Scant Articulations of Time

ARITHA V AN HERK Scant Articulations of Time The short story is a genre both trapped by intensity and freed by brevity. At its best, it can enact a scintilla of momentary dazzlement, a brilliant flash articulated with swift and graceful hesitation. That is perhaps all that can be asked of the short story, and yet, how difficult to achieve that eloquent, elegant shape, a short story that seizes its reader with the glittering authority of a novel, the reduced beauty of a poem. The moveable feast that banquets short stories written in Canada belies description, falls into a wonderful, vast bath of difference, of articulated regionalisms, of strange euphonies and stranger etchings. Short stories can truly call themselves the heartbeat of Canadian literature, in so far as they collapse the erratic, the elementat and the reluctant into a version of rnultiplicitous and Wildly contaminatory fiction. The pedantic version of the Canadian short story in English gives it a 'long and substantial tradition' (Weaver, 752) and 'a high degree of sophistication' (Weaver, 755). Such critical evaluations, as Robert Lecker would have it, take place 'against a backdrop of imagined canons' (Lecker, 113), but in the case of the short story, the imagined canon is impossibly chimerical. There is no space that can measure the dimensions of such a multiple genre. But, as Geoff Hancock asserts in the second edition of the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (1997), the.Canadian short story is an optimistic genre, seeding itself as ubiquitously as dandelions do. Such fedora-tipped generalizations properly incite yawns, for while competent short stories persist, appearing regularly in the best and worst of periodicals, there are still only a few that dazzle, that actually stop a discerning reader in her tracks and ask her to reconsidec to halt the tick of narrative expectation and rethink the effect of an epiphany or a powerplay. Proliferative though they might be, our short stories still display a marked yearning for the canonical 1950s, realism's contemplative satisfaction, well rOWlded, fulsome, and replete. For, despite its best intentions, its desire to practise a variety of identities, the Canadian short story seems always to be measuring itself into a Munroesquo costume. Munro and GaHanthavebeen so avidly identified as mistresses of the genre that the form seems to regard itself as needful of a certain kind of 19505 hat with a dotted veil and a guest for self-ironizing frippery. Those writers most gestured towards as masters of this craft are contiguously realistic, riding the vapour trails ofMunro and UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 4, FALL 1999 926 ARITHA VAN HERK Gallant in a version of imitativehomage that is almost disturbing in its revisionist determination, its modernist transfusions. The goal of the modernist story is to achieve a je ns sais quoi of revelation. These stories seek to unveil some kernel of knowledge, often with an emotional quotient, that has baffled or eluded the subject in question, whether narrator or character or both. That they have so thoroughly incorporated that irritating grain of sand, Joyce's notion of epiphany, to the extent that every story must provide a psychologically religious pearl-drop to justify its own narrative, speaks to a disturbing writerly nostalgia. The notion that narrative contains the grammar of its own culmination is a heavily inflected one, essentially anxious, conservative, and suspicious of both abstraction and fragmentation. Hence, the desire for the wellplumaged revelation, that suggestion of a code or guide by which to understand and order events. Even if the effect of such fictions is illusory, and no guidebook is necessarily provided for the inchoate effects and reversals of unpredictable life, the fiction can pretend to a version of coherence, thus satisfying the insecure narrator and narratee both. It is tempting to suspect that, as a virtual state of exile, Canada provides an extravagant excuse for the persistently modernist writer's affair with expatriation, that ongoing and romantic desire that arises from a determined disaffection with home and all it stands for. Since Canada cannot be an unambiguous origin to any writer (except presumably First Nations writers), it serves handily as a political frame, both home and not-home, acts as...