Jaimy Gordon and the polyvocal world of Lord of Misrule

Award-winning author Jaimy Gordon visited UNT last Tuesday. In her Q&A with students and faculty, she described her writing as simultaneously "all about voice" and tightly plotted and carefully structured. She described the writing process as one which uses imagination to create or locate narrative in the raw material of the observable world. This creation comes though on the page via a "massaging" of language, sometimes using "a voice that's trying to replace the real world with its idiosyncratic output" in a technique that Gordon calls "heightened first person." Gordon also stressed grounding a story in the literal world and creating a plot that unfolds towards a central event that connects all of the characters. The story, she said, should function on two levels: a surface story that contains a deeper undertow or undercurrent of thematic depth. Although she draws from folktales, fairy tales, opera, and a host of writers stretching from present day to the seventeenth century, Gordon keeps her own writing in Lord of Misrule, winner of the 2010 National Book Award, solidly planted in the universe of its racetrack setting.

Author Andrei Codrescu, one of the fiction judges for the 2010 National Book Award, states that Jaimy Gordon has "an incredible command of other voices, and a sense of music in language that is unequaled.” Lord of Misrule is praised as “moving and lyrical,” possessing prose that is “moody, poetic, darkly funny,” with language that is “so textured that her pages seem three-dimensional.” In the world of Lord of Misrule, racetrack slang mingles with gangster dialect and the ingredients for “horse goofer dust,” a magical concoction that guarantees a horse to win—but also results in that horse’s destruction. A polyvocal novel, each section of Lord of Misrule shows us another facet of the world of horse racing: owners and trainers, groomers and jockeys, gangster financiers and, of course, the horses themselves, who speak though their intricately described gestures on and off the track. 

Lord of Misrule is also a page-turner, masterfully constructed of unexpected reversals of fortune. And as Jaimy Gordon states in an interview with Bret Anthony Johnston, she “believes deeply in plot, or rather in whatever attribute it is of novels that makes a reader need to know what happens in the end.” Horse racing presents an obvious arc: who will win? And in the hands of a lesser writer, a horse race’s outcome might be the central question of the book. But by the time we get to the arrival of the Lord of Misrule, the titular horse, we’ve already been through three races, and a kidnapping, and watched as each voice, gesture, and description, using language high and low, spirals around a tightly constructed core. The Lord of Misrule appears in the final section of the novel, a demon horse brought in to run a fixed race. The melee of Gordon’s close-third perspectives unites to watch him arrive in third person plural: “They were all looking for a van like a Chinese jewel box.” In this van— a vehicle in fact disappointingly ordinary—is the horse, who possesses a head that is “calm, black and poisonous of mien as a slag pile in a coal yard. He had a funny white stripe like a question mark on his forehead.” The horse’s arrival is big news, “they looked at each other and they thought, this is big, and how can we get a piece of it, we’ll take anything, even a hoof paring, sawdust, loose change.” But The Lord of Misrule could care less about their adoration, providing a stark contrast between the stuff of dreams and the more mundane ingredients of hard realities. Upon arriving at the run-down Indian Mound Downs, he throws back this same head and “snorted out dust and rolled his eye at the other cheap horses. His black tail arched and, ugly as Rumpelstiltskin, he let drop great soft nuggets, part gold, part straw, all the way down the ramp.”

Please join us on Thursday, November 3rd for our next visiting writer, poet Carl Phillips, who will participate in a Q&A in LANG 314 at 4 pm and give a reading in the Golden Eagle Suite of the University Union at 8 pm. Phillips' most recent book, Double Shadow (FSG 2011) was just named a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in poetry.