Breaking the Rules

177}ASTONISH ME:
BREAKING ALL THE RULES

Earth is round and open, whole and beating in its early years. Middle of the night, the stars a bright smear against the blackboard. Sit in the secret centuries-long lull. A breath pulled so gradually still; the breath forgets. Clouds slowly shift their shapes. Winds run back and forth. Our planet in the slowest pink floyd intro. Melted tears run, then freeze. Stubborn ice blocks will not be niced down by the fat sun.

Pedagogically, writing like this puts me in a delicate position. It forces me to have to defend a piece of work which on its surface violates every single law or rule of fiction writing, rules meant to apply loosely to traditional narratives. Here, though, tradition is violated at every turn, with a “plot”—the story of man’s evolution from fish to present-day upright pink creature—woven from a series of staccato glimpses of changing habits of excretion. There are no traditional characters, no characters whose personalities are evoked with any particularity, or whose emotions we invest in or whose plights we care about. There is no conflict, no resolution, no dialogue. The effect of the piece is cumulative, rather than energeic or profluent, with motifs accruing through repetition, sentence by sentence, with the hypnotic insistence of a metronome or a hypnotist’s watch. The experience as a whole is boggling, and yet, somehow, for me, anyway, satisfying.

This is writing that disarms, then charms. Beginning with its naughty title (“Pee on Water”) it has already disarmed this reader, or begun to. Pee on Water? An imperative? A description? The title of a painting (like “figure in landscape”)? With these first three words already I’m induced—compelled—to play the game not by my own stodgy rules but by the author’s. The first sentence takes the disarming process further, invoking both the world’s “ancient past” and the reader—myself—in a juxtaposition that should make me wary, if not altogether hostile. But it doesn’t. Too curious to stop or to let my defensive instincts gird me, I read on to find “my” grandparents evoked (along with their bones) and furthermore to learn that I have fallen in love. By now the narrative’s second person “you” has become a sort of Everyman or Everyperson, carrying me back to that nostalgic time before there were such things as floors and feelings. One short paragraph into the story, and we are—I should say I was—hooked.

The delicate problem for me arises when I have to explain the difference between this piece of writing and writing that’s mannered, pretentious, forced for effect, or willfully obscure. It’s a hard difference to explain, since this story is indeed hard to follow at times, and arguably obscure. Except that here, each sentence feels authentic and earned, as does the idiosyncratic punctuation and aggressive use of fragments. The writing says to me, from the start: This is my world, with my rules: Abandon all predigested notions of fiction ye who enter here. So intent is this author on breaking form she even resists numbering her pages with numbers, using capital letters instead. Here too this should annoy and offend. Instead, it charmed, in part because it’s so consistent with the work’s theme, which is, after all, evolution. And shouldn’t a story about evolution be—well, revolutionary?

It’s the confidence with which the writer shirks the rules, the quality of conviction that, like an armature of steel giving support to a sculpture, holds up this work and others like it and makes them succeed. Behind each word is the author’s wit and fancy as she flies her rhetorical kite fearlessly up into the stratosphere. By page 3 I was cheering her on, hoping she’d bring me to a satisfying conclusion (one definition of a good story being ten to fifteen pages of interesting prose with a good ending). She did (again: for me). It’s worth invoking Schopenhauer here: “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.”

Given that, I ask myself: What of writers like Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Beckett; what of works like Mrs. Dalloway and The Sound and the Fury, let alone Moby-Dick, Ulysses, or Watt? How would they have fared in MFA programs, or at the hands of pettifogging fussbudgets like me? I wonder and worry, and so should we all. Some of you who’ve read the passage quoted above may think it a complete waste of paper and me a lunatic; for you maybe it was and I am. But can we be entirely sure that its author won’t be the next Virginia Woolf—or Shakespeare (who broke a few rules himself)? But then, without rules, what fun is any game? Rules give us something to bounce the ball against and, sometimes, to tear down with sledgehammers.

Writing fiction is an art, not a science. We honor its conventions and rules as much for the pleasure they give us when brilliantly obeyed as for the occasional thrill of seeing them as brilliantly subverted or destroyed. It pays now and then to remember Diaghilev’s challenge to the French poet Jean Cocteau, when Cocteau asked what he wanted from a work of art. “Astonish me!”⁶³ was the great impresario’s curt response.

In exchange for being astonished, I’ll happily take back all of the advice I’ve dispensed in these pages.