The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

Ah, I know in my last post I described The Savage Detectives as a conventionally structured, first person, sequential narrative; well, dear housewives, that was true of the first part. Once the second, and longest, section of the book kicks in, though, it changes to unrestrained high-modernism: a fascinating eddying time structure (there are waves of voices; each wave regresses back to January 1976; each succeeding wave laps a bit further forward in time than the wave before) and narration by dozens of separate characters, many, though hardly all of them, people who were mentioned by the hero of the opening section. (Do we still miss modernism so much? Is that why there’s such acute passion for Bolaño now? The literary world seems to treat modernism as a long-ago lover from whose loss it never recovered, and whom it has desperately tried to forget ever since…)

Two of Bolaño’s preoccupations dominate here, as in so much of his work: time, and the sense of literature as a collective, a hive mind. As in Amulet, Bolaño finds opportunities to list the names of writers, both remembered and obscure, until the names become an incantation, the noise of voices joining together in a communal force. (For an example, check this excerpt from Amulet.) The structure of the middle section of The Savage Detectives recreates that hive mind. A swirl of voices (mostly the voices of poets) talk about one another, remember one another, and, while some are individual enough to stand out, others merge, ebb, flux. The poets are formed from each other; literature is formed from those it forgets; those forgotten inform those who are remembered. There’s a kind of unspoken sense, here, that every writer who becomes famous enough to be remembered, even very selectively, contains the remains of dozens who weren’t so lucky. Bolaño is said to have based his characters on people he knew: it’s as if he were listening to the people he loved in anticipation of their deaths, listening to them as a babble of ghosts, and offering himself as a kind of mass grave. It’s tenderly, bitterly beautiful. (And if you’re looking for a Bolaño novel to start with, I think I recommend this one, even though it’s pretty long.)

There’s an interesting, subtle way in which this idea is reinforced through recurrent imagery in which things substitute for other things and contain them, just as people substitute for and support one another. As in:

“He came up and offered me his hand. His grip was peculiar. As if, as we shook, he threw in Masonic code and signals from the Mexican underworld. A tickling and morphologically peculiar handshake, in any case, as if the hand shaking mine had no skin or were only a sheath, a tattooed sheath. But never mind his hand. I said it was a beautiful night and we should go outside and walk. It’s as if it were still summer, I said.”

And:

“Only then did I realize that there was someone beside him. A dark, strong, Indian-looking guy. A guy with eyes that seemed to sort of liquefied and blurry at the same time, and a doctor’s smile, an unusual smile at the Passy Commune, where we all tended to have the smiles of folk musicians or lawyers.”

More on this later…

(And for a previous post on The Savage Detectives, try this.)

From what I’d heard, I expected The Savage Detectives to be a rewarding slog; it was described to me as almost unreadably dense, and then both the short Bolaño novels I’ve read took me some time to get through. Instead I’m finding it brash and playful, with a brightness that persists no matter how dark the story becomes; even, say, when a teenage prostitute is being stalked by her sadistic pimp. Add to that ravenous sexuality, a relative deemphasis on language (his shorter novels took me a long time to read partly because I stopped so often to stroke the prose) and a spattered and unstructured but nonetheless fast-paced plot, and you have something resembling a page-turner. When I’m not reading it, as now, I slightly resent the fact…

It’s also (so far) a lot more conventional than the others I’ve read, without their will to dissolve time into simultaneity. In the first part of The Savage Detectives, the hero Juan Garcia Madero starts college and then stops going, regrets his virginity and then loses it (and then some), immerses himself in bohemian chaos, and hits a pimp, all in sequence. But still I think there’s something about the treatment of experience in The Savage Detectives that anticipates Bolaño’s later trickery with time. In Amulet there’s no distinction allowed between past, present, and future; in By Night in Chile, memory wicks up and drowns the immediate moment. In both cases, I suspect Bolaño was conveying a sense of time informed by his own illness and by the consciousness of coming death. But while there’s still sequence in The Savage Detectives, there’s also a peculiar equalizing of all moments. The wash of idle conversation weighs as much as sex, as much as wandering through bookstores, as much as a beating; causes may have effects, but just as often they eddy and go nowhere, or drowsily reverse themselves. The moments may still be ordered, but their order becomes almost irrelevant. Every moment is so saturated with presence that they’re all constantly on the verge of lifting free of the structure of time. Moments are bubbles of the absolute, each one its own emblem, and it’s easy to imagine that when Garcia Madero thinks about his life he might find himself in the same position as Auxilio in Amulet: subsumed by an infinity of layered moments, all of them still happening.

If it’s an understanding of time infused with death, it’s also a portrayal of sexualized time, in which all moments slide over and through each other. Moments become so vital that they’re almost living things, caught in a soft and constant interpenetration. Bolaño is playing with an animism of the instant.

It’s no wonder to me that Bolaño’s reputation is in such crazed ascent. This is literature like they don’t publish in the United States anymore; literature that has to be vetted abroad before it can appear here. People are so thrilled by this kind of writing because they’ve almost forgotten that it’s possible: that the structuring of a narrative, the texture of language, can be enough to reveal a fresh cult of being…

More on this later.

I’m still on a Bolano kick; now I’m reading By Night in Chile, a swirl of the dying thoughts of a priest and literary critic. Like Amulet, its real subject seems to be literature. But where Amulet presented literature as a source of sustenance, By Night in Chile tends to present it as a disappointment. The peculiarly fluid immortality literature offers (not of individual works or of reputations, but of a kind of intergenerational feeding, a continuity of voices) is the ultimate ideal in Amulet. To the priest in By Night in Chile, the same ideal appears hazy and inadequate, a convulsion of shadows.

At the moment, though, what interests me is the fact that, in both Bolano novels I’ve read so far, the protagonist is an observer of writers rather than a writer him or herself. Auxilio in Amulet is a kind of bohemian hanger-on with a vocation for tending to young poets; Sebastian in By Night mentions his own poetry, but is mainly concerned with refracting other people’s works. I tend to believe that this is to Bolano’s credit. When so many novels resort to the narcissistic (and desperately unimaginative) tack of making the protagonist a writer, too, and thus an obvious stand-in for the author, it’s lovely to see someone choose protagonists that offer, not an occasion for self-absorption, but a vehicle for the contemplation of others. Bolano is fervently interested in literature as a force larger than himself, in how it moves and functions.

He’s keenly aware that almost all writers, even the famous ones, are ultimately dissolved by the flood of other voices. The question present in these two novels is whether it’s correct to regard that dissolution as ecstatic or degrading. Auxilio’s passionate immersion in a literary floating world of nighttime cafes and dying painters suggests a willingness to disappear in voices not her own. Sebastian is positioned at more of a remove, as a friend of other critics and of the already-famous (Neruda figures) and also in his position as a priest, a celibate, and a participant in right-wing politics. He reveals the queasy suspicion that underlines Auxilio’s affirmations: that literature does not provide transcendence, but instead is only a kind of malfunctioning life-support system. He wants to be saved, where Auxilio asks only to be lost.

By Night in Chile is even more deliriously beautiful than Amulet (I’ll post an excerpt soon) but somewhat less engaging, probably because of its narrator’s refusal of belief.

(more)

Specifically, a bit more about that angel I quoted in yesterday’s post: the one, identified as Auxilio Lacoutre’s guardian, who tends her hallucinations as she hides out for days, dizzy with hunger, in a university bathroom after the army has occupied the campus. The angel who reproaches her when she makes the claim that voices are incapable of listening; all they can do is speak. “You’re wrong about that, but it doesn’t matter,” the angel replies; she may be only a voice with borrowed teeth, but she can still hear what’s said to her, even make notes about it. The important thing here, I think, is the insistence on voices, however disembodied, as essentially reciprocal: a significant idea in a novel about literature, when so many of the writers we love no longer have bodies beyond the paper they’re printed on.

Can they hear us, or can they only speak? And whose guardians are they, anyway?

Bolano’s general slipperiness, his comfort, for instance, with permeable boundaries between memory and immediate experience, between present experience and imagination, suggests that he might also be open to multidirectionality in what appear to be one-way exchanges: for example, when a writer addresses readers who weren’t yet born when he wrote. It’s a particular understanding of what literature does. It suggests that to speak is at the same time to hear—the emotional presence, the valence, of your listener, and how that charge shifts the quality of your words even as you say them.

You play a song you love for a friend, and realize immediately, by how terribly altered for worse the song suddenly sounds to you, that your friend hates it; you hear them hearing it, and it changes. You say something thoughtless on the phone, and your insensitivity appears to you figured by the response they haven’t even spoken yet. Or you hear yourself loved in an equal silence. Does something like this occur in literature: that writers hear distant readers through a seeping coloration?

I picked up Bolano’s Amulet recently, more or less at random. There isn’t much plot, or, apart from the narrator, much in the way of characterization, so the question becomes what makes it so effective? Part of it is textural—a back-and-forth slurring through time where the narrator might follow someone in 1963, then, once her target is out on the street, declare that it is actually 1973, or that she remembers things that haven’t happened yet. The narrative is so minimal that this kind of slipperiness is pretty easy to deal with, and it creates a very effective replication of the immersiveness of memory, the way the past can wick up and drench the present…

But basically, Bolano, at least in this novel, is a guy to read for his prose. Witness: “And I see myself that night, my friends, walking towards Lilian Serpas’s apartment, driven by a mystery that is, intermittently, like the wind of Mexico City, a black wind full of geometrically shaped holes, and at other moments more like the city’s calm, an obeisant calm whose sole propety is that of being a mirage.”

The black wind with its geometric holes plays one obvious trick, juxtaposing something fluid and shapeless with the rigidity of hard-edged forms. It also mixes the wind with the city, pocking it with square windows and round potholes, so that these settled forms start to swarm as if alive—lovely.

More on this later.

(Oh, I know the housewives have been missing for some time, the dishes have piled up, the children turned skittish and translucent. But suddenly here we are, saying that we got caught in traffic on the way home from the hairdresser’s. If someone objects that traffic simply couldn’t have been that bad, we will only look blank and complain about the car’s vinyl seats, and how terribly they chafed our thighs.)

It is much noted that sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Dracula is displaced from humans onto vampires; women, indeed, are liberated from their obsessive, saccharine purity only once they become vampires. Also noted is the gender ambiguity of the vampires: male and female, they have sopping vaginal mouths punctuated with pointy phallic teeth; female vampires may thereby penetrate human males; male vampires may suckle human females on blood.

The sexuality is also fugitive, locating itself anywhere but in the genitals. Genital stand-ins can take up residence anywhere, in fact: in the chest punctured by a stake, the throat pierced by teeth. In the latter image both the phallic substitute and the vaginal one are shrunken down to the scale of dollhouse miniatures. Much is made of the daintiness of the holes in Lucy’s neck.

Once seduction becomes so vagrant and ambiguous, the seduced (and the readers) are less responsible, wandering out to the cemetery on the cliff in a trance. The characters may have mastered the defense of genital purity (though Lucy’s explicit wish to marry three men—a detail I was surprised not to see mentioned in the criticism at the back of my Norton critical edition—does suggest that their mastery is not entirely settled) but they can’t withstand these tiny not-quite-genitals that take up residence in odd locations.

The vampires are so hermaphroditic (the teeth forever in the mouths, in diminutive but permanent coitus) that we might wonder why they bother with humans at all.

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.

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 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…

Dear housewives, I’m still reading the absurdly brilliant book-length poem A Border Comedy by Lyn Hejinian, and still reacting to it with sporadic outbursts of delight. A day or two ago I collided with the following passage:

“UNNAMED: There was once a muscular sandpiper who found a ruby of historic size amid the obscurities and glimmers of the rising tide, also there was a vegetarian bartender once, his shoes squeaked indoors and out, and there was a burly doctor too, and a man with a chirp in his ear which called him terrible names/But to these he answered: No!”

And having read it, I felt the need to analyze my reaction: visceral, jubilant love. The thrill here has something to do with the interaction among three forces: the novelistic tone, which to me carries implications of inevitability (Emma Bovary, Lol Stein, Benjy Compson can only be themselves; they are avatars of a sort of absolute that must have always been there, long before their respective novelists marked them down; the pleasure of a great novel is exactly this feeling, no matter how delusory it may be); the gleeful arbitrariness running against the implied inevitability; and the obvious truth of Hejinian’s claims. With the possible exception of the sandpiper, all of these characters clearly do exist in the form of real people. They’ve existed more than once, in fact. There must be dozens of vegetarian bartenders with squeaky shoes in the United States alone. That I continue to figure the character in my head (bald, gay, tall, very possibly living in Palm Springs or some similar resort town) may narrow the field, but it can’t eliminate him. He’s out there!

However arbitrarily she’s conjured him, his inevitability persists. The call goes out into endlessness, and someone answers. That dynamic of call and response is weirdly, painfully beautiful—as if Hejinian were saying that possibility itself will always answer us.

Each novel, with all its freight of inevitability, is written by an entirely arbitrary human being with no real excuse for being him or herself. Benjy Compson feels more necessary to me than Faulkner does. Faulkner: reputedly kind of an asshole. Benjy Compson: a call to the certainty of his own existence, however that existence refracts through thousands of other people.

Maybe the inevitability of fictional characters comes precisely from the fact that they aren’t tied down to any one body, any one identity. They’re free to split, to arrive and depart wherever they want to, opening their eyes inside of anyone.

Possibly more on this later.

The middle section of Shirley Jackson’s exquisitely charming We Have Always Lived in the Castle (see part one) is dominated by the appearance of Cousin Charles, estranged cousin to our narrator, Mary Katherine (whom we know by this point as Merricat), and her sister, Constance. We know he’s trouble right off the bat, but we can’t be immediately certain how insidious his intentions are, whether some of the disgust we feel toward him might have merely rubbed off from Merricat’s obsessive desire to maintain their private, isolated life amid the artifacts of the grand family they once belonged to (and whom one of the sisters most likely poisoned)¹. While it soon becomes clear that Charles is looking to run off with the family fortune (he repeatedly inquires about the safe in the drawing room under the clumsy guise of familial concern), Merricat is much more worried about how he seems to be convincing her sister she ought to travel off the family grounds, to live a more normal life.

The book does an excellent job making us loathe him. Along with Merricat, we hate how he’s insinuated himself into their lives and home. He moves into their father’s bedroom. He wants to send their invalid Uncle Julian off to a nursing home. He lacks the others’ respect for the dead and their artifacts, ridiculing Merricat’s sentimental attachments, scolding Julian for continuing to obsess over the family’s tragedy story². And, with Merricat, we’re frustrated that Constance doesn’t seem to mind.

There’s one aspect of this loathing, however, that makes the reader complicit in something uncomfortable. When Charles gets angry with Merricat after discovering some gold coins she’s buried in the yard (and, earlier, when he discovers she’s nailed her father’s watch to a tree to ward off trouble) we’re made to hate him for his small-mindedness, partly because these little superstitious acts are so tied up with what we adore about Merricat, but largely because what feels like his undue concern over ‘things of value’ serves as a marker of his ulterior, financial motives. But in this latter feeling, in our disgust toward him, we’ve become complicit both in the family’s cavalier Old Money attitude toward their wealth and with their disdain for the less well-off who apparently need to treat money as something truly of value. It’s a doubly uncomfortable position since, as we saw last week, the book’s first chapter even goes so far as to conflate the townsfolk’s disgust at the murders with their resentment of the Blackwoods’ wealth. But our sympathy for Merricat is so pleasurable we decide to overlook it.

It was last October when I read the first half of Lyn Hejinian’s A Border Comedy, and I was already a fan of her marvelous not-really-autobiography My Life–a book which must surely establish her as the ultimate in honorary housewives, if only for the line “Jameson speaks of a ‘collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity’, and I put pen to page scrupulously and write, ‘I prefer the realm of Necessity’.” My Life is a work of delirious madness primarily concerned with things like bringing in the groceries–a truly nervy gerrymandering of visionary territory that earned her my undying ardor. Oh, and then I saw her read, and she kicked ass.

But halfway through A Border Comedy I put it aside, and not because I didn’t love it. It was only a few days ago that I picked it up again. Maybe the stakes were too high, and too exhausting. My Life is basically a portrayal of each human life as porous, filtering every other possible life and snagging loose fragments of all of them. One critic (Kornelia Freitag) wrote that it reads like a collection of sentences taken from every possible story, all endlessly alluding to their continuity beyond the text’s confines. Lives (in their narrative form, anyway) infiltrate each other, twist other lives into new shapes. But in My Life the sentences retain a solidity, an integrity, even as they nose and jostle at each other and shove each other off on strange trajectories. Still, through all the hubbub, the sentence remains the inviolable unit, and the sentences imply stories.

A Border Comedy is a rougher, funnier, perhaps more sadistic work, because now the unit is the word (or sometimes the phrase) and each individual fragment is at the mercy of the corrupting influence of every word near it. The insinuation is no longer just that stories and lives are infinite, mutually distorting, but that meanings are. The DNA of every word is contaminated by all the words around it, so that it mutates with each fresh repetition. Disturbing things start to wriggle out of the petri dish: “I may sleep you to the bed, you bandage me to the hand, I poison you to the spider, the spider cloud you to the skyline, the skyline unknowingly cog the sky…”

It’s a book, I think, about the metamorphic possibilities of language, about words as shape shifters. And that brings us back, for the moment, to Marina Warner, who quotes yet another critic, Michel de Certeau, on metamorphosis: “It carries the sign from one space to another, and it produces the new space. It is by this metamorphosis that a chart of knowledge is transformed into a garden of delights.”

Is this just the same old instability-of-the-signifier business? I feel like it isn’t. I feel like we’re messing with something a lot scarier, here, than just instability.

This is signifying as a slapstick pursuit of meaning, a cruelly comic effort to smash it flat with each word we speak, before it has time to transform itself and thereby escape us.

This is meaning as the nightmare mutating cockroaches of the mind.

Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle has such a charming, curious opening, and until the end of the second chapter we’re not sure what kind of book we’re reading: a more or less realistic story of a culture gone awry (like her now-canonized “The Lottery,” which you most likely read in grade school) or a story of the outright supernatural (like her The Haunting of Hill House).

It turns out, I’m pretty sure, that as we saw with the uncanny elements in Les Enfants Terribles, the potentially supernatural in this book serves as a marker pointing toward or intensifying a purely realistic family drama. Until the end of the second chapter, however, we just sense that something is or has gone wrong. The eighteen year old narrator walks through town to pick up groceries, careful to avoid people. Her whimsy, specifically in response to the townsfolks’ hatred toward her and her family (as we saw in the quotation posted last week, imagining herself on the moon), calls into question the veracity of the less whimsical, but still unusual, things she hints at.

The book’s first paragraph, for example, even suggests that we might be reading a story with werewolves in it. I’ll quote it because it gives a nice sense of how Mary’s curious strangeness is bound up in these nice, too-simple sentences:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

It’s the town’s hatred toward Mary Katherine and her family that dominates the first chapter, but we’re not let in yet on precisely why there’s such hostility. It’s strongly suggested that class inequity is the main issue. The town is mostly impoverished, and the Blackwood family – what’s left of it – lives off on a big, fenced-in plot of land (perhaps having taken their money out of the banks shortly before the depression hit?). They can afford to send Mary Katherine out shopping once a week for a lavish list of groceries. And while some off-hand remarks suggest something more is going on, we think these uncanny bits might just be a way for the book to explore class as something sinister. Mary Katherine talks about the townsfolk like they’re irrational monsters. The townsfolk seem to treat her almost like she’s a ghost. Or maybe she’s contagious. Or maybe she’s a monster. Or her sister is.

But it turns out the book’s first chapter is playing a sort of double game. We later realize we couldn’t help but misinterpret, for example, what’s going on in the grocery store when someone gasps at Mary’s asking for a fresh sack of sugar. We think, on first reading, that it must be the excess of it, that sugar must be something audaciously scarce. Likewise, when the grocery list has been fully recited and someone in the store says “The Blackwoods always did set a fine table” we think it must be resentment about what the Blackwoods have and do not share. But there’s an excess of response here that suggests there’s something more that we’re not comprehending:

”The Blackwoods always did set a fine table.” […]and someone giggled and someone else said “Shh.” I never turned; it was enough to feel them all there in the back of me without looking into their flat grey faces with the hating eyes. I wish you were all dead, I thought, and longed to say it out loud. […] I would have liked to come into the grocery store some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves[…].

(And if this is ultimately about class, then Mary definitely isn’t coming off too well, dreaming of robbing the less well-to-do who feel contempt for her).

But by the end of the second chapter we learn that the sugar Mary requests is a special object, that the Blackwood family, less the surviving three members, were killed one night six years ago when their sugar bowl was laced with arsenic, and that Mary’s older sister (who even now cooks all the meals every day for the three survivors¹), was accused of committing the murders, though later acquitted. So there’s the uncanny referent: killing those closest to you, through their sweet dessert berries, no less. The danger posed by sweet, innocent-seeming loved ones and their too-sweet treats².

This is a great book so far: The townsfolk (particularly a representative visitor in chapter two who comes to gawk at the family’s dining room table) don’t believe in Constance’s innocence. She washed the sugar bowl right after dinner – but not any of the other dishes – because, she says, there was a spider in it? We don’t know what to think yet. And Mary is excessively afraid when Constance starts mentioning she might like to go off their property some day (something that reads as potentially supernatural until it gets recontextualized by the murder story). And Mary’s narration, her anger, her guilty feelings toward her uncle who was poisoned, but not mortally so, continually reminding herself to be kind to him, clearly suggests she was the murderer, but the story moves along without turning into a murder mystery. It’s much more interested in the aftermath, in memory, in fear of the world, in the strange family dynamic. And – one more charming thing – her uncle, enfeebled, prone to memory loss, talks endlessly of the memoir he’s writing, his “papers” about that tragic day’s events, no detail too small to note.

As part of my ongoing study of horror I’m reading Marina Warner’s book on monsters, No Go the Bogeyman. And at the halfway mark the most intriguing thing (in a lovely, complex, charmingly ornate book) is her diagnosis of a debate buried in the subtexts of our culture: which member of the family is the monster, or more precisely, which position in it is the monstrous one? (As I write this, Andrew Bird is singing through my headphones: “Monsters will walk the earth!”) Monsters used to be identified primarily with child mortality, the constant menace that children wouldn’t live to adulthood. Warner makes the case that, since the odds of our children surviving are now quite good, we’ve been liberated to relocate the monster inside the child. Now that we’re not afraid monsters will eat our children, we’re free to be afraid that the children will eat us. (Of course, as some housewives out there are well aware, questions of children’s perceived monstrousness are dear to my heart.)

Warner’s hostility to this idea is clear. If there are cannibals in the family, she says, then they’re certainly the adults. Of course it’s easier to deal with the indictment children represent if we can turn the blame on them. Then the questions cease to be the hateful ones (what hellish legacy have we left them, what have we done to their planet, how has our personal darkness imprinted them?) and become instead more palatable (will they devour our bones, our homes, and our lives? Will they simply squeeze us out of existence? Isn’t there a fucking food crisis? Why can’t they just stop eating already?) As she notes, it’s far more likely that parents will do physical and emotional harm to their children than the other way around. During sieges and famines cannibals snatch children as the easier prey. If adults think of children as monsters, they’re only projecting their own sadism. And so Melanie Klein, who wrote a lot about children as loci of violent appetite, comes in for some criticism.

Warner hasn’t yet mentioned how overpopulation might enter into this suppressed identification of children with consuming monstrosity. I can’t help thinking it’s a pretty serious oversight. We may indeed be approaching a moment when humanity could eat itself: a kind of monstrosity involuntary and innocent, but devastating all the same.

In the course of thinking about which texts generate fear and why, I’ve found myself recalling the book that might have scared me more than any other in my life: Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, a long narrative poem published in 1862. I was probably five or six years old when it was first read out loud to me, and it’s formed an undercurrent in my mind ever since, a private haunting. And even now rereading it sends shivers through me, though I find it hard to communicate the precise quality of dread it inspires.

The story involves two sisters, Lizzie and Laura, who go every evening to fetch water in a glen where the goblins sell fruit. Like many of the best horror stories, this is a seduction narrative: the girls know that the fruit is dangerous, but it’s still terribly beautiful. (Can there be terror unless the victim is complicit? I suspect that real dread is provoked by the treachery inherent in the self, its hidden pitfalls.) Rossetti offers a refrain, always in parentheses: “(Men sell not such in any town)”, and each time those parentheses seem to enclose a soft patch in the mind. The words affect me as if my foot had slipped into quicksand.

Lizzie runs from the goblins; Laura lingers behind, and trades a lock of her hair for the fruit. It’s a potent image of seduction, addiction: offering part of your own body in exchange for an experience both violent and transcendent. (”She sucked and sucked and sucked the more/Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;/ She sucked until her lips were sore”). But the passage which has stayed with me more than any other comes once Laura finally wanders home, only to be scolded by the unsuspecting Lizzie. I’ll quote it in full:

“‘Dear, you should not stay so late,/Twilight is not good for maidens;/Should not loiter in the glen/In the haunts of goblin men./Do you not remember Jeanie,/How she met them in the moonlight,/Took their gifts both choice and many,/Ate their fruits and wore their flowers/Plucked from bowers/Where summer ripens at all hours?/But ever in the noonlight/She pined and pined away;/Sought them by night and day,/Found them no more, but dwindled and grew gray;/Then fell with the first snow,/While to this day no grass will grow/Where she lies low:/I planted daisies there a year ago/That never blow./You should not loiter so.’”

Laura doesn’t listen. She’s still crazed from the fruit, already delirious in anticipation of getting more, but of course Jeanie’s story presages her own. The next night only Lizzie can hear the goblins calling them: having once eaten the fruit, you can never find it again. This is an element of the plot which has stymied interpreters who try to explain the story purely in terms of sex, which generally isn’t too hard to find a second time. It makes more sense as a depiction of the insatiability of addiction, but it doesn’t perfectly correspond to addiction either: the spell can be broken by a second taste of the fruit.

It might be that slipperiness which makes this poem so eerie: it can’t be reduced to something as simple as Laura’s losing her virginity, or getting hooked on coke. The otherness that consumes Laura is indwelling, close to home: a complex of destructive longings that ripens in permanent summer, and that doesn’t need to conform to any particular devastation, because it can transmute into any of them.

Octavia Butler’s “Near of Kin,” according to the jacket copy of her Bloodchild collection, is “her only non-SF story.” In this collection, at least, which is all I’ve read of hers, it’s the only story that doesn’t contain some sort of horror or fantasy element, the only story that rests perfectly within the rules of our real, everyday world.

It’s no coincidence, then, that this simple, touching story of a girl and her uncle going through the belongings left behind by her recently dead mother, his recently dead sister, is, in the end, an incest narrative. (The girl reveals to her uncle that she knows he’s her father). This isn’t to say that the specter of incest here takes on any of the uncanny qualities we see in, say, Les Enfants Terribles (see two earlier posts), but rather simply that incest, by virtue of its own cultural force, even without reinforcement by literary device, can take the place of the monstrous or uncanny for an author otherwise exclusively interested in those modes. Analogous in some ways maybe to Barthes’ photographic punctum, incest serves as the element of the story that pierces the reader, that jars us to attention. (Bloodchild’s first two stories, for counter-example, use the horror of bodily evisceration to similar effect).

One more thing: while looking around for a source online for this story’s full text (unfortunately not available), I came across another site writing about the Bloodchild collection. She sketches out their plots much more completely and elegantly than I have, so it’s worth taking a look for that alone. (It also looks like a great site in general.)

About “Near of Kin,” she writes that while “Butler calls this her sympathetic incest story I find it sad that there is very little in the way of redeeming human relationships in the story.” I wonder if this is a common reaction, because while the mother-daughter relationship is certainly depressing (the mother having all but abandoned her daughter as a child), I read the daughter-uncle relationship as really quite hopeful. It sounds like he’s always been a loving, if distant, figure in her life, and it sounds like he can now, with their shared paternity secret acknowledged, be a whole lot more.

Touré’s The Portable Promised Land is a dangerous and compelling book. A number of its stories – especially the first few – beg for a phrase like “Black American Magic Realism,” but the real thread connecting most of its stories has less to do with their magical, fantastic elements (a preacher ‘flies’ with a harness but then a boy flies for real, a man loses his ability to see white people, a number of deals may or may not have been made with devils) and more to do with an analogous heightening of racial tropes.

Where magic realism (and I’m really thinking of García Márquez here) reveals something about the world through its confusion of the real and the imaginary, Touré’s equivalent cultural move seems to make a similar claim about its confusion of the real and the stereotype. It feels particularly dangerous because we can’t necessarily put our finger on where precisely The Portable Promised Land slips between these two categories.¹ We know that a church installed in an abandoned Kentucky Fried Chicken is over the top, and we know that its preacher giving sermons on how to make love to your lady is way over the top (as “the women [congregants] let out a tremendous mmm-hmmm.”), but we’re not sure about, say, an up and coming MC who, we’re told, has “the political complexity and hiphop passion and technical mastery and pure soul of Tupac, Rakim, [and] Big,” who is “possibly the most baadass sexy woman Black America has seen since her Highness Pam Grier busted out,” and whose soon to be released album “is a thirty-two-song essay about the coming race war.” “[…]if they need some euphoric catharsis at the end of a long day of killing, my album got that, too,” she’s quoted in interview.

This last comes from the first in a series of stories about The Black Widow’s rise and fall, the first of which originally appeared in The Source as a feature article with no accompanying language to suggest its subject wasn’t actually real. She’s quoted saying “Racism is the cosmic, pathetic, and logical invention of a thoroughly diseased skull. […]Actually, the word racism is too vague and confusing. It leads to the thinking that we’re talking about race prejudice, which Black people can practice. Black people are not the problem. The word is white supremacy[…]” and we nod our head because the analysis feels cogent and cuts through a lot of the bullshit we see in culture about affirmative action and so-called reverse discrimination. But she continues, “And when you realize how second nature the supremacy of whiteness is in their minds, then you begin to understand that no amount of hand holding or million marching or consciousness raising will cleanse them. There is only one antidote for white supremacy. It is a bullet, delivered swiftly to the cranium. The higher the caliber, the more effective the treatment.”

Even read within a collection of fiction (and not as supposed true journalism) this puts us in a tricky position. At this point, the narrator/journalist, has shown himself to be a clear admirer. The Black Widow is hiphop’s new hope for artistic strength and political clarity, he tells us. And so when we get to this tricky logical transition, we can’t help but wondering where the author stands, where Touré himself stands, where we should stand. We’ve been seduced into admiring the Black Widow ourselves, and so, for a moment perhaps, we might even buy into her call for war.

By the end of this first story we get that we should have known better. We get this well before the later stories and their revelation that even within this fictional world the Black Widow’s backstory is a hoax (things coming to a head after a young black girl kills her white boyfriend in front of MTV’s live, broadcasting cameras). We should have sensed right from the start, for example, that something was funny about the Black Widow’s insistence on using “MC” to mean “melatonin-challenged” (i.e., not black, white-people), and the narrator/journalist’s ability to ignore this ironic rapper-“MC” vs. white people-“MC” word choice. By the end of this first story we see a white fan brought up on stage, tied to a chair, and shot dead. We see the audience’s disunification as the earlier talk of violence suddenly becomes present and straight-forward and real (“Somehow it sounds different now that she’s added to her body count right before our eyes. The crowd stands paralyzed by what they’ve seen. After a confused moment some head for the door. Some vomit on their shoes. But some cheer maniacally, energized by The Black Widow’s example, ready to follow her to the earth’s end”). That the body in the chair is dragged far offstage, only to then get up and be wished a good night, is almost beside the point. We’ve already been well played.

A few closing thoughts. First is that while the “Black Widow” series, which comes late in the collection, tips its hand in its cultural critique, earlier stories, particularly those dealing with an older sense (and stereotype) of urban black community, don’t. And so it’s neat how their use of magic realism points us toward their cultural slippages and exaggerations, a way at getting to broader, emotional, phantasmatic truths about being black in America, a recognition that myth-making is precisely how communities form and function.

Lastly, I should point out that Touré’s short story collection is operating in a whole slew of modes beyond that of the realistic magical. In a sort of conversation, I think, with other young, contemporary writers (there’s even a tennis story for David Foster Wallace, though this one ends in child-on-child lynching), a number of stories take unconventional form. One gets presented as “Afrolexicology Today’s Biannual list of the Top Fifty Words in African-America.” Another suggests the outline of a narrative through a long series of one or two word racially coded phrases, separated into paragraphs as though in the form of a conventional story. Another presents a soundbite history of the late 20th century as it should have been. (This one’s particularly touching.)

The Portable Promised Land is a broad collection of stories and I’m excited to pick up Touré’s second once I get back to town.

You know by now that housewives read a lot of ghost stories, but I may not have mentioned that, for this housewife at least, it’s part of a deliberate study of horror as a genre. I’m reading them partly to monitor my own reactions: which tactics work to create a feeling of dread? Which tricks feel risibly manipulative, too cheap to deserve responsive fear? (In this category I place, for instance, loud-mouthed instructions from the writer to be very, very afraid, along with assurances that he can’t possibly reveal what it is I’m supposed to be afraid of, because if he did it would blow my fucking mind. To this I say, Nice try, buddy. Indeed I regard this kind of emotional dictation as the major weakness of the otherwise stunning House of Leaves.) And which techniques are more ambiguous? Rudyard Kipling’s “They” makes me keenly aware that I’m both manipulated and unable to resist, so that I feel torn between annoyance and admiration.

So how does it work? Kipling lays on the wispy atmospherics with a spatula, and I quite like wispy atmospherics, but they do draw themselves to my attention as a device. Nice-guy hero lost in a dark woods stumbles across a beautiful house inhabited by a beautiful, ethereal blind woman. It seems to be some sort of orphanage. Imperfectly seen children peer through the windows and flit across the wooded grounds, and our hero does his best to amuse them, though they are too shy to come close. Soon we begin to suspect that he may be a bit slow on the uptake: the beautiful blind woman is surprised but pleased that he sees the children, and admits that she has no idea how many of them there are; they come and go, and after all she can’t see them but only hears their voices. If this is an orphanage, they’re slacking on the record keeping. We wait in vain for the hero to ask a few direct questions.

These kinds of elisions are pretty standard. The writer creates mystery by deleting various means of determining the truth: the woman’s sight, the hero’s capacity for critical thinking, the children’s proximity. But damned if it isn’t effective! I’m seduced by the uncanny even as I watch its construction.

Cut to the nearby village. Our hero, who has a car, races for a doctor in an attempt to save a local child dying of meningitis. The child’s grandmother observes that the kid doesn’t stand a chance: soon her daughter will be “walking in the woods.” What can that mean, he wonders.

Another basic trick: let the reader understand more than the protagonist does, so that a fissure opens in our identification with him. It’s as if we watched our own minds yawning after comprehension, unable to quite grasp the obvious. It creates a dreamlike ache, a restless longing, while we wait for him to finally recognize the truth. Add to this the poignancy of Kipling’s image of bereft peasant girls trying to glimpse the ghosts of their dead children, and I am helplessly taken in.

And perhaps I would remain so, if Kipling didn’t exploit mystery as a shortcut. The hero notices that visitors to the house are unaccountably terrified, and he feels the touch of small unseen hands. But having realized these children are all ghosts, he knows that he can never come there again. The beautiful blind woman perfectly understands his reasons for this, drawing on her psychic link with him, but the reader is left out of the loop. And at that point seduction turns back into irritation, and I resist the invitation to believe that our hero has profound but unspoken motivations that simply elude me. Should a story really end with the reader asking, “Wait. What’s his problem, already?”

I have mixed feelings about Paul Auster these days, mixed because I still read every book he publishes but while I read them now, no matter how much or little I might enjoy each one, a voice in the back of my head keeps telling me he might not be a very good writer. I’m afraid to go back and re-read the New York Trilogy, for fear of, through distaste, betraying the teenager who had been so taken in by its charms and complications after picking it up more or less randomly from a library shelf years ago. I just don’t want to find out now that the whole thing feels…empty.

And it’s possible it will, that all that self-referential play might be a sham, a trick that papers over a sort of core void at the center of his books.

I’m less worried about it today.

Yesterday I went wandering through the library stacks, looking for some books to bring along on a trip this week, and an illustrated edition of Paul Auster’s Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story caught my eye. I was pretty sure I’d read it before, but most likely as part of a collection and definitely not with these illustrations. It’s an extremely short story, originally published on Christmas Day, 1990, as a New York Times op-ed column, and there’s something appealing about such small books when imagining lugging bags through an airport.

The story breaks into two parts. First we hear about Auggie Wren, a counterman at Auster’s local cigar shop, and his decade-long project in which he takes a photograph outside his shop every morning and places them in, at that point, twelve identical photo albums.

The second half is the story of how Auggie Wren acquired his first camera and thus started his project. He runs after a young shoplifter who gets away but drops his wallet. A few months later, on Christmas Day, a bit more lonely and a bit more forgiving, he decides to do a good deed and return it to the thief. At the apartment he instead finds an elderly blind woman who mistakes him for her errant grandson and he plays along, knowing all the while that the woman must realize he’s not actually her kin, that they’re both in fact playing along for the sake of the fiction and for the sake of what that fiction can satisfy for each of them (on Christmas Day). He finds a stack of cameras, most likely stolen, in the bathroom corner. She’s fallen asleep. He takes one and wanders out. A few months later still he goes back to return it, but a different family has moved in.

It’s a simple story, a bit sentimental, and it’s complicated by a few storytelling tricks. Auster explains his nervousness at being commisioned to write a Christmas story. The second half of the story is in fact narrated by Auggie to Auster, who toward the end interjects with a few questions. Auster, by noticing a wry smile on Auggie’s face, let’s us know that Auggie’s story may in fact be completely invented, but that it would be inappropriate to ask if that’s the case. We’re thusly led to suspect that the entire wrapper story is also a fiction, but we’ve already been told — twice now, once through watching Auggie play along with the grandmother, a second time just now through Auggie’s wry smile — that the proper response as readers is to let that play of truth and fiction flutter about and not worry too much about pinning it down. Perhaps we’re moved to check the New York Times archives to see if the bit about the story being commissioned might even itself be a lie, but if we do go check we do it with a small sense of guilt that we’ve missed the point.

What I’ve taken away from rereading the story is this: that the narrative trickery elevates the story’s sentiment by bestowing on it a little bit of magic and wonder. By foregrounding the act of storytelling, it softens us up a bit: we remember being told stories as children and not necessarily grasping what’s real and what’s not, and, in finding ourselves in such a position, we’re better able to accept the story’s sentiment. I mean, it’s a Christmas story! Precisely what we’re most likely, cynically, to reject! That we also get to feel warm about storytelling itself, about its power to charm us, is an added gift. (Merry Christmas, housewives).

P.S. - I wanted to link to the original NYTimes op-ed, but the best I could find was this page from Christmas, 1990, mentioning its existence.

P.P.S. - The illustrated edition I found really is lovely. It would make a nice gift — eight months from now.

I’m about halfway through Matt Ruff’s Sewer, Gas & Electric, and while I’m enjoying it immensely I may not end up with much to say about it. For now I’ll point out that it shares a lot with (my vague memories of) Gravity’s Rainbow – something about its craziness, its complicated list of characters and their complicated plotting, their obsessing. I’ve counted at least a few Pynchon references in the book, some of them overt, some of them more sly. Spotting them has been fun, and I do suspect that I’m missing a slew more. It’s sent me to the P section of my shelves a few times now, and that’s been satisfying in and of itself. (I’d forgotten how lyrical Gravity’s ending is, the rocket rising and falling, about to strike what I think is positioned as the theater of the book’s own storytelling, finally carving out the infinitesimal moment between living and not with a last appeal to the reader/viewer: “There is time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next to you, or to reach between your own cold legs[…].” I didn’t get around to reading Gravity’s Rainbow until shortly after the airplanes flew the wrong way and the big buildings came down. I’ll have to read it again the next time explosions hit close to home.)

Back to Sewer, Gas & Electric, the section I’ve just finished reading — set at about exactly the halfway point, no less — includes a six page summary of Atlas Shrugged. This is especially nice, because 1) it turns out it’s really funny for a book to suddenly slip into an extended summary of one of its pre-texts (and now I see there’s been a whole lot more play on Ayn Rand’s book than the overt references I’d caught), and 2) I’ve always been too afraid to read Ayn Rand. I hear I just shouldn’t bother anyway, but I had previously been afraid of being brainwashed by her wily narrative tricks and corrosively self-interested philosophy. Now I think her books might be enjoyable on the level of unintentional self-parody? (The figure of Atlas shrugging is that of the world’s capitalist leaders more or less going on strike? Really?) Please advise.