Miriam Sved on Janette Turner Hospital
I am teaching a creative writing subject this semester about short fiction. I’ve tutored in this subject a few times over the years, and I love it. Lots of grist in the reader: Chekhov, Faulkner, Garner, Munro. I can keep coming back to these stories and finding new ways into them. And short fiction is good to teach: literary techniques jump right out at you, there’s nowhere for them to hide. In novels you tend to have to search for them in all the flesh.
I came to short stories quite late, as a reader and a writer – for a long time I was only really interested in novels, then I got whacked over the head with Alice Munro (I think I was staying at my uncle’s, an old copy of The New Yorker lying around) and was never the same.
In class we look at metaphorical and elliptical plot structures. A Marjorie Barnard story (fruit and breasts). James Joyce (piecing together a hypothetical plot from scant clues on the page; I find it satisfying but some of my students hate it). An ingeniously evasive Nabokov and deceptively simple Mansfield.
At home I start reading Forecast: Turbulence by Janette Turner Hospital. In the first story, ‘Blind Date’, a young boy waits for a reunion with his father. Lots of weather imagery, conveyed in sensory gasps, the boy’s blindness never stated but there as subtext in every part of the story. The history of the family comes out in bites of dialogue and sense memory, the emerging understanding of a child.
‘I’m sorry, mate.’ When his father said that, he was hugging Lachlan so tightly that all Lachlan could think of was washing machine. His face was pressed into his father’s shirt where the collar met the yoke and there was a damp vibrating sweetness that Lachlan recognised.
The more the dripping Melbourne weather permeates everything the further you go into the boy. Pathetic fallacy: the attribution of human emotion to nature. As soon as I finish the story it seems like it was in first person rather than third.
In class we look at different ways to begin a story: scene setting openings that paint the world before you occupy it, and in media res, dropping you straight into the action. Like most contemporary writers, I favour in media res.
From ‘The Prince of Darkness Is a Gentleman’: ‘On one night, the worst one, and the last one before Katie ran away, there were eighteen of those calls.’
One day I’d like to write an opening line that good. She can do scene setting too: ‘Jodie’s desk in the capitol building in Wirranbandi is a scratched and gouged door resting across two wooden sawhorses in a room that was once the lobby and teller area of a now-defunct bank.’ A layering of camera angles, worked into the sentence to make it look seamless, no transition between close view and wide. In two clauses you get the measure of the place.
We discuss material and treatment, which dictates chronology. Material: the what and what and what of a story, boring linearity; treatment: the how and why.
And characterisation. Flat characters and round ones. I think most of Turner Hospital’s characters are round; certainly the main characters, every line redolent of inner life. But there are ‘types’ too, characters who are quickly recognisable. Nelson, in ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’: computer geek, somewhere on the Autism spectrum, weirding his way through an escalating feud with his obnoxious former employer. But at some stage Nelson diverges from type; a decision, or a series of decisions; believable but so surprising that the Nelson we’re left with takes on retrospective heft, a shadowy roundness. It happens in just a few paragraphs; I re-read them to see if I can isolate the moment, the exact words; how she does it.
‘What’s the point of always picking apart these stories?’ one of my students says. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to just, like, experience them?’ And I give the spiel about reading as a writer, getting into a text so we can see its mechanisms, understand them, recreating them. In university terms the creative writing workshop is an exercise full of interesting tensions. A throw-back to a time before the author died. For me it’s a pragmatic alibi: I’ve always read like this, long before I started writing. As an undergrad I studied literature in a theoretically oblivious bubble that was somehow allowed to exist at Sydney Uni in the 1990s (or this is how I remember it) – an innocent textual playground where we were encouraged to chase down a unified, unitary reading, a meaning behind the text, and where close reading might one day lead to the golden pinnacle of understanding: authorial intention. You probably can’t get away with that kind of thing in a literature tute anymore, but in creative writing the question of authorial intention lurks behind the other questions: how did she do this bit, why put that there? A way of embodying the text from within, claiming it almost; owning it. An act of readerly stalking.
In class we do two weeks on graphic narratives (I flounder) and at home I read the last fictional piece in Forecast: Turbulence, ‘Afterlife of a Stolen Child’. A clever take on an emotive subject, and I’m glad for the slight tricksiness of it, which I trace with interest: multiple narrative perspectives on an event, the points of view beginning to concertina together until it seems like there might be a singular perspective behind them all, a character with his own agenda informing everything. Perspectives are distinct but not too distinct: there is an overarching narrative tone even when the voice moves close to the characters, inside the characters, melding with their own voices. A narrative mystery as well as a plot mystery, balanced between the questions who dunnit and who tells it. I wonder about trying something like that myself: multiple voices, multiple characters shimmering in slightly too golden light, not quite believable. Follow the literary clues, effect and intention, aware of being toyed with, and of toying back.
Then somewhere in the last section – the point of view with the mother – the language races faster than I can pin it down, I slip into a space between devices, between narrative voices and rounded characters and chronological structuring – into the dream of a dream that feels real, phantom memories working on raw nerve endings. I finish the story, and I cry and cry and cry.
