Allusive Fiction - Always Waking Up - Decadent Artists Abroad
strange patterns, strong reactions, drs. Moreau
Part of the reason that I’ve been neglecting this newsletter (a rite of passage, like the Haj, or starting a newsletter) is my commitment to forging ahead with new fiction. I’ve been working under Evelyn Hampton, who is a very thoughtful teacher, eclectic in her taste, and adept at humoring me.
Initially I tried and failed to write vaguely formal, gothic weird fiction in the mold of Robert Aickman; but as in real life, I never know where the best point to walk away from a scene or a section is, so I linger, and I languish. Having come to generative writing via the online essay boom of the early ‘10s, I am for the most part a writer very focused on the sentence level.* Mastery of structure was not that prized among blogs of the time. So I find myself vexed by the strictures of rhythm that a lot of fiction writing maintains.
To ease my frustration, Evelyn’s been pushing me toward more avant garde and eccentric fictions, everything from the insular communist fantasy-parables of Antoine Volodine to the sublime portraits of Robert Walser. The sorts of things that would die of a thousand cuts in workshop, precisely because they don’t concern themselves with what a workshop would want out of them.
What I’ve been trying to do personally, in breaking out of these craft expectations that I’m failing to fulfill, is move toward a more clipped and impressionistic formal turn. To wit, I’m relieving myself of dilemmas in scene and length by disregarding the demands of concrete time and place, at least to an extent. The vantage point of the prose changes, temporally or spatially, about every two paragraphs. It’s an exercise in minimalism, but not the kind of minimalism that would please the readers at any austere journal. The effect is, for the most part, a fog, or a fugue. I let that in.
I was telling Evelyn how strange it was this format - staccato, fluidly moving - seems to in some way reflect my experience of a weed high. I was telling the story of how marijuana highs (which I don’t like, as a rule, and haven’t experienced in years) manifest in me as a literal cycle of falling asleep and waking up. I am conscious, but my body seems locked in the feeling of falling asleep and jolting awake every 3-4 seconds, my mind speeding up and slowing down like a boat on rough water.
I felt extremely gauche as I realized I was describing this to my mentor (I didn’t think it was actually interesting, nor was it particularly fun to go through when it was happening), but it put her in the mind of Paul Bowles, the latest author she has immersed me in.
I have complicated feelings about Bowles. As a writer of short fiction he plays in the sort of thematic and tonal wheelhouse I cherish. His work is often called “psychological horror”, which is to say, literary fiction with a pitiless heart, devoid of the overtly supernatural, or even the allegorical fogs of Kafka, but nonetheless infused with certain allusive and mysterious qualities. The way a boat-faring couple whose marriage is fraying will suddenly find themselves sailing through extremely tight river channels, the way mosquitos pervade in one room but not another. There is a lot of Poe in his work.
He had an eventful life - he graduated from Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon to become the expatriate American artist in Tangier, Morocco - but his place in the canon (if he occupies such a space) is hard for me to defend. Since childhood I have had many qualms about travel; I went on a trip to build houses in Nicaragua for Habitat for Humanity, and dramatic as it is to say, I came back changed. I loved the hearts behind that effort, but I saw that so much work would still be done by locals after we’d gone, that we sat and ate our lunch when locals were still working, that the whole thing had the sense of doing good while on vacation, and that we congratulated ourselves a little too much.
I was profoundly alienated, shamed by the trip.** It gave me some consciousness of the power imbalances in tourism. I made the determination never to be a tourist in a land to which I was unaccustomed. Bowles, naturally, didn’t really feel that way.
I hesitate to say that he made Morocco his home (and not just because he wintered in Sri Lanka). Bowles’ fame and status in Morocco seem to me to be inexorably tied to the colonial project in Africa generally, and Morocco specifically. It echoes in my mind with Richard Branson and John Lydon’s excursions to Jamaica to “discover” dub production and reggae. But not even so loving or even reverent as post-punk could be toward the culture it piflered from, or looted.
Did Bowles ever assimilate, to the extent that such a thing is possible? Did he associate with the people around him except as others, as servants? I have not yet read anything to suggest so. There is something profoundly ugly about cultured white people living high on the hog in an exploitative state. I keep thinking of the Island of Dr. Moreau, the bizarre film version. The aloof, legendary figure. The coldness, the pride.
Bowles smoked hash every day - that was Evelyn’s association with my story - and to some extent it affected the form and content of his work as a writer. Many of his stories are very strange and very good (“You Are Not I” is excellent, and a clear precursor to Richard Matheson and Brian Evenson, among others), but they also seem to have a preoccupation with the inherent hostility of indigenous regions to visitors (not to mention racist notions generally). Exotic locales always feature, and their cultures suffuse the prose with dread.
“Call at Corazon”, the aforementioned story about the couple on their riverboat honeymoon, pulls some elements of tension from the lizard-brain dream logic of Kafka - the boat squeezing into ever tighter river channels as the partying on it seems to react not at all to the ominous groans of the hull - but the most unbearable tension of the story comes from the titular call, a stop on the boat’s voyage during which the narrator’s wife, with whom he has been passive-aggressively battling with over sex and drinking, seems to disappear. The suggestion of a kidnapping, perhaps by the cryptic, enigmatic boat staff (who are natives, naturally) who seem to quietly foresee and permit the narrator’s torment at the proboscises of river mosquitoes, is its nervy engine.*** One of his more famous stories, “A Distant Episode”, explicitly raises the specter of white slavery. It reads as familiar to anybody who endured George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire chapters on Theon Greyjoy in captivity.
Over time it seems the image of the decadent western expatriate in the global south has taken on a detestable quality. I think that it’s earned, and Bowles may well be its definition. But I like dread in my fiction, so I’m continuing my read of him with a critical eye. Or ear, as the case may be. I have been alternating, from cold to hot, between Bowles and Robert Walser, a Kafka contemporary who didn’t write stories so much as generous character portraits, detours through minds that begin small and somewhat petty before deepening considerably in their insecurities and insights into themselves. In retrospect I see a lot of Walser in a writer like George Saunders, whose “Puppies” achieves a similarly spectacular and similarly humane review of regular people.
I may have to write about horror, soon.
* Not that you can tell by these first-draft newsletters, certainly.
** It didn’t help that the one album I brought on my shitty little 240mb drug store mp3 player was a Tool album (a latter day one, at that). A local kid half my age was utterly hypnotized by it, so I gave it and my cheap headphones to him. I regret that I didn’t think to give him a charger.
*** It occurred to me reading it that there was more than a little of “Call at Corazon” in a latter-day Peter Straub novella I’d read / listened to called “The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine”. I’m unsure if this was intentional, but the same unease - and the same sources of unease - seemed to pervade.