I've not yet read Polly Buckingham's The Expense of a View, published last year by the University of North Texas Press--I actually still need to track a copy down. But I'm a fan of the other winners of the Katherine Anne Porter Short Fiction Award that I've read and find them to be consistent in quality from year to year. So, I'm looking forward. In the mean time, Polly has penned for us an essay on John Cheever and Joy Williams that makes me want to dig up my collections of theirs as well.
John Cheever and Joy Williams: Experimentalism and Psychosis in Fiction
As someone whose work leans toward the experimental, I’m surprised by how diverse my reactions are to it. Why does some experimental writing work and some fail? Or is it a reader’s ability to tap into an author’s vision that makes some experimental stories more palatable than others? Some works of experimental fiction feel like experiments for the sake of experimenting, as if the author is performing a flashy exercise, making the work feel mannered or false. In other works, the experimental presentation seems to be the only way for the author to express her vision and/or the character's vision. It is the only container, or lack of container, for the experience; the subverting of a traditional narrative structure is integral to the experience. And thus the work feels authentic. The stories of Joy Williams and John Cheever, two of my long standing greatest loves in fiction, fall into this latter category.
Between them, they’ve authored some of the strangest, most authentic stories I’ve ever read—stories that redefine the boundaries of point of view, narrative structure, the presentation of time, and figurative language. Cheever’s “A Vision of the World” subverts the notion that one narrative event should follow logically upon the previous event; there seems to be no coherent sense of reality; and the narrator spends half the story describing indecipherable dreams in excruciatingly random detail. I have read this story dozens of times and still, every time I get to the end I think much the same thing: what just happened to me and how did Cheever do that? The one thing that is clear is the narrator's descent into madness. He attempts to find relationships in a series of unrelated events, tries to find meaning in his dreams, and at some point, though we're not entirely sure what point, he loses touch with reality such that it is impossible for the reader to know what is delusion and what actual. It is this psychosis that determines the narrative structure. Cheever's narrator, instead of seeing his own madness, experiences a heightened sense of connectedness and enlightenment. The narrator's experience of the world is inexplicable, like the nonsense words of his dreams, and our experience, too, is equally as troubling, as if we're reaching ever closer to some great epiphany or some great emptiness.
In Williams’ “The Excursion” a little girl projects herself into the sexual fantasies of an adult woman in an abusive relationship with head spinning shifts in time such that the reader is never quite clear which space to occupy—the present or the future. There is no clear indication of whether we are reading flash forwards or the machinations of Jenny's mind. Neither possibility is completely supported by the story: the images invade the child’s life suggesting they couldn’t be flash forwards, but there is also no explanation of how and why a child could imagine such adult fantasies. What we do know is that the experience of the narrative is absolutely authentic to a child who has been sexualized far too early. As in "A Vision of the World," the narrative forces us into her altered state, her confusion and her painful dreaminess. We feel it in our gut. Everything breaks the rules; everything is set free of safe, prescribed norms. It's absolutely necessary for our own unhinging and for Jenny's.
The most interesting pairing of Williams and Cheever are the stories "The Bridgetender" and "The Chimera." The first person narrators of both stories create a phantom female lover. Cheever's narrator is aware that he has created his chimera, but the chimera's existence so bleeds over into reality that by the end both the reader and the narrator are hard pressed to say where imagination left off and reality began—or is it the other way around? In "The Bridgetender," the very lonely narrator is not aware that his lover is a figment. And even to the reader, she at first appears quite realistically enough walking down the beach. But her actions are so bizarre we are hard pressed to see her as anything other than figment by the end of the story. Even the settings and the characters' situations don't quite match up with reality. There is no real bridge to tend, and there are never visitors in the Williams' story. And in the Cheever story, the narrator's descriptions of his wife are so over the top, we have to wonder at their accuracy.
Both authors are known for their depiction of delusional characters, narrator's on the edge of sanity whose realities no longer match up with the status quo. Both are known for blurring lines between the past, present, and future and for their heightened language and startling imagery. Both authors allow the reader to leave with a sense of unknowing. It is this sense that perhaps unsettles us the most, makes us feel like we've been hit by an imaginary but familiar advisary, but when we look back, we can't quite recognize its face. We feel the power and beauty of the mind that can't be contained by the traditional narrative, and we feel the terror of its ultimate inexplicability. I cannot speak for all experimental fiction. It is likely the visions I don't see another reader does. But I suspect the stuff that works, works because form and content are inseparable; this may serve the purpose of delusion or enlightenment. The workings of the mind are vast and unknown, and we cannot expect to understand them unless we are willing to reach out into that darkness, beyond the known edge of our own craft as writers and the known modes of storytelling. Some stories, the necessary ones, are just that hard to tell.
Polly Buckingham's collection The Expense of a View won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (2016), her chapbook A Year of Silence won the Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award (2014), and she was the recipient of a 2014 Washington State Artists Trust fellowship. Her work appears in The Gettysburg Review, The Threepenny Review (reprinted at poetrydaily.com), Hanging Loose, Witness, North American Review, The Poetry Review and elsewhere. Polly is founding editor of StringTown Press. She teaches creative writing at Eastern Washington University and is Associate Director of Willow Springs Books. www.pollybuckingham.com
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