The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon by Charles Jensen (New Michigan Press, 2007)

New Michigan Press, 2007

Unlike the Octopus authors, Charles Jensen doesn’t play mind games with the artificial distinctions among categories. Rather, he creates a collage from bits and pieces of various genres in the service of a real, honest-to-god narrative. Of course, how to characterize that narrative poses problems of its own. Jensen gives us a (possibly) mad scientist who has invented a machine (the “physiotranslator”) for journeying to another dimension, a love story that continues beyond death (wasn’t there a movie about that?), as many clues as a Golden Age whodunit.

A young physicist, Edward Dixon, discovers the new dimension he calls “The Ghost-World” in 1921. As he writes in his thesis, “There are no palpable entities within this further dimension and so, much like the ghost stories of our youth, all that exists . . . are disembodied voices. Or, to put it plainly—language and its verbalization: the sound wave.” Thirteen years later, when he has constructed his physiotranslator, Dixon’s cancer-stricken wife Maribel, for whom “the Ghost-World was her only hope to survive the year,” volunteers to become “the first test subject.” What happens to Maribel after that can be reconstructed only indirectly, for she has disappeared from this world. Although Edward, in 1972, “confesses to the unintentional murder of his wife,” we are encouraged to surmise that she survives as a voice, able to reach her grieving husband by telephone.

So, is this a poetry chapbook or a piece of genre fiction (and if the latter, which genre)? Yes, it is. All of the above. Jensen tells the story as an assemblage. An excerpt from Edward’s thesis, an interview with his brother, and bits of a faux-biography do the heavy lifting—although none of these prose fragments achieves real understanding of the Dixons’ strange saga.

The “truth” emerges through the prose poems of Dixon’s diary entries (“Our voices connect in the Ghost-World. The overlap is all we have to give”) and the poetry of shredded documents “recovered from the Dixon papers” and reassembled. The literal-minded biographer notes that “these documents seem to be transcripts of a voice unlike Dixon’s” and quotes another scholar’s theory that they constitute “‘automatic writings’ resulting from the extensive drug and alcohol use of Dixon’s later years.”

We, smarter readers can guess that the speaker in these shreds is Maribel. Who else would declare herself like this?

To be shapeless
is what you’ve given me
I can’t describe the form of your voice, its energy
or the timbre of our love, which has its own noise.

Some sort of contact exists then, between the lovers, and Edward continues, over the decades, to seek a reunion with Maribel, which he may or may not have achieved when he vanishes on the night that a mysterious fire destroys his physiotranslator. One journal entry dated around the time of his disappearance reads in its entirety, “How do you love a lightning bolt? The answer: you do it quickly, and once.” A “singed fragment” found on the site of his “burned laboratory,” however, notes sadly, “They say lightning does not strike twice. It is true, it is true.”

Or is it? The final entry, another shredded and reassembled document, concludes:

There is no riddle
more complex than us. Simply say,

You have no need for body,
I am filled with you already.

Existence as disembodied language goes back at least as far as the myth of Echo and Narcissus and has beguiled poets from Ovid to the present. Don’t we imagine the survival of our words as a form of immortality? In Maribel Dixon, Charles Jensen finds another form—and quite an appealing one—to embody this eternal fascination with the power of the tongue (or sound wave).