SansPoint

Buy this book from Amazon.com

It was Sunday evening when the TV People showed up.

My first exposure to the works of Haruki Murakami came from a collection of Japanese short fiction I’d found on the “to be returned” shelf at the main branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia. The collection was called Monkey Brain Sushi, and they were pretty much all dull, save for one…

The season, spring. At least, I think it was spring. In any case, it wasn’t particularly hot as seasons go, not particularly chilly.

To be honest, the season’s not so important. What matters is that it’s a Sunday evening.

“TV People” is classic Murakami, a slow, controlled decent into surrealism, where a perfectly ordinary situation is thrown deeper and deeper into absurdity and surrealitly. Murakami’s most famous novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, works in a similar way. A man searching for a lost cat suddenly finds himself in a bizarre underworld where his brother-in-law exerts psychological control over others.^[1] “TV People,” by it’s form, is a much quicker decent, but just as controlled. Only Murakami could have a character talk about Sunday evenings devolve into written sound descriptions: “KRRSPUMK DUWB KRRSPUMK DUWB KRRSPUMK DUWB,” in four paragraphs.

Murakami loves to leave the reader guessing. A number of moments occur where the reader has to question the narrator’s own account of the events, such as the TV People entering a meeting room with a Sony TV, and walking back out without being noticed. The narrator is afraid to even broach the subject with his co-workers. His wife doesn’t notice the TV placed in their living room, knocking magazines and bric-a-brac out of place. The reader can never be sure of just what’s fact and fantasy, which the narrator shares in the climax, watching the TV People on his television, putting together an “airplane.”

In stories like this, Murakami can leave the reader stifled, gasping for air, some connection with reality, as they fall deeper into his well^[2]. The important thing is to relax, and let him guide you where he wants to take you. You won’t be abandoned, but you’ll certainly need some time to think about what’s happened to you. The ultimate strength of Murakami’s works lies in his ability to ferry the reader, safely, through dark, strange, and fantastic situations without leaving you utterly lost. The reader cannot explain, but they do not feel as if someone’s played a trick on them. If you need to start reading Murakami, and everyone does, The Elephant Vanishes is a great starting place; not just for “TV People.”

1. This summary is woefully insufficient. Just read the damn book. ↩
2. Another Wind-Up Bird reference. ↩

Buy this book from Amazon.com

I recently got ahold of House of Leaves (part of my reading list for 2008), and have been almost unable to put the damn thing down since I got it. Even without the strange formatting and typography, it would be a captivating read, though the strange formatting certainly adds to the experience, particularly during Expedition #4.

Reading it has me thinking about about multiple narrators and multiple points-of-view. It’s a technique that I’ve been using in my fiction for a while, and something I want to develop. The novel-in-progress I am working on currently switches between a limited first-person perspective with third-person limited perspectives^[1] and the occasional first-person flashback^[2] Multiple narrators and multiple POVs help to expose a reader to alternate sides of a story, providing perspective and exploring situations that affect the main plotline, but are not directly involved by the main character.

What, perhaps, I like best about multiple narrators is the idea of the unreliable narrator, and how an event or situation depicted from multiple perspectives can vary, leaving the true story somewhere in between.^[3] The three main intertwined House of Leaves narratives: that of The Navidson Record itself, Zampanó’s critical essay on The Navidson Record, and Truant’s exploration of Zampanó’s writing and its effect upon his own life all function to provide a different perspective on each individual narrative. They form a cubist structure, augmented by the physical structure of the text, reflecting back upon each other^[4]

I’d love more examples of novels with well done multiple narrators and points-of-view. If you want to make recommendations, leave a comment.

1. i.e. a third-person narrator that only can focus on one character at a time, and explore only that person’s thoughts. ↩
2. My first-person flashbacks are, curiously, in present tense to contrast them with the past tense writing in the main first-person narrative. ↩
3. The canonical example of this is the Japanese short story Rashomon, in which multiple narrators tell their side of a murder story. Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque does a similar thing in a more modern setting. ↩
4. This reflection sometimes is physical, such as a footnote rendered in mirrored text or blue boxes revealing reversed versions of the text on the previous page, as if a window. ↩

Buy this book from Amazon.com

Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you.

David Foster Wallace’s story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was my first introduction to truly experimental short fiction. Wallace dissects, plays with, and reassembles the short story into a variety of bizarre and intriguing compositions that are recognizable as narratives, but turn expectations on their head. Among the most striking examples of this are “Octet,” which takes meta-fiction to an illogical extreme, “The Depressed Person” where the true story is contained in multi-page footnotes, and the series of title stories. By their standards, “Forever Overhead” is amazingly simple and straightforward, yet its surface simplicity belies a clever and impressive command of language and narrative.

The main “trick” of “Forever Overhead” is its use of second-person narrative. The narration is subtle, not speaking to the reader/protagonist you, but about them. Wallace restrains his narration to simple sentences or fragments with one or two images for the majority of the work.

Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair. There are now more of the hard curled hairs around your privates than you can count without losing track. Other things. Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning.

Yet, he is able to switch this up, moving to complex, flowing writing when appropriate, such as the powerful description of a wet dream.

And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of yielding curves, frantic pistons, warmth and a great falling; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of a feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights though your window blinds cracking into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling, and on you a dense white jam that lisps between legs, trickles and sticks, cools on you, hardens and clears until there is nothing but gnarled knots of pale solid animal hair in the morning shower, and in the wet tangle a clean sweet smell you can’t believe comes from anything you made inside you. This masterful, clever, and deliberate switching of tone and language draws the reader in, grabs their attention and establishes what is to come as important and impactful, as one’s first wet dream.

Even beyond the simple considerations of the language, Wallace’s masterful use of second-person speaks to, and connects with the reader. There is a certain universality of terms, familiarity with the emotions, and the sensations, if not the exact events.

You are in line. Look around. Look bored. Few talk in the line. Everyone seems by himself. Most look at the ladder, look bored. You almost all have crossed arms, chilled by a late dry rising wind on the constellations of blue-clean chlorine beads that cover your backs and shoulders. It seems impossible that everybody could really be this bored.

What thirteen-year old or former thirteen-year old, cannot relate to this?

Even more stunning is the story’s anti-climax, a surprising, intimate look behind a facade of banality. There is something to even a simple story of a birthday visit to a pool, behind a first try at the diving board, and it clicks, it connects with the reader in a way that could not be done through first or third person. This is a narrative that requires the reader to feel there, and be there. No work I have read in second-person before, and none since, has had the same level of impact and connection as “Forever Overhead.” It’s what made me fall in love with David Foster Wallace’s writing, and I hope it does the same for you.

Buy this book from Amazon.com

I do not know our target. They do not tell us for which city the bird is targeted. I do not know. That is planning. That is not my responsibility. My responsibility is to watch the console and when certain events take place on the console, turn my key in the lock.

I was born right in the tail end of the Cold War, around the time of Reagan, glasnost and perestroika. By the time I became cognizant of politics, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Union was no more, and the omnipresent fear of nuclear annihilation had receded. Despite this, I retained enough cultural consciousness to be aware of the Cold War; aware of the paranoia, the legit fear, the names and the moments. The Cold War, of course, plays a huge role in fiction of the second half of the 20th Century, and this short story embodies it. “Game,” by Donald Barthelme, was published at the height of the Cold War, just two years after Thomas Pynchon’s short story/novella The Crying of Lot 49. Its setting, its content, and its (non-)resolution could only come from the environment of the Cold War.

In “Game,” two Air Force officers are locked in a missile silo, and have been for 133 days “owing to an oversight.” The nature of why the two men are in the silo is never revealed. Instead, Bartheleme uses their predicament as a way to explore the way people behave in isolation, the destruction of norms, and the futility of the Cold War. Barthelme compares the war, and the actions being performed to those of children. The superior officer, Shotwell, is first shown playing jacks, and has been selfishly keeping his partner, the narrator, from playing. To keep each other sane, they sing each other lullabies. Each has tried to launch the missile, but “They had in their infinite patience, in their infinite foresight, in their infinite wisdom had already imagined a man standing over the console with his two arms outstretched, trying to span with his two arms outstretched the distance between the locks.” The narrator’s language, on the cusp of deranged, and repeating and rephrasing further reveal the growing mental breakdown.

Even within the silo, a micro-Cold War brews. “Each of us wears a .45 and each of us is supposed to shoot the other if the other is behaving strangely,” the narrator explains, only to add that he has “a .38 which Shotwell does not know about concealed in my attaché case,” and “Shotwell has a .25 caliber Beretta which I do not know about strapped to his right calf.” They watch either other, and their concealed weapons carefully, while trying to hide behind a facade of normalcy. Shotwell studies for an MBA. The narrator, perhaps worse off, writes on the walls with a diamond engagement ring. Shades of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb come to mind. Dr. Strangelove, much like “Game” shows the effects of paranoia on people, and their attempts to deal. General Jack D. Ripper’s paranoia causes him to launch nuclear strikes on Russia. Likewise, Shotwell in “Game” implies to the narrator his desire to launch the missile: “He has made certain overtures… It has something to do with the keys, with the locks.”

Ultimately, the lasting strength of “Game” comes not from its position in history, but its ability to echo even now in the age of the “War on Terrorism” the paranoia and fear that can come from isolation, and to reveal the folly of war and humanity. The childish behavior of Shotwell and the narrator reflect upon the same system that put them together in the silo, the builders of the missile and the silo, and whatever events could force them to launch the missile; whether ordered to or not. The same apt comparison can be made now to the machinations of those in power in America.

A few months ago, I attended a lecture and performance by Daniel C. Howe, a digital artist and poet, at Temple University. He demonstrated for us a number of his projects and experiments in Electronic Writing. While his stuff was certainly appealing on a visual, sensual level, I found the actual textual part of the works to be lost in the shuffle of showing off interactivity, graphics, and bullheaded experimentation. Ultimately, poetry is primarily about aesthetics, and one has to judge a poetic work primarily on its aesthetic value, less on the quality of the text itself. Howe’s electronic writing seems to view technology less as a means of creating poetry, and more of a way of presenting and adding interactivity to poetry. It succeeds in adding an interactive element, but the writing itself falls to the wayside.

For me, Howe’s works call to mind Twenties by Jackson Mac Low. Twenties is a series of poems in which he wrote twenty lines of words chosen purely for aesthetic value, as they came to him. (Example) The work is spontaneous, yet somehow it doesn’t work for me. When I read a poem, I expect there to be a connection, a cohesion, something to link the words, lines, and stanzas together. Twenties failed in that its text was presented without any cohesion aside from each word’s aesthetic properties and the spontaneity of it. What leaves me lacking is the way Howe uses technology to seemingly supplant the role of the text, rather than emphasize it. Howe surrenders an element of authorial control which I admit I am uncomfortable with, however the intention if his work is to provide reader control of what is presented. I would be more comfortable if I felt he succeeded.

What happens in the majority of his projects is that a pre-existing text is presented in an interactive form which the reader/viewer is able to recombine and modify through interaction. Text Curtain, as pictured, is an excellent example of this. The curtain presents a poem of fourteen lines, and the individual columns of letters can be shifted and moved about. After enough agitation, a new line rises from the bottom, and the top line is removed from the view. No matter how many times this occurs, the poem maintains readability and cohesion—a difficult task! Here I question the presentation. The ability of the reader/viewer to play with the columns seems to be unrelated to what is actually delivered. The interactivity seems to be tacked on, a way to present the unique work, not as a way to develop the work.

When I consider technology and its relation to poetry, I am more interested in generative works, similar to Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings. I asked Howe about generative poetry and writing, and aside from technical considerations, as the processing power isn’t there to really deliver language synthesis into a way that actually feels like natural writing, he expressed that generative writing isn’t his interest. I can respect that. Howe does what he wants, and his work does stand as an example of the power of technology in presentation of poetry. I just don’t feel it succeeds as a way of changing poetry or writing for the Internet age.