George Chambers, born in Peoria, Illinois in 1931, is a former
professor of English at Bradley University, and author of the
beautiful little artefact The Bonnyclabber, a concrete novel
(of sorts), published in 1971 in a collaboration between December
and Panache magazines, illustrated with surreal and eerie
pencil sketches from William B. Mulstay. The word ‘bonnyclabber’,
according to various dictionaries, is from the Gaelic and translates
into ‘sour milk’, or in the verb form, ‘to curdle’. Opening
with three blank pages and a series of footnotes, starting ‘op.
cit., p.734’, the novel makes clear its unflinching assault on
linear conventions, leading into a sing-song nonsense story: “la la
lalala la, with my bow and arrow/where the hunting is good.” Taken
as a sequence of fragments that might cohere into something larger
(if that matters), the novel is entertaining, even if one’s hope of
a larger coherence fades somewhere into p.59. Featuring strange
typographical arrangements (one in the shape of nipples), tagless and
punctuationless dialogues where basic spellings and meanings are
debated, newspaper cuttings, surreal stories (often on the topic of
warfare), and typewritten letters, the novel presents a maelstrom of
sometimes violent and sexual images, which when accompanied by the
cubist illustrations, several of a recurring topless female, makes
for an unsettling experience where the reader is forced to take a
whole new approach to reading and thinking. As Raymond Federman
writes in Critifiction: “By rendering language seemingly
incoherent, irrational, illogical, and even meaningless, these works
of fiction negate the symbolic power of language so that it can no
longer structure or even enslave the individual into a
sociohistorical sceanrio prepared in advance and replayed by the
official discourse on television, in the mass media, in the political
arena, and in literature.” (p.33). More than ever do we need novels
like this. Chambers’s second (and final) novel, The Last Man
Standing, is more obviously a novel, and on that old chestnut of
chestnuts, the dead father. Split across four days, covering the
protagonist’s arrival to attend the funeral, the novel is separated
into mini-sections that summarise their content, i.e. ‘Chores’,
‘Tableware’, ‘Songs’, etc. The protagonist’s siblings are
‘Brother’ and ‘Sister’, unnamed, and his mother is ‘Agnes’.
The novel consists of literal descriptions of the protagonist’s
actions, childhood flashbacks, and surreal fantasies. More
conventional in approach apart from the formatting (the text is
arranged like a playscript), the novel serves up a melancholy
portrait of an unlikeable father whose influence is imprinted on his
children for the worse. The protagonist’s sexual approaches to the
housekeeper seem of more importance than sorting out the family’s
affairs, telling of potential domestic chaos to follow back home. On
the whole, this short novel is more banal, however, the Vietnam war
resurfaces as a topic, suggesting perhaps Chambers’s participation
and flagging up the autobiographical content of the work (it is
probable his father passed around this time), which for the nosier
reader adds an extra dimension in which to poke around. He should have written more.
Editions:
Paperback, 1971, December-Panache.
Paperback, 1990, FC2.
Bibliography:
Novels:
The Bonnyclabber, 1971, December-Panache.
The Last Man Standing, 1990, FC2.
Short stories:
ɸ
Null Set and Other Stories, 1977, Fiction
Collective.
The Scourging of W.H.D. Wretched Hutchinson and Other Stories,
1995, Summer House.
The Twilight of the Bums (with Raymond Federman), 2008,
Stacherone Books.
