Notes on ‘The Stench’
Notes on The Stench
This story is probably the only one in this collection that I can say truly poured out of me. I thought about it in some form for several months, and it basically exploded on the page when the time came to write it; the whole thing materialized in about four or five days, to the best of my memory. This may help to inform, to the outsider, the principal that governs The Stench, because they are perhaps the most ambitious and high-reaching of anything I’ve done so far—not to say that they’re anything above vulgarity in the grand scheme of literature.
I’d say Toni Morrison (one of the great American writers) eminently articulated this thesis in the opening lines of her 1992 work of critical analysis, Playing in the Dark: "I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from—and in what disables the foray, for purposes of fiction, into corners of the consciousness held off and away from the reach of the writer's imagination (p. 4).” This process, communicated in varying modes of perspective, is almost an even exercise in both writing and acting, more specifically the act of becoming another person, steeping oneself in all of their unique beliefs and idiosyncrasies. This is what I aspired to do with Barley Montrose: create a character so foreign to my—and most modern people’s—imagination as to be estranged completely, and to deliver that character’s thoughts in an unadulterated way as he enters a situation that shatters his conceptions of base reality, coming for each pillar of speech until his rather miserable death at the bottom of a cave.
To start, Montrose himself cannot speak—he has a debilitating stutter that consigns any thought of remote viscerality to the sole canvas of the page. Anything else is a physical struggle, compelling most to pass over him, perhaps unjustly. This is where he finds you, the reader, grabbing you by the collar and confessing his every thought. He has no care for orderliness, or sophisticated prose. This often leads him to speak in double negatives and triple similes, with many vagaries in ability and command over language. These verbal and textual idiosyncrasies were employed at the earliest point of conception, to estrange myself from this man to my utmost capability, so I, suffering so few of Montrose’s handicaps, could be forced to struggle to rip myself, Leon Atweh, out of this unique individual, until there was nothing left of the naive eighteen-year-old to see.
Further, I employed a stream of consciousness quite gratuitously at various points, as an extension of Montrose’s frantic need to catalogue something, anything, and his rapidly-increasing sickness that builds through the narrative. My purpose in this, as I would really like to stress, was not to engage in some masturbatory obfuscation by way of employing strings of fusty and dull words, but to enforce a complete desperation in him that could not be escaped. By reading The Stench, my ideal purpose is to give you, for a moment, the brain of this protagonist, in all of its digressions, running-on, terror, and tenderness. This latter feature is one of the utmost importance. Barley is a deeply isolated person, and longs, subconsciously, to be connected to anyone or anything. His previous alcoholism and current reverence for the scripture are both consequences, each with positive and detrimental attributes, of this longing which first impels him and later kills him.
My process with this story and its composition was by far the most straightforward and simple of any in this collection. I wrote it across the span of a week, consistently, and every day, and made almost no edits outside of chronological corrections and matters of organization. Unlike some of my later endeavors it was quick and painless, and didn’t lead to some lasting scar or insecurity; this may be because, even through my utmost attempts to separate myself from Barley West in every conceivable facet, in many ways his personality—and by extension his words that construct the story—is a reflection of my own, and in his desperate search for the means to make himself new, and his shame at his lowly state, I can see myself. Thus, I was able to look into this mirror that Barley presented to me, and quickly move on from it, I’d suppose.
As for its order in this collection, being placed at the beginning in addition to having been written first, there is intention behind these things. It introduces several characters that would later recur in stories like On Magnificent Apostates and And So, And So, such as Wilhelm and Montrose’s father, and is also the farthest-flung story chronologically, occupying the same year only as Vertices. In this way it is both a beginning and an end, as it thematically initiates much of the stories to follow while decisively killing all of its major proponents. Without Barley, there is no Obadiah, and there certainly is no Inés: the obsessively reflective, beautiful, and utterly destroyed mind of this first character makes any subsidiary of Barley possible, and any continuation of his suppression and suffocation a thematic necessity.
Looking back on what could have been improved, I find many things to touch on. First, the story’s linguistic density, while a deliberate artistic decision, is quite jarring as an opening to the project, and could easily deter someone from persisting to the (hopefully) rewarding conclusion. This, of course, is not what any artist really wants, as art that goes unseen and unfelt—for my purposes—is a failure of my mission to convey the history of New Mexico in an interesting way. I also found the plot upon my many readings to grow less and less important, becoming further supplanted by the weight and necessity of the prose and mind exercised by Barley. This became suffocating and obtuse at times, particularly in moments of description. Wordiness is my most apparent flaw—from my observation—and I could always do more to restrain and hone it. In addition, minor characters fell—more out of neglect than intentionality—to the wayside as the coalmine consumed Barley, and I felt that I lost the potential to explore the interesting minds of Devin and Armijo, who I thought contained multitudes on their own; one of the many lessons I learned in this collection: characters will dictate their own importance following their inception, and the place they take is rarely up to you.
There is no exit from the mine, and Montrose is certainly dead, but the implication of his refusal to renounce love and hope upon his suffocation—a hapless occurrence caused by a landowner thousands of miles away—pose some implications that I’d dare to call comforting.
