What appears to be, in Windeye, is not what is in actuality.
The result, which feels distinctly Brian’s or maybe Rod Serling’s, is a very
intimate and jarring dissonance—a ringing in the ear which one locates just
outside of the ear. A disembodied whispering over the shoulder.
He presents the reader
with a mode of Pararealism—a twice displaced article that bears only a trace of
its origin. Like finding yourself, your reflection, cascading infinitely
between two directly opposed mirrors. Mise en abîme.
His is the presentation
of a language, a matrix of interconnected signifiers which consistently evades
the logic of reality as we live it and know it. So, in this way, what Brian
presents in no unreal terms locates itself outside of or beside common
perception. He presents a wilderness, a thing, a moment, a myth, skewed and
spectacular and endowed with a certain alien quality that projects a distorted
reflection of the reader.
Brian read this story
to a small audience at Brown University just before the collection debuted and
it was really that first scene, that first fragment that caught my mind’s eye,
so to speak.
As the younger sister
explores opaquely the exterior space of the house, fitting her small hand under
the shingles, the older brother frames her experience narratively, sensually
directing her thrill while he himself is thrilled by her reaction. It’s an
uncanny denuding.
Looking back on it, many years later, he often
thought it had started with that, with her carefully working her fingers up
under a shingle as he waited and watched to see if it would crack. That was one
of his earliest memories of his sister, if not the earliest.
His sister would turn around and smile, her hand
gone to the knuckles, and say, “I feel something. What am I feeling?” And then
he would ask questions. Is it smooth? he
might ask. Does it feel rough? Scaly? Is
it cold-blooded or warm-blooded? Does it feel red? Does it feel like its claws
are in or out? Can you feel its eye move? He would keep on, watching the
expression in her face change as she tried to make his words into a living,
breathing thing, until it started to feel too real for her and, half giggling,
half screaming, she whipped her hand free. (1)
Influenced as I am with
the work of William Faulkner and The
Sound and the Fury especially, I asked Brian if he’d intentionally drawn
some sexual, incestuous subtext between the siblings in the opening scene of
Windeye. Of course he shrugged it off gracefully and I then felt like a
pervert.
His response gave me
the impression that it was not intentional, at least not in artifice. And,
after all, a magician never reveals his secrets.
Written in the third
person past tense, we as readers are already acutely aware that what has not
yet transpired in narrative, has already occurred in time. This is a retelling,
a secondary source. This creates an initial valance of distance. The narrative
first introduces the physical space of the home. We then encounter the brother
and sister in the familiar territory of juvenilia which is also already the
poetic space of the uncanny—as both Freud and Bachelard can attest. “The German
word 'unheimlich' is obviously the opposite of 'heimlich' ['homely'],
'heimisch' ['native'] the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted
to conclude that what is 'uncanny' is frightening precisely because it is not
known and familiar.” (Freud) This interplay of interiority and exteriority, of
experiencing an intimate space and then from the outside witnessing its
temporality and finitude, is a common theme in the collection.
This is embodied in the
interplay of the children. The relationship between the siblings in Windeye bears
a universe of potential energy which finally crescendos in the little sister’s
disappearance and the older brother’s subsequent lapse from normative reality.
Being
not alive wasn’t like being dead, he felt: it was much, much worse. There were
years too when he simply didn’t choose, when he saw her as both real and
make-believe and sometimes neither of those things. But in the end what made
him keep believing in her—despite the line of doctors that visited him as a
child, despite the rift it made between him and his mother, despite years of
forced treatment and various drugs that made him feel like his head had been
filled with wet sand, despite years of having to pretend to be cured—was simply
this: he was the only one who believed his sister was real. If he stopped
believing, what hope would there be for her? (5)
Immediately after
reading the story I wanted to trace the narrative arc from its origin in
reality to its manifestation in fantasy and place a cogent reading on its
oddity, a carceral interpretation of its final discourse with wind. “If he
turned around, he would be wondering, would he find the wind’s strange, baleful
eye staring at him?” (6)
The first, and maybe
most important clue we get is the dedication, For my lost sister. These
are without a doubt the first and last transparent words the author inscribes
in the text (disbarring the acknowledgments). Although it's possible that the
dedication too was in service of the story, but I doubt it (paranoia). The
story Windeye revolves around the loss of a sister, which coincides with the
author’s dedication, now making this, in my opinion, a highly personal
narrative.
Biography is relevant
to our understanding of this text in so far as what occupies the narrative is
memory and perpetuity. If the ghostly, unexplainable disappearance of the
story’s little sister coincides with the true loss by the author of a sister,
then the link here is trauma—a trauma which is veiled and then mythologized so
as to allow its presence, her presence, as memory, as story, to exist. Because
if she never existed then, in some way, neither had he.
And if the story is
itself a way of remembering the presence of another (perhaps the author’s
sister), then the trauma, the experience of trauma, finds its objective
correlative (Eliot) in the figuration of the Windeye.
The Windeye (a portmanteau
of Nordic origin from which we derive our English Window) itself is an artifact which wrestles with notions of
opacity and our response to opacity—in this case a hubris of Gnostic
satisfaction and pleasure which culminates in loss. The boy wants to know with
certainty, with empirical evidence, what occupies the discrepancy between what
he’s perceiving and what he recognizes logically as truth or reality.
That is:
There’s a window
visible on the outside which has no discernable presence on the inside. The boy
is looking at an object which presents as its function and general purpose the
ability to see through it, but this so called Windeye (not window) resists, and
insists on its alterity—a window which projects outward, like the gaze of an
eye, and captures/holds/suspends what it beholds. The uncanny here, again
reminiscent of Freud and his fascination with E. T. A. Hoffman’s The Sandman, replicates itself in uncertainty
and anxiety. And the narrative concludes thus.
And
he would set about describing it. Does it
feel red? Does it feel warm-blooded or cold? Is it round? Is it smooth like
glass? All the while, he knew, he would be thinking not about what he was
saying but about the wind at his back…
Chances
were that he’d be stuck with the life he was living now, just as it was, until
the day when he was either dead or not living himself. (6)
This final sentence in
its deceptive simplicity belies the character’s abyssal relation to time. It is
an interesting example of paraprosdokian—from the Greek para (παρά) meaning beside, outside of, or against, and prosdokia (προσδοκία)
meaning expectation. Consumed in what one may interpret as survivor’s guilt,
the boy, now an old man, replays in his mind the young thrill of their
experience as children. He has to remember, revisit, reinscribe their empirical
instance because, “…what hope would there be for her [to live on]?” He admits
his secret intention to continue visiting this memory until he is dead or not living. Hearkening back to his
revelation that being not alive wasn’t
like being dead…it was much, much worse. That one could be both dead and
not-living, like Schrödinger’s cat, is yet another suspension which implies
that he alone is responsible for keeping his sister from death, though she is
not living. The conundrum, inherent in his mission of remembering, traps him
tragically in a circular ruin (Borges).
The ruin of this final
sentence falls farther, deeper, into anacoluthic distortion. Chances were that he’d be stuck with the
life he was living now, just as it was… There is a fracture, a hanging
conditional, a past subjunctive perhaps—already narratively couched in the
past, his present is contingent upon what was and cannot be removed from this paradigm
without inhabiting what is worse than death. Abyssal time.
In a way, Windeye
is a sort of eerie reconfiguration of the Pandora’s box myth. What is
ultimately lost is innocence and candor, the innocence and candor that comes
with youth, with opacity. What remains is the injunction of narrative, belief,
and hope.
—Presented at Université Rennes 2, May 21, 2015
Colloque sur l'oeuvre de Brian Evenson
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