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Issue # 125
| John
Fell
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| The Man Who Beat the Man |
by F.B.Andre (Edmonton: Newest Press, 2000). Paperbound, 189p., $16.95.
Southern Stories by Clark Blaise (Erin, ON: The Porcupine's Quill, 2000). Paperbound, 190p., $17.95.
Pull Gently, Tear Here by Alexandra Leggat (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2001). Paperbound, 193p., $19.95.
Drying the Bones by Madeline Sonik (Roberts Creek, B.C.: Nightwood Editions, 2000). Paperbound, 223pp., n.p.
Our perceptions are shaped by where we live - or have lived.
To see how this psychological fact plays itself out in the writing of
fiction will take varying degrees of digging on the part of the interested
reader, depending, for one thing, on the degree to which a writer chooses
to particularize place as a fictional construct. All four collections
of Canadian short fiction reviewed below focus on separation - whether
it be the result of a "common divider" such as race or gender, or some
even more pervasive sense of alienation. It may not be entirely coincidental
that all four authors appear also to have an international (i.e., not
exclusively Canadian) perspective from which they see the world. A central
feeling of displacement could indeed colour one's life, heightening an
awareness of the forces that separate the self from others.
Of the four authors, Clark Blaise suffers from the most pronounced (or at least most extensively documented) malaise over nationality. Southern Stories is, in fact, a repackaging of previously collected pieces, some of which appeared in the aptly-titled Resident Alien. A number of these stories deal with nationality explicitly, the central characters' attempts to unravel their identities complicated, as with the author himself, by significant connections to both Canada and the United States.
Blaise has always existed in a mysterious obscurity; his works are no sooner applauded than they vanish forever from the bookstore shelves. However, for those who greatly admire his writing (which would probably include most who have had the good fortune to encounter it), there can exist a peculiar fascination that comes with attempting to measure the distance between Blaise's various protagonists - and the distance between the protagonists and the man himself. For example, some of the characters in Southern Stories bear a marked psychological resemblance not only to each other but also to the protagonist/narrator of Lunar Attractions, Blaise's first novel - and not only to that protagonist but also to the "protagonist/narrator" of Blaise's autobiographical I Had a Father. (Blaise does little to discourage such speculations; for example, the childhood photo described in detail in the story "A North American Education" would seem to be the same photo that later appeared on the cover of I Had a Father.) These protagonists tend in several ways to blur together; they are normally children experiencing an inevitable feeling of uprootedness suffered at the hands of adults who, equally inevitably, move from place to place either in pursuit of dreams or merely in an effort to survive. In the story "The Salesman's Son Grows Older," the narrator, Franklin, describes his younger self as follows:
I was a British subject with a Deep South accent, riding in a cold car with a strong new uncle. So many things to be ashamed of - my accent, my tan, my chubbiness. I spoke half as fast as my uncle and couldn't speed up.
"Ever been to a bonspiel, Franklin?"
"No, sir, I don't think so." (80)
Elsewhere, Franklin again bemoans his divided status from a more comic, and presumably later, perspective:
And what if we'd never stayed anywhere? If we'd never left Montreal, I'd have been educated in both my languages instead of Florida English. Or if we'd never left the South I'd have emerged a man of breeding, liberal in the traditions of Duke University with tastes for Augustan authors and breeding falcons, for quoting Tocqueville and Henry James, a wearer of three-piece-suits, a user of straight razors. (81)
But the tone in these stories is not generally comic (and when it is, it is mordantly so, as in the satyric "How I Became a Jew"), nor are the extremely hostile conflicts the protagonists find themselves either party to or witness of necessarily along national lines. I will risk pointing out the obvious again, however: Blaise's view of life as a whole would naturally be influenced by ambivalent feelings over nationality.
At this stage it may be appropriate to mention F.B.Andre's The Man Who Beat the Man by way of comparison. As a 1971 immigrant to Canada from Trinidad, Andre conveys in his stories not only the sense of a divided national self but also the racial tension that can either accompany it - or in the case of the title story, exist independently of it. For "The Man Who Beat the Man" does not in fact deal with a character or characters whose situation would be directly that of the author; rather, the "man" dominantly positioned in the title is heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston, and the real story (once one gets past the intricate frame) is that of the complex and dynamic attitudes of predominantly sympathetic whites towards the potentially menacing central figure. A particularly poignant scene occurs when Charlotte, who was assigned the task of teaching Liston (unable even to supply autographs for his fans) to read and write, is saying goodbye to her pupil while poised on the brink of a move from Denver to Vancouver and the beginning of her married life.
The thing that her Bertie fears most in an America of assassins and martyrs, is Us and Them. Charlotte has the for-sure knowledge that the most reviled and feared of Them all is this man who is fiercely loyal, who is funny and genuine, and who is having trouble packing up his gear. (30)
Andre's fictional world is divided, but not so starkly as Blaise's. Whereas the cruelty that Blaise's characters display towards their fellow creatures ("A Fish Like a Buzzard" and "Broward Dowdy") and towards each other (virtually all the "Southern Stories", including the aforementioned) seems genetically universal, Andre's frequently gentle characters show an ability to transcend antagonisms that seem more inherent in situation than in psychology. This is not always the case, though, and his portrayal of class division in the story "The Upsetter" is most keenly emblematised in the terms that the narrator uses to describe the meeting of the company higher-ups occasioned by the death of his coworker.
Mr. Fancy Suit recreates the accident on his blackboard. He calls it like a slow motion replay of a horse race. I can still hear the crack of excitement in his voice, blunted by the surety of the outcome: Colly reached the starting gate at 7:08 and clocked on at 7:34; before the first turn, at 9:26, he was out of the race. (38)
It is interesting that there is no necessary indication that the bitterness in this story cuts along racial lines - the race that Colly is out of is the human.
In both Southern Stories and The Man Who Beat the Man the reader encounters extremely solid work - work that seems to consolidate gains made by the past century's masters in the realist mould. Madeline Sonik's Drying the Bones, on the other hand, is characterized in general by an art that is more self-conscious and more overtly symbolic, as suggested by titles such as "Ugly Hands," "The Bleeding Doll," and "The Cherry Tree." Here for example, in "The Beacon," is the character Nathan's beautiful and poetic repudiation of working life as experienced in the contemporary "employer's market."
His square hand jerks toward his head; it yanks at his Pacific Tours hat and hurls it into an undertow of misty air. The hat rises and spins, like a whirling seed, and then makes one gigantic loop in its descent to the water, landing like a perfect bubble. In a moment, it's gone. (13-14)
Attempts to comment on such a passage tend to lead me toward some rather feeble statement to the effect that "the pleasure is in the writing itself." Of course, where would the pleasure be but in the writing? I do think, though, that the way one reads Sonik's stories is significantly different from the way that one reads stories like those of either Blaise or Andre. As arresting as some of Blaise's images are (for example, the cigarette-smoking vagina in the well-titled "A North American Education"), there is nothing quite comparable, for example, to the dream-image in "Liar" of an abused child being remodelled as a wire statue by a deranged teacher: "your long wire neck is joined to your straight wire shoulders, there are no bolts and your head is the only thing left"(111). Such an image slows the reader down not only because it is so striking, but also because it is immediately recognizable as central both to the reader's understanding of the work and to the characters' understanding of the fictional world they inhabit. (In the above case, the mind's capacity to create symbols is well in advance of the character's ability to distinguish between symbolic and literal truths.) It is Sonik's firm grounding of stories in a single image that distinguishes her from most other fiction writers.
The ends to which she employs this technique, however, are inherently similar to those of Blaise and Andre, in that Sonik too explores conflict that may well have its root in a feeling of dislocation. As the cover of Drying the Bones tells us, Sonik was born in Detroit and moved to Ontario when she was thirteen - and by fifteen was living on her own in England. The conflict played out in the stories is often between generations and also between the Old World and the New. In "Apparitions," a recent immigrant who has become a prostitute schemes to bring her sisters to Canada, only to be shunned by them once they have settled into their comfortable new lives. In "Ugly Hands," both father and daughter are murdered when father teaches daughter to drive, instruction that is deemed by the Eastern-European ghetto community to be "'like teaching a fish to fly...wrong, unnatural'"(49). A fairly typical situation is that of a child put upon by insensitive and self-righteous adults (as in "Anna, I Love You"), but Sonik's stories assume a refreshing variety of tones: her child protagonists, while they may all be victims, do not necessarily have the appropriate attitude. In "Cellar Dust," for example, a child exiled to the cellar begins the narrative as follows:
I'm in the cellar jumping rope. My shiny shoes are clickety-clacking like patent leather bones, and even though I know it's wrong to swear, I'm damned happy. (81)
In "Home Sick," a rather unbelievable seven-year-old, institutionalized, writes a sophisticated apology to her parents for ever having responded to their "jokes" as though they were a form of psychological abuse:
I know I must have appeared pretty foolish never to have gotten the jokes, and I realize how upsetting this was for you and father, who so enjoyed jokes. I suppose if I had been more alert, I would have immediately recognized my lack of humour as the first symptom of my illness, and we could have secured a place for me at this institution prior to my fifth birthday. (91)
The detachment of the narrators is curiously uplifting, for the conflicts they face, while totally unresolved on a human level, are in fact subject to an aesthetic resolution through the humour employed.
Detachment may similarly be the end result of dislocation in Pull Gently, Tear Here by Alexandra Leggat. In the tone-setting "London School," the narrator gives us a glimpse of cruelties experienced during childhood in England which serve as counterpoint to the other stories in their recognizably North American settings. The final paragraph of this five-paragraph vignette (a fairly standard length for Leggat - though a few of the pieces are significantly longer) helps to establish the narrative stance.
I wonder why I never spoke up, never spoke up about the girls throwing me in the nettles. Spoke up about the food I didn't like, and the cold water, and the boy with the yellow teeth. You just did things even if you didn't want to. Too afraid to say no. To say no was not the done thing. I'd say a lot to myself loudly, often deafeningly. It was there I learned, don't speak until spoken to. Don't speak. (18)
Saying "a lot to myself loudly" describes very well Leggat's restrained but penetrating - and ultimately disturbing - poetic prose.
In terms of technique, while she no doubt has more similarities to Sonik than to Blaise or Andre, Leggat would be difficult to compare with any of the three. Her stories advance without named characters - sometimes without clearly denoted external incident. The observer is in exile, the world seen at a distance and sometimes, one suspects, through a distorting lens. At times, as in these two passages from "Dodger," the distance is one of resignation - perhaps with a hint of contempt:
You wander down an alley lined with flaming oil drums. Passed [sic] a group of dirty, drunken men trying to keep warm. They lift paper bags shaped like bottles up to their cracking lips. You listen to them converse in grunts and cackles and think you wandered into the beginning of time when men were apes and women weren't invented yet. They don't notice you. You can't entice them with a taste of things to come. You move on like women do. (43)
You move past a woman begging for change in front of a corner store. She's got a sign hanging around her neck. You think you read something like help please my child and something about a dog and other things under a roof she can't afford. At least she has a roof, you think and wonder what happens if she dies, to the child and cats and dogs. And you wonder why it is these people have children, cats and dogs, as you wander by childless with money in your pocket. (44)
The real polarity in Leggat's prose, then, is that between observer and observed, which tends in turn to be rooted in gender and class. Sometimes the distance is so great that the testimony of the observer could at best be described as unreliable, as in "Second Skin" where a solitary man watches an unknown woman on the street from his father 's Cadillac: "He bets she has a husky voice and although she's wandering around town at dawn with no shoes on, he bets she has a good head on her shoulders"(52).
One could go on quoting forever from Leggat, for her great achievement is her seamless uniformity of both vision and voice. In Donald Justice's preface to The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, he characterizes that poet as "original in one of the few ways that matter: he speaks to us in a voice or, rather, in a particular tone of voice which we have never heard before"(ix). This is exactly the sort of originality that Leggat, too, possesses. In her detached, quietly desperate narrative voice, we hear what is likely, among the four works reviewed here, the most effective in exploring and conveying the richly problematic gap between the human environment and the isolated human being.
In closing, though, I would suggest that while uniqueness of voice may be one of the few types of uniqueness that "matter" in poetry, we might be well-advised to broaden our criteria for what matters when it comes to prose. Leggat is, in fact, a poet (with one volume previously published), and it is a rare ability she displays in transferring a traditionally poetic virtue into another genre. However, I would highly recommend Blaise, Andre, and Sonik to readers of fiction - and surely that recommendation must have something to do with originality. How often, for example, have I seen a genius like that of Blaise - so polished that I feel as though I were looking through clear glass into a world more real than my own? I have a feeling that the answer to such a question will reflect well upon the ways in which these broadly Canadian writers have employed their respective talents.
Works Cited
Blaise, Clark. I Had a Father. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1993.
Kees, Weldon. The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees. Ed. Donald Justice. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975.
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