"Hunting for the Eve's Last Cry": Sandy Florian's On Wonderland & Waste
).
Florian writes at the leading edge of the contemporary. Whenever I
teach a work of hers, my students comment to the effect that they have
never before read such sentences. To praise a work of writing, the
ancient rabbis would say it "defiles the hands." Imagine that a work
"defiles the hands" if reading the work changes the reader irreversibly.
As with On Wonderland & Waste, Florian's Telescope, The Tree of No, and Prelude to Air from Water
are books for readers who want to get their hands dirty. Each exhibits a
distinct idiom in which Florian recovers English as a fertile medium
through which she engages topics literary traditions bequeath. Florian
turns (tropes) those topics or commonplaces toward her singular
meditations. In those turnings, Florian achieves her fictions.On Wonderland & Waste
collects short works encompassing a variety of Florian's modes of
writing. If pressed, I might call these works prose poems, with several
displaying traits of the dramatic monologue. But, in truth, the works in
On Wonderland & Waste defy simple generic classification.
Some of the pieces seem readable as straightforward narratives. For
example, "Mornings" follows the routines of a charmingly laconic urban
couple groggily entering their days. Yet "Mornings" invites the reader
to become delightfully lost in a labyrinth where motifs echo, awareness
shifts into and out from dreams, and time goes relative. Chapters such
as "And Your Messages" and "Franchise" collage sentences together into
brief first-person narratives of lyric intensity. The reader will
encounter reworkings of Genesis, Hamlet, and other precursor
texts. Florian's response to Hamlet, titled "Dumbshow & Noise,"
particularly astonishes by consisting almost entirely of words and
phrases from the play recast by Florian into an anonymous drowner's
haunting soliloquy.
Though already going
under, this drowner communicates words, which seems impossible, barring
telepathy, unless telepathy itself is impossible. Wouldn't a drowner be
capable of only a thrashing dumb show and water-garbled noise? Many ways
to become a drowner exist, with or without water. An early attunement
to finality may suffice. Several of Florian's chapters stage the
narrator or a character, even the bluebird of "Evenings," as producing
words without sequel in a moment without future. The reader overhears
these words, these thoughts, as if in witness to the moment in which
they take place. In the places where the thoughts or words occur, time
slows to a standstill, random details take on an incredible fascination,
past and future mix, and death as a meaningful act of the "I" becomes
unknown, though dying becomes actual. These places harbor as much dread
as desire, as much terror as beauty. The literary explorer Maurice
Blanchot describes such places as defining the space of literature.
There, words drift from semantic fixtures, paratactic interstices spark,
and the literary artist works without a net. On Wonderland & Waste excels at transporting the reader to the space of literature.
In
this space, borders erode and boundaries blur, however much
distinctions remain. The shellac wears off surface colors and they
become achingly saturate. Tactile sensations give meaning the slip.
Desires flare. Plato, or at least the Plato of Platonism, approached
such literary space with trepidation. In the Republic, Socrates
claims the soul has two aspects. One trusts numbers. The other images
seduce. The number-trusting aspect listens attentively to voices arguing
toward orderly oneness. A shoemaker is a shoemaker and nothing else,
just as a circle is a circle and nothing else, for instance a triangle.
Coursing with desires, the other aspect feels drawn to images mixing
kinds or showing in the very same place and at the very same time a
whale and a butterfly, a circle and a triangle. Socrates presses his
interlocutors to agree the number-trusting aspect must control the
desiring aspect. Perhaps, as desirous, the soul never can leave the
Platonic cave's shadows and step into the sun's light. In stepping
toward the light, the desirous aspect of the soul would lose
distinction, reluctantly becoming orderly and numerable. If there is any
shadow, there must be some light. What if light were to relax and let
be?
If the commonplace that "writing takes
courage" has settled into a cliché, Florian undoes that cliché
altogether. In her book, desireful beings speak, despite the pressures
toward their silencing yet in open awareness of silence. Their ways with
words Socrates would have deep and wonderful trouble countenancing.
Florian freely mixes genres and invites readers toward imaginal spaces
where want calls with fine urgency. Images improbable in nature find
welcome. On Wonderland & Waste includes image collages by
Alexis Anne Mackenzie. In response to each of Florian's texts, Mackenzie
created a collage. A given text's collage appears as a color
reproduction on the page across from the text's title page. Students of
mine have made a point of mentioning that all the collages (except
bluebird's) feature the image of a woman.
If
tragedy in the Aristotelian sense involves the expiation of an excess,
say of passion, then the term "tragic" would not quite describe On Wonderland & Waste.
Rather, the book crosses the elegiac with the ecstatic. The ampersand
in the book's title gets the reading eye quickly from Wonderland to
Waste while adroitly insisting on the one as much as on the other: a
wonderland thoroughly a waste, a wasteland thoroughly a wonder.
Review by Robert Savino Oventile
Originally published in Sobriquet Magazine's short-lived "The Literary Life" blog.
