In the Subjunctive Mood: Carol Shields's 'Dressing up for the Carnival'

Abstract

Abstract The concept of the carnivalesque is redefined in Carol Shields's recent short story collection, though its traditional promises of celebration, disruption, and excess are nevertheless obliquely fulfilled. Focusing on the title story and 'Dressing Down', this essay argues that Shields's postmodern versions of carnivalesque are written not in the indicative but in the subjunctive mood, signalling openness and unrealized possibilities. Her stories trace subjective patterns of fantasy and desire, and social collectivity is reconstructed through narrative frameworks. Diurnal surfaces could be observed by a fiction writer with a kind of deliberate squint, a squint that distorts but also sharpens beyond ordinary vision, bringing forward what might be called the subjunctive mode of one's self or others, a world of dreams and possibilities and parallel realities.[1] Any fiction with 'carnival' in its title promises some kind of challenge to traditional structures of social order and possibly of literary convention, 'dressing up' in anticipation of celebration and festivity, where for a brief space of time dailiness is transcended, split open to allow other more chaotic energies to express themselves. These celebratory gestures may be collective and robustly corporeal as Mikhail Bakhtin has shown in his study of Rabelais,[2] or they may be more individualistic and subjective in our own fragmented contemporary world, which Carol Shields calls 'this torn, perplexing century',[3] though in either case resistance to prescribed limits is the promise of the carnivalesque. In her most recent short story collection Shields acknowledges the impulses towards celebration and (modest) abandonment, by writing in what she has described as the 'subjunctive mode', looking at what human beings may do or might have done or would do, which is the territory of 'dreams, possibilities and parallel realities'. In the language of traditional grammar describing the modalities of verbs, 'The indicative presents an event as a fact, whereas the subjunctive expresses it, as for example, a possibility or an aim, or calls it into doubt or denies its reality, or expresses a judgement on it.'[4] By invoking the subjunctive, Shields opens up possibilities for shifts of emphasis, not only cracking open the 'diurnal surfaces' of realism but also writing beyond the 'phantom set of rules about what a story should be and how it must be shaped'.[5] It is the odd association between the carnivalesque and the subjunctive mood that I shall explore in my readings of the two stories framing Shields's most recent collection, 'Dressing Up for the Carnival' (the title story at the beginning) and 'Dressing Down' at the end. Carol Shields is a Canadian writer, an immigrant from the United States, born and brought up in Oak Park Illinois, who met her Canadian husband when on a student exchange to Exeter in the late 1950s and who has lived in Canada ever since (in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Winnipeg) interspersed with longish visits to Britain and Europe. Since the first British publication in 1990 of her novel Mary Swann,[6] Shields has gained a wide readership this side of the Atlantic. The Stone Diaries was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993, Larry's Party won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1998, and all her fiction (seven novels and three short story collections) are currently available in Britain. Her fictions cross national borders, moving easily between North American and European locations, just as her novels cross generic borders (between fiction, history, biography, and popular romance) and between genders (Happenstance, The Stone Diaries, and Larry's Party). However, it is with her experiments in the short story genre that I am concerned here. Shields has written about how in the early 1980s she broke away from the traditional short story structure, which she describes with a sly hint at its gender affiliations as 'that holy line of rising action that is supposed to lead somewhere important, somewhere inevitable, modelled perhaps on the orgasmic pattern of tumescence followed by detumescence, an endless predictable circle of desire, fulfilment, and quiescence'. …