the storiness of stories
I read some good short stories today, all courtesy of the Oxford Book of English Short Stories, the one I bought in Oxfam at the beginning of the summer 'break' (ahem) and which has been boxed up for some time due to our enforced move.
First up, Rudyard Kipling's 'Wireless'. I've heard Kipling is celebrated as a short story writer but never read any before this, and indeed I did enjoy it. It's terribly dated, as it turns on the wondrous introduction of electricity and wireless communications. But this has a quaintness and curiosity about it also, and of course as a tutor I'm always thinking about how perhaps this or that could be adapted/ updated... to be a story about new technologies and what comments on creativity they could offer. For in Kipling's tale, wonders more than technical are caused by the brief explanation by the new 'gadget man' about sympathetic vibrations caused by a Hertzian wave coming all the way from London to Poole. The elderly owner of the apothecary shop, lovesick as he already is for a young lady called 'Fanny Brand' and imbibing a decoction composed by the narrator, starts to channel, in a quasi spiritualist manner, something very akin to 'St Agnes' Eve' by (consumptive and former apothecary himself) John Keats:
'If he has read Keats, it proves nothing. If he hasn't - like causes must beget like effects. There is no escape from this law... If he has read Keat's it's the chloric ether]. If he hasn't it's the identical bacillus, or Hertzian wave of tuberculosis, plus Fanny Brand and the professional status which, in conjunction with the main-stream of subconscious thought common to all mankind, has thrown up temporarily an induced Keats.'
It's a mystery about the mystery of creation, a scientific parallel, a tease, and a kind of homage and parody to Keatsian Romantic imagination all at the same time. Keats' sensibility is replicated but rather crudely, as is echoed by the garish advertising poster of a girl which serves as a sort of shrine to the woman in the poor apothecary's life.
More weird metaphysics in H.G. Wells 'Under the Knife'. The premise is simple: a narrator (white, male, unmarried) is due for an operation and has a premonition that he will not survive. During the surgery has has an out-of-body experience which loosens him further and further from the operation room, the earth itself, the sun, stars, galaxy, until the known universe itself is a mere cluster of light. Two reasons I was struck by this tale. Firstly, for a brief fairly straightforwardly plotted story, the momentum and the scientific detail of the narrator's space journey is impressive. And there is a thoughtful sense of the soul's evolutionary, metaphysical journey as well as of the vast space geography covered: ' About me in space, invisible to me, scattered in the wake of the earth upon its journey, there must be an innumerable multitude of souls, stripped like myself of the material, stripped like myself of the passions of the individual and the generous emotions of the gregarious brute, naked intelligences, things of newborn wonder and thought, marvelling at the strange release that had suddenly come on them!' However, and the second reason to find this story memorable, things turn rather queasily nasty in a final vision, although this in turn is resolved by a return to earthly life. One is left as a reader wondering whether the serenity of the temporarily disembodied soul is a reassuring vision or whether there is a further discomforting one behind even that. But surely it was all an anaesthetic dream...
On to Charlotte Mew's 'A White Night'. A dramatic, quasi-gothic tale of depersonalised, menacing monks, chanting through the night before interring a woman, robed and seemingly resigned to her fate although clearly very much alive. A horrible story with added punch when given a feminist reading perhaps. ' I felt the force of her intense vitality, the tension of its absolute impression. The life of those enclosing presences seemed to have passed into her presence, to be concentrated there. For to my view it was these men who held her in death's grip who didn't live, and she alone who was absorbently alive.' The narrative is in fact similar to what happens when an anchoress is 'walled in' to her cell - the same funeral rites are read to signify her death to the world. But all the implications here are that there is a genuine burial of a still-living woman. To add to the layers, the narrator, it is stronly implied, is male. He sees a horrible beauty in the ritual. Should we? And what gendered implications are to be drawn from such a stark passage from life to living burial?
Finally GK Chesterton's 'The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown'. Not Father Brown, mind, and I nearly skipped this story. But I'm glad I didn't. Not to spoil the complex, and suprisingly meta and post modern plot, there are layers of artifice at work here in what starts out as a Sherlockian style crime fiction, complete with victim and private detective. Things turn out to be a good deal more constructed and 'fictional' than may be supposed at first. Chesterton's protagonist quotes Whitman when he talks about the longing for adventure, the 'hunger for something to happen' (which in its widest sense captures one of the essentials of the short story): how we can start to yearn for '"something pernicious and dread; something in a trance; something loosed from its anchorage, and driving free." Did you ever feel that?' Well if you did, something can certainly be arranged. If not, reading short stories is absolutely the thing to do.
First up, Rudyard Kipling's 'Wireless'. I've heard Kipling is celebrated as a short story writer but never read any before this, and indeed I did enjoy it. It's terribly dated, as it turns on the wondrous introduction of electricity and wireless communications. But this has a quaintness and curiosity about it also, and of course as a tutor I'm always thinking about how perhaps this or that could be adapted/ updated... to be a story about new technologies and what comments on creativity they could offer. For in Kipling's tale, wonders more than technical are caused by the brief explanation by the new 'gadget man' about sympathetic vibrations caused by a Hertzian wave coming all the way from London to Poole. The elderly owner of the apothecary shop, lovesick as he already is for a young lady called 'Fanny Brand' and imbibing a decoction composed by the narrator, starts to channel, in a quasi spiritualist manner, something very akin to 'St Agnes' Eve' by (consumptive and former apothecary himself) John Keats:
'If he has read Keats, it proves nothing. If he hasn't - like causes must beget like effects. There is no escape from this law... If he has read Keat's it's the chloric ether]. If he hasn't it's the identical bacillus, or Hertzian wave of tuberculosis, plus Fanny Brand and the professional status which, in conjunction with the main-stream of subconscious thought common to all mankind, has thrown up temporarily an induced Keats.'
It's a mystery about the mystery of creation, a scientific parallel, a tease, and a kind of homage and parody to Keatsian Romantic imagination all at the same time. Keats' sensibility is replicated but rather crudely, as is echoed by the garish advertising poster of a girl which serves as a sort of shrine to the woman in the poor apothecary's life.
More weird metaphysics in H.G. Wells 'Under the Knife'. The premise is simple: a narrator (white, male, unmarried) is due for an operation and has a premonition that he will not survive. During the surgery has has an out-of-body experience which loosens him further and further from the operation room, the earth itself, the sun, stars, galaxy, until the known universe itself is a mere cluster of light. Two reasons I was struck by this tale. Firstly, for a brief fairly straightforwardly plotted story, the momentum and the scientific detail of the narrator's space journey is impressive. And there is a thoughtful sense of the soul's evolutionary, metaphysical journey as well as of the vast space geography covered: ' About me in space, invisible to me, scattered in the wake of the earth upon its journey, there must be an innumerable multitude of souls, stripped like myself of the material, stripped like myself of the passions of the individual and the generous emotions of the gregarious brute, naked intelligences, things of newborn wonder and thought, marvelling at the strange release that had suddenly come on them!' However, and the second reason to find this story memorable, things turn rather queasily nasty in a final vision, although this in turn is resolved by a return to earthly life. One is left as a reader wondering whether the serenity of the temporarily disembodied soul is a reassuring vision or whether there is a further discomforting one behind even that. But surely it was all an anaesthetic dream...
On to Charlotte Mew's 'A White Night'. A dramatic, quasi-gothic tale of depersonalised, menacing monks, chanting through the night before interring a woman, robed and seemingly resigned to her fate although clearly very much alive. A horrible story with added punch when given a feminist reading perhaps. ' I felt the force of her intense vitality, the tension of its absolute impression. The life of those enclosing presences seemed to have passed into her presence, to be concentrated there. For to my view it was these men who held her in death's grip who didn't live, and she alone who was absorbently alive.' The narrative is in fact similar to what happens when an anchoress is 'walled in' to her cell - the same funeral rites are read to signify her death to the world. But all the implications here are that there is a genuine burial of a still-living woman. To add to the layers, the narrator, it is stronly implied, is male. He sees a horrible beauty in the ritual. Should we? And what gendered implications are to be drawn from such a stark passage from life to living burial?
Finally GK Chesterton's 'The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown'. Not Father Brown, mind, and I nearly skipped this story. But I'm glad I didn't. Not to spoil the complex, and suprisingly meta and post modern plot, there are layers of artifice at work here in what starts out as a Sherlockian style crime fiction, complete with victim and private detective. Things turn out to be a good deal more constructed and 'fictional' than may be supposed at first. Chesterton's protagonist quotes Whitman when he talks about the longing for adventure, the 'hunger for something to happen' (which in its widest sense captures one of the essentials of the short story): how we can start to yearn for '"something pernicious and dread; something in a trance; something loosed from its anchorage, and driving free." Did you ever feel that?' Well if you did, something can certainly be arranged. If not, reading short stories is absolutely the thing to do.
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