Oct 122013
 

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Herewith a new short story by Greg Gerke, a writer out of the tradition of Gordon Lish, the second generation, sentences that ring of Gary Lutz; characters reminiscent of Sam Lipsyte; the whole exuding panache and cool and the inner seediness of the soul, ever hopeful.

Last month Greg Gerke, David Winters and Jason Lucarelli published “Learning from Lish, a Roundtable on Style in Fiction” at The Literarian (published by the Center for Fiction in New York) — Gordon Lish, the tradition, Lish’s aesthetic and his influence, the place of art in life; I am still mulling over this amazing conversation. One thing Gerke wrote especially hit home:

Isn’t the way of literature to tap into the source self, since writing bores into the pit of the brain better than any other process? Maybe that “last thing you would ever want anyone to know” is exactly the first thing any reader wants to know—otherwise, what is the point? The world is so full of deception that not to spread oneself out naked on the page or the screen or the canvas is senseless.

Think about this as you read the story.

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—-

Though they had been friends for ten years, Bret never fully trusted Ted. They would make fun of the same people, praise a select set of dead artists, and stuff themselves with Indian food, but about women they did not agree.

Short with a gecko-shaped face, Ted could talk and after a few laughs and drinks, even men wanted to rub his bald head. We like this every day guy, this new century Ralph Kramden, they thought. Maybe if we touch him we’ll find a hundred dollar bill in the gutter.

On Fridays, Ted would hoist a drink, twist his thin lips, and stretch his red cheeks to construct something resembling cute. “To all my friends,” he said sanctimoniously, aping a movie scene, though he’d long forgotten the title, even the story. “Let’s just say I invented it. Where’d you get that shirt?”

Nervous since childhood, Bret came at things like he continually walked the side of a 2×4. “What do you mean you forgot the Frisbee, did someone steal it?” he would say, wrinkling his forehead under straw-colored hair spidering out from his crown. People tolerated him because of Ted, but couples who knew them whispered about Bret before they went to bed. If he did finally lose it, they hoped to God they wouldn’t be around.

Bret’s plight. That phrase stuck in Ted’s head one morning after he completed a cardio workout at the gym. He approached the new girl at the front desk. “One of my best friends is so shy, babe. What do you say about a guy who likes to put a time table on when he’ll sleep with someone?”

She turned a magazine page and avoided Ted’s oily face by moving her lazy eyes to the far wall of gold-plated trophies. “I’d say nothing.”

Ted wiped his neck with a towel. “He’s great. He’ll make you frittata for no reason. He’d drive twenty miles to help me with my car—the man is a living, breathing, fucking AAA.” After a harsh laugh, he quickly judged her bicep tattoo of the grim reaper a worthy effort.

“Yeah, well.” She went back to the magazine.

“Where do you live, Martha?”

“On a street you may know, but will never visit.”

One afternoon before they played tennis, the two friends sat on Bret’s porch drinking lemonade with a splash of rum. Bret had found a set of childhood pictures. He bunched his shirt sleeves and grinned, “Look, this was me as the sad clown. Don’t I look ridiculous? My mom spent two weeks making the costume.”

Ted pouted his lips in appraisal, “Your eyes are pretty expressive—they say I hate Halloween, I hate my mom, and I hate my life.”

Bret gathered the stack of Kodak processed photos into his lap and ordered them neatly. “Don’t be a dick.”

“What? You told me those things about your childhood, bro. It was a tear-stained day in the mighty month of May.”

Bret scowled. “I only told you half the story.”

“Why only half? Am I half a friend?”

Bret laughed. “Hey, arsehole, why do you always deliver the punch lines?”

“Cause you’re the straight man.” Ted burped and hearing a car’s passing music, shook his arms to the groove.

Bret put the photographs back in a bubble envelope. “I’ll show you some other time when we don’t have a big match pending. Now, who is this woman? You said she played tennis at Irvine?”

Checking the money in his wallet, Ted said, “Sherri or Sharon. I don’t know, it begins with Sh. And no, I don’t know if she played tennis there or knew someone on the team. All I know is she’s wanted to play for months. Does massage. You know she’s trying to find her way here.” Ted made a wind sound. “The skin, I’m telling you. She could be in a mag a couple notches below Vogue.” He stretched his arms proudly. “Maybe one notch.”

The trio hit balls for less than a half hour. Bret wanted to let them play one on one and sat down for five minutes. We’ll go out, get some drinks, and then they’ll go and sleep together, he thought. What do I really want in my goddamn life?

The ball bounced off his foot and Sherri bounded over. As she blocked his sun, she twirled her old racket, still carrying a smudge of cob-web just below the strings. “Is our little ball boy tired already?”

“I just want to watch the professionals.”

Sherri giggled and he smelt her apricot body wash. Ten years ago, after she finished high school in Seattle, she had joined the army. She’d been in Oakland only three months. A middle-eastern restaurant venture in Portland had failed and now she lived here with her sister. She was lonely and when she smiled her gums showed.  Dropping Cézanne’s name made Bret want to take her in a corner and rub colors into her muscular chest.

Ted announced the Giants had won in extra innings and then kissed his cell phone.

They drove into Berkeley and after three rounds of mojitos on a patio with Tibetan prayer flags waving, Bret started doing impressions. He tilted his head and spoke in a baby-like staccato, “Yeah, gotta see Wapner at 4:00, then Jep-Jep-Jeopardy.”

“Rainman, ole!” Ted cackled, calling their waitress to also salute Bret’s skill.

It had been months since Bret didn’t feel terribly dependent or stricken by a sense of not belonging. For one grand moment he didn’t care about childhood or not being able to swim. He pictured pummeling his abusive father and being celebrated for it with a ticker-tape parade on Fifth Avenue. His blood ran faster and all the ideas and words that could never get out in time were readily available, like they hung on a snazzy tool belt. Four hours ago he had cursed the wireless signal in his house. Now his life was heaven.

When Sherri touched his knee, he knew he’d gone about the enterprise all wrong. Be a loud ass like his beefy friend, not a timid, sulking bore who dusts when he can’t think of anything better to do. Be sloppy and ruin the tawdry perceptions people hold to. Invite them to be entranced by your feelings. Give them what they can’t give themselves.

Sherri reeled from his Katherine Hepburn, holding his shoulder for support. “My parents took me to On Golden Pond. I was five. I totally hated it.”

Bret’s eyes lit up. “Mine took me, too.” Then he stalled like his battery had died, like he didn’t believe his bullshit anymore. He looked to Ted who grinned devilishly while composing a text that would surely make someone miserable.

Sherri went to the bathroom and Ted snapped his fingers. “You have a mini-stroke?”

“Fuck off. I’m having fun.”

“I know you are, but she likes you and you have to close it. Talk her up. Tell her she has strong legs.”

“Why?” Bret snorted. “Why legs? She has strong everything. A strong, warm per— And I’m goddamn thirty-two, dad. I don’t need pointers.”

Ted sat back and made the peace symbol. “Loving you, brother.”

When Sherri returned, Bret yelled, “Basta!” She smiled and the tip of her tongue showed like a cat in the midst of licking itself.

Bret motioned toward her with his drink. “You must have jogged a bunch in the army, right?”

Ted went to a birthday party, and Bret and Sherri walked into the hills of the campus at dusk. Giant fir trees swayed. Heat bugs rattled. They scooted to a prominence overlooking the football stadium and sat down to kiss. With his hands fastened to her breasts, he ejaculated. Quietly, he sunk his head into his armpit, but she yanked his chin up and opened her eyes to him. “I have an incredible feeling about you, Bret. I want you to come to my bedroom.”

His face finally softened.

She nibbled at his ear and whispered, “I just put on clean sheets.”

In the morning they couldn’t stop laughing. They’d made love all night and the world smelt raw and unrelenting like it had been created a few hours ago. When Sherri went to the bathroom, he pressed the pillow to his face to keep her sweet scent in his head. Joyously he lunged over the bed and noticed a hairpin underneath, along with some popcorn kernels. Also a white object that after he dug it up turned out to be her vibrator. A yellowy streak on the side momentarily disgusted him. He shrugged his shoulders and put it back. There were probably stale tissues under his bed.

Sherri came back gleaming, her skin golden. Everything she had stood out before him in the daylight. She sang, I want to thank you, for giving me the best day of my life.

“Please,” he said, raising his arm like a matador.

Her sister was gone for the weekend and later they sat in the living room naked—cuddling and listening to music. “I wanna hear all about the army,” he said brightly.

“No, you don’t and I don’t really want to talk about it, baby. It’s very overrated. Nothing big happened. It’s just like living. You work, then you party and have fun.” She took an apple slice off the coffee table and wiped up a spot of cinnamon.

Bret did a double take. “What is it? Two o’clock and all we’ve had is an apple?” They laughed and hugged. Outside a dog barked.

“You like chihuahuas?” she said.

He stared at her genitals, judging her labia’s breezy swirl the greatest work of art in North America. “Chihuahuas are number one.”

She looked across the room. “I want to get a dog, but I don’t have any money.

“My sister’s getting me some stuff, but I’ve got to get a real job. I live off of two massages a week. That restaurant debt,” and she shuddered. She turned up the sound on one of the few cds she had brought from Portland—Coltrane’s Giant Steps. “No worries,” she said and she danced back to the couch.

“Let’s get a pizza!” he shouted.

Sherri leapt for the telephone book while howling like an Indian and Bret closed his eyes in triumph.

When the doorbell rang Sherri went to get some clothes. Normally skittish about showing his rail thin body to the public, Bret threw a towel around his waist. “Oh, just use my wallet. It’s on the kitchen table,” she yelled from the bedroom. He would insist on getting dinner.

He took the wallet and opened the door to a short, pimpled delivery driver with a pale face. Part of Bret wanted Sherri to show herself behind him so the teen could see more of his new life. Her wallet had a ten and a clip of twenties with handwriting on the back of the outside bill. Bret’s eyes buoyed slantwise. He took a twenty from the middle and impatiently tossed it to the driver. After he closed the door, he read the note on the last bill. You’re the best. Tubby

Sherri ran in, dressed in a white bikini and clapped her hands as she jumped up and down. “I smell artichokes!”

“Who’s Tubby?”

“Huh?”

He turned the clip and showed her.

“Oh, just an old friend.”

“He owed you money?”

“Yeah,” she said.  She reached for the bills, but he pulled them away.

There was a fork in the river and Bret could have taken the way that didn’t lead to the falls, but he knew she lied. He’d been made to pick at the slightest mark on the wall. Bret wiped his face and handed her the money—all four cold, heartless twenties.

Sherri kept staring at him and then opened the pizza, but he slapped the cardboard shut. “When did you meet Ted?” he said.

“This year.” Her head lowered like a dog. “Two years ago in Portland. We had a short thing, it was nothing. It was when the restaurant—”

“Stop talking.” Bret tried to step outside himself. The cords in his throat were going stiff and his right leg began to shake.

“Okay, Bret.” She felt the bikini’s pinching fabric on her once sleek body and crossed her arms over her breasts. “You alright?”

He sat down on the carpet and bunched the towel out to cover his parts. Silent tears slid off him. “He fucking paid you to sleep with me.”

“No!” she said. “No. I’m giving it back. It’s a misunderstanding.”

He beat the floor at his side.

“Stop, Bret. I like you. It’s not what you think.” She reached toward him.

“No,” he said. “It’s worse.”

Bret confronted Ted at his house. An embarrassing scene. Ted had offered himself to be pummeled. “Take me out, man. Do it. It was rotten, but I tried to help. I thought I was doing good.”

Six months later Ted again called and they exchanged pleasantries but when he tried to get him to go out, Bret laughed. “I can’t forgive you, Ted. I’m sorry.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Ahhhh.”

“Cut the shit. We’re  friends for a long time. You’re my brother,” Ted said mincingly.

Bret would often go to dinner by himself. It calmed him in some way. Chinese, Thai food—anything. He watched the slight waitresses and thought, Why can’t I let it go? I’d be happier. Bret once asked his waitress the same question. A smile raised her eyes and she walked to the back, returning with two spring rolls.

Ted had been out till dawn carousing. He bought a soda and drove up the foggy coast into Marin and parked at Muir Beach. Two couples had slept there and they were just waking up. A man with a bushy beard ceremoniously poured milk into cereal bowls while one of the women began tumbling on the shore. Dressed in purple yoga pants, she performed very precise somersaults and headstands, posing after each like an Olympian gymnast.

Ted sat on his patch of cold sand and felt the weakened sun on his neck. The limber woman sauntered before him—he wanted that dance. Twisting slightly, his bones ached and he ground his fingertips in the sand to erase last night’s woman. Then he stroked his growing belly like a slothful king.

The surf crashed loudly, almost otherworldly. Booming and bright white. A scene he hadn’t appreciated in years. Though fifty yards away from the group, he yelled and pointed at the ocean, raising his soda and laughing. They nodded briefly and went back to their breakfast. The woman in purple hadn’t noticed at all, she went onto cartwheels.

He’d had every kind of woman there was to have and they all felt amazing. Each time. The supply staying steady, with the women getting younger, but more disenfranchised, more insecure. He could easily relax. But he couldn’t. As the woman rolled about and yipped, as gulls strode the shoreline like pontiffs—he knew there was something in his life he hadn’t learned and women couldn’t help him with it. Massive and unwieldy, it kept stable at the top of his vision like a boulder fastened to his forehead. He couldn’t sit right until he faced it, but he didn’t exactly know what it was.

Ted burped and nodded, trying to assure himself everything would work. He looked for a big rock to toss into the ocean. He settled for a small black pebble.

 —Greg Gerke
———————
Greg Gerke’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, The Kenyon Review OnlineDenver Quarterly, Quarterly West, Mississippi Review, LIT, Film Comment, and others.
Aug 122013
 

Jason Lucarelli

Jason Lucarelli follows his brilliant essay on Gordon Lish, composition and consecution (published on NC in February) with an equally brilliant and challenging piece on Stein, Walser and Lipsyte and the use of repetition in constructing narrative prose. In many ways this is an extension of his earlier essay since it seems obvious that Gordon Lish and Gertrude Stein emerge from the same stream of American Modernism and play somewhat similar roles as inspirational figures in their different generations. Lish’s influence on Sam Lipsyte goes without saying. And Walser is a European avatar of that same tradition. Jason’s essay, based on a lecture he gave at Vermont College of Fine Arts in July, is cogent, erudite, intuitive and compulsively readable. He teaches you how to read.

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“The whole idea is that there is the pattern.”

– Diane Williams, “D. Beech and J. Beech”

 

Lately I have been thinking a lot about repetition.

More specifically, I have been thinking about patterns of repetition and compression and ways to compose a narrative so that certain words and phrases carry the burden of motion or narrative momentum.

This all started after I read Roland Barthes, a French literary theorist who published a book in 1953 called Writing Degree Zero. In an essay titled “Is There Any Poetic Writing?” Barthes says that written language has a “relational nature” and that “words are abstracted as much as possible in the interest of relationships” (44). Barthes continues, saying, “no word has a density by itself, it is hardly the sign of a thing, but rather the means of conveying a connection.” According to Barthes, words extend toward other words, forming, what he calls, “a superficial chain of intentions.” As a word stands for itself, it also points to other words in a “relational network” that drives narrative intention and momentum. Barthes suggests that a reading of these relations might function similarly to a mathematical language expressing either “operative equality” or “difference.”

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As I thought about patterns of repetition, specifically word patterns, this seemed very interesting to me. I started thinking about the inter-textual connections in narrative form and the need for readers to be able to derive meaning from those relationships since it is always necessary to understand where we are going, why we are going there, and what the relational elements of a narrative mean within the context of the work as a whole (47).

Barthes says that our function as writers is “not to find new words, with more body or brilliance, but to follow an order of an ancient ritual, to perfect the symmetry or conciseness of a relation,” and because I was thinking about word patterns, I took Barthes quite literally (45). I thought, what could be more concise or symmetrical than a relational network of the same words and phrases repeating throughout a narrative?

So my journey into the world of word patterns began, and I will attempt to construct that same tour for you by examining word patterns from three stories: Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha,” Robert Walser’s “Nothing At All,” and Sam Lipsyte’s “The Wrong Arm.”

First, I would like to introduce a working definition of word patterns from the mouth of Douglas Glover. In his essay “The Mind of Alice Munro” from his book Attack of the Copula Spiders, he says, word patterns “begin with mere repetition and accumulate meaning by association and juxtaposition, splinter or ramify, sending out subsidiary branch patterns, and…discover occasions for recombination or intersection of the various branches…in tie-in lines” (95). As portions of a pattern repeat, each repetition conveys its relationship or connection to the pattern. Glover separates word patterns into categories of root pattern (identified as such by its connection to a story’s protagonist) and split-off patterns.

In an echo of the Barthes passage mentioned earlier (“no word has a density by itself…”), Glover says, “No word sits by itself; instead, each word vibrates in a dozen relationships with other words, repeating, competing, dominating, wrenching, transforming, shading, and subverting” (98). Similar to Barthes, Glover emphasizes the relationships between words and the nature of those relationships. In this way, repeating word patterns are charged with a variety of structural and thematic functions. Word patterns, for example, can initiate motive and intention, develop conflict and characterization, convey desire and resistance, action and counteraction.

Glover’s words are a contemporary explanation of word patterns, so before examining a portion of one of the many patterns in Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha,” let’s take a step back and see what Stein herself has to say about her process since she wrote and lectured on it so extensively. In her lecture “Portraits and Repetition,” published in 1935—eighteen years before Barthes, sixty-eight years before Glover—she says “…if you like repetition, that is if you like the repeating that is the same thing, but once started expressing this thing, expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis” (167). In her own way, Stein is saying that repetition alone is not enough, for how can one say anything by merely repeating oneself? Rather, Stein stresses the importance of how that repetition is positioned in relation to its prior utterance. Stein unpacks this idea later in her lecture when she says, “the repetition consists in knowing that that one is a kind of one” and “each sentence is just the difference in emphasis” (198). Each repetition with variation carries its own emphasis, its own context, and as a “kind of one,” points back to the whole of where it came. As a rule, each sameness should carry its own difference.

In an examination of the work and life of Gertrude Stein, scholar and literary critic Fredrick J. Hoffman writes, “Repetition is an essential strategy in composition; it guarantees similarity and forces the consciousness upon the nature of the thing seen while at the same time it provides the avenue along which movement and change may occur” (Stein, 20). The momentum of Stein’s stories—published in the early 1900’s until the time of her death in 1946—do not rely on discernable plotlines, but rather, as Hoffman says, “subtle gradations of change” and “slow accretions of variant meaning” achieved through a careful balance of repetition with variation (21).

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In “Melanctha,” published in 1909, Stein builds a relational network of patterns that, as Douglas Glover might say, “controls development and meaning within the text” (96). Stein repeats a variety of words with varying emphasis as a way of progressing the emotional battle experienced by Melanctha throughout the story. The patterns in “Melanctha” are too numerous to name now in every instance, but some of the repeating words and phrases can be easily integrated into the following summary: Melanctha is a girl of mixed race who often feels “blue,” loves “too hard,” “too fast,” and can only find “new ways to be in trouble.” She “wanders,” and in her “wandering,” searches for “wisdom” and “understanding.” But poor Melanctha is “full of the excitement of many men,” and can “always only find new ways to get excited.” When her mother becomes ill, Melanctha meets Dr. Campbell. Melanctha and the doctor begin a relationship of “talking” and “listening,” and Melanctha pushes Dr. Campbell to do less “thinking” and more “feeling,” but Dr. Campbell believes Melanctha’s way of “feeling” is much too “hard” and “too fast.” Eventually Dr. Campbell comes to a new “understanding” and a new “feeling” about Melanctha, even though Dr. Campbell believes he is moving “fast” and ahead of his own “feeling.” Yet Melanctha only “suffers” and remains unsatisfied because Dr. Campbell still seems so “slow” in his “feeling.” This struggle of conflicting emotions continues between them, their “minds” and “hearts” never agreeing, until they finally end their relationship.

threelives“Melanctha” is told in the third person by an omniscient narrator who narrates closely beside Melanctha and other characters in the story, like Rose Johnson, Melanctha’s best friend, and Dr. Jeff Campbell, Melanctha’s love interest for most of the narrative. Much of the tension in “Melanctha” develops from and is controlled by word patterns, and I would like to look at a few patterns, a few examples, slivers really. The word patterns of “trouble,” “excited,” and “courage” are all connected to Melanctha’s character development, though these same word patterns also control aspects of the conflict between Melanctha and Dr. Campbell. The first instance of “trouble” is tied to Melanctha: “Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet, and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble” (3). To give you a sense of its frequency, the word pattern “trouble” occurs 97 times throughout the story. The function of the pattern here is to reveal one of Melanctha’s flaws. The pattern continues on in other instances, though, most importantly, it appears in the sentence introducing Dr. Jeff Campbell: “Jeff Campbell had never yet in his life had real trouble” (14). Already, it’s easy to see the difference, the conflict, between the two characters: Melanctha is always in “trouble” and Jeff Campbell has never known “real trouble.”

Let’s look at a few instances of the intersecting patterns of “excited” and “trouble”: “Melanctha Herbert was always seeking peace and quiet, and she could always only find new ways to get excited” (3). For Melanctha, getting into “trouble” and getting “excited” are connected. One leads to the other, and Stein conveys this relationship in a sentence whose structure is parallel to that of the one with “trouble”: “Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet, and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble”. Again, to give you a sense of its frequency, the pattern of “excited” along with its split-off pattern of “excitements” is repeated 27 times throughout the text.

During a conversation between Melanctha and Dr. Campbell early in their courtship, Melanctha suggests that Dr. Campbell do less “thinking” and more “feeling.” Dr. Campbell replies, “…I really certainly don’t ever like to get excited, and that kind of loving hard does seem always to mean just getting all the time excited. No Miss Melanctha I certainly never have mixed myself up in that kind of trouble” (18). Here, the patterns of “excited” and “trouble” intersect to reveal complication and growing tension in the relationship between Dr. Campbell and Melanctha. In this example, the patterns of “trouble” and “excited” indicate opposing viewpoints, alternate lifestyles.

 What makes Melanctha so prone to finding “new ways to be in trouble” is revealed in the following sentence: “Melanctha had always had a break neck courage…” (4) The relationship between “break neck courage” and “trouble” is defined in a later conversation between Dr. Campbell and Melanctha when she says: “…I mean real courage, to run around and not care nothing about what happens, and always be game in any kind of trouble” (37). Dr. Campbell replies, “…its all right being brave every day, just living regular and not having new ways all the time just to get excitements…I ain’t ashamed ever to say I ain’t got no longing to be brave, just to go around and look for trouble…” and, he continues, “that kind of courage makes all kind of trouble…” (38) Dr. Campbell’s idea of “brave” reflects “wisdom” that knows to keep away from certain “excitements” and “trouble.” Alternately, Melanctha’s idea of “courage” is one that leads to new “excitements” and “trouble” of all kinds. This succession of contexts forms a battle of opposites and, as Douglas Glover might say, “the competing points of view strive for interpretive primacy” (97). In other words, whose conception of love will supplant the other: Melanctha’s or Dr. Campbell’s?

Stein constructs the avenue for this struggle along threads of repetition and variation, sameness and difference, through the use of precise, complex word patterns. On “Melanctha,” Frederick J. Hoffman says, “Each of the significant phrases is repeated, again and again, in slightly new contexts, until one is aware of change within a central pattern of conscious experience” (30). Ultimately, the desired effect of Stein’s patterns, of all word patterns, is to produce some sort of change, or, in some instances, an awareness of staying the same.

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In Robert Walser’s “Nothing at All,” published in 1917, the pattern making is even more transparent. Walser was a German-speaking Swiss writer who published short pieces of prose, novels, plays, and essays throughout 1901 to 1953 during the height of the Modernist period. “Nothing at All” (700 words) is much shorter than “Melanctha” (50,000 words), and while Walser’s patterning and use of repetition is equally interwoven, the compression of his narrative has much to do the transparency of his patterns.

“Nothing at All” is told by a first person narrator who narrates the story of a woman, a little “flighty” and a little “absentminded,” who goes shopping for something “good” for her and her husband to eat for supper that night. In town, the woman cannot keep her “mind on the matter,” a result of her “absentminded”-ness.  Between her inability to keep “her mind on the matter” and being a little “flighty,” the woman comes to “no decision” and goes home with “nothing at all.” At home, she explains to her husband how the “choice was too difficult,” and because her “mind wasn’t on the matter,” she bought “nothing at all.” The “good” husband accepts his wife’s explanation and that night they have “nothing at all,” which, ironically, tastes “exceptionally good to them.”

walserbook1The transparency of Walser’s patterning lends itself more easily to categories of root pattern and split-off patterns. Walser even tips off readers to the main pattern of “nothing at all” by initiating the pattern in the title of the story. Instead of tracing each pattern separately, I will trace the root pattern of “nothing at all” and its connection to the split-off patterns of “good” and variations of the phrase “mind on the matter.” As in Stein’s “Melanctha,” “Nothing at All” contains other patterns that carry all other prior utterances to the pattern they came from while relating to other patterns at work throughout the narrative.

The intersection or tie-in of all three patterns (“nothing at all,” “good,” and “mind on the matter”) occurs at the juncture, or climax, of the wife’s decision-making: “It isn’t good when minds aren’t on the matter, and, in a word, the woman finally got disgusted, and she went home with nothing at all” (110). When the woman gets home, her husband asks what “delicious and good” food she bought for supper, to which the wife responds: “nothing at all.” The woman explains: “‘I went to town and I wanted to buy something truly delicious and good for me and you, I wasn’t lacking in good will, over and over I considered, but the choice was too difficult and my mind wasn’t on the matter, and therefore I didn’t succeed, and therefore I bought nothing at all.’” Walser constructs this sentence using the ancient repetitive structures of polysyndeton and asyndeton. Asyndeton is the omission of conjunctions between phrases in favor of rhythm and speed, as in the first half of the sentence: “‘I went to town and I wanted to buy something truly delicious and good for me and you, I wasn’t lacking in good will, over and over I considered…” The final half of the sentence uses polysyndeton, a repetitive structure relying on excessive conjunctions also in the favor of rhythm: “‘…but the choice was too difficult and my mind wasn’t on the matter, and therefore I didn’t succeed, and therefore I bought nothing at all.’” In both cases, asyndeton and polysyndeton focus on the way clauses (or words and phrases) are linked. In other words, Walser uses these repetitive techniques to establish concise connections between three separate patterns: “good” and its split-off pattern “good will,” “mind on the matter,” and the root pattern of “nothing at all.”

Throughout the story, “good” is used in relation to the “something good” the wife wants to buy for supper. “Good,” in this case, represents intention or character desire. In other instances, “good” had the effect of characterization, like in connection with the “good intentions” or “good will” of the woman during her supper-search, and in the use of “good upright husband.” The woman’s motivation carried by the line, “A woman…went to town to buy something good for supper for herself and her husband,” receives its fulfillment in a tie-in line between “good” and “nothing at all” toward the end of the story: “And so they ate nothing at all and were both satisfied, for it tasted exceptionally good to them” (110). The husband is “in no way angry,” and this irony seems to suggest a resolution, because, in a way, the wife succeeds, at least until the final line of the story, which contains the final instance of the root pattern “nothing at all”: “Many other things would probably have tasted better to him than nothing at all” (111). This line reveals the only instance of judgment from the perspective of the “good” husband in the story, and extends the root pattern of “nothing at all” by complicating the narrative. This final instance also completes the circular momentum of the pattern—and the movement of the piece as a whole—as “nothing at all” moves from its connection of “good” into an implied connotation of “not good.” While “good” is a split-off pattern, it occurs more than any other pattern in the text, 17 times in all, 7 more times than the root pattern “nothing at all.” Here, the root pattern drives the avenue of progression, while the enriched pattern of “good” and all its variant meanings helps to elicit deeper meaning from the root pattern and the narrative overall.

lipsyte

The same kind of transparent pattern making is evident in Sam Lipsyte’s “The Wrong Arm,” a contemporary short story from Lipsyte’s collection Venus Drive, published in 2000.  Lipsyte’s root pattern of “the wrong arm,” initiated in the title of the story, controls the development of the narrative while the split-off patterns and repetitive phrases in the narrative initiate change.

lipsyte_venus_drive“The Wrong Arm” is told in the past tense from the first person point of view of an adolescent genderless narrator, who, for the sake of simplifying pronoun use, I will refer to as “he.” A family—consisting of a father, a mother, and three children—sets out on a road trip to see “the boats of the world” sailing up a river somewhere, but during the course of the trip, the narrator overhears his father and mother talking, and the narrator realizes there’s more to the trip than seeing “the boats.” The father says the boats are one thing and that there is another thing that they all need to talk about once they reach “the boats.” The narrator believes that what his father and mother have to tell the children has something to do with the “wrongness” in his mother, who has an arm with a visual history of “all the scars from all the times something tried to kill her in that arm.” Through the years, the mother’s arm has come to be known as the “the wrong arm.” There are strict rules against touching “the wrong arm”, or leading the mother anywhere by “the wrong arm.” Once the family arrives at the river to see “the boats,” in an effort to prove that “the wrong arm” is just like “anybody’s arm,” that they are “making it wrong by saying it was wrong,” the narrator suggests they “go closer” to the boats, and then he does “the wrong thing.”

As with Walser’s “Nothing At All,” “The Wrong Arm” contains a root pattern that centralizes the progression of the story by creating conflict, increasing narrative tension, and tying into the desires of multiple characters in various ways. The root pattern has branching associations of split-off patterns that, in one way or another, relate back to the root pattern. In Gertrude Stein’s words, each repetitive phrase, in connection to the root pattern of the story, helps to provide new insistence, new emphasis to the pattern. Lipsyte uses patternmaking as a way to compress the history of “wrongness” done to the mother’s “wrong arm” while also progressing the pattern in the present moment of the narrative.

Let’s look at an example that outlines the boundaries of the relationship between “the wrong arm” and the other family members: “All we knew about the wrong arm was that it was wrong to touch it, to pinch it, to rub it…The wrong arm was not for us to take her by and lead her. The wrong arm was not for us to tap it for her to turn” (117). This portion of the root pattern containing its split-off pattern of “wrong” wrenches with tension, and provides a source of conflict in the story. The fact that “the wrong arm” should never be touched acts as an obstacle for the narrator in his quest to discover the truth behind his mother’s mental and physical state. The root pattern of “the wrong arm” and all of its split-off patterns of “wrong,” “wronger,” and “wrongness” repeat 27 times throughout the text.

Lipsyte slowly unravels the history of hurt behind “the wrong arm” and its history of hurt through split-off patterns like “bees,” “bad nails in the porch door,” “porch-door nails,” and “scars.” Split-off patterns relate back to the root pattern in other ways, like the way “the boats” functions as the motive for the scene and the way “waste a wish” functions in the narrator’s evolving line of desire. Of course, there’s not enough time to look at examples of these patterns in any real detail, so instead, let’s look at possibly the most important connection to be drawn from the history of “the wrong arm” as seen in this example of the root pattern: “The wrong arm would never heal right.” Not only is it “wrong” to touch “the arm,” but the narrator also understands that “the wrong arm” would never heal “right.” This portion of the pattern is constructed on sameness and difference, or, as opposites, like in the instance of “good” and the implied “not good” in Walser’s story.

The next example of the split-off pattern “wrong” reveals a change in the narrator’s line of desire when the narrator says, “We were making it wrong by saying it was wrong. We should be holding it and rubbing it and taking her by it to lead her somewhere. To lead her by it to the boats” (121). This is the climax of the story, a turning point in the narrator’s understanding of his mother’s arm as he begins to form a new association in his mind. At the same time, this example recalls an earlier utterance of “the wrong arm” root pattern: “All we knew about the wrong arm was that it was wrong to touch it, to pinch it, to rub it…The wrong arm was not for us to take her by and lead her.” The change in the narrator results from his desire to deny the entire history of “the wrong arm,” to move beyond the prior association that touching “the wrong arm” is “wrong,” and so the story ends on the action of his following through: “And then I did the wrong thing.” All at once, the narrator’s actions extend the split-off pattern of “wrong,” complicate story action, and complete the circular momentum of the plot.

josipovici bookThroughout this essay I have looked at small examples of word patterns for the ways they function in narrative through a relational network of connections. On the relational nature of written language, Barthes says, “connections lead the word on, and at once carry it towards a meaning which is an ever-deferred project” (47). In these stories by Stein, Walser, and Lipsyte, the connections between words do not point immediately to one meaning, but rather, defer meaning through the act of repetition. This effect is something that contemporary British literary theorist Gabriel Josipovici, in his book Whatever Happened to Modernism?, calls the “playing off” of “forward movement against stillness and repetition,” an effect that has long been prevalent in poetry (Modernism, 87).

On the making of Three Lives, the book in which “Melanctha” was first published, Stein says, “In the first book there was a groping for a continuous present and for using everything by beginning again and again” (3). Stein’s “using everything,” her reliance on repetitions, and the varying of those repetitions allowed her to construct Melanctha out of a succession of contexts instead of a scene-by-scene based pattern of conflict. The resulting narrative seems temporally odd with a constantly churning, elliptical momentum. As readers, we move through the narrative without seeming to move at all.

In Walser’s “Nothing at All,” a story of only 700 words, 331 words span the arc of the woman’s journey into town for something good to eat, while 182 subsequent words amount to her re-telling of that journey to her husband after she returns home, a movement that is, essentially, a repeating of, or, using Stein’s words, a “beginning again.” Walser dilates the situation and achieves a complete deceleration of forward movement, or, as Josipovici might say, the staving off of forward movement in favor of “stillness” and “repetition.”

Roland Barthes says that narrative “is an act which necessarily implies a duration,” and by “duration” he means an “oriented and meaningful time” (38). In an essay by Ben Marcus in the June 2003 edition of The Believer, Marcus says, “One basic meaning of narrative [is] to create time where there was none” (2). He also says, “Fiction is the production of false time for readers to experience. Most fiction seeks to become time.” The stories by Stein, Walser, and Lipsyte are all concerned with influencing the way readers experience narrative time through using repetition and word patterning as orienting devices to compress time (in the way Lipsyte compresses a history of hurt into “the wrong arm”), or to subvert our narrative-based notion of passing time (in the way Stein carries out her concept of a “continuous present,” or in the way Walser decelerates the forward momentum of his narrative).

As writers, there’s no way to escape time, but there are alternative ways for building narratives outside of using an events-with-consequences based pattern of conflict. In word-pattern based stories, the duration of the narrative persists as long as the dominating or root pattern remains open, and in this relational temporality, the tension between a set of words behaves similarly to the way consequences separate events. Causality and consequence will always be concerns for fiction writers, but the contingencies that result from the textual connections between repeating words and phrases can also provide narrative movement or momentum, and new opportunities for finding ways in, around, and out of story.

—Jason Lucarelli

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Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. New York: Hill and Wang. 1968.

Glover, Douglas. Attack of the Copula Spiders. Biblioasis. 2012.

Josipovici, Gabriel. Whatever Happened to Modernism?. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2011.

Lipsyte, Sam. “The Wrong Arm.” Venus Drive. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2000.

Marcus, Ben. “On the Lyric Essay.” The Believer. July 2003.

Stein, Gertrude. “Portraits and Repetition,” Lectures in America. New York: Random House. 1935. “Melanctha.” Three Lives. 1909.

Walser, Robert. “Nothing at All.” Selected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2012.

 

Jason Lucarelli lives in Scranton, PA. He is a recent graduate of the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. This is his second appearance on the pages of Numéro Cinq.

 

Apr 042013
 

lipsyte(Photo: Robert Reynolds)

Fun Parts

The Fun Parts
Sam Lipsyte
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
224 Pages, $24.00
ISBN 978-0374298906

About halfway through Sam Lipsyte’s comical, prickly new story collection, The Fun Parts, comes “The Worm in Philly,” a narrative wound around the nameless junkie son of a sportswriter and his desire to pen a children’s book about the middleweight boxer Marvelous Marvin Hagler (“Why Marvelous Marvin Hagler?” he ponders. “Why not?”). The story contains all the Lipsyte standards—absurdity, crudeness, punchy dialogue, and a strange, underlying sweetness. It also weaves two elements of the author’s personal life into the text: the well-known sportswriter/children’s author father (Lipsyte’s dad is Robert Lipsyte), and the moment when the narrator realizes nobody has any interest in pursuing his project:

“What about the book?” I said.
“The book.”
“The advance?”
“The advance,” said Cassandra. “Here’s your advance.”
She pulled bills from her bag, tossed them on the table.

Lipsyte’s first novel, The Subject Steve, suffered from an unfortunate publication date, September 11, 2001, and flopped so badly with the general public that when he completed his follow-up, Home Land, he couldn’t acquire US distribution. And though things eventually worked out—Home Land finally found paperback publication, and the author has since released another novel, 2010’s The Ask—this brush with failure seems apt, in a way, for an author whose stories repeatedly provide toeholds for similar situations. Dating back to his 2000 collection, Venus Drive, Lipsyte’s strong understanding of those existing on the fringe allows his narratives to crackle with an uneasy vigor. As such, the struggles of has-beens and never-weres flood The Fun Parts. Tovah D’Agostino, the part-time preschool assistant in “The Climber Room,” is a failed poet. The male mother’s helper in the witty “Wisdom of the Doulas” finds himself marginalized by his employer to the point where he takes desperate measures to regain his stature. And the namesake of “Ode to Oldcorn,” once a famous shot-putter, now rolls into town to party with a bunch of teenagers, declaring, “I want all the beer in your town … And I want teen poot, if that’s available.”

While the thirteen stories in the collection are not intentionally linked, like in the aforementioned “The Worm in Philly,” most find a thematic spine in their exploration—both closely and peripherally—of family bonds. In these tales, parents often come across as aloof, cruel, or manipulative. Doctor Varelli, the father of the title teenager in “The Dungeon Master,” calls his children “puppies,” and fawns over them as if a fanatic, rather than an authoritarian. Similarly, the parents of an overweight boy in “Snacks” pressure him to lose weight while simultaneously neglecting to help him achieve said goal. And, returning to “The Climber Room,” the character of Randy Gautier, adoptive father to Tovah’s young student, Dezzy, uses his power and money to influence the world around his daughter, controlling the schedules of daycare employees by dangling the carrot of an annual donation in front of their faces.

This parental scheming slinks into the relationships between Lipsyte’s adult characters and their aging progenitors, as well. “Nate’s Pain is Now,” one of the book’s strongest stories, chronicles the day-to-day of a once-popular author of drug memoirs:

I had a good run. Bang the Dope Slowly and its follow-up, I Shoot Horse, Don’t I?, sold big … My old man, the feckless prick, even he broke down and vowed his love. But as a lady at a coffee bar in Phoenix put it, what goes up can’t stay up indefinitely because what’s under it, supporting it, anyway?

Realizing his star has faded, the author bums around the city and finds nourishment in the faxes sent to him by his father, which begin “Dear Disappointment.” This, of course, is often quite funny. Still, at a later visit, the following transpires:

“Why don’t you drink a pint of lye and get it over with?” my father said. “Why don’t you have yourself a nice little lye-and-hantavirus smoothie? That’ll fix you up good, you piece of shit.”

My father flung himself across the table, flapped his hand in my face. It’s true he never hit me. A father need not hit. His coughs, his smirks, are blows. Even a father’s embrace confers a kind of violence. Or so I once pronounced on public radio.

Though clearly aiming for a laugh with the final line in this passage, Lipsyte’s own words argue a truth behind the contrasting ideas of love and violence within family. For even the few healthy relationships within The Fun Parts contain pointed edges. “Deniers,” concerning a recently clean woman, a man looking to escape the prejudices of this past, and her Holocaust-survivor father, presents a man who loves his daughter, yet rarely speaks to her from his nursing home bed. He’s lost in his memories of WWII, his own dementia, and in the middle of a conversation, asks her, “How’s the whoring? You make enough money for the drugs? You let the scvartzers stick it in you?” Though she replies with a clever retort, she looks up at her father’s attendant for “some flicker of solidarity.” A similar reaction occurs in “The Republic of Empathy,” where young Danny, a boy convinced he’s “the narrator of a mediocre young adult novel from the eighties,” waxes poetic during a drive with his father:

I generally want to hand it to him, and then, while he’s absorbed in admiring whatever I’ve handed to him, kick away at his balls. That’s my basic strategy.

Despite the fact that the surface relationships between these characters appear stronger than those in the collection’s other stories, they are still quite fragile. Verbal and physical violence, humorous or not, simmer under a thin façade. Such emotion, like the individuals who possess them, quivers on the fine line that divides success from failure.

This is not to say that The Fun Parts loiters in misery. If anything, the collection finds some of its finest moments laughing at despair. And much of this success comes from Lipsyte’s terrific use of language. A student of Gordon Lish, the author borrows liberally from his mentor’s literary toolbox, frequently employing Lish’s idea of consecution to his writing. As defined by Jason Lucarelli in his essay “The Consecution of Gordon Lish,” consecution is, “about continually coaxing action, conflict, and interest out of prior sentences by bringing out what is implied or suggested in what has already been written.” This technique includes the use of image patterning, alliteration, repetition, and parallel construction, among others, to construct strong, momentum-building narratives.

As an example, “The Climber Room” contains two repeated images: Jesus Christ and penetration. One, in a way, implies the other, and yet they transpire separately within the narrative. The first image echoing Christ occurs when Tovah is at a market checkout counter. “You didn’t die for my sins, lady,” the register employee tells her. “So don’t go building a cross for yourself.” Later, Tovah thinks about a past moment of comfort and equates it to “the way Jesus must have worked.” When she then considers having a child of her own, Jesus returns with the quip: “You couldn’t be pregnant if you hadn’t been laid in three years. A devout Catholic could still hope, but not Tovah.” And, finally, Jesus Christ makes an appearance in a panicked curse, when Randy exclaims, “Jesus fucking Christ.”

Similarly, the image and concept of penetration begins its patterning when Tovah suffers from a stomachache so painful, it is as if “a miniature swordsman flensed her gut with his foil.” In the next paragraph, her fountain pen is said to have “impaled” a pillow. This pattern continues throughout the story, from reference made to a heroin addiction, to “sharp” dollar bills and gold-digging implements “edged enough to carve.” And the ultimate payoff is the story’s final image: that of Randy standing in front of Tovah with his penis exposed, ready for sex, the ultimate penetration.

The two repeated images in “The Climber Room” create a kind of thematic consecution, providing, as defined in Lucarelli’s essay, “a deeper level of coherence and unity to a story with passages that offer insight into story meaning.”

Lipsyte also employs alliteration to add a bouncy depth to his narratives. The pregnant couple in “The Wisdom of the Doulas” is described as the type lost without “their antique Ataris and sarcastic sneakers.” Within the first two pages of “The Climber Room,” parents are called “crypto-creepy,” and Dezzy is complimented on her “sparkly shoes.” Talk of Dezzy’s sparkle shoes then leads to the memory of a home, which is called “dizzying.” Dezzy, sparkly, dizzy. Likewise, Lipsyte finds strong use for parallel construction in these stories. The boy at the beginning of “Snacks,” in considering the perks of losing weight, mentions the possibility of receiving “blow jobs,” “hand jobs,” and “all the jobs” from his sister’s friends. And when Tovah in “The Climber Room” meets an old flame for dinner, the third person narration notes: “The shock about Sean was his shock of white hair.” This playfulness creates action at the base level of sentence, and in turn strengthens the overall work.

In the end, though, what makes The Fun Parts such a joy to read is Lipsyte’s commitment to creating environments and situations that are often left in the shadows of contemporary American literature. In a 2010 interview with Paris Review, the author said, “I write what I want. I try to write what I’d like to read. I think about not wasting a reader’s time, my own included.” This personal enjoyment is evident in his stories, where the losers find a voice, even if they continue to stumble toward obscurity.

Benjamin Woodard

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Ben_WoodardBenjamin Woodard lives in Connecticut. His reviews have been featured in Numéro Cinq, Drunken Boat, Hunger Mountain, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and other fine publications. His fiction has appeared in Numéro Cinq. You can find him at benjaminjwoodard.com.

Feb 272013
 

I write what I want. I try to write what I’d like to read. I think about not wasting a reader’s time, my own included. As to the what and the how, I’m certainly not the first to use those terms. I guess others would call it content and style, and so forth. Of course, they can never be untangled from each other. They are each other. My point, and it’s an obvious one, I think, to many writers and readers, is that the story is nothing if you are not invested in every line of its telling. I’m talking about that charged feeling, the startling stuff, the poetry, the humor, the hurt, and getting your effects through language as well as through the situation. Your desired effect might be something percussive, or languorous, or plain-spoken, or richly complex, but they all require artifice, manipulation, in order for their power to compel us and to be sustained, undeniable. And here’s the crucial thing: By not thinking of your sentences as mere delivery trucks for the information of your story, by putting pressure on them, you often end up with a much more profound “what” than you could have dreamed up beforehand. As I said, this is really obvious. But it took me a long time and the help of teachers to figure it out.

via Paris Review – Pressing Flesh with Sam Lipsyte, Giancarlo DiTrapano.

Feb 242013
 

Sam Lipsyte & Gordon Lish at Columbia University, February 21. Photo by Jason Lucarelli

Mr. Snorkel here, writing from Culebra PR. I got in last night (Casa Resaca — resaca means undertow), with the surf still ringing in my ears, and found this email waiting for me. It’s from Jason Lucarelli, the same who wrote the wonderful essay on Lish and literary compositon in the current issue of NC. I thought it best to just give you the uncut report.

dg

Doug,

Sorry for the half-crazy phone message I left you. I had just found out about Gordon Lish speaking at Columbia on the 21st and I figured I would try to see if I could convince you to go.
A few choice quotes:
“I’m willing to make an enemy of anyone here over the lightest pretext.”
“Take heart to the statement: Form is all.”
“If it cannot be framed, it just isn’t there.”
“I’m not here to talk about literature. It’s not about literature. It’s about staying alive.”
“The wound becomes, if you’re lucky, the life.”
“You have to be determined to make your craziness profitable.”
“We are helpless in the sway of all we have read.”
“Those who use the language have a lot to answer for.”
Sam Lipsyte and Ben Marcus escorted Lish into the room, and Richard Ford sat next to him too, which was surreal enough for me. You’ll be happy to know I approached Sam after the reading, talked a bit about Venus Drive and one of the stories I am looking at for my lecture. (Hopefully I wasn’t too much of a fan.)
Hope all is well with you. Attached is a creepy photo I took from the lecture.
Jason Lucarelli
May 302011
 

Sam Lipsyte, © Robert Reynolds

The Ask
Sam Lipsyte
296 pp.
$25
ISBN  978-0-374-29891-3 

As a Canadian, I’m ashamed that American fiction, which is largely underwritten by a market, has a keener social eye than Canadian fiction, which is underwritten significantly by state-funded, supposedly arms-length grants. Contemporary American novels from maturing writers like Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan, Michael Cunningham and Sam Lipsyte (author of this superb novel The Ask) as well as emerging novelists Joshua Ferris and Jonathan Dee examine, castigate and celebrate today, while my fellow Canadian writers remain obsessed with yester-year. Egan’s recent A Visit from the Goon Squad mocks celebrity culture and trophy marriages. Dee’s The Privileges boldly reasserts that novels about money are not the exclusive domain of the Victorian novel. Ferris’s chilling The Unnamed and Cunningham’s By Nightfall fearlessly plumb the life-time relationship. Here in Canada we get muskeg tales of outport woe (see February by Lisa Moore and/or Annabel by Kathleen Winter). With The Book of Negroes, a mega bestseller in Canada, Lawrence Hill digs deep to conclude that slavery was bad. Canadian writing grants that should make our fiction brave and bold too often leave it feeling like it was written (reluctantly) by a harried committee at a government ministry.

Sam Lipsyte’s searing, hilarious and moving new novel The Ask is able to judge the society it records without sounding as sanctimonious as a government recycling campaign. Most fiction writers at some point feel the pull of Chekhov’s claim (or Thornton Wilder’s paraphrase) that literature is not bound to answer questions but rather to pose them fairly. However, Chekhov’s advice can create a crippling rudderlessness that leaves superficial fiction misidrected and unengaged. Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad has an utterly condemning scene with a self-inflicted scar. Franzen’s The Corrections has that minor but unforgettable couple who lost their adult daughter to murder. The father responds by eventually deciding to never speak of the matter again. The mother draws the killer’s gun every day then rips up her (near perfect) drawing. Social portraiture is alive and well in American fiction. In The Ask, the multi-talented Sam Lipsyte laughs and cries along with the characters he condemns and condones.

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