In response to my entry, last week, about Colm Tóibín’s story, “Barcelona, 1975,” my friend Ellen Moody wrote,

The reality is fiction is free: for some writers it’s not limited to states of mind or whatever we as readers like to read about. It may give Toibin great pleasure to re-enact the sex act as it may other readers. I agree with your response but know it’s just one. The story is interesting because in The South the narrator is a painter who goes to Barcelona and creates a life with a man — so there is autobiographical content in South. 

Something about Ellen’s comment — the idea that a a writer might re-enact a sexual encounter by writing about it  — woke me up to something about reading novels and stories, which most people consider a perfectly private thing. I do not. I am never alone when I read fiction. I am quite conscious of reading in a gathering — a gathering of other readers and writers past, present, and future. I may not have any distinct names in mind (although when I read Colm Tóibín’s fiction I always think of Henry James, and I wonder what The Master would think of it), but I am in company. And that’s why I’m a bit squeamish about plumbing — by which I mean not only sexual sensations but gastro-intestinal ones as well. There is something about obtrusive organic processes that breaks down the self, and this diminishment is embarrassing in a crowd. Especially now that we’re all so much more candid about memoir, and can publish just about every fact from our past, I want fiction to capture life not at its most intense but at its most aware. (That is certainly the lesson of The Master!) I have no objection to a blow-by-blow-by-blow account of Tóibín’s erotic life in Barcelona, so long as it’s fact, and includes all the heartbreak that the writer strains from his stories. But when it comes to fiction, I would prefer not to read about anything that Tóibín wouldn’t be doing in my presence.

(What about crime fiction? Perhaps this is what genre means: the simulation, by a quickened pulse, of someone else’s plumbing.)

“The Street,” as I said last week, is another story. The Master might wrinkle his nose here and there, but it would be only fair of him to concede that “The Street” is a masterpiece of feeling intensified by disciplined point of view. It is not so much that we see what Malik, a poor Pakistani migrant worker recently brought to Barcelona, sees as that we touch it through his words. Because Malik’s language has no correlative of “gay” or “lover” or even “romance,” his description of what we would call an affair is altogether free of shorthand. Without handy but hackneyed keywords, Malik’s awareness of his attachment to Abdul (another migrant) is unself-conscious. He knows that it is considered “bad” to have such feelings for another man, but this makes him careful, not guilty. It also makes him confused, doubly: he not only doesn’t know what’s going to happen, but he also has no idea how it ought to happen. It’s as though Tóibín were describing a natural dancer learning his first steps.

The story’s brief moment of “graphic sex” is essential precisely because it is discovered, and the discovery changes everything for the two men, quite badly at first, as you would expect, but then for the better. It is never made clear why the leaders of the Pakistani community decide to grant Malik and Abdul a measure of privacy, but this is world (not unlike the writer’s Ireland) where humane kindness is tempered by the withholding of explanation, tantamount to denial. Malik and Abdul are not to forget that their love is suffered. The story ends on a transfigured note.

But all of that was hours away, the hours after darkness fell. Now it was still bright. And all Malik wanted was for this walk to go on, for him to say nothing more and for Abdul to leave a silence too, for both of them to move slowly by the big strange bronze fish, both of them looking at the tossed sand and the small waves breaking and being pulled out again, out to sea. Both of them were on their afternoon off, away from all the others, away from the street; both of them were slowly walking away from everything as though they could, but not minding too much when they had to turn back and face the city again. Brushing against each other, they both knew that they could do that only once or twice, and only when no one was watching them.

That’s more like it.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 13th, 2011 at 3:00 pm.