The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form by Douglas Glover

The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form Reviews

• 
  Shane

  This collection of essays comes from a lifelong absorption in the literary form. Some are broken out into the minutia of formulae that could be delivered to a class on short story writing, while others cover books and writers that appear to be the author’s favourites, among them Alice Munro, Jane Austen and Albert Camus.
  
  Glover opens with Munro and two stories in her book The Lives of Girls and Women. Munro’s style is focussed on chronological threads, repetitions, parallels, constraints and reflectors more than on story and closure. Austen on the other hand, given the tumultuous time she lived in (American Revolution, Industrial Revolution, French Revolution etc.) contrasted with the pastoral and secluded life she led as the unmarried daughter of a not-so-well-to-do clergyman, advocated restraint in her characters. Fanny the heroine in Mansfield Park, the book that Glover dissects, is a heroine by default due to her self-restraint and non-action. Camus (the novel in question being L’Etranger) strays into Hemingway territory with his ellipsis style of showing character actions but not thoughts, often mistaken for Existentialism but vehemently denied by the French-Algerian author.
  
  The extensive essay on the short story resembled a college lecture to me, where three short stories of varying length and voice are broken out into their minutia. The old anchor of “plot” around which stories were traditionally built seems to be giving way to other emphases like image patterning, word repetition, thematic passages, backfill and conflict formulae. I wondered whether this drift was due to the increasing influence of poetry on fiction, or whether readers were getting tired of “story” within “short story.” Other essays also get into the craft of fiction, like the ones on time control in narrative prose and on building sentences, and they too resemble classroom lectures. In the very short essay titled “The Literature of Extinction,” experimental literature is discussed; again the old must-haves of plot, setting and theme are discarded in favour of repeated events and images, patterns, sound, dream, and the accidental.
  
  The final essay titled “Consciousness and Masturbation” in which Glover examines the short novel Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz was the most interesting to me. It reminded me of Kafka’s work. Here, there is a chaos of events, with no apparent meaning, taking place, with the protagonist trying to create order. Gombrowicz’s novel brings into focus all the points hitherto raised by Glover in this collection of essays: imagery, repetition, and cross references that usurp a nonsensical and parodic plot. Masturbation is presented as a way to create a private world from the chaotic one outside one’s control. Some of the other imagery borders on the obscene. Although dubbed a quasi-detective novel, Cosmos ends up a horror story.
  
  Reading this book of essays I realized that if I were to be conscious of all the elements of fiction as outlined here while creating a short story or novel, I might be so self-conscious and paralyzed that I might not write a single word. It is therefore better for the writer to create and the academic to analyze. The creator is free to take the analysis, or reject it. However, keeping these learnings in mind during revision and sculpting of a first draft can help to deepen and enrich it. It is a tribute to an author like Glover who is able to balance both roles of creator and academic in his presentation of this work.
  
  With the rapid evolution of fiction, one wonders whether it is easy to become dated quickly. However, Glover provides one nugget of hope: “What is old and discarded becomes fashionable again.” Testament to Austen’s renaissance 200 years after her passing!
• 
  Andrew Sare

  I'm not sure if there is much out there better in new experimentalist/pomo Canadian Fiction and short stories than Glover's stuff. If there is - list it for me. I mean it. This is all about listing - Which is one of the literary techniques (yes listed) by Glover in Erotics of Restraint, his recent collection of essays, writer's craft, and general observations about fiction and writing.
  
  Inside this work, Glover presents observations about patterns in writing, which at first I wondered if they might just be patterns in living and expression which couldn't be consciously crafted, but Glover headed off this thought explaining that storytelling and how we live are intricately mixed at an evolutionary level because as a race we've been telling our stories for so long. From there he goes into more overt explanations of how writers can emulate good craft/expression. Some of this was somewhat repetitive, but in doing so he also simultaneously lists book after book - which is a service to you as a reader, because Glover is also a fine editor of short story collections.
  
  Throughout this Glover explains the progression of experimentalism beginning with with Menippus or I suppose for our purposes (as his work is lost) Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel (I know, I know, others have also done this) Tristram Shandy, Poe and Moby Dick.
  
  Other works commented on include (let's just keep on listing folks, good stuff here): Ovid- Metamorphoses, Gordon Lish - My Romance, Proulx "Brokeback Mountain", Charles D'Ambrosio, Bobbie Anne Mason "The Point", Joyce's stories, David Helwig - The Stand In, Jane Austin - Mansfield Park, Nabokov - Pale Fire, Tolstoy -Anna Karenina, Dostoyevsky - The Idiot, Melville - Bartleby, Christia Wolf - The Quest for Christa T, Friedrich von Schlegel, Broch , Rober Musil, Steven Milhauser “the Barnum museum”, Leonard Michaels “in the fifties”, Mark Anthony Jarman, Hubert Aquin - Prochain Episode, Thomas Bernhard - The loser, Lawrence Durrell, Stendhal, Gertrude Stein, and Flaubert. ...Sounds like a great year in books to me.
  
  Amongst all of this Glover has specific essays of analysis and praise for three books: Alice Munroe's The Lives of Girls and Women, Albert Camus' The Stranger, and Witold Gombrowicz's Cosmos. There you go... I'll be reading them.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Al Kratz

  Worth it for the 60 page chapter on short story theory and study of 3 stories.
• 
  Aaron Cohen

  A brilliant collection of essays. Want to dig into Glover's work a bit deeper, he has a rare balance of technical understanding of fiction along with a clear, abiding love for the art.