July 6th, 2008
by
vito_excalibur
It has become fashionable, especially among female novelists, to exploit the license of poetry while claiming exemption from poetry’s rigorous standards of precision and polish. Edna O’Brien is one of the writers who do this, but Annie Proulx is better known, thanks in large part to her best seller The Shipping News (1993). In 1999 Proulx wrapped up the acknowledgments in a short-story anthology titled Close Range by thanking her children, in characteristic prose, “for putting up with my strangled, work-driven ways.”
That’s right: “strangled, work-driven ways.” Work-driven is fine, of course, except for its note of self-approval, but strangled ways makes no sense on any level. Besides, how can anything, no matter how abstract, be strangled and work-driven at the same time? Maybe the author was referring to something along the lines of a nightly smackdown with the Muse, but only she knows for sure. Luckily for Proulx, many readers today expect literary language to be so remote from normal speech as to be routinely incomprehensible. “Strangled ways,” they murmur to themselves in baffled admiration. “Now who but a Writer would think of that!”
The short stories in Close Range are full of this kind of writing. “The Half-Skinned Steer” (which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, in November of 1997), starts with this sentence:
In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns.
Like so much modern prose, this demands to be read quickly, with just enough attention to register the bold use of words. Slow down, and things fall apart. Proulx seems to have intended a unified conceit, but unfurling, or spreading out, as of a flag or an umbrella, clashes disastrously with the images of thread that follow. (Maybe “unraveling” didn’t sound fancy enough.) A life is unfurled, a hustler is wound tight, a year is spooled out, and still the metaphors continue, with kicked down—which might work in less crowded surroundings, though I doubt it—and hinge, which is cute if you’ve never seen a hinge or a map of the Big Horns. And this is just the first sentence!
– B.R. Meyers, “A Reader’s Manifesto”, The Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 2007.
For obvious reasons, that essay was the first thing that I thought of when I opened The Orphan’s Tales: In The Night Garden to find this first sentence:
Once there was a child whose face was like the new moon shining on cypress trees and the feathers of waterbirds.
This pissed me off so much that I took a red pen and started underlining the passages in the book that mean absolutely nothing. Beginning with that one. Because I defy you to show me the new moon shining on anything. The new moon is a moonless night. So this is a child whose face is like a logical impossibility; but man, is that dressed up pretty with arabesques of language!
(Below find spoilers for In The Night Garden, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Air.)
It also reminded me of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Klatsand, in which she describes seafoam as disturbingly fleshy,wobbly, female. Because that was incredibly refreshing. I live by the sea. I’ve seen seafoam. It looks like this. If an author wishes to describe a character’s face as “framed by an explosion of white stars, trailing in the sky like sea foam” (p. 170), they should expect the image formed in the reader’s mind to be of a character silhouetted against stars clumped in dingy, oily-looking piles with bits of twig and kelp caught in them. Or, less literally, stars the color of tacky wedding dresses. Your choice. But I’m guessing not the image the author meant to create.
However, I should point out that the real reason I got so annoyed by this – the reason I actually defaced a book to note that the caves in it apparently include the mysteriously glowing moss that Terry Pratchett points out always grows in underground caves, just so a human hero can find his way around in them, should he happen to end up there without a torch – is that most of the book is actually quite wonderful. Most of the language is incredibly beautiful and vivid, and I read it slowly, taking the time to live in the book’s lush texture, to really form and savor the pictures in my mind it evoked. Which is why it brought me up short like an unexpected rock in my crème brûlée when things happened like a character on page 77 stating that her baby never cried at all and then four paragraphs later saying that she could not keep from going to the baby whenever it cried. It broke the spell. It threw me out of the story. Which pissed me off, because they are wonderful stories, and I look forward to getting the second one (In the Cities of Coin and Spice, yay, it’s out!) I do not wish to be thrown out of them any more than any of the other characters in the book did.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao suffered, for me, from This Is Not The Book I Thought It Was Going To Be syndrome. I’d seen it described as the story of a Dominican science fiction geekboy – and of course I couldn’t wait to get it, because at that point I was suffering from Hey! That’s Me! syndrome. (You know the one – well, you do if you’re Arab or lesbian or poly or something – the one where there’s never ever ever anyone like you on TV, so if anyone ever does show anything with a character a bit like you, you will love it regardless of how good or bad it is. I’ve been told Speedy Gonzalez cartoons aren’t shown anymore because they’re offensive. When I was a kid? We fucking loved Speedy. We had our own cartoon character! We ran around yelling “Arriba arriba, andale!” I guess nowadays they have Dora the Explorer & all, but would it kill the Cartoon Network to have two Spanish-speaking cartoons? You know, for the kids?)
Anyway, point is, Diaz sucks you in with a Stan Lee epigraph (“Of what import are brief, nameless lives…to Galactus?”) and an an aside about how of course Oscar’s favorite Weis-Hickman character was Raistlin, so you know you’re reading about Your People, and then suddenly wham! We have taken a quick left turn out of Geeksville, so welcome to Your Family’s Escape From Your Small Corrupt Caribbean Country Which You Will Nonetheless, Somehow, Never Truly Escape land. Please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle, because we have machetes. Thing is, though, I’ve read my Julia Alvarez. I’ve read my Achy Obejas. It’s a fine genre but, you know, it’s not the one I really wanted to read. I’ve read it before.
And the other genre it was – the one that was actually about Oscar himself? I’ve read that one before too. I’ve seen it. I’ve heard it. So have you. It’s called Nerd Trek IV: The Search For Ass. I’m so fucking over it. Dear authors: I don’t care about the fact that some teenage boys can’t get laid. That is not the tragedy of the fucking human condition. It is not heartbreaking. It does not fill me with sympathy and hopes for them. At this point it fills me with nausea. Also, it cheapens the concept of love when you describe your character as being hopelessly in love with women he’s never actually spoken to. That is not love. I understand your confusion but the proper word to describe that is actually a little later in the L section of the dictionary and trust me, we can tell the difference.
[Interlude: Mr. E and I have a vicious fight. He does not think that lust is in fact the proper term to describe Oscar's fantasy interactions with all of the apples of his eye. Some of them, many of them even, yes; but he insists that in the mind of a shy young geekboy there are subtler shades of infatuation and puppy love, fantasies which have nothing to do with getting a hard-on. We like to present both sides of the story here at the Feminist SF blog.]
Ok, back to me and beating up on Oscar. Oscar is unfortunately the weakest character in the whole book: a paper caricature of Comic Book Guy. Fat, can’t get laid, runs D&D campaigns, yada yada. (So tired of this shorthand.) There are two moments in the whole book where Oscar breathes in a little life and suddenly looks like a three-dimensional person, like one of the geeks I’ve spent my whole life around. Two moments only. The first one, in a chapter narrated by his sister, Lola:
I called home. The first time no one answered. The second time it was Oscar. The de Leon residence, how may I direct your call? That was my brother for you. This is why everybody in the world hated his guts.
The second, described by the omniscient narrator, Yunior:
Despite Nataly’s homeliness and the medicated fog she inhabited, Oscar entertained some pretty strange Harold Lauder fantasies about her. Since she was not hot enough, in his mind, to date openly, he imagined them in one of those twisted bedroom-only relationships.
That’s what’s missing from those Cat Piss Man caricatures: the arrogance.
Actually what I longed for was to leave poor, boring Oscar behind, and find out what happened to his childhood girlfriend, Olga Polanco. Olga: the one and only girl in the book who doesn’t suddenly become a stunningly carnal beauty at the age of fourteen. Maritza: “blew up into the flyest guapa in Paterson, one of the Queens of New Peru.” Lola and her friends: “tall and fit as colts and when they went for runs it was what the track team might have looked like in terrorist heaven.” Ana Obregón: “the sort of heavy that almost every Island nigger dug, a body that you just knew would look good in and out of clothes;” Belicia Cabral: “caught a cuerpazo so berserk that only a pornographer or a comic-book artist could have designed it with a clear conscience.” Shit man, we’ve heard Oscar’s story a million times. What happened to Olga, who had “a troll gene in her somewhere”? How did she end up knocking over a grocery store? Why a grocery store, for chrissake? There’s not even a caricature for the fat geeky girl. She doesn’t get the guy. She doesn’t even get to play D&D (there’s no girls in D&D! Duh!) There’s just the cardboard cutout: unfuckable.
So it was extremely refreshing to read Geoff Ryman’s Air, which is science fiction about the Internet coming to rural Kazakhstan, basically. Everyone looking for books with interesting middle-aged heroines? LOOK HERE. Mae is just a delight to read: she is clever, insightful, and has a logical clarity of thought that made spending a few hours in her head a wonderful experience. Her world reminded me of the underwater world I saw on my trip: I went scuba diving for the first time in my life. It was amazing: beautiful, fertile, and every creature in it every single moment was looking to find something to eat and to avoid being eaten itself.
But Mae’s human, and she knows her world is changing:
Mae stood her ground. “Why do people treat the past as if it had lost a battle that the present won?” she demanded, fists clenched. “Why do they treat it as if it faded because it was weak?”
Air reconciles mourning the past to embracing the future…but with a deeply ambiguous ending. The first child born to Air:
…was tiny, the size of a hand. How could it shrink so small? And it was burned black – black by acids. Its tiny fingers seemed melted together, and its tiny genitals were a blur of ruined flesh and its eyes had been seared shut.
And the child beamed-smiling, joyful, dazed.
The babe had been Formatted.
Sezen shows Mae that the coming connectivity is not just an inevitable future that must be grappled with: that it will be wonderful. But is Ryman saying this what losing our humanity to Air looks like?
Other books: Bellwether by Connie Willis (funny, quick read – basically Passage without all the death stuff) and Villette by Charlotte Bronte. I was so pissed at the end of that one. Argh! Anyone want to make me feel better about it?
(x-posted to my LJ)
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Filed under assorted | Comments (19)
The fish macro and most of the others after it are too wide: they’re breaking the blog’s formatting and pushing the right-hand column down to the bottom of the page.
…Hmm. That is not showing up on my browser, but as a quick fix I have moved all but the first macro under the cut, so at least they’re not screwing up the front page anymore, I hope? I will take another look at it tomorrow. Thanks for the heads-up.
Thanks. That fixes the formatting on the main page.
Villette by Charlotte Bronte. I was so pissed at the end of that one. Argh! Anyone want to make me feel better about it?
I thought the ending was one of Villette‘s saving graces. The ambiguity of it means that there’s at least a 50% chance that the heroine’s emotionally abusive, self-centered dick of a boyfriend died, thus freeing her from his corrosive influence.
[...] Humor: No, reelee! 6 July 2008 — nightgigjo In the midst of a perfectly serious examination of modern prose, including Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on Feminist SF — The [...]
Abigail:
Ok, you make a good point. I think that does make me feel a bit better. :)
Mind you, I don’t think you can legitimately call him self-centered. I mean, by his actions he’s generous and self-denying almost to a fault. What he is is horribly childish, immature and misogynist.
By the end, he isn’t really emotionally abusive at all – I think Bronte meant to show all his awful behavior as merely the result of jealousy, and once he & Lucy understood each other, he was happy – but of course what that means is that once the honeymoon period was over he’d go back to being a complete asshole, so she may indeed be better off without him, would she just realize it!
What do you mean 50% chance though? How can anyone call that ending ambiguous? “There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope…”? It sounds like exactly what it is, which is that she wrote him shipwrecked, and then her dad tore his hair out and said “Aaargh Charlotte you can’t write that!” and she took him at his word and wrote exactly: not quite that.
Ide Cyan:
I shrank the pictures, too. Hopefully the formatting is okay now.
I call him self-centered because he never really sees Lucy. From their first meeting she reminds him of his dead, saintly fiancée, and he assumes that that’s who Lucy is. But actually Lucy is depressed and on her way to a nervous breakdown. The personality Paul imagines is a symptom of mental illness, and for the rest of the novel whenever she shows any spark of life, of a will of her own, of a personality that doesn’t track with the one he’s invented for her, he stomps her down remorselessly, withholding his affection and belittling her until she bows to his will (hence emotionally abusive).
(I’m sorry, I tend to get exercised whenever Paul Emmanuel comes up in conversation, so I just have to say this: dick.)
I suppose I see the ending as ambiguous for the same reason that we tend to think of unhappy endings as real and happy ones as fantasies. My idea of a happy ending is one in which Paul dies, so I’m hesitant to believe in it.
Abigail:
Nooo, I don’t buy that. First time he meets her he’s judging her for whether Mme. Beck should hire her; he says he can see a lot of things in her face, maybe good, maybe evil. And then the next time is when he storms up and insists that she can and will play Ginevra’s boyfriend in Mme. Beck’s fête (which, wasn’t that a delicious scene! The whole Lucy-Ginevra relationship is fascinating to me.) Really neither of those is treating her like a memory-sainted dead nun girlfriend. I see no reason to believe that he isn’t seeing her; in fact he abuses her exactly for the forceful personality which he rightly observes.
Funny, now I think of it, she dealt with Ginevra by beating her verbally, and Ginevra was satisfied; I expect the same treatment would have done Paul a world of good! If she had been in a more equal social and financial position, not an employee of his cousin, she might have been in a position to fight back, and they might have settled into a more Elizabeth Bennet-Mr. Darcy relationship. What a pity.
[...] “Dear authors: I don’t care about the fact that some teenage boys can’t get laid. That is … [...]
Hmm. It’s been several years since I read the book so obviously your recollection is crisper than mine, but I remember at least one scene in which Paul talks to Lucy about his fiancée, and about how he saw the echo of her in Lucy when they first met – at which point Lucy was on the verge of collapse.
You’re right that he observes Lucy’s forceful personality, but he perceives it as an aberration, a deviation from her ‘real’ character (that of the dead girlfriend) which it is his job to correct by any means necessary.
I loved the end of Villette. I didn’t find it ambiguous at all, not with that last line. For me (and just for me), the point of the end was a reminder that we love to read these fairy tales but all too often the truth is that people don’t live them. Lucy is always presented as a realist. It’s sad, definitely, but she has her school and her independence, and that is something that is real and graspable. Not the romance.
I felt like- I don’t know- that Charlotte Bronte was offering me something precious with that ending. A kind of gentle if bitter truth about life. Not sure I can entirely explain.
I know other readers who read the ending as a happy one, though (that he does turn up in the end, alive and well).
I love _Villette_, in large part because of the ambiguity of the ending. I think it’s gutsy.
It’s also perfectly in synch with Lucy’s character. Her most salient characteristic is that she withholds information; she doesn’t like to share it, even with the reader. Early in the book there’s a scene in which she looks at another character and notices something about him–but refuses to tell us what. We have to wait for a considerable amount of time for her to tell us what it is (that he’s a character we’ve already met in different circumstances). It speaks to just how isolated she is, and to her psychology.
It’s a brave and very deliberate choice to make a character this unforthcoming your first-person narrative, but Bronte pulls it off. I think she was interested, both artistically & personally, in creating a first-person narrator as different from Jane Eyre as possible. (She was subjected to an unusually crazy amount of the Victorian women-can’t-invent-so-you-must-be-Jane-Eyre nonsense after her identity was revealed.)
Of course she doesn’t tell us what happens at the end. She’s Lucy Snow.
The other interesting thing about Lucy, of course, is that she’s a bigot. She makes incredibly offensive, often racialized comments about every non-English ethnicity she encounters (the Irish, the French, etc.), but her nationality pales in the face of her religious bigotry.
She is virulently anti-Catholic, repeatedly showing that she believes that the religion makes its practitioners less than human. In this, she’s representative–it was a common and very acceptable prejudice of her time. (_Villette_ was published less than 25 years after Catholics in the UK had won the right to vote and access to certain professions after a long, hard battle, and the conversation about whether to change other laws was still going, and very much tied to questions of colonialism.)
But Lucy is unusually obsessed–and therefore fascinated–with the religion of the country to which she’s moved. She can’t help being drawn to Catholic symbols (like the nun and belltower), and of course she ultimately winds up falling in love with a Catholic man.
That’s a significant part of her evolution, and there’s a way in which the ambiguity of the ending speaks symbolically to the difficulty of people from different groups being able to come together.
Either way, I think the ending works perfectly as a book that is primarily a character study. I don’t agree with Virginia Woolf’s idea that _Villette_ is far superior to _Jane Eyre_ (I think they’re both masterpieces, albeit very different kinds), but I do think it’s a great book–if only because by the time I reached the end, I really cared what happened to a character I found it difficult to like.
Kate Elliott–thanks much for your perceptive comments.
I’ve always believed the ending of Villette was clear. Yet, Lucy felt she was loved and remained loved. It is sad, but it was far more life than she’d previously had in England.
Love, C.
I received Díaz’s novel differently, and I do admire what he accomplished with it. It was others, ignorant of genre, of Dominicans, whether here or on the island, who presented his book in a light that was wildly inaccurate as to the book he’d actually written.
He’s a very unassuming and pleasant fellow, as was clear at the annual Feria del Libro, where he was guest of honor this year. He understands very well that the publishing world works on the order of ‘niche.’ There has been no one to fill the niche of the new young literary thing representing the Dominican Republic. He got put there, like some years back Edie Danticat got put into the niche of new young literary thing re Haiti.
Love, C.
Constance: Yes, which is why I wanted to say right from the start that the negative parts of my opinion of it were almost certainly colored by the fact that I expected it to be a quite different book; which is not the book’s or the author’s fault at all.
Zahra,
thanks.
You bring up some really great stuff, too; you’re absolutely right about Lucy withholding information and how that plays into the end. I hadn’t thought of that, and it makes the ending even better.
I admit I read Villette years ago, and have little memory of the anti Catholicism; it probably just rolled past me as part of the book.
Constance – yes, Lucy still gets far more than she might otherwise have hoped for. I sometimes wonder if that was part of the point Bronte was trying to make, although obviously I don’t know. As much as I love Jane Eyre, Villette remains my favorite of her novels (although I liked Shirley, too).
Zahra: Yes, I kept boggling at the anti-Catholic stuff and reminding me that it was Perfectly Normal. I’m not sure that adds to Lucy’s interest; as you say, it was bog-standard for a woman of her time, nationality and class. Theoretically it does add to her interest that she nonetheless became engaged to a Catholic, but it doesn’t really seem to add any complexities to her worldview; her opinion remains what it was, she just doesn’t feel she has the authority to change her fiancé’s religion, even though it continues bad for him.
That nun thing…I admit this was something I liked more than in Jane Eyre! Seems odd in an f-sf fan to insist that I don’t like elements of the fantastical in my fiction, but I don’t, unless it’s clear that everyone knows they’re fantastical. Otherwise it starts to have an unpleasant taste of “Guardian angels are real!” I’ve always been uneasy with the fact that such a vital part of the plot of JE is driven by Jane’s mystical hearing of Rochester calling her name in despair miles away ooooh spooooky. So I liked the way the nun thing worked out; but I think I was so busy thinking about that fairly superficial aspect of it that I did not pay sufficient attention to the symbolic Gothic psychological aspects.
In Villette it was two different regional and religious bigotries colliding and out of that collision creating more than conciliation.
It’s that attraction of the ‘other’. It’s one of the things that makes the world go round. It can be a horse who is as curious and entertained by a 2-legged as the 2-legged is curious about and entertained by the horse.
Or it could be a lonely, fussy, exact, learned, honorable Catholic fellow with the desire for dominance, and a poor, supressed (not repressed), intellectual, lonely, young Protestant from the cold regions of the world.
They encounter on the edge of the world of Saints and Festivals — the Catholic world — and within that world, filled with public spaces within which public community rituals are enacted, they watcb each other, spar, and entertain each other more than anyone else ever did.
Being 2-legged, and young, they fell in love. But in their own way.
It’s a fascinating novel, like no other I can think of.
Sorry for not responding for so long — but I’m down in the northernmost reach of the Saints and Festivals region of our hemisphere — New Orleans — and internet is skippy here in the hotel, and we’re busy.
Love, C.