Genesis Of A Story -- Interview with Mavis Gallant

Dear Readers,

Mavis Gallant is one of the most talented short story writers in English language. The following stimulating interview published in an online magazine, about three years old, provides glimpse of a writer’s mind, the writing process and her opinions.

Here are a few portions of this interview:

Aurora: Many of your characters seem to be trying to cope with a certain role that has been prescribed to them by their circumstances, and they do not easily accept their roles.

Gallant: No, resignation is not something I write easily about. It’s probably something missing in my work because there is a great deal of resignation in life, particularly social resignation, and I find it hard to write about. I can’t put myself in that role. God knows I can put myself in lots of roles that aren’t mine, but I can’t stand in the place of someone who is completely resigned.

Aurora: At the same time, they are not openly rebelling.

Gallant: Well, if there was constant open rebelling all over the world there would be constant turmoil and hysteria. It would be like a boarding school with adolescents screaming and throwing things around, and that isn’t the way life is. You rebel up to a point, but rebelling that consists of moral breakage is rare. Resignation is much more common, and oddly enough, it’s something I can’t get close to.

Just this morning the news of her winning the PEN/Nabokov award was released. Read the related news from the following link: http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/artslife/story.html?id=96f8fe94-9428-4304-8db6-a065cfde57a9

Regards,
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
May 3, 2004


Genesis Of A Story

Mavis Gallant Describes The Creative Process Behind Her Award-winning Stories
Interview by Kathy Williams

Mavis Gallant is one of the preeminent short story writers in the English language today. Canadian born, Mrs. Gallant has been living in Europe since 1950. Critics and fellow writers alike acclaim her stories for their economy of expression, yet richness of detail and texture. She evokes not only a fully developed personal setting for her characters, but completes their world by placing them in a sensitively observed political and social context. Many of her stories have been collected in seven volumes of short fiction, while new stories continue to appear regularly in the New Yorker. Home Truths, a collection of short stories about Canadians, won the 1981 Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Luc and His Father won the 1984 New Press Award.

Although a superb stylist herself, Mrs. Gallant began this interview by politely but adamantly maintaining that she has no theories about the short story. Nevertheless, it is apparent that she has strong opinions. If these opinions do not constitute a theory, they are at least indicators of what she likes in a short story and how she approaches her own writing.

Mrs. Gallant’s ironic humour—so evident in her writing—and a desire to be clearly understood and helpful, but not dogmatic, to students of her work permeate the interview. She discusses the special concentrated nature of the short story and the genesis of her own work. While she asserts the author’s omniscience about his story and characters, Mrs. Gallant nevertheless insists that the creative process not be labelled metaphysical.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Aurora: In defining the short story, often textbooks resort to saying what the short story is not: it’s not an anecdote, it’s not a reported incident, it’s also not a novel.

Gallant: It can be a reported incident, but the writer should know more about it than the writer says, and that should be apparent to the reader. There are Chekhov short stories that are merely incidents, but he knows absolutely everything humanly possible about them, and that is what comes through to the reader in a very few words. That is the difference between a reported anecdote in a newspaper and a work of fiction. That is art.


Aurora: Do you feel that people—textbooks, perhaps—are reducing the short story when they see it in terms of another form?

Gallant: It is another form altogether. Writing a short story is different from writing a novel. A short story is extremely difficult, not that a novel isn’t, but a novel is difficult in another way. Hardly anyone was ever constantly on tiptoe for the length of a novel. Oh, someone like Virginia Wolf, yes. But in a successful short story, you are standing on your toes the whole time; you don’t dare let down for a second because a word too many or too few and the whole thing collapses. It’s very tense. Writing a novel is a bit more relaxed. It’s longer, and perhaps you can take a few more chances.


Aurora: Edgar Allan Poe theorized about the short story claiming that it dealt with a single effect to which every detail is subordinated.

Gallant: Well, in the long run that’s true. I don’t think one sets out thinking, “I am going to do this and this.” I think the short story aims in one direction, so you see the end of the road from the beginning. I don’t like trick short stories like Maupassant, and I don’t like O’Henry, that kind of thing. But anyway it’s out of fashion.


Aurora: The traditional view of a plot with five stages—an exposition and rising action, crisis, falling action, resolution—is really no longer valid for many contemporary short stories. In fact, it’s been said that your stories move in a helix fashion, and I think you’ve, said that your stories build like a snail growing out from the centre.

Gallant: Oh no, that was William Maxwell, my editor at the New Yorker for 25 years. After ten years he sent me a letter and said, “You finally stopped going round and round.” But he had never once before told me that I went round and round.


Aurora: So you consciously are not going round and round?

Gallant: I wasn’t aware of it. I can’t imagine leading into a story with the weather or the colour of the sky. I don’t despise those stories, but I wouldn’t imagine doing it myself.


Aurora: What is at the centre of your story?

Gallant: Well, the first glimpse of any story is an image in my mind. It’s always an image of someone doing something. I don’t write anything yet. I have just seen this thing. It’s like a nucleus around which different things build. I can’t really explain it in a way that would be satisfactory to a student, for example, for every writer works differently, but this is what happens with me.

I have been asked to write for an anthology, Ten Best American Stories of the Year. I was asked to explain a bit about how I came to write the story, and I was at a complete loss. I don’t know how I come to write anything. There is a very quick image which goes round and round, as William Maxwell said, and then I can write it. I know that’s not helpful because I don’t think it’s possible to describe the creation of fiction. It’s a very odd process, and if you begin to describe it, you begin to sound as though it were a mechanical process with the author as a transmitter and, of course, that’s utter nonsense because it’s not metaphysical.


Aurora: In The Pegnitz Junction, you stretch the limits of the traditional use of point of view. You tell the story from Christine’s point of view, but she actually is receiving the thoughts of the other characters.

Gallant: Fiction. That to me is the writing of fiction. I truly enjoyed writing The Pegnitz Junction, and I didn’t care if it was ever published. I absolutely adored writing it. I wrote it in a great hurry and put a lot of things into it that I liked and that amused me. It’s one of the few things I can reread.


Aurora: I feel sometimes that she is almost helpless. They are transmitting, and she has to receive these waves, these messages. Sometimes she doesn’t know what to do with them.

Gallant: But it’s not metaphysical. I absolutely refuse that! I won’t have it! No, I’m joking. The things that she sees out of the train window all had a reference to German literature. I was just having a good time with it, and a lot of it is satire. There are names in it from Wilhelm Busch, the German caricaturist. That thing in the castle is obviously just a satire of Kafka’s castles. Even the names I gave people, if you look at them closely, are satire. But I just did it for myself.


Aurora:At the same time, I have read that you were exploring the whole phenomena of the rise of Nazism.

Gallant: Was I now? When I was writing the stories that were in the book—not the novella—I was fascinated with Germany, but that has something to do with my generation. I am the war generation, and I was never satisfied with anything that I had read about it. Everything seemed to me to be written in black and white, and I wondered if I could do something with fiction. I thought it had to be done at a kind of lower middle-class level. I think that’s where it all arose, the Nazi movement. I got very much into it, then I couldn’t do anymore, so I stopped. That was when I wrote all those stories, as well as a couple that were in other anthologies.


Aurora: I think you stated that you don’t deliberately strive to create symbols in your stories.

Gallant: No, that would be a very cheap thing to do. I did it deliberately in The Pegnitz Junction because I was doing it for myself. But there is something in the writing of fiction that one will see only later. In a funny way, your memory and your unconscious work together without your being always aware of it, and then you are aware of it much later. I have had to change things in proof because I realized I had used a real situation or a real name that I didn’t remember having remembered.


Aurora: Irony seems to operate on several levels in your stories. There’s a tension, an inconsistency, between the characters and even the reader’s expectations and reality. You juxtapose the commonplace with the bizarre. In The Fifteenth District the dead are haunted by the living.

Gallant: This is very cruel, but I am going to tell you anyway. I am at an age where everybody is dying, so I’ve seen quite a few little widows. One thing I’ve noticed is that when the poor man dies, often very glad to get out of his misery, the widow will always evoke an extraordinary marriage, nothing that ever really existed. I have often thought about this poor guy running through eternity, with this complete nonsense following him from the living. That was where I got the idea of the professor who keeps saying that his wife is a saint, and she’s so sick of hearing it. The whole thing is meant to be funny.


Aurora: Many of your characters seem to be trying to cope with a certain role that has been prescribed to them by their circumstances, and they do not easily accept their roles.

Gallant: No, resignation is not something I write easily about. It’s probably something missing in my work because there is a great deal of resignation in life, particularly social resignation, and I find it hard to write about. I can’t put myself in that role. God knows I can put myself in lots of roles that aren’t mine, but I can’t stand in the place of someone who is completely resigned.


Aurora: At the same time, they are not openly rebelling.

Gallant: Well, if there was constant open rebelling all over the world there would be constant turmoil and hysteria. It would be like a boarding school with adolescents screaming and throwing things around, and that isn’t the way life is. You rebel up to a point, but rebelling that consists of moral breakage is rare. Resignation is much more common, and oddly enough, it’s something I can’t get close to.


Books by Mavis Gallant

Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews. Toronto:.Macmillan, 1986.

Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris. Toronto: Macmillan, 1985.

What Is to Be Done. Montreal: Quadrant Editions, 1983.

Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories. Toronto: Macmillan, 1981.

From the Fifteenth District; A novella and eight short stories. Toronto: Macmillan, 1979.

The Pegnitz Junction; A novella and five short stories. New York: Random House, 1973.

The Affair of Gabrielle Russier. London: V. Gollancz, 1973.

The Other Paris: Stories. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970.

An Unmarried Man’s Summer; Eight stories and a short novel. London: Heinemann, 1964.

Green Water, Green Sky. Toronto: Macmillan, 1959.


Kathy Williams tutors English at Athabasca University.


An Aurora Update
In 1981, Ms. Gallant received the Office of the Order of Canada Award, only to be bestowed the next highest award of Companion in 1983. In 1982, Toronto's Tarragon Theatre premiered her first play, "What Is To Be Done?". Ms. Gallant has published a number of novels and collections since this interview.

Source Link: http://aurora.icaap.org/archive/gallant.html