The Worlds of Carol Shields

David Staines

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780776622064
• eBook ISBN: 9780776621852
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"Carol was a very fine writer and a remarkable human being, a wonderful person whose work I closely followed for more than 20 years. I interviewed her frequently over those years, with virtually every work she produced —novel, radio drama, play, book of stories. So I had a good sense of the span of her work and also her evolution as a stylist. But the key reason I wanted to make a book focusing on her life and work is that we were friends."
—Eleanor Wachtel

This book strikes the right balance between intimate accounts and literary analysis. It opens with reminiscences by close friend Eleanor Wachtel, which are followed by a study of Shields' poetry by her daughter and grandson, then by various aspects of her fiction, including a detailed examination of her plays. It closes with reminiscences by four close friends: Jane Urquhart, Joan Clark, Wayson Choy and Martin Levin.

The 23 contributors offer new insights, new theories, and new perspectives about Shields' illuminating career. Only one piece—her obituary written by Margaret Atwood—has been previously published.

Cool Empathy in the Short Fiction of Carol Shields

MARILYN ROSE

Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

—Ian McEwan, “Love, Empathy and 9/11”

In reviewing Carol Shields’s short story collection Various Miracles (1985), New York Times book reviewer Josh Rubins refers to her “serious whimsy,” a “fragile amalgam that…is sometimes surprisingly powerful as well as highly engaging. (11)” He notes the way that some of Shields’s “tiny fictions” have “sizable impact” and observes that her stories are somehow “disarming,” and pull “the reader inside her reckless imagination before the usual resistances can take shape.” He concedes that not all of her stories are equally successful: some are merely droll or seem to strain for effect. The best, however, exhibit a kind of “minimalism” that manages to be “ambiguous” and “slippery” in a “dainty” but “full-hearted” sort of way.

Rubins is onto something here, although I would use a term that he does not. It seems to me that Carol Shields’s most remarkable stories are those that masterfully evoke empathy in her readers, and that it is the key mechanism by which we are drawn into so many of her stories “before…resistances can take shape.” Her handling of empathy, moreover, is particularly deft in that it does not require forfeiture of the “slipperiness” and “ambiguity” that are hallmarks of Shields’s style and vision, as Rubins suggests.

That much of Carol Shields’s short fiction should be characterized by empathy is not surprising. She has often been celebrated for her commitment to the need for understanding and other kinds of love in human relationships. In Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields, for example, Eleanor Wachtel repeatedly characterizes Carol Shields as a writer of extraordinary “compassion” (10), “humanity (15), and “gener[osity]” (16). In conversation with Wachtel, Shields states that living fully is not a matter of “standing by” (155) but of sympathetic engagement with one another, of “love” in other words (87). She speaks of the mutability of human beings (18), the way that we must constantly change and evolve in response to the “random accidents” that shape our lives (73). Life is a “maze,” she says: we are never sure of our direction and always making wrong turns (78). But she is moved by what she sees as our “longing for belonging,” for “home,” which she defines broadly as a “place where we are enabled, where we can be at ease…where we’re free to be creative, where we’re at peace with other people…” (117).

I am interested in the way that Shields’s short fiction explores human relationships and particularly our apparently intrinsic drive to find ways of being at one with others—despite the competing drives, needs, contrarieties, and general prickliness of the egocentric inner self in its ongoing struggle for self-realization and control, which also governs thought and human behaviour. While Shields’s characters are seldom entirely loveable, I see her as managing to trigger compassion for them—or what might be called empathetic engagement with them—through fictional mechanisms that generate empathy in interestingly indirect ways.

Such indirection is part of Shields’s self-identified aesthetic. In quoting Emily Dickinson in the epigraph to her first collection of short stories, Various Miracles (1985)—“tell all the truth but tell it slant”—Shields runs up the flag, so to speak. She, like Dickinson, will prefer the circuitous and the oblique to the overt. And nowhere is this more evident than in her generation of what I call cool empathy in so many of her short stories. By this term I refer to her employment of literary strategies that generate identification or fellow feeling in her readers while avoiding levels of emotion that might dismissed as sentimental or even mawkish by contemporary readers and critics, who tend to see overt sentimentality as more properly appropriate to genre fiction than to serious art.

“Fiction” encompasses many kinds of writing, and it is true that some kinds of fiction invite intellectual more than emotional investment on the part of readers. Stories that focus on puzzles of one kind or another or on metafictional play are cases in point, and such narratives have abounded during the postmodern period of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The fiction most avidly consumed by readers of all kinds, however, remains stubbornly realistic, and the work of Carol Shields in which I am interested belongs to this category. Such fiction rests for its success upon the evocation of emotion, on the reader’s losing himself or herself in the alternative world that the narrative represents through identification with the characters in the story as it unfolds. Indeed some would argue, as does Keith Oatley, that realistic “fiction is all about…emotions” and that we read realistic fiction primarily because “we want to be moved” by it (Passionate Muse 15–16), which is to say that we seek to empathize, to feel with the fictional other in ways that will allow us to incorporate the imagined, vicarious experience into our own ways of being.¹

But what does it mean to be “moved” by fiction? And why should we yearn for this experience? Notions of empathy and its importance in fiction have been bolstered by new scientific discoveries and paradigms in the fields of cognitive and social neuroscience² that support the idea that art, especially narrative art, inevitably evokes emotion, can stimulate empathy, and can do this to good social effect.³ A brief overview of that complex scientific landscape may be helpful in understanding the relationship between emotion and narrative as currently construed—and hence the ways through which emotion may be generated in storytelling.

Emotion is seen by contemporary neuroscience not as amounting to “bursts of irrationality” (Hogan, On Being Moved 240) but as measurable physiological/somatic responses to sensory “triggers” in our environment that (and this is the cognitive side) engage with our stored memories (Hogan, Cognitive Science 162) and “move” us into feeling and potentially into action. More to the point for literary scholars, relatively new brain imaging techniques, such as fMRI imaging (Keen 61),⁴ demonstrate that “…our brains respond in roughly the same manner when we imagine something,” such as the suffering of others, as when we experience it directly ourselves (Hogan, On Being Moved 243).⁵ Of even more significance is the evocation of “motor mimicry” during such “pre-empathic or emphatic arousals” (Snow 72)—that is, the fact that during vicarious experiences to which we fully attend, our bodies themselves register and experience motor changes that parallel the movements of embodied figures as they move within the narratives we read, hear, or (in the case of film or television) watch.

We seek such experiences, it would seem, because of their utility as a tool for the construction and reconstruction of our social selves. Novelists have understood this for a very long time. As Sheila Heti observes in “On First Looking into Pride and Prejudice,” the work of Jane Austen—a writer whom Shields admires and aligns with in interesting ways⁶—is all about “what other people are like.” Heti says of Austen, “She knew that life is not about who we are alone, but who we are in relation to others.” Contemporary neuroscience supports what Austen and others, including Shields, have understood intuitively. Human beings are by far the most social of primates: Oatley goes so far as to argue that being social is in effect our “ecological niche” (Such Stuff 39). In this regard, fictional narrative represents a kind of laboratory in which we can develop what Raymond Mar has called “a repertoire of social emotions” (qtd. in Oatley “Entertainment”) through engagement with imagined others. Cognitive evolutionists affirm that humans spend much of their time throughout their lives attempting to understand what others are thinking or feeling as a strategy for interacting with them and learning thereby how to navigate social situations.

The principal technique for doing so appears to be attempting to “read one another’s minds”⁷ in order to make sense of the behaviour of others and to ascribe meaning to our own lives.⁸ In speaking of “mind-reading” in this sense (alternatively called “theory of mind” or “perspective taking”), such advocates point to the universality of narrative as an instrument for accessing the minds of others and processing their feelings,⁹ and to our seemingly innate yearning for stories.¹⁰ Ellen Spolsky, for example, speaks of “narrative as nourishment” (37), and goes so far as to argue for the existence of an evolved “representational hunger” in human beings (38),¹¹ an idea echoed by Shields in her essay, “Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard,” in which she examines our profound “need” for narrative (19).¹²

The main mechanism for the generation of empathy in representational art is thought to be the “sympathetic identification” of the reader or viewer with the character or characters central to the fictional world that is being experienced¹³—through the reader’s or viewer’s participatory immersion in the “concrete detail” located in the fictional experience (Feagin 59). Critics like Oatley argue that the process of identification involves the generation of “fresh emotion” (Such Stuff 115) that moves us through the “observation or imagination” of another’s emotions (113).¹⁴ It is a matter of engagement, and when so engaged, we bring our own experiences and “schema” (or patterns of thinking) to texts (60). We try on, or “simulate,” the emotions of those with whom we identify—but at an aesthetic distance that permits us to assess or think about implications as we vicariously experience the intuited feelings of others (43–44).

Cognitive space, or room for the processing of vicarious experience within narratives, is essential to notions of empathy, as can be seen in the distinctions made between empathy and the related concept of sympathy. Generally “empathy” is assumed to involve feeling along with or in line with a fictional other, whereas “sympathy” is thought to constitute feeling for another and is closer to pity (Barnes and Thagard). In the words of social psychologist Lauren Wispé:

In empathy one substitutes oneself for the other person; in sympathy one substitutes others for oneself.…The object of empathy is understanding. The object of sympathy is the other person’s well-being. In sum, empathy is a way of knowing; sympathy is a way of relating. (qtd. in Barnes and Thagard)

The emphasis on empathetic understanding—on knowing, thinking, and applying what we are experiencing vicariously to our own lives—helps to explain the assumption that persists into our own time that there are higher and lower orders of narrative.¹⁵ Narrative marked by blatant sentimentality is typically seen as lower in the hierarchy, which is to say suitable for “popular” or “genre” fiction but not for high art, whose subtlety is assumed to be predicated on openness and greater room for varieties of feeling and interpretation than is typical of genre fiction.¹⁶ Oatley contends that while genre fiction leaves little room for unexpected feelings and complex judgments, works of art invite exploratory “conversation” (Such Stuff 180) and are by nature “surrounded by orbits of discussion” (178). Along similar lines, David Miall suggests what he calls “sub-literary genres” (such as romances and thrillers) lack the “[i]ndeterminacy” that engenders “more fresh emotions.” Higher order narratives elicit novel rather than familiar feelings; their delicacy and ambiguity invite, through cognitive processing, the “retuning” or “recalibrating” of the reader’s feelings, which in turn enable self-modification (“Emotions” 334–35). A key assumption among such critics is that sophisticated art will avoid overt evocations of feeling that solicit sympathy or pity, or what might be called, I suppose, “hot empathy,” such as might be found in narratives designed simply for entertainment or to recruit readers to particular political causes.¹⁷

And so the trick for serious writers of fiction in our own time—this wintry age of irony, in Frygean terms—is to attempt instead to generate “cool empathy” in ways that skirt easy sympathy and engage intellect as well as emotion, which is to say in ways that invite engagement and require thought and processing, rather than obviously assigning feeling to readers in hot-button fashion.

What can be taken from what we currently know of the human brain in relation to narrative, then, is that empathetic fiction will deploy tactics that play into the ways in which the body and brain collaborate in processing emotional triggers. This includes the adroit handling of point of view, so as to assure what Suzanne Keen calls “interior representations” of a character’s or characters’ consciousness (69), along with an abundance of sensual detail so as, in Elaine Scarry’s words, to “skillfully [recruit] the same processing mechanisms that the mind relies upon in live perception,” and thereby “tacitly instruct the reader in re-creating” the experience as he or she absorbs a text (qtd. in Waugh 551).¹⁸ It will include physical cues, such that a character’s positioning or movement will trigger mirroring physical responses in the body of the reader or viewer.¹⁹ It will also employ the judicious use of descriptive detail in order to create an immersive social world in which focal characters reside, which some refer to as attentiveness to the subject’s “status life”—everyday manners, customs, habits, gestures, furniture, clothing, and styles, and related domestic detail as they pertain to focal characters (Oatley and Gholamain, 273; Oatley, Such Stuff 136–37).

But all of these must be enhanced by cognitive prompts—invitations to think and process that allow “the brain and the body to ruminate over particularly difficult social puzzles in good time” (Spolsky 50). Miall speaks of defamiliarization (“Emotions” 334) and Oatley of unexpected juxtapositions (Such Stuff 30–31), both of which require readers to navigate unusual connections. Miall notes the presence of a “degree of uncertainty, challenging the reader to locate a meaning for themselves” through the feelings evoked (Miall, “Emotions” 333). Keen makes reference to “aspects of the discourse that slow the reader’s pace” and “invite more active reading that opens the way for empathy” (73). And both Keen and Oatley note the importance of authorial manipulations at the “discourse level,” which is to say ways in which the author inserts “direct and indirect speech acts” into a story—acts “intended to influence the reader” (Oatley and Gholamain, 272) and that amount to metafictional commentary that moves readers towards desired emotional states (Keen 69).

Carol Shields published three short story collections in her lifetime, Various Miracles (1985), The Orange Fish (1989), and Dressing Up for the Carnival (2000). Her Collected Stories (2004), published posthumously, includes the stories found in all three collections, along with one new story, “Segue.” To read them together is to be impressed by Shields’s cleverness and the variety of kinds of stories attempted, from the realistic to the fantastic. But more impressive is the variety of their approaches to readerly engagement and questions of empathy. One of her stories, in fact, serves as a kind of negative tutorial, an example of the “unempathetic,” a depiction of what empathy is not.

“Poaching” (Various Miracles 1985) is narrated in the first person by a supercilious woman whose circle of disdain apparently includes not only those with whom she crosses paths, such as tiresome innkeepers, but also her husband Dobey—who insists, for example, upon using the downscale word “serviettes” for “napkins” and is sometimes too soft, she feels, on hitchhikers, such as “those poor bloody Aussies” they had picked up that day (75). Hitchhikers are their prey, in effect, and she is proud of their tactics in prying stories from these hapless passengers: they keep the back seat of their car clear of luggage in order to inspire trust in those they pick up, and wring stories from some by affecting silence and from others by “prim[ing] the pump” (75). She notes, and apparently agrees with him, that Dobey knows that the poaching of personal narratives is a crime, a form of “stealing,” though no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• To the Light House
• Art Is Making: Carol Shields in Conversation and Correspondence
• The Square Root of a Clock Tick: Time and Timing in Carol Shields’s Poetry and Prose
• All That “Below-the-Surface Stuff”: Carol Shields’s Conversational Modes
• Guilt, Guile, and Ginger in Small Ceremonies
• Revisiting the Sequel: Carol Shields’s Companion Novels
• Bio-Critical Afterlives: Sarah Binks, Pat Lowther, and the Satirical Gothic Turn in Carol Shields’s Swann
• Assembling Identity: Late-Life Agency in The Stone Angel and The Stone Diaries
• Male-Pattern Bewilderment in Larry’s Party
• Departures, Arrivals: Canada/United States Migrations and the Trope of Travel in the Fiction of Carol Shields
• “To Be Faithful to the Idea of Being Good”: The Expansion to Goodness in Carol Shields’s Unless
• Narrative Pragmatism: Goodness in Carol Shields’s Unless
• Shields’s Guerrilla Gardeners: Sowing Seeds of Defiance and Care
• Cool Empathy in the Short Fiction of Carol Shields
• The “Perfect Gift” and the “True Gift”: Empathetic Dialogue in Carol Shields’s “A Scarf” and Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Scarf”
• Prepositional Domesticity
• “Grand Slam”: Birthing Women and Bridging Generations in Carol Shields’s Play Thirteen Hands
• Archives as Traces of Life Process and Engagement: The Late Years of the Carol Shields Fonds
• The Voices of Carol Shields
• The Clarity of Her Anger
• My Seen-Sang, Carol Shields: A Memoir of a Master Teacher
• Carol Shields
• Contributors