A Monkey piece by Goldberry Long

(My response is at the end of this)

From University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 75, Number 1, Winter 2006

IN:
INSIDER, OUTSIDER: READER'S CHOICE

Letters in Canada 2004, pg 6
by Goldberry Long

(Thank you Goldberry Long)

Billed as a 'post-cubist deconstructionist kung fu story told in a lyrical Gertrude-Stein-like style,' Michael Boyce's Monkey certainly signals from the flap copy onward that a reader will be either an insider or an outsider to this text. Brush up on your modernism, dust off your art history book, and you may get the joke. With a Tender Buttons sensibility, this book does deliver the promised kung fu scenes. Clearly allegorical, at time frustratingly self-conscious, it's also weirdly compelling and entertaining.
The story is about 'the monkey' who 'goes into homes that aren't his own, and that is bad.' The monkey is an outsider to the extreme:

"He likes his secret life, his no-one-knows-him life. He is anonymous. ... The whole of him is secret but plain enough to see. He does not hide behind a mask like heroes have to do, pretending that they're normal when they're really something else. It's just that no one gets close enough to really know him."

He enters the snake's house and takes a 'thing' that belongs to the snake. He is glimpsed by the snake, and the snake begins to follow him. The snake, it seems, is a sort of 'secret agent' who works for a group 'that is more a force of bad,' and the snake wants to recruit the monkey. The snake, Boyce writes,

"Could be so charming and make you want to know him and make you want to be with him and want to hang around with him and do with him the things he does and that could be a thing that's bad unless you're strong inside and know yourself inside and can be yourself inside and stay yourself inside and keep him from inside you and keep him there outside you."

The monkey is also being followed by the tiger, who 'is very charming. It can be quite alarming just how charming she can be. Of course she can be sexy. She can be very sexy. She is also alluring. She's very much alluring. ... it's a good thing that she's good and that she fights for good.'
In the triangle that emerges, the tiger and the snake take turns attempting to recruit the monkey, and all three of them discover that they share an outsider status. Though affiliated with groups, both the tiger and the snake insist on independence, and are more like the monkey in that they are 'a rare, endangered species and they must somehow resolve the differences between them and come together somehow, and be as though they were a tribe, a clan and a family.'
Through the allegorical narrative, then, Boyce explores what it means to be an insider and an outsider. Ho are groups important, the narrative asks, and when is membership valuable? Herein lies the paradox: when the tiger, the monkey, and the snake become a small group of outsiders, they render themselves insiders, if only of a group of three. This transformation of their identity is strangely circular, and is oddly suited to the prose style of the book. Boyce writes, 'Meeting up with people can be very interesting. Sometimes it is a thing, which is a thing that's interesting. When membership does matter, it often is a thing that is an interesting thing.'
Clearly, Boyce is seeking to comment on narrative and form as he is telling a story, and the form demands the primary attention of the reader. Told in a deliberately flat and abstract prose, the sentences circle around meaning with chant-like repetition. The form, of course, must do more than pay homage to Gertrude Stein; it must yield meaning. In this case, deliberately withholding detail (as in the 'thing' that the monkey steals) makes the reader grapple with its absence.
In one passage, the reader is told to think of a detective in film noir movies: 'if you could imagine that, then you could also then imagine the way the monkey moved and how he might appear to be if you saw the monkey moving as he headed for the snake's place, see?' In other words, in acknowledging the need for description (the need to 'see') and motioning towards description in another medium, the narrative asks the reader to supply description. The narrative creates a place-holder and provides a prompt: Insert film noir image here. This is interesting in its way, as a discussion of the conventional fictional expectation of particularity; this narrative refuses the reader, and in doing so, creates a dialogue with the text.
What's compelling is how this intertwines with the theme of the outsider. Depending on the reader, the narrative abstraction results in two possibilities. First, the reader may participate in filling in the blanks - so that the identity of the stolen 'thing' is reader-defined. Thus, the 'thing' becomes known only to the reader, and he or she becomes the sole insider to the text created by that particular reading. Alternatively, the reader may disengage, experiencing the text only on the abstract level. Thus, the reader becomes a complete outsider, unable to access the information available both to Boyce and to the characters (who all know the identity of the 'thing').
Whether these aspirations are successful depends entirely on whether the reader is engaged in the questions. A reader seeking a novel in the conventional sense will be particularly challenged by passages like the following:

"He certainly is only like himself, and such a man who is only like himself would certainly be known to be someone who's only like himself. He would be known for it. He would be known, he could be known, because he is most certainly only like himself. He is only like himself and not just like another man and not like just any man. He is not like any other man. He would be known for that. He would be known, he could be known, and anyone could know him as the man they saw as certainly a man only like himself. They might have seen him."

Whether readers emerge from this passage feeling they know something about what he is like is entirely up to them - which is, I think, what Boyce intended.

Michael Boyce's Comments about this piece

This is very interesting. And it was very interesting to read, for me. It has a certain way of being writing for a journal in a university, and I have done that too, so it is for me a thing that's interesting because it is a way that I'm familiar with, and because it's being used to talk about my book.

I do like it. I always did enjoy writing things in university, and I really do enjoy that someone in an academic context is writing about me, and is writing about Monkey. I do like that it is thinking in the way that it is thinking about Monkey. It stimulates my thinking about Monkey and about what it is that I was doing.

Some of it is not what I would say, but I like that she is saying it, and saying it the way that she is saying it. It is most agreeable that anyone is thinking about what is going on with it, and I think that there are things she thinks are going on with it that are really going on with it, and it is for me a pleasure to be seeing that any one is seeing that, seeing the things that may be going on with it.

There is a lot of quoting, and I am thinking that I will record myself and link it to the quotes so that any one can listen to me reading it, and that can be an interesting way to insinuate myself into this piece.

Think about this piece.

What is this piece? It is not what you normally would say was a review. I like that fact about it. That you have to think a bit about just what it is itself, even as it goes along thinking about something, which happens in this case to be my book.

Who knows if Goldberry Long will ever read my response to this. But if she were ever to be doing that, then I would say to her, that what's important about anything that can be anything the reader cares to make it be, is that the relationship to any thing becomes much more apparent, and the way that any thing is something that any one is making into something that has meaning is becoming more apparent, when the description of the thing is done in how it's done in Monkey.

There are many things, and a lot of them are things that anybody has some sort of a relationship towards or with or both and more, and what is that all about? I am often thinking about that. In my new book, I am thinking about that in a different kind of way, where the relationship itself is more the focus of a thinking about things, as relationships are things and things also are relationships. But that is something else for sometime in the future.

There is some thinking about membership in Monkey, and there is some thinking there about what the inside is and what the outside is. So it is interesting to read somebody pay attention to those things, and think about the way that Monkey thinks about those things.

Thank you once again, Goldberry Long.