I have always argued that there are two basic modes of
experience in prose fiction: one which involves the development and acceptance
of the everyday world of phenomenonal, sensate, and logical relation--a realm
which the novel has always taken for its own--and the other, which involves an
experiences that challenge the acceptance of the reality as simply sensate and
reasonable--a realm which has dominated the short story since its beginnings.
The novel involves an active quest for reality, a search for
identity that is actually a reconciliation of the self with the social and
experiential world—a reconciliation that is finally conceptually accepted,
based on the experience one has undergone. The short story often takes a
character who has reached, or is in the process of reaching, such a conceptual
identity through reason, experience, or a combination of both, and confronts
him or her with the world of spirit, which then challenges his conceptual
framework of reason and experience. Short fiction is a fundamental form because
human beings’ earliest stories were stories of an encounter (given Mircea
Eliade’s division of primal reality into the Sacred and the Profane) with the
sacred. Narrative in its primal origins
is of "an experience" concretely felt, not "experience"
generally conceived, and the short story still retains that primal aspect.
Kevin
Wilson, “A Birth in the Woods”
When Kevin Wilson was asked once how he balances the real
and the strange in his stories and keeps them believable, he suggested that
when you present something strange and perhaps impossible, you simply
incorporate it into the story without making a big deal about it, thus making
it more readily accepted by the reader.
“A Birth in the Woods” begins and ends with blood. The father cuts his finger to help Caleb,
age 6, become accustomed with blood as normal and ordinary. But blood, as Wilson’s story explores, is
not ordinary; it has magical powers beginning in birth, as imaged in the mother’s
“bloody show,” and ending in death, when the mother’s blood will not stop
flowing. The framework of the story is that of two young parents who have
decided they will “make a world apart from the world” by living unaccommodated
out in the woods. The immediate focus
is on their decision to allow Caleb to assist in the birth of the new baby.
The story establishes a primal scene: The house in the woods, the snow “filling up
the space around the house until they were the only people left on earth, three
of them crowded together, the fourth still to come.” Then comes the “labor,” the work of childbirth, and the
omnipresent blood. All this is intense
enough, but then Wilson does a strange thing; he makes the baby a freakish
creature, “covered all over in dark black hair…slicked with blood and mucus,”
with a long bearlike snout and useless claws for fingers. When the baby growls, Caleb knows that it is
not his brother, not a baby, “but an animal, a creature, something wild.”
While the reader is still puzzling over this seemingly
superfluous birth of the horrifying and the grotesque, Wilson then does another
strange thing. The father leaves to get
help and Caleb hears the brakes squealing and a crash, “the sound of metal
twisting, the world giving up its shape.” We expect the mother to die, but why
the father? If we are not to think of this story as a tale of supernatural
horror, in the mode of Ambrose Bierce, then how do we understand the seemingly
meaningless death of the father and the grotesque birth of an animal-like baby?
Caleb feels hatred toward the thing that has killed his
mother, leaving her hollowed out and empty. However, when he begins to smother
the infant, he knows he must obey his mother’s request to protect his brother;
he suckles the child with honey on a stick and gives it its first toy--the
blood spattered wooden duck his father made for him earlier. He begins teaching the child, saying,
“Duck…though the word sounded as if it were from a language that had died out
hundreds of years ago.”
I don’t agree with Laura Furman’s view that the story is
about how every child is a victim of his parents’ choices, in this case, a
joyful arrogant belief that they can make a new Eden and raise the child in a
utopia. This all seems to me to be
merely the real-world social context for a story about blood, birth, horror,
death, and responsibility. And I don’t
believe that Wilson is merely trying to give the reader a little shot of
horror, although he does succeed in doing that. The story, in my opinion, is about primal reality, unassisted by
social support systems of doctors, nurses, and hospitals. We like to think that these can protect us,
but ultimately, it is just birth and death.
To Caleb the infant is what seems the inevitable result of the blood
soaked horror he has witnessed—something alien and strange—an intruder, ugly
and unwanted. The mother and the father both die, leaving Caleb alone to suckle
and teach his little brother, as a reminder that we are all ultimately
alone--except, that is, for our brother, which we must love as ourself, for it
is all we have.
Steven Millhauser, “Phantoms”
While most short-story writers in the last two decades
joined the realist rebellion against the fabulism of the seventies--e.g. Barth,
Barthelme, Coover--Steven Millhauser has stayed true to the fantastic tradition
that extends from Scherazade to Poe and from Kafka to Borges, playfully
exploring the freedom of the imagination to reject the ordinary world of the
mundane and explore the incredible world of purely aesthetic creation. Whether
his stories focus on magic carpets, men who marry frogs, automatons, balloon
flights, or labyrinths that lie beneath everyday reality, Millhauser embodies
one of the most powerful traditions of short fiction--the magical story of the
reality of artifice.
Karen Carlson wrote in a comment to this blog that she was
perplexed by the acclaim “Phantoms” has received—having won a Pushcart Prize, a
PEN/O. Henry Prize, and selected for Best American Short Stories. I have read the story several times and
would like to suggest that what Millhauser, one of our greatest short-story
writers, has captured in “Phantoms” is an exploration of humankind’s most
perplexing existential and social problem—our sense that we live in a world
inhabited by “The Other.” In one
section of the story—divided
into separate sections describing case studies of encounters with the phantoms,
theories about what they are, refutations of the theories, and history of their
manifestation—Millhauser describes “The Look,” which the phantoms cast in people’s
direction before turning away.
In Being and Nothingness,
Jean Paul Sartre uses the terms “The Other” and “The Look” to refer to the
phenomenological problem of human interactions and perception. When one
recognizes that someone is a subjective being, then one becomes an object to
that person. Thus, to maintain our
illusion of our own subjectivity, it behooves us to make objects out of the
Other; or else our world is “haunted” by the values of the Other.
The phenomenological terms “the
Other” and “the Look,” as further interpreted by Simone de Beauvoir, have been
adopted by feminist criticism to refer to the way men have objectified women by
their stare, denying them subjectivity, transforming them into objects. More recently, the same terms have been
adopted by cultural critics to refer to the way that a dominant culture
objectifies another culture, making them into the Other.
What Millhauser has captured here is
a quintessential narrative about all human apprehensions of something or
someone else outside the self—ranging from the basic impetus for all
religion-i.e. that there is another life outside ordinary everyday life—to the
basis of human discrimination based on race, gender, sexual preference,
etc.
With
this perspective in mind, one can understand the purpose of the various
sections of the story. For example, one section deals with “crossing over,”
which usually refers to intermingling between the phantoms and the
nonphantoms. Often phantoms are made scapegoats
for fears and weaknesses, and are referred to as “one of them.” Anyone familiar
with the history of racism in America will recall that it was not that long ago
that the majority of Americans were sternly against white people marrying black
people, just as many today are sternly against people of the same gender
marrying each other. And, please
forgive the reference to an old slur, but many may remember that African
Americans were once referred to by whites as “spooks.”
Anytime
one individual or one group classifies another person or another group as an
object in the world, an “Other,” the pathway is open for scapegoating and
placing blame of one’s fears and insecurities on the Other. For example, the fact that when a child goes
missing in the story, people say the phantoms have lured him or her into their
fold, is an echo of the common irrational belief that homosexuals should not be
teachers or scout leaders because they will try to seduce others into the gay
lifestyle.
The two theories most central to a social reading of the
story are Explanation # 3, which asserts that humans and the phantoms were once
a single race, which at some point divided into two societies, and Explanation
# 4, which asserts that the phantoms have always been here and that we are
intruders who seized their land and drove them into hiding. However, the most basic and encompassing
theory is Explanation #6, which, drawing from modern studies in cognitive
psychology, claim that our bodies, and thus all objects, are nothing but
artificial constructs of our brains. “The
world is a great seeming.” Everyone, therefore, is a phantom; there is nothing
out there but projections of our imagination.
Lauren Groff, “Eyewall”
In her author comments, Groff says
this story came to her in terms of its structure. When she thought of the word “hurricane,” she saw a despairing
character at the centre of a harsh circular wind, “whipping enormously urgent
leitmotifs around and around her at blinding speed.” I like this description, because it reminds me that whatever the
reader thinks about what is happening in a story, the author is always thinking
in terms of how the language and structure of the story create an
aesthetic experience. If you come to “Eyewall” expecting Hurricane
Katrina social commentary, you will be disappointed. Groff uses a the eyewall of a hurricane—located just outside the
“eye” of the storm where the most destructive rain and wind exist--as a
real-world vehicle for a story about the disruption of everyday reality, a disruption
that intertwines stuff of the imagination with stuff of the world—stuff of the
past with stuff of the present.
Groff has great fun using language
the way all poets use language--to defamiliarize the world. “I felt, rather than saw, the power out.
Time erased itself from the appliances and the lights winked shut.” The world is turned terrifyingly, and yet
somehow comically grotesque, upside down, inside out: “My best laying hen was scraped from under the house and slid in
a horrifying diagonal across the window.”
The apparitions of both her husband and her old college boyfriend come
bearing literary allusions, as if to remind us that what we are involved in her
is not a natural or a social phenomenon, but a poetic phenomenon, a thing of
language, in which, not stuff, but leitmotifs, swirl about in a highly
controlled way. (N.B.: When the narrator tells her husband that she is letting
his literary career languish, he says, “La belle dame sans merci” (Keats); her
old college boyfriend says to her, “You’re old! You’re old! You should wear the bottoms of your trousers
rolled” (T. S. Eliot)
Although folks who have experienced
hurricanes or witnessed the effects of tornados know that the storm can create
strange juxtapositions, such as bathroom fixtures in the tops of trees, and
cars pushed into houses, Groff extends these to surrealistic extremes: “On my
way downstairs, I passed a congregation of exhausted armadillos on the
landing. Birds had filled the Florida
room, cardinals and whip-poor-wills and owls.”
The story is structurally and rhythmically a language delight,
combining, as the short story always does when done well, the ordinary and the
extraordinary.
Note: I apologize for an earlier glitch in this post which made the right margins bleed off in sections.
