Very early this morning, as I was sipping my first cup of
coffee, I was reading the final story in George Saunders’ fine collection,
Pastoralia. The title of that story is “The Falls.” The story’s protagonist is a sorry creature named Morse, who
lives in a tiny rented home near an unimportant river, resentful of those living
in the larger homes past which he is walking on his way home from work. The following
paragraph introduces another character, whose interior dialogue has actually
inspired this post:
From behind him on
the path came a series of arrhythmic whacking steps. He glanced back to find
Aldo Cummings, an odd duck who, though nearly forty, still lived with his
mother. Cummings didn’t work and had his bangs cut straight across and wore gym
shorts even in the dead of winter. Morse hoped Cummings wouldn’t collar him.
We see that Morse, a small, struggling, conventional man,
fears the possibility of having to interact with this weird character, Cummings.
Cummings, for his part, as we shall see below, feels superior to Morse, despite
the fact that the Morses of this world would unanimously consider Cummings to
be a pathetic loser.
George Saunders masterfully allows Cummings to present
himself through the device of the following stream of consciousness paragraphs. In so doing, Saunders also brilliantly satirizes
that which makes bad writing bad, even while pretentious “writers” imagine
their adjective-burdened, esoteric-noun-laced “purple prose” to be brilliant :
Cummings bobbed past
the restored gristmill, pleased at having so decisively snubbed Morse, a smug
member of the power elite in this conspiratorial Village, one of the league of
oppressive oppressors who wouldn’t know the lot of the struggling artist if the
lot of the struggling artist came up with great and beleaguered dignity and bit
him on the polyester ass. Over the Pine Street bridge was a fat cloud. To an
interviewer in his head, Cummings said he felt the possible rain made the fine
bright day even finer and brighter because of the possibility of its loss. The
possibility of its ephemeral loss. The ephemeral loss of the day to the
fleeting passages of time. Preening time. Preening nascent time, the
blackguard. Time made wastrels of us all, did it not, with its gaunt cheeks and
its tombly reverberations and its admonishing glances with bony fingers. Bony
fingers pointed as if in admonishment, as if to say, “I admonish you to recall
your own eventual nascent death, which, being on its way, human, is
forthcoming. Forthcoming, mortal coil, and don’t think its ghastly pass won’t
settle on your furrowed brow, pronto,
once I select your fated number from my very dusty book with this selfsame bony
finger with which I’m pointing at you now, you vanity of vanities, you luster,
you shirker of duties, as you shuffle after your worldly pleasure centers.”
That was some good stuff, if only he
could remember it through the rest of his stroll and the coming storm, to
scrawl in a passionate hand on his yellow pad. He thought with longing ardor of
his blank yellow pad, he thought. He thought with longing ardor of his blank
yellow pad, on which, this selfsame day, the first meager scrawlings which
would presage his nascent burgeoning fame would be wrought, or rather writ, and
someday someone would dig up his yellow pad and virtually cry eureka when they
realized what a teeming fragment of minutia, and yet crucial minutia, had been
found, and wouldn’t all kinds of literary women in short black jackets want to
meet him then!
In the future he must always
remember to bring his pad everywhere.
There are not a few among those publishing their efforts on the
various writers’ group pages of Facebook who would profit from the reexamination of their
own writing—not to say their own mode of living--in the light of George
Saunders’ high satire.
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