Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Review
Reviewed Work(s): The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary
Short Stories by Daniel Halpern
Review by: Ronny Noor
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 74, No. 3 (Summer, 2000), pp. 689-690
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40156057
Accessed: 14-10-2023 12:54 +00:00

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 Akhmatova, Adrienne Rich, Assia Dje-
plete with silences, doubts, and feelings
of alienation. My activism in human bar, Anne Frank, and more. A Map of
rights was born from various conditions Hope is highly recommended to those in-
volved in both literature and in the
that came together: I was Jewish, female,
and an exile/' human experience.
After the UN's Universal Declaration Bettina L. Knapp
of Human Rights over fifty years ago, Hunter College & Graduate Center, CUNY
Agosin informs her readers, violations
and indignities toward women - in
The Art of the Story: An International
Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle
East, Latin America, and the subconti- Anthology of Contemporary Short Sto-
nent of India, to mention but a few areas
ries. Daniel Halpern, ed. New York.
- continued to occur. Some govern- Viking. 1999. xiii + 667 pages. $40.
ments, reported by Amnesty Internation- isbn 0-670-88761-7.
al as well as by the UN, paid little or no
attention to violations of the human nn/ze Art of the Story is the second collec-
rights of women and young girls. En- J. tion of this kind edited by Daniel
slavement, violence in the nuclear family,Halpern, himself a writer and the editori-
sexual abuse, domestic violence, marital al director of the Ecco Press. He has in-
rape, and genital mutilation continued at cluded seventy-eight stories from thirty-
Anthologies their sordid pace. five countries in this venture, by authors
The six-part collection of creative born between 1938 and 1970. The reader
works presented in A Map of Hope focus-gets a glimpse of the world in miniature
A Map of Hope: Women's Writing on between the covers of this delightful
es on specific themes associated with
Human Rights - An International Lit- human rights and their abuse. The open- book.
erary Anthology. Marjorie Agosin, ed. ing section, "War and Remembrance/' The stories in the anthology are of the
Mary Robinson, foreword. New deals with the stories and poems of highest standard, varying in their themes
Brunswick, N.J. Rutgers University Press. those, like F. Durakovic, whose families from personal relationships to sociopolit-
1999. xxix + 369 pages. $40 ($19 paper). were destroyed, who knew torture and aical issues to contemplation of life and
isbn 0-8135-2625-6 (2626-4 paper). climate of physical and spiritual destruc- death. Duong Thu Huong of Vietnam,
tion. The second section, 'Imprisonmentfor example, in "Reflections of Spring,"
editor of the important anthology and Censorship," features the writings of writes a moving account about a success-
A Map of Hope, Marjorie Agosin, hon- the Egyptian author and physician ful economic planner who, on one of his
ored with the United Nations LeadershipNawal El Saadawi, the Burmese Nobel official tours to the province, remembers
Award for Human Rights and the authorPeace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, the young girl he loved as a teenager. He
of such works as An Absence of Shadows, and the French resistance fighter Char- cannot forgive himself for leaving her,
Ashes of Revolt, My Jewish Fathers, and lotte Delbo, who was sent to Auschwitz. especially because he is now locked in a
Dear Anne Frank, is to be commended on All were cloistered against their will. The loveless marriage. Haunted by her mem-
her latest venture. Such writings not onlythird section, "Childhood," on the muti-ory even after his return to Hanoi, he
demonstrate great knowledge on her lation of innocence, brings in the creativewalks out of the conference room leaving
part, but utmost sensitivity to what was works of Nelly Sachs, the Greek writer his admiring colleagues and photogra- O
and is, for some, the noxiousness of Elsa Spartioti, and others. phers, a conclusion that can be aptly
human existence. To be able to read into The fourth section, "Exiles and summed up in Graham Greene's words: 5
the hearts and minds of those who have "D
Refugees," brings to life the fate of such "It was the biggest protest he ... allowed m
za
known suffering, and to attempt to better Japanese Americans as Hisaye Yamamo- himself to make against the condition of \s>
■u
their lot by informing the world of the to and Mitsuye Yamada, interned in thelife." m
n
cruelties still being heaped on the living U.S. during World War II, as well as the Salman Rushdie, as usual, deals with
by those who - psychologically speak-Bosnian writer Slavenka Drakulic and the corruption of Indira Gandhi's gov- <
m
ing - may be alluded to as brain dead, the Polish author Alicia Nitecki. In the ernment in India in "The Free Radio."
indicates the depth and scope of Ago- fifth section, the topic of "Domestic andAnd the famed Russian writer Tatyana
sin's contribution to the literary world asPolitical Violence" is explored by MeenaTolstaya, great-grandniece of Leo Tol-
well as to humanity in general. Alexander of India, Maud Suiter of stoy, ponders the glory of life and the in-
As the great-granddaughter of a wom- Ghana, and Taslima Nasreen of Pakistan, evitability of death in "On the Golden
an whose sisters were killed at Au- who probes the violence perpetrated Porch." The story that touched me most
schwitz but who herself had fortunately against women in Islamic fundamentalist - and I had to go back and read it again
escaped from the Nazis to South Ameri- lands. after closing the book - is "Night Wom-
ca, Agosin is grateful for having been ac- The concluding section, "Resistance en" by the young Haitian American au-
cepted first in Chile, then in the Unitedand Refusal," features Nadine Gordi- thor Edwidge Danticat. It is the poignant
States. Each move made by her family mer's heroic struggles in her fight againsttale of a fallen woman who lives a dou-
spelled another physical, linguistic, and apartheid in South Africa and the ble life under the same roof: one is that
Chilean writer Isabel Allende's literary of a prostitute to earn her living, the
cultural exile, not to speak of the psycho-
logical ramifications these ruptures en- endeavors against the Pinochet dictator- other that of a tender mother who makes
tailed. Such displacements stirred in her,ship. Included as well in this star-stud- up stories about angels to keep her little
she writes, "a great empathy for those ded anthology are works by Natalia son from discovering her sinful ways. In
with similar destinies, similar pasts, re-Ginzburg, Marguerite Duras, Anna just three pages, Danticat demonstrates

WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • 74:3 • SUMMER 2000 • 689

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what the Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia cross-cultural, formalist experiments in Brian T. Fitch. A I'ombre de la littera-
Marquez put so epigrammatically: stories literature - that is, in fiction and poetry. ture: Pour une theorie de la critique
come to those who know how to tell As a professor of comparative litera- litteraire. Montreal. XYZ. 2000. 354
them. ture at the Sorbonne, Bessiere is widely pages. Can$27.95. isbn 2-89261-246-2.
The present collection of stories has read in contemporary European and
what an anthology should: cultural di- Anglo-Saxon literatures and displays this
versity, ethnic diversity, class diversity, background with samples taken primari- Hermeneutics
tion of the Bible,began as the
especially interpreta-
in sup-
and even sexual diversity. There are ly from French, American, British, Ital- port of Luther's famous dictum of scrip-
short biographical notes at the end to ian, German, and Hispanic cultures to tura sola, the Reform Bible explaining
summarize the writers' backgrounds. exemplify his discussions. Well-known itself. This method was then extended
However, the ragged preface leaves theauthors, however, are often ignored in into the field of law. In A I'ombre de la lit-
reader confused about the inconsistencies deference to writers not so well known,
terature Brian Fitch admirably identifies
in the book. One wonders why Kazuo such as Nuno Judice, Jose Angel Valente, Johann Martin Chladenius (1710-59) as
Ishiguro and Rushdie are English whileFernando Pessoa, Osip Mandelstam, and the precursor of literary hermeneutics by
Daniele Del Giudice. These names are in-
Bharati Mukherjee, who won the USA's extending the biblical and juridical
National Book Critics Circle Award for deed worthy of mention for their literary
method into historiography. Friedrich
The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), is
insights but are not widely read enough
Schleiermacher (1768-1834) is credited
considered Indian and Danticat, whom to clarify the arguments about the rhetor-
with the literary implications of herme-
ical schemes of modernist literature.
Granta lauded as one of America's best neutics by postulating noncomprehen-
Bessiere's discussion of the rhetorical
young novelists, is classified as Haitian.stakes of a deconstructive view of litera- sion as the beginning of the literary prob-
Ian McEwan appeared as an Englishman lems of reading. From Chladenius to
ture entails some problematic assump-
in The Art of the Tale (1986), Halpern's Gadamer, this inventory of hermeneutic
tions. Beginning with the assumption
previous anthology of international sto- voices provides insightful studies of the
that literature creates its own context, the
ries, but now he is Welsh. If the reader contributions to hermeneutics by Schlei-
presentation is often too abstract and be-
overlooks such technical flaws and the ermacher, Spitzer, Bakhtin, Picon, Rous-
comes lost in philosophical jargon aboutset, Todorov, Ricoeur, Poulet and the
fact that the Chilean master storyteller Is-
literary esthetics. The rhetorical strategies
abel Allende has been deprived of her Geneva School, Gadamer, Jauss, Iser, and
of modernist literature are not always Blanchot. The theoretical discussions are
rightful place among the world's elite, apparent in justifying the claim for a lit-
The Art of the Story will certainly be a also grounded in enlightening herme-
erary otherness to ordinary language.
wonderful experience for the aficionados neutic readings of Blanchot's Thomas Vob-
Equally problematic are the unarticulat-
of short fiction. scur and Camus's L'etr anger. The end-
ed assumptions that "literature" is avant-
Ronny Noor product of Fitch's study is to eschew the
garde and its readers possess ordinary
University of Texas, Brownsville possibility of any single method to open
language. After so many postmodernist
up all literary texts in favor of a relation-
and postcolonial studies in our time, I
ship of mutual dialogue between a read-
also expected a breadth of literary exam-
er and the text being read.
Criticism ples, to include those from such non-
Western cultures as various Islamic, Indi- The presentation is divided into four
Jean Bessiere. La litterature et sa rhe-
an, and African literatures. Instead, the parts. These are organized as follows:
1) the literary text as other is discussed,
samples I encounter here are much too
torique: La banalite dans le litteraire with Levinas, Gadamer, Blanchot,
restricted to European texts. There is
au XXe siecle. Paris. PUF. 1999. vi + 238 Schleiermacher, and Ricoeur providing
even a reference to Ezra Pound without
pages. 148 F. isbn 2-13-0498604. the primary theoretical voices; 2) the his-
any mention of his Oriental experiments.
torical bases for hermeneutics are found-
These are the disappointing results of re-
\ Tow that Jean-Frangois Lyotard and
turning to modernism as if we had not ed in Schleiermacher's ontological for-
1 \ Gilles Deleuze have passed, mod- mulation, with separate chapters on
learned anything since.
ernism is making a comeback as a viable
There is also a tendency herein to pre-Spitzer, Bakhtin, Picon, and Rousset;
literary model for current writing and
fer French-language versions of literary 3) literary criticism as a hermeneutic
reading. Jean Bessiere's Litterature et sa texts. It is not obvious how the rhetoric of process is presented, with separate dis-
rhetorique makes such a case, as his study literature can be understood by citing the cussions of Gadamer, Jauss, Iser, and
implies the suspension of the postmod- French translations of works originally Chladenius in that they postulated the
ern experiment to reconsider modernism composed in another language, such as stakes of hermeneutics in the conceptions
as a model to investigate how human Eliot's Waste Land. This is part of a short- of horizon, dialogics, and appropriation;
imagination continues to validate litera- circuit in Bessiere's presentation which and 4) the critical metatext or commen-
ture as a means of pushing the limits of gives glimpses of insights that quickly tary is proposed in its dialogic relation-
ordinary language with an intransitive fade because selections from such com- ship to a text, with a fine discussion of
esthetic. The parameters of deconstruc- plex writers as Valery and Pound are not the Talmudic model of the commentary
tion are herewith directed toward mod- and text united together. In this final
sufficiently developed. Nevertheless,
ernism to discuss the midnineteenth-cen- Bessiere is to be complimented for begin-chapter, parody and translation are well
tury interrogations of the Romantic ning to delineate the parameters of the discussed as examples of the dialogic re-
esthetic. About 1850, the questioning of modernist experiment from the decon- lationship between text and metatext.
Romantic presuppositions by the imagi- structive orientation. Much is left to be Uncommon for these days, there are
native use of literary language began the said about such a worthy project. no editorial snafus such as misspellings
modernist experience, which is pre- Roland A. Champagne or typographical errors in Fitch's book.
sumed to continue into the present in University of Missouri, St. Louis While the bibliography is impressive,

690 • WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • 74:3 * SUMMER 2000

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