Tuesday 20 October 2020

The Grotesque in Southern literature

 

The Grotesque - essay by Rob McInroy

Sarah Gleeson-White, in a study on the southern grotesque, argues against the common interpretation of it as presenting a “gloomy vision of modernity” which acts as an allegory of the human condition as “existential alienation and angst.” Her focus is specifically on Carson McCullers, highlighting a quote from her The Vision Shared, which sought to justify the grotesque school by claiming, of its authors, “I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive.” This demonstrates, Gleeson-White suggests, rather than an alienated modernity, an affirmative and transformative quality, and it is this we should be celebrating when reading the southern grotesque. 

In developing her argument, Gleeson-White adopts and adapts Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualisation of the grotesque which, she feels, comes closest to articulating the celebratory nature of McCullers’ cry of “I am alive”. In doing so, she rejects as incomplete those traditional interpretations, as expounded by the likes of William Van O’Connor and Millichap and Fiedler, with their allusions to “dark modernism” and “alienation, loneliness, a lack of human communication, and the failure of love.” 

She presents instead, McCullers’ explanation of the grotesque: “The technique is briefly this: a bold and outwardly callous juxtaposition of the tragic with the humorous, the immense with the trivial, the sacred with the bawdy, the whole soul of a man with a materialistic detail.” 

A key focus for Bakhtin and McCullers is the body, in particular deformity and difference from conventional perceptions of beauty, even normality. Physical freaks are, of course, a signature of the grotesque, from Faulkner’s Benjy to O’Connor’s Hulga and onwards. McCullers’ novels and stories, too, are peopled by freaks – giants or dwarves, mutes, hunchbacks and cripples, self-mutilators, androgynous men-women, and so on – but, Gleeson-White argues, and I would agree, McCullers ultimately uses these characters as a reaction against convention and as an exploration of humanity. She suggests that: “Her novels of resistance present us with unsettled identities and so push the very boundaries of how we understand human being.” 

This idea of the transformative nature of grotesque freakery is interesting. For all her brilliance as a writer, for example, I cannot see it in Flannery O’Connor. Transformation, for her, is bound to redemption, and her perspective on redemption is that of a subject reconciling him or herself to the will of the master; her works are flavoured, for me, by subjugation to the supernatural and not celebration or understanding of the human.

 

Likewise, I look at the works of Cormac McCarthy and try to discern how they might be described as affirmative or transformative. Only his early works, of course, are considered to be truly southern but I believe that typical southern transgressiveness suffuses his later works, too. And, in his collection of freaks, from Lester Ballard and Rinthy and Culla onwards through the seven feet albino judge to the morally autistic Chigurh, he presents a set of characters who are outwith anything that could be considered normal. But is he, in Bakhtinian terms, “[disclosing] the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life”? And, moreover, is he using his grotesquery to unnerve in order to enlighten? 

The answers to those questions would appear to me to be yes and possibly no, and therein lies a difficulty. Yes, McCarthy shows us a different world, most significantly in Blood Meridian and The Road. This is what mankind is capable of, he is telling us in the former, and because of that the latter he presents the road we may be leading ourselves down. It is, then, a negative view, and what positives one may take from his novels must generally be taken by this process of inversion: don’t do that, or this may be the result. Such is the approach of organised religion through the ages: behave, or else; believe, or de’il tak ye; belong, or be cast adrift. 

In this, then, we see echoes of Hazel Motes and Tarwater, even of Captain Ahab; we see the human relegated beneath the supernatural, and the result is obeisance to the godhead, whoever or whatever that might be. Rather than transformative, then, it is reactionary: it is promulgated on the maintenance of a primordial order rather than the advancement of humanity. Hence the answer to the second question may be no: McCarthy’s grotesquery does not wholly enlighten, but rather it can seem to cast us backwards, to limit our freedom. McCarthy so constructs his characters – indeed, they are often more archetypes than characters, with no psycho-social histories or motivations – that they are unable to project forward. 

It is all very well for McCarthy to warn of the dangers to human society of our inwardness, our selfishness, our self-destructive disregard for nature, because those are warnings we would do well to heed, but in presenting only the binary oppositions of annihilation and acceptance of a putative god, he is artificially defining the boundaries of the debate. His grotesques are so designed, those characterless characters, that they miss the true alternative, the human. They endure so much and experience so little. And his words, all that rhetorical portentousness, serve only to wrap a mystery around them that, in the end, overwhelms. 

It is a grotesquery which doesn’t so much say “I am alive” as “I can only die”.

 

Tuesday 13 October 2020

The Regret by Dan Malakin

The Regret by Dan Malakin review by Rob McInroy

 

Full disclosure: I know Dan Malakin slightly. Back in about 2005 to 2008 we were both in an online writers’ group, Alex Keegan’s Boot Camp, famed for its forthright approach to literary criticism. Or brutality, if you’d prefer. We also spent four days on a writers’ course at Alex’s house in Berkshire, and we met up again once more, along with the estimable C.L. Taylor (another Boot Camp alumnus) at the launch of Alex’s short story collection in London. However, as a former Boot Camper, Dan will know that none of this makes any difference and I won’t pull my punches in this review... 

Actually, I don’t need to. The Regret is a quality novel for a number of reasons, and Dan Malakin is a skillful writer. One of the areas we used to score stories on in Boot Camp was pace, by which I don’t simply mean that the story rattles along at a tremendous lick, but rather its pace is in sympathy with the plot, character, theme and mood of the work. The Regret does indeed rattle along at pace, but importantly this is not to the detriment of character or emotion. Where many novels eschew character building in their headlong impulse to thrash the story along, The Regret draws us expertly into the troubled mind of the protagonist Rachel, a woman who has suffered trauma in her life and is now, forcibly, having it revisited on her. Previously hospitalised for anorexia and associated mental health issues, she reacts to the terrifying position she finds herself in by reverting to type, and observing Rachel’s disintegration is harrowing. The reader wills her to succeed, even as she descends deeper and deeper into terror. It’s brilliantly handled. 

It’s a very modern story, and it confronts issues central to the 21st century zeitgeist, looking at social media and the often malign influence it can have. The story revolves around a hacker who targets Rachel by using sophisticated computer hacking skills to take over her social media accounts, to intercept her wages and have them redirected to another account, to fabricate reports on her work computer to make it appear she has been negligent in her work as a nurse. In our massively connected world, where everyone is online all the time and our personal information is far more vulnerable than we would care to recognise, the dangers Rachel faces are all too real, and Dan Malakin explores them in a dramatic and telling way. The ease with which Rachel’s life is torn asunder is chilling. 

For all its modernity, though, there’s a Hitchcockian feel to the narrative, based as it is on an innocent whose life unravels because of the actions of external agencies. At first, of course, no-one believes her, thinking she was responsible herself for some of the things which happened. And, typical of the genre, details are layered ever denser, with new things happening, gradually increasing in intensity, gradually pulling Rachel ever closer to disaster. But just when you begin to think “hang on, that’s a bit implausible”, something else crops up which explains it and makes it credible again. It takes tremendous skill to be able to continually throw new adversity at the main character while all the time making it believable. Dan Malakin achieves this brilliantly. 

All in all, this is an excellent read. Dan has just signed a two-book deal with Serpent’s Tail and it’s not hard to see why. If you want a story that zips along at electric pace, but still packs an emotional punch, then The Regret is the book for you.

Tuesday 15 September 2020

The Yellow On the Broom by Betsy Whyte

 The Yellow On The Broom by Betsy Whyte reviewed by Rob McInroy

When I was a young boy living in Crieff in the 1970s, every October the Meadows would be occupied by dozens of vans and caravans, filling the entire area between the back of Commissioner Street and the old railway cutting, where now stands the Cooperative supermarket and its car park. There were caravans and people everywhere, the sounds of living, the instant creation of a new, mobile community within the existing, settled one. These were Scottish traveller families, congregating for the tattie howking, or picking the potato harvest. Travellers were immensely hard working, and tattie howking – by hand in those days, of course – was especially hard work. It was a remarkable spectacle, these transient families meeting in common purpose as they had done at this time every year, back through generations.

When they arrived, my mother used to warn me to behave myself “or the tinks will take you”. We called them tinks then. We didn’t think it demeaning. We know better now, although it’s probably too late for it to really matter. I fervently wish my mother hadn’t tried to frighten me like this because the travellers were decent, compassionate people who would never have done me any harm, as my mother well knew. When she was a girl, back in the 1930s, one of her best friends was a tinker lassie and my mum regularly got into trouble with her parents for playing with her. One time, she got lice and her father washed her hair in paraffin. Still, she continued to play with her friend. So why she chose to frighten me in this way is a mystery.

Within a matter of years, this annual congregation of the travellers on the Meadows was a thing of the past. A way of life enjoyed by travellers over centuries was eradicated within a single generation. I’ve always thought that was a terrible thing. As it turns out, though, those 1970s meetings that I witnessed and thought were the continuation of an ancient tradition were, even then, showing signs of terminal decay. That much is clear on reading Betsy Whyte’s wonderful memoir, The Yellow on the Broom, which details Betsy’s early life on the road with her family in 1930s Scotland. They travelled constantly, going from job to job and place to place before one year, much to Betsy’s horror, over-wintering in a new Council house in Brechin. But the story she tells us, of itinerant life in the years before the war, was already the last gasp of a unique culture. Betsy wrote later:

 

The end of the war was ... the beginning of the end for the Scottish travelling people. With bewildering speed camping sites disappeared almost completely. Soon too, the farmers had machines which took over many jobs that the travelling folk had done. Even if a farmer did need workers, he was not allowed to have campers without providing flush toilets and running water, etc. Some farmers who grew a lot of berries did have those things put in, but for the majority it was not worth their while.

 

And, even in the 1930s events relayed in The Yellow on the Broom, the portents are there. There is one chapter, near the end, where the family go to all their usual camping points around Blairgowrie, only to find, on each successive site, “No Camping” signs had been erected. Travellers were always mistrusted and disliked and yet, for all that, in the old days a symbiotic relationship existed between the tinkers and the hantle – their name for non-Travelling folk. The travellers would request boiling water, or milk, or old clothes, and offer clothes pegs or baskets in return. The hantles and the tinks could co-exist, sort of.

But all that began to change. Ironically, partly it was due to the establishment of the welfare state. Before, people felt it was their duty to look after each other, even strangers, even outsiders. But with the advent of the welfare state we began to believe that it wasn’t our personal responsibility to look out for other people, but the state’s. That is a sad bastardisation of Beveridge’s noble vision behind the establishment of the welfare state but it is the truth, nonetheless and, in the less welcoming world that resulted, a way of life withered and died.

When I started working in Perth and Kinross District Libraries in 1981, my main duty was accessioning books – putting on the various stamps and labels, giving them a numerical accession number, jacketing them and so on. I remember once having to accession dozens of copies of The Yellow on the Broom. It must have been a reprint because the book was first published in 1979. I didn’t give it much thought at the time, other than to curse how many damned copies of it there were: the time went slower if you had lots of copies of the same book to accession because you had nothing fresh to look at. I remembered it, and I remembered what the book was about, but I never bothered to read it. I was young. History was interesting enough in an academic sort of way, but it didn’t really connect, even although, as it turned out, I was part of the last generation of hantles to witness a congregation of travellers and their once vibrant, now extinct way of life.

I’m glad, now, to have read The Yellow on the Broom, and to have entered the life of the clever, obstinate, short-tempered but kindly Betsy Whyte. I’m glad I know a little of how she lived, and I’m glad she had a happy childhood, oblivious that she was one of the last to experience it. Their life was very hard and it doesn’t do to romanticise it. All the same, the traveller way of life was vibrant and vital and meaningful.

Now it is gone and, in that, I fear we have all lost something a little precious.

 

Tuesday 25 August 2020

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead


 The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead: book review by Rob McInroy


Having spent five years studying the baroque writing of Cormac McCarthy – the high register, the biblical language, the extraordinary range of allusions and references, I have come to cherish simplicity in writing. True descriptive power does not derive from language used but from emotions evoked.When an author disappears into his or her text, so that only the story remains, this is something alchemical, something wonderful. What happens is that the reader is absorbed into the narrative, lives it, picks up its resonances.

Colson Whitehead is such an author. His use of language is exceptional: he tells his story in crisp, clean language, just the facts, ma’am, and we, the readers are left numbed, not because of an overstraining for effect or impact, but because we have been forced to confront the world of another person, a world wholly different from ours, a world that is hostile and dangerous and cruel.

The narrator of The Nickel Boys is a young boy called Elwood Curtis. Elwood is very clever, very moral and very hard-working. He has ambitions and he has the drive to achieve them. Unfortunately for Elwood, he is also black, in 1950s Florida, where Jim Crow still holds sway and life for black people is impossibly tenuous.

Elwood achieves a scholarship to a good school and, curious, decides before school starts to vist this place which is going to shape his future. He accepts a lift from another young black man, but they are pulled over by the police and the car is found to be stolen. This being 1950s Florida, and Elwood being black, he is sent to reform school, his hopes for the future in tatters.

What unfolds in the reform school is horrific beyond words. Whitehead models his fictitious Nickel Academy on the real Arthur G Dozier School for Boys in the small panhandle town of Marianna in Florida. In 2012, during an archaeological excavation, dozens of unmarked graves were discovered. What emerged in the subsequent investigation was a hideous story of a brutal regime in which boys were routinely and horrifically tortured, raped and beaten, many to death. Their bodies were discarded like so much garbage.

The school only closed in 2011.

Whitehead uses this ghastly truth to fashion an extraordinary fiction. The boys of the reform school are subjected to a regime of abuse which is as unpredictable as it is horrifying. Intially, Elwood thinks if he behaves and shows himself to be diligent and conscientious he will flourish, even gain early release. His is quickly disabused of this and joins the procession of boys through the years taken in the dead of night to the “White House” for special attention. A giant industrial fan is used to drown out their screams. Those who can’t sustain the beatings are tossed into unmarked graves, never to be mentioned again.

It was William Faulkner (or at least one of his characters) who said: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” This world-haunted view is, of course, particularly apposite for the American south as it struggles to reach a compromise with its past. Faulkner himself experienced similar struggles, most catastrophically in a drunken interview in 1956 in which he argued that the pace of desegregation needed to be slowed or they would “be back in 1860”, that is, at the start of the secessions which led to the American Civil War. More, he stated that if it came to Mississippi versus the United States, “if I have to make the same choice Robert E. Lee made then I’ll make it.” Although he quickly distanced himself from these remarks, the uncomfortable truths they contain remain. There is still a deep-rooted conservatism in the American south (and elsewhere) in which racism is not necessarily overt, but it exists all the same. More than that, it is systemic.

To go back to my one sentence paragraph earlier: “The school only closed in 2011.” Think about that. We are decades from the civil rights movement and Dr King and the long march to freedom. Desegregation has been dismantled. Civil rights have been won. Equality has been enshrined in law.

Has it really?

What this deeply unsettling novel tells us is that hidden in full view such atrocities persist. Being a young, black man is still a dangerous condition in many places. The life chances of that young, black man – and woman – can be shattered as easily today as they were in the 1960s of Elwood Curtis. Ask George Floyd. Ask Michael Brown. Ask Eric Garner. Ask Freddie Gray. Ask Sandra Bland. Go back to 1955 and ask Emmett Till. Turn on the news today and ask Jacob Blake, paralysed after being shot seven times while walking away to his car.

There are just too many to ask.

The Nickel Boys is a confession. But it is the confession of a country and a society still to understand what that confession means.

Or what to do about it.



.

Thursday 13 August 2020

Not the Deaths Imagined by Anne Pettigrew


Not the Deaths Imagined : Pettigrew, Anne : Review by Rob McInroy

Not the Deaths Imagined by Anne Pettigrew



Beth Semple, the narrator of Anne Pettigrew’s terrific first novel the medical Tartan noir Not the Life Imagined, is back in an even better sequel, Not the Deaths Imagined. Still a GP in Glasgow, Beth becomes embroiled once more in a story of deaths and deceit and dodgy doctors. This time, though, Beth herself is in jeopardy, along with her family, and the book gallops along to a rousing and frightening climax.

As with the first novel, Not the Deaths Imagined is mostly narrated by Beth herself, and we get her highly moral, utterly decent view of a world which becomes increasingly murky. Interspersed throughout, though, are third person interludes where we are taken into the viewpoints of the other characters, particularly the dodgy ones, and this gives the novel a pleasing balance. The story unfolds and the reader is taken on the journey of good (Beth) and evil (David Goodman). We know a clash is coming and we wait nervously for it to happen. Supporting Beth along the way are a number of her friends whom we first me in Not the Life Imagined.

David Goodman is a doctor in another practice in Glasgow, one with which Beth’s practice has a reciprocal agreement for out of hours cover. It is during one of these occurrences that Beth is asked to sign a “Part Two” form for a recently deceased patient, permitting the body to be released for cremation. Beth, unable to honestly say she can agree the cause of death, refuses to sign. This honest, dutiful act sets in train the frightening events of the novel.

Goodman, it becomes clear, is a multiple killer, bumping off his more elderly or vulnerable patients having first ensured their wills have been changed to include him. Nothing much, not more than £5000 or a painting each time. Not enough to draw attention. Enough to be lucrative. Besides, there is the thrill of the act, which never diminishes.

Goodman is clearly insane, and it is notoriously difficult to write such characters effectively. Either they are too normal and the reader can’t buy into it, or the writer tends to ham things up so much the character ends up like Chief Inspector Dreyfuss in the Pink Panther films, driven to raging madness by Clouseau and his incompetence. Anne Pettigrew avoids these extremes and in the process she creates a deliciously monstrous villain.

It is obvious from reading the novel that the author was a GP herself. Her familiarity with medicine and general practice gives an air of authenticity and credibility to the drama that unfolds, so that you can implicitly believe what you are reading. Not the Deaths Imagined rattles along pleasingly and the reader is drawn into Beth’s increasingly frightening world, willing the deaths imagined not to include her or hers. In a dramatic climax, the answer to that hangs in the balance...