A story trying to find its way through all these words -- a review of Carrying the Body by Dawn Raffel
Ken Sparling

What is necessary? I wonder, as I read Raffel.
There are writers who convince me that something is necessary. I'm never sure about how they accomplish this. Raffel keeps me wondering until I know nothing is ever necessary, to the point where I stand outside myself and when I turn to go back, there's nowhere left to go. Whoever I was is gone; whoever I was going to be never was.

*

I no longer hear my own familiar voice. Raffel's mess is all.
I have a tune in my head that I play back again and again, like my head is a tape recorder. I know this tune so well. Then Raffel comes and her words rain down and land like mines in the field of my tune until I can't hear it anymore ­ I can't hear anything. I am lost. I don't know where I am. Don't know where Raffel came from or where she has gone.

*

I kept expecting, as I read Carrying the Body, to start understanding at some point. But that never happened. I stopped expecting it. I gave up. I surrendered. That's when I heard each line:

"Perhaps it starts with s," she said, still in the bathroom. "Statice or something. A lavender bud that my mother revered."
"Iris?" he said.
"Not iris," she said.
He sat on the tub lip.
He had often told her this: How often had he told her this: How was he to know? The things she asked! Was it taupe? Puce? Straw? Was it natural, this? Was it poly-whatever?

*

I was at a meeting. We were making plans for implementing new software. At break, they talked about the war. I was trying to read Raffel. The war talk broke in on the Raffel. I tried to keep reading. It is easier to read Raffel while listening to talk of war.

*

At Mark's piano lesson, I read more.

*

Say the aunt was Gordon Lish. Who would he be warning the little pig about?

*

Do you ever think some writers write what they write just to be irritating? That some writers are themselves pissed off? Not pissed off about the American literary scene, or the cost of gasoline, or even the latest war. What I mean is, some writers are already pissed off before they even get to the things they are pissed off about. Do you think maybe we're all already pissed off before we even think of anything to be pissed off about? We bring these feelings of being pissed off with us to the price of gasoline, or the latest war. And so with these certain writers they bring their feelings of already being pissed off to literature.
If the writer is pissed off and the reader is pissed off, how can we say the writing itself is irritating? What happens when the reader gives up, stops being irritated? Isn't it the same as giving up hope and finally seeing the world for what it really is?
Or, like how you have to give up any Utopian ideas of peace in order to see with any degree of honesty the way the tree outside your window looks? Or how the sky is only the inside surface of your skull and the trees the writhing ganglions of your brain matter?

*

So when I arrive at the chapter entitled 'A note about volume', whose fault is it that I want to linger among the words? Whose fault is it that, to me, these words, more than those that precede them, seem less intent on settling themselves down as reasons for co-existence. These short bursts of meaning seem each to have their own reason, and if there is some external narrative settling in to collect them, who ­ myself or Raffel ­ has managed, finally, to resist this terrible tendency to settle?

*

When you get up in the morning, do you already have a plan? When you first open your eyes, do you stay in bed a moment and wonder? Do you tell your friends at work: "I like to lie in bed a while before I get up in the morning."?

*

There's something private in Raffel's work. Something unexcavated, something I can't quite see beyond the words. Is it something I want that Raffel refuses to give me, something I've grown accustomed to getting that Raffel won't give? Or does Raffel create a promise in the piece? Is the something I want to get at something Raffel somehow suggests might be there, if only I were to look harder? Am I Raffel's pawn when I read her book? Is Raffel my keeper? Is Raffel, as writer, responsible for my welfare as I travel through her book? Or is she like the world, a kind of looking away from me, a tossing of elements in a storm, a fury of falling bits that I, the reader, get left alone with when Raffel sets down her pen and walks away?

*

There are some authors who fully authorize. Every step of the way through their book, they assume full authority. They expect you to follow. They are easy to follow. They are like God. Unquestionable. Beyond question. You are dead as you read. No matter how much you enjoy the book, or if you don't enjoy it at all, either way you are dead. You want to be dead. You want to rest. Stop thinking. Stop struggling. With these sorts of authors, you leave the world when you enter their books. You abandon all responsibility, all wonder, any claim to some authority of your own.
Then there are authors like Raffel who seem themselves to be lost. They authorize nothing beyond the problem of discovering authority. Raffel pushes you back on the world and, in a strong sense, forces you to reconsider.

*

For instance, I constantly find myself looking up from the book. I have no strong desire to get back to the book in the midst of doing the dishes, for instance. I go back, though. I read a few sentences.

*

In some ways, Raffel's book is like a list. (Every book is like a list and what the writer struggles for, often, is connections. Ways of disguising the list-like nature of the work. Ways of making the reader forget the mawing, aimless hole that really is what a book is.)

*

I won't try to say what Raffel was going for when she wrote this book.

*

Who decided that a book should call you out of the world, that a book should compel you to return to its pages again and again, so that even in the midst of washing the dishes, instead of washing the dishes you are thinking of returning to the book? What if a good book was really a book that drove you back out into the world, a book that asked you to return to the world, to return as a question? Even when that return means returning again to the dishes? To return as a question, not after you finished reading the book, but after you finished reading a single sentence? And then, again, after you finished reading another single sentence?

*

. . .not because your real life seems better, but because entering your real life seems better. Because being a position within your real life seems better. Where being compelled to return to your book is suddenly itself a position. You bracket yourself back upon what you thought you were compelled to, only to see that you've already taken a position. You stood in compulsion.

*

Ask yourself, is this, what you've just read, a review of Raffel's book? In reading this, have you stepped further away from your real life, the life you confront when you look up from the words on this page? Have you stepped even further from your life than you would have stepped in actually reading Raffel's book? Or is this 'review' a first step back from Raffel's words, a step back toward your own real life?

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