Ms. Hempel Chronicles

To me, Ms. Hempel Chronicles was the most cohesive short story cycle - perhaps because of its implied structure of self-contained "chronicles" that imposed a structure immediately in my mind. I wasn't expecting continuity between stories or struggling to figure out how one story connected to another. Perhaps as someone who is comfortable with the traditional Western structure of a coherent plot, something like Ms. Hempel Chronicles is a lot more comfortable to my closed Western mind than In Our Time, which interspersed the italicized interludes in between the stories, and it wasn't entirely clear how everything connected right away. Maybe my comfortability with this cycle is emblematic of my discomfort with openness and ambiguity.

Each story illuminated a different aspect of Ms. Hempel, and I really like that we stayed with one character in this work and used her as a conduit to explore the other characters that populated her universe, like the children (I really liked Edward, who was a lovely writer despite not doing well in school), and the faculty members. A lovely, understated humor (such as when Ms. Hempel describes the Next song in "Talent," and in "Satellite," when she bemoans the fact that she'll "never be punk rock") permeates through the collection, as well as Bynum's descriptions, which are always quirky and at some times, eerie (in particular, I think of the "Sister" tee-shirt that Beatrice wears to tatters and Calvin with the flashlight, repeating, "It's late!") I think the distanced third person also works well with a collection like this, as Shun-Lien Bynum can easily shift perspective according to her needs in each story. The stories in which Ms. Hempel assumes the role of a teacher, she can be referred to as "Ms. Hempel," and in the private sphere, she can be referred to as "Beatrice." It is also a good perspective to explore the students and the family members that populate Ms. Hempel's world.

As I read this collection, I couldn't help but notice how semi-autobiographical it was (not only in the fact that she was a seventh-grade teacher, but also when she explores questions of ethnicity in "Satellite"). Ms. Hempel feels a certain distance from her ethnicity (the conversation she has with Mr. Meacham about abbreviating her name comes to mind; as well as her unpursued desire to learn Mandarin), yet it inserts itself most explicitly in the stories that concern her family life at the close of the work. I found it curious when it did show up because it seemed, thus far, Shun-Lien Bynum was attempting for (white) universality. I've never thought of writing a semi-autobiographical cycle simply because I presumed my life experience, not being a white one, would not appeal to a predominantly white audience. When I wrote theory about my characters (not only in Poetics but on my own, in a less sustained and developed form), I always thought of it as "splitting" parts of my psyche and creating a character around it - an idea like misanthropy or insecurity. Never have I thought about splitting the part of my psyche that is grappling with the failures of a colorblind ideology, or has a "cultural heritage" to speak of. But even speaking of a distanced cultural heritage would be preferably to pretending that cultural heritage doesn't exist.

Another thing I noticed in the last story, "Bump" was its placement within historical time (particularly, with Sophie mentioning the anthrax attacks and security). I wonder about such references in terms with my own writing. I'm reminded of a series I wrote in fifth grade, entitled Reality. In this series, which I wrote around 2000-2 I made a lot of musical cultural references, but if one looked at my drafts now, these references would be incredibly dated! In the story I'm writing (glacially) for the Short Novel course, I make Internet references to cat macros and Facebook (with a planned reference to YouTube forthcoming). In five years, will people still be using these sites? Will cat macros have the hold upon our consciousness that it does now?

I think in "Bump" this reference works because it's referring to a climate/sea change that happened to the U.S. psyche (as much as I hate this expression...) post-9/11. Placing your story in historical time depends a lot on how quickly you can get it published, what type of reference it is (general? specific?), etc. I think writing about the Internet is especially tricky and almost requires you to place your story in a very specific time period just because of how rapidly things change. If I wrote my Short Novel story five years ago, the characters would probably be using Myspace. So I think if I do use those reference, coupled with ethnicity, it's speaking to a specific time period and a specific way people view themselves and place themselves in time.