A Beleaguered City

I assume I was right in saying I had a story for people to read this week, since it looked as if there weren't enough weeks for people to each suggest a story a week. Especially if we just started from next week.

Anyway, what's below is my suggestion, and perhaps my first blog post.

My suggestion is to read a chapter (the first chapter seems ideal) of a novella that I like, "A Beleaguered City." It's useful in a number of ways.

First for me is something we didn't get to discuss in class - that part of why there can appear to be such homogeneity in the stuff churned out of MFA programs is that they pay so much attention, and so often use as their models, contemporary works of fiction. I can understand the desire to present to people writing that they can more easily engage with, being more "relevant" to them, but it can lead to instructors presenting writing of really variable quality, especially in not being good enough on a fundamental level to overcome objections of "taste."

As often as not, people don't "like" the work they're being made to read, which seems contrary to their use as models. The models we use should be writing of such quality that it transcends boundaries of taste, so as to be able to engage a reader whether or not that particular genre/style of writing is what appeals to them. Works of proven literary and academic merit seem like a more reliable pool of writing to draw from, and so you are now reading a story by a Victorian writer. Margaret Oliphant is not a canonical presence, so I'd like to think that's not why I'm drawn to her writing - it's not like I'm saying we should be necessarily reading Shakespeare and Dickens (though it wouldn't be the worst idea).

Second, there's a trendiness about writing stories with multiple narrators, and this, for me, is an example I always point people towards. Each chapter (as you'll discover after the first two, if you choose to read on) is narrated by a different character. But already from the first chapter, we can see why the story would be told the way it is, with the kinds of social, religious, economic etc. tensions that are talked about. Yes, we find the best form to "tell the story," but at the same time we need to recognize that form is always related to purpose. That how a story is told has to be related to why it is being told. If there is no "why", then the "how" is just stylistics and vanity.

But aside from rhetorical intent, it seems to me that a useful term to steal from film criticism is this idea of a text having great "formal and structural rigour" - that at it's most basic level, the level of language, as well as on the level of story and structure, there is (if not necessarily a unity) a consistency of execution that for canny readers like us, should be unmistakable.

The novella is online because it's old, and so it's public domain. The home (and contents) page: http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/blgctymn.htm

The page for the first chapter (which is the excerpt I'm suggesting): http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/blgctyX1.htm

People who want to be able to view (and edit, I think) the Word 2007 file format, docx, should download this: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-C6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en

Just click on the "download" button, and then install the file.

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