Ethnicity and the American Short Story

Julie Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780815321057
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134822294
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How do different ethnic groups approach the short story form? Do different groups develop culture-related themes? Do oral traditions within a particular culture shape the way in which written stories are told? Why does "the community" loom so large in ethnic stories? How do such traditional forms as African American slave narratives or the Chinese talk-story shape the modern short story? Which writers of color should be added to the canon? Why have some minority writers been ignored for such a long time? How does a person of color write for white publishers, editors, and readers?
Each essay in this collection of original studies addresses these questions and other related concerns. It is common knowledge that most scholarly work on the short story has been on white writers: This collection is the first work to specifically focus on short story practice by ethnic minorities in America, ranging from African Americans to Native Americans, Chinese Americans to Hispanic Americans. The number of women writers discussed will be of particular interest to women studies and genre studies researchers, and the collections will be of vital interest to scholars working in American literature, narrative theory, and multicultural studies.

1. Identity in Community in Ethnic Short Story Cycles: Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place

Rocío G. Davis

The powerful images and themes that have emerged with the rise of ethnic literatures have led to a necessary reworking of traditional views of the immigrant and minority situation in the United States. Entrance into what has long been considered the territory of the "other" is made possible by the ever-expanding fiction of writers who repeatedly meditate on the situation of the between-world artist and present us with a search for personal and communal identity through reflections on a homeland and the active responses to the immigrant's "new" world. The complicated process of selfhood and the inescapable doubleness of the between-world subject is the covert theme in much of this ethnic fiction, as the writers question what it is that determines both identity and community, signaling how geographical, ethnic, political, and cultural makeup and differences serve as signifying aspects to this complex self. The recreation of this intricate self in fiction has, interestingly enough, brought about the development and expansion of a literary genre that has proven itself particularly suited to the task of articulating and elaborating its distinctiveness. A survey of ethnic fiction in the United States demonstrates a proliferation of the short story cycle, a hybrid form with roots in the western tradition, which many of the principal ethnic writers have adapted and perfected as a tool through which they enact their dramas. This paper will explore the theory of the short story cycle as a vehicle for the development of ethnic fiction and analyze the cycles of three of the most important ethnic writers in the United States today (Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich, and Gloria Naylor) in an attempt to show how the dramas of identity and community executed by these writers find their fulfillment through a genre that is particularly fitting to the themes they embody.

The dynamics of the short story cycle have converted it into a form that is especially appropriate to the kinds of conflict presented in ethnic fiction. Forrest Ingram, among the first critics to set forth a definition of a cycle, has determined it to be

... a set of stories linked to each other in such a way as to maintain a balance between the individuality of each of the stories and the necessities of the larger unit... (so) that the reader's successive experience in various levels of the pattern of the whole significantly modifies his experience of each of its component parts.

(15, 19)

The term "short story cycle" implies, above all, a principle of organization, a structural scheme for the working out of an idea, characters, or themes, even a circular disposition in which the constituent narratives are simultaneously independent and interdependent. A central aspect of the working of the short story cycle is the interaction, the tension that exists between the individual stories and the overall effect of the patterning of the collection. The pivotal challenge of each cycle is twofold: the collection must assert the individuality and independence of each of the component parts while creating a necessary interdependence that emphasizes the wholeness and essential unity of the work. Ingram has further pointed out that consistency of theme and an evolution from one story to the next are among the classic requirements of the form, with recurrence and development as the integrated movements that effect final cohesion (20). As such, short story cycles magnify the relationship among the separate stories to create a larger whole, without destroying the specificities of each individual story.

This genre, though deprived of serious critical attention for a long time, has existed as a basic narrative form since classical times, as collections unified by editor-authors: Homer's Odyssey, Ovid's Metamorphosis, Boccaccio's Decameron, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the Indian Panchatantra, the Arabian A Thousand and One Nights, and Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur all demonstrate the principal characteristics of the short story cycle. In this sense, the short story cycle looks back to oral traditions of narrative while embodying signs of modernity. Cycles may be said to emulate the act of storytelling, the effort of a speaker to establish solidarity with an implied audience by recounting a series of tales linked by their content or by the conditions in which they are related. The fact that the original stories arose from folk imagination, from the collective effort of many people, gave each a separate identity, a uniqueness, and an independence which then was subsumed and integrated into a whole by a single author who modified and retold the stories, fitting them into a specific design. The short story cycle has undergone a revival in our century, with such examples as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, and Hemingway's In Our Time, to name a few. Although it is obvious that the existence of short story cycles is a global phenomenon, still the pragmatic affinity for short stories that shaped the literature of the United States decisively in the nineteenth century seems to persist in the form of a national inclination in the present century for organized short story collections: perhaps the very determination to build a unified republic out of diverse states, regions, and population groups helps to account for this continuing passion for cycles (Kennedy Modern viii).

Short story cycles are complex works of art. The fundamental structure emerges from the interaction of the diverse elements in the relatively independent components. While each story has its own static and dynamic structures, connective patterns on all levels draw these together to form a cycle, and the stories are strengthened by varying types of internal cohesion. Furthermore, the title of a volume may indicate an organizing concept that acquires resonance as the collection unfolds: titles that point to a particular locale (such as The Women of Brewster Place) or to a unifying element (The Joy Luck Club) give immediate focus to the process being unveiled.

The principal approaches to the necessary cohesion may involve, for instance, the process of development of a character, a composite type, or a set of characters; a dominant theme such as a generation gap or search for identity or the delineation of a particular locale or community is often treated symbolically. In general, more than one such pattern rivets story to story. The orchestration of the whole often appears in the ordering of the stories. Kennedy has pointed out that the arrangement can suggest a cyclical process or an incremental action, produce striking juxtapositions of individual texts, or create clusters of closely linked stories within a volume: this organization may range from obvious to subtle, and connections between stories may be patent or covert (Modern ix). Since a short story cycle does not usually require the type of ending expected of a traditional novel, its typical concluding section or sections tend to simply round off the themes, symbols, or whatever patterned action the cycle possesses. In this manner, through the drawing together in final stories or series of stories the themes and motifs, symbols, or the characters and their communities that have been developing throughout, the author places the finishing touches on the portrait being created.

Nonetheless, as Ingram has emphasized, the most pervasive unifying pattern of short story cycles appears to be the dynamic pattern of recurrent development. It affects all the elements of the narrative: the themes, leitmotifs, settings, characters, and structures of the individual stories and, in consequence, the entire context of the collection as a unit. The repetition of a theme from different angles, for instance, and its ensuing growth in depth in the mind of the reader may unify a cycle at the same time that it individualizes each story. The shared frustration of the Chinese mothers over their inability to reach their American daughters in Amy Tan's cycle creates a composite portrait of the immigrant's dilemma. This example also demonstrates the development typical of characters in short story cycles as differentiated from the single continuous process one finds most often in novels. Character development in a cycle tends to follow a typically cyclic pattern: those characters who appear in more than one story rarely, if ever, occupy the center of the action in all the stories. While there are cycles unified by a single protagonist, most contain a series of different protagonists or an evolving prototype. Another peculiarity of the cycles is that secondary characters seem to collectively receive as much, if not more, attention than do the protagonists in a novel. Even then, "minor characters" are often delineated through comparison with and contrast to the other characters, some of whom may actively influence their growth or present condition, while others merely serve to deepen the reader's insight by juxtaposition. At any given moment, the action of the cycle is centered in the action of the story which is at that moment being experienced (Ingram 22). As character and setting tend to be determining aspects of the story cycles, orchestration of time patterns acquires almost a secondary place in the structure. Frequently, the individual stories in a collection are organized independently of chronology; the author often demonstrates greater concern with the rhythmic pattern of the telling than in the chronological consistency of the events themselves. Often, no temporal relationship at all exists among the various stories of a cycle, but frequently enough one notices some kind of mythic advance in time or some general reference to historical time: chief concern seems to be reserved for psychological time, symbolic times of seasons, times which recur, and mythic times of legendary events (Ingram 23-24).

The specificities of the form therefore work to make the short story cycle an especially pertinent vehicle for the distinctive characteristics of ethnic fiction in general. The short story cycle itself is a hybrid, occupying an odd, indeterminate place within the field of narrative, resembling the novel in its totality, yet composed of distinct stories evoking different characters and problems. Such a fusion of modes "imposes new strategies of reading in which the movement from one story to the next necessitates reorientation, just as the uneasy reciprocity between part and whole conditions the ongoing determination of meaning" (Kennedy "Towards" 14). Ethnic fiction has also facilitated new strategies of reading and has caused a new awareness through a revisioning of the between-world circumstance. The short story cycle, which hovers between the novel and the short story, is thus a particularly apt medium with which to enact the enigma of ethnicity, the feeling that one falls "between two stools." The ethnic short story cycle may be considered the formal materialization of the trope of doubleness as the between-world condition is presented via a form that itself vacillates between two genres.

The ethnic short story cycle, as a hybrid within a hybrid, ultimately offers diverse levels of reading and understanding and may help further the ethnographic purposes of the writers. On the one hand, there is the patterned closure of the individual stories that enact personal dramas of identity and, on the other, the discovery of larger unifying strategies that bridge the gaps between the stories and construct a larger sphere of action through the creation of communities. Ethnic writers, who may be conscious of a double literary inheritance or, at least, the reality of an insider/outsider point of view, tend to contemplate how binary categories of cultural classification have worked in the production of knowledge and counter-knowledge within the framework of literary and cultural studies, a position from which they redefine and construct alternative identities and communities. Hybridity is an important characteristic of all ethnic literary texts and should therefore be considered a strength rather than a weakness. It does not imply a denial of the traditions from which it springs but rather focuses on a continual and mutual development. In this manner, the text itself becomes the embodiment of the histories, the mechanism for modifying and recreating personal and collective identity.

On different levels, ethnic short story cycles may project a desire to come to terms with a past that is both personal and collective: this type of fiction explores the ethnic character and history of a community as a reflection of a personal odyssey of displacement and as a search for self and community. The between-world writer's situation is the intense reworking of questions that ultimately refer to issues such as oppositionality, marginality, boundaries, displacement, and authenticity: a process rather than a structure, requiring constant variation and review. This process is not different from that involved in the appreciation of a story cycle, in which the evolution and gradual unfolding of the themes and a discovery of a new kind of unity in disunity, integrate the essence of the form. Although there is no limit to the kinds of subjects that are found in cycles, one repeatedly discovers that twentieth-century cycles are preoccupied with certain themes, including isolation, disintegration, indeterminacy, the role of the artist, and the maturation process (Mann 13-14). More specifically, the two principal thematic constituents of the ethnic story cycle are the presentation of identity and community, as separate entities, and the notion of an identity within a community--again, a common theme of ethnic fiction in general.

In the first place, the gradual revelation of character through apparently random glimpses serves to emphasize the idea of a personal and cultural identity as a collective self, shared by people with a common history and ancestry, which provide a consistent frame of reference and meaning. Interestingly enough, ethnic identity is, most often, "a matter of 'becoming' as well as of 'being'. It belongs to the future as much as to the past... identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past" (Hall 227). As such, the act of amalgamation required for the understanding of the short story cycle is the same movement as that needed for the consolidation of the ethnic identity portrayed. The shifting borders of identity, isolation, fragmentation, and indeterminacy find their formal expression in the isolated episodes that make up a cycle. The ethnic self, forced to sift constantly through the assorted influences that mold it, ultimately seems to find completion and coherence in the totality, in uniting within itself the diversity it experiences.

Secondly, there are numerous and varied connective strands that serve to draw the individuals of any short story cycle into a single community, bonds that range from familial relationships to friendship, to belonging to the same town, ethnic group, or sex. However this community may be achieved, it usually can be said to constitute the central character of a cycle (Ingram 22). The passage from appreciation of individual stories to the whole presented in the cycle marks the shift from the individual to community; and it constantly sets the individual against the social group to which he or she belongs. The connections that are established will therefore yield what Kennedy has called the "defining experience" of the short story cycle: a vision of unity or community, accumulated by the reader's discernment of meanings and parallels inherent in the composite scheme (Modern 196). But, paradoxically, this vision of wholeness inferred from a cycle may present another side of the coin: the short story cycle may also be viewed as a genre that reflects the struggle between cohesion and fragmentation, between things holding together and things pulling apart. While the fusion of the stories in the reader's imagination may effectively create a vision of community, the actual fact of the stories' independence, their individual closure and completion, may suggest the incapacity to form community. As such, this unique form may also reflect "the failure of place and character to unify a work that remains tantalizingly whole yet fundamentally suspicious of completeness" (Lynch 96). In the case of the ethnic story cycle, these two possibilities are clearly evident, as the search for community, specifically for identity within community, is tantamount. Yet, while The Joy Luck Club and The Women of Brewster Place clearly manifest the generation of a community of women linked by bonds of shared suffering and common understanding, in Love Medicine the failure to form and define a community is evident at the close of the final story.

The three story cycles to be analyzed in this essay fulfill the potential of the cycle form as a vehicle for the expression of the particular sensibility and experience of the ethnic subject in diverse ways. Moreover, they share common elements that somehow suggest a link between one specific type of ethnic fiction to another. In each of the cycles, the unifying force of the narratives is a woman who pulls together the diverse elements that make up the collection. Jing-mei Woo, in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, speaks in two voices--her own and her dead mother's--and metaphorically embodies the conflicts of the other members of the Joy Luck Club and their daughters. Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine unites the different members of the Kashpaw family after June's death. She is the link between the different characters and her death is the impulse that triggers the narrative recounting. Mattie is the central character in Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place. As the community's confidante and its sharpest eye, she is thus well qualified even to express the unconscious urgings of the community and dream a collective dream for the women of Brewster Place. Furthermore, in all three cycles, the problems of race and adapting to the mainstream American life as well as the consciousness of marginality and the inescapable desire to belong are recurrent themes. The multiple narrators of the cycles address over and over again the enigma of their ethnicity, and their conclusions--or the lack thereofconstitute an essential part of the development of the theme.

Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989) is an attempt to synthesize Asian heritage with American aspirations as it presents a group portrait of four mother-daughter relationships that have to endure and bridge not only a generation gap but that created by the waning influence of an older culture and the overwhelming presence of another. The polyphony of voices belongs to four Chinese mothers, immigrants to the United States, and their four daughters, born and raised Americans. The cycle is divided into four parts, each part f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• General Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Editor's Note
• 1. Identity in Community in Ethnic Short Story Cycles: Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place
• 2. Marking Race/Marketing Race: African American Short Fiction and the Politics of Genre, 1933-1946
• 3. Womanist Storytelling: The Voice of the Vernacular
• 4. A Minor Revolution: Chicano/a Composite Novels and the Limits of Genre
• 5. Resistance and Reinvention in Sandra Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek
• 6. Healing Ceremonies: Native American Stories of Cultural Survival
• 7. Asian American Short Stories: Dialogizing the Asian American Experience
• 8. The Invention of Normality in Japanese American Internment Narratives
• 9. No Types of Ambiguity: Teaching Chinese American Texts in Hong Kong
• 10. "Wavering" Images: Mixed-Race Identity in the Stories of Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far
• 11. Resistance and Reclamation: Hawaii "Pidgin English" and Autoethnography in the Short Stories of Darrell H. Y. Lum
• 12. Conflict over Privacy in Indo-American Short Fiction
• 13. Re-Orienting the Subject: Arab American Ethnicity in Ramzi M. Salti's The Native Informant: Six Tales of Defiance from the Arab World
• 14. The Naming of Katz: Who Am I? Who Am I Supposed to Be? Who Can I Be? Passing, Assimilation, and Embodiment in Short Fiction by Fannie Hurst and Thyra Samter Winslow with a Few Jokes Thrown in and Various References to Other Others