EXPLORINGfictions

Douglas Messerli "Prophets of the Ordinary" (on Jane Bowles' Two Serious Ladies)

2011-12-03T08:27:00.000-08:00

prophets of the ordinary
by Douglas Messerli

Jane Bowles Two Serious Ladies in My Sister's Hand in Mine: An Expanded Edition of the Collected Works of Jane Bowles (New York: The Ecco Press, 1978)

The two serious ladies of Jane Bowles' title, are, in many ways, as different as they could be; and, although they know one another slightly, they are not good friends. Bowles presents us with a brief history of Christina Goering, daughter of a wealthy American industrialist. Even as a child Christina was not appealing, most children refusing to play with her because of in the puritanical religious games she demanded along with a bizarre series of punishments, in one case involving being packed in mud before swimming in a small stream.

Yet, as with almost all Bowles' women, she is strong-minded, opinionated, and feels no regret for speaking forthrightly. She is, in some senses, an absolute monster. Yet, throughout her life, she attracts people to her, or at least they are attracted to her because of her money. Lucy Gamelon, despite having any real connection to Miss Goering, visits her one day, only to move in with her the next day. At a party, Miss Goering meets a sweating, overweight man, Arnold, who soon also moves in with her and Miss Gamelon.

But hardly has this tale begun, with its completely unexpected results, before Bowles interrupts it to tell another story, about Mrs. Copperfield. The two meet momentarily at the party, but other than that, there seems to be little connection, and one can only wonder at the structural logic of Bowles' fiction.

For all that, we do, however, sense a link between the two other than the authorial declaration of them both being "serious" ladies. Mrs. Copperfield is far more hesitant in doing new things than is Miss Goering, yet it is she who actually travels, with her husband, to Panama. And once she is ensconced into the run-down hotel in the middle of town to which he has taken her—determined to forgo the expense of the more popular tourist hotel—she appears far more adventuresome than anyone else in the fiction.

Certainly her first foray into Colón street life is characterized as a Kafka-like nightmare:

They were walking through the streets arm in arm. Mrs. Copperfield's

forehead was burning hot and her hands were cold. She felt something

trembling in the pit of her stomach. When she looked ahead of her the

very end of the street seemed to bend and then straighten out again...

Above their heads the children were jumping up and down on the wooden

porches and making the houses shake. Someone bumped against Mrs.

Copperfield's shoulder and she was almost knocked over. At the same

time she was aware of the strong and fragrant odor of rose perfume. The

person who had collided with her was a Negress in a pink silk evening dress.

..."Listen," said the Negress, "go down the next street and you'll like it

better. I've got to meet my beau over at that bar." She pointed it out to them.

"That's a beautiful barroom. Everyone goes in there," she said. She moved up

closer and addressed herself solely to Mrs. Copperfield. "You come along

with me, darling, and you'' have the happiest time you've ever had before.

I'll be your type. Come on."

....The Negress caressed Mrs. Copperfield's face with the palm of her hand. "Is

that what you want to do darling, or do you want to come along with me."

....:Wasn't that the strangest thing you've ever seen?" said Mrs. Copperfield

breathlessly.

It is precisely scenes like this, or even more normal-seeming meetings wherein the characters say totally unpredictable things that entice us into Bowles' story and helps us to comprehend Mrs. Copperfield's actions. For no sooner has she encountered this strange world than she is truly sucked up into it, joining, ultimately, the prostitute Pacifica, who encourages her to move into the Hotel de las Palmas where she lives.

Giving up her husband's hotel, and, finally, even her husband himself, the timid and frightened Mrs. Copperfield discovers the friendship and love of the local prostitutes and shares time with them drinking in bars. By the end of her story, we recognize that she, like Miss Goering, is a woman on a mission to challenge herself, to alter her life, and survive in conditions she might never have imagined. Similar to Miss Goering, this serious woman is rushing into the unknown as a kind of punishment and test for her own fears. As Mr. Copperfield writes, in his goodbye letter to his wife:

Like most people, you are not able to face more than one fear during your

lifetime. You also spend your life fleeing from your first fear towards

your first hope. Be careful that you do not, through your own wiliness,

end up in the same position in which you began.

In short, as we are about to discover, Mrs. Copperfield—although a much more charming and, at times, disarmingly sensual woman, is of the same breed as Miss Goering, both of them being strong strictly-raised women of great eccentricity testing themselves over and over again to challenge the patterns of their lives.

When we return to the story of Miss Goering, accordingly, we read her increasingly bizarre shifts in reality with the knowledge that, as in the case of Mrs. Copperfield, it can result in significant sensual changes.

Yet, as we have been told, Miss Goering's seriousness is more of the religious type than Mrs. Copperfield's inconsistencies. She is determined to challenge almost all her fears. She sells her lovely house, despite the outcry of the parasitic Miss Gamelon and challenges of the t dependent Arnold, moving to an industrial island near Staten Island into a house with little charm and hardly any heat.

When a third man, Arnold's father, determines to join their strange little community, Christina begins traveling to the larger island, visiting a local derelict bar and accepting the offers of its male customers to join them in bed.

After her first adventure, she reports that she intends to return, admitting that she may not come immediately come back. One by one, the remaining trio who have lived with and off of her fortune, abandon the house, Arnold having discovered a new love, Miss Gamelon having moved into another house, and Arnold's father returning to his wife. In the end Miss Goering, who has gone off with a ugly man who believes she is a prostitute, must face a future even more undetermined than Mrs. Copperfield, who has returned to New York with Pacifica in tow—although it does appear that Pacifica may not soon bolt.

Even Miss Goering, although believing that the challenges she has set before her, has made her "nearer to becoming a saint," wonders if she hasn't been piling "sin upon sin as fast as Mrs. Copperfield." For these strong women have both become dependent upon the flesh.

The marvel of Bowels' strange tale is its complete originality. Although, the events she tells are often strange, even a bit surreal, they are played out in a seemingly logical way that they seem the more incredible for their occurring. Most important, the central figures speak in the linguistic pattern, mixing a kind of nineteenth century rhetoric with a language which might be at home on the street. In a very odd way, Bowles' language is as outlandish as is Damon Runyon's—except that although these characters, like Runyon's, are not particularly educated, their talking is a process of thought instead of simple communication. And in that sense, they are always participating in a dialogue—socially or interiorized—with everyone around them, with the entire world.

At times, in fact, it seems that the whole world might potentially be pulled into Bowles' tale as the two serious ladies travel about, gathering up friends and lovers as they go. Both are heavy drinkers, who prefer to sit at the bar and seem able to attract anyone to them with whom they speak. Critics have mentioned the pattern of twos and threes that accumulate around Mrs. Copperfield and Miss Goering, but I would argue that while the two do tend to alternate between duos and trios, like magnets they might equally attract dozens of willing partners, men and women. And, in that sense, these highly wrought women are a bit like latter-day prophets, missionaries who in preaching to the natives, willingly take on the attributes and behavior of those whom they might seek to save, transforming themselves, in the end, into absolutely ordinary human beings. Yet both, strangely, have become something larger simply through their abilities to change their lives.

Los Angeles, November 29, 2011

Douglas Messerli | "Life in Duluth" (on John Ashbery's and James Schuyler's Nest of Ninnies)

2011-11-12T09:23:00.000-08:00

life in duluth

by Douglas Messerli

John Ashbery and James Schuyler Nest of Ninnies (Calais, Vermont: Z Press, 1975)

Ashbery and Schuyler begin their fiction in what seems, at first, an almost conventional mode. Two people, Alice and Marshall, sit at the dinner table, gently arguing, a conversation that appears to be between husband and wife. He, quite obviously, goes to the city every day to work, while she, a 1950s housewife, it seems, is dissatisfied with life in a New York suburban community, "fifty miles from a great city."

Alice seems bored, languid at the very least, disinterested in the leftovers that Marshall has pulled from the refrigerator for their supper. Poutingly, she refuses to eat, wanting to go to the city. Marshall himself is described as sulking, seeking a missing bread basket in which serve hot bread. Indeed, pouting, sulking, wounding seems to the major activity of these two, until they are interrupted by a woman, Fabia, from next door, at which point Marshall seems to come alive while Alice retreats to the basement to shake their furnace into action. Before long a fuse has blown and a snowstorm has begun, the three heading off to a hardware store and to a nearby Howard Johnson's for a drink.

Throughout Nest of Ninnies, in fact, storms—both meteorologically and emotionally—are abrew. None of the characters might be described as emotionally stable, and the weather, no matter where these figures go, is generally filled with rain, snow, ice, and wailing winds. And many of them are perpetually drink.

In this first chapter, moreover, we quickly discover that whatever one might think are the facts have nothing to do with reality—if there is reality in their world to be found. Language, in particular makes no true connections. In the first few pages I've described above the characters speak more by association than through any attempt to truly communicate:

"We of course made no attempt to alter this old place when we took

it over, beyond a few slight repairs," Marshall seemed aware of the

young woman for the first time. "I wanted to have the fireplace bricked

up because it cools the house, but so many people commented on it

we decided to leave it."

"You don't seem to see so many people."

"Look, snow is coming down it now."

An especially loud clang from the basement caused them both to

start. "You sit down and I'll get you a cup of coffee. I'll put on the lights

and call Alice," Marshall announced.

Alice's dim form appeared in the door. "I think I've just blown a

fuse. Hello, Fabia."

"That's very funny. The fuses at our house blew out too. It must be

general."

As we move forward into this strangely charted territory, we gradually begin to meet other characters, Fabia's brother Victor, who has just dropped out of college, her parents, The Bridgewaters, while we discover that the quarreling couple of the first scene are not husband and wife, but sister and brother, Marshall being somewhat attracted to Fabia, while Alice is interested in the wayward Victor.

As these characters (types more than flesh-and-blood figures) are established, we begin to suspect that the fiction will be a kind of domestic story of their interchanging relationships and lives. But after a few chapters, in which the characters half-heartedly attempt to settle down (Marshall is the only one, it appears, who has a job), Ashbery and Schuyler take the work in an entirely different direction.

Just as we grow used to the small cast of figures he has presented us, they quickly begin to gather others around them as they move forward in space, first to Florida, then to Paris, Italy, back to New York, and away again, floating in an out of their original home while adding more and more figures as they go.

One might argue that, after the first few scenes, Ashbery and Schuyler pick up on Henry Green's marvelous Party Going just where it ended, with a large party of figures finally ready to move on. That group of ninnies is perhaps more British than is this American grouping, but there are enough French acquaintances, Italian pickups, Pen Pals (does anyone remember when young men and women had Pen Pals?), school girls, and numerous others to create a hilarious international "nest" into which and out of which the figures come and go, just as in Green's fiction.

If the language these characters use is absurdly associative and self-centric, so too are their actions. Time and again characters meet and accidently reencounter each other as if the whole of Europe and the US were just as small as the suburban New York community in which the work begins and ends.

Just as absurdly, in the latter part of the book, the figures pair off in odd combinations we might never have expected, Alice marrying an Italian pick-up, Giorgio, who together open a restaurant; Irving Kelso, a mama's boy and Marshall's co-worker, marrying a French woman the group has met in Florida, Claire; while Claire's sister pairs up with Victor.

Victor's Pen Pal, Paul, meanwhile, arrives at novel's end with Marshall, the two having evidently traveled to Duluth and South Bend! As all the other figures move off in the various directions their lunatic behavior leads them, Marshall announces that he may move to Duluth; Duluth, he reveals, is big in plastics, and his company (evidently producing or using plastics) wants to open up a new branch in that Northern Minnesota City.

I have eyes only for Duluth. That's a place where they really

know how to relax and get the most out of life. I could even

live there myself. You never saw such steaks.

Paul announces, in turn, that he likes the US and may not return to his home in France. Both speak of the delights of South Bend.

Meanwhile Fabia was saying to Paul, "What was there in South

Bend, anyway?"

"You won't believe this," Paul said, "but it's true: a Pam-Pam's!"

"Oh," Fabia allowed.

The cryptic reference to the international bar and restaurant chain suggests far more that it appears, perhaps even hinting how to read through the characters' scatter-brained references.

Bar Pam-Pam's was a kind of early bar and coffee house scene somewhat in the manner of Starbucks today, except that several of the Bar Pam-Pam's operations played cool jazz and catered to special audiences.* Cartoonist Joe Ollmann writes in The Paris Review about a local Pam-Pam's in New York which he describes as an "old man bar," suggesting to me that its clientele are elderly gays. What Ashbery and Schuyler seem to suggest, accordingly, is that suddenly Marshall and Paul are an couple who perhaps may be the first to escape the loony nest into which the dozens of characters have fast settled.

After having just feasted on Giorgio's special courses, Victor suggests in the final lines of the book, perhaps hinting at the new relationship between the two men:

"I'm so hungry I could eat a wolf. Why don't we go over the Gay

Chico and have some refried beans?"

And so these "cliff dwellers" bid their goodnights, moving off toward the parking lots and shopping plazas of their empty lives. Life in Duluth might be just the tonic.

Los Angeles, November 8, 2011

*Steve Fletcher describes a Bar Pam-Pam in England on the internet:

The refectory in the college had about as much atmosphere as a cemetery with lights, so a girl student with whom I was highly smitten, Diane, suggested we go to the Pam Pam. A coffee bar.

It was just across Oxford Circus at the junction with Hanover Street and Hanover Square and the exterior had a South East Asian look about it which was continued on the inside with low lighting, bamboo and palm trees in jungle browns and greens.

The Pam Pam was quite small; it had about half a dozen very low tables and behind the counter was the first coffee machine I had ever seen. (There was a small upstairs section too over the counter with no more that three tables).

Scandinavian open sandwiches were the house speciality (and the only ones on offer) consisting of a piece of rye bread topped with a piece of lettuce, a tomato and a hard boiled egg or a sardine - very exotic.

A bit pricey too, I seem to remember. But the owner, a Spaniard, was never in a hurry to get rid of poor students. He also played music: jazz. Not on a juke box but on a Dansette 78 r.p.m. record player behind the counter.

He had great taste and I was always asking him what the records were, his favourites being the boogie inspired piano pieces by Oscar Peterson. Cool sounds in a cool place.

The Pam Pam was different and quite unlike the other coffee house I was now also frequenting - the infamous French coffee/newspaper shop near the corner of Old Compton and Charing Cross Road, and the Gyre & Gimbleat at Charing Cross.

There one could rub shoulders with hookers, villains and dealers - plus the likes of Victor Passmore, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and demi-monde characters like Quentin Crisp and Ironfoot Jack.

Because it was just outside Soho and on the edges of Mayfair, which was relatively quiet at night, the Pam Pam seemed a bit exclusive to the art students of RSP. I hung out there for about a year and became an ardent modern jazz fan.

2011-11-07T15:00:00.000-08:00

Review of Richard Kalich's Penthouse F, by Christopher Leise

2011-11-07T06:43:00.000-08:00

from Electronic Book Review

A REVIEW OF:

Richard Kalich, Penthouse-F
by Christopher Leise

Richard Kalich is a failed novelist.

At least it is the case that Richard Kalich, the protagonist of the recent novel Penthouse-F, is a failed novelist. This fictional Kalich cannot compose his protean ideas on what he feels could be "the definitive novel of our time"(18)-ideas about the decline of language in the face of an increasingly image-dominated world, and which was to be titled Transfiguration of the Commonplace-into an actual, readable text. Over the course of twenty-five years, his once-prescient projections become banal realities, and the once-profound insights of Transfiguration simply become commonplace observations blithely reported in newspapers and television commentary.

In response to his writerly inability, the imaginary Kalich attempts to will his failed fiction into actuality, inviting a boy and girl that resemble his ideal characters into his beloved penthouse. He develops a mediated relationship with his characters-cum-cohabitants, watching them on closed-circuit cameras, almost as if trying to keep up with a world in which relationships are increasingly mediated by technologies of surveillance and surrogacy. But even those efforts fail, as the boy and girl commit conjoined suicide, opting out of Kalich's penned-up penthouse by leaping to their deaths.

The sense of an artist's frustration to fail in staying ahead of his time recalls William Gaddis's posthumously published Agapē Agape, wailing that Thomas Bernhard had "plagiarized my work right here before I've even written it!" (Gaddis 13). And although Kalich's style is markedly minimalist in contrast to Gaddis's rant-infused maximalism, both books are similarly fragmentary in their presentation of the writing process. But whereas Gaddis's final work is an admission of the inevitability of the decline of process into pure chaos (although the underlying ideas remain coherent), the fictional Kalich of Penthouse-F continually longs for control he cannot attain, in both his process and the product it yields.

The facts of Penthouse-F are revealed in a series of shards of a broken whole: many of which take the form of an interrogation led by an unidentified-or should I say unauthorized?-inquisitor; interrogations of Kalich's neighbors; lists of rules; self-analysis on his mother-son relationship; typescript pages of the unwritten novel, scribbled over with illegible marginalia; and musings on the failure of Transfiguration of the Commonplace to transfigure itself from idea to iteration.

It is, in a way, a mystery: is Kalich responsible for the death of the young lovers? But the mystery is also ontological, as it is generally unclear if the boy and girl truly "exist," even within the story-world of Penthouse-F. It is unclear if the inquisitor exists outside the character Kalich's own head, or if the worried writer simply invents a mechanism through which to work out the fact that he "murdered" his characters by failing to write them into something that is "not merely another would-be novel [he] was planning to write" (37).

In a word, Penthouse-F is absurd. But it's a new take the European absurdist tradition it so lovingly lifts from, yoking to it an Auster-esque indeterminate self-reflexivity.

And so it can also be said: Richard Kalich is a successful novelist.

This is determinately verifiable given the very existence of Penthouse-F as a novel. As a well-received author of three prior novels, the successful writer Kalich has added another installment to a career that is as distinguished as it is consistent.

Then again, perhaps one should reconsider the matter: is Richard Kalich a failed novelist in the specific case of Penthouse-F's artistic effect, or a successful one? This determination cannot be subjected to the normal praxis of empiricism, because understanding Penthouse-F requires one to ask questions of categorization and of tone. As Warren Motte has already remarked in his review of this book, the novel-as-inquisition is "a topos so broadly exploited in contemporary literature, from Kafka to Volodine, that it is now ripe for parody" (62). Parody, however-like other categories and like tone-cannot inhere in a novel. These elements reside in the space between text and reader, between the codes given by a text and the choices readers make in interpreting those codes. At times, the writing of Penthouse-F signals a kind of literary seriousness, in prose that attains to the tradition the book so clearly cherishes. Describing an act of warmth and contact with his captives (a foot massage), Kalich muses, "An even greater sense of power and erotic command enveloped me as I observed the girl's imploring, pleading eyes begging that I do the same for the boy, asking nothing for himself, but rather only for the girl" (178).

Yet the text undermines itself farther down the page through repeated and clichéd language and arguably purple prose:

Two images kept recurring in my mind. The boy's stoical refusal of myself and the girl's imploring, pleading eyes that had her lover's welfare more selflessly in mind than her own. At such moments in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat that made my skin stick to the sheets ... I kept hearing for the second time in my life a little voice emanating from deep inside me saying: Who's going to love me? Who's going to love me? Along with the added proviso-like Romeo and Juliet love each other? (178)

If this is read as un-ironic, serious, literary fiction, we could reasonably conclude that Richard Kalich is a failed novelist. Because, at least from my perspective, the repetition and melodramatic elements are really funny, despite the possibility that it is a sincere effort at expressing exasperation. At the same time, read as parody, it is also really funny . . . for precisely the same reasons. Taken alongside the fact that the story is so improbable, the protagonist so seemingly impossible (does he have a job?), the character of the inquisitor's questions often so impertinent to the matter of the suicides, Penthouse-F begs the question: does it matter if we're laughing with or laughing at?

So allow me to offer another statement, the truth-value of which is questionable but is nevertheless an expression I stand behind: Richard Kalich is a successful novelist, one who has succeeded in consistently producing perplexing fictions that fail to categorize themselves and escape the warping influence of authorial intent. For by so emphatically inserting himself into the fiction of Penthouse-F, questions about the real Kalich's intentions are thrust far into the realm of the inscrutable. Kalich's newest novel is either risible for being a weak inheritor of Kafka or it is hilarious for being the most piquant appropriator of absurdism, given your stance as a reader and the choices you make in receiving its tone. I think it is overwhelmingly the latter, and a joy for that.

Thus there is no denying that the work of Penthouse-F is important. It is important because it makes plain the choices by which we approach fiction. And this is something that Kalich's metafiction does distinctly well. It holds up authorial intent to the effect of effacing it. It questions where literary categories originate from in the first place: writers? texts? publishers? readers? It foregrounds tone by deadening tone so subtly as to leave one unsure how seriously we should take the book's argument about what Baudrillard called "The Precession of the Simulacra," now so thoroughly axiomatic as to make a rear-guard observation into an avant-garde artifact.

So in the end, forget about the Richard Kalich the living man, and whether he is successful or not. He probably doesn't want you thinking about him anyway. But read Penthouse-F, because this is a book that will throw you back into an energetic relationship with the process of reading fiction, and force you to ask as many questions about how you read as it asks questions of itself, its characters, its reality, and ours. And you'll probably laugh despite the severity of the novel's inquisition.

Works Cited

Gaddis, William. Agapē Agape. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.

Motte, Warren. "Book Review of Richard Kalich's novel: Penthouse-F." World Literature Today 85:2 (March-April 2011): 61-62. Print.

Christopher Leise is assistant professor of English at Whitman College. He is most recently the co-editor of Pynchon's Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide (U Delaware P, 2011) and William Gaddis, "The Last of Something": Critical Essays (McFarland, 2010).

ON NET Titles available

2011-10-20T15:30:00.000-07:00

Green Integer
On......Net......

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Most of these will appear for free through our various blogs, which can be accessed on the Green Integer Web sites through direct links. Some of these titles, new books and others, will be priced at affordably low prices for our "on net" customers.

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The first of these titles have now been posted to our On Net site on the Green Integer Web and through the various blogs devoted to specific literary genres: The PIPPoetry site (poetry), the USTheater site (theater), EXPLORINGfictions (fiction), International Cinema Review (film), and the Green Integer Blog (devoted to other cultural events).

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Kajii Motojirō | Underneath the Cherry Trees

2011-10-20T08:05:00.000-07:00

Motojirō Kajii

Underneath the Cherry Trees
Translated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

Underneath the cherry trees cadavers are interred!

I don’t deny I had to be persuaded. Nevertheless isn’t it incredible how the cherry trees flourish so splendidly? I was restless, those days, because I hadn’t been able to believe in such beauty. But now I have at last understood: underneath the cherry trees cadavers are interred. I don’t deny I had to be persuaded.

Why is it that, each evening, when I get home, among all the objects in my room, it is a thin object like the blade of my safety razor which steals over my spirit, as if by telepathy? You say you know nothing? Neither do I. But why should it matter? In the end, it’s all the same.

The trees in flower, having attained full bloom, lavish all about them an aura of mystery. This resembles the impression of perfect immobility given by a spinning top or the hallucination which always accompanies a good musical performance: the illusion of fervent procreation, of self-perpetuation emanating like a halo. It is a strange beauty full of life, which cannot fail to move the beholder.

Yet, yesterday and the day before, this was the very thing which rendered me so frightfully sad. This beauty appears to me something scarcely believable. On the contrary, it makes me feel uneasy, melancholy, empty.

Try to imagine that a cadaver is interred under each of the cherry trees flowering with such swarming luxuriance. I believe that you have grasped my malaise.

Cadavers of horses, cadavers of dogs and cats, cadavers of human beings, all these cadavers in putrefaction, teeming, swarming, crawling with worms, emitting an insupportable foulness.

Nevertheless, they ooze, drop by drop, a liquid resembling fluid crystal. The roots of the cherry trees enlace like the arms of rapacious octopi and pump this liquor while wriggling their radicles like the tentacles of sea anemones.

Of what are these petals made, of what are the hearts of these flowers composed? As in a dream, I seem to see myself climbing, in a silent cortege, to the interior of some stalks or stems, borne along by the current of this sap resembling crystal which their roots inhale.

Why do you affect that air of suffering? Isn’t there much to be admired in this act of second sight? Now I am capable of gazing for hours, staring fixedly at the cherry blossoms; I have been freed from the mystery which tormented me yesterday and the day before.

Once or twice, I descended to the bottom of the gully and skirted the torrent, stepping from stone to stone. Borne everywhere from powdery clouds of water, like Aphrodite, were ephemerids which lifted themselves dancingly towards the sky where they celebrate, as you know, their beautiful nuptials. After having walked a ways, I encountered something truly singular. It floated on a little puddle sunk in the bank of the stream in an otherwise dried-up spot. Its entire surface flashed and shimmered with an unexpected brilliance like that produced by an oil smear. What was it, do you think? It was the glare from the corpses of an incalculable number of ephemerids. Their crumpled wings which covered the puddle, shriveled into the sunlight spreading an oily glow. That was their cemetery over there, beyond the bridge.

When I saw that, I had the impression of receiving a direct blow to the solar plexus. I tasted the sadistic joy of a maniac who violates sepulchers and loves cadavers.

In this gully, there was nothing in which to delight. The nightingales, the tomtits, the white light of the sun which the buds of the trees absorbed in a bluish blur – all that formed nothing more than an image hazy and vague. It struck me as tragic: for it was only by virtue of this counterweight that my mental pictures were able to take shape and clarify themselves for the first time. My heart is thirsting from melancholy, like a demon’s; to be appeased, it must attain its plenitude.

Do you find yourself sponging under your arms? You have cold sweats? So do I. But there is no reason to find that displeasing. Try to consider how this stickiness is exactly like that of sperm. Then our melancholy shall attain its plenitude.

Ah! Beneath the cherry trees cadavers are interred!

I truly don’t know from where this illusion came to me but now I know that these cadavers and the cherry trees must be considered as one. I have duly shaken my head; they cannot undermine unless I stay away.

From now on I have earned the right, like the villagers, to picnic beneath the cherry trees. I believe I shall sample the sake in anticipation of the feast.

_____________________________
English language translation copyright ©2011 by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert and EXPLORINGFictions.

Born in Osaka on February 17, 1901, Motojirō Kajii wrote several fictions, described by the Japanese as masterpieces of poetic quality, including "The Lemon," "Winter Days," and the above, "Underneath the Cherry Trees." Although his work was highly appreciated, and praised by Kawabata, Motojirō remained unknown for much his life. In 1932 he wrote a novella, The Carefree Patient. The same year, the writer died of tuberculosis. His work Lemon appeared in English translation.

Douglas Messerli | Not at Home (on Alois Hotschnig's Maybe This Time)

2011-09-22T07:50:00.000-07:00

NOT AT HOME
by Douglas Messerli

Alois Hotschnig Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2006), translated by Tess Lewis from the German as Maybe This Time [read in manuscript]

Austrian writer Alois Hotschnig's 2006 collection of short stories titled Die Kinder beruhigte des nicht (That Didn't Reassure the Children) is filled with empty people, shadow-images of life who haunt seemingly ordinary worlds, where no one seems to notice if these figures are present or missing.

In the first story, "The Same Silence, the Same Noise," a man rents a lakeside home, becoming entranced by the never-ending blandness of his neighbors, who each day sit peacefully on their deckchairs, staring into space. It is as if they have no other life, and he becomes so transfixed by this emptiness that watching them becomes a kind of mania. A first he watches out of the corner of his eyes or unseen from a window like a voyeur. But even when one of them turns to catch him at the act, there seems to be no recognition on their part. Gradually, accordingly, he becomes more and more open about his interest in their timeless stares into space, at one point boating out to their sundeck, struggling ashore with the intention to sit in their chairs in order to better understand the passivity of their lives.

Of course, in his mania, he too has become isolated and useless. He no longer sees friends, talks to few, and like his neighbors, leads an idle life. When he finally grows disgusted with his actions, he discovers the previous tenant of his house has returned, like him intently staring at the couple, just as if he has been hypnotized. The current renter suddenly discovers a new focus of attention:

He sat there now, in my place, and I watched him from the house, which
soon I no longer left and I didn't take my eyes off him, but saw how he
stared over at them, as they stared into the water, and I looked over at them
every day, every night, always, until now.

In the eerie tale "Then a Door Opens and Swings Shut," Karl, a man on his way to visit friends, is lured into a neighbor's house, where a woman keeps a vast collection of seemingly hand-made dolls. She shows him some of the dolls before she begins to talk about someone in the house who has been waiting for Karl, waiting evidently for years for his arrival. The him is a doll, also named Karl, who is the spitting image of the man, and strangely, meeting this doll, a feeling of piece comes over him; they become, somehow, friends.

Karl returns to the house several times, soon beginning to recognize some of the dolls as replicas of people of the village. The neighborhood children, who the woman also tries to lure into her house, all fear her—with good reason. For, after several visits, the woman begins to make love to the doll Karl in front of the man, licking him obscenely. But as he watches the woman with the doll upon her lap, he grows more and more peaceful, reminded of the joys of his childhood. His relationship his own wife begins to fray as he becomes more and more "used to the old woman's idiosyncrasies."

One day, however, he discovers in a cabinet different costumes for the dolls, shockingly coming across shoes, sweaters, pants, and other articles of clothing that he, too, wore as a child. And ultimately the man himself becomes one of her dolls, and through the doll is petted and cuddled.

Eventually, the licking, cuddling, petting is transformed into the woman's consumption of the doll:

She kept licking tenderly and sucking, and now put the entire hand
into her mouth, which also melted and vanished. ...She ate and relished
it, and, again and again, I sat there before her, watching as I disappeared
into her and as she deteriorated more and more right before my eyes.

She begins to consume all the dolls, and when he returns, her eyes are no longer directed at him, but towards all. She has devoured her world.

Perhaps the best tale of this short but spell-binding collection is "Maybe This time, Maybe Now," from which the translator has selected her English-language title. Here the numerous family members seem to be quite normal, gathering at holidays, birthdays, and other family events regularly in seeming joyfulness and celebration. Yet we soon learn that there is always one person missing, their Father's brother Walter, who, although he often promises to attend, never appears. As the tale progresses we gradually learn that the family eternally forgives Walter his absence, but the children's parents and other brothers and sisters still are convinced each time that "this time" Walter will appear. The narrator even attempts to skip these events, realizing that no one at these family gatherings is really important; only, he who is the focus of everyone's attention, really matters. Yet the narrator finds it hard to stay away, and returns to the pattern. Occasionally, Walter's wife visits, but never her husband, as she hurries away to discover what happened to him.

Walter, it gradually appears, is less a person than an unspoken desire, a desire different perhaps to everyone, but wished for always. While the family is surrounded by love and fulfillment, their focus remains on their emptiness. In short, the very reason for their gathering betrays their failure to live fully and love.

In the Kafkaesque "The Beginning of Something," a person discovers in the mirror "a stranger's face," and believes he is dreaming. But each time he arises to wash his face and rid himself the dream's residue, he has more and more difficulty in returning to his own past, his own life. He has, in short, "escaped himself," and is unable to return to reality. He feels he has done something terrible, but realizes that those that seek him will never come; that he has become a living lie, an unreality.

Similarly, in "You Don't Know Them, They're Strangers," a man is called by another name and discovers things in his apartment that do not seem to be his. The neighbors, who he does not know, suddenly seem to know him, a stranger telephones, claiming to be a friend, arranging a meeting. But he doesn't know this "friend" either, who speaks knowledgably of the man's past.

The next morning he goes to work, but there he also is greeted by people he does not really know; although he goes through the actions, he not sure what he is expected to do. A woman arrives at his apartment, "She'd come to pick him up as he was bound to have her waiting again or not to have show up at all."

These events begin to happen regularly, and the man begins to wonder whether or not he has memory lapses or is totally distracted. But after a while, the pattern becomes familiar; his job changes daily. He never knows the people around him who claim his friendship. At least the apartment remains the same, but then it too begins to change, and a random visiting of other addresses surprises him with people who know him, or strangers and even enemies. Once, he is even mistaken for the man he was before all the changes had taken place.

Soon he begins to travel to other neighborhoods, even other cities, his key fitting into the lock of any door he chooses. He is greeted by people in other apartments as if he has arrived home. His own previous life, whatever it might have been, no longer exists. Like Woody Allen's Zelig his being has become a part of everyone else's experiences.

In each of these nine nearly flawlessly-crafted tales, the ego shifts or disappears, and with it people become something other than they were or are revealed to never have been who thought they were in the first place. Identity in this rapidly shifting world, the author seems to suggest, no longer means anything. As everyone quickly adapts to become another or each other, no one is any longer "at home" and children can find no safe place in which to survive.

Los Angeles, March 1, 2010
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (March 2010).

Douglas Messerli | Selling Out (on August Strindberg's The Red Room)

2011-09-22T07:41:00.000-07:00

SELLING OUT
by Douglas Messerli

August Strindberg The Red Room, translated from the Swedish by Peter Graves (London: Norvik Press, 2009)

Although Strindberg had already published one of his major dramas, Mäster Olaf in 1872, his long fiction, Röda rummet (The Red Room) of 1879 was his first great success, and is often described as the earliest modern Swedish novel. In noting that, however, one should not expect the kind of psychologically-based, well-made fictions of such modernists as Joyce, Woolf, Proust, and even fellow Scandinavian writer Knut Hamsun. The Red Room can hardly be said to have any coherent structure, and, as a social satire of the whole Swedish culture, it has little concern with character. Rather, it resembles in odd ways, as translator Peter Graves suggests, the kind of overview of society that occurs in Dickens' novels. Yet even here the similarities quickly disappear, since narrative is at the heart of the great English writer's fictions, whereas Strindberg relies on a series of comically imagistic sketches to capture his much beloved and obviously much hated Stockholm.

To tell his story, Strindberg relies on what might be described as a single thread in the figure of a young idealist Arvid Falk, following the vicissitudes of his life along with tracing loose strings through the various figures he meets along the way. Strangely, however, because of Strindberg's buoyant comic timing and the large palette from which he paints his doctors, lawyers, actors, artists, philosophers, journalists, do-good philanthropists, publishers, carpenters, prostitutes, street urchins, misers, ministers, and just plain drunks one doesn't, ultimately, feel the lack of coherency in this work. Strindberg sets this whole world so a-whirling already in the second chapter that by the last page the reader is dizzied enough that he has had little time to realize that the merry-go-round upon which he has just careened should have sent him wobbling off into chaos. That sense of dislocation, perhaps, is why this work does seem, despite its numerous set pieces, so modern.

Moreover, as anyone who has read of Strindberg's life up until the time The Red Room's creation realizes, most of the various figures of satire have to do with careers with which he himself had suffered and failed. Accordingly there is, at times, a biting edge to this work that will find its fulfillment in the author's later domestic dramas and autobiographies of madness. But here, despite the constant sense of the injustice and meaninglessness of the society at large, we do not ultimately feel, as Graves puts it, the "disillusion and pessimism" that seem to be "at the heart of the book."

The satire is ebullient and hits home with an open, almost
Pythonesque, glee which is, however, remarkably free from
bitterness....

Although The Red Room received mixed reviews from the critics and was turned down for newspaper serialization, the work quickly sold out and went through four editions in the next year, allowing Strindberg at least a short period of economic relief.

From the very beginning of the book we quickly come to realize that poor Arvid Falk is a kind of holy fool, a gentle, even bashful man, seldom able to stand up to friends or enemies in his defense of goodness and meaningful social involvement. His own brother has chiseled him out of some of his inheritance, and others throughout the book will hit him up for money and even his suit and overcoat whenever he is able to accumulate anything.

At work's beginning Falk has a respectable job, even if low-paying, as an Assessor. But he can no longer bear to work at a place where no one shows up until hours after starting time, spending most of their remaining hours in countless meetings where nothing gets settled save the pettiest of decisions. Despite no training in writing, he is determined to quit the government and become a journalist. The ridiculousness of this decision is apparent to anyone who has read Hamsun's novel Hunger, published eleven years later, whose journalist hero nearly starves to death. Falk similarly undergoes nearly every kind of deprivation possible. To start with, even before he can raise a pencil to paper, he is accused by the press of having attacked the government—a terrible blow to his socially-concerned brother. Falk is innocent; the man to whom he has told his story and revealed his decision returned home to immediately write a piece for one of the most disreputable newspapers of the day.

The rest of Strindberg's work is centered on the assignments given Falk and the individuals he meets along the way. A visit to a publisher lands an immediate assignment to rewrite a German documentary, The Guardian Angel, about the surviving children of a couple drowned in a shipwreck; fortunately they were insured, but as they rush to claim their inheritance they discover that the boat that carried their inheritance had also sunk, and their parents had failed to pay the insurance premium due on the day their death! Falk wisely rejects the assignment.

A visit to a religious charity portrays a mad man sitting behind a churchlike-organ shouting messages to various employees through the trumpet while pulling out its stops. A visit to a local field uncovers artists living in shanty-like constructions, one painting landscapes, the other religious subjects, while nearby two friends spend the day reading philosophy. For supper they quickly gather up anything that might sell (including each other's prized possessions), speeding them off to the pawnbrokers, and gathering at a local bar to fill their bellies. It is the room in the bar, nicknamed the Red Room, that gives Strindberg's work its title. And it is in this room where Falk feels most a home, surrounded by seedy Bohemian-like types.

I will not list every societal situation Falk must endure—he meets up at various moments with a theatrical troupe, a beautiful prostitute, an entire household of unemployed workers, and a disgusting-looking and profoundly boisterous man of the medical profession; he visits the Swedish Riksdag (parliament), attends a labor meeting, and finally, in complete despair, travels with the doctor to the countryside for a few weeks of rest. Upon his return he is seen as being a different man, a being who now has now sold out to the barren and destructive society he has fought. Becoming a teacher of Swedish Literature and History at a Girl's School, he smilingly attempts to keep a bird's-eye view of the society. Strindberg writes:

But when he is tired of family life and the falseness of society he
goes down to the Red Room and meets that dreadful man Borg [the
doctor], his admirer Isaac, his secret and envious enemy Struve...and
the sarcastic Sellén....

Of Falk, Borg writes:

He lives for his work and for his fiancée, whom he worships. But I
don't believe all that. Falk is a political fanatic who knows it would
destroy him were he to let air reach his flame, so he smothers it
instead with these strict, arid studies. I don't believe he will succeed
and however much he controls himself I fear there will be an
explosion at some point.

Strindberg suggests, as I read it, that there may be hope for some in Swedish society despite the impossibility of their cause. It is the possibility of those explosions that promise change, and in allowing their potential Strindberg appears to look ahead to the Futurists and other literary movements of the new century.

Los Angeles, August 27, 2010
Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Winter 2010/2011).
Copyright (c)2010 by Douglas Messerli

Review of Prieto Gonzalez' Nocturnal Butteries of the Russian Empire, by Nicholas Birns

2011-09-21T13:07:00.000-07:00

José Manuel Prieto Gonzalez, Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire, trans. from the Spanish by Thomas and Carol Christensen (New York: Grove Press, 2000)
by Nicholas Birns

Prieto tells the hidden story of the cold war’s frantic swan song. Like Nabokov in Sebastian Knight, he gives us a V. and a quest; like Pynchon, he searches amid literary burrowings and apocalyptic agitation. Going from Cuba to Novosibirsk in 1986, the author can report on what, for American readers, is the other side of history. Prieto renders the incongruous into the irresistible. The narrator wanders through ruins, looking for his lost love and the shards of his own consciousness.

The woman is no longer there, and when she was there she was clouded by Leilah, a third term, a specter of the night. The narrator scans people who have spent whole lives under tyranny, searching for signs of hope. His sole activity is “crossing the membranes of states (borders), taking advantage of the different values between one cell (nation) and another.”

Anchored in the mournful Crimean seaside palace of Livadia, the narrator transverses a de Chirico dreamscape. And when the butterflies? They are rarities made commodities, objects of mass desire for their obscure aura.

The narrator, a foundling of the new world scavenges among the detritus of the old. Competently translated by Thomas and Carol Christensen, Prieto’s prose keeps us interested even as it keeps us wondering. Quests take place across landscapes, but what happens when the political contours of landscape shift so drastically? And how does the receding object of the quest, in her alluring elusiveness, affect the perceiver’s “lines of transmission”? Post-Soviet, yet more than omni-America, Prieto’s butterflies bypass usually traveled cultural itineraries and flutter their way toward a new route for globalization. [Nicholas Birns, Context]

John Ashbery on his and Schyler's A Nest of Ninnies

2011-09-21T12:43:00.000-07:00

For a discussion by John Ashbery about how he and James Schuyler came to write the fiction A Nest of Ninnies, click below:
http://jacketmagazine.com/33/wallenstein-ninnies.shtml

Douglas Messerli | Writers from the Diaspora of Truth (on Davenport's The Jules Verne Steam Balloon and Sorrentino's Rose Theatre)

2011-09-17T09:39:00.000-07:00

WRITERS FROM THE DIASPORA OF TRUTH
by Douglas Messerli

Guy Davenport The Jules Verne Steam Balloon: Nine Stories (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987)
Gilbert Sorrentino Rose Theatre (Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1987)

Over the last two and a half decades, Guy Davenport and Gilbert Sorrentino have come to be recognized as two of the leading postmodern fiction writers, that is as fiction writers working against the normative patterns of psychological realism established by authors of the 1940s and 1950s such as Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and John Cheever. Of course, even 20th-century fiction has always included far more than the psychological novel allowed, as Davenport and Sorrentino are well aware. In this sense, perhaps, it is a disservice to confuse these writers with something standing entirely apart from the modern tradition. For Davenport's interconnected stories, The Jules Verne Steam Balloon owes more to the high modernist collage-fictions of Max Ernst and to the pre-modern philosophical treatise-fictions of Søren Kierkegaard than to the self-referential modes of much of contemporary writing. And Sorrentino's Rose Theater is, as is all of his fiction, deeply steeped in the modernist novels of Flann O'Brien and James Joyce.

Indeed, Davenport's story-series might be best illuminated in the context of a modern masterwork of interrelated tales such as Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples. True, where Welty and writers like her use myth and history as symbols to reveal the psychological complexities of the lives of ordinary characters, Davenport employs outlandish figures who inhabit a world in which myth and history are demeaned, forgotten, or downright dangerous. In "Pyrrhon of Elis" the Skeptic philosopher Pyrrhon levels all meaning—in an ironic reversal of Descartes—by doubting the existence of everything around him, including himself: "I may not be, I think." In "We Often Think of Lenin in the Clothespin Factory," the characters speak nostalgically of art and artists from Pushkin, Canaletto, Rilke, and Robert Walser to the Aleksandr Deineka paintings, “Workers' Summer Vacation Pool” and "Lenin Taking a Walk in His Car”—as if all were equal. And in “Bronze Leaves and Red,” Davenport approaches the unforgivable in writing a tale in which our century's monster, Adolf Hitler, is represented as living in an idyllic world of social calls to Wagner's widow, chess games, music, macaroons, and metaphysical discussions. These stories present, in short, exactly that world which Welty and so many other great modern writers feared for us.

But these are purposeful intrusions of possible evil in a world that otherwise is as idyllic as that of Welty's King/Zeus figure, while Davenport's Hugo Trevmunding romps in a world alive with sexual excitement and desire. Through the interleaving of botanical descriptions and the actions of his various Scandinavian pan-sexual lovers, Davenport's Sweden literally throbs with an adolescent agitation of its sexual parts. Brother and sister, brother and brother, sister's lover and brother, brother and sister's lover's students—everyone gets into the act in Davenport's panegyric to free sex. And indeed, living as we do in an AIDS-conscious culture, Davenport's liberated 1960s Sweden becomes as mythic, as magical and desirable, as the Greek myth embedded in Welty's 1940s small Southern town.

And as in Welty's world, the worst dangers to the boys of Hugo's NFS Grundtvig lie not in the past-in outmoded laws or in parental displeasure-but in a loss of the present made meaningful by dreams of the future and understood through the past. The villains of The Jules Verne Steam Balloon are those levelers of meaning as exemplified by Hugo's mysterious bicycle rider, a young man he encounters, falls vaguely in love with, and attempts to teach. But the bicycle rider, lost in neural hallucinations of LSD, marijuana, cocaine and the promises of a fraudulent Transcendental Meditation Group, will not be taught. In that throbbing world of the living, the bicycle rider experiences nothing but the phantoms of his own non-acts. It is Hugh, like Welty's Virgie Rainey, who can see clearly the signs of the heavens, who has the vision to transform his acts into meaning in life. For Virgie, the vision is represented in the image of Perseus severing the head of Medusa; for Hugo, it is a wonderful contraption of the 19th-century, the stream balloon, inhabited by creatures of some science-fiction future: here the present truly meets the future in its past.

One wonders how these "stories" read apart from each other; together they make perfect sense.

Gilbert Sorrentino's Rose Theatre explores similar terrain. Focusing on issues and characters that appear in several of his previous books, Sorrentino also attempts to uncover truth. But like Davenport's Pyrrhon, the author strongly doubts whether it exists; or perhaps one should say that he is intensely sensitive to how it can be manipulated. For Sorrentino does not have the faith of a Davenport or of a Welty in the human race. As our most brilliant social satirist-censorious and vituperative as Rabelais—the most he can do is to demonstrate our follies and forgive them. But in a society that separates myth even from its religions, that is no mean feat. Try as they might, the shallow women and sadistic men of Sorrentino's world can find no way out of either the fictions of their own making or the fiction of the book. Trapped in language, they can merely speak, aping the linguistic society that has created them. But what hilarious verbal portraits they serve up!

Giving a real voice to the “less than zero world,” Sorrentino wakes us to our own inanities. We feel we do "sort of know" all about our culture's easy assimilation and acceptance of everything from new cuisines to kinky sex. In Rose Theater, as in his other fictions, sex seldom results in either pleasure or propagation of the species, but is a tool of domination and destruction. Sex for Sorrentino's ten ladies, trotted out in the Roman sunlight, is a spiraling vortex into what his character Joanne Lewis dreams is the mouth of Hell opened for her.

These may seem like trivial questions, but put within the context of thousands of small and large lies, misunderstandings and contradictions, they become important clues in the diaspora of truth. Rose Theatre is the second volume of Sorrentino's projected trilogy, and what he has done here is to bring into question nearly all the information of the first volume, Odd Number. Thus, he makes apparent how impossible it is to comprehend reality, let alone to believe in it.

Perhaps Sorrentino summarizes this predicament best in his fable of the seven wives who marry seven husbands. Upon their marriage, the sisters decide to secretly nickname each of their seven husbands; the husbands, in turn, secretly nickname their seven wives. It so happens that these wives each acquire lovers whom they also nickname: And the husbands, having evidently uncovered their wives’ secret names for them, insist their seven lovers call them by the same nicknames. Who is who? If even the name—that which ancient cultures held sacred and eternal—changes from instant to instant, how can language, which after all is the way we think, be expected to reveal anything but itself, its own shifting and slippery track? The chapter in which Sorrentino tells us this tale is titled "Tree of Golden Apples." The tree, which for Welty (through W. B. Yeats) represented truth, the ideal of human experience, is mocked in Sorrentino's satire as sticking in the mind of his character because he liked “images.” No steam balloon appears in Rose Theatre as a sign—vague as it might be—of meaning. For Sorrentino's fiction does not reveal a world of sense, of reason, but portrays with equal brilliance our fall into nonsense, into the babel of our everyday lives.

Los Angeles, 1987
Reprinted from the Los Angeles Times Book Review (Sunday, December 6, 1987)

Douglas Messerli | Runaway Moon, or The Duchess of Lust (on Sorrentino's The Moon in Its Flight)

2011-09-17T09:34:00.000-07:00

RUNAWAY MOON, OR THE DUCHESS OF LUST
by Douglas Messerli

Gilbert Sorrentino The Moon in Its Flight (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004).

As a long fiction and short story writer, an essayist, poet, and teacher, Gilbert Sorrentino has several personas; and in his short stories he uses many voices, but there are two opposing voices I’d like briefly to explore.

In about half the works of The Moon in Its Flight, Sorrentino, creates short linguistically focused tales in which characters are basically, as Martin Riker, writing in The Review of Contemporary Fiction has described them, “wooden puppets whose possibilities of movement and/or choice are confined within their small worlds to the predictable words and gestures available to their narrators.” Indeed, in these works—“The Dignity of Labor,” “The Sea, Caught in Roses,” “A Beehive Arranged on Humane Principles,” “Pastilles,” “Sample Writing Sample,” “Lost in the Stars” and others—the emphasis in not on character but rather on language itself organized around definitions, descriptions, lists and other various structures. “Pastilles,” for example—a satire, in part, on New York School poetry guru Ted Berrigan—is structured around several recurring figures and images: Napolean and his battles, including his defeat by Lord Nelson; optical illusions; and lemons, to name three. “The Dignity of Labor” recounts four incidents between management and employees that reveal the necessary desperation of the latter:

You will discover that the stationery on the shelves is nothing, really,
other than good American paper and nothing but; nothing to be in
awe of, letterheads or no. And you would do well to ignore the rumors
suggesting otherwise. Rumors of all sorts are born and circulate in a
large and virtually omnipotent corporation such as this one. They emanate,
for the most part, from the “creative” divisions of the firm, the Professional
Trash-Fiction Division, the Memoir Division, the Hip-Youth Division, the
Sure-Fire Division, the Dim-Bulb Division, the Texas School-Adoption-
of-Everything Division, the Devout-Christian Rapture-Mania Division,
the Unborn-Child-Series Division, as well as those divisions that support
what the company likes to think of as its old soldiers—those editors,
publicists, accountants, and lunch-eaters who have made their lives into
one long testament to their belief that they have done their best to make
real for all humankind the kind of book that is both an exciting read
and a contribution to the general culture of regular Americans….

In these pieces, which are so sharply satirical that there is no attempt at mimesis, the author empties his tales of any remnant of humanity, going straight for the jugular vein in these short works, or centering his language on Oulipean-like devices that call attention to form over matter. There is no question that these works are tours de force of writing, but ultimately they entertain more than they evoke any substantial emotional response outside of laughter, even though we might recognize ourselves at the periphery or even at the center of the stories themselves.

I prefer, however, what I’d describe as the “other” Sorrentino, a writer who, despite his often caustic demeanor and hard-boiled attitudes toward life in general, at heart, is a poet who detests while being attracted to sentiment, a kind of wise fool who desires to believe what he himself has determined is not worthy of belief. It is almost as if Sorrentino has never recovered from the recognition that many of his early childhood ideals were revealed to be false, an apparently devastating realization that he summarizes in a poem, “Razzmatazz,” the first the stanza of which reads:

Young and willing to learn (but what?) he was the boy
With the sweaty face the boy of the Daily News
The boy of bananas peanut butter and lemon-lime
Who read Ching Chow waiting for the punch line
Who watched the sun more often than not a bursting rose
Swathe the odd haze and clumps of the far-off shore.

The poem ends, in part, where it began, but the tone has moved from one of possibility to cynicism:

Young and willing to learn (but what?) he was the boy
Who found that the fabled dreams were fabled
In that their meaning was their own blurred being
Who suddenly found his alien body to be the material
From which could be made a gent or even life. Life?
Young and willing to learn oh certainly. But what?

In the long, final story of The Moon in Its Flight, “Things That Have Stopped Moving,” Sorrentino covers similar ground in a beautiful description of the narrator’s Sicilian father—clearly with autobiographical overtones—who, dressed in his white Borsalino suit and snap-brim fedora, bets his fellow ship-cleaning workers that he can walk through a Norwegian freighter—in those days Norwegian ships were known for their filthy conditions—“without getting a spot or smudge or smear of oil or dirt or rust on his clothes or hat.” To his then-young son’s amazement, he puts down a wad of cash and proceeds to walk through the Trondheim without a spot. In the context of a tale in which the narrator presents himself as a self-loathing slave to his lust for his friend Ben’s wife, Clara—so well-known for her sexual escapades with men that the narrator himself describes her as “a duchess of lust”—this dream-like image stands in opposition to what his father might have desired for him but which he, in his own generation, cannot obtain—a kind of sureness of self and grace in living. Cast out of Eden, perfection for the son has no appeal; it is the squalid, “filthy” little lives of him and his friends that drive him forward in what he himself describes as a “dementia.”

In “In Loveland” the narrator tells the story of his collapsing relationship with his wife, a perfectly petite doll-like figure of a woman, who ultimately has an affair with the husband’s empty-minded former-employer and friend, Charlie, who finishes off their marriage, with the narrator’s wife’s encouragement, by imitating his friend in costume and manner—in short, by becoming and, symbolically, “replacing” him. In the middle of this typical story of failed love, however, Sorrentino posits a stranger, Hawthorne-like tale concerning an accident that occurred to his wife just before their marriage. Falling down a flight of subways steps—accidentally or on purpose—his fiancée is temporarily scarred with a huge scab over one side of face. The appearance of this scab somehow makes her appear almost as a stranger and, accordingly, increases the narrator’s lust for her. Indeed, from the marriage until the healing and disappearance of the scab, he is sexually aroused by her “new” face, so perfect on one side and so flawed on the other. As the “scar” disappears so does his fervor dissipate. Like the narrator of “Things That Have Stopped Moving,” this narrator is more attracted by the flaws of the woman than by the perfection his wife will later seem to represent to other men.

In some ways Sorrentino is our most “American” writer, cataloguing as he does the psychoses of the child-adults of our society. Like Scott Fitzgerald, Sorrentino seems effortlessly to present a world where men and women merrily delude themselves with art, literature, alcohol and drugs that they are living “happy” and meaningful lives, while in truth their dreary lives are almost completely empty. The author’s most Fitzgeraldian stories in this volume, “Pyschopathology of Everyday Life” and “Land of Cotton,” clearly present the phenomenon.

The self-deluded characters of the latter story, Joe Doyle—who transforms his family name for Lionni or Leone to Lee, ultimately claiming he is a descendent of Robert E. Lee—his wife Hope and mistress Helen, whom he ultimately jilts as she lays dying of cancer, are obviously all self-deluded beings seeking a reality to match.

The first story is representative, once again, of Sorrentino’s fascination with a seemingly Edenic world suddenly revealed as disastrously fallen. The two characters in this fable, Nick and Campbell, represent two aspects of American culture, the ordinary working man represented by Nick and the moneyed WASP, Campbell, living in what appears as an enchanted world. The tale reveals the growing friendship between the two office workers as Nick guides his friend through the lunch-time and after-work dining and drinking establishments of the city, of which Campbell seems to have no prior knowledge and is now fascinated to encounter each day before returning to his Connecticut home or his New York rendevouses at the Plaza, the Pierre, the Blue Angel, or Carnegie Recital Hall.

The friendship flourishes until one day Campbell invites his friend to visit them in Connecticut, shortly thereafter presenting him with a stack of photographs of himself and his wife Faith, one of her which is nearly pornographic. Nick perceives the photo as a sort of tease, a direct assault upon his sexual desires, and is disgusted by what he senses is the husband’s attempt to use his wife as a lure to bring him to their home. Doubting, however, what he has imagined, he soon forgets it until another photograph, even more pornographic than the first is delivered to him, whereupon he recognizes that he is being encouraged to think of Campbell’s wife as a sexual companion. He is quite obviously aroused by the possibility, but continues to delay his visit until it is finally clear he will not make good on his promise. Campbell is depressed and reveals that, after a fight with his wife, he has met a young man who “sucked him off.” Nick’s decision to take a job in another city drives his friend into further despair which reaches its peak on the day of Nick’s departure, when he reveals his love for Nick and attempts to plant a kiss upon his lips.

Sorrentino presents a world, in short, where love is not only impermeable and fleeting but is impossible, a world where passion is unfulfilled and even a kiss is potentially a dangerous event. Perhaps none of Sorrentino’s short tales reveal these facts more thoroughly than my favorite story of the book, “The Moon in Its Flight.” Unlike so many of the later works, trapped in a post-Edenic reality, Sorrentino allows this story of a budding love affair between a nineteen-year-old young man and a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl, Rebecca, to develop in a “summer romance,” when “The country bowled and spoke of Truman’s grit and spunk,” and the whole nation “softly slid off the edge of civilization.” As in Aberration of Starlight, the author here allows youthful clichés into his work, this time, not just for the purpose of artful satire, but as a support for the lovingly naiveté they reveal:

The first time he touched her breast he cried in his shame and delight.
Can this really have taken place in America? The trees rustled for him, as
the rain did rain. One day, in New York, he bought her a silver ring,
tiny perfect hearts in bas-relief running around it so that the point of
one heart nestled in the cleft of another. Innocent symbol that tortured
his blood.

And later:

Stars, my friend, great flashing stars fell on Alabama.

Reality, nonetheless, will not allow these lovers to exist; they have no place to which they might escape in order to fulfill their desires. In one of the most beautiful narrational intrusions he has uttered, Sorrentino cries out passionately (despite being equally mocking):

All you modern lovers, freed by Mick Jagger and the orgasm, give them, for
Christ’s sake, for an hour, the use of your really terrific little apartment. They
won’t smoke your marijuana nor disturb your Indiana graphics. They won’t
borrow your Fanon or Cleaver or Barthelme or Vonnegut. They’ll make the
bed before they leave. They whisper good night and dance in the dark.

No apartment is available, and the couple, a mismatch when it comes to their families, drifts apart, only to meet again years later when they are both married to others. Only now can they finally culminate their love in sex, but despite the tears of joy and shame, they will never encounter one another again.

I don’t think Sorrentino is arguing through these somewhat exasperatingly dreary tales that love is impossible. It is merely the false ideas and notions that surround the vision of oneself and the other that make it so difficult. It is clear that Sorrentino heartily longs for that “spotless” innocence of the past, but that he recognizes, just as surely, that that desire for “innocence” is the cause of the current emptiness and squalidness of his subjects’ lives. It is almost with a cry of despair that Sorrentino asks, “Who will remember // the past is past?” The furious frown he casts upon his characters can be seen as a stern warning to all that is doesn’t help a damn to invoke a childhood vision of innocence: life is not perfect, there is no “dream” to be found, no “rainbow” at its end, no coherent “America” even to be had. It is no wonder his narrators often struggle in their attempts to tell their stories and admit that something is missing in their revelations of the awful truths they find difficult to accept.

Los Angeles, May 25, 2006

Douglas Messerli | Seeing Red (on Sorrentino's Red the Fiend)

2011-09-17T09:32:00.000-07:00

SEEING RED
by Douglas Messerli

Gilbert Sorrentino Red the Fiend (New York: Fromm International, 1995).

The son of an absent drunk of a father and a passive-aggressive mother, Red is offered up as the scapegoat for all of his Grandmother's rage. Smacked, whipped, systemically humiliated and degraded while his cowed Grandfather stands by, Red's anything but idyllic childhood mirrors the hardships his Irish-Catholic Depression-era family suffers. Grandma's frustrations stem from a lifetime of disappointment. Before she was consumed by bitterness, life held promise for her. Now someone must bear the burden of blame for the failure of her hopes, and Grandma is ingenious at devising methods to inflict the pain on Red, turning the boy from victim into monster, Red the Fiend.

On one level this is a painful book, as Red is tortured through childhood in various ways. But Sorrentino's work also functions almost as a fable of American fears, akin to our terror of the political kind of “Red,” directed toward those who seemingly stand in our way of a better life. And on that level, observing the various punishments directed at the enemy, Sorrentino's short novel is hilariously absurd.

Los Angeles, 1995

Douglas Messerli | The Novel Against Itself (on Sorrentino's Aberration of Starlight and Mulligan Stew)

2011-09-17T09:26:00.000-07:00

THE NOVEL AGAINST ITSELF
by Douglas Messerli

Gilbert Sorrentino Aberration of Starlight (New York: Random House, 1980).
Gilbert Sorrentino Mulligan Stew (New York: Grove Press, 1979)

In relation to his earlier fictions—Imaginative Qualities, Splendide-Hôtel, and Mulligan Stew—Gilbert Sorrentino’s Aberration of Starlight is perplexing, not in terms of linguistic style or content, but in its unabashed use of modernist structures and other narrative techniques. His three previous works—representing such genres as the mock-essay, the fantasy, and the anatomy—were explicit declarations against the novel and its domination of prose literature in the twentieth century. Yet Aberration of Starlight not only announces itself as a novel on its dust-jacket (although, one must admit, that the generic differences of which I am speaking have little to do with what the publisher chooses to call a work), but within its pages it generally behaves as one. Except for one section in each of its four perfectly balanced “acts,” this is a story which presents, primarily in objective narration, the viewpoints of four different characters, mimetically grounded in a specific time and place, whose interactions precipitate thematic dichotomies—“love and separation,” “youth and age,” “innocence and knowledge”—similar to those of the majority of works of twentieth-century fiction. The book, in fact, is imbued with a sense of ironic nostalgia that Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren—those doyens of modern narrative theory—might applaud.

It is not that this fiction is “modern” as opposed to “postmodern,” or even “retrogressive” as opposed to “advanced,” that troubles one; it is just these kinds of categorizations and their mindless devotees which Sorrentino so brilliantly satirizes in Mulligan Stew. Rather, the problem is that in the context of the modern novel, Aberration of Starlight is not seemingly an very original work. In such a genre, Sorrentino’s literary fortes—his stunning leaps of logic, lists, litanies, and mimicries—for the most part are missing, and by the reader are missed. This is not to say that the book is without its obvious pleasures. The white-starched, sunlit world which Marie Recco, her son, father, and would-be suitor inhabit, superficially is as loving and longing a portrait of America as are Edward Hopper’s canvases. Like Hopper, Sorrentino captures the spirit of a people so splendidly naïve that, poised on the edge of World War II, they fail to comprehend their own potential to isolate and hate. The very similarities between Sorrentino and Hopper, however, point to what appears to be the novel’s failure. The reader has been here before, and, on the surface at least, Sorrentino has nothing new to say of it. Describing its characters as boorish and banal, Paul West correctly observes that the novel presents literary figures who,

Instead of discovering or inventing compensations that
would free them as characters, from the anonymous pattern
of libido and denial, …back off into the twaddle that surrounds
them. Their heads, and what little is in them, dominate the
narrative, and keep on coming through direct, without much
of the narrational intervention that could render shades of
feeling they feel but can’t express. Indeed, the narrator, who
shows up rarely, seems even more buried in the stuff of their
lives than they are. (The Washington Post Book World, Sunday, August
31, 1980).

With regard to objective narration and its inherently closed structures, it is as if in Aberration of Starlight Sorrentino has attempted to outdo the moderns. It is not that one necessarily demands a more “contemporary” fiction; it is simply that one is less satisfied by an anachronistic one.

If such comments sound contentious, it is the result of Sorrentino having set up certain expectations in his previous fictions, which appear thwarted in this new book. But that very fact encourages one to speculate that this “novel” is not all it seems. There is, after all, that one section in each of the four portraits that does not conform to the prevailing structure of the book, that, in fact, in the prose romance as practiced by the majority of moderns, is clearly out of place. In each of these passages, the narrator intrudes upon his fiction, not only asking direct questions about his characters, but answering them with authorial knowledge not implied in the book’s other parts. For example, the plot of Sorrentino’s fiction gives the reader little indication whether Tom Thebus, the salesman to whom Marie is attracted, is a rakish Romeo “out to get a lay”—as Marie’s father describes him—or whether his interest in Marie is sincere. In most objectively narrative novels such information is conveyed through denouement or is left purposely ambiguous for the reader to piece together from what he or she has gleaned of the characters through their words and acts. But in Aberration of Starlight such impersonal methods are circumvented. “Was Tom indeed a maker of cuckolds?” the narrator asks.

If rumor is to be given credence, the answer is “yes.”
Three men putatively so served were: Lewis D. Fielding,
a junkman of Ossining, N.Y., through his wife, Barbara;
Alfred Bennett Martinez, a plumber of Ozone Park, N.Y.,
through his wife, Danielle; William V. Bell, a shop
teacher of Paterson, N.J., through his wife, Joanne.

Similarly, the reader is told outright that Marie is sexually afraid of men (p. 67), that her father “had energetically conspired in his own defeat” (p. 175), and numerous other pieces of trivial and useful information that radically work against the objective point of view which dominates the rest of the book.

More important, in these four sections, Sorrentino occasionally permits himself the lists and litanies he scrupulously avoids elsewhere in the text. Concerning Marie, for example, the narrator asks:

The names of some of her favorite poets?

Ella Wheeler Wilcox; Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff; Captain
Cyril Morton Thorne; Burelson St. Charles MacVoute; Dinah
Maria Mulock Craik; Edgar A. Guest; Josiah Gilbert Holland,
Lorna Blakey Flambeaux; H. Antoine D’Arcy; Emma Simpere
Furze; Alaric Alexander Watts; Mary Artemisia Lathbury;
Blanche Bane Kuder; Jean Ingelow; Carruthers Sofa-Jeudi;
Maltbie Davenport Babcock; Nixon Waterman.

This is the stuff of Mulligan Stew and other earlier fictions. Not only are some of the names the same (an entire sheaf of poems by Lorna Flambeaux appears in Mulligan Stew), but the structure of such a listing is of the same kind of pattern that controls Mulligan Stew and Imaginative Qualities.

One understandably is surprised in encountering such structures in the midst of a novel; and, accordingly, one is brought to question whether such passages are simply lapses in what is otherwise a carefully composed novel, or whether they are purposeful intrusions, and, if so, to what effect? I do not pretend to have answers to such questions of authorial intent; but it may be helpful to explore some of the implications of such structures, which, in turn, may suggest why Sorrentino uses them.

The following is a typical listing from Mulligan Stew:

What cannot God do?

A number of things, the more prominent among which are:
make the pivot, shoot the rapids, differential calculus, speak
Spanish, hit in the clutch, carry a tune, get a job, say not, walk
a crooked mile, swim, hold his liquor, support his children,
write a poem, play tennis, pay his bills, trim his beard, shine
his shoes, take a shower, use capital letters, keep his sex life
private, be proud, speak to an angel, take a little walk, boil
lobsters, open clams, like women, cut it out, grow up, move
to Yonkers, cease and desist, jump over the candlestick,
act his age, fly a kite, go two rounds, catch a fish, make a
salad, write a check, wash the windows, eat crow, crack corn,
fly the coop, take a powder, go anywhere alone, bunt, write
a play, stop the shit, cut the comedy, know Brooklyn, mind
his business, sharpen his ax, make an apple pie, honor his father
and mother, be a Jew, shoot crap, make a list, see himself as
others see him, play pool, be joyful and triumphant, take
off his hat, wash a glass, deck the halls, mix a Sazerac, be a
clown, sing in the rain, jump with Symphony side, make ‘em
laugh, stand a ghost of a chance, button up his overcoat,
love a mystery, get started, and shudder….

The immediate purpose and effects of such a list are quite obvious. In this case, the narrator, punning on a cliché, transforms the thing, gold, into a person incapable of actions, triggering a series of new clichés, common expressions, song titles and idioms signifying acts. A listing such as this—this one is from a character’s scrapbook—has little to do with plot, character, place, or theme as readers of twentieth-century fiction have come to think of them. Attempts to relate these actions to characterization, to understand these things of which the character Gold is incapable, would miss the point: Gold has no substance as a character, he/it is merely a thing of language, a pun. There is an “idea” behind this combination of words: that of inaction, which Sorrentino expresses quite concretely; but one recognizes that this “idea” is far less important than the structure it takes. One might suspect, knowing Sorrentino’s writing, that there is a kind of Oulipean logic to this list. But, although one might contrive to find a thematic link in the passage, the very order of these verbal constructions work against any such attempt. For these do not represent a particular kind or even context of acts. “Sing in the rain” may relate to “deck the halls,” “be joyful and triumphant,” “be a clown,” “button up his overcoat,” and even “carry a tune,” but such musical references have little in common with “mind his business,” “sharpen his ax,” or “make an apple pie.” It quickly becomes clear that the focus here is on verbs and little else, on their everyday and idiomatic usages (“shine his shoes” and “stand a ghost of a chance”), on their rhythms and other patterns of sound (“wash the windows, eat crow, crack corn, fly the coop…”) and their syntax. And while there is a beginning and ending to this list of verbals (it opens with the clause, “A number of things,” and closes with the conjunction), one understands it as something akin to a catalogue, as something that, while complete in itself, retains the potential for continuance. The reader, therefore, does not experience the passages as something whole, as organic, even as developmental, but recognizes it as a linguistic sequence capable of being repeated indefinitely, as a pattern of language which—although operating within certain organizing principles—inflects no subordinations upon its constituent parts.

The controlling mechanism of such a passage is not repetition, therefore, but progression. And one need only compare Sorrentino’s list with a passage from the work of another contemporary, William Gass, to understand the significance of this. In In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, Gass writes,

The sides of the buildings, the roofs, the limbs of the
trees are gray. Streets, sidewalks, faces, feelings—they are
gray. Speech is gray, and the grass where it shows. Every
flank and front, each top is gray. Everything is gray: hairs,
eyes, window glass, the hawkers’ bills and touters’ posters,
lips, teeth, poles and metal signs—they’re gray, quite gray.
Horses, sheep, and cows, cats killed in the road, squirrels
in the same way, sparrows, doves, and pigeons, all are
gray, everything is gray….

Superficially, Gass’s writing here seems to have much in common with Sorrentino’s; it is a list of things that share a syntactical relationship, that of noun to adjective, with the color gray. But a closer look reveals that Gass’s list functions in a very different structural context. Although they may seem potentially infinite in number, Gass’s nouns are made finite because they are secondary to repetition, are subordinate to the word “gray.” These nouns all point to the word “winter” (mentioned one sentence earlier in the passage) and refer the reader back and forward in each sentence to their adjective. The listing, accordingly, reveals itself as developmental, organic, and whole. Because the list is self-referential within Gass’s work, it is finite and complete. One experiences it less as a catalogue than as an inventory or compendious description. In other words, while progressive structures such as Sorrentino’s may contain repetition, structures of repetition such as Gass’s are not necessarily progressive.

The structure of Gass’s listing, in its organicism and self-referentiality, is perfectly at home in the novel. In its potential of continuance, the structure of Sorrentino’s catalogue points away from its type; it is a sequence of a kind of construction; and, in that fact, it directs the reader’s attention from the temporal context of narrative towards space, towards the world of things he himself inhabits. Mimesis, the heart of modern prose, is undermined as the imitation is transformed into a thing itself: a catalogue of actions, a syntactical grouping of language.
When such catalogues appear in profusion in a fiction, as they do in Mulligan Stew, the effect is devastating. Mimesis and its attendant hand-maidens, character and place, seldom survive. And that is just what Anthony Lamont, the character-novelist central to Mulligan Stew, encounters. Like many moderns, Lamont, an avowed “experimentalist,” manipulates style and content, while tying his fiction to organic structures of character and place. Unlike the great moderns, however, Lamont is what Pound calls a “diluter,” a follower of the inventors and the masters of a tradition, who produces “something of lower intensity, a flabbier variant” (“How to Read”). So inane is Lamont’s writing, so constraining his setting (a mountain cabin wherein the narrator, musing over the body of his murdered friend, awaits the police) that his characters rebel and attempt to escape their fictional confines. Unable to “master” his creations, and faced with what he sees as an increasingly valueless and hostile environment outside his fictional one, Lamont declines into paranoia.

In a 1980 review of Mulligan Stew I suggested that Lamont’s insanity was a negative thing that left the reader with a vision of the world in which language is so denigrated that it brought into question his or her own existence. In a response to that review, Sorrentino wrote me that his intention had been to show that “as Lamont gets crazier he gets better.” My mistake had been to look at the fiction more in terms of content than of structure; I had made presumptions which had less to do with the fiction than with lived experiences. But it is in the structure, not in plot that Sorrentino reveals his concerns. As Lamont moves towards insanity, he gradually embraces the very catalogues, lists, indexes, technical manuals, and other enumerations that—while obsessing both his society and him—are seen as signs of the culture’s decay, and thus separates him from his fiction, from his idealized representation of life. As he embraces these, bit by bit, his fiction is invaded by the progressive structures inherent in his scrapbook. the following appears in the fourth to the last chapter of his novel Lamont’s novel, Crocodile Tears:

In the meantime, our sinisterly slick magicians were
extracting gouts of applause by a series of tricks that,
so I assumed, were designed to “warm up” the audience,
a large moiety of whom, I assure you, were drunkenly
blasé, and replete with doubts and cynicalities of varying
potency. These tricks were, according to Madame
Corriendo, “wand inspired,” and, surely enough, in her
long fingers she held a curious wooden rod of maybe
a foot and a half long, atip at both ends with pointed
caps of a metallic substance, perhaps metal itself! In
some shape or other, I mean alloy, if you are with me.
At the sight of this innocent-appearing chunk of wood,
Ned Beaumont, his eyes watering in loathsome pusillani-
mousity, and his fingers, how do you say it? “plucking”
on the tablecloth, breathed heavily and began to sweat
onto the rather tasteful silverware that had been placed—
and with inherent correctness, too—before him.

Although this passage may at first seem to be descriptive, it actually has very little in common with conventional descriptive narration. What the narrator describes as a “series of tricks,” functions as a sequence that resists a coherent presentation of reality, that works against mimetic relationships. Although it is at first connected with the character Madame Corriendo, the phrase “wand inspired,” for example, directs one’s attention away from character or even action to a list of things in space: her long fingers, a “curious wooden rod,” and its metallic tips. The tips, in turn, permit the narrator to pun on “alloy” (a mixture of metallic substances and “to debase, to impair”); the object of the second meaning, is accordingly the subject of the next sentence, Ned Beaumont, whose actions, once again, point the reader away from the character and his actions to other objects: to the table, the tablecloth, and the “rather tasteful silverware.” Whereas the Gass passage continually refers the reader back to its subject, the writing here moves ceaselessly forward in what Gertrude Stein describes as the sequence of counting “one and one and one and one” rather than “one, two, three, four” (“Poetry and Grammar”). By the time Lamont reaches his last chapter—significantly titled “Making It Up as We Goes Along”—the progressive structure has taken over entirely. There is little difference between its sequence of dialogue and the list of “what Gold cannot do.” Both point to the world outside the fiction, and, in that sense, both create something “new,” something that follows its own language into being rather than merely using language to express the known or preconceived. And Lamont, in this regard, does become a better writer, an inventor of sorts. Yet he too, obviously, is a thing of words; and Mulligan Stew thus ends not with his writing, but with a three and a half page “will,” one final grand listing of the disposition of things. As in the works of Samuel Beckett, both characters and characters’ characters all are subsumed into the flow of words, are sacrificed to the endeavor of naming the imagined as things of sound and space into reality.

In light of these concerns in Mulligan Stew it is almost unthinkable that such structures in Aberration of Starlight are unintentional “lapses” or even mere intrusions upon what is otherwise a conventional prose romance. The effects of such interruptive and progressively structured passages are too deleterious to the mimeticism inherent in the 20th-century novel to be disregarded in a fiction that appears to be imitating it. Let us imagine that in The Sound and the Fury—a novel organized as is Sorrentino’s around the viewpoints of four characters—Faulkner suddenly asked of Caddy, as Sorrentino does of Billy, “How did [s]he feel when [her] grandmother died?” and answered, “[s]he was frightened that she was not really dead because of how she looked in the funeral parlor.” Upon climbing the tree in her muddy drawers (the image Faulkner described as central to his novel), Caddy, in fact, is frightened by what she sees: her dead Damuddy laid out on the bed. But the reader is never told that. Faulkner’s reader must come to his or her conclusions based on Caddy’s later actions, her amoral commitment to things of the world. One is forced to evaluate her, in other words, as one would a living being, and the character is made to seem more real by that fact.

Faulkner represents an extreme of objective narration. An omniscient narrator might simply tell the reader in passing how Caddy or Bill felt. But even so, by first asking the question, Sorrentino draws attention to himself, to the author, or, at the very least, to some imagined narrator of the work; and, in so doing he reiterates the fact that his character is merely a creation, a thing of words. When this is done several times, as it is in Aberration of Starlight, the whole begins to function as its own progressive sequence, as a series of authorial intrusions which, like the list of Gold’s inactions, point the reader away from any reality that the fiction is attempting to imitate, towards the world which reader and author cohabit outside the book. The fact that some of these particular questions and commands also are progressive in structure further helps to undercut the organicism and mimesis of the prose romance.

Yet one must recall it is the extreme objectivism of Faulkner to which the rest of Sorrentino’s book seems to aspire. Such extremes are too radical merely to be sloughed off by calling Sorrentino, as Guy Davenport has, a “Late Eclectic Modern.” For these are reconcilable systems; as the fiction itself demonstrates, one cannot serve God and mammon both. Made conscious of his or her own world through the progressive structures, faced with knowledge that lies “outside the book,” so to speak, the reader gradually is placed in the role of voyeur in relation to Marie Recco and the other characters in the book. Sorrentino accentuates this feeling by framing several of his scenes as if in a photograph. The fiction begins, indeed, with the photographic image:

There is a photograph of the boy that shows him at
age ten. He is looking directly into the camera, holding
up a kitten as if for our inspection, his right hand at
her neck, his left hand underneath her body, supporting
the animal’s weight. The sun is intensely bright, and he
squints at us, smiling, his white even teeth too large
for his small face.

When, moreover, the author alternates such framing techniques with personal letters, interior monologues, and descriptions of intimate sexual encounters (“He pulled his fly open and yanked his hard-on out of his pants, then grabbed her hand and told her to look at him…”), the result is almost pornographic. Peering down from Gulliverian heights, the reader begins to comprehend how completely such techniques—all perfectly at home in the modern novel—close the fiction’s characters within a claustrophobic structure to which there is no direct access, only resemblance to real life.

Such an impenetrable world is Lilliputian, a world inhabited by the near-sighted and small-minded. Each of the fiction’s characters, as Paul West notes, is unable break out of his or her behavioral patterns. But that is just Sorrentino’s point. As do his narrative techniques, his characters represent the extreme of the Romantic dichotomy of self and world; and, as such, they have fallen into solipsism. Those outside the self are transformed from individuals into cliché and epithet. A single paragraph must serve as example in a fiction pervaded by racial epithets, euphemisms, and exaggerated similes and metaphors.

Dare I call you, Marie darling? Or should I address
you, you swell thing, as Mrs. Recco, prostrating my-
self before your tiny feet in formality. Like a monkey
in a tuxedo on a chain held by an old dago? And of
course I beg you to forgive that terrible word knowing
you, dear princess and Queen of sweetness were once
married to a dago and so got your name. But I don’t
hold that against you, not on your life, darling!

Such writing may be funny, but its implications are horrifying. There is little possibility that anyone might escape from such a “prison-house of language.” In so solipsistic a vision, love and communication cannot exist; at book’s end, Marie, her father, son, and would-be lover are as frozen in time and place as the photograph with which the work began.

It becomes apparent that what was first perceived as a bittersweet presentation of post-World War II America, is, in the end, an indictment of the modern novel and the vision inherent in its structures. By exaggerating those structures and juxtaposing them with the progressive structures of contemporary fiction, Sorrentino clearly demonstrates the dangers of any closure. In short, in Aberration of Starlight Sorrentino uses the novel against itself; the organicism of the modern novel turns in to swallow its own tale. Like its predecessors, this fiction explores, through its own telling, the nature of art, which, ultimately, Sorrentino seems to argue, is all any fiction can hope to accomplish. Imitation and ideas, he makes clear, have little to do with art. Writing in The Washington Post Book World, Sorrentino recently argued,

For some reason, incomprehensible to me, [the]
mimetic concept has all but defined the “important”
novels of this country. We love our novelists to be
seers, to have Important Ideas…. (February 13, 1980)

The structures of Sorrentino’s fiction seldom stand for the world, but pointing outward, define and become one with the world; like the last chapter of Lamont’s Crocodile Tears, Sorrentino’s works make up the world as they go along. In his fiction it is as with starlight, what appears to be traveling at an angle to the direction of the observer—what appears as an aberration—actually travels in a straight line between the observer and its source.

Philadelphia and College Park, Maryland, 1980
Portions of this essay reprinted from “The Role of Voice in NonModernist Fiction,” Contemporary Literature, XXV, no. 3 (Fall 1984).

Douglas Messerli | A War Against Death (on the works of Marianne Hauser)

2011-09-17T09:17:00.000-07:00

A WAR AGAINST DEATH
by Douglas Messerli

Marianne Hauser Dark Dominion (New York: Random House, 1947)
Marianne Hauser The Choir Invisible (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958)
Marianne Hauser Prince Ishmael (New York: Stein and Day, 1963); reprinted by (Los Angeles:
Sun & Moon Press, 1989)
Marianne Hauser A Lesson in Music (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964)
Marianne Hauser The Talking Room (New York: The Fiction Collective, 1976)
Marianne Hauser The Memoirs of the Late Mr. Ashley (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986)
Marianne Hauser Me & My Mom (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993)
Marianne Hauser Shootout with Father (Normal, Illinois/Tallahassee, Florida: Fiction Collective 2, 2002)
Marianne Hauser The Collected Short Fiction (Normal, Illinois/Tallahassee, Florida: Fiction Collective 2, 2004)

All year long I’d promising myself to read Marianne Hauser’s Collected Short Fiction, and here it was nearly the end of June and I’d still not picked up the book. I loved Hauser’s writing as much the woman herself, and anticipated the reading as a pleasurable experience; but other more pressing commitments kept me from attending to the 2004 collection. I had hoped when I finished the book and had written something about it, to send it to Marianne as a kind of apologia—my Sun & Moon Press had published three of her fictions, The Memoirs of the Late Mr. Ashley (1986), Prince Ishmael (originally published by Stein and Day in 1963, and reprinted by Sun & Moon in 1989), and Me & My Mom (1993), books, except for the latter, now out of print on account of the press’s demise—and a simultaneous testament to her literary contributions. I knew she was aging, and her silence haunted me, but when I’d last seen her in her late 80s she was spryer than a 60-year-old—which I will become in another year—with an athletically wiry body that promised to house her comfortably for decades to come.

What a shock, accordingly, to receive an e-mail from Marianne’s son, Michael Kirchberger, about her death at the age of 96 on June 21. “We knew she was quite ill,” Michael wrote, “but we thought she was recovering and doing well.” Even her family, apparently, had been misled by Marianne’s seeming robustness.

I remember her sitting upon her couch in her tiny New York apartment (apartments that at one time at least were—and perhaps still are—leased primarily to faculty and staff at New York University), dressed entirely in black, long before it became fashionable to dress that way, both legs hiked up under her buttocks like a new kind of Buddha, lithe and, with those glittering eyes (were they green?), ready to spring up, panther-like and embrace any new task.

Ray Federman recalls her smoking pot—I am sure he is correct, although she never did so in front of me—her joints stashed away in “an antique silver cigarette box.” I have never seen such a box, nor can I imagine Marianne owning the object. For she was stunningly sleek, all moderne, in the old meaning of that word, a kind of ur-beatnik (whose mirror-opposite was the slim, well-groomed early 1960s executive, epitomized by young president Kennedy) dressed in a turtle-neck sweater and leotards. Later she might wear a brown or white silk blouse, but her taste in dress could never have diminished into the garish colors, loopy beads, and granny gowns of the hippies or the later shoulder-padded blazers that characterize the costumes worn by powerful women like Hilary Clinton today. I believe she was a vegetarian—although I can’t swear to that fact; in any case she clearly ate healthfully.

Federman also calls her an “outrageous lesbian,” but I was somehow oblivious to that possibility. She had after all been married to the great German-born pianist and music teacher, Frederic Kirchberger, whose books, including Let Them Sing in English! (a compilation of “over 200 German Lieder with singable English translations”) is still advertised on the internet. Truman State University in Missouri notes with pride, moreover, the Kirchberger scholarship for the study of piano “established by Dr. Frederic Kirchberger and friends” in 1983, the year of his retirement from the institution where he had come in 1951. I knew only that she had long ago divorced him—understandable, I felt, given the restrictions that must have been placed upon her as a faculty wife (who, not to mention, was a sophisticated Alsatian who had traveled to Egypt, India and China as a journalist before settling in 1937 in the United States) ensconced in the small, Midwestern town of Kirksville, a community brilliantly and often satirically portrayed in her 1958 novel, The Choir Invisible. I also knew that she had some years before been part of a circle centered around Anais Nin and that she had met, if I remember correctly, Djuna Barnes—although, given Barnes’s hatred of Nin, it would have had to have been apart from that circle of friends. By the time I met Marianne, she had already written four English-language novels and one collection of stories. The fact that one of them, The Talking Room, had been a work about lesbian life seemed to me beside the point. Her major characters were always outsiders battling the dominant culture, class values, and sexual mores. These, indeed, were the major issues of most great European fiction, to which, despite her intimate understanding of contemporary American life, Hauser would throughout life have close ties. The first book of Hauser’s I published, The Memoirs of the Late Mr. Ashley, moreover, was written from the viewpoint of a married, New England man, a closet homosexual, whose relationship with an American-Hispanic hustler is shockingly revealed to his family and friends with his sudden death. Despite the distance in manner and time from own experiences with gay life (I was the first of generation of new gay openness), I found the work totally believable. Marianne was clearly a writer who wrote less from experience than from her brilliant imagination.

I might rather have called Marianne “omnisexual,” particularly given her statements in the introduction to her stories, where she describes her new lover as a vibrator. “Touch is the key. When I make love and come to the perfect climax, it may well be the key to paradise. Now in my nineties, arthritic joints easily hurt, I feel safest to be my own lover, alone in bed. The paradisiacal orgasms have become rarer. But they still happen. And when they do, their intensity and beauty are beyond words.” Marianne glorified “eros,” and that included not only the enjoyment of every part of body, but of being itself. She was in love with life!

Her Collected Stories, accordingly, meant far more to me than just another book. Sun & Moon was to have published that collection, along with her other recent title, Shootout with Father, both scuttled in the closing of the press. Nine of these stories appeared in her 1964 collection, A Lesson in Music, a book I remember from my high school days sitting for several months on the “New Books” shelves of the Marion (Iowa) City Carnegie Public Library, my home away from home for much of my young life. Its dark blue cover beckoned to me for months—although I never read it nor Prince Ishmael, which also temporarily appeared upon those shelves. In those days, I loved books but seldom read them; I was in awe of them, I suspect, for the potential experiences that awaited me between their covers. It was not until my senior year in Norway that I began to read with any regularity and only in college did I begin reading in way that would come to define my daily life. Now, once more, I was faced with that childhood potential, the older collection interleaved with newer tales by the same author. With Marianne’s death that potential joy seemed to come crashing down upon me, representing a failure on my part; I had missed my opportunity to return a favor, to send Marianne a personal response in return for the great imaginative journeys she had provided me throughout my life.

These stories, like her novels, witness a life lived at war with ignorance, complacency, stupidity. One didn’t need to have a long afternoon conversation with Marianne—as I had—to know that she was impatient with many of society’s most beloved values. “A Lesson in Music,” like the novel The Choir Invisible recounts a frightening encounter with death. But the story’s young heroine is not as aware or as expressive as the young wife of the novel. This story’s narrator tells of her piano lessons with an elderly spinster, Miss Stoltz; as time progresses, and the young girl’s abilities regress, the teacher becomes more and more distressed. The student arrives early each week, listening to the near-perfect renditions by a young boy, Manfred, before her inadequate performances. The girl practices arduously, but without being able to convey any improvement. One day, in a near hysterical frenzy of laughter, the girl admits that her behavior is in response, in part, to the way Miss Stoltz nods in time to the music, the result, probably, as Manfred later perceives, of “nerves” or what today we might describe as Parkinson’s Disease. The lesson is cancelled, and on her way home, her young pianist friend reveals that Miss Stolz will soon stop teaching, that she is too old to go on with the lessons. This surprising and now painful information helps the young girl to pinpoint the real problem of her piano playing, that what most troubled her was not the nods but what those nods perhaps symbolized.

There was the whistle of the evening train. A red glare hit the clouds
and vanished. “Maybe she’s too sick to go on teaching. Or maybe she’s
just too old,” he said in his clear, untroubled voice.
His footfall resounded evenly from the wet pavement. I did not dare
touch his hand. “Old,” I said. “Yes, very old.” And unthinkingly, as though
some other person whom I had never seen was making me say the words,
I added, “She reminds me of death.”

While “A Lesson in Music” shares the psychological intensity of stories by Eudora Welty, other psychologically framed works in this volume such as “Allons Enfants” and “My Uncle’s Magic Machine”—works that recount childhood experiences during World War I (Marianne was just six years of age by the end of the war)—seem, understandably, much more embedded in European literature, with slight nods to Mann, Gide, Céline, and particularly the European-aligned American writer Henry James.

In some senses, it is difficult to reconcile the Hauser of these psychological portrayals—her greatest effort in that direction being the remarkably epic-like story of Casper Hauser (the young boy who mysteriously appeared at the gates of Nuremberg in the early part of the 19th century) presented in Prince Ishmael—with her more postmodern fiction (what I’d prefer to call “nonmodern,” if by “modern” one means the kind of psychological realism practiced by James, Conrad, Woolf, Proust, Faulkner, and the early Joyce) particularly given her jabs at Freudian psychoanalytical studies in Dark Dominion, wherein the characters are hilariously forced each morning to recount over breakfast their night-time dreams. As early as “The Sheep” of 1945, Hauser had shifted her concerns from psychological perceptions to social and class interactions that betray the absurdity of situations and characters. “The Sheep” of the title are a mother and her daughters caught up in the courting of the eldest, Elizabeth, by a charmingly intelligent, knowledgeable, and solicitous Greek named Alcibiades. The imperiously bourgeois mother is horrified by the intrusion of this exotic outsider into her waspishly organized home, but his conversations prove so amusing and his manners so polite that he charms all three women—against the increasing objections and resulting ostracism of the father. When the Greek suddenly disappears for an entire season, the women become as despondent as if the couple had been married and divorced, and the mother gives up her artful reorganization of her furniture and careful tending of her house. Like Odysseus, this Greek one day returns, but is now rejected; soon after the mother discovers that he is married with children, merely an everyday shopkeeper living in the nearby town.

“The Cruel Brother” of the same year has important psychological implications, but is more evocative and absurd in its assumptions. A respectable salesman refuses to pick up a woman hitchhiker, observing that the car behind him has taken her in. The car soon passes him, the girl waving in apparent spite. Several miles later, however, the woman reappears sitting on her suitcase in the middle of the highway. The other man apparently made a pass, and she is determined to catch a new ride. Once again on the road, she begins to endlessly chatter about anything and everything that crosses her mind. The salesman suffers her until they reach a small town, where the two have a long and increasingly drunken lunch, while she flirtatiously praises his silent sensitivity, perceiving he must have a mean older brother. Returning to their journey, she has no perception that they are traveling in the direction from which they have just come. Stopping before a small, decaying corncrib he had previously spotted, he points out the hut which she willingly enters as he pulls the fragile walls down over her body. He turns the car around and speeds off in the original direction of his voyage. The cruel brother is, obviously, himself.

The New Jersey housewife of “The Other Side of the River” (1948) is happily married with a child, while secretly in love with an adventurer named Brooks, whose photographs and stories recounted in a travel magazine have been her solace for years. In her youth she had known the world-renowned traveler and temporarily lived a bohemian life with him, before leaving for a more conventional and safer existence. Now that he is returning to New York, she is determined to cross the river into Manhattan and regain the link to the world of adventures she had regretfully forsaken. Terrified, she travels into the city to reencounter the life she has left behind, only to discover that her Brooks is not the same as the one in the magazine, but is a photographer of babies, living for all these years in a squalid home in Greenwich Village. As in the previous two stories, Hauser suggests that these women are deluded not so much by their men as by their own romanticized desires. The comedy—and nearly all of her tales are ironic comedies—is primarily a social one, not a tale centered upon psychological insights.

“Peter Plazke, Poet,” originally published in 1955, is a hilarious study in cultural pretension. A petty pickpocket seeking to outrun the police joins a group of people filing into an Manhattan apartment; once inside he discovers himself among a strange, incoherent party of individuals who, after scooping up drinks and appetizers, gather into groups speaking a language he can hardly comprehend. A somewhat elderly but beautiful woman explains that they are all writers and this is a weekly salon where they gather to steal each other's plots for new stories and subjects for poems. The thief is described by the woman as a poet, and given his disinterest in and naiveté of the scene around him, he quickly becomes the subject of deep gossip in several conversations. Itching to find out how much money the wallet he has stolen contains, he retreats to the bathroom, after which he is ready to return to the party and accept their adulation. The party-goers, however, have all suddenly disappeared, taking his legendary status with them. He has no choice, if he wishes to regain his new-found identity, but to return the next Thursday, when, presumably, he will shift his activities from stealing wallets to stealing ideas.

The dominating mother of “The Dreaming Poseidan” of 1961 somewhat foretells the mother-daughter relationship of Hauser’s 1993 novella, Me & My Mom. Only in the short story the daughter speaks through a letter that infuriates the nouveau riche mother, whose offspring is determined to remarry, this time to an “underpaid research professor” from Missouri. Despite her wealth and pretensions, we gradually discover the course and nefarious background of the mother who has used men sexually before suing them through her lawyer/now lover.

The father appears to be at the center of Hauser’s story, “The Island,” in which Homan Waterlow Hatchetson Boman the Fifth has inherited a booming construction business to which he now is slave. As in Hauser’s 2002 novella Shootout with Father, the father is both hated and beloved. In the story, however, the mother’s love for her son and their time away from the father in summer vacations on a remote island far outweigh the son’s relationship with his father. Upon the mother’s death, he determines to place her ashes on their beloved retreat, only to discover that it, like the city from which has escaped, has been transformed by his business’s cheap constructions, and, that despite his futile attempts to destroy the new cottages and break his ties with his father and company, his efforts will be futile. He is too weak to control his own destiny, because, Hauser hints, corporate worlds control even those seemingly in charge.

In the most recent of Hauser’s stories, such as “The Seeksucker Suit,” first collected in the 1986 Fiction Collective anthology, American Made, Hauser has nearly abandoned any psychological realist conventions. Caught up in a clearly abusive and criminal life with a man identified as R, his wife suffers his fits of temper, beatings, and long disappearances, feeling herself blessed by the gift of a fur stole, which quickly transforms into a dog dressed in a seersucker suit, whom she suddenly recognizes as her son, Karl. Entertained by the “talking dog,” she attempts to raise money for herself, R, and their new son by offering the scientific wonder to the local university, which at first dismisses the tongue-tied animal, but then takes him away for further studies. Days later—and only after her insistent entreaties—the laboratory delivers up his dead body. Here the satire, cloaked in the guise of an absurd fable, is broad, aimed at once at various institutions—marriage, the subservience of women, and the university. But in its absurd, Ionesco-like transformations of human and beast, is one of Hauser’s best short works.

Each of these stories, in retrospect, presents us with individuals wounded, if not yet destroyed, by their own inability to relinquish absurd social conventions as well as by the corrupt society at large. Almost all of Hauser’s characters, in both her short fictions and longer works, are trapped by dominating figures and their own ready subservience. Nowhere is that more apparent, in fact, than in “Conflict of Legalities,” wherein a lawyer—formerly a grammar-school student of his client—attempts to engage his former teacher in her own defense against a murder by poisoning to which she has admitted. After years of rape and other abuses by a local farmer to whom she consigned her life in return for financial protection, the teacher is just “too dead tired” to go on, and placidly slathers a dose of rat poison on the ham sandwiches she prepares for his picnic lunch. The woman, however, refuses to participate in her own defense, knowing that she has been a victim, but perceiving that in the murder she has freed herself from further victimization. She conceives of her imprisonment not as punishment, but as a strange reward—for she now has a room (however humble) and sufficient food without having to serve as a slave to a cruel master. Now, she can peaceably sleep.

The characters of “Heartlands Beat” cannot comprehend why their son, lover, friend Johnny Upjohn, Jr. has, on the night of the prom, committed suicide. But through their revealed conversations, diary entries, and letters we quickly discern that not only is the small town in which he lived without any cultural or social diversions, but that his life has already been determined by the various battles between his unexpressive, insensitive father and his near-incestuously doting mother. In his death, he has finally escaped a more horrifying living death the others keep within themselves:

What can I say? It’s been a bad, bad trip….Yes, I could use a shot.
But first scoot over, willya, honey? I’m so godawful dead inside. Hold
me.

(Mary-Sue May [Johnny’s girlfriend] tells it “like it is” to Eddy,
chance acquaintance, instant confidant & psych major at
Munich U.)

If the young girl of “A Lesson in Music” is terrified in her subconscious realization that, despite the transformative power of art, death ultimately rules, by the end of Marianne Hauser’s writing career, her characters have come to comprehend that life itself is a war against that death we all carry within ourselves. Hauser herself demonstrated that tenacious will, not only to survive, but to prevail (as Faulkner put it) against all the enemies of living life to its fullest, whether those forces come from within or outside of oneself.

If Hauser has a grave—I presume, however, like the dead narrator of her The Memoirs of the Late Mr. Ashley she willed herself to the fire*—the words upon Casper Hauser’s tombstone, the hero of her great Prince Ishmael, might equally serve her:

You call me what you will, angel or liar, I may yet live forever,
mark my word.

*Hauser’s body, I was later told by her son, was cremated.

Los Angeles, August 13, 2006
Reprinted from The New Review of Literature, IV, no. 2 (April 2007).

Douglas Messerli | Our Wonderful Lives (on Mathews' My Life in CIA and The Journalist)

2011-09-17T09:12:00.000-07:00

OUR WONDERFUL LIVES
by Douglas Messerli

Harry Mathews My Life in CIA (Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).
Harry Mathews The Journalist (Boston: David R. Godine, 1994); reprinted by Dalkey Archive Press, 1997.

I have long felt that Harry Mathews is one of the best American fiction writers who came of age in the mid-twentieth century, and his newest fiction confirms my opinion. Mathews’s 2005 work, My Life in CIA, might be said to represent a late-career shift in style and subject, imbuing his work with a new accessibility not unlike that of Gertrude Stein, whose late-life The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas has generally been represented by critics (including myself) as a simplification of her previous bravura techniques. Like Stein, Mathews appears in this work to be writing an autobiography, strange as that lived experience may seem, a work very different, for example, from his earlier convoluted tale of an obsessive journalist (hero of The Journalist) who uncovers shockingly “secret” information about his family and friends.

For one personally acquainted with Mathews as I am, the facts of this seemingly experiential recounting of his illusionary life as a CIA agent at first seem almost plausible. The tall and trim, often behatted Mathews—whom many individuals also mistakenly perceived as being gay (in part because he had several gay friends, John Ashbery among them) and as a man of “independent means” (even I presumed this, since he had, it appeared, two addresses in France, a Key West abode and an apartment in New York)—seemed almost to match the image one might conjure up of a CIA operative (although one must admit Mathews dressed, when I met him, far too foppishly to fit the mold.) In Paris of the early 1970s, accordingly, friends and strangers alike suspected that he was an agent, and the more he attempted to deny it the firmer they grew in their beliefs. The fact that he had a diplomat friend who became ambassador to Laos in the midst of the Viet Nam War and that Mathews visited him in Laos in 1965—information leaked, unknown to him, by real agents and perhaps members of the French Communist Party—gave credence to the gossip.

Understandably, Mathews—in reality an experimental author sympathetic with several liberal and leftist causes and the only American member of the French-based group of writers, mathematicians, and scientists called the Oulipo (Ouvrior de literature potentielle) who employ a wide range of formal constraints in their literary endeavors—grew increasingly distressed by these rumors. In 1972 Mathews met two Chileans, Silvia Uribe and Enrique Cabót, who encouraged him, along with other French friends, to enjoy his unwanted celebrity by embracing it, to pretend he was an agent, a game which might also give him entry to different elements of French society and, if nothing else, provide him with an entertaining avocation.

Part of the great fun of this “fiction” is Mathews’ recounting of how he goes about—often unwittingly—to establish his CIA identity, reasserting the rumors with more concrete evidence. Since most agents hide their activities behind fabricated employers, Mathews creates a mythical travel agency (named after his real avant-garde journal of Locus Solus), listing himself among other non-existent directors. The company, amazingly, attracts the interest of some who ask him to lecture and, others, ultimately, who hire him for covert deliveries of documents. Most of his efforts to establish his “CIA connection” are ridiculously ineffective: observing that someone appears to be following his footsteps, the author takes absurdly convoluted walks, marking his tracks in chalk upon certain buildings along the way, even renting a car to stage an imaginary “drop.” But when he meets a supposed businessman, Patrick Burton-Cheyne—a new acquaintance whose employment involves him in activities seemingly in synch with that of an undercover agent—Mathews is educated in new ruses which grow increasingly complex, ending in attempts to make contact with the French Communist Party and other organizations.

At this point, the reader also begins to realize that the seemingly plausible “adventures” of the author begin to move into the realm of marvelous fabulation, as Mathews describes various escapades, including several sexually unconsummated encounters with a beautiful woman and an interrupted sexual episode with a weaver of Turkish rugs, which ends with him being rolled up in the rug and his accidental delivery to a party of right-wing conspirators who, after a lavish dinner, play an Oulipean-like game of Squat in which he is forced to improvise lyrics rhymed with words such as swastika, haddock, jonquil, plectrum, gardenia and farthing while he and others dance.

As the story moves forward, Mathews—without completely perceiving the extent of his involvement—is caught up in a vortex of coincidental assumptions and events inevitably leading to his attempted assassination by individuals from both the political right and left. His advisor and friend Patrick disappears, and after failing to gain access to the Communists, he is warned for his own safety to leave France. His final escape reminds one of something out of a James Bond movie, as he seemingly kills one of his adversaries and apparently eludes his enemies by joining up with a family of sheep-herders.

Just as the author-narrator finds himself moving from what might be a very real dilemma to a fantastically absurd series of events, so too do we, as readers, experience a shift from a very plausible autobiographical tale to an entertaining invention. By book’s end we no longer can separate the “real” (his life in Paris, his friendship with the noted author Georges Perec, his involvement with Oulipo, etc.) from completely fabricated situations. Just as Stein weaves real events into a fictional autobiographical story with herself as the center of grand adulation, so too does Mathews present himself within the context of a great adventure worthy of being filmed by a major American studio. Even the author believes what he overhears in an East German café, that he has been “terminated with extreme prejudice”; for the prejudice emanates, perhaps, not only from some unknown outsider, but from the author himself.

Like Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Mathews represents his life through the voice of a being that is as fictional as any reader’s representation of his or her self. While it may be wonderful if others could perceive how exciting each of our lives has been, we might also find ourselves, like the hero of Mathews’s fiction, in great danger. For, if nothing else, our lies and selfishly coincidental participation in villainous acts would turn everyone against us, perhaps even our own consciences. Are not all Americans, for example, covert agents behind the war in Iraq? Were we not all, as political activists argued, somehow involved in the atrocities of Viet Nam? Perhaps that’s why so many Americans resist all attempts to describe and reveal the events of our own lives; for only those who remain ignorant of their involvement in the world can pretend to the innocence to which most of our countrymen seem to aspire.

Los Angeles, August 1, 2006
Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 5 (November 2006).

Douglas Messerli | A Real Doll (on Unica Zürn's Dark Spring)

2011-09-17T09:07:00.000-07:00

A REAL DOLL
by Douglas Messerli

Unica Zürn Dark Spring, translated from the German, with an Introduction by Caroline Rupprecht (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Exact Change, 2000).

Written in the third person, present tense with a child-like narrative tone, Zürn's short novel, Dark Spring, about a girl growing up in a bourgeois German home may appear—if one were to skip the introduction and back cover copy—as pretty standard fair. The young child is in love with her father, who like many fathers, fictional and real—particularly those serving in war—is mostly absent. Accordingly, she is left alone with a mostly inattentive mother whose "large, heavy body, which has already lost its beauty," offends her and whose "open mouth, out of which slithers a long naked tongue," reminds her less of a feminine kiss than "the thing hidden in her brother's pants." Like many such a child—one thinks of some of Schnitzler's children, for example—her love is transferred to the servant girl, who reads her romantic novels and introduces the child to her own sexuality and body.

The jealous mother replaces the young servant girl with an "ugly hunchback." Meanwhile, the young girl becomes attracted to a quiet boy at her school and his comic friend, and with them plays "robbers and princesses," in which she usually is captured and tortured to death, suffering the tortures with complete equanimity and almost joyful submission. Gradually, as she explores her own body, the friendship between her and the boy, Eckbert, expands into a quiet love-affair, where the two exchange notes with each other; and almost as suddenly, as with young girls near puberty, she is attracted to a man she sees at the local swimming pool. Her infatuation with this man, from whom she attempts to hide her attraction, leads her ultimately—when he becomes ill and can no longer visit the pool—to seek him out in his own house, traveling to a distant spot in the city. Recognizing her infatuation and the importance of her act, he gently receives her and shares a peach which she has brought him, presenting her with her request of a hair from his head.

If, indeed, this were the entire content of this book, one might argue that—with the exception of the girl's obsessive delight in torture and bestial masturbation—Zürn's narration is that of a typical young girl growing up into the painful time of adolescence. But two events in this fiction stand apart from all others: the young girl's rape by her brother and, after the brother has revealed to her mother the girl's infatuation with the man at the pool, her sudden decision to commit suicide. In reality, both of these may happen far more than we like to imagine. Studies have shown that sibling sexuality is one of the most common forms of child abuse. And what child, male or female, has not at one time or another thought of his or her self-inflicted death. The shock of Zürn's novel is that the young girl completes her act, steps out onto the windowsill and falls "on her head and breaks her neck." The painfully cinematic discovery of the body by the child's dog, who "sticks his head between her legs and begins licking her," ends this startling fiction.

All of this is made more horrifying, however, by the knowledge that a year after the publication of Dark Spring, the author herself jumped to her own death from the balcony of her lover's sixth-floor apartment in Paris. That lover, moreover, was not just any individual, but the artist Hans Bellmer who spent his life photographing stuffed effigies, broken dolls, and Unica herself in a series of photographs of her nude torso bound with string. It is natural, accordingly, to connect the young girl with the author's own biography, a connection encouraged in fact by the author is quoted as having said that Dark Spring is "the erotic life of a little girl based on my own childhood." Obviously, the reader of this book is presented with a near-equivalent of the sensationalist journalism now so common, where one is faced with images of the death or near-death of unknown victims. Does this book seem so fascinating because of its literary value or because of the facts surrounding the author's act of writing it? What is the difference here between life and art?

In her introduction the translator attempts to answer some of these questions. For me, the several variations and differences she describes are, at times, a bit fetching and merely academic; but on the whole, one must agree that to write a work of art and then to enact it are not one and the same. Rather than seeing it as an example of life revealed in art, it is rather an instance of art determining life if—as the translator suggests—the author chose her form of suicide because "it was familiar." And it is, after all, only through the body of her writing, not through the body itself that the reader can come to know this psychologically tortured author.

Los Angeles, 2000
Reprinted from Rain Taxi V, no. 4 (Winter 2000/2001).

Review of Erpenbeck's Visitation, by Christian House

2011-09-17T09:05:00.000-07:00

Review of Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation, by Christian House
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/visitation-by-jenny-erpenbeck-trs-susan-bernofsky-2099630.html

Douglas Messerli | Hunger and Thirst (on Erpenbeck's The Old Child and Other Stories)

2011-09-17T08:54:00.000-07:00

HUNGER AND THIRST
by Douglas Messerli

Jenny Erpenbeck Geschichte vom alten Kind (Berlin: Eichborn, 1999) and Tand (Berlin: Eichborn, 2001). Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky as The Old Child and Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 2005).

The story central to this new collection of tales by German author Jenny Erpenbeck, is, at heart, a kind of “Russian doll” tale, a story of selves within selves within selves. But “The Story of the Old Child” begins in a manner that seems far from the psy-chological manifestations inherent in that kind of structure. The sudden appearance on the street of the nameless “child” of this story reminds one, rather, of the Casper Hauser legend, where a young animal-like boy, with no language and no knowledge of his past, appeared wandering the streets of Nuremberg in 1828.

This animalistic child is, like Casper Hauser, a kind of “blank slate,” a being so empty that adults hardly take note of her. But for the young boys and girls of the Home for Children in which she is placed, she is seen as a kind of monster that reminds one a bit of a Russian doll in appearance, “bigger than she should be,” appearing “like Gulliver among the Lilliputians,” with a “body that has swollen out of all proportion,” and a face equally swollen so that it has almost erased her eyes, nose and mouth.

Given her near-complete emptiness of being and the monstrosity of her appearance, it is almost inevitable that she is tortured by her classmates. But the tale that Erpenbeck weaves is much more complex, as the children gradually perceive how to abuse her in much more devious ways. One of the first lessons she encounters in her schooling at the Home concerns Bertolt Brecht’s comedy, Puntila and His Man Matti, a story about a hard-drinking master who suffers from a split personality: friendly and humane when drunk, ruthless and self-centered when sober. With these two personalities he tortures various employees, his daughter, potential wives, and, particularly, his chauffeur-valet Matti. It is a story, in other words, about servitude. The fellow students of this monstrous child, accordingly, quickly perceive the potentiality, in both her seeming stupidity and in her desire to be loved, for her to serve them. She willing does so in numerous ways, passing messages between them, covering up their derelict behavior, serving as a silent confessor for her roommates, even becoming a sexual surrogate lover for the young boys.

It is as a servant, in short, that this “Russian doll” attains any happiness, any sense of being, any possible personality that she attains. The moment she begins to discover the power and joy of her role, however, a second being within her begins to emerge. As the city in which the Home is located is fire-bombed, a battle brews equally within, as the “old child” begins to write letters, apparently to herself, which she hides in secret places around the Home. The messages scrawled upon these, read by no one after they are hidden, portray an inner world that may begin to explain the emptiness of the girl’s surface: NEVER GO OUT IN THE DARK AGAIN WITHOUT YOUR CAP, OR ELSE THE CROWS WILL PECK YOUR EYES OUT. BEST WISHES—YOUR MAMA; DON’T STICK YOUR HEAD SO FAR OUT THE WINDOW, OR ELSE IT MIGHT FALL OFF. BEST WISHES—YOUR MAMA.

These horrific aphoristic-like warnings—so full of hate and seemingly maternal love—gradually reveal a past of servitude on an even grander scale than the roles imposed upon her by her fellow students. Just as in Brecht’s play, the world conveyed through these hidden epistles is one of extremes: HUNGER AND THIRST. AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED, reads one of the messages, YOU ARE DEAD. BEST WISHES—YOUR MAMA.

In the context of these tortured warnings, the dénouement of this beautifully crafted tale is inevitable. The girl falls into a deep sleep, refusing to eat, and is rushed to the Municipal Hospital, where she gradually wastes away, revealing a full-grown woman, whose elderly mother sits by her bedside, “shame…written all over her face.” Whether the shame is due to her own behavior to her daughter or because her daughter has been found to be a kind of fraud is not revealed. But, in a sense, it hardly matters: the shedding of so many layers of selves has also allowed the girl-woman to shed her past. “Oh, are you my mother? says the woman who used to be a girl, and very slowly she opens her eyes. I don’t remember you at all.” The servant-child has at last become master of her own life.

Within the context of this title book of seventy-some pages, no other tale can compare. However, three stand out: “Sand,” a beautiful story of youth and age, and, again, of power and servitude; “Siberia,” another tale of servitude, this of a woman—who upon surviving and escaping from a Siberian work camp—returns home to find another woman living with her husband; and “Hale and Hallowed,” an ironic work about two woman, the birth of their sons, and their sons’ fates.

In all, Erpenbeck’s writing represented in this book promises more work in the future worth our attention.

Los Angeles, January 1, 2006
Reprinted from Rain Taxi, II, No. 1 (Spring 2006).

Douglas Messerli | Possibilities of Coincidence (on Olson's Writer Letter to Billy and Dorrit in Lesbos)

2011-09-17T08:46:00.000-07:00

POSSIBILITIES OF COINCIDENCE
by Douglas Messerli

Toby Olson Write Letter to Billy (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2000).
Toby Olson Dorit in Lesbos (New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1990).

Years ago—as a university colleague and a regular dinner companion—I told Toby Olson that his fiction reminded me, in some ways, of the paintings of Frederick Edwin Church, one of the notable Hudson River School painters of the 19th century. As in Church’s landscapes, Olson’s fictions pictured everything with the utmost detail and, consequently, seemed to give all its subjects–-animate and inanimate—equal importance; as in Church’s paintings, where each leaf and blade of grass is represented with as much attention as the largest objects of his canvases, so in Olson’s writing there is a strange lack of proportion. It’s an American concept, I argue; everything is as important as everything else; there is no sense of hierarchy, no difference nor differance.

I don’t know if Olson remembers our conversation, but in his next novel, Dorit in Lesbos, he named his major character Jack Church, and the hero’s uncle, Edward Church, was a painter who painted with the same painstaking detail: “...I saw the subtle art, the supple roundness and the actuality of the flesh tones, even the blemishes, the realism of the nails, and the way fingers intertwined....” Indeed, in this novel the elder Church paints subtle emblems and signs into his work, layering the painting so that the objects reveal things hidden behind them. As in his previous novels (with the exception perhaps of his first, poetically-conceived fiction The Life of Jesus), Dorit was a highly detailed book. Nearly everything was in the minute details of the language.

Write Letter to Billy is no exception. Following the familiar plot structure of most of Olson’s novels, this work begins with a call to the narrator informing him of a relation he knew little about–in this instance it is a daughter, of whose existence he has known nothing–which leads to a voyage through the familial past–in this case, with daughter in tow–that is both a mystery and an adventure that may redeem his future life. This basic Olsonic structure is an almost abstract pattern of movement that propels his fictions, and makes them the exciting mysteries which his admirers so enjoy. Fleshing out this basic structure, however, are all the details, thousands and thousands of details about everything from how to deep-sea dive to the minute aspects that he recalls of his mother’s face; from the detailed mechanical constructions of his now dead father, to childhood memories of, this time round, Los Angeles and its environs. Together the two, the familiar story pattern and uninflected detail of present and past, go hand in hand to create some of the finest writing of American realism today.

But as readers of Olson’s novels know, there is another pattern engaged in nearly all of his works, a pattern revealed in the very title Dorit in Lesbos. As American as Olson’s writing is (so completely antithetical to the more European-inspired metaphysical mysteries of Paul Auster or Raymond Federman, for example) Olson’s work is also very Dickensian in the sense that, while on the surface everything is very orderly, visible, contained, explained, internally—internal both to characters and the story itself—all is coincidence: not “chance” as in Auster’s works, but the old fashioned, plot-driven contrivance of coincidence.

Write Letter to Billy is almost a prose poem to the possibilities of coincidence. Led on by a list he finds in the boxes that remain of his dead father’s possessions, Billy and his teenage daughter Jen set out on their visit to Laguna Beach to explore a long ago mystery of the death of Susan Rennert. Along the way, Billy discovers that as a child, exploring the maze of interconnecting concrete tunnels meandering under the Los Angeles streets, he, oddly enough, had visited the dead girl’s home and kissed her in a nearby abandoned house. Later, he and his daughter discover photographs that link the dead woman to his parents and to his mother’s jewelry which Billy has subsequently passed on to the young Jen. It turns out that the girl he had kissed was the dead woman’s cousin, raised as a twin sister, and that the cousin–are you ready for this?–has been engaged in a long-time relationship with Billy’s twin brother, whose existence is a complete surprise to him. Nicholas Nickleby move over!

For that is only the beginning. Estelle Rennert (who has murdered her mother—actually her aunt—and caused the death of her sister—actually her cousin, except that she and Susan unknowingly shared the same father) wants the necklace she has sold to Billy’s mother years before back; it’s worth a great deal of money. So while they hold Jen as ransom, Billy is sent from Catalina off to Laguna Beach to retrieve it. But his intentions are different; by putting his diving skills to work, he is determined to climb aboard the boat as it leaves Catalina harbor and surprise the villains (Estelle and Billy’s own twin brother). But a fall into a cliff-side cave, the rope dropping below him, ends all his good intentions. He is trapped in the cave. Attempting to escape through a small chimney-like structure at the cave’s back he discovers an old suitcase partially blocking the would-be exit. But this is not just any suitcase, but is his father’s, left nearby when the family had gone to this same spot years before, when the father, setting up a strange metal contraption emitting a high-pitched noise (beyond the range of human ears) had attracted all the buffalo into the nearby meadow and drawn the famous flying fish of Catalina’s waters up the cliff in masses! The suitcase contains a strange construction that enables Billy to fly, Daedalus-like, to the ship’s deck, knocking over his twin and, combined with the perfectly timed arrival of the police helicopter, sending Estelle over the edge–-both psychologically and physically catapulting her into the ocean, like her sister before her, to drown.

It’s a shame to have to reveal to readers this much of the plot, but it’s hard to explain the effect, let alone the intention of Olson’s novel without the evidence. For as my brief summary makes clear there is, as any detective worth his salt would perceive, something wrong with this picture. On the one hand Olson has loaded his fiction up with the slow accumulation of detail, detail that seems to give everything its equal existence and meaning, its crystalline and clear definition as a work of realist art. But then, out of the shadows, he has pulled something else, a kind of fantasy, an incredible story alike a child’s tale. Olson is no sloppy artisan. So, what to make of the two opposing elements so intricately woven together into this often brilliant friction?

Those who have followed Olson from his earliest novels (Seaview, The Woman Who Escaped from Shame and Utah) to the most recent (Dorit in Lesbos and At Sea) will not be surprised at my descriptions of the elements of fantasy and coincidence in his detail-driven works. It is the sheer accumulation of the coincidence here—the absolute incredulity of the storyline—that makes this work different.

Obviously, the story here–while often emotionally moving–is made, by its series of events, highly comic; and there is almost the feel about the work, in its focus upon an all-American, sensitive but near psychically dead, adult-adolescent hero, of the comic-book exploits of Captain Marvel or Superman. As the young girl’s mother asks near the end of the novel, “She’s made a fucking god of you. What did you do to her?”

And that is precisely the question the novel asks, not of the young daughter, but, perhaps, of Billy himself. What has the world done to make him such a caricature of himself, or, rather, what has the past done to him? This novel is, indeed, a book of the past, a book that questions memory, a book that explores how each of us creates an imagined reality, particularly of our pasts, which ultimately determines our futures, our lives. How can we ever change if we can never quite know who we were, who we have become?

Billy’s adopted parents–and don’t we all in some way, musn’t we all believe that our own parents are not our true heritage?–represent two compelling American types. His mother was an actress, an actress in the way Katherine Hepburn portrayed Mary Tyrone in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a woman–-as a family friend describes her–-of “the teatah.” Moreover, like Mary Tyrone, his mother is a not-so-secret addict, not of morphine as in O’Neill, but of alcohol. Like many such a type, she is all sensitivity, all emotion, all self-consuming in her tireless activity of playing to the invisible audience she imagines surrounding her. Even motherhood is, for her, a kind of theatrical activity, a kind of burden bound with its own secrets (it is she who will not tell Billy of his twin brother) to entertain her life. Her all-adoring husband is a type himself: the inventor, a kind of garage-bound madman in the mold of Edison or Bell or the Wright brothers–-except none of his inventions, save the flying Deadulus suit, ever functions. To her imaginary theatrical career, he plays the failed scientist: the Frankenstein always seeking a monster-son. Even his list of his detailed research into Susan Rennert’s death is a failure, is a compendium of wrong turns, misunderstood connections, uncompleted desires: “Write letter to Billy.”

These figures, quite obviously, are two variations of the elements that compel American dreams: the contradictory and often opposing forces of the scientific and the creative, of the imaginative and the money-driven get-rich schemes of America past and present. One has accomplished only the slow accumulation of detail based upon the search for and evaluation of data; the other is all intuitive, dominated by irrational action and coincidence. These, of course, are the magnetic poles of American culture–-and of Olson’s novel.

In the end truth can be recognized only when both elements are given their due: Billy–and it is right of Olson to insist upon his remaining a Billy, a child-like adolescent, instead of a William–-must combine his father’s attention to all the little pieces and parts with the absurd and always unbelievable elements of accident and coincidence to come to an understanding of the past. But, as Olson makes clear at the end of the book, this is not really Billy’s narrative, but is Jen’s, the daughter, told through his words. The reality, ultimately, is that of a young, maturing girl, and accordingly, it is a comic vision, an unrealistic one. Isn’t it always the way of youth, when it is healthy and blessed, that it sees the future full of magical, fantastic and heroically achieved deeds; that Icarus can fly with Daedalus again?

Los Angeles, 2000

Douglas Messerli | The Poetics of In and Out (on Olson's The Bitter Half)

2011-09-17T08:37:00.000-07:00

THE POETICS OF IN AND OUT
by Douglas Messerli

Toby Olson The Bitter Half (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press/FC2 [Fiction Collective 2], 2006).

Before memories of high school humor overwhelm any of my readers, let me assure them that, despite any associations evoked by this essay’s title, my subject, Toby Olson’s new novel, The Bitter Half, portrays no acts of sex. The sexual activities of which it hints take place off-stage in this dark comedy. The ins and outs of my title might be said to relate to everything except the act of sex.

The major character of this fiction, Chris Pollard (whose last name is defined through dictionary quotes in the frontispiece of the book) is a consultant in the field of prison escapes—a job which Pollard has invented at a time in the Great Depression when any job, let alone a newly created one, is as sparse as the vegetation around the Pearce, Arizona border prison where the fiction begins. Pollard has been asked out to evaluate the prison for flaws, particularly since its population of mostly Mexican men has escaped on a regular basis and, most importantly, because the prison now houses a young man, little more than a boy dubbed by authorities as “the kid,” who is a legend to inmates for his escapes from the most notorious of prisons. Pollard and the boy exchange only a few words, but within those moments an unspoken relationship between the two has been established.

Pollard has several suggestions for prison security, but recognizes that the job is primarily a “boondoggle,” a political formality to protect the authorities when “the kid” makes his move, which, the moment the inspector has completed the job, the boy does, escaping to a nearby Mexican border town where most of the previous prisoners have been hunted down and returned to incarceration.

Pollard has gone there out of curiosity and desire for a drink; encountering the escaped prisoner, the elder listens to the story of the young man’s life into the early morning hours. The tale the boy tells is revealed gradually in bits and pieces throughout the fiction, but a quick summary may help to show why Pollard makes no attempt to contact authorities and even warns the kid that, if he truly intends to get away, he should move on. It is clear, however, that the boy wants to be recaptured, to bask in the prison guards’ and inmates’ wonderment at his accomplishments.

The son of a drunken and abusive stepfather, his life has been changed in a series of horrible events: as the father drinks himself into a stupor, the boy’s baby sister begins playing with the father’s whip and tack; momentarily coming to, the father observes the child’s actions, and in his anger and confusion, picks up an iron as he moves toward the child, the object of his fury. The family’s beloved dog, Buck, leaps up, grabbing the baby in his mouth, rushing off into the woods with her, the kid following after; although he comes upon the dog and the child’s bloodied doll, his sister is nowhere to be found. Upon his return to the farm he discovers his mother murdered—evidently by the father—and, when a few weeks later the father is also found dead, the son presumes he has been killed by the dog, while the authorities immediately assume the kid has committed both acts, perhaps doing away with his baby sister as well. He is brought to “justice” and imprisoned. He escapes, but is jailed again and beaten. So the pattern begins.

Pollard and the boy share a bed for the night, and in the morning, as Pollard begins the train journey back to Wisconsin, the prison inspector recalls their encounter, a description that serves as a haunting leit motif throughout the work:

We fell asleep…, and I think I remember him turning, my own
movement toward him until I had formed into a chair and he
was sitting in it.

It is quite apparent that the two not only now share a budding romance, but that they are bound together by their respective roles in life—the young man playing the role of an escape artist—a man who has spent nearly his entire young life moving from a position of being outside to being inside—with Pollard, an authority on that transformation, moving perpetually between the two. Both are figures damned, it appears, to eternal transition, a circular movement between in and out.

Quite obviously, as any prescient reader may presume, the author also presents us with figures who, in their apparent homosexuality, are instinctual outsiders working and living within a world of brutal masculinity. And, in that sense, both are doomed to feel as if their real lives must be locked away as well.

Olson, however, has never been a novelist of easy presumptions, and he soon demonstrates that Pollard is not what he appears to be, that in truth—and I reveal this information to those who have not yet read the book with the assurance that Olson’s fiction, unlike Neil Jordan’s 1992 movie The Crying Game, does not depend upon the viewer’s misperceptions—Pollard is not a man but a woman in man’s dress, a rather wealthy woman in fact, who has been forced into pretension in a world that would never allow her admittance to the position she enjoys were she to reveal her sex.

Lest this same potential reader presume that Pollard is an unhappy lesbian, the “bitter half” tucked away in frontier isolation, let me also allay such fears. Although Chris Pollard is a self-sufficient woman who spends much of her time in a cabin in the woods enjoying fishing and other outdoor activities usually (alas) associated with male-only pleasures, she also oversees a beautifully joyful home where her cook-butler-advisor-friend Danker serves up delicious meals and wherein she entertains the locals from adjoining farms and the nearby town, including her best friend, a hilariously foul-mouthed entrepreneur who—dressed for the role—runs the Bo Peep candy shop. Despite the dark overtones of her avocation, it is clear that Chris and her friends are caring and loving individuals, who go out of their way to help the few of the poverty-stricken, homeless, and wandering hordes who make it that far north. Indeed, Olson almost overstates Pollard’s liberal-minded normalcy, presumably so that no one can possibly pity this figure.

In his presentation we recognize, moreover, that Pollard is, in reality, a total insider, someone at ease in the world whose journeys into prisons are a trek to exotic locations outside of her everyday life and experiences. What may seem inside, accordingly, is suddenly reversed, and the very role prisons play, that of incarceration, is obliterated in her visitations.

The author makes this absolutely clear in the wonderful chapters devoted to Pollard’s visit to “the house of brutality and suicide,” a southern prison where mostly black prisoners, shackled together for work in chain gangs, are routinely beaten and tortured. Pollard tours this prison, housed in what was a former viscount’s mansion, with its curator, Hans Bonnefoy, the grandson of the viscount, discovering in its twisting and turning confines half dead men, rotting in their bloody wounds. But the kid has escaped from this seemingly impenetrable fortress as well, and now others have followed his lead; it is Pollard’s purpose to discover how these escapes have been accomplished.

In his novels, Olson’s characters have often bordered on being super-heroes (figures such as Jack Church in his Dorit in Lesbos and Billy in Write Letter to Billy immediately spring to mind), and here he reveals that Pollard is not only a clever analyst, but a master ninja who, donning black, invisibly joins the shadows as she stalks the prison cells to uncover the secret pattern of suicide and escape that pervades this bloody hall of horrors. She uncovers the method of escape, but in her newfound hatred of her role of would-be informer, comes to share the prisoners’ objective. She is only too ready to return to “normal” society and give up her job—in short, to escape.

As Olson soon reveals, however, there is no true escape to be found. Discovering a lump in her breast, Chris is imprisoned again, this time in a hospital where the surgeons’ knives remove both her breasts and radiation leaves her head permanently hairless, transforming her physical appearance into a figure close to the one which she has previously imitated. With this transformation, once again, the boundaries of in and out—is she more like a man now in or out of costume?—are crossed.

As in Olson’s other fictions, moreover, The Bitter Half is chock full of coincidence—and with an entire populace on the move, it is almost believable—culminating in the arrival on her farm of a young group of itinerants who propose being paid for performing circus tricks. Like a troupe of medieval performers out of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, they preview their somewhat amateurish acts. Having previously postponed her annual gathering due to her illness, she takes on these acrobats, juggler and loquacious impresario as the centerpiece for a planned costume party. I won’t describe the numerous machinations of plot that weave together Bonnefoy, the kid’s sister, and dog Buck, with various other characters into this celebratory event. I have long ago stopped scoffing at such chance encounters. Like Dickens, Olson takes up the various strands of his tale and places them within Pollard’s confident hands. When a neighboring landowner, who had once hoped to marry Chris, shows up to the party dressed in drag and gracefully dances the night away with Bonnefoy, we hardly bat an eye! For the figures of this novel, we now perceive, all shift in and out—of prison, society, sexuality, love, and reality.

At fiction’s end, we await only the arrival of the kid, who—this time with Pollard’s unwitting help—has escaped once again. We can only hope that this is a final escape from the cold world in which he has so long been confined, that the kid will come home to sit in “the chair” Pollard’s body has promised him.

Los Angeles, August 22, 2006
Reprinted from The American Book Review, XXVIII, no. 2 (January-February 2007).
Copyright (c) 2006 by Douglas Messerli

Douglas Messerli | The Perfect Servant (on Cadiot's Colonel Zoo)

2011-09-17T08:33:00.000-07:00

THE PERFECT SERVANT
by Douglas Messerli

Olivier Cadiot Le Colonel des Souaves (Paris: P.O.L, 1997); translated from the
French by Cole Swensen as Colonel Zoo (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006)

The Colonel of the Zouaves, published by my Green Integer press, was translated by Cole Swensen as Colonel Zoo, since, she argued, few Americans would understand a reference to the Zouaves (the French corps first raised in Algeria in 1831, recruited originally from Zouaua, a tribe of Berbers), best known for their colorful dress and their fighting in 1914-1918 in the First World War. Perhaps Cole did not know that there was also a regiment of American Zouaves (named after the French unit) who fought in the Civil War, and as they vanished from the U.S. military were transformed into what we now call the National Guard! In any event, she felt she captured the sense of zaniness their name called up in French culture with the suggestion of a zoo-like atmosphere.

The fiction begins with the arrival at a grand country home—the same kind of country house portrayed in Renoir’s Colinière and Altman’s Gosford Park—of a tall, elegant man “impeccably turned out in ostrich-skin driving shoes, jodhpurs inched just below the knee, and a Harris-tweed jacket over a blindingly white shirt with a jaunty open collar”—in short, a kind of moderne Zouave—who, as he leaps “gracefully” over the low door, crashes to the floor, breaking his ankle. A fleet of valets comes to his rescue, signaling the arrival of our narrator-hero, alias John Robinson, who is either the most conscientious butler who ever existed or an utter lunatic.

Much of the fiction’s humor—and, in the tradition of the British dialogue novels by Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and others, this is a satiric work—is revealed in the butler’s multitudinous attempts to improve his body and service. He runs daily, fishes the nearby ponds, and lectures the other servants on methods ranging from respectful salutations to the exact curvature of the arm holding a serving platter, and appropriate nods in response to the approval of the dinner guests. His fellow-servants are made to run, swim, climb trees, and perform various other activities in their spare time in order to improve their perfect servitude.

Much of this process of self-improvement is also used by the butler to overhear the conversations of the guests and gather information in what the reader increasingly perceives as both a possible sexual assault of one female guest and a political assault on the upper class. Unlike the perfect servant of Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Stevens, who politely ignores the pro-Nazi discussions at his master’s events, Robinson absolutely delights in repeating the uncompleted phrases of abuse of those outside the society gathered at the dinner conversations over which he presides, phrases which poet-writer Cadiot hilariously presents in poetic stanzas:

Who pays in the end
who pays the subsidies?

They’ll be in our place soon
it amounts to the same thing
there’s always a high and a low

Later:

We need a governmental decree to extract
a priori this mental gangrene

If a citizen has a rotten limb
cut it off no time to stand around and talk about it

And if there’s no more either Major
you go ahead with it anyway

Bite down on that my boy
stick a bit between his teeth
and off you go.

If Robinson is frustrated at times with his fellow-workers’ lack of comprehension, he is understandably infuriated by the dinner-time chatter of those whom he serves, and this seemingly leads him to work even more furiously to improve himself—or to further his hidden plan.

Ultimately, he moves so gracefully, so unobtrusively that he almost blends in with the furniture, the walls, the rugs, allowing him further opportunites to explore contents of secret drawers and shelves. If occasionally he is caught by the master and guests in a thoughtful pose or perceived in a place where he should not be, he quickly turns his behavior into a kind of theatrical performance which, since they have the attention span of a mosquito, quickly puts them to sleep.

Yet, Robinson’s maneuvers become more and more complex as he imagines and devises numerous time-saving devices and even a secret code between himself and the other servants:

“Beautiful day today” means “Change the silverware.”
“Oh, yes…” means “more bread.” Advantage: no more
foot bell or Morse code (source of much error and confusion…)

What, we ask, is he after?

Even as he imagines an escape to a “rented apartment” with the woman guest for whom he lusts, the reader cannot comprehend the reasons for such maniacal servitude. But then, what is any servitude but the erasure of the self? As the butler slowly transforms into a spy and, finally, into the tripping American hero, the story collapses into a game of Clue with a murder in the mansion, the reader coming to recognize that that erasure is exactly what Robinson seeks, particularly he suggests he himself dress as the figure of the first scene:

…Stuff cheeks with special gum. Dye hair with black
wax. Glue on false badger-brush moustache. Tri-focal
glasses with tinted contact lenses. Shoes done up in
imitation ostrich-skin. Riding breeches. Hazelnut crop
in hand. Sharp tweed jacket. Stolen white shirt…. Turn
into the drive between the open gates…. Cut the engine.
Leap over the low door, legs first followed by
the head levered by the arms. Hop. Twist of the hips,
and land, both feet on the ground.

And with that, his Zouave-like (and zooish) maneuvers are complete.

Los Angeles, September 15, 2006
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (May 2008).

Douglas Messerli | The Serving Class (on Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, Bacacay, and Cosmos)

2011-09-17T08:25:00.000-07:00

THE SERVING CLASS
by Douglas Messerli

Witold Gombrowicz Ferdydurke (Warsaw: Towarzystwo Wydawnicze Rój, 1937).
Witold Gombrowicz Ferdydurke, translated by Eric Mosbacher (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World, 1961).
Witold Gombrowicz Kosmos (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1986)
Witold Gombrowicz Ferdydurke, translated from the Polish by Danuta Borchardt (New Haven,
Connecticut:Yale University Press, 2000).
Witold Gombrowicz Pamiętnik z okresu dojrzewania (Poland, 1933).
Witold Gombrowicz Bakakaj (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1957).
Witold Gombrowicz Bacacay, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston (New York:
Archipelago Books, 2002).
Witold Gombrowicaz Cosmos, translated from the Polish by Danuta Borchardt (New Haven,
Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2005).

Gombrowicz’s great masterwork of Polish literature, Ferdydurke, was published in Warsaw in 1937, and over the years has been twice translated into English. The current edition, published by Yale University Press, seems destined to become the authoritative edition—although some critics have argued that the changes put forward by the new translator Danuta Borchardt are not that central to the reading; and for some readers the favorite edition remains Eric Mosbacher’s translation of the early 1960s. Since I don’t read Polish, and have forgotten my experience of first reading the book, I’ll offer no opinion on this issue.

No one seems to know the exact source or meaning of the novel’s title—which has no particular meaning or obvious association in Polish culture; some argue it was appropriated from Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt character, Freddy Durkee. It hardly matters, for Gombrowicz’s tale is centered on three interconnected stories of institutional domination and the infantilization of the individual that follows. In the first section, Joey, an adult in his 30s is suddenly abducted by his former schoolteacher, T. Plimko, “a doctor of philosophy and a professor, in reality just a schoolteacher, a cultural philologue from Kraków, short and light, skinny, bald, wearing spectacles, pin-striped trousers, a jacket, yellow buckskin shoes, his fingernails large and yellow.” Joey is taken away and returned to sixth grade, where—in Lewis Carroll-like absurdity—he towers among his fellow students without anyone seeming to notice his age or stature. Through a series of verbal abuses, ritualistic mutterings (which includes the conjugation of Latin adverbs and statements like “…We teachers love you little chickies, chirp, chirp, chirp, you know: ‘suffer the little ones to come unto me.’”) Joey is imprisoned and belittled into submission at his new institution.

Gombrowicz hilariously mocks not only the teaching in this absurd world, but the students who through their language have grotesquely twisted their thinking to the empty logic of the system: “And what perfidious whims and airs have perchance caused the person of my dear Sir to present himself so tardily at this dump of a school?” chirps one of the students. Another laughs idiotically, saying, “Could it be that amours for a damsel have delayed our colegus venerabilis? Is this perchance why our presumptuous colegus so languidus est?” Given such meaningless jargon, the linguistic battles between students Syphon and Kneadus become a world of hyper-speech that is a good match to our cyber-talk and advertising jargon of today.

Just when it appears that Joey could not be further humiliated, he is sent to live in the home of a bourgeois family, the Youngbloods, where he falls ridiculously in love with the daughter, who as a “modern schoolgirl,” creates a pattern of perpetual seduction and punishment of her would-be suitor. To get back at the girl and family, Joey plots to entrap his professor in the girl’s room, which ends in an absurd free-for-all on the floor of the room where she has been discovered by her parents with a young student and Plimko both. Humiliation and denigration has again won the day, and Joey is left with no alternative but to escape.

His escape with fellow student Kneadus to the country, however, bodes no better for the future. For Kneadus has suddenly transformed his love of young serving girls to a homoerotic search for young farmhands. Joey and Kneadus retreat to the farm of Joey’s uncle and aunt, where indeed Kneadus finds the object of his desire, much to the consternation of the elderly couple, Joey, and the young valet,Valek. Joey’s attempt to take Kneadus from the house in a final escape ends in perhaps the funniest scene in the book, as the master of the house, hearing Joey, Kneadus and Valek on the escape, enters the room—gun in hand. Lights out, they remain frozen in position as the farmer searches for them, soon joined by Joey’s cousins—who, in turn, all freeze in panic as the butler enters with a paraffin lamp. Each individual, terrified of discovery, pretends a kind of nonexistence until the room is filled, Gombrowicz hints, with a world of inexplicable ghosts.

Before one can have a world of absurd bureaucracy, one must have a world of individuals willing to submit.

In Bacacay, made up of sections from Ferdydurke and seven earlier short stories, we see the roots of Gombrowicz’s thinking and perceive the grotesque humor which already characterized his writing before the great novel. “Lawyer Kraykowski’s Dancer” begins very similarly to Arthur Schnitzler’s short novel, Lieutenant Gustl: a man at a concert is insulted by another. But while Schnitzler’s Lieutenant suffers such indignation that he imagines murder and suicide, the narrator of Gombrowicz’s story follows his tormentor, observing his patterns of life and ultimately becoming so infatuated with the figure that he loses his mind; encountering the lawyer in the park he goes into a kind of wild, bacchic dance that reminds one a bit of Martha Graham’s mad dance of Medea. Revenge may be his, but he has lost life in the process, and, accordingly, ends up worse than Schnitzler’s insufferable soldier.

A judge on a business visit to a landed gentry’s manor, finds his client dead, and is convinced, although there are no outward signs, that it was a murder. “A Premediated Crime” is Grombrowicz’s version of a murder mystery—with his usual inversion of reality: there is no true evidence of murder. Convinced the man did not die of a normal heart attack but was asphyxiated, the hero stays on with the family, suspecting each of them and uncovering some rather bizarre behavior and lies. Ultimately, it is determined that all the family members expected, perhaps even sought out, his death, but had locked themselves in their rooms at night. Under the pressure of suspicion, however, the son suddenly admits the murder. The judge has no alternative but to admit, however, that there is no evidence, no marks upon the deceased man’s neck. In an absurd reversal to childhood, the judge retreats to the wardrobe of the dead man’s room, as the son or, perhaps, another family member, enters to place the evidence of his finger marks upon the dead man’s neck. In a world of such absurd suspicion, Gombrowicz indicates, one cannot but become a criminal. Like Kafka’s K., in a society of suspicion even the guiltless are necessarily guilty.

“Dinner at Countess Pavhoke’s” reiterates many of the themes of Ferdydurke, as a young commoner is taken into the world of high Society. Here too there is an absurd twisting of language, as the new guest attempts to match the poeticized sentiments of the other guests. Attending one of the countess’s “meatless evenings,” he quips, “This soup’s deliciously filling—/And made, what’s more, without corpses or killing.” But the other highly cultured guests gradually begin to reveal their coarseness and malice. As they eat their way through the supposedly delectable vegetarian dishes, the outsider and reader gradually began to comprehend that the cook has served them up various courses of human flesh. Indeed, everything is “a matter of taste” if one understands that such acculturated “tastes” depend upon the destruction of the serving class.

Los Angeles, November 15, 2005

Readers and critics generally agree that Gombrowicz’s masterpiece is Ferdydurke, while his other works are less interesting experimentations. My favorite of his fictions, however, is his last, Cosmos, a work I find to be far more troubling and yet deeply comic than his satiric portrait of an infantilized society. As Gombrowicz himself commented on this work: “Cosmos for me, is black, first and foremost black, something like a black churning current full of whirls, stoppages, flood waters, a black water carrying lots of refuse, and there is man gazing at it—gazing at it and swept by it—trying to decipher, to understand and to bind it into some kind of a whole….”

The author aptly summarizes his fiction, but in typical Gombrowicz style he has, one recognizes, expressed truths with a bit of tongue-in-cheek. For, although it is most certainly the darkest of the writings under consideration in this essay, it is also the most grandly comic, a comedy that transpires without eliciting much outright laughter.
If the characters of Ferdydurke and Bacacay predicate their actions upon a society devoted to servitude, so too does the “hero” of Cosmos—a young Polish student seeking a place of peace to study for his university exams—serve what he might express as a “higher cause.” This student does not intend to obey “others”—he has just had a terrible fight with his father and family, presumably over the direction of his career—but is determined to serve “the truth.” What he does not recognize, however, is that his university-learned “truths”—truths built upon rational connections of the human mind, associatively-constructed realities predicated on the sensate signifiers of the surrounding world—may reveal nothing and lead one down a labyrinth of inane relationships that result, in the end, in madness. If as a child I laughed at my grandmother when she proclaimed, “If you think too much, you may go mad,” Gombrowicz helps us to perceive that indeed it is possible if one too carefully follows the modernist principles of psychologically realist literature and art.

“Only connect,” proclaimed E. M. Foster (in the epigraph to his novel Howards End), one of modernist fictions most adamant proscribers. Witold takes that command at face value as he attempts to comprehend the world around him, leading to a despairing impasse that only a post-modernist-before-the-fact-writer such as Gombrowicz could have forseen.

As the young student begins his search for housing in the small town Zakopane, he suddenly runs into an old acquaintance, Fuks, who suggests they share a place on the outskirts of town, where rooms are cheaper. Off they trudge into the countryside, resting momentarily in a thicket where, as they turn to leave, they discover a terrible “crime,” a dead sparrow hanging from a wire hooked onto a branch high in a tree, “its head to one side, its beak wide open.” The sparrow has clearly been killed and hung there for all to see. Who could have done such a deed? And why?

The troubled students find a house advertising rooms nearby, and knocking at the door are greeted by a housekeeper with a strangely deformed mouth. They take a room, noticing in another empty room a young woman lying upon a mattress, her leg dangling across the metal mesh of the bed. Everything in this Zakophone farmhouse seems slightly awry and out of place to these young would-be intellects, who yet perceive that there is nothing outwardly strange about any of it.

Joining the Wojty family for dinner, the young student and his companion experience what might be perceived as a normal evening meal as a series of strange events. As with Gombrowicz’s detective in his “A Premeditated Crime,” for these would-be detectives the more things appear as normal, the stranger they become. There is a troubling connection between the “slithering” lips of the housekeeper Katasia and the “slippery” lips of the Wojty’s daughter, Lena. For the young student, in turn, these have some relationship he cannot explain to the nearby executed sparrow. Exhausted from his travels, he still cannot sleep, and discovers that Fuks has disappeared into the night. Has he snuck into Lena’s room, returned to observe the sparrow in the moonlight?

The following day, the young man observes what appears to be an arrow upon the wall of the room adjoining their dining space; Fuks points out a similar arrow-like stain on the ceiling of their bedroom. Is someone trying to tell them something, point out a path to follow in their search for the “murderer” of the innocent beast?

Late at night, with comically inventive tools, they “scientifically” attempt to follow the path of the arrow into the backyard, where they are led to an old building where, nearby, a stick is hanging? Is the hanging stick related to the hanging bird? A nearby whiffletree seems to be pointing in the same direction; is someone observing them from the windows of the house?

These ridiculously tenuous connections lead the students on a maddening search for meaning which ultimately involves the entire family—the mother (dubbed Roly-Poly by the boys); the distracted and logorrheic husband, Leon; Lena and her husband Ludvik; as well as the mysterious Katasia—in an internal investigation which occasionally reveals each as lonely and somewhat desperate, but just as often leads to blind alleys which the narrator’s mind refuses to accept. He himself becomes engulfed in the strange events as he inexplicably strangles Lena’s pet cat and hangs it, connecting himself with the neverending trail of “evidence.”

Ultimately, as Leon leads them on a day trip into the nearby mountains, the rational world is replaced by more and more startlingly insane interconnections as the seemingly innocent family members and friends are caught up in their own webs of symbols and associations, ultimately leading to a strange nighttime celebration of Leon’s only extra-martial affair—culminating in an incomprehensible private language and public masturbation—and the apparent suicide of Ludvick, discovered hanging from a tree. By this time the narrator has become as mad as any of his imaginary perpetrators, forcing his fingers into the mouth of the dead man—a mouth somehow connected in his psychologically tangled “plot” with Lena and Katshsia—and, later, stuffing them into the mouth of a priest the travelers have picked up on their voyage into these wilds.

By fiction’s end the narrator has experienced a kind of mental overload of information, has attempted so desperately to connect the pieces of the sensate world that he can no longer function—a flood of information paralleling a sudden deluge in the natural world:

Loose, dense drops, we lift our heads, it suddenly poured buckets,
water came down in sheets, a sudden wind rose, panic, everyone
running for the nearest tree, but the pines are leaking, dripping,
dribbling, water, water, water, wet hair, backs, thighs, and just
ahead of us in the dark darkness a vertical fall of falling water
interrupted solely by despairing flashlights, then, in the light of
the flashlights, one could see it pour, fall, also streams, waterfalls,
lakes, it drips, spurts, splashes, lakes, seas, currents of gurgling
water and a bit of straw, stick, carried by water, disappearing….

Our young hero returns to Warsaw, to war with his father, problems, complications, difficulties…: in other words, he is forced to once more to deal with the “real” world of human interchange—a world often without answers, without the strained connections of a pretending art.

Los Angeles, June 12, 2006
Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 5 (November 2006).
Copyright (c)2005 and 2006 by Douglas Messerli

Douglas Messerli | The Last Innocent Moment (on Kehlmann's Measuring the World and Aira's An Episode in the Live of a Landscape Painter)

2011-09-17T08:12:00.000-07:00

THE LAST INNOCENT MOMENT
by Douglas Messerli

Aaron Sachs The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of
American Environmentalism (New York: Viking, 2006)
Daniel Kehlmann Measuring the World, translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2006)
César Aira An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, translated from the Spanish by Chris
Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2006)

2006 saw what might almost be described as a mini-celebration of the great naturalist/explorer Alexander von Humboldt. A major new study of Humboldt, Aaron Sachs’ The Humboldt Current, focused on Humboldt’s achievements and his influence on environmentalism in America. Austrian novelist Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World—a fictional recounting of the lives of both Humboldt and German mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss—was published in translation later in the year; it was joined by a translation of Argentine writer César Aira’s short fiction, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, centered on Humboldt’s friend and admirer, German artist Johann Mortiz Rugendas (1802-1858).

Today most Americans probably have not even heard of the name Humboldt or, for those of a certain generation, vaguely associate it only with the Humboldt current off of South America, now called the “Peru current.” In 19th century USA, however, Humboldt was known by every American student the way the name Einstein is recognized today. His influence on American literature (from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, to Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman) was central to the viewpoints of the literary American Renaissance and had an enormous impact on the shift from the high European Romantic concepts of Emerson and Poe to the more home-grown egalitarianism of Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman. American art would not have made the transformation from generic portraiture to the broader expressions of the Hudson River School painters such as Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, and others had it not been for Humboldt’s influence. Sachs convincingly demonstrates that Humboldt’s ideas even more deeply permeated American scientific thinking—stretching from Thomas Jefferson, Antarctic explorer J. N. Reynolds, and the mountain-climber/first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Clarence King to the arctic explorer and chief engineer of the U.S. Navy, George Wallace Melville and the founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir—helping to develop shifts with regard to viewing nature that led ultimately to contemporary environmentalism.

Not only were the writings of his expeditions with botanist Aimé Bonpland to the Canary Islands, their travels from the Orinoco to the Amazon, climbs in the Peruvian Andes, and journeys to Mexico and the USA, described in popular publications with numerous prints and drawings, but Humboldt’s later writings of his tour through Russian and Siberia were eagerly read throughout the world with wonderment; his scientific theories, collected into the five volumes of Kosmos, revolutionized the very way scientific study was conceived.

At the heart of Humboldt’s theories was the idea of “unity in diversity,” his argument that “In considering the study of physical phenomena…, we find its noblest and most important result to be a knowledge of the chain of connection, by which all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent on each other.” For Humboldt, this concept covered not only the natural world, but all indigenous people within it. A determined advocate against slavery, Humboldt argued over and over for recognition that man and nature were inseparable in their interrelationships, that all things were inextricably interconnected.

Kehlmann’s enjoyable novel, focusing equally on Humboldt and Gauss, and culminating in their near-disastrous meeting in 1828 at the German Scientific Congress in Berlin, opposes the two geniuses, following Humboldt through various of his extraordinary and death-defying expeditions, while Gauss more comfortably, but perhaps less joyfully, sits at home conjuring up many of his great discoveries within the confines of his own head. While Humboldt is an adventurer, ill at ease with society and sexually dysfunctional—some of the most comic moments in the novel are devoted to Humboldt’s puritanical reactions to Bonpland’s sexual escapades and to his companions’ attempts to find a suitable sexual partner for him (when a native woman fails to arouse the scientist, Bonpland and/or the natives send him a young boy for the night)—Gauss, although completely dismissive of the intellectual abilities of those around him, marries twice and raises an extensive family. On the other hand, Gauss is so intolerant of his fellow man that he has few social graces, dooming even his own son to imprisonment through an outburst of righteous outrage in response to an attempted bribe by a local authority to release Eugen. While Humboldt, contrarily, is an almost naïve patsy to Napoleon III, he was in his later life celebrated and highly in demand by most of European society. If only because of gregariousness, Humboldt is the more engaging of Kehlmann’s two heroes.

Measuring the World, however, ultimately fails to capture the intellectual excitement of Humboldt’s life, in part because of the very metaphor it has chosen to describe the scientific activities of its heroes: vermessung (the surveying or measuring of the world). Humboldt certainly did travel the world with compass and sextant in hand; even as he climbs Mount Chimborazo, suffering from “constant vertigo,” asthenia, and terror of falling, with hair, beard, and eyebrows covered with ice, the adventurer continues to note the air temperature and altitude. But for Humboldt the experience was still immeasurable; in his understanding of the relation of any one thing to everything else, nature and man were ultimately unknowable. As he wrote in Cosmos:

In the midst of the universal fluctuation of phenomena and vital forces—
in the inextricable net-work of organisms by turns developed and destroyed—
each step that we make in the more intimate knowledge of nature leads us to
the entrance of new labyrinths…. As men contemplate the riches of nature,
and see the mass of observations incessantly increasing before them, they
become impressed with the intimate conviction that the surface and the
interior of the earth, the depths of the ocean, and the regions of the air will
still, when thousands and thousands of years have passed away, open to the
scientific observer untrodden paths of discovery.

Kehlmann’s novel, however, often reads like an historical summary of events rather than a true imaginative creation of his heroes’ lives and events. The humor of the book—much touted in the German press—relies more on his superheroes’ obstinate hostility and ignorance of the mere humans around them than it does on the Humboldtian amazement of nature and man.

The Humboldt-like hero of Aira’s novel, on the other hand, more thoroughly captures the spirit of the scientist’s presence. Like Humboldt and Bonpland, Rugendas and fellow-painter Krause travel throughout Central and South America in an attempt to “capture” the physiognomic types of humans they encounter and the landscapes into which they enter; and like the explorer-scientists in whose steps they follow, they encounter fantastic adventures:

Travel and painting were entwined like fibers in a rope. One by one, the
dangers and difficulties of a route that was tortuous and terrifying at the
best of times were transformed and left behind. And it was truly terrifying:
it was hard to believe that this was a route used virtually throughout the
year by travelers, mule drivers and merchants. Anyone in their right mind
would have regarded it as a means of suicide.

Despite the difficulties—and, occasionally, absurdities—of their journey, however, Rugendas is ever ready to move forward, and particularly anxious to encounter an attack of native Indians on the white settlements so that he might draw their faces. No such opportunity immediately arises, but the artists do encounter a series of adventures, coming upon a vast landscape of a “terrifying void,” a world that has been destroyed by locusts. The horses having reached the end of their endurance, the artists and their guides are forced to stop. Rugendas is determined, however, to check out a route of escape from this “lunar ocean, rimmed around with hills” by riding south to the hills while Krause rides north. Krause rejects the suggestion, and Rugendas rides off without him.

Why, he wonders as he moves forward into the hills, is the formation called “El Monigote,” “the Puppet?” Suddenly he is struck by lightning once and again a second time; picked up, pulled forward, and dropped by each of the bolts of lightning, he and his horse miraculously survive, but the animal takes off with its rider dragging after. They are found a day later, Rugendas’s face “exposed and strips of skin [hanging] over his eyes.” He gradually heals, but the immense pain he experiences requires him to take morphine.

As he further recuperates at a settlement, an Indian attack is announced. Despite his half-drugged condition, which leaves his retina painfully exposed to light, Rugendas borrows a lace scarf (a sort of mantilla) from the settler’s wife, and goes charging off. He and Krause follow the attacking and retreating bands of Indians throughout the day, sketching on the run; but by night he is still dissatisfied, determined to enter the jungle to see if he might witness the natives one last time. As the Germans come quickly upon the Indians joyfully barbecuing some of the stolen cattle and drinking liquor they have plundered, the figures from the two worlds come, so to speak, face to face—but with the mantilla still hiding the details of Rugendas’s head.

Drunkenness and guilt fused into terror when they saw that moonlit face.
They did not even notice what he was doing: all they could see was him.
They would never have been able to guess why he was there. How could
they know that there was such a thing as a procedure for the physiognomic
representation of nature, a market hungry for exotic engravings, and so on?
…So Rugendas was able to enter the circle of firelight undisturbed, open
his pad of good canson paper and go to work with charcoal and red chalk.

Aira, it seems to me, has better captured the spirit of the surveying scholar, a spirit of wonderment and awe in the brave new world. In some sense, Humboldt and his ideas represent the last innocent moment in the encounter between man and nature, perhaps even between man and man. For in the very act of charting and recounting these marvelous adventures, both Humboldt and Rugendas had begun the destruction of the world and peoples they witnessed. As all the others—caring scientists, conquerors, developers, settlers, soldiers, tourists—followed, the world of which Humboldt was in awe—that grand chain of connection—slowly eroded. While Sachs argues that his heroes were not men out to conquer nature but to embrace it, we know that others in their trials would have no qualms with plundering and destroying that same natural world. As Sachs himself sadly admits, while Muir may have begun life as a Humboldt-like environmentalist, he had no choice but to end it as a preservationist.

Los Angeles, March 4, 2007
Reprinted from Rain Taxi, XII, no. 2 (Summer 2007).

Douglas Messerli | A Battle with Both Sides Using the Same Tactics (on Welty's Losing Battles)

2011-09-17T07:55:00.000-07:00

A BATTLE WITH BOTH SIDES USING THE SAME TACTICS
by Douglas Messerli

Eudora Welty Losing Battles (New York: Random House, 1970)

In Losing Battles Eudora Welty expresses an aspect of the phenomenon of time which she has hinted at in her other works but has not fully developed, namely the relationship of time to language. One could say that Welty has always been concerned with how human perceptions of time are expressed in narrative language, but in Losing Battles she is just as deeply interested in exploring how language is used to create or support a specific perspective of time. Indeed, in this novel of family tales and yarns, language is the message itself: she not only conveys her themes through language, but makes language her theme. Narrative language is more important here than in any previous Welty work because the novel is primarily oral—it is primarily written dialogue—and in this oral form Welty attempts not only to say something through language, but to say something about language. Losing Battles goes to the very heart of Welty’s art, asking not only such questions as “how is time represented in narrative language?” and “what do different narratives tell the reader or listener about the way the narrator views the world” but “what is narrative language’s relationship to time?” and “how is language causal to the creation of a world order and a particular perspective of time?

These issues emanate from Welty’s presentation in Losing Battles of a large Mississippi back hills family holding its annual reunion at the Refro farm, where Granny Vaughn, grandmother to the visiting Beechams and to Beulah Beecham Renfro, celebrates her ninetieth birthday and where the elder Beechams and Renfros, joyously coming together after a year apart, sit back and perpetually talk. As Louis Rubin notes, “They do not talk to, they talk at” each other. They chatter “away the time…never entirely revealing themselves or saying what they think.” “Part of the reason [they talk so],” Rubin observes, “is to dissemble, to mask, to hide” (Louis Rubin, “Everything Brought Out In the Open: Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles,” Hollins Critic, 7 [June 1970], 2). However, it soon becomes clear that the family is not hiding something as much as it is hiding from something. And, if one becomes sensitive to the way in which this seemingly meaningless chatter is expressed, what the family is hiding is quickly revealed.

Despite its dissimulation—perhaps one should say because of it—the Beecham-Renfro family is one that cannot accept time in flux; the family members so desperately fear the passage of time and the change it brings to pass that they do little but sit and tell long tales (otherwise only arriving, eating and departing), like James Murrell of Welty’s story “A Still Moment,” going forward by going “backward with talk.” The family uses language as a shield to protect itself from time. Language that communicates or reveals the self is a threat, for any representation of self admits to man’s existence in time which flows toward death. As philosophers and psychologists have continually shown, death is the definer of an individual; it is only in death that an individual is made whole, is made itself (see for example the comments of Eugène Minkowski in Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies [Evanston: Northwestern University Press]). Without selfhood or ego, the flux of time is obliterated and the family is left free (or perhaps one should say, the family is condemned) to live a life of presentism. Thus all of the Beecham-Renfro tales concern the family at large or tell of such individuals as Beulah’s son Jack, who acts for or out of commitment to the family. Any revelation of true individuality horrifies the uncles and aunts sitting and talking.

This horror of separateness is made more clear by their narratives. When Aunt Cleo, the aunt new to the reunion, asks to hear why Jack was sent to the state penitentiary, the barrage of voices commences, each voice avowing more strongly than the last the whole family’s battle against time and change. Even before Cleo arrives and asks the crucial question, Beulah “just somehow” knows Jack will return from Parchman prison in time for the reunion, even though it comes a day before he is due to be released. Miraculously, he does return, although he has had to escape to do it. No sooner is Jack welcomed home as hero, however, than he is told the awful news by a Renfro uncle arriving just behind him that in the car Jack has helped to pull from the ditch sits the very Judge Moody who sentenced Jack to Parchman in the first place. Jack has failed to recognize the man who put him in jail. The family demands that Jack seek revenge, that he “make a monkey” out of the judge, and swayed by them, he returns to the road to “shoo” the judge’s car back into the ditch Accompanied by his wife Gloria and baby daughter Lady May, Jack goes to nearby Banner Top to await the judge, who must eventually pass on the road below. Thus the family has directed Jack to commit an act for its sake very similar to the one which sent him to prison in the first place, when he stole a safe containing, supposedly, a ring belonging to his grandmother.

This time Jack’s action ends humorously. Lady May runs into the road with Gloria after her at the very moment the judge’s car comes along, so that the judge swerves and ends up with his car balanced atop the hill, its engine left running. Beholden to the judge for saving his wife and child, Jack has no choice but to invite the judge and his wife to the reunion. Clearly Jack’s act is potentially recriminating, and not very different from his earlier “crime.” Even though he was sentenced by the Judge as “a living example” to all those who perpetuate the ethic of family feuds, he and his family have not changed an iota; the family still demands the same revenge, the same sacrifices. Nothing has changed nor will change the family. As Brother Bethune, the acting family historian, observes of the Beechams who went to World War I: “they come back the same old Beecham boys they always was, and just the good old Beecham boys we still know ‘em to be. Like they’d never been gone” (p. 191).

Gloria recognizes the family’s refusal to accept change, and consequently devotes herself to weaning Jack away from the family. As she tells him at the novel’s end, she wants him all to herself with “nobody talking, nobody listening, nobody coming—nobody about to call you or walk in on us…nobody left but you and me, and nothing to be in our way” (p. 431). But the family’s presentism appears to be stronger than she is, and at least in the events of the first day of Jack’s return, it defeats her. Because she concentrates entirely upon the future, she fails to help Jack change in the present, and she fails to perceive how she and Jack may be affected by the past. “We’re going to live for the future” (p. 60); “all that counts in life is up ahead” (p. 135), she repeatedly announces. Even her trip with Jack to Banner Top in order to “save” him ends with the Moody car in a more precarious position than it had previously been, and Jack in even greater danger of reimprisonment.

Relying on untrustworthy memories, quick associations, and an old postcard from the dead brother Sam Dale, the family later upsets Gloria by claiming to have solved the secret of her parentage. (She has grown up in a nearby orphanage without knowing who her parents were.) The family declares that Rachel Sojourner, a woman who once sewed from them, is her mother, and that her father is none other than Sam Dale Beecham himself; the explanation makes Gloria first cousin to her husband and thus truly one of the family. When Gloria denies kinship, refusing to join the family circle, the aunts stuff her mouth with watermelon until she says the equivalent of “uncle”—“Beecham.” In short, although Gloria attempts to stand her ground throughout the fights she must endure for her love of Jack, she, wishing to see the future “unwinding” ahead of her, “smooth as a ribbon,” ends up unable to see anything “beyond the bright porch” (p. 320). Later she admits, “I don’t see our future Jack” (p. 390). True to the April first birthdate she claims, Gloria is made a fool by the family.

A more fit adversary of the family—although no more successful—is Gloria’s mentor, Miss Julia Mortimer, the long-time school teacher whom Gloria has replaced. She is the one Judge Moody has been on his way to visit, having received a letter from her begging him to come. But waylaid at the Renfros’ the judge hears of her death. Since Miss Julia has tried for decades to educate the family and to make them give up their ingrained patterns of thinking, she is the family’s arch-enemy, and the judge must hear all the stories about her that they can recall. A painful portrait is drawn, a story of a determined woman perpetually engaged in a losing battle against what she has labeled as their ignorance. Year after year she has attempted to give enough knowledge to children of the clan that would help them to come to terms with a world outside that of their parents’ destructive patterns of family behavior. But with the Beecham-Renfro family and families like it—the Broadwees, the Comforts—she has only failed. Gloria’s defection from school teacher to wife is the final blow. “Put out” of her own school because of age, the teacher is left in the hands of Lexie Renfro, a Beechman-Renfro aunt who cruelly “nurses” her by cutting her off entirely from the outside world, taunting her for having visitors, and finally tying her in bed while refusing to bring her books, mail her letters, give her paper, or even grant her the solitude in which to die. Lexie’s attendance at the reunion has given Miss Julia her only chance to escape to the mailbox, where she is discovered near death by a passing carpenter. Despite her death—or because of it—the family tells the stories of her defeat with laughter, but as Judge Moody observes, it “could make a stone cry” (p. 306).

Yet for all the cruelty of the family, the same kind of horrible acts have been perpetrated upon them as well. The family too has been cut off from the world, and not only by its own doing. As the judge’s wife observes of the Renfro place, “You sure are stranded here….Mercy, what a long way off from everything”; “this is the edge of nowhere.” Her metaphor says far more about the family’s condition than she or the reader first imagines. For despite their pretense of presentism, the Beecham-Renfro family are on the very verge of nowhere, of exactly what they try to stave off, of chaos, of death itself.

Although they have scraped together a bounteous feast for the reunion, one is continually reminded throughout their narrative that they are living through the Depression, a time of dust, crop failures and destitution. Brother Bethune says of their condition: “in all of our glorious state I can’t think of any county likelier to take the cake for being the poorest and generally the hardest-suffering than dear old Boone….Floods all spring and drought all summer. We stand some chance of getting about as close to starvation this winter as we come yet. The least crop around here it would be possible for any man to make, I believe Mr. Ralph Renfro is going to make it this year….No corn in our cribs, no meal in our barrel, no feed and no shoes and no clothing—tra la la la” (pp. 191-192). As Gloria admits when asked why she is still suckling a baby as old as Lady May, “What I’m seeing to is she doesn’t starve!” (p. 326). On the sign which Uncle Nathan in his traveling ministry has placed on Banner Top—the very object which keeps the Judge’s car from careening over the cliff—are words applicable to the family’s precarious predicament: “Destruction Is At Hand.”

The family’s position, accordingly, is not so different from Miss Julia’s, and in her letter to Judge Moody, who reads it to the reunion despite their protests, she recognizes that not understanding this has led to her defeat: “I’m alive as ever, on the brink of oblivion, and I caught myself once on the verge of disgrace. Things like this are put in your path to teach you. You can make use of them, they’ll bring you one stage, one milestone, further along your road. You can go crawling next along the edge, if that’s where you’ve come to. There’s a lesson in it. You can profit from knowing that you needn’t be ashamed to crawl—to keep on crawling, to be proud to crawl to where you can’t crawl any further. Then you can find yourself lying flat on your back—look what’s carried you another mile. From flat on your back you may not be able to lick the world, but at least you can keep the world from licking you. I haven’t spent a lifetime fighting my battle to give up now. I’m ready for all they send me. There’s a measure of enjoyment in it” (p. 299).

Before her death Miss Julia has come to the realization that the battles she and the family have fought have not been out of mere antipathy, but have emanated from the “survival instinct,” that her fight to bring them knowledge that would free them from their isolation has been matched by their battle to remain unknowing in order to protect their isolation in time and place. For it is their all-encompassing notion of the communal present that constrains them from swirling off into space, that saves them from the mad forward rush of death. Like the judge’s car, caught up in the words of doom, their language deceptively cocoons them against time and the world at large. The family uses language as a weapon against knowledge, while Miss Julia has fought for a language which—as Gloria describes it—demands direct and open communication: “Miss Julia Mortimer didn’t want anybody left in the dark, not about anything. She wanted everything brought out in the wide open, to see and be known. She wanted people to spread out their minds and their hearts to other people, so they coud be read like books” (p. 432).

Just before her death Miss Julia realizes her mistake, that she could not possible have won against so many using her available tools. “Oscar,” she writes to the Judge, “it’s only now, when I’ve come to lie flat on my back, that I’ve had it driven in on me—the reason I never could win for good is that both sides were using the same tactics” (p. 298). Both sides, she has come to understand, have used language as a tool to gain control over the situations, have used words to create perspectives of time in which they could survive.

For the Beecham-Renfro family language is ritualistic, a process rather than a mode of communication. At the very beginning of the novel one witnesses an aspect of that process which the family repeats throughout. Welty’s novel begins with six descriptive paragraphs of chronographia written in the past tense. The time is immediately established in this past tense (“When the rooster crowed, the moon had still not left the world”), but through the use of a conjunction (“but was going down on flushed cheek”) and conjunctive adverbs (“Then a house appeared on its ridge….Then a baby bolted naked out of the house” [emphasis added]), the time is immediately connected with active verbs manifesting process. The effect is to cast the subsequent events in the imaginative present. Of course, this is basically no different from what happens in most narrative fiction. Welty herself points out in “Some Notes on Time in Fiction” that the “novelist can never to otherwise than work with time, and nothing in his novel can escape it. The novel cannot begin without his starting of the clock.”

The involvement with time in the very nature of narrative fiction demonstrates my point, for it is because of the innate potential of narrative language to convert past into present that the family is so dependent upon storytelling. Uncle Percy proceeds to tell the tale, which Aunt Cleo has requested (like Clio, the muse of history, this aunt is generally the one to stimulate the family’s memories), in much the same manner in which Welty’s work begins. Percy’s tale is also told in past tense, and it too begins with the starting of a clock, with an indication of time: “Well, crops was laid by one more year. Time for the children to be swallowed up in school” (p. 22). But no sooner are the past tense and time established than the present, introduced by a conjunction, is interjected into the narrative: Aunt Nanny interrupts, “But it don’t take Ella Fay long” [emphasis added]. And by the very next line Uncle Percy makes the same linguistic conversion: “So when the new teacher looked the other way, she’s [Ella Fay] across the road and into the store after it.” Although the past tense is returned to in the following lines, the imaginative conversion to present has already occurred. Ella Fay is corrected and criticized in the present for her past actions as if there were no distinction.

The family is obviously not telling a novel but relating a family tale and is required therefore to carry the narrative no further than this conversion to presentism. A novel must proceed in time within the imaginative present that it has created, but the family’s tales, as Welty writes of children’s tales, are “not answerable to time” (The Eye of the Story, p. 164). The family’s stories are all without suspense; the events they describe have already occurred in time and are dead. The stories the family tells are all well known, have already been assimilated into its members’ lives. As the promptings and verbal embroiderings of the family imply, a magic lies in the repetition. Granny Vaughn admits, “I’ve heard this tale before,” and, as the first story rises to a climax, the aunts cry out in unison, “Here it comes!” In their cries they betray the fact that any communicative aspect of the narrative is lost; the news the narrative may once have threatened to impart has already been subsumed into the family’s world; it has lost its power to psychologically affect their lives. By converting events into narrative, the family renders them harmless.

Something close to the prototype of this process of assimilation can be observed at several points throughout the novel, for almost all of the events which happened during the day—and they occur significantly at some distance from the family—are immediately converted into stories, into language. By the end of the day, as the aunts and uncles ready themselves to leave, all the events have been transformed. As Uncle Noah Webster (whose name is surely connected with language) tells Gloria upon his leaving: “Gloria this has been a story on us all that never will be allowed to be forgotten….Long after you’re an old lady without much further stretch to go, sitting back in the same rocking chair Granny’s got for her little self in now, you’ll be hearing it told to Lady May and all her hovering brood. How we brought Jack Renfro back safe from the pen! How you contrived to send a court judge up Banner Top and caused him to sit at our table and pass a night with the family, wife along with him. The story of Jack making it home through thick and thin and into Granny’s arms” (p. 354).

The foregoing paragraph is the culmination of a process that goes beyond the family’s transformation of past action into the timelessness of a tale. In the introductory paragraphs to the novel, Welty uses a great many figurative devices, certainly the most numerous of which are adverbial and adjectival comparisons. There are at least sixteen such comparisons in the first six paragraphs, and dozens appear throughout the book. Indeed, whenever the family stops talking for a moment, Welty describes the world around it with similes and similitudes. She has chosen these devices, I suspect, to demonstrate how place is brought into the family’s conception of time. I suggested earlier that because of their physical location and deprivation the Beechams and Renfros are on the edge of nowhere. But if one considers the similes and similitudes, one sees that the family literally lives nowhere as well—literally, that is, in the sense that consciousness is reality. In their world of presentism the Beechams and Renfros can rarely accept visible phenomena which are not in motion, and they can never come to terms with visible phenomena outside the familiar. The world around them is thus brought into the perception, into their conspiracy against time. For example, the distant point of the ridge puts “its lick on the sky” “like the tongue of a calf”; Sunday light races over the farm “as fast as the chickens were flying” [emphasis added]. The ridge and light are seen to be in motion and are as quickly converted through similitude into the colloquial. Every simile demonstrates, or at least implies, the same process. The invisible is made visible (for example, heat is “solid as a hickory stick”) and all the visible is brought into action into a world which the family mentally knows and spiritually feels safe in. There is no hesitation whatsoever to convert the whole visible world into conceptualized motion. In fact, the family must make this conversion to preserve its perceptual shield against death. As any post-Bergsonian study of time makes clear, visible phenomena in space are dead. Only things in time, which is human consciousness, are living. Thus just as the family has transformed past, and therefore dead, events into the present, and brought them through language into the present—so must the reunion convert visible phenomena, always reminders of space and death, into time and the familiar, where through language, through repetition, they are rendered harmless.

Because they are part of the visible world, whole groups of people and individuals are subject to this same process. Men and women are never defined by the family according to invisible qualities, personality or values. The judge and Miss Julia are hated not because of their beliefs, but because of what they do. The concept of respect for authority, for which Judge Moody sentences Jack, is seen by the family as the judge’s “battle cry” (p. 56); Miss Julia’s conviction that knowledge frees minds is seen as having “designs” on everybody (p. 235). Of the stolen safe’s owner, Curly Stovall, Aunt Birdies asks Ella Fay to “tell what he’s like, quick.” “He’s great big and has little bitty eyes…Baseball cap and sideburns,” Ella Fay hurriedly answers. Aunt Nanny reacts, “She’s got it! Feel like I can see him coming right this minute” (p. 23). In other words, the physical description functions only as something which brings about conceptualized motion. And, of course, once people are set into motion they too are readily converted from the time of their actions, the time-in-flux, into the family’s presentism. People also become stories. Mr. Renfro says of the Bywy Indians who originally inhabited the location where the family has settled, “There ain’t too much of their story left lying around” (p. 335). Similarly, when Jack says he knows Miss Julia “hated to breathe her last,” and Gloria retorts, “You never laid eyes on her,” Jack answers, “I heard her story” (p. 361). Just as the family renders all acts nugatory, so does it make impotent all natural forces and individual values, personalities and characteristics through language.

Over and above this, the family believes the individuals, once they are converted into tales, are answerable to language. This idea is hinted at in Uncle Noah Webster’s statement to Gloria. His claim that the family brought Jack home is a brag which tacitly suggests that the aunts and uncles sitting and talking have had control over Jack’s movement in space. As outrageous as this sounds, he is speaking the truth. For if the family has converted all reality into the ideality of their presentism, then there is no space. They live in a world of language, not of location; they exist in a world where time stands against real time by excluding space. Human physicality is thus erased. Although the family laments that its members are physically spread out in space, all living near different towns with names like Banner, Morning Star, Peerless, and Alliance, any such lamentation is quite meaningless, for they live in intellectual synchronicity; in their intellectually constructed world they are inseparable.

One can observe in the family’s lament, moreover, yet another linguistic phenomenon that is closely related to the annihilation of space, that is their need to repeat locational names. Because it symbolically represents space, and because it also converts space into words, naming is seen to have magical powers very similar to the repetition of tales, which is a sacred process to the Beecham-Renfros. Just as tales reconstitute action, locational names, the only vestiges of space, reconstruct space according to the family’s requirements. The name alone allows the family to live in space because it permits them to control it. Of course, the same is again true of human beings. Since the family will suffer no act of individuality, the only vestiges left of physical beings are the names. And the name has magical powers because it allows a man to physically exist and yet permits the family to control and define him. In both these cases, however, the magic of the name lies not in the fact that the place or being resides in the name. Unlike primitive cultures wherein the name is the place or individual, to the family of Losing Battles the fact that the name is not the place or individual is what is important, for only through the separation of spatiality and nomination can one be converted into another (and, one might add, for that same reason naming was perhaps mankind’s first dissociation of time and space). Only thus can place and the individual become words, which as language can be put into conceptualized space—a space which is man-made rather than natural.

In Uncle Noah Webster’s statement one can observe both these linguistic transformations at work. Beulah need only repeat her son’s name, and the act she desires of him follows. She says, “Jack’s coming,” and, since there is no “true” space and Jack’s actions are controlled by language, the words are all powerful: Jack comes. The whole family participates in the same ritual calling by repeating Jack’s story, which is the same as Jack, and therefore reproduces him. In their linguistic presentism there is no better way for the Renfros and Beechams to bring Jack home than by “telling” him, retelling his story. Like Ora Stovall, who the next morning hurries out to Banner Top to get down the names and the story of the people involved in the retrieving of the Judge’s car for the readers of the local newspaper, The Vindicator, the family vindicates its reality by confounding people with names and stories.

Obviously, none of these linguistic processes is understood by the family in the way I have attempted to describe them. Nor do any of these processes actually stop the approach of death. The family merely acts instinctively in a way that makes them “appear” to be free from flux. Although the family refuses to recognize the full meaning of death, its tales area filled with admissions of defeat by death and confessions of pain which death has wrought: the Beecham-Renfro recollections of the simultaneous deaths of the father and mother and the death in the war of the brother, the family’s confrontations with the recent death of the grandfather, the immediate death of Miss Julia, and the imminent death of Granny Vaughn. These recollections link the family to the past, present and future, to the cycles of time that undercut their artificial presentism. The car is salvaged only after it has fallen; similarly, the family must accept its fall, its doom of death, before its members can be saved. As in all of Welty’s works, a transcendent vision which frees one from time-in-flux is possible only when the past is brought together with the future in present time.

Within the novel the family does not come to this awareness. The major problem of Losing Battles is, in fact, that it is difficult to point to a character who does come to terms with both the past and the future, and who represents, accordingly, a moral order within the work. Certainly one is tempted to see Judge Moody and, especially, Miss Julia as advocates of Welty’s view of morality and time. Both judge and school teacher consistently perceive the destructive results of the Beecham-Renfro’s presentism, and they dedicate their lives to countering its effects. But upon examination of their vision of time and their own linguistic patterns, it appears that their perception of time as a delimited and destructive as that of the family’s.

Miss Julia’s letter, for example, presents a world that, unlike the family, has a past, present and future. Her letter evaluates her present state (“I’m alive as ever, on the brink of oblivion”) in relation to her past (“I caught myself once on the verge of disgrace”) in connection with an implied future (“I’m ready for all they send me”). Nevertheless, while she combines the three modalities of time, no substantial evidence exists to show that she actually connects them. Rather, Miss Julia’s awareness of time is historical. Her historicism shows up in her metaphors: life for her is a “path,” a “road” which can be measured by “stages,” by “milestones.” Behind these metaphors lies the whole notion of time as progression. The adverbs “then” and “next” reveal her historical perspective. Events for her occur in series, not simultaneously. Whereas Welty used conjunctive adverbs to bring past events into an active and colloquial present, Miss Julia merely uses these adverbs as connectors between one modality and other. The past for her is always finished, the future something ahead, and the present only a momentary pause—never a time in which through memories the past can be brought together with a vision of a future that includes death. As she says, “Doubling back on my tracks has never been my principle. Even if I can’t see very far ahead of me now, that’s where I’m going” (p. 299).

With her historicism, her view of life as a journey through time, it is not surprising that she arrives at death’s door asking, “What was the trip for?” (p. 241). As her name suggests (“Mort” or death, and “time”), Miss Julia does not find any meaning in the end but death itself. She may recognize her mistakes—“the side that gets licked gets to the truth first”—but she has no personal revelation in those facts.

Both sides may be using the same tactics, accordingly, but they have been unable to communicate what they perceive. Miss Julia has tried and failed to indoctrinate the family in her historicism. Willy Trimble, who speaks the same language as the family, admits that although Miss Julia knew history well, she could not teach it to him (p. 233). Similarly, the family can only fail to make clear to Miss Julia their presentism. “She couldn’t beat time when she marches us. …She run ahead of us,” Aunt Birdie recalls (p. 293). In retrospect, one sees that the novel is based upon the antinomy of presentism and historicism. Gloria, like Miss Julia in her rush to the future, is thus set in position to the family. Judge Moody, like the other two, is in a hurry to get somewhere, and accordingly entering the terrain of the family finds that roads circle about, double upon one another and end up nowhere.

The three prefer reading and writing rather than speaking. All three put their experiences down on paper, and thus convert them into something in space, something dead. The family, as we have seen, live their experiences over and over simply by speaking them. Even if they cannot read “the handwriting on the wall” and, therefore, cannot foresee their own doom, at least they can bring their past back to life again; they can bring the past imaginatively into the present. Much to the family’s dismay, they cannot bring memory back to life; the Judge must read Miss Julia’s letter against the family’s protest whose view is reflected by Aunt Birdie: “I can’t understand it when he reads it to us. Can’t he just tell it?” Instead of actualizing the visit for which Miss Julia begged, Gloria writes a letter, remaining ignorant, accordingly, of her own past.

In their presentism, the family has the roots (like the concentric rings of the nearby tree trunk) to achieve a transcendent vision, but they lack just what they need to survive, what Miss Julia, Gloria and the Judge might have given them—a future. But for the family the future is terrible, and most horribly, it is silent. As Brother Bethune dramatically describes Judgment Day: “You’ll be left without words. Without words! Can you believe it? Think about that!” (p. 212). Perhaps, accordingly, we must look to those in the family who are not part of the ongoing cascade of language. Critic James Boatright has pointed to several characters within the family who most remain silent (“Speech and Silence in Losing Battles,” Shendandoah, 25 [Spring 1974], 3-14). He speaks of Granny Vaughn as the family’s sibyl or oracle, and mentions Nathan and Vaughn as others who keep silent while the family speaks. These characters all incorporate the past, present and future. Granny, perhaps, is the least transcendent of the three, but she intermingles past and future in a way no other living character does. Throughout the novel she confuses dead grandchildren with living ones—bringing death upon the living who refuse to accept it—and, simultaneously, she lives in some future time where she is one hundred instead of her real age of ninety. “Time’s a-wasting,” she constantly reminds those around her who refuse to recognize time (p. 40). This joining of the past and present with the future permits her a transcendent vision of sorts. She knows all the family secrets—she knows of the parents’ death, of Gloria’s birth—but she never tells all. For this reason she is recognized by the family—and the reader—as someone special.

Nathan, who participates in the family circle, also stands apart. He partakes of the Beecham-Renfro past made present, but in his silence is separated from them. And in his silence he is something of an oracle. He too has a secret: he has killed a man. That murder has cost him—he has lost a hand—and with the sacrifice he has been made to see things with a new awareness. “He surrendered to the Lord,” as Beulah says (p. 329), suggesting he has come to accept death. His sign, it should be remembered, saves the car from falling right over Banner Top into nothingness, and, similarly, it is Nathan’s signs that warn the family it must come to terms with its future by facing the questions of meaning and death.

Vaughn is another member of the family who comes to value the future. In one of the most lyrical scenes of the novel, Vaughn walks through the night to retrieve the Banner school bus from the ditch. He is relieved to escape all the voices “telling it—bragging, lying, singing, pretending, protesting, swearing everything into being, swearing everything away” (p. 363). He also keeps in his silence an important secret: he loves the language of silence; he loves to read and write. Despite the family’s attempts to destroy all portents of change, to ridicule the language of death that reading and writing symbolizes for the family, it has produced within its own ranks a child who will face the flux of time, who will learn of a world outside his own.

Two other characters within the family, however, represent an even greater hope for the family as a whole. Sam Dale is a figure of the past, but he has brought both the past and the future to bear upon the present. In the photography which Beulah shows the family, Sam Dale is caught twice in the eternal moment of presentness: “Evidently by racing the crank of the camera and running behind backs, Sam Dale had got in on both ends of the panorama, putting his face smack and smack again into the face of oblivion” (p. 328). Because he has faced oblivion, Sam Dale has achieved a truer immortality than the family can in all its present talk. He is, moreover, the family’s favorite; even in the silence of death he has still a shaping power over them.

Lady May, child of Jack’s presentism and Gloria’s future-orientation, is also silent. Throughout most of the novel she cannot yet speak, but she represents the hope that the family may grow in transcendent perceptions, and when she does speak, that hope is given new force. Lady May speaks not as part of the reunion, not as part of the family circle in its “soul-defying” speech, but alone and in secret. In the face of chaos itself, she confronts the approaching storm with her first words: “What you huntin’, man” (p. 368). Beulah’s immediate rush to snatch up the child “as if a life had been saved” suggests that the child will be condemned to the familial desire to blot out death. But she will also be blessed with love from her parents and a family with a tradition which, at least, will give her the potential for a vision which sees life in the richness and fullness of time.

In Losing Battles Welty shows the reader that the language of the visionary, the language which includes a vision of time in all its modalities, is a language of both process and reflection; it is a language that both brings meaning into being with speech and receives and reflects on meaning through the silence of reading and writing. Ultimately, what Welty shows us is that man has within him the capabilities of being both godly and sinful. Man can call things into being; through speech he can bring order into this universe. But he is also fallen; he is no god and must eventually submit to the order or chaos of the universe in death. Just before her death Miss Julia perceives this fact. She writes Judge Moody: “There’s been one thing I never did take into account…. Watch out for innocence. Could you be tempted by it, Oscar—to your own mortification—and conspire with the ignorant and the lawless and the foolish and even the wicked, to hold your tongue?” (p. 300).

Miss Julia has realized that man is a fallen being; she has recognized death. Her lesson has been that man must be ready to receive, to look around him and take in everything, above all to learn in his ignorance all there is to know. But she has forgotten that man also makes meaning, that man is driven in his innocence to make order of the universe, that in his pride, his foolishness, perhaps even in his wickedness, his nature requires that he struggle against his own fallen condition, that he try to regain his Eden.

College Park, Maryland, 1978
Reprinted from Peggy Prenshaw, ed., Eudora Welty: Critical Essays (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1979).
Copyright (c)1978 by Douglas Messerli

Douglas Messerli | The Elements of Fiction (on Aira's The Seamstress and the Wind)

2011-09-17T07:35:00.000-07:00

THE ELEMENTS OF FICTION
by Douglas Messerli

César Aira La costuera y el viento (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editoria, 1994), translated by Rosalie Knect as The Seamstress and the Wind (New York: New Directions, 2011)

This is the fifth English-language translation of Argentinean writer César Aira’s over eighty publications of fiction. For devotees of his writing—and I now consider myself one of them—each new book is a must, different as they are from one another. For each of these slightly quirky fictions takes the reader into new territory where he feels that the author, like the great storytellers of all time, is making it up as he goes along. These short volumes, accordingly, seem so fresh that one might imagine that if Aira were to begin the story over by repeating the first few pages, the ending would be entirely different.

The Seamstress and the Wind begins, in fact, with the author revealing some of his methods. “Trapped” for a few weeks in France (the narrator proclaims he dislikes traveling), the author decides to write a fiction with two major elements: his central character must be a seamstress and the tale must include the wind. The narrator claims that he seeks through these two elements to write “a novel of successive adventures, full of anomalies and inventions.” And he proceeds to do so, beginning with an autobiographical memory from his childhood in the Argentine suburb of Coronel Pringles, where one day he and a school friend decide to play a game of hide and seek within an open semi-truck parked near their houses.

As the friend draws near him, pretending to be a monster of sorts, the young narrator closes his eyes in horror. When he opens them his friend has disappeared, and a few moments later he finds himself, almost as if he has fallen into a time warp, at his own kitchen table, startling his mother, who has been told he is missing and, unable to find him, is quietly pondering her and the family’s predicament. It is his friend, in reality, who has gone missing, and after a search of the entire neighborhood, the mother, Delia, who works as a seamstress, becomes convinced, having begun to lose her sense of reality, that her son has been “stolen” by the neighborhood truck driver, Chiquito, now on his way to make a delivery of goods in Argentina’s vast and empty Patagonia.

Scooping up the wedding dress upon which she is working, she hires one of the town’s two taxi drivers to chase after the truck, and speeds away into the night.

Thus Aira whips up a kind of strange Keystone-cop like chase that results in just what he has determined his fiction should be: a story of odd adventures and inventions that remove this fiction from any sense of being a “novel” and transforms the work into a kind absurdist fantasy. As the taxi and its occupants speed off into the desert, they suddenly crash, with enormous velocity, into the back of the huge truck, instantaneously killing the taxi driver and sending poor Delia into a kind of coma, as their small taxi, impaled into the back of the truck, moves off into space, without the truck driver having the least suspicion of the accident. He is in a hurry to reach his destination.

Meanwhile, Delia’s husband, returning home from work, is told by the neighborly gossips that his wife has gone off, and he, in his own kind of madness, takes after her in the family car, followed by a small blue car of Delia’s customer, determined to retrieve her wedding dress.

Part of the joy of reading Aira is the surprising series of strange events as they occur, so I will not reveal all of the long series of amazing adventures that these figures endure. Let us just say that the adventures of the fiction include Delia’s husband’s addiction to gambling, a strange gambling den in the middle of nowhere, a transformation of the woman who is to be married the next day, Delia’s romance with the strong Patagonian wind, a mysterious “monster child” created out of a sort of atomic meltdown of the gambling den, and a rediscovery of a large Paleolithic armadillo shell. Few American writers, except perhaps for Mac Wellman, could possibly whip up a story with these unlikely props. Aira makes it all seem easy, and, although it is thoroughly unbelievable—particularly for those steeped in realist traditions—the author somehow poetically combines them to create a sense credible denouement. If the “scattered elements” of Aira’s fable do not magically come together “at the end in one supreme moment,” like a magnet they click into place as the wind shuffles and deals each of these characters its fate.

Los Angeles, September 16, 2011

Douglas Meserli | So and So (on Henry Green's Party Going)

2011-09-16T06:46:00.000-07:00

SO AND SO

Henry Green Party Going (London: The Hogarth Press, 1939)

The elderly Miss Fellowes begins this wonderful comic novel, as she walks through a thick London fog toward the train station where she intends to see her niece, Claire, off on a trip the younger woman is making to the continent with several other friends. Suddenly, a dead pigeon falls from the murky sky to her feet below. For some inexplicable reason, Miss Fellowes, picks up the dead bird, washing in the lavatory sink, and wrapping it up in brown parcel paper. Soon after,

Miss Fellowes did not feel well, so, when she got to the top of
those steps she rested there leaning on a handrail.

Slightly recovering, the woman decides to order tea at the busy station food shop, but when no one will come to wait on her, she decides to go over to the counter and orders a whisky instead.

Meanwhile, the party-going group gradually arrives, each member finding it difficult to make their way to the others, but eventually gathering, with their luggage, at a central point. Their host, Max, is the latest to arrive, after having considered not even going. The others, Claire, Evelyna, Angela, Julia, Alex, and Robert gradually do link up, but by the time they encounter each other, the trains have been long delayed because of the fog, and Miss Fellowes has fallen into a faint at the restaurant. Max arranges for their party to inhabit rooms at the nearby station hotel, into which they also sneak Claire's ill aunt before the management pulls down gates over the entrances to protect the premises from the potentially marauding crowds beginning to gather at the station.

So begins Green's satirical work. The rest of it is spent in close rooms, where the women each gossip and try to out-wit one other, manipulating the men in their group, while trying each to vie for the eligible, wealthy, and handsome Max. Alex, who is gay, spends most of his time whining and complaining, Robert retreats to the hotel barroom, and Angela's equally incompetent boyfriend, mopes nearby, sorry that he had not wished her a better farewell.

Green's work, accordingly, is centered primarily on the women and their subtle and, more often, obvious put-downs of one another, just as they pretend long friendships and admiration for each another. Into this group, the beautiful and legendary Amabel miraculously finds entry, claiming her right to join them, even though she has been rather specifically uninvited by Max. Her visit, moreover, ratchets up the heightened tensions between these competitive harridans, and ultimately threatens to break-up the party. Nothing much else happens in this fiction, but the war of words and these women's mindless and often meaningless actions and disparagements of one another, along with Alex's aspersions, and Angela's discomfort (she is a first-timer in their party), creates enough comic energy to match any boulevard farce.

All the ninnies gathered at the hotel, wealthy and/or spoiled, are, at heart, mean and bored, having no ideas with which to entertain their empty heads. And Green's satire soon turns somewhat vicious as we observe their selfish manipulations. Only the gravely ill Miss Fellowes, cared for by two of the women's nannies who have also come to see the group off, perceives anything of significance. In her fight against alcohol and possible death, she undergoes a kind of spiritual journey that transforms the empty connections made by the others into something meaningful and possibly salving.

Claire, as well as the others, is described as being incapable of caring for her aunt, and gradually, we discover she is only too ready to leave her behind in the strange hotel room for her own escape, Green revealing that Miss Fellowes' herself cannot stand her niece, nor Claire's mother, the older woman's sister—feelings we share.

The vast void of these individual's lives is less revealed in their catty statements and petty behavior, than it is in Green's own impeccable style—through the very language Green uses to convey their feelings. Among the author's several rhetorical devices, the most obvious is his use of the word "so" to convey the weak link of their logic. The conjunction and, at times, adjective, seems to convey an underlying relationship of events where there are actually no real connections. Three examples from many dozens of examples throughout the work will have suffice:

She called him darling, which was of no significance except that
she had never done so before, and he did not at once tumble to it
that her smiles and friendliness for him, which like any other girl
she could turn on at will so that it poured pleasantly out in the way
water will do out of taps (p. 117) [italics mine]

So she came over to where he was sitting, and, his hands taken up
with pouring out his drink, she kissed his cheek and then sat down
opposite (p. 113) [italics mine]

They made noises which could be taken to mean yes and Julia ex-
plained to Miss Henderson how Max had already ordered tea so that
it would be easy to carry two cups along to them without Angela knowing.
(p. 71) [italics mine]

One need only compare that false connection of "so," with the adjectival and adverbial connections that actually suggest a subsequent relationship, used to describe Miss Fellow's nightmare adventures:

And Miss Fellowes wearily faced another tide of illness. Aching all
over she watched helpless while that could rushed across to where
was wedged and again the sea below rose with it, most menacing
and capped with foam and as it came nearer she heard again the
shrieking wind in throbbing through her ears. In terror she watched
the seas rise to get at her, so menacing her blood throbbed unbearably,
and again it was all forced into her head but this had happened so
often she felt she had experienced the worst of it. But now with a roll
of drums and then a most frightful crash lightning came out of that
cloud and played upon the sea, and this repeated, and then again, each
time nearer till she knew she was worse than she had ever been. One
last crash which she knew to be unbearable and she burst and exploded
into complete insensibility. She vomited.

Here there is a specific relationship between events. The mental vision Miss Fellowes encounters,a kind of apocalyptic tempest, results in an actual physical action. The mental vision she encounters directly relates to her own actions and behavior.

For the others, there is "no significance," as they speak of pointless actions such assmiling, kissing a cheek, or carrying two cups of coffee. For the party-goers, action is pointless, and ideation, accordingly, has no real connection with the petty things they accomplish.

Whereas, Max's gathering of nit-wits can only wait, twittering away their time before an equally meaningless adventure in the South of France, Miss Fellowes has responded to nature in her attempt to give the dead bird—itself a kind of symbol for the others' spiritual deaths—a properly ritualized burial. It is she, accordingly, who must suffer the storms and waves of angst that the others will not and cannot face.

When the news finally reaches the group that the trains are running again, Julia—who throughout the early part of the fiction has worried over what she calls her charms, meaningless tokens from her childhood that she carries with her wherever she goes—rushes into Miss Fellowes' room bursting out with the news, oblivious of Miss Fellowes' presence:

"children we are to go, they've telephoned to say it's all over,
isn't it just wonderful and we're to get reading, darlings, just think."

But, obviously, she and her friends cannot "think," for they have no "fellow" feelings, no empathy for anything or anyone in the world around them. Julia's tokens are all inanimate objects, things, as opposed to Miss Fellowes' formerly living being. In the world of the party-goers there are no true connections between anything they might do as opposed to something else, and, therefore, no difference between present or past. As Embassy Richard says, after he is asked to join their party:

"But weren't you going anywhere?" Amabel said to Richard, only she
looked at Max.
"I can go where I was going afterwards," he said to all of them and smiled.

The relationship between human beings that characterizes Julia and her friends is summarized, again with the recurrent word "so," a few sentences earlier:

So like when you were small and they brought children over to play with
you and you wanted to play on your own then someone, as they hardly
ever did, came along and took them off so you could do what you wanted.

Los Angeles, September 12, 2011

Recorded Voice of Virginia Woolf

2011-09-15T07:07:00.000-07:00

To hear the recorded voice of Virginia Woolf, click below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8czs8v6PuI

Øystein Lønn | The Calf in the Sea

2011-09-11T12:12:00.000-07:00

Øystein Lønn
The Calf in the Sea
Translated by Frances Diem Vardamis

The year Anders began school, it was his job to take care of the boat. In the morning he took the oars from the shed and went down to the wharf. He pulled the newly painted fishing boat in towards land, tied it to the pole with a clove hitch, and carefully laid the oars under the seats. The boat rubbed against the sand, small fish darted through the kelp, and he waded out with the lunch. He was careful not to step on broken mussel shells, but the sea was as clear as glass, and he did not see a single shell on the sandy bottom. He placed the lunch basket in an empty crate; there was not a drop of water in the bottom of the boat, and he left the bailing scoop in place and waded back.

It was dead calm in the inlet, not a ripple, and he could barely make out the small waves near the buoy. When it was not windy, he was allowed to row out the Mystic Reefs alone, and while he waited for the woman to come, he sat watching the small fish that swam among the tangled kelp.

It always took a while, but he waited happily. Because when they rowed out to the Mystic Reefs, she was so content and on such familiar terms with the sea that she always trailed her hand in the water. He rowed slowly across the narrow inlet, and in the reflected light he saw fish among the steep underwater reefs. She called his attention to the fish, and talked about the fishing beds out between the islands. That was far out, almost all the way to the lighthouse, and he was not allowed to row there alone.

It took a half hour to row out the Mystic Reefs, and the woman always sat in the back of the boat. When they reached the small island with the salt sheds, between the sheds and the deserted house, she winked at him and lit a cigarette. Otherwise, she only smoked late in the evening when she sat by the fire reading. The open sea lay beyond the small islands, the oars creaked as he rowed, it was still in the sheltered coves, the gulls cried, and he saw how she followed the flight of the terns. Grass clung stubbornly to the steep slopes and raspberries and currants grew in the richer soil within the coves.

They bathed in the bay with a sandy bottom. She taught Anders to swim in a cove where the sea was as clear as glass, and he saw thick tangles of kelp and the shadow of small crabs along the small islands. In the first years he floated in blue water wings, paddling among the reefs in the bay. He could stand on the bottom everywhere, and he knew each and every rock in the pale, golden sand. Kelp swayed when he paddled past, and now and then he caught a glimpse of large crabs. During the past two summers she had taught him to swim. In the cold water, early in the summer, he felt as if he were gliding.

The first week in June the family moved out to the white summer house, and they returned to the city by August. The furthest islands of the Mystic Reefs were so low that they had a view in all directions. They bathed out there every single day, even when it rained, and had been out there every summer of his life. The woman always bathed for a long time. She swam between the islets where the drop-off was sudden, and she watched him when he waded in the shallows. He played in the kelp and the sea grass until the water reached his chest. When, sometimes, she heard the sound of a boat, she reluctantly pulled on her dress. She predicted the weather from the colors of the sea and followed the sun’s progress in the sky.

She had made a fireplace out of three rocks. There he learned to make coffee. He drank red currant juice and ate cheese sandwiches.

Anders was rowing into their cove when he saw the calf in the sea. He saw two of the hooves and a little of the head. The calf was no longer brown, but almost gray and hairless. The water was salty out by the open sea, and the calf had been floating there for four days. Anders suddenly stood up in the boat, clutched the oars and said: The calf is there. It is Salvesen’s calf. The one that is missing.

The woman set Anders on land, handed him the picnic basket, rowed out in the current until she reached the calf, tied two hitches around the foot with a rope, fastened it to the ring in the stern of the boat, and rowed out the farthest Mystic Reef and fastened it to the pole. She backed up with the oars, washed her hands in the sea water, rubbed them, turned the boat and rowed back to Anders. We have to warn them, she said.

Whom? Anders said.

He sat on the small island with the picnic basked between his legs.

Salvesen is out with the “Sea Star,” the woman said. He will come in with the shrimp before tomorrow morning. The calf cannot stay in the channel. We have to report it at the fishing station.

The woman rowed in. Anders sat aft. He thought about throwing out the line, but he did not do it. Beyond the fishing station, by the buoy, she asked if he would like to fish, but Anders refused. He refused to go into the fishing station with here, and he refused to shop in the store. He refused to bring the oars up to the shed, and he refused to have anything to do with the boat. He refused to leave the boat, and he refused to put the fishing lines away. The woman looked at him and tied up at the pole.

She said nothing.

All afternoon he sat on the stop outside the house. The cat rubbed against him, but Anders kicked it away. The fishing boats lay by the wharf, but he sat on the step, did not move, refused to hear their arrival, refused to hear when the boats were tied up and when the crates were dragged across the wharf and into the fishing station. Anxiously, he grazed far out towards the Mystic Reefs.

The woman did not say anything.

In the evening he refused to eat. He drank some water, straightened his room, showered for a long time and went early to bed. He fell asleep immediately, dreamed and began to scream. The woman did not go up to him, but she walked up and down the stairs so that he would hear her. He slept and dreamed again, screamed again, and he went down to her. He stood in the door and was sweaty and uneasy.

He was alone in the house with the woman. The woman sat by the fireplace and read. She put the book in her lap when he came into the room. A glass of brandy stood on the table. That almost never happened: Is it Salvesen’s calf? She said.

No, he said.

He looked as her, surprised. She almost always understood what was wrong, and Anders was embarrassed.

Isn’t it?

No, Anders said.

Would you like to sit by me?

Not tonight, he said.

She got up and went out to the kitchen, opened the cabinet door and found a glass in the sink. She washed it, looked at him through the door and mixed juice concentrate and water. She was in the kitchen for along time, ran some water, and put the cups away in the cabinet. She shook out the rag rug, washed the blue step, scrubbed the sink, and fetched more firewood from the shad. It smelled of soap powder, and she did all the things that she, otherwise, did not do in the evening.

When she returned to him, he was sitting in her chair by the fireplace. In his lap was an unopened magazine. The cat lay under the table. She did not say that he should drink the currant juice, but she placed the glass in front of him. In the evening he drank juice while she drank coffee.

Anders looked at the juice. Then he looked at the flames in the fireplace. When they were alone, she lit a fire. The summer was warm, but when evening approached, she got wood from the shed. She added a piece of wood, looked at him, went out to the kitchen again, returned with the coffee pot and poured a cup. Anders did not touch his juice. The evening was light, almost pale blue, cool, no wind, the small islands rose out of the sea in the night light, and flies hummed around the windowpanes. She stood by the window. Anders looked at her back and shoulders: Is it me? The woman said.

Anders did not move.

Did you realize that I will die? She said. Did you understand that I will die before you do? Because you were not thinking about the calf. Were you?

No, said Anders.

He took the glass of currant juice.

And so you were afraid.

Yes, Anders said.

Had you never thought about that before?

No, said Anders.

And it was upsetting? the woman said.

Anders drank the juice. Will it be along time before it happens? he said.

I don’t know that. No one knows that. And it is good that we do not know.

Anders looked at her. From the chair near the fireplace he clearly saw both the woman and the blinking light from the lighthouse beyond the Mystic Reefs.

Would you like to eat? said the woman.

I don’t think so, but I would like to lie down.

The next morning he slept until ten o’clock. And when he finally came into the kitchen, she had packed the picnic basket. The woman brought the oars from the shed, pulled the boat in towards land, loosened the clove hitch from the pole and sat down at the oars.

Anders sat in the back.

She did not speak as they rowed across the channel, and she did not point out the fishing spots. But she smiled at Anders, and slowly rowed out to the salt sheds. As usual she watched the terns, rested on the oars before she attempted the current between the Mystic Reefs and backed into their cove.

Anders watched her.

We will swim out, said the woman.

Where? Anders said.

To the reef, she said. To the reef where I tied up Salvesen’s calf. You know that, she said. And Anders knew and she spoke quickly so that he could not interrupt her: That reef is actually the Mystic Reef. The small islands around the reef have no name. And they mean nothing. But we call all of them the Mystic Reefs.

Why is that, Anders said.

Because there is a pole set into the farthest reef. But the pole is not usable. Boats can only be tied up out there when it is dead calm. I have never seen anyone tie up there. Not even city folk who are out fishing. The current is far too strong, and it is in the middle of the channel. Those who live on the mainland say that a crazy man hammered it into the reef. They say that they see light out there when it is dead calm. That is nothing but talk, she said.

When was that? He said.

A long time ago, she smiled. Most crazy things were, unfortunately, done a long time ago. Many crazy men are supposed to have hammed poles into the mountains. I’m sure that they’re the nicest of all. When all is said and done, she added and looked at Anders.

He heard from her voice that she was talking in order to be talking. She almost never did that. But he did not become anxious.

Shall we swim in the current? He said.

Yes, said the woman.

How far do you think it is?

I am not sure, but I think it is fifty meters. At least fifty meters. To begin with we have to swim a little to the right of the reef, so that the current carries us in towards the pole. I have never noticed any undercurrent here. But you must certainly have noticed that I backed into the current before I rowed in. there is not so much current today.

Is it deep? Anders said.

Yes, she said. Thirty fathoms.

I cannot swim so far, Anders said. I can only swim inside the cove.

You can ride on my back, the woman said.

She undressed. Anders smiled at her. And he saw her brown arms and her strong shoulders. She was perfectly calm. She gathered her hair in a knot and fastened it with a hairpin. The woman was brown over her entire body. Sometimes she swam behind the boat when he rowed to land. He knew that she could swim an hour without being particularly tired, and he knew that she was very fond of the sea. When she did not see the sea, she became anxious, and he understood that she was most content when they lived in the white house. He glanced towards the pole on the reef. And, for the first time, he noticed that the sea was gray between the small islands and the reef: All right by me, he said and waded out.

The water was warm and salty. The waves were small around the golden red boulders. The sea was quiet. In the west lines of high white clouds floated in the sky. The boats were out in the fishing fields. Their young scurried along the shore. The kelp swayed. The waves splashed. The woman swam. Anders put his arms around her neck and his head against her ear. In the sun, her hair was almost red. Anders saw the vaccination mark on her shoulder. And out on the reef he could make out the pole: Sometimes you should look closely at what frightens you most, the woman said.

Anders did not answer.

Here is where it is deepest, she said.

He let himself glide through the water. She swam a little to the right and let the current take them. He felt the cold ocean current on his back and the way it tingled against his skin. The sea was salty in the current. A little too salty, and he lifted his head. He felt the breeze against his forehead and saw the terns diving into the waves. Not for one moment did he doubt that she had estimated the distance correctly. They floated in towards the reef and she let him grab the pole: Are you afraid now? She smiled.

Not a bit, he said.

_____
Øystein Lønn (born April 12, 1936) is a Norwegian writer. He made his literary debut in 1966 with the short stories Prosesjonen, and followed up with the novel Kontinentene in 1967. Lønn was awarded the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature in 1993 for Thranes metode og andre noveller. He received the Dobloug Prize in 1992, and the Brage Prize in 1993. He was awarded the Nordic Council's Literature Prize in 1996 for Hva skal vi gjøre i dag og andre noveller ("What shall we do today and other short stories").

Roy Jacobsen | The New Window

2011-09-11T11:59:00.000-07:00

Roy Jacobsen
The New Window
—Translated from the Norwegian by Torild Homstad

After you’ve made a hole in the wall with your head,
what are you going to do in the next cell?
-S. J. Lee

That fall I was to install a new window in an older house. I removed the old one and stood in the middle of a strange living room and stared out through the opening in the wall. Far away I saw a man coming towards me through the wheat field. The heads on the gain reached his waist. His face was hidden in the shadow of his hat brim. It was still and hazy.

During the night it rained in through the opening, and the carpet and the floor got damp. The house had become vulnerable.

Then the old woman I was working for died suddenly. Before I could put in the new window. And since there was no longer any need for my services, I came by one day just to pick up my tools. I packed them up and went through the field, where the stranger had walked, down to the boat which lay tied up in the willow thicket by the shore.

Out in the middle of the black lake I put up the oars and looked up at the house for the last time. The field, the maple trees, the little red house, and the hill behind it in fall colors. I saw a pair of ducks glide down into the next bay.

Several days passed without thinking about the woman and the house. But they must have been in the back of my mind all the same, because I couldn’t seem to concentrate very well on my new job. So one morning I decided to go back. A gray oppressive day.

The boat lay where I had tied it. It was half full of rain water, and withered leaves floated between the ribs. It was my boat now.

By the time I reached the field I knew that someone had been in the house in the meantime. The doors were locked, but I got in through the opening in the wall. Without investigating I got out my tools and materials and set to work.

After a couple of hours the new window was in place. It was larger than the old one, and as clear as water. It captured the entire field, the old summer barn and the alder trees in the swamp below.

I cleaned up after myself in the living room and went to the kitchen to put the coffee on. Suddenly a strange feeling came over me: someone had been there and taken away the potted plants. And in the bedroom the flower pots were stacked up neatly one inside the other.

The key was in the lock on the inside of the kitchen door. I went out and walked around the house. All the flowers lay on the compost heap. Fortunately, most of them were still alive. I carefully picked them up, carried them into the house, and put them where they belonged, in their respective pots. Then I watered them.

Since the coffee wasn’t ready yet, I went in search of curtains for the new window. In a closet in the attic I found something usable. In another closet I found curtain rods and hooks. It was an easy job to put them up. Curtains for the new window.

I poured a cup of coffee, sat down in an easy chair in front of the window and began to wait for the man in the field. Wherever there’s a woman there ought to be a man. A thick mist hung over the fields, and the sky was just as gray as before.

The man didn’t come.

When it began to get chilly I lit the stove. The smell of birch wood has a calming effect. The thought of being becalmed is a pleasant one, and I watched the smoke float straight up from the chimney. It was my house now.

But I missed the woman and went to look for her. On the wall in the living room, just above an oval plant, hung a wedding picture. The young man could be the man in the field. The woman was the woman.

In a dresser drawer lay some cheap jewelry. Bracelets. Earrings. Necklaces, Several of the pearls were yellowed, the gilding flaking off, and here and there a stone was missing. Everything tossed into the drawer at random. I gathered it all up and lay it in a jewelry box which was decorated with colored shells. An old jewelry box. Some of the shells were broken.

In the next drawer I found a photo album bound in leather. It contained strangers from an unfamiliar time. Children, grandchildren, relatives, friends? Mostly children, but also a little farm work and a few trips.

I looked so long and hard at the pictures that I learned all about the fates they held. I got to know each individual’s story. Everyday stories. Routines. A season. A few important events and some tragedies, all emerging from the features and the thoughts in the different faces. Eyes that looked at me and spoke. These people who had lived; maybe they were still alive. And their gazes obliterated the time which had passed between them and me. We spoke of the same things.

When I put the album down, it had begun to get dark.

In the little yellow room stood some cheap and poorly-made knickknacks. Sloppily painted figurines. Keepsakes from the fumbling beginnings of a period of prosperity. A teak barometer which didn’t work. Small copper trinkets. Ashtrays with pictures of exotic landscapes. Pewter, black and pink plastic. In every nook and cranny. Small crocheted cloths. Embroideries of a wood grouse, a cabin by a turquoise lake, a man by a flaming red bonfire. A wooden fish for hanging towels on. A bowl with a half-obliterated place name in the bottom. A dusty bouquet of plastic flowers. A wall clock that was still ticking.

I went around to every stick of furniture, from one shelf to the next, looked at every little object, picked them all up in my hands and held them, studied them and wove them into my image of the woman. I overlooked nothing.

On a little brass saucer I found a key. The key to the wall clock. I dragged out a chair, climbed up and opened the clock. It was very old. The key fit into the hole and I would it up. I felt I was doing life itself a favor by not letting it stop.

A cupboard in the hall was full of Christmas presents, collected over the years. Some of them could have been more than ten years old. They had all been opened, but the Christmas paper had been painstakingly wrapped back around them. Undoubtedly she had just glanced at what they contained, and then put them away, as remembrances or because she didn’t have and need for them. There were four sets of salt and pepper shakers, all of them lying untouched in their boxes. Three sugar tongs, two of them identical. Four sets of teaspoons. The same number of knives and forks. Some plates. A vase which was neither pretty nor ugly. Two egg warmers. A little lamp with a red light. Unused objects, and none of them intimate or personal, just some small obligations in oblivion.

I didn’t see any books in the house. And no magazines. But there was a radio and an old television set with antenna wires fastened to the wall.

In the bedroom stood sacks, cartons, chests and crates stacked one on top of the other. They contained everything from clothing and kitchen tools to coal, wood and potatoes. With her bad legs she had to have everything within reach.

I looked at her clothes, at the cups and plates she had in her kitchen cupboards. I saw how she washed dishes, how her hands grasped a stick of wood and put it in the stove. I looked at the pictures on the walls, at where everything was kept. Household chores. A green fleck in the sink. A shawl on the back of a chair. I looked t her habits, her days and her life.

In the living room stood a well-used piano. A similarly well-used hymn book lay on the bench. The house held as many dreams and hours of loneliness as the piano did melodies. I sat down and played a bit. Accompanying the old woman’s dream of eternal life. There was a faint tinkling between the walls and I heard her gentle voice:

“God is God, though lands were all forsaken
God is God, though all by death were taken.”

Then we sat down, each in our chair in front of the new window. It was evening and we didn’t turn on the lights. We held hands and waited from the man in the field. After a little while we saw him coming towards us, far away. The heads of grain reached his waist. His face was hidden in the shadow of his hat brim. I felt her hand tremble faintly.

Then I stood up, kissed her gently on the cheek and left. The boat lay tied up in the willow thicket by the shore. Out in the middle of the black lake I put up my oars and looked up at the house for the last time.

_____

Roy Jacobsen (born 26 December 1954) is a Norwegian novelist and short-story writer. Born in Oslo, he made his publishing début in 1982 with the short-story collection Fangeliv (Prison Life), which won Tarjei Vesaas' debutantpris. He is winner of the prestigious Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and two of his novels have been nominated for the Nordic Council's Literature Prize: Seierherrene (The Conquerors) in 1991 and Frost in 2004. The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles was published in Britain in 2008. Jacobsen lives in Oslo.

Review of Vollmann's Butterfly Stories, by Steven Moore

2011-09-11T11:29:00.000-07:00

Butterfly Stories, William T. Vollmann. (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1993)
Review by Steven Moore

The search for love has rarely been portrayed as joylessly as it is in Butterfly Stories. The unnamed narrator—variously called "the butterfly boy," "the journalist," "the husband"—moves through different sorts of jungles, some literal, some metaphorical, so lonely and so anxious to be happy that he can't help but fall in love with almost any woman he meets, beginning with a girl who defended him from the school bully, continuing with a lesbian met on a train to Istanbul, and finally a Cambodian whore name Vanna, an literate taxi dancer with whom he can't even converse.

To maintain the bleak, hopeless nature of the narrator's quest for love Vollmann reins in his often extravagant style for bare-bones recitation much of the time. The novel moves from America to Europe to Asia, to northern Canada, to England as the narrator flits about like a butterfly: not a symbol of lighthearted caprice but of ceaseless wandering and searching.

Towards the end the narrator tests HIV positive, but that is nothing to the despair he feels at the loss of Vanna. The narrator's lack of shame and pride is almost ascetic in its self-abnegation, giving him a pure quality despite his incessant whoring. Butterfly Stories follows from Vollmann's Whores for Glora and Thirteen Stories to explore the desperation that lovelessness can lead to. [Steven Moore, The Review of Contemporary Fiction]

Review of Becker's Die Boxer, by Klaus Phillips

2011-09-11T11:22:00.000-07:00

Die Boxer, Jurek Becker. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1976)
Review by Klaus Phillips

Jurek Becker's first two award-winning novels, Jakob der Lügner and Irreführung der Behöden were highly successful. His latest work, Der Boxer, is the fascinating account of one man's ill-fated struggle to come to terms with his past.

The fictional story of Aron Blank, a Jew who survived ghetto and concentration camp, is recorded in fictional interviews with a fictional chronicler. Ironically, it is precisely this contrived set of circumstances which ultimately lends credibility to Becker's novel. Italicized words and phrases in the chronicle appear to represent Aron's own choice of language. Verbal exchanges between Aron and the writer regularly disrupts and yet complement the narrative. Aron's stated purpose is erzählen (to narrative), not erklären (to interpret or explain), and the reader learns a great deal about Aron's character from these interspersed conversations. At one point, for example, Aron advises the chronicler that his story cannot be presented objectively and that he should go and describe a soccer match, if objectivity is what he is after. Aron is not presenting a history of the postwar years, he insists, but rather his story. There are times when Aron is reluctant to continue with the project, and in one instance progress is halted for six months because Aron has suffered a near-fatal heart attack.

At another point the writer calls off the session because he is not in a working mood; he even considers burning his notes. This method of presentation is nothing completely new, particularly in DDR fiction, but it works especially well for Becker, obviously giving him an unusual degree of latitude and freedom in unfolding his narrative. Aron emerges as a man bonded to his principles, hesitatingly accepting a job as bookkeeper for a black-market racket and, later, as interpreter for the Russians. Relationships inevitably dissolve. The various subplots, involving Linda London, Paula Seltzer, Alois Weber, Kenick, Tenebaum, Ostwald and others, ultimately form a constellation circling around the nucleus of Aron's story: his search for and subsequent acceptance of his lost son Mark. In an attempt to create a model for the child, Aron invents the boxer.

As Mark grows up, the two men grow apart. Mark, who may or may not actually be Aron's son, emigrates to Israel, where, presumably, he is killed in the Six-Day War. Becker's sweeping chronicle lacks the grandeur and the grotesque imagery of Grass's Blechtrömmel. His record of a family's disintegration does not have the generational scope of Mann's Buddenbrooks. And yet his novel presents a complex and engrossing account of man's exhaustion from his inability to cope with history, an account which, universally, reflects the fate of millions. Der Boxer is an immensely readable book that is destined to establish Jurek Becker as one of the most gifted novelists writing in the German language today. [Klaus Phillips, World Literature Today]

Review of Mayröcker's Brütt oder Die seufzenden Gärten, by Susan Cocalis

2011-09-11T11:15:00.000-07:00

Brütt oder Die seufzenden Gärten, Friederike Mayröcker. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998).
Review by Susan Cocalis

The two terms of the title, brütt and die seufzenden Gärten, signify the contradictory aspects of love, according the author: the former referring to its brutality and pain, the latter to tenderness and surrender. For although Friederike Mayröcker has a reputation as an experimental writer who would never dream of providing a coherent narrative line, this current "novel" is being billed as a "love story."

Her avant-garde following need not become alarmed, however, for this is certainly no conventional "love story" and there is no need to fear that she might have lapsed into sentimentality ("the sighing gardens"!) or any semblance of a plot. Beginning with the statement "Ich erlebe nun eine Liebesgeschichte: meine letzte' muß es heißen" (I'm now experiencing a love story: my last one, it should be said), everything is fragmented and relativized by the author. Rather than a love story in any traditional sense, Mayröcker's novel is an extended meditation on the effect of love on a middle-aged, avant-garde writer: what does it do to how she perceives the world, how she articulates her pain and surrender, her sense of narrative and language?

It is never really clear if "Joseph," the putative object of her affections, is actually a figment of the narrator's imagination, providing her with an incentive to write "eine Art Tagebuch" (a form of diary) of this affair and its aftermath. In a series of dated entries, she records details of her experience in love along with a running commentary on the effect of her longing on her writing and her subjectivity. The "diary," written in the first person, begins on 9 Septebmer and covers the period until 4 July of the following year. The entries consist of the narrator's thoughts and observations on the topics of love, life, aging, literature, philosophy, esthetics, art, music; wordplays; fantastic sequences; recurring phrases and passages used like a theme and variations in music; and word-collages in Mayröcker's ironic, distanced, idiosyncratic prose, punctuation (:/!), and typesetting style.... The main questions for the unintiated reader may be, perhaps: who is the object of this love story.

Is it Joseph, one of a series of formulaic male ciphers including "X. (oder Wilhelm oder Ferdinand)," who recur throughout the text? Or is it "Blum," the one constant partner in the narrator's life, with whom she "converses" in each entry and who seems to understand her broad-ranging interests and to appreaciate her style. "Blum" is the other component of the dialogic principle governing the process of the narrator's writing: "sage ich zu Blum," "sagt Blum," "Blum fragt mich," "antworte ich Blum." Although "Joseph" seems to be the cause of her suffering, and although she speaks directly to him at times, he leads her into the temptation of "narrative" banality; "Blum," however, serves as her esthetic conscience, helping her "1 GANZ BESTIMMTE SCHREIB-HALTUNG BEIBEHALTEN ZU KOENNEN, usw" (to be able to maintain 1 very definite style of writing, etc.).

If you are a fan of Mayröcker already, or if you delight in non-narrative verbal pyrotechnics pushing the limits of language, this is the "love story" for you. It's brilliant in its use of and discourse on language. If, however, you are the type of reader looking for a coherent plot, passion, or romance in any traditional sense—sigh!—you are in for a rude (brütt?) awakening. [Susan Cocalis, World Literature Today]

Review of Bjarnason's Borgin bak við orðin, by Kirsten Wolf

2011-09-11T11:10:00.000-07:00

Borgin bak við orðin, Bjarni Bjarnason. (Reykjavík: Vaka-Helgfell, 1998).
Review by Kirsten Wolf

Bjarni Bjarnason is no doubt one of the most remarkable of Icelandic authors of his generation, and his two novels, Endurkoma Maríu (Mary's Return) and this book (The City Behind the Words) have won much acclaim. Borgin bak við orðin is a sophisticated and extraordinary piece of work, in which stories of a peculiar kingdom are skillfully interwoven with tales of an unknown city.

The protagonist is the young boy Immanúel Merkúríus, the son of King Salómon, founder and regent of a curious land with curious customs and rituals and a devotee of silence. As Immanúel points out: "My father says that when we manage to create the original material, we can turn stones into gold. His main advisor, the blind seer, whom no one may meet except him, claims that prima materia, the original material, is silence. The silence which prevailed before the world came into existence....My father says that language is the landscape of the soul, and that the first land disappeared when the first language was lost.

But if a child born of royal stock is placed at birth in the original silence, it will in time speak the first language of the world, God's language. He says that people need not hear more than a single word of this heavenly language...and then the language will automatically awaken in the mind of the listener, who at the same time will forget all other languages...Only one word, and the world will take on the right form." (Readers may recognize here pronounced Augustinian themes, particularly from On Christian Doctrine and The City of God.) For venturing outside his father's valley, however, Immanúel is destined to abandon his little sister, who at birth was placed in the original silence and entrusted to his care, and to live in the streets of an unkown city, where he makes a living telling stories about his father's kingdom "until," as he says, "my soul became fiction."

Having eventually been "civilized" by one of his enthusiastic listeners, Mrjam Baldvin, a publisher, who requests that he commit his stories to writing, Immanúel happens to see his own reflection in the mirror of the city's hotel where he is now staying and recognizes his reflection as the robot he had encountered while living in the streets. Immanúel's stories combine the naïveté of a child with the wisdom of an adult in a type of lyrical prose that reaches heights of great beauty. Immanúel raises many important, profound, and relevant issues with his audience, the readers, and provides them with, if not truth, then fiction of almost divine inspiration. [Kirsten Wolf, World Literature Today]

Review of Puértolas' Bordeaux, by Kay Pritchett

2011-09-11T11:05:00.000-07:00

Bordeaux, Soledad Puértolas. Burdeos (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1986). Translated from the Spanish by Francisca González-Arias. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998)
Review by Kay Pritchett

Bordeaux is the English translation of Soledad Puértolas's 1986 novel Burdeos. Several themes are at its core, each expressed in a separate section. "Pauline" revolves around the issue of judgment. "Entre-Deux-Mers" treats stagnation, and "The Capitals of the World" examines mobility. Character rather than plot predominates in this nonlinear narrative, with each section portraying the experiences of one of three individuals who belong to the same circle of acquaintances but never meet in the space of the novel. In "Pauline" the eponymous protagonist does not judge but simply gazes while the moral histories of others—Hélène Dufour, Rose Fouquet, Florence Clement, and several servants, Madeleine, Gracielle, and Claude—pass before her eyes. Maracel, Pauline's father, an avid reader of Montaigne, the philosopher for whom doubt was essential and judgment deadly, becomes an observer of human behavior yet fails to see beyond his own judging eyes.

His daughter, to her credit, learns not to judge but sinks nevertheless into a bog of indifference. As if in a dream, Pauline watches as people she hardly knows pass through her field of vision. On one particular day, her purse holds a number of items vital to others: letters used for blackmail, a train ticket, and money to pay off the blackmailer. But Pauline, on the courier, never learns the outcome of the intrigue. René Dufour, the son of Pauline's best friend Hélène Dufour, is the weak-willed protagonist of "Entre-Deux-Mers."

When Hélène abandons her husband and young son to marry an American millionaire, René flounders for the next two decades, moving indifferently from one place to the next, one girlfriend to the next. He takes a serious interest in nothing and no one until he meets Bianca, a new mother—perhaps in the double sense of the phrase—who becomes his first sexual partner and for whom he steals a large sum of money from his father. Neither his own mother nor Bianca, however, is able to fill the void in René's life. Only when his father steps aside, leaving René to manage the family winery, does his life acquire direction. The pace of the narrative picks up notably in "The Capitals of the World," as the author begins virtually to bombard the reader with thematic material.

Every other sentence underscores the anonymity of human existence, the failure of individuals to penetrate the lives of others. The American-born Lillian Skalnick, Hélène's stepdaughter, takes a whirlwind tour of Europe, skimming the surfaces of a number of French, Spanish, and Italian cities. She is an attractive, intelligent woman, and several men attempt to draw her into their lives. She always slips away but garners something from each encounter. "General truths like at the bottom of all behavior," she maintains. And, indeed, Lillian rises to the occasion of life more successfully than does either Pauline or René. What are the general truths taught by the characters of Bordeaux? although the author does not provide a precise answer, perhaps she offers a hint with the novel's title: a city, symbolic of modern reality, star and desolate like the Edward Hopper painting Rome by the Sea, which is featured on the book's cover.

The reader must ultimately ask and answer the question: what is Bordeaux? A fine wine, like the one Pauline receives in payment for her services: "That dark red liquid, full of light, of shadows and tints, conferr[ing] a sense of security and risk...its flavor [like] nothing else"? Or is it a town? Or, more obliquely, an often-cited example of metonymy? The last of these is particularly instructive, since the lives recounted in Bordeaux function according to the principle of proximity rather than commonality, which seems, to me at least, to be the general truth contained in Bordeaux's "permanent bustle." Bordeaux is an outstanding novel, and Francisca González-Arias's translation does it justice. I recommend it to all fiction enthusiasts. [Kay Pritchett, World Literature Today]

Review of Nádas' A Book of Memories, by Irving Malin

2011-09-11T11:02:00.000-07:00

A Book of Memories, Péter Nádas. Emlekiratok konyve. (Budapest: Szepirodalmi Konyvkiado, 1986). Translated from the Hungarian by Ivan Sanders with Imre Goldstein (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997)
Review by Irving Malin

A Book of Memories, I believe, is one of the great novels of the last fifty years. It reminds me, in part, of the amazing conjunctions of memory, sexuality, and creativity found in Proust and Mann. I can merely hint here at the themes and metaphors of Nádas's achievement.

The title immediately brings into play two of the underlying themes of the narrative: memory and the creative description of memory. There are three sections of the text. One seems to be concerned wit the "last days" of the narrator who, at age thirty-three, tries to understand the reasons for despair about his abilities to render the past—that past which has made him the odd, miserable artist he assumes he is. But even in this section we are made aware of his "anomalous nature."

Although the narrator wants to write another text—and he gives us in the second section a broken, mythological "mural"—he is unable to finish it. He is so preoccupied with arbitrary movements, disjointed perceptions, that he offers one which reflects his obsessions with creativity and bisexuality. He calls his text "the multisecret world of my presentiments and presumptions." The "multisecret world" challenges his talent and life. To complicate matters, the third section seems to be another revision—a revision by another narrator.

Thus we have a textual commentary upon the "original" text. And we are not really shocked because Nádas has been using duplicitous subversions throughout his novel. Such sentences as the following have prepared us for "multisecret worlds": "There is no memory without the recurrence of emotions or conversely, every moment of lived experience is also an allusion to a former experience—that is what memory is." [Irving Malin, The Review of Contemporary Fiction]

Review of Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, by Phillip Landon

2011-09-11T10:55:00.000-07:00

The Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares [Fernando Pessoa]. Livro do deassossego (Lisbon: Atica, 1982). Translated from the Portuguese by Alfred Mac Adam. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991). Translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996). CURRENT AMERICAN EDITION [Mac Adam translation]: (Boston: Exact Change, 1998)
Review by Phillip Landon

This [Exact Change edition] is a reprint of Alfred Mac Adam's superb English-language rendition of the major prose work by the Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). Discovered posthumously in a chaotic trunk in the author's apartment in Lisbon, Livro do deassossego was first published in Portugal in 1982. It is now one of the undisputed classics of twentieth-century literature. Bilingual in English and Portuguese and powerfully addicted to feelings of nostalgia, estrangement, and exile, Pessoa stands beside Conrad, Nabokov, and Beckett as a writer who used his position as an imaginative outsider to reinvent literary form.

Pessoa's particular contribution is to explore new levels of self-consciousness by facing and indeed cultivating "the ill-being that comes from feeling the futility of life." He is a connoisseur of ennui in all its permutations. His narrator, Bernardo Soares, attributes twentieth-century disquietudes to the loss of faith, not just in religion, but in the hopeful doctrines that replaced it, including social equality, aestheticism, science, and philosophy: "We lost all that; we were born orphans of all those consolations." Infinite longing and finite answers—these are Pessoa's parameters.

He contemplates a secular universe with mystical intensity, and achieves a wholly modern, revitalized sense of the self as endlessly elusive and yearning. He recoils, with Beckett, from closure and plot, and subjects himself to a fearful austerity, embodied in the very from of his deliberately open-ended book of fragments. Like Pessoa's radically innovative multipersonal poetry, this uniquely ambitious novel makes an essential and illuminating contribution to twentieth-century tradition. It sheds a particular light on modernist, decadent, and absurdist literature. As Mac Adam rightly contends in his introduction, "The Book of Disquiet is a literary phenomenon of such magnitude that it must be known." [Phillip Landon, The Review of Contemporary Fiction]