Alexandra Kleeman: Philip K. Dick’s “gnostic logic” and other influences on You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

You Too Can Have a
Body Like Mine by
Alexandra Kleeman
(Harper, 2015)

Our series of guest posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry continues today with a contribution from Alexandra Kleeman, whose just-published debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, a seriocomic foray into consumerism and a uniquely contemporary kind of anomie, is drawing comparisons to DeLillo and Pynchon and, in the words of a Slate reviewer, “may be our best novel about the weirdness of being female in a culture that is obsessed with women’s bodies.” Below, Kleeman shares some of her formative influences as a writer.

VALIS, Philip K. Dick. People often think of Dick as a bad writer with an amazing set of concepts he’s trying to convey, but it’s not until you try to perform a Dickian act of narrative inversion or reality-shifting that you see how much skill and craft goes into what can look superficially like clunky writing. VALIS aims to make the reader perceive distinct entities as existentially or spiritually unitary—beneath surface differences lies a gnostic equivalence. Hence VALIS’s unfortunately-named protagonist Horselover Fat (an etymological equivalent for Philip K. Dick’s own name) can have a friend named Phil Dick, and later discover that he and Phil Dick are one and the same person. It would be easier (though still somewhat impossible) to tell this story from the outside, narrating and explaining this discovery. But Dick embeds you in Horselover Fat’s consciousness, forcing you to experience the contradictions of this gnostic logic as a visceral assault on your own individuality. It’s one of the strangest and most mysterious books out there, and I think it’s more radical in its structure than Pynchon or DeLillo because Dick allows not just inconsistencies but full-blown paradoxes to crop up in his world. The reader becomes a site for the resolution of these unresolvables, the effect often being that you find yourself thinking an impossible thing that you’ve never thought before, or experiencing something that feels like it could tear you in half.

Letters to Wendy’s, Joe Wenderoth. This book takes the form a series of direct-address poems written on [the fast-food restaurant] Wendy’s comment cards—a uniquely modern constraint on composition if there ever was one. Shifting between exhortation, reflection, abuse, Wenderoth did a sort of postmodern take on “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”—you could call it “500 Ways That Wendy’s Looks Back at You.” Lines like “People eating toward eternity! People looking nice toward eternity! It is terrible to be real, I know, but it is more terrible to be long” abut vivid descriptions of ground meat and factory farming. Wenderoth challenges the idea that the American lyric voice died with the obsolesce of the circumstances and landscapes that gave birth to it originally: in his poems there are pathos, tenderness, rage, and above all 100% real emotion, not from concentrate. I first read these when I was eighteen, and they rooted in me a belief that the unexceptional suburban places that surrounded me were not boring and sterile even though they were built to be—there was ample emotion, only that emotion was made wilder and stranger because it couldn’t find a place to settle itself.

The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers. A slew of books and movies out there aim to represent the transitional point at which the world stops engaging with you as a girl and begins engaging you, whether you like it or not, as a woman. None of them do it as well as Carson McCullers does. Frankie Addams is a twelve-year-old tomboy who “wishes that people could change back and forth from boys to girls”—we follow her over the course of a few days as she fantasizes about leaving town with her brother and his new bride, who are due to get married and then go on a honeymoon. By the end of the book, she’s narrowly escaped a disturbing encounter with a soldier and has learned what the reader knew all along: Her life is fixed insofar as her gender is fixed. She’ll learn to navigate the world with her newly sexualized body, she’ll learn unpleasant lessons about other people, she’ll age and if she does leave town it’s likely to be through a conventional, gendered channel rather than the escape she had imagined with her brother and his new wife, in a role she had dreamed up herself. This is a dark book, but funny, and true to a form of becoming a woman that I’ve known myself.

Breakfast of Champions
by Kurt Vonnegut
(Delacorte Press, 1973)

Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday, Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut is a good prescription for anyone who’s suffering from loneliness or sadness, which is why I read him in high school and why I consider him something like a personal friend to this day, even though obviously we never met. What he does so well in this book is depict people who are alone in their loneliness, together. Dwayne Hoover is a successful car salesman who’s on the brink of going insane and just looking for the right idea to fixate upon, Kilgore Trout is a published but more or less ignored author with a fictional premise that will end up driving Hoover mad. Threaded through their story are victims of racism and injustice, syphilitic microbes, cows and the hamburgers they are made into. From the perspective of narrator or reader, the sadness of each of these individual characters becomes visible as a sad but sympathetic web that connects us all invisibly. Even if the problems are terrible and unresolved, Vonnegut gives you a taste of what it’s like to empathize not just with individual others, but for the whole painful system.

Empathy, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. This is the poetry that I open up whenever I want to feel calmer and wiser, or like I am with a calm wise friend whose emotions absorb me while allowing me to be myself, separate. These are intricately detailed etchings of an internal landscape, or a seismograph registering the peak and fall of one single emotional thread. Everything in them is an analogue for feeling, or every feeling in them is an analogue for unadulterated space and air and light. I love this book too much.

Though relations with oneself and with other people seem negotiated in terms secretly confirmed

by representation, her idea of the person’s visibility was not susceptible to representation. No matter

how emphatically a person will control his demeanor, there will be perspectives she cannot foresee or

direct, because there is no assignable end to the depth of us to which representation can reach,

the way part of a circle can be just the memory of a depth. The surface inside its contour,

like the inside of a body emits more feeling than its surroundings, as if

the volume or capacity of relations would only refer to something inside, that I can’t see,

that the other person and I keep getting in the way of, or things in the landscape while they are driving,

instead of the capacity being of your person. The volume of a bright cottonwood could be almost

a lack of volume or lack of space inside the tree, the way a membrane is the entrance of an organism.

—from “Honeymoon”

Alexandra Kleeman’s fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Conjunctions, Guernica, and Gulf Coast, among others, while her nonfiction has appeared in Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Vogue has praised You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine as “Fight Club for girls,” while the Chicago Tribune called it “a satirical and searing critique of modern-day womanhood.”

Previously in this series:
“Influences” posts by Jabari Asim, Deborah Baker, Kate Christensen, Jennifer Gilmore, Lauren Groff, Lev Grossman, Jane Hirschfield, Alan Heathcock, Amitava Kumar, Adam Levin, Annie Liontas, Dawn McGuire, Dinaw Mengestu, Jim Moore, Manuel Muñoz, Maggie Nelson, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Geoffrey O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Carl Phillips, Karen Russell, Timothy Schaffert, Philip Schultz, Mark Statman, Emma Straub, J. Courtney Sullivan, Ellen Ullman, and Adam Wilson

Suzanne Vega talks about Carson McCullers

Suzanne Vega as Carson McCullers
Photo: Sandra Coudert

Earlier this year singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega drew on a lifelong fascination with the work of Carson McCullers to create, with Duncan Sheik, Carson McCullers Talks About Love, a one-woman show Vega performed at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in Greenwich Village. The play ranged across McCullers's many friendships, loves and infatuations; her successes and illnesses; the characters she created, the writer she aspired to be and became. Vega talked about what McCullers has meant to her in an exclusive interview with The Library of America.

LOA: In previous interviews you’ve mentioned discovering Carson McCullers as a teenager and, at Barnard College, adapting some of her short stories into songs for an undergraduate thesis. Now, some thirty years later, you’ve just finished a month-long run of Carson McCullers Talks About Love. What is it about Carson McCullers’s work that has kept her such a presence in your life all this time? 

Vega: It’s really more like four years spread out over thirty. There were years when the project had to take a back seat to raising my daughter and being on tour. The things I find compelling about Carson McCullers are: First, her character. Brilliant, funny, droll, compassionate, bitchy, needy, but never pathetic. Second, her work itself. Her social vision—so unusual in a girl her age when she wrote The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—beautifully and humanely rendered in language and imagery. And yet odd and unique at the same time. Her details resonate with me. For example, Mick Kelly takes an art program sponsored by the government—I was that kind of child.

Vega and Sheik wrote fourteen songs for the show and one of the evening’s most entertaining moments comes when everything McCullers ever felt or thought about other writers seems to get poured into the song “Harper Lee” (see YouTube video below).Vega talked about her research for the song:

LOA: The McCullers in your play has a winning feistiness but she’s not always entirely likable. In “Harper Lee” she sings:

Virginia Woolf, she leaves me cold.
I recognize the genius, but I’m twice as bold.
I have more to say than Hemingway.
Lord knows, compared to Faulkner,
I say it in a better way.

She goes on to sing that her Ballad of the Sad Café is better than The Great Gatsby and pokes fun at Harper Lee because she “only wrote the one book” compared with McCullers’s “more than three.” Did all of these sentiments really come from her writings?

Vega: Her actual phrase about Virginia Woolf comes from a transcript of a lecture she gave at the 92nd Street Y with Tennessee Williams. She says that she is a genius, but doesn’t “send her, as they say in the theater, the way Katherine Mansfield does.” She did actually say “I have more to say than Hemingway,” and “Lord knows, I say it better than Faulkner.” The quote about Ballad of the Sad Café—I found it on Amazon, written in a review by a reader. She didn’t say it about herself, but I thought she would have liked it. Of course she actually was a Fitzgerald fan. I made up that line about Harper Lee and the “one book.” However, she did say that Harper Lee was “poaching on my literary preserves.” The whole verse about Truman Capote “plagiarizing her cadences” is taken verbatim from the biography The Lonely Hunter by Virginia Spencer Carr.

Read the entire interview

Watch Suzanne Vega perform "Harper Lee" on WNYC's Soundcheck


Related LOA works: Carson McCullers: Complete Novels

Carson McCullers: “delicately sensed ironic knowledge”

Carson McCullers died 43 years ago today, at the age of 50, in Nyack Hospital after suffering a stroke.

In 1940, only 22 years old and having published just one story, McCullers burst onto the literary scene with her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Two years earlier, her writing teacher had heard about the new Houghton Mifflin Fiction Fellowship Award and suggested McCullers submit the outline and completed chapters of her novel-in-progress. She didn’t win first prize—but she did win a publishing contract.

When she arrived in New York in June 1940 to promote her book, she found copies stacked in bookstore windows next to her own blown-up image. She was the new sensation. The Chicago Tribune review was typical: “There is not only the delicately sensed need that one might expect youth to know but an even more delicately sensed ironic knowledge.” Reviewing for The New Republic, Richard Wright found something quite unusual in this work by a young writer from a small town in Georgia:

To me the most impressive aspect of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.

During the next ten years she wrote three major novels. Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, and Ballad of the Sad Café. She converted Wedding into a popular and critically acclaimed play that launched the Broadway career of Julie Harris, who reprised her role in the 1952 movie.

Some critics pigeonhole McCullers as a master of Southern Gothic. Assessing her career in The New York Review of Books in 1974 Ellen Myers found that too limiting:

No writer of our time worked more seriously with Gothic forms or created more haunting monsters of ambivalence than Carson McCullers . . . It has long been a critical commonplace to explain the Gothic strain in Carson McCullers, who came from Georgia, as belonging to the southern American Gothic school of which William Faulkner is the notorious advertisement. But there is abundant evidence of McCullers’s participation in a tradition at least as feminine as regional.

McCullers could sometimes be notoriously prickly. One of her biographers, Josyane Savineau, describes her as “sickly, paralyzed, alcoholic, and depressed” but in a Washington Post review Jonathan Yardley echoed a judgment held by many of her friends:

McCullers was that true rarity, a born writer. She had to write, and it is reasonable to assume that she came up short in other aspects of her life because they simply didn't matter to her the way writing did.

In 2004, sixty-four years after it was first published, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was selected for Oprah’s Book Club. For a few weeks in May it was the #1 bestseller in the country with some 700,000 copies in print.

Of related interest:

• Variety recently reported that Deborah Kampmeier is at work making a movie of Sarah Schulman’s play Carson McCullers (Historically Inaccurate).
• Waiting Room Aquarium quotes Charles Bukowski’s poem "Carson McCullers" as part of a recent appreciation.
• The Carson McCullers Center blog recently announced plans for the February 2011 Carson McCullers Conference.
• Watch a trailer for Dan Griffin’s work-in-progress documentary about Carson McCullers with reminiscences by Tennessee Williams, Horton Foote, and others.

Related LOA works: Carson McCullers: Complete Novels; Southern Women Writers Set

John Ashbery and Paul Auster at Brooklyn Book Festival; February House

The Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday brought together for an hour of conversation novelist Paul Auster, the 2007 winner of the festival’s Best of Brooklyn or “BoBi” award, and this year’s winner, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet John Ashbery. The BoBi is given each year to “an author whose body of work exemplifies or speaks to the spirit of Brooklyn.”

Following a reading of a few poems from Notes from the Air and of “Cities 1” from his forthcoming translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Ashbery described how he first came to New York City at the suggestion of poet and novelist Kenneth Koch. He found his first job fresh out of Harvard working as a clerk—filing books and answering the phone—at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library:

I did so miserably at that job and was so unhappy at it—though loving Brooklyn of course. I had to punch a time clock and almost every day it was red because I was staying out late in New York which I had never lived in before—having a high old time. At the end of the summer most of my time clock was printed in red. Then I got accepted at Columbia Graduate School in literature and I thought they would be very angry when I told them I wasn’t coming back. Instead they broke out in smiles and wished me well. That was the beginning of my Brooklyn experience. The collection was very good. I got a lot of reading done there—another reason they were glad to see me go.

Ashbery noted that his boss at the library had lived at February House, the curious short-lived experiment in artistic communal living in 1940–41 in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. As Sherill Tippins recounts in her book February House, the commune was launched by George Davis, just after Harper’s Bazaar fired him as editor. Starting in June 1940 Davis persuaded several of his artist friends to live and work together in the rundown building at 7 Middagh Street. In addition to John Ashbery’s boss at the library, its residents included W. H. Auden, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee (who wrote a mystery, The G-String Murders, with the help of her housemates), Carson McCullers (who began The Member of the Wedding while living there), all three of Thomas Mann’s children, and later, Ellen and Richard Wright.

Ashbery also revealed that the reason many people don’t understand the reference to Coney Island in one of his poems is because it refers to the Human Pool Table ride at Luna Park, which has been torn down.

Read other recaps of the Brooklyn Book Festival from Electric Literature, Jacket Copy, The Mantle, and Library Journal.

Read The Library of America interview with John Ashbery.

Related LOA works: John Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956–1987; Carson McCullers: Complete Novels