V24|NO16
Fictional Reenactment
What we can learn from a novelist about emphathy Over the past two weeks or so, I’ve been reading Nick Flynn’s new memoir “The Reenactments.” It’s his third, and at this point — about 200 pages in — I can’t decide whether it’s his best or his most mediocre (I’d be hard-pressed to characterize any of his writing as “bad”), but it definitely has my attention. Not that my decision to finish it has anything to do with that; once I start a book, movie or any undertaking, I have a hard time justifying the termination or suspension of completing it. The only exception is the occasional video game — I’m still trying to figure out how to KO Mike Tyson from the original “Punch-Out!” and have spent the last six months just staring down Electro through the shrink-wrap on the Wii Spider-man box art. To the point, Flynn’s fame yanks any writer honest with him- or herself in two different existential directions, neither of them particularly pleasant. On the one hand, he is infuriatingly successful. The near-simultaneous clapping-over of his first memoir (“Another Bullshit Night in Suck City”) and his first volume of poetry (“Some Ether”) immediately established him as both a truly legitimate author and a darling of the literary community. Those two categorizations don’t always go hand in hand, and it’s exponentially frustrating to anyone on the outside when they do. To his credit, Flynn hasn’t squandered his notoriety. Since then, he’s used it to pursue a couple of pet projects that likely wouldn’t have seen the light of day if no one knew his name: “Blind Huber,” his sophomore poetry collection, for example, is a series of short, ephemeral poems centered around an eponymous beekeeper. On the other hand, success has not come easy, though it seemed to occur all at once for him. “… Suck City” wasn’t published until Flynn was in his forties, an age at which debut working authors are still referred to as “young,” and he had to live through hell — the failing mental health and suicide of his mother, his own drug and alcohol dependency, and the crux of the book, his father’s homelessness and their reconnection through Flynn’s work at a Boston homeless shelter — described in the book, to attain it. It’s a book and a personal history that begs the question: Must we suffer — or rather, should we seek suffering — in order to obtain success and/or self-fulfillment?
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METROSPIRITAUGUSTA’S INDEPENDENT VOICE SINCE 1989
Certain religious orders would agree, to an extent. While only the most extreme actively seek to suffer — think self-flagellation, life-endangering fasting — they do live apart from the world, and lead lives characterized by prayer, labor and scholarship. Some of them get to drink beer, a meager pittance. And that’s me saying that. I bring up this question because of, in a roundabout way, “The Reenactments.” See, a few years ago it was made into a film called “Being Flynn,” (a title which did nothing to downplay Flynn’s celebrity, but whatever) and starring the like of Julianne Moore and Robert de Niro as his mother and father. Paul Dano (“There Will be Blood,” “Little Miss Sunshine”) played Flynn, evidently as a hipster. The film did reasonably well, and de Niro earned particular acclaim for his portrayal of the father. “The Reenactments” is an account and meditation of that process from Flynn’s perspective, sometimes a mere chronicle of production, at other times a more insular discussion of what it means when life takes on a layer of the meta. Stylistically, Flynn responds by dappling the book with numerous selfreferences, repurposing lines from old poems and more of his own writings. In this way, Flynn would seem to resoundingly answer “yes” to the question about suffering, as he willfully — or at least sees this as the only way to deal with the book’s goingson — recalls earlier painful bits of his life in order to place into context the current, though on-thesurface-haute, painful bits. The book is good, and the contemporary stylistic flourishes — a single sentence on a page, for example — that seem at first to do little more than pad the page length are in fact timed and measured to ensure maximum rhetorical and emotional impact. For that matter, we don’t think — or even do — in fully fleshed-out paragraphs. The self, not to mention its view, perception and processing of the world, is a fractured one. When I started writing this, I swear I had a point in mind, and I think it’s this: Flynn’s book, while a notable one, doesn’t describe an experience that all of us have not or will not go through if we simply allow ourselves a single modicum of self-awareness. Be still a moment — listen, see, feel — and the world truly seems to playact. It’s almost absurd.
Be still a moment longer, however, and something else begins to happen. That iota of self-awareness you allowed yourself begins to expand, to encompass and enfold the daily, the populace’ minutiae, that teeming yet ephemeral mass of firing synapses that keeps the world electrified. It’s called empathy. After a tragedy, it’s the easiest thing in the world to feel, or to pretend you feel. And if we would wake up and make the effort to harness that sentiment, that knee-jerk care-ofour-fellow-man, oh, what we could accomplish. How we would lessen the dire need of it, even as it proliferates. How we would reshape the legacy of our species, before something final scatters us throughout the vacuum.
JOSHRUFFIN, a Metro Spirit alum, is a published
journalist and poet who just received his MFA from Georgia College & State University. He was once the most un-intimidating bouncer at Soul Bar.
18APRIL2013