“Trauma is a narrative problem” is a refrain that appears at various points in the book. Trauma “traffics first and foremost in uncertainty,” LaBarge writes. It defies the compulsion to identify cause and effect. It warps one’s sense of time, speeding it up and slowing it down. Dreams can capture this disorientation; fairy tales, too, which are “a realm of dream rather than a sphere of action.”
Language, for LaBarge, offers both constraint and possibility. In an epigraph, she includes a line from the critic Vivian Gornick: “The trick, she saw, was to pay strict attention to one’s actual experience and then find a way to make the writing accommodate it.” Later LaBarge quotes Samuel Beckett saying the task of the artist is “to find a form that accommodates the mess.”
Dog Days” traces her discovery of the form this accommodation could take. It begins with the lonely violence of waiting to die with a crocheted blanket over her head and ends with a commitment to engage with the world. “What happens to you happens to me happens to everyone and everything”: We all share the stubborn fact of our mortality.
LaBarge recounts how the poet and performer Antonin Artaud delivered his lecture at the Sorbonne on “Theater and the Plague” by rolling around on the floor, screaming and gasping. He later explained that he wanted his audience “to be terrified and wake up” because “they don’t understand that they are dead.”
But this anguish wasn’t the same as despair; in Artaud’s confrontation with finitude, LaBarge finds a measure of hope: “I read this desire to show the audience they are dead as an exhortation to live.”
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