by
Andre Dubus
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She wanted equilibrium: she wanted to carry what she had to carry, and to walk with order and strength. She had never been helpless, and she thought of Drew: his throbless penis with a catheter in it, his shit. If he could not feel a woman, did he even know if he was shitting? She believed she could not bear such helplessness, and would prefer death. She thought: I can walk. Feed myself. Shower. Shit in a toilet. Make love. She was neither grateful nor relieved; she was afraid. She had never imagined herself being crippled, and now, standing behind the bar, she felt her spine as part of her that could be broken, the spinal cord severed; saw herself in a wheelchair with a motor, her body attenuating, her face seeming larger; saw a hired woman doing everything for her and to her.
Kirk had said: “Know what I mean?” To love without the limits of seeing; so to love without the limits of the flesh. As Kirk danced through the crowd, he had hugged women and men, not knowing till his hand and arm touched their flesh. When he hugged Emily, she had not felt like a woman in the embrace of a man; she melded; she was music.
“He was laughing the whole time,” Alvin said. “While the chute was pulling them on the ground. He’s on top of the guy, and he’s laughing and shouting: ‘This is great, this is great.’ And on the video you can hear his bones snapping.”
“When did you know?” Jeff said.
“On the third day. When my feet were swollen, and Alvin couldn’t get my shoes on.”
“You never felt pain?” Rita said.
“Not like you do. It was like a pinball machine, this little ball moving around. So in the hospital they sent me a shrink. To see if I had a death wish. If a normal sky dives and breaks some bones, they don’t ask him if he wanted to die. They ask quads. I told him if I wanted to die, I wouldn’t have paid a guy with a parachute. I told him it was better than sex. I told him he should try it.”
Rita said: “How did you get hurt?”
“Diving into a wave.”
“Oh my God,” Emily said. “I love diving into waves.”
“Don’t stop.” He smiled. “You could slip in the shower. I know a guy like me, who fell off his bed. He wasn’t drunk; he was asleep. He doesn’t know how he fell. He woke up on the floor, a quad.”
Alvin asked Rita to dance, and Kay asked Jeff. They pushed tables and chairs and made a space on the floor, and held each other, moving to Desmond’s slow song. Emily said: “When this happened to you, who pulled you out of the water?”
“Two buddies. They rode in on the wave that got me. They looked around and saw me. I was like a big rag doll in the water. I’d go under, I’d come up. Mostly under.”
“Did you know how bad it was?”
“I was drowning. That’s what I was afraid of till they came and got me. Then I was scared because I couldn’t move. They put me on the beach, and then I felt the pain; and I couldn’t move my legs and arms. I was twenty-one years old, and I knew.”
Coltrane softly blew a low note and held it, the drummer tapping cymbals, and the cassette ended. Emily withdrew her hand from Jeff’s back, but he still held hers, and her right hand. He said: “He told me once: ‘I wake up tired.’ His body was his enemy, and when he fought it, he lost. What he had to do was ignore it. That was the will. That was how he was happy.”
“Ignore it?”
“Move beyond it.”
He released her back and lowered her hand, and shifted his grip on it and held it as they walked toward the table; then Jeff stopped her. He said: “He had something else. He was grateful.”
“For what?”
“That he wasn’t blown to pieces. And that he still had his brain.”
[...] And if this series of real and imaginary lives is shuffled together, what emerges is a composite portrait: a narrator saddened by history, who refuses to accept that life is fate. [...]
i just like this phrase
[...] The novel was published in Prague in 1964, when Hrabal was fifty. “Ah, those beloved Sixties,” remembered Milan Kundera, “at the time I liked to say cynically: the ideal political regime is a crumbling dictatorship; the machinery of oppression functions ever more incompetently, but it is still in place to stimulate a critical, mocking turn of mind.” [...]
jej
In the twentieth century, as Hrabal described it, Central Europe was a “literary laboratory.” But the moral paradoxes examined in this laboratory are not only Central European, or of the twentieth century. No, the questions are global, and permanent. And so Hrabal’s fictions, with their intent sad joyfulness, their reworking of the usual art of the novel, are portable. His narrators are haunting, and this haunting, I think, is because the avant-garde veering and careering of the technique is so sadly and comically embedded in a true and lovable character, so that the reader is caught between a clinical detachment and an anguished empathy. Because there is no real need to know, as Hrabal tells his wife in In-House Weddings, without mentioning Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age: “I was a champion at polka and waltz, I won a prize in the mature/advanced category, you know, I completed two levels of dance, wanted to be the number one of the dance.”[32] No, there is really no need to know the depth of Hrabal’s self-exposure in his narrators, how far he identified with these painfully vulnerable fantasists. And so I write this and wonder if something analogous, from the modern world of Los Angeles, would be the sadness that leaks from Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid fantasists, trapped in their noirish plots and counterplots; or the melancholy films of David Lynch, where the fragmentation of the narrative is countered by the helpless tenderness of his characters.
Yes, Hrabal’s fiction is portable: his irony is a necessary instrument. For after all, the truth about man is by nature ironical, wrote Thomas Mann in his essay on Chekhov. And he was right: this irony is universal. Not even death is preserved from the history of mistakes. [...]
[...] when I was serving in the most elegant army in the world I told our medical officer, Doctor, I said, I’ve got a weak heart, but all he said was, So have I, boy, and if we had a hundred thousand like you we could conquer the world, and he put me into the highest category [...]
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