Amy Hempel

March was a march of whimsy.¹ It started when Amy Hempel shook Fictionaut‘s tectonic plates when she posted “In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried.” This story got the most hits of any other story in that electronic community: 930 and growing, with 35 comments.² The content of the comments are telling. In awe and almost sycophantically, I heard the voice of the online fiction world resoundingly claim the legitimacy of Hempel’s style. I thought, “This is indicative of something.” But what?

Let’s start with her style and then see what it indicates. When I first read the story, I thought it was just a series of absurd, well-placed swatches of color. As in this:

I began. I told her insects fly through rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like a banana—you see it looking full, you’re seeing it end-on.

Here, it’s almost as if the fiction has taken a turn for the still-life. This is a trend in a good chunk of the writing I’ve found, notably in Wigleaf’s well-edited pages. But after consulting a friend on the matter, I saw that there’s more to Hempel’s style than just still-life. There’s whimsy involved, and some recognizable semantics.³ That is, there’s an order to it. And this order gives us something. It isn’t just an empty series of interestingly placed objects. There’s movement and substance along with the swatches of color. This approach, what we’ll call here the whimsical approach, creates glimpses–moments–of humanity through pastel-laden concatenations of Barthelme-like non-symbols.⁴ We can see it almost everywhere in the Hempel story, like here towards the middle:

She flew with me once. That time she flew with me she ate macadamia nuts while the wings bounced. She knows the wing tips can bend thirty feet up and thirty feet down without coming off. She believes it. She trusts the laws of aerodynamics. My mind stampedes. I can almost accept that a battleship floats when everybody knows steel sinks.

I see fear in her now, and am not going to try to talk her out of it. She is right to be afraid.

After a quake, the six o’clock news airs a film clip of first-graders yelling at the broken playground per their teacher’s instructions.

“Bad earth!” they shout, because anger is stronger than fear.

Keyhole issue 9

Another story that does this exceptionally well is Corey Zeller’s piece “My Morning Song” in Keyhole. In little blips, quanta maybe, she builds a moment. She splatters words and images, sort of Pollack-ish, until the climactic moment, which, for this kind of whimsy we’re analyzing here, is a congealing moment. It’s a moment when the disparate swatches of the story’s semantic quanta unify into an emotional whole and—hey presto!—we get a story about a break-up and its aftermath. She starts with paragraphs like this:

Bitch, they say, is a good word for the dog-red gums of the sky. I say bitch when there is some static in the air. We go whirling in it. And I just feel so bad like sinking my teeth into something really soft but hard enough to take it.

You might think this freezes into still-life. But then, towards the end, the story congeals again with lines like, “All quantification is justification. Just wait and see when it adds up,” and you feel a certain kinetic energy as the story ends. (I won’t give it away, go read it yourself.) This is the whimsical approach: from still-life to feeling.

For other whimsical stories, Kuzhali Manickavel’s flash piece entitled “Put Your Hand in the Hand of the Man With His Hand in the Hand of the Man With His Hand in the Windmills of Your Mind” in Ekleksographia speaks for itself.  The story of a metaphysically-minded moose at Bear Parade by Mazie Louis Montgomery is a fable-ish example of the same. And, finally, a more Jack Handey approach to this whimsy is Swan’s “Uncle Fishead” in Pindelyboz. Whereas Zeller makes a sad congealing, Manickavel screws with you, Montgomery tells you a bedtime story, and Swan makes you laugh. The rhythm here is admirable:

Finally it was time. Horothy sampled each concept in turn. Contestant 4 had baked a red satin pillow. The pillow was hot and burnt, blackened. I don’t normally go crazy about pillow, but this I like, said Horothy. Warm, rich, fluffy, decadent. Very nice.

Uncle Fishhead?

Yes, Tina?

Why am I so ill?

I know! exclaims little Tommy, raising high his hand.

Yes, Tommy?

Microflora.

Correct! Uncle Fishhead gives him a sticker. Tommy beams. Tina plays with her faulty leg. Uncle Fishhead is feeling suffocated. He goes and opens a window. A baby deer clambers in, collapses in a scrawny battling heap, cries, and struggles to its feet, bright-eyed.

In any case, March was a month full of this flim-flam.

Bear Parade

At first, when I read the Fictionaut reactions to the Hempel story, I rolled my eyes and thought it was just overly-styled hipster gibberish. I thought something akin to the editor at Lung Full who said, in an intra-magazine memo full of rejection statements, “Wake me up at the part where Wes Anderson dies.” But then I read the other stories and felt the good things they have to offer. I felt their quanta of colors and semantics congealing together and I began to like it. Because, to some degree, this is how we experience life: through concatenations of colors and emotions and words, mixtures stippling into the stories of our existences. I went back and reread Hempel and I realized that this whimsy is a pretty accurate and fulfilling literary grammar. Now I look forward to reading it.

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(1) The Internet has good things to say about this word. Definitions include: “1. a capricious idea or notion 2. light or fanciful humour 3. something quaint or unusual.” The etymology is much better: It tells us first to “see whimwham,” which says: “whimsical device, trifle,” 1529, of unknown origin; perhaps from Scand. (cf. O.N. hvima “to let the eyes wander,” Norw. kvima “to flutter”), or else an arbitrary native formation (cf. flim-flam).Then, obviously, one goes to see ‘flim-flam’ and gets: also flimflam, 1530s (n.); 1650s (v.); a contemptuous echoic construction, perhaps connected to some unrecorded dial. word from Scandinavian (cf. O.N. flim “a lampoon”). Please keep this idea of “echoic construction” in your mind as you read.

(2) I had a very interested exchange with Zack Wentz, editor of New Dead Families, recently regarding Fnaut. He raised an important question: If you publish a story there, is the story published? If so, should editors specify in their submission guidelines that a story on Fnaut isn’t acceptable, or should be treated as a reprint? Further, what is the difference between an online writing community like Fnaut and online journals, if the only people that read the journals are other writers? This is an important and, it seems, largely ignored question in our online literary world.

(3) By this I mean clearly scrutable concepts (maybe even archetypes): Mother, Pancake, Blood, etc.

(4) >kill author, another source of good whimsical writing, named its most recent issue after Barthelme.)