Poetry Its Own Logic - #27

STORY: "Leopard Arms" by Leni Zumas

FROM: FAREWELL NAVIGATOR (Open City Books, 2008)

BASICALLY: A dreamy and unsettling account, as told by a gargoyle, of the occupants of the Leopard Arms apartments in Brooklyn. To save a neglected child with tonsillitis, he'll have to break the rules he learned in gargoyle school.

"Leopard Arms" isn't like any of the other stories so far twiddled apart here on YoOHS. Much stranger and harder to categorize than, say, "The Last Rabbit", its experimental elements mean we're dealing with a new species of short fiction. It's far more of an actual story than Lydia Davis' experimental "The Family", but it's not even trying to do what "Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian" was going for—and so I find myself less sure than normal what to make of it.

I either liked "Leopard Arms" or I didn't. One of those two things. The jury's still out. Could go either way. But since it's trying something that feels fresh and weird, I lean toward giving it the benefit of the doubt.

I liked how it's episodic—a simpler structure that doesn't require such a tight control on continuity between scenes. To open, for example, the gargoyle narrator introduces the "new family" that "is taking the place of the woman who choked on a peanut." Then, following a section break, the gargoyle gives his backstory and outlook—

The word you know me by is from gargouille, the French for throat. A throat can sing a tune, swallow milk, be sliced wide open. Down throats go slender needles aimed at human hearts. 

Another section break, and now for a moment we see the new family, the young daughter "pacing along each new wall to listen," but then the camera swings outside to show a passing bus full of tourists and swoops back in to show the reactions of building residents like Mrs. Megrim and "the watcher."

So Zumas builds up her story stroke by stroke. It's how a lot of TV shows work—a whole tangle of subplots get advanced at once by moving an inch on one, then switching to another. And of course they all interact. Part of the appeal of a show or a story with a large cast is our involvement and interest in their individual lives. When they inevitably conflict, fall in love, form friendships, and make enemies of one other, we have a sense of complexity because we are intimately familiar with all the separate points of view. (I love shows like The Good Wife or True Blood or Boardwalk Empire for this, but look for it in your favorite ensemble dramas. You'll probably start seeing it everywhere.)

While I think Zumas creates a narrator that's just perfect for giving voice to this episodic structure—a gargoyle is the ultimate watcher of all and sundry—something's missing. She either doesn't try to or isn't successful at binding all her strands together. The threads that follow the collector and the watcher and the flautist, while stuffed full of lovely poetic non sequiturs, don't do much that I found satisfying. They're connected, but the connections don't bear fruit. The scenes are well-larded with striking imagery, yes—the shame collector's senile grandmother phoning him, the watcher's bittersweet longing for a shark—but in the end, are used only as elaborate set pieces. I felt like the peripheral episodes on which the story spent so much time didn't signify much to the main story about a neglected little girl finding a mother-substitute in her curmudgeonly neighbor.

So I don't like that. Except that I can appreciate how this story eschews narrative structure for its own kind of poetic logic. Maybe it's because I've been reading a lot of poetry for school, lately, and so I feel sympathetic or attuned to the lushness of strange words arranged just to be fascinating…Even though the scenes didn't satisfy me in terms of story, there's still something about their eccentricity, their sense of being assembled of odds and ends, that, surprisingly, ties them together enough to make them feel like more than they individually are.

The Stink of a Human Heart - #16

STORY: "Winky" by George Saunders

FROM: PASTORALIA (Riverhead, 2001)
 
BASICALLY: Neil Yaniky attends a self-help seminar to determine how to overcome the person who's the source of all his problems. Meanwhile, Winky, his nutso-religious, oblivious sister bumbles around the house, thinking about how much she loves him.

George Saunders is the most hilarious man who'll make you sob uncontrollably. There are several great parts to "Winky," though the story ultimately leaves me sad and deflated—deliberately, I think. Saunders likes to set up all the grief and vagaries of the world, but give his reader with no tools to deal with them. His mordant humor doesn't provide a way out so much as it makes clear that we are all equally pathetic. …Yay!

What makes this story interesting is the way that it sets up two competing loci for our contempt. Just on its own, Saunders' lampooning of a self-help seminar is pure gold. He starts the scene with a third-rate guru's literal pageant of cheap Types with paper labels (You longing for Inner Peace, almost thwarted by Whiny, Self-Absorbed, Blames Her Fat on Others, Insecure, Disappointed, Too High-Strung to Function, etc., until they're thrown in the Pokey for Those Who Would Keep Us from Inner Peace). Neil Yaniky, like the rest of the crowd, is mesmerized. Then the founder of the Seminars, Tom Rodgers, gives a rousing, ludicrous, spot-on speech about how everyone started out in a pure, unsullied state like oatmeal, happy and nourishing, but there's a problem: people are constantly wanting to come and crap in your nice warm oatmeal! 

"Let me tell you something amazing: I was once exactly like you people. A certain someone, a certain guy who shall remain nameless, was doing quite a bit of crapping my oatmeal, and simply because he'd had some bad luck, simply because he was in some pain, simply, because, actually, he was in a wheelchair, this certain someone expected me to put my life on hold while he crapped in my oatmeal by demanding round-the-clock attention, this brother of mine, this Gene, and whoops, there goes that cat out of the bag, but does this maybe sound paradoxical? Wasn't he the one with the crap in his oatmeal, being in a wheelchair? Well, yes and no. Sure, he was hurting. No surprise there. Guy drops a motorcycle on a gravel road and bounces two hundred yards without a helmet, yes, he's going to be somewhat hurting. But how was that my fault?" 

Then Rodgers goes on to explain how he dumped the problem of Gene on his sister Ellen, and so Rodgers is now free of Gene's oatmeal-crapping ways, though, "'as for Ellen, Ellen still has some issues, she'd take a big old dump in my oatmeal right now if I gave her half a chance, but guess what folks, I'm not giving her that half a chance, because I've installed a protective screen over my oatmeal.'" Saunders is a master at simply standing back and letting his characters show, through their own conflicting, hypocritical speech, exactly what kind of people they are.

Neil Yaniky has a personal session with Rodgers to determine the source of Neil's problems, and the source is easy to locate: it's Neil's sister, ugly and crazy and hyper-religious. She needs to move out of his house, and Neal leaves the session gathering his strength and repeating his mantra: Now Is the Time for Me to Win! Now Is the Time for Me to Win!

But Neil's sister is also a piece of work. As idiotic as the self-help session was, and as pathetic as Neil is for buying into it, we do sort of want his life to get better. And when we see Winky, we understand what he's up against. The story shifts into her point of view and her thoughts flit from topic to nonsensical topic, sometimes alighting on a funhouse version of Jesus, or a memory about her and "Neil-Neil's" childhood with their alcoholic father and miserable mother, or the time a vagrant outside Rexall Drug told her she was "too ugly to f—." She's not likable, but she's too pitiful to hate. It's clear that if Neil kicks her out, Winky will have absolutely nothing to hold onto in this world. The story closes on Neil's recognition that he can't give her the boot, but ironically, he's no better for it. There's no redemption.

In the end, whether we're dealing with a modern religion like the self-help movement, or an older religion like Christianity, Saunders shows that we are equally self-deceived and equally ill-equipped to find our way out of the irrational holes into which they thrust us. He makes this more profound—and more damning, and more depressing—by lampooning not just one mindset, but all the mindsets that intersect with it. Tom Rodgers, who has divested himself of responsibilities by pawning them off on others, has made a career of inspiring others to take control of their lives. The poor slobs who listen to him, like Neil Yaniky, are grasping at straws. And the hideous idiot sisters like Winky who depend on them, and smile at mirrors as they pass them to thank God for the trial of their suffering, have no understanding whatsoever.

A Conjugation of Green Velvet - #12

STORY: "Continuidad de los parques" / "Continuity of Parks" by Julio Cortázar

FROM: INVESTIGACIÓN DE GRAMÁTICA, 2ª ed., by Patricia Vining Lunn & Janet A. DeCesaris (Heinle Cengage Learning, 2007) – yes, this is a Spanish grammar textbook, but I actually think it's really amazingly cool that, among other approaches, it uses fiction to convey an understanding of grammatical concepts / BLOW-UP AND OTHER STORIES by Julio Cortázar, trans. Paul Blackburn (Pantheon, 1967)

BASICALLY: A man is reading a novel in the green velvet chair of his mountain cabin. The characters in the novel are two lovers who must kill the woman's husband--who is found in his mountain cabin by the killer, reading a novel in a green velvet chair.

Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar is known for his bag of tricks—his ability to invoke duality and parallelism, his stories-within-stories, his erasure of time as a barrier. In "Continuidad de los parques" (translated into English as "Continuity of Parks"), he not only does all of this, but he accomplishes it in about 500 words.

Lucky me, I got to read this story in Spanish for school, and then analyze what Cortázar does grammatically. And if you think I'm being sarcastic, you have severely underestimated my level of nerdliness—I think it's one of the more thrilling things I've gotten to do in college. I was already a big admirer of Cortázar, but now I can see something that was previously invisible to me.

What you have to understand is that, unlike English, Spanish has two past tenses. (Trust me, it is one of the many royal pains in the patootie related to Spanish verbs for the native English-speaker.) I won't bore you with the details, but very basically, the imperfect deals with events without a clear beginning or end, or things that occurred habitually, while the preterit deals with actions with a clear beginning/end, things that occurred in a single discrete time. So, you would use the imperfect past tense to say "I went to the store every day," but you'd use the preterit to say "I went to the store today." Both happened in the past, but they express different perspectives on the time involved.

In "Continuidad de los parques," Cortázar does something absolutely brilliant with these two past tenses. He starts out telling the story with the normal mix between the two, setting the scene with imperfect and mentioning some of the particular actions of the protagonist with preterit, exactly as you would expect for "reality." When he shifts into talking about the characters in the novel that the protagonist is reading, he uses the imperfect. This is appropriate because, in a novel, characters are always doing what they are doing at any given point. There is no beginning or end to what happens on, say, page 37; it is endlessly occurring. (For class, we also read a scholarly paper that points out how Spanish-speaking children will use the imperfect when they're talking about what happened in their games of pretend. Neat, yes?)

And THEN. Subtly and exquisitely, after the story's only paragraph break, a change: the world of the novel begins to intersect the "real" world of the reader/protagonist, and the fictional characters begin to act with verbs expressed in the preterit.

You can totally get the coolness and circularity and chill-on-your-neck feeling of this story when reading it in English, but you can't get this beautiful thing that Cortázar does with the verbs.

It reminds me of a kerfuffle that went on last year, when Philip Pullman (author of many great books, including THE GOLDEN COMPASS, one of my all-time favs) dissed the Booker Prize committee for its love of present-tense novels. Although I definitely don't share Pullman's disgust with the "wretched fad" of writing in the present tense, I was very much struck by his commentary on verb tense: 

I can't see the appeal at all. To my mind it drastically narrows the options available to the writer. When a language has a range of tenses such as the perfect, the imperfect, the pluperfect, each of which makes other kinds of statement possible, why on earth not use them?

This, to me, is a lovely (if archly-worded) reminder to everyone who wants to manipulate the written word: we each have a set of tools available to us. Cortázar clearly understood how to make his work for him. As the example of "Continuidad de los parques" shows us, these tools go beyond just language itself; they are actually wrapped intimately into the fabric of the particular language we are using. That doesn't mean you have to go out and learn another (though, if you've got the opportunity, why not?), but I do think you should know your own inside out. Get a little grammar, check out etymology, subscribe to the A Word A Day newsletter, whatever.  All the richness and depth we can add to our understanding of words, of verbs, of forms and structures and connotations—it all becomes part of what we have the capacity to create.

1-2-3 What Are We Writing For? - #7

STORY: "The Family" by Lydia Davis
 

FROM: ALMOST NO MEMORY (Picador USA, 2001, © 1997)
 

BASICALLY: An experimental story in which a maybe biracial family goes to the park. Something horrible possibly happens but I wouldn't swear to it. The family members are not named, but each action by each member is numbered.

Lydia Davis likes to be weird, and I admire that. She's fond of leaving her characters unnamed, of irony, of overt structural meta-commentary, and of strained relationships. She maps the circuitous routes of mental mastication, the way a thought keeps building on itself. I think her voice must have first struck me when I discovered it around 2001 because I was so accustomed to male experimental voices—Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges—and Davis was as confident and interesting as any of them, but palpably different in the way she traced the refractions between people, the way she expressed female identity.

Davis writes stories (or aphorisms) that are only a single line long, and stories (or parables) that are a paragraph, and longer short stories. But she doesn't write stories that follow established rules. She doesn't conform to norms. She has the capacity to genuinely surprise you.

The thing about breaking new ground, though, is that there's often a cost. Not everything works. A lot doesn't work at all. Of course, even failed experiments can suggest the possibility of a story that could work using that technique. Sometimes the point of experimental fiction isn't the story being told—Bitsy's in love with Dippy but Dippy loves Bootsy, yadda yadda—instead, it's about the fictional mode itself. Using the medium to examine the way we see and reveal ourselves through the medium.

With all that said, I have to admit that I don't entirely know what to make of "The Family." I picked it more or less at random, and I'm sure there are plenty of other pieces that I could have raved about, but it seems like Davis has sacrificed all the things that are enjoyable about reading a story for making an inscrutable commentary about structure and objective voice.

That sounds exactly as exciting as it is!

The story opens by setting the scene: "In the playground near the river, toward evening, in the lowering sun, on the green grass, only one family." She doesn't say that the children are swinging, but reports on the sound the swings make and how the shadows of the "swinging children foreshorten, fly over the grass into the weeds." It's all elegant and spare—so far so good.

Then Davis starts describing what each person in the scene is doing. I presume they are all part of the one family? Though they don't seem like much of a family, and maybe when she said "only one family" she meant it in the sense that there are a bunch of people, but only one group happens to be related to one another. I can't quite tell. Characters include: fat young white woman, white baby, little black boy, older (than little black boy) black girl, young black man, long-haired white girl, tall bony wrinkled mustachioed white man in baseball cap, and older white man (wait, nevermind, I think he's the same as the mustachioed man, and he's got a walkie-talkie so I think he's a security guard). Got all that straight?

These characters—maybe a family and a security guard, or maybe not—all interact with one another, and their actions are listed numerically with absolutely no elaboration or explanation. Have a taste, won't you?

(23) White girl squirms in arms of young white woman, breaks free and runs again, crying, toward river. (24) Black girl, taller, follows, overtakes her, lifts and carries her back. (25) Young white woman holds white girl who struggles, hair covering her face, while (26) black girl swings on swing holding white baby, and (27) white man stands still, back hunched, hips forward, eyes invisible under visor of baseball cap. (28) Young black man goes off toward concrete hut in setting sun and (29) returns to call out to white woman, who (30) leaves white girl and follows after him with baby to concrete hut while (31) black girl continues to swing alone and

…It goes up to (47), in case you were wondering. I don't think I'll be spoiling anything to say that, in the end, the family leaves the park.

But hey. I'm not wanting to merely mock this effort. I think that as story—you know, from a reader's perspective—it's pretty snooze-inducing. I don't know why these people go to that concrete hut. I'm not sure what relation they all have to one another. There's some kind of conflict-ish-type-thing, but I really couldn't say what it is. And the only curiosity that propels me forward is the literal sequence of numbers.
 
But…"The Family" does have some things going for it. By lacking most of the things we normally associate with story, like character development and motivation, it draws our attention to the inner workings. How to get from one place to another, how strange it is to see characters described as combinations of race and sex (which makes me think that maybe names are just window dressing, or shorthand, and I'd never thought about it in that way before…Hmm…) Here is narrative filleted wide open, all the blood drained out, and with neat labels pointing to this specimen's forty-seven parts
.

Of course, it's a loathsome but very real possibility that I am simply Missing the Point. (Noooo!) After I'd read the story a couple of times, I noticed that the blurb on the back of my book says, "In 'The Family,' one horrifying afternoon in the park is succinctly described in forty-seven human actions." Er, what? When did something horrifying happen? I mean, there was some unnecessary slapping of children, but…seriously, WHERE ARE THEY GETTING THAT? This is gonna drive me crazy. And then, the essay here remarks admiringly that the "staging, both visual and literary, fractures the story, at the same time displaying the desire to create order in a nonsensical or painful world." Which sounds pretty impressive, when you put it like that. There's a lot more than nothing here, it would seem
.

Davis has a way of opening a crack behind the story and, as it turns out, it's stories all the way down. Even if I haven't tempted you to go read Lydia Davis, you should absolutely go read this fantastic interview with her at The Believer—her brain is chock full of interesting things to say, and they are eloquently said, believe me.

Bricks in the Wall -- Story #2

STORY: "The Great Wall of China" by Franz Kafka, translated from German by Willa and Edwin Muir

FROM: METAMORPHOSIS AND OTHER STORIES (Penguin Books, 1961)

BASICALLY: If a Chinese man had actually written this during the construction of the Great Wall, this piece could just be considered an essay on the manner of the wall’s construction, the character of the Chinese empire, and a few philosophical explorations. But it was written by a German man in 1917.

And that German man, Franz Kafka — author of such uplifting and optimistic works as The Trial and Metamorphosis — chose to write about the wall as if he were an aging man in ancient China, reflecting on paper about how exactly he had helped to build it. The piece could have just as easily, with some minor omissions, been a readable, apparently factual article about the origins of the Great Wall of China. With the deletion of the rare first-person-voice appearances, it could have been a speculative historical essay. But as it is it’s a story. A genre-bending one, bringing to mind Robbe-Grillet’s plotless and purely descriptive story “The Escalator,” but a story nonetheless, and one with a lot going on in it.

But the story of what? The main character talks about why it was that the wall was built in sections, for the first half of the essay, and that’s something worth noting, because this story is built in sections too. Just as, as Herodotus said, “Character is fate,” who we are dictates in large part what will happen to us, so too is the subject of this story also its structure, its form, and its thematic content.

After a time, the story digresses from its previous exploration to daydream a bit about a theoretical emperor who sends a herald to give a message to you—yes, the second-person POV comes into play here, in an interesting way—but that messenger can never reach you, because he is much like Zeno’s arrow in the famous paradox, which every time it has traveled half the total distance, it will have to travel half of what’s left, and of what’s then left, and so on ad infinitum.

The messenger started off at once, a powerful, tireless man. Sticking one arm out and then another, he makes his way through the crowd. If he runs into resistance, he points to his breast where there is a sign of the sun. So he moves forwards easily, unlike anyone else. But the crowd is so huge; its dwelling places are infinite. If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you would hear the marvelous pounding of his fist on your door. But instead of that, how futile are all his efforts. He is still forcing his way through the private rooms of the innermost palace. Never will he win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards through the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, through stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years. And if he finally burst through the outermost door—but that can never, never happen—the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his way through here, certainly not someone with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes.

It’s all a bit...what’s the word...Kafkaesque? No. Something else. What’s really interesting to me, is that this digression has also been published alone elsewhere as “A Message from the Emperor.” This story is actually an infinite number of stories, an infinite set to be divided infinite times in an infinite number of ways. I thought I was reading one story. It turns out I was reading two. Maybe I was reading a million. Or ten billion.