Here we dive into the season’s most committed and formal exploration of identity. House Mother Normal: a Geriatric Comedy skins this onion all the way down. Our nine strangers live in an English geriatric facility for the poor and indigent at varying levels of senility and health. How much can you lose and still be yourself? How is one’s identity parceled and mediated? This book is filled with crass sexuality, surprising instants of pathos, vulgarities that run from shocking to farce, and totally raw pain.
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As Mrs. Bowen says:
“I may not be very................but I am”
[Right up top here, let’s note that the December / January books are short, easy reads, both whimsical & fun.]
A 3-Dimensional Form
It goes like this: Each of the 9 characters has 21 first-person pages spanning the same events and hours of an evening. Thoughts are printed in Roman script, spoken dialogue in italics. Gaps and blanks represent different forms of consciousness, too (such as a memory lapse; a pensive reminiscence; shock; sleep; oblivion; etc). They almost all begin mid-sentence.
I call the form 3-dimensional because each page matches in time—line for line, second for second—with the corresponding pages for every character. So if you stacked and held up to the light every character’s page 13, for example, you’d see Ivy, Ron & Sioned having a simple and sensible conversation with one another, and later a separate spat between Ivy & Gloria. The House Mother addresses or dialogues directly with all 8 characters on that page alone. One character's 2-D page of prose is not enough to complete a movement. Stack the pages together & the whole room suddenly appears.
A Note from the Author
B.S. Johnson himself described HMN as a study of what is Normal vs. Abnormal. (This is interesting, but don't let it limit your discussion.)
“What I wanted to do was to take an evening in an old people’s home, and see a single set of events through the eyes of not less than eight old people. Due to the various deformities and deficiencies of the inmates, these events would seem to be progressively "abnormal" to the reader. At the end, there would be the viewpoint of the House Mother, an apparently "normal" person, and the events themselves would then be seen to be so bizarre that everything that had come before would seem "normal" by comparison. The idea was to say something about the things we call "normal" and "abnormal" and the technical difficulty was to make the same thing interesting nine times over since that was the number of times the events would have to be described. … Each of the old people was allotted a space of twenty-one pages, and each line on each page represented the same moment in each of the other accounts; this meant an unjustified right-hand margin and led more than one reviewer to imagine the book was in verse. House Mother’s account has an extra page in which she is shown to be
the puppet or concoction of a writer (you
always knew there was a writer behind it all?
Ah, there’s no fooling you readers !)
Nor should there be.”
Click here to read his whole essay on novels, truth in fiction, form, and his body of work.
Have fun with this one!
--A. Campisi
Discussion Questions & Subjects
Just to start yourselves out on the same page, as it were, you might begin your discussion by laying out some basic discoveries of Who, What & Where:
WHO: Characters. We know their names & statistics, and that having “no effective relatives, [they] are orphans in reverse”. But most of them reveal a great deal more. A Welsh house servant, a black prostitute, a war veteran and concert pianist cum street musician…Briefly and simply, just to set the stage, lay out the cast of characters as they revealed themselves.
WHAT: Sequence of Events. In chronological order, briefly & simply, what’s this Social Evening’s actual set of events?
WHERE: The House. What do you know about the House? What's the hierarchy of control? What are the patients’ general attitudes about being here?
‘Work’. • What exactly are Sarah & Charlie doing with the bottles? How might their work—the dilution, the removal of labels, for example—function metaphorically?
•What are the others doing with the glue & red crepe paper?
‘Play’. When they play Pass the Parcel, everyone has a different reaction to what’s inside it, & not all of them are negative. How did you react? Is the parcel itself a metaphor?
Disgust. Do you take HM’s argument at face value, that “I disgust them in order that they may not be disgusted with themselves….” (HM 15; p 197)? What do you think of her argument?
Sex. There’s a lot of sexuality in this book. Histories are dominated by it. Passions endure. As do memories of abuse and longing and joy. Bawdy songs! Ron & Gloria stake breakfast milk against “a quiet feel in the toilet before bed” on the outcome of the tourney! And then there’s the HM & her Ralphie… Discuss sex.
Shit. Ron Lamson suffers badly from an inoperable rectal carcinoma. How do you read the coincidence of this with:
1) His being the one to open the parcel (RL14; 86)?
2) His buying a boy while he was in the Navy (RL 18; 90), or
3) His saying “I would not have been stupid enough to shit on my own village doorstep” (RL 16; 88).
Is Johnson just imposing a morality tale (as Ron himself suggests (RL 18; 90) or does it do something more?
Form: Regarding the 21 pages per character. What’s the effect of separating it out like this? What are some of its advantages and disadvantages? Discuss it in terms of our theme.
Gaps & Blanks. Oddly, the gaps and blanks can sometimes contain as much content and eloquence as the words. List out, compare & discuss the distinct forms of consciousness you can find the blanks & gaps representing, e.g.: sleep (SB 6; 122), listening (GR 17; 111).
[If you're stuck in traffic without end some day, you could even compare the semiotics of p182…which is actually just blank, separating one section of the book from another...vs. the charged Stanton blank page that comes immediately before it.]
Rosetta Stanton. Is this a call for interpretation? What, if anything, is there to be deciphered in
• With a CQ of 0, some of
• A Prisoner in my Self. The 9 characters can’t or don’t communicate their pasts to one another. Some are trapped in their bodies. In one of the most potent lines of the book, Rosetta rouses to Ivy’s raised voice and says, “Now I can........every word you say I am a prisoner in my self. It is terrible. The movement agonizes me. Let me out, or I shall die.” (RS 16; 175-76) Talk about this moment.
Details & the CQ. How important are these measurements? How meaningful? Given that she's not brain dead, what does a CQ of 0 mean?
Identity. Johnson’s characters are unmoored from their pasts, their families, their control, & for some: their memories. The novel highlights that there’s no Archimedean point of identity. That is, there’s no single fixed or absolute quality by which we can navigate to know, or communicate, who we are.
Rather, Johnson seems to suggest, the sum of a person is an ever-shifting (& collaborative) amalgam of different qualities and references. After all, what one thing could be necessary or sufficient to BE one’s Self?
• Talk about some of the ways and means by which specific characters know themselves (e.g.: their senses; abilities; pride; habits (reading; sex; fastidiousness); memories, reliable & not).
• Talk about some of the specific ways and means by which characters are known by others, including a reader (e.g: CQ count; name; looks; habits; speech; other peoples’ narratives)
Strangers. Talk about our theme directly. How are these characters estranged to themselves and to one another? How do they navigate in this foreign land?
Frameworks: The HM claims she gives her 8 ‘friends’ “a framework within which to establish—indeed, to possess—their own special personalities.” (p. 198; HM 16). She does this in different ways: with the structure of the pathologies & 21 pages; with the structure of the day’s events; with the twitcher; & with her own perverse / provocative actions (all—she claims—are in their service).
Each character is utterly beholden to his or her body, the House Mother, & the pages. The HM herself is beholden to an inherited tradition, a Council, her own biological time bombs, and ultimately, always: the Writer.
Talk about the utility of these frameworks with respect to the characters in a nursing home and, separately, to us reading characters in a book.
Mediation. This is one of the central projects of the book. Everything we readers & the characters here use to know ourselves (and one another) is MEDIATED by something. And not necessarily by reliable things. Our memories change; our motives are false; our eyes fail; our doctor writes a 2 instead of an 8; our Writer has an agenda. In a piece of writing especially, identity is a collaboration, beginning with the fact of an author.
So who, in this book, can tell us who someone is and how? What happens when they’re not reliable? What happens when none of it is reliable?
Coda. Almost all of the sections end with: “Listen to her! No, doesn’t matter.” What is this repetition about?
The Author. The fact of an exterior writer is explicitly invoked at the end. So is the form: as HM “is getting near the end of the page, Ralphie!” (HM 20; 202) and on the next page says she’s “about to step…outside the convention, the framework of 22 pages per person.”
The HM, who acts the puppet master, is explicitly puppeted unto farce by the author. He doesn’t let you forget the conceit that there’s ever only one mind on the page: Johnson’s. Does it change the way you look back on the characters? Talk about this move.
Pathology. The description of each character’s pathology is sometimes voiced. “Everything everyone else has,” for example (RS 1; 161). Who’s voice is it? How does the pathology page affect your reading of each character?
House Mother’s pathology. By the time we get to it, the HM’s pathology sounds lightly voiced to me as well somehow. Maybe in its choice of afflictions? As if it’s not just reporting but inflicting it on her. Mean-spirited. But you tell me. How should we interpret the HM’s pathology of “malignant cerebral carcinoma (dormant)”? 40% for poor taste? How does it frame her narration?
Normal vs. Abnormal. How did you find the novel in terms of this authorial project?
HM’s section. Now what about ‘Frau Holstein’ (Frau Cow?)…on the slopes of
“Ivy! How dare you read a book during Entertainment! Who do you think you are?” (HM20; 202)
It calls itself a Comedy. Did you laugh?
