How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields

Author:David Shields [Shields, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-96153-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

5

THE WOUND AND THE BOW

In which I make various self-destructive gestures, flirt none too successfully or seriously with suicide, pull back from the brink via the written word.

Other people

IN THE FIRST of the eight interlocked stories or chapters of Butterfly Stories: A Novel, William Vollmann tells “what happened to the child,” establishing the psychic interconnection—for the butterfly boy—between solitude, beauty, loss, pain, and punishment. The lyric catalogue of childhood humiliations in the first story yields, in the seven stories that follow, to litanies of the butterfly boy (who as an adult is called first “the journalist,” then later “the husband”) reenacting—with a lesbian traveling companion, the son of a former SS officer, a sybaritic and amoral photographer, and especially with a Phnom Penh prostitute named Oy—the sadomasochistic scenarios of his childhood.

Vollmann begins Butterfly Stories with an evocation of war torture by the Khmer Rouge. On the next page, he writes, “There was a jungle, and there was murder by torture, but the butterfly boy did not know about it. He knew the school bully, though, who beat him up every day.” Vollmann makes absolutely explicit the link between the butterfly boy’s childhood and his adult experiences in Thailand and Cambodia. The butterfly boy thinks about the school bully, “The substance that his soul was composed of was pain,” but this is at least as true of the butterfly boy, who “was not popular in the second grade because he knew how to spell ‘bacteria’ in the spelling bee, and so the other boys beat him up.” One evening, a monarch butterfly lands on the top step of his house, squatting on the welcome mat and moving its gorgeous wings slowly. Then it rises in the air. He never sees the butterfly again; he remembers it the rest of his life.

Butterfly Stories is told in more than two hundred very short sections, many of which deal with the economies of desire: “A middle-aged midget in a double-breasted suit came down the alley, walked under one girl’s dress, reached up to pull it over him like a roof, and began to suck. The girl stood looking at nothing. When the midget was finished, he slid her panties back up and spat onto the sidewalk. Then he reached into his wallet.”

In the middle of the novel, Vollmann appends to the conclusion of several sections the words “The End,” as if to suggest the ceaselessness of the butterfly boy’s capacity for self-inflicted punishment. After acting out “endless” scenarios of humiliation and loss, “the husband,” who may have AIDS, returns in the final chapter to San Francisco, self-consciously trying—and failing—to play his spousal role: “Sometimes he’d see his wife in the back yard gardening, the puppy frisking between her legs, and she’d seem so adorable there behind window-glass that he ached, but as soon as she came in, whether she shouted at him or tried desperately to please him, he could not feel. He could not feel!” Reading this extraordinarily intimate book about the butterfly

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.