The situation is not the story

. . . and how a story always tells two stories

Anyone who has taught or attended a creative writing course in the English-speaking world is likely to have come across Vivian Gornick’s essay, ‘The situation and the story’:

In every work of literature there’s a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional insight that preoccupies the writer. In his Confessions, Augustine tells the tale of his conversion to Christianity; that’s the situation. In this tale, he moves from an inchoate to a coherent sense of being, from an idling existence into a purposeful one, from a state of ignorance to one of truth; that’s the story . . .

The questions are always the same: What is the situation, and what is the story? What is the experience being shaped, the insight expressed, the self revealed? These questions are asked of the nonfictional witness as well as of the fictional storyteller.

Similarly, almost anyone concerned with the teaching of contemporary literature (or of escritura creativa) in the Spanish-speaking is probably familiar with Ricardo Piglia’s ‘Theses on the short story’:

In one of his notebooks, Chekhov recorded the following anecdote: “A man in Monte Carlo goes to the casino, wins a million, returns home, commits suicide.” The classic form of the short story is condensed within the nucleus of that future, unwritten story. Contrary to the predictable and conventional (gamble–lose–commit suicide), the intrigue is presented as a paradox. The anecdote disconnects the story of the gambling and the story of the suicide. That rupture is the key to defining the double character of the story’s form. First thesis: a short story always tells two stories.

The classic short story — Poe, Quiroga — narrates Story One (the tale of the gambling) in the foreground, and constructs Story Two (the tale of the suicide) in secret. The art of the short story writer consists in knowing how to encode Story Two in the interstices of Story One. A visible story hides a secret tale, narrated in an elliptical and fragmentary manner. The effect of surprise is produced when the end of the secret story appears on the surface.

Chekhov’s tale might also be interpreted according to Gornick’s criteria of the situation and the story. A man goes into the casino at Monte Carlo and wins a million, then goes home and commits suicide: that’s the situation. The story lies in the paradox, in the disconnect between the one thing and the other.

Much as I resist (or even disapprove of) ‘how-to’ pieces of advice about the craft of writing, there is a simplicity and truth to the idea that whatever we tell contains a substratum of meaning which even the narrator might be unaware of; similarly, Gornick’s concept of ‘the situation’ — which might so easily be confounded with ‘the story’— helps establish the essential duality at the core of most human storytelling.

For example, we might apply either thesis to the life of the addict. In Olivia Laing’s magisterial study of alcoholic writers, Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink, we find the following:

An alcoholic may be said in fact to lead two lives, one concealed beneath the other as a subterranean river snakes beneath a road. There is the life of the surface — the cover story, so to speak — and then there is the life of the addict, in which the priority is always to secure another drink.

This mirrors almost exactly what Ricardo Piglia writes about the structure of the short story: that the outer, surface narrative, always contains and conceals a parallel interior story. This poses the idea that a human life is always about (at least) two narratives, the overt and visible, and the covert or hidden. In the case of the addict, the duality of these narratives is especially extreme, because the parallel interior or subterranean story — even if initially concealed or invisible — eventually breaks out into awful visibility, affecting all those in the immediate vicinity. But the truth is, we all have our hidden inner stories that snake like an underground river beneath the road of our life’s grand narrative.

Here is the opening paragraph of Eduardo Halfon’s novel, The Polish Boxer:

I was pacing among them, moving up and down between the rows of desks as if trying to find my way out of a labyrinth. We were reading from a Ricardo Piglia essay. We read about the dual nature of the short story, and it didn’t surprise me, as I looked out, to be met with a sea of faces covered in acne and heartfelt bewilderment. We read that a story always tells two stories. We read that the visible narrative always hides a secret tale. The story’s construction makes something hidden appear artificially, we read, and then I asked them if they’d understood it, any of it, but it was as though I were speaking some Bantu language. Silence. But rashly, undaunted, I stepped further into the labyrinth. Several of them were dozing. Others were doodling. An overly thin girl toyed with her long blond locks, absentmindedly coiling and uncoiling a twist of hair around an index finger. Beside her, a pretty-boy eyed her lasciviously. And from within that vast silence, I heard the drone of tittering and whispering and gum chewing and then, as I did every year, I asked myself if this shit was really worth it.

And there we have it: Halfon tells us a story that includes a rather hefty clue about itself as he attempts to teach Piglia’s hypothesis to a class of disinterested college students, and within that paragraph alone we have a strong indication that the ‘story’ — or in Gornick’s terminology, the situation (the classroom scene) — is merely a vehicle for something else . . . But that’s hardly a spoiler. All writers do this.

Anyhow . . . attempting an overhaul of my laptop’s photo collection recently, I come across a shot that I must have taken of Eduardo Halfon, standing across the road from Coffee a Gogo in Cardiff (Wales), in front of a makeshift sign that — miraculously — cites a line from the opening paragraph of The Polish Boxer. No one is sure how the signs got there, but we have our suspicions. Tellingly, the word ‘tells’ is missing. It reappeared by the evening of that day. I wonder where it went in the meantime, and, more specifically, what it told.

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator from Wales. His books include The Color of a Dog Running Away, The Vagabond’s Breakfast, The Blue Tent and Ambassador of Nowhere. For many years he led the graduate programmes in Creative & Critical Writing at Cardiff University, Wales. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews etc can be found at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.