Encounters with books

If this perspective is uncommon it’s largely because of how universities operate, how people have to specialize in life.

Duffy’s poems resonate with me and revive that once-familiar image of man as a creature driven by the pursuit of knowledge and search for essential truths. The very first poem, Earthrise, is about an astronaut returning from one of the Apollo missions.

In the name
of science I had ascended
higher than
the mountain tops through all the shades
of day until there was only
night left

Several of the poems juxtapose the intellectual passion with the mundane, the domestic, and the chaotic. They bear witness to a world fast losing an appreciation for Mind/Spirit/Intellect – and do so in surprising and intriguing ways. We meet a professor ‘in sloppy collegiate tweed’ pressing a tea-bag against the side of the cup, who then squeezes past ‘a sharp-tongued student holding court / on Derrida and the deconstruction of art’
(No prizes for guessing what the poet thinks of postmodern philosophy.)
Another poem looks at the invention of the microscope a kind of counterpart poem to Earthrise which begins the book. This time the new worlds opened up to human sight are the infinitesimally small. Duffy makes an imaginative leap:

“But in this I saw not just matter alone, but another light also
that penetrates further to the very notion of order,
beneath the base of the world and all we perceive

Duffy’s poems, by and large, are not in the business of highlighting the absurdity of existence, fragility of reason, fragmented identity. Instead his poems reach out to a broader understanding of what it is to be human. Broader in the sense of including thirst for knowledge, encounters with the transcendent, and also in an expanded grasp of time and location.

It was the late 70s, time of cutbacks
and strikes, the dole queue never far
from mind. One morning on a picket line,
my dad got talking to a labourer from the depot
who had read The Illiad and was a respected
amateur antiquarian.

The sequence of poems which includes the lines above is a powerful and illuminating part of the collection. It’s composed of memories of his father and the labourer from the depot, called PJ. This PJ is a lover of wisdom and artist. The poems in this section convey a thirst for knowledge and understanding, for the Logos of the Greeks. It is a real thirst, there among the other impulses and desires of daily life of ordinary people (i.e. working class).

Here’s another few opening lines that are as good as any to illustrate Duffy’s clarity and sense of place.

Things had gone wrong. I was a young man
lost, my mind struggling with the impossible
questions. I travelled alone by train to a place
by the sea where tall houses lined the seafront,
tall windows taking in the prospect.

Duffy tends to keep his language and rhythms pellucid, the knottiness and twists of these poems are in the meanings and situations presented. Some of these poems are close to flash fiction – I don’t mean this detracts from them in any way.

Nietzsche and others viewed creativity as emerging from a Dionysian/Apollonian dialect. The Dionysian represents the visceral life-force, passions, intoxication. The Apollonian represents the search for truth, overcoming one’s nature, light rather than heat, construction not destruction, a grasp of the extended self rather than immersion in the moment.

Duffy’s poetry is Apollonian, refreshingly so. Rooted in his own life (including intellectual life), and not driven by what the news headlines proclaim are the pressing issues of the day.

I’ll leave off with this verse from a poem called “The Older Artist” (presumably not a hugely successful one).

As I looked at one piece he came
and stood beside me in silence for a time,
then turned to me and gripped my arm fiercely,
saying, ‘Somehow it all matters. It has to.
It fucking has to, doesn’t it?’

Given the heterogeneous nature of the anthology, it might give an idea of what to expect if I describe a couple of the more accessible pieces. Jose Chaves’ All I Misunderstood as a Man makes Complete Sense as a Parrot begins:

I am enjoying a cup of coffee with friends at a small café, when the conversation turns gray with politics. Suddenly, they are no longer friends, but large green parrots …

This piece has an obvious metaphorical meaning. It has a pleasingly transparent structure, and yet is rich enough to bear being re-read several times.

Bob Thurber’s Shuteye is a domestic scene written in standard snappy prose. But the second sentence is: “Donna had my heart on the table and a steak knife in her hand.” The story invites a reading as an allegory. Yet the severance from realism is so stark that it resists any easy interpretation. An anxiety remains; there is arguably a direct interaction with the unconscious mind. Many other pieces share this characteristic of being like a probe planted deep in the psyche. They lodge in memory and keep surfacing, grasping for meanings.

Kevin Sexton’s The Spindler is an intense tale of an encounter with a skinny, spider-like stranger who inspires revulsion in the narrator. Anyone who has ever had nightmares of chasing someone, or being chased, will tap in to the energy this story unleashes. The spindler and the loathing he arouses have the force of a symbol, but one which is personal and not universal.

Anything I might venture to say about the definition or workings of the irreal is pre-empted by the thirteen theoretical texts that constitute the last sixty-four pages of the book. Such a large number of critical essays (mostly) dedicated to a self-definition of the genre is unprecedented. Imagine if a love story was appended with several psychological articles on the nature of romantic attachment. There is a precedent — however not in fiction. Modern art often leans on the associated theoretical perspective; the audience has come to expect the sheets of paper pinned alongside the works.

The perceived need for these appended essays is another indication of just how far from ordinary fiction these irreal pieces roam. The phenomenology of the act of reading – the way one’s eye scans the sentences and constructs a narrative – is put in question. It’s an invigorating experience. The best pieces have a character of ‘thingness’ about them, in that they can be read again and again from different perspectives.

One of my favourites, Richard Kostelanetz’ Openings, is a list of purported opening sentences of stories. It makes for such fascinating reading I have to resist the urge to keep quoting the best ones.

The irreal as a method may be more familiar to readers in regions beyond the English-speaking world. Central Europe has its Kafka and Schulz and Danilo Kis. South America has Borges and García Márquez. As explained in the essays, the editors of this collection were impatient with the staid realism of American letters, and set up an internet journal to seek out and publish non-realist genres. The Café Irreal has been running since 1998. It is partially based in Prague, and their list of leading writers through the years is impressively international. Such a project would not have been possible before the era of the internet. The editors’ assessment of this project as of 2013 however is not positive.

The staid, realist orthodoxy of American letters that most of us were seeking to shake now seems more entrenched than ever, aided by the growing number of MFA programs in creative writing, most of which use realism (especially in the form of personal narrative) as the template for ‘fine writing.’

Many of the fictions in this collection are short: flash fiction in fact. I would argue that flash fiction, or short short stories, are a natural preserve of irreal techniques, in the English-speaking world at least. The irreal is not as uncommon as the editors seem to conclude. In novels – English-language novels – however it is indeed rare. The essays point out what we are missing by remaining within ‘the cult of experience’ to use Rahv’s expression. They argue that the restrictive definition of fine writing, in the USA at least, is no coincidence, but ties in with a disinclination toward the intangible and impractical typical of American culture in general.

Intriguingly, the essays also look at uses of the irreal in other arts: in the visual arts and in music. Irrealism and Ambient Music by Garrett Rowlan was a revelation to me, and I’ve spent several hours browsing through the tracks he references.

This collection is a fascinating mind-stretcher, a door open to an entirely new gallery. Perhaps it is best read in brief forays. It is a book of international significance and influence much greater than the limited media attention would suggest.