Souvenir (Criticism)

Criticism

Carol Dell’amico

Carol Dell’Amico is a doctoral candidate in Literatures in English at the State University of New Jersey, Rutgers. Her primary field is twentieth-century literature. In the following essay, she discusses “Souvenir” within the context of literary realism, and Black Tickets within the context of short short stories in contemporary prose fiction.

This essay in criticism on Phillips is a genre study, so the notion of genre first will be defined. The word genre generally refers to two things. On the one hand, it refers to forms found in literature, such as the novel, the short story, the sonnet, the lyric, the essay, and so on. On the other hand, it is used to refer to styles within these genres, such as realism, science fiction, magic realism, gothic. Genre studies classify novels and look at the history of forms. When did realism begin; what is realism? When does science fiction take off as a highly popular sub-genre? “Souvenir” as a story, and Black Tickets as a collection of stories, are both interesting topics in genre. Stylistically, some of the longer short stories in Black Tickets such as “Souvenir” are treated in genre criticism as stories by American writers which evince a “return to realism” in contemporary letters. The significance of this critical claim will be explored, and “Souvenir” as an instance in realism will be addressed. Then, since Black Tickets contains fifteen stories out of twenty-seven which are four pages or less in length, and since other contemporary writers have written “short short stories,” the generic phenomenon of the short short story in contemporary letters will be the final brief discussion in this essay on Phillips and genre.

Jayne Anne Phillips immediately comes to mind when reading recent critical studies announcing a return to realism on the part of writers. This resurgence tends to be dated from the 1970s. Realism in this sense is distinguished from prose fiction that departs from stable points of view or that tends to a greater artifice in plot or narrative construction. Stories told from multiple viewpoints that contest each other and thus make discovering a discrete story-line difficult, or stories which contain significant elements of dream or fantasy, or stories which depart from the process of story-telling to selfconsciously comment upon what is being written about can be excluded from stories more properly described as realist stories. Realism proceeds around the minutiae of life. It is like a historical chronicle of the individual, her thoughts and activities, in her open-ended present. The bulk of nineteenth-century fiction is realist, and, beginning with writers such as Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald, realism in the novel and short story modified somewhat to suit the modern age. However, since twentieth-century fiction also witnessed significant developments in narrative quite different from this modified realism, much of the genre criticism on twentieth-century forms addresses itself to these developments. Some of these developments are modernist stream-of-consciousness writing, symbolic fiction, and so-called metafiction like self-reflexive writing or historiographic metafiction. Historiographic metafiction in some instances involves the meshing of real historical figures within an overarching fictional work and is a form of writing particularly widespread and popular in post-modern, or post-World War II, fiction (Michael Ondaatjie’s The English Patient, for example). While prose fiction continues to change (witness developments in cyberspace publishing), and while new twentieth-century forms must be generically addressed, nevertheless, realist prose never really stopped being written. This “return to realism” conversation most accurately points to how young writers coming of age from the mid-1960s on simply felt less pressured to try out non-realist forms in writing and felt freer to continue in the realist tradition. Thus, realism persists, and the “return” in this equation includes a return to paying attention to this tradition. Today, it seems best to acknowledge that the field of prose fiction is highly diverse, harboring everything from the realism found in some of Phillips’s work, to the gothic supernaturalism of a writer like Anne Rice.

The question then becomes, if realist fiction resembles a historical chronicle of people’s lives, then whose lives does Phillips chronicle in “Souvenir”? The story is about a middle-class family, and focuses on a young woman’s relationship to especially her mother, but also to her father and brother as well. Kate, her mother, her dead father, and her brother, Robert, are the characters in “Souvenir.” Given the story’s focus on Kate and her mother, the story’s realism could be said to provide us with a glimpse at the ways that mothers and daughters communicated and related in the 1970s. Kate and her mother are educated, and are tolerant of each other, this much we learn from the initial telephone conversation between them. We also detect in this conversation the generational divide, a major source of conflict between them. Kate, as the younger will do, urges her mother to live more recklessly than she does in her life as a school superintendent. For her part, Kate’s mother encourages Kate to be careful in her dealings with men. What we glean from this conversation is a sense of a generational divide produced by a difference of mores, or values. This sense is confirmed in the portion of the story which is a sustained treatment of a scene from these two women’s past.

In this scene, Kate and her mother are arguing bitterly, and both are upset. The dialogue reveals the source of the conflict:

“But, hypothetically,” Kate continued, her own voice unaccountably shaking, “if I’m willing to endure whatever I have to, do you have a right to object? You’re my mother. You’re supposed to defend my choices.”

“You’ll have enough trouble without choosing more for yourself. Using birth control that’ll ruin your insides, moving from one place to another. I can’t defend your choices. I can’t even defend myself against you.” She wiped her eyes with a napkin.

The particular historical moment which Phillips captures here chronicles the changing sexual mores of a nation. Kate’s free lifestyle and her use of birth control frighten her mother, but Kate desires approbation and support from her parent. No matter what happened and was not spoken about in middle-class homes before the 1960s, until the 1960s, the American middle-class woman remained celibate (or were supposed to) unless married. Here, Phillips writes about the changing status of women in culture, and the clash that resulted between an older more traditional generation and a younger, changing generation. As in “Home,” another story in Black Tickets, Phillips’s realism treats historically specific conflicts between mothers and daughters.

The second topic in genre this essay takes up is Black Tickets as a whole, that is, as a short story collection. Considering that most of the stories in Black Tickets are short short stories, we can take Phillips at her word and try to read this shortening of the short story as a deliberate attempt to modify the short story in terms of expectations of length. Since other contemporary writers have also written short short stories, this genre is deserving of mention as, at least, a phenomenon in contemporary letters. One wonders if Black Tickets could have made the impact it did if it were not in part because of these startling exercises in short short fiction. Critics who have attempted to theorize about this sub-generic efflorescence come up with different commentary. Perhaps it is a bit early to say. A critic like Miriam Marty Clark, for example, asks whether these fragments are not evidence of a weakening in the sense of history? “The stories I am interested in here,” she writes in Studies in Short Fiction, “thematize within narrative the weakening of historicity.” Is this inability to sustain a story a sign of the inability to place an individual within history, and project a coherent future for that individual? A possible criticism of this position is to note how a writer like Phillips can write this sort of fiction but then can write a historical novel as well (Machine Dreams). Another approach would be to note how these fragments capture slices of scenes and lives and voices that together add up to a sort of anthropological or ethnographic conglomeration of fragments which attest to an incredibly diverse world. In this case, a fascination with difference and the specificity of the local and particular can be seen to be urge behind this type of writing. In the short short stories of a writer like Amy Hempel, for example, the argot, cadences, and rhythms of contemporary urban Los Angeles are captured with documentarylike clarity, in one short burst of vision followed by another.

Genre studies make up one area of literary critical inquiry. Novels and short stories are a part of an intricate cultural web undergoing continuous change. Generic classifications keep track of the history of forms and trends in literatures and the arts. The longer short stories in Black Tickets like “Souvenir” correspond to a twentieth-century tradition of realist prose. But Phillips can not be too easily “pegged” as a writer. In her short short stories, her prose pushes the bounds of realism in its highly condensed temporal scope. Since the publication of Black Tickets, Phillips has published another collection of short stories, Fast Lanes (1987), and, besides Machine Dreams (1984), another novel entitled Shelter (1994).

Source: Carol Dell’Amico, “Topics in Genre in the Writing of Jayne Anne Phillips,” for Short Stories for Students, Gale, 1998.

D. Mesher

Mesher is a professor of English and American Studies at San Jose State University. In the following essay, he discusses Jayne Anne Phillips use of characterization in “Souvenir.”

“Souvenir,” the one-word title of Jayne Anne Phillips’ story about Kate, a woman who comes to terms with herself and her mother when the latter is diagnosed with terminal cancer, means “to remember” in French. A souvenir is a keepsake, a memento, something to serve as a reminder. Near the beginning of the story, Kate recalls a visit with her mother the previous summer, when “they bought each other pewter candle holders. ‘A souvenir,’ her mother said. ‘A reminder to always be nice to yourself.’” But the visit begins much less pleasantly: Kate feels frustrated and betrayed by her mother’s criticisms of her, while the mother predicts that Kate “may feel different later on,” once the mother is dead and “floating around on a fleecy cloud.” In the time-present of the story, Kate remembers that visit between receiving the telephone calls from her brother Robert, that inform her of her mother’s hospitalization, first, and then of the diagnosis. The memory, a souvenir in itself, effectively portrays the tension, as well as the love, between mother and daughter, in a story in which characterization, and not plot, is the chief focus.

Someone reading only for plot might not find much in “Souvenir”: Kate learns that her mother has cancer, and agrees to abide by her brother’s decision not to tell her mother the truth; later, while she is visiting her mother in the hospital, the two women walk to a park and take a ride on a Ferris wheel. Her mother tells Kate, “I know what you haven’t told me.” Such a reading, however, would miss the rich texture of Kate’s characterization, as well as Phillips’ achievement in producing so complex a personality within the limitations of a short story. In “Souvenir,” that texture is woven from strands of personality often only suggested or implied, producing what seem to be confused or contradictory impressions of the main character.

Consider the false impression created in the first lines of “Souvenir”: “Kate always sent her mother a card on Valentine’s Day,” the story begins, conjuring up the image of a loving daughter in a cherished relationship with her mother. The rest of the story’s opening, however, undermines that image. Kate’s Valentine’s Day tradition has only been going on six years, since her father’s death, not “always”; and, rather than an act of love, Kate has sent the cards as — in the story’s cold and impersonal phrase — “a gesture of compensatory remembrance.” Further, there has been a decline in her effort over those six years, from hand-made cards to mass-produced “art reproductions . . . with blank insides” on which she has written short, almost trite sentiments. That decline culminates with the Valentine’s Day on which the story begins. “This time, she forgot.” And even the long-distance telephone call she makes to her mother, in place of the forgotten card, seems devalued, because Kate waits until “night when the rates were low.”

Having reduced Kate in the reader’s estimation, however, Phillips begins to rehabilitate her. Though the mother’s voice grows “suddenly brighter” when she realizes it is her daughter calling, Kate recognizes in it “a tone reserved for welcome company” — as if family has always been of less importance to her mother and, worse yet, as if sometimes it takes her mother “a while to warm up” that welcoming tone in Kate’s case. By the time her mother says, “this is costing you money,” the reader may be wondering if Kate waited for the low rates before calling to save money or merely to please her mother.

But why begin with a false impression of Kate as the loving daughter, only to undercut the image and then blame the mother for the problem? In part, the answer has to do with narrative technique: the story is told in the third person, not from an omniscient point of view, but from Kate’s “center of consciousness.” All the thoughts and descriptions in the story are Kate’s, and the narrative never leaves her presence, or her mind. The story’s first line, “Kate always sent her mother a card on Valentine’s Day,” is therefore not a statement of fact, but Kate’s own way of looking at herself, and the details that follow are her own recognition of the falseness of that image. Further, the reader cannot be sure that there is ever any “tone reserved for welcome company” in her mother’s voice; what is certain, however, is that Kate thinks there is such a tone, since the description comes from her thoughts, as related by the narrator. Through the use of these apparently contradictory impressions, then, Phillips has involved the reader in a sense of the tensions that are at the core of Kate’s characterization.

Those same tensions are also expressed in the story in other ways, including, on occasion, the incongruent pairings of Kate’s thoughts. When, for example, her brother Robert phones early on the morning after Valentine’s Day, with the news of her mother’s hospitalization, Kate thinks of herself, “She would never make much money, and recently she had begun wearing make-up again, waking in smeared mascara as she had in high school.” Sitting over a cup of coffee after speaking with Robert, Kate again reflects on herself: “She hadn’t slept with anyone for five weeks, and the skin beneath her eyes had taken on a creamy darkness.” The fact that Kate’s thoughts turn inward, when her mother has fallen ill, is revealing in itself. But what is the connection between making money and wearing make-up, or having sex and having dark patches under one’s eyes? The free associations underlying both pairings seem to offer a glimpse into Kate’s troubled subconscious, and to suggest that she lacks a sense of fulfillment in her life. By leaving the exact terms of those associations undefined, Phillips adds to her portrait of an emotionally distraught young woman.

One of the most important strategies in Phillips’ creation of Kate’s characterization is her use of the double — a literary technique in which two characters share parallel (or opposing) attributes, allowing elements of the minor character’s personality to reflect directly on that of the major one. For all the tension between them, Kate and her mother are doubles in “Souvenir.” They are both women, both teachers, both living alone. That Kate recognizes this part of their relationship is clear from the frequent comparisons she makes between herself and her mother. Sometimes, those comparison point out their differences, as when Kate makes a “cup of strong Chinese tea,” and then thinks that “her mother kept no real tea in the house. “But she is just as likely to focus on similarities: her mother is a diabetic, so Kate fears “a secret agent in her blood making ready to work against her.” They both eat their meals alone, Kate thinks, at “similar times of day, hundreds of miles apart. Women by themselves.”

After Robert’s call, Kate remembers the curtains on her mother’s windows: “all the same, white cotton hemmed with a ruffle, tiebacks blousing the cloth into identical shapes. From the street it looked as if the house was always in order.” On one level, this suggests that her mother’s house is not always in order. But whose house always is? Without any evidence as to the degree of disorder, it is unclear whether those curtains hide a mother who is too concerned with appearances, or reveal a daughter who unreasonably holds her mother responsible for the random nature of everyday life.

When Kate arrives at the hospital, however, her role has been reversed. Having acceded to Robert’s demand that the diagnosis be kept secret from the patient, Kate finds herself in the uncomfortable position of putting up a false front. Yet her remark to Robert, that “we’re lying to her, all of us, more and more,” suggests that Kate now believes the current one to be only the latest in the succession of lies she has told her mother. The “succession of blocks tumbling over,” which she sees when she closes her eyes, may represent the collapse of walls she has built from those lies to separate herself from her mother.

The role-reversal continues during their first visit, when her mother comforts Kate, instead of the other way around: “‘You’re not alone,’ her mother said, ‘I’m right here’.” Again, Kate experiences an emotional change described in concrete terms: “She sat motionless and felt her heart begin to open like a box with a hinged lid. The fullness had no edges.” But for all the emotional progress Kate has made during the story, she is still in denial, thinking mostly about herself. This is best illustrated when, looking for hand cream in her mother’s suitcase, Kate finds “a stack of postmarked envelopes” her mother’s keepsakes, “beginning with the first of the marriage” and including family photographs and “Kate’s homemade Valentines.” These are her mother’s souvenirs, reminders of her own happiness. But Kate finds the love they suggest to be literally smothering: “Kate stared. What will I do with these things? She wanted air; she needed to breathe.” And when a few of the photographs fly out of an open window, Kate does not even try to reach them.

Kate would like to believe that, despite the “tension,” there has always been “a trusted clarity,” between her mother and herself — a clarity now “twisted,” because she has gone along with Robert and hidden the truth of her mother’s condition from her. Instead of revealing that truth, however, Kate takes her mother to the small amusement park near the hospital to ride the Ferris wheel. As they ascend on the ride, Kate finds herself again reassured by her dying mother, this time about an approaching storm, when her mother makes a comforting gesture, moving “her hand to Kate’s knee and touch[ing] the cloth of her daughter’s skirt.” And once again she feels smothered, aware of “the immense weight of the air as they moved through it.”

This time, however, something is different: her mother is close to death, which she once described as “floating around on a fleecy cloud.” The description is recalled when, as they begin to ascend, Kate asks her mother, “Are you ready for the big sky?” Near the top of the Ferris wheel, literally suspended between heaven and earth and figuratively between life and death, her mother withdraws her hand and Kate, no longer smothered, feels “the absence of the warmth.” It is at this climactic point that Kate’s mother resolves the tensions between them. “I know all about it. . . . I know what you haven’t told me,” she says, apparently referring to a great deal more than the doctor’s diagnosis. And the story ends, as Kate sees “herself in her mother’s wide brown eyes” and feels she is “falling slowly into them” — an image of acceptance and harmony between mother and daughter at last.

Source: D. Mesher, for Short Stories for Students, Gale, 1998.

What Do I Read Next?

• Reasons to Live (1985) by Amy Hempel is a collection of short short stories. Hempel’s narrative voices offer wry, pithy observations that are both intriguing and disturbing.
• Housekeeping (1970), by Marilynne Robinson, is a novel about a family of four women. Robinson’s prose captures the pace of rural life and of her characters’ lives and thoughts.
• White Noise (1984) by Ron Delillo is a keen, funny satire and reflection on contemporary American life. In it, a blended family makes its way through surreal mutations in environment that characterize an age of malls, multiplexes, media, and technology.