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Number
282
August
September 1999
The Color of
Hallucination
MIMI ALBERT
Copyright
© 1999 Poetry Flash
SMALL CRAFT WARNINGS, stories by Kate
Braverman, University of Nevada Press, Reno,
Nevada, 1998, 180 pages, $16.00 paper.
The direction of literature in the twentieth
century, at least since the publication of
Ulysses, has forced all serious writers and
readers of fiction to come to terms with the
question of form versus content, material versus
style. As we struggle toward the next millennium
this question seems to have become a matter of open
conflict, with distinctly pitched camps fortified
either by academia or by commerce. Frequently, it
seems as if works of fiction today are written
either for an elite so conspicuously sequestered
they don't want anyone else to know or even suspect
what they're talking about, or for a public so
battered by electronic media that they need
increasingly higher doses of shock to be numbed
into the act of reading. There are notable
exceptions, of course; writers of the caliber of
Richard Ford, Michael Cunningham, and Gina
Berriault have manaed to overcome all barriers and
classifications. Nonetheless, the sale of literary
fiction on all levels is plummeting.
Neither camp may have fully realized the true
function of a body of literature as both measure
and emblem of its culture, however. Philosophers,
like Foucault and Heidegger, studying the nature of
phenomena itself, come much closer: "The being of
men is founded in language," Heidegger asserts, and
"…poetry is the establishment of Being by
means of the word." Fortunately, despite the
ordeals and restrictions imposed by the
contemporary literary market, an original voice
occasionally arises which can demonstrate this,
establishing and defining the reality of our lives
through the use of powerful metaphor and image. And
although the pieces in her most recent collection,
Small Craft Warnings, are presented as
fiction rather than as poetry, no one can doubt
that Kate Braverman is such a voice.
Braverman has long been a poet as well as a
writer of short fiction and novels, and it's
undoubtedly because she has engaged so fully in the
poet's relationship with language that she manages
to keep finding a way of presenting, naming, and
describing even those components of existence which
other writers find indescribable. She captures
states of being altered by emotion or perception,
by drug induced delusions, by unspeakable
exigencies, by passion or by fear. She deals with
subtleties so ephemeral that they might be
annihilated by an eye even slightly less piercing,
a voice only minimally less true. Her palette of
words is magical and allusive, whether she is
painting "…the color of winter
silence…strained pale like a bruise that has
already partially healed…the color of
hallucination," (page 109) or examining "the
junctures of confluence where one can look between
worlds…camouflaged bridges, sunken corridors,
black holes in the fabric you find by an opening a
window or a door." (page 80)
A heroin pusher in one story ("They Take a
Photograph of You When You First Get Here") names
himself for a gemstone and insists on living in a
monochromatic world of his own creation; he "has
his denim-blue notebook with his poems written in
calligraphy in a special cobalt pen. He also has a
flashlight and a semiautomatic Beretta with nine
hydroshock hollow-point bullets." (page 37) When he
dies, the young female addict who survives him
grieves because, "all the blues have been used up.
They have been leached from the air. They have been
temporarily removed. They have faded. They are less
than bruises." (page 48)
There is, in Braverman's prose, an ongoing
counterpoint of the lyrical and the bitter, the
enchanted and the squalid, and the people in her
stories are similar in that they're frequently
disoriented, confusing, difficult but lovable,
alienated but wise. Within their individual
situations are recreated the dilemmas of the modern
human being, surrounded by outer landscapes that
smell "of some tangible despair, as if heartbreak
could be opened like a sore…," (page 31) by
cities like "Hollywood in a strange hot winter when
everything seemed singed. The stray air over the
gutted shell," (page 28) on days with
"edges…elegant under a grainy pewter
half-light that reminded me of a new razor." (page
13) What is experienced by the reader is
transformed by the language into a kind of vivid
illumination, a region of its own, with its own
parameters and its own air.
At the same time, the form and style of
Braverman's work recapitulates its content---what
it is about---with such force that the
reader is compelled to enter an altered reality, to
share in the lives of the characters of whom she
writes with an excitement and mystification very
much like what they themselves experience. In the
first story of the book, the "Small Craft
Warnings," of the title refers to the triangular
red flags flown by the Coast Guard indicating rough
weather for small boats on Santa Monica Bay. But
rough weather is metaphoric as well as an actual
element in the story; the narrator, a woman looking
back at her thirteenth year, describes the period
of her grandmother's life in which Danielle, the
grandmother, rich and sybartic but about to die of
a "rotting heart," attempts to fill her last days
with novelty and pleasure. There's nothing
sentimental about these memories, however. "If I
had been younger," the narrator confesses," I might
have thought she had become a witch.…But my
grandmother Danielle was not a witch. She was
merely corrupt and sociopathic. That's how my
mother described her." (page 1)
Inherent in all these stories is a sense of
failed relationship, a despair at the impossibility
of connection, particularly between mothers and
daughters. In the first story, the narrator is
periodically dumped with Danielle, the "sociopathic
grandmother," by her academically successful mother
who keeps getting international travel grants;
these visits are interrupted only by the
grandmother's love affairs, invariably with much
younger men whom she obviously supports.
"…Danielle's most recent lapse
[was] a liaison with a man thirty years
younger than she.…This man was the worst yet,
my mother informed me. The ultimate blond bimbo,
she called him…there were details my mother
didn't even want to discuss. Something about the
paintings and the car, something about tailored
suits and the silver, something that had nothing to
do with burglary. Now there was the matter of how
my grandmother's body was again betraying her, this
time with the heart disease." (page 8)
In "Pagan Night," Sunny, who retreats to a life
of impoverished vagabondage with her musician
boyfriend after their band breaks up, contemplates
the act of throwing her newborn infant from an
Idaho railroad bridge with a sense of despair so
anaesthetized it begins to seem almost reasonable.
In "Something Particular About Midnight," Rachel, a
photographer who has just had a child out of
wedlock and cannot yet bear to give it a name,
decides to telephone her grandmother, Pearl, for
the first time now that her mother, Pearl's
daughter, has rejected them both. "Rachel would
hold her daughter to her breast and dial Pearl. It
was dawn and still snowing in New York. Rachel was
aware that there was a complete circle of women
alone in rooms in winter. Her brand new baby, who
seemed to resist a name, who did not yet inhabit
any of the syllables she had temporarily contrived
for her. Then her dying grandmother on the other
coast, more syllables without substance." (page
110)
Despite all the lapses, all the failures of
communication and sensibility throughout the book,
it is these matrilineal connections which seem to
prevail, to lead at least some of the female
protagonists into a sense of purpose and support,
the "complete circle of women" of whom Rachel
becomes aware. By contrast, encounters between the
genders seem so fraught with the possibilities of
abandonment and betrayal that they exist only as a
negative power, a goad compelling the characters to
react and change. The farther in "Hour of the
Fathers is a "comet with a predictable orbit;" a
drug-dealing disabled veteran with a missing leg,
he floats into and out of his daughter's life like
a dark force, in contrast to her mother, a
successful advertising executive who provides for
everyone financially but is emotionally absent. The
husband and father in "Near-Death Experiences,"
while relatively benign, is given only a few lines
and actions in the story as a whole, which center
around the perceptions and memories of his wife; in
"A Conjunction of Dragon Ladies" and "Pagan Night"
the men are loved briefly and then either vanish or
exist merely as a sinister threat. Sunny in "Pagan
Night" realizes that her lover, Dalton, "never
really wanted…[her] baby," and "can't
stand…[its] crying;" she knows he will
inevitably leave them both. Nonetheless, the action
of the stories and the dense, overwhelming reality
of the language are no more gender-specific than
those stories which evolve painfully and
breathtakingly out of the desperate situations of
men, like those of Raymond Carver, Ethan Canin,
Chekhov. These are stories of outward exploration
and inner search which are specific to the human
condition; it just so happens that the principle
actors, like their creator, are women.
Braverman's own journey as a writer has been
deservedly distinguished. She has achieved major
honors as a poet as well as for her fiction---two
of her four books of poetry were nominated for
Pulitzer prizes, and her stories have won an O.
Henry Award and been selected for the Best
American Short Stories 100 Distinguished List.
This new collection of short fiction, pieces
previously published in such literary magazines as
The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review,
ZYZZYVA, and American Short Fiction,
is as exceptional as anything she has written; each
piece is fueled and empowered by its language as a
great poem might be, taking its readers to the very
edge of their senses, and then, with that ultimate
push achieved only by the most brilliant of
writers, to a point beyond that edge. The reader is
consistently led into a previously inaccessible
labyrinth of exhilaration, exhaustion, and
sometimes the heightened awareness which
occasionally redeems trauma---and which invariably
redeems art. Kate Braverman is a writer of stature,
and as with all fine literature, her work not only
guides us into self-surpassing, it shows us who we
are.
Mimi Albert is the author of two critically
acclaimed novels, The Second Story Man and
Skirts, numerous short stories, and book
reviews in many literary publications, from the
American Book Review to the San
Francisco Chronicle. Her work also appears in
A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat
Generation, a recent anthology.
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