Gobsmacked by Literature

Feat Lorrie Moore, Dorothy Allison and Anton Chekhov

How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler’s mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye’s instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That’s where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth’s eager devastation. —Lorrie Moore, People Like That Are The Only People Here

This is to follow my September 3rd post about the Alice Munro/Andrea Skinner story, that series of revelations and conversations that not only disillusioned me regarding Munro, but which made me entertain some alien thoughts about writing itself, I mean alien to me. To refrain: “I had absurd thoughts or rather thought-like strings of words such as: ‘beautiful writing is artificial, in its nature deceptive and actually evil.’..It felt like I was finally caving in to something that I have resisted all my adult life; a suspicion of formal beauty, of “fancy language” or art that is so powerful it may restructure how the reader or viewer sees the world, finding uplift in an ugly story or making a distractingly interesting puzzle of it.”

This is a hard subject to say anything precise about because first I don’t actually believe it and yet—there something here I want to at least try to explore. The Lorrie Moore quote touches on it certainly. The story it is taken from is fiction bounced off a real and frightening experience, the illness of a very young child. The protagonist of the story is a writer of fiction whose husband urges her to write a story about the ordeal because they will need money to pay the hospital bills; the writer doesn't want to, actually doesn't think she can. Their back-and-forth gives the narrative a kind of double-barreled power: the protagonist's furious anguish as a mother juxtaposed with a deeply felt artistic question: not should such a private traumatic event be written about but can it be written in any way that approximates such raw reality? (And then, wedged in between, there is the more brute practical question, the one about the hospital bills.) As Moore eloquently suggests in the quoted passage, how can an abstract word-structure thing, an imitation world stitched together with metaphor, dialogue and (in Moore's case) charming humor begin to do justice to an experience of such visceral fear and pain? As it turns out, readers felt the story did the experience even better than justice--but then it wasn't their visceral pain, meaning that they didn't really know what the experience was. Parents who have had a seriously ill child surely understood it more than others. But really they couldn't even know on the most intimate--that is to say wordless--level."

“All that unsayable life!” When a story is, like Moore’s, about something painful and overwhelming, it is perhaps natural to sense a kind of spiritual disjunction between the artful rendering and the painful subject matter—sometimes such a disjunction can even be disturbing, almost like psychic violence. In People Like That, the author seemed aware of the disjunction and worked with it, highlighting it to create a certain jagged tension; she eschewed stylistic beauty, going instead for sharp, manic comedy that dances and darts around the cruel disjunction until the narrator finally falls prostrate before it in a dramatic change of tone (quote above). It’s an unusual choice and when I first encountered it, it rubbed me the wrong way. For me the human will to define, to assert itself in the chaos and brutality of life, to spiritually talk back to it is not only an act of courage but necessary for survival. (I still believe that actually.) I initially found the narrator’s protestations coy and irritating; eventually I grasped that Moore was deploying them in the service of artistic layering; her character rages and then bows before the impossibility of “unsayable life” and then Moore says it anyway.

Lorrie Moore

But even when it’s not a beautifully (or cleverly) told narrative about something painful and cruel, even if it’s a bright and funny story, it’s still myriad, multifarious life with a sophisticated word-structure thing imposed on it. Looked at a certain way, just the insistent shape of the structure itself might be felt as a kind of strangely grating arrogance, particularly when the structure is the product of an exceptionally powerful will—I think this is one reason that a lot of people dislike Nabokov. But the concept applies even if you’re not that kind of sui generis force: who are you to tell life what it is?

During a recent interview my interlocutor paid me a great compliment: He said “You have the power to name the thing.” That is a power indeed, even if it’s only expressed in stories read by a relatively small number of people. But any time you name a thing you define it and the definition is inherently limiting; when you name a thing you cut out a lot of other things, and no human can name all the things—at least not by all their possible names—or even see them. (In some story or other, I don’t recall which, I wrote a line describing a pop singer who’s high, super-sweet voice “cut a valentine heart in the coarse flesh of love;” it was meant to evoke the quotidian seductive violence of restricted definitions.) Most of the time, this is no big deal! Everybody knows that a story or a song, even if it is great on a human scale, is a small, fleeting phenomenon meant to give pleasure or something more profound or both. We enjoy it for what it is and, if we think about it, maybe reverence it as an intrepid human response to the too raw, too-muchness of life. One can also see the human response as an integral part of the too-muchess, swimming in the stream of it.