Dissecting Narratives

Diagram is not a journal of straightforward narratives; in fact, nothing about its stories is straightforward. Diagram is made up of experimental, playful, and plain odd fiction and with reason: five of its entries are finalists from its Innovative Fiction Contest, a tall order to live up to.

Alongside the fiction, there are two reviews as well as a section intriguingly named ‘Schematica’ comprising of slightly fantastical diagrams lifted or inspired from various sources. These include C.T. Joslin’s 1920 ‘Cabinet for Cigarettes’ with its secret mode of operation: ‘other methods of operation resulting in an idle stroke of the operating member.’ A more literary diagram lists in an imaginative format the ‘Antecedents of the Wasteland’. The reviews are just as unpredictable considering one of them features an interview with an imaginary character, Miss Peach, from Catie Rosemurgy's The Stranger Manual (Graywolf 2010).

Amongst the diverse forms chosen by Diagram’s fiction authors there is Mark Ehling’s ‘Gives’ which is told entirely through dialogue and Amy Marcott’s ‘Flying the Coop’, which uses the format of an internet forum. Of the two, Marcott stands out with its beautifully painful tale of a woman watching her Alzheimer-suffering husband fall in love. Marcott’s chosen format allows for unforced humour to seep through, with the board-etiquette conscious character of RonS reminding the central character, Molly, to stay on topic. This also eventually leads to surprising poetry, as when RonS types:

‘Molly, the birds will likely be there throughout October. Then one day they'll vanish, with no fanfare except your prolonged sleep.’

Innovation doesn’t just turn up in the shape of an unusual format; there are more subtle formulas afoot. Eleanor Boudreau’s ‘Meredith’s Story’ has a deliberately misleading title but it sets the tone for Boudreau’s unreliable narrator, Eleanor. The story is on the surface an account of Meredith’s murder told from the viewpoint of her roommate Eleanor (no relation, we are told, to Boudreau). Yet it really is a character study of Eleanor conveyed through a collage of narratives and oddly lyrical repetitions. To take an example, Eleanor includes in her thoughts an excerpt from an old school essay:

‘Humbert Humbert said, "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style." (p9) Which was true— Humbert Humbert was a murderer, and he had a fancy prose style—but it was also ironical as it is the plainest sentence in the paragraph.’

This is just one of the few delectable puzzle pieces conjured by Boudreau. Puzzle is perhaps the wrong word implying as it does, that there is a clear image, a completed product at the end of the story. Boudreau avoids that sort of narrative heavy-handedness in favor of a more elusive picture. Eleanor calls pictures of the deceased Meredith ‘color ghosts’ and this is an apt term for the piece as a whole: as defined and intangible as the fading memory of a loved one.

Diagram also includes the winner of the Innovative Fiction Contest, Sutherland Douglas. His winning entry is ‘The Idea of Arkadin Grady’ a scrapbook ‘impressionist, associative, mish-a-mash—an intuitive, free-range retelling of this new-old story’. Sadly it is only comfortably readable to those with larger computer screens than mine (for some reason the PDF version came without text for me). Still, I applaud the concept even if accessibility to the content failed me.

Nick Leigh’s ‘Relief: 1; Fear: 0’ is a frustrating two-column narrative. It is frustrating in the sense that each column begins with a beautiful clarity that rapidly shrinks into a messy colloquial style, a confusing enmeshment that locks the reader out with lists that eat their own tail. It is an account of hospital patient Francis, ‘Vegetables make the best patients’, mixed with a study of fears relating not just to old age, but more generally the fragility of life, expressed through a methodical amendment of newspaper headlines. Yet, it is at his simplest that Leigh touches you, with moments like these:

‘Old age exiles you you know. The way you shrink back into your skin, repulsive to other people still blooming in theirs.’

These rare instants feel all too much like sunbeams piercing a storm and perhaps that is the point, but I can’t help but feel that a tidying of the chaos would make this story much more effective.