For this post, I’ve taken the opportunity to pose some questions to Toronto fiction writer, Matt Shaw, whom I’ve never met, but whose debut short fiction collection, The Obvious Child (Exile Editions, 2007) I recently read and enjoyed. The collection’s opener immediately got my attention and I found myself increasingly intrigued by these darkly comic and elliptical stories. Matt was very thoughtful and candid in his answers to my questions. In the first half of this interview, Matt discusses his Journey-prize winning story, the writing workshop process, the perils and pleasures of absurdist fiction, as well as the central theme of his collection. The second half of the interview will be posted in the coming weeks.
“Matchbook for a Mother’s Hair,” your collection’s Journey-Prize-winning opener is a very fine story of the classic sort where there is a significant plot revelation toward the ending. Though this kind of story (I’m thinking, for example, of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”) was once common in popular mid-twentieth century American magazines, it is unusual in contemporary literary fiction.
I never thought too much about the mousetrap ending myself, but I know other people have. I am sometimes asked to confirm if what a particular reader thinks happens in the story is what actually occurs. As though I’ve got a right answer and they’re trying to find out if they got it, too. If they get my “point.” And I always tell them that whatever it is they’re thinking they’re probably right. That answer doesn’t satisfy people. But I don’t care much one way or the other about the ending from a plot point of view, or making people feel better about what actually happens.
More important, as far as I’m concerned, is that no one seems uncertain about Gordon’s utter lack of realization and the confusion that does not subside, even as the reader himself starts to put together what’s going on. There is no Joycean epiphany for Gordon at the end of his story, no moment of realization about what is happening to him or why. The reader does have an epiphany – causally, the weight of the story, the dramatic irony, is fully realized only at the moment Gordon is led away forever in the nondescript car. The reader spends a good deal of time and effort figuring out just what Gordon is telling them. Once they think that they’ve put it together, it’s too late. Gordon’s gone.
Someone told me that whatever sympathy they felt for Gordon was tempered by the helplessness that they felt for themselves at the end of the story. In this way, the reader’s epiphany is a mousetrap. The reader is led to believe or hope that there will be some epiphany or satisfactory resolution for the character. But it never arrives. In fact, it’s the reader who’s put in the hot seat: the moment of knowing what the character cannot know and is unable to do anything about it – to tell Gordon about his fate. They want the resolution for themselves, but they can’t have it.
Perhaps the mousetrap is that the reader believes that, as he understands Gordon’s plight, he’ll feel sympathy for him. And maybe we do experience some sympathy for him, or at least pity, but not without some anxiety, or worse, selfishness on our part. The part of us that feels good when we do good things for others. Selfishness disgusts us when we see it in ourselves: the realization that we’re more like Mrs. Ween and her friends than we’d like to believe.
You acknowledge that “two dozen colleagues took friendly hacks” at this story. How do you successfully process this volume of editorial input? Did you deliberately set out to write a story with this kind of revelatory “mousetrap” ending, or did it evolve through the revision process?
I wrote “Matchbook for a Mother’s Hair” over two evenings in 2003 or 2004 for a creative writing class at York University. I sat down and I wrote the first two sentences, “Where do I start, my name is Gordon Ween. I am seventeen and three quarters.” I had been tossing those sentences around my head for a month or two, not writing anything. I was getting the rhythm of the voice right. It was all about the rhythm of the voice. I didn’t care about anything else: about character or story or theme. Once I had those two lines the way I wanted them, I wrote the rest of the story in about three hours. In terms of plot, “Matchbook” is pretty simple: a young boy, developmentally disabled and permanently confused (not at all the same thing), the women at the card table, the temptations/encounters/denials, the fatal accident, and the epiphany (or at least the place earmarked for it).
I had written the entire story on the sound, timbre, and rhythm of the voice alone, and in a few short hours at that. I expected people to have big things to say about the plot, about how shallow it was, how obvious the form was, or how indulgent the language. But most people seemed to understand what I was trying to do. Most of the responses simply listed several other nouns or adjectives that I could use because they sounded better, more in line with the rhythm. The only difference between the first draft and the final draft is maybe thirty words – which I changed with the help of my classmates – and punctuation. My publisher added most of the commas that appear in the published edition.
Of course, some of my classmates did a lot more than that for me during those years. It was important that I acknowledged them for that support. I trusted their opinions. It can be hard for a writer to trust another writer. The support meant a lot.
Characters in this collection are often helpless in the face of personal crises. In “One Trick Pony,” a concerned father is incapable of keeping his daughter from her obsessive juggling. In “The Deportee,” a legitimate citizen is unwilling to take action in order to keep himself from being deported. For much of “The Elevator,” the protagonist is unable to quit his job, despite multiple attempts. What’s interesting about the sense of paralysis that pervades these stories is that it seems to simultaneously result from both stifling external bureaucracies, as well as a kind of personal failure to act on the part of the protagonists. Do you conceive of this ‘helplessness’ as ultimately a personal failure on the part of the protagonists, or an external one resulting from the bureaucratic institutions to which these protagonists are beholden?
For me, the answer to that question is the crux of the entire book: somewhere in between. The central dilemma for many of these characters is to search for the boundary between fatalism and free will. Or the boundary between them as characters (letters that form words) and characters (as words that represent people) and the way they stand out from – and blend in with – their surroundings. A lot of the characters in the book – Dreschl most obviously – seem to almost recognize that they are book characters. Maybe the author from “After the Doctor Died in his Novel” understands that, too. Players on a stage or letters on a page.
Writing labeled “absurd” is too often associated simply with postmodern free play: if life is meaningless or beyond your control, the label says, you can at least feel free to get in the sandbox and mess around. And while the act of playing, of formal experimentation, of wit and tragedy and jokes and games is worthy enough, it is often dull.
For example, I don’t like to read Waiting for Godot as an aimless play in which the characters and reader are left waiting for something that never happens. I read the play and think that, in their banter, Estragon and Vladimir almost seem to be aware that something is going on in their world. It is a strange world and not quite right. They look at it a moment, to analyze it, but they can never analyze it very long. It’s like looking at the sun. But they come up with some ideas about. In fact, they make a good deal of sense, even if it their way of thinking, their associations, their vicious wordplay, seem alien to us. But they experience anxiety. They talk about it. And they do some strange things. They seem to start the play with a preconceived notion of what the boundary of their sandbox is and, knowing that, mess around, almost “for fun.” The characters in my book are much more earnest. Most try a little harder. The father in “One Trick Pony” does eventually try to do something: he makes a serious resolution to rescue his daughter. He fails, but he tests the boundary. He tests it more than Saul from “The Elevator.” Saul is not even convinced about his own beliefs, nor is he remotely as self-aware as Barb’s father. The woman in “Talmud,” on the other hand, is pretty successful. She bends the rules of her fictional world to her own needs.
In short, I’d rather let the characters discover the boundaries of whatever peculiar world belongs them and to decide for themselves how hopeless or meaningless it is than to have everyone be entirely convinced of the eventual result before the story even starts. So the characters must be capable of both failure (which can be caused by their own hand or a total lack of personal choice) and a window, however small, for success. Otherwise there’s no real story. Just play. There’s nothing fun about watching other people play if you can’t join in yourself. -Matt Shaw
That night at Mitzi’s Sister, this argument, which ma-ay have been well-watered, stumbled around accessibility. The accessibility of poetry is separate from concerns of its marketability—how many people poetry is reaching—but the two get smushed together, as if a batch of easy-peasy poems would suddenly go all CSI. (Will this question, which arises from a capitalist, market- and readership-based quantified evaluation of art, fade as this recession slows us down to fondue parties and reading E.E. Cummings to each other when we can’t afford the cable bill?)
iting it, though this is a rant for another time). Have the tools overtaken the creation?
I first met Nila Gupta during the Eighties when we were both young and without a voice. I had started a peer group called S.A.G.A for South Asian gays and lesbians (later renamed Khush) because as minorities within a minority we felt alienated from all sides. Hence we created our own space, our own sense of community and identity. Participation in this small ad-hoc group helped give voice to a movie director (
