Fever To Tell
In which James Wood attacks convention and defends the conventional, and Alice Munro offers a way out
Beginning creative writing students are always told to show don’t tell (because we all remember show and tell!). If they veer into things like “he was tall” or “the wine was good,” or, shudder to think, “she was sad,” they’re told, show me this in a scene, or, use a gesture to convey this—“he bends to go through the doorway”; “the wine leaves a licorice taste on her tongue”; “she closed her notebook and held it there a minute, closed.” Better, but after a while don’t we know what to expect? Somewhere, aren’t some neurons going to sleep?
James Wood evokes this sort of thing so concisely in his discussion of David Shields’s much-discussed Reality Hunger: A Manifesto that his examples read like satire. He also notes:
Convention may be boring, but it is not untrue simply because it is conventional. People do lie on their beds and think with shame about all that has happened during the day (at least, I do), or order a beer and a sandwich and open their computers; they walk in and out of rooms, they talk to other people (and sometimes, indeed, feel themselves to be talking inside quotation marks); and their lives do possess more or less traditional elements of plotting and pacing, of suspense and revelation and epiphany.
Alternatives to conventional realism—acknowledging the artifice of showing and limitations of language by focusing on language itself and abjuring conventional scene-building—are easy to find, particularly in web-based journals and books through small presses. They can be bewildering at first: no immediately identified places or characters, elusive time lines, shifts in and out of ‘real world’ plausibility. They also have a prevalence of first-person narrators—the recent (excellent) flash-fiction issue of the Mississippi Review (vol. 16, no. 1) had eighteen stories with first-person narrators (or intrusions) to seven with third-person narrators.
In first-person, any experiment is valid: the story is coming through a Voice, a frank confrontation of the fact that I am telling you a story. The limits of a single vantage point become almost desirable. The story presumes to know less. What is undesirable is a story in which the fact of illusion is clearer to the reader than (apparently) to the narrator/writer. Unacknowledged telling, or other rude awakenings to the fact of the narrator, in this formulation punctures the narrative spell, unless the narrative is about being a narrative. In this I think experimental writers and Chekhovian and Carverian realists would agree.
But is showing (mimesis) inherently superior to telling (diegesis)? Isn’t fiction inherently diegetic,
the telling of the story by a narrator; the author narrates action indirectly and describes what is in the characters’ minds and emotions. The narrator may speak as a particular character or may be the invisible narrator or even the all-knowing narrator who speaks from above in the form of commenting on the action or the characters…
…in Plato’s and Aristotle’s formulations [mimesis] represents, [diegesis] reports; one embodies, the other narrates; one transforms, the other indicates; one knows only a continuous present, the other looks back on a past.
This distinction originally contrasted drama (re-enactment) with lyric poetry (recitation). Where does fiction fit in this? It portrays scenes, but it is told, not re-enacted (and even plays are, ultimately, told; it’s just that their presentation blots out the sense of the writer. No such competition in fiction. But the Chekhovian story is philosophically anti-diegetic, insisting on a ‘found’ quality, privileging (imagined!) characters over the narrator. This is all admirably democratic, but Chekhov maybe was more interested in things being true than interesting. This removes a lot of tools from the writer’s toolkit, and leaves her wrestling with trying to remove all signs of herself from the very work she’s creating, while dutifully, carefully furnishing scenes and artfully dropping casual details. Is there anything more predictable, more formulaic once you’re onto it?
* * *
Alice Munro’s stories have Chekhovian moral neutrality; her characters navigate an impassive universe in which only they pass judgment on one another. But she is visibly active in arranging things. While her stories are anchored in the tangible, they are at home with being told in a way that many post-Carver readers and writers do not seem to be. I think they are also more emotionally true, thematically rich, and temporally varied. But you have to get used to some telling.
“Jakarta” and “The Children Stay” seem to me particularly interesting from this perspective and satisfying as stories. Both use close third person narrators, with a lot of internal rumination, agile with respect to time. “Jakarta” has almost no conventional plot, “The Children Stay” a simple plot rendered into a complex lens through which a woman’s entire psyche and family life seems revealed; a novel in thirty-five pages. Both stories, characteristic for Munro, blend generally simple, non-lyrical language with precise details. So at first they seem “just the facts, m’am,” when they are actually virtuosic. But the virtuosity, the satisfaction of time opening at our feet, is in the arrangement.
* * *
“The Children Stay” opens with apparently basic establishing details—who, where and when:
Thirty years ago, a family was spending a holiday together on the east coast of Vancouver Island. A young father and mother, their two small daughters, and an older couple, the husband’s parents (p. 181).
The cast back in time alerts us to the narrator’s hand—who is telling us that it’s thirty years ago? Will we return from thirty years ago to the present? The narration claims the whole intervening expanse of time. The specificity of the unadorned details carry authority; who are we to say that these things were not so? Characters aren’t named, hinting at archetype. The sentence patterns, the fragment for a second sentence, shows great assurance. Munro quickly gets right down at ground-level:
What perfect weather. Every morning, every morning it’s like this, the first pure sunlight falling through the high branches… every morning the pavilion of sand is shrinking, but it still seems ample enough. The changes in the tide are a matter of great interest to the grandfather, not so much to anyone else (p. 181).
The effusive, near exclamation, the repetition carry echoes of what we can imagine the family saying. More acute naturalistic detail, maybe symbolic, and then we’re into relationships, tension, ever so leisurely told. Would there be any benefit to getting this in scene? The summary lets Munro specify a minor detail precisely—human relations as wallpaper, the backdrop against which the story will unfold, and which gives the protagonists’ choices resonance. It also conditions us to attend to the minor detail and hold off deciding what we’re reading.
Not until page three does the narration settle on Pauline getting up early to walk the children, alone, and rehearse her lines for the play she’s in. What play, you might ask? That’s Munro’s cue to dips back to earlier in the summer. This isn’t a strictly mimetic time-change prompted by Pauline’s thoughts, but provoked by exposition:
[Brian] agrees though that she does need some time to get over her lines for the play she’s going to be in, back in Victoria, this September.
Pauline is not an actress. This is an amateur production, but she is not even an amateur actress. She didn’t try out for the role, though it happened that she had already read the play. Eurydice by Jean Anouilh. But then, Pauline has read all sorts of things.
She was asked if she would like to be in this play by a man she met at a barbeque, in June… (p. 184)
And we’re back into the past for two pages. Does this feel like an excursion from the ‘real’ story? I think not. For one, we don’t know what the ‘real’ story is going to be yet; we’ve received only Pauline’s situation. Also, the dip into the past begins slyly. The “Pauline is not an actress…” paragraph is an elegant sleight of hand, leaving a cryptic, possibly ominous generalization with us so that the return to the story of how she got into the play comes as a dive into action instead of a diversion from it.
We touch base with Pauline’s walk for two paragraphs, now in past tense, and then we’re into the past for another four pages.
Why not tell the story linearly? Why cast so much central action into what writing classes would call “back story”? Aesthetically, there’s something immensely pleasing about these dips back and forth, these broad, painterly dashes of a week here, a party there. Isn’t that the way we feel our own time and memory? Beginning with the family rather than the theatre director makes this a story of Pauline’s marriage, not of this particular incident. It puts us in her and the family’s shoes—for we get a lot from her husband and his family’s perspective—so that Pauline’s liaison with Jeffrey the director feels like the stepping outside that it is, instead of relying on us to share a morals-based judgment that adultery is bad. Munro’s time shifts make us feel the violation in human terms—admirably Chekhovian—but her structure is narratively intrusive, not at all mimetic.
She is telling, as Cheever or Hawthorne might, but she’s telling a Chekhovian story.
* * *
Munro’s scenes are always directed; there is always a sense of them as part of a story. They are rarely more than a page long uninterrupted, and there are rarely more than a few lines of dialogue without a narrative intrusion, how things seem to a character, a memory, what somewhat had said at another time.
We return to the present (still in past tense) on p. 190, at an evening with Brian’s parents—dialogue first, to let us know we’re in-scene, then a quick backtrack to the kids being put to bed. We get almost no scene details, just a lovely (but plainly told) description of the mountains against the sky, the sun behind the island. Would we be any better for knowing what the parents’ cabin is like? Munro has already shown us around the island and the beach in the first few pages of the story, and will again, slowing to a crawl when Pauline, on the beach, gets a phone call and has to come up to the store.
I think this selective eye, this lack of dutifulness or doctrinaire, regimented scene building, has the effect of heightening our involvement, our belief. We trust Munro not to distract us. We trust her to trust us.
We then get three pages of exposition about Brian and about his relationship with Pauline, scene-less details of long-standing beliefs and conflicts illustrated with and punctuated by single lines of dialogue, until we slip seamlessly from a general description of their talk in bed into a specific night—this night—in bed:
So talking in the dark had something to do with the fact that she could not see his face. And that he knew she couldn’t see his face.
But even with the window open on the unfamiliar darkness and stillness of the night, he teased a little (p. 196).
We’re moored to the physical world again:
Finally a rainy day (p. 197).
Whose voice? Are there the echoes of Pauline’s discontent, the dissatisfaction of everyone but the grandfather, the inevitable vacation-sense of time dragging (before it all seems to come at a rush?)
The time sequencing of the climax is baroque, the scenes internal. Pauline is on the beach with the kids, remembering getting a call from Jeffrey asking her to visit him in the city, which she’d refused. Then, in the present (still in past tense), he then calls again, this time from a motel in the town Pauline and Brian are staying in, only a page and a half of children’s details after Pauline has wondered if she’d “made a great mistake with that refusal… [w]ith that reminder of how fenced in she was, in what anybody would call her real life” (p. 202).
Munro drastically slows down the scene with details of Pauline’s interactions with the kids, heightening the tension, immersing us in what Pauline is chafing at. There are few physical details; even the description of the store is in terms of action, being the “tiny” place “in the lodge where you could buy ice cream and candy and cigarettes and mixer” (p 204).
We then skip ahead to Pauline waking up the next morning, remembering getting the car from Brian:
“Okay but you’ll have to put some gas in,” he said.
Later she had to speak to him on the phone. Jeffrey said she had to do it.
“Because he won’t take it from me. He’ll think I kidnapped you or something. He won’t believe it.”
But the strangest of all the things that day was that Brian did seem, immediately, to believe it (p. 205).
In a single word, “later,” Munro encompasses leaving Brian and meeting Jeffrey, who then speaks, in Pauline’s memory, in answer to the narration, which then answers his dialogue in a description of the day that seems like Pauline’s implied surmise. It’s so fleet-footed, crossing time and perspectives, threading through the central questions of what did Pauline do, how did everyone react. It fluently blends mimesis and diegesis into something that seems like consciousness until we compare it to a voice-driven stream of consciousness like those in Mrs. Dalloway. Here, everything is submerged in Munro’s storytelling. So much is in reported or hinted thought and dialogue, the voices never escape the narration for long. We are always being guided.
More supplely than in Munro’s earlier fiction, what drives the stories, even those like “The Children Stay” that have events and crises, isn’t the march of time, this following this, but the beat of consciousness with a retrospective precision that might be criticized for telling us what to think but allows Munro to cover a lot of ground quickly, to focus very selectively and guide the narrative away from cliché or what feels like cliché. Would we really prefer to see all these scenes in order, Pauline leaving, Pauline calling, some sex, waking, rumination, and regret? How much better to get Brian’s cutting words, “The children stay,” (p. 212) in Pauline’s recollection rather than in the blow-by-blow of a scene. Munro tells us how to interpret it:
Changing the word “kids” to “children” was like slamming a board down on her—a heavy, formal, righteous threat (p. 212).
The Carverian realist might complain of being told too much, being told what to think. The experimentalist might complain of the metaphor, and is this Pauline or Munro. I think it’s the kind of metaphor Pauline would use. Is it needed? Is Munro not trusting us? Maybe. But she’s telling us how it is for Pauline, not how it is in the abstract. Who are we to know better than she about her character?
The risk of the show don’t tell mantra is timid storytelling, polite safe scenes that all feel the same and unfold with expected signals. I would rather a few off notes like this that jolt me from fictional convention to think why yes, that is how it would be I appreciate Munro’s telling me, in case I missed it.
After all, I’ve come to the story for something new.
All page numbers are from the Vintage edition of The Love Of A Good Woman.
