English 4011: Advanced
Creative Writing: Fiction ● Spring 2005
Fiction & the List
Brian Kiteley
Office: Sturm Hall, 487C ●
Phone: 303-871-2898 ● Email: bkiteley@du.edu
NOTE: This graduate
fiction workshop is open ONLY to MA and Ph.D
candidates in the English Department.
TEXTS: Xeroxed course packet with the exercises and advice,
available at the book store; Robert Walser, Selected Stories (New York Review of Books edition);
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Richard Zenith
translation—Penguin edition); Don DeLillo, Americana; and Biting the Error: Writers Explore
Narrative, edited by Mary Burger, Robert Glück,
Camille Roy, and Gail Scott.
ABOUT THE
EXERCISES: There are no set rules for
your use of the exercises from the course pack.
You may use them often or less often.
I do wish to discuss the book as a teaching device, for
pedagogical purposes, so it would be useful to try at least a handful of them
during the term.
ABOUT THE
COURSE: This graduate fiction workshop
will focus primarily on another essential method of constructing narration than
in a linear fashion—the list.
These three writers (Walser, Pessoa, and DeLillo) in very different ways
construct their stories out of repetitions, rather than cause and effect.
Hand in the
exercises by Friday at noon in our mailboxes, the week before the class (or
preferably at the class session the week before).
You are each
responsible for two 200-400 word critiques of each others’
work—meaning, you’ll write a critique of everybody’s work
twice (of the four sets of writing everyone is producing). Give me a copy of these critiques.
Read, in
Walser, “Response to a Request,” “Trousers,”
“Kleist in Thun,” “The Job
Application,” “Helbling’s
Story,” “Nervous,” “The Walk,”
“Dostoevsky’s Idiot,”
“Am I Demanding?” “A Sort of Speech,” “Essay on
Freedom,” and “Thoughts on Cezanne.”
• • •
Three-Dimensional Thinking
The contemporary, accepted meaning of the word list is a catalogue or roll consisting
of a series of names, figures, or words.
In early use, a list was a catalogue of the names of persons engaged in
the same duties or connected with the
same object (useful to keep that in
mind—a gathering of details around one concept). The word
list derives from an old French word for a strip of paper. Obsolete uses of the word include art,
craft, or cunning. Pleasure, job, and
delight, as well as longing and appetite, precede the notion of inventory. One also lists, inclining to one side, as a
ship or a drunk does. An inventory is a detailed list of such as
goods and chattels, or parcels of land, found to have been in the possession of
a person at his decease or conviction, sometimes with a statement
of the nature and value of each. Inventory and list both represent a mortal accounting of the things left of a
life. Novels have had similar urges, to
account for the things and actions left behind by a life (E. M. Forster said
the novel represents “life by time,” as opposed to the more ancient
desire to portray “life by values”).
The inventory story (Charles Baxter’s phrase) might
seem like a relatively rare phenomenon.
I propose that it is not so rare.
We are accustomed to the cause and effect of narrative. Steve Evans, a critic of poetry, says
“mimesis is tied to conformity.”
There is, he suggests, an “overwhelming urge to do what others do
when representing reality.” The
list as an operating metaphor for narration is also linear (as is most
traditional fiction), but it cuts off the notion of cause and effect at its
roots. An ancient inventory story is the
myth of Cadmus, who slew a dragon and sewed the dragon’s teeth into the
earth. Up grew an army of soldiers. The myth is supposed to represent the new
preference for alphabetic languages (over hieroglyphic languages). The dragons’ teeth are the alphabet,
another list. Priests of fierce learning
were the only men able to read hieroglyphics.
The alphabet was more accessible, making written language the domain of
generals, as well as priests. This new
language system moved the power away from the intellectuals and into the hands
of the military/industrial complex.
There’s a line I like from one of the Star Trek movies. Spock is advising Kirk on how to battle Khan,
a 20th century result of a eugenics experiment gone bad, brilliant
and megalomaniacal (he was frozen and revived in the 23rd
century). Spock says as much—that
Khan is very smart, but his tactics betray two-dimensional thinking. The implication is that Kirk has been trained
in space wars, where you have to look not only in every direction along one
plane, but up and down, with planes intersecting you at every possible
angle. The inventory story is
three-dimensional thinking.
• • •
The Annals of Saint Gall
709. Hard Winter.
Duke Gottfried died.
710. Hard year and deficient in crops.
711.
712. Flood everywhere.
713.
714. Pippin, mayor of the palace, died.
715. 716.
717.
718. Charles devastated the Saxon with great
destruction.
719.
720. Charles fought against the Saxons.
721. Theudo drove the
Saracens out of Aquitaine
722. Great crops
723.
724.
725. Saracens came for the first time.
Hayden White, in The Content of the Form, comments on
this list (The Annals of Saint Gall):
This list immediately locates us
in a culture hovering on the brink of dissolution, a society of radical
scarcity, a world of human groups threatened by death, devastation, flood, and
famine. All of the events are extreme,
and the implicit criterion for selecting them for remembrance is their liminal nature.
Basic need—food, security from external enemies, political and
military leadership—and the threat of their not being provided are
subjects of concern; but the connection between basic needs and the conditions
for their possible satisfaction is not explicitly commented on. Why “Charles fought against the
Saxons” remains as unexplained as why one year yielded “great
crops” and another produced “floods everywhere.” Social events are apparently as
incomprehensible as natural events. They
seem merely to have the same order of importance and unimportance. They seem merely to have occurred, and their
importance seems to be indistinguishable from the fact that they were
recorded. In fact, it seems that their
importance consists in nothing other than their having been recorded.
Janice Gangel-Vasquez:
The burden on deaf children who are learning to read goes
well beyond decoding a written system.
Andrews and Mason note that the isolation of most deaf children creates
knowledge gaps in their worldview, which interferes with their ability to
understand relationships between ideas.
For example, deaf children perceive stories as lists of discrete lexical
signs, unlike hearing children who more quickly perceive the structure as a series
of connected events.
Jess
Row, in Slate:
Another
kind of disembodiment takes place in Susan Sontag's "Project for a Trip to
This
way of presenting a story by alternate means was very much in vogue in the late
'80s and throughout the '90s. The story
could take the form of a sequence of photographs in a wedding album (Heidi Julavits, "Marry the One Who Gets There First"),
a personal bibliography (Rick Moody, "Primary Sources"), or a group
of reviews (Anthony Giardina, "The Films of
Richard Egan"). Implicit in the
inventory form is a certain structural irony: The surface text (whether a
"catalog," a "project," or a "bibliography") has
its own logic, and the story emerges in spite of that logic—through gaps,
omissions, parenthetical remarks, footnotes.
It's surely no accident that the inventory-story became popular at a
time when we swam in a sea of trivial, distracting, often useless
data—stock quotes, "factoids," logos, advertising jingles,
spam. Sontag herself might have pointed
out that it bears a certain resemblance to the collage, which became popular in
the 1920s and '30s, in an era of anxiety about the mass reproduction of visual
images.
An
exercise from my own book, The 3 A.M.
Epiphany:
Listful.
Write a story that is a list. A
story that relies on the qualities of a list as its form or operating metaphor
can be dandy. A grocery list that
includes a wife’s complaints about her husband’s slothful habits is
one example. You might also write about
collections that appear on your own or friends’ shelves—books,
DVD’s, videos, CD’s, records, trophies, glass figurines—some
commentary on the nature of this list is acceptable, but don’t get
carried away explaining the contents.
Stick to the notion that this is a list as much as you can—not a
list that devolves into a traditional story.
600 words.
A lesson this exercise should
impart is that narrative moves forward in many inventive, unexpected, and
unusual ways, even without the traditional trappings of story. A good example of
this kind of story is Tim O’Brien’s story “The Things They
Carried,” from the book of stories with the same title. The story details the contents of the
backpacks a platoon of soldiers carries off into battle or on their long
marches. The contents dictate the direction
of the story, rather than a more traditional approach, which would have been to
let the story organize the telling of the contents. The list does not need to be part of a
fictional world. William Gass’s beautiful book of philosophy and literary criticism,
On Being Blue, is not much more than
a verbal collection of blue things in the world and things called blue. Gass’s great
story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” operates similarly
as a list of things to hate about a small
A Night to Remember, a book about the doomed ship The Titanic, ends with a simple twenty-page list of the people on
board the ship when it sank. Names in
regular font died; names in italics survived—a powerful and moving set of
stories keyed to modest typography. The
list also breaks down the survivors and the dead according to class, and in the
Third Class section according to nationality, another cruelty that was in
keeping with the way the story was reported at the time.
When Maya Lin proposed the Vietnam
War Memorial in