Watch the 1978 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers . Watch special effects—music, camera techniques, sound effects, juxtaposition of scenes, etc.—are used to create horror? Rewrite one of the scenes from Ritter’s piece to create an atmosphere of horror, script it, and then try the results on videotape or audiotape.
Language
The profession of flight attendant is not, of course, the only one that has its own peculiar language; every job does. Working with four other students, create a situation in which a number of people with different jobs/professions might be talking in a group: a traffic accident, a community meeting, a home and school meeting, etc. Be very specific about the nature of the situation. Each of the group members should privately select a profession and take a day or two to think about and/or research the kind of language people in that profession use. When the group next convenes, get into role and discuss the chosen situation with the others. Remember, you have an opinion to express but you also have to respond to the others in-role. Try not to stereotype. After the exercise, see if the others in the group can guess your role. Did you feel you were convincing in your role? When did you find it most challenging?
“Fairie Tale” by Janice Elliott (England)
If many modern and postmodern fictions are about the process of writing stories, Janice Elliott’s “Fairy Tale†is about that process being at once motivated and overwhelmed by the writer’s own desire—a desire she obviously shares with us, her readers—to hear stories. And the story she, and we, really want to hear is not just any story, but our story, the story in which we are hero/heroine, the story in which our dreams come true.
In other words, we want to hear a fairy tale. But if we start out to tell ourselves one (and who else is likely to undertake the task?), we find we have a more demanding audience than we expected—our sophisticated, critical, feet-planted-firmly-on-the ground selves. Unlike children, adults are not content to hear their own names glorified with the title of princess or knight. They want the best of both worlds—the dream career and the knight in shining armour: the perfect house, congenial neighbours, an understanding mate, and a secret lover, a felicitous forest, and children who fall asleep at convenient times. In adult fairy tales, a person can enjoy both the status of “good womanâ€/â€good man†and “boundless ecstasy†beside a bubbling brook. But, like that other fairy-tale character, the old woman in the vinegar bottle who wants to be God, the importunate adult wants safeness that entropy can beseige even perfection. Therefore, like Elliott, the adult must create a fairy tale whose plot is forever deferred by innumerable ironic asides and by countless new beginnings. In adult fairy tales there can be no “happily ever after†because the tale itself never ends, but, like Finnegan, begins again—and again—and again.
Janice Elliott, 1931—
Janice Elliott was born in Derby, England, and was educated at Oxford. She has written over twenty novels for adults and four for children, and has contributed stories to many anthologies and magazines. She is also well known as a critic, spending seventeen years as a regular book reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph, and as a journalist on the editorial staff of House and Garden, House Beautiful, Harper’s Bazaar, and the Sunday Times. Her most famous work is probably the novel Secret Places which earned her the Southern Arts Award for Literature in 1981, was adapted to film in 1984, and re-released by Twentieth Century—Fox/TLC Films in 1985. She is admired for her talent at creating mood and atmosphere, and her crisp but revealing dialogue. Her other novels include the post-World War II trilogy A State of Peace, Private Life, and Heaven on Earth; Summer People, a futuristic work of social criticism; and the impressionistic Magic.
Exploring the Text
- There is a lot of humour in Elliott’s tale, and much of it depends on the element of surprise. But not all people find this kind of humour effective. Share your feelings about the humour in this story with one other person, focusing first on the sections you found most amusing and then on those you did not find amusing.
- The forest, with its “black heart,†is a pervasive image in this piece. Working with one other student, collect all the information you can about this forest and the characters’ relationship to it. Examine your collected materials and speculate on the significance of this image. Compare your ideas with those of other groups in a whole-class discussion.
- Analyze Caresse’s long speech to her guests beginning, “O, we are so lucky†down to and including “I had a silly afternoon in the forest today (p. 115). Focusing on tone, diction, and sentence structure, write a critique of this passage. What do these elements suggest about Caresse’s state of mind?
Personal Response
Keep a progressive record of your responses to this short fiction as you read “Fairy Tale” for the first time. Although the author has divided it into sixteen sections, we can combine some of these to form a total of eight sections: section one, section two, section three; sections four plus five; six plus seven and eight; section nine; ten plus eleven and twelve: and, finally, sections thirteen plus fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen together. As you read each of these eight main sections, keep a record of your responses. Explain how the story makes you feel, why you feel this way, and what you think will happen next. Take time to explore your feelings. Let yourself wander through your own responses just as you wander through the story. Above all, be honest. When you have finished writing, think back over the story as a whole. Select three adjectives that you feel best describe this story. Compare your responses and choices with those of others in your class.
Media
The tone in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail is similar in some ways to the tone of this short fiction in that it, too, seems to shift back and forth between a respect for, and a parodying of, the fairy-tale genre. View this film and select three scenes from it to compare with three scenes form “Fairy Tale.†Remember you are focusing on tone, not plot. Look for differences as well as similarities.
Language
The phrase “good woman†is used over and over again throughout the story; indeed, in the first half of the story it almost functions as a refrain. You’ve probably been advised—over and over again—not to use imprecise diction and not to repeat the same phrase too often. How, then, can you account for Elliot’s frequent use of this expression? What does it add to this story? Before you answer these questions, try the following:
- Select five possible synonyms for the word good and clarify the distinctions among them.
- Reread the first few pages, imagining that the word good has been replaced with one or the other of your chosen synonyms. What is lost when the word good is replaced by a variety of other words?
“An Ounce of Cure” by Alice Munro (Canada)
“Why is it a temptation to refer to this sort of thing lightly, with irony, with amazement…? That is what we are apt to do, speaking love; with adolescent
love, of course, it’s practically obligatory…â€
Two voices seem to be speaking in the above passage: there is the narrator of “An Ounce of Cure,†who asks her readers why we all tend to trivialize our memories of unrequited adolescent love. And then there is the author, who asks the question apparently to herself; not to draw her readers into a shared experience, but rather to muse on the question of why she, and other writers, tend to speak of teenaged passions in such jocular tones. Munro realizes, as few writers do, that one has to set bounds not just to sympathy (that, apparently, is easy enough to do) but also to humour.
But Munro’s accomplishment lies not only in establishing the right tone, nor even finding the right blend of adolescent and adult voices, but also in so framing and editing the story of a former “catastrophe†as to show both the cause as perceived by the adolescent (“my own incommodious natureâ€) and the cause as perceived by the adult. From the adult narrator’s perspective, the adolescent needs only to get beyond her sense of helplessness (“dominated my mind,†“against my will,†“gave up my soul for deadâ€); needs only to be cured, as the title suggests, not so much in the sense of overcoming a disease as in the sense of ripening or maturing. Munro’s narrator is eventually able to respond in her own terms to a gentleman’s “reminiscent smile.â€Â If she gives the adult Martin Collingwood “a gentle, uncomprehending look,†it is a decidedly gentle but fully comprehending look that she gives her teenaged self.
Did you ever “put your foot in it?â€Â Looking back on something foolish or wrong that you did five or six years ago is an embarrassing or at least disquieting experience; the question “How could I have been so—awkward/stupid/dumb/unfeeling?†invariably comes to mind.
Alice Munro, 1931—
Alice Munro is well known to almost any lover of literature in Canada, and is one of our most internationally recognized writers. While Munro (née Laidlaw) started writing in her early teens, her marvelously crafted short stories did not find their way into hardcover until 1968, when her firs collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, won a Governor General’s Award. Since that time, her novel Lives of Girls and Women and her growing number of short story collections have won numerous awards, both here and abroad. She has also written a number of television scripts including one for the CBC series “The Newcomers.â€Â Munro writes with a sensitive understanding of the depth of the experiences of “ordinary folk,†describing these experiences in such patient and engaging detail that, in Munro’s own words, they are “not real but true.â€