The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

Locate the body before you begin, or digestion will take place outside it—a terrible waste of food. If you are unsure where to find your body, bait a comfortable chair with unspooled sticky tape, feathers, and a melancholy atmosphere. Then wait. What could be softer than the self unhinged? That is the hidden principle of digestion. Open yourself to its possibilities.

Be careful that the digestive process does not spread to the chair where your body reclines, or it may become tricky to determine exactly what has been swallowed, what acted upon by enzymes.

Once the body has been secured, gently turn it inside out using the same technique that you would with an opera glove. Dot its exposed surfaces with tender substances, and once it shudders right it again.

It will be weary from the exercise. Cuddle it. Remember that it means you no harm.

This ad campaign has shifted now, but for a while there were ads that said things like “The Reluctant Psychic” follwed by the tag “Characters Wanted.”

Assuming that this understanding of character reflects our beliefs about actual humans, what does this mean? That there are simply so many people living now that there has to be a strict rationing of personal attributes, and everyone is allowed one noun and one adjective as a summation of their being?

Get ready for the future. You can have your noun and your adjective, one arm, one leg, and one lung, one eye and one profile, one auricle, one compromise, a first thought but certainly no second thoughts, a leap but no landing, volume but not mass, breath but not air…

There’s a war on. Don’t be greedy. Save the last piece for Mister Manners.

How is a literary character’s structure different from the structure of a human being? I have only scraps and curls of conjecture on the question, so if you have any particular insight let me know… I’ve mentioned some aspects of character in previous posts: simultaneity (for a human being time is real; for a character, illusory; a character, at least in the novel, is a constellation of established moments, just waiting to be exposed by the turning pages, and is identical with those moments) and inevitability (a human’s existence is random and refers to nothing, whereas a character inevitably refers to thousands of human beings for whom he or she is an approximate stand-in, a metaphor…) The time a character lives in is reduced to its emblematic moments, without connective tissue. A character is an aspect of his or her author, and therefore almost certainly both a distillation and a reduction; that is, if one author can write in a dozen voices, the implication is that human beings are necessarily vastly more complex than characters, even if it doesn’t always feel that way–unless, of course, characters can actually exceed the authors they come from.

But these ideas don’t lead to a higher cohesion, an overall understanding of what a character is, or exactly what they do for us… If they are the answers to unposeable questions, then why should our answers take this quasi-human form?

It’s a globe. You can’t just get off.

If you attempt to test the hypothesis by walking around it, you will only pull its ellipses tighter, like shoelaces, and so reduce your own options.

I’ve just read David Foster Wallace’s great-but-horribly-sad novella “Mister Squishy,” and I wonder if in it he tracked a new form of human disappearance. Something that we’re accustomed to thinking of as a site of personal identity, the body, instead becomes a means to personal erasure, as it’s sliced, and sliced again, into demographic categories. The categories overrule whatever is inside them, and the self becomes its own static, or a set of blackly crosshatched lines that extend for miles…

Terry Schmidt observes the Focus Group he’s directing in a study of their response to a new Mister Squishy snack cake, and divides them into segments of being:

“Fully seven of the Focus Group’s men had small remains of Felonies! either on their shirtfront or hanging from the hair on one side of their mustache or lodged at the inner corner of their mouth or or in the small crease between the fingernail of their dominant hand and that nail’s surrounding skin. Two of the men wore no socks; both these men’s shoes were laceless leather; only one pair had tassles. One of the youngest men’s denim bellbottoms were so terrifically oversized that even with his legs splayed out and both knees bent his sock-status was unknown. One of the older men wore black silk or rayon socks with tiny lozenges of dark rich red upon them… One of the group’s men had a pear-shaped face, another a diamond of kite-shaped face; the room’s second oldest consumer had cropped gray hair and an overdeveloped upper lip that lent him a simian aspect.”

What matters here is the impossibility of assembling any one human being out of the scattershot details: the man with the simian face may or may not also have crumbs on his shirt, may or may not have socks. That Terry is also being erased by the marketing prattle he deploys, and is so acutely aware of his own disappearance that the only form of self-assertion he can still imagine is mass murder, doesn’t stop him from turning that force on others…

I’m reminded of Robbe-Grillet, especially of his novel Jealousy: you know people must be there, but their existence is only betrayed by how they impact objects. We learn of the protagonist’s presence because there are four chairs in the room; two are occupied by people observed with anxious detachment; only one chair is empty. A stubborn knot of being waits at the end of a problem in subtraction, but its only substance is in the chair’s refusal to be vacant. But where Robbe-Grillet saw people overwhelmed by the detailed materiality of their surroundings, DFW saw them overwhelmed by the details of their own bodies, clothes, ages. Obliteration is intrinsic, only waiting to be called out, to be named, through the kind of disassociative categorization Terry employs…

He’s a reverse Adam, naming the self’s destruction.

We will make paper boats from every page of your books, and send them all drifting down a very long river to look for you.

Your husband and children will assuredly become hostile if you set a place at the dinner table for your imaginary friend. Your husband will suspect a sexual frisson between you and your guest, and the children will resent the sudden bulk and overweening neediness characteristic of the imaginary. It will be much simpler for everyone if you hide the utensils intended for any non-visible friend or acquaintance. Your friend is certainly entitled to expect a welcoming place dedicated to his or her feeding, but may be surprisingly flexible on the question of where dinner is served.

A dinner table with a false top is extremely useful for this purpose. Lift off the top and arrange your friend’s placemat and silverware, glass and napkin attractively within. Thoughtful touches (a few blossoms floating in a crystal bowl, perhaps) will reassure your friend that this concealed dinner in no way implies a second-class status. Serve the meal, then replace the tabletop, drape it with a cloth, and go about setting the para-table normally.  Your friend will enjoy dinner in the warm comfort of the secret compartment, and your family will be none the wiser.

If this seems impractical the only alternative is to hide place settings around the house, in drawers and the backs of closets. The major disadvantages of this method are that you will have to cook several extra dinners every night to ensure that your friend will find at least one of them, and that the pleasurable conversation that should accompany a leisurely meal will become strenuous, conducted in long-distance whispers, as your friend may be eating far away from you.

One day all the housewives will throw a party. The invitation: The largest house on the block. The invitation: After the sun goes down. The invitation: Fancy dress strongly encouraged. The invitation: Grownups only! The streetlamps flicker on, the children are put to bed, and out each front door, down each driveway: a modest dress, a pleasant smile.

They ring the doorbell. They’re greeted. Kiss-kiss, kiss-kiss. A chandelier. A wine glass. A twisting grand staircase, and before it, on an indigo dais, a tremendous cake. A tremendous cake all to themselves. A tremendous, delicious cake with no children around to smear their ravenous faces in it.

Mingling and chitchat and Have you heard and Oh dear and, most of all, This is so, so very nice, isn’t it yes.

Here’s where the story turns sad. The cake, underneath the outer layer, is one of those cardboard novelty cakes, the kind strippers jump out of. Barely enough to feed a chipmunk. And inside are the children, waiting to yell surprise, waiting for the gasps and the smiles and the We’re so happy to have you here and the We were so lonely without you. But it’s a long, long party, and this is a sad, sad, story. Midnight is for the cake, and by then even the oldest of the children has fallen asleep. You can see what’s coming. A clock somewhere strikes twelve. A large knife is retrieved from the kitchen. A ceremonial cake-cutting. We just thought it would be nice to have something for ourselves for once.

Is literature really over?

What else will keep subtext from burying us all? It keeps piling up–every word, every expression, has its heavy subtextual mimic, the freight of the unspoken that it drops on us. (Words that are manipulative,  sadistic, wheedling, drag endless wakes of unsaid replicas.) Literature gets the job of digging us out: reclaiming subtexts as texts, spelling out what weighs on us. Rendered as language, subtext lacks the same power to oppress.

Such a restless enterprise, when there’s always more of it, cultural and interpersonal, mounting on all sides. But it hardly strikes me that this is the moment to quit trying.

When you feel a sense of disproportion—when your body is too geometric for all your clothing, your shirts turn hunchbacked, your foot still refuses to emerge from your trouser leg hours after the initial insertion—then it is time to go back to school. Bundle up your impulses. Remember it will be cold soon, and flightiness will be punished. Of course, as a housewife, you will be much larger than the other students, but you can make yourself less conspicuous by growing into the spaces between them. Compress your excess volume into cubes and then slide them surreptitiously under the desks.

Does someone look familiar? If so, he certainly does not wish to be recognized. Ignore him carefully.

Protect your own identity as well as his. Resist any urges, for example, to clean up after your fellow students, or to help them with their work. You are never safe here. Don’t bring volumes of Proust to class with you—stick, for now, to true stories of sailors rescued by dolphins.

Count the walls. Count again. There will be more of them the second time.

Even if the room was definitely empty when you locked the doors and windows, inspected all the closets, and then turned off the lights, you should still assume it is populated once dark closes in. Whatever you cannot see is fecund and will surely breed figures that in one respect or another refer to the human form.

If something touches you in the dark, you should leap at once to the conclusion that this presence is animate, however cold, geometric, and lifeless its surfaces happen to feel. Does it refuse to yield under your fingertips, is it as chill and flat as the side of a refrigerator? Nonetheless, you must inform yourself loudly and insistently that it is not merely alive, but also intelligent and hungry. Do the work yourself. Conjure a coat of rough, oily hairs, breathing sides, and a smell of musk and upturned earth. The senses are deceptive unless properly directed, and this new version will surely be more accurate than your first impression.

If the presence then becomes threatening, try to distract it. Imagine beautified variants of your own body inside whatever garments happen to be lying around, or if none are available present the same body unclothed.

I wrote before about the daring inertia of The Changeling by Joy Williams. The funny thing is that it falters slightly once the action picks up. How many books can only sustain their brilliance as long as nothing happens? How many characters lose their attraction once they become sympathetic? But that seems to be the case here. As Pearl starts to manifest a bit more self-awareness and initiative she becomes less compelling, and Williams seems more powerful as a poet of inaction than as a creator of events: an ambiguous, aggressive attempt at sex that occurs toward the end, for example, felt wholly slapdash, drama-as-randomness, even though it was carefully foreshadowed earlier…

It’s still a great book, don’t get me wrong. But with the unravelling of its quiet, fidgeting, multivalent anxieties into murder and mayhem (perhaps in the second-to-last eighth of the book) I found my interest flagging—just at the moment when it should have been most exciting. So perhaps the real hazard of character like Pearl, who exists as a web of tensions rather than as a series of events, is that she can only exist as tension: drama snaps the threads and she falls.

The premise is brilliant. The changeling himself, Sam, who may or may not be Pearl’s child, introduces a kind of subliminal magic to the other children on the island, and the children start to metamorphose into animals and slaughter the adults, leaving only Pearl alive. The prose is spectacular, seductive, insinuating; the transformations are alluringly layered and uncertain. Even Pearl seems a bit unclear on whether or not any of this is actually happening. We gets lines like this: ” It was a summer night. Always it was summer in the womanish, childish, animal houseshape of God.”

If plot is a manifestation of character, though, then maybe plot in a book like this—even inspired plot—can only be an imposition.

“I have to stop this, Pearl thought. I’m going mad. Everything was turning white. Her white nails were gnawed and ugly upon the smooth white mug. She had let one of the children paint them. There was the story, wasn’t there? about the English-woman, who could have been French or Dutch, or even a wealthy American, with one of those wealthy purses or belts or eyeglass cases that says upon it ’shit shit shit shit shit,’ and this woman, whoever she was, was mad but she had been cured of it and they had asked her what it had been like in there, in madness, and she’d said, the angels are white, they give off the most amazing light…”

(Damn, dear housewives, don’t you want that purse? I do.)

I tend to believe that plot is an expression of the characters who generate it. In a way there is no such thing as plot, only the different phases inherent in the character, who exists simultaneously in all of them. It’s not so much that Quentin Compson commits suicide, but instead that suicide is intrinsic to Quentin Compson. His suicide unpacks his soul.

So it’s fascinating to watch a writer determined to violate this tenet as thoroughly as possible, to write a novel whose characters are composed of nonevents: characters so inert that no narrative can inhere in them. To the extent that anything happens, it has to be imposed from without, say by a plane crash. What happens in a narrativeless narrative with characterless characters? I’m more than halfway through The Changeling by Joy Williams, and after a quick blurt of introductory drama her heroine Pearl just sits endlessly beside a swimming pool getting wasted. In so far as there are events, they are mostly passages in the wash of dialogue that surrounds her: she lives on a private island populated by a handful of adults and by her brother-in-law’s many foster children. And Pearl isn’t the only character in the book to display sludgy passivity; the whole book seems to take place in gelatinous suspense.

It’s occasionally draining, but not boring at all. The flux of random voices and broken stories that saturate Pearl have enough fascination to substitute for the absent narrative. This isn’t plot as an expression of character, but plot as a culture of airborne bacteria, stray words and flecks of anxiety.

And there’s the odd excitement provoked by the project’s daring in hanging itself on a character as weak and repellent as Pearl. I’m absorbed in the suspense of waiting for the novel to collapse, to become lousy instead of brilliant. It never happens. The trippy virtuosic prose carries a lot of the weight, certainly, and the sheer textural luxuriance of the fragments Williams collects, and then the creepy resonance that starts to gather between those fragments…

At a certain point, halfway through twilight, the housewife swallowed the house. She instantly regretted it. So much externality confused her. Objects ceased to define her, as they had in her old home, and instead became unraveling extensions of her head, her hands.

As long as she stayed home, her fate was intrinsic. It was just a matter of turning the pages and so finding out who she was. Out here she was as episodic as the streets, as dubious as a sequel.

She could hear the children bickering in her midriff. A fight over who owned the blue horse. They apparently hadn’t even noticed.

If she tried hard enough, could she stop noticing? Insinuate herself again between the covers? She shut her eyes and tried. There was too much cold wind for the effort to be convincing.

You know that someone is a person if he or she is the right size. The housewife realized that her enormity would make her status difficult to determine.

Housewife and nobody are off to the Sanatorium for Uncertain Housewives. We will return, some semblance of ourselves, when our cure is complete, or sooner should we manage to escape. We may, in fact, have a plan.

Check in for fresh dispatches around July 13th.

“Dear Housewives’ Guide,
My children think I’m a monster. I’m afraid they’re disappearing from my life.
[unsigned]”

Dear anonymous,

Don’t fret! You’ve been a wonderful mother, I’m certain of it, else you wouldn’t be writing in to us with such concerns! Children become larger children and larger children become ghostly children. It’s perfectly natural for them to fade in and out of intelligibility, and it’s unlikely they’ll blink out for good. Relax. Think of how delightful it will be when they’ve grown up and become tangible again. And remember when you were a little ghostly thing: everything with solid edges seemed a monster.

Yours,
n

p.s. - Future enquirers: please do make sure your question is properly in the form of one! Manners, manners!

“One looks up
Reading is a mild form of writing
One and one
Book and book
ONE READER: What are you reading
ONE READER: I am reading the essays of Montaigne
BOOK ONE: He says, “We can only improve ourselves in times like these by walking backwards”
BOOK TWO: Let’s suppress the slightly theatrical element in this
BOOK THREE: And now the god put off the bull’s disguise
ONE READER: The head Thought’s Monster, the heart Mind’s Pathos, the genitals Mind’s Beauty, and Thought’s Measure in the hands and feet
ONE READER: Whoever wrote this book could hardly read
BOOK FOUR: Well, as they say in Bulgaria, if you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water
BOOK FIVE: Nobody has ever claimed that the private eye novel has to be realistic to seem realistic
ONE READER: That’s “eye” for “I”
ONE READER (continuing): The detective goes into hospitals, bars, brothels, morgues, girls’ schools, and consulates—anywhere there are people
BOOK SIX: As La Bruyere says, “At the beginning of love and at its end lovers are embarrassed to be left alone”
ALONG COMES A NEW READER: Fork up, mouth open, eat and don’t speak, fork down, mouth closed, chew, then fork up, speak and don’t eat, mouth—
THE OLD READER: Not waving in the air—fork not waving in the air
BOOK SEVEN: There is no feast without cruelty
THE EIGHTH BOOK is a good fiction and it begins as good fictions do
Slowly
The morning-star brings back the shining day
OBSERVER (gazing into a baby buggy): An infant two or three months old will smile at even half a painted dummy face if that half face has at least two clearly defined points or circles for eyes
BOOK NINE: The hero asked the woman why the groan, the gesture, the mutilated forehead, the old river
WOMAN: I see that you have a swirling gait—water is often a medium for transformation
READER: Often in old tales a goose personifying persuasion waddles at love’s side through scenes of seduction
BOOK TEN: In this tale a woman discloses that it is her own seduction of her own husband that has aroused her interest in seduction
That prolongation, that extension of change
Yes, says the hero, if you do something then you have something, and 100% is all of it
BOOK ELEVEN: A totality, but it’s irrevocably dark
READER: He’s gone totally blind
BOOK TWELVE: An incitement to the reader, the guilty
READER (interrupting): … but not apologetic
WRITER: I’m not confessing
BOOK TWELVE (continuing toward a conclusion): Beside the bed a crowded bookcase and on the floor sex toys”

The horizon is a line that may slither in anywhere. Although straight in its relaxed moods, it will often bunch, pleat, or coil the better to conceal itself in the depths of a lingerie drawer or broom closet. It is an intestinal presence, and you should guard against its digestive inclinations. Do not assume that its diet is invariably limited to cars, boats, and birds.

In its white state, it may knock holes in sentences before you say them. Parts of the body, especially the hands and feet, may become confused in its presence and congregate in jostling bunches under the ceiling, or in extreme cases even flit from the window.

If your husband’s teeth or genitals seem suddenly too distinct, too brightly outlined, proceed with utmost caution; the horizon may have negotiated a path around them, and be waiting there in ambush. If you feel uncertain, approach him not with your hand but with an implement such as a hairbrush or pencil, and watch carefully to see if the object appears blunted or vanishes at its tip.

In its darkened form, your horizon may confine itself to making suggestions for your conduct: retreat, surrender, or a vow of silence. Even if you take these suggestions seriously, do your best to keep it off balance. Pretend to laugh.

“Gentlemen! Today is the first time that I realize the presence of life! Gentlemen! I beg you to leave me alone for a moment, so I can savor this formidable, spontaneous, and recent life emotion, which today, for the first time, enraptures me and makes me happy to the point of tears.

My joy comes from what is unexperienced of my emotion. My exultation comes from the fact that before I did not feel the presence of life. I have never felt it. If anyone says that I have felt it he is lying. He is lying and his lie hurts me to such a degree that it would make me miserable. My joy comes from my faith in this personal discovery of life, and no one can go against this faith. If anyone would try, his tongue would fall out, his bones would fall out and he would risk picking up others, not his own, to keep himself standing before my eyes.

Never, except now, has life existed. Never, except now, have people walked by. Never, except now, have there been houses and avenues, air and horizons. If my friend Peyriet came over right now, I would tell him that I do not know him and we must begin anew. When, in fact, have I met my friend Peyriet? Today would be the first time we became acquainted. I would tell him to go away and come back and drop in on me, as if he did not know me, that is, for the first time.

Now I do not know anyone or anything. I notice I am in a strange country where everything acquires a Nativity relief, a light of unfading epiphany. No, sir. Do not speak to that gentleman. You do not know him and such unexpected chatter would surprise him. Do not put your foot on that tint stone: who knows it is not a stone and you will plunge into empty space. Be cautious, for we are in a totally inknown world.

What a short time I have lived! My birth is so recent, there is no unit of measure to count my age. I have just been born! I have not even lived yet! Gentlemen: I am so tiny, the day hardly fits inside me.

Never, except now, did I hear the racket of the carts, that carry stone for a great construction on boulevard Haussmann. Never, except now, did I advance parallel to the spring, saying to it: “If death had been something else…” Never, except now, did I see the golden light of the sun on the cupolas of Sacré-Coeur. Never, except now, did a child approach me and look at me deeply with his mouth. Never, except now, did I know a door existed, and another door and the cordial song of the distances.

Let me alone! Life has now struck me in all my death.”