X
In a recent post, I noted that I was reading Stanley Elkin’s novel, The MacGuffin, and shared an excerpt from it, along with a few words of my own concerning pervasive fear, or paranoia. I’m still reading the book and have a bit more to say about it as I approach its final pages.
I have a fairly good vocabulary, including slang, but I was not familiar with the term “MacGuffin.” Curiosity about the word was one of the factors prompting me to pick up this particular Elkin novel when it caught my eye at a used book sale. On page 183 (of 283) of the novel, I have identified what I believe to be Elkins’ working premise of what a MacGuffin consists of, as examined in the mind of his protagonist, City Commissioner of Streets, Robert Druff. I will provide that quote below; but first I will share some of the fruits of my investigation of the term, undertken before starting to read the novel. Here is a short explanation of “MacGuffin” from the relevant Wikipedia article:
A MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin or maguffin) is "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction.” The defining aspect of a MacGuffin is that the major players in the story are (at least initially) willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to obtain it, regardless of what the MacGuffin actually is. In fact, the specific nature of the MacGuffin may be ambiguous, undefined, generic, left open to interpretation or otherwise completely unimportant to the plot. Common examples are money, victory, glory, survival, a source of power, or a potential threat, or it may simply be something entirely unexplained.
This slightly more colorful and poetic explanation is provided further on in the same article:
Interviewed in 1966 by François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock illustrated the term "MacGuffin" with this story:
It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?", and the other answers "Oh, that's a McGuffin". The first one asks "What's a McGuffin?". "Well", the other man says, "It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands". The first man says "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands", and the other one answers "Well, then that's no McGuffin!". So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.
Elkin’s novel takes place within what seems to be one 24-hour period in the life of Druff: the day upon which (in his paranoia) he comes to believe that he “has a MacGuffin.” As indicated in the Wiki article, the MacGuffin comes to drive the plot:
Here it ain’t been but a day, he thought, since he’d first surmised the MacGuffin and just look where it had taken him. His first tentative suspicion confirmed, connected to his second tentative suspicion, that one to a third and that to a fourth and so on. By God, he might have been hooking a rug! Because everything was linked, everything. If he had a sidekick (just about all that was missing here) he would tell him so. Begin with an initial observation. Make an observation, would tell him, any observation, any observation at all. Like one guy leading another through a card trick. Everything inevitable and conjoined in the vast, limitless network of things, merged in the world’s absolute ecology. There was, it seemed, no such thing as a loose end. Not in this life, there wasn’t. The universal synergy. In the end, thought our City Commissioner of Streets, all roads led.
The message: all roads lead. It is the leading, not the destination, that governs a man’s fate. The fault is in our selves and in the stars: the distinction is moot. The life of Everyman is a work of fiction, the author of which is unknown and probably unknowable. (Or so Elkin—the author—would have it.)
X
Showing posts with label Stanley Elkin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stanley Elkin. Show all posts
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Reflections: The Banality of Fear
X
Yesterday I posted some thoughts of the religious writer, Caryll Houselander, on the subject of existential fear. Today I am going to share some words, from his novel The MacGuffin, by contemporary writer of fiction, Stanley Elkin. I found these passages—upon reading them this morning—to be expressive of the kind of pervasive, low-volume, fear with which most of us live our day-to-day lives. Hannah Arendt, an acolyte of the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, famously coined the term “the banality of evil.” I have found Stanley Elkin to be a master at writing about the banality of fear. I was struck by the coincidence of Houselander’s use of the medical reception room as a locus of our fear in the excerpt from The Reed of God which I posted yesterday, and Elkin’s portrayal of the tailor shop dressing room in which his character, Druff, finds himself as “vaguely medical.” Druff is suffused with a kind of underlying fear, or paranoia, which flavors his every thought, as we follow him through his day in this novel:
xxx“Better try it on, “ the salesman said, “before my tailor goes to lunch.”
xxxDruff following him to the tiny, flimsily contained dressing room with its hard little bench, shallow as a bookshelf, where the man handed over Druffs purchase and left him, the venue suddenly, subtly shifted, vaguely medical now, as though Druff had been called in for devastating examinations, something unforeseen popped up in the blood, the stool. (And this, well, aura, too, like a stall in the gents’ in a restaurant. Something he couldn’t think of as private property, yet understood—from his jacket on the hook on the wall there, like some flag slammed into enemy terrain in a battle—to be his as surely as if blood had been spilled for it, the front lines of the personal here, hallowed ground for sure, if only because of the men who’d occupied it before him, but not so hallowed he didn’t resent them, their collective spoor and lingering flatulence.)
Amazing how closely Elkin’s words echo Houselander’s there.
Druff’s fears are summed up as follows:
xxxDruff’s suit, as his heart had known in advance, did not look good on him. It didn’t. (Druff humiliated by his hologram in the three-way mirror, the comings and goings of his balding, frailing self like a body knocked down on an auction block, going going gone. His image there telling as a CAT scan—of shabby old mortality and downscale being.
Again, the parallels with the passages from Houselander are striking. This is the human condition. And it is the universal human project—the vocation of each individual human lifetime—to learn how to overcome the banality of this existence, as endured in somnambulant passivity.
X
Yesterday I posted some thoughts of the religious writer, Caryll Houselander, on the subject of existential fear. Today I am going to share some words, from his novel The MacGuffin, by contemporary writer of fiction, Stanley Elkin. I found these passages—upon reading them this morning—to be expressive of the kind of pervasive, low-volume, fear with which most of us live our day-to-day lives. Hannah Arendt, an acolyte of the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, famously coined the term “the banality of evil.” I have found Stanley Elkin to be a master at writing about the banality of fear. I was struck by the coincidence of Houselander’s use of the medical reception room as a locus of our fear in the excerpt from The Reed of God which I posted yesterday, and Elkin’s portrayal of the tailor shop dressing room in which his character, Druff, finds himself as “vaguely medical.” Druff is suffused with a kind of underlying fear, or paranoia, which flavors his every thought, as we follow him through his day in this novel:
xxx“Better try it on, “ the salesman said, “before my tailor goes to lunch.”
xxxDruff following him to the tiny, flimsily contained dressing room with its hard little bench, shallow as a bookshelf, where the man handed over Druffs purchase and left him, the venue suddenly, subtly shifted, vaguely medical now, as though Druff had been called in for devastating examinations, something unforeseen popped up in the blood, the stool. (And this, well, aura, too, like a stall in the gents’ in a restaurant. Something he couldn’t think of as private property, yet understood—from his jacket on the hook on the wall there, like some flag slammed into enemy terrain in a battle—to be his as surely as if blood had been spilled for it, the front lines of the personal here, hallowed ground for sure, if only because of the men who’d occupied it before him, but not so hallowed he didn’t resent them, their collective spoor and lingering flatulence.)
Amazing how closely Elkin’s words echo Houselander’s there.
Druff’s fears are summed up as follows:
xxxDruff’s suit, as his heart had known in advance, did not look good on him. It didn’t. (Druff humiliated by his hologram in the three-way mirror, the comings and goings of his balding, frailing self like a body knocked down on an auction block, going going gone. His image there telling as a CAT scan—of shabby old mortality and downscale being.
Again, the parallels with the passages from Houselander are striking. This is the human condition. And it is the universal human project—the vocation of each individual human lifetime—to learn how to overcome the banality of this existence, as endured in somnambulant passivity.
X
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Readings: A Natural Gass
X
Some backstory: When I was growing up in Ann Arbor, I knew this kid named Johnny Jones. I knew him first as a member of my little league baseball team, when I was eleven years old. Then I lost sight of him for a few years, because he attended different schools that I did. I attended the public high school, but Johnny Jones went to the University of Michigan’s 12-grade laboratory school, known as “U High.” He was a star guard on their basketball team, and I saw him play a couple of times, because I had a friend from the neighborhood who was a student at U High.
Like me, Johnny Jones attended the University of Michigan, as an English major. In my freshman year at Michigan, I met the kid who had played center on the U High basketball team , and through him got back in touch with Johnny Jones. It turned out that Jones could play guitar. He did a better finger-pickin’, bottle-neckin’ version of “Panama Limited” than did Tom Rush, according to some. Jones was also wildly enthusiastic about the writings of a guy named William H. Gass. He was particularly enthralled by the novel Omensetter’s Luck. And then there was the story collection, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. Going on the assumption that anybody who could drain a jumpshot and play guitar the way Johnny Jones could must also have superior judgment concerning matters of contemporary fiction, I eventually acquired and attempted to read both of those books. And I was disappointed. I didn’t get it. My estimation of Jones plunged below the radar.
Jump now to the present. Forty-five years have passed under the bridge. In the course of investigating the fiction of Stanley Elkin, I borrow from the library a short-story anthology entitled “Stories from the Sixties” edited by Elkin. The fourth story in the collection is “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” by William H. Gass. Having developed an admiration for Elkin, I shrug and decide to give it a shot.
And it blows me away, folks. How could I have ever doubted a renaissance man like Johnny Jones? What was I thinking? This isn’t prose—it’s poetry; deep, insightful, poetic narrative. The set-up is this: the piece is narrated by man, presumably a poet, who is deep in contemplation of his hometown, described as “B… a small town fastened to a field in Indiana.” The story is divided into sections, titled “A Place” or “Weather” or “My House” or “A Person” etc. The one I have chosen to excerpt, I have chosen because, although it was first published in 1967, it still so well fits what might be called “the American condition." Replace the reference to the John Birch Society, with a reference to the Tea Party, and you could publish this in next week’s edition of Time Magazine:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxPOLITICS
Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated. They are the Midwest’s open sores. Ugly to see, a source of constant discontent, they sap the body’s strength. Appalling quantities of money, time, and energy are wasted on them. The rural mind is narrow, passionate, and reckless on these matters. Greed, however shortsighted and direct, will not alone account for it. I have known men, for instance, who for years have voted squarely against their interests. Nor have I ever noticed that their surly Christian views prevented them from urging forward the smithereening, say, of Russia, China, Cuba, or Korea. And they tend to back their country like they back their local team: they have a fanatical desire to win; yelling is their forte; and if things go badly, they are inclined to sack the coach. All in all, then, Birch is good name. It stands for the bigot’s stick, the wild-child-tamer’s cane.
This is not the most poetic section of the story. But I don't want to spoil those for you. Surely, you won't want to waste 45 years as I did; and based on the recommendation of Johnny Jones, you will want to read those for yourself.
X
X
Some backstory: When I was growing up in Ann Arbor, I knew this kid named Johnny Jones. I knew him first as a member of my little league baseball team, when I was eleven years old. Then I lost sight of him for a few years, because he attended different schools that I did. I attended the public high school, but Johnny Jones went to the University of Michigan’s 12-grade laboratory school, known as “U High.” He was a star guard on their basketball team, and I saw him play a couple of times, because I had a friend from the neighborhood who was a student at U High.
Like me, Johnny Jones attended the University of Michigan, as an English major. In my freshman year at Michigan, I met the kid who had played center on the U High basketball team , and through him got back in touch with Johnny Jones. It turned out that Jones could play guitar. He did a better finger-pickin’, bottle-neckin’ version of “Panama Limited” than did Tom Rush, according to some. Jones was also wildly enthusiastic about the writings of a guy named William H. Gass. He was particularly enthralled by the novel Omensetter’s Luck. And then there was the story collection, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. Going on the assumption that anybody who could drain a jumpshot and play guitar the way Johnny Jones could must also have superior judgment concerning matters of contemporary fiction, I eventually acquired and attempted to read both of those books. And I was disappointed. I didn’t get it. My estimation of Jones plunged below the radar.
Jump now to the present. Forty-five years have passed under the bridge. In the course of investigating the fiction of Stanley Elkin, I borrow from the library a short-story anthology entitled “Stories from the Sixties” edited by Elkin. The fourth story in the collection is “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” by William H. Gass. Having developed an admiration for Elkin, I shrug and decide to give it a shot.
And it blows me away, folks. How could I have ever doubted a renaissance man like Johnny Jones? What was I thinking? This isn’t prose—it’s poetry; deep, insightful, poetic narrative. The set-up is this: the piece is narrated by man, presumably a poet, who is deep in contemplation of his hometown, described as “B… a small town fastened to a field in Indiana.” The story is divided into sections, titled “A Place” or “Weather” or “My House” or “A Person” etc. The one I have chosen to excerpt, I have chosen because, although it was first published in 1967, it still so well fits what might be called “the American condition." Replace the reference to the John Birch Society, with a reference to the Tea Party, and you could publish this in next week’s edition of Time Magazine:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxPOLITICS
Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated. They are the Midwest’s open sores. Ugly to see, a source of constant discontent, they sap the body’s strength. Appalling quantities of money, time, and energy are wasted on them. The rural mind is narrow, passionate, and reckless on these matters. Greed, however shortsighted and direct, will not alone account for it. I have known men, for instance, who for years have voted squarely against their interests. Nor have I ever noticed that their surly Christian views prevented them from urging forward the smithereening, say, of Russia, China, Cuba, or Korea. And they tend to back their country like they back their local team: they have a fanatical desire to win; yelling is their forte; and if things go badly, they are inclined to sack the coach. All in all, then, Birch is good name. It stands for the bigot’s stick, the wild-child-tamer’s cane.
This is not the most poetic section of the story. But I don't want to spoil those for you. Surely, you won't want to waste 45 years as I did; and based on the recommendation of Johnny Jones, you will want to read those for yourself.
X
X
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Readings: Talk Radio, Back in the Day
X
I am currently deep into reading a remarkable novel by Stanley Elkin: The Dick Gibson Show. I don’t like to look ahead while I’m reading, but I can report at this point that the novel is comprised of at least two parts. The first gives us a bit of the boyhood and familial background of ‘Dick Gibson,’ as well as depicting his self-designed apprenticeship in the world of radio, pre-WWII. Part I ends with ‘Dick Gibson’s’ stint, during WWII, as a d.j. on Armed Forces Radio, and a mind-bending hunt for a magical dodo bird on the island of Mauritius.
As Part II opens, ‘Dick Gibson’ (a nom de mic, btw) has established a radio talk show at an AM station in Hartford, CT. Now, this novel is copyrighted in 1970, so it had to have been written by Elkin largely in the sixties. The long excerpt which I’m going to share below is an index of the kind of Special Guests that Dick Gibson has had on his show. What is remarkable about this list is that although it was imagined by Elkin in the 1960s, it could have been imagined by anyone creating a similar character in 2010. Here is Dick Gibson, contemplating the nature of his guests, after having contemplated his audience:
No, he knew little about his listeners. They were not even mysterious; they were there, but distant as the Sioux. He knew more about the passionate extremists who used his microphones…-- the wild visionaries, opponents of fluoride, palmists, astrologers, the far right and far left and far center, the dianeticians, scientologists, beatniks, homosexuals from the Mattachine Society, the handwriting analysts, addicts, nudists, psychic phenomenologists, all those who believed in the Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman and the Communist Conspiracy; men beyond the beyond, black separatists who would take over Idaho and thrive by cornering the potato, pretenders to a half-dozen thrones, Krebiozonists, people from MENSA, health-food people, eaters of weed and soups of bark, cholesterolists, poly-unsaturationalists, treasure hunters, a woman who believed she held a valid Spanish land grant to all of downtown San Francisco, the Cassandras warning of poison in the white bread and cola and barbecued potato chip, conservationists jittery about the disappearing forests and the diminishing water table (and one man who claimed that the tides were a strain on the moon), would-be reformers of a dozen industries and institutions and a woman so fastidious about the separation of church and state that she would take the vote away from nuns and clergymen, capital punishers, atheists, people who wanted the abortion laws changed and a man who thought all surgery with a knife was a sin and ought to carry the same sentence as any other assault with a knife, housewives spooked by lax Food and Drug regulations, Maoists, Esperantoists, American Nazis, neo-Jaegerists, Reichians, juvenile delinquents, crionics buffs, anti-vivisectionists, witches, wizards, chief rabbis of no less than three of the twelve lost tribes of Israel, and a fellow who claimed that he died the same year Columbus discovered America.
And to imagine that this list is not even close to exhaustive!
The best laugh I got from Part I, btw, was this passage relating the point in the post-adolescence of ‘Dick Gibson’ when he is leaving home to begin his career:
His mother…called Dick aside and before his eyes transformed herself into a sacrificing mother in a sentimental fable who covertly slips all her life’s savings and most trusted talismans into her boy’s pockets to tide him on his way. She managed to make him feel like someone off to medical school in Edinburgh, say, fleeing the coal mines in which his father and his father’s father before him had worked for years, ruining their healths and blunting their spirits. When he looked in the envelope later he saw that she had given him her recipe for meat loaf.
This book is one hell of a good read.
X
I am currently deep into reading a remarkable novel by Stanley Elkin: The Dick Gibson Show. I don’t like to look ahead while I’m reading, but I can report at this point that the novel is comprised of at least two parts. The first gives us a bit of the boyhood and familial background of ‘Dick Gibson,’ as well as depicting his self-designed apprenticeship in the world of radio, pre-WWII. Part I ends with ‘Dick Gibson’s’ stint, during WWII, as a d.j. on Armed Forces Radio, and a mind-bending hunt for a magical dodo bird on the island of Mauritius.
As Part II opens, ‘Dick Gibson’ (a nom de mic, btw) has established a radio talk show at an AM station in Hartford, CT. Now, this novel is copyrighted in 1970, so it had to have been written by Elkin largely in the sixties. The long excerpt which I’m going to share below is an index of the kind of Special Guests that Dick Gibson has had on his show. What is remarkable about this list is that although it was imagined by Elkin in the 1960s, it could have been imagined by anyone creating a similar character in 2010. Here is Dick Gibson, contemplating the nature of his guests, after having contemplated his audience:
No, he knew little about his listeners. They were not even mysterious; they were there, but distant as the Sioux. He knew more about the passionate extremists who used his microphones…-- the wild visionaries, opponents of fluoride, palmists, astrologers, the far right and far left and far center, the dianeticians, scientologists, beatniks, homosexuals from the Mattachine Society, the handwriting analysts, addicts, nudists, psychic phenomenologists, all those who believed in the Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman and the Communist Conspiracy; men beyond the beyond, black separatists who would take over Idaho and thrive by cornering the potato, pretenders to a half-dozen thrones, Krebiozonists, people from MENSA, health-food people, eaters of weed and soups of bark, cholesterolists, poly-unsaturationalists, treasure hunters, a woman who believed she held a valid Spanish land grant to all of downtown San Francisco, the Cassandras warning of poison in the white bread and cola and barbecued potato chip, conservationists jittery about the disappearing forests and the diminishing water table (and one man who claimed that the tides were a strain on the moon), would-be reformers of a dozen industries and institutions and a woman so fastidious about the separation of church and state that she would take the vote away from nuns and clergymen, capital punishers, atheists, people who wanted the abortion laws changed and a man who thought all surgery with a knife was a sin and ought to carry the same sentence as any other assault with a knife, housewives spooked by lax Food and Drug regulations, Maoists, Esperantoists, American Nazis, neo-Jaegerists, Reichians, juvenile delinquents, crionics buffs, anti-vivisectionists, witches, wizards, chief rabbis of no less than three of the twelve lost tribes of Israel, and a fellow who claimed that he died the same year Columbus discovered America.
And to imagine that this list is not even close to exhaustive!
The best laugh I got from Part I, btw, was this passage relating the point in the post-adolescence of ‘Dick Gibson’ when he is leaving home to begin his career:
His mother…called Dick aside and before his eyes transformed herself into a sacrificing mother in a sentimental fable who covertly slips all her life’s savings and most trusted talismans into her boy’s pockets to tide him on his way. She managed to make him feel like someone off to medical school in Edinburgh, say, fleeing the coal mines in which his father and his father’s father before him had worked for years, ruining their healths and blunting their spirits. When he looked in the envelope later he saw that she had given him her recipe for meat loaf.
This book is one hell of a good read.
X
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
