The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

The real housewives of Bushwick aren’t here for your fucking funeral. As far as we’re concerned, that coffin is made of glass, and we can already see the goldfishes flopping around inside. We can throw stones inside it, and not break anything but our own view of the street. You haven’t sold us a single vacuum cleaner, not even one with an attachment that can suck up the emotional residue of your own untoward death. You might as well stop trying.

And now that that’s settled, and you’re down on the couch, resigned to your highball in lieu of a bouquet, I can ask you: why is the desire to be a robot so universally selfish? It only takes a moment on the internet to ascertain this: millions of people wish they were, themselves, robots, but no one at all wishes the same thing for their daughters, husbands, boyfriends. It’s sad, really. Emotional remove, automation, appears to be a private luxury, something hoarded, something no one will give as a gift.

(And only one person wishes to be a machine. I don’t know who it is. Everyone else wants to gain the detachment while retaining the humanoid shell. They’re tricky that way. And no one wishes they were a typewriter.)

And are they so different from you, my dear, with your inhumed words, your turned-over goldfish, your legs always straddling that coffin? Don’t you realize we can all see you aren’t inside it?

“When the sun stands striding at high noon,
then up from the waves he comes—
the Old Man of the Sea who never lies—
under a West Wind’s gust that shrouds him round
in shuddering dark swells, and once he’s out on land
he heads for his bed of rest in deep hollow caves
and around him droves of seals—sleek pups bred
by his lovely ocean lady—bed down too
in a huddle, flopping up from the gray surf,
giving off the sour reek of the salty ocean depths…
Now I will tell you all the wizard’s tricks.
First he will make his rounds and count the seals
and once he’s checked their number, reviewed them all,
down in their midst he’ll lie, like a shepherd with his flock.
That’s your moment. Soon as you see him bedded down,
muster your heart and strength and hold him fast,
wildly as he writhes and fights you to escape.
He’ll try all kinds of escape—twist and turn
into every beast that moves across the earth,
transforming himself into water, superhuman fire,
but you hold on for dear life, hug him all the harder!
And when, at last, he begins to ask you questions—
back in the shape you saw him sleep at first—
relax your grip and set the old god free
and ask him outright, hero,
which of the gods is up in arms against you?”

I was a bit surprised to realize that almost exactly the same fight occurs in certain Russian fairy tales, except in those the protean figure is the hero’s lost beloved, and if he can just hold onto her through all her transformations he’ll win her back. He lets go. (Menelaus deals better, here.)

I’m sorry to have been so absent, dear housewives. For one thing I was reading the first two Twilight books, which are much better than expected but don’t inspire much in the way of commentary. (Buffy disempowered at last! Sub-dom manhandling as a substitute for sex! If vampires have no blood flow, then how can they get erections anyway?)

They did inspire a dream, however, in which a crew of vampires was painstakingly disassembling my body for parts—spooling up my intestines, carefully peeling my muscles from the bones and sorting them out, etc. I was conscious and in pain, but quite calm.

Persistent housewives will know I’ve done some theorizing in these pages about the relationship between plot and character. More specifically, I’ve advanced the view that there is not really plot-as-such, but only plot as the phases of the characters, their disclosure in action and event.

Oh, I still believe this. But the trouble is that I believe the reverse simply can’t be true: character cannot be only the source of the plot. (Character can be no more than that, of course, even in good books; but, I ardently believe, not in great ones.) The moment where the character digresses, takes on a private trajectory, becomes the source of no story, serves nothing, is utterly unto itself: that, I think, is what fiction is looking for. A novel is a search for the moment where the self exceeds the structures that define it.

Of course a character has no possibility of exceeding the plot until their symbiosis is established…

(If anyone is waiting for further word on The Savage Detectives, well, I’m pretty near the end, but I’ve been too fluttered of late to read much. And it’s become so cuttingly, terribly beautiful that I’m not sure I’ll be able to write more about it. At this point I’ll just say, Go see for yourself.)

Everyone in the subway car shaves his or her head completely. An individual ziplock bag for collecting the hair is provided to each passenger. An attendant then passes through the car and collects all the bags. As long as each person’s hair is kept separate there is no need for names or numbers.

Then, on a large canvas, the attendant sets the hairs tuft by tuft with tweezers, perhaps using melted wax as an adhesive. The attendant is careful to keep each head of hair distinct: the borders may touch, but the hairs from different individuals must not mingle. The finished piece should give the impression of a quilt of scalps.

Once the canvas is hung several pairs of stethoscopes hang from hooks beside it, so that viewers can listen for the thoughts under each patch of hair. Viewers may write down the thoughts they hear or assign names to the squares on the canvas: the names they had when they were part of a person, and the new names they acquired once they gained their independence.

“It came as something of an epiphany the first time I realized that Mexicans, as one example among many, do not eat Mexican food — they are, that is, simply eating food — and I think it is equally the case that Latin Americans don’t make broad, sweeping, and at times almost caricaturish generalizations about Latin America, at least not unless they are already, like Bolaño’s eager Anglo readers certainly are, outsiders imagining an inside to which their access is structurally impossible because their very imaginative faculty exteriorizes them from that whose very interior they would deign to imagine.”

—Eli Evans, writing on bookslut.com

Faithful housewives will be aware that I’ve lately been on a Bolaño kick; in the course of that kick I poked around some of the commentary available online, and came across Eli Evans’s critique of Amulet on bookslut. Evans looks at a smattering of (admittedly heavy-handed) comments on the nature of Latin Americanness in Amulet, then accuses Bolaño of “fraud” for, essentially, offering us a touristic view of his own experience. I didn’t pay much attention to the lines Evans singles out when I was reading Amulet: in a book full of dizzying prose it would be hard to find comments less distinguished than, say, “In Latin America no one is ashamed of being poor.” And then I take a limited interest in questions of anyone’s cultural identity, including my own. I was far more engaged by what Bolaño had to say, and imply, on memory, on the nature and function of literature, on voice.

But Evans’s critique suggests a breathtaking range of presuppositions about authenticity and self-consciousness, posing them as mutually exclusive. Bolaño’s apparent European influences and the period he spent living in Spain are taken as having given him exactly two options: to adhere to a “birthright” of naive, but genuine, Latin-Americanness, or alternatively to view his heritage from without, slice up this externalized version of it, and offer it up as a commodity to his unsuspecting readers as if it carried all the privileged interiority that he actually abandoned. Evans is demanding innocence. In his view, being authentically Latin-American means never thinking about the nature of Latin-Americanness—never stepping far enough outside of the experience of Latin-Americanness to look back and examine it.

Evans isn’t alone in feeling cheated by the self-consciousness of those he regards. Think, for instance, of the hostility so many men express towards beautiful women who are aware of their own beauty. The words “Yeah, and she knows it,” are delivered with disdain, even indignation. If the girl knows the market value of her own face, how will the speaker ever get it at the bargain price of himself?

The demand for a naive absence of self-awareness in an object is a demand for power over that object. North American writers are, to my knowledge, never criticized for offering a fetishistic, exteriorized look at The Idea of America, as so many of them do—because we don’t presume to insist on innocence in those we regard as our equals. We can think of our mashed potatoes as American food, and eat them, too. There’s an implicit understanding here that the ability to simultaneously live out identity and also think about it is the prerogative of the powerful. Others have to choose. For them, self-awareness inevitably alienates them from “real” experience.

This idea has a strange corollary. It denigrates empathy. If it’s impossible to imaginatively occupy more than one position at a time, then imagining the world, or oneself, from someone else’s viewpoint becomes hazardous in the extreme. If you consider how others might see you, you will find yourself instantly ejected from authentic selfhood. Better stay home, in parochial self-absorption, lest empathy deprive you of your own true essence.

But there are psychologists who regard the ability to imaginatively occupy a variety of positions as the source of selfhood. Mary Watkins has defined the self as “an organization of perspectives.” In her view, the self is created when we engage in precisely this empathic seeing-ourselves-from-without: when we imagine ourselves as others might see us, collect those perspectives, and bring them home. If this is the case, then Evans’s expectations of Bolaño are both unreasonable and cruel. They amount to a demand that Bolaño not form a self at all.

For the Evans review, click here.

For previous posts on Amulet, click here and also here.

For an excerpt, try this.

So, looking at our two recent posts concerning shadows (a Robert Louis Stevenson poem and an excerpt from Bolano) it’s clear that they’re offering competing ideas of the anatomy of shadows: if you slice a shadow open, what implications will you find inside it?

The Stevenson poem suggests that the shadow is a hole there to catch the rejected aspects of its owner; this is classical shadow anatomy. The shadow’s sporadic enormity (when it “shoots up taller like an Indian-rubber ball”) lets the boy offload his grandiosity and his desire to consume his environment; the shadow’s sharp diminishment in steep light supplies him with an image of the fear of insignificance, which he can then expel. The shadow’s other characteristics (he’s an infantile coward, an embarrassment, a slacker) illustrate the same conception: the shadow is the I-am-not that mocks us with our own shape.

Bolano’s shadows are different; what matters is not their freighted resemblance to the self, but their ability to transform anything into anything else, the “multiplicity of readings” they allow. At first the game is fairly harmless; Farewell describes his rural scene, his whores, his endlessly mutable tree. As By Night in Chile goes on, though, it starts to seem that the two literary critics who are talking in that scene are clinging to shadows as a means of evading a darkness larger than their personal limitations. Once Sebastian becomes complicit in Pinochet’s regime his longing for the instability of the shadows returns in a new form: “Sometimes, at night, I would sit on a chair in the dark and ask myself what difference there was between fascist and rebel. Just a pair of words. Two words, that’s all. And sometimes either one will do! So I went out into the street and breathed the air of Santiago with the vague conviction that I was living, if not in the best of worlds, at least in a possible world…” What matters here is that only Sebastian’s conviction that he he can change words into other words lets him see his world as even possible. If he didn’t use words as shadows, didn’t render them with infinite meanings, the history he participates in would exceed his own capacity for belief.

This is a bit of a tangent from our usual mission, but last week I saw Zoe Strauss’s show America: We Love Having You Here at the Silverstein gallery on 24th Street in Chelsea. (Follow the link above to see some photos on her website.) The photos are of desolate, wrenching Americana; an old subject, which made it surprising that they were so fresh and startling. They were pictures, I thought, of loss.

The first image you see, walking in, shows a half-expired inflatable Titanic, canting at an angle that makes it appear to be sinking into the grass. A little girl slides down the deck. The picture is not of the girl, though, but of the girl as a ghost of all the people who sank with the real Titanic. She marks the spot where those lives vanished.

In other images, the subjects look out from their own bodies as if they were conscious that those bodies were slowly devouring them. The body appears as a seething nest of soft, quiet animals. Once they eat their fill they crawl off, one by one.

I thought of America’s interest in superheroes: the idea that our secret identities, and the secret bodies that go with them, are stronger, faster, lovelier, and more coherent than the bodies we present in everyday life. It’s a protective fantasy, an inversion of the truth: Clark Kent’s real secret body is diabetic, dissolute, loosely assembled from sentient rats; he keeps it stuffed in a closet while he goes out to paint a mural of the New York skyline on the side of the local drycleaners. (Another Zoe Strauss photo shows a mural like that: the absence of a city, and of whatever dreams the city might represent to the painter.)

If there’s a hollow in the grass, a pothole in the street, it’s safe to assume that somebody disappeared there. That empty space is the image of their departure.

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?

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.

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.