The Experimental Short Story--Part I: Caponegro, Evenson, and the Experimentalists of the Sixties

Mary Caponegro and Brian Evenson are often characterized as “experimental” writers. I had only read their stories occasionally as I ran across them in the journal Conjunctions and in trade anthologies such as Ben Marcus’s The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. However, I recently read their new collections All Fall Down by Caponegro and Fugue State by Evenson (both published by Coffee House Press).

If you have never read Caponegro, this new collection may be the one to begin with, since the four stories in it are somewhat more traditional than her usual “experimental” style. The two novellas in the book are closer to the challenging syntax more often associated with Caponegro. “Ill-Timed,” the longest piece in the collection, is challenging, if for no other reason than its lengthy repetition of banter between two women. However, the witty dialogue makes it relatively more porous and comprehensible than the final novella, “The Translator,” in which self-conscious literary monologues about language threaten to mire one down in the inky print on the page.

I enjoyed Evenson’s stories even more than Caponegro’s, for no one pushes the envelope of the Poe/pulp tradition with more bravura than he does. In “Mudder Tongue,” chosen for the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories, the central character loses his ability to communicate with others when the words he speaks are not the ones the thinks. In “Dread,” a graphic tale illustrated by Zak Sally, a man’s identity crisis is caused when he is haunted by a phrase--“He no longer resembled me”-- from Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. “Ninety Over Ninety” is a laugh-out-loud satire on the publishing industry, while the title story is a Borges-like nightmare in which dissociation is a contagion that causes characters to morph from one to another. Fugue State is an irresistible mélange of the comic and the terrifying. I recommend both Caponegro and Evenson to you.

However, what the two books got me to thinking about was the meaning of the term “experimental,” especially when used to describe a type of short story. I remembered that the debate about experimental fiction made some literary news a few years ago and dug out an old issue of Harper’s (October 2005) and reread Ben Marcus’s essay “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It.” Marcus, whose penchant for “experimental” fiction can be seen in his own work, as well as the choices he made for The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, takes on Jonathan Franzen for his attacks on James Joyce, William Gaddis, and other nontraditionalists.

Franzen has said that praise for Ulysses as one of the top ten books of the century “sends this message to the common reader: Literature is terribly hard to read. And this message to the aspiring writer: Extreme difficulty is the way to earn respect. This is fucked up. It’s particularly fucked up when the printed word is fighting other media for its very life.” In another place, Franzen calls Gaddis “unreadable, needlessly obtuse, and frequently indifferent to his reading audience.”

Marcus argues: “If reading is a skill, with levels of ability, and not simply something we can or cannot do, then it’s a skill that can be improved by more, and more varied reading. The more various the styles we ingest, the better equipped we are to engage and be moved by those writers who are looking deeply into the possibility of syntax as a way to structure sense and feeling, packing experience into language, leveraging grammar as a medium for the making of art.”

I align myself with Marcus’s argument that fiction writers use syntax to explore human complexity, but would further argue that writers such as Alice Munro and William Trevor, who are often called “realists” or “traditionalists,” use language in this self-conscious way, as well as so-called “experimental” writers such as Evenson and Caponegro. If you are interested in this debate, you can find Marcus’s essay online, as well as the various pieces by Franzen that he refers to. I would be happy to discuss the issue with anyone who wants to resurrect it. However, as a student of the short story as a genre, I am more interested in what kind of short fiction is often called “experimental.” I went back over a number of writers I have read and written about in the past to see what is characteristic of the “experimental” short story, if there is such a thing.

I will mention briefly four writers from the late sixties who were called “experimental” (Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and William H. Gass) and four writers from the nineties who have likewise been dubbed something other than traditional (Stephen Dixon, Steven Millhauser, George Saunders, and David Means). I will make a few comments about the Sixties writers in this blog and discuss the four Nineties writers in next week’s blog. I will then try to draw some conclusions about what is the typical “experimental” short story.

Robert Coover's first collection of short stories, Pricksongs and Descants (1969), consists of a number of stories based on fairy tales, legends, folktales--all of which are made more earthy and "real" than their mythic originals. "The Door" is an erotic, self-reflexive retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood," while "The Magic Poker" is an elaborate exploration of fictional creation, ala Shakespeare's The Tempest, and "Seven Exemplary Fictions" is an homage to Cervantes. However, the most popular story in the collection is "The Babysitter," a complex play with the shifting intermixture of fantasy and reality. "The Babysitter" ultimately asks the basic question "What actually happened?" for as you read the story you are never quite sure at any given point if you are reading a fantasy or a description of so-called reality. Although the story seems filled with ominous events, nothing actually happens, except in the sexual fantasies of the participants, which predominate over ordinary reality. At the end of the story, when a television program enters the mix of fantasies, it seems no less real than the character fantasies throughout. Few stories have gone as far as "The Babysitter" in undermining the easy assumption that reality refers merely to external events in the physical world.

When Donald Barthelme's first collection of stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, appeared in 1964, critics complained that his work was without subject matter, without character, without plot, and without concern for the reader's understanding. For Barthelme, the problem of language is the problem of reality, for reality is the result of language processes. Because so much contemporary language has become trash, dreck, Barthelme takes as his primary task the recycling of language, making metaphor out of the castoffs of technological culture. For Barthelme, the task is to try to reach, through metaphor and the defamiliarization that results, that ineffable realm of knowledge which he says lies somewhere between mathematics and religion "in which what may fairly be called truth exists."

Barthelme has noted that since films tell a realistic narrative so well, the fiction writer must develop a new principle. Collage, says Barthelme, is the central principle of all art in the twentieth century, the point of which is that "unlike things are stuck together to make, in the best case, a new reality." One of the implications of this collage process is a radical shift from the usual temporal, cause-and-effect process of fiction to the more spatial and metaphoric process of poetry.

The most basic example of Barthelme's use of this mode is "The Balloon," in which a large balloon has encompassed the city. The persona of the story says that it is wrong to speak of "situations, implying sets of circumstances leading to some resolution, some escape of tension." In this story there are no situations, only the balloon, a concrete particular thing that people react to and try to explain. The balloon is an extended metaphor for the Barthelme story, to which people try to find a means of access and which creates varied critical responses. To plunge into a Barthelme story is to immerse oneself in the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary society, for his stories are not so much plotted tales as they are parodies and satires based on the public junk and commercial media hype that clutter up and cover over our private lives.

In 1967 and 1968, John Barth made his alignment with the postmodernist focus on fiction as a self-reflexive art form explicit. First he published a controversial essay in the Atlantic entitled "The Literature of Exhaustion," which, although it has been much misunderstood to have argued that contemporary fiction writers have "run out" of a subject for their work, actually urged more of the kind of self-conscious experimentation practiced by the South American writer Jorge Luis Borges. Secondly, he turned from the novel form to the short story, publishing Lost in the Funhouse, an experimental collection in which the stories refused to focus their attention on their so-called proper subject--the external world--and instead continually turned the reader's attention back to what Barth considered their real subject--the process of fiction-making.

Barth insists that the prosaic in fiction is only there to be transformed into fabulation. The artist's ostensible subject is not the main point; rather it is only an excuse or raw material for focusing on the nature of the fiction-making process. Great literature, says Barth, is almost always, regardless of what it seems to be about, about itself. Perhaps more than any other American writer Barth made fiction intensely conscious of itself, aware of its traditions, and of the conventions that make it possible. If, as the main currents of modern thought suggests, reality itself is the result of fiction-making processes, then John Barth is truly a writer concerned with the essential nature of what is real.

A philosopher particularly interested in the fictional nature of reality, William H. Gass's contribution to the postmodernist short story came in his 1968 collection, In The Heart of the Heart of the Country. Gass, as well known for his philosophical literary essays as for his fiction, has always reminded readers that "stories and the places and people in them are merely made of words." A character in a story, Gass insists, is not an object of perception, and "nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be said of him."

"Order of Insects," which Gass thinks is one of his best short fictions, charts the growth of a woman's obsession with a species of insects that inhabit her home. By limiting her vision obsessively, she transforms the insects into mythic creatures, ultimately feeling as though she has been entrusted with a kind of "eastern mystery, sacred to a dreadful god." As opposed to humans, the insects, whose skeletons are on the outside, retain their shape in death. They are beautiful in the ideal sense with a fierce joy in their very composition, a joy of stone that lives in its tomb like a stone lion. Never seeming to participate in decay, they are perfect geometric shapes representing pure order.

The title story of Gass's collection is a lyrical evocation of being in "retirement from love." The voice of the narrator, who has come to a small town in Indiana because he has "love left over" which he would like to lose, mixes his response to the inhabitants of the town with his meditations and memories of a past love, who was, as all romantic lovers are, a fiction. "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" is the narrator's attempt to organize himself, pull himself together by means of the language of poetry.

I will try to draw some general conclusions from all this next week when I discuss four major nontraditional short story writers from the nineties.

Reading Like a Writer, Reading Like an Editor

The July 20th issue of The New Yorker includes three letters about Louis Menand’s “Critic at Large” piece on the rise of creative writing programs in the June 8^th & 15^th issue. Allyson Stack from Edinburgh, Scotland, writes that creative writing programs teach young writers to be their own editors since publishing companies no longer have the time or money to shepherd younger writers along. “A good creative-writing program,” argues Stack, “will aim at making students better editors by requiring them to read intensively, exhaustively, and endlessly—and to read far more than one another’s work.”

Stack reminds us that reading a novel (or a story) with an eye toward writing one is a very different task from reading it with an eye toward writing a term paper, a review, or a lecture. The aim of creative writing classes should be, Stack concludes, “not so much to produce novelists or poets as to produce more astute readers of novels and poetry—which is to say, better editors.”

Stack’s argument for writers being taught to read like editors does not sound that different from Francine Prose’s argument in her book Reading Like a Writer that everyone should read like writers.

Prose’s central point is that to be a good reader, one must be knowledgeable of, and sensitive to, those elements of writing that constitute the craft: words, sentences, character, dialogue, and details. Prose reminds us of something that students of literature often find it hard to accept—that subject matter is not all that important, that what the writer most often wants to do is write really great sentences.

Over and over, Prose urges the reader to focus on words, rhythm, and pattern–not subject matter. By relentlessly insisting on the importance of language and form, Prose reinforces what William H. Gass has argued in Finding a Form: that the artist's "fundamental loyalty must be to form.” Every other diddly desire," insists Gass, "can find expression; every crackpot idea or local obsession, every bias and graciousness and mark of malice, may have an hour; but it must never be allowed to carry the day."

Prose’s insistence on the importance of language and literary form seems so obvious it is difficult to see how anyone could deny it. But of course that the excellence of writing depends not on its content but its language and form is denied in classrooms around the world every day. In fact, the very idea of artistic form and excellence is often challenged in many of those classrooms as elitist.

Prose admits that many of her students complain that reading great writers makes them feel stupid. And indeed, a quick look at the hundred-plus list of “Books to Be Read Immediately” that Prose appends may have that effect. In addition to the “classic” writers who put off modern students--Austen, Babel, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, James, Joyce, Kafka, Mansfield, Melville, Proust, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Twain, and Woolf--there are a number of intimidating contemporary “writer’s writers” as well--Raymond Carver, Stuart Dybek, Deborah Eisenberg, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, William Trevor, and Joy Williams.

In her Gold Medal acceptance speech at the 1999 National Book Awards, Oprah Winfrey told a little story about calling Toni Morrison and asking, “Does anyone ever tell you that sometimes they have to go over the sentences several times to get the full meaning of what you’re really saying.” Morrison wryly and wisely replied, “That, my dear, is called reading.”

Writing that requires going over the sentence several times to get the full meaning is usually the result of the writer’s careful editing, which most often means following Chekhov’s advice that it is better to say too little than too much, or the famous advice of Strunk and White in Elements of Style: “Omit needless words, omit needless words, omit needless words.”

Perhaps the best-known example of the relationship between a writer and an editor, in which the issue of omitting needless words is crucial is the writer/editor collaboration of Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish. In my opinion, Carver’s stories that show Lish’s influence in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please and What We Talk When we Talk About Love are much better stories than the “more generous” stories that appeared in Cathedral after he had repudiated Lish.

Critics who have scolded Carver for his minimalist shortcomings have done so for the same reasons that in previous generations they criticized Poe, Chekhov, and Sherwood Anderson. Clearly, those who spent much of the eighties scorning Carver's so-called cryptic tales for the same reasons that previous critics have criticized the short story in general, were more comfortable with the later, more explanatory versions of such stories as “The Bath” and “So Much Water Close to Home.”

However, Carver adds explanatory information to “A Small, Good Thing” that adds nothing significant to the original version entitled “The Bath.” For example, in “The Bath” the parents are trying to fasten on to some term that will categorize and thus normalize the son's condition, but each time they use the term “coma” the doctor simply says “I wouldn't call it that.” In “A Small, Good Thing.” Carver puts into the doctor's mouth a verbatim definition of a coma from Webster's New World Dictionary as a state of “deep, prolonged unconsciousness,” which does nothing to clarify the essential mystery of the boy's inaccessibility. In “The Bath,” when orderlies come in to get the boy for a brain scan, “they wheeled a thing like a bed.” However, in “A Small, Good Thing,” Carver uses the word “gurney”--certainly a more informative term, but one that loses the sense of disorientation the parents feel.

This addition of such bits of information serves unnecessary and distracting polemical purposes in the long version of “So Much Water Close to Home.” In the short version, when the wife reads about the death of the girl in the newspaper, she sits thinking and then calls and gets a chair at the hairdresser's. In the long version, we are told what she is thinking: “Two things are certain: 1) people no longer care what happens to other people; and 2) nothing makes any difference any longer. Look at what has happened. Yet nothing will change for Stuart and me.”

Chekhov would never have approved of Carver's added explanation, which sounds more like a freshman composition essay than the muddled emotions of a woman who has identified with the image of a dead girl floating just beneath the surface of the water.

I agree with Francine Prose that the best way to teach reading is to teach students to read like writers and with Allyson Stack that the best way to teach writing is to teach students to read like editors.

I would love to hear from writers who have been in MFA programs and teachers who have been in graduate literature programs on the issue of how to teach good reading and good writing.

Playing it Safe with the Pulitzer: Olive Kitteridge and The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao

I finally found the time to read Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, a collection of thirteen loosely linked stories that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year. Coincidentally, I just finished listening to (on my Ipod on daily dog walks) last year’s Pulitzer Prize Winner, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

As I have mentioned before, the Pulitzer Prize is seldom given to a collection of stories (Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, 1970; Stories of John Cheever, 1979; Robert Olen Butler’s Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, 1993, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, 2000). So I am happy that a group of stories won it this year, even though that pleasure is somewhat lessened by the fact that Random House has packaged the book as if it were a novel and that it seems to fulfill too slavishly Joseph Pulitzer’s original aim of the fiction prize—that it be given to a work published during the year “which shall best present the whole atmosphere of American life…”

William H. Gass wrote a blistering attack on the Pulitzer in The New York Times Book Review (1985) that later appeared in his collection of essays, Finding a Form (1996). The most memorable quote from the essay: “The Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses.” Complaining that the judges are often chosen to represent their race, religion, or sex, Gass insists that the only qualification a judge of the Pulitzer should have is “unimpeachable good taste, which immediately renders irrelevant such puerile pluralistic concerns as skin color, sex, and origin. Egalitarians shouldn’t give prizes and be too humble to receive them.” Gass says the Pulitzer has perceived an important truth about our culture: “Serious literature is not important to it.”

As much as I admire the work of William H. Gass, that judgment may be a bit extreme. I enjoyed reading Olive Kitteridge and I enjoyed listening to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In the past few years, I have also got a lot of pleasure out of listening to Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and The Known World by Edward P. Jones—all Pulitzer Prize winners that I admire and none of which I would call mediocre. (You will probably notice that I more often listen to novels than read them; novels just require less of my attention than short stories do.)

I admire William H. Gass’s work a great deal. His novella Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife is one of my favorite books, and I thought his novel The Tunnel was brilliant and beautifully written. I think it is laughable that such a masterpiece would be passed over by the Pulitzer, while such a mediocre work as Richard Ford’s Independence Day would win the prize. However, Gass’s blanket condemnation of the Pulitzer Prize may be a bit of sour grapes.

I thought that The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was a good novel. The voice of the narrator is hard to resist. But it was just a novel—and a very traditional, safe, coming-of-age novel at that. The fact that the young protagonist is a Dominican nerd who plays video games and writes science fiction/fantasy does not make it less traditional and less safe. And the style, because it is in the voice of Junior, who appeared in the stories in Drown, is more than a little sloppy.

I liked Olive Kitteridge also, but I did not “love it,” as some reviewers have rhapsodized. The recurrent appearance of the grouchy schoolteacher Olive sometimes seems like a gimmick to me. She is the central figure in some stories, but is only referred to in others. Strout’s idea is to present her in relationships with several different people—her husband, her son, her neighbors, her colleagues, etc—and thus reveal her to be more complex than any one person thinks she is. Sometimes this device works, sometimes it seems forced, especially when extreme events are invented to reveal Olive’s hidden nature. Sometimes you like her; sometimes you think she is a bitch. You never really know what makes her do the things she does. All you can say is, “That’s just Olive.” Although Olive Kitteridge has been compared to Winesburg, Ohio, in my opinion, it does not take the kind of chances, either in style or content, that Sherwood Anderson’s collection did in 1919.

William H.Gass’s opinion of the Pulitzer may be a bit extreme, but he is probably right that a novel or collection of stories that plays it safe is more apt to win the prize than one that takes chances with style, content, or theme.