Alyson Hagy, “The Sin Eaters”
I enjoyed “The Sin Eaters” but not in the way I enjoy short stories, rather in the way I enjoy a chapter in a novel. Short stories generally are more often structured around theme, rather than around plot or character. I know this is a generalization for which everyone can find exceptions; however, I still suggest it is “generally” true. I enjoyed the journey Revered Porterfield makes, the characters he meets along the way, the country he discovers, the plot in which he becomes involved. I would like to know more about his adventures in Wyoming. However, this is the kind of loose narrative verisimilitude I enjoy in a novel, not the tight thematic structure I enjoy primarily in a short story.
I would like to suggest two common characteristics of the short story as a form that Hagy does not seem to be concerned with here. That is certainly her prerogative; one can write a piece of fiction in any way he or she can get successfully get away with. I’m just saying that this piece of fiction is more like the chapter in a novel than a short story
First, there is the possible thematic significance of the title. Margaret Atwood has a story entitled “The Sin Eater” in her book Bluebird’s Egg that seems more typical of the short story. Here is part of the second paragraph:
“In Wales, mostly in the rural areas, there was a personage known as the Sin Eater. When someone was dying the Sin Eater would be sent for. The people of the house would prepare a meal and place it on the coffin…. According to other versions, the meal would be placed on the dead person’s body, which must have made for some sloppy eating one would have though. In any case the Sin Eater would devour this meal and would also be given a sum of money. It was believed that all the sins the dying person had accumulated during his lifetime would be removed from him and transmitted to the Sin Eater. The Sin Eater thus became absolutely bloated with other people’s sins. She’d accumulate such a heavy load of them that nobody wanted to have anything to do with her; a kind of syphilitic of the soul, you might say. They’d even avoided speaking to her, except of course when it was time to summon her to another meal.”
Atwood’s story centers on the thematic interrelations between sin, guilt, and psychological transference revolving around the psychiatrist who provides the above background on sin eating and the narrator of the story. Atwood’s “The Sin Eater” is not a very good story, but it does try to work the way a short story generally works. Hagy may be interested in social scapegoating in her story, but most of the detail of the story does not cohere around that theme the way it does in the Atwood story. Hagy uses a lot of detail that is perceptive and interesting, but it is more verisimilitude than it is thematic.
Second, there is the importance of the ending. The Russian critic B. M. Ejxenbaum suggests, “By its very essence, the story, just as the anecdote, amasses its whole weight toward the ending.” Whereas Atwood’s story concludes with an extended dream that suddenly pulls its various thematic threads together, Hagy’s ending deals with a plot issue involving rustlers and ranchers and the Rev. Porterfield’s future missionary work with the Shoshone.
Hagy’s “The Sin Eaters” reads like a chapter from a highly stylized late nineteenth-century novel told by an all-knowing Victorian novelist (albeit from the perspective of the Rev. Porterfield) who speaks as follows:
“His duty was to the north, with the downtrodden Red Man.”
“He asked a young street arab for directions, and the scamp agreed to guide him to the parsonage.”
“Langston was all surety on the surface.”
“He was well forged for solitude”
“It took that ministration to clarify the fact that he was actually perched upright in a wooden chair.”
Even the characters talk in this formal, highly stylized, way:
“They are stimulating individuals and eager to converse with learned travelers,” Langston noted.
“We are honored, sir. You will forgive our crude frontier ways.”
“The thing is afoot. Laws must be obeyed.”
“One month on the Popo Agie River with those wretches will gut you or temper your steel forever.”
“I’m under advisement to avoid all politics,” he said.
I like this kind of talk. I grew up reading novels in which the novelist and his or her characters talked this way. However, I am not sure anyone ever really talked this way except if he or she lived only in a Victorian novel.
Pinckney Benedict, “Zog-19: A Scientific Romance”
In his “Contributor’s Note” to the 2001 O. Henry Awards Prize Stories, Pinckney Benedict says this is the “first love story” he has ever written, as well as his most “autobiographical story.” He says he feels like McGinty/Zog—that he is out of place and out of time, “that I’m intended for some task that I don’t clearly understand and that probably has little importance—pretty much constantly. I loved writing this story. I often wish that I could just go on writing it for all time….”
I taught this story several years ago when I used the 2001 O. Henry Awards Prize Stories in my American Short Story class. I checked my teaching notes and found this: “Some funny sophomoric stuff here about belching and farting. I like this story; it is fun and works because Benedict is having so much fun with it.”
George Brosi, editor of Appalachian Heritage, where Benedict has published a couple of stories, did a profile on Benedict a few years ago which opened with: “Pinckney Benedict is a gleeful writer. He digs writing and takes a kind of boyish pride in the work he has created. His writing is deep and complex, yet the delight that goes into it is obvious to most readers.” He quotes Benedict as saying: “It fundamentally makes my day when something I’ve written gets up the nose of some stodgy academic or critic. That’s when I know I’m in the ballpark.”
Well, I sure as hell don’t want to be thought of as a “stodgy academic or critic” by Benedict or anyone else. I think “Zog-19” is the most fun I have ever had reading a postcolonial story, even more fun than watching Avatar in 3-D. It is what George Brosi called the one story I have ever published—“a hoot.” And I can see how Benedict would think it autobiographical, since as a kid his favorite reading matter, according to Brosi, was a comic book series called Weird War. Benedict claims he has been influenced by comic books, science fiction, horror writing, movies, tv, video games and computer simulations.
If there is any thematic significance to Benedict’s sophomoric satire on colonialism (and God forbid that there may be), then it has to do with storytelling being primarily a lot of gas, like a fart in a crowed room.
A stodgy academic who nevertheless likes a good laugh as much as the next man, I published a scholarly essay several years ago entitle “Literary Masters and Masturbators: Sexuality, Fantasy and Reality in Huckleberry Finn.” I was trying to settle an academic debate about the common critical opinion that the last quarter of Twain’s great novel, when Tom Sawyer comes back on the scene, undermines with fantasy the so-called reality of Huck’s journey down the river with Jim. I thought that was nonsense.
In trying to prove my point, I got involved with Twain’s sophomoric satire entitled “1601,” a conversation at the social fireside in Tudor England that focuses on witty sexual repartee and stories about the sexual behavior of various individuals. The bulk of the narrative is concerned with Sir Walter Raleigh's powers of breaking wind and the Pepysian narrator's disgust with the "wyndy ruffian" and the whole "brede" of all those that "write playes, bookes & such like." The other members of the conversation include Bacon, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, and Shakespeare. That Twain identifies with the narrator's scorn for the storytelling windiness of these writers might be further suggested by the fact that he once said that Sir Walter Scott was full of "windy humbuggeries" and that James Fenimore Cooper's characters talk like "windy melodramatic actors."
It is not necessary to go into the Freudian relationship between what is produced by the anus and what is produced by the artist; Twain makes the connection quite clear in "1601" itself. For example, in the beginning of the piece when "it befel that one did breake wynde, yielding an exceeding mightie and distressful stinke," Queen Elizabeth demands that the "author" of the fart confess it; Bacon refers to it as a "great performance"; Shakespeare compares the flatus with the divine afflatus by noting that the angels had foretold the coming of "this most disolating breath, proclaiming it a work of uninspired man"; and finally, when Raleigh confesses, he dismisses it as a mere clearing of his "nether throat." Moreover, that storytelling is just so much flatulence is suggested at the conclusion of the piece. After Lady Alice delivers a long grandiose and windy speech, the Queen concludes it by commenting, as much in the imperative as in the exclamatory, "Oh Shitte."
If ever the Internet acronym lol is worth using, then it is worth applying to Twain’s “1601” and Benedict’s “Zog-19.” Toot toot, Mark Twain. Toot toot, Pinckney Benedict.
Showing posts with label Pinckney Benedict. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pinckney Benedict. Show all posts
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Short Story Month 2010: Pinckney Benedict's "Mercy" and Alyson Hagy's "Oil and Gas"
Pinckney Benedict, “Mercy” (Miracle Boy and Other Stories)
Sure, this is a simple story. But it is a hard story for me to resist. I tried, but after three readings I gave up and gave it to it.
When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather, who tended a stony farm on the slope of a steep hill in Eastern Kentucky. He was a tough old feller and, like the father in Benedict’s story, never spoke directly to me. I have been thinking about him this spring as I plant tomatoes, Kentucky Pole Beans, potatoes, onions, and squash in whatever plots of soil I can carve out of our narrow Southern California backyard. I hear him say: “If you can’t eat it, no use growing it, no matter how purty you think it is.” Like the father in Benedict’s story, the worst thing my grandfather could say about any thing was that it was “useless.” I cringed when he aimed that epithet at me, spitting tobacco juice at my feet, especially when the accusation was “useless as tits on a boar hog,” the closest thing to poetry he seemed capable of.
I never really understood my grandfather, never really thought he had any inner life, never knew what he loved, or if he loved anything. I never saw any break in his stony approach to reality, never heard him laugh except derisively at somebody. So I liked Benedict’s story, knew from the beginning that it was going to be one of those rare moments when a boy secretly sees a breakthrough in the hard veneer of his father.
I have spent my life teaching short stories to university students, and practically every semester, some of them would whine about how short stories were always such downers, never ending happily. And every semester, I would haul out my old canards about the sloppiness of sentimentality, the toughness of complexity, the slyness of subtlety, etc. etc. The smartest students would nod sagely; the average ones shake their heads sadly.
And while it is true that “feel good” stories that end happily often lapse into the simplistic and the sentimental, the artistic question is whether the happy ending is earned or given away. Sure, “Mercy” illustrates the cliché, “All work and no play….” But I don’t find it a simple illustration. When a man makes a living off the lives of animals, he can’t give them names. When they are Angus cattle, they cannot be seen as more than huge slabs of flesh—potential steaks, roasts, and Big Macs. But that doesn’t mean that when they are all loaded on the trucks and on their way to the abattoir, the man who raised them has no feelings about it. The boy sees the father’s face go slack and his shoulders slump. “And for a brief instant he stood still, motionless as I had never seen him.”
And those miniature horses! If you have never seen one, take a look at some of the videos on Face Book. Yeah, the comments are all: omg, lol, cute, adorable, etc. But the miniatures seem to exist for no other reason than to play, to gambol, to roll over, to scamper. Less 34 inches high, between 55 and 100 pounds, they are not ponies; they are horses. But horses no bigger than a good-sized dog. You gotta love em. Especially in this story, you do, since their owners neglect them, pen them in, let them go hungry, leave them out in the cold. They want out, want to play. So I like that scene when under the weight of the bunched-up horses, the fence gives way and the posts go over one after another like gunshots. (Harmless gunshots are my favorite kind) And the horses shake off the snow and bound out like great dogs through the gap in the fence and head for the bales of hay. “The scene had the feel of a holiday.”
When the father shows up with the .30-06, the boy knows what is coming; after all the father has said if the horses came over into his land he would shoot them. So for a few moments, the reader is not completely sure if the boy knows what is going to happen. The mare dares to play with the father, just doesn’t know any better, dragging him gently forward until, in the cliché classic comic slapstick bit, “He fell right on his ass in the snow, my old man, the Remington held high above his head.”
So is it a well-earned pleasure when we see that the gun is not loaded and that the father is laughing, or is it a sentimental give away? The thing is, a boy may think he knows his father, but does he really? Sometimes the old man may just feel like playing. Unlikely. But possible. And although in the next minute, life may go back to the way it has always been, it may never quite be the same again. I like a story that ends with an “I’ll be damned” moment. But then, maybe I’m just getting old and soft.
Alyson Hagy, “Oil and Gas” (Ghosts of Wyoming)
This story wears me out, for Hagy absolutely refuses to give me any help by identifying the characters and specifying their connections. I know all the events take place in Campbell County, Wyoming, in and around the town of Gillette. I know the latitude/longitude coordinates of all the characters, except for those in specific buildings, like the emergency room in Gillette and the Red Dawg Bar off route 16 in Clearmont. Hell, I can even locate every one of them on online maps.
But the point of the story seems to be that they are all lost; no matter how close together they are, they miss making connections. The theme is announced emphatically at the end of part 1: “Found and Lost. I’d like to write that up as the damn Wyoming state motto.”
Then there’s the story of the day at the hospital that they lost a patient. Not that he died, but got lost, like misplaced. Lora Van Tassell found the old feller up on Fortification Creek, and while he was being treated for dehydration, he just wandered away.
And then there’s Andy Josling who took a wrong turn in his blue Toyoto 4x4. Phil Triplet saw him turn around, “just another fool that got hisself lost on these roads.”
And Prentiss just wandered away from his crew when their rig broke down, and no one has seen him since.
It’s all just another day in “Wild, Wonderful Wyoming—the last place in America to get ahead, except the getting don’t last.”
But then in the last section of the story, two people actually find each other: Lora and Andy are having a five-hour lunch at Debbie’s Restaurant. Neither is young, but Phil Triplet is full of admiration for the “sheer balls” it took Andy to stop looking over his shoulder and to move ahead. “I’d pay a lot to be able to see a good road into the future…. make sure it’s not another backbreaking mirage. A real future. Goddamn.”
I kinda liked this story after I got over being aggravated by it. On the one hand, it seems too much like a show-off indie film in which we are given several separate episodes that finally come together at the end if we work at it hard enough—a Hagy tour-de-force of monologue and dialogue capturing voices that ring true. On the other hand, it seems like a significant effort to capture something about being lost in the changing world of Wyoming, even while you are at home there, because no matter how big the sky is, the earth seems to be altering.
Sure, this is a simple story. But it is a hard story for me to resist. I tried, but after three readings I gave up and gave it to it.
When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather, who tended a stony farm on the slope of a steep hill in Eastern Kentucky. He was a tough old feller and, like the father in Benedict’s story, never spoke directly to me. I have been thinking about him this spring as I plant tomatoes, Kentucky Pole Beans, potatoes, onions, and squash in whatever plots of soil I can carve out of our narrow Southern California backyard. I hear him say: “If you can’t eat it, no use growing it, no matter how purty you think it is.” Like the father in Benedict’s story, the worst thing my grandfather could say about any thing was that it was “useless.” I cringed when he aimed that epithet at me, spitting tobacco juice at my feet, especially when the accusation was “useless as tits on a boar hog,” the closest thing to poetry he seemed capable of.
I never really understood my grandfather, never really thought he had any inner life, never knew what he loved, or if he loved anything. I never saw any break in his stony approach to reality, never heard him laugh except derisively at somebody. So I liked Benedict’s story, knew from the beginning that it was going to be one of those rare moments when a boy secretly sees a breakthrough in the hard veneer of his father.
I have spent my life teaching short stories to university students, and practically every semester, some of them would whine about how short stories were always such downers, never ending happily. And every semester, I would haul out my old canards about the sloppiness of sentimentality, the toughness of complexity, the slyness of subtlety, etc. etc. The smartest students would nod sagely; the average ones shake their heads sadly.
And while it is true that “feel good” stories that end happily often lapse into the simplistic and the sentimental, the artistic question is whether the happy ending is earned or given away. Sure, “Mercy” illustrates the cliché, “All work and no play….” But I don’t find it a simple illustration. When a man makes a living off the lives of animals, he can’t give them names. When they are Angus cattle, they cannot be seen as more than huge slabs of flesh—potential steaks, roasts, and Big Macs. But that doesn’t mean that when they are all loaded on the trucks and on their way to the abattoir, the man who raised them has no feelings about it. The boy sees the father’s face go slack and his shoulders slump. “And for a brief instant he stood still, motionless as I had never seen him.”
And those miniature horses! If you have never seen one, take a look at some of the videos on Face Book. Yeah, the comments are all: omg, lol, cute, adorable, etc. But the miniatures seem to exist for no other reason than to play, to gambol, to roll over, to scamper. Less 34 inches high, between 55 and 100 pounds, they are not ponies; they are horses. But horses no bigger than a good-sized dog. You gotta love em. Especially in this story, you do, since their owners neglect them, pen them in, let them go hungry, leave them out in the cold. They want out, want to play. So I like that scene when under the weight of the bunched-up horses, the fence gives way and the posts go over one after another like gunshots. (Harmless gunshots are my favorite kind) And the horses shake off the snow and bound out like great dogs through the gap in the fence and head for the bales of hay. “The scene had the feel of a holiday.”
When the father shows up with the .30-06, the boy knows what is coming; after all the father has said if the horses came over into his land he would shoot them. So for a few moments, the reader is not completely sure if the boy knows what is going to happen. The mare dares to play with the father, just doesn’t know any better, dragging him gently forward until, in the cliché classic comic slapstick bit, “He fell right on his ass in the snow, my old man, the Remington held high above his head.”
So is it a well-earned pleasure when we see that the gun is not loaded and that the father is laughing, or is it a sentimental give away? The thing is, a boy may think he knows his father, but does he really? Sometimes the old man may just feel like playing. Unlikely. But possible. And although in the next minute, life may go back to the way it has always been, it may never quite be the same again. I like a story that ends with an “I’ll be damned” moment. But then, maybe I’m just getting old and soft.
Alyson Hagy, “Oil and Gas” (Ghosts of Wyoming)
This story wears me out, for Hagy absolutely refuses to give me any help by identifying the characters and specifying their connections. I know all the events take place in Campbell County, Wyoming, in and around the town of Gillette. I know the latitude/longitude coordinates of all the characters, except for those in specific buildings, like the emergency room in Gillette and the Red Dawg Bar off route 16 in Clearmont. Hell, I can even locate every one of them on online maps.
But the point of the story seems to be that they are all lost; no matter how close together they are, they miss making connections. The theme is announced emphatically at the end of part 1: “Found and Lost. I’d like to write that up as the damn Wyoming state motto.”
Then there’s the story of the day at the hospital that they lost a patient. Not that he died, but got lost, like misplaced. Lora Van Tassell found the old feller up on Fortification Creek, and while he was being treated for dehydration, he just wandered away.
And then there’s Andy Josling who took a wrong turn in his blue Toyoto 4x4. Phil Triplet saw him turn around, “just another fool that got hisself lost on these roads.”
And Prentiss just wandered away from his crew when their rig broke down, and no one has seen him since.
It’s all just another day in “Wild, Wonderful Wyoming—the last place in America to get ahead, except the getting don’t last.”
But then in the last section of the story, two people actually find each other: Lora and Andy are having a five-hour lunch at Debbie’s Restaurant. Neither is young, but Phil Triplet is full of admiration for the “sheer balls” it took Andy to stop looking over his shoulder and to move ahead. “I’d pay a lot to be able to see a good road into the future…. make sure it’s not another backbreaking mirage. A real future. Goddamn.”
I kinda liked this story after I got over being aggravated by it. On the one hand, it seems too much like a show-off indie film in which we are given several separate episodes that finally come together at the end if we work at it hard enough—a Hagy tour-de-force of monologue and dialogue capturing voices that ring true. On the other hand, it seems like a significant effort to capture something about being lost in the changing world of Wyoming, even while you are at home there, because no matter how big the sky is, the earth seems to be altering.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Short Story Month, May 2010: Pinckney Benedict's "Bridge of Sighs" and Alyson Hagy's Brief Lives of the Trainmen""
More Comments from my discussion of stories from Pinckney Benedict's Miracle Boy and Other Stories and Alyson Hagy's Ghosts of Wyoming, including a comment from Pinckney Benedict. The full discussion, involving several others, can be found on the Emerging Writers Network blog.
Pinckney Benedict, “Bridge of Sighs”
I agree with John that in “Bridge of Sighs” Benedict uses the vehicle of a cattle epidemic to explore a universal human reality. However, I am not so sure it is a “sickness in humankind,” except that ultimate “sickness unto death” that befalls us all. And as I read it, the boy does not hallucinate a flame-throwing nightmare of war. He tells Scurry, “I made a mistake. I thought it was a cartoon on, but it was the war.” What he took for a kind of Tom and Jerry bit of stylized violence was actually the news showing a scene probably from Viet Nam. So, it seems to me, war is not the problem, just another symptom of the universal human reality of facing death. And it is always brutal.
I remember the first time I saw the Bridge of Sighs spanning one of the canals in Venice. I think it was Lord Byron who gave it this name because when the prisoners were taken across it, they looked out one of the small windows and sighed at their last view of the world before being placed in a dungeon. Benedict does not make a big deal out of this allusion, but the fact that the name is given to the walkway over which animals and workers cross in an abattoir or slaughterhouse, combined with a suit named “The Exterminator” and an instrument named Humane Cattle Killer, all urge a universal reading, especially when the boy makes the mistake of thinking it is a Human Cattle Killer.
I looked up Greener’s .445 Humane Cattle Killer on line and found pictures of it and full instructions on how to use it. Cold and grisly stuff! But all perfectly natural. During hog-killing season back in Eastern Kentucky, as a child I watched my grandfather take a short-handled sledge to forehead of a hog and stun it to its knees, before deftly slicing its throat with a razor-sharp knife. All perfectly natural and perfectly inevitable.
The story makes me think of James Agee’s fable “A Mother’s Tale”—a more obvious parable about facing death, in which a mother cow tells her child about the story passed down through generations of The One Who Came Back, having escaped the mysterious Man with a Hammer. Being frightened by the father in the Exterminator suit, but seeing his loving friendly eyes inside the eyeholes is an effective image of the kind of make-believe monster that Bruno Bettleheim says frighten children in fairy tales and haunt our unconscious. The two-headed monster that turns out to be two spring calves is similar at the end of the story. The real problem the boy says, is telling the difference between what’s happening and what we think is happening. His father helps him with that.
The boy hears the sound of running water and thirsts for it, has a hard time imagining a world without dogs, hopes to find mudpuppies in the stream, and all the while the sound of the shots remind him of the inevitable. At the end of the story, it comes down to Scurry’s powerful desire to deny death, to insist that nothing is wrong, “Nothing wrong at all.” The boy knows that Scurry needs someone to bear witness to that, to testify to that. So do we all. If it were not so, we would not have religions.
I can’t help remembering the movie, The Love Bug, when Michelle Lee is trapped inside the Volkswagen, Herbie and cries, "Help! I'm a prisoner! I can't get out.” A hippie in a van looks over and says: We all prisoners, chickie baby. We all locked in.”
Yeah, I know that is like leaping from the sublime to the ridiculous. But I reckon that's the way stories make my mind work.
Comment by Pinckney Benedict
Dude, I adore that detail about THE LOVE BUG and the hippie. It's exactly the kind of comedown that's needed, the exact right way to undercut melodrama. And I love that it came up in connection with my work, and particularly "Bridge of Sighs" (which verges pretty heavily on the melodramatic, if it doesn't outright plunge into it - not the worst, maybe, but one of the most frequent of my sins as a writer).
I actually didn't know about the bridge in Venice (what an ignoramus!) until I was working on the story. I ran across a reference, in looking up some stuff about slaughterhouses, to the walkway into one of the big Chicago packing houses, which they called The Bridge of Sighs, and I thought it was perfect. Imagine my chagrin when Richard Russo publishes a book by this same name right around the same time the story came out!
"A Mother's Tale" sounds like something my parents would have read to us when we were kids. They used to tell us, when we didn't drink all our milk at a meal (and we drank a LOT of milk) that our refusal "made the cows cry." They were sneaky that way, as all good parents are. We drank our milk. I'll have to find this one and read it for myself. Thanks for the steer (no pun intended).
Alyson Hagy, “Brief Lives of the Trainmen”
This is one of those stories that the more I read it the better I like it. That’s a good thing, don’t you think? —Certainly better than the opposite. Like Dan and John, I am drawn to the multiple metaphors and similes. But I think Hagy has more going on with this kind of language than local color and picturesque poetry. I think she creates a kind of stylized folktale, a cartoon-like world and cleverly leads us into it.
In my opinion, this is a story about how stories come into being. All the “brief lives” in the separate sections accumulate and create an alternate reality until that wonderful folktale episode of Captain Hallock’s horse being spooked by Joe Hanna’s shooting the cook’s rooster and throwing him into the laundry pot. Hagy says that this will not be the last word about the misadventure: “The tale will have ten verses and a chorus once the rail gangs slaver into it.” Why else would one of the characters in the story be named "Ode”?
Bret Harte once said of this kind of story (his kind of story): "It was Humour--of a quality as distinct and original as the country and civilization in which it was developed. It was at first noticeable in the anecdote or "story," and after the fashion of such beginnings, was orally transmitted. It was common in the barrooms, the gatherings in the "country story," and finally at public meetings in the mouths of "stump orators." Such characteristic American humor, says Harte, was the parent of the American short story.”
I don’t know if Hagy had Harte in mind when she wrote this story, but she sure creates a wonderfully Western comic image of “Liberty’s living fuse” as those folks on the work train lay down another mile of track. God knows how the Transcontinental Railroad, that Diviner’s line, ever got laid by the “miscreant hands” of these trainmen. But by God, it did! Even the journalist who tries to record it all, following the line’s progress with a wagon full of lead type, has to cope with a scrofula swelling of the testicles. The trainsitman on the surveying team remembers his former professor who quoted Seneca: “It is better to know useless things than to know nothing at all.” He thinks those words “convey the sad blare of an anthem” and he believes he knows less than he did when he left Chicago. “About himself. About ambition and America.”
This is a story about how great things grow out of little bits. That applies to the Transcontinental Railroad as well as it does to Hagy’s story.
Pinckney Benedict, “Bridge of Sighs”
I agree with John that in “Bridge of Sighs” Benedict uses the vehicle of a cattle epidemic to explore a universal human reality. However, I am not so sure it is a “sickness in humankind,” except that ultimate “sickness unto death” that befalls us all. And as I read it, the boy does not hallucinate a flame-throwing nightmare of war. He tells Scurry, “I made a mistake. I thought it was a cartoon on, but it was the war.” What he took for a kind of Tom and Jerry bit of stylized violence was actually the news showing a scene probably from Viet Nam. So, it seems to me, war is not the problem, just another symptom of the universal human reality of facing death. And it is always brutal.
I remember the first time I saw the Bridge of Sighs spanning one of the canals in Venice. I think it was Lord Byron who gave it this name because when the prisoners were taken across it, they looked out one of the small windows and sighed at their last view of the world before being placed in a dungeon. Benedict does not make a big deal out of this allusion, but the fact that the name is given to the walkway over which animals and workers cross in an abattoir or slaughterhouse, combined with a suit named “The Exterminator” and an instrument named Humane Cattle Killer, all urge a universal reading, especially when the boy makes the mistake of thinking it is a Human Cattle Killer.
I looked up Greener’s .445 Humane Cattle Killer on line and found pictures of it and full instructions on how to use it. Cold and grisly stuff! But all perfectly natural. During hog-killing season back in Eastern Kentucky, as a child I watched my grandfather take a short-handled sledge to forehead of a hog and stun it to its knees, before deftly slicing its throat with a razor-sharp knife. All perfectly natural and perfectly inevitable.
The story makes me think of James Agee’s fable “A Mother’s Tale”—a more obvious parable about facing death, in which a mother cow tells her child about the story passed down through generations of The One Who Came Back, having escaped the mysterious Man with a Hammer. Being frightened by the father in the Exterminator suit, but seeing his loving friendly eyes inside the eyeholes is an effective image of the kind of make-believe monster that Bruno Bettleheim says frighten children in fairy tales and haunt our unconscious. The two-headed monster that turns out to be two spring calves is similar at the end of the story. The real problem the boy says, is telling the difference between what’s happening and what we think is happening. His father helps him with that.
The boy hears the sound of running water and thirsts for it, has a hard time imagining a world without dogs, hopes to find mudpuppies in the stream, and all the while the sound of the shots remind him of the inevitable. At the end of the story, it comes down to Scurry’s powerful desire to deny death, to insist that nothing is wrong, “Nothing wrong at all.” The boy knows that Scurry needs someone to bear witness to that, to testify to that. So do we all. If it were not so, we would not have religions.
I can’t help remembering the movie, The Love Bug, when Michelle Lee is trapped inside the Volkswagen, Herbie and cries, "Help! I'm a prisoner! I can't get out.” A hippie in a van looks over and says: We all prisoners, chickie baby. We all locked in.”
Yeah, I know that is like leaping from the sublime to the ridiculous. But I reckon that's the way stories make my mind work.
Comment by Pinckney Benedict
Dude, I adore that detail about THE LOVE BUG and the hippie. It's exactly the kind of comedown that's needed, the exact right way to undercut melodrama. And I love that it came up in connection with my work, and particularly "Bridge of Sighs" (which verges pretty heavily on the melodramatic, if it doesn't outright plunge into it - not the worst, maybe, but one of the most frequent of my sins as a writer).
I actually didn't know about the bridge in Venice (what an ignoramus!) until I was working on the story. I ran across a reference, in looking up some stuff about slaughterhouses, to the walkway into one of the big Chicago packing houses, which they called The Bridge of Sighs, and I thought it was perfect. Imagine my chagrin when Richard Russo publishes a book by this same name right around the same time the story came out!
"A Mother's Tale" sounds like something my parents would have read to us when we were kids. They used to tell us, when we didn't drink all our milk at a meal (and we drank a LOT of milk) that our refusal "made the cows cry." They were sneaky that way, as all good parents are. We drank our milk. I'll have to find this one and read it for myself. Thanks for the steer (no pun intended).
Alyson Hagy, “Brief Lives of the Trainmen”
This is one of those stories that the more I read it the better I like it. That’s a good thing, don’t you think? —Certainly better than the opposite. Like Dan and John, I am drawn to the multiple metaphors and similes. But I think Hagy has more going on with this kind of language than local color and picturesque poetry. I think she creates a kind of stylized folktale, a cartoon-like world and cleverly leads us into it.
In my opinion, this is a story about how stories come into being. All the “brief lives” in the separate sections accumulate and create an alternate reality until that wonderful folktale episode of Captain Hallock’s horse being spooked by Joe Hanna’s shooting the cook’s rooster and throwing him into the laundry pot. Hagy says that this will not be the last word about the misadventure: “The tale will have ten verses and a chorus once the rail gangs slaver into it.” Why else would one of the characters in the story be named "Ode”?
Bret Harte once said of this kind of story (his kind of story): "It was Humour--of a quality as distinct and original as the country and civilization in which it was developed. It was at first noticeable in the anecdote or "story," and after the fashion of such beginnings, was orally transmitted. It was common in the barrooms, the gatherings in the "country story," and finally at public meetings in the mouths of "stump orators." Such characteristic American humor, says Harte, was the parent of the American short story.”
I don’t know if Hagy had Harte in mind when she wrote this story, but she sure creates a wonderfully Western comic image of “Liberty’s living fuse” as those folks on the work train lay down another mile of track. God knows how the Transcontinental Railroad, that Diviner’s line, ever got laid by the “miscreant hands” of these trainmen. But by God, it did! Even the journalist who tries to record it all, following the line’s progress with a wagon full of lead type, has to cope with a scrofula swelling of the testicles. The trainsitman on the surveying team remembers his former professor who quoted Seneca: “It is better to know useless things than to know nothing at all.” He thinks those words “convey the sad blare of an anthem” and he believes he knows less than he did when he left Chicago. “About himself. About ambition and America.”
This is a story about how great things grow out of little bits. That applies to the Transcontinental Railroad as well as it does to Hagy’s story.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Short Story Month 2010: "Miracle Boy" by Pinckney Benedict and "Border" by Alyson Hagy
To celebrate May as Short Story month, Dan Wickett, editor of Dzanc Books, has arranged for several writers, reviewers, bloggers, critics, and editors to discuss selected stories from two new books: Pinckney Benedict’s The Miracle Boy and Other Stories and Alyson Hagy’s Ghosts of Wyoming. I am posting my own comments from that discussion here and urging you to check Dan’s blog “Emerging Writers Network” at http://emergingwriters.typepad.com for comments by several others. Following are my discussions on one story by Benedict and one story by Hagy, along with a remark by Hagy. I will post my discussions on two other stories with remarks by Benedict in a couple of days.
Pinckney Benedict, “Miracle Boy”
When three boys want to see the scars of someone named Miracle Boy, it seems pretty obvious that we are in for a story about sin and redemption. Jesus, after all, is the number one “miracle boy” in Western culture, and if you are a doubting Thomas, you want to see the stigmata. The problem, it seems to me, with writing a story about this central Christian mystery, is how to bring it off without being too obvious, or lacking that, how to bring it off daringly in such a different way that the reader doesn’t mind.
I like the fact that Benedict makes his Miracle Boy a soft and jiggly kid who, when beaten down, says “It’s miracles around us every day…Jesus made the lame to walk…and Jesus, he made me to walk too.”
I can’t resist the scene of the father scrambling up the silage wagon like a monkey and rummaging around in the silage to find those feet while the boy lies there knowing what his old man was looking for. “He knew exactly.” That’s a good short line, it seems to me, to make me frighteningly filled with admiration for both the father and the boy.
And that silent scene when Miracle Boy’s father brings him over to Lizard’s house and sits out on the porch while Lizard’s mother brings iced tea and Coca-Colas to them works well, for, when such a “mean” thing happens, what is there to say? The difference between a house with a woman in charge and one with a man is the difference between Geronimo and Eskimo’s “I don’t give a damn” attitude and Lizard’s nagging guilt. I like those shoes dangling up there on the high-powered wire; they evoke just the right touch of iconic mystery.
Lizard’s climbing up that pole while driving nails just below his body to step up on creates a powerful image of the cross, as Lizard, trying to atone, pulls himself up higher and higher by his own bootstraps, as it were, to try to reach the holy grail of those grimy shoes. Those flat-faced, indifferent cows grazing just below Lizard seems just the right audience. As the nails tear at his flesh and wobble under his feet, the reader grunts and groans with him. When he reaches the top and frees the shoes, he can see his whole world around him, and it is not as big as he thought it was. He knows he is in the palm of the hand of something; he just doesn’t know what.
In the final scene, Miracle Boy’s father tells Lizard, “Your Mommy may not know what you are…But I do.” And we do too—for Lizard is suffering man, trying to atone for his sins. It is inevitable that he looks at Miracle Boy with “curious eyes, seeing him small, like a bird or a butterfly.” And even though we are not surprised that Lizard would hold out the shoes like a gift, and even though this risks lapsing into the banal, Benedict brings it off, it seems to me, ending the story with echoes of the Southern masters of this kind of story—Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor.
Alyson Hagy, “Border”
It seems to me that the key to the effectiveness of this story is Hagy’s ability to withhold crucial information until the very end without causing the story to collapse into an O’Henry surprise trick ending. I think she does this by exploiting the reader’s tendency to read short stories too fast and thus miss the little clues that something bad has happened that the boy, whose thoughts we are privy too, is just not thinking about. The only indication we have of this secret from the past is when, early in the story, the boy wishes he could stop at a café, but knows he cannot “because of the deputies and what had happened with his father.”
Like most short stories that depend on an ending that pulls us up short, this one has to be read a second time, once we have the ending imprinted on out minds. We get subtle clues—e.g. the reference to the bottled water his father made fun of--that the boy’s relationship with his father has not been a good one and that the mother has “never been part of anything.” But it is not until we know how extreme that schism between the boy and his father has been that we understand his relationship with the Border collie.
He treats the dog as if he were a good father and the dog is his child, echoing the baby sounds the dog makes, being nipped by the dog’s sharp baby teeth, telling her she is smart to make him proud on her first day, apologizing for not feeding her right away and leaving her for a short time in a trash barrel.
His fatherly need to protect the dog is embodied in the scene with the “good cop/bad cop” cowboys who pick him up. The one named Ray is just petty and “mean,” chaffing over his failure to prove himself a man by being thrown off the back of “the crippledest mare on the Western slope.” The boy knows from his father that because Ray is a loser, he has to make someone else the loser. After Ray throws the dog out the truck window, the boy is again proud of her for being so tough and for how readily she learned things, especially the lesson that he has obviously learned and doesn’t want to teach her right away—“the black lesson of fear.”
But the final lesson, of course, is the lesson that the teacher teaches him--the lesson of betrayal. If Ray is a loser who wants someone else to lose, then the teacher, because she cannot get answers to her questions, leaves the boy with a question he cannot answer—why would she not want the dog? Although we cannot really blame the woman for calling the deputies, for she has obviously read about the boy in the papers and knows he has killed his father, at the same time, we have grown to like the boy so much that we cannot feel kindly toward her. When she refuses to take care of the dog, the boy cannot understand, for he knows the dog would be good for her. “How could anybody not want the thing that would keep them from being sent backward one last time? With this line, we understand the basic human need felt by all the characters in the story—the need to nurture and be nurtured, to love and be loved, without which one becomes hard and “mean.” As the teacher says, “It’s the kind of person I am. What I’ve turned into.”
Followup Post
Hello, my colleagues. I am enjoying reading all the remarks about “Miracle Boy” and “Border.” I always love talking with readers who love to read and read closely. It’s what I miss about not teaching any more.
I would like your opinion on an issue our discussion raises for me. In answer to John, I read “Miracle Boy” first, but actually I read it when it first came out, in Harper’s, I think. I liked it then, but I didn’t even think about the Christian symbolism at that time. I read it just once and put the magazine aside, feeling pretty good about the experience. I did not read it again because I wasn’t teaching it, wasn’t reviewing the book it was in, wasn’t writing a critical article on it, wasn’t delivering a lecture at a professional conference—all those things I have done throughout my career. That first reading was very much like the kind of reading that many subscribers to Harpers and the New Yorker engage in, just a “good read.” Not the kind of reading we have been engaged in this week, which is from the perspectives of professional writers and professional readers—the kind of reading that often made my students ask, “Where did you get all that stuff? Did the writer really put all that in there or did you just make it up?”
The question I want to put to you is this: Do you think that nonwriters and nonprofessional readers profit by being taught to read like professional writers and readers? Is there value in teaching them to read these two stories the way we have been reading them? Francine Prose wrote what I thought was a very fine book on this subject a few years ago called “Reading Like a Writer.” I reviewed the book for a couple of newspapers and raised the issue as follows:
Prose’s insistence on paying close attention to language is not a politically correct definition of reading nowadays for many academics, who have in fact argued that once you give priority to close reading, you engage in the following socially irresponsible acts: You favor indirect expression over direction expression. You favor deep meaning over surface meaning. You favor form over content. And—most unforgivably—you favor the elite over the popular.
At an international conference on the short story in Lisbon, Portugal, four years ago, I shared the platform with Francine Prose at one of the plenary panel sessions. Prose and I were in complete agreement about the importance of close reading of literary texts. However, during my presentation, Amiri Baraka stood up in the audience, and with a dramatic thumbs-down toward the stage, left the room. In his own presentation later that day, he condemned my remarks and called me a “reactionary.” Later, in her blog, Latina writer Ana Castillo, who was also in the audience, aligned herself with Baraka, dismissing Prose’s comments and calling me “a stupid white guy” for mine.
Some writers and many teachers nowadays have nothing but scorn for what they term "the so-called aesthetic," insisting that the proper aim of literary education is righting old wrongs. For them, literature is not the mysterious exploration of the complexity that makes us human; it is sociology; it is limited by history; it is Eurocentric, phallocentric, and logocentric. Originality is mere self-indulgence. Exploration of the self is narcissism.
And about that issue raised this week of writers “exploring the complexity that makes us human”: I think there is more such mystery in “Border” than there is in “Miracle Boy.” I think the mystery of “Miracle Boy” is external to the story, lying in the Christian mystery of redemption, much the way some of Flannery O’Connor’s stories owe their complexity to the dogma of Catholicism rather than to the complexity inherent in the characters and the action of the stories. I finish “Border” more puzzled about the mystery of what makes us human than I do when I finish “Miracle Boy,” because what motivates the teacher to give the boy up in the end is indeed a mystery. Lizard’s motivation for doing what he does is part of the Christian mystery of redemption. I remember once when I was in high school asking an elderly female missionary who was our next-door neighbor, “You know, what I really don’t understand is, what does it mean that Jesus died for my sins?” Funny, I don’t remember the answer; I only remember the question.
Flannery O’Connor once said she lent some stories to a country lady who lived down the road from her, and when she returned them the woman said, “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.” O’Connor agreed: Good stories have to show how “some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.” The peculiar problem of the short-story writer, O’Connor has said, is to reveal as much of the mystery of personality as possible.
John is right, of course, Flannery O’Connor detested “sentimentality.” But, as John says, “sentimentality” does not seem to be the right word for the suspicion we feel about stories that end happily, or at least, in some sort of fulfillment. Just because Lizard brings the shoes to Miracle Boy does not mean he has erased anything or solved anything. Redemption is not that easy. What one really wants is to “take it back.” One wants to go back and erase it, make it not happen, but there you are and where are you? The teacher in “Border” wants what is happening at the very moment not to be happening, but there you are and where are you? As the old lady down the road from O’Connor says, “some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.” It’s a mystery.
Comment by Alyson Hagy
All a writer ever wishes for is readers. We sometimes find them. I am humbled by the seriousness and intelligence of these readers.
I also think the writer is sometimes the last person who should be asked to comment upon his or her work. We work from the "inside." In "Border," I was trying to map the physical and emotional journey of a runaway teen. Charles and Jane and Anna and Stacy and John and Pei-Ling and Steven and Dan are far wiser about the nuances and echoes of the story than I am. Truly. They see the story's flaws and successes more clearly than I can even now.
But I will say that I am a fan of Francine Prose's book Reading Like a Writer. Charles's thoughts about the tension between those who read literature while "paying close attention to language" and those who read with a different kind of agenda are familiar to me. What can I say? I make stories from language. Every syllable matters to me. The older I get the more I think of myself as connected to a long, long tradition of storytellers, folks who chronicle their human cultures with language. The politics tend to slip away from me beyond that point.
I don't know if there is "mystery" in "Border." I hope there is. I sometimes want a story to ask questions that cannot be answered within the boundaries of the time/space/activity framed in the narrative. There is some attempt on my part of "flood" those boundaries in the last few paragraphs of "Border." Should all stories do such a thing? No. Was I successful in this case? I leave that to others.
Thank you all for the kind of attentive engagement with my characters and setting that all writers hope for. You've been remarkable and generous.
Pinckney Benedict, “Miracle Boy”
When three boys want to see the scars of someone named Miracle Boy, it seems pretty obvious that we are in for a story about sin and redemption. Jesus, after all, is the number one “miracle boy” in Western culture, and if you are a doubting Thomas, you want to see the stigmata. The problem, it seems to me, with writing a story about this central Christian mystery, is how to bring it off without being too obvious, or lacking that, how to bring it off daringly in such a different way that the reader doesn’t mind.
I like the fact that Benedict makes his Miracle Boy a soft and jiggly kid who, when beaten down, says “It’s miracles around us every day…Jesus made the lame to walk…and Jesus, he made me to walk too.”
I can’t resist the scene of the father scrambling up the silage wagon like a monkey and rummaging around in the silage to find those feet while the boy lies there knowing what his old man was looking for. “He knew exactly.” That’s a good short line, it seems to me, to make me frighteningly filled with admiration for both the father and the boy.
And that silent scene when Miracle Boy’s father brings him over to Lizard’s house and sits out on the porch while Lizard’s mother brings iced tea and Coca-Colas to them works well, for, when such a “mean” thing happens, what is there to say? The difference between a house with a woman in charge and one with a man is the difference between Geronimo and Eskimo’s “I don’t give a damn” attitude and Lizard’s nagging guilt. I like those shoes dangling up there on the high-powered wire; they evoke just the right touch of iconic mystery.
Lizard’s climbing up that pole while driving nails just below his body to step up on creates a powerful image of the cross, as Lizard, trying to atone, pulls himself up higher and higher by his own bootstraps, as it were, to try to reach the holy grail of those grimy shoes. Those flat-faced, indifferent cows grazing just below Lizard seems just the right audience. As the nails tear at his flesh and wobble under his feet, the reader grunts and groans with him. When he reaches the top and frees the shoes, he can see his whole world around him, and it is not as big as he thought it was. He knows he is in the palm of the hand of something; he just doesn’t know what.
In the final scene, Miracle Boy’s father tells Lizard, “Your Mommy may not know what you are…But I do.” And we do too—for Lizard is suffering man, trying to atone for his sins. It is inevitable that he looks at Miracle Boy with “curious eyes, seeing him small, like a bird or a butterfly.” And even though we are not surprised that Lizard would hold out the shoes like a gift, and even though this risks lapsing into the banal, Benedict brings it off, it seems to me, ending the story with echoes of the Southern masters of this kind of story—Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor.
Alyson Hagy, “Border”
It seems to me that the key to the effectiveness of this story is Hagy’s ability to withhold crucial information until the very end without causing the story to collapse into an O’Henry surprise trick ending. I think she does this by exploiting the reader’s tendency to read short stories too fast and thus miss the little clues that something bad has happened that the boy, whose thoughts we are privy too, is just not thinking about. The only indication we have of this secret from the past is when, early in the story, the boy wishes he could stop at a café, but knows he cannot “because of the deputies and what had happened with his father.”
Like most short stories that depend on an ending that pulls us up short, this one has to be read a second time, once we have the ending imprinted on out minds. We get subtle clues—e.g. the reference to the bottled water his father made fun of--that the boy’s relationship with his father has not been a good one and that the mother has “never been part of anything.” But it is not until we know how extreme that schism between the boy and his father has been that we understand his relationship with the Border collie.
He treats the dog as if he were a good father and the dog is his child, echoing the baby sounds the dog makes, being nipped by the dog’s sharp baby teeth, telling her she is smart to make him proud on her first day, apologizing for not feeding her right away and leaving her for a short time in a trash barrel.
His fatherly need to protect the dog is embodied in the scene with the “good cop/bad cop” cowboys who pick him up. The one named Ray is just petty and “mean,” chaffing over his failure to prove himself a man by being thrown off the back of “the crippledest mare on the Western slope.” The boy knows from his father that because Ray is a loser, he has to make someone else the loser. After Ray throws the dog out the truck window, the boy is again proud of her for being so tough and for how readily she learned things, especially the lesson that he has obviously learned and doesn’t want to teach her right away—“the black lesson of fear.”
But the final lesson, of course, is the lesson that the teacher teaches him--the lesson of betrayal. If Ray is a loser who wants someone else to lose, then the teacher, because she cannot get answers to her questions, leaves the boy with a question he cannot answer—why would she not want the dog? Although we cannot really blame the woman for calling the deputies, for she has obviously read about the boy in the papers and knows he has killed his father, at the same time, we have grown to like the boy so much that we cannot feel kindly toward her. When she refuses to take care of the dog, the boy cannot understand, for he knows the dog would be good for her. “How could anybody not want the thing that would keep them from being sent backward one last time? With this line, we understand the basic human need felt by all the characters in the story—the need to nurture and be nurtured, to love and be loved, without which one becomes hard and “mean.” As the teacher says, “It’s the kind of person I am. What I’ve turned into.”
Followup Post
Hello, my colleagues. I am enjoying reading all the remarks about “Miracle Boy” and “Border.” I always love talking with readers who love to read and read closely. It’s what I miss about not teaching any more.
I would like your opinion on an issue our discussion raises for me. In answer to John, I read “Miracle Boy” first, but actually I read it when it first came out, in Harper’s, I think. I liked it then, but I didn’t even think about the Christian symbolism at that time. I read it just once and put the magazine aside, feeling pretty good about the experience. I did not read it again because I wasn’t teaching it, wasn’t reviewing the book it was in, wasn’t writing a critical article on it, wasn’t delivering a lecture at a professional conference—all those things I have done throughout my career. That first reading was very much like the kind of reading that many subscribers to Harpers and the New Yorker engage in, just a “good read.” Not the kind of reading we have been engaged in this week, which is from the perspectives of professional writers and professional readers—the kind of reading that often made my students ask, “Where did you get all that stuff? Did the writer really put all that in there or did you just make it up?”
The question I want to put to you is this: Do you think that nonwriters and nonprofessional readers profit by being taught to read like professional writers and readers? Is there value in teaching them to read these two stories the way we have been reading them? Francine Prose wrote what I thought was a very fine book on this subject a few years ago called “Reading Like a Writer.” I reviewed the book for a couple of newspapers and raised the issue as follows:
Prose’s insistence on paying close attention to language is not a politically correct definition of reading nowadays for many academics, who have in fact argued that once you give priority to close reading, you engage in the following socially irresponsible acts: You favor indirect expression over direction expression. You favor deep meaning over surface meaning. You favor form over content. And—most unforgivably—you favor the elite over the popular.
At an international conference on the short story in Lisbon, Portugal, four years ago, I shared the platform with Francine Prose at one of the plenary panel sessions. Prose and I were in complete agreement about the importance of close reading of literary texts. However, during my presentation, Amiri Baraka stood up in the audience, and with a dramatic thumbs-down toward the stage, left the room. In his own presentation later that day, he condemned my remarks and called me a “reactionary.” Later, in her blog, Latina writer Ana Castillo, who was also in the audience, aligned herself with Baraka, dismissing Prose’s comments and calling me “a stupid white guy” for mine.
Some writers and many teachers nowadays have nothing but scorn for what they term "the so-called aesthetic," insisting that the proper aim of literary education is righting old wrongs. For them, literature is not the mysterious exploration of the complexity that makes us human; it is sociology; it is limited by history; it is Eurocentric, phallocentric, and logocentric. Originality is mere self-indulgence. Exploration of the self is narcissism.
And about that issue raised this week of writers “exploring the complexity that makes us human”: I think there is more such mystery in “Border” than there is in “Miracle Boy.” I think the mystery of “Miracle Boy” is external to the story, lying in the Christian mystery of redemption, much the way some of Flannery O’Connor’s stories owe their complexity to the dogma of Catholicism rather than to the complexity inherent in the characters and the action of the stories. I finish “Border” more puzzled about the mystery of what makes us human than I do when I finish “Miracle Boy,” because what motivates the teacher to give the boy up in the end is indeed a mystery. Lizard’s motivation for doing what he does is part of the Christian mystery of redemption. I remember once when I was in high school asking an elderly female missionary who was our next-door neighbor, “You know, what I really don’t understand is, what does it mean that Jesus died for my sins?” Funny, I don’t remember the answer; I only remember the question.
Flannery O’Connor once said she lent some stories to a country lady who lived down the road from her, and when she returned them the woman said, “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.” O’Connor agreed: Good stories have to show how “some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.” The peculiar problem of the short-story writer, O’Connor has said, is to reveal as much of the mystery of personality as possible.
John is right, of course, Flannery O’Connor detested “sentimentality.” But, as John says, “sentimentality” does not seem to be the right word for the suspicion we feel about stories that end happily, or at least, in some sort of fulfillment. Just because Lizard brings the shoes to Miracle Boy does not mean he has erased anything or solved anything. Redemption is not that easy. What one really wants is to “take it back.” One wants to go back and erase it, make it not happen, but there you are and where are you? The teacher in “Border” wants what is happening at the very moment not to be happening, but there you are and where are you? As the old lady down the road from O’Connor says, “some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.” It’s a mystery.
Comment by Alyson Hagy
All a writer ever wishes for is readers. We sometimes find them. I am humbled by the seriousness and intelligence of these readers.
I also think the writer is sometimes the last person who should be asked to comment upon his or her work. We work from the "inside." In "Border," I was trying to map the physical and emotional journey of a runaway teen. Charles and Jane and Anna and Stacy and John and Pei-Ling and Steven and Dan are far wiser about the nuances and echoes of the story than I am. Truly. They see the story's flaws and successes more clearly than I can even now.
But I will say that I am a fan of Francine Prose's book Reading Like a Writer. Charles's thoughts about the tension between those who read literature while "paying close attention to language" and those who read with a different kind of agenda are familiar to me. What can I say? I make stories from language. Every syllable matters to me. The older I get the more I think of myself as connected to a long, long tradition of storytellers, folks who chronicle their human cultures with language. The politics tend to slip away from me beyond that point.
I don't know if there is "mystery" in "Border." I hope there is. I sometimes want a story to ask questions that cannot be answered within the boundaries of the time/space/activity framed in the narrative. There is some attempt on my part of "flood" those boundaries in the last few paragraphs of "Border." Should all stories do such a thing? No. Was I successful in this case? I leave that to others.
Thank you all for the kind of attentive engagement with my characters and setting that all writers hope for. You've been remarkable and generous.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Short Story Month, May 2010
The idea of a Short Story Month has been floating around for several years. In 2003, Larry Dark, director of The Story Prize, urged in an interview that the short story was a very American form and should be celebrated in a National Short Story Month. In 2007, Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network and executive director and publisher of Dzanc Books, took up the banner and declared May to be “Short Story Month,” initiating several online activities to promote that idea and publishing a collection of essays and reviews. On May 1, 2009, I polled my readers about the idea and got a 99% approval vote.
However, the short story does not have a broad based nonprofit organization willing to promote Short Story Month in the way that the Academy of American Poets did when they designated April as National Poetry Month in 1996, encouraging a number of artists, publishers, educational leaders, and arts organizations to sponsor activities across the country. As Larry Dark argued on his blog last year, for a national Short Story Month to become a reality, “It will need to have a strong organization behind it, a real concerted and nationally coordinated effort, and buy-in from bookstores, schools, and libraries, not to mention authors and publishers.”
I queried The Society for the Study of the Short Story last year about their interest in promoting a National Short Story Month but got no reply. The Society will be holding its 11th International Short Story Conference in Toronto June 16-19. I will be participating on a panel at the conference, and at that time, I will once again urge them to help promote a month-long yearly celebration of the short story.
This year Dan Wickett has enlisted the help of a number of short-story bloggers, reviewers, writers, editors, and publishers to participate in a joint discussion of stories from two new collections: Alyson Hagy’s Ghosts of Wyoming (Graywolf Press, Feb. 2010) and Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy and Other Stories (Press 53, May 2010).
I intend to increase my efforts on this Reading the Short Story blog during May 2010, with two or three posts per week, as follows:
1. I will discuss the work appearing in the Fiction 2010 special supplement to The Atlantic, which accompanied the May 2010 issue.
2. I will discuss some of the stories appearing in the 2010 Pen/O. Henry Prize volume which just came out.
3. I will discuss some of the stories appearing in the 2009 The Best American Short Stories, which came out last October.
4. I will post blog entries on Pinckey Benedict’s Miracle Boy and Other Stories and Alyson Hagy’s Ghosts of Wyoming from the joint online discussion organized by Dan Wickett, to which I am contributing.
I hope you will join in discussions and help promote May as Short Story Month.
However, the short story does not have a broad based nonprofit organization willing to promote Short Story Month in the way that the Academy of American Poets did when they designated April as National Poetry Month in 1996, encouraging a number of artists, publishers, educational leaders, and arts organizations to sponsor activities across the country. As Larry Dark argued on his blog last year, for a national Short Story Month to become a reality, “It will need to have a strong organization behind it, a real concerted and nationally coordinated effort, and buy-in from bookstores, schools, and libraries, not to mention authors and publishers.”
I queried The Society for the Study of the Short Story last year about their interest in promoting a National Short Story Month but got no reply. The Society will be holding its 11th International Short Story Conference in Toronto June 16-19. I will be participating on a panel at the conference, and at that time, I will once again urge them to help promote a month-long yearly celebration of the short story.
This year Dan Wickett has enlisted the help of a number of short-story bloggers, reviewers, writers, editors, and publishers to participate in a joint discussion of stories from two new collections: Alyson Hagy’s Ghosts of Wyoming (Graywolf Press, Feb. 2010) and Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy and Other Stories (Press 53, May 2010).
I intend to increase my efforts on this Reading the Short Story blog during May 2010, with two or three posts per week, as follows:
1. I will discuss the work appearing in the Fiction 2010 special supplement to The Atlantic, which accompanied the May 2010 issue.
2. I will discuss some of the stories appearing in the 2010 Pen/O. Henry Prize volume which just came out.
3. I will discuss some of the stories appearing in the 2009 The Best American Short Stories, which came out last October.
4. I will post blog entries on Pinckey Benedict’s Miracle Boy and Other Stories and Alyson Hagy’s Ghosts of Wyoming from the joint online discussion organized by Dan Wickett, to which I am contributing.
I hope you will join in discussions and help promote May as Short Story Month.
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