very sad to lose john updike today. i'm currently half way through roger's version so i'm sure i'll be tackling it with a different approach from here on out.
give a&p a read. i came upon it through one of DFW's syllabi at pomona.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
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I was trying to find a link to an online version of his story "Nakedness" and found this excerpt from a chapter called "'Nakedness' or realism in Updike's early short stories" from something called The Cambridge Companion to John Updike:
From the beginning of his career, the kind of realistic writing that Updike practices in his short stories has been devoted to what one of his narrators somewhat ruefully calls “quotidian fluff”: an asparagus patch in “Flight” (1959), a listing of supermarket items in “A & P” (1961), the detailed pattern of a bird's plumage in “Pigeon Feathers” (1961). To a certain extent, this preference can be attributed to Updike's apprenticeship at the New Yorker, “a loving respect for facticity - for the exactly what of matters” comprising the “shared heritage” he found common to all those who worked at the magazine under Harold Ross (Hugging, 848). To a larger extent, it reflects the influence of two acknowledged predecessors. One, William Dean Howells, Updike praises for “bringing dullness and mixedness out of the rain of actuality into the house of fiction” (Odd, 170). Skirting, on the one hand, the melodramatic plots and morally balanced endings that marked the classic European novel and, on the other hand, the subjects peripheral to ordinary experience (such as whaling ships) that formed the basis of the classic American novel, Howells, with his “fidelity to the mild, middling truth of average American life” (183), provided a model of realism that pointed to “the triumph of American life,” the fact, according to Updike, “that so much of it should be middling” (189). Walt Whitman, in contrast, Updike commends for granting the minutiae of that model metaphysical dimensions. Quoting, in a talk on Whitman's “egotheism,” the transcendentalist poet's assertion that “the true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and to common lives, endowing them with glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to every real thing, and to real things only” (Hugging, 117), Updike delineates the democratizing ramifications that this credo of such an unlikely prophet of realistic writing augured: real things - an old milk carton as much as a rose, a trolley car as much as a tree - can be “assigned the sacred status that in former times was granted to mysteries” (Picked-Up, 518; Hugging, 117).
On the plus side, Del James is still alive.
http://hatteraslight.com/navy/GunsandRoseshall/read.php?f=70&i=286&t=286
I should clarify that this link is to the short fiction iece, "Without
You" by Del James. Much in the same way that Apocalypse Now has
overshadowed Hearts of Darkness in the minds of most, people forget that "Without You" is the inspiration for the Guns and Roses music video for "November Rain".
Like Heart of Darkness, it's a fascinating read in its own right, and it answers some questions that the video left unanswered in favor of documentary images of Slash's odd hobby of playing an unamplified
electric guitar in the desert (and they say that Axl was the crazy one). The most pressing of these questions would be, "How did Stephanie Seymour die?" In the way that literature scholars have come to term Jamesian, ever-coy James is...coy.
Her thick lips smiled sympathetically. Then the song started growing in
volume.
A sharp twinge of panic shot through him when he realized which of his
songs it was. Cold sweat
seeped out of his pores and dread consumed him. His vision spiraled as
reality distorted.
Breathing became difficult, complicated. Desperation attacked and
twisted every muscle in
his thin body. Much worse than the pain was his fear. Unsuppressable
anxiety swept through him as
he started toward the stereo. Everything lost its natural texture; the
walls, the floor, the air
became surreal. The louder the music, the more difficult he found it to
move. He had to remove
the compact disc but his feet felt like large concrete blocks. He
couldn't move fast enough.
She already had the pistol's barrel against her temple.
BLAMM!
Well, there's your answer. There's a mystery solved. Except, stupid me, I've ruined everything with my habit of interrupting at the wrong time. Mr. James, continue if you'd please:
Mayne awoke covered in sweat, a mute shriek still lodged in his throat.
The past six hours had been
spent in a drug-and-alcohol-induced coma that he put over as sleep.
Oh. Well, I guess that's not how she died. All a dream. Sorry about that. Del James isn't sorry about that. To misquote "It's So Easy," with Del James, "It's Not So Easy".
Some would call Del James' work "sub-Updike" but I prefer calling Updike's work "supra-James". Compare the following passages:
He unbuttoned his leather pants. Before beginning
his self-stimulation, he pulled himself over to
the night-table refrigerator and removed an
unopened bottle of Dom Perignon champagne. The
bottle opened with a loud pop and smoke billowed
from the top, but no liquid spilled.
That's from "Without You" by Del James, published in 1995 . Here's
Updike in "Rabbit is Rich", allegedly published in 1981:
The noise in the living room keeps growing, and the front door keeps
opening, Stavros and the Murketts following Mim and Ma's brood in, and
all the fools come gabbling when the first cork pops. Boy, it's like
coming, it can't stop, the plastic hollow-stemmed champagne glasses
Janice found at the Acme are on the round Chinese tray on the counter
behind Grace Stuhl's grandson's beer, too far away for Harry to reach
without some of the tawny foam spilling onto the linoleum. The glasses
as he fills them remind him of the gold coins, precious down through the
ages, and a latch inside him lifts to let his sorrow out. What the hell,
we're all going down the chute together.
And...a tie. But occassionally, James gets the upperhand,
such as this passage, shortly following the above:
"Fine champagne was something he and Elizabeth enjoyed sharing. He could still share it with her. As he took hold of his wet erection, his thoughts began to slip."
I never went back for my master's so I'm not sure of that the equation of thoughts and the wet erection is synecdoche or metaphor or what. All I know is that it is something. I could take a guess, which is what Del James wants. He wants to keep you guessing.
Por ejemplo:
For the past fourteen of his twenty-eight years,
he'd spent the majority of his time inside a
bottle. Teenage beer and wine parties turned to
vodka and rum at nightclubs, which in turn
evolved into straight whiskey. Exiting the
bedroom, he said a silent prayer to his patron
saint, Jim Beam, asking that there be some in the
liquor cabinet.
The first sentence of this section would seem to hint that Del James is some kind of pretender to the Borges legacy. On the contrary, this "time inside a bottle" is a direct reference to a classic Zen koan. Zen, of course, being an eastern tradition but hardly foreign to the close confederate of famed Chinese Democratist, W. Axl Rose. The koan goes something like, "A goose egg is in a bottle. It hatches and the baby
goose is fed until it grows too large to get through the bottleneck. How can the goose be freed from the bottle without killing it and without breaking the bottle?"
There is no answer and that's really the point, the eliminate the
unnecessary interference that keeps a mind from comprehending the truths of the world. So Del James would seem to be a pious, reflective man, his narrator taking a pause from his self-destruction for a little
rock-and-roll Eucharist. The push, the pull, the efficacy of artifice and the efficacy of prayer taking equal places of honor atop his altar.
Or here, where he writes:
It didn't take very long before he made the connection between the empty
bindles in the bedroom and Jamie. Jamie (pronounced Jay-mee) was typical
Hollywood trash
who hand delivered coke, toke, crack, or smack to troubled celebrities,
exploiting their
vulnerabilities.
Hmmm. He gives you a pronunciation guide for some words, but not others. Is this a hint? A clue, a muted bugle of old Trystero? Are we to assume that perhaps other words are pronounced different ways than we might think? Is this a new language that only represents English? Sort of like when you see Cyrillic characters that almost look like they're spelling English words. The primary character's name is Mayne! How the heck do you pronounce that? I'll trade all of the photographs of the world's most photographed farmhouse for an answer to that, Del James, you postmodernist noggin-scrambler.
See, Del James is as slippery as Mayne's wet erection/thoughts. Turns out what you thought was a dream at the start of the story was actually reality. Elizabeth did actually shoot herself. Yikes. Is that intense? In a vacuum, yes, but not in a world that contains the ending
of "Without You" by Del James. Here's how it ends:
Even if her physical
body wasn't present, he could still sing to her
in heaven. He wanted to jam but was afraid to
touch the guitar.
Then Mayne saw an alternative. He scooped up the
almost-dead whiskey bottle and finished what
little was left. It slipped silently from his
hand. Very drunk, very drugged out, he staggered
over to the piano. The smoldering cigarette on
the bedroom rug had burned its way over to the
goose-down comforter. The cover caught and flames
quickly spread throughout the bedroom. Discarded
clothing acted as kindling and soon the bedroom
was on fire.
Until several hazy hours ago, Mayne's life, no
matter how miserable, had been something most
people could only dream about. It was all an
illusion, and he was one of rock 'n' roll's
elite, a hero. Now, he'd been reduced to his
basic self and nothing really mattered. He felt
the thorns wrapped around his heart and for the
first time in far too long, felt human again.
He'd smothered his spirituality in drug abuse.
He'd stunted his health and personal growth with
vice. He'd blinded himself because he was afraid
to see that his purpose, his gift in life, was to
be true to himself. And the only time he was able
to find that inner truth was when he played his
music. He softly tapped the ivory keys, making
melodies come to life through his fingers. No
matter how badly his hand hurt, he persisted in
making music. He was determined to play for
Elizabeth and all the other angels. With every
fluid run, every harmony, every musical accent,
his inner pain subsided a little. With each
passing musical note, he became one with the
music.
Sweating profusely, Mayne felt something stirring
behind him. He tried ignoring it for as long as
possible. Finally, he turned and saw large flames
billowing out of his bedroom. At first he thought
it was a hallucination but the fire was
scorchingly real and heading his way. His
favorite guitar was already engulfed and dying.
He wanted to save it but couldn't. He refused to
let his jamming be interrupted. Elizabeth was
listening. Every time his fingers pressed the
Steinway's keys, crimson stained the ivory and
smeared. He ignored the small red spots, sliding
his long fingers through them. Scarred-up veins
bulged from his forearms a sweat ran down his
face. All he'd ever wanted to do with his life
was play his music and now he was. For the
moment, he felt free from his demons. He built up
the courage and began singing "Without You" in
his natural gruff voice. The thick carpeting
quickly became a wall-to-wall inferno as a giant
wave of fire rose up and spread around the piano.
He couldn't have cared less. As flames swallowed
the apartment, Mayne never screamed and never
missed a note.
Blamm, indeed, Mr. James.
Some would say that the writing of Del James is about as nuanced as a bullet to the head but I would agree with those people, so as long as they are talking about a bullet to the head as described by Del James. Just look at what he does here at the tail end of a conversation in which Mayne calls directory assistance to find out what day of the week it is:
“Ma’am, you’re Information and I asked you a
question,” Mayne corrected her. A snide laugh
escaped him. After a silent moment, she answered
his question.
“It’s Wednesday, sir.”
“Thanks,” he said, and hung up. There would be no
maid service today. This was not the way he
wanted to start the day. He polished off the
beer, finished his cigarette, and snorted more
cocaine.
Scoff at him if you want but now Del James will scoff at you. Ready? Augustine's Confessions:
"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know. But at any rate this much I dare affirm I know: that if nothing passed there would be no past time; if nothing were approaching, there would be no future time; if nothing were, there
would be no present time."
What is time but the absent maid in the burning one-bedroom condominium of our souls?
Listen, I've got places to go so I'm going to cut things short with a statement of intent. I've decided to start my own blog. It will exist only to meticulously analyze "Without You" by Del James and will only be found in the comments section of the Updike death notice posting on Novel-Designs.
I have no idea if the Novel-Designers are notified about comments posted on their blog. I'm not sure how people will comment on my blog. Maybe in the comments section as well, maybe as a Novel Designs posting. Maybe we can work out a code. Like if the Novel Designs posting is about skateboards or surfing, that is like commenting, "Way to go!" on
my latest entry. If it is an embedded video that I can't watch on my iphone, then that is something close to, "Yeah, but Kazin said the same thing and better, oh, only like 40 years ago." If it is a collection of
pictures of good looking people doing things in warm climates or of car bumpers or something taken from an unusual angle, that is the same as saying, "We kneel! We kneel before you!" And if there's a post that requires me to scroll down for about nine minutes to get through it, I'll take that as a sign to not continue with my blogging.
That's cold. My first blog posting is up for just under twenty-four hours when ASP makes his first coded comment I'm the form of eleven embedded Dick Cavett videos which, if you look at the key above, is about as harsh as a dude can get.
Fine. I have a lot of interesting thoughts on "Without You" by Del James but I'm just going to keep to myself. Thanks, ASP. At least it wasn't CAP. That would have killed me.
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