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.