Vasconcelos - The Boar Hunt
This one left me completely cold. Maybe it was a weak translation, maybe it was an uninteresting theme, maybe it was the total lack of biological reality (I'm sorry, this always gets to me) but the result was that my eyes read over the few pages this story occupied with little engagement or interest. While I don't want to make subtlety the end-all of writing, I feel like a little subtlety is necessary, or at least appreciated, and this had all the subtlety of a thrown stone. It makes me afraid I missed something for it to be included in such an auspicious anthology, but given that I can only reasonably write on what I experienced here it is.
(The biologist in me must note that the top image is a peccary, not a boar; South America doesn't have native boars, and honestly peccaries are rather cute little things. If the hunters really were slaughtering boars then they were culling a damaging and invasive species and doing all of us a service.)
Sherwood Anderson - Sophistication
I feel like I read this story 20 years too late. It's a strange thing, really, because I know intimately what this means:
With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another. If he prefers that other to be a woman, that is because he believes that a woman will be gentle, that she will understand. He wants, most of all, understanding.
With his hand resting comfortably on the chair behind Riko, for a moment it had almost seemed like they were united in their goal. Though not necessarily a romantic past, there is a sense that they were close once and that he still turns to her in the expectation of being truly understood; it is the most precious type of intimacy for eccentrics.
But the element that Anderson captures is not just the sentiment but the freshness of it at a certain stage of life. George is just experiencing it for the first time and is uncertain of what he wants or how to address it, and the almost feverish isolation he experiences as a result is the core of the story (along with Helen's accompaniment, although the story definitely favors him). Because of this there is a natural and necessary lack of additional emotional layers. That's the genius of the story; even though it begins with many reflections of a more mature mind, as though this story will be about becoming older, it really focuses on just the novice vantage point. Similarly, though written almost as a reminiscing, it feels like a recent memory, or perhaps a cherished memory, one that despite the years still carries with it all the self-absorbed intensity of adolescence. That's what makes the story great, is that Anderson has managed to exclude the later moderation that inevitably occurs. It's like when Shinkai (image above) is at his best, absolutely making you remember those moments when another person seems like the entire world, and that is quite enough.
But that's also the rub for me: that's just no longer where I am, and I admit I've never quite romanticized romance in the same way that allows me to idolize it into later life. Perhaps I will be forced to eat those words some day but for now this story feels to me like it has its time and season. Too early and it's not known, too late and it's too well known. It is written by somebody who knows better but, truthfully, does not quite feel better, and as a result is able to capture the experience fully.
Joyce - The Dead
There's a feeling I get occasionally when I read or watch certain things. It's a rare sensation, like the shadow of a giant just passed over you.
How to describe it...
We're waiting for something. Or we're on the lookout for it. Lily's name comes first, which given this is a story would suggest she's it, but that's ludicrous; what kind of hostess would be on the lookout for their own maid on the night of a dance party? Of course we're waiting for Gabriel. He's the star guest who will make everything work and deliver the cinching speech. It's such a comfort when Gabriel is here. But we don't discount the idea that maybe Lily's important either, until after a few pages of neglect she is totally forgotten.
Meanwhile, though, we're still waiting. Waiting for Gabriel to announce himself, to observe this miniature of the human comedy and render us a verdict. There are types to be had about, in a drunkard, the old man, and now the idealistic student who invites Gabriel west. Miss Ivors seems to raise herself as a foil, critical of his old-fashioned ideas and getting under his skin in a way nobody else does; perhaps she's a less-cynical parallel of Lily, who also decried the modern state of things. But that conversation comes to as much nothing as the one with Lily and Miss Ivors retreats hastily from the party, her reasons palpable but unexplained.
Well, not nothing. Gabriel does find it sticking with him and it finds its way into his speech. A speech which... says nothing. We were waiting for it. It seems as though all these interactions ought to have added to something, and that at the appointed time Gabriel would hold forth some insight drawn from them. But instead it is merely a gracious sally to his gracious, doddering old hosts, made respectable-sounding with antique references and literary quotes, a sermon to a young woman who is no longer here to hear it. And then they all go home.
But the action keeps going. The party's wrapped up, the actors have all made their exits, but for some reason the story doesn't conclude. Why won't it conclude? Instead all we have to think on is a quavering song, sung when everybody's gone and heard in memory. It's enough of a moment to make it an archetype - a woman listening. Though it's importance isn't obvious at first, as Gabriel reveals himself to just be a man, in love with his wife after all these years, lustful after her all these years, and jealous after her all these years. Maybe that's the true story. That he was just a ridiculous figure when seen in a mirror, they were all ridiculous figures, monkeys tottering about and giving to their impulses greater meaning than there ever was. He is about to show us that dull rage at having his desires thwarted is his true human nature. Then full stop. He sees what that song means to his wife. And the snow keeps falling.
---
In Haruhi there is an episode called Some Day in the Rain. It is the most enigmatic episode of them all, being anime-original, and I have had conversations with people who experienced it as eerie, as peaceful, as Zen, and as nihilistic. In it nothing really happens; Kyon is sent to pick up a space heater for the club room while Suzumiya engages in her usual terrorizing of Asahina. And Nagato... Nagato is waiting for something, along with us.
Sitting in an empty room, yet full of props and memories, listening to nonsense spewing out of a radio, but desperately trying to make something of it. We're confident that if we can figure out the cipher it will make the rest of this episode click into perspective. Occasionally people pop in and we think this will start something, but it does not. They're just here for instructions to go elsewhere, and so they come and go, and neither do they explain what is going on. When she finally stands up the screen cuts to black; nothing came of our waiting. It's like an episode forgot to happen.
Which is not to say that it is empty. Nagato is quite the opposite, desperately lonely and waiting for others to notice. She has an intense inner life, and the episode ends on a note of delicate care, her coat left unassumingly over Kyon to keep him warm.
---
One of my long-running 'jokes' is that Haruhi is the Finnegan's Wake of anime: dense, confusing, intensely referential, the play of a genius mind who is trying to sum up all that came before it and in doing so declaring the 'end' of its genre. I actually hadn't read a single Joyce when I made that up, but I feel as though I ended up being more prescient than I could have guessed.
In The Dead we have come to a strange place. Joyce understood the novel and the short story. He understood them well enough that he could somehow see through them. When I read The Dead I was carried away by how intensely real the interactions were. Sure, we find our parallels in art all the time, but there's usually the slight sense that they've been organized, sanitized. Elevated a bit to fit into art. But in Joyce? Nothing of the sort. The old aunts talking brought to mind my own grandmother's habits, not idealized but actualized. It was a kind of genius of expression that somehow made absolutely unadorned life fit onto the page without any of the usual trappings.
And the people... in several moments I had this flash of feeling that they were the protagonists of somebody else's short story. We see Gabriel's thoughts, but I have no doubt that this night could have been written from the perspective of Miss Ivors with just as much texture and depth. Or perhaps his wife's. Or maybe even all these strange, random figures who come in and out of the room to listen to the piano being played, and who are still up dancing while Gabriel is giving his speech. The centerpoint is not "here". Action is going on all around, here and elsewhere.
How he accomplishes this... it's like Joyce has a grasp of the fundamental units, like he wrote in phonemes rather than words. Most writing unconsciously draws on our knowledge of genre, of convention, of signs that mean things to convey to us the purpose of what is happening. This is lovely, but quite frankly also involves itself in a kind of illusion, one where we think that because we are familiar with the symbol we are familiar with the thing itself, but that in truth all that has happened is that we have had either our memories guide us or our imaginations mislead us. The description of the experience in a book is so often nothing but a recollection of what we thought about it. But when Gabriel remembers his life with his wife, I felt it. I, who certainly has not been married for several decades. I, who only knows romantic arithmetic, was induced to follow Joyce's proof to a surprising new theorem. This speaks to an utter mastery of the fundamentals, both literary and psychological, all employed without appearing grandiose. It's as I once wrote about another piece:
Having left the realm of discourse we enter into that of art. At this stage, the series ceases to obsess over what is being portrayed. If the content cannot convey the message, it must be found in the form instead, with the ultimate goal to affect change in the recipient directly. It is the imparting of a type of knowledge that cannot exist separate from the knower. How this alchemy is performed I do not know, and am in awe that such things exist.
And it is only because of this utter genius that Joyce can make his non-point. Having given this intensely real survey of everything that went on, seeing through all the conventions that structure art and life, one comes to... what? Not to homey happiness being the locus of meaning, for while there is warmth and life, Gabriel's attempt to exalt that in his speech is a clear failure. But, and this is key, so too is its opposite. There is no commentary either on superficiality of the partygoers. It is not that in seeing through social conventions he has "uncovered the real truth" behind human nature, that we're just vicious little beasts lying to each other through our bared teeth. That's just another story. And he hasn't uncovered that it's all meaningless either. Nihilism has a way of asserting itself as an ultimate position, as a kind of fundamental category that exists in itself, but it's as though Joyce has also grasped that nihilism can only exist in stories too. Or, to put it another way, the lack of a story is a story too, and that's the one thing that this short story (hah) has entirely done away with. Things happen, and there are reasons for them happening; there are material, formal, and efficient causes... just not a final one. Which is perhaps nihilism if that's how one wants to define it, but that relies on postulating and then rejecting something that by definition never existed if you're a nihilist. In other words, you're reacting to a story, not the real thing.
So what does this leave us with? [Pending revision]
