Wednesday, March 31, 2010
plunging, Kincaid
I noted yesterday that I couldn't cut my finger without thinking of Randall Jarrell cutting his finger. For better or worse, I seem to be constant (and sometimes reluctant) communion with the books I've read. There's that great line of Milosz's: "[F]or our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, / and invisible guests come in and out at will." Interviewing the poet in 2000, I asked him about that very line, and he replied: "When writing [Milosz's ABC's], I tried to be as passive and open as possible to the haphazard appearances of persons who are no longer alive. In other words, I treated myself as an instrument that would serve to mark their existence." This is a little different from what I'm describing--he's allowing the honored dead to use him as a megaphone--but many of those departed voices are writers, so I suppose it comes to the same thing.
In my previous post, for example, I mentioned my father plunging the drain in our shower. It is impossible for me to picture that scene without a passage from Nicholson Baker's A Book of Matches flitting through my brain. The drain in the narrator's shower has clogged. He grabs the nearby plunger and goes to work, with results that are almost sensually gratifying:
Nor is the fact that I've been haunted by the first sentence of Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother ever since I read it in 1996: "My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind." The first half, up to the semicolon, is bad and sad. The second half is frightening, both for what it says and how it says it. What I mean is, there's a formal perfection to those words: "bleak" and "black" have an almost familial relationship, very appropriate to the matter at hand, while the rhyme of "back" and "black" seals up the sentence in a kind of sonic casket. None of this would matter if Kincaid hadn't cut right to the heart of a scary, permanent emptiness. Beyond repair. At moments of major or minor desolation, the sentence tends to float into view.
In my previous post, for example, I mentioned my father plunging the drain in our shower. It is impossible for me to picture that scene without a passage from Nicholson Baker's A Book of Matches flitting through my brain. The drain in the narrator's shower has clogged. He grabs the nearby plunger and goes to work, with results that are almost sensually gratifying:
It made the most wonderful deep squirting noises--huge sucking, bubbling gulps and gasps and noggin-snorts as several pounds of water were thrust down into the drain and forced up in a foul fountain out the overflow valve higher up on the top. I began working with the water, as if I were rocking a car when it's stuck in the driveway, sucking, pushing, sucking, pushing. At one point the drain seemed even worse, and I found that all the turbulence had caused the drain lid to turn and fall shut. When I opened it again and was more careful to center the plunger over the mouth of the drain, I got real results: after one blast, to which I gave the full might of my arms, a supernova of black fragments came up, God, and then more with a second plunge, and I knew that without chemicals, without rooting snakes, with only strength and cunning, I had made that water move. I held still for a second to listen: yes, the purling of water curving away into the pipes. Later there was even a brief vortex, like a rainbow after a storm."Noggin-snorts" might be my favorite touch here: a noggin is a person's head, of course, but also a small quantity of booze. It's one of those multiplex metaphors, staggering around with its shirttails out. The drain is a drunk; no, the drain is a drink. I also like the rooting snake and the rainbow--bits of biblical frosting. But why should this scene have stuck in my head, along with the narrator's earlier, shower-related disclosure that he likes to sing "Eight Days A Week" to the drone of the ceiling fan? It's not logical.
Nor is the fact that I've been haunted by the first sentence of Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother ever since I read it in 1996: "My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind." The first half, up to the semicolon, is bad and sad. The second half is frightening, both for what it says and how it says it. What I mean is, there's a formal perfection to those words: "bleak" and "black" have an almost familial relationship, very appropriate to the matter at hand, while the rhyme of "back" and "black" seals up the sentence in a kind of sonic casket. None of this would matter if Kincaid hadn't cut right to the heart of a scary, permanent emptiness. Beyond repair. At moments of major or minor desolation, the sentence tends to float into view.
Labels: Czeslaw Milosz, Jamaica Kincaid, Nicholson Baker, plunging
Friday, August 14, 2009
Truth or consequences
I meant to point out this excellent CJR piece by Nicholson Baker some time ago. It's about Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, whose agonized tone and apocalyptic detail Baker finds utterly convincing. The fly in the ointment: Defoe was a tiny child when the plague hit London in 1665. So he cobbled together his first-person, "nonfiction" account from contemporary sources, family reminiscences, and so forth. In our era, beset as we are with the post-James-Frey jitters, such a tossed salad of fact and fiction can be, in Baker's phrase, a "thorny shrub."
But the other interesting aspect of the piece is Baker's own ambivalence toward Defoe's methods. He doesn't believe that journalists or other purveyors of truth (put whatever words you like in quotation marks) should ever invent. The minute an author tampers with a single verifiable detail, he or she must stamp the resulting work as fiction. That seems pretty clear, doesn't it? No ambiguities. No loopholes. No gray zone where fib and fact can merrily cohabit, confusing the daylights out of the reader.
On the other hand, when I interviewed Baker in 1999 (or whenever it was), he wearily asserted that novels had a higher reality quotient than we gave them credit for. "I get tired of writers who insist on the fictionality of their work," he said. "Even Nabokov, who's an exceptionally autobiographical writer, made a big deal about how he invented his people and then dismissed them from the stage. He was forced to do that, in a way, because he'd written Lolita, so I forgive him. But I'm certainly not going to pretend that the thoughts in my books would never enter my own head.... When I read Updike, I assume what he's writing happened to him--unless he's going to the moon or something. And I think that especially with the first two books, people should be entitled to think that about my own work."
Still, in theory, Baker should be recoiling from Defoe's book--or at the very least, from its mendacious packaging as a memoir. Instead, its brilliant ventriloquism draws him in. Perhaps the ultimate lesson is: don't lie unless you're a genius. In any case, Baker begins his piece like this:
But the other interesting aspect of the piece is Baker's own ambivalence toward Defoe's methods. He doesn't believe that journalists or other purveyors of truth (put whatever words you like in quotation marks) should ever invent. The minute an author tampers with a single verifiable detail, he or she must stamp the resulting work as fiction. That seems pretty clear, doesn't it? No ambiguities. No loopholes. No gray zone where fib and fact can merrily cohabit, confusing the daylights out of the reader.On the other hand, when I interviewed Baker in 1999 (or whenever it was), he wearily asserted that novels had a higher reality quotient than we gave them credit for. "I get tired of writers who insist on the fictionality of their work," he said. "Even Nabokov, who's an exceptionally autobiographical writer, made a big deal about how he invented his people and then dismissed them from the stage. He was forced to do that, in a way, because he'd written Lolita, so I forgive him. But I'm certainly not going to pretend that the thoughts in my books would never enter my own head.... When I read Updike, I assume what he's writing happened to him--unless he's going to the moon or something. And I think that especially with the first two books, people should be entitled to think that about my own work."
Still, in theory, Baker should be recoiling from Defoe's book--or at the very least, from its mendacious packaging as a memoir. Instead, its brilliant ventriloquism draws him in. Perhaps the ultimate lesson is: don't lie unless you're a genius. In any case, Baker begins his piece like this:
I first read Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year on a train from Boston to New York. That's the truth. It's not a very interesting truth, but it's true. I could say that I first read it sitting on a low green couch in the old smoking room of the Cincinnati Palladium, across from a rather glum-looking Henry Kissinger. Or that I found a beat-up Longman's 1895 edition of Defoe's Plague Year in a dumpster near the Recycle-a-Bicycle shop on Pearl Street when I was high on Guinness and roxies, and I opened it and was drawn into its singular, fearful world, and I sat right down in my own vomit and read the book straight through. It would be easy for me to say these things. But if I did, I would be inventing—and, as John Hersey wrote, the sacred rule for the journalist (or the memoirist, or indeed for any nonfiction writer) is: Never Invent.You can read the rest here.
Labels: Daniel Defoe, Nicholson Baker
