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The Scalpel We Need

Tadhg — Tue, 23 May 2006 05:49:43 +0000

Earlier this year I read this:

It’s not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.”
—”Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed”, p61, in Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace

(The essay is online.)

My initial reaction to this was that Kafka was talking about the act of writing. This is definitely not the case—he was talking about the impact that books should have upon us. However, I was definitely struck by the idea that writing was itself a way to move in the same direction. Perhaps not an axe, because the books, written by other people, would probably have greater force (their unexpected nature providing this) and not very much accuracy (their authors don’t know us). We, writing for ourselves, however, are also working on the frozen seas of ourselves, and I for one certainly need to write, to assault the ice. The concept of the self as a frozen sea is powerful, and resonates with me. I need books to chop away as hatchets, and I need my own writing as a scalpel.

Although now that I think about it, I might need more of a flaming sword than a scalpel.

Tags: books, criticism, essays, philosophy, psychology, writing

MTGO Needs Replays

Tadhg — Thu, 08 Aug 2002 08:00:07 +0000

First of all, this is not a criticism of Leaping Lizards. The features I discuss below are certainly important, but they’re more important in terms of the overall health of MTG than to the narrower concern of making MTGO work (which is what LL, presumably, are responsible for). If the features don’t appear, it is a failing on the part of WotC much more than LL, and while I hope that the LL team will see the benefits and include them, I suspect that pressure needs to be brought to bear on WotC to pay for what I suggest.

My concern is with replays. Specifically, the ability (currently lacking) to share replays. Sharing replays would immeasurably increase our understanding of the game, a goal which hopefully needs no explanation.

Currently, describing games of MTG is laborious and clumsy. Match reports give overviews and then some detail on what the reporters see as critical points, but they are sketches at best. It’s difficult to accurately report on every event in a game. That’s a major obstacle in our attempts to understand the game better. It should be evident that being able to study games in depth is critical to increased comprehension of how to play well, and that detailed accounts of past games are critical to said deep study.

MTG Online offers us a chance to get past that. Everything that happens in the game is noted by the program itself. And we each have the ability to study our own games. However, the feature as it stands now is completely inadequate, for one main reason: we cannot share our replays with other players. We can’t send them to other players with notes about specific turns and what they think we should have done. We can’t examine other players’ games to see how we should improve our play.

A clear demonstration of how this constraint imposes a low ceiling on dialog about the game is found in Andrew Johnson’s Concepts of Magic: Case Study article. No criticism of Andrew is intended, but the format is awkward, and it’s not easy to follow what’s going on in detail. We get the basic gist of the games, but that’s not really enough for the kind of analysis that Andrew is attempting. Obviously, the fact the that games were played in MTGO help a lot, because he is able to replay them, take notes, take screenshots etc., but it’s still a convoluted process.

How much easier would it be if he could just point to a link and tell the readers to grab that file, open it in MTGO, and then refer to specific turns or events?

How much better would our understanding of the game be if we could all do that, and also see the games that the top players play? A lot better. The leap would be comparable to the leap in deck construction made by the ability to share decks on the Net… although without the issue of people simply copying outright.

The point of all this is that WotC should make the ability to share replays a priority for MTGO. I say this knowing what the other issues (Judgment, bugs, the "13 states", etc.) are, but I still think that in the long run, for MTG as a whole (rather than just MTGO), the replay-sharing is more important. MTGO needs to provide two main things (the others are just frosting) in order to take advantage of this opportunity to increase understanding of the game immeasurably:

Replay sharing. Ideally, this should be in the form of downloadable files that players can share, but if game identification numbers that have to be referenced in the game is the only way it can be done, well, that’s not a huge loss.
LL apparently want to implement this feature at some point, and the following are links to the relevant entries in Bugzilla:
http://www.lplizard.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16703
http://www.lplizard.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2628
This one isn’t a simple bug, and I doubt that there’s any way this could happen without serious pressure (and money) from WotC: the ability to use the MTGO client as a game notation program for offline matches. That might not sound too exciting, but it would completely revolutionize match coverage, and again reap rewards in terms of being able to analyze high-level play. Essentially, what’s needed is a graphical client that match reporters could use during Top Eight and Featured matches. This eliminates the need for either clumsy notation or extremely high detail when recording the match, and the need to wade through that when reading about it. Instead of that, just download a file from (for example) the SideBoard’s coverage, then play it in MTGO, and that’s it, see the match in full. Really, this would be an amazing, amazing feature.
This Buzilla entry indicates that the backend ability to script games is already present in the system, as that’s how the tutorial games were created. That functionality is restricted to administrators, and sounds as if the process of creating a game involves scripting. So what would be needed is a simple, drag-and-drop frontend for match reporting. I don’t think that’s an easy thing to just whip together, and I strongly urge WotC to do whatever is necessary to get it into MTGO. The infrastructure is already there, it just needs that last piece. (And as a real pipe-dream thought, how about hooking it up to voice-recognition functionality and being able to notate live games by speaking? It’s not beyond the bounds of possiblity…)
Moving backwards and moving to specific points in replays. This would just make everything a lot easier. If you’re trying to analyze a specific situation, it really helps to be able to go back and forth over it, and to be able to step directly to specific point. This Bugzilla entry, and this one, suggest that rewind would be very difficult to implement, which makes the ability to go to a specific point even more important (because people are likely to fast forward to something, and then miss it, and then be unable to rewind). I’m hoping that the MTGO replay code already tags events in some way, in which case it should be relatively simple to tell the program to keep fast-forwarding until a specific event occurs. If not, that’s something that they should really think about putting in…
Adding notes to games. Commentary, especially commentary that could be tied to specific events, would be an excellent addition. The Bugzilla comments referenced in point 2 suggest that this is possible on the backend already, but ideally the system would allow anyone to modify a replay file and add commentary.
Some people have suggested audio commentary, but I don’t think there’s a need to tie that into the client itself; it seems rather easy to synch up an audio player and start a recorded track of commentary at the same time as the replay.
Viewing and creating replays offline. This comment from LL indicates that playing replays offline won’t be possible, which is a shame; it’d be great to analyze games on a laptop on your way somewhere. However, that’s a pretty minor need, and the need to be able to record replays (i.e. create replays from live games as per point 2) while offline is much greater. Some Premier Events occasionally have Net access problems, and it would be bad to miss recording a final because of line noise…
Playing from the middle of replays. Now, this is something that I can’t see happening, since it seems really difficult to do, even without considering card-ownership issues. I list it here purely because it would be nice to take situations in games and play on from them to see what approaches might work better.

So those are the things MTGO needs. The first two are critical, the others are bonuses. Sharing replays is absolutely crucial to the evolution of the game, and being able to turn offline games into replays as per point two would make that even more useful. For comparison, consider chess and Quake, both games that have benefitted hugely from players being able to examine matches in full detail. Bringing that to MTG would be tremendous for the game. How about it, WotC?

Tadhg (Erisian on MTGO)

(Another version of this article appeared on Star City Games, with alterations by that site’s editor.)

Tags: article, essays, games, MTG, writing

Credibility and authorial strategies in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Tadhg — Wed, 10 Oct 2001 08:00:19 +0000

The Gilman and Poe stories discussed in this essay deal with bizarre events that are made plausible to readers in ways that I will examine.

The concept of credibility as it applies to these stores is divisible as follows: whether we believe that the events occurred as reported by the narrators; that the narrators are telling the truth as they know it; that the narrators (and other characters) are real; and that the ‘realistic’ events in them happened. The last question is the most interesting, as it is layered beneath the text itself. Both stories deal with apparent madness, and in both of them we find it difficult to tease out ‘actual events’ from those that occur only in the wild imaginings of the narrators. The concept of ‘actual events’ is critical because none of the events are actual, but rather all are fictional. The fact that readers will be driven to distinguish between different levels of ‘reality’ is very important to both stories, in particular as a method of making the overall story more plausible.

Of the two, “The Tell-Tale Heart” is more straightforward. It leans heavily towards a reading that the narrator is mad, underscored by his frequent early denials.

How, then, am I mad? Hearken! And observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story
(Poe, p92)

Most revealing are his claims of universality.

If you still think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took â€¦ I cut off the head and the arms and the legs
(Poe, p95) .

These demonstrations of what he thinks is reasonable show clearly that he is mad. Nevertheless, the story makes you wonder. The character of the narrator is so believable, and his tale so compelling , that the reader is caught up in the telling. At least at first, we believe that he believes, even if the tale itself is dubious, and we then begin to separate his delusions from what ‘really’ occurred.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” takes the form of journal entries rather than an oral tale, and this alters its credibility. In “The Tell-Tale Hear” we are given only hints of how the narrator’s madness came to be, and he is too far gone by then to believe that his feelings are other than reasonable.

One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold;
(Poe, p92)

Gilman slowly develops the obsession of the narrator, beginning with suppressed resentment of her husband.

… I don’t care—there is something strange about the house—I can feel it.
I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said that what I felt was a draught, and shut the window.
…
He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.
(Gilman, p155)

Gilman weaves this in closely with examination of her surroundings, which always end up focusing on the wallpaper. The first section ends with a six-paragraph long description of it, including this particularly telling passage:

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough constantly to irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of (sic) contradictions.
(Gilman, p156)

This establishes her fixation early on and effectively foreshadows the course the narrator herself will take.

Both authors concentrate on making plausible the obsessions of the protagonists. Poe, in a much shorter work, succeeds primarily with voice and style.

You should have seen how wisely I proceeded—with what caution—with what foresight—with what dissimulation.
…
And then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously—oh, so cautiously—cautiously (for the hinges creaked)—I undid it just so much that a single ray fell upon the vulture eye.
(Poe, p92)

Gilman builds her narrator’s disintegration more slowly, showing the obvious sublimation of her frustrations into her unhealthy fascination with the wallpaper.

There’s one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wallpaper.
â€¦
I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here after all, I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.
â€¦
There are things in that paper than nobody knows but me, or ever will.
(Gilman, p161)

Both stories involve sublimation/repression heavily, with Poe’s narrator breaking down and confessing under the weight of suppressed guilt.

The sublimation is in each case critical to the story, and could be argued to be the crux of the story. The authors have taken pains to make it credible that suppression of feeling could have the results described. This enhances plausibility overall, but also creates tension between different aspects of the stories—tension that ultimately reinforces that plausibility.

In both stories, the narrator’s obsession serves to render their subjective credibility (i.e. the degree to which it is credible that they believe what they are saying) more effective while undermining their objective credibility. In addition, they enhance the credibility of the characters’ madness. This disjunction is significant because it is what pushes us to divide the stories into different levels of reality. Convinced by the stories that the narrators are mad, we analyze them to distinguish the imagined from the real. Once we do that, we privilege the parts that we decide are real, and we readily believe that certain of the events in the story really happened—the murder of the old man and the spontaneous confession in Poe, the naked creeping and tearing at the wallpaper in Gilman.

These events are in themselves rather bizarre. By focusing our disbelief on the fact that the narrators cannot be trusted to fully know reality, the authors consolidate our belief in two other pillars of the stories: that the narrators are believable as characters, and that the events which are not clearly madness really did happen. In other words, our dismissal of the beating heart and of the creeping ladies in the wallpaper serve to heighten our credulity regarding the murder and, in both cases, the catastrophic breakdown of the narrators. Similarly, our drive to discern what events are ‘real’, as opposed to entirely in the minds of the narrators, cause us to accept the rest of the story as real. This is no small effect. A man murdering a housemate because of his eye and confessing because he heard the still-beating heart, or a perfectly respectable middle-class woman (married and sister to doctors, no less) going entirely mad because of wallpaper are not particularly believable events in themselves. Convincing readers of the plausibility of these events is a feat in itself, and accomplished so effectively in both of these stories that we take it for granted.

(1158 words)

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Tags: article, criticism, essays, gilman, poe, short-story, writing

If on a winter’s night a traveller: written by aliens, read by fictional constructs

Tadhg — Sun, 30 May 1999 08:00:57 +0000

If on a winter’s night a traveller was written by an alien, or group of aliens. Actually, this is not quite true: the novel was written by an alien, or group of aliens, and also by Italo Calvino. Calvino was being used by the alien(s) to communicate some message to Earth. He was not consciously aware of this, but knew on some level, which is one of the reasons why the text is full of questions about how writing is produced.

The proof of this hypothesis lies in the text itself. The main author character is Silas Flannery, whose status in the text is highlighted by chapter eight, which is an excerpt from his diary. Here he is given the opportunity to present himself as I, something otherwise granted only to the characters in the ‘fictional’ passages (fictional must be placed in quotes because the adjective becomes almost meaningless in this particular text). Although Calvino has claimed that he is most like Ludmilla, it is nonetheless the case that Silas Flannery is the character in the book closest to the ‘author’ role. Also, it is possible that Calvino’s claim to be most like Ludmilla was entirely true when he made it, i.e. when he had finished the book, and so was no longer able to alter it as an author, and therefore was simply another reader. When he was writing it, however, he may have identified much more with Flannery. After all, the basis of Calvino’s claim was that he read like Ludmillaâ€”this says nothing about how he writes.

Flannery’s concerns are similar to Calvino’s also: he worries about fakes and where writing comes from. In addition, he is creatively stuck.

The key point is that Flannery, suffering from a form of writer’s block, encounters a group of UFO cultists, who tell him that they are searching for an author suffering from writer’s block. He undoubtedly realizes that he fits the description, but fobs them off (p145)(in the process ensuring that the Reader is unable to finish In a network of lines that intersect(p154)). They tell him that

The book he will write when he emerges from the crisis is the one that could contain the cosmic communications.
… He wouldn’t even be aware of it. he would believe he is writing as he likes; instead the message coming from space on waves picked up by his brain would infiltrate what he is writing.
(p145)

At the end of the chapter, Flannery gets an idea for a novel, his first of any promise since he entered his crisis. The idea is for a novel that is "composed only of beginnings" (p156) that itself begins with a Reader picking up a book in a bookstore only to find it is defective, and so begins a series of interruptions… This is obviously the plot of If on a winter’s night a traveller. Equally clearly, Flannery’s experience is precisely what the UFO cultists described: he was in a crisis, and he comes up with an idea that he thinks is his own.

Clearly this is a ridiculous hypothesis. However, the reasons why it is ridiculous have nothing to do with literary or critical theory and everything to do with our conceptions regarding alien intelligences and channelling. From an examination of the text, it is a perfectly sustainable argument.

Which is precisely what Calvino (or the aliens, or machines, or whatever is ultimately ‘responsible’ for the text) wants. This episode, like so much else in the book, is designed to force the reader to pay attention to the fact that they are reading a book. More than that, to force the reader to analyze the nature of the medium (the novel) that they are reading. This in itself is a relatively radical move, which influences the analysis the reader is likely to make.

In my view such a ploy is quintessentially postmodern. One of the key components of postmodernism is the foregrounding of the ontological, the drive to make the reader aware of what they are reading and the issues surrounding the relationship between reader and text and author. Such a foregrounding clearly makes ‘escapist’ or ‘readerly’ reading extremely difficult, since the whole point of such reading is to mistake the structure of the text for reality, which cannot be done if the text itself continually stresses its fictional nature.

As well as emphasizing its fictional nature, the text also stresses its structure, in the sense that it causes strain to be placed on that structure. With the Silas Flannery situation, the Flannery writes the text in which he is a character in which he writes a text in which he is a character, and so on, creating a recurring abyss inside the text. The text also seeks to exceed its structural bounds in other ways, such as the second-person narration, which undermines the reader’s sense of strict boundary between real and fictional by deliberately confusing the reader with a fictional construct. The effect here is paradoxical, simultaneously highlighting the fictional and textual nature of the text (particularly by addressing a ‘Reader’) and yet seeking to interact with the reader as if the boundary between textual/fictional and ‘real’ did not exist. This attempt to involve the reader in the text in one of the most direct ways possible (by making the reader the protagonist) combined with constant pointers to the book’s structure and its fictional status (every mention of ‘reader’ brings this to mind) means that the text demonstrates three other typical postmodern qualities: irony, self-referentiality and confusion.

Another way in which If on a winter’s night a traveller seeks to move outside its own bounds is in its identification with other (sub)texts. After all, if the reader never gets to finish the novel that is printed blank after the first chapter, then the rest of that text (also called If on a winter’s night a traveller) is a mystery and must reside somewhere else, presumably somewhere within the universe of the greater text. In other words, the narrative begun in that chapter and in the others extends somewhere, in some direction. These directions are closed to Reader and reader alike, but are nonetheless present, and again serve to draw attention to the text’s somewhat problematic structure.

Calvino’s last major assault on the reader’s attempts to use the text in an escapist way is connected to the alien hypothesis also. Flannery’s aliens also force the reader to think about the author, and the entire concept of authorship. The authors in the text are all undermined by counterfeits, fakes, mistranslations, machines, and aliens. The concept of authorship is one that Calvino deconstructs here, by way of attacking the concept of origin. There are few originals in his works, and since the work itself is made up of a series of unoriginal works, where does that leave it? Where does that leave the idea of origin? The various assaults on Calvino’s authors suggest that the authoring process, rather than the author, is the key to the creation of a text, and also that this process can be separated from the author. The author merely ‘channels’ this process. The implication again is that there is no ‘creation’, merely a filtering of what is already present. The reader, so accustomed to treating books as worlds created by godlike Authors, becomes uncertain about both authenticity and completion/closure, since the lack of a central authorial authority means that defining the end of a text is rather difficult. After all, as stated above the end of If on a winter’s night a traveller is not the end of the first novel in the text, and that may well leave the possibility open for some other writer to write that novel, and it might be difficult to argue that such a novel would have no place in the ‘canonical’ version of the greater If on a winter’s night a traveller.

Tags: article, books, criticism, essays, novel, reviews, writing

Submission to the Points Commission

Tadhg — Sat, 31 Jan 1998 08:00:13 +0000

Introduction

Our purpose here is not to detail in depth what we consider to be the problems with the Leaving Certificate/Points System, but rather to suggest constructive ways to eliminate problems. Pure critique is available in our feature film ‘How To Cheat In The Leaving Certificate’.

The problems with the Leaving Certificate are not superficial. They are fundamental. Therefore, radical solutions are necessary—tweaking and nudging will not be sufficient. The education of a society is of paramount importance, and we have no excuse for complacency or the avoidance of difficult changes.

The failing of the Leaving Certificate and the points-based college admissions system which accompanies is not due to limited resources or limited opportunities: the problem is that the Leaving Certificate and the Points System assumes that there is only one type of intelligence, when in fact there are many different types. ‘If you are not intelligent in our way’, the system says to each and every student, ‘you are not intelligent at all’.

While claiming to aid the development of academic intelligence the system in fact doesn’t even do that. It focuses on the ability to do three things only: to read, remember, and regurgitate. This demands a restricted degree of literacy and does not demand critical thinking, understanding, or analysis. Clearly, this discourages personal responsibility and initiative. Students are made simply to listen and accept, or to read and accept. This inevitably has serious ramifications for third-level education, employment and, of course, society as a whole. The system doesn’t even function properly as a selection process; measuring only a narrow bureaucratic skill means that it simply cannot work as a means of determining the suitability of applicants for University courses which is supposed to be its primary role.

This submission presents the following suggestions designed to deal with these various problems. We have divided this submission into three parts: the first deals with changes we believe are necessary in schools themselves, in terms of their educational structure and the role of students within that structure. The second deals with the role of the Government through the medium of the Department of Education: practices we feel should be introduced or abandoned in order to make the Leaving Certificate and points system more equitable and less intimidating for students. The third part deals with what we consider to be the social and theoretical ramifications of the present system, and the benefits which we feel would follow on the implementation of our suggestions.

1.

The development of critical thinking, innovation and creativity is feasible only with increased student participation in the classroom. The prevalent assumption that true learning can only occur when 30 students are working silently at their desks is a false one. Learning is an active activity, not a passive one, and Irish classrooms must reflect this. This is well known-the problem has always been how to implement a dynamic learning system. Two major problems stand in the way. One is the current state of Irish teacher training. This must be altered so that student participation becomes a basic premise of that training. The other problem is class size. It requires a truly gifted, extremely energetic and dedicated teacher to foster participatory learning when the class contains thirty pupils. We are aware that it is simply not possible to hire twice as many teachers to rectify the situation. Our suggestion is this: halve the size of the classes in Irish schools by halving the school day. Teach half of the country’s school population in the morning, and half in the afternoon. The higher quality of education that would result more than makes up for the time lost—and it is quality, not quantity, that matters.

One might argue that this would lead to a chaotic and unproductive environment; we would argue, however, that these qualities are exactly those which are most in evidence in modern working environments. A teaching model based on discussion and participation is the only one which will enable students to develop initiative, articulate expression, creativity and critical thinking. This model reflects the modern business world much more accurately than the traditional classroom. Success in the business world relies on the ability to work well in teams, to come up with creative solutions, to express oneself well, and to show initiative. The participatory classroom model obviously encourages these qualities far more than the traditional one. Not only would students become more confident and focused within the school setting itself, but they would learn also those qualities which will be essential to them in their future lives, such as clear, creative thinking and initiative.

Halving the school day in order to halve class size is obviously a radical proposal, but that is not important. What is important is that its benefits would be enormous. The disadvantages are mainly logistical, and would primarily involve the transition to the new system. Accompanied by new emphasis on participation in teaching methods, the new system would help students become more confident and focused within the school setting, and students would more rapidly learn valuable, essential skills. Given these benefits, any reason for not implementing such a system must be a far better one than unwillingness to change.

(Note that we are not advocating the abandonment of traditional teaching goals such imparting literacy and numeracy to students. Those skills are completely essential. What we are suggesting is a far superior method for giving students those skills as well as many others.)

As well as this overhaul of teaching methods and class structure, we believe that students themselves should have a greater say in the administration of their education. In third-level institutions all over the country the problem of student apathy is acute. Only a small number of students involve themselves in the political aspects of their education, having never in their lives been consulted as to syllabi, course materials or teaching methods. Increasing the interest and participation of students in school can only be a good thing, and so we suggest: that students be given meaningful representation on school boards; instituting staff-student committees; instituting widespread and meaningful liaisons between student bodies and the Department of Education. This development would be most useful at post-primary level, and it is at this point in their educational development that we believe students should be involved in the structure and content of their learning.

2.

The impetus for change in this area is clearly going to have to originate with the Department of Education. We see a number of key aspects of current Departmental policy that should be addressed as a matter of priority:

State examinations, if they are intended to test writing speeds and ability to memorise, should stay exactly as they are. If they are intended to test the degree to which the student has assimilated and understood the course materials, and the student’s ability to apply that understanding under examination circumstances, those who design them should recognise that students’ ability to write quickly and call strings of facts to mind is only one aptitude of many differing aptitudes, and varies hugely as between individuals. Why should a student who understands a course very well and could give an excellent oral presentation of what he/she has learned have to write 20 to 25 pages of essays in three hours—which students often find they must do, for example, in the Higher Level History paper for the Leaving Certificate.

If the ability to understand material, analyse it and criticise it is what is desired here (as it should be: most adults who have passed the Leaving Certificate will have long forgotten most of what they wrote in their examinations), then there is no reason why students should not be permitted to bring certain materials with them into examinations, and why they should not be given as much time as they need. If the ability to understand, analyse and criticise material is what is being examined, then surely open-book examinations would be superior. Also, there is no reason why exams should have three-hour time limits-speed is less important than overall understanding and ability.

The Leaving Certificate marking system should be more accessible. The marking scheme has already been made available to students and teachers, therefore there is no reason why the marking system should not be available also. Also, students should be able to get their papers back. Transparency and accountability should be encouraged at all stages of the Leaving Certificate process.

We believe that the syllabi for the Leaving Certificate are outdated, and do not give students the tools they will need in order to interact with the world in which they will find themselves after school. Successive Governments have decried the huge incidence of school-leavers being unemployed and on the dole very soon after leaving school, but have failed to look at concrete ways of dealing with this situation. One way would be to give students the option following the Junior Certificate to become involved in professions of interest to them, through placement schemes with different professions. While in school, these students could attend courses relative to their interests (business management, media production) etc.) and learn skills relevant to those interests. If thousands of students are sitting Leaving Certificate examinations every year in subjects which are of no use to them in their everyday lives, the Department has to recognise and address this.

We would welcome the establishment of an Ombudsman for Education to deal with problems students encounter in their educational lives, with the same far-reaching influence and reporting obligation of the current office of the Ombudsman.

3.

The points of reference speak of the impact of the points system on the selection of third level courses.

Selection by individual students of courses they would hope to follow at University is characterised to a greater and greater extent by snobbery in respect of different institutions. Many students feel that, rather than decide which third-level institution best caters for their needs or interests, they should first decide which college to attend and then decide what courses to apply for. This is most marked as regards Irish universities, which attract large numbers of applications from students who will take almost any course in respect of which they can secure a place, regardless of their interests or aptitudes. This phenomenon is exacerbated by the points system, which immediately sets students against one another for the highest results, and which also causes students to believe that courses with the highest points requirements are the most prestigious.

Following the publication of the Leaving Certificate results every summer, thousands of parents all over the country speak about their children ‘getting into’ certain courses, such as Law, Medicine, Pharmacy, Actuary, etc. The impression that this gives is that the system is a game: you are on the outside, and the object is to get in. This aim becomes the focus of the student’s efforts, and is often used as a benchmark of his/her performance in the Leaving Certificate. And so students will choose to do courses for which they are ill-prepared, and in which they may have no interest and little aptitude.

This has its most profound effects on students ‘who have experienced significant educational disadvantage’. The effect of treating the university admissions system as a game where the most successful are those with the highest points is to load the dice in favour of certain sectors of Irish society. Supplementary education, usually in the form of ‘grinds’, is now a common feature of second-level education in Ireland. For students sitting the Leaving Certificate, it is not uncommon to attend grinds in almost all of one’s subjects; the question is not often posed, however, of what this tells us about our schools.

Most students attending grinds are not doing so because they are being inadequately educated at school. Rather they are doing so because they, and their parents, believe that any extra advantage which could give them the edge over their fellow candidates on the day of their examination is worth the time and money which they invest.

Students suffering educational and financial disadvantage are thus one step behind such students, in terms of how they well they will contend with the points system, before they even start the Leaving Certificate syllabus in Fifth Year. Firstly, they cannot afford to attend expensive grind schools; secondly, even if they could afford grinds, they are competing with students who would probably do excellent Leaving Certificate exams without grinds.

The reason for grind schools is not to deepen the understanding or appreciation of the student for the subject, but to give them the tools that they need to beat the Leaving Certificate system. These institutions are set up in order for business interests to capitalise on the Irish college admissions system. The way that this is done is that these schools specialise in teachers with an encyclopaedic knowledge of part Leaving Certificate papers and marking practice, who teach exam practice and technique.

Students with financial disadvantage have long been recognised as being systematically excluded from University education in Ireland. It is extremely expensive for a student to attend and complete a full-time University course, and the youth of this country’s students means that it is normally the student’s parents who support him/her financially during this time. Consequently, only a tiny percentage of University students are from families without the resources to support them while in college. There are schools in Dublin where the it is expected that most students in any Leaving Certificate class will attend some third-level institution. There are also schools within a few miles of them where it is a significant event for any student to go on to third -level education. For such students, the Leaving Certificate is totally inadequate and does not prepare for them for what they must contend with once they leave school.

Conclusion

Our argument is that the Leaving Certificate values and examines only one kind of intelligence: academic intelligence, and even that only in a narrow and rigid way, which involves memorisation and the ability to produce what one has memorised with almost mechanical skill. The Leaving Certificate / CAO system focuses on a far too narrow range of aptitudes, and also precludes the expression and development of the individual student’s own conclusions, opinions or ideas. While the Department of Education may wish to encourage students to think for themselves and be innovative, such attempts are doomed to failure in the current system.

The current system is too narrow, too rigid, and has a negative, inhibiting effect not only on the students who pass through it, but also on society as a whole. For these reasons, radical change is absolutely necessary.

Submitted by:

Tadhg O’Higgins
11 Trimleston Gardens,
Booterstown
Co. Dublin.
tadhg at tadhg dot com

Deirdre Ní Fhloinn
205 Barton Road East
Dundrum
Dublin 14.

Graham Jones
17 Windsor Court
Stradbrook Road
Blackrock
Co. Dublin.

graham at jonesy dot com

With thanks to Orla Ní Chuilleanáin.

Tags: article, education, essays, politics, writing

The Short Story and the Supernatural

Tadhg — Fri, 17 Jan 1997 08:00:32 +0000

The short story is a marginal, fragmentary, invasive form. In this essay I shall examine why ‘supernatural&8217; tales are suited to the short story form and what techniques are used to maximise their effect.

Short stories are marginal in part because of their protagonists, which Frank O’Connor asserts are ‘submerged population groups’ (O’Connor p18), are figures on the margins. O’Connor is in general right about the short story. The protagonists are almost always outsiders, from the clerk in Gogol’s “The Overcoat” to almost any protagonist in any Raymond Carver story. O’Connor states: ‘Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society’ (O’Connor p19). What’s more, there is always a sense of the inexplicable about their exclusion. There are evident reasons for this exclusion, but these seem insufficient, especially to the protagonists themselves. Holly and Duane in Carver’s “Gazebo” are a submerged population group—people whose lives have simply gone wrong and who can’t find their way back. The event responsible for this, Duane’s infidelity with a maid, does not rationally explain the complete collapse they undergo afterwards. Carver’s characters are ideal examples of characters in the modern short story in general: unfocused, vaguely wandering, looking for an escape that will never come, unable to identify solidly why they are where they are. Characters in the modern short story are like Ancient Mariners, cursed to suffer for reasons that are at best oblique. They are adrift, as described by O’Connor, in ‘a society that has no sign posts, a society that offers no goals and no answers.‘ (O’Connor p18) This is very different from the novel, which is mainly concerned with society and what happens in it rather than outside it.

This tendency of the short story is one of the reasons why short stories about the supernatural work well. Characters who experience ‘supernatural’ or inexplicable events are no longer part of the mainstream of society in many respects. They retreat or go mad, or they become doomed to repeat their tales in the hope of being believed by enough people and hence re-accepted. In either case, they become a ‘submerged population group’ because their belief in their own experience cannot be reconciled with the belief system of the society they live in. Normally, this belief system is also the belief system of the reader’s society, and normally some kind of ‘rational explanation’ is given for the events; however, this explanation often come too late to save the poor individual who is victimised by the ‘supernatural event’ in question. This is precisely what happens in Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea”. The Rev. Jennings is plagued by an imp, and retreats, becoming cut off from society (almost literally, as he flees to ‘a dark street in off Piccadilly, [where] he inhabits a very narrow house’ (Le Fanu p180)). He becomes a ‘submerged population group’ because of his affliction, and also because of his studies of and belief in occult texts. The reader, however, is not asked to believe in the imp, since Hesselius reveals (far too late) that the problem lay in the green tea, and that science could have effected a cure easily enough. This serves to offset the unreality of the story, and take it closer to the reader, who can reconcile the events with his or her own knowledge of the world. Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ also deals with a ‘submerged population group’—Roderick and Madeline Usher, separated from the world in their excessively Gothic castle. They also suffer a doom that is inadequately explained by the text; in a sense, the point of the text is to indicate that such things can happen for no good reason.

The short story does not have the time that the novel has for setting up a believable world. It must grip the reader with the reality of its events from the very first. This need coincides with the need of ’supernatural’ stories to be believed. There is a well-established tradition of establishing the credentials of the narrator, either by giving him or her a highly respected profession or position, or by having the narrator admit to the fantastic nature of their tale and insist on its truth nonetheless. This is how “The Black Cat” is introduced: ‘Mad indeed would I be to expect it [belief], in a case where my very sense reject their own experience.’ (Poe p476) Other devices are also used. In “The Fall of the House of Usher” the narrator is portrayed as loyal, since he comes immediately at Roderick Usher’s request (Poe p263); noble or well-off, as he attended school with Roderick and also since he claims the type of decor in the House of Usher has surrounded him ‘from infancy’ (Poe p265); educated, as evidenced by the books they pore over, among other things; and accustomed to the environment of the castle—as mentioned above, he claims intimacy since birth with such trappings as adorn the House of Usher, but it is worth mentioning again since this also means that he is unlikely to be rattled by the surroundings in normal circumstances, hence adding weight to the feeling that something out of the ordinary transpired in that house. The narrator of “Green Tea” is set up more blatantly: he is introduced as a doctor, a father figure, a man of means, and a genius (Le Fanu p178-179). The person who introduces him, moreover, is also a trained doctor and surgeon, so there can be no doubt about the respectable nature of the man. These characteristics combine, quite deliberately, to make the reader trust the narrators’ testimony. The ending of “Green Tea” is also highly credible because the situation is that of a doctor finding a dead man and ascertaining the cause of death—an entirely normal situation for a doctor to be in. The climactic ending of “The Fall of the House of Usher”, on the other hand, is made more credible because the narrator prefigures it by telling us about the fissure around the house at the start of the story (Poe p265) and then reminds us that he mentioned it earlier (Poe p277). This prefiguring is essential; it creates the effect that the reader feels as if the event is fated, rather than being merely a whim of the author. The sense of fate adds to the credibility of the story as a whole. Inevitability also features in other ‘Dr. Hesselius’ stories by Le Fanu, though in different ways. In “The Familiar” and “Mr. Justice Harbottle” the main characters both die in ways prefigured by earlier events in the stories, creating again a feeling of fate. This feeling combats the disbelief of the reader.

The short story is a fragmentary form. Unlike the novel, it does not deal in wholes but in small but crucial pieces of some whole. Mary Louise Pratt states that ‘One of the most consistently found narrative structures in the short story is the one called the “moment-of-truth” [which] focus on a single point of crisis in the life of a central character.’ (Pratt p99) Stories concerning the supernatural certainly do this, though without much subtlety: the ‘central point’ is often death, though not necessarily that of the central character. The events related in “The Fall of the House of Usher” must be central in the life of the narrator; they are so Gothically cataclysmic that the reader knows the narrator’s life will never be the same again. The supernatural short story benefits from the fragmentary nature of the form because the reader must supply the surrounding world and history / future; since this will obviously be more tailored for each reader than anything an author could write, it is more credible to each reader. The novel, on the other hand, would have to support a whole structure inside which the fantastic events could take place; this is possible, but the reader is more likely to simply imagine the novel as taking place in another world, whereas the short story is likely to be imagined as part of the reader’s world. The short story can be an invasive fragment, pushing into the reader’s universe with a power that a larger whole would not have. Jorge Luis Borges deals with a similar theme in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, in which a forged encyclopaedia overwhelms the laws of the world, replacing them with the laws of its (fictional) world. Reading this, of course, is profoundly disturbing, and the victory of ‘fiction’ over ‘fact’ in the story makes the reader worry about how far this crossing of boundaries can extend—can the world of Tlön extend more than one level? In my mind, this Borges story epitomises all that is disturbing about short stories: the possibility that whatever is happening in the story can happen in the world of the reader. Novels cannot have the same impact, since they create an entire other world the reader can safely dismiss as a separate, imaginary, realm; the short story, on the other hand, is just a fragment, and is easily assimilated into the reader’s idea of this world. The Borges story accentuates this by bringing the entire structure under scrutiny, and making us question the validity of our map / territory distinctions.

The Borges story also has another advantage from its short-storiness, that of focus. A novel would get bogged down in details, in divergence of plot, and so on; a short story concentrates on one thing, the getting across the full effect of the fantastic event(s) the author writes. The stories of Poe, Le Fanu and other short story writers of course benefit from the same thing: they sustain the effect for only as long as is necessary, then finish. This gives the short story additional force. “The Fall of the House of Usher” illustrates this force: the reader is immediately submerged in the atmosphere Poe creates, and is held there briefly, but long enough, the plot runs on, and the reader is released. This intensity would probably be unsustainable for either reader or writer over novel length, but it only strengthens the grip of the short story on the credulity and attention of the reader. This focus is also used to great effect in Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, which moves the reader closer and closer to the thoughts of a man about to be hanged—closer than the reader at first realises. This focus works over a short period, and allows the story to get the full impact of the hallucinatory episode across. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is also an excellent example of the techniques used to engage the credulity of the reader. The tone is authoritative from the start—factual, curt, later also paternal: ‘Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.’ (Bierce p59) When the narrative fixates on Farquhar’s fantasy as he falls, it is intensely detailed, and there is absolutely no hint given that it is fantasy. Peyton Farquhar is presented as a solid, practical man, not given to flights of fancy. Here Bierce takes advantage of the convention that the reader expects some heroism, expects some fantastic event, and leads the reader along this imaginary path. The snap back to reality represents the reverse of the standard effect of fantastic fiction: instead of pushing a belief (however temporary) in some unreal event, Bierce’s story forcefully tells the reader never to expect miracles, in life or in fiction.

Though in many ways the opposite of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, Bierce’s story uses the same mechanisms. Borges also establishes the credibility of his narrator early: he is erudite, owns an encyclopaedia, is given to discussing ideas for novels with equally erudite friends late at night, and narrates in an even, educated tone. Of course, the fact that the information first comes from an encyclopaedia, a standard ‘repository of fact’ of the Western world, is part of the brilliance of the story. The reader suspects that if it is in an encyclopaedia, even just in a fragment, there must be some truth in it. The introduction of Ashe, whose death provides a crucial link, is perfectly real: “He and my father had entered into one of those close… English friendships that begin by excluding confidences and very soon dispense with dialogue.” (Borges p30) The piecing-together of the puzzle is also a common way of establishing the veracity of an account: the reader, impressed by the logical deduction of the narrator and by the way the pieces fit neatly together, is distracted from the improbability of the whole being constructed. The sheer detail (excerpts from the encyclopaedia on philosophy, language, geography, etc.), as well as the weary, fatalistic tone with which the narrator greets the usurpation of the old order, make it very convincing. Poe used the puzzle-solving and raw detail approach, essentially inventing the modern ‘deductive reasoning detective’ character, in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. This works convincingly; the short essay at the start also works well, since it is highly probable that the narrator, after spending any time with so prodigious an analyst as Dupin, would write some kind of treatise on analysis and deduction. The introduction serves the dual functions of that just mentioned and also that of preparing the reader for the somewhat astounding feats of reasoning that follow. The introduction could also serve to give an ‘ordinary’ approach to the story; the early part of the story is not particularly strange, and readers of Poe might have thought that they were reading the beginning of one of his essays. The method of beginning in an ordinary fashion is common in short stories dealing with fantastic themes. Ordinary means ordinary for that genre or author: in J. G. Ballard’s “Report on an Unidentified Space Station” the beginning is completely standard science fiction of the 50s ‘classic sci-fi’ style. The story departs quickly from this mode, but it has already claimed from the reader (who after all thinks he or she knows what to expect) a certain credulity, an expectation that the story will follow the genre. The story also uses a very authoritative voice, that of a log of survey reports. Charles Bukowski does essentially the same thing in “No Wing High”, starting off with a ‘typical Bukowski story’ opening featuring two guys in a bar. The approach to the supernatural element is very down-to-earth:

“Beating them on the field was the only way we could get even. We dreamed about it night and day. It meant everything… We were down 20 to 16 with 30 seconds left and they were on our 12 yard line… they wanted to rub it in. Not bad enough that they were screwing our women, they wanted to score again, on us.” (Bukowski p195)

All of these techniques, all of the things that heighten the short story’s ability to intrude into this reality, make the short story an ideal form for ‘supernatural’ stories. The aim of a ‘supernatural’ story is to grasp the attention and belief of the reader, and force them to accept what is written at face value, at least for a time; the writer must also achieve an effect or effects that takes advantage of this credulity and gets its message across. The aims of a non-supernatural short story are essentially the same. The novel is like a painting of a foreign landscape; the author paints a picture so that the reader can see what the author is imagining. The short story is a bridge from the writer’s consciousness to the reader’s consciousness, a bridge that’s only there for a moment and that must allow its effect to cross. The immediacy of the short story , and its fragmentary nature, as well as its highly-refined, highly-crafted nature, make it an invasive form, as I stated above. Short stories, like those of Poe, or Carver, leave a desolate ringing in the mind where they have passed, an echo that remains and that reflects the entire story, whatever it was; this makes the short story different from the novel, play, long poem, or film, only segments of which will remain carved in memory. The ultimate aim of the short story is to have such an impact; ‘supernatural’ stories are a cruder attempt at doing this, using their strangeness as an attempt to last in the mind of the reader. Early short stories, like those of Le Fanu and Poe, often attempted to dull the impact of such strangeness (thus heightening its credibility) with rational explanations of the goings-on. The modern short story as exemplified by Carver, aims at the same thing but does it more subtly, less forcefully, with subject matter as close to the everyday as possible, but the everyday so closely and carefully examined and laid out that it assumes a strangeness as well, while Borges seeks to break boundaries with paradox, using the short story to push the paradox, subtly enough, into the reader’s mind. I define the ‘supernatural’ as something outside of your world, outside of your experience, your reality, that is trying to ‘get in’, trying to affect you. The short story does that best.

(2895 words)

Bibliography

Bierce, Ambrose. The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce. New York: Ballantine, 1970.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. London: Penguin, 1981.

Bukowski, Charles. Septuagenarian Stew: Stories & Poems. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1990.

Carver, Raymond. “On Writing.” The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1994.

Carver, Raymond. Where I’m Calling From. London: HarperCollins 1993.

Jarrell, Randall. “Stories.” The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1994.

Le Fanu, Sheridan. Best Ghost Stories. London: Constable, 1964.

O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice. London: MacMillan, 1963.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Poe on Short Fiction.” The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1994.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “The Short Story.”The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1994.

Semiotext(e) SF. Ed. R. Rucker, P. L. Wilson, R. A. Wilson. Edinburgh: AK Press, 1989.

Tallack, Douglas. The 19th Century American Short Story: Language, Form and Ideology. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Tags: article, books, criticism, essays, reviews, short-story, writing

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