The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

A couple footnotes to yesterday’s post on the middle third of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

¹Faithful housewives will recognize that I have a mild obsession with intragenerational incest narratives these days, so do tell me if you think I’m seeing ghosts where none exist, but I can’t help sensing that the spell Charles is casting on Constance is something of a seduction. It would be merely perverse to suggest anything untoward in Constance’s first response to her cousin’s appearance (“‘Merricat,’ Constance said; she turned and looked at me, smiling. ‘It’s our cousin, our cousin Charles Blackwood. I knew him at once; he looks like Father.’”), but there’s something subtly charged about how Merricat and Constance discuss whether Constance should put on their mother’s pearls for dinner (“‘I have never worn pearls[…]It’s not likely that anyone would care,’ Constance said. ‘I would care, if you looked more beautiful.’ Constance laughed, and said, ‘I’m silly now. Why should I want to wear pearls?’ ‘They’re better off in the box where they belong.’”). This wouldn’t be the only instance of the sisters using ’silliness’ to ward off the specter of sexuality. One more quotation, in which talk of Charles leads awkwardly into talk of boyfriends (and then, again, to silliness):

“I think,” Constance said, “that we are going to have to forbid your wandering. It’s time you quieted down a little.”

“Does ‘we’ mean you and Charles?”

“Merricat.” Constance turned toward me, sitting back against her feet and folding her hands before her. “I never realized until lately how wrong I was to let you and Uncle Julian hide here with me[…]We should have been living like other people. You should . . . ” She stopped, and waved her hands helplessly. “You should have boy friends,” she said finally, and then began to laugh because she sounded funny even to herself.

[…] “You are the sillest person I ever saw[…].”

I had assumed all this was hinting toward an inappropriate relationship between Constance and Charles, but now, seeing these out of context, I wonder if what we’re really seeing is a quasi-sexual relationship between the sisters that’s been threatened by Charles’ mere presence. When Merricat says that she “would care” if the pearls made Constance more beautiful, is she saying that she would mind her sister’s preening in front of Charles, or that she, unlike Charles, would care to admire her sister’s beauty? Maybe I am seeing ghosts. Please advise.

(click for pronunciation)

²Toward the end of this section, when Charles discovers that Merricat has filled his bed with muddy leaves and broken glass (and we love her for it, the little rascal!), frustrated with Constance’s lack of interest in punishing her, he turns to Uncle Julian who tells him “‘My niece [Merricat] has been a long time dead, young man. She did not survive the loss of her family; I supposed you knew that.’ ‘What?’ Charles turned furiously to Constance. ‘My niece Mary Katherine died in an orphanage, of neglect, during her sister’s trial for murder. But she is of very little consequence to my book, and so we will have done with her.’”

This is a neat turn for a couple of reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple footnotes to yesterday’s post on Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

¹The book can’t help but raise, of course, the question of why the daughter was doing all the family’s cooking in the first place: even in her death, the specter of the Bad Mother is endlessly and ultimately responsible.

²This redoubling of the sugar’s significance — first as money-excess and then, excessively itself, as a shameless reminder of an intra-family murder — is mirrored in the way Mary, through a sort of imaginary, magical thinking, imbues ordinary objects (and words!) with power. (She has always buried things just under the topsoil, like she’s marking the family land as her own, or planting her family’s history so it can later sprout. She has a book nailed to a tree by the border, to ward off trouble. She tells herself, I’ll pick three words and as long as no one says these words out loud we’ll be safe.)

Both the book’s play with the sugar and Mary’s play with her special objects and words are a sort of fetishization of the mundane, something we also saw in Les Enfants with its drawer of special objects (the first blockquote in this post). A possible generalization: the more whimsical fetishization, excessively cathecting onto the ordinary (discarded object), is the flip-side of the uncanny, which can take the ordinary (sugar bowl) and make it horrifying.

(click for pronunciation)

A couple footnotes to last month’s post on Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles:

¹Let me point out here that intragenerational incest makes for the perfect tragic-romantic love story — much more fertile than any Shakespearean nonsense about warring families — partly because the familial closeness can easily read as Perfect For Each Other (bonus points if they’re twins, bonus points for you as a reader if you believe in Sameness as a proper romantic quality), but even more so because what keeps a story’s sibling lovers apart, what makes their love monstrous, what necessitates their narrative punishment, is the very prohibition-taboo upon which society is founded. Teenagers in love against their rival families’ wishes? Facile by comparison!

²When I was a third of the way through, and utterly taken with its uncanny charms, I assumed that Les Enfants Terribles was building up to a central taboo revelation, but it turns out that “incest” only gets mentioned once, only in the book’s final scene, only “one little moment” before the siblings death, “[…]where flesh dissolves, where souls embrace, where incest lurks no more.” Read the rest of this entry »

A footnote to last month’s post on Jesse Ball’s excellent Samedi the Deafness:

¹We learn, for example, on the bottom of the very first page, that James, our main character and reader-surrogate, is a professional mnemonist. Actually, we learn it twice on the first page, as though we might need help remembering: “Sunday was always the best of days for being the self you had intended to be, but were not, for one or another reason. This was true most of all for those without families, those without friends. He thought, then: We of the mnemonist profession are always discrete in our ways. This pleased him. He said it aloud as he passed again into the morning as though entering some familiar hall. / — Of course, we of the mnemonist profession are always discrete in our ways.”

We learn more about this throughout the book, but almost always similarly in passing. We learn that it is in fact James’ job to remember things. We learn that he works for a firm, hired out, we assume, to corporations in need of a living witness. We don’t learn why his clients don’t just write things down. We learn that he’s been trained for perfect recall. We suspect that it’s the completeness of a mnemonist’s memory that makes their services useful. Maybe they can testify at trial about the angle of the shadows and the color of the drapes. We get to imagine all this ourselves.

But each time James’ profession is mentioned I can’t help but thinking What restraint! What restraint for a book to set up a main character with perfect recall and to not let him narrate! Because a narrator’s perfect recall is the superhuman trait we forgive every book with a character-narrator. It’s the little trick behind every first-person narration, the fiction we allow because we (usually) have no choice but to believe, within the fictional world, that what’s being narrated is the truth. Can we say that the reliability of the narrator’s memory is the bedrock of the Novel’s fictional legibility? Sure!

That Samedi the Deafness seems precisely interested in these questions of truth and reliability, in locating the point beyond which we have no choice but to believe in what we’re being told, makes the choice of third-person narration even more interesting. The answer may very well be that the extra possibilities for confusion a first-person narration would allow would just be too much to handle, no longer fun. We’d also miss out on a whole bunch of Ball’s stylistic tricks, and that would have been a shame.

A footnote to yesterday’s post on Touré’s The Portable Promised Land:

¹If there’s an equivalent danger to be found in, say, One Hundred Years of Solitude’s use of straight up magic realism, it would most likely have something to do with how its general slippages between the real and the mythic end up confusing the truth-value of one of the book’s central horrors: the Colombian government’s slaughter, en masse, of the striking banana plantation workers in 1928.

It feels dangerous — similarly to Touré’s slippages between the real and the stereotype — precisely because of the political import of the banana massacre’s details. The event is already shrouded in myth and counter myth: the Columbian government claiming a death toll of as few as 47 (or possibly even 9? I haven’t researched beyond wikipedia here, which is itself slightly confused on the matter), the workers claiming a death toll of as many as 2000.

The discrepancy, of course, matters, if nothing else for generating outrage at the government’s violent collusion with corporate interests. And so there’s a danger that García Márquez’s telling — in which thousands are killed — will be classified as mere exaggeration, exaggeration on par with the book’s obviously magical elements.

On the other hand, however, it could be said that by being incorporated into a book filled with myth and exaggeration, García Márquez’s telling of the banana massacre story can be placed beyond reproach, beyond the author-journalist’s common need for what in this case might prove to be impossible fact checking. And because the book’s myth-making in general takes on the power of a supernatural truth, a truth more pure, we feel, than a respect for the strictly-possible could ever get at, its horrible story of thousands dead (for the sake of money!) rings true as well.

(Maybe a third view could talk about the massacre as an “unimaginable horror,” a dark hole in history’s fabric that allows the rest of the book’s myth-making to be elevated even further into the realm of the possible. “If this unimaginable horror could be true” we might ask as readers, “then why not everything else, to boot?”)