A better wrong tool: "The Tomb of Wrestling" by Jo Ann Beard (O. Henry Award Anthology)

We've probably all heard someone describe a traumatic experience, and because they were unable to get across the unusual cognitive reactions they had to the event, that person fell back upon lazily saying something like, "It was all so surreal." I'm sure I've said it before. People can be forgiven this little bit of narrative fuzziness, of course, just like they can be forgiven for being in shock during the event and failing to act in their own interests. When experts give self-defense classes, they often emphasize that what's important isn't so much what you do, but that you do something and do it decisively. Criminals often capitalize on the way normal people fail to react when under stress, because the first reaction of most people is to rationalize away being in the situation. Their rational minds can't square with irrational behavior, and so they shut down. That's what "surreal" means for most people--it's a world where the rational order breaks down. It's not totally unrelated to the artistic movement of surrealism, although it may be a bit of an inexact shorthand.

Jo Ann Beard's "The Tomb of Wrestling" is sort of what you'd get if you were telling your story about getting mugged on the subway and called it "surreal," but the person you were telling the story to happened to be an art scholar specializing in surrealism. That term is going to evoke certain reactions in your listener it wouldn't in the normal audience, who knows you just mean that you were flummoxed and didn't know how to act.

Instead, we get a story that more or less says okay, you want to talk about trauma as surreal? I'll show you what surreal means. The entirety of the story is suffused with surrealism; even the title is a reference to French surrealist artist Rene Magritte's 1960 collection "The Tomb of the Wrestlers." The main character, Joan, has studied art history, which allows the story to be unapologetically ekphrastic at times. It also allows the story to not only talk about surrealism as a technique and movement, but to actually be surreal, in the sense that it plays with time and place and narrative subjectivity.

I had to Google many elements referenced in this story. 

If not for this playing around with these elements, we'd actually have a very simple story. Joan is an extremely mild woman. So mild, she carries a shovel around in the trunk of her car to help turtles off the road in order to make up for hitting a deer with her car once. So mild, she has been a vegetarian her whole life, ever since she met living farm animals as a child. So mild, she wet her pants in grade school rather than raise her hand. So mild that...well, you get the picture. She's not an assertive woman. Joan is attacked in her own home, almost killed, then hits her attacker over the head with her turtle shovel. She then panics, is unable to leave the kitchen where the man is lying, unable to call the police, unable to do anything logical to save herself. She mostly just waits while he slowly regains consciousness. Then, the big finish.

But because the story does play around with time and place and point-of-view, we have a lot to chew on as readers. The beginning of the story is a standard third-person-limited POV, although an agonizingly slow one. The first line tells us that she hits the guy with her shovel, but then we wait four pages to back up and see it happen, all the while being interrupted with small things Joan notices or remembers. As soon as her art history background and surrealism are invoked, though, the story begins to move around its point-of-view. We get the perspective of the attacker, the dogs outside, even a random coyote, heron, and frog.

 "All around her, things had come loose from their meanings and were washing in and out with her breath like tidewater," we read, not long after the narrative begins to slip around on us. Or: "Something weird was happening to time--it was swirling instead of linear, like pouring strands of purple and green paint into a bucket of white and giving it one stir. Now was also then was also another then." There is no generic meaning to the notion of surrealism here. We're with a passionate student of the school, and we're going to get an ear full of what surrealism really means with graphic specificity: "The strange notions of the surrealists, with their unmoored minds and their brutal depictions of women. Limbs severed into doll parts and re-arranged, high heels turned upside down and presented on a platter like a roasted bird..."

But there is a relatively straight-forward reading of this story

In spite of the somewhat non-traditional narrative structure of this story, there is one reading of it that isn't all that hard to piece together from the fragments. It's tempting, reading a 2018 anthology here in 2019, to read this story as "another Me-Too piece." And it does fit into the discourse of violence against women that's being examined in our society right now. Joan recalls being picked up while hitch-hiking as a teen, and the two boys in the car with her made jokes about wanting to rape Joan and her friend. Or were they jokes? It's hard for women to know, and that's the particular, never-ending threat they face.

But the story actually was published before Trump was even elected, which means it was written even before that. It pre-dates Me-Too.

More importantly, even though it frankly looks at threats from violence aimed at women, these threats are situated within a violent world where nobody is safe. As Joan is noticing everything with hyper-sensitivity on her route to hit her attacker over the head, she notices that outside the kitchen, "The hummingbirds had bad personalities, always trying to spear each other away from the trumpet vines and the feeders, their thumb-sized shimmering bodies aglow with bad intentions." She recalls being handed piglets to pet while in the pig pen "their mothers snuffled and bit each other." When we are in the head of the attacker, he recalls growing up with a grandfather who was a gravedigger, and how, when he walked through the cemetery, occasionally seeing people who died young, "You could feel the unfairness hanging over the tombstones."

So there is violence against women, and while that violence is worse for them, it's just part of the context of a natural world that lives with (and as a result of) violence every day. The violence against Joan is unfair, but there is nothing unique about it within a big, violent, unfair world. Outside, her dogs spend most of their time trying to figure out how to kill things for fun.

Joan is attacked in her home, which is, for most of us, one of the most fundamental symbols of civilization. It's the place where nature ends. But today, Joan couldn't keep it out. Nature, red in tooth and claw, has forced its way into her study while she read her art history, and she will either find a way to live in this brutal world or she will die in a hurry.

In this reading, the story is something of a female-centered Call of the Wild. Instead of embracing the inner ubermensch and overcoming the tame side of ourselves in order to become dogs with god-like powers, though, she is going to have to learn to deny her own soft and non-violent nature in order to survive in a brutal world.

This is a tall order for gentle Joan. "It went against who she was," both because of her lack of physical strength, but also because she just doesn't like to hurt things. She hated the way her family fished, ripping worms like licorice and throwing the trash fish into the weeds to suffocate. The person she admired most growing up was one of her grandmothers, the one who was "a silent, opinion-less woman from the unpopular side of the family."

Nonetheless, she is able to overcome her own timid and gentle nature. In the critical moment, when she needs to swing the shovel, she find that "There was no process, no hesitation, because she was operating like a simple organism in that moment, one that is programmed to survive, like a sperm, or hammerhead shark." There is enough nature still in her civilized heart to survive.

But there's something complex working in that simple reading

It's how Joan manages to find her inner shovel-swinger that's the interesting part. In order to save herself, she has to learn the mastery of tools, which is typically thought of as something of a man's domain. She's had some schooling in this area. Roy, the hippie-dippie guy she worked with in an art gallery back in Iowa, showed her how to "make the hammer work for her." This is something pretty much anyone being taught to use a hammer hears. It means to hold it in the right place to make your hand a fulcrum such that the mechanical advantage of the hammer is maximized, allowing gravity to do most of the work. It's remembering this advice that allowed her to swing the shovel hard enough to knock her attacker out. But having done that, her less aggressive, less wild side reasserts itself, and she simply watches, uselessly, while her attacker slowly revives, doing nothing more than poking him in the shoulder with the shovel from time to time.

What she needs is not just the basics of using tools; she needs a master class. It turns out her attacker has already had this class. He learned from a childhood friend he admired that real tool mastery meant using something nobody would have thought of as a tool to do the job. "Once you understood basic physics, you could use things as tools that weren't necessarily tools....He would never use the right tool if he could use a better wrong one."

Indeed, the attacker has fully absorbed this lesson by the time he is attacking Joan. He is choking her with a somewhat flimsy measuring stick. He barely even needs to concentrate as he does, "as though he could more or less do it by feel, like gliding underneath a chassis and tightening a bolt, gliding out again."

She cannot figure out for the life of her how to tie up her attacker's hands while he in out on the floor. Significantly, her current husband is nowhere to be found during the attack. He is only referred to in two dismissive passages, one about how he disapproves of Kraft singles (the monster!), and the other comparing him to Jack Nicholson in The Shining, which doesn't seem like much of a vote in confidence of the husband, either. If she is going to figure it out, she'll have to do it alone. Unable to find rope, she senses she will have to think out of the box, but can't quite wrap her head around how: "Other things could be used to tie him up, but what?"

Just as her attacker is beginning to wake back up, it comes to her. The dogs that have been outside trying to come in and see what they think of this stranger are stuck at the back door are her tool. It comes to Joan: "Let the dogs work for you." That is, let what's wild in nature work for you. Those who live by the sword of violence can be made to die upon it if those who want to live by something else can just keep their heads.

"The frog was either in the pond or in the heron as it flew slowly past the kitchen window," writes Jo Ann Beard, which reminds me of what Cleveland Indians broadcaster Joe Tait used to say: "Some days, you eat the bear, and some days, the bear eats you." 

But if she's part of nature, there's a corollary to that

Joan has learned that she cannot really set herself apart from the natural world. Everything is connected, which is why in surrealism, a hammer can become a doll or a shoe or whatever. But if everything alike is a part of the natural world, then so is her attacker.

Indeed, there are constant connections between Joan and her attacker we learn about. Besides the way both are drawn to learn about unorthodox tools, there is the link both have to the "Tomb of Wrestling" concept. He grew up digging graves and looking at gravestones. She first realized her own vulnerability when wrestling with her first husband got out of hand and he pinned her easily. She has studied Dali's "In Voluptate Mors," but he is actually drawn to voluptuous death, and has been ever since he first saw a teacher holding up a skull with a pencil (another tool used in an unorthodox way). As the dogs tear him apart, he is enjoying "in morte voluptas," going from death into pleasure. He apparently didn't have a happy life, given up by a mother who didn't want him and then raised by violent grandparents.

If Joan has a violent side in her, then it's also true even violent people have a gentle side. Her father loved to watch boxing and tell her about how one guy "clocked" the other, but he did this while stroking a dog on his lap. Even Kyle, the guy who taught the attacker to dismember frogs and use the wrong tool, had cats he swore he tortured but which climbed on his lap anyway. This isn't a story about evil men and the patriarchy. The mothers and grandmothers in the story don't come off any better than the fathers and grandfathers. It's a story about the inevitability of unpleasantness in the world, and how no matter how much we try to set up ways to avoid looking at it, eventually it's going to find us, so we have to learn to either make it work for us or kill us. It's a story about how difficult it can be at the end of the day to differentiate oneself from those who use violence for pleasure if you're willing to use it for security.

Which is not the usual way of looking at trauma

That's not what we usually tell victims of violence. It may not be clinically sound. But then, this story isn't seeking therapeutic correctness. This isn't how you'd think to go about explaining trauma and violence to those who've suffered it, which is pretty much everyone. But it is, in its weird way, effective. By situating violence in a much larger and stranger context, the world in which frogs either jump fast enough to get away from herons or they end up as lunch, the violence of the violent somehow loses its punch. Compared to the therapies we would normally prescribe for those trying to recover psychologically and emotionally from violence, this story is, in many ways, a better wrong tool, if we can just have the wherewithal to make it work for us.