How (Some) Short Stories Work
For its summer fiction issue, the New Yorker asked a few contemporary writers to write short stories “inspired by” stories previously published in the New Yorker. In response, Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri wrote “Jubilee,” a short story about three months she and her parents spent in London when she was ten. In an accompanying essay, Lahiri writes that her story was inspired by the short story “Voices Lost in Snow,” written by Mavis Gallant in 1985. “Voices Lost in Snow” is one of Gallant’s Linnet Muir stories, later published in her collection Home Truths.
I’m interested in this notion of “inspired by.” How does one story “inspire” another? Lahiri’s story is not an “adaptation” of the Gallant story, the way a movie her parents watch on television is “an adaptation of The Turn of the Screw.” Nor is the new story a “retelling,” as Percival Everett’s James is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn. There are echoes of Gallant’s story in “Jubilee,” but no obvious borrowings or cross-pollenations. And yet “inspired by” seems a step up from “based on,” which can mean anything: John Ford’s film Stagecoach was “based on” the short story “The Stage to Lordsburg” by Ernest Haycox, which in turn was (roughly) based on the Guy de Maupassant short story “Boule de Suif.” If you read Lahiri’s story on its own, you probably wouldn’t say it reminded you of Gallant’s. “Inspired by” is more inscrutable than that, more ambiguous, the connectors are harder to pin down.
What is it, then, about “Voices Lost in the Snow” that inspired Lahiri to write “Jubilee”?
There are similarities. Gallant’s semi-autobiographical story takes place in Montreal, Gallant’s birthplace before she moved to Paris. Lahiri’s story takes place in London, her birthplace (“my janmasthan”) before her parents moved to the United States. Both Lahiri’s narrator and Gallant’s are ten years old. Both stories are told in the first person, from the point of view of a woman now in her fifties who is recalling a particular childhood event. Gallant begins with a general observation of how children of the time lived in an adult world that was undecipherable and essentially indifferent to them. “Because I say so” was the answer to “Why?”, Gallant writes, because asking questions was “being tiresome.” Linnet Muir endures a childhood in which she feels unimportant, neglected, isolated, and lonely. So does Lahiri’s unnamed narrator: when she picks a fleck of something from her dal with her finger, she is “told later, by both parents, never to embarrass them that way again,” although they don’t explain to her why her behaviour was unacceptable. It just was.
But there are differences, too. Unlike Linnet, Lahiri’s ten-year-old has a close friend, Joya, with whom she shares the isolation of childhood. Lahiri’s narrator’s parents are unpredictably indulgent. On a shopping trip, she is allowed “an ice lolly or a Dairy Milk,” although this reveals “a new side” of her mother. Linnet similarly is allowed an occasional hot chocolate when her father brings her into the Ritz Carlton hotel, but she is being played as a pawn in an adult game. Lahiri’s narrator is not used, in that sense; her parents treat her with some consideration, but she still wonders “why, when I stick my hand into the past, does it come away coated with cobwebs…?”
In the accompanying essay, Lahiri tells us she was “stunned by the way [Gallant] excavated the past, shuffled narrative time, and privileged shards of perception over conventional plots.” “Excavating the past” is workshop-speak for using incidents from one’s own life in one’s fiction. Both stories are so “semi-autobiographical” that they read like memoir, but Gallant is far from the only short-story writer to have used that technique. I think of Gallant’s contemporary and fellow Canadian ex-pat, Norman Levine, whose short stories also bordered on memoir.
“Shuffling narrative time” means jumping back and forth within the chronological sequence of events, employing flash-forwards that emphasize that the narrator is now a grown woman and therefore reliable. Gallant tells us what happened to Linnet’s godparents after the time of the story – one dies young and the other, Georgie, falls mysteriously out of favour with Linnet’s mother. Lahiri writes that “that summer marked ten years since my mother had become a mother. I would be conscious of that milestone when my own son turned ten.”
Injecting “privileged shards of perception” means, in Lahiri’s words, that Gallant’s story is “full of phantoms, of voices from the beyond, combines a gathering of scenes with observations on marriage, illness, boredom, loneliness, language and death” that no ten-year-old could convincingly have had. Neither Gallant nor Lahiri try to reproduce the perceptions and confusions of a ten-year-old; both make it clear that we are reading the recalled and interpreted memories of an adult.
The inspiration must have come from something more intangible than literary technique. Inspiration is more like suddenly seeing, when reading another writer, a solution to a puzzle, finding a key to what Gallant calls the “dark riddle” enshrouded in a childhood memory. A single word can set it off. The mention of a distant grandmother, a father’s falsely hearty laugh. Lahiri had been trying to write about those three months in London for years – “Early drafts of the material were composed in Italian,” she writes, “but the heart of the story eluded me.” Gallant seems to have inspired Lahiri to write in English. But more than that, for both writers, the emotional distance between herself and her parents was a painful vacuum. Gallant show Lahiri how to write about that distance from the point of view of a child who is not aware of it. In her Linnet Muir stories, Gallant writes in the first person, from the perspective of an adult diving into the “long backward reach” of memory, and is thus able to convey things she did not grasp as a child – her father’s infidelity with Georgie, the estranged godmother, for example. Lahiri writes from a similar perspective – with the matter-of-factness of a child and the sharpness of an adult having an epiphany – and the dark riddle unravels.
The riddle, in Gallant’s story, is why her father brought her with him to visit Georgie. At the time, Linnet finds the visit insufferably boring. but later detects undercurrents she hadn’t noticed at the time. The puzzle for Lahiri’s narrator is why her mother hadn’t gone back to India when her own mother died, and why, later, she did not fly to London to console Joya’s mother when Joya died. Fiction doesn’t exist to answer questions, but to recreate the circumstances in which certain decisions were made to see if unsuspected motives pop up. That’s why both stories end in such ambiguous ways. Lahiri’s ends with the realization that the narrator’s mother “had always been afraid to look death in the face”: it is a moment of understanding and forgiveness, and it differs significantly from the ending of Gallant’s story. In Gallant’s final paragraph, the adult Linnet muses on the expression “played her cards right.” She imagines her father placing a playing card on the table, and Georgie looking at it and not picking it up. “It was a low card,” Gallant writes, “…the eight of clubs – a female child.” This is the story’s give-away: in French cartomancy, with which Gallant would have been familiar, the eight of clubs does not mean “a female child,” it means “a casual relationship.”
“Much of childhood in [Gallant’s] stories,” writes Lahiri, “is an act of decoding the incomprehensible behaviour and speech of adults – one could call it a form of translation.” One could also call writing a story “inspired by” another story a form of translation. It is like a musician “covering” a song by another musician: the new work is both an homage to the original artist and a work of independent creativity. “Voices Lost in Snow” acted as a catalyst to “Jubilee.” It is unobtrusively present throughout Lahiri’s story; without it, “Jubilee” may not have been written. And after that “aha!” moment of recognition, the two stories go their separate, triumphant ways.