Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant’s Fiction

306 Pages·2000·17.69 MB·English

by  Lesley D. Clement

Learning to Look
A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant's Fiction
In Learning to Look Lesley Clement traces the evolution of Mavis
Gallant's visually evocative style through five decades of her short
fictional works. From her earliest explorations of displacement and
the disparity between perception and reality through her later explo-
rations of memory and history to her more recent explorations of the
role of culture in a contemporary world where commercialism and
madness threaten to extinguish the potential for illumination and
enlightenment, Gallant envisages and renders her fictional world
with techniques analogous to those of visual artists.
Clement shows us that Gallant's fiction of the 19405 and 19505
exhibits a keen interest in perspective and proportion achieved
through concentration on line, her fiction of the 19605 and early 19705
reveals a heightened interest in composition achieved through a
focus on framing, proportion, and form or shape, and her fiction after
the mid 19705 demonstrates the full realization of her art through
attention to colour and light. Gallant increasingly explores the
boundaries between visible and invisible worlds as the lines, shapes,
and colours suggested by her allusions, analogies, and structures
give her fiction the perspective, proportion, density, and fluidity that
illuminate the printed page and challenge us as readers. Alert to
visual cues in Gallant's fiction we acquire a heightened perception of
the manifold richness of worlds and lives that might otherwise have
been relegated to the unseen and unsung.
LESLEY D. CLEMENT is an instructor of English in the Division of Arts
at Medicine Hat College, Alberta.
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Learning to Look
A Visual Response to
Mavis Gallant's Fiction
LESLEY D. CLEMENT
McGill-Queen's University Press
Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca
McGill-Queen's University Press 2000
ISBN 0-7735-2041-4 (cloth)
Legal deposit second quarter 2000
Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper
This book has been published with the help of a grant
from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of
Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the
financial support of the Government of Canada through
the Book Publishing Industry Development Program
(BPIDP) for its activities. We also acknowledge the
support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our
publishing program.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Clement, Lesley D. (Lesley Diana), 1951-
Learning to look : a visual response to Mavis Gallant's
fiction
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7735-2041-4 (bnd)
i. Gallant, Mavis, 1922- - Criticism and interpretation.
i. Title.
Ps85i3.A593z62 2000 c8i3'.54 099-901356-4
PR9199.3.G26z62 2OOO
Typeset in Palatine 10/12
by Caractera inc., Quebec City
Material included in chapters i and 2 was published
previously in Canadian Literature 129 (Summer 1991),
English Studies in Canada 18, no. 3 (September 1992),
and American Review of Canadian Studies 24, no. i
(Spring 1994). The author gratefully acknowledges
the permission of the editors of these journals to publish
this material in modified form. The author also thanks
Mavis Gallant for permission to quote from her
unpublished material housed in the Thomas Fisher Rare
Book Library, University of Toronto.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
1 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective: The Early Years 3
2 Inside and Outside the Frame: Characters in Search of an
Audience (1959-1964) 34
3 Tyranny of Form: Adjusting Proportions in the Stories of
the Early 1960S 73
4 Portraiture and Landscapes of "Life at Point Zero":
A Decade of Remembering and Exorcizing and
Remembering (1963-1972) 107
5 Coloration of Monochromatic Moments (1968-1978) 150
6 Mapping Panoramic Landscapes: Idyll, Farce, Parody 188
7 Towards an Illumination of Gallant's Late Fiction 230
Notes 249
Works Cited 281
Index 289
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Preface and Acknowledgments
Nothing reveals the state of mind of a class and a society quite
so much as what it chooses to hang on the wall. The Hebert
Museum is interesting not so much for a way of art but for a
way of looking at life.1
Mavis Gallant reveals her fascination with the visual arts throughout
her fictional and non-fictional writings. Gallant's observation con-
cerning the Hebert Museum could be revised and refocused: nothing
reveals the state of Gallant's mind quite so much as the visual art to
which she alludes. These allusions are interesting not so much for a
way of art, not so much as ends in themselves, but for revealing
Gallant's way of looking at life.
As revealing as the allusions are the techniques through which
Gallant engages the reader in her way of looking at life. To read her
fiction responsively - that is, affectively and effectively, achieving the
aesthetic response that Wolfgang Iser defines as "the fulfillment of
that which has been prestructured by the language of the text"2 - we
must be alert to visual cues. "All representation," E.H. Gombrich
says of pictorial art, "relies to some extent on what we have called
'guided projection.'"3 As many of the characters in Gallant's stories
are given opportunities for learning to look,4 so too readers of Gallant
may respond to signals in her texts that guide us to develop a visu-
alizing process as we read her fiction.
In an interview with Gallant, Geoff Hancock, remarking on the
visual quality of her stories, conjectured that she "might [have] liked
to have been a painter at one time." Gallant replied that she often
imagines how she would respond to a scene were she re-creating it
on canvas.5 Her fiction usually springs from the "envisioned," from
a glimpse that she catches, recalls, or imagines of a person or a small
group of people. "It consists of a fixed image, like a slide or (closer
viii Preface and Acknowledgments
still) a freeze frame, showing characters in a simple situation/' Gallant
writes. "The quick arrival and departure of the silent image can be
likened to the first moments of a play, before anything is said. The
difference is that the characters in the frame are not seen, but envi-
sioned, and do not have to speak to be explained."6 Their behaviour,
reactions, and interactions prompt her imagination to work on the
arrested moment, the static tableau, which she captures and then
frees through the simultaneously progressive and recursive nature of
language: "Whole scenes then follow, complete in themselves but
like disconnected parts of a film. I do not deliberately invent any of
this: It occurs."7 On a number of occasions Gallant has confessed to
interviewers that had her circumstances and talents been different,
her inclination might have led her instead to capture these scenes on
canvas. In a 1981 CBC Radio interview, for example, she spoke with
Stuart McLean: "I don't think you can learn to become a writer ...
You learn because there is a way of life involved, but a talent ...
talent exists ... inclination for one thing rather than another exists. I
would have loved to paint, but I have absolutely no talent for it at
all. I love music, but I'm not musical." Like an artist approaching a
canvas, but through words and narrative structures, Gallant begins
with lines that take shape as perspective, proportion, framing, and
foreground and background are adjusted; then pigments are mixed,
colours applied, and the desired chromatic and light effects achieved.
In this study I trace Gallant's development as a writer, a develop-
ment marked by an increasingly complex and sophisticated use of
techniques analogous to those of visual artists. Like any student of
art, she was not content just to practise line drawings to acquire
perspective and proportion, then later to master shape and compo-
sition, and finally to perfect colouring and lighting effects. Examples
from Gallant's earliest fiction demonstrate her simultaneous interest
in all these elements, yet there is an observable chronology in her
writing career. Her fiction exhibits a keen interest in perspective and
proportion achieved through concentration on line in the apprentice-
ship years of the 19405 and 19505; a heightened interest in composi-
tion achieved through a focus on framing, proportion, and form or
shape follows in the 19605 and early 19705; and finally, she fully
realizes her art through attention to colour and light in the stories
from the mid-1970s onwards. These formal concerns neither dictated
nor fashioned Gallant's evolution as a writer. On the contrary, her
canon is distinguished by variations on several themes: displace-
ment, perception and conception, fixation on form, the role of the
past, memory and history, life at point zero, the transformative effect
ix Preface and Acknowledgments
of imagination, the place of culture in contemporary society. Because
unique formal concerns arise with each new challenge that her "way
of looking at life" presents, Gallant comes to each story with fresh
eyes, sharpened drawing pencil, and reconfigured palette.
After a brief examination of the articles that Gallant wrote describ-
ing the changes that the Quebec art scene was undergoing in the
19405, chapter i of this study discusses the development of Gallant's
style and themes in the 19405 and 19505, concentrating on her exper-
imentation with cubist and surrealist techniques that through struc-
ture, perspective, and metaphor create an increasingly kinetic
medium for characters and readers alike. One of the distinctions tra-
ditionally made between literary and visual arts, a distinction most
notably articulated in Lessing's Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of
Painting and Poetry (1766), is that the literary arts represent "a visible
progressive action, the various parts of which follow one another in
time," and that the visual arts represent "a visible stationary action,
the development of whose various parts takes place in space."8
Kernel to this distinction, Lessing contended, are the tools that each
art form employs: "If it be true that painting employs wholly differ-
ent signs or means of imitation from poetry, - the one using forms
and colors in space, the other articulate sounds in time, - and if signs
must unquestionably stand in convenient relation with the thing sig-
nified, then signs arranged side by side can represent only objects
existing side by side ... while consecutive signs can express only
objects which succeed each other ... in time."9
Through this century, however, writers and critics both have
increasingly strained against the static boundaries prescribed by this
distinction between the arts. James Heffernan notes that "the point
first systematically developed by Lessing - that painting is funda-
mentally spatial and literature fundamentally temporal ... has come
under recent attack in ways that have provoked significant debate."10
A pioneer voice in this "significant debate" is that of Joseph Frank,
who, in "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," demonstrated that "the
evolution of form in modern poetry and, more particularly, in the
novel ... as exemplified by such writers as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound,
Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, is moving in the direction of spatial
form ... All these writers ideally intend the reader to apprehend their
work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence."11
More recently, Wendy Steiner, a leading theorist on the relationship
between literature and painting, has appealed to modern narratology
and linguistics: "The view of narrative (and language) as a mere
sequence is not tenable in light of recent theory. It is the mistake of