‘The business of invoking humanity’: Barbara Gowdy and the Fiction Gone (A)stray

university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 3, summer 2003 MARÍA JESÚS HERNÁEZ LERENA >The business of invoking humanity=: Barbara Gowdy and the Fiction Gone (A)stray He can only suppose that the heads of other men are filled with comparable systems, with philosophies, histories, logarithm tables, texts, with points of persuasion or mapped cravings that bear men forward, as does his range of living classes, orders, families, species, and sub-species. Barker Flett reassuring himself, in Carol Shields=s The Stone Diaries (143) No >philosophical position´ directs all this, only the comic sense that life is far too various ever to be one thing, or anything, for long, except for megalomaniacs. Colin Manlove, The Fantasy Literature of England (140) The short stories in Barbara Gowdy=s We So Seldom Look on Love (1996) feed on the disarrangement of bodily tissue. Viewed as a whole, the collection contains a wide range of bodies whose limbs join deficiently or abnormally. >Body and Soul= contains several unfinished bodies and minds (characters are blind, deaf, armless, retarded); >Sylvie= contains at least one overgrown body, the protagonist herself being attached to a redundant pair of legs; >Presbyterian Crosswalk= deals with an apparent weightless body and a diminishing head; >Two-Headed Man= features two separate people living in a single body. In these stories we see what otherwise is normally concealed and little thought of: the hinges of bodily flesh. We witness what happens when parts refuse to connect coherently and also when a part has to make do as the whole of a person. The other stories in the collection, >Ninety-Three Million Miles Away,= >We So Seldom Look on Love,= and >Flesh of My Flesh,= deal with forms of deviation from socially determined norms of conduct, forms embodied in an exhibitionist, a necrophile, and a transsexual. We observe the pleasure and punishment derived from the characters= lack of control over their excessive or anomalous bodily needs and demands. The notion of the self as fleshy aberrant design is associated with the grotesque, a manifestation of fantasy in literature which draws attention to the process of representation itself because of its unexpected or illogical combination of elements that were coherent parts in other beings. In doing so, it disturbs our habit of looking at the human body as a unified and coherent whole by making it appear as a construct, a version of personhood that has deliberately gone astray. One of the most relevant issues raised by 716 maría jesús hernáez lerena university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 3, summer 2003 the visual display of human anomalies is precisely the question of connectivity or >jointedness=;1 the literary grotesque displaces our standardized ways to connect adjoining parts into a whole, which we then tend to call >identity= or >story.= The idea of jointedness is crucial for an understanding of the nature of the short story as a genre, and my interest in this paper is to reflect on the ways in which the style of dissent related to grotesque discourse can contribute to short story theory. The grotesque in literature is often read as a trope, as a metaphor: it juxtaposes the visceral and the abstract.2 The carnal body stands for something else, but that something else is not just an idea, the idea of the absurd ego, for example, or the incoherence of contemporary experience, but represents rather a visual perspective, a way of looking at reality contrary to reason or consensus, precisely because the activity involved in the grotesque is highly perceptual rather than cognitive. The grotesque is mere spectacle, since the absurd is not subject to rationalisation or synthesis. Mary Russo has contemplated the possibility of dealing with the grotesque physicality not only as an image or a collection of images but as a >world vision,= an ethos that projects anomalies onto others and creates spectacle (79B80). The freak or unconventional body, as Russo argues, is not in essence a freak; it is made so by our looking at it from a distance. Once 1 The term >jointedness= was used by Austin M. Wright to signify the connectivity of the action in novels...