Summary
Stone criticizes on the writings of Douglas Glover. He claims that Glover's protagonists are not often characters in the conventional sense; rather, their identities regularly undergo a variety of distortions, involving slippages on point of view as well as other subtler and more radical dislocations that call to mind William Gass's Formulation, "Characters are those primary substances to which everything else is attached."
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Douglas Glover
Douglas Glover's characters are a persecuted lot. They suffer from cracked skulls, diseased lungs, digital amputations (both elective and compulsory), aesthetic constipation, nymphomania, toothache, chronic masturbation, amnesia, Kierkegaardian despair, alcoholism, and are sometimes politely homicidal. Squeezed between an intolerable past and an equally intolerable future, they are driven by desire and literally driven mad by its perversions. For these characters, suffering is the primary ontological condition. As one narrator in Glover's most recent collection observes, "It seems impossible that a human being could suffer this much and live. And just when you think you can't stand any more, it gets worse and you discover new possibilities of living" (16 Categories 174). It might sound excessively bleak were it not for the fact that pain, in Glover's universe, is very often the instrument for transcendence and redemption, if only temporarily and incompletely. What's more, Glover's prose radiates a blistering irony, by turns wickedly comic and sublimely affective, which, coupled with a broader compositional mastery, further leavens the agonizing climate; in his studied pursuit of stylistic estrangement, Glover knocks edgewise, as it were, even the weightiest drama-on the battlefield or in the bedroom-transporting the reader, if not always the character, to an entirely other plane where pleasure is, in fact, the norm.
To be clear, Glover's protagonists are not often characters in the conventional sense; rather, their identities regularly undergo a variety of distortions, involving slippages in point of view as well as other subtler and more radical dislocations that call to mind William Gass's formulation, "Characters are those primary substances to which everything else is attached" (49). To redirect Glover's terminology slightly, characters are the "essential furniture" in a work of fiction (Notes Home 36). They frequently exist in the space where text and selfhood overlap, well versed in the malign influence of semiotics, very much aware that their subjectivity is a by-product of linguistic systems. In this regard Glover is thoroughly, almost stubbornly, postmodern, a stance he defines broadly as having one's aesthetic "options open" (Notes Home 102). And his work capitalizes on this ultimate latitude, at once technically experimental and viscerally experiential, which entitles him, one would think, to a readership much larger than he currently enjoys.On the whole Glover's aesthetic might best be characterized by the rift that his works generate between predominantly two interpretative strategies; it almost seems as if there are two Glovers, forking along the lines of deconstructionist theory and formalist praxis. As Glover's fiction openly flexes its philosophical muscle-one character remarks, "Structuralists would characterize my style as 'robbing the signifier of the signified'" (Dog Attempts 107)-his work inevitably triggers one's theoretical reflexes, broaching issues of subjectivity, agency, and the much-ballyhooed problem of language. This programmatic philosophizing, partly borne out in the essay collection Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, tends to give the prose the weight of an "ethical injunction" (107); against the machine of language, Glover is scatological and anti-Zen, offering a nearly Blakean concept of libidinal energy, and on this level his fiction can be configured to provide, as the title of his third collection seems to indicate, A Guide to Animal Behavior. That title is, however, ironic, and to read Glover this way is, at least for some of us, to construe narrowly the scope of his achievement. Rather, there's another Glover who operates solely on the aesthetic level, for whom the deconstructive autocommentary is as much a stylistic opportunity as it is an ideological necessity, for whom both suffering and its temporary alleviation, transcendence, are figurative textual requirements as much as they are literal worldly critiques. Glover is making a career out of exploiting this slippery divide between Arnoldian imperative and Paterian possibility, but I would argue that it's his aestheticism that equips him to outlast any potentially faddish interest (or disinterest) in theory mongering.A partly expatriated Canadian, Glover has written to date four collections of short fiction, four novels, and a book of essays. His most recent novel, Elle, was published in April 2003 by Goose Lane Editions; Dalkey Archive Press has seen fit to release a book of selected stories, Bad News of the Heart, which appeared in March of the same year. His short fiction has been nominated for the Governor General's Award (Canada's version of the National Book Award) and has been anthologized in both Best American Short Stories and Best Canadian Stories (where he has been the editor since 1997). His criticism has appeared in the national juggernauts of, among others, the New York Times Book Review, the Washi...See the full content of this document
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