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

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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. This page intentionally left blank 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 This page intentionally left blank 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

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Clement shows us that Gallant's fiction of the 1940s and 1950s exhibits a keen interest in perspective and proportion achieved through concentration on line, that her fiction of the 1960s and early 1970s reveals a heightened interest in composition achieved through a focus on framing, proportion, an
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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.