Day 23: Dorothy Parker, Annie Proulx, Fay Zwicky
Note: Poem is moved to the bottom. It contains my thoughts on suicide which might not be the most pleasant thing to read straight up. I advise you to skip unless you are also a pessimist.
Story: Annie Proulx - Negatives
Content warning: sexual assault
I finally finished Proulx's collection Heart Songs, and enjoyed it a lot. Her stories are always rich with strange characters and descriptions of things you have never bothered to examine. The plots can be quite slippery - often I feel I have missed something, and quite a few stories I had to read twice. Fortunately, another blogger SlapHappyLarry has written incredibly detailed sparknotes for each, all for free on his blog. He mentions Proulx's use of microscopic details that become vital to the plot, and explains many literary techniques I didn't know about. Thanks Larry!
I think this is the third or fourth story in the collection where a man does something terrible to a woman. Sex in Proulx's stories usually happens suddenly and unexpectedly, the character experiencing a beastlike loss of control. This happens most famously in Brokeback Mountain, but whereas that story has an equal and respectful power dynamic between the two stoic cowboys, the protagonists in these stories are all exploiters- hunters and yuppie-capitalists, taking advantage of those they see beneath them. The enormous woman in Heart Songs, the urchin child in Bedrock and the rough-voiced homeless lady in this story. The collection, themed on the American past-time of hunting, subtly(?) links the hunting of animals to sexual abuse; both based on the will to power by hurting something week.
Whether Proulx perpetuates the myth of masculine aggression by showing it as latent in all men, or if she is more critiquing a patriarchal ideology that encourages violence, I am not quite sure. Christiana Thompson wrote a brilliant essay critiquing the kill-fuck-man myth in Australian narratives, which I wrote about here. The original essay is not online. Email me if you'd like a scan.
A detail I liked in this story is the (then-current) satirization of Abject Art, which was all the rage in the 90s, where beauty was rejected in favour of grimy taboo.
Walterâs photographer friends sent him prints: an arrangement of goat intestines on backlit glass, a dead wallaby in a waterhole, a manâchin upâswallowing a squid tentacle coming out of a burning escalator, Muslim women swathed in curtains of blood.
When a friend sends him a stack of undeveloped negatives found in an Inuit cache, he is disappointed to see they are all of missionaries except for one photo of an Inuit child.
Walter caught the flaw in the shadow. Light coursed through the space between the soles of the childâs boots and the ground because her weight was on her heels. She was propped against the building.
âItâs a corpse,â said Walter, delighted. âSheâs stiff.â
That he is delighted shows his character, which comes out when the homeless women asks him to take her pictures and he poses her in all kinds of terrible ways.
Annie Proulx's stories are similar to Flannery O'Connor's stories in that they use shock to reveal both the subtle and blatant violence that results from unchecked ego.
Essay: Fay Zwicky - Influence and Independence
A great essay from a Perth poet and literary critic who lectured at UWA with my grandma. The essay shows a fierce and scathing intelligence, giving an answer to the question: why is Australian literature so juvenile and dumb when it comes to discussing the inner-life?
I will need to reread this and come back to it to find quotes. For now I will put a bookmark here.
Poem: Dorothy Parker - Braggart
Tw: suicide
Often I'm too scared to open my Dorothy Parker book because I know I'll love every page. I save it as medicine to allay the days of intense life-hatred.
So I love Parker's honesty and her bravery to turn the "unspeakable thoughts" into jokes. Her poems have a sing song quality that make the revocations of life even better. I find this poem especially delightful- the bragging of being young in hell while everyone else has to get old.
People tend to be po-faced about suicide. Most believe life has to be lived even if its not worth living. I understand this from a religious standpoint but not an atheistic one. For the suicide obsessed, the value of life is always conditional, and the topic itself is at its best when funny - only jokes can take away the urge to do it.
In my experience, people go into a panic when they hear about anyone feeling suicidal, whether its a family member, stranger, or man on death row. Instantly they'll hand over a suite of crisis care cards and write down numbers, but for me, having a suicidal thought is not a crisis. It is a feeling as common as tiredness, like driving past the same McDonalds each day on the way to work, oh, theres my hanging body again, hi noose, bye noose. Only in times of prolonged stress do the thoughts get urgent enough for me to bother chasing them away. I always have a survival instinct that kicks in. Weirdly, I always want to die until I actually do, but I also know that some day things will get hopeless enough that I'll do what I have to. Until then I'll be having a good time and trying to behave as well as I can.
People think suicide is selfish, which it is, but so is everything else we do. What ever you do or buy, you are helping to wreck someone elses life, whether they are a human in the third world, or one of the billion species of animals. I also think there are worse things you can do with your life than commit suicide. You could kill someone or hurt them badly. To me it is better to kill yourself than to be a sadist. Yet killing yourself will hurt a lot of people, which is true - the suffering of yourself does not outweigh the suffering of others. But they shouldn't make a big stink about it. It's not your fault some people caused you to get born.
My only ethical qualm with suicide is the children. While I don't and won't have children, I believe that once you have a child, you need to do your best to give them the best possible life until they can leave home. I know I want to stay alive to take care of my nephew and niece for as long as I can. I don't want to cause any negative events for them.
So unless I accidentally get hit by a car or am punched by some derro in the back of the head, which would actually be a good compromise, I am here for another 20 or so years. Much thanks to Dorothy Parker and all the other depressed humourosts who fill out the darkest hours of this life.