Rain Mountain
Review by Walter Cummins
In her piece “The Foghorn,” Rosalind Palermo Stevenson includes several of her own translations of Antonin Artaud, including, “The dream is true. All dreams are true.” Her own writing is often dreamlike, verbal visions that evoke alternative realities that enjoy their own visionary possibilities. She accomplishes this sensation though her unique use of language, sentences whose rhythms are mesmerizing, the objects of their content not quite solidly there, as if being observed through a haze of consciousness. Here’s an example from a section of “Anomalous Projections” called “A Fetid Place”:
I remember being in a building where the floors were rotting and the foul smell took me by surprise. I wanted to make a telephone call and kept searching my pockets for change while at the same time trying to avoid the processions of people coming up and down the stairs. I was at the point of becoming exhausted when I noticed an exit door that had been left open; the people on the stairs stood motionless and watched as I went out through the door.
This passage captures the unmoored logic of a dream is which the dreamers have no control over what is happening, unsure where they are or anything is happening, here under the gaze of oppressive and judgmental strangers. The passage is reminiscent of scenes from The Trial in which Joseph K finds himself subjugated and scrutinized in unfamiliar places. That’s no surprise because Stevenson has also written Kafka at Rudolph Steiner’s.
Although some have called this book a collection of stories, it is more a gathering of prose and occasional prose poetry that does not fit into any rigid genre category. These are language pieces that access realms beyond that of most fiction. The “My Absolute” aspect of the title suggests the philosophical context of the “absolute” that refers to ultimate reality or truth that exists independently of human perception or understanding. Stevenson seeks language to convey such a reality. Here is an example from “Birth”: “the light the sound the rocking as if rocking in the vastness of an ocean so much so that it enclosed me confined and constricted me as if a closing in by walls or by the openness of oceans and the deeps received me.”
The most realistic and story-like work in the book, titled “The Guest,” is presented through typographically side-by-side juxtapositions of the same situation, based on what Stevenson identifies as “the embrace of fascism and Mussolini by the Italian people.” In one column, we get the thoughts and actions of those in the hosting household told from different perspectives and in the other the thoughts of the visiting il Duce himself throughout the one full day and one night visit.
Stevenson in her Notes credits Joyce Carol Oates’ similarly bifurcated retelling of “The Turn of the Screw” and John Ashbery’s two-column poem Litany as models for “The Guest.”
How to read the work probably varies with each person. I went back and forth, taking in a paragraph on one side and then shifting to the other for the immediate contrast of the ironic differences. The reports from the house vary from details of what is happening in the rooms to the thoughts of people, especially of an aroused woman. Mussolini’s thought are filled with self-grandiosity, political scheming, and carnal lusts, concluding with his cynical decision: “Yes, in the end this house must fall.” Most in the family have regarded him as the future of Italy.
“The Guest” won the Italian American Writers Association annual fiction prize and was named story of the year by Italian Americana. It serves as a significant example of Stevenson’s commitment to experimental writing. As the collected work in this book illustrates, she is unique.
