Jul 072013
 

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Ethan Rutherford’s debut collection, The Peripatetic Coffin, is a funny, cutting, clever look at seclusion, often on the high seas. The title story, concerning the first Confederate submarine, was anthologized in the 2009 edition of The Best American Short Stories, while other stories originally appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, and Five Chapters. Though less than two months have passed since its publication, Rutherford’s collection has quickly gathered praise, from a longlist nomination for the Frank O’Connor award, to inclusion on several summer “must read” lists.

Though I eventually met up with the author at a reading in Providence, RI, the following interview was conducted during a long chain of emails, sometime between late May and mid-June. 

— Benjamin Woodard

Peripatetic_Coffin

Benjamin Woodard (BW): There’s a strong theme of isolation—both physical and emotional—that runs throughout the book. Did you aim for this theme, or did the thread organically appear as you assembled the collection?

Ethan Rutherford (ER): I’d like to say the thread appeared organically as I was putting the collection together—that I sat down with, say, twenty stories, and it became clear that what connected these eight particular stories was that they all orbited around the theme of what you’ve nicely identified as physical and emotional isolation (that “and” is important). But for whatever reason, isolation is a bit of an idée fixe for me as a writer. I can’t get away from it, and the result is that almost all of my stories hinge on, and address to varying degrees, the deleterious effects of spiritual, emotional, or physical isolation. If I were the sort of person who looked inward, rather than pushed these things outward, I’d be tempted to look for reasons: either that’s a sensation I’m familiar with, or the condition I fear most, or some fraught combination thereof. Or, most simply—and less all about me—I think that when a character finds herself in an isolated state, she is at her most combustible, which is an interesting place to be as a reader. And those are the sorts of moments I hustle towards, as a writer.

As for the stories that made the cut and appear in the book: the hope, with a collection, is that each story pulls its weight in order to make the whole somehow greater than the sum of its parts. You want thematic riffing between stories, but you don’t want repetition. The stories need to be in conversation with each other, even if that conversation is submerged, but you don’t want to bang the same pots and pans over and over again. The ocean; the theme of isolation; the ways in which all the characters, at some point, confront what I’ve taken to calling the Talking Heads question—David Byrne, in “Once In A Lifetime,” saying in the turn around: “You may say to yourself, My God, what have I done?” After many cuts and substitutions—giving different stories a shot in the lineup—the stories you see here were the last ones standing. 

BW: Staying on the theme of isolation, you often achieve this effect by employing large vessels to quarantine your characters. Of these, two—the Hunley and the Saint Anna—are real, and one—the Halcyon—exists in a sort of alternative Earth. I’m curious as to what drew you to write historical narratives around the Hunley and the Saint Anna, and also what spurred you to create an alternative universe in which the Halcyon exists.

ER: Ah, “quarantine” is a great way to put it. Well, the easiest answer is simply that I love boats, and the ocean, and one of the great things about writing fiction is that you can sit down and ask yourself: where do I want to go today? The answer for me is always: out to sea. But the challenge, of course, comes when you begin to interrogate what you’re doing, and ask: well, what’s interesting about this, and what makes it a story? What drew me to the historical stories—“The Peripatetic Coffin,” which is set aboard the H.L. Hunley, the first Confederate submarine, and “The Saint Anna,” a story that swims and dips into the True Arctic Disaster genre—was that the real circumstances and events of those stories were so bracing, and end in such calamity, that I was interested in trying to pull those events back down to the human scale. We know how the stories end—catastrophically—but as I read about the fate of those ships, I began to wonder what it felt like to be aboard, embarking on what anyone would eventually recognize as The End of the Line. How do you wrap your mind around something like that?  How do you square up, and to what extent does your emotional response meet or fall short of the ways in which you would’ve hoped and expected? Both of those stories end, to some degree, in failure—the ship is sunk, the crew, nevermore.

With “Dirwhals!” I was hoping to flip the scenario—it’s a successful voyage, in that they finally get what they came for, but at what cost? They’ve hunted a species to extinction, and here we are, the David Byrne question ringing out once more, but this time in a slightly different key, perhaps a more horrified register. “Dirwhals!” was supposed to be a novel—a sequel to Moby Dick—set during the waning days of the American Whaling Industry, when, after the discovery that petroleum could be distilled into kerosene, whaling seemed even more pointless. The voyages were longer, the returns diminished, the hunt increasingly senseless. But, you know, who can go up against Moby Dick? That book is a masterpiece. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the concerns of that imagined story—the rolling wheel of capitalism, the senseless degradation of the environment, the squeezing of natural resources until there is simply nothing left—were still resonant, maybe even more so, today. It’s not too hard to see the way we are going with the environment, and the decision to put the story a few years in the future had to do with wanting those issues to be even starker than they are right now. So there’s the heavy thematic answer for you. On a more basic level, I just love sci-fi, and was excited to write in that genre, and build whatever world I wanted.

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BW: “The Peripatetic Coffin” quickly builds a rhythm off of a series of narrative lists. “Summer, Boys” flows thanks to a strong use of parallel construction. And “Camp Winnesaka” bounces along with a steady combination of high and low (even casual) vocabulary.  How do you approach the language of your narratives?

ER: Well, for me, the challenge of a particular story, the fun part, is sitting down and wondering: who is the best, most interesting person to tell this story? And then you’re faced with the question of how are they going to tell it. I wanted each story to be distinct, and the way I chose to do that was to vary the formal approach—the narrative nuts-n-bolts—of each story. You don’t want stylistic repetition. There may be no new stories under the sun, but there are always new ways to tell them. But the trick is trying to marry form and function. In a story about friends who view themselves as somewhat indistinguishable from one another, a parallel construction and a blurring of narrative POV is in some ways appropriate (“Summer, Boys”). In “Camp Winnesaka,” which is what Charles Baxter would call a dysfunctional narrative in that it is a story in which absolutely no one is willing to take responsibility for what has happened, a monologue that falls all over itself trying to avoid culpability, complete with sentence fragments, etc., seemed like a good mode to work in. You know, that camp counselor has a hard job, trying to convince the reader that the accidental deaths of like, 70 campers, is emblematic something other than a total debacle. The trick is in finding a way of telling that augments the themes contained within a story—brings them into sharper relief, makes the stories sail a little further than they would have otherwise. But narrative tricks, or formal experimentation for experimentation’s sake—where form is the dominant characteristic—that falls flat for me as a reader.

BW: In a story like “Saint Anna,” how do you balance the level of humor and horror in a narrative that essentially revolves around impending death?

ER: Well, I don’t know how it’s done, necessarily, and I couldn’t write a story that says [insert joke here], but I do know that tragedy without comedy isn’t tragedy at all. The characters I love, as a reader, are the ones who take the time to say: wait a second guys, did you see that? That is ridiculous. It’s about seeing. And if all you see is doom and gloom, you don’t have your eyes open very wide at all, and it comes off, on the page, as seeming less than human. Or maybe I should just say this. In every story I write, Bill Murray, who is my hero in every possible way, is sort of sitting on my shoulder, saying: sure, the ship is about to be crushed by ice, but have you tried this amazing hardtack? I like the dissonance created when someone who should be taking something seriously does not; it’s a refusal I find stubbornly humane. Here’s a quote I love, but even as it’s guided my approach to writing about bracing things, I’m not sure I fully understand: “To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero.” Edmond Rostand wrote that. And I guess I have an issue with the idea of bland, tragic heroism. The world is so much more complicated than that. At a reading, someone said that the characters in “The Peripatetic Coffin,” as I’d written them, behaved heroically. And that hadn’t been my intention, at all.

BW: Your stories, while containing dialogue, do not rely on long character conversations to relay a narrative. When you write, do you construct longer passages of dialogue that get edited down, or is this sparseness there from the start?

ER: It got hammered into me pretty early that dialogue should only be used sparingly. The sparseness is there from the start, and I tend to think of dialogue more as a form of emotional punctuation in a story than anything else. Every time a character speaks, it should be in the service of revealing how that character feels about a situation, and I’ve found that if that’s your intention, you don’t need a page of conversation to get to the point. I’m happiest when exposition does most the work of moving a story forward, and dialogue daggers in either to veer the emotional content in a new direction, or reveal something about how the events feel to a character. Obviously, there’s a spectrum here, and the ratio of exposition to dialogue will change depending on the formal choices you’ve made—if the story is told in the first person, there is less dialogue than if it were, say, told in close third. But for the most part I try to keep the dialogue sparse. Action speaks louder than words, and all of that. I’m sure I’ll regret saying this, and my next story will consist of nothing but dialogue, but that’s how I felt when putting these stories together.

BW: At the beginning of “A Mugging,” your omniscient narrator pulls a very brief metafictional trick by speaking directly to the reader and admitting that he (or she) cannot do anything to stop the story from happening. What played into your decision to have the narrator make this statement, as it is the only time he (or she) makes such a move?

ER: In the original draft of that story, the narrator swoops in again at the end, to bemoan the inevitability of the fallout from the mugging and to provide a bookend for that initial meta-commentary. But it never sat right, that ending, and felt largely unnecessary, and too directive (really, it was one of those: “What you’ve just read is…” kind of things, just mortifying in retrospect). I went to chop the beginning, though, and found that I could not. And I think it has something to do with the initial invocation of the “you,” the direct address to the reader, making him/her complicit to some degree with the events that follow. One of the unsettling things for me about being a reader is that you are fundamentally passive, and though you are engaged with whatever story you’re reading, you are helpless to stop the locomotive as it rounds the bend. Making that explicit, in this particular story—I’m not sure what the effect is for other readers—but for me, in writing it, it made me care more about the dissolution about this particular marriage. The story is also told in the future tense, which also hopefully compounds the reader’s sense that something could have been done, if only someone could have cut the red-wire on the ticking bomb in time, stepped in, said “stop.” I think the characters are aware of this as well—aware that their actions are destructive to one another even as they are doing them, but they can’t bring themselves to act differently. The characters are passively watching as they unravel their own marriage. It seems only fair to spread some of that blame around. 

BW: I read “Camp Winnesaka” as an allegory for the Iraq War. Is that a fair assessment? How do you react to these kinds of interpretations of your work?

ER: Oh, yes, absolutely, and in this case, you’ve found the nerve. This story originated after I’d been reading about Pat Tillman, and the events that followed his death due to friendly fire (more specifically: the way that narrative was spun by those invested in the war effort, until the truth came out). But the hope is that the story succeeds on its own, even if the parallels aren’t picked up. People have read that story without registering the Iraq/Afghanistan/Endless War analog, and have been properly horrified, which makes me happy, because if seeing the “real world” parallel is required for the story to have any emotional heft, then it’s a failure. Just this morning, I was in the car, and “Space Oddity” by David Bowie came on the radio. For years and years I’d thought that was just a weird and beautiful song about an actual spaceman, in actual space, whose final missive, as he’s heading out of range, is to tell his wife he loves her very much (“she knoooooows!”). Then someone told me: you know that’s about drugs, right? And I was strangely flattened by that news. You can’t unhear it, and I liked the song better when I understood it literally, rather than as an elaborate junkie metaphor. Which is a long way of saying: I’m happy to hear that anyone has enjoyed that story, on any level. These stories—they’re not yours once you send them out into the world, and it doesn’t matter what your intention was as you were writing them. What matters is how they’re received. “Camp Winnesaka,” though, was the happiest I’ve ever been writing a story, though, for whatever that’s worth. It just came right out. Pure joy to write that one.

BW: In addition to writing, you play guitar in the band Pennyroyal. Do you find that your work in one medium influences the other? Have you written songs that become stories, and vice versa?

ER: The crossover has only happened once, between the story “The Saint Anna” and a song called “Captain,” which opens: “Captain, the ice it won’t break on its own / and we can’t brook the expanse all alone. / By your brow I can see you’re unhappy now. / The leads have stitched and there’s no going home.” What a chart-topper! Other than that, music and writing rarely intersect for me. I find when I write fiction, the pleasure comes from inhabiting the lives of others, and trying to bring color to experiences I’ve never had. When writing music, it tends to be more confessional, more personal, more of a direct unburdening. What I love about writing—that you are responsible for creating your own tiny universe—is the exact opposite of what I love about playing music, which is that when things are moving well, and everyone is playing and really listening to each other, what is created is always a bit of a happy surprise. You know immediately if something is working or not; whereas with writing, it might take you months to figure out you’ve hit a sour note, or were playing in the wrong key all along.

BW: Several small narrative elements in “Summer, Boys”—the Boz poster, Spokey Dokes, Garbage Pail Kids, Bambi vs. Godzilla—firmly and genuinely plant the story in the late 1980s. I’m guessing you were a kid during this time. Do you have fond memories of these knickknacks, and, if so, is it difficult to inject real elements of your childhood into a fictional story?

ER: I was a kid during the 80’s, though the references invoked in that story are a combination of the things I loved and what I understood Older Kids to love (i.e. the things I knew I should love too, but my parents either wouldn’t get for me, or wouldn’t let me watch). And it was a pleasure to allow myself to go back in time like that, remembering this or that cherished and fetishized, and now forgotten, object of childhood. Just a pleasure. All of it came right back. When you’re a kid, you love stuff. The few things that are yours are extremely important to you, emotionally and imaginatively; they link you to the world. Who am I? I’m a kid who lives for a new pack of Garbage Pail Kids. There’s always a concern out there—someone always brings it up—that if you include pop-culture touchstones in a story you are unnecessarily dating a piece of writing, ensuring that it won’t have resonance outside of the few people who cherished the exact same things you did, and therefore Won’t Become Literature. I get where that idea is coming from, but with respect, that theory of literature can go sink itself. It’s the most reductive way to think about fiction, that there are certain things you can and should be writing about. And for “Summer, Boys” in particular—a story that is about a fleeting moment in childhood, when meaning is attached to, and in many ways originates from, very specific pop-cultural flotsam—how could you not include the names? They’re not toy robots. They’re Transformers. That these things ascend as treasured objects, and then are promptly forgotten, or replaced—that’s the point of the story. And as far as that emotional sentiment also characterizes the friendship between the two boys, is where its sadness comes from.

BW: Perhaps this is a cruel question to ask someone on the week that his debut collection is released, but what are you working on now?

ER: Oh boy, you are cruel! I’m working on a novel, which is in its infancy at the moment, and may thrive, or may not. I mean: I think it’s a good idea for a book. But I’m also the guy who spent seven years trying to write a story narrated by Conan the Barbarian, so I don’t always have the best perspective on these things.

BW: Finally, what’s the best advice you received from a literary mentor?

ER: Paraphrasing here, but from Jim Shepard—take what you’re interested in seriously, push it until you find what’s weird about that, and then keep digging until you find the emotional heart of your story. More directly, from an interview he did: “Quirky without pain? Then you’re just performing.” And from Charles Baxter, who said to me once: “Nothing’s happening here.  Something has to happen.” He’s also the guy who pulled the plug, finally, on the Conan story, and the world can thank him for that forever.

— Ethan Rutherford & Benjamin Woodard

———————

Ethan Rutherford was born in Seattle, and now lives in the Midwest. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, New York Tyrant, Esopus, Five Chapters, and The Best American Short Stories. His work has received special mention in the 2009, 2010 and 2013 editions of the Pushcart Prize, and received awards from the McKnight Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board. He received his MFA from the University of Minnesota, and has taught creative writing at Macalester College, the University of Minnesota, and the Loft Literary Center. He is the guitarist for the band Pennyroyal, which has been assaulting the ears of its listeners with songs of the ocean and long lost love since 2010. He is currently at work on a novel set in the Alaskan wilderness.

Ben_WoodardBenjamin Woodard lives in Connecticut. His writing has been featured in, or is forthcoming from, Numéro CinqDrunken Boat, Cleaver Magazine, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and other fine publications. You can find him at benjaminjwoodard.com.

Jun 252010
 

 

#6:  Letting Characters Speak the Truth

How often do we lie, hide, evade, and otherwise avoid a truth in life?  I don’t mean big lies, lies of consequence, but little ones, white lies, lies of avoidance in place of harsher truths.  Most of the rules of polite society demand decorum at the expense of honesty.  The common question in the street, “How are you?” is seldom met with a genuine response.  If it was, the inquisitor would likely run for the hills.  We are expected to behave, to polish reality, to adhere to the strictures of proper behavior, and this tendency can bleed over into our writing.  (Well, it did in mine.)

Charles Baxter, in his essay, “Create a Scene,” says, “In fiction we want to have characters create scenes that in real life we would typically avoid.”

In a story I submitted for my third packet, I did something right (at last!) which created a spark of drama.  I had one of my characters speak honestly to his wife when he didn’t necessarily want to.  It was an uncomfortable moment, and my character spoke a truth that in real life he probably would have avoided saying out loud.  Prior to this moment, I had diligently avoided making this choice in much of my writing, but once I did, the scene erupted with dramatic potential.  (It fizzled soon after, but hey, I’m still learning.)

Doug wrote about this scene in my packet letter: “But then the scene develops good drama when Jacob actually tells the truth.  I love it when a student learns to use the truth to power a scene.”  They were only two lines in a 5 page, single spaced response, but what joy at reading those two lines!

On our follow-up phone conversation, Doug reminded me that at each moment in a story, the writer chooses how a character acts.  The writer, through the characters, decides to evade or rush forward with the truth.  Those choices change the outcome of  scenes and stories, creating vibrant, dramatic ones, or, in my case before this scene, creating flat, lifeless ones that mimic the undramatic experiences we have every day.  In much of my previous writing, my characters mostly behaved like genteel people, avoiding the truth in a bland mimesis of reality.

Baxter again: “The story becomes the stage, not for truth, but for self-actualization.  We try to imagine the person as we would like ourselves to be and as a result write a banal and lifelessly idealistic story.”

In life most of us are duty-bound to follow very different rules than the ones we create in our writing.  In fiction, we’re unfettered.  In fiction, the inner demons can rage.  By allowing them to do so, the writer creates an opportunity for drama.

On a specific, concrete level, such drama can be created simply by having characters tell each other difficult truths.  Baxter calls this the “staging of a desire, making a darkness visible and dramatic.”

I knew avoidance was wrong and that it impeded my story.  That was the frustrating part.  I knew that desire/resistance leads to conflict which leads to drama, but I had a hard time enacting it in a scene.  Doug’s simple solution of having my characters behave honestly (usually in dialogue) significantly helped me understand the potential at various stages throughout a story.

I found myself going back to this lesson again and again throughout the semester.  My characters began to blurt out things that most people wouldn’t say sitting around the dinner table.  Baxter says we need such spectacle.  “Bad manners put us on a stage, and a stage, as every writer knows, is what is required for dramatic force.”

By taking this relatively small step, and letting my characters speak the truth, I found a tangible technique that helped me amp up the dramatic potential of a scene.

Up Next: #5: My Love Affair with Abstractions

See also other entries in this series starting with #10.

-Rich Farrell

Apr 132010
 

CaptureLorrie Moore

Birds-of-America

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Dancing Amidst Despair: From Cosmology to Counterpointed Characterization

We begin adrift, as an idea hovering above a blank page, as two cells floating in the miasma of fallopian tubes.  Our stories and our lives begin as little-things, as truly, almost nothing.  And from the void emerges a word, a unified cell; and thus begins the story, begins the life.  How much does an idea weigh?  Certainly even less than a single cell, if such weights were quantifiable, yet all things are built upon these foundations of lightness.  A creation begins with the merest thing.  The idea, like the cell, must gain by accretion.  It lives only with connections to other ideas—without those connections, it vanishes.  And with variability, with diversity, with contrast, the stories and characters become rich and layered.

Pattiann Rogers opens her essay, Twentieth-Century Cosmology and the Soul’s Habitation, with this thought: “I’m very curious about the grid upon which we mentally place ourselves in time and space.  There must be a grid of some kind there for each of us, a visual scaffolding, for balance, for orientation.”  I think of that grid as a story, as the details which define the particular world of imagined lives captured on a page.  I think of that grid as the small, Pennsylvania college town where Lorrie Moore’s unnamed narrator has gone for an evening to meet up with her old friend, Cal, in the short story “Dance In America.”  I’d like to dwell on that grid awhile, to see if it can provide some clue what it’s all about.

Moore opens with an evocative, almost lyrical passage about dance.  Yet absent in this opening is character.  The unnamed narrator speaks in abstractions to an undefined audience, albeit with carefully crafted words.

I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom.  I tell them it’s the body’s reaching, bringing air into itself.  I tell them it’s the heart’s triumph, the victory speech of the feet, the refinement of animal lunge and flight, the purest metaphor of tribe and self.  It is life flipping death the bird.

I make this stuff up.

Despite the power of the language, the story suffers because we don’t have a grid yet, we don’t have a context for what’s happening, until the second paragraph, that is.  Until the narrator bursts in and says, “I make this stuff up.”  That short sentence brings life in.  It opens up the story so that a character speaks honestly about herself.  It reveals instantly a penetrating and close narrative voice.  The rest is slight by comparison—beautiful phrases destined for posters hanging in a dance studio.  Without the dancer, the words mean almost nothing.  Character must be present to contextualize the abstraction.

Later, the narrator and Cal are out walking his dog, and talking about the past.  “He’d been exaggerating his interest in dance.  ‘I didn’t get it,’ he admitted.  ‘I kept trying to figure out the story.’” Dance continues to remain abstract here, a concept not yet alive.  Cal as much as tells us this.  There is also a distinct coolness between these two old friends so far.  “I’m determined to be agreeable,” the narrator says at one point; “I must be nice,” she says just a paragraph later.  They talk about paint colors and trade witticisms about Snickerdoodles, but all of this is surface clutter.  There is not enough contrast or conflict between the narrator and Cal.  At one point on the walk, they even think the same thoughts.  “Up in the sky, Venus and the thinnest pairing of sickle moon, like a cup and saucer, like a nose and mouth, have made the Turkish flag in the sky,” thinks the narrator.  “‘Wow,’ Cal says.  ‘The Turkish flag.’”  Were this to continue, I would argue that these two characters would not generate much dramatic spark.  Such energy-providing contrast comes from what Charles Baxter calls counterpointed characterization.  This will come in a minute, but first, back to the cosmos.

Rogers quotes Bertrand Russell when she says, “The point of departure must be ‘unyielding despair.’  We start from the recognition of that point to build the soul’s habitation.”  This despair emerges from a modern cosmology, a historically recent understanding of the universe and our almost imperceptible presence in it.  Rogers says:

The Sun is tiny compared to the size of the solar system, the solar system to the size of the Milky Way galaxy, the Milky Way to the size of the Andromeda galaxy, which is twice as big, containing 400 billion stars.  And yet the Andromeda galaxy is tiny compared to the universe, which contains billions of other galaxies.  All of that, up there, going on at this moment.

The point of departure Rogers refers to is the act of creation within the vast coldness of an indifferent cosmos.  In the past, such creation had a single source and a single destination: the divine and it’s manifestation of a destiny—a revealed plan for man.  For a long time in the West, art, history, politics and society served and glorified God, with a capital G.   Modern thinking, however, must contend with a much different perception of reality.  Rogers says: “As a result of this cosmology all of us, I would venture to say, have seen ourselves at some moment or other as ‘mankind aimlessly adrift in a meaningless universe.’”  We begin adrift. This awareness of our diminished role in the cosmos leads directly to a sense of unyielding despair.  What can we do, specks of dust on a piece of rock floating in an unfathomable, endless universe? How can we create something of value in a universe devoid of meaning?  Rogers turns not to science’s reductive approach of cutting and measuring (which she also defends and respects) but by seeking an artistic interconnectedness in things.  “The creative person, whether scientist or artist,…is that person who imagines new, different connections, broadening our conception of the universe and its interconnectedness as a whole.”   Charles Baxter echoes this too, although more narrowly, when he talks of the “incompatibility of passion and gentility” in James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.”  The artist seeks to illuminate the human condition in the darkness of an unfathomable universe.  Creation, in its highest forms, begins as an act of passion.  “Passion knocks decency right off the stage,” Baxter says.  The soul’s habitation is constructed on this grid, against this backdrop of cold, endless despair, filled with quotidian formality, gentility, struggles and structures, but in the hearth, a fire surely burns.

In order to render such passion in fiction, characters must be brought into contrast.  Baxter says, “Plot often develops out of the tension between characters, and in order to get that tension, a writer sometimes has to be something of a matchmaker, creating characters who counterpoint one another.”  Baxter says that characters are designed to rub up against each other, to create friction of sort, or even warmth, but that it is the connections between the characters that make the story.  “Certain kinds of people are pushed together, people who bring out a crucial response in each other.  A latent energy rises to the surface.”  It can’t be done with beautiful prose alone, at least not in a sustainable way.  Without the characters, the prose energy cools quickly. With counterpointed characters, the energy levels rise even more quickly.  In “Dance In America,” Lorrie Moore works to heat up her story with the introduction of a seven year-old boy named Eugene.

Eugene, the son of Cal and his wife, Simone, has cystic fibrosis and his “whole life is a race with medical research.”  Moore never says so directly, but we gather that the boy is dying.  “Already, Cal says, Eugene has degenerated, grown worse, too much liquid in his lungs.  ‘Stickiness,’ he calls it. ‘If he were three instead of seven, there’d be more hope.’”  Enter the backdrop of despair. Yet in spite of his condition, a condition which makes him labor for breath, Eugene steals this story, crashing into it with life and verve.  Notice the verbs Moore uses with respect to Eugene:  shouts, slides, chases, races, grabs, and smiles.  Eugene roars with life, overcoming his parents, the narrator and even our own despair.  Before he even enters the story directly, his presence pulsates with energy.  Talking to the narrator, Cal says:

‘It’s not that I’m not for the arts’, says Cal.  ‘You’re here; money for the arts brought you here.  That’s wonderful.  It’s wonderful to see you after all these years.  It’s wonderful to fund the arts.  The arts are so nice and wonderful.  But really: I say, let’s give all the money, every last fucking dime, to science.’

Notice the contrast here.  The repetitive use of wonderful and the clichéd language in relationship to abstract things, and in relation to the narrator’s visit, builds to an almost ecstatic outpouring for Eugene, who has yet to appear but whose illness has been introduced.  Moore uses the word fuck two times in this story, and both times (I will examine the second use below) the energy and force of that most un-genteel word strike exactly the right tone.  There is no vulgarity here, only passion.  The last sentence of this paragraph works like a prayer, like a devotion to the modern god, Science, driven by the most desperate yearning of the human spirit.

Eugene works as the counterpointed character to the adults in the story.  With only Cal, Simone and the narrator, the story would fall flat.  Eugene reminds the other characters what life is supposed to be about.  In talking about counterpointed characters, Baxter says:

A third element is born when these characters meet.  This element is not just drama, the force of conflicting desires.  It is a kind of invisible presence whose identity is generated by the proximity of these…characters, and this presence in not moral or simple.

Eugene shakes up this story when he arrives.  The adult lives are turned completely around.  The story becomes exciting during Eugene’s time on stage.  Notice the changes in the voice of the narrator especially—gone is the cynicism and ironic detachment from her voice.  “He huddles close, cold in the drafty house, and I extend my long sweater around him like a shawl.”  “He watches, rapt.  His brown hair hangs in strings in his face, and he chews it.”  With Eugene present, the narrator is dancing for the first time.  Through his suffering, Eugene teaches the narrator (and presumably, hopefully, the reader) to celebrate life. After dinner, they actually go and dance in Cal’s living room.  The narrator takes the hand of the “amazing Eugene” and loses herself to the music of Kenny Loggins.  “We make a phalanx and march, strut, slide to the music.  We crouch, move backward, then burst forward again.  We’re aiming to create the mildew, resinous sweat smell of dance.”

This story works with no real direct conflict in it, other than the unyielding despair of an indifferent universe that would besiege a seven year-old boy with cystic fibrosis.  What drives this story is the contrast between the adult word of sophistication and social codes and the free, more open world of Eugene.   It’s Baxter’s passion knocking decency off the stage again.  “Counterpointing substitutes for conflict, or displaces it,” Baxter says.  Were Eugene not present, some other motive force would have to drive this story forward.  Instead, Eugene’s vibrancy works to shake the characters loose of their doldrums.  It’s managed carefully, however.  Moore is hardly preaching and hardly providing a caricature of morality.  In one telling scene, Eugene practically begs the narrator to visit his classroom the next day, when she stops by his school to conduct a dance workshop for older kids.  “‘Sure,’ I say, not knowing that, in a rush, I will forget, and that I’ll be on a plane home already, leafing through some inane airline magazine before I remember that I forgot to do it.”  Moore uses prolepsis here to underscore this scene’s importance, and she shows us how easy it is to forget the sublime in place of the mundane.  The use of the airline magazine works to underscore this point.  Just because Eugene’s presence shines like a beacon in this story, Moore is a careful enough artist to render reality’s often cold indifference to the light.

Yet, in spite of the pain and suffering, we press forward.   Rogers puts it this way:  “And here’s a miracle that must be constantly celebrated: In spite of the moments of the soul’s desperation, we do proceed.”  Moore paints this picture vividly in the story, again using the sharp contrasts between Eugene and the adults.   After he is called to dinner, Eugene must take a regimen of pills for his illness.  Notice the verbs and how they contrast between the characters.

‘Coming!’ shouts Eugene, and he leaps off the couch and slides into the dining room, falling sideways into her chair.  ‘Whoo,’ he says, out of breath.  ‘I almost didn’t make it.’

‘Here,’ says Cal.  He places a goblet of pills at Eugene’s place setting.

Eugene makes a face, but in the chair, he gets up on his knees, leans forward, glass of water in one hand, and begins the arduous activity of taking all the pills.

I sit in the chair opposite him and place my napkin in my lap.

In this short example, we have despair and miraculous procession.  The illness hovers always over Eugene.  Like the universe, it is a dark, relentless presence that cannot be escaped.  Yet Eugene perseveres, undaunted by the magnitude of it.  Notice also the counterpointing to create this effect: Cal, placing the pills, the narrator placing the napkin, while Eugene shouts, leaps, slides and falls into his chair.  And though out of breath, he finds the strength to speak while the adults watch in near silence.  As readers, we feel the emotional weight of Eugene through the adult consciousness of the story, but it is Eugene, not the adults, who instructs us how to live under the cold universe.  Rogers says that “we continue to build the soul’s habitation” by “expressing the awe and thrill and gratitude we feel at the mystery and beauty of the universe.”

The final scene in “Dance in America” seems to capture this feeling of awe perfectly.  The characters are dancing in the living room but Eugene tires due to his illness. He is “determined not to cough until the end,” and the narrator then goes to him.  Notice the change in language from the opening.

I am thinking of the dancing body’s magnificent and ostentatious scorn.  This is how we offer ourselves, enter heaven, enter speaking: we say with motion, in space, This is what life’s done so far down here; this is all and what and everything it’s managed—this body, these bodies, that body—so what do you think, Heaven?  What do you fucking think?

This passage is the narrator’s direct answer to the cosmos; it’s her defiant answer to the question, What’s it all about, down here?  In spite of the flaws and terrible fates awaiting them, these characters are dancing.  They are staring into the unfathomable emptiness of infinity and “flipping death the bird.”   Moore’s narrator has reclaimed the language of her opening, by rubbing up against Eugene, and has taken the “latent energy ris(ing) to the surface” and burst it over the top.  By achieving a harmonious balance between very different characters, Moore has crafted both a simple story and a profoundly moving one, one that seeks to find a grid, a location to construct the human soul’s rightful habitation in the universe.

—Richard Farrell

Works Cited

Baxter, Charles.  Burning Down the House.  (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1997)

Moore, Lorrie.  “Dance in America.”  In Birds of America. (London: Faber and Faber, 1998)

Rogers, Pattiann.  “Twentieth-Century Cosmology and the Soul’s Habitation.”  In Writing it Down for James, edited by Kurt Brown.  (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)

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