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.

The Story of the Whole World - #43

 

STORY: “Fermi and Frost” by Frederik Pohl – Winner of the 1986 Hugo Award.

FROM: PLATINUM POHL: THE COLLECTED BEST STORIES (Tor, 2005)

BASICALLY: What the whole world long feared has finally come to pass--the USSR has launched a full nuclear offensive against the US. Amid the massive casualties and ensuing nuclear winter, one American man and the boy he happens to rescue are lucky enough to escape to Iceland. There, protected from the very worst of the global extinction by geothermal warmth and a society accustomed to long bouts of cold, they try to hang on to human civilization amidst the tragedy.

One thing is clear: Frederik Pohl knows what he’s doing. I, who am young and green (in writerly, if not necessarily chronological, terms), might have been tempted to begin this story post-collapse, unfolding my characters’ story in a devastated post-apocalyptic world. Then I guess I would’ve worked backstory into their conversation or something.

But what Pohl does is so much better. He begins the moment before everything changed. He begins with the recognizable:

On Timothy Clary’s ninth birthday he got no cake.

The reason for this is explained in a roundabout fashion. Timothy’s in the TWA terminal of New York’s JFK Airport, apparently alone, with nothing but some stale pastries to eat all day, and we learn that he’s wet his pants because

Getting to the toilets over the packed refugee bodies was just about impossible. There were twenty-eight hundred people in a space designed for a fraction that many, and all of them with the same idea. Get away!

This all happens in the space of a paragraph. Notice how quickly Pohl widens the scope of the narration. The story’s “camera” is focused tightly on this little boy, but it almost immediately pans out and lets us see that the story isn’t about just the little boy, but about many people—an entire nation, at least. And what’s wrong with them? The camera keeps pulling out for a wider and wider shot, until we learn,

Because there had been no launch order yet, or none that the public had heard about anyway, there might still be time for escape. A little time. Time enough for the TWA terminal, and every other airport terminal everywhere, to jam up with terrified lemmings. There was no doubt that the missiles were poised to fly. The attempted Cuban coup had escalated wildly, and one nuclear sub had attacked another with a nuclear charge. That, everyone agreed, was the signal. The next event would be the final one.

Why is beginning in this way such a masterful maneuver on Pohl’s part? I think it has to do with creating stakes. By beginning his story just before all of human civilization nearly comes to a grinding halt, Pohl grounds his story in a horrible event that feels all too plausible. The particular plight of a little boy, poor Timothy Clary, is what draws us into the story, but it’s immediately apparent that what happens to him is incidental in comparison to what seems imminent for the whole earth. 

However, if Pohl had begun after the devastation, the story could be read as pure fantasy. Whether you’re looking at Jonathan Lethem’s AMNESIA MOON or the movie MAD MAX, the dystopian and/or post-apocalyptic landscape is a trope frequently employed to have a little fun, asking important questions like, What if society completely broke down and there were no laws, but we still had cars? Such stories can be highly enjoyable, but Pohl clearly wanted to go in a different direction. “Fermi and Frost” asks a different kind of What if…? question, one that has real relevance in a world still plagued by a nuclear threat (even if an “attempted Cuban coup” is unlikely to be the triggering event anymore). This is science fiction firmly attached to knowable and known reality.

Pohl takes some interesting risks in his narration. The camera-panning-out style of narration I mentioned above could easily lapse into telling rather than showing, or it could come to seem distanced from the story it’s telling. But Pohl appears to avoid these difficulties by returning again and again to his particular characters and the realistic actions they’re taking. One moment, we’re getting omniscient narration, like this:

If the terror had passed and the frantic negotiations had succeeded, Timothy might have found his parents again in time to grow up and marry and give them grandchildren. If one side or the other had been able to preempt, and destroy the other, and save itself, Timothy forty years later might have been a graying, cynical colonel in the American military government of Leningrad. (Or body servant to a Russian one in Detroit.)

But the next moment, we’re seeing the overcrowded airport through the eyes of Dr. Harry Malibert, SETI researcher. The great scientist gets tasked with helping a sick little boy who’s wet himself, bringing the story right back to individual humans in a unique situation. It’s a brave maneuver, to let the narration swing out so far from the characters, but Pohl manages to be quite smooth about it. Ultimately, I’d say that Pohl’s combination of micro character-focused events with macro omniscient narration is what allows him to tell a fundamentally didactic moral (i.e., that nuclear weapons are a real threat) in a way that feels like a genuine piece of honest storytelling. 

* * * 

As you can see from the picture on today’s write-up, LIBRARY MONTH continues! (Not that I checked Cleo out from the library--but you can see the library barcode just behind her ear.)  In fact, I’ve recently gone spelunking amidst the stacks of a new-to-me library branch and have selected some collections that appear highly promising. I know I’ve been neglecting my bloggerly duties of late, as well as my many dedicated fans (sorry, Mom!), but I have a Nefarious Plan for catching back up. Mainly, it involves totally cheating. Am I clever or what? Stay tuned!

Linked Just By This - #42

STORY:  “The Eggy Stone” by Tessa Hadley – Once again, when I selected this story, I had no idea it was available to read HERE for free! Yay!

FROM:  SUNSTROKE AND OTHER STORIES (Picador, 2007)

BASICALLY:  At a week-long school trip to camp, two girls’ hands touch the same beach pebble--the Eggy Stone--at the same moment. Over the holiday, like best friends, they pass the stone between them by elaborate rituals--but how will they share when the trip comes to an end?

Here’s another gorgeous story you can go read for yourself.  Out loud, if you’re up for it.  Some of the lines seem to long to be spoken.

We crunched in socks and sandals across a rim of crisped black seaweed and bone and sea-washed plastic: the tide was in, the long gray line of the waves curled and sucked at the cramped remainder of the beach, a narrow strip of pebbles…Under our sandals the big pale pebbles rattled and shifted awkwardly.  The boys began throwing them in the sea; we felt between them for treasures, the creamy spirals from old shells, bits of washed-soft glass.

The prose is musical; it lilts from hard to soft and, when said aloud, makes the throat open and close through a revolving progression of vowels.  Word-shape is a part of musicality—but what’s here is more than merely pretty.  This passage lays the nature scene with specific sensory details and a certain breezy-but-invigorated tone.  It mimics the movement of water with its sibilants (SockS and SandalS acroSS a rim of criSped black Seaweed) and its repetition (sea-washed plastic…in the sea…washed-soft glass). Thanks to the mention of “the boys” followed up with “we,” as in we the girls, it also manages to indicate in a masterfully understated manner that the narrator is female.  It’s pretty impressive—information like this, while crucial, isn’t always easy to slip in without being really heavy-handed about it. 

Actually, I’d like to stagger off-course for just a moment on that topic.  In my own writing, I used to think a certain amount of androgyny in my narrators was kind of clever.  I was writing about humanity and human beings, after all, not simply one gender or the other; if I had hit upon a voice, a point of view that could be interpreted in either direction, so much the better.  However, after enjoying many heaping mounds of manuscript workshopping and critique-grouping, I’ve come to learn that a character whose sex could genuinely go either way actually happens to annoy the shit out of readers.  Really.  They don’t read it as groundbreaking or delightfully playful or an interesting commentary on their own internalized gender norms.  Nope.  It just bugs the ever-loving crap out of them. 

But hey.  That’s not to say that you should never, ever do it.  Absolute rules do not exist, no matter what you might hear.  But when we take risks in our writing, we should understand what it is we’re risking.

And one other thing.  You might still fall into this trap if you try to make the sex of your narrator clear through action and voice, but you never explicitly say what it is.  My teacher Jack Trujillo at UNM once told us that if you don’t tell your reader what sex your narrator or main character is, they’ll always assume it’s the same sex as you the writer.  While a narrator that seems at one moment male and another female will frustrate your readers, the narrator that’s left undefined is assumed—without comment or much conscious thought—to be the writer’s gender.  (If something later in the story contradicts what the reader had assumed, they will move on to the annoyance I mentioned above.)  I never noticed this tendency until it was pointed out to me.  In fact, when I actually caught myself flipping to the beginning of a story to see if the writer was a man or a woman so I could figure out what POV I was reading—I realized exactly how true this observation is.  So I pass it unto you, dear readers, with my compliments.  Do with it what you will.

But back to the story at hand.  “The Eggy Stone” strongly calls to mind Margaret Atwood’s “Death by Landscape” (a.k.a. story #31).  Besides being beautifully written, both deal with girls who become close friends for only the duration of camp, and both approach the relationship from the POV of the girl who has less social standing (“The Eggy Stone” in first person and Atwood’s “Death by Landscape” in close third).  But where Atwood’s story takes a long view and uses a remembered tragedy to link a past event to the emotional present, Hadley’s story is quieter, almost completely contained in the childhood moment it seeks to describe.

Through the course of the narrative, the Eggy Stone becomes imbued with a kind of power that links two girls who have little else in common.  It’s a bridge between two distant nations. Speaking different languages, they've got to invent their own form of communication:

We took turns holding the Eggy Stone, and the turns were decided by various ritualized competitions, including folded-paper fortune-tellers, knocking the heads off plantains, and a kind of wrestling we invented, kneeling opposite each other with the stone placed between us and swaying in each other's arms, trying to force our opponent to touch ground on one side or another. Before each competition there was a form of words: something like "Eggy Stone / On your own / All alone / Inaccessible light."

What I love about this is how it externalizes the very real kinds of tacit competition that can occur between girls (and also not-girls, I presume), even ones who are best friends at camp.  A rumination on the ways in which one jockeys for position even with the people one loves would not be nearly so effective as this glimpse into the competitive heart of these girls’ connection.

If you can get ahold of the Atwood story (HINT: try your local library!), I recommend reading it in conjunction with this one.  There’s no such thing as a scientific approach to the study of fiction (what would the control group be—a blank page?), but the subject matter of “The Eggy Stone” is so similar to that of “Death by Landscape” that their differences are truly instructive.  However, even if you’re not trying to dissect the hows and whys of short stories, Tessa Hadley’s writing is lovely and I can wholeheartedly recommend popping over to read this very short story.  Thanks Library Month—you’ve given me another introduction to yet another fabulous author!

P.S.  I couldn't decide which cute bonus pic with neighborhood kitty to include, so here's another:

And Now I Die - #41

STORY: “A Memorandum of Sudden Death” by Frank Norris - Take a gander for yourself here.

 

FROM: THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF FRANK NORRIS (Ironweed Press, 1998) – Originally published in 1902. 

 

BASICALLY: Framed as a journalist’s publication of pages found by chance in the desert, an accomplished young writer’s hastily-scribbled diary of his final days traveling across the barren desert southwest as his group is first followed and then attacked by a band of Indians.
 

As a blogger, I am contractually obligated to whine about this sooner or later, so I might as well do it now. I’m having trouble staying up to date with my (admittedly rather untaxing) posting schedule here on the YoOHS blog. Here it’s already July, but ack I’m not even halfway to the finish line. I’ve been trying to catch up, and I very nearly got three entries posted last week (instead of just the minimal two), but then I stumbled on this curious little number from Frank Norris.  (...Since this entry took me forever and a half to write, however, AND I've been beset with a bunch of really boring technical difficulties, I'm even more behind.  Yeesh.)

 

That I picked it up at all, of course, is sheer chance. That’s one of the great glories of the public library—all the rampant serendipity, the accidental finds. At the risk of pestering you with the obvious, I’d like to point out: libraries—they are places! with stuff! to discover through actual physical contact! (Discovery can happen in a bookstore, too, but then you have to pay for it, and that throws a wrench into the proceedings.)

 

As you can see from the photo above, THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF FRANK NORRIS is unassuming at best. But I liked the cover photo, and the description on the back seemed intriguing, considering I’d never heard of the man: “Frank Norris (1870-1902), in the course of his tragically brief career, distinguished himself as one of the most influential and innovative writers of his era, leaving an indelible imprint on American literature.”

 

So I checked it out and brought it home. Then, when I was trying to decide which piece to read, the book fell open to a story that begins, “The manuscript of the account that follows belongs to a harness-maker in Albuquerque, Juan Tejada by name, and he is welcome to whatever of advertisement this notice may bring him.” A charming opening line that touches on local history and promises some rich historical detail? Yes please.

 

But…there are issues. Okay, I know I just said that the opening line is charming, but the story starts out with this whole journalistic background thing which drones on for almost three pages. The journalist details how he got ahold of the manuscript, and the history of the writer, named Karslake, and why this particular account should be of interest to the reader, and what the manuscript looks like, and why Karslake had enlisted in the U.S. Cavalry and… yeah. A tidal wave of piddly details.

 

My assumption is that Norris meant this introduction to serve in place of backstory so that the story itself, in the form of hastily-written log entries, might focus on action and not get bogged down with the kind of background necessary to make a reader care about that action. Also, of course, a journalist’s fact-based introduction, even if fictional, lends an air of truth to the piece. Norris takes great pains to provide the kind of quotidian detail that grounds this in real life:

Though I did not know young Karslake, I knew his stuff—as everybody still does, when you come to that…the mere mention of his pen name, “Anson Qualtraugh,” recalls at once to thousands of the readers of a certain world-famous monthly magazine of New York articles and stories he wrote for it while he was alive; as, for instance, his admirable descriptive work called “Traces of the Aztexs on the Mogolon Mesa,” in the October number of 1890. Also, in the January issue of 1892 there are two specimens of his work, one signed Anson Qualtraugh and the other Justin Blisset. Why he should have used the Blisset signature I do not know. It occurs only this once in all his writings. In this case it is signed to a very indifferent New Year's story. The Qualtraugh "stuff" of the same number is, so the editor writes to me, a much shortened transcript of a monograph on "Primitive Methods of Moki Irrigation," which are now in the archives of the Smithsonian. The admirable novel, "The Peculiar Treasure of Kings," is of course well known. Karslake wrote it in 1888-89, and the controversy that arose about the incident of the third chapter is still--sporadically and intermittently--continued.

None of this bears any direct relation to the rest of the story (or if it does, the connection is far too subtle for me to tease out). From a historical perspective, this mountain of details is kind of interesting. But as a reader—gah.

 

Once the action of the “manuscript” gets going, things ramp up a little. (Fun tidbit: the entire reported text of the manuscript is actually enclosed in quotation marks. It’s so quaint and fussy I could squeeze its widdow cheeks!) Karslake begins in an interested, but nonchalant, tone:

“They came in sight early this morning just after we had had breakfast and had broken camp. The four of us--'Bunt,' 'Idaho,' Estorijo and myself--were jogging on to the southward and had just come up out of the dry bed of some water-hole--the alkali was white as snow in the crevices--when Idaho pointed them out to us…We took them in through my field-glasses and Bunt made sure they were an outlying band of Hunt-in-the-Morning's Bucks…They seem to be well mounted.
     "We held a council of war from the saddle without halting, but there seemed very little to be done--but to go right along and wait for developments. At about eleven we found water--just a pocket in the bed of a dried stream--and stopped to water the ponies. I am writing this during the halt.
      "We have one hundred and sixteen rifle cartridges.

Karslake is sure, almost from the outset, that an attack is imminent. Yet the attack doesn’t come. This wavering certainty does create some tension—because of the introduction, the reader knows that an attack will come, so Karslake’s anticipation within his narrative combines with what we know will take place.

 

But it’s not enough. Certain stories to which we already know the ending still manage to hold our interest, even fill us with a delicious readerly anxiety as we hope against hope that there’s some loophole and things will not end as we know they must. (The only example jumping to my mind at the moment is a novel, WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys, which reimagines the history of JANE EYRE’s madwoman in the attic. The whole time I was reading, I kept wanting to believe that I had simply misunderstood some fundamental point and that it would all end happily…) In “A Memorandum of Sudden Death,” however, there’s no mounting sense of tragedy. 

Perhaps it’s a question of length? Or maybe Norris provides the wrong kinds of details about Karslake in that journalistic introduction—for all that the reader ultimately knows in the way of facts, we get very little sense of who the man actually was or why we should especially care about what happened to him. His tragic end is no more than a curiosity.

 

This piece does contain some good writing and historical detail that’ll probably make me recommend it to certain friends who have an enthusiasm for literature about the desert and the west. I especially like several bits about the landscape and the way the story ends in the middle of a sentence (as though the writer really were killed in the middle of the action). I also like a passage in which Karslake recounts his surprise that the death of one of his companions should feel so insignificant:

This is the first violent death I have ever seen…If I had been told of his death—the details of it, in a story or in the form of fiction—it is easily conceivable that it would have impressed me more with its importance than the actual scene has done. Possibly my mental vision is scaled to a larger field since Friday, and as the greater issues loom up one man more or less seems to be but a unit—more or less—in an eternal series.

Naturally, I can’t help but connect this to Norris’ own desire in writing this short story (and feel a little haunted by the fact that his own life would end so soon after writing this). It’s conceivable, even, that Norris wanted to make this thrilling scene of death by shootout in the desert into what Karslake experiences—just “a unit...in an eternal series.” (But if so, it would mean that it’s gone out of his way to make his story less interesting than it otherwise could be.) In the end, I’d say that “Memorandum of Sudden Death” is an example of a fine piece of writing that, because of its structure, doesn’t reach its true potential.

Speaking of Speaking - #40 – ALSO, LIBRARY MONTH CONTINUES!

STORY:  “I Kiss a Door” by Miranda July

FROM:  NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU (Scribner, 2007)

BASICALLY:  Looking back on the details of her interactions with a former friend, a woman realizes that the signs of the friend’s big secret were there all along.

So, I sort of want to hate Miranda July.  She’s one of those wunderkinder too bright to look at—writer, filmmaker, actor, etc. etc. etc., plus exceptionally pretty, plus my age, plus recipient of all kinds of awards and critical accolades and jury prizes and so yes, sometimes I just want to throw up my hands, toss down a vodka tonic, and crawl under a rock.  Oh sure, oh sure, I’ll drunkenly mutter to myself, it’s *easy* to be published in The Paris Review when you’re already perfect in every way.  And then I’ll belch and fall into fitful dreams of losing the Tuscaloosa County Pie Eating Contest to a members-only club of pygmy chimpanzees.

They’re called coping strategies, people.

Unfortunately for my planned slide into bitterness, alcoholism, and night terrors at the hands of these damned injustices, Miranda July is, by all appearances, actually a very nice person who has actually done a lot to earn all the praise that's been heaped upon her.  When I heard her talking on a podcast about her writing, I found her intelligent and likeable.  Click on her book link above or head over to her personal site and notice how casual and quirky and charming she manages to be.  So, I suppose that, instead of despising her and making up nasty rumors to insert into her Wikipedia page and feeling generally venomous and petty, I should just sit back and try to learn something useful from her.  Argh, maturity.  I haz it!

“I Kiss a Door” is short and on first glance, feels slight, almost underdeveloped.  It doesn’t branch out from its center.  By “center,” I mean in this case the mind of its narrator, a somewhat self-involved woman who is essentially relating her shock at a piece of gossip she just heard.  But on reflection, I think the story instead branches inward, becoming deeper and more layered precisely because it doesn’t move around much and have a bunch of plot pushing things forward.  The narrator’s thoughts and judgments about her friend Eleanor, by remaining enclosed in her own mind, become as much about herself as about that other person.  Eleanor’s particular relationship with her father, especially, but also her troubled views on creation and art and freedom, become a prism through which the narrator sees her own views on these things—though she can’t acknowledge it even to herself.  No, in her own mind, it’s just a Well I’ll be damned kind of moment as she grasps something about Eleanor she never before realized.

In terms of technique, it’s notable that a large percentage of this story takes place through dialogue.  Interestingly, July chooses, in this story as elsewhere, not to mark her dialogue with quotation marks.

I don’t know what it’s like for you, but when I read dialogue that doesn’t use quotes, it feels completely different in my mind.  Such a little thing, but it makes so much difference.  For me, the effect is what I’d call flattening, though if you ask me to explain that I’ll just stammer and try to change the subject.  Without quotation marks to set them off, the words feel pushed into the page—even though they’re structured much like normal dialogue, like the specific things that people actually said, they feel less certain.

I have my suspicions that to never, ever use quotation marks is something of an affectation, but I do think it’s an effective technique in this particular story.  We’re learning about the past (and by extension, the present) through the memories of the narrator, and the fact that all of the dialogue occurs in this flat and unmarked manner only seems to underscore that it’s not a completely reliable record of events.  Not that it’s an unreliable narrator in the strict literary sense of the term, but that any first person account is by its natured skewed.  Plus, all the dialogue in the story occurs between the narrator and another person—there aren’t any group conversations, or reports of others’ conversations.  Here’s how “I Kiss a Door” opens:

Now that I know, it seems so obvious. Suddenly, there is nothing I remember that doesn’t contain a clue. I remember a beautiful blue wool coat with flat silver buttons. It fit her perfectly, it even gripped her.

Where did you find that coat?

My father bought it for me.

Really? It’s so cool.

It just arrived this morning.

He picked it out? How did he know how to pick something so cool?

I don’t know.

Notice that, lacking quotation marks or dialogue tags to clarify things, July sticks to back-and-forth dialogue that’s both simple and brief.  No speeches, no ambiguous attributions.  Her narrative paragraphs are set off partly because they are longer—i.e., visually—and partly because of the cue words July uses to begin them.  The example above doesn’t make it obvious, but other non-dialogue paragraphs begin with things like “It seemed unfair that…” and “When Shy Panther played at…” and “By the time Thunderheart came out…”  It would be difficult to mistake these phrases for the narrator’s dialogue.  Quietly and carefully, July works hard to make sure that these shifts don’t annoy or confuse her readers.

And now.

I have absolutely no transition (Miranda July would have thought of a transition…), but hey everyone, it’s Library Month! My father suggests I call “Library Month ±” since, as I have explained, NO ONE has any idea how long it’ll actually last.  Feel free to think of it in mathematical terms!  Meanwhile, I’d like to point your mouse-clicks to some library-related coolness:

• The literary blog MobyLives recently drew my attention to what census figures can tell us about the personal and professional lives of librarians over the past century or so.  And good news, because the librarian profession is no longer in decline, having apparently found its cultural niche.
• Except maybe not.  The Daily Dish highlights the ongoing debate.  Fie!  Librarians are cool.
• In fact, take a look at some photographic evidence of their coolness in a series of gleeful posts over on writer/artist Laini Taylor’s blog.  She’s just returned from her first ALA annual conference and has posted tons of great on-the-town photos and book porn.  Enjoy!