With The Association of Small Bombs, Karan Mahajan succeeds in the difficult task of describing the immense, unbearable consequences of a terrorist act. The novel begins with a small bombing, it kills “only” about 50 people, at the Lajpat Nagar market in Delhi, in 1996. Mahajan’s prose is well-measured, his descriptions visceral and tactile, as he develops his story in short chapters that bring out the inner life of each character. In these characters’ humanity and fullness Mahajan displays his control of his craft, his artistry and brilliance.
Two of the people who die in the initial blast are Nakul and Tushar, 11 and 13, the sons of Vikas and Deepa Khurana. They go to the market to repair a TV with their friend Mansoor, who survives the blast, but suffers mentally and physically for years to come. The repair of a TV is a meaningless reason to die, which is among the first things we learn from this novel: all bombings are meaningless, except to the people that set them off. That must be why we are introduced to Shockie, the bomb maker, right after meeting the Khuranas and Mansoor’s family. Shockie has killed dozens of Indians in revenge for the military oppression of Kashmir, but we first encounter him when he is performing his pre-mission ritual of calling home to his sick mother.
Shockie’s character is as developed and human as any. He is full of anger and hate, but he has remorse for his actions when he gets to know some of his victims, and after his friend Malik is imprisoned for the mission he completed, he is plagued by guilt. Mahajan does not make it easy for his readers to apply to the perpetrators in his book any preconceived notions, instead he confronts us with their reasoning, their dreams and their friendships.
All though the terrorists in The Association of Small Bombs are well created and interesting, with motivations all grounded in political activism and not radical Islam (as one might expect), it is in the description of their victims that Mahajan truly devastates. The first thing that struck me about his writing is how brilliantly he describes the unexplainable experience of Vikas and Deepa’s loss. Their chapters are the most tender and relatable. The opening of the novel, “Blast,” immediately connects the reader to their story, and shows off Mahajan’s prose. Already on page five, we are placed in Vikas’ post bombing dream, where he becomes the bomb that killed his children:
The best way to describe what he felt would be to say that first he was blind, then he could see everything. This is what it felt like to be a bomb. You were coiled up, majestic with blackness, unaware that the universe outside you existed, and then a wire snapped and ripped open your eyelids all the way around and you had a vision of the world that was 360 degrees, and everything in your purview had been doomed by seeing.
Here, Mahajan describes the ruinous impact of the bomb through the eyes of the man it affected most of all. Choices like this one throughout the novel impressed me. Mahajan has an unfaltering ability to get at each event he describes from interesting, unexpected angles. The description of the bomb is also a great image for how the novel works. Like Vikas and the bomb, so do Mahajan’s readers experience the doom by seeing all angles and perspectives, everything that went into the act of the blast, and everything that came out of it.
As the book unfolds, we get to know young Mansoor as a timid, overprotected adult, who is finally safe from fear and terror when he arrives for his studies in California. Then 9/11 happens, and he immediately feels the impact of being a Muslim in a country that develops a sudden and all-consuming fear for his religion. Not to speak of the fact that Mansoor dreams of being a programmer, but during his time in America suffers a relapse to the pain he had in his wrists after the blast. He has carpal tunnel syndrome, which means he can never work with programming, and he returns home to find solace in the religion he didn’t practice much growing up, and a group of activist friends. Their group attempts to gain fair treatment of jailed Muslims, one of them Shockie’s friend, Malik, who is in prison for the bombing that Mansoor can blame for his suffering, and his recent return to India.
Mansoor has an impressionable nature, after having spent his childhood mostly “protected” in his parents’ house, dreading anything else that might happen to him out in the world. Therefore, it is no surprise that he seeks something to fill him with belief and meaning. Mahajan’s writing is sensitive and intelligent when he describes Mansoor’s new devoutness and engagement with politics. We are shown that this, arguably like most of what happens in the life of a young person, is more than anything about the friends he connects with and the community he finds. This realization makes Mansoor’s chapters all the more powerful and heartbreaking, the closer we get to the unavoidable tragic end of the novel. Finally, we understand just how fatalistic Mahajan’s story is; none of the victims of the small bomb at Lajpat Nagar will ever escape its consequences.
I’ve retreated to nonfiction and global literature to avoid the fate of leaving half-read books around my apartment. The title alone told me that Blackass was going to be irreverent and the fact that it was a satire sold me on the novel. This was a book that wasn’t going to be sanctimonious, but it would be serious. One of the the joys of reading world literature is that beyond the convention and obsessions of our own culture, we tap into a new perspective. Through it, we are exposed to different challenges that help us reframe the way in which we engage with our everyday frictions and larger societal issues. By erasing our ability to cozily make ourselves at home in the familiar postures and shorthand of a novel, are we opening ourselves up to the possibility of more incisive, thoughtful connections in the world?
In Blackass, no character is free from the engagement of escaping their prescribed lives. Some characters have more surreal exit strategies than others. On the morning of a crucial job interview, Furo Wariboko wakes up to find that he is no longer a black Nigerian. He’s confronted with a white body that alienates himself from himself, his family, and pretty much everyone he encounters. No one knows what to make of an oyibo, Nigerian slang for a white person, who speaks and acts with the fluency of a native black Nigerian.
Furo chafed under his father’s passive, unsuccessful career. His mother’s hard-earned success kept the family afloat and provided her two children with their education. Not only emasculated by living at home as an unemployed man in his thirties, Furo finds that he must turn to his savvy younger sister even for help with social media. He’s adrift and in search of an anchor. There is nothing cozy about the inertia he’s experiencing.
The condition of his status quo vanishes overnight. The morning that he wakes up as a white man, Furo flees his home, leaving behind his phone and all possessions to in order to sneak out, unnoticed. Even if he had managed to remember his wallet, he didn’t have any money and had planned to borrow some from his family in order to make it to the interview. Without thinking twice, he knows that he can’t expect his family to believe this white man is their Furo.
Despite these challenges, Furo still manages to charm his way into cash and a ride. And in spite of the stress of scrambling to make it to said interview, he was offered a different, better job with higher pay, a laptop, and company car. Within twenty-four hours of living as a white man, a series of absurd encounters leaves Furo with money in his pocket, a lucrative job, a new roof over his head, and, along with that new bed, an attractive, ambitious girlfriend. Why look back?
Unlike Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, Furo embraces his metamorphosis.
Meanwhile, Furo’s family struggles to make sense of his disappearance. As his parents mourn, his sister draws on her fluency in social media to cope. Through Twitter, her initial cries for help morph into the tweets of an outspoken self-marketer. Mastering the art of googling search engine optimization tips, she revels in her new followers, engages in Twitter feuds, and develops a new, assertive persona. While Furo could not be two people at once, his sister taps into the means of juggling various personalities. Barrett recognizes that what society can’t handle in person, it somehow accepts through the conduit of the internet. Twitter’s platform allows Tekena/@pweetychic_tk to make herself so visible that she attracts the attention of another transitional figure — Igoni, an author who meets Furo on the first day of his new life.
Complicating Barrett’s identity puzzle further, Igoni, who shares his name with the author but also refers to himself as Morpheus, transitions from living life a man to an existence as a woman. It’s through this new identity that she reaches out to Tekana/@pweetychic_tk over Twitter. Fascinated by a brief encounter with Furo, Igoni/Morpheus wants to follow the progress of a fellow traveler, treading between worlds.
While both Furo and Igoni transition into their new selves with incredible ease, the reader has to flip back to see when the switch occurs for Igoni/Morpheus. Her change is just that slippery. It feels problematic, even in a deliberately Kafkaesque novel, to move from one race or gender to another, but through this seamless transition, Barrett exposes the way in which life truly can be radically different in another skin.
Larger questions loom regarding the complications of adapting a different race or gender. How do we come to know our true selves? Would life be so different if we could simply swap out specific circumstances such as gender, race, class, religion, ethnicity, nationality? Is this the appeal of the internet: it’s ability to offer amnesty to those in need of community? What does it take for us to shake off the confines of various prescribed conditions? And in the end, where do we feel most “at home?”
In spite of the advantages he enjoys as a white man, Furo faces the skepticism of Nigerians who distrust the very details of his background. Through their inability to believe he is indeed a Nigerian, the ways in which one’s race determines one’s neighborhood, education, vernacular language, name, ethnicity, and sense of comfort with one’s self become excruciatingly clear. One begins to wonder: Is this a nightmare or a satirical look at the barriers built by racial difference?
Barrett’s fascination with social media begs another question: Can social media work to break through these barriers? Through Twitter, despite the fact that, throughout the course of the novel, she remains a Nigerian black woman, Tekana/@pweetychic_tk quickly acquires a powerful sense of agency. Through the experience of Furo’s new girlfriend Syreeta, the reader is keenly aware of the challenges inherent in being an independent woman in Lagos. Syreeta has a university education, but she is a kept woman relying upon a sugar daddy for her car, apartment, and income. Tekana/@pweetychic_tk represents a more mobile, fearless younger generation, eager to adapt and navigate independence on her own terms.
Absurdity provides Barrett with the ability to tease out these fraught issues across a tangled and loaded landscape. My frustration with the humorless novels I’d been reading may not be that their seriousness lacks amusement. Rather than accepting realism in fiction as a means of empathizing with the world, I’ve been aching for the higher stakes and more rigorous engagement with social issues that find a more fertile home in satirical, surreal fiction.
Barrett’s frenetic plot and pacing takes his characters to uncomfortable places that seem unbelievable and yet, in the moment of this novel, feel entirely plausible. When faced with the question of abandoning his personal history and family for his new life, Furo makes what seems like a shocking decision. For better or worse, his call speaks to the world we live in. Sometimes it’s only through the looking glass that we can honestly see the true extent of the damage inflicted by the world we live in.
Click here to read an excerpt from Blackass as part of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading. Also, click here to read about A. Igoni Barrett’s writing life in Nigeria, part of Electric Literature’s series, The Writing Life Around the World.
There’s something embarrassing about writing short stories. First there’s the word “short,” a word I’ve always associated with my height, with having to stand in the front row in class pictures. I have a nagging feeling that if I were more disciplined, a bigger thinker, or even just taller, I’d have written a novel by now. Maybe I’d have written Herzog for ladies. The problem is that I really like stories. I like the efficiency. I like the things that are not said. I’m a sucker for an epiphany. Most of all, I like that stories are a chance to experiment.
Great novels also experiment and innovate, but a short story can make a never-before-seen formal leap and then peace out, before you’re even sure what’s happened. And we live in a thrilling time for stories — the last half-century, the last decade, the last year. In the past year, I’ve read stories by Paula Bomer, Rebecca Curtis, Greg Jackson, Shelly Oria, Matt Sumell, and Deb Olin Unferth that are strange in all the best way, stories that have excited me as much as anything I’ve read before. These writers are my age. Why are they — we — so bold? We may be less afraid to take chances in our stories because we grew up knowing that we were alive at the same time as writers who took even bigger chances in their stories — Grace Paley, Barry Hannah, David Foster Wallace. I mention these three because they died recently, and so can’t be included on my list, which will just be about the living.
This is supposed to be bad, but I learned how to break the rules of fiction before I learned the rules.
For some people, the short story starts with Chekhov. For others, it begins with Hemingway. For me, in the mid nineties, it began with Lorrie Moore. I was wandering under the klieg lights at Barnes and Noble, looking for the next book to get me through adolescence, and a book titled Self Help seemed like a good idea. There was no Electric Literature then to tell me that I would love Moore, that I would age quickly into her demographic (alienated women), that she would wind up mattering to me and a generation of short story writers. This is supposed to be bad, but I learned how to break the rules of fiction before I learned the rules. “Plots,” says Moore’s narrator in “How to Be a Writer,” “are for dead people.” For the living, there are Lorrie Moore jokes, whole pages that just say “Ha! Ha! Ha!”, completely original metaphors, and with them, a new way of seeing.
2. George Saunders
I hated the first George Saunders story I read. The story was “Sea Oak,” anthologized in the O’Henry Prize stories of 1999, and it confused and bothered me. “What the hell was that?” I thought, after I finished reading it. “I’m ready to get back to the rest of these stories now. Give me affecting realistic fiction, thank you very much.” Of course I don’t remember the other stories anymore. “Sea Oak” is a Saunders masterpiece, the story of a male stripper and his dead aunt Bernie, who never had anything nice in life and so comes back from the dead to give the narrator some memorable financial advice — “Show your cock.” Saunders has figured out a way to write about poverty in America, to cut through the clichés and sentimentality. “At Sea Oak, there’s no sea and no oak, just a hundred subsidized apartments and a rear view of FedEx.” There’s also a made-up TV show called “How My Child Died Violently,” a title that works because it has both consonance and assonance, for writers who want to learn how it’s done.
3. Joy Williams
Her stories make craziness seem so natural that I’ve become convinced that sanity is a construct…
Things get even darker and weirder in the stories of Joy Williams, whose collected stories came out this year. One of my favorites is about a woman named Miriam who is dating a forensic anthropologist named Jack Dewayne (“[His students] called themselves Deweenies and wore skull-and-crossbones T-shrits to class.”) Jack accidentally stabs himself in the eye mid-story and spends the rest of the story brain damaged, nursed by a student named Carl. Miriam befriends a lamp. The four — Jack, Carl, Miriam, and lamp — take a road trip. Another story of displaced affections involves a man who becomes convinced that his employer looks just like Darla. The employer replies, “This is of no interest to me, but who is Darla?” Darla was a beloved childhood babysitter, and like the lamp in the previous story, becomes more emotionally significant as the story progresses. Williams’s stories take things we think are of no interest to us and make us interested in them. Her stories make craziness seem so natural that I’ve become convinced that sanity is a construct, something we keep around because we are too scared to look (or stab) ourselves in the eye.
4. Alejandro Zambra
Alejandro Zambra is actually around my age, but he lives on a different continent and has already written three novels, three books of poetry, a collection of essays, and a collection of short stories. Maybe growing up under Pinochet gives you a sense of urgency — this needs to be said today in case I’m disappeared tomorrow. Zambra’s stories are urgent but still loose, funny because he has confidence that he is allowed to play. In the title story of his collection My Documents, Zambra writes, “My father was a computer, my mother a typewriter.” I don’t know what this means, but of course I know exactly what it means. My father and mother were the same way. Zambra also has a story called “I Smoked Very Well” where the narrator asserts, “I was good at smoking; I was one of the best.” He tries to quit and fails and tries again. It’s hard to stop when you’re good at something.
5. Sam Lipsyte
His stories take every risk you wish you were brave enough to take, and then risk some more.
Another writer with a smoking story is Sam Lipsyte, though his narrator has “quit quitting them again.” It takes courage to know that something as small as a pack of cigarettes is going to get us to childhood and parent death and lost love, but Lipsyte lets language lead the way to the cancer ward, where the narrator’s mother is dying and everyone is still lighting up. “Bald men, bald women, bald teens sat out in the summer twilight in their gowns. Cut open, sewn shut, garlanded with IV lines, poisoned with their futile glowing cures, they puffed away like wild heroes.” Lipsyte has written three novels, but his two story collections, Venus Drive and The Fun Parts, should make him a wild hero to short story writers. His stories take every risk you wish you were brave enough to take, and then risk some more.
6. Lydia Davis
I’m going to end with Lydia Davis, because I’ve exceeded my word count. Davis rarely exceeds hers. She can do in a paragraph or in a sentence what most writers can’t do in whole novels. “There are also men in the world,” begins a story called “Men.” Davis knows that half of her readers will get the joke. She knows we’ll get everything. I’m not worried about plot or characters when I read a Lydia Davis story. I just want her to do her thing, to play with language and obsession, and to frighten me. You could call her a stylist, but that would be undervaluing style, which in Davis’s hands is so original that it remakes the world.
About the Author
Rebecca Schiff is the author of The Bed Moved. She graduated from Columbia University’s MFA program, where she received a Henfield Prize. Her stories have appeared in n+1, Electric Literature, The American Reader, Fence, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn.
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing Turbo Boost.
The hit 80s drama Knight Rider was a portent of many of the technologies we have today, from cars that drive themselves to watches that are also walkie-talkies. Sadly, one of the show’s most exciting technological advances was Turbo Boost — the ability for cars to jump over obstacles.
Currently, the only way for a car to become airborne is with the use of a ramp or life-threatening accident. Typically the use of a ramp necessitates that it be installed beforehand, which requires a lot of preplanning. What’s so wonderful about Turbo Boost is that it can happen with only the press of a button.
There are a number of things I could have avoided driving into if I had Turbo Boost. The bunny that ran out in front of me last night, for instance. Perhaps car scientists can look into the bouncing abilities of bunnies to help develop the Turbo Boost technology. We would save a lot of bunnies and driving would look cuter.
It may be that the auto industry is intentionally suppressing advancements in Turbo Boost. This may be due to collusion with the tire industry. The more time spent airborne, the longer tires will last. It’s simple math. But if you’re looking to stick it to the tire industry and can’t wait for Turbo Boost, I’d suggest putting snow chains on your tires year round. It makes for a bumpier ride but your tires will last forever.
While I’ve never personally experienced Turbo Boost, I can imagine what it’s like to go soaring through the air while little children look up at you in awe. It’s pretty awesome. I’m imagining it right now. There’s one little kid looking up at me and he can’t believe how cool I am. And now there’s a tear in his eye. I hope it’s one of joy. Oh no. He just realized he’ll never be as cool as me. Now I feel guilty. Not too guilty though, because wheeeeeeeeeeee!
Turbo Boost would also be a big time-saver in heavy traffic or construction zones. If a deer runs out in front of you, Turbo Boost over it. If that deer is just a guy dressed as a deer and playing a prank, you won’t get convicted of manslaughter for driving into him.
What I’ve described here today is only the tip of the Turbo Boost iceberg. That’s why I implore the young and innovative tech companies to please invent Turbo Boost. Please, Mark Zuckerberg or Gary Google — if you’re reading this — the world needs you, and you’re the only ones who can save us.
BEST FEATURE: The name Turbo Boost is exciting, informative, and sounds a little like “burro juice.” WORST FEATURE: Once Turbo Boost is invented, a lot of people will be hitting their heads on their car ceilings.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing an onion.
Lina Wolff begins Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs with a character telling a first person narrator a story: “‘It was a Friday two weeks ago,’ Valentino told me on one of the days he drove me to school. ‘Alba Cambó and I met up at ten that morning and went for a spin in the car.’” As a reader, you don’t know who the narrator is. You know nothing about her (him?) other than what’s expressed between Valentino’s dialogue. She goes to school. Valentino gives her a ride. It’s not clear who Valentino is. The focus of his story is Alba Cambó. You don’t know who she is, either. For the next ten pages, Valentino tells a story of major, life changing events that occurred on that ride two weeks ago. The story is exciting. It’s gripping. It’s so interesting that you almost forget that Wolff is giving you no ground to stand on as a reader.
When I read the first chapter, I was fully invested in what Valentino told me about Alba Cambó, fully invested in their lives, but also struggling with this lack of a foundation. Who was “I”, the narrator? Why did she disappear after the first ten pages of her own novel? Why didn’t she respond to anything he said? Why didn’t she interject with her own feelings, her reactions, or even what she saw outside the car window? What was her relationship with Valentino? Why did he feel so comfortable sharing incredibly intimate details with her? Why is Alba so important to both of them? Should I be reading more into this? Do the names matter? Is Valentino supposed to harken romantic notions of a dashing silent film star? Does Alba’s last name carry symbolic weight: cambó, literally, “she bent”?
After a page or two of these questions, I had to make a decision: do I follow this author whom I’ve never heard of into uncharted reading territory or do I abandon this book for something more familiar, more comfortable? I knew that sticking with the novel would require a certain amount of trust. I would have to forego my typical expectations and reading patterns and just go with the flow of this novel. Valentino’s story was interesting enough. The fact that I cared to ask all of these questions so quickly mattered. I trusted Wolff and kept going. It was the right decision.
Part of the joy of this novel lies in all that is unknown. The back cover gives almost no sense of what to expect from the pages within. The title is misleading. It was possible for me to enter into my reading completely in the dark, then wait for Wolff to gradually turn on one light after another. She is a master at this. She controls the information in very compelling ways, giving just enough to intrigue, then letting us get lost in the characters before what’s going to happen happens. She’s so good about revealing the information slowly that I’m hesitant to even review this novel. I’ve already told you too much. You’re better off buying the book and reading it before you read another written here.
And now that I’ve done my due diligence in warning you, I’ll carry on with this review. Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs has nothing to do with Bret Easton Ellis. It’s just the name of a dog that a minor character, Rodrigo, talks about, a dog that the narrator never meets. It came from a brothel where all the dogs are all named after famous authors. Rodrigo buys the dog as part of his plan to repair his deteriorating marriage. If there’s a literary allusion at all, it’s simply that looking toward Bret Easton Ellis isn’t the best way to fix your relationship. This is a warning that you probably don’t need — who looks to Bret Easton Ellis for relationship advice, anyway? In the brothel, the prostitutes feed rotten meat to the dogs when johns are cruel. The back cover tells you as much. Neither are dripping with significance in the novel.
The misdirection continues in the very nature of the novel. It’s written in Swedish and by a Swede, but there are no Swedish characters and no reference to anything Scandinavian. It takes place entirely in Spain and follows Spanish (and one Italian) characters. It would feel Spanish except that the translator is English and he uses English colloquialisms. Araceli’s mother is “Mum,” their apartment is a “flat,” friends are sometimes “mates” and colors are “colours.” All of this adds up to something beautiful and global in the same way that Lee Van Cleef in a Spanish desert that was supposed to be the American West and fighting Italians who were supposed to be Mexicans all made sense in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Once all of these typical expectations are abandoned, you can get to the heart of the novel. Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs follows an eighteen-year-old narrator named Araceli. She lives with her mother in a crumbling two bedroom apartment in Barcelona. Not much is happening in their lives. Araceli attends a school for translation and interpretation even though she has no real talent for this and no real job opportunities on the horizon. Araceli’s mother is a government employee who eschews relationships but enjoys trysts. A short story writer named Alba Cambó moves into the apartment below them. At first, Araceli and her mother are intrigued by Alba from a distance. They buy the magazines that feature her short stories and read them. Gradually, they get to know her and her servant, a central American named Blosom. Alba, Blosom, and Araceli’s mother grow closer. The introduction of Alba’s new love, Valentino, only serves to strengthen their ties. The fact that Alba is dying — which she reveals to Valentino in that opening story of his — enriches their bond. Because she is a generation behind them, Araceli becomes the outcast of the group.
The novel moves forward, meanders, and backtracks through the stories of these women. While Araceli is the narrator and this is ultimately her story, she spends much of the novel in the background. She’s a character we’re familiar with in film: the best friend, the one whom the story is never about, but who shows up at a café to say to the protagonist, “What’s wrong? You haven’t been yourself lately?” At least, Araceli seems to see herself as somehow not worthy of a story all on her own. So Valentino tells his story, Rodrigo tells his, Blosom tells hers, Araceli witnesses the adventures of her mother and her more glamorous best friend and her famous downstairs neighbor, and we even get to read one of Alba’s short stories in a chapter all its own.
This discursive aspect of Bret Easton Ellis is reminiscent of The Savage Detectives. I know that, in about a decade, Roberto Bolaño has gone from obscurity to worldwide fame to the cliché reference point for all Latin American fiction. I don’t mention him lightly or make this comparison in passing. Wolff’s work reflects Bolaño like Haruki Murakami’s The Wild Sheep Chase reflects Raymond Chandler novels. In both cases, authors take something incredibly original and put it into a context so unexpected that the second work is brilliant in its own right. In this case, Wolff has learned something about how to tell a story from Bolaño. The Savage Detectives is revolutionary in the way it chooses to approach protagonists. The reader never gets too close to Ulysses or Arturo. We instead get the stories of everyone who encountered the pair — old friends, passing acquaintances, lovers, editors, enemies. Because we can never see the work of the two poets or read their thoughts or even get a chapter in which they’re the clear cut main characters, we have to reconstruct them in our mind from a series of tangential points. It’s never a clear view. In structuring The Savage Detectives this way, Bolaño touches on something unique to twenty-first-century identity construction. We’re starting to construct our own identities through tangential points — posts crafted to maximize likes, pictures or videos with no context that sometimes vanish after a few seconds, ideas restricted to 140 characters and shaped in hopes of retweets. Bolaño’s Ulysses and Arturo are hidden and guarded because they live the lonely, disconnected, and sometimes passionate lives of artists, not because they’re social media addicts. Regardless, in both cases, identities come to be hyperaware of how they’re viewed from the outside.
Wolff shifts this. Our protagonist is also our first-person narrator. Her hyperawareness of how others view (or more often, ignore) her becomes all the more poignant. She’s not searching for meaning in her life because, clearly, there’s not much hope for that. She’s not sharing much of her internal struggles, her ideas or dreams or feelings, because no one in her life seems interested in hearing them. Those around Araceli are dismissive of her to the point where Araceli seems to guard herself from what’s going on inside. Within this dismissal lies the real feminist power of the novel.
The only stories men will listen to in the novel are Alba’s. She writes dark stories about men who meet humiliating or violent ends. Her longest is about a mysterious place called Caudal. She describes it as the last town on the road to hell. The townspeople are the last remnants of an era on its way to becoming bygone. In many ways, they demonstrate the worst parts of our own personality, kind of a collective id that has forgotten how to have fun. A specter of death hovers over them. The cemetery is the town’s most prominent landmark. A new priest enters the town with hopes of reviving it. The town, instead, destroys him.
Even the men who don’t get humiliated or killed come across poorly in Alba’s stories. Still, men love the stories. Araceli seems to learn something from this. When she tells her own story, she finds way to show men in honest, if humiliating, ways. She lets them lead themselves to their own dark ends. Similarly, like Alba does in her stories, Araceli finds a way to keep the women prominent in the stories. The men can take the lead and carry on to their logical conclusions. The women, in the meantime, learn to operate on the margins. They work together and get stronger through this work. They confront their isolation and nurture one another. They leave situations that feel untenable. They reject patriarchy in blatant and subtle ways. As Araceli grows and changes around these women, she learns to tell her own story. While it may not matter much to the people around her, Araceli’s story matters to Araceli. As you read the novel, it matters to you, too.
I must admit that when Electric Literature presented me with the opportunity to interview subversive master of psychological suspense Peter Straub on the occasion of the release of Interior Darkness: Selected Stories, I was not a little intimidated at the prospect. Not only were Straub’s novels Ghost Story, Koko and The Throat dear to me growing up, but his short stories, which I had never read, elevated him to another level completely. Populated by sociopathic teenagers who turn their siblings into somnambulant puppets, murderous kindergarten teachers who slather themselves in human feces, and wicked barristers who fall headlong into self-made purgatories of psychosexual entrapment, Straub’s stories stopped me in my tracks, often with a chuckling grimace, and forced me to take stock anew of a world I wrongly thought I understood. Nor was my giddy apprehension at interviewing Straub ameliorated by the fact that, even by email, Straub is a fiercely intelligent man with a mordant and suffer-no-fools sense of humor. Over the course of a couple of weeks we struck up a warm and complex repertoire. Some highlights not included here were hypothetical riffs on the fate of a fictional character name Romilley “Bud” Bitterman that Straub invented on the spot, Straub’s continuous stream of self-deprecating yet never self-effacing humor, and Straub’s unapologetic fabrication of a quote by Roland Barthes that he insisted, nonetheless, on including in this interview. Straub is a funny, engaging, quick man, with a dark restless mind, a cantankerous streak, and lacerating self-awareness. I thoroughly enjoyed our talk and fully trust that you will, too.
Adrian Van Young: What struck me foremost in reading these stories was a kind of baroque compression whereby the sentences accrue and pile up on each other in a way that both hides and reveals. Hides, in that each story’s revelatory moment is often surrounded by a cascade of less important moments. Reveals, in that these revelatory moments stand out, in turn, from the less revelatory moments that surround them. Take, for instance, this passage from “Ashputtle,” about an ecstatically degenerate and possibly murderous kindergarten teacher, which comes suddenly in the middle of an otherwise normal paragraph: “How it felt to stand naked and besmeared with my own feces in the front yard, moveless as a statue, the same as all nature, classical.” Can you speak to this tendency in your short fiction in terms of what effect you mean it to have on the reader?
Peter Straub: In general, the kind of sentences you are alluding to have several purposes, or so I fondly think. The simultaneous concealment and revelation demonstrates a sort of aspirational quality, often leaching into outright pomposity, on the part of the speaker. He may be trying to present a more sophisticated, better-educated version of himself, so a bit of comedy is freed to float through the atmosphere. Lots of times, however, this kind of internal contradiction signals an emotional disconnection, which may be so pronounced that the speaker literally has in fact no idea how he feels about his subject matter. The reader is intended, I think, to move wool-gathering along, mildly surprised by the (strictly unnecessary) form of these utterances and now and then amused by some local distraction, perhaps eventually to be concerned by the distance between what is being said and what, if anything, is imagined actually to be felt. A great violence might lay hidden behind what turns out to be a strenuous act of denial. You’re a smart guy, you know that absence always involves or invokes a presence, that strictly speaking absence does not exist. It’s like an empty, self-consuming category, an onstage curtain.
However, the sentence you quote, and the many others like it in “Ashputtle,” have an actual provenance. Their use represents an all-but act of appropriation. Tonally, they actually are pretty much a pure example of appropriation. The same set of exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, of which at the time I was a patron, in which I found the John Baldessari painting titled “Ashputtle” had also displayed, on another floor, a good many abstract paintings by Agnes Martin. I loved the Martin paintings. They were astonishingly serene and meditative in feel. Passages from Martin’s journals had been printed up and distributed throughout the galleries. The passages quoted were all surpassingly calm, wide, unpredictable: they were sentiments like “I am the same as all of nature, classical,” and “The work of art has no responsibility to its audience.” Were I to give such excellent sentiments to the mad, furious Ashputtle just coming into being in my mind, I thought, they would acquire an odd and useful resonance. So I did.
AVY: “The reader is intended… perhaps eventually to be concerned by the distance between what is being said and what, if anything, is imagined actually to be felt.” That’s apt and lovely. Granted, pretty much any first-person narrator is unreliable to some degree, but the first-person narrators in these stories seem particularly unreliable, and then in very specific ways. What is your favorite brand of unreliability in a narrator? How does it factor into the frequent portrayals of madness you undertake in your work?
PS: Hmm. Yes. Well. It is a mire, it is a midden. I guess I begin with the conviction that very nearly everyone, well, at least 75–80% of our population, anyhow, serves as its own unreliable narrators — that one’s truest, deepest motives lie locked within a lead-lined tray in a locked lead-lined chamber buried within a locked lead-lined vault deep at the back of a sub-basement beneath a windowless stone fortress guarded by savage dogs and surly, pissed-off deaf mutes. Of this wretched condition, which condemns us to an ongoing emotional ignorance, we remain of course, guess what, happily ignorant, convinced that we are savvy characters with very good ideas of what we are about. For many, a mingled dread and terror, thoroughly repressed, becomes a constant though silent and invisible companion, so close at hand as now and then to be experienced, in fleeting dimply perceived though poignantly experienced moments, as an ally. All of this is the case before we take even a single step past the front door, before we turn the key in the ignition. Once we are outside and moving through the world, we bounce off other people as misguided as ourselves. Deeply hidden plots collide or collude with other motivic and thematic switchbacks hidden no less deeply. Madness can beckon very easily from this situation; the confusion level is positively toxic, and what keeps us out of trouble is chiefly good will and whatever intelligence we can summon from the murk.
I overstate, but not by much.
AVY: You say that, “…what keeps us out of trouble is chiefly good will and whatever intelligence we can summon from the murk.” Granted, you’re referencing real-life here, which has no bearing on fiction, necessarily, but all the same these stories are fairly bleak. In “Blue Rose,” for example, it would seem that the protagonist is aware of the heinousness of his actions toward his little brother and continues on with his life determined to do better — and yet, he only glancingly acknowledges his complicity — indeed, his instrumentality — in what happened. The story concludes on a sinister note. Do you see that kind of redemption through acts of good will and intelligence as available to your characters in these stories?
PS: Real life has no bearing on fiction? Is that what one learns in the theory-academies these days? I am baffled, profoundly. Somewhere in Writing Degree Zero, maybe some other book actually but I don’t think so, doesn’t Roland Barthes — you may find him a bit sketchy, and I understand completely, but I’ve always liked his way around a Dingan sich — say something very like, “As if addressing an intimate friend, one says to the world, ‘The luxury, richness, and amplitude of narrative cannot but derive in the first instance to its relationship, that of connective tissue and torn newspaper hoardings, between itself and the world in which it is given us?’” Probably I do not really understand that sentiment, but it has always reminded me of the conviction I’ve held for years and is by now very dear to me, that Fiction IS Life. Without fiction, a condition in fact unthinkable because impossible, whatever we would call life would be barren, sterile, without memory or enduring emotion, tasteless, like death. Also, and this is really a side issue but at least quite an important one, it is always true that fiction has deep designs on life. It wishes to replace life. I can tell you, it certainly wishes to replace mine. Fiction wants to worm its way into my every memory, even the little desiccated rags and scraps, and stake its claim there, it wants to pitch camp and colonize all the surrounding territory. That’s its god-damned JOB!
Bleakness is really okay with me, you know.
Being sociopathic and without much internal life beyond fear and desire, even in childhood Beevers is way farther along the path toward fiction (Fiction) than most of us. He’s sort of like a tiny, directionless, blocked John Updike, a little Updike without the resources of Shillington and Harvard and Berks County. Harry is bereft of good will, except at times when it seems instrumental and he can display an imitation so flawless it would dupe Mother Theresa and Jacques Lacan, but intelligence is always available to him. Redemption is a meaningless concept to Beevers at any age in his life. Whatever he writes his girlfriend about his little brother and his father is false, actorly, feigned. Bleakness is really okay with me, you know.
AVY: That’s my kind of outlook! And, apropos of the fiction/life discussion: “it is always true that fiction has deep designs on life. It wishes to replace it.” I like that too. I suppose what I mean is that verisimilitude in fiction has always seemed like a false dichotomy to me — that fiction is in some way obligated to reflect the world as it really is. “Relatable” has become such a buzzword these days when it comes to how people connect to narrative in a way that seems antithetical to that signal aim of fiction you cite: “[replacing] life.” Sometimes, the best narratives are profoundly un-relatable to the average person; indeed, many of the narratives in Interior Darkness are. That said, several of the stories in this collection are also deeply experimental, which I was surprised to find given how much commercial success you’ve had as a novelist. Can you discuss the relationship between experimentation and more traditional narrative aims in your fiction? Is there something about the short story that allows you to more fully exercise the former?
PS: I suppose the “relatable” and the “immersive” exist not only side by side but are also holding hands, and both apart and together represent a really satisfying narrative stance. Readerly safety, comfort, security are taken care of; the reader drops her hands, lets her oars drift in the water, and closes her eyes, knowing that her little boat will veer well away from the rapids. For a long time, Stephen King, whom I love as a person and as a writer, attracted readers who understood this as it were Prudential contract to be the only valid relationship between narrative and its audience. Anything that jolted them out of the frame, anything that forced them to notice the very process in which they were so happily engrossed, was experienced as an offense against the act of reading. I guess my doubts about the totality of this project began to come into being after I moved back from London to the U.S. in 1979, started spending a lot of time with my friend the poet Ann Lauterbach, and through her met the poet Charles Bernstein and the novelist and editor Bradford Morrow. None of these people had any real interest in the total immersion school of narrative method. The more time I spent with them, the more limiting I, too, came to find it. I did not want to blow my readers out of the water, but neither did I wish to continue perpetuating a system in which all they felt and understood was what I, their concealed and paternalistic guide and tour director, arrayed before them.
Oh, they were all dead; oh, so HE’s the vampire; hey, that little boy is God! Okay, cool, what else you got in that box?
Without quite being aware that this was what I was doing, I began to loosen the bolts and rattle the floorboards by taking the same crucial bits of character detail — what had been done to whom — and assigning them to different people from novel to novel. So and so grew up at a certain address in Book X; in book Y, another person is given the same address. His life both chimes and does not with the life of the character from the previous book. Traumas were distributed the same way, as if by an amnesiac or indifferent author. Doing these things allowed me to destabilize narrative without damaging the traditional integrity of individual novels. (Much later, Ann Lauterbach’s description of the “whole fragment” helped me clarify this kind of procedure — I mean, to clarify it to myself.) In shorter fiction, with which I was a lot less comfortable/familiar, it was a lot easier to conduct my experiments in plain view: the conventional genre short story, almost always dependent upon a sort of reversal of a conventional polarity, never did strike me as very compelling. Oh, they were all dead; oh, so HE’s the vampire; hey, that little boy is God! Okay, cool, what else you got in that box? I just took it as part of the essential procedure that all bets were off, that you could do anything you felt like, could suppress, heighten, distend, flatten, aerate, amplify as you liked. It is worth remarking that ninety per cent of my short fiction has been published in Brad Morrow’s intrepid journal, Conjunctions, where it rubs up against fiction by writers like William Gass, William Burroughs, John Barth, Brian Evenson, and Rick Moody.
AVY: That’s quite an array of company in Conjunctions. I see the influence of those I’m most familiar with in your work — especially Evenson, Gass and Burroughs. That said, when I was reading this collection I was reminded of nothing so much as the early work of Ian McEwan (First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets), specifically in the way he examines aberrant sexuality and rampant psychosis in this very cool, clinical light. I’m wondering: who are some other authors who have exerted the firehose pressure that we call influence on your work over the years? Who are some in more recent years that you’ve come to admire?
PS: I did always like the amazing writing of those early McEwan stories, and in fact kept on reading and admiring him right along. English novelists have always been very important to me. I liked the tone, the assurance, the implication that the whole central business was going to be taken care of really well, without fireworks or embarrassing displays of self-admiration. I’m speaking of Trollope, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Iris Murdoch, A S Byatt, Kingsley Amis, Muriel Spark. Of all these writers, Murdoch was far and away the greatest influence on me, especially in The Bell, The Unicorn, The Black Prince, The Nice and The Good. So was John Le Carre, in another way, especially in Tinker, Tailor and The Perfect Spy. Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet was also a huge influence on my work, both technically and emotionally. Henry James took up a lot of real estate in my mind, and the same is true of Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and John Gardner. I will describe the astonishing virtues and achievements of Donald Harington to anyone capable of listening to me for at least an hour. From when I first read him at the end of the seventies, Stephen King taught me a great deal, and he is still doing do. Newer writers I like a lot are Laird Barron, John Langan, Joe Hill, Caitlin Kiernan. Roberto Bolano has opened my eyes to a great deal, also the intrepid Laszlo Krasznahorkai. I think John Crowley is in a class by himself, of which he is naturally President. Once every decade or so, I reread The Ambassadors and marvel at the beauty of James’s language and technique.
AVY: That’s an estimable and in some ways surprising list. I’m especially interested in your mention of people like George Eliot, A S Byatt and Henry James. Partly due to literary-historical context and partly due to innate stylistic tendencies, these are all what I would call maximalist writers; they revel in the ornate, not only on the sentence level but also when it comes to things like structure, scope, characterization. Reading this collection all at once I was struck as though for the first time by what a gloriously ornate stylist you can be when you put your mind to it. I’m thinking specifically of stories like “Ashputtle” and “Mr. Cuff and Mr. Clubb,” and I’m wondering: is there a part of you that identifies as such a stylist? In a culture that increasingly values the “hot take” and defaults to terseness in its storytelling, what do you believe to be value of having an ornate and, some might even say, challenging style?
PS: When younger, by which I mean before I turned forty, I took an excessive amount of pride in the ornate lyrical complications of my own style. Not long after that spine-stiffening birthday, which I spent largely in a Westport, CT, riverfront bar called The Black Duck, I happened to notice that the style with which I had been so pleased had somehow softened up and run to fat and flab. Nuts to pride, it required a lot more discipline and attentiveness simply to be worthy of reading. I began to work toward a real transparency of style, and the word “work” in this sentence is not an over-statement. I wanted to get out of my own way, but even more than that to get out of the reader’s — to be as presentational as possible, as invisible as I could be while I went about doing my work. I worked this way for years, for at least a decade, without adjusting the formula.
Then I wrote a story called “Hunger: an Introduction,” not included in my Selected Stories, in which I wanted to release another kind of voice altogether, one more ornate, wilder, also more diffuse and pompous, a show-offy voice that demonstrated the aspirations, pretensions, self-satisfactions, and internal insecurities of the man producing it: a man who instead of “ratty” or “ratlike” would say “rodentine.” This was the origin of the style you admire. It began as an elaborate joke. In part because this sort of style was so absolutely different from the voice I began to evolve after I turned forty, it was very enjoyable to write — it was like a kind of holiday from responsibility, an invitation to have fun.
You will notice that in “Ashputtle” and “Clubb and Cuff” this more ornate style is still presented as the voice of specific characters and represents those characters’ evasions of various kinds. However, by the time I came to “Clubb and Cuff,” it no longer seemed merely the demonstration of evasiveness and pretension, but a valid method for presenting a more complex emotional style, a way of dealing with feelings. The revelations no longer needed to be purely unconscious, but a matter of individual will and intellect. It was still fun, but fun of a more exploratory nature. It felt to me like the opening of a room that had always been there but had been overlooked and passed by for a long time — entrance to the room seemed almost a bit dangerous, because in violation of orders that I had taken as my own decades earlier. Yet once I walked (burst) in, I learned that I was not at all damaging myself, but actually sort of expanding myself, not least into a variety of humor that I had been polishing in emails for maybe twenty years. Somewhere in the back of my mind as I write these sentences is the shade of Nabokov, the patron saint of so much American writing, especially in its maximalist and more self-consciously elevated modes.
AVY: Can we switch “rodentine” and “ornate” altogether? Transparency has its trade-offs, sure, but so do “ornate lyrical complications.” I wonder all the same though if it isn’t more rewarding for one to encounter a beautiful mess than a calibrated calibrated masterwork with monumental purpose. What beautiful messes do you most prefer?
I’m curious what you are working on now. Care to elaborate? What’s the new business?
PS: Here are some books, in part or altogether beautiful messes, that I like a lot.
Under the Volcano: Malcolm Lowry wrote his editor at Jonathan Cape a letter of more than twenty pages that justified and explained every square inch of this big, sprawling novel, a sure sign that it contains some substantial messiness. You don’t try that hard unless the wind is whistling down the back of your shirt.
Gravity’s Rainbow: Brilliant, sure, Pynchon always is, but too exuberant and unbuttoned to be anything but a bit of a mess.
The Tidewater Tales: John Barth’s great novel is straining against its own boundaries at every step. A deft, brainy, deeply felt exhilaration.
Women in Love: I think this is DH Lawrence’s absolutely greatest novel, really elevated by its sense of yearning to demolish both the conventions of fiction and its own limits.
These days and for maybe three years now I work away, when permitted by health and hospitals, on a long strange novel called Hello Jack. Jack the Ripper is invoked by a devoted admirer. The fifth-richest woman in America murders her dying husband. A black, retired homicide detective works as a private chauffeur, in which capacity he does a lot of good. Over various iterations of a very odd repeated story, the dead walk again, the young age hideously, and both seem exhausted by the effort. Henry James pops up, thinking hard, as does the 12-year-old Aleister Crowley. There’s a weird painting, but no one can figure it out.
Believe it or not, Fifty Shades of Grey and the Bible have wound up on the same book list: the American Library Association’s “Top Ten Most Frequently Challenged” books of 2015. John Green’s Looking for Alaska tops the list, which identifies the books — including nonfiction and picture books — that were most frequently recommended for censorship last year.
Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
The Holy Bible
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Habibi by Craig Thompson
Nasreen’s Secret School: A True Story from Afghanistan by Jeanette Winter
Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan
OIF bases its rankings on “anecdotal data derived from media stories and voluntary reports sent to OIF about book challenges in communities across the United States.” The organization defines a “challenge” as “a formal, written complaint, filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.” OIF estimates that “for every reported challenge, four or five remain unreported.”
The most common reasons for the 2015 book challenges include “unsuited for age group,” “religious viewpoint,” “homosexuality,” “offensive language,” and “sexually explicit.” Fifty Shades of Grey fell victim to censorship due to concerns that it’s “poorly written,” and that “a group of teenagers will want to try it.” People objected to Two Boys Kissing because it involves homosexuality and “condones public displays of affection.”
The “religious viewpoint” challenge had a number of different applications. People challenged The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, for instance, because of its “atheism.” NPR reports that a Florida parent challenged Nasreen’s Secret School: A True Story from Afghanistan out of fear that it would “indoctrinat[e] children with Muslim beliefs.” Deborah Caldwell Stone–deputy director of OIF–told NPR that people challenged the Bible, which appears on the list for the first time this year, based “on the mistaken perception that separation of church and state means publicly funded institutions are not allowed to spend funds on religious information.”
OIF publishes its annual list of challenged books to promote the freedom of information in libraries and schools, and to remind the public that “censorship is still a very serious problem.” “In an ideal world we would have more tolerance for the idea that people have different ideas, different beliefs and live in different cultures,” Stone told NPR. “Books are a way of exploring these different worlds and can help us appreciate the differences between us.”
Francesca Woodman was a late 20th century American photographer known for her dramatically staged black and white self-portraits. She started photographing at the age of 13 and produced an astoundingly large and diverse body of work before committing suicide at the age of 22.
I.
In the first Manifesto of Surrealism, Andre Breton lays out the heritage for his movement by retroactively claiming the great authors of the past were channeling his ideas: “Swift is Surrealist in malice,” “Reverdy is Surrealist at home,” and, my personal favorite, “Hugo is Surrealist when he isn’t stupid.” The absurdity of this is not unlike my mother’s claim that the one poem she wrote in middle school — “I see myself an old man now / with wrinkles deep across my brow” — is the wellspring for any poetic talents I might now be able to claim.
Woodman had a similar relationship to drugs. She was “already out there” when she was sober.
Breton goes on to point out that these artists are not always Surrealists, that there is some impurity in their thinking, namely forethought, that prevents them from accessing the unconscious for any extended amount of time. Rimbaud is the one person on his list that comes closest though; “[he] is Surrealist in the way he lived, and elsewhere.” His decision to bathe around twice a year, his endless experiments in absinthe and knife fighting, his defecating on a café table to show what he thought of impasto, all of these are swept under the Surrealist rug. Breton, though, was adamant that drugs were not to be involved in his movement; the drunkenness was to be totally induced from within.
According to Woodman’s good friend Betsy Berne, the photographer had a similar relationship to drugs. She was “already out there” when she was sober. Nevertheless, the link that many draw between her and her Surrealist predecessors is overstated, and her work is best appreciated in her own austere light. There is a feminist restraint, a cold eye, to her work that is totally unlike anything they produced. The only persuasive link between her and them is through Rimbaud, the proto-Surrealist, whose life and precocious mental faculties mirror her artistic arc and downfall more than any of Breton’s cronies or excommunicated cronies.
II.
Woodman famously produced all of her work by the age of 22 when she leapt to her death from a loft window, leaving behind over 800 prints and 10,000 negatives (her father believes the catalyst for this final act was a failed application for an NEA grant). All the poetry Rimbaud would ever write was produced before he turned 21 and ran off to Africa to deal in guns and coffee. He came to completely loathe the European continent and lifestyle, but couldn’t stop himself from ironically becoming its ambassador. Besides the obvious prodigy connection, they are bound together by their mutual insistence that they weren’t receiving proper recognition in their time even though they were still babes at the time of their departures from art. They, too, like my mother and T.S. Eliot, saw themselves as elderly and improperly laurelled from the onset. No doubt this is due to their high level of passion mixed with self-criticism at such early ages. Rimbaud continuously tills over his own pronouncements, at one moment claiming he alone holds the key to all invention, and at the next saying he’s going to bury his imagination forever. Woodman’s self-portraits, the first of which appeared at the age of thirteen, can similarly turn from celebration of the body to degradation, from portraying herself as an angel, to displaying herself unconscious in a glass case of hissing taxidermy raccoons.
Woodman’s self-portraits, the first of which appeared at the age of thirteen, can similarly turn from celebration of the body to degradation, from portraying herself as an angel, to displaying herself unconscious in a glass case of hissing taxidermy raccoons.
Their inner critics, though pitched to the same volume, were of two different natures due to their differing childhoods. Rimbaud came from a provincial background he would later describes as of “pagan blood” (although his mother was strict with him when it came to schooling and moved the family out of a neighborhood she considered poor), while Woodman was the child of two well-off, moderately successful artists who set the standards for her achievements. In Rimbaud’s work his wretchedness can always be attributed to his upbringing or to the French society that tried to shape him, and eventually succeeded in turning him into a colonial capitalist. Much of this is played out in ASeason in Hell, “The pagan blood returns! The Spirit is near; why doesn’t Christ help me, by giving my soul nobility and freedom. Alas! The Gospel has passed by! The Gospel! The Gospel.” In typical Rimbaud fashion, even the request for aid is both sincere and sarcastic. He doesn’t believe in the Gospel in the slightest; these are merely the only terms he’s inherited for salvation.
There was no world to turn against, only a world to turn into, and so when the breaking point comes for her, society is absolved of its sins.
Woodman, however, never finds comfort in blaming the world at large for her problems. Because of her parents, her life from a young age was spent in expression, visiting the Uffizi to sketch masterpieces, discovering photography. There was no world to turn against, only a world to turn into, and so when the breaking point comes for her, society is absolved of its sins. She does thoroughly examine the “male gaze,” but her work is too insular and claustrophobic and Puritanically austere for the frame to fully believe in societal forces beyond her control. She brings everything under her control. In fact, if I had to play Breton’s game of assignment with Woodman, I’d say her consistent staging of tableaux vivants makes her a “Surrealist in forethought,” a contradiction in his eyes, but he was so fond of contradictions and paradoxes that it might be most apt. Here, too, her reasoning powers are aligned with Rimbaud who believed poetry was the result of a “rational derangement of all the senses.”
III.
Not only is she more aligned with critical aspects of Rimbaud, as mentioned, her link to the Surrealists is tenuous, though she did admittedly admire the interplay between text and photography in Breton’s Nadja, and her props — the mirrors, gloves, masks, and occasional stuffed animals — were all favored by Surrealist predecessors. In many of her photos she’s transubstantiating her inheritance with her body. She presents a direct challenge to the Surrealist’s He-man Woman Haters Club (and a challenge to their extreme fondness for transforming anything and everything into glass).
The uncanny anxiety I experience when looking at her work makes me feel as though no one is watching nor should they be.
Take for example the series A woman. A mirror. A woman is a mirror for a man. The literal looking glass in question is a wide cheval mirror that barely rises to Woodman’s navel, the kind of height and width appropriate only for pre-teen conjoined twins. There are circular dust marks smeared across it as though it had been cleaned previously with a dirty rag. In the first frame she appears nude kissing the butt of a cat that’s jumping off and away from her (this cat presages some of her own animalistic movements to come). The room itself is in flux between an abandoned factory and an artist’s studio converted from an abandoned factory. On the ground there is a three-cubby cupboard whose mosaic frame is seemingly composed of mirrors. There’s one frame of a floor to ceiling window in the far right of the shot, which one would normally associate with voyeurism except the factory across the way looks just as dead as the one Woodman is occupying. And, because Woodman is both classic nude model and photographer, the picture itself lacks a traditional maker/voyeur. The uncanny anxiety I experience when looking at her work makes me feel as though no one is watching nor should they be. When I step behind that vacant camera to view a print, instead of filling the role of maker she’s left empty, I feel my ego float away and pass its control totally and solely down to my eyes.
The technique and set-up of this first photo also plays with metaphysics in another way. The factory space is distorted due to the long exposure time, the high contrast, and the tilt of the cheval mirror. It’s almost entirely implausible that its reflection belongs to this room (the far window appears shrunken, whited-out, and oblique, that’s our one clue, so at best it’s a funhouse mirror). There is something of the fairy-tale then in this first picture that intrudes, the link to another space, a wardrobe offering the escape to elsewhere. The second photo in the series comes as a shock then, when Woodman grabs the mirror, looks into it, and the door to elsewhere swings shut with her tenderly distorted face. Her body and hands threaten to bring the mirror down to the horizontal so she can fully transform into Caravaggio’s Narcissus (a self-critique on her many self-portraits as well a reminder that our prototype for vanity is a man). The light streaming down from the window casts a shadow that belongs to Woodman’s mirror-self, whereas her corporeal shadow is nowhere. So, not only has this elsewhere been cut off, the mirror has been given a reality that the room and the body lack.
In the third picture of the series, the camera shifts in and to the right of its previous location. We are given a better sight of the large industrial windows and now Woodman is holding a glass frame, facing the camera. Nothing from our side of the view is reflected in the glass she’s holding, and it can only really be made out because of its edges and its scratches and a stray piece of tape failing at translucency. The photo is almost wholly taken over by reflective surfaces, mostly surfaces that can also be seen through. The right side of her face is totally obscured by shadow and the left is obscured because of the long exposure. Behind her, the mirror appears threateningly darker than the room it’s reflecting and the contrast reminds me of a section of Louis Aragon’s post-Surrealist poem “Elsa at the Mirror”, translated here by George Dillon: “Her dark glass was the world’s facsimile / Her comb, parting the fires of that silken mass, / Lit up the corners of my memory.” The reflection of Woodman’s mirror, as in the first parts of the series, seems to be misremembering the room it’s currently in.
The meaning of the glass frame becomes apparent in the last print. Here Woodman is trying to mount herself to the cheval mirror, to literalize the metaphor of the title. Unlike another untitled photo from this same time period in Providence, the frame isn’t disfiguring her just yet. Her animalistic movements suggest we are looking at the reflection of the spirit trying to yoke itself. Since this is the last in this series, everything that is implied by this act remains for the imagination to fill in, the struggle and disfigurement and impossibility, while here we see a portion of her body “framed” by the glass, another “framed” by the mirror, and the whole “framed” by the limits of the actual photo. Woodman shows us through this excessive framing as well as through the discreteness of the series that the body is never considered “in the round”; she forces us to consider that the images reflected on our retinas are two-dimensional no matter how spherical our eyes appear to be. This effect is reinforced by the small size of the original prints; at only 5 and 3/4” by 5 and 3/4”, they force you to confront the intimacy and flatness of your own experience.
The body is never considered “in the round”; she forces us to consider that the images reflected on our retinas are two-dimensional no matter how spherical our eyes appear to be.
IV.
One reason why this work and many of her other photos resonate so deeply is that their claustrophobic atmospheres, their blurred or obscured faces, recall certain strains of dreams and nightmares that evaporate just as their reality is about to be proven dubious. In my own, there is always something imminent occurring, a tornado absent-mindedly picking up a little girl, a deranged man holding a knife holding my reflection, and always my body is unmoving, but attempting to scream, as if noise alone could stop whatever is occurring and pierce the veil of Maya. I’m never able to speak anything more than clipped words, which sound like panting to my significant other whenever I wake her and myself up. In my head the words have endings, but on my tongue they’re reduced to unorganized air.
…her other photos resonate so deeply is that their claustrophobic atmospheres, their blurred or obscured faces, recall certain strains of dreams and nightmares that evaporate just as their reality is about to be proven dubious.
The analysis of these dreams is easy enough. They’re linked to my own feelings of poetic self-criticism and my inability to speak without first bending each word to my will, exerting a Woodman-like control over my environment. It’s impossible for me to stop wanting to individualize each thought enough so that it’s sincere, to process my feelings to such a degree that they wind up feeling genuine, so that I can place them back into the body where they started. Woodman and Rimbaud’s mission is similarly visceral and embodied. In Rimbaud’s “Genie” for example, he invents a new god to clear out the terror of the morality of the past and the suffering of Christian guilt; this outdated morality is replaced with “the clear song of new misfortunes!” Later he intones that we should “follow his seeing, his breathing, his body, his day.” Because Christ’s sufferings were so tied to his corporality, he can only be replaced by a figure who incarnates the new misfortunes of modernity. The only consolation we’re left with is clarity, and if this clarity of feeling is indeed the new god, then Woodman, through obfuscation and reflection and the fog of long-exposure, is as clear as it gets.
Crabby and Albina the albino giantess leave town on a bicycle built for two after drugging the corrupt and lecherous policeman Drumfoot, who is now dangerously transformed by a bite from Albina. While disturbed by the violence they’ve witnessed, the new companion they rescue might change their cynical idea of men.
Crabby pedaled in the forward seat. Albina, behind, moving her enormous legs automatically without holding onto the handlebars, was writing in her notebook: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I do know with whom I’m going. I don’t know where I am, but I do know that I’m here. I don’t know what I am, but I do know how I feel. I don’t know what I’m worth, but I do know not to compare myself to anyone else. I don’t know how to dodge punches, but I do know how to withstand them. I don’t know how to win, but I do know how to escape. I don’t know what the world is, but I do know that it’s mine. I don’t know what I want, but I do know that what I want wants me.”
In that manner, they reached the outskirts of Iquique. The fishmeal factories appeared, covered by a thick layer of café-con-leche colored dust and vomiting thick smoke that slithered up through the chimneys and down to the ground, where they threw down roots and stuck. Rotten meat, acrid excrement, fermented guts — the stench passed through their pores, infected their blood, and tried to infect their souls. Crabby made Albina sit up front and pedaled behind her, sinking her nose into Albina’s wide back. The pestilence was like the mass of demons born from Crabby’s intestines, and the fragrance that emanated from Albina’s white skin, the redemption of the world. Barely breathing, they covered twelve more miles.
After a steep hill, the ocean appeared, sending its salty aroma toward the flank of the mountain, which, under that extended caress, responded with a thousand perfumes from its ochre earth. “Let’s stop to enjoy the pure air and to eat a bit. Just look, Albina, all I have to do is stroll among the rocks on the shore for the crabs to come to me.” Which was exactly the case; hundreds of crustaceans came out of the cracks and began to follow Crabby. It was easy to catch a couple, open them up, roast them on a red-hot stone, and devour them. All the while crabs never stopped rubbing against the legs of the woman they considered their Universal Mother.
A ray of lunar light passed through the keyhole and hit Drumfoot’s forehead. He awakened without realizing he was naked, and lifted the leg with his normal foot to scratch himself behind the ear. Then he went into the kitchen and lapped up the water in the washbasin. Since the door resisted his shoves, he pulled up some of the floorboards and used his hands to dig into the clayish soil and make a hole to get out. He howled at the waning moon and set out, bent over, sniffing the road. “Mmm… they stopped here and placed their feet right on this spot… mmm!… they peed here and… mmm!” He rolled around in Albina’s excrement, panting with pleasure.
Some soldiers on coastal patrol found him that way, naked and carrying out that fetid act. After giving him a good thrashing, paying no attention to his heartrending barks, they dragged him off to the police station. After two days, he got his mind back. The bite on his shoulder had healed, leaving a violet, half-moon shaped scar. “Those witches will get what they deserve!” Drumfoot spent hours sharpening his knife.
The narrow road built by the Incas along the ridge seemed to float over the abyss. Far below, the waves, transformed into gigantic foamy lips, called to them, insidiously sucking. Luckily, the landscape flattened out little by little, and the path was swallowed up by the dunes on a beach. Albina stripped, ran over the hot sand, and plunged into the glacial water. Crabby followed her, fully dressed. They swam, frolicked, ate clams, and drank the little water they had left, knowing that if they didn’t find a town soon, thirst would swell their tongues.
Original illustrations for ALBINA AND THE DOG-MEN by François Boucq, courtesy of Restless Books
Twelve bowlers floated out of a creek followed by top hats, pith helmets, military caps, pork pie hats, Panama hats, and a huge variety of hats with upturned brims. The tide was carrying them to the shore like an armada of fragile little boats. The intrigued women climbed the rocky wall. On a narrow beach, a small man — he had no visible deformity, so he couldn’t be called a dwarf — surrounded by empty hatboxes was staring out to sea. As they watched he burst into high-pitched laughter, ran toward the high waves, and let himself be carried away, beginning to drown in those convulsing waters.
Albina dove in. Swimming vigorously, she reached the desperate man, knocked him cold with a punch to the jaw, and floated him to the beach. Crabby shouted in a rage, “Why did you bother to risk your life? You should have let him carry out his destiny! He may be small, but he is a man, and one less man in the world is a good thing!” The drowned man opened his eyes, and with an amiable smile said to Crabby, “Madam, perhaps my destiny was to be saved by your friend here, or, even better, perhaps I’m here so that your destiny can be carried out. The plans of mystery contain multiple paths. But I see you have eaten clams! Allow me to translate what these scattered shells mean.” And the little man examined the remains.
“The white lady, who has fled from a temple — I don’t know if she transmits a blessing or a curse. She’s something less or something more than human. With regard to you, Madam Anger, it seems you hate men because you see them as identical to your father, a thin, tall, dead man who was a callous remover by profession. Since I am the opposite of him, a pudgy, living, short man, a hat maker by profession, you may accept me as a partner without a second thought.”
“As a partner? You’re raving mad!”
“Wait a second, let me go on interrogating my clams. A dangerous enemy is chasing you. One of you dances, and the other manages her. You’re looking for a tranquil place to set yourselves up. Now I appear. About a mile from here, in a ravine near the Camarones River — not much of a river, true, but more than welcome in these sandy territories — is my town, Camiña. A little-known place because the highway is far away from it and you can only get there on foot or by mule. About forty years ago, miners loaded with silver from the Chanabaya mine came to town. My father sold them all kinds of hats, because they wanted to look elegant for the prostitutes working in the saloons. But the silver veins gave out, the miners went off to other regions, and the whores followed them. I inherited an enormous shop filled with bowlers, wide-brimmed, narrow-brimmed, and pork-pie hats opening their felt jaws hungry for heads. Those mute complaints drove me to despair. With no other profession than this useless hat-making business and forced by my stature to have no wife, sick with boredom, I decided to bury myself in the sea along with my little felt brothers. But as you two may see, I have a different destiny. Come with me, I’ll give you everything I have, a magnificent shop in the center of town! There you can set up, as the clam shells tell me, the café-temple you want!”
Original illustrations for ALBINA AND THE DOG-MEN by François Boucq, courtesy of Restless Books
Hiding a smile under her severe face, Crabby looked over at Albina, certain she’d burst into a crystalline laugh of approval. The little man was offering them exactly what they had been seeking but had no hope of ever finding, convinced they could only locate it in an unreachable future. But perhaps because the day ended so brusquely, devoured in one bite by the full moon, Albina tensed her muscles to the point that her white skin turned garnet red, showed her teeth, as if all of them were canines, and stuck out a hard, black tongue. Leaping like a wild beast, she snatched the hat maker, wrapped him in a rib-smashing embrace, pulled off his clothes, rubbed her body with his as if the poor man were a sponge, and bit him on the left shoulder, pulling off a piece of flesh she swallowed with delight. Squealing with a sensual pleasure that filled her stomach with waves, she sat down, foaming at the mouth, and recited for hours incomprehensible words: “Bhavan abhavan iti yah prajanate… sa sarvabhavesu na jatu sañjate…” Crabby, always wearing her severe mask, swallowing her astonishment (she considered that with regard to Albina’s unsoundable mysteries it was just better to let them pass, perhaps like divine serpents), picked up the hat maker’s torn clothing, took needle and thread out of her pocket, and with the precision of a sailor sewed everything back together. The hat maker, almost stiff, sometimes emitted small barks or wiggled his backside as if wagging an invisible tail. Soon the sun came up. No sooner did the first ray of light caress her face than Albina, even though she hadn’t slept, seemed to awaken from a deep sleep. Pale once again, she made a small cry of sympathy and went to the hat maker, who was still in a faint, and licked his shoulder. The wound closed in a few seconds and became a violet half moon.
While Albina recovered from her attack by breathing in the sea air and waving her arms like a giant albatross, Crabby dressed their new friend. When she put on his trousers, she surprised herself examining with pleasure that short, large-headed pink penis arising humbly from a clenched scrotum grooved with wrinkles ordered like an ancient labyrinth. It enraged her to admire that sublime and grotesque appendage. She smacked him on the back, and barely had he blinked when she said incisively, “Seeing is believing, John Doe. If your worship says we three are knotted into the same destiny, let’s not make a habit of rejection, and let’s accept that Camiña awaits us. But before we take the first step along that fatal path, please be so kind as to tell us your name — that is, if you have one. I for one don’t go beyond my nickname. Crabby, at your service. My friend, in accord with her pigmentation, is named Albina.”
“Madam Crabby, Miss Albina, for many years now I’ve been called Hat Maker. Even so, I must confess — overwhelmed by shame, since it is a ridiculous injustice — that I was baptized Amado, because my last name, perhaps of Italian origin, is Dellarosa. So I am ‘beloved by the woman who is a rose!’ How’s that for a lie?” And the little man began to weep. Crabby spit violently toward the parched hills so that she wouldn’t feel the knot in her throat.
In that dried out valley, where the earth was a hard shell covered by a pattern of angular cracks, Amado Dellarosa guided them for hours along a steep path that went forward, backward, twisted left, then after a very long curve, went right, straightened out and again went forward, repeating the same movements again and again, hundreds of times. Crabby shook her head trying to banish an impertinent thought: this capricious path was a labyrinth that resembled in every detail the wrinkles on the little man’s scrotum. Albina, perhaps affected by rays of the sun drilling into her skull, began to repeat obsessively a single sentence: “Seek in the root the future flower.” Finally they entered a grand plateau surrounded by mountains: Camiña.
Original illustrations for ALBINA AND THE DOG-MEN by François Boucq, courtesy of Restless Books
The town consisted of an extensive circle of wooden houses built around a plaza where grew four enormous cypresses whose trunks were studded with woody eyes, making them look like a nest of ghosts. No living person or animal was visible. No breeze shook the spiny branches, no curtain waved, no fly buzzed. Everything looked clean, dry, immobile, and silent.
“Dear friends, don’t think my town is a cemetery. After twelve o’clock noon it’s so hot that all inhabitants, along with their pets, retreat to the penumbra of home and take a seven-hour siesta. For their part, the wild animals dig tunnels under the desert plain so they can let the heat pass while in narrow but cool grottoes. Believe me, King Sol hits so hard in these parts that the mosquitoes die in midair. Later in the afternoon, when the temperature becomes agreeable, the businesses still functioning — barbershop, billiard hall, grocery store, herb shop — open their doors while the townspeople stroll the ring-street, men in one direction and women in the other, doing nothing else but staring at one another and saying hello. Nothing extraordinary ever happens here. When the Chanabaya mine closed down and the miners left, the Lady, along with her whores, went off after them. By some miracle, she forgot us. For a long time now, no one has died in Camiña. Old folks, when they’re informed they have to give up and yield their spot to someone new, go to live in the abandoned mine tunnels, a charnel house that goes on for miles toward the very entrails of the earth. We know they’re still alive because from time to time they form a chorus and sing old love songs. It seems — though no one has proven it, as we’re all scared to death of even going near the mine — that they eat the red clay that covers the walls. As for us, we’ve learned to survive by keeping bees from the pampa. It’s a rare species, peaceful up to a point. If you approach them on tiptoe, fine, but if someone approaches planting his entire foot on the ground, they sting him without pity and he falls into a coma, transformed into a mass of rashes. For lack of flowers, these worker bees suck the juice of sea algae and make a delicious, salty honey. As you can see, the roofs of all the houses are covered with hives. Pinco, the deaf mute, transports our product to Arica on burros. The tourists just love it, and the money we get from sales allows us to survive. We are bored, yes, but in a certain way we secretly enjoy the fact that we have at our disposal an apparently infinite amount of time. You must understand that lacking any end changes your mentality. The urgency to do things disappears; idleness, once a sin, has become a virtue. The present moment stops causing trouble and offers us its unconcerned calm. Hope, because it’s unnecessary, is expelled from our souls along with fear. Since we all have the security of living, the only thing we long for is to sleep and find the opium that is pleasant dreams. Solitary pleasure is preferred rather than bothersome coitus. Seduction, lacking a mortal anguish to exacerbate it, becomes an obstacle. A long robe, wide and black, accompanied by a handkerchief worn on the head makes all women identical. It makes no difference whether you marry this one or that one, and that’s only done when a pregnancy is needed to fill the vacancy left by an old person. Do you see why I tossed my hats into the sea and wanted to make the waves my grave? Living without death is not living. But here I am going on and on, while the hat shop awaits us.”
No one peered out to see them arrive, despite the fact that their footsteps, no matter how hard they worked to make them weightless, resounded on the whitish asphalt, turning it into a drum. Suddenly, a voluminous bee, its body a brilliant scarlet, flew over to trace a halo around Crabby’s head. The hat maker whispered, “Make not the slightest gesture. It’s a warrior-spy. It can sting without losing its stinger, and its poison is deadly.” Crabby, stiff despite the heat, thought she would sweat ten thousand gallons of cold water. And her terror increased when the animal slowly flew toward Albina. Smiling, Albina shook her hips, opened her mouth, and stuck out her tongue. The bee landed on that moist appendage and began to drink her saliva. Gorged, it used its stinger to draw a tiny cross on Albina’s white throat and then drew another on Crabby’s forehead. Then it flew off like a flame to its hive. From all the roofs arose a general buzzing, rather like rain falling from the earth to the sky. “Well,” said the little man, “both of you were accepted! Hallelujah! I don’t have to tell you how many smugglers and bandits have been killed by those guardians! Without their permission, no outsider enters our town.”
Original illustrations for ALBINA AND THE DOG-MEN by François Boucq, courtesy of Restless Books
Crabby swallowed her rage. Without warning her, this squirt had dared — a second time — to place the life of her friend at risk. Her own mattered nothing to her, but Albina’s? Shit! To say man is to say calamity! Nevertheless, the bitter saliva in her mouth became sweet syrup when the miserable pygmy raised the metal gate and, with the face of an angel, the eyes of a dove, and the gestures of a gift-giver, showed them the spacious place, where more than two hundred idiots could be packed in. “Thank you, Don Amado!” The now likeable little man stood before her on tiptoe and offered her his forehead. Crabby wrinkled her nose in disgust for an instant, and then, suddenly, as if a stretched elastic band had broken within her heart, she smiled for the first time at a man. Enveloped in a cloud of tenderness, she bent over, and planted a kiss between his eyebrows. Bursting into diaphanous laughter, Albina took off her clothes, and with her marmoreal skin shining like a star in the half-light, began to dance in order to bless the new café-temple.
On a khaki motorcycle, Drumfoot traced the road that rose toward the north. A blood infused with hatred accumulated in his erect penis. In his right fist vibrated a knife, also infused with hatred. The two extremes were guiding him, one wanted pleasure, the other death. While the mountain wind had swept away all tracks from that dirt path, a third extreme, his nose, with its abnormally developed sense of smell, picked up traces of the effluvia emanating from the white woman. It was a vaginal scent, unctuous, biting, bittersweet, greenish, as fragrant as the ivy flowers that open at dawn. Mmm! Suddenly an intolerable stench expelled him from his olfactory paradise. Blood poured from his nostrils. Barking his complaints, he passed by the fishmeal factories. He began to cough, lost control, and, making a leap, twisting like a beast, he fell on all fours, clinging to the edge of the pavement while his motorcycle smashed to pieces on the rocks a hundred yards below.
He left behind the sticky smoke infecting those territories and reached the beach. Vomiting, he ran to dive into the frigid ocean. When the salt water had extirpated even the tiniest particle of stench, he shook his body vigorously, surrounding it for a few seconds with a cloud of golden drops. He growled with satisfaction; there, abandoned at the outset of a narrow path, stood the bicycle built for two! He sniffed it over from end to end, from the handlebars to the tires. He licked the seat that had sunk itself between Albina’s buttocks, and then, overwhelmed by an enraptured hatred, his lower jaw tremulously revealing his canines, he ran along the path, his knees bent, using his hands as feet by leaning on his fists. Soon, so many curves, advances, twists, and switchbacks exasperated him. He located a point in the north, his goal, and left the path to get to it in a straight line. When it was already nightfall, after many hours of trotting, he realized with angry shock that he’d reached his starting point. There was the bicycle, now covered by a sheet of crabs.E
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