Story Endings and Me (aka: It's a long post because I'm still learning how to blog)

Outstanding Conclusions from Great Short Stories


Ernest Hemingway’s “A Very Short Story” from In Our Time, 1939.
The protagonist, a wounded soldier, falls madly in love with his nurse, Luz, but they can’t get married right away. During a period of separation, she leaves him for an Italian major, an ostensibly bigger and better man. The story ends:

“The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.”

Denis Johnson’s “Work” from Jesus’ Son, 1992
The narrator, a man known only as Fuckhead, abandons his girlfriend at a motel after a drug binge only join up with a friend named Wayne on an excursion to steal wire and copper from an abandoned housing development. The narrator later discovers the house they robbed from was purchased by Wayne and his ex-wife. Broke, aimless, and heartbroken, the men end the day at their usual watering hole:

“The Vine had no jukebox, but a real stereo continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce. ‘Nurse,’ I sobbed. She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass, no measuring. ‘You have a lovely pitching arm.’ You had to go down to them like a hummingbird over a blossom. I saw her much later, not too many years ago, and when I smiled she seemed to believe I was making advances. But it was only that I remembered. I’ll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.”

Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams” (2002)
Johnson’s “Train Dreams” could be categorized as a long story, depending on one’s method of categorization. Nevertheless, it features a man named Robert Grainier whose life falls to ruin and monotony after his wife (Gladys) and infant daughter (Kate) are killed in a forest fire in the Idaho panhandle around 1920. Years pass and rumours of a wolf-girl spread through the few people with whom he associates. She appears to him one night, wounded, allowing him to apply a bandage, and then she vanishes. The story concludes with Grainier attending a freak show with the intention to ogle Theodore the Wonder Horse, but the evening ends when a wolf-boy takes the stage:

“But they hushed, all at once and quite abruptly, when he stood utterly still at center stage, his arms straight out from his shoulders, and went rigid, and began to tremble with a massive inner dynamism. Nobody present had ever seen anyone stand so still and yet so strangely mobile. He laid his head back until his scalp contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, a a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship’s horn, the locomotive’s lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moan-music of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever.”

Leonard Michaels’ “Murderers” (1975) from A Girl with a Monkey (2000)
A group of adolescent boys climb the rooftops of their Lower East Side neighbourhood in order to perch on a water tower and masturbate while watching their rabbi and his wife have sex. The youngest boy falls to his death, which the naked rabbi witnesses. In the instant, he shouts “Murderers!” though no murder’s been committed. The story concludes:

“Nothing was discussed.

The rabbi used his connections, arrangements were made. We were sent to a camp in New Jersey. We hiked and played volleyball. One day, apropos of nothing, Melvin came up to me and said little Arnold had been made of gold and he, Melvin, of shit. I appreciated the sentiment, but to my mind they were both made of shit. Harold Cohen never again spoke to either of us. The counselors in the camp were World War II veterans, introspective men. Some carried shrapnel in their bodies. One had a metal plate in his head. Whatever you said to them they seemed to be thinking of something else, even when they answered. But step out of line and a plastic lanyard whistled burning notice across your ass.

At night, lying in the bunkhouse, I listened to owls. I’d never before heard that sound, the sounds of darkness, blooming, opening inside you like a mouth.”

Me
With all that out of the way, I’ll quickly say something of myself, in an effort to follow my first (confessional) post and adhere to the philosophy of this blog thing. The Barth lecture went well. I tripped up once, maybe twice, but on the whole it was, I feel, a success. It was also an exercise in learning to love a kind of story I otherwise overlook. Crazy, though, how long it takes to prepare a 50 minute lecture. I spent over a week putting it and the PowerPoint presentation together, wanting to be accessible yet comprehensive and exciting, to include pictures (because they’re fun when done well), all the while knowing that a good portion of the students would simply sit in the auditorium, tune me out like some annoying mosquito and cruise their Facebook accounts. I loathe the day wireless internet made its way into the classroom (I don’t even get it in my office). So much for the Socratic Method being alive and well in the classroom – Mark Zuckerberg (et al) have raped and murdered that time-tested system of learning. Nonetheless, the lecture, as I say, was a success and fun to lead.

In other news, my department’s Graduate Studies Committee decided my face is like filthy rag your babushka must take to the riverbank and grind against a metal washboard to get clean. In other words, my already delayed PhD research is being further delayed by revisions to my proposal so that I can attend to issues of interest to profs with entirely other scholarly agendas than my own. God forbid someone study literature as literature and rhetoric as rhetoric anymore, but I’m trying. Of course, I recognize the presence of power discourses in the Foucauldian sense, but one must resist Foucault’s reading of power discourses from implementing a power structure its own. I think. My frustration comes from trying to understand and navigate the touchy (boiling, explosive) interdepartmental relationship of English and (trendy) Cultural Studies, the latter of which, in my experience, often amounts to little more than an uppity adaptation of the kind of “fix the world’s problems” conversations I have with friends after a few beers. There are, of course, many admirable Cultural Studies scholars and theories; I loves me my Giorgio Agamben, but Lord am I happy Jacques Derrida will never write another word for the rest of eternity.

If you’re still reading, thanks, I’ll end now. I apologize for rambling. And here I want, so badly, to think of myself like an introspective veteran described by Michaels’ in the “Murderers” conclusion printed above. But I guess I’m a rambler. Lady Churl can attest to that. In conclusion (this time) take a minute to read one of the stories I mentioned above. I’ll be back with more such entries in the future. If someone other than the one person I know is reading this blog is reading this blog, let me know, somehow, so this exercise can feel less self-serving.