Progress of Stories
Page 36
What are the chances that my making comments on this story will be helpful to readers if they have this contemporary predisposition to viewing a story as an escapade in literary invention, an experiment in writing in a narrative manner? I faithfully risk skeptic disingenuous reading of my comments, as I risked the like with the story itself. In writing this story, I wrote writing to which I gave the identity of a story, presenting it to readers as such, because I meant the word 'story' for name of its identity. I meant to be telling a story, not to be doing anything else. If certain persons, their being, and existing in the world of happenings, personal and natural, can be imagined as a credible possibility, there is in this the making of a real story: who tells it means it, means the name 'story', means the story he-she tells. I meant it all, the story 'Eve's Side of It'. I meant: a character Eve, of whom stories were told of old, that I imagine as 'really' existing, far, far, back in existence; and the same, with Lilith, she further back. Great, big personality-actualities looming up in the dramatics of the Private Life of the universe named 'human', Lilith wrapped in veils of gloom never quite shed, seeming more a Mood weighing upon time's yet undetermined content than an imaginatively locatable Being. The other personality of the story is of ubiquitous placeability!
The personality 'Eve' was an articulate presence: "I am not to be treated as a mythical character," it declared. "Whatever I am thought of as being, by the Others, or in relation to the mythical Adam, whether a piece of the like of him, or them, or made in the image of them as made in the image of that in the image of which they have conceived themselves to be generally made—whatever has been or is done with me in ideas, I have to be treated as real." This being real, over and over, in every occurrence of me as to be included in the lived story of life, is both my welcome to the Others, as proving them real, and very inconvenient to their theories of the nature of life, which they deduce from the nature of themselves understood as that of philosophers whom the universe invented for the purpose of having bestowed upon it by them, to its peace and glory, the explanation of its existence. If I, in my irrepressible being wherever they have being, in numbers balancing in a natural sort of way with their own, am not otherwise knowable than as real, what of the theories about 'reality' as knowable only by most complex processes of—? There is incessant argument as to whether knowable by intuitive or rational processes (an impossible opposition, since the difference is only between speedy apprehension of a little, and step-by-step accumulative apprehension of much, of what is to be known of the entire knowable—or 'reality', as they call it).
But what of the new one? This is a story: it has got to be as broad as it's long. A story moves on, but it always takes all of itself along with it—the persons, and the happenings, don't just disappear from one part to the next. The story holds it all together. It is about all that it is about. And so, if we are to pay respect to the character Eve who has figured so importantly in the stories of the past of our Life, we owe it to the sincerity of our story-sense of the real to put everything into the story of Eve that agrees with our ability to tell it or read it or listen to it as real, in the way in which stories can have realness.
As to the meaning of 'the new one': it means that this is a story. A story does not cut itself short with itself, does not 'really' end. A story hangs suspended in time. The New One, one might say, is the she-I when the story breaks out of its perpetual condition of occurrence in past time, and overthrows the literary difference between Story realness and Life realness, between what is imagined with belief in the possibility of its being 'true' and what is perceived with the eyes of knowledge to be of the very stuff of reality, and requiring therefore to be thought of as material of the story of Life. For there is this peculiarity, this wondrous naturalness of story as truth of the imaginable, that empowers it to become a changeling, in its character of narrative, when thought's vision authenticates the credibility of the imaginable. Story is the communication of human beings to human beings of beliefs as to what the life of human beings is 'really' like. This metaphoric mode of narrative suits both the case of uncertainty in knowledge of what things are really like, the subject being a universe of complexity, and the case of the uncertainty of the human form of being as to just what, in full and final determination, it is (whether as form self-determined or brought to be what it determinedly is by the managements of universal circumstantiality). Story has to stay metaphoric and at the same time (in so far as it is genuine in its really-like effect of truth) come to the very finest margin of vergence on the realm where story-telling changes naturally into truth-telling, story narrative into truth, the narrative that must be kept self- renewing.
Such is the doctrine of implication of this story. It may be said that, when I wrote it, the doctrine was but a matter of good-faith keeping with the spirit in which I wrote it—my sense of where story fits into patterns of human communicative behavior, which includes so much that is imitation of truth that great confusion exists as to what is truth, what untruth, what falsehood, what lying. It will have been noted that I have let myself 'go' in making these comments on the story, speaking about it and its characters now as author, retrospectively, now as myself as present-time reader of it, now dramatizing the personality of Eve of the story in words spoken as by her, additionally to the first-person mode of narrative of the story, and now, even here, in the midst of authorial comment, slipping into commentator's self-identification with the personality Eve. I think all this proves the extraordinarily live nature of story as the next-best thing to truth—when it is formed with love of it for its capability of feelable likeness to life. It does not prove, should not be taken to prove, that, as author, I conceived Eve to be a spitting like of myself, in writing the story, and that in commenting on it I recast this autobiographical hallucination by making an appearance as the spitting real of the story's Eve. The key to Story is bountiful sympathy with the immensely varied actualness of life, as the key to Truth is bountiful knowledge of actualness, in the immense unity of its significances. I have spread out the case of my little story about Eve to conversational breadth with interest in generating an atmosphere of ease between readers of it, and it, and readers of it and myself. And I leave the matter at that.
But a little more, finally, as to 'the new one': let her be just that. Do not take her out of this spiritually modest story into the raucous favor of current feminist narrative. And so I have, after all, supplied an epilogue, which can be used also as a prologue.
While my later reviewing of the stories is confined to just a few, the prompting for it being almost accidental, not, at any rate, programmatic, an example of what can happen when commentary is taken in hand by Criticism is provided in a treatment of 'Eve's Side of It' and 'In the End.' It is ground for arguing both the futility of visitations of commentary by authors to their writings, and their serviceability at least where danger of defective understanding or arbitrary interpretation has become evident. A book recently published in which feministic analysis is employed as an instrument of literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic—The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, is citable in support of both views. The authors have chosen a short passage from 'Eve's Side of It' to use as a front-of-the-book epigraph because Lilith is named in it, describing me in the body of the book as depicting Lilith as "an archetypal woman Creator"; and they have adopted a short passage from 'In the End' as an epigraph for the first chapter. It is clear from their notes that they know these stories from their Chelsea appearance, and so have seen my comments accompanying them there. No reference is made to what I wrote on the first in specific cautioning. The spirit of what I wrote on the second, which reflects a conception unallied to feministic ideology, is disregarded. The passages are cast, with implied authoritativeness, as relevant to the authors' theses. The ineffectiveness, here, of my commentary can be reasonably viewed as evidence of particular need of its general availability.
The l
ittle commentary on the third of the last four stories, 'Privateness', should have some use as chasing away temptation to read it as an exercise in realism of a stoic pathos. My commentary on 'In the End', in which I stress the story's being no feminist tract, should present no difficulty for readers who have made their way to the book's last pages (these bearing upon the content of the last pages of the original Progress of Stories!).
ON 'PRIVATENESS'
Will I be gilding the obvious, if I declare this bare little story an idyll of sanity, a reduction of the course of perfect love to the mechanism of simplicity? This life of two is described as capturing the peace that does not pass understanding. All in it is of a perfect unremarkableness, but nothing in it is 'ordinary': the story takes into the interior or human acceptance of humanness. It is, in its picturing of this, of the natural material of revelation.
ON 'IN THE END'
Here, there is no revelatory procedure! This is a translation of intuitive apprehensions of the nature of human existence, as being of a tenor that is at once cosmically and humanly real, into a story-form of understanding: the task of explaining the tenor of the apprehensions is entrusted to the imagination. All such attempts to justify very seriously conceived ideas of a veritability obtaining real as better than intellectual inventions with imaginative specifications have the peculiarity of combining the strange and the familiar in their picturing. The story-effort will combinedly satisfy and not-satisfy because the story carries a cargo of factuality in its imagination-hold: can it be factually as well as imaginatively successful?
For me, the non-satisfying aspect of this story concentrates itself in the dicta that rise up, in the story's closing offices, from the depths of its burden of factual significance. Yet the story needed some relief of literary expression; in these dicta, the element of factual significance has been transmuted into vaporous effusions that curl their way out of sight—the story-vessel being as carried along with them into disappearance.
Are children 'really' omens of despair—the beasts, of familiar evil? There are senses arguable by which the two declarations have some factual reasonableness. Skipping to the attributions of envy to flowers, scorn to rocks, feigning to water: likewise, there are senses arguable, for these, that are capable of serving as glosses of fact, in delicate evaluations of significance. But the final pronouncement is the good-bye to itself of the story's freight of factualistic implication as it evaporates into problematicalness. Those who are tempted to linger over that pronouncement, detaining it from its work of clearing the story-horizon of all residual clouds of prophetic suggestion, will find that nothing more is suggested in it but that complete knowledge of what will be, as it becomes knowledge of what is, dissolves the difference between story and fact, and puts an end to endings.
It may be appropriate to say here that the temptation to linger is very characteristic of us all, as we fight our way to fullness of wisdom between the distractions of actual story and those of as yet only conjecturable fact.
On those who may feel my report on my surviving interest in the stories to trespass on their own interest distractingly, I urge a deferring of impatience with me. Readers themselves can acquire, in time, concerns of conscience towards writing they care about, and know all the promptings and pangs of responsibility of the author.
Table of Contents
Title page
THE STORIES OF THE FIRST EDITION
I: Stories of Lives
SOCIALIST PLEASURES
THE FRIENDLY ONE
SCHOOLGIRLS
THE SECRET
THE INCURABLE VIRTUE
DAISY AND VENISON
THREE TIMES ROUND
II: Stories of Ideas
REALITY AS PORT HUNTLADY
MISS BANQUETT, OR THE POPULATING OF COSMANIA
III: Nearly True Stories
THE STORY-PIG
THE PLAYGROUND
A FAIRY TALE FOR OLDER PEOPLE
A LAST LESSON IN GEOGRAPHY
IV: A Crown for Hans Andersen
V: More Stories
IN THE BEGINNING
EVE'S SIDE OF IT
PRIVATENESS
IN THE END
OTHER EARLY STORIES
INTRODUCTION
from Anarchism Is Not Enough, 1928
Three Stories About Unexpressed Feelings, Including Mine, About People, About Me
HOW CAME IT ABOUT?
HUNGRY TO HEAR
IN A CAFÉ
A Story About the Realness of Story Unrealness and the Unrealness of Story Realness
AN ANONYMOUS BOOK
from Experts Are Puzzled, 1930
Stories That Make a Point of Going No Further Than They Go, This Being Their Point
MADEMOISELLE COMET
THE FORTUNATE LIAR
MOLLY BARLEYWATER
BUTTERCUP
THE FABLE OF THE DICE
PERHAPS AN INDISCRETION
ARISTA MANUSCRIPT
THAT WORKSHOP
FINALE
A Later Story: CHRISTMASTIME (1966)
SOME STORIES IN REVIEW
SEQUEL OF 1964 TO 'A LAST LESSON IN GEOGRAPHY'
SEQUEL OF 1974 TO 'A LAST LESSON IN GEOGRAPHY' (HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED)
ON 'IN THE BEGINNING'
ON 'EVE'S SIDE OF IT'
ON 'PRIVATENESS'
ON 'IN THE END'