Her unnamed narrator, if we bother to disentangle the story’s confused events into a timeline, walks into an art exhibit at a church while “on my way to someplace else, an appointment with a doctor my doctor had arranged” (Hempel 343). In fact, the act of concealing is itself, in a metafictional flourish, the agent of revelation. She exposes her story’s obsession even as she seeks to conceal it. Hempel, too, betrays her preoccupation with the relationship between concealing and revealing, plot and meaning. Plot without meaning, Atwood suggests (or “life without meaningful narrative”), is less than meaningless, as she illustrates with bullets B through E, which contain less happy variants of the story, each ending with “and everything continues as in A.” What is revealed is the plot what is concealed is the meaning. Though technically a “happy ending,” the fact that Mary and John’s life stories bore the reader, and that the story leads to the death of its subjects does not feel happy-its semantic meaning conflicts with its syntactic meaning. The reader is invited here to consider Tolstoy’s posited analysis of storytelling that “All happy families are alike” and thus not worth our time. And then, after a long and happy life, they die. They are taken through the bland lifespans of the pair “They both have worthwhile and remunerative jobs which they find stimulating and challenging,” a home, children, a “stimulating and challenging sex life” (Atwood 724). Readers then “try A”-the first bullet in a series. Atwood’s tale is “inside-out,” in that a despotic and ironical narrator takes us through a series of bulleted writing clichés. Metafictional texts-texts that self-consciously signal their status as texts-often parody the tropes and expectations of traditional literature. Thus, these two metafictional texts expose some of the pitfalls of storytelling and these storytelling pitfalls are the same pitfalls of a life lived without a “how” or a “why.”īoth works are concerned with concealing and revealing, and one of the ways they reveal is by allowing readers a look behind the curtain (perhaps “prison bars” is a more appropriate metaphor here) at the process of writing itself. The muddle in the middle is where the story is. The true mystery lies in our lives, the “now” between birth and death. But the messaging in both, while rhetorically distinct, is clear: Death and decay await us all, and despite all our attempts to circumvent the inevitable, there is no mystery in them. In the former, the thesis is explicit in the latter, coquettishly implicit. Hempel’s carefully-crafted lacunae-literally the “white things” of the story-do everything they can not to indicate death and decay, thereby highlighting them like redacted text in a classified document. Atwood’s deeply ironic choose-your-own-love-story draws readers again and again to the true “ending” of everything: Inexorable death and decay. This late night city bus is the perfect place to dig into Margaret Atwood’s tongue-in-cheek story/user-manual “Happy Endings” and Amy Hempel’s coy, spiralized “What Were the White Things?” Not only does the average bus ride take about as long as it takes to reach the “end” of said texts, the experience of the ride replicates the existential crisis inherent therein, what with its jostling, unpredictable movements its cranky, taciturn driver who could be taking me home or to hell its host of ever-changing apparition-riders that hover somewhere between real and unreal and the circularity of bus routes that, if riders ride long enough, will take them back to their beginnings.
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