Writers who dispense with the conventional ingredients of storytelling present themselves with a challenge. Strip your creation of event, suspense, resolution, sustained depiction and development of character, and you increase the pressure to supply your readers with stimulation of another kind - intellectual, perhaps, or imaginative, formal, aesthetic.
This collection of short stories bears about as much relation to orthodox narrative as Samuel Richardson did to brevity. What we get instead is concept. One half of the book, “Severance”, is composed of a series of monologues, each of 240 words, in which the American novelist Robert Olen Butler imagines the thoughts that ignite in a person’s mind in the moment following decapitation. The other, “Intercourse” (the two parts can be read in any order), considers what occurs in the brains of couples while they are having sex. Both conceits are exhausted in about a dozen pages. The volume as a whole runs to 15 times that length.
Butler, who was awarded the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1993, has routinely set himself the task of exploring new forms and modes of expression. His 12 novels and six collections of short stories include experiments with history, crime, satire and a certain kind of fantasy: Hell, his 2009 novel, is set in an underworld populated by US presidents, Humphrey Bogart and William Shakespeare.
The present volume features elements of all these genres – save, perhaps, crime. Butler begins each set of vignettes at a remote point in the real or invented past (in the case of “Severance”, with early man in northern Europe at around 40,000BC; in “Intercourse”, with Adam and Eve), before proceeding chronologically through the centuries to the near-present day. Along the way we meet beings real, mythological and animal. The beheaded include Medusa; the dragon slain by Saint George; Sir Walter Raleigh; Lady Jane Grey; Agnes Gwenlan (an American “factory girl” who was decapitated by an elevator in 1889); Lois Kennerly (a systems analyst who died in 2001 during the attack on the World Trade Center); and Butler himself (“decapitated on the job”). The lovers include Helen and Paris; Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn; Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings; James Joyce and Nora Barnacle; a rooster and a chicken; and (again) Butler, whose partner is referred to as Miss X.
Some of what Butler does with this is amusing, especially when addressing male vanity: Raleigh devotes his final musings to a sexual encounter with Elizabeth I, yet is unable to do so without reference to his own writing (“her long fingers scrawling upon my back a history of the world”); Henry VIII has heavily aspirated congress with Boleyn and dreams of a giant male heir planting “first one foot upon the cliffs of Cornwall and then the other upon Dover”. When Butler thinks himself into the minds of women, the result can be affecting: Boleyn’s posthumous reflections give rise to expressions of delicate tenderness for her daughter and plangent stoicism at their fates: “I say to her Lady Princess I will always be your mother and she says in her wee voice madam you are my Queen ... I bend to her, I draw near to her, I cup my daughter’s face in my hands.”
But most of what we are offered is repetitive, perfunctory and lacking in attentiveness and imaginative rigour. Butler writes about sex while giving almost no consideration to the body, though we do get a lot of queasy euphemism (his “mansword”; her “Amazon”). The cogitations of the recently departed, customarily cast in vague poeticisms, are almost always of family, sex or love (fair enough, but this can be wearing). And he subjects us to an irritating surfeit of jokes (feeble) and parody (inept). When Sigmund Freud and his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, unite, both parties end up thinking about sleeping with their parents; when Joyce is in the arms of his wife Nora, his ruminations are supposed to capture the lineaments of his prose: “Saint Michael the Consumptive, enters in from his grave and he sits beside us and we are trinitised before the flail of her and I implore them both to neither Nora burrower nor a Nora bender be.”
The sense of frustration and detachment induced by this is compounded by the occasional indication that Butler can really write: the distant sound of fingers on a keyboard is “like tiny clawed feet running in a wall”; a Swedish woman executed for witchcraft looks at the night sky and thinks of herself as one with “the scattered white fire of the stars”. But these little blooms are rare. For much of the time you spend reading this work, all you really want to hear is a story.
