| Description |
Tongues of Men and of Angels is a collection of short works exploring E.L. Doctorow's claim that, "There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative." Though the individual pieces in Tongues might be conventionally categorized as short memoirs and personal essays (and thus thought of as works generated by a singular author about the life of that author as a singular person), the book as a whole seeks to problematize popular notions of writing about the self. By subverting formal elements held to be the foundations of personal nonfiction narrative, these pieces, each in their own way, question the prevalent opinion that a given narrative is capable of posing as strictly fiction or nonfiction. Written as present-tense memoirs, my collection's opening pieces, "Mother Moves Us, Father" and "College, Art, Et al: An Evolution," highlight the slippery ground between the self recounted and the self in the act of recounting. The narrator of "Mother Moves Us, Father" attempts to investigate the meaning behind a memory of his adolescence and, in the process of elucidating this memory, loses track of his original intent in a spin of florid language, strange characterizations, and interpolated stories. Conversely, the narrator of "College, Art, Et al: An Evolution" holds tight to his narrative trajectory but, in doing so, exposes the artifice and absurdity of trapping one's personal history in the guise of linear recollection. The pieces "What's He Got?" "Thriftstore," "Paralyzed by the Immediate," and "Cut but not Dried," interrogate the convention of first-person POV as crucial to nonfiction or realistic narrators. On the other hand, works such as "Pornography," "Loop," and "Tongues of Men and of Angels," perform an overwrought first-person narrative. These greedy, interruptive, lyrical, and tangential voices blur the tentative lines meant to distinguish story and storyteller, experience and authority, and the subject and its traces. Freud famously said, "Writing is the record of an absent person," and, years later, Leonard Michaels expounded upon this idea in "Writing About Myself," arguing that author-personalized narratives bring subjective notions of presence and absence into extreme tension. Just the basic awareness of this tension, Michaels continued, allows the writer, when writing about himself, to place more interest on "the expressive value of form and its relation to the personal more than [an interest in] particular revelations of [one's] individual life." Hoping to expose this writerly tension for the reader while also seeking a sense of ineffable (in)completion, Tongues of Men and of Angels assembles a multivalent, polyphonic narrator who, through gaps, tangents, liminal spaces, and "fictional" elements, is more human and more real than any conventional subject of nonfictional writing might hope to be: a narrator who lets the reader listen, as Barry Hannah puts it, "to the orchestra of living." |
