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How to Read, Write, and Interpret Fiction: Authorial Strategies and Literary Technique

Introduction

The most effective way to understand how an author's textual choices lead to a desired result is to read thousands of texts. Over many years, such an avid reader would come to absorb the stories and their construction by way of a kind of literary osmosis, but such marinating in the sauce of technique is not always possible. The student of literature--or the writer interested in textual interpretation--might work through the thousands of permutations each strategy can offer the writer, but without a formal understanding of the craft, they run the danger of writing stories which do not quite jell, or readings that refuse to be supported by the text.

Such flailing in the shallows surrounded by thousands of stories, leads the reader to put his or her oar in the turbid waters of explanatory reference works. The literary world offers little besides lists of literary terms with definitions, however. Even those anthologies which cater to undergraduate students make only the most cursory readings and often are limited to slim biographical prefaces before each anthologized entry. Beyond the casual explication offered by dictionaries of literary terms and anthologies, only a few works try to take on the diverse world of literary strategies with an eye to explaining the subtlety and power they offer the writer and critic.

When I was an undergraduate student I thought of myself as a reader, and my professors' off-handed statements about the omniscient narrator or the use of motifs didn't surprise me, although how they were chained to authorial intent often remained obscure. The choices authors made, and the implications of their strategies, were of less interest to my professors than the outcome. I supplemented what I was being taught by reading more closely, looking for the techniques and their use in the texts I was reading for my classes. That proved to be an uneven way to learn about the choices authors make, however, and I was still at sea when it came to the implications of those choices for the text's performance or intent.

My pathway to understanding the use of literary techniques, as well as how to explore and describe those implications, was a long one that led to but did not culminate with a PhD. Along that tortuous way I absorbed the craft unevenly, and had to unlearn much of what I'd been taught through the degrees. Only when I was teaching the use of literary technique, and began to think seriously about a way to explain what literary strategies offer the writer, did I understand that such knowledge is neither easy nor universal.

After twenty years of teaching at universities, I started to think about writing a guide that I would have found useful when I was going through the university system. I imagined at first such a guide as others I have seen, an alphabetical list of literary terms with definitions, such as the one offered by the Glossary. There are a number of those on the market, and many of them are much more comprehensive than the word list implies, but they falter as they grapple with the students' understanding of particular examples. The reader, armed only with definitions, is like someone trying to understand English through use of an ordinary dictionary rather than the Oxford multivolume set. Although a normal dictionary contains useful descriptions, defines the parts of speech the word belongs to, and often makes a statement about etymology, it does not compare to seeing the words in context. In that way, the Oxford Dictionary was a real innovation, for the shifting connotations of a word can be traced through the ages.

After teaching a course about literary technique a few times, I began to imagine a different type of guide, one founded in the literary texts it purported to describe. Although I do not intend this guide to either make a comprehensive reading of the historical context of the literary techniques in question, or provide a comprehensive readings of the texts under study, I think a view of the technique in its natural habitat, informing the story itself with the diverse ways it can be called to perform an author's intention, is a much more useful way to consider the profound subtlety such devices bring to the story.

This study begins by examining Michael Crummey's very short story "Bread," which relies on the reader's cultural understanding of both story codes and North American culture to provide much of the implied content of the narrative. Crummey's story is a concise introduction to several aspects of story that a reader should be alert for, and provides a literary context for the stories that follow.

Two quite different overtly metafictional texts, George Bowering's "A Short Story" and Dale Bailey's "The End of the World as We Know It," are also useful as an introduction. They take on the task of teaching their readers how to think about stories as a construct and encourage writers to reflect on the use of a clichéd form. Both metafictions also provide a springboard to a better understanding of the evaluation of character and how it features in the story.

Although the use of character is often dismissed as almost a gimmick to encourage reader interest, in terms of its use as a subject position, it directly informs the story. Although the use of character in this survey is hardly limited to merely three iterations, Kim Stanley Robinson's "A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations," Terry Bisson's "England Underway," and Thomas King's "Joe the Painter and the Deer Island Massacre" explore the implications of character as a technique for the delivery of the authors' arguments.

Once the tone of the study has been established, and the reader has begun to understand the literary terms the text uses, it begins to examine the thorny issue of narrative voice. Examining the first person or unreliable narrator, the sections on the first person narrator range from the use of the unreliability of the narrator in an epistolary form in Richard Bissell's "Mike Polk" and the retrospective child narrator in his "Mohamad Ali," Thomas King's "Borders," and Fritz Leiber's "A Pail of Air." With Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," the unsettling world of a private journal by a mentally ill narrator is explored, as well as the fertile ground of the untrustworthy delivery of textual information that has already been implied by an analysis of the child narrator.

Although the omniscient narrator is largely seen as objective, which is evident in its use in history and science textbooks as well as news reports, its truly omniscient form is rarely used. More often, writers make use of the limited omniscient. This allows for a type of unreliability just as much as the first person narrator. In Jack Hodgins' "By the River," the limited omniscient narrator follows a delusional abandoned wife, and in George R. R. Martin's "Dark, Dark were the Tunnels" the narrative switches between a mutated human descendant and the lunar colonists who have come to find them. In both cases, the narrator structure allows for the author to play with the reader's expectations. As well, both stories encourage an initial reading that the reader, upon reflection, ultimately rejects.

This same type of authorial trickery works through an apparent objective narrative voice, such as is found in Thomas King's "How Corporal Colin Sterling Saved Blossom, Alberta, and Most of the Rest of the World as Well," where the objective narrator proves to become gradually more intrusive and biased, and Carol Emshwiller's "Killers," in which the mundane and apparently objective narration of the post-apocalyptic life inadvertently hides a secret. In H. G. Wells' "The Star," Wells plays with a true objective narrator and its rather cold-hearted view of the world as he callously describes the devastation of the Earth by a planetary near-miss.

Stories with a particular rhetorical axe to grind use similar techniques to support their argument, and this study next considers the use of metaphor and imagery to evoke a particular moment in history. J. G. Sime's "Munitions" uses the limited omniscient narrator in her story about the nascent women's rights movement, but more importantly she uses the weather of the spring day and the youth of her protagonist, to evoke the changing social and economic status of women. Thomas King's "Totem" similarly enacts the dehumanizing effect of government policies on Indigenous people of Canada by limiting their voice to symbolic noises and their agency to an inanimate object. In "A Seat in the Garden," King continues his examination of colonization by examining the stereotypes applied to Indigenous people, as well as the more subtle and persistent dehumanization that exists in the present day. These more metaphorical representations call upon a series of strategies in order to both evoke the sentiment of a particular time and relate opaque institutional practices in a way a reader can understand, and thereby become apt strategies for their authors.

Once the reader has their footing, this study sets farther out to sea, until we are in the deep water of stories which disrupt the typical narrative in order to tell a broader story about how stories are received. Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds" engages reader interest in a romantic narrative only to withdraw that abruptly enough that her reader questions where they learned to settle for romance as an automatic denouement, and Morgan Wyman's "The Second Life" is a thought experiment which teases the reader with their notion of an afterlife as it is presented by human cultures. In H. G. Wells' "Empire of the Ants," he takes on a more prosaic problem than ideological differences between either narrative desire for closure or religious verities. Wells asks his reader to imagine a world in which we are in danger of being toppled from our self-appointed thrones by mere insect life in a kind of reverse colonization of Europe. In his thought experiment, he begs us to evaluate the strengths which have led to our collective successes, and the weaknesses which are our downfall.

As the reader will note, the stories under study become more complex as the reader learns to trust their knowledge of the language of narrative interpretation. By this point the reader has mastered genre choice and its implications, has learned to be alert to the use of metafiction and different types of narrator, imagery and metaphor, and is comfortable with a host of other literary techniques. The last sections take on the use of magic realism and the playful use of dominant narratives for political or ideological purposes.

The intrusion of magic realism into the story is not just used for its own sake, but, rather like the stories from the history section which present a certain argument, magic realist texts often have ideological intentions. Bruno Schultz's "The Cinnamon Shops" represents the most straightforward use of the device in this survey, and in his story it both evokes and explores the imagination of a child turned loose on a spring night. The fantastical journey he relates in his prose, the compound adjectival strings and the fantastical use of light, work together to lend the child's imagination momentarily to the reading adult. The world of Gabriel García Márquez's "The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" is already fantastic, largely due to the superstitions which make up the villagers' daily fare, so the intrusion into their world of the fantastic is not remarked upon in a story which examines our fantastic views at least as much as it does the intrusion. Jorge Luis Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is more concerned with the eager acceptance of ridiculous and patently false ideology. The disruption he imagines confronting his world is largely the result of human abdication of responsibility for the ideas we let set our policy and make our decisions.

The last two stories from the collection, Cory Doctorow's "To Market, To Market: The Rebranding of Billy Bailey" and Thomas King's "One Good Story that One" do not at first blush seem to belong together, but they both employ broader narrative understandings--rather like Michael Crummey's "Bread" and Dale Bailey's "The End of the World as We Know It"--and seek to explore and undermine how those narratives are typically understood. Doctorow's "To Market, To Market" uses the well-known narrative of a schoolyard bully and the petty revenges of childhood to examine the market forces competing for the child's attention in his coming-of-age examination of commercialism. King's "One Good Story that One" is as complex as Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in how it imagines cultural narratives informing genocidal actions and contemporaneous entitlement. In his story King evokes--and thus establishes-a series of cultural understandings--many of them Indigenous--in order to call into question the cultural practices which enable and inspire the colonial enterprise.

Both students and writers should find this study useful for understanding what writers have done before them, and what the textual form allows and how literary devices assist in the delivery of story.

 
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