Issue Eight (Omnibus)

Reviewed in this issue:

James Elkins, Weak in Comparison to Dreams (Unnamed Press)

John Madera, Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press)

Christina Tudor-Sideri, Schism Blue (Sublunary Editions)

Babak Lakghomi, South (Dundurn Press)

Zombie Zoo

It is hard to say whether Samuel Emmer, the protagonist of James Elkins's Weak in Comparison to Dreams, should be regarded as a "reliable" narrator of his story. On the one hand, there is no reason to believe he is telling us a false story about his experiences as a municipal employee in Guelph, Ontario, assigned to make a series of visits to various zoos to ensure the new Guelph Zoo avoids their problems with neurotic animals, or even that these experiences are being distorted (especially where the narrator's behavior is concerned). Yet we also can't finally be certain that we have perceived this character's true nature, because he may not possess a true nature--the enigma that persists even after we have come to the end of the narrative presented in this novel may just be an artifact of the protagonist's mutable personality.

The novel begins normally enough, the first chapter an apparently conventional first-person narrative, as Samuel recounts one of his zoo visits, although the setting does seem a bit unusual: the city zoo in Tallinn, Estonia. After a brief flashback to the circumstances surrounding his assignment to the Zoo Feasibility Committee and to his first such visit, to the Bronx Zoo, Samuel goes on to relate his encounters in Tallinn with the zookeeper and her assistants, as well as his observations of the conditions in which the animals are kept. As he continues to make these visits (Finland, Germany, Salt Lake City and Knoxville in the United States), his obsession with the animals and their inhumane imprisonment intensifies. This is not conveyed to us directly through internal deliberation but in the narrator's depicted behavior in the narratives of his visit. The narrator not only becomes more strident in his insistence to his hosts that their animals are expressing deep-seated distress, but in doing so he increasingly affects a knowledge and expertise he does not possess. It is not so much that he is trying to be more forceful in his disapproval of the treatment of zoo animals but that in each of his zoo experiences he is becoming a different person.

His metamorphoses in these scenes are aided and abetted by a series of "reports" provided to him by his Guelph laboratory assistants (although one of them is actually a former assistant), papers and case studies ostensibly meant to add to Samuel's knowledge of animal behavior but that are also intended, we discover, to provoke Samuel into noticing that his own behavior, as observed by the assistants, shows some of the same disturbances exhibited by captive zoo animals (repetition -compulsion). The graphical elements included in these reports--charts, tables, drawings--are paralleled by many photographs that appear throughout the text, especially photographs that accompany Samuel's reports of a series of dreams that alternate with his accounts of the zoo visits. At first, the dreams, invoking his childhood in Watkins Glen, New York, seem harmless enough, but eventually they begin to obsessively revolve around fires in woods and mountains. The dreams seem to reinforce Samuel's erratic conduct during his interactions with the zoo personnel to suggest a psychological breakdown, toward which the novel seems to be heading.

But after losing his job in Guelph due to his erratic behavior, Samuel essentially runs away, driving north ("toward the Arctic"), where apparently we leave him. He reappears to us as a much older man, living in northern Ontario but shortly to move to live with daughter. Here Samuel's narration is more lucid and controlled, but still obsessive, except that in this case his obsession is with the music he plays on the piano, most of it written by obscure modern composers whose methods of composition are likewise at times repetitive and compulsive, like both Samuel and the animals he observed many years previous. It it is unclear whether Samuel is himself aware of the correspondence between this music and his own personality traits, but it seems likely that he is, and his incessant playing of the music both continues to manifest the protagonist's obsessive-compulsive behavior and also allows him to express it in a way that brings a degree of satisfaction not evident in the earlier scenes. If compulsive behavior is in part a full immersion in the present, in the here and now (or a way of coping with that immersion), Samuel Emmer seems poised in the present, quietly situated between the turbulent events depicted in his previous narrative and the change that awaits (at the end of the novel, Samuel is preparing to move out of his home).

He has been living in the home for 40 years, but this novel passes over those 40 years in silence. Samuel occasionally alludes to these years, but we never get a fully articulated account of how he spent this large portion of his life (or, for that matter, why this elision is significant.) Such a discontinuity in Samuel's story has the effect of suggesting a discontinuity in the personality of Samuel Emmer, a suggestion that is not fully realized in the depiction of the character in Weak in Comparison to Dreams but becomes more visible as both character trait and formal device in the many documents relating to other volumes in the Samuel Emmer saga that Elkins has made available on his website. This novel is merely one in a series of five that, as we are also told on the website, Elkins has mostly completed but remain unpublished. Our current lack of access to the further context and elaboration these other books would provide ultimately presents the biggest obstacle to a full appreciation of Weak in Comparison to Dreams: the portrayal of Samuel Emmer and his life presumably requires all of the volumes in the series to be complete so that interpretation based solely on this novel is itself incomplete--not just a question of creative ambiguity but a constraining uncertainty. If it is finally a part of a larger whole, surely we do need to comprehend the whole in order to properly comprehend this portion.

Nevertheless, Weak in Comparison to Dreams still provides a rewarding reading experience. Although it is no longer such a novelty to encounter a work of fiction that incorporates photographs or other visual imagery, Elkins integrates them with his verbal text very dexterously, and ultimately text and visuals seem fully complementary, both of them necessary to the story the writer wants to tell, not an exercise in ornamentation. That story is certainly not a conventional one, but its mysteries and surprises are revealed in a skillfully calibrated way that keeps the narrative lively enough that the novel's length does not seem excessive and maintains the oddity in the protagonist's character that justifies its formal indirection. (In addition to the photos, drawings, and diagrams, the novel also includes numerous interpolated documents, as well as several extended fantasias in which Samuel imagines the interplay between his two assistants.) Overall, the novel exhibits laudable ingenuity and manifest intelligence. I hope to hear the other four novels have found their publishers. 

Damaged by Reality

John Madera's collection of stories, Nervosities, is not "experimental" in that it rejects most readers' expectations of form in fiction: Most of the stories feature well-developed characters from whose relatively accessible points of view (both first-person and 3rd-person "free indirect") the events in the stories are related. Although these are not "plot-driven" stories with carefully laid-out scenes contributing to a narrative "arc," they are indeed stories; things happen to and through the characters, and these things have dramatic significance, especially in the conclusions to many of the stories. What is dramatized serves the stories' thematic purposes, which in most cases are relatively apparent, although they are not insistently accented, instead realized through setting and character interaction.

But all of these elements are mediated through Madera's dynamic style, which does take the stories out of the ordinary, marking them as separate from conventional "literary fiction." At its most adventurous, this style seems a kind of untamed amalgam of Gary Lutz and Thomas Bernhard: 

Here is my brain: a swollen sewage grate after rainfall--inkbled newprint, leafy bits, had-it twigs, mucosal drift bunging up the holes. Listing in my mind different things that fall (like petals, leaves, and pinecones; like acorns, berries, and other fruit; samaras, and seed pods; like shushing rain and silent snow; like sleet and hail, pellets, a perpetually whisked beaded curtain, clattering up the ground; like massy meteorites mussing up the mud) was, perhaps, superfluous; and thinking about how human beings (who are, in one sense, natural objects themselves, subject to all the causal laws of the physical world), if dropped from a height, will fall at a rate of thirty-two feet per second per second, until the rate of their fall reaches terminal velocity, was not an adequate replacement for the pernicious idea of the so-called great fall of man; but these thoughts, of falling things, while perhaps so much belly lint-picking, kept me from thinking about other things I should have been thinking about but did not want to think about. . . . ("Bees Build Perfect Hexagons with Their Spit")

More controlled than Bernhard's headlong expository monologues, less obsessively focused on surprising verbal devices than Lutz (although evoking each of these strategies), Madera's style isn't simply the vehicle for relating character and event, and doesn't serve as the kind of verbal decoration that often passes for "good writing." Language in most of these stories doesn't serve their conventional elements at all but instead makes manifest something like the reverse: plot, character, setting are a function of the use of language, its particular qualities invoking the illusions of plot or character in a particular way. This is actually true of all works of fiction, but Madera's stories are most unconventional in their rejection of the usual attempts to conceal the artifice of language, to make language transparent to the needs of narrative.

The book's first few stories are rather more verbally constrained than some of the later stories, which suggests a process of discovering a more audacious prose style, although these stories still do not rely on familiar sorts of characters or ordinary situations. Indeed, "Some Varieties of Being and Other Non Sequiturs" and "Notes Toward the Recovery of Desiderata." the first two stories, incorporate uncommon settings (not to mention story titles), the first featuring a man who has moved to an Indian city on the Ganges, where apparently he hopes to die, the second recounting the story of a Cuban girl who becomes a participant in the Mariel boatlift, a notorious mass emigration to the U.S. Both stories introduce a background of political turmoil, hints of which also recur in later stories but never really become a primary focus of the book's concerns. "Some Varieties of Being" does present us with a character whose general type--alienated both from his circumstances and from himself--recurs in later stories and whose predicament more nearly illustrates a dominant theme in the book ("Nervosities" seems a coinage particularly applicable to these characters.)

Although many of the characters in Nervosities are dissatisfied with their lives (some more consciously than others), two stories ("Anatomy of a Ruined Wingspan" and "An Incommodious Vehicle") feature a protagonist who has essentially given up on conventional social existence, drifting without a fixed abode or much desire for remunerative work. In each case the character accepts temporary lodging with friends, but the events in the stories really only reinforce the protagonists' social estrangement, although in the first the character does strike up a friendship of sorts with a local homeless man, with whom at the story's conclusion he shares a convivial home-cooked meal. In some stories there are indications by story's end that the protagonist has come to a decision that might alter his/her circumstances (a man abandons his "dingy apartment," clearly an emblem for the dinginess of his life, a woman finally ends things with the boyfriend she clearly doesn't love), but in others no such decision seems possible. (In "Nature Under Constraint and Vexed," a man suffers a ruptured appendix that is going to kill him.) The characters in Nervosities inhabit an American culture that is hostile to their well-being and for which they have little affinity.

Perhaps the grimmest story in the book is "To Have Done with the Division of Moving Bodies," featuring a man, an Iraq War veteran, who has just killed his girlfriend’s dog in a fit of rage against the girlfriend for breaking up with him. Although the story circles back to depict how the man (called simply "the killer") was affected by his experiences in Iraq (three deployments) and his difficulties in adjusting to life back home with the girlfriend, it nevertheless doesn't hesitate in showing the merciless brutality of the man's action. The story both maintains a clinical distance from the compromised protagonist (partly by never giving him a name) and takes us far enough into the man's mind that he doesn't become merely a brute, his behavior entirely unaccountable. There is no sentimentality in Nervosities: the stories concern characters who are damaged by reality, but they don't make excuses for the characters. They just register the damage in Madera's kinetically alert language.

Although these stories are by no means formally conservative (several feature unconventional formal devices), for the most part all of them could really be called works of a particularly disabused kind of realism, depicting a mostly broken culture. However, this realism is itself a route on the way to style, not vice-versa. Through reminding us that the reimagining of reality through the devices of language is the essence of literary art, Madera's stories both heighten our impression of the disenchanted lives they portray and challenge our passive reading habits.

The Shape of His Departure

Many readers of Christina Tudor-Sideri's Schism Blue would likely find it initially to be somewhat static and abstract, perhaps even obscure. The two figures who will be the novel's characters--the only characters--are rather indistinct at first, and where such qualities as their appearance or their manner of speaking are concerned, they remain indistinct throughout. There is no story of any conventional kind, except for what could loosely be called the story of the main character recollecting (and recreating) her now dead lover, Few concrete events aside from this recollection are related in present narrative time (it could  be said that part of the main character's motivation is to, in effect, annul narrative time altogether), although eventually we are presented with brief episodes of more concrete activity occurring in the past. The novel seems to be set nowhere in particular, but wherever it is it is cold, and it seems to snow quite a lot.

These formal features are reinforced in the novel's style, which is highly metaphorical but doesn't provide a lot of close figurative description, the language more philosophical and rhetorical than lyrical:

    Between them, the night, its shadows, ambivalent as to whom to protect, him or her; the night that cannot tear itself asunder, the night that cannot offer itself to both of them; the night, its shadows in disarray, from her steps to his hesitations and back again, from the idea, no from the essence of a god, the god of this painting in reverse, this painting that shows her leaving when it was, in fact, that reality took the shape of his departure; from this essence of a god to the rest of the world, in throes, to the world immersed in petty passions and ebbing desires and folding of the senses.

This language is employed to disclose the efforts of the main character, who is a writer, to not merely remember her lover, who was a painter, but to in effect keep him alive in her continuing acts of imagination. It might be said that the novel as whole comprises this character's attempt to meld past and present through a kind of perpetual visionary projection.

Thus, while Schism Blue never does develop the drama or narrative movement of the kind readers might expect, it does acquire its own sort of fascination as a contemplative metafiction that ruminates on the process of fiction-making--or on the process of fiction-making as it unfolds within the consciousness of its main character. This character is not relating her experience in her own voice, so it as if the larger narrative voice observes these cerebral acts of creation, although it is more like this voice reports on the character's awareness as she creates, while the actual creation--the fictional character that is the lover, and the specifics of his actions (his "story")--remains unavailable to us, tucked inside the writer's desk. The "narrative" offered by the novel, is indeed the story of the storytelling, without access to the story told.

Because of this odd narrative structure (a narrative that is a supplement to another narrative that is hidden), the pleasures to be found in Blue Schism are realized in individual passages of writing rather than the architectural whole to which they nominally belong. In an extended reverie in which she summons the lover by thinking about the image of a red house (presumably an image in one of his paintings), the main character reflects: 

     A beautiful echoing, this memory now for assembling all that she has gone to assemble; a house amidst spruces; a house he made for her; a house on the beach; a house, emergent, on the highest of crests, in the deepest of caves, a house from the hands of a painter, from the mind of a writer, from a beautiful creator of tiny red houses.

     She is able to apprehend the nature of this red house. And that is happiness. That too is paradise. She is able to situate this house inside the human space of the mind. She is able to create correlation and contain absence and presence and coming-into-being inside of its redness. She is able to carry this house.

The novel is best at offering this sort of insight into the aesthetic transformation of experience, expressed metaphorically and rhapsodically, ultimately making such transformation what the novel is actually "about," acting as both the object of its discourse and the engine of that discourse. Schism Blue pushes against the tyranny of the conventions of plot, character, and setting as strongly as any novel I've read, even though I wouldn't really call it a work of experimental fiction. It is more like a prose poem than a formal or stylistic experiment.

Still, I wouldn't call Schism Blue "poetic" as that term is usually applied in reference to works of fiction. Its metaphorical language is used not as lyrical embellishment but as a formal pattern that  brings a unity to the novel that usually comes from plot. The novel does depict characters, even if they are less explicitly delineated than in most novels. And if the setting is also mostly nonspecific, it actually figures into the living memory the protagonist is attempting to create by serving as evocative imagery. This novel definitely blurs strict boundaries between fiction and poetry, but it works most provocatively as an unorthodox work of fiction.

No doubt some readers would find it too unorthodox, too dependent on its elaborate prose, providing too few of the usual signposts by which we navigate most works of fiction. For those who absolutely require those signposts in order not to lose their way, perhaps Schism Blue would prove too perilous. For those willing to get lost once in a while but trusting that the work itself will ultimately guide them back, the effort is fully worth the risk.

Gone South

On the surface, Babak Lakghomi's South takes on the characteristic features of conventional allegory. Predominantly emphasizing narrative, it tells the story of a quasi-innocent protagonist (innocent in his understanding of the true dangers lurking in the world he inhabits) who undertakes a journey (in this case, to the "south") that, should he successfully complete it, will bring him good fortune (since the protagonist is a writer, the reward will be publication that will presumably bring more financial stability and help heal his troubled marriage). The novel's allegorical framework is reinforced by the cast of characters and the way they are portrayed: in the protagonist's first-person account, only his wife is given a proper name (Tara), while he is himself referred to simply as "B." All of the other characters are identified by their relationship to B. and their function in his story--"the Editor," "the Publisher," "the Assistant Cook,"-- or are described only vaguely--"the man with the deflated face." Finally, the novel's pared-back style de-emphasizes extended sensory description or other lyrical flourishes and focuses our attention resolutely on what happens, even when what is happening seems hallucinatory or surreal.

Ultimately we indeed might read South as broadly allegorical, a story about one man's confrontation with a reality more precarious than he had imagined, but it in fact winds up undermining the fundamental mechanism of allegorical narrative. A classic allegory is a narrative that proceeds on dual levels: the manifest, literal level on which the directly depicted events take place, and an impalpable, symbolic level of secondary, augmented meaning to which the first level alludes, but does not articulate. In this sort of allegory (as in, say, Pilgrim's Progress or some of the short stories of Hawthorne), that secondary level is charged with specific, relatively fixed meaning, although such meaning must be filtered through a reader's act of interpretation. But in South, the meaning is finally indeterminate, especially to the protagonist whose experience the narrative relates.

B. is a mostly unsuccessful writer whose most recent effort, an "essay about the extinction of painted storks," has failed to  be published, although he has also written a book about his father that is being considered by the Publisher. As the novel begins, he has been given an assignment by the Editor to visit an oil rig in the South and report on labor unrest reputed to be occurring there. B. is not entirely sure why he has been given the assignment (and by the end of the novel, we're not sure, either), and when he arrives at the rig, he discovers that although the powers that be have been informed of his task and are prepared to allow him access, no one, including the workers supposedly threatening to strike, welcomes his presence. He receives no cooperation, except from his bunkmate, the \Assistant Cook, a veteran rig worker who provides him witb mostly general information about the Company, owners of the rig, and about the history of the rig's operation. He is also unable to communicate directly with anyone outside the rig, compelled to instead write brief notes to Tara and the Editor that are then relayed by the Secretary through Company email. 

Gradually B.'s situation degrades from mere non-cooperation to more actively sinister actions taken against him, presumably at the behest of a white-haired man with whom B. meets several times and who seems to be the man in charge (at least on the rig). B. is held in increasing isolation, and seems also to be administered certain mind-numbing and mind-altering drugs. Most likely, B.'s increasing paranoia is an effect of these drugs, although it certainly seems to be the case that someone in the power structure is definitely after him--but by this time B. has also become an unavoidably unreliable narrator, so it becomes all but impossible for us to come to any definitive conclusion about what is actually happening. Eventually B. is able to escape the rig with the help of a woman he has managed to befriend, although it turns out she has also been an agent of the Company. Whether her assistance in enabling B to swim from the rig to a nearby island is a sincere gesture of kindness to B. or is still part of her collaboration with the Company is something neither B. nor we can decide, but B. does finally manage to get back home (to the City), where we next find him being tended by Tara.

B.'s experiences on the oil rig are prefaced by his initial account of driving to the south, in which he stops to witness a ceremony performed by locals, apparently an exorcism of wind spirits. Being haunted by the wind becomes a recurring motif  in the novel, broaching the possibility that B.'s dilemma might involve such a haunting, a fate that might, as well, have afflicted his father, a poet and activist who disappeared when B. was a small boy. (Excerpts from the father's dream journal are provided at intervals during B's narration.) The man with the white hair strongly suggests that his interest in B. is as much an interest in his father's activity as in B.'s own, which further suggests that the line between the Company and the government is thin indeed. Exactly what B.'s father might have done to warrant the government's concern remains unspecified (it is suggested that among his reputed offences could have been that he was a homosexual), and it is additionally unclear whether its interest in B. himself extends beyond the information he might provide about the father.

Perhaps the offence committed by both B. and his father is simply that they are writers, naturally and therefore dangerously inquisitive. To the extent that the novel does point us toward some sort of unified allegorical meaning, this might be it: the writer's indulgence of curiosity and imagination is always a threat to the reigning powers.. Yet even this interpretation is not unambiguously supported by B.'s narrative. B., while still mostly a sympathetic character, does not always show a great sense of purpose or determination: his commitment to writing seems hesitant, and he hardly seems a stalwart defender of artistic freedom or a seeker of the truth.  Even at the novel's conclusion, when he does seem prepared to persist in writing about what he has seen, his life (not to mention his memory) has been sufficiently impaired that the reader must wonder how successful he will be. But we may also end up feeling even more disturbed about a world in which even such a tentative truth-teller as B. is considered subversive.

What is communicated most forcefully in the story of B.'s journey to the south is how elusive meaning can be, how fragile our grasp of the truth. If it is becoming clearer that we in the putatively civilized world are not invulnerable to the dissolution of democratic norms and long-held assumptions, South provides a bracing glimpse at what living in a world in which arbitrary authority prevails is like.