Modern
Fiction Studies
John
Gerlach. Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story.
University: U of Alabama P, 1985. 193 pp. $21.50 cloth; pb. $9.95.
What
prompted Professor Hershel Walker to write Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons
was the misguided, naive, obstinate, inflexible, whimsical, willy-nilly,
procrustian, or "adventitious" critical, creative, and editorial
theories "which led to the habit of ignoring . . . biographical-textual
evidence and its implications." In the course of his book, Parker works
hard to define and demonstrate "a textual-aesthetic approach" to the
study of American literature and has with good cause and solid evidence
directed an ironic and occasionally devastating onslaught against "academic
writing on American literature . . . with broad application to literary
criticism as practiced by American professors of English, whatever their
fields."
Flawed Texts
is certain to stir controversy among scholars because the "creative
process," whatever that really is, has always been subject to shifting
interpretations, some awestruck and grateful, some ignoring the whole business
or taking it for granted, most resulting from manifold theories of the day or
perhaps merely the time of day. It is frivolous, says Parker, to assume
anything other than "all meaning is authorial meaning," which by
itself will raise hackles concerning the legitimacy of authorial
intentionality, but he also says that it is equally silly to assume "every
author retains full authority of anything he has written for as long as he
lives." We are teased into "tough thinking" about creativity and
literary authority, and Parker calls into question the New Critical intrinsic
mentality, some of it "banal" and "vacuous," as it simply
refuses to admit the extrinsic facts that writers are real people living in a
real world who are sometimes moved to [End Page 721] depend on the
fictions of memory in their revisions and who before revision are often held
hostage by the very "monsters" they are creating because "no
writer can have fully thought something if he cannot then and there express
it" and because in the process of "expressing" the writer can be
compromised or buoyed in the course of creativity.
Parker leads us through a counting house of
flawed texts—books by Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Dreiser and
Crane and James and Twain and Mailer—texts analyzed and interpreted and
pedestalized and condemned by brilliant men in a maze of ignorance. And he
cites frequent and often funny critical gaffes, one critic discounting textual
errors saying, "It doesn't really alter my interpretation." We
find that Mark Twain "never did" work his original Siamese twins plot
to its conclusion in Pudd'nhead Wilson and that a compositional error in
an edition of White Jacket ("soiled fish of the sea" in place
of "coiled fish of the sea") caused one critical luminary to
"rhapsodize" over the twisted imagery that was, after all, never part
of Melville's plan.
Parker's humor and chronic good sense make Flawed
Texts not only illuminating and challenging but "a good read" as
well. His final pages forecast hope for the return of close textual analysis
based on the shifting circumstances of time and place, thus dictating that
greater attention be focused on historical contingencies and the writer as a
human being rather than as an angel or a programmed-for-life word processor.
In his book, Toward the End: Closure and
Structure in the American Short Story, John Gerlach of Cleveland State
University writes that although he sometimes focuses on short story
"endings alone," he is "generally more interested in the way
anticipation of endings serves to structure a story as a whole and in the
causes of changing views of closure." He admits as he should his
obligation to the "injunctions" of Poe, and he quotes Robert Louis
Stevenson's declaration that the "body and end of a short story is bone of
the bone and blood of the blood of the beginning." He tells us that
"closure" is now acceptable literary jargon for "ending,"
and then, remarkably, he writes this: " . . . the nature and degree of
closure has...
