"Critique de la Vie Quotidienne"

I'm a big fan of Donald Barthelme; in fact, I'd say he's my absolute favorite writer of short stories. As is the case with Denis Johnson (see my previous post), I first discovered Barthelme in college, through a friend, the difference being that I loved Barthelme immediately. And so, an aspiring collector of books (on a limited budget), I made it my mission to find every mass-market edition of Barthelme's original collections over the course of my four years in school.

There's a lot of greatness to be found in any of Barthelme's books. "The Balloon" (from Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts), which is probably Barthelme's most famous story, might come off at first as little more than an exercise until you get to the end, which explains why the titular balloon was built and which suddenly, gut-punchingly, makes the whole thing personal. "The School" (from Amateurs), which George Saunders has written about as an exemplar of "rising action," is, to me, an exemplar of hilarity. It details a series of deaths as experienced by a grammar school class: plants, goldfish, etc., but it reaches the level of laugh-out-loud funny when it gets to the Korean orphan that the class has chipped in to adopt. My favorite story by the man, though, is "Critique de la Vie Quotidienne" (from Sadness). And what really makes that story work for me is its use of person (as in first, second, third).

[Tangent: They Might Be Giants's first video single was for a song called "Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head":

It's an okay song from a band that would go on to do much better things. But what I like most about it now is its use of person. I'm not sure if it was an intentional structural device or not, but the verses of the song move from second ("As your body floats down third street...", to third ("Ads up in the subway are the work of someone trying to please their boss..."), to first ("Quit my job down at the car wash, didn't have to write no one a goodbye note..."), and the overall effect reinforces the message of the song. The narrator moves from a projectional "you" to an empathetic "he" to an empowered "I" taking control of his life: "putting his hand inside the puppet head." But I digress.]

Back to what really makes the Barthelme story work for me, though: it's not what comes at the end (as with "The Balloon"), but what comes at the beginning. The story is (basically) about the dissolution of a marriage, narrated by an alcoholic husband/father. But early on, we get this:

'Our evenings lacked promise. The world in the evening seems fraught with the absence of promise, if you are a married man. There is nothing to do but go home and drink your nine drinks and forget about it.

Slumped there in your favorite chair, with your nine drinks lined up on the side table in soldierly array, and your hand never far from them, and your other hand holding on to the plump belly of the overfed child, and perhaps rocking a bit, if the chair is a rocking chair as mine was in those days, then it is true that a tiny tendril of contempt - strike that, content - might curl up from the storehouse where the world's content is kept, and reach into your softened brain and take hold there, persuading you that this, at last, is the fruit of all your labors, which you'd been wondering about in some such terms as, "Where is the fruit?"'

And it goes on. There's a lot to like here. For one thing, it's funny ("Where is the fruit?")! But what I love is how it starts out with that general "you" (that's just what one does when one is in this situation), and it slips occasionally back into the first person ("if the chair is a rocking chair as mine was in those days"), but as it goes on (and it goes on), the "you" becomes more and more specific, reading almost like the "you" of a Twist-a-Plot or an Infocom game, which you start to find a little disorienting:

And then at some point (again, pretty early on), it becomes clear to you that the "you," no longer abandoning the second person, is actually a mask for the "I" that started this whole thing to begin with. But shifting the person is a way of reaching out, perhaps, seeking a connection, trying to force another person to identify with him (or me, or you?), if only for a second, despite the clinical tone that generally characterizes the story. It's fitting that this comes from a collection called Sadness.

Also, I try at one point to rip off this sort of effect in Bad Teeth, which came out yesterday. Obligatory plug.

"Car Crash While Hitchhiking"

So I'm starting a blog about stuff I've read. Here we go.

I first heard about Denis Johnson when I was in college, 1996 or 1997, I guess, and I was playing a Beat Happening song called "What's Important," from 1982, for a friend:

That song contains the lyrics:
"We sit by the window and we watch the rain
Each little drop has got a name.
They're falling down, they're hitting the ground.
They're washing all the people away."

My friend told me that the song reminded him of the story "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" (1992), by Johnson (Denis, not Calvin), which contains the line, "I knew every raindrop by its name." I liked the Beat Happening lyric, so I decided to check out the story.

For the most part, I didn't like it. It felt fake from the opening lines:

"A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping . . . A Cherokee filled with bourbon . . . A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student . . .

And a family from Marshalltown who headonned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri . . ."

Today, I read the story again. Seventeen years on, I can find things to admire in this opening ("captained" as a verb choice, for instance), but it still rubs me the wrong way with all the ellipses and especially that overly-dramatic paragraph break. It all feels as if it should be read by Bruce McCulloch in the voice he uses in the "Doors Fan" sketch from The Kids in the Hall:

Particularly when McCulloch says, "An old lady on a bus sucking humbugs, she's a rider on the storm, but she ain't never heard the sounds." That seems to me like a line that could have come out of Jesus' Son.

The line about the raindrops, though... When I first read it, I thought it was just the sort of thing someone would say to try to seem cool, like the pretty but ultimately meaningless poetry Roy Batty spouts at the end of Bladerunner. Reading the story again, half a life later, I see it has a bit more weight. The raindrops have names but the people don't, and it's but one of many moments when objects take on traits that are "more human than the human" (to reference Bladerunner again), culminating in the box of cotton balls that speaks to the narrator. But it works better in the Beat Happening song.

What I liked most about the story this time around, though, was this line: "my pulse marked off the seconds of time." "Seconds of time" defamiliarizes a simple concept. It almost sounds like something a person who speaks English as a foreign language would say. Like, "How many dollars of money should I pay you?" But I like that sort of wording that slows me down and makes me pay attention.

I'm still not the biggest fan of this story, as it mostly seems to hinge on the fairly simple dramatic irony that the innocents rather than the sinners are the ones involved in the car crash, and it's all a bit too overly dramatic without much sense of humor about itself. But I like it more than I did when I first read it, and I may finally get around to reading more Johnson despite the initial negative impression.

Also, I think it's funny that in Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice there's a character named Denis whose name rhymes with "penis."