Julio Cortázar (1914 — 1984) was an Argentine writer who became an architect of what is known as the Latin American Literary Boom. A novelist, poet, playwright, and nonfiction writer, Cortázar also wrote many short stories, collected in Bestiario (1951), Final del juego (1956), and Las armas secretas (1959), among others. His entry point to the weird tale was the influence of surrealism. His fantastical stories almost always begin with a mundane reality into which unexplained strangeness intrudes. Cortázar’s work as a translator, including the stories of Poe, also influenced his fiction. Here, Larry Nolen has offered his own lucid insights on Cortázar and his classic story “Axolotl.”

- Adam Mills, editor of “101 Weird Writers”

***

Several stories in The Weird contain thematic similarities, to the extent that a thematic “arc” or thread winds its way through them.  Many of the stories share common influences, such as Arthur Machen or H.P. Lovecraft, while others use weird elements to explore common contemporary concerns.  Sometimes these connections are obvious, while at other times it may take several readings before they emerge.

Such is the case with an author I profiled earlier, Augusto Monterroso, and émigré  Argentine writer Julio Cortázar.  At first glance, “Mister Taylor” and “Axolotl” would not seem to be related, as the former is an explicit fable regarding the deleterious effects of American imperialism and the latter a story of transformation.  Yet when “Axolotl” is examined closely, elements complementary to those in Monterroso’s story emerge.

Take for instance the first paragraph, which sets up the transformation:

There was a time when I thought quite often about the Axolotl.  I used to go and see them in the aquarium of the Jardin des Plantes and remained for hours captivated, gazing at them, observing their immobility, their indistinct movements.  Now I, too, am an Axolotl.

The key here is not the stated transformation, but rather the observation and rapt gazing the narrator undertakes, an element Cortázar explores in depth throughout “Axolotl.”  One could read the story as a tale of dissociation and a descent into a symbolic schizophrenic state, especially with the ending paragraphs, namely the reference to the narrative “us” and the human “him.”  I, however, would posit that there is another, more political undertone to “Axolotl.”

Early in the story, the narrator goes from being merely fascinated with these perpetually larval-stage amphibians to looking up more and more information on them, including their Spanish name (ajolote).  As he returns to the Jardin des Plantes day after day, he begins to make comments such as these:

I would prop myself up on the railing in front of the tanks and set to study them.  There was nothing strange in this, because after the first minute I knew that we were linked, that something infinitely lost and distant continued to unite us nevertheless.

***

And nevertheless they were close.  I knew it before this, before being an Axolotl.  I knew it the day I approached them for the first time.  Contrary to what most people think, the anthropomorphic features of a monkey reveal the distance that separates them from us.  The absolute lack of similarity between the Axolotl and a human being proved to me that my recognition was well founded, that I was not sustaining my theory with easy analogies.

***

The Axolotl were like witnesses to something, and at times like horrible judges.  I felt ignoble in front of them; there was such a terrifying purity in those transparent eyes.  They were larvae, but ‘larva’ means mask and also specter.  Behind those Aztec faces, expressionless but of an implacable cruelty, what appearance awaited its hour?

Beyond this sense of obsessive madness lurks something else.  Notice the acuteness of self-identification with something alien to the narrator’s senses.  As the story progresses, he begins projecting a self-identification with them, with repeated references to their land of origin, Mexico, and through that to the Aztecs that ruled ere the Spanish arrived.  The narrator probably is mad  — the narrative seems to hint at an obsessive nature at the very least — and yet the passages quoted above could also be read as a metaphor for those who become so fascinated with an alien culture that they immerse themselves in it, to the point where they confuse their adopted culture with their native origins. This sense of alien acculturation, presented in “Axolotl” in an unstable fashion, is matched in several of Cortázar’s other stories and novels, which utilize the cultural issues that often affect émigrés to create surrealistic tales such as “La autopista del sur” (“The Southern Freeway”), “Casa tomada” (“A House Taken Over”), or his brilliant novel Rayuela (Hopscotch).

In these tales, Cortázar would often employ the inexplicable to explore the confusions of life.  In “A House Taken Over,” the aging brother and sister who dwell in seclusion in their grandparents’ home slowly sense that something is invading their closed-off living space, forcing them to flee or else succumb to it.  It is a slow, creeping horror that seeps through the narrative and into the thoughts of readers, but it is also closely related to xenophobia, that fear and hatred of others “contaminating” the “purity” of one’s culture.  “The Southern Freeway” is much more ambiguous, as it begins with an interminable traffic jam on a Kafkaesque scale.  As the passengers struggle to occupy themselves, their behavior toward each other begins to shift.  Some make love, others retreat as far as they can from everyone else.  Both it and “A House Taken Over” resemble “Axolotl” in how the narrative slowly intensifies as “reality” shimmers and fades away into a weird, surrealistic landscape where what is real and what are figments of the imagination merge into a hallucinogenic entity.

Through the hop-and-skip sections of his lauded “anti-novel,” Hopscotch, Cortázar traces the life of an Argentine émigré in Paris and his search for his one-time mistress, the Uruguayan he knows as “La Maga.”  Several of the concerns discussed above (self-identity, the sometimes violent collision of cultures, the blurred line between hallucination and reality) are addressed here.  Ultimately, for Cortázar the politics of identity and culture were never far from his thoughts or his writing.  In his protagonist, Horacio Oliveira, we see the embodiment of that searching, almost insane narrator of “Axolotl.”  His drifting through Paris and Buenos Aires in search for “La Maga” can also be read as a search for an elusive reality through life’s hallucinations, which the novel’s anti-structure serves to reinforce.  There are moments of quiet menace, similar to those of “A House Taken Over,” but then there are episodes where Oliveira’s quest appears to be more Quixotic than anything else.

Over the course of his thirty-five year writing career (1949–1984), Cortázar created some of the most powerful and memorable literature of the mid-20^th century, utilizing the elements of culture collision, surrealism, self-identity, and the question of where reality ended and hallucinations began.  His use of unstable, yet keenly, even painfully aware narrators allowed him to create stories that utilized the inexplicable component of weird fiction to make statements about contemporary life that he could not otherwise do through realism alone.  Consider that for most of his adult life, Cortázar was a semi-political refugee (first from Péron’s government and later from the 1970s junta). In several of his stories, such as “Axolotl,” there are traces of this in regard to his narrators dealing with radical changes to their lives and how they identify with the world.  Cortázar delves deep into these protagonists’ psyches, and in doing so he reveals unsettling truths about how we view ourselves in relation to the often-mad world around us.  Sometimes, this is expressed through a loss of identity and separation from our past, as with the narrator in “Axolotl,” while in “A House Taken Over” it is a dreaded, possibly violent future that seems to be embodied in the metaphor of unnamed house invaders. Meanwhile, in the case of Hopscotch the very nature of one’s search for understanding is shown to be a symbol of an unraveling thread where the lines between reality and delusion are blurred.

Weirdness serves as a conduit for Cortázar to explore these elements in a framework that can be just as political as the works of his Guatemalan contemporary, Augusto Monterroso, although with a decidedly more subtle and ambiguous subtext. This in turn leads to stories that work on multiple levels and benefit from periodic re-reading.

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Bruno Schulz (1892 — 1942) was a Polish writer of stories that share some affinity with the work of Alfred Kubin, Franz Kafka, Leonora Carrington, and Michael Cisco, among others. He was shot dead by a Nazi officer when he ventured into an “Aryan” section of his town during World War II. A great prose stylist, Schulz created a mythical childhood in his fiction that centered on surreal, sometimes grotesque events. English-language translations include The Street of Crocodiles (1963) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1988). The title story from the latter collection, first published in 1937 and collected as part of The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, is the tale of a strange sojourn by the narrator in which the weird seeps through in quiet but unsettling ways. It is also available to read on this site in the translation of John Curran Davis. 101 Weird Writers is honored to present this appreciation of Schulz and his life and work, as written by regular contributor Larry Nolen.

– Adam Mills, editor of 101 Weird Writers

***

Some authors require more than a handful of pages or a single reading for their works to open up to readers.  Early 20th century Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz is certainly one of those writers.  At first, the stories contained within the Penguin edition The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories felt odd and weird, yes, but there was little emotional resonance to them.  In a sense, my experience was akin to something experienced by a character in Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s 1996 short novel, Distant Star. In a key scene late in the novel, the protagonist (and authorial stand-in) Arturo Belano is reading Schulz while avoiding the attention of another character, Wieder.  Belano’s differing reactions to Schulz the two times he attempts to read him sums up succinctly the shift in attitude that I myself had as I continued to read Schulz’s stories:

I opened the book, the Complete Works of Bruno Schulz translated by Juan Carlos Vidal, and I tried to read. At the end of a few pages I realized that I was not understanding anything.  I was reading but the words were passing by like incomprehensible beetles, busy in an enigmatic world.

***

Same as myself, I discovered with alarm and lit the cigarette and tried to lose myself in the pages of my book.  The words of Bruno Schulz acquired for a moment a monstrous dimension, almost unbearable.  I felt that the dull eyes of Wieder were scrutinizing me and at the same time, that in the pages that I was turning (perhaps too quickly), the letters that were before beetles had turned into eyes, into the eyes of Bruno Schulz, and they were opening and closing again and again, some eyes clear like the sky, shining like the sea’s spine, which was opening and blinking, again and again, in the middle of total darkness.  No, not total, in the middle of a milky darkness, like the interior of a black cloud.

At first, in stories such as “The Street of Crocodiles,” there is this sort of busy scurrying, not necessarily those of incomprehensible beetles, but rather of a similar sort, that of:

Tall dark salesgirls, each with a flaw in her beauty (appropriately for that district of remaindered goods), came and went, stood in the doorways watching to see whether the business entrusted to the experienced care of the salesman had reached a suitable point.  The salesman simpered and pranced around like a transvestite.  One wanted to lift up his receding chin or pinch his pale powdered cheek as with a stealthy meaningful look he discreetly pointed to the trademark on the material, a trademark of transparent symbolism.

Here the hustle and bustle of a remaindered goods store may find its parallel in Bolaño’s scurrying beetle, as each sifts through wasted, spoiled goods in search of something of value.  It is alien to those looking in from the outside, yet there is a steady pace to it.  It is perhaps the picture-perfect example of capitalistic banality in action.  Yet there is much more to Schulz’s stories, something more sinister and frightening in its implications.  The “eyes” that Bolaño describes, the ones that are ever and anon opening and blinking in a darkness that is not quite total yet still obscures vision, can be felt by readers as they come upon passages such as this, just a page further along in “The Street of Crocodiles”:

It is, as usual in that district, a gray day, and the whole scene seems at times like a photograph in an illustrated magazine, so gray, so one-dimensional are the houses, the people, and the vehicles.  Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.  At times one has the impression that it is only the small section immediately before us that falls into the expected pointillistic picture of a city thoroughfare, while on either side the improvised masquerade is already disintegrating and, unable to endure, crumbles behind us into plaster and sawdust, into the storeroom of an enormous empty theater.  The tenseness of an artificial pose, the assumed earnestness of a mask, an ironical pathos tremble on this façade.

This “thinness” of reality is a motif that Schulz explores frequently in his fiction.  Beneath the hum-drum of an industrial society lurks another world, one in which all that activity is revealed to be a masquerade, a sometimes badly choreographed dance of characters from one crumbling cityscape to another.  There is little permanency to our lives; all seems to be on the brink of dissolution.  Considering that Schulz’s surviving work was largely composed during the interwar period, when the great empires had collapsed at the end of World War I and their totalitarian successors were beginning their ascent, it is tempting to point out parallels between specific stories and real-world events.  After all, we are viewing Schulz’s stories across the chasm of the Holocaust, and his ultimate fate – being shot dead in the streets of his occupied hometown of Drohobycz/Drohobych on the infamous “Black Thursday” of November 1942 by a Nazi officer – certainly colors our impressions of his fictions and illustrations.  Yet it would be a mistake to attribute some of the more unsettling elements of Schulz’s writing to a sort of prescient warning about the devastations of World War II, which came less than a decade after his two story collections were published.  Rather, in stories such as the novella-length “Spring,” there is this sense of Schulz looking back to the age of Central and Eastern European empires for something that was lost after 1918:

The world at that time was circumscribed by Franz Josef I.  On each stamp, on every coin, and on every postmark his likeness confirmed its stability and the dogma of its oneness.  This was the world, and there were no other worlds besides, the effigies of the imperial and royal old man proclaimed.  Everything else was make-believe, wild pretense, and usurpation.  Franz Josef I rested on top of everything and checked the world in its growth.

This image of the Austro-Hungarian emperor, Franz Josef, represents the stable counterforce to the unfolding narrative of “Spring.”  It also can be seen as one enduring metaphor that permeates many of Schulz’s fictions.  The weird, shifting, unstable phenomena in his fictions can be seen as antagonists almost, divisive forces that had split a multinational empire into smaller, often mutually hostile nation-states.  Certainly “Spring” is based in part upon an actual visit of the old emperor to Drohobycz some years before World War I, and many of the impressions discovered within find their roots in Schulz’s own reactions to that historic visit to a provincial backwater town.  An argument can be made that in the intervening decades, the old empire came to represent for Schulz stability in a sea of chaotic change.  Certainly the images of the cities and the townspeople in Schulz’s fiction and illustrations resemble much more those of the late 19^th century than interwar 20^th century Polish society.  Consider this illustration that he drew for “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass”:

The attire, the traveling bag, cane, and train resemble more closely something from the 1890s than the 1930s.  Even the illustration style that Schulz chose feels separated from Modernist techniques that were prevalent during the 1930s.  This all creates a feel in “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” of a time that has already been lost, spurring a sense of yearning to return to the past that accentuates the narrative’s sense of confusion.

“Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” is perhaps Schulz’s strangest, most disturbing fiction.  Here his illustrations and words complement each other most fully.

Schulz’s mixture of distinctive humans, with their detailed and oversized heads, contrasted with faint background images creates a sense of irreality, of something that could exist and may be encountered, but yet ultimately is not as substantial as the people that move among it:

The whole landscape, somber and grave, seemed almost imperceptibly to float, to shift slightly like a sky full of billowing, stealthily moving clouds.  The fluid strips and bands of forest seemed to rustle and grow with rustling like a tide that swells gradually toward the shore.  The rising white road wound itself dramatically through the darkness of that woody terrain.  I broke a twig from a roadside tree.  The leaves were dark, almost black.  It was a strangely charged blackness, deep and benevolent, like restful sleep.  All the different shades of gray in the landscape derived from that one color.  It was the color of a cloudy summer dusk in our part of the country, when the landscape has become saturated with water after a long period of rain and exudes a feeling of self-denial, a resigned and ultimate numbness that does not need the consolation of color.

The sanatorium toward which the narrator travels is in another country.  It is a place where his father has not yet died, where he is alive despite the shadow of that death in his own country casting a pall over him.   Here Schulz sets up a situation in which reality can be seen as malleable, where as the sanatorium caregiver says, “we reactivate time past, with all its possibilities, therefore also including the possibility of a recovery.”  This malleability, however, comes at a dreadful cost, as the narrator discovers to his chagrin as he ventures out from the sanatorium into the streets below.  There, life such as that of his father’s is conditional upon the whims and beliefs of the beholder; the slightest doubt risks destroying everything.  Control is illusory, and virtues that might have otherwise been steadfastly maintained have been abandoned here.

This is a sort of anti-sanatorium, where instead of the convalescing spending their time in isolation in order to become well, the locale has come to undermine their sense of place of time.  It is the initiator of change rather than the conservator of a former state of being.  The patients are here left to fend for themselves in a world that is careening out of their control or even their ability to understand it:

Conditions in the Sanatorium are becoming daily more insufferable.  It has to be admitted that we have fallen into a trap.  Since my arrival, when a semblance of hospitable care was displayed for the newcomer, the management of the Sanatorium has not taken the trouble to give us even the illusion of any kind of professional supervision.  We are simply left to our own devices.  Nobody caters to our needs.  I have noticed, for instance, that the wires of the electric bells have been cut just behind the doors and lead nowhere.  There is no service.  The corridors are dark and silent by day and by night.  I have a strong suspicion that we are the only guests in this Sanatorium and that the mysterious or discreet looks with which the chambermaid closes the doors of the rooms on entering or leaving are simply mystification.

As the story progresses, time slips out of the hands of the narrator and events grow more monstrous and terrifying, with soldiers marching in and dog-men appearing in the streets.  The weird here has manifested as something anti-order, anti-peace.  In it, the dissolution of states at the end of World War I can be discerned in symbolic form, as the old order has collapsed and something new and chaotic has emerged to take its place.  Yeats in “Easter, 1916” might have proclaimed that a “terrible beauty is born,” but for Schulz there is more the sense of monstrosities being birthed.  Whether or not he is correct is still being argued 70 years after his death; the haunting images in his fictions and illustrations still lurk around us even today.

Bruno Schulz, Self Portrait

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Mercè Rodoreda (1908 — 1983) was an important postwar Catalan writer whose novel La plaça del diamant (translated as The Time of the Doves, 1962) has been translated into over twenty languages. Rodoreda fled to France during the Spanish Civil War and, robbed of her home and language, wrote almost nothing for nearly two decades. She began to write short stories as a way of reclaiming her voice, and many of these tales contain more than a touch of the surreal or fantastical. Rodoreda often used the weird in the service of transformation and commentary on repression, ignorance, and other unfortunate human behaviors. As argued by regular contributor Larry Nolen, Rodoreda’s short story “The Salamander” (1967), found in The Weird via Martha Tennant’s exquisite translation, fits comfortably within that artistic mission.

- Adam Mills, editor of “101 Weird Writers”

***

The word “weird” does not have an exact cognate in the Romance languages.  Whereas synonyms for “weird” include “bizarre, odd, or strange,” in Spanish extraño  — or in Catalan, estrany — can also denote foreignness or that quality of estrangement in people where one is separated by chance or will from the rest of humanity.  It is very difficult to sum up this emotional state in a single pithy English expression, as the closest equivalent is the borrowed French estrangement, which carries a more pejorative connotation than it does in English.

Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda’s fictions are imbued with estrany.  In her 1967 short story, “The Salamander,” we see a nameless village girl who is hounded by her fellow villagers after being seduced by a married man:

But ever since the day his wife took him away, people in the village have looked at me as if they weren’t looking at me, some furtively making the sign of the cross when I walked by.  After a while, when they saw me coming they would rush inside their houses and lock the doors.  Everywhere I heard a word that began to haunt me, as if it were born from light and darkness or the wind were whistling it.  Witch, witch, witch.  The doors would close and I walked through the streets of a dead village.  When I glimpsed eyes through parted curtains, they were always icy.  One morning I found it difficult to open the front door, a door of old wood split by the sun.  In the center of it, they had hung an ox head with two tender branches wedged in the eyes.  I took it down – it was heavy – and, not knowing what to do with it, left it on the ground.  The twigs began to dry, and as they dried, the head rotted; and where the neck had been severed, it swarmed with milk-colored maggots.

Here the multiple senses of extraño/estrany can be seen.  Not only do we see the bizarre detail of a quickly-rotting ox head with rapidly drying twigs in its eye sockets, now flush with teeming swarms of maggots, but we experience the distance forced between the narrator and the villagers because of her seduction.  “Witch, witch, witch”:  such damning words only a few centuries ago, and yet they still have a faint echo of nefarious power to them even today.

Rodoreda has set up in this single paragraph two complementary yet different events:  the weirdness of the head and the estrangement of the narrator.  Each ties into the other.  As she is persecuted and eventually dragged to a stake to be burned alive, the strangeness about and around her becomes ever more pronounced.  A headless pigeon.  A premature, stillborn sheep.  The difficulty in starting the fire and after that, the transformative effects of the fire.  These scenes and details are then filtered through the intimate third-person point of view of a bewildered, yet ultimately curious young woman fascinated by the changes in her condition, both physical and metaphorical. All of these elements coalesce to create a weird tale of transformation.

This combination of strange-as-setting and strange-as-emotional-condition makes several other of Rodoreda’s fictions undeniably compelling.  Much of this is probably due to Rodoreda’s own personal experiences.  A rising Catalan writer during the turbulent 1930s, she was forced to flee into exile, first to France and then Switzerland after the outbreak of World War II.  This exile affected her output, as she wrote virtually nothing from the 1938 publication of Aloma until the 1958 publication of the collection Twenty-Two Stories.  Several of these stories later appeared in Martha Tennant’s translation in the 2011 collection Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda, which also included later stories such as “The Salamander”.

Unlike her pre-war writings, which were more psychological in nature, Rodoreda’s post-war short fictions utilize vivid, strange imagery to convey a sense of loss and separation.  Take for instance this snippet from “The Mirror:”

I woke when it was still dark.  Someone beside me was weeping.  The smell of night and wind reached me.  He had returned.  I felt the suffering, and it calmed me.  He wept with his face close to my back; the smell of wind and night were in his hair.   Against my skin I could feel his burning breath broken by sobs.  Another breathing, within my belly, burned me.  Every drop of blood gathered together to create flesh.  I lay very still, observing the shadows in the corners of the room.  Dawn would devour them.  I held a monster within me, a footless, handless monster.  I thought my belly moved, that hands were forming as I watched, determined to emerge.  A bitter, sour taste coursed into my mouth.  He wept, and I fell asleep.

Here the narrator is mourning the impending loss of her husband, Roger, while pondering their son that she is bringing to term.  The act of generation is here described in visceral terms, with the blood drops “gathered together to create flesh.”  In her despair, she sees their unborn child as a “footless, handless monster.”  “The Mirror” thematically resembles “The Salamander” n both its reflection upon loss and betrayal and its use of the irreal to accentuate the narrator’s emotional stresses.

Rodoreda’s posthumous novel, Death in Spring, like “The Salamander,” utilizes a Catalan village setting to explore the nature of human relations and a search for identity.  Published in 1989, Death in Spring further explores the dual senses of alienation and self-discovery through the eyes of a young village girl.  Whereas “The Salamander” used fire imagery to describe the narrator’s transformation, in Death in Spring water, particularly a local stream, serves as a metaphor for change:

I lowered myself gently into the water, hardly daring to breathe, always with the fear that, as I entered the water world, the air – finally rid of my nuisance – would begin to rage and be transformed into furious wind, like the winter wind that nearly carried away houses, trees, and people.

Throughout the novel, water is never a metaphor for peace.  Instead, it is a destructive force, one that batters bridges, bludgeons unfortunate souls who venture into its treacherous depths, all while reinforcing the cruel capriciousness of people, even as they grow estranged from each other.  Rodoreda’s characters are often cruel and distant from one another, as in the case of their treatment of prisoners as caged animals to be tortured before they are killed.  One character, referred to by the narrator simply as “Senyor,” is sentenced to die by having cement poured down his gullet until he suffocates.  This concrete metaphor for the silencing of dissenters echoes “The Salamander”’s treatment of foreigners/outsiders as nefarious agents who must die by fire.  Zealotry and irrational fear, Rodoreda reminds us, often leads to human loss and suffering, while also dehumanizing those who perpetuate such inhumane treatment upon other human beings.

In Rodoreda’s fictions, the weird is not just something inexplicable that occurs within a narrative, but also a commentary on human relations.  We see in Death in Spring a girl who munches on bees, followed shortly by a young boy who, after venturing into the treacherous waters underneath the village bridge, is mutilated by the waters as the villagers watch on, some with apparent glee.  “The Salamander” focuses on a shapeshifter, one who suffers at the hands of villagers, who in turn cannot condone a “witch” yet also cannot comprehend why the fire alters her.  In these tales, Rodoreda portrays that sense of alienation, of being extrany, while utilizing strange, weird imagery to act as symbols of this separation of humans from communion with one another.  In doing so, she creates narratives that operate on several thematic levels, with each interpretation complementing another, leading to poignant stories that are powerful precisely because they stimulate both our senses and our minds.

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Brian Evenson (1966 — ) is an influential American writer of hard to classify dark fiction that often seems surreal or Kafkaesque. He is also a translator of French literature and the Chair of the Literary Arts Program at Brown University, as well as a senior editor of the Conjunctions literary journal published by Bard College. Evenson’s critically acclaimed story collections include The Wavering Knife (2004) and Fugue State (2009). Strange or absurd happenings occur with frequency in his fiction, and nothing could be odder than the events that occur in “The Brotherhood of Mutilation” (2003), later expanded into the novel Last Days (2009). The novella is a modern classic of weird ritual, mixed with noir and horror. And, according to regular contributor Larry Nolen, it may well chart a path toward both terror and salvation.

- Adam Mills, editor of “101 Weird Writers”

***

The torn-lipped man raised his eyebrows and looked at his companion.  ‘He’s pretending not to remember,’ he said.

‘Of course you remember,’ said the one with the bass voice.  ‘Opportunity knocking?  All that?’

‘Ah,’ said Kline.  ‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Look at you,’ said Torn-Lip.  ‘Do you want to die in bed?’

‘You don’t want to die in bed,’ said Low Voice.

‘We’re here to save you,’ said Torn-Lip.

‘I don’t want to be saved,’ said Kline.

‘He doesn’t want to be saved,’ said Low Voice.

‘Sure he does,’ said Torn-Lip.  ‘He just doesn’t know it yet.’

The concept of salvation, of being removed from a condition of perdition through divine – or, in some cases, human – agency, has fascinated humans for centuries.  If such a thing as “being saved” is possible, what can be done to generate such a beneficent action?  Is it something that can be grasped or even understood?  Within those questions lie even greater mysteries:  Who possesses the arcane knowledge that could unlock the secrets of salvation?  Are there truly prophets that make the inexplicable comprehensible to the masses?

Brian Evenson’s 2003 novella, “The Brotherhood of Mutilation” (which also comprises the first half of his 2009 novel, Last Days), tackles these issues in a way that underscores the tensions between the mysterium fidei that believers in many sects hold to be true and the desire by many within those religious communities to find a surer, more easily grasped path to salvation.  More importantly – and ominously – there are those who take the words of prophets and other religious men so literally that we see self-effacement taking place, whether it be total subservience to those who have been divinely inspired or, in the case of historical groups such as the Flagellants, the decision to disfigure themselves and self-inflict pain. This can make outsiders wonder what could move them to inflict such pain and suffering upon themselves and others. Evenson addresses some of those questions in Last Days, in particular the question of why the Brotherhood of Mutilation feels “a calling” to take literally the passage in Matthew 5:29–30 regarding the amputation of body parts for the greater glorification of the spirit. As it is with trying to grasp the mentalité of those whose world-views are so alien to ours, there are times where the narrative falters and the reader is left confronted with the raw, visceral “otherness” that has fallen across adherents to such extreme manifestations of religious faith.

“The Brotherhood of Mutilation” begins with detective Kline, himself a recent victim to a severing of his right hand, being approached by a secretive religious cult that revolves around the passage of Matthew 5:29–30 suggesting that if one’s hand causes one to commit sin, that such a member ought to be severed and cast off in order for one to remain righteous. Instead of telling this in a direct fashion, Evenson uses the first paragraph not just to foreshadow this first contact, but also to go beyond it and hint at the meanings embedded in the story:

It was only later that he realized the reason they had called him, but by then it was too late for the information to do him any good. At the time, all the two men had told him on the telephone was that they’d seen his picture in the paper, read about his infiltration and so-called heroism and how, even when faced with the man with the cleaver — or the “gentleman with the cleaver” as they chose to call him — he hadn’t flinched, hadn’t given a thing away. Was it true, they wanted to know, that he hadn’t flinched? That he had simply watched the man raise the cleaver and bring it down, his hand suddenly becoming a separate, moribund creature?

For the “they” involved, the Brotherhood of Mutilation, it wasn’t as much Kline’s loss of hand that interested them, but rather his unflinching resolve, his self-cauterization of the wound by use of a hotplate, more than his “heroics.” But even more than that, Kline’s description of the event, with his severed hand “suddenly becoming a separate, moribund creature,” sets the tone for the rest of the story. Mutilation is not simply the loss of an integral part, but rather the separation of parts that may run counter to the needs and goals of an immortal soul. This I believe lies at the heart of the narrative, or at least at the heart of “The Brotherhood of Mutilation.”

After contact is made, Kline enters a world in which initiates are referred to by the number of body parts lost, or rather by the number of mutilations. Rank, such as it is, lies within the number of mutilations, not in the degree of those mutilations. Therefore, a person who has lost his genitals and two arms would count only as a Three, while someone who had four fingers on each hand removed would be an Eight and thus have precedence over the Three. In scenes such as this, Evenson displays a rather dark humor, but it also serves to highlight the religious component of this Brotherhood. How is order of rank determined? Which is the Right and True way to proceed in affairs? Is Holiness obtained by the degree to which one has made a sacrifice (in this case, the voluntary mutilations) or by the number of sacrifices offered?

Kline is taken to a Twelve, Borchert, who asks him to investigate the disappearance and likely murder of Aline, the founder of the Brotherhood who has, like Johnny in Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, lost as much as could be taken from his body and still live. However, being but a lowly One in the eyes of the cult, Kline finds himself stimied in his investigation of Aline’s disappearance. In the scene quoted below, Kline and Borchert talk about a mysterious tape recording and how the cult’s rules are caught up in it:

‘I need to see them,’ said Kline.

‘Them?’ asked Borchert. ‘My dear Kline, who?’

‘The people on the tape.’

‘Mr. Kline,’ said Borchert. ‘You’re a one. You can hardly expect someone in the double digits –’

‘– I need to see them,’ said Kline.

‘But Mr. Kline –’

‘– something’s wrong with the tape,’ said Kline. ‘With the questions. It doesn’t all mesh.’

Borchert looked at him, coolly. ‘I don’t think that you should let the tape trouble you, Mr. Kline. Why don’t you simply accept it for what it pur­ports to be?’

‘Because it’s not what it is,’ said Kline.

This scene is important not simply because it reveals Borchert’s unwillingness to bend the Brotherhood’s rules for Kline to do his investigation, but that it gives a subtle hint as to what the remainder of the novella deals with, the investigation of Truth in a setting where all such questions regarding it have been caught up in a hierarchical web of dismemberment sacrifice, with power being granted to those who separate themselves from various body parts. As the mystery of Aline’s disappearance unfolds, the setting becomes ever more macabre, with cult members being depicted with severed genitals, guards with only one eye, and at the heart of it, Borchert and his quest to become ever more holy…and his attempt to have Kline ensnarled in this pattern.

“The Brotherhood of Mutilation,” gripping as it is, both as a mystery and as an exploration of faith in a way that accentuates the “otherness” of religious faith and revelation,  continues Evenson’s exploration of human desires and violent impulses, first seen in his debut collection, Altmann’s Tongue, in 1994.  In stories such as “My Possessions, “ Evenson uses short, sharp sentences to portray in stark terms the quiet and often growing violence of human life:

I looked around me.  The street was empty, save for my ruination.  I groped my way to a doorframe and sat down, out of sight, out of the rain.  I possessed nothing.  I had nowhere to go.

There is more than just bleakness in his earlier collections.  By the time his fifth collection, The Wavering Knife, came out in 2004, Evenson had begun to deepen his exploration of human relationships with their physical and mental landscapes and with their desire to discover the Sublime, even if that might lead to further madness and grief.  There is more explicit symbolism found in these stories, especially in the concluding paragraph to “The Wavering Knife”:

I could feel her all around me like a sheen over the surface of my body, and she having taken charge of me as well.  I could see her gathering in my reflection.  The whole world was turning and me along with it, and I was falling backwards and onto the floor, so taken with everything I could not move except in response to her missing touch, all language and analysis having fled me, my dress coming off, my lover’s body touching all parts of my body until my body too was wavering and coming asunder and my soul dissolved and expelled to bubble along the surface of my skin and away, until nothing was left of myself nor my body, nothing left of anything at all.

This passage succinctly describes many of the elements that have been central to Evenson’s latter fictions.  There is a hint of a simultaneous physical and mystical relationship between the world and the narrator, with something present and yet unknowable existing somewhere between the narrators’ consciousness and their more primal desires.  Language falters, symbolic discourse shatters in the face of this strange entity that cannot be discerned or scried.   What is left is desperate non-comprehension, itself a form of nothingness whose non-existence serves as a sobering reminder of the limits of understanding.  This quest for comprehension fascinates because the goal is ultimately unreachable; we can only reason and rationalize to a point.  Beyond this lies the uncanny, the undiscovered country described in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that unsettles us, makes us question and desire to create something that is more readily grasped.  Out there, Evenson’s stories seem to indicate, lies madness…or perhaps salvation.

The post Weirdfictionreview.com’s 101 Weird Writers: #6 – Brian Evenson appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

For the past several weeks, I have struggled to write about Eric Basso’s poetry.  At first, I thought it would be a simple affair, comparing the imagery found within his six collections to his prose and drama output, noting how he carefully constructs elaborate narratives with just a few well-chosen words.  Yet after beginning a draft several weeks ago, I found myself stuck, unable to get around this nearly inexplicable barrier that barred me from delving to the heart of the matter.  While I tried to reason out what it was that I was reacting to, whatever progress I had made at the time toward exploring Basso’s poetry was erased.  Ultimately, after my earlier draft and much thought, I have this sense that Basso’s poetry lies at the heart of his weird fictions.  When I read The Beak Doctor  — both the collection and the eponymous novella — I noticed that Basso uses metaphor and description to describe wonder and alienation.  In his poetry collections, beginning with Accidental Monsters (1976), these emotional states are laid bare, bereft of any narrative “cover”;  what we are left with is raw expression of these emotions.

This is not to say that Accidental Monsters or his latest collection, Earthworks (1995–2006), cover the same thematic grounds in the same way.  Rather, each collection reveals changes in approach.  Accidental Monsters, for example, would at first glance be the most “experimental” of the six collections, as Basso here utilizes the physical structure of the poems to convey a sense of separation, with the poem “Resaltz” cited below as an example:

Here, it is the form that matters more than the words alone.  There is a sense of strangeness, of wondering about the sleeping gorilla, the man lying in a bathtub full of shaved ice, and the odd ditty being sung, but the weirdness here and in several other of the poems in this collection are confined to external affairs.  It is the internal world of conflicting desire and repulsion, of acceptance and alienation, that awaits further exploration.

The Catwalk Watch, Basso’s second collection (1977–1979), delves further into the interior mindscape.  While grotesque and odd beings do populate some of the poems here, they are not quite as prominent as they are in Accidental Monsters.  There is the sense that the characters in these poems are “caught in a moment,” exploring just what it is about their lives of ritual and custom that have increasingly lost rhyme, reason, or meaning to them.  In “LXXII”, as survivors of some unspoken event gather together:

the survivors met at a beer-stained table
under Japanese engravings that hung
in the dark of the tavern

their barman had died during
the long years of the search –
some wondered why
they had ever bothered to return

Basso here is more direct, both with the imagery and with what troubles these survivors.  We get descriptions of their gathering place, with the details providing a sense of refinement colliding with a dark, rough décor.  Their barman (perhaps their accustomed host?) has somehow perished, with a mystery hinted at with the reference to “the long years of the search,” but what is striking is that lingering question:  Why did they bother to return after that?

In The Smoking Mirror (1980–1986), Basso continues to refine this question of why we do the things we do, in a world that is often bitter for us and indifferent to our longing for something different.  In “Confusion,” we encounter a woman switching her identity, to the point where her husband, after a rather boorish approach to dining, responds thusly:

and asked her name – he looked her
straight in the face and said
what does this mean?  Who are you?
what’s coming off here? It rained and
he pretended not to know her in the rain
to give them both an hour’s grace to think
of her name:  the name he too had forgotten

Basso revisits this lack of recognition of what is changing in “Love and the Worm,” where the narrator reveals his growing blindness to the subject of his ruminations, with colorful description contrasting with this obliviousness:

hair three shades from gold to dun
Glüm Jupiter and Omega:  he’s blind
to smell you there and speculate on
which is which – three mutes he chooses one
waiting to regret a voice he’d loved and forgotten
blind as the worm

These two poems in particular point the way toward the direction Basso takes in his fourth collection, Catafalques (1987–1989).  Here the images of blindness and alienation become even more intimate, more visceral in a way that is discomfiting.  Yet this is not to say that Basso eschews symbolic passages that reference shared cultural heritage.  In “Villa of the Mysteries,” he combines them to create a very unsettling affect.  Below are a few relevant stanzas taken from the middle and end of this poem:

dream of the monster Blindness
that creeps through the pillared halls
stops for the echo of its breath off the walls
to tell the distance it has yet to cross
to find the bleeding core of the Villa
and wipe death’s glaze from its eyelids

Tiresias in rags sifting the volcanic ash
for buried centaurs found a hoof
tugged at the desiccated fetlock
till a flank emerged and the face
came up black its eyes the sightless rubies
he could touch but never see the blindness of

***

this is not mine but the dream of another
who has never seen my face or heard my voice
but whom the womb separated before birth
when I too was breathing water and mist
gilled for an eternity in the grotto where no sound
could reach him untranslated by these liquid depths.

Throughout “Villa of the Mysteries,” references to “dreams” and “blindness” abound.  There are references to dreams that foretell horror and doom, dreams of separation.  Blindness lurks in the dark caverns, in the personified monster, in fates that are unseen by others.  Both are bound together in the person of Tiresias, whose own fate figures in several Greek poems and myths.  “Villa of the Mysteries” grabs attention quickly because it cuts straight to the heart of the matter:  we often enter labyrinths that confuse us, upset us, and make us turn our heads away in shame and eagerness to forget what we have just encountered.  Yet there is the sense of something looming over us, or lurking just out of sight and hearing, that may be waiting to engulf us, to envelop us again with a cloak of unease.  This certainly does not make for easy reading, especially when dealing with issues of loss and grief.

Now to Ghost Light (1990–1994), which is where I began to struggle to re-read these poems.  When I first encountered them in June 2011, I thought they were good expressions of how the narrators grieve and perceive absence around them.  It was much more difficult trying to re-read them seven months later, two months after the death of my maternal grandmother, with whom I was very close (she is the one who shaped my love of poetry and speculative fictions).  I could see in these poems, and in the following collection, Earthworks, strong echoes of my own emotional state as I dealt with the aftermath of her funeral, receiving several books and magazines (and one of her bookcases, made by my deceased grandfather) and watching as my mother stoically forged on from this latest grief (the first being the initial diagnosis of my grandmother’s dementia five years prior).  What Basso describes in these two collections resembles elements of what my family has experienced that proved too traumatic to put in words for several weeks.  Perhaps it is best just to quote a few relevant passages to clarify this.  Take for instance Ghost Light’s “Ice Fields”:

if I could inch it forward
without choking on my own air
like all the others here

less left of me
to make these words
you will never read

For me, this captures a sense I felt (and still feel, to an extent, although it is fading) that there is something suffocating about being alone in times of separation.  It is very difficult to describe in prose how keenly one feels the absence of a loved one who will never return, how that person may feel as though he or she is lost unto themselves, that words can never be enough.  If others were around, how could they understand the words that would be spoken through this grief?

In this light, it is understandable why there were several years (1998–2003) during which Basso wrote no poetry.  It was too painful to contemplate putting in words what he was feeling after he, in a role similar to my mother’s, acted as the caretaker for his mother as she slowly died.   Before her death, he wrote this haunting poem, “Moment,” that directly references this:

It must be the Champs Élysées
I told my mother
and wanted to walk into
that tall alley of darkness

before I could take a step
mother’s bell rang in
the sickroom and woke me

In this I heard the echo of my mother receiving phone calls from other relatives asking if she could watch over her (my aunts and one of my cousins were also caretakers during day/night shifts for most of the three years before her death).  The world outside, similar to how Basso describes it in the poetry during this period, was cold, dark, indifferent to the sacrifices being made.  Watching from a slight remove (which itself was a source of consternation later), I felt something akin to what Basso describes in “Found Objects”:

a border of black spitting snow
the last thing you see
before losing consciousness
a darkness that has no meaning
followed by disintegrating outlines
of leaves or a path beside
a crumbling house.

It is here in Earthworks where the culminated force of the themes previously explored in Basso’s previous collection is felt most.  The more abstract and distant motifs from Accidental Monsters are crystallized into much more intimate, direct expressions of grief, alienation, and confusion over the strangeness that exists when the personal meets the global.  The weird manifests itself in smaller, more intimate moments, such as in “Meanwhile” when the protagonist stares into a mirror. He does not experience a Borges-like moment of timelessness; instead, he wonders whether he should comb his hair before he returns to his bed, which he reluctantly sleeps on because it is the bed of his conception.  There is something strange about life itself, Basso hints here, how we go through it, try to live it, and yet ultimately our experiences of life cannot be distilled into something that we can truly comprehend.

Perhaps that is precisely the point of his poetry.  We exist in a world that does not care how we try to quantify it; it is oblivious to our machinations and attempts to rationalize how we relate ourselves to it.  The symbols embedded in several of his poems show a careful poet who explores (before often exploding) how we have throughout the centuries tried to understand the mysteries that surround us.  Why do we exist?  What meanings can be derived from what we experience?  Sometimes, the answers to those questions startle us, unseat us from our seemingly secure positions.  This is where the weird exists in Basso’s writing, and whereas his prose contains elements of these explorations, it is in his poetry where the fullest expression of his search for understanding and the sometimes disturbing conclusions are reached.  Basso’s poetry is often raw, emotional, and searing, and it rarely ever leaves the reader unaffected.  It is the key to understanding his prose and dramas.  What it unlocks may not be pleasant for some readers, but it certainly provokes and stimulates those who carefully consider those revelations.  Few works achieve this effect in any medium and it is a testimony to Basso’s writing that he manages to move readers in each of the three original genres.

The post Caught In A Moment: The Poetry of Eric Basso appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Eric Basso (1947 — ) is an American poet, novelist, playwright, and critic, born in Baltimore, Maryland. “The Beak Doctor” novella reprinted herein has had a cult following among avant-garde gothic writers since it was first published by the Chicago Review in 1977. Since then he has published a novel, several plays, many poetry collections, and a book of nonfiction. In part, “The Beak Doctor” reads like a modern, more Joycean version of the first selection in this anthology, Alfred Kubin’s “The Other Side,”  in that the nameless city is plagued by a strange sleeping sickness. Despite being criminally overlooked, Basso is an important part of the landscape of weird fiction. As part of Eric Basso Week here on Weird Fiction Review, we are proud to present an examination (and appreciation) of “The Beak Doctor,” as written by regular contributor Larry Nolen.  — Adam Mills, editor of “101 Weird Writers”

***

Now I will try to keep awake.  The fog.  They must have come for me before morning.  Empty streets.  Across a dimly lit room.  She lay in the shadows.  The steps.  One at a time.  Not that I’m old.  It was the mask. Plaster chipped off the walls.  She lay asleep on a couch.  A network of cracks and branching veins like the surface of an antique painting.  Chiaroscuro.  Figures half formed.  And she was naked.  Little water-blots the color of rust.  An odor of disinfectant emanated from the bannisters.  Mothballs.  The smell on my hands as I return there.  From the bottom of the rickety stairs I could make out the febrile glow of a bulb screwed into the pitted ceiling on the landing.  Step-shadows dwindling over the tips of my shoes as I neared the top.

Eric Basso’s novella, “The Beak Doctor” (1976) is a fascinating example of how a writer can utilize syntax to create a sense of dissolution, alienation, or weirdness.  Each sentence in this opening paragraph contributes to the creation of an eerie, dark, desolate state.  We first learn that there is apprehension behind the desire not to fall asleep, that there is something in the fog, a nebulous “they,” and “they” have visited the narrator at some point before he begins his narration.  This mystery is further stoked by references to a “she” lying asleep on a couch nearby, with “figures half formed” around her nude body.  Musty “mothball” smells and “febrile” lights serve to heighten the atmospheric effect of this creepy enigma that the narrator struggles to comprehend.  It is astonishing that in a single paragraph, Basso has not only established the setting but also constructed it in such a fashion that the environs are as much a central part of “The Beak Doctor” as the erstwhile protagonist.

As the story unfolds and the narrator wanders through a city afflicted with a strange sleeping sickness, he encounters strange sights, such as a “headless shirt with no visible legs.  One bare arm reaches slowly for the glass stem.  Suddenly the hand draws back, as though a spark had passed from the smoky helix through the tip of one of its fingers.” There are even deeper, weirder mysteries to be encountered as he moves on through the city.

“The Beak Doctor” is an early example of how Basso utilizes sounds, smells, and strange sights to create arresting prose and poetic passages, a creative direction found in much of his writing.  In his first, and thus far only, short fiction collection, also titled The Beak Doctor,  the story “Gothick Eschatology” depends heavily upon the atmosphere created when “a wheezing bellows noise caroms off the brinks at her back:  air whistling through a hairline fissure in the dome of the bell.” Such a detail helps enhance this gothic-inspired tale of anguished longing and horrific discovery. Basso does not always use auditory and olfactory depictions to create the desired narrative effect (in the story “Equus Caballus,” also found in The Beak Doctor, it is his use of intruding narratives that serves to jar the reader from any presumed comfort with the story). However, such details are employed in “The Beak Doctor” to explore the darker, more uncomfortable elements of human life, as hinted at in this paragraph:

The rain, half drowned by the din of a huge ventilation fan, came down in torrents on the corrugated roof.  He was straining over a load of weather-beaten paperbacks.  One small gap left in the shelves.  For the girl in white under the leaning oak by moonlight, with the mansion tilting its cavernous porches, ricketing back in the distance.  His face, lit from below by the jaundiced flame of a cigarette lighter.  An upper room.  Confessions under the draftsman’s lamp.  Unaccountable losses.  Crosswords.  Enough to fill the absences between the sound of a gravelly morning voice.

Often, writers either use modifiers in the wrong places or they fear that using them will create stilted “purple prose” that ruins the narrative flow.  Basso for the most part employs these modifiers expertly.  Re-read the above passage and see if your mind lingers a bit on “weather-beaten paperbacks” or “cavernous porches.”  There certainly is something unsettling about a “jaundiced flame” that creates this sickly, off-kilter portrayal of what might otherwise seem to be an average, ordinary room.  But these descriptions, evocative as they may seem, serve to complement a greater internal battle that is being fought.  “Confessions under the draftman’s lamp” seems to hint at something affecting a human soul; this is amplified with the comment that this was “enough to fill the absences between the sound of a gravelly morning voice.”  Instead of focusing on sounds and how they relate to human relations, Basso chooses, in this instance (as he does elsewhere in the story), to emphasize the absence of such jovial sounds.

In the passages between the ones cited so far, the mystery of the sleeping city is slowly revealed.  The bodies found laying about the city are in turn deposited into the care of a possibly nefarious entity to be found on the other side of the afflicted city.  As the narrator travels across a landscape strewn with malfunctioning machinery and dense, ominous fog, the narrative becomes more and more detached, as if it were an entity that has alienated itself from its narrator.  Things seem to be on the verge of dissolution, as described in part of a paragraph three-quarters into the story:

Temperature seems to play a crucial role in determining the degree of dematerialization of any given part of the body.  The pathology, here, is elemental.  The tip of the nose, the ears, the toes, and often the buttocks, being anywhere from a quarter to a full two degrees cooler than the normal bodily temperature, tend to retain their density over a longer period of time than those organs and tissue which are normally concealed by the epidermal layer.  One way to retard the illness, then, would be to keep the patient constantly exposed to the cold which, however, would almost certainly result in pneumonia or some other complication.  The process of dematerialization is such that, once the cutaneous envelope becomes affected, the glands, the musculature, the lymphatic and circulatory systems, being from one to four degrees warmer, will already be too far gone by the time the skin has begun to effervesce, removing all possibility of an early diagnosis.  The incubation period is unknown.  One cannot be absolutely certain that the dematerialization is in any way connected to the endless sleep.

Basso balances the horrific dissolution of a body with a cold, clinical voice that strips the horror away, leaving instead a detached description that is unsettling because it is simultaneously intimate (could such a thing happen to us/the narrator?) and distant, as if the narrator has become alienated from not just his fellow humans, but also life itself.  Alienation certainly is an integral part of Basso’s work, whether he is writing prose, drama, or poetry.  It plays a major role in the conclusion of “The Beak Doctor” and in much of his writing in general, including several of his other fictions (the dramatic final scene in “The Beak Doctor” has a parallel with the conclusion to “Gothick Eschatology,” where the protagonist struggles to remove the veil that lies across the face of a beloved one). All told, “The Beak Doctor” and the other stories in that eponymous collection carry a variety of elements that reappear in other works.  “Equestrian Scenes” and “Equus Caballus” both contain an intensity of language and metaphor that are emblematic of the stories found in this collection, a quality also found in Basso’s later poetry and dramas.  Meanwhile, the mini-stories contained within “Logues,” with their short, sharp, staccato bursts, read almost like an embryonic form of the dream passages written down in Revegations.

The weird in ”The Beak Doctor” and in several of his other works symbolizes our own inept struggles to constrain, contain, and conceive just what constitutes those elemental forces that shape our daily lives.  Basso’s writing unsettles us because his narratives pierce us to the quick, laying us open to forced consideration of things that we dare not dwell upon, lest we risk our sanity.  Very few writers have this ability, and in “The Beak Doctor,” as with his dramas, prose, and poetry, Basso plumbs the depths of human repulsion/fascination with the unconscionable in a memorable, unsettling fashion.

The post Weirdfictionreview.com’s 101 Weird Writers: #5 – Eric Basso appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Augusto Monterroso (1921 — 2003) was a Guatemalan writer known for short stories. Indeed, he is credited with writing the shortest story ever: “When she awoke, the dinosaur was still there.”  Monterroso is considered a central figure in the Latin American “Boom” generation, recognized alongside such canonical authors as Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. Monterroso often used the weird and grotesque to create incisive contemporary fables, as in his most famous story, “Mister Taylor” (1952). The story’s mixture of weird imagery with social commentary on U.S. imperialism has made it one of the most popular Latin American short stories of the mid-20th century. Here, the contributor of the newest translation of this story for The Weird, Larry Nolen, has chosen to give his own considerable insights on the story and its writer.

- Adam Mills, editor of “101 Weird Writers”

***

At first glance, Augusto Monterroso’s “Mister Taylor” would not appear to be a suitable addition to The Weird.  Set in South America, the setting contains nothing eerie or supernatural about it and the narrator is perhaps a bit detached in comparison to other tales.  Yet if one digs further into the narrative, “Mister Taylor” begins to reveal weirdness shrouded in fable that makes some rather uncomfortable observations about imperialism and human avarice.

Monterroso is unjustly overlooked in conversations about the great Latin American writers of the Boom Generation.  Whereas Julio Cortázar (also featured in The Weird) or Gabriel García Márquez were equally at home writing short fiction or novels, Monterroso contented himself with writing short fictions in a variety of modes.  This is not to say that Monterroso was not a technical or storytelling genius (a quick review of his oeuvre  would indicate otherwise), but that unlike his peers, he was not known for writing in a particular style.  However, an analysis of “Mister Taylor,” shows a master who was adept at subverting story conventions to tell tales that are rich in irony, fabulism, and imagery.

“Mister Taylor” is a tricky narrative, in that it requires a closer examination of its structure to reveal Monterroso’s use of the weird to drive his story of a headhunting exporting business and its effects on producers and consumers alike.  Monterroso’s narrative is replete with asides and striking images, constructed in such a fashion as to seem almost effortless.  When I worked on translating “Mister Taylor” in the spring of 2010, it took several drafts to get the phrasing just so, as the power of the story is derived from the subtle juxtaposition of native and foreign perspective to generate a sort of social étrangeté where the weirdness comes not from external sources but from human behavior.

Early on, Monterroso establishes the terms of this social weirdness with the character of Mr. Percy Taylor:

‘It is known that in 1937 he left Boston, Massachusetts, where he had refined his spirit to the point of becoming penniless.  In 1944 he appears for the first time in South America, in the region of the Amazon, living with the natives of a tribe whose name there is no need to remember.’

Here we see an ironic allusion to the “refinement” that imperialists frequently used to justify their exploitation of non-Western societies.  This is contrasted by the purposeful elimination of the native tribe that Mr. Taylor visits.  In several of his fictions, including “The Eclipse,” Monterroso often would subvert the association of the European with knowledge and wisdom and the natives with superstition and primitiveness.  Here in “Mister Taylor” we see the titular character being so blissfully unaware of his initial stance within the community, as he thinks to himself, while the schoolchildren throw stones at him and call him “the poor gringo,” that:

“…this did not distress the humble character of Mr. Taylor, because he had read in the first volume of The Complete Works of William G. Knight that if he did not feel envious of the rich, poverty would not dishonor him.”

With this passage, Monterroso has shifted the perspective away from that of a white man’s burden–wherein the hero enters alone into a primitive place and quickly modernizes the joint while becoming its beneficent leader–toward a more nuanced look at the fools who seek to “improve” others without realizing that it is they themselves who need to be looked after better.  In this manner “Mister Taylor” satirizes the attitudes of many Latin American officials toward American businessmen in the wake of “Dollar Diplomacy.”  In scenes such as the one where the President and Minister of Foreign Relations treat the penniless Mr. Taylor with respect solely due to his “blue eyes and a vague foreign accent,” the reader quickly realizes that Monterroso is utilizing the form of a demented fable to make some striking points about the nefarious effects of American imperialism on the peoples and governments of Latin America during the mid-20^th century.

The true weird elements emerge after Mr. Taylor has been offered a shrunken human head:

“It is unnecessary to say that Mr. Taylor was in no position to buy it; but as apparently he didn’t understand this, the Indian felt terribly embarrassed due to not speaking English well, and he gave Mr. Taylor the head as a gift, seeking pardon.”

Here the confusion of cultures is directly revealed.  The stammering pidgin of the native who went from jumping out from behind a bush with the head, going “Buy head?  Money, money” to Mr. Taylor’s being “somewhat indisposed” creates a moment of awkward confusion:  why should one be offering and why can’t the other demur?  What value is there in this head?  Is it a religious or social trophy, or is it something else?

It is from this point that the story veers into a killing/selling frenzy, as Mr. Taylor and his uncle Mr. Rolston realize that there is a market in shrinking of heads and marketing them as a novelty.  The grotesqueness of  the latter part of “Mister Taylor” relies upon the dissonance created by vivid imageries of hipsters who limit the “cool factor” of the heads to arbitrary, almost incomprehensible numbers and shapes; the bicycles and trimmed pathways that the leaders of the natives utilize in the wake of the business generated by the slaughtering of their own people; and the frenzy that comes with the increased demands for more heads.  This strange, over-the-top caricature of imperialist exploitation and marketing leads up to a surprising and chilling conclusion.

The end of “Mister Taylor” resembles several other of Monterroso’s fictions.  Often, as is the case with “Mister Taylor” and “The Eclipse,” the conclusion references the beginning and recasts it, and with this, reader interpretations change.  The vivid images conjured by Monterroso’s adroit placing of metaphor and simile often lead readers to question their previously-held assumptions about the types of fiction Monterroso is subverting or parodying.  The weird here inhabits those gaps between reader expectations and the narratives in which Monterroso explores the depravities and fallacies of our belief and social systems, creating stories that surprise readers with their combination of ironic placement, fable, motifs such as the self-made man, and devastating conclusions.

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“Bloat Toad or Escuerzo?”  This question predicates the translation choices made in translating anew Leopoldo Lugones’ 1906 short story about a legendary vindictive amphibian that stalked those who had done injury to it.  An earlier translation used the descriptive “bloat toad” throughout the tale so as to make it easier for those unfamiliar with the original tale to envision the creature that lies at the heart of this creepy, threateningly odd tale.  Yet in the course of reading Lugones’ tale and doing a cursory search to see if he invented this nightmarish creature, I discovered that there is indeed a South American amphibian known as the escuerzo toad that has all sorts of superstitious beliefs tied around it which Lugones references in this tale.  Therefore, in order to balance between the descriptive element believed necessary to help non-South American readers understand the physical nature of the beast and to preserve a nod to the legends from whence Lugones’ tale sprang, it was decided that it would be best to have the title be “The Bloat Toad” but that all direct references to the animal would be given as “the escuerzo” in order to preserve the sense of the legendary that the original Spanish contained.

Beyond the issue of the creature’s nomenclature, Lugones’ text provided several challenges.  Lugones tended to use more ornate descriptions in his text.  Here is an example:

Así es que el pequeño y obstinado reptil no tardó en sucumbir a los golpes de mis piedras.

A literal translation would be:

“So it is that the small and obstinate reptile did not tarry in succumbing to the blows of my stones.”

 But that is a bit awkward in contemporary English, so my final translation renders it as:

“Thus the small and obstinate reptile soon succumbed to the blows of my rocks.”

 I could have gone further and said “The small and obstinate reptile soon succumbed to my stoning,” but I wanted to preserve an echo of Lugones’ descriptive prose, where he would often use a more complex noun or adjective phrase in place of a simple, direct statement.  Another example of this occurs later in Lugones’ first paragraph, which I split in two in order to make for an easier read in translation:

Como todos los muchachos criados en la vida semicampestre de nuestras ciudades de provincial, yo era un sabio en lagartos y sapos.

 A literal translation would be:  “Like all of the boys raised in semi-rural life of our provincial cities, I was a wise man in [the way of] lizards and toads.”  But that sounds strange to Anglophone ears, so a simpler “Like all those raised in the semi-rural life of our provincial cities, I was knowledgeable of lizards and toads.”  Yes, there may be a slight loss of narrative power (after all, who wouldn’t want to be considered a “wise man?”), but it makes for a smoother reading experience in English.

 Translation derives from the Latin translation (transference), which itself ultimately means “bearing across.”  Translators are burdened with the Sisyphean task of trying to port across linguistic barriers as much of the letter and spirit as possible of the words and semantics of the original.  It is difficult enough when it’s a mere matter of translating adverbial phrases such as “así es que” into “thus” or “so it is that,” but the difficulty increases exponentially whenever colloquial expressions are used.  It was very difficult to make “mis primeras empresas de cazador” into something that didn’t sound too pretentious for a young boy of eight.  I finally chose “my first hunting enterprise,” even though that still sounds a bit high-falutin’ (pardon my own colloquial expression) for a child.

Another challenge was taking a story of an anthropomorphic battle, the “batracomiomaquía,” between frogs and mice, and making it intelligible for English readers.   Batrachomyomachia, the Greek story of this battle, is not as common of a story tale in English as it was in Spanish-speaking countries, so explaining it as “a battle of frogs and mice” was the compromise I chose.  Despite this, there is some semantic loss, as “batracomiomaquía” is associated with ridiculousness.  

Despite these difficult choices, on the whole the atmosphere of impending doom and horrific revenge translates well from Spanish into English.  Lugones carefully builds up the tension when the dreaded escuerzo toad makes its fateful appearance:

 Calculaba ella que sería la medianoche, pues la luna muy baja empezaba a bañar con su luz el aposento, cuando de repente un bultito nego, casi imperceptible, saltó sobre el dintel de la puerta que no se había cerrado por efecto del gran calor.

“She calculated that it was midnight, as the very low moon began to light the room, when suddenly a little black shape, almost imperceptible, jumped over the lintel of the door which she had not closed due to the great heat.”

 Here, minus the choice to use “began to light the room” in place of “began to bathe with its light the room,” Lugones uses fewer adjective phrases to describe the action.  After having carefully built up the fearsomeness of the toad through the stories of the narrator’s old maid and her friend, Antonia, Lugones describes the creature and its actions in sparse, almost clipped tones.  This made the most important part of the narrative strangely the easiest to translate, as the curtness of the action narrated makes it much easier to discern intended meaning:  

“Seguía saltando.  Estaba ya al pie de la caja.”  

“It continued jumping.  It was already at the foot of the box.”  

Step by inexorable step.  The tension builds as Lugones pares everything down to the impending action of the escuerzo.  The match has been struck and the fuse is now lit after the descriptive dynamite was packed earlier into the story.  At this point, I began to realize just why Lugones had constructed his story in this fashion.  The descriptions, the incredulity of the doomed youth, all of this were kindle for the fire he wanted to unleash in the final, fateful paragraphs.  It is a story that is deceptive in its complexity, but once the effort had been put in to find les mots justes, the “right words” as Flaubert might say, the soul of the narrative opened readily.  “The Bloat Toad” may have been problematic in translating it precisely, but the slowly building tension ultimately makes this translation one of the more enjoyable translations that I have done to date.

(title page of original collection in which “The Bloat Toad” appeared)

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