If you know me at all, you know I'm a big fan of the concept of the metaphor. Any e-mail correspondence from me will include one or more extended metaphors, as an idea strikes me, often in the middle of a paragraph, and I find myself following it through well past the point where I should have stopped. Talking to me is even worse as I often dispense with plain, direct talk and instead opt for a more elliptical style, piling on the descriptive clauses and forcing you to do some on-the-spot deciphering to figure out what I'm really saying.
Which is the point, right? Metaphors are one of those tools in the writer's box that allow us to add a little color to our sentences and create shades of meaning where a more plainspoken narrative would not. "Everything means more than one thing" and all that, right? Crafting a sideways world, just off out of view, where the aspects we take for granted are tilted just slightly, giving you a new way of seeing something that previously had seemed ordinary. A well constructed metaphor can spice up the most mundane action. A man can simply smile at you, or it can be "a razor's slash, toothless and taut", to come up with one on the fly. You stick two concepts together that really didn't mean to ever be put together and in doing so, create a connection between them in the reader's mind, forcing the reader to assess what they know about the two concepts in an effort to draw the line between the two. And in doing that, you take them down your own path, because in trying to draw that line, they have to retrace your steps and your train of thought, to arrive at the same place where you eventually did. So a succession of metaphors can more or less force the reader to think like you, or at least put you on the same plane of thought. Which I believe is a good thing, unless you like having readers scratching their heads and going "eh?" the entire time they're reading your story.
But metaphors are more than just fancy sentences, taken far enough, it becomes an entity unto itself, a way of pushing forward a point and illustrating your idea without having to sit there and explain it all. Describing a person as "your sunshine" is only the starting point because in the end it's just a sentence and stories are made up of lots of sentences. Structured properly, you skew the literal meaning entirely and suggests that may not have been apparent originally. It becomes a different way of telling the story, caught in its own grip and sliding by just outside of normal grasp. Remember the book A Wrinkle in Time? And one of the old women in the book, Mrs Who, was unable to speak plainly and thus had no choice but to speak entirely in quotes from famous people to say what she really meant. That's a metaphor, not literally, but that's the idea I'm trying to get across here. You have to pull the meaning of the quote out of the quote itself and then try to apply it to a story that the quote was never really designed to be inserted into. The juxtaposition alters the reader's view of both entities. The story is furthered and we've told you nothing, you've done all the work yourself. All we did is give you the tools.
So the story itself can be a metaphor, and it's a common tactic that many writers take. This type of tale is generally called an allegory and doesn't necessarily have to be literal in nature (George Orwell's Animal Farm was not meant to be played straight, by any means) and a little absurdity is allowed to hammer the point home. The more ridiculous the setup, the more you force the reader to pay attention to the metaphor itself and thus consider the idea rummaging about behind it. Thus the whole story becomes the metaphor, so to speak, where the structure of the story itself is devoted to making a larger point that isn't explicitly expressed in the story itself. Focusing on the surface of it buys you nothing but maybe some transient entertainment, the real meat of the story lies deeper inside, waiting for you to tease it out. In Creative Writing class in college, I remember one fellow who entered a story that involved talking socks and other inanimate objects doing things that inanimate objects don't normally do. But that wasn't the point. The weirdness was just the delivery system, the way of getting the message across. The message itself was sketched out in the actions of the characters, the situations they were involved in, creating a map to the actual point, in a way that would have been more interesting than simply spelling it out. Metaphor allows you to dress things up, wrap them in pretty gauze and disguise the shape of it, leaving the reader the task of peeking through and discerning the outline. It's been with us since the days of mythology, when people tried to tell a story about the world and had to put it into terms that would make sense to the people they were telling it to. It's one of the best tools in the box, because when used correctly it's more than just describing objects and settings in an off-kilter way, or telling an opaque story . . . it adds shades and angles, it puts light where no light previously lurked. At least that's the idea, in theory.
Which brings us to "Bent".
And brought indeed, we are, to a story that takes the concept of "he's got his head up his own ass" and takes it to the literal extreme. Obviously, that is physically impossible (unless bones became made of rubber somehow) so the idea isn't meant to be taken as fact. He's describing to us this scenario but we're not supposed to take the scenario seriously. It must be something else. There's got to be a spot beyond the situation. That's just the first impression, although granted I'm approaching it as a person who has read his fair share of where the situation put forward isn't the actual intent.
But you know what the beginning reminds me of . . . Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", which has a similar very casual, very plain as day opening where Gregor Samsa wakes up and finds himself turned into a bug. It's surreal and it grabs your attention and while Kafka was telling you the story of a man who is turned into a bug, he's also showing you how some things can mean other, entirely different things. And maybe that's more symbolism than metaphor, that's the idea we're going to run with here. One morning, Joe Schom woke up to find his head jammed up his own ass. So, now what?
Unlike Kafka, the author here attempts to find a literal explanation for the outcome. In our culture, as best I can figure out, "head up your own ass" is defined as someone who is oblivious to the stupidity of their own comments, indeed they're unaware of how stupid they are in general and thus walk around and say ridiculous things without realizing how ridiculous people think they are. The author implies here that Joe is one of those people and thus he's only getting what he deserves by having his body contort him in such a manner that he now reflects what he is (though you think it would be easier for him to bend over backwards and shove his own head in there, forward is really going to take some maneuvering, with the legs and crotch in the way). Which would make sense if it came at the end, showing Joe as a man so oblivious to his polarizing effect on people and how stupid he sounds, that he's not even aware of the fact that his head is slowly but surely gravitating toward his own rear end. He's so into himself that he merely accepts the situation without realizing the impact of it, and just accepts it as merely another aspect of his wonderful life. As an ending it would be the cap to a vulgar Tales from the Crypt episode, a dense and thick man getting his just desserts by showing the world just exactly what he is.
Except, this comes at the beginning. And therein lies where things get interesting.
It takes a certain sense of optimism, or perhaps a heightened narcissism that can we can barely conceive, to have your head pulled toward your own ass and not really be concerned with that fact at all. Joe is portrayed as a man so in love with himself that he only makes sense to himself, you know the kind of person, the one who laughs the loudest at his own jokes even when everyone else is staring awkwardly at each other and wondering how the conversation got hijacked. And such is that love for himself that even when something clearly terribly wrong is happening, he seems to welcome it as just another fantastic event in his life. Joe admires every portion of himself and the chance to get closer to it is like a dream come true. Is he delusional, or just a man willing to make the best of what can be described as a weird situation? A certain level of delusion could be implied, but that might be part of the personality trait to begin with, a blocking out of reality, or at least redefining it into a more suitable light.
As I said before, coming at the end of the story, this would make a great conclusion, the logical extrapolation of an extreme personality. The setup, the word choices, the whole tone of the story is great satire, as Joe is sucked deeper into the black hole that is himself, lambasting those people who see every day and who seem to be multiplying more and more. What happens here is what we'd like to see more of, these arrogant pricks disappearing up their own assholes and not bothering us anymore. It's a punishment that fits the crime and at the same time makes us question just how far away we are from such a fate. After all, don't we all suffer from a bit of self-centeredness here and there, the times when we think we're so brilliant that we can't see how not brilliant we are? It works both as parody and as a cautionary tale, with the line about Joe finding the Universe up his own ass working as the perfect cap. He's found contentment, as it were, a certain type of nirvana and we can admire that while at the same time never ever wanting to go there. Sure, we all want that type of peace, but is the price really worth it, in this case? It's hard to say. And it could leave us there, asking that question and dangling it before us while we stare at it, unsure of how to respond. Because really, until you've been there, you really just don't know.
But the story keeps going. Stories are funny things, and different from lives in that you get to pick when to wrap things up, to draw the line and say, "Enough, we're done." Except for extreme circumstances, we don't really get to pick the leaving of this life and so we leave things messy and loose, just scattered around for the next bunch to try and make sense of. Too often, we imagine lives as stories and don't wait to stick around to see how it really turns out. The beautiful wedding with the happy couple, with everyone thrilled and together, enjoying themselves and ignoring the fact that in ten years, the couple will be cheating on each other before divorcing and half the family there will be dead of cancer. How many times in our lives have we thought, "This is the perfect ending, it can't get better than this" and although we don't honestly intend to die right then and there, the sentiment exists. You extend the tale long enough and the magic goes away, to be replaced by the harsh knock of reality, the sense that nothing lasts and nothing was ever going to last and you were a fool for thinking otherwise.
Lives, though, don't function as meaningful things, at least by the base definition. We live and we die and that really doesn't mean anything other than that, unless you're trying to get all philosophical or religious about it. Any meaning that gets assigned to our lives is generally done after the fact, and that's typically done by other people, who have their reasons for doing so. Stories, however, can be designed to mean something, not in the "this changed my life" fashion but in the sense that it can be something other than words on a page. Because the author is intimately invested in the construction of the tale, it's easier to line up the variables so that coincidences come more readily, that symbolism is layered on in just the right places, that a concept that should be patently absurd when taken literally can mean something else entirely when taken less literally.
That's what allegory does for us, showing us without really showing us. And that's what it seems like this story is trying to do here, in scatological fashion, crafting a story that's more than just its surface vulgarity, to the point where the question "Well, why bother to come out?" could speak to society as a whole and this century, the fact that we've all become so insular and our apathy so acute that nothing matters to us anymore except what we find in the confines of our own safe and warm assholes. When you don't give a damn about anyone other than yourself, who gives a flying you-know-what about what goes on outside your own sphere.
But the story keeps going. And this is where it starts to lose me.
Doing this column is all about discussing things that I have no way of knowing. To analyze these stories, to really talk about them, I have to sort of discern the author's intent. Which I'm guaranteed never to be right about because unless the author is sitting there and telling me exactly what he or she intended in such and such a part, I'm never going to know for sure. All we have is the text and the conclusions we can draw from it. And a good text will have multiple meanings but there's a certain consensus to what people see in it, which is how we can have classes on literature and so on. But not everyone is going to see the same things in a story as the person sitting next to them and no matter how many people see it one way, there's always going to be a little pain in the butt in the corner going, "Well, maybe it's more like this . . ."
If you think for a second that I'm describing myself, then you don't know me at all. And you may suspect that I'm lying.
A story that insists on grabbing the reader's attention like this, with a concept designed to get people talking, is an interesting beast to me. Because it's easy to have a shocking opening, a startling premise, a sentence that is guaranteed to get people talking. All of those things are easy. But, and this is just me, I tend to look at such a thing and say, "Okay, so you've got my attention, now what?" To me, the premise isn't enough, there has to be more to it to sustain interest, to keep the reader coming back. Because that's the thing about shocks, they really only work once because once you've seen it once, you know it's coming. In a movie there's other elements to work against you, the sudden rise of music, the sense of things leaping out at you. In a story, the story has no such defense. As someone once said, once a thing is seen it can't be unseen. Once the tale has shot out its best offense, that's all it has when it comes to that aspect. What you once found so surprising is nothing more than just another line thereafter, all its power removed. So if the story is able to maintain anything resembling power, it's got to have something else besides that shock to keep it going. "Now what?" is the question we ask. "What else do you have to say?"
Apparently what it has to say that the police are inhuman and barbarian tools of the State, but that's kind of unfair to assume that and besides the point, regardless. The police come in and they are every police stereotype you've ever encountered and perhaps that's the point in the end. The Law straining, unsure of how to deal with something that it can't shoot at or beat up, unable to think it's way around a problem, if a problem even exists. Because here we have a man who has become a closed system, totally apart from society now. He takes nothing but us and gives us nothing in return but we demand nothing from him. And yet that's a problem, according to the police. They burst in and try to reverse his state of head-in-assness, for no other apparent reason than because they can. It's not particularly subtle and it's not even clear why the police would even care unless you buy into the theory that all cops are intolerant assholes that enjoy the power trip that authority gives them. The author probably doesn't feel this way and was just using the scene to make a joke and chances are he's staring at the screen now going, "What the hell is this guy talking about?" But we can get something out of this. Work with me, here, please. For a minute. Because Joe's state can be a cause for concern. After all, what does society need and rely on? People, working productive people. And if everyone starts to disappear up their own buttcracks (the one officer implies that Joe is not the only one, they don't seem especially surprised at his state, unless they knew him in person and were expecting this) then what happens to society as a whole. Just room after room of people reenacting a perverse version of the snake eating its own tail, no work getting done and nobody caring. Would the State want that type of existence, to go down that spiraling path? I doubt it, since any entity seeks to continue its own existence and the only way to do that is to either cure them or eliminate them. So it tries to cure them first and as we'll see, it's a bit of a null-sum game. If they can't be cured, then maybe they aren't worthy anything at all. A very scary idea, when you think about it, where the people who can't take care of themselves any longer not worth being taken care of at all. The cops are acting as the hands, the tools, of the State and maybe they aren't the State itself but it's a fractal in its own way. The smallest part reflects the nature of the whole, in shape and in intent.
The prose in this sequence, indeed, in the whole story, is gleefully over the top, almost giddily so. Each sentence is awash in off-kilter descriptions, saying what it has to say while giving the reader an unorthodox visual of what is going on. Sometimes it seems like the story is choosing the most disgusting imagery you can think of and at some points the text is like a fifth grader's dream, full of poop jokes and other asides involving excrement. Is it meant to disgust and provoke us, or is it simply the author playing around and having a ball. I lean toward the latter, if only for the sense of wild abandon I get from the prose, and especially because when you come down to it, nothing in here is that shocking. It's too far out, it's gone so far over that it refuses to be realistic anymore and one can make all the comments about feces that one wants to try and get some kind of reaction. It has no power over us because on some level it's just words. Dirty, visceral words, sometimes, but nothing with any inherent power to harm us, because all that lurks behind it is a grin and a laugh and a "Isn't this fun, to talk so much about ass?" It's not out to scare us, but make us go "Ew", but as I said, repeated exposure to the things that rile us deaden the sensation of it. It's just the way we're designed. Repeated stimuli numbs the nerves. There's no way around it. The body remembers, even when you don't.
I don't think this tale is meant to be taken seriously. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. The concept, the situations, the characters are all beyond cartoonish and there's no attempt to be subtle at all, everything is played so broadly that you feel that if you scratch the surface all you're going to find is more surface. You get the sense that this was all done purely to elicit some giggles, which is fine on its own but at the same time leaves the story feeling a bit hollow. There's no catering to anyone's sensibilities here and anyone inclined to be offended is going to find something to provoke them here. In fact, the very sensitive can easily take their pick, whether they want the constant references to asses and feces, the portrayal of cops as doughnut chomping thugs with a penchant for violence, doctors as egotistical maniacs concerned purely with becoming famous, or even nurses who have learned to pour coffee for men as part of their education. The broadness of the barrage speaks to how dear the author probably holds these beliefs (as in: not at all) and suggests that this is all a funny put-on. In fact, anyone who is foolish enough to be offended by any of this and write to the author probably can imagine the author laughing uproariously at the fevered responses.
And yet, you have to wonder, what it's all for? In places it reminds me of the inspired insanity of Catch-22, especially how the doctor's line of "We'll save this guy even if it kills him" become reminiscent of Yossarian's "I'll live forever even if I have to die in the attempt." But that book was telling us about the illogical flaws built into the military and how war really doesn't make much sense and all you can do is sort of overlay your own sense on top of it, and hope that it's enough. What is this story trying to tell us, other than everything is a target, that the whole world is full of foolish men who try hard at all the wrong things and fail spectacularly because of it. Joe isn't a hero, he's barely a character. Beyond the opening sequence we barely peek into his thoughts at all and once the cops show up he becomes nothing more than a glorified paperweight, a thing for the other characters to react against and sculpt their own petty fears and desires upon. And by reacting to it, the principle players might reveal more about themselves. Except, again, beyond the surface there really is nothing. Everyone hits their notes from the first moment they walk onto the stage and essentially sustain those high notes right until the final fadeout.
The good Doctor Burrows is the closest thing we get to an actual secondary character but he's a cartoon like the rest of them, a collection of over-the-top mannerisms meant to exist in an outlandish situation. The whole scene in the hospital, right up to where Joe dies, isn't meant to be taken seriously at all. If you sit there and go, "This isn't actual medicine" you are missing the point entirely. It's slapstick in the vein of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, only with more blood and crap to go along with it. Or a Marx Brothers bit, for those who want to reach a little further back. The wordplay, the grabbing of random items meant to act as medical devices, the fluids splattering all over the place, it's Dead Alive by way of ER, with Bruce Campbell taking the George Clooney role and forgetting that every so often he has to sleep with someone to earn his pay. So it speeds along in its fashion and just when it starts to become a bit much, it's over. Joe is dead and it's not clear whether the doctor really ever intended to save him or was just indulging in a bit of experimentation. But nobody seems really sad at that outcome and considering that Joe himself was a bit of a prick, the rest of us don't really any kind of loss either. Mr Schom, we hardly knew you. We never will, at least not here.
Thus it ends. And again, we ask, what was it all for? In the pages of the story we're shown a man undergoing a strange change, and it takes us all the way to his death at the hands of a medical community that could care less about the outcome so much as how it will be written up in the journals. In between we meet some rude cops and get a faceful of more fecal references than a documentary about monkeys directed by a college fraternity will get you. The prose is upbeat and humorous, brimming with confidence, there's hardly a wasted word here. The pace skips along nicely, not overstaying its welcome but hanging around long enough to make its point. In terms of pure mechanics, this is textbook on how to tell a story and those interested may want to take notes on how to construct a sentence and structure a tale so that it moves along without being boring.
But. But but but. The question lingers and remains. Pull back the curtain and what do we find? More curtain, it seems. Writers distort the world to make a point, exaggerating the things we see in order to make us reconsider what it is we're actually looking at. However, the distorting can't be the whole point or you just have a shell for the story to rest on and nothing inside. I enjoyed reading this story, it was fast and amusing and extremely well written. But having read it, I don't have any reason to read it again. The broad strokes remain the same strokes, a rereading doesn't alter their context at all or give new insight. The only thing different about a reread would be the lack of surprise, the subtraction of the shock of the new. And that may be okay, for the author, for the people who also read the story. For me, I prefer a slightly different tactic. If one can call it that.
We become writers because we have something to say. Sometimes we say things plainly, in the style of the real world, so that what you read isn't much different than looking out the window and seeing life passing us by. Sometimes we take the ideas and put them in a new and more fantastic setting, to juxtapose how alien they seem, once settled in a different context. And sometimes we take the world and stretch it out to its most absurdist extreme, so that by distorting we seek to change the world back into something we can recognize again. The fun house mirrors that reveals more by pushing the places closer that we don't find ourselves typically regarding and forcing us to take a harder look at those places. It's not easy to say something, or really very necessary. Not every story has to shoulder the weight of a generation, in the fashion of Proust, or make grand statements like Tolstoy. Sometimes it's okay to just tell a story. But surrealism purely for the sake of surrealism has its own drawbacks, in that a metaphor without any support will simply collapse under its own weight. And then all you have left is a pile of dust and a gathering crowd slowly taking its last glances and filing away, wondering what there ever was to see.
The only person who knows what a story truly says is the writer and that only lasts until its seen by another person. Because just as the act of observation alters the very thing that its observing, once a story is out into the hands of the public, you have no control any longer in how its perceived. And what you thought you were saying, you may not be saying at all. Readers tend to see things that were never intended and sometimes we don't see what has been sitting there all along, cloaked in words and concepts. The trick is to say it right, so that while they may not get the point, they'll get a point and it might be close enough to yours that nobody will notice the difference. It's not a goal or a purpose but simply communication and without that, the medium is nothing at all.
What are you trying to say? That should be the question any writer should ask themselves the minute they sit down to start, when the blank screen is still staring at them, virgin and unadorned. Because if they have no answer to that, then it might be wiser to take a little time and figure it out. Because otherwise what comes out may be a story and that could be fine and right and okay. Except when you stare into the warped curve of its reflection, you may indeed see yourself, but it might not be anything that you recognize at all.
• MB
12.8.06
"I used to try very hard to make friends with everyone on the planet . . ." – Pulp, Party Hard"
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