Reversing the Ordinary: Comedic Effects in Richard Garcia's Poem, "In the Year 1946"

by Ian Randall Wilson

I've often wondered how external influences can affect a poet's work. The poet Richard Garcia, born in 1941, is part of a group of American poets who are in their fifties. Mainstream poets such as Thomas Lux, David St. John, and Reg Gibbons are in this group. But also poets such as Alice Notley, Wanda Coleman, and Paul Hoover.

Garcia was, no doubt, subject to influences such as the impact of the end of World War II and the rise of the U.S. as a nation and a culture with huge effects on the rest of the world. He says in his collection, The Flying Garcias, that he grew up "in a house without books." One has to consider its effect on the writer. The lack of exposure to books suggests that if he had a love of language, it would have been spoken, not written.

There is evidence of this spoken quality in The Flying Garcias. I heartily urge readers to check out this book of poems for its highly inventive quality and storytelling atmosphere. The poems are characterized by a prosaic, narrative style that frequently uses colloquial language and imports pop images. Maura Stanton, on the back-cover blurb, calls it "a hybrid of the lyrical and the colloquial." But I don't see the lyric impulse at work in language, unless what she refers to is the brevity of the situations described. The poems are also characterized by the use of humor and images that could be considered surrealist.

A Storyteller at Work
In the wonderful poem, "In the Year 1946," the form and tone of the poem is like that of a storyteller at work. The poem has the feeling of being spoken. The five stanzas are much more "paragraphs" than a bundle of broken lines creating something akin to a short-short story. The form also calls into question our notion of what is a poem, and the stanzas disguise some of Garcia's craft.

At first, the tone seems spoken in the style of a storyteller: plain-spoken language. But upon a closer look, even at the first stanza, the tone modulates between the "writerly" and the "speakerly," and this tonal shift forms one of the reversals that contributes to the comedic effect.

Roland Barthes describes a "writerly" text as a difficult text, on that reveals itself as written by the consciousness standing behind, directing the piece through the conventions of writing. That is, the reader is active in the reading process, filling in the gaps, becoming "a producer of the text." Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes that "The Speakerly Text refers to a text whose rhetorical strategy is designed to represent an oral literary history."

Integrating the Two
There is clear evidence in "In the Year 1946" of lines that are constructed and lines that seem more like speech or storytelling. They represent important shifts in tone. It's a telling mark of Garcia's craft that he is able to integrate the two (writerly and speakerly) in a natural way.

The first sentence is highly constructed: "In the year 1946 a young sailor came bounding up the stairs, leapt into the kitchen, and with arms spread out, exclaimed, 'I'm home!' " This declaration by the sailor is held in dramatic tension until the end of the line. Nineteen forty-six is qualified as "the year." The word "came" is more studied than natural. The sentence proceeds in careful clauses separated by commas. The language of the stanza is simple and plain-spoken. The domestic situation is rendered using clichéd action verbs that also have a strong suggestion of cartoon movement, such as "bounding up the stairs" and "leapt into the kitchen." The scene becomes familiar and imaginable as a result, also easily seen. Only the moment of dialogue feels truly spoken.

Reversals
The comedy is in the reversals. Following the sailor, there's the unexpected reaction from the family: silence. We learn that the family is "not his mother, brothers and sisters." Finally, what we see as a punchline comes in the last two lines: " 'Sorry,' he said, 'wrong house.' "

The reversals in themselves don't produce the comedic effects. It's the reversals coupled with another kind of shift -- the change in tone from writerly to speakerly -- that complete the effect. To test this idea, I've recast the stanza as if it were completely spoken:

"One day in 1946 a young sailor ran up the stairs into our kitchen. He had his arms open and he shouted, 'I'm home!' We stared at him but we didn't say anything. He wasn't in our family. 'Sorry,' he said, 'wrong house.'"

The same reversals are present but they don't have much comedic impact
because the tone is now wholly consistent and at the same level. There is no
change in dynamics to produce the comedy (though the final line of dialogue
has the kind of unexpected timing elements that make it act as a punchline).

This pattern of situational reversals as well as the modulation between the writerly and the speakerly continues throughout the poem. In the next stanza, the situation is more generalized. The sailor never alters his pattern of searching for the correct house, but each time he's thwarted, reversed, as "people no longer leave their doors unlocked." Whether he's the cause of this or if there's some "societal change" at work, we don't know. There's another level of comedy because there is an irony in this behavior change on the part of the homeowners. Perhaps the most humorous line is once more close to a punchline, that the sailor "has to ring the bell."

Stanza three has another reversal. The speaker turns away from the sailor's plight and moves to consider himself. The speaker becomes another person, a stranger to his family, someone who spits and curses God, allies himself with the devil. The stanza uses the same pattern as the first stanza, with the lines of dialogue that modulate between the writerly and the speakerly. In his strangeness, the speaker is not so different from the young sailor searching for his home.

The final reversal is a reiteration of the opening stanza's situation, and the notion of "silence." The speaker offers access to the mind of the family as they wonder "who is this boy?" Just as they wondered at the beginning, who is this (sailor) boy?

Ordinary Language
Garcia manages to accomplish these reversals and his comedic effects with plain, ordinary language. The details are often quotidian: a staircase, a radio, a sailor after the war, the speaker describing himself with hands raised as a "triumphant fighter," the "busted wing" of the bird, the sister's use of a wrestling hammerlock. The final questions are ordinary, too: "Who is this boy? Where did he come from? Are we his family?" The middle question is perhaps the most colloquial as it ends on a preposition rather than recasting for grammatical purposes -- again, evidence of a shift to the speakerly.

My first reading of this poem, and many of his other poems in The Flying Garcias, led me to decide that the issue raised by Garcia is the difficulty of producing comedic effects while using the lyrical at the same time. A closer reading, though, reveals that Garcia produces complexity through the writerly nature of portions of his work. I conclude that the lyric impulse would include not just the words themselves, but the word choice (diction) and syntax used. I also conclude that what I call 'reversals' are a comedic technique but need to work in concert with other effects in order to produce the humor or lyricism.

-- IRW
©1999 Ian Randall Wilson

Ian Randall Wilson is a prolific poet, short story writer, and novelist who lives in Los Angeles, California. His poems and short stories have appeared in many national magazines and literary journals, including The Gettysburg Review and The North American Review.