Exit Interview

The syllabus for the Short Story is infinitely flexible--I like to use collections of stories, and I aim for a diversity of styles and voices, but the mix could take a vast range of different forms. Ben Marcus compares the compiling of an anthology to a mix-tape, and as your DJ for the semester, I'm curious which of these tracks have been most compelling to you, have stuck with you the most, and which are most forgettable.

Please take a few minutes, in this final class before graduation(!!), to answer a brief survey. And once again, thank you for all of your efforts this semester--I've really enjoyed the ride.

“Interpretation and Jhumpa Lahiri”

The New Yorker magazine has an uncanny record of publishing new work by authors I’m currently teaching in my classes, or articles relevant to subjects I’m teaching. A new short story by Jonathan Lethem will appear while I am halfway through his novel Girl in Landscape for my Coming-of-Age Novel course. A story based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis—by my favorite contemporary Kafkaesque writer, Haruki Murakami—will appear just as I’m wrapping up my unit on Kafka in the Twentieth-Century Novel. A review of the first Amazon Kindle, written by the novelist Nicholson Baker, will appear just after we finish discussing the summer reading for Twentieth-Century Novel, Baker’s 1988 book The Mezzanine. And there are further examples I could cite. The coincidence is nice, and it gives me an opportunity to mention some recent work by these living authors in class, but it’s also a little eerie, as if the New Yorker were keeping tabs on me, observing my syllabus from afar and orchestrating these convergences.

So I wasn’t too surprised when the December 7, 2015, issue arrived, featuring a “Personal History” story by Jhumpa Lahiri, just as the first iteration of this Short Story class was winding down last semester—and we were right in the middle of Interpreter of Maladies. The personal essay is titled “Teach Yourself Italian,” with the subheading, “For a writer, a foreign language is a new kind of adventure.” There’s a nice black-and-white photo of Lahiri, gazing with intense eyes at the camera. The first section is headed “Exile.” The essay begins:

                       My relationship with Italian takes place in exile, in a state of separation.

                        Every language belongs to a specific place. It can migrate, it can spread. 
                        But usually it’s tied to a geographical territory, a country. Italian belongs 
                        mainly to Italy, and I live on another continent, where one does not 
                        readily encounter it.

                        I think of Ovid, exiled from Rome to a remote place. To a linguistic 
                        outpost, surrounded by alien sounds.

            I think of my mother, who writes poems in Bengali, in America. Almost
fifty years after moving there, she can’t find a book written in her 
language. (30)

Right away, we recognize some familiar themes from Lahiri’s fiction—cultural exile, language and culture migrating (or failing to migrate) to a new geographical territory, movement between continents. But something seemed off. This doesn’t sound like Lahiri’s prose, the graceful, carefully crafted, detail-oriented sentences that shape her short fiction. There’s a choppiness, a slight stiffness; the sentences are short, with fragments and comma splices. And the paragraphs are short. There’s the stiff use of “one” as a personal pronoun. There’s a kind of tentativeness to the sentences, like feeling around in the dark rather than confidently asserting a state of affairs.

The essay goes on to describe Lahiri’s own efforts to teach herself Italian, using a book called, conveniently enough, Teach Yourself Italian. She becomes obsessed with the Italian language, and with it, Italian history and culture. She writes her doctoral thesis on Italian architecture and its influence on seventeenth-century English playwrights. She travels to Italy, where, despite feeling confident that she “knows” the language, she is “barely able to ask for directions on the street.” Eventually, she moves with her family from the United States to Rome, where she begins to write in Italian rather than English. The essay details her “linguistic metamorphosis” as she explores the “very different literary path” that another language offers her: “I can demolish myself, I can reconstruct myself.”

The prose manages communicate its ideas clearly, and the short, choppy sentences often have a poetic directness to them. But they remain short, for the most part, with simple grammatical constructions. At the very end of the essay, there’s a clear explanation for this shift in narrative voice: Translated, from the Italian, by Ann Goldstein. Lahiri, of course, composed the essay in Italian—writing about her struggles to grasp the language and its nuances, to think in the language, and to express her ideas in this foreign form in the unfamiliar language itself.

It turns out that this essay is an excerpt from Lahiri’s newest book, In Other Words, which was composed in Italian and translated into English, which builds on the themes in the essay to explore her “love affair” with the Italian language, and her struggle to find a new voice with which to express herself after growing dissatisfied with English.

A nonfiction book about an Indian American writer’s fascination with Italian language and culture might seem like an abrupt transition, for a Pulitzer Prize winner in short fiction in English. But I was struck, as I read again through the stories in Interpreter of Maladies, how constant this theme of interpretation is throughout Lahiri’s work, how fascinated she is with people’s efforts to communicate across cultures, their failures and successes in doing so.

The title story, of course, concerns a literal “interpreter of maladies.” Mr. Kapasi had always imagined himself doing “real” and consequential work with his linguistic aptitude: “He had dreamed of being an interpreter for diplomats and dignitaries, resolving conflicts between people and nations, settling disputes of which he alone could understand both sides” (52). But instead, in addition to part-time work as a tour guide, where he “interprets” India for visitors, he works in a doctor’s office, finding clever ways to convey the metaphorical descriptions of symptoms that patients bring to the doctor: “He complained that he felt as if there were long pieces of straw stuck in his throat. When I told the doctor he was able to prescribe the proper medication” (51). The Indian American wife in the backseat of his cab is suddenly interested in him, finding his work “romantic,” and thus begins a short-lived but intense period where Mrs. Das and Mr. Kapasi engage in what he describes as “like a private conversation” between them (54).

It soon becomes clear, as they are alone in the car and she moves to the front seat, treating him as a kind of confessor, that she has her own “malady” she wants him to interpret. After her sudden, shocking confession that Bobby is not Mr. Das’s son, and Mr. Das and Bobby (and the father) have no idea, it’s not clear what she’s hoping to hear him say, as we discussed in class: his summation, that it sounds like “guilt,” is about as good as I’d be able to do. But we get the impression that Mrs. Das wanted something more—she doesn’t ask what she should “do,” but demands that he have “something to say” (65). She wants a “remedy,” but it sounds more like she just wants to be understood, or sympathized with. To be interpreted to herself. Her secret makes her profoundly lonely, and we observe her disconnection from her husband and children from the first paragraph. She has this almost mystical faith in the ideal of “interpretation,” only there’s no “doctor” in the equation. It’s like she wants to be understood by Kapasi, or for him to “say something” that makes her understood to herself.

There’s one moment in “Interpreter of Maladies” that seems to anticipate Lahiri’s recent adventures in Italian, where the narrator describes, through Mr. Kapasi’s perspective, the excitement he feels at the prospect of this projected cross-continental friendship with Mrs. Das: “It was similar to a feeling he used to experience long ago when, after months of translating with the aid of a dictionary, he would finally read a passage from a French novel, or an Italian sonnet, and understand the words, one after another, unencumbered by his own efforts. In those moments Mr. Kapasi used to believe that all was right in the world, that all struggles were rewarded” (55-56). “Interpretation” here is not simply the substitution of one code for another, but a sudden dawning of understanding, an ability to see another picture of the world, “unencumbered” by “effort.”

This idea of “interpretation” as something more than simple “translation” recurs throughout the collection, in many of the cross-cultural encounters Lahiri narrates. In “Sexy,” we see Miranda develop a sudden interest in Indian culture and language because of her exciting affair with Dev. She goes to an Indian restaurant and tried to “memorize phrases printed at the bottom of the menu,” but “the phrases didn’t stick in her mind” (96). So she starts to frequent the foreign-language section of a local bookstore, where she “studied the Bengali alphabet” using what appears to be the same series of books Lahiri herself used, “the Teach Yourself series.” She even tries to “transcribe the Indian part of her own name, ‘Mira’” (97), but it doesn’t turn out so good. “It was scribble to her, but somewhere in the world, she realized with a shock, it meant something” (97).

This ambiguity of “interpretation” persists throughout the story, as Miranda is never sure she “understands” Dev, and the reader can’t tell for sure whether this is a bona fide love affair, or is she is being played by a more experienced seducer. The story’s title refers to what she views as a key early moment in their affair, when they stand on opposite ends of the bridge, alone together in the Mapporium at the Christian Science center. Dev insists that they will be able to hear each other whisper across the span of the bridge, and he urges Miranda to say something. All she can think of is “hi,” after she hears his whispered words “so clearly that she felt them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot” (91). Ever the smooth-guy, he whispers back, “You’re sexy.” She experiences this moment as a kind of pure communication, across a symbolic cultural bridge (he’s just shown her the map of India), where “interpretation” takes the form of a physical sensation on her skin.

If this is the moment that makes Miranda believe that she’s in love, the story’s account of her falling out of love with Dev hinges on a reinterpretation of the titular phrase. When she encounters the preternaturally incisive, hyper-mature eight-year-old Rohin—a symbol of her own guilt, as he’s the one who must witness his mother crying herself to sleep every night as her husband has an affair halfway around the world—he suddenly calls her “sexy” (after she puts on the dress she bought for a date with Dev, significantly). She is, understandably, shocked (not a comfortable thing to hear from an eight-year-old!), so she asks him what the word means. He won’t reply at first (“It’s a secret,” implying that he knows some aspect of the word that she will be unfamiliar with), but she persists and, “gripp[ing] his ankles, holding his feet still,” she gets him to “interpret” Dev’s earlier line: “It means loving someone you don’t know” (107).

Now, lexicographers would dispute Rohin’s translation, but it hits home for Miranda. What she had experienced as a thrilling sensation of being “known” by Dev is now revealed to be a moment of failed communication, of not being known but only being seen, or wanted. “Miranda felt Rohin’s words under her skin, the same way she’d felt Dev’s. But instead of going hot she felt numb” (107-8).

It’s a revealing moment when she asks Dev later if he remembers what he whispered that day on the bridge, as if trying to confirm Rohin’s suggestion of a failed communication. Dev responds “playfully,” flirtatiously, and claims that he remembers: “Let’s go back to your place” (109). Well, no, Dev, those weren’t your actual words—but clearly this is what he meant by “You’re sexy.” He wasn’t seeing or knowing her in some profound way, expressing his love and their spiritual connection spanning continents; he simply wanted to go back to her place, which sums up his experience of their affair quite succinctly. Rohin’s interpretation turns out to be spot-on.

“Masculinity in the Stories of Junot Diaz”

One of the common threads in Díaz’s first story collection, Drown, is the recurring character and frequent narrator Yunior. In these stories, we see him as a young boy, aged nine and younger, in the Dominican Republic, and as an adolescent in urban New Jersey. Díaz has gone on to employ Yunior as the (partial) narrator of his 2007 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which follows him into his college years at Rutgers, and he reappears as an adult (still going by the juvenile name Yunior) in the 2012 story collection This Is How You Lose Her. Díaz has described his larger writing project as a kind of cumulative biographical novel of Yunior’s life. Yunior’s circumstances closely echo Díaz’s own, yet he insists that his character is not a transparent representation of himself—Yunior is a fictionalized rendition of the author, as Rafa is a “satanic extremity of [Díaz’s] brother.” In the same interview with Richard Wolinsky where he memorably describes Rafa as “satanic,” Díaz says of Yunior, “I had an idea for Yunior at the beginning. My entire project had certain preoccupations. I kept looking for a protagonist that would allow me to address some of these preoccupations. I wanted to talk about gender. I wanted to talk about masculinity. I wanted to talk about race. I needed a character who was fantastically honest, fantastically observant.”

The stories throughout Drown reflect these preoccupations with gender, masculinity, and race, and these preoccupations are focused in this collection on young men in the process of forming their identities. Even the stories that don’t feature Yunior center on young men—pre-teens or early teenagers, sometimes young adults—who occupy Yunior’s north Jersey urban immigrant milieu. We imagine the narrators of “Drown” or “Aurora” or “Edison, New Jersey” as guys Yunior might know, or go to school with, or live down the block from. The collection could be read as a study of coming-of-age as experienced by young Dominican immigrant men to Northamerica, and of course, sexuality and gender identity are a big part of any coming-of-age story. We encounter these characters at a formative stage in their lives, and we see them trying out their nascent masculine identities, figuring out where they fit into the culture. A recurring theme throughout concerns the pressure to be, to act like, a particular type of man: dominant, assertively heterosexual, emotionally detached, sexually virile and promiscuous, and independent of women’s influences. Yunior navigates his coming-of-age with his older brother Rafa and his often absent father as his male role models, and we see him both wanting to be a man and grappling with some serious ambivalence about what it means to be a man in his community. Even in his absence, his father serves an ambivalent role-model function, communicating a picture of “manhood” as independent and not firmly tied to family. It seems that Yunior isn’t sure he wants to be like his father, even as he understands that in many ways his father is typical and representative of what masculinity entails in his world.

We see a similar dynamic between male friends and co-workers throughout these stories, with the narrator/protagonist often as a younger, less experienced male who is “apprenticed” to an older or more experienced man (Lucero and Cut in “Aurora,” the narrator and Beto in “Drown,” the narrator and Wayne in “Edison, New Jersey”). Our protagonists are given subtle and not-so-subtle life lessons in what it means to be a man in this Dominican American community. Another common thread is the relationships between these young men and their mothers. It would sound disparaging to call them “mama’s boys,” but their mothers loom large in their consciousness, and these sometimes emotionally callous young men are remarkably sensitive and empathetic toward their mothers. We see how their views of masculine sexuality are strongly shaped by their lonely, abused, and steadfast mothers—Yunior’s view of his father is largely shaped by his bitterness about his Mami’s suffering and struggle to raise the family in his absence (reflected in “Aguantando”). Yunior’s love and admiration for Mami is unambiguous and evident throughout the book—he portrays her as strong and committed, where his father is shady and unreliable. Did you notice that Díaz dedicates the book to his mother?

Yunior and Rafa share the secret knowledge of their father’s ongoing affair with “the Puerto Rican woman,” and they both decide not to say anything to their mother, in “Fiesta, 1980.” Yunior’s resentment of his father for riding him so relentlessly about his motion sickness is compounded by his resentment of his brazen infidelity and disrespect of his wife. While Rafa seems to be modeling himself as a young Papi-in-training, going off with the girls at the fiesta, Yunior—as the object of his father’s critical scrutiny and negative attention—feels more of an allegiance toward his mother, sitting in the hall and watching her whisper back and forth with her sister. He wants his father to be publicly “exposed” as a cheater, and he even looks forward to it as a justified comeuppance (40), but he hesitates to be the one to do it (in large part because he doesn’t want to hurt his mother, but also because he’s not certain it would improve the situation to tell her). What he’s really learning in this story is that his mother likely knows something about the affair, and that she resents it but is powerless to do anything about it. When his father unabashedly takes him to the other woman’s apartment, Yunior glimpses how unremarkable and commonplace such infidelity is in this community—a “boys will be boys” approach that sends him and Rafa mixed signals. On the one hand, he’s upset at the way it hurts and upsets his mother; on the other hand, he realizes on some level that the sexual double standard will apply to him, too, and that he might even be expected to be a habitual cheater.

There are interesting examples of young men learning these implicit lessons about gender and masculinity throughout these stories, but I’ll just cite one other. The narrator in “Edison, New Jersey” has recently broken up with his girlfriend, and he laments that his mother misses her as much as he does. He has his own ethical limitations—he openly boasts about “stealing” from his boss—but his moral sense is strong when reacting to Wayne’s open boasting about his own marital infidelity. “Twice this year Wayne’s cheated on his wife and I’ve heard it all, the before and after,” he complains. The narrator communicates his disapproval, but that makes Wayne drive all crazy, so he “[tries] to forget that I think his wife is good people and ask[s] him if Charlene’s given him any signals” (124). He’s bothered by Wayne’s reports of pursuing Charlene throughout the story, no doubt chafing after his own recent breakup with “the girlfriend.” When he makes his romantic effort to “save” the Dominican maid by helping her escape from Pruitt, Wayne warns him not to. The only way the narrator can save face is to imply that he is just trying to score with the maid. Wayne asks, “Was it worth it?” and the narrator admits “it wasn’t.” “Did you at least get some?” Wayne asks. “Hell yeah,” the narrator replies. When pressed, he says, “Why would I lie about something like that?” (138). Well, why would he lie? The reader knows that whatever romantic interactions went on in the van on the way to Washington Heights were awkward and halting, endearingly innocent, in contrast to Wayne’s relentless pursuit of women. The narrator does seem to have some vague romantic intentions: he puts his hand in her lap and leaves it there as he drives, hoping she’ll grasp his hand. She doesn’t. “Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work” (137). The narrator is not a predatory alpha-male but a sweet, romantic dude who is quite passive and even childlike in his efforts to seduce the maid. His bid to “save” her is deemed foolish by Wayne, his mentor figure, and the only way he can reclaim his pride is to insist that he “scored” with her. He turns himself into a Wayne—there’s less shame in predatory pursuit of women for sex than this quasi-heroic, even chivalrous attempt to rescue her from a sketchy situation.

We see these young men at decisive stages in their lives, in terms of gender and identity. It makes sense why this macho ideal of masculinity would take hold in a marginalized and exploited immigrant community like this (with roots, of course, in the Dominican culture they’ve moved from—Papi is already cheating before he comes to the US). These men feel marginal, neglected, criminalized, and ostracized from the American Dream and mainstream white American culture. They live among poverty, vice, and often squalor, and the projection of physical strength and independence has a lot to do with pride and a strong assertion of self. Their masculinity is implictly under attack in America, and they have something to prove. Yunior, in Oscar Wao, has gotten deep into weightlifting, and Díaz has described his character’s bodybuilding as a way to give himself a kind of protective layer against his vulnerabilities and insecurities. We can see the men in all these stories as playing out some version of this same dynamic, asserting their dominance over the women in their lives when they are unable to assert it elsewhere.

“Lorrie Moore at the Movies”

In addition to stage musicals and operas, movies feature prominently as settings and plot devices throughout Lorrie Moore’s stories in Self-Help. In “How to Be an Other Woman,” Charlene goes to “a Godard movie” with Mark, the banker her co-worker sets her up with, but she neglects to read the subtitles and instead ponders whether or not to sleep with him—when he winks at her in the middle of the film, she exclaims silently, “Good god” (19). Most of the plot of “The Kid’s Guide to Divorce” features the mother and daughter watching a Cary Grant movie, which they have seen before, and which always makes the mother cry (maybe especially now, given the great unspoken tension in the room); they follow it up with “The Late, Late Chiller” featuring a mummy and a werewolf. A key scene between Trudy and Bob in “Amahl and the Night Visitors” takes place in a mall movie theater (“Cinema 1-2-3”)—decidedly not the “downtown theaters of your childhood” (112)—when Moss had been allegedly “too busy” to go. The previews take forever (even in the 1980s previews took forever!), and the movie itself (ostensibly “about Brazil”) starts to seem more like Trudy’s own anxieties projected onto the screen: “The images melt together like a headache. The movie seems to be about a woman whose lover, losing interest in her, has begun to do inexplicable things like yell about the cat, and throw scenes in shopping malls” (113). The audience’s laughter makes Trudy “tense with comic exile”—they are ostensibly laughing at her very predicament—and she and Bob beat a hasty retreat.

These references to movies—the act of watching movies together, with the screen reflecting and affecting the “real life” depicted in the story—are of a piece with the book’s other popular-culture references. Many of Moore’s male characters are performers of one kind or another (singers of opera and stage musicals, actors), and plays and popular songs are referenced throughout. Her stories are set firmly in the cultural landscape of the 1980s—her characters allude to movies, TV shows, and popular songs as common points of reference. But this last example, where Trudy doesn’t “objectively” see the film about Brazil on the screen (they should have opted instead for the one “about sexual abandonment in upstate New York” [107] as an escape from her worries!), is especially interesting to me, and reflects the way Moore depicts her characters and their worlds as moving in and out of familiar fictions—and movies, rather than literature, become the template for these “fictions” they inhabit. Her characters sometimes see themselves as living scenes out of the movies, finding themselves playing out roles that seem familiar somehow—not from personal experience, but a more postmodern kind of “deja-vu.” So Trudy goes to the movies to take her mind off everything with Moss (and now Bob), but then Bob accompanies her, they talk about Moss during the movie, and all Trudy can see on screen is her own predicament reflected back—with the audience laughing at her. She has become a character on the screen, and her life has become the kind of thing that would be projected on the screen.

Moore introduces this blurring of movies and “real life” in the first paragraph of the first story in the collection, “How to Be an Other Woman.” While Trudy undergoes the strange dissociative experience of seeing her life projected on the screen for others to laugh at, at the start of this first story, the dynamic is reversed: it’s as if Charlene (or the “you” we eventually learn is named Charlene) suddenly finds herself living in the middle of a movie, cast in a role she didn’t audition for: “Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like in a detective movie” (3). Being “instructed” to “meet” a stranger seems to suggest a life as following a script—go here, stand here, cue the appropriate atmosphere and mood lighting, and . . . meet! As if to drive home the artificiality of the scene Moore is calling up here, we get images of artifice—“fake velvet Hummels,” a “small mound of chemical snow” on display in the store window. The atmosphere may evoke a detective movie, a film noir, but what follows is a “romantic” scene—a “cute meet.” If it’s a detective movie, then Charlene is the “femme fatale,” luring the male hero into a shady underworld of deceit and illusion. (Only it seems more like he’s the one luring her—an “homme fatal”?) The man’s entrance is straight out of Hollywood: “He emerges from nowhere, looks like Robert Culp, the fog rolling, then parting, then sort of closing up behind him” (3). Only in movies does fog part like a curtain, and then seal up again photogenically behind the strong-jawed leading man, who here is explicitly likened to the film actor and archetypal but not-quite-famous-as-Cary-Grant leading man Robert Culp. What do two lovers do when they meet in these kinds of movies? You already know the answer: “He asks you for a light. . . . He lights the cigarette, cupping his hands around the end, and drags deeply, like a starving man” (3). They proceed to stand next to each other waiting for the bus, each palpably aware of the other: “You begin to circle, gauging each other in primordial sniffs, eyeing, sidling, keen as Basil Rathbone” (3). One more allusion to an actor, to solidify our sense that we’ve seen this scene before—not in life, but in the movies. They get on the bus (as she pretends to be reading a biography of the movie star Doris Day, even though she’s really reading Flaubert’s novel of marital infidelity, Madame Bovary), and she attempts some snappy dialogue (which “sounds dumb,” but still gets the job done). The rest, as they say, is history.

This is such a self-consciously constructed “start of a story”—Moore risks opening her collection of innovative narrative fiction with a scene that evokes every cliché you can think of for a “romantic” meeting. The second-person narration here reads like a director instructing actors, choreographing their movements and words to produce a scene that not only explains how they meet, but which tries hard to invest that meeting with an atmosphere of romance. There’s the sense of the character losing all control or free will: she’s now “the other woman,” and once cast, she must follow the plot to its inevitable finish. The distinctive second-person narrative style Moore employs in different ways throughout this book flaunts its artifice, even as it is used to represent distinctive and emotionally complex, realistic, and distinctive characters: it “puts us in the character’s position,” but it also runs the risk of reminding us, at every turn, that this is not “us,” that “we” haven’t done any of these things, and often our inclinations would be quite different from those of the characters. It’s hard, for most of these stories, for the reader to not be aware on some level of the style being deployed—to know that an author is putting together a story for us, and finding tricky ways to try and get us into that narrative. With first-person narration, it’s pretty easy to maintain the illusion that the narrator is an autonomous person choosing to share their story with you. The second person calls attention to itself, reminds us that there’s an author telling us all this stuff.

In this first story, with this self-consciously “cinematic” opening, Moore is inviting us to play along, to imagine this wholly unrealistic yet uncannily familiar scene, as the character finds herself falling into an all-too-realistic and familiar “role” as an “other woman.” It’s as if Charlene can’t believe the opening of her story is so clichéd, either. As the story unfolds, she becomes increasingly uneasy with and detached from this version of herself—she has become “another woman” (5), and this is not the plot she had envisioned. The familiar story is full of the kinds of clichés introduced in the opening scene, and the reader will have the feeling of having seen it all before (there is a surprise plot twist at the end, with the revelation that “the wife” is really just the “other mistress”—but surprise twists are, paradoxically, an expected feature of cinematic narrative). Her awareness of the artifice doesn’t stop her from falling for its magic (“He leaves before you have even quite fallen asleep, but before he does, he bends over you in his expensive beige raincoat and kisses the ends of your hair. Ah, he kisses your hair” [6]). 

Charlene imagines a quite different life for herself, with her college education and her Phi Beta Kappa key, but she ends up being cast into this role as if she’d wandered onto a movie set on that “pea-soupy” night, and she can’t quite escape. The inevitable breakup scene remains in cliché territory. When he says, lamely, “what I’ve always admired about you, right from when I first met you, is your strength, your independence,” she replies, “That line is old as boots” (21). He leaves as cinematically as he enters—“pulling up the collar on his expensive beige raincoat, like an old and haggard Robert Culp”—but all Charlene, or “you,”  can do is “slam the door like Bette Davis.” 

As Moore puts it in “How,” “One of those endings” (64). 

“James Baldwin and Dancing about Architecture”

An oft-quoted warning—which I’ve always attributed to the American rock critic Lester Bangs, but whose origins are apparently murky, and might have originally been said by Martin Mull, Laurie Anderson, Steve Martin, Thelonius Monk, or Elvis Costello—holds that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Writing is one kind of art form, music another, and the effort to try to account for the effects of music in language is inherently doomed to approximation, vagueness, and failure. Or it could be just saying that writing well about music, in an illuminating way, is really, really difficult. Either way, the phrase has stuck so well, been recirculated so many times that no one knows who originally said it, because it clearly holds true. The experience of listening to, being moved by, music surpasses our ability to articulate it.

James Baldwin writes about music throughout Going to Meet the Man: the singing during the revival meeting in “The Outing,” the gospel songs performed by Pete and the narrator in “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” the mention of specific musicians and singers like Mahalia Jackson and Charlie Parker, the protest songs sung by the activists in “Going to Meet the Man,” which upset Jesse so strongly (and, grotesquely, the songs he remembers the “picknickers” singing at the lynching his father takes him to at age eight). Music is a part of the world his characters occupy, and Baldwin makes their listening to and performance of music central to these stories.

In “Previous Condition,” we sit with the narrator as he listens to “Ludwig” (van Beethoven) on the radio in the apartment downstairs from the one his white friend rented for him, terrified that he’ll be discovered in this white-only building. Baldwin represents what the narrator is hearing as a visual imagining of the orchestra’s performance, as if we are listening with him:

            I sat with my knee up, watching the lighted half-moon below, the black-coated, 
            straining conductor, the faceless men beneath him moving together

            in a rhythm like the sea. There were pauses in the music for the rushing, calling,

            halting piano. Everything would stop except the climbing soloist; he would reach

            a height and everything would join him, the violins first and then the horns; and

            then the deep blue bass and the flute and the bitter trampling drums; beating,

            beating and mounting together and stopping with a crash like daybreak. (90)

The music sets the mood for the tense scene that follows, as “below the music” he hears “footsteps on the stairs.” There’s irony, of course, in this Beethoven-appreciating theater-geek being miscast as a threatening, dangerous black man by the racist landlady and her racist tenants just as he’s miscast as Bigger Thomas in Native Son. (Not as if her eviction of him would be justified if he’d been listening to Charlie Parker or James Brown, but Baldwin emphasizes how badly she misreads him by making him a fan—and careful, informed listener—of the quintessential Western classical composer.) But Baldwin doesn’t just narrate that his narrator listens to Beethoven; he walks us through the performance, as the narrator hears it, in a very active way. The different parts of the composition are joined together (“orchestrated”?) in a single sentence, linked by semicolons, to reflect their working in concert together. His language is figurative and evocative—the pit musicians moving together “in a rhythm like the sea”; the “rushing, calling, halting piano”; the “deep blue bass” and “bitter trampling drums.” The performance is active, in Baldwin’s narrative, as is the narrator’s listening.

The tour-de-force of “dancing about architecture” in this book would be “Sonny’s Blues.” The title of the story holds two simultaneous connotations, both of them reflected in the quintessentially American musical form of the blues: Sonny’s personal struggles, his suffering, his demons, his addiction to heroin, and the music he produces in response to that human condition. He “has the blues” and he “plays the blues,” and his performance of music serves as the pivotal scene in the story. The culminating scene—where Sonny has invited the narrator to come out and see him play at a jazz club in the Village—represents both a personal form of communication between the narrator and his estranged brother and a more complex form of reflection on African American history and cultural resilience (which jazz itself represents, with each new performer adding to that story in some way). The scene makes for one of the most satisfying, moving endings to any story we’re going to read this semester, and I often cite it as one of the best examples of writing about music that I know.

Previous to Sonny’s performance, we have an extensive, very serious conversation between Sonny and his brother in which Sonny attempts to make his brother understand his heroin use, his music, and how they’re connected as a response to the “suffering” that is inherent to existence. Significantly, Sonny raises this topic after having listened to the singing at the storefront church service across the street: “When she was singing before . . . her voice reminded me for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes. . . . Sometimes you’ve got to have that feeling” (131). Earlier in the story, the narrator sums up his failure or refusal to empathize with Sonny by telling his heroin-using friend, “I certainly didn’t want to know how it felt” (107). He’s much more comfortable judging Sonny, or simply remaining perplexed about “why” he would get involved with people who use heroin, than trying to understand what Sonny is going through, “what it feels like.” And even in this later conversation, there’s no clear indication that communication has taken place. “It can come again,” Sonny says to his brother, referring to his addiction and how the desire to relieve the suffering never fully disappears. “It can come again. . . . I just want you to know that.” The narrator’s response resembles his much earlier failure to really grasp his mother’s urge that he “be there for” Sonny: “All right. . . . So it can come again. All right” (135). “You’re my brother,” Sonny says. “Yes,” the narrator repeats, “yes, I understand that.” But it’s not at all clear to the reader that he does understand: he gets that Sonny is his brother, of course, but he doesn’t seem to get what Sonny is implying about brotherhood, and understanding, and compassion. He reaches out to his older brother and tries to honestly let him know about his experience, but his brother just says, “yeah, yeah, I get it.”

So when the narrator shows up at the club downtown, Sonny gets another opportunity to express himself, this time without words. It’s as if Baldwin were saying some things are better expressed nonverbally, musically, through the individual expression of improvisation in collaboration with other musicians. The narrator hasn’t “gotten” Sonny’s music since he first declared his intent to be a musician; he’s bewildered by Sonny’s early efforts to play piano, he is totally unfamiliar with the bebop style (epitomized by Parker) that Sonny loves, and he dismisses the whole downtown Village jazz scene as shady and morally suspect—just the kind of situation that will land Sonny in jail one day.

It’s a big deal, therefore, for the narrator to even be in attendance at this show. And because he’s the narrator, we experience Sonny’s performance in a very direct and personal way—we listen with the narrator, and Baldwin’s remarkable portrayal of the delicate negotiations of live improvised performance all reflect the narrator’s understanding of what Sonny is doing.

I would love to walk through the entire performance scene—which runs from page 137 to 140, and which I insisted on reading aloud in its entirety this morning in class—but this post is already running long. Baldwin presents the “thesis” of this scene at the start: “All I know about music,” the narrator says, “is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates music is hearing something else. . . . What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason” (137).

The music “has no words,” but Baldwin doesn’t spare any in the effort to represent the narrator’s experience as a listener. What he writes is not simply good musical criticism, like a skilled reviewer of jazz performance. The performance is action in this story, quite literally a form of conversation, and we watch as Sonny’s playing, and Creole’s orchestration of the band to allow for Sonny to express himself, and his gentle encouragement of Sonny, all registers on the narrator’s consciousness. He doesn’t “describe” the music; he narrates it. Observe the strikingly specific active verbs Baldwin uses throughout, and how few of them are typical ways to describe people playing instruments: the musicians on stage “say” things, and others “answer,” “listen,” and “comment.” Creole “remind[s] them that what they were playing was the blues” and “tell[s] us what the blues were all about” (139)—and he’s not stopping and lecturing from the stage. The language of verbal communication is deployed to depict the interaction among musicians and between musicians and audience. Baldwin describes Creole as gently leading Sonny out into deeper water, before allowing him to swim (or “speak”) for himself.

The final descriptive passage—“Sonny’s blues,” as “announced” musically by Creole—is remarkable, as we see both Sonny’s performance and the narrator’s very personal and specific “understanding” of what Sonny is “saying”: “Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his” (140). Sonny’s expression takes effort, takes suffering, and the narrator seems to “understand” this: “I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth.” The narrator sees his mother’s face again, and “for the first time” feels a deep empathy for her and her struggle. He sees “the moonlit road where [his] father’s brother died” and, heartbreakingly, “I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel’s tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise.” (My own begin to rise just typing this line.) Sonny moves the narrator—from comprehension, to compassion, to an awareness of this music and its deep historical connection to their family and their race, to a powerful emotional experience of his own suffering, made beautiful through wordless music.

A pretty good dance about architecture, if you ask me.

Salinger’s Children

One thing that distinguishes Salinger’s Nine Stories from the other collections we’re reading this semester is the number of children that appear on his pages—and not just as side-players, incidental members of the main character’s family, but as distinctive, individuated characters who often play a decisive role in the story. Anyone who has spent any time around young children will attest that Salinger has a remarkable ear for children’s speech and their idiosyncratic conversational rhythms. But these stories aren’t primarily concerned with the children’s world as such—rather, the children are presented as part of the adult world. He doesn’t tend to depict children among children, but children interacting with adults, and often the children influence the adult characters in profound and ambiguous ways.

Readers of Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye will recall the key role played by sixteen-year-old misanthrope Holden Caulfield’s younger sister, ten-year-old Phoebe, late in the novel. After Holden shrugs off every adult in his life as “phony” and not worth listening to, this little girl is able to get through to him, to challenge him to reassess some of his recent self-destructive tendencies. He talks about her as the least phony person he knows. Ironically, though, Phoebe comes off as more mature and level-headed than her older brother, as she asks him tough questions about his plans for the future and the fact that he’s royally screwing up his life, and she doesn’t let him off the hook when he offers his usual half-assed, whimsical answers. He might think he’s about to have some light and easy conversation with the little kid he loves most in the world, but that’s not what he gets.

So it’s too simple to say that children simply represent innocence in Salinger, although that is part of the picture. He definitely seems drawn to children’s lack of pretense, their sometimes uncomfortable honesty, their unself-consciousness (remember Ramona scratching herself while her mother keeps telling her to cut it out), the fact that they aren’t trying to impress anyone—and “innocence” is a part of this. There’s a sense, throughout the book, of the adult world as corrupt, self-absorbed, traumatized, and children often serve the role of dramatizing the gap between who these people are now, and what they might have been like not too long ago. When Eloise pauses in the doorway of Ramona’s room, after berating her quite harshly for “replacing” Jimmy Jimereeno with Mickey Mickereeno, she is suddenly overcome with emotion, and while her reaction is ambiguous, it seems to have something to do with suddenly seeing—and recoiling from—the nasty, embittered woman she has become: “I was a nice girl, . . . wasn’t I?” (56). Ramona’s imaginative play has forced the traumatized Eloise, who is still grieving the loss of her beloved Walt, to face the fact that her grief has changed her, made her jaded, ironic, and cynical. The story ends with her seeming to lament a lost innocence, to want affirmation of the “nice” person she once was.

Instead of viewing childhood as a necessary formative stage before “real life,” Salinger often seems to take the opposite view: children are more in touch with what’s “real” (ironically, even through imaginary friends), while adults have, for a range of reasons, compromised themselves, become artificial, materialistic, cynical, status-obsessed. Remember that the book opens with a Zen koan. A central aim in Zen spiritual practice is to achieve a “child’s mind” or “beginner’s mind,” and through many of his child characters Salinger seems to be exploring this idea in the very un-Zen milieu of postwar, privileged, northeastern white Americans. In the final story in the collection, a precocious child prodigy, Teddy, tells Bob Nicholson that he must empty his mind of logic and reason in order to truly understand anything and laments how hard it is to articulate this idea in midcentury America.

Consider the role of Sybil, in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” We are introduced to the story’s central character, the enigmatic and war-traumatized Seymour, through her perspective. She has reinterpreted his name as a sentence, “See more glass,” and she indeed seems to “see more” in him than just the erratic and potentially dangerous veteran described by Muriel’s mother. Salinger establishes the dynamic of a free-spirited child existing within an adult world that doesn’t really value them as individuals right away, as her mother absently applies “sun-tan oil” (a relic of the pre-sunscreen-conscious era) while talking to the woman next to her about a lovely silk handkerchief someone was wearing the other day. She speaks to Sybil mainly to get her to “hold still,” before prompting her to “run along and play” while she sneaks off to the bar for a Martini. “I’ll bring you the olive,” she says (15). Sybil seems completely unaffected by her mother: she more or less patiently endures the application of sun-tan oil before being “set loose” to run off on her own. Her mother isn’t the least bit interested in this “See more glass” stuff; she just wants that Martini.

What seems to set Seymour apart in this story—aside from his paleness and his propensity to wear his hotel bathrobe on the beach—is his total engagement with Sybil, on her level. Some in class and on the blogs have mentioned feeling uneasy throughout the scene where they’re together, and this suspicion toward Seymour is built into the story from the start: you’re thinking like Muriel’s paranoid, hysterical mother, seeing him as a dangerous “crazy” person. And perhaps it’s a measure of our own loss of innocence that when we see a grown man interacting with a child like this, we assume the worst. But the scene Salinger provides is actually quite innocent, and in light of the story’s abrupt ending, quite poignant. What we actually get in the scene with Sybil is not a predatory monster or dangerous psychotic but a witty eccentric who doesn’t seem to care about “adult” concerns and seems quite jaded with the privileged, materialistic life he leads. As he brushes off questions about Muriel’s whereabouts with a satirical crack about how she might be off “having her hair dyed mink” (17), we note how he associates adulthood with artificiality and self-indulgence. Seymour, at the very least, seems disillusioned with the life of luxury and leisure his postwar existence affords. The setting is an elite Florida beachfront hotel, but he doesn’t seem to be having fun there the way the other adults do, playing the piano in the lobby and joking around with Sybil and Sharon Lipschutz.

And it seems clear that Sybil prefers Seymour’s company to her mother’s—she doesn’t care how eccentric and weird he looks, sitting on the beach in his bathrobe. He engages her at her level, sometimes making jokes that go a little over her head, but silly enough that she can appreciate the playful tone (“Olive and wax. I never go anyplace without ’em” [21]). He seemingly improvises a fanciful story about “bananafish” and their habits while wading out into the water with Sybil, and she quickly picks up on the game and plays along (“I just saw one” [24]). The bananafish story is not a happy one, though—“They lead a very tragic life” (23), overindulging in the thing they think they want (bananas) until they die. Not exactly The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Seymour seems to be communicating something here, but it’s not at all clear what, at the time. In retrospect, it’s possible to read this bananafish story as a parable, even a kind of suicide note. Seymour may be expressing his own disillusionment with adult life, with the materialistic overindulgence that has followed the war. His same ironical sense of humor suddenly turns paranoid and nasty in the elevator with the woman. Whatever is going on with Seymour—and he remains enigmatic throughout the story—it seems clear that this brief episode with Sybil is decisive, and seems to represent a significant moment of human connection, perhaps the kind of thing he can no longer achieve among the adults who now populate his world. Sybil accepts his fantastical, alternate reality without skipping a beat; she believes in bananafish. I’m not sure exactly what it means, but it seems that her claim to have seen a bananafish with six bananas in its mouth (24) seems decisive to him. He ends their little swim and immediately returns to the hotel. There’s no sentimentality in Sybil, either—she runs off  “without regret in the direction of the hotel” (25).

In the opening story, Sybil is unable to “save” the traumatized veteran, and her role in the story remains ambiguous and open to interpretation; it even seems that she “inspires” Seymour’s final act, in some unintended way. But in “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” a story that is widely considered to be a very personal one for Salinger, the D-Day veteran who experienced a debilitating nervous breakdown after the war and who remained profoundly out of step with and even hostile toward mainstream American culture for the rest of his life, we see a much more restorative role played by a child. The story’s “before and after” structure, with the wartime trauma passed over in silence, turns our attention to Esmé and her role—she promises that she’ll write a letter to the narrator, and he promises to write a story for her in turn. She’s another precocious Salinger child, who seems both wise beyond her years and innocent at the same time. It’s not as if she is “naturally” compassionate; indeed, she’s consciously working on her compassion. He gets her letter at a point where he is unable to function like a human being. His “faculties” are not “intact.” The simple but profound gesture of giving him her dead father’s watch serves to connect with him in a way that Clay’s clumsy efforts at conversation do not. It seems to make him able to “sleep,” and the story ends in a hopeful tone that is reinforced by the comparatively “healthy” narrator who opens the story, talking about Esmé’s wedding invitation. The end of the story is in the beginning, and the story we read is, self-reflexively, the story the narrator promises to write for Esmé. It stands as Salinger’s most straightforward treatment of the trope of a child helping an adult, and Esmé remains one of Salinger’s most beloved and memorable characters. But we see here a paradigm for Salinger’s treatment of children in his work: her precocity, lack of pretension, emotional intelligence, and simple, unsolicited compassion provides the narrator—and the author?—with something he seems unable to find in the adult world.

“Fabula” and “Sjuzet”: Or, We Need Some Good English Words for This Theoretical Distinction

The other day in class, after going over your Short Story assignment, I briefly introduced a useful pair of concepts drawn from Russian Formalist criticism, which revolutionized how literary scholars conceived and talked about narrative in the early half of the twentieth century: fabula and sjuzet. These are often loosely translated into English as “story” and “plot”—terms which are so close in meaning that the distinction nearly gets lost. I will attempt a more detailed and hopefully clearer summary here; you may consult Wikipedia for a more complete account.

“Fabula” (or “story”) refers to the sequence of events, actions, spoken words, and circumstances that comprise the “raw material” of a story—the “stuff that happened” apart from any narrative representation of these events. We imagine a “God’s-eye” view of the world that could reconstruct every significant feature of an event without altering or distorting it in any way. The fabula, however, turns out to be a theoretical construction: no such account, of any event, exists. Once something happens, it immediately slips into the past, and our only way of accessing it takes the form of narrative—whether a memory, an anecdote, a diary entry, a police report, court testimony, journalism, or historical writing, we have no access to “events themselves” apart from some form of narrative. We can never access the “real story,” and any narrative, theoretically, is an approximation.

The “sjuzet” (or “plot”) represents the artificial linguistic construction that seeks to represent the story in words: an author shapes and interprets the “events themselves” in all kinds of ways when he or she builds a narrative from experience. (And even fictional writing not based on direct experience posits or imagines a fabula that must be given written form.) An author plots or arranges that raw material according to linguistic and cultural conventions of narrative. A well-told story might create a strong impression of accuracy, reliability, of access to the “events themselves”—in fiction, we call this “realism.” But a relentlessly “realistic” rendering of a narrative (without a lot of personal, editorial commentary or obvious speculation; employing the “omniscient” third-person voice—think of Hemingway's style in “Hills Like White Elephants”) is still as much of an artificial construction as a more obviously “fictionalized” account. In either case, we have nothing but the narrative to go on, no finally “real” version of the story against which to gauge its accuracy. Evidence can bolster an account of events, and we might reasonably gauge the accuracy of a narrative in all kinds of ways, when it really matters (as in courtroom testimony, where a sjuzet always is subject to critical scrutiny and burdens of proof). But even the most scrupulously “objective,” fact-based narrative is, fundamentally, a linguistic construction.

Does this distinction make sense? Does it seem obvious? The important insight to grasp, I think, has to do with the constructed nature of any narrative. The fabula does not exist, except in so far as it has been given shape in a sjuzet. We can’t conveniently step outside of language and access “the events themselves”; once they’ve occurred, “events” only take shape as part of a narrative (or else they are forgotten and disappear). We are indeed “trapped in language,” with no access to some extralinguistic reality, as some of the poststructuralist followers of the Russian Formalists might have put it.

The study of fiction—and especially short fiction, which has to do more in a compact space—repeatedly bumps us up against these limitations of language. We are only reading sjuzets in this course. For some of these narratives, there may indeed have been “real” people, settings, and a sequence of events on which they are based—but that doesn’t matter much to us as readers of a short story. I don’t see this “limitation” as a cause for despair, and I don’t feel especially “trapped in language.” But it does mean that we have to accustom ourselves to ambiguity, to the fact that short stories often end without clear resolution—questions remain, and continue to point us outside the apparent bounds of what the author has chosen to include. We have these wonderfully rich and ambiguous stories to work with, and while they prompt us to imaginatively reconstruct a hypothetical fabula as we read (they seem to point toward an external reality where certain things happened at a certain time to certain people), we do not despair (usually) of never getting access to “the real story.” There is no real story, apart from the constructed, written narrative.

Some writers will try to relentlessly hide the constructed nature of their narratives, to create the illusion of unfiltered reality being presented directly to the reader. But Tim O’Brien constantly draws attention to the constructedness of his stories, the theoretical fabula-sjuzet divide, from the very start of this book (its dedication page, its epigraph, and its explicit identification as “a work of fiction” on the title page), O’Brien compels us to recognize both that we are reading an account of real stuff that happened to real people in a real war (we take these stories as a reflection of actual wartime experience, written by an eyewitness and participant), and that he, as the author, is constantly shaping, reshaping, altering, and adding to that real stuff (“making stuff up” in order to produce short stories, or works of fiction). Even when his fictions use a character’s “real name” (as far as we know), or refer to the author/narrator himself as “Tim O’Brien,” we are still fully aware that the events (often controversial and morally ambiguous) cannot be accessed outside of the stories we are reading. To call these “fiction” is not to say that they are phony, imagined, or false—indeed, O’Brien is adamant that “truth” can be achieved through fiction, even especially through the invention and alteration of the factual bases for a story.

Think of how often the “same” stories appear in various forms throughout this collection. Near the end of “Spin,” early in the book, we get the following brief exchange between Kiowa and a silent “Tim”:

                        A red clay trail outside the village of My Khe.

                        A hand grenade.

                        A slim, dead, dainty young man of about twenty.

                        Kiowa saying, “No choice, Tim. What else could you do?”

                        Kiowa saying, “Right?”

                        Kiowa saying, “Talk to me.”   (36)

And yet “Tim” doesn’t “talk” here—not yet. We might be able to surmise something about the situation, but we have not yet heard “the story.” We “get” this passage much more clearly on a second reading. Not until “The Man I Killed” do we get further elaboration of this earlier sketch (with the repetition of key phrases, like the “dainty” qualities of the dead man), but at this point, the focus is primarily on the moments just after the man has been killed, as the narrator (“Tim”) tries to deal with the horror of what he’s done. And then, in the next story (“Ambush”), he finally recounts the act of killing itself (in an imagined response to his daughter’s question about whether he killed anyone in the war). It takes “Tim O’Brien” multiple attempts to “talk”—to turn this set of actions and events into a “story”—and indeed the book almost seems to avoid certain subjects at first, as if the author would really rather not get into some of these stories. And yet he comments that the effort it takes to confront this stuff is largely “why [he] keep[s] writing war stories” (125). The same set of now-familiar elements are revisited yet again in “Good Form,” even as this short fragment calls the now-established “facts” of the story into question (“twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough” [171]). The book continually circles around stories it wants to tell, as if wondering how to tell them.

The “story” of the man he killed (or didn’t) is “told” in various forms—often repeating key images and motifs—throughout this book, and the same is true of other stories (Kiowa’s gruesome demise, for example). This is a book that is centrally about people trying to make sense of their experience, to turn the chaos and absurdity of war into a coherent and meaningful narrative. But O’Brien continually reminds us that this is an artificial and subjective process. The “real story” continues to exist in a theoretical plain outside narrative. We know “stuff happened,” and these arrangements of words are an effort to make that stuff real, to allow it to be communicated to someone else, to approximate the lived experience, “how it felt.” 

While a more straightforward, chronological account of the shooting of the young man with the dainty wrists in one conventional narrative might seem like a more effective way to create the illusion of reality (more of a direct reflection of how things actually happened), in fact, this odd “circling around” of the story generates a unique confidence in the truth of what is being conveyed: with each attempt to tell the story, our conviction that there is a story to tell (that something happened, and that it very much matters to the person telling it) is strengthened.

So, as readers of short fiction this semester, we will continually attend to the creative choices an author has made to shape his or her sjuzet: the narrative point of view, the structure, the chronological sequence, the beginning and end. As writers of short fiction yourselves, who are basing your work at least in part on real stuff, you will be thinking about fabula and sjuzet all the time, whether you use these arcane Russian words or not. There are infinite ways to shape your story, and as the author, you need to make a number of consequential decisions about how that theoretical set of events and actions will be constructed in narrative form.