Comments on Week 3 Reading

Collage History of Art by Henry Darger by John D’Agata

The piece is one large, messy crazy collage that wants to be mimetic of Henry Darger’s art and, I suppose, his life. Nothing is known for sure of his origins, for example, just rumors, so the paragraph on his “birth” is crammed with contradictory and seemingly irrelevant facts. Nothing is sequential or logical, but the reader can stand back after reading the piece and assemble some kind of narrative about Darger’s life—that details of his birth are unclear and contradictory, that he lived in a mental institution from which he escaped when he was 18, that he worked as a dishwasher and lived in an apartment (being visited by the “I” narrator of the story, escorted by HD’s landlady), that he was a hoarder and made art from found junk, that he was also a writer. We get some idea of the kind of art Darger made (magazine cutouts of girls with penises) and also of his writing, from an actual bit reproduced in the essay.

The essay collides different points of view, tenses, and expressive modes. One section gives instructions for what to bring for a journey (the “journey” of taking the virtual tour thru Darger’s apartment, via this essay?) Another is a list of events, with dates,  from Darger’s life. Another is via negativa, all the things that did NOT happen after Darger died. Some paragraphs, like the one telling what to pack and another beginning “Now let’s play a game” are vocative with an implied you, the narrator talking directly to the reader and telling us what to do. Another such direct address apologizes to the reader for misleading, for suggesting that it might be possible in an essay to convey anything about Darger.

The really confusing sentences in paragraph 3 (about the struggle not to express what he could see, etc.) took me a long time to unpack, but I do like the idea that this writer, in a “there are not words for this” kind of moment is trying for a different kind of expression. Conventional expression reports on things we “see;” that is, the things we think we see. According to D’Agata,  we don’t really see them, or can’t be sure what we see is real and true. It’s a phenomenology thing—we don’t see what’s real, or we see only a part of what’s real, and any reporting based on this flawed vision must fail. Is a lie, in fact, b/c it pretends it is recording something real. D'Agata wants to avoid doing this—he wants “not to express what he did not see.” In other words, he wants to avoid reporting on things he thinks he sees (but does not really see). He does not want to report a lie.

I guess this motivation accounts for the crazy fragmented non-structure of the essay. I like the idea better than the actual execution. I understand D’Agata wants to convey the sheer magnitude and complexity of what he encountered in the apartment that day and to have his readers feel, as he must have felt, overwhelmed and at a loss for words. In this, he was successful. He evoked in me the feeling of being overwhelmed, of not being able to take it all in.

The problem is, I kept wanting to quit reading. It all felt like too much. Again, brilliantly mimetic. But I’m not sure I’d choose on my own to come to this kind of piece again. It made me uncomfortable, as I am sure it was intended to do.  If your artistic intent is to evoke in the audience the pain you felt when you stepped on the piece of glass, then, yes, setting up an exhibit in which the audience actually steps on a piece of glass and lacerates their feet is very effective.  But how long will the audience stand and bleed on the glass? And will it come back for another look?

The piece would have worked better for me if it had been more compressed. At a certain point I figured out what the writer was doing, then lost interest in reading on.

I can see how this technique, used as part of a larger of more conventional piece could be powerful, and I plan to try it. But for me, having the whole essay rendered like this was too much. I want my fragments to shore up my ruins! My poetry to be a momentary stay against confusion!

Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book

I can’t seem to find the link to or attachment containing this piece—can someone help me here? I’ve heard and read about it & have a general idea of what to expect. When a group of friends & I read Lyn Hejinian’s The Book of a Thousand Eyes, several people said it was like The Pillow Book.

Nick Flynn, “Same Again”

Basically a list of phrases in the vernacular of drinking, with repetition of “I say” serving as connective tissue. That repetition is crucial and, for me anyway, makes the piece into a poem. The reiteration of essentially meaningless phrases, or rather, phrases that mean all the same thing (getting drunk, getting fucked up) are like the wheel rim and the “I say’s” are the hub, and through this structure the piece mimics the endless cycle of addiction. It is very effective but again, a little of this goes a long way for me. Once I figured out the writer’ strategy, the technique (and rest of the essay) did not hold my interest.

I get that if Flynn had done something different, say if the list had accreted in some way, then it would have lost its mimetic value, b/c the point is that with addiction, nothing changes, it’s always the ‘same again.’ This essay is, for sure, art creating life. But how much of this do I want to read (experience)? I don’t want to keep reading this the way I don’t want, anymore, to listen to my father on his nightly drunk dials. And when it goes on too long, I stop reading. Just like, after like fifteen minutes, I hang up.

Sara Manguso’s Napkin Fiction: “I Am Afraid of the Future”

I liked this piece the best of the three I read, probably b/c it was short and more conventional. I tried to figure how the narrative moved in this piece. First, it is chronological, a sequential telling of the events of her morning, right up to the act of sorting the mail.

Then a thought intrudes, “Sometimes my lover comes over for dinner.” The thought triggers a digression on the topic of the lover and then the narrative moves by association—recalling that the lover is on an out-of-state interview leads Manguso to reflect that she has never had such an interview, which leads her to reflect, more generally, on her “small” life. At this point, we get some emotional color about the “facts” told at the very beginning of the essay—what her students are like, etc. So the narrative has gone from linear and vectored to something more stagnant and layered. It has also gone inward—from reporting on actions undertaken all morning, to the author’ inward thoughts and feelings:

With “By afternoon I am fearful,” we are momentarily back on track with the linear narrative—the day, at least, has progressed through morning to the afternoon.

In the last bit, the author shifts gears to future tense and the “future” the title tells us she fears. “Tonight I go out for a drink. I’ll walk home  . . .take a pill.” The narrative is linear again, but interrupted by moments of frank, raw emotion, like: Remember what it is to be touched.” She is hungry for human touch, lonely, and this causes her to consider that her parents won’t live long and that her lover’s mother lives far away. The thoughts about parent (generations) trigger the thought/fear that closes the essay—the author’s fear she will not have a child, peaking in the repeated “what if . . .what if . . .” in the last sentence: What if we can’t have a child, what if I need to keep taking these pills and we cannot have a child.