In the interest of interest

By Randy Koch

When people ask where I'm from, I tell them that I grew up on a farm in southwestern Minnesota near Lamberton, less than 15 miles from Walnut Grove. Walnut Grove was, of course, the locale of Laura Ingalls Wilder's book On the Banks of Plum Creek and the setting of the once popular television program Little House on the Prairie, which starred Michael Landon. They often ask questions suggesting that they imagine that life on a farm is genteel and bucolic and that I filled my days by laying in a field of clover and watching clouds drift by or cuddling wobbly-legged lambs or white piglets in the spring or sailing down a snow-covered hill on a sled that I found under the Christmas tree my dad cut in the woods a week earlier. They think that a day on the farm consists of songbirds at dawn, fresh vegetables straight from the garden and eggs from the hen house, damp-nosed calves nuzzling me for a bottle, hayrides, brilliant sunsets, and creek beds filled with fireflies. And while there's some truth to that quaint rural vision, it's sentimental, idyllic, and incomplete.
Sure, I've seen my share of sunrises and sunsets and watched rain course off the barn roof, but I have also seen the knees of a 200-pound hog crumple when hit between the eyes with the edge of a plywood sorting panel, or a Percheron, hooves big as dinner plates and a bullet hole behind its ear letting blood, dragged from the barn, a log chain looped around its neck and hooked to the drawbar of the International. I have seen a dead cow forgotten behind the machine shed, its swollen body cracked open and its flesh busily rippling with maggots. I have seen a cat drag its broken hind legs across the sill of the barn door and the old dog swagger back to the house. I have seen the rubber-banded tails of lambs blacken, shrivel, and drop and have marveled at the ease with which the heads of chickens sprang loose at the fall of an axe. I have un-nested blackbirds and sparrows and pitched the bald young against tree trunks. I have seen a tomcat eat kittens, a sow eat its newborns, 60-pound hogs carve up a bloodied runt. I have seen nine-fingered neighbors, a man gagging on siphoned gasoline, a Mason jar full of pocket gopher feet, and blood arcing from the de-horned skulls of steers. I have seen bloated Holsteins, ruptured hogs, and foundered Shetlands. I have pulled the heads from shot-gunned doves, done "She loves me, she loves me not" with a spider's legs, and tossed pig testicles to a leaping dog. I have caved in the skulls of weak, lame pigs with a small sledge, and I have seen a rainbow in the glistening viscera of butchered chickens.
This, too, was part of the "genteel" rural life.

Pepperidge Farm's trademark phrase, "Never have an ordinary day," seems, on the surface, philosophical and poignant, yet logically it contradicts itself. An "ordinary day" is one that is routine, predictable, and commonplace, the kind of day during which the expected happens. However, if people "never have an ordinary day," if every day is out of the ordinary, then doesn't that become predictable? Doesn't "never" negate the possibility of the "ordinary" and imply the inverse: "Always have an extraordinary day"? However, if every day were extraordinary, how would we even know it since we'd have no ordinary days to compare them to, and as a result the routinely extraordinary would also become ordinary? I know -- they're only suggesting that the contrast between a day with Goldfish Crackers and one without would be so great that we would never want the latter again, but their flawed logic irritates me.

Writing is made powerful and memorable when images work against one another, when understated language contrasts with high drama or action, when a familiar situation is made unfamiliar by twisting or changing it, when sometimes the honest lie, the brave flee, and the gentle are cruel. In good poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, the predictable and the ordinary should be occasionally jarred and upset by the unpredictable so that by contrast even the ordinary becomes frightening, magical, ominous, or beautiful.
Take, for example, Carolyn Forché's prose poem "The Colonel," in which the persona and a friend are dinner guests at the home of an El Salvadoran colonel in the late 1970s. In the beginning, everything is ordinary and familiar: "His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers [and] pet dogs." We are briefly made to feel comfortable, but the next detail -- "a pistol" -- hints at the danger; however, even that is minimized since it isn't where we might expect it -- in a holster or in the colonel's hands -- but instead "on the cushion beside him." The meal and conversation progress, and later when "his wife took everything away," he spoke "of how difficult it had become to govern." Then he left the room briefly and returned with "a sack used to bring groceries home." We realize that it's unlikely he is carrying groceries in this bag; however, the contrast between this ordinary object and its actual contents -- "human ears" which "he spilled . . . on the table" -- provides a horrific contrast to the mundane, everyday details of dinner. At first, the images that we normally associate with an average American family give the reader a sense of security so that when the colonel reveals his true self, the stark, frightening contrast is devastating and the power of the poem greatly increased.
Another way to work against the ordinary and expected is to create unusual circumstances in which common, familiar events occur. Normally the birth of a child takes place in a hospital or, on occasion, in a taxi; weddings happen in churches; and interrogations in dim rooms with a bare bulb over a table and two chairs. We even have preconceived notions, depending on the participants, about scenes involving sex; where and under what circumstances the sex occurs is often predictable -- in the backseat of a car for teens, in a motel for two lovers cheating on their spouses, in a suite with a heart-shaped bed for newlyweds, in the privacy of their own bedroom for a husband and wife. But like any event created for prose or poetry, we should work against the expected and routine. Louise Erdrich in Love Medicine, a novel set on a North Dakota Indian Reservation, finds a way in the chapter called "Wild Geese" to make an encounter between two characters, Nector Kashpaw and Marie Lazarre, strange and memorable. Nector, who is walking up the road to the Sacred Heart Convent to sell "two geese slung from either wrist, tied with leather bands" (57), is daydreaming about Lulu Nanapush and how "she will be waiting [for him] in the bush" that night (58). He's so distracted that he doesn't see Marie running down the hill from the convent until she's nearly upon him. Because Nector thinks she's stolen something from the nuns, he grabs her. They struggle, and he falls, clumsy with the heavy geese on his arms. When she bends over him and swears at him, he lunges forward, knocks her down, and pins her to the ground under his weight. She's furious at first, but then she laughs. Gradually he realizes that "something happens. . . . It hits me then I am lying full length across a woman, not a girl. Her breasts graze my chest, soft and pointed. I cannot help but lower myself the slightest bit to feel them better. And then I am caught. I give way. I cannot help myself, because, to my everlasting wonder, Marie is all tight plush acceptance, graceful movements, little jabs that lead me underneath her skirt" (60-61). All is unexpected yet believable and even symbolic. It reminds me of Zeus coming to Leda in the form of a swan, but in Erdrich's story it's Nector with geese, and we're in North Dakota on the road to the Sacred Heart Convent, an unlikely but memorable place for an encounter that too often is portrayed in predictable, unimaginative ways.
Writers can also use contrast by recognizing the contradictions within people, whether fictional or real. Stereotypical characters never break out of the very limited boundaries set for them by the writer, the sort of thing that typifies genre fiction, such as romance novels, detective stories, and horror fiction by writers like John Grisham, Stephen King, Lavyrle Spencer, and others. However, far more interesting characters result when we recognize and develop aspects of their character that work against our initial impressions of them. The young, black narrator of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is initially torn between doing what he knows society expects of him and acting on his true feelings and thoughts. In Chapter 1, often anthologized as "Battle Royal," the narrator tells how "on my graduation day I delivered an oration . . . [which was] a great success." As a result, he "was invited to give the speech at a gathering of the town's leading white citizens." When he arrives, however, he finds that he must first participate in part of the night's entertainment -- a battle royal with nine other young black men. Wearing fighting togs and boxing gloves, they are rushed to the ring in the front of the large ballroom where in the middle of "a sea of faces, some hostile, some amused, ringed around us, . . . stood a magnificent blonde -- stark naked" (18). It's in the contrast between what he should do and what he wants to do that we see him as a realistic, three-dimensional human being, and it's this that drives him and the chapter forward: "I wanted at one and the same time to run from the room, to sink through the floor, or go to her and cover her from my eyes and the eyes of the others with my body; to feel the soft thighs, to caress her and destroy her, to love her and murder her, to hide from her, and yet to stroke where below the small American flag tattooed upon her belly her thighs formed a capital V" (19). We recognize in the narrator's fears and fascination our own, and our interest in how he deals with his contrasting thoughts and emotions propels us through the story.
In his poem "Anagrammer," Peter Pereira argues "That if you could just re-arrange things the right way / . . . you'd understand how . . . / . . . not one letter separates stained from sainted" (325). Or how on the farm the bucolic is part and parcel of the brutal. And that, in the interest of interest, the ordinary is essential to the extraordinary.

Works Cited
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Vintage Books ed. New York: Random, 1972.
Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. New York: Bantam, 1987.
Forché, Carolyn. The Country between Us. New York: Harper, 1981.
Pereira, Peter. "Anagrammer." Poetry. 182.6 (2003): 325.

(Randy Koch teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Texas A&M International University.)