Real vs. Irreal: Mining a Thoughtspace Threading out Inner Realities

Prologue

The last two books I read were The Great Lover by Michael Cisco and The Sensualist by Daniel Torday. They were widely different, the first being 300+ pages of dark fantasy and the latter a slim novella set in the real world. It was a coincidence that I happened to read them successively, and I think if I hadn’t read both, if I’d only ever read either one, I might not have posed this quintessential question I’d like to pose to you. What genre, or style of writing, better reflects our modern existence: realism or irrealism? And, what is more important: to recreate the world around you and evoke an emotive experience that possibly transcends it, or to mine a thoughtspace threading out inner realities?

I’d like to take each book in turn as examples of their genre and let me think about these questions.

Irreal

“Do you ever write a story that isn’t weird?” A friend of mine asked me this question the other day.  I told her I didn’t see the point. I write stories to express some inner truth of myself, and a realistic story imitating my own life or someone like me would only be redundant. I wanted to write stories that limned the subliminal.  I wanted to explore only interiority, justifying my self-indulgence as microcosmic. I thought that my subjective feelings could somehow reflect objective, grander-scale issues. But I didn’t write about my feelings in a diary, emo way. I hid them buried deep under imagery and metaphor.

It was because of all these things that I was attracted to The Great Lover by Michael Cisco. Although not set in a traditionally otherworldly fantasy land, it refuses to describe a real world of any kind. It starts in what might be our own reality but quickly transforms everything into landscapes of pure language. The Great Lover doesn’t describe a real world; it is a real world. By eschewing any semblance of “reality,” it itself becomes hyper-real, the only reality we can be ensconced in and enveloped by. The words themselves and the emotions they evoke are the terrain for the Great Lover to frolic in.

It starts with the protagonist, only ever deemed the Great Lover, dying. He dies and his afterlife or resurrected body or zombie soul carries on trudging through sewer systems, given power. One of his powers is the ability to build a Prosthetic Libido for a scientist who can’t be bothered with his own urges as they distract him from his work. So the Great Lover cobbles together a robot golem to bear the burden of all of the scientist’s lust.

Even though there are these ideas and sometimes only ideas devoid of plot strung together, it was the prose that really encapsulated the tone of the novel. It was rich and chthonic, transporting you into different thought processes where pure emotive mandates were viable.

The book is published by Chômu Press who champions new irreal novels, works that explore the way life feels and not the way it occurs merely to our primary, primate senses.

In a chaotic world in which “truth” and verifiable facts seem to be a commodity, it may be of more value to trade in concepts.

This isn’t fantasy genre with wizards, dragons and zombies. This isn’t Twilight.

“It’s like time travel or music. . . . Don’t try to fit it all together into one story line, but transfer from line to line,” it says metafictionally. The book is self-aware and uses itself to its own end.

Real

After reading The Sensualist, I began to reanalyze the possibility of writing stories that were based on real experience. Because the environment is real, emotions evoked feel real as well.

The Sensualist doesn’t just take place in the real world, but specifically Baltimore. Torday, by reducing the focal point of his gaze, is able to make subtle and passive generalizations that are universally applicable.

The story tells “[t]he events leading to the beating Dmitri Abramovitch Zilber and his friends would administer to Jeremy Goldstein.” It is told in the first-person narrative of Samuel Gerson who falls in love and tries to stay true to new friends.

Readers can identify with a story set in reality or a realistic setting. They are more easily able to comprehend and empathize if they are not always required to decode the language. There is a given template which we all understand as the thing we have been raised in and guided by. Stories set in the real world obey laws and theories that we are familiar with. The readers can exchange themselves in the roles of the characters even if they don’t understand the characters’ exact motives or actions.

Because realistic story-telling is so enterable, it also has the potential of being less engaging. There is a thin line between the familiar and the rote or boring. It is possible that the flaw of realism lies in its closeness to reality, a reality that has its moments of overwhelming boredom. In human experience there tends to only be a handful of distinct stories, but a million ways to tell them. Which is why I left in all of those qualifiers like “possible” and “potential.” In Torday’s hands the story never feels stale even though it is intentionally modeled after classic literature. It directly points out its homage to The Great Gatsby and The Idiot, which strengthens the prose as part of a lineage.

In the real world with real problems, the only solution or salve must be couched in experiences that reflect that reality. Torday’s story is structured so that you feel every emotion as it piques itself viscerally towards its conclusion.

Epilogue

There are strange parallels between The Great Lover and The Sensualist whose titles might almost be interchangeable. They both deal with unattainable love, alienation, and the rites of tribes. They each use exquisite craft of language to evoke their respective ethos.

Here are passages from each that could almost be describing the same scene but to disparate ends:

I pulled her to me by her upper arms. I put my bare arm across the back of her neck and mashed the top of her head against my face. The move was clumsy, and after I had acted I hoped that at least some semblance of intimacy might come across. She pulled away. The momentary rejection of it made me want to grab her, hold her against me. . . .

I got in my car. In the rearview mirror I saw that Yelizaveta was watching. She had already lit another cigarette, and as I pulled away, the burning red ember glowing between Yelizaveta’s fingers became the only thing clearly visible.

—The Sensualist

I live borne up sustained held and tensed in a gossamer medium of will. Walking up the hump of the street, I have a yen to lean forward arms outstretched. Its slope receives my remains as easily as if they were tipped from a can: and this vile city that barks its hate at me from passing cars, whose buses and streets roar hate at me, whose hysterical citizens recoil from my bland, sallow, wickedly-vacant face. No I don’t belong among you with my nails imbrued in the loam of graves, my breath foetid with my own stale words. Coiled like a turd on my warm mattress, nestled in a chilly reckless draught I bring with me wherever I go. I am a spacious ruin. I am made, and despicable, and I will recount to you your crimes against my sainted person like beads of glowing amber. I have an excellent memory and nothing to gain from forgiveness; I have stored up the venom of blighted days, and trample out your pollution, your stupid trouble, your irreverent work. The music of my soul the world hates.

Ah, Vera!

—The Great Lover

In the end, I couldn’t tell which was more important or if such a distinction could be made. It might have expected that one relationship to the external world – mirroring or symbolizing – would be superior. But I just couldn’t determine the winner. It is like pitting photography against abstract expressionism. I would definitely recommend either / both of these books to see for yourself which reflects your own worldview.

And Then I Read Normally Special & Knew I Feel Fucked Being A Girl Or The Legend of xTx

“I’m a mess. Dirty, like he said. I’m feeling every bit of being a woman. I resent the weakness of my sex.”

—from Normally Special by xTx

Where would you like to begin? With the good news or bad?

Bad news is more girls have read Twilight than Normally Special.

Good news is if you’re a girl and have read Normally Special, you know weakness isn’t romantic. Men don’t save us. Art is an offensive play. Female empowerment exists. But it’s fragile. I’m tired. Is this the handbook for girls like these, torn knees, slanted eyes, Kool-Aid in dirty jars, and secrets? Maybe this is a precautionary tale. Maybe you’re fucked being a girl.

Where would you like to start? With the writer or the book?

Normally Special, available for $9.99 from Tiny Hardcore Press, is smaller than my hand, which might disappoint if size matters, if you’re accustomed to the weight of a man, I mean a book, upon you. Don’t worry. You’ll feel the weight of this book.

Ninety-four pages. Twenty-three stories. Many of them a page or two long.

Still you could tie this book to your ankle and walk into a river and drown.

Good-bye, Virginia Woolf.

In writing this review, I spent a great deal of time thinking about Normally Special, re-reading the stories, and quizzing the author by email. Around all this, I lost my job, boss laid me off, and so my situation as a single mother with a mortgage, a car payment, and bills-bills-bills became precarious, or in spirit of Normally Special, more precarious. Because ladies life according to Normally Special is this: womanhood is weakness, degradation, terror, exhaustion.

There is a rampage. There is a tornado of anger. Men will come for us, sometimes as children, and they will show us no mercy, not relent. In “There Was No Mother In That House,” pages sixty-four and sixty-five of Normally Special, a girl realizes her act of rebellion, knocking over her brothers’ fort, is as bright and short-lived as a sparkler.

Her brothers finally find her in a tool shed and beat her senseless.

There you go. Snuffed out.

The cover photo for Normally Special provides a brilliant, if not beguiling, hint to what we’re in for. The picture by Robb Todd depicts a street scene, trash bags nearly off camera, a bike, a view into two shop windows and maybe the reflection of Christmas lights. But here’s what’s striking: a baby girl in a yellow dress framed by an enormous door looking off camera in contrast to a man in a red shirt stepping into the street and so closest to camera and therefore the largest image in the picture. The impression is, he’s charging into the frame. Impression is the girl is stunned. At least bewildered. The photo renders her diminutive.

And even if she grew six feet tall and sprouted fangs, the girl remains a timid monster.

You should be glad there isn’t a part of my brain that clicks, breaks, and changes Wolfman-style into something that can break skin razor sharp into every piece of every part of you. Something that needs to feed on the fear screaming in your pupils of your green fucking eyes, bites your sweet throat warmest of veins screaming for my warmest of mouths, stubble a delicious obstacle to the smoothness of my tongue. You will never need a single silver bullet for me. You will not need a stake made of wood. You will not need holy water or a Jesus cross or torches or pitchforks or any other sort of protective weapon made for monsters such as me. I’m the most timid of monsters. They have removed me from my position within their ranks citing words such as fail, coward, reject, weakling, useless, stupid, worthless, dumbass.

Where would you like to start? With a whisper or a scream?

So many of the women in Normally Special never scream, either they can’t or won’t.

In “The Importance of Folding Towels,” a woman crosses her arms over her chest. That’s it; that’s defiance. Yes, her scream. Another woman smashes fireflies in place of screaming. And still another in “She Who Subjected the Sun” sits on a chair trying not to choke to death while a man mouth fucks her with his hand and another woman is murdered beside them.

We never see the murdered woman. The narrator never looks. She imagines the tracks she makes in wake of what’s left of the dead woman behind her on the floor. Later, she stares into the sun without blinking, which will fry your pupils, leave you blind, but then tries to convince us she’s won. I’m not sure this is triumph, except when I ask the writer about female empowerment in the context of her book she provides a list of examples.

The woman in "The Duty Mouths Bring" distracts Juan with a smile and slows his box making.

The mother in "Standoff" is empowered in the end, the author says, because she gives up, which is sad, but then it’s something she has power over. Well. Yes. Each of us has the power to give up.

Another woman in the book fantasizes control over a boy in “Good Boy, Fritos.”

I feel I would have the emotional advantage over Fritos in that he would need me more than I would need him. This would be a first for me and I would feel a sick power in this feeling. I know if I asked Fritos to hurt himself because it would make me smile that he probably would.

Yes, Fritos like the corn chips. The story begins with the narrator eating them. Fritos is young and Hispanic and “almost chubby” and the narrator orders him to jab himself in the stomach with a drink sword, thirty-three times. The end is ambiguous. Either Fritos continues jabbing himself in the stomach or he turns the sword on the woman’s naked tit with it and stabs her.

Female empowerment in Normally Special isn’t Spice Girls, isn’t Angelina Jolie kicking ass in Salt, isn’t women who attend college or own businesses or run for President. Sure, a few times female empowerment appears in a familiar guise, a woman turns a man on sexually or preys on a boy, but usually it’s less familiar. More dire. Like if you live through this, you’re empowered. Or maybe it’s more twisted than that, far more uncomfortable.

For instance, if your father fucked you when you were a child, and now as a woman you’re able to masturbate then come while fantasizing about your father as he was from your childhood days, is that empowerment or symptomatic of trauma, psychosis? Both?

Normally Special asks this question with “I Love My Dad. My Dad Loves Me.” I wanted to know the genesis of the story, but the author refused to go into it. She did say, “Incest is a horrible thing. It’s disgusting. It’s probably one of the hugest betrayals that can be perpetrated on another. It fascinates me. It’s probably ugly to say that but I’m hiding behind my fake name so it makes it easier.”

Where would you like to start? With who the writer is or isn’t?

xTx isn’t a feminist. She isn’t an anti-feminist either.

“I hope I’m not a let down to my sex for saying so.”

She’s a girl of undetermined age and race. Her name is a pseudonym.

Her name started out as a joke.

“xTx is an alphabetical version of a dick-and-balls,” said the author. “It’s a shield.”

The discussion could go two ways from here. One, the author’s name represents a dick-and-balls, which is ironic in light of her subject matter.

Like, being female sucks.

So invent a name that’s not female. That represents the oppressor.

But here’s another way the discussion could go.

“Maybe I ought to have a dick, on accounta how I seem to approach certain sexual things,” said xTx. Meaning masturbation and porn.

When xTx first began publishing online as a blogger, she didn’t want anyone to know who she was, which isn’t uncommon in the blogosphere, especially among women who write about human sexuality or confront taboo topics. This is twofold is you’re married, threefold if you’re a mother. Plenty of my female peers write erotica or sexual memoir using pen names because they don’t want the world-at-large to burn them at the stake or ostracize their children.

Lest they be cast out as the spawn of whores.

I don’t think xTx is married. I don’t think she has children, although two of the stories in Normally Special are narrated by mothers. In both these stories, “An Unsteady Place” and “Standoff,” the mothers come unglued, unravel, give up.

“Mothers are not given permission to be breakable,” xTx told me. “Yet they are probably the most breakable things in the world.”

Yeah, but what about the children? They could end up living an xTx story like the girl in “There Was No Mother In That House,” or another, “The Mill Pond” in which a mother worries more about her daughter’s weight than well-being, which leaves the girl at the mercy of a child molester.

“I can only speak from my experience of being a girl and a woman,” said xTx, “but I think we have a lot of stuff happen to us because of our sex. I just think that’s how it’s always been and how it always will be and I like to ‘look at it’ by writing about it. I wish I could protect all the little girls in the world so they don’t have to write stories like mine.”

Perhaps the characters xTx breathes fire and life into are more witch than princess, more perverse than pristine, heroic in ways we don’t expect or readily celebrate, yet isn’t that what both literature and pop culture need, a hotshot of anti-heroine so we all OD, in order to eradicate sexism and prejudice?

Jerry Stahl once described JT Leroy as “Flannery O’Conner tied to the bed and plied with angel dust.” xTx is a young Joyce Carol Oates on meth careening down the middle of the highway in a red Fiat without the headlights on. Frantically, bravely. Miranda Lambert on the radio. “Your fist is big. But my gun is bigger.” Her light is the moon. Every time a woman writes, she commits a political act.

Sometimes she writes a love letter to her gender.

A part of me inside a part of you . . . a part of you inside a part of me . . . Those times you put down the razor, that was me forcing your hand. Those moments where you told them no, that was me giving you strength. Each time I stepped back from the ledge, that was you pulling me back. Whenever I kept walking instead of falling down, that was you holding me up. We were saving each other then so we could save each other now and so we do. And so we are.

Blake Butler said if he knew xTx’s true identity he’d file a restraining order against her, which is either sexist or isn’t. xTx says the majority of her audience is male. At least men review her book more often, and more men frequent her blog. What the hell does that mean?

The author has no explanation.

More girls have a copy of Twilight than Normally Special.