Bennett Sims' Other Minds & Other Stories
Been tarrying with the negative so long it looks positive to me...
Who says the Iowa Workshop produces nothing but downbeat realists with stories of quarreling couples, petty property disputes, and…uh, corn?
Actually, that probably hasn’t been accurate since at least the turn of the millennium. Michael Cunningham published his unconventional homage to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours, in 1998.
The story collection under review is the second from Bennett Sims, an Iowa alum and a serious new American voice, whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, Georgia Review, Conjunctions, and BOMB. These pieces aren’t in the flavor of Richard Yates or Raymond Carver, or at least they’re only partially so. In fact they’re cerebral narratives with a little bit of the grotesque, owing a lot of influence to prestigious German language authors (think Th. B. and W. B. Sb.) carrying on the modernist trend in literature.
These stories are concerned with other minds, that is, the capacity of other beings to think. The scenarios of encountering other minds can be down to earth, involving our mundane technology, like in the opening lines of the title story.
The reader was reading an e-book in a cafe. Whenever he arrived at a sentence that other readers had highlighted, a pop-up notification would display how many times it had been underlined. The reader had come to dread this feature. No matter what genre of novel he was reading, the same type of sentence was always underlined: maxims about love.
The encounter can be even simpler, like the speaker watching the snow outside his window in the story “Minds of Winter.” In tracing the path of a single flake, it’s as if he’s identified a mind of its own.
From out of the white totality a tiny whiteness had individuated itself: one flake in particular had emerged from the flurry as a fleck of awareness. It was like watching mind emerge from matter, the coming to consciousness of one monad within matter’s white mindlessness. This was why you needed a theory of mind when watching snow, I thought.
Later on in this story, which has the tenor of mourning, we read a three-page gloss of Fredric Jameson’s reading of an art installation from his book on Postmodernism. The description itself is compelling and Sims works it into the narrative skillfully.
Other Minds refers to other theorists besides Jameson, particularly Jacques Derrida, with Nietzsche brought in as the master-thinker of postmodernism (the usual suspect). These stories include pastiches of critical theory concepts, and it’s most amusing when they’re included as details in the lives of nervous academics.
“Introduction to the Reading of Hegel” is an example: it’s not really about Hegel but about one’s relationship to the philosophical discipline — plus the unconscious psychological process beneath it. The protagonist, called “the reader,” struggles to write a personal statement for a fellowship, and catches his reflection in his laptop’s blank monitor.
This could be his future self he was seeing. Whenever he thought dark thoughts, this must be the dark face that uttered them. The other self inside him — the self that lay hidden on the shadow side of his mind, the shadow side of the hyphen, the secret subject behind all his self-consciousness, self-doubt, self-pity — was regarding him from tomorrow here. And he could see that tomorrow would be the same as today. He would wake in bed with the same Hegel-less brain.
This story is a 30-page unbroken paragraph, but Sims’s prose isn’t taxing, and has some nice prosody at points. The effect is to compress our sense of time, like in Thomas Bernhardt’s Old Masters (1985).
Less successful for me was a story called “The Postcard,” where Derrida’s book — probably his most famous among avant-gardists since the 70s — becomes literalized in a thin mystery story.
The message of every postcard, no matter what is written on it, is I wish you were here.
The sender calls out to an absent receiver from some present site, but by the time the postcard arrives, the sender will no longer be there, they will be absent themselves, the here will have become there in their memories, emptied of presence and become past.
As I write this, I wish it were the case that you were here, but also, When you read this, I will be wishing that you had been there.
The here always flickering between present and past, presence and absence.
Every postcard is the expression of this paradoxical desire.
Every ghost or haunting is like a postcard. And also, for your consideration, every hospital is like a prison and like an airport, well well! The niggling questions that remained were why arguments from Derrida and Foucault were arranged together in this story, other than the diffused category of Postmodernism sustaining them. They aren’t that useful for interpreting the world of the story, let alone our world of production, and to take a step back, they don’t say much about how the fiction writer can interpret their social world using them. They seem to point back to the essence of how fiction works, at least at a rhetorical level, the nature of a one-way communication and all that.
I suspect a chief reason critical theories of this sort gets accommodated into these discursive types of literary fiction is that they’re concerned with descriptions of effects at the psychological level. That is, it’s not so different (if we abstract a lot of other factors) from the vocation of narrative prose. Hence the situation of writers and critics relating to this material as if it were poetry — and perhaps they’re practically right, though it’s not my relationship to postmodernism, hence my own disquiet.
The best piece of the collection is I think “Pecking Order,” which may be the most philosophically animated (by the “other minds” concept) while being the least explicitly referential. Sims’s fiction here isn’t what I’d call horror (unless encountering philosophical agnosticism in your literary fiction is a kind of horror), though the block paragraphs and lack of named characters creates an ill-at-ease atmosphere. “Pecking Order” however contains a splatter punk set piece involving the maladroit butchering of a chicken.
While the craft is king mentality of American fiction kind of dulled the reading pleasure, the techniques of European modernism and the intellectual content of Sims’s book serve as a bridge to more dark and decadent areas.
Also worth mentioning are the pieces of ekphrasis on ancient Roman sarcophagi and tiled murals. This stories include photographs. Because of the spooky roles some of these elements play, this was arguably better than the use of pictures in Sebald!
Read Sims’s story “A Nightmare” at Conjunctions.