Pastiche

emulate your idols

I was rereading a Lara Vapnyar story that appeared in the 2017 O. Henry Prize Stories, the other day, in preparation for a workshop. Initially, the food imagery in “Deaf and Blind” was the thing that most captured my attention. There’s a childhood memory of a delectable orange ice cream, a snowy picnic in the woods, a problematic chopped salad, fresh-picked wild strawberries… The focus on food and the sense of taste is an interesting avenue to journey down, when a character with sensory impairments is in play. As I kept reading, though, I got distracted from the food. I kept thinking of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” which also features a visit by a blind character. There was food in that story, too: cube steak, scalloped potatoes, green beans, buttered bread, strawberry pie, all eaten with gusto, not to mention copious Scotches drunk. The management of the food on their plates by the blind men is discussed in both stories. But none of that was the connection I was looking for. Both stories are written in the first person present from the point of view of characters with little insight into themselves or sensitivity toward others. Maybe that’s what makes them resonate, I thought. In the Carver, the narrator is an adult man (a typical Carver antihero, devoid of any excuse for his antediluvian attitudes). In the Vapnyar it’s a retrospective adult narrator recounting experiences from the time when she was a young girl. However different, the two narrators have a lot in common, including their initial fear of meeting a blind (or deafblind) person. The narrators in both stories are emotionally, metaphorically blind, in contrast to the literally blind characters. Clearly Vapnyar was writing her story in dialogue with Carver’s. Then, when I hit the line toward the end of the Vapnyar, where the narrator is dazzled by the connection between the deafblind man and his wife — “It was like nothing else in my life up to then” — I jumped up and pulled out my Library of America Collected Stories of Raymond Carver. There it was again, almost at the end, when Carver’s narrator and blind man are drawing the cathedral together on a paper bag: “It was like nothing else in my life up to now.” Vapnyar had borrowed Carver’s sentence, altering just a single word. Her story ends differently from the Carver, delivering a series of facts that deflate the epiphany (the deafblind man’s wife dies just a few years later on, the narrator’s unhappy mother never remarries), but it’s undoubtably inspired by the Carver in a way that makes the story richer if you know that.

A little research turned up the New Yorker interview, conducted when the story first appeared there, in which Vapnyar mentions her admiration for “Cathedral” and says she had wanted to write “Deaf and Blind,” which she says is partly autobiographical, ever since reading the Carver almost twenty years before, but it took that long to figure out how. Her story is stronger because she leaned so hard on the Carver, making her own a pastiche.

PROMPT:

Do a pastiche of a text you love. Go to your bookshelf and take down a book or story you admire to the point of envy or obsession. Find a page, paragraph or sentence that rivets you. Read it ten times over, out loud if possible. Then close the book and put it away. Write a paragraph in which you try to channel the voice and approach of your model but make it yours by using only details that belong to your story. Next, you might try doing an open-book version, where you closely study each sentence and try to match yours more exactly to the model. Maybe, like Vapnyar, you’ll find a sentence, or a couple of them, that you can sneak into your text whole, or almost whole. It may not come immediately. That’s okay. Lara Vapnyar spent two decades letting “Cathedral” and her own story percolate, and the resulting brew was worth the wait.

FURTHER READING

Cathedral by Raymond Carver

Deaf and Blind by Lara Vapnyar