whistle and a glint in his eye.

Only later does the narrator discover more about the man, when he happens to enter a bar in an unfamiliar part of the city that turns out to be owned by him. The narrator begins to drop in regularly, watching the goings on of the regulars, especially the love affair between the daughter of the man—his name, we learn only relatively late in the story, is Krause—and a young electrician. The last part of the story tells what happens one day when the weather is sultry and a storm just about to break. The electrician stops by the bar, pours himself a drink, and makes himself on his way. Krause demands that he pay; the man refuses, saying that, after all, here he is at home. Matters escalate rapidly and in a matter of a sentence or two the men are fighting with bare fists on the street, to the glee of a crowd that has gathered seemingly from nowhere. Krause knocks the electrician out. The narrator vainly, rather heartlessly, attempts to comfort the girl with a kiss. And that’s it. The story’s over.

For me, “The Fight” is a parody of the chart known to every high school student, the one that details initial exposition followed by gradually rising action that leads to a climax and then comes down to a resolution. Instead of those hoary conventions, this story asks instead: In what way does a climactic action need to be prepared for? What happens if that action isn’t resolved?

Wednesday was the first rainy day of the semester, and I knew the students would be listless. So I divided the students into groups and gave each a question I’d prepared beforehand. In lieu of any interpretation of the story—read it, it’s about five pages, and fabulously Nabokovian with its disturbing first-person narrator, you won’t be disappointed—I’ll simply list them here. I’ll take your answers in the comments below.

  1. Why is this story called “The Fight”? After all, the fight doesn’t take up much of its length. What is the fight like? What does it lead to? What is the story telling us about it?
  2. We could divide the story into three parts: pp 141-3//143-4//144-6. What do the parts have to do with each other? Why all that stuff about swimming at the beginning?
  3. What is the narrator like? What do we learn about him, even if indirectly?
  4. What does the story tell us about bodies?
  5. How does the anecdote about the dogcatcher function? What’s it doing here?
  6. How does the final paragraph affect our understanding of the story?

Another short week next week, what with Rosh Hashanah. And the demands of the semester are really tightening. But I’ll do my best to report back here again when we turn our attention to two much more recent stories.

Short Fiction 2015 Week 2: Balzac, Chekhov, Kipling

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I’m still uncertain what kind of a group I’m dealing with. A smaller one than last week, at any rate. Two students dropped—one had been a strong contributor to discussion and we’ll miss her—and now we’re reaching the point where the class won’t work if everyone doesn’t pitch in. It doesn’t help that there are almost no humanities students in the class. That can bring its own rewards, but it doesn’t help my department’s goal of using classes like this one as a way to generate majors. And although the students have been willing to work with me so far, I sense that they simply aren’t sold yet on the value of close textual analysis. I worry that if even a few of them decide to check out, our conversations will become strained and artificial.

What a shame that would be: the material is so interesting! I would say that of course, but I really don’t see how anyone could fail to be intrigued by the stories we studied this week: Balzac’s “Sarrasine” (1830), “Kipling’s “Mrs. Bathurst” (1904), and Chekhov’s “The Kiss” (1887). They happen to be the three oldest stories on the syllabus, as well as some of the longest. No doubt those things contributed to some of the students’ difficulties. But in general we persevered.

I wanted us to consider in particular these questions: What sorts of things should happen in a story, and how should they be told? To this end I introduced the distinction made by the Russian Formalists in the first decades of the twentieth century between fabula and syuzhet, or story and plot. Although readers sometimes use these terms as synonyms, narratologists make a useful distinction between them. Story is the chronological order of events; plot is the arrangement of those events into the order we experience them in our reading of the text.

In preparing for class I came across this example, which I put on the board. (I love the room we’re in because it still has a chalkboard.) What, I asked, is the difference between these narratives?

Tim got up in the morning. There wasn’t any cereal left, so he went out to get some. On his way to the store, he was hit by a car and died.

Tim couldn’t believe he was dying because of cereal. He should never have left the house.

Students were readily able to note to difference between a chronological ordering of material and an achronological one that begins with the end and will presumably flash back to earlier events in order to explain the cryptic sentence “Tim couldn’t believe he was dying because of cereal.” It took a little prodding, however, for them to say that the second of these admittedly not especially elegant examples is more interesting than the first—specifically, it is more suspenseful. I observed that some genres, crime fiction in particular, manipulate story more than others, largely in the service of suspense.

My main points were these: all narratives have plots, however minimal, and so all narratives manipulate the presentation of events. Story is what readers are continually creating, often unconsciously, from their experience of plot. Story is therefore a necessary fiction, an effect of plot. It’s not something that pre-exists plot.

I hope they got this counter-intuitive idea, but I don’t know (yet). I noticed that the students were happiest—and liveliest—when they were learning this vocabulary and applying it to the course texts. They liked it, in other words, when I was lecturing. But I’m not a particularly good lecturer, and I don’t do much of it in this course or any other. What I really do—what I really want them to learn—is how to pay close attention to literary texts; how to develop interpretations of the whole based on scrupulous attention to its parts.

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I can’t talk about these stories without spoiling some of their surprises, so consider yourself warned. Each is wonderful, but this time around the one that really struck me was “Sarrasine.” I’ve only ever taught it in the context of Roland Barthes’s powerful reading of it in his brilliant book about realist fiction, S/Z. My take on the story is heavily indebted to Barthes, but I found it freeing to teach the story on its own terms. I think using Jordan Stump’s translation from this lovely new edition of Balzac stories helped too. It feels fresher and lighter than the one by Richard Howard I’m familiar with.

I had the students bring a one-page summary of the story to class, partly as a diagnostic exercise (so I could see what their writing was like) and partly to get them to practice accurate and concise description. I wanted to know what they chose to emphasize. (Interestingly, they almost all ignored the ending.) Here’s my crack at it:

“Sarrasine” begins at an opulent ball at the home of the mysterious de Lanty family. The narrator has brought a (married) woman to the party, Madame de Rochfide, whom he hopes to seduce. Like the rest of Parisian society, the young woman is both attracted and repelled by an old man who regularly appears at the de Lantys’ parties. Who is he and why is the family so solicitous but also so frightened of him? The narrator knows and agrees to explain all to his lover when they meet in her boudoir the following evening. There he launches into the story of one Earnest-Jean Sarrasine, a sculptor who rose from obscurity in provincial France to fame in Paris, leading him to win a prize to study in Rome. Sarrasine’s genius combines a fiery, unruly nature with a profound lack of worldliness. That naivety is apparent when, arriving in the Eternal City, he attends the opera and falls immediately in love with a singer known only as La Zambinella. La Zambinella rebuffs the sculptor’s professions of love, saying that if Sarrasine really knew her he would be horrified—a diagnosis that proves to be true when she turns out not to be a woman. Her unearthly voice is the result of castration. An enraged Sarrrasine is on the point of killing the poor creature, to use a word the text repeats several times, when he is himself murdered by ruffians hired by the singer’s protector, one of Rome’s most powerful Cardinals. The old man—the uncle of Madame de Lanty—is none other than La Zambinella; his musical career generated the fortune that has fueled the family’s rise to respectability. But when the mystery is revealed it casts a shadow, a kind of taint on its eager audience. Madame de Rochfide is so repelled by the story that she breaks off her relation with the narrator (and in classic Balzac fashion, threatens to retire from this monstrous world to a convent).

“Sarrasine” is a great story. And it’s great for teaching narrative structure, both because it’s filled with so many mysteries and because it’s so brilliantly manipulative in making us care about them. In other words, it’s very suspenseful, and we feel the suspense all the more powerfully because characters in the story do too, and they’re always cuing us to experience events in a certain way.

I began our discussion of the story by asking the class to identify the story’s key mysteries. They quickly said: Where does the de Lantys’ money come from? Who is the old man? Who is the subject of the portrait of Adonis that hangs in the de Lanty mansion? Who is La Zambinella? Will the narrator get together with Madame de Rochfide?

These all turn out to be versions of the same question. Even the last one hinges on the revelation of the others. I pointed out some of the ways the story answers these questions early on without really answering them. These pieces of incomplete information fit with the story’s depiction of concealment and revelation. Plots work by oscillating between revealing and concealing; Balzac is a master of literalizing these narrative metaphors. The story is full of secret passages, cloistered window-ledges, disguises, etc.

Here’s an example of the kind of half-answer I’m talking about. Already on the fourth page the narrator reveals “The beauty, the fortune, the wit, the grace and intelligence of these two children [the de Lantys’ son and daughter] came to them solely from their mother” (my emphasis). As Barthes points out, the sentence’s parataxis—the presentation of information serially, without any kind of subordination or hierarchy—sweeps us along, so that it’s almost impossible to notice that we’ve already been given the answer to one of the story’s burning questions. But the answer is only a partial answer, an answer we can’t yet fully understand. The de Lanty fortune comes from the maternal side. But we don’t yet know what that means.

The story’s clever plotting, especially the extended flashback to the time when the enigmatic old man was the diva La Zambinella, contributes to its sense of mystery. Where things get really interesting is when that mystery is resolved. At the end of the story, all our questions are answered, but the resolution isn’t satisfying, at least not to the character that has been our stand-in, Madame de Rochfide. (She is the one, like us, who hungers to know the truth behind the mysterious appearances.) Barthes famously described the story’s final scene as a metaphorical instance of castration, an echo of the literal castration that befalls the singer. Here, for example, is the narrator explaining the connection between the old man, La Zambinella, and the de Lanty fortune:

“Perhaps now you can understand Madame de Lanty’s interest in concealing the source of a fortune that comes from—”

“Enough!” she interrupted, with a commanding gesture.

We sat for a moment in the deepest silence.

The event at the heart of the story—Zambinella’s castration, that is, his becoming Zambinella—is so terrifying, even, it would seem, disgusting, that it cannot be spoken, and even the incomplete revelation of its truth is enough to kill desire in anyone who hears of it. (I mean both narrative desire and sexual desire.) The exchange the narrator and his lover have agreed upon—a story for sex—isn’t consummated. In this sense “Sarrasine” offers an allegory of the impossibility of any story to conclude satisfactorily—no solution is ever as satisfying as its enigma.

In other words, one of the things Balzac’s story is about is that what is hidden can never be fully revealed. To satisfy narrative desire is always to incite a kind of death. And that’s especially true in a story like this one, where a key connection between the story of the sculptor and the castrato and the story of the narrator and his lover is the former’s desire to shape the other to their own ends. What Madame de Rochfide says bitterly to the narrator—“Oh! You’re remaking me to suit your own tastes. A strange sort of tyranny that is! You want me to be something other than me”—could just as easily be said by La Zambinella to Sarrasine.

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The same sort of solipsistic control is evident in more melancholic form in Chekhov’s “The Kiss.” A general who like fat women assumes his men must as well. A habitual cynic assumes his colleague must be lying. And an introvert assumes that others must share his disparagement of himself. In contrast to Balzac, and also to Kipling, with their dramatic, even melodramatic events, Chekhov operates in a more muted register. I don’t know if he invented the modern conception that short fiction centers on small epiphanies, but he’s certainly an important figure in the development and eventual triumph of that mode.

I began our discussion of the story by asking students to name the central event of the story. They immediately referred to the scene in which the protagonist Ryabovich, lost at a house party, wanders into a darkened room where he is embraced by a woman who has mistaken him for her lover. But a student immediately added that the real event seems to be the man’s reaction to the embrace. Thus the titular kiss becomes an allegory for our tendency to imagine that a story pre-exists its telling—its plot—when in reality it is only ever constructed from our ways of telling it. Here’s the passage we spent a lot of time on:

Ryabovich stopped, uncertain what to do… Just then he was astonished to hear hurried footsteps, the rustle of a dress and a female voice whispering breathlessly, ‘At last!’ Two soft, sweet-smelling arms (undoubtedly a woman’s) encircled his neck, a burning cheek pressed against his and at the same time there was the sound of a kiss. But immediately after the kiss the woman gave a faint cry and shrank backwards in disgust—that was how it seemed to Ryabovich.

It took a little prodding but eventually I was able to get students to see that this is really a very strange description. The loss of sight in the darkened room means that other senses are heightened—here we referenced a number of other passages that describe sounds and smells—but how trustworthy are those senses, or how are they being interpreted? Why does the text add that parenthetical “undoubtedly a woman’s”? Hasn’t the reference to a female voice made that clear? (Though “Sarrasine” ought to have made us suspicious about such essentialism.) I can’t trust that “undoubtedly”—I immediately hear the doubt hiding within the word. It’s not that I think the person was actually a man. It’s that the whole scenario seems so insubstantial. As one student pointed out, it’s only Ryabovich who is convinced the woman shrinks in disgust. (And because he decides never to return to the house, we never find out if he’s right.)

Further uncertainty comes from that strange phrasing, “there was the sound of a kiss.” Sound isn’t usually the first way we experience a kiss. Why then does Chekhov describe it this way? Again the effect is to render the whole event uncertain. But that very uncertainty is what enables Ryabovich to speculate extravagantly about it, to construct an ideal woman composed of all the most appealing parts of the different women at the party (he imagines the shoulders of one, the smile of another, etc).

We didn’t have time to consider the different registers of experience in the story—the way the habitual actions of the artillery battalion to which the protagonist belongs are succinctly described but derided by the text as boring, whereas the singular action of the kiss, if we can even talk about it in such terms, is developed at length to the point of distortion. But we did linger over the end of the story, over Ryabovich’s decision not to return with the others to the house where the kiss occurred, a decision that comes after he stands overlooking a river. The current that purls faintly and passes inexorably along leads Ryabovich to feel a sense of futility. Yet the story’s final irony is that in taking, at long last, a decisive action—in not returning to the house where, in a different kind of story, he would have re-encountered the woman from the darkened room—he resolutely chooses irresolution. But doing so allows him to maintain the power of fantasy, thereby asserting the inevitable quality of reconstruction that attends all the important moments of our lives. Yet in a way I still don’t fully understand the recognition of this inevitability is combined with a really ominous sense that things will go badly for poor Ryabovich. When the others go off to the party, he lies on his bed “in defiance of fate—as though he wanted to bring its wrath down on his own head.”

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Speaking of ominous fate, what about “Mrs. Bathurst”? This post is already too long, so I won’t say much about it here other than that it is in fact the most enigmatic of these puzzling tales. In fact, it’s really hard to know what happens in it, and we spent much of the class period trying to sort that out. Like “Sarrasine” and “The Kiss,” “Mrs. Bathurst” is also a story about storytelling. Four men gather in a railway car near Cape Town to tell the story of a man who deserted from the Navy. But what exactly happens to him, and what led him to desert? A quick online search suggests that commentators can’t agree on the answers. I think the students found it hard—it worked less well than the last time I taught it—and it’s true that to make any sense of it at the most basic level we have to make much of enigmatic and offhand phrasing, as when the deserter tells the story-teller: “remember that I am not a murderer, because my lawful wife died in childbirth six weeks after I came out [i.e. away from England].” Why “lawful wife”? Isn’t that redundant? Well, maybe not if you have a second wife, an unlawful one. Not, in other words, if you’re a bigamist. Look here for an extraordinarily detailed, if sometimes pedantic to the point of obtuseness, analysis of much of the existing criticism of the story, where this suggestion among others is made. (The whole site has the layout and monomaniacal tone that so characterized the Internet in its early days.) Kipling doesn’t even attempt the resolution of narrative enigmas that proved so problematic in Balzac. He’s probably the least well respected of the three writers today, but in this sense at least he feels the most radical. We’ll return to the topic of uncertain or unknowable events when we read an early story by Nabokov next week.

Short Fiction Week 1: Lydia Davis

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I mentioned last time that I’m teaching a course on short fiction each semester this year. It’s been a while since I’ve taught it and I’m quite looking forward to it. I love novels, but it’s a relief to have a course without any. Short Fiction falls under my department’s Introduction to Literary Studies category, and is intended for Freshmen and Sophomores. These courses satisfy two of the general education requirements all students at my institution need to fulfill: Literary Studies and Writing Level 1 (W1). Thus although I hope to entice some of these students into at least thinking about majoring in English, the reality is that this is the only English course most of them will take.

It’s not easy teaching students how to develop their interpretive skills by reading attentively. But it’s even more challenging when I’ve also got to combine that task with teaching them how to write. Reading and writing go together, of course, but turning students into proficient writers takes a lot of time, both in class and in individual conferences with me. All of the assignments are structured into stages emphasizes revision. The dual aims—complementary but each daunting in its own right—make these classes hard to teach. (Fortunately, we were recently able to limit these classes to 18 students (it used to be 25) which helps quite a bit.) But I usually enjoy my introductory level courses a lot, especially in the fall semester. There’s nothing quite like the excitement—however undisciplined—of a first semester college student.

It doesn’t take long for the semester to get to the point where day-to-day survival is the only thing that matters. One of the first things to go by the wayside, at least for me, is my own writing, including here at the blog. I want to change that, and so this year I’ve decided to write each week about one of the stories we’re studying in class. I hope my dozens of loyal readers will keep me accountable. I welcome all gestures of support!

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Class met for the first time today, and I reserved the tedious business of going over class procedures & the syllabus for the last ten minutes and spent the rest of the time on a short piece by the contemporary American writer Lydia Davis. I’ve often taught her absolutely wonderful story “A Mown Lawn,” but this year I decided to go with something different, the first story in her most recent collection, Can’t and Won’t (2014). Davis is known for writing very short, very smart, often very funny stories, and this one is no exception. It’s called “A Story of Stolen Salamis” and here it is in its entirety:

A Story of Stolen Salamis

My son’s Italian landlord in Brooklyn kept a shed out back in which he cured and smoked salamis. One night, in the midst of a wave of petty vandalism and theft, the shed was broken into and the salamis were taken. My son talked to his landlord about it the next day, commiserating over the vanished sausages. The landlord was resigned and philosophical, but corrected him: “They were not sausages. They were salamis.” Then the incident was written up in one of the city’s more prominent magazines as an amusing and colorful urban incident. In the article, the reporter called the stolen goods “sausages.” My son showed the article to his landlord, who hadn’t known about it. The landlord was interested and pleased that the magazine had seen fit to report the incident, but he added: “They weren’t sausages. They were salamis.”

I started by asking the class what wasn’t in the story. Answers came pretty quickly: defined characters, description of the setting or much of anything else, and most importantly, details about the crime and its upshot. As one student cleverly put it—and this was by far way my favourite observation today—the story “leaves out the meat.” (That kid’s going far.)

Students were readily able to recognize the story’s obliquity, though it was a bit harder for them to see how much of that effect comes from Davis’s decision to tell the story in first person but without telling us very much about that person. We know only that she is the parent of a son who lives in Brooklyn and the possessor of both a good vocabulary and a wry, detached way of looking at the world, in short, that she is someone rather like Davis herself, which is why I use “she” here though there’s no indication of the narrator’s gender in the text itself, and it really doesn’t matter whether she’s like Davis at all. The narrator’s presence in the text is so minimal that it’s as if the story is taking the piss out of the convention that first person narrators are the heroes of their own stories. But that indirect, mediated quality is central to understanding the story.

I asked the class why the story was called “A Story of Stolen Salamis” rather than, say, “Stolen Salamis.” Isn’t the introductory phrase redundant, implied by the very existence of the text? And why “a” and not “the”? One student observed that “the” would mean there was only one story. But in this case there are at least two. There’s the story as a whole, and there’s the story within the story, the one reported in “one of the city’s more prominent magazines.” I reminded students that we use “story” to refer both to fiction and to fact. What links these uses are narrative and rhetorical conventions of the kind we’ll be studying in class. Certainly fiction seems to trump fact here, since the reporter—echoing the son (though it’s unclear how directly—the passive construction “the incident was written up” doesn’t tell us how the reporter found out about it—from the crime blotter, maybe?)—wrongly calls the stolen objects “sausages.” And although we didn’t actually talk about it, the quotation marks matter a lot. “Sausages” isn’t in quotation marks the first time the word appears in the story. Here the narrator is aligning herself—in her words, commiserating—with her son, as if to suggest that she too would have made that mistake. But the later reference to sausages—“In the article, the reporter called the stolen goods ‘sausages’”—is clearly not the narrator’s. Yet the sentence would have worked just fine without the quotation marks. We’d still know it was the reporter who had used the offending word. But in setting “sausages” off like that, the narrator distances herself from the glib and patronizing magazine.

She respects the landlord, who, thanks to his perhaps absurd but ultimately noble insistence on distinguishing salamis from sausages, is definitely the hero of the story. Preparing for class (how did anyone do that before the internet?) I looked up the difference between these terms, and everything I found said a salami is a kind of sausage, just one that is cured longer and is therefore drier. The difference, then, is subtle, but subtle differences matter a lot, especially when we’re reading literary texts. The main reason I wanted to start the course with this text—besides the fact that I like it so damn much—is that it’s such an elegant parable of interpretation, of how words matter, how we must always respect the specificity of whatever it is we’re interpreting. This precision can have other ends than linguistic ones, too, as one student noted by saying, when I asked them why the guy cares so much about the distinction anyway, that he might be asserting his Italian or Italian-American identity.

A fair point, but the identity the story really cares about isn’t ethnic or nationalistic but rather linguistic. Returning to the title, we can see that the most important word in it is not, as we might have expected, “stolen” (in other words, the drama of its narrative events, however absurd—the alliteration of the “stolen salamis” is like something from a Post headline:   “Stolen Salamis!”) but rather “salamis” (in other words, language itself, the importance of naming). In the end, I can’t quite figure what eh story wants to say about linguistic precision—after all, insisting that they were salamis doesn’t keep them from being stolen. Maybe, then, the joke is on the landlord? But I think the story presents him as a man of integrity rather than a pedant. And certainly not clichéd or casual like the reporter, a tone the story itself always seems to be skirting in its use of ready-made phrases like “a wave of petty vandalism and theft” or “an amusing and colorful urban incident.” For these phrases reduce the specificity of what exists in a way that completely opposes the landlord’s insistence on his salamis.

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There’s even more to be said about this story, I’m sure. But we said a lot in a short time—we got to most of these points, and I was pleased about that. I was less happy about how uneven the participation was—some students seemed much more engaged than others. But it’s too early to come to any conclusions as to what this group will be like. I’ll report back next week about how we’re getting on as we tackle stories by Balzac, Kipling, and Chekov. Stick around—that is, if you can stand to see how the sausages are made.

How Danish is It? Naja Marie Aidt’s Baboon

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Baboon–Naja Marie Aidt (2006)

Translated from the Danish by Denise Newman (2014)

Baboon, the debut collection in English by the Danish writer Naja Marie Aidt, has been getting a lot of buzz among bookish types. That was enough to get me to buy it, but not of course to read it. It had to compete for my attention with all the other books on my bedside table: books I had to read for work, books I had to read because they were coming due at the library, books I had to read so as not to face the books I had to read for work, books I had to read to satisfy obscure readerly projects of the sort I’m always setting for myself.

But Baboon spent only a short time in the purgatory of the TBR pile (most books sit there for years). I read it in two or three short sessions last weekend, impelled by the now inescapable fact that school is about to start up again. This year I am teaching a course on short fiction each semester and I always like to include a couple of recently published stories to help me decide what I really think about them. In this way I decided that I didn’t like Haruki Murakami or Etgar Keret as much as I thought I did, but that I liked Rachel Seiffert even more than at first. Although I’ve a few reservations about Aidt’s work, the collection impressed me enough that I’ve assigned the first story in the collection, “Bulbjerg,” for the first week of class.

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“Bulbjerg,” named after a prominent limestone cliff in Jutland, reminded me a bit of a Margaret Atwood story. There’s the same sense that however threatening the natural world might seem it isn’t nearly as hostile as the people lost in it. And a similar tone: Aidt has Atwood’s asperity and intelligence. “Bulbjerg” opens with an expression of wonder—“Suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of an astonishing landscape: luminous, white sand dunes on all sides, wind swept, small trees twisting under the vast open sky”—but its dominant emotion is in fact fear. It’s fitting that “suddenly” is the story’s first word. A lot of dramatic things happen in its ten pages, just as they do in the other concise stories in the collection. But as PT Smith points out in an excellent review, eventfulness plus concision doesn’t equal clarity. As the story begins, the narrator, his wife, their six-year-old son, and their dog are lost in a forest. In the opening sentence they come up for air, but only by happenstance—note the passive construction “we found ourselves”—and not for long. They must plunge back into the forest to get where they are going. But where is that? And who are these people?

Aidt is good at menace, as in this scene from early in the story. The boy is tired, the family collapses to the ground. But time is passing. They need to get moving:

“Shouldn’t we get going?” you ask. I get up and suddenly notice how tired I am. My arms are completely limp and there’s an overwhelming feeling of weakness throughout my entire body. The water bottle is empty. The dog pants with its tongue hanging out of its mouth. You lift it into the cardboard box on the bike rack. Sebastian bravely picks up his bike and rides ahead of us. His bell rings with every bump on the road, and the flag he was so proud of when I mounted it on the rear mudguard looks cheap and shabby now. We ride on in silence.

The first time I read this, I was sure something terrible had happened, a catastrophe of some kind. A war, maybe, or a natural disaster. Maybe it was that cardboard box for the dog that got me thinking this way. Who takes their dog on a bicycle trip in a box? It seemed so desperate. Are they escaping something? Or maybe it was that bell, ringing its feeble warning, its futility only exacerbated by the cheap and shabby flag. What could have pushed this family to this point? They’ve run out of water, they’re tired, vacillating between barely restrained anger (“Shouldn’t we get going?) and silence.

But it’s not a catastrophe, at least not in the apocalyptic sense. It turns out that this is just a family outing gone awry, not life threatening, but dangerous nonetheless. Aidt captures perfectly that knife-edge between panic and exhaustion that sets upon you when you’ve lost your way in the woods. But she isn’t just describing that sensation—she’s also inciting it in us. In this story and in the others, readers are as lost as these characters. That’s because Aidt is always dropping us in the middle of things, leaving us to sort out who the characters are, how they’re related to each other, where they are and what they’re doing. And when we do figure these things out, we often have to wrestle with our feelings about them. There are not many likable characters in this collection, some are downright unpleasant, even disgusting. That’s true even in a story like “Interruption,” a kind of absurd experiment in the mode of Kafka or Gogol, when a middle-aged woman—a fugitive, it would seem, though this too is never made clear, from a newly opened “massage parlor” which is really nothing more than a brothel—bursts into the apartment of a graduate student, installs herself there (cooking and cleaning and offering other services besides) and refuses to leave. Our feelings towards the woman—the narrator thinks she is Thai or Filipino but can’t be bothered to find out for sure—remain unclear because we never get any access to her consciousness, and the narrator’s indignant and slightly revolted response to her is hard to get past. We know it tells us more about him than her, but she remains a cipher to us. I admire the way Aidt suggests the precariousness, even the danger of the woman’s life without using it to build sympathy. Similarly, I appreciate the way she makes the student, who in another story might seem sympathetically put upon, as much cold and calculating as bewildered and frustrated.

If I say these are confusing stories, then, I’m referring not to their style—Aidt’s sentences are straightforward, even plain—but to their emotional force. They refuse to offer us the consolations of protagonists that we can identify with and situations that we can embrace. Even when the characters threaten to become caricatures the stories wrong-foot us, as in the case of the self-satisfied hedonist of “Wounds,” whose life falls apart when an innocuous boil on his ass becomes a horrifying, life threatening, baffling disease. We can’t enjoy disparaging him, yet we don’t quite ever come to sympathize with him either.

So when I say these stories left a bad taste in my mouth you shouldn’t take that as criticism, exactly, but rather as recognition that they’ve done the work they set out to do. These stories don’t ask to be loved—they’re the opposite of ingratiating—so what’s left might be admiration. And I do admire them, certainly enough that I want to read Aidt’s first novel, also just out in English translation. And I’m curious how I’ll feel about “Bjulberg,” at least, after I’ve taught it next week.

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Baboon is translated by Denise Newman. As always when I read translations from a language I don’t know, I’m at a loss as to what to say about her efforts, beyond expressing deep gratitude for giving me access to books I’d never otherwise be able to read. I could say the translation seems fluent and skillful, which it does, but in the absence of the original I’ve no idea. I do wonder, however, and this doesn’t have to do with the specifics of this translation but of its very existence in English translation (and thanks are due to Two Lines Press for publishing these stories, and in such a handsome edition). As I read the book, I thought about what Tim Parks has been saying repeatedly over the past few years—that “international” or “world” literature is increasingly governed by the unstated, free-floating, but no less powerful desire to be translated into English, such that a straightforward style (more Raymond Carver than Henry James, say) and a lack of cultural specificity have come, however unconsciously, to govern the production of literature already in their original form, let alone in the decision (always as much economic as aesthetic) to translate that literature into English. If I understand him right, Parks thinks there is a whole canon of world literature that is being written in ways that make it amenable to being translated into English.

Whatever one thinks of Parks’s claims—I like him because he’s kind of cranky and intemperate, our own D. H.Lawrence, even though I think he might be exaggerating the case—I think there’s a useful question to be asked about what we want from literature in translation. Another way to say what I mean is that I found myself wondering as I read this collection whether there was anything particularly Danish about it. Which in turn made me wonder, what the hell would that even mean and why would I want it? Was I expecting a landscape tastefully littered with Arne Jacobsen chairs? It’s condescending to expect the foreign to be exotic, or to correspond to one’s received idea of a place (these things usually mean the same thing). And yet the suggestion, made in a blurb on the back cover, that these stories are “universal” (which I take to mean, “could be American!”) seems similarly condescending and disrespectful. Maybe it’s knowing so little about Denmark other than a few television shows and crime novels (as well as an abiding conviction that it must be the loveliest place on earth) that makes me feel this way.

But I did decide, as I always do, not to include Babel on my short fiction syllabus, even though those stories are wonderful, because they strike me as likely to seem foreign to my students in ways my course doesn’t have the time to explicate. Aidt, on the other hand, will I suspect resonate strongly with students. The comparison could be better, I know: anything written a century ago needs context in a way something written today doesn’t (though I do teach plenty of early twentieth century texts in this course). But I can’t help thinking that the ready amenability of these stories to being translated into English is a kind of fault. And yet as soon as I do I remember the disreputable narrator of “Bulbjerg” and his desperate family, as lost to each other as they are in the woods, and unsettling to us. Perhaps I’ve been fooled in my thinking. Perhaps these are uniquely Danish stories. Perhaps there is no such thing as a Danish story. Perhaps the apparently assimilable style of Baboon is a false friend, only an apparent cognate. Perhaps I’m not giving these surprising and sly stories their full due.

A Summer’s Worth of Crime Fiction

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Summer isn’t over yet, of course, especially not in Arkansas. But my summer almost is. Administrative duties begin this week, and the first day of classes is only three weeks away. I’m sure I’ll dispose of a few more crime novels before the semester really starts to pinch, but for now here are a few thoughts about some I’ve read lately:

Gallows View—Peter Robinson (1987)

The first in the long-running Inspector Banks series, and a pretty good debut. For a while there I read the new installments of this series religiously. I’m a few behind now, not sure why, they’re always solid, often much better than that, and Banks is likeable enough, a kinder, less tormented Rebus. I don’t always need to know so much about the music he’s listening to, though. I’d never read the first five or six, though, and it’s interesting to compare the later installments to the first one. Robinson has become a better writer, but already here he shows a light touch in explaining the story of Banks’s move from London to Yorkshire. And his pacing is good, too. At 250 pages this book is the right length. I’ve bemoaned many times the bloat in crime fiction, with novels regularly topping 400 pages. In fact, Robinson himself has since succumbed to this tendency. Still, meeting Inspector Banks has reignited my interest in the series and I plan to read the next few.

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The Strangler Vine—M . J. Carter (2014)

This first time novel by a historian begins what promises to be a very good series. Someone recommended this in the TLS Summer Reading series, and I’m glad I followed up on it. William Avery is a young soldier recently arrived in India in the 1830s. Languishing in Calcutta before joining his regiment, he is charged with accompanying Jeremiah Blake to find a well-known poet, the Walter Scott of Anglo-India, who has gone missing. Blake is a shadowy figure who is employed by the East India Company but lives in disrepute in the “native” part of the city, and in fact seems to have repudiated the Company altogether. Avery is naïve, a bit complacent and blustery, though a good sort. Blake is mercurial, expert in a dozen Eastern languages, an expert at tracking people who don’t want to be found. There’s an extended “meet cute” in which Blake is contemptuous of Avery and Avery horrified by Bake before each comes to appreciate the other, work as a team, etc. Avery is disabused of his faith in the Company; Blake regains some of his faith in the human race. So far, so conventional. Fortunately, Carter doesn’t push the Holmes/Watson comparison too hard. And her knowledge of the period is impressive. She describes the 1830s as a time when an earlier openness on the part of Company officials for India’s cultural traditions was hardening into something more dogmatic and oppressive, an incipient White Man’s Burden. The book drags a little at times, especially in the middle third, usually when Carter tries to burden her story with too much information. But the ending is genuinely moving and I look forward to the next installment, which, it seems, will be set somewhere quite different. (Already out in the UK—Book Depository order necessary? Hmm…)

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Invisible City—Julia Dahl (2014)

I read this because it’s ostensibly about the Hasidic community in New York. But it’s actually about the newspaper business in the era of social media, which interests me a lot less. Dahl’s portrayal of an insular world in which wrongdoings are overlooked in a tacit understanding between community leaders and secular officials is fine as far as it goes. But Rachel Aviv’s New Yorker piece from last year explores the same topic much more probingly. It tells you something that a few later I can’t even remember the protagonist’s name, but she has a complicated back-story that allows her access to this relatively closed world. I didn’t find that story interesting enough to want to read the just-released follow-up.

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Oblivion—Arnaldur Indridason (2014/2015 English translation Victoria Cribb)

Indridason is one of my absolute favourites and I always order his books from the UK since they come out a year earlier there. Some are stronger than others, of course, but this one is particularly good. A couple of years ago, Indridason concluded his series centered on his melancholy detective, Erlendur. But then he had the idea of writing about Erlendur’s early days. Last year’s Reykjavik Nights showed us Erlendur’s life as a traffic cop in the early 70s. In this follow-up, set a few years later, Erlendur has become a detective. He investigates two unrelated crimes, one recent and one from twenty years earlier. The resonances between them—they are linked only thematically, in relation to the American military presence in Iceland after the war—are intriguing but not hammered home. I’ve written before about my love of Iceland, so maybe this stuff interests me more than most people. But everyone ought to appreciate how almost insistently low-key these books are. Indridason is especially good at showing how awkward it can be to investigate crimes in a small country, where everybody almost knows everybody else.

Dissolution—C. J. Sansom (2003)

I’m not much of one for classical/medieval/Renaissance-era historical mysteries, but I quite liked this first installment of a series centered on Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked lawyer working for Thomas Cromwell in the 1530s who increasingly finds himself torn over his master’s methods. At least I liked it until I read Jenny’s damning but compelling complaint about the implausibility of importing what are essentially 19th/20th century narrative protocols on to the Early Modern period. After that I liked it less. I might continue with the series anyway, though: the first one was definitely readable, and I enjoyed the counter-perspective on Cromwell, who I only know from Hilary Mantel. This book is fine, but it’s no Wolf Hall! Think Sansom is tired of hearing that yet?

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The Red Moth—Sam Eastlake (2013)

Found this while in Canada and it seemed like the kind of thing that might be hard to get in the US, plus I’m a total sucker for WWII crime/espionage fiction. The inspector is a Finn who once worked for the Tsar and then was recalled from Siberian exile and put to work for Stalin. It’s all most implausible—Stalin is even a character, which doesn’t work out too well: I get that the point is that he’s not a frothing madman, but the picture of him as simply a malign functionary is fairly preposterous. A perfectly adequate vacation read, but I doubt I’ll be getting to the rest of the series anytime soon.

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Ngaio Marsh—A Man Lay Dead (1934)

Marsh is one of the most famous Golden Age British crime writers along with Christie, Allingham, and the utterly glorious Tey. This is the first of her Inspector Alleyn series. It’s not perfect—Marsh can’t quite seem to figure out what she wants Alleyn to be like: is he nice, is he brooding, is he a bit callous?—but it’s thoroughly enjoyable, a classic country house murder with a hint of espionage. Read it—it absolutely stands the test of time. Looking forward to reading more of her work.

One Night, Markovitch–Ayelet Gundar-Goshen (2012)

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Translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston

As part of my ongoing but not particularly diligently executed plan to get a handle on contemporary Israeli writing by authors not named Oz, Grossman, or Appelfeld, I was pleased to find Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s debut novel on my recent trip to Canada. (It’s published there by Anansi and in the UK by Pushkin, but not in the US, at least so far.)

One Night, Markovitch, which won a big Israeli prize, begins with twenty men boarding a ship in Mandate-era Palestine on their way to a clandestine mission in Europe. But why would Jews be going to Europe just when so many were trying desperately to get out?

The answer is as fantastic as many of the events in this fanciful novel: in order to circumvent British restrictions on Jewish immigration, each man has agreed to marry a woman active in the Zionist movement and then divorce her once the ship has arrived safely back in Palestine. I’m pretty sure nothing like this ever really happened—though the more I learn about the events of that period the more extraordinary things I learn, so who knows—but historical accuracy isn’t Gundar-Goshen’s concern. Nor is it even the mission itself, which is easily accomplished and cursorily described. Her concern is instead for the metaphor the conceit enables.

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One of the men, the Yaakov Markovitch of the title, thoroughly plain if not exactly ugly, is paired up with the most beautiful woman in the group, named (not particularly imaginatively) Bella. For reasons that are never quite clear, Markovitch decides that he won’t divorce Bella. What to him is devotion is to her, not surprisingly, intransigence. Bella has no interest in or desire for Markovitch, yet even though the two live separate lives, sometimes in the same house and sometimes not, he continues to refuse her a divorce, a state of affairs that persists for years.

The novel explores the consequences of this refusal, not just on Bella and Yaakov but also on a handful of others associated with the voyage. This group, most of whom end up on a moshav (I think maybe in the Jezreel Valley, though I can’t be sure: Gundar-Goshen never tells us where it is though maybe it’s obvious to Israeli readers), is clearly intended to represent the generation that founded the state of Israel. Some reviewers—especially those in the German-language press—read the novel as an attempt by a member of the younger generation (Gundar-Goshen was born in 1982) to debunk the myths of tenacity and sacrifice that have long been used to characterize the pioneers who forged a Jewish homeland by making the desert bloom and by defeating a sea of implacable enemies.

I don’t think this reading is quite right, though. It’s not so much that Gundar-Goshen wants to disparage her forbearers or show them as less than heroic. If she did, she would surely have written her book in a less mythologizing style. I’ve always been suspicious of the term “magic realism” because I’ve never understood it. But I think it might be the right term to describe Gundar-Goshen’s book. Consider some of its events: a house become literally frigid as a result of the hostility between its inhabitants; a woman smells of oranges so strongly that the man who loves her unrequitedly banishes the fruit from his surroundings for the rest of his life; and a man willfully blinds himself by staring into the sun after receiving admittedly terrible news. Emotions are literalized in the world of the novel; feelings are so powerful they work on things in extraordinary ways. Here, for example, is Markovitch’s friend extolling the virtues of his soon-to-be wife: “At that point Zeev Feinberg burst into such roaring laughter that the train accelerated, and he finally sighed and said, ‘When we go back, I’ll marry her. Really and truly.’”

The language here—of admiration so strong it can make a train speed up—seems to support the mythology of the virile pioneer. It’s possible, of course, that the novel’s marvelous events are meant ironically. But I think we’re meant to sympathize with these characters, not disparage them.

It’s true that the magic realism of Garcia Marquez and Carpentier and others was developed as a response to the overwhelming vicissitudes of colonial experience, of a way of life so confounding that “mere” realism couldn’t make sense of it. As such magic realism isn’t quiescent or naïve but rather politically subversive. But Gundar-Goshen always subordinates public politics to private emotions, as her opening paragraph makes clear:

Yaacov Markoviotch wasn’t ugly. Which is not to say he was handsome. Little girls didn’t burst into tears at the sight of him, but neither did they smile when they saw his face. He was, you might say, gloriously average. Moreover, Yaacov Markovitch’s face was remarkably free of distinguishing features. So much so that your eyes could not linger on him, but slipped onward to other objects. A tree on the street. A cat in the corner. It required an enormous effort to keep looking at the barrenness of Yaacov Markovitch’s face. People do not enjoy making enormous effort, and so they only rarely looked at his face for any length of time. This had its advantages, and the unit commander was aware of them. He looked at Yaacov Markovitch’s face for exactly the amount of time he needed, then dropped his gaze. You will smuggle weapons, the unit commander said. With that face, no one will notice. And he was right. Yaacov Markovitch probably smuggled more weapons than any other member of the Irgun, and never came close to being caught. The British soldiers’ gaze slid over his face like oil on a gun.

Reading this paragraph in the bookstore I thought I was going to get a novel about the struggle to establish a Jewish state and I was intrigued enough to overlook those irritating sentence fragments and the repeated use of Yaacov Markovitch’s full name (a tic I still cannot explain charitably). But that’s not the book I got. The dangerous missions alluded to by the narrator are never described, the investigation of the terrorism at the heart of the founding of the state is never pursued. What is developed instead is the effect of Markovitch’s face on women, not just the little girls referred to here. But even the physical and emotional responses of distaste, even repulsion, that become so important to the book are confusingly presented. It’s not clear why the “gloriously average” face becomes, in the space of a sentence or two, an almost pathological “barrenness.”

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One Night, Markovitch might not put politics at its center, but it doesn’t ignore the political events of the period entirely. Feinberg—the one whose laugh sped up the train—fights in the 1948 war and is psychologically traumatized when he accidentally kills an Arab woman and child. The novel doesn’t have much to say about Jewish-Arab relations, even in moments like this one where it directly references them. Instead, Feinberg’s guilt is depicted through the freezing of his relationship with his wife and child, an emotional disassociation only broken by the melodramatic series of events that follow from his decision to become a Nazi hunter in postwar Europe. One of his victims has an infant child, which he takes as his own, returning with her to Israel.

All of which might simply mean that Gundar-Goshen is more comfortable talking about the nascent Israel’s relationship to Europe than to the Arab-Israeli conflict. (Is the only way for Gentiles to overcome their enmity to Jews to become them, the only way for Jews to overcome their enmity to Gentiles to make them Jews?) But I think that the central tragedy of the Zionist enterprise—its willingness to repeatedly indulge its central fiction: that the land it bent to its will was empty—is never far from her thoughts.

In that sense, then, the split between politics and emotions I’ve been ascribing to the novel isn’t really there. Instead, the emotional warfare practiced by the characters on each other becomes an allegory for Israel’s political situation. This possibility is made clear in two extended meditations on Markovitch’s refusal to divorce Bella.

In the first, Feinberg has learned that Markovitch sleeps every night with Bella’s nightdress and upbraids him for thinking that eventually the nightdress will turn into a woman. “ ‘It’ll never happen, not in a year, not in twenty.’” Markovitch angrily responds:

‘So in another thirty, or forty. You know what, Feinberg, maybe never. But I hope, and that’s something too. And maybe if I hope enough, if I hope really hard, that hope will turn into something real. Look at us, look at this country. Two thousand years we’ve been hoping for her, waiting for her, sleeping at might with our arms around the sleeves of her nightdress, because what is history if not the sleeves of a nightdress that has no smell? And you think she wants us? You think this country returns our love? Nonsense! She vomits us up time and time again, sends us to hell, beats us down without mercy. With the Romans and the Greeks and the Arabs and the mosquitoes. So you think that someone here says, ‘If she doesn’t want me, I should go?’ Someone here says, ‘There’s no point in holding a country by force if she’s been trying to get rid of you from the minute you came to her.’ No. You hold on to her as hard as you can and you hope.’

History might be a lot of things, it might be a nightmare from which we are trying to escape, but nothing here convinces me that it’s the sleeves of a nightdress that has no smell. But just where is the narrator in relation to Markovitch’s outburst? How are we to take his claims? The hoary conflation of land and woman suggests that the answer is, skeptically, a reading supported by the second passage, in which even Markovitch himself comes to see that the rhetoric of oppression, coercion and domination does more harm than good. Feinberg and his wife have suffered a terrible loss; Markovitch catches them comforting each other:

 [Markovitch] looked at Zeev Feinberg with wide-open eyes. Only a moment ago he was roaring outside the hospital, gripping his pain and anger with clenched teeth. Now he had let it all go at once, leaving the rotting carcass behind, and had returned to comfort his wife. And he, Markovitch, had been wallowing in his own pain for so many years, holding on to his protesting wife, refusing to let go…. Yaacov Markovitch had been holding on to Bella for so long, and she did not want him. He held her dress in his clenched fist and refused to let go. When he looked at Zeev Feinberg’s open hand on Sonya’s shoulder, he suddenly remembered the blessing of fingers spread wide. And he wondered if he could still open his hand. But the thought terrified him. Let go? Of Bella? How could he? His fist had been clenched for so many years that his hand was no longer suited to any other work. Refusal had been a way of life for him.

The description of the fingers spread wide refers to a line from the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai that stands as the novel’s epigraph: “Even a fist was once an open palm with fingers.” In her riff on Amichai’s image, Gundar-Goshen reveals Feinberg as the closest thing the book has to a hero because of his willingness to forgive, forget, let go, change.

The passage never makes it obvious but it’s hard for me to read Markovitch’s epiphany and not think about the Arab-Israeli conflict. What it might mean to fully unfold the metaphor—to imagine what it might mean for Israelis to unclench the fist against those they’ve refused to let go (which in turn would mean thinking that the Israelis at least believe they love the Arabs, a strange idea perhaps but one that would make sense in the Freudian theory that there is no opposition between love and hate)—is unclear. Perhaps the allegory is really about the Israelis themselves, and a part of themselves they’ve held hostage or forgotten in their decades of being clenched. I don’t know—the book doesn’t tell us. Maybe not surprisingly, it is better at diagnosing the perils of refusal than the implications of acceptance.

But a book premised on the comparability of politics and emotions that cannot articulate what that comparison might enable or require is in bad faith. Gundar-Goshen’s revision of the narratives that have dominated Israeli history is based on the idea that our intimate, emotional relationships ought to predispose our political ones. But she seems unable to tell us how or to what end. And that makes the book more muddleheaded than anything else.

In the end, I just don’t know what to do with One Night, Markovitch. I didn’t read it with particular pleasure, found many of its characters irritatingly portentous and moony, grew exasperated with its magical events and histrionic prose—“Because Sonya’s eyes were identical to Bella’s and, from now on, one would not be able to cry without the other crying along with her.”

I was frustrated not because I disdain the thing that might go under the term “magic’ but because I believe in them so much. Gundar-Goshen’s magic of potent laughter, sentient houses, and inescapable odours is thin gruel compared to the real work that fantasy performs in our affective and social-political lives. Ultimately it’s the domestication of magic that bothers me about One Night, Markovitch.

Yet I can’t entirely dismiss it, either. I’m drawn to its belief that anyone who expects to be able to force another person to recognize their desires, even from what might seem good or noble motives, misunderstands the idea of what it means to enter into a relationship. And the reminder that a fist was always—and so might become again—an open palm and five dexterous, supple fingers resonates powerfully and beautifully for me. Still, when the bit that lingers most from an almost 400 page novel is its epigraph, maybe it’s time to search out the inspiration rather than invest more energy teasing out the contradictions of the work it inspired.

You can read the first installment of my encounter with contemporary Israeli writing here. I’m going to have to pick up the pace if I want to be able to come to any meaningful conclusions…