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(More to come...)
New! Click here to hear my voice reading one of my favorite passages from Thomas Pynchon's magnum opus, Gravity's Rainbow -- part of the Banana Breakfast scene that opens the novel. We are in a soldiers' dormitory somewhere in London in World War II, some "war morning," smelling the smells of young Pirate Prentice's cooking. Somehow Pynchon manages to gracefully blend allusions to alchemy, cooking, and genetics without ever forgetting that he's essentially dressing up a scene in which one of us poor slobs, a helpless human being, a schlemihl, is passing the time waiting for an incoming Rocket to make its horrible descent -- to claim someone's life, maybe his, maybe not. "Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects..."
(This way to a wonderful research site -- a rather substantial concordance to Gravity's Rainbow, with links to more Pynchonalia.)
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
I can't believe some of the things she does -- and gets away with -- in her writing. The figurative language she develops -- it's so concrete, so sensuously particular, and at the same time so involved in wordplay and verbal magic...
It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives... (4)
You shouldn't be able to do that. You shouldn't be able to start off a paragraph with a blatantly mixed metaphor and have it work, but work it does. Or here:
Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it. (13)
Abstractions no less than physical facts are factual, take on shapes and forms, but these forms are not classical or measured; they're grotesque and mismatched. Fetuses, swamps, inks, vacuum cleaners, octopuses -- these images are joined by force; they have no natural and necessary unity, but are rudely juxtaposed, because the world they describe is not ruled by natural necessities but by force, by law. When laws are broken, when things try to unite with other things in relations of affinity -- this is called chaos, and it is met with pain and punishment.
Perhaps Ammu, Estha and she were the worst transgressors. But it wasn't just them. It was the others too. They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly.It was a time when uncles became fathers, mothers lovers, and cousins died and had funerals.
It was a time when the unthinkable became thinkable and the impossible really happened. (31)
The lawlessness of love, the cruelty of History -- these things are revealed, not through the working-out of problems of form, but by the workings of a kind of form which is a problem, a breakdown, a tampering and leaking and transgression. It's brilliant, and it breaks my heart when I read it.
Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
You will have to pardon me if I quote too much from this book. It’s simply too beautiful -- I read it and was ravished. Schulz, another Eastern European Jewish writer from the early twentieth century, writes in a style something like Kafka’s, but in a different key of melancholy -- not the nailbiting, wall-climbing anxiety of In the Penal Colony, but an oppressed sigh that is also wistful, rising into an imaginative, almost utopian register.
I think Schulz would have well understood Arundhati Roy’s hatred of the brute engine she calls History, slaughterer of human hopes...
Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread... Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided, and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, homeless, and errant?Could it be that time is too narrow for all events? Could it happen that all the seats within time might have been sold?... For heaven’s sake, is there perhaps some kind of bidding for time? Conductor, where are you?
Don’t let’s get excited. Don’t let’s panic; we can settle it all calmly within our own terms of reference.
Have you ever heard of parallel streams of time within a two-track time? Yes, there are such branch lines of time, somewhat illegal and suspect, but when, like us, one is burdened with contraband of supernumerary events that cannot be registered, one cannot be too fussy. Let us try to find at some point of history such a branch line, a blind track onto which to shunt these illegal events. There is nothing to fear. It will all happen imperceptibly: the reader won’t feel any shock. Who knows? Perhaps even now, while we mention it, the doubtful maneuver is already behind us and we are, in fact, proceeding into a cul-de-sac. (14)
Thus Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass sends us down one of the unused tracks of history, a parallel world whose substance (for time has a substance -- “a night in July,” for instance, is really “the secret fluid of dusk, the living, watchful, and mobile matter of darkness” [85]) seems to be composed of all the accumulated ennui and daydreaming of a certain epoch of real history...
The world at that time was circumscribed by Franz Joseph I. On each stamp, on every coin and on every postmark his likeness confirmed its stability and the dogma of its oneness. This was the world, and there were no other worlds besides, the effigies of the imperial-and-royal old man proclaimed. Everything else was make-believe, wild pretense, and usurpation... (33)
The book we read, like the book of postage stamps that the narrator collects, offers to take us beyond this tightly bounded, prosaic universe:
And just when we had given up hope and bitterly resigned ourselves inwardly to the uniformity of the world -- the guarantor of whose narrow immutability was Franz Joseph I -- then suddenly Oh God, unaware of the importance of it, you opened before me that stamp album, you allowed me to cast a look on its glimmering colors, on the pages that shed their treasures, one after another, ever more glaring and more frightening... Who will hold it against me that I stood blinded, weak with emotion, and that tears flowed from my eyes? What a dazzling relativism, what a Copernican deed, what flux of all categories and concepts! Oh God, so there were uncounted varieties of existence, so your world was indeed vast and infinite! (33)
Only in language like this can Schulz play the kind of trick he plays: with the precision of an imaginary cartographer, a meticulous collector of stamps, in short, a novelist, he demonstrates the impossibility of the real and the reality of the impossible.
Created Fall 1999 JessEcoh@cs.com
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