And framing can, at least in my mind, also include what I think of as "braiding" - having two story lines going at once. Same deal - we want to ask: Why am I doing this? And: Is doing this keeping from doing something else (for example, concentrating more on the essence of one of the two storylines)?
Btw, I literally just made up the term "braiding."
And I want to talk, in future posts, about another idea, "avoidance." This is where we do something - make a frame, or a "braid" or about a million other things - in order to avoid something in our story. In my experience, it's a form of the subconscious saying, "I'm not ready to go there, so let me push that decision down the road."
I like that term “braiding” a lot. It’s active and tangible. And we saw it in “The Falls,” didn’t we, with the duelling mental commentaries of Morse and Cummings?
Don't mean to be rude, but I think I first learned of the term braiding in the book Tell it Slant. And it is a form taught by Priscilla Long, who teaches several different forms for structuring one's writing. Priscilla and you are both brilliant, so--brilliant minds think alike!
Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction was written by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola (2019). A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form was written by Brenda Miller (2021). Great books! It's all good.
BTW After 40 years as a technical writer with "Omit needless words!" as my mantra, I've spent the last few years trying to unwind from all that in my own writing. So advice on when to let it be or not would be great. Tuned in at Part 1 of "The Incident," and I am really enjoying this. Thanks!
Hi Charlie. About a year ago following a long spell of editing I had the feeling I was stripping my own writing back to below zero, so I tried an exercise in Ursula K. Le Guin's "Steering the Craft." After a few example paragraphs (Kipling, Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, Molly Gloss, etc.) she suggests "being gorgeous." Her focus is on writing crafted for the ear, i.e. to be read aloud, but for me that word "gorgeous" unlocked something – like being given permission to put on diamonds after wearing sackcloth. I still love the (sci-fi) paragraph I wrote. It sparkles! Try it – you might enjoy dressing your prose up too...
I loved the 'being gorgeous' exercise in Steering the Craft and found all Ursula le Guin's exercises and explanations brilliant. She's a wonderful writer.
Hi Em. Thanks for your suggestion. I've always had so much respect for Ursula Le Guin and a while back a writer friend suggested "Steering the Craft" but I didn't follow up. After your suggestion, I'm definitely going to get that book. Thanks so much!
I also loved the Le Guin. I felt it really changed the way I thought about sentences. The exercises aren't easy and I still like to go back to them from time to time to see what they unlock.
I am looking forward to the discussion about avoidance! I can see how in less skilled hands (like mine!), braiding could be used as an out, or a device to make a point about a character, or the story arc, that could have/should have been made through the main story.
"Braiding"--I think this comes up often with personal essayists, too-- a "braided essay" is an essay type I recall linked to Judith Kitchen and to Brenda Miller to describe the double narrative effect in essaying. I like this idea of a braid as a diversion tactic!
I’m happy to see you use this term! But Isn’t a braid made up of 3 or more interlaced parts? I ask only because I’m working on writing now in which the story gets handed off to different characters and I’ve been describing it as “braided.” For sure I’m going back into it to make sure I’m not avoiding something.
Pretty sure you're asking George your question, so I hope you don't mind me answering. A braid in writing, from my experience, can have two or three strands that interweave (or, I suppose, even more). Here's from Priscilla Long's book: "The two-strand structure takes two topics and weaves them. Each pulls on the other, stretches the other, pushes against the other..... Like so many writing strategies, it is not only a writing plan but also a thinking plan."
I’m very glad to have your reply, Mary.- and also found your later comment where you first reference Long’s book- and thank you for the quote which I’ve copied and tacked to my desktop. My only reference has been what one does to get hair out of the face of children.
fishtail braid - 2 strands, however it looks a lot more complicated. Maybe we say braid instinctively because our stories go off in all directions and - phew - we pull the strands back and weave them in.
"So, here, re. “An Incident,” let’s pose a hypothetical question: Could we just cut the intro and epilogue?"
You conclude that we probably shouldn't, but I'm betting almost every Clubber would indeed cut some or all of that Intro and all of the Epilogue, and if you don't mind me saying, George, if this was your story I think you'd do so too.
Not because the Intro and Epilogue are superfluous -- you make a convincing case against that -- but because they're simply not the kind of things most modern writers are going to end up including in their final drafts. "One incident, however, struck me as significant, and aroused me from my ill temper, so that even now I cannot forget it" is gorgeously raw and open and/but also mildly boastful about the resonance of the story that follows, and for these very reasons would be cut by almost all modern writers. Nobody in this Club would ever say in their opening paragraphs "The story that follows is important and transformative", would they? Instead they'd leave it to the reader to be the judge of that.
And it's even more likely IMO that any Clubber would cut an Epilogue like
"Even now, this remains fresh in my memory. It often causes me distress, and makes me try to think about myself. The military and political affairs of those years I have forgotten as completely as the classics I read in my childhood. Yet this incident keeps coming back to me, often more vivid than in actual life, teaching me shame, urging me to reform, and giving me fresh courage and hope."
Again, beautiful and touching and even inspiring as this is, it's too raw and blunt about the story's moral impact on its teller for our fallen 21st-century tastes. None of us would get away these days with boasting, or seeming to boast, that a crucial event years ago may have made us a better person, including making us braver and more hopeful. And we fallen modern writers know this, I think, and therefore for better or worse, this Epilogue would end up getting cut by every writer in this thread.
Yes, interesting & valid points, Sean. I think I’d make a distinction, though, between the language of the intro & epilogue (which, possibly because of the periods in which it was written, is a bit formal & stilted, to our ears) and their function (which is to, let’s say, advance, between them, our understanding of the narrator’s arc). He’s more overtly didactic than we can likely get away with, but in something like “The Calm,” there’s also that sort of guiding tone at the end (albeit much more minimally and, if I’m remembering correctly, conveyed on the action of...something to with the leaves on the sidewalk. (I’d consult it directly but am currently taking a break from shoveling our driveway out from a mudslide...and gotta get back to it.❤️
We might ask how a contemporary writer might rewrite the framing graphs in “An Incident,” losing the didactic quality/stiffness but preserving the slight escalation there at the end - that sense of renewed moral resolve...
"We might ask how a contemporary writer might rewrite the framing graphs in “An Incident,” losing the didactic quality/stiffness but preserving the slight escalation there at the end - that sense of renewed moral resolve..."
Yes! And Rosanne has pointed the way with her Frank O'Connor example below. And Borges managed this (extremely difficult, for me at least) effect many times, didn't he? Not necessarily in terms of moral resolve, but instead feeling comfortable explicitly stating the narrator or protag's revelation and transformation, as part of framing devices or within the stories themselves.
Denis Johnson's 'Jesus' Son' too, though almost in an opposite way to Borges, who prepares the reader for these statements through the establishment of authority (technical, philosophical, spiritual). When his claims about relevation arrive, therefore, I find myself simply submitting to that authority. But Johnson's Fuckhead is so broken, has so little personal authority beyond the beauty of his voice, that there's no chance of his declared revelations seeming boastful, and so I find myself entralled and, yes, inspired by them.
'An Incident' lies somewhere between those two, I think, and therefore is less likely to offer a model to modern writers. Still a stoater (Scottish word) of a story, though.
"I move off down the sidewalk. Some kids are tossing a football at the end of the street. But they aren't my kids, and they aren't her kids either. There are these leaves everywhere, even in the gutters. Piles of leaves wherever I look. They're falling off the limbs as I walk. I can't take a step without putting my shoe into leaves. Somebody ought to make an effort here. Somebody ought to get a rake and take care of this."
Interestingly enough, the ending section of "The Calm" uses the word "framing": "We looked into the mirror together, his hands still framing my head."
Anyway, Raymond Carver is amazing and I'm having a great time reading all of these comments.
I just now read "The Calm." Unbelievably good. And the way the narrator is nearly invisible until the very end, when he finally is not, is astonishing.
I also like "soughing" -- He listened to the wind soughing through the trees. (Some pronounce it "suff" but I believe it's original pronunciation is "sow." I guess it works best while reading silently to oneself.
We could say that soughing is a product of psithurism. Neither is especially onomatopoetic.
Perhaps this is more a reflection on my drafts that are written in first person evolving into a third person narrative, leading me to wonder if "The Incident" had been written in a third person point of view of the official riding in the rickshaw, would the introduction and epilogue seem boastful. In this iteration, my first impulse would be a narrator relating the introduction and epilogue as a conversation between the official (if that is what he truly is) and another person.
This story is quite a fragile piece, especially perhaps by modern standards, as you allude to. However, it is also exceptionally good(!) and makes you feel amazing after reading it. If a modern writer was lucky enough to have written it and then tried cutting away the intro and epilogue and then read it again and thought, well it’s not quite so amazing now, you’d hope they might put them back.
It somehow brings to mind a conversation I once had with a friend who pointed out that if you read a paragraph or a page of Kafka, you wouldn’t necessarily know you were reading a great writer. I guess I mean by that: if you read the intro or epilogue of An Incident on their own you might think “Cut that!” But reading them in the story as a whole you might think they were just about as good as they could be?
But we just don't see it, Shaiza. I can't think of a single modern story that explicitly and unironically claims the events portrayed turned the narrator into a significantly better person, and certainly none that concludes that way. Haven't seen it in published writing, fellow writers' final drafts, anywhere.
I've seen stuff vaguely akin to that in early drafts, but it always ends up getting cut, for the reasons outlined above. And I've seen it plenty of times in self-help books. But not in any fiction I can recall. Hence the assumption that this Club's writers are unlikely to include such an Intro and Epilogue in their final drafts. I'm not claiming intimate knowledge of these Clubbers' minds, yourself included, just assuming they and you are probably not that different from virtually all other modern writers.
I think you are right that the style of An Incident is certainly old-fashioned, but I think George's reply of looking at the function vs the language is really interesting. A modern writer wouldn't use that same language, but could perhaps convey a similar feeling or perform a similar function in the story without being so extra WOW I'M CHANGED about it.
But I'm not talking about the prose style of 'An Incident'. Apologies if I haven't made that clear. I'm talking instead about the content, the actual idea itself, however we phrase it:
Intro: Here is an important and transformative story.
Epilogue: This event was so significant it forced me to look deeply into myself, after which I emerged a better person.
I would *love* it if modern writers could say this kind of thing with a straight face, but we can't. There is no way to phrase the above ideas that doesn't contain a strong sense of WOW I'M CHANGED (LOL at *your* witty phrasing btw). Or none that I can see at least.
Which is not to say the particular issue we're addressing here -- i.e. why can't modern writers just be straightforwardly honest about their stories' moral worth, even if this sounds somewhat boastful? -- can't be finessed some other way. In other words, I strongly agree with your final sentence.
Late to the party, I know, and slightly off piste, but your comment reminded me of the semi-lament in this intro to a (wonderful) Paul Giamatti reading of A Noiseless Patient Spider:
"So much contemporary poetry is full of playful irony and irreverent humor – which, personally, I love. But when I go back and read Walt Whitman, the grandfather of American poetry, I feel like a post-modern fool in the face of Whitman’s totally sincere, un-ironic vision."
It would make an interesting writing exercise/challenge to put together a modern story with a similar moral vibe to see how (if) it could be done without hitting us over the head with its intentions.
I wonder, can we step back and ask if the narrator is a significantly better person at the end of The Incident? If we want him to be, he can be. But he may well be an unchanged man paying lip service, putting off his goodness until tomorrow instead of getting around to it today. There's a lot of motion at the end of the story that says his journey isn't complete - he has hope and courage to be good one day. Not the same as attaining it. He tries. But, you know the quote, do or do not, there is no try. I'd vote that the author doesn't claim the narrator is a significantly better person. Just that he wishes he were. And that is his moral failing. I'm out on a limb, I know.
Is this epilogue boastful? My first gut read of it was, "well this stuck with me over the years, but do you know what I am not actually sure I'd behave differently even after all this". Hedging is right in there: 'makes me try to', 'often' rather than 'always', and no indication that anything has changed other than thoughts. I think in C21st we might very well frame in this way: sure this story has some power, but I can't promise it's enough.
However, I do think your point is interesting, Sean, and carries a wider truth about one way framing can seem awkward for our modern expectations. A v interesting discussion.
Cheers. George and others ask the really interesting question, though: how *might* we explicitly communicate a story's resonance and moral worth without seeming in any way boastful about that story? Extremely difficult task, I'd say, but well worth the effort if it can be convincingly pulled off.
I put 'apparently' and 'seeming' alongside boastful because as you suggest, Niall, it's not clearcut. What tips it for me is the fact that the Intro is bordeline boastful too about the story's resonance for the narrator and therefore, by implication, for the reader. The Epilogue has a similar flavour. It's subtle, and it's hardly a crime -- in fact I like it, if I haven't made that clear. But I still think most modern writers would cut it, because they wouldn't want any of that flavour in their story.
It's not even a particularly interesting point I'm making tbh. George asked might we Clubbers cut the Intro and Epilogue? And I'm just saying yes, I think most of us would.
Agree, Niall, and I suppose a reader (then or now) might reject too much certainty in the epilogue. Ambiguity improves it, I think. One thing we know for sure is that the narrator, misanthrope or no, is still thinking about the incident, and in that way, if no other, he has been changed.
Wow. This comment is amazingly crazy in the best possible way. And I thank you for leaving me forever imagining Lu Hsun behind closed blinds in a tweed walking suit twirling a brass and walnut cane indulging his secret Victorian dandy side.
Agreed, Rosanne. I have no issues at all with framing devices, and as you say they can often be very helpful in orienting the reader. And I didn't have any objections to the device used in 'An Incident'. I found it beautiful. Nonetheless I'm confident it wouldn't survive the final drafts of most writers hereabouts, for the reasons given.
"And anything that happened me afterwards, I never felt the same about again". I think that story would be less, would suffer, without that line, that back end of the frame."
Complete agreement on this, and a superbly chosen example. And because it's shorter, subtler and less (apparently) boastful, most of us, even in the self-conscious, morally nervous 21st century, would be proud of that line if it was ours.
I’m a little late to this framing thread, but I wonder if one of the things the frame in this story does is to get the reader to feel more generously about the narrator than if the opening part of the frame was not included.
In paragraph 1, he describes himself as a misanthrope - and my first thought is, do I even want to read a story about a self-described misanthrope? But in the next paragraph, he immediately says that an incident aroused him from his ill temper. So I think, okay, something happened to make him change and maybe I will give this story a chance.
After the opening part of the frame, his description of himself becomes worse and worse, and it is not until paragraph 12 that his revelation about his lack of compassion begins. So, without the frame, I think I would have felt negatively about the narrator for much of the story, since I would not have known from the outset that he had changed.
Ah, Guests of the Nation was my gateway into short stories. I finished reading and anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.
Mine too, Niall and when I was reading George's comments on introductory and epilogue paragraphs, I thought of the ending of Frank O'Connor's story, the enormous emotional force of it! I remember the first time I read it... 1970, I was thirteen, imprisoned - as I saw it - in a catholic convent boarding school ... a grim winter evening and I'd run out of things to read so I borrowed an older girl's textbook - Exploring English 1 -and came across Guests of the Nation. I'd been an avid reader since I was about six, but mainly for escape or comfort or a laugh. After Guests of the Nation I think I became a different kind of reader, I started looking for stories that would make me feel part of 'it' all, get me thinking about things. I'll never forget that ending ( and anyone who hasn't read the story yet should skip this, but find that story and read it!) :
" Noble says he felt he seen everything ten times as big, perceiving nothing around him but the little patch of black bog with the two Englishmen stiffening into it; but with me it was the other way, as though the patch of bog where the two Englishmen were was a thousand miles away from me, and even Noble mumbling just behind me and the old woman and the birds and the bloody stars were all far away, and I was somehow very small and very lonely. And anything that ever happened me after I never felt the same about again"
On my first read I wanted to cut that whole ending, feeling that the story had already ended. But I understand it’s place from George’s comments. Have I read too much “modern” literature without framing that I can’t accept it in a story, even if it is done well?
One of my favorite writing professors, Cathy Day, always asked us to ask a version of the first question about virtually any aspect of a story, whether ours or someone else's: "Why this way and not another?" I think the addition of, "What am I avoiding by doing it this way and not another?" feels just as crucial.
"Braiding" makes me think of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and how each of the six stories in the book frame each other both as prologue and epilogue (since the first half of each story is told in chronological order, and the second half in reverse-chronological order.) I think this framing device grants extra weight to each story because the reader can place what transpires in the context of (fictional) history.
I wonder what Deborah Treisman would say about this. I recall her fairly forceful deprecation of "tidy" endings that wrap up a story, as a kind of erstwhile "service to the reader." She seemed to feel that these are usually better omitted, since they can be redundant, or even subtly condescending (my word, not hers). Perhaps this reflects the less frequent use of framing in contemporary short stories. I found her advice, gentle though it was, very helpful in dealing with endings in general.
This story's framing isn't, of course, redundant -- it's part of the author's message. And since the story is (to my ear) overtly didactic, the condescending effect is intrinsic, not unique to the ending. So it's a bad example of what Deborah was referring to. Still, I have trouble relating to stories that are too transparently schooling me what or how to think about what I'm reading. Writing is always about "telling the reader what to think" at some level, so there's a fine line between overtly didactic and skillfully (i.e., successfully) manipulative.
So sometimes I have heard that prologues are lazy and epilogues worse. But used as an ID channel theatrical device — ie the murdered screaming woman is shown in prologue and then shown happy and smiling in the first real beat of the plot line does too much work to raise emotional stakes without the writer earning it. However I found The Incident to gain resonance through a set up as opposed to a “vomit” of emotional resonance to hook you— it does have to braid all the way through and backward to the first line — so it has to have emotional elasticity to the same tension throughout— anyway that’s my humble opinion. As far as trying to find a concentrated essence I feel much more invested as a reader if the essence is a bit more diffuse and open to a true honesty of messiness like life is—
I was about to respond to your most recent post (Feb 3), when I found myself editing "An Incident" -- to see how it would read with all the framing and coaching removed. A disturbing reaction emerged when I thought about the result:
=====================================
It happened during the winter of 1917. A bitter north wind was blowing, but I had to be up and out early. I met scarcely a soul on the road, and had great difficulty in hiring a rickshaw to take me to S—— Gate. Presently the wind dropped a little. By now the loose dust had all been blown away, leaving the roadway clean, and the rickshaw man quickened his pace. We were just approaching S—— Gate when someone crossing the road was entangled in our rickshaw and slowly fell.
It was a woman. She lay there on the ground, and the rickshaw man stopped.
"It's all right," I said. "Go on."
He set down the shafts, and gently helped the old woman to get up. Supporting her by one arm, he asked: "Are you all right?"
"I'm hurt."
Still holding her arm, he helped her slowly forward. When I looked ahead, I saw a police station. Because of the high wind, there was no one outside, so the rickshaw man helped the old woman towards the gate.
I got down from the rickshaw.
A policeman came up to me, and said, "Get another rickshaw. He can't pull you any more."
Without thinking, I pulled a handful of coppers from my coat pocket and handed them to the policeman. "Please give him these," I said.
The wind had dropped completely, but the road was still quiet. I walked along thinking, what had I meant by that handful of coppers? Was it a reward?
====================================
In reviewing my butchered version of the story, I began to see the excised portions in a different light. They seemed overtly manipulative, even tawdry, and in the aggregate, self-serving and obsequious. I couldn't shake the feeling that Lu Hsun was really just painting a picture of himself as a political sycophant, and not lauding the driver at all. He seemed to be contriving a "re-educated" image of himself that some Kafka-esque, dangerously judgmental government official would find acceptable. Almost every phrase of the excised "coaching" material seems directed to this end.
And now I find myself squirming at the political incorrectness of what I've just written!
Is there a name for what I'm trying to work on. A woman presented with a very bad situation (which we don't learn till much later) remembering all the incidents and events of the past 20 years that led to this, as she's waiting for coffee) but unexpected events near the end, just outside the coffee shop, make her present day a complete narrative as well as the flashback stories. The story from the past has a conclusion near the end, but then an encounter outside the coffee shop provides another conclusion beyond the first one.
Asking only because if such a flashbacky device has a specific name, I can look at other stories that employ it, or analyses of it.
Seeing the opening and epilogue together, something else struck me. It seems from the opening that he is still engaged in state affairs (“Six years have slipped by since I came from the country to the capital”). But in the epilogue he says, “The military and political affairs of *those* years I have forgotten as completely as the classics I read in my childhood,” as if he has retired or quit, and entered a new era of life. This could be a matter of translation, but at least in English, it makes me wonder if the driver somehow inspired the narrator to leave his job.
Great catch. I like how in a story everything doesn't have to line up and be symetrical. And how that space lets a question arise and exist in the reader. Like the Wisdom of Omission chapter was saying in A Swim In A Pond In The Rain. Then again, too much omitting can feel like cheating. Anyway, thanks for the food for thought.
I think there's a problem with the tense of the verb in the first paragraph. The Present Perfect makes it sound as if the paragraph refers to a recent event. It would make more sense for the narrative timeline if the verb "have" was in the Past Perfect "had slipped by" and "I had seen and heard". Like this:
"Six years had slipped by since I came from the country to the capital. During that time I had seen and heard quite enough of so-called affairs of state"
As we learn further down in the story and at the end, all these events are well in the past, a long time before the narrator is narrating them:
"It happened during the winter of 1917" and "Even now, this remains fresh in my memory"
From the first reading, the use of the Present Perfect confused me, as it implied a recent past.
Super interesting. In law school, we were taught CRAC. Conclusion, Rule, Application, Conclusion. For persuasive writing. For objective writing it was IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion). This can sound super mechanical after a while but it is how first year law students are taught. So maybe if it sounds mechanical in a story, it should def come out.
I was also interested to read some commenters say An Incident felt like a morality tale to them, and like they felt they were being manipulated. Maybe the frame has something to do with why it comes off that way, to them? I loved An Incident's frame but maybe that's just because I'm used to reading frames. Actually no, that frame was gorgeous. Even if I'd never read a frame before, I'd still love it.
But anyway, aren't most stories framed? Like in real life, when my friend is telling me what happened to her that morning, she'll always give context from before or after that morning before starting her story.
I feel like the frame usually answers the Why Are You Bothering Telling Me This? question George mentioned in A Swim In A Pond In The Rain.
Also, I feel like the frame lets us get to know the narrator, which I like.
Hi, Shaiza. Maybe we've been framed? I read The Incident frame unaware the first two or three times.
The intro didn't seem superfluous to me at all. The man relates how he is losing his humanity to detestable work. How can the story work without that context? Moreover, I have worked those jobs myself! So right away I had a clue. The idea of a life punctuated by seminal events didn't seem contrived either. Nor a life punctuated by ruminations over fateful incidents in the past. I simply didn't snag on the intro.
The conclusion I found trickier. Yet "the Club" often demonstrates that the beauty of a story is somehow proportional to our generosity how we are disposed toward it. I didn't feel cheapened by it. It is clearly cast as the narrator's reaction to the incident and not represented as a moral teaching. If the ending is satirical, then this piece would have been very courageous in its day and in keeping with the author's reputation.
So the framedness didn't make me like it less.
I'm on the record as loving the parable of the Good Samaritan and identifying its similarities to The Incident.
You won't get all the juiciness of that parable just from reading King James though. It's a shame. To get close, I now and then consult "Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus" by Klyne R. Snodgrass.
The Good Samaritan is a framed story too.
With a little generosity, you will see that the intro or epilogue of that makes Christ look like a gunslinger at high noon in Dodge City. The drama is huge. His challenger, an expert on scripture, is testing his knowledge with a not so veiled accusation of false prophesy, which then was a capital offense. So, if Christ doesn't produce a good answer, he could be stoned to death on the spot. That all happens in about three lines. And not incidentally, it also introduces the radical concept of a hierarchy of laws in scripture and the meanings of love and neighbor in their significance to the life of (a religious) person.
It's old-school flash fiction, really old-school, denser than a fruit cake and told with simple words and words that have harmonic effects.
It's the antiquity of the story that I think has some bearing on the Club and how we read. It makes it easier to see how quickly we slip into the murkiness of "context" and "text". Context has everything to do with what we need to know to get to the narrative. In that sense, intros are context provided by the author and, on this point, I almost don't understand what difference it makes if we call that framing or not.
The context not given by the author is at least if not more vital. This context is the rest of the context we provide as readers. As the Club has discussed, the style of The Incident, e.g. the epilogue, may have been influenced by a desire to mitigate the risks to the author's life and liberty upon the story's publication. So, maybe the older the story or the more remote or obscure the cultural context, the more vigorously we have to exert generosity with the text.
Not on topic? but wanted to share this quote a friend sent from James Baldwin:
“An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is tell that, I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are.
I want to be stretched, shook up, to overreach myself, and to make you feel that way too.”
Now that I think of it, "An Incident" does make me wonder about Lu Hsun's motive and if he'd say something quite similar! This story puts a "small" moment of shame under a microscope to show what being alive IS: humbling, inspiring, heart breaking.
This is so nice. "I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are" echoes Chekhov's quote, approximately: "An artist doesn't have to solve problems, but formulate them correctly."
Thanks for sharing this quote and your comment Angela- your link to shame and storytelling makes me see this story and it's purpose with less judgmental eyes.
YAY, Emma! I've been thinking bout my own over-active judging tendencies in life and work lately. It's great to find moments of relief from it--thanks for the reminder!
‘Story is not about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ but rather just about what happens.’ Is this a reasonable assertion?
‘When we read a story it can be interesting to probe into how it works but what matters more is what we feel when we’ve read it and, sometimes, such feelings may contribute to understanding our sense of self.’ Is this a reasonable second assertion, that builds on the first and gets us, approximately, aligning with James Baldwin’s (in my view far from off topic) point of view?
Your 'shame under a microscope' corresponds with something I hear in "An Incident". I hear an homage to _Notes From Underground_. In this short novel, ashame/shame has 46 word count. Towards the end the narrator shares “At least I’ve felt ashamed all the while I’ve been writing this story: so it’s no longer literature, but corrective punishment.”
WOW! Thanks. This gets me to consider the role of shame in writing. How it works in each of us. Is it a goad to help us find redemption or self-compassion? Is it self-flagellation or confession and expiation? It might be different with each story. Maybe we don't need to know, but shame, I'm thinking now "will out." It wants to be transformed.
I agree about transform. Neither narrator will we see smiling on a mental health wellness ad. And that said, exploration is compelling. There can be the search to transform. There can be the compulsion for further shame.
I love that this comes back to the idea of escalation. Does a framing device provide escalation to a story, does it meaningfully expand the story? If so, great. If not, eject it. It's a simple idea (although not necessarily easy to execute) but one that's already been helpful to my own writing.
Carol, something's wrong with the pagination at the end of The Calm. Page 36 ends with "But if he saw something" and page 37 carries on "fingers back and forth through my hair..."
One line is missing: ... he didn't comment. He ran his fingers... This version of the story is different than the one published in "What We Talk about When We Talk About Love". Much sparer.
I caught the line skip too, so I had to look it up. I'm assuming the jstor link was from the Iowa Review but not sure what year. Whether this was published before WHAT WE TALK... or after BEGINNERS was released (the Gordon Lish unedited manuscript of the book). The beginning and ending of this version is not from WHAT WE TALK..., but rather from BEGINNERS. So no (or less) of Gordon's editing. I've been a huge fan of Carver all my life, so comparing pre & post Lish edits was a rather eye-opening from a craft POV in that collection. I just reread both versions now and I may have to give Lish's version the win in this case, however slight the word changes at the end are (but it made all the difference to my reading), which may offend some of the true Carver faithfuls out there! : )
For me, the "incident" is not the story. The story is the transformation, and so the frame is essential to telling that story.
On another note, I read the comments and feel awe and envy at how easily other readers and writers can cite examples and references from the rest of literature. I struggle to remember what I read. What am I doing wrong? I have notebooks filled with notes from class assignments, and books marked up with notes, and I will often look back at them and have no recollection of any of it. Does anyone else have this experience? Is there anything I can do?
Feel the same, Namra. Even when I've read things and NOT taken notes. But something is happening here in Story Club which seems to be helping clarity form in my head. When reading the stories, unable to make a clear idea about my thoughts, then seeing the comments play out, I start seeing bits of what I think in them too. Which is adding up each time we do this. I'm hoping at some point it will gel, like playing scales or practicing a song on a piano, thinking you can never learn music, until one day, you can do it and you do understand it. Thanks for putting yourself out there and saying your thoughts! Trying to be braver too.
What a beautiful description, Emma, and it's one I hear from students, too. The more they engage with the stories and listen to discussions and enter into them with increasing confidence, the more they grow as readers. I love the analogy of learning a song on the piano. What we're doing here in Story Club is really fun, but it doesn't always come easily, depending on how much you've read in your lifetime or how you did that. So yes, now the fun part is actually noticing how, as we move from story to story, you're reading differently, slowing down, and taking more in.
Thanks, Nancy. I'm learning piano too, so the sense of frustration at times can be similar!
I've been a big reader forever, but was taught to speed read in early high school- a strategy I suspect stopped me from doing close reading like this. I think it may be why it's harder to retain the detail after reading a text or to see the structure. I've been typing out short stories as another way of slowing down, reading, rereading. Short Story is already getting me to notice so much more- hope to translate this into my writing at some point too. 'Taking more in' is so much better than scanning! :)
Elisabeth Strout said--and I don't remember if it was in writing or when I spoke to her once after a reading--that she would hand copy parts of stories that she admired, to understand how they worked. I've tried it and it definitely makes you more aware of what's happening. Another trick someone else suggested was to read a paragraph and try to write it out from memory. I was shocked by how little I had taken in. So Namra, you're not the only one.
I get this, too. I have a good friend who can't read anything unless she prints it out. It's a bit old-fashioned, but hey, it's why I don't read anything on a kindle. I have to feel, smell, hold a book in my hands while I read. There's something about it that is just kind of sensual. If that makes sense.
**For me, the "incident" is not the story. The story is the transformation, and so the frame is essential to telling that story.**
I agree with you, Namra, the real story is the transformation. The funny thing is that we don't actually "see" the transformation. We see the event that prompted the interior work that the narrator undertakes afterward, in the vastness outside the story, and then he comes back to report to us that he's changed, but with relatively little detail as to how exactly, and in what ways.
I don’t remember a lot of what I read, either. I have actually started books, gotten several chapters into them and then realized I had read them before. I’m not even that old so I can’t blame decades and decades passing between readings.
I think I tend to become immersed in whatever I am reading and it pushes out everything that came before it!
Like you I am completely in awe of the literary knowledge of some of our fellow club members.
Hi Namra, I wonder if this exercise might help you: stop taking notes in the moment. My first day of law school, in the very first class, our torts professor told us to put away our laptops, that this wasn't stenography school. He was an intimidating guy. But I think what he was getting at was that in order to digest something, sometimes you have to give yourself some space. Years later, at a firm retreat, my friend got the same advice during a mock deposition. She was recorded as she took the depo (the firm had hired an actor to serve as the witness) and on replay she saw that whenever the witness said anything, she reflexively bent her head and wrote it down, which took her out of interacting with the deponent and figuring out the best next question to ask. So maybe the next time you're in class or reading a story, don't take notes and see if you remember better. Hope that helps!
P.S. It reminds me of that scene in The Namesake when the protagonist is remembering a moment with his dad at the ocean and his dad didn't have a camera so said we'll just have to remember it, and the little boy was like how long do we have to remember it for? Such a cute scene.
Love this advice, and wholeheartedly agree. Asking students to put their pens down or close their laptops often causes them some cognitive dissonance at first sometimes (smile) but you're so right, Shaiza. When they're kind of forced to just interact with one another and discuss something, it's a much more fruitful exercise.
You might benefit from the book How To Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens, which promotes the use of a note-taking system called Zettlekasten. And you might want to try using a digital note-taking tool. I use (and like) Roam Research, but I've also heard good things about Obsidian, Notion, and Craft.
Thank you for this recommendation! I have never heard of the Zettelkasten note-taking method and just looked it up, as well as Sonke Ahrens' book. So interesting!
I think you're already doing what you should to make sure you remember things that stand out to you. The memories will probably just come more quickly with time.
You're doing great, Namra, and I don't remember a lot of what I read, either, but some of these stories I've read multiple times and are currently teaching them in classes. I think when you do that, you imprint them on your brain more powerfully, and then too, students add on to the knowledge we build in class. I don't have my mind made up about what these stories mean so when students shed light on an element in a story, there have been many times I've stopped walking around the classroom and look at the student, saying, "Hmmm...that hadn't occurred to me before!" So when you have conversations about them you remember them differently. So keep reading, and read writers who really turn you on. And as you keep reading, notice patterns between characters (archetypes). Keep asking yourself stuff like "Where have I seen her before?" You start to notice more when you slow down, too, as we are here in George's class.
Just this week, as I was looking through the first draft of my novel for clues my subconscious might have left me (and guessing at what a clue might be), I hit a scene where my P meter was jumping up high. I’d thought I was going to have to cut that whole braid (hey!) of text because I’d decided in advance (boo) not to deal with that timeline.
I’d been revising the one-sentence-leads-to-another-and-that’s-all-you-need-to-know way, and the opening of the novel refused to come to life.
And then the idea of a prologue knocked on my brain with goods (and a special character) from the timeline I thought I’d have to lose entirely.
When I gave this prologue a whirl, not only did its own sentences arrive in great shape (and turn undeniable quickly) but the prologue itself cast light and shadow across the opening in this way that makes me freshly excited to work now. The prologue also talked directly to the people I’m writing this story for, which I didn’t expect, and it helps me to remember why this is all worth trying. Feels like a giant charging station for the whole endeavor.
And here comes George this morning, all “Oh, by the way, framing” and I am once again feeling blessed as hell to be here in Story Club.
I'd venture the purpose of the frame in this story is akin to a lawyer's opening statement, then later the summation in a court case
First the author opens with a paragraph telling us he's about to give evidence of something important. Last of all he finishes with a paragraph on there you go, I proved it, I certainly hope you got the point.
I've been thinking on why Hsun chose to use a frame instead of incorporating the details in the meat of the story - surely we could have 'seen' him unimpressed by the affairs of the state and misanthropic. Perhaps the reason he chose this narrative summary was because it was more efficient? Which begs the question, what is this particular efficiency driving? How is the story served by telling us these things, rather than showing them in a more organic way?
These questions have tumbled around in my head for the past few days without any real answer or epiphany, and then this morning my brain recalled another framing story that I loved as a child (and still do) - the Princess Bride. Which led me to discover that a number of my favourite movies as a kid (and this goes out to all the Gen X story clubbers) were also (to various extents) framing stories: The Neverending Story, and (probably to a lesser extent the Goonies). They all have this secondary (but ultimately more important) story that is connected by the smallest thread to the prominent story - that if you removed it, would still leave the prominent story (of action and drama) intact - take out Kevin Arnold and Columbo (jks - I mean, the grandson (played by Fred Savage) and grandfather (Peter Faulk)) and you still have a fun caper fantasy; take out Bastian and his breakfast conversation about unicorns with his dad, and him riding a massive luck dragon at the end, and you still have a great adventure fantasy (you could even take his character out altogether and have a great fantasy, albeit a tragedy); and take out the threat of the local country club taking buying up Astoria homes, and there's still a great caper fantasy.
These stories and 'An Incident' use the same kind of framing structure - there's a prologue and epilogue based in this 'other' story, and a moment (or two) in the prominent story that calls back to this other story - in Hsun, it's the 'Suddenly, I had a strange feeling' (the moment of introspection, where we see how the events of the prominent story have affected him), in Princess Bride, it's that moment where we cut to Kevin and Columbo "Do you want me to stop. You look a little scared." "I'm not scared, maybe a little concerned, but that's not the same thing" (or something along those lines, it's been a while...) - where again we see how the main characters of the 'other' story are being affected by the events of the prominent story, in the Neverending Story there's a few but my fave is where Sebastian saves the rest of his sandwich like Atreyu; and in the Goonies, it's that moment where Troy turns up at the wishing well.
And I think the reason why they are all framed (and successful because of their framing), is because a) the real impact is the one that happens outside the events of the story, and b) the framing removes the distance between the story and the reader, whereby even if we can't relate to the events of the prominent story, we can relate to the 'other' story and their protagonists. It makes the fantasy of the fiction more tangible, and helps us to experience it more intimately (rather than at the kind of distance we'd be faced with if we didn't have these story interlocutors). I wonder if, in the same vein, we can call Gatsby a framing story? Where the story is framed by Nick's observation/engagement in the key story at a distance, which provides the moral lesson and a more relatable character for the reader to hitch a ride with...
Anyway, after this long digression, I think that while Hsun could have left out the prologue (or incorporated its points more organically in the story), the epilogue is needed to show the future/ongoing impact on the narrator long after the events of that day. And the prologue, then, is needed to balance that epilogue and give a sense of symmetry. (ie He needed to have an open bracket at the beginning in order to use the close bracket at the end).
There's also something wonderful about how dang short "An Incident" is. It's a real tour de force, in my view. A lesser writer might have put in a scene of him at work, etc. But...why?
Exactly! I think putting more in about the narrator, would cheapen the story and turn the focus to him, instead of turning the focus to ourselves. The true genius of this story is that it presents the narrator in broad strokes, which helps us to occupy his nebulous form without resistance as we read the story...
So interesting to link back to these stories from childhood and the experience of reading/being told a story in those formative years. Maryanne Wolfe in her Proust and the Squid (on science of reading and learning to read) talks about how for some the very first experience of reading is of sitting with a parent or grandparent to sing/read along together. She says (if I remember correctly) that such an experience which connects the act of reading with feelings of love, safety and warmth is not something that can be provided by schooling. Not everyone is lucky.
I wonder, after reflecting on your ideas about these early stories with frames, whether there is something deep about the act of reading which is a frame in itself: this time is important to me, it is nourishing, this chair I sit in and this lamp's familiar light are echoes of that grandmother and her musical voice, framing what it is to be a story worth hearing.
Do, then, written frames such as the prologue/epilogue in An Incident draw on these same responses? Perhaps, for me, they do, though I will need to think further on this. Perhaps also there is an implicit frame in every act of reading or choices made in sending out a piece of writing.
I suppose what I wonder is can I stop thinking about framing as a device that is either present or not present, but rather as something that is always present and either spoken or unspoken?
This is such an interesting train of thought. I like the idea that all stories are externally framed. It rings true - we come to them all with a mood or emotion in us (sometime we have that Princess Bride/memories of childhood warmth, sometimes the frame is less nostalgic and more current (bad day/i'm tired/i've just binged three hours of horror, etc) - which colour the text and the juxtapositions and the symbolism (at least in the beginning, until we get our bearings, depending on how much the text echoes our mood or pulls us out of it). So, perhaps, Lu Hsun's framing is a way to manipulate that mood before we begin - he's positioning us in that old armchair in preparation of the story to come.
It kind of reminds me how eating food in a fancy restaurant changes the taste of the food in the way that if I ate the same food presented differently on cheap plates sitting on plastic chairs in a fluorescent-lit and crowded diner, it would 'taste' different. Which makes sense, because taste isn't an objective experience - it's a translation of all (some dominant, some subtle) stimuli by the brain. And maybe reading is the same - it's not just the words on the page that affect our reading experience (although the more immersive a text is, the more we can shut out external stimuli and get drawn into the story (despite the lingering internal stimuli of memories and mood)).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, in this sense, framing is a very useful device for manipulating the reader to be in a certain mood or frame of mind (ha! (terrible pun)) before they approach the meat of the story and its transformative elements.
My favorite moment of cross-talk between the frames in Neverending Story is when Bastian realizes it's up to him, as the reader, to save the world in the book by naming the Empress. I always assumed he named her after his late mother, and loved imagining what that name might be (I must have rewound the VHS a dozen times during that part to try to figure out what he shouted into the storm). Powerful stuff!
Your comment made me realize that another one of my childhood favorite films is a framed story: Stand By Me. Could easily chop Richard Dreyfuss out of the movie entirely. But really, adult Gordie remembering . . . that last line of text on the screen . . . what a gut punch.
Yes! Trying to figure out the name he shouted was an ongoing source of frustration that kids who have only ever known the powerful convenience of google could never imagine :) (And 'Stand by Me' - another great one! Golden age of cinema :D)
Mikhaeyla: I so love your posts, ideas, and questions. You have led me to think about "The Great Gatsby" because I am teaching it this term. I see the frames there as so important and revealing. There is the story of Jay Gatsby, of course, and there is Nick's story in telling it. In my opinion, we need these frames to see TGG as a story of how to hold oneself up (in American life/life) after seeing all the contradictions in it, and in ourselves. We need the fragments in the opening and closing (monologues, "straight narration," scene work, poetic interludes) to see how a human being tries to make sense of a confusing and even downright cruel modern world. Maybe the ending is really about Nick trying to hold himself together as "a Westerner, after all" given what he has witnessed and experienced in the East. He tries to return/returns (?) in these fragmented frames (particularly the conclusion) to the ideas and dreams of his America and America, even if, like all of us (Americans, if not many in the world), we face its contradictions as "boats against the current." Anyway, now I don't know if my post makes sense, but like a message in a bottle I am throwing it out there. What I know is the frames in TGG are sometimes overlooked or admired, but they are not always considered for how they escalate the plot and advance the narrative. The frames here tell me that a human will struggle in the beauty and nightmare of American dreams, and yet struggle one must (or at least one may choose to do). Maybe the frames in TGG tell other readers other ideas, but I hope they tell readers something, and I hope readers see the meaning in them - just like you do. Thank you for inspiring me, Mikhaelya, and no doubt many others on this thread.
Your bottle has found me as well, and its message makes perfect, wonderful sense.
Mikhaeyla's initial comment on framed films reminded me of how much I loved "Stand By Me" as a child. I was probably 8 or 9, much younger than the boys in the film when I first watched (and rewatched) it, and I doubt that I gave much thought to the adult Gordie/narrator at the time. It was only later, when seeing it again as an adult myself, that the frame's power finally hit me. Here Gordie is, reminiscing about the friendships of his youth, trying to say, "I never felt that way again." I get a little weepy just thinking about it. Now that I am at my own distance from that particular simplicity and innocence of childhood, I too can say, "I never felt that way again."
I have similar feelings about TGG, but like with "Stand By Me," they came to me later. I have a vague recollection of first reading the book in high school and discussing symbolism, the American Dream, etc. I may have just left it at that, if it weren't for an interview I came across many years later with a writer I love and greatly admire (Stuart Dybek, and many of his stories come to mind that handle memory in such beautifully braided/framed ways). His admiration for TGG turned me back to it, and I'm so grateful that I read it again as an adult. The frame! It was probably overlooked in class discussion, or perhaps I just didn't "feel it" as a teenager and so I'd forgotten it. But for me now, it's essential to my understanding of the book. My awareness of Nick colors everything. My uncertainty over whether or not he's being completely honest. The fact that he's "a Westerner, after all" (that passage about the "thrilling returning trains of youth" is probably my favorite in the entire book). You've made me want to revisit it again, and I feel a little twinge of envy for your students!
And the Woolf quote that you've shared is beautiful. A quote of hers has been on my mind these past few days, especially since it speaks to my understanding of "An Incident" and our general discussion here:
“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
What are the moments we hold on to, and why? What experiences do we revisit to try to make meaning out of? What do they say about the people we are now? Like so many narrators in the stories I love, I feel myself searching for answers to these questions in my own life. If I can't quite express what certain moments mean (like the coins to the narrator in "An Incident"), I find myself returning to them moreso. Every single thing I remember and everything I understand is framed by the person I am now.
Thank you, and again Mikhaeyla, for giving me much to think about today. Hope the bottle I'm pitching out here makes some sense as well :)
I've loved this discussion thread - so many beautiful observations. And you've both made me want to go back and read everything ever written by Virginia Woolf! I really loved your reflection Manami - "What are the moments we hold on to, and why? What experiences do we revisit to try to make meaning out of? What do they say about the people we are now?". What a perfect story seed.
Yes!!! Manami & Mikhaelya, and all: Why these seeds? (Why those moments with x...?) When we did George's exercise with our chronology of people, places, moments, et al over time... What keeps rising or trying to.
I literally just worked with students on "story seeds" - noticing them, listening to them, and making the first steps to put them down on paper, if only in phrases, until they reveal themselves; eventually a butterfly can break out of even the tightest cocoon.
Thanks for such a lovely message, MVM (and throwing out messages in bottles is my kind of style :)). Your line about struggling 'in the beauty and nightmare of American dreams' is beautiful. I think that's what good framing does - it shifts attention from the overt/obvious/surface-level impacts of the story event, and pulls us towards the subtle/intense/complex impacts that come with distance (either physical, like in Gatsby, or temporal, like in An Incident).
Reading your message made me think about the two stories twined (or 'braided' as George says) as a tree - the prominent story is the trunk and branches living above the earth and on display, but the 'other' story is the roots pushing below the soil into dark and hidden crevices. They are connected at small and finite points in terms of the text, but fundamentally interconnected in the soul of the story; they almost seem to form an imperfect reflection of the other (and in that imperfect reflection we can better observe what is different/has changed). As readers, we see the surface level of the prominent story and judge it as a distant observer, but it's the 'other' story that worms its way into the darker/unexplored parts of our minds...
Maybe that's why, without the framing, it would be easy to sit back and judge the rickshaw customer as a jerk, but with the framing we are not just confronted with his humanity but our own? And maybe that's the same with Gatsby - without hitching our ride with Nick, it would be easier to judge Jay and Daisy at a distance; but with Nick, we're pulled in and pushed out of that orbit, that 'struggle in the beauty and nightmare'...
Hi Mikhaelya: Wow - your beautiful descriptions, comparisons and ideas! I see them so vividly. You are bringing them to life. There is entirely something else that happens with the narrator in "An Incident" that has its own moments of escalation, urgency, and ultimately change - in the narrator, and I hope in the reader. And yes!!!! That worming and winding into our minds; there is a soul in this story, and I think if we sit with the story, really read it, the soul shows itself. If we are lucky enough, we find our own souls in it. (There is a madly beautiful appreciation of Virginia Woolf written by WH Auden, and in it he quotes her statement that: "'One can’t,' she observes, 'write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes; but look at the ceiling, at Grizzle, at the cheaper beasts in the Zoo which are exposed to walkers in Regent’s Park, and the soul slips in.' ") And so I really love how you are exploring this: that this story, a well told story, reaches another level of awareness "even" if it talks about the seemingly ordinary "incident."
One of my favorite photographs in the world is Edward Steichen's "Moonrise" (1904; https://www.moma.org/collection/works/51812). It is that "imperfect reflection" you describe: it is a still moment and yet shimmering in the sky, and (I'd like to believe) even below, in the seemingly dark and sleepy water. Maybe your post has also helped me to understand why I so love to look at this photo.
That quote by Virginia Woolf is beautiful! As is the photograph. When I looked at it, I was arrested by the image of these story frames as reflections, reflecting back, imperfectly, our core story. And of course, the word 'reflection' made me think of the rickshaw's driver 'reflection' on the incident, which made me rush to explore the etymology of the world: "flecto" - (Latin (figuratively)) I persuade, prevail upon, or soften. I bend, curve or bow. I turn or curl + "re-" (Latin ) again; prefix added to various words to indicate an action being done again, or back, backwards = "reflecto" (Latin) I reflect. I turn back or away.
How beautiful is that? For me, it holds the essence of both the Incident's narrator and Nick Carraway.
There should be a "love" option on Substack. "I reflect. I turn back or away." Oh, Mikhaelya - what a wonderous post.
"I turn back or away."
Maybe this raises a point about the ending in at least the two stories mentioned ("An Incident" and "TGG"): there are shown endings (scene/image with little commentary); told endings (voice-based scenes but perhaps little reflecto), and reflecto endings (some combination of the told or shown with reflecto). And combinations of these. And endings are sometimes a mix: a paragraph or line of reflecto; a paragraph or line of shown or told endings.
Maybe narrative is really about finding the balance and "pattern" (however irregular) we want of show, tell and reflect. Sometimes the edges blur; sometimes the edges are sharp(er). Here is the famous opening of Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Pale Fire":
"Two leaves, two triskelions, like two shuddering three-legged bathers coming at a run for a swim, are borne by their impetus right into the middle where with a sudden slowdown they float quite flat. Twenty minutes past four.
View from a hospital window.
November trees, poplars, I imagine, two of them growing straight out of the asphalt: all of them in the cold bright sun, bright richly furrowed bark and an intricate sweep of numberless burnished bare twigs, old gold—because getting more of the falsely mellow sun in the higher air. Their immobility is in contrast with the spasmodic ruffling of the inset reflection—for the visible motion of a tree is in the mass of its leaves, and there remain hardly more than thirty-seven or so here and there on one side of the tree. They just flicker a little, of a neutral tint, but burnished by the sun to the same ikontinct as the intricate trillions of twigs. Swooning blue of the sky crossed by pale motionless superimposed cloud wisps.
The operation has not been successful and my wife will die."
This weave ("braid") of show, tell, and reflecto creates urgency and beauty. (And it blurs even within the sentences.)
I don't know how much of this should be thought of consciously in early drafting, but it can certainly be considered in revising. Maybe even a reflecto can be used as a writer's mental note as to why the character/narrator is telling the tale (what's at stake), and maybe the reflecto can be ultimately included or discarded. Nothing has to remain in the final draft. But the writer/reader can feel it.
Can you imagine - at the risk of spoilers - collecting "reflectos"? Perhaps another literary non sequitur, but here is an ending reflecto that haunts me from a novel, Iris Murdoch's "The Sea, The Sea" (do not read if you do want want a reflecto spolier):
"She came to me, she ran to me, that was no dream. That was no phantom I embraced that night. And on that night she said she loved me. My idea of her return to an 'original resentment' was too ingenious. One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story. She was not able to be my Beatrice nor was I able to be saved by her, but the idea was not senseless nor unworthy... The past buries the past and must end in silence, but it can be a conscious silences that rests open-eyed. Perhaps this is final forgiveness that James spoke of."
Mikhaelya (and George!), thank you for guiding me/us through this process of reflection on so many levels.
Nabokov - word artist extraordinaire. And I love the idea of frames within a work, bracketing individual microcosms of story and providing a lens we take with us until the next one is provided. Have you ever been to those science museums where you enter a room that's lit with a colour-filtered light and everything appears yellow or olive green or brown, and then you shine a white light torch around and suddenly everything is cerulean, and magenta, and emerald? That's what this framing feels like, except you sometimes forget you have that white-light torch and just let the author guide you through the rooms with their differently filtered lights...
I'm so sorry this comment is so long - Story Club is the only place I can have conversations like this and my mind jumps at the chance to let go of all these thoughts and feelings about what I've read. I'll do better to keep things shorter in future.
Thanks so much, Rosanne. Story Club has been such a rare and positive experience. And I agree - it's inspiring to see the diversity of stories despite their common structures!
That's such a good point re. those 80s movies which I hadn't thought about for a while but thinking back remember that, yeah, the framing in them is part of what made them so enthralling to me as a child!
Your comment also reminds me of Dwight V. Swain's "Techniques of the Selling Writer", the details of which are a little hazy now but if I remember correctly he insists quite heavily on breaking down narration into action/reaction of characters and that that's in essence what makes a story engaging; something happens, and you want to know how a character reacts to it. It was a really useful thing to realise for me at the time and, as you commented, I think that applies to framing as well.
Right? Story is all about the tension between the action and the reaction, and it's an interesting experiment to see how that tension can be stretched when we put a little distance between the action and reaction - either by using another narrator, or by having a reflective epilogue.
Your comment also got me thinking about why those early 80s kids movies *were* framed - and I think it was to say "hey, this is a cool movie and you're going to have a lot of fun with it, but I also have a life lesson for you, kid, that I don't want you to forget; and that's [don't grow up too quick, don't let the adult world creep in too fast and steal away your joy and imagination, don't give up fighting for what's important even when it all feels like a lost cause, don't ever let anyone tell you that what's important to you is worthless or silly...]". And maybe there's something powerful in having that advice come so directly, in seeing yourself/your dreams/your shame so clearly reflected in a story, that it sticks with you in a different way. I know I've held on to those lessons as clearly as any I got from trusted adults (parents/teachers).
Well put. Now you mention it, I also realise the Neverending Story was such a really formative experience for me in seeing the pure adulterated escapism (in the best possible sense of the word) afforded to Bastian by poring over this magical book, which I then tried to emulate through my own reading (it also helped that to me, as a European kid, Bastian was not only an introvert like I was but also incredibly cool simply by virtue of being American...)
Thanks for discussion of films with framing device as I'm still getting my head around it. So would 'Wizard of Oz' and 'Stand by Me', 'Shawshank Redemption' also fit into this device category?
Your post, Emma, really got me thinking :) I think Wizard of Oz is a framed story - the real world brackets the fantastical world and the two are tethered by the thinnest of threads, the framing primes us for how to view/make conclusions about the prominent story, and there is a moral lesson to be learned from the prominent story that is applied in the 'other' story.
My mind thinks of it as brackets - (Other story/world prologue (Prominent story/world) Other story/world epilogue) - the prominent story is self-contained and doesn't rely on the other story to be a fully-fleshed story, but without it, the prominent story loses some of that emotional resonance and moral lesson. Wizard of Oz, Princess Bride, Neverending Story, and Stand by Me all have that in common with Hsun's story. I guess the difference with Wizard of Oz (and also Goonies) is that in the others, the moral lesson transforms either another person or a later version of that person, whereas with Oz and Goonies the moral lesson is felt straight away. Oz is definitely a better example than Goonies, since there is a *moral* lesson, whereas Goonies is more of an external impact (ie the story sets up the global stakes then moves to internal and then ends with global - which is not what I typically find with stories (usually the other way round)).
I think when you boil it down, all stories are framed - it's why we have the beginning show us the main character's status quo (telegraphing 'these are the things that will change throughout the story') - it's just that some are more obvious about it? And some, like Hsun, use it to coach us how to *feel* about what comes next.
Someone else in the comments put it much better than I can - they suggested that the direct prologue and epilogue is like a lawyer arguing a case - the opening statement says 'I'm going to present evidence of something important that will prove X' and the closing statement says 'I've proved what I set out to, I hope you were paying attention and got the point'.
I think when you have this structure, it broadcasts to the reader - the point of this story isn't the drama of what happens in between - the trials and the successes - it's the lasting impact on characters beyond the main event.
Thanks for responding, Mikhaeyla- I can't remember The Goonies, Princess Bride or Never-ending story anymore (though am an X). I suspect Labyrinth is another in this framing type I did see!
Your line 'I think when you boil it down, all stories are framed' feels very true - hadn't really understood 'framing' to be but one device of many for writers. This structural consideration of story telling is bringing a whole new dimension into reading- appreciate it so much!
Yes! I had been thinking of Princess Bride, but hadn’t thought of Goonies. The framing in that story definitely adds to the meaning and depth. It would just be an adventure without the trouble in the Goondocks, and the satisfying ending with Mikey’s marble bag.
I'll steal from my comment on one of the previous posts, because I talked so much about the frame there...
I think one of the crucial things this frame is doing is placing the events of the story "in question". Without the frame, the events are simply happening; we're aware (if we're attuned to it) that the narrator is "coaching" us and that there is a particular point of view here, but the frame has the extra effect of placing not just the events in the story but the point of view itself into question. Because it's not an in-the-moment point of view - it's a reflection, written after the fact. Is this how the narrator *really* felt at the moment the events actually happened? Is he recalling them correctly? Are his reflective thoughts accurate - has he really changed, as he indicates at the end?
I'd argue that because the frame is in place, we can't interpret the narrator's "spin" without taking into account how he feels now, at the time of writing. What struck me is that even though this is presented as a reflection, the narrator isn't really doing a whole lot of reflecting. Though he seems to be trying to accurately represent his emotional reactions, he doesn't view them in a specifically critical light (for example, he says "She must be pretending, which was disgusting", rather than "I felt disgusted"), showing that he still hasn't really questioned himself and his responses. And, of course, "perhaps he had not heard" is also telling - he is reluctant to view himself as the true non-entity in the action of the story (unworthy even of acknowledgment by this remarkably attentive rickshaw man), because he still wants to see himself as the center of the story. In the second to last paragraph, the wind (a large, sweeping, impersonal force, sort of an agent of change and self-transcendence, which is inextricable from the action of the story) dies down and leaves him caught in his own "small" thoughts. Though he is approaching some kind of reflection, is at least made uncomfortable in his usual perspective, he still cannot "answer himself". Everything is still about him. And he does not wonder at all about the fate of the rickshaw man or the woman, which gives the impression that even now, he still doesn't really care.
The fact that the story begins and ends in the same matter-of-fact, removed language provides a contrast with the middle of the story, where the action is. It is almost as if the narrator is no longer himself when he describes the action. This shows how deeply it has affected him, drawing him so dramatically outside of his usual perspective, but also shows how resistant to change he actually is. He reverts right back to the same language at the end (nonspecific, failure to provide details about what impressions it has actually made on him in his daily life), making his reflection seem hollow.
But I don't think it's *completely* hollow - after all, something significant has caused him to question himself, and he is the one telling the story - describing that wind as it whips through, not just the story's action, but his own mind.
I love your insight around framing as a way to make the story not just about the events, but also the POV. This really solidified my understanding of it.
“The gravel pit was about a mile east of town, and the size of a small lake, and so deep that boys under sixteen were forbidden by their parents to swim there.” So begins another great framed story, “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” by the great William Maxwell. What begins as a somewhat mysterious digression, circles round to a powerful conclusion, where we don’t need another description of that place, or even its name, because we now feel its stoney depth in our hearts.
I love this, George. I was just talking recently about Flannery O'Connor's framing device in "Good Country People." A student had asked about the opening and ending graphs that have to do with what seems to be an ancillary character (Mrs. Freeman) and what she's gazing at. The story begins and ends with her gaze, though the guts of the story have little to do with her directly. But I hadn't thought of putting this exercise in front of them -- that idea of taking the frame out, and noticing how that might alter the story. It helps readers understand more about the nuts and bolts of writing, how a story is put together and what choices writers make. Though I don't think this is always the "plan." I also think writers go with their guts, and aren't necessarily thinking consciously of following a kind of template. But that's the magic of writing. Just want you to know you are giving me great ideas for small group workshop exercises! I can't wait to see what you put in front of us next!
So framing can be thought of as other than now - past - now. I visited Andalusia on Saturday and walked the grounds and surrounding woods. Her story Displaced Person is not framing, physical framing or in time framing, but like Mrs. Freeman's gaze, Mrs. Shortley's stance in opening paragraphs is structural. I find physicality in O’Connor stories draws me in to a reality.
Yes, this is interesting, Anne. When I stop and consider why and how a framing device works, what it accomplishes for the story, O'Connor seems to be doing something differently from Hsun. She is drawing our gaze here to what Mrs. F. is looking at. As a matter of fact, throughout this story, she does in fact seem obsessed with what and where characters' gazes are directed....
George, I laughed out loud at your paragraph about "Frugality Fever," which I do come down with every-so-often—sometimes when writing a story, but more often with poetry. I'll just keep cutting stuff mercilessly, telling myself over and over it's not needed, be spare, spareness is power, less is more, don't reveal everything, show don't tell, blah, blah, blah, until all I'm left with is about three lines. "What am I supposed to do with THIS??" I shout, and I hurl my computer out the window.
I truly appreciate your insight into the reason the intro and epilogue bookends work so brilliantly in this story. There is movement between the two passages that reflect, elaborate on, and deepen how and why the movement of the action is life-changing for the narrator.
And framing can, at least in my mind, also include what I think of as "braiding" - having two story lines going at once. Same deal - we want to ask: Why am I doing this? And: Is doing this keeping from doing something else (for example, concentrating more on the essence of one of the two storylines)?
Btw, I literally just made up the term "braiding."
And I want to talk, in future posts, about another idea, "avoidance." This is where we do something - make a frame, or a "braid" or about a million other things - in order to avoid something in our story. In my experience, it's a form of the subconscious saying, "I'm not ready to go there, so let me push that decision down the road."
Does this mean we're going to get more hair analogs? "This is a mullet story-short on top and long on the sides..."
"Tolstoy has really 'crew-cut' this section!"
Navy cut^^
I love a story with good bangs.
I like that term “braiding” a lot. It’s active and tangible. And we saw it in “The Falls,” didn’t we, with the duelling mental commentaries of Morse and Cummings?
Yes!
Don't mean to be rude, but I think I first learned of the term braiding in the book Tell it Slant. And it is a form taught by Priscilla Long, who teaches several different forms for structuring one's writing. Priscilla and you are both brilliant, so--brilliant minds think alike!
It was new to me, anyway. 😉
So it is a double braid^^
Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction was written by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola (2019). A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form was written by Brenda Miller (2021). Great books! It's all good.
BTW After 40 years as a technical writer with "Omit needless words!" as my mantra, I've spent the last few years trying to unwind from all that in my own writing. So advice on when to let it be or not would be great. Tuned in at Part 1 of "The Incident," and I am really enjoying this. Thanks!
Hi Charlie. About a year ago following a long spell of editing I had the feeling I was stripping my own writing back to below zero, so I tried an exercise in Ursula K. Le Guin's "Steering the Craft." After a few example paragraphs (Kipling, Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, Molly Gloss, etc.) she suggests "being gorgeous." Her focus is on writing crafted for the ear, i.e. to be read aloud, but for me that word "gorgeous" unlocked something – like being given permission to put on diamonds after wearing sackcloth. I still love the (sci-fi) paragraph I wrote. It sparkles! Try it – you might enjoy dressing your prose up too...
I loved the 'being gorgeous' exercise in Steering the Craft and found all Ursula le Guin's exercises and explanations brilliant. She's a wonderful writer.
Couldn't agree more, Heather.
Hi Em. Thanks for your suggestion. I've always had so much respect for Ursula Le Guin and a while back a writer friend suggested "Steering the Craft" but I didn't follow up. After your suggestion, I'm definitely going to get that book. Thanks so much!
Most welcome. Have fun!
I also loved the Le Guin. I felt it really changed the way I thought about sentences. The exercises aren't easy and I still like to go back to them from time to time to see what they unlock.
The Writer's Portable Mentor by Priscilla Long (2010, republished in 2018). She covers different structures in writing including collage and braiding.
TX Mary^^
Well, you could look at Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style", timeless, readable, enjoyable, useful.
I am looking forward to the discussion about avoidance! I can see how in less skilled hands (like mine!), braiding could be used as an out, or a device to make a point about a character, or the story arc, that could have/should have been made through the main story.
"Braiding"--I think this comes up often with personal essayists, too-- a "braided essay" is an essay type I recall linked to Judith Kitchen and to Brenda Miller to describe the double narrative effect in essaying. I like this idea of a braid as a diversion tactic!
I call it braiding, too! And now I'm doing a little happy dance at the coincidence :)
I’m happy to see you use this term! But Isn’t a braid made up of 3 or more interlaced parts? I ask only because I’m working on writing now in which the story gets handed off to different characters and I’ve been describing it as “braided.” For sure I’m going back into it to make sure I’m not avoiding something.
Meanwhile, hope you got the mud shoveled.
Pretty sure you're asking George your question, so I hope you don't mind me answering. A braid in writing, from my experience, can have two or three strands that interweave (or, I suppose, even more). Here's from Priscilla Long's book: "The two-strand structure takes two topics and weaves them. Each pulls on the other, stretches the other, pushes against the other..... Like so many writing strategies, it is not only a writing plan but also a thinking plan."
I’m very glad to have your reply, Mary.- and also found your later comment where you first reference Long’s book- and thank you for the quote which I’ve copied and tacked to my desktop. My only reference has been what one does to get hair out of the face of children.
fishtail braid - 2 strands, however it looks a lot more complicated. Maybe we say braid instinctively because our stories go off in all directions and - phew - we pull the strands back and weave them in.
I just googled fishtail braid! Wow!
like your story - will look really fancy when you're done, but just two strands!
Thinking of a girl again?^^
Ah. You have my attention. I have been thinking about this recently.
Painfully true for me
"So, here, re. “An Incident,” let’s pose a hypothetical question: Could we just cut the intro and epilogue?"
You conclude that we probably shouldn't, but I'm betting almost every Clubber would indeed cut some or all of that Intro and all of the Epilogue, and if you don't mind me saying, George, if this was your story I think you'd do so too.
Not because the Intro and Epilogue are superfluous -- you make a convincing case against that -- but because they're simply not the kind of things most modern writers are going to end up including in their final drafts. "One incident, however, struck me as significant, and aroused me from my ill temper, so that even now I cannot forget it" is gorgeously raw and open and/but also mildly boastful about the resonance of the story that follows, and for these very reasons would be cut by almost all modern writers. Nobody in this Club would ever say in their opening paragraphs "The story that follows is important and transformative", would they? Instead they'd leave it to the reader to be the judge of that.
And it's even more likely IMO that any Clubber would cut an Epilogue like
"Even now, this remains fresh in my memory. It often causes me distress, and makes me try to think about myself. The military and political affairs of those years I have forgotten as completely as the classics I read in my childhood. Yet this incident keeps coming back to me, often more vivid than in actual life, teaching me shame, urging me to reform, and giving me fresh courage and hope."
Again, beautiful and touching and even inspiring as this is, it's too raw and blunt about the story's moral impact on its teller for our fallen 21st-century tastes. None of us would get away these days with boasting, or seeming to boast, that a crucial event years ago may have made us a better person, including making us braver and more hopeful. And we fallen modern writers know this, I think, and therefore for better or worse, this Epilogue would end up getting cut by every writer in this thread.
Yes, interesting & valid points, Sean. I think I’d make a distinction, though, between the language of the intro & epilogue (which, possibly because of the periods in which it was written, is a bit formal & stilted, to our ears) and their function (which is to, let’s say, advance, between them, our understanding of the narrator’s arc). He’s more overtly didactic than we can likely get away with, but in something like “The Calm,” there’s also that sort of guiding tone at the end (albeit much more minimally and, if I’m remembering correctly, conveyed on the action of...something to with the leaves on the sidewalk. (I’d consult it directly but am currently taking a break from shoveling our driveway out from a mudslide...and gotta get back to it.❤️
We might ask how a contemporary writer might rewrite the framing graphs in “An Incident,” losing the didactic quality/stiffness but preserving the slight escalation there at the end - that sense of renewed moral resolve...
"We might ask how a contemporary writer might rewrite the framing graphs in “An Incident,” losing the didactic quality/stiffness but preserving the slight escalation there at the end - that sense of renewed moral resolve..."
Yes! And Rosanne has pointed the way with her Frank O'Connor example below. And Borges managed this (extremely difficult, for me at least) effect many times, didn't he? Not necessarily in terms of moral resolve, but instead feeling comfortable explicitly stating the narrator or protag's revelation and transformation, as part of framing devices or within the stories themselves.
Denis Johnson's 'Jesus' Son' too, though almost in an opposite way to Borges, who prepares the reader for these statements through the establishment of authority (technical, philosophical, spiritual). When his claims about relevation arrive, therefore, I find myself simply submitting to that authority. But Johnson's Fuckhead is so broken, has so little personal authority beyond the beauty of his voice, that there's no chance of his declared revelations seeming boastful, and so I find myself entralled and, yes, inspired by them.
'An Incident' lies somewhere between those two, I think, and therefore is less likely to offer a model to modern writers. Still a stoater (Scottish word) of a story, though.
I think the story with the leaves is "Intimacy":
"I move off down the sidewalk. Some kids are tossing a football at the end of the street. But they aren't my kids, and they aren't her kids either. There are these leaves everywhere, even in the gutters. Piles of leaves wherever I look. They're falling off the limbs as I walk. I can't take a step without putting my shoe into leaves. Somebody ought to make an effort here. Somebody ought to get a rake and take care of this."
Interestingly enough, the ending section of "The Calm" uses the word "framing": "We looked into the mirror together, his hands still framing my head."
Anyway, Raymond Carver is amazing and I'm having a great time reading all of these comments.
You are right, Brad, thanks.
I just now read "The Calm." Unbelievably good. And the way the narrator is nearly invisible until the very end, when he finally is not, is astonishing.
Psithurism does inspire reflection^^
I just learned a new word! thank you.
I also like "soughing" -- He listened to the wind soughing through the trees. (Some pronounce it "suff" but I believe it's original pronunciation is "sow." I guess it works best while reading silently to oneself.
We could say that soughing is a product of psithurism. Neither is especially onomatopoetic.
Perhaps this is more a reflection on my drafts that are written in first person evolving into a third person narrative, leading me to wonder if "The Incident" had been written in a third person point of view of the official riding in the rickshaw, would the introduction and epilogue seem boastful. In this iteration, my first impulse would be a narrator relating the introduction and epilogue as a conversation between the official (if that is what he truly is) and another person.
This story is quite a fragile piece, especially perhaps by modern standards, as you allude to. However, it is also exceptionally good(!) and makes you feel amazing after reading it. If a modern writer was lucky enough to have written it and then tried cutting away the intro and epilogue and then read it again and thought, well it’s not quite so amazing now, you’d hope they might put them back.
It somehow brings to mind a conversation I once had with a friend who pointed out that if you read a paragraph or a page of Kafka, you wouldn’t necessarily know you were reading a great writer. I guess I mean by that: if you read the intro or epilogue of An Incident on their own you might think “Cut that!” But reading them in the story as a whole you might think they were just about as good as they could be?
I wouldn't. I also wouldn't speak for people I don't know.
But we just don't see it, Shaiza. I can't think of a single modern story that explicitly and unironically claims the events portrayed turned the narrator into a significantly better person, and certainly none that concludes that way. Haven't seen it in published writing, fellow writers' final drafts, anywhere.
I've seen stuff vaguely akin to that in early drafts, but it always ends up getting cut, for the reasons outlined above. And I've seen it plenty of times in self-help books. But not in any fiction I can recall. Hence the assumption that this Club's writers are unlikely to include such an Intro and Epilogue in their final drafts. I'm not claiming intimate knowledge of these Clubbers' minds, yourself included, just assuming they and you are probably not that different from virtually all other modern writers.
City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert.
Loving this sub-thread & wishing we were all in a physical classroom, working through it that way...
But this is still pretty good. 👍
I think you are right that the style of An Incident is certainly old-fashioned, but I think George's reply of looking at the function vs the language is really interesting. A modern writer wouldn't use that same language, but could perhaps convey a similar feeling or perform a similar function in the story without being so extra WOW I'M CHANGED about it.
Hi Sara.
But I'm not talking about the prose style of 'An Incident'. Apologies if I haven't made that clear. I'm talking instead about the content, the actual idea itself, however we phrase it:
Intro: Here is an important and transformative story.
Epilogue: This event was so significant it forced me to look deeply into myself, after which I emerged a better person.
I would *love* it if modern writers could say this kind of thing with a straight face, but we can't. There is no way to phrase the above ideas that doesn't contain a strong sense of WOW I'M CHANGED (LOL at *your* witty phrasing btw). Or none that I can see at least.
Which is not to say the particular issue we're addressing here -- i.e. why can't modern writers just be straightforwardly honest about their stories' moral worth, even if this sounds somewhat boastful? -- can't be finessed some other way. In other words, I strongly agree with your final sentence.
Late to the party, I know, and slightly off piste, but your comment reminded me of the semi-lament in this intro to a (wonderful) Paul Giamatti reading of A Noiseless Patient Spider:
"So much contemporary poetry is full of playful irony and irreverent humor – which, personally, I love. But when I go back and read Walt Whitman, the grandfather of American poetry, I feel like a post-modern fool in the face of Whitman’s totally sincere, un-ironic vision."
Has irony robbed us of the honesty you mention?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/74670/looking-for-god-with-ar-ammons
It would make an interesting writing exercise/challenge to put together a modern story with a similar moral vibe to see how (if) it could be done without hitting us over the head with its intentions.
Somewhat to Shaiza's point, aren't artistic revolutions/changes set in motion when someone says "to hell with 'we just don't do that"...?
I wonder, can we step back and ask if the narrator is a significantly better person at the end of The Incident? If we want him to be, he can be. But he may well be an unchanged man paying lip service, putting off his goodness until tomorrow instead of getting around to it today. There's a lot of motion at the end of the story that says his journey isn't complete - he has hope and courage to be good one day. Not the same as attaining it. He tries. But, you know the quote, do or do not, there is no try. I'd vote that the author doesn't claim the narrator is a significantly better person. Just that he wishes he were. And that is his moral failing. I'm out on a limb, I know.
Is this epilogue boastful? My first gut read of it was, "well this stuck with me over the years, but do you know what I am not actually sure I'd behave differently even after all this". Hedging is right in there: 'makes me try to', 'often' rather than 'always', and no indication that anything has changed other than thoughts. I think in C21st we might very well frame in this way: sure this story has some power, but I can't promise it's enough.
However, I do think your point is interesting, Sean, and carries a wider truth about one way framing can seem awkward for our modern expectations. A v interesting discussion.
Cheers. George and others ask the really interesting question, though: how *might* we explicitly communicate a story's resonance and moral worth without seeming in any way boastful about that story? Extremely difficult task, I'd say, but well worth the effort if it can be convincingly pulled off.
I put 'apparently' and 'seeming' alongside boastful because as you suggest, Niall, it's not clearcut. What tips it for me is the fact that the Intro is bordeline boastful too about the story's resonance for the narrator and therefore, by implication, for the reader. The Epilogue has a similar flavour. It's subtle, and it's hardly a crime -- in fact I like it, if I haven't made that clear. But I still think most modern writers would cut it, because they wouldn't want any of that flavour in their story.
It's not even a particularly interesting point I'm making tbh. George asked might we Clubbers cut the Intro and Epilogue? And I'm just saying yes, I think most of us would.
Agree, Niall, and I suppose a reader (then or now) might reject too much certainty in the epilogue. Ambiguity improves it, I think. One thing we know for sure is that the narrator, misanthrope or no, is still thinking about the incident, and in that way, if no other, he has been changed.
Wow. This comment is amazingly crazy in the best possible way. And I thank you for leaving me forever imagining Lu Hsun behind closed blinds in a tweed walking suit twirling a brass and walnut cane indulging his secret Victorian dandy side.
Agreed, Rosanne. I have no issues at all with framing devices, and as you say they can often be very helpful in orienting the reader. And I didn't have any objections to the device used in 'An Incident'. I found it beautiful. Nonetheless I'm confident it wouldn't survive the final drafts of most writers hereabouts, for the reasons given.
"And anything that happened me afterwards, I never felt the same about again". I think that story would be less, would suffer, without that line, that back end of the frame."
Complete agreement on this, and a superbly chosen example. And because it's shorter, subtler and less (apparently) boastful, most of us, even in the self-conscious, morally nervous 21st century, would be proud of that line if it was ours.
I’m a little late to this framing thread, but I wonder if one of the things the frame in this story does is to get the reader to feel more generously about the narrator than if the opening part of the frame was not included.
In paragraph 1, he describes himself as a misanthrope - and my first thought is, do I even want to read a story about a self-described misanthrope? But in the next paragraph, he immediately says that an incident aroused him from his ill temper. So I think, okay, something happened to make him change and maybe I will give this story a chance.
After the opening part of the frame, his description of himself becomes worse and worse, and it is not until paragraph 12 that his revelation about his lack of compassion begins. So, without the frame, I think I would have felt negatively about the narrator for much of the story, since I would not have known from the outset that he had changed.
Ah, Guests of the Nation was my gateway into short stories. I finished reading and anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.
Mine too, Niall and when I was reading George's comments on introductory and epilogue paragraphs, I thought of the ending of Frank O'Connor's story, the enormous emotional force of it! I remember the first time I read it... 1970, I was thirteen, imprisoned - as I saw it - in a catholic convent boarding school ... a grim winter evening and I'd run out of things to read so I borrowed an older girl's textbook - Exploring English 1 -and came across Guests of the Nation. I'd been an avid reader since I was about six, but mainly for escape or comfort or a laugh. After Guests of the Nation I think I became a different kind of reader, I started looking for stories that would make me feel part of 'it' all, get me thinking about things. I'll never forget that ending ( and anyone who hasn't read the story yet should skip this, but find that story and read it!) :
" Noble says he felt he seen everything ten times as big, perceiving nothing around him but the little patch of black bog with the two Englishmen stiffening into it; but with me it was the other way, as though the patch of bog where the two Englishmen were was a thousand miles away from me, and even Noble mumbling just behind me and the old woman and the birds and the bloody stars were all far away, and I was somehow very small and very lonely. And anything that ever happened me after I never felt the same about again"
Just seen Rosanne's comment now, which also quotes this ending (I've just joined and am playing catch up)
Guests of the Nation is a great story. Many years ago, I saw Gregory Peck read it at the Mark Taper Forum. Thanks for reminding me.
On my first read I wanted to cut that whole ending, feeling that the story had already ended. But I understand it’s place from George’s comments. Have I read too much “modern” literature without framing that I can’t accept it in a story, even if it is done well?
One of my favorite writing professors, Cathy Day, always asked us to ask a version of the first question about virtually any aspect of a story, whether ours or someone else's: "Why this way and not another?" I think the addition of, "What am I avoiding by doing it this way and not another?" feels just as crucial.
"Braiding" makes me think of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and how each of the six stories in the book frame each other both as prologue and epilogue (since the first half of each story is told in chronological order, and the second half in reverse-chronological order.) I think this framing device grants extra weight to each story because the reader can place what transpires in the context of (fictional) history.
Cloud Atlas! Forgot all about that book but remember I liked it. Good recall on your part!
Such an amazing book ❤️
I agree, framing adds weight, well said
I wonder what Deborah Treisman would say about this. I recall her fairly forceful deprecation of "tidy" endings that wrap up a story, as a kind of erstwhile "service to the reader." She seemed to feel that these are usually better omitted, since they can be redundant, or even subtly condescending (my word, not hers). Perhaps this reflects the less frequent use of framing in contemporary short stories. I found her advice, gentle though it was, very helpful in dealing with endings in general.
This story's framing isn't, of course, redundant -- it's part of the author's message. And since the story is (to my ear) overtly didactic, the condescending effect is intrinsic, not unique to the ending. So it's a bad example of what Deborah was referring to. Still, I have trouble relating to stories that are too transparently schooling me what or how to think about what I'm reading. Writing is always about "telling the reader what to think" at some level, so there's a fine line between overtly didactic and skillfully (i.e., successfully) manipulative.
So sometimes I have heard that prologues are lazy and epilogues worse. But used as an ID channel theatrical device — ie the murdered screaming woman is shown in prologue and then shown happy and smiling in the first real beat of the plot line does too much work to raise emotional stakes without the writer earning it. However I found The Incident to gain resonance through a set up as opposed to a “vomit” of emotional resonance to hook you— it does have to braid all the way through and backward to the first line — so it has to have emotional elasticity to the same tension throughout— anyway that’s my humble opinion. As far as trying to find a concentrated essence I feel much more invested as a reader if the essence is a bit more diffuse and open to a true honesty of messiness like life is—
Hadn't thought of it that way, but yes. And that question: "Why am I doing this?" A good thing to be asking in revision if not before.
I was about to respond to your most recent post (Feb 3), when I found myself editing "An Incident" -- to see how it would read with all the framing and coaching removed. A disturbing reaction emerged when I thought about the result:
=====================================
It happened during the winter of 1917. A bitter north wind was blowing, but I had to be up and out early. I met scarcely a soul on the road, and had great difficulty in hiring a rickshaw to take me to S—— Gate. Presently the wind dropped a little. By now the loose dust had all been blown away, leaving the roadway clean, and the rickshaw man quickened his pace. We were just approaching S—— Gate when someone crossing the road was entangled in our rickshaw and slowly fell.
It was a woman. She lay there on the ground, and the rickshaw man stopped.
"It's all right," I said. "Go on."
He set down the shafts, and gently helped the old woman to get up. Supporting her by one arm, he asked: "Are you all right?"
"I'm hurt."
Still holding her arm, he helped her slowly forward. When I looked ahead, I saw a police station. Because of the high wind, there was no one outside, so the rickshaw man helped the old woman towards the gate.
I got down from the rickshaw.
A policeman came up to me, and said, "Get another rickshaw. He can't pull you any more."
Without thinking, I pulled a handful of coppers from my coat pocket and handed them to the policeman. "Please give him these," I said.
The wind had dropped completely, but the road was still quiet. I walked along thinking, what had I meant by that handful of coppers? Was it a reward?
====================================
In reviewing my butchered version of the story, I began to see the excised portions in a different light. They seemed overtly manipulative, even tawdry, and in the aggregate, self-serving and obsequious. I couldn't shake the feeling that Lu Hsun was really just painting a picture of himself as a political sycophant, and not lauding the driver at all. He seemed to be contriving a "re-educated" image of himself that some Kafka-esque, dangerously judgmental government official would find acceptable. Almost every phrase of the excised "coaching" material seems directed to this end.
And now I find myself squirming at the political incorrectness of what I've just written!
Is there a name for what I'm trying to work on. A woman presented with a very bad situation (which we don't learn till much later) remembering all the incidents and events of the past 20 years that led to this, as she's waiting for coffee) but unexpected events near the end, just outside the coffee shop, make her present day a complete narrative as well as the flashback stories. The story from the past has a conclusion near the end, but then an encounter outside the coffee shop provides another conclusion beyond the first one.
Asking only because if such a flashbacky device has a specific name, I can look at other stories that employ it, or analyses of it.
Love Alice Munro....a real special eye into hidden Canada and it's people^^
Not a short story, but the framing technique reminds me of the movie "The Princess Bride"
Seeing the opening and epilogue together, something else struck me. It seems from the opening that he is still engaged in state affairs (“Six years have slipped by since I came from the country to the capital”). But in the epilogue he says, “The military and political affairs of *those* years I have forgotten as completely as the classics I read in my childhood,” as if he has retired or quit, and entered a new era of life. This could be a matter of translation, but at least in English, it makes me wonder if the driver somehow inspired the narrator to leave his job.
Great catch. I like how in a story everything doesn't have to line up and be symetrical. And how that space lets a question arise and exist in the reader. Like the Wisdom of Omission chapter was saying in A Swim In A Pond In The Rain. Then again, too much omitting can feel like cheating. Anyway, thanks for the food for thought.
I think there's a problem with the tense of the verb in the first paragraph. The Present Perfect makes it sound as if the paragraph refers to a recent event. It would make more sense for the narrative timeline if the verb "have" was in the Past Perfect "had slipped by" and "I had seen and heard". Like this:
"Six years had slipped by since I came from the country to the capital. During that time I had seen and heard quite enough of so-called affairs of state"
As we learn further down in the story and at the end, all these events are well in the past, a long time before the narrator is narrating them:
"It happened during the winter of 1917" and "Even now, this remains fresh in my memory"
From the first reading, the use of the Present Perfect confused me, as it implied a recent past.
Super interesting. In law school, we were taught CRAC. Conclusion, Rule, Application, Conclusion. For persuasive writing. For objective writing it was IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion). This can sound super mechanical after a while but it is how first year law students are taught. So maybe if it sounds mechanical in a story, it should def come out.
I was also interested to read some commenters say An Incident felt like a morality tale to them, and like they felt they were being manipulated. Maybe the frame has something to do with why it comes off that way, to them? I loved An Incident's frame but maybe that's just because I'm used to reading frames. Actually no, that frame was gorgeous. Even if I'd never read a frame before, I'd still love it.
But anyway, aren't most stories framed? Like in real life, when my friend is telling me what happened to her that morning, she'll always give context from before or after that morning before starting her story.
I feel like the frame usually answers the Why Are You Bothering Telling Me This? question George mentioned in A Swim In A Pond In The Rain.
Also, I feel like the frame lets us get to know the narrator, which I like.
Hi, Shaiza. Maybe we've been framed? I read The Incident frame unaware the first two or three times.
The intro didn't seem superfluous to me at all. The man relates how he is losing his humanity to detestable work. How can the story work without that context? Moreover, I have worked those jobs myself! So right away I had a clue. The idea of a life punctuated by seminal events didn't seem contrived either. Nor a life punctuated by ruminations over fateful incidents in the past. I simply didn't snag on the intro.
The conclusion I found trickier. Yet "the Club" often demonstrates that the beauty of a story is somehow proportional to our generosity how we are disposed toward it. I didn't feel cheapened by it. It is clearly cast as the narrator's reaction to the incident and not represented as a moral teaching. If the ending is satirical, then this piece would have been very courageous in its day and in keeping with the author's reputation.
So the framedness didn't make me like it less.
I'm on the record as loving the parable of the Good Samaritan and identifying its similarities to The Incident.
You won't get all the juiciness of that parable just from reading King James though. It's a shame. To get close, I now and then consult "Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus" by Klyne R. Snodgrass.
The Good Samaritan is a framed story too.
With a little generosity, you will see that the intro or epilogue of that makes Christ look like a gunslinger at high noon in Dodge City. The drama is huge. His challenger, an expert on scripture, is testing his knowledge with a not so veiled accusation of false prophesy, which then was a capital offense. So, if Christ doesn't produce a good answer, he could be stoned to death on the spot. That all happens in about three lines. And not incidentally, it also introduces the radical concept of a hierarchy of laws in scripture and the meanings of love and neighbor in their significance to the life of (a religious) person.
It's old-school flash fiction, really old-school, denser than a fruit cake and told with simple words and words that have harmonic effects.
It's the antiquity of the story that I think has some bearing on the Club and how we read. It makes it easier to see how quickly we slip into the murkiness of "context" and "text". Context has everything to do with what we need to know to get to the narrative. In that sense, intros are context provided by the author and, on this point, I almost don't understand what difference it makes if we call that framing or not.
The context not given by the author is at least if not more vital. This context is the rest of the context we provide as readers. As the Club has discussed, the style of The Incident, e.g. the epilogue, may have been influenced by a desire to mitigate the risks to the author's life and liberty upon the story's publication. So, maybe the older the story or the more remote or obscure the cultural context, the more vigorously we have to exert generosity with the text.
Thanks for your helpful comments.
Cheers,
John
Speaking of stories..are you a lawyer??^^
Wow! This is fascinating. Thanks-
Not on topic? but wanted to share this quote a friend sent from James Baldwin:
“An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is tell that, I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are.
I want to be stretched, shook up, to overreach myself, and to make you feel that way too.”
Now that I think of it, "An Incident" does make me wonder about Lu Hsun's motive and if he'd say something quite similar! This story puts a "small" moment of shame under a microscope to show what being alive IS: humbling, inspiring, heart breaking.
This is so nice. "I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are" echoes Chekhov's quote, approximately: "An artist doesn't have to solve problems, but formulate them correctly."
Thanks for sharing this quote and your comment Angela- your link to shame and storytelling makes me see this story and it's purpose with less judgmental eyes.
YAY, Emma! I've been thinking bout my own over-active judging tendencies in life and work lately. It's great to find moments of relief from it--thanks for the reminder!
‘Story is not about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ but rather just about what happens.’ Is this a reasonable assertion?
‘When we read a story it can be interesting to probe into how it works but what matters more is what we feel when we’ve read it and, sometimes, such feelings may contribute to understanding our sense of self.’ Is this a reasonable second assertion, that builds on the first and gets us, approximately, aligning with James Baldwin’s (in my view far from off topic) point of view?
'the doom and glory' - how great is that?
Yeah!
Your 'shame under a microscope' corresponds with something I hear in "An Incident". I hear an homage to _Notes From Underground_. In this short novel, ashame/shame has 46 word count. Towards the end the narrator shares “At least I’ve felt ashamed all the while I’ve been writing this story: so it’s no longer literature, but corrective punishment.”
WOW! Thanks. This gets me to consider the role of shame in writing. How it works in each of us. Is it a goad to help us find redemption or self-compassion? Is it self-flagellation or confession and expiation? It might be different with each story. Maybe we don't need to know, but shame, I'm thinking now "will out." It wants to be transformed.
I agree about transform. Neither narrator will we see smiling on a mental health wellness ad. And that said, exploration is compelling. There can be the search to transform. There can be the compulsion for further shame.
I love that this comes back to the idea of escalation. Does a framing device provide escalation to a story, does it meaningfully expand the story? If so, great. If not, eject it. It's a simple idea (although not necessarily easy to execute) but one that's already been helpful to my own writing.
That’s it.
Yes. Otherwise, why's it there?
Yes!
Bonus material: http://sittingbee.com/the-calm-raymond-carver/
https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/iowareview/article/21061/galley/129460/view/
Thanks for posting, Carol.
Carol, something's wrong with the pagination at the end of The Calm. Page 36 ends with "But if he saw something" and page 37 carries on "fingers back and forth through my hair..."
One line is missing: ... he didn't comment. He ran his fingers... This version of the story is different than the one published in "What We Talk about When We Talk About Love". Much sparer.
I caught the line skip too, so I had to look it up. I'm assuming the jstor link was from the Iowa Review but not sure what year. Whether this was published before WHAT WE TALK... or after BEGINNERS was released (the Gordon Lish unedited manuscript of the book). The beginning and ending of this version is not from WHAT WE TALK..., but rather from BEGINNERS. So no (or less) of Gordon's editing. I've been a huge fan of Carver all my life, so comparing pre & post Lish edits was a rather eye-opening from a craft POV in that collection. I just reread both versions now and I may have to give Lish's version the win in this case, however slight the word changes at the end are (but it made all the difference to my reading), which may offend some of the true Carver faithfuls out there! : )
Thanks!!
Thank you, Carol!
Thanks, Fred.
Bonus?^^
just from me
For me, the "incident" is not the story. The story is the transformation, and so the frame is essential to telling that story.
On another note, I read the comments and feel awe and envy at how easily other readers and writers can cite examples and references from the rest of literature. I struggle to remember what I read. What am I doing wrong? I have notebooks filled with notes from class assignments, and books marked up with notes, and I will often look back at them and have no recollection of any of it. Does anyone else have this experience? Is there anything I can do?
Feel the same, Namra. Even when I've read things and NOT taken notes. But something is happening here in Story Club which seems to be helping clarity form in my head. When reading the stories, unable to make a clear idea about my thoughts, then seeing the comments play out, I start seeing bits of what I think in them too. Which is adding up each time we do this. I'm hoping at some point it will gel, like playing scales or practicing a song on a piano, thinking you can never learn music, until one day, you can do it and you do understand it. Thanks for putting yourself out there and saying your thoughts! Trying to be braver too.
What a beautiful description, Emma, and it's one I hear from students, too. The more they engage with the stories and listen to discussions and enter into them with increasing confidence, the more they grow as readers. I love the analogy of learning a song on the piano. What we're doing here in Story Club is really fun, but it doesn't always come easily, depending on how much you've read in your lifetime or how you did that. So yes, now the fun part is actually noticing how, as we move from story to story, you're reading differently, slowing down, and taking more in.
Thanks, Nancy. I'm learning piano too, so the sense of frustration at times can be similar!
I've been a big reader forever, but was taught to speed read in early high school- a strategy I suspect stopped me from doing close reading like this. I think it may be why it's harder to retain the detail after reading a text or to see the structure. I've been typing out short stories as another way of slowing down, reading, rereading. Short Story is already getting me to notice so much more- hope to translate this into my writing at some point too. 'Taking more in' is so much better than scanning! :)
Wow, you're so diligent and committed, Emma. I'm impressed that you're typing these out! Good for you!
Elisabeth Strout said--and I don't remember if it was in writing or when I spoke to her once after a reading--that she would hand copy parts of stories that she admired, to understand how they worked. I've tried it and it definitely makes you more aware of what's happening. Another trick someone else suggested was to read a paragraph and try to write it out from memory. I was shocked by how little I had taken in. So Namra, you're not the only one.
Well, the typing out is also so I can read them on a print out- reading on computer is not great...
I get this, too. I have a good friend who can't read anything unless she prints it out. It's a bit old-fashioned, but hey, it's why I don't read anything on a kindle. I have to feel, smell, hold a book in my hands while I read. There's something about it that is just kind of sensual. If that makes sense.
I'm so grateful for all this encouragement and these suggestions from everyone.
**For me, the "incident" is not the story. The story is the transformation, and so the frame is essential to telling that story.**
I agree with you, Namra, the real story is the transformation. The funny thing is that we don't actually "see" the transformation. We see the event that prompted the interior work that the narrator undertakes afterward, in the vastness outside the story, and then he comes back to report to us that he's changed, but with relatively little detail as to how exactly, and in what ways.
Great stuff here, Tony. Yes, the incident is what prompts the transformation.
I don’t remember a lot of what I read, either. I have actually started books, gotten several chapters into them and then realized I had read them before. I’m not even that old so I can’t blame decades and decades passing between readings.
I think I tend to become immersed in whatever I am reading and it pushes out everything that came before it!
Like you I am completely in awe of the literary knowledge of some of our fellow club members.
Ditto. But even more than that everyone's sincere joy in wordcraft.
Hi Namra, I wonder if this exercise might help you: stop taking notes in the moment. My first day of law school, in the very first class, our torts professor told us to put away our laptops, that this wasn't stenography school. He was an intimidating guy. But I think what he was getting at was that in order to digest something, sometimes you have to give yourself some space. Years later, at a firm retreat, my friend got the same advice during a mock deposition. She was recorded as she took the depo (the firm had hired an actor to serve as the witness) and on replay she saw that whenever the witness said anything, she reflexively bent her head and wrote it down, which took her out of interacting with the deponent and figuring out the best next question to ask. So maybe the next time you're in class or reading a story, don't take notes and see if you remember better. Hope that helps!
P.S. It reminds me of that scene in The Namesake when the protagonist is remembering a moment with his dad at the ocean and his dad didn't have a camera so said we'll just have to remember it, and the little boy was like how long do we have to remember it for? Such a cute scene.
Love this advice, and wholeheartedly agree. Asking students to put their pens down or close their laptops often causes them some cognitive dissonance at first sometimes (smile) but you're so right, Shaiza. When they're kind of forced to just interact with one another and discuss something, it's a much more fruitful exercise.
You might benefit from the book How To Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens, which promotes the use of a note-taking system called Zettlekasten. And you might want to try using a digital note-taking tool. I use (and like) Roam Research, but I've also heard good things about Obsidian, Notion, and Craft.
Thank you for this recommendation! I have never heard of the Zettelkasten note-taking method and just looked it up, as well as Sonke Ahrens' book. So interesting!
I think you're already doing what you should to make sure you remember things that stand out to you. The memories will probably just come more quickly with time.
You're doing great, Namra, and I don't remember a lot of what I read, either, but some of these stories I've read multiple times and are currently teaching them in classes. I think when you do that, you imprint them on your brain more powerfully, and then too, students add on to the knowledge we build in class. I don't have my mind made up about what these stories mean so when students shed light on an element in a story, there have been many times I've stopped walking around the classroom and look at the student, saying, "Hmmm...that hadn't occurred to me before!" So when you have conversations about them you remember them differently. So keep reading, and read writers who really turn you on. And as you keep reading, notice patterns between characters (archetypes). Keep asking yourself stuff like "Where have I seen her before?" You start to notice more when you slow down, too, as we are here in George's class.
I’m so pleased that framing’s come up right now.
Just this week, as I was looking through the first draft of my novel for clues my subconscious might have left me (and guessing at what a clue might be), I hit a scene where my P meter was jumping up high. I’d thought I was going to have to cut that whole braid (hey!) of text because I’d decided in advance (boo) not to deal with that timeline.
I’d been revising the one-sentence-leads-to-another-and-that’s-all-you-need-to-know way, and the opening of the novel refused to come to life.
And then the idea of a prologue knocked on my brain with goods (and a special character) from the timeline I thought I’d have to lose entirely.
When I gave this prologue a whirl, not only did its own sentences arrive in great shape (and turn undeniable quickly) but the prologue itself cast light and shadow across the opening in this way that makes me freshly excited to work now. The prologue also talked directly to the people I’m writing this story for, which I didn’t expect, and it helps me to remember why this is all worth trying. Feels like a giant charging station for the whole endeavor.
And here comes George this morning, all “Oh, by the way, framing” and I am once again feeling blessed as hell to be here in Story Club.
I'd venture the purpose of the frame in this story is akin to a lawyer's opening statement, then later the summation in a court case
First the author opens with a paragraph telling us he's about to give evidence of something important. Last of all he finishes with a paragraph on there you go, I proved it, I certainly hope you got the point.
I've been thinking on why Hsun chose to use a frame instead of incorporating the details in the meat of the story - surely we could have 'seen' him unimpressed by the affairs of the state and misanthropic. Perhaps the reason he chose this narrative summary was because it was more efficient? Which begs the question, what is this particular efficiency driving? How is the story served by telling us these things, rather than showing them in a more organic way?
These questions have tumbled around in my head for the past few days without any real answer or epiphany, and then this morning my brain recalled another framing story that I loved as a child (and still do) - the Princess Bride. Which led me to discover that a number of my favourite movies as a kid (and this goes out to all the Gen X story clubbers) were also (to various extents) framing stories: The Neverending Story, and (probably to a lesser extent the Goonies). They all have this secondary (but ultimately more important) story that is connected by the smallest thread to the prominent story - that if you removed it, would still leave the prominent story (of action and drama) intact - take out Kevin Arnold and Columbo (jks - I mean, the grandson (played by Fred Savage) and grandfather (Peter Faulk)) and you still have a fun caper fantasy; take out Bastian and his breakfast conversation about unicorns with his dad, and him riding a massive luck dragon at the end, and you still have a great adventure fantasy (you could even take his character out altogether and have a great fantasy, albeit a tragedy); and take out the threat of the local country club taking buying up Astoria homes, and there's still a great caper fantasy.
These stories and 'An Incident' use the same kind of framing structure - there's a prologue and epilogue based in this 'other' story, and a moment (or two) in the prominent story that calls back to this other story - in Hsun, it's the 'Suddenly, I had a strange feeling' (the moment of introspection, where we see how the events of the prominent story have affected him), in Princess Bride, it's that moment where we cut to Kevin and Columbo "Do you want me to stop. You look a little scared." "I'm not scared, maybe a little concerned, but that's not the same thing" (or something along those lines, it's been a while...) - where again we see how the main characters of the 'other' story are being affected by the events of the prominent story, in the Neverending Story there's a few but my fave is where Sebastian saves the rest of his sandwich like Atreyu; and in the Goonies, it's that moment where Troy turns up at the wishing well.
And I think the reason why they are all framed (and successful because of their framing), is because a) the real impact is the one that happens outside the events of the story, and b) the framing removes the distance between the story and the reader, whereby even if we can't relate to the events of the prominent story, we can relate to the 'other' story and their protagonists. It makes the fantasy of the fiction more tangible, and helps us to experience it more intimately (rather than at the kind of distance we'd be faced with if we didn't have these story interlocutors). I wonder if, in the same vein, we can call Gatsby a framing story? Where the story is framed by Nick's observation/engagement in the key story at a distance, which provides the moral lesson and a more relatable character for the reader to hitch a ride with...
Anyway, after this long digression, I think that while Hsun could have left out the prologue (or incorporated its points more organically in the story), the epilogue is needed to show the future/ongoing impact on the narrator long after the events of that day. And the prologue, then, is needed to balance that epilogue and give a sense of symmetry. (ie He needed to have an open bracket at the beginning in order to use the close bracket at the end).
"As you wish."
There's also something wonderful about how dang short "An Incident" is. It's a real tour de force, in my view. A lesser writer might have put in a scene of him at work, etc. But...why?
Exactly! I think putting more in about the narrator, would cheapen the story and turn the focus to him, instead of turning the focus to ourselves. The true genius of this story is that it presents the narrator in broad strokes, which helps us to occupy his nebulous form without resistance as we read the story...
So interesting to link back to these stories from childhood and the experience of reading/being told a story in those formative years. Maryanne Wolfe in her Proust and the Squid (on science of reading and learning to read) talks about how for some the very first experience of reading is of sitting with a parent or grandparent to sing/read along together. She says (if I remember correctly) that such an experience which connects the act of reading with feelings of love, safety and warmth is not something that can be provided by schooling. Not everyone is lucky.
I wonder, after reflecting on your ideas about these early stories with frames, whether there is something deep about the act of reading which is a frame in itself: this time is important to me, it is nourishing, this chair I sit in and this lamp's familiar light are echoes of that grandmother and her musical voice, framing what it is to be a story worth hearing.
Do, then, written frames such as the prologue/epilogue in An Incident draw on these same responses? Perhaps, for me, they do, though I will need to think further on this. Perhaps also there is an implicit frame in every act of reading or choices made in sending out a piece of writing.
I suppose what I wonder is can I stop thinking about framing as a device that is either present or not present, but rather as something that is always present and either spoken or unspoken?
This is such an interesting train of thought. I like the idea that all stories are externally framed. It rings true - we come to them all with a mood or emotion in us (sometime we have that Princess Bride/memories of childhood warmth, sometimes the frame is less nostalgic and more current (bad day/i'm tired/i've just binged three hours of horror, etc) - which colour the text and the juxtapositions and the symbolism (at least in the beginning, until we get our bearings, depending on how much the text echoes our mood or pulls us out of it). So, perhaps, Lu Hsun's framing is a way to manipulate that mood before we begin - he's positioning us in that old armchair in preparation of the story to come.
It kind of reminds me how eating food in a fancy restaurant changes the taste of the food in the way that if I ate the same food presented differently on cheap plates sitting on plastic chairs in a fluorescent-lit and crowded diner, it would 'taste' different. Which makes sense, because taste isn't an objective experience - it's a translation of all (some dominant, some subtle) stimuli by the brain. And maybe reading is the same - it's not just the words on the page that affect our reading experience (although the more immersive a text is, the more we can shut out external stimuli and get drawn into the story (despite the lingering internal stimuli of memories and mood)).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, in this sense, framing is a very useful device for manipulating the reader to be in a certain mood or frame of mind (ha! (terrible pun)) before they approach the meat of the story and its transformative elements.
My favorite moment of cross-talk between the frames in Neverending Story is when Bastian realizes it's up to him, as the reader, to save the world in the book by naming the Empress. I always assumed he named her after his late mother, and loved imagining what that name might be (I must have rewound the VHS a dozen times during that part to try to figure out what he shouted into the storm). Powerful stuff!
Your comment made me realize that another one of my childhood favorite films is a framed story: Stand By Me. Could easily chop Richard Dreyfuss out of the movie entirely. But really, adult Gordie remembering . . . that last line of text on the screen . . . what a gut punch.
Yes! Trying to figure out the name he shouted was an ongoing source of frustration that kids who have only ever known the powerful convenience of google could never imagine :) (And 'Stand by Me' - another great one! Golden age of cinema :D)
Mikhaeyla: I so love your posts, ideas, and questions. You have led me to think about "The Great Gatsby" because I am teaching it this term. I see the frames there as so important and revealing. There is the story of Jay Gatsby, of course, and there is Nick's story in telling it. In my opinion, we need these frames to see TGG as a story of how to hold oneself up (in American life/life) after seeing all the contradictions in it, and in ourselves. We need the fragments in the opening and closing (monologues, "straight narration," scene work, poetic interludes) to see how a human being tries to make sense of a confusing and even downright cruel modern world. Maybe the ending is really about Nick trying to hold himself together as "a Westerner, after all" given what he has witnessed and experienced in the East. He tries to return/returns (?) in these fragmented frames (particularly the conclusion) to the ideas and dreams of his America and America, even if, like all of us (Americans, if not many in the world), we face its contradictions as "boats against the current." Anyway, now I don't know if my post makes sense, but like a message in a bottle I am throwing it out there. What I know is the frames in TGG are sometimes overlooked or admired, but they are not always considered for how they escalate the plot and advance the narrative. The frames here tell me that a human will struggle in the beauty and nightmare of American dreams, and yet struggle one must (or at least one may choose to do). Maybe the frames in TGG tell other readers other ideas, but I hope they tell readers something, and I hope readers see the meaning in them - just like you do. Thank you for inspiring me, Mikhaelya, and no doubt many others on this thread.
Your bottle has found me as well, and its message makes perfect, wonderful sense.
Mikhaeyla's initial comment on framed films reminded me of how much I loved "Stand By Me" as a child. I was probably 8 or 9, much younger than the boys in the film when I first watched (and rewatched) it, and I doubt that I gave much thought to the adult Gordie/narrator at the time. It was only later, when seeing it again as an adult myself, that the frame's power finally hit me. Here Gordie is, reminiscing about the friendships of his youth, trying to say, "I never felt that way again." I get a little weepy just thinking about it. Now that I am at my own distance from that particular simplicity and innocence of childhood, I too can say, "I never felt that way again."
I have similar feelings about TGG, but like with "Stand By Me," they came to me later. I have a vague recollection of first reading the book in high school and discussing symbolism, the American Dream, etc. I may have just left it at that, if it weren't for an interview I came across many years later with a writer I love and greatly admire (Stuart Dybek, and many of his stories come to mind that handle memory in such beautifully braided/framed ways). His admiration for TGG turned me back to it, and I'm so grateful that I read it again as an adult. The frame! It was probably overlooked in class discussion, or perhaps I just didn't "feel it" as a teenager and so I'd forgotten it. But for me now, it's essential to my understanding of the book. My awareness of Nick colors everything. My uncertainty over whether or not he's being completely honest. The fact that he's "a Westerner, after all" (that passage about the "thrilling returning trains of youth" is probably my favorite in the entire book). You've made me want to revisit it again, and I feel a little twinge of envy for your students!
And the Woolf quote that you've shared is beautiful. A quote of hers has been on my mind these past few days, especially since it speaks to my understanding of "An Incident" and our general discussion here:
“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
What are the moments we hold on to, and why? What experiences do we revisit to try to make meaning out of? What do they say about the people we are now? Like so many narrators in the stories I love, I feel myself searching for answers to these questions in my own life. If I can't quite express what certain moments mean (like the coins to the narrator in "An Incident"), I find myself returning to them moreso. Every single thing I remember and everything I understand is framed by the person I am now.
Thank you, and again Mikhaeyla, for giving me much to think about today. Hope the bottle I'm pitching out here makes some sense as well :)
I've loved this discussion thread - so many beautiful observations. And you've both made me want to go back and read everything ever written by Virginia Woolf! I really loved your reflection Manami - "What are the moments we hold on to, and why? What experiences do we revisit to try to make meaning out of? What do they say about the people we are now?". What a perfect story seed.
Yes!!! Manami & Mikhaelya, and all: Why these seeds? (Why those moments with x...?) When we did George's exercise with our chronology of people, places, moments, et al over time... What keeps rising or trying to.
I literally just worked with students on "story seeds" - noticing them, listening to them, and making the first steps to put them down on paper, if only in phrases, until they reveal themselves; eventually a butterfly can break out of even the tightest cocoon.
P.S. Seeds do not exactly relate to a cocoon. Bad connection. I should stick to the plant world. :)
Thanks for such a lovely message, MVM (and throwing out messages in bottles is my kind of style :)). Your line about struggling 'in the beauty and nightmare of American dreams' is beautiful. I think that's what good framing does - it shifts attention from the overt/obvious/surface-level impacts of the story event, and pulls us towards the subtle/intense/complex impacts that come with distance (either physical, like in Gatsby, or temporal, like in An Incident).
Reading your message made me think about the two stories twined (or 'braided' as George says) as a tree - the prominent story is the trunk and branches living above the earth and on display, but the 'other' story is the roots pushing below the soil into dark and hidden crevices. They are connected at small and finite points in terms of the text, but fundamentally interconnected in the soul of the story; they almost seem to form an imperfect reflection of the other (and in that imperfect reflection we can better observe what is different/has changed). As readers, we see the surface level of the prominent story and judge it as a distant observer, but it's the 'other' story that worms its way into the darker/unexplored parts of our minds...
Maybe that's why, without the framing, it would be easy to sit back and judge the rickshaw customer as a jerk, but with the framing we are not just confronted with his humanity but our own? And maybe that's the same with Gatsby - without hitching our ride with Nick, it would be easier to judge Jay and Daisy at a distance; but with Nick, we're pulled in and pushed out of that orbit, that 'struggle in the beauty and nightmare'...
Hi Mikhaelya: Wow - your beautiful descriptions, comparisons and ideas! I see them so vividly. You are bringing them to life. There is entirely something else that happens with the narrator in "An Incident" that has its own moments of escalation, urgency, and ultimately change - in the narrator, and I hope in the reader. And yes!!!! That worming and winding into our minds; there is a soul in this story, and I think if we sit with the story, really read it, the soul shows itself. If we are lucky enough, we find our own souls in it. (There is a madly beautiful appreciation of Virginia Woolf written by WH Auden, and in it he quotes her statement that: "'One can’t,' she observes, 'write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes; but look at the ceiling, at Grizzle, at the cheaper beasts in the Zoo which are exposed to walkers in Regent’s Park, and the soul slips in.' ") And so I really love how you are exploring this: that this story, a well told story, reaches another level of awareness "even" if it talks about the seemingly ordinary "incident."
One of my favorite photographs in the world is Edward Steichen's "Moonrise" (1904; https://www.moma.org/collection/works/51812). It is that "imperfect reflection" you describe: it is a still moment and yet shimmering in the sky, and (I'd like to believe) even below, in the seemingly dark and sleepy water. Maybe your post has also helped me to understand why I so love to look at this photo.
That quote by Virginia Woolf is beautiful! As is the photograph. When I looked at it, I was arrested by the image of these story frames as reflections, reflecting back, imperfectly, our core story. And of course, the word 'reflection' made me think of the rickshaw's driver 'reflection' on the incident, which made me rush to explore the etymology of the world: "flecto" - (Latin (figuratively)) I persuade, prevail upon, or soften. I bend, curve or bow. I turn or curl + "re-" (Latin ) again; prefix added to various words to indicate an action being done again, or back, backwards = "reflecto" (Latin) I reflect. I turn back or away.
How beautiful is that? For me, it holds the essence of both the Incident's narrator and Nick Carraway.
There should be a "love" option on Substack. "I reflect. I turn back or away." Oh, Mikhaelya - what a wonderous post.
"I turn back or away."
Maybe this raises a point about the ending in at least the two stories mentioned ("An Incident" and "TGG"): there are shown endings (scene/image with little commentary); told endings (voice-based scenes but perhaps little reflecto), and reflecto endings (some combination of the told or shown with reflecto). And combinations of these. And endings are sometimes a mix: a paragraph or line of reflecto; a paragraph or line of shown or told endings.
Maybe narrative is really about finding the balance and "pattern" (however irregular) we want of show, tell and reflect. Sometimes the edges blur; sometimes the edges are sharp(er). Here is the famous opening of Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Pale Fire":
"Two leaves, two triskelions, like two shuddering three-legged bathers coming at a run for a swim, are borne by their impetus right into the middle where with a sudden slowdown they float quite flat. Twenty minutes past four.
View from a hospital window.
November trees, poplars, I imagine, two of them growing straight out of the asphalt: all of them in the cold bright sun, bright richly furrowed bark and an intricate sweep of numberless burnished bare twigs, old gold—because getting more of the falsely mellow sun in the higher air. Their immobility is in contrast with the spasmodic ruffling of the inset reflection—for the visible motion of a tree is in the mass of its leaves, and there remain hardly more than thirty-seven or so here and there on one side of the tree. They just flicker a little, of a neutral tint, but burnished by the sun to the same ikontinct as the intricate trillions of twigs. Swooning blue of the sky crossed by pale motionless superimposed cloud wisps.
The operation has not been successful and my wife will die."
This weave ("braid") of show, tell, and reflecto creates urgency and beauty. (And it blurs even within the sentences.)
I don't know how much of this should be thought of consciously in early drafting, but it can certainly be considered in revising. Maybe even a reflecto can be used as a writer's mental note as to why the character/narrator is telling the tale (what's at stake), and maybe the reflecto can be ultimately included or discarded. Nothing has to remain in the final draft. But the writer/reader can feel it.
Can you imagine - at the risk of spoilers - collecting "reflectos"? Perhaps another literary non sequitur, but here is an ending reflecto that haunts me from a novel, Iris Murdoch's "The Sea, The Sea" (do not read if you do want want a reflecto spolier):
"She came to me, she ran to me, that was no dream. That was no phantom I embraced that night. And on that night she said she loved me. My idea of her return to an 'original resentment' was too ingenious. One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story. She was not able to be my Beatrice nor was I able to be saved by her, but the idea was not senseless nor unworthy... The past buries the past and must end in silence, but it can be a conscious silences that rests open-eyed. Perhaps this is final forgiveness that James spoke of."
Mikhaelya (and George!), thank you for guiding me/us through this process of reflection on so many levels.
Nabokov - word artist extraordinaire. And I love the idea of frames within a work, bracketing individual microcosms of story and providing a lens we take with us until the next one is provided. Have you ever been to those science museums where you enter a room that's lit with a colour-filtered light and everything appears yellow or olive green or brown, and then you shine a white light torch around and suddenly everything is cerulean, and magenta, and emerald? That's what this framing feels like, except you sometimes forget you have that white-light torch and just let the author guide you through the rooms with their differently filtered lights...
I'm so sorry this comment is so long - Story Club is the only place I can have conversations like this and my mind jumps at the chance to let go of all these thoughts and feelings about what I've read. I'll do better to keep things shorter in future.
I think story club is made for long comments. Personally, I enjoy reading them. (And writing them! 😊)
Thanks for your kindness, Sara!
Thanks so much, Rosanne. Story Club has been such a rare and positive experience. And I agree - it's inspiring to see the diversity of stories despite their common structures!
Your comments are always wonderfully thoughtful, Mikhaeyla. So...please feel free to make them even longer, is my view. :)
Enjoying them too! So great to find a place where readers/writers want to chat about stories like this.
That's such a good point re. those 80s movies which I hadn't thought about for a while but thinking back remember that, yeah, the framing in them is part of what made them so enthralling to me as a child!
Your comment also reminds me of Dwight V. Swain's "Techniques of the Selling Writer", the details of which are a little hazy now but if I remember correctly he insists quite heavily on breaking down narration into action/reaction of characters and that that's in essence what makes a story engaging; something happens, and you want to know how a character reacts to it. It was a really useful thing to realise for me at the time and, as you commented, I think that applies to framing as well.
Right? Story is all about the tension between the action and the reaction, and it's an interesting experiment to see how that tension can be stretched when we put a little distance between the action and reaction - either by using another narrator, or by having a reflective epilogue.
Your comment also got me thinking about why those early 80s kids movies *were* framed - and I think it was to say "hey, this is a cool movie and you're going to have a lot of fun with it, but I also have a life lesson for you, kid, that I don't want you to forget; and that's [don't grow up too quick, don't let the adult world creep in too fast and steal away your joy and imagination, don't give up fighting for what's important even when it all feels like a lost cause, don't ever let anyone tell you that what's important to you is worthless or silly...]". And maybe there's something powerful in having that advice come so directly, in seeing yourself/your dreams/your shame so clearly reflected in a story, that it sticks with you in a different way. I know I've held on to those lessons as clearly as any I got from trusted adults (parents/teachers).
Well put. Now you mention it, I also realise the Neverending Story was such a really formative experience for me in seeing the pure adulterated escapism (in the best possible sense of the word) afforded to Bastian by poring over this magical book, which I then tried to emulate through my own reading (it also helped that to me, as a European kid, Bastian was not only an introvert like I was but also incredibly cool simply by virtue of being American...)
Thanks for discussion of films with framing device as I'm still getting my head around it. So would 'Wizard of Oz' and 'Stand by Me', 'Shawshank Redemption' also fit into this device category?
Your post, Emma, really got me thinking :) I think Wizard of Oz is a framed story - the real world brackets the fantastical world and the two are tethered by the thinnest of threads, the framing primes us for how to view/make conclusions about the prominent story, and there is a moral lesson to be learned from the prominent story that is applied in the 'other' story.
My mind thinks of it as brackets - (Other story/world prologue (Prominent story/world) Other story/world epilogue) - the prominent story is self-contained and doesn't rely on the other story to be a fully-fleshed story, but without it, the prominent story loses some of that emotional resonance and moral lesson. Wizard of Oz, Princess Bride, Neverending Story, and Stand by Me all have that in common with Hsun's story. I guess the difference with Wizard of Oz (and also Goonies) is that in the others, the moral lesson transforms either another person or a later version of that person, whereas with Oz and Goonies the moral lesson is felt straight away. Oz is definitely a better example than Goonies, since there is a *moral* lesson, whereas Goonies is more of an external impact (ie the story sets up the global stakes then moves to internal and then ends with global - which is not what I typically find with stories (usually the other way round)).
I think when you boil it down, all stories are framed - it's why we have the beginning show us the main character's status quo (telegraphing 'these are the things that will change throughout the story') - it's just that some are more obvious about it? And some, like Hsun, use it to coach us how to *feel* about what comes next.
Someone else in the comments put it much better than I can - they suggested that the direct prologue and epilogue is like a lawyer arguing a case - the opening statement says 'I'm going to present evidence of something important that will prove X' and the closing statement says 'I've proved what I set out to, I hope you were paying attention and got the point'.
I think when you have this structure, it broadcasts to the reader - the point of this story isn't the drama of what happens in between - the trials and the successes - it's the lasting impact on characters beyond the main event.
Thanks for responding, Mikhaeyla- I can't remember The Goonies, Princess Bride or Never-ending story anymore (though am an X). I suspect Labyrinth is another in this framing type I did see!
Your line 'I think when you boil it down, all stories are framed' feels very true - hadn't really understood 'framing' to be but one device of many for writers. This structural consideration of story telling is bringing a whole new dimension into reading- appreciate it so much!
Yes! I had been thinking of Princess Bride, but hadn’t thought of Goonies. The framing in that story definitely adds to the meaning and depth. It would just be an adventure without the trouble in the Goondocks, and the satisfying ending with Mikey’s marble bag.
I'll steal from my comment on one of the previous posts, because I talked so much about the frame there...
I think one of the crucial things this frame is doing is placing the events of the story "in question". Without the frame, the events are simply happening; we're aware (if we're attuned to it) that the narrator is "coaching" us and that there is a particular point of view here, but the frame has the extra effect of placing not just the events in the story but the point of view itself into question. Because it's not an in-the-moment point of view - it's a reflection, written after the fact. Is this how the narrator *really* felt at the moment the events actually happened? Is he recalling them correctly? Are his reflective thoughts accurate - has he really changed, as he indicates at the end?
I'd argue that because the frame is in place, we can't interpret the narrator's "spin" without taking into account how he feels now, at the time of writing. What struck me is that even though this is presented as a reflection, the narrator isn't really doing a whole lot of reflecting. Though he seems to be trying to accurately represent his emotional reactions, he doesn't view them in a specifically critical light (for example, he says "She must be pretending, which was disgusting", rather than "I felt disgusted"), showing that he still hasn't really questioned himself and his responses. And, of course, "perhaps he had not heard" is also telling - he is reluctant to view himself as the true non-entity in the action of the story (unworthy even of acknowledgment by this remarkably attentive rickshaw man), because he still wants to see himself as the center of the story. In the second to last paragraph, the wind (a large, sweeping, impersonal force, sort of an agent of change and self-transcendence, which is inextricable from the action of the story) dies down and leaves him caught in his own "small" thoughts. Though he is approaching some kind of reflection, is at least made uncomfortable in his usual perspective, he still cannot "answer himself". Everything is still about him. And he does not wonder at all about the fate of the rickshaw man or the woman, which gives the impression that even now, he still doesn't really care.
The fact that the story begins and ends in the same matter-of-fact, removed language provides a contrast with the middle of the story, where the action is. It is almost as if the narrator is no longer himself when he describes the action. This shows how deeply it has affected him, drawing him so dramatically outside of his usual perspective, but also shows how resistant to change he actually is. He reverts right back to the same language at the end (nonspecific, failure to provide details about what impressions it has actually made on him in his daily life), making his reflection seem hollow.
But I don't think it's *completely* hollow - after all, something significant has caused him to question himself, and he is the one telling the story - describing that wind as it whips through, not just the story's action, but his own mind.
I love your insight around framing as a way to make the story not just about the events, but also the POV. This really solidified my understanding of it.
“The gravel pit was about a mile east of town, and the size of a small lake, and so deep that boys under sixteen were forbidden by their parents to swim there.” So begins another great framed story, “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” by the great William Maxwell. What begins as a somewhat mysterious digression, circles round to a powerful conclusion, where we don’t need another description of that place, or even its name, because we now feel its stoney depth in our hearts.
I love that book, too.
LOVE that book!
A book I revisit often ❤️
My “Books to Read” list has grown so much longer since Story Club started.
Same, Sara!
Thought the group might be interested in this BBC Radio 4 15-minute piece from this week on a Lu Xun novella https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0013rbg
I love this, George. I was just talking recently about Flannery O'Connor's framing device in "Good Country People." A student had asked about the opening and ending graphs that have to do with what seems to be an ancillary character (Mrs. Freeman) and what she's gazing at. The story begins and ends with her gaze, though the guts of the story have little to do with her directly. But I hadn't thought of putting this exercise in front of them -- that idea of taking the frame out, and noticing how that might alter the story. It helps readers understand more about the nuts and bolts of writing, how a story is put together and what choices writers make. Though I don't think this is always the "plan." I also think writers go with their guts, and aren't necessarily thinking consciously of following a kind of template. But that's the magic of writing. Just want you to know you are giving me great ideas for small group workshop exercises! I can't wait to see what you put in front of us next!
So framing can be thought of as other than now - past - now. I visited Andalusia on Saturday and walked the grounds and surrounding woods. Her story Displaced Person is not framing, physical framing or in time framing, but like Mrs. Freeman's gaze, Mrs. Shortley's stance in opening paragraphs is structural. I find physicality in O’Connor stories draws me in to a reality.
Yes, this is interesting, Anne. When I stop and consider why and how a framing device works, what it accomplishes for the story, O'Connor seems to be doing something differently from Hsun. She is drawing our gaze here to what Mrs. F. is looking at. As a matter of fact, throughout this story, she does in fact seem obsessed with what and where characters' gazes are directed....
George, I laughed out loud at your paragraph about "Frugality Fever," which I do come down with every-so-often—sometimes when writing a story, but more often with poetry. I'll just keep cutting stuff mercilessly, telling myself over and over it's not needed, be spare, spareness is power, less is more, don't reveal everything, show don't tell, blah, blah, blah, until all I'm left with is about three lines. "What am I supposed to do with THIS??" I shout, and I hurl my computer out the window.
I truly appreciate your insight into the reason the intro and epilogue bookends work so brilliantly in this story. There is movement between the two passages that reflect, elaborate on, and deepen how and why the movement of the action is life-changing for the narrator.
Save your computer just add a few more tasty words^^
Thank you so much, George. I have already gotten so much out of Story Club, well in excess of the cost. I am very grateful.