*Read Kirsty Gunn’s short story “‘It is lonely being a young man sent abroad to fight’, she said” in MATRAGA: Modernist Prose in Contemporaneity, edited by Davi Pinho and Jane Goldman. Available here.
‘There comes a time in all short stories when the register of the narrative shifts’, the narrator announces, whereby enacting such a moment but also inviting the reader’s complicity in this pivotal discursive event, a threshold moment of possible breaking and entry, and one of many such electrifying moments in this new short story by Kirsty Gunn, beginning with its very title: ‘“It is lonely being a young man sent abroad to fight” she said.’ How thrilling to make the title of a story from what appears to be a piece of its narratorial furniture, snapped off to boldly name the whole thing, as if a narrative event such as this is a kind of naming or marking or conjuring. It is simultaneously lifted from and embedded in the final paragraph where it is coda to a longer passage of direct speech uttered by Sophie, purportedly endorsing an utterance that Alison does not quite make anywhere in the narrative, for example: ‘“Remember, he was only lonely” Alison reminded me when we were talking about everything again, as a kind of coda, and I was telling her that I was thinking about writing a short story all about what had happened, about Anthony and the flat and even the dream.’ Indeed the title does become a kind of coda to the story, but its direct speech there belongs to Sophie, a narrative glitch in the ‘she’ of ‘she said’ that sends the reader on high alert back to the title and back into the story.
Readers of Gunn’s fiction, whether the novels or short stories, are well accustomed to encountering overt and playful acknowledgement of the horizon or scene of writing in the story, to feeling like a co-creator or accomplice in the making of the story. The reader is let in on the story. ‘Absolutely let in on the story’ is how Gunn responded when I asked her about this in a recent zoom conversation (14 May 2020): ‘The reader is part of the absolute making of the story—that’s a pun: making of it what you will but also being part of making it up and part of making in the sense that the reader brings all of her own imagining and intelligence and intuition into the world of the story and then adjusts the world.’ And this story, which begins with a dream reported to the narrator by her sister, very soon primes the reader: ‘Everything that happens must be followed by a conversation – it’s always event plus discussion, event plus discussion – even if the “everything” is just some rag bag of images hauled up from her unconscious and set before her while she is asleep’. This story, rather like a dream, compresses so much into its swerving narrative. Fasten your seatbelts as ‘event plus discussion’ becomes event as discussion; language is both event itself and event-making, and vice versa. Language produces events, this story makes clear, sometimes death-dealing events, perhaps the fate of that ‘young man sent abroad to fight’ reported in the sentence that folds in and back on the story from its final line to its title. This sentence, the reader cannot escape noticing, is not simply the sentence uttered in direct speech marks opining on the state of mind of the boy soldier departing London for Iraq, but the bigger sentence we utter that contains it, ending in ‘she said’—and the ‘she’ of ‘she said’ soon destabilises itself. But already the story (of the ‘young man’ spoken by the ‘she’) explodes into gender war. This is the sharp threshold Gunn has us on. Shall we break and enter?
Gunn takes the epithet I proffered her of ‘contemporary modernist’ as a compliment, recognising that her own unique form of self-conscious, self-referential and dialogical making arises from a space cleared by the great ‘modernist’ writers, not least Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, along with Muriel Spark and later technicians of what we might term ‘the modernist sentence’. Modernism for Gunn is a living mutating mode not an historical literary era, nor is it a form of realism: ‘I’ve never aligned myself with a version of modernism understood as a literary reflection of social factoring or a sign of the times’. The ‘powerful effect’ of these writers who were formative in opening a space for her own writing was that they
cut—immediately cut—with their pens—schioooh! [imagine the sublime sound of a jet engine accelerating high up]—a straight path right into the centre of the world of words, into the world of fiction as utterly self-contained places. So, none of this turgid, diluted, screened world that we’re participating in that came from notions of writing mimetically or allusively. The words themselves are the things of the worlds that they are making. The words are plastic. The words become a kind of clay with which you build the worlds that the story is happening in.
Gunn talks of the ‘sticking and making and binding of the story’, of words as ‘plastic’, as malleable, labile material, and of the primary importance of the unit of the sentence: ‘Everything happens at the level of the sentence’. Ever since Gunn’s inaugural professorial lecture at the University of Dundee in 2006, I have enjoyed numerous conversations with her over the years on the making of her sentences. On this occasion she refers me to the writer Gary Lutz’s published lecture The Sentence is a Lonely Place (2008), declaring: ‘It’s true! A sentence has to do absolutely everything for itself. Imagine the first letter of the sentence and the last letter of the sentence become like brackets for the whole thing.’
I ask how that might compare to poetry where it is the line that is ‘the unit of semantic yield’, as poet Tom Leonard has it, and sentences may traverse or be cut open by line-breaks, referring her to James Scully’s Linebreak: Poetry as Social Practice (2005). We ponder whether in poetry the line breaks with the language of the poem, returning the reader in a sense into the public sphere. If the cutting of a poetry line opens to the world, then, I wonder maybe that what’s lonely about a prose sentence is that it’s sutured to another one. Where is (or what is) the kind of edge you can get with a sentence? Is this perhaps the work of Gunn’s very distinctive use of ellipses, both in direct and indirect speech? There are examples of both in the present story, and they seem to be a nod to Woolf’s stylised ellipses, yet also quite distinctively a signature style of Gunn’s own, not least in her novel, The Boy and the Sea (2006), where they at times seem, amongst the other things that ellipses can do, to be signifying the soughing of waves.
Gunn says she thinks of an ellipsis primarily in the sense of the classical aposiopesis, ‘a falling into silence, or an acknowledgement you don’t have the words, or a drifting away from language’; but it is also for her a means of putting the ‘breath back into text, acknowledging we’re participating in the text, actively reading it, speaking it too, and we’re not simply being delivered some block of information’. That phrase ‘writing good English’, says Gunn, ‘makes my blood run cold . . . an ellipsis really messes with that.’ It’s a matter of breathing, she explains, ‘an ellipsis returns the reader to the writing as a musician to her score’. Yet the unit of the sentence remains sacrosanct, for Gunn, in its powerful irreducibility, however layered, lilting, convoluted, drifting or concise. In composition her drafted ellipses she confesses may be reeled in on occasion, contracted back up into a full stop.
Gunn’s sentences are precision engineered. She talks of the energy-generating capacity of the sentence, compressed between its first and final words, its first and final letters, an energy generated perhaps by what Lutz, I later learn, identifies in the fiction of Christine Schutt, as the ‘intra-sentence intimacy’ of its jostling words. Perhaps it is the unit of the paragraph, then, where something like a lyric cut akin to the line occurs in Gunn’s prose. Certainly, she has powerful opinions on the paragraph too, which she prefers to be printed without indentation, using blank space to separate one from another. So, we must mind these gaps. Gunn’s paragraphs, island zones of contiguous shimmering sentences, float before the reader who must swim up from the blanks between them to participate in their performance, in the making of the story. What are we to make, then, of the irreducibility of that ominous eponymous sentence, and its reiterated final ‘she said’?
Jane Goldman, Edinburgh, 10 August 2020
Jane Goldman is Reader in English Literature at Glasgow University and a poet. She likes anything a word can do. She is a General Editor of the Cambridge University Press Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, and author of The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf (Cambridge UP, 1998), The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge UP, 2006), and With You in the Hebrides: Virginia Woolf and Scotland (Cecil Woolf, 2013). Her poems are in Scree, Tender, Gutter, Blackbox Manifold, Zarf, Adjacent Pineapple, Stand and Spam. Her first slim volume is Border Thoughts (Leamington Books, 2014). She is preparing a new collection SEKXPHRASTICS for publication in 2020.
Kirsty Gunn is the author of six novels – Rain, The Keepsake, Featherstone, The Boy and the Sea, The Big Music and Caroline’s Bikini – extended essays and short stories about identity and Katherine Mansfield – Thorndon, My Katherine Mansfield Project and Going Bush – as well as of two collections of short stories – This Place you Return to is Home and Infidelities – and 44 Things, a collection of essays, fragments and stories. She is the recipient of a number of awards and prizes including the Scottish Arts Council Bursary for Literature, the New York Times Notable Book Award, and Sundial Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year. The Big Music was shortlisted for the James Tait Black and Impac Awards and was a Guardian Book of the Year and winner of the New Zealand Book of the Year. Her most recent novel, Caroline’s Bikini, is just out in paperback this year.