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My grandmother suffers from dementia. I could say that his sense of reality is unstable, but that would be misleading. What is more, his experience of reality is not bound by time and space. When she looks at me, she sees me, and she sees my mother. She remembers that I am married and then she asks when I am getting married. She grabs my hand and, when she touches it, exclaims that my skin is “so cold.” A few minutes later, she holds my hand again.
From an early age, my life has been defined by people who have a loose grip on the world around them. At my other grandmother’s funeral, my uncle spent a lot of time eulogizing her, recalling vivid—perhaps too vivid—memories of her birth. The principal at my Christian high school routinely attributed world events—terrorist attacks, elected or unelected presidents, the price of gas—to an invisible spiritual warfare. When I was thirteen, I worried that a demon was stalking me and when I shared these suspicions with the woman in charge of my Bible study group, she didn’t say that I was imagining things. She just started praying.
Although I can’t say whether my background is typical or not, I think it is common to have an odd relationship with everything outside and sometimes inside the self. In fact, it’s probably inevitable. All kinds of factors – religious fervor, drug trips, the absurdities of aging – wear down a person’s mind and spirit. So what do we mean when we, citizens of the literary world, use the word realism? What counts as real?
In the past, we would have been referring to a specific literary tradition that began with a movement that emerged from the literature of nineteenth-century French and Russian writers. Now, we think of realism as that elegant, default style that scholar George Goldin defines, in part, as “sympathy for ordinary life.” By this, we suggest that normal life does not include my grandmother, my uncle, and even me.
What do we mean when we, citizens of the literary world, use the word realism? What counts as real?
This problem became especially apparent to me when I wrote my story “New Mercies,” which appears in my first collection Please Don’t Touch the Body and was first published by Kenyon Review. Through this piece, I wanted to look at dementia from the inside and out. With this goal in mind, I wrote a story from a third-person perspective from three overlapping viewpoints, ending with the man suffering from dementia.
I based the first approach on a teenage girl named Corey. In the story, she volunteers at a retirement community in an effort to free herself from sin by teaching the residents about poetry:
Corey has never seen a penis. Not completely. Not free from clothing and away from thick tangles of hair. However, he has a feeling. Once. She felt its coiled energy straining beneath her tight underwear. She traced her fingers over its length until a dark, wet spot bloomed through the cotton, and she pulled her hand away, nauseated, but looking up at the face she considered faithful. Although she struggles with keeping track of specifics, right and wrong and yes and please don’ts, conviction pierces her through. She stumbled and caused the other person to stumble as well.
In this passage, Cory is confused. She blames herself for what someone else has done to her, and claims that she has “stumbled and caused another to stumble.” His whole class adheres to the general expectations of realism, although its thoughts and feelings are distorted by religious guilt.
The second and third viewpoints are based on the only two people who come to Corey’s poetry reading: Martha and Anne, who are longtime romantic partners. Martha’s segment confirms what we may have already suspected based on Corey: that Anne has dementia and that her dementia is most apparent when she fantasizes about cloning Martha and Anne as children in order to extend their lives. We also learn that Martha is obsessed with preventing Anne from showing any signs of her dementia. Martha bargains with the universe, thinking that if she can finish the poetry reading without Cory realizing something is wrong with Anne, then Anne will be okay. When this fails, Martha becomes distraught:
Anne’s speech makes no sense, which reveals in just a few seconds how Anne’s reality has been distorted beyond comprehension. Yet Martha feels as if he is somehow crazy. She wants to push Anne out of the room and close the door. She wants to hold Anne’s head in her hands and kiss her hair. She wants to wring Anne’s neck and dig into her ears to tear out the roots of her old age. She wants Anne to be Anne.
Although Martha’s thoughts are clouded by her desire to fix Anne’s situation, her section also adheres to the terms of realism, never straying too far from what might be considered normal life.
But in the third section devoted to Anne’s perspective, the genre distinctions become more intriguing. Anne has an inner world whose witnessing is disturbing to Martha, yet enriching. Through Anne, we weave in and out of the present moment with Martha and Corey, following Anne and Martha’s shared past and the threads of Anne’s imagination about cloning. Part of his section reads:
Anne and Martha get what’s theirs by knocking on their doors and wrapping newborn babies on their doormats, and delivering them like room service. Although Martha eventually agrees to have children, Anne keeps a close eye on her reaction. At first Martha simply looks down, with her hands over her mouth. But then the children start crying and she reaches them.
When told from Martha’s point of view the hallucination becomes true from Anne’s point of view. Cloning is real, as are children, so are Anne’s hopes for her and Martha’s future.
Throughout Anne’s volume, the veil of realism is stripped away not because of any change in approach or perspective-related strategy, but because of a continuing commitment to the original approach. And by ending with Anne’s dementia-distorted experiences, I wanted to resist privileging one perspective over another, instead asking the reader to acknowledge the conflict between those perspectives and embrace the idea that reality is not one consistent thing.
I wonder what we gain and what we lose by separating the works of realism and surrealism.
Although I wouldn’t label Anne’s section as realism, I wonder what’s not real about her perspective. Is realism based only on a mind untouched by disease or any other distorting factor, or at least not so touched that that mind, like my grandmother’s, becomes unfettered? It occurs to me that if I were to write a novel based on my own experiences as a child, that novel would turn out to be a surrealist quality, with its demons, angels, and visions, despite its fidelity to the details of my daily experience.
I was thinking specifically about Franz Kafka while writing this story metamorphosis. A fantastical tale of a man’s transformation into a giant insect and a committed portrayal of a mentally ill man misunderstood by his family, metamorphosis Challenges the genre of realism, highlighting the ways in which our definitions differ from one another. Consider, for example, this moment at the end of the novel, when Gregor attempts to reunite himself with his family on the night his sister plays the violin:
However, no one paid any attention to him. The family was completely busy playing the violin. . . . Gregor’s sister was playing very beautifully. Her face was tilted to one side and she was following the lines of the music with a careful and sad expression. Gregor crawled a little further, keeping his head close to the ground so that he could make eye contact with her if he had the chance. If music could so captivate him, was he an animal? He felt as if he was being shown the way to the unknown nourishment for which he yearned. He was determined to advance towards his sister and pull up her skirts, to show her that she could come into his room with her violin, for no one here appreciated her playing as much as he did. He never wanted to let her out of his room, not as long as he was alive, anyway; Her startling appearance should, for once, be of some use to her; He wanted to immediately stand at every door of his room and hiss and spit at the attackers.
This passage straddles the boundary between realism and surrealism, beginning with the ambiguity of “no one noticed him”, a statement that could apply equally to a fleeing insect and a human who thinks he is an insect, hiding uncertainly in the shadows of a room, not knowing how he will be welcomed. This dual possibility is further emphasized by the teasing line: “Was he a beast if music could fascinate him?” As we reach the end of the paragraph, we may feel even more unsettled when we read, “He wanted to hiss and spit at the attackers.” That is, we can flicker between two images, one of an insect in distress, and the other of a man literally crawling on the floor, hissing and spitting.
We are meant to sit in the discomfort of not knowing, or knowing two things in opposition to each other. Without this commitment to Gregor’s distorted experience, metamorphosis It Won’t Be What It Is: a story that, for me, is simultaneously about seeing mental illness from the outside and being trapped within that illness – or, put another way, a story about the inevitable differences between one mind and another.
I am not suggesting that the categories of realism and surrealism are meaningless. They are helpful when we talk about our work and especially when we sell it. And of course there are works of science fiction and fantasy that are deliberately written apart from our world – for example, NK Jemisin’s broken earth Trilogy, by Susannah Clark Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrelland Octavia E. Butler intimate. But the category of realism gets blurred at its edges. The worry is that when we call one experience “real” and another “surreal,” we necessarily demote that experience to the realm of the surreal.
I wonder what we gain and what we lose by separating the works of realism and surrealism. Perhaps realism offers us more comfort than truth, for some people it is a way of saying that my mind is stable, we can agree, this is bound to happen.
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please do not touch the body by Emily Doyle is available through Bloomsbury Publishing.
