Rawi Hage

Congratulations to Rawi Hage, winner of the 2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for De Niro’s Game (Anansi, 2006).

Hage’s debut novel received a double honour the year it was released, nomination for both the Scotiabank Giller Prize and Governor General’s Award for Literature. Though it won neither, the book achieved broad recognition, critical acclaim and other awards. The IMPAC, however, is an important international notice for this Canadian talent.

The publisher’s website describes the book this way:

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."

In Rawi Hage's astonishing and unforgettable novel, this famous quote by Camus becomes a touchstone for two young men caught in Lebanon's civil war. Bassam and George are childhood best friends who have grown to adulthood in wartorn Beirut. Now they must choose their futures: to stay in the city and consolidate power through crime; or to go into exile abroad, alienated from the only existence they have known.

…

Rawi Hage brilliantly fuses vivid, jump-cut cinematic imagery with the measured strength and beauty of Arabic poetry. His style mimics a world gone mad: so smooth and apparently sane that its razor-sharp edges surprise and cut deeply. A powerful meditation on life and death in a war zone, and what comes after.

In 2006, I was part of a mock Giller Jury experiment for GoodReports.net, later reproduced on the TDR website. Asked who I thought should have won, I said:

Hage’s book was the clear #1 pick for me. Why? It was the only one that gave me a knot in my stomach. None of the other books gave me the same kind of emotional engagement. A large part of the power of the book comes from the extraordinary circumstances of the story: the Lebanese Civil War. In structure, it’s essentially a buddy story and quite simple, as is its prose. I found the references to Camus’s The Stranger unnecessarily literary. Hage’s novel is existentialist, yes, but readers should have been left to reach that conclusion on their own.

Two years later I still have strong affection for the novel. In my memory, in fact, it has improved over time. I feel that I was overly critical in dismissing the "unnecessary literary" in the novel. Someone once dismissed the book to me, using a similar but stronger argument. She said that De Niro’s Game was watered-down Camus. This is a fair comment, but I have come to feel is it also part of a trend of dark cosmopolitanism – the kind of cynicism that kills babies in their cribs.

I wonder how a literary culture grows, how it is nurtured. What threats does it face? How can these be addressed? There are internal and external threats, it seems to me. Censors and book burners can exist both inside and outside the community. Not that disliking a book is a symptom of being a philistine. But how one phrases one’s dislike may well be.

In this regard, I am sure I have made my share of errors. Perhaps I’ll confess them some other time.

For now, some reflections on De Niro’s Game. Hopefully meaningful ones.

Rawi Hage has achieved his fame as a Canadian writer. His novel, however, is not about what it means to be a Canadian. If one looked at the definition of Canadian literature on Wikipedia, one would be hard pressed to locate De Niro’s Game within this topos. (Please, Wikipedians, fix the abomination of your Canlit definition.)

Of course, it doesn’t really matter whether Hage’s book is "Canadian literature" or not, but for the sake of some academic log-rolling, let’s keep going. Because if Hage’s novel isn’t Canadian literature, then Canlit is a historical anachronism. Perhaps this is another way a literary culture grows. The definitions are kept under constant pressure, the categories kept ajar.

In June 2002, Harper’s Magazine published a notable essay by Pico Iyer, called "The Last Refuge: On the promise of new Canadian fiction." Terry Rigelhof summarized Iyer’s essay in Canadian Notes and Queries:

What Iyer [says] the "New Canadian Novel" … offers a kind of multiculturalism that can be known only at the individual level, where people understand that it is only in the imagination that we can begin to penetrate the Other (or to allow the Other to penetrate us), a multiculturalism that is based on shared beliefs not shared roots and, especially, on the most universal of all shared beliefs, the belief that art transcends ideology and political identity.

Iyer identified Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) as "the defining work of modern Canadian fiction, not only because it won so many readers worldwide but because it presents us with a stirring vision of what Canada might offer to a world in which more and more people are on the move and motion itself has become a kind of nation."

For a reason along these lines (one imagines), Bono endorsed Paul Martin for Prime Minister and said, "The world needs more Canada" (November 2003). Because Canada, in the internationalist’s imagination, is a blank slate on which can be written the aspirations of the world’s dispossessed. Canada doesn’t have an (international) colonial legacy. It is a post-colonial state itself. Right? Well, some would say this is too simple.

Within De Niro’s Game, Canada plays no role. It is truly the blank slate on which the story of the Other can be told.

And yet I am insisting that Hage’s novel is a Canadian novel. Because Hage is a Canadian. Is that the only reason?

Yes.

De Niro’s Game was written in Canada, published in Canada, and launched to the world stage on its Canadian foundation. There is more than a peripheral relationship between nation and novel. And there is no reason why a Canadian novel needs to be about Canada. Vis a vis Nabokov, there’s no reason for a novel to be "about" anything.

Even Carol Shields says so:

I love language, and I think I come out writing novels from that direction rather than from what Nabokov used to call the "aboutness" of novels. That's interesting to me too. But the language is always first.

De Niro’s Game is not about what it means to live here, and it’s not about what it means to arrive here – or to have a difficult past. As the Anansi blurb suggests, it’s a novel that looks back at the existentialist philosophers and brings forward their point of view into a dramatic story of war and friendship.

The novel creates a vivid view of the chaos of the world. It is a significant achievement.

I will end with a note about Hage’s other profession: photographer. His online profile provides something to interest us:

…one of his professors, Raymonde April, brought him to see photography as a medium that can become very aggressive, very unjust . . . at the documentary level, because it can be easily manipulated by the media. Hage opposes that pernicious effect on the medium by incorporating his photos—which deal mainly with immigration, war and racism—into fictional contexts where many voices summon each other. Somewhat like a Vermeer who has metamorphosed, through his art, the images of a camera obscura, he transforms his photographs so as to make them unsuited to hurried consumption or sensationalist use.

As to photographs, so to novels. "Unsuited to hurried consumption or sensationalist use" is as apt a description of literature as any.

Postscript:

After I wrote all of the above, I found in today's Globe and Mail:

Our part-time home and native land

...

It is a Canada that, at first glance, looks to be stretching social cohesion beyond limit, a Canada crumbling into author Yann Martel's metaphor of the world's best hotel, but where none of the guests make small-talk in the lobby. No getting together in the dining room for meals, no gathering in the bar to watch hockey.

It is a Canada that has arrived at multiculturalism Mark II and a generation of new adults who have moved decisively beyond nationalism to embrace a kind of transcendent planetary supranationalism. We are becoming the land of global citizens, by all accounts galloping out ahead of other advanced democracies.

It appears to be occurring within a broad consensus.

Strange, huh?

Richard Ford

Richard Ford: novelist, short story writer, anthologist, buddy of the late Raymond Carver. He came into my life first in 1996 when a fellow graduate student recommended Ford’s short story collection, Rock Springs (1989). My colleague had done his bachelor’s degree at Harvard and was about to go off to an internship at The Paris Review. I trusted his judgment. I read the book. I didn’t think it was that great.

Since then I’ve read nearly all of Ford’s books. I haven’t changed my opinion of Rock Springs, though. I admit it’s a strong collection and worth the reading investment, but what Ford will rightfully be remembered for, however, is the creation of Frank Bascombe, protagonist of The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1996) and The Lay of the Land (2006). I mumbled some about that latter book online here.

Recently I read Wildlife (1990). I was going to write about it here, but as this NY Times review notes, the novel isn’t a highlight of Ford’s oeuvre, and I’ve struggled to decide what to say. I thought it read like a play treatment, actually. Most of the action takes place over a couple of days. There are a limited number of settings and characters. The plot hinges on a minimal number of key events.

The problematic aspect of the novel is a technical one: the narrative voice. While the action in the novel seems contained by a short span of time, in fact it is not. The narrator speaks about events that happened to him and his family in 1960. However, as readers we’re never sure where the narrator sits in time. What is the present of the "telling"? The action is recounted in the past tense, but the narrator gives very few hints about the value or damage of time on his recollections. Another way of approaching this issue is to ask: What did the narrator learn from the key events in the novel? He presents himself as strangely emotionally mute. The events are significant enough to recount, but as readers we have no context about the present of his life, or the time that has passed since 1960, to evaluate the true effect on the narrator’s character.

Is this a flaw? The Times’ reviewer wonders if the narrator is too closely aligned with the authorial voice. This is one way of stating the problem: "The question remains: has the author separated himself from the narrator sufficiently to signal an independent awareness? It is not so easy to say." I’m not sure I’d accuse the author of aligning himself too closely with the narrator. The insight demonstrated by the narrator’s reflective telling of past events is ultimately too thin to justify the retelling in the first place. Dude, something happened to you. What was it? What did it mean to you then? What does it mean to you now?

That said, we must remember that Frank Bascombe excels at doing next to nothing and learning next to nothing and propagating his concepts about nothingness, like "the Permanent Period." A quick Google search turns up a blog with a good rumination on this phrase:

Whereas the Existence Period is concerned with the fact that "your opponent's the past and everything you've done in it and the problem of getting away from it", the Permanent Period recognizes that you are who you are, so you may as well accept it and forget about; it "tries to reconcile [the] irreconcilables in your favor by making the congested, entangling past fade to beige, and the present brighten with its present-ness" ... etc.

In The Sportswriter, Bascombe describes his life as overwhelmed with "dreaminess." Ford has clearly staked out a theme in these novels. One might easily mistake it as a passive response to life, a poor engagement with "reality." The Times' reviewer finds a hint in looking back at a story in Rock Springs:

One has to go back to ... Rock Springs to find a better clue. There, in a story called ''Optimists,'' which is also set in Great Falls and also involves a family named Brinson, the narrator's mother talks to him about a murder his father has just committed.

Presumably to comfort her son, the mother tells a story within a story about a flock of gadwall ducks taking off from a river and leaving one of their number behind because its feet are frozen in the ice. ''It's just a coincidence,'' goes the moral of the story. ''It's wildlife.''

Nature is beyond meaning and so is human existence. That's about as far as the narrator gets in Wildlife, but in Frank Bascombe Ford has shown he won't settle for anything so simple.

I don't remember enough of Ford's early novels to go too much farther with this line of thought, but I do remember thinking that A Piece of My Heart had echoes of Faulkner that I hadn't expected. Ford is a Southern Writer and the early work falls in line with that tradition -- like Flannery O'Connor's sudden, total violence. Frank Bascombe, however, is a Yankee. He lives in the modern world, selling real estate, even if he did once write about sports and have artistic ambitions (he authored a short story collection).

Wildlife seems to straddle two components of Ford's career. On its own, one must conclude it is incomplete. As part of a oeuvre, it is a specimen most valuable as a point of contrast to other specimens.

I want to end here by linking to an essay by Ford on the short story, called "High-wire performers" (Guradian online, November 3, 2007). The subtlety of thought demonstrated here, particularly the lack of dogmatism or prescriptive advice, is what I value most about Ford. I like his dreaminess, the idea that the ideal is still out there. And even if it isn't, we gotta keep looking.

Residential Schools

This past Wednesday, the Government of Canada formally apologized "for forcing about 150,000 native children into government-financed residential schools where many suffered physical and sexual abuse." Audio and video of the Prime Minister's remarks is available online.

More on the residential schools is available at Wikipedia or on the CBC website or on the Assembly of First Nations' website. Plus many other places.

I included a reference to the residential schools in my short story "Beginnings and Endings," pubished in Thirteen Shades of Black and White (Turnstone Press, 1999). The story consists of alternating voices: a teenage girl who lives on the streets, and a young, male writer of short stories. To clarify in advance, it is completely made up; but like all fiction, some of it is true.

In the voice of the teenage girl, I wrote of her visits to a therapist:

She has a nice office. It was air-conditioned. I noticed that right away. She has art on the wall, too. Most of it is Native stuff. She explained that to me once. The paintings were about healing. They were by people who had been in the residential schools. Carole told me a little bit about that, about the Native residential schools. They don't teach you that stuff in school, man. I didn't learn nothing in school but lies.

From 1992-94, I worked for Saskatoon Community Mediation Services. We had a number of paintings on our walls that could meet the description of the painting in Carole's office. We also had a significant Native clientele, as does anyone involved in any capacity with the justice system in Saskatchewan.

I had the same experience as Darlene, the teenage street-kid in my story. I completed high school and a bachelor's degree and didn't know the first thing about Canada's residential school legacy. I learned a few things in school that weren't lies, but on the whole a critical engagement with the past was sadly lacking in my education.

Any engagement with the Aboriginal fact in Canada was sadly lacking.

In July 1993, I visited the Lubicon Cree Nation in northern Alberta. The story of that group is grippingly told in John Goddard's Last Stand of the Lubicon Cree (Douglas & McIntyre, 1991). The story was unbelieveable then. Fifteen years later it is utterly astonishing. To make a long story short, this is one Aboriginal group that has never signed a treaty and, therefore, has never ceded any land rights. And yet, the land they live on is forested and drained of oil, while they live amongst the agents of the multinational corporations, in their traditional communities, starved of an economic future or compensation.

As a child of multicultural Toronto, as a product of a school system that supported the children of 70+ ethnicities, I confronted my ignorance about Canada Aboriginal peoples during my years in Saskatchewan. Oka, of course, had happened only a few years earlier. I knew that had happened and had a few other politically correct notions. Such as the fact that Indians didn't like to be called "Indians." Though when I asked the Cree woman in my office is Saskatoon about that, she told me bluntly, "I've been an Indian since I was born. Nobody is going to make me change that now."

Toronto multicultural kids learn to treat people of all culture equally. With a level of tolerance, curiosity and respect that says: You can do whatever you like, as long as you don't interfere with my ability to do whatever I like. Capitalism is a great leveler. We all want to make money, right? Not always. Some concerns are more basic. Like survival.

For many years, tolerance, curiosity and respect isn't what Canada gave its Aboriginal people. The Prime Minister this week said it bluntly. He quoted Harry S. LaForme, the justice of the Ontario Court of Appeal who will be leading the truth and reconciliation commission to document the experiences of children in the residential schools: "The policy of the Canadian residential schools wasn't to educate Indian children. It was to kill the Indian in the child."

This is the story I didn't learn in school. This is the story all Canadians should hear. Not all cultures need be equal, legalistically. The First Nations have a unique place in Canada constitutional order, and that is as it should be. The courts, over and over in recent decades, have upheld that specialness.

All of us visitors have taken great wealth out of the land. The original residents of the continent have paid a high price for their relationship with us. Recalibrating that relationship -- through acts like this week's apology (but also much more) -- will help us all in the future.

Relationship is the key word here. Simply inviting Aboriginals into the multicultural milleau is not the recommended option. Integration and assimilation have long, stained histories, which we ought to be well enough educated to avoid repeating.

This (and here I come to the point) is a subject that ought to inspire greatness in Canadian writers. And I'm not talking about the need for yet another novel of massive historical sweep, though I will illustrate my point by referencing Russell Banks' novel Cloudsplitter (HarperCollins, 1999), a book set in 19th-century America and generally about ending slavery.

I saw Banks read (and be interviewed) in Toronto a few years his collected stories came out in 2001. In one of his answers, he outlined part of the gradeur of his mission. He spoke about the national myths of the Nordic countries, the tales of Vikings, etc., and said he was one of the American writers who was trying to create a similar binding mythology for America. He said the central story of US history was slavery. The 1776 Revolution had brought into the world a vision of social equality, but it had built it on the social evil of humans owning other humans. This contradicton has had massive consequences over time, and it is the central contradiction that American writers had to addess, in Banks' view. He did in Cloudsplitter.

Something similar could be argued about the Canadian vision of "peace, order and good government" being built on or around the structure of the Indian Act. Other examples abound, including how the South Africans came to Canada to learn about this nation's reserve system and help them design apartheid. I would prefer to blog about matters literary. This week's historic apology, however, drove me to this subject and these thoughts.

I will end with an indiosyncratic reference ... to Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow (Talon Books, 1988) by Brian Fawcett. Fawcett in this book shows traits rare in combination in Canadian letters: a focus on the contemporary, a penchant for historical context, and a skepticism about idealism. These are subjects I will return to in the future. They interest me greatly.

They are related to the subject of my post last week: about how Coetzee forces readers to ask unsettling questions about who, ultimately, are the barbarians. The Prime Minister's speech this past week provided the hint of an answer. So did comments by one of this MPs.

The Prime Minister gave a remarkable speech. I commend him. It's now up to writers to go forth and find in all of this ... literature. It's out there somewhere.

Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003. His Nobel lecture took the form of a short story. The Nobel committee lauded Coetzee -- "who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider" -- for a body of work that includes Waiting for the Barbarians, a book I consistently recommend whenever someone asks: "Read any good books lately?"

Coetzee is a polarizing writer. I've met a number of people who strongly can't stand his work. (Atwood seems to have the same effect.) Coetzee's fault, in the mind of these readers, seems to be the "coldness" of his prose. His standoffish tone. His clinical assessments of people and environments. This is only a broad, general assessment, of course, and other readers find in those qualities Coetzee's aesthetic strengths.

I am among this latter group. Reading Coetzee, I am reminded what it was like to first read Orwell. These writers, I think, provide a shock of illusions peeled away, which is, of course, another reason why people dislike Coetzee. Illusions help societies function. Scraping away illusions in discomforting. Reading Coetzee is often discomforting. Those who read for entertainment, or comfort (reassuring stories about people like them), find in Coetzee a prototypical writer to avoid.

WAITING FOR BARBARIANS is a novel about the limits of imperial assumptions. Here's the plot summary from Wikipedia:

The story is set in small frontier town of a nameless empire. The town's magistrate is the story's main protagonist and narrator. His rather peaceful existence on the frontier comes to an end with the arrival of some special forces of the Empire, led by a sinister Colonel Joll. There are rumours that the barbarians are preparing an attack on the Empire, and so Colonel Joll and his men conduct an expedition into the land beyond the frontier. They capture a number of "barbarians," bring them back to town, torture them, kill some of them, and leave for the capital in order to prepare a larger campaign against the barbarians. In the meantime, the Magistrate becomes involved with a "barbarian girl" who was left behind crippled and blinded by the torturers. Eventually, he decides to take her back to her people. After a life-threatening trip through the barren land, he returns to his village. Shortly thereafter, the Empire's forces return and the Magistrate's own plight begins.

In short, the novel asks the readers to wonder who are the barbarians? Readers will be led to unsetting possible conclusions.

Coetzee mines similar questions in a book I've just finished, Inner Workings: Essays 2000-2005. These essays show the same penchant for precision as Coetzee's fiction, though one must say that they also demonstrate a lighter touch and a trace of a sense of humour.

The essay on Philip Roth's THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA is so comprehensive, one almost wonders if there is anything left to say. Coetzee also provides sensitive readings of works (and careers) by Nadine Gordimer, Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and V.S. Naipaul.

At the heart of the book for me, however, was a series of essays about German-Austrian writers, only one of whom I've read: Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin, Bruno Schulz, Joseph Roth and Sandor Marai. Coetzee provides a concise, though fulsome, summary of each writer's work, career and interests. Taken together, the essays also demonstrate an interest of Coetzee's: how writers adapt, respond to, write within (pick your own verb cluster) ... the decline (and end) of empire, culture, civilization, the world as one knows it.

The culture collapse that haunted the above writers was the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The other thing that haunted them, of course, was the rise of the Nazis (no hyperlink needed). Which isn't to say that Coetzee tracks the end of empire and the rise of facism. Or that he equates empire with civilization: the author of WAITING FOR BARBARIANS would never do that. What he presents instead is an examination of group of sophisticated writers who lived through the collapse of their culture, the end of their system of meaning, and the rise of different systems of meaning ... or often just chaos and senselessness (specifically, the holocaust).

Coetzee, we'll note, is a white South African who has recently changed his permanent residence to Australia. INNER WORKINGS makes no reference to these autobiographical details. The themes of Coetzee's essays may only coincidentally align with his life. In any case, what does it matter? The theme of the end of meaning and the rise of senselessness is one all of us need to attend to. Perhaps more, in the 21st century, than ever.

Q&A About "Live Bait"

My story "Live Bait," which first appeared online and in print in 2004 in Qwerty, was interrogated by students in Montreal this past year. In 2007, the story appeared in Writing at the Edge: Fiction that takes risks (Siren Song Publishing). That anthology is being used as the source text for a course at Marianopolis College.

Two groups of students sent me questions. I posted both the questions and answers below. Interestingly, both groups of students were presenting a psychological reading of the story.

------------------

FIRST GROUP

Hello,

My name is ..., a student in Zsolt Alapi's english class. Myself and my group are currently organizing a seminar presentation about your story "Live Bait", and were wondering if it would be possible to ask you some questions about this particular story as well as your writing in general.

I've attatched seven questions focusing on the short story itself to save some time between emails, I hope it doesn't seem to presumptious...

1. Why focus of family neurosis?
2. In the story, Jake engages in a lot of "enlightened" discussion and use of narcotics. What is the relationship between enlightenment and drug use, does drug use lead to enlightenment, or the other way around? Or would you say that Jake has simply deluded himself into a state of pseudo-intellectuality?
3. Throughout, it seems hard to pin-point Jake's exact age. Based on the age of the father, we assume he is in his fourties or so, however, he seems to be, in some ways, very sophmoric. Is this a reflection, perhaps, or his own lack of identity?
4. Is it impossible to have intimacy without intoxication?
5. Is Jake's inability to have a serious relationship the result of his father's inadequacy, or would you say that Jake sees his father through the lens of his own failures.
6. Death appears prominantly throughout the narrative. Why the obsession with death? Is it perhaps a result of Jake's guilt over his sister?
7. What is the significance of the title?

Lastly, I'd just like to ask whether it would be possible to write you back at a later point in time with a few further questions. And if so, to which address would you prefer we write?

Thank you,

------------------------

Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:01:14 -0400
From: michaelbryson@rogers.com
Subject: Re: "Live Bait", questions for Zsolt Alapi's class
To:
Hi -

Answers below. Cheers!
If you have any questions about the answers, feel free to ask more questions.

> 1. Why focus of family neurosis?

> > I'm not sure that "family neurosis" is the focus of the story. It's certainly an element of the story, though. The central relationship ofthe story is father/son, and that relationship is complicated by anumber of factors, one of them being mental illness. The story beginswith the father and son alienated from each other. The son has lost hismother to cancer and his sister to suicide, and now he seems to havelost his father to depression. The son's attempts to have meaningful relationship with women have also been problematic. He asks: "What islove?" His attempts to have fulfilling relationships seems to be abetrayal of the promise of love, that one can be lifted out of the troublesof the everyday and taken to a "higher plain." The father's story about hisextra-marital encounter many years earlier suggests the promise of love is not hopeless (or is it?). The story ends with the son's renewed attempt toconnect with his father: "hey pop, talk to me."
> >
> > 2. In the story, Jake engages in a lot of "enlightened" discussion and use of narcotics. What is the relationship between enlightenmentand drug use, does drug use lead to enlightenment, or the other wayaround? Or would you say that Jake has simply deluded himself into a stateof pseudo-intellectuality?

> > There's two questions there; I'll take them separately. First, I don't see any connection between enlightenment and drug use. Drug usedoes not lead to enlightenment, nor does enlightenment lead to drug use.(Incidentally, I don't believe marijuana is technically a "narcotic."There are no narcotics in the story.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcotics

> One of the themes of the story is the subjective nature of"reality." Drug use alters perception (as does mental illness), but so do manyother factors: age, gender, culture, class, race, level of education,to name a few. One of the key lines in the story is "realism is onlywhat has been traditionally represented as real." That's a tough notionto unpack, but it's what the story is trying to illustrate.

> > About Jake's "pseudo-intellectuality" ... I would not say he has deluded himself. I would say he is attempting to live through a difficultsituation. He's looking for something objective and solid and notfinding a lot to hold onto. He might be a victim of the post-moderncondition.

> 3. Throughout, it seems hard to pin-point Jake's exact age. Based onthe age of the father, we assume he is in his forties or so; however,he seems to be, in some ways, very sophomoric. Is this a reflection,perhaps, or his own lack of identity?

> > Interesting question. I see him as mid-thirties. It's fair to say he's sophomoric. In some ways he's classically Gen-X, an aging slacker.But I would go back to the theme of hyper-subjectivity and argue thathe doesn't lack an identity; it's just that his identity is unsettledby questions about "what is real and what is not" (to quote BobDylan). Jake's mother asked him to help his sister, yet his sister killed herself. His failure to save his sister distresses him and pushes his toask the general question: "Why bother?" Jakes seems to be surroundedby signs of collapse (the snow storm, his father's mental health), buthe keeps trying to move forward. He may be sophomoric, or he may be akind of anti-hero, trying to keep making meaning against heavyodds.
> >
> > 4. Is it impossible to have intimacy without intoxication?

> > Isn't intimacy a kind of intoxication? We make meaning in our lives through the use of figurative language. Fiction, on the other hand, should be read figuratively. I'd ask you to avoid the temptation to linkthe story to literal, real-world conclusions. In the story the newgirlfriend needs to get stoned before she can "take her clothes off."This is a metaphor about barriers to connection between people, not justsexual intimacy. There are many other instances in the story ofmissed or broken connections between people. Articulating patterns in thelanguage gets at the story's purpose or meaning.
> >
> > 5. Is Jake's inability to have a serious relationship the result of his father's inadequacy, or would you say that Jake sees his father through the lens of his own failures.

> > The story says Jake's father was the rock of the family and never missed a day's work in 25 years, even when his wife was dying. So I don't think his father is inadequate; he is mentally ill (depressed),which is a recent occurrence. I don't think Jake sees his father throughthe lens of his own failures. I think Jake sees his fatherrealistically; his father is sick. What Jake struggles with is, what to do aboutit? His father's collapse parallel's Jake's inability to find solidityin other areas of his life. Once again, there's a pattern here. Ithink there's something deeper going on in the story than Jake's inabilityto have a serious relationship. Perhaps he's overwhelmed byhyper-subjectivity. Maybe his expectations about the power of love areunrealistic. Maybe he's been let down by people he thought he could trust. Ithink he has had some serious relationships, and maybe all of the aboveare the lessons he's learned from them. He hasn't managed to find a long-term successful relationship, but that's different from being "serious," isn't it?
> > >
> > 6. Death appears prominently throughout the narrative. Why the obsession with death? Is it perhaps a result of Jake's guilt over hissister?

> > Sex and death. Eros and thanatos. The two great themes of literatureand life. Creation and destruction. Beginning and ending. The storytries to grapple with big issues. I think it's as simple as that.
> >
> > 7. What is the significance of the title?

> > This is the toughest questions you've asked me. The image on the T-shirt in the story actually comes from a real experience. I saw a girlwearing a T-shirt just like that, and the image stuck with me, and Ifound a place for it in this story. I think it's an outrageous image,because it's self-derogatory. It's a self-putdown, which is so sad --and sadly predictable. I saw it worn by this beautiful girl and thecontrast between her beauty and this disturbing image struck me. Ofcourse, one can make too much of this also, because there's a kind ofrisqué sexual humour present too. And perhaps the girl was well aware ofhow she was advertising herself. This is a topic that could engender alot of discussion, I'm sure.

> > But back to the phrase "Live Bait," as title. I don't think I can outline its significance definitively. I like titles that are suggestive, ambiguous, open to interpretation. I also like titles that have aconcrete image, not an abstraction (i.e., the title could have been "ThePower of Love," but it isn't). So I'm just going to throw this oneback to you, if you'll pardon the fishing pun. Hopefully, there's enoughin the story to open many doors of perception and mystery.

(See "TheFiction of Douglas Glover" [opens outward into mystery] essay....)http://www.danforthreview.com/features/essays/glover.htm

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STUDENT RESPONSE

Hello again,

Firstly, thank you for the answers to our questions.

Secondly, no, we didn't forget, but as our presentation happened to be a long way off, and we tend to procrastinate, we kind of put our project on the backburner until necessity forced us to get down to serious work.

Oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, your answers really were helpful in getting a better grasp of the story on our second, third, and nth reads through it. Currently, we've more or less finished the presentation, as in, it's tomorrow, at 8:00am, and I'm currently taking any excuse to further procrastinate designing the last few slides. So I've decided to send a last few questions, just for interest's sake, recognizing and not at all expecting to recieve a response before the 8:00am deadline.

Our given topic was to analyse your story in the context of psychoanalytic criticism, and as I was writing the presentation, I wondered about your opinion on this type of criticism, as an academic and a writer.

1. What do you think about Freud, generally speaking?
2. What do you think about Freudian literary criticism? What do you think about Jungian archetypes? Do you feel one approach is more apt than the other?
3. Do you feel that psychoanalytic criticism at times goes too far in connecting the work to the author, that is, on a personal, biographical level?
4. You mentioned in your responses to our questions that you'd like us to avoid linking the story to "literal, real-world conclusions". Do you feel psychoanalytic criticism can be limiting in this way? That is, do you feel this type of criticism applies a focus to the more "real-world", concrete interpretation of a given piece of literature?
5. How do you think this type of criticism might be applied to "Live Bait". This is a really general, vague question. I'm really just curious as to how you would approach the type of topic we were given, where would you start, what would you focus on, generally speaking?
6. How exaggerated -or not- do you feel use of the Oedipal Complex is in literary criticism?
7. How do you feel about caffeine pills? Have you ever used them? Does anything beat that warm, 4am cup of black coffee?

Please don't hold any spelling or grammatical errors against me. I'm pretty tired just now. Thanks,...

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BRYSON RESPONDS

Hi -

Good luck with your presentation. Here's some quick answers to your questions ....

1. What do you think about Freud, generally speaking?

Freud, simply put, was part of a wave of thinkers that defined what it meant to be modern. Marx illustrated the hidden forces at work in the economy. Freud articulated the hidden forces at work in human behaviour. The popularization of these thinkers had a profound effect on history. At the same time, what they told us were INTERPRETATIONS of phenomena. They were part of an ongoing process of the enlightenment to articulate how the world works, a process which may or may not be doomed.

My thought about Freud is that he's a good writer. I read some of his "analyses" of patients as part of a course on biography (Freud's theories had a profound impact on how people wrote biographies and autobiographies -- using psychological motivations for behaviour). I was quite impressed with Freud as a writer and interpreter. He had a flare for dramatic interpretation.... which isn't quite how one tends to think of him.


2. What do you think about Freudian literary criticism? What do you think about Jungian archetypes? Do you feel one approach is more apt than the other?

About Freudian literary criticism, I'd just note that its changed how we think about our motivations and the motivations of characters. Jane Austen's characters had never heard of Freud, but we can now do a psychological interpretation of their movitations. Are we any further ahead? Maybe, but probably not. We're just somewhere we wouldn't have been before. Perhaps a more interesting place, perhaps not.

About Jung. He had a different framework than Freud. It also produced interesting insights. Is one more apt than the other? I couldn't say really.

3. Do you feel that psychoanalytic criticism at times goes too far in connecting the work to the author, that is, on a personal, biographical level?

Well, I don't think psychoanalytic criticism is really about going back to the author. That seems like a fallacy to me. To go back to Jane Austen, we can talk about the psychological motivations of Emma et al without looking into the biography of Ms. Austen. I'd think that each novel, each short story, is a universe unto itself, and the interpretation of the meaning of the text should be found within the text.

4. You mentioned in your responses to our questions that you'd like us to avoid linking the story to "literal, real-world conclusions". Do you feel psychoanalytic criticism can be limiting in this way? That is, do you feel this type of criticism applies a focus to the more "real-world", concrete interpretation of a given piece of literature?

In short, no. But in some ways, yes. Psychoanalysis seems to me to be about the universe of the subconscious, not the world of concrete objects. The subconscious is a world of symbols and motifs. For example, to simply, girls like princesses and boys like knights. I happen to have an eight-year-old step son who is obsessed with his mother. He is in the midst of an Oedipal romance -- which Freud would say he needs to break free of so he can "self-actualize", become a separate and whole individual. I'd agree!! There's a real-world example for you. But we're talking about literature here. If we read THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, do we look at Holden Caufield and say he's a dopplegagger for JD Salinger and all of Holden's issues actually belong to JD. I hope not. That would be an unfruitful way of reading the novel to my mind. The novel doesn't lead back to the real world in that sense. It leads to broader associations of the imagination, just as Freud's theories lead to broader associations, or interpretations, of the subconscious and hidden and therefore mysterious motivations that drive behaviour. Why does a character in a novel or story act a certain way? There are multiple, equally accurate and convincing reasons. To go back to the real world of the author's so-called history (also open to interpretation) is limiting. Interpretation should lead to openings, not closings. More questions, not "the answer."

5. How do you think this type of criticism might be applied to "Live Bait". This is a really general, vague question. I'm really just curious as to how you would approach the type of topic we were given, where would you start, what would you focus on, generally speaking?

I'd start by asking who is the protagonist. That'd be Jake. If Freud had Jake on a couch, what would he say? Tell me about your childhood. Jake's father is the dependable rock, until he cracks after the death of his wife. Jake's mother is the caregiver, then she dies. Jake's sister commits suicide, even after Jake was asked to save her. Jake's attempt at reconnecting with the feminine (he's attempts to keep a girlfriend) all fail. Jake's attempt to be "a man" are complicated by his encounter with feminism (which he accepts, but doesn't know how to integrate into his life). One might say Freud gave us tools to try to understand why we do what we do. Why does Jake do what he does? He doesn't know. He's confused. He would like to understand. In the end, it's the collapse of his father (the solid male figure in his life) which is the focus of the story. He would like to rehabilitate his father. Is this a way of rehabilitating his own manhood? His father wants to reconnect with a teenage girl he met decades earlier. Is this a way of restoring his manhood? The questions are left unanswered in the story, but they remain for us to ponder.

6. How exaggerated -or not- do you feel use of the Oedipal Complex is in literary criticism?
No comment on this one. As I said, I see it in my own home!

7. How do you feel about caffeine pills? Have you ever used them? Does anything beat that warm, 4am cup of black coffee?

Scotch on ice!

=======================

SECOND GROUP OF STUDENTS

Dear Mr. Bryson,

I am in Dr. Zsolt Alapi's English course at Marianopolis College, and I have just read your story "Live Bait." I am planning to lead a seminar on a psychoanalytic interpretation of "Live Bait" and I was wondering if you would be able to answer a few short questions about yourself and the story, and about the process of writing the story.

Thank you for your time,

----------------------------------

Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:05:51 -0400
From: michaelbryson@rogers.com
Subject: Re:

sure thing. send them along.

----------------------------------

Dear Mr. Bryson,

Here are the questions:

1) Do you feel a connection to, or affinity with, your characters? Are they analagous to any of the people you have met or known during your lifetime?
2) What are your favourite pieces of writing? Who have your artistic influences been, and who are your favourite writers?
3) What do you think of writers such as Matthew Firth? Are there any writers on the Canadian or American scenes whom you find interesting at the moment?
4) Would you describe your writing as "Urban Writing?"
5) We notice that in "Live Bait," the sexual encounter between the protagonist and the young lady he meets at the party has certain post-modernist characteristics. Are we mistaken? What is your opinion of Post-Modernism?
6) Who are your philosophical and intellectual influences? What do you think of the findings of thinkers such as Freud, Jung, Campbell, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche?
7) Did you have an intended meaning or message when you wrote "Live Bait" (If so, what is it?) ? Do you feel that as the author you have a priviledged access to, or interpretation of, the text?

Thank you for your time,

--------------------------------------


Hi Nicholas -

Here are the answers:

1) Do you feel a connection to, or affinity with, your characters? Are they
analogous to any of the people you have met or known during your lifetime?

- I'd say my characters are like estranged cousins. I sort of know them, but
they exist in a world I only visit in memory and imagination. Ultimately,
they're mysterious to me, as everyone is. We can move towards knowing each
other, but there's anyways more to know (the same, I believe, is true about
our relationship with ourselves...).- Short answer about "analogousness"... no. My father did have a period of
serious depression. However, my mother is still alive. I don't have a sister.
No one in my family has committe suicide. I've never smoked pot with my
father. Nothing that happens between Jake and the women in the story ever
happened to me. I've never owned a car. And so on. I've always said that I
can't pretend that my stories don't expose my subconscious, because they do.
However, the facts in the story are all made up. The facts of the story don't
correlate to my autobiography.

2) What are your favourite pieces of writing? Who have your artistic
influences been, and who are your favourite writers?

- I'm not sure I have favourite writers, but there are a handful of Canadian
short story books I'm always happy to promote:

- 19 KNIVES by Mark Anthony Jarman
- WHITE BUICK by Greg Hollingshead
- 16 CATEGORIES OF DESIRE by Douglas Glover
- Other Canadian short fiction writers I'd recommend: Zsuzsi Gartner, Neil
Smith, John Lavery, Craig Davidson, Tony Burgess, Barbara Gowdy, Lynn Coady,
Tim Conley. Alice Munro, too, of course: she is our Chekhov.

- Re: influences. You might be interested in Harold Bloom's view of literary
influence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxiety_of_Influence). My opinion
about influnces is that you discover them, like mentors (or lovers), but the
germ of the relationship pre-existed the discovery. In other words, you find
the influences you need to find in order to better be the writer you always
wanted to be. For example, twenty years ago I kept writing stories with
narrators/protagonists who were largely passive. I thought I was doing
something wrong. Then I read Raymond Carver's short stories and found he was
writing similar kinds of stories. I learned some things from Carver, but I
was writing like myself before I was "influenced" by Carver. (Similarly, it's
easy to see Hemingway's influence on Carver...).

- I'll just way one more thing about my influences, which is: I try to bring together in my writing both "realist" and "fabulist" elements. I've learned from writers like Terry Southern, J.G. Ballard, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth, Kafka, Douglas Glover .... how to meld these traditions. In Canada, it seems to me, our criticism tends to divide the "realists" from the "experimenters,"
as if you need to be one or the other and can't be both. (Probably because our criticism has centred on what makes CanLit "Canadian," i.e., real, rather than what makes it "literature" in the broader sense.)

3) What do you think of writers such as Matthew Firth? Are there any writers
on the Canadian or American scenes whom you find interesting at the moment?

- There's lots of interesting books/authors. I've named some above.

- Re: Firth.... I've known Matthew about 10 years or so. I like him as a
person very much, and I'm always interested in what he's doing in his
writing. As you probably know, his work is all part of a bigger project he's
extremely dedicated to. He could describe it better than I can, but I'll just
call it "telling the truth through fiction about working class life." He'd
probably find my answers to your questions here far too much
"intellectualizing." His work is about trying to capture honest, truthful,
real representations of life as lived. I have deep respect for all of that,
but the graduate student in me always concludes with the fact that fiction
is, at the end of the day, a construction of language. And that raises a host
of questions about "truth."

- Actually, this kind of reiterates what I was saying above about my
"realist" and "fabulist" influences. I want to write truthfully and honestly
and communicate what it feels like to be alive (from my point of view). But I
also see fiction as a playful thing, existing in a rhelm that isn't make of
objects and facts. It's a connundrum!

4) Would you describe your writing as "Urban Writing?"

- Is urban writing the opposite of rural writing? Do those categories mean
anything?

5) We notice that in "Live Bait," the sexual encounter between the
protagonist and the young lady he meets at the party has certain
post-modernist characteristics. Are we mistaken? What is your opinion of
Post-Modernism?

- I'm not sure what you mean by "post-modernist characteristics." Also, I
don't think it's up to me to tell you whether or not you are mistaken. The
story is open to many interpretations. I don't think I'm in a position to
invalidate any of them.

- Re: Post-modernism. I think the best thing I can do is recommend Linda
Hutcheon on this subject; my take is she's got it right. These links are a
good place to start:
- http://individual.utoronto.ca/lindahutcheon/
- http://www.ualberta.ca/~jwilliam/eng478/pomo.htm
-
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/postmodernism/modules/hutcheon
postmodernity.html

6) Who are your philosophical and intellectual influences? What do you think
of the findings of thinkers such as Freud, Jung, Campbell, Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche?

- I like Wayne Gretzky: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
- Also John Lennon: "Well, you know, you better free your mind instead."
- Bob Dylan: "Don't follow leaders, watch parking meters."

7) Did you have an intended meaning or message when you wrote "Live Bait" (If
so, what is it?) ? Do you feel that as the author you have a priviledged
access to, or interpretation of, the text?

- No intended meaning or message.

- As above: "The story is open to many interpretations. I don't think I'm in
a position to invalidate any of them."