Author: Jonathan Gibbs

‘Autolysis, or Ways of Disappearing’ by Sylvia Warren

In one sense, ‘Autolysis’ is the story of humanity’s unhumanity. It’s well known, though rarely admitted, that the human body is not just human. We couldn’t live without the bacteria in our guts, for instance. Only death, when our bodies decompose into the Earth, reveals us for what we truly are; and this revelation is a lifelong project. Warren unconceals it through fantasy. There are many fairy tales, it’s true, of humans turning into nonhuman animals, humans metamorphosing into trees, humans caught between humanity and fish-hood. But Warren’s story is the first I’ve read in which becoming-fungus is a run-of-the-mill aspect of contemporary women’s life cycle. In ‘Autolysis,’ coming of age means learning the nonhumanity, the “rot,” as Warren puts it, innate to one’s body. There are rituals to instigate various stages of the transition, rituals to palliate the pain of metamorphosis. And this is another way to read ‘Autolysis’: the phased development of a woman’s inborn fungus coincides with the familiar metamorphoses that are her human-reproductive cycle. Warren illuminates by exaggeration the hidden agonies which every woman suffers but is ideologically bound to consider precious—even amidst the recurring horror of her body becoming alien to itself.

“Things were budding inside, forming fleshy growths that burst outwards under my skin. I lay there in the dark of my bedroom, a wet itchiness as the insides of me became too large . . . I waited to disappear into the bed, tied down by the maze of mycelia until I melted and decomposed.”

Published in minor literature[s], February 2020, and available to read here

‘Queen’ by Amina Cain

A quilt of objects, layers, and gaps, ‘Queen’ is an anti-drama of monotony and dirt in the small and stagnant world of hotel chambermaids. Cain’s abrupt, often fragmentary sentences which insist upon their nouns, sometimes consisting only of nouns, stitch together a static drama of things, one beside the other and another and another in an assemblage that is perfectly contingent. There are human things and nonhuman things. They are nonhierarchical. People and objects have the same ontological and dramatic status, the same ability or lack thereof to move the plot. You could almost say nouns are the plot, a plot picked out in disconnected dots. Their separation, the space between—in that silence is the drama. For in this encounter between things, which isn’t at all obliged to happen the way it happens, bodies and roles and backstories and identities slip-slide into each other. Forms are exchanged. Relationships quietly light up the silences and become meaning in potentia. A juxtaposition suggests an unnecessary connection which suggests another and another till the story leaves its world: ‘Queen’ ends with Cain’s prose-objects side by side with a quotation from Clarice Lispector.

A quotation from Cain: “Objects. The tiny cameo necklace my grandmother gave me. Something Marguerite gives me, on paper. Keep it in your pocket, she says. I touch a wall. Make dinner for Marguerite. Eat quietly. A lamp on the wooden table. An album with sounds of geese, and then wolves howling. Eight o’clock . . . Overcast sky. Painting of a river scene, children with kites.”

Collected in Creature, Dorothy Project, 2013

‘Brasília’ by Clarice Lispector, translated by Katrina Dodson

In 1956, Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek commissioned the design and construction, from scratch, of a new capital city: the city of Brasília was to be a center of modernist, egalitarian, highway-driven progress with the shape, visible from above, of an airplane. By 1960 this concrete and steel embodiment of networked unity and nationalist-cosmopolitan innovation was complete; and in 1962, with no idea that Walt Disney was planning, along the same lines but wheel-shaped, an Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow in the United States, Clarice Lispector visited Brasília for the first time, returning briefly twelve years later. On both occasions, what she wrote about it was fantastical but not. She invented an ancient history for the two-year-old city, imagining the original ‘Brasilianaires’ as “extremely tall blond men and women” who “sparkled in the sun,” were completely blind, and, “dressed in white gold,” were altogether more like skyscrapers than people. Lispector’s Brasília is so hospitable that there’s no room for pedestrians. It’s so bright and vigilant one feels guilty for feeling guilty. The utopian imperative is so insistent that tears and tiredness aren’t allowed. There’s such a rational lack of corners that this actual, real-life city seems not to exist—like a fantasy without magic. Lispector’s writing, too, is dizzying, euphoric, terrified, insomniac, as she recognizes in herself the temptation to wish for absolute order, to create a situation where although freedom and clarity are the first imperatives, there are no surprises. And no rats.

“A whole part of us, the worst, precisely the one horrified by rats, that part has no place in Brasília. They wished to deny that we are worthless. A construction with space factored in for the clouds. Hell understands me better . . . —The construction of Brasília: that of a totalitarian State. —This great visual silence that I love. My insomnia too would have created this peace of the never.”

Collected in The Complete Stories, New Directions, 2015

‘George’s Wife’ by Véronique Bizot, translated by Youna Kwak

Besides being a linear or actually quite curly narrative, this story feels like a sort of diorama of a particular insulated interior, namely a cluster of affluent condos. What counts most decisively as ‘action’ is extreme inaction. What passes, leaving aside flashbacks, for a ‘plot’ is the acquisition of guests and their arrangement in a condo for a dinner party. Which character comes forward as the ‘protagonist’ is unclear. Although neither the narrator nor anybody at the dinner party is George, this George is on the barbed tip of every tongue and thought. So if this is George’s story, we’re getting it obliquely and at second hand. George himself appears nowhere except in memories, ill-timed references, and a distant, unacknowledged glance. If this is the narrator’s story, it’s given to us incomplete and from the side: we see its disembodied George-infested edges and no more. Scattered through the story like abstract portraits are other characters’ untold stories and unanswered questions, hints at which add nothing to the plot but much to the diorama. I read in an interview that Bizot trained as an interior decorator. Reading ‘George’s Wife’, I feel as if I’m wandering a painstakingly eccentric dining room. ‘Why put that detail there?’ I wonder, and ‘Why is such an obvious thing missing?’

“On that side, fairly tall and dense trees block the view I might have of George’s patio, a hideously tiled slab of flambé flagstone, overhung by a striped orange awning trimmed with grayish fringe, underneath which I imagine him seated and, like me, motionless.”

Collected in Gardeners, Diálogos, 2017; published here in Brooklyn Rail and here in The Short Story Project

‘The Memory’ by Mitsuyo Kakuta, translated by Polly Barton

Kakuta’s narrator says of a certain celebrity model who happens to be the same narrator’s sort-of stepdaughter: “In the end, her beauty terrifies them. Her looks are not the kind to enthrall or impassion. When people look into her eyes, they feel like they are being seen through, stolen away, sucked in toward some kind of terrible misfortune.”

Terrifying beauty. Carnivorous, destructive beauty. This is the paradox of the sublime (says Kant, of whom more below). Sublimity is easy to spot in certain art and landscapes, sharks and octopuses. But in a human? How, with just a look, can a human whirlpool another human towards terrible misfortune? I’m suspicious of the ‘windows to the soul’ trope. The notion that someone’s eyes can reveal their inner perverseness, holiness, or emptiness sounds practically phrenological. Yet Kakuta’s narrator insists some inner secret is the dark fount of the model’s physical sublimity. Could the secret lie not with the model but with the narrator—she who’s so insistent that this other woman is sublime? We’re told that this young woman believes herself to be guilty of a horrible crime. Why, then, does she choose the life of a celebrity model? Once you ask yourself that question, Kakuta’s story changes color. Personally I suspect the narrator of feeding the young woman the ‘memory’ of her guilt in order to conceal the narrator’s own part in the tragedy and create the opportunity for the narrator to play the magnanimous stepmother. But see what you think. A single event broadcast-spawns how many memories, each possessed of self-destructive malleability?

Published here in Words Without Borders, March 2015

‘One Woman and Two Great Men’ by Danielle Dutton

The last sentence of this story is a lie, but the story is fiction made of fact. Most of the events in the plot really happened; Fleur Jaeggy did translate Thomas de Quincey’s translation of Andreas Wasianski’s account of Immanuel Kant’s bedtime routine. But because Dutton’s gorgeous prose has a way of seeming gently tongue-in-cheek, it feels as though the events that she’s describing didn’t happen even though they did. The translations and usurpations of each ‘great man’ by another and another give Dutton’s summation of these events the dubious flavor of rumor—a summation, by the way, which isn’t really a summation since the events thereby aggregated have yet to conclude: de Quincey’s fame eclipsed Wasianski’s and then they died, Dutton says, but because Jaeggy still lives, who knows whether she might eclipse de Quincey in the ruins of literature’s so-called canon? And what about Kant? Ostensibly what matters here are not Kant’s philosophical achievements but various rumors concerning his eccentric way of going to bed and his uneventful way of quitting the world for good. But Kant did theorize that because our minds generate the structures (space and time and so on) which make reality intelligible, we have no idea what reality is in itself beyond the schemata we ourselves impose upon it. As such, Kant’s philosophy, which de Quincey said was the least interesting thing about him, could be a hidden engine of Dutton’s depiction of Jaeggy’s depiction of de Quincey’s depiction of Wasianski’s depiction of this:

“. . . first, he’d sit on the side of the bed and with an agile motion vault obliquely into his lair; next, he drew one corner of the bedclothes under his left shoulder and, passing it below his back, brought it round so as to rest under his right shoulder; fourthly, by a particular tour d’addresse, he operated on the opposite corner in similar fashion, finally contriving to roll the blanket around his entire person. How pleasing it is to imagine Immanuel Kant thus enswathed (self-involved as a silkworm) . . .”

Published here in The Chicago Review, November 2020

‘I am the Brother of XX’ by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Gini Alhadeff

Both sister (XX) and brother (the brother of XX) seem to want to become writers. XX seems to wish to turn her brother, who is also our narrator, into a fictional character, exaggerating his experiences in what may be the germs of stories. Meanwhile she urges him not to write but instead to find a job in a bank or some such place so that he might ‘succeed in life.’ The brother of XX is obedient but spends his life regretting it, is in fact obsessed with regret, consumed by resentment for the sister who made him betray his true calling. It’s as if he’s forgotten his own name; he sees himself as nothing but the tool of XX, and he redacts her name too in double strokes of rebellion and revenge, canceling her out twice over. But it’s as if his words are stuck. His descriptions are precise, he identifies novel and unexpected connections—”There is a kinship in the clothes”—he sees, in short, like the poet he should have been. But his narrative voice is stuck, his sentences are repetitive and broken. Stumbling as if struggling to articulate how it feels to be the lifelong prisoner of a lie. Such sentences make the reader stop. They stop you. I wonder if the brother of XX realizes his insistence on unfamiliar, unflowing, unconventional constructions—in other words, expressions which are entirely his own—also constitute resistance.

“I myself felt apparent.”

Collected in I am the Brother of XX, New Directions, 2017

‘The Quantity Theory of Insanity’ by Will Self

Self remains my favourite short story writer. ‘The Quantity Theory of Insanity’ depicts an eccentric academic who invents the conceit that there is a fixed quota of insanity in the world, and therefore that “if you provide efficient medication for manic depressives in the Fens, there are perceptible variations in the number of agoraphobics on the South coast”. I think I was initially drawn to Self’s writing because he writes about madness so well. ‘Quantity’ – both the story and collection – captured the quiddity of my father’s illness (schizophrenia), far better than many stories/novels which aimed to portray the illness in a more direct and obvious fashion. It’s the tone of the story that resonated: the wonderful mixture of the banal and the bizarre, the comic and the tragic, and the swirling schizoidy colours of Self’s imagination. It’s also the first of Self’s stories, I believe, that introduces Dr Busner, the Laingian psychiatrist who became a recurrent figure in Self’s fiction.

First published in The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Bloomsbury 1991

‘The Debutante’ by Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington was a lifelong lover of animals. I remember reading that as she child she was so fond of her horse that for a time she believed she was a horse too. Horses and hyenas often feature in her magnificent Surrealist paintings and short stories. In ‘The Debutante’, the female narrator is a frequent visitor to her local zoo. There she befriends a hyena, who turns out to be very intelligent – “I taught her French and she, in turn, taught me her language.” Keen to avoid playing the debutante and going to a ball, she and the hyena plot to swap places. This involves killing her maid Mary, so that the hyena can nibble off her face and adopt it as a mask. The prose is clean and simple, and the merry tone of the story makes the sudden swerve towards violence even more blackly comic and disturbing. Whilst the hyena goes to the ball, the debutante is able to stay in and enjoy reading Gulliver’s Travels. The hilarious, satirical twist at the end explores how difficult it is to maintain masks, especially when young women are expected to play feminine and nice; the hyena certainly can’t keep up the pretence for long…

First published in 1940 in André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour.Collected inThe Debutante and Other Stories, Silver Press 2017

‘The Story of Śikhidhvaja and Cudala’ by Valmiki, translated by Swami Venkatesananda

My father is a Catholic and I attended a C of E school; my mother was an Indiophile and so I grew up reading The Vedas, which I took to more than the Bible. Vasisthya’s Yoga, written around the 6th century, is a spiritual epic which explores the nature of reality and the path to enlightenment. It is also a treasure trove of gloriously imaginative cosmic stories that can be enjoyed for their literary value, regardless of the reader’s interest in the spiritual. ‘The Story of Śikhidhvaja and Cudala’ is a feminist one, and the oldest story I know that explores gender fluidity. Śikhidhvaja and Cudala are a King and Queen who rule a kingdom; Cudala becomes enlightened before her husband, who wanders off into the forest seeking liberation, only to find himself lost and confused. Cudala turns herself into a brahman who offers to educate him (though, conveniently, s/he informs him that due to a curse s/he turns into a nymph by night, allowing them to make love once their daily instruction is over). What follows is a tale structured like a matryoshka, stories nestled within stories, as Cudala coaxes him towards enlightenment. It is playful, witty and full of twists and turns, but interspersed with profound reflections on the nature of life.

Included in Vasistha’s Yoga, University of New York Press 1993, p.422

‘No Love Lost’ by Rachel Ingalls

One of the finest stories I’ve read exploring war and its aftermath. It’s very different from the playful magic realism of Ingalls’ novel Mrs Caliban. Ingalls was inspired to write it after seeing news footage of the 1990s Balkans War. A family return to their home after an unnamed war, finding it wrecked and soiled and slashed and ruined. The father, shellshocked by his experiences as a soldier, finds solace in simple, unexpected pleasures – plucking a small apple from a remaining tree in his garden and remembering his boyhood, when he was “unbroken”, when the trees “brought the loveliness of spring up to the windows and its honey breath into all the rooms”. For the most part, however, this is a harsh, bleak story depicting societal breakdown as the townsfolk struggle to repair their lives. Ingalls captures their descent into desperate brutality in sparse, sober prose.

First published in Days Like Today, Faber & Faber 2000

‘Celesteville’s Burning: A Work in Regress’ by Andrew Gallix

Sostène Zanzibar, a successful novelist based in Paris, is suffering a midlife crisis and struggling with creative inspiration. When the journalist Loren Ipsum comes to interview him, they embark on a love affair that ends in humiliation for Zanzibar, who then descends into crisis. The prose is beautifully crafted, the story a wonderful mixture of literary satire, erudite references, superb puns and zingy one-liners, and jokes that made me laugh out loud – Zanzibar’s ex “publicly pooh-poohed his cunnilingus technique, comparing the result as a series of ‘indecipherable chicken-scratch squiggles’”. As the story progresses, there is a shift in tone from comic to poignant and the ending is dreamy and bittersweet.

First published in The White Review, and available to read online. Collected in We’ll Never Have Paris, Repeater Books, 2019

‘Scale’ by Will Self

“Some people lose their sense of proportion; I’ve lost my sense of scale.” So begins Self’s hallucinogenic, 15,000-word tale of a morphine addict, a divorcee living in Beaconsfield in a cramped bungalow next to the Bekonscot Model Village. As the narrator descends in breakdown, he muses on motorway culture, failed fatherhood and his attempt to write a crime novel called Murder on the Median Strip. Burroughs and Ballard are clearly strong influences, as well as Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll and Claude Lévi-Strauss in his play on size and scale. Self has stated that “my scale shtick goes right back to childhood scale”, when “I assiduously collected trolls, doll’s house furniture and tiny books such as Langenscheidt dictionaries – little things that I would arrange into tableau.” Self blends all these elements in the melting pot of his warped genius to form something wonderfully peculiar.

First published in abridged form in Granta 43: Best of Young British Novelists 2, 1993, and available to subscribers to read online here; collected in Grey Area, Bloomsbury, 1994; also published as a standalone Penguin 60, Penguin, 1995