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Indeed, some of
us--cousins, perhaps, to Laura
Kasischke's Kathy Bliss -- might go looking for exactly this sort
of trouble. Jill, the protagonist of Ben Fountain's masterly story "The
Lion's Mouth," is such a person. She is the "country project director
for World Aid Ministries," a charitable organization concerned with
feeding the poorest of the poor, and she has voluntarily gone to Sierra
Leone, which James Traub has called "the worst place on Earth."
According to established stereotypes, Jill should be a near-saint --
either that or she should be an ingénue of sorts, the kind of person V.
S. Naipaul would refer to (with magisterial contempt, no doubt) as a
"tourist." It is part (but only part) of the brilliance of Fountain's
story that she fits neatly into neither of these roles, though she
partakes of both of them.
At the outset, certainly, Jill seems closer to Terry Sightseer than to
Mother Teresa--though she's supposedly in Sierra Leone for humanitarian
reasons, she's sitting at a pale imitation of a beach resort bar,
drinking rum colas and keeping one eye on CNN and the other on her
boyfriend, who's doing business at a table a little ways off. The first
irony (and this is a story in which ironies -- none of them cheap --
are as thick and thorny as raspberry brambles) is that said boyfriend's
business is diamond smuggling, and diamonds are precisely what the wars
have been
(and are still being) fought over
that have made
Sierra Leone such a horror of a place. Does this bother Jill? Maybe.
It's not as though she's unaware of it -- that would be impossible,
given the small size of the émigré community in Freetown and the even
smaller size of the country's economy. And it's not as though she
doesn't care about the suffering that surrounds her, the suffering
directly due to her lover's stock-in-trade -- the story, as it unfolds,
makes it marvelously clear that she does. But still -- she's far fonder
of her boyfriend, supplier to smugglers, than she is of almost any
other character in the story. And this is another neat trick, and
another wonderful irony -- the way Starkey (the boyfriend) becomes one
of the story's most sympathetic figures, despite his profession and
even his appearance. Here is Jill's impression of his appearance:
Physically he
wasn't much, a short, thick-legged man with a blunt, fleshy face and
thinning hair dyed an improbable midnight-black. He had an
embarrassing taste for gold accessories, and most days dressed for
business in shorts, espadrilles, Hugo Boss golf-shirts --
resort-wear, here in one of the world's genuine hellholes. Shed of
his clothes he was worse than she'd expected, his body pale and soft
as a mitt of dough, shot through with a vestigial stringiness.
And here is the next
sentence:
What had surprised
Jill as much as anything was how little any of this mattered to her.
Well, why? It has
something to do, Fountain says nearby, with Starkey's "...mellow,
cheerful voice that made the things he said sound so reasonable. He
gave people hope, he made them feel close to something real, this in a
place that kept threatening to slide past zero." ("Threatening"?
Haven't we long ago passed the point of threatening -- ?) But
there is more to it than that: Starkey is rich, and Jill, who was
raised "more than comfortably on Connecticut's Gold Coast" has
discovered, now that she's in Sierra Leone, that she misses money. (Or
thinks she does -- as we shall see, money, for Jill, is only a symbol
of what she really wants, which is far less attainable.) Above all,
however, Starkey gives Jill certainty. When she's with him, managing
her thoughts and feelings is easy. "Do you know how good you look right
now? You're a gift, Jill, that's what you are to me. You're just
amazing, love," Starkey says to her, and Jill's reaction is to become
"...warm, slack; her eyes went slightly out of focus. Was this what it
felt like to be loved? Before Starkey she'd never let anyone talk to
her that way, and lately she had trouble remembering why."
So: Jill is, in some sense, sleeping with the enemy. It would be a
mistake, however, to think that she is not serious about her
work -- which, of course, is to provide her own version of hope to the
victims of Sierra Leone's civil war. To this end, she has set up sewing
co-op; here, one-armed women, working in teams, turn out garments that Jill figures out how to export. (That the women
are one-armed is one of the more fantastical elements of the war; it is
a hallmark of the "rebels," when they sweep through civilian
populations, to chop off the right arms of anyone they happen to catch.
Despite the obvious sadism of the act, there is a political motive at
work, though Fountain doesn't mention it: if you can't sign your name,
you can't vote.) And in Fountain's description of her reaction to the
co-op, we have another clue as to what is driving Jill:
Jill always felt a
kind of compression when she stepped into the co-op, a crowding of
awareness that made her hushed and anxious while at the same time
lifting her out of herself. How believers would feel when they entered
a church -- it had something to do with suffering, she suspected, but
beyond that she lacked the energy to analyze it.
We also learn, a
couple of pages earlier, that in putting together the co-op a year
before, Jill had given free rein to her "...rage for order: the stone
paths, the neatly thatched baffas and sheds, the flame trees
she'd planted about the grounds for shade. Beyond the walls lay a world
of squalor and chaos, but here she'd managed to carve out a small
island of control." We therefore know that Jill wants at least three
things: order, money, and transcendence -- very different things
indeed.
Or are they? To a large degree, all of them can be read as synonyms for
predictability, or simplicity. In the case of order, this is obvious:
if everything is where it belongs, you know where everything is -- and
you probably know what's going to happen next, too. Transcendence is
also uncomplicated (although, admittedly, it represents a radically
different path to simplicity) -- if you transcend the world, if you are
lifted out of yourself, the world's concerns are no longer relevant to
you. Life becomes simple, because it ceases to matter. (Note Fountain's
canny use of the word "compression" in the paragraph block-quoted
above: for Jill, a spiritual experience is not only uplifting but
narrowing.)
The money is the most curious of the lot, probably because we are
inclined to see greed as antithetical to simplicity. Ascetics typically
give all their possessions away, after all -- they do not try to obtain
more. But it's not really possessions, not really wealth in the sense
that we understand it, that Jill is after. It is the greed of the
miser, not of the playboy, that interests her. After all, on the very
second page of the story, Fountain says this about her: "She had a
congenital distrust of money and luxury, her militant asceticism
further aggravated by a very low tolerance of boredom."
What she envies in her rich older lover, therefore, is greed as a
purpose, money as an end in itself. If money is all you care about,
then you need care about nothing else. Fountain plays variations on
this theme all through the first half of the piece. "Starkey was
responsible only for himself," Jill observes, further speculating that
"...this was the great luxury of business, of a life solely devoted to
making money..." And later on she thinks of him and reflects that there
"...was a truth in that kind of life, a black-edged clarity; more than
anyone else she'd ever met, he seemed to operate from a firm
understanding of what was and was not possible." It is therefore, not
the money itself that attracts her, but that black-edged clarity, that
compression of the world to simple, manageable proportions.
The world, however, cannot be thus compressed, no matter how much
Jill -- or anyone -- desires it; it is the job of fiction to contrast what
we want the world to be with what it actually is. It is true that in
the second half of the piece (which, astonishingly, is only a little
over twenty-six pages long -- it feels far longer, as though it packs not
only the emotional heft but the sheer amplitude of a novel), Jill does
attain an exceedingly high degree of clarity. The problem is that the
world is spectacularly indifferent to her epiphany. The last episode of
the story, brilliantly realized, is Dantesque (though Fountain himself
invokes Brueghel) not only in its portrayal of surreal horror but in
its allegorical resonance -- except that "The Lion's Mouth" is a product
of the twenty-first century, not the fourteenth, and so the clean
resolutions of allegory must collapse under the hard weight of reality.
Through a variety of circumstances (all eminently plausible, in case
you're wondering), Jill and a contingent of United Nations peacekeepers
arrive at what is revealed to be a bush-country mental hospital in
order to evacuate it from a marauding band of rebels. But
there is, of course, a catch: the UN soldiers' orders are to rescue
only the staff. No official provision has been made for the patients
(or, more properly, inmates), and even if there had been, there's no
way they could fit in the few trucks the rescuers have. There is no
time to send for more; Jill and the soldiers have been escorted into
the hospital compound by a motley collection of rebels, mad as any of
the lunatics within the asylum and armed to the teeth. The officer in
charge of the UN forces wants (sensibly, under the
circumstances -- indeed, Fountain's portrayal of this good, competent,
and ultimately overmatched man is one of the many minor miracles of the
piece) to carry out only his orders, but this means abandoning the poor
patients to the rebels, who will, quite literally, carve them to bits.
Jill will not hear of it, and in a moment of inspiration -- of
transcendent clarity -- she devises a plan by which they are able to
rescue everyone: in essence, she trades both her relationship with
Starkey and the future of the co-op for safe passage. It works
brilliantly -- everyone gets out alive. The story could end there; it
could end there, and in the hands of a lesser talent, it would. The
lesson would be clear: Jill has found herself, and in so doing she has
been able to save not only her own soul but many innocent lives.
Indeed, Fountain teases us with this possibility, having the UN officer remark to Jill as they're
traveling to safety, rescued patients in tow, "You know, you make me
ashamed of myself."
Fountain, though, is too honest a writer -- and thinker -- to let this be
the final word, gratifying as it might be. For Jill has, in fact,
accomplished nothing. Three-quarters of a page later, when we're
inclined to think that all is well (even if Jill is a bit
depressed -- understandably so, considering what she's just given up),
the officer is back, this time with an urgent question, as well as the
story's last line.
"Please, Miss,"
Sawhey said. "We need to know what to do with these people now."
There is no hope
here, no triumph; Jill's moment of inspiration has led to nothing, or
something even worse than nothing. Fountain leaves us with a bleak
picture indeed: a bunch of lunatic refugees milling about a battered
city square, without food, without water, without even the ability to
take care of themselves, the promise of sudden violence hovering
balefully above the scene. This is, horribly enough, exactly as it
should be. The reality of Sierra Leone -- of the world -- is too big to
be compressed, simplified, managed. Clarity is an illusion, evanescent
as smoke from the cooking fires in a nightmare country.
Before I conclude, I want to comment a bit on Jill's big moment, her
moment of (false) insight. It disappointed me -- but before you leap to
the conclusion that here is yet another bit of King's Council snideness,
I want to add that in no way do I hold Fountain responsible for my
disappointment. Here is some of the passage in question:
It surpassed her,
simply carried her along -- in some clenched part of herself, she
registered surprise, a faint grace-note of wonder as it happened...
Later, playing it
back in her mind, she found that whole blocks of memory had been lost
to her. She couldn't recall getting her daypack from the Mazda, nor
stepping into the open away from the trucks, away from the thin,
sheltering line of soldiers. There must have been an exchange, an
understanding of sorts, because she started down the road with a vague
sense of assurance, a mental imprint of their rifles coming to bear.
Then it was all jump-cuts and pieces of things, fragments spliced one
after another -- the awful heat, the scything bird-song in the bush, her
nausea and a sharp copper taste in her mouth. How the sun threw orange
shafts of light across the road, shadow and light alternating light
like flattened stairs, and how the rebels fell silent when they saw her
coming.
What's my beef? It's
the haziness of the passage, the incoherence, the inaccessibility to
logical analysis. For the most part, Fountain's style is all business,
crisply realistic with no words wasted. Jill's thoughts, in other
portions of the piece, are sensible, easy to follow -- but here we lapse
into a sort of dream. (It's telling, I think, that the only way
Fountain can find to relate this moment is by appealing to Jill's
memories after the fact -- which, come to think of it, puts a slight
smudge on the sheen of the story's otherwise perfect ending: how long
after the moment itself does she recall it? If it's more than a few
hours, doesn't that imply that in some way life went on even after the
story's end? How?) But as I said, I don't blame Fountain. It seems to
me that no one, not the greatest of masters, has managed a clear-eyed
portrait of a soul in extremis: when the crisis comes, the view
always grows a bit fuzzy or fades to black. (Even Dostoevsky, the great
anatomizer of the human psyche, cannot quite pull it off -- Raskolnikov,
in the grip of madness, develops a debilitating fever, and thus is only
partially aware of his soul's convulsions, and the narrator of Notes
from Underground drinks himself nearly senseless before he can
stumble into Liza's bed.) Perhaps such states simply cannot be captured
on the page, that there is something inherently foggy about them; I am
inclined to think (or at least to hope), though, that this is not the
case, that a less retiring Proust, for example, could gracefully
dissect even our most exalted moments. (One might argue that his
descriptions of both Swann's and Marcel's reactions to Vinteuil's music
represent exactly this, but somehow I think not -- there's something
too mellow, too unheated, about those moments. They're perhaps related,
but still qualitatively different.)
I'll end this long-winded rave review with an attempt to circle back to
where I came from. Before she came to Africa, and after stints in
Guatemala and Haiti, Jill told her employers that she wanted "the
hardest place." And sitting back in that hotel bar in Freetown, she
thinks, "So much on one hand, so little on the other; often she
wondered what kept the world from going up in flames." Jill has
consciously chosen that little, that compression; a self-proclaimed
ascetic, she has been seeking to narrow her options, to bury herself in
the misery of others. Starkey has responsibility only for himself, and Jill thinks
she envies him for this; what she fails to see is that in taking on
responsibility for the whole world, she has chosen not to take
responsibility for herself. This is deliberate, even if it is not
conscious -- Jill wanted the hardest place, a place that has already
gone up in flames, because it is, in the end, easier than living in a
world with endless opportunities, yes, but also with no clear
direction. To put one's head in the lion's mouth is to hope, at least
secretly, that it will be bitten off.
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