From Is to Are Not
Although Mike Corrao's Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede, as well as his previous Gut Text, a prequel of sorts, audaciously reject just about all of the recognized conventions of prose fiction--down to the placement of words on the page, and even the expectation we will find words on the page--unfortunately the idea motivating both of these books is more interesting in conception than in execution. The effort it makes to render text-as-object, to reconfigure our notions of "text" in the first place, is certainly a worthy one (albeit not a wholly original one), but as a reading experience it does not really engage the reader, either in its language or its interpolated graphical elements, in a way that persuades us that regarding a literary text as something to be perceived as much as read can be compelling in its own way.
Gut Text features four text-fastened "characters" aware of their status as merely textual beings and attempting to reckon with their fate. Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede focuses on one such character, except that this character is the text itself, grappling with its own instability, its own lack of corporeal being. Thus:
Waiting here there is little to do. I am alone. I am empty. My contents have shifted from is to are not.
Swarms of air and heat. The oxygen discolors my skin and weakens my frame.
Let sinews sew me together again and return my eyes to open and my appendages to the ground or sky.
Most of the book is devoted to chronicling this character's attempts to, in effect, get his sinews sewn together again, which, of course are doomed to failure. The reader is also drawn into this drama: at times the text-character directly addresses us, while at others the character and the reader ("you") seem to merge. Other characters are introduced by name ("Nathan Carpenter," "Thelma Gibbs"), but there is no character development as such aside from the protagonist's continuous metamorphosis. None of this is related in a conventional linear narrative, or even through standard paragraphing, but arranged into something closer to stanzas, some longer, some shorter (sometimes a single line). "Arranged" is arguably a better description than "written" of the method used for the book as a whole, as the written text itself is frequently enhanced by situating it in various places on the page, sometimes put into boxes or different kinds of typeface. Purely graphical elements--various geographical shapes--are also often included, seemingly at random.
Indeed, both Rituals and Gut Text are really assembled rather than composed as conventional prose fiction. This is not in itself a criticism. The notion that the printed page, which is, after all, traditionally the medium fiction writers work in, can be treated as malleable, subject to manipulations that challenge the protocols of writing as embedded in the customs of printing, is perfectly valid, although the gestures made in these books are certainly not new. The sort of experiment Corrao ventures seems to me to be prefigured in Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, in such pieces as "Frame-Tale," "Autobiography," and "Glossolalia," and is especially indebted to Raymond Federman's novels Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It, probably the first extended experiments in the cartography of the page in American fiction. Finally, neither Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede nor Gut Text seem to significantly advance the efforts to reshape our expectations of "text" begun by these writers.
However, the most serious impediment to a full appreciation of Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede, at least for me, is not a lack of originality but the book's relentless expository prose (despite the typographical maneuvers), which essentially turns it into a series of mini-narratives relating, in generally bland language, the progressive changes the protagonist/text undergoes:
The water evaporates from your blood. Leaving behind a metallic syrup. Oozing from the cuts under your knees and ribs.
This vessel quickly loses its usefulness. You perform and incantation and create a new one. Gathering mounds of geological debris. But the bindings that you have dressed yourself in do not act reliably.
The actions described in this work are inherently disturbing, as the character's transformations often involve images of bodily rupture and dismemberment, but the language used to describe them remain detached and purely denotative. Perhaps the concept of fiction-as-assemblage requires that words and sentences themselves be treated as "materials" to be fitted into place, but this doesn't make the repetitious and often colorless prose any more fun to read. It isn't enough merely to subvert formal conventions; an innovative work needs to offer the reader some additional source of pleasure or interest--in this case a more adventurous style could have helped.
The idea of fiction as verbal architecture is a potentially fruitful one, and surely future writers will produce imaginative and compelling works in redeeming it. Mike Corrao may be one of those writers, but I don't believe he's there yet.
Writing This Yourself
If a book like Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede might be described as a kind of apotheosis of metafiction (not only are we aware of the text as text, we are witnessing the text's coming-into-being), then Jeff Bursey's Unidentified Man at Left of Photo adopts the more "classic" metafictional conceit: a writer writing a novel about writing a novel. The narrator forthrightly acknowledges he is making things up as he goes along, at times providing the moves a novel is expected to make but more often warning the reader such moves have been rejected:
Writing is hard work, often unrewarding, so there's not going to be much effort here to convince you that you're in a version of the so-called real world. Things are told, not shown. Everything's so open-ended you'll soon believe you're writing this yourself. . . .
As it turns out, however, the effort the novel does make proves quite consistent with evoking a semblance of the "real world," precisely because its portrayal of both characters and setting remain "open-ended." As we accompany the narrator through the process of creation, we indeed watch the novel's "world" come into view, but since this is not purely an invented world but the author's recreation of Prince Edward Island (which, indeed, might seem largely uncharted to everyone except Canadians--and perhaps even to many of them), based on his many years as a resident of PEI, the effect is of gaining a slowly developing, ultimately synoptic view of the place (although the novel is more specifically set in Charlottetown).
The characters as well seem both tentatively presented, as if the narrator is not entirely sure what he is going to do with them once they are introduced (with some of the minor characters there are even slippages in identification, the character's name changing even as he/she is invoked), and ultimately part of a broader cross-section of Charlottetown (somewhat more emphasis on the arty/bohemian side of town) that seems all the more convincing because they seem to have been created for no reason other than to be themselves--no "arcs," no moral fables attached to their fates. By the end of the novel, it can't be said the characters have undergone any dramatic transformation, any inner "growth," but this refusal to engage in any of the usual tactics of literary fiction turns out to be the novel's greatest strength.
In addition to the novel's self-reflexive premise, Bursey also incorporates various formal and stylistic stratagems that mark Unidentified Man at Left of Photo as unconventional. One chapter consists of a series of suggestions the narrator has received about what to put in his book, but, he says, "I don't have the ingenuity or energy to work them up," so he presents them as notes. Two chapters, with the same title, are blank. Another chapter is narrated entirely through questions, and photos are inserted at numerous points in the text. None of these gestures are especially radical, but Bursey's ambition seems clearly enough not to break previously untouched formal ground but to enlist an array of unorthodox formal devices in realizing his novel's subject without falling back on the usual novelistic clichés, an ambition the novel does fulfill, although such a strategy arguably threatens to reduce these devices to just more "tools" a writer might use to raise the same old sort of structure.
Bursey resorts to a more traditional type of device--personification--at the novel's conclusion, although the result is decidedly not a typical kind of ending for a novel. (Krasznahorkai's Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming might be a recent analogue, however.) Bursey brings to life a hurricane, Bruce, who exults in the havoc he wreaks throughout the Atlantic basin before he finally makes his way to Prince Edward Island. Bruce is an especially savage hurricane--RAGE! RAGE! RAGE! KILL!KILL!KILL! is his refrain--as he ignores the advice given by the ghosts of hurricanes past to "stay away from Nova Scotia," but retains enough strength to reach Prince Edward Island, anyway. Thus Bursey essentially destroys the fictional PEI he has endeavored to create, perhaps a final reminder that the setting has been a composed illusion all along. Some readers might regard this inverted deus ex machina as trivializing the achievement of that illusion, but the author might retort: this is a novel, and the end is the end.
Undreamt Daydreams
Gabriel Blackwell's novels could be regarded as exercises in creative collaboration--collaboration with known works and writers, the latter generally dead. Shadow Man evokes the the tropes and the manner of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men appropriates both the work and the life of H.P. Lovecraft, while Madeleine E attempts a kind of synthesis of the criticism relating to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The stories included in Babel (Splice, 2020) are less exclusively devoted to this particular method of metafictional rewriting--although one of them does center around a nonexistent book by Borges that nevertheless shows up on Google Preview--more surreal or absurdist than metafictional, more focused on character and incident (however askew).
Perhaps this difference in tactics is itself a function of the book's thematic focus on family conflict and especially on the relationship between fathers and sons. Particularly in the first half of the book, the stories depict this relationship as fragile and a source of anguish for both fathers and sons. In the story called "Fathers and Sons," as well as the one immediately preceding it, "The Invention of an Island," the situations are especially fraught, as the narrators' young sons appear to suffer from developmental afflictions with which the fathers clearly have trouble coping even if their distress is displaced, expressed through curious plot devices: In the latter, the narrator's wife has taken the son and gone, but not before installing mirrors everywhere, leaving the narrator essentially immobilized. The narrator of the former investigates the disappearance of his grandfather, Rudolph Fentz, as related in a curious letter his own father has sent him. "How was I like Rudolph Fentz," the narrator asks at the story's conclusion, waiting outside his son's school. "Was there time to change? Was there really the will to?"
The incongruities in these two stories are only amplified in some of the other stories that are less focused on a father's anxieties, although images and tropes related to family still predominate. One of the more disturbing stories is "A Field in Winter," in which a young narrator worries about the status of his "brother," who appears to be some amalgam of vegetable, alcohol, and "pickled" human. His father is depicted growing (making? siring?) other brothers whom the narrator (otherwise an only child) once found buried in the field of the title. Additionally, the narrator may be a ghost, or his father may be, although at the story's conclusion they both may be, as they wait in "Mr. Strick's pavilion," where the narrator anticipates that "soon something dark will rise up out of Mr. Strick's pond." The temptation is to try and make this story make some kind of conventional sense, to interpret the grotesque images and strange goings-on as perhaps allegorical, but it is a surreal sort of symbolism that subverts its own figuration, implying meaning that remains just beyond our grasp.
This impression is left as well in stories such as "Leson" and "The Before Unapprehended," In the former, the title character, an ex-soldier now living in a "colony," is feeling "stuck," stagnant. When doctors are unable to help him (aside from being told that "what is wrong must be inside") he begins to take a regimen of pills and other "medicaments" that soon start to work: he literally begins to grow from the inside out, his bodily fluids breaking through the skin, depositing "bits that had once been Leson, leavings, outpourings of his slow flood." Eventually he empties out completely, reduced to the flow of his bodily substances. The story teases us with unexplained details--what is this colony? what are these "passage worms" the characters keep seeing?--but again seem to promise more meaning than they deliver. The same is true of the latter story, narrated by a man marching and reciting verses with a procession of other men (their destination and purpose unexplained), who has noticed that one of their "brothers" has disappeared (although he doesn't actually know which brother it might be). Thus an element of mystery is set up at the very beginning of the story, but the narrator doesn't so much solve it as dissolve it in quasi-metaphysical speculation, surmising that the missing brother escaped through a hole in language:
There must be a reality that does not obtain, but does exist, and it seems to me that brother must have found it. What if he found a way to follow the steps given by these subverses instead of the steps the rest of us were taking, the steps given by the verses being recited? Where would such a path lead? Wouldn't it take him into regions that exist in the same way undreamt daydreams exist?
Blackwell's stories are elusive enough that perhaps it is unwise to extrapolate from any specific passage to a broader generalization about his assumptions, but perhaps this narrator's speculation concerning the whereabouts of his missing companion does provide a perspective that can help orient us to the particular (but satisfying) kind of strangeness we find in Babel. Reading these stories, the world they invoke does start to seem like "a reality that does not obtain, but does exist"--at least here, in this reading experience of them. And it is as if the stories as a whole have indeed exited, if not language itself, then through a hole in the conventional representation of "reality" in literary language, emerging into "undreamt daydreams" (or nightmares) that Blackwell has obligingly gone ahead and dreamt for us.
Destination Unknown
In an interview for Heavy Feather Review, when asked how she would describe the form of her debut book, Tight Little Vocal Cords, Loie Rawding responds
I absolutely consider this a hybrid novel, a relatively short one at that. There are several forms here: epistolary, script, poetry, and fiction, that work with each other and, at times, against each other. It’s kind of a hot mess! But a carefully curated mess that weaves the journey of my character into a threnody about loneliness, love, and failure to act when we are called to.
If we take the term to signify a work of fiction whose discursive character is not unitary, unrestricted to the kind of expository prose leavened with description and dialogue that has traditionally defined the form, then Tight Little Vocal Cords might indeed be called a “hybrid novel.” Yet “fictional discourse” is not unitary in the first place, since exposition, description, and dialogue themselves are ultimately separate modes that have come to be associated as the “normal” rhetorical practice of narrative fiction only through custom and historical contingency.
Tight Little Vocal Cords encompasses sections written in both prose (from both first and third-person perspectives) and verse, as well as dramatic and epistolary forms (and flashes of what appear to be Morse Code, tapped out by the protagonist). It does not, however, include graphic or other visual elements, the presence of which characterizes the most radically hybrid works, and thus the novel remains an assortment of writing per se, not a multi-media experiment. Although a unifying narrative does ultimately arise from the novel’s various episodic parts, the episodes retain a certain degree of aesthetic independence that makes them more than substitute structural devices for the more familiar devices of plot (nevertheless they do serve as such a device), prompting us to consider such an approach as “hybrid” in the first place.
What, then, distinguishes such a novel as Tight Little Vocal Cords from the very many novels — going back to the very beginning of the form — that assimilate “other” modes of writing: letters, diaries, journals, newspaper reports, extending all the way to the present and the use of digital-era forms to be found in much (presumably non-hybrid) contemporary fiction? Indeed, it seems almost a commonplace to note that the novel actually has no fixed form, has been a hybrid literary genre since the first novels (what we now call novels) were written. Arguably, in fact, the novel has persisted as a literary practice precisely because of its nearly infinite verbal and formal ductility, its capacity to absorb and adapt all other forms of writing for its own artistic purposes, purposes that remain provisional and open-ended. Thus, simply to speak of the “hybrid novel” as a specific category of fiction is neither to specifically define the term in a way that is useful for literary criticism nor to identify something that could be called a recent development.
Even those works that reach beyond writing itself to incorporate visual elements in a more boundary-challenging kind of hybrid work are really logical extensions of the novel’s inherent hybridity, although some writers (Steve Tomasula, say) have gone farther than others in really transforming prose fiction into an alternative medium not confined to purely verbal arrangement. Tight Little Vocal Cords, however, has more modest aims, perhaps to help break down genres of writing into a more amorphous endeavor of “writing,” with the characteristics of both fiction and poetry — or where the distinctions among these characteristics disappear altogether. This does not mean the novel indulges in conspicuous stylistic flourishes or sheerly ornamental language. Although the narrative strategy Rawding uses is indirect and impressionistic in effect, the chronicle of the protagonist’s life that is the object of the narrative still proceeds through incident and scene. The elliptical and fragmented way the story is told acts as an alternate means of enabling the telling, but much of the writing continues to perform the expository function intrinsic to most narrative fiction.
The protagonist of Tight Little Vocal Cords is known to us simply as M. Rawding has said that her novel has its origin in a consideration of the life and work of the painter Marsden Hartley, but although he does appear to share some biographical attributes — the trajectory of his life is roughly analogous — M is not Hartley. Most overtly, M is not a painter. Still, he does in a sense follow in Hartley’s footsteps in his journey out of a bleak childhood in coastal New England, to a free-spirited period spent in Europe, and back to New England. Rawding seems to have endowed M as well with Hartley’s somewhat equivocal sexuality. Over the course of the novel he is depicted in sexual relationships with both men and women (although his great love is, like Hartley, for a German soldier), an uncertainty that reflects a broader provisional quality to M’s experience: at first the novel would seem to be developing into a picaresque coming-of-age story of sorts, as M escapes the grim conditions of his youth after the death of both of his parents (his mother dies early in the book, in a flash-fiction episode that may have been the genesis of the novel, evoking a Hartley painting) and immediately embarks on a cross-country trip, winding up in the desert West.
Although M subsequently travels halfway around the world before coming back to where he began, it cannot be said that he appears to have gained some essential wisdom or completed a journey of self-discovery. In fact, at the novel’s conclusion M is again on his way to parts unknown (he may be returning to the desert in a version of the eternal recurrence), the narrator remarking that “We leave him to search for his self again,” making explicit that his story has not reached a conventional resolution. At this point, the narrative “We” is an imaginary assemblage of sailors purporting to occupy M’s mind and with whom M interacts in the final pages of the novel. Whether this is to be taken as an ominous sign of M’s mental instability or as perhaps lingering evidence of his past that he still must leave behind is not entirely clear, although perhaps both of these perspectives are true to an extent.
Yet this uncertainty about M’s state of mind underscores what may be the novel’s most serious weakness, one that its discontinuous formal method exacerbates, however much it also constitutes the medium by which such a character is possible in the first place. Ultimately M is a less interesting character than the aesthetic and emotional ministrations provided him suggest he should be. While other characters come and go — including his parents in the novel’s first section — M is the almost exclusive subject of attention throughout, and we never really get close enough to him or share his emotional responses to find his plight particularly urgent or his behavior especially affecting. The novel’s middle section, set in Weimar Germany, is narrated by the soldier (who is AWOL), and while the focus is ostensibly on M and his further attempts at self-discovery after leaving the desert, the soldier (unnamed, but referred to playfully by his friends as “Yin-Yang”) emerges from the episode as a far more dynamic character than M. Certainly being given the first-person narration for an extended portion of the novel (an opportunity not afforded to M at any point) contributes to the added depth and color of this character, but, here and elsewhere in the novel, M remains sufficiently removed, an object of observation and contemplation, that he seems too much like a specimen under examination.
To this extent, M seems like a character being used for illustrative purposes. He exemplifies sexual (if not gender) fluidity. His quest is to achieve self-actualization through satisfying his sexual impulses, yet his self appears so thoroughly mutable, it seems likely it will be a quest without completion. Perhaps this is the point — to suggest that human desire is elastic and infinitely variable. But then Tight Little Vocal Cords becomes a novel that has a point, to which the main character has been made more or less subordinate. M is not portrayed as beyond criticism or disapproval. He can be callous in his treatment of others and is often enough inattentive, and thus the novel is not an unqualified celebration of his non-heteronormative behavior. Nevertheless, it does ultimately present M’s experiences as authentic and beneficial expressions of his inner nature, and it would not be distorting what seem to be its ambition, at least thematically, by saying that it works to a significant degree as an instrument for affirming these experiences.
Undoubtedly many readers would find this a wholly worthwhile project, ample justification for any work of fiction. Isn’t the putative warrant for reading fiction that it provides us access to multifarious experiences, especially those different from our own? However, it seems to me that this novel itself undermines the notion that its value should be attributed primarily and most importantly to its status as a vessel for a character’s immediate experience. Surely a more direct representation less dependent on artifice would be the more expedient means of relating M’s activities and perceptions. Not only has Rawding chose to render “experience” through a work of fiction, already a displacement of life as lived and therefore less trustworthy as a conduit to reality, but the novel she has written is formally intricate enough that it threatens to seem entirely superfluous to the goal of simply communicating the protagonist’s experience. This intricacy is in fact the most compelling feature of Tight Little Vocal Cords, one that has little to do with whether we want to call it a “hybrid novel” or not. The formal imagination evinced counterbalances any lack of charisma in the main character, and this resourcefulness, at the very least, should not be disregarded in considering the contribution of a work such as this.
Syntactical Deductions
Eric Chevillard has described himself as a writer attuned first of all to the effects of his sentences: "Everything comes together in my sentences, in the moment of their writing, driven by a hopscotch logic, by syntactical deductions. My stories are born out of sheer energy" ("A Conversation with Eric Chevillard.") A first sentence is especially important in opening up "a wholly unexplored space" that the following sentences proceed to occupy.
This focus on the dynamics of the sentence in determining the shape and direction of the story seems somewhat reminiscent of the notion of "consecution" as promulgated by the American writer/teacher Gordon Lish and put into practice by many of his students. Chevillard does not appear to emphasize the purely sonic qualities of the procession of sentences in quite the same way, but unfortunately, the reader of Chevillard's fiction in translation can't really appreciate the full range of possible effects put into play by the writer's method of composition, no matter how diligently the translator tries to reproduce or recreate them. This is the inherent limitation in approaching a writer's work through translation--one that most of us can only accept--but it becomes especially apparent when the writer is as solicitous of literature as a "language act" as Chevillard avows himself to be.
Luckily, Chevillard is also a writer whose manner of filling that "wholly unexplored space" invoked by language still registers distinctly and distinctively, the "sheer energy" scarcely diminished. In particular, the "hopscotch logic" of Chevillard's novels seems their most essential characteristic, making them both manifestly peculiar and frequently hilarious. This logic is especially evident in a work such as The Crab Nebula, which might be said to "hop" randomly from vignette to vignette in the story of "Crab," except that there is no story (or rather there are many stories), Crab is never quite the same person, and sometimes not exactly a person. The tonal effect is really neither surreal nor absurdist, but rather a near-total disregard of "sense" as a goal the novelist should strive to achieve. Yet one does come to have some feeling for poor Crab in his effort to cope with the senselessness we all come to suspect is our inescapable reality. Demolishing Nisard has more continuity and coherence, centered around its narrator protagonist's obsession with obscure 19th century pedagogue Désiré Nisard, although it too threatens to teeter over into nonsense. In this case, the "hopscotch logic" is embodied in the narrator, who allows his neurotic belief that the opinions of the man he reviles epitomize the vacuity of the modern age to in effect turn himself into just another version of Nisard.
Each of these novels at first might seem both aimless and formally chaotic, but ultimately their collage-like structures bring about a congruity of sorts in the evocation of character (even if Crab is only a provisional sort of character in the first place). On the other hand, in The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster, the latest Chevillard novel to now be translated (by Chris Clarke), form is conspicuously present: the novel purports to be a collection of unpublished writings by the recently deceased writer Pilaster, with an editorial apparatus by Pilaster's fellow writer (and supposed friend), "Marc-Antoine Marson." The pieces included do indeed seem like odds and ends--diary entries, a very brief detective story, a collection of haiku, an unperformed one-act play, among others), but Marson does his level best in his introductory and editorial notes to make them seem even more marginal--while also damning Pilaster's published oeuvre with the faintest of praise.
If the editor's impatience with the author's works begs the question of why the book has been assembled in the first place, eventually it becomes clear enough that Marston has come to bury Pilaster, not to praise him, that his enmity against the writer goes back a long way indeed (to their student days together) and has only deepened through jealousy, both professional, due to Pilaster's more exalted reputation, and the more traditional kind: Marson reveals himself to have been in love with Pilaster's wife, Lise, whose own death preceded Pilaster's 15 years earlier. The novel bears an undeniable resemblance to Nabokov's Pale Fire, although the "backstory" the reader must piece together is rather less exotic than Nabokov's. Still, the reader does come to suspect that the undercurrent of jealousy that seems to propel the editor's compilation of Thomas Pilaster's posthumous works might also have risen to murder; the murky circumstances of the deaths of both Lise and Pilaster himself point to Marson as the likely perpetrator.
The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster, like the Chevillard novel translated most immediately before it, the metafictional The Author and Me, is a more recognizably "postmodern" novel than The Crab Nebula and Demolishing Nisard, which to an extent seem like more singular creations. On the whole, however, Chevillard is an audacious and insidiously entertaining writer, and the reader new to his work (as I was) might just as well read these books all together (as I did).
An Unruly Woman
Elisabeth Sheffield's novels feature women who are "difficult" "unruly," at times resolutely unpleasant--at least to readers who expect a fictional protagonist (especially if it is a woman) to be at heart "likable." They are otherwise dynamic characters who just don't observe the rules of propriety or decorum. Stella, one of the protagonists of Sheffield's first novel, Gone (2003), is a disaffected and dissolute adjunct community college English instructor who goes on a fruitless quest, accompanied by her ex-student lover, to track down what she believes is her inheritance, a valuable Winslow Homer painting. Along the way we read from letters written by Stella's deceased aunt, Juju, who in her own, different way, is as incorrigible as Stella. The protagonist of Fort Da (2009), a 38 year-old neurologist, relates (in a dissociated and displaced way) an account of her reverse-Lolita obsession with an 11 year-old boy. One of the dual protagonists of 2014's Helen Keller Really Lived (the other protagonist is a ghost) is a quasi-grifter (she dispenses "healing") who ultimately becomes involved in a theft of embryos from a fertility clinic.
It is likely that these portrayals against the grain of conventional assumptions about appropriately feminine behavior help account for the dearth of critical attention given to Sheffield's work in the mainstream literary press (or even what was once called the blogosphere), although the adventurous formal structures of the novels also no doubt bother less adventurous readers and critics as well: it would seem that difficult women require more unorthodox, more ostensibly difficult methods of aesthetic representation to adequately render their experiences. If in Fort Da the main character offers her version of events through a misleading, pseudo-scientific "report" and much of Helen Keller Really Lived comes to us as a ghost's communications to the protagonist (his ex-wife) through her computer, in Sheffield's 2021 novel, Ire Land (a Faery Tale), the narrative consists of a sequence of emails written by the protagonist, Sandra Dorn--although they actually come packaged as an edited and annotated manuscript sent to the now deceased Sandra's daughter.
The status of the text has--or should have--an immediate effect on our perception of the narrative it relates, making it, of course, an inherently unreliable source of truth or accuracy, especially since the story that emerges from Sandra Dorn's email chronicles (sent as responses to the unknown recipient "madmaeve17") involves the intercession of Gaelic faeries and Sandra's transformation into a hare. That story is essentially a picaresque recital of Sandra's fortunes after losing her home in Denver, where she is a professor of gender studies whose disorderly behavior has left her an older woman without friends or defenders among her colleagues, a wretched outcast. She first finds refuge with a younger sister, and when that ends up badly, she lives for a time with a brother and his girlfriend, but that too comes a cropper. Finally she is granted a reprieve of sorts with an offer of a temporary teaching position in Belfast (where she had lived previously in a relationship that ended badly), and the novel concludes--after a bizarre interlude in the classroom--with the intimation that Sandra has been taken away by the faeries ("[we can] fix ye up and kit you out" the mysterious editor--or some other shadowy figure usurping his role--declares in one of the editorial insertions).
While it is somewhat hard to know how seriously to take all of the particulars of Sandra Dorn's account (or at least the version we are presented), finally the plot details are less pivotal for an appreciation of the novel than our response to Sandra Dorn and her recital of her life experiences. It would be very easy to recoil from her, given some of the bad behavior to which she confesses (abandoning her first-born son) or we witness her perform (hurling invective at a child), but it's also hard to not admire the unapologetic candor of her admissions, her acceptance (not without an implicit sneer) of her dismal circumstances after a lifetime spent insisting on personal autonomy and disregarding convention. If Sandra Dorn were the male protagonist (Sandy Dorn, say) of a male-authored novel, he would surely be considered a "rogue," defiant of norms but to a degree laudable for that. Perhaps such a roguish personality is still regarded as objectionable in a female character, but at this stage in her life, while it might be salubrious for Sandra to be with the faeries in their mounds, that Sheffield affirms as her protagonist such a morally unkempt character as Sandra Dorn in the first place is arguably the novel's most praiseworthy achievement.
Sheffield would be high on my list of unjustly overlooked writers in current American fiction, but fortunately she is still able to attract publishers to her work. Ire Land would certainly be a good place to start with that work for the uninitiated, but really all of her books are equally worthwhile.
Down and Sideways
The publisher of Damien Ark's Fucked Up has called it "as extreme as it gets," and he's probably right. The depictions of abuse, sexual obsession, sadism, and grotesque violence are straightforward and relentless, and pretty clearly the author intends to overwhelm the unsuspecting reader with his novel's ugliness and horror. The author should perhaps be applauded simply for the audacity of the effort to carry out such a task so resolutely (and the publisher as well for taking the risk of publishing it, even if it isn't likely to reach a large enough audience to provoke widespread outrage).
It seems to me that Fucked Up really highlights the difference between "experimental" and "transgressive" fiction. It is a first-person narrative that proceeds more or less linearly, although it is leavened with flashbacks and, because the narrator is schizophrenic, endeavors to incorporate the disembodied voices with which he is plagued and to evoke the hallucinations to which he is inevitably prone. But the narrative otherwise unfolds directly enough, and the prose style is neither elliptically pared-back nor ostentatiously ornate. (We are to believe the narrator is very intelligent, so he is generally quite articulate, perhaps more so than his relative youth and traumatic experiences might suggest.) The novel transgresses in its content, not its form--although that transgression is uninhibited indeed.
If Fucked Up is not formally complex, it certainly could be called excessive, again deliberately so. The novel's scenes of, at some points, detailed sex acts (mostly, but not exclusively, same-sex) and, at others, brutality and chaos recur almost without surcease for 850 pages. The novel essentially takes as its mission to portray both the protagonist and his environment (personal and social) as "fucked up," and thus it does, attempting to add another twist of perversity or cruelty to the already considerable number of such twists previously provided. Suffice it to say that it doesn't always succeed in this mission, and the shock value of such repetition wanes, eventually becoming wearisome. Suffering at the hands of one child-abusing serial killer is horrific enough the first time, but when the narrative makes its way to another such predator, who in effect repeats the depravity of the first one, the effect is closer to numbness than fear or trembling. Of course, this recurrence is intentional, as it reinforces the implacability of the protagonist's fucked upness, but by the novel's end the presumption that he will never escape the legacy of his early abuse has long been verified.
Many--probably most--readers will not make it to the end of this novel, either because some particular episode or action is too much to take, or because trudging through to the end doesn't seem worth it. Some might find the narrator and his extreme self-destructiveness at such great length too oppressive. My problem with the narrator has nothing to do with his behavior or attitudes but rather with his narration's conditions of possibility, so to speak: At no point is it suggested that the narrator is in fact writing down his account, even though it comes to us as a fully articulated, verbally cogent whole (it's a monologue, not a "free indirect" report from an outside narrator). It is as if he is speaking to us directly; we don't get fragmented thoughts or inchoate perceptions. This device, a narration from nowhere, floating in the narrative ether, especially on the scale with which it is used in this novel, eventually becomes too artificial, too convenient, to be credible. An additional layer of artifice is added by setting the story in some near future in which global warming and a heightened authoritarianism has brought the U.S. to the brink of destruction (we're all fucked up). These strategies work to undercut the novel's transgressive force, taking the story too far into the land of make believe. If we're irretrievably fucked up, better to make it real, not the subject of a dystopian fantasy.
Too much artifice renders this sort of transgressive fiction, if not tame, then strangely ineffectual. I'd like my transgression neat, please.
All Work, No Play
I want to think that my inability to fully appreciate Matthew Burnside's Wiki of Infinite Sorrows is due not to its palpable flaws but because finally I am not really part of its intended audience. The book is apparently a reworking of a text that originally appeared as an online hypertext work called In Search Of, and although I am not altogether unfamiliar with (or unsympathetic to) electronic texts, this work seems to have been composed primarily for a community of readers especially attuned to the possibilities of digital storytelling. (Burnside teaches "cross-genre and digital writing.") In addition, this form appears to be heavily indebted to the conventions of the video game, with which most of the members of this community are intimately familiar but which, suffice it to say, is entirely unexplored territory for me. (The last video game I can remember playing was Pong.) Surely this audience understands Burnside's objectives better than I do.
Still, presumably Burnside would not have adapted the original work to print unless he believed it could stand on its own in this medium. While its origin as a hyperlinked text to be read on a screen could give us clues as to how the print text is organized and the effect it is intended to have, its form and devices ought to succeed or fail by the standards we are accustomed to using in judging traditional print fiction. Certainly Burnside should be free to experiment with the conventions of fiction, to unsettle reader's expectations, including expectations of what "experimental fiction" might do. To the extent that in Wiki of Infinite Sorrows (as well as his previous book, Postludes (2016)) Burnside is indeed searching for a form to accommodate a vision of form expanded by the elasticity of digital narratives, then each book merits reading, but the former, at least, more as a failed experiment than a compelling adaptation of digital storytelling.
My first problem with the novel is that it doesn't really seem consistent with its title, or the publisher's description of it as "a collection of fictional wiki entries." Even if this merely means that the individual entries were initially composed online, the notion that the interactive qualities associated with "wiki" have been reproduced in this novel is inaccurate and misleading. The core narrative in Wiki of Infinite Sorrows enlists the characters and setting of In Search Of, although necessarily this narrative does not have the indeterminacy of the hypertext version. It concerns the Cress family, living in the town of Brownleaf, whose youngest son dies suddenly but apparently continues to live deep inside the cyber world. Later, his sister searches for him and ultimately joins him in his world. This narrative, however, is supplemented with various other scenes, interludes and stories, most of which have no directly discernible relationship to the Cress family story.
The temptation, of course, is to search for interpretive connections among all of the included fragments, for a coherent integration of the book as whole, and while no doubt some such integration is always possible given a suitably sweeping generalization, this effort finally seems antithetical to the work's origins and its reconceived purpose. If the goal is to invest print-bound fiction with something of the digressiveness and multivalence of electronic fiction, then imposing a synthetic unity on a motley succession of vignettes simply because they are unavoidably serial would surely be misguided. Some of the segments do indeed link up with other segments in a fairly straightforward way (besides the Cress family narrative, there are also a number of episodes concerning "Sal" and his problematic relationship with a court-appointed android "companion"--known commercially as a "Sidekick"), but many others bear no apparent relationship to these stories or to each other. This discontinuity may be not only deliberate but ultimately the book's underlying warrant. But does this move work?
The original title of In Search Of identified it as a "Sandbox Novel," which apparently was meant to identify it as a work accentuating the reader's participation, allowing the reader to "play." This is a perfectly fine idea, but it seems to me that readerly play in relation to print text must be directed to different ends than it would be with a hypertext work, which explicitly solicits the reader's participation in determining plot. Merely to disconnect the book's individual parts from an expected structural whole to make them more disparate and divergent does not really ensure more active and productive reading. It just makes it more likely that we will find a work like Wiki of Infinite Sorrows a frustrating reading experience.
Inside Game
Whether through “stream-of-consciousness” or the less strict adherence to continuous thought of psychological realism, it has become an almost reflexive assumption among many writers and readers that the job of serious fiction is to penetrate the veil of speech and action and reveal the human mind at work. It is often said, in fact (think James Wood), that what separates the art of fiction from all other modern narrative practices is precisely that it is able to “go deep” beneath the surface of ordinary reality and to capture the role of consciousness in processing and shaping that reality, thus enhancing the ostensible story a work of fiction relates with, in effect, an additional story (even the “real” story): an account of the mind attempting to make sense of the world it confronts. But is it really the case that this is therefore the presumed goal that writers of fiction should pursue if they want to fulfill fiction’s artistic mission? Is stream-of-consciousness literary fiction’s consummate achievement?
Reviewers of Mauro Javier Cardenas’s first novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again (2016), as well as his most recent, Aphasia, have referred to his narrative strategy in both as stream-of-consciousness, and it seems an accurate enough characterization. While the term is often used very loosely in describing almost any attempt to suggest “what’s happening” inside the mind of a fictional character, in Cardenas’s case the effort is not just a routine exercise in “free indirect discourse” or the creation of an especially introspective first-person narrator. Each of the novels, most emphatically Aphasia, with its focus on the consciousness of a single character, offers propulsive but meticulous renditions of subjective states of rumination and perception, not always reflecting a habit of strictly linear thinking—indeed, Aphasia really does seem to evoke the “flow” of mental awareness.
The notion that narrative discourse in fiction might be shaped to mimic the human thought process is of course most familiar from the work of the early modernists (perhaps also encompassing Henry James’s emphasis on a “central consciousness”). In its historical context, this strategy can be regarded as part of the broader modernist search for alternatives to the reigning assumptions of realist fiction: Stream-of-consciousness implicitly proposes that reality is to be discovered in its most essential manifestation in the phenomenon of perception, while at the same time in enacts a radical experiment in point of view, effectually inverting the synoptic vision of the third-person omniscient perspective employed by many 19th century novelists, in favor of the subjective outlook of the created character’s understanding. This paradigmatic version of the stream-of-consciousness technique, if not the technique itself, has been profoundly influential in the widespread appeal to what is more broadly called “psychological realism” in the years following on high modernism.
Missing from most criticism considering the devices that produce psychological depth is the acknowledgement that the impression of such depth is indeed an illusion created by the writer successfully exploiting artificial devices. It seems highly unlikely that most—if any—emulations of Mind in fiction actually resemble the phenomena of consciousness as understood by psychologists and neuroscientists. What the best psychological realism brings to the treatment of human thinking in fiction is art, the verbal artistry we should expect from novelists and poets, not some special insight into the way the brain works. Unfortunately, the moves required to invoke the illusion of a perceiving mind have become sufficiently routine through repetition that they have come to function more as shorthand than as expressions of literary art, although for this very reason writers who do manifestly bring literary art to the portrayal of a character’s internal state are perhaps all the more noteworthy. Happily, this is precisely what Mauro Javier Cardenas brings to his account of the experience of Aphasia’s harried protagonist, Antonio.
Antonio is a Colombian-American immigrant writer and database manager attempting to manage several ongoing and overlapping dilemmas in his own life. He is a divorced father of two daughters attempting to preserve a relationship with them by living in an apartment in the same building in which they and Antonio’s former wife live. Although he is trying to maintain a civil relationship with the former wife, he is also seeing a number of (mostly younger) women through a “dating service” called Your Sugar Arrangements but hoping to keep this hidden from the wife. Most stressfully, he is doing his best to avoid thinking about his mentally ill sister, who has fled the institution to which Antonio and his mother have confined her and is currently subject to arrest.
These strands, as well as others related to them—scenes of Antonio speaking to other characters, passages in which he considers other literary works he is reading—braid through and around Antonio’s consciousness, combining seamlessly together in continuous passages of unbroken paragraphs consisting of multiple phrases and clauses fused into a single sentence.
God will punish you, my mother would say, the lord said that what you inflict on your mother and father will return to you fivefold, so now you know what awaits you in life, my god what’s going to happen to me, I would say, what will I have to endure later in life, everything magnified through a child’s imagination, of course, if I’d said to my mother, for instance, I am running away from this house because I can’t stand it here anymore because my parents are unjust, and my mother would reply your words will be punished by god because a son or a daughter can’t say this to her parents, and later the night mares I would have my god what’s going to happen to happen to me, what will I have to endure. . . .
The audacity of this strategy is admirable, but more so is the way in which Cardenas is able to achieve a kind of dramatic momentum while also maintaining clarity and recognition for the reader through syntactical linkages and variations. Readers must slow down while negotiating Cardenas’s prose in Aphasia, but this serves the illusionist goal of mimicking the “flow” of Antonio’s active awareness.
Although the effect the story gains could be called realist, the effort to simulate this awareness seems almost as much a kind of convenient camouflage for an exhibition of the prose style in and for itself. The meandering sentences, approaching a conventional end point but refusing it in favor of the next turn of thought or expository element, might seem reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, or the Garcia Marquez of The Autumn of the Patriarch, or Mathias Enard’s Zone, although Aphasia is more concentrated in its scope, less rhetorical than a Bernhardian “rant” and less dependent on narrative than Garcia Marquez and Enard (even the nested, retrospective narrative of Zone). Discursive as they are, Cardenas’s long sentences in a sense seem more crafted, more deliberately composed to signify the presence of consciousness. If writers such as Marquez and Bernhard are among the writers who first challenged not just conventional narrative form or the protocols of realism but the structural and syntactical expectations of fictional discourse itself, Cardenas is able to adapt their practice to a self-sufficient verbal strategy that uses this disrupted discourse as an available aesthetic resource.
What is most admirable about Aphasia is the way in which he does in fact execute this strategy not just for the purpose of depicting his protagonist’s stream of consciousness but to realize what turns out to be a fully developed and conventionally recognizable crisis narrative in which the protagonist faces the various causes of his crisis and in the end manages, if not a solution to all of his problems, at least a reprieve. Along the way, much is revealed about Antonio and his past, contributing to the creation of a “well-rounded” character, as at the same time we are provided an account of his present actions (principally his interactions with his former wife and daughters, but also his “arrangements” with the women from the dating app) and his ultimate reunion with his sister, who is again being treated for her mental illness. In addition to these channels of Antonio’s direct experience, the separate chapters focused on Antonio’s reading of various works of fiction (presumably as a substitute for his own current inability to write much himself) are integrated into the novel’s narrative structure, incorporated into Antonio’s ongoing reckoning with his circumstances.
Cardenas’s endeavor to create the appearance of stream-of-consciousness, then, is not simply carrying out the imperative to provide psychological depth (to “get inside” for its own sake) but is another means of accommodating the breadth of Antonio’s experience, through something other than usual formal and stylistic conventions. In short, Cardenas uses stream-of-consciousness as an aesthetic device, not as a revelation of the human mind at work. The former, I would argue, is what makes Aphasia most worth the reader’s attention, what signals to us an author taking his medium seriously as literary art, not the novelist's putative authority to probe the human mind. Indeed, to the extent that the impression of Antonio’s mind at work is largely created by the writer’s loosely joined, onrushing sentences, Aphasia could be called an exercise in style, albeit one absent the standard sort of decorative lyricism that often passes for style in American fiction.
It is through style that we come to know Antonio, even though the novel is not a first-person narrative. Being a writer, not his routinized job as a data analyst, clearly seems an essential ingredient in his sense of identity, and it is more likely that the novel’s prose is a reflection of Antonio’s own writing than a facsimile of his thought process. Such a presumption is only reinforced by those parts of the book that are not in fact representations of thought but include Antonio’s transcriptions of tapes of his mother speaking, his conversations with former girlfriends, and his reunion with his sister. These sections employ the same elongated sentences as those depicting Antonio’s solitary deliberations, indicating that Aphasia’s focus on the protagonist’s internal state provides a suitable context for Cardenas to effect the sort of prose style he favors, not the subject in service of which a prose style has been fashioned.
Rendering the internal perspective is not finally the most serious task that a work of fiction might undertake. At best it can fool us into believing we have access to a character’s inner self (and by analogy to human inwardness in general). This is not an inconsequential feat, if not the form’s raison d’etre. Even if you think that pulling off such a feat is the preeminent achievement of fiction, however, Aphasia would surely be judged a success in satisfying this goal. But in this case it would hardly suffice in acknowledging either the novel’s ambition or its value to say it is a successful work of psychological realism. Yes, we might say we are provided with a vivid portrayal of Antonio’s state of mind, but that is not really the point. What Cardenas has really done is in a sense to merge style and form so that style actually produces form, a move that is seriously impressive.
Staying on Message
Among all writers whose work might be cited as experiments in “hybrid” writing, Thalia Field is arguably the most deserving. Her first book, Point and Line (2000), is a more or less indeterminate synthesis of fiction, essay, poetry, and drama, a fusion of genre that becomes only more pronounced in subsequent books, which also add photos and graphic illustration. Her work still seems classifiable as fiction, but to call individual pieces in her collections “stories” or her full-length work Experimental Animals (subtitled “A Reality Fiction”) a “novel” also seems inexact, if not misleading.
Without question Field’s work can also justifiably be described as “experimental,” if we understand “experiment” in fiction to be the testing of limits: How far can the effort to find alternatives to conventional practice while still retaining a place within a form’s ostensible boundaries be taken? Not only does Field challenge conceptions of conventional literary elements such as plot, character, or setting, but as well the linguistic and notational presumptions of writing itself and the customary logic of reading. In Point and Line we find arrangements of words in almost every possible configuration except sentences organized into traditional paragraphs (including one piece presented horizontally across its pages rather than vertically). Incarnate is perhaps the book that most fully crosses over into poetry (many of the reviews discussed it as “prose poetry”), while Ululu (Clown Shrapnel) most explicitly invokes theater — a performance piece that can’t really be performed.
If in these early works the author seems primarily engaged with the exploration of forms, beginning with Bird Lovers, Backyard (2010), Field’s formal variations are more directly put into the service of a single subject, treated with a fairly obvious polemical purpose. However, while all of the pieces in Bird Lover, Backyard evoke the human relationship with animals (especially birds) and often destructive interactions with the natural world, the focus on animal welfare in this book is more restrained and unobtrusive than it would become later, in some cases secondary to other, more portentous concerns, such as the legacy of American nuclear testing in the Pacific Islands in “Crossroads” or the inflated reputation of the naturalist Konrad Lorenz in “A Weedy Sonata,” which focuses on the implications in his scientific work of his documented Nazi sympathies, which have largely been ignored.
Experimental Animals (2016), an examination of the controversies surrounding vivisection in 19th century France, of course makes animal welfare the explicit subject, but the ingenuity with which this work is constructed allows it to avoid becoming too heavy-handed, although its sympathies with the anti-vivisectionists are clear enough. Moreover, the novel does not treat its ostensible antagonist, the celebrated French anatomist Claude Bernard, as a cartoon villain. While he is certainly haughty and self-absorbed and seems callous in his treatment of his wife (although we must keep in mind that this impression is created from his wife’s point of view, as her narration is the one completely fictionalized element of the novel’s discourse, the rest being an arranged collocation of historical documents), Bernard is not a wanton torturer of animals but a committed scientist who sincerely believes in the scientific importance of his work. His defense of experimentation on live animals is not the rationalization of a singularly cruel man but represents the collective ethical mindset of scientists (at least 19th century scientists), which Field subjects to an exacting critique without sentimentality or rhetorical manipulation.
Field’s latest book, Personhood, like Bird Lovers, Backyard a collection of shorter pieces (but like Experimental Animals with some graphical embellishment), is her most accessible, but also most transparently didactic, the two qualities undoubtedly related. The first four stories in the book especially make the thematic emphasis on animal rights unmistakable. Perhaps if we could say that in this book Field has adjusted her hybrid approach more to the formal procedures of the essay, then the polemical weight of these pieces might seem less heavy. But this is not really the case. While three of the selections (“Unseen,” “Liberty/Trees.” and “Glancing Backward”) might be described as poems, the rest, although as anchored in “reality” as Experimental Animals (one piece is an arrangement of transcripts in a legal proceeding), in their artifice and deployment of point of view are best regarded as fiction. The formal dexterity displayed does provide some welcome variation in a book with an otherwise monochrome thematic character, but it is less formally adventurous than either Point and Line or Bird Lover, Backyard.
The didactic tone of the book is set in the first story, “Hi Adam,” a second-person narrative that follows a visitor to an exotic bird sanctuary around the menagerie. Individual birds (such as Adam, who turns out to be female) become the characters in the story, as we are provided with the parrots’ direct speech and much of their backstories (how they came to be in the sanctuary). The appeals to sentiment are quite strong in this piece: we learn of parrots’ complex emotional lives and the damage done to them by living in captivity as a companion to humans — even when they are ostensibly “well-treated.” The second story, “Happy/That You Have the Body (The Mirror Test)” restages the court case concerning Happy the Elephant, whom an animal rights organization has tried to free from captivity in the Bronx Zoo by having her legally declared a person because she is self-aware, having passed the titular mirror test, and is entitled to release via a writ of habeas corpus. The narrator directly declares outright, abstracting from the legal briefs:
Yet doesn’t the very will to autonomous life grant a right not to be deprived of it? Or suffering at the hand of another confer a right to be relieved of it? Don’t inflicted damages give standing, and once standing, doesn’t a form of law evolve along with every animal who stands in the shadow of those laws?
“Turns Before the Curtain” and “True Crime/Nature Fakirs” shift the focus somewhat from animal rights to the insidious influence of human activity on the equilibrium of the natural environment more generally. The former is a kind of meditation on the phenomenon of “invasive species” cast in the form of a theatrical entertainment, although gradually this conceit recedes in favor of a serial recitation of the history of such invasions: tumbleweed, fungi, feral pigs, rabbits. In all of these cases human intervention is the ultimate source of disharmony, making humans the truly “invasive” species. “True Crime/Nature Fakirs” is a variation of sorts on this same theme, in this case taking the form of an absurdist crime story — complete with invitations to the reader to fill in some of the details — about home invasions by wild animals. “Is it possible they still thought they lived here” asks the narrator at one point, highlighting the artificial conception of “home” employed by the human species, one imposed on all other animals to constrict their own natural rights.
Both of these stories surely employ lively and innovative forms, which again gives them an aesthetic interest that could stand apart from the appeal of the subject, but if anything the uniformity of theme we continue to find in Personhood almost makes the aesthetic invention Fields genuinely displays start to pall, as it seems to be employed as a kind of ornamental contrivance meant to serve the theme but otherwise superfluous. The remaining pieces in the book to a degree modify the prevailing subject — although environmental degradation and its malign effect on animals is still the abiding concern — and ultimately Personhood really does little to detract from Thalia Field’s achievements as an innovative writer. But in this book the unorthodox formal devices seem less adventurous, made more “readable” by subordinating them more obviously to the communication of “message.” Certainly writers can find their way to innovative forms because a subject has in effect compelled unconventional treatment. However, here Field’s already well-established formal virtuosity at times seems imposed on a favored topic.
Which is not to deny that some of the pieces in the book work considerably, even powerfully, well within the more limited play of form and content Field has allowed in Personhood. “Liberty/Trees” is a hybrid Whitmanesque poem/reality fiction organized around the image of the famous Boston “liberty tree,” but it also ranges more widely to relate the story of liberty trees more generally (several other revolutionary-era communities planted trees in commemoration of the Boston tree), and riff on the fate of trees over the course of American history. Most notably, we are given the details behind the spread of the Dutch Elm Disease, which wiped out so many elm trees across the world, as well as the longer-term effects on the environment this blight helped to produce. Neither is the association of trees with liberty dropped from the story, and it concludes in bitter irony with a consideration of a lynching tree:
Men surround, again, a tree, to lose their wits
to drink their brains, to lean against the trunk
to drag a boy over, and beat a man [two names, to cross
out, to map]
a mob enjoys a picnic on the designated day
yelling, lemme see! at others
laughing. . . .
Perhaps “The Health of My Stream or The Most Pathetic Fallacy” best represents both the strengths and weaknesses of Personhood — strengths if you think that works of literature can bring descriptive and narrative specificity to a cause in a way that advances that cause beyond sloganeering, weaknesses if you note that in this piece Field’s formal idiosyncrasies have been smoothed out almost entirely, leaving only a fairly ordinary mode of fragmented narrative. The narrator of the story owns a property through which a stream flows. The narrator uses the stream for irrigation during the dry season, creating a luxurious, plant-strewn riverbank. Soon enough the narrator begins to observe the fish in the stream, deciding to intervene in the water current to create a more flourishing environment for them. This does not work out well, and the narrator learns about the well-being of streams and the dangers of human meddling with nature. The depiction of the ecology of river environments is vivid and engrossing, but, especially in a collection that takes up the same theme more or less repetitively, “The Health of My Stream” is also entirely predictable.
Experimental fiction (or poetry) ought to be predictable only in being unpredictable. Most of Thalia Field’s books have indeed been characterized by their aesthetic ingenuity and variety. She is, in fact a writer about whom it is justified to say that her work so blurs the distinction between forms and genres that it could be regarded simply as an integrated practice of “writing.” But Personhood suggests that her audacious verbal imagination has started to become merely the available instrument for promulgating an increasingly familiar message.
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