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Merwin Recollected: Echo-Futures With or Without Us
Essays

Merwin’s Prose Poetry: Collective Memory in Uncanny Short Fiction

Françoise Palleau-Papin

Résumés

Dans ses premiers recueils de textes de poésie en prose, The Miner’s Pale Children (1970) et Houses and Travellers (1977), W.S. Merwin dénonce le hiatus entre le passé et le présent, l’écart qui s’est creusé au fil du temps entre les générations, ainsi qu’entre l’humanité et la nature. Il explore ces liens manquants grâce à une multiplicité de procédés littéraires et stylistiques qui présentent les résurgences du passé comme autant de motifs obsédants dans l’inconscient collectif, quand la transmission de la mémoire a été perturbée ou interrompue. Il se sert de la répétition et de certaines fonctions syntaxiques pour suggérer le refoulé dans sa poésie en prose, empruntant à plusieurs traditions littéraires, dont la narration allégorique qu’il adapte pour figurer la perte de mémoire, d’une manière déroutante. Il invite ainsi les lecteurs à rassembler les fragments d’un monde étrange, afin de prendre la mesure de ce qui ne peut être recouvré, dans une écriture qui met en avant la perte comme un événement collectif plutôt qu’individuel.

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1Merwin’s prose poems resist classification and interpretation, and it is not very surprising that no thorough criticism has been devoted to the corpus. This might be because our critical tools need some forays into other disciplinary fields to explore the purpose of such resistance to an easy reading. This paper offers to analyze the rather difficult prose poems or, more generically dubbed, short prose pieces, in Merwin’s early works The Miner’s Pale Children (first published in 1970) and Houses and Travellers (first published in 1977). Both collections were later reprinted separately before they were united by Copper Canyon Press under the title The Book of Fables in 2007. It is interesting to notice that they were brought together and given a second print life under the tag of “fables” at a time when the prose pieces of Lydia Davis, among several other contemporary writers whom we will briefly mention, converged into a new range of texts, between poetry and narrative, all resisting classification into predefined literary genres.

  • 1 In this story, the narrator, as well as the character, sound like avatars of Bartleby, unless they (...)
  • 2 “La circulation de l’information, des sentiments et du vécu entre les uns et les autres passe donc (...)
  • 3 “L’émotion, l’interdit et les angoisses qui lui sont liés vivent leur propre vie à l’intérieur d’un (...)

2So let us travel through their abysses evoked in all the pieces, such as “The Abyss” or “The Trembler,” a story in which a Melvillian1 narrator ironically considers “the abyss into which we are all happily travelling” (1994a 73). Let us explore the ways Merwin’s short-fiction collections depict uncanny resurgences of the past as haunting figures in a collective unconscious, once memory and a sense of inheritance have been lost or damaged. The notion of a collective unconscious is not to be taken in the sense of Carl Jung’s primal instincts, archetypes or universal set of drives in a mystical conception of an autonomous psyche, although Jung’s assertion that “the collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings” (112) is not very far from Merwin’s relationship with his forefathers, but rather in the sense of a cross-generational repression, which Barbara Couvert aptly calls the “family co-unconscious” (106)2 built around a family secret, with its long-term consequences: “The emotions, the ban, the anxieties linked to the secret have a life of their own in the person they inhabit like parasites and live on in the following generations without any connection to the person’s actual experience” (Couvert 115, translation mine). 3 The lack of any direct connection to the real and personal experience is what comes across as uncanny in Merwin’s prose poetry, as if some mechanical agency was at work in the living, signaling a repressed co-unconscious across the generations and in close history. We understand the “uncanny” as David Lodge defined it, following Tzvetan Todorov’s categorization, as a tale in which “a rational explanation of the supernatural phenomena” may be “possible” while it remains open to interpretation (Lodge 212). What Merwin adds to the idea of a cross-generational transmission of neuroses is the horizontal panning of such repressions in an entire generation, more broadly than in any specific family: one particular cross-generational repression often reverberates many others, and Merwin managed to find a literary form for such a large-scale transmission of a difficult history, bringing together the memories of individual narrators, of families, as well as that of several nations in his odd short fiction pieces, which borrow from many literary traditions across the ages, such as tales, fables, or parables, all bringing realism and surrealism together.

Reverting Time’s Arrow

3Before analyzing the short fiction strictly speaking, some contextualization brings to light the poet’s intentions. In Naked Poetry, a collection of “American poetry in open forms” published shortly before his first short fiction collection, Merwin includes a three-page essay entitled “On open form,” in which he writes: “Our age pesters us with the illusion that we have realized a great deal. The agitation serves chiefly to obscure what we have forgotten, into whose limbo poetry herself at times seems about to pass” (Merwin, 1969 271). Written in or shortly before 1969, the statement takes on a concern that is rarely expressed by people who were, like Merwin, staunch opponents to the Vietnam War and the conservatism of mainstream America at the time of the Civil Rights Movement and the student protests of 1968. In this opinion piece, Merwin speaks for an entire generation. Born in September 1927, Merwin was about 42 years old when the collection was published. For this poet nearing young middle-age and achieving recognition (as he lived to be 91), who had already published The Moving Target (Atheneum, 1963) and The Lice (Atheneum, 1967), who published regularly in The New Yorker and in Poetry, at least two things are remarkable about this statement. Against the grain of the political protests of the time, which aimed to make room for the new, and free the people oppressed by segregation and the draft, and against a generally lethal conservatism, he stresses what has been “forgotten”; and in so doing, he turns the word “poetry” into a gendered noun, in the feminine. A supporter of the new, of open form without shapelessness, Merwin stresses the danger of obliterating tradition, when he writes: “neither technique nor abstract form can be abandoned, finally” (1969 270). He fears a generation without a past, forgetful of ancient art forms, and concerned with the present self-regeneration to the point of reinventing the wheel. He calls himself a “formalist” but also stresses that form is not everything. For him, poetry “touches on all that is unrealized” (1969 271). Against the smugness of thinking one has pinnacled above the past, that one can wipe a slate clean of tradition, and while emphasizing the role of time and poetry’s inscription in a particular time, Merwin praises poetry’s fragile grasp of what is unrealized. He highlights poetry’s birthing capacity, her care for process and continuity rather than end, her incompleteness in solipsism, and her desire to pass creation onto others, continuously. She’s a woman, capable of birthing the repressed, or mothering what might come to be; she is a possible matrix of “all that is unrealized.” And most importantly, she is not alone.

4In the collection of short prose pieces The Miner’s Pale Children (first published in 1970), Merwin sets out to signify the repressed for an entire era, spanning his parents’ generation and his own. Yet the pieces are not directly autobiographical. They expose the repressed of the age more generally, in many forms which suggest an ancient literary heritage, but so jumbled up as to be rendered “rich and strange” (Shakespeare, The Tempest, I, ii.). Merwin’s biographical journey alone suggests that as soon as he was able to, after his university years, he moved to Europe and never ceased to counter his ancestors’ sea journey to America and their colonization of the lands, be they continental territories or overseas. He renovated an old house in France and later built one in Hawaii, inscribing himself in a different history. Going against time’s arrow symbolically, three decisions seem to mark his progress backwards: first, he married an English woman, taking part in the literary circles of his ancestors’ nation for a while; second, his settling down in France, a historical enemy of England during the Hundred Years’ War, gave him access to a disappearing rural world with its own nearly extinct language (Occitan); and third, his work in setting up a Conservancy in Hawaii to preserve palm trees, and writing an epic poem from the native viewpoint—all decisions and actions seem to reverse the vectors of several onslaughts of colonization. Ceaselessly, in his personal life as well as in his works, Merwin has tackled the healing process of “Unchopping a Tree” (1994a 85), of going against the previous destruction, all too aware of the impossibility of the actual task described in the piece of fiction, but of its great symbolic value for all generations, including ours.

5In his 1970 publications, Merwin sets out to explore the murky collective past in depth, exposing what is usually kept underground. First, the title of the prose collection presents a plural, and a class: The “miner’s pale children” are not described, but named generically. They have no face, and they have no voice, kept silent in the collection as no fragment describes or calls upon them directly; they evoke a class of people who are often silent sociologically, because underfed and underground (“pale”) or underprivileged children more rarely make it to the more vocal professions of the well-to-do classes. Wealthier children are expected to become educated and take part in debating contests, but not the miner’s pale children. The themes of the collection also evoke what is usually kept silent for many reasons, including shame or shady ethics. “The Dachau Shoe” describes a shoe which a relative “picked up at Dachau” in an uneasy third-person narration full of self-justifications, denial and repressed guilt about the Holocaust, all revolving on the strange impulse to keep a souvenir, while refusing to analyze that impulse, as if Dachau was a place the narrator’s cousin visited as a tourist rather than a soldier on a mission. The succession of repetitions makes for a very uncomfortable read, as it smoothes over many ethical hurdles under the same anaphora in each opening sentence, and in the recurrent use of the radical “thing” (four times in close succession):

He explained he didn’t steal it because it must have belonged to a Jew who was dead. He explained that he wanted some little thing. He explained that the Russians looted everything. They just took anything. He explained that it wasn’t top quality to begin with. He explained that the guards or the kapos would have taken it if it had been any good. He explained that he was lucky to have got anything. (1994a 15, emphasis mine)

6In a piece of forty-nine lines, the phrase “he explained” or “he explains” is used twenty-three times, about once every other line, before the final conclusion: “you learn a lot from his explanations” (1994a 16). One learns a lot about what the cousin does not say as well, and which the narrator only evokes laconically: “Actually we share a German grandfather” (1994a 16). The narrative moves from the past to the present tense when talking about the shoe’s removal to the cellar of the cousin’s house. The cellar becomes an image of memory, of what lies buried beneath the present glibness of postwar times, with the image of burial in a “box”: “Now he has it down in the cellar in a box” (1994a 16). The double containers, the box and the cellar, cannot bury the shoe deep enough though, because in the last paragraph, the narrator invites the readers to take part in the uncanny experience of looking at the shoe: “You really ought to go and see it. He’ll show it to you. All you have to do is ask” (1994a 16).

Syntactic Screens

7Not only do the themes of the prose pieces allude to the repressed memories of an entire generation, but the syntax also participates in the general obfuscation, hiding things in language the better to signify that there is a secret buried in the telling. In many ways, the collection builds up a set of screen memories for an entire generation who were eager to erase the past in the 1960s, some passages signaling by their weirdness, uncanny and dream-like quality that the images conveyed are screens displacing and rearranging the memories, and inviting the readers to recompose the pieces into a meaningful narrative, like an analyst putting together a fragmented collective psyche rather than an individual’s.

8Obfuscation seems to be a rule, screening meaning from our consciousness and forcing us to probe the pieces which resist understanding, as in analysis, in which the reader stands for the therapist. This first appears in the syntax. The collection The Miner’s Pale Children displays a few delayed predicates, with an inversion of subject and verb order, as if staging the meaning of a sentence from a distance, as in the poem “The Weight of Sleep” the word order seems to display the difficulty of accessing sleep, and thus the unconscious, for the narrative voice who belatedly shows where sleep sits, enthroned: “There is the weight of sleep, properly speaking: its throne. There the wheel’s mass preserves its motion. There its stillness dreams of falling.” The use of the adverb “there” is a way of delaying the predicate, and of staging a mystery after the opening description, which described nothing in the way of introduction: “The hub is darkness. Across one side is a segment of solid black.” With such non-descriptive mysterious staging, one can only access tautology: “There what it is dreams of what it is” (Merwin, 1994a 23).

9Elsewhere, in the volume’s otherwise fairly simple and sparse expression, if not of simple meaning, a few passages are remarkable for the way they stretch the limits of sentences with interpolated elements or clauses between the subject and the predicate, thus delaying information. The opening sentence of “In a Dark Square,” for example, defines the reason why myths, and their transmission, matter: “He who has lost the key to the ancient lies which everyone held in common is wandering at night, by himself, in an empty square surrounded by featureless doors, with no one to listen to how many telephone numbers he has memorized” (1994a 49). The narrator interpolates the long relative clause “who has lost the key to the ancient lies which everyone held in common” between the short subject “He” and the predicate “is wandering at night” in a mimicry of the topic of wandering, suggesting that the character’s “wandering” in the dark is syntactically as well as thematically metaphorical of erring. The form of the sentence thus indicates that memory is useless if the accompanying tales of our mythology are missing, because we understand who we are only if we know where we come from, and what tales have come before us, to define our world and our place in it, and the way we are part of nature ourselves. The modernity of telephone numbers thus intrudes as anachronistic and useless, because no contact or phone conversation will help us get a footing in the world without a deeper sense of the continuity of the tale of how we belong to nature and should relate to everyone else and to all its parts.

10In Houses and Travellers, the mystery of the language of nature, audible to the poet under certain circumstances, can be extracted from the convoluted syntax in the opening paragraph of “A Conversation”:

There is a wind that when it turns I hear the garden and the desert discussing things with each other. Sometimes in the garden, sometimes in the desert, day or night. Mud walls, stone walls, no walls, limestone, sheep far away, howling, birds singing, hissing, trickling silence, dry smells, watered smells, moons, stars, flowers that are keys between them. (Merwin, 1994b 22)

11Such repetitions and echoes in the enumerative structure of the sentences seem to belittle the powers of the narrator to describe, as if any mimetic attempt to capture the world was doomed in our loss of the connecting principle between the items of the list.

12A sideway foray into Merwin’s verse shows a similar concern. In the poem “Island City” from the 1982 collection Finding the Islands, a stanza repeats a verb in an otherwise sparse line, when describing the action of the mist which screens the countryside from the poet’s view:

At night the autumn mist
arrives and arrives in silence
but the eaves drip through the dark (1982 25)

13Among images of mist obscuring vision, and silence pointing to the impossibility of pathetic fallacy, nature remains inaudible to mankind, when only man-made “eaves” make any sound (as signaled by the shifter “but”). The poem revolves around images the speaker sees during sleep rather than observes in hours of wakefulness, openly suggesting a plunge into an unconscious vision, recomposing from disjointed elements, as here the place is “unknown” to the observer:

Sleeping I saw the new moon
through the open window
of an unknown kitchen (1982 25)

14Likewise, in the collection of prose poems The Miner’s Pale Children, repetitions suggest a probe into the unconscious with displacement to overcome a resistance to remembrance, but in this case the dream-like vision does not belong to an individual psyche; rather, this vision provides access to some collective memory, made explicit with the clause “they say” in “The Cheese Seller”: “Everything, they say, everything that ever exists even for a moment floats on the black lake, the black lake, and there at each moment what is reflected is its opposite what is reflected is” (1994b 166).

15The repetitive mentions of an unreadable reflection and a dark mirror image suggest access to repressed memories or the unconscious in Merwin’s works, and the repression of the memory from consciousness occasions physical symptoms of unease, repeated several times like the hurdle of the trauma it signifies obsessively without revealing the reasons of the faulty “heart”:

Instead of my heart being variously oppressed by my heart being variously oppressed by the interruption, by not being allowed to listen, the interruption, by not being allowed to listen, by the neglect of the old cheeses one by one, it is variously delighted by the untroubled encomium, the prospect of—no, I will go on leaving myself out of it. (1994b 167)

16Here a number of stylistic elements converge into symptoms: the obsessive repetitions around the “heart” being “oppressed” and the submission to a higher power repeatedly turning the speaker into a passive form (“not being allowed to listen”), as well as the syntactic anacoluthon of the sentence around “the interruption”—all emphasizing the omnipresence of the speaker’s trauma, and turning the final assertion that he “will go on leaving [him]self out of it” terribly funny in its obvious denial.

  • 4 “Simonized” may also pun on “simony, buying or selling of something spiritual or closely connected (...)

17The mirroring image of the “black lake” in “The Cheese Seller” thus sends a darkened, unreadable vision of the self, possibly obscured by the looming father figure one finds in the autobiographical sketch “Tomatoes” (from the “recollections” collected in Unframed Originals). The narrator remembers his father’s old Buick, not without humor, once the Minister’s figure has been put at a safe distance through the therapeutic depiction of his neurotic gestures: “The body of the car, from the windowsills down, was a lustrous blue, a twilit sky color. It looked as though you could see far into it, as into water, and my father, and a series of men from the church ritually, indeed reverently, washed and Simonized it”4 (2005 17). What makes this original is that the access to some profound truth (“as though you could see far into it”), ironically suggested but not explored, is collective and gendered. Here it brings together the minister and other dehumanized “series of men from the church” into a ritual that has all the trappings of a church ritual, but a rather unorthodox transcendence. The father figure has been put at the safe distance of analysis and humor.

18The story “The Uncle” describes the perceptions of the narrator when he inherits from a similar father figure, on the occasion of his visiting the vacant factory and lodgings of his uncle after his demise:

To stand in front of it under its own unrepeatable clouds and to hear the silence coming from the building coming from the building coming from the building as a whole and dwarfing the voices of the local worthies in their darkest suits emerging ahead of you and around you from their dark cars drawn up on the edge of the cinders as on the edge of a beach. The silence coming from the building and drowning the notes of their car doors slamming, of their affable weightless exchanges. (1994b 205)

19The passage repeats “coming from the building” four times, the last time taking up the entire expression from the first occurrence, “the silence coming from the building” in a rounding up for greater emphasis. The echo of silence resonates in written words only, paradoxically duplicating the silence in another medium, in a strangely mimetic way. The double aporia of making silence audible through words suggests a desire to emulate the world, and its insistence bespeaks a metaphysical meaning, when the “it” of “To stand in front of it” stands for the long noun phrase “this huge blistered edifice with its once-white clapboard here and there swinging loose in the ceaseless wind of the prairie and knocking on the walls like boats.” This poetic description encapsulates the Westward progress of the pioneers in its metaphors, from their ocean journey to their crossing the prairie and settling down in clapboard houses. Thus, the inheritance is not the narrator’s only, but enlarged to the country’s heritage and expressing the common burden of history.

Ostentatious Secrets

20This is probably one of Merwin’s most characteristic traits: the more personal his images and reminiscences are, the more collective the evocation is. The psychological burden is shared, as expressed by his narrative voices, at once intimate and generic, at once repressed and brought to the fore, in an uncanny vision of strangely collective memories, both dated precisely (with the use of the verb form “Simonize” in “The Tomatoes” previously quoted) and brought to the level of timeless mythology; he depicts memories called up by a very personal consciousness, giving access to the intimacy of dreams that could well be ours, across the times. The fragmented visions and mostly unexplained succession of images and causality in The Miner’s Pale Children thus take on the aspect of a sequence of dreams being narrated and shared, of an unconscious being opened up for all to inhabit. Among many examples one could choose from, the section entitled “Being Born Again” comments on such dislocations of images, as in the change of paragraph between the narrator’s observation of the current of a stream (“What will come down that current? I see only the paper boat which I know to be sleep, disappearing behind some willows. It had something to tell me. It is sorry.”) and the sentence opening the following paragraph: “The whole scene comes and goes” (Merwin, 1994a 48). The process of opening up the most foreign part of the self and making sense of the pieces afterwards is what is at stake in the collection, suggesting an unconscious to be passed on and processed by the responsive readers, possibly in the hope of triggering an analytic response, rather than a historical and impersonal analysis of the past.

21Accessing such a general unconscious for a generation, Merwin’s definition of memory goes even further back. Memory is not only personal, but also genetically encoded in the poem “The Rose Beetle” (the last poem in the collection The Rain in the Trees, 78). Like insects, human memory is shared by many, both synchronically and diachronically, like the genetic encoding of beetles who have never seen the land where their “ancestors” came from, but carve the same lace from the local leaves as their genetic forebears did of other leaves in China, turning them “into an arid net/into sky//like the sky long ago over China” (Merwin, 1988 78).

  • 5 Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, also known as The Big Five, are the American compani (...)

22Even if genetic, memory blooms where it will, the displacement across continents being bridged over in the suggested transcendence of the sky image, bringing a sense of reassuring permanence. Most importantly, memory cannot be archived by machines, as the story “The Remembering Machines of Tomorrow” points out ironically, in an enthusiastic description of a world close to our own today, in which everything can be data-based and privately owned: “The memories of the dead will be available in the new repositories, and many will be privately owned” (Merwin, 1994a 130). Imagined before the world of computers and the GAFAM5 took over, data bases called “new repositories” are here foreseen to go one step beyond the genealogies of the Mormons, and to include private musings and remembrances. The narrator only relaxes his ironic tone at the end of the fable, with two caveats, first: “Attached to every person like a tiny galaxy will be the whole of his past—or what he takes to be the whole of his past” (1994a 130-131); and secondly, the final sentence is set in a paragraph of its own, with a clear threat devoid of irony: “Then one by one, but with growing frequency, men will begin to lose their machines” (1994a 131). The whole story stresses the difference between “remembering” with its flawed and creative process, and “a memory recorded with mechanical objectivity” (1994a 129), but does not develop the consequences of such a mechanical intrusion in the psyche. Cancelling the possibility of processing memory, cancelling “the imaginary liberties of the ages of forgetting” (1994a 129), the new machines bring Orwell’s Brave New World into the psyche, erasing the workings of the unconscious and the intricacies of desire in our daily negotiations between our past and our present in every decision we make, consciously or not. The story seems to stress that memory must compose with the obfuscations of our repressed and unconscious thoughts, for fear we lose the depth of unknown drives which make us human.

23Unsettling the mechanical conceptions of memory as a self-contained, exhaustive data base even in his composition, Merwin writes mostly wide-open endings, or even, contradictory endings going against what the stories or parables have established, forbidding any stable decryption of metaphors we might have aspired to. As Jane Frazier remarks in her 1999 book-length study of Merwin’s poetry, “The prose poems of Merwin are no doubt his most difficult works to interpret. For their degree of surrealism many are quite obscure, and these pieces have been abandoned more often than not by critics” (110). Indeed, Merwin’s reluctance to establish any stable decryption is one way of keeping us one foot in the air when we thought we had grasped the correspondences of the metaphorical or allegorical construct of the story, imagining we had both feet firmly planted on each side of the “decoding,” as David Lodge defines allegory as “a specialized form of symbolic narrative, which does not merely suggest something beyond its literal meaning, but insists on being decoded in terms of another meaning” (143). Without closure, or with added obfuscation, the last sentence of “The Smell of Cold Soup” further complicates the main point of the story, as it introduces a new element of threat at the very end of the final sentence, contradicting the address “You know” opening the story and the final sentence:

You know from the smell of cold soup that they would still understand if you were to break through to them—as you could if you really cared enough—and tell them that whatever else happens we have not ceased to be ourselves, and that the war is still going on somewhere. (1994a 165)

24In the collection, such recurrent befuddling and changes of focus (here from a kitchen to the world at large) end up casting a pall of doubt over the simpler paragraphs and pieces, as if they hid some further correspondences with other allegorical strata of meaning, although no clear parallelism can be established in the easier pieces either. Such obfuscation, found in the most surrealistic pieces, contaminates the entire collection, in such a way that the more self-explanatory pieces may be read as possible screens, just as a psyche may have screen memories, shielding the consciousness of the less admissible thoughts or constructs of memory. As we will see, the entire story “What Happened While They Were Away” (1994a 157-160) is a case study of this contamination. The fantasy, or referential reality within the story, of parasites or interlopers lurking in the cellar of a house comes to exemplify the repressed beneath any regular-looking story, or in the foundations of a plain looking (storied-)house. Topically, any sedate appearance thus comes to signify that the object under observation might have parasites beneath the surface, or that there must be more than meets the eye. Secrets, contradictions, uncanny descriptions evading the causalities of realism even as they claim to sound plausible, and entering the realm of dreams or fantasies: many or most of the pieces signal in their composition and writing the “accomplishment of repressed desires” (Freud 106) which one achieves indirectly through screen memories.

The Difficulty of Vision

25In that sense, the image of the old lady living in the cellar unbeknownst to the owners of the house, in “What Happened While They Were Away,” may be read metatextually as a mode of composition in the collection. As in Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 film Parasite, the repressed of class-consciousness or some unacknowledged fault lurks below the ground floor. In the story, the old woman living in the cellar is a skeleton by the time the narrator gets to her, and her bedside audience of two old men, both uninvited parasites like her, have seen her die in the most paranormal restitution of the images she had accumulated in her lifetime: “everything that she had ever seen had begun to flow in two almost identical films that ran down her face and over the bed and onto the floor and out the door, while they sat and watched and everything became clearer and clearer” (Merwin, 1994a 160). What such films reveal is left out of the narration, like a secret establishing its power ostentatiously as a mystery, withholding the revelation it suggests. As a metanarrative comment on the collection, the troubling image refuses to reveal any stable vision, and the intradiegetic old men cannot provide access to what they may have seen as “clearer,” because the comparative has no stable ground to compare their vision to. The story lets the skeletons lie in the cellar of the house of fiction, barring access to the revelation, and frustrating the narrator and the readers in the process.

26Many stories deal with the impossibility of actual vision, as in “The Roofs,” “The Abyss,” or even “The Knives.” In “The Roofs,” the main paradox is that it seems easier to dream about the next village, called the “other” village, than to attempt a visit. The knowledge gained from recurrent dreams about it sounds actual and detailed:

It was a dream that returned at intervals over several years, always essentially the same, but always in greater detail. Gradually I came to know the other village in those dreams: the corners of lanes, the massive stone portals, the doors open into courtyards, the smells of cow barns and of meals cooking over fires fed with some unfamiliar wood, the backs of women vanishing into kitchen doors, leaving their fresh-hung laundry behind them—it’s true I never saw their faces. (1994a 180)

  • 6 In a text unpublished in English and written for the French collection L’Appel du Causse, published (...)

27Echoing Kafka’s novel The Castle, the narrator’s goal may not be reached geographically, but here it may be accessed through the portal of dreams and the unconscious. The description reminds us of the Quercy in Southwestern France, where Merwin had a house and lived for several years, and which appears in many of his works, most notably in his beautiful collection of poems, The Vixen (Knopf, 1996). It all sounds as if the only way to see a place in all the sensory layering of its smells, its architecture, its cooking habits, its laundry-hanging sights, one needed more than conscious vision. If eyesight is not enough or is impeded, an unconscious preparation is required, closer to desire and anticipation than to actual observation, as if Merwin’s house in the Quercy had always be meant to be his, unconsciously even before he set eyes on it, preparing his love at first sight when he happened upon it for the first time. As Merwin explains in “Loving the Upland,” there is an element of mystery in the encounter, which no explanation can begin to capture: “To me in those first years, the great landscape of the Causse was filled with the secrecy—the other side of the revelation—of a work of art.” (Merwin, 2013 62) 6. Merwin shies away from explaining the secrecy of a culture understood as art, and in some stories, such as “The Abyss,” he even stands in the dark, all too conscious of his limited vision.

28“The Abyss” in particular goes against Emerson’s famous claim in his 1836 essay “Nature” that the self could erase its “egotism” and see nature in a God-like vision: “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God” (Emerson 39). On the contrary, Merwin’s narrative voices seem to doubt their visual capacity, claiming that the observer may even impede the light of nature from shining, in particular when no access to the revelation is allowed, for fear of being presumptuous: “For I am held up by nothing but a transparent film like the skin of a bubble, which stretches across the darkness from side to side. Above it my head. Below it everything else. […] Below me, far below me, the light is a little clearer, but it is sealed away from my eyes, and only in that condition can it shine” (1994a 183, my ellipsis). The words used to show the barrier between the narrator’s eyes and the visible things are strong: the verbal phrase “sealed away” carries an agency, with a determination to forbid access to what is coveted, making the revelation of some post-apocalyptic world, or even the current world, forever out of reach.

29The story “Knives” calls for a better vision than one narrowed down by self-interest. The first-person narrator expresses himself in the plural pronoun “we” for all mankind, to explain the paradox that people are blinded by their use of things such as knives, when the knives themselves, although devoid of any eyes, are more than the painful use we make of them: “We see only the service we ask of them—separation, separation, and pain. Without which, as we say, we would be nothing. So we never see those meek faces themselves, moving in a world upon which they open no eyes at all, about which they know nothing, and of whose savageries they have become a symbol” (1994a 185). Not only do the blind knives have faces, but what’s more, they have “meek faces” who, no doubt, shall inherit the earth (according to Matthew 5, 5).

30In his excellent book-length study of Merwin’s works, H. L. Hix emphasizes the idea of separateness in Merwin’s ecological consciousness, as Merwin is all too aware of the influence the observer has over the observed: “Like anthropologists studying small-scale societies they purport to respect, his very presence corrupted what he sought to witness in its purity” (83-84). Merwin warned his readers of the danger of interference as early as 1970 with “The Abyss.” If the observer is thus variably incapacitated, limited, or constrained in his rendering of experience, perceived through the distortion of “a transparent film like the skin of a bubble” (1994a 183, quoted above), he can only provide a contrived referential grasp of the world. In the story “The Death-defying Tortonis” the narrator makes many references to his impeded vision, in particular in the most dangerous situations, when every perception might help: “I roll the front wheel onto the wire eighty feet above the ground, with nothing below it except dark air. Dark in our eyes despite the floodlights” (1994a 103). The act of writing is such a prowess of equilibrium on a wire, when the writer’s observation skill implies that he is willing to receive the dark into his eyes, paradoxically, rather than to follow the more conventional expectation of looking into the dark to probe its depth, and while the glary floodlights of artificial lighting, or common, conscious observation, cannot help.

31In that sense, Merwin’s short pieces are precursors of other depictions of the uncanny and of reality as a source of loss and befuddlement, not unlike the ones Mary Caponegro, Lydia Davis and Ben Marcus have written about more recently. Mary Caponegro’s sense of the uncanny finds a poetic and lyrical expression in her dissections of family life in The Complexities of Intimacy, where her writing displays a rare blend of humor and empathy, eroticism and otherworldly spirit, realism and surrealism. Her stories often sound like fables, full of the wonder of Eastern Antiquity in Tales from the Next Village, or oddly immerse her readers in the prosaic life of contemporary misfits, in All Fall Down. As for her, Lydia Davis explores the uncanny in her many collections of short prose pieces, in which the rational explanation of puzzling disturbances is threatened by some obscure sense of irreducible wonder, as in her “Circular Story” the loop of her formal return to the same sentence belies the easy explanation of noise, and it is worth quoting the story fully here:

On Wednesday mornings early there is always a racket out there on the road. It wakes me up and I always wonder what it is. It is always the trash collection truck picking up the trash. The truck comes every Wednesday morning early. It always wakes me up. I always wonder what it is. (Davis 5)

32Through her use of repetition and her return to the same, the explanation of the narrator’s sense of wonder butts against the hurdle she cannot overcome, in a vicious circle. Things may all well be rationally explained by the return of the trash collection truck, but how extraordinary they feel, all the same, her syntax seems to say. And Ben Marcus uses the form of dictionary definitions or very short stories sounding like a taxonomy of the world in The Age of Wire and String, the better to unsettle our grasp of the world. According to Peter Vernon in his study of the collection, Marcus inaugurates “the creation of a new language whereby the author does not so much give voice to the inanimate, but allows the inanimate to write itself, which has the effect of altering all our expectations of referentiality” (Vernon 122).

33With a great deal of formal innovation, all explore a sense of loss and unacknowledged melancholy expressed mostly through short fictional pieces, and may invite their readers to map out the miscarriage in the transmission. With Merwin, readers are invited to explore the gaps between the present and the past, revisiting the obscure, as well as the fragments of other narratives, with the conventions of fables, dream-narratives, surrealism and magical thinking as so many bridges over the losses of memory, in the hope of understanding our present-day disjunct world—together.

34The collection The Miner’s Pale Children thus provides a sense of belonging, because even though the vignettes do not fill in the blanks of the solipsistic disruptions, even though they show images as disconnected as in dreams, yet by emphasizing the gaps in the logical connectors as a communal loss, or the echoing repetitions as symptomatic hurdles for all, they manage to unsettle readers into an active response. Relying on the versatile narrative combinations of prose in a variety suggesting the accumulation of literary history across the ages, the “fragments, essays, journal entries, instructions and lists, oral tales, fables” (Merwin, 1994a xiv), the pseudo-allegorical stories, or parable-like pieces put together may offer hope for a renewed acknowledgment of a collective historical inheritance, with its ensuing lot of obligations and interdependency—and all this, not because the texts are quickly put together into a coherent whole, but precisely because they resist any easy understanding, just as the layering of history resists a unilateral, uniform narrative. We as a group have disjunct images to process, the sirens of haunting repetitions or screen images to resist, before we can access a form of collective co-unconscious: that of a generation burdened with an inheritance of destruction. Our children are pale, and have limited eyesight in the abyss, because we’ve all stayed in the mines of coal-extraction too long, and can barely acknowledge, let alone honor, the world outside. Yet it is precisely what Merwin invites us to, as Judith Kitchen aptly wrote: “Merwin, for all his acute awareness of loss, writes not to alter the world but to honor it” (Kitchen 63, quoted in Hix 138).

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Bibliographie

CAPONEGRO, Mary. Tales from the Next Village. Providence: Lost Roads Press, 1985.

CAPONEGRO, Mary. The Complexities of Intimacy. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2001.

CAPONEGRO, Mary. All Fall Down. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2009.

COUVERT, Barbara. Au cœur du secret de famille. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2000.

DAVIS, Lydia. Can’t and Won’t. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

DUCHEMIN, Violaine. Le Dénouement d’un secret familial: « Derrière le voile de Vichy ». Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007.

EMERSON, Ralph Waldo. Selected Essays. New York: The Penguin American Library, 1982.

FRAZIER, Jane. From Origin to Ecology: Nature and the Poetry of W.S. Merwin. Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.

FREUD, Sigmund. Huit études sur la mémoire et ses troubles. Traduit de l’allemand par Denis Messier. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 2010.

HIX, Harvey L. Understanding W.S. Merwin. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.

JUNG, Carl Gustav. Collected Works, vol. 8, Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche. Translated from the German by Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

KITCHEN, Judith. “Skating on Paper (on A Dream of Mind by C. K. Williams; Travels by W.S. Merwin; To Put the Mouth To by Judith Hall; Fanatic Heart by Deborah Pope; Shoetown by Gerald McCarthy; & Short Talks by Anne Carson).” The Georgia Review, vol. 47, no. 3, 1993, p. 585. Reprinted in Kitchen, Judith, What Persists: Selected Essays on Poetry from The Georgia Review, 1988-2014, 2016, p. 56-75.

LODGE, David. The Art of Fiction. London: Penguin Books, 1992.

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MERWIN, W.S. “On Open Form.” Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms. Eds. Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969, p. 270-272.

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Notes

1 In this story, the narrator, as well as the character, sound like avatars of Bartleby, unless they are the heirs of the multifaceted and ironic narrators in The Confidence Man.

2 “La circulation de l’information, des sentiments et du vécu entre les uns et les autres passe donc par une télépathie interne et personnelle à chaque famille qui crée une sorte d’inconscient commun aux membres de la famille: le ‘co-inconscient familial’” (Couvert 106).

3 “L’émotion, l’interdit et les angoisses qui lui sont liés vivent leur propre vie à l’intérieur d’un sujet qu’ils parasitent et continuent à exister dans les générations suivantes sans être rattachés à quelque chose de réel du sujet qui la ressent.” Also quoted by Violaine Duchemin (79).

4 “Simonized” may also pun on “simony, buying or selling of something spiritual or closely connected with the spiritual. More widely, it is any contract of this kind forbidden by divine or ecclesiastical law. The name is taken from Simon Magus (Acts 8, 18), who endeavoured to buy from the Apostles the power of conferring the gifts of the Holy Spirit” (britannica.com/topic/simony). My gratitude to Peter Vernon, Université de Tours, for this suggestion.

5 Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, also known as The Big Five, are the American companies which rule the digital world.

6 In a text unpublished in English and written for the French collection L’Appel du Causse, published by Fanlac in 2013, translated into French by Michael Taylor.

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Françoise Palleau-Papin, « Merwin’s Prose Poetry: Collective Memory in Uncanny Short Fiction »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2024, consulté le 08 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/23847 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/134go

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Françoise Palleau-Papin

Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, UR Pléiade

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