Brief note: Severance

Robert Olen Butler's Severance (2006) consists of 240-word short-short stories, told by a series of talking heads--literally.  Each plotless, stream-of-consciousness tale begins at the moment of decapitation and ends with the head's final death.  The heads in question form an interesting jumble of historical, mythical, and fictional beings, starting with a caveman from 43,000 BC and ending with the author himself (mysteriously decapitated "on the job" [256]).  Aside from decapitation, there are no real similarities among the characters.  Some die in accidents, some are guillotined, some are punished for real or imagined crimes, some are somebody's else's dinner, and so forth.  Structurally, the collection at times seems like a free-wheeling homage to Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, mixed up with Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations: several of the posthumous speakers cluster at a particular historical moment, like the French Revolution, or are corresponding pairs, like St. George and his dragon.  (The French Revolution cluster, which begins with Louis XVI, ends with Robespierre, and has a coda of sorts featuring a criminal guillotined in the 1830s, is the most Masters-ish; its irony, though, is a matter of structure rather than dialogue.)  Death, as always, is the great leveler; the politicians and monarchs mingle with an American chicken. While Butler doesn't try to construct a sense of posthumous community, the dreamlike tales interact through visual and thematic echoes, ranging from erotic imagery to different forms of consumption--including the consumption of bodies, whether through cannibalism or eucharistic imagery.   

 

All of the tales consist of a single, run-on sentence, usually fragmentary.  Butler emphasizes the temporal rush of his characters' memories through generous use of asyndeton, as well as coordinating conjunctions like "and" ("and we alone sit at flame and suckle woman puts her hand upon her head alone and puts her mouth to our ear alone and makes a soft cry" [13]).   Each head organizes his or thoughts around a particular word or image, an associative process which carries the tale forward in lieu of a plot.  Thus, Catherine Howard keeps returning to "tumble," which begins as a sexual noun ("what a tumble") and ends on the scaffold, ominously, as a verb ("I tumble" [81]).   Similarly, Thomas More's "king" slowly morphs from Henry VIII into Christ (73).  While very few characters even notice that they've been beheaded--Howard is one of the ones who does--the word "head" itself frequently intrudes at the end after the end of their lives, rather like the head of Charles I that keeps cropping up in Mr. Dick's history.   

Although the tales neither have plots nor conform to old cliches about "your life flashing before your eyes," they all emphasize processes, persons or things mutating and coming-to-be.  The most metafictional tales, like that of advertising executive Robert Kornbluth, dwell on individuals finding themselves momentarily face to face with their own language.  Kornbluth opens with an imperative--"look I cry"--that directs the audience not to a Wordsworthian field of daffodils, but to an ad for Burma Shave (201).  As it turns out, Kornbluth not only writes ad copy, but he also automatically thinks in ad copy.   The opening "look" turns out to be addressed to Kornbluth's wife, and he spends the rest of the tale confronting her anguish with his tag lines, "words I know will do only harm" (201).   Anchoring his flashback in allusions to classic consumer goods, from a 1952 Packard to Hanes underwear, Kornbuth finds that this language of desire is entirely inadequate to handling his wife's rage; comfortable selling objects to a mass public, Kornbluth cannot find a way of acknowledging his wife's interiority.  He can persuade an invisible audience, but has no speech for intimacy with a single person--even himself.  In a sense, he has no speech that has not already been depersonalized, whether by being posted on a billboard or turned into a TV commercial.   Even his epitaph, amusingly and pathetically enough, turns out to be ad copy: "DON'T LOSE, YOUR HEAD, TO GAIN A MINUTE, YOU NEED YOUR HEAD, YOUR BRAINS ARE IN IT" (201). 

Comments

[J.D.]

This is fascinating. I've read Butler's A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, but I'd never even heard of this collection before.

I've been out of the MFA loop for too long, I guess.

Anyway, great post. I dig concept fiction, and when I get around to checking this collection out, your insights will be handy!