"Bride," Julia
Elliott
This seems to me to be
primarily a theme-story based on the medieval concept of the basic evil of the
female body. It begins with a nun
whipping herself in order to "chastise" her "animal body. She has subdued her body to the extent that
her menstrual flow is no longer a flow,
but a dribble. She thinks of her body as a "bundle of polluted
flesh." Just the night before the
Abbot has said women are by "nature carnal"—that they have an
"opening that the Devil may slip through unless she fiercely barricade
against such entry."
In an interview in Fiction Writers Review, Julia Elliott
said: "In grad school I read a lot of Renaissance gynecology and
obstetrics works and discovered that they are insane; they are like magic
realism or something: monstrous births, weird reproductive theories,
melancholy, all that stuff. When barber surgeons started to do anatomy
theatres, it all got a little more 'scientific,' as we think of it today, but
was still brutal and culturally loaded. If they had a woman out on the anatomy
table, for example, you could pay admission and go and watch, and the anatomist
would say things like 'Behold, here is the uterus, the origin of sin and
death,' and then he would dissect it. Here, cultural ideas about femininity are
obviously mixed in with the supposed science."
The notion that the uterus
is the origin of sin and death is the basic thematic concept that energizes the
story, but the story does not create it or explore it; it simply embodies or
illustrates this preexisting cultural/religious idea.
"Big Cat,"
Louise Erdrich
Whereas Julia Elliott's
story seems obviously the embodiment of a thematic idea, Louise Erdrich insists
that her story is somewhat of a mystery to her and to those who read it. She
said in her "Contributor's Notes" that when people mention this story
to her their mouths open and their hands flap, and they laugh an odd
laugh. As a consequence, she says this
story became a favorite of hers because it seemed to make people uncomfortable.
In her interview with New Yorker editor Deborah Treisman, Erdrich said that when she was
writing the story, the character Elida "seemed to thwart my narrator at
every turn, yet she exuded a scholarly ascetic quality that was irresistible to
him. I decided to give in to her perhaps unconscious malevolence, and after
many revisions I wrote the ending. I was genuinely disturbed by this ending and
have no idea how to account for it." When Treisman said she thought "The Big Cat” reads a little like
a fairy tale or a fable, asking Erdrich there was a moral to this story,
Erdrich said she liked the idea that "this story reads like a fairy tale, but there
is no moral at all... Nothing I write ever has a moral. If it seems to a reader
that there is one, that is unintentional."
The plot of this story focuses on a man married to a woman named
Elida who snores. Not only Elida, but also her mother and her sisters are
terrible snorers that no remedy seems to alleviate. After he divorces and
marries someone else, he and his first wife become sexually involved again.
This is less important than the significance Erdrich seems to develop out of
the snoring and a short film Elida, edits together about the man's life, made
up of snippets of bit parts he has played in movies.
The story ends with the man's recognition that the 30 minute film
Elida has made which she entitled "Man of a Thousand Glimpses," makes
a sort of narrative that has its own thematic significance. From heroic acts to images of being a good father, to infidelity, to
criminal behavior, to multiple images of his death--the narrative is a
"dark" one that makes the man feel he has wasted his life and acted
ignobly. He realizes that the film reflects the way Elida really felt about
him.
The story ends with them spending the night in Elida's parents'
house. The snoring of the whole female side of the family hits him with
"abrupt ferocity. It is like a pack
of wolves snarling over a kill and then lions driving off the wolves, gnawing
off a leg and fending off a male. Elida sounds like a big cat ( thus the title
of the story) digesting her prey, and he dreams he is the hunted animal being
eaten alive.
Despite Erdrich's claim that she herself was not sure what to make
of the ending of the story, it seems rather clear it evokes what Treisman
recognizes as the fairy tale motif of the female revenging herself on the male
for his treachery, for failing to be the good husband and good father that he
promised to be, and finally devouring him like a wild animal—a big cat.
"The Fugue,"
Arna Bontemps Hemenway
Like Erdrich, Hemenway
also disavows that he really knows how this story came about, as if the story
somehow took control of the writing process. He says, "I am embarrassed to admit that
I don't remember actually writing this story," Suffering from sleep
deprivation from having to wake up all though the night to feed a new baby who
is having trouble eating, and feeling the pressure of having to turn a story in
to a graduate workshop or risk failing began to get mixed up in his mind in an
hallucinatory way.
The story seems to derive
from Hemenway's research into the Iraq War, specifically about soldiers
allegedly involved in atrocities. He
says in his "Contributor's Notes" that in his research, he learned about the
U.S. military's strategy of re-creating whole Iraqi villages in the Mojave
desert and hiring real Iraqi expatriates to "play out complex
psychological behavioral profiles faked by various intelligence training
units." The thematic concept that drives the story is the blurring of
reality and fantasy as the central character, a soldier referred to as Wild
Turkey, gets his memory of actual events and pretend events confused. It is all
a bit too obvious for me. Thom Jones did
this war and fugue state theme several years ago with more style and energy
than Hemenway does here.
"M&L," Sarah
Kokernot
Kokernot says this story
began with the image of a man picking up a woman's dress shoes as he followed
her into the woods. This is the image
that the story moves toward and concludes with.
It has two separate points of view—one by Miriam, the ""M of the
title, who was sexually attacked when she was thirteen and then sees the man
years later at the time of this story at a wedding, and the second pov by Liam,
the "L" of the title, who loves her.
It's a slim narrative striving for a kind of romantic, painful lyricism,
but the language is not strong enough to support the delicacy the circumstance
demands, for example: "He saws from her face that she'd gone to a place
deep inside herself, and he knew she would never allow him to go there." That's just too easy, isn't it?
"Jack, July,"
Victor Lodato
Lodata says the story
started with body language—the way he pictured the central character's way of
moving down the street. This is a story of a meth addict on the streets of
Tucson, Arizona, on a journey across town in search of more drugs. Lodato, who
once lived in Tucson, says he never really knows where he is going when he
begins a story and that the character in this story perfectly mirrored his own
state of mind. He adds that the central
character's heightened state of mind made him feel free to "go a little
crazy, to edit myself less as I wrote—and in doing so, I ended up in in some
unlikely places."
Maybe it is just my
impatience with stories about guys on drugs, wandering about that makes me
unimpressed with this story. Maybe it is
just the loose and lost sense of movement and style of this story that makes me
lose any interest in what happens to Jack or in what that means, if anything.
Maybe a little more editing might have been a good idea.
"Madame
Lazarus," Maile Meloy
T. C. Boyle says in his
Introduction that he felt this story was the most moving one in the
collection. He says he read it out doors
and found himself in the "mortifying position" of sitting there
exposed and sobbing in public, concluding that what Meloy has accomplished here
is evoking "true emotion" over the ties that bind us to the world and
how they are cruelly broken forever.
This is the story of an
elderly gay man living in Paris with a younger man, who brings home a small
terrier to keep the older man company after he retired. The story focuses on
the man's fears that the young man will grow tired of him; it also centers
around his memory of the first boy he loved and a tragedy that marked that
love.
The story moves to a
conclusion when the dog seems to have died and then revives, leading the vet to
refer to the animal as "Madame Lazarus." A few months later, the dog
becomes much more ill and must be taken to the animal hospital to be
euthanized. And this is what makes T. C. Boyle cry. Of course it does. I cried when our dog of fifteen years
died. Everybody cries when a dog
dies. But this story is a fairly simple
account that unfairly evokes an emotion that no one, at least no one who has
ever had a dog, can resist.
"Mr. Voice,"
Jess Walter
In his "Contributor's
Notes," Jess Walter says this story began with the first line that just
popped into his head like a song lyric, "Mother was a stunner." Calling it a story that kept surprising him
as he discovered more about it every day, when he got to the end of the first
draft and wrote the line the mother says to her daughter,("Nobody gets to
tell you what you look like, or who you are"), he realized that's what he
wanted to say to his own daughters concluding, "sentimental goof that I
am, I started crying."
I can understand Walter's
response, but I am not sure the story is what T. S. Eliot would call an
"objective correlative" of the emotion. It deals with a young girl whose mother is a
beauty who goes out with lots of men, and then marries one who does commercials
and announcements on the radio—earning the nickname "Mr. Voice." When the narrator is age twelve, her mother
leaves Mr. Voice and her for another man, and Mr. Voice becomes her guardian—and
a good guardian and protector he is—not merely a stepfather, but, by the end of
the story her "father." It's a
nice story, but a bit too easy in the emotion it evokes.
"Thunderstruck," by Elizabeth McCracken, is, it seems to me, a more
complex father/daughter story. (More about this story next time)
My favorite three stories
in this year's Bass collection (which
for me means they are the "best" of the "Best") are Denis
Johnson's "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden," Elizabeth McCracken's
"Thunderstruck," and Colum McCann's "Sh'khol." They all
made me feel a strong emotion--not because they evoked anything personal or purposely
played on my feelings, but because they were so damned well-written. More about
that next week. For me, the "best" stories are always the
best-written stories.
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