She’s one of my favorite present-day writers. I first discovered her back when her first short story collection came out – Bad Behavior: Stories
Her debut was a stunner – I remember everybody talking about it. It was a big deal. (The movie Secretary was based on one of the short stories in that collection – although she did say that it was the “Pretty Woman version of what she wrote” – which is true. By the way – I just went to the IMDB page for the film and noticed the brief plot summary – rated R for “strong sexuality” and also “depiction of behavioral disorders”. Hm. I don’t know what behavior disorder is in that film. Obsessive cleanliness maybe? She was in a mental hospital – but the story isn’t really about that. She may seem odd, different, but mentally ill? Insane? The film makes it a point of showing that she is not, and in a way she is the sanest one in the film. Or is it the S&M that is considered a behavior disorder? If you think there’s an easy answer to that last question, or if your answer to that question is a very quick “yes” – then probably Mary Gaitskill isn’t your girl.). The story is way darker than the film, and the story doesn’t have the nice domestic ending. But I loved that movie – they were true ENOUGH to what she wrote … in its controversial way … the freedom that that character found in a sado-masochistic relationship. How addicted she was to it. And how to her – that was love. And who is to say that she is wrong? Of course everyone in the film says she is wrong … but she knows. She knows that “normal” love just wouldn’t work for her.
Gaitskill writes about people like that like nobody else I know. It’s not artificial, or … self-important. She’s not writing about a sub-section of society that she finds interesting – which can be a condescending stance to take. She’s writing about people she knew, and about the kind of struggles people like that have. The ones who grew up being raped, abused, abandoned … what happens to those people when they’re adults? Can they just start having normal relationships? Or has something twisted in them, for good? This is an open-ended question. Certainly some people survive such abuse and are able to then join society in a normal way … but Gaitskill isn’t writing about those people. She’s writing about the other ones. The subversive ones. The ones who love pain, the ones who associate love or sex with humiliation. You know those people who are just so attracted to the very thing that will be the WORST for them? Gaitskill writes about them. But the great thing – and you can see it in Secretary perfectly – is that maybe the larger world, the conventional world – would look at that relationship and think: “How could she debase herself like that? Or … how could she “let herself” be treated like that? She obviously has serious Daddy issues … and so she’s looking for an authoritarian figure in her boyfriend … and that is absolutely the WORST thing she could look for …” And yes, that is A point of view … but it’s not the only point of view. The OTHER point of view is that that girl in Secretary actually chooses the only way that is possible for her. It is the only way she can actually have what others have (a mate, a home, safety, stability) … and in a way, she has chosen perfectly. She has made the BEST possible choice she could make.
Excerpt from the story:
When he asked me to come into his office at the end of the day, I thought he was going to fire me. The idea was a relief, but a numbing one. I sat down and he fixed me with a look that was speculative but benign, for him. He leaned back in his chair in a comfortable way, one hand dangling sideways from his wrist. To my surprise, he began talking to me about my problems, as he saw them.
“I sense that you are a very nice but complex person, with wild mood swings that you keep hidden. You just shut up the house and act like there’s nobody home.”
“That’s true,” I said. “I do that.”
“Well, why? Why don’t you open up a little bit? It would probably help your typing.”
It was really not any of his business, I thought.
“You should try to talk more. I know I’m your employer and we have a prescribed relationship, but you should feel free to discuss your problems with me.”
The idea of discussing my problems with him was preposterous. “It’s hard to think of having that kind of discussion with you,” I said. I hesitated. “You have a strong personality and … when I encounter a personality like that, I tend to step back because I don’t know how to deal with it.”
He was clearly pleased with this response, but he said, “You shouldn’t be so shy.”
When I thought about this conversation later, it seemed, on the one hand, that this lawyer was just an asshole. On the other, his comments were weirdly moving, and had the effect of making me feel horribly sensitive. No one had ever made such personal comments to me before.
And so. In her own way … this girl knows what she needs. And she ends up choosing it.
There are no victims in a Mary Gaitskill story.
This is a tough thing to get … but that’s one of the reasons why Gaitskill is such an important voice. Because she gets it. Her writing idol is Nabokov, and it’s obvious why. She has that kind of complexity, that kind of relentless honesty about sexual impulse and how often it goes completely against what society says it should want.
But it’s not for the CONTENT of her stories that I love her, although that is one of the reasons why she got so much attention. They’re shocking stories, if you don’t read that kind of stuff, or if you have no contact with that totally fringe element of society. But I’ve known a couple of prostitutes in my day (I mean, not THAT way – ha – but just people I knew – women who supported themselves by stripping – also one of my best friends was a prostitute once upon a time) – and I’ve known a lot of strippers … So I guess I’m not all that shocked by some of her stories. You know, shocked by what these people go through, but also – part of the appeal of her stories is the commonplace way she writes about them. They are not mystical weird creatures who live completely weird lives. They are not all raging pathetic drug addicts. Some, sure, but not all. Gaitskill doesn’t write about them with the hushed sense of “wow … check out THESE people …” It’s all very bland, and normal – which is part of the horror of it. They have apartments, they go get Starbucks in the morning, they maybe want to go to art school, or law school … You know, regular. Of course there’s a lot of CRAP there as well … the stories!! And the reasons WHY women make the choice to live that life are as random and diverse as the reasons why anybody does anything. So … the content isn’t really the draw, although I know it is for a lot of people – because it’s a part of the population that isn’t really, uhm, known. Except Biblically, of course. Still, though – it’s totally peripheral. Under rug swept. Existing, but not acknowledged openly.
The draw for me is her writing, which still never ceases to stun me. She’s the kind of writer where occasionally I have to put down the book, after some particularly good sentence, and just sit with it for a second. She’s that good.
I have not read her latest novel – Veronica
She has also come out with another collection of short stories called Because They Wanted to: Stories
Here’s an excerpt from the story I mentioned above – the four-parter called “The Wrong Thing”. I found this story almost unbearably sad. I read it recently and I have felt like I have been on a bit shaky ground these past couple months … and maybe 5 or 6 pages in, I had to make a choice … should I go on with this? Should I keep reading? I decided Yes, I would. But I went slowly, and I was very gentle with myself as I did so. My friends will know what I mean. I didn’t let my mind wander into my own life experiences too much as I read, I didn’t let myself identify too much with the narrator – even though my heart and soul felt completely exposed by that story – but I kept a bit of distance, which seemed necessary in order for me to be able to complete the story. It’s a testament to Gaitskill’s writer – and my regard for her – that even with such an un-balancing experience – I finished the story, and sat for a bit, profoundly moved. It was as though someone had pressed their finger into my skin – and for a second, the skin didn’t bounce back.
Here’s the opening of that story:
Today the clerk in the fancy deli next door asked me how I was, and I said, “I have deep longings that will never be satisfied.” I go in there all the time, so I thought it was okay. But she frowned slightly and said, “Is it the weather that does it to you?” “No,” I said, “it’s just my personality.” She laughed.
It’s the kind of thing that I enjoy saying at the moment but that has a nasty reverb. I want it to be a joke, but I’m afraid it’s not.
Last week a woman I have not spoken to for years called to tell me that someone I used to have sex with had died of a drug overdose. I was shocked to hear it, but not especially sorry. He’d had a certain fey glamour and a knack for erotic choas that was both exhilarating and horrible, but he was essentially an absurdly cruel, absurdly unhappy person, and I thought that, in the end, he was probably quite relieved to go. I had not seen him in ten years, and our association had been pornographic, loveless, and stupid. We had had certain bright moments of camaraderie and high jinks, but none of it justified the feelings I’d had for him. Even now he occasionally appears in my dreams — loving and tender, smiling as he hands me, variously, a candy bar, a brightly striped glass ball, a strawberry-scented candle. In one dream he grew wings and flew to South America with me clinging to his back, ribbons flying from our hair and feet.
“I know he hurt you,” my friend said. “But I think he hurt himself a lot more.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He did.”
When I got off the phone, I sat still for some moments. Then I got up and dressed for the party I was about to attend. It was a birthday party for an acquaintance, a self-described pro-sex feminist who had created a public niche for herself as a pornographer and talk-show guest. I put on a see-through blouse, a black bra, a tiny black skirt, high-heeled boots, and a ratty black wig I had found in the bargain bin of a used-clothing store.
I took a taxi to the party, and the driver, whom I had engaged in conversation, commented on my clothes. “I just wondered,” he said, “why you’re dressed so, well, so … I mean …”
“You mean like a slut?”
“Uh, yeah.” He glanced in his rearview. “Not that I’m saying anything.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s because I think it’s fun. It’s not a big scary sex thing. It’s an enthusiastic, participatory kind of thing. Besides, I’m thirty-nine, and pretty soon I won’t be able to do it anymore, because I’ll be an old bag.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Well, that’s cool,” he said. “It’s just that you don’t seem like the type who needs the attention.”
His comment was so touching that it made me feel maudlin, and feeling maudlin made me feel belligerent. “A guy I used to be involved with used to criticize me for not dressing slutty enough,” I said. “He said I wasn’t much of a girl. He’d probably like what I’ve got on, but the little jerk is dead now.” I dug around in my bag for the fare. The driver’s eyes flashed urgently in his rearview.
Happy birthday Mary Gaitskill – I look forward to all the books you have yet to write.
How have I not read her stuff yet?? I had already planned on going to Barnes and Noble tomorrow, to get all kinds of stuff for my classroom. How weird that will all look with Mary Gaitskill placed neatly on top!! Ha ha!!
hahaha Just make sure you bring the right book to the kindergarten Story Hour, mkay??
hahaha
She’s good. See if you can find Bad Behavior. I’ll lend it to you if you can’t find it.
I shall visit Amazon and make much good use of my AmEx.
Thanks for the post! I always learn something from your blog.
Lord, honey.
it’s not often that about ten paragraphs isn’t enough warning.
and i have a feeling that’s a pretty benign example.
reminds me of a girl.
she snuck up on you, too.
not the gorgeous and funny part. those parts were
right out front.
but in the midst of those things, her guard would drop. her eyes would get sharp for just a split second. so quick , you weren’t even sure what you saw.
but you knew it was really, really bad.
and as it was impossible not to like her,
it would occur to you that you were really, really screwed.
This comment is completely off topic (except you mentioned imdb, so maybe we could stretch and say it’s on topic), but I saw THIS and thought of you. What do you think??? I’m always nervous when books I love get the film treatment…Hopefully this one will work like (the very different, but equally great) Sophie’s Choice and Misery, and hopefully it won’t be another The Hours (loved the novel, hated the film).
Erik –
I’m really scared. I’m scared of that movie.
I don’t know. I seriously might not see it – unless it gets reviews that make me HAVE to see it. The book is too important to me.
Is it truly pathetic that I thought that about Lord of the Rings? So much so that I refused to see the first, until the whole flippin’ world told me how super it was – so I saw the second and Jackson has utterly ruined Faramir but by then it was too late and I had to put up it to get the amazing Ents and great performances interladen with stupid dwarf-tossing jokes and AAARRGGGHH zazsqafbvqbllhlaly;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Sorry – gave myself an episode. Off to lie down.
So this is a bit late as an offer, but I wanted to say, again, how happy I am you’ve alerted those near to and far from knowing Mary Gaitskill’s work about its existence, you analysis of her strains and style being spot-on and a reminder in and of itself of how richly provocative and mesmerising M.G.’s work can be.
And far be it from me to give spoilers, but her last book, “Veronica,” is truly astounding in terms of how it both confirms and debunks the kind of writing style we’ve come to expect from M.G. At once clinically hard-edged and nearly heartbreakingly lyrical, “Veronica” lives on a plane that’s at once all-too familiar and yet also quite estranged. And I mean this last term in the best way; you really get the feeling that M.G. in this book has somehow cut out onto some looser, higher, almost hallucinatory plane of writing than she ever has before. Here’s an example of that shift, with the narrator Alison riffing on, well, her notion of what it means to be alive:
“The wind rises. The rain dashes sideways. Slowly, the trees throw their great hair. Their trunks creak and mull. My fever makes a wall in my brain. A door appears in the wall. It opens and another dream comes out. Is it from last night, or the night before, or every night? In it, a man and woman are on a high-speed train that never stops. Music is playing, a mechanical xylophone rippling manically up a high four-note scale again and again. Bing bing bing bing! It is the sound of a giant nervous system. The man and woman are built into this system and they cannot leave it. They are crying. Looking out the window, they see people hunting animals on game preserves. There are almost no animals left, so they have to be recycled–brought back to life after they’ve been killed and hunted again. Mobs of people chase a bear trying to run on artifical legs. It screams with fear and rage. The man and woman cry. They are part of it. They can do nothing. Bing bing bing bing!
My forehead breaks into a sweat. I unfasten a button and loosen my scarf. The air cools my skin; the fever recoils, then sends hot tadpoles wiggling against the cold. Drive the animal before you and never stop. Starve it, cut it, stuff silicone in it. Feed it until it’s too fat to think or feel. Then cut it open and suck the fat out. Sew it up and give it medication for pain. Make it run on the treadmill, faster, faster. Examine it for flaws. Not just the body but the mind, too. Keep going over the symptoms. It’s not a character defect; it’s an illness. Give it medication for pain. Dazzle its eyes with visions of beauty. Dazzle its ears with music that never stops playing. Send it to graze in vast aisles of food so huge and flawless that it seems to be straining to become something more than food. Dazzle its mind with visions of terror. Set it chasing a hot, rippling heaven from which illness and pain have been removed forever. Set it fleeing the silent darkness that is always at its heels. Suck it out. Sew it up. Run. When the dark comes, pray: I love my ass.”
I’ll stop there. So many other incredible arias like that in a book that, obviously, occupies territory that M.G. knows so well (the city, men, women, sex, bodies, drugs, narcissism) but also departs from it in truly startling, poetic ways.
In other words, somewhat different in scope and tone from a passage like this one, from “A Romantic Weekend,” one of my favorite M.G. stories, in her 1st collection, “Bad Behavior”:
“He went home with her that night. He lay with her on her sagging, lumpy single mattress, tipping his head to blow smoke into the room. She butted her forehead against his chest. The mattress squeaked with every movement. He told her about Sharon. ‘I had a relationship like that when I was in college,’ she said. ‘Somebody opened me up in a way that I had no control over. He hurt me. He changed me completely. Now I can’t have sex normally.’
The room was pathetically decorated with postcards, pictures of huge-eyed Japanese cartoon characters, and tiny, maddening toys that she had obviously gone out of her way to find, displayed in a tightly arranged tumble on her dresser. A frail model airplane dangled from the light above her dresser. Next to it was a pasted-up cartoon of a pink-haired girl cringing open-mouthed before a spike-haired boy-villain in shorts and glasses. Her short skirt was blown up by the force of his threatening expression, and her panties showed. What kind of person would put crap like this up on her wall?”
I’ll say no more–other than to say that when I read that last line (and continue re-reading it, through the years), all I can think of is how she’s made Flaubert proud. She’s merciless in her judgment, surgically perfect in her presentation of it, and completely up to the challenge of getting us deeply invested with these completely unlikeable people. And then to see how she builds upon those skills in “Veronica,” at once sharpening and softening her writerly blade, it just reaffirms just how deep and continuous her work and vision are.
Happy Birthday, M.G.!
Jon –
A couple things:
First of all: I am just so glad that you and I have reconnected. I really am. It’s just so cool.
Second of all: You are my Mary Gaitskill partner-in-crime. That first excerpt you posted from Victoria is almost … BAFFLING to me. Like I know her style … and that is completley different from it. Perhaps softer? More subconscious? That’s very moving language.
You know what – I find her to be a consistently COURAGEOUS writer. She’s on the edge. She doesn’t just push us, the audience … she pushes HERSELF. I so admire that.
Funny, too – I just re-read Romantic Weekend this past weekend (which was decidedly NOT romantic … well, there was the masturbatory afternoon … but it was merely romance with mySELF) – and that was one of the paragraphs that really struck me in this last reading of it.
‘I had a relationship like that when I was in college,’ she said. ‘Somebody opened me up in a way that I had no control over. He hurt me. He changed me completely. Now I can’t have sex normally.’
It’s such a RAW story. That whole collection is raw. Except, actually, for the last story in the colleciton – Heaven – which suddenly goes all … Ordinary People-ish and elegiac – I think it’s masterful, and it’s hard to believe that a woman of, what, 24, wrote that story. It feels like it comes from someone much older. Kind of astonishing.
You wrote:
//She’s merciless in her judgment, surgically perfect in her presentation of it, and completely up to the challenge of getting us deeply invested with these completely unlikeable people. //
God, yes. Completely unlikeable. And yet – my heart just cracks for them – AND I see myself in so many of them. She NAMES me. I mean, not literally … but you know what I mean. I feel NAMED by her stories. That’s why I find them kind of hard to read – as i mentioned in this post. I have to be really careful not to identify too much – because then I’ll get all suicidal.
I love how say she is sharpening and softening her writer’s blade. Wow.
THANK YOU for your great comment.
I will be sure to let you know when I finally read Veronica. I’m on a fiction kick now – so it should be soon.
I’m thrilled too that we’ve reconnected–even if right now it’s only through cyberspace. Not that your glorious blog is a shabby conduit (by any means), but ultimately there’s no substitute for meeting your literary soul sister in the flesh…and French kissing her…just like you do with your real sister.
Huh?
No, seriously, I’m having a blast kibbitzing with you. And the whole Mary Gaitskill dialogue we’re having, however perilous reading her stuff can be, is great. As ever, I look forward to hearing your impressions about “Veronica.”
And I think you’re absolutely right: the writing in that book, which is as much about the unbidden and abrupt way memory hemmorahges into and ablates our consciousness as it is about a specific set of characters at a specific point in time, often feels as though we were traveling through someone’s subconsciousness. But given that it’s M.G. who’s writing, she hardly lets this impluse go unchecked; that’s what makes the book, to my mind, such an accomplishment. It’s really uncanny how well she times and arranges the dipping in and out of those reveries throughout the novel. Granted, she’s got a protagonist whose health and temperament are already well-disposed toward that kind of movement, but as is the case with great poetry, where the poem is arguably as much about the art of poetry as it is about its manifest subject (e.g., Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry”), M.G.’s work in “Veronica” is masterful precisely for the same reason, because of the number of layers she writing on and through, including (but hardly limited to) a discussion about the “meaning” of writing itself. Here’s an an example of this particular perspective from the book, one that had me laughing aloud–but mostly in horror and recognition (and, as you’ve alluded to in terms of being “named” by her work, also a kind of “horrible recognition”):
“The writer on the radio is talking about her characters like they’re real people: ‘When you look at it from her point of view, his behavior really is strange, because to her, they’re just playing a sexy game, whereas for him it’s–‘ She blooms out of the radio like a balloon with a face on it, smiling, wanting you to like her, vibrating with things to say. Turn on the radio, there’s always somebody like her on somewhere. People rushing through their lives turn the dial looking for comfort, and the excited smiling words spill over them. I drink my coffee. The novelist’s characters dance and preen. I drink my coffee. People from last night’s dream stumble in dark rooms, screaming at one another, trying hard to do something I can’t see. I finish my coffee. Water is seeping in and soaking the edge of the carpet. I don’t know how this happens, I’m on the second floor.”
And yet–and yet!!–the kind of discipline and control she exercises while navigating these various depths–sometimes ironically (like in the above passage), sometimes quite earnestly–allows us to stay immersed in them without ever getting annoyed or bored–which is always a liability when a writer starts trafficking in a kind of stream-of-consciousness mode. Obviously, I can’t say enough good stuff about this novel.
Meanwhile, if diddling yourself on a weekend afternoon will help you to avoid allowing M.G.’s work to put a rope around your neck, then I’m all for the self-diddle.
Hi diddle dee! Hi diddle dum! Guess what I’m going to do with my aching thumb…
Oh dear. I better get out of my bathrobe before the “What are you still doing in it at 10:30am?” police squad arrives.
hahahaha Yep, diddling keeps from a Gaitskill-inspired suicide.
But, uhm, seriously – that excerpt you just posted (and I just love that you are obviously sitting on the other end with your book open beside you!!) – is scary good.
I felt like: Oh God. I so could be that person she describes. “She blooms out of the radio like a balloon with a face on it, smiling, wanting you to like her, vibrating with things to say.” That’s me on this blog sometimes. I’ve been trying to break out of that a bit – because I think it’s good practice. Here I am kinda in public … people comment – it becomes a HUGE trap to write FOR the people who comment – as opposed to for myself. It all comes down to not caring if people like me or not.
I’ve noticed certain readers not coming back too much anymore – or at least not commenting – and in a way (weirdly) it makes me feel like I’m doing something RIGHT. Not that there’s any virtue in being DISliked … No, no. It’s the not caring whether or not they like me or not that is the virtue. The people who DO “get me” are the ones I am writing for anyway.
So shit like that (trying to write for yourself, as opposed to trying to make people like you) always helps you be a better artist. It helps in acting, too. You know, like the exercise they give sometimes in creative writing class: “Write this short story as though your parents are dead.” Like: nobody will be shocked by what you write, your parents won’t judge, write what you want to write. Write about a gang-bang, write about your coke addict boyfriend, write about whatEVER …
That’s a huge barrier for all of us – or for those of us who have parents who give a crap about us. We need to break free from that – to some degree – otherwise we’ll never become who we want to become.
Maybe I’ll read Veronica next.
I just finished Master and Margarita. And I’m reading a skinny little biography of Isaac Newton right now … but I’m in a fiction mood these days.
What? You no go to Sally Field School of Poise(on) & Ele(ctro)cution?
I like you. I like you very much, Sheila, when you vibrate.
With things.
To say.
Oh dear.
Have no fear: you hardly seem like the interviewee in that passage. And I actually heard Gaitskill being interviewed about that very passage on a radio show, and the whole thing was very heady–esp. since it was being recorded in front of a large live audience, to whom she confessed that she had included that passage in the book after listening to tapes of radio interviews she gave a while ago during which she felt she sounded fairly like a complete moron. Kind of brought the house down and made me like her (oh no! get it?) even more than I already do. Almost as though she were double-counter-subverting the subversion she was making in the passage (e.g., playing down the book-promoting interview she was actually giving about the book-promoting interview dramatized in the book which itself is based on another actual book-promoting interview she gave in real life–the sum total effect of which was a simultaneous humbling and aggrandizement of her public persona, something of which I’m sure she was astutely aware and probably slightly frustrated over given the kind of near-paralyzing, almost self-canceling position it put her in.) But she did this all in a very good-natured way, and it didn’t seem at all calculating (i.e., like something one of her characters would spend hours preparing to do.)
Anyway, congrats on finishing Master & Margarita. That’s one I yet have to read myself, and so you’ve counter-inspired me: will aim to read that one, too, sooner rather than later.
hahahaha You like me!!!
Ha. No.
And fabulous observation about the self-cancelation in Gaitskill’s commentary – how funny. She’s such a smart person – you always get the feeling that she is willing to pay the price. What do I mean by that … Hmmm. She writes what she wants to write. Even if it hurts. Even if it reveals the darkest side of her nature. Her desire for pain, perhaps? Whatever it is in her … She’s fearless (or seems to be) in getting it out. And yet – it’s controlled. It’s not just a stupid “wah wah wah” catharsis. It’s Joyce-an. It’s an exorcism – which has been completely crafted into something marvelous and nearly perfect.
I’d love to hear her read – I should keep my eyes peeled for any public readings in the Manhattan area. It’d be really fun to see what she’s like, in person. I have this whole idea of her … but I could be totally wrong.
And Master & Margarita was tough – it took me a while. The notes at the back of the book are essential – so there’s a lot of going back and forth. But the extended metaphor of Stalin’s terror is just beautifully expressed here – it’s amazing that a book about that topic can be funny – but this book is. It reminds me of a Fellini movie a bit. Strange tableaux – a man with white hair sitting in an armchair in the middle of a rocky field – two demonic creatures standing on a rooftop against the sunset – etc. etc. It’s very cinematic.
I think you’d dig it.
It’s one of the angriest books I’ve ever read – yet you can’t point to one single example of where he lets out his rage. it’s all hidden. It’s a book in code.
Great stuff.
Yeah, the whole projection of expectation of greatness (or lack thereof) onto a fiction author is probably inevitable on one level (she is, after all, the one who wrote about that sadist, or that masochist), but at the same rate it’s arguably an irrelevant venture in the long run (she is the meek, palid one embroidering away in Bath while secretly writing about Mr. Rochester. How is that possible? She hasn’t lifted her ass off that rocking chair in ten years! And, yet, still, so what? Isn’t that in fact what makes her great? And, really, why does she matter anyway? Get Her out of the picture! Pronto!)
Which is another way of raising the always thory issue of, as John Irving put it, the “tyrannny of one’s authenticity.” On the one hand, a writer may have lived something that’s translatable into fiction, but it’s usually when that writer stops trying to be so faithful to her “own” story that her “real” story actually begins to express itself.
And in the end, isn’t anything produced by a fiction writer “autobiographical”–even if it obviously isn’t? (e.g., a man with white hair sitting in an armchair in the middle of a field)? May as well assume, then, from the start that a fiction writer’s material definitely has nothing to do with that writer’s life; and for the fiction writer herself, it would seem doubly important to keep this notion in mind as she moves into territory that isn’t putatively autobiographical–so that, as with Bulgakov, the reader will apprehend exactly what she definitely needs to know: that what she’s reading has everything to do with what’s imperative to understand about the writer’s actual world and experience (i.e., Stalin and his reign of terror).
Though it doesn’t sound like it was possible for Bulgakov to write what we might think of as traditional autobiographical fiction, I wonder whether he would have been able to convey the kind of unforgettably fantastic truth about life and death in early Soviet Russia that he does in M&M if he had given us instead a more literal translation of his actual experience? Something tells me that…
…well, anyway, speaking of terror reigns, you’re the second person this week I’ve encountered who’s talked about Master & Margarita at length–and who has also expressed, in so many words, admiration for an artifact that, in the words of the other person I’m referring to (Charles Baxter, another great fiction writer), shows just how far the imagination can take you when you’re under extraordinary duress. Some become schizophrenic, some write novels for the canon. And some do both. And some do neither. No hard and fast rules here, obviously, but still, it makes sense that I hear as often as I do that some of the best theatre or art or writing in the former Soviet republics and satellite countries happened when they were still Soviet.
And I actually have a friend who wants Bush to somehow remain president in ’08 so that the explosive kulturkampf that the U.S. hasn’t really ever experienced artistically will finally have the basis to occur. Strip us of all civil rights and watch the masterpieces pop up like daisies. Sick, I know. And I of course hope this never happens. But at this perverted fantasy’s heart there is still a certain truth that harkens to the glory of a work like Master & Margarita.
Now all I have to do is read it and see if any of my blah blah blah is actually valid.
//whether he would have been able to convey the kind of unforgettably fantastic truth about life and death in early Soviet Russia that he does in M&M if he had given us instead a more literal translation of his actual experience? //
I feel like for Bulgakov it was his “way in”. He was a playwright so he dealt in artifice, in fantasy … And he was dealing with a supernatural power, like the Devil – so he wasn’t bound by reality.
I suppose the terror at the time was so out of control that there was a sense of unreality to it. There’s a chilling moment when a stranger comes up and starts talking to Margarita – she has no idea who he is -and he’s basically just making chit-chat … but she says to him, when she can get a word in edgewise, “So. Have you come to arrest me?” The chilling thing about this is: she has done nothing wrong. She is an ordinary citizen. But that didn’t matter at the time. And her calm acceptance of those insane rules is what is so frightening.
Then there is someone like Solzhenitsyn – whom I also love – and a lot of his stuff is much more on the nose – he writes about the gulag (I can’t believe it but yes, I did read his entire Gulag Archipelago) – and obviosuly his stuff couldn’t be read in his own country for years. But his novel – The Cancer Ward – is another one of those Soviet System Metaphors … only it doesn’t have that fantastical element that Bulgakov has. Bulgakov has objects and people flying out of windows, men being transformed into pigs, people being beheaded but then still being alive – the head blabbing on and on, empty suits sitting at desks – signing signatures to memos with invisible hands … WILD stuff. Really fun, in a way.
It makes me think, too, about censorship – which obviously I am not “for”. But some of my favorite films ever were made during the strongly censored time of the 30s and 40s … Those are sexy movies, man – sexy, vibrant, hot movies – and you never see any skin, or any writhing naked people … but Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings? Great movie, if you haven’t seen it. You can just feel the palpable sexual energy between them … it’s amazing how OBVIOUS it is. But the scriptwriters and directors had to be really clever to get stuff around the censors … I think, in a way, those limitations really pushed the artform along.
Now I also love a good sex scene – I’m not anti-sex on screen … God no!! But censorship, instead of squashing creativity, forced everyone to be much sneakier, and MUCH more clever than they are now.
Let the Mo’Fo’in Reign of Censorship Rise to the Top!
Ha ha ha. Listen to us little Fourth Reichers!
But I totally know what you mean about the usefulness of repression: put a person who’s more than their haircut in jail for life with nothing but a roll of toilet paper and a nub of graphite, and nary even a microscopic speck of shit will touch those fibers.
And, no, I haven’t seen “Only Angels Have Wings,” but I’ll be sure to put it on our Netflix queue.
And also with regard to fully-clothed, greyscale, non-genital-rubbing filmic representations of full-on multiple orgasmic fucking, have you seen David Lean’s “Brief Encounter”? Something tells me you probably have. In any case, it’s one of my favorite movies, made in ’45, and written by Noel Coward. Barely a collar button gets undone, but the principal characters in that movie are being passionately thrashed about in a near abysmal fit of chucking it all for that random stranger met on the train (literally)…only for it all to end right back where it started: even more deeply under wraps, but with those characters changed indelibly forever.
God, the art of that film almost makes you nostalgic for the days when coming out of the closet (any closet, for that matter) had a death sentence attached to it.
But: can’t wait now to get to Master & Margarita. Your description of it is tantalizing. And, yes, I think you’re the only person I know who’s actually read the entire Gulag Archipelego. I’m proud to know you. And obviously envious of your reading history. I’ve only read “Ivan Denisovich”– and, yeah, it makes sense, if that book is anything like “Cancer Ward” or the “G.A.,” that the latter two would be banned altogether under Stalin. Also, the difference in artistic background between Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov makes me think of certain passages in Wallace Shawn’s “The Designated Mourner,” where one of the characters talks hauntingly about how the choice to write poetry versus prose while living in repressive regime is the choice between life and death, where choosing the former usually guarantees you enough obscurity not to be understood well enough by those who would slit your throat, the drama and allegory of verse (and vice versa) being generally too difficult for a genuine thug to parse out. All the more geninus, then, of Bulgakov having been able to couch his allegory in a form that arguably would’ve/could’ve given him away to the authorities much faster than might’ve been the case had he written M&M as a play. Again, I don’t know enough about him or the history of that work, but I’m really jazzed to find out more now.
Jon – so weird: Came home last night to find Veronica waiting for me on my doorstep. I had forgotten I ordered it!!