Startle and Illuminate

by Carol Shields

  And yet, we continue, even today, to be troubled by a perceived dichotomy between what is called “reality” and what is known as fiction. This sorting out of “reality”—those quote marks again—and invention is not a new problem, but a very old one, and it has to do, I think, with the inability of fiction to stare at itself. So many questions arise. Is there such a thing as truth? Can we set aside our attachment to honesty? Who makes the rules? Who is telling the story, and how does the teller relate to the tale? Exactly how far can a teller take a tale? Can a fiction writer, for instance, write about a year that is 400 days long? About daisies that fall from the sky instead of rain? (You will recognize this particular event from García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Now there’s a man who knows how to bend and rattle the narrative apparatus.) Can the novelist rename a street in Winnipeg (I got into all sorts of trouble when I did) or make a cat fly? Do we accept the fact that fiction is not strictly mimetic, that we want it to spring out of the world, illuminate the world, not mirror it back to us?

  Yes, you will say, or perhaps no, and your response will depend on the culture you live in, the era into which you are born, and on the width or narrowness of your aesthetic or moral responses. Huge pieces of potential narrative have been sacrificed in the name of authenticity, of not telling the untrue, not risking deviance. (We can snip our circle again.) Here I can only estimate the size of the loss.

  “Reality” has generally held on to its authority, at least until recently, but fiction, it seems, has been defending itself forever. Either that or finding sly wink-of-the-eye ways to circumvent moral skepticism. The “stories” that take their roots in mythology or in our scriptures establish their legitimacy by their divine origins or ethical purpose. The novels of Danielle Steel demand their way by promising a light diversion from the serious problems that trouble us. Sadly, narratives without a ticket don’t get on the train.

  Enormous quantities of stories, perhaps the finest stories of our culture, have been lost through illiteracy or lack of permission, either a prohibition placed on the storyteller, most often “Women, hold thy tongue” (a snip again, again dividing our circle) or the simple inability to write down one’s experience on paper (snip). The historian Theodore Zeldin, who has written with such thoroughness about the civilization of France, tells us that, in the tenth century, nine-tenths of the French were peasants. And yet, we possess only one personal eyewitness account of French peasant life in that century, and even that account must be looked at with some skepticism, since its author became literate eventually and left his peasant past behind, skewing the sample. There are, however, dozens of novels set in the rural France of that period, novels whose authors have leapt across the synapse of what is known and what is imagined, or have deduced their historic narratives from artifacts, paintings or documents. Do at least some of them get it right? An unanswerable question. And an unfair question, perhaps. Is conjecture better than nothing at all when it comes to reaching into the narrative cupboard for something to eat?

  Humankind cannot bear very much reality, T. S. Eliot once said. (Snip.) Happy stories are doomed to extinction, says Lorrie Moore. (Snip.) We will never have a true account of war, said novelist John Hersey. No one could bear to write it. No one could bear to read it. (Snip.) The world would split open if one woman told the truth, says poet Muriel Rukeyser. (Snip.)

  And then there are the stories that are excavated authentically enough from the past, but lose their meaning to contemporary sensibility. You may be familiar with Robert Darnton’s book The Great Cat Massacre, in which a famous eighteenth-century joke is examined in order to see what light it throws on French society of that time, and the way people thought during the Enlightenment. We are introduced to a cat-loving master printer in Paris. His young and unruly apprentices kill his dozen or so cats one night and string them up in the print shop for the master to discover in the morning. That is the joke, a joke that travelled across Europe over a period of several years and apparently cracked up the populace. The cat massacre joke has been carefully analyzed for historical context, for language puns, looked at from every possible perspective, but its humour remains stubbornly opaque, even alarming: something is askew here, either in the narrative, or with the society that delighted in it, or—could it possibly be?—with us? (Snip).

  Another problem: Since the days of relating stories of the hunt around the fire we’ve grown self-conscious about our fictions, inventing categories—tragedy and comedy, after all, are only a convenient and arbitrary shorthand, a crude approximation—and we’ve made rules about how stories must be shaped. Rules about unity of time and space, about conflict, rising action and the nature of story conclusions. Our narratives, then, have had their hair cut and permed; they’ve been sent to the fat farm where they’ve learned to take nano-bites out of their own flesh in order to maintain a sleek literary line, a line that will assign itself to one of those major genres or else surrender to deconstructive surgery, and disconnect, more and more, from the texture and rhythm of “reality.”

  For a life, as writer Sandra Gulland reminds us, does not unfold in chapters—you may have noticed this. A life does not have an underlying theme, yet we seem to believe a novel must. A life does not build slowly but steadily to a climax. A life is rarely restricted to three main characters. In life, a new character may enter the scheme in the final pages, but in fiction we have declared this an offence against aesthetic order. And so, ungainly or overweight stories fall out of the narrative record (snip); they’re too bulgy for theory, too untidy for analysis. Too hard to teach. In or out of the official canon, stories really are described as being teachable or not, and you can imagine what happens to those that are deemed unteachable. (Snip.)

  Contemporary stories may be very different from the old tale of the bison hunt, but the long history of the teller and the tale does offer up a remarkably persistent pattern, what critics such as Robert Alter call “deep structures.” We can go straight to Ulysses to see an early model: the tale of the wanderer, the homeless, the picaresque hero with an unsteady eye, an inability to effect change, a being helplessly adrift. Often orphaned, spiritually or else psychologically, and often wounded, maimed in some way, either metaphorically or otherwise, the picaresque traveller is someone who stands outside of events, who, in fact, chooses that position.

  If the outsider is the most persistent of literary heroes in our tradition, we can probably conclude that those who elect themselves writers are also outsiders. What then happens to the narratives that arise at the centre of our society and to the point of view of those who choose to stay rooted at that centre? Are they lost? (Snip.) Are these narratives erased from the collective memory as well as the literary storehouse? If so, what an enormous gap there must be between the nexus of life and the literature that grows on its margins. You can see the predicament this puts us in: society invites its outsiders to keep the narrative record, to select and shape those stories that will survive in the culture.

  In our view of narrative, we eliminate, cut off (snip) an immense slice of the world’s story horde, those stories possessing the brevity and shape of a Zen koan, or stories such as those we find in, say, the Cree tradition, that refuse to complete themselves according to the narrative arc our culture has sanctioned.

  Even within our own culture, certain narrative material leaks away for want of a catchment vessel. I’m told by my linguistic friends that English is poor in words that describe mystical or transcendental experiences, and there is a well known and bitterly chilling story about a New England housewife who, when washing dishes one evening, happened to notice how the soap bubbles gathered in a wreath around her wrist, and how the fading light from the window picked up a thousand tiny rainbows. She found the moment beautiful and profound, and seemed to sense in the apparition something of the order and meaning of the universe. Excited, she called her husband and attempted to share the vision with him. He immediately sent for on ambulance and had her transferred
to a mental hospital. (Snip.)

  We speak, too, of the absent narratives, the negative element of a photographic print—the dark void or unbridgeable gap, shadows, and mirages, the vivid dream that fades by morning, the missed bus, the men we didn’t marry, the unconceived child, the confession murmured to a priest, or not murmured to a priest. The pockets of time and light that are too evanescent to be put into words or even to catch the eye. This narrative lint refuses to collect itself, and is lost to our memory and to the narrative record. (Snip.)

  I recently read a book called Ruby: An Ordinary Woman, made up of the diary extracts of one Ruby Alice Side Thompson—so ordinary a woman that you will not recognize her name. The diaries span the years 1909 to 1969. The entries are selected from forty-two handwritten notebooks that were doomed to obscurity, when, entirely by accident, they were rescued by a granddaughter and put into print. How many other such accounts go to the dump? (Snip.) Accounts that, like Ruby’s, would change forever the way we think of women’s lives during that period?

  Our stories distort the past, then; probably no one ever thought otherwise. Futuristic stories have always, for some reason, been relatively few in number, tinged with the exotic, and often politically weighted. What then of the stories of the moment; do they possess the midnight shine of verisimilitude, can we trust them to give a portrait or a sense of meaning to the present or even to tell us what people do and think when they are alone in a room?

  In recent years, the spectre of political correctness has touched all of us, placing limits on our available narrative field, restraining even the possibilities of observation, let alone development. Political correctness, of course, has suppressed great widths of life in the past—almost all of gay society, the larger part of women’s sexuality, also Catholics, Protestants, disbelievers—each taking their turn on the absentee list. (Snip.)

  There are curious deformations in our stories of the present day, too. I’ll address myself to just one small domestic area, the question of marriage and divorce in our society. Look into the other-world of the contemporary novel, and we find the divorce curve running wildly above the 50 percent rate of contemporary marital breakdown.

  Jane Austen shows us attitudes toward marriage in her society, the search for a life partner, the developing notion of a marriage of friendship, but ask yourself when you last read a contemporary literary novel about happily married people. For one reason or another, enduring marriages (that other 50 percent of the statistical pattern) find little space on the printed page. How is a novelist to pump the necessary tension into the lives of the happily committed? Even the suggestion of a sound marital relationship posits the suspicion of what is being hidden and about to be revealed in a forthcoming chapter. Couples who have good sex, who discuss and resolve their differences, and care deeply about their bonds of loyalty are clearly as simple-minded and unimaginative as their creator. There they sit with their hobbies and their wallpaper and their cups of filtered coffee, finishing each other’s sentences and nodding agreement. She sends his winter coat to the cleaners and worries about his asthma. He continues to find her aging body erotic and he’s also extremely fond of her way with grilled peppers. This is all very well, but what can be done with folks so narratively unpromising? (Snip.)

  It might be thought that novelists would come running forward to pick up the gauntlet. Six hundred fast-turning pages without a single marital breakdown; now there is a challenge. Two people meet, fall in love, and integrate their histories. Crises arrive, but the marriage holds firm. Really? Who would expect readers to believe this fairy tale?

  Why do today’s novelists distort the state of marriage by concentrating on connubial disarray? To this I can only cry mea culpa, since my novels and short stories are as filled with divorce as any other writer’s.

  I would, though, like to redress this rather small and curious distortion, to see more marital equity in the pages of our narratives. And I’d be willing to honour the principle of mimesis and settle for a straight 50 percent success/failure rate. Coupledom, especially when seen in an unsparing light, should not necessarily equal boredom, should it? It might be interesting to see novelists look inside their own specific human packaging and admit that a long relationship—the union of two souls, the merging of contraries, whatever—can be as complex, as potentially dynamic and as open to catharsis as the most shattering divorce.

  Perhaps it is this notion of conflict that needs revisiting. It might be a project for the narratives to come, asking why the rub of disunity strikes larger sparks than the rewards of accommodation, and how we’ve come to privilege what separates us above that which brings us together.

  Our narrative cupboard is far from being bare (snip) but it seems it needs restocking. We need perhaps to turn back to that twilight of the gods where our stories were born. And to look ahead to narrative’s full potential, that bountiful human impulse that says: Once upon a time—opening every question, every possibility.

  Looking at writing in Canada, the storyboard does seem to be growing here rather than shrinking. Voices formerly at the margin are now being heard, bringing with them their different rhythms and their alternate expectations. More is permitted; more can be said.

  Women’s writing has already begun to dismantle the rigidities of genre, those “four basic types of fiction” referred to earlier, and to replace that oppressive narrative arc we’ve lived with so long, the line of rising action. The definition of the real has expanded or, as writer Russell Hoban says, the bricks are falling out of the tower, letting the craziness in. Film, which conveys narratives of action superbly, has left to the written word, by default perhaps, what many of us value most in narrative: the interior voice reflecting, thinking, connecting, ticking, bringing forward a view of a previously locked room, and, to quote John Donne, making one little room an everywhere.

  In Brief …

  • We are hungry for narrative, for stories that serve as witness to our place in the world.

  • Although all the world is available for narrative, much of it falls through the narrative sieve and is lost.

  • There are certain characteristics of the novel as we know it and write it:

  • a texture that approximates the world as we know it

  • characters who in their struggles with the world resemble ourselves

  • dilemmas that remind us of our own predicaments

  • scenes that trigger our memories or tap into our yearnings

  • conclusions that shorten the distance between what is privately felt and universally known, so that we look up from the printed page and say, “Aha!”

  ~ 13 ~

  WRITING FROM THE EDGE

  CANADIAN WRITING IS IN A STATE OF EXUBERANT GOOD HEALTH. Why is this, you ask, and why now? There are some who believe that the perceived lack of national identity, of cultural cohesiveness, is a vacuum crying to be filled, and that the sudden burst of new writing clusters around the impulse to identify, define, and make solid what in the past has been random and unnamable. If this is true, I am sure it is unconscious, since I can’t imagine a writer sitting down at her computer and thinking: Now I am going to contribute to the nexus of Canadian identity.

  There are those who suggest that the Canadian literary body is so new and so loose and uncodified that writers are relatively free and unshackled to pursue their literary track. You’ll remember what Robertson Davies said, how we in Canada are the attic of North America, suggesting that there’s plenty of room in that dark and empty attic to shout.

  I am a little reluctant to admit that we may still be colonialist enough in our posture to measure our literary health by the international stamp of approval. And so we at home notice when Canadians appear on the Booker shortlist. And when the New York Times’ annual list of most important books includes books by Canadians, as it did in 1996, when two were by Canadian women, Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro. I was delighted with this recognition of our two major writers, but even more pleased that
at home we took the New York Times fairly calmly, a sign that these kinds of triumphs have become (almost) taken for granted. In addition, our recent Governor General’s Award and Giller shortlists have been rich in strong and innovative fiction, and—here I go again—these novels are finding international publishers.

  Simultaneous waves of fiction are coming out of the rest of the post-colonial world: India, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, Africa. The children have grown up, and are producing their fresh, lively, self-confident, sometimes audacious novels, beamed from parts of the world that had been for so long silent, humble, dependent, and distrustful of their own surfaces. This new writing, not very new when you get down to dates—Patrick White, V. S. Naipaul, our own Alice Munro—was coming from cultures not, perhaps, perfectly understood by the British reading public, coming, in fact, from the exotic margins of the planet, the far edge.

  I’ve already mentioned the idea that the short story is, mainly, a new world form. Reports from the frontier, Hortense Calisher called them, a lovely and accurate phrase that caught my attention. Perhaps this is what all of literature is: a dispatch from the frontier, news from the edge. Even given that the edges and centres of society are forever shifting, it does seem to me that the view from the edge offers a privileged perspective. Also freedom from cynicism, if not from anger. Also a kind of real or willed innocence, which is what I believe every writer must keep alive in order to write.