Context

Interviewed in 1978 by John O’Brien, Coleman Dowell (1925-1985) said, “In Island People I had to invent everything—my techniques and everything because I wanted to do things I wasn’t sure words could do.” What “words could do,” of course, turned out to be the focus of Island People, with its hair-raising presentation of what Dowell refers to in the book as “the underlying.” The connotations of this term are rehearsed endlessly in the text, but what we read is the “underlying” itself: within the preternatural boundaries of this astounding book, its repeated instances act individually and together to point away from the possibility of “solving” the work. Though Dowell, in his interview, offers many authorized (so to speak) interpretations, Island People manages to slip out from under anything as slight as its own author’s claims about its nature.

A plot summary doesn’t help much here as a starting point for analysis: as the saying goes, you’d have about as much luck bisecting a sneeze. An unnamed man leaves the city to live in a house he has bought on a small island, a lone outsider among the “island people” who inhabit the place year-round. Though he lives alone with his dachshund, it appears that he has an engaged (if isolated) existence, enjoying frequent contact with and occasional visitors from the city. Abruptly, it’s revealed that the acridly disturbing comedy of manners we have read, involving the man and his guests Beatrix and Jeremiah, is a story, “The Keepsake,” written by another unnamed man living under circumstances identical to those of the first man, though somewhat more removed from the outside world.

Island People seems to have unveiled its framework here, and even the reader habituated (whether by contemporary fiction or by facile Scream-style reflexivity) to metafictional techniques expectantly awaits the commencement of the “real” Island People. As with Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, the wait is unending. But while Calvino’s comedy draws inevitably toward the shaggy-dog joke that crowns its penultimate chapter, Island People is all “underlying.” It’s a book that doesn’t seem to have been written as much as it seems to crawl out of itself, and is made up of a handful of chronic images, a few stark and unsubtle metaphoric figures, and an endless succession of contrasts, correlations, and transmutations that are effected through a continuous stream of distorted information, to which the periodic addition of what seems to be fresh intelligence only adds to the overall indeterminacy.

Island People can perhaps most usefully be read as a collection of documents—journal entries, fragments, poems, short stories, and mysterious shifts in time and voice denoted by switches to what I take to be a more “archaic” typeface (it’s the fact that the typeface is changed that textualizes these phantom utterances for me and allows me to feel comfortable categorizing them as documents)—whose authorship is unclear and whose veridicality, within the confines of the book’s peculiar space, is likewise undetermined. Island People is set in motion by the Narrator’s decision to embrace his invention Beatrix as an alter-ego (“helpmeet” is the curious word Dowell chooses in the interview) and to allow her, as a sort of repentance for his maligning of her in “The Keepsake,” to write his life. In the process, the wholly invented Beatrix herself invents, in a series of episodes, several versions of the Narrator, most of them named variations on “Chris,” all of whom move ever-closer to the danger and the “assault of desire” that the Narrator has decamped to the island to avoid. These episodes are surrounded by journal entries, presumably the Narrator’s (though their provenience is open to question), and by the strange articulations from the past, announced by the change of typeface, which obliquely tell the story of the family, touched by sickness, murder, and accusations of witchcraft, which had lived in the house in the nineteenth century.

Even as Beatrix’s Chris-avatars echo one another across the chasm of the novel, on still another level each “Chris” has his own doppelganger/opponent to grapple with inside the limits of each episode, while the other characters engage and complement one another in their respective episodes and with their counterparts throughout the novel, so that—just for the sake of example—the infinitely supercilious “Christopher” who stages patronizing “interviews” with his perceived social inferior Victor (both to discern the similarities between them and to indulge in the homoerotic undertone of the meetings) echoes not only the “Chris” of the next segment, a youthful playwright who is overwhelmed by the otherworldly depravity of the salon maintained by Claudo Darius, and not only Claudo, who takes “others into his body” to arrest decay, a sort of vampire who prolongs his own life “by ceasing during those periods to be . . . ,” but Victor as well, with whose condition Christopher is forcibly made to identify. Island People gradually fills with these doubled and reflected inhabitants—with writers and interlocutors whose pitilessly cold probing reveals their own barrenness more than that of their subjects, with precise observers who are so concerned with concretizing the abstruse social code their antennae pick up they remain unaware that they have entered the very slipstream of unuttered information that they monitor, with gigolos and hustlers and con men, with runaway boys, with the scarred and the birthmarked, with people who snap, or sag, when confronted with desire or the revelation of truth—all in various guises, at different stages of life, crossing the lines of gender and sexuality and race and class and time and space to form a webbed whole.

The web is spun entirely from language. I find that each new reading reveals deeper levels of—perhaps not meaning, but significance. Opening the novel for the purpose of confirming a quote for this essay newly exposes another of the interlacings that connect episode to episode and character to character. The effect of recognizing that you are reading a book that’s largely been generated from smaller pieces of itself is claustral (to use a component of the carefully chosen, nearly ritualistic vocabulary employed by Dowell) but it’s also liberating in a profound way. This kind of work, where words and phrases become suffused through systematic repetition with a private, diacritical import, opens itself to the infinite even as it closes itself and becomes defined by its textual limitations, because the “action” of the text does not center on the novelist’s technique of executing imagined alternatives to what “is,” a technique that usually manages to escape scrutiny because as a convention it’s inseparable from our concept of the novel form (in fact, it—the “idea” of the book, the unique set of alternatives each offers—is probably the very essence of the novel to most readers), but on the combinatorial possibilities inherent in the very words of the text in their juxtaposition to one another.

Consequently, countless parts of Island People set off sympathetic vibrations with countless other parts. Again, to provide just a few examples: in addition to numerous occurrences of the text’s central figure of an isolated man attempting to connect “like an island managing to throw out from itself . . . to touch, however tenuously, a main body and thus become a peninsula,” there are evocations in at least ten other places in the book of people with “island-like” traits or of conditions akin to living on a metaphorical “island,” plus numerous instances in which the “island people” reference is intended literally. The image of someone staring through, or at, the panes of a mullioned window or door is likewise revisited. Memory or what “could be another world” is evoked repeatedly through the related metaphors of a “vertical door,” a “line of yellow light,” a “dilated chink,” and “a thread of gold from a barely cracked door.” The similitudes are opposed in equal number by contrasts. Broad antitheses like writer and written, victim and victimizer, attraction and repulsion, male and female, homosexuality and heterosexuality, and youth and age, to name just a handful, appear throughout, and more specific motifs are held up for detailed comparison—e.g., on page 31, Grace is portrayed as a condition to attain, the essence of benevolence; while on page 66 Grace is described as a kind of a priori bestowal and a “malignancy.” Juxtaposed to the similarities, which have a tendency to ground the text, and contrasts, which help to deny the text “realism,” are correlative echoes and occasionally drastic transmutations of previously “received” information, which repeat the characters’ own mutability and underscores Island People’s refusal to reappear from out of the language into which it vanishes. For example, “Chris’s” frenzied moonlit fight with a rosebush on page 38 is echoed by the tree surgeon, Sajic’s, healing ministrations 250 pages later. When “Christine” makes her willfully mute son witness her stoning of a rabbit that has become trapped in the garden, it is recalled later when Sajic and his teenage lover, Moselle, are (nonfatally) stoned when discovered in flagrante delicto. The Narrator’s idle comment early in the book regarding the hunters who have overrun the nearby woods, “I could pick them off from my window,” is chillingly evoked in the novel’s final pages, as the danger dwelling at the edge of the fiction threatens to inundate it.

Though we are continually being confided in and directly addressed by the book’s various narrators, shown privileged information, and generally having the book’s textiness held under our noses, Dowell is silent as a sphinx: there is no point in the book at which there is any intrusion that might attest to the presence of the author: he remains hidden: in other words, while the stylistic differences proffered by the authors of the miscellaneous documents in Island People are perhaps subtly real,* each is unimpeachably “literary,” so to speak—that is, not only is there an absence of the parody that would lend a Just Kidding aspect to the proceedings (as is the case with another book made up entirely of documents, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew), there is also, to borrow from structuralist thinking, no “metalanguage” to allow a dominant and “authentic” voice to emerge, comment on, and claim authority over the book.

Dowell said that the book’s concept began with the theme he read in the Dickinson lines that serve as one of Island People’s epigraphs, “One need not be a Chamber / to be Haunted / One need not be a House / The Brain has Corridors surpassing / Material Place,” and the book pays overt homage to the lines several times. Dickinson’s verse is a particularly good choice to express the sense of ardent yearning Island People’s miscellaneous techniques, its haunting recurrences and hand-picked lexicon, collaborate to sustain, a longing that drives each of the characters who inhabit its “corridors” to their increasingly desperate and reckless acts—either material or imagined. When the extravagantly birthmarked Low criticizes the affectless and clinical “Chris” for writing a story of their relationship, “The Birthmark,” in the episode of the same name, he complains, “You didn’t want the real thing to get in the way of your story.” The increasingly foregrounded impetus of Island People is its unsuccessful effort to write that “real thing” and set it to rest. Island People’s conundrum and implicit tragedy is that it is composed of a series of truths and accurate intuitions that are nonetheless defective, that in the end avoid or elide the “real thing” that has sent its characters into their solitary orbits. The mysteriousness at Island People’s core is the reason for its uncanny and disturbing ambience: there is no more succor for the reader than for the characters. Speaking of the book’s lesson, Dowell said, “that kind of loneliness will not lead to a knowledge of reality or how to separate art from life.” What Dowell did not mention—perhaps he felt it unnecessary or self-evident—is that the lesson comes from outside the text. The book itself is singularly unedifying in this respect, and ends on a note of unendurable desolation: emptied of its inhabitants, the book leaves the reader to turn out the lights when (s)he leaves, as it were. The “real thing” is connection, a confrontation with desire. Aloneness yields an impoverished existence; it yields, to paraphrase a passage from early in the book, the reality we create in those secret places of ours that others do not know about—”But what about the eyes that took some of him in passing on a windy corner one dark night and enshrined that fragment of him like a holy relic and yearned over it and prayed to it for days and years . . .”—insulated from the risky evanescence that always holds the possibility of love as well as danger.

*In essence, the styles themselves are indistinct until the episode “Up at Claudo’s,” which is the book’s pivot and—taken as part of a continuum with “Victor,” the episode that precedes it—where Island People fully commences its project of self-regard, which crests with “1st Person Biography,” when the allegorical yields to cruel explicitness; when the “disquiet” described by the primly disdainful “Christopher” yields to the distasteful “fear” and the improbable “horror” each of the Chris-avatars has tried to avoid.

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

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