Abstract
Tobias Wolff’s short story “Bullet in the Brain,” a deeply ironic version of a near-death experience, can be read as a modernized version of Hemingway’s “The Killers,” and it has also been read as an optimistic—but at the same time sentimental—tale about the unspoiled roots of a cynical critic. However, when focusing on the presence and function of medialities in the text, another plot becomes visible. In this chapter, I attempt to demonstrate that sound and music (surprisingly perhaps, in a short story about a literary critic), actually play the leading roles in the text. The strange musicality inherent in the faulty grammar of a child in the critic’s childhood carries the symbolic weight of the story. In order to try to offer a plausible contextual background to the presence of medialities, I mention Wolff’s engagement in an attempt to revive realist poetics (what has been termed “Dirty Realism”), but end up suggesting that a deeper meaning of the protagonist’s childhood memory has to do with the unexpectedness of unmediated presence.
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Notes
- 1.
For instance, Paul March-Russell notes that “Bullet in the Brain” seems to borrow, probably unconsciously, traits from William Sansom’s 1944 short story “The wall.” See Paul March-Russell, The short story (2009, 243).
- 2.
Whose name has a Scandinavian ring to it, like Hemingway’s Swedish boxer Ole Andreson in “The Killers.”
- 3.
A classic example, in other words, of Harold Bloom’s (1973) ideas of the compulsory structure of admiration and anxiety. For the reader not familiar with Hemingway or “The Killers,” the scene nevertheless feels utterly familiar due to the scores of bank robbery scenes in cinema and television.
- 4.
This is in contrast to my reading of Nabokov’s short story, where the temporal order of the plot is much more complicated and deliberately confuses the reader, and where I chose to read the systematic representation of medialities with little consideration of the representations in the plot.
- 5.
For instance, in the Paris Review interview of Wolff conducted by Livings (2004).
- 6.
For a thorough discussion of the history, form, and critical potentials of Dirty Realism, see Tamas Dobozy, Towards a definition of dirty realism, Ph.D. dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2000.
- 7.
Mason notes Wolff’s failure to include even a single story written in the postmodern manner in a large anthology consisting of 42 stories, where, as he puts it, “[I]t is interesting now, writing in 2004, ten years after the anthology, to see how ‘unrepresentative’ the anthology turned out to be. Neither Lydia Davies, Robert Coover, John Barth or David Foster Wallace – who have all reached, or already had, important positions in contemporary American writing – were found worthy to enter Wolff’s Picador selection” (Mason 2004, 19).
- 8.
For a brief, but very useful, overview of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff’s attempts to distance themselves from postmodern fiction, see March-Russell (2009, 235–245).
References
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Bruhn, J. (2016). “Great script, eh?”: Medialities, Metafiction, and Non-meaning in Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain”. In: The Intermediality of Narrative Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57841-9_5
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