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Department of English and American Studies the Canadian Short Story

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Department of English and American Studies the Canadian Short Story Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Bc. Katarína Kőrösiová The Canadian Short Story Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Mrg. Kateřina Prajznerová, Ph. D. 2012 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature I would like to thank to my supervisor Mgr. Kateřina Prajznerová, Ph. D. for initiating me into this interesting subject, and mainly, for her help and valuable advice. I am also thankful for all the support I received from my family. Table of Contents 1. Introduction: What Makes the Canadian Short Story Canadian? 5 1.1. The Genre of the Short Story 7 1.2. The Canadian Short Story 15 2. Multiculturalism 25 2.1. Generational Differences 26 2.2. Biculturalism 32 2.3. Language and Naming 36 2.4. Minority or General Experience 38 3. Family and Gender 42 3.1. The Notion of Family and Home in Madeleine Thien‟s Stories 43 3.2. The Portrayal of Children 46 3.3. Alice Munro‟s Girls and Women 50 4. Place 57 4.1. Canada as Utopia 57 4.2. The Country and the City 63 5. Conclusion: The Relationship Between Form and Theme 68 Works Cited 74 Resumé (English) 78 Resumé (České) 79 1. Introduction: What Makes the Canadian Short Story Canadian? How do readers know that they are reading a Canadian short story? Lynch and Robbeson suggest an apparently easy and “common sense” solution for the problem: “we know [that] we‟re reading Canadian stories [when] the author is Canadian or / and the setting is Canadian” (2). However, this raises other questions, such as: When is an author considered to be Canadian? Should the term „Canadian‟ include the Natives and the immigrant writers too? Bonnie Burnard sets out to another direction to tackle the problem in “It Almost Always Starts This Way.” After presenting a sketch for a short story about a writer being on a reading tour in British Columbia, she adopts a systematic approach to her work and analyses the various motives she has used. At the end, she asks what makes any of what she has written Canadian and subsequently proposes a couple of feasible answers too: Perhaps the bad hotel? The challenge of an altogether new kind of weather; the need to adapt to an entirely different world within the same country? Certainly the woman wanting it both ways, wanting both a decent room and not to be seen making a big deal about it. The underexpressed fear of strangers? The immigrant family, understood so superficially? The quiet? The water? (15) - 5 - Burnard‟s propositions abandon trying to define the Canadian short story according to the author and instead, they turn to the themes and elements appearing in the stories. Her propositions practically concern either the geographical qualities of the land (weather, different regional landscapes, quiet, water) or the behaviour of the people (a woman wanting it both ways, fear of strangers, misunderstood immigrants). The aim of this thesis is to examine the most frequently addressed issues in the recent Canadian short story writing and to find out which topics and elements makes the Canadian short stories authentic. The most frequent topics that the stories engage with are the ones dealing with everyday experiences. These include family dinners, school days, dating, get-togethers, trips – and the list could continue. I am going to argue that the short story form is able to turn these ordinary events into extraordinary – occasionally, even bizarre – experiences. I propose that this phenomenon suggests that the apparently ordinary parts of everyday life can appear to be challenging for the individuals who are unable to find their places in the society (due to either gender, generational or cultural differences). I am going to restrict the range of the analysed materials to the works of short story writers living and creating (at least at one point of their lives) on the West Coast of Canada which is probably the country‟s culturally most diverge region. This includes: Madeleine Thien (Simple Recipes), Alice Munro (Lives of Girls and Women), Eden Robinson (Traplines), Jack Hodgins (Spit Delaney’s Island) and Wayson Choy (The Jade Peony). I have chosen for my research the writers mentioned above because the diversity of their stories due to their different gender and origins may provide a rich variety and thoroughness to my analyses. The subsequent part of the Introduction offers an overview of the difficulty of genre definition and an attempt to identify the characteristics of the short story that distinguishes it from the other genres. The second subchapter examines the historical - 6 - importance of the short story genre in the Canadian culture. It proposes a connection between popularity of the genre in Canada with the country‟s colonial past. Chapters two, three and four deal with the actual analysis of the stories. The chapters are structured according to thematic categories – the main categories being: multiculturalism, family and gender, and place. Chapter five forms the conclusion to my analyses and contains a comparison between the genre characteristics of the short story and themes in the analysed works. Several parallels are drawn between the use of structure and the conveyed message. I also offer a plausible interpretation of why the short story form is so suitable for communicating the themes the discussed authors are most concerned about. 1.1 The Genre of the Short Story Defining genre has always been a difficult and controversial topic among literary critics. The major problem is that all the plausible definitions are “either so exact that they completely stifle what they pretend to describe or so general that they can be applied to any literary work” (May 462). For this reason, many critics have abandoned the effort or rejected the possibility of formulating an adequate definition or definitions for genre distinction. Ruth Suckow went as far as declaring that “[a]ll books dealing with classifications and systems of the arts should be burned without any loss whatsoever” (qtd. in May 462). Naturally not all critics share this pessimistic attitude and there are numerous generic theories that are worth a closer investigation. For instance, Lynch and Robbeson suggest that Alistar Fowler‟s conception of genre is a very useful approach to be adopted (2). It says that we should understand the different literary genres and the - 7 - connection between them “as kinds of literary works that share a „family resemblance‟” (qtd. in Lynch and Robbeson 2). Alistar Fowler derived his concept from Wittgenstein who in his approach to genres cautioned against looking “for something common to all … but rather for a whole series of complicated networks of similarities and relationships that overlap and crisscross, sometimes involving overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail” (May 462). According to this interpretation, genre is a “concept with blurred edges” (Lynch and Robbeson 2) and therefore it is impossible to form clear-cut definition for the length or other qualities of the short story or other literary genres for that matter. While in his study “Prolegomenon to a Generic Study of the Short Story,” Charles E. May agrees with Wittgenstein‟s definition, he also agrees with Morris Weitz who argues that Wittgenstein‟s theory proved that “theoretical definition of art and its kinds are not possible” and the only way to restrict the meaning of a genre is through historically closed concepts (May 462).1 Based on Weitz‟s ideas, May proposes that even though it is complex to define the genre of the short story as such, “one can rather confidently describe the generic characteristics of such closed concepts as the early nineteenth-century gothic story, the mid nineteenth-century local color story, the late nineteenth-century well-made story, the early twentieth-century impressionistic story, and the late twentieth-century minimalist story” (463). Naturally, May emphasises that the two types of genre definitions should be sharply distinguished since the general concept – short story – is based on theory and literary discourse while the closed concept – e.g. early nineteenth-century gothic story – “starts with the observation of 1 This means that the genre of the Greek Tragedy can be defined because “critics can list the common properties of extant Greek tragedies” based on a historical period, but the genre of the „tragedy‟ is too open for definition (May 462). - 8 - a period of literary history” (465). Critics have recently been attempting to find a middle course between the two approaches that would combine the benefits of the theoretical and the historical perspectives where the “patterns of similarities that enable intertextual interpretation are preserved against the flux of historical change” (qtd. in May 466). For example, Frederic Jameson argues that the elements that most truthfully characterise a genre are those that “persist through many historical periods” (May 466). He is especially interested in what he calls the “mode” of a piece of writing that stands for “some universal attitude toward life” (466). There is going to be a further investigation of this argument in the following chapter. Since there is scepticism about whether it is possible to define the notion of genre as such, critics also disagree about whether there exists a satisfactory definition for the short story genre. Suzanne Ferguson, one of the opposing critics, has “[concluded] that there is no evidence that either a single characteristic or a cluster of characteristics distinguishes the short story from other fiction,” while Norman Friedman has remarked that “he does not believe there is a definition of the [sic] short story more specific than „a short fictional narrative in prose‟” (May 461).
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