Slightly but Marvelously Off

While it’s been a brutally hot New England summer in the physical world that we all inhabit, I’ve been in what writer Jami Attenberg calls the “winter” of my inner world that only I inhabit. In 1000 Words, Attenberg uses the seasons as a metaphor for the different phases of the writer’s creative life. As she describes it, spring is about prepping projects, summer is about producing new work, fall is time for rest, and winter is about asking broad questions regarding our creative aims.

My writer’s winter hasn’t done much to help with New England’s crippling humidity this year, but it has helped me to think about method. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about the uses of experimental fiction techniques: postmodernism, absurdism, and the like. I’ve gotten curious about works that include just a hint of the experimental—what we might call a “tincture of the surreal,” or the inclusion of subtle, almost sub-perceptual experimental flavoring in an otherwise realist work. I think of it as the avant-garde literary equivalent of psychedelic microdosing.

What does this approach include? Well, it obviously excludes the absurdism of Beckett or Barthelme, the lush extravagances of magical realism, or the inventions of fabulists like Stanislaw Lem. Great as they are, there is more than a tincture of the surreal in those works—they’re full-blown trips rather than barely perceptible microdoses.

Lynch and the Image

Would David Lynch qualify? On a first pass, of course not. His films certainly have more than a hint of the avant-garde in them. There is, however, a resonance between our idea of the tincture and some accounts of his work. For example, David Foster Wallace’s “David Lynch Keeps his Head” (1995) famously defines “Lynchianism” as the “irony of the banal” achieved through scenes that juxtapose the extreme macabre with the extreme mundane to illustrate how the mundane houses the dark (161). This effect is achieved through shots that DFW describes as “just slightly but marvelously off” (200). As an example of Lynchian logic in action, he gives the charming example of Jeffrey Dahmer putting a decapitated head next to a carton of milk in his refrigerator (161). In another case, he identifies Lynchian elements in Tarantino’s early films, such as Reservoir Dogs, in their pairing of inane small talk with extreme violence (164).

What stands out to me in this reading of Lynchian methodology is the centrality of the image. On this definition, the images are what do the work. Indeed, a case could be made that, on this account, Lynchian surrealism is “thick” in the sense of having an argument woven into its method: by establishing a disjuncture between the expected meanings of two images (hence the “irony”), a point is made about the specific relationship between depravity and mundanity. DFW goes a little further in locating that relationship in the “dark” dimensions of the unconscious in general and American culture in particular (what he calls how “the U.S. present” feels on one’s “nerve endings” (200)). Or both, I guess.

I see the truth in both of its apparent applications. It's interesting, however, to think about what DFW’s rendering of Lynchian cinematic logic might look like if deployed toward other ends. I guess this would be something achieved through the ironic pairing of contrasting images that don’t gesture quite so directly to the dark mechanics of the unconscious and/or relatively recent American culture. As he suggests in that essay, what stood out to DFW about Lynch is how films like Blue Velvet used avant-garde methods to say things that seemed true and authentic rather than trivially clever and self-indulgent. It’s an open question how much those successes can be attributed to the definition of Lynchianism given above rather than the more general surrealism and dream logic of much of Lynch’s stuff. If you stop to think about it, Lynch had a broad aesthetic signature that included distinctive auditory and narrative elements just as much as ironic visual ones.

Anyway, I like all of that about Lynch, too, but what’s stood out to me more recently in reading Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet or Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances is their use of experimental methods to communicate truths about emotional commitment, love, and sacrifice. These warmer truths of the heart are a striking contrast to the points entailed by the thick definition of Lynchianism given above, with all of its underlying darkness. They are a long way from the nearly sociopathic coldness and hermeticism of Lynch’s films. Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet in particular includes Lynchian aesthetics (in the broader sense), which might signal ways of using Lynchian storytelling logic and/or aesthetics to achieve a hint of the surreal being put toward other thematic ends.

Who knows, but the point for now is that some renderings of Lynch’s work seem to be in line with our thinking of the tincture of the surreal, and those definitions privilege the image.

PKD, Lethem, and Plot

Perhaps a more direct case of realist fiction that contains a hint of the surreal comes from one of the masters of speculative surrealism: the mighty Philip K. Dick himself. There were of course many PKDs: PKD the SF pulpist, the philosopher, the religious explorer, the 1960s iconoclast, and the social critic/prognosticator among them. His prescience in predicting so much of modern dystopia is no small part of why he is having something of a moment, as expressed by a recent cartoon in The New Yorker. That fame is deserved: the man’s work is the epitome of capturing how the “U.S. present feels on one’s nerve endings.”

Famously, PKD aspired to have “realist novelist” rank among his many identities, which he achieved to a moderate degree by the end of his life. Of the various PKDs, that’s the one that comes to me now. I’m not the first to point out that even in his more realist, mainstream stuff, PKD is often slightly but indeed marvelously off. Confessions of a Crap Artist, for example, gives us a type of surreal Cheeverism, and only one reason for this is its awkwardly deployed cult and UFO subplot (fumbled, in my view, at the end). As another example, much later in PKD’s oeuvre, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer contains just the faintest hint of a ghost story in an otherwise realist book based on Episcopal bishop James Pike’s life.

I’ve always wondered to what degree PKD included those elements for literary purposes. It might have been intentional. It also might have been that he was so ensconced in spec lit norms that they inflected his realist fiction on reflex. Or maybe he was just a weird guy who couldn’t keep his weirdness out of his writing. Regardless, I for one have always wished he’d drawn those elements out just a bit more than he did. Not everyone agrees, but they feel more like missed opportunities than missteps to me.

I’m not alone. If there’s any writer who took notes when reading his PKD, it is Jonathan Lethem, and that element of the realist works certainly wasn’t lost on him. Lethem works that into his plots to marvelous effect. While the obvious touchstone here might be Fortress of Solitude, with its genre-busting use of an invisibility ring interrupting its realism, I would direct us more to his underappreciated Gambler’s Anatomy, The Arrest, or You Don’t Love Me Yet. Dissident Gardens, arguably Lethem’s most “realist” work would also qualify, as would something like Chronic City, but that one is pretty surreal overall.

Lethem’s more realist works often contain just a light flavoring of weird plot devices (supercars, stolen kangaroos, sex scenes featuring Abraham Lincoln, etc.). Like PKD, Lethem arguably achieves that tincture of the surreal primarily through plot than image (at least in the sense of Lynchianism from above). Often pigeonholed as a “genre buster,” really the mash-up of genre conventions is only one way he achieves that effect, though it is satisfying when the Pynchian comic book qualities of Gun, with Occasional Music surface in his realist prose.

Much remains to be said, but the point for our purposes is that folks like Lethem and PKD largely achieve their hint of the surreal through plot rather than imagery in the manner of Lynch, which signals a second way that a tincture of the surreal can be injected into realist works or scenes.

Almodovar and Texture

So, we’ve got a hint of the surreal achieved through imagery and a hint of the surreal through plot. People also achieve that effect through texture and voice. For example, a synopsis of Almodovar’s Room Next Door needn’t mention anything surreal or strange: two old friends go to upstate New York. One is suffering from terminal cancer and wants to commit voluntary suicide, and the other has agreed to help despite her initial misgivings and discomfort with death. In a sense, nothing weird happens: an old flame surfaces. The police are a little suspicious. No Lynchian severed heads or Lethemian pilfered kangaroos in sight.

But it’s a bizarre, unnerving film. In this case, everything feels just slightly off, but in a way far subtler than in Lynch. A few factors contribute to this: one is the film’s straightforward but odd, distilled visual aesthetic. Another is its restraint and texture. As I experienced it, the film consistently edges up to what seems to be a likely conclusion or turn of events without pulling the trigger. It systematically and routinely flouts Chekhov’s famous principle that “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off,” or, in other words, that a story shouldn’t plant irrelevant plot devices that have no payoff. Almodovar’s film loads us down with Chekhovian guns, and none of them go off. The result is that the viewer is always a little uncomfortable while waiting for the other shoe to drop. Eventually, so many potential threads are left hanging that the filmic experience becomes unnerving in a way that’s hard to pin down, and even the film’s clumsy lobbying for assisted suicide detracts only slightly from this effect.

Maybe I’m giving Almodovar too much credit on this one, but I’m inclined to think he did that intentionally. Regardless, for our purposes, what matters is that this reading of the film indicates a third way that a largely realist work can host a hint of the surreal viz., vibe and restraint. Whether one sees it in Almodovar specifically or not, such an approach could be redeployed elsewhere.

Why Bother with Just a Hint?

A simple question: why bother? Whether done through imagery, plot, or voice, what is to be gained from such an approach? To return to DFW on Lynch, I don’t know that I would say it communicates how the U.S. present in particular feels on my nerve endings. I wish we lived in an era that had only a “hint” of anything in our tawdry, grandiose dystopian present.

With that said, I do think the truths that such a method can communicate go deeper than simple cleverness or cool storytelling, though they’re great for being clever and telling cool stories. Sticking with contemporary spec lit examples, one thing I like about Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts is how it addresses noisy, discordant lunacy in ways that are ultimately amenable to rational explanation. Without making potential possession or ghostly inhabitation subtle in the least, the book always offers a potential way out through recourse to physical explanation. That’s probably how I would experience a horror-film scenario if it were to happen in my life. But horror-film experiences, or freakouts like those in PKD’s Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, don’t happen in my world. This isn’t to say I don’t adore art that expresses those truths, but they don’t capture much of how life feels on my nerve endings (which, to be clear, isn’t to say either I or the author want that of them).

A tincture of the surreal does, however, capture how life feels to me. Everyday reality often feels a little flat with just an echo of something more. It has a certain squinting, was-that-it? quality. Large parts of life take a faint otherworldly tint such as in Almodovar’s film or a vague echo of something weird in the manner of PKD’s Transmigration. In a different way, Lynch’s imagistic surrealism does reflect how my unconscious feels, but that dream logic is so divorced from my daily waking experience that I think I get something different from his stuff.

The tincture of the surreal captures something of how life feels and might reflect nostalgia for a time when life was less tediously overblown that one could think of the present as indicating just a hint of something being off. For those reasons and more, such a tincture is, indeed, marvelously but slightly not off.