The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

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.