Rikki Ducornet
Rikki Ducornet’s novels published in the 21st century (so far Gazelle (2003, Netsuke (2011), and Brightfellow (2016) have discernibly evolved away from the more purely fabular kind of fiction—often veering into the surreal or fantastic—that characterized her previous work, toward more naturalistic settings and more recognizably “lifelike” characters. Although these later novels are by no means conventionally crafted “literary fiction,” they draw less noticeably on the structures and iconography of fairy tales and fables than the novels for which Ducornet initially became known, especially the “elements” tetralogy, The Stain (1984), Entering Fire (1986), The Fountains of Neptune (1989), and The Jade Cabinet (1993). The recognizable motifs introduced in the earlier books recur in these later ones, but they are now not tied directly to the more imaginatively colorful contexts in which they initially appeared.
These three novels seem as well more directly autobiographical in choice of character and setting, as if only after invoking the “monstrous and the marvelous,” as the title of her 1999 collection of essays has it, through emphatically invented worlds could Ducornet then turn to the monstrous and the marvelous in the actual world of experience. The early novels were, of course, ultimately grounded in experience, both personal to the author—the settings were greatly influenced by Ducornet’s residence in a small French village, for example—and the very real human experience of wonder, cruelty, loss, and desire. In them, however, Durcornet chose to render human experience through undisguised fabulation, creating vivid characters who are nevertheless “flat” according to the prevailing assumptions of “depth” in characterization that inform most contemporary fiction. Ducornet’s fiction is intensely concerned with the effects of psychological impulses and states of mind, but these manifest themselves in the tropes, images, and external action of her stories, which perform acts of imagination rather than laboriously simulate consciousness.
Ducornet’s characteristic exercise of imagination has perhaps most frequently been described as a form of surrealism, and indeed her pervasive invocation of dreams and dreamlike situations certainly associated Durcornet’s work with surrealism in its original incarnation (not simply as the general purpose term for literary works that don’t strictly adhere to the protocols of realism it has largely become). But Ducornet’s surrealist narratives do more than incorporate hallucinatory imagery or uncanny events, although both are often featured. Instead they seamlessly integrate these elements within the formal conventions of folk and fairy tales, revealing not least the extent to which such stories themselves are inherently surreal in the way they draw on elemental fears and desires, and depict human experience in stark contrasts and distorted perspectives. Ducornet’s fictions offer distinct oppositions (good/evil, innocence/experience) that allow for occasionally extravagant plot devices, and if novels like The Stain and The Jade Cabinet draw extensively on the allegorical resources of the fairy tale (as do the stories collected in The Complete Butcher’s Tales (1980/1994) and 1997’s The Word “Desire”), the aura of dream they induce also works to modify their allegorical content, suggesting a larger encompassing meaning but in its altered reality also partially concealing it.
The dreamlike element has been muted in Gazelle, Netsuke, and Brightfellow, although the reality depicted in each is far from ordinary, the characters engaged in extreme behaviors that are not so far removed from those depicted in the earlier novels. The stories take place in mid-20th century Cairo, a current-day psychiatrist’s office and a college campus during the 1950s rather than “Dreamland” (as Phosphor in Dreamland (1995) explicitly identifies what in effect is the setting of all of Ducornet’s previous fiction), but both the often destructive latent impulses and the potentially liberating possibilities made visible in dream worlds continue to be manifest in the characters, situations, and formal assumptions of Ducornet’s most recent novels. Characters persist in being confused about the nature of their own desires, acting on them in heedless and hurtful ways, seeking to control and exploit others as a means of coping with a flawed sense of themselves and their place in the world. At the same time, wonder and beauty also exist, available to those willing to accept it, free of self-interest and the urge to possess.
Netsuke was a further departure from Ducornet’s usual practice in that its protagonist is an adult (a middle-aged verging on elderly adult at that), although the psychoanalyst whose account of his own sexual exploitation of his patients (and concurrent mistreatment of his wife) is the focus of the novel certainly well represents the Ducornet character type who, through an apparent inability to become properly attuned to the influences of desire behaves at best in a manner indifferent to the needs and well-being of others (and in the case of the psychoanalyst, that is ultimately self-destructive as well). More often the protagonist is young, if not a child (as in Gazelle) then a youth on the cusp of maturity. Brightfellow is more in keeping with Ducornet’s characteristic depiction of a youthful perspective on the world the character inhabits, featuring a young man of 19 whose “world” is mostly restricted to a college campus, where he is a ghostlike presence after he leaves his troubled home and takes residence there, successfully occupying its nooks and crannies and avoiding discovery.
Given access to the college library, the young man, who is identified simply as “Stub,” begins to read the works of an obscure anthropologist (and former professor at the college), an endeavor that pays off handsomely when one day Stub encounters an elderly man he presumes to be a retired professor and to avoid exposure claims he is an Australian student on a Fullbright scholarship studying the papers of this anthropologist, Verner Vanderloon. The professor, who insists that Stub call him “Billy,” invites Stub to live with him for what Billy assumes will be the duration of his visit as an exchange student. Stub, adopting the pseudonym “Charter Chase,” accepts, and for a while he flourishes in his new environment, cultivating with Billy what is obviously the most substantive human relationship Stub has ever experienced. In the meantime, however, Charter also develops a fascination with a young girl named Asthma, a fascination that quickly enough moves from heartfelt to creepy.
As a character, Stub/Charter seems most reminiscent of Nicholas, protagonist of The Fountains of Neptune, even though in that novel Nicholas is portrayed first as a nine year-old boy and then as a much older man who has awakened from the coma into which he fell after a near-drowning, a sleep lasting 50 years. Essentially each of these novels is a coming of age story (a favored narrative mode for Ducornet). Nicholas must cope with the emotional and psychological impulses of a pre-adolescent boy as he tries to catch up to his 60 year-old body; he has missed the maturation period that Stub is going through and must struggle to compensate. But where Nicholas finally succeeds in reconciling his mind/body split, Stub’s passage to maturity is blocked by his own emotional impairment. Eventually Stub begins to fear his masquerade is about to be revealed, but even more devastating is his disillusionment withAsthma when he finds her engaging in activity inconsistent with his romanticized vision of her. One day he sees her playing with her friend, Pea Pod:
. . .He sees Asthma slap Pea Pod across the face with such force Pea Pod stumbles and falls, vanishing as if swallowed by the floor—only to rise and fly at Asthma and, like a wild thing released from its cage, bite her arm.
Charter turns away. Repulsed and despairing, he falls to his knees, his hands held to his ringing ears. . .He has seen something primal, grotesque. He has seen two little girls transformed into harpies before his eyes.
Not long afterward, Stub sees Asthma and Pea Pod again, but to him it is as if “he has seen the end of time. . . severed from what he has come to count on, what he has come to know.” Feeling “solitary now in new and expected ways,” Stub takes his leave of Billy and proceeds to set Asthma’s house on fire, pausing only long enough to watch Asthma leap from her bedroom window and become caught in a tree before he walks away from the campus and makes his way through the woods to an isolated house that turns out to be the house of Verner Vanderloon. The novel ends on Stub’s acceptance of Vanderloon’s invitation to spend the night. “And in the morning you will be telling me just what it is you’re wanting,” Vanderloon says.
The novel’s conclusion is sudden and disconcerting. It doesn’t work only if you believe it isn’t consistent with Stub’s character as presented in the rest of the novel, but his actions force us to reflect on our response to Stub until these moments. Initially we are no doubt inclined to sympathize with him, considering the circumstances of his childhood related in the first chapters: abusive and neglectful mother, bitterly resentful father, Stub constrained to act on his own resources at an early age. When Stub takes up residence on campus (the descriptions of which seem to directly reflect Ducornet’s own experience growing up as the daughter of a professor at Bard College) and shows his skill in surviving despite his utter isolation, many readers are likely to admire him, to be rooting for him to overcome the obstacles that life has so arbitrarily put in his way. Even when he assumes his false identity and begins to take advantage of Billy’s goodwill, we might feel that, however much Stub is engaging in deception, his attempts to better himself through self-education have been real and Billy is benefitting from Stub’s companionship as much as Stub benefits from the momentary stability Billy has provided. Moreover, that Stub comes to feel a genuine attachment to Billy seems undeniable.
Perhaps it is even possible to regard Stubb’s infatuation with Asthma, at least at first, as a sincere appreciation of her childhood innocence (leavened by her cheekier qualities, as she is not always entirely respectful, especially toward Stub, to whom she has given the nickname, “Brightfellow”). But long before Stub releases his barely suppressed yearning in a literal conflagration (which must also be called an act of attempted murder), it is apparent something has gone awry in his psychic development, that his emotional wiring has become seriously crossed. If we are not quite prepared for him to lash out in such a deadly way, it finally should not really be a surprise that Stub’s idyll would come to be spoiled, most likely by his own actions. Still, the novel’s resolution is disturbing (a quality that should not be unfamiliar to long-time Ducornet readers), not least because Stub’s story is presumably still unresolved, or at least resolved only to continue, slightly revised in a different setting.
But this conclusion might provoke us not just to consider what lies ahead for Stub but also return to our initial view of him as an infant, left alone and playing on a linoleum floor: “He doesn’t know how beautiful he is,” the narrator tells us. “He doesn’t know he’s lonely and that his fear is not of his own making, that it will haunt him for the rest of his life. It will impede him years from now—twist and turn him just as an incessant wind twists and turns a tree—just as it will in unexpected ways nourish him. Yes: it will both nourish and impede him. And this is a terrible thing. How can he undo such a tangle?”
Since we have not yet been given illustration of the source of Stub’s fear, or just what makes such fear “a terrible thing,” it might be easy to take this lament as just part of an expository invocation, a lyrical flourish designed to suggest a kind of generic innocence, but Ducornet has actually provided the solution to the final mystery of Stub’s behavior at the beginning. The fear is not simply the fear of being abandoned or mistreated (both of which he suffers nonetheless), but a fear, bred from the inherent hostility he absorbs from his surroundings, of fully asserting the sort of allegiance to imagination we find him expressing as a child, as “the linoleum swells with stories” he is inventing. Consequently, his orientation to the world, to his own experience of the world, is warped, along with his relationships to other people. “At home his isolation deepens,” we are told just before Stub leaves it for his new existence lurking in the shadows of the campus. “But instead of dying, his affections are displaced.”
Those displaced affections find their ultimate displacement when Stub meets Asthma. In the solitude he has been unable to escape, his conception of beauty and wonder has not advanced beyond the childish versions he acquired while entertaining himself on the linoleum. Finally Stub’s interest in Asthma is not really sexual (although no doubt his post-pubescent libido has a role in coloring his interest), but instead he has idealized her from an infantilized perspective (probably reflecting Stub’s forced separation from Jenny, his live-in babysitter) that demands reality conform to Stub’s imagined perfection. One could say that Stub’s assumption of an invented identity is also a manifestation of his impaired sense of the role of imagination, an attempt to bring his spectral reality into actual existence through an act of make-believe.
But the primordial fear has indeed nourished Stub as well. If his presence in the world is askew, he is also undeniably resourceful, curious, and self-reliant. He skulks behind the façade of the college and its campus because he could never really participate in the routine, if often hypocritical and tawdry, life he observes on and around it. For better or worse, he is different, more alert and alive than those around him who are otherwise privileged to lead a “normal” life. Finally Stub is a character whose spirit has accommodated both the monstrous and the marvelous, so much so that they threaten to become indistinguishable. This makes him one of Rikki Ducornet’s most compelling characters, and the reason why Brightfellow leaves such a lingering impression.
Aimee Bender
There are really two writers at work in the fiction of Aimee Bender. First and most conspicuously we find the fabulist, who frequently invests her stories with a surface surrealism by evoking fables and fairy tales. The surreal qualities of her tales might be more pronounced and extreme (a human woman marries an ogre and begets ogre children) or more restrained and less insistent (as in both of her novels), but anyone who reads her collections of short stories in particular would have to conclude she is a writer partial to devices that enhance and distort reality. Nevertheless, there is also a realist lurking beneath the surface of Bender's surreal narratives, a writer who uses the surreal plot turns and fairy tale motifs to render middle-class American life in a way that remains faithful to its underlying configurations and habitual behaviors.
The surrealist Bender ("magical realist" is also a term that she has accepted as a description of her method) undeniably has been influential on other writers (particularly younger women writers), but while arguably her influence was felt strongly because her fiction seemed a significant departure from the norms of the minimalism and neorealism that dominated short fiction in the 1980s and 1990s, she is certainly not the first contemporary writer to work in the anti-realist mode inspired by fairy tales. Such postmodern writers as Robert Coover and Steven Millhauser have consistently practiced this sort of fabulism, but it is in the work of British writer Angela Carter that we really see the comprehensive appropriation of the fairy tale in order to fashion an invigorating and innovative form of what Robert Scholes called "fabulation." Her stories and novels exploit the elemental patterns and iconography of fairy tales to create very modern (not to mention very adult) works of aesthetically sophisticated fiction.
Bender is clearly enough influenced by Carter, although her approach, and especially her style, are much different than Carter's, in some ways their total opposite. Where Carter bends, twists, and transforms the conventions of the fairy tale, in a prose that is equally sinuous and startling, Bender more or less borrows these conventions and their attendant imagery in order to use them as extensions of her focus on the conflicts of ordinary life, and her prose is generally ordinary as well, more concerned simply with relating the bizarre plot turns than with enlisting language in the effort to transfigure entrenched narrative practice. Where Carter seemed inspired to assimilate the fairy tale in order to expand the formal possibilities of "serious" fiction, Bender seems content simply to invoke anti-realist strategies already recognizable from the work of writers such as Kafka, Marquez, and Carter herself.
In this way Bender's fiction contrasts as well with that of Rikki Ducornet, Angela Carter's most immediate and, in my view, most accomplished successor. Ducornet is rarely mentioned in discussions of Bender's books (or in interviews with Bender herself), so it must be assumed that whatever effect Ducornet's work may have had on Bender is either minimal or just gets lost in the citation of her other influences (which would not be surprising given the general neglect of Ducornet, both as an important writer in general and specifically as an important innovative woman writer). Like Carter, Ducornet uses fabulation as embodied in the fairy tale to create transformed fictional worlds, worlds that are not merely "unreal" but in fact are very real in their integrity as verbal-aesthetic inventions. Partly through her active, vibrant prose style and partly through her dynamic imagination, Ducornet makes us feel we are authentically inhabiting the fabricated world her fiction collectively invokes.
This is not really what Aimee Bender seems to be after. If her fiction does show imagination, it is imagination with a limited effect, the use of a surreal device almost as if it were a kind of trope, a flourish added to the text, not part of a larger effort to create a completely different kind of formal order, one in which such devices would not be the alternative means to the same narrative purposes. Not all of Bender's fiction in fact makes use of these devices. Her first novel in particular, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2001), is essentially a work of straightforward realism, albeit one with a "quirky" cast of characters and an "offbeat" situation. Other of her stories contain few if any surreal or fantastic touches, and these more conventional narratives reflecting a more familiar kind of workshop realism allow us to recognize that the surrealism in Bender's fiction complements its realism more than subverts it. Where the realism of middle-class anxiety and dysfunction leaves off, the whimsical distortion of magical realism takes up.
Perhaps this strategy is best illustrated in Bender's second novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010). Finally this is a novel about the hidden discontents of the American nuclear family, but rather than treat that subject as domestic drama, Bender creates an extended fantasia in which familial unhappiness is revealed not through specific conflict but via a supernatural plot device whereby each member of the family has been endowed with a special power--the daughter and protagonist of the novel is able to "read" food, to determine the emotional state of the person who prepared it, while her brother, we eventually discover, has the ability to disappear into inanimate objects, a power that ultimately he apparently exercises for good, as he vanishes and is not heard from again. Thus does the sadness, disappointment, and desperation that afflict this family become concrete through the fantasy device—at least to us, although not so directly for the family itself, except the daughter, who otherwise undergoes her journey of maturation more or less quietly, even if her brother's final fate does provide the novel with a creepy enough denouement.
Probably readers find this variation on the bildungsroman effective to the extent they can credit the fantastic elements of the premise. I confess to finding the protagonist's peculiar form of sixth sense an initially intriguing and potentially fruitful literary stratagem, but when Bender expands the trope to encompass the whole family's spooky endowments, the effect mutes the trope's signifying capacity, reducing it to a gimmick that finally can't maintain the integrity of its own quirk, leaving the novel itself stranded awkwardly between whimsical fantasy and a kind of naturalistic family drama in which the family can't escape its hereditary defect. This makes the subplot involving the protagonist's brother less mysterious than melodramatic, heavy-handed rather than horrifying. Indeed, when the protagonist encounters her brother in his apartment as he is in the process of literally disappearing into the chair he sits in, an episode that is clearly meant to be uncanny is really so overwrought as to seem inescapably silly.
In some of Bender's stories, whimsy wins out over all other tonal qualities. "Ironhead," for example, surely among her most surreal stories, tells the tale of a family of pumpkinheads who unaccountably sire a baby with an ironhead instead. The boy feels horribly out of place, of course, and the story pulls heavily at our heartstrings in provoking feelings of pity for the poor lad:
The ironhead turned out to be a very gentle boy. He played quietly on the his own in the daytime with clay and dirt, and contrary to expectations, he preferred wearing ragged messy clothes with wrinkles. His mother tried once to smooth down his outfits with her own, separated iron, but when the child saw what was his head, standing by itself, with steam exhaling from the flat silver base just like his breath, he shrieked a tinny scream and matching steam streamed from his chin as it did when he was particularly upset. . . .
A passage like this comes perilously close to, if it doesn't topple over completely into, a cartoon-like sentimentality. The remainder of the story doesn't really advance beyond this level of emotional engagement. Once we've registered the notion that a boy has been born with an iron for a head, the story has little more to offer. It continues to rely on faux-naïve phrasing ("a very gentle boy," "played quietly") and an altogether formulaic plot—the iron-headed boy dies, of course, leaving everyone very sad. In another story in the same book (Willful Creatures), "The End of the Line," a "big man" goes to a pet store "to buy himself a little man to keep him company." This rather tepidly surrealist premise established, again the story proceeds in a fairly predictable, and rather mawkish, fashion. The big man begins to torture the little man, who contemplates his escape but is unable to accomplish it. The big man sets the little man free, but decides to follow him as he drives away in a "small blue bus"—he "just wanted to see where they lived." A (literally) little girl looks up at the "giant" who has found them and wonders at the "size of the pity that kept unbuckling in her heart."
For a "parable" like this to work, in my opinion, it either has to implicitly examine the structural and thematic assumptions of the parable itself (in the process reconfiguring the possibilities of the form) or it has to manifest some stylistic vigor to compensate for the formulaic nature of parables and fables. Carter and Ducornet, as well as, say, Borges, Calvino, or Donald Barthelme, are writers who readily perform each of these tasks, but Bender's stories do neither. Beneath the ultimately superficial distortions of ordinary reality, plot conventions associated with the fabulative mode are preserved more or less unselfconsciously, and the stories are related in a flat and affectless style that mostly keeps the reader's attention on the developing actions. (Narrated in the first person, Bender's two novels are somewhat less illustrative of this style.) It's as if the author wants to urgently draw our attention to the strange events unfolding in these stories, except that they're related in such low intensity language they seem strangely uninteresting.
Bender's most recent book, the story collection The Color Master, is generally of a piece with her two previous collections, containing stories by both the realist and the surrealist Bender. A number of the former are first-person narratives, and thus the stylistic tenor of the book as a whole is more varied than The Girl in the Flammable Skirt or Willful Creatures. Among the realist stories "The Fake Nazi" and "The Doctor and the Rabbi" are perhaps the most effective, in each case managing to appropriately evoke strong emotions in contexts that might seem inauspicious ("The Fake Nazi," about a man who falsely accuses himself of having been a Nazi) or hopelessly grandiose ("The Doctor and the Rabbi," about the title characters talking about God), while "Tiger Mending" seems impossibly twee, succumbing to the kind of sentimentality that mars many of Bender's surreal fables. The best story in the book is the title story, a "prequel" of sorts to the French fairy tale, "Donkeyskin." It is a story that recalls the work of Carter or Ducornet more than any other of Bender's fairy tale-derived fictions in its imaginative expansion of this particular fairy tale.
In my view, Aimee Bender's fiction is more important as a sign of a shift in sensibility among current writers than a significant aesthetic achievement advancing the cause of innovative fiction. Her stories, beginning with the debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998), announced that an alternative to minimalist realism was available, a call that later writers such as Karen Russell, Kate Bernheimer and Joanna Ruocco clearly heeded. Whether these writers will ultimately ratify and extend the legacy of Carter and Ducornet more convincingly than has Bender herself is still to be determined, but unless Aimee Bender is freshly inspired to transcend the limitations of the strategies she has continued to employ so far, her work is unlikely to be a further part of that effort.
Joanna Ruocco
In 1979, Robert Scholes published Fabulation and Metafiction, in retrospect perhaps the work of literary criticism most influential in shaping our perspective on “postmodern” or “experimental” fiction from the 1960s and ’70s. The fiction of this period, according to Scholes, systematically swerves away from realism toward the more elemental mode of fabulation, inspired literally by the fable rather than by modern realism and intent on “telling such truths as fiction may legitimately tell in ways which are appropriately fictional,” unafraid of imaginative distortion or outright fantasy. Although Scholes saw fabulation and metafiction as linked, twin sides of the same experimental coin (indeed, he defines “metafiction” as “experimental fabulation”), the experimental impulse in American fiction has subsequently found expression separately in these two modes.
“Metafiction” as practiced by such writers as John Barth and Gilbert Sorrentino highlights the artificiality of traditional narrative, implicitly appealing to the “ingenuity of the fabulation” (as Scholes puts it) in substituting its own artifice for the traditional artifice of “story” (in Barth’s case attempting to renew narrative by exploiting its “exhaustion”). While this sort of self-reflexivity has continued to be common and appears even in more mainstream fiction, in the past fifteen to twenty years there has been among many avowedly experimental writers a conspicuous turn instead to a purer kind of fabulation. Whether the surrealistic fairy tales of Aimee Bender, the satirical parables of George Saunders, or the science fiction–tinged magical realism of Kelly Link, to name just three of the more prominent such writers, this sort of narrative, non-realist but still leaning on plot, has most consistently claimed the legacy of the kind of experimental fiction Scholes identified.
Among those writers devoting themselves to the fabulative mode clearly would have to be included Joanna Ruocco. Her most recent novel, Dan, is set in the fictional village named in the title, which itself seems to exist somewhere aslant reality as we know it, occupying a place on the border between the almost plausible and the mostly dreamlike. The characters in the novel likewise are at once both recognizably human and figures from the simplified world of the fable, including the protagonist, Melba Zuzzo, who on the one hand resembles the innocent maiden of a fairy tale, but on the other reacts to the dangers she encounters with a kind of incomprehension not so much expressing fear as a kind of confusion, as if she thinks her own inability to understand is to blame: her apprehensions arise not from the perception that her world is menacing, but from the possibility that it might be meaningless.
The novel follows Melba over the course of a day in Dan. While this day certainly proves to be an eventful one for Melba, those events are framed less as Melba’s story than as its dissolution, the ultimate denial of further development in her “character arc.” Melba’s experience bitterly answers the question posed at the novel’s beginning:
Melba Zuzzo stood in the yard chewing tiredly on several pieces of gum. The day had barely started, and, as soon as it was over, another day was bound to begin. When would it end?
The novel’s conclusion suggests that it ends, both literally and figuratively, with Dan’s final words, and not just for the reader. As the narrative of Melba’s day proceeds, it quickly comes to seem that Melba has a fragile sense of herself and her place in Dan, indeed a very shaky grasp on the concept of existence itself—as reflected in a recalled conversation with her teacher Mr. Sack, to whom she declares, “I have a problem. . . I just can’t figure out what time is made of.”
If it feels to Melba that time “must be like a kind of jelly,” as she further suggests, that is because Dan is in part the sort of provincial, backwater town in which life does indeed move slowly and in established patterns. But those patterns, while routinized, are off-kilter, seemingly normal to Melba and the inhabitants of Dan but odd and arbitrary from the reader’s perspective. Details of this skewed world emerge with deadpan regularity:
Melba had looked around her mother’s kitchen. For years, snails had been wearing runnels in the floorboards, and in these runnels, Melba could see several dozen snails in transit. . . .
Mr. Sack, the history and phrenology teacher, did not believe in text books. Instead, he distributed modeling clay, which the students used to shape the noses of 19th century naval heroes. . . .
“You’re not like the other children, Melba,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “You react poorly to elastics. Whenever you are given a piece of elastic your nose begins to bleed. I blame factors from your birth. Namely, your abnormally long umbilical cord.”
Melba herself simply accepts the weirdness of her world, but she is nevertheless dissatisfied with what she perceives as the underlying uniformity of her existence. “You’re right,” she says in a conversation with one of the inhabitants of Dan:
"I’m always waiting. It’s because I’m confused about what’s happening. Life can’t possibly be just what’s happening right now. Then you’d be right, it would be just the two of us in the cold street, talking. This would be the whole thing. It’s only waiting that makes it more than that. I’d say remembering too, but you can’t trust memories."
Despite Melba’s reservations about the reliability of memory, the story of her day is structured precisely as a narrative of “waiting,” her experience of Dan’s all-too-familiar presence alternating with moments in which she is seized by an episode of “remembering,” usually prompted by something she observes. Like Melba, we readers wait to see what she will encounter next, what we will come to understand about this peculiar place in which she lives, although never does it really seem that we are in the midst of a conventionally developing “plot.”
Melba’s plaint that “Life can’t possibly be just what’s happening right now” certainly puts her in conflict with the prevailing attitude in Dan, however, whose people do indeed seem wholly oriented to the present, so much so that the past seems swathed in the sort of cloudiness that hovers over the mountains surrounding the town, most disturbingly illustrated in the case of those people Melba recalls simply vanishing, a phenomenon the citizens of Dan have apparently taken in stride, provoking little curiosity or concern among them. Indeed, Melba’s references to these events and her clear resistance to the general complacency otherwise characteristic of Dan make her an object of suspicion. This suspicion and impatience is filtered mostly through the men she meets in the course of her activities (although she is castigated for her shortcomings most vociferously by her own mother), introducing the possibility that Melba’s status in Dan is especially precarious because she’s a woman.
Certainly it is tempting to regard Dan as a novel employing the allegorical or symbolic mode that can perhaps be taken as partly a feminist fable. Not only does the narrative conjure the atmosphere and attributes of a clearly make-believe world, a large part of this effect is achieved by Ruocco’s deliberately artless prose, its simple, straightforward diction and emphasis on declarative sentences without much figurative ornamentation. It is language that mimics the manner of a fairy tale, as if the primary effect of Melba’s experience of Dan has been to infantilize her, as evoked by the ingenuousness with which the third-person narrator conveys Melba’s awareness. Yet Dan has infantilized everyone who lives there, or at least lulled them into accepting existing conditions, however puzzling or arbitrary, as essentially inescapable. (Indeed, “the only way to leave is to go nowhere,” Melba is told.) At the novel’s end, we find Melba laid out on an examining table, exposed perhaps to some final degradation at the behest of Dan’s male authority. Yet the details of this final scene are typically enigmatic, and the scene might just as easily be interpreted as a kind of metafictional apotheosis: “The paper on this table is just like the paper I used for my drawing,” Melba declares. In the last view we have of her, “She felt the paper moving beneath her, and she lay very still on top of it, not saying anything, not moving at all,” as if Melba is being imprinted on the paper, returning her to the domain of artistic creation from which she came.
It is difficult to say that by the novel’s conclusion Melba has found the “meaning” she desires. As well, the meaning of Joanna Ruocco’s fabulist novel is elusive, dispersed and deflected through its surreal imagery and motifs. A story with all the markings of an allegorical fable, it is closer to the kind of fabulation Scholes identifies in the work of Donald Barthelme, in which an apparent symbol really “symbolizes symbolism, reducing it to absurdity.” If Ruocco’s fiction doesn’t quite exhibit the formal or stylistic audacity of Barthelme’s, it does similarly compel us to register its motifs and images in their immediate and literal manifestation (in, as it were, their denotative state), without subordinating them to an external representational or symbolic order where they find their true significance. Ultimately Dan fails to deliver the kind of clear-cut moral traditionally associated with a fable, but this failure is actually a measure of its success.
Angela Woodward
Angela Woodward is a younger writer who clearly belongs to the group of innovative women writers who could be designated as fabulators, writers who tend toward undisguised fabulism as their chosen form of departure from conventional practice. Like Joanna Ruocco, Danielle Dutton, or Helen Oyeyemi, she favors fanciful, dreamlike worlds appropriate to fables and fairy tales, although similarly to, say, Ruocco, it is the ambience and mannerisms of allegorical fantasy that this fiction seeks to incorporate, not the underlying symbolic structure that allows an allegorical narrative to abstract a higher level of meaning (“the moral of the story”). For this mode of radical fabulism, the main object of subversion is “realism” conceived as fidelity to reality in its familiar aspect, subject to the know laws of causation, and in the fiction of the neofabulists this reality is freely transformed through the unfettered exercise of imagination.
Woodward’s Natural Wonders, like her previous novel, End of the Fire Cult, ultimately tells a story about a rather familiar subject—the stresses, strains, and uncertainties of marriage—but does so obliquely, through sidelong suggestion, as the relationships between the characters are filtered by and mirrored in narratives not directly relating those relationships (although the narrator/editor of Natural Wonders does provide us with some specific details about the course of her marriage to the novel’s ostensible protagonist). End of The Fire Cult most purely executes this strategy, indirectly telling us the story of the decline of its twin characters’ marriage through an elaborate exchange of stories about imaginary countries each of them invents. The conflicts between the countries correspond to conflicts in the marriage, although of course this is something the reader must deduce after accepting the novel’s unorthodox conceit. In this case, it’s the possibility of allegorical content in a narrative that the author exploits, but it’s the reader who adds meaning by reading closely enough to note the parallels and underlying connections.
Natural Wonders is somewhat less allusive than End of the Fire Cult, although in it as well what the novel at first seems to be about is not finally its literal subject. We immediately encounter what seems to be an academic lecture:
BENJY, FIRST SLIDE, PLEASE
Let me tell you about the age of the earth, he said. The English scientists worked together diligently and announced that the earth had been created on October 26, 4004 B.C. at nine in the morning. Out of formless mud, the sun rose and spread its light, the animals got to their feet and began wandering around the fields. Trees arched up, leaves unfolded out of their twigs and cast shadows on the meadow irises, purple flags wavering under the nostrils of curious gazelles.
In the second chapter, however, we learn that this is one of many lectures given by a professor (the narrator refers to him simply as “Jonathan”), now deceased, in his course on Earth and Prehistory. (We discover that the professor’s particular area of scientific expertise is “jaw measurement.”) The professor’s widow, Jenny, has been asked by his department chair to put together a “definitive edition” of her husband’s lectures as a memorial. Ultimately, however, she cannot help embellishing the lectures with scenes dramatizing his classroom presentations, his students’ responses, and episodes from her late husband’s courtship of her and their subsequent marriage.
Jonathan taught primarily an undergraduate course focusing on early scientific efforts to understand the “natural wonders” of the earth. Frequently the lectures center around a prominent scientific figure such as Louis Aggasiz, at other times they focus on more obscure figures, such as the astrophysicist Milutin Milankovitch, who calculated “the exact amount of the sun’s heat that had reached the earth at any time in its long history.” The lectures are more often fairly colorful and involved stories rather than recitation of facts, as when a crew of shipwrecked Portuguese sailors are introduced to a vegetarian diet by a “tribe of wild, matted-haired men” they encounter on the coast of India. When the ship finally returns to Portugal, the crew eagerly return to eating meat, but “meat didn’t taste the same. It had about it the possibility of not eating it, its negative, like a ghost on the stairs. Regret was its horrible aftertaste.”
This lecture arises from Jonathan’s interest in eating practices (thus his specialization), but one can ask how exactly Jenny is able to reconstruct the story, along with Jonathan’s asides, his habitual manner, and the responses of his students (often puzzled, at times uncomprehending), especially when Jenny herself says “It’s not easy to be his editor” due to the lack of clarity in the notes with which she is working. Indeed, finally the novel becomes as much about Jenny’s effort to bring her husband to life through imagination (partly that manifested by Jonathan in his lectures, partly her own) than about either Jonathan himself or the subjects of his lectures. Whether the portrait that emerges has much fidelity to the “real” Jonathan—likely it doesn’t—is less important than what it tells us about Jenny’s need to give Jonathan, and perhaps their marriage, a dignity he—and it—might not have possessed. She may also be attempting to persuade herself that she had good reasons to marry him in the first place (or realizing that she did not).
“We were both of us foolish, him for falling in love with me, me for not putting him off for his own good,” Jenny tells us early on, as she contemplates the attitude Jonathan’s colleagues take toward her following his death. In her own characterizations of the marriage Jenny confesses that whatever passion that might have existed at the beginning dissipated rather quickly:
. . .One morning as I left for work, he turned in to kiss my cheek, and I swerved sideways. As we both righted ourselves, our cheeks passed by each other, only a few inches apart, so that my refused intimacy nevertheless took me through the field of his heat, the smell of his scalp and shaving cream. A few months earlier, I might have inhaled with something like pleasure, or at least nostalgia for the early moments of our love affair. Now it was a relief to be just outside his orbit.
When Jenny immediately follows this fragment of memory that opens a chapter with Jonathan’s lecture on “geologic time” (“the scale of it all takes some imagination to comprehend,” she has him announce), it is evident that her mission to memorialize her husband’s work and her unavoidable reflections on a marriage that seems increasingly impalpable to her have merged into a narrative meditation on the inscrutable agency of time, the natural wonder of the ways human beings attempt to reckon with its force.
Ultimately Natural Wonders is less conceptually audacious in its formal conceit than End of the Fire Cult, and perhaps this is why eventually interest lags: the novel proves more readily assimilable to conventional expectations, even if it doesn’t really have a plot and the central relationship is “developed” only in the most implied and indirect manner. Readers who prefer fiction that is “about” something and invites emotional engagement would not be disappointed with Natural Wonders, although they must be willing to read more actively and imaginatively than a typically “immersive” novel might ask. This novel could without serious distortion be called a love story, albeit more about the natural wonder of its absence than its presence. Still, it finds a way to relate such a story that takes us beyond the familiar means of rehearsing it.
Stephanie Polek
It may turn out that the two most influential American writers in the first two decades of the twenty-first century will be George Saunders and Aimee Bender. (The former published his first book in 1996, the latter her first in 1998.) After a prolonged period during which realism was once more the default mode in American fiction — whether in the form of the minimalist neorealism that arose in the immediate aftermath of postmodernism or just the more general kind of realism associated with writing workshop-style “craft” — Saunders and Bender again posed a challenge to its dominion. In their work, however, the challenge was expressed not through formal experiment, stylistic excess, or a broadly comic worldview, but by adopting a version of surrealism, directly posing against the presumption of lifelike representation in fiction its literal antithesis in fantasia and distortion.
Certainly neither Saunders nor Bender were the first late-twentieth century writers to incorporate surrealistic strategies into their work. Among American writers, Rikki Ducornet and Steven Millhauser offered surrealistic fables and twisted fairy tales in much of their work in the 1970s and 1980s, while the British writer Angela Carter may be the most accomplished of these earlier fabulists. Nevertheless, since the critical success of Saunders’ and Bender’s first few books, fabulation has increasingly become a prominent feature in the fiction of many younger writers. It has especially come to characterize the work of younger women writers, such as Karen Russell, Helen Phillips, and Joanna Ruocco (and, in the UK, Helen Oyeyemi), among whose ranks Stephanie Polek would appear to belong.
Polek’s début collection, Imaginary Museums, opens with a story called ‘Rope Barrier’ that immediately alerts us we are entering a world in which, at the very least, the implausible and the incongruous occur as a matter of course:
The woman invested in a rope barrier, with a green velvet rope, which she carried around in her backpack like a tripod.
She assembled it when she sat down on the subway. She assembled it at work when she responded to emails. She placed it beside her when she visited the cemetery, and in front of the curtain when she showered. Her husband sometimes stood on the other side of the rope and watched her rest in bed.
Quickly enough (the story is only three pages long) the woman finds that the rope barrier is increasingly ineffective in “protecting her” and in her frustration she takes an axe to it, chopping at it “again and again”. Thus we come to understand that the story’s apparently fanciful conceit — not literally impossible but certainly farfetched — is a device for portraying the protagonist’s fears and insecurities, her alienation from her own life.
Something similar is at work in “Arranged Marriage”. Here a would-be bride is clearly having second thoughts about her upcoming wedding, and the story relates her attempts to forestall it, depicting her hesitation in a series of efforts to find replacements for her own part in a performance whose script she is unwilling to follow herself: “Lilith looks exactly like a young girl except bigger, so the neighborhood girl named Susan, who is in eighth grade and looks exactly like a woman except smaller, is contacted to play Lilith’s part, the bride.” Unfortunately, Susan’s mother forbids her to go through with her scheme, and then, when Lilith fails to show up at the wedding, her uncle “agrees to put on the wedding dress” instead. Conveniently for Lilith, the wedding parties have already dispersed when she finally “bursts through the doors of the chapel with her dress half-zipped, an apology half-rehearsed.”
Like most of the book, both of these stories are diverting enough, darkly amusing in their way, but in each case the nudging of reality into a more oblique space seems an overly transparent strategy, designed to produce rather obvious effects. Feeling overwhelmed by circumstances, as each of these protagonists clearly does, is of course a common human predicament, yet it is difficult to conclude that either of the stories with their exaggerated embellishments render this theme more persuasively than would a more straightforwardly realistic account. Certainly such an approach leaves a more memorable impression, but arguably the ultimate effect of this strategy is to further emphasise the theme itself, to make the invocation of surrealism mostly an expedient vehicle for conveying the stories’ paraphrasable meaning.
By no means, however, are all of the stories in Imaginary Museums “surreal” in the way these two stories bend reality almost to the breaking point. (Sometimes onward into the purely fantastic, as in ‘Love Language’, in which an airline pilot announces to his passengers that they are lost, flying over “somewhere that should no longer be there,” and the passengers subsequently jump out of the plane into “burning clouds,” amid “an evil sound that brushes up against the side of the plane.”) While most of the stories in the book are very abbreviated, some quite clearly qualify as flash fiction, consisting of brief scenes or images, while others take the form of short, mostly realistic narratives that strongly highlight their characters’ loneliness and their failed efforts to communicate it to others. Indeed, the dominant tone in the stories as a whole is one of melancholy, which the strange plot turns and irreal flourishes in the less conventional stories really only accentuate.
But even in these relatively undistorted stories there is still a feeling of enervation, a lack of will or energy to engage with a reality that itself seems depleted, so that outbursts of the irreal might only be expected as a kind of compensation. In ‘The Dance’, a married couple, Esme and Ismer, persist in a state of perpetual misunderstanding, each trying to please the other but hopelessly incapable of knowing how to accomplish this goal. At one point the narrator tells us that “[i]t is as though the lexis of their feelings is a separate creature within the house. Like a fat cat that holds all their secrets and stolen glances. Howling, obese, and grumpy, the keeper of their true feelings, bursting with things that can’t be said.” It is as if in this story Polek, has confined to this extended simile a correlative of sorts to the inner drama (or lack of same) in which these characters are implicated, rather than transforming it into a surreal occurrence—although one could indeed imagine a story that makes this cat a corporeal creature, beset with Esme and Ismer’s “secrets and stolen glances” and plaguing them with its presence, in contrast to the minimalist narrative of marital breakdown we actually get in this instance.
A few of the stories are more or less familiar tales of millennial malaise and anomie, infused with some extra desperation. The title story, for example, depicts a recently divorced woman who takes up painting as a way to counter what seems to be a newly felt sense of aimlessness in her life. Her painting instructor informs her of the existence of an Air-Conditioning Museum (“the AC unit is an anthropological lens for community”, he tells her), which she resolves to visit because she can go into New York City: “this museum and the city was the ‘perfect fix’ that could help her move on”. When she discovers that there is in fact no Air-Conditioning Museum after all, she is devastated beyond any reasonable measure, since she realises that the anticipation of her trip was providing her with false comfort—but comfort nevertheless. The story ends with the protagonist attempting to convert her apartment into its own kind of air-conditioning museum.
Whether explicitly surreal or just presenting “quirky” situations, the stories in Imaginary Museums are united by a predominant (although not exclusive) focus on the predicaments of their women characters. While it may be that the collection shows Polek to be oscillating between the fabulist mode and a sort of minimalist vignette, the effort to capture such predicaments, whether by representing them directly or by inflecting them through fantasia, clearly enough remains the goal. That most of these characters are captured in moments of disorientation and duress gives Imaginary Museums an effectively disquieting atmosphere, and Polek manages to maintain this atmosphere despite the staccato effect created by the extreme brevity of the stories — twenty-six of them in just over one hundred pages. But finally whatever impact the book might have as a challenge to narrative convention is muted by the uniform purpose to which all of the stories’ formal and narrative strategies are subsumed. Presumably Polek’s objectives will become more definitive in future work, but for now she ventures only into territory that remains safely recognisable.
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