lately i’ve been going over the proofs for the awful possibilities and also writing a short story about the ultimate warrior, so i’ve got short fiction on the brain. to gear up for it (i knew all this was coming), i’ve been reading collections, mostly checking back in on old favorites.
i read and liked jim shepard’s like you’d understand anyway when it was first released (a rare hardcover purchase — i had a giftcard), and i particularly liked his historical stories, and since one of the things i’ve been doing when i’ve been doing any writing in the past year is trying to research as a way of slowing myself down and better integrating the composition and editorial processes, i went back and reread a number of the stories that i assume shepard did research for.
this is probably gonna be a little bit assaholic (george saunders taught me this word) (i think he made it up) (genius) of me, because like i said, i really like a bunch of the stories in the collection, but there’s one in there that has given me serious problems on both readings of it.
i have this friend and coworker, let’s call him jason woolf because that’s his name, and jason is a smart dude who really likes books, but mostly he likes moby dick. what i mean by that is, we talk about books a lot and he’s read a lot of them, but i would say that probably fifty percent of the time we spend talking about books we’re talking about moby dick. also, he has tattoos of scenes from moby dick on his arm. and will readily list metal bands who have recorded albums inspired by moby dick. so, you know, if you have a question about moby dick, you go to jason.
the only question he hasn’t been able to answer to my satisfaction is the question of ishmael’s perspective, and this is probably because in order to answer it you have to go outside the text, maybe even read melville’s mind.
here is the question: ishmael has access to information and perspectives that he shouldn’t have. sometimes he knows what other people are thinking when he couldn’t, others he vividly describes scenes that he isn’t present for and wouldn’t know about. was melville doing something so new that he just wasn’t aware that he was breaking the rules of consciousness, or did he realize it, and then tell his imaginary reader in his head to leave me the fuck alone, i’m trying to write moby dick, you idiot?
the cosmonauts found god.
jim shepard’s “eros 7″ is not moby dick. moby dick is about the water. “eros 7″ is about space. moby dick is a huge novel. “eros 7″ is a short story. but they do have something in common.
“eros 7″ purports to be the diary of valentina vladimirovna tereshkova, the first woman in space, as she prepares to become the first woman in space. we know this because she says, beginning on the first page of the story:
Diary! You are a historic document: my name is Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova and I was born in the Yaroslavl Raion, and I am twenty-four years old, and by 12:30 Moscow time the day after tomorrow I will have put on my orange spacesuit and climbed into my spacecraft, the Vostok 6, to rendez-vous with a fellow cosmonaut, Senior Lieutenant Valery Fyodorovich Bykovsky, 150 miles above the earth. I will become, then, the tenth person, the sixth Russian, and the first woman in space.
this is an awesome passage, because it follows a lyrical opening describing, essentially, the landscape, which is maybe a little too lyrical for what it purports to be (or not lyrical enough — there are, of course, diarists who like to get really purple thinking that it will make them sound intelligent and passionate should their mothers or little brothers pick the locks). mash the two against each other and you get an improbably stylish narrator who is also a little naive (diary! you are a historic document…). this combination is great because tereshkova is presented as the sort who works hard to make much out of very little natural ability (the idea being, i suppose, that her ethics combined with her natural innocence will keep her from overthinking a tough space situation, which you kind of have to worry about with the smarter, more intellectual types).
anyway, the story isn’t one of the more electrifying in the collection — tereshkova tells us about preparing to go to space while also telling about her infatuation with her married male counterpart, bykovsky, and then she blasts off, doesn’t do a great job in space but it isn’t a disaster, and comes back — but it works and is pleasant enough until she comes back to earth.
the story is presented as a diary, complete with dates and relative times (early morning, for example, as opposed to 5:37 a.m.). but then midway through the final entry, dated 1 August 1964, we get this:
Of course, my diary had been found and read immediately upon my return.
and this line is surrounded by things that happened after, and also well after 1 august 1964, both in the context of the story and in real life.
jim shepard is a sophisticated writer. he knows that this last entry breaks the illusion that the story is composed of tereshkova’s diary entries, but i can’t at all understand why he’s done it, and to tell the truth, it reads to me like the kind of ending an undergrad might tack on the night before the story is due for workshop (albeit in much better prose).
even if we aren’t confident about our take on moby dick, jason and i tend to think that the latter is the answer.
leave me the fuck alone, i’m trying to write moby dick, you idiot.
but i already said “eros 7″ is not moby dick.
anybody?
