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The Grouper
The
unexplained coherences intrigue me, the every day exotic, how random abrasive
fragments operate as structure. Something succinct and deep is expressed
that cannot be said in words. In Lissa McLaughlin's
drive-by America, there is more than just the view passing frame by frame
outside your window. Beneath a seemingly still surface, sensory experience
cuts deep. Danger lurks in many forms: gun-wielding uncles, hurricanes,
nascent sexuality. Here, the sticky stuff of memory is equal parts experience
and dreamscape-and what falls in between. Lissa McLaughlin reaches through
the boundaries of consciousness to create a richly layered prose. Lissa McLaughlin knows
that narratives based around memories are truest to experience exactly
at that moment when they know what can't be said. The pained, angry, yet
often slyly humorous collection in The Grouper illustrates that memory
must never pretend to understand more than it can. The starkly resonant,
but finally resistant, photographs show how language can only navigate
edges of the irreducible instants of a life which words cannot finally
know. In so doing, The Grouper reminds us that trauma must never be reduced
to an excuse for story. Reading The Grouper,
we are "listening for the mess to speak, afraid it will." Convincingly,
disturbingly, Lissa McLaughlin has "opened her mouth as far as it will
go" and given us pictures of language learning "to mark physically the
moment speech ruptures." What does writing become when it "refuses to
enter the novel memory writes"? Page after page, in brief prose fragments
and fragmented anecdotes, in photographs and jaggedly chiseled poems,
McLaughlin provides a turbulent sequence of answers to this question,
where "the meaning of nothing becomes more and more clear to us [as] bits
of the temporal world snag and accumulate." And if the language is a "mess,"
it is nonetheless well made, offering not chaos but the form chaos takes
when we call it writing. |
