To wit: epigrams

I was away, briefly, so I'm kind of rushed this week and missed my regular posting day--sorry about that. In the meantime, here's a quick salute to the art of epigram writing in stories, because I happen to be reading Jincy Willett's wonderful collection, Jenny and the Jaws of Life.

I attended a writing lecture with Canadian writer Douglas Glover at the Center for Fiction a couple years ago, and he talked about the importance of epigram to stories and how often you find them in good writing. I had never noticed this before, but now I find them everywhere. According to Glover, they function as a sort of shot in the arm to the theme of the story--they help raise questions, introduce paradoxes, and heighten irony, and besides that, they are delightful to read and bump up the quality of the writing.

Jenny and the Jaws of Life is full of fantastic examples, but here are a few of my favorites....

From "Melinda Falling":  "Mother was a good woman with execrable taste."

Also from "Melinda Falling":  "It had often struck me that while we view the pairing of lovers with benign speculation, even envy, there is nothing so baffling, so grotesque, as another man's choice of wife, or a woman's of a husband."

From "My Father, at the Wheel":  "This is a very old story, the one about daughters and fathers. It ends in marriage, and the promise of renewal. So it must be a comedy."

When I look at these examples, it also strikes me that they serve to poke fun at the narrator, whose distance, biases, and judging function become all the more apparent in quips like these. Maybe that's part of the epigram's appeal--it's both witty and unwitting, in the sense that it reveals as much about a narrator's own flaws and disappointments as about how the narrator wants to present him or herself.

Quotes: Sorry, no page numbers again, since this if from my Kindle version, but I've included the short story titles for your reference.

What has 2 thumbs and no sense of humor?

Sometimes writers are like serious putty. From xkcd.

Unfortunately—sometimes writers. I love reading fiction that’s also funny, and that’s why I was so happy to read not one, but two, pieces that touched on humor this month—an essay on humor by E. B. White (in Essays of E.B. White), and an interview in The Paris Review with short story writer Marie-Helene Bertino.

In the essay, Some Remarks on Humor, E. B. notes how “serious” writing is often seen to be in conflict with humor—especially unintentional humor—because a serious writer’s worst fear is to have his “architectural scheme” of high emotion toppled by a “snicker.” In summary: “Here, then, is the very nub of the conflict: the careful form of art, and the careless shape of life itself”. (I love this last phrase, “the careless shape of life itself”—I think it perfectly sums up the silly in life.)

And yet, this conflict—in art, as in life—is the source of so many of our emotions. Maybe that explains why, as E.B. writes, humor “plays close to the big hot fire which is the Truth.”

It’s also why I was so glad to read Marie-Helene’s interview because I think she sums up really well what humor can do—not to trivialize human emotion—but to enhance it. In answer to the question of how she manages to integrate both despair and humor in her stories, she says:

“…[H]umor is a key to certain locks that straightforward storytelling can’t open…. Humor brings out… the little nuances—Isn’t the world ridiculous? Isn’t this just absurd? If your house burns down, and you go to the diner because you don’t have a kitchen anymore and they say, ‘Smoking or non,’ and you’re sitting there basically charred and cindered, that’s funny, and it’s also really sad. You can…go a lot further if you’re intercutting severe sadness with humor.”

So, the bottom line? I think it’s something like, don’t be afraid to make with the haha. It can really pay off if handled right—or maybe especially even if handled a little wrong!