Radical Privacy

RADICAL PRIVACY THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MODERN CANADIAN SHORT STORY By LARRY FROLICK Integrated Studies Project submitted to Dr. Raphael Foshay in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts – Integrated Studies Athabasca, Alberta October, 2012 Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………… 3 Introduction…………………………………………………………….. 4 1. Condition Replaces Identity: Harvor, Munro, Valgardson………….. 7 2. No as Fashion: Gallant, Spencer, Garner…………………………….. 11 3. No as Politics: Atwood, Laurence, Moore…………………………… 15 4. What Happens After: Lowry, Levine, Kreiner……………………….. 17 5. Conclusion: The Critical Response…………………………………... 22 After Notes………………………………………………………………. 28 Bibliography…………………………………………………………….. 30 3 ABSTRACT The Modern short story is commonly regarded as the highest literary achievement of Canada’s postwar generation. Its central theme of liberation in refusal distinguishes it from European and American antecedents. The classic example pits a protagonist against the demands and temptations of domestic society in a quest for radical privacy — setting the writer against writing itself. But what happens after? The immediacy and transparency of the genre has recently found favour with a new generation of 21st Century writers, whose explorations of today’s Impossible World continue to demonstrate a hard-won formal mastery. Authors discussed: Margaret Atwood, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul Carlucci, Mavis Gallant, Hugh Garner, Wayne Grady, Elizabeth Harvor, Ernest Hemingway, Dean Irvine, Philip Kreiner, Margaret Laurence, Norman Levine, Malcolm Lowry, Brian Moore, Alice Munro, Viktor Shklovsky, Elizabeth Spencer, and W. D. Valgardson. 4 Introduction Fifty years ago the short story blossomed into this country’s dominant artistic form, easily outshining theatre, painting and architecture. Evidence for its sudden elevation are not hard to find. The genre was already a successful export item before 1960. Mavis Gallant’s one hundred published stories in The New Yorker began with “Madeline’s Birthday” in 1951, while Norman Levine’s work made the leap from obscure British literary journals to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, with his first story collection, One Way Ticket, published in London in 1961. Hugh Garner’s Best Stories, which won the 1963 Governor-General’s Award, alerted the reading public to a gathering storm of resident writers who now pushed the form to its radical limits. Their newly confident stories all began with a decisive no — no to family, no to community, and no to the compromises our traditional history upheld as worthy of emulation and adoption. The social protest of earlier literary works turned inward, and searched for a self-celebration independent of class, power, and locality. The best of these stories transcend the local completely, and reach for a cool detachment epitomized by the word modern, taking us beyond the brushstrokes of literary technique and narrative detail, and deep into those heightened perspectives of reality that 5 exist only in art. Applying it to art generally, Russian Formalist critics of the early 20th Century call this strategy defamiliarization.1 It is harder to achieve in literature than in painting, because it requires a freely complicit audience or it does not happen at all. Following Magritte, a painting by Warhol confronts and confounds the peripatetic viewer with a claim that the soup can is only a soup can, refuting the familiar. Short stories (and, by extension, readers) cannot deny themselves so easily. The trick is to do it in five thousand words, to do it using the commonplace universals of our ephemeral experiences in mass society, to get it published by a shrinking list of periodicals as television relentlessly takes over audiences, and to make it worthwhile enough for increasingly distracted readers to commit their scant leisure time to the connoisseurship of an eminently private literary form. As these stories reveal, the post-war era in Canada was shockingly different from the interwar decades that preceded it. Speedier and emotionally jarring. The gloomy Depression notwithstanding, the 1930’s were the last decade of languid social time, an element we encounter as an absolute force of nature in the works of Somerset Maugham, Frederick Grove, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. In 1931 the weekend edition of the Toronto Star arrived at the door as a fat addendum to 200,000 paid weekly subscribers (an astounding readership, given a country of 10 million with one-third jobless),2 and it featured dozens of serialized adventure stories and exotic illustrated articles that might take readers a week to finish. Mayfair Magazine, published by Maclean-Hunter in Toronto, recounted the monthly triumphs of Canada’s surprisingly large leisure class at polo, European travel, and socially appropriate marriages throughout 6 the 1930’s. Everyone had time for dancing on Saturday and reading about it on Monday. After the War, nobody did.3 The appeal of Modern Canadian stories lies precisely in their compressed energy and formal qualities of accelerated feeling — a ringing kaleidoscope of mixed emotions that were not this and not that, but something insistently different. The razzle-dazzle of an accelerating age soon found its voice, as nervous energy replaced muscle power, and tense inner dialogues amusing dinner conversation. The dilemma faced by the student of this movement is whether to invent a critical language appropriate to describe these new literary sensations and outcomes, or redefine overused terms like “Modern.” We will examine this question more fully, but clearly the Canadian writers under review thought of themselves as “Modern” in a distinctly novel way. One only has to watch archival film footage showing the clipped performance swagger of writers at Toronto’s Bohemian Embassy in the 1950’s, (including a young Margaret Atwood), to understand that their stark, post-war postures of bantering, irony, and free association were all part of a brave collective experiment at streamlined urbanity. If these writers were not seeing psychiatrists themselves, or using pot or prescribed mood-drugs, or living in ranch houses with large picture windows and Scandinavian furniture, or going on transcontinental road trips in an air-conditioned Comet or Strato Chief, they certainly understood the implications of these things: The past was an postulation, and everything was open to improvement. 7 1. Condition Replaces Identity: Harvor, Munro, Valgardson Three stories by Alice Munro, Elizabeth Harvor and W.D. Valgardson 4 show this electric dazzle at play, and raise questions about the broader social significance of this literary movement as a radicalizing force. Elizabeth Harvor had “Heart Trouble” published in The New Yorker in 1979. The heroine Maria has a complex, undiagnosed medical problem; and she seeks a cure, taking us breathlessly through the subterranean world of New Age practitioners, faded denim monks whose scientific tests and clinical offices do not disguise the essentially primitive nature of all holistic treatment, the laying on of hands and the awkward faith of the resisting, newly secularized patient. Maria ends her pilgrimage stripped of illusions, standing naked like a camp prisoner before her ultimate interrogator: ‘That’s right. Cry,’ he says. ‘But I cry easily. Always have.’ ‘But do you cry right? Do you cry with your body? Or are you just crying up in your head?’ ‘I cry as quietly as I can, usually.’ This doctor tells Maria she must be tired of being so good all the time, and, as if accepting a wedding vow, Maria ends her story in sacrificial acquiescence: “I do.” Her intimate self is exposed to the overwhelming diagnostic power of a new Gothic Age, to its specialized techniques and mystifying orders of causality; and she accepts the mirrored gaze of its long, unmarked institutional corridors as her condition. Her private fears of cancer express a nameless guilt at not measuring up, at being marked defective by the glossy eugenic standards of a heartless clinical culture. Diagnosis has replaced identity as technique has replaced history. 8 Are these authors responding to each other’s work? Alice Munro’s “Thanks for the Ride” was published in the Tamarack Review twenty years earlier (1957). It is narrated by an aloof and college-bound teenage boy who is pressured by his crude cousin into picking up two small town young women — “pigs” the cousin calls them in the vernacular of that era — for a drinking party in the bush. The hero emerges from his privileged stupor when the girl, Lois, goes home to change her clothes before their debased “date.” He is obliged to meet her smarmy mother, a harridan who artlessly probes him about his prospects, as if he were a proper suitor, not a stranger who cares less if he gets lucky that night: ‘Do your folks have a summer cottage up here?’ I said no, and Lois came in, wearing a dress of yellow-green stuff — stiff and shiny like Christmas wrappings—high-heeled shoes, rhinestones, and a lot of dark powder over her freckles. Her mother was excited. Despite her frippery, however, Lois is also flat, unexcited. Lois could care less, too; at least this is what Munro fools us into believing. Then the author hits us with her firebomb: the boy returns from their passionate love-making in a derelict barn, aglow. Lois turns out to be a “mystic of love,” someone who goes “very far with the act of love,” who surrenders herself completely. The pair must return to the real world in a few minutes, brooding to the end of their trip — he, anxious at his coming loss, and she, bitter; both knowing nothing else is possible, knowing the futility of it. It is a knockout story; its power derives from ancient agricultural myth. Lois is what the Greeks called the Kore, a fertility maiden, in a world that does not heed the sexual power of virgins anymore.5 It is quietly abandoning the old seasonal cycles of sowing and harvest festivals.

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