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Of course, Lewis said, each fish as an individual is not eternal,
which is the down side of fish. To give you an example: I was recently
living in the Philippines. Got myself all set up with a fancy
tank and a fish to match a particularly beautiful and pleasing
specimen, a sort of blue-and-yellow-banded disk with a flirty tail.
. . . It was a very beautiful being. But one evening I was having a
little drink with some buddies, and one thing led to another and
so on and so forth, and, what with this and that, by the time I got
home, which was not for a couple of days, as it happened, when I
walked in the door, there was that fish, lying on the surface, belly up.
Maybe you should feed this one now, Caitlin said. The fish
looked agitated; it was darting back and forth, bumping against
the glass., I think it’s hungry. Or maybe it was suffocating the
bowl was filthy, with trailing bits of pale debris floating around in it.
For a moment Lewis seemed not to have heard, but then he
lifted the ashtray from the night table and flung it against the
wall., Fucking fish, Caitlin heard him say through the noise of
the impact, which was reverberating around and around her like
a lasso about to snap tight.
Ten steps to the door, not more than ten. But the door itself
was on the other side of the bed. Lewis lay back down, looking
at Caitlin past the fish., Hey, he said., What are you doing down
there on the floor?’
Although most readers will recognize the first passage from Hemingway s ‘the
Snows of Kilimanjaro, they may nonetheless diagnose a fatal case of, female writing.
It’s that telltale, kiss-of-death whiff of the, fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, . . . crippled,
creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquilles in mannequin’s whimsy.
. . ., And what is Bwana doing, exactly, except, stamping a tiny foot against God’?
It’s not Hemingway s best work, so it may be unfair to pick on the stilted Noel-Coward-on-downers
dialogue, and perhaps it’s stacking the deck to compare it with the
passage from Deborah Eisenberg’s, Under the 82nd Airborne. Dying from gangrene
caused by the failure to disinfect a scratch may be inherently less dramatic than facing
rape or worse at the hands of a psycho soldier of fortune and tropical-fish hobbyist.
But we are not talking about drama of plot so much as drama of writing: the
inflated inexactitudes, the, lyrical posturing of the Hemingway sentences compared
with the crisp, glittering menace, the winking death’s-head humor of the Eisenberg.
Another charge often leveled at women writers is that our work is limited to the
rather brief run, between the boudoir and the altar. Men write sweeping, phonebook-size
sagas of the big city, of social class, of our national destiny, our technological
past and future. They produce boldly experimental visionary fiction that
periodically revives the moribund novel. Women write diminutive fictions, which
take place mostly in interiors, about little families with little problems. And it’s no
wonder, since our obsession with, feelings blinds us to the larger sociopolitical realities
outside the tiny rooms in which our theaters of feeling are being enacted.
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