Stein constructs a cubist portrait or skewed biography of Ida, who was born with a twin, Ida-Ida, to kind parents. “It was a nice family but they did easily lose each other . . . her parents went off on a trip and never came back. That was the first funny thing that happened to Ida.” Odd, sad and happy events populate IDA’s pages, while doppelgängers lurk everywhere: Ida becomes Winnie, because she’s winning; characters like parents to Ida come and go, and men who may, or do, become her husbands appear, disappear, reappear. Ida herself leaves and returns, she’s often going to another state (a place or state of mind). A reader experiences the pull of freedom, and Ida’s contradictory desires—wanting a home, needing to escape; wanting to be known and not. Her identity is in doubt and it’s not.
With these radical changes, there’s a bounty of tension and release. Words appear and reappear—like her husbands—but syntactically differently, scrambling meaning and Ida too. There’s psychological and logistical weight on Ida: whom does she know; what does she know; which dog has died, and where will she live, with whom. Most urgently, who knows her and what does that knowing do.
Ida sat on. She said to herself. If a great many people were here and they all said hello Ida, I would not stand up, they would all stand up. If everybody offered me everything I would not refuse anything because everything is mine without my asking for it or refusing it.
There isn’t a better description of celebrity affect.
Release from textual and narrative tension comes, in part, through Stein’s remarkable voice, as well as internal and external rhymes, some so childlike one might be listening to a book read aloud. “Well what did Ida do. / Ida knew just who was who. / She did. She did know. . . . There are so many men. What do you call them there. They did not know Ida. / Now then.” Also, Ida frequently rests, and “when anybody needed Ida Ida was resting. That was all right, that is the way Ida was needed.” I read the word “rest” again and again, and had a weird sensation. The story would sort of stop, and a space opens up where I could disappear like Ida, or stop too. Also, it provides a rest, as in music.
IDA wanders from its theses in its second half. Interrupted by allusions to, and fragments of other texts Stein had written before or during the writing of IDA, such as “Superstitions,” the novel turns into a repository of fleeting images and ideas that protagonist Ida might hold. Something feels missing and amiss, much as Ida bemoans and muses on missing. “Everybody began to miss something and it was not a kiss, you bet your life it was not a kiss that anybody began to miss. And yet perhaps it was.” I love the insertion of “You bet your life.” My own insertion was Ida became a pronoun and verb: I da won’t, I da will, I da wanna.
Stanzas in Meditation fulfills Stein’s great ambition. It’s an amazing work, a modernist epic, and Stein is at her playful, philosophical, poetic best. It’s a lively, imaginative work, riffing off Tennyson, Shakespeare’s sonnets, nursery rhymes, the cultural gamut. Joan Retallack’s rich introduction, “On Not Not Reading Stein: Pressures and Pleasures of the Text,” reckons creatively and helpfully with the problem I’ll call “Who’s Afraid of Gertrude Stein?” Retallack also presents Stein scholar Ulla Dydo’s important textual discovery: Stein’s lover/wife, Alice B. Toklas, forced her to change the verb “may” to “can.” May Bookstaver was Gertrude Stein’s first lover, and Toklas was enraged finding her name so many times in the manuscript of Stanzas in Meditation. (Apparently, Toklas had no trouble reading Stein.) In the new Yale edition, “may” has been returned, according to Stein’s original manuscripts. The Stanzas’ editors, Suzannah Hollister and Emily Setina, literary sleuths, have done significant work restoring it.
Gertrude Stein suggested that becoming a classic could kill a work of art. I enjoy Gertrude Stein most as a theorist, her ideas startle me, in whatever form they appear. (I call myself an inexpert.) Readers’ responses should shift, like Ida, with changing times, to make a book new(er), otherwise it doesn’t truly live in the present. If Stein becomes an endpoint for literary invention—a classic—her work can’t be read in the present tense. I figure that if Gertrude Stein were alive now, she’d be rambunctious differently. Literature can’t stop, and can’t rest on its laurels.
And she wouldn’t be writing like Gertrude Stein.
Pastoralia
The Puritans proved their worth in the New World by achieving worldly success that, they hoped, demonstrated God’s love. But since the Bible told them the meek shall inherit the earth, wealth was an uncertain sign. God could be ambivalent. Failure, like the Devil, could masquerade in a wicked variety of disguises. Anxiety and guilt drove the Puritans, and those were their psychological gifts to America’s future. It is this punishing legacy that shapes the wacky world of George Saunders’ story collection, Pastoralia.
Saunders’ exuberantly weird stories recount Americans’ mostly futile attempts at self-improvement, the terrible dread of failure—or damnation. His stories appropriate behaviors and institutions that already seem parodies of themselves. They respond to an America where men running for president cite Jesus Christ as their favorite philosopher, either to curry votes or because they haven’t actually read any philosophy, and where women vie to marry a multimillionaire on television. They speak about the most prosperous nation in the world, whose citizens don’t have adequate health insurance and worry about being too fat to be loved but not about being too self-involved to consider the pain of others.
Saunders showcases Americans’ fears, shames and need to be accepted—all resonant reminders of this country’s neurotic origins. In Pastoralia, his frantic characters move through defamiliarized terrain. They anxiously await punishment for nonexistent crimes and imperfections, suffering for the strange sin of wanting to be happy. His losers are threatened with losing even more—jobs, sexual attractiveness, their illusions, just about everything.
In this collection’s title story, a woman named Janet and an unnamed male narrator worry about losing their jobs playing cave people in a historical theme park. The pair are not allowed to speak English: “I make some guttural sounds and some motions meaning: Big rain come down, and boom, make goats run, goats now away, away in high hills.” Janet speaks English anyway, among other rules she breaks, and the narrator protects her from the boss. The boss punishes him by withholding their daily food. “I go to the Big Slot and find it goatless.”
In CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, his first collection, Saunders also represented America as a kind of Disneyland and relied on repetitions and other stylistic devices to hammer home the poverty of a simulated existence. He stripped down his sentences to convey the inadequacy of language to capture the zeitgeist. His insistence on these effects sometimes turned smart into merely clever, inventive into predictable.
But in his new collection, Saunders’ tales cover larger, more exciting territory, with an abundance of ideas, meanings and psychological nuance. Saunders can be brutally funny, and the better his stories are, the more melancholic, somber and subtle they are, too. Pathetic contradictions underlie the ruthless drive for success in love and work, and Saunders weaves them into artful and sophisticated narrative webs.
In “Winky,” a desperate character named Yaniky is prey to self-help and New Age groups whose philosophies fault the individual for not having it all. Yaniky attends a meeting where people wear white paper hats that mean “Beginning to Begin,” or pink ones meaning “Moving Ahead in Beginning”; they are labeled “Whiny” or “Self-Absorbed” and are taught there’s “A Time for Me to Win.” Their leader tells them: “I was once exactly like you people. A certain someone, a certain guy who shall remain nameless . . . simply because he’d had some bad luck, simply because he was in some pain, simply because, actually, he was in a wheelchair, this certain someone expected me to put my life on hold.” He exhorts the group not to let others, as he puts it, relieve themselves “in your oatmeal.” Suddenly Yaniky realizes that his sister, Winky, has been fouling his. This dismal epiphany provokes a series of deluded interi
or monologues that describe yet another geek who won’t realize the American dream. But what makes the narrative truly unusual is Saunders’s introduction of Winky, whose voice he juxtaposes with Yaniky’s in a tragicomic duet for codependents.
‘“Sea Oak” is the sick tale of a man who works in a strip club but who doesn’t want to show his penis, even though he’d earn more in tips. After giving the ladies (almost) what they want, he returns home to his dysfunctional family. Saunders mocks that overused generalization in stupefying exaggerations that recall Theodor Adorno’s dictum, “Today only exaggeration can be the medium of truth.” The stripper’s sister, Min, and cousin, Jade, are barely literate single mothers who watch bizarre television talk shows and converse in monosyllabic curses. Their Aunt Bernie, an optimist—or “optometrist,” as Jade calls her—acts as a foil to their sullen negativity. But when this Pollyanna dies, Saunders transforms their home into a neogothic haunted house. Aunt Bernie returns from the grave. “Why do some people get everything and I got nothing?” she asks. “Why? Why was that?” Through the undead Bernie, Saunders unleashes the fury of the unfulfilled, the yearnings of America’s damned.
In “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” an aging bachelor who was born without toes lives with his mother (in Saunders’s world, this always signals male abjection). He spends his time “ogling every woman in sight” and fantasizing about each one. An uncle’s cruel comments about his bachelorhood spark even more obsessive thoughts, which are both hilarious and miserable.
Saunders crosscuts between the lives of two anxious men in “The Falls.” There’s Morse, who is “too ashamed of his own shame,” and Aldo Cummings, “an odd duck who, though nearly 40, still lived with his mother.” To Cummings, Morse is “a smug member of the power elite in this conspiratorial Village”; to Morse, Cummings is a nut he fears will “collar him. When Cummings didn’t collar him . . . Morse felt guilty for having suspected Cummings of wanting to collar him.”
Saunders pulls out all the parodic stops in “The Falls.” Cummings, a secretive writer, concocts rhapsodies in his head and also corrects them, hoping to remember and write it all down later. Morse, a family man, carries Saunders’s version of the paradigmatic American disease. “His childhood dreams had been so bright, he had hoped for so much, it couldn’t be true that he was a nobody.” Both wind up at the falls, witnesses to an accident, where they fear taking action and dream of heroism, two solitary fighters in an ethical boxing match. Uncharacteristically, both “The Falls” and “The Barber’s Unhappiness” end ambiguously—with hope, maybe. Given Saunders’s generally ironic stance, it’s hard to tell but intriguing to consider.
In all of his unsentimental stories, Saunders commiserates with the disspirited, the weak, the flawed. His engagement with have-nots is a kind of return, like Aunt Bernie’s, a visit to the worlds of John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder and the Theodore Dreiser of “An American Tragedy”—small-town, small-city, little-people writers. Impoverishment in Saunders’s work includes economic inequality, but he focuses more on deprivations that foreclose possibilities for expansive experiences, limiting perception and imaginative thinking. His eccentrically poignant fictions speak, in part, to the concerns Max Weber raised in 1921 in “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”: “In the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport. No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance.”
Saunders avoids righteousness and pleading. He understands Mary McCarthy’s observation in “A Charmed Life,” “Nobody can have a permanent claim on being the injured party,” and his earnestness and seriousness propel him instead, as they did McCarthy, to satire and parody. Imagine Lewis’s Babbitt thrown into the back seat of a car going cross-country, driven by R. Crumb, Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, Harvey Pekar or Spike Jonze. That’d be a story Saunders could tell.
T is for What Would Lynne Tillman Do
The First Novel
I wrote a first novel. I spent years on it, and, when it came out, it was just a book. I had worried about its cover, but it was just a cover. When I went into a bookstore, I saw it was just a book among many others, or it wasn’t even there. Its dwarfed presence or absence made me think: Why add another book, I haven’t even read all the books here? Or, narcissistically: Why publish a book if even I can’t find it? When it was reviewed, the reviews were just words, often the wrong words. I spent months in bed, overwhelmed by my naïveté and folly. All my suppressed hopes acted like a tsunami and reduced me to nothing; my wishes were too big for any book, especially a first book. Later, I discovered it was the book that readers knew, if they knew any of mine, and no others. It was also the book whose existence made me realize that writing before publication was sweeter. Then I could think about my work the way I wanted: It didn’t exist for others, and nothing about it could be disputed, including its presence.
Write your first novel, put everything you know and don’t know into it, and stow it in the back of a drawer. Do this with your agent’s cooperation. Ask her or him to spread the word in the industry that your first novel is explosive, revealing, scandalous, so brilliantly written that you are the new Pynchon, Morrison, Austen, Beckett, Joyce, Woolf, Burroughs. You have created—no, invented—an entirely new novel, whose time has not yet come; it cannot be exposed to the public. Instead, the manuscript on offer is your second novel, which is even better, as it is more mature.
Your second novel is not roman à clef or a bildungsroman, not thinly disguised or outright autobiography. It is not based on your terrible past, whose egregious trials mock the reality of childhood innocence. The protagonist is not you. If the secondary characters appear to be you, they are cleverly achieved. The reader will not look for you, the author. You have skipped all the troubles of the first novel by presenting your second, first. Let others wonder about the first. Someday, you suggest, you may allow it to be published. But only after everyone, including you, has died.
Doing Laps without a Pool
In the beginning, there seems just one way to write, the way it comes out, and then that way becomes a debate, contested, most essentially, in and by its writer. Hopefully, a writer reads and reads and will become more conscious of decisions in style and form. Some writers make these choices more consciously than others, the decisions mark differences in fiction, though whether they might be experiments can’t be assumed, certainly not by their authors.
The term “experimental” and others that characterize or categorize writing have, for me, lost their explanatory power. Mainstream, conventional, innovative, progressive, whatever value they hold or once held, the notions are vague, and they lack agreed-upon meanings among writers, readers and critics. Rather than being descriptive, the characterizations are predictive and can mark expectation, both writers’ and readers’. Also, they are outmoded and unhelpful, even as heuristic tools; still, they survive, like the human appendix, without usefulness. Lacking other terms, we writers are their hapless recidivists.
If a writer has an idea about how writing should act, or what a reader should experience, it can occupy the writing, which then might foreground the writer’s beliefs and a priori aesthetic preoccupations, which then might preclude a sensation, for a reader, of its “newness” (even when writing is not technically “new,” as most isn’t). A writer’s discovering or discerning a way to write “it,” whatever that is, finding a style, structure, subject to realize “it” through his or her capacities and sensibilities, lies outside of proscription. It’s not that any of us can, with clairvoyance, recognize our ensnarement in and by language or in the grand, middling and small narratives that construct our lives, but it is a w
riter’s most essential work to be conscious of the act of writing, of enabling words to do as much as possible, for instance.
Our business is to see what we can do with the old English language as it is. How can we combine old words in new orders so that they create beauty and that they tell the truth. That is the question. . . . [Words] hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or one attitude. What is our nature, but to change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, they convey it by being many-sided, dashing this way and that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person.
—Virginia Woolf, from “A Eulogy to Words,” BBC Radio broadcast 1938
Sometimes finding the best word, best way of saying it, at least to the writer’s mind, can be less accommodating to a reader; difficulty is always relative. But how a writer’s trials, errors and successes add, or not, to a body called literature draws consensus in one time that might be denied in another. Believing in how it should be written, a way to write, also bedevils reasons to write; for me, the necessity to figure out how to accomplish a story or novel pushes me on. Many writers talk about sensing necessity in fiction, feeling it in a story, in its writing, which does not imply subject, psychology, relevance or reason, since nonsense can have necessity in the way it’s written. Harry Mathews once remarked, and I paraphrase, It’s not what you write about, it’s how you write it. This is the ineffable which makes writing about writing so hard.
What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Page 19
