thoughts on readings, chapter 8

The pairing of Mansfield’s “Miss Brill” with Gilb’s “Love in L.A.” illustrates the authors’ divergent approaches to a similar theme, which might be paraphrased as: how the retreat into private fantasies can distort not only one’s sense of collective realities and perceptions, but impair self-perception as well. Mansfield’s modernist stream-of-consciousness narration, reflexively commenting on its own polished style, as in graf 9 (“Oh, how fascinating it was! How she enjoyed it! . . . Who could believe the sky at the back wasn’t painted?”), builds to a tragic end after the sullen boy’s derisive aside in graf 13, recasting Miss Brill from a harsh new angle as “that stupid old thing . . . [a] silly old mug.” The wounded protagonist slumps home alone, to a “cupboard” suddenly more forlorn than anything at first suggested by her rosy late-Victorian diction.

By contrast Gilb updates the existentialist hell of being trapped on some endless, eternally unmoving freeway for comic purposes, via snappy sitcom dialogue. Jake’s dream of a mobile environment of “crushed velvet . . . a nice warm heater and defroster . . . cruise control [and] mellow speakers” described in the first graf is so enticing only a collision can jar him out of it. Jake’s attraction to Mariana, the motorist, is an “added complication” (graf 4) to an underlying aggression kept at bay through the richly upholstered fantasy, but implicit in the violence of “snuffing out that nasty exterior” in the first graf, and coloring Jake’s words to the notably younger woman; e.g., the threat in graf 5 of not having “to lay my regular b.s. on you,” or the overbearing “You’re not married, are you?” in graf 16. But the story resolves into sly comedy, as the trimmings of Jake’s outlaw self-image foil Mariana’s attempt to hold him responsible for messing up her car. The police can run his plate numbers, but just as Mariana’s Florida plates don’t make her Cuban, Jake’s stolen plates establish no link, either. In lotus-land all is surface, the sky at back is painted. Jake’s possibly delusional self-fashioning, this time at least, shields him from the law even as it hides him from himself.