The Calculation of Other Meanings - #44 and #45

STORIES:  “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” (1964) and “A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman” (1973) by Margaret Drabble

FROM:  A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A SMILING WOMAN: COMPLETE SHORT STORIES (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)

BASICALLY:  Both are stories of a repressed character who finds their self-control suddenly slipping.

• In “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” a young man named Humphrey feels uncomfortable at a party where he doesn’t know anyone.  In one corner, an attractive redhead is holding court with her many admirers.  He makes his way to her but of course she ignores him--until he improvises a startling method for catching her attention.
• “A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman” follows television personality Jenny Jamieson as she cooks, cleans, and manages her household, attends a committee meeting, and has lunch with a clergyman whom she’ll be interviewing on her program.  But it’s her afternoon appointment that throws her whole day off-kilter and makes every interaction, except those with her children, seem meaningless.  For months, she’s been ignoring an alarming, unexplained feminine bleeding, and now the doctor confirms that she needs to return for surgery as soon as possible.  Though her condition is never explained in detail, we know it’s bad, and Jenny starts bleeding again from all the digging around the doctor did during her appointment.  She begins to reflect on death, believing her own to be imminent.  But she still shows up to her final task of the day, a speaking engagement at a girls’ school.  There, as Jenny lectures winningly about new opportunities for girls, her clothes slowly soak with blood.

And with that giant gob of Courier font washing across your monitor, you may have picked up on just how it is I plan to catch up on my Year of One Hundred Stories …(HINT:  It’s not by continuing the recent trend of not posting for large chunks of time.  Sigh.)  Actually, I declare unto you, henceforth I shall be doubling up on stories as the mood strikes me.  I am blogger, hear me roar.  My goal this year is first and foremost about reading a hundred stories and, to be honest, penning a hundred separate write-ups seems a little unnecessary.  I mean, the write-up is important (if for no other reason than that my brain is a sieve and retains nothing if I don’t write it down), but synthesizing multiple stories into a single cohesive essay is its own intriguing challenge.  Let’s see if I’m up to it, shall we?

I picked today’s stories, as usual, without much of a plan.  I happened to like their titles, and because the pieces in this collection are organized chronologically, I wanted to make sure I didn’t get two that were right next to each another.  That’s why I was so weirded out by how much each reminded me of the other.  If I’d been looking for two stories to compare and contrast, I couldn’t have chosen more aptly.  Although you can see from the outlines above that their plots are quite different, and “A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman” is much longer (and therefore more multifaceted) than “Les Liaison Dangereuses,” these two stories have a curious sameness to them.  In fact, to my eyes, they represent a single basic technique, or maybe I should say an approach, as initially applied by a less-developed writer and, later, by one more developed.  They just happen to be the same writer, which is marvelously instructive.

“Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” published in 1964, is very short and encompasses a single action in a brief space of time.  Humphrey, a young man at a party, hovers unseen behind a beautiful and popular stranger, finally turning her attention to himself by—I’m about to spoil this for you, so hang onto your hat—by setting her hair on fire with a candle. Totally spontaneously, but totally on purpose.  Yikes, dude.  The bulk of the story leading up to this startling ending is taken up with Humphrey’s self-involved reflections on the rudeness of the other guests who ignore him, and trying to decide whether he should leave, and bitter judgments about the various attractive females who don’t so much as look at him.

What comes across about this young man is how uptight he is.  He follows the conversations around him closely, but he’s sort of shocked that no one’s polite enough to invite him into their conversations and resents that the other partygoers “seemed to be getting on quite nicely without him” and his “unoriginal views on Harold Pinter. On the other hand, he did not really want to leave.”  Humphrey begins as a person who is emotionally frozen by an unfamiliar setting filled with intimidating strangers.  But, ultimately, he surprises even himself with his ability to take action.  And here’s the zinger—Humphrey is socially rewarded for his entirely senseless (if mild) violence.  Self-assurance itself is enough to win the day, and apparently also the heart of the redhead:

“What did you do it for?” she cried, in a positive blaze of admiration, the kind of excitement kindled by duels or the Rape of the Sabine Women or indeed any violent and decisive action taken in the cause of passion.

            “Oh, well,” he said, with nonchalant pride, as though such inspirations came to him every day of the week, “I just wanted to attract your attention, that’s all.” 

Although 1973’s “A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman” is far more complex—the time span is longer and augmented by flashback, the topic more serious, and Jenny Jamieson considerably more fleshed out—it likewise features a protagonist who is discovering cracks in the system of social norms she has always adhered to.  Jenny has navigated society’s demands with ease; she’s always been able do exactly what was required of her, and do it in a way that others found pleasing.

She always managed to say the right things to everyone; she never offended and yet never made people dull. She was intelligent and quick, she had sympathy for everyone she talked to, and all the time she looked so splendid, sitting there shining and twinkling…She told everybody that she loved her job, that she was so lucky, that it fitted on so well with the children and her husband…She didn’t take herself very seriously—it’s just an entertainment, she would say. I’ve been lucky, she would say. All I do is have the chats I’d love to have at home, and I get paid to do it. Lovely!

I can just imagine Humphrey, in the other story, gazing from afar at Jenny Jamieson, telling himself how stuck up she must be and simultaneously longing to be near her.  His story has him on the outside, socially, but through a sudden flash of illumination (essentially, that style counts far more than substance), he blazes his way in.  Jenny’s story, on the other hand, is one of a woman who, by dint of her own skill, talent, and effort, has mastered being on the inside, but the intrusion of her own mortality has brought to the surface the emptiness of that success.

What is our role, and how do we fulfill that role?  How do we defy it?  How much of oneself is authentic, and how much a construction?  These questions clearly interest author Margaret Drabble.  Her method of exploring them seems to be one of setting up a reflective individual to have their assumptions overturned.  Successful television interviewer Jenny Jamieson can’t seem to escape an awareness of how her own success seems to be destroying her husband, even though he’s the reason she got the job in the first place.  Jenny’s strength has served in the past, one gets a sense, to cover up his weaknesses.  She has always done everything exactly right, and yet everything is falling apart—especially herself.  The most positive thing she can think of is that she was smart enough to take out a life insurance policy on herself years before.

It had seemed a good idea at the time, and she had never regretted it. Her husband, though competent in some ways, was feckless: he was also much hated, as editors often are, and if ever he lost his power to control others, others would not waste time in trying to ruin him. She had thought to herself, some years ago, as soon as she began to earn good money, I should insure myself, for the children’s sake. Well, she had done it, she had not merely thought about it, she had done it. That was the kind of woman she was. So she need not worry about their material future.

And yet, even feeling the rightness of that decision, Jenny can’t escape the sense of having wasted her life.

Drabble engages in one technique of which I’m not especially fond.  Both Humphrey and Jenny, in their respective stories, reflect on an experience similar to their own that happened to one of their friends.  Humphrey recalls a “chap he had once known who had put a cigarette out on the back of his hand because some girl said he was a physical coward.”  The girl, he notes, “had been most impressed: indeed she had screamed loudly and burst into tears.”  Jenny reflects on a friend of hers who had committed suicide, while she, Jenny,

had comforted husband and mistress and child, in so much as it was in her to do so…So much sympathy had been lavished upon the survivors. But the woman, Jenny’s friend, was dead forever. She was beyond sympathy and love and fear. She was no more. What rage must have possessed her, at the moment of extinction, to know what tenderness would accrue to others from her death, while she lay rotting.

In both cases, I think Drabble is trying to find a way to have her protagonist reflect on the meaning of their own actions without doing so directly.  She doesn’t want to explain the moral or the point of the story directly, so she couches it in a memory suddenly coming to her protagonist’s mind.  But the sudden remembrance, occurring both times not far from the story’s end, feels to me like an intrusion.  It’s just too convenient that the guy struggling with getting a girl’s attention remembers a friend who once tried to get a girl’s attention, and that the woman who’s struggling with her own possible death remembers a friend’s death. 

Well, the second one is maybe more plausible, but, because I had already read the first story, I was probably sensitive to the repetition of it.  When people complain that a collection of short stories can seem redundant, this is what they’re talking about—so I think it’s worth bringing up as something to possibly avoid.  Or at least, to be aware of.  As different as these two stories are in terms of their plots, they feel like they’re solving similar questions in similar ways.

Still, though, they’re worth reading.  If you’re interested in tackling big social questions in your writing, Drabble is a worthwhile model.  One other point, in that vein, before I go—Drabble works outright symbolism into the ends of both of these stories in a very interesting way.  Though it’s outside of the scope of this blog to analyze what she really means by having a guy enjoy social success when he dares to do violence to a beautiful woman, and having a beautiful woman give an inspirational speech while her clothes soak with the blood of her diseased body, I want to draw attention to how well she makes both of these symbolic endings work within the universe she has set up inside her work.  It would be entirely possible to read both of these stories and not notice the symbolism at all and yet still get the stories’ import.  That is to say, the symbolic images mesh entirely with the plot and characters of the story.  (In “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” this is maybe a little less seamless—my first instinct was to be annoyed by the redhead’s giddy response—but that could well be because I’ve benefited from the intervening half a century of women’s cultural advances.) 

Though I’m no expert, it certainly seems that the success of symbolism sometimes depends on its superfluity.  What I mean is, the story would still be the story without the symbolism.  It’s just that the symbolism reinforces what the story is trying to say and makes it feel true in an indirect and non-logic-based manner.  Using symbolism well is still a pretty big mystery to me, but Drabble’s given me something to think about.

Between Two Places - #10

STORY: "Two Kingdoms" by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

FROM: THERE ONCE LIVED A WOMAN WHO TRIED TO KILL HER NEIGHBOR'S BABY: SCARY FAIRY TALES by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Selected and translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers (Penguin, 2009) – Here's the review I read a year ago that made me buy the book. Good stuff!

BASICALLY: A sick woman's dreamy experience of transmigration. Lina travels from the hospital with her new "husband" Vasya to an oddly tranquil land, a kind of holding zone where all her needs are met, but she cannot contact her young son or her mother. A foreign kingdom awaits her on the other side of a sparkling river.

Have you ever gotten to take a fiction workshop? That's where you write a short story, and then the whole group reads it (or sometimes listens to you read it) and then they give you feedback. Your characters are flat, I don't understand the part where the hero starts rollerblading, maybe three scenes of ground-up fire ants being snorted is excessive—that sort of thing. There's simply nothing like hearing a roomful of honest-ish advice about your art to open your eyes to your own failings. I actually love workshopping, but here's the crucial thing to know: only some of the enormous value of the process comes from what's actually said by other workshop members.

That's because, while feedback can range willy-nilly from the quite genuinely insightful to the batshit-crazy-did-you-even-READ-it? bad, most falls somewhere in the unexceptional middle. You've got your people who maybe want to say something useful, but don't know what they're doing, and the kids who are just learning the power of Disdaining Others as a route to self-love, and a whole lot of people who remember little rule-nuggets (whether from teachers, magazine articles, blog posts, writing books, or This One Writer Friend Who Really Deserves to Be a Lot More Famous But It's All About Who You Know Anyway) and then apply them, like a yardstick, to everything they meet. (…I'm not knocking the rules, by the way, just their one-size-fits-all application.)

So, anyway, all this is a long-winded way to say that I sometimes like to amuse myself by imagining what fiction workshop types might say about any given published short story. I think this one's a good candidate because its otherworldliness makes it appear simplistic. Throughout, symbols seem at first obvious, but then a little confused. Culled mainly from my own pessimistic worldview, with perhaps a sprinkle of Amazon reviews thrown in, here's a handy workshop-style breakdown of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's "Two Kingdoms":

HYPOTHETICAL COMMENT	IS IT DESERVED?
I like how your story was kind of like a fairy tale about how someone died.	There's certainly a simplicity to the prose, and a dreamlike procession of events, so calling this fairy-tale-like is reasonable. Of course, it's not structured like a fairy tale—we begin with the protagonist Lina on a plane, and then we move backwards and find out how she got there from the hospital, and then forwards until the story ends with Lina progressing to the beautiful but remote kingdom on the other side of the river. So that's kind of interesting, right? To lend the feeling of a fairy tale, you don't have to match the style in every regard—a modern version needn't start with the equivalent of Once upon a time and move in a straightforward path.
The reveal that Lina is dead didn't surprise me at all.	This was my first impression, too, until I went back and re-read the opening. It turns out that I am not incredibly clever for realizing right away that Lina's airplane trip is some sort of transitional journey between life and afterlife; the author clearly wants this to be understood. Assuming the translation is faithful, the title alone—"Two Kingdoms"—suggests the connection, and also the very first line: "In the beginning they flew through a celestial paradise, through a glorious blue landscape and over thick curly clouds." If Petrushevskaya isn't trying to surprise us, she must have another purpose. Not that most people in a workshop would ever go back and read a story for a second time. Heavens no. If you find someone who does, be nice to them. Seriously. People who pay attention are invaluable.
Some of the imagery didn't seem to fit, or it's too obvious. Like when you said, "But later, later [Vasya] would take them away, her and her son, and her honorable mom, too, to an earthly paradise far far away, somewhere on the shores of a warm sea, amid marble columns, where they had—was it little elves?—flying about. In short, she'd live like Thumbelina from the fairy tale." So first you beat us over the head with the fairy tale aspect, but then what does Thumbelina have to do with it?	What are cherubim if not little fat flying elves? I take this as sly reference to the way in which our conceptions of the afterlife tend to rely on fairy tale tropes. Lina accepts what is happening to her, but she filters it entirely through the lens of her earthly life. That's why she thinks of Vasya as her "new husband," though "no one noticed him," and when she realizes on the plane that nothing hurts, she figures that "they must have given her some painkillers." It's also why she reaches for what to call the beings of "an earthly paradise" that just happens to be nothing like Earth. As for Andersen's fairy tale, Wikipedia mentions some interesting potential connections, like Maria Tatar's analysis that Thumbelina seeks transfiguration and redemption through the lens of Christian suffering, resurrection, and salvation. Similar themes, very different treatments. But Petrushevskaya creates a connection outside of the world of the story that both ties it to the real world and adds depth. Some folks in fiction workshops have a hard time telling the difference between the random noise of an unhoned draft and the difficult but deliberate details of a textured story. (I mean, it's actually really hard to tell, sometimes. If we already know a story is good—because it's published, because it's covered with about a million laudatory quotes, whatever—it's not that hard to find some justification. It's quite another to see the shimmery bits in a pile of classmates' Xeroxes.)
Is Vasya supposed to be an angel? How is it that he works in a bookstore he inherited from his aunt? If Lina's supposed to be dead, how come she worries about dying in the hospital and thinks, "This way I'll live" and then she can bring her son to her? If these are symbols, I'm not clear on what they're supposed to mean.	As readers, we want to understand what's going on. We want the writer, if not to make everything plain, then at least to provide all the necessary clues for us to figure it out. Even if we're readers of literary fiction, all highbrow, we still want to GET IT when it comes to a story. But of course, the stories that stay with us, the great literatures, are the ones that hold back just enough, the ones that make us think and wonder. Petrushevskaya doesn't provide us with easy answers, but it's not the scattered mish-mash of student writing—there's simply no one-to-one correspondence between symbols and the thing symbolized. Everything is suggestive rather than definite, but there's also nothing missing. You can come up with a hypothesis about the meanings of Vasya and the airplane and the hospital and everything else by using only what you find in the story itself. It's only poorly-executed symbolism that requires the reader to help make it up. And then someone else can come up with a differing hypothesis, and maybe there's something to back it up, as well. But the story bears up. And that's why I'm doing this blog. To figure this stuff out. Not that "Two Kingdoms" is the awesomest bestest story I've ever read, but it's good. It bears up well under poking. And it's got something to show us about creating a story with the universality and lightness of a fairy tale, but that reflects our modern preoccupations in an almost childlike language.

The Phantoms of Your Own Fragmentation - #9

It's authentic props like this that make this blog what it is.
 

STORY: "Cogwheels" by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Trans. Cid Corman and Susumu Kamaike; (translated elsewhere as "Spinning Gears")

FROM: THE ESSENTUAL AKUTAGAWA, Ed. Seiji M. Lippit, Foreword Jorge Luis Borges (Marsilio, 1999)

BASICALLY: At least partially autobiographical, follows a writer's gradual--but calm and detached--descent into depression and mental illness, accompanied by the increasing appearance of portents, patterns, and hallucinations.

Akutagawa Ryunosuke (or Ryunosuke Akutagawa, I suppose, depending on your preference) was some kind of genius. By the time of his death in 1927—a suicide at age 35—he had achieved literary success and international renown for basically inventing the modern Japanese short story. Director Akira Kurosawa later used two of his stories ("Rashomon" and "In a Grove") as the inspiration for his famous RASHOMON, and Akutagawa's influence continues to be felt in the work of writers (ahem, Haruki Murakami) whose work you'd better know if you want literary hipsters to admire your taste. I chose the story "Cogwheels" because of what Jorge Luis Borges declares in his introduction: "Like the Inferno of Strindberg, who appears toward the end, this story is the diary, atrocious and methodical, of a gradual hallucinatory process."

And wow. I was not disappointed. "Cogwheels" tells the story of a writer as he sinks into an overwhelming depression and profound sense of fragmentation. If that doesn't sound like a hoot and a half, I don't blame you. But consider this—the absolute best word I can think of to describe this story is "delicate." The swelling tension of a man's fractured reality is secured by mere cobwebs, people! From the clarity of the narrator's observations to the gentle materialization of linked signs, the true horror of "Cogwheels" unfolds with a touch that is featherlight. The question is, as usual—how does Akutagawa manage to create this effect?

From the outset, the narrator describes his surroundings with simplicity and precision. There is no elaborate layering of adjectives, no baroque stylization, no heavy-handed symbolism. Simply a pensive man riding in a taxi, hoping to catch a train. His companion in the car, a barber, mentions a haunted house—"No joke, I assure you! . . . And they say the ghost does its haunting in a raincoat." Then the ride is over, the train has indeed been missed, and the narrator/author notes, "On a bench in the waiting room one man in a raincoat stared vacantly out. I remembered the tale I had just heard. But I let it go with a faint smile and decided to go into a café in front of the station to wait for the next train."

I see two thrilling writerly tricks at play here. First, this is brilliant characterization. Akutagawa has already (in a single page, mind you) described the barber as being "as plump as a peach" and recounted the conversation about the ghost, so we know that his protagonist/self is awake to the odd detail. And we know, too, that the narrator is prone to melancholy reflection from that brief interaction in the car—"Looking out at the far hills of pine bathed in the afternoon sun of winter, I satisfied him with occasional responses." So this new observation fits perfectly with the character that has been sketched. Even as he becomes more disconnected and hallucinatory later in the story, he continues in precisely this vein, making his madness seem not like a departure, but like he is becoming more himself. The moments barely stands out.

Which, by the way, is the second trick—that it takes Akutagawa only a page to repeat the portentous appearance of the raincoat, and yet the fabric of the story doesn't so much as ripple. Notice how the mention of the melancholy man in the waiting room is sandwiched between two practical, modern-day allusions to schedules and trains—like the protagonist, we are distracted by the demands of the workaday world. Only after the raincoat appears again (when a man wearing one sits opposite him on the train) and again (on a couch in the lobby of his hotel) do we start to feel nervous.

In the meantime, Akutagawa has already introduced other portents—the hallucination of cogwheels that precedes a headache, the maggot-like worm "wriggling at one edge of the meat" on his plate, the doppelganger of his "overcoat hanging on the wall" that "looked too much like my upright self"—with equally casual aplomb. These things appear consistently in the midst of actions that pull our focus away from their significance. We listen in on his conversation with a Chinese scholar and forget to think about symbols. We're as uneasy as he is when his niece calls and insists that "something terrible's happened"—his sister's husband has committed suicide—and we hardly have time to consider the significance of the man's dying while wearing a raincoat. In fact, though the protagonist is frequently thoughtful or fretful, his focus is always falling on a new event, a new manifestation of his fixations, and he never seems to consider directly what is happening to him.

"Cogwheels" clings to the mind after it has been read, eerie and persistent. It is not necessary to know that Akutagawa wrote this shortly before he killed himself, nor that numerous events related in the course of the story came directly and explicitly from his own life—though these facts cannot help but inform our understanding of what the author has done here. The story is not the accidental by-product of a disintegrating sanity, but a carefully-balanced progression of damning details, culminating in a tragic plea for relief. That's, I think, why it must be genius—the Self and the Art mirroring one another, finding fevered expression, even as they are splintering disastrously…