How We Spend Our Days / OCTOBER: DAVID JAUSS

As part of the How We Spend Our Days series, writer Jodi Paloni talks to October’s writer David Jauss about point of view.

JODI: A book that I think should be required reading is one of yours—your essays, On Writing Fiction and particularly “From Long Shots to X-Rays: Distance and Point of View,” a version of which is archived at The Writer’s Chronicle in the September 2000 issue. In Glossolalia, as well as in your previous story collections, you tell stories in both the first and third person. You’ve also used multiple points of view, such as in the story “What They Didn’t Notice.” In your essay, I remember clearly how you take point of view to a much deeper level than a lot of material I’ve been able to find in other craft essays. You discuss long-range and close-up perspective and that point-of-view is not just the use of “person.” Would you be willing to talk a little about your point of view on point of view?

DAVE: I think point of view is the most poorly taught, and therefore the most misunderstood, aspect of fiction. Most craft essays and creative writing textbooks focus on the narrator’s person, not on the techniques the narrator uses, and the techniques are vastly more important than the person. To make matters worse, the authors of these essays and textbooks tend to write prescriptively rather than descriptively, asserting that certain techniques, like omniscience, are available only to certain types of narrators. If we look at the actual practice of writers, however, we’ll see that all of the techniques that comprise point of view—the presentation of only what can be seen and heard, as in drama; omniscience; indirect interior monologue (aka free indirect discourse); direct interior monologue; and stream of consciousness—are available to any narrator regardless of person. There are innumerable examples of first-person omniscience throughout literary history, for example, including the Decameron, Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Madame Bovary, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, and, more recently, works by Barth, Beckett, Borges, Díaz, Eugenides, García Márquez, Grass, Kundera, O’Brien, Rushdie, and Welty, not to mention our most recent Nobel Laureate. Still, virtually everyone who’s written on the subject of point of view claims that omniscience is the sole province of third-person narrators. And the most commonly used term for indirect interior monologue these days is “close third,” a term that belies the fact that first-person narrators can, and do, use this technique as well.

Also, because it’s generally a bad idea to shift person in a work of fiction—to have a first-person narrator suddenly morph into a third-person one or vice versa—textbook authors have leapt to the conclusion that point of view should be singular and consistent. That may be good advice when it comes to the narrator’s person but it’s definitely not good advice when it comes to the narrator’s techniques. As I tried to show in my essay, the techniques that truly constitute point of view are inevitably multiple and shifting. For example, the point of view we call third-person omniscience may be consistently third-person but it is not consistently omniscient, for the narrator must of necessity shift from omniscience to the dramatic point of view whenever she deals with a character whose mind she doesn’t enter. And narrators shift from one narrative technique to another not only within a story or novel but also within a single paragraph—and sometimes even a single sentence. In one brief paragraph from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for example, Joyce shifts from omniscience to indirect interior monologue to dramatic point view.

It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. That was very far away. First came the vacation. It was like a train going in and out of tunnels and that was like the noise of the boys eating in the refectory when you opened and closed the flaps of your ears. Term, vacation; tunnel, out; noise, stop. How far away it was! It was better to go to bed to sleep. Only prayers in the chapel and then bed. He shivered and yawned.

Joyce starts simultaneously inside and outside his protagonist’s consciousness, then goes deeper and deeper inside, and then concludes completely outside the character. In short, in this one paragraph he does what he and every other writer worthy of the name have done in their works: move from outside to inside, from long shots to X-rays, and back, modulating the psychic distance between the reader and the character to create the effect and meaning they desire. 

One final point: defining point of view in terms of person ignores the fact that first-person narrators use third person whenever they talk about other characters and that they sometimes even talk about themselves in third person (witness Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum and, more recently, Kevin Brockmeier’s O. Henry Award-winning story “These Hands,” which begins, “The protagonist of this story is named Lewis Winters. He is also its narrator, and he is also me”).

As for how I choose what point of view I use in my fiction, all I can say is “I’m not sure.” It’s a whole lot easier to analyze point of view choices once they’re on the page than it is to explain how those choices were made. Basically, I just try several approaches until one feels right. I wish I could give you a more specific and helpful answer, but if I did, it wouldn’t be an honest answer.

JODI: For writers wanting to learn more from Dave on all aspects of craft, I highly recommend, On Writing Fiction, previously published in hardback as Alone With All That Could Happen. Thanks so much for the interview, Dave. Enjoy the rest of October!

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Many thanks to JODI PALONI for Catching Jauss.
Jodi can be found at a Stone’s Throw, where she sometimes blogs. She is a freelance writer, as well as a creativity coach, and her writing has been published in Carve Magazine, upstreet, Whitefish Review, Contrary Magazine, and Spartan, among other places. Her story “Deep End” won the 2013 Short Story America Prize for Short Fiction and will be anthologized in Short Story America Volume IV. She also placed second in the 2012 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest for her story, “The Third Element.”

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October 1: How We Spend Our Days: David Jauss

October 2: Dave and Jodi discuss Munro,Chekhov, Carver, and the short story

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— Other Writers in the Series—

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How We Spend Our Days / OCTOBER: DAVID JAUSS

As part of the How We Spend Our Days series, writer Jodi Paloni talks to October’s writer David Jauss about Alice Munro, Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver, and the short story.

JODI: What was your reaction when you heard that Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature?

DAVE: I had pretty much given up hope that the Swedish Academy would ever recognize someone who wrote short fiction rather than novels—after all, not one of the previous winners wrote short fiction exclusively—so I was thrilled when she won the prize. I took it as reparation, 110 years late, for failing to give the award to Chekhov, and it made me feel that short stories just might finally start to get their due.

JODI: I’ve heard Munro referred to as Canada’s Chekhov. How has her work instructed your writing and teaching?

DAVE: I wish I could say that my writing shows her influence, but alas, I don’t think it does. Her work has definitely affected the way I teach writing, however. By subverting so many of the so-called “rules” of fiction, she has made me aware of possibilities available to fiction writers that I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. Munro’s fiction is frequently described as “traditional,” but it is anything but. Like Chekhov, to whom she’s often compared—indeed, it’s become almost obligatory to call her “the Canadian Chekhov”—she is an extraordinarily innovative writer. Like him, she breaks every so-called rule in the book, and by doing so she reveals new ways to convey the depth and complexity of human experience.

But she hasn’t been merely following Chekhov’s playbook. They share subtlety, a self-effacing, unprepossessing style, a sympathetic but unsentimental understanding of an enormous range of human beings, and a willingness to depart from the conventions of their times, but her approach to story-telling is quite different from his. Her stories are far more capacious than his—and certainly far more capacious than mine. It’s not unusual for her stories to cover decades, and they loop backwards and forwards in time in unexpected but always enlightening ways. And her handling of point of view is also more complex than Chekhov’s and virtually anyone else’s. Anyone who believes the contemporary shibboleth that point of view should be consistent throughout a story would have that belief seriously tested by Munro’s brilliant modulations of point of view.

The best description of Munro’s original approach to both structure and point of view is her own: “A story is not like a road to follow,” she said, “it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.” Ultimately, it is her innovations, especially in structure and point of view, that make her stand in relation to our time as Chekhov stood in relation to his, not any superficial similarity in their styles or their attitudes toward their characters.

JODI: I like that analogy of entering a house; it’s useful to think about writing a story in that way, especially about the way in which “the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows.” Do you think this kind of notoriety–a Nobel Prize in Literature–will serve the short story form?

DAVE: I’m not expecting the world to reverse its novel-centric view of fiction anytime soon (or ever), but I do hope the prize makes people recognize that, in Munro’s own words, “the short story is an important art, not just something you play around with until you write a novel.”  For me, the short story is the most demanding and beautiful of all fictional forms. But don’t take my word for it; take Gabriel García Márquez’s. A few years ago, he said, “I’m convinced more than ever of the supremacy of the short story over the novel.”  The short story may be small in size but not in ambition. As Stephen Milhauser has said, the “ambition of the short story” is “to body forth the whole world . . . in a grain of sand.”  Whereas novelists all too often make a molehill out of their mountain of material, short story writers can make a mountain out of a tiny grain of sand. Amy Bloom summed it up best: both forms scale Mt. Everest; the short story just does it faster.

JODI: Besides Chekhov and Munro, what other short story writers would you recommend to short story readers and why? Or, to use the old familiar question, if you were to be stranded with five story collections on a desert island, which ones would you hope they’d be?

DAVE: Chekhov and Munro would definitely be on my desert island list, but since you’ve asked for other choices, I’ll be greedy and take five nice fat ones: the collected stories of Hemingway, Faulkner, García Márquez, Kafka, and Flannery O’Connor. But these are all books by established masters and your readers have probably already read them (if they haven’t, they should do so pronto). So here are five of the many lesser known contemporary collections that I admire and wish were more widely read: Leslee Becker’s The Sincere Café; Jack Driscoll’s Wanting Only to Be Heard; Julie Orringer’s How to Breathe Underwater; Ann Pancake’s Given Ground; and Eric Puchner’s Music Through the Floor.

JODI: And, Carver?

DAVE: Raymond Carver was a very big influence on me, as many of my stories probably make all too clear. I was drawn to his work in the same way, and for the same reasons, I was drawn to Chekhov, who is to me the Lord God of short fiction. They both have a cold eye and a warm heart and write sympathetically about people quite different from themselves. I think of them as the literary equivalent of defense attorneys, writers who make the case for even the most flawed of us while looking unblinkingly at those flaws. O’Connor’s been a big influence on me as well, but I see her more as a prosecuting attorney, someone who is doing her damnedest to convict her characters. Even though she sees these “convictions” as ultimately for the characters’ good—her goal is to show them, and her readers, the way to salvation—I think sometimes her heart is almost as cold as her eye, so I’m less drawn to her. But lordy, can she ever write. I marvel at her stories—and her essays, too. I think Mystery and Manners should be required reading of anyone who wants to be a fiction writer.

How We Spend Our Days: David Jauss

Catching Jauss: David Jauss on Point of View

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— Other Writers in the Series—

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At this time in 2010, I was working with my advisor David Jauss, and I invited him to write a post in the How We Spend Our Days series. He declined, saying it would be a pretty short post—he wrote and he taught. When his new book came out a year ago, I asked him again. Same answer, he said. Somehow, Jodi Paloni managed to catch him. And what’s more, she caught a lot of him—three days’ worth. Come back on OCTOBER 2^nd to hear what Dave has to say about Alice Munro, Anton Chekhov, and the short story. Then come back on OCTOBER 3^rd to see what he has to say about point of view.

I couldn’t be prouder to include in the series the man I think of as the god of writing craft.

Today, please welcome writer DAVID JAUSS, caught by writer Jodi Paloni.

JODI: I know that many of your September days—years and decades of days, in fact—have been spent heading back to teach the full-time academic year at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, after a summer of relaxing and teaching in Vermont. How long have you been a student or a teacher, heading back to school in the fall?

DAVE: Since (gulp) 1956.

JODI: You recently retired from full-time academic teaching. What has it been like this year, not heading back to school during the back-to-school season?

DAVE: For the most part, I’ve barely noticed the fact that I’m not back in the classroom. That’s probably due to the fact that I’m still teaching for the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and I spent the first two weeks of the fall semester critiquing my advisees’ work. But every now and then, I think about how much more time I have for my own work and get a whiff of bliss.

JODI: I like that, “a whiff of bliss.” So how do you find yourself spending your days?

DAVE: Besides writing, reading, and teaching my VCFA students, I spend time with my wife, our children and their significant others, our grandkids, and our pooches. I’m also currently addicted to the Danish television series Borgen.

JODI: I haven’t heard of that one, but I’ll check it out. Let’s talk about Glossolalia. The opening story, “Torque,” is a domestic tragedy, but told with a unique twist. You deal with your main character with such a deep sense of compassion regarding the “point of no return.” Heart-breaking stuff. I have to say, it may be my favorite story in the collection and one that has stuck with me since the first time I read it in Black Maps. Do you have an all-time favorite story of your own?

DAVE: I’m glad you like “Torque.” It just might be my favorite too, though I’m also more pleased than not with “Glossolalia.” I made them the first and last stories of the book not only because they’re my favorites, but also because I see them as “bookends” of sorts. “Torque” is about a man who suffers a breakdown and loses touch with reality, and “Glossolalia” is about a man who recovers from a breakdown; the first ends in darkness and despair and the last in light, forgiveness, and love. I wanted the collection as a whole to trace that arc from darkness to light (for lack of better words) as much as possible, and that’s why I began it with the stories I consider the darkest, ones about mental breakdowns, death, murder, loss of religious faith, etc., and ended it with stories that are more hopeful (though still dark, alas; I’m not the world’s most optimistic guy), ones about love, forgiveness, acceptance, etc. I realize that the order of the collection doesn’t perfectly enact this narrative arc—at times I felt the need for contrast, a change of voice or subject matter, etc.—but I wanted the book as a whole to suggest it.

JODI: What are you working on post Glossolalia?

DAVE: I’m working on some new stories I hope to include in a second volume of new and selected stories that Press 53 plans to publish next year. Besides the new stories, this volume will contain some works there wasn’t room for in Glossolalia, including a revised version of a novella from my first book, Crimes of Passion, and a couple of stories from my second, Black Maps.

JODI: I’m looking forward to that. You write poetry as well as short stories. Tell us a little about your work. How much time do you give to poems versus short stories? How does being a poet impact your story writing and vice versa?

DAVE: Although I write poetry and short fiction, I’ve never been able to do both of them at the same time. I’ll go through periods in which I write nothing but poems and other periods in which I write nothing but stories. I can’t explain why, but sometimes things come to me as poems and other times they come to me as stories. It’s as if there’s a switch in my brain, and when it’s flipped one way, I write poems and when it’s flipped another, I write stories. And unlike some people who write in both genres, I’ve never written a poem that turned into a story or a story that turned into a poem. Stuart Dybek has done that, he says, but it’s never happened to me. Nor have I ever written what could be called a prose poem. Although there are a lot of similarities between poems and stories (more than there are between stories and novels, I’d argue), they require, at least for me, very different modes of thinking. When I’m writing poems, I’m thinking in lines, and when I’m writing stories, I’m thinking in sentences. In any case, I don’t seem to be able to choose what genre I can write at any given time. When I’m writing stories, I can’t imagine ever writing poems again, and vice versa. Right now I’m in the longest story-centered period of my life; I don’t think I’ve written a poem for six or seven years. But who knows?—I just may wake up tomorrow and find the switch in my brain has flipped from Fiction to Poetry. However, because there are so many similarities between poems and stories, thanks to their mutual focus on communicating an experience as compactly as possible, I think my writing in each genre influences my writing in the other. Specifically, I think writing poems has made me more conscious of rhythm and sound in my fiction than I would have been had I never written poems, and I also think it’s led me to write stories that are less overtly plotted than traditional stories, more “lyrical” in form, so to speak. And conversely, writing stories has led me to write some poems that tell stories, albeit in a more oblique way than in my fiction.

JODI: As a student of the short story, it has been such a privilege for me to know you and work with you and read your stories. You’re known as one of the legendary short fiction master teachers at Vermont College of the Fine Arts. Do you enjoy teaching or writing, one more than the other?

DAVE: Well, since legends are by definition either exaggerations or out-and-out lies, I guess I can accept the title of “legendary master.” No doubt a lot of students would beg to differ with that description, however. But I do work very hard on my students’ behalf and I enjoy it almost as much as I enjoy writing. For me, it’s just another way to feed what Jean Rhys calls “the lake.” In her Paris Review interview, she says, “Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.” If Jean Rhys is a trickle, then I’m at best a drop, but in both my teaching and writing, I’m trying to feed the lake to the best of my ability.

JODI: In my estimation, you most certainly are. I am grateful for the countless drops—pearls—from you that impact my writing, which is why I wanted to create this post. It gave me a chance to chat with you again about the work. I’m curious, too, about the place where you work. Would you send some photos?

DAVE: I can’t imagine anyone would want to see a photo of my office––it’s pretty dull.

JODI: What? I love seeing people’s offices. Are those all of your books? How do you decide which ones to keep and which ones to let go?

DAVE: No, those aren’t all the books I have. The photo shows only two of the seventeen bookcases scattered around the house, not to mention the piles of books I have stacked on endtables and nightstands, etc. Except for the bathrooms, every room in the house has at least one bookcase and most have several. I used to have an office full of books at my university office too, but I had to give more than a thousand of those books to the library because I didn’t have room for them at home. And I’m at the point now that I can’t get a new book unless I get rid of one–there’s just no more room.

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AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• Steven Schwartz’s Little Raw Souls. I chose it because I have long been a fan of Schwartz’s work. To my mind, this is his best book to date. Anyone who loves the short story form ought to give themselves the great pleasure of reading it.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• Don’t neglect body language. Depending on what scientific study you most trust, 65 to 90% of all communication in life is conveyed via body language, yet we tend to use it only sparingly in our fiction. Rather than describe a character’s body language, we tend to interpret it. We say things like “He was visibly angry” when we should be making the anger visible.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I don’t think I have any strange reading or writing habits. Doesn’t everybody yodel and tap-dance while reading and writing?

CATCHING JAUSS:

DAVID JAUSS ON MUNRO, CHECKHOV, AND THE SHORT STORY

DAVID JAUSS ON POINT OF VIEW

By David Jauss

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— Other Writers in the Series—

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I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month, a guest writer shares how he or she spends the day. This month, something different! Today, guest host Jodi Paloni introduces the next writer in the series, and on the first, we’ll have an interview!

October 1, 2014: David Jauss
photo credit: Arkansas Literary Festival

by GUEST HOST JODI PALONI

JODI at Vermont College of Fine Arts

I first met Cynthia Martin climbing the long stairway leading to the chapel room, a grand space, at Vermont College of Fine Arts on our way to a faculty reading. I can’t remember which of our many teachers read that night, but I do remember a walk downtown afterwards and talking with Cynthia about the writing projects we were most excited about, and the daunting, yet fabulous adventure of going for our MFA degrees in Writing. That was over four years ago. Cynthia and I have been talking writing ever since.

It is my great pleasure to be a guest host at Catching Days and an even greater pleasure to introduce the next writer in the series, David Jauss. Cynthia and I share a mutual admiration for the Vermont College mentor we both respect, and more, we mutually regard him for the writer he is, the way in which his own fiction “walks his talk.”

But the first piece I ever read by Dave was not a work of fiction. It was an essay from a first edition hardcover publication (fresh off the press!) of his collection of craft essays, Alone with All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom about the Craft of Fiction. The current paperback version is titled, On Writing Fiction, but I admit that I like the original title far better. It tells us so much about the contents of the book and “alone with all that could happen” was also exactly how I felt approaching the degree program, until I met Dave.

I first met Dave over a meal in the Dewey Hall cafeteria at Vermont College, the summer residency 2009. He asked me what I had been reading lately, and I responded, “Wait a sec. I have to think.” He laughed and said the same thing sometimes happens to him. We did manage to stitch together a conversation about the authors we each enjoyed, and afterwards, I walked to the college bookstore and bought his book of essays. The next morning, I took Alone With All That Could Happen and a cup of coffee to a bench in a small park in downtown Montpelier to begin my formal education in writing fiction.

Here’s one of the first sentences I highlighted:

How can writers blame their readers for failing to recognize that fiction is fiction, not truth, when we do everything we can to make them believe something we imagined is true.

I would spend the next two years trying to do just that. Dave’s book became my MFA bible. Other chapters found more marks, especially the craft essay on point of view, a lesson I needed to study several times until I finally got the teaching to show up in my work. More recently, I turned to his chapter “Stacking Stones: Building a Unified Story Collection” when my stories were finally ready to be, well, stacked.

But Dave is far more than a beloved teacher and an astute craft essayist. He is a fine short story writer and a poet, with many books to show for decades of days spent tapping the words onto the page, including his latest–Glossolalia, New and Collected Works–published by Press 53.

Come back on OCTOBER 1st for a Catching Days interview with DAVID JAUSS.

OTHER POSTS ON DAVID JAUSS:

• WORDS OVERFLOWN BY STARS
• I SPENT THE DAY WITH CHEKHOV
• CROSSING BORDERS
• ALONE WITH ALL THAT COULD HAPPEN
• YOU ARE NOT HERE