True and false

September 23, 2015

The door between truth and (literary) fiction

There may be doors that “need to be knocked down.” But, just because a door is closed doesn’t mean it is locked; just because a door is locked doesn’t mean someone won’t open it when we ring the bell. – Uncle Albert

If there is drivel in these pages, it is because I am firmly convinced that life makes as much sense – philosophically and aesthetically – as a sagging helium balloon. Imagine drivel sucking the helium from the balloon and squawking in that high, airy, rasping whiny voice about whatever . . . shit . . . comes to mind. Then, drivel has captured life.

What really happens?

   But there is true drivel, and there is fictional, literary drivel, which, after it has come to mind, must be written and rewritten, proofed and galleyed, brought to press and sold on Book-TV. The soprano heliumo has become basso profundo in, let’s say, Verdi’s Don Carlo.

When in the Booker Prize winner Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero, after surviving a father’s wrath and a tornado, Coop becomes a world-class “mechanic” (manipulator of playing cards) while one daughter of the father, Anna, falls blithely into bed with a gypsy, we’re clearly in the realm literary inspired literary drivel, that is, not true but operatic drivel, melodrama. (Ondaatje’s reputation as a serious, literary writer rests no little, incidentally, the way he writes of people not, as people are but as literary readers wish people were: subtle, clever, smart – rational and adventurous Romantics, who if they can’t administer their own destinies can legislate their own moralities.)

   When in the same book in the midst of the tornado, a badly injured Coop can walk for thirty minutes, blind! across an unmarked landscape, find his way into an automobile, and honk the horn and turn on the inside light just at the moment other daughter Claire can see it so she can tie a rope around her waist, lunge into the howling wind and driving rain and haul him out of the vehicle, across the yard, up the stairs, to safety, we are in the presence of great literary – but again not true, or truth-revealing - drivel.

Here on our second day of travel from there to somewhere else, we’re concerned that we may have inadvertently gone out of range of our shit schedule – every morning after coffee, book in hand - and we are in for an uncomfortable day. Then, when we manage at last at least to expel the plug before we have to finish packing and go, we celebrate – dance the antick hay. There is truth: it’s never in the drivel of melodrama, always in dribble of physical comedy.