Stories in Letters - Letters in Stories: Epistolary Liminalities in the Anglophone Canadian Short Story

244 Pages·2021·1.316 MB·English

by  Rebekka Schuh

Rebekka Schuh
Stories in Letters – Letters in Stories
Buchreihe der ANGLIA/
ANGLIA Book Series
Edited by
Lucia Kornexl, Ursula Lenker, Martin Middeke,
Gabriele Rippl, Daniel Stein
Advisory Board
Laurel Brinton, Philip Durkin, Olga Fischer, Susan Irvine,
Andrew James Johnston, Christopher A. Jones, Terttu Nevalainen,
Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien,
Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Puchner
Volume 75
Rebekka Schuh
Stories in Letters –
Letters in Stories
Epistolary Liminalities in the Anglophone Canadian
Short Story
ISBN 978-3-11-072672-5
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-072619-0
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-072623-7
ISSN 0340-5435
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939870
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
www.degruyter.com
Contents
 Introduction 1
 The Current State of Research 10
Part I: Theoretical Considerations
 The Epistolary Short Story in Canada and Beyond 17
 Liminality and the Epistolary Short Story 28
. Liminality: A ‘Travelling Concept’ and a Concept of Travel 28
. Point of Departure: Arnold van Gennep (1909) and Victor Turner
(1964) 31
. Liminality as a Spatio-Temporal, Universally Human
Experience 34
. Detour: Liminality, Marginality and Hybridity 36
.. Liminality versus Marginality 36
.. Liminality versus Hybridity 38
. The Short Story: The Marginal, Liminal, and Minor Genre 41
.. The Short Story and Marginality 42
.. The Short Story and Liminality 48
.. The Short Story as ‘Minor Literature’ 52
. The Letter asa ‘Textual Migrant’: On the Liminality of Epistolary
Fiction and the Epistolary Mode 53
. The Liminality of Canadian Literature and the Short Stories
Considered in this Study 61
Part II: Analytical Case Studies
 The Epistolary Mode as First- and Second-Person Narration in the
Single-Letter Story 65
. The Epistolary Mode as an Improper First-Person Mode 67
. The ‘You’ in Second-Person Narration versus the ‘You’ in Letters:
A Critical Juxtaposition 68
VI Contents
. Between ‘I’ and ‘You’: Miriam Toews’s and Margaret Atwood’s
‘Love Letters’ 75
. Epistolary You-Narration: Elizabeth Hay’s “A Personal Letter” and
Alice Munro’s “Tell Me Yes or No” 78
 Letters from Alice Munro, ‘the Master of the Epistolary Short
Story’ 86
. Enveloped in Epistolary Illusion: Liminal States of Reading and
Writing Letters 91
.. Letters as Literature: Letter Writing and Reading as a Mise en
Abyme of Writing and Reading Literature 97
.. Aesthetic Illusion According to Wolf (2013) 99
.. Epistolary Illusion: AVariant of Aesthetic Illusion 101
.. Epistolary Illusion in Alice Munro’s Stories 115
. Writing Back: An Epistolary Metaphor Applied 137
.. Don’t Write Back in Anger: A Reappraisal of ‘Writing Back’ 141
.. Munrovian ‘Writing Back’ and the Letter Story: “A Wilderness
Station” and “Material” 144
 Between ‘Here’ and ‘There’: Letters and the Experience of
Migration 158
. Letters as/across Borders: West Indian-Canadian Letter
Stories 160
.. Epistolary Traditions in West Indian Literature 162
.. Austin Clarke: Letters asa Reflection of the Black Immigrant
Experience in Canada 164
.. The Indo-Caribbean Perspective: Rabindranath Maharaj’s
“Kevin’s Log”, “Escape to Etobicoke” and “The Diary of a Down-
Courage Domestic” 187
. Moving Letters, Moving Identities: Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from
Firozsha Baag asan Epistolary Self-Begetting Short Story
Cycle 196
.. The Tradition of Self-Begetting: The Self-Begetting Novel 199
.. The Theme of Self-Begetting in Tales from Firozsha Baag 201
.. The Semantic Dimension of Genre: From Self-Begetting Novel to
Epistolary Self-Begetting Short Story Cycle 207
 Conclusion 216
Contents VII
Works Cited 221
Primary Sources 221
Secondary Sources 223
Index 235

1 Introduction
Contrary to the widespread belief that epistolary fiction is obsolete, in recent
years criticism onepistolaryfictionhasrepeatedlypointedtoanepistolaryren-
aissance in the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century.Thus, Altman,
authoroftheseminalEpistolarity:ApproachestoaFormobserves“aclearrevival
ofthe[epistolary]formbycreativewriters”(1982:3)asearlyasthe1970s,while
pointing to a parallel increase in scholarly interest in epistolary works. Harris
similarly notes“a majorrenaissanceof critical and creative interest in the epis-
tolary” (2001:158),which coincided with the publication of Derrida’s The Post-
Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond in 1980, and Beebee speaks of “a re-
markable revival of the [epistolary] form coupled with an intensity of scholarly
study”(1999:199)attheendofthetwentiethcentury.Consideringthattheepis-
tolaryformhaditsfirstheydayintheseventeenthandeighteenthcenturies,Bee-
bee(1999:199)usestheimageofasine wavetoillustratethefluctuatingdevel-
opmentof epistolaryfiction.Heargues that the epistolaryform enjoyed its first
risefromtheendoftheseventeenthandthroughouttheeighteenthcentury,and
receded into the background in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century.
Contrarytothewidespreadbeliefthatthefalloftheepistolaryformwasperma-
nent,Beebee’simageofthesinewavedoesnotendwiththetroughinthenine-
teenth and the early twentieth century, but rather continues with a second up-
surge in the late twentieth century, thus suggesting a renaissance of epistolary
fiction.WhileneitherBeebeenorAltmanandHarrisofferanystatisticsorfigures
thatprovetheirclaimsofarevivaloftheepistolaryforminfiction–norwillIfill
this gap – a glance at the ‘new releases’ section in a bookstore testifies to the
increasinguseofletters,postcardsandtheirdigitaloffspringinAnglophonefic-
tioninthelatetwentiethandtheearlytwenty-firstcentury.Theexactbeginning
ofthisrevival,whetheritwasinthe1970s,asAltmansuggests,oraslateasthe
1990s, as Beebee proposes, is difficult to pinpoint, and, after all, only minorly
important to the subject matter.What remains incontestable, however, is that
epistolary fiction, long thought to be dead, has returned.
Anglophone literatures all over the world have (re‐)turned to the epistolary
form in the last decades. Recent epistolary novels include, for example, Mari-
lynne Robinsons’ Gilead (2004), Maria Temple’s Where’d you go Bernadette?
(2012), and Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members (2015) from the US-
American market,TheMixquiahuala Letters (1986) byMexican-American Chica-
nawriterAnaCastilloandFromAtoX:AStoryinLetters(2003)byBritishwriter
JohnBerger.Severaloftheserenaissancenovelsexperimentwiththedigitalized
offspringoftheletterintheformofe-mails,asalsoseeninCanadianwriterLynn
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110726190-001
2 1 Introduction
Coady’sTheAntagonist(2013)orIrishwriterCeciliaAhern’sWhereRainbowsEnd
(2004); Lauren Myracle’s Internet Girls series (2005–2014), for example, takes
the form of chatroom conversations. Others combine conventional letters with
digitalized forms, diaries, and other hypertexts, such as T.R. Richmond’s What
She Left (2015) and Richard B.Wright’s Clara Callan (2001).While all of these
novels speak to the continuing popularity of epistolary forms in twentieth and
twenty-first century literature, and thus to an epistolary renaissance, it is inter-
estinglyalsointheformoftheshortstorythatthisnewinterestinepistolarityis
reflected.
Notably, as this book will show, the epistolary renaissance in Anglophone
fiction marks not only a renaissance of the epistolary long form, but also the
(re)birth of the epistolary short story,the story in letters. Scholars of epistolary
fiction and other attentive readers will rightfully object that Henry James wrote
epistolarystories,forexample,“ThePointofView”(1882)and“ABundleofLet-
ters” (1878). However, in the course of the epistolary renaissance, epistolary
short storieshavebecomesignificantlymorecommon,particularlyintheCana-
dianliterarylandscape.Aswiththeepistolarynovel,thereareexamplesofepis-
tolaryshortstoriesinavarietyofAnglophoneliteratures(see,forexample,Joyce
CarolOates’“DearHusband”,ElizabethJolley’s“WednesdaysandFridays”,San-
dra Cisneros’ “Little Miracles, Kept Promises”, and Sefi Atta’s “News from
Home”), the epistolary short story has been particularly prominent in Anglo-
phone Canadian literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
Major writers of epistolary stories during this time include Nobel Prize winner
Alice Munro,with an astonishing twenty-two letter stories in her oeuvre. She is
joined by other renowned short story writers, such as Austin Clarke,with five
epistolary stories altogether, Rohinton Mistry, who published an epistolary
short story cycle, Rabindranath Maharaj,who has written three epistolary sto-
ries, Lee Maracle, who has written two epistolary stories so far, Caterina Ed-
wards, Emma Donoghue,Yann Martel, and many more.
Despite the prominence of epistolary stories, particularly in Canada, this
sub-genre has been of little interest to both scholars of epistolary fiction and
scholars of the Canadian short story. In fact, apart from occasional remarks
about letters in short stories,the epistolaryshort storyhas remained largely in-
visibleinscholarlycriticism.RachelBowerisanexceptionwhenshenotesthat
her focus on epistolary novels forced her “to leave aside the short stories and
verse works using epistolary conventions during this period” (Bower 2017:
20–21).GivenboththedominanceandvarietyofCanadianepistolaryshortsto-
ries,however,thisfascinatinggenredeservesastudyofitsown.Theadoptionof
the letterintothe short storyandthe ensuingemergence ofthe Canadian letter
story offers a new generic framework in which the letter’s potential to create