I just posted that long quote from “Visitation” because it struck me as a strange moment in a story I quite liked. At first I thought the problem was a kind of Chekhovian gun problem — the helicopter never comes back, never amounts to anything. But that’s actually kind of refreshing; the typical short story’s economy of symbolic elements dictates that anything interesting that happens or exists within the story has to recur or exist in some new light, when in fact most events play out and end, and most objects continue existing in exactly the same light as before.
I guess what struck me as strange about this episode is that it is very obviously a writerly moment, a place where the “art” of the story intervenes in the narrative. These moments are obviously part of the point of fiction, and in some writers — Marilynne Robinson or Virginia Woolf, for example — the lyricism or art makes up nearly the entirety of the fiction. That’s cool: do what you got to, Marilynne Robinson and Virginia Woolf, you got a good thing going.
But in a story like “Visitation,” which is realist in a broad sense — it doesn’t advertise its artifice, it purports to be telling a straight story about some character — such a moment can be jarring. There are other quasi-magical elements in the story (fortune-telling Gypsies, ghostliness, etc.) and a veneer of strangeness created by drunkenness and illness, but for some reason I can’t quite pin down those magical elements and certainly the real strangeness work and the helicopter doesn’t. I think perhaps it’s because this kind of story can only accomodate one such convenient symbolic presence, and the Gypsies have been introduced earlier and are more fully fleshed-out, and the ghostliness is not a presence but instead a thing intimated by the real narrative.
None of this is meant to criticize “Visitation,” which is terrific. But I’m struggling with my own problems with these sorts of writerly moments, as a reader and an erstwhile writer. I don’t mean to get all rigid and prescriptive about these things, but it seems like there are proper and improper ways to execute such moments, and executing one incorrectly can (in a worse case) sink a story altogether. Any thoughts?
