| Description |
Transcendent Waste is a collection of stories that explores the difficulties of bereavement through what we literally and metaphorically throw away. Characters in Transcendent Waste question the validity of ritual in healing, displace guilt and grief onto relationship and career, and attempt to empathize with others who understand death and mourning in radically different ways. Influenced by Bataillean notions of excess and Kristeva's concept of the abject, I explore loss by using the concept of "waste" within literal, symbolic, and conceptual frameworks. Waste can signify trash, a surfeit of language, the lost potential of a life, the misuse of time, or the degradation of the body. In "Hotel Grand Abyss," for example, a professor of popular culture/zombie studies reluctantly decides to consign his dementiariddled father to a convalescent home. Waste need not be negative: in "Strawbellies," for example, waste refers to once-useful survival strategies that must be sloughed off so that a family can recover from the loss of a son. Similarly, in "Mermaid Anatomy," the narrator employs unpunctuated digressions, fractured timelines, and improper syntax; a "wasteful" and energetic language that, by fetishizing the unfamiliar, staves off his depression. Formally, the stories in "Transcendent Waste" are characterized by disruptions to subject position, language, and linearity. In "Southwest of Guadalajara," a dramatic monologue by the Nazi architect Albert Speer is interrupted by either the collective voice of his victims or the voice of his own guilt. The story "In The Room / Memory is / White" depicts the relationship of a self-punishing child to his separated parents through multiple points of view and a narrative sequence that moves from the chronological middle towards the first and last scenes. Ideally, the use of unconventional narrative strategies in character-based, pathos-driven plots complicates our understanding both of storytelling and of loss. |
