Out of Tales, into Reflections: The Expository Thread

Today I’m talking about what was for me the most fun part of Out of Tales, my braided not-exactly-novel I’m releasing on July 15: the “Jennie sections,” the non-novelistic prose.

These are a mix of essay and memoir-through-a-funhouse-mirror. They’re pretty dense and abstract — one early reader said, even abstruse. The essay bits discuss (in general) desire, self-regard and identity, and theology I would like to believe. The memoir bits involve a fair bit of mundanity, occasional forays into fantasy of a more magically realist bent, some reversals and substitutions (Jennie’s mother is both Jennie-the-original-fictional-character’s mother and explicitly the opposite of mine in important ways), and a few bits of fiction that will become relevant in later volumes.

When (as you can read about in my last post, “Learning from Women Modernists: H.D. and Gertrude Stein”) I dove into H.D.’s HERmione, I found a lot of beautiful, interesting writing that was overwhelmingly focused on emotional and sensory experience, insightfully — poetically — bitingly — explored, but with limited insight into anyone but the protagonist. I suspect the Jennie sections have this problem too, though I’m not convinced it has to be a problem (H.D. is plenty intresting to hold my attention, and we feel claustrophobic largely because she does herself).

More sadly for me, though, strange though Out of Tales is, I don’t have half H.D.’s strangeness or intricacy of prose style, and I really should (not in the same ways, obviously, but in my own, yet-to-be-developed ways). I half-want to go back and completely rewrite the Jennie sections to be more daring in syntax and the texture of words, to be more like poetry. This temptation is especially strong because January is, in my mind, associated with aspects of modernism and postmodernism (both in some sublogical, synaesthetic sense and inasmuch as those movements, to my mind, upcycle trash — trash ranging from Deschamps’s urinals to Warhol’s advertising to the minutiae of moment-to-moment experience).

I haven’t. I think Out of Tales has finally started to make sense to me as a whole, even if it is not a whole that embraces everything I originally wanted it to be. It’s not just not linguistically innovative enough for that. It’s not raw enough for that. It’s not funny enough for that (a sense of humor, indeed, might be the single largest thing lacking in the Jennie sections as they stand). In fact, I’m scared it’s not just unreadably strange but also unreadably stuffy and boring.

It’s a tough call, but there’s one piece of good news: I still have a bunch of hypertext fiction (or whatever you want to call the zinegamethings) to create and release, and I can get as much weirder and funnier and more complex there as I want to. (I already have gotten funnier there. I’ve described the style as “cynical, poignant lolhuman”).

I would say “Maybe I’m finding my voice, and my voice is complex, lyrical, elliptical, but fairly traditional prose” — except I’m pretty sure I have and always have had more than one style I like to work in, if I have a coherent voice and point of view it should emerge in spite of my conscious decisions and not because of them, and if it’s all coming out sounding the same I’m being too goddamn lazy.