And from the ends of the earth, across thousands of miles of land and sea, kindly, well-meaning speakers tried to voice their fellow-feeling, and indeed did so, but at the same time proved the utter incapacity of every man truly to share in suffering that he cannot see.
-Albert Camus. The Plague (1947).
I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed, but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world, when a story shows me just how much I don’t know and need to know about the lives of others.
-Roxane Gay, “What Does a Political Story Look Like in 2018?” October 3, 2018.
All novels are political because language is political; living is political.
–Ploughshares interview with Matthew Salesses, August 13, 2020.
Things look different in 2020. As we approach the first day of school and I prepare to start teaching introductory fiction to a brand new crop of high-school freshmen in an unprecedentedly fully online environment, I’m wondering about the virtual venue’s potential to test and/or reinforce fiction’s potential to connect us as humans–more specifically, as humans not occupying the same physical space. Obviously, I have to rethink what my class is going to look like.
In the in-person version of the class, I usually introduce the general concept of fiction as offering something I don’t think a lot of other media can: access to a more direct firsthand experience of what it’s like to be somebody else. I back up this claim with scientific evidence of its effects on the brain–if you evoke an experience via words that evoke the five senses (the creative-writing maxim of “show”ing instead of “tell”ing), your brain doesn’t really distinguish between reading about someone else experiencing something and actually experiencing that something directly yourself. Which is good news for people with fewer opportunities to leave the house these days. As we continue to try to quell Covid by hiding behind masks when we’re not hunkering at home, maybe we’ll be more inclined to interact with others and enter other worlds via the written word.
But the stakes for the written word, and for the types of experiences getting fictional airtime through it, have risen in other ways. In the wake of the murder of native Houstonian George Floyd over the summer compounding the murders of countless others and ushering in a new era of racial consciousness, it seems more important than ever to examine texts in a deeper way than before, to acknowledge the ways the patriarchy has informed the conception of “literature” by marginalizing non-white non-heteronormative voices (by essentially defining them as “non”s), and to read from an array of diverse voices, particularly those the patriarchy has sought to silence. I usually say something about how the facsimile of firsthand experience that fiction offers, a version of virtual reality, provides readers greater access to empathy, something with the potential to make us better human beings by being better to one another. If we can really imagine what it’s like to be somebody else whose position we would never be in because of fundamental differences in race, class, gender identity, sexuality, socioeconomic status, etc., then we might have more compassion and make decisions more conscious of the effects they have on others.
In an intro fiction course, you have to define what a story is and provide parameters for how it’s supposed to be told. Of course, there are lots of ways, but you have to start somewhere. A lot of teachers start with the “inverted checkmark” narrative model–a story has “rising action” by means of a conflict that increases in intensity until that conflict comes to a head and is thus resolved. Story as battle. Because life’s a struggle.
The two stories I’ve used as entry points for the intro course are “The First Day” by Edward P. Jones and “Reunion” by John Cheever. I’ve used these because they have focused timelines, young narrators, and probably because I read them in my first fiction class. They also seem an interesting pairing for juxtaposing the relationship between a black mother and daughter with that between a white father and son, both in the 1960s.
“The First Day” always seems a fitting story to start with since it’s about a little girl’s first day of school literally ever. In the course of getting registered for it, the narrator learns that her mother can’t read. I’ve used “The First Day” as the first story in the intro class for years now, but it wasn’t until this past spring that I learned–or re-learned, apparently–that there are two different versions of this story in print. Searching for an old email in my inbox, I stumbled on a different one in which a former grad-school classmate mentioned where to find these two different versions. The original was published in the journal Callaloo in 1982 as “First Day,” and the other–the one I’d been using–was published as “The First Day” in Jones’ 1992 story collection Lost in the City. While the core story and themes remain the same, the changes Jones saw fit to make in the intervening decade go beyond minor copyedits.
One of the reasons this story has always seemed a good starting point for novice writers is thematic: the reader, as a writer at the beginning of their intro fiction course, is at the beginning of an educational journey, as the narrator is (the age gap between first-graders and freshmen notwithstanding). But a more significant reason is really mechanical/narrative: this story integrates the small picture (sensory, concrete details) with the big picture (plot). My initial post about the 1992 version analyzes the role sight plays in the story, and at the end, when the narrator’s mother is leaving her so she can start her day at school, how the sense of sound rather than the sense of sight starts to pervade the text, constituting a concrete change in the narrative pattern that helps provide a sense of closure–a sense that the story is “over,” even though the narrator’s first day at school is just beginning.
The emphasis on the sense of sight (on “looking at looking”) is also present in the older 1982 version, though it’s noticeably played up more–or taken greater narrative advantage of–in the later version. This was most noticeable to me when, after the mother admonishes the narrator for staring at someone, the mother is then noted to “stare” at the teacher when she introduces herself. This gesture undermines the mother’s authority–she’s blatantly violating her own established rules–in a way that reinforces how the larger conflict of the mother’s illiteracy is undermining her authority. But in the original version, the mother only “smiles” when she meets the teacher, which does none of the aforementioned work, which is to say it does not generate as many layers of emotional resonance, or give the reader as many feels.
The ending of the original also pivots on the critical concrete shift from emphasizing sight to emphasizing sound, but there is a pretty critical difference in the sight-sound interplay. In the original, the sounds are described thus:
Her shoes made loud sounds in the hall. She passed through the doors and I could still hear the tap-tapping of her shoes. The teacher turned me away from the dying sounds and I was confronted with new ones–laughing, talking, singing–of what must have been all the children in the world. I strained desperately to hear my mother’s shoes but their sound was already lost in the mass of children’s voices. The ceiling in the hall seemed as high as the sky, and the sounds of the children made my heart hurt, like the night I woke and heard my mother crying.
The sounds of the mother are lost, except for a sound of her from the past, a sound that represents her pain. Compare/contrast this with the the later version’s sound descriptions:
Her shoes make loud sounds in the hall. She passes through the doors and I can still hear the loud sounds of her shoes. And even when the teacher turns me toward the classrooms and I hear what must be the singing and talking of all the children in the world, I can still hear my mother’s footsteps above it all.
This is more condensed, but it’s also completely different. Instead of the school’s sounds drowning out the mother’s sounds, in the new version the opposite happens: the school sounds fail to drown out the mother’s sounds. The thematic implications of what might seem a tiny change are actually hugely significant.
But before I get to those implications, one other thing about the sound-related endings: in the later version, the sound description above is the very end of the story. In the original, the parallel sound description is not the very end, but the second-to-last paragraph. The last paragraph in the original might help explain another change noticeable from these passages–the original is told in the past tense while the later version is told in the present. The original has to describe the first day of school in the past tense because its final paragraph jumps ahead in time to the narrator’s high-school graduation, which her mother is present for.
This graduation ending is happy, almost hokey, and shows that the mother’s sacrifices in making sure her daughter got an education have paid off. But the later version complicates the happy ending by cutting the last paragraph. It also does this, and a better job emphasizing the sacrifices the mother has made, through a significant change made to the first line. The original version begins:
One morning in September my mother woke me, saying, “Get up. We got to make ready, you and me. No sleepin’ our life away today.”
While the later begins:
On an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin my very first day of school.
The later’s first sentence is doing a lot more narrative work, first by being more up front with what the overall narrative conflict/main event/acute tension is (“my very first day of school”), and second by articulating the deeper emotional conflict/chronic tension to which that surface acute tension is related (“I learned to be ashamed of my mother”). We’re basically “told” what the rest of the story will “show” in that first line. The original version may “show” that the narrator will learn shame when it shows her observing not only her mother’s illiteracy but others’ reactions to it, and it may reinforce a painful idea of loss/a transfer of loyalties by elevating the school sounds above the mother’s sounds in that second to last paragraph, but the leap to the future happy ending undermines that melancholic note, not letting it get the final word.
Reading these two versions side-by-side now in our current cultural context, I’m especially struck by that shift from the sound of the mother’s footsteps being drowned out in the original to remaining audible “above it all” in the latter. The sounds signify the state of the narrator-daughter’s loyalties: when the school’s sounds drown out the mother’s sounds, the school’s message is drowning out the mother’s; the school becomes the dominant influence. And the school, part of the public education system, perpetuates the message of the white patriarchy’s dominance. One bittersweet implication of the mother’s actions is that in sacrificing her pride to give her daughter the education she didn’t have, she’s giving her daughter a certain advantage, but that advantage consists of participating in a system that will both marginalize her while also causing her to be ashamed of her mother. The changes in the mother’s response to meeting the teacher also figure in this symbolic reading: in the new version the mother doesn’t just accept all this with a smile.
The education system will marginalize the narrator in many ways, one of which will be what it dictates to be “literature”–namely, mainly, the work of dead white dudes. In the original version, the sounds of this white system drown out the sounds of the mother–the sounds and influence of the narrator’s Black heritage. But in the later version when the mother’s sounds remain the most audible, the narrator maintains a connection to that heritage, even clings to it.
The question of heritage–and a plot predicated on accepting or rejecting it–is also present in the second story we read in the intro class, Cheever’s “Reunion,” in which a young male narrator recounts the “last time” he saw his father. Already estranged, the father and son have a brief opportunity to meet for lunch. The father ends up dragging the narrator-son to a series of restaurants, transitions necessitated by the father’s increasing buffoonery, and which I analyze in my initial post as constituting a pattern of narrative rising action by revealing increasingly questionable elements of the father’s character:
The father has gone from merely rude to morally repugnant to classist to racist in the course of a single story/afternoon.
The son learns from the experience that perhaps estrangement from this particular man who makes a habit of “getting a rise” out of people is not the worst thing in the world. This knowledge precipitates a significant shift in the narrator’s attitude from the beginning:
I felt that he was my father, my flesh and blood, my future and my doom. I knew that when I was grown I would be something like him; I would have to plan my campaigns within his limitations.
I don’t have a newly discovered older version of this story to draw new conclusions from, but I do have new feelings precipitated by the shift it in our cultural context and considerations of the American education system’s elevating the white male canon and its attendant marginalizations. The a-hole father in “Reunion” turns out to be a pretty apt representation of the white male canon, the shadow of whose influence has always been pervasive but whose true colors are now garishly on display to the point of necessitating estrangement–or even vociferous severance–from it. To that end, I’m seeking out new stories to read with the freshmen and for them to discuss on the class blog this year, stories that offer an increased range of perspectives and experiences, and ones that thereby challenge the conventional (i.e., western) modes of narrative structure and technique.
-SCR
the pva creative writing review 