Apples and Oranges

Comic Apples and Tragic Oranges:

Comparing, but mostly contrasting, the writings of David Arnarson and Kristjana Gunnars.

“...As far as I can understand it, tragedy, and the ability to understand tragedy, is essentially a narrow, elitist sensibility of the upper classes that allows them to feel superior to the people in the pit. I’ll cast my lot with the people in the pit.”

(David Arnarson, “Story Forming.”)

Introduction: Dead Authors and Liberated Students

One of the most difficult essays I have ever been forced to read was Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author”. I spent the better part of a week puzzling through a badly-photocopied collection of obtuse and seemingly purposely incomprehensible text, only to find a single diamond in all the dust. “There is nothing outside the Text”, writes Barthes, and therefore to attempt to discover what the “author-god” really means is an exercise in futility. The entire liberal-humanist approach to literature is annihilated in that essay. The reader is liberated to interpret writings as he or she sees fit, without regard to the desires or aims of the author or any other authority.

Sadly, this good news has yet to reach the hallowed halls of academia. In approaching this essay, I was confronted with the dubious task of amassing the necessary secondary sources to somehow legitimize my reading of David Anarson’s The Happiest Man in the World and Kristjana Gunnars Any Day but This. I found very little useful, aside from an interview with Arnason. Add to that the difficulty of writing a short paper on two collections of short-stories, which has the effect of multiplying the number of characters and possible themes to the point at which one would need to write a book as long as the collection to adequately examine them in detail and you get one daunting prospect.

So I’m taking a leap. I’m hoping my own writing will make up for the lack of regurgitated academic sources. Hope I don’t break something when I land.

Upper-class, educated, Canadian, middle-aged, and different altogether

In both these collections, there is an overwhelming majority of well-educated, professional, and upper-class (or at least previously upper-class) Canadian characters in their middle-age, with a smattering of children, teens and twenty-something’s, and elderly characters rounding out the mix. The voice of the stories, especially in the case of Gunnars, is almost entirely in this mode, with the other voices slipping in as dialogue. Given this, and the similar backgrounds of both authors, one would think that the voices would sound similar, would pontificate on similar troubles or move through similar situations, and to an extent this is true. Both collections contain a wide variety of similar people dealing with the post-modern angst of middle age and retirement, but here the two authors divide quite sharply. While Gunnars’ characters wallow in a seemingly unending series of tragedies, large and small, and grapple with their angst and long for escape, Arnarson’s clownish protagonists serve as entertaining parables on modern life, alternately bemused and reveling in a world they can’t understand, and have given up trying to.

Escaping Any Day but This

An overriding theme in Any Day But This is a longing for escape, the urge to cast off the hubbub world of professions and modernity, and escape to someplace somewhere where one can lead a content, slow existence. The “Sunshine Coast” of British Columbia, a warm, tranquil spot without extremes of weather, serves as a convenient symbol of this longing for escape. Other places serve this function as well, such as Svelvik, Norway, and a village in southern Sweden “where there is magic...Where life is magical”. Gunnars’ characters seem always on the verge of leaving something, be it a marriage, a home, a career, or life itself. The majority of these voices are far from content with their lot, touched by tragedies large and small, ridden with anxiety about relationships, the past, the future, or even the dark.

Yet even when they leave, they do not truly escape. The female protagonist in Code Pink and Denim plans her escape, going so far as to quit her job and pack up her apartment, but we never see her go. Arne Ibsen, in Directions in Which We Travel, escapes to Canada only to find his new home a prison of his own making. Nancy Hedgecroft seeks solace and a way out in the form of her pastor, only to be subject to his unwelcome advances in Dancing in the Market Place. The list goes on and on.

This lends a distinctly nihilistic feeling to some of the stories. Gunnars’ characters inhabit a world without meta-narratives, without God, without “Progress”, without permanence. Without a source of over-arching meaning in their lives, they wander about in a kind of existential fog looking for whatever lantern they can find, be it a grandchild (The Secret Source of Tears), the security of an older lover (Pleasures Liberty Cannot Know), or the illusionary comfort of controlling one’s small domestic sphere (The Road Between Wind and Water). And yet the author chooses to leave it to the reader whether or not these lanterns in the foggy Sunshine Coast of her creation are really lighting the way, or just illusions in and of themselves.

There in a certain pretension to these stories which troubles the reader. There is no humor as such and precious little joy. The focus is so purely on the tragic that one gets the sense the author is trying too hard to be taken seriously. Add to that such “literary” devices as quotes and references to authors and works, most of which obscure, that serve to weed out those not intellectually prepared. The author’s attempt at creating a feeling of coherency by having characters from previous stories appear briefly in later ones feels forced and fails at its aim. Finally, the purposeful elimination of “endings” in the traditional short-story style results in the tales simply stopping, without achieving any catharsis at all, and leaving the reader in an uncomfortable limbo.

My closest friend and I have this ongoing joke. Whenever we’re faced with a work of fiction that “tries too hard”, or is exclusionary, or pretentious, we sentence the author to imaginary torments for “committing Literature”. After reading Any Day But This, I felt forced to decide that the author is “committing Literature” in the first degree. My sentence is more humane than usual. I think she should read some David Arnarson.

Laughing at the po-mo condition

The gulf in tone, style, and content between Arnarson’s work and that of Gunnars’ is like a canyon. This is interesting. Both authors come from similar backgrounds. They are of Icelandic descent, both are academics, both live or lived in Canada, and both have chosen to write mainly short stories. But while Gunnars peoples her work with figures of tragedy, Arnarson peoples his The Happiest Man in the World with another sort of character altogether. While still educated, upper-class, Canadian, and middle-aged, Arnarson’s mid-life-crisis ineffectual male protagonists are very much a foil to Gunnar’s angst-ridden menagerie of voices. Also interesting is that Arnason includes a great deal of “Icelandic” material in his works, be it references to folk tales, names, or simply the location of the story. Gunnars, on the other hand, would appear to be Norwegian if one were to only read Any Day But This.

Arnarson’s characters, even when not taking part in an obvious comedy, are none-the-less laughable. They are victims of their own pretense, as in The Boys and The Naiads, or more-or-less ordinary folk presented with extraordinary circumstances (The Sunfish, The Washing Machine, The Marriage Inspector) who respond with varying degrees of comic effectiveness. Unlike Any Day But This, The Happiest Man in the World is not encumbered by the weight of tragedy. Rather, Arnarson transforms potential tragedies (the twice abandoned husband in Over and Over, or the widowed father in The Event) into moments of rueful comedy or transcendental wonder. His stories seem to say to the reader, “It’s not so bad, nothing can kill you that you can laugh at.” Arnarson’s stories are enhanced by a magical realism, which the author admits to reading a lot of, completely lacking in Gunnars’ work. The laws of space, time, and probability, along with the long established patterns of plot and literary voice are null and void in his stories. The utterly irrational can take place, a man can appear on your doorstep and announce that he is a marriage inspector; a rather effete middle-aged scholar can sail into an erotically charged nude camping myth, bed three beauties, and survive a shipwreck. A trip to a marriage counselor ends with smiles all around as all three involved part ways, bound for the life they truly want to live. Yet the reader believes, not because of the realism, or symbolism, or emotional weight, but because they are good stories.

The short story form is particularly punishing to writers unwilling to give the reader what they want, which in the case of the short story is, as Arnason himself states “the good parts”, with “the dull parts” left out. “The reader has to be entertained and there are ways of doing that. The thing about reading is, as soon as they close the book, that’s it. You’re not there and they don’t have to be polite. They’re sitting in their own living rooms and when you bore them, they close the book.” (Arnason,” Story Forming”)

In order to keep his readers entertained, Arnarson resorts to an interesting method. He rejects any ending he comes up with before he has finished the story. This would seem an odd choice for a short-story writer, as most short stories, especially the gothic ones, almost always have a twist ending. Poe, for example, is said to have written the endings for several of his tales before the body of the tale itself. (Cite)

By refusing to do this, Arnarson creates endings that do not necessarily “twist”, but none-the-less surprise. No story ends entirely happily, no story ends in pure tragedy, but all the stories have an ending at once satisfying and intriguing. A Girls Story, in which Arnarson as author keeps breaking into his own parody of a Harlequin Romance, ends with the young lovers just about to kiss, frozen in that moment by the author-god. This leaves the reader to wonder just how much the two characters would care for that situation, which, like much of Arnarson’s work, seems to contain heavenly bliss and tormenting disappointment in equal measure. At the end of Fathers and Sons, Sons and Fathers, the rather effete father/narrator is surprised to find that in the process of retelling the story of his tragi-comic hunting trip with this own father and young son, that he has become the center of the story, not the father he always felt over-shadowed by, and the reader is almost as surprised as he.

With his emphasis on humor and humanity, and his interest in hooking the reader in, Arnason’s prose stands in stark contrast to Gunnars’. There is next to no reference to literary works, with the possible exception on A Field Guide to Birds East of The Rockies, or obscure poets. Rather, Arnarson includes his references within the body of the story itself, calling on almost archtypal and widely know stories, which he then presents in his own comic way. Hence, Little Red Riding Hood becomes a coy seductress and the wolf her prey in Girl and Wolf. The Marriage Inspector has a recognizably Bradberrian flavor, with its topsy-turvy inversions of gender roles and public versus private issues, which makes for laughter and shivers in equal measure.

All in all, despite their myriad similarities in background and field, the dense, tragic, and rather exclusionary writing of Kristjana Gunnars has precious little in common with the lightly meaningful comedic writing of David Arnason. It’s a case of apples from Gimli and oranges from the Sunshine Cost. Frankly, I’ll take the apples.

Arnason, David. “Story Forming.” Interview by Robert Enright. Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing. Birk Sproxton, ed. Winnipeg Turnstone, 1986. 101-09

Arnason, David. The Happiest Man in the World. Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1989

Gunnars, Kristjana. Any Day But This. Red Deer Press, Calgary, 2004