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…

Normal Bunnies are Normal - #8

STORY: "The Last Rabbit" by Emma Donoghue

FROM: THE WOMAN WHO GAVE BIRTH TO RABBITS (Harcourt, 2002)

BASICALLY: Based on a historical incident, a woman becomes involved in a hoax in which she claims to give birth to rabbits. She is examined by a series of callous doctors with little knowledge of women's bodies, but is ultimately unable to maintain the illusion.

Wow. It's so normal! The subject matter is a little unusual, to be sure, but the story itself is just…a story.

Not that I wish to damn with faint praise. When a person spends so much time reading the weird, the vile-but-fascinating, the masterful, the geeky, and the experimental, a short story that just tells you what actually happened, without any tricks, seems kind of revolutionary.

Author Emma Donoghue has chosen to present her subject with very little commentary and absolutely no—what should we call them?—literary flourishes. A poor and uneducated woman named Mary Toft is convinced by her sister-in-law to begin the hoax, but the local charlatan of a doctor soon takes charge. They pickle baby rabbits in jars, and Mary learns to make her stomach jump as though little rabbits hop within, and the doctor sends off wonderstruck letters advising the eighteenth-century medical establishment that "The woman Mary Toft has just now given birth to five praeternatural rabbits, all dead, a fact of which there is hitherto no instance in Nature." As the narrator, Mary seems only tangentially involved in her own tale. It's not meant to be ironic; Mary understands, more or less, what is happening to her, and even finally draws the conclusion that

for a month I had been nothing but a body. Though I believed that every body had a soul, as my mother taught me, I had no idea where it might reside. How could there be anything hiding in me that had not been turned inside out already?

At every opportunity in this story, Donoghue chooses the straightforward path. For example, fictional works with a historical bent frequently seek to bring the reader a sense of the enormity of time, of passing centuries, of how things have changed and how they have stayed the same. Perhaps a character reflects on the future, or refers to something—a structure, an institution—that modern eyes will recognize. But Donoghue keeps her tale in the here-and-now of her protagonist and presents its entire development with total linearity. We begin just before the hoax and end when the jig is up.

The effect of this simplicity of structure and lack of varnish is both expansive and confining. Donoghue doesn't seek to comment upon Story or Narrative or any of those other postmodern concerns—she simply wishes to make a curious historical incident a little more relatable. She uncovers the inherent humanity of a person acting outside of social norms. I have the feeling that what I will remember from this story is not what the author did with it, but the very incident that drew Donoghue's own attention: a woman who claimed she could give birth to rabbits and was almost believed.

Story # 3 - Echoes of a Life Still Being Lived

STORY: "Old Mr. Marblehall" by Eudora Welty

FROM: THIRTEEN STORIES, by Eudora Welty

BASICALLY: Old Mr. Marblehall is an old man whose wife has a child when they are very old, and the whole small town they live in gossips about them. Old Mr. Marblehall also has another wife in the same town, that the first doesn’t know about, and they also have a young child. Or does he?

“Old Mr. Marblehall” is only the second short story I’ve ever read from Eudora Welty, but already I’m considering organizing some sort of mini-parade for how great she is, for how huge and wild and perfect her stories are. Like most of my other mini-parades, it will mostly just be me yelling at people from my open car window, and maybe throwing books at them. These parades are not very popular with other people, and have on more than one occasion gotten me arrested, but if anyone has ever deserved one, I suspect it may be her.

The story is set in a small town, but it’s also set IN THE ONLY SMALL TOWN. There is no world outside this town, its boundaries are as limiting as the doorways at one of Bunuel’s dinner parties, and in just such an unspoken way.

The story is set in a quaint early-Twentieth-Century past, but it’s also set IN THE ONLY TIME. Nothing ever really happened before this time, nothing that really matters anyway, nothing that was any different. Sure, Old. Mr. Marblehall went to Europe once and wasn’t that impressed, but that was almost like a dream, and really he’s just like his father, another Old Mr. Marblehall, and just like his grandfather, another.

A week or two would go by in Natchez and then there would be Mr. Marblehall, walking down Catherine Street again, still exactly the same degree alive and old.

In the heat haze of this southern setting, the world is reduced to one universal, homogenous, drowsily pleasant whole, and if there are any other places, they’re not to be bothered with, and if there are any other times, a past, a future, they are just the same, come on, don’t worry about them.

There is only one town and there is only one time, and it may be there is only one person. There is only one Old Mr. Marblehall. He has a wife, and a son, and his son was born when Old Mr. Marblehall was already old, and his son seems like an old man already, like the next Old Mr. Marblehall, just smaller.

The story talks about his double life, his waiting until he was sixty to get married and have a child, but then even the term “double life” gains a double meaning, as we find out that he has another wife, also married at sixty, in the same town, with another creepy old-looking sweet child. And perhaps there are even more. Who knows, really?

You will think, what if nothing ever happens? What if there is no climax, even to this amazing life? Suppose old Mr. Marblehall simply remains alive, getting older by the minute, shuffling, still secretly, back and forth?

One critic, Alfred Appel, in his 1965 book A SEASON OF DREAMS, suggests that “the story itself is like a marble hall in which the sounds of the real world and those of the fantastic invisible world echo and resound, becoming indistinguishable from one another, each world assuming the same identity," and I think that’s accurate. I think that’s what’s going on here.

This is a life in a jar, in a closed marble hall, echoing back and forth against itself in a closed time and a closed space. That’s what I’m feeling right now, anyway, though there’s more than just that, and this is an amazing, mind-stretching story that will surely receive many re-readings by me over the rest of my life.

If I’m not killed in a mini-parade first.

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.

Everything Is Questionable - #6

STORY: "Pages from Cold Point" by Paul Bowles 

FROM: COLLECTED STORIES 1939-1976 (Black Sparrow Press, 1997) 

BASICALLY: After the death of his wife, a man and his son take a remote house on the deserted side of an island. The son bicycles off on his own most every day to do God-knows-what. Mounting sense of unease that culminates in stunning display of amorality. Written in 1947 and still shocking. 

Paul Bowles led one of those Really Interesting Lives with which the first half of the twentieth century seems to be so littered: he became a successful composer before turning to writing, lived all over the world, married an equally-talented woman, and, says Gore Vidal in his introduction to my collection, "during the late thirties and forties they became central figures in the transatlantic (and Pan-American) world of the arts," on close terms with the likes of Tennessee Williams and W.H. Auden. Who knew? He's remembered now mostly for THE SHELTERING SKY, made into a Bertolucci movie a couple of decades ago.

This is a freakish story, but in absolute control of its own effects. Everything is beneath the surface. We're in the hands of a strong first-person narrator—from an opinionated, even swaggering, point of view, he talks at length about his son and their home—but we can tell that something's not being said. In the hands of other writers, this might come across as strongly ironic, letting the audience in on a kind of in-joke about the narrator. (Not that that's always bad; we understand more about what Huck Finn experiences than Huck does, for example, and that duality is crucial to the story.) But Bowles plays it close to the vest. We're not even sure whether the issue is the narrator or his son Racky, and we're really left in the dark about the nature of the problem. The opening speaks grandiosely about life being "visually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it"—so was there a murder? But the narrator and his brother are bitterly at odds about something—so is there some other family secret? Once they're on the island, the narrator is deeply curious about what Racky does all day—is Racky himself the significant thing, or is his father exhibiting something other than the normal concern of a parent?

There's a really great part, right before the story's big reveal, in which the father has to spend the night away from home, taking care of some business on the other side of the island from their isolated house. He goes out for cigarettes and sees a woman leaning on her fence.

As I passed by her, she looked straight into my face and said something with the strange accent of the island. It was said in what seemed an unfriendly tone, and ostensibly was directed at me, but I had no notion what it was. I got back into the car and the driver started it. The sound of the words had stayed in my head, however, as a bright shape outlined by a darkness is likely to stay in the mind's eye, in such a way that when one shuts one's eyes one can see the exact contour of the shape. The car was already roaring up the hill toward the overland road when I suddenly reheard the very words. And they were: "Keep your boy at home, mahn." I sat perfectly rigid for a moment as the open countryside rushed past. Why should I think she had said that?

What an exquisite way to build tension. The reader is already struggling to put the pieces together and decide what they mean. The only evidence to go on is what the father says—so what's to be done with this passage? Did the woman really say that? And if she did, how come? But there's already some evidence that the narrator might be a bit paranoid, so is he deteriorating?

What Bowles does in this story is to create a continuous stream of questions. The pieces of information never quite fall into place—they suggest more than they answer. By the time we arrive at the Big Shocking Thing, we're not even sure we're understanding what just happened, because Bowles talks all around it. It's sort of the opposite approach I looked at in the Jayne Anne Phillips story "Lechery." In that one, everything is brutally on the surface, and what happens outside speaks volumes about the psychological destruction of the characters. Here, the unstable psychology of the narrator means that the actual events themselves seem to be more (or less) than they are.

I had planned to give away the ending, but since I've focused above on tension, I think I'll keep it to myself. DOES MY SILENCE FILL YOU WITH TENSION? Hah! I highly recommend this story, and I'm very curious to know what others think of it—largely because while I admire it very much from a writing perspective, I'm not sure I like it. But since I'm not sure I dislike it, either, I just keep turning it over in my mind. I definitely need to read some more from Paul Bowles.

Feeling the Love, and It’s Kind Of Ooky - #5

I hope you don't find my pink walls too girly, Robert Sheckley.

STORY: "Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?" by Robert Sheckley

FROM: CAN YOU FEEL ANYTHING WHEN I DO THIS? AND OTHER STORIES (Doubleday Science Fiction, Book Club Edition, 1971)

BASICALLY: A frothy little tale of casual misogyny. Bored housewife of the future is seduced by her mysterious new vacuum cleaner. Men everywhere are emasculated.

After two weeks of stories by Really Great Authors, I thought I should read something that had at least the potential to suck. After all, I'm not in a classroom, here. Short stories—especially science fiction—have a long and proud history of hackery. This slender volume with its Oh So Seventies color scheme (picked up for a mere fifty centavos at a library book sale) certainly looked promising.

At first, I thought I had failed.

I mean, Sheckley can certainly put an entertaining sentence together. He's got Voice and Confidence and a Cynical Eye. Here's how the story starts:

It was a middle-class apartment in Forest Hills with all the standard stuff: slash-pine couch by Lady Yogina, strobe reading light over a big Uneasy Chair designed by Sri Somethingorother, bounce-sound projector playing Blood-Stream Patterns by Drs. Molidoff and Yuli. There was also the usual microbiotic-food console, set now at Fat Black Andy's Soul-Food Composition Number Three—hog's jowls and black-eyed peas. And there was a Murphy Bed of Nails, the Beautyrest Expert Ascetic model with 2000 chrome-plated self-sharpening number-four nails. In a sentence, the whole place was furnished in a pathetic attempt at last year's moderne-spirituel fashion.

Cue Lisa flipping to the copyright page. "Copyright © 1961, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971 by Robert Sheckley." Okay, so some 1960s satire on newly in-vogue holistic lifestyles and Eastern spirituality…still reads as fairly accurate…Maybe a bit of an old-fashioned ring to it, a touch of the xenophobia, but amusing. Perhaps we'll get some acidic and prescient cultural commentary in this story, that's always fun…

But then the "semi-young housewife, Melisande Durr, who had just stepped out of the voluptuarium" is described thusly:

She was a pretty girl, with really good legs, sweet hips, pretty stand-up breasts, long soft shiny hair, delicate little face. Nice, very nice. A girl that any man would like to lock onto. Once. Maybe even twice. But definitely not as a regular thing.

Whoa. Uhm. Narratorial POV established much? Were you actually going for "slimy"? I take it that I, with all my lady parts, am not the target demographic? Cue more flipping. Ah, story was originally published in Playboy. That makes an incredible amount of sense, actually. (ASIDE: Playboy is, and has long been, considered a publisher of high-quality fiction. But a magazine doesn't stay in business for fifty-odd years without knowing what its audience likes. Amirite?)

So I will tell you what happens in spoileriffic detail: Melisande has received a mysterious new multifunctional vacuum cleaner. This is the Future, y'all, so vacuum cleaners have reached the apex of their powers—they "scrub the walls" and "rub the halls" and remove clothing stains with tender strokings! But this vacuum cleaner has an agenda: it has been in love with Melisande ever since the day three months prior when it saw her "in Stern's, trying to decide if [she] should buy a sesame-seed toaster that lit up in the dark and recited Invictus." (Ha-ha!) Now it gives Melisande a sensuous massage, attempting to bring her—despite her fluttery and ambivalent objections—to ecstatic "cancellation." There is some cute quasi-philosophical patter about whether metal can feel, and how Melisande has suddenly been made to feel when before she was so frigid (no one ever says "frigid" but that is clearly what We Are Dealing With Here) and the machine even recites a speech about how it has awakened her, and then in what is clearly a monstrous act—it's too awful—oh god—