mavis gallant - for this week's lit seminar

Mavis Gallant’s story, “Mademoiselle Dias de Corta," is a second-person narrative in which the overtly conservative narrator directly addresses the central character whose absence only serves to strengthen her hold on the narrator. The tone of the story is set in the stunning opening with the narrator addressing her former lodger: "You moved into my apartment during the summer of the year before abortion became legal in France; that should fix it in past time for you, dear Mlle. Dias de Corta."

Gallant, through carefully etched prose gives us a full character sketch of a middle class French woman replete with her snobbery ("a young lady of mixed descent...two of her grandparents are Swiss...") and racism ("Asian colonization had already begun...") and her desperate loneliness ("my son was seldom available for conversation..."). She does this with a narrative dexterity seldom seen in modern literature and in such a way that the reader is scarcely aware of the complexity of the portrait until the story is finished.

That Gallant is a genius is evident from the first paragraph to the last - the sheer vigor and velocity of her writing, the use of details that are always relevant, and characters so finely etched in a few sentences that not only do we see them and hear them but come to pity, loathe and laugh at and with them in the few pages of their existence. Gallant is a master of the novel within a short story - in other words, the ability to create a complete snapshot of a character's life - in this case, the narrator's - within a few short pages. The pathos of this story creeps up stealthily with hints at the narrator's loneliness, her wasted life until at the story's close we are delivered a vision of desperation, "I prefer to live in the expectation of hearing the elevator stop at my floor and then your ring, and of having you tell me you have come home."