[This semester,
as part of my Ethnic
American Lit course, I’ve taught all or part of three short story cycles: Love Medicine, The Joy Luck Club, and The
House on Mango Street. So this week I wanted to AmericanStudy those three
works, as well as a few other examples of this complex
literary genre.]
On the value of
reading a cycle’s stories on their own terms, and the necessity of not stopping
there.
Nearly a year
ago, as part of my July 4th series, I wrote
about Tim O’Brien’s compelling and powerful short story “Speaking
of Courage,” and implicitly made the case for that work as a standalone
text, one that can and should be read as a distinct short story. The same can
definitely be said for most of the other long stories that comprise the heart
of O’Brien’s short short cycle The Things
They Carried (1990), the book that also features “Speaking”: the title
story, “On the Rainy River,” “Sweetheart
of the Song Tra Bong,” and “How
to Tell a True War Story” (among others) are all amazing works that have
plenty to offer if read on their own terms. Indeed, I would go further:
although perhaps best known as a novelist, O’Brien is a master of the short
story form, and each of those stories is dense and demanding enough that they
require us to focus in on them individually, closely, and at length, a form of
close reading that it might be more difficult to perform fully or successfully
if we’re reading them as chapters of a longer work.
So we can and
should read O’Brien’s short stories individually—but at the same time, I would
argue that we should ideally do so with the book in hand, because they build
upon, engage with, and even complicate and change both one another and the
shorter inter-chapters that surround them. That interconnected nature is most
dramatically illustrated by “Good
Form,” a very short piece that comes late in the book (it’s the 18th
of the book’s 22 stories), that opens “It’s time to be blunt,” and that bluntly
seems to deconstruct every other story in the superficially autobiographical
collection. “I’m forty-three years old, true, and I’m a writer now, and a long
time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier,” O’Brien
continues. “Almost everything else is invented.” There is, of course, no necessary
reason why we should have otherwise read the book’s individual stories as
accurate or authentic to either O’Brien’s life or historical experiences—other than
that, y’know, they often feature Tim O’Brien as a character, and that they’re
part of a book dedicated to many of the story’s other featured characters, and
that they deal with specific historical events and moments from the Vietnam War
and its era, and that they include sentences like “This is true” (the opening
line of “How to Tell”), and…
Okay, so there
are lots of reasons to read the book’s individual stories as “true”—and O’Brien
likewise engages with but tries to challenge and revise our understanding of
precisely that question in “Good Form,” arguing that the “form” he utilizes
throughout the collection is because, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want
you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” It’s of
course possible to capture the former in an individual short story, or even a
single moment within such a story, and O’Brien’s collection is full of those
moments. But I would argue that reading
them in relationship to each other, and ultimately as part of a whole, offers
an even more potent and powerful effect, one that both undermines and amplifies
our perspective on war and America, memory and history, identity and
perspective, and what works of art and culture can do to portray and help
create such themes. O’Brien’s book is one of our greatest short story cycles,
and the way it creates both individual and collective effects is one of its
greatest strengths.
Last cycle
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other short story cycles you’d highlight?
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