banks :: essays research papers

If much of contemporary literary theory emphasizes the hea whereforeish production of class, race, and gender in American fiction, contemporary fiction that utilizes the resources of record reductivism to explore issues of cultural division - fiction by such(prenominal) writers as Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, Susan Minot, and Russell Banks - increasingly brooks the context for critical debate. The refusal to elaborate plot or to use plot to suggest a narrator who controls interpretation, becomes itself a strategy that allows the reader to observe clearly the boundaries betwixt the storys minimal plot and the counseling the socially produced annalss invoked by the story enforce cultural division. If we conceive of narrative as the establishment, for the reader, of a network of expectations within a frame of contingency, then perhaps no expectation is more fundamental than that of intelligible achievement the progression of story through chronological time, which we commonl y refer to as plot. In a world where the possibilities of plot express unattainable desires on the part of a narratives characters, however, the readers desire for a resolution of plot into consequence is thwarted, and the resultant anxiety the reader feels underscores his or her complicity with the frustrations and incoherencies of the characters, lives. These incoherencies resist sentimental soaking up into the readers aesthetic imagination. The resultant daydreams and wish-fulfilling fantasies display, as Fredric Jameson argues, the otherwise inconceivable link between history and desire (182). Russell Bankss Black Man and uncontaminating Woman in Dark Green Rowboat" presents precisely such an evasive narrative, hotshot whose very evasion establishes a dialogic relationship between the reader and a cast of characters whose lives display the wreckage of the larger cultural narratives that marginalize them. In effect, Bankss minimalism accentuates the missing cultural narra tives that have written the characters into the margins."Black Man and White Woman" does, of course, present things that happen. The story opens with an apparently random variety of good deal who live in a trailerpark commencing their days. The reader is not immediately awake(predicate) that the black man and the white woman are the focus of the story. They in stages emerge from the narrative background, and the story follows them as they haggling onto the lake, converse laconically, and row home. The sense of nothing happening is created in the context of their desire, both their animal(prenominal) desire for each other and their desire to construct plots that might provide a meaningful structure to their lives.