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Dr. Bordelon's The Short Story: On Campus |
Week 1: A Beginning Titles of Stories, Page Numbers, and Date Published Introduction to Assignment: #1 Updike's "A&P" and Forche's "The Colonel" represent two approaches to short stories: "A&P" is a quiet story of a young man's initiation into adulthood -- a situation that many readers can identify with; on the other hand, "The Colonel" is a dark and shocking descent into an underworld that, hopefully, few readers have experienced. In "A&P," Updike attempts to construct a familiar world in the hopes that readers will pause and, for a moment, consider the drama of everyday life. Throughout the semester, we'll be looking at stories -- such as "Everyday Use" "Shiloh," etc. -- with a similar intent. This type of fiction, since it doesn't deal with dictators who wield a murderous bent or very old men with enormous wings suddenly appearing on a doorstep, requires that the reader pay attention to the smaller details -- the interior life of the character as expressed by his or her thoughts and utterances, comments made by other characters -- to fully enter into the world constructed by the author. As Updike himself once noted, "I distrust books involving spectacular people, or spectacular events. Let People and The National Enquirer pander to our taste for the extraordinary; let literature concern itself, as the Gospels do, with the inner lives of hidden men. The collective consciousness that once found itself in the noble must now rest content with the typical" ("Updike"). The familiarity of these "hidden men" and their "hidden lives" aren't meant to breed contempt; instead, the authors construct an interesting, vivid world from the seemingly boring, mundane features of everyday life -- a teenager's futile attempt to make an impression, a sister's conflict over a quilt , a marriage falling apart. Like life, the stories may not lead to an obvious climax, and like life, the messages or meaning they impart may not be readily apparent. These types of stories respect the reader's intellect; in effect, they say "I realize that you're a discerning reader -- you don't need a dramatic confrontation between the forces of good and evil to engage your mind." These stories ask you to ponder the subtle forces of everyday life -- a compliment that goes unnoticed, a store manager's inflexibility -- and their ramifications. Often, these ramifications are left unsaid by the writer: as in life, there are no easy answers, and part of the challenge of these stories is that the endings may leave you with questions instead of answers. "The Colonel" represents another branch of short fiction. Here, and in other stories dealing with more obviously dramatic situations, the world presented by the author is often strange, surreal, or exaggerated. In works such as these, writers attempts to break through the background static of modern life, be it the judicial farce that was the O.J. trial, Jerry Springer's circus of human oddities, and the thongs and cigars of our recent Presidential sex scandal, with vivisections ("Carnal Knowledge"), supernatural apparitions ("Gimpel the Fool"), the "swollen black bruise" under the eye of a dead GI ("The Things They Carried") and other exaggerated situations. The shock of these fictions is like a jackhammer chipping away at convention and reality -- the seemingly placid façade of life and the ennui it creates. But creating this shock presents problems of balance for the writer. Flannery O'Connor, in her essay "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction," notes that a writer needs to "know how far he can distort without destroying" (383). The difference between horror for horror's sake -- see the string of Saw movies -- and horror to jar the reader out of complacency -- see a story like "The Colonel" -- lies in this ability to "distort" events, yet maintain a connection with the hopes, fears, and longings of the "real" world. These more exaggerated short stories take fantastic situations -- how often are you attacked in a doctor's office by a girl with acne named Mary Grace? -- and uses them to comment or reflect upon "real" life. Just as in quieter, more "realistic" stories, the writers respect your intellect; here, they trust that the fissures -- the cracks that they've opened in our jaded minds -- by virtue of their exaggeration, will, paradoxically, reveal a more heightened reality. While the drama is apparent, the meanings, again, just as in more realistic stories, are often up to the reader to decipher. For instance, just what does a bag of ears flung upon a table mean? Thus both types of short stories share a desire to make readers reflect on their own lives and experiences, challenge their preconceptions while creating entertainment. When the two are combined, I get a sensation in my mind of a whirring, tactile pleasure -- what Emily Dickinson described as "feel[ing] physically as if the top of my head were taken off" (1018). In short, these stories make your brain itch, and that, to me, is the definition of a successful short story -- or any work of literature. In these two stories, as in all the stories we read, the authors have created distinct and specific worlds: it's up to you to visit them. Let's get started. . . . Work Cited Dickinson, Emily. "Emily Dickinson on Writing." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction,
O'Connor, Flannery. From "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction." Literature: An Introduction to
Updike, John. "Updike on Updike." New York Times Book Review 27 September 1981: Sec.7, 1.
Questions to mull over as you interpret the story "A&P"
Group Questions "A&P"
"The Colonel"
What The Author/Critics Say "Ambiguous ceremonies of farewell dominate Pigeon Feathers [the collection "A&P" is taken from], as maturing characters begin to realize how far they have receded from the past and strive to accommodated themselves to the present" (Luscher 23). "Unhappiness in an Updike story moves the character not to large-scale significant action but to quiet frustration, and thus some readers respond by saying that nothing happens. Plot and characterization often give way to layers of meaning usually dependent upon an image or a gesture so that dramatization becomes meditation. The question to ask, it seems to me, is not what happens but what is felt or exposed" (Greiner 92). Greiner, Donald J. The Other John Updike: Poems/Short Stories/Prose/Play. Athens, Ohio: OUP,
Luscher, Robert. John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. © 2008 David Bordelon
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