Part III.
Remember how I talked about anxiety? And how anxiety can lead people to read for different purposes, to seek out different kinds of reassurance (aka comfort)? Well, I think the anxiety I experienced from reading Gardner was that there was some idea or tendency for people to engage with literature in a limited way, with a certain set of rules to this engagement, and a certain set of expectations that had to be met in order for that literature to be deemed worthy or useful or good. And I believe that the assertion or belief that fiction’s content is exhausted, that its purpose is to simply remind us of what is already known, devalues what it is that fiction actually does (not just what fiction says). Now, I do concede that there has to be some recognizable truth in a work of fiction – if we don’t buy it we will emotionally and intellectually disengage from it and the piece will have no meaning for us – it won’t matter. But if we open a book or approach a story with the idea that we are reading it to confirm, or to better clarify and articulate that which already resonates within us, aren’t we just glorifying what we have already become? How is that progress? How does that “crack the door to the morally necessary future”? Doesn’t that assume a) that we are already know everything and that b) we are too lazy or gentle with ourselves to keep these things in mind or articulate them for ourselves?
I don’t know about you, but I sure as fuck don’t know everything. And by ‘everything’ I’m not speaking of everything in the universe, but just on the topic of human emotion. I can be pretty damn stubborn about what I think I do know, but I assure you, I stick my neck out with the reassurance that I am presupposed as a complete ass and that I will be forgiven my trespasses, excused with the same flippancy conceded toward drunk uncles and developmentally challenged children. Besides, who’s listening? Does anyone else have a problem here with the idea that we know everything? That life is not mysterious? Isn’t that kind of permission to die? As in: oh yes, no need to worry, we’ve figured it all out, you can rest now? We may know some things, that murder is bad, for instance. But murder is sometimes necessary? Or forgivable?
How about this: Suppose I’m willing to believe we know everything (which we don’t), or that we will one day reach a point at which we know everything there is to know about human beings and their emotions: we still don’t know dick about what to do with this information. I don’t think that many of us know the first thing about how to behave or what to actually do when life confronts us. And when it does, when life shoves its dirty little mouth at us and we’re breathing its full stink, we’re likely going to act how we’re going to act, despite everything we might want, feel, intend, know what to be true or untrue. So how is the premise that literature instructs us how to live by reiterating old truths useful in any sense? Do we read to close a circle we know already exists but that we like to see clarified, getting darker, more solidly permanent? To get a better sense of where that perimeter lies, to make sure we stay inside it?
Or maybe, it might just be morally necessary to engage with literature because the potentialities of language will never be exhausted, because each word choice and syntax reveals a way of thinking that is not already ours, because we need to see things differently. Because language can transform the nature of how we see and how we know. Because narrative is not just content but action taken toward content. How to proceed, what to do . . .
I’m anxious that one of the dangers that can exist in fiction that seeks to reaffirm or reiterate already known truths, is that this kind of fiction can (not necessarily does but it can), with repetition, teach a certain learned, limiting relationship of the reader toward the world. That if we approach narrative with a rigid set of expectations and rules for how the narrative can produce meaning (such as the ones set forth by Gardner), a reader may be in danger of accruing a very limited set of lenses with which to perceive and know the world. That the limitations of the ways we engage with narrative may be a limitation on how we engage with the world and with each other.
Now, I understand that I am prone to somewhat reactionary, over-the-top fits of contempt and rage concerning things most people, or at least a fair number of people, would consider rather innocuous or of very little concern. I am unreasonable, malicious. Cold, unforgiving, dismissive. I can be a bit of a prick and I’m not only judgmental but enjoy being judgmental. I’m a snob when it comes to people reading ‘for entertainment’ or ‘leisure.’ Fuck you. Fuck you and your Jennifer Weiner on the best fucking seller list. Go check the NYTimes. See if I’m lying. Fuck your mass market murder mysteries, fuck your Harry Potter. Yes, Harry Potter. Go fuck yourself. See I got this problem (yeah, not just the one, ha ha. assfuck) with equating pleasure with effortlessness. With thinking that a good read is something that doesn’t force a person to think too hard. Something that tickles the pudgy brain flaps but has everything set out for the expected gratifications: description enough to make the setting convincing, empathetic characters, a narrative that assumes your immediate complicity. And I’m not just referring to the easy listening crap of the trash romance and mass market set – I’m talking about any form of literature that doesn’t cost you anything. That doesn’t leave you bleeding, spent on the floor, gasping for breath, torn up and trembling. Now, a reasonable person would say there is room enough in the world, on the shelves, for all kinds of different strokes for different folks, but as I said, I am not a reasonable person. Rather than pick up ‘The Kite Runner,’ I would prefer if you could just slap me, then push me onto the ground and shit all over my face. Make sure to tell me about your feelings while you’re doing it, too.
Let’s take a breath. Are we okay? Was that a little much? The shitting on my face? Just breathe a minute. We’ll get through this. You and me: we’re in it together.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Monday, August 3, 2009
To See What I Mean
Part II.
I knew there was something I didn’t trust reading Gardner, some vague suspicion that the man was grand-standing; making loose, provocative proclamations that weren’t accounting for everything; that he was drunk. Let me throw you a bone here (probably too many bones, more bones than you’d care to chew on, all from Gardner’s ‘The Art of Fiction’):
“Thus the value of great fiction, we begin to suspect, is not just that it entertains or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations.” p. 31
“None of this high minded rhetoric is meant to deny the fact that fiction is a kind of play . . . It is sometimes remarked, not by enemies of fiction but by people who love it, that whereas scientists and politicians work for progress, the writer of fiction restates what has always been known, finding new expression for familiar truths, adapting to the age truths that may seem outmoded. It is true that, in treating human emotion, with which we’re all familiar, the writer discovers nothing, merely clarifies for the moment, and that in treating what Faulkner called ‘the eternal verities,’ the writer treats nothing unheard of, since people have been naming and struggling to organize their lives around eternal verities for thousands of years . . . But the fact remains that art produces the most important progress civilization knows. Restating old truths and adapting them to the age, applying them in ways they were never before applied, stirring up emotion by the inherent power of narrative, visual image, or music, artists crack the door to the morally necessary future.” p. 80
That’s not enough for me. Literature does more than that.
I only recently discovered my true qualm with Gardner, and it’s something that should’ve been evident from the first, but that somehow didn’t dawn until weeks after I’d given up being angry about it. The thing with Gardner is that his primary concern in terms of what he identifies as good and moral writing versus ‘less useful’ writing has to do with a story’s content. His arguments are focused on plot and character. He does talk about the differences between first person and third, omniscient vs. restricted narrator, etc, but his focus on what he argues as the morality in a work of fiction is almost entirely content driven. I’ll throw you some examples:
“ . . . the writer who denies that human beings have free will (the writer who really denies it, not jokingly or ironically pretends to deny it) is one who can write nothing of interest . . .For the writer who views his characters as helpless biological organisms, mere units in a mindless social structure, or cogs in a mechanistic universe, whatever values those characters may hold must necessarily be illusions, since none of the characters can do anything about them, and the usual interplay of value against value that makes for an interesting exploration of theme must here be a cynical and academic exercise.” p. 43
“Though we do not read fiction primarily in order to find rules on how to live or, indeed, to find anything that is directly useful, we do sympathetically engage ourselves in the struggle that produces the fictional events. Reading a piece of fiction that ends up nowhere – no win, no loss, life as a treadmill – is like discovering, after we have run our hearts out against the timekeeper’s clock, that the timekeeper forgot to switch the clock on. The only emotions such fiction can ordinarily produce are weariness and despair, and those emotions, though valid and perhaps even justified (finally) by the nature of the universe, are less useful to the conduct of our lives than are the emotions we exercise in other kinds of fiction. Not even Aristotle would argue that fiction ought [ital] to be cathartic; he says only that such fiction is most satisfying. But certainly more is involved than simple pleasure or displeasure. At least in comparison with the resolved ending (Aristotle would have said if the question had come up), the ending in logical exhaustion is morally repugnant.” p. 54-55
Now, for those of you familiar with my fiction (the select, blessed few), ya’ll know I don’t give a shit about plot. You think I know ‘what happens’? I don’t have any fucking idea – that’s someone else’s business, not mine. I mean, I’ve been working on this – it’s a problem: I piss people off. Or to give you an example of how I go about selecting a book to read, if I happen to pick one up at random at a bookstore: I don’t read the back cover. I’m not interested in the synopsis: it’s not going to tell me whether or not I’ll enjoy reading it. The context, character and storyline don’t necessarily tell me anything. What I do is flip to a random page. Sometimes the first but never more than a third from the back. And I read the prose. The language is what’s going to get me to read it. What a book is about can be anything, I’m interested in how it’s told. Now, of course plot is important, and every book that’s worth its salt has well-constructed, beautiful sentences, but I’m without question much more concerned about sentences than I am with plot. In terms of the ol tree vs. forest routine, I’m looking down at a piece of bark I chipped off in my hand, already forgetting it came from the tree beside me.
So no fucking wonder my panties get all in a bunch reading Gardner. He’s all “meow meow content content” and I’m all “woof. Shut the fuck up already.” I totally agree with the whole free will package; characters need to have agency or no one’s going to give a shit, but is anyone nowadays really worried that free will doesn’t exist? Does anyone honestly question that anymore? Maybe I’m out of the loop but come on, grow the fuck up already.
I was not upset because Gardner was assigning values to different kinds of plots (to use his terminology, energaic vs. logical exhaustion) but that he would identify the value of fiction as located in its content; what the story says (or values) by means of its plot. And for me, much of what I adore about literature and one of the primary reasons I involve myself in it is that narrative has the ability to teach me how to see. Narrative can rewire and expand upon the way I perceive and engage with the world. This has very little to do with ‘what happens’ in a story’s plot but everything to do with how the story is told.
Remember that Gary Lutz story I talked about? Probably the first post on this bitch, little story called ‘Mine’? Narrator wanting to see the father ‘eye to eye’? Is it coming back to you? Nothing really ‘happens’ in the traditional, progressive sense. The plot or ‘fictional dream’ (that’s Gardner) progresses from one scene in the life to the next, descriptive explanations of a particular summer, adding layers rather than necessarily progressing forward. So while I doubt it would qualify as ‘useful’ in terms of Gardner’s standards, it does consist of a narrator who displays quite cunning and skillfully displayed agency. Agency in how the narrator sees, perceives and then proceeds to tell.
Where I am going with this? Is this your question? We’re going to Brian Evenson. We’re going to Brian Evenson and demonstrating how he fucks a reader’s world up, how meaning (remember Samantha? There’s a reason I talked about that) can be derived not just from reaffirming a reader’s belief, and not solely by means of the content, but by changing the nature of the relationship we have toward narrative. By clipping the traditional strings of narrative that hold the reader so snuggling in place.
But ya’ll bitches ain’t ready yet.
* * *
I knew there was something I didn’t trust reading Gardner, some vague suspicion that the man was grand-standing; making loose, provocative proclamations that weren’t accounting for everything; that he was drunk. Let me throw you a bone here (probably too many bones, more bones than you’d care to chew on, all from Gardner’s ‘The Art of Fiction’):
“Thus the value of great fiction, we begin to suspect, is not just that it entertains or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations.” p. 31
“None of this high minded rhetoric is meant to deny the fact that fiction is a kind of play . . . It is sometimes remarked, not by enemies of fiction but by people who love it, that whereas scientists and politicians work for progress, the writer of fiction restates what has always been known, finding new expression for familiar truths, adapting to the age truths that may seem outmoded. It is true that, in treating human emotion, with which we’re all familiar, the writer discovers nothing, merely clarifies for the moment, and that in treating what Faulkner called ‘the eternal verities,’ the writer treats nothing unheard of, since people have been naming and struggling to organize their lives around eternal verities for thousands of years . . . But the fact remains that art produces the most important progress civilization knows. Restating old truths and adapting them to the age, applying them in ways they were never before applied, stirring up emotion by the inherent power of narrative, visual image, or music, artists crack the door to the morally necessary future.” p. 80
That’s not enough for me. Literature does more than that.
I only recently discovered my true qualm with Gardner, and it’s something that should’ve been evident from the first, but that somehow didn’t dawn until weeks after I’d given up being angry about it. The thing with Gardner is that his primary concern in terms of what he identifies as good and moral writing versus ‘less useful’ writing has to do with a story’s content. His arguments are focused on plot and character. He does talk about the differences between first person and third, omniscient vs. restricted narrator, etc, but his focus on what he argues as the morality in a work of fiction is almost entirely content driven. I’ll throw you some examples:
“ . . . the writer who denies that human beings have free will (the writer who really denies it, not jokingly or ironically pretends to deny it) is one who can write nothing of interest . . .For the writer who views his characters as helpless biological organisms, mere units in a mindless social structure, or cogs in a mechanistic universe, whatever values those characters may hold must necessarily be illusions, since none of the characters can do anything about them, and the usual interplay of value against value that makes for an interesting exploration of theme must here be a cynical and academic exercise.” p. 43
“Though we do not read fiction primarily in order to find rules on how to live or, indeed, to find anything that is directly useful, we do sympathetically engage ourselves in the struggle that produces the fictional events. Reading a piece of fiction that ends up nowhere – no win, no loss, life as a treadmill – is like discovering, after we have run our hearts out against the timekeeper’s clock, that the timekeeper forgot to switch the clock on. The only emotions such fiction can ordinarily produce are weariness and despair, and those emotions, though valid and perhaps even justified (finally) by the nature of the universe, are less useful to the conduct of our lives than are the emotions we exercise in other kinds of fiction. Not even Aristotle would argue that fiction ought [ital] to be cathartic; he says only that such fiction is most satisfying. But certainly more is involved than simple pleasure or displeasure. At least in comparison with the resolved ending (Aristotle would have said if the question had come up), the ending in logical exhaustion is morally repugnant.” p. 54-55
Now, for those of you familiar with my fiction (the select, blessed few), ya’ll know I don’t give a shit about plot. You think I know ‘what happens’? I don’t have any fucking idea – that’s someone else’s business, not mine. I mean, I’ve been working on this – it’s a problem: I piss people off. Or to give you an example of how I go about selecting a book to read, if I happen to pick one up at random at a bookstore: I don’t read the back cover. I’m not interested in the synopsis: it’s not going to tell me whether or not I’ll enjoy reading it. The context, character and storyline don’t necessarily tell me anything. What I do is flip to a random page. Sometimes the first but never more than a third from the back. And I read the prose. The language is what’s going to get me to read it. What a book is about can be anything, I’m interested in how it’s told. Now, of course plot is important, and every book that’s worth its salt has well-constructed, beautiful sentences, but I’m without question much more concerned about sentences than I am with plot. In terms of the ol tree vs. forest routine, I’m looking down at a piece of bark I chipped off in my hand, already forgetting it came from the tree beside me.
So no fucking wonder my panties get all in a bunch reading Gardner. He’s all “meow meow content content” and I’m all “woof. Shut the fuck up already.” I totally agree with the whole free will package; characters need to have agency or no one’s going to give a shit, but is anyone nowadays really worried that free will doesn’t exist? Does anyone honestly question that anymore? Maybe I’m out of the loop but come on, grow the fuck up already.
I was not upset because Gardner was assigning values to different kinds of plots (to use his terminology, energaic vs. logical exhaustion) but that he would identify the value of fiction as located in its content; what the story says (or values) by means of its plot. And for me, much of what I adore about literature and one of the primary reasons I involve myself in it is that narrative has the ability to teach me how to see. Narrative can rewire and expand upon the way I perceive and engage with the world. This has very little to do with ‘what happens’ in a story’s plot but everything to do with how the story is told.
Remember that Gary Lutz story I talked about? Probably the first post on this bitch, little story called ‘Mine’? Narrator wanting to see the father ‘eye to eye’? Is it coming back to you? Nothing really ‘happens’ in the traditional, progressive sense. The plot or ‘fictional dream’ (that’s Gardner) progresses from one scene in the life to the next, descriptive explanations of a particular summer, adding layers rather than necessarily progressing forward. So while I doubt it would qualify as ‘useful’ in terms of Gardner’s standards, it does consist of a narrator who displays quite cunning and skillfully displayed agency. Agency in how the narrator sees, perceives and then proceeds to tell.
Where I am going with this? Is this your question? We’re going to Brian Evenson. We’re going to Brian Evenson and demonstrating how he fucks a reader’s world up, how meaning (remember Samantha? There’s a reason I talked about that) can be derived not just from reaffirming a reader’s belief, and not solely by means of the content, but by changing the nature of the relationship we have toward narrative. By clipping the traditional strings of narrative that hold the reader so snuggling in place.
But ya’ll bitches ain’t ready yet.
* * *
Friday, July 31, 2009
To See What I Mean: A Long Rant Toward Us
The next few posts are all part of an ongoing series. Or rather, an extended piece I assume no one wants to read in one sitting, as it's already rather long. Trust me, we'll go places.
Part I.
The first story I ever wrote (or remember writing) was prompted by the death of a man at my church. He was a professional dancer, could only have been in his thirties. He died of AIDS when AIDS was just beginning to creep into public thought as an epidemic. It was 1988. I remember a performance he gave with two women in the parish hall. Large, decadent cloth was draped across banisters, their outfits a matching monochromatic, creamy shade. Their movements took up the length of the hall; the large space devoured quickly by their three bodies, graceful leaps defying the thump of the dull floor when their feet landed. I remember it as silent except for their feet, but there could have easily been music. It was modern dance but still very close to ballet. Fluid and controlled, their bodies were free from air, kinetic molecules released from gravity. I was eight years old.
The story I wrote in red pencil and I never showed it to anyone. I didn’t tell anyone about it either. I have a vague memory of one day finding it in my mother’s dresser years later some afternoon when my friend and I were talking bras, growing up, but this memory could be entirely wrong. I found a lot of reasons back then to despise my mother, to convince myself she invaded my privacy like a snake, that she couldn’t be trusted.
The story had been about a little girl named Samantha dying of AIDS. Samantha was my favorite girls’ name, my sibling envy of that toughness only boys could have, already pissed that girl delicacy and sweetness wasn’t as cool. Samantha was diagnosed and in the hospital. She was going to die. All her friends came to see her. Then everyone at school, even kids who weren’t her friends came to see her. Everyone felt really bad when she died. She was the most beautiful girl, even when she was sick, and she was braver than even the grown up men. After she died, everyone talked about how brave she was. How wrong it was that she died and how she took hold of her death with such dignity.
I’m pretty sure I wasn’t a very morose child. I wasn’t anxious about death or think about it often. I think my preoccupation at the time, and what prompted the story, was a search for meaning. That what threatened me, when I was eight and a man I knew died because of a disease no one yet had a handle on, was the possibility of dying without the life or the death having meant something. Of course I also desperately craved acknowledgment, the final triumph of the brave girl hero, and I’m sure the writing and its red scratchy penmanship was dripping with self-pity. Feel bad for me, look at what I’ve been through. But at the time it felt important. It felt important for me to put it on a page, to believe that the worst possible moments, the scariest things, could still be beautiful.
There’s been a lot of talk, for centuries even, about why people read literature, what its purpose is, its reason. A lot of the experts have suggested comfort; that human beings turn to literature for models to live by, to confirm and convince themselves of the great human truths. A whole life put down in a book, given order, described with precision and care. It’s reassuring, it lets us believe that sense can be made, that however tragic or dull there is a logic or energy that propels life forward. I can swallow that. I’ll tip my hat to the end of the bar where that announcement sits, but I’m not going to buy it a drink or go over to talk to it.
I want to suggest two particular anxieties that seem to me to run against each other, each anxiety responsible for an underlying desire drawing people towards story. I’m not suggesting these are the only anxieties or only reasons people read – those possibilities are endless and personal and can do and behave however they want. And I know it’s dangerous and kind of low down and shameful to group ideas or tendencies but I’m going for it anyway. Just run with me on this and rest assured I don’t believe I’m accounting for everyone, plus, I think the same reader can go back and forth on these, reading one book and getting one kind of satisfaction out of it, another story for a different kind of pleasure.
I think a lot of people read in order to reaffirm their own beliefs, to feel commended by their own view of the world, to believe the world as ultimately knowable and unthreatening. Or rather, there are stories that do this. However unstable the world of the story might initially be, the story’s job is reign the world back to something controlled, contained and finite. Familiar characters, familiar plot, vivid description and titillating action with a recognizable narrator, the reader knowing his or her place immediately as the fly on the wall, or the one confessed to, inside the character’s head or spoken to by some wise and forgivably fallible sage years after the event has finished. This appeals to a reader anxious to know that things are going to be okay, that there is beauty and truth in the world and we can see it and believe that it exists.
Another anxiety that I think is at work drawing people toward story is the fear that the possibilities of the world, of narrative, are subject to exhaustion, that one day there will be nothing left to seek or say. That there are only so many truths and discoveries and that these truths are simply repackaged once they’ve been forgotten in order to fit into a new style of thinking. That nothing under the sun is news, that someday we can (or will, maybe have) stop searching. Narratives that ease this anxiety will fill a reader with doubt, question the positions and authority of narrator and reader, thwart a reader’s expectations as to what they are supposed to find. Readers suffering from this anxiety read in order to see things in a new way, to discover something about the world or themselves that they didn’t already suspect.
One kind of story can reassure us that we are able to know the world, another kind of story can reassure us that there is still more left to discover. I’m going to ask that you keep this in mind.
* * *
Part I.
The first story I ever wrote (or remember writing) was prompted by the death of a man at my church. He was a professional dancer, could only have been in his thirties. He died of AIDS when AIDS was just beginning to creep into public thought as an epidemic. It was 1988. I remember a performance he gave with two women in the parish hall. Large, decadent cloth was draped across banisters, their outfits a matching monochromatic, creamy shade. Their movements took up the length of the hall; the large space devoured quickly by their three bodies, graceful leaps defying the thump of the dull floor when their feet landed. I remember it as silent except for their feet, but there could have easily been music. It was modern dance but still very close to ballet. Fluid and controlled, their bodies were free from air, kinetic molecules released from gravity. I was eight years old.
The story I wrote in red pencil and I never showed it to anyone. I didn’t tell anyone about it either. I have a vague memory of one day finding it in my mother’s dresser years later some afternoon when my friend and I were talking bras, growing up, but this memory could be entirely wrong. I found a lot of reasons back then to despise my mother, to convince myself she invaded my privacy like a snake, that she couldn’t be trusted.
The story had been about a little girl named Samantha dying of AIDS. Samantha was my favorite girls’ name, my sibling envy of that toughness only boys could have, already pissed that girl delicacy and sweetness wasn’t as cool. Samantha was diagnosed and in the hospital. She was going to die. All her friends came to see her. Then everyone at school, even kids who weren’t her friends came to see her. Everyone felt really bad when she died. She was the most beautiful girl, even when she was sick, and she was braver than even the grown up men. After she died, everyone talked about how brave she was. How wrong it was that she died and how she took hold of her death with such dignity.
I’m pretty sure I wasn’t a very morose child. I wasn’t anxious about death or think about it often. I think my preoccupation at the time, and what prompted the story, was a search for meaning. That what threatened me, when I was eight and a man I knew died because of a disease no one yet had a handle on, was the possibility of dying without the life or the death having meant something. Of course I also desperately craved acknowledgment, the final triumph of the brave girl hero, and I’m sure the writing and its red scratchy penmanship was dripping with self-pity. Feel bad for me, look at what I’ve been through. But at the time it felt important. It felt important for me to put it on a page, to believe that the worst possible moments, the scariest things, could still be beautiful.
There’s been a lot of talk, for centuries even, about why people read literature, what its purpose is, its reason. A lot of the experts have suggested comfort; that human beings turn to literature for models to live by, to confirm and convince themselves of the great human truths. A whole life put down in a book, given order, described with precision and care. It’s reassuring, it lets us believe that sense can be made, that however tragic or dull there is a logic or energy that propels life forward. I can swallow that. I’ll tip my hat to the end of the bar where that announcement sits, but I’m not going to buy it a drink or go over to talk to it.
I want to suggest two particular anxieties that seem to me to run against each other, each anxiety responsible for an underlying desire drawing people towards story. I’m not suggesting these are the only anxieties or only reasons people read – those possibilities are endless and personal and can do and behave however they want. And I know it’s dangerous and kind of low down and shameful to group ideas or tendencies but I’m going for it anyway. Just run with me on this and rest assured I don’t believe I’m accounting for everyone, plus, I think the same reader can go back and forth on these, reading one book and getting one kind of satisfaction out of it, another story for a different kind of pleasure.
I think a lot of people read in order to reaffirm their own beliefs, to feel commended by their own view of the world, to believe the world as ultimately knowable and unthreatening. Or rather, there are stories that do this. However unstable the world of the story might initially be, the story’s job is reign the world back to something controlled, contained and finite. Familiar characters, familiar plot, vivid description and titillating action with a recognizable narrator, the reader knowing his or her place immediately as the fly on the wall, or the one confessed to, inside the character’s head or spoken to by some wise and forgivably fallible sage years after the event has finished. This appeals to a reader anxious to know that things are going to be okay, that there is beauty and truth in the world and we can see it and believe that it exists.
Another anxiety that I think is at work drawing people toward story is the fear that the possibilities of the world, of narrative, are subject to exhaustion, that one day there will be nothing left to seek or say. That there are only so many truths and discoveries and that these truths are simply repackaged once they’ve been forgotten in order to fit into a new style of thinking. That nothing under the sun is news, that someday we can (or will, maybe have) stop searching. Narratives that ease this anxiety will fill a reader with doubt, question the positions and authority of narrator and reader, thwart a reader’s expectations as to what they are supposed to find. Readers suffering from this anxiety read in order to see things in a new way, to discover something about the world or themselves that they didn’t already suspect.
One kind of story can reassure us that we are able to know the world, another kind of story can reassure us that there is still more left to discover. I’m going to ask that you keep this in mind.
* * *
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Discomfort Part II: Diane Williams ‘The Kind You Know Forever’
Initially I had intended this post to be concerned with all of this sister-fucking business and the way both Evenson and Williams use naming (‘cat killers’ and ‘sister-fucker,’ respectively) as controlling devices – the kind of dismissive, encapsulating, excruciatingly inescapable characterization that informs the reader as much about the narrator as those named, and then how the narrator’s posture towards subject informs the reader’s understanding of the narrator and thereby their experience of story, but I just wasn’t feeling it. There’s a lot to be said about Diane Williams’ work and how uncomfortable it makes people who read it. Her work is excruciatingly awkward and embarrassing; it’s worse than shitting yourself in front of the UN while being told intimate details of your grandmother’s vagina by your father, loudly. I promise.
But what really gets me about the stories of Diane’s that I really love has just as much to do with her language and rhythm as it does with her vulgarity. I’m not saying you can take the vulgarity away – leave my vulgarity the fuck alone – it’s better than you and any nice thing that might happen to fall out of your dumb mouth. Oh Jesus, I’m sorry. I just get so defensive and irrationally protective around that which I love. Anywho, there are also some incredibly pleasant and riveting power dynamics at play in her stories, and a lot of them make me think of the kind of perceptual power I’ve spoken about earlier with Gary Lutz’ work and the way in which power/control/agency is captured, taken by the force of a character’s (or narrator’s) ability to see, perceive, transform, and shape into language. I definitely get a little flutter reading ‘The Kind You Know Forever,’ kind of like the narrator’s flirting with me. Have we seen Flight of the Concords? Do we know Mel? Reading ‘The Kind You Know Forever’ makes me feel like Mel making a tiger claw and pretending to bite Germaine but then I’m embarrassed and kind of shy about it at the same time. Don’t judge me. Read the fucking story (it’s in Excitability). Desire bound up in power and perception and confession and acuity and willingness amongst debilitation, chaos, better judgment.
The tension and drive of Diane Williams’ ‘The Kind You Know Forever’ rests in her syntax; in the ambiguity of her clauses, the dangling confusion from phrase to phrase. While the movement of Brian Evenson’s ‘Cat Killers’ goes forward in small logical steps, direct statements minutely building toward an unexpected, fearful place, Diane’s sentences meander and mislead, opening one door that leads into a maze of several other doors, forcing the reader to slow down, to stop and look back, trying to figure out where they were, how they got to be where they are. While our feet seem to slide from underneath us, the narrator herself remains entirely astute, alert, cunning. We are struck still by the dismissive mastery she has over this universe, the easy competence she displays in her description:
“I had just met them – the brother and the sister who had fucked each other to see what it would be like. And then they said – either he said or she said – that it was like fucking a brother or a sister, so they never did it again.”
The real boner (okay, can we tell that I’m really trying to cram in the obscenity before I talk about something other than obscenity? PENIS. PENIS PENIS PENIS. cocksuckerchildporntittyfuckassrammer. Labial shrug, colonoscopy, poinsettia) for me, is the precision of Diane’s phrasing and how completely (wholly, experientially, viscerally) it communicates a sort of human vulnerability. In every phrase there is a tension and control or authority for character, narrator and reader isn’t simple. Event, experience, perception and expression interact; they live and breathe, slippery and incomplete, unobtainable, within, around and on top of language. Let’s hope that sentence didn’t mean anything. I’m not shooting to kill here; I just want to point at some stuff and make you look at it for a while.
Take the following passage (the second to last sentence in particular conveys a sense of nervousness in the clunkiness of its phrases and dangling preposition):
“She handed out little wrapped gifts in such a hurry at the door, when we were all saying goodbye – it was such a hurry – I didn’t get to see where she was getting all of her gifts from. All of a sudden there was just a gift in my hand, as I was going out the door. At the end of the party, I had never gotten a gift before, not since I was a little girl, and then we thought we deserved those gifts. So now, something was turned around.”
Different people will scan this differently, but the way I read the first sentence incorporates this rhythm:
she HANded OUT diDUm deDum
lit tle WRApped Gifts didiDUMDUM
In SUCh a HURry At the Door deDUMdiDUMdi dediDUM
When We were All dedumdedum
SAyIng GoodBye DUMdiDUMDUM
It was SUch a Hurry dedeDUMdiDUMdi
I didn’t GET to SEe de didiDUMdiDum
Where she was GETting All of her GIfts from DUMdedeDUMdi dedidiDUMdi
I apologize for not being savvier with my keyboard and figuring out some sort of strike and slash business, but this format might be more accessible to those less readily familiar with poetic scansion. If we focus on the larger stresses and how often or rapidly they appear among the smaller stresses, we can see the simpler, straight rhythm slowly getting pushed down, becoming sloggy, groggier, weighted. There’s more pushing and piling up of smaller stresses in order to reach the larger stresses. And it’s not just a matter of adding more grace notes but adding triplets that take up a whole beat. Am I making sense? Are we musically inclined? The rhythm in the next few measures (phrases) is largely made up of threes (‘All of a sudden/There was Just a Gift in my Hand/as I was going/out the door’) and then the last sentence takes a turn by framing the triplet on either side with twos: one Two/One two three One two One or deDUM DUMdidiDUMdeDUM. Some of you might recognize that last rhythm DUMdidiDUMdeDUM as that triumphant bugle call (or trumpet, it might be a trumpet) when the hero shows up in the cartoon or the western. There is a sense of arrival in the rhythm, a kind of closure or finality. As readers, we have reached a destination both rhythmically and as a turning point in the story; that an event has happened is definite, secure. Neither the reader nor the narrator is able to articulate precisely how that event occurred but both are able to experience the sensation, the emotional and cognitive texture of it.
But what really gets me about the stories of Diane’s that I really love has just as much to do with her language and rhythm as it does with her vulgarity. I’m not saying you can take the vulgarity away – leave my vulgarity the fuck alone – it’s better than you and any nice thing that might happen to fall out of your dumb mouth. Oh Jesus, I’m sorry. I just get so defensive and irrationally protective around that which I love. Anywho, there are also some incredibly pleasant and riveting power dynamics at play in her stories, and a lot of them make me think of the kind of perceptual power I’ve spoken about earlier with Gary Lutz’ work and the way in which power/control/agency is captured, taken by the force of a character’s (or narrator’s) ability to see, perceive, transform, and shape into language. I definitely get a little flutter reading ‘The Kind You Know Forever,’ kind of like the narrator’s flirting with me. Have we seen Flight of the Concords? Do we know Mel? Reading ‘The Kind You Know Forever’ makes me feel like Mel making a tiger claw and pretending to bite Germaine but then I’m embarrassed and kind of shy about it at the same time. Don’t judge me. Read the fucking story (it’s in Excitability). Desire bound up in power and perception and confession and acuity and willingness amongst debilitation, chaos, better judgment.
The tension and drive of Diane Williams’ ‘The Kind You Know Forever’ rests in her syntax; in the ambiguity of her clauses, the dangling confusion from phrase to phrase. While the movement of Brian Evenson’s ‘Cat Killers’ goes forward in small logical steps, direct statements minutely building toward an unexpected, fearful place, Diane’s sentences meander and mislead, opening one door that leads into a maze of several other doors, forcing the reader to slow down, to stop and look back, trying to figure out where they were, how they got to be where they are. While our feet seem to slide from underneath us, the narrator herself remains entirely astute, alert, cunning. We are struck still by the dismissive mastery she has over this universe, the easy competence she displays in her description:
“I had just met them – the brother and the sister who had fucked each other to see what it would be like. And then they said – either he said or she said – that it was like fucking a brother or a sister, so they never did it again.”
The real boner (okay, can we tell that I’m really trying to cram in the obscenity before I talk about something other than obscenity? PENIS. PENIS PENIS PENIS. cocksuckerchildporntittyfuckassrammer. Labial shrug, colonoscopy, poinsettia) for me, is the precision of Diane’s phrasing and how completely (wholly, experientially, viscerally) it communicates a sort of human vulnerability. In every phrase there is a tension and control or authority for character, narrator and reader isn’t simple. Event, experience, perception and expression interact; they live and breathe, slippery and incomplete, unobtainable, within, around and on top of language. Let’s hope that sentence didn’t mean anything. I’m not shooting to kill here; I just want to point at some stuff and make you look at it for a while.
Take the following passage (the second to last sentence in particular conveys a sense of nervousness in the clunkiness of its phrases and dangling preposition):
“She handed out little wrapped gifts in such a hurry at the door, when we were all saying goodbye – it was such a hurry – I didn’t get to see where she was getting all of her gifts from. All of a sudden there was just a gift in my hand, as I was going out the door. At the end of the party, I had never gotten a gift before, not since I was a little girl, and then we thought we deserved those gifts. So now, something was turned around.”
Different people will scan this differently, but the way I read the first sentence incorporates this rhythm:
she HANded OUT diDUm deDum
lit tle WRApped Gifts didiDUMDUM
In SUCh a HURry At the Door deDUMdiDUMdi dediDUM
When We were All dedumdedum
SAyIng GoodBye DUMdiDUMDUM
It was SUch a Hurry dedeDUMdiDUMdi
I didn’t GET to SEe de didiDUMdiDum
Where she was GETting All of her GIfts from DUMdedeDUMdi dedidiDUMdi
I apologize for not being savvier with my keyboard and figuring out some sort of strike and slash business, but this format might be more accessible to those less readily familiar with poetic scansion. If we focus on the larger stresses and how often or rapidly they appear among the smaller stresses, we can see the simpler, straight rhythm slowly getting pushed down, becoming sloggy, groggier, weighted. There’s more pushing and piling up of smaller stresses in order to reach the larger stresses. And it’s not just a matter of adding more grace notes but adding triplets that take up a whole beat. Am I making sense? Are we musically inclined? The rhythm in the next few measures (phrases) is largely made up of threes (‘All of a sudden/There was Just a Gift in my Hand/as I was going/out the door’) and then the last sentence takes a turn by framing the triplet on either side with twos: one Two/One two three One two One or deDUM DUMdidiDUMdeDUM. Some of you might recognize that last rhythm DUMdidiDUMdeDUM as that triumphant bugle call (or trumpet, it might be a trumpet) when the hero shows up in the cartoon or the western. There is a sense of arrival in the rhythm, a kind of closure or finality. As readers, we have reached a destination both rhythmically and as a turning point in the story; that an event has happened is definite, secure. Neither the reader nor the narrator is able to articulate precisely how that event occurred but both are able to experience the sensation, the emotional and cognitive texture of it.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
A Position of Great Discomfort: ‘Killing Cats’ by Brian Evenson and ‘The Kind You Know Forever’ by Diane Williams
I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve been reading John Gardner’s ‘The Art of Fiction’ and it has me depressed. Despondent, slunking in my chair with a bad attitude and snarly teenage frown. It’s a tone thing. I’ve got some bones to pick, and I’ll get to them later, I assure you, but for right now, let’s just say I don’t appreciate his fucking attitude or his condescending pedantry, self-satisfied smug fuck cock wanker that he is. Insightful, useful, yes, but he makes me feel as though literature is small; a tidy little package some old fuck sits at a mahogany desk in a finished attic looking out from a high window whittling out like a tricky word puzzle that will instruct the rest of humanity how to live. Assuming a sly, cunning cleverness to the tilt of his chin, bringing the lead tip of a pencil into his quivering, wet mouth. “Ah ha!” you can hear him say. “I’ve got it!” He may make statements to the contrary, but the small concessional bursts of the occasional sentence can’t compete with his overpowering voice. I understand: it-is-an-instruction-manual and so automatically vulgar (it’s copyright is also 1983 but I swear to you my anger’s still relevant), but what I’m getting at, right now, is that the effect reading him has had on me is to shut my mouth about what literature does, how it works, etc, which is problematic to our purposes here.
Again, to reiterate what I’ve mentioned before; the goal and purposes for what I set out to do here and how I propose we (you and I) should approach literature is to accumulate description and definition for the purpose of deepening knowledge, with fascination, joy, and enthusiasm, not to pursue description and definition for the purpose of restriction. I interpret Gardner’s tone to imply a finite set of definite answers to the problems faced in issues of craft, and this neatness, the compartmentalized assignation of value he’s bound around different aesthetic choices, gets my brain all crammed up and angry. I find it belittling. Why would we want to say one kind of novel is more profound, morally better, than another? How do these restrictions service us in any way? Does it make us feel better? Why impose a Victorian caste system on what we read? Can’t we just experience what the novel or story sets out for us to experience? Are we afraid to be alone with our books?
To alleviate my irritation with Gardner, and to get to a point, I want to look at two stories that place the reader in an uncomfortable position toward the narrator (in both instances first person) and toward the situation at hand. Much of the delight in these stories, for the reader, is trying to figure out where one stands in relation to the narrator. Within this maneuvering, the reader sinks deeper into the uncomfortable situation and has to deal with it directly as a human being, not just as a reader of a story. Are we titillated? I know I am.
The story ‘Killing Cats’ in Brian Evenson’s collection Altmann’s Tongue begins:
“They wanted to kill their cats, but the problem was the problem of transportation.”
An interesting dilemma, to be sure, but what is perhaps most unsettling is the tone with which the narrator presents the dilemma to us, with a particular word choice and syntax that displaces our expectations and anxiety, deepening the sense of threat and alarm we feel in reading it. We almost immediately have to adjust and accept the desire to kill the cats as normal: the logical structure of the sentence with the coma ‘but’ we would expect to take us to addressing the concern we have for the cats, and instead identifies ‘the problem’ as ‘the problem of transportation.’ That the narrator so coolly overlooks the threat of violence and chooses to relate to us, in explanatory language, that ‘the problem’ is a strategic hurdle in order to accomplish that violence, has us pull away and look at him funny. To utilize ‘The Good Times,’ “what you talkin’ bout, Willis?” would be a common response here, in the mind of the reader. It is ‘they’ that wanted to kill the cats, not ‘I’, but that the narrator is trying to explain pure logistics puts us in a cautious position toward him. The narrator hasn’t really done anything yet, and maybe there’s a reason for his method of presentation, and we can’t yet assess what his values are in this situation.
We continue reading, not entirely certain of where our horror should be located, though game enough to spread it around if need be. The narrator continues:
“They invited me to dinner to beg me to drive them and their cats out to the edge of town so that they, the cat killers, could kill their cats.”
There’s a sort of democratic decency in including ‘their cats’ in the phrase “to drive them and their cats”; the phrase could easily not include ‘the cats’ and still maintain the same basic meaning, but the inclusion brings something special to the narrator’s relationship to the cats – a notice, an acknowledgement. The inclusion might be a kind of neurotic precision, we may take it to imply affection (though probably not). However we take it, it maintains our attention on the existence of the cats. The narrator’s choice to name and identify ‘them’ in the clarifying aside “they, the cat killers” communicates a kind of formality and callousness, which could be an indication of the narrator’s contempt for them but could just as well be a sign of the narrator’s lack of affect. Continuing with the conclusion of the sentence “to kill their cats” the rhythm and repetition emphasizes the act and the narrator’s preoccupation with repeating it word for word, not in euphemism or just alluding to it. Not to be thought callous myself, but there’s a kind of giddy joy in the many repetitions of the words ‘cat’ and ‘killing.’ Go ahead, read that sentence out loud. Nobody’s watching. Frankness with a taut tongue: pleasure all around. Enjoy yourself.
There’s a certain restraint that works in tandem with the frank, affectless tone that keeps the story from drifting into absurdity. It isn’t so much the writing as it is the reader who proceeds cautiously. The narrator expresses no confusion in word or tone and continues to use very direct statements and appears clear in his intentions. Part of the reader’s experience in reading the story is trying to figure out the narrator’s intentions, and because of this, we read each sentence carefully and with great attention. Further on in the story, as the narrator reveals more of his feelings toward the cats we begin to see the narrator’s intention in articulating the problem as he has:
“I did not much care to try my hand at cat killing but all I would have to do was to drive. I did not have to kill the cats. So I told them, yes, I would drive them, yes, as a token of friendship – if they would pay for gas. They said all right, they would pay, and introduced their cats to me.”
Whatever our feelings are towards the narrator’s reaction to the cats, they don’t begin to compare to the disgust we feel toward the cat killers. The narrative builds slowly so as to point our attention to how the cat killers have gone about involving the narrator – the depth of disturbance these cat killers are capable of:
“But the people insisted on telling me names, and once they told me they insisted on apologizing, telling me the cats’ names were not names the people personally would have chosen, but had been, they unfortunately insisted on telling me, the names their children had chosen.”
Whatever kind of sicko the narrator may be, both the reader and the narrator are appalled at the kind of sicko these cat killers are, and we are now kind of on the narrator’s side, uncomfortable for him more so than uncomfortable toward him.
There is also excellent humor (there’s been humor from the beginning, of course, but not dismissive, preposterous humor to turn the whole story into a joke):
“He had wanted to ‘blast the cats away’ for quite some time, he said, Checkers most of all, he said, but Oreo and Champ were no exception.”
The repetition of the identifying action “he said” and the quotation marks at the beginning of this sentence do a lot of work to keep the narrator separate from what the man is saying, in addition to keeping the tone from slipping into humor or absurdity. The insistent, almost neurotic attention the narrator has in conveying very precisely the details and actions of the story invite us to take the story seriously; though we can laugh, the story is not absurd. Our discomfort in reading is challenged and we are forced to spend time with our discomfort. Our initial discomfort transforms into greater discomfort and more anxiety than we had bargained for. I would like to propose that this is an excellent thing for a story to do. We should read fiction not solely for the answers or guidance it can provide but read fiction for the questions it can put to us. We should be implicated, our well-being should be at stake. I’m not interested in being a fucking tourist. You want to be a spectator, you want to have your uncomplicated voyeurism and your values praised, go watch fucking television.
The story proceeds to recount the process by which the cat killers attempt to pull the narrator further into the situation and the narrator is confronted with what he can do now that he’s there. I’m not going to give away any secrets (go read the story), but when I finish reading, I leave the page with chills. It’s fantastic.
This has already gone on too long for a single post, hasn’t it? I’ll continue with the Diane Williams as a part II. I’ll leave you with her first sentence (from ‘The Kind You Know Forever’):
“I had just met them – the brother and the sister who had fucked each other to see what it would be like.”
Are you smiling? I’m smiling. How much fun is this? I love perverts.
Again, to reiterate what I’ve mentioned before; the goal and purposes for what I set out to do here and how I propose we (you and I) should approach literature is to accumulate description and definition for the purpose of deepening knowledge, with fascination, joy, and enthusiasm, not to pursue description and definition for the purpose of restriction. I interpret Gardner’s tone to imply a finite set of definite answers to the problems faced in issues of craft, and this neatness, the compartmentalized assignation of value he’s bound around different aesthetic choices, gets my brain all crammed up and angry. I find it belittling. Why would we want to say one kind of novel is more profound, morally better, than another? How do these restrictions service us in any way? Does it make us feel better? Why impose a Victorian caste system on what we read? Can’t we just experience what the novel or story sets out for us to experience? Are we afraid to be alone with our books?
To alleviate my irritation with Gardner, and to get to a point, I want to look at two stories that place the reader in an uncomfortable position toward the narrator (in both instances first person) and toward the situation at hand. Much of the delight in these stories, for the reader, is trying to figure out where one stands in relation to the narrator. Within this maneuvering, the reader sinks deeper into the uncomfortable situation and has to deal with it directly as a human being, not just as a reader of a story. Are we titillated? I know I am.
The story ‘Killing Cats’ in Brian Evenson’s collection Altmann’s Tongue begins:
“They wanted to kill their cats, but the problem was the problem of transportation.”
An interesting dilemma, to be sure, but what is perhaps most unsettling is the tone with which the narrator presents the dilemma to us, with a particular word choice and syntax that displaces our expectations and anxiety, deepening the sense of threat and alarm we feel in reading it. We almost immediately have to adjust and accept the desire to kill the cats as normal: the logical structure of the sentence with the coma ‘but’ we would expect to take us to addressing the concern we have for the cats, and instead identifies ‘the problem’ as ‘the problem of transportation.’ That the narrator so coolly overlooks the threat of violence and chooses to relate to us, in explanatory language, that ‘the problem’ is a strategic hurdle in order to accomplish that violence, has us pull away and look at him funny. To utilize ‘The Good Times,’ “what you talkin’ bout, Willis?” would be a common response here, in the mind of the reader. It is ‘they’ that wanted to kill the cats, not ‘I’, but that the narrator is trying to explain pure logistics puts us in a cautious position toward him. The narrator hasn’t really done anything yet, and maybe there’s a reason for his method of presentation, and we can’t yet assess what his values are in this situation.
We continue reading, not entirely certain of where our horror should be located, though game enough to spread it around if need be. The narrator continues:
“They invited me to dinner to beg me to drive them and their cats out to the edge of town so that they, the cat killers, could kill their cats.”
There’s a sort of democratic decency in including ‘their cats’ in the phrase “to drive them and their cats”; the phrase could easily not include ‘the cats’ and still maintain the same basic meaning, but the inclusion brings something special to the narrator’s relationship to the cats – a notice, an acknowledgement. The inclusion might be a kind of neurotic precision, we may take it to imply affection (though probably not). However we take it, it maintains our attention on the existence of the cats. The narrator’s choice to name and identify ‘them’ in the clarifying aside “they, the cat killers” communicates a kind of formality and callousness, which could be an indication of the narrator’s contempt for them but could just as well be a sign of the narrator’s lack of affect. Continuing with the conclusion of the sentence “to kill their cats” the rhythm and repetition emphasizes the act and the narrator’s preoccupation with repeating it word for word, not in euphemism or just alluding to it. Not to be thought callous myself, but there’s a kind of giddy joy in the many repetitions of the words ‘cat’ and ‘killing.’ Go ahead, read that sentence out loud. Nobody’s watching. Frankness with a taut tongue: pleasure all around. Enjoy yourself.
There’s a certain restraint that works in tandem with the frank, affectless tone that keeps the story from drifting into absurdity. It isn’t so much the writing as it is the reader who proceeds cautiously. The narrator expresses no confusion in word or tone and continues to use very direct statements and appears clear in his intentions. Part of the reader’s experience in reading the story is trying to figure out the narrator’s intentions, and because of this, we read each sentence carefully and with great attention. Further on in the story, as the narrator reveals more of his feelings toward the cats we begin to see the narrator’s intention in articulating the problem as he has:
“I did not much care to try my hand at cat killing but all I would have to do was to drive. I did not have to kill the cats. So I told them, yes, I would drive them, yes, as a token of friendship – if they would pay for gas. They said all right, they would pay, and introduced their cats to me.”
Whatever our feelings are towards the narrator’s reaction to the cats, they don’t begin to compare to the disgust we feel toward the cat killers. The narrative builds slowly so as to point our attention to how the cat killers have gone about involving the narrator – the depth of disturbance these cat killers are capable of:
“But the people insisted on telling me names, and once they told me they insisted on apologizing, telling me the cats’ names were not names the people personally would have chosen, but had been, they unfortunately insisted on telling me, the names their children had chosen.”
Whatever kind of sicko the narrator may be, both the reader and the narrator are appalled at the kind of sicko these cat killers are, and we are now kind of on the narrator’s side, uncomfortable for him more so than uncomfortable toward him.
There is also excellent humor (there’s been humor from the beginning, of course, but not dismissive, preposterous humor to turn the whole story into a joke):
“He had wanted to ‘blast the cats away’ for quite some time, he said, Checkers most of all, he said, but Oreo and Champ were no exception.”
The repetition of the identifying action “he said” and the quotation marks at the beginning of this sentence do a lot of work to keep the narrator separate from what the man is saying, in addition to keeping the tone from slipping into humor or absurdity. The insistent, almost neurotic attention the narrator has in conveying very precisely the details and actions of the story invite us to take the story seriously; though we can laugh, the story is not absurd. Our discomfort in reading is challenged and we are forced to spend time with our discomfort. Our initial discomfort transforms into greater discomfort and more anxiety than we had bargained for. I would like to propose that this is an excellent thing for a story to do. We should read fiction not solely for the answers or guidance it can provide but read fiction for the questions it can put to us. We should be implicated, our well-being should be at stake. I’m not interested in being a fucking tourist. You want to be a spectator, you want to have your uncomplicated voyeurism and your values praised, go watch fucking television.
The story proceeds to recount the process by which the cat killers attempt to pull the narrator further into the situation and the narrator is confronted with what he can do now that he’s there. I’m not going to give away any secrets (go read the story), but when I finish reading, I leave the page with chills. It’s fantastic.
This has already gone on too long for a single post, hasn’t it? I’ll continue with the Diane Williams as a part II. I’ll leave you with her first sentence (from ‘The Kind You Know Forever’):
“I had just met them – the brother and the sister who had fucked each other to see what it would be like.”
Are you smiling? I’m smiling. How much fun is this? I love perverts.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Depositories
Alas, I am moving. Placing my items in boxes, stacking these boxes on top of one another, finding my body pummeled, disconcerted by the different paths it must take to maneuver among the boxes. As of this moment, my books are divided and resting in eight crates, eight liquor store boxes, two grocery bags and three shelves. This makes me unnecessarily, irrationally nervous. How must the books feel? I hate not seeing them. Yes, I know where they are, but where are they in relation to one another? What if I need them - I need them - and they are buried, depressed, flattened. Could a page be bending? How am I supposed to know what is happening? How can there be any certainty without the black ink and the white page to squint and whittle my mind toward?
I read three books this week (‘The Open Curtain’ and ‘Last Days’ by Brian Evenson and Mary Gaitskill’s ‘Don’t Cry’) but do I have anything I can say about them? No! No, I do not. Because all of my print is being kept from me! All information and evidence is trapped in this purgatory and my blistering mind sizzles and pops, spewing goobers of watery life juice – all vague and sporadic, nothing I would try to impose upon other people. My brother jokes about getting me a kindle. A fucking kindle. I told him I’d ship fecal matter to him at his job if he went through with this threat. I’m not a neurologist, I don’t know how people’s minds work, but I need physical, tangible words, print and page to be okay with being alive. I need to touch and smell, I need them all in direct sight of my physical person. I need to be able to open them up, put my finger on a passage of one and open up another. One screen? Are you mad? Do you hate being a person? I love my brother, he’s awesome, but he makes me insane.
In this chaos, in this neurotic panic, I think it best to share some old work, a few short, prose ditties that are more narratively honest than most of my work, though incredibly derivative of other authors. Let us consider each ‘poem’ to be an assortment of personal effects stored in a crate, the crate being the form picked up from the other authors. Credit should be given to Lydia Davis, Russell Edson, Brian Evenson, Diane Williams, Joe Wenderoth, Gary Lutz.
Here are my items. Maneuver around them. Safety will come again in a few short days, when I can fastidiously assort, find that special place for each and every special book, petting and loving them, cooing and whispering slow apologies for my time away from them.
To feel like prayer
It is often with sincere regret that I put my finger on anything. A finger and not the whole hand, not the spread palm and its cup and divots of warmth.
We can agree then, that I am best on my knees, and that what I don’t say cannot hurt us.
Certainty has done nothing to prevent our catastrophes.
A finger says there. That is the moment.
When I say that I love you, it does not mean that I’m finished.
Michael Wermeister
Michael Wermeister showed his peepee in the first grade. He was the boy with the glasses, pale like scar-tissue over his eyes whose hands the girls and boys didn’t want to share crayons with, looking wet as they did with always some flake of brown like molting or chunks of snot, running like fever hands too hot or too cold. He was a menace in recess games of tag until the girls found out he couldn’t stand up to harsh scolding, when he would stop mid-chase once turned upon and throw his head to the ground. We had taught Michael Wermeister to feel the great shame of himself, as a teacher had taught him how a desk, filthy with pencil lines that wasn’t sat still in, could fly across a classroom.
“Come on!” he said, calling like a master of ceremonies, standing on top of the playground bench holding himself. “Run under me! I will make a rainbow of gold for you to pass through.”
Uphill
There is something contagious in the word blasphemy. Saying it out loud erupts something in the throat that is then spread into the air; tight pressure along the bridge of mouth holding teeth together, confusion of lips slipping from s to phhh. Emmy having to draw heavily upon the resources of the stomach. Like regurgitation, it is an entire process. With the quick flush of air between teeth and lips, something will go wrong. It is exhausting and there is bound to be spittle. But even as I only think it, climbing the steep sidewalk home, my biggest concern on the ascent remains that which will fall upon me.
An unremarkable moment
The dog bit after we passed each other, sneaking up from behind and catching the lower back of my hip, on the decline towards definite ass. Not the round outward nor the full cheek but the impress in between. I had thought nothing. I had thought it was only a lunge, perhaps a long nail, and continued walking. Dogs jump. There is no need to remark upon a dog jumping on a person, I hardly turned.
A sharp sting persisted, grew precise and found its fullness in between my hip and ass. I unbuttoned my pants for an investigation. The skin was raised. Hmm, I thought to myself. How did this happen? He had only lunged, a dog jumping, unremarkable. But then this raised skin and this sting. There is no other explanation. How did he get me here? What is this fullness where I am bent in?
Later, I showered, and the raised skin had become a bruise. Red lines on either side where his mouth would have opened, a deep eggplant purple of lips. My blood spread to meet where his teeth found me, where I am bent in and had thought nothing.
Apartment
By the best standards of anything I am no longer hungry. Sunlight encircles the shade where I sit, split and shimmering to the bob and weave of branches bending. To feel the sun I would have to fall thirty feet, or descend a stairwell littered with mail for previous occupants. Day after day it keeps arriving. Five piles of unopened envelopes each on a stair.
I sleep fully clothed to make waking easier. See? I tell my mattress, shrugging off the bed sheets. We were just fooling around. I love the rest of the house more than you; I have to go tend to it. This is a lie. The walls and ceiling don’t believe me, but the floor does what I want.
Still, I cannot bring myself to gather all the dirty linen. It is fully soiled and there is much of it. It lies heavy and loose on my skin. I pour more coffee through a swollen mouth that tastes of wet paper. Gray smoke in and out of a throat, grey like winters and the exhaust chugging from a bus through streets plowed of snow. How is it not supposed to taste like this?
James Curtis, an offer awaits you. Hazel Mendeha remains uninsured. How is anyone supposed to call Alexis Martin? I cannot walk through all of these people. I would have to lie down, to rest with my cheek to the step.
Resurrection after Joe Wenderoth Letters to Wendy
I wonder if Jesus crucified tasted like that special layer of pocked grease sweating off the beef patty beneath a dense mustard blanket. If one had been there, on his knees, only daring the tip of the tongue within Jesus’ thorned slits and didn’t fuck it up with a too eager swash of a full lick. The bun aside, just chortled animal and mustard seed whirred to a complacent smoothness. Could this really waken anyone? What are we afraid of? Don’t we stick out our tongues only to reassure ourselves that the animal is dead?
Affection after Joe Wenderoth Letters to Wendy
Ejaculation requires the dimming of knowledge. Consciousness reasserts in the recognition of ejaculate outside of the body, which demands of us wiping. Not a cleansing but a removal, a putting aside of the confrontation. In this way we know that our essential action is a clearing away, and that the essential object of desire has always been the towel. The towel gets tossed to the floor, kicked further into bed sheets, shoved between the bed and the wall. Only with great effort is the towel washed, folded, placed in a pile of other such towels, all of whom wait silently in the dark for us to find ourselves, to take us away.
I read three books this week (‘The Open Curtain’ and ‘Last Days’ by Brian Evenson and Mary Gaitskill’s ‘Don’t Cry’) but do I have anything I can say about them? No! No, I do not. Because all of my print is being kept from me! All information and evidence is trapped in this purgatory and my blistering mind sizzles and pops, spewing goobers of watery life juice – all vague and sporadic, nothing I would try to impose upon other people. My brother jokes about getting me a kindle. A fucking kindle. I told him I’d ship fecal matter to him at his job if he went through with this threat. I’m not a neurologist, I don’t know how people’s minds work, but I need physical, tangible words, print and page to be okay with being alive. I need to touch and smell, I need them all in direct sight of my physical person. I need to be able to open them up, put my finger on a passage of one and open up another. One screen? Are you mad? Do you hate being a person? I love my brother, he’s awesome, but he makes me insane.
In this chaos, in this neurotic panic, I think it best to share some old work, a few short, prose ditties that are more narratively honest than most of my work, though incredibly derivative of other authors. Let us consider each ‘poem’ to be an assortment of personal effects stored in a crate, the crate being the form picked up from the other authors. Credit should be given to Lydia Davis, Russell Edson, Brian Evenson, Diane Williams, Joe Wenderoth, Gary Lutz.
Here are my items. Maneuver around them. Safety will come again in a few short days, when I can fastidiously assort, find that special place for each and every special book, petting and loving them, cooing and whispering slow apologies for my time away from them.
To feel like prayer
It is often with sincere regret that I put my finger on anything. A finger and not the whole hand, not the spread palm and its cup and divots of warmth.
We can agree then, that I am best on my knees, and that what I don’t say cannot hurt us.
Certainty has done nothing to prevent our catastrophes.
A finger says there. That is the moment.
When I say that I love you, it does not mean that I’m finished.
Michael Wermeister
Michael Wermeister showed his peepee in the first grade. He was the boy with the glasses, pale like scar-tissue over his eyes whose hands the girls and boys didn’t want to share crayons with, looking wet as they did with always some flake of brown like molting or chunks of snot, running like fever hands too hot or too cold. He was a menace in recess games of tag until the girls found out he couldn’t stand up to harsh scolding, when he would stop mid-chase once turned upon and throw his head to the ground. We had taught Michael Wermeister to feel the great shame of himself, as a teacher had taught him how a desk, filthy with pencil lines that wasn’t sat still in, could fly across a classroom.
“Come on!” he said, calling like a master of ceremonies, standing on top of the playground bench holding himself. “Run under me! I will make a rainbow of gold for you to pass through.”
Uphill
There is something contagious in the word blasphemy. Saying it out loud erupts something in the throat that is then spread into the air; tight pressure along the bridge of mouth holding teeth together, confusion of lips slipping from s to phhh. Emmy having to draw heavily upon the resources of the stomach. Like regurgitation, it is an entire process. With the quick flush of air between teeth and lips, something will go wrong. It is exhausting and there is bound to be spittle. But even as I only think it, climbing the steep sidewalk home, my biggest concern on the ascent remains that which will fall upon me.
An unremarkable moment
The dog bit after we passed each other, sneaking up from behind and catching the lower back of my hip, on the decline towards definite ass. Not the round outward nor the full cheek but the impress in between. I had thought nothing. I had thought it was only a lunge, perhaps a long nail, and continued walking. Dogs jump. There is no need to remark upon a dog jumping on a person, I hardly turned.
A sharp sting persisted, grew precise and found its fullness in between my hip and ass. I unbuttoned my pants for an investigation. The skin was raised. Hmm, I thought to myself. How did this happen? He had only lunged, a dog jumping, unremarkable. But then this raised skin and this sting. There is no other explanation. How did he get me here? What is this fullness where I am bent in?
Later, I showered, and the raised skin had become a bruise. Red lines on either side where his mouth would have opened, a deep eggplant purple of lips. My blood spread to meet where his teeth found me, where I am bent in and had thought nothing.
Apartment
By the best standards of anything I am no longer hungry. Sunlight encircles the shade where I sit, split and shimmering to the bob and weave of branches bending. To feel the sun I would have to fall thirty feet, or descend a stairwell littered with mail for previous occupants. Day after day it keeps arriving. Five piles of unopened envelopes each on a stair.
I sleep fully clothed to make waking easier. See? I tell my mattress, shrugging off the bed sheets. We were just fooling around. I love the rest of the house more than you; I have to go tend to it. This is a lie. The walls and ceiling don’t believe me, but the floor does what I want.
Still, I cannot bring myself to gather all the dirty linen. It is fully soiled and there is much of it. It lies heavy and loose on my skin. I pour more coffee through a swollen mouth that tastes of wet paper. Gray smoke in and out of a throat, grey like winters and the exhaust chugging from a bus through streets plowed of snow. How is it not supposed to taste like this?
James Curtis, an offer awaits you. Hazel Mendeha remains uninsured. How is anyone supposed to call Alexis Martin? I cannot walk through all of these people. I would have to lie down, to rest with my cheek to the step.
Resurrection after Joe Wenderoth Letters to Wendy
I wonder if Jesus crucified tasted like that special layer of pocked grease sweating off the beef patty beneath a dense mustard blanket. If one had been there, on his knees, only daring the tip of the tongue within Jesus’ thorned slits and didn’t fuck it up with a too eager swash of a full lick. The bun aside, just chortled animal and mustard seed whirred to a complacent smoothness. Could this really waken anyone? What are we afraid of? Don’t we stick out our tongues only to reassure ourselves that the animal is dead?
Affection after Joe Wenderoth Letters to Wendy
Ejaculation requires the dimming of knowledge. Consciousness reasserts in the recognition of ejaculate outside of the body, which demands of us wiping. Not a cleansing but a removal, a putting aside of the confrontation. In this way we know that our essential action is a clearing away, and that the essential object of desire has always been the towel. The towel gets tossed to the floor, kicked further into bed sheets, shoved between the bed and the wall. Only with great effort is the towel washed, folded, placed in a pile of other such towels, all of whom wait silently in the dark for us to find ourselves, to take us away.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
‘Shit’ by Gordon Lish from Mourner at the Door
When I was young, the main bathroom of our house had this wallpaper decorated with large archaic sea-faring vessels. The design was executed in billions of tiny, thin lines, and while there were many different ships and many details shown on each of these many ships, each individual line consisted of the same width, and there wasn’t any shadow or perspective drawn, so that while there was a whole lot going on on this wallpaper, everything blended into the same texture and I really had to concentrate, from only two or three feet away, to make out the particularities of any individual ship. It didn’t take much to see the wallpaper as only swaths and stringy lines of color. The back color was a light, fleshy tan, while the ships had some blue to them: a deeper steel, slate blue and what a box of crayons would call cerulean. All of the ships had huge, billowing sails and were set into the tan back drop with rippling waves. The pattern of the ships on the wallpaper was sporadic and complex enough to not appear symmetrical, designed, planned. I had to count the ships from a close distance, marking each off, to see where the pattern began and ended.
Picking up Gordon Lish over the weekend, I was surprised at how much of the language, syntax and content was similar to Gary Lutz. I had never read any Lish before, only knowing him as the ‘great editor’ the ‘ruthless professor,’ thinking of him sweetly, demurely, as only ‘Papa.’ Here is the opening of a story entitled ‘Shit’:
"I like talking about people sitting on toilets. It shows up in the bulk of my speech. Wherever at all in keeping with things, I try to work it in. You just have to look back at the stories I have had printed to see that I am telling the truth. People on toilets is certain to show up with more than passing incidence. I will even go so far as to say that where you find a story with a person on a toilet in it, forget the name that’s signed as author – no one but me could have written the thing. Indeed, it is inconceivable to me that I didn’t.
But the one I’ve got now, this one here, it promises to be the best of the type.
Or anyhow the purest.
Well, the truest, then – the one with nothing in it made up.
The other thing about it that I like is that it could not be simpler to tell – nothing in it but just a man sitting on a toilet in it and the wallpaper in it that the man is looking at.
Oh, of course – not just a man in general but me, in fact – the one who is doing all of this telling right here this instant.
In fact, I would never tell a story about anyone else. For one thing, it could never be true, could it? I mean, what do I know about anyone else – or care to? Good Christ, I have all I can do to marshal even a small enough interest in myself.
Or do I mean large enough?
I don’t know."
What’s being done here?
How is this a ‘story’?
We begin with the sort of straight-forward, abrupt confession we expect from children just potty trained but perhaps not in school yet; private, bodily – disarming in its bluntness, socially awkward, funny. The confession puts us in a position of involuntary ally toward the narrator, or, in the chance we don’t find this confession amusing, turns us away (either prudishly or with a tired exhaustion – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had friends tell me to stop talking about the poop already). The second sentence complicates this relationship – the advanced, sophisticated language challenging the simplicity of the sentence before, adding texture and depth to the original thought. Talking about people on toilets is not just a pleasure but a recurring action – not just something the narrator likes but something the narrator does often. The third sentence, with a complex syntax that slows our reading even within the simple, easy word choice, lets us know that this action, this pleasure, is pursued – it is intentional, the narrator is driven toward it. The direct address then invites us into the story itself – our presence is a consciously required element, we are asked to participate actively in the story. While no action has taken place in the story in terms of a plot, what’s being built here is this relationship between the narrator and the reader. We are being asked to consider not the scene or action of a man shitting but the narrator’s relationship to his subject. We progress through the story being granted increasingly personal, increasingly intimate information: “Good Christ, I have all I can do to marshal even a small enough interest in myself.” What is at stake here, what we are being asked to look at, is the narrator’s dependence on and limitation with story and language. “Or do I mean large enough? I don’t know.”
I obviously can’t reprint the entire story here, but it goes through the narrator’s habits as a writer, some childhood memories, and the story about the shitting and the wallpaper, “this story, the wallpaper” doesn’t really come into play until the third page, and we get the story of a difficult shit, and the narrator holding onto the wallpaper: “I thought: ‘Hang onto the wallpaper.’ I mean, with my mind, with that.” and the description of that wallpaper.
When I was little, in the bathroom with the wallpaper with the ships on it, there was also a wooden magazine rack that was always stuffed with newspapers. Sometimes, there’d be a New Yorker, but the New Yorkers were mostly kept in my mother’s bathroom. The magazine rack sat directly in front of the toilet. The rack was simple, old-fashioned, with vertical columns that held the newspapers in place. Sometimes there’d be a newspaper open on the floor. Whenever I sat on the toilet I would look at the newspapers to make sure no photographs of people were showing, and if there were, I’d make sure to cover them up. I would turn the newspaper around in the rack or fold it differently so that the photograph would face the other way. Sometimes, with newspapers that were on the floor, I would just put my foot on top of the photograph, covering it up. I didn’t want the people in those photographs looking at me.
"I sat there holding on.
I mean to tell you this – that I had had the thought that I was doing it for nothing less than life. Pretty dumb, right? After all, all it was was just a lot of shit. If anything, I should have been joyous, been jubilant, been pleased as punch. Hey, come on – I was going, wasn’t I?
But I was scared to death.
I thought: ‘You think you’re so smart, then make something out of this.’
Skip it, what the facts are – I don’t trade in science. I say that you just heard a story. I say your life, it saved your life."
Picking up Gordon Lish over the weekend, I was surprised at how much of the language, syntax and content was similar to Gary Lutz. I had never read any Lish before, only knowing him as the ‘great editor’ the ‘ruthless professor,’ thinking of him sweetly, demurely, as only ‘Papa.’ Here is the opening of a story entitled ‘Shit’:
"I like talking about people sitting on toilets. It shows up in the bulk of my speech. Wherever at all in keeping with things, I try to work it in. You just have to look back at the stories I have had printed to see that I am telling the truth. People on toilets is certain to show up with more than passing incidence. I will even go so far as to say that where you find a story with a person on a toilet in it, forget the name that’s signed as author – no one but me could have written the thing. Indeed, it is inconceivable to me that I didn’t.
But the one I’ve got now, this one here, it promises to be the best of the type.
Or anyhow the purest.
Well, the truest, then – the one with nothing in it made up.
The other thing about it that I like is that it could not be simpler to tell – nothing in it but just a man sitting on a toilet in it and the wallpaper in it that the man is looking at.
Oh, of course – not just a man in general but me, in fact – the one who is doing all of this telling right here this instant.
In fact, I would never tell a story about anyone else. For one thing, it could never be true, could it? I mean, what do I know about anyone else – or care to? Good Christ, I have all I can do to marshal even a small enough interest in myself.
Or do I mean large enough?
I don’t know."
What’s being done here?
How is this a ‘story’?
We begin with the sort of straight-forward, abrupt confession we expect from children just potty trained but perhaps not in school yet; private, bodily – disarming in its bluntness, socially awkward, funny. The confession puts us in a position of involuntary ally toward the narrator, or, in the chance we don’t find this confession amusing, turns us away (either prudishly or with a tired exhaustion – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had friends tell me to stop talking about the poop already). The second sentence complicates this relationship – the advanced, sophisticated language challenging the simplicity of the sentence before, adding texture and depth to the original thought. Talking about people on toilets is not just a pleasure but a recurring action – not just something the narrator likes but something the narrator does often. The third sentence, with a complex syntax that slows our reading even within the simple, easy word choice, lets us know that this action, this pleasure, is pursued – it is intentional, the narrator is driven toward it. The direct address then invites us into the story itself – our presence is a consciously required element, we are asked to participate actively in the story. While no action has taken place in the story in terms of a plot, what’s being built here is this relationship between the narrator and the reader. We are being asked to consider not the scene or action of a man shitting but the narrator’s relationship to his subject. We progress through the story being granted increasingly personal, increasingly intimate information: “Good Christ, I have all I can do to marshal even a small enough interest in myself.” What is at stake here, what we are being asked to look at, is the narrator’s dependence on and limitation with story and language. “Or do I mean large enough? I don’t know.”
I obviously can’t reprint the entire story here, but it goes through the narrator’s habits as a writer, some childhood memories, and the story about the shitting and the wallpaper, “this story, the wallpaper” doesn’t really come into play until the third page, and we get the story of a difficult shit, and the narrator holding onto the wallpaper: “I thought: ‘Hang onto the wallpaper.’ I mean, with my mind, with that.” and the description of that wallpaper.
When I was little, in the bathroom with the wallpaper with the ships on it, there was also a wooden magazine rack that was always stuffed with newspapers. Sometimes, there’d be a New Yorker, but the New Yorkers were mostly kept in my mother’s bathroom. The magazine rack sat directly in front of the toilet. The rack was simple, old-fashioned, with vertical columns that held the newspapers in place. Sometimes there’d be a newspaper open on the floor. Whenever I sat on the toilet I would look at the newspapers to make sure no photographs of people were showing, and if there were, I’d make sure to cover them up. I would turn the newspaper around in the rack or fold it differently so that the photograph would face the other way. Sometimes, with newspapers that were on the floor, I would just put my foot on top of the photograph, covering it up. I didn’t want the people in those photographs looking at me.
"I sat there holding on.
I mean to tell you this – that I had had the thought that I was doing it for nothing less than life. Pretty dumb, right? After all, all it was was just a lot of shit. If anything, I should have been joyous, been jubilant, been pleased as punch. Hey, come on – I was going, wasn’t I?
But I was scared to death.
I thought: ‘You think you’re so smart, then make something out of this.’
Skip it, what the facts are – I don’t trade in science. I say that you just heard a story. I say your life, it saved your life."
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