Lecture 43- Short Story in the Modern and Post-modern Era VIII

Good morning and welcome back to the lecture series. We are discussing short story in modern and postmodern era. Today we are going to discuss a short story by Margaret Atwood. So, Margaret Atwood whose full name is Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in November 18, 1939 in Ontario, Canada. She is a Canadian writer best known for her prose fiction and her feminist perspective, the feminist perspective that is at the heart of most of her writings. Atwood was raised in Canada for the majority of her childhood. She is an internationally acclaimed author that has written award-winning poetry, short stories and novels. So, one of her best known quotes today for which she is remembered is that, war is what happens when language fails. We are discussing a short story by Margaret Atwood titled Happy Endings. So, Happy Endings is a short story or more accurately, it could be seen as a piece of metafiction. So, it was first published in Margaret Atwood's 1983 collection Murder in the Dark. The story has postmodern and metafictional elements and offers six alternative storylines which feature a relationship between a man and a woman. Happy Endings is an example of a metafiction where the work becomes self-conscious and it comments about itself being an artefact, a fiction, a creation. So, it creates a distance between the work and the reader. The reader is also conscious about the artefices that are spun through the process of storytelling, through the process of making of a fiction. It is a story about stories and a story about storytelling. So, rather than creating a realist picture of the two protagonists of Happy Endings, namely John and Mary, Atwood deliberately distances the reader from the process of creation, from the storytelling process, reminding the reader that they are nothing more than, so the characters are nothing more than authorial constructs. So, this way the readers cannot immerse themselves in the story and start viewing John and Mary as real people. There is this distance between the work and the reading experience, reading experience is more conscious. Much of Atwood's story is about delineating the six different scenarios, each of which involve a relationship between a man and a woman. But as the story unfurls, the author breaks in on her characters more and more. And in this way, she breaks the fourth wall to remind us that they are mere ciphers, mere creations and that the things being described do not exist outside of the author's own head or for that matter, the reader's own imagination. Atwood wishes to interrogate both the nature of romantic plots in fiction and the reader's attitudes, traditionally how the readers treat them, react to the romantic plots. It is commonplace that happy endings in romantic novels sell very well, people buy them, people like them. It gives readers what they want. It is a wishful closure to a narrative. After various rocky patches, lovers usually end up living in the immortal worlds happily ever after. Although she questions, she revisits such a phrase whether there can ever be, there ever was, there ever can be happily ever after anything of the sort. So, Atwood wants to put such plot lines under her microscope and subject them to closer scrutiny. By the time we get to the fifth plot E, she calls the fifth plot as so A, B, C, D, E. The narrator is happily encouraging the reader to view the plot details as interchangeable between Fred and Madge as if they do not really matter. The more important details are as the closing paragraphs of happy endings have it, character motivation is more important than what they do or what is done to them. So, a feminist angle is evident in the narrative where relationships are shown as not equal in a Men have their things easier than women. And the third of Atwood's six scenarios show Mary as the key player where this point is made more apparent. Freedom does not mean the same thing for girls and boys. So, while James is off on his motorcycle, Mary is forced by societal expectations to do other things. So, although she is also carrying on an affair with a married older man, which is unconventional enough. She, however, cannot be expected to similarly travel in a motorcycle across America by herself because that would not feel safe like it would in the case of a man. So, happy endings is a postmodern story that freely and self-consciously announces itself as a metafiction, as being more interested in how stories work than in telling a story itself. So, it is a story about how stories happen and what should not be expected, what one should expect, where to look at in a story or through a storytelling process. Within the narratives Atwood presents to us, she also addresses some of the inequalities between men and women and exposes how relationships are really a level playing field between the two sexes. According to Rengar Nischick, Margaret Atwood is, I quote, a chronicler of our times, exposing and warning, disturbing and comforting, opening up chasms of meaning as soon as she closes them and challenging us to question conventions and face up to hitherto unarticulated truths, unquote. So, happy endings can be compared to Robert Coover's The Babysitter, in which the author offers several possibilities of what happens to the babysitter, leaving the decision ultimately to the reader's imagination. And it could also be compared to Akira Kurosawa's 1951 film Roshomon, which depicts the rape of a bride and the murder of her husband through various eyewitness accounts. It demonstrates the near impossibility of arriving at one actual final and singular truth of any given event. So, Atwood's technique differs from that of Coover and Kurosawa in that she fleshes out nothing. Indeed, the six possible endings to the story of John and Mary are written as a skeletal outlined only to be filled up through active reading process, through the readers travelling the other half way and applying their own imagination. She opens with the words, I quote, John and Mary meet, what happens next? If you want a happy ending, try A, unquote. In fact, after presenting all of her mock scenarios for the characters, Atwood abruptly changes tone to tell the reader an important fact. The only authentic ending is the one presented here, John and Mary die, John and Mary die, John and Mary die, unquote. After all, the end of every person's life regardless of how they have lived their life or what they experienced is an encountering death. So, Atwood notes that people tend to not think quite like this. In all likelihood, because it is not the most comforting of thoughts and so she uses happy endings to allow people a chance to be a little introspective, to think what is in the end. In the end, whether happy or sad, so much for endings, beginnings are always more fun, she would say. Happy endings is a treatise about how one should savour the development of one's life and move beyond its structures to focus on its meaning and purpose. Nothing remains the same always. So, happy endings is an illustration of the idea that the ending of a story is always the same. It could be the death and therefore, the middle matters more, what happens in the middle should be of more interest, should be something that the reader wants to unpack and decipher further. This idea is based on the fact that eventually everyone dies, so the meaning of life should be looked for elsewhere. So, Atwood's point is to focus the reader on the importance of understanding how the conclusion is reached and why. The six sketches contained in Happy Endings illustrate vast differences between the beginnings and the middle of stories. After this, I will move to our next story and discussion. So, the story is titled One Good Story that won by Thomas King. Thomas King is a pseudonym of Hartley Goodweather. He was born in April 24, 1943 in Roseville, California, US. He is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, screenwriter and photographer, also a member of the Order of Canada. He is often described as one of the finer contemporary aboriginal writers in North America. He is a citizen both of the US and Canada. So, King is of Cherokee and Greek origins and he is considered as a spokesperson for indigenous populations. King likes to play with and interrogate the history and thereby bring in the question of indigenous people's rights, indigenous people's way of greatly disrupted through colonial intervention through colonization. He is also interested in science fiction. King has won the Governor General's Award and the Canadian Authors Award for fiction. Thomas King's stories grapple with subjects such as colonial history, like I said, the Judeo-Christian tradition that tries to replace and dominate the indigenous way of living and being. And he constantly focuses on the question of tribal sovereignty, indigenous sovereignty through telling stories. He transforms old cliches towards dynamic and complex portrayals of American Indians. The Kiyote stories in One Good Story are excellent examples of the way King's humour invites readers to discover different set of truths and possibilities alongside the trickster figure of Kiyote. The trickster figure of Kiyote that dismantles and reassembles historical narratives that are often portrayed as indisputable facts. So, put in simpler words, the colonial version, the coloniser's version about the indigenous people, their lives are often understood as derogatory, as belittling and quite besides the reality of indigenous lives. So, the coloniser's lens make the indigenous lives quite besides what they really are. I mean, it leads to dilution and vulgarisation of meaning, something that Thomas King wants to take up through his act of storytelling. So, just like the coloniser's map making act, his act of narrating about another community cannot be taken as final and indisputable. There has to be a version and alternate reality coming from within these communities as well. So, in One Good Story that one, Thomas King makes history come live, connects the past to the present and invites the readers to question and explore what came before, who came before, did the white men really discover the indigenous people and their lands or were they already pre-existing even before these discoveries? Because Columbus's discoveries made to be understood in mainstream history in a way as though the indigenous people had not existed prior to Christopher Columbus finding them. So, it is made to seem as though Christopher Columbus finds them for the first time and they did not even exist, their lands, their social, cultural, geographical truths did not exist prior to Christopher Columbus locating them. So, the result of Thomas King stories is a powerful and insightful narration about American Indians from within their communities. So, it is the lens that is turned around, it is not the gaze of the coloniser on the indigenous men, the native American Indians, but the other way round, how they choose to be looked at, how they choose to depict themselves, what they think about the Judeo-Christian myths. So, the gaze is returned. Thomas King tells the readers what happens when between a narrator's cumulative memory and the listener's fluid faculty of hearing and imagination, there is a camera, a recorder and a microphone that are determined to freeze narratives about the Red Indian lifestyle. So, the Red Indian is already an offensive term as such used by the white men for the indigenous people. So, the desire to record everything, to find the authentic version, there is a violence that can be extended by these modern devices. They can be seen as intrusive into the natural existence of the indigenous people and the curiosities and doubts and the questions about the authentic Red Indian lifestyle that make the colonisers, the white men, penetrate the indigenous communities and enter into their communities unwarranted. The indigenous people extend their familial propinquity to their surrounding macrocosm, both animate and inanimate. So, they have a very different worldview from that of the Euro-American lifestyle and their relationship with the nature, therefore defines their own existential and spiritual relevance. That is why when the colonial intention is there to hijack the names of the mountains and the rivers, it is seen as synonymous with rendering a group of people with facelessness. So, all these rivers and mountains had indigenous names till the colonizers came, changed the indigenous names to English names and their own existence was imperiled thereby. These indigenous people were rendered with some kind of facelessness, they suffered an identity crisis as a result. So, Christina Orlet argues, I quote, that the act of misnaming our manifestations of power as they include or exclude, allow or deny access, unquote, thereby divesting an individual body of its reality and insistently reducing it to representation. So, that is what indigenous people have been reduced to. Through the mainstream history books and the anthropological exploits that they have suffered, they have been reduced from the discursive realities into very stereotypical representations, something, representations that suit the colonizers gaze and understanding. So, in One Good Story, that one by Thomas King, we see that the white men are interested in a traditional Indian story, but they are instead being given a subversion of their own myth, their own myth of origin, which is tied to their own traditional stories. We see a subversion of the Judeo-Christian myth over here as told from the vantage point of the indigenous person. In the story, the Kiyote is an immoral clown in the natural world. So, when we say immoral, we mean that the moral yardsticks set by the Euro-American groups of people are not abided by the Kiyote. Kiyote does not subscribe to the notions of morality and immorality that define the Eurocentric, the Euro-American world. Many native tribes view the symbolism of this Kiyote as a trickster, as a shapeshifter and transformer. So, at this moment, it could be a fox, the other moment, it could take the shape of a human. In the story, the author has created the parody, a comic inversion of the Bible and mocked the deep meaning behind the story of creation. So, the narrator begins in a typical white man fashion, once upon a time. We know that the Western narrative has a specific beginning, middle and end. And he is trying to put the more discursive existence, the more discursive realities of the indigenous people within this mould of once upon a time, which ends typically with a happily ever after. But that is not how life happens, life is lived by the indigenous communities. So, this is most certainly a mockery of the Western style of documentation, which has a linear progression and which has a very definitive closure. So, King here writes in a broken English and thereby he uses the colonizers vehicle, their language of communication as a way of tampering with the very, their own conventional yardsticks. So, he is mishmashing English with indigenous languages. So, we see that this brings to forefront an open-ended framework of the non-European ethos. So, English being interspersed with the indigenous words. And this creates a kind of threshold at least, some difficulty that the reader ought to face as a way of crossing the border and entering the cosmos of the Indian storytelling. So, it is never a smooth entry into the indigenous person's space. They have to understand the alternate world system that the indigenous people inhabit. And that is how they can appreciate what the indigenous stories are about. If we are reaching an indigenous person with our camera and our recorder, we might not be able to grasp all the realities. So, this is a criticism of the epistemic violence, the anthropological gaze and here we see the counter gaze, the indigenous person looks back at the colonizer. So, throughout the short story, the native man is playing a trick on the three anthropologists that have visited from out of the town and through the biblical story and retelling of God's word, he is revisiting the Judeo-Christian belief. The story he tells is the same as Genesis. So, only a little bit of subversion of the original Genesis. So, he has God creating the world, including a television and a grocery store and God being not so smart, referring to the Adam and Eve story of creation, referring to Eve as evening and calling her she be Indian woman. So, this is also reference to how the colonizers made inroads into the indigenous communities through selling modern objects, modern commodities to them that the indigenous people had never seen before. So, in exchange for a grocery store or a television products of modernity, their lands, their heirlooms that they had bequeathed as ancestral positions were taken away from them. The indigenous people find this exchange as a raw deal, where in exchange for various modern communities such as television, grocery store, matchsticks that the indigenous people have not seen before, their lands, their ancestors lands were taken away from them, things that they consider as heirloom, as something that they have inherited from their ancestors. So, with the reversal of the original myth of Genesis, one good story that one deflates this entire predatory paradigm that the white anthropologists had created that they posited. Playing with the singularity and plurality of God and distorting the names of Adam and Eve into Adam and evening, the desire for the original native story is constantly flouted and frustrated. And what we get in exchange is a distorted Judeo-Christian tale. I am going to read a little bit from the story. So, this is an excerpt. It is hilarious, but it is also very, very insightful about how the indigenous people, indigenous communities feel about the anthropological gaze that colonises mission. The figures of Adam, Eve and even God become signs of something else here as the critics, you know, Davison, Walton and Andrews would point out. I quote from the critics here. I quote from the story here. Unlike Eve, evening is not breaking a treaty, so to speak, with God who has not told her that the tree is sacrosanct. She is hungry and she eats, unquote. Adam, instead of being treated or projected as a novel father figure with Eve as his appendage, so Eve being a lesser human that we find in traditional biblical narration is being held up to ridicule. So, Adam is being ridiculed. Quoting once again from the story, that Adam, not so smart, like Harley James, white man, those. Evening, she be Indian woman, I guess, unquote. And then the critics infer Adam's affinity with white culture, which is written, is contrasted with evening's affinity with native culture, which is primarily oral and closely allied with nature. And further, they say, the critics say, since King's text posits evening's actions as practical rather than seductive, it undercuts Eve's traditional role as femme fatale, unquote. So, evening here is an intelligent woman who can very much be identified in today's modern world and who has the nerve to tell a rather archaic God as he grumbles because she has eaten his apple, calm down, watch some television. So, she has the spunk, she has the guts to tell God, you just calm down and watch some television. In this version, we see Adam and Evening are also expelled from the Garden of Evening, just as the Indians are disposed of their lands, lands of their ancestors, by an angered God because they ate the miso and Adam lied about the number he ate. He nearly forgets the snake in the story. And so, we have the role of the snake in the original biblical myth. But here, the snake, the figure of the snake is foisted as an afterthought. So, there is playing with the myth actually. The snake is suddenly remembered and added in the end and the snake is hissing because Evening or Eve, that is, has comically stuck an apple in his mouth. And this is precisely what comic inversion is about. So, the parody of the biblical myth is hilarious and the story as a whole is absurd and very, very sharp and clever. King denounces the way white men appropriate Indian people's tales and properties and he is doing that, he is commenting on this appropriation in a humorous manner. The first thing that strike the readers is the rhythm which is reminiscent of the way native storytellers narrate a story. So, storytelling is part and parcel of the native indigenous traditions and they do not have documentation as part of their culture. Stories about their myths, about their heirloom, their ancestors pass from one generation to another through listening and repeating, retelling. So, King identifies the epistemic violence inflicted by the Western scriptural knowledge had already commenced with the colonial intention of trying to fix polarities between the indigenous and the Western patterns of living and such that the non-Western other is produced in terms of the Western standards of ideals. They are from the Western man's eye and the non-Western person is already always inferior. Their qualities, their ways of life, their existence are considered as a non-standard, inferior. So, King's counter discourse here is trying to necessitate the binary between, it is trying to debunk the binary between right and wrong written oral and then we see that these binaries created through the Western eye eventually falls apart in the story. So, here I would like to stop our discussion today and let us meet again for another round of discussions in our on-scene lecture. Thank you.