Orphan Factory: Essays and Memoirs.
Nash, Susan Smith
Charles Simic. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. 1997. 115
pages. $39.50 ($13.95 paper). ISBN 0-472-09663-X (06663-3 paper).
Orphan Factory, Charles Simic's fascinating collection of
creative nonfiction, critical essays, autobiographical sketches, brief
memoirs, and prose poems, differs from his other recent offerings in
that it presents a very personal view of a writer often associated with
highly stylized writing. In the past, Simic has utilized elements from
both the Gothic and from the theater of the absurd to represent an
existential state that follows a person who has emigrated to the United
States to escape unsurvivable conditions in Yugoslavia. In many of the
essays here, Simic points out with great sadness that the conditions of
conflict have repeated themselves. In the title essay, "Orphan
Factory," he recalls his mother's view that taking sides in a
conflict could never be justified, that the participants in war were all
equally criminal. They were "idiots killing idiots" in her
view. Simic and his mother escaped from Yugoslavia in 1948 with all
their possessions packed in two suitcases - an image he sees repeated on
television broadcasts that chronicle the conflict in Bosnia, Croatia,
and the other sections of a country once unified under the name of
Yugoslavia. The images of corpses, cities of rubble, and gutted
farmhouses are indelibly etched in his consciousness, and the insomnia
Simic writes about in "My Insomnia and I" has its origins in
the way in which images, consciousness, and the physical body function
together. The bloodstains left by a century of horror are indelible,
writes Simic, and lead to profound questionings: "I pretended to
believe in the future, but even so, fits of doubts. Even when I slept
soundly, I dreamed I was awake." His conscience, his thoughts, and
the need to help right the wrongs of the century by exposing the errors
that make nationalism a tool of neofascism drive Simic, although one
senses he does not believe in the final efficacy of such arguments.
In exile in the U.S., the need to construct an identity is pressed
upon the individual with the illusory promise that one might be able to
rid oneself of anxieties and fears by assuming "typical"
American practices: by eating canned soup, white bread, and Jell-O and
"hiding one's passion for sausages smothered in onions and
peppers and crackling in fat." In "Fearful Paradise"
Simic again gives the reader a very personal, intimate view of the
seduction of "assimilation" and the resistance to it that
allows the exile to continue to perceive cultures from a perspective
which enables others to see the parts of the psyche usually hidden from
view in their own self-examinations.
The brief essays and reviews included in Orphan Factory benefit from
Simic's unique perspective and his ability to name the processes
occurring in a work as well as their impact on the reader. On Jane
Kenyon, he writes that her poems "measure the gap between language
and what it presumes to name. That distance to her at times appears
infinite, and that it is the cause of her melancholy." His review
of a collection of photographs taken of the war in Sarajevo and Bosnia
is heartrending. In "Assembly Required" he presents a series
of aphorisms that reflect what he has written earlier about the impact
of images on the consciousness, particularly images of horror: "In
no other century, in no other literature of the past has the image been
this important. In the age of ideology and advertisement, the poet, too,
trusts the eyes more than the ear."
This is an important collection, and although the contents seem to be
quite diverse, they are unified by themes of exile and grief over the
tragedies of a century that leave Simic not so much with millennial
yearnings as with a need to call for people to wake up and find
strategies for discerning the propagandistic uses of image and discourse
from those that value individual difference and thought.
Susan Smith Nash St. Gregory's College (Ok.)
