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Monday, October 5, 2009

Books The Walking Literary Dead

Posted by Paul Constant on Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 4:57 PM

This feature from the Baltimore City Paper theorizes that the last paragraph of Joyce's "The Dead" has killed modern short story writing:

Let's recapitulate what goes on in that last paragraph. Gabriel Conroy, a college professor in his 30s, looks out the window at the snow falling softly over Ireland and the Bog of Allen, thinking wistfully about the fact that even though his wife isn't sleeping with another man, she wishes she was. She's just told him about her first love, Michael Furey, who died at 17. Generous tears fill his eyes. There's a keen sense of dissolution. Gabriel has coined a phrase for the aesthetic effect: distant music.

Right this moment, there are armies of writers going through workshops, getting their work ruthlessly dissected as they try to create that lyrical effect of waning poignancy.

(Oh, um: Spoiler alert?)

There are lots of problems with short story writers, of course. I think the culture of MFA programs have more to stand trial for than James Joyce does, but I attended a reading just last week that featured a half-baked life lesson that could have erupted straight out of a bad understanding of "The Dead". If I never read another short story that ends with a paragraph that includes the phrase "As I looked out on [the misty morning plains, the ruins of my life, my children's sleeping faces, etc.] I realized..." I will die a happy man.

Comments (5) RSS

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Maybe I don't understand the use of the term "modern" here, but didn't, like, ALL modern short story writing take place since Joyce? He seems an odd culprit for its death, considering how much fantastic short fiction has occurred since.

Sorta off topic: you mentioned you were a fan (I'm a huge fan), so be sure to check out George Saunders new piece of fiction in the New Yorker if you haven't already.

Posted by Dougsf on October 5, 2009 at 5:24 PM

I read for a literary magazine, sort of. I'd say we get bad Joyce imitations, bad Hemingway imitations, and bad Burroughs imitations in roughly equal measure. That's William of course, not Edgar Rice. Perhaps it is possible to classify MFA programs by what writers their students produce bad imitations of.

Posted by Brian Conn on October 5, 2009 at 7:55 PM

Plenty of novels and short stories ended with a sense of waning poignancy before Joyce, and plenty have ended with that since he wrote "The Dead".

The majority of short stories will always be bad because the majority of ANY art form will always be bad. That is what makes art so precious and wonderful: such a small portion will ever come close, let alone achieve, the ideal of any given viewer/reader/listener.

For me, The Dead is one of those. And there is a huge difference between how The Dead ends and the generic meditative sappy bad ending Mr. Constant cites. There is conclusion, no rectifying of Gabriel's disquiet. Writing an ending like that takes guts and understanding of how unassailable the questions raised in the story are. If someone doesn't get that, they need to be discouraged from writing in any form other than for themselves. That is the job of teachers in university. Like most writers, most teachers lack the guts to do that. To think that it has ever been any different is silly.

I've always liked what Harold Bloom said about what is required to have a passion for deep reading (I think the same applies to serious writing and just about every other art form): a love of solitude.

Posted by Lilting Missive on October 5, 2009 at 8:22 PM

I read for a genre-fiction magazine, but we get plenty of subs from MFA students. I've seen this reach for poignancy, but I rarely read as far as the end. What I usually see is beginnings taken from John Gardner's barn-describing exercise. That's the one where you describe a barn where the owner's son died in the war and you can't mention the man, the son, or the war. What you get is "mood" without any clue as to whose story it is or what is going on.

Posted by mint chocolate chip on October 6, 2009 at 11:00 AM

Waning poignancy is over-rated. What we need is more Zombies.

Posted by Michael Perridge on October 7, 2009 at 4:23 AM