Truer Faults

Unless a language user's position in language is authenticated--that is, unless the "I" has a tenable sense of what it occupies--language is vitiated as a means of communication: it isn't right between the "I"s. Such is the primary dilemma of Madison Allman, who is gifted, young, talented, and who inspects verbal organisms with the attention of an entomologist in search of an insect-shaped entomologist--along the way, calling into question the idioms that inform patterns of thought, and balking at the mendacious term "voluntary" and its ilk--but who, between her longing for community and her longing to be sincere, feels unable to represent herself. To exfoliate depth, to unite mind and skin, to be "self-evident" would be ideal; as an alternative to that pipe dream, she reasons that if she can see herself in writing on the page, she has material. That much of her writing is an elaboration of her problematic relationship with the capacity of language and its tendency to mislead should come as no surprise: she recounts a childhood misadventure with made-up, self-making secret language, for instance. And the novel's dramatic material consists chiefly of Madison's insolvent efforts to make her performed self commensurate with her written self--she plans and premeditates, she writes stories and reads them over the telephone in order to "have" stories--primarily to secure the good opinion of two young men who seem to have no reservations about asserting ephemeral notions and acting out their vicissitudes. The first to appear is adversarial Malachi Watts, who, in reminding Madison that her quiet demeanor might simply mean she's utterly vacuous, galvanizes Madison to check and elaborate on her convictions more than anyone--he even prompts her to bang out a novella, "Cracked Dishes," that takes as its subject this collision of discursive verbal free play and the world that, by turns, stimulates defensible personal development and threatens to subvert it. In "Cracked Dishes," the following tenets of Madison's linguistic disquietude play ("play," literally) major roles through the projection of her sexless ego (or protagonist) who she names, "Fac Dishes": what is evident to Fac, Fac deems self-evident (so why not let it go without saying?); Fac recoils at the thought of reproduction--physical, psychical, and artistic--but also realizes it is hirs ("hirs" being an invented pronoun--one of three--that covers both genders) lot, and thus, by the end of the novella, erects somewhat of sham of a persona wholly divorced from its "true" intentions--though, ostensibly, the development of this phony persona, in being the logical conclusion of the text that accumulates underneath it, is in perfect alignment with who Fac really is; the topography of any thinking individual upon whom Fac projects hermself is changing and unmappable, so anxiety over whether or how an interlocutor receives Fac cripples herm. And the world shoves so much unwanted pabulum down the gullets of its people, to shut them up. After Madison completes--indeed lives inside of--"Cracked Dishes," she is ready to exist outside the text, ready to bear it in mind, if not bear it on her face, almost like the enervated and (at long last) well-fed, "phony" Fac. Madison is tired of writing, tired of isolation, tired of her misanthropic contentions--her truths--that keep her from "life." With impeccable timing, Alex the magician, long since an object of Madison's desire, enters the scene. At this point begins Madison's spiritual declension: although she cultivates precisely the lively, clever, sexy, lexically imaginative relationship she wished for all along, the relationship also leads to a social codependence that implodes: neither constructive nor destructive criticism pass between the two of them to mark their differences; there appears to be no distinction between the performer and the audience. Madison's performed self is Alex, and he is her identity. So, when Madison reads in Alex's journal of his recent infidelity and sees that the position she occupies in his world is relatively insignificant, she reinstates the page as her screen and there finds community--perhaps not in life of her own devising (the words are still borrowed) but of her own configuring. Restrictions placed upon her "I" are, at least, more visible this way.