Looking Around - Contrary For The Sake Of Being Contrary

 My great-aunt told me once I was the most bullheaded child she ever met. I would like to think I have learned my lesson about that, but I am not so sure. Being too stubborn, too set on doing what my depression-riddled brain told me, got me into prison. Which did get me to write again. It is a truly ill wind that blows no good. (Unless you find my prose and my musing execrable; sorry, if that is so.) 

For my writing, I am still trying to find out what I can do by seeing what has been done. So when I saw Writing Ugly: Kirsty Gunn on Novelist Rosalind Belben’s Unappealing Appeal in today's LitHub newsletter, I had to click on the link.

I do not think that I am writing about pleasant things. Even if "Love Stinks" is meant to be a comedy, it is part of a larger idea that I have named "No Clean Slates". In the original work, a screenplay, my two leads were unpleasant people who just did not know how to love one another very well. Now, they are more the bickering Bickersons - two prickly people who love one another but expect the worst from the world, including love.

I do not think I could go the way of Ms. Belben, although the following I find delights me and makes me wish I could have done it her way:

Belben shuffles these about and lays them down like a deck of cards. A flirtation at the Captain’s Table, when the two protagonists of the novel, husband and wife, meet each other for the first time comes hard on the heels of a memory from childhood of a beaten dog who is then shot dead in the stables. Ilario, Anna’s husband is, at the end of one chapter, musing tenderly upon his wife, and at the beginning of the next remembering her squatting on the toilet like an ape. What next? What now?

I think Belben may be the first contemporary writer in English since Muriel Spark I’ve come across who makes a virtue of being contrary for the sake of it—in Belben’s case, not wanting to be “good” in the sense of either creating smoothly comprehensible sentences in English nor making the subjects of her books necessarily appealing or easy for the reader to feel empathy. Belben, like Spark before her—and more so—has no intention of setting and holding to any but her own rules and she writes about stuff that can be awful and brutal and shocking in the most jaunty, beautifully put together way.

I have abuse and a miscarriage shuffled into my deck; the damage done by parents and by history; the difficulties of creating a family; and the dangers of the wider world faced by a family.

But the real takeaway has to be this:

For Belben’s sentences, like some of that content of hers, are equally difficult to manage. She uses allusion and metaphor in a way that can seem private and deliberately exclusive: Who is seeing what, when? Where are we? Is this written from the first person, or the third? We’re kept at arm’s length while at the same time being brought right inside the action, made unavoidably close.

It is not only the content but the marriage of those equals prose style and content that draws in readers, and makes the dreadful readable.

Belben reminds me that despite its often-seeming limitations, the novel can be an exciting form of pleasure indeed; that being a novelist in the first place can be a compelling and riveting way to spend one’s time. Her books demonstrate that not all fiction has to appeal to that phantom creature “the common reader” in order to be valuable. Being unappealing—letting the ugly in to work its maleficence at the level of the sentence of a narrative… This has its own vast and life affirming reward. 

That last quote gives me a bit of hope at a time when I need some to keep working.  May it do the same for you.

I did not indulge in listening to the podcast, but he following is contained in the abridged transcript of Kaveh Akbar on Questioning Goodness where the subject is guilt:

What contemporary American isn’t governed by that question, right?  I mean, we’re all wincing as we order toothpaste from Amazon, or as we put gas into our car, or whatever, you know, I’m wearing a Nike hoodie right now fully aware of the harm that Nike has wrought across the world, right? I mean I’m living on stolen land fully aware that it’s stolen land, right? There’s no one who is not complicit in the violence of empire, or no one that I’ve met alive today. And I’m so much more, endlessly more interested in art that says, I’m complicit and so are you. What do we do about it? More interested than in art that says, I’m good and these people are bad, be more like me. And I think it’s very soothing to metabolize that latter type of art. I think it’s very soothing, in that it vents a kind of neoliberal guilt. If you read a book that says people like this are the bad ones, then you are tacitly a good one for reading that book, right? You’re sort of like inoculating yourself against the harm that it describes. Or you’re saying, well, since I have borne witness to this testimony, now I’m exonerated from the harm that it describes. And I’m interested in what that guilt might have otherwise applied itself towards had it not been vented in that way.

I have found myself commenting in several stories about the lack of Native Americans in Indiana. History will give us much to feel guilty about. Not that I am buying into the conservatives' idea that some people are trying to make others feel this guilt. It is just a fact of history, it may be its purpose, to prick our consciences by showing what was. I am far more worried about people not feeling shame at the genocide of the Native Americans or of slavery, to take two prominent current examples. I am almost as worried that we will not heed our consciences and modify our behavior.

And what is uglier than that guilt which punctures our illusions of goodness?

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