Gardener of Stars
Carla Harryman
publisher: Atelos
isbn: 1-891190-10-5
price: $12.95
Today is somehow different from the other days I have tried to make contact with Gardener as my other life. I pick up my pen to join with her impulsiveness. Sometimes I have thoughts like Gardener would have had her freedom in a world without language. In a world of pure contact and wordlessly making everything up.
[tk]
True to the genre-torquing spirit of the Atelos line, Harryman's new book only appears to be a "novel" when approached from the angle of another genre -- memoir, confession, philosophical tract, even prophecy. The "characters" of this work are not constants -- sympathetic figures who lead one into the woods and back -- but rise and disappear based on "pure contact," the metaphorical embodiments of philosophical ideas, erotic impulses, moral dilemmas, or the pawns of invisible strategies enacted by some all-seeing, but not very holy, god.
The sentences, often tightwire acts of tonal control, slip from the belle-lettristic idiom of an Arcadian narrator to the psychotic realms of the Son of Sam:
One day I sat her down to explain the word oxymoron and then to describe a magnificent and bucolic world of insults. Babs sat listlessly under the darkening skies as I repressed my desire to tie her to a tree, as my cousins had once done to me when my self-seriousness had bored them.
[84]
This world -- in which rape, birth, the first thoughts of a child and the dying thoughts of a post-nuclear race blithely coexist -- is that of the "cyborg" in Donna Haraway's sense, a land of creatures with no origins but self-mythologed births, no slavery to historical time (which "places living time in a tomb in which it can neither breathe nor suffocate" [132]), no limits to the extension of their bodies which extend into limitless circuits of "narcissism" -- that is, a world of the "monstrous."
Irony has hypertrophied to the degree that even laughter is impossible, like screams drowned out at a crowded stadium; it is as if the naughty kids of John Ashbery's Girls on the Run had grown as huge, fertile and pissed off as the creatures of the Godzilla movie series.
The moral ambivalence of Lewis Carroll's apotheosis of a pre-teen girl into the annals of literary history is the wavering, "virtual" foundation of Harryman's metaphysical roller coaster ride, in which the taboo starts on the table, and emotions such as "love" are obscene: "The meaning of everything becomes sexual." [87] The laws of physics have seceded along with the laws of narrative; Harryman variably over-extends or completely collapses any of the normative structures of fiction, as in this unceremonious dismissal of Carroll's very nymphet:
Alice swung her mind to an upright and seated position. And as she railed against human stupidity, her body followed. A little girl threw a small stone at her, hitting her in the head. She was instantly dead.
[93]
Harryman describes a world in which "our utopian plans" have been "gutted," and the best not only lack conviction but are resplendent in the time beyond the paradigm shift that replaced our essentialist certainties about identity and being with dangerous digital wavering, coaxing us into mental adventures in a slipstream of avatars and misfit angels. What "happens" here may not be as important as the fact that it leaves no trace.
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