Literary Visions; 108; The Author's Voice: Tone and Style in Short Fiction

Literary visions program 1 0 8. The author's voice tone and style in short section. Or audio channel 1 the stereo left channel to stereo right channel 3 timecode executive producer Gail Porter long produced by Maryland Public Television. The. Funding for this program was provided by the Adam Burke CPV project. Jones daughter has fallen in with the Stars and is using the heavens as Jones will be the first to admit more than he ever has. She's going to Mexico. We are soon in the mountains. She will have a

nervous breakdown. The other day I tried to buy a new coffee mugs and friends coming for dinner and I thought. Oh I'll just get any old thing. Well I saw several mugs that match my china and lots with cute animals but none that look like me. I kept telling myself just choose something that I couldn't. They just weren't my style. I decided to let my friends drink out of my old chipped mugs and

wait for the right ones to come along because style may be an overall impression that reflects who you are inside. But it's made up of individual choices like the right coffee mugs. Now writer style is made up of individual choices to this word and the use of repetition or convoluted sentences. Details would seem unimportant in themselves but add up to something much much more. Because style is the point of interaction between the author and the reader. How many times have you decided you love the book. In the opening paragraph there's something about the tone in the style that speaks to you. This is often called responding to the author's voice. And language and sentence structure repetition denotation and connotation. The choice of formal language or slang.

These are the components of a style. The formal and poetic diction of Edgar Allan Poe in The Mask of the Red Death transports the reader into his world of living deaths and tortured souls. And one by one dropped the revellers. In the blood be through the halls of the revel. And died much in the despairing posture. As for. The crisp ordinary words of John Updike in his story a in P On the other hand immediately put us in a world we recognise as our own. In walked these three girls in bathing suits. I'm in the third checkout slot with my back to the door so I don't see him till are over by the bread.

But style has no function by itself. It is the outward expression of the author's inner vision. Every author hones his or her style working at and worrying over it until the inner vision can be seen and heard in the words and sentences. William Faulkner was a master of the subjective viewpoint. In barn burning. He takes us inside a boy's angry heart using one long complex sentence. There was a face in the red haze moonlight bigger than the full moon. The owner of it half again his size he'd leaping in the red haze toward the face feeling no blow feeling no shock when his head struck the earth. Scrambling up and leaping again feeling no blow this time either and tasting

no blood. Scrambling up to see the other boy in full flight in himself already leaping into pursuit as his father's hand jerked him back the harsh cold voice speaking above him. Go get in the way. Compare that style with Alice Munros in the found boat as she creates the exhilaration of adolescence running naked through a field on a day where they felt as if they were going to jump off a cliff and fly. They felt that something was happening to them different from anything that had happened before. They thought of each other no hardly as names are right people but as echoing shrieks reflections Oh bold and white and loud and scandalous and fast as our own was. Having established the core of a particular style the author can then adjusted to

suit the needs of each story. Consider the impersonal tone. Margaret Atwood had opted for The Handmaid's Tale. A chair a table a lamp above on the ceiling a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath and in the center of it a blank space. There must have been a chandelier once they've removed anything you could tie or rope to. That stark style with a breezy irony in rape fantasies. The day before yesterday that would be Wednesday. We were sitting around in the women's lunchroom. The lunch room. I mean you'd think you could get some peace and quiet in there. And Chrissie closes up the magazine she's been reading and says. How about it girls. Do you have rape fantasies.

With that line Atwood juxtaposes a very serious topic and a chatty style she sets a tone that lowers you along so that at the end when you realize that the narrator is talking to a strange man in a bar a potential rapist and is actually afraid it breaks your heart. The choice of tone expresses the writer's attitude toward the subject and has tremendous effect on our identification with the characters in rape fantasies. Atwood sets up an ironic tone by undercutting the seriousness at every opportunity with humor. The character avoids direct emotion and so it wells up in the reader first. When you read those last lines when the narrator asks the stranger how could someone rape someone they've had a long conversation with. We experience her desperation even as she continues chattering brightly now and taking care of by Joy Williams. We meet an older man going through the illness of

his wife but it is all done with distant almost clinical language. We never even learn the man's first name. So our guard comes down and we allow ourselves to experience both his glimmers of hope and his despair. Jones The preacher has been in love all his life. He is baffled by this because as far as he can see it has never helped anyone. Joan's love is much too apparent and arouses neglect. He is like an animal in a traveling show who through some aberration wears a vital organ outside the skin. Something that shouldn't be seen certainly is something that shouldn't be watched

working. His wife has been committed here for tests. There is something wrong with her blood. That's what the doctors are severe and wise with you answering Joan's questions in a way that makes him feel hopelessly deaf they have told him that there really is no such thing as a disease of the blood. They have shown him that his request slides and charts of normal and pathological blood cells which look to Jones like can a pace as they speak. Or he insists of leucocytes smile asides and megalo glasses but doesn't know what you want you just know. But none of this takes into account the love he has for his wife. In the world.

Jones and his wife have one child a daughter who in turn has a single child. A girl. Born one half year ago. Jones daughter has fallen in with the Stars and is using the heavens as Jones would be the first to admit more than he ever has. She has left her husband and brought the baby to Jones. She's going to Mexico where soon. She will have a nervous breakdown. Jones does not know this but his daughter has seen it in the stars and is going out to meet it. Jones quickly agrees to care for the baby as this seems to be the only thing his daughter needs from him. According to the charts the

baby's symbol is a bareback rider. Jones This is a graceful thought it signifies audacity. It also means loch. Jones drives his daughter to the airport. Thank you. Taking. The plane taxis down the runway and Jones waves. Holding on. They're not.

At this point our identification with Jones is complete but it is as if we were looking at him through a window. Greg Omer of the University of Florida suggests that it is the author style that creates this effect. Dr. William storey taking care is a good example of how style creates hole in the story. Think of the stylistic features the characters name is Jones. What do we make of this. It's a very common name Joan Smith. He's really every person these could be anybody. Mary Poovey focus is on another aspect of William style the third person narrator is another distancing device. It enhanced its the quality of passivity it enhances the quality of suspended animation that characterizes Jones Jones's relationship to the action that's going on the third. It keeps us from the tent to find with the details. It keeps us from identifying with the interior emotions that Jones is having. Jones is writing to his daughter. He received a brief letter

from her this morning telling him where she could be reached. She did not mention either her mother or the baby. Which makes Jones feel peculiar. He writes everything is fine here. We are burning wood from the old apple tree in the fireplace and it smells wonderful. Has the baby had all of her polio shots. Take care. Jones uses this expression constantly usually in totally unwarranted situations as when he purchases pipe cleaners or drives through toll booths. He will mail this on the way to the hospital. His wife is now in a real sick bed with high metal sides. It is Sunday morning and Jones is in the pulpit. This is the

day he baptizes the baby. Almighty and everlasting God. Your view of all life. You promise not only to be our God but also to be the God of our children. The baby looks charming you know lacy white dress Jones bought the dress and I bet you in the name of God the Creator. Christ the Savior and the Holy Spirit our comforter and God. We're not saved because we're worthy. We're saved because we're loved. There was nothing. Wrong with when.

Jones begins his sermon. But there is something he can't remember when he wrote it but there it is typed in front of him. Jones would like to leave to walk down the aisle and out into the window where he would read his words into the ground. Why can't he remember his life. In the accumulation of detail after detail. A theme emerges. One of the stories themes concerns the struggle of the human mind to comprehend the mysteries of life and death. So for example the nature of the blood. The reason for the snowshoe rabbit's death the kind of joy that the little child has. The meticulous details that Williams gives us about every day things contribute to a sense of a reality observed but not really emotionally experienced as if we are being kept always slightly

outside the mysteries which Mr Jones is attempting to penetrate. Well the thing is in the title of the story. Taking care titles are often significant in this way. And really the key to this thing is the care part. Care is not just a kind of emotion. You know the Jones loves deeply loves the family he loves everyone and this is part of his problem. But there's something more profound than that about his hair care for JONES It's really a kind of mode of Being. It's a way of experiencing the human condition. OK. Jones is waiting for the results of his wife's operation. Has there ever been a time before dread.

And you know he is waiting and watching his wrist watch. The tumor is precisely this size they tell him the size of his clock's face. Jones adores the baby. He sniffs her warm head. Her birth is a deep arrow or an obstruction. Born in wedlock. But out of love. All objects here are perplexed by such grief.

For insurance purposes Jones wife is brought out to the car in a wheelchair. Jones is grateful and confused. I have so many years really passed. Is this not his wife his love. Fresh from giving birth. Isn't everything about to begin. Jones has readied everything carefully for his wife's homecoming. For days he has restricted himself to only one part of the house so that his clutter will be minimal.

Jones helps his wife up the steps to the door. Together they enter the shining room. There's also a great deal of comfort in those last words the adjective Shining is given its power by the absence of adjectives that precede it. The author deliberately avoided emotional language in a story about grief and in doing so evoked some Koori emotions. Maxine Hong Kingston speaks of her writing style as a struggle to translate her life experience into words. She was born in California but her imagination has carried her into her family's past on mainland China. Her first book Woman Warrior won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1076.

Her most recent work trip master monkey has won praise from all as a masterful depiction of the Chinese American experience. I was in the fourth grade I think and I was sitting at my desk and I thought. And I suppose I was. I should have been doing a with Metallica drawing the map of California or something and and all of a sudden this poem came to me and I started to write it down and I remember the room became golden. It was like oh a lion came into the room and and I could hear the poem. And it all rhymed. But having had that experience I feel that an 8 year old child different decided for me that I would be a writer forever. When Kingston was 12 she started writing the stories of her Chinese ancestors.

This eventually became her first book Woman Warrior which was a combination novel and autobiography The imagined lives of her ancestors. I see these people in my dreams and in my imagination. And I also hear their voices. And. True Pastor Muthee I heard the voice of witness saying and I am with him. Spoke to him and listened to him. And. And I love his voice. I wanted to to set it down. And I love it because it is the the vigorous and alive voice of a of a Chinese-American young man of the 60s. True Master monkey is the book in which I can use my own voice. And I think of it as a very American hip slang a voice.

And I hope that the readers will very graphically hear the play I'm doing with the voice and style in this scene. Whitman has come to his mother's house during her weekly game. Are you working hard with men. I've been fired. Let him have it. Fired his mother screamed fired. Fired. It's OK mom I didn't like the job anyway. For years college mom put down her tiles. She shut her eyes. A mother defeated. She's an actress. She's acting. You can't trust factors feel one thing an act another. She put her hand on her brow chew the scenery. What are we to do. The chorus girls noted with more comfort. You get a job again Ruby Nowadays they try out jobs then settle down. WHITMAN be smart he'll be rich one of these days. He read books when he was three years old said his mother now look at him. A bomb how.

Kingston's unique voice springs from her effort to create a language that truly reflects the experience of life. This is part of my my struggle in my writing. How do I take this language which I speak which is American. And it's American with with them Village Cantonese. Overtones and undertones. Listen and read them. And how do I find the poetry in that and so on. So with that I also have the the 60s slang and and that's my language too. And so it's my task as as a as an artist to to create out a new language out of all of those elements. But for Kingston the task of the writer does not stop with grading her own language.

She wants to use the power of writing to change how we see ourselves. I need to save us from our own violence. And I do think that we love violence we. We are addicted to it and our art feeds our addiction. The movies television and and books. There is so much work that has to be done. We still need to create. The. Prototype of the human being. That we want to be. We still need to write novels in which we create the big woman. We still need to write the novel of the good pacifist man. We still need to write a novel in which we can write the vision of of the human community.

We still need to write a novel of the convincing happy ending the happy ending that we can carry out into the real world. Maxine Hong Kingston speaks of her early works as acts of translation of putting her Chinese rhythms and emotional experience into American English. Now she is evolving a new style because she has a new purpose in her writing and she points out that her stylistic development and her personal development go hand in hand with a connection between the two. There is no true communication because no matter how impressive the form how delightful the word play style is an empty shell unless it reflects the heart of the author. And. Literary visions

is a production of Maryland Public Television. We are. Funding for this program was provided by the Edinburg CTV project. For more information on the college town of course video cassettes off air video taping and the books based on literary visions call 1 800 learn or. Just use us.