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Sticking to Stories:
A Career Outside the Mainstream

Susan Lohafer

An informal talk about my career history, given to the UI English Department on September 9, 2004

            I think you’ll see from my professional story why I’m so pleased by this chance to tell you about my work.  I’d like to think I could play a duet with a number of people in this department, but it is true that my closest colleagues are at other universities and often in other countries, and that my field is outside the mainstream of literary studies.  My history suits me, but it is not a model for anyone else; instead, I offer it as one illustration of adaptations between the personal and the institutional. 

            Let me start by mentioning Ann Beattie’s leg.  She is, as many of you know, a writer of short stories mostly published in The New Yorker and mostly about her post-Sixties generation.  I will explain later how I came to be sitting on the floor next to her, but I have a clear image in my mind of her right calf stretched out straight in a very high, very expensive brown leather boot.  That moment is described on p. 114 of my recent book, and I hope, before I’m done, to explain what it’s doing there, and what kind of genre theory allows for it.

Stage One: I wanted to be a writer before I wanted to be a scholar.   As an English major at Harvard in the Sixties, I learned the skills of close textual analysis associated with New Criticism.  Because I liked putting sentences together to make stories of my own, I was interested in taking other people’s writing apart.  We started with an artifact made of words.  We unmade it.  We figured out what patterns we could make with the pieces.  We explained why these designs were significant.  In doing so, we made an artifact of our own, of lesser beauty and importance, but also unique, also expressive, also artful.  So this is literary criticism! I thought.  Then one of my undergraduate instructors shook his head over a paper of mine and told me that it was either obscurely original or oddly meaningless, and I was sure he inclined to the latter opinion. 

Eventually, I realized he was speaking for a group—now we would call it a discourse community—whose members talked to each other in a code I hadn’t learned yet, but from then on I viewed the fashions and methods of scholarship as external to me.  When I went to Stanford for a Masters in Creative Writing, I had no thought of going on for a doctorate, but the alternatives were so much less appealing that I found myself on that path.  I taught myself how to study more systematically, how to talk the talk on exams, and how to recognize a school of thought when I fell over it, but I still couldn’t think the think.  It was partly a lack of mental fortitude, partly a knee-jerk aversion to canned language, partly an identity crisis.  Just the frame of mind for beginning a dissertation! 

My thesis became my first book, so I will mention it briefly.  I was in love with 19th-c. American fiction, and I happened to notice how many of my favorite authors—Hawthorne, Melville, James—wrote about confidence men and women.  I understood that that had something to do with the age and character of the country itself, and that there was an affinity between a confidence game and the creation of fiction.  The game I played was to imagine these confidence men as avatars of a single protagonist whose story I could tell. 

Here are two sentences from the introduction: “I have seen him . . . in various forms which reveal the special qualities of each author who tricks him out in a new disguise.  I have found that his equivocal nature places him at the right hand of creators who face their own moral and aesthetic dilemmas in handling the art of illusion”(x).  When I look back at this book, I am pleased by the amount of old-fashioned, archival research that went into it, but a little chagrinned by my simple way of co-opting the material, of positioning myself as a writer who was backed into the corner of scholarship and determined to come out fighting.  However, I still believe that everything I write, from a letter of recommendation to a lecture on genre theory, should have a character and a plot. 

Stage two:  I was interested in the short story before I was interested in genre.  A couple of years after I joined the Iowa faculty, I was talking one day with Paul Diehl.  As most of you know, he’s an expert on prosody.  He asked me whether the short story has a rhythm.  “I’ll get back to you,” I said, and started looking into the field of short fiction theory.  It was so small I could hardly find it, but I discovered that the seminal works were by practitioner-theorists like Edgar Allan Poe and the Irish writer, Frank O’Connor, and that the most interesting work in the 1970’s was scattered in articles here and there, many of them gathered in a collection called Short Story Theories, edited by Charles May in 1976.   Most of the vocabulary in these writings was either invented by artists to describe an art form they loved, or borrowed from studies of the novel and poetry.  Because I had tried to write short stories, and because I loved the scattered, imaginative, and maverick quality of this criticism, I set out to find a language for talking specifically about the way short stories behaved.  That is how I became a genre theorist. 

At the time, reader-response criticism was in the air.  Also, I was starting to teach our undergraduate writing course, and was exposed to the rhetorical and stylistic theory Carl Klaus and Jix Lloyd-Jones were then teaching in our graduate program—theory I absorbed more by osmosis than by study.  The sentence was god in this building, as it was for a writer who influenced me at the time, William Gass.  And I was still tied to the Poe Doctrine, which says that the end of a short story is present from the beginning and that brevity is the basis for all other features of the genre, an insight echoed by the Russian Formalists. 

So in the late Seventies I wrote a book to explain to Paul that short stories do, indeed, have a rhythm; that it is defined by the reader’s experience of entering, moving through, and exiting the text; that the periodic sentence is a model for the periodicity of the short story, which is defined and enforced by its imminent closure.  Here are a few lines from that book: “. . . [W]e pay attention to sentences in stories because we have to, because if we dally over the nuances of a word, if we skim for the drift, either way we are missing literally the sentience of the story.  We are missing the experience of being acclimated to the story-world, of assimilating all that it interposes between the beginning and the closure we want—and yet don’t want—to reach” (34-35).  And another quote from closer to the end: “Short stories, unlike novels or poems, by their very nature, compete with the rhythms that keep us functioning as organisms.  Stories complete themselves in our experience between other cycles of need—for food, sleep, and the releases of the body.  Unlike longer fictions—even the most artful and word-conscious novels—short stories do not offer vicarious experience of a surrogate world.  They haven’t the time.  Rather, . . . they put us through something . . . that happens to us with as much authority as a delayed meal or an overdue nap” (159). 

The argument took existing theories—reader-response, phenomenology, Formalism, some textual linguistics—and applied them, in an eclectic and subjective way, to the encounter between reader and text, with a resulting emphasis on the types and behaviors of closure at—and after—the end of a story.  It was a hands-on demonstration of how to read the form appreciatively.  Sherman Paul recommended me to his then-publisher, LSU Press, the manuscript was vetted by Charles May, and the book became one of the relatively few recent monographs on the short story as a genre.  Years later, I discovered that it was read by graduate students in Canada, Norway, Spain, China, and other places where the short story is perhaps taken a little more seriously as a field of study. 

Stage three: I became a theorist by promoting a field.  In the Eighties, I did supervise a number of doctoral dissertations that treated the short story as a genre.  One of those students organized a panel at the M/MLA bringing together many of the people who had written significantly in this area—including Charles May and Mary Rohrberger.  Afterwards, we gathered the papers together and solicited further contributions.  I then organized the collection as a map of the contemporary field of short fiction studies, providing several introductory essays and a chapter of my own.  That was my third book, called Short Story Theories at a Crossroads.  It confirmed that the short story was my specialty.  By defining a field, it became a textbook of sorts.  It led Mary Rohrberger to suggest that we develop a series of international conferences on the short story in English, which in turn led to the founding of the Society for the Study of the Short Story.  I had a career in spite of myself.  But all of this coherence was threatened and my course redirected in the mid-Nineties.  If there’s a plot here, it has a turning-point.

Stage four: I found my métier by losing my place.   The profession, and graduate study at Iowa, shifted massively toward cultural studies.  Genre theory was passé.  As it turned out, my aversion to –isms and my hands-on approach to verbal art worked more naturally and productively in the writing program than in the doctoral one.  As my work with graduate students shifted into the nonfiction writing program, my identity here became more and more separate from my identity outside Iowa.   Long before, however, I had realized that the most forward-looking, inspirational, and form-conscious ally on my horizon was neither a literature professor nor a short-story author nor even a writing teacher, but rather a cognitive scientist who was experimenting with readers to find out how their brains made sense of a short literary narrative.  In my first book on the short story, I’d already made use of text-level macrostructures in order to talk about progression through a story, but now I was starting to learn about text grammars and story schemas.

At the first short story conference, I put together a panel of scientists, and I still remember standing with John Barth, author of Lost in the Funhouse , and William F. Brewer, author of “Structural Affect Patterns in Short Fiction,” listening to them do the genius version of exchanging phone numbers.  In the Nineties I became a sort of non-scientific, empirical, revisionist, story-telling researcher, following the lead of psychologists by using my students as test readers, designing experiments I’ll talk about in a minute, but using the objective data in highly subjective ways to fuel my own engagement with particular stories and with the genre itself.  For me, working with writers and borrowing from scientists were the two back doors to the future of literary study.  I didn’t see my view reflected in this building, but I must tell you that I received nothing but kindness, support, and trust from five chairs of this department and, as far as I know, from all of my colleagues.  That said, perhaps nothing has shaped my career more decisively than a collegial resistance to my own profession. 

And that brings me to my fourth and very recent book, Reading for Storyness.  It illustrates very clearly why I am known as a genre theorist but not as a person who “does theory.”  It is hard for me to tell which came first, the need for a question suitable for test readers, or the notion that closure did not have to pertain just to the end of a story or to the post-reading experience.  In any event, during the Nineties I did a series of what I called “preclosure” experiments, in which I asked readers to identify places where they felt a story could end before it actually did.  The idea was to free readers from the authorial fiat of actual closure, while still subjecting them to closural signals embedded in the text.  I wanted to trigger the readers’ own sense of narrative closure, to code those perceptions as data, and to look for inherent or learned models of whole-storyness.

A breakthrough occurred when I realized that each preclosure point was not only the site of closural signals but the end of a shorter, putative story within the longer, actual story.  A series of preclosure points yield a series of embedded stories that overlap and unfold on the way to the real end.  By identifying these putative stories, the most untrained readers could give me objective data about storyness, and a new perspective on any given text.  I was free to invent the uses for that perspective.  Certainly I was answerable for the accuracy of the raw data and for the coherence of my reasoning, but I also wanted the findings to be surprising and useful to other specialists, engaging for general readers, and satisfying to me.  What I wanted was an empirical license for personalized criticism. 

After many delays, I pulled together the scattered experiments, added some new work on the fuzzy boundary between the short story and creative nonfiction, and, as I was contractually obliged to do, went back to LSU Press.  However, they were now more interested in cultural studies, and I, too, wanted to move on.  I queried the Johns Hopkins University Press. 

One never knows exactly why a book is accepted, but here are four circumstances that may have helped.  1.  At the time, I was still president of the Society for the Study of the Short Story.  2.  The director of the Press was temporarily handling acquisitions in the humanities, but that wasn’t his real area.  3.  Johns Hopkins is a very large Press with a very broad range of interests and a willingness to take risks.  4.  The second reader (the director counted himself as the first) was not a scholar but a writer.  Here’s an excerpt from the book’s introduction, considerably abridged: 

“. . . Before the legends and myths, before the hunting stories and the war stories, before the folk tales and the fairy tales, was the neuro-scenario.  A hand reaches out, touches a flame, starts back in pain, and registers a meaning.  Antiquity’s child and tomorrow’s infant are similarly equipped.  Both have this built-in plot-making talent, although it takes several years before humans can recognize or tell a “story.”  My notion of “storyness” is based on this neuro-scenario, which is infinitely rewritten in simple or complex form, with infinite variety, to produce the world’s cache of short stories.  . . . .” 

. . . The experiments in this book are directed exercises in “text processing.”  . . . I’ve picked stories that test limits: Can a story be interpreted to death?  Can a plotless fugue still be a story?  How minimal is minimalism?  Can art survive cultural studies?  Can we draw a line between fiction and creative nonfiction?”  (3-4)

I’ll close now with a few comments about the newest—but not last—chapter.  It had to be written during the summer before the manuscript was due.  I had no students at hand, so I became my own test reader in one case, marking preclosure points in two stories by Ann Beattie.  The chapter opens with me on the floor, listening to a series of readings in the IMU at the short story conference in 1992.  Barth was there, and Jamaica Kincaid, and Robert Coover.  All the seats were gone when Beattie, the keynote speaker from earlier that day, made her way into the room.  I’d taken her to dinner the night before, so she recognized me sitting on the floor near the front, and plopped down beside me, stretching out that brown leather boot.  She could see the podium, but there were “odd angles of vision: speakers severed at the neck by a looming audience; herself reflected in the iris of a gawker” (114). 

In the course of the chapter, I dealt with Sandra Sprows’ theory of “psychasthenia” in Beattie’s work.  It means “a slippage between frames requiring negotiation at the borders between images or formulas provided by the culture.”  Sprows argues that Beattie undermines “the systematicity of coherent narratives” (128-29).  She does, but she offers an alternative.  Reading for storyness is one way to discover in her work a kind of narrative coherence that’s rooted in the past yet specific to her art.  Here’s the conclusion of my chapter, again, somewhat abridged:

“. . . Sprows would be delighted with my opening image of Ann Beattie—sitting on the floor at the edge of an auditorium as a not-quite-audience-member at the standard campus cultural . . . event of a literary reading.  Psychasthenia may be an apt model for a moment that is freeze-framed in my memory.  Quite literally, Beattie was inserting herself on a border between the expectant listeners and the performing artist, filling neither frame completely, yet defining herself via both” (131-32).  I thanked Sprows for the insight.  However, based on her theory of psychasthenia and her feminist convictions about Beattie’s subject matter, Sprows had argued for the anti-narrative behavior of Beattie’s prose.  My experiments, on the other hand, brought out the familiar story-types serially embedded in that prose, a sequence that had an overarching structure of its own—whether “meta” or “sub”—with all the power of simple storyness.

“. . . Beattie’s characters may be trapped or confused, they may be unsure of what they want, or betrayed in their reach for it, but they [are] still . . . oriented toward what lures them.  . . . The putative stories in ‘Weekend’ and ‘Where You’ll Find Me’ create sequences that turn on a point of stasis (the hum of [a] . . . clock) or denial (the absence of [a] . . . dog).  These preclosure points highlight the deflation of meaning, the ‘flat,’ almost programmatic acceptance of postmodern anomie and disillusionment.  Yet, given their place in the series, these moments become actively and richly transitional—in other words, anything but empty or defeatist. . . .  Haunted by story-types that used to deliver meaning, like fairy tales, parables, and epiphanies, [Beattie’s fiction is] . . . pregnant with others, like love stories and ghost stories, almost wistfully re-imagined.  When Ann Beattie got down on that dirty floor and craned her neck, her gaze was on the podium, not the exit” (132). 

This chapter is a mixture of memoir, adversarial criticism, close reading, taxonomy, and preclosure theory.  It is the kind of work toward which my career has been moving in what looks, in hindsight, like a fairly straight line that is also a circle.  Last March, Charles May and I spoke at a conference in Spain, where we congratulated ourselves for lasting so long by sticking to our story.  I don’t think I could have done it anywhere but at Iowa.

 

 

 

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