The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

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.