Willful Creatures: Aimee Bender's American Gothic
“It is these empty spaces you have
to watch out for,” we learn in “The Meeting,” “as
they flood up with feeling before you even realize what’s happened.”
One of the briefest stories in Aimee Bender’s newest collection,
Willful Creatures, “The Meeting” describes a nameless
man who falls for a nameless woman, despite the fact that “she did
not fit the shape in his brain of the woman he had planned so vigorously
and extensively to meet.” A parable on the uncontrollable nature
of attraction and intimacy, the story is also a metaphor for the reader’s
experience of Bender’s stories: to truly appreciate and enjoy them,
we must let go of preconceptions about (narrative) form. There are “empty
spaces” in Bender’s stories, but they are better described
as gaps—gaps between “the real” and “the surreal.”
We are constantly drawn to the difference between Bender’s stories
and more traditional narratives, with the startling realization that profound
emotion flows freely in that space, never favoring one side over the other.
The word “surreal” appears all
over reviews of Aimee Bender’s books, and more than once on the
dust jackets. If by “surrealism” we mean portraits, à
la Magritte, of characters with household appliances for heads or keys
for fingers, then Bender is a surrealist’s surrealist. Willful
Creatures offers, for example, the angular (so they don’t bump
heads) sex of the pumpkinheads (in “Ironhead”), and the failed
attempts of a woman to abort her cast-iron pot of gestating potato babies
(in “Dearth”). In Bender’s narratives the fantastic
is a given, sometimes intentionally exaggerated to the point of hyperbole.
But what is more remarkable is the mundane,
which is quietly ominous, like the teenage girl in “Jinx,”
separated from her best friend (who is making out with a boy), alone on
a busy street corner. Taking the bus home she finds her mother, alone,
“sitting there on the couch looking at the backyard. It was like
the whole afternoon had got a haircut that was too short.” The girl
and her mother sit together, “making sure the backyard stay[s] put,”
like two automatons with no one to animate them. Moments like these, in
which realism teems with loss and alienation (the crazed antics of the
desperate heiress in “Off,” or the vicious inclinations of
popular girls in “Debbieland”) are often more disturbing than
the allegorical birth defects and the sadistic inclinations of the big
man towards his miniature man-pet (in “End of the Line”).
Willful Creatures, like The
Girl in the Flammable Skirt, has elements of the best gothic fiction,
in the manner of Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard
to Find or Joyce Carol Oates’s Where Are You Going Where
Have You Been?—not in the sense that Bender is occupied with
the decay of American cities, or the sinister beneath suburban facades.
Bender, like O’Connor and Oates, displays a passion for the grotesque,
a devotion to deformity, whether physical or spiritual, that expresses
itself in small moments of perfect, loving detail. The title character
of “Ironhead,” for example, the pumpkinheads’ strange
child, does not know how to sleep, but spends his nights “smoothing
his pillowcase with his jaw” and “breathing out clouds into
the cramped sky of his bedroom.” When the woman in “Dearth”
finally accepts her potato children, she takes them to a movie where,
since “they could not eat the popcorn, they clutched handfuls of
it in their fat fingers until it dribbled in soft white shapes to the
floor.” These are two of the most poignant stories of the collection,
not despite the grotesqueness, but because of it—because of the
inseparability of strangeness and empathy.
What becomes increasingly obvious to me
as I read more of Bender’s work is that surrealism is not the active
trope. It is the common descriptor because the surreal elements of Bender’s
work demand attention in a way that her solid similes and rhythmic cadences
don’t. Even the sex (prevalent and protected by a sort of pre-Freudian
veneer) doesn’t make it to reviews the way the surrealism does,
despite the charming way pants fall open with a sigh (“Ironhead”),
or the way the mutants (the key-fingered boy in “The Leading Man,”)
make great lovers, or the way female-female interactions are sometimes
violent and/or sexually charged (“Off” and “Debbieland”).
The uncanny, that phantasm of all gothic
fiction, expresses, in a way that surrealism only partially suggests,
what we respond to in Bender’s stories: it’s that peculiar
state of discomfort, that jarring sense of removal, that comes from being
situated, then lifted slightly, precisely out of place. Bender’s
stories are an out-of-aesthetic experience for us because we have been
trained to lose ourselves in narratives. It is never easy to lose oneself
in Bender’s stories because her narratives demand that we watch
ourselves read them. As Bender discards narrative conventions, we watch
our expectations thwarted, we see how we read stories with certain forms
in mind, with certain desires. We keep reading because we’re waiting
to be resituated, and Bender responds with an emotional potency that,
despite our strange surroundings, is viscerally familiar. The familiar
in the strange: the uncanny. It’s a gut feeling; it’s primal.
It’s finding ourselves in that gap—displaced, but keenly aware—flooded
with emotion.
Willful Creatures achieves what
many story collections do not: it leaves an emotional impression that
transcends the individual stories, but does not erase them. This may explain
why her readers are so devoted: we feel as though we’ve witnessed
the miraculous rebirth of the short story. In the final story of the collection,
“Hymn,” a generation of “unusual births” proves
to be a blessing and a loss—the loss of the previous species. “Hymn,”
like “The Meeting,” is also a metaphor for Bender’s
stories as a whole: they are a startlingly different breed of narrative.
The final directive of “Hymn” and the book: “my genes,
my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can
live inside.” Bender’s stories are gothic fiction in which
mutation and deformity on are the resurrection of hope. Amen. |
