20. FACE

If you order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales now, you may be one of the first 50 to get a free broadside of a story featured in the collection. Click HERE to order now!

One of the collection’s 22 stories is titled ‘face’. It’s an attempt to concretize the slippery but all-consuming phenomenon of Facebook, and it does so by starting with the following Stéphane Mallarmé quote:

All earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book.

The story unfolds around a triangle modeled after the one that is central in the Jean Rhys story, ‘The Lotus’. The triangle consists of

… [A] retired stewardess and a young straight couple who suffer a bit from a case of the hipsters. The couple consists of Poney Marie, a Portlander fresh out of public policy school, and Remy, a young man from a wealthy background who helped develop the book. The retired stewardess, Myrne, is singled out as a political candidate for Poney Marie to mentor and possibly install as a puppet dictator in the newly opened district of the book.

The book refers to that materialized version of Facebook I mentioned. The above excerpt is from a series of blog posts I wrote about ‘face’ when I was deep in the midst of writing it. Not only did I bring in Jean Rhys, I also managed to reference Danielle Steel, Roberto Calasso, and Caitlin Horrocks. To learn more about how ‘The Lotus’ influenced my writing process, you can read those posts here.

And click HERE to order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, where you can read the full text of ‘face’!

Jean Rhys, I Love You.3

This is the second of two parts. To read the first part, click here.

What I love about “The Lotus” is that the emotions taking place are so hard to categorize. Nevertheless, I’m going to try: Ronnie has invited his downstairs neighbor, Lotus, to Christine’s and his apartment, all the while viewing her with an attitude somewhere between pity and cynical glee. Christine feels toward Lotus something akin to envy, with a clear dose of revilement, all the while trying to play along with Ronnie’s condescending joke. It’s funny, though: am I projecting or is there some level of reluctant admiration on the part of the couple?

The ironic tone of Ronnie and Christine is what makes “The Lotus” feel so contemporary. Ronnie tells his wife about Lotus:

‘I think she’s damned comic. She’s the funniest old relic of the past I’ve struck for a long time.’

The inside-jokey objectification here reeks of hipsterism. Later, after he has escorted Lotus home, Ronnie even thumbs through a catalog of second-hand vinyl! My own couple, Remy and Poney Marie, have a similar throwback-inspired superiority toward / fascination with Myrne.

Lotus, like Myrne (a character from my short story, “face”), is an older woman with trashy tastes and a substance dependence problem. Both women also have a tarted up, sickly appearance: Christine, at one point, remarks that Lotus “looked awful.” Poney Marie has similar thoughts about Myrne, and worries that the former stewardess’s ugliness might sabotage her campaign. This aspect of their relationship forms a dissimilar, complicating element to the story I’m writing (which is perhaps why it’s starting to spiral a bit—even, at times, hinting at becoming a novel): business is at the heart of how Myrne and Poney Marie relate, which causes a constantly shifting power dynamic.

Another difference: where Lotus is a mass of insecurities on display, Myrne puts up a tough front. Reading “The Lotus” reminded me that maybe I need to temper Myrne’s toughness with some more obvious fears, that her vulnerability at times needs to be more apparent to Remy and Poney Marie.

What’s also interesting about Lotus and Myrne is that both women are literally out of their elements—albeit in vertically opposite directions. Lotus is a basement dweller, subterranean, who has ventured upstairs to socialize. Myrne, as a former flight attendant, once frequented the skies, but has since become entangled in the social nightmare of the book, which has grown so weighty, it’s bound her to earth.

Lotus—like Myrne and like me in the midst of that long, looming middle—is trapped. Myrne is literally stuck in the book; Lotus, a romance novelist in the midst of a manuscript (not five), is more figuratively ensnared.

‘The awful thing,’ Lotus said as she was going out, ‘is not knowing the words. That’s the torture—knowing the thing and not knowing the words.’

I’m sure Rhys understood this better than anyone—writing can always sort of wall you in. There’s a point where the book encloses you and is no longer yours. To make a punny, surface-level comparison, I’ve also heard tell of this happening with Facebook.

I’ll return to the subject of death in a moment, but first, while we’re trapped down here in Lotus’s basement, some questions: Isn’t there always a hint of death every time we sit down to write? On the surface, perhaps, we want to be remembered, and so, our hands over keyboard, there’s a part of ourselves that’s trying to outsmart the reaper. But writing, of course, in its purest form, is about discovery, about finding out what we didn’t know we knew. And the ultimate unknown: what happens when we die? How are things going to end? When we write, we—often unsuccessfully—feel around beyond those all-interring walls.

For me, the most chilling part of “The Lotus” is Christine’s willful ignorance of her own all-too-obvious mortality. In a sense, Lotus has risen from the grave to haunt Christine, coming up from the basement, white as a ghost, with falsely bloodied lips.

‘No, isn’t it distressing?’ Christine remarked to no one in particular. ‘Most people go on living long after they ought to be dead, don’t they? Especially women.’

While I don’t think Poney Marie—so far, at least—is as vicious as Christine, she is equally naïve, and consequently just as destructive. Like Christine, who is bored with slumming it, Poney Marie has hopes for a brighter future. At one point she follows Remy to New Orleans, after he convinces her of the city’s romantic charm. I think of Poney Marie as belonging to the cult of youth, the word cult used here not to imply worship, but rather a sort of limited vision. Christine also belongs to this cult, although it’s her encounter with Lotus that leads her unwittingly away from it. But while Lotus is emblematic of Christine’s dismal surroundings, I think I want Myrne to haunt a less explicitly symbolic frequency. Perhaps because she exists within the book, such an already overwrought symbol.

This is how “The Lotus” ends:

He could not help admiring the way Christine ignored the whole sordid affair, lying there with her eyes shut and the eiderdown pulled up under her chin, smiling a little. She looked very pretty, warm and happy like a child when you have given it a sweet to suck. And peaceful.

A lovely child. So lovely that he had to tell her how lovely she was, and start kissing her.*

Notice that twice Rhys compares Christine to a child. I see Poney Marie’s youth similarly ending in “face”, but I’ve never imagined her being quite as oblivious. There is disillusionment in store for her, I don’t doubt it, but I wanted from the beginning for her to be conscious of it. I also wanted somehow—and who’s being naïve now?—to have Myrne be Poney Marie’s salvation. After re-reading that final paragraph of “The Lotus”, though, I wonder if that salvation is meant to happen. Maybe I’m the one who’s in for some disillusionment.

I’m in the middle, you see, and it’s dark down here in my box, and, maddeningly, the end is obscured through miles and miles of dense dirt.

*The moment Ronnie starts kissing her here, Lotus’s loneliness hit me hard, and I thought again of Mike Leigh’s Another Year.

Jean Rhys, I Love You.2

I’m in the middle of writing a short story. I’ve been that way for a while now, in the middle—which is annoying, as I always feel kind of uneasy when something remains unfinished. One of my aims of this blog, though, is to explore my writing process, as well as to overcome my fear of putting unfinished things out in the world. So in the spirit of early sharing, you can read a draft of the story’s first few pages here. It’s tentatively titled “face”.

The story’s setting, funny enough, parallels my current state of suspension in the midst of a manuscript. It takes place in a book called the book, a place I think of as being a literal, physical manifestation of a social network along the lines of Facebook, an unwieldy, well-worn volume, dusty in some sections, moldy in others, a place where people must overcome large numbers of pages in order to communicate with one another. This meta shtick sounds gimmicky, I know, but I feel there may be an emotional cost to the extent which we now virtually interact, and my hope is that something about this setting can conjure or at least point toward this lack, which is otherwise so hard to pin down.

The characters that populate this setting form a triangle: a retired stewardess and a young straight couple who suffer a bit from a case of the hipsters. The couple consists of Poni Maree, a Portlander fresh out of public policy school, and Remy, a young man from a wealthy background who helped develop the book. The retired stewardess, Myrne, is singled out as a political candidate for Poni Maree to mentor and possibly install as a puppet dictator in the newly opened district of the book.

Danielle Steel made an appearance on The View a few weeks ago, where she mentioned that she abstained from reading while in the midst of working on a book, because she was too afraid of being imitative (She also mentioned that she had five manuscripts going at all times, which, well, I’ll stop there. Poor Danielle is too easy of a target, and for the sake of Lotus Heath, I refuse to pick on her. Besides, she looked absolutely stunning.). While avoiding clichés is a worthy goal, absorbing the techniques of other writers isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I had one writing teacher who encouraged imitation and even gave us the option of using a published short story as a template on which to hang our own characters and their interactions. Another teacher talked a lot about conversations that happen between works of literature. She assigned us the book Literature and the Gods by Roberto Calasso, a deeply spiritual text that discusses the ancient gods who refuse to die, who appear and reappear in books. The point is, I think there’s a kind of cyclical magic, a fortuitousness of discovery that often happens when looking backwards, one that’s often necessary to completing a creative work.

And here’s where Jean Rhys enters the conversation—or at least Jean Rhys as channeled through her short story “The Lotus”. I read Rhys’s story—which is about writing and youth and death and loneliness and other great Rhysian stuff—a few weeks ago, when I was somewhat nearer the beginning of the middle of writing “face”. “The Lotus”, like my story, concerns a triangle consisting of a young, condescending couple (Ronnie and Christine) and an older woman (Lotus Heath) who finds herself an object of their ridicule. There were points when “The Lotus” gave me chills, like Rhys’s work often does, but it wasn’t until after I’d finished the story that I realized its triangle was not only eerily similar to, but also an ideal emotional template for my own.

Roxane Gay, in a recent interview with Caitlin Horrocks, author of This Is Not Your City, asked Horrocks if she wrote “toward or from a place of emotion.” Horrocks remarked that it’s a great question, and I would have to agree, as my answer is similar to hers: Toward. Emotion is essential to a great story, but it doesn’t come naturally to me—I have to work for it. That’s why finding a template like “The Lotus” made me feel like I’d struck gold.

Is this plagiarism? It’s often said that great fiction is characterized by its universality; I’d like to think I’m just trying to tap into that universe.

This is the first of two parts. The second part of this post is here. 

Jean Rhys, I Love You

“Why do people so expert in mental torture pretend blandly that it doesn’t exist?”

                                                                                                — J. R., “I Spy a Stranger”