A nice rhythm, a little simple and sad: "Octopus VII" by Anna Reeser

If you haven't already figured it out, one of my patented fall-backs when I'm faced with a tough story to analyze is to present two or more possible readings, summarize the evidence for each, and call it a day without opining much on which is the right one. I usually will try to cover up my lack of spine in picking an interpretation with some blather about how great art often leaves us without certainty. 

For "Octopus VII" by Anna Reeser, I'm going to present evidence for two different readings, but I AM picking a side. 

Brief synopsis

Sometimes, re-stating the plot of a well-told story in simpler terms does some great injustices to it, but a very simple summary with just an emphasis on the raw facts of the plot can help the reader to focus on elements that might have been missed in the more artful telling. 

Tyler is a recent art school grad who has his first show, where he displays his sculpture titled "Octopus VII," a twisted wire and steel piece whose main characteristic seems to be the way it depicts movement. A woman asks if he'll make an alteration, suggesting she'll buy it if he does, but he refuses to make changes to the way he thinks it should look. He doesn't sell the thing, and while he figures his day will come, he was already starting to panic before the show that he had peaked. He feels inferior to his girlfriend, another artist. She leaves soon after the show to move to Los Angeles, and Tyler, feeling lost for direction, follows her, in spite of not being invited. 

He lives a few blocks from her in L.A. He is wracked with guilt about living off his dwindling trust fund, feeling like he's produced nothing for all the privileges he's had. He can't really get himself to create more art, and Octopus VII, which he dragged down to L.A. with him, sits in his living room, making him question himself more and more each time he sees it. Some of his classmates begin to sell their art in miniature form, which Tyler looks down upon as selling out. His ex-girlfriend comes over once, and asks him rather randomly to cut her hair. He obliges. Later, he responds to a billboard advertising for a school to get his license cutting hair. He attends for six months, gets his license, finds himself totally over the ex-girlfriend, and a customer in the salon flirts with him. He throws away the sculpture and gets ready to call the woman from the salon.

This figure is $118 on Etsy, so I don't know what made Tyler think someone would pay $2,000 for his sculpture. 

Two ways of looking at it, and one is better

Tyler worries a great deal throughout the narrative that he is in danger of selling out, or that he won't fulfill his potential, or that he has no potential. He doesn't want to settle, and yet he is frantically aware that he isn't going anywhere. So at the end, when he finds himself settling into a life where cutting hair is "mostly" what he does, one could look at it as a tragic story, in which an artist is giving up on himself and settling for bourgeois American life. It's the story of an artist talking himself into selling out. Conversely, it could be the story of an artist realizing the "lame day job," to use the phrase of ex-girlfriend Kelsa, is actually not so lame. It's realizing that giving up your dream is sometimes how you find yourself, and that if it's what makes you happy, it's not selling out at all. 

The second one is right. 

Evidence for reading #1, that Tyler sold out

Tyler certainly seems to equate anything other than critical and commercial success as an artist on his own terms to be failure at the beginning of the story. He suffers from a kind of obsession with being great. His dad has somewhat contributed to this, ironically, by supporting his art so fully that Tyler feels even more pressure to succeed than he would if he were a true starving artist. Before anything has happened in the story, he worries that he has already peaked as an artist. There are a number of passages where Tyler exhibits shame at his lack of forward progress in art, as well as his belief about the kind of life an artist SHOULD live, mainly that they should suffer:

• "But that's what artists did. Felt terrible and made something out of it."
• "Sell-out art. He wasn't ready for that shit."
• "But he was afraid to look at the idea, because he was afraid it would probably be disappointing."
• "He wasn't supposed to be fulfilled by (cutting hair); he should be dead broke and sculpting out of found metal."

One could see the drive to create real art as the "real" Tyler, and the person he is at the end as the fake Tyler, someone he has talked himself into being. The catharsis, where Tyler is making his choice what kind of life he will live after throwing his sculpture in the trash, sort of sounds like rationalizing: "Was this how it happened to people? How your life gets going, making a living, watching TV at night, the whole thing tapping out a nice rhythm, a little simple and sad--but that's what people did." That sounds like a pretty plain life, not a great or memorable one. 

Evidence for reading #2, that Tyler actually found his way

From the very beginning, Tyler is straining against the way life is trying to push him, insistent upon having it his way. We first find him pushing backwards against the wall he's standing against so hard he's sweating on it. Even the way he creates art involves straining, often to no avail: "With pliers, he bent a piece of wire into a rough shape, which ended up looking like a clothes hanger." Or: "A few times he sat at the worktable, bending a piece of wire with his bare hand until it hurt..." His sculpture snags carpets and sweaters. It's as though Tyler is never able to live in harmony with the way things really are. He'd rather keep struggling for one view of how things should be, even if it makes him miserable, than try looking at something a different way, or maybe seeing if he's better at something else. Clearly, this isn't the right view, and so Tyler's change at the end is the right one for him. 

Tyler also never seemed to have a clear sense of his own aesthetic, something that's de rigeur for an artist aspiring to greatness. He had chosen the octopus for a specific reason, because the octopus represented something to him: "Tyler had chosen the octopus for its constantly shifting shape, and finally he got the sculpture to look like it was twisting, thrashing, changing." But his art professor quickly talked him into a completely different aesthetic, telling Tyler he saw "total abstraction" in his future work, an idea Tyler quickly agreed to, as though that's what he'd meant to do all the time. Eventually, he ended up lugging around the thing that was meant to represent change as a constant symbol of refusal to change. 

It's significant that he called his sculpture Octopus VII, meaning there were six before it that didn't work out. He thinks at one point about making an eighth, which, given that an octopus has eight legs, would presumably be the true masterpiece, the one that most fully captures the essence of the octopus he was going for in the first place. One could read it that the true masterpiece of change is his destruction of Octopus VII, the only thing of note he'd done in his life, the thing he had to get rid of in order to move on to the next phase of his life. 

Tyler, in fact, never had a clear vision of what he was doing as an artist. Even trying to capture the protean aspect of the octopus was to some degree just copying what he imagined was Kelsa's style, whom he saw as essentially "kinetic." When his father asked him why he was moving to L.A., he stole Kelsa's description of it as "apocalyptic." Tyler isn't wrong when he destroys the octopus because it would "remind him of how he'd felt like a boy genius, and how of course he wasn't...How after years of art school, maybe his calling was cutting hair in Van Nuys." 

There's a real difference in working in the medium of hair and metal for Tyler. Working with wire and found metal is all about straining. Working with hair, the scissors just kind of cut through the medium with a satisfying "hssk" sound. I'm not going to claim some mastery of Taoism based on reading a translation of the Tao Te Ching in college, but I do remember how the Tao Te Ching recommends people be like water, flowing where there is room to flow. Tyler's eighth sculpture is even more an embodiment of the notion of change than the octopus; he's water itself. 

I quoted the passage above about the "simple and sad" rhythm of falling into working-class life, but if put in a slightly larger context, I think it's pretty clear there's a crescendo that builds, and picking a life of cutting hair is a good choice for Tyler. After hauling the sculpture to the curb, Tyler finds that:

The carpet was tamped down in places where the sculpture had been, but the space was huge. The smell of the jacaranda trees came in as the air cooled and the traffic died down. It would be good to tell his dad what he was doing. He'd probably laugh in a short bark, the way he did when he heard something idiosyncratic. 

Tyler lifted a mat knife and twirled it in his hand. Was this how it happened to people? How your life gets going, making a living, watching TV at night, the whole thing tapping out a nice rhythm, a little simple and sad--but that's what people did.

Karen Carlson at A Just Recompense saw this story as more of a slacker story than I did. To see her take, go here.