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Sharon's Bottle, Malcolm's Ukelele: The Machineryof Desire in Confabulations GARYGEDDES IN READING FORTHE PLOT: Design and Intention in Narrative , Peter Brooks speaks of the "narrative motor" that drivesa text, the fundamental dynamic that stimulates our desire to continue toward recognition and ending. "We can, then, conceive of the reading of plot as a form of desire that carries us forward, onward, through the text," he says. "Narratives both tell of desire—typically present some story of desire— and arouse and make use of desire as dynamic of signfication. Desire is in this view like Freud's notion of Eros, a force including sexual desire but larger and more polymorphous, which (he writesin Beyond the Pleasure Principle ) seeks 'to combine organic substances into ever greater unities'"(37). I am interested here in the design of Sharon Thesen's long poem Confabulations ( 1984), which explores some of the mysteries surrounding the death of Malcolm Lowry. While it may seem odd to cite a book about the function of plot in the novel, you can see immediately from Brooks' statement how the concept of desire might apply to long poems and poetic narratives, which depend not only on connective tissue (which you need to hold the pieces together), but also on a driving force, whatever serves to maintain momentum, keep us engaged and reading. I'd like to show how Sharon Thesen in Confabulations employs a kind of narrative shorthand, seeding the text with elements of story, with the ghost of a plot (or plots). In the case of many postmodern texts, the story component usually involves ostensible "information" about author and the process of composition. This is only marginallythe case in Confabulations , where the material that fuels the narrative motor is drawn mainly 134 from the two fictional works, Under the Volcano and Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, and two non-fiction sources, The Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, edited by Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry, and Douglas Day's biography, Malcolm Lowry. By giving us a short prefatory biographical sketch of Lowry's death in Ripe, East Sussex on June 27, 1957, Thesen is able to suggest immediately that this is not a conventional "life" she is writing about. In fact, the two small indicators that are intended as clues in the mystery to be unravelled are the possibility of a suicide, by an overdose of alcohol and drugs, and the doctor's diagnosis of "death by misadventure," a phrase that Lowry would have enjoyed. The medical diagnosis, of course, is rendered less than convincing by the accompanying statement that Lowry was "buried just at the edge of consecrated ground in the churchyard." Having established that she will address this ambiguity,Thesen then offers the reader two epigraphs, including one from Lowry that begins with the straightforward observation, "I still believe that bad French wine was my nemesis," which might be taken literally, but which proceeds with an ironic comment that eliminates any potential for seriousness: "I began to improve slightly when I took to rum and gave up taking vitamins." Lowry acknowledges his own alcoholism, but dismisses its importance. The second epigraph, from Gaston Bachelard's The Psychoanalysis of Fire, is more ambiguous in intent. "When the fire devours itself, when the power turns against itself, it seems as if the whole being is made complete at the instant of its final ruin and the intensity of the destruction is the supreme proof, the clearest proof, of its existence." Fire and alcohol will prove to be dominant images in the poems to follow. Lowry's shack will be consumed by fire; he will have nightmares and hallucinations of hellfire. And die reader will carry, consciously or not, the suggestion created by the use of Bachelard's quotation, that there isa deeper burn at work here for which alcohol is a mere symptom, a burn that positively seeks its own annihilation. Before we have even entered the poem per se, Thesen has created in us a desire to know what killed Lowry and she has suggested that psychoanalysis might be the most fruitful direction to take. To make sure we have not missed the point, she next includes Lowry's self-styled epitaph, which appears in his Selected Poems: Malcolm Lowry Late of the Bowery His prose wasflowery And often glowery He lived, nightly, and drank, daily, And died playing the ukelele. [3.21.104.109] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 12:07 GMT...

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