{"id":3546,"date":"2019-03-05T16:27:38","date_gmt":"2019-03-05T16:27:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/floridareview.cah.ucf.edu\/?post_type=article&p=3546"},"modified":"2019-03-05T16:27:38","modified_gmt":"2019-03-05T16:27:38","slug":"the-shrapnel-of-being","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/the-shrapnel-of-being\/","title":{"rendered":"The Shrapnel of Being"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading Life<\/em> by Chris Arthur
\n<\/strong>Negative Capability Press, 2017
\n<\/strong>Paperback, 202 pages, $15.95<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\"Cover<\/p>\n

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Chris Arthur, a native of Ulster, Ireland and a long-time resident of Wales and Scotland, happens to be one of the prominent authors of long-form, meditative essays published in America. All but one of his books have appeared with a US publisher, and he makes frequent appearances in Best American Essays<\/em> as well as a variety of US literary journals. Reading Life<\/em>, his sixth collection, declares again a kind of trans-border citizenship through his lifelong residence in texts and the literary imagination. It offers his most direct commentary on the form of the essay itself.<\/p>\n

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\u201cPerhaps no essayist,\u201d he muses, \u201cis worthy of that name unless he or she succeeds in creating objects which do not resemble their usual descriptors but are instead depicted in that elemental rawness which shows how little, in the ordinary run of things, we allow them to resemble what they in fact appear to be.\u201d The sequence of negatives and reversals in the sentence indicate the complexity of the task: truth is, of course, elusive; evidence is illusive; the essay, with its epigrammatic etymology of provisionality and its seventeenth-century pedigree, must somehow get beyond these matters and uncover the bones.<\/p>\n

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Writing instructors often coach students in the practices that lead to a \u201cwriting life,\u201d and Arthur\u2019s title hints at a kind of companion practice, how to establish a life as a reader. In this vein, he re-examines texts acquired in his youth, such as novelist Flann O\u2019Brien\u2019s At Swim-Two-Birds<\/em>, \u201ca piece of literary flotsam picked up on one of the many occasions when I was beachcombing in bookshops in my late teens.\u201d On the occasion of his ten-year-old daughter being assigned to read\u00a0Erich Maria Remarque\u2019s All Quiet on the Western Front<\/em>, he wonders whether the novel\u2019s gruesomeness might be at best a \u201ccurious choice\u201d or \u201cunsuitable\u201d for children that age and decides to re-read the novel alongside her to consider the question carefully.<\/p>\n

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But these sorts of reflections\u2014living with and re-living familiar texts\u2014are just one of Arthur\u2019s intentions in Reading Life.<\/em> In \u201creading\u201d the objects of the world around us, Arthur offers a kind of enactment and commentary regarding the essayist\u2019s purpose. \u201cEssays deal in the shrapnel of being,\u201d he writes, \u201cturning over now one piece, now another, carefully running the fingers of their prose along the edges, testing for sharpness, looking for hints of connection, feeling for the cut-off remnants of joins, trying to reconstruct a sense of setting, context, contiguity, extrapolating from the minuscule moments and objects that create a life reminders of the massive milieu in which they and it are embedded.\u201d The extended metaphor\u2014stunning in its disruptive mashup of violence and contemplation\u2014exemplifies Arthur\u2019s method. He favors complex and suspended syntax; he crafts intricate details that subtly interconnect.<\/p>\n

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Arthur\u2019s essays have always worked by way of fragments, assembling mosaics or braiding multiple narratives. His style lies in the scope of these assemblages and the patient, measured pacing with which he brings the pieces together and an unseen pattern emerges. Sometimes those fragments are literally objects\u2014a whale\u2019s tooth, for example, that Arthur subjects to close examination and free association, linking the memory of his childhood visits to the dentist who gave him the small artifact to consideration of the unbroken texts of DNA, \u201ca paired line of antecedents going back some 60 million years to the land animals whales once were \u2026 [leading] finally to the same destination: that moment of naked singularity, the great beginning, the point at which there was something rather than nothing.\u201d (This was one of my favorites in the book, recalling in some ways \u201cMiracles\u201d from his 2005 Irish Haiku<\/em>, in which the fossilized bone from a whale\u2019s ear resonates with connection to cosmic unity and the disunity of religiopolitical violence in Northern Ireland.)<\/p>\n

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Arthur\u2019s omnivorous attention \u201creads\u201d moments from literary history\u2014a passage in the Goncourt brothers\u2019 Journal containing an image of child prostitution in nineteenth-century France; a few degrees of separation regarding Seamus Heaney and his famous Bog Bodies poems\u2014and from personal experience\u2014leading a group of writing students out into the snow on a quest for found objects as writing prompts; \u201clistening\u201d to the histories associated with three walking sticks Arthur inherited. Through these readings, the richness he gleans includes delight in language itself (acquiring new words like \u201csett\u201d and \u201cclough\u201d), companionship in shared meaning (\u201cone of the things I\u2019ve always liked about second-hand books is the way they hold the spoor of other readers and how, following their tracks, a sense of almost tribal complicity can be kindled\u201d), the sudden shock or surprise of entering an alternate point of view (\u201cwhy did this glimpse of child prostitution in nineteenth-century France strike me so forcefully that it felt\u2014still feels\u2014as if it left a splinter?\u201d). Such \u201csplinters\u201d stay a long while with the reader, too\u2014that\u2019s part of Arthur\u2019s power as prose writer, to deliver images, or facts, or anecdotes that work their barbed way more deeply in.<\/p>\n

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Reading Life<\/em> is distinguished from his previous books in its deliberate commentary on form and theory. Essayists often like to comment on the meandering, fragmentary, organic approach that seems fundamental to the form, and Arthur has done so before. But here he devotes more direct consideration to such matters. Instead of losing himself in the unfolding energy of the essays, more often Arthur remains a self-conscious, authoritative as well as authorial presence. It\u2019s sometimes as if he\u2019s holding a subject before his own and the reader\u2019s gaze, while simultaneously commenting upon what gazing feels like and explaining how sight casts an upside-down image of the world on an imaginary screen on the back of the eye.<\/p>\n

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And so \u201cSonatina for Oboe and Bayonet (Reading All Quiet on the Western Front<\/em>),\u201d the piece in which Arthur and his daughter read two distinct editions (his a 1963 edition with a cover depicting the dead and dying, hers with \u201conly\u2026an artful image of a poppy\u201d), the story of their reading widens to recount their discussion of what a bayonet actually is (a knife the size of an oboe, he explains at first) and to examine one from the World War I theater purchased long ago from a junk shop. Soon the essay also provides a close reading of its own movement, Arthur explicating for the reader the image he\u2019s just drawn, laying out the layers of symbolism he perceives there, making what moments before were implicit, explicit. The prospect of his own daughter on the floor between the musical instrument she plays at school and the authentic German bayonet her father has brought for her to look at \u201cmakes a powerful cameo \u2026 freezing into a kind of icon of incongruity that\u2019s at once symbolic and interrogative,\u201d Arthur muses. \u201cIt symbolizes vividly the way in which our world is riven by the coexistence of opposites: gentleness and brutality; compassion and cruelty; beauty and ugliness; creativity and destruction; peace and war. These polarities can pull apart any equilibrium of meaning we try to lay between them. Their sudden alternations act like military rounds, pounding the semblance of order on which we build our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

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This, too, is vintage Chris Arthur. Calm and articulate, while pointing to the firing guns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In “reading” the objects of the world around us, Arthur offers a kind of enactment and commentary regarding the essayist’s purpose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":3548,"template":"","categories":[9,139],"tags":[1053,6,1054,1055,1056,1057,1058,1059,1060,1061,1062,1063],"class_list":["post-3546","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-book-review","tag-all-quiet-on-the-western-front","tag-aquifer-the-florida-review-online","tag-at-swim-two-birds","tag-chris-arthur","tag-elizabeth-dodd","tag-erich-maria-remarque","tag-essays-and-essayists","tag-flann-obrien","tag-irish-haiku","tag-reading-life","tag-seamus-heaney","tag-the-goncourt-brothers"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Shrapnel of Being - The Florida Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/the-shrapnel-of-being\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Shrapnel of Being - 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