Day 12: Annie Proulx, Elizabeth Hardwick, Peggy Robles-Alvarado
content warning in the following texts: suicide, dv
Annie Proulx - Bedrock (1994)
I am enjoying the stories in Heartsongs so much that I am gonna just finish the book.
Out of the three I've read so far, this one is the best, having the same rugged characters and details while being focused and precise like a Flannery O'Connor story- only with a twist so crazy you feel the need to reread the whole thing right away, if you can stomach it.
A lot of the story is of the old man protagonist disapproving of his creepy brother inlaw's shoddy yardwork. In one scene, Bobhot (thats his name) repaints the old man's house a glaring fluorescent yellow.
If this story fits into any horror-related microgenre, it would be Home Maintenance Gothic.
Elizabeth Hardwick - Southern Literature (1983), and, Suicide and Women (1972)
Am also enjoying Hardwick's Uncollected Essays too much to read anything else (I only have a book of Sontag and some hauntological diaspora essays I have procrastinated on reading for years).
Her essay on Southern Lit, if it has a focus, discusses how various well-known Southern writers have worked with or against of "Southernness", that is the romantic tropes and archetypes of the region.
Hardwick is Team O'Connor and Faulkner, versus the other two popular writers, McCullers and Williams.
There is no pretension in Flannery O’Connor, as there is in Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams, that the outlandish is filled with hidden goodness, with romantic isolation and longing. [...] The sourness, the angularity of the conceptions, the purity of the ear and of the style, the way things are—in Flannery O’Connor’s work I think you find Southern literature that is a devastation of southernness.
And on Faulkner:
Faulkner’s art, with its high classical diction and its profound absorption in his region, is nevertheless the most experimental to come out of the South. His work seems to me impossible without the avant-garde experiments of the 1920s in all the arts.
Hardwick's division and judgement of the four writers into two teams of good and not-so-good echoes the judgements in Clement Greenberg's essay Kitsch and the Avante Garde, in which kitsch is defined as anything that follows the old formulas and assumptions with a sheen of pseudo-subversion, so that audiences go away feeling content and comfortable after their excursion into high-culture. However, I don't think Hardwick is being as harsh as Greenberg, nor do I think McCullers and Williams are schlocky writers. Its just Flannery and Faulkner are so transcendently good.
And on the Suicide and Women essay...
This was a heavier read than I expected. Hardwick thinks of answers to the question: why did suicides of Californian women in their 20s rise from 0.4% to 9% between 1960 and 1970.
Her answers have a real empathy and understanding of how it is for both young women and the suicidal.
On the mindstate of the suicidal:
Those who grieve for a suicide show in their grief that they have retained hope for some abatement of the pain. Had we the suicide’s conviction that his condition was unalterable we would not grieve so fiercely.
One possible reason was the new burden of freedom given to young women in the 1960s along with new neoliberal ideologies, where for some, their realities cannot match up to the worlds ideals.
When everything is possible, to have little becomes unbearable. There is not only an absence then, but a cutting awareness of incapacity. Freedom has opened up new roads—and closed many of the old ones. Think of the number of respected and apparently happy spinsters in the past—school teachers, nurses, maiden aunts—and remember that their life was not always thought of as a calamity. It is not a question of marriage alone, but of renunciation, chastity, deprivation. We are no longer free to be contented old maids. The condition itself has been outlawed by critical analysis and pity.
On the Western approach to suffering:
Physical and emotional pain have been the lot of mankind and, in a sense, it has been the mission of America to seek the diminishment of this pain by the use of technology, raised living standards, and urbanization.
Then, identifying loneliness being the driving factor, Hardwick comes to the main point of the essay:
There is something of the child in all of us that cannot accept loneliness, an abandonment to the dark. And what will the future be? The modern world places enormous demands upon the individual, requiring of him a lone, spectacular effort. You are only yourself, we say, and in some sense always alone. The question is whether we have mastered the terms of this profound singularity, this enlarging self-determination. It is clear, as the suicide figures show, that many young women have not.
I think it is cool (wrong word?) that this was written in 1972, and things have only gotten worse, and the governments still cant solve the problem of systematic loneliness.
As a man who has spent half his life suicidal, I hadn't thought so much about the experience of women and suicide being so different from men's- like surely the existential causes, the pain or hopelessness is not gendered. But men and women have different expectations of how they are meant to be, look, behave, achieve. I do not know whose standards are harder to reach. To be honest, I'd never thought much about anyone's reasons but my own, which change all the time, though I am trying to work out a philosophical position of where I stand on suicide.
When I am not suicidal I'm pro-suicide and when I am suicidal I'm anti. How does that work? Yiyun Li, i think, wrote that when you are at the depths of suidality, it is like half of you is trying to kill you and the other half trying to save you. That is what its like for me. The saving part always steps in, and when I am glad to be alive again, I think, thank god Australia took away all the guns, though they would make the matter a bit simpler.
Peggy Robles-Alvarado - In Leticia's Kitchen Drawer
I like the concept behind this poem, which tells us about all the objects in Leticia's kitchen junk drawer. I love how universal the junk drawer is- the one you keep the matches, batteries, lackybands, old tourist keychains. In my bedroom, every drawer is a junk drawer. I have about 8 of them, filled up with Bullshit.
This is not an object poem. Rather it connects each object with various people in Leticia's life; a horrible sister, a philandering ex lover, her abusive husband. From looking in Leticia's junk drawer, we see her unhappy life.
Who narrates the poem? Surely Leticia is the only person able to know the intimate memories that these banal objects hold, yet it doesn't feel like she could willingly be this honest or brutal with herself. The narrator could be the repressed unconscious, but the lines read like those of a tired, judgemental daughter:
Diamond long stick matches for lighting the broken pilot light and the
candles that keep her bowing to him.
I feel like I could talk and study this poem for a long long time,