Visiting Sausage Planet
My White Planet
Mark Anthony Jarman
Thomas Allen Publishers, 2009
240 pages, $22.95
If there is such a thing as a stream of consciousness, at least as we see it represented in literature, then its current is just as likely to be driven by sound as sense. Sometimes the resulting babble adds depth of meaning – an unconscious woman’s “senseless, scentless thigh,” the “fracture and fracas” of a battlefield, frozen fields along the St. John River a “lunatic lunar blue,” the “sail lofts on the estuary, statuary and spires” of London – but in each of these cases what is primary is the way one word suggests another, not the relation between associated ideas. If you ask what the narrator in the following passage is thinking about, the only answer is . . . cod:
Region 3 paramedics yelled, Is she coding?! but we’re all coding and decoding, we’re all coddled, minor codicils in the will that has so many patches you can’t see the tire.
There needn’t be any logic to such word games, only flow. Bayonets that “scissor strips of skin” from the ribs of horses makes for a nice stream of alliteration, but bayonets don’t scissor (the flensing of flesh that immediately follows is better). And paramedics who “bicker like bakers” seems like a bit of nonsense from a nursery rhyme, the likely origin of all such mental streams of sound being when rivers loved to blend their murmurs to our nurse’s song. In our own time television jingles and pop songs have crowded out these cradle ur-tunes with their subliminal white noise, but the rage to turn thought into a kind of music, to make it dance, persists.
Mark Anthony Jarman, whose latest collection of stories My White Planet provides the above examples, is a master of such musical compositions, his prose moving to the rhythm of a “perverse, personal jukebox” loaded with rhythms and lyrics borrowed from the Norton Anthology of English Literature, classic jazz, Joy Division, The Who, and . . . good lord, is that a reference to Motorhead on page 122? Where are my milk crates . . . .
None of this, however, makes Jarman an allusive writer. Instead, he samples text. Borrowings high and low erupt on the white planet of the page like pop-ups, and are just as quickly closed. “Cream-faced loon” (he sneaks this in twice) . . . Macbeth . . . click. Whatever their thematic and situational aptness, the borrowings themselves seem to serve a primarily metrical purpose, notes to be struck in different keys and held for different durations as the line demands, appearing in italics or regular type to register variations in emphasis. Thinking of women (and this book spends a lot of time thinking about women), Marvell immediately comes to mind: there will be time, none I think do there, none I think do there embrace, had I but world enough and time.
The sampling is usually from musicians and poets, and it’s typical to refer to Jarman as being a “poetic” writer himself, with his piercing imagery, mannered sound effects, and discontinuous, fragmented narratives. My White Planet takes things further than ever, often giving us the feeling that the familiar structures of prose are breaking down into an unparseable Joycean riverrun that mimics chaotic, (sexually) obsessive mental states:
Sausage and honeycomb, her blossoms, corn cakes and rum, her bosom, potted meat, mouths open or grimacing like dancers, shouting and swearing, salt tongues stuck in babel and brothy breath, all the brains and bodies, in battle all of us pushing toward forest and fence, the flowers of the forest shredded under rounders and rowdymen, where are they, where, see, see, hundreds of voices becomes one foul full sound and we break rank, run like turkeys.
This has something of an Anglo-Saxon flair to it, especially with all the alliteration and the almost visible line and half-line breaks. It’s easy to think of it as spoken word. At times it even seems to be breaking into a rap beat:
Hat boxes, invoices. O Miss! O Miss!
The bulled passes my head. You missed!
And it’s no surprise that the final two stories are presented as “BONUS TRACKS!” with the instruction given to “PLAY LOUD!”
Though a gulf separates them stylistically, Jarman is a writer in the performance mode of Leon Rooke. Character, story and plot take a back seat to the drive of words, the propulsion of breath. And if obscurity follows, so be it. As Jarman’s “one foul full sound” sentence (if we can even call it a sentence) indicates, there is a trade-off. My White Planet has a theme and it is related to the obscurity of the voice: style doesn’t just express a certain point of view, but is trapped in the same. The stream of consciousness has no tributaries. The white planet is a skull.
Jarman is clearly aware of this. His narrators experience difficulty getting outside their own heads. Witness the parable of the submariners:
After VE Day a lone U-boat refused to surrender, snuck out of the Baltic Sea, and crossed the Atlantic to South America, last of the Reich’s wolfpacks. Took them a long time, underwater most of the time, afraid to be spotted by Allied planes or destroyers. No sunlight, no fresh oxygen, the U-boat’s air poisoned by the mammoth batteries, everyone coughing in bunks and everything drips water, pipes and bulkheads and sausage covered with mildew, no ersatz coffee, bread wet and mouldy, the sailors’ skin gone weird haunted colours – an invisible crew caught between bottom and top.
We’re trapped inside that U-boat, and I’ll never see home again. Our faces are starting to look like the pictures jailed on our driver’s licence.
We’re all trapped inside that U-boat. At least us men are. Women are, in the book’s own terms, another world altogether. The eponymous white planet is, in the title story, the pale ass of a woman who is discovered, à la The Thing from Another World, by a group of isolated polar scientists stranded at a research station – a closed community that bears a more than passing resemblance to that stuffy, semeny submarine (oh those moldy sausages! those dripping pipes!). In “My White Planet” the woman’s sun-starved hemispheres are a metaphor for the sexual other, a creature entirely alien to male experience but one the male narrator’s imagination won’t let go. A condition shared by the soldier in “Night March in the Territory” who thinks the act of sex “seems like another planet,” Trevor seduced by the “closed garden,” the “warm world” of a teenage lover, the chauffeur who sees the girl sitting/stripping next to him as a “walled garden,” a “new planet,” and all those boozy, old-timer hockey duffs and their lame, locker-room humour about who is and who isn’t gettin’ some poontang. Planet Sausage is not a happy place.
What makes the experience even more uncomfortable and claustrophobic is the unity of voice. This has always been an issue with Jarman, but in My White Planet it takes on an even greater significance. What I mean by unity of voice is simply the fact that all of Jarman’s narrators – whether they be aging hockey players, middle-aged academics, or nineteenth-century frontiersmen – all sound the same. They all listen to the same music, they’ve all read the same books. One simply has to accept that Drinkwater, the narrator of Salvage King, Ya!, is a former professional hockey player who can’t stop quoting Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot. Anachronisms lead the reader to experience a kind of historical vertigo trying to figure out when certain events are taking place. The two Assiniboia stories in My White Planet seem to be set around the time of the Riel rebellion, but the narrator name drops eBay and describes horses as moving “like sudden amphetamines.” In his primer on How Fiction Works, James Wood talks about the tension between an author’s personal style and the way stories like to “bend” towards individual characters and their habit of speech. In Jarman’s fiction there is no such conflict because the bending only goes one way. Language orbits the author’s white planet.
Of course we must never confuse the author with the narrator. And yet at least one story in My White Planet is explicitly presented as non-fiction. Indeed “Bear on a Chain” won Prism International’s Non-fiction contest. As we’ve seen, that story has Jarman imagining the life of a kid named Trevor Hachey who died after falling into the St. John River. Hating to think of Trevor dying a virgin, Jarman enters into a sexual fantasy: Trevor exploring the undiscovered country of the girl’s body, with “the slight slight independent sway of each breast suspended in cotton ribbing” and the “closed garden” of her “warm world,” all to the whispering of lines from Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress.” It is an identical scene to the one in “Fables of the Reconstruction” where the “narrator” becomes fixated on a girl sitting beside him, the way she removes her bra without taking off her shirt, the “walled garden” of her sex, the lines from Marvell.
The point is not that Mark Anthony Jarman has a bra fetish, but rather to note how the language throughout the book bends toward a single, obsessive, closed point of view. I think this is quite deliberate. The perverse, personal jukebox, the brain on a chain rattling its post, the white planet of the skull that we can never get outside of, is Jarman’s theme. As a helpful stewardess informs us in one of the bonus track stories, you can “fly up, up and away, but you can’t escape the red interior of the skull that houses you.” We’re trapped inside that U-boat, watching the same damn videos over and over until the tape rots.
It’s typical of a unique talent like Jarman’s to push an art until it reaches a natural limit. At that point the chain goes tight, the post begins to rattle, and the writing locks into a frustrated, fixed orbit. My White Planet, as good as it sometimes is (and I would place it second among Jarman’s books to 19 Knives), represents such a terminus. One is reminded of Eliot’s thoughts on Yeats:
It is my experience that towards middle age a man has three choices: to stop writing altogether, to repeat himself with perhaps an increasing skill of virtuosity, or by taking thought to adapt himself to middle age and find a different way of working.
Yeats was an example of one such triumphant adaptation. Cormac McCarthy’s later career, I think, shows what can go wrong. In any event, if my reading of the anxieties of My White Planet are any indication, it seems Jarman is ready to try something new.
Tags: Issue 76, Mark Anthony Jarman