Burma Shave Ads Along the Road to Perdition
On Joy Williams's story collection "Concerning the Future of Souls"
In Paul Schraeder’s 2017 film First Reformed, an anguished parishioner asks his Reverend a simple question: “Will God forgive us for what we’ve done to this world?” The Reverend has no answer besides “Who can know the mind of God?”, and spends the rest of the film wrestling with humanity’s slow destruction of God’s planet. Seven years later, Joy Williams may have come up with a better answer to that question, one that doesn’t eventually require a bomb vest. The story’s title quotes Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” - “May the judgement not be too heavy on us” and responds with only the simple retort: “Why not?” In Williams’s new collection, Concerning the Future of Souls, a follow up to her 2016 collection Ninety-nine Stories of God, Williams provides 99 more encounters between the higher heavenly world and the rapidly deteriorating one down here, this time focusing on Azrael, the biblical psychopomp responsible for the transportation of souls between their hosts.
Joy Williams still writes traditional stories – here’s a good recent one from The New Yorker – and came out with a novel not too long ago - 2021’s Harrow – but these last two collections of stories have marked a shift into what we could call Williams’s ‘late style’: each story is numbered, 1-99; they rarely stretch beyond three pages and are often just one paragraph; and their title comes after the text of the story, sometimes acting as a punchline, sometimes a quote or citation, and sometimes a clarifying image. For a quick example, story 33 reads:
The Elysian Fields should not be confused with the Asphodel Meadows. ͟M͟A͟P͟ ͟Y͟O͟U͟R͟ ͟R͟O͟U͟T͟E͟
The experience of reading through the book is not unlike those old Burma Shave highway advertisements or the roadside sermons of Flannery O’Connor’s driving scenes (famously: “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”) – a slow procession of signs, one line, another line, and then a final tag. Like O’Connor, Williams is interested in the many shades of grace that fall upon our benighted world, but she has winnowed down her form into a kind of airy concision, little scenes and ruminations untethered from having to be the anchors of a longer story. It’s a bit of Lydia Davis’s or Diane Williams’s flash fictions, a bit of Kafka’s aphorisms, and a splash of Anne Carson’s Red books, but also something entirely her own. Like in Harrow, where Williams fixates on the character of Enoch, one of the few non-Jesus Biblical figures to escape death, Williams has taken a liminal theological presence to the center in order to think through our passing on to the next world, if we have the good luck to be brought to it.
Azrael is often depicted as the angel of death and linked with the Devil himself, and so many of these stories see Azrael – charmingly beatific, a little naive, “so innocent, so eternally, newly fledged” – in conversation with a world-weary and vain Lucifer, who may have lost the battle against God but seems to have won the war in the human realm, much to his displeasure. As in Story 39:
When he was in one of his blue periods, the Devil feared that he had lost his edge, that alien awareness that sees matters differently, that thinks differently. That it was gone. And what remained had been embraced, enthusiastically embraced by the predictably human, the tares that made up his unholy aggregate. They were perennially hungry and impatient, they were boring. He couldn't stand most of his followers, they were bums. And there we so many of them, it would appear that he had won. But he didn't want to win, he wanted to keep playing the game. ͟T͟A͟R͟E͟S͟
Compare this sore-winner drudgery to story 19, where Azrael dreamily completes his duties: “The souls made no sound as Azrael transported them. Never had one attempted to engage him in thought. The journey was made in perfect silence. They seemed wonderstruck.” But despite his holy function, Azrael is lagging behind humans’ devilish ways; in story 28, Azrael alights upon a “vanished forest, amidst the smoldering stumps… More and more Azrael was arriving too late for the world … The forest had been a living thing and now it was not. Azrael felt a little sick, He was still more or less on time with humans but was finding it harder and harder to keep up with everyone else… His methods were being disrupted by the sheer precipitous magnitude of it all.” The animals’ souls that Azrael picks up, “octopi and sharks, great fishes and rays and turtles, even the glittering lowly ones, the little ones … would fear no further judgement,” unlike those human souls who must past eventually muster for their deleterious habits.
The collection would be entertaining enough as just a sort of odd-couple tête-à-tête between Azrael and the Devil, but Williams spends just as much time in the human world, elucidating small moments not only of, as one character says in Harrow, the world’s death because humans are “dead to its astonishments, pretty much” – a fragment of Uluru stolen and misplaced, a bit of ‘humanely-raised’ beef eaten unthinkingly – but also strange moments of unexpected grace (the only way it can come) and bits of surreal yet everyday humor, sometimes all at once. In “FOAL,” a grandmother remembers a skywriting proposal at the beach that spells out “I Love You Aster Marry Me in letters of smoke. But the beginning was disappearing before the end appeared,” a Kafka-like description of an important message from above being rendered unreadable as it appears; the story is then sidetracked by a young listener’s interest in the beach boardwalk’s attraction of a “horse who would leap from a high platform into a barrel of water,” all of it eventually leaving the young listener a little confused, a succession of messages lost over time and by translation, a bit like the holy texts themselves. Another story concerns “the Franciscan John Duns Scotus,” known for his medieval concept of “The Univocity of Being,” the idea that “All life – water, trees, animals – participate in the same Being and that Being is holy.” Yet centuries later, “the ideas of Renaissance humanism prevailed in European thought with its emphasis on the self and the centrality of the human in the cosmos,” and thus Scotus’s holy vision of a unified world is scorned, and he and his followers go from Dunsmen to dunces, God’s world irrevocably separated from his people by the drive of individualism.
Some of the stories reach beyond the intelligible and digestible and into the provenance of dreams, images beyond words. As Azrael says to the Devil, “You dream a dream according to one order and remember it in another … [t]o make it more comprehensible,” and Williams litters her collection with messages just before the moment of comprehension, an understanding beyond logic. A man and his dog share a moment in a garden; the man thinks of a two monks who sit in silence, before “one of them broke into loud laughter. He pointed across the lawn and said, ‘They call that a tree,’ whereupon the other monk began to laugh as well.” The man can only think to say to his dog, looking upon a similar scene, “You’re going to like this shampoo, it gets rid of flicks and teas,” which he immediately knows “with violent assurance that it wasn’t at all what he ultimately have wanted to say,” words failing the vision. Another dreamer is led by angels to “Two elephants … their trunks entwined. His instinct is to speak, to ask a question but he feels it is better to be quiet. He is quiet. Touch them, one of the angels says. He makes his way towards the elephants. He walks and walks. The light never wavers though surely darkness has fallen by now.” The story is tagged “OPPORTUNITY,” though, as in dreams, we are never given the answer as to what that opportunity is, just the image of an eternal light and those beguiling elephants.
Williams’s allusions and citations throughout the collection range from Pascal to Washoe the signing chimp, and beyond many more thinkers; between these two latest collections, she’s created a kind of commonplace book for the long sloughing off of the Anthropocene. If she’s the Virgil to all of us Dantes “within a shadowed forest,” or perhaps a forest already cruelly wiped from the earth, ready to guide us towards the next world, well, I’ve got my sunglasses ready, Joy.
You can get Concerning the Future of Souls at your local bookstore, local library, or online at Bookshop.org, where purchases support independent bookstores around the country. If you liked this post, please share it with a friend!
Previous writing on Joy Williams: