Winging It: Realism and Invention in the Stories of Tobias Wolff Author(s): Martin Scofield Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 31, North American Short Stories and Short Fictions (2001), pp. 93-108 Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3509376 . Accessed: 08/10/2011 13:01
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Winging It: Realism and Invention in the Storiesof Tobias Wolff
MARTIN SCOFIELD
of University Kent
What is the best way to get a critical purchase on the stories of Tobias Wolff? Inevitably, he has hitherto been put in the critical filing cabinet in one of the sections of the drawer marked ‘Realism’. As long ago as 1963 Gordon Becker wrote in the introduction to his Documentsof ModernLiteraryRealism: ‘Certainly it would add to ease of discourse in the future if whatever happens next should be given a new name, and not be tagged with some variant or permutation of the word “realism”.” But this has not prevented the persistence of the (more or less serious) permutations: ‘Dirty Realism’ (Granta, 8 (Summer I983), a volume that brought together work by Wolff, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford,Jayne Anne Phillips, Bobbie Ann Mason, and others), ‘New Realism’, ‘Neo-domestic Neo-Realism’, ‘Wised Up Realism’, or John Barth’s engaging parody of the Polonius-like yen for classification, which might just fit Carver in his early phase, but hardly suits Wolff or the others: ‘Post-Alcoholic Blue-Collar Minimalist Hyperrealism’.2 The persistence of the term, so mocked and excoriated by critical theorists as to be by now, in certain circles, unusable, attests to the power of the word for ordinary non-academic readers, a power arising from the fact that, in some way or other, it appeals to a notion of the real.3 ‘Authenticity’, ‘truth to life’, ‘actuality’: concepts that turn out to involve such different claims and provide matter for whole volumes when examined by philosophers or literary theorists, seem to be terms the common reader and reviewer cannot do without. What, in the face of this, should the academic critic who is more concerned with individual works and authors than with the latest development of postmodern theory, do to get a hearing for an author who seems to appeal to the taste for just those discredited categories? It seems a hopeless task to take on (yet again) the question on a theoretical level: to ‘defend realism’ along the lines of, for instance, some (though not most, even there) of the contributors to George Levine’s conference collection Realism and
The Term Paper on Background of the Story
In a much lighter context, Giovanni’s room tries to intricately explain the reasons behind men becoming gays. The matter, discussed through experiential accounts brings the story into a more emotional presentation of the issue thus creating a more attractive environment of understanding for the readers to indulge into. Aside from this, the story written by James Baldwin also aims to reiterate the ...
ed. Documents Modern of Realism, by George Becker (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Literary 2 Cited Review,4I/42 (Winter I985), 7-22 by Kim Herzinger, ‘On the New Fiction’, TheMississippi TimesBookReview,28 December (p. 8).
For Barth, see also ‘A Few Words About Minimalism’, New York
3 A hostility to the term is noted by George Levine in his introduction to Realismand Representation (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, I993), p. 3. 1963), p. 37.
The Term Paper on Analysis of the Short Story: Super Toys Last All Summer Long
What is real? I have been trying to answer this question since we started our project about robots. It’s a very complex question. The classical sense of what is real is something natural, something that is not man-made, for example the nature or the universe. But the world isn’t the same as it was for hundred years ago and the reality concept has moved in time with the technology. For instance I ...
1986, pp. 1-2.
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(I993) or Raymond Tallis’s commonsensical In DefenceofRealism Representation (London: Arnold 1988).
But more importantly (and not to seem to throw in the sponge out of despair), perhaps it is unnecessary. First of all, the tastes of the intelligent general reader need hardly be (indeed will not be) straitjacketed by theoretical correctness. And secondly (more importantly for criticism), the categories of theory frequently seem not a little heavy-footed in comparison with the practice of actual short story writers and novelists (one hesitates to say ‘writers of fiction’, since many theorists will be only too ready to argue that they write fiction too).
One of my points about the stories of Tobias Wolffwill be that experimentalism and ‘realism’ (in some sense of the word) are not mutually exclusive, and that the experiments of the ‘realist’ writer are often more engaging than those of the more self-consciously avant-garde. Another is that the virtues of ‘the well-made story’ (a term Wolff is not unwilling to use) and even, at times, of the effect of’closure’ (a term so dreaded, it seems, by future-oriented theorists) still have their place. I shall also argue, in relation to these ideas, that the point of view of an authoritative author (another betenoirefor many recent theorists of fiction) is not incompatible with the freedom of the reader, and with that openness to other selves and the unknown self that current theory seems most to want. Indeed, how otherwise to become aware of the other than through an awareness of the limits of the conscious self? I also want to suggest that Wolff seems more successful at fiction (in the usual sense of the term), and at the short story form in particular, than in his memoirs and his one early novel; to suggest that fiction has a creative potential for truth-telling which autobiography and memoir seem to lack; and to suggest why the short story is becoming increasingly recognized as a form of equal importance with the novel.
The Dissertation on Analysis of the Story “the Gold Bug”
2.General character of style: The work is written in subjective style with elements of colloquial speech. 3.The functional style: The functional style of the story can be described as fiction with elements of suspense and stream of consciousness 4.The genre: The genre, the author wrote in, is a short story. Subgenre: mystery with elements of detective short 5.The form of the story: The form of the ...
Thewell-made story
The well-made story is a good starting point because Wolff’s unembarrassed willingness to recognize its virtues is part of the solid, craftsmanly side to his writing and also to his moral sense as a writer. (It is also better to start than to finish with this aspect, since it is ultimately Wolff’s moments of discovery, his free-winging moments of poetry and the freedom he gives the reader that I want to stress).Jay Woodruff, in an interview with Wolff, suggested that the story ‘Hunters in the Snow’ tests ‘some of the traditional conventions’, but Wolff demurred slightly: TW Not formally it doesn’t. jw No, because it’s very well made. TW It’s a ‘well-made’ story, true. jw The whole business about the dog, that’s very carefully constructed.
TW Exactly.4
4 Reprinted in Tobias Wolff ed. by James Hannah (New York: Twayne; London: Prentis Hall International, 1996), p. 124.
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Woodruff had been suggesting that the story seems to ‘spiral into the surreal’ as the two hunters drive through the snow, becoming more and more absorbed in their growing friendship, while their more aggressive buddy (whom they are supposed to be driving to a hospital for treatment for a gunshot wound) lies in the back of the truck, forgotten about. But Wolff seemed to want to hold on to some traditional realist virtues for the story, its authentically observed language of sentimental ‘male-bonding’ and its black humour. And the story is more disturbing and provocative, as a presentation of human sentimentality and insentience, if it is read as realist. The reader has to stop and think: is this a ‘tall tale’ or is it realistically plausible? And the ambiguous status between the two, with a definite tilt towards the latter, gives the story its charge. ‘The Chain’, another story with a violent outcome (Wolff is especially good as an analyst of violence), again illustrates Wolff’s power of tight construction and his preoccupation with moral questions. It also illustrates his gripping power of rendering action. The opening paragraph is one of his most arresting beginnings: Brian Gold was at the top of the hill when the dog attacked. A big black wolf-like animal attached to a chain, it came flying off a back porch and tore through its yard into the park, moving easily in spite of the deep snow, making for Gold’s daughter. He waited for the chain to pull the dog up short; the dog kept coming. Gold plunged down the hill, shouting as he went. Snow and wind deadened his voice. Anna’s sled was almost at the bottom of the slope. Gold had raised the hood of her parka against the needling gusts, and he knew that she could not hear him or see the dog racing toward her. He was conscious of the dog’s speed and of his own dreamy progress, the weight of his gumboots, the clinging trap of crust beneath the new snow. His overcoat flapped at his knees. He screamed one last time as the dog made its lunge, and at that moment Anna flinched away and the dog caught her shoulder instead of her face. Gold was barely halfway down the hill, arms pumping, feet sliding in the boots. He seemed to be running in place, held at a fixed, unbridgeable distance as the dog dragged Anna backwards off the sled, shaking her like a doll. Gold threw himself down the hill helplessly, then the distance vanished and he was there.5 For that kind of writing the word ‘riveting’ does not seem a cliche. The relentless drive of the opening is continued in the strong chain of cause and effect (one of the connotations of the title) that binds the story together. The revenge enacted by Gold’s cousin makes Gold feel obliged to carry out a reciprocal, if more trivial, piece of violence (damaging a car), and this leads to more violence and the accidental death of a victim unconnected with any of the previous acts. The chain of events and the moral point behind it might seem banal if it were not for Wolff’s accuracy of rendition, and interest in character. Gold (like Wolff himself) is a Jew who has been brought up a Catholic, and he puts some of his positive qualities down to this background. But he had certain other tendencies, less dear to him, that he also suspected of being Jewish. Corrosive self-mockery. Bouts of almost paralyzing scepticism. Physical
The Essay on How Does the Story Encourage the Reader to Admire Scheherazade?
The author in the story uses many linguistic devices such as metaphor, superlatives, similes and strong adjectives to encourage the reader to admire Scheherazade. The author uses superlatives to set up the story such as he describes Scheherazade’s beauty “Excelled that of any girl in the Kingdom of Persia. This gives the story a background of extreme power and amazing people; an exotic world ...
The Essay on Story Film Moore Point
"Roger and Me" The film was one that utilized and demonstrated many techniques found in the genre of documentary. Michael Moore took every aspect of making a film and flawlessly executed it. The resulting product was one that was to the point and interesting. The first thing that I realized was Moore's ability to use B role and integrate it seamlessly into the film. One example would be when he ...
s TheNightIn Question (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), pp.
131-32.
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awkwardness.A disposition toward passivity, even surrender,in the face of bullying people and oppressive circumstances. Gold knew that these ideas of Jewishness were also held by anti-Semites, and he resisted their influence, without much success. (p. 137) It is this resistance that leads him to steel himself to carry out the revenge for his cousin. At the end of the story any sense of over-determination we might get from the chain of cause and effect is lightened by the chance way Gold comes to feel the weight of his guilt. The focus changes in the last two pages to the school-friend of the boy who has been killed, who goes to Gold’s shop to rent a video. Garvey had not known Marcel, but when cornered with a question about why he is not at school, he ‘decided to blow a little smoke’ at Gold and, like a number of Wolff’s characters, invents a story. It is about what a good guy Marcel was, how he could bring people together, how he was a peacemaker, ‘and that’s the best thing you can be’. Mr Gold agrees. ‘He put his hands on the counter and lowered his head’. Then Garvey saw that he was grieving, and it came to him how unfair a thing it was that Marcel Foley had been struck down with his life before him, all his sunny days stolen away. It was wrong, and Garvey knew that it would not end there. He touched Mr Gold’s shoulder. ‘That man’ll get his’, he said. ‘He’ll get what’s coming to him. Count on it.’ (p. 148) Instead of focusing on Gold’s realization, Wolff ends the story with a little incident from a fresh perspective, which both underscores the moral point and is also true to the element of chance that has played against the chain of determinism in the story. The author is very much in control of his material here and indeed the story has the quality of a moral fable. Wolff has spoken of his admiration for Flannery O’Connor, another Catholic writer (Hannah, p. 139), and this seems relevant here, particularly in this case of violent event and moral realization. But he has also expressed his preference for those stories of O’Connor in which she shows some affection for her characters (as in ‘Parker’s Back’).
The Essay on “This is the story of a young man/woman who was able to escape from a difficult past to make a success of…”
I tuned off the school principal's voice at this point, ignoring his excited gestures and flying spittle.I was eight then. The man came out of nowhere, and I remember pain, horror, screaming, torn clothes, more screaming…It was only afterwards, in the hospital, that I understood what had happened to me. Twenty years ago the society wasn't exactly sympathetic towards rape victims; it still isn't ...
In ‘The Chain’ there is sympathy for Gold, and also for the cruder cousin; but it is a particularly fine touch of sympathy to give a sudden access of awareness at the end to the unwitting school-friend.
Authority, closure, andfreedom
One of the consequences of ‘the death of the author’ is the bereavement of the reader: the main quality of Barthes’s ‘writerly’ text seems to be that the reader has to do all the work. This may be advantageous to the academic theorist who is then justified in ‘producing’ the meaning of the text. (‘Meaning’ for postmodern theorists is always ‘deferred’, of course, but sometimes it seems that it is only deferred until the theorist has produced it).
Tobias Wolff’s stories frequently give the reader, among other things, the satisfaction of a shaped and finished work which aspires to a kind of unity,
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reaches a conclusion, and suggests a way or ways in which it might be read. Readers can, of course, refuse that reading, and either judge the story adversely or find a better meaning for it (or even both, as in the kind of criticism that sees the work as symptomatic of some social or cultural condition or attitude):but at least they know what they are up against. The areas that Wolff’s stories explore also frequently involve moral questions, which means that the reader has something serious to think about. In ‘An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke’, the slightly reserved and old-fashioned but sympathetic figure of the eponymous protagonist, who is the story’s ‘point of view’, is set against the ‘flashy’ figure of the careerist academic, Riley. (The question of relative sympathy will of course vary from reader to reader, and Wolff’s treatment is even-handed enough to suggest his own sympathies while leaving room for others’).
Riley is rumoured to have had affairs with some of his students and Brooke suspends his usual discreditingof rumours in Riley’s case; but what Brooke dislikesjust as much (when Riley turnsround in church) are ‘the handlebarsof Riley’s unnecessarily large moustache’, suggesting his purely personal reaction. The story is about Brooke’s one-night affair with Ruth, a woman he meets at a conference. Riley becomes aware of it and pointedly reassuresBrooke of his discretion. Brooke decides not to tell his wife but he reaches an insight, of a kind: Never again,he decided,wouldhe sit in the backof the churchand watchRiley. whathe Fromnow on he wouldsit in the frontof the churchand let Riley,knowing knew,watch him. He would kneel beforeRiley as we must all, he thought,kneel beforeone another.6 This direct moral reflection, surprisingenough in contemporary fiction, has an undoubted force. But were this the only element of the conclusion, the reader might feel it was rather too easily achieved. Closer attention makes one more aware of the sentence that precedes this moral epiphany: ‘Without really being aware of it, Brooke saw the events of his life as forming chapters, and when he felt a chapter drawing to a close he liked to tie it up with an appropriate sentiment’ (p. 5′).
Without negating the moral reflection, this prevents us from taking it too complacently. And the two short concluding paragraphs also militate against the latter possibility: the first tells how the chapter was not ended for Ruth, who throughout that winter sends Brooke anonymous love poems with no return address. The second tells of how Brooke’s wife finds a heavy scent on one of his shirts, and feels unworthy because of her suspicions: ‘The doubt passed from her mind to her body; it became one of those flutters that stops you cold from time to time for a few years, and then goes away’ (p. 52).
Brooke’s is the ‘point of view’ in the story, but the author retains a broader perspective; and that final ‘you’ is a small,
6
TheStories TobiasWolff(London:Picador, 1988), pp. 51-52. of
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seismic shift which in the story’s last sentence nudges the reader into a new, less comfortable position. There is a comparable combination of authorial point of view and freedom for the reader in ‘Lady’s Dream’ from Wolff’s most recent collection of stories, The Night in Question.The narrative is in the third person (as are twenty-six out of Wolff’s thirty-eight hitherto collected stories), but the point of view is for roughly the first and last third of the story that of the protagonist, Lady. Travelling by car with her husband Robert, Lady dreams of her life in the American South with her mother and sister, and in particular of a summer afternoon before her marriage, waiting at home for Robert to arrive on leave from the army. The middle section of the story takes Robert’s point of view and recounts his journey, up to the point where he advances towards Lady who is sitting with the others on the porch of their house and thinks of the strawberries that they will have prepared for him: ‘He takes the steps as if he means to devour her.’ At this point the point of view switches back to Lady’s dream, though the voice is still the narrator’s, reporting Lady’s words which are both words said in her dream world and words spoken out of her sleep to Robert in the car: No, she’s saying, no. She’s talking to him and to the girl whose life he seeks. She knows what will befall her if she lets him have it. Stay here on this porch with your mother and your sister, they will soon have need of you. Gladden your father’s eye yet awhile. This man is not for you. He will patiently school you half to death. He will kindly take you among unbending strangersto watch him fail to be brave. (p. 172) (This last phrase alludes to Robert’s unconscious motive of proving himself to his father, which we have seen from Robert’s viewpoint in the central section of the story).
This mingling of origins for the words, between the past and the present character and the narrator, gives a sense of the narrator’s sympathy while at the same time allowing for separate perspectives of the younger and the older character. In the dream, Lady as a girl leans forward to brush a smudge from Robert’s cheek. There’s no turning back from this touch. She can’t be stopped. She has a mind of her own, and she knows something Lady doesn’t. She knows how to love him. Lady hears her name again. Wait, sir. She blesses the girl. Then she turns to the far-rolling fields she used to dream an ocean, this house the ship that ruled it. She takes a last good look, and opens her eyes. (p. 173) In the space of a seven-page story, with its subtle manipulation of voice, time, and point of view, a whole world and relationship are evoked. The characters are given the freedom of their different perspectives. It has to be admitted that the story moves to a conclusion which endorses the ‘conventional’ value of marriage: for some readers that will doubtless be a problem.
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But the story finds its own way there, and opposing voices (particularly that of the younger woman) are allowed their own resistance to it. ‘Someof theteachers women’ are One of the notable facts about Wolff’s stories is how many of them, indeed, focus on or take their point of view from women characters. This may at first seem surprising in the light of Wolff’s popular image as a man’s writer, a chronicler of war, male friendship, a boy’s coming of age, and the rest, though it is not so surprising when one thinks of the importance of the figure of Wolff’s mother in his memoir This Boy’s Life. In ‘Face to Face’ Virginia, abandoned by her husband and living alone with her son, takes a trip up to Vancouver with Robert, a shy and lonely divorcee. The night they spend together is at first awkward (Robert comes to bed only when he thinks she is asleep) and ultimately (for her) unpleasant: Robert’s love-making when he wakes is blindly self-absorbed, refusing to acknowledge her. ‘At first Virginia wanted to kill him. After a while she decided she would settle for understanding him’ (Stories,p. 78).
Her mixture of dislike, discomfort, and compassion on the subsequent drive home is finely done. But there is no sentimentalizing of the pathos of human failure: an equally important ingredient of her reaction is a sense of her own strength. One of Wolff’s ironic recognitions in the concluding lines is that pity, in its commonest human forms, involves the inescapable sense of superiority: ‘Don’t give up, Robert. Not just because it didn’t work with me.’ She wanted to say more, but he had left her, gone back to his injury. She exercised her pity on him. The road slipped under the tyres. Virginia stared greedily ahead. Poor Robert, she thought. (p. 82) The story ‘Desert Breakdown, 1968’ also has as its concluding focus the figure of a woman becoming aware of her own strength. Krystal is stranded with her two children at a lonely gas station in California while her husband Mark, a small-time singer, goes off to find a new distributor for the car. The central part of the story focuses on Mark’s lift in an old hearse with some eccentric film-extra types and his fantasies of abandoning his family and taking up with them: he makes a getaway from the hearse when their craziness starts turning ugly, but his weakness is still apparent when, without enough money finally to buy the distributor, his only resort is to ring the parents towards whom he has been fantasizing revenge throughout the story. Meanwhile Krystal, waiting in the cool, dark, run-down cabin of the gas station owners (the atmosphere of the place is vividly evoked), dreaming of her German background, has to cope with the rednecks who teach her small son to say ‘bitch’ to her. In a fit of anger she berates them and belabours them with a plank: their consternation and sheer surprise is wonderfully comic; and the way the owner Hope’s tough, violent husband is shown up as a straw man is a fine addition to the popular Western tradition of the bully
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humiliated. Hope has told how she fell for Webb: ‘This one day he came into our station on his Harley. It was cold. His cheeks were red and his hair was all blown back’ (Stories,p. 3 I0).
This is recalled in the later scene in a brilliant image: ‘As he danced over the hot sand his hair flapped up and down like a wing’ (p. 326).
The women in this story seem to be the ones who can hold things together; the final image is Hope returning with the supper: ‘As she drew near Krystal waved, and Hope raised her arms. A rabbit hung from each hand, swinging by the ears.’ ‘Passengers’, ‘Coming Attractions’, ‘Leviathan’, and ‘In the Garden of the North American Martyrs’ all have central female characters, all very different from one another, who demonstrate or discover different kinds of strength. I shall discuss the last (about a woman academic) later in another context; but in case the reader should feel Wolff gives the ‘strong’ woman some kind of sentimental overemphasis, I would like to draw attention to ‘Sister’, which deftly sketches, in a few hours’ action (jogging in the park, talking to two men) the predicament of a young woman defined and trapped by a man’s world, her only freedom a certain self-awareness. One gets the measure of Wolff’s quality as a writer when one realizes the impossibility of paraphrasing, or summing up with a single quotation, even a nine-page story like this. But, as often, it is Wolff’s conclusion that concentrates so much of the suggestiveness of the story, here the sense of the young woman’s exclusion, resignation, tenacity, and capacity for life, as she thinks of her brothers in a bar after a day’s hunting: ‘And outside in the car the dogs will be waiting, ears pricked for the least sound, sometimes whimpering to themselves, but mostly silent, tense, and still, watching the bright door the men have closed behind them’ (Stories,p. 268).
and Story memoir
Tobias Wolff is perhaps best known for his autobiographical This Boy’s Life (1989), which tells the story of his life with his mother and his vigorous but bullying stepfather, from age eleven to the time he goes off to private school at sixteen. The book has Wolff’s characteristic vividness and also a strong sense of optimism and possibility, the belief in the value of an idea of the self pursued with determination and not a little bravado and cunning. The story is told with all Wolff’s sense of literary shaping and structuring. It often shapes itself into short-story-like episodes, without being simply a string of anecdotes. The opening paragraph describing himself and his mother witnessing a runaway truck, the suddenness, the shock and his own ten-yearold eye for the main chance (‘I saw that the time was right to make a play for souvenirs’) is a miniature short story in itself.7 And the concluding episode, once again in a car (that icon of American freedom), singing hymns with his
7 ThisBoy’sLife(London: Picador, 1990), p. 3.
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schoolfriends as they climb higher into the mountains, has the resonance, the ironic finality which is not quite finality, of the best stories: ‘It was a good night to sing, and we sang for all we were worth as if we’d been saved’ (p. 243).
But one wonders if it is quite right to call the book Wolff’s ‘best work’ (as for instance Blake Morrison did in a long and informative newspaper piece).8 In my experience, at any rate, there is something constricting in the awareness that we are tied to fact, with the young Tobias Wolff himself as hero, and only some of the names changed, perhaps to protect the guilty as well as innocent. Or are we tied to fact? The young Tobias’s own genius for deceptions and tall stories is one of the themes of the book, after all. How is one to know? A certain kind of critic might say it cannot matter, since all stories, all versions of reality, are constructed. But I suggest that it does, and that generic expectation is crucial here: if this is a memoir then we want to be as sure as we can be that it tells what happened. At any rate it seems reassuring that Wolff has put on record that ‘I used to lie a lot, but not anymore. That’s something I reserve for my fiction now’ (Hannah, p. 135).
The ‘lies’ that appear in fiction are of course in a different category, but the paradox that Shakespeare’s Touchstone identified: ‘The truest poetry is the most feigning’, remains a teasing one, and the question ‘How does- or tell the truth?’ is one of the most important that simply, does -fiction criticism can ask. Pragmatists such as Richard Rorty are more likely to feel that a more important question would be something like ‘How does fiction contribute to our sense of what we want for society?’9 But it seems to me that if one of the things we need in order to answer this question is a sense of how things are, as well as how they might be, then the question of truth is not so easily disposed of. At any rate, the question I want to ask here is: ‘What kind of truth can Wolff’s short fictions give us which is not available to the genre of memoir?’ One thing the short story can allow for is, paradoxically, time. The short story can afford to deal with events in slower motion. Because Wolff’s focus is generally on one particular incident or episode, the story can afford to dwell on that and to look backwards and forwards in time in relation to that moment. Frank O’Connor put this capability of the short story succinctly and suggestively: ‘The short story represents a struggle with Time [. . .]; it is an attempt to reach some point of vantage from which the past and the future are equally visible.’10 In This Boy’s Life, on the other hand, we feel the constant press and hurry of fact and incident. Perhaps because of Wolff’s understandable aim not always to be second-guessing his younger self, and to give the sense of a life where the future (as in all lives) is unknown to the
on TheIndependent Sunday, October 1994, pp. 10- 13. 30 9 Compare Richard Rorty: ‘Most battles between alternative readings of literary texts seem like battles about what is important’, (‘AnAntirepresentationalistView’, in Levine, p. 128).
10 TheLonely Voice (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1963), p. I05.
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subject, there is little change of time perspective, and little sense of the present self’s relation to the past. There is also almost the feeling of too much material to be ‘got in’: I mentioned the ‘miniature short story’ quality of the opening paragraph: it makes for a swift and bravura opening, but when one comes to it from the short stories there is almost a sense of rush, of lack of time to take the incident in. As in most of the episodes of the memoir, there is a brisk sticking to perceptual details: this makes for a direct, forceful, action-filled narrative which is doubtless in part responsible for the memoir’s popularity. The point of view is naturally always that of the boy, and Wolff has perhaps deliberately chosen not to complicate the narrative with reflection, changes of perspective or subject position, or with alterations to a strictly linear flow of time. What this amounts to, in sum, is a limitation of imaginative freedom, a limitation which is, I suggest, endemic to the genre. Some of Wolff’s stories about childhood will provide contrasting examples of the freedoms of short fiction. ‘Firelight’ is a first-person narration about an unnamed boy and his mother looking for an apartment to rent in Seattle. It is clearly related to the autobiographical situation sketched in the first paragraph at the beginning of the second section (entitled ‘Uncool’) of This Boy’s Life, where Tobias and his mother are doing the same thing in the same city. This memoir chapter deals mainly with their life in the boardinghouse and Tobias’s exploits and relationships with friends at school: there would seem to have been material left over from that period that could be used in fiction. Since the story is published as fiction, how close the events are to actual events does not, of course, matter. We are (quareaders of fiction) not constrained by questions of that kind. What matters is the effect, and the effect here is one of authentic experience felt inwardly and shaped into a form that both is specific and has a wider resonance. The boy and his mother visit an apartment in an older house in the university district, which turns out to be owned by a university professor, a ponderous, buffalo-like man with a massive head. The boy, cold from walking around the city in winter, luxuriates in the warmth of the open fire, while Dr Avery’s wife offers them some of ‘Dr Avery’s brownies’ and Sister (the daughter) then shows them round the apartment. In the subsequent conversation Dr Avery holds forth on the ‘Pseudo-Gothic humbug’ and ‘counterfeit experience’ of the university, while the boy basks in the warmth of the fire: ‘The sound of his voice made me drowsy with assurance, like the drone of a car engine when you’re lying on the backseat, going home from a long trip [… ]. Nodding by the fire, torpid and content, I had forgotten that this was not my home’ (The Night in Question,pp. 194-95), until his mother’s voice rouses him. Looking back from his adult vantage point, the narrator ventures an ironic guess at Dr Avery’s situation, ‘denied tenure [ . .] carrying his fight against mere appearances from one unworthy institution to the next’. Mrs Avery ‘consoles his wounded anima’ (a word Avery had used, which had been lost on the boy).
‘Her faith [.. .] is heroic’. The narrator now imagines Sister’s future
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and her rebellion against and reconciliation with her parents. The imagination has started inventing. It might have gone this way, or another way. I have made these people part of my story without knowing anything of theirs, just as I did that night, dreaming myself one of them. We were strangers. I’d spent maybe forty-five minutes in their apartment,just long enough to get warm and lose sight of the facts. (p. 196) ‘Losing sight of the facts’, fatal for memoir, becomes a condition for imaginative freedom and creation. And this in turn leads to the concluding qualified affirmation of the ‘dream of home’, a description of the narrator’s family fireside. The ending might have become sentimental (i.e. evoking the stock response with the stock image) but does not do so both because of the element of ironic detachment in the tone of the story, particularly in the treatment of the actual home life of the Averys, and because of the fine sense of the precariousness of the dream in the concluding lines: This is the moment I dream of when I am far away; this is my dream of home. But in the very heart of it I catch myself bracing a little, as if in fear of being tricked. As if to really believe in it will somehow make it vanish, like a voice waking me from
sleep. (p. 199)
Fiction also allows for greater experiment with structure as a means of exploring the paradoxical relation of moral reflection and the actual conditions of action and growth. In ‘Smorgasbord’ (in the same collection) the narrator is invited out to dinner by a prep-school acquaintance and the latter’s Spanish step-mother. During the dinner he flirts with the stepmother, boasting and lying about his relations with his girlfriend, but succeeds only in making her more amused. In bed that night he is ‘miserable about the things I’d said’: I understood that I had been a liar and a fool. [.. .] I picked up the new picture my girlfriend had sent me, and closed my eyes, and when I had some peace of mind I renewed my promises to her. (p. 161) InJoyce’s ‘Araby’ the famous equivalent moment of shame and realization is the ‘epiphany’ at the ending of the story. But Wolff has other revelations up his sleeve. One is often reminded in Wolff’s stories of Raymond Carver’s suddenly particular version of epiphany: a phrase of Chekhov’s -‘and attracted Carver not only because of its everything became clear to him’suggestion of realization, but because it prompted him to wonder not only what now? There are ‘what has been unclear before’ but ‘Most of all as a result of such sudden awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of consequences and anticipation’.” In ‘Smorgasbord’ the sense of shame is not the relief end of the story: it is followed by a flash-forward to the narrator’s reunion with his girlfriend, and her sudden realization, in which he to his own surprise acquiesces, that he does not love her. A paragraph of moral
11 Fires(London: Picador, 1986), p. 23.
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reflection follows: ‘We’re supposed to smile at the passions of the young […]. Yet there was nothing foolish about what we felt. Nothing merely young. I just wasn’t up to it. I let the light go out’ (p. 162).
This again, might have been the end of the story, a conventional kind of closure. But the last two pages return to the night after the dinner where the narrator talks to the hitherto rather despised schoolfriend who accompanied him to the dinner with Garcia and the step-mother and together they decide to ‘buy a woman’, ‘whispering back and forth about how this thing might be done, and where, and when’. This ending clarifies the reasons for the break-up with the girlfriend, reported earlier (the narrator’s commitment to her was always largely imaginary).
But above all it ends the story on a note of amoral energy and a look towards the future. The structure of the fiction has incorporated certain conventional moral realizations but has subordinated them to a final effect of growth and development, something slightly anarchic but vital. Linear narration (the staple of memoir) has been disrupted in favour of imaginative reordering. Wingingit In an interview with Bonnie Lyons and Bill Oliver in i990, Wolffwas asked: ‘Why is lying so necessary to your characters’, and he replied: ‘The world is not enough, maybe?’. A few moments later he added: When I hitchhiked as a kid I used to lay these incredible stories on people, as a way of entertaining them – and myself. I didn’t even know what I was going to say. I’d just spin it out. Wing it. I used to lie a lot, but not anymore. That’s something I reserve for my fiction now. (Hannah, p. 135) ‘The world is not enough.’ That phrase perhaps puts in a nutshell why it is not entirely adequate to call Wolffa realist, if by realism we mean a faithful transcription of what already exists. One is reminded of Flaubert’s statement to Turgenev: ‘Reality, as I see it, should only be a springboard’ (Becker, p. 96).
Wolff’s stories are often in a mode we associate with formal realism, but there is more to them than that, and perhaps there was always more than that even to the great ‘realists’ such as Flaubert and Tolstoy. Perhaps the whole discussion of Realism is bedevilled by the fact that the great ‘realist’ writers were never realists in the sense that sees language as simply a mirror or transcription of reality. It is perhaps surprising that the confusion should have arisen if we remember that fiction must involve invention. Compare, again, Flaubert: ‘MadameBova?ycontains nothing from life. It is a completey invented story’ (Becker, p. 94; Flaubert’s emphasis).
Reality is a springboard, but once imagination or invention takes off from it, the story starts to wing it. One story of Wolff’s, ‘The Liar’, shows the roots of this process. The narrator tells how as a boy he told lies about his mother: he would write to friends saying how ill she was, or tell neighbours of tragic events that had not
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happened. It got so bad his mother consulted a doctor about it, but he could not find a reason for it and nor couldJames. The middle section of the story goes back to his earlier life when his father was still alive: his father used to read them Scott and Dickens, and used to tell stories himself, correct his wife’s stories, and point out the morals to the stories his friends told. In the last part of the story the doctor has a joke about solipsism (‘How can you prove to a solipsist that he’s not creating the rest of us?’) andJames and his mother talk about the paranoia of the neighbour who thinks she is being harmed by Rosicrucians, devil-worshippers, and communists. (‘But you don’t believe those stories of hers, do you?’ asks James.) The story raises questions about the roots of story-telling and about its perversions and corruptions. It ends with a moment which raises the possibility of’story’, of the ‘lying’ of fiction as a beneficent art. James takes a bus to Los Angeles to see his brother; the bus breaks down and he finds himself in the early morning, telling a story to his fellow passengers about how his parents were missionaries in Tibet and how he worked there as a refugee officer. They ask him to speak some Tibetan: They bent towards me. The windows suddenly went blind with rain. The driver had fallen asleep and was snoring gently to the swaying of the bus. Outside the muddy light flickered to pale yellow, and far off there was thunder. The woman next to me leaned back and closed her eyes and then so did all the others as I sang to them in what was surely an ancient and holy tongue. (Stories, 191) p. This has a poised irony, but there is still the possibility here that when the imagination takes off it moves into the realm of poetry and song. The short story as a form has sometimes been compared to the poem, but seems to me that short story criticism should pursue this avenue further than it has.12 Structure, image, symbol, motif, detail, rhythm, phrasing, tone, music are all fundamental to the art of the short story. The technique of ‘incidental’ descriptive detail which has greater significance than just scenesetting is one which is finely developed in Wolff. There is an example in ‘In the Garden of the North American Martyrs’ which Jay Woodruff drew attention to. Mary, the protagonist, and her friend Louise are driving through the countryside of upstate New York; Louise is talking volubly and self-centredly about her problems with her husband’s and children’s reaction to her ‘lover’: ‘they refuse to discuss the problem at all, which is very ironical because over the years I have tried to instil in them a willingness to see things from the other person’s point of view’ (Stories,p. I40).
Coming round a curve they caught two deer in the headlights. Their eyes lit up and their hindquarters tensed; Mary could see them trembling as the car went by. ‘Deer,’ she said. ‘I don’t know,’ Louise said, ‘Ijust don’t know. I do my best and it just never seems
to be enough’. (p. 4I1)
12 For one such discussion, see Eileen Baldeshwiler, ‘The Lyric Short Story: The Sketch of a History’, in TheNew Short ed. Story Theories, by Charles E. May (Athens: Ohio University Press), 994, pp. 231-4 .
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The possibility that Louise mistakes ‘Deer’ for ‘Dear!’ (which Woodruff points out) accentuates the point of the contrast between Mary’s and our sense of the natural world surrounding them and Louise’s self-deluding selfabsorption. The glimpse of wild nature, the deep forests which were there in the time of the eighteenth-century Jesuit martyrs of the story’s concluding passage, and long before, gives a suddenly deepened sense of place and perspective. Wolff commented on this as something that came to him in one of the later drafts of the story: ‘I was imagining myself going along the road, and the sense of the old country asserted itself in the great wilderness that underlies the veneer we live in’ (Hannah, p. I 13).
But the moment at which the story really takes off into another dimension of discourse is in the fine and comic conclusion. Mary discovers, from a student who is eager to impress her with the progressive credentials of the college where she is to be interviewed for a job (‘Some of the teachers are women’), that there is a rule that at least one woman should be interviewed for each appointment. Realizing she is simply the ‘token woman’ she scraps her intended presentation (which she had in fact borrowed from Louise) and gives, extempore, a lecture on the gruesome martyrdom of twoJesuit priests at the hands of the Iroquois. At the moment she reaches the climactic point of the dying speech of one of the martyrs she forgets the facts and invents, producing a prophetic denunciation of the corruption of society in the style of the Old Testament. As Lyons and Oliver point out, she ‘wings it’. And Wolff wings it too with the inspired comic detail of the close: ‘Louise was waving her arms. “Mary!” she shouted. But Mary had more to say, much more; she waved back at Louise, then turned off her hearing aid so that she would not be distracted again’ (p. I49).
Invention self-discovery and
Mary’s power to detach herself from the conventions of her immediate society and see for a moment through the eyes of a distant historical figure, to invent a new self, is of course related to the fiction writer’s power of projection. As in ‘Firelight’, the ability to imagine the story of the incidental figures in the narrative is the condition of the narrator’s more fully realizing his own position. It is also a stimulus to the imagination of the reader. The ability of fiction to create a new ‘subject position’ for the reader is one of the virtues sometimes claimed for experimental, ‘non-realist’ fiction.13 It is a process carried to extremes, for instance, in the experiments with a decentred voice in Beckett. But it seems to me that this kind of exploration is also possible in outwardly more ‘realist’ fiction like Tobias Wolff’s (realist, that is, in at least some of the connotations of the term such as everyday life, linear time, plausible motivation, and so on).
‘Our Story Begins’ exemplifies this.
Character See, for example, Thomas Docherty, Reading(Absent) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 86.
13
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A young would-be writer, working as a waiter in San Francisco, overhears a conversation in a coffeehouse between a husband and wife and a sardonic, professorial friend. The friend tells a story about Miguel, a young man who is brought back from the Philippines by a Monsignor Strauss. Miguel falls in love with Senga; she rejects him but he stalks her obsessively, finally pretending to be blind and following her to Portland despite a court order. As the professorial friend tells this story it becomes apparent that he is having an affair with the wife who is sitting beside him in the coffeehouse. At the point where the friend tells how he helped the ‘blind’ Miguel on to the bus for Portland, the triangular relationship becomes clear: Audrey put her hand on Truman’s. ‘Truman’, she said. ‘We have to talk about something.’ ‘I don’t get it’, Truman went on. ‘Why would he travel blind like that? Why would he go all that way in the dark?'(Stories, 340) p. A few moments later Truman is saying ‘This takes the cake’, and the trio are leaving the coffeehouse. The story of the young writer (the story of artistic beginnings), then, frames the story of the trio in the coffeehouse (the old everyday story of the eternal triangle, of the end and beginning of a relationship), and that in turn frames the story of Miguel (the strange, unfinished story of obsessive passion).
All three stories are beginnings: as George says at the beginning of his story ‘Our story begins.’ All this is done casually and naturalistically, without any sense of artifice, but the structure is clear. The suggestion is that the young writer finds his ‘beginning’ in his imaginative engagement with the scene in the coffeehouse, in which George and Audrey reach their beginning through a narrated tale. Fiction is a way towards action in the real world. And for the reader? His (or her) action cannot be included in the tale, of course, but there is a sense in which his story begins too. The story leaves the reader with a sense of heightened awareness towards living which the fictional immersion in other selves can bring. The concluding paragraph has all Wolff’s poetic sense of the unexpectedness of life, its mixture of real and surreal (the lobster) and of the mind’s continual power to project a future through the imagination: Charlie turned and started up the hill, picking his way past lampposts that glistened with running beads of water, past sweating walls and dim windows. A Chinese woman appeared beside him. She held before her a lobster that was waving its pincers back and forth as if conducting music. The woman hurried past and vanished. The hill began to steepen under Charlie’s feet. He stopped to catch his breath, and listened again to the foghorn. He knew that somewhere out there a boat was making its way home in spite of the solemn warning, and as he walked on Charlie imagined himself kneeling in the prow of that boat, lamp in hand, intent on the shining light just before him. All distraction gone. Too watchful to be afraid. Tongue wetting the lips and eyes wide open, ready to call out in this shifting fog where at any moment anything might be revealed. (p. 342) The contrasting ideas of home and of journeying, which one often finds separately at the ends of different stories by Wolff (‘Firelight’, ‘Face to Face’)
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are here held in tension in the image of the boat journeying home but through dangerous waters, ‘in spite of the solemn warning’. And the final clauses, while referring to Charlie, detach themselves to some extent from him by means of the grammar and become images of a state of mind which the reader assimilates to himself, an alertness which looks out beyond the confines of the story into a world in which anything might be revealed. At the end of the story our story begins.
