How does a Clark Blaise story feel? The tactile emphasis is crucial. Blaise's characters are inseparable from the things they touch—gooey, sticky, dirty, infested things that "ooze" through swamps, broken buildings, jungles. But if we read only for sensation (consider: "his brains are coming out of his mouth") or only for repugnant shock ("the hiss of a million maggots") the rawness metaphor seeps by us. (p. 26)
If you ask someone what they think a Clark Blaise story is about, their first answer will probably not be: rawness. Critics have stressed the extraordinary sensitivity of Blaise's characters to "dilemmas caused by conflicting cultures,"… their articulate response to particular "kinds of exile,"… and their involvement with texture, voice, and "a creative ordering of events."… All of these descriptions are accurate. But the Blaise narrator is also defined by his tragic view of the social order, by the "sudden tragic nosedive" which disorients him and marks his plunge into a morass where spiritual and aesthetic values have been corroded or debased. No celebrations of life here ("I am death driven"); no celebrations of human purpose ("Nothing principled, nothing heroic, nothing even defiant"). Blaise's voice holds the tone of mourning: "Many things are gone for good"; "I who live in dreams have suffered something real"; "I felt a pity for us all that I had never felt before." The stories—elegies—return again and again to life tragically "crumbling into foolishness" and "darkest despair."
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