TDR
Interview: Sara Jamieson
Sara Jamieson teaches a course at the
University of Calgary called "The Short Story in Canada." For
a couple of years now, The Danforth Review has been conducting an
informal -- and somewhat
haphazard -- inquiry into the same subject. As part of this inquiry,
we thought it would be interesting to ask Dr. Jamieson a few questions.
Interview by Michael Bryson (Spring
2006)
*
First, could you say something briefly
about yourself. What's your connection to the subject? Why are you drawn
to the subject? How did the course at U of C come about?
I'm a postdoctoral fellow in the
department of English at the University of Calgary, and I'm currently at
work on a project on Alice Munro -- one of my all-time favourite short
story writers. As a postdoc, I'm given the opportunity to design and
teach courses that are connected in some way with my research. I thought
that a course on Canadian short stories would be a good chance for me to
learn more about the history and the field of Canadian short fiction
(before this, I specialized in Canadian poetry) and about the critical
and theoretical discussions surrounding the genre.
Are there canonical or touchstone texts
on this subject (i.e., essays or books that have framed the discourse in
one way or another -- texts that all students of the subject ought to be
introduced to)?
Edgar Allen Poe's 1837 review of
Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales is still important reading because
it really inaugurated critical discussion of short fiction (at least in
North America) and was very influential for subsequent theorists of the
genre. Brander Matthews' 1901 "The Philosophy of the Short
Story" is also important in this regard.
I'm especially interested in how short
story theory has shifted over the years from being primarily concerned
with defining and identifying supposedly essential and universal
elements to a recognition of genre as a social and historical construct.
Mary Louis Pratt's essay "The Long and the Short of It," for
example, examines how our expectations of what a short story is and does
are produced by its asymmetrical relationship to the novel, alongside
which it developed, and in comparison to which it has been historically
regarded as a lesser genre.
As for discussions of the short story
in Canada, I like Frank Davey's essay "Genre Subversion in the
English Canadian Short Story," which argues that the Canadian short
story developed along very different lines from its Anglo-American
counterparts. And of course, W.H. New's book Dreams of Speech and
Violence, as well as Gerald Lynch's work on English Canadian short
story cycles are also important texts.
Did the short story in Canada develop
along different lines from its Ango-American counterparts? What was/is
unique about the short story in Canada?
Davey makes the point that a particular kind of short
story (the stories from James Joyce's Dubliners are often held up
as the primary example) has been canonized as a kind of universal
standard for short fiction writing. These are stories that can seem to
exemplify Modernist or New Critical values like compression, unity,
universality, a focus on character rather than event, an epiphanic
moment of truth or revelation etc..
What Davey points out is how many examples of short
fiction produced in Canada don't really fit this description: Charles
G.D. Roberts' animal fables; the sketches of Moodie and Leacock; even
the stories of "good" modernist writers like Morley Callaghan
and Sinclair Ross employ mixed generic codes that problematize their
interpretation according to the standards that I mentioned above.
I wouldn't argue that there is anything uniquely
Canadian about this kind of generic flexibility; rather, I would say
that the forms that short fiction has taken in Canada can be used to
question the universalist bias of much short story criticism, and make
visible its ideological slant.
Some younger Canadian writers
– such as Peter Darbyshire in a
recent feature in The Danforth Review – have suggested that the
short story in Canada is too predictable, too staid, too pastoral,
realistic, etc., in comparison to stories by USAmerican writers such as
George Saunders and Annie Proulx. I’m not sure I agree with this,
since it seems to me there are a number of experimental of short story
books published every year in Canada. However, there does seems to be an
unnaturally large number of writers imitating Alice Munro’s style,
rural-focus and subject matter at the same time as the country is
becoming increasingly urban, multi-ethnic and globalized. I’m not sure
I have a question here. Maybe, is the short story particularly prone to
housing nostaliga? Has the genre kept up with the times?
Yes, I'm familiar with these
complaints. I seem to remember Ray Robertson accusing Munro of
inadvertently ruining an entire generation of Canadian short story
writers by making them all want to write like her. Being a huge Munro
fan, I'm not sure what to make of this. I don't think it's fair to
Munro: does she really only write about rural life? What about all those
stories set in Vancouver and Australia and Albania? I also wonder who
makes up this "unnaturally large" number of Munro imitators?
Madeleine Thien is a writer whose work is often compared to Munro's
these days, and she writes about Asian communities in Vancouver, so is
the Munro influence necessarily all that limiting?
Your question about the short story
housing nostalgia is fascinating. I don't know if I have a ready answer
for that, but, teaching this course, I have been especially struck by
how many of the stories we're covering are about childhood remembered:
not only Thien's "Simple Recipes," but Antanas Sileika's
"The Man Who Read Voltaire," David Bezmozgis' "The Second
Strongest Man," Isabel Huggan's "End of the Empire,"
Timothy Findley's "Stones" to name just a few. So there may be
something to what you say, but I wouldn't say that these texts are
generating nostalgia in an unexamined or uninterrogated way.
As for the perceived lack of
experiemental short fiction being produced these days, George Bowering
laments that there is something about the short story that fails to
interest Canada's more experimental writers like Robert Kroetsch and
Michael Ondaatje, but it seems to me that, as you say, there are plenty
of writers out there experimenting with short fiction. They just never
seem to get included in those anthologies of Canadian short fiction that
are not expressly devoted to experimental writing. I'm not sure why this
has to be the case, and it is an issue for me in the class I'm teaching.
The students really liked P.K. Page's "Ex Libris," one of a
few non-realist inclusions in the anthology I'm using;. (Incidentally,
it's interesting, in view of your association of the experimental with
"younger Canadian writers" that Page is the oldest living
writer on my course!) Anyway, the students have expressed an interest in
reading more experimental writing. If I were to teach this course again,
I think I might include some selections from Zoe Whittall's Geeks,
Misfits, and Outlaws or some of the short pieces in Christian Bök's
Ground Works. It would also be interesting, in view of the
tautological tendency of much short story criticism ("a short story
is a story that is short"), to approach the whole question of
brevity by looking at some examples of microfiction. So I think that the
genre has definitely kept up with the times, and, if my students are any
indication, there is lots of interest among young readers for new
Canadian short fiction.
Michael Bryson is the
editor of The Danforth Review and a short story writer. |
