Saturday 18 February 2017

For Wed 21: George Saunders, on "The School" by Donald Barthelme and how to write a short story

We are all a community: let's get ready to write with and back and forth at each other.

Read:
http://paulsaxton.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/saunders-barthelme-a.pdf

in Come Back, Donald Barthelme, ed. Dave Eggaes, San Francisco : McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, [2007]

and comment on one or more of the three:
a) a surprising statement
b) an insightful statement
c) a statement you disagree with

8 comments:

  1. b) an insightful statement
    “No worthy problem is ever solved within the plane of its original conception” (p.36)

    In my point of view, the conception of an idea generally starts by finding a problem that needs to be solved. A problem could be our own desire to write; or the unbearable realization that something must be written, either to benefit an individual or a collective.

    The problem in itself cannot be solved without passing through a process of finding “ideas”. Consequently, by selecting the writer's most creative or, perhaps, controversial ideas; one can start the process of problem solving. But, in order to solve the problem that has been found, the author must externalize and materialize his or her ideas. The writer must pass through a series of experiments in which he or she will come to a conclusion about the success or failure of the material application his or her ideas.

    The process, which is to say the development of the idea, will ideally result in the solution to the original problem. However, in order to achieve the most adequate solution, one must analyze the whole problem; must be observant of its origin and content. And, of course, one might leave the original plane where the problem was initially created.

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  2. c) a statement you disagree with
    "We, like the children, cheer wildly."

    This is the only statement on the text that I have to disagree with. Sometimes short stories can be tricky to create. Often I feel like some writers rely too much on certain "gimmicky" techenics to grab our attention and make an impact. Should it be from exagerated scenarios; predictable escalations or surprising twists. Escalation is mentioned on the text, on how good it is executed and how it avoids following a path we expect, and that I agree with. The expectation created gave me a fascination to know the outcome or the follow up to the pattern created by the author. When the love angle is brought up by the children and they start using a "professional diction" is the point of the story where I think a twist happens. The author escalated in a much larger scale what was happening around him, to a level of seriousness and importance that had me hooked and intrigued. That was the punch line in my point of view. "The reader is satisfied: so much has happened, in so short a time and in such an unexpected way. It could end with a simple line: "I looked at Helen, and she looked at me."" I could not concur more. "But Barthelme, being great, abides long enough to produce from his sleeve one last escalation which, Barthelme being Barthelme, arrives in the person (?) of a gerbil (...) We, like the children, cheer wildly". My reaction to the ending was slighlty irritated or riled. Since I felt that the reading was abruptly halted by this girbil and it caught me off guard in a negative way. Almost as if the Hot Wheels gas station(often mentioned in the text as a propulsor for the story), had a brick wall instead of a finish line at the end.

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  4. B) An insightful statement
    "We, like the children, cheer wildly."

    This statement made a lot of sense to me, as did the ending of the story. It is my opinion that playfulness is a powerful quality that must be taken seriously. What the author demonstrates with his quasi-surreal ending is exactly that, that playfulness is necessary and there are circumstances where nonsense is really what makes sense. The author's never-ending escalations taught the reader to expect the unexpected, so why would the reader expect a safe ending line? Why would the reader even want that? We cheer for the walking gerbil with a smug expression because in some way or another we were expecting that. There is value in everything, specially in the nonsensical, absurd side of life (or fiction). And that is wonderful.

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  5. b) An Insightful Statement
    "A story is made of things that fling our little car forward."

    I liked this statement, it is a good idea on how to progress on a short story. George Saunders does a great job on summaryzing while explaining the short story "The School" by Donald Barthelme. Saunders compares the process of writing a short story to a hot wheels device, a little gas station. So, you have a track, but you need to "fill" up before you progress trhow it. Same thing happens in a short story, you have a book (track) and you have a reader (car) but you need the "gas" to make the reader finish the book. Saunders then shows us that these "gas stations" appear in Barthelme short story as surprises, things we are not expecting, like a new thing in a pattern-element. So we clearly see a pattern of things dying in this short story, but we find different things happening for the same outcome. For example, the puppy Edgar was found underneath a truck by a class student before it died, and the children named him Edgar after their teacher. I feel like this is what keeps the pattern interesting, It shows us the different possibilities, like what if this little girl had never found the puppy underneath the truck? Would it live? Another thing that makes this short story interesting is the escalation of these patterns, we go from dead trees to dead kids (wow, that escalated quickly!).

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  6. b) "I knew what was going to happen."
    Esta afirmação demonstra o quão inevitável e, por vezes, trágica é a morte. Antagonicamente àquilo que associamos a "escola", como a ideia de exclarecer dúvidas, as mortes ocorridas criam perguntas para as quais não existem respostas.
    Ao contrário do rumo inicial do texto com a ideia de ser a morte a dar sentido à vida, o fim revela-se uma peripeteia, ao dar continuidade à vida mesmo sentindo a proximidade da morte.
    Apesar de a afirmação se refirir à morte do cachorro, "I knew what was going to happen" parece prever o fim que está por vir ("the new gerbil walked in").

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  7. Not so much an insightful statement as an insightful use of form, Saunders’ mirroring of the same devices that Barthelme uses to structure his story, not only make the essay arguably as interesting as the story itself in terms of trajectory, but function as a self reflective demonstration as to their effectiveness as a toolset. Just as Saunders comments on Barthleme’s use of ‘gas stations’ in ‘The School’, in his own essay in turn he employs similar techniques, with periodic humorous and anecdotal interjections and laconic comments such as ‘Sheesh’ (p.36) or ‘…more often fly out and hit one’s sister in the face’ (p.33). Just as Barthelme’s action escalates, by the end of Saunders’ essay too, we have arguably leapt to another plain as he begins himself to embellish the narrative with his own depictions of Helen ‘drumming her ink-stained fingers, gazing out the window, waiting, hoping’ which move his criticism from the world of analysis of existing material into something more imaginative. As Saunders leads us through the story, which escalates in itself, he also continues to escalate the tempo of his own writing from the theoretical (Freitag’s triangle) to a torrent of speculative questions on the gerbil’s sudden appearance, all contributing to an incredibly cleverly calculated essay.

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  8. This statement unveils the real purpose and theme of the short story: although of order (if we presume that life comes before death) our personal take on life is presented.
    The author makes use of the Saunders short story construction and in each paragraph (in a rising action) approaches new stages of knowledge resorting to the kids understanding. First everything dies, seaming not to stop. In a way it did. When the students start to question the teacher with multiple metaphysical questions love comes up like a possible solution to improve life (“there was value everywhere”).This way their dying anxiety is set aside (“we are frightened” to “the children were exited").
    Barthelme proposes a love celebration (“Its a love story”) by exposing that whole classroom to a state of thought that is not permanently considering death but enjoying what life has to give, love and a new gerbil.

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