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  • Paring Down
  • Amelia Gray (bio)
LISTEN: twenty-nine short conversations. Corey Mesler. Brown Paper Publishing. http://brownpaperpub.wordpress.com. 202 pages; paper, $6.00.

In an interview with The Believer talking about his radical work Eunoia (2001), Christian Bök said,

The project also underlined the versatility of language itself, showing that despite any set of constraints upon it, despite censorship, for example, language can always find a way to prevail against these obstacles. Language really is a living thing with a robust vitality. Language is like a weed that cannot only endure but also thrive under all kinds of difficult conditions.

He proves the claim by creating structures designed to challenge; in the case of Eunoia, he created a book of five chapters in which each chapter focuses on the use of one vowel each.

The goal of his experiment is not only coherence but beauty—not only enduring, but thriving. The success of the experiment comes when the reader realizes that something which felt so essential to communication—the letter E, for example—is not necessary at all for communication and not required for beauty.

In the same way, Corey Mesler sets up his own experiment with LISTEN: twenty-nine short conversations. Mesler's dialogues remove description unless description is given specifically to a character—one character tells another she is smiling, an action that the reader could easily imagine, but means something different when placed into the dialogue. When the woman is angry, she says, "I am mad." When a man is amused, he says, "Ha." Again, these elements become changed when they move from exposition into dialogue.

By cutting character description, exposition, and narrative outside of dialogue, Mesler severely limits what he can do with a story. If his characters were in a play, the audience would have the benefit of watching the actors on stage, or reading their actions on the page. If it were a radio play, the audience could infer from sound and inflection. The title of the book suggests we should be listening, but in its current form, the reader has no such luxury.

The work becomes all tell and no show—a statement that might ring as a condemnation to writing students but should come as a hopeful sign to readers who tire of the conventional form. When dialogue limits, Mesler sometimes heads for the joke or the shocking element—the pastor's wife shocking herself at the word "cock" or the man in therapy fantasizing about drinking the blood of a waitress. Characters are sort-of engaged or sort-of divorced, floating in the same experiential sort of ether that prevents them from making gestures or grimaces—none that we know about, anyway. When Mesler avoids clichés of dialogue—so important, as the dialogue is his only tool—the book is at its strongest.

Paring a story all the way down to its dialogue is an exercise as difficult as, with Christian Bök, using one vowel per chapter. It brings to mind Charles Baxter, who claims that writers in North America no longer describe their characters' faces. These faceless characters become stand-ins for conversations we could have in our own lives—a couple on a first date, or a therapist having a conversation with her patient. Aside from the funny exchanges with celebrities like Buddy Gardner or John Lennon, all the reader has to work with is a character's gender, determined by making assumptions based on their name. One limit to the form is the fact that characters generally have to play to type; the couple on their first date looks and behaves physically exactly as the reader assume they would, because there is nothing in the text to challenge the assumptions the reader has made.

There are more benefits to this cut-down style: namely, that when one sense is limited, the others heighten. Elements like page breaks take on new meaning when the reader is forced to imagine the events taking place in the interim. Is the woman moving across the room, or sitting and staring at the man? In one epistolary piece, Mesler pulls the interaction into email, playing with the interesting idea...

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