by Thomas Johnson
July 2, 2024
Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams; Tin House; 161 pages; $22.95.
Take a look at everything and imagine: we’re going to have to do all of this a second time. That’s what the stories of Joy Williams’s Concerning the Future of Souls suggest anyway, that history does truly repeat. It becomes apparent that the author is seeking this effect immediately and profoundly, having sculpted her sequel to 99 Stories of God from the same scaffolding as its predecessor and giving it the same lean. We’re here to pass through the anthropomorphized stories of Azrael, angel transporter of souls, as he discusses his role in death with the Devil, unnamed. This is just like those of the stories of God that came before and none of it by mistake.
What is it then that conjures Williams to revisit the form and to say something new? I could take a guess.
Subtitled “99 Stories of Azrael” the collection is a new mirror into our current condition based on all the things that came before, everything from the differences between Abrahamic and Buddhist traditions to the current state of forests in Siberia. Just like that first collection, Williams’s stories here range from single words and images to a couple pages’ worth of reflections and vignettes, often seeking the eloquent flow of discordant poems enjoined for effect. The language remains classic, serene, and approachable. And by keeping the form familiar for her readers, Williams stays right in her lane of slowly illuminating many thoughtful discoveries by using the folklore of religious belief to poke at the absurdity of this, our modern condition.
She looks everywhere, too, for these discoveries. Notable figures from history and literature appear at mention and disappear with the page. Octopi receive multiple mentions where Friedrich Nietzsche gets only a secondary reference in passing. And in between each of the 99 stories Williams builds a growing dialogue between Azrael and The Devil concerning things of just about the same nature. Readers will ask themselves, what’s the point of this absurdity? That itself is very much the point.
Comte de Lautréamont passed away long before his Les Chants de Moldoror took hold of the French Surrealist and Dada movements, but his lengthy 19th Century prose poem about the chants of an unnamed evil one make for a good comparison here, built around digressive cantos that shift from first person narrative to third person story, mostly without plot and drafted to address the reader directly as a provocation into the ridiculous and the illogical. You can see why it later became cited as influential to Dalí, Magritte, and Modigliani. The point of Lautréamont’s nonsense is to recognize all the nonsense around us that exists in spite of our clawing efforts – as if readers, we the people, are so used to the habit of seeking meaning and semblance that we should at once understand there is none to be found.
With Souls, Williams pokes the same bear by keeping human what we tend to lift into iconography. For our betters, she reduces Dylan Thomas to his foibles (“Dylan Thomas Spoke No Welsh”) and writes of Robert Lowell that the American poet “on writing a poem about the death of the family’s guinea pig, Mrs. Muffin, was moved to quote Heidegger” (“Time Is Ecstasy”). These are both facts, data stripped of its emotion and bared to its mathematical certainty, which on rendering becomes irrational. Of what consonance does a family pet ring with Heidegger? The answer is the sound of laughter.
This is the joy in reading Williams’s collection. The crafting of cohesion (and there is cohesion) appears only slowly at first, drifting through recollection, data mining, and heresy, before colliding into a poignant warning by the author. Nothing here in these stories is accident, everything placed intricately and with precision to beg the reader’s curiosity and ponderous thoughts before making way to affirmation. Stories lead one into the next, and though not always at first directly, they occur with a profundity as to allow the reader their own discovery into the path and direction the author is taking:
“The soul was not present.
Subsumed? The Devil asked, calm again.
I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t there. It was as if the tattoos had nibbled it to nothing. It was gone.
Oh that’s a good one, the Devil said.” (“End Result”)
And right as the reader (myself in this position) questions if Williams is making the accusation that tattoos and body modification allow the soul to seep from the body, Azrael asks for us at the onset of the following story:
“Could it be that souls are leaving a person before the body dies?” (“A Sinking Ship”)
Williams isn’t making a statement about tattoos but ponders instead the mere possibility of a waking death, a life without living. Can a soul really be gone before death? There isn’t an answer because there couldn’t be, but it’s in the asking that Williams’s proves her merit and, for my money, represents the raison d’etre of the piece. We have to at least ask the question, don’t we? Because what else are we to do in a burning world seemingly bereft of hope, as cancer races through our bodies (“Striking Style”) and oceans are desalinized (“Salt”)? Williams thinks an answer might be in the heavens if it isn’t on earth – Azrael’s thousand eyes watching over the souls of animals are slowly closing and covered with salt, without spirits to guide, never to open again. In the end, Williams gives the Devil a sand timer. The author discusses it at length, providing multiple descriptions of symmetrical form meeting in the center, two cones with a singular path that starts one way and returns again. This is the final allusion to Azrael’s discussion with the Devil on the oneness of souls in the afterlife – “all souls participate in the same Being and that Being is holy” (“dunce”) – and alludes to the synthesis of the Inner Fire in the traditions of Tibetan mysticism, binding terrestrial knowledge with cosmological destiny through the pathway of human existence, our bodies caught in the center of transmogrification. On one side of the timer sits one universe and on the other side another. Caught in the middle there is our planetary struggle. But the Devil flips it over, see? This is Williams’s gift to us. This knowledge of knowing, that the coming turn is always approaching, that we’re always going to have to keep flipping the sequence of all history over again, can be the source of inspiration. We don’t have to like the stripping of the trees from the biosphere, and we don’t have to like the death of our loved ones. We don’t have to like the way any of this is going. After the Devil flips the timer, Azrael leaves to commit his journey again, taking souls into the afterlife, but this time appears “improbable glorious weary sorrowful. Still rejoicing, but this time the tiniest bit less” (“The Orphan”). But what if it doesn’t have to be that way? Well, then, that would concern the future of souls, wouldn’t it.__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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Joy Williams’s Concerning the Future of Souls Says We Don’t Have to Keep Doing This
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Jordan Benton from Pexels
Thomas Johnson lives in Washington, D.C. and works as Reviews Editor for West Trade Review. He received a Master of Arts in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. Johnson graduated from the University of Texas at Austin before enlisting in the United States Army. His work is available in the Museum of Americana Literary Review, Cleaver Magazine, and Valparaiso Fiction Review.
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