From Poetry Flash, Number 128, November 1983; posted here with permission of the author
La Fontaine by Bruce Boone and Robert Glück, Black Star Series, San Francisco, 1981. 71 pages, $5.00 paper.
Elements of a Coffee Service by Robert Glück, Four Seasons Foundation, San Francisco, 1982. 96 pages, $5.95 paper.
Whenever childhood was invented (was it as recently as the 18th century?) it became the dumping ground for the adults’ outgrown and useless cultural effects: myths, folktales, fables. What enlightened, rational mind could view these relics of the primitive or peasant past and not dismiss them as stuff fit only for children? But for himself? why, he had science now and knew better. And weren’t fables written to teach moral principles? Just what the children needed: an entertaining package with a bit of wisdom wrapped in to redeem it. And so we all grew up reading Aesop in grade school, and fairy tales, but mostly we went to the movies (today’s children are instructed privately and from birth at their TV’s knees) and learned the Walt Disney versions. I found them more scary than funny: didn’t anyone notice how mean these animals were to one another? Of course this has nothing to do with innocence. One’s incipient cynicism was confirmed as the years hardened into adulthood. The world was even more stupid, greedy, hypocritical and murderous than the cartoons had taught us it would be. “Hollywood has come a long way from animal stories like the Fables…” Boone and Glück remark in their introduction to these new “translations/alterations” of La Fontaine. One might have a look at, say, Ariel Dorfman’s How to Read Donald Duck to judge that distance.
La Fontaine may well have wondered at the tricks of history. Though he certainly never intended his work for children, “generations of sullen French schoolchildren will sit glumly through this on generations of sullen stone benches.” He wrote for the sophisticated ruling class “aslant,” as Boone and Glück observe, “about money and power.” Their work is as much a critique of La Fontaine as it is a translation. Indeed, it is a critique of nearly everything in sight. They start right off: “Does La Fontaine patronize his animals?” Does he patronize women, children, the weak and the poor? They’d like to spare him a little. They remember that he walked a very thin tight rope. They’d “love to think he still valued these animals, was true to his childhood loves…” Still, Boone and Glück “bare the device,” all the brilliant devices of this clever La Fontaine, and give us a wonderfully personal reading (they don’t disappear behind the masks of translators—they do that third kind of translation about which George Steiner writes on page 253 of After Babel—a kind which is also serious political commentary/comedy).
The cover of this book (by Tom Thompson) is itself a brilliant metaphor: the device of course is the demonic face of an animal (bear? or lion?), teeth literally bared in aggression. This savage beast is set against the image of pink and swirly marbled paper. It represents perfectly the contradictions of La Fontaine’s civilization. Boone and Glück bring those contradictions up to date. We participate. In this book “they remind me of something—what selfishness might be in another time, without cruelty, exploitation. It’s beyond knowing.”
When Bruce Boone and Bob Glück are not actually collaborating on a project such as La Fontaine, they become recurrent figures in each other’s stories. An earlier work of Boone’s is called My Walk with Bob, and since the appearance of La Fontaine Glück has published Elements of a Coffee Service, a collection of narratives through which “Bruce” wanders with others in complex interrelationships that illustrate themes of violence, sexuality, power, filial love, gay experience and safety. A certain event in the life of this Bruce becomes the peg on which Glück hangs a tale (truly, in every sense of that word including the archaic “tally or reckoning”—the toll) which will serve as an example, as well as any piece in this book, of the way he discovers the ramifications and nuances of his themes. This tale (“When Bruce Was 36 [Gossip and Scandal]”) begins: “When Bruce was 36 he learned the name and address of his real mother and introduced himself to her.” Peg in place.
Oedipus is only the most famous story in which the question of parentage is crucial; “the family romance” (in Freud’s sense) is a nearly universal fantasy. In Glück’s tale the question of the plot (“Who are my real parents?”) becomes one of the elements of the narrative. From the Greeks to the Victorians the fate of the orphan, the bastard, the adopted child has been played out in various literary works from folktales to novels, but the onus is on this child and really (stripped of the details) there are only two possible outcomes: he/she finds appropriate parent surrogates (or sometimes, miraculously, a long lost real parent) or fails tragically in the attempt. (Oedipus, of course, finds a real parent but in the context of an inappropriate relationship.) Glück would demystify this plot-as-fate, articulate its shifting boundaries, imagine possible alternative versions or solutions.
After all, what made the classic plot work was a sense of inevitability about a given set of social and psychological relationships which were seen as largely unalterable. What Glück brings into play is a radical subjectivity, an acute self-consciousness which is informed by the paradoxical idea that the self is, at least in part, a fiction. It’s not that this fictional self is illusory; it’s founded rather on the affirmation of belief in the world as a necessary prerequisite for change: “To believe in the world marks you oddly as a visionary. In order to change the world you must believe in it, the things that make it up, the ideas that inform these things, the connections between them.” To change the world Glück is constantly re-inventing the self, rapidly and delicately altering, questioning, proposing partial scenarios with a great deal of verve and wit.
The charm of Glück’s writing is its discursiveness. The question of Bruce’s relationship to his newly found mother opens into all kinds of speculation on the ways we touch each other: he rambles around the territory of subjectivity, family and social structures, radical politics, and sexuality, drawing on anecdote, dream, projection to illuminate his observations.
One of the nice twists in this narrative is Glück’s invention of the figure Jane, Bruce’s mother. In the old plots the mother is (usually) simply an absence and the orphan-hero is the focus of attention. But Glück brings the mother out of exile from the underworld of dream and myth, of gossip, scandal, and silence, and gives her a residence among us: rather, she is still subject, like we are, to these forms of exile, and at the same time she has “the mobility to assess and to act.”
Finally, as Glück writes: “It’s scandal’s defining of boundaries that interests me, what is inside and what is outside—it’s one way a community organizes itself, tells itself its story about what is forbidden and expected.”
That the mother of an illegitimate child is still a figure at the boundary, in peril, would seem to be the conclusion of this tale. Glück imagines a myth in which “pleasure rains across her body defining it in rivulets of Greek cloth.” She becomes an inanimate object, or anyway something other than human (presumably as punishment for her indiscretion) and Glück notes: “That she is oppressed, even by this myth, is undeniable.” Indeed, this myth is the very sign of her oppression. “Also,” he continues, “she did what she wanted.” She stands at the great divide, the boundary as ancient as humanity, between culture and nature. If she will not deliver her child to the culture in accordance with its law, she must disappear forever into wild nature. To question this boundary is to question the very foundation of civilization.
Elements of a Coffee Service goes a long way to disarrange our attitudes about boundaries of all kinds. It’s a pleasure and a disturbance to read.