Toad's Mouth
Isabel Allende’s ‘Toad’s Mouth’ is undeniably a story. Whether it is a good one we can leave aside for the moment, but if a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, can usefully have someone arriving and someone leaving, and it contains a transformation, ‘Toad’s Mouth’ is a successful tale. Mary Morris notes that “John Gardner once said that there are only two plots in all of literature: You go on a journey, or the stranger comes to town. Since women, for so many years, were denied the journey, we were left with only one plot in our lives — to await the stranger. Always, the stranger is a man.” (New York Times) That is something else we will leave to one side till later: how stereotypical ‘Toad’s Mouth’ may be. If Gardner is at least partially right that stories are about people coming and people going, Allende’s tale has both people coming and going, and contains this coming and going within a broader arrival, one that offers the story’s sense of loss, as the central figure Hermelinda leaves, and the community is bereft.
But first, we should say a few things about what we think a story happens to be, all the while accepting that what constitutes a narrative can change over time. If ‘Toad’s Mouth’ feels like an old-fashioned tale, it rests not a little on its undeniable presence as one. There we are in the isolated south of South America, past Patagonia and at Tierra del Fuego, and the narrator is determined to inform us this is the back of the back of beyond. It isn’t even colonially that useful: the English have arrived late to the colonialist party and, missing out on the exuberance of proper plunder, must settle for raising that most docile of creatures, sheep. Apart from the superintendent’s wife, there are no young women for many miles on this all but useless tundra, except for one: Hermelinda. Here is a woman who really does make her living on her back, and not always by sleeping with the men straightforwardly — though she does that too. No, in the local bar, she often lies down, certainly thinks not of England, and spreads her legs. The men throw a coin and hope that, as she twists around trying to avoid their aim, it will land in her sex. If they fail, she keeps the money that enters the circle she has drawn where she lies. If they succeed, they get “two hours alone with her behind the curtain in absolute ecstasy”. The game is called Toad’s Mouth’, and hence the title.
Hermelinda is all they have in this hard, rough environment, and she is a happy hooker who likes to please even if she acknowledges the need for cash. “She knew the illusory strength and extreme vulnerability of her clients, but she never took advantage of those weaknesses; on the contrary she was moved by both.” A good woman is hard to find and all but impossible on sheep ranches in Tierra del Fuego. She is, of course a local treasure, and though a man might lose “a month’s pay in fifteen minutes playing the game…,” it is the only available excitement in their life, and worth the money.
Yet one day a stranger comes into their midst. A loner type, who is used to his own company but maybe finally getting a little tired of it, as though his bones aren’t aching from years of tough labour; more from a lack of something else. “The pain was not the pain of stiff muscles but an accumulation of sorrow and neglect.” If Jane Austen can insist that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, Allende’s formulation is that a man exhausted by his own solitude must be in want of beautiful company. He finds it when he sees Hermelinda and wins her love as though a knight errant, but rather than travelling vast lands proving his chivalric virtues, this already well-seasoned peripatetic merely needs to offer a bit of arced brilliance. “Pablo squinted, exhaled a deep breath, and after a second or two of absolute concentration, tossed his coin. Everyone watched as it formed a perfect arc and entered clearly in the slot.” Pablo and Hermelinda go off for an assignation, but it goes on much longer than the workers anticipate, and the couple don’t emerge until the following lunchtime. Pablo saddles up the horses and off they go, riding into the sun that hasn’t yet set.
This can seem so sexually stereotypical that with feminists like Allende, who needs misogynists? She may have said “at five I was already a feminist and nobody used the word in Chile yet,” in the sort of exaggerated language her fiction also deploys. Yet whatever else we have, we do have a story, and that is what Allende wishes to offer. “I just want to tell a story as straightforwardly as possible, from all angles, with a strong voice…I’m not trying to experiment with the form.” (Guardian) However, perhaps it is story squared or cubed, in keeping with the overstatement in the prose. While many modern writers have moved towards what we might call fractional narrative, Allende hasn’t retreated from the story but insistently exaggerates it. This needn’t be a bad thing in-itself and the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the metafictional ploys of Donald Barthelme, the postmodern impulses of Salman Rushdie, all sometimes play up giving you more story than you might expect.
James Wood has even coined a term for the more exuberant exaggerations to be found in contemporary writing: hysterical realism. “Recent novels—veritable relics of St. Vitus—by Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace, and others, have featured a great rock musician who, when born, began immediately to play air guitar in his crib (Rushdie); a talking dog, a mechanical duck, a giant octagonal cheese, and two clocks having a conversation (Pynchon).” Then there is “…a nun called Sister Edgar who is obsessed with germs and who may be a reincarnation of J. Edgar Hoover, and a conceptual artist painting retired B-52 bombers in the New Mexico desert (DeLillo); a terrorist group devoted to the liberation of Quebec called the Wheelchair Assassins, and a film so compelling that anyone who sees it dies." (Foster Wallace) (The New Republic).
Less is usually more for Wood, and one reason why Chekhov has been such an enormous influence on the modern short story is due to the fractional aspect; the willingness to tell but a part of one’s story that will nevertheless allude to a much greater whole. When Daniel Halpern asked writers of the post-war generation whose work impacted on them most, he says: “by a very large margin, [they] were the stories of Anton Chekhov.” This was not so of a newer generation who “…have distanced themselves — sometimes subtly, sometimes less so — from the influential writers practising during the first two or three decades of the twentieth century, not to mention nineteenth-century models.” (The Art of the Story) If Wood is right, part of that distancing has been a move towards creating more story, not less.
Allende is part of this tradition, even if her work is unlikely to be seen as the equal of the figures Wood mentions as important precursors or continuing practitioners: Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace. Maggie Shipstead says of one of Allende’s novel that it is a “…book so unconvincing as to raise questions about how many literary sins have been disguised by Allende’s historical settings and shielded by the vague label of magical realism.” (New Republic) Allende herself has said: “The critics in Chile still did not consider me a writer, dismissing me as a simple storyteller. I remember when I was nominated for the National Literary Award, which is the highest award you can get in the country, some absolutely awful things were said about me.” (Latino Life) One of the great modern writers, and a fellow Chilean, Roberto Bolano, noted that her work “…ranges from the kitsch to the pathetic.” (Between Parentheses) Low praise indeed. Some might see jealousy: Allende has sold more than seventy million books worldwide.
Yet rather than viewing it as an either/or, with Allende the wonderful storyteller other writers cannot match, or the writer so populist that she will write fiction that hardly passes for the literary, we might conclude Allende is a very accomplished storyteller, and a pretty poor writer. In escaping a dichotomy, we may have arrived at a paradox: how can a poor writer tell stories well? This might be where we distinguish between bad writing and poor writing. A bad writer will have no sense of story structure, narrative pertinence or character plausibility. These aren’t really Allende’s problems. She can make us accept that there is an isolated community at the end of South America, that a beautiful woman will stop off there for a while and make some money, and that a solitary soul will turn up and whisk her away. But let us look again at those last few words: a solitary soul will turn up and whisk her away. This is stale language we are using, and Allende’s work is full of it. Is this a problem of translation? Margaret Sayers Peden has translated much of her fiction, but has also worked on Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz and others without relying on dead phrasemaking. Also, Allende is fluent in English (she has lived in California for decades). She would have no problem checking how faithfully the translator has adapted to her work.
The story opens with “times were very hard in the south.” Hermelinda had “…a heady mixture of blood in her veins and a hearty taste for a good time.” “Word of her firm horse-woman’s legs and breasts without a trace of wear had spread across the six hundred kilometres of that wild province.” Raymond Williams has written of James Joyce’s writing that it is “tense with the effort of definition”, and by this reckoning Allende’s is slack prose: hence poor, rather than bad writing. As Williams says, “too many works are imposed upon us as masterpieces because of the ‘weight’ or ‘beauty’ of their ‘message.” (Reading and Criticism) People may read Allende novels like The House of the Spirits and Eva Luna and see a skilful enough storyteller with a wonderful message about love and happiness, difficult trials and daunting tribulations, and say how could anybody call such a warm and generous storyteller a bad writer? We are not. We are calling her a poor one.
TE Hulme talks of metaphors soon running their course and dying. “But it is necessary to remember that when they were first used by poets who created them they were used for the purpose of conveying vividly felt actual sensation.” (Speculations) They become dead metaphors, but they didn’t start that way. But what of stillborn similes? Allende’s story is full of them. The company’s headquarters “rose up from the sterile plain like a forgotten cake.” The sheep “looked like clouds trapped against the ground.” “The dark centre of her body would be revealed as open as fruit.” Sometimes she is given to resuscitating dead phrases with minor variations. “She reigned among them like a queen bee,” or “the tiny foreigner tensed like a viper…” and that Pablo had “guts of steel.”
Allende may have millions of readers, but they might not be concentrating too hard, happy to turn the page quickly as the story moves along at a pace fast enough for the patchy prose to pass for literary. If poor Stephen Fry is said to be a stupid person’s idea of what an intelligent person is like, then Allende might be the literary equivalent: someone who gives the impression of writing well, yet who generally writes poorly - but where the prose is contained by a storytelling competence that shouldn’t be denied.
Nevertheless, one could imagine if Allende were a fractional writer, someone like Chekhov, or Wharton, or Henry James, the mediocrity of the prose would be much more apparent. Speaking of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Wood says: “White Teeth is a big book, and does not deal in fractions: when it excites, and when it frustrates, it ‘o’erflows the measure’.” (The New Republic) This doesn’t mean all writers should be fractional; of course not. But when the overblown hides the underwritten, when the story is too readily the thing, we can muse over the popular without merely condemning it. Instead we can try to understand it. Allende insists, “I write with a Passion. The overwhelming passion to tell a story” (Contemporary Literature). We don’t doubt her claim, but that doesn’t mean we need to regard her as the equal of many of Allende’s contemporaries.
© Tony McKibbin