Spaces of Home and The Shape of the StoryDenise Delgadotalk@denisedelgado.com

Juan Fresán, from a print edition translating Julio Cortázar’s “House Taken Over” into graphic design illustrations, 1969.

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Ernesto Oroza, Architecture of NecessityMonday, May 8, 17

Ernesto Oroza, Architecture of NecessityMonday, May 8, 17

Make a quick list of places you’ve lived, as many as you can recall: rooms, apartments, houses, dorms, temporary housing—everything counts. From your list, pick one or two homes that you feel compelled to write about. Think about what made these homes particular. A kitchen that only fit one person? A window looking into a neighbor’s window? A part of the house that often broke?

Write for 3 minutes.

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Turn to the person next to you. For the next three minutes, talk to each other about the homes you recalled in more depth. What made them particular? Share those details.

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“The word ‘setting,’ especially as it is used in fiction-writing textbooks and workshops, has a drab, dutiful quality. Setting is the element in fiction that seems the least susceptible to imaginative work. It’s already there, always. Put it in the foreground and you get snide compliments about local color. The usual assumption is that setting is objective, that it “helps” and “shapes” a story. In the way that I am describing them, however, the objects and things surrounding fictional characters have the same status and energy as the characters themselves. Setting--in the way I want to define it--is not just a place where action occurs....What surrounds the characters...can be as expressive as the action. No law dictates that the setting should always express the feelings of the characters. Too often, however, it does.”

Charles Baxter, “Talking Forks: Fiction and the Inner Life of Objects,” from Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction.

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WHAT WE WRITE ABOUT WHEN WE WRITE ABOUT HOMES

• Social status, social struggles• Individual and collective experiences

of massive social and cultural shifts• Generational conflict and change • The psychology of intimate family

relationships• Class satire• The history of specific cities and

countries• Nebulous forces that threaten a sense

of safety and security

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Salman Rushdie, Shame, 1983 (fictionalized Pakistan)

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 1962 (small town New England)

Julio Cortázar, “House Taken Over,” from Blow-Up and Other Stories, 1946 (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

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• Mansions the legacy of a wealthy past

• Family members who live there are reduced / in decline due to death, illness, or loss of wealth

• Houses with idiosyncratic, even fabulist properties (i.e. Nishapur, the mansion in Shame, with its expanding network of subterranean rooms)

• In real geographical locations, or invented places that make specific allusion to real ones.

• Their inhabitants spend most or all of their time shut in because they must or because they want to.

• Large parts of the house are no longer in use.

• Bizarrely close relationships between siblings

• Mysterious or social forces threaten inhabitants’ safety or sense of security

• At right: Wazir Mansion, or Quaid-i-Azam Birthplace Museum, considered the birthplace of the founder of Pakistan

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Adapt the following sentence from Cortázar’s “House Taken Over:”

How not to remember the layout of that house.

Use it as a starting point for writing, in detail, a passage about one of the remembered interiors from the last exercise OR a home of your own invention. Pay more attention to the shape or structure of the home than to the way it is decorated. Recall its most salient feature and morph or exaggerate it. You could take a cue from one of the readings we’ve just discussed.

6 minutes

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Imagine (or recall) some force, threat, or event that will bring major change, for bad or good, to this home. It could be structural damage to the home, a renovation next door because of gentrification in the neighborhood, or the sound of dancing feet coming from the apartment upstairs--despite the neighbors being away on a trip. Free-write about this change and how it begins to impact the people who live there.

3 minutes

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Alice Munro, “Friend of My Youth,” 1990, set in Ottawa Valley, Canada

V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas, 1961, set in Trinidad

Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, 1992, set in Martinique

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