how to save characters from traditional fiction
by Douglas Messerli
Stacey Levine Mice 1961 (Portland, Oregon:
Verse Chorus Press, 2024)
It is
1961, the time of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion and just before the Cuban
Missile Crisis, a time of cold war hysteria. And some of the feelings generated
by Mice’s appearance is a result of the feelings of “otherness” it arouses in
the poorly-educated neighbors.
One
might describe the first fourth of this fiction, in fact, as a tale of
outsiderness, a struggle for one young shy girl, who much like the tortured gay
boys of later LGBTQ films, is simply attempting to go about her life while
keeping the female and other neighborhood bullies away, and simultaneously
quelling her beloved sister’s increasingly bourgeois demands that she take a
job in the nearby bookmobile under the domain of a woman named Florence.
Many of
the early pages of the work, in fact, are devoted to the “irritation” that Mice’s
presence causes the neighbors. As the narrator observes:
“As I pieced it together, few locals, in the weeks
after the sisters arrived to the neighborhood, saw Mice. But after a time,
neighbors slowly grew to know about the girl and immediately expressed
irritation toward her. As Mice began to traverse the neighborhood during the
evenings, neighbors blazed as if horrified to see her, overall full of
objections to her tender, chapped looking hands and the outer ears so peel-thin,
devoid of the rolled tops that characterize others’ ears. A number of neighbors
chewed with enjoyment over the girl’s weird, abrupt, off-topic speech, too,
confirming for each other that wariness, when it came to Mice, was the best
approach. To pity the girl was also reasonable, they implied, in light of her
hopeless appearance: the all-whiteness, clumsy, exploratory demeanor, and small
blue eyes that twitched near-constantly.”
In her all-white
appearance, Mice attracts the fear and hostility of the world around her almost
as if she stood in league with Herman Melville’s terrifying White Whale, or the
horrifying hieroglyphs at the end of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym signifying the word “White.” In US literary culture, one must
remember, an all-white world, representing “absence,” is far more horrific than
a mixed and colorful society, which despite the values spouted by some
dictatorial politicians throughout our history, is what US culture has been
from the start.
Other
than her sister, Mice’s seemingly only friend is an older neighbor named Lance,
who collects crystal radios and encourages her to build receivers so that she
might hear the coded messages of Russian spies and the Americans who plan an
invasion. Every day he pumps her for any information that she might have heard,
interpreting even a woman mentioning numbers as a spy reading out coded
signals.
Soon
after, Mice is trapped in a first floor window-well by mean school-girls who
spend most the time talking drivel amongst themselves before every so often
returning their attentions to their trapped “mouse.” But they, like everyone
else in the neighborhood, soon depart, as they prepare for a big party at the
local bakery, which nearly everyone but Lance plans to attend. Jody has
insisted that Mice be there as well, mostly to talk to Florence about a
possible job at the Bookmobile.
The
rest of Levine’s fiction shifts into a grand dialogue fiction, through which we
not only get the opportunity to thoroughly come to know all the neighbor
figures, but to hear their strange and often impenetrable palaver, filled with
colloquialisms, clichés, and endless conversation stoppers as they spout and
stammer their way through the long afternoon and evening with all the
intelligence of normal American chit-chat. Anyone who loves the colloquial
language of our country will adore their stream-of-unconscious blather that
takes up topics ranging from cranberry salad to God.
As
critic Northrup Frye long again argued in his still revelatory critical study Anatomy of
Criticism, the dialogue genre is closely related to the literary anatomy, the kind
of fictional work that takes us, as in Petronius’ Satyricon, from the lowest of the
social orders of a culture, in this case, perhaps represented by the local
school janitor who men are sent to fetch and bring to the party, to the
highest, in Levine’s community, represented, perhaps, by the Gruelins a wealthy
brother and sister who have swooped down into the neighborhood from Paris and
elsewhere presumably because their father hopes to set up a new “plant” in the
neighborhood.
When
she discovers Mice has not come to the party, however, Jody almost ruins the
first hours of the grand pot-luck as she hovers between self-pity and worry
about her sister's whereabouts, until finally the narrative gets rid of her by
shuffling her off to a bedroom upstairs and into the arms of the local detective,
Denny, who has to come to report that he found their kitchen stove turned on,
which might have caused a major fire or explosion, something clearly that
Girtle, the girl’s servant-protector, seems almost to desire.
Meanwhile downstairs Larry the beatnik attempts to play some serious
jazz (Charles Mingus) against pleas from the others for music to which they can
dance. Fruit salads fall from platters onto the concrete, and spaghetti goes
flying. But the real fun of this melee exists in the endless flow of constantly
interrupted conservations. One of the best, reminiscent of Gilbert Sorrentino’s
great fiction Mulligan Stew occurs in a woman’s discussion
with the local poet, which will have to serve of dozens of such delightful
tidbits throughout Levine’s work:
“What are you doing dear?”
“Oh hello Gabby.” The Artist removed small eyeglasses.
“I’m finishing a poem. Free-form.”
“Marvelous!”
“I’ll read it aloud tonight for the poetry circle.”
“What’s the title?” Mrs. Fox peered at the
oversized page.
“Lilacs and Gym Shorts.”
“You’re terribly artistic.”
Eyebrows shifting with feeling, The Artist read the
first line: “In that we are growing…” But Mrs. Fox had already left, sailing
down the hallway with her pastry bags, past the counter and out the front door.
I ran to the window, glimpsing in the passage seat a plump, motionless husband
in shadow as the car spun away.”
When
Mice finally does arrive, Jody is nowhere to be found, and that oddity of Reef
Way is suddenly taken up first by Eve Gruelin whose brother wants to hire Mice
as basically a plaything for his sister. Soon after an utter stranger to the
party, Kenny Anther, takes a real liking to Mice, trying to get her to dance
with him. But even here, Mice’s endless questions begin to drive him off, and
before the evening is over he leaves her since she seems intent on leaking his
apparent secret, that he truly is a “government hireling,” a flyer come to
Miami to possibly attack Cuba.
By
party’s end, as Anther attempts to quiet the usually silent Mice, she escapes
into a cornfield, this time perhaps to never return to the sociable world in
which she has discovered she will never be welcome, freed at last from all,
including fictional, restraints.
Stitching
up all these various tableaux in the role as narrator has been Girtle, a kind
of simulacrum of the author herself, who attempts to girdle up her central
figures, keeping them out of harm’s way— particularly when it comes to the
traditional narrative patterns in fiction featuring women. As Girtle explains, she
also is an outsider, an escapee from Children’s Home, someone who recognizes
that she has finally grown up into adulthood, however uncomfortable that role
may be. In previous fictions, such as Frances Johnson, as well, Levine has
clearly been terrified for the arrival of the “perfect man” to which the
fiction usually marries off the heroine. In this fiction, Girtle describes such
a man as “the helper,” the male who takes over the narrative as he leads away
the heroine into the space outside the fiction.
Throughout this work, where poor Girtle is forced to sleep on the floor
and mostly hide-out from the other characters, the narrator fears the arrival
of “the helper,” who would also, obviously, displace her, taking over her role
as the reader’s imagination is called forth to finish the tale after the close
of its last pages. In this book, Girtle is finally convinced that the “helper”
is Kenny Anther, particularly since he appears to literally be courting the
character nearly everyone else in the story evades, as I mentioned, with
irritation and fear.
But
Levine’s final narrative proves even her (or at least Girtle’s) own fears
wrong, as Anther suddenly takes a swerve to become the someone Lance had long
been warning Mice to be on the lookout for. And in this case, instead of
falling in love with the male and dancing away with him to some impossibly
happy future, he drives the central character, Girtle’s special charge, off
into her own kind of freedom, a world which also lies outside of the book.
Los Angeles, September 10, 2024
Reprinted from Reading with My
Lips (September 2024).
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