My niece is now in her first semester of her Sophomore year in college. It's a time in her life I'm happy to witness and also one that leaves me with a good shot of wistful nostalgia. Besides my envy over her photography course, she is taking Fiction. I would love so much to sit in a classroom for three hours a week and discuss short story fiction.
Her textbook sits on my lap right now. I asked to see it over two hours ago and find myself unable to return it. Totaling 1,838 pages, this tome is organized with the reader in mind. The first part is the stories themselves. Short stories by Sherwood Anderson, Ambrose Bierce, Isabel Allende, Henry James, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Guy De Maupassant, Joyce Carol Oates, Octavio Paz, Vonnegut and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. To name a few. The second part, and this is the brilliance of this book, is the writers talking about their writing, their stories, and their story. So, for instance, in the second half of the book, is a piece from James Baldwin about dreaming up stories from the moment he learned to read. His fantasies were dismissed as unrestrained observation. He goes on to say that he learned that the things that helped him and the things that hurt him could not be divorced from each other, and that is what made him start writing his unrestrained observations.
Guy De Maupassant says that each of us forms for himself [or herself] an organic illusion of the world, which is the illusion poetic, or sentimental, or joyous, or melancholy, or unclean, or dismal, according to his nature. In other words, the particular way we see the world is our particular individual illusion, and for writers, he goes on to say, their only mission is to reproduce their particular illusion.
What is he saying, that their are no truths, only illusions that are organic in nature? I wish I could sit in that class when this is discussed.
I could stay up the entire night, and the next several to be sure, reading the voices of these writers. It's like conversation, this second half. Page after page of writers talking about writing. For me, that's pure heaven.
Do you think that My Aunt took it would be an acceptable answer when asked tomorrow where her textbook is?
2 comments:
Oh how I want to get my hands on that book. Maybe a better excuse is it was stolen by my Aunt's friend.
::CHUCKLES:: as a teacher i can say i would have no problem with that excuse.
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