As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself
transformed in his bed into a giant insect.
So begins Franz Kafka’s famous novella "The Metamorphosis,"
written in 1912. The weirdness of the transformation, not to mention where it
takes place, makes us wonder if maybe Gregor isn’t still asleep. His
"uneasy dreams" seem to have carried over into his waking life.
Fast forward to the year 2000, and Ottawa writer Paul Glennon:
It freaked me out at first. It was bound to. I woke up and everything
was chrome.
The stories in Glennon’s exciting debut collection How Did You Sleep?
open a door into a dream world of fiction that is remarkably like Kafka’s.
Both writers set their fiction in an alternate reality that is threatening and
absurd, and both have an interest in metamorphosis. In Glennon we not only have
the man whose world has turned into chrome, but a husband who discovers his wife
is made out of wood and a chairman of the board who is changed into a bear.
But it is where Glennon differs from Kafka that he is the most interesting.
What makes Glennon’s nightmares so threatening is their seductive appeal. With
Kafka one always has the sense of an individual unfairly trapped in an absurd
world. Glennon’s writing is more surreal, in that his dark, dream images are
the expression of a subconscious in artistic revolt.
Dreams and the unconscious have long been associated with imagination and the
artistic side of human nature. In the story "One Hand" Glennon turns
this into an allegory. The narrator is a man of science without an artistic bone
in his body who dwells on the example of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo apparently
took notes using his left hand and writing in reverse script, which the narrator
understands as a method for tapping into the creative right side of the brain.
But when the man of science begins his own left-handed journal things start
to get out of control. It seems that the creative side of the brain is also the
self-destructive side. The left hand goes from making strangely coded threats to
wrecking the narrator’s marriage and endangering his life.
Self-destructive revolt also plays a major role in "My Babylon
Cells," a story that locates Poe’s imp of the perverse in a type of
pre-human bacteria. Mitochondria are imagined as terrorist cells, seeking to
sabotage and destroy the bodies they are trapped within. But by being so
subversive they are also more truly human: little souls raging against the human
machine.
The scientist’s left hand and the Babylon cells are just two examples of
inner revolt. In other stories the revolt is public and political, though still
irrational, threatening and dangerous. The story "The Terror" is set
in a state where a new regime has implemented a code of social behaviour that
turns out to be fatal for some. In "Save the Barbers" a seemingly
innocuous profession is targeted for extinction by rednecks.
Unconscious forces, even the dark ones, are not without their attractions.
The complaint of the scientist’s wife about all the attention he gives to his
hand is an obvious joke, but it makes a point. Many of the stories deal with
relationships that have failed or are on the rocks precisely because of this
introversion. The pleasures of art, illusion, and the imagination are what
seduce the narrators into isolation, loneliness and suicide. Make the personal
political and you can see the analogy to intolerance and terror.
The cover of How Did You Sleep? features a painting by the Surrealist
painter René Magritte. Like his fellow Surrealist Dali, Magritte knew that his
jokes and illusions wouldn’t work unless he took them perfectly seriously.
Glennon’s prose has the same task, and it works in the same way. The writing
is deadpan, sometimes even scholarly. When we finally get some earthy language
in the final story it almost comes as a shock. The perfect illusion is ruffled
by voices that are real.
Such a weird and original debut can only leave us wondering what dreams may
come.
Notes:
Review first published January 6, 2001.
