Context

The unit of composition in the fictions of Stanley Elkin is not the sentence or the paragraph, but the breath. Often critics and readers talk about the work of novelist Elkin as though he were just a stand-up comic. A borscht belt guy, a Catskills guy. They imagine perhaps that the stories and novels are formulated around bits of business that might sustain a stand-up comedian for a few minutes on stage, before this comedian races off to the next subject. And you can certainly support this argument with great moments from his work: the professional wrestling passages of the author’s first novel Boswell; radio shtick in The Dick Gibson Show; God’s show-stopping monologue in The Living End; the sequence of George Millses in his most ambitious novel, George Mills, etc. But it’s a mistake to think of Elkin only in these terms—he was apparently uncomfortable with being thought of merely as a humorist ("I didn’t even know I was funny until a friend of mine told me that I wrote funny stuff"). I would therefore argue that it was language that Elkin was first concerned with. The permissive medium of language as opposed to the restrictive message of comedy. The narratives of Elkin proceed out of love of language first, through no other engine. Well, it’s true that stand-up comedy is structured around how a comedian talks. It’s all about spiel, about how a certain piece of business can sustain a sequence of jokes for a time. And certainly this emphasis on spoken rhythms is a relevant piece of Elkin’s prose, in part, because it has resonances with Elkin’s origins, with the orality occasionally implicit in literature by Jewish writers (you feel spoken rhythms also in Singer, in Malamud, in Salinger, in Lish, even in Brodkey), with the fact that Elkin had salesmen in the family, etc. But this orality is about breath. The spiel goes on until the breath runs out. The texture of talk is essential to this language, sure, as in a passage like the following, from The Magic Kingdom,

[Epcot Center] was, finally, like Heaven. Convenient, about the same size, without obstacle or climate, and laid out like the aisles in a department store. It was like Heaven and it scared him. It would scare the kids too. They would see that there really was a China, that there really was a France. That Germany was not made up. That Italy was no invention, improbable Mexico, unlikely Japan.

Breath (from which comes the word inspiration, of course) is the real motivator in the way the sentences are structured. Sometimes a passage in Elkin goes on at some length just because the rhythms are good. Sometimes a passage goes on simply because of sound:

This woman, lusty as a sailor, a fleet, a navy, bringing the spilled beans of her fevers and kindling points like all the pressed and faded roses of love, not barbarians at her gates now but blander, more unsuspected things, not the wired protocols of flesh or her body’s steamy skirmishes and star wars so much as the politics of etiquette and love, all the gossip of the heart and head, of some brand new flower style like those dumb sexual displays in nature, the bright bandings on birds, say, who do not even know that what they’re wearing is instinct and evolution; that innocent, that naïve, up to her ass in guilt and underwear and outraged as someone trying to clear her name, wanting, needing frill and circumstances, some all-the-trimmings life she hadn’t ever lived and hadn’t even known she’d longed to live, her lust diffused, broad and scattered as cloud cover?

The metaphor I’d like to propose to you with respect to how breath gets meted out in the work of Stanley Elkin is the saxophone solo. I’d like to propose the saxophone solo as articulated in the orchestra of Duke Ellington. Maybe something by Johnny Hodges, one of Ellington’s great sidemen and soloists. Or maybe a Wayne Shorter solo from the early electric period of Miles Davis. Jazz had ignoble origins, of course, in bars and brothels of New Orleans, and early jazz was full of warmth, and tremendous comedy, and it is built in short, three-minute bursts, like the popular melodies which it later spawned. And this, to my mind, is how Elkin structured his novels, in bursts of musical invention, which came to a close when the breath of a speaker (the narrator, mostly, that wild voice which is identical from book to book, always consistent, featuring a joy like a sort of brush fire) exhausted itself. Take the opening passage of The Magic Kingdom, an extended sequence in which the protagonist of the novel, tour-organizer Eddy Bale, father of a famous terminally ill child, manages to secure an audience with the Queen of England. The scene is organized entirely around its conclusion, a wonderful piece of deflation, in which the Queen gives Eddy Bale a check for fifty pounds, not a farthing more, and tells him to return the check when he’s done securing other donations. The Queen, it turns out, is one shrewd philanthropist. And yet what makes this tour de force passage work is the sequence of delays that precedes this final revelation. Bale’s meditations on the death of his son, his considerations of the politics implicit in Buckingham Palace, his recent past, all spin out in a great freewheeling squawk before the Queen is able to drop her bombshell. The story is great, but it’s the delay that is the heart of the work ("The moves were based upon principles of misdirection and distraction," as the narrator says), the opportunities for language that delay affords. The melody is the anchor in Ellington, too, not to be underestimated. But all the real fun is in the solo.

A brief digression on my history as a reader of Stanley Elkin. I came to Elkin’s work later than I should have done, and not for want of trying on the part of my teacher, Robert Coover, who had urged upon us, when I was an undergraduate, a short story from Elkin’s collection, Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, viz., "A Poetics for Bullies." I was a lazy student, didn’t pay attention, didn’t bother to read the work in question, as I didn’t bother to read a lot of what I was told to read. Not long after, though, I read Coover’s introduction to Stanley Elkin’s Greatest Hits (that series of novelistic jewels pried from their settings). It was an introduction as act of love and fealty and I loved it, and thus was the ground prepared for me. I wanted to know more. Still, the case was closed for a good five years, until in a spell of acute melancholy in the middle eighties, I decided I would read nothing but comic writers for a while. In an attempt to cheer myself up. First I read some Groucho Marx, then some Thurber, then some Benchley, and then, according to impulse, I picked up the Obelisk paperback of The Magic Kingdom. It was the plot summary that did it: a bunch of terminally ill kids go to Disney World. I was sold! It was the most blasphemous, the most rageful, the funniest, the most American of all conceits for a novel. And Elkin wasn’t kidding about the kids either. They weren’t on some long-slow train to the hereafter. These kids were doomed.

It’s no secret that the author himself knew a thing or two about mortal illness. He’d had a heart attack in his thirties. Not long after, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Mortality began to recur in his work. In, e.g., The Franchiser, where the protagonist, Ben Flesh, also has M.S., in The Living End, with its depictions of the afterlife, and then, most forthrightly, in The Magic Kingdom. It’s not difficult to imagine in our own memoir-obsessed period of literature a contemporary novelist issuing confessions of the tortures of his illness, spastic pain, paralysis, vision problems, loss of muscle tone, etc. But Elkin’s tactic was more persuasive and much more heartrending in The Magic Kingdom: to assemble one of the most afflicted and poignant casts of sufferers ever in the English-language novel and to deny them, unilaterally, the merest expression of self-pity, to make them questing, eager, joyful, randy, enthusiastic, and doomed: Janet Order ("Because of her abnormality, the deficient oxygenation in her holed heart, the surgically attached aorta added on by the doctors like some displaced bit of afterthought architecture, she had been cyanotic from birth, her skin everywhere an even, dusky bluish color, dark as seawater"); Noah Cloth ("The first operation had been successful, yielding tiny growths of a benign jewelry, but when the surgeons went back in a second time, they discovered the boy had severe osteosarcoma and had to amputate the finger"); Benny Maxine, with Gaucher’s, the "yid disease"; Rena Morgan, with cystic fibrosis ("Her giggle had shaken loose some of the immense reserves of Rena Morgan’s clear, cystic fibrotic phlegm"); Charles Mudd-Gaddis, whose progeria "ages him prematurely"; and so forth. Each of them leaking, decaying, mortifying, at least one of them destined, of course, to perish.

The dream chapter as microcosm of the whole: Rereading this fabulous book, almost fifteen years later, I’m happy to note how little has dated, how acute is its assault on the American commercial edifice, how well it illustrates the author’s simple if ambitious aesthetic, "More is more," how consistent it is with the rest of Elkin’s work, but above all how brilliant is its dream chapter. Personally, I tell students never to write about dreams. It can’t be done with any novelty at all. Everyone knows how to interpret dreams, since Freud’s opus on the subject, and the rules for interpreting dreams are more constrictive than the rules for interpreting fiction, and, therefore, while you’re thinking it’s a brave new ocean into which you wade with your dreams, you are actually restricting your options, hemming yourself in. I can count on one hand the dreams in contemporary fiction that are at all convincing. But after coming anew to the fourth chapter of The Magic Kingdom I am pressed into revision of my pedagogical guidelines. The chapter begins from the p.o.v. of one of the caregivers on the trip (as we might term them now), a guy worrying about who’s going to be his roommate in Disney World. But the narrative wheels quickly around to the kids ("In the seat next to him Benny Maxine stirred, whimpered in his sleep"), penetrating, cyclically, into their slumbering consciousnesses: "Lydia Conscience giggled. Of all the children on the plane—indeed, of all the sleeping children in the world at that moment, those in their beds for the night as well as those merely napping—she was the only one who happened to be dreaming of the Magic Kingdom." This is, on reflection, an arresting boast. The narrator has insight into all the sleeping children of the world? Yet the incredible accomplishment of the dream chapter is that it delivers on this boast, through abundant pyrotechnical razzle dazzle, because Lydia’s dream, just as she’s settling into it, also includes her tour companion Janet Order, "But it was too spooky-making just now to have to run into that little blue girl. What was her name?" And, just as you’re adjusting to this predicament, this siamese dream, the narrator leaps, virus-like, into Janet herself: "At the precise moment that Lydia Conscience was hiding from the blue girl, Janet Order entered the dream. Lydia was nowhere about, nor did Janet know that Lydia—she was that neat—had ever occupied it." In turn, after Janet, we get again a few snapshots of staff members on this Trans-Atlantic flight, and then more of the kids, "The children slept, fitfully dreaming": "Little Tony Word dreams of his low-salt meals, of the liquids and fruit juices he is forced to swallow, almost, or so it seems to him, by the pailful, of all the rind fruits he must eat, and which, because of the invisible germs and hidden dirts which might be on his mother’s hands, he must peel himself"; the aged Charles Mudd-Gaddis, "that little old man, dreams of his first birthday"; Rena Morgan, who "can’t tell if she’s awake or sleeping"; and finally, "In Monte Carlo, Benny Maxine held a bad hand and waited for the croupier to scoop in his losses." Even Eddy Bale, the tour organizer, is imbricated into this dream design, "Eddy Bale talks to his dead son, Liam, in his sleep addresses the boy in a hospital room he does not remember." As this catalogue of dreams is a microcosm for the interior lives of all children, so is the dream called The Magic Kingdom a microcosm for the dream of American fiction. Which is to say, redundantly, that the rest of the book is just as brilliant as the dream chapter, just as risky, just as elegant, just as multifarious, snow falling on the Magic Kingdom when the kids arrive, the philosophical discussion of the precise relationship between Pluto and Goofy, the description of the Haunted Mansion, the rest of the story, which I decline to give away, just as brilliant as the dream chapter, as Elkin was always brilliant. The disabled but unbowed Elkin worried that his most glittering edifice (George Mills) might be behind him, and yet here he stumbled like Moses, onto the very burning bush of narrative prose, complex point of view, and, loving his creations as God might love them (with perfect clemency, without pity), he used the urgency of his voice to redeem all sick children, to recuperate the very notion of the sick child, to slay death.

All this mortality, however, overlooks the degree to which sexual longing is central to The Magic Kingdom, the longing thrown into relief by the battle to survive. Here longing turns up in some hilarious set pieces that highlight the way love and mortality are obverses, as in the case of Mary Cottle (one of the nurses on the tour), who absolutely must pleasure herself, and so rents a hotel away from the rest of the tour ("Only orgasm calmed her, lined up the iron filings . . . of her scattered spirit like a powerful magnet, restored her, and, wonderfully, could hold her for hours"); as in the case of Colin Bible, another of the chaperones, who goes trolling for carnal action at the Contemporary Hotel’s health club ("He loitered by the urinals, skulked near the stalls, slunk along the washstands, and insinuated himself at the electric hand-dry machines"); as in Eddy Bale’s attempt to seduce his own employees; as in the kids’ efforts to experience the fireworks of love in their briefly allotted terms, which efforts ultimately lead these kids, of course, to sneak into Mary Cottle’s private hotel room, to hide behind her curtains, and to gaze ("She looked in her nakedness nude as meat in a butcher shop—and [Benny] was struck by the rare, pink baldness of her body, by its unsuspected curves and fullnesses"). Love and desire should be no surprise here, since these are great sources for language, even if in America sex and death are always submerged in merchandising. There’s a lot of merchandising here too. Thus, the scene wherein young Noah Cloth goes crazy attempting to spend his trip allowance:

And he had an impression of bounty, of infinite variety—the things in this shop that fall neither under the category of staple nor luxury and that seem to him products for which no real use exists—the Mickey Mouse candle holders, for example, the cartoon stamp books, their gauzy, transparent envelopes filled with pictures of Mowgli, Mr. Toad, Bambi, Snow White, the dwarfs on gummed stamps.

Which leads us at last to the question of the Orlando theme park. Well, Disney World, as a Disney cast member remarks near the climax of The Magic Kingdom, not only has

The guns, the Bomb, and the animatronics, but the Ten Commandments and the Onward Christian Soldiers too! They’re connected high up with important principles: with Safety First and Handicap Access. With double sinks and orthopedic mattresses. With convenience, clean accommodations, and fair value understood. With public temperance and a Lost and Found like the secret fucking service! With clever mice and friendly bears, with reluctant dragons and horticultural bulls. With Nature in sweet tooth and claw, as it were. . . . With family, I mean!

Nevertheless, through language Elkin bests the Mouse. In fact, it isn’t even close. The Mouse stands for diversion from consciousness, The Mouse stands for overstimulation, The Mouse stands for retardation of aesthetic impulses, The Mouse stands for community without any idea about individuals, The Mouse stands for repression and for displacement, for dream strategies without any idea of what dreams mean, The Mouse stands for mechanization, for anesthesia. And Elkin stands for language and shtick and music and breath and desire, Elkin stands for survival and memorial, whose improvisations in the face of mortality just keep reiterating, irascibly, loveably, the same wild chant, still here, still here, still here.

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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