Short Story: Narrative Innovation
Session Coordinator: Kimberly A. Nance
Department of Foreign Languages 4300, Illinois State University
Normal IL 61790-4300
kanance@ilstu.edu

“Painterly Ambitions: Hemingway, Cezanne, and the Short Story”

Hemingway’s two-part short story “Big Two-Hearted River” is recognized as one of his most innovative early works, published in the collection In Our Time. The story follows the actions of Nick Adams as he makes a solitary journey through the countryside to go fishing. There is little to no reference of other people, places, or events; the story is praised for exhibiting Hemingways famous iceberg theory. Another well-known fact is that the author was interested in the paintings of Paul Cezanne; indeed in A Moveable Feast and various letters, Hemingway explicitly claims that he wished to write as Cezanne paints. Yet critics rarely conduct a rigorous formal study of these two distinct Modernist moments and the aesthetic process involved in carrying out such a cross-disciplinary project. This paper will attempt to delve deeper. I argue that Hemingway achieves narrative innovation in “Big Two-Hearted River” because he deliberately experiments with painterly form in language. Using the principles of post-impressionist art, I will go further than critics who simply suggest what lies below the surface in this story by showing how Hemingway uses visuality to craft dramatic tension and tone without relying on traditional categories of storytelling like characters, plot, or background. This paper will not hold literature up to painting for its descriptive ability to portray correspondence in subject matter, but will attempt to study the problems of medium-boundedness and ruptures in representational assumptions that Cezanne made possible for Hemingway to imagine.

Monika Gehlawat

UC Berkeley

monika7@uclink.berkeley.edu

“Narrating the Unnarratable: Robert Walser’s Apophatic Narrative Mode”

This paper investigates how ostensibly antinarrative devices in the short story can in fact be the locus of a story's narrativity.  This paradox will be examined in what are essentially digressive narrative modes, those parts of a narrative that depart from the plot or story and/or delay the progression of the narrative.  When sustained or radically implemented, digression can result in the weakening or even the destruction of plot.  Can a story's narrative drive lie in these antinarrative gestures?  Can they participate in the recuperation of a completely different kind of narrativity (one no longer tied to the necessities of plot)? These questions will be addressed by way of an analysis of the short prose pieces of the Swiss outsider-Modernist Robert Walser (1878-1956). Walser's fundamentally digressive stories seem constantly to avoid actually telling a story.  What sustains the narrative of his prose miniatures is therefore not any actual semblance of story, but rather an extraordinarily palpable sense of their telling.  Thus what his stories are very often actually about is the very act of telling, or trying to tell, a story. The events of the story appear to be displaced from the level of story to the level of discourse. Walser's foregrounding of his own will to narrate, his desire to successfully carry out his representational endeavor, further complicates such perhaps not so unusual (in post-modern fiction, for instance) metanarrative playfulness.  His antinarrative maneuverings finally turn in on themselves, so that the story-elements that they seem to abolish re-remerge in altered form precisely by means of their apparent abolishment. 

Samuel Frederick

Cornell University

smf32@cornell.edu

“Deconstructing Magical Realism: ‘Journey to the Seed’”

The only cause of death is birth and by moving along with time, the future brings our inevitable death, but ironically not our inevitable birth. Alejo Carpentier’s short story “Journey to the Seed” explores the devastation of existence, the cruelty of time, and the pleasure of unmaking mistakes. In a paradoxical journey, time is separated between the
narrator, the reader and the characters. The main character, Marcial, is given the gift of living his life in reverse until he reaches the time before his conception and ultimately his non-existence, but as Marcial is going backwards, the narrator continues to move forwards, setting the base narrative from which the characters are directed in their forward and backward movements in the reality of time as it is presented within the text. The story also explores the ontological journey of existence and non-existence by
splitting the concept of reality into real reality and magical reality by dividing the concept of time within its narration into time going forward and time going in reverse. In this paper I will examine the idea of a structured Magical Realism narrative in order to break
it down into its elemental fragments. I will explore the details that make this story a part of magical Realism and why it is so important to the literary community, by utilizing concepts that I have been developing over a series of papers titled Deconstructing Magical Realism.

Anne Bahringer

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

triplecatsink@yahoo.com

"Jean Rhys and Postmodern Narrative Authority: Selina's Patois in ‘Let Them Call it Jazz’"

Through her black Creole first-person narrator, Rhys also responds to literary modernisms critical narrative preoccupations.  In The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language & Twentieth Century Literature, Michael North interrogates the racial cross-identification prevalent throughout the modernist period, as Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, among others, reimagined themselves as black, spoke in a black voice, and used that voice to transform the literature of their time.  Conversely, many African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance eschewed black dialect or risked disparagement by incorporating it into their writing.  A white Creole woman of British descent, Rhys similarly grappled with race and speech in her life and fiction, rendering her uniquely positioned to create Selina of “Let Them Call it Jazz.” Bridging the narrative gap between white masquerade and black dialect, Rhyss female narrator undertakes what Susan Sniader Lanser calls extrarepresentational acts: reflections, judgments, generalizations about the world beyond the fiction [. . .] that allow the writer to engage, from within the fiction, in a cultures literary, social, and intellectual debates.  While Lanser focuses on the novel in The Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice, her theory of narratology aligns well with “Let Them Call it Jazz.”  As my paper demonstrates, Rhys’s narrator challenges, in a complex new voice, conventional sexual, racial, and class paradigms.

Kristin Czarnecki

University of Louisville

kczarnecki@fuse.net