Heather Folsom, Philosophie Thinly Clothed
and Other Stories
(Cadmus Editions)

Jack Foley

      The stories in Philosophie Thinly Clothed are marvelous, imaginative, funny, wild, but they are also in a certain sense limited. (For one thing, not a single male character appears in any of the book’s 251 pages: even when “The Devil” makes a Faust-like appearance, that figure is female, not male.) I want to begin with some remarks about the limitation.

      Philip E. Slater’s classic book, The Glory of Hera (1968) is a study of “pre-Oedipal” or “oral” relationships, relationships between mother and child. At the center of such relationships is a “conflict between the desire to merge and the desire to be free and separate.” Slater terms this conflict “the oral-narcissistic dilemma”:

[The dilemma] originates in a failure to negotiate successfully the transition from the infantile state of total narcissism and total dependence to one involving an awareness of the separate existence of others. As this awareness grows, one’s sense of narcissistic integrity and one’s dependency needs are simultaneously violated...Total fusion and stratospheric isolation become equally essential and equally terrifying.

[T]he serpent represents the oral-narcissistic dilemma because it is the most common symbol of boundary-ambiguity. It appears in connection with the boundary between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, male and female, and so on. Devouring and being devoured are associated with it, dying and being born, and everything that has to do with the edges of the body or with changes in its shape (pregnancy). Thus the sexual organs receive serpentine associations primarily because copulation blurs the boundaries of the organism....

      It is in this somewhat narrow emotional range that Heather Folsom’s stories take place. Compare this passage from Slater,

In this case the patient, an eight-year-old boy characterized by a “wish for and dread of being contained in the ‘mother box,’ acted out this ambivalence sequentially, “enclosing himself in a box, closet, or any dark place, only to burst out again using his feet vigorously,”

 Long ago, two dreams: one sleeping, one waking. In the sleeping dream the girl’s pale wrist was bound and the strong rope was tied around the first tree. The rope that held the other wrist was secured around the second tree. The two trees swayed so violently in a high wind, they exerted a terrible pull on each arm. The third force came from the legs, thrashing frantically in an effort to escape, with such energy that the body was horizontal, the legs running away in mid-air, increasing the pain.

It is the principal weakness of psychoanalytic students of mythology that they so often mistake oral phenomena for oedipal ones...Greater understanding of schizophrenic ideation has shown that beneath apparently oedipal fantasies one often finds a totally oral orientation to the world. 

      If Philosophie Thinly Clothed--not “veiled”--is an example of an “oral orientation to the world,” it is also one of the most brilliant, enjoyable books I have read in years. The subject matter may be limited, but it is by no means trivial, and the real “glory” of the book is its amazing capacity to present such subject matter in an astonishing number of forms. If in one sense the stories can all be “reduced” to the “oral-narcissistic dilemma,” in another sense they extend the oral-narcissistic dilemma into infinity. “The Rat Suit” alone is worthy of Kafka, and there are many other extraordinary tales.

      None of the stories is “realistic” in the usual sense of that word: they are fables, allegories, “fictions” in the Borgesian sense. None of them is very long. Yet we have the sense throughout of a “reality” staked out, claimed, and named. They are inhabitants of a new yet utterly familiar psychic territory.

      The stories are widely varied in subject matter. Many are complex and delicate in their feelings; all have amazing moments and odd twists of plot. (This is particularly true of the extraordinary “Mammae Potentes”--“Breasts of Power.”) A few (“The Good Doctor,” “The Biographers”) are overly explicit in drawing their moral: “She felt a rush of relief at her escape, gratitude for her guardian stubbornness. She was free to write and to fail.” Themes of magic, sincerity, watching, criminals, suicide, “revolutionary activity,” friendship, and the nature of female achievement emerge frequently. There are many moments of risk and escape--boundary crossings--some of which turn out badly, some well. In “The Hermit” a woman transforms herself from “hermit” to “Heroine.” Not surprisingly, there is a story dealing with “The Doorkeeper.” Slater’s idea of “everything that has to do with the edges of the body or with changes in its shape (pregnancy)” is illustrated here not by pregnancy (no men, no pregnancy) but by a woman who becomes tremendously fat in order to impress (and become) her unknowing “object of desire.” There are many mother/authority figures--often represented as “aunts”--who have to deal with “difficult,” rival daughters. One finds such confrontations in “Mammae Potentes,” “The Biographers,” and “The Last Criminal.” This latter story, one of the finest in the book, contains perhaps the most remarkable passage ever written about the mother/daughter problem:

 I had come to a decision: ice the kid. I couldn’t keep having those dreams. The way the kid was headed, she would be trying bigger and bigger stuff. Until the kid would be the big criminal and I would be history, meaning no longer history. I had worked too hard and lived too long to let some punk kid steal my legacy. I had never iced anyone in cold blood before. Self defense a couple of times. Never a kid. This would wake everybody up alright. No more telethons for me.

discovered that she took on the mannerisms of everyone she met--speech, gestures, facial expressions. It was automatic yet also deliberate: she would enter the other person and feel what they were feeling. In a sense, for at least a moment she was the other person.

      (“A Mirrorist”)

      There are no memorable “characters” in Philosophie Thinly Clothed, but there are many memorable gestures: these are after all fables, not “realistic” character studies, and in fables gesture counts far more than characterization. In such work it is not a central character but the fable itself--which is often filled with utterly improbable, sometimes impossible incidents--that lifts us into psyche. The stories Folsom writes are a metamorphosis of children’s stories, which are typically not about character but about adventure. As such, her stories express both the longing to inhabit the child’s consciousness and the simultaneous realization that it is finally impossible to do so.

      The opening story, “The House of Inspection,” tells of someone escaping from prison only to be slowly drawn back into it. Prisons of various kinds (including the hermit’s hut and the lion’s cage) as well as the perception of the self as “criminal” are major elements of this book. This suggests that Folsom too--at least as she is present here--is in a kind of prison. But she insists, in her captivity, that “prison” and “world” are interchangeable terms. Imagination stretches free of everything the stories are ostensibly about--or rather, presents it all (with an utterly straight face) in an excessive, stunning, hilarious, impossible context. The stories take us everywhere except into freedom.* Boundary anxiety hangs heavily over every page of this masterful, riveting, limited, stunningly ironic book. Philosophie Thinly Clothed is a marvelous example of the deep mythologizing of a “conflict between the desire to merge and the desire to be free and separate”:

The wind stopped. Everything was silent. The rat looked at its handiwork, blinked. It gnawed the remains of the ropes from its claws. Then it lumbered off in search of food.

      (“The Rat Suit”)

Jack Foley