Nabokov is advancing a theory of epiphany: The chimney sweep's capacity to attend to the banal, the mundane or what he so beautifully terms those gentler "asides of the spirit," even in the midst of certain peril, enables his tragic sweep to achieve revelatory freedom -- at least for a spell. There is a distinct recuperative turn here; the loser wins, a misstep marks a miracle, a fall becomes a leap.
Like Nabokov, B.C. writer M. A. C. Farrant (an admirer of Nabokov and of this essay in particular) also queries "the validity of the inspired haul," not from the vantage point of a breezy rooftop, but from the post-human landscape of a hysterical collapse.
In The Breakdown So Far, Farrant's eighth volume of aggressively short stories (some span a mere sentence fragment), the viability of epiphanic vision -- or what Farrant calls "large moments," "the distinctive now," those "perfectly executed moments of attention and regard" -- is at constant issue. There is nothing particularly new in this; scrutiny of the sublime is as old as Augustine. But what is fascinating and admirably harrowing in The Breakdown So Far is Farrant's staunch determination to conjure beatific vision from dystopic void. An admirer of Beckett as well, Farrant ups the ante on gentle Nabokov: Her chimney sweep does not fall -- he is pushed.
The Breakdown So Far seems a very loud, very hysterical book. Inane statements are screamed, shouted and/or squawked, and throughout, a nerve-jangling cacophony of truly mad laughter holds court. For instance, in one story, Too Late, a deranged grandfather "has escaped" (from where? -- we're never sure, but a nuclear family-cum-compound comes to mind) and, with dingo-like glee, makes off with the neighbours' baby: "He's got the baby on the front lawn," Farrant coolly reports, "and is licking the chocolate crucifix around its neck. The baby is laughing and laughing."
There is a kind of inscrutable "movement" here, too (I hesitate to ascribe to this work any kind of narrative arc or sense of obvious meaningful progress; this is not its aim), but it ranges along the lines of the creepy-amoebic. Listless dissolution, for instance, vies with furtive, futile recuperation. In Two Leaking Men, two men . . . well . . . "leak." In another, an anonymous expedition of searchers armed with butterfly nets (homage to Nabokov, a notable lepidopterist) forage for "lost minds" amid a pile of garbage in hopes of salvaging, if not minds intact, at least "broken bits of memory, the odd disintegrating word." Paralysis hangs in the air; a toxic malaise stings the throat. Unnervingly, we are never quite sure who -- or what -- caused the leak in the former story.
At other points, Farrant questions the very desirability of revelation: Some characters grimly refuse to cross what increasingly becomes a kind of ambiguous revelatory threshold. In Sixty Degrees, an elderly woman on a seemingly Stygian ferry ride looks on when a door in the ferry wall magically opens onto a steel mesh ramp: "The old woman became agitated. I'm not walking through any wall," she informs her companion, who, haunted by his own "permanent state of wonder," is convinced he is being stalked by a vampire. When we learn, in another story, that yet another seemingly inviting gateway is actually "littered with corpses," we feel relieved. That old woman is right; she should stay exactly where she is.
Still other characters express garish hostility before the prospect of redemption. In Large Moments, yet another dislocated family unit discusses revelation:
"Some idiot, says the daughter, wrote a book that said you'd get more bang for your buck if you lived your life having large moments. Get a load of this: A large moment is an opening in the stretch of time.
"Sounds like having a tumour, says the son-in-law."
Even when there does seem to be a suggestion of epiphanic bliss, words, for this writerly writer, ironically do not serve: In Parade, a celebratory pageant of sacred freaks concludes with a man in white commending silence: "He puts a finger to his lips as we head off -- no words, no words . . ."
The Breakdown So Far circles the telling moment: There is anticipation, deferral, even post-saturated exhaustion, but never consummation. In a dark pastiche of corporate/divine surveillance, for instance, a cryptic "Madame Miner . . . pans for revelations. So far -- gravel. But -- any day now . . ." Such deferral soon broaches nihilistic excess through the sheer volume of Farrant's "etceteras," her pointed use of ellipses, and the sense of almost nauseating infinite regress expressed, for instance, in the title of one story, Perpetual Codas. What is remarkable, however, is that Farrant does manage to sustain a singular note of hope even in the midst of such a purposive drone.
Toward the conclusion of his essay, Nabokov cautions: "We are all crashing to our death." The question remains: Can we convert a fall into a leap? It seemed a relatively simple affair for his chimney sweep -- a matter of perspective, of mere attention to detail. But Farrant has, rather mercilessly, rather masterfully, upped the stakes by demanding of her reader: Can we really conjure vision from a void -- from our void?
Perhaps significantly, Farrant's collection is not called The Breakdown; it is called The Breakdown So Far. So, either the worst is yet to come (heaven help us; this breakdown is nightmarish enough) or, maybe the breakdown so far is actually reversible. Maybe Farrant will succeed, as she notes in her final lines, in "finding what excites, finally, like something pure . . ."
But then again, as her coy simile implies (not to mention her signature ellipses) it wouldn't actually be something pure; it would only be "like" something pure. Language is on trial here as much as revelation, form as much as content, and the oscillation between something "like" meaning and meaning itself is fortuitously dizzying.
The Breakdown So Far is challenging, unnerving, unforgettable and very unlikely. If, as Nabokov advises, the monster of grim common sense must be "shot dead," then Farrant is, indeed, a crack shot.
Karen Luscombe is a professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design, completing a doctorate on modernist epiphanies. She has not had one -- not yet.
