[Prefatory note: Here at Bookbread I’m starting a new series, one where I will review short stories I’ve read. I’ll try to review one at a time (in about one paragraph), but possibly intersperse those singular reviews with commentary that compares and contrasts various stories. But I want to keep the general focus on one-short-story-at-a-time. Most of the things I’ll review were written in the last five years.]
So I got around to reading GD Dess’s “The Bayside Blonde,” a short story published by New Pop Lit this past January. It makes for interesting, but exhausting reading. The same could be said for much of Proust, some of Ulysses (1922), and the great rant by the father at the end of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997).
By “interesting, but exhausting” as in Joyce’s Ulysses, I mean things like:
—Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty from Kyrios Menelaus’ brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy in whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty years he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich. His art, more than the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, is the art of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies. Sir Walter Raleigh, when they arrested him, had half a million francs on his back including a pair of fancy stays. The gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had underlinen enough to vie with her of Sheba. Twenty years he dallied there between conjugial love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures. You know Manningham’s story of the burgher’s wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had seen him in Richard III and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate, answered from the capon’s blankets: William the conqueror came before Richard III. And the gay lakin, mistress Fitton, mount and cry O, and his dainty birdsnies, lady Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is suited for a player, and the punks of the bankside, a penny a time.
(Ulysses, IX [“Scylla and Charybdisâ€] )
Whether or not this kind of story-telling is your cup of tea, this kind of thing is what can be found in Dess’s “The Bayside Blonde.”
Shoptalkwise: Dess crams a lot of micro-narratives, pustulating plots and bursting conclusions in single paragraphs–but all through a well-controlled, well-modulated narrator’s voice–one neither excessively loud nor wanting in volume.
As a story, “The Bayside Blonde” is quite Aristotelian in terms of plot: it has a distinct beginning, middle, and end.
Overall, I don’t know if I “like” it per se, but it works. It doesn’t cheat readers of their time. I don’t feel “ripped off” for having taken the time to read it. And that’s more than can be said for a lot of short fiction slung around these days.
Except for most of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s work, some Hardy
Boys, and a little Dick Tracy, a sprinkling of Edgar Allen Poe and Alfred
Hitchcock mysteries series, and a couple of Goosebumps
books—I didn’t read any Young Adult Fiction as a young adult (unless you
think the 1992 NIV Student Edition of the Bible and 1984 edition of the World Book
Encyclopedia qualify).
No Lovecraft in childhood. No Tolkien. No Stephen King (in
book form). I did, however, read Lewis’s The
Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) but none of its sequels,
even though we had the whole series sitting right next to the encyclopedias.
(And I’m too old for Harry Potter to have made an impression.)
So I don’t know if I’m an apt critic to comment on current young adult fiction like Jeff Duke’s Ghostly Tales of Mississippi (2018). I have, however, had no hesitation in writing about the most recent work that I’ve read in this genre: the first two books of Heidi. So in what follows, I hope not to disappoint.
Besides being young adult fiction, Duke’s book is certainly southern gothic in genre. But thankfully, its aromas contain none of the musty smells of imitation-disguised-as-influence so frequently found in writers who were repeatedly burdened by classroom-assigned readings of Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily (1930) and O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find (1953). Duke was taught by Barry Hannah (1942–2010), a highly revered writer, but one I’ve yet to read (so I can’t tell you how strong his influence on Duke is).
But the stories in Duke’s book do remind me of the things I as
a child liked (and of which I was chased by the occasional nightmare) in the works
of R. L. Stine. Most of
the ghosts and witches that appear in Duke’s stories, however, don’t cause most
of the characters they’re chasing or spooking much harm. Most of them….
I’m particularly appreciative how the title of each story in
Ghostly Tales of Mississippi is of a
particular place in that state. This detail is part of the book’s larger intention
of weaving together an intricate pattern from various strands of local
folklore, geography, and family mythology.
“Rosehill Cemetery (Brookhaven)†and “Cinema Theater at the
Barnes Crossing Mall (Tupleo)†remain my two favorite stories. The first for
its simplicity at rendering spookiness; the latter for its keen combination of nostalgia
for playing Street
Fighter II at an arcade, the vivid image of a phantom seen in the
reflection of an arcade video game screen, and the very Kubrickian environment of
a quiet, empty, cinema at night.
And there’s even a bit of Joyce in Duke’s collection of local tales; for his final story “Witchdance (Houston),†(Houston, Mississippi, of course), almost overpowers all the stories that came before it––very similar to the way “The Dead†does for the rest of the local tales in Dubliners (1914). But only almost.
The age of argument appears to be over…. (Is that what’s implied when someone says we live in an age of anxiety?) … But let’s walk away from that question and leave behind the game of Who Can Best Guess this Zeitgeist? Leave that contrivance to the book peddlers….
All I can do is read a story and see what grabs my attention. And what grabs my attention is usually the essence of the story. (I say usually, because any first appearances that grab one’s attention can of course be deceiving.) And just because the essence of a story grabs my attention doesn’t mean I’ll be able to articulate a definition of that essence.
By essence I mean the thing (moment, symbol, character, idea, etc.) that the entire work of short fiction seems to hinge on—the essential thing without which the story would have no reason to be read by the average casual, curious reader. It may or may not mean a Joycean “epiphany,†or an Aristotelian catharsis, or the thesis of a classical rhetorician. The essence may even be something “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.â€[1]
What topics does each story contain and concern?[2]
What of things I’ve previously read that concern and compare and contrast with those topics and subjects?
Who is the storyteller of each story? (Which is not the same as asking, Who is the creator of each story?)
And in asking these questions I assume the storyteller is separate from the story creator, but I don’t assume or deny any reliability in what that storyteller tells me the reader/listener. At this early stage in the investigation, I don’t even have to worry about defining the word reliability.
The next two posts in this series will examine a pair of short stories by a pair of New York writers: Chris Arp and Nicole Cuffy. And while no one ever confused the Big Apple with the Midwest, Edward McClelland’s How to Speak Midwestern (2016) does include much of Upstate New York to be, in terms of regional dialects, part of the Midwest. Keep in mind, however, that both Arp and Cuffy have written pieces of historical fiction set neither in New York or the Midwest.
[2] An infinite number of topics might exist for any story, sure, but see Bateson on Kant:
Kant argued long ago that this piece of chalk contains a million potential facts (Tatsachen) but that only a very few of these become truly facts by affecting the behavior of entities capable of responding to facts. For Kant’s Tatsachen, I would substitute differences and point out that the number of potential differences in this chalk is infinite but that very few of them become effective differences (i.e., items of information) in the mental process of any larger entity. Information consists of differences that make a difference. (Mind and Nature: a Necessary Unity, (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979) 81, 99.)
I read Lolita for the first time about five years ago and was overwhelmed by the style but thought it lacked substance in terms of plot and character. Upon a second reading I would concede the book has substance, and my initial sense of something lacking was really a reflection of my belief that the novel contains no likeable characters. I find nothing to like or sympathize in Humbert, Lolita, or Quilty.
Lolita’s name is Dolores—“pain†in Spanish––Lolita is a “pain†and painful for Humbert.
The book is setup as a confession: Humbert is definitely no St. Augustine, though he may have read some Rousseau. I have not read Rousseau’s Confessions (1782), but as a reader, I find the company of the literary children of James Joyce more tolerable than that of their father. In other words, the linguistic acrobatics of Nabokov’s Lolita, as well as Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), work in ways Joyce never mastered. The Irish Oscar Wilde taught art-for-art’s-sake, and later Irish James Joyce believed in style-for-style’s-sake—but Nabokov and Burgess both know that the best formula is style-for-story’s-sake.
It’s quite a writer’s trick for Nabokov to make the narrator a professor of French poetry. Throughout my reading this trick made it difficult for me not to confuse Nabokov-the-author-poet for Humbert-the narrator-poet.
Early on Humbert confesses: “I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita,†(Part I, Ch. 15). This line might be compared to a reflection made by the character of Thomas Buddenbrook:
“I know that the external, visible, tangible tokens and symbols of happiness and success first appear only after things have in reality gone into decline already.” (Buddenbrooks, VII, vi, 378–79)
Later Humbert dreams of eventually impregnating Lolita (Part II, Ch. 3), so that he can have a second Lolita, somewhat like the character of Manfred in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), P. B. Shelley’s remark that incest is the most poetic of all circumstances, and sentiments of the villain Noah Cross at the climax of the film Chinatown (1974). Nabokov’s line “my impossible daughter†(Part I, Ch. 29) is brimming with multiple meanings and interpretations.
I remain ambivalent but more accepting of Lolita after this second reading, but Nabokov has thought about the idea of re-reading, as found in his lectures on literature:
“I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” (“Good Readers and Good Writers,†3)
For Nabokov, a writer is a storyteller, a teacher, and an enchanter:
“There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three—storyteller, teacher, enchanter—but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer…. The three facets of the great writer—magic, story, lesson—are prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought.” (“Good Readers and Good Writers,†5–6)
Finally, here’s Nabokov on artists and morality:
“I never could admit that a writer’s job was to improve the morals of his country, and point out lofty ideals from the tremendous height of a soapbox, and administer first aid by dashing off second-rate books. The writer’s pulpit is dangerously close to the pulp romance, and what reviewers call a strong novel is generally a precarious heap of platitudes or a sand castle on a populated beach, and there are few things sadder than to see its muddy mat dissolve when the holiday makers are gone and the cold mousy waves are nibbling at the solitary sands.” (“The Art of Literature and Commonsense†376)
NOTES
Mann, Thomas Buddenbrooks, Verfall einer Familie. Berlin: S. Fischer. 1901. Translation by John E. Woods published as Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, 1993.
Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1982.
“everybody’s been making their own lists so that everyone else can refute them flatly, and loudly.”
Exactly, Jenn–it’s on this very issue that Bookbread finds himself perplexed. Â What is this compulsion to refute, to dismiss, to accuse, to ignore which infests the landscape of book conversation?
“The books we’re arguing over—even the supposedly overrated ones, or the ones dubbed critical successes—are not the books people are buying in droves.”
Aye. Â Contrary to the Apostles of Joyce, unbought authors are neither the most read nor those best remembered.
“I think people should keep talking about the divide between popular literature and serious works—and especially the way the two are lately striving to imitate each other to stay afloat in the struggling publishing economy.”
And here Jenn reminds Bookbread of some words from Dylan: “When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose,”—so that in American fiction, when you’re going broke (apparently) you go for baroque.
“For whatever reason, books that bridge the seriousness divide from either side, no matter how superficially, seem to sell the absolute best.”
Yes, but which books bridge that divide?—that is the question. Â Certainly not Ulysses or Infinite Jest [NYR].
