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The Novella, Part III: The Last Educations

6/18/2012

As novella month scoots along, I might as well mention my as-yet unpublished novella collection, The Last Educations…This was the creative part of my creative dissertation (excerpts from the critical introduction can be found here and here).

Comprised of three novellas—“Fate,” “The Consolation of Empire,” and “The Incomplete”--The Last Educations is an academic satire set at a large university in Austin, Texas. It’s filled with the absurd struggles of education: favor-dodging, ex-girlfriend avoiding, grade-dreading, plagiarist-busting, dissertation-reading, office-mate annoying, litter-box spilling, book-stealing, student-humping, cat-chasing, wrist-breaking, inopportune erectile-disfunctioning, boyfriend-dumping planning, dead-professor missing, committee-meeting texting, cloud-spotting, bureaucratic student mis-filing, classroom failing, hidden Confederate-history uncovering, book-writing, student advising, professional dysphoria-feeling, drunk-tank loitering, book discussion-leading, meth snorting, paper researching, academic schooling, sink urinating, New Years’ kissing, pool-playing, stranger disemboweling, paper-writing, paper-writing failing, incomplete-taking…yet, as the characters struggle to fit into a rapidly-changing institution, medicating themselves as best they can with sex, drugs, and literature, learning actually happens. Somehow.

You don’t like novellas or novella collections? You could call it a novel—the three sections/novellas are linked together, forming a composite novel. Or you could just call it a collection of three long short stories. At any rate, I’m convinced this book will find an audience, eventually—after all, academics like reading about academics….

Also, it’s really good! Here’s a pdf of the first few pages of “Fate.”

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Moving Finds

6/15/2012

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As I pack for my move to faraway Kansas, after 9 years in College Station, I’ve been going through boxes and drawers, and I’ve made some interesting discoveries…

As below: My University of Texas identification card from the time when I was Paisano Fellow, and my City of Austin hack license….

I’m kind of a thuggish-looking cab driver, eh? That was actually an advantage. Some customers—strippers and little old ladies, in particular—like a cab driver who can at least pretend to be a bodyguard….

Below is another find: Word for Windows 2.0

This whole package weighs about eight pounds. It was probably about five years old when I bought it used in 1996 or 1997. Still I was very glad to have it, for it seemed like a definite step up from the dos version I had been using.

They don't make 'em like that anymore. It's an antique! But do I want to lug it all the way to Kansas?

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The Novella, Part II: More Depth, Less Length

6/13/2012

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It’s still novella month! So here’s another passage from the critical introduction to my dissertation, where I actually offer a definition of this apparently hard-to-define genre….

…I hold that it is this element of depth that is the defining element of the modern novella, not length.

There are those who would argue differently, of course. Charles May says:

Although the term “novella” is used to refer to both short pieces of fourteenth century fiction best exemplified by The Decameron and the highly developed nineteenth century German form, it is more often used in the twentieth century to refer to a number of works of mid-length, somewhat longer than the short story and somewhat shorter than the novel (3874).

For May, apparently, it all comes down to length, with the additional inference that the contemporary novella (May was writing in 1983) is somewhat different in form than the German novellas of the 19th century.

In “Why Not a Novella?,” his 1998 introduction to The Granta Book of the American Long Story, Richard Ford asserts that the novella is so indistinct as to not exist at all as a separate genre, and that what is commonly referred to as a novella is really nothing more than a long short story. Henry James, Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel West, and Edith Wharton, Ford says, all

…wrote what they or their reviewers called novellas, but in their stories these writers made no special effort to employ the traditional [19th century Germanic] structure and intellectual hardware (cyclical ordering, the framing device, turning point, the specific use of symbols) (xxii).

This might just mean nothing more than that these “traditional elements” are not necessary to the genre—or that these American writers were not writing 19th century German novellas. Whatever. Ford argues that length alone is an indistinct standard for defining a literary genre: “Length certainly doesn’t constitute a shaping purpose” (xxix).

Ford is essentially correct here, though his reasoning is inverted. Length, however nebulous, is only the most obvious way of looking at any genre of fiction, and emerges as a result of the shaping purpose—the “shaping purpose” being the writer’s intention to fill the available compositional space with narrative. A blank page or computer screen presents the writer with a practically infinite space, and the process of writing is the process of imaginatively occupying the available space. The decisions a writer makes during the composition of her or his narrative forces the narrative into different forms, resulting in a short story or a novel—or a novella. Length, then, is merely the most external attribute of genre; the internal elements used to fill the space are determinative. And so while the short story concentrates on the psychology of the individual within a constrained compositional space, and the novel concentrates largely on the relationship between society and an individual (or individuals) in a practically unlimited compositional space, the novella demonstrates the psychology of the individual though action, in depth, in a loosely expanded compositional space. As Howard Nemerov says, the definition of the novella is “not a question of length, but much rather a question of depth…” (60).

It is my feeling that the current resurgence in the novella’s popularity is tied to its ability to use narrative depth to respond to and depict societal change. To restate Siegfried Weing’s quote of critic Heinrich Laube: the novella “deals with the process of becoming…” (38). In its narrative depth, the novella offers writers a way in which to depict change—”the process of becoming”—in more detail than is possible in the short story, while at the same time avoiding much of the diffusing expository clutter and plotlessness that can often occur in a novel.

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LBJ Who?

6/9/2012

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I’ve been amused in recent weeks that people are referring to talented but no-heart basketball player LeBron James as “LBJ.”

I suppose this reference has been going on for some time—no doubt I just noticed it because I’ve been caught up in reading Robert Caro’s splendid Johnson biography, The Passage of Power, and because of the NBA playoffs are going on.

For me—perhaps because of the Caro book, perhaps because I’ve lived in Texas for 30-(very)-odd years, or maybe just because I’m old—LBJ will always mean Lyndon Johnson. It doesn’t even mean Lady Bird Johnson, Linda Bird Johnson, Luci Baines Johnson, or Little Beagle Johnson. For sure, it doesn't mean LeBron James.

Though I’m also aware that you can’t fight popular culture. And also the photo below is funny.

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The Novella: It's About Depth, Not Length

6/7/2012

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Because June is Novella Month, I’m treating you to an excerpt or two from the critical introduction to my dissertation…today we’ll begin working toward a definition of the novella…..

Though the literature of English does not have the history or depth of the German novella tradition, American and British writers also wrote novellas, of course. Most of these novellas use an informal first person narration, and frequently use a classic German framing device. The plots are generally built around unusual events that seem to have happened, and are, on the whole, thematically concerned with change. A few examples: Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, published in 1853 and in book form in 1856, demonstrates a baffling and destructive employer-employee relationship set in an American whose hierarchy and economy were undergoing a period of growth and solidification. Henry James’s Daisy Miller, first published in 1878, shows how changes in American society and the growing accumulation of wealth come into conflict with Old World values of aristocracy. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, first published as a book in 1902, shows the social limits of imperialism, and the beginnings of its demise. The traditional framing device used in Heart of Darkness, the narrator’s account of Marlow’s tale to his listeners aboard the boat in the Thames, parallels Marlow’s search for Kurtz. In A River Runs Through It, published in 1976, Norman Maclean explores a family tragedy in an American West that is undergoing environmental degradation and loss. Although the family tragedy is the main focus of the novella, the narrator emphasizes that he is telling a story about a place in the midst of a transformative period of change. Don DeLillo’s Pafko at the Wall, first published in 1992, juxtaposes two significant, simultaneous events that took place in the fall of 1951: the public revelation of the detonation of an atomic bomb by the Soviet Union, and the special playoff game to determine that year’s National League pennant (the game that famously ended with Bobby Thomson’s game-winning home run, “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World”). Unusually, DeLillo uses an omniscient third-person narrator in his novella, moving around the stadium to show the game from different points of view, all the time focusing on the event and the implied transformations that stem from it.

Many of the theories developed in Germany were used in British and American literature, and still inform our conception of contemporary fiction; most importantly, the fact that a narrative—a short story, a novel, a novella—is about something that happened. An event, a happening that might be wondrous or unprecedented or remarkable—or maybe just a strange instance of tomfoolery. In Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, Rust Hills claims that a short story “tells of something that happened to someone” (1), and the same is apparently true of the novella: something happens to a character that sets off a train of incidents that culminates in a decisive moment of change for the character—or not (the lack of change can also be decisive). This can be reduced to a five-step paradigm:

1.    Life is going along for the protagonist.
2.    The story begins.
3.    Things happen in the story.
4.    The story ends.
5.    Life goes along—but it’s different, because of what happened in the story.

A classic illustration of the short story paradigm is found in a story I often teach, Ernest Hemingway’s “Indian Camp.” The story begins as young Nick Adams gets in a boat and crosses a lake with his physician father. The doctor delivers a baby. They find that the baby’s father has committed suicide. They go back across the lake—and Nick’s life, his perception of life, is changed. It’s different. Though every literate person can probably come up with exceptions to this paradigm, I think it nonetheless holds true for the vast majority of short stories. While actions take place in stories, they are usually too simple to constitute a plot; while there is certainly no plot to “Indian Camp,” it remains an exceptionally powerful story. Like other short stories, it derives its power through psychological insight, precise detail, and overall compositional concision. But even a complex short story, a story that attempts to depict the main thrust of a character’s entire life and has many different actions in it—Thom Jones’s “The Pugilist at Rest,” for example—is concise, achieving its purpose in a relative handful of pages.

“The Pugilist at Rest,” a story narrated in the first person begins in 1968 in Marine Corps boot camp, follows the narrator through to Vietnam, shifts up to the present (the story was published in 1992), back to the narrators post-Vietnam garrison duty, slips into brief essays on ancient Greek boxing and the history of epilepsy, and ends in the present, with the narrator struggling to decide what to do with his life. It is a complex, shimmering, circular narrative that focuses on the themes of loss and guilt and redemption, and seems very removed from the simple linearity of “Indian Camp.” Yet it is undeniably a short story: it concentrates on the psychology of the individual—in this case, an individual who struggles to achieve a level of balance and grace. The situation the narrator encounters—life in the Marines in the late 1960s—is presented not in a larger societal context but as a personal crucible in which the narrator’s personality is developed and tested. The story achieves that elusive quality of “depth,” but it is a personal depth rather than a situational or social one.

Novels focus more on the relationship between the individual and society. An example here would be The Great Gatsby, a novel I’ve seen several times listed as a novella, apparently because of its relatively short length (just under 50,000 words). But it’s not a novella, not really. It’s a novel that deals with the relationship between the narrator, Nick Carraway, and the society he finds himself in, represented by Tom and Daisy and Gatsby and the rest. Nick is constantly observing and learning, measuring his life and values against the lives and values he encounters. This focus on society, I think, is a novelistic approach; the looseness of compositional space allows Fitzgerald to stretch out and portray a specific time and place.

In A History of the German Novelle, E. K. Bennett says:

The novel, described graphically, advances in a definite direction from one part to another. This line along which it moves need not absolutely be a direct one, and indeed rarely is; it can twist and turn, pause, spread itself out, loiter, only its general direction must be towards the point which is its aim (6).

Though this is a somewhat antiquated description of the novel—it was published in 1949—I like it for its description of the elasticity of the novel’s compositional space. With its practically unlimited space, the novel can go almost anywhere. The novella, with its more constrained compositional space, is necessarily more limited in its scope. Bennett quotes German novellist Paul Heyse;

The particular charm of this literary form [the novella] consists in the event being sharply outlined in a restricted framework…herein differing from the wider horizon and the more varied problems of character which the novel spreads out before us (quoted in Bennett 13).

While the contemporary short story, due it its brevity, offers only a glimpse of the character’s internal life, and often, if not usually, has an open and ambiguous ending, the novella, with its somewhat greater length and depth, can aim for a greater sense of narrative completeness. Like a short story, a novella’s protagonist has his or her life changed by what happens in the novella; but the “things that happen” in the novella—the actions—are connected, are deeper and more complex, and they in fact often (though not always) constitute a plot. I hold that it is this element of depth that is the defining element of the modern novella, not length.

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Pups in Prison

6/6/2012

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The prison where I teach has a program that trains guide dogs, and it’s a common sight to see inmates leading handsome labs or lab-mixes around from building to building. One of my students was recently promoted to dog-handler, and last night she brought her pup with her—Madrid, a pleasant young black lab.

The topics we worked on in class last night were gossip and news, and the similarities and differences between the two. About gossip, one student wrote, “If you want people to know something, tell a convict.” Other had been in the news when their indictments came down, and felt ill-used by the media….

It was a good class, and through it all, Madrid slept peacefully under a table while we wrote and discussed our writing, bringing a doggish sense of—what? Normality?—to the room. Critters can change an environment simply by being in it....

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Goodbye, Blocker Building!

6/3/2012

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Ordinary Horrors

The Novella, Part III: The Last Educations

Moving Finds

The Novella, Part II: More Depth, Less Length

LBJ Who?

The Novella: It's About Depth, Not Length

Pups in Prison

Goodbye, Blocker Building!

Lowell Mick White

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