Stories I like to teach

I’ve been teaching Comparative Literature 111, an undergraduate course on the short story, for some semesters now. It’s a course I helped design — or, actually, to restore into the English curriculum at UP. Back when I was a returning sophomore (in 1981, at age 27; you know the story), this used to be called CL 180, and it was taught by one of the department’s most formidable professors, Sylvia Ventura.

She marched us through a great number of the world’s best stories, and by the end of the semester I felt that I had begun to understand something that I had only intuited up to that point: the form and function of the short story. It coincided with my own budding commitment to the genre, to writing the short story in English.

Until then I still thought of myself primarily as a playwright in Filipino, but after losing out in competitions with a sickening consistency to the superior skills of my good friend Bienvenido “Boy” Noriega, I decided to focus on something else. The delight I felt in CL 180 confirmed my choice for me: this was what I wanted to do, to attempt — at least in my fevered imagination — to deserve the exalted company of such as Ivan Bunin, W. Somerset Maugham, and J. D. Salinger.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who was inspired by that course, taught with the kind of methodical precision that required you to know each story by heart (Prof. Ventura — whose Shakespeare class I also attended and enjoyed — favored the “spot passages” exam, where you had to identify, contextualize, and discuss some suddenly obscure passage, blind).

Sometime in the 1990s, however, perhaps because of the rise of new literary theories that privileged craft less and ideology more, CL 180 and other such “genre” and “survey” courses fell out of favor, to be replaced by trendier alternatives. The impulse of the moment was to “subvert the canon” or to toss it out the window altogether, and like most revolutions this one produced its excesses.

While it may have been a good move for the critically inclined, it was disastrous for student writers, many of whom graduated without never having read anything by, say, Thomas Mann or Katherine Mansfield, not to mention Kerima Polotan and Gregorio Brillantes. (I know what some of us are thinking: in the old days, nobody had to force you to read anything; you went out and discovered great literature on your own — not even for a grade, but just because you wanted to.)

This was why I was glad the department decided, a couple of years ago, to restore these genre courses and to require them of our Creative Writing majors, to give them a better sense of what came before them, and to get them to know the canon before they even think of subverting it (and to realize, perhaps with a certain modesty, that each of these landmarks was, in a sense, revolutionary in its own time). I embraced the teaching of the short story (its history, elements, and techniques), as a way of paying forward what Professor Ventura had taught me.

My syllabus covers about 24 stories from all over — from old popular classics such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” to postmodern puzzlers such as Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon” and much newer but excellently crafted pieces by Filipinos such as Merlinda Bobis’ “Shoes.”

We read these stories for more than enjoyment; since I’m taking them up with student writers, I’m ever mindful of form and technique — why this point of view, why this opening scene, why this image or this phrase, why this ending. I’d like them to be able to second-guess the author, to see how his or her imagination works and moves over the narrative. I don’t expect them to write like Kerima Polotan or Dino Buzzati if they don’t care to, but I’d like them to be aware of their options, to realize that there’s more than one way of telling a story.

There are two stories I keep coming back to — and the students have this coming out of their ears — because they mark, for me, two key moments in the history of the short story, particularly in terms of style and sensibility.

The first is James Joyce’s “Araby” (1905), part of his Dubliners suite, the quintessential coming-of-age story, dwelling on a young boy’s fervent infatuation with an older girl. It’s a puppy-love story my students can easily relate to and might have written themselves, except that they can’t — not in the way Joyce sets the story up, opening with the bleakest of settings:

“North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.

“The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room. Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. Among these I found a few paper-covered books, the pages of which were curled and damp…. The wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes, under one of which I found the late tenant’s rusty bicycle-pump.”

Age and decrepitude permeate this opening scene, but it’s vital in setting off the vigor and ardor of the boy’s feelings for the nameless and unnamable “Mangan’s sister.” I can’t imagine how anyone can do Joyce better in describing his narrator’s welling emotion: “My body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.”

I also ask my students to take note of the motif — the recurring element — of seeing and not seeing, of light and shadow; “Araby” is suffused as well with images of religion and chivalry, coming together in the boy’s imagination of himself as a Galahad protecting his precious love against the world’s coarseness and crassness. In one of the story’s most memorable lines, the narrator says: “I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes.”

He goes to Araby (why “Araby”? what does it conjure in relation to our knight-errant?) — a bazaar — to buy a gift for his lady-love, only to find himself being brushed off by a salesgirl who’s busy flirting with two young men, and the boy suffers the crushing realization that he’s simply too young to be taken seriously, for all his rampant affections. The story ends with what would come to be known as the epiphany (literally, the “showing of the gifts,” in this case the insight gained by the narrator): “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”

But this isn’t a young boy’s voice, nor is it a young boy speaking; many readers fail to realize that the actual narrator is a much older man, trying to make sense of what must have been a painfully bewildering experience from a bygone age of innocence.

Another classic I enjoy teaching is Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), as much for its style as for its substance. “Hills” has none of the Latinate floridity of “Araby,” and indeed it would define Hemingway’s signature spareness of language. The prose is as dry as his setting — a small train station somewhere between Barcelona and Madrid (and again, the setting is the first thing I draw my students’ attention to: why here?).

“Hills Like White Elephants” has two travelers — an American man and his presumably American girlfriend — arguing over whether she should have an abortion or not. He wants her to have one, and uses everything in his arsenal, including emotional blackmail, to get her to agree; she’s reluctant, hoping she can keep both him and the baby.

Any story about abortion can be potentially explosive in class, and as the teacher I have to remind my students that we’re not about to engage in a pro-life vs. pro-choice debate. The more pertinent question in terms of substance is, who makes the decision, and how? We often think of “Papa” Hemingway as this big, burly, white-bearded macho man who loved bullfights and barracudas, but “Hills Like White Elephants” is anything but a macho manifesto. Hemingway (who, by the way, visited Manila in 1941 just before the war) writes with great sensitivity and restraint; take note of how “the girl” comes into her own in the story.

I admire “Hills” mostly for its style, which, for 1927, seemed way ahead of its time, and would in fact prefigure what would come to be known as “minimalism,” the school of “less is more,” which Hemingway himself would refer to as “the iceberg principle,” whereby only one-tenth of the whole piece shows above the surface, with the rest to be inferred by the reader. Hemingway achieves this by literally letting his characters speak for themselves, without any authorial commentary, so that the story is 80 percent dialogue, and the effect is that of the reader eavesdropping on a private conversation:

“We can have the whole world.”

“No, we can’t.”

“We can go everywhere.”

“No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.”

“It’s ours.”

 “No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.”

Many decades later, the dean of American minimalism, Raymond Carver, would pay tribute to “Hills Like White Elephants” by titling one of his books, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, with a take-off from a line in the story: “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”

That’s a great example of the short story looking back, then moving forward.

* * *

E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.net.