During our literary criticism class today, we had a small discussion about how the short story seems to be modeled after the male sexual experience. Within a short story there is the beginning (the conflict) which eventually rises up to the climax. The short story structure then slowly descends as the climax has been revealed and the story come to a close. Before class today, I had never thought about this parallel and I have to say I am intrigued by what could be a very true (or false) claim. I just recently finished reading a book called How Stella Got Her Groove Back and I am amazed with how this book, written by a female African American fiction writer, resists the normal layout of the short story. As myself and a friend read this book, we found ourselves becoming extremely agitated with the way the book plays out. It is impossible, we feel, to find a climax anywhere in the book. This because there is literally so much going on in the story that there could be six or seven different climatic points of the novel. The author's (Terry McMillan) writing style is not set in the structure of the normal story, but in fact, jumps all over the place. In my own societal ignorance, I finished the book feeling dissatisfied with not being able to identify the most important part of the book. However, after class today, I have been given a completely new perspective on why McMillan chose to do this in her writing. For a woman author writing about the life and story of a woman, it would make no sense what so ever to follow the normal and male-dominated sequence of events in storytelling. Now, looking back, I find this to be an amazing and important way of writing a novel like How Stella Got Her Groove Back.
Here is a link to the Amazon.com page for the book How Stella Got Her Groove Back. I'd encourage you all to read some of it (an incredibly easy, funny read) if for nothing else than just to see how the normal nature of story telling is defied:
1 comments:
Nice post, Abigail. I don't know that you have to feel that these things are overdetermined, or that male or female writers always write in the same way. It is fairly typical of modern and postmodern novels that they resist the typical conventions of plot. Still, someone like Cixous identifies this as "ecriture feminine." A writing that is more compatible with female experience and sensibility, even if it is something that is also done by men. Cixous's great example of "ecriture feminine" after all, is James Joyce. So it's not too neat. On the other hand, it is worth asking why the short story has been dominated by and interesting and powerful formula, but one that may reflect male experience--sexual or otherwise--than female experience. What does this mean for how we conceive of women as writers or readers. Or of men as readers or writers?
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