The 100 Super Movies au maximum: The Reckless Moment

"Cyberspace is no place for mommies." -- Karen Joy Fowler

Sit-coms and comic strips love the American family because something big always seems to be happening but everything is back to normal by the end of the episode. The Reckless Moment repositions that once-a-day cycle from the mother's point of view: the family member's job is to present every passing fancy as an emergency to the mother, but the mother's job is to maintain stability at any cost. Where Douglas Sirk's domestic tragedies emphasize suffocation (the enveloping family keeps you warm at the cost of snuffing out flames), Ophuls pecks to death.

The eventual effect of this affection-hungry din is to level all stimuli out. Thus Ophuls's thoroughgoing use of a narrative technique I've never seen used anywhere else in film, fiction, or theater: the deliberate tossing away of obvious opportunities for suspense and emotional climaxes. Drama is replaced by fretfulness:

• The mother takes a motorboat on a dangerous mission. After she's safely home, we're told at some length that the boat has mechanical problems and that she could have been stranded. Why are we told afterwards? Is it important? Probably not, but it nestles in with the other nagging pointless worries
• A romantic stranger signals his affection by smuggling a gift into the mother's shopping bag; she finds it and assumes the shopkeeper made a mistake and that she'll have to return it later. She doesn't. Has she forgotten? Has understanding dawned offscreen? What will happen the next time her child asks about it? We never find out, because more recent (and therefore more urgent) crises intervene.
• A small town, full of gossips in that Hollywood small town way, sees her gallivanting around all day with the romantic stranger. Does that put her marriage in danger? Who knows? We're on edge, but the only on-screen event that might have been provoked by gossip is her father-in-law's distractingly and uselessly tardy offer of emotional support.

(Those intrigued by Ophuls's gynocentric approach to film noir should also seek out Caught, which must be the only Hollywood movie in which a miscarriage supplies the happy ending. And then probably move on to Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai Du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles....)

Collage by Christina La Sala

Special Anniversary Narcissism Week! (concluded): Rooms for Improvement Over the past year, I finished a long essay, collaborated on a short film, wrote some letters, and made a living. But mostly it's been Hotsy Totsy. Over the next couple, it won't be too big a surprise if I finish some other essays I've been promising for years (on Patricia Highsmith, on Jean Eustache...) or months (on Barbara Comyns, on Karen Joy Fowler...), or even something unexpected. And I better make a living. But mostly I expect it to be Hotsy Totsy. Well, if this is gonna be my standard watering hole, I got some suggestions to make to the proprietor, if he can rouse himself up from behind that 1.5L jug of Wild Turkey for a moment....

• As previously noted, one of the goals for my topical-page-assembler script was discussion threading: folks would write me and then I'd thread their letters. It hasn't worked out: over time, I've gained more readers but they've become more passive. I want to keep editorial control, which is why there's not a "Forum" plugged into the page, but that assertion of control may be stifling conversation. Maybe also I've gotten shyer about quoting correspondents? Whichever, I get tired of hearing my own whiny voice alla time. Something must be done.

• More music! More pictures! (Not more JavaScript and more Java. Twice a year's probably enough for that shit.) OK, for the former I have to cut deals and pay for more web space and for the latter I have to buy a Windows-usable graphics tablet. Everybody got trouble.

• One of the storms that drove me into this dive was my frustration with fiction. But that's also one of the things I miss. About the only weblog I know that's experimenting with fiction is Once I noticed I was on fire, with its Robert-E.-Howard-meets-Tim-Powers alternate history scenarios. But what about dialog and incident? What about characters? What about sensitive poetic descriptions of landscapes? And all the other garbage I'd like to get rid of without putting it into a story? Because I don't trust story farther than I can throw it, and my noodle arms can't throw story very far....

• And while we're on fiction, how about that paraliterary subgenre we call "real life"? How about a little more real life? Admittedly, I've been living in one place for a while now and, like most predators, I can't see anything that stands still for any appreciable amount of time. But I could always go travelling with a laptop.

Doug Asherman queries: "Here's something probably no one cares about, but....is there a conspiracy to hide all the good music from us? And the good books? Are people in the arts laughing at us for buying their crap? And if so, what can we do about it?"

Meanwhile....

Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet is a charming zine in the proto-Web tradition, but I didn't expect to find the two best short stories I've read this year tucked up its slender cuff. What a "coup," as they say in the editor's native Scotland!

With frighteningly typical aplomb, Karen Joy Fowler's "Heartland" demonstrates the equation: Tropical resorts Fantasy lands Ground meat = = Club Med MGM McDonalds Brightly colored plastic and happy little people, as maintained and portrayed by grim Oompa-Loompas -- pay no attention to the sentimentalizing whip-wielders behind the curtain.... Oh, it's barely possible that you or I might, given sufficient prompting, work out that premise, but neither of us would be able to incarnate it in so convincingly organic a form. This is politics drawn from life and returned to living flesh. And Kelly Link's "The Glass Slipper" is the most interesting modern take I've seen on Cinderella. Of course I would be interested, being as it directs the spotlight off the girl and onto the Prince, whose motivations have always been rather shadowy. What would drive a nice guy (because, after all, we'd really prefer him to be nice) to go around fitting shoes? Is fitting shoes really a good way to meet Ms. Right? (I can't tell you myself, 'cause I got fired from my shoe store clerk job after just two weeks, thus condemning me to life in the software industry.) If it is, mightn't you meet Ms. Right through the process itself, even without an official win on the foot? I mean, you can probably get to know someone as well by fitting their shoes as by dancing with them, right? And so we find ourselves pratfalling over the tangled, by no means strictly causal, relations of fetish and love, attraction and consummation.... It's what fairy tales were made for: to warn us about real life.

Continuing our schedule of Irony Supplements ("Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman"), we happened to intercept a note being passed along the unruly back rows:

"Irony is a way for [a weirdo] to put himself down without it looking like he's putting himself down."

The imagination of egocentric drama queens like Stendhal or Byron rarely strays far from the self-as-hero, and so their irony is worn form-fitting and pointy-side-in, whereas a less self-obsessed sort like Karen Joy Fowler is apt to seem much less masochistic about the whole venture.

Our San Francisco readers, along with any friends they can fetch, would do well to make all conceivable effort to reach A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books (Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness) by 7:30 tonight to listen to Karen Joy Fowler, who, besides being one of the greatest writers of our time, puts on a very entertaining show.

Believe me, your English major grandchildren will look at you pretty funny if they ever find out that you saw Neal Pollack but skipped Karen Joy Fowler. Don't let that happen!

Make the voices stop

At a similar literary salon about, oh, maybe seven or eight years ago, the favorite first lines game was played, and I quickly realized that I didn't have any.

Partly that's because so much of my favorite writing occurred before the late-twentieth-century vogue for hooky opening sentences; partly it's because I dislike that vogue, which will seem as eccentically simplistic to future readers as an earlier era's focus on moments of moral sublimity seems to us. Grabbing the reader by her arm and yanking seems a rude way to initiate a conversation, and when I remember particularly enthralling beginnings, I remember their structural effects rather than the wording of sentence one: the early and peculiar disappearance of Madame Bovary's initial narrator, for example. (Back at that salon, the only opening line I could recall right off was a condensed version of the Bovary gambit, as played by Beckett in Mercier and Camier: "The journey of Mercier and Camier is one I can tell, if I will, for I was with them all the time." The rest of the book being I-less.)

On the other extremity, I'm a sucker for endings that snap close with a satisfying click, and I recall (and re-read) a good many last lines, with special fondness for those whose persistent startle ripples backward through the entire work, restructuring it retrospectively into something far richer than one had even dared to hope for as one kicked joyfully up surfacewards holding one's perfectly timed-to-the-last-page breath.

(Oddly, few of the examples I'm about to offer really count as "spoilers": to understand their defiance of expectations, one must have developed those expectations in the first place. The truly itchy can feel free to request story-wrecking explanations from me.)

Such an ending is more likely to speed the traveller on with a slamming of the door than with a gentle swinging to, treating readerly expectations so aggressively that they could almost be called rebuttals to their own books. (Ulysses is one such rebuff after another.) Closure is, after and above all, a refusal of further story.

[The first remains the most chill-enducing and daringly experimental ending I've ever read, as befits Charlotte Brontë's Villette, the pinnacle, in English literature, of characterization through narrative voice: The plot is resolved in the imperative! or, more accurately, via the narrator's very use of the imperative! Aided by the unemphasized selectivity of her seemingly conventional last paragraph wrap-up! (I think we can agree that exclamation marks are called for here, given the tightrope-acrobat precision of the performance.)

The second concludes Flaubert's most brilliant closing movement: that of the infinitely self-undermining Sentimental Education -- whose influence can be clearly seen in my third entry, from M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart, and perhaps also in Mavis Gallant's "The Moslem Wife" (as cited in Eclogues).

Next, and speaking of characterization through narrative voice, the befuddled detective of Henry James's The Sacred Fount finally manages to reach a conclusion. Fifth is Dashiell Hammett's last word on the murder mystery genre (or perhaps on fiction in general) in The Thin Man, and lastly Patricia Highsmith's The Cry of the Owl abruptly becomes non-Highsmithian -- and freezes.]

[Janet Frame's Faces in the Water throws mental health into our eyes like vitriol; Virginia Woolf's Orlando shoots its arrows of desire right through the temporal barrier; Jack Womack's Going, Going, Gone goes home; Raymond Chandler's The High Window gives everyone a fucking break.]

[Carol Emshwiller's Carmen Dog; Barbara Comyns's Mr Fox; Herman Melville's The Confidence Man; and the devastating final sentence of John Crowley's Engine Summer, whose subject (in several senses) might be said to be the tragicomedy of incompletion.]

[Robert Musil's Young Törless enters sentimental grad school; Djuna Barnes's Nightwood pays tribute to Aphrodite; Karen Joy Fowler's Sister Noon lights out for the hills.]

2015-06-21 : Guy Lionel Slingsby kindly directed my attention to this trimmer and more Twitter-friendly approach.

The enemy of my friend is confused; the friend of my enemy is instructive

I write to work out problems, and the stories of Karen Joy Fowler rarely leave me anything to say except "Read this."

Attacks on the stories of Karen Joy Fowler are a different matter. Richard Butner recently referred me to an appetizingly al dente specimen authored by Dave Truesdale and inexplicably incited by "What I Didn't See." (Not that the story doesn't push buttons; it's just not clear how it pressed these.)

This is absurd on the face of it down past the hypodermis, but there's something about it that interested me.

Face first:

1. There's no genre activity less productive than defining the genre. No, not even masquerade contests. And when play cartographers start policing their delusionary border, they're promoted from nuisance to the rank of actively destructive parasite. Determining the worthiness of an individual work on the basis of its typicality is like choosing friends based on how closely they match the traits on a eugenicist's chart.

2. Truesdale's fervor seems particularly misplaced here, since "What I Didn't See" is clearly science fiction: Where else could the Bride-of-the-Gorilla theme be treated seriously and realistically?

   Intragenre call-and-responsiveness also anchors Fowler's story. Its title points to James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Women Men Don't See," its setting and voice point to Alice Sheldon, and its acerbic mix of escapist eco-fantasy and repressive violence points to effects characteristic of both Tiptree and Racoona Sheldon, while the focus on those left behind is pure Fowler.

   A story, like it or not, which could only exist inside a genre and which has been published in the genre is pretty securely part of the genre.

3. The supposed specifics of Truesdale's discomfort make no more sense, since the episode described by the story was a pivotal experience for the protagonist and her husband, pivoting the latter right into his grave. The characters change significantly, all right. They're just not necessarily happy about the change.

4. The reader modification that Truesdale purportedly wishes to chase away is instead a long-time distinguishing trait of science fiction. What's "sense of wonder" if not a change in perception and what's "world building" but a way to accomplish that without character development? What romance authors have become successful cult leaders? How many libertarians were birthed by Mencken and how many by Heinlein? Is the New Yorker as responsible for Westchester as Astounding is for NASA?

5. And if allowing the reader's understanding of characters to grow more complex over time counts as being "lectured at" and "told what to feel," what coercive terms are strong enough for writing that tells you exactly what attitude to take toward every character from the beginning (or even before)?

6. No, what bothers Truesdale isn't lack of incident, or lack of change in the characters, or being bullied by assumptions about the characters, or even reader modification, but lack of expectedness. The revelations gained by Fowler's characters aren't the ones that intrepidly well-meaning white explorers are supposed to end up with. And it's not just a matter of pessimism: a Harlan Ellison story might climax in far splashier violence and much louder breast-beating without tripping up readerly expectations in the least.

   This question of fulfilled expectation has helped bisect the bookish world before, into "readerly work" and "writerly work," "passive recipients" and "active recipients," "text de plaisir" and "text de jouissance," "easy" and "challenging,""childish" and "mature," "novelized" and "novel." But it would be absurd to claim that the line divides "mainstream" from "science fiction" when both types of reader and both types of writer are also found, to their mutual irritation, in mysteries, thrillers, horror, porn, romance, and every brow level of mundane fiction.

   He has confused the genre and the generic.

7. Given the nature of Truesdale's indigestion, a better analogy than "vegetarian meal for a carnivore" would be "offputtingly exotic meal in place of comfort food." Or, if we take the insulted host's point of view, "preparing gaeng kiao wan ped from scratch for someone who refuses to eat anything but popcorn shrimp."

1. Like Fowler, "I like stories that only fall into place when you've read them." Obviously, you can't experience crystallization unless you've kept expectations in suspension. When I'm enjoying what I enjoy, I'm not thinking about how moral and intelligent and shit I'm being; "writerly," "active," "challenging," and "novel" are just the labels for what I need to stay entertained instead of bored and disgusted.

   But you may have noticed a hierarchy behind those dichotomies. As usual, academics and critics haven't been shy about exaggerating the importance of their trades' minor differences, and Truesdale's preferred mode of consumption has been blamed for such ills as global capitalism, the formation of subject-identity, and compulsory heterosexuality.

   Villainous though that makes him, I can't suppress a sense of fellowship with anyone who complains about feeling manipulated. After all, when not stunned by tedium, my reaction to "readerly" texts ranging from Steven Spielberg and Mike Resnick to Mark Amerika and Robert Hass has been a straight-from-the-gut "Get your filthy hands offa me afore I call a cop."

   A sleepy dog and a fidgety cat have different notions of fun and of irritation, and the switch between pleasurable "play" and aversive "manipulation" isn't always clearly marked. As Truesdale correctly insinuates, what I enjoy is also manipulation -- it's manipulation that provides the illusion of interaction rather than the illusion of being catered to, but it's manipulation all the same.

   As for the question of "maturity," every writerly writer I can think of started readerly and then switched teams; often, as with the Brontës, at the end of adolescence. My own childhood preferences weren't just readerly but speed-readerly, and I grew extremely annoyed when the work exhibited any bumps that might impede my progress. At puberty, bumps became more interesting and my reading slowed to its present Karloff-like lurch. But that doesn't so much imply that readerly readers are immature, as that the maturing of writerly taste is dependent upon having gained a certain amount of readerly ease with the conventions being disrupted.

   Regarding the broader brushwork, I'm sure I hope that a certain flexibility and a certain suspicion of narrative patness are healthy for the species. But is it necessary to be flexibly suspicious all the time? About everything? Would Franklin D. Roosevelt really have achieved more as President if he'd spent his free time reading Proust instead of gobbling murder mysteries like candy? Would you vote for Harold Bloom? Heck, I wouldn't even vote for Ralph Nader!

   To return to the dining room, some people find it unappetizing to have their attention drawn to the food they're eating, and others find it unappetizing to ignore the food they're eating. One might guess that the latter type of person is more likely to become a cook, and one might therefore call their approach to dining "cookly" as opposed to "eaterly," and think them handier in some circumstances, but that's about as far as my value judgments could stretch.

... the escapist aspect is something to think about. It's seldom admired, and yet it seems to me often that if people's lives are hard and a book takes you out of it for a few hours, what's wrong with that? Why isn't that an admirable thing for a writer to have done?

Whether theoretically justified or not, when she purveys a back-o'-the-thick-hornrimmed-specs view of 80 Flowers, Leggott follows the author's lead. The nearest Zukofsky came to a public statement about the book was in a 1975 recorded discussion with Hugh Kenner. After reading "#22 Bayberry," the first words out his mouth are:

The source of this is...

"Durant," and that's where Dante comes in.... The name Dante: do you know what that means? ... It's still used today: it's deer-skin. And it's enduring. It presumably holds. So it's "durant leaf."

Even if we intuited a proper name in "durant leaf," wouldn't we hit Jimmy before Alighieri?

Given Zukofsky's lack of interest in biography, the focus on process is surprising. Maybe his assumption is that there's no reason to point out the details of the craft, it resting right there on the surface free for Kenner's taking? We are talking about someone whose most manifestive critical work was an anthology. Maybe he's not really talking professionally, even if he's not talking all that personally either. (Another quote from the tape: "My original source, that's a private matter.") Maybe he's just providing a professional friend with professional gossip.

So! All right, this is how Zukofsky amuses himself. They say, they ask me, do I amuse myself? God, no, I...! But when it's done, well, then, it's -- at least it's out of the way, damn it.

Instead, here I write about a book about Zukofsky. Because that's where something bugged me.

Most good fiction set in the past achieves its brief rapprochement between history and story by avoiding any names that might rouse mutual interest. But let an old beau be brought up and the holiday is ruined: "Well, if you'd only listened to Aaron Burr —" "Aaron Burr! Aaron Burr! Always she throws Aaron Burr in my face!"

Name-dropping historical fiction, whether researched-sincere or postmodern-bratty, may sell well, but it withers quickly. Even Flaubert couldn't lift John the Baptist to the same level as Frédéric Moreau, and a Michener or Vidal, or worse yet a James Tully or Sarah Booth Conroy, seems irredeemably presumptuous. History originally comes from story — the rushed and slanted newspaper report, the misremembered self-serving memoir — and if I'm going to give up the illusion of certainty, I might as well just return to those primary sources. Their half-truths will most likely provide more surprises than a contemporary fiction writer's could.

You could easily argue with that opinion. Me, I just hold it. And it was with no small confusion that, in the dazzle of my first reading of Sister Noon, I looked down and found it still there in my unattended hands, a commute-worn hat from which a table-filling bouquet had been produced with a show of perfect ease.

Well, one of the critic's tasks is to figure out how the trick's done. It doesn't begin to make the magic easy, but it's what we do. And after a few years of slow-mo-ing through Fowler's performance, I think I might've done it.

Rather than confusing gossip and slander with knowledge, Sister Noon eyes that confusion's source and the hunger that feeds it. Its hero isn't the ascertained celebrity, but the half-reluctant, half-fascinated hanger-on. Its plot isn't a schematic rise to power and fall into disgrace, but a journey into the sucking bog of schemas and back out again.

With "poor, fanciful, inconsequential little Lizzie," we learn how one's unattended, unkempt life becomes structured into narrative by a brush with celebrity, or a dream of celebrity, or a memory of celebrity. Suddenly that's what people know about you, that's what people think about you, that's what they want to hear, that's what you want to tell them. You find yourself with a story, even if it's a pale distorted reflection of someone else's story, even if that story itself distorts the celebrity's own unattended, unkempt life.

As docudrama's smugness resembles the lower forms of biographer or journalist, Fowler's fond respect resembles The Quest for Corvo. What's offensive about those other ginks is their wilful, even spiteful, ignorance. The finer stuff of Fowler and Symons gracefully incorporates its own limitations. Symons begins his biography not with an unpromising birth but with the author's curiosity, and ends it not with an overdue death but with the author's satisfaction. In Sister Noon's first chapter, the protagonist is brought into the circle of the most infamous name of her time and place; in its last, they definitively separate, and, satisfyingly, that's the only thing made definitive.

Fowler's choice of protagonist neatly solves another generic problem as well, that being how to convey the alienness of another time or culture with the techniques of realistic fiction. If reader identification takes for granted a shared notion of what's natural, how can what's "natural" become an issue? Of course, this is also a foundational problem for science fiction, and in both genres a frequent solution is to make the novel's protagonist a first-time visitor to the novel's setting. Fowler instead leverages the insight that alienation from one's mundane surroundings is a familiar shared experience (albeit not one that's necessarily taken for granted). Lizzie Hayes exhibits the same dully baffled irritability towards spiritualism, white slavery, and the Doom Sealers that I feel towards Burning Man, multi-player shooters, or the Great Anthrax Scare. We all occasionally find ourselves stranded on Mars or in a suburb of Carthage.

The ambiguous and disputatious sources of history aren't different in kind from those of the present. To resolve them is to falsify not just "what really happened" but also "what really happens."

And we — readers, gossipers, hanger-ons — make up part of "what really happens," unattended though we might be even by ourselves. A close look at an entrepreneurial multi-millionaire may confirm our unconfessed contentment in the tweedy middle class. Long-standing acquaintance with a successful author may reduce the shame-facedness with which we prefer self-publishing. On the sinister hand, our growing identification with a target of scandal may weaken our own restraints: having seen the worst, the fears that hemmed us in seem tawdry things, low-grade cotton rotted and easily torn.

There's a reason the fiction was put into this historical fiction. Lizzie Hayes isn't merely a passive conductor, capacitor, or resistor of the social current. When she has reached this realization — or rather more actively has realized it, in the most humane and engaged way imaginable — the tension between perfectly known fiction and permanently unknowable history is released, and the characters are set spinning out of the name star's orbit, from the documented fantastic to the unlimited mundane, cycling around once, four years later, to be glimpsed in the novel's first paragraph, and then (re-)lost to view.

Not that Lizzie Hayes would genuinely vanish, much as she might like to. Duties, if not heavens, forbid. She and her new-found (or rather more actively new-founded) family drive away, quite as material as they ever were, into what would appear to be a most distinctive narrative of their own.

But that's another story.

A Note on "Karen Joy Fowler's Sister Noon: A Note on Method"

You do realize, right, that an entire novel took place behind me while I blathered about abstractions? (Mysterious orphan, kidnapping, drugging, plague, daring rescue, and plenty wicked men —I'd call that an entire novel.)