By Vanessa Lent, Arts Contributor
Last Friday afternoon, a dozen excited people sat in room 1198 of the McCain building awaiting the arrival of Pasha Malla. In my four years of attending the English department’s Colloquium Series I’ve never made it more than a few minutes early. I usually showed up, along with everyone else, tiptoeing past bookbags and winter jackets to a seat as a nervous moderator started the class. Not this time. The room was only half-full, but butts were in seats an unprecedented 15 minutes early for what turned out to be one of the most original and challenging talks in years.
Malla is – as a friend commented last week when I told her he’d be giving a talk – “a huge deal right now.” Originally from St. John’s, he’s a regular contributor to McSweeney’s and has been published in The Walrus, Esquire, Nerve and Salon. Along with being long-listed for the Giller Prize and short-listed for the Commonwealth Prize, he’s also a bona fide winner, snagging the Trillium Book Award and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for his short story collection The Withdrawl Method and an Arthur Ellis award (given by the Crime Writers of Canada for the best works of crime or mystery) for his short story “Filmsong”.
Add that all up and you get a writer with a significant quota of peer respect, an impressive amount of cold, hard cash, and a little statuette of a hanging man who dances when you pull a string. Arthur Ellis is, after all, a pseudonym for Canada’s official hangman.
Fitting, then, that instead of the usual lecture style of the Friday afternoon Colloquium Series, Malla would instead choose to open up the format to a dialogue. He asked for an audience volunteer to read part of a conversation between himself and writer Sheri Heti, encouraging members of the audience to interject whenever they liked. The topic loosely circled the tenuous lines we tend to draw between fantasy and realism in literature. What is the value and how do we value non-realist texts? Who decides how the terms fantasy, fable, magic realism, fairy tale, myth, and sci-fi are variously assigned to our literature? How do we gauge the value of a fantasy that seems to have few reference points to our contemporary world, or few that seem decipherable (think David Lynch’s Eraserhead) against fantasy that seems to be thinly-veiled allegory (think any episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation)? Where does the impulse to always try to pull literature to a reference point come from? Why can’t stories, as Malla asked us, just be stories?
By the end of this dialogue, we had covered the under-ratedness of New Jack Swing, the Disneyfication of everything sacred in childhood, Fox’s innovative use of three-act structuring in “The Simpsons”, Y2K (what were those big techno-Armageddon fears about again?), the omnipresence of Coca-Cola as a mythic trope, second- versus third-wave feminism, and how to scare the bejesus out of children (answer: German fairy tales and Edward Scissorhands).
No agreement on or clarity about the questions originally posed was reached, of course, but the value of a dialogue is always located in the process of the thing. Pasha Malla left us, wine glasses in hand, with a satisfying amount of questions to puzzle over in the old brain box.
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