Context
Reading Stanley Elkin’s The Franchiser
William H. Gass
The following is William H. Gass’s 1980 foreword to The Franchiser, which provides a very different reading of Elkin’s work than Rick Moody offered in CONTEXT #5. It appears here by permission of the author. You
do not write a foreword to the novel of a friend, and the man, among
men, you admire and love most, with an easy conscience or a restful
mind. To place any words ahead of a work like this is the act of an
upstart, an interloper, an interventionist; so I shall say briefly what
moves me most when Stanley Elkin’s prose becomes my consciousness, and
simply hope that others will be drawn to it, and find, if not my
pleasures, others equally important and enduring. Stanley Elkin puts his imagination to work by placing it like a seed within the soil of some vocation. Vocation: that is no trade-school word for him. What is your name? where are you
from? what do you do? Among those who survey the habits of Americans,
there are many who find these questions, which are likely to be among
the first answering holes we fill in on forms, and the first we put to
strangers, indicative of our indifference to the essential self. Should
men and women, after all, be defined in any important way by their
work? The answer, of course, is yes, otherwise the activities that
largely support our lives and consume our time would be unfriendly,
foreign, and irrelevant to us. Our occupation should not be something
we visit like the seashore in summer or a prisoner in a prison, despite
the fact that the work may be unpleasant and dangerous and hard, like
that in a mill or a foundry or a mine. Even if it is like speaking a
foreign language we haven’t learned, that incapacity itself is totally
defining. In Boswell, Elkin’s first novel, the occupation was that of a celebrity seeker, but it may be a merchant’s, as it is in A Bad Man, or a bailbondsman’s, as it is in the brilliant story of that name.
Again, a gloomy grocer may be his concern, or a debt collector, the
disc jockey of The Dick Gibson Show, or a franchiser like Ben Flesh—jobs that are often seedy or suspect in
some way. Elkin does not wonder what it would be like if he were a
professional bully, or an elderly ragman, though new to the nation, a
peddler trundling a cart down the street and crying "Regs, all cloze."
He does not say, What if I were running my own radio show?—and then
write. His fictions are not daydreams; there is no idleness in them, no
reveries. They are not acts of ordinary empathy, either, in which the
novelist listens in on some way of life and then plays what he hears on
his Linotype. Instead, Elkin allows the activity itself to create his
central characters, to find its being in some gainly or ungainly body,
and then he encourages that body to verbalize a voice. Voice: for Elkin, that’s no choir boys’ word. Just as in Beckett, the logos is life. There is not a line in The Franchiser that doesn’t issue from one. And what is this occupation it speaks for,
but acts and their names, agents and their frailties, the textures of
their environments? . . . things, words, sensations, signs—all one. And
the mouth must work while reading him, must taste the intricate
interlace of sound; wallow, as I now am, in the wine of the word. With
the whole book to follow, one is still compelled to quote: From time to time the voice halts, fills its trunk, and sprays us
with speech. How long has it been, how far back must we go, to
encounter such speeches, such rich wild oratory? If I were to hazard a
guess, I would say we should find it again in The Alchemist, in Volpone, in Every Man in His Humour, and if that seems an extreme claim, simply compare Jonson’s
characteristic rodomontade (as wonderful as the word that is supposed
to condemn it) with the piece you will shortly encounter, the speech
that begins: "How crowded is the universe. . . . How stuffed to
bursting with its cargo of crap." And goes on: "A button you could be,
a pocket in pants, a figure on print." And on: "I am talking of the
long shot of existence, the odds no gambler in the world would take,
that you would ever come to life as a person, a boy called Ben Flesh."
And on: "You weren’t aborted, you didn’t end up in a scum bag. You
survived the infant mortality stuff. You made it past measles, polio,
mumps. You outwitted whooping cough, typhoid, VD. God bless you, boy,
you’re a testament to the impossible!" And on, page after page: "Ben,
everything there is is against your being here! Think of
get-togethers, family stuff, golden anniversaries in rented halls, fire
regulations celebrated more in the breach than the observance, the
baked Alaska up in flames, everybody wiped out—all the cousins in from
the coast. Wiped out." Until it ends: The Franchiser is engaged, then, in the naming of names, the names of places and
people, of course, but above all the names of things: commercial
enterprises of all kinds, name brands, house brands, brandless brands,
labels, logos, zits. Elkin composes a song from the clutter of the
country, a chant out of that "cargo of crap" that comprises our
culture, the signs, poles, boxes, wires, the stores along the roads and
highways, our motorcars. He writes with the stock in trade and with the
salesman’s slang. About the tissues, rags, and wipers that are
appropriate to every fixture and furnishing—bowl, screen, or clockface,
asshole or cheery cheek—he knows, and taps out the call sign, grasping
the peculiar argot of every agency, the specific slant of every
occupation, the angle, the outlook—the edge. There is, in
Elkin, only the "rich topsoil of city asphalt"; there are no lisping
winds or drooling streams. He dances to a wholly urban oo-la-la. He
cannot see the forest for the picnic tables, the cookout pits, the
trash containers with their loose heaps of bottles, Dixie cups, and
paper plates; and on those plates he spots the catsup smears, the
mustard marks, the crumbs from cookies and potato chips, and he
understands at once whether they were reconstituted, ruffled,
extra-hearty, or Mexicanized. Nature is a Kodacolor picture wall in one
of Ben Flesh’s Travel Inns. It is where you go to get wool for fine
suits, wood for boardwalks, food for fast foods, electric warmth for
blankets, power for power tools. There is one moment—you will reach
it—when Ben Flesh finds himself in Nature (ominously in, as though she
really were the Mother of us All). Here then we have no namby-pamby style. The roll call rolls on:
wristwatches and lamps, you name it and Elkin will name it; the
rhetoric rises like a threatening wind, and the effect is like that of
a storm on those who like them: exhilarating, and a little scary. He is not content with nice precise observations, in which, for
instance, a policeman’s long holster looks like a weapon, "its pistol
some bent brute at a waterhole, the trigger like a visible genital"
(wonderful and radical enough), but the uniform itself becomes a
weapon, and then parts of this new mechanism are beautifully described:
"the metal blades of Mopiani’s badge, the big key ring with its brass
claws, a tunnel of handcuffs doubled on his backside, the weighted,
tapered cosh, the sergelike grainy blue hide, the stout black brogans,
and the patent-leather bill of his cap like wet ink." He is
not satisfied with the simply sensuous (Ben Flesh standing in his tux,
"his formal pants and jacket glowing like a black comb, his
patent-leather shoes vaulted smooth and tensionless as perfect
architecture," as though he "might be standing in the skin of a ripe
bright black apple"). It does not matter that apples are every other
color, or that eggplants come close to patent black in their most
bruised moods; just try eggplant instead of apple and feel the effect of the change. Not
satisfied, never content, Elkin presses beyond his mountains of
apparently realistic detail, with their dangerous slides of wit; he
passes safely through the misleading forests of simple fun, the satiric
gibes, the sirenlike lists; he pushes on into the nuclei of his various
vocations (the dance studio, for instance, one of Ben Flesh’s failing
franchises), pushes, presses, until they are more than metaphors, more
than merely the nice idea that "work for rent" has been set up on
signs. He searches inside of whatever one of them possesses his
imagination at the moment to find the form—the spreading itch—of the
image itself: its finality, its limits, its outer edge; for then that
occupation, because it is the wholehearted consequence of a thought
that has put on a pair of pants and found a passion that they conceal
like an excited penis; this work, with all its learning and its lingo,
dreams itself back over the whole world of the fiction like a cloud,
settles over us all like a communal hallucination; whereupon we realize
that Elkin is a visionary writer; he is Brueghel or he is Bosch; he
pictures people at picnics, at weddings; Icarus falls suddenly through
the white sky; in the middle of a figure eight a skater dies, a sodden
sleeper floats out of the nervous corners of our eyes; and the
exuberance with which Ben Flesh has traveled the cloverleafs,
generously giving hitching thumbs a ride; his and our relish for
existence, for the least as well as the large, for the sweet names of
things, turns to dumb drunkenness, to petty meanness, to slobby
gluttony; vice emerges like a green haze from virtue’s smiling mouth;
the dance of life becomes the dance of death, but—more than that—the
dance of death is no better off: the bones play like tickled ivories
some sugary welcome to the spring or some soft September song. The
dance develops, step by step, as Ben Flesh decides to honor his losses
with a gala, and trays of slivered turkey and skin-thin beef are bought
with a Diner’s Club card and taken to the studio. People are lured in
off the street by bribes, and the Wurlitzer is applauded to get in
practice for the time when there will be a real band. "Night and Day"
is played, and "Happy Days Are Here Again." A bottle of catsup falls
from a shopping bag and spills its blood on the floor, where it soon
shows Flesh the paths of the dancers, its "beautiful red evidence"
making the music visible. It isn’t long before this mess is mixed with
bits of pork and rice, assorted hors d’oeuvres, soft crusts, and chunks
of chicken that explode "like delicious gut under the dancer’s weight."
It is a nightmare made out of reality by adding more: do people tend to
put out butts on the ballroom floor? then let fall a thousand cigs like
flaming stars; do guests incline to crumb their canapes, spill their
drinks? let litter float down upon the party like the ash that
preserved Pompeii; do old folks like to love the old songs? then let
them be set upon by "On the Road to Mandalay." Elkin plays the real
world loud; and by turning up the volume he has already rendered the hellish glow many a heaven casts before he gets around, in The Living End, to depicting our conventional ones—depictions, however, that rival, recall, revive Brueghel, Bosch. The
machine plays "The Night Was Made for Love." It plays "I’m Sitting on
Top of the World." The dancers continue to turn through their own slop,
and Flesh makes a great and crazy speech presumably about convenience
(complete convenience, not just that of convenience foods), the total
ease of chemical creams, the relief afforded by flowered sheets and
pretty pillow cases, the comfort control he calls the real measure of
mankind. It is an astonishing replay of the earlier "oration" I
mentioned, and there will be others, later, even more amazing. "Nobody,
nobody, nobody even had it so good. Take heed. A franchiser tells you."
Liquor continues to leak from the plastic cups. "Smile, you fuckers,
laugh, you shitlings. I come from Fred Astaire, everybody dance!" Flesh,
in effect, foams at the mouth; he represents America at its best; he is
the word become Ben; he utters pure pop; he speaks Lite beer; his verbs
are coated with a secret recipe, Vic Tanny keeps his prepositions slim,
though his nouns are all frozen custards and spun milk; yet what his
long rant is really about is the movement, the form, the true
table-turning of this incredible novel. Vision, I
said. For Elkin, it is no visionary’s word, no politician’s promise,
preacher’s ploy. It is the unerring instinct of the verbal eye. Ben’s
name knows the worst: the flesh fails, and Ben is stricken with a
scribbler’s sickness; he is MS’d up, to put it as poorly as possible;
nevertheless (our author notes), though as illnesses go, MS is truly
big-league—while one is sitting down (as authors do) it is an invisible
disease. In-visible. Our language, in Elkin’s hands, opens like a paper
flower. The symptoms of this sickness are drawn inside out with an
unfailing artistry of line. Once again, they circumscribe a vision. It
involves the unity of hell and heaven—this vision—even a nervous
interplay; it is a vision of value, to complete the vs, of how
life is nurtured by decay; it is a victory for the material, for the
carnal spirit, because even as Ben weakens, as both his flesh and his
Fotomat fold, and the hyperreal world of the novel completes its
business and makes its final sale, its hero is having an ecstasy
attack; and because love is finally Ben Flesh’s forte, he retains his
edge to the end. To turn to account . . . to disable
disabilities by finding their use . . . to celebrate circumstance . . .
to turn on a light in the heart of darkness . . . well, all flesh is
grass, as the prophet said, but the word of the Elkin shall franchise
it forever.
He loved the shop, the smells of the naphthas and benzenes, the
ammonias, all the alkalis and fats, all the solvents and gritty lavas,
the silken detergents and ultimate soaps, like the smells, he decided,
of flesh itself, of release, the disparate chemistries of pore and
sweat—a sweat shop—the strange woolly-smelling acids that collected in
armpits and atmosphered pubic hair, the flameless combustion of urine
and gabardine mixing together to create all the body’s petty suggestive
alimentary toxins. The sexuality of it. The men’s garments one kind,
the women’s another, confused, deflected, masked by residual powders,
by the oily invisible resins of deodorant and perfume, by the concocted
flower and the imagined fruit—by all fabricated flavor. And hanging in
the air, too—where would they go?—dirt, the thin, exiguous human clays,
divots, ash and soils, dust devils of being.
And this is precisely how Elkin makes a man—out of the elements he
lives in, the body he is confined to, the world he works in, the
language he knows.
"Irving, add water, we’ll make a man."
"So! Still! Against all the odds in the universe you made happy
landings! What do you think? Ain’t that delightful? Wait, there’s more.
You have not only your existence but your edge, your advantage and
privilege. You do, Ben, you do. No? Everybody does. They give
congressmen the frank. Golden-agers go cheap to the movies. You work on
the railroads they give you a pass. You clerk in a store it’s the 20
percent discount. You’re a dentist your kid’s home free with the
orthodontics. Benny, Benny, we got so much edge we could cut diamonds!"
Central to the theme and movement of the book, this harangue is one of fiction’s finest moments.
In nature. His scent in the thin air like a signal to the
bears, to the cougars. Out of his element, the franchiser
disenfranchised. Miles from the culture, from the trademark and trade
routes of his own long Marco Polo life.
Elkin is not concerned with High Culture, either. He knows it not.
The city, itself, is his Smithsonian, and there is real lust in his
love for it, not merely the usual honor and respect. He has been
happily captured by this vast dump of dreck the city has become, and
the country has become as it has become a city. He adores this spill of
drink and splat of spittle, this rind of flesh, dry ash, and peel of
paint, this loud honk the city is, and all its elements; even if it is
a steel shaving, this mother of muggers and vulva of vulgarity, this
hospice for rape and every kind of wretchedness—the city; although it
is only a loud shout, a long hurt, and place of enlarging hate—he loves
it, its objects, its stone scapes, lit ways, and glowing windows, this
shag of hair and shard of glass the city is; the bag, can, weed, and
bitter litter it makes; the cold smoke, the poisoned air it holds; this
dog leaving that the city is: Elkin has an embracing passion for it. He
celebrates it as no one has done or has been able to do (if we except
only Augie March), and although he knows motels, as habitable space,
are like the shaven cunt of a packaged whore, still he hums his hymns;
although he knows how many streets are ugly, foul-smelling, and
dangerous, as full of E. coli as a lower intestine, he warbles
away; even though he knows money is society’s perfumed,
silver-plattered shit, he goes on loving the prime rate; he knows fame
is a faded billboard now for rent, and yet he goes on touching the
famous as if they were kings who could cure; he knows, and yet he goes
on loving the menace and the waste, the tacky, cheap, lovelorn,
gimcracky life our modern lot has all too often come to; he loves it
exactly as the saint loves the leper—despite and because—not in
blindness or through any failure of taste, but because it is all so
deeply and dearly human to him; because, as Rilke put it, it is good
just to be here—Siehe, ich lebe!—since existence itself is
outrageously chancy and strange and stable and ordinary (it is like
that flameless combustion of gabardine and pee); and all of it—our
whole cornpone commercial culture—becomes so transformed by Elkin’s
attention, his love and his writing, so changed, altered beyond any
emblem, that even an enemy of crud such as I esteem myself to be—grim,
bitter, and unforgiving—is won over, and I walk through the dime store
in a daze of delight.
It was a hotel, dark except for the light from an open elevator
and a floor lamp by one couch. The Oriental carpets, the furniture, the
registration desk and shut shops—all seemed a mysterious, almost
extinguished red in the enormous empty lobby. Even the elevator—one of
four; he supposed the others weren’t functioning—seemed set on low. He
looked around for Mopiani but the man had remained at his post. He
pressed the button and sensed himself sucked up through darkness,
imagining, though it was day, the darkened mezzanine and black
ballrooms, the dark lamps and dark flowers in their dark vases on the
dark halved tables pressed against the dark walls of each dark floor,
the dark silky stripes on the benches outside the elevators, the dark
cigarette butts in the dark sand.
There is no fear of excess here, either, because Elkin
oversubscribes to everything. Centers will not hold him in spite of his
academic training, his professorial position. He goes to extremes
simply to have his picture taken standing at an edge. His language
carries him away (there is a pile-up of images at every corner, like a
crash of cars); his characters get carried away; his words first
explore, then explode the world.
