University of Cape Town – ELL3009S

Laura Barnard

22 October 2016

‘Revolutions for Grown-Ups’:

The Dangerous Innocence of Heather O’Neill’s Daydreams of Angels (2015)

“You have to create thoughts from scratch, Piglet. And as for the ingredients, you need love, wisdom, terror and acceptance.”

– pg. 58, from the story ‘The Holy Dove Parade’

“Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.”

– William Blake in his ‘Proverbs of Hell’

“Here’s a verse about rabbits

That doesn’t mention their habits.”

– The entirety of Ogden Nash’s poem ‘The Rabbits’

In coming to the close of a seminar with as broad and oxymoronic a title as ‘Postmodern Fairy Tale’, it perhaps feels appropriate that we should now tarry with the unavoidable questions of our literary moment. Since ‘the Postmodern Condition’ was diagnosed more than a generation ago[1]already, is the present really a kind of post-postmodern era? Do we need a name yet for what we are undergoing? Should we even still aspire to ‘make it new’ with old storytelling ingredients in a time when reality itself has apparently taken on such a virtualized aspect as to make the cliché ‘stranger than fiction’ an entirely insufficient description?[2]

The Montreal-based writer Heather O’Neill’s recent short-story collection Daydreams of Angels does not pretend to provide a brash, epochal answer to any of these inquiries, but in its own quiet, delightful way it asserts its confident place in a new tradition of reimagined narratives that self-consciously picks up where Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and the open school of Magical Realism left off in the 1990’s. O’Neill doesn’t invert the stories she inherits. She perverts them. Or at least she shows up the originals as bearing a repressed content which, once exposed or re-contextualized, imbues them with an innocence or a depravity (or both) that, to use academic terminology, jumpstarts their interest and jacks up their contemporary appeal like a kind of extreme makeover procedure.[3]The fascination this technique inspires in the reader will be the shared subject of my analyses of the three stories I most dearly appreciated on a first reading. The newness of the text and the limited accessibility of theoretical resources in the midst of a national education crisis are the reasons for my relative deficit of references for this essay, but hopefully the closeness of my readings and the fact that I managed to conduct a brief interview with O’Neill herself at the Cape Town Open Book Festival on the 11^thof September will compensate for this absence. In this sense, the authority of my readings is mostly constituted here by the writer’s signature and the words “It was lovely to meet you!” and “(From Montreal with Love!)” on the title page of my copy of the collection.

Thesis – ‘The Story of Little O’ (Fantasy with a Twist)

“The ones who weren’t afraid of others knowing that they were perverts were the ones that were going to rule the world. Little O would not be chaste.” – pg.165

Subtitled ‘A Portrait of the Marquis de Sade as a Young Girl’, the first 16 words of the tenth story in the collection thus provide three separate shout-outs to predecessor tales of controversial youthful eroticism: James Joyce’s autobiographical Portrait, Pauline Reage’s scandalous The Story of O and the entire corpus of the Marquis de Sade, whose voluminous output is of course one long literary bacchanal from beginning to end. All three are linked by an intense and very visceral sensuality that uses language to stitch together the first physical and psychological traumas of youthful consciousness with the precocious inflammation of their protagonists’ libidos.[4]For Little O, O’Neill’s own test-subject, “[i]t was troubling to feel so much” (156) and indeed it is troubling too for the reader to feel, through O’Neill’s prose poetry, even an inkling of her experience. In contemporary Montreal, she begins puberty at eleven and spends her adolescence negotiating between her own unbounded fantasies and those of the grateful, overawed boys of her class and neighbourhood. Orphaned and unsupervised, except by her ‘welfare-case’ Grandfather Joe, she inhabits an Edenic domain of unselfconscious all-round titillation. Her wet daydreams fluctuate between visions of masochistic trysts and seductions by cartoon characters like Tintin and Felix the Cat. She doesn’t care what anyone’s parents think of her.

O’Neill’s style is typified by a certain syntagmatic stringency. Almost all her sentences in all her stories read as deliberate declarations of curt fact. But in the charged confines of ‘Little O’s short, taut paragraphs, wherein sexual fantasy and subjective reality are so often confused, this effect is exacerbated by a sensually surreal affection for corollary similes: “The mercury in the thermometer went down like the ink in the teacher’s red pen as she wrote criticisms all over everyone’s homework” (162) and “The sky became pink as the sun set, like someone had poured a packet of pink Kool-Aid into a glass of water.” (159) Asked about this tendency on a panel at Open Book, O’Neill explained that she’d initially dreamed of being a poet instead of a fiction writer but inevitably found that the latter was at least a little more financially viable than the former.

Accepting the compromise, she’d nonetheless tried never to miss an opportunity to incorporate poetic phrasing into her stories. This juxtaposition of matter-of-fact narrative with inchoate poetic license lends O’Neill’s adaptation technique a very characteristic sense of literary revival (as opposed to narrative regurgitation). We can see the general correlations with the Marquis’ great, depraved heroines Justine and Juliette, but the rootless aristocratic infinity of endless S&M and boredom-inducing blasphemy is replaced here by a definite setting and a strangely kind and sympathetic Dickensian tone. Little O is not naïve and nothing about her sexual awakening is depicted in an exploitative or condescending fashion. Instead, indeed, it is adult hypocrisy and the repressed desire inherent to grown-up culture that receives its necessary scrutiny: “It was strange that adults all had sex. It was strange how appalled they were about the idea of young people having sex. Why that of all things?” (171) The implicit meta-commentary here may be the question of why even 200 years after de Sade published his explications of libertine virtue, and 100 years after Freud’s inquiries into infant sexuality, we still feel as if we can’t trust children with certain Knowledge when their biology so often provides it for them anyway.[5]Thus the relocation of de Sade’s character to present-day bourgeois Canada says far more about us than it does about de Sade, as O’Neill means it to.

Antithesis – ‘Swan Lake for Beginners’ (History with a Fantastical Twist)

“Only individuals, all on their own, can decide to dedicate their lives to expression. Art comes from some mysterious place that cannot be located by science. Scientists could make a human, but they could not make an artist.”

– pg. 52.

Science Fiction is an old enough literary genre by now to possess its own set of fairy tale-esque common elements. The famed figure of the mad scientist itself – from Victor Frankenstein to Dr. Moreau – finds its implicit pre-modern precursor in the character of Merlin or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. O’Neill’s third story here continues ‘Little O’s reification process by bringing just such a fable-like yarn into a definite historical timeline, but on this occasion goes one step further by invoking too the tragically underappreciated tradition of Soviet techno-futurist myth-making and critique, from Yevgeny Zamyatin and Andrei Platonov to the Strugatsky Brothers and the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. The prodigal protagonist in this case is an absent-minded genius named Vladimir Latska, who at the age of 17 manages to invent cloning in 1955, long before the West achieves the feat but also just too early for the Kremlin to deem the discovery altogether useful. In 1961 however, after the real-existing virtuoso ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev famously defects to the West, Latska steps in to assuage his country’s embarrassment by proposing the extensive experiment of cloning a whole generation of Nureyevs to prove that “[h]e was replaceable. It was the Soviet Union that was unique.” (37) The fable form itself dictates that things just don’t go according to plan, and generation after generation of unfortunate Nureyevs are raised to replicate their original in an obscure town in the Canadian tundra only to all fail for marvelously diverse reasons. Either they’re treated too louchely and thus don’t value dance as a career-choice, or they’re too disciplined and have no personal pizzazz,[6]or else finally they feel undercut by the number of fellow clones who look just like them of course, allowing none to stand out from the crowd. Eventually a local boy, Michel, inspired by the Nureyevs’ technique but with none of the advantages of their funding or manifest destiny, takes it upon himself to break the mould and pursue his own ballet career, and his remarkable success makes Latska and his fellow scientists concede defeat at much the same time the U.S.S.R. is itself falling apart.

The mechanistic aspect of the story – the fact that it explicitly builds up to the moral expressed in this section’s epigraph – contrasts with the ironic contingency of its context. We might find it too fanciful at first to consider such an experiment as if it could have actually been carried out, but then we reflect that the Soviet Union itself was nothing if not a 74-year long inquiry into the limits of human nature. And like Latska’s, it failed miserably, but not for want of good or genuinely revolutionary intentions.[7]The moral of real-existing Communism itself might be said to be that people cannot achieve perfection through self-sacrifice alone.[8]And along with this metaphor linking the production of history with the re-production of people we can surely also add to the list the re-application and adaptation of stories. By maintaining that the conditions that ultimately nurture the individual genius of an historic artist cannot ever be perfectly replicated, O’Neill outlines the principle that all sought-after repetitions of the past must embrace the contingencies and accidents of the present to stand a chance of standing up by themselves. To really retell a story, you do have to make it your own.[9]The ideology which shapes its form and being can only come from within, not imposed by controlled variables. And so even if you can create a planned economy, you can never create a planned aesthetic. Artistic freedom then, is the capacity to turn unexpected experience into meaningful reflection, to appropriate the incidental past for the sake of bringing meaning into an uncertain future. “[Art for art’s sake] proves that the universe is full of surprises.” (55)

Synthesis – ‘The Holy Dove Parade’ (Everything Twisted Madly Together)  

“We weren’t sinister. We liked kids. We acted like kids who had no rules ourselves.” – pg. 72

O’Neill’s fourth story though shows how this vision of productive uncertainty clashes with a homegrown form of aesthetic Communism to create the conditions for a living nightmare. It is O’Neill’s own invention – neither a recontextualized tale nor an historical fantasy – but a combination that amounts to a Genesis story of a very North American cult a la the Manson Family or the Jonestown Massacre. This time it is told in the form of a prison letter from ‘Pooh Bear’ to ‘Piglet’[10]– the sweet, ironic monikers of a prodigal cult leader’s girlfriend and their adopted/kidnapped daughter respectively. The former had fallen in love at first sight with Edward (“I thought, Hallelujah!” (57)) on his 18^thBirthday and run away with him and a set of other homeless, hopeless teenagers to found a church called ‘The Holy Dove Parade’ in a derelict Ice Cream parlour in Montreal. This is a kind of proto-Christianity formed around the sui generis self-consciousness of Edward’s charisma.[11]What begins as a makeshift sanctuary for the low and the lonely in the dropout district of French Canada’s social-democratic utopia transmogrifies into a fully-fledged money-raking evangelical establishment. Edward inspires all his listeners with a doctrine of universal brotherhood and responsibility, denouncing the family-life he never had as a trap set by capitalism to manufacture division between people who should by all rights love each other completely. But, of course, when he eventually assembles his own family with Pooh Bear by abducting Piglet from her still-present parents and escaping to a secluded farm, he betrays his own ideas wholesale – like a religious Stalin – and becomes a vengeful primordial patriarch, spending all the church’s savings on weapons and border defense, predictably leading to a shootout massacre when the police track them down. Nonetheless, Pooh Bear finishes her letter with a message of delicate hope, appealing to Piglet “that maybe there’s some possibility that you would want to carry on Edward’s teachings. Because whatever the papers say, he had some wonderful, wonderful ideas.” (78)

And indeed, one feels that this perhaps perfectly encapsulates the predicament of the contemporary Left; that despite the atrocities of the 20th Century, there is nothing ostensibly wrong with spreading the ideals of universal love and dignity through social organization. Trust the tale and not the teller, in brief. Or don’t let the human failures of a cause’s leader distract you from the essential validity of the cause, in long. In storytelling terms, the question becomes the Zizekian one of ‘the morning after’: how do we rewrite the story of the Event of an idea, like Edward’s gospel, without devolving into tragedy or propaganda and all the while admitting the imperfection of reality itself? O’Neill herself doesn’t know, but I take Pooh Bear’s encouragement to be her sincere sentiment because of the trust she exhibits throughout the collection in the self-reckoning capacities of the young. There is no true conservative adulthood from which the follies and illusions of youth are finally judged with dismissive indulgence. And most of her precocious protagonists are defined to some extent by an awareness of how their misfortunes are the result of the abuses and idiocies of the adults who supposedly run the world they emerge into.[12]Crises and miseries produce visions of paradise on earth. But because stories are what we have in common, and, if they’re good, do not disappear after their consumption, their capacity to be reclaimed and re-forged by the lowest members of society into promises of power and meaning makes the case that the task of Literature is not only unfinished but endless. Until we fail to imagine our societies being different, we will always have new takes on old stories, whether we like it or not. Thus O’Neill can be seen to be leading by example by taking apart her favourite texts and adding her own undeniable contribution.           

When I eventually got to talk to her in person after the very last panel discussion of the festival, I managed to ask two thankfully relevant questions. First, whether she had set out with a conscious project to make an entire book of ‘Twisted Fairy Stories’ as the collection’s subtitle suggested, and then, just because I’d already written an essay on another Canadian female fabulist’s work for this seminar, whether she felt any kind of Bloomian anxiety of influence with Margaret Atwood. She politely and directly responded that the stories she’d chosen to re-write were the ones she’d absorbed most intimately in her aforementioned impressionable youth and thus the ones she most often still returns to so as to see whether their “form still holds” with what she’s come to learn with age, thus the collection kind of fell together, and then, vis-à-vis her predecessor, she said that far from impeding her development, Atwood’s example, especially her recent promiscuity between literary and popular genres, was an inspiration for her own avowed diversity. She could face her publishers and say “[i]f Margaret Atwood can get away with it, then so can I.” And in much the same way, Heather O’Neill’s work gives one the impression that most young short story writers could read her and draw more confidence than envy from the bravery and madness of her style and content. This ideal of a co-operative (as opposed to a competitive) literary tradition, wherein a writer writes new stories and retells old tales in part so that the next generation will feel inspired to repeat the feat, can be seen to be implicit in the very substance of O’Neill’s work. She doesn’t feel she needs to be too original. Her identity is so evident already in the first versions of the stories she appropriates that her style merely passes them onto us, makes us feel like the recipient of a gift instead of the purchaser of an entertainment. And this charitable attitude towards fiction, of a constantly self-revolutionizing tradition of re-engineered keepsakes, is surely a singular literary movement for our time as much as any.

Word Count: 3050

Reference List:

All page references cited are from the edition:

O’Neill, Heather. 2015. Daydreams of Angels: ‘Tall Tales and Twisted Fairy Stories’. London: Quercus.

Particular Story References:

‘The Story of Little O’ (pgs. 151-180)

‘Swan Lake for Beginners’ (pgs. 33-55)

‘The Holy Dove Parade’ (pgs. 57-79)

[1]By the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard in 1979, among many others.

[2]And this goes along too with the more recent wide-scale co-optation of the ‘rewritten fairy tale’ form by the most mainstream entertainment producers in creation, Disney and Pixar. (Cf. Frozen, Braveand Into the Woods)

[3]Two representative examples that I will not examine in this essay are ‘The Gospel According to Mary M.’, in which the life of Christ is depicted amongst present-day Canadian Sixth Graders, and ‘Bartok for Children’, in which Pinocchio is a re-animated Frankensteinian rapist let loose behind enemy lines in WWII.

[4]In O’Neill’s version this paradoxical temperament is evidenced in perfectly pithy sentences such as “ She didn’t know how she felt when a dodge ball hit her hard.” (176)

[5]The story’s last words re-emphasize the point that there is decidedly nothing unnatural about Little O’s precocity, just the opposite in fact: “And then it occurred to her that maybe they weren’t mistaken at all. Maybe she just happened to be a very ordinary little girl.” (180)

[6]“One [Nureyev] would close his eyes when passing ponds, so that he didn’t have to look at swans reaching about gracefully with their necks. He ended up falling in and drowning.” (41)

[7]Is it just a coincidence that two Vladimir L.’s (Latska and Lenin) were the respective architects of these experiments?

[8]This is no reason, however, to abandon the idea of re-imagining humanity’s possibilities. O’Neill finishes the story by depicting the Siberian tiger the scientists had imported to help replicate the environment of Nureyev’s childhood as a wandering Trotskyist rabble-rouser “[s]nuggling up to the youngsters under their blankets, with its mouth next to their ears, it tells them not to be afraid of their revolutionary dreams. It lets the children know it has their backs.” (55) Such is seemingly the spirit animal of youthful subversion.

[9]Or, like Borges’s Pierre Menard, you have to imagine how the exact same story could come into being today considering all that has changed in the world since its original telling.

[10]If this is not a retelling of A.A. Milne’s children’s tales per se, the contrast between the friendships in his work and in this story, and especially the implicit figure of ‘Christopher Robin’ in either, is revealing enough.

[11]“There was something really dignified about him always. He was above material possessions. He really was. (And, whew, did I find him handsome!).” (59) and

“A bright kid born into horrific circumstances is what marks the birth of a prophet.” (60)

[12]O’Neill said in the same panel cited earlier that the reason for her preference for young, orphaned protagonists is that she was herself born to an unfit mother and an absent father, spent years on child welfare on the streets of Montreal and had a daughter in her very early twenties, so that she has never lost the impressionable sensibility she was fixed into by circumstance at that time and never wants to lose it either for that matter.