The final part of a three-part literature series with comparative literature and French faculty member emerita Angela Moger. This event is open to the Friends of Sarah Lawrence; to register for this event or to learn more about joining the Friends, please contact Cheryl Cipro at ccipro@sarahlawrence.edu or 914.813.9211.
Narrative art has the perverse duty to tell what cannot be told, to portray matters whose complexity eludes description or conventional articulation. Furthermore, stories are often palimpsests, superficially conforming to sanctioned norms and, at the same time, implicitly acknowledging their suppression of alternate realities. Consequently, transgressive forms erupt, singular modes of telling that undermine closure and coherency and the decorum and consensus they posit. To put it another way, eccentric practices of language, of chronology and narrative syntax, as well as subversion of the ostensibly requisite movement to resolution/outcome, communicate that the story is concerned with a subject different from its subject matter (What does it mean when the story's not about what it's about?).
In this series, stories by Tillie Olsen, Alice Munro, and Lorrie Moore will serve to illustrate the potential of formal techniques (a whole range of stylistic gestures: tone, symbol, rhetorical figures, fractured sequence) to represent issues that lie beyond mere description. "Fiction writing is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things", says Flannery O'Connor, adding that "technique is ...something organic, something that grows out of the material." Accordingly, the accounts of a neglected child (Olsen), of a failed marriage (Munro), and of a writer's fraught vocation (Moore) reveal how narrative strategies provoke the emergence of larger truths than would be transmissible in direct statement.
A case in point: in a recently published novel, the writer records, from the mind of a protagonist adrift in a state of mental agony, the character's observation of "motes of dust turning in a shaft of light". This phrase conveys through adroit refraction ("Tell all the truth, but tell it slant", Dickinson) the immobilization in hyper consciousness that attends anxiety or pain, or just plain distracted revery (what it feels like),the accuracy and impact of the phrase arguably more powerful than would be a protracted descriptive statement of the person's fear or bewilderment. Thus, literature makes possible the Representation of what can't be told.