Jan

5

Cortazar and “Faddish Indecency”

Filed Under Fiction |

subway.jpgI’m re-reading Cortazar’s Hopscotch. As you know, you can read the book in a linear fashion, up until Chapter 56, or alternately, in a “hopscotch” fashion, jumping around according to the dictates of the author given in the Table of Instructions. This time around, I’ve chosen to disregard the Table of Instructions, foraging through the book according to my whim, to see what might happen. I’ll write more about the results later, but I must say, some parts of Hopscotch make better sense to me, now that I’m in NYC and have been on the L train to Brooklyn on numerous occasions (I’d insert a smiley face emoticon here, only if I knew how to) -

… and it occurred to me like a sort of mental belch that this whole A B C of my life was a painful bit of stupidity, because it was based solely on a dialectical pattern, on the choice of what could be called nonconduct rather than conduct, on faddish indecency instead of social decency.

I’m sure most of us are guilty of this “faddish indecency” at certain points of our lives. But in this post, I’m going to deviate from Cortazar’s connotation here to appropriate the phrase, “faddish indecency,” to describe a kind of writing that I don’t have much of a tolerance for. Specifically speaking, it’s the kind of writing pertaining to rendering moments of violence through fiction (for that matter, let’s also include rendering sex in fiction as well). The faddish indecency, in such cases, occurs when such moments are overly aestheticized.

A couple of years ago, in the summer ‘06 issue of Zoetrope’s All-Story, there was a good short story written by David Means, called “Nebraska.” From the beginning, I was engrossed by it. The prose was beautifully immaculate, each word impeccably considered. The story wasn’t one of those enervated pieces about the tortured inner lives of people, either; it had a real, strong plot, concerning a heist that a set of characters were to pull off.

The characters in “Nebraska” are faddishly indecent, in the original Cortazarian sense, deliberately living in defiance of social decency, but with a cool sense of style. Before the planned heist, one of the protagonists bleaches her hair and feels like Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, and her cohorts strive for a certain élan as well, going for the Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway vibe, circa Bonnie & Clyde. I have no problem with this; it’s entirely natural for these characters to fashion their identities, referring back to their cultural icons. But I have a problem with how the actual heist is rendered, the violent crux of its action. Means’ prose goes into a cinematic slow-mo -

… all frozen there for a moment in the fear and agony until there is the flash of muzzle fire and then - in what seems to be a modulated time/space, not slow motion but rather something else, a kind of compact glimmering shimmer of movement - the fat man falls to the side, collapsing under the weight of his torso as his knees give, falling to the ground and then bowing down, prayerfully, his dark oil-slicked hair glinting in the light and his scalp bright red with sweat until another bullet hits and the top of his skull flowers with bone and spray; then the other man falls too, his lean slim body folding over sidelong and leathery; his own bones balsawood frail and delicate so that he appears to come down to the earth with a sliding motion, like a leaf blown by the wind, crumpling over himself.

I understand that this may be Means’ prose homage to the hail-of-bullets ending of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. Even still: is it me, or is this too pretty or too precious Would such a moment of terrible violence really boil down to a “compact glimmering shimmer of movement” Would the falling man’s bones really occur to anyone to be “balsawood frail” as he crumples in death Perhaps it’s only a matter of subjective opinion, but I found the action of the violence too thickly smeared with aestheticized glaze, too prettified and stylized to be convincing as any real moment. So I found this passage to be an instance of “faddish indecency.”

fish.jpgI don’t know why such writing bothers me more than any other kind, but I figure I’d need an analyst to figure it out rather than a literary critic. But on an aesthetic level, I feel that the closer you get to depicting the limits of death, the more difficult it gets in rendering the truth in that given moment. Rather than dressing it up with beautiful shrouds, I feel that the writer should strip death of decorousness. It doesn’t mean that every writer should write about violence and death in a stark, Cormac McCarthy-esque cant. In his essay “That To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne writes that it is the dreadful trappings and faces with which people surround scenes of death that are more frightening than death itself -

Children fear even their friends when they see them masked, and so do we ours. We must strip the mask from things as well as from persons; when it is off, we shall find beneath only that same death which a valet or a mere chambermaid passed through not long ago…

Montaigne’s stoical prescription on dealing with death seems as good an advice on writing about death as any: to strip the masks from things to discover in the moment of death - by the process of attrition - any and all truth available, lurking beneath the masks.


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