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    How to Read, Write, and Interpret Fiction: Authorial Strategies and Literary Technique
    How to Read, Write, and Interpret Fiction: Authorial Strategies and Literary Technique
    How to Read, Write, and Interpret Fiction: Authorial Strategies and Literary Technique
    Ebook418 pages5 hours

    How to Read, Write, and Interpret Fiction: Authorial Strategies and Literary Technique

    By Barry Pomeroy

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    This guide is meant to assist the student of literature and the creative writer in their understanding of how literary techniques and narrative devices can inform a reader’s interaction with text. Each writer, from experts in the craft—like the writers of the stories I use as examples—to the beginner who wants to exercise control over the story they are writing, choses from a series of techniques or strategies that permit or prevent certain stories from being told. This study is an attempt to examine more closely the ways that literary techniques—such as use of narrator, the construction of character, narrative desire, the manipulation of narrative levels and narrative time, the evocation of cultural codes, as well as metafiction and magic realism—assist or frustrate the reader’s attempt to understand the author’s intentions.
    By making writerly readings of realist texts as well as symbolic, psychological, and speculative thought experiments from writers as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schultz, Octavia Butler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Fritz Leiber, George R. R. Martin, Gabriel García Márquez, Thomas King, and Kim Stanley Robinson, the implications of these choices can be more easily seen. The reader becomes privy to certain types of information depending on what strategy the writer has chosen, and that choice leads the writer to ever more circumscribed possibilities until the story has fulfilled its author’s intention. Although knowledge of these techniques is typically demanded at the undergraduate level, and there are list-like guides which purport to define them, seeing them in their natural habitat gives the reader a much better sense of what the technique or strategy offers to the author.
    This analysis of the techniques used to create engaging stories should be useful for both students and writers who are interested in learning about the diversity of ways in which authors have confronted both narrative and structural questions in the stories they wish to tell. The short story—just to name one fictional form—seems endlessly flexible, but with an understanding of what a particular strategy allows, both the reader and the writer are better equipped to understand the text’s messaging as well as how the chosen technique informs or inhibits its performance.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarry Pomeroy
    Release dateNov 8, 2019
    ISBN9781987922752
    How to Read, Write, and Interpret Fiction: Authorial Strategies and Literary Technique
    Author

    Barry Pomeroy

    Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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      How to Read, Write, and Interpret Fiction - Barry Pomeroy

      The most effective way to understand how an author’s textual choices lead to a desired result is to read thousands of texts. Over many years, such an avid reader would come to absorb the stories and their construction by way of a kind of literary osmosis, but such marinating in the sauce of technique is not always possible. The student of literature—or the writer interested in textual interpretation—might work through the thousands of permutations each strategy can offer the writer, but without a formal understanding of the craft, they run the danger of writing stories which do not quite jell, or readings that refuse to be supported by the text.

      Such flailing in the shallows surrounded by thousands of stories leads the reader to put his or her oar in the turbid waters of explanatory reference works. The literary world offers little besides lists of terms with definitions, however. Even those anthologies which cater to undergraduate students make only the most cursory readings and often are limited to slim biographical prefaces before each anthologized entry. Beyond the casual explication offered by dictionaries of literary terms and anthologies, only a few works try to take on the diverse world of literary strategies with an eye to explaining the subtlety and power they offer the writer and critic.

      When I was an undergraduate student I thought of myself as a reader, and my professors’ off-handed statements about the omniscient narrator or the use of motifs didn’t surprise me, although how they were chained to authorial intent often remained obscure. The choices authors made, and the implications of their strategies, were of less interest to my professors than the outcome. I supplemented what I was being taught by reading more closely, looking for the techniques and their use in the texts I was reading for my classes. That proved to be an uneven way to learn about the choices authors make, however, and I was still at sea when it came to the implications of those choices for the text’s performance or intent.

      My pathway to understanding the use of literary techniques, as well as how to explore and describe those implications, was a long one that led to but did not culminate with a PhD. Along that tortuous way I absorbed the craft unevenly, and had to unlearn much of what I’d been taught through the degrees. Only when I was teaching the use of literary technique, and began to think seriously about a way to explain what literary strategies offer the writer, did I understand that such knowledge is neither easy nor universal.

      After twenty years of teaching at universities, I started to think about writing a guide that I would have found useful when I was going through the university system. I imagined at first such a guide as others I have seen, an alphabetical list of literary terms with definitions, such as the one offered by the Glossary. There are a number of those on the market, and many of them are much more comprehensive than the word list implies, but they falter as they grapple with the students’ understanding of particular examples. The reader, armed only with definitions, is like someone trying to understand English through the use of an ordinary dictionary rather than the Oxford multivolume set. Although a normal dictionary contains useful descriptions, defines the parts of speech the word belongs to, and often makes a statement about etymology, it does not compare to seeing the words in context. In that way, the Oxford Dictionary was a real innovation, for it allowed the shifting connotations of a word to be traced through the ages.

      After teaching a course about literary technique a few times, I began to imagine a different type of guide, one founded in the literary texts it purported to describe. Although I do not intend this guide to either make a comprehensive reading of the historical context of the literary techniques in question, or provide a comprehensive readings of the texts under study, I think a view of the technique in its natural habitat, informing the story itself with the diverse ways it can be called to perform an author’s intention, is a much more useful way to consider the profound subtlety such devices bring to the story.

      This study begins by examining Michael Crummey’s very short story Bread, which relies on the reader’s cultural understanding of both story codes and North American culture to provide much of the implied content of the narrative. Crummey’s story is a concise introduction to several aspects of story that a reader should be alert for, and provides a literary context for the stories that follow.

      Two quite different overtly metafictional texts, George Bowering’s A Short Story and Dale Bailey’s The End of the World as We Know It, are also useful as an introduction. They take on the task of teaching their readers how to think about stories as a construct and encourage writers to reflect on the use of a clichéd form. Both metafictions also provide a springboard to a better understanding of the evaluation of character and how it features in the story.

      Although the use of character is often dismissed as almost a gimmick to encourage reader interest, in terms of its use as a subject position, it directly informs the story. Although the use of character in this survey is hardly limited to merely three iterations, Kim Stanley Robinson’s A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations, Terry Bisson’s England Underway, and Thomas King’s Joe the Painter and the Deer Island Massacre explore the implications of character as a technique for the delivery of the authors’ arguments.

      Once the tone of the study has been established, and the reader has begun to understand the literary terms the text uses, it begins to examine the thorny issue of narrative voice. Examining the first person or unreliable narrator, the sections on the first person narrator range from its use in an epistolary form in Richard Bissell’s Mike Polk and the retrospective child narrator in his Mohamad Ali, Thomas King’s Borders, and Fritz Leiber’s A Pail of Air. With Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the unsettling world of a private journal by a mentally ill narrator is explored, as well as the fertile ground of the untrustworthy delivery of textual information that has already been implied by an analysis of the child narrator.

      Although the omniscient narrator is largely seen as objective, which is evident in its use in history and science textbooks as well as news reports, its truly omniscient form is rarely used. More often, writers make use of the limited omniscient. This allows for a type of unreliability just as much as the first person narrator. In Jack Hodgins’ By the River, the limited omniscient narrator follows a delusional abandoned wife, and in George R. R. Martin’s Dark, Dark were the Tunnels the narrative switches between a mutated human descendant and the lunar colonists who have come to find them. In both cases, the narrator structure allows for the author to play with the reader’s expectations. As well, both stories encourage an initial reading that the reader, upon reflection, ultimately rejects.

      This same type of authorial trickery works through an apparent objective narrative voice, such as that found in Thomas King’s How Corporal Colin Sterling Saved Blossom, Alberta, and Most of the Rest of the World as Well, where the objective narrator becomes gradually more intrusive and biased, and Carol Emshwiller’s Killers, in which the mundane and apparently objective narration of the post-apocalyptic life inadvertently hides a secret. In H. G. Wells’ The Star, Wells plays with a true objective narrator and its rather cold-hearted view of the world as he callously describes the devastation of the Earth by a planetary near-miss.

      Stories with a particular rhetorical axe to grind use similar techniques to support their argument, and this study next considers the use of metaphor and imagery to evoke a particular moment in history. J. G. Sime’s Munitions! uses the limited omniscient narrator in her story about the nascent women’s rights movement, but more importantly she uses the weather of the spring day and the youth of her protagonist to evoke the changing social and economic status of women. Thomas King’s Totem similarly enacts the dehumanizing effect of government policies on the Indigenous people of Canada by limiting their voice to symbolic noises and their agency to an inanimate object. In A Seat in the Garden, King continues his examination of colonization by examining the stereotypes applied to Indigenous people, as well as the more subtle and persistent dehumanization that persists in the present day. These more metaphorical representations call upon a series of strategies in order to both evoke the sentiment of a particular time and relate opaque institutional practices in a way a reader can understand, and thereby become apt strategies for their authors.

      Once the reader has their footing, this study sets farther out to sea, until we are in the deep water of stories which disrupt the typical narrative in order to tell a broader story about how stories are received. Octavia Butler’s Speech Sounds engages reader interest in a romantic narrative only to withdraw that abruptly enough that her reader questions where they learned to settle for romance as an automatic denouement, and Morgan Wyman’s The Second Life is a thought experiment which teases the reader with their notion of an afterlife as it is presented by human cultures. In H. G. Wells’ Empire of the Ants, he takes on a more prosaic problem than ideological differences between either narrative desire for closure or religious verities. Wells asks his reader to imagine a world in which humanity is in danger of being toppled from its self-appointed throne by mere insect life in a kind of reverse colonization of Europe. In his thought experiment, he begs us to evaluate the strengths which have led to our collective successes, and the weaknesses which are our downfall.

      As the reader will note, the stories under study become more complex as the reader learns to trust their knowledge of the language of narrative interpretation. By this point the reader has mastered genre choice and its implications, has learned to be alert to the use of metafiction and different types of narrator, imagery and metaphor, and is comfortable with a host of other literary techniques. The last sections take on the use of magic realism and the playful use of dominant narratives for political or ideological purposes.

      The intrusion of magic realism into the story is not just used for its own sake, but, rather like the stories from the history section which present a certain argument, magic realist texts often have ideological intentions. Bruno Schultz’s The Cinnamon Shops represents the most straightforward use of the device in this survey, for he both evokes and explores the imagination of a child turned loose on a spring night. The fantastical journey he relates in his prose, the compound adjectival strings and the fantastical use of light, work together to momentarily lend the child’s imagination to the reading adult. The world of Gabriel García Márquez’s The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings is already fantastic, largely due to the superstitions which make up the villagers’ daily fare, so the intrusion into their world of the fantastic is not remarked upon in a story which examines our fantastic views at least as much as it does the intrusion. Jorge Luis Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is more concerned with the eager acceptance of ridiculous and patently false ideology. The disruption he imagines confronting his world is largely the result of human abdication of responsibility for the ideas that inspire our policy and influence our decisions.

      The last two stories from the collection, Cory Doctorow’s To Market, To Market: The Rebranding of Billy Bailey and Thomas King’s One Good Story that One do not at first blush seem to belong together, but they both employ broader narrative understandings—rather like Michael Crummey’s Bread and Dale Bailey’s The End of the World as We Know It—and seek to explore and undermine how those narratives are typically understood. Doctorow’s To Market, To Market uses the well-known narrative of a schoolyard bully and the petty revenges of childhood to examine the market forces competing for the child’s attention in his coming-of-age examination of commercialism. King’s One Good Story that One is as complex as Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius in how it imagines cultural narratives informing genocidal actions and contemporaneous entitlement. In his story King evokes—and thus establishes—a series of cultural understandings—many of them Indigenous—in order to call into question the cultural practices which enable and inspire the colonial enterprise.

      Both students and writers should find this study useful for understanding what authors have done before them, and what the textual form allows and how literary devices assist in the delivery of story.

      Genre

      The first interpretative tool in the English literature basket is the definition of genre. Whether we do it knowingly or not, we always begin our interpretative journey by examining the genre of a text. We do this in many other aspects of our life as well. For instance, when my students come into the class they immediately scan the room for someone who fits their idea of a professor. When I was younger that was a more difficult task, but now they find it quite easy to presume that the older man lounging at the front of the class must be the professor. I am coded in other ways as well. I am not sitting down, unless it is on a desk, and I am typically more at ease in the room than their fellow undergraduate students.

      These genre assessments are almost instinctual. We do this in all aspects of our lives, putting objects and people in categories so that we know the rules about how to deal with them. Animals do this as well, and whether they can categorize successfully defines their ability to survive. When a bear encounters a person for the first time they have to decide if the person is in the category of food, or if they are a danger that should be avoided. The only bears that have not refined this technique are juveniles. They often will attempt bluff charges to see if the person runs. If a person runs from a black bear, then they have identified themselves as prey, and the bear will then attack and eat them. If the person stands their ground instead, then they are at least a competitor, and possibly a danger. The bear will normally decide that discretion is the better part of valour and escape into the woods or up a tree.

      We make these same assessments when it comes to text; largely unwittingly, we search the text for codes which will tell us the rules it follows. When we tell our friend that we read a novel in one night they are impressed, because they know a novel is likely hundreds of pages long. If we say that we read a short story, they are less impressed, because they have certain ways of thinking about shorter texts that they have internalized from encountering them before.

      When first reading the story Bread, the reader immediately notices that it is short. Although some call it a prose poem, I normally teach it as a postcard story, or a short short. Once the genre is established, the reader automatically knows something about the form. The novel is about the development of character, for instance. There is enough time in a novel, both in terms of novelistic time as well as number of pages, that the full extent of a character’s transformation can be examined in detail. This is obviously not true of a short story.

      The short story is normally used to develop a scene. The characters are already fully drawn, and any changes they endure in the story are necessarily limited. The short story instead takes a character or a few characters and typically has them collide with a major incident. In the case of Bread, the reader uses their understanding of the genre’s characteristic form to decide if the story fulfills or undermines those expectations.

      The Faiths of English Literature

      It is important to note that the study of English literature, like any field of study, has its faiths. The sciences, for example, operate out of the faith that once a phenomenon is measured it can more easily be examined for its causes or parameters. The field of English literature would claim that some aspects of a text are more important than others. When the reader first encounters a story, it is worth looking at the four elements which the field considers to be important. These are titles, names, first lines and last lines. The title is chosen very carefully by the author—although by times it is modified or invented by the editor or publisher—so it is worth examining with that in mind. The title often provides a shorthand description of the story, or directs the reader’s attention.

      This is also true for the names in the story. Some of them are rather heavy-handed, such as Paul Bunyan’s use of the proper name Christian for his protagonist in his Christian allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, or Charles Dickens’ interest in names which define a character’s personality, such as Barnacles, Krook, and the schoolteacher Mr. M'Choakumchild. Other names are more subtle, such as Frank Churchill in Kim Stanley Robinson’s A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations—an obvious invocation of Winston Churchill. Likewise, Wyndham from Dale Bailey’s The End of the World as We Know It is meant to evoke John Wyndham, and if that broad hint is missed, the story even alludes to his The Day of the Triffids. With thousands of names to choose from, the reader will scarcely be surprised that writers make their choices exactingly.

      The first lines and last lines are crucial for slightly different reasons, for the story must establish its operating principles in the first few lines. That is because the reader has only made a guess about the story’s structure and intent on the basis of the title, and will need tutoring if they are to understand the laws of its textual world. The last line is the story’s parting salvo, which is meant to make a lasting impression on the reader as well as comment on the text’s intent.

      The Effaced Narrator of Michael Crummey’s Bread

      The title Bread seems to point to the central image in the story, the loaf of bread that the husband mentions at the beginning of the story and reappears at the end, with all of its associations with love. Like the barebones story itself, the title also seems plain and uncomplicated. The word also has implications for the development of the love affair, and, like the relationship, bread is a staple in the story. Like rice or potatoes in terms of the family’s nutrition, the title directs the reader’s attention to the importance of bread in the life of the characters.

      First Person Narrator

      Every story, I tell my students, teaches you how to read it. Within the first page or two, or in a story this short, a few sentences, the writer teaches his or her reader the concerns of the text. In the case of Crummey’s story, the first word in the story is the word I. This tells the reader that the story is written in the first person.

      Crummey had a few options at his disposal: the first, second, and third person narrator, and each have implications to their use. The New Critics of the 1960s called the first person narrator the unreliable narrator, largely because we presume that anyone who narrates their own story is biased.i If I am telling a story I might obscure details and well as lie outright. In that sense, all first person narrators should be considered liars.

      The advantage of the first person narrator, for the writer, is that it can be a subtle way to deal with the delivery of textual information. The protagonist might be an ironic figure who does not realize the profundity or implications of her statements or she might be deliberately withholding pieces of information that means the reader is unaware of certain details until the end of the story. It is a fascinatingly subtle textual structure and in some ways allows for more complex possibilities in terms of the delivery of information than the use of the third person narrator.

      The Second Person Narrator

      The second person narrator is similar to the structures that were common in the first person narrators of the Victorian period when their textual voices directly addressed their readers. Such a second person address to the reader by the text can be clumsy and alarming, and it is typically used sparingly; the Victorians used it to alert the reader to information, and it has been used in postmodern texts to disconcert the reader with a metafictional address.

      The Third Person Narrator

      The third person narrator is recognizable as the voice of science textbooks and newspapers. Its pretense is that it merely delivers information. Some people call it the Eye of God narrator and compare it to a camera hovering over the scene—since it seems to see all—but it is more properly called the omniscient narrator. As the term implies, it is all-knowing. It can be anywhere geographically, even places impossible for a person to inhabit, like deep in the ocean or in lava, and it can report on phenomenon that the characters cannot access. It often peers into the minds of the characters, and writers commonly make use of the insights gained by such voyeurism to deliver information to the reader. The first person narrator does not look into others’ minds, and by times is not able to examine her own mind. Instead, she directly reports what she is thinking, but the reader is never quite sure they are receiving a correct report. That means the reader has to employ a kind of doubled reading, both establishing what the narrator presents at face value, and trying to discern what might be hidden under the narrator’s bias or lack of understanding.

      The very beginning of Crummey’s story provides, even in the first word, a wealth of information. We know that we are dealing with a first person narrator and we are on the alert for false information, although we know that will be difficult to discern given that we are trapped by her point of view. The second word is was. That also gives the reader valuable information. The narrator is relating a story that happened in the past. That means we are not dealing with a strictly first person narrator, but rather a form of that structure.

      The First Person Retrospective Narrator

      Crummey’s story is being related by a first person retrospective narrator. The first person narrator is not telling us what is happening now, which is suspect enough, but rather is relating a story from an earlier time. That means that the events which have happened earlier than the story’s narrative frame might have been transformed by the telling or the operation of a faulty memory. We know that people edit their memories to make themselves appear heroes and others villains, or to cut out a part of their past that they find difficult, or merely forget some details or misremember information. The first person retrospective narrator is also capable of those errors and deliberate omissions. It’s also worth considering, in this particular story, that the narrator might be referring to the death of her husband by using the past tense. Presumably, if the husband were still alive she would still be twenty years younger than him. There is nothing else to support a reading that the husband is dead, but this possibility provides an intriguing supplement to the idea that she is relating the story much later.

      The reader is even more wary now that they realize that the story they are receiving is filtered both by time and personality. Michael Crummey chooses this structure deliberately, and because the reader knows that the first line should be important, they read further to see how the story is delivered: I was twenty years younger than my husband, his first wife dead in childbirth (Crummey).

      The narrating wife is quite a bit younger than her husband, but that bald statement is the content but not the import of the first line. Rather like a complicated math question, we feel like we are being asked to come up with her age on the basis of very flimsy information. However old her husband is, she is twenty years younger. What is hiding behind this mathematical sleight of hand is the way she defines her age. She is defining her age in reference to her husband. She could just as easily have said, My husband is twenty years older than me. She did not, however. Instead, she has made him the important one in the sentence, even though she is ostensibly telling a story from her own point of view.

      Even at this point, it is worth stopping to consider why the wife might do this. Perhaps she is so much younger than her husband that she feels inferior by comparison. Her self-esteem might be tied to his impression of her, and therefore she defines herself in reference to him. The time period—the reader will note the wife mows hay by hand, tends the garden, and home cans food—may go a long way toward explaining why the wife feels she is not important even in her own story. Whatever the explanation, the reader has been taught a crucial piece of information about how Crummey’s story works. By reading the rest of the story we can see that she hardly considers herself in her story, even when her baby dies. Even then, her husband’s feelings are more important than hers in her story.

      The story uses a first person narrator who may not be aware that she is undermining herself, and that gives the reader a glimpse of the subtlety of the first person narrator. Not only might the reader be lied to in this narrator structure, the reader is also subject to the narrator’s sense of self. She thinks of herself in reference to her husband, but since the reader is trapped by her narration, they will not be able to tell the truth of the matter. The reader relies on her impression of who is important in the relationship, and she has decided that she is not. The reader is already suspicious of the narration, and now they are scrutinizing closely what the young bride says, trying to discern where she is missing from her own story and what that might mean.

      Cultural Codes

      Much of the interpretative work that the reader is asked to do with this short text is in reference to their knowledge of cultural codes. One of the examples I continually return to when it comes to understanding cultural coding and how difficult it can be to interpret for a cultural outsider, as well as how difficult it can be for us to see that we are bringing what we already know to a text, is from a Tom Waits song. In his song Small Change, Waits relates the death of his main character by the line, Small Change got rained on by his own 38. Although it is not obvious what the line means, especially without the context of the song, this is not an obscure line for the typical North American student. They can figure out what Waits intends quite quickly, and usually begin by working backward from the recognition of the .38. Most North Americans will know that a .38 is a gun, and a few of them will associate it with the police, since many of them historically carried that gun. The .38 was also a cheap and illegal street gun, the Saturday Night Special, and it could be purchased for as little as twenty dollars. It was correspondingly poorly made, and was famous for exploding in its user’s face. Despite being confined to a single line out of context, we can tell that Waits is referring to the cheap street variety which was commonly used in petty crimes.

      Once the gun has been identified, the reader works backwards to the verb. Someone got rained on. Although the verb is more metaphorical than a common idiom, we may guess that whatever happened to the person was negative. Notably, in cultural terms, the reader should recall that rain is not universally understood to be negative. For instance, in southern India, the monsoon season is seen as a time for romance, and in that climate, like many tropical climates, rain is a temporary relief from the unstinting heat. In North America, however, where to be caught in a rainstorm might mean death by hypothermia, to get rained on is unlikely to be positive. To get rained on by a gun, not only brings to mind a rain of bullets, as the expression would have it, but also that the recipient has likely been killed. Finding out that he got rained on further informs the reader that something has been done to him, rather than he chose this fate for himself. The .38 belongs to him, according to the use of the possessive in the line, which means that the person who was rained on by his own gun was likely a street hoodlum who was foolish enough to let his gun out of his hands or who has lost a fight.

      The grammar of the sentence also gives the reader the name of the man who died by his own gun. The pronoun his

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