Reading is Writing #6: Dead dogs and sad women

What’s with this dog motif? Do you have something against dogs?

I don’t have any pictures of dogs. But red pandas are kind of like dogs, I guess. Woof.

I’ve been reading enough short fiction to get me to rethink how and why I write short stories. I have started to see the structures in my own work obscured by my heart’s attachment to the material. So I’ve been remaking stories, cutting words by the thousand, rewriting first acts, putting a captive bolt pistol to the skulls of my minor characters and rolling their corpses into a freezer full of scraps from other works. From such bloody remains, something new may come. But not yet.

I’d be remiss here if I didn’t acknowledge the editorial role played by my professor, who asks wry, probing questions of my work, and the role of my friends. I am in a writing group with several friends and one, Liam, has been especially helpful in finding the extraneous in my work of late. Without Liam’s commentary, my stories would remain ponderously self-involved. Still, the books have played their part.

I recently read Brad Watson’s Last Days of the Dog-Men, a 1996 collection of Southern fiction about (sort of) men and dogs. It’s a slim volume and a quick read, and some of the stories in it were good enough that I had to get up and walk around my apartment after finishing them—my standard measure of a good story. Because the collection is geographically and situationally specific (people with dogs having a hard time), the stories share motifs and moments. I have written below an essay about some of these moments. Bennington requires I write a 15 page critical paper for the end of the semester, I intend to expand on the moments discussed below for that paper. So you will encounter Brad Watson in greater depth sometime probably in the third week of May. Consider yourself warned.

But first, a word on dogs.

I have a primitive aversion to dogs. I dread their innocent, stupid faces and their ivory, ravenous teeth. I abhor their habit of eating their own feces; their simpering obedience and childlike wrath. They seem to me to have all the worst characteristics of humans: servility, unrestrained desire, violence without thought, unselfconscious speech. Yet there is something sad and lovely in the species; we have made them into these pitiful things. And if I think hard enough about it, my real trouble is with owners. See dogs, like men, need a purpose beyond unanswered love. It seems to me that most of the beasts I encounter are begat solely to serve as the flying buttresses of the fragile egos of largely sedentary consumers. They are imbued with all the pathologies of the suburbanite* city dweller: anxiety, aggression confused for sociality, a frothing defense of property and quietude, an ambient insanity produced by an overabundance of commodities and sedentary pleasure. They degrade and defile urban space with their noxious excrement and uncontrollable noise, the barks and the incessant ‘aw puppy’ (so close to canine whining) of owners drown the human speech of city residents. They are little biological cars. In this abasement, the dog becomes the mirror image of the desiring process of the owner, a commodity with a heart, a Thing with a soul. They exist for the extraction of love by owners who, by and large, fail to reciprocate that devotion with space, seriousness and time, half-roommate, half-child, all plaything. Some owners even make their dogs watch television. I believe that owners of this type loathe dogs and dogginess with a depth, fervor and cruelty that I, with my simple fear of teeth, will never match. I dislike dogs; they destroy them.

So it is a pleasure and a shock to encounter a working dog or a dog that plays with seriousness, or a dog whose conception of the world is not limited to 576 square foot studio apartments or sixteenth acre lots with grass stained brown from urine and dirt mixed ankle deep with shit.

The dogs Watson writes are these platonic dogs, separated from the libidinal attachments of neurotic petit bourgeois owners in sapphire cities, dogs that live for themselves. Dogs with heart. Sometimes these dogs die.

Last Days of the Dog-Men

In two instances, across “A Blessing,” “Wake,” dogs die in front of the narrators, but in each instance the actual moment of death is concealed visually. In another moment, in “Last Days of the Dog-Men,” a dog is euthanized and in “Kindred Spirits,” a woman and her lover are murdered and, in separate instances, a dog drowns and a hunting dog is shot and killed. In those cases the deaths are related to the narrator by another character. A second dog may also have died in “A Blessing.” There are too many killings in this collection for an essay of less than 2,000 words, so I’m going to talk about “A Blessing” and “The Wake” and expand on the others for the paper.

In “A Blessing,” a pregnant woman and her husband try to adopt a dog from an owner who has several undisciplined dogs. The dogs greet the woman and her husband and, while competing for their affection, two of them, a collie and a brown-and-white mutt, get into a fight. The collie bites the mutt on the throat. The owner threatens to shoot the collie because it refuses to release the mutt. The woman objects. The owner asks her and her husband to choose which dog must die; this time the husband objects. The owner carries the dogs down to a lake and submerges them. The collie releases the mutt. The mutt swims away. The owner drowns the collie.

“She could see him struggling to hold her under. His shirt was wet, and she could see the muscles on his thick shoulders bunch together with the strain. She could see air bubbles break the surface above where he held her. She could see the man’s neck turn a deep red.” (79). Watson’s use of a limited third and his decision not to name these characters mean that at the moment of death we get a second where the woman’s gaze and the dog’s gaze could be the same. The killing of the dog becomes, almost, the murder of the woman. The sentence “She wanted to call out and claim the little dog, try to save her life, but she couldn’t move,” continues this transposition. It continues on the next page too: “She wept in broken, childlike sobs….When she was done they were alone, the water’s surface undisturbed and the sun gone down behind the high ridge across the lake.” (80) While the water obscures the dog’s fate, the woman is cast into shadow. The act of violence is made invisible, and in a symbolic sense the response to it becomes invisible as the sun vanishes.

The connection between seeing and death is made more explicit in the final graf of the story: “the low sun’s light shot through gaps in the trees and hit the windshield straight-on, exploding. The glare was like a blow to her eyes….She felt the light go into her brain. She felt it move down through her and into her child, like the infusion of knowledge.” I don’t like that final phrase of the story, it feels just a beat too far. But light is curiously described in a more violent fashion than death. Watson uses these words for light: ‘hit,’ ‘exploding,’ ‘blow;’ and these phrases: ‘a hot white hole burned into the air, the world around it black as smoldering paper.’ The violence of vision transmits the knowledge of death, possibly the knowledge of good and evil to the woman and, by extension, to her child.

In “The Wake,” a woman, Marcia, who has left a man, Sam, ships herself back to Sam in a UPS crate. Marcia tells Sam she shipped herself, rather than just showing up, because it would break the ice a little. Meanwhile, a dog crawls under Sam’s house and dies. Sam digs a hole to bury the dog but does not bury it, Marcia remains in the crate. Some acquaintances come over for dinner, remark on the crate and smell the dead dog. At the end, the acquaintances help Marcia out of the crate and Sam buries the dog.

We’ll track how Watson describes the dog and its death and how he describes Marcia and her confinement.

Sam finds the dog in front of his house on a cool evening:

Sam could see the dog’s sides shiver as she labored to breathe. Her dark coat was patchy with mange and her eyes looked bad. When Sam walked closer they went to slits and a low growl came from her throat. He could smell her from ten feet away: a ripe, sweet rotten smell. (102)

He calls the pound, but by the time they get there the dog is gone. He hears it yowling that night under his house, he can smell it, but then it falls silent, dead. He hears “wind rattling the dry leaves,” a symbolic departure for the dog.

The next day, UPS delivers a crate. Sam doesn’t know what’s in it but considers using it to bury the dog. After Henry, the delivery worker, has left the crate in the house, Sam “heard the dolly rattle down the steps,” (105). The repetition of rattle links the delivery of the box with the death of the dog. That link is developed further when Marcia, in the box, talks, like the dog yowling under the floorboards the night before. She talks and the smell of her perfume is noticeable, but she’s concealed, much like the dead dog beneath the house.

The Marcia-dog parallel continues through the dinner Sam hosts with two co-workers, and reaches a breaking point in the burial of the dog and the liberation of Marcia from the box. Sam has to crawl under his house to retrieve the dog’s corpse, he finds it:

Her eyes bore fiercely into the beam, black lips curled back from her teeth. Sam’s heart leapt and raced in his chest.

She never moved.

“Oh,” he whispered, eyes welling, “poor thing.” He shut off the light and lay in the dark beside her. Above him, the shuffling sounds of the living were creaky and vague. (118)

Marcia, unseen again, has come out of the box and into life, while Sam and the dog are now concealed in darkness and death, a repetition of the unseen death that reaches back to the witness and the death in darkness which we saw in “A Blessing.” But there is no sun to give Sam a burst of knowledge. He is still alone with the past. The dog is a symbol loaded with the loneliness of his life without Marcia and his resentment of Marcia’s departure.

Watson has established a symbolic language in these two stories quite economically. He speaks in dialects of this language throughout the rest of Last Days. This, I think, is the important lesson for writers to take from these two stories. All it takes to make an animal or a person into a symbol are a couple connected verbs and images. This symbolic language is fairly simple in “A Blessing,” but in “The Wake” is more complex. The dog in “The Wake” is less explicitly contiguous with a woman at the level of symbol; at times Sam and Marcia are both the dying dog. Its ability to move on its own, to choose where to die, and to situate that dying in the dark (subconscious) space of the bourgeois domestic sphere means the dog has autonomy as a symbol. Its death is a living thing, shifting meaning and weight through the story. This symbolic wobble creates the negative space necessary for an ambiguous ending in “The Wake.”

This ambiguity, despite the heightened play of symbols, makes “The Wake” feel closer to life than “A Blessing.” I’ve never been shot in the head with a lightning bolt of Knowledge from Heaven, but I have listened to the sounds of a party in the next room and wondered if my connection to the people in that room could bear the cold light of absolute reality. I think we all know it’s wrong to drown a dog with our bare hands, we don’t know if it’s wrong to feel strange about resuming a relationship once abandoned.

In another story, this ending might not read as ambiguous: Sam would drag the dog out and bury it in a grave he’d dug before Marcia arrived, then go into the light of his house and join the living, the work of his grieving done. But Watson’s stories suspend some of the operations of normality; Marcia shipped herself to Sam. The play of symbols here is fairly explicit, reality is more intense. Does Sam die down there? Does he bury himself? Does he crawl back out without the dog’s corpse and go in and drive the living—co-workers and Marcia both—from his house?

A political note:

The American regime is kidnapping ideological dissidents in broad daylight and deporting them for no crime. The latest victim I know of is Rumeysa Ozturk, a Phd. student in child studies and human development at Tufts University, my alma mater. Tufts University helped lay the ideological groundwork for this deportation through the mealy-mouthed declarations of its president over the past year and a half. For over a decade Tufts has tolerated the existence of an organized cadre of racist zionists on its campus. Those activists have carried out crybully campaigns to intimidate, smear and (now) deport anyone critical of Israel. They are an existential threat to intellectual and political freedom.

To stand for political freedom requires us all to stand in solidarity with those facing direct repression; Ozturk seems to have been seized for co-authoring an op-ed in The Tufts Daily, a newspaper I used to edit. When I was editor of the Tufts Daily opinion section I published similar pieces, the thought that my actions as editor could have put my writers in danger of disappearance, torture and deportation makes me physically ill. But this is also a testament to the weakness of the present government—a strong ideological movement doesn’t need to send people to camps over the things they write in student newspapers. This government is afraid of you personally. It is afraid of me personally. It is afraid that its effort to make us small and weak and cruel will fail. It is afraid that we will continue to say that from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, Palestine will be free, and that undocumented people should have the same rights as citizens. Yet I am afraid of this government, afraid that it will begin putting citizens in cages alongside permanent residents or that it will sell dissidents to the private torture prison of Nayib Bukele, as it is already doing with undocumented people.

To let my fear rule me would put me on the same side as the people who kidnapped Ozturk. I will oppose the American government and its genocidal policies in the Middle East and Latin America as long as there is breath in my lungs, and I will oppose it as publicly as I can.

I initially appended this to the start of the newsletter, but you are here for the books, not for my imitation of Charles Foster Kane.

I also read:

For School:

Lady Chatterley’s Lover: D.H. Lawrence sure does like the word womb. Manages to make that word dirtier than ‘cunt’ or ‘fuck.’

Brandon Taylor’s essay on story openings: How is he so good at this?

For Fun:

The Gunslinger, by Stephen King: That opening line! But to me, the great point is that time works funny here, here being novels. I’ve been making time work funny since I read this.

Next Week: Writing battle scenes with Emile Zola.

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*Most of the dogs I encounter are PMC dogs in blue cities, working dogs and some rural dogs are exempt from this, somewhat, though a great many American “country” dwellers are suburbanites. What I mean here by suburbanite is anyone who prefers the sterile silence and ontological paranoia of the cul de sac to occasionally giving a homeless person five bucks. Such people are busy killing American cities—at the animal level with their dogs, the political level with their incessant screams for more cops, and at the architectural level by replacing neighborhoods with an endless succession of real estate speculation properties. You’re a social being, stop lobotomizing yourself and shake someone’s fucking hand.