Psychedelic Everest
by Brian Poloncic
Auto-Interview
Q: I’ve read you are schizophrenic? What is that like?
A: Some days I choose not to wear my heart on my sleeve as much as others. I embrace it for Marketing sometimes, I’m not proud of that. Today is one of those days, but It’s true, I was Diagnosed with the “S” word when I turned 21. It’s a bitch sometimes., that’s what it’s like. Yeah, it’s hard but in some ways it saved my life…
Q: How is that?
A: It gives me time to write and draw, a lot of free-time really.
Q: You were once called the Daniel Johnston of the literary world. How does that work?
A: I might be, I don’t know. I am not bothered by the outsider artist thing though,
I’m broke you see, I’ll ride it as long as I can, but I think I’ll probably out grow that.
Q: What did you want to be as a child?
A: When I was a child I wanted to be a philosopher. I think that may have been why I went mad. Mad. Reason being, I had to come up with a philosophy to make sense of the experience of Mental illness in 21st Century America. I am a bit flustered, can we continue some other time?
Excerpt from Psychedelic Everest
which is published by the Journal of Experimental Fiction
Uh which student? Here we go and tulips and love and sweetness and doves my my the buzz gets you and lies down beneath the blankets and then here she comes again and stops in midair like a helicopter bug like you’ve never seen one. Oh my this place sure is a mess, coming in low and aloft with finesse bows and banana peels and concession stands and a morphing hoop from which nothing much comes but does not give up all the same post war mint and dollar store laundry detergent amiss a flood a Miss a dud and woops here goes the best the ephemeral the bloody smoke on which we choke fuck for heaven’s sake and not to get excited please bring me back she said at caffeine dreams and I write from them, the was a gourd I hate people when the band was travelling to Kansas City, I am exactly like, enough purpose so outside English have some control and me, enough purpose so outside, religious or philosophy class pretty cool, I loved critical thinking, oh god texture, every single dot, now generalize that fifth, and it’s like shut up but then you think of it and it’s like Jesus! I oxford, no one really understands, one fourth of the population, it’s really funny, she’s also hilarious and I’ve never read a book like that before, I get into each subject, dumb dancing are hilarious right to do and everything, quantum theory, the opposite of what you want to do. I don’t know what to do about it, people have dedicated their life to this, it’s all about being self-aware, you have no idea, it just made me laugh, not unless you are into science, I am not one percent I am not suicidal, all you do it…..i am really unsaid, I’ve decided pages stamped in quinoa and either that or can we go inside no dean faction if you like the silent teaching talk to them and I know It sounds stupid but the birds and stuff like that and I make friends and I don’t question about something, and then I have a syllabus and to be in two classes at once, and it was hard to focus on mine but she was like oh yeah we can do this and that’s what got me into the classes we take and r.B. and one and our contagion and honestly there is some…….i blanched it all too. I don’t’ want to take it so I don’t take it all and she did the math and it would be the same price if I had gone to metro. Double prospectus like 18 credit hours which I absolutely believe dissolved errrr….that’s what we don’t like if I schedule and also we have a lot. A professor and language about a girl wish I had known awe man that’s a bummer and oh that stopped everything and I know I have a schedule and so I started out, it’s nice to start out tense and a chess match or a close approximation of bad well known and bad establishment I have all the verbs. Tuesday Wednesday class and I ended out at eleven and grand slam this sucks on with the classes it’s the most wayward chuckle and they took a nap like amazon for ours. Damn girl! A lot of abilities a cycle weird to ride ok it’s not everything but your opinion is wrong science defacto a girl again she asked oh where I been and I need science needs typing question ok with all matter its boring to me and it’s a shitter but I want to adhere but I just don’t know gather anywhere what a creative train wreck ha ha ha I was gonna go inside every done that? Honestly I am not educated enough and that was gonna be my first I’m on it will not be well founded. That’s a pitchfork I’m burning Halloween like I said I am waiting if you take a big wherever you are to one guitars plus is the next one you’re welcome thank you. It’s kind of weird but it’s not this kind of awesome, oh my god are you cause I walk in oh abandon that heavy seriously it is something of the girls I think talking about what you think and laugh ha ha. I mean it’s like a grocery store it happens even not knowing ha ha politically clap snap clap laughter do you vote well not challenge the pull by the time we drop all the elements it will look like glasses look better for them am I addicted now fair enough thank you for the porpouri and a floppy daze we used to do well it’s local I just abhor a shakes plus that will be oh the vacuum is us numbers numbers a game of backgammon not if he is railed with shit like you. Where is it? That is so I think it was skier a good time for the letter bonze get the flies out of here where glad I am not charging today oh I’ll look at it lovely pardon he does look like a’s finally go home what would we need next day oh jadon beat Chicago she’s still bitchin I know an ice jockey where ride the mule and hence a starter I went to once we’re gonna do bottom drop off yeah this tom he did their shoes the story yeah feel like surfing like one shoe naw I don’t think I saw do you know that one half courier curry oh yeah feel it brakes like good job aha! Is not way wings, yeah. God. More coffee? And uh, they say didn’t have anything spray paint which is youthful which isn’t rather incite cuz beans don’t burn in the kitchen ha wow they are nine thirty thank god they are a train does he? Where is alien coup if you don’t have to work fine frightened ha ha ha is all this for real for some reason our torpedo is that all of them um yeah cody beat that then again do you like katy? That is work done we’re gonna be elated get into that but I think I guess you could say this he had a rock inside his shave what about tort you French for turtle I’m going for three could be a beer can others release like lance does, yeah responsive have they left already so you and the bitter college we haven’t grubbed their high pitched feel shadowed but nice guy they are um Macy’s you have long legs oh gosh talons fur maid that’s mine really all that smoke first day planters oh my gawd vroom oh yeah that’s right okay thank you thank you head some people ruth I’ll bet on rudiment she really admired my dad double garry tell you this four way they had such a crime are gonna be so long it takes so long. I did it once last week, I don’t really think I’m gonna need this, she’d have it out of the way, one in line to do it…dizzy is like the light and we get it right but we don’t like it often like howdy okay flipflop and the guy is like here go check first state stuck with rough diamonds a lot of amount of reason but mental a good address I make it out I knew three thousand out of nowhere well be it starts to be that was the first time I was dreaming of it I really down you make have a good night I’m out.
Ohio part of being f Tasting bad bad for you even tonight I abstract that’s irrate yeah it’s earth being inviting could be invited but yep I can see that be hugs I wonder a walkathon okay cause I was afraid there are times I cannot say it super energetic but last not this last summer but last fall that I am better at writing things out a guy wanted to dine enjoy the alpha plane it was stupid cause I was just shocked I know and I wanted to thank I got that I told them that no idea okay I can see that. On skype whatever but so like I just understood that shock yeah that’s coo so something something eeeeear!!!!!! Could you not go white? Break up with him and where’d so and so guy vague enough to let her know what happened. Here’s a blunt question because you seem very excited about this and I’m the type of person who hold on hold on here’s the thing, many many times what? I’m not saying it I’m saying I don’t want to sit here like I’m not ready to do this and then go aghh. I also so like you seem very excited about this but I can’t now even work out. I mean you shouldn’t right now so don’t get too far in and basically just pushing yourself further more but she’s like they did they really that’s alright I was going to school just there because if you go and you are gonna make yourself more upset schnauzer that’s not gonna be us and they say five inches taller she’s such the perfect purse. Nipples are dank. Oh that’s cool and around that time she dished out a lot of poems that’s good she’s your doll I actually hello? All of them I’m like not on algebra creepy baby it looks like overdone oh yeah! Oh it even has name the best right dude the ending is so good well this is one I read there was like it was a blow that is the key question everyone can get put off I am going to at this point probably not because I scheduled payment but I went in yesterday and I managed to sir I don’t know you alright that’s cool I managed to vocalized a sweater beast rounded feather yeah it’s not easy it’s the darkness NO as it stands just go with any old ATM oh also banks taken enough oh god dangit it’s just a matter to be a comedian overall you just have to capture him oh that’s the thing I cannot rationalize when she pulls them out although don’t know you two and I don’t want to spoil it it’s okay she dropped off it’s less likely so yeah I was thinking again I what advice I know what did happen there face to face to lips to tongue tell me about the kissing he’s got a knife spot a knifing good spot I don’t know what you are expecting spacer a little bit do I not want to be I don’t know ha ha ha right! It just goes straight into a curve she likes mine she likes mom slow or stabby tongue okay invading a fair amount of everything yeah still ok guys I have enough energy now I’ll let you know dude do you want to work I am declining too much too much that’s where towels go I am working so sister beam me up in heaven yeah it seems like without lying just a little I probably got a she thinks she is if that sort of seems that way I don’t know how to answer that question.
Reviews:
"Brion Poloncic is the Daniel Johnston of the literary world"
- Eckhard Gerdes, author of Hugh Moore and My Landlady the Lobotomist
“Call Brion Poloncic an Art Brut or Outsider Artist, if you must, but for me all art is either good or bad and those are the only distinctions that matter much. Brion's stories and experiments in fiction are playful, serious and incredibly entertaining, especially when heard live by the artist himself.”
– Simon Joyner
“Brion is the master of psychedelic realism.”
-Dominic Ward, editor Dirt Heart Pharmacy Press
Q: I’ve read you are schizophrenic? What is that like?
A: Some days I choose not to wear my heart on my sleeve as much as others. I embrace it for Marketing sometimes, I’m not proud of that. Today is one of those days, but It’s true, I was Diagnosed with the “S” word when I turned 21. It’s a bitch sometimes., that’s what it’s like. Yeah, it’s hard but in some ways it saved my life…
Q: How is that?
A: It gives me time to write and draw, a lot of free-time really.
Q: You were once called the Daniel Johnston of the literary world. How does that work?
A: I might be, I don’t know. I am not bothered by the outsider artist thing though,
I’m broke you see, I’ll ride it as long as I can, but I think I’ll probably out grow that.
Q: What did you want to be as a child?
A: When I was a child I wanted to be a philosopher. I think that may have been why I went mad. Mad. Reason being, I had to come up with a philosophy to make sense of the experience of Mental illness in 21st Century America. I am a bit flustered, can we continue some other time?
Excerpt from Psychedelic Everest
which is published by the Journal of Experimental Fiction
Uh which student? Here we go and tulips and love and sweetness and doves my my the buzz gets you and lies down beneath the blankets and then here she comes again and stops in midair like a helicopter bug like you’ve never seen one. Oh my this place sure is a mess, coming in low and aloft with finesse bows and banana peels and concession stands and a morphing hoop from which nothing much comes but does not give up all the same post war mint and dollar store laundry detergent amiss a flood a Miss a dud and woops here goes the best the ephemeral the bloody smoke on which we choke fuck for heaven’s sake and not to get excited please bring me back she said at caffeine dreams and I write from them, the was a gourd I hate people when the band was travelling to Kansas City, I am exactly like, enough purpose so outside English have some control and me, enough purpose so outside, religious or philosophy class pretty cool, I loved critical thinking, oh god texture, every single dot, now generalize that fifth, and it’s like shut up but then you think of it and it’s like Jesus! I oxford, no one really understands, one fourth of the population, it’s really funny, she’s also hilarious and I’ve never read a book like that before, I get into each subject, dumb dancing are hilarious right to do and everything, quantum theory, the opposite of what you want to do. I don’t know what to do about it, people have dedicated their life to this, it’s all about being self-aware, you have no idea, it just made me laugh, not unless you are into science, I am not one percent I am not suicidal, all you do it…..i am really unsaid, I’ve decided pages stamped in quinoa and either that or can we go inside no dean faction if you like the silent teaching talk to them and I know It sounds stupid but the birds and stuff like that and I make friends and I don’t question about something, and then I have a syllabus and to be in two classes at once, and it was hard to focus on mine but she was like oh yeah we can do this and that’s what got me into the classes we take and r.B. and one and our contagion and honestly there is some…….i blanched it all too. I don’t’ want to take it so I don’t take it all and she did the math and it would be the same price if I had gone to metro. Double prospectus like 18 credit hours which I absolutely believe dissolved errrr….that’s what we don’t like if I schedule and also we have a lot. A professor and language about a girl wish I had known awe man that’s a bummer and oh that stopped everything and I know I have a schedule and so I started out, it’s nice to start out tense and a chess match or a close approximation of bad well known and bad establishment I have all the verbs. Tuesday Wednesday class and I ended out at eleven and grand slam this sucks on with the classes it’s the most wayward chuckle and they took a nap like amazon for ours. Damn girl! A lot of abilities a cycle weird to ride ok it’s not everything but your opinion is wrong science defacto a girl again she asked oh where I been and I need science needs typing question ok with all matter its boring to me and it’s a shitter but I want to adhere but I just don’t know gather anywhere what a creative train wreck ha ha ha I was gonna go inside every done that? Honestly I am not educated enough and that was gonna be my first I’m on it will not be well founded. That’s a pitchfork I’m burning Halloween like I said I am waiting if you take a big wherever you are to one guitars plus is the next one you’re welcome thank you. It’s kind of weird but it’s not this kind of awesome, oh my god are you cause I walk in oh abandon that heavy seriously it is something of the girls I think talking about what you think and laugh ha ha. I mean it’s like a grocery store it happens even not knowing ha ha politically clap snap clap laughter do you vote well not challenge the pull by the time we drop all the elements it will look like glasses look better for them am I addicted now fair enough thank you for the porpouri and a floppy daze we used to do well it’s local I just abhor a shakes plus that will be oh the vacuum is us numbers numbers a game of backgammon not if he is railed with shit like you. Where is it? That is so I think it was skier a good time for the letter bonze get the flies out of here where glad I am not charging today oh I’ll look at it lovely pardon he does look like a’s finally go home what would we need next day oh jadon beat Chicago she’s still bitchin I know an ice jockey where ride the mule and hence a starter I went to once we’re gonna do bottom drop off yeah this tom he did their shoes the story yeah feel like surfing like one shoe naw I don’t think I saw do you know that one half courier curry oh yeah feel it brakes like good job aha! Is not way wings, yeah. God. More coffee? And uh, they say didn’t have anything spray paint which is youthful which isn’t rather incite cuz beans don’t burn in the kitchen ha wow they are nine thirty thank god they are a train does he? Where is alien coup if you don’t have to work fine frightened ha ha ha is all this for real for some reason our torpedo is that all of them um yeah cody beat that then again do you like katy? That is work done we’re gonna be elated get into that but I think I guess you could say this he had a rock inside his shave what about tort you French for turtle I’m going for three could be a beer can others release like lance does, yeah responsive have they left already so you and the bitter college we haven’t grubbed their high pitched feel shadowed but nice guy they are um Macy’s you have long legs oh gosh talons fur maid that’s mine really all that smoke first day planters oh my gawd vroom oh yeah that’s right okay thank you thank you head some people ruth I’ll bet on rudiment she really admired my dad double garry tell you this four way they had such a crime are gonna be so long it takes so long. I did it once last week, I don’t really think I’m gonna need this, she’d have it out of the way, one in line to do it…dizzy is like the light and we get it right but we don’t like it often like howdy okay flipflop and the guy is like here go check first state stuck with rough diamonds a lot of amount of reason but mental a good address I make it out I knew three thousand out of nowhere well be it starts to be that was the first time I was dreaming of it I really down you make have a good night I’m out.
Ohio part of being f Tasting bad bad for you even tonight I abstract that’s irrate yeah it’s earth being inviting could be invited but yep I can see that be hugs I wonder a walkathon okay cause I was afraid there are times I cannot say it super energetic but last not this last summer but last fall that I am better at writing things out a guy wanted to dine enjoy the alpha plane it was stupid cause I was just shocked I know and I wanted to thank I got that I told them that no idea okay I can see that. On skype whatever but so like I just understood that shock yeah that’s coo so something something eeeeear!!!!!! Could you not go white? Break up with him and where’d so and so guy vague enough to let her know what happened. Here’s a blunt question because you seem very excited about this and I’m the type of person who hold on hold on here’s the thing, many many times what? I’m not saying it I’m saying I don’t want to sit here like I’m not ready to do this and then go aghh. I also so like you seem very excited about this but I can’t now even work out. I mean you shouldn’t right now so don’t get too far in and basically just pushing yourself further more but she’s like they did they really that’s alright I was going to school just there because if you go and you are gonna make yourself more upset schnauzer that’s not gonna be us and they say five inches taller she’s such the perfect purse. Nipples are dank. Oh that’s cool and around that time she dished out a lot of poems that’s good she’s your doll I actually hello? All of them I’m like not on algebra creepy baby it looks like overdone oh yeah! Oh it even has name the best right dude the ending is so good well this is one I read there was like it was a blow that is the key question everyone can get put off I am going to at this point probably not because I scheduled payment but I went in yesterday and I managed to sir I don’t know you alright that’s cool I managed to vocalized a sweater beast rounded feather yeah it’s not easy it’s the darkness NO as it stands just go with any old ATM oh also banks taken enough oh god dangit it’s just a matter to be a comedian overall you just have to capture him oh that’s the thing I cannot rationalize when she pulls them out although don’t know you two and I don’t want to spoil it it’s okay she dropped off it’s less likely so yeah I was thinking again I what advice I know what did happen there face to face to lips to tongue tell me about the kissing he’s got a knife spot a knifing good spot I don’t know what you are expecting spacer a little bit do I not want to be I don’t know ha ha ha right! It just goes straight into a curve she likes mine she likes mom slow or stabby tongue okay invading a fair amount of everything yeah still ok guys I have enough energy now I’ll let you know dude do you want to work I am declining too much too much that’s where towels go I am working so sister beam me up in heaven yeah it seems like without lying just a little I probably got a she thinks she is if that sort of seems that way I don’t know how to answer that question.
Reviews:
"Brion Poloncic is the Daniel Johnston of the literary world"
- Eckhard Gerdes, author of Hugh Moore and My Landlady the Lobotomist
“Call Brion Poloncic an Art Brut or Outsider Artist, if you must, but for me all art is either good or bad and those are the only distinctions that matter much. Brion's stories and experiments in fiction are playful, serious and incredibly entertaining, especially when heard live by the artist himself.”
– Simon Joyner
“Brion is the master of psychedelic realism.”
-Dominic Ward, editor Dirt Heart Pharmacy Press
On the Invisibility of Writing
“RARE: Novel, Concept, Artwork,” page 75 (detail)
Stéphane Zagdanski
“I am the boy
That can enjoy
Invisibility.”
“Turko the Terrible,” mentioned by James Joyce in Ulysses
It was in the end of 2013.
One year ago, my last novel Chaos brûlant[1], which my publisher[2] thought would be a best-seller of the Autumn 2012, was a commercial fiasco. It did not happen because of the novel itself (a fierce humorous description of the financial political sexual ecological and media dementia in our days – with the “DSK Case” in the background), but because of my terrible relationship with journalists, critics and some other writers in France. If you read Balzac’s masterpiece Illusions perdues[3], you will learn everything you need to know about French literary critics. How despicable they were 150 years ago, how despicable they remain nowadays. Add to this the biographical and bibliographical facts that:
1/ I am the grand-son of Polish Jews (who emigrated to Paris at the beginning of the 20th century and were persecuted during the Second world war, with my parents still children, by the French Police under Nazi Occupation), living and writing in a traditionally anti-Semite culture and country…
2/ my wife (and main character of one of my novels : Noire est la beauté[4]) is an African who migrated at 25 years old to an ex colonialist empire and country with still a lot of racist unconscious (in the best of cases) intellectual reflexes (when not remarks)…
3/ I freely despise, denounce and castigate these floundering French journalists and cretinous critics inside my books since I was first published in 1991… and you will have a slight idea of what it means to be me in Paris in the 21st century.
To make a long story short, I think – and wrote clearly – about critics what every serious writer knows. Take Hemingway, for instance: “All criticism is shit anyway. Nobody knows anything about it except yourself. God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp-followers.”[5]
As I don’t want to sound paranoid, I must admit I also have good friends amongst this putrefied hating pot called Parisian Literary Life. They like my writings, they admire my thinking, they enjoy my personality – it’s true I am a nice guy in private… – and they defend me in the media when they have the opportunity. But this time, in the Autumn of 2012, my numerous foes shot first, and my few friends reacted too slowly and too late to save the public life of my book.
As simple as that.
***
The following months, I pondered about what writing meant to me. I remembered the pure joy, the intense pleasure I felt in my twenties when, waking up early in my small student room – not because I had to go to the university but because I decided –, I was writing for myself all morning long (no computer, no internet, no email and no Facebook to distract you then), listening to some Mozart piano sonatas while drinking my Italian coffee. From time to time, searching the right word or expression, I stood up, a cup of hot coffee in hand, gazed at the horizon out of my window and thought: “This is happiness…”
And after 25 years of publication I knew it was still here, the great lonely joy of writing. But obviously, as the resentful reception of Chaos brûlant demonstrated, something went wrong. I was now published by some of the greatest Parisian houses; I had enjoyed everything a writer can savor around here : TV talk shows, radio talk shows, good articles, bad articles, free travels, literary festivals, public debates, solo conferences, cocktails, diners, nice girls from many countries, nights spent discussing Philosophy, Literature and Art in La Closerie des Lilas at the very same table where Joyce and Hemingway sat 90 years before (their names are graven on a small copper plate fixed on a corner of a table)… If you ever dreamed to be part of a Woody Allen’s movie about intellectual life in Paris, you would worship the life I lived this last 25 years.
Yet, the intellectual, spiritual and material collapsing of the world I describe in Burning Chaos was serious and real (it still is, in case you didn’t notice), and I could not not take it into consideration. In 2013, I was 50 years old, in good shape and health. God willing, I might live some 30 more years, taking care of my beloved daughter who was only 4… What would I do during all this time, if not writing? But what was the purpose to write even a single sentence about any subject, when I already knew whom would say what (mainly negative) about it in which newspaper, once the book would be printed, after one year or more of hard, meditative and solitary work…
Face to face, in a regular debate, or even in an article answering to a bad critic, I knew I rhetorically feared no one. But the French journalistic system is made in such a way that you might never have the opportunity to express yourself about your own work. I am no Philip Roth[6], I could not write to Wikipedia, asking and getting a modification for some mistakes published about who I was, what I thought or did or didn’t write. . . So many bullshit was already online about me, even on my Wikipedia Page where anti-Semites, from time to time, were trying to change parts of my own biography… Welcome in Paris, guys, the place were a stupid neo-Nazi gets millions of followers on Youtube!
But even this wasn’t the heart of the question.
Mallarmé once wrote: “Why tamper about what, maybe, should not be sold, especially when it’s not selling…”[7] What is the purpose of trying to deal the work of my most intimate heart and soul with the greatest number of people (which is what “publication” is all about) when my words are pondered and written for nobody else but me and, in the best case, some happy few who devoted their life to what their soul only would enjoy.
The problem was not in not being a best-seller, whatever the causes were – and of course I had a major responsibility in the public fate of my books. It was in depreciating my writing by letting it suffocate inside a corrupted system where it had nothing to do with the essence! I didn’t want my words to neighbour in bookshops the texts of so many lazy zombies I deeply disdained… Which is what publication is about. I wanted my writing to get its rarity back, and by rarity I mean what I felt when I hand wrote powerful sentences in the lonely days of my youth, being so happy, feeling so special just because of the intense sparkling life of my brain, my heart and my imagination…
I think that’s about when I got the first idea of RARE.
***
And after 25 years of publication I knew it was still here, the great lonely joy of writing. But obviously, as the resentful reception of Chaos brûlant demonstrated, something went wrong. I was now published by some of the greatest Parisian houses; I had enjoyed everything a writer can savor around here : TV talk shows, radio talk shows, good articles, bad articles, free travels, literary festivals, public debates, solo conferences, cocktails, diners, nice girls from many countries, nights spent discussing Philosophy, Literature and Art in La Closerie des Lilas at the very same table where Joyce and Hemingway sat 90 years before (their names are graven on a small copper plate fixed on a corner of a table)… If you ever dreamed to be part of a Woody Allen’s movie about intellectual life in Paris, you would worship the life I lived this last 25 years.
Yet, the intellectual, spiritual and material collapsing of the world I describe in Burning Chaos was serious and real (it still is, in case you didn’t notice), and I could not not take it into consideration. In 2013, I was 50 years old, in good shape and health. God willing, I might live some 30 more years, taking care of my beloved daughter who was only 4… What would I do during all this time, if not writing? But what was the purpose to write even a single sentence about any subject, when I already knew whom would say what (mainly negative) about it in which newspaper, once the book would be printed, after one year or more of hard, meditative and solitary work…
Face to face, in a regular debate, or even in an article answering to a bad critic, I knew I rhetorically feared no one. But the French journalistic system is made in such a way that you might never have the opportunity to express yourself about your own work. I am no Philip Roth[6], I could not write to Wikipedia, asking and getting a modification for some mistakes published about who I was, what I thought or did or didn’t write. . . So many bullshit was already online about me, even on my Wikipedia Page where anti-Semites, from time to time, were trying to change parts of my own biography… Welcome in Paris, guys, the place were a stupid neo-Nazi gets millions of followers on Youtube!
But even this wasn’t the heart of the question.
Mallarmé once wrote: “Why tamper about what, maybe, should not be sold, especially when it’s not selling…”[7] What is the purpose of trying to deal the work of my most intimate heart and soul with the greatest number of people (which is what “publication” is all about) when my words are pondered and written for nobody else but me and, in the best case, some happy few who devoted their life to what their soul only would enjoy.
The problem was not in not being a best-seller, whatever the causes were – and of course I had a major responsibility in the public fate of my books. It was in depreciating my writing by letting it suffocate inside a corrupted system where it had nothing to do with the essence! I didn’t want my words to neighbour in bookshops the texts of so many lazy zombies I deeply disdained… Which is what publication is about. I wanted my writing to get its rarity back, and by rarity I mean what I felt when I hand wrote powerful sentences in the lonely days of my youth, being so happy, feeling so special just because of the intense sparkling life of my brain, my heart and my imagination…
I think that’s about when I got the first idea of RARE.
***
I noticed, when I bestowed upon one of my books to people who visited me (I have “stolen” a lot of my books to my publishers because I like making gifts, and for me what I write is the most precious gift I can make), they almost never read it nor speak to me about it anymore. It’s not only that readers are rare and good readers exceptional, but people don’t appreciate what they get too easily. Anyway, since what I write is not easy reading, why would I make it easy to get…
In a novel still in progress I began writing before Burning Chaos, I invented a guy who is so rich that he doesn’t need to sell his art book – a personal encyclopedia about Balzac –, which is gorgeous and costs a lot of money to compose and print. He freely distributes it to people who write him a nice and smart letter explaining in what way they deserve to possess and read this masterpiece. If the writer doesn’t like the letter – because it is vulgar, stupid, or has too many spelling mistakes… – the reader never gets his exemplary. If the letter is agreed, the reader receives gratis a beautiful process color volume full of the most interesting and original facts, thoughts and analyses written about Balzac.
That’s the idea, I thought. A book is a “Spiritual Instrument” as Mallarmé wrote. It should never be treated as a common merchandise. A true book should be considered page after page by the reader with the same intensity and attention required by a painting or a work of art, because that is what writing is invisibly. After all, for centuries the most refined civilizations, including Judaism[8], considered the art of writing as the most precious occupation a human being may have on earth.
Handwriting is the key, I thought. Manuscript, Colors, Beauty, Ink, Paper, Art are the keys…
In February 2014, when I penetrated for the first time inside Boesner, a huge shop for artists and art students, when I discovered these thousands of colored paint tubes, Chinese inks, papers, brushes, pens, canvasses, pencils, nibs, pastels, markers… I knew I made the good choice. I was jubilating exactly as when, as a kid, I received a new paint box ! Maybe what you are going to do from now on is completely crazy, I thought, and maybe you will be the only one to understand and appreciate it, but the sincere and intense joy you feel now is a good guide. Follow it, wherever it might take you.
***
What is RARE about?
Well, mainly about what I just wrote here. The singular life of a Parisian writer who devoted his entire thoughts to literature, who wrote a novel about the nihilistic destruction of the world, then decided to save his own writing in some Noah’s Ark of Art, the very same calligraphic paintings, pictures and videos on which this story is written. RARE is about how it metamorphoses itself into a work of art. . .
I always admired the helicoid prodigy Proust accomplished in À la Recherche du Temps perdu[9], writing about a book to write, and achieving his novel with the idea he now was ready to write the exact same book the reader just finished reading.
Or Mallarmé’s typographic masterpiece Un coup de dés[10], describing the wreck of a ship with words scattered all over the pages like fragments from the wrecked ship.
Or Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in which he had “put the language to sleep” because it describes a full night wake.
I even like Apollinaire’s Calligrams who are shaped in the form of the object these poems are about…
And this is mainly what RARE accomplishes: telling about what it is, and being what it tells about.
***
Why did I decide to write RARE in this funambulistic Frenglish of mine?
For two reasons, mainly. First, I wanted my prose to be considered with fresh eyes. Thanks to internet, I could easily find new readers, English speaking poets, writers, artists, academics. . . At least, if no one was interested in my project, it would not be because of my bad reputation. Here, in France, in the Parisian literary hating pot, everyone knows me, nobody would have an innocent look at it. People who like me would like it, people who loathe me would detest it. Nothing new under the Parisian polluted fog.
Well, mainly about what I just wrote here. The singular life of a Parisian writer who devoted his entire thoughts to literature, who wrote a novel about the nihilistic destruction of the world, then decided to save his own writing in some Noah’s Ark of Art, the very same calligraphic paintings, pictures and videos on which this story is written. RARE is about how it metamorphoses itself into a work of art. . .
I always admired the helicoid prodigy Proust accomplished in À la Recherche du Temps perdu[9], writing about a book to write, and achieving his novel with the idea he now was ready to write the exact same book the reader just finished reading.
Or Mallarmé’s typographic masterpiece Un coup de dés[10], describing the wreck of a ship with words scattered all over the pages like fragments from the wrecked ship.
Or Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in which he had “put the language to sleep” because it describes a full night wake.
I even like Apollinaire’s Calligrams who are shaped in the form of the object these poems are about…
And this is mainly what RARE accomplishes: telling about what it is, and being what it tells about.
***
Why did I decide to write RARE in this funambulistic Frenglish of mine?
For two reasons, mainly. First, I wanted my prose to be considered with fresh eyes. Thanks to internet, I could easily find new readers, English speaking poets, writers, artists, academics. . . At least, if no one was interested in my project, it would not be because of my bad reputation. Here, in France, in the Parisian literary hating pot, everyone knows me, nobody would have an innocent look at it. People who like me would like it, people who loathe me would detest it. Nothing new under the Parisian polluted fog.
Another reason was my desire to put a mute on my prose. In French, I could easily let my anger and my maledictions deploy themselves, as I did with the character of “Luc Ifer” in Burning Chaos. Anger may sometimes be good, rhetorically speaking, but too much anger decays into hate, and hate never gives good literature. In this new autobiographic novel, I couldn’t afford to get angry.
Also I wanted to tell my story from where I left it in Beauty herself is black, which is a love story between a French painter – Doppelgänger of myself – and an African woman who illegally immigrated to Paris. Fifteen years later, my life and my couple resembled more The Taming of the Shrew (or Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man, if you prefer a modern equivalent), than to Romeo and Juliet. . .
As I would not be able to hide my sentences forever – since it was also made to be exposed some day in a gallery –, writing honestly about my intimate life in French would give haters an easy way to take an advantage against my wife (my “spouse” as I call her in RARE). For me, I didn’t care. I received already numerous anonymous anti-Semite letters (welcome in Paris, guys…), and usually I don’t pay attention to the trash exposed online. But my wife, without knowing it, had recently been outraged by a racist writer in an article against me published by my former editor in a French literary review, so I needed to be cautious, become invisible in another way. Since French generally suck at it, English would be my aegis.
Also I wanted to tell my story from where I left it in Beauty herself is black, which is a love story between a French painter – Doppelgänger of myself – and an African woman who illegally immigrated to Paris. Fifteen years later, my life and my couple resembled more The Taming of the Shrew (or Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man, if you prefer a modern equivalent), than to Romeo and Juliet. . .
As I would not be able to hide my sentences forever – since it was also made to be exposed some day in a gallery –, writing honestly about my intimate life in French would give haters an easy way to take an advantage against my wife (my “spouse” as I call her in RARE). For me, I didn’t care. I received already numerous anonymous anti-Semite letters (welcome in Paris, guys…), and usually I don’t pay attention to the trash exposed online. But my wife, without knowing it, had recently been outraged by a racist writer in an article against me published by my former editor in a French literary review, so I needed to be cautious, become invisible in another way. Since French generally suck at it, English would be my aegis.
Why then did I decide to come back to French at PAGE 72? Because, as I once wrote to Philip Roth (never got an answer), to write in English fells like playing piano with my tongue. It became too frustrating while I was describing the death of my grand-mother. I suddenly felt it was time to unmute my prose and let my verdant vocabulary take these sad and funny memories in charge. After all, Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake in many languages; why wouldn’t I make RARE, more modestly, a bilingual novel, especially as the title is already valuable both in French and English?
But there is another meaning, a deeper one, to what I call the invisibility of writing. The prose of RARE will spread itself from page to page on various supports, in many colors, materials and shapes. The day it will be fully exposed, the coherent chaos of colours exhibited to the eyes of the visitors will make the real character of this story conspicuous by its absence, if I may say so.
As I said in the beginning, the real character of RARE is literally the writing itself, the handwriting gesture, the magical enigma which metamorphoses a thought – a feeling, a dream, an intuition, an emotion, a reasoning – into a living sentence, running from the soul and the brain to the extremity of the hand through the veins, the muscles, the nerves and the bones… You can see the result of it, but the process itself remains a mystery. The handwriting, with all its pentimenti, sketches, crossing out, is only the slipstream of a translucent boat which nobody ever saw and on which only the rarest spirits travel…
Stéphane Zagdanski © 2015
[1] “Burning chaos”, from a quote by Nietzsche: “Civilization is only a thin film over a burning chaos.”
Cf. my dialog in English with Robert G. Margolis online: http://chaosbrulant.blogspot.fr/2012/09/the-eruption-of-verbal-audacity.html
[2] Éditions du Seuil : http://www.seuil.com/livre-9782021091533.htm
[3] Lost Illusions, written from 1837 to 1843, especially the second part, where “Balzac denounces journalism, presenting it as the most pernicious form of intellectual prostitution”, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusions_perdues
[4] “Beauty herself is black”, from a sonnet by Shakespeare... Published in 2001 by Éditions Fayard: http://www.fayard.fr/noire-est-la-beaute-9782720214424
[5] Letter to Sherwood Anderson, 23 May 1925.
[6] http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-open-letter-to-wikipedia
[7] « À quoi bon trafiquer de ce qui, peut-être, ne se doit vendre, surtout quand cela ne se vend pas. » Quant au livre
[8] Cf. the proximity between RARE and Jewish Mystic in http://bit.ly/rareenglishpresentation
[9] “If at least, time enough were allotted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time, the idea of which imposed itself upon me with so much force to-day, and I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through—between which so many days have ranged themselves—they stand like giants immersed in Time.” Last lines of Time Regained
[10] http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/MallarmeUnCoupdeDes.htm
Cf. my dialog in English with Robert G. Margolis online: http://chaosbrulant.blogspot.fr/2012/09/the-eruption-of-verbal-audacity.html
[2] Éditions du Seuil : http://www.seuil.com/livre-9782021091533.htm
[3] Lost Illusions, written from 1837 to 1843, especially the second part, where “Balzac denounces journalism, presenting it as the most pernicious form of intellectual prostitution”, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusions_perdues
[4] “Beauty herself is black”, from a sonnet by Shakespeare... Published in 2001 by Éditions Fayard: http://www.fayard.fr/noire-est-la-beaute-9782720214424
[5] Letter to Sherwood Anderson, 23 May 1925.
[6] http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-open-letter-to-wikipedia
[7] « À quoi bon trafiquer de ce qui, peut-être, ne se doit vendre, surtout quand cela ne se vend pas. » Quant au livre
[8] Cf. the proximity between RARE and Jewish Mystic in http://bit.ly/rareenglishpresentation
[9] “If at least, time enough were allotted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time, the idea of which imposed itself upon me with so much force to-day, and I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through—between which so many days have ranged themselves—they stand like giants immersed in Time.” Last lines of Time Regained
[10] http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/MallarmeUnCoupdeDes.htm
Photo by Scott Indermaur
Interview with Vi Khi Nao by Atticus Lanigan and Giovanna Coppola
Atticus Lanigan roams the universe in red. Giovanna Coppola lives in London and is writing a novel about a stinking nun. Here, the two talk to Vi Khi Nao – author of The Vanishing Point of Desire (2011) and Swans In Half-Mourning (2014) – about writing and its intersections with desire, with death, with God. Vi Khi Nao’s latest novella, Swans in Half-Mourning, is a postmodern take on the fairytale The Six Swans, which in her reworking becomes a theological meditation as well as a tale of love between two princesses.
1. GC: Yesterday we talked about the difference between longing and desire and I continued to think about it afterwards. Longing is when you don't want to/can't act, and desire is when you do. It's about movement and non-movement. Do you think that's true?
VKN: For me, I think longing and desire are both momentum builders fastened to the seat belt of passion, with a kind of fixed or pinned mobility, which I think explains some of the unbirthed pain that is attached to it. Longing wears the seat belt without complaints or discomfort, but desire is like a child with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
2. AL: Quoting from your novella, Swans In Half-Mourning, – “Is it milk and desire at the height of their pleasure?” Why white? Why not red, the color of blood? Why not pink, the color of flesh? What reflects longing most?
VKN: In Vietnamese culture, the color white is the symbol of death. And I often equate death with pleasure. Milk is alabaster and it is colored by death too, despite its ability to nourish, to feed, to keep things germinating. When you think of white, you think of stuffed cotton and heavy white plaits and they are very sexual too.
3. AL: Is it possible for Vi to write when she does not feel desire? Is the basis of your writing mourning the absence of a beloved or the absence of desire?
VKN: I write regardless of whether or not I have desire. I write because language is food for me. Recently, I satisfied my craving by making bun rieu and eating it. Bun rieu has annatto seed, red like the color of the earth when its seed gets pulled out of its body for coloring. Every time I don’t eat bun rieu, I mourn perilla, bean sprouts, spearmint, crab cakes, tofu, tomatoes, banana flowers, elsholtzia ciliata. My writing isn’t born out of mourning the absence of a beloved or the absence of desire. It gets born because it likes to eat ink and I like to eat ink.
4. GC: Body parts have a life of their own and that's where I think some of your humor comes from. They excrete, shit, puke, come apart and the people are so surprised. I like this element of alarm and surprise when a body part does what it wants to do. Why are the humans so oblivious? Why don't they want to know their bodies? What are they afraid of?
VKN: I don’t know, Giovan, but if I were to speculate – because the body is the temple of pain and pleasure and because it’s also the printer in which we print and reprint our DNA, I think perhaps people are afraid of how much ink they spill and how much paper they waste, and because printers tend to be replaceable and new printers come out so frequently, there is no point in getting to know them when in a flash, they must get married to the dumpster. I think my “Xerox” story doesn’t capture this fear very well, but it has the core. Somewhat.
5. AL: Does Vi's protagonist ever get the girl and live happily ever after?
VKN: YES. The happiness of Cynthia and Veronika is a paragon of this.
6. GC: There is little movement in your stories. People or things don't drive in cars or fly or go fast from one place to the other. It's as if they don't move because they don't want to disappear. The writing in the stories trains you to stay still, to look at an object or person and to watch it open into many things.
What would happen if the objects or people moved fast? What would happen if the reader moved? Why is disappearing so easy?
VKN: I think there is movement in my work, but it is not defined traditionally. Most of my stories are not still-life paintings, waiting for the permission of the artist to live or to grow ephemeral, phantom limbs. But I do understand your astute observation of my work, in that individuals in my narratives don’t voyage from one geographical landmark to another, rather all of their perennial traveling takes place inside of language itself. As if words have taken a bus through the vocal cords and existential crises of the characters and transport themselves through pragmatic places such as the supermarket or in their own homes or at work. So, the characters are grounded in reality.
What are not grounded are their semantic and ontological dimensions, which are largely fueled by compassion and housed by skewed logic. At times, they invite the marriage between horror and comedy. If individuals move fast in my stories, they may become obliterated by my inability to track their progress. They do move fast in some ways anyway. I often forget my characters after I have written about them, like purging, giving me no time or space to lengthen their stay in the guest room of my subconscious.
And if the reader moved? Well, they better not move! I like my readers to be like seats at a football stadium, where they can’t bring their own chairs with them and if there are too many people, they are stuck!
7. AL: What kind of writing inspires you most?
VKN: Writing that eats fried rice or horseradish with spring roll or bun rieu. Any writing that opens the door into intimacy. I think tenderness is a splendid landscape, but most writers fail to take a train there. The tenderer the writer is – the more vulnerable that piece of writing is. Vulnerability makes the writing fresh. Any writing that has a narrow passageway and you have to squeeze yourself like tomato juice in order to slip in. Writing that behaves like a sculpture or cinema. Writing that walks into the page in the flesh and provides a new perspective on the old. Writing that is fearless and eats itself if it gets hungry. Writing that likes to take a walk with other writers, sometimes dead writers too.
10. GC: Yesterday you said, 'When I write there is a void and that abyss takes over and it becomes my writing.' When you said abyss, I got scared. Is writing scary?
VKN: I don’t think writing is scary, but I think the last stage before writing is the most terrifying. At the door of creation, all my fears and excitement tend to get fattened with the unknown. This heightened obesity can be paralyzing. I do prefer the abyss over the void.
9. AL: Your writing seems to be written sometimes from the inside of a room without windows. Do you agree?
VKN: It may not even be a room. Just windows only. Just windows. Windows that look like God.
10. AL. In “Swans In Half-Mourning,” God seems to be not a passive bystander but almost disinterested. Connie Zweig states in her study of what she calls "holy longing”- "the search for the romantic beloved is a spiritual search, an attempt to return not merely to the oceanic feeling but to conscious, ecstatic union with the divine." What happens to desire for the beloved when one gives up on God? Or, what happens to one's faith in the divine when they are broken by love?
VKN: Those are great questions. When God is gone or roaming the universe while eating pomegranates with Persephone instead of dealing with her rape, I think it doesn’t matter anymore. The divine exists only if humans haven’t fallen out of grace. Divinity was born to separate God’s secretaries from God’s busboys. After we have crushed God’s ego by eating the apple, he says, “Fuck this. I am going to let my son take care of everything.” Desire just wanders and wanders. Enters one place then moves on to the next victim. Faith is birthed from Hope and Hope, according to Livermore (Jesse Livermore was the greatest speculator/investor of all time), Hope is Greed. So, what happens to one’s faith in the divine when they are broken by love? It doesn’t die, it gets converted into greed. And greed leads to bankruptcy of emotions, of finance, of opportunities, and invites desperation.
And then one stops eating donuts with holes.
Paperback
Epub
1. GC: Yesterday we talked about the difference between longing and desire and I continued to think about it afterwards. Longing is when you don't want to/can't act, and desire is when you do. It's about movement and non-movement. Do you think that's true?
VKN: For me, I think longing and desire are both momentum builders fastened to the seat belt of passion, with a kind of fixed or pinned mobility, which I think explains some of the unbirthed pain that is attached to it. Longing wears the seat belt without complaints or discomfort, but desire is like a child with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
2. AL: Quoting from your novella, Swans In Half-Mourning, – “Is it milk and desire at the height of their pleasure?” Why white? Why not red, the color of blood? Why not pink, the color of flesh? What reflects longing most?
VKN: In Vietnamese culture, the color white is the symbol of death. And I often equate death with pleasure. Milk is alabaster and it is colored by death too, despite its ability to nourish, to feed, to keep things germinating. When you think of white, you think of stuffed cotton and heavy white plaits and they are very sexual too.
3. AL: Is it possible for Vi to write when she does not feel desire? Is the basis of your writing mourning the absence of a beloved or the absence of desire?
VKN: I write regardless of whether or not I have desire. I write because language is food for me. Recently, I satisfied my craving by making bun rieu and eating it. Bun rieu has annatto seed, red like the color of the earth when its seed gets pulled out of its body for coloring. Every time I don’t eat bun rieu, I mourn perilla, bean sprouts, spearmint, crab cakes, tofu, tomatoes, banana flowers, elsholtzia ciliata. My writing isn’t born out of mourning the absence of a beloved or the absence of desire. It gets born because it likes to eat ink and I like to eat ink.
4. GC: Body parts have a life of their own and that's where I think some of your humor comes from. They excrete, shit, puke, come apart and the people are so surprised. I like this element of alarm and surprise when a body part does what it wants to do. Why are the humans so oblivious? Why don't they want to know their bodies? What are they afraid of?
VKN: I don’t know, Giovan, but if I were to speculate – because the body is the temple of pain and pleasure and because it’s also the printer in which we print and reprint our DNA, I think perhaps people are afraid of how much ink they spill and how much paper they waste, and because printers tend to be replaceable and new printers come out so frequently, there is no point in getting to know them when in a flash, they must get married to the dumpster. I think my “Xerox” story doesn’t capture this fear very well, but it has the core. Somewhat.
5. AL: Does Vi's protagonist ever get the girl and live happily ever after?
VKN: YES. The happiness of Cynthia and Veronika is a paragon of this.
6. GC: There is little movement in your stories. People or things don't drive in cars or fly or go fast from one place to the other. It's as if they don't move because they don't want to disappear. The writing in the stories trains you to stay still, to look at an object or person and to watch it open into many things.
What would happen if the objects or people moved fast? What would happen if the reader moved? Why is disappearing so easy?
VKN: I think there is movement in my work, but it is not defined traditionally. Most of my stories are not still-life paintings, waiting for the permission of the artist to live or to grow ephemeral, phantom limbs. But I do understand your astute observation of my work, in that individuals in my narratives don’t voyage from one geographical landmark to another, rather all of their perennial traveling takes place inside of language itself. As if words have taken a bus through the vocal cords and existential crises of the characters and transport themselves through pragmatic places such as the supermarket or in their own homes or at work. So, the characters are grounded in reality.
What are not grounded are their semantic and ontological dimensions, which are largely fueled by compassion and housed by skewed logic. At times, they invite the marriage between horror and comedy. If individuals move fast in my stories, they may become obliterated by my inability to track their progress. They do move fast in some ways anyway. I often forget my characters after I have written about them, like purging, giving me no time or space to lengthen their stay in the guest room of my subconscious.
And if the reader moved? Well, they better not move! I like my readers to be like seats at a football stadium, where they can’t bring their own chairs with them and if there are too many people, they are stuck!
7. AL: What kind of writing inspires you most?
VKN: Writing that eats fried rice or horseradish with spring roll or bun rieu. Any writing that opens the door into intimacy. I think tenderness is a splendid landscape, but most writers fail to take a train there. The tenderer the writer is – the more vulnerable that piece of writing is. Vulnerability makes the writing fresh. Any writing that has a narrow passageway and you have to squeeze yourself like tomato juice in order to slip in. Writing that behaves like a sculpture or cinema. Writing that walks into the page in the flesh and provides a new perspective on the old. Writing that is fearless and eats itself if it gets hungry. Writing that likes to take a walk with other writers, sometimes dead writers too.
10. GC: Yesterday you said, 'When I write there is a void and that abyss takes over and it becomes my writing.' When you said abyss, I got scared. Is writing scary?
VKN: I don’t think writing is scary, but I think the last stage before writing is the most terrifying. At the door of creation, all my fears and excitement tend to get fattened with the unknown. This heightened obesity can be paralyzing. I do prefer the abyss over the void.
9. AL: Your writing seems to be written sometimes from the inside of a room without windows. Do you agree?
VKN: It may not even be a room. Just windows only. Just windows. Windows that look like God.
10. AL. In “Swans In Half-Mourning,” God seems to be not a passive bystander but almost disinterested. Connie Zweig states in her study of what she calls "holy longing”- "the search for the romantic beloved is a spiritual search, an attempt to return not merely to the oceanic feeling but to conscious, ecstatic union with the divine." What happens to desire for the beloved when one gives up on God? Or, what happens to one's faith in the divine when they are broken by love?
VKN: Those are great questions. When God is gone or roaming the universe while eating pomegranates with Persephone instead of dealing with her rape, I think it doesn’t matter anymore. The divine exists only if humans haven’t fallen out of grace. Divinity was born to separate God’s secretaries from God’s busboys. After we have crushed God’s ego by eating the apple, he says, “Fuck this. I am going to let my son take care of everything.” Desire just wanders and wanders. Enters one place then moves on to the next victim. Faith is birthed from Hope and Hope, according to Livermore (Jesse Livermore was the greatest speculator/investor of all time), Hope is Greed. So, what happens to one’s faith in the divine when they are broken by love? It doesn’t die, it gets converted into greed. And greed leads to bankruptcy of emotions, of finance, of opportunities, and invites desperation.
And then one stops eating donuts with holes.
Paperback
Epub
About Nora Wright
Winner of Editor's Pick Awards at Textnovel
Tantra Bensko: Hello readers of Everything Experimental Writing. Some of you coming to this article will already be familiar with Nora. For example, her first version of her Light Novel, My Favourite Sin, was at the top of its section's charts at the website Textnovel.com. She took it down to revise and started all over, and it's still doing well. It won the Editor's Pick award, certainly deservedly. It's only one one of her narratives that have a substantial following there, where she is a star for good reason. It's my favorite of her work, and also one of my favorite books of all time. I cried, stared at the screen with my mouth open, gasped, said expletives, repeated phrases of it out loud, laughed out loud, talked to myself about it, exclaiming its wonders, shook my head in amazement. My thoughts returned to it day after day, haunted by its excellence. I finally started corresponding with Nora, wanting to know more about her and help more people find her work, and obtain an appreciation for the Light Novel and other aspects of the world she's involved with. People who have only read her work at Textnovel may enjoy getting to know her better here.
Other readers might be surprised by an interview with someone not appearing in magazines. Nora doesn't particularly read literary magazines, which is no doubt true of many Textnovel members. She reads Manga extensively, however, and like many members there, she uses some of those conventions in her presentations, such as the art, and the convoluted, intensely dramatic plots involving young, active people. She of course also reads the material on Textnovel. It's a whole self-contained world, though some authors there have had their work published outside of that site.
Some writers, such as Nora, also put their work up at Wattpad, and spend time reading the other works there. Such communities tend to be more directly interactive than many magazines, though those sometimes have forums, Facebook pages, representation at AWP, etc. and the individual authors tend to network heavily.
In fact, while people coming from the Literary magazine direction might be surprised to see all this work given away for free without the gatekeeper's seal of approval, consider this: in a magazine, the slush readers, and team of editors, or sometimes, the sole editor alone, makes the decision to publish a piece in a journal or anthology. In Textnovel, popularity is shown by page views, Editor's Picks, votes, etc. so it's like having a lot of editors give the seal of approval if a story gains attention.
We must take into account, when using that system to attempt to sanction a story, that there are a majority of readers and writers who are very young, and who like stories about young romance. The paranormal/supernatural genre is also popular, though there is a wide variety of material on the site, and all ages and audiences. Still, the very highest ranking ones find their audience with the majority of the young readers, are the site's version of commercial fiction, and some even use something akin to advertisements within them. Quiet, philosophical literary fiction by an elderly scholar would have more of a challenge in gaining such high ranking there, whereas it has no handicap within most literary magazines. But such a writer might find great inspiration in the new forms such as Cell Phone Novel (CPN) and Light Novel, the direct interaction, a new challenge to write to appeal in a sink or swim way with real-life readers for entertainment.
This is not a perfect system for an outsider to navigate looking for quality alone, as many factors besides that can go into popularity there, and because we don't know who the editors are and their unique credentials and tastes. However, taking some time looking through the site, you'll see you can search by genre, to help narrow it down to your taste. Also it has a handy way of showing you the first bit of the description about each newly added, updated, award winning piece as well as the ones people pay to have brought to the editor's and reader's attention without the need for much searching. If you like one writer, you can see who else she likes, and though most of the narratives on the site would never make sense in a Literary magazine or Literary publisher, there is a Literary section, and some, including some of the genre pieces, could well appear in respected publications.
Author Kyle Muntz says: "It's still rare, but the anime industry produces convoluted, unconventional work a lot more regularly than any visual media over here, which is especially impressive considering how small their budgets can be."
In the Japanese tradition this site arises from, this is the way to get published, especially as it is the first English language website and is the largest source of CPN. In 2007, half of the best selling novels in Japan began as CPN, generally ended up with movies and games. Now 3/4ths of teens in Japan read CPN. TAKATSU has been instrumental in bringing that to North America. Light Novels are also very popular there. Both of these have conventions I'd like to hear Nora describe. I'd like to hear her talk about all sorts of things, so I asked her to get it started with some background about herself.
Nora Wright: I mainly write on Textnovel.Com. Two of my works got Editor Choice Award on Textnovel.Com.
Link: http://www.textnovel.com/story/My-Favourite-Sin/14485/
http://www.textnovel.com/story/Koi-No-Yokan/15093/
Actually, I got the idea of My Favourite Sin because of my online activities. I spend a lot of time online and have met some really great people. I took a bit of the story from real life and a bit of imagination. The start of the story was based on an online relationship I had, but later, I went with the Flow. Writing about a girl with secrets was not tough. We all have secrets. I was anything like my character. But, when I wrote My Favourite Sin, I didn't really plan the story.
I write without thinking. I become my character. Although, my character and I might not have any connection. When I write stories, I don't think. I role play. I become the characters and my mind thinks like them. After that, I switched to my writer self. I create situations and imagine what my character will do in those situations. Will they break or will they fight? I also don't believe in black and white world. That's why, my characters have 'shades of grey' personalities.
I just write. I don't think about my readers. I think, writers are reader themselves. Writing is a way to pleasure themselves. To satisfy themselves. It's like day dreaming and at the same time, having no control what's going to happen in that dream. So, most of the time, I have no idea how the story will end. Sometimes, I surprise myself.
Light Novel or LN is Japanese style novel that are typically not more than 40,000–50,000 words long. These novels are usually directed toward young adults (high schoolers or middle schoolers). On www.Baka-Tsuki.Org, you can find many translated Light Novels.
Tantra: Maybe you could tell people about the conventions of writing a Light Novel as it relates to Manga and Anime. TAKATSU says this on the subject: "Essentially Light Novels are like young adult novella in a Japanese context with Japanese entertainment influences and mythos, that's the extent I know. Perhaps things like what kind of themes are common in Light Novels? A large amount of them are fantasy or sci-fi I believe, if I'm not mistaken, while manga can include more slice of life, romance and so on. How would Light novels compared to magical-realistic (I'm abusing the term) literary fiction? Japanese entertainment and literature often tends to blend and blur the lines. A lot of manga, anime, light novel concepts is hard to categorize into a strict Western genre, like traditional LOTR/Tolkien structured fantasy or space-grown science-fiction. Many feature young characters, who may lead ordinary realistic lives, etc. We would both be interested in hearing your perspective.
Nora: illustrations. The difference between Novellas and Light novels. Anime/Manga illustrations are used in Light novel. Also, Light novels are more straight forward and dialogue oriented. Light novels are alter ego of Manga, I think. In Manga, we see more pictures and less words. In light novels, More words and less pictures. Light Novels are like Manga, but in novel form.
Themes that are common in light novels: So far, I have read light novels on Baka-Tsuki.Org. I would say mystery, adventure, paranormal, fantasy and science-fictions are more common. There is romance too. Most light novels I read are either shounen or narrator point of view (not personal narrative). Because light novels are like Manga, so I see harem in there a lot too. I have read quite a slice of life genre light novels. They are not as much as the fantasy or science fictions, but it must be because there are not that are translated in English. In slice of life genre, my favorite is Toradora and Papa no iu koto o kikinasai. In fiction, I like Utsuro no Hako to Zero no Maria and Tokyo Ravens. I wish to write like them someday.
As compared to Novella, literature and other western genre: Light novels are more straightforward like Manga and also, it's serialized in small novels form. When I read Light Novels, they had a light feeling to them. It's directed toward High Schoolers or late teens. Fan service is also included in light novels. I think, the word limit, illustration, straightforward or manga like writing is the main difference. Like, Manga it is written in the form of words and few anime illustrations are added. A light novel without illustrations isn't a complete light novel.
Tantra: Thank you very much, very clear and helpful analysis. Now, let's look more directly at your narrative. Here is an intriguing quote from the Light Novel that expresses the search for identity, the effect of the protagonist's partial amnesia, and the mystery of how that relates to the people closest to her. Would you like to start with this jumping point to address this section and anything else about the plot, themes, and characters that might draw readers toward reading My Favourite Sin on Textnovel, or bringing new understanding of it to its fans? What mysteries within it can you discuss here without giving too much away?
""Are you enjoying?" We are on the Ferris Wheel. He is sitting very close to me. I notice it now. I have followed absent-mindedly on the Ferris Wheel. Noah is still holding my hand.
"I want to tell you something." Noah says in a serious tone. "The reasons I did those things to you."
My ears perk up. I turn my face to him and our heads bump. His honey eyes are so sad. I have only seen those expressions on somebody else. I jog my memory. I can't remember that person. Its been too long. I can't even tell how long.
"Because I love you." Noah's voice is so soft that my heartbeats slow down.
I push that person memory in my head. I don't want to remember him.
Because that person is gone and I am not good enough for him anymore. I am not the Mira I was once. I have killed people. I have lied. I have turned into everything that person would hate. I have broken my vow with that person.
But just like now, that person confessed loving me on a Ferris Wheel when my parents were alive. I can't remember that person anymore. I repressed those memories. This moment with Noah is making me dig it again.
That's why it feels like Deja Vu.
"I am sorry that I have hurt you." Noah cups my face with his hands. "But I have loved you for a long time. I did everything to get you back. If I haven't done it, you would never have come out of your shell."
He is right. I have locked myself in the DWO world and lived a mirage until now. In my both worlds, everyone thought that I was perfect until I met White Whisper. My world was torn open by him when I went out with that middle aged man to save my DWO life.
When did I become like this? I can't tell. For last five years, I did everything to create a world where nobody could raise their fingers on me. Not even my dead family."
Nora: Mira or Miranda Roy is a hollow person who is trying to make up for the holes in her life by being a perfect girl who mastered everything. To her, winning is everything, since it will give her temporary satisfaction. She is baffled by her questions from her own mind and that's also the reason that she wants to be the perfect girl, to stop her own heart to ask her questions that are linked to her dark past. She is also a violent R+ game player.
Her life was peaceful until she gets a message from another game player named White Whisper who knows the secrets of her dark past that she is trying very hard not to remember. White Whisper is manipulative and cunning. He knows everything and he controls her life. Soon, Mira finds her perfect life mirage breaking. Her wounds are being cut open and she can't do anything about it.
Then, there is Noah- Her classmate. She suspects him of being White Whisper. When he confessed in the scene, she believed him. You can see that she almost forgives him when she realizes that he loves her. Her simple need is love -- not particularly romance. She realizes that her life is a mirage that she has built in the last five years. It's not perfect. Underneath that mirage, she is standing there alone.
An article I find helpful about the history and circumstances behind the appearance of the visuals: Why Do Manga and Anime Characters Look the Way They Do
Our recommended Anime Death Note.
Other readers might be surprised by an interview with someone not appearing in magazines. Nora doesn't particularly read literary magazines, which is no doubt true of many Textnovel members. She reads Manga extensively, however, and like many members there, she uses some of those conventions in her presentations, such as the art, and the convoluted, intensely dramatic plots involving young, active people. She of course also reads the material on Textnovel. It's a whole self-contained world, though some authors there have had their work published outside of that site.
Some writers, such as Nora, also put their work up at Wattpad, and spend time reading the other works there. Such communities tend to be more directly interactive than many magazines, though those sometimes have forums, Facebook pages, representation at AWP, etc. and the individual authors tend to network heavily.
In fact, while people coming from the Literary magazine direction might be surprised to see all this work given away for free without the gatekeeper's seal of approval, consider this: in a magazine, the slush readers, and team of editors, or sometimes, the sole editor alone, makes the decision to publish a piece in a journal or anthology. In Textnovel, popularity is shown by page views, Editor's Picks, votes, etc. so it's like having a lot of editors give the seal of approval if a story gains attention.
We must take into account, when using that system to attempt to sanction a story, that there are a majority of readers and writers who are very young, and who like stories about young romance. The paranormal/supernatural genre is also popular, though there is a wide variety of material on the site, and all ages and audiences. Still, the very highest ranking ones find their audience with the majority of the young readers, are the site's version of commercial fiction, and some even use something akin to advertisements within them. Quiet, philosophical literary fiction by an elderly scholar would have more of a challenge in gaining such high ranking there, whereas it has no handicap within most literary magazines. But such a writer might find great inspiration in the new forms such as Cell Phone Novel (CPN) and Light Novel, the direct interaction, a new challenge to write to appeal in a sink or swim way with real-life readers for entertainment.
This is not a perfect system for an outsider to navigate looking for quality alone, as many factors besides that can go into popularity there, and because we don't know who the editors are and their unique credentials and tastes. However, taking some time looking through the site, you'll see you can search by genre, to help narrow it down to your taste. Also it has a handy way of showing you the first bit of the description about each newly added, updated, award winning piece as well as the ones people pay to have brought to the editor's and reader's attention without the need for much searching. If you like one writer, you can see who else she likes, and though most of the narratives on the site would never make sense in a Literary magazine or Literary publisher, there is a Literary section, and some, including some of the genre pieces, could well appear in respected publications.
Author Kyle Muntz says: "It's still rare, but the anime industry produces convoluted, unconventional work a lot more regularly than any visual media over here, which is especially impressive considering how small their budgets can be."
In the Japanese tradition this site arises from, this is the way to get published, especially as it is the first English language website and is the largest source of CPN. In 2007, half of the best selling novels in Japan began as CPN, generally ended up with movies and games. Now 3/4ths of teens in Japan read CPN. TAKATSU has been instrumental in bringing that to North America. Light Novels are also very popular there. Both of these have conventions I'd like to hear Nora describe. I'd like to hear her talk about all sorts of things, so I asked her to get it started with some background about herself.
Nora Wright: I mainly write on Textnovel.Com. Two of my works got Editor Choice Award on Textnovel.Com.
Link: http://www.textnovel.com/story/My-Favourite-Sin/14485/
http://www.textnovel.com/story/Koi-No-Yokan/15093/
Actually, I got the idea of My Favourite Sin because of my online activities. I spend a lot of time online and have met some really great people. I took a bit of the story from real life and a bit of imagination. The start of the story was based on an online relationship I had, but later, I went with the Flow. Writing about a girl with secrets was not tough. We all have secrets. I was anything like my character. But, when I wrote My Favourite Sin, I didn't really plan the story.
I write without thinking. I become my character. Although, my character and I might not have any connection. When I write stories, I don't think. I role play. I become the characters and my mind thinks like them. After that, I switched to my writer self. I create situations and imagine what my character will do in those situations. Will they break or will they fight? I also don't believe in black and white world. That's why, my characters have 'shades of grey' personalities.
I just write. I don't think about my readers. I think, writers are reader themselves. Writing is a way to pleasure themselves. To satisfy themselves. It's like day dreaming and at the same time, having no control what's going to happen in that dream. So, most of the time, I have no idea how the story will end. Sometimes, I surprise myself.
Light Novel or LN is Japanese style novel that are typically not more than 40,000–50,000 words long. These novels are usually directed toward young adults (high schoolers or middle schoolers). On www.Baka-Tsuki.Org, you can find many translated Light Novels.
Tantra: Maybe you could tell people about the conventions of writing a Light Novel as it relates to Manga and Anime. TAKATSU says this on the subject: "Essentially Light Novels are like young adult novella in a Japanese context with Japanese entertainment influences and mythos, that's the extent I know. Perhaps things like what kind of themes are common in Light Novels? A large amount of them are fantasy or sci-fi I believe, if I'm not mistaken, while manga can include more slice of life, romance and so on. How would Light novels compared to magical-realistic (I'm abusing the term) literary fiction? Japanese entertainment and literature often tends to blend and blur the lines. A lot of manga, anime, light novel concepts is hard to categorize into a strict Western genre, like traditional LOTR/Tolkien structured fantasy or space-grown science-fiction. Many feature young characters, who may lead ordinary realistic lives, etc. We would both be interested in hearing your perspective.
Nora: illustrations. The difference between Novellas and Light novels. Anime/Manga illustrations are used in Light novel. Also, Light novels are more straight forward and dialogue oriented. Light novels are alter ego of Manga, I think. In Manga, we see more pictures and less words. In light novels, More words and less pictures. Light Novels are like Manga, but in novel form.
Themes that are common in light novels: So far, I have read light novels on Baka-Tsuki.Org. I would say mystery, adventure, paranormal, fantasy and science-fictions are more common. There is romance too. Most light novels I read are either shounen or narrator point of view (not personal narrative). Because light novels are like Manga, so I see harem in there a lot too. I have read quite a slice of life genre light novels. They are not as much as the fantasy or science fictions, but it must be because there are not that are translated in English. In slice of life genre, my favorite is Toradora and Papa no iu koto o kikinasai. In fiction, I like Utsuro no Hako to Zero no Maria and Tokyo Ravens. I wish to write like them someday.
As compared to Novella, literature and other western genre: Light novels are more straightforward like Manga and also, it's serialized in small novels form. When I read Light Novels, they had a light feeling to them. It's directed toward High Schoolers or late teens. Fan service is also included in light novels. I think, the word limit, illustration, straightforward or manga like writing is the main difference. Like, Manga it is written in the form of words and few anime illustrations are added. A light novel without illustrations isn't a complete light novel.
Tantra: Thank you very much, very clear and helpful analysis. Now, let's look more directly at your narrative. Here is an intriguing quote from the Light Novel that expresses the search for identity, the effect of the protagonist's partial amnesia, and the mystery of how that relates to the people closest to her. Would you like to start with this jumping point to address this section and anything else about the plot, themes, and characters that might draw readers toward reading My Favourite Sin on Textnovel, or bringing new understanding of it to its fans? What mysteries within it can you discuss here without giving too much away?
""Are you enjoying?" We are on the Ferris Wheel. He is sitting very close to me. I notice it now. I have followed absent-mindedly on the Ferris Wheel. Noah is still holding my hand.
"I want to tell you something." Noah says in a serious tone. "The reasons I did those things to you."
My ears perk up. I turn my face to him and our heads bump. His honey eyes are so sad. I have only seen those expressions on somebody else. I jog my memory. I can't remember that person. Its been too long. I can't even tell how long.
"Because I love you." Noah's voice is so soft that my heartbeats slow down.
I push that person memory in my head. I don't want to remember him.
Because that person is gone and I am not good enough for him anymore. I am not the Mira I was once. I have killed people. I have lied. I have turned into everything that person would hate. I have broken my vow with that person.
But just like now, that person confessed loving me on a Ferris Wheel when my parents were alive. I can't remember that person anymore. I repressed those memories. This moment with Noah is making me dig it again.
That's why it feels like Deja Vu.
"I am sorry that I have hurt you." Noah cups my face with his hands. "But I have loved you for a long time. I did everything to get you back. If I haven't done it, you would never have come out of your shell."
He is right. I have locked myself in the DWO world and lived a mirage until now. In my both worlds, everyone thought that I was perfect until I met White Whisper. My world was torn open by him when I went out with that middle aged man to save my DWO life.
When did I become like this? I can't tell. For last five years, I did everything to create a world where nobody could raise their fingers on me. Not even my dead family."
Nora: Mira or Miranda Roy is a hollow person who is trying to make up for the holes in her life by being a perfect girl who mastered everything. To her, winning is everything, since it will give her temporary satisfaction. She is baffled by her questions from her own mind and that's also the reason that she wants to be the perfect girl, to stop her own heart to ask her questions that are linked to her dark past. She is also a violent R+ game player.
Her life was peaceful until she gets a message from another game player named White Whisper who knows the secrets of her dark past that she is trying very hard not to remember. White Whisper is manipulative and cunning. He knows everything and he controls her life. Soon, Mira finds her perfect life mirage breaking. Her wounds are being cut open and she can't do anything about it.
Then, there is Noah- Her classmate. She suspects him of being White Whisper. When he confessed in the scene, she believed him. You can see that she almost forgives him when she realizes that he loves her. Her simple need is love -- not particularly romance. She realizes that her life is a mirage that she has built in the last five years. It's not perfect. Underneath that mirage, she is standing there alone.
An article I find helpful about the history and circumstances behind the appearance of the visuals: Why Do Manga and Anime Characters Look the Way They Do
Our recommended Anime Death Note.
The Placebo Effect Trilogy by Yuriy Tarnawsky
Tantra Bensko Interviews the Author
The Placebo Effect Trilogy put out in 2013 by JEF Books is made up of longish stories in sections, told in present tense, rich in analogies. Like Blood in Water concerns mortality, impossibility of attaining what one wants when one wants it, disconnection from the self. A night bird flies out of a girl's hair, touching a boy's forehead, and disappearing. The Future of Giraffes is about boys and their stodgy's mothers, their dreams, and desperation. One boy has an epiphany that the landscape has nothing to do with him, or he with it. View of Delft includes madness and impairment, obsession, birth defects, death, and inability to connect. One boy rations using the Bible, so he doesn't use it up before a critical moment. The stories leave much to the imagination, with gaps in between sections where life lives and death lurks. The visual element fascinates, the surreal potentials scintillate.
Yuriy, could you tell readers what sort of entertainment they could expect from the trilogy? What would they get out of reading the books?
Entertainment? Probably none, if you understand entertainment as having fun, stretching out your legs on the sofa and relaxing with an inch of Pinch in a glass next to you on the coffee table. I rigorously contrast entertainment with art. Literature to me is not entertainment but life perceived through the sixth sense of language, that is, life experienced not directly but through someone else’s words as if through your own five senses, with all that living implies—it may be joy, it may be boredom, and it may be pain.
In my writing I try to distill and concentrate to the maximum the essence of life and offer it to the reader for him to experience. But since I feel that pain, in all its multifarious manifestations, is the most essential part of life, I frequently make it the central element in my writing, although I try to bring into it also the beautiful aspects of life, so as to create a balanced picture. As I explain in the little write-up about the trilogy I provide in the text, the placebo effect I refer to is life itself—“the empty sugar-coated pill of faith in the future encoded in the genes of every human being.”
So the trilogy is my take on life. The three volumes that make it up--Like Blood in Water, The Future of Giraffes, and View of Delft—are unified not by characters or events as happens in traditional trilogies, but by themes that unify the three books into one whole. The basic themes are screaming as a manifestation of existential despair, alienation, which is a contributing factor to existential despair, and fear of death, which is another contributing factor to existential despair.
Each of the books consists of five short works which I call mininovels, so that the trilogy essentially consists of three collections of mininovels, with about a hundred different characters in them. There is only one character that appears in two different mininovels. But I sometimes use the same name for different characters, so that they may appear to be the same one to the reader. In total, the trilogy is more than 700 pages long.
But to get back to your question—in spite of what I said above, I do think the trilogy does provide entertainment to the reader, if you consider entertainment in the broad sense, as a new experience. Each of the fifteen mininovels in it constitutes a condensed life and the reader will be able to live it fully without having to get up from his chair. This in my opinion is the best entertainment you can get.
Could you talk some about the mininovel and what you call negative text?
I came up with the idea of the mininovel when I was working on the book of stories Short Tails back in about 2000. I was trying out different techniques of writing short fiction and came up with one consisting of brief sections—chapters—separated by gaps of missing information necessary for interpreting the story. For instance a person is alive in one chapter and gone in the next. There would be multiple hints at how this may have happened, to help the reader out, but he would have to construct the scenario on his own. relying on his imagination and facts from his life. I call this type of information negative text, by analogy with negative space in modern sculpture which refers to void and concavity. So, negative text is information necessary for the interpretation of the story which has to come from the reader himself.
There are other ways of generating negative text, such as using names of famous people for character names, which evoke the image of what the reader has created in his mind, metaphorical use of language, dream sequences, and so on. So, while reading a mininovel, the reader becomes a co-author of the story together with the author, with the effect that these short works take on the scope of much longer ones—novels. This is why I have called the genre the “mininovel.” And I write it as one word, not hyphenated, by analogy with “miniskirt.” I like the similarity.
If you can answer this without giving away too much about your plot, what else do you offer unique about the themes you mentioned above that take readers to new perspectives and understandings?
It is organized more like a musical composition than a work of fiction, a symphony in three movements—“a symphony of semantics rather than of sound.” In addition to the three basic themes I listed above, there are three secondary ones, which are variations of (contributing factors to) alienation, namely abandonment, personal loss (of a child or parent), and departure from the norm. All of these are repeated and elaborated throughout the three books in different ways. The first book, Like Blood in Water, introduces the theme of screaming in the first mininovel, named “Screaming,” which was the first mininovel I wrote, as I was working on Short Tails. Here, I also introduce the theme of personal loss as well as fear of death, in particular in the last mininovel in the book called “Surgery.” (Who isn’t afraid of dying as he goes in for a major surgery procedure?) All of The Future of Giraffes is dedicated to the topic of childhood. Here abandonment and personal loss are the main themes, especially in the first mininovel “A Day in the Life” and “The Quarry.” The theme of departure from the norm is introduced in “The Short Unhappy Life of Pinky Schmuck” and “Your Childhood.”
All of the mininovels in View of Delft have German background. Departure from the norm is treated in “The Idiot” and “The Albino Syndrome,” and fear of death in particular in the latter and in “The School,” the last mininovel in the book, where it is the main topic—it is a school where they teach you how to die. The last word in the piece, the third book, and the trilogy is “fin,” which means “end” in French and Spanish, but is an unfinished English word in the phrase “you’re fine.” The character dies before hearing it fully said to him.
Could you please quote a couple paragraphs from your books?
I love riding on trains and watching landscapes opening up before my eyes, vast vistas stretching in all directions to the horizon, and love no less describing them. Let me quote an excerpt from each of the three books.
The earth is flat and perfectly bare, without a trace of plant life on it. It is a rich brown however, and looks fluffy, so it is probably very fertile and will eventually sprout lush vegetation. Apparently it has been a very hard winter until recently. The sky above is also brown, tinged by the light reflecting from below. It is very low—so low Roark has to stand with his head bent down. It stretches flat all the way to the horizon where there is only a thin opening left between it and the earth like the slot in a pinball machine. Someone on the other side is feeding shiny new quarters of light into it one by one, over and over again.
“Screaming,” Like Blood in Water
Huge tracts of land, constituent parts of the landscape, rotated as he walked as if he traveled in a fast-moving train. An industrial-grade gray Formica sky hung low over the landscape.
At one point he came to a river. It was wide but shallow and fast-flowing and curved first this way then that, flaunting ostentatiously its unquestionable grace. The sandy flats in the bends it had created on their part proudly showed off the emptiness of their pristine white crescent shapes.
In one spot along the river women were doing their washing. Most of the time they stood bent down with their hands in the water but from time to time almost periodically would abruptly stand up and flap giant white sheets which they held in their hands—the linen they washed joined for an instant by the white in the air. These would billow voluptuously displaying for everyone to see the heretofore hidden aw-inspiring curvature of space.
Soap suds would gather about the women’s legs in big white irregular shapes and from time to time again also essentially periodically pieces of these would break off and float down the river in the shape of wheels usually broken and sometimes completely smashed up.
Not too far downstream men—fishermen—were cleaning giant fish they had caught as big as hogs and the water ran red along that side of the river for a long way. The soapsuds would merge with it in places and the fish bladders that swam with the blood would mingle with the soap bubbles so that it was hard to tell one from the other.
“The Short Unhappy Life of Pinky Schmuck,” The Future of Giraffes
Three days after Karla’s funeral Georg was walking down the road through the fields in which he and Karla had spent so many hours together.
As always it was spring and sap in plants shone topaz-like like the evil eyes of a snake. Earthworms were having the time of their lives underground romping around in the soft black earth like miniature whales in water, gobbling it up in great quantities and from time to time sending it skyward in tiny dark geysers. Beetles pushed huge balls of dung carefully like mothers their babies in tall unsteady prams. The bright green grass squeaked like a rubber duck in water under the pressure of his gaze.
The unpaved road surrounded by big gnarled willow trees resembling old women in the act of mourning curved first this way, then that, and then this way again through the flat landscape like a drunk having a hard time walking in a straight line. No sooner had the horizon below the sapphire sky gotten nearer than it was far off again at times even farther than before.
Georg walked on.
Eventually he found himself in a strange landscape. He had never walked this far before. The ground all around was uneven as if covered with molehills and dark green, almost black. There were light patches in spots on it however, almost golden, with the vegetation pale at the tips, straining to the utmost to bring some joy into the gloomy landscape. The ground looked squishy too as if overgrown with water-laden moss. Here and there dwarf pines grew in clusters like kids gathered in hostile gangs in a schoolyard during a recess. Georg decided to stop there and explore the surroundings. He stepped off the road to his right and proceeded walking.
The ground in fact was squishy underfoot and covered with thick water-laden moss as it had looked from the road. Within seconds Georg’s shoes became filled with water. It felt cold on his feet like a knife blade looking for the proper spot where to cut. He seemed to be walking on a soft mattress and at times his feet sank into the moss up to his ankles. Water kept creeping up his pants and eventually they became wet all the way up to his knees. Still he pressed on.
The clumps of moss gradually got taller and taller and it was hard walking among them. Georg grew tired and decided to rest. He found a clump almost as tall as a chair and wearily sat down on top of it.
It felt comfortable at first like an armchair but then his seat started getting wet and it was clear things would get worse. He ignored the feeling however as well as the prospect of what was to come, decided to stay where he was, and looked around.
Tiny lakes, sometimes no bigger than a few yards across, dotted the landscape all the way to the horizon like the eyes of thousands upon thousands of people lying flat on their backs staring in a stupor at the sky.
“Karla and Georg or the Ambiguous Nature of Clouds,” View of Delft
What do you feel about the role of the traditional plot arc based on desire and conflict in our society?
I have avoided plot in most of my fiction. I find it too artificial, too constricting for my goal to represent (that is, create) life in my writing. Life is a series of loosely bound events rather than a string of tightly connected ones like those in the chain reaction in a nuclear explosion. In fact, I came up with the genre of the mininovel as a reaction against plot. There were short discrete situations I wanted to describe and I didn’t feel like dreaming up something that would link them together. I left this up to the reader to do on his own. The chapters in a mininovel are usually autonomous, self-contained units, which work on their own like short stories, and the reader puts them together to the best of his abilities. It’s real fun to write like this. I think it should be fun for the reader too. He must feel empowered, an active participant in creating the final product, which is the interpretation of the work in his mind.
In addition to the trilogy, in 2013 you published a book of poetry Modus Tollens. Could you tell us a little about it?
Between the time I finished the pre-final draft of the trilogy and readied it for publication, I took a little breather from fiction and returned to a book of poetry I had started to think about a few years back. I hadn’t written any poetry for about ten years and felt really charged up. It’s a book of some 150 pages and I did most of it in about six months. For an artist, it pays sometimes to hold back for a while, so that the creative energy builds up inside him. All of the poems in the book—more than sixty—are written in the same style—short lines, often broken off in logically inappropriate places, and sometimes in the middle of a word, which leads to ambiguous initial readings that force the reader to go back and reread passages so as to get a meaningful interpretation. I call this kind of poetry Heuristic, that is, such that it requires the reader to do exploratory work in order to properly interpret it. In the course of the reading, through the many ambiguities the reader encounters, he will generate for himself numerous associations which will cause the poem to expand in his mind like those Japanese paper flowers do when immersed in water..
So here again, similarly to the way it happens with mininovels, the reader will become a co-author of the poem together with me. I don’t know why I have struck out in this direction in my writing, but somehow it feels the right way to go. It might have something to do with the awareness that has become part of our times, that in life there are no absolutes, hard truths, but only partial ones, and that the same thing may have different meanings for different people. As is the case with all my writing, the book focuses on the basic existential issues, dear to us all. The title of the book is a term from symbolic logic, referring to deductive reasoning--syllogism—with negation introduced into it. (Syllogism without negation is called modus ponens.) By this I am hinting that even if you think that something exists, if you don’t have proof of it, it means that it isn’t there. The subtitle of the book, by the way, is IPD’s: improvised poetic devices, an allusion to IED’s we know so well from Iraq, because, as I say in the introduction to the book, “similarly to the way the latter shatter and shred hard matter, they wreak havoc in the reader’s mind through the confusingly arranged and chopped up language of which they are composed.”
Please, give us a brief example from the book.
Here’s one called “rose1,” the first of a little triptych on the subject of the rose, of which there are many in the book on various other subjects.
a love
letter crump
led up in a cramp
ed hand a
bloody little
rag stink
ing of the
gasoline flow
ers run o
n a tempo
rary name th
at ultimate
ly turns to
fell like a
ll that ris
es in the e
nd it f
all
s
What advice do you have for writers?
Oh, I would say first of all, don’t try to be a writer unless you really have to, unless your life would be meaningless without your writing. It is a lonely and frustrating métier. You’ll work your fingers and eyes off and most likely will get nothing for it. You will crave recognition, but it will be slow and meager in coming, if it comes at all. If you’re a true writer, you’ll probably make no money from your writing and will have to earn a living in some other way, which you will hate. Taka a course on how not to become a writer and live happily ever after….
But if you really have to be one, be true to yourself. Write to please yourself and not your reader. (You can’t please everyone, etc.) Forget about the critics. Don’t ask for or take advice. Study the great writers of the past. Be selective with reading your contemporaries. They will make you chase their tails. Study other forms of art. They may help you even more than literature. Observe life. Know yourself. Be in touch with your feelings. Observe your dreams. Understand them. Understand how they arise. Write only about what you know and what you have to say and not what you think you should say. And above all, don’t force yourself. If you don’t feel like writing, you’re lucky. You’ve finally been cured.
Yuriy's bio:
Yuriy Tarnawsky has authored more than two dozen books of poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and translations. He was born in Ukraine but raised and educated in the West. An engineer and linguist by training, he has worked as a computer scientist at IBM Corporation and professor of Ukrainian literature and culture at Columbia University. He writes in Ukrainian and English and resides in the New York City area. His English-language books include the books of fiction Meningitis (1978) and Three Blondes and Death (1993) from FC2, and from JEF Books, the play Not Medea (1998), Short Tails (2011), and the trilogy LIKE BLOOD IN WATER, THE FUTURE OF GIRAFFES, and VIEW OF DELFT (2013).
Tantra Bensko Interviews the Author
The Placebo Effect Trilogy put out in 2013 by JEF Books is made up of longish stories in sections, told in present tense, rich in analogies. Like Blood in Water concerns mortality, impossibility of attaining what one wants when one wants it, disconnection from the self. A night bird flies out of a girl's hair, touching a boy's forehead, and disappearing. The Future of Giraffes is about boys and their stodgy's mothers, their dreams, and desperation. One boy has an epiphany that the landscape has nothing to do with him, or he with it. View of Delft includes madness and impairment, obsession, birth defects, death, and inability to connect. One boy rations using the Bible, so he doesn't use it up before a critical moment. The stories leave much to the imagination, with gaps in between sections where life lives and death lurks. The visual element fascinates, the surreal potentials scintillate.
Yuriy, could you tell readers what sort of entertainment they could expect from the trilogy? What would they get out of reading the books?
Entertainment? Probably none, if you understand entertainment as having fun, stretching out your legs on the sofa and relaxing with an inch of Pinch in a glass next to you on the coffee table. I rigorously contrast entertainment with art. Literature to me is not entertainment but life perceived through the sixth sense of language, that is, life experienced not directly but through someone else’s words as if through your own five senses, with all that living implies—it may be joy, it may be boredom, and it may be pain.
In my writing I try to distill and concentrate to the maximum the essence of life and offer it to the reader for him to experience. But since I feel that pain, in all its multifarious manifestations, is the most essential part of life, I frequently make it the central element in my writing, although I try to bring into it also the beautiful aspects of life, so as to create a balanced picture. As I explain in the little write-up about the trilogy I provide in the text, the placebo effect I refer to is life itself—“the empty sugar-coated pill of faith in the future encoded in the genes of every human being.”
So the trilogy is my take on life. The three volumes that make it up--Like Blood in Water, The Future of Giraffes, and View of Delft—are unified not by characters or events as happens in traditional trilogies, but by themes that unify the three books into one whole. The basic themes are screaming as a manifestation of existential despair, alienation, which is a contributing factor to existential despair, and fear of death, which is another contributing factor to existential despair.
Each of the books consists of five short works which I call mininovels, so that the trilogy essentially consists of three collections of mininovels, with about a hundred different characters in them. There is only one character that appears in two different mininovels. But I sometimes use the same name for different characters, so that they may appear to be the same one to the reader. In total, the trilogy is more than 700 pages long.
But to get back to your question—in spite of what I said above, I do think the trilogy does provide entertainment to the reader, if you consider entertainment in the broad sense, as a new experience. Each of the fifteen mininovels in it constitutes a condensed life and the reader will be able to live it fully without having to get up from his chair. This in my opinion is the best entertainment you can get.
Could you talk some about the mininovel and what you call negative text?
I came up with the idea of the mininovel when I was working on the book of stories Short Tails back in about 2000. I was trying out different techniques of writing short fiction and came up with one consisting of brief sections—chapters—separated by gaps of missing information necessary for interpreting the story. For instance a person is alive in one chapter and gone in the next. There would be multiple hints at how this may have happened, to help the reader out, but he would have to construct the scenario on his own. relying on his imagination and facts from his life. I call this type of information negative text, by analogy with negative space in modern sculpture which refers to void and concavity. So, negative text is information necessary for the interpretation of the story which has to come from the reader himself.
There are other ways of generating negative text, such as using names of famous people for character names, which evoke the image of what the reader has created in his mind, metaphorical use of language, dream sequences, and so on. So, while reading a mininovel, the reader becomes a co-author of the story together with the author, with the effect that these short works take on the scope of much longer ones—novels. This is why I have called the genre the “mininovel.” And I write it as one word, not hyphenated, by analogy with “miniskirt.” I like the similarity.
If you can answer this without giving away too much about your plot, what else do you offer unique about the themes you mentioned above that take readers to new perspectives and understandings?
It is organized more like a musical composition than a work of fiction, a symphony in three movements—“a symphony of semantics rather than of sound.” In addition to the three basic themes I listed above, there are three secondary ones, which are variations of (contributing factors to) alienation, namely abandonment, personal loss (of a child or parent), and departure from the norm. All of these are repeated and elaborated throughout the three books in different ways. The first book, Like Blood in Water, introduces the theme of screaming in the first mininovel, named “Screaming,” which was the first mininovel I wrote, as I was working on Short Tails. Here, I also introduce the theme of personal loss as well as fear of death, in particular in the last mininovel in the book called “Surgery.” (Who isn’t afraid of dying as he goes in for a major surgery procedure?) All of The Future of Giraffes is dedicated to the topic of childhood. Here abandonment and personal loss are the main themes, especially in the first mininovel “A Day in the Life” and “The Quarry.” The theme of departure from the norm is introduced in “The Short Unhappy Life of Pinky Schmuck” and “Your Childhood.”
All of the mininovels in View of Delft have German background. Departure from the norm is treated in “The Idiot” and “The Albino Syndrome,” and fear of death in particular in the latter and in “The School,” the last mininovel in the book, where it is the main topic—it is a school where they teach you how to die. The last word in the piece, the third book, and the trilogy is “fin,” which means “end” in French and Spanish, but is an unfinished English word in the phrase “you’re fine.” The character dies before hearing it fully said to him.
Could you please quote a couple paragraphs from your books?
I love riding on trains and watching landscapes opening up before my eyes, vast vistas stretching in all directions to the horizon, and love no less describing them. Let me quote an excerpt from each of the three books.
The earth is flat and perfectly bare, without a trace of plant life on it. It is a rich brown however, and looks fluffy, so it is probably very fertile and will eventually sprout lush vegetation. Apparently it has been a very hard winter until recently. The sky above is also brown, tinged by the light reflecting from below. It is very low—so low Roark has to stand with his head bent down. It stretches flat all the way to the horizon where there is only a thin opening left between it and the earth like the slot in a pinball machine. Someone on the other side is feeding shiny new quarters of light into it one by one, over and over again.
“Screaming,” Like Blood in Water
Huge tracts of land, constituent parts of the landscape, rotated as he walked as if he traveled in a fast-moving train. An industrial-grade gray Formica sky hung low over the landscape.
At one point he came to a river. It was wide but shallow and fast-flowing and curved first this way then that, flaunting ostentatiously its unquestionable grace. The sandy flats in the bends it had created on their part proudly showed off the emptiness of their pristine white crescent shapes.
In one spot along the river women were doing their washing. Most of the time they stood bent down with their hands in the water but from time to time almost periodically would abruptly stand up and flap giant white sheets which they held in their hands—the linen they washed joined for an instant by the white in the air. These would billow voluptuously displaying for everyone to see the heretofore hidden aw-inspiring curvature of space.
Soap suds would gather about the women’s legs in big white irregular shapes and from time to time again also essentially periodically pieces of these would break off and float down the river in the shape of wheels usually broken and sometimes completely smashed up.
Not too far downstream men—fishermen—were cleaning giant fish they had caught as big as hogs and the water ran red along that side of the river for a long way. The soapsuds would merge with it in places and the fish bladders that swam with the blood would mingle with the soap bubbles so that it was hard to tell one from the other.
“The Short Unhappy Life of Pinky Schmuck,” The Future of Giraffes
Three days after Karla’s funeral Georg was walking down the road through the fields in which he and Karla had spent so many hours together.
As always it was spring and sap in plants shone topaz-like like the evil eyes of a snake. Earthworms were having the time of their lives underground romping around in the soft black earth like miniature whales in water, gobbling it up in great quantities and from time to time sending it skyward in tiny dark geysers. Beetles pushed huge balls of dung carefully like mothers their babies in tall unsteady prams. The bright green grass squeaked like a rubber duck in water under the pressure of his gaze.
The unpaved road surrounded by big gnarled willow trees resembling old women in the act of mourning curved first this way, then that, and then this way again through the flat landscape like a drunk having a hard time walking in a straight line. No sooner had the horizon below the sapphire sky gotten nearer than it was far off again at times even farther than before.
Georg walked on.
Eventually he found himself in a strange landscape. He had never walked this far before. The ground all around was uneven as if covered with molehills and dark green, almost black. There were light patches in spots on it however, almost golden, with the vegetation pale at the tips, straining to the utmost to bring some joy into the gloomy landscape. The ground looked squishy too as if overgrown with water-laden moss. Here and there dwarf pines grew in clusters like kids gathered in hostile gangs in a schoolyard during a recess. Georg decided to stop there and explore the surroundings. He stepped off the road to his right and proceeded walking.
The ground in fact was squishy underfoot and covered with thick water-laden moss as it had looked from the road. Within seconds Georg’s shoes became filled with water. It felt cold on his feet like a knife blade looking for the proper spot where to cut. He seemed to be walking on a soft mattress and at times his feet sank into the moss up to his ankles. Water kept creeping up his pants and eventually they became wet all the way up to his knees. Still he pressed on.
The clumps of moss gradually got taller and taller and it was hard walking among them. Georg grew tired and decided to rest. He found a clump almost as tall as a chair and wearily sat down on top of it.
It felt comfortable at first like an armchair but then his seat started getting wet and it was clear things would get worse. He ignored the feeling however as well as the prospect of what was to come, decided to stay where he was, and looked around.
Tiny lakes, sometimes no bigger than a few yards across, dotted the landscape all the way to the horizon like the eyes of thousands upon thousands of people lying flat on their backs staring in a stupor at the sky.
“Karla and Georg or the Ambiguous Nature of Clouds,” View of Delft
What do you feel about the role of the traditional plot arc based on desire and conflict in our society?
I have avoided plot in most of my fiction. I find it too artificial, too constricting for my goal to represent (that is, create) life in my writing. Life is a series of loosely bound events rather than a string of tightly connected ones like those in the chain reaction in a nuclear explosion. In fact, I came up with the genre of the mininovel as a reaction against plot. There were short discrete situations I wanted to describe and I didn’t feel like dreaming up something that would link them together. I left this up to the reader to do on his own. The chapters in a mininovel are usually autonomous, self-contained units, which work on their own like short stories, and the reader puts them together to the best of his abilities. It’s real fun to write like this. I think it should be fun for the reader too. He must feel empowered, an active participant in creating the final product, which is the interpretation of the work in his mind.
In addition to the trilogy, in 2013 you published a book of poetry Modus Tollens. Could you tell us a little about it?
Between the time I finished the pre-final draft of the trilogy and readied it for publication, I took a little breather from fiction and returned to a book of poetry I had started to think about a few years back. I hadn’t written any poetry for about ten years and felt really charged up. It’s a book of some 150 pages and I did most of it in about six months. For an artist, it pays sometimes to hold back for a while, so that the creative energy builds up inside him. All of the poems in the book—more than sixty—are written in the same style—short lines, often broken off in logically inappropriate places, and sometimes in the middle of a word, which leads to ambiguous initial readings that force the reader to go back and reread passages so as to get a meaningful interpretation. I call this kind of poetry Heuristic, that is, such that it requires the reader to do exploratory work in order to properly interpret it. In the course of the reading, through the many ambiguities the reader encounters, he will generate for himself numerous associations which will cause the poem to expand in his mind like those Japanese paper flowers do when immersed in water..
So here again, similarly to the way it happens with mininovels, the reader will become a co-author of the poem together with me. I don’t know why I have struck out in this direction in my writing, but somehow it feels the right way to go. It might have something to do with the awareness that has become part of our times, that in life there are no absolutes, hard truths, but only partial ones, and that the same thing may have different meanings for different people. As is the case with all my writing, the book focuses on the basic existential issues, dear to us all. The title of the book is a term from symbolic logic, referring to deductive reasoning--syllogism—with negation introduced into it. (Syllogism without negation is called modus ponens.) By this I am hinting that even if you think that something exists, if you don’t have proof of it, it means that it isn’t there. The subtitle of the book, by the way, is IPD’s: improvised poetic devices, an allusion to IED’s we know so well from Iraq, because, as I say in the introduction to the book, “similarly to the way the latter shatter and shred hard matter, they wreak havoc in the reader’s mind through the confusingly arranged and chopped up language of which they are composed.”
Please, give us a brief example from the book.
Here’s one called “rose1,” the first of a little triptych on the subject of the rose, of which there are many in the book on various other subjects.
a love
letter crump
led up in a cramp
ed hand a
bloody little
rag stink
ing of the
gasoline flow
ers run o
n a tempo
rary name th
at ultimate
ly turns to
fell like a
ll that ris
es in the e
nd it f
all
s
What advice do you have for writers?
Oh, I would say first of all, don’t try to be a writer unless you really have to, unless your life would be meaningless without your writing. It is a lonely and frustrating métier. You’ll work your fingers and eyes off and most likely will get nothing for it. You will crave recognition, but it will be slow and meager in coming, if it comes at all. If you’re a true writer, you’ll probably make no money from your writing and will have to earn a living in some other way, which you will hate. Taka a course on how not to become a writer and live happily ever after….
But if you really have to be one, be true to yourself. Write to please yourself and not your reader. (You can’t please everyone, etc.) Forget about the critics. Don’t ask for or take advice. Study the great writers of the past. Be selective with reading your contemporaries. They will make you chase their tails. Study other forms of art. They may help you even more than literature. Observe life. Know yourself. Be in touch with your feelings. Observe your dreams. Understand them. Understand how they arise. Write only about what you know and what you have to say and not what you think you should say. And above all, don’t force yourself. If you don’t feel like writing, you’re lucky. You’ve finally been cured.
Yuriy's bio:
Yuriy Tarnawsky has authored more than two dozen books of poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and translations. He was born in Ukraine but raised and educated in the West. An engineer and linguist by training, he has worked as a computer scientist at IBM Corporation and professor of Ukrainian literature and culture at Columbia University. He writes in Ukrainian and English and resides in the New York City area. His English-language books include the books of fiction Meningitis (1978) and Three Blondes and Death (1993) from FC2, and from JEF Books, the play Not Medea (1998), Short Tails (2011), and the trilogy LIKE BLOOD IN WATER, THE FUTURE OF GIRAFFES, and VIEW OF DELFT (2013).
Nathaniel Tower’s Alter-Ego Interviews Him About Misogyny and his New Short Story Collection, Nagging Wives, Foolish Husbands
Norton Loomer: Congratulations on the new collection. Isn’t it true that this same collection was once rejected for being too misogynistic?
Nathaniel Tower: Not exactly. It was once accepted by a publisher who later decided she didn’t want to publish it. She was afraid that people might misconstrue the stories as having a misogynistic tone. She didn’t want to deal with the controversy.
NL: I see. Sounds like a pretty lame publisher. Anyway, I’m really excited about having all these stories together in one book. I know that there aren’t enough depictions of nagging wives in literature. In fact, just a few months ago I was sitting around wondering what misogynistic book I could read next. I don’t mean to sound like a dick or anything, but misogynistic lit is pretty awesome. Did you see that whole controversy on HT--
NT: Um, Nagging Wives isn’t a misogynistic book at all. Sure, there might be some female characters who seem to play the villain. But any female villainy is pretty quickly outshined by the idiocy of the male characters. Besides, the stories are more about battling with the difficult situations that arise in marriage and life as a whole.
NL: Oh, I see. Well, I haven’t read many of the stories yet, so I wasn’t quite sure. I guess I was just hoping.
NT: Sorry to disappoint.
NL: Well, of course there are many people bound to be disappointed by any given book.
NT: So true, so true. I think it’s important for writers to be true to themselves as artists. They shouldn’t write to avoid disappointment.
NL: Yeah. So philosophical and deep. Well, let me ask you a blunt question. Was your nagging wife okay with this?
NT: My wife isn’t a nag. And, yes, she was fine with the book. She’s been very supportive of everything related to my writing.
NL: Wow. I mean, I’m shocked. It seems like wives try to pick up on every little thing to be naggy about, and this is a pretty big thing
NT: Well, if you read the book, you’d know right away that this isn’t about my wife, or any wife in particular. It’s more about the human condition and how we struggle and have to work to survive this institution of marriage. Besides, my wife doesn’t nag me. Of course, it helps that I don’t get drunk while simultaneously watching sports, playing shooter video games, and viewing porn with my buddies when there are chores to be done.
NL: Yeah, women can get bothered by the littlest things, can’t they? Okay, so let’s talk about some of these stories. You’ve got a woman who gives birth to a boot, a man who battles a wildebeest, a giant squid living under a bed, and a host of other ridiculousness. Where did you come up with this shit?
NT: I don’t actually find these situations that outlandish. If you’ve been married, especially if you have kids, you’ve encountered something along these lines. Yeah, it might not be a gorilla in your house who refuses to leave without a little loving. But if you’ve ever tried potty training a kid while working a full-time job, it’s pretty much the same.
NL: Hmm. I’ve never thought about it that way. So, which of the women in these stories is most like your wife? Is it the really mean wife from “Abortion Party”?
NT: I don’t think my wife is anything like any of these characters. And the wife in “Abortion Party” isn’t mean. There is a disconnect between her and her husband. In the end though, it turns out that they don’t disagree as much as they thought they did. I think that is something that happens a lot in relationships.
NL: Okay, sure. But you have to say that your wife isn’t mean because she’s going to read this. But which one is really most like her.
NT: You don’t listen much, do you? The women in this book, and the men as well, are fictional characters. They aren’t based on anyone in particular. They are built from a life of experience. Experience includes everything you’ve done, read, seen, heard, etc. That’s why fictional characters can become real even when they seem absurd.
NL: Yeah, that makes sense. You and your wife must be very happy. Do you feel comfortable carrying around the title of a misogynistic author?
NT: No, absolutely not. Is someone actually calling me that?
NL: Well, the internet isn’t exactly buzzing with news about you or this release. If I figured the book was misogynistic just from the title, then surely someone else will. Hell, there might even be a blog dedicated to hating you and your misogynistic stories.
NT: That would be a very misguided and pointless blog. Do you ever read the books written by your interviewees?
NL: Yeah, I eventually get around to it. On to the next question: Would you admit to being a misogynist if it meant that you would sell a million copies of the book?
NT: I’m not sure why such an admission would make the book sell a lot of copies. I’ll have to think about that one. I’m not sure it would be worth all of the hate mail I’d receive. Besides, a million dollars isn’t that much money. I’d probably do it for like $100 million.
NL: Interesting. So money doesn’t buy everything. Glad you aren’t a sellout yet. So which of these stories most resonates with you as a married person?
NT: Wow, a legitimate question. I think they all resonate, at least to some extent. It’s not because they are examples of my life. I think that some of them can be viewed as cautionary tales. “A Happy Family” resonates a lot because I think everyone has a fear that something is going to be wrong with their child. And “Waiting for the Wife” resonates because it is simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting. It’s a situation that every couple will face eventually, and I think it’s placement as the final story in the collection is very important. Some of the stories are just good fun though. I don’t really like to set the tone for what my readers are supposed to get out of my work. I hope people will read and enjoy and let it resonate as it does. I don’t want to force anything on anyone, and I don’t want people to feel that they have to force a message out of everything.
NL: So you are saying it’s all pointless?
NT: No, not at all. At least I hope not. I think there is much to be learned from a tale about a couple who has to figure out what to do when their firstborn is a boot. I mean, think about all of the difficulties that new parents encounter. When you are first handed this gooey living mass, you are so overwhelmed that it might as well be a boot. But you end up loving it no matter what anyway. And you figure it all out along the way. Or at least you pretend to.
NL: But do we really need a collection of stories about all this? It’s not like it’s going to make anyone a better parent.
NT: That isn’t really the goal. It’s not a parenting book. It’s a book that--
NL: Right. Well, congratulations on the book. While you were responding, I skimmed through the story about the guy who loses his balls. Are you sure you’re not a misogynist? That was a pretty cool story, but that guy really hates his woman. In fact, she’s just a bitch.
NT: I think you missed the point of the story. The guy doesn’t lose his balls because of the woman. He loses his balls because he has no ambition. Even a bird can walk all over him. His wife certainly isn’t the problem in the story.
NL: Hmm, yeah, I misread that one. Or mis-skimmed it, I should say. Ha! Maybe you should spell it out a little better.
NT: Why don’t you just write your own stories that say what you want them to say.
NL: You know, I think I might. So thanks for answering these questions. Really I just needed someone to fill up a blog post, and interviews are pretty easy. The other guy does most of the work, ya know! Oh, I guess I’m supposed to tell people to buy the book at this point. So, go buy Nathaniel’s book. It’s called Nagging Wives, Foolish Husbands. Out through Martian Lit. Print, e-book, all that stuff. But don’t buy it if you are looking for misogynistic literature. You’ll be disappointed. Then again, you can make whatever you want to out of any book, right?
NT: Right. Literature is what we make of it. Anyway, thanks for having me.
NL: Yup.
Buy the book.
Nathaniel Tower: Not exactly. It was once accepted by a publisher who later decided she didn’t want to publish it. She was afraid that people might misconstrue the stories as having a misogynistic tone. She didn’t want to deal with the controversy.
NL: I see. Sounds like a pretty lame publisher. Anyway, I’m really excited about having all these stories together in one book. I know that there aren’t enough depictions of nagging wives in literature. In fact, just a few months ago I was sitting around wondering what misogynistic book I could read next. I don’t mean to sound like a dick or anything, but misogynistic lit is pretty awesome. Did you see that whole controversy on HT--
NT: Um, Nagging Wives isn’t a misogynistic book at all. Sure, there might be some female characters who seem to play the villain. But any female villainy is pretty quickly outshined by the idiocy of the male characters. Besides, the stories are more about battling with the difficult situations that arise in marriage and life as a whole.
NL: Oh, I see. Well, I haven’t read many of the stories yet, so I wasn’t quite sure. I guess I was just hoping.
NT: Sorry to disappoint.
NL: Well, of course there are many people bound to be disappointed by any given book.
NT: So true, so true. I think it’s important for writers to be true to themselves as artists. They shouldn’t write to avoid disappointment.
NL: Yeah. So philosophical and deep. Well, let me ask you a blunt question. Was your nagging wife okay with this?
NT: My wife isn’t a nag. And, yes, she was fine with the book. She’s been very supportive of everything related to my writing.
NL: Wow. I mean, I’m shocked. It seems like wives try to pick up on every little thing to be naggy about, and this is a pretty big thing
NT: Well, if you read the book, you’d know right away that this isn’t about my wife, or any wife in particular. It’s more about the human condition and how we struggle and have to work to survive this institution of marriage. Besides, my wife doesn’t nag me. Of course, it helps that I don’t get drunk while simultaneously watching sports, playing shooter video games, and viewing porn with my buddies when there are chores to be done.
NL: Yeah, women can get bothered by the littlest things, can’t they? Okay, so let’s talk about some of these stories. You’ve got a woman who gives birth to a boot, a man who battles a wildebeest, a giant squid living under a bed, and a host of other ridiculousness. Where did you come up with this shit?
NT: I don’t actually find these situations that outlandish. If you’ve been married, especially if you have kids, you’ve encountered something along these lines. Yeah, it might not be a gorilla in your house who refuses to leave without a little loving. But if you’ve ever tried potty training a kid while working a full-time job, it’s pretty much the same.
NL: Hmm. I’ve never thought about it that way. So, which of the women in these stories is most like your wife? Is it the really mean wife from “Abortion Party”?
NT: I don’t think my wife is anything like any of these characters. And the wife in “Abortion Party” isn’t mean. There is a disconnect between her and her husband. In the end though, it turns out that they don’t disagree as much as they thought they did. I think that is something that happens a lot in relationships.
NL: Okay, sure. But you have to say that your wife isn’t mean because she’s going to read this. But which one is really most like her.
NT: You don’t listen much, do you? The women in this book, and the men as well, are fictional characters. They aren’t based on anyone in particular. They are built from a life of experience. Experience includes everything you’ve done, read, seen, heard, etc. That’s why fictional characters can become real even when they seem absurd.
NL: Yeah, that makes sense. You and your wife must be very happy. Do you feel comfortable carrying around the title of a misogynistic author?
NT: No, absolutely not. Is someone actually calling me that?
NL: Well, the internet isn’t exactly buzzing with news about you or this release. If I figured the book was misogynistic just from the title, then surely someone else will. Hell, there might even be a blog dedicated to hating you and your misogynistic stories.
NT: That would be a very misguided and pointless blog. Do you ever read the books written by your interviewees?
NL: Yeah, I eventually get around to it. On to the next question: Would you admit to being a misogynist if it meant that you would sell a million copies of the book?
NT: I’m not sure why such an admission would make the book sell a lot of copies. I’ll have to think about that one. I’m not sure it would be worth all of the hate mail I’d receive. Besides, a million dollars isn’t that much money. I’d probably do it for like $100 million.
NL: Interesting. So money doesn’t buy everything. Glad you aren’t a sellout yet. So which of these stories most resonates with you as a married person?
NT: Wow, a legitimate question. I think they all resonate, at least to some extent. It’s not because they are examples of my life. I think that some of them can be viewed as cautionary tales. “A Happy Family” resonates a lot because I think everyone has a fear that something is going to be wrong with their child. And “Waiting for the Wife” resonates because it is simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting. It’s a situation that every couple will face eventually, and I think it’s placement as the final story in the collection is very important. Some of the stories are just good fun though. I don’t really like to set the tone for what my readers are supposed to get out of my work. I hope people will read and enjoy and let it resonate as it does. I don’t want to force anything on anyone, and I don’t want people to feel that they have to force a message out of everything.
NL: So you are saying it’s all pointless?
NT: No, not at all. At least I hope not. I think there is much to be learned from a tale about a couple who has to figure out what to do when their firstborn is a boot. I mean, think about all of the difficulties that new parents encounter. When you are first handed this gooey living mass, you are so overwhelmed that it might as well be a boot. But you end up loving it no matter what anyway. And you figure it all out along the way. Or at least you pretend to.
NL: But do we really need a collection of stories about all this? It’s not like it’s going to make anyone a better parent.
NT: That isn’t really the goal. It’s not a parenting book. It’s a book that--
NL: Right. Well, congratulations on the book. While you were responding, I skimmed through the story about the guy who loses his balls. Are you sure you’re not a misogynist? That was a pretty cool story, but that guy really hates his woman. In fact, she’s just a bitch.
NT: I think you missed the point of the story. The guy doesn’t lose his balls because of the woman. He loses his balls because he has no ambition. Even a bird can walk all over him. His wife certainly isn’t the problem in the story.
NL: Hmm, yeah, I misread that one. Or mis-skimmed it, I should say. Ha! Maybe you should spell it out a little better.
NT: Why don’t you just write your own stories that say what you want them to say.
NL: You know, I think I might. So thanks for answering these questions. Really I just needed someone to fill up a blog post, and interviews are pretty easy. The other guy does most of the work, ya know! Oh, I guess I’m supposed to tell people to buy the book at this point. So, go buy Nathaniel’s book. It’s called Nagging Wives, Foolish Husbands. Out through Martian Lit. Print, e-book, all that stuff. But don’t buy it if you are looking for misogynistic literature. You’ll be disappointed. Then again, you can make whatever you want to out of any book, right?
NT: Right. Literature is what we make of it. Anyway, thanks for having me.
NL: Yup.
Buy the book.
About Nate Tower
Nathaniel Tower lives in the Twin Cities area with his wife and daughter. After teaching high school English for nine years, he decided to start a new career in writing / publishing / editing. His fiction has appeared in over two hundred online and print journals. In 2011, MuseItUp Publishing released his first novel, A Reason to Kill, followed a year later by his first novella, Hallways and Handguns. Nathaniel is the founding and managing editor of Bartleby Snopes Literary Magazine and Press. When he’s not doing writerly things, he likes to joggle (juggle and run simultaneously). He is the former world record holder for running a mile backwards while juggling. He is working on getting his record back. Find out more about Nathaniel at nathanieltower.wordpress.com.
Nathaniel Tower lives in the Twin Cities area with his wife and daughter. After teaching high school English for nine years, he decided to start a new career in writing / publishing / editing. His fiction has appeared in over two hundred online and print journals. In 2011, MuseItUp Publishing released his first novel, A Reason to Kill, followed a year later by his first novella, Hallways and Handguns. Nathaniel is the founding and managing editor of Bartleby Snopes Literary Magazine and Press. When he’s not doing writerly things, he likes to joggle (juggle and run simultaneously). He is the former world record holder for running a mile backwards while juggling. He is working on getting his record back. Find out more about Nathaniel at nathanieltower.wordpress.com.
How Munro Evades Classification as "Women's Fiction" -- Literary Women, Take Note
by Heather Fowler
Alice Munro’s work, in recent years, has become a subject of much critical response and one very compelling factor about her work’s analysis, while there is clearly an interest in determining what role feminism plays in her narratives, is that the body of her stories often escapes the common pitfall of being determined “women’s fiction,” or, as many might whisper, “valueless to male readers,” despite being heavily populated by female protagonists and women in conversation with each other. In today’s landscape of modern literature, where women writing predominantly about women lives are rarely listed as on literary par with male peers, this is a feat many women currently writing aspire to match, especially when famous novelists like V.S. Naipaul are unashamed to publicly characterize work by women authors as inferior, riddled with “feminine tosh” (qtd. in “"V S Naipaul Slams Women Writers”). When confronting numerous lists of the “best” novels and story collections, it is a frequent experience to see the imbalance of just how many books by male authors consistently make these lists while the women included are usually those who are dead and/or those whose book sales (read undeniable public embrace) have created openings years after their titles were first published. As I have stated before in an earlier essay, one way women tend to infiltrate these lists is to move into public visibility via bending the possibilities of genres while doing highly proficient and literary work. Munro, however, is literary without apology—and her ability to avoid being minimized or reframed as insignificant is worth a keen glance from any woman wanting to break into literary fiction today.
This is not to say that the analysis of how she creates her work’s obvious significance as serious literature is always accurate. Regarding Munro specifically, even the male authors who pay her tribute acknowledge that her subjects tend to be far smaller and more intimate than those one expects from traditional (read: male), epic literary accomplishments. As novelist Michael Cunningham states about Munro’s work in a 2006 VQR Symposium entitled “Appreciations of Alice Munro,” Munro, “like Virginia Woolf, has always insisted on the particular importance of women's lives, insisted that the story of an unhappy housewife in middle age is every bit as important as the story of a sea captain about to undertake the search for a white whale” (91). Am I the only one who finds this clustering of words insulting?
Cunningham refers, of course, to Melville’s Moby Dick. So, Munro writes no Moby Dicks? Granted. His further discussion of Munro’s work goes on to discuss how her work instead succeeds by intensive details, narratives that map lifetimes with short fiction, and, as if that weren’t enough to mark her stature eligibility, Cunningham falls back on making a parallel association between Munro’s skills and those of Flannery O’Connor, stating, “what Munro can do with sex is a little like what Flannery O'Connor did with divine intervention” (90-91), likely making use of Ms. O’Connor since the renown of Flannery O’Connor as a heavy hitter is clear to most readers since O’Connor is often one of few “strictly literary” women, born in the last century, grudgingly included in many lists of the “best” books—so one presumes Cunningham attempts to cast reflected glory by this association.
All right, Mr. Cunningham, you are a fan of Munro’s work—but it does seem that so much of your defense of Munro’s status, with such myriad reasons, begs the opposing question of: If Munro’s work is deserving as significant, why do you think it requires so much justification to defend or appreciate a woman author writing predominantly about women, or, as you remark, telling “the story of an unhappy housewife in middle age”?
I am not saying Cunningham’s assessments regarding stylistic accomplishments are incorrect, or that he is not right in lauding Munro’s work—just that I feel his take is diminutive and limited. I would venture to say that fine writing and skillful narratives of lifetimes in short frames are good reasons indeed to value Munro’s work, all accurate, but they are at the surface of her texts, obvious glimmers on the surface of her gems.
It is my supposition that, deeper, Munro exposes universal truths with narratives that interest both men and women because they speak intensively about men and women of many ages and stages, while reversing which gender would normally take center stage. Critic Linda Weinhouse’s explanation of the Freudian joke and how Munro subverts this dynamic in her work is applicable when Weinstein parses the Freudian joke dynamic and how Munro’s fiction differs from the gender roles traditionally found therein when she states both, “According to Freud, a boy desires a girl; but because his desire is frustrated, he tells an obscene joke in her presence to another male. The joking triangle consists of a desiring subject, male, a desired female—butt of the joke, and an intruder—accomplice joke hearer, who is also male and who will eventually go on to repeat the joke to others” (121), and that instead, in a Munro story she analyzes, “it is the ‘man’ who masquerades and whose meaning is unstable; the women speak and eventually control their own destinies through speech. They are the jokers, and in all probability the future jokers” (122). Munro’s work is so interesting to feminist critics because her women are more powerful in assuming speech rights, in failing to be simple objects—and are taking over the narratives and negotiating the narrative terrain in ways that put the female participants with primary roles as “jokers” rather than submissives. That said, anything that dismisses either sex as unnecessary or relegated to negligible roles in Munro’s work is erroneous.
In my view, Munro’s pull with a larger audience could not be accomplished without these dual or dueling depictions, and yes, she writes, for the most part, love stories or those that involve loss and intimacy between lovers or family members—topics popular with both male and female authors, though more frequently negatively connoted when female work is discussed (consider the lionized treatment of Maugham, Franzen, Kundera, et al, with that of female peers)—but what is particularly special about Munro’s work and allows it to transcend the category of “women’s fiction,” or that which pertains almost exclusively to women’s worlds or desires, is that she manages to produce stories that require an analysis of gender roles regardless of an imbalance of perceived gender representation on the page—because men in Munro’s stories are often powerful agents in terms of the contents and motivations of her stories yet tend to woo, harm, and vanish, so it is therefore up to the women in her narratives to explain and reflect their own impressions, a frequent characteristic in Munro’s work that does give Munro’s women more page-time, yet leaves no gender unexamined. In other words, there are complex portrayals in process, but Munro’s work should not fall under the heading of “women’s fiction” because these portrayals explore both genders, albeit in such a way that the depiction of one gender depends on the approach or retreat of the other, one at the fore and the other nearly invisible—women and men depicted by Munro, as a sculptor might say, with one in high and one in low-relief.
While it can be said that nearly all of her stories accomplish this feat, two stories in Alice Munro: Selected Stories particularly emphasize Munro’s trend with the narrative technique of the high relief vocal/audible women and the low relief, vanishing men in Munro’s narratives and demonstrate the agility with which Munro can adjust her writing strategies to suit the varied needs of the stories’ protagonists: “Postcard” and “Wild Swans.” The story “Postcard” is a tale about a young woman who enters a sexual relationship with a wealthy man who both woos her and secretly marries another woman, which places men in the position of lower immediate visibility by its use of correspondence to limit men’s actual page-time and allows most of the discussion about men and the story’s plot to occur mainly between women. The story “Wild Swans” follows a female narrator taking her first ride to a nearby town on a train with a man who molests her and remains very present in the active narration, yet aloof and in the shadows since Monroe places more stress on the warnings and deliberations of the main character Rose’s stepmother Flo that precede the main action and are used as a foil with which to compare his actions, while the man’s marauding hand receives more attention in the story than any use of his whole person. In both pieces Munro uses a deeply layered narration and elements inside the narration in which male characters’ acts are causal and important to the movement of the stories, but their presence is surface-level minimal and reconstructed in many ways by a female narrator.
The concept of women telling the tales but men who do not overwhelm the narrative but woo, harm, and vanish—low relief vehicles—occurs in several significant stylistic choices in Munro’s story “Postcard.” The first stylistic choice is in the author’s use of three pieces of correspondence or news items from or about male love interests, in lieu of more scenic and active page-time, that are short but pivotal to the forward momentum of the story: the first, a love letter from a jilting suitor discussed retrospectively by the story’s protagonist Helen Louise, about whom she meditates as her romantic story with her primary love interest in the piece, Clare McQuarrie, begins; the second, a postcard sent by Clare, in which he demonstrates his distance and lack of sincerity by committing the common sin of omission; and the third, a newspaper announcement of Clare’s marriage to someone else that is delivered to Helen Louise by a female friend of the family, demonstrating that this marriage has occurred while Clare was in Florida, during the same trip in which he mailed the story’s namesake postcard.
The love letter in which the actions of Helen’s jilting suitor Ted Forgie are displayed exhibits a flippant tone that proceeds his abandonment, which the female protagonist of “Postcard” must discuss line by line to understand, and Munro’s use of this letter is done in such a way that passage after passage of the missive enters the narrative to first be represented and then analyzed in direct contrast with how the unspecific segments make the narrator feel in light of his later abandonment—while simultaneously establishing the context for her relationship with Clare, the story’s second jilting man, in medias res, over the course of a two page segment of a seventeen page story (36-37). Munro’s economy is clear:
I read the letter all the way through and I thought, not for the first time, Well, reading this letter any fool can see there is not going to be another. I want you to know how grateful I am for all your sweetness and understanding. Sweetness was the only word that stuck in my mind then, to give me hope. I thought, When Clare and I get married I am just going to throw this letter away. So why not do it now? I tore it across and across and it was easy…That being over I lay down on my bed and thought about several things. For instance, if I hadn’t been in a stupor over Ted Forgie, would I have taken a different view of Clare? Not likely. If I hadn’t been in that stupor I might never have bothered with Clare at all.” (37).
What this passage explores here, women in high-relief, men in low, is the narrator’s decisions and reactions in relation to her romantic relationships. It is not about the men, per se, but Helen’s considerations of the effects of her choices, the aftermath of self-delusion. Helen Louise reads the letter from Ted more than once and the repetition of “in a stupor” as her initial response to the letter before internalizing the harm and the fact that she has been left becomes a textually acknowledged factor in her decision to give romantic energy to Clare. Both men in this conversation are Helen’s objects of consideration, causal to the action, yet Ted’s actual words are light in texture, unable to be parsed without the benefit of Helen’s summary of the events.
During this same two page increment, the backstory regarding what brought Helen and Ted together before the letter concludes their romantic tryst is done in roughly one paragraph of narrative summary (36). Munro does not use any scenes to bring the character Ted Forgie to the foreground. One could argue that this is because Ted should not receive the same level of attention as Clare, who is the main love interest in “Postcard”—but this reader would say it is yet another manifestation of Munro’s style, which is to make what the men say sparse so that the women can interpret, must interpret, and therefore will often find themselves the agents of both analysis and fitting conclusion. This supposition of Munro’s use of craft as a structure to reinforce the significance of her female narrators is supported by the narrative strategies of the rest of the story “Postcard” in that any dialogue that comes directly from Clare later and throughout the piece is also riddled with deception and ambiguity.
The postcard itself, one of few direct interactions the reader receives from Clare that is not a retelling of his interactions, also accomplishes a lot of dismissal in a very short space. In its visual depiction, Munro establishes it has a photo of a buxom blonde on the front who articulates via a speech bubble “Sleep at my place,” before Clare’s actual words to Helen Louise, which are short and less than sweet, explicable, almost defensible, by the small place allowed by a postcard upon which an individual can write: “I didn’t sleep at her place though it was too expensive. Weather could not be better. Mid-seventies. How is the winter treating you in Jubilee? Not bad I hope. Be a good girl. Clare” (32). As the story makes manifest, this postcard has been received long after Clare has initiated a courtship and sexual interaction with the protagonist and yet was mailed during the same trip in which Clare has not only violated his sexual relationship with Helen Louise via sleeping with a different woman but has married this other woman as well.
The particular strength of the postcard as a low-relief vehicle in the narration is highlighted in four ways: 1. although it is a direct interaction, its tone forsakes intimacy and seems not only dismissive but patronizing, as Clare’s low intensity discussion of the weather and parting remark of “Be a good girl” demonstrate; 2. it has been received from a male character who has been too lazy to ever send a real letter, a more detailed letter, that the protagonist Helen Louise articulates she has requested long before (32); 3. the postcard has been dated but upon receipt, Helen Louise notes the date on the freshly received correspondence is “ten days back. Well, sometimes postcards are slow, but I bet what happened was he carried this around in his pocket a few days before he remembered to mail it. It was my only card since he left for Florida three weeks ago,” (32), and 4. that it serves in the story as a counterpoint and the main article that causes the protagonist’s disbelief when she hears that Clare McQuarrie has gotten married, an article of proof she may have presented as making these claims unsubstantiated until the female visitor Alma announces the nuptial news as more than a rumor in the following passage:
Alma said, “Clare MacQuarrie has gotten married.”
“What are you two up to?” I said. “Clare MacQuarrie is in Florida and I just today got a postcard from him as Mama well knows.”
“He got married in Florida. Helen, be calm” (380).
A female guest, not Clare himself, relates the facts of what has happened. When Helen disbelieves Alma’s announcement, Helen Louise cites the postcard as if to display how ridiculous Alma’s statements must be, but Alma’s request of “be calm” foretells that more will ensue as proof of Alma’s original unsupported remark. At this point in the story, the narrator’s mother also has a stake in the discussion, the stake which echoes through the pages that follow and suggest that the mother never believed that Clare intended to marry her daughter because Helen and he were intimate without the requirement of marriage (41, 43), yet another suggestion of expected betrayal by a man who is not scenically present for this exchange, while the audible role of the female friend of the family, Alma, in the passages about the initial announcement, cannot be underestimated. Helen Louise, Alma, and Helen’s mother dominate the scene in high-relief, while their topic is the veiling done by men at low-relief and in the background. Via these conversations, Helen comes to believe that Alma is correct, but before more concrete proof appears, Helen’s faith in the postcard and its connection to a reality must be debunked by a stronger source than hearsay.
Enter Munro’s use of the newspaper clipping from “the Bugle-Herald,” where Alma delivers a more irrefutable source about the Clare’s marriage and Helen ruminates:
“’I don’t believe it any more than fly,’ I said, and I started to read and read all the way through as if the names were ones I’d never heard of before…A quiet ceremony in Coral Gables, Florida, uniting in marriage Clare Alexander MacQuarrie, of Jubilee, son of Mrs. James MacQuarrie of this town and the late Mr. James MacQuarrie, prominent local business man…and Mrs. Margaret Thora Leeson…The bride wore a sage green dressmaker suit with dark brown accessories” (39).
Again, Munro has chosen to verify important events concerning the main characters in this piece without establishing this information scenically, where Clare and his exact motivations may have been more clearly viewed. Instead, her whole description of the wedding and who attended appears in a one paragraph notice in the style and formal format of a newspaper announcement (39), which makes Helen Louise’s next actions and reactions more volatile than if Munro’s male characters were presented more actively, where men might speak in their defense—but, woo, harm, and abandon is the pattern, and the story completes this agenda admirably, while the women, in order to interpret events more fully, must continue to speak.
Similarly, conversations between women about men are the driving force for a quite different story entitled “Wild Swans,” although Munro’s strategies with keeping fully realized male contact at a minimum vary with what she displays in “Postcard.” Often critics of Munro’s work have been quick to point out the various ways that Munro uses plot and structure in keeping the men central to the narrative yet layered below the action cemented by dialogues between women in Munro’s scenes, and I consider the remarks, in particular, of critic Gayle Elliot, author of article, “’A Different Tack’: Feminist Meta-Narrative in Alice Munro’s ‘Friend of My Youth’” where Elliot asserts about Munro’s structure: “The women in these stories…seek to retrieve meaning from a recollected past…they manage to explore, together, the enticements and disappointments of sexual and romantic love, the compromises within marriage, and the pain of conflicting loyalties” (76). While Elliot does not speak to “Postcard” or “Wild Swans” in specific, but instead a different Munrovian collection, her summary of tactics is still apt and clear regarding how Munro’s narratives are structured around the perception of female protagonists search for “retrieved meaning from a recollected past” via their interactions with other women.
This view is obviously relevant while discussing either “Wild Swans” or “Postcard,” but particularly in “Wild Swans,” which is a ten page story where the female narration is maintained as high-relief throughout, even when the male molester character is actively present in the scene, but is displayed most clearly in the first three pages of the story, where the interactions of an older female character named Flo with Rose, the young protagonist, display a stepmother’s dialogue with a daughter figure, in which Flo’s enumerated warnings and remembered stories will become a foil for “Swans” main character Rose to use as a contrast for personal analysis while the story’s real-time action with her old man molester transpires, during which Rose is first courted by him with innocuous words and then molested by his disembodied hand, which is initially hidden beneath a newspaper, on the train before she is abandoned. Both the story’s set up with Flo’s diatribes on the dangers of men in the world, particularly those that molest (140-144) and Munro’s intense focus on the man’s hand as an acting agent in the story (145-149) work to establish the high-relief women, low-relief men dynamic discussed earlier in terms of the story “Postcard” and Gayle Elliot’s perception of how meaning is articulated in Munro’s work.
During the first paragraph of “Wild Swans,” a story full of information about frightening reported sexual exchanges as well as actual sexual exchanges, Flo’s remarks about “White Slavers” and young girls being stolen into the dark trade of involuntary prostitution are present in the first line and amplified in the entire first paragraph of the piece, where Flo’s very first advice in the piece begins as follows: “Flo said to watch for White Slavers…” and is followed up by a lurid, highly speculative cautionary tale about what unsavory things can happen to girls lured into such a trade, which ends, in Flo’s discussion, with a female “you” character “invested by vile disease, your mind destroyed by drugs, your hair and teeth fallen out. [This] took about three years for you to get to this state,” and further expresses that “this state” is one the leads to the abused woman in question being unwilling to go home due to the circumstances, or even unable to remember her home at all (140). Flo’s warnings are particularly dire, yet instrumental in how the character Rose then proceeds to dissect her relative levels of risk when the active parts of Rose’s interactions with the male minister/molester in plainclothes begin.
In terms of Munro’s often used dynamic of the male character’s presence as one that woos, harms, and abandons, the narrator’s connection to what Flo has said is all the more important. The minister/molester first speaks to Rose in a very innocuous fashion and is not even wearing his religious garb, though he makes a point of announcing his role in his church (145). This contrasts with a story told by Flo earlier where “Watch out, Flo said as well, for people dressed up as ministers. They were the worst. That disguise was commonly adapted by White Slavers, as well as those after your money” (141). The differences between what Flo told her and what Rose sees happening are causal to Rose’s continued questioning as to whether she is indeed experiencing something dangerous later, but are kept constantly in mind. In this way, the minister character is kept in low-relief, since he is an object to be analyzed in comparison to examples that come before in the narrative, but Rose and her interpretations are still primary.
Later on page 145, Rose and the minister engage in a dialogue where he, like Clare, like Ted Forgie, like many male characters in Munro’s stories, says nothing but innocuous things on the surface, which this reader could interpret as the wooing stage. He speaks of swans and studiously avoids any mention of religion, which does two things that are important to the action of the story: 1. breaks Rose’s expectations that ministers will be more lofty with speech infused by religion and religious metaphor, and 2. makes him seem harmless and light-hearted, accessible, appropriate for a young girl to speak to when he says things like, “Well, as I said, I was driving through the country and I saw some Canada geese down on a pond, and I took another look, and there were some swans down with them” (145). Who, the reader might ask, could be considered dangerous in a discussion of the beauty of nature? Is that not refined, safe, innocuous?
Only the foreshadowing provided by Munro, which appears primarily in the early part of Flo’s cautions to Rose, clues the reader in that any discussion of swans in this story will have a double-foil of sexual perversion through which the presence of these birds must be considered. When Flo warns Rose about an undertaker who sings of swans—and whom Flo believes to be a molester who drives around in a hearse with candy used as bribes in his attempts to engage with available women on the road—the lyric given for the undertaker’s song is as follows: “Her brow is like the snowdrift / Her throat is like the swan…” (142). One can assume the comparison of a hypothetical, sought and desired, unknown woman’s brow to a snowdrift, white, potentially pure, followed by a comparison of her throat to that of a swan attaches the idea of beauty or desire to the connected animal named in this lyric, which demonstrates a gentle and at once rather ominous song of pursuit in light of the surrounding narrative and suppositions. The undertaker seeks a swan. He seeks a victim. A pure one, gilded by beauty, to take into his hearse, the traveling vehicle of transport for the dead.
This reference to a hypothetical swan comes early in the narrative, long before the minister in plainclothes enters the train scene with Rose, and becomes both a precursor to the molesting minister’s innocuous remarks and subtly loaded content for Rose (and the reader’s future slant), regarding how the minister’s seemingly innocuous mention of the birds should be deconstructed or construed. Yet, since minister’s first actual speech about swans among the geese occurs without real penalties or negative proofs before the plot action that can depict him as other than a gentle old man at harmless chatter, the minister is allowed, even if briefly, the benefit of the doubt. No real negative action, at this point, has transpired.
The harming part of his characterization, while Rose’s meditations on men continue for the duration of the narrative, is when he actually acts in relation to the plot’s architecture of revealing men’s sexual perversions, and Munro illustrates the molestation act via what seems this minister’s disembodied hand, at first appearing to be no presence, no pressure, yet getting progressively bolder as the train ride continues, as illustrated by this passage, “The hand began, over the next several miles, the most delicate, most timid, pressures and investigations.” After the progress of several miles, the reader is then taken on a binge of sensation where the narrative follows both the sensory response of Rose to “the hand” and an increasingly surreal depiction of the outer landscape and interior imagination at parallel with Rose’s approach to orgasm that culminates in a third and different usage of swans than the first two uses in the story.
This third use of swans, relative to the orgasm Rose has on the train, reads as follows, “The Exhibition Grounds came into view, the painted domes and pillars floated marvelously against her eyelids’ rosy sky. Then flew apart in celebration. You could have had such a flock of birds, wild swans, even, wakened under one big dome together, exploding from it, taking to the sky” (148-149). There is a sense of whimsy in Rose’s release. There is metaphor and personal exploitation of experience into vision, but not so much a sense of harm here in the man’s action, though one might speculate that this is only because the woman’s pleasure is primary in the moment of release—and the shame or possible risk occurs to the narrator later, as she then deliberates upon her potentially dangerous activity and blissful near escape.
Of course, when the molester has finished with his actions and his hand returns to his body, his dismissive and cloaking dialogue returns every part of him to low-relief when, as the train comes to a stop, he offers some help with Rose’s coat, but Munro writes, “His gallantry was self-satisfied, dismissive,” and “No, said Rose, with a sore tongue” (149). Both his conduct and her refusal are significant because they negate any further real-time role for his character. Rose then further contemplates the trip she has undertaken and how to interpret what has just transpired and during such interpretation, the fleeting images of birds that accompanied her orgasm completely vanish. Her tongue is sore. The word she replies with first, “No,” is the one she should have used more aggressively perhaps. It’s no wonder that verbal negation and injury to the mouth, the speech organs, is another way Munro drives home the point that the girl has, in one way or another, been victimized—harmed.
Even Rose comes to this realization in hindsight when, after the minister leaves the train, mentally she returns to Flo’s discussion of ministers in her mind and Munro’s narration observes, “But that she had come as close as she had, to what could happen, was an unwelcome thing…She couldn’t stop getting Flo’s messages” (149). While Munro has effectively distanced the minister with innocuous dialogue, a body part that seems to function outside of the rest of his body, and a dismissive goodbye where the distance is clear enough to be determined “dismissive,” he, too, has functioned in “Wild Swans” as a character who is less integral in life than in the interpretation of the women who populate and control the story—while at the same time he is the one providing the climax of the story’s basis. Again, Munro demonstrates that both genders are subject to scrutiny, even while the narratives of women are what dominate the actual page.
In sum, I don’t think it would be false to say that Cunningham is right about many of Munro’s successful strategies as a gloss, on one light level—of course her work possesses sophistication in the use of narrative structure, language, and framing—but he is wrong about quite another deeper and more fundamental aspect of her fiction: There is never a story about “a middle-aged housewife” in Munro’s stories—at least not without that housewife’s significant romantic interest lurking in the shadows, playing an important role in her immediate awakening or destruction, vanishing or cloaked as he may be by deliberate narrative strategies.
That Munro’s prose enacts a reversal in narrative expectation of who should achieve more focus is only to her credit as one woman author paving a path of more fulsome representation of complex female protagonists, their view of their lovers’ actions, and their motivations for other women authors. And is it so terrible for men to be portrayed as low-relief, while women have more intensive focus and speech rights? As women, our tongues may be sore with our trials in the aftermath, riddled by the analysis of others’ perversions—we may not triumph in all exchanges related to gender when the power dynamics of the societies we live in are still so skewed, but I don’t think such strategies are anything less than an expression of the possible strength (and better valuation) of female protagonists I’d like to see more women authors confidently use on the page when creating their literary, fictive magna opera to address the romantic intersections of men and women in an exchange, of anyone of substance interacting with anyone else of substance in an exchange of ecstatic literary departure—especially when you realize that male authors have been doing the exact same thing, albeit with protagonist gender roles reversed, for centuries.
Works Cited:
"V S Naipaul Slams Women Writers - including Jane Austen - for Their 'sentimentality and Feminine Tosh'" Editorial. Mailonline.com 2 June 2011: n. pag. Mail Online. Associated Newspapers Ltd, 2 June 2011. Web. 15 July 2013. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1393365/V-S-Naipaul-slams-women-writers--including-Jane-Austen--sentimentality-feminine-tosh.html>.
Dickler Awano, Lisa, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Virginia Barber, Michael Cunningham, Ann Close, Douglas Gibson, Charles McGrath, et al. "Appreciations of Alice Munro." Virginia Quarterly Review 82.3 (2006): 91-107. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 Jun 2013.
Elliot, Gayle. "'A Different Tack': Feminist Meta-Narrative in Alice Munro's 'Friend of My Youth.’" Journal of Modern Literature. XX.1 (1996): 75-84. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 Jun 2013.
Munro, Alice. Selected Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Print.
Weinhouse, Linda. "Alice Munro: Hard-Luck Stories or There is No Sexual Relation." Critique XXXVI.2 (1995): 121-129. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 Jun 2013.
This is not to say that the analysis of how she creates her work’s obvious significance as serious literature is always accurate. Regarding Munro specifically, even the male authors who pay her tribute acknowledge that her subjects tend to be far smaller and more intimate than those one expects from traditional (read: male), epic literary accomplishments. As novelist Michael Cunningham states about Munro’s work in a 2006 VQR Symposium entitled “Appreciations of Alice Munro,” Munro, “like Virginia Woolf, has always insisted on the particular importance of women's lives, insisted that the story of an unhappy housewife in middle age is every bit as important as the story of a sea captain about to undertake the search for a white whale” (91). Am I the only one who finds this clustering of words insulting?
Cunningham refers, of course, to Melville’s Moby Dick. So, Munro writes no Moby Dicks? Granted. His further discussion of Munro’s work goes on to discuss how her work instead succeeds by intensive details, narratives that map lifetimes with short fiction, and, as if that weren’t enough to mark her stature eligibility, Cunningham falls back on making a parallel association between Munro’s skills and those of Flannery O’Connor, stating, “what Munro can do with sex is a little like what Flannery O'Connor did with divine intervention” (90-91), likely making use of Ms. O’Connor since the renown of Flannery O’Connor as a heavy hitter is clear to most readers since O’Connor is often one of few “strictly literary” women, born in the last century, grudgingly included in many lists of the “best” books—so one presumes Cunningham attempts to cast reflected glory by this association.
All right, Mr. Cunningham, you are a fan of Munro’s work—but it does seem that so much of your defense of Munro’s status, with such myriad reasons, begs the opposing question of: If Munro’s work is deserving as significant, why do you think it requires so much justification to defend or appreciate a woman author writing predominantly about women, or, as you remark, telling “the story of an unhappy housewife in middle age”?
I am not saying Cunningham’s assessments regarding stylistic accomplishments are incorrect, or that he is not right in lauding Munro’s work—just that I feel his take is diminutive and limited. I would venture to say that fine writing and skillful narratives of lifetimes in short frames are good reasons indeed to value Munro’s work, all accurate, but they are at the surface of her texts, obvious glimmers on the surface of her gems.
It is my supposition that, deeper, Munro exposes universal truths with narratives that interest both men and women because they speak intensively about men and women of many ages and stages, while reversing which gender would normally take center stage. Critic Linda Weinhouse’s explanation of the Freudian joke and how Munro subverts this dynamic in her work is applicable when Weinstein parses the Freudian joke dynamic and how Munro’s fiction differs from the gender roles traditionally found therein when she states both, “According to Freud, a boy desires a girl; but because his desire is frustrated, he tells an obscene joke in her presence to another male. The joking triangle consists of a desiring subject, male, a desired female—butt of the joke, and an intruder—accomplice joke hearer, who is also male and who will eventually go on to repeat the joke to others” (121), and that instead, in a Munro story she analyzes, “it is the ‘man’ who masquerades and whose meaning is unstable; the women speak and eventually control their own destinies through speech. They are the jokers, and in all probability the future jokers” (122). Munro’s work is so interesting to feminist critics because her women are more powerful in assuming speech rights, in failing to be simple objects—and are taking over the narratives and negotiating the narrative terrain in ways that put the female participants with primary roles as “jokers” rather than submissives. That said, anything that dismisses either sex as unnecessary or relegated to negligible roles in Munro’s work is erroneous.
In my view, Munro’s pull with a larger audience could not be accomplished without these dual or dueling depictions, and yes, she writes, for the most part, love stories or those that involve loss and intimacy between lovers or family members—topics popular with both male and female authors, though more frequently negatively connoted when female work is discussed (consider the lionized treatment of Maugham, Franzen, Kundera, et al, with that of female peers)—but what is particularly special about Munro’s work and allows it to transcend the category of “women’s fiction,” or that which pertains almost exclusively to women’s worlds or desires, is that she manages to produce stories that require an analysis of gender roles regardless of an imbalance of perceived gender representation on the page—because men in Munro’s stories are often powerful agents in terms of the contents and motivations of her stories yet tend to woo, harm, and vanish, so it is therefore up to the women in her narratives to explain and reflect their own impressions, a frequent characteristic in Munro’s work that does give Munro’s women more page-time, yet leaves no gender unexamined. In other words, there are complex portrayals in process, but Munro’s work should not fall under the heading of “women’s fiction” because these portrayals explore both genders, albeit in such a way that the depiction of one gender depends on the approach or retreat of the other, one at the fore and the other nearly invisible—women and men depicted by Munro, as a sculptor might say, with one in high and one in low-relief.
While it can be said that nearly all of her stories accomplish this feat, two stories in Alice Munro: Selected Stories particularly emphasize Munro’s trend with the narrative technique of the high relief vocal/audible women and the low relief, vanishing men in Munro’s narratives and demonstrate the agility with which Munro can adjust her writing strategies to suit the varied needs of the stories’ protagonists: “Postcard” and “Wild Swans.” The story “Postcard” is a tale about a young woman who enters a sexual relationship with a wealthy man who both woos her and secretly marries another woman, which places men in the position of lower immediate visibility by its use of correspondence to limit men’s actual page-time and allows most of the discussion about men and the story’s plot to occur mainly between women. The story “Wild Swans” follows a female narrator taking her first ride to a nearby town on a train with a man who molests her and remains very present in the active narration, yet aloof and in the shadows since Monroe places more stress on the warnings and deliberations of the main character Rose’s stepmother Flo that precede the main action and are used as a foil with which to compare his actions, while the man’s marauding hand receives more attention in the story than any use of his whole person. In both pieces Munro uses a deeply layered narration and elements inside the narration in which male characters’ acts are causal and important to the movement of the stories, but their presence is surface-level minimal and reconstructed in many ways by a female narrator.
The concept of women telling the tales but men who do not overwhelm the narrative but woo, harm, and vanish—low relief vehicles—occurs in several significant stylistic choices in Munro’s story “Postcard.” The first stylistic choice is in the author’s use of three pieces of correspondence or news items from or about male love interests, in lieu of more scenic and active page-time, that are short but pivotal to the forward momentum of the story: the first, a love letter from a jilting suitor discussed retrospectively by the story’s protagonist Helen Louise, about whom she meditates as her romantic story with her primary love interest in the piece, Clare McQuarrie, begins; the second, a postcard sent by Clare, in which he demonstrates his distance and lack of sincerity by committing the common sin of omission; and the third, a newspaper announcement of Clare’s marriage to someone else that is delivered to Helen Louise by a female friend of the family, demonstrating that this marriage has occurred while Clare was in Florida, during the same trip in which he mailed the story’s namesake postcard.
The love letter in which the actions of Helen’s jilting suitor Ted Forgie are displayed exhibits a flippant tone that proceeds his abandonment, which the female protagonist of “Postcard” must discuss line by line to understand, and Munro’s use of this letter is done in such a way that passage after passage of the missive enters the narrative to first be represented and then analyzed in direct contrast with how the unspecific segments make the narrator feel in light of his later abandonment—while simultaneously establishing the context for her relationship with Clare, the story’s second jilting man, in medias res, over the course of a two page segment of a seventeen page story (36-37). Munro’s economy is clear:
I read the letter all the way through and I thought, not for the first time, Well, reading this letter any fool can see there is not going to be another. I want you to know how grateful I am for all your sweetness and understanding. Sweetness was the only word that stuck in my mind then, to give me hope. I thought, When Clare and I get married I am just going to throw this letter away. So why not do it now? I tore it across and across and it was easy…That being over I lay down on my bed and thought about several things. For instance, if I hadn’t been in a stupor over Ted Forgie, would I have taken a different view of Clare? Not likely. If I hadn’t been in that stupor I might never have bothered with Clare at all.” (37).
What this passage explores here, women in high-relief, men in low, is the narrator’s decisions and reactions in relation to her romantic relationships. It is not about the men, per se, but Helen’s considerations of the effects of her choices, the aftermath of self-delusion. Helen Louise reads the letter from Ted more than once and the repetition of “in a stupor” as her initial response to the letter before internalizing the harm and the fact that she has been left becomes a textually acknowledged factor in her decision to give romantic energy to Clare. Both men in this conversation are Helen’s objects of consideration, causal to the action, yet Ted’s actual words are light in texture, unable to be parsed without the benefit of Helen’s summary of the events.
During this same two page increment, the backstory regarding what brought Helen and Ted together before the letter concludes their romantic tryst is done in roughly one paragraph of narrative summary (36). Munro does not use any scenes to bring the character Ted Forgie to the foreground. One could argue that this is because Ted should not receive the same level of attention as Clare, who is the main love interest in “Postcard”—but this reader would say it is yet another manifestation of Munro’s style, which is to make what the men say sparse so that the women can interpret, must interpret, and therefore will often find themselves the agents of both analysis and fitting conclusion. This supposition of Munro’s use of craft as a structure to reinforce the significance of her female narrators is supported by the narrative strategies of the rest of the story “Postcard” in that any dialogue that comes directly from Clare later and throughout the piece is also riddled with deception and ambiguity.
The postcard itself, one of few direct interactions the reader receives from Clare that is not a retelling of his interactions, also accomplishes a lot of dismissal in a very short space. In its visual depiction, Munro establishes it has a photo of a buxom blonde on the front who articulates via a speech bubble “Sleep at my place,” before Clare’s actual words to Helen Louise, which are short and less than sweet, explicable, almost defensible, by the small place allowed by a postcard upon which an individual can write: “I didn’t sleep at her place though it was too expensive. Weather could not be better. Mid-seventies. How is the winter treating you in Jubilee? Not bad I hope. Be a good girl. Clare” (32). As the story makes manifest, this postcard has been received long after Clare has initiated a courtship and sexual interaction with the protagonist and yet was mailed during the same trip in which Clare has not only violated his sexual relationship with Helen Louise via sleeping with a different woman but has married this other woman as well.
The particular strength of the postcard as a low-relief vehicle in the narration is highlighted in four ways: 1. although it is a direct interaction, its tone forsakes intimacy and seems not only dismissive but patronizing, as Clare’s low intensity discussion of the weather and parting remark of “Be a good girl” demonstrate; 2. it has been received from a male character who has been too lazy to ever send a real letter, a more detailed letter, that the protagonist Helen Louise articulates she has requested long before (32); 3. the postcard has been dated but upon receipt, Helen Louise notes the date on the freshly received correspondence is “ten days back. Well, sometimes postcards are slow, but I bet what happened was he carried this around in his pocket a few days before he remembered to mail it. It was my only card since he left for Florida three weeks ago,” (32), and 4. that it serves in the story as a counterpoint and the main article that causes the protagonist’s disbelief when she hears that Clare McQuarrie has gotten married, an article of proof she may have presented as making these claims unsubstantiated until the female visitor Alma announces the nuptial news as more than a rumor in the following passage:
Alma said, “Clare MacQuarrie has gotten married.”
“What are you two up to?” I said. “Clare MacQuarrie is in Florida and I just today got a postcard from him as Mama well knows.”
“He got married in Florida. Helen, be calm” (380).
A female guest, not Clare himself, relates the facts of what has happened. When Helen disbelieves Alma’s announcement, Helen Louise cites the postcard as if to display how ridiculous Alma’s statements must be, but Alma’s request of “be calm” foretells that more will ensue as proof of Alma’s original unsupported remark. At this point in the story, the narrator’s mother also has a stake in the discussion, the stake which echoes through the pages that follow and suggest that the mother never believed that Clare intended to marry her daughter because Helen and he were intimate without the requirement of marriage (41, 43), yet another suggestion of expected betrayal by a man who is not scenically present for this exchange, while the audible role of the female friend of the family, Alma, in the passages about the initial announcement, cannot be underestimated. Helen Louise, Alma, and Helen’s mother dominate the scene in high-relief, while their topic is the veiling done by men at low-relief and in the background. Via these conversations, Helen comes to believe that Alma is correct, but before more concrete proof appears, Helen’s faith in the postcard and its connection to a reality must be debunked by a stronger source than hearsay.
Enter Munro’s use of the newspaper clipping from “the Bugle-Herald,” where Alma delivers a more irrefutable source about the Clare’s marriage and Helen ruminates:
“’I don’t believe it any more than fly,’ I said, and I started to read and read all the way through as if the names were ones I’d never heard of before…A quiet ceremony in Coral Gables, Florida, uniting in marriage Clare Alexander MacQuarrie, of Jubilee, son of Mrs. James MacQuarrie of this town and the late Mr. James MacQuarrie, prominent local business man…and Mrs. Margaret Thora Leeson…The bride wore a sage green dressmaker suit with dark brown accessories” (39).
Again, Munro has chosen to verify important events concerning the main characters in this piece without establishing this information scenically, where Clare and his exact motivations may have been more clearly viewed. Instead, her whole description of the wedding and who attended appears in a one paragraph notice in the style and formal format of a newspaper announcement (39), which makes Helen Louise’s next actions and reactions more volatile than if Munro’s male characters were presented more actively, where men might speak in their defense—but, woo, harm, and abandon is the pattern, and the story completes this agenda admirably, while the women, in order to interpret events more fully, must continue to speak.
Similarly, conversations between women about men are the driving force for a quite different story entitled “Wild Swans,” although Munro’s strategies with keeping fully realized male contact at a minimum vary with what she displays in “Postcard.” Often critics of Munro’s work have been quick to point out the various ways that Munro uses plot and structure in keeping the men central to the narrative yet layered below the action cemented by dialogues between women in Munro’s scenes, and I consider the remarks, in particular, of critic Gayle Elliot, author of article, “’A Different Tack’: Feminist Meta-Narrative in Alice Munro’s ‘Friend of My Youth’” where Elliot asserts about Munro’s structure: “The women in these stories…seek to retrieve meaning from a recollected past…they manage to explore, together, the enticements and disappointments of sexual and romantic love, the compromises within marriage, and the pain of conflicting loyalties” (76). While Elliot does not speak to “Postcard” or “Wild Swans” in specific, but instead a different Munrovian collection, her summary of tactics is still apt and clear regarding how Munro’s narratives are structured around the perception of female protagonists search for “retrieved meaning from a recollected past” via their interactions with other women.
This view is obviously relevant while discussing either “Wild Swans” or “Postcard,” but particularly in “Wild Swans,” which is a ten page story where the female narration is maintained as high-relief throughout, even when the male molester character is actively present in the scene, but is displayed most clearly in the first three pages of the story, where the interactions of an older female character named Flo with Rose, the young protagonist, display a stepmother’s dialogue with a daughter figure, in which Flo’s enumerated warnings and remembered stories will become a foil for “Swans” main character Rose to use as a contrast for personal analysis while the story’s real-time action with her old man molester transpires, during which Rose is first courted by him with innocuous words and then molested by his disembodied hand, which is initially hidden beneath a newspaper, on the train before she is abandoned. Both the story’s set up with Flo’s diatribes on the dangers of men in the world, particularly those that molest (140-144) and Munro’s intense focus on the man’s hand as an acting agent in the story (145-149) work to establish the high-relief women, low-relief men dynamic discussed earlier in terms of the story “Postcard” and Gayle Elliot’s perception of how meaning is articulated in Munro’s work.
During the first paragraph of “Wild Swans,” a story full of information about frightening reported sexual exchanges as well as actual sexual exchanges, Flo’s remarks about “White Slavers” and young girls being stolen into the dark trade of involuntary prostitution are present in the first line and amplified in the entire first paragraph of the piece, where Flo’s very first advice in the piece begins as follows: “Flo said to watch for White Slavers…” and is followed up by a lurid, highly speculative cautionary tale about what unsavory things can happen to girls lured into such a trade, which ends, in Flo’s discussion, with a female “you” character “invested by vile disease, your mind destroyed by drugs, your hair and teeth fallen out. [This] took about three years for you to get to this state,” and further expresses that “this state” is one the leads to the abused woman in question being unwilling to go home due to the circumstances, or even unable to remember her home at all (140). Flo’s warnings are particularly dire, yet instrumental in how the character Rose then proceeds to dissect her relative levels of risk when the active parts of Rose’s interactions with the male minister/molester in plainclothes begin.
In terms of Munro’s often used dynamic of the male character’s presence as one that woos, harms, and abandons, the narrator’s connection to what Flo has said is all the more important. The minister/molester first speaks to Rose in a very innocuous fashion and is not even wearing his religious garb, though he makes a point of announcing his role in his church (145). This contrasts with a story told by Flo earlier where “Watch out, Flo said as well, for people dressed up as ministers. They were the worst. That disguise was commonly adapted by White Slavers, as well as those after your money” (141). The differences between what Flo told her and what Rose sees happening are causal to Rose’s continued questioning as to whether she is indeed experiencing something dangerous later, but are kept constantly in mind. In this way, the minister character is kept in low-relief, since he is an object to be analyzed in comparison to examples that come before in the narrative, but Rose and her interpretations are still primary.
Later on page 145, Rose and the minister engage in a dialogue where he, like Clare, like Ted Forgie, like many male characters in Munro’s stories, says nothing but innocuous things on the surface, which this reader could interpret as the wooing stage. He speaks of swans and studiously avoids any mention of religion, which does two things that are important to the action of the story: 1. breaks Rose’s expectations that ministers will be more lofty with speech infused by religion and religious metaphor, and 2. makes him seem harmless and light-hearted, accessible, appropriate for a young girl to speak to when he says things like, “Well, as I said, I was driving through the country and I saw some Canada geese down on a pond, and I took another look, and there were some swans down with them” (145). Who, the reader might ask, could be considered dangerous in a discussion of the beauty of nature? Is that not refined, safe, innocuous?
Only the foreshadowing provided by Munro, which appears primarily in the early part of Flo’s cautions to Rose, clues the reader in that any discussion of swans in this story will have a double-foil of sexual perversion through which the presence of these birds must be considered. When Flo warns Rose about an undertaker who sings of swans—and whom Flo believes to be a molester who drives around in a hearse with candy used as bribes in his attempts to engage with available women on the road—the lyric given for the undertaker’s song is as follows: “Her brow is like the snowdrift / Her throat is like the swan…” (142). One can assume the comparison of a hypothetical, sought and desired, unknown woman’s brow to a snowdrift, white, potentially pure, followed by a comparison of her throat to that of a swan attaches the idea of beauty or desire to the connected animal named in this lyric, which demonstrates a gentle and at once rather ominous song of pursuit in light of the surrounding narrative and suppositions. The undertaker seeks a swan. He seeks a victim. A pure one, gilded by beauty, to take into his hearse, the traveling vehicle of transport for the dead.
This reference to a hypothetical swan comes early in the narrative, long before the minister in plainclothes enters the train scene with Rose, and becomes both a precursor to the molesting minister’s innocuous remarks and subtly loaded content for Rose (and the reader’s future slant), regarding how the minister’s seemingly innocuous mention of the birds should be deconstructed or construed. Yet, since minister’s first actual speech about swans among the geese occurs without real penalties or negative proofs before the plot action that can depict him as other than a gentle old man at harmless chatter, the minister is allowed, even if briefly, the benefit of the doubt. No real negative action, at this point, has transpired.
The harming part of his characterization, while Rose’s meditations on men continue for the duration of the narrative, is when he actually acts in relation to the plot’s architecture of revealing men’s sexual perversions, and Munro illustrates the molestation act via what seems this minister’s disembodied hand, at first appearing to be no presence, no pressure, yet getting progressively bolder as the train ride continues, as illustrated by this passage, “The hand began, over the next several miles, the most delicate, most timid, pressures and investigations.” After the progress of several miles, the reader is then taken on a binge of sensation where the narrative follows both the sensory response of Rose to “the hand” and an increasingly surreal depiction of the outer landscape and interior imagination at parallel with Rose’s approach to orgasm that culminates in a third and different usage of swans than the first two uses in the story.
This third use of swans, relative to the orgasm Rose has on the train, reads as follows, “The Exhibition Grounds came into view, the painted domes and pillars floated marvelously against her eyelids’ rosy sky. Then flew apart in celebration. You could have had such a flock of birds, wild swans, even, wakened under one big dome together, exploding from it, taking to the sky” (148-149). There is a sense of whimsy in Rose’s release. There is metaphor and personal exploitation of experience into vision, but not so much a sense of harm here in the man’s action, though one might speculate that this is only because the woman’s pleasure is primary in the moment of release—and the shame or possible risk occurs to the narrator later, as she then deliberates upon her potentially dangerous activity and blissful near escape.
Of course, when the molester has finished with his actions and his hand returns to his body, his dismissive and cloaking dialogue returns every part of him to low-relief when, as the train comes to a stop, he offers some help with Rose’s coat, but Munro writes, “His gallantry was self-satisfied, dismissive,” and “No, said Rose, with a sore tongue” (149). Both his conduct and her refusal are significant because they negate any further real-time role for his character. Rose then further contemplates the trip she has undertaken and how to interpret what has just transpired and during such interpretation, the fleeting images of birds that accompanied her orgasm completely vanish. Her tongue is sore. The word she replies with first, “No,” is the one she should have used more aggressively perhaps. It’s no wonder that verbal negation and injury to the mouth, the speech organs, is another way Munro drives home the point that the girl has, in one way or another, been victimized—harmed.
Even Rose comes to this realization in hindsight when, after the minister leaves the train, mentally she returns to Flo’s discussion of ministers in her mind and Munro’s narration observes, “But that she had come as close as she had, to what could happen, was an unwelcome thing…She couldn’t stop getting Flo’s messages” (149). While Munro has effectively distanced the minister with innocuous dialogue, a body part that seems to function outside of the rest of his body, and a dismissive goodbye where the distance is clear enough to be determined “dismissive,” he, too, has functioned in “Wild Swans” as a character who is less integral in life than in the interpretation of the women who populate and control the story—while at the same time he is the one providing the climax of the story’s basis. Again, Munro demonstrates that both genders are subject to scrutiny, even while the narratives of women are what dominate the actual page.
In sum, I don’t think it would be false to say that Cunningham is right about many of Munro’s successful strategies as a gloss, on one light level—of course her work possesses sophistication in the use of narrative structure, language, and framing—but he is wrong about quite another deeper and more fundamental aspect of her fiction: There is never a story about “a middle-aged housewife” in Munro’s stories—at least not without that housewife’s significant romantic interest lurking in the shadows, playing an important role in her immediate awakening or destruction, vanishing or cloaked as he may be by deliberate narrative strategies.
That Munro’s prose enacts a reversal in narrative expectation of who should achieve more focus is only to her credit as one woman author paving a path of more fulsome representation of complex female protagonists, their view of their lovers’ actions, and their motivations for other women authors. And is it so terrible for men to be portrayed as low-relief, while women have more intensive focus and speech rights? As women, our tongues may be sore with our trials in the aftermath, riddled by the analysis of others’ perversions—we may not triumph in all exchanges related to gender when the power dynamics of the societies we live in are still so skewed, but I don’t think such strategies are anything less than an expression of the possible strength (and better valuation) of female protagonists I’d like to see more women authors confidently use on the page when creating their literary, fictive magna opera to address the romantic intersections of men and women in an exchange, of anyone of substance interacting with anyone else of substance in an exchange of ecstatic literary departure—especially when you realize that male authors have been doing the exact same thing, albeit with protagonist gender roles reversed, for centuries.
Works Cited:
"V S Naipaul Slams Women Writers - including Jane Austen - for Their 'sentimentality and Feminine Tosh'" Editorial. Mailonline.com 2 June 2011: n. pag. Mail Online. Associated Newspapers Ltd, 2 June 2011. Web. 15 July 2013. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1393365/V-S-Naipaul-slams-women-writers--including-Jane-Austen--sentimentality-feminine-tosh.html>.
Dickler Awano, Lisa, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Virginia Barber, Michael Cunningham, Ann Close, Douglas Gibson, Charles McGrath, et al. "Appreciations of Alice Munro." Virginia Quarterly Review 82.3 (2006): 91-107. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 Jun 2013.
Elliot, Gayle. "'A Different Tack': Feminist Meta-Narrative in Alice Munro's 'Friend of My Youth.’" Journal of Modern Literature. XX.1 (1996): 75-84. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 Jun 2013.
Munro, Alice. Selected Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Print.
Weinhouse, Linda. "Alice Munro: Hard-Luck Stories or There is No Sexual Relation." Critique XXXVI.2 (1995): 121-129. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 Jun 2013.
About Heather Fowler
Heather Fowler is the author of the story collections Suspended Heart (Aqueous Books, Dec. 2010), People with Holes (Pink Narcissus Press, July 2012), This Time, While We're Awake (Aqueous Books, May 2013) and Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness (Queen's Ferry Press, forthcoming May 2014). Fowler’s People with Holes was named a 2012 finalist for Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award in Short Fiction. She received her M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University. Her stories and poems have been published online and in print in the U.S., England, Australia, and India, and appeared in such venues as PANK, Night Train, storyglossia, Surreal South, JMWW, Prick of the Spindle, Short Story America, The Nervous Breakdown, and others, as well as having been nominated for the storySouth Million Writers Award, Sundress Publications Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. She is Poetry Editor at Corium Magazine and a Fiction Editor for the international refereed journal, Journal of Post-Colonial Cultures & Societies (USA). Please visit her website: www.heatherfowlerwrites.com