The Microcosm and Extraordinary Stories
Oh hello
Marble floors, clacking heels above, climbing upwards, lunging, holding the rail, striding, level three, staggering, down the hall to a room that encloses sound, where my violin teacher, composed with hair like Miranda July’s, sits. She tells me I need to focus on my scales more. I should block out distractions. I tell her I have had a lot on this week. She says, drily: same. She says but you must, you must focus on your scales, particularly chromatic, because you are weakest at those, if you want to continue to improve at the violin. She says there’s no need to get metaphorical here. You can keep your messy room. I am not asking you to structure a five year plan and a daily bullet list. I am really, listen, really only telling you to do your scales everyday.
But it’s too late, of course. I’m gone, already, my phone has been vibrating throughout with 11 Feeld notifications, messages from someone who had not replied for 6 weeks. I have a date tonight. I will focus on the scales tomorrow but they are unfortunately just not something I can pay attention to right now. No one has held me since my last failed so called out of body experience which one friend described as clearly articulating what you want, and another as: kind of fucked up. I returned (do we ever leave) to the violin because I wanted a closer relationship to the sublime in 2023 and I really like the smell of rosin. And also, perhaps, because I wanted to construct a scaffold for my life, when really I needed to demolish it, and only keep one shoe box of baby teeth and favourite mugs and year 4 swimming champ breaststroke medals. So now, I’m descending the stairs, willing that each step continues to drop before me forever, with each floor my tread becoming lighter, my focus returning to what I have to do now, which is go down the stairs.
This week, I’m writing about Maureen Duffy’s The Microcosm (1966) and Mariano Llinás’ Extraordinary Stories (2008). The Microcosm centres around a London lesbian bar, The House of Shades. Extraordinary Stories floats between three stories across Argentina. Both are anthology works, that deal with loneliness and community, grouping characters without the whip of a shared plot, but their forms are markedly different: where Duffy’s novel contains characters that are closely connected in space and with love, Llinás’ work is tautly narrated but has more room between the stories. If drawn, The Microcosm would look like kids drawing circles overlapping on a page. Extraordinary Stories would be like one child’s drawings scattered and retraced throughout their homework.
The Microcosm (1966) by Maureen Duffy
“And I think by now you must be earth, earth or slime”, Maureen Duffy starts The Microcosm, a novel that swivels between lesbians living in 1960s London, held by and stuck in (both earth and slime) their community that hangs out most nights at The House of Shades. There is Matt, a philosophical butch mechanic who feels insecure at his lack of normative success, who appears throughout. And there is Miss Stephens, a teacher who worries about seeing her students at the bar; Marie, married unthinkingly to Guy, who experiences a gay awakening at the beach on holiday; Cathy who moves to London and becomes a bus conductor; and Judy who is getting ready to go out: “All day has been devoted to the preparation of her exquisite body.”
Duffy, in the afterword, describes her style as “mosaic” but it is a mosaic in which the tiles press hard against each other, sometimes, perhaps in a rush, overlapping. The stories, with the exception of Matt’s, stop and start without hesitation or completeness. This leaves you, the reader, bereft.
My favourite story is Cathy’s. She moves to London and is practical, focussing first on a job (bus conductor) then on a place to live (small room, shared bathroom). Only then, with those bookends in place, her gay coworker takes her to a bar to meet people. There, not making friends—it’s too early for that—but meeting other lesbians, and imagining a future of friendship, love and support with them, she experiences a moment, like we’ve all had, where aspects of your life are slowly clicking into a place that feels right. At the bar, she “found herself clenching her palms tight so that something tangible shouldn’t slip away”.
Cathy’s story glimmers with the hope and embrace that community—that walking down the stairs into The House of Shades—can offer. Duffy sees the bar as a crucial respite to the loneliness of modern life: “the terrible corroding loneliness all day until in the evening you seem to have lost the power or will to speak”. Matt again: “We keep ourselves too much apart instead of making a place for ourselves and taking it.” The Microcosm represents a memorial to a physical centring of community that, in the contemporary metropolitan city, is slipping away from us.
The novel toys, as well, with our persistent ambivalence about which direction of the stairs to take. Matt describes gay life as a rock pool, “a microcosm”. “You think it contains all you want, all varieties of human experience and just as you’re becoming thoroughly absorbed in it a great wave washes over it and you realise it’s not complete in itself”. For much of the novel, Matt is supported by the loving community that he has but feels, at the same time, unfulfilled. There is a nagging ache that the world beyond his rock pool—a world that every now and then washes over him to remind him of its existence—that that larger world has more for him. Matt, scared but frustrated, is restless to own what he wants for himself. He wants to be out in the world as himself. He can’t stay in the earth and slime. “I’m just taking up my whole personality and walking quietly out into the world with it.”
Extraordinary Stories (2008) by Mariano Llinás
H is driving up a river looking for monoliths. X is hiding in a hotel room. Z is following a trail left by the predecessor to his job who died alone. H meets someone who is blowing up the monoliths. They travel together, H photographing the monoliths, the other blowing them up. X, who shoots a man who appeared on a tractor, begins to like his hotel room. He doesn’t want to leave. Z visits a stud farm in which he finds a lion that is about to be poisoned. The farm is burnt down and he stays, next door, with a family that laugh at his jokes. H is driving up the river so that someone else can win a bet. The river floods. X reads about his story in the newspaper. He sees his neighbour at breakfast in the hotel bar and considers it ominous. Z falls into the family’s routine.
There is a lot of dust.
Extraordinary Stories is a four hour film by Mariano Llinás, the Argentinian director known for Le Flor which is 14 hours long. Where The Microcosm moves between the perspective of each character, Extraordinary Stories is closely narrated with a deadpan voice over that contrasts with the space of the Argentinian countryside. The characters do not meet but share a common focus on quests that are endless, pointless and from which they stray.
Despite its length and uncentred plot, Extraordinary Stories remains compelling, moreish in tone. Like The Microcosm, it also offers, I think, moving narratives on alienation in contemporary life and the struggle to find meaning and worth within it. There is a ridiculousness to H, Z and X’s lives: a comic futility—reflected in part in there being no dialogue, only narration—that they seem aware of but remain powerless to change. Each character can’t escape, I felt, making themselves feel small. They struggle to imbue meaning into their lives when the world that they live in feels both mysterious and infinitely large. H, Z and X are drawn to their quests but they aren’t permitted to focus, solely, on their smaller lives: their microcosms. Z comes close. When he moves in with the family next to the stud farm where the lion died, the home is like a vista that offers him the close borders that he needs to regain his spirit. But Z is restless and cannot stay forever. The father of the house becomes interested in Z’s quest—that he had put on hold—and reignites his devotion to it. Matt’s wave washes over and the unfathomably large world returns.
There is a flippancy to the storytelling—the narrator says, for instance, “This is a possible end for X’s story”—that indicates a belief in the flexibility with which life unfolds and comes apart; the randomness of events that appear and then obstruct and then recede again. Life is so crazy, we are always saying. So unpredictable, we chorus. So large, so vast, but still, still, so connected, we reply. Extraordinary Stories is an epic that chews at those feelings: of the messy grandness of life and its interconnected disparateness. X, Z and H’s stories do not grow nearer in place or narrative. Yet in their placement together, as we move between them scene after scene, a lovely narrative blurring occurs. A shared structure starts to take shape. The stories begin to connect.
Love
Anne