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Gargoyles, Thomas Bernhard's Philosophical Novel of Abject Madness
In its English translation, Thomas Bernhard's 1967 breakthrough novel Verstörung received the title Gargoyles. Verstörung translates to something like distress or disturbance, while Gargoyles (obviously) evokes Gothic monsters. Considered together, both titles communicate this philosophical novel's themes of abjection, decay, and madness.
Bernhard explores these themes by dividing the novel into two sections that occur over the span of the same day. In the first section, "First Page," a country doctor takes his son on his daily rounds in rural Stryia, "a relatively large and 'difficult' district." The son, a mining engineer student and aspiring scientist, is ostensibly the narrator of Gargoyles. He tells us that his father "was taking me with him for the sake of my studies." Their journey culminates in a visit to Hochgobernitz, the gloomy castle of Prince Saurau, an insane, suicidal aristocrat who mourns his own son's self-exile to England, where he has gone to study. While the doctor's son remains the narrator of the book in "The Prince," the second part of Gargoyles, Prince Saurau overwhelms the novel with the force of his monologue, a tirade that gobbles up all that comes before it. His monologue ventriloquizes the narrator's consciousness, echoing in the young man's skull long after he's left the castle.
The prince's monologue is a prototypical Bernhardian rant that will be familiar to anyone who's read The Loser or Correction (and undoubtedly other Bernhard novels I haven't read yet). Unlike those novels, Gargoyles offers its first section "First Page" as a point of contrast to the monologue that will come later. These episodes are short and digestible, and while hardly conventional, they are far easier to handle than the sustained intensity of the prince's monologue. The grotesque cavalcade that the doctor and son trek through in "First Page" allows Bernhard to set out his themes — not neatly or precisely, but clearly — before the prince commences to swallow and then vomit them.
Here are the first two paragraphs of the novel:
On the twenty-sixth my father drove off to Salla at two o'clock in the morning to see to a schoolteacher whom he found dying and left dead. From there he set out toward Hüllberg to treat a child who had fallen into a hog tub full of boiling water that spring. Discharged from the hospital weeks ago, it was now back with its parents.
He liked seeing the child, and dropped by there whenever he could. The parents were simple people, the father a miner in Köflach, the mother a servant in a butcher's household in Voitsberg. But the child was not left alone all day; it was in the care of one of the mother's sisters. On this day my father described the child to me in greater detail than ever before, adding that he was afraid it had only a short time to live. "I can say for a certainty that it won't last through the winter, so I am going to see it as often as possible now," he said. It struck me that he spoke of the child as a beloved person, very quietly and without having to consider his words.
The specter of infanticide and the doctor's resistance to it haunts the novel. We can also sense a cerebral chilliness in the narrator, who is "struck" by his father's empathy. The doctor's empathy repeats throughout the novel; we next see it clearly when he's brought to attend an innkeeper's wife assaulted in the early morning "without the slightest provocation" by one of the drunken miners who frequented her inn. Unconscious for hours before police or doctor are even called for, the woman dies. But—
It was of no importance that the innkeeper had not notified him of the fatal blow until three hours after the incident, my father said. The woman could not have been saved. The deceased woman was thirty-three, and my father had known her for years. It had always seemed to him that innkeepers treated their wives with extreme callousness, he said. They themselves usually went to bed early, having overworked themselves all day on their slaughtering, their cattle dealing, their farms. But because they thought of nothing but the business, they left their wives to take care of the taverns until the early morning hours, exposed to the male clients who drank steadily so that as the night wore on their natural brutality became less and less restrained.
As the day unfolds, the "natural brutality" that the doctor is up against evinces again and again in the various gargoyles he attends to. The rumor of the innkeeper's wife's murder floats in the background as a reminder of violence and brutality that bizarrely unites this community of outsiders.
Those outsiders: a bedridden, dying woman with a feeble-minded son and a murderer for a brother; a retired industrialist, living "like man and wife" with his half-sister, who devotes "himself to a literary work over which he agonized, even as it kept his mind off his inner agony"; the school teacher whose death initiates the novel; mill workers murdering exotic birds with the help of a young bewildered Turk; an insane and deformed man, the son's age, attended to and cared for by his sister. And the prince. But I've rushed through so much here, so much force of language, so much terror, so much horror.
These gargoyles live, if it can be called that, in abject, isolated otherness. The doctor diagnoses it for his son:
. . . no human being could continue to exist in such total isolation without doing severe damage to his intellect and psyche. It was a well-known phenomenon, my father said, that at a crisis in their lives some people seek out a dungeon, voluntarily enter it, and devote their lives—which they regard as philosophically oriented—to some scholarly task or to some imaginative scientific obsession. They always take with them into their dungeon some creature who is attached to them. In most cases they sooner or later destroy this creature who has entered the dungeon with them, and then themselves. The process always goes slowly at first.
There is something of a warning here for the doctor's son, who tells us at one point: "Every day I completely built myself up, and completely destroyed myself." Like Roithamer of Correction, the son is something of a control freak ("Only through such control can man be happy and perceive his own nature"), and, like Roithamer and so many other Bernhardian figures, he has a frail (perhaps suicidal) sister who could perhaps fall prey to his idealism—who might indeed be the "creature who has entered the dungeon" with him.
There's also the risk, one which the doctor perhaps did not account for when he set out to help his son with his "studies," that the son might fall into the prince's dungeon. But perhaps I'm making too much of the doctor's empathy, of his resistance to brutality and his commitment to caring for those who repel all others. His own philosophy seems coded in misanthropy and failure. "All of living is nothing but a fervid attempt to move closer together," he says at one point. But also: "Communication is impossible."
The resistance to abjection is paradoxical—as the doctor points out, the "philosophically oriented" and "imaginative scientific obsession[s]" often lead people deeper into the abyss—as the prince's monologue will illustrate. Each of the gargoyles presented in the text offers a rare and special talent—art, music, philosophy, etc. Sussing out the novel's treatment of the philosophies it invokes is beyond my ken, but I can't resist lazily dropping a few names: Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Pascal, Diederot (all on the doctor's reading list), and Schopenhauer, whose philosophy of the will surely informs the text more than I can manage here. (From the prince's father's suicide note: "Schopenhauer has always been the best nourishment for me"). And while I'm lazily dropping names: Edgar Allan Poe, King Lear, Macbeth, Dostoevsky, and Francisco Goya—especially his Los caprichos, a few of which accompany this review . (And although he came after, I can't help but read Roberto Bolaño in some of the more grotesque, horrific passages).
The levels of ventriloquizing and the layers of madness set against the novel's depiction of radical repression lead to an abyssal paradox, perhaps best figured not in the philosophers Bernhard invokes but in the novel's backdrop: a dark, enveloping gorge, the yawning chasm that surrounds the high walls of the castle the prince walks with his auditors. These walls are the stage from which the prince performs his monologue; their visceral dramatic emphasis derives from the abyss below. In an ironic note at the beginning of "The Prince," the son remarks, "From here, I thought, you probably had the finest view of the entire country."
Upon this stage, Bernhard's main characters function as asymmetrical parallels (forgive the purposeful absurdity of this oxymoron). The father and his son the narrator are set against the prince and his absent son. In a particularly bizarre episode, the prince recounts a dream:
"But my son," he said, "will destroy Hochgobernitz as soon as he receives it into his hands."
Last night, the prince said, he had had a dream. "In this dream," he said, "I was able to look at a sheet of paper moving slowly from far below to high up, paper on which my own son had written the following. I see every word that my son is writing on that sheet of paper," the prince said. "It is my son's hand writing it. My son writes: As one who has taken refuge in scientific allegories I seemed to have cured myself of my father for good, as one cures oneself of a contagious disease. But today I see that this disease is an elemental, shattering fatal illness of which everyone without exception dies. Eight months after my father's suicide—note that, Doctor, after his father's suicide, after my suicide; my son writes about my suicide!—eight months after my father's suicide everything is already ruined, and I can say that I have ruined it. I can say that I have ruined Hochgobernitz, my son writes, and he writes: I have ruined this flourishing economy! This tremendous, anachronistic agricultural and forest economy. I suddenly see, my son writes," the prince said, "that by liquidating the business even though or precisely because it is the best, I am for the first time implementing my theory, my son writes!" the prince said.
Note the strange layers of narration and creation here. The prince's son, a creation of the prince, exists in the prince's dream (another creation) where he creates a manuscript. All this creation though points to destruction—of the father, of the ancestral estate. The prince's impulses signal self-erasure, suicide as a kind of radical return of the repressed (here, Austria's inability to speak about, reconcile, admit its complicity in the horrors of World War 2).
The doctor contrasts with the prince, perhaps representing an order, health, and sanity that serve to sharpen and darken the abject decay of the crazed aristocrat. "My father goes to see the prince only to treat him for his insomnia," observes the narrator, "without doing anything about his real illness . . . his madness." But can the doctor really treat the prince's illness?
Both fathers in their respective philosophies signal the possible paths that might be inherited by their sons (and, if you like, by allegorical extension the sons could represent Austria, or perhaps even Western Europe). How to live against the promise of suicide, against the perils of infanticide, against the kind of "natural brutality" that leads to murder, insanity, the abyss?
This problem is encoded into Bernhard's rhetorical technique. The prince's devastating monologue consumes the narrative, reader and narrator alike. By the end of the novel, he's infiltrated (and perhaps infected) the narrator's consciousness, highlighting the dramatic stakes here—of being ventriloquized, possessed by the diseases of history and authority—an illness that trends to self-destruction. It's worth sharing a passage at some length; the following section highlights and perhaps even condenses what I take to be the core themes of Gargoyles:
"Whenever I look at people, I look at unhappy people," the prince said. "They are people who carry their torment into the streets and thus make the world a comedy, which is of course laughable. In this comedy they all suffer from tumors both mental and physical; they take pleasure in their fatal illness. When they hear its name, no matter whether the scene is London, Brussels, or Styria, they are frightened, but they try not to show their fright. All these people conceal the actual play within the comedy that this world is. Whenever they feel themselves unobserved, they run away from themselves toward themselves. Grotesque. But we do not even see the most ridiculous side of it because the most ridiculous side is always the reverse side. God sometimes speaks to them, but he uses the same vulgar words as they themselves, the same clumsy phrases. Whether a person has a gigantic factory or a gigantic farm or an equally gigantic sentence of Pascal's in his head, is all the same," the prince said. "It is poverty that makes people the same; at the human core, even the greatest wealth is poverty. In men's minds and bodies poverty is always simultaneously a poverty of the body and a poverty of the mind, which necessarily makes them sick and drives them mad. Listen to me, Doctor, all my life I have seen nothing but sick people and madmen. Wherever I look, the worn and the dying look back at me. All the billions of the human race spread over the five continents are nothing but one vast community of the dying. Comedy!" the prince said. "Every person I see and everyone I hear anything about, no matter what it is, prove to me the absolute obtuseness of this whole human race and that this whole human race and all of nature are a fraud. Comedy. The world actually is, as has so often been said, a stage on which roles are forever being rehearsed. Wherever we look it is a perpetual learning to speak and learning to walk and learning to think and learning by heart, learning to cheat, learning to die, learning to be dead. This is what takes up all our time. Men are nothing but actors putting on a show all too familiar to us. Learners of roles," the prince said. "Each of us is forever learning one (his) or several or all imaginable roles, without knowing why he is learning them (or for whom). This stage is an unending torment and no one feels that the events on it are a pleasure. But everything that happens on this stage happens naturally. A critic to explain the play is constantly being sought. When the curtain rises, everything is over." Life, he went on, changing his image, was a school in which death was being taught. It was filled with millions and billions of pupils and teachers. The world was the school of death. "First the world is the elementary school of death, then the secondary school of death, then, for the very few, the university of death," the prince said. People alternate as teachers or pupils in these schools. "The only attainable goal of study is death," he said.
Such searing nihilism here—the prince angrily mourns the grotesqueness of the world, the lack of agency of people to control their own fate, to be but players, dummies mumbling someone else's script. And it all leads to death. For the prince, dialogue is impossible in the face of this death: "All interlocutors are always mutually pushing one another into all abysses." But the prince, notably, is his own interlocutor; he pushes himself into abysses of his own contrivance.
Neither is love a solution for the prince:
"We face questions like an open grave about to be filled. It is also absurd, you know, for me to be talking of the absurdity," he said. "My character can justly be called thoroughly unloving. But with equal justice I call the world utterly unloving. Love is an absurdity for which there is no place in nature.
And community?
We see in a person frailties which at once make us see the frailties of the community in which we live, the frailties of all communities, the state; we feel them, we see through them, we catastrophize them.
But is this necessarily the essential view of the novel? I don't think it plausible to argue that the prince's monologue be read entirely ironically, but it's worth bearing in mind that both his auditors understand him to be mentally ill and terribly isolated. The guy is histrionic, a drama fiend holding forth on his stage. And while his acerbic misanthropy and nihilism may scorch, it's also very, very funny. I chuckled a lot reading Gargoyles.
But yes—the prince is sincere in his pain. "We assume the spirit of the walls that surround us," he declares near the end of the novel. He's a a prisoner in his own gloomy castle, the dungeon he refuses to leave. He resents his son's self-exile to London, but also longs—literally dreams for—his son to return to destroy that dungeon.
Of his family: "But probably all these creatures deserve ruthlessness more than pity." I think that But is important here. The doctor, like the prince, also situates everyone on an axis of ruthlessness and pity. The doctor is full of cruel observations about the gargoyles he encounters. But: But he gets up, goes out, does his rounds, tries in some way to mitigate some of the "natural brutality" of the world. And he tries to show this world—and this method—to his son this as well, for his son's "studies." In the room of the lonely, dying woman, the son remarks of his father: "I noticed that he made an effort to stretch out the call, for all his eagerness to leave." The son, in thrall to the prince's monologue, perhaps fails to notice that his father also stretches out his time on the castle wall despite an eagerness to leave the prince.
By the end of the novel, we see the prince's consciousness inhabiting the son's thoughts:
In bed I thought: What did the prince say? "Always wanting to change everything has been a constant craving with me, an outrageous desire which leads to the most painful disputes. The catastrophe begins with getting out of bed.
The pessimism and sheer despair here erupts into black comedy with that last line, one echoed in Bernhard's later novel Correction: "Waking up is the always frightening minimum of existence." If to simply get out of bed (which, of course, is where the son is as he work's through the prince's ideas) is to invoke and invite disaster and despair, it's worth noting that this simple action—getting out of bed—is what the doctor performs each day, even if it means he wakes to a dead teacher, a boiled infant, a murdered wife. While hardly a beacon of optimism or hope, the doctor nonetheless figures an alternative to the prince's abject madness. If we "assume the spirit of the walls that surround us," the doctor understands that it's important to leave those walls, to not seek out dungeons—and drag others into dungeons with us.
Gargoyles is by turns bleak and nihilistic. It's also energetic, profound, and at times very, very funny. Its opening section will likely provide an accessible introduction to readers interested in Bernhard, with the prince's monologue offering the full Bernhardian experience. Dark, cruel, and taxing, Gargoyles isn't particularly fun reading—except when it is. Highly recommended.
Suttree, Cormac McCarthy's Grand Synthesis of American Literature
In his 1992 interview with The New York Times, Cormac McCarthy said, "The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written." McCarthy's fourth novel, 1979's Suttree is such a book, a masterful synthesis of the great literature — particularly American literature — that came before it. And like any masterful synthesis, Suttree points to something new, even as it borrows, lifts, and outright steals from the past. But before we plumb its allusions and tropes and patterns, perhaps we should overview the plot, no?
The novel rambles over several years in the life of Cornelius Suttree. It is the early 1950s in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Suttree ekes out a mean existence on the Tennessee River as a fisherman, living in a ramshackle houseboat on the edge of a shantytown. This indigent life is in fact a choice: Suttree is the college-educated son of an established, wealthy family. His choice is a choice for freedom and self-reliance, those virtues we like to think of, in our prejudicial manner, as wholly and intrinsically American. Suttree then is both Emersonian and Huck Finnian, a reflective and insightful man who finds his soul via a claim to agency over his own individuality, an individuality poised in quiet, defiant rebellion against the conforming forces of civilization. These forces manifest most pointedly in the Knoxville police, a brutal, racist organization, but we also see social constraint in the form of familial duty. One thinks of the final lines of Huckleberry Finn: "I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before."
Like Huck, Suttree aims to resist all forces that would "sivilize" him. His time on the river and in the low haunts of Tennessee (particularly the vice-ridden borough of McAnally) brings him into close contact with plenty of other outcasts, but also his conscience, which routinely mulls over its place in the world. Suttree is punctuated by–perhaps even organized by–several scenes of hallucination. Some of these psychotrips result from drunkeness, one comes from accidentally ingesting the wrong kind of mushrooms (or, the right kind, if that's your thing), and the final one, late in the novel, sets in as Suttree suffers from a terrible illness. In his fever dream, a small nun–surely a manifestation of the guilt that would civilize us–accuses him–
Mr. Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.
The passage is a marvelous example of McCarthy's stream-of-consciousness technique in Suttree, moving through the various voices that would ventriloquize Suttree, into the edges of madness, strangeness, and the sublimity of language. The tone moves from somber and portentous into bizarre imagery that blends humor and pathos. This is the tone of Suttree, a language that gives voice to transients and miscreants, affirming the dignity of their humanity even as it details the squalor of their circumstance.
It is among these criminals and whores, transvestites and gamblers that Suttree affirms his own freedom and humanity, a process aided by his comic foil, Gene Harrogate. Suttree meets Harrogate on a work farm; the young hillbilly is sent there for screwing watermelons. After his release, Harrogate moves to a shantytown in Knoxville. He's the country mouse determined to become the city rat, the would-be Tom Sawyer to Suttree's older and wiser Huck Finn. Through Harrogate's endless get-rich-quick schemes, McCarthy parodies that most-American of tales, the Horatio Alger story. Simply put, the boy is doomed, on his "way up to the penitentiary" as Suttree constantly admonishes. In one episode, Harrogate tries to buy arsenic from "a grayhaired and avuncular apothecary" to poison bats he hopes to sell to a hospital (don't ask)–
May I help you? said the scientist, his hands holding each other.
I need me some strychnine, said Harrogate.
You need some what?
Strychnine. You know what it is dont ye?
Yes, said the chemist.
I need me about a good cupful I reckon.
Are you going to drink it here or take it with you?
Shit fire I aint goin to drink it. It's poisoner'n hell.
It's for your grandmother.
No, said Harrogate, craning his neck suspectly. She's done dead
Suttree, unwilling father-figure, eventually buys the arsenic for the boy against his better judgment. The scene plays out as a wonderful comic inversion of William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," from which it is so transparently lifted. McCarthy borrows liberally from Faulkner here, of course, most notably in the language and style of the novel, but also in scenes like this one, or a later episode that plays off Faulkner's comic-romantic story of a man and a woman navigating the aftermath of a flood, "Old Man." Unpacking the allusions in Suttree surpasses my literary knowledge or skill, but McCarthy is generous, if oblique, with his breadcrumb trail. Take, for example, the following sentence: "Suttree with his miles to go kept his eyes to the ground, maudlin and muttersome in the bitter chill, under the lonely lamplight." The forced phrase "miles to go" does not immediately present itself as a reference to Robert Frost's famous poem, yet the direction of the sentence retreats into the history of American poetry; with its dense alliteration and haunted vowels, it leads us into Edgar Allan Poe territory. Only a few dozen pages later, McCarthy boldly begins a chapter with theft: "In just spring the goatman came over the bridge . . ." The reference to e.e. cummings explicitly signifies McCarthy's intentions to play with literature. Later in the book, while tripping on mushrooms in the mountains, Suttree is haunted by "elves," the would-be culprits in Frost's poem "Mending Wall." The callback is purposeful, but tellingly, McCarthy's allusions are not nearly as fanciful as their surface rhetoric might suggest: the goatman does not belong in Knoxville–he's an archaic relic, forced out of town by the police; the elves are not playful spirits but dark manifestations of a tortured psyche.
Once one spots the line-lifting in Suttree it's hard to not see it. What's marvelous is McCarthy's power to convert these lines, these riffs, these stories, into his own tragicomic beast. An early brawl at a roadhouse recalls the "Golden Day" episode of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man; a rape victim's plight echoes Hubert Selby's "Tralala"; we find the comic hobos of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row–we even get the road-crossing turtle from The Grapes of Wrath. A later roadhouse chapter replays the "Circe/Nighttown" nightmare in James Joyce's Ulysses. Ulysses is an easy point of comparison for Suttree, which does for Knoxville what Joyce did for Dublin. Suttree echoes Ulysses's language, both in its musicality and appropriation of varied voices, as well as its ambulatory structure, its stream-of-consciousness technique, its rude earthiness, and its size (nearly 600 pages). But, as I argued earlier, there's something uniquely American about Suttree, and its literary appropriations tend to reflect that. Hence, we find Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Walt Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams, to name just a few writers whose blood courses through this novel (even elegant F. Scott Fitzgerald is here, in an unexpected Gatsbyish episode late in the novel).
Making a laundry list of writers is weak criticism though, and these sources–all guilty of their own proud plagiarisms–are mentioned only as a means to an end, to an argument that what McCarthy does in Suttree is to synthesize the American literary tradition with grace and humor, while never glossing over its inherent dangers and violence. So, while it appropriates and plays with the tropes of the past, Suttree is still pure McCarthy. Consider the following passage, which arrives at the end of a drunken, awful spree, Suttree locked up for the night–
He closed his eyes. The gray water that dripped from him was rank with caustic. By the side of a dark dream road he'd seen a hawk nailed to a barn door. But what loomed was a flayed man with his brisket tacked open like a cooling beef and his skull peeled, blue and bulbous and palely luminescent, black grots his eyeholes and bloody mouth gaped tonguless. The traveler had seized his fingers in his jaws, but it was not alone this horror that he cried. Beyond the flayed man dimly adumbrate another figure paled, for his surgeons move about the world even as you and I.
Suttree's dark vision points directly toward the language of McCarthy's next novel, 1985's Blood Meridian, roundly considered his masterpiece. Critics who disagree tend to point to Suttree as the pinnacle of McCarthy's writing. I have no interest at this time in weighing the books against each other, nor do I think that doing so would be especially enlightening. For all of their sameness, they are very different animals: Suttree provides us intense access to its hero's consciousness, where Blood Meridian always keeps the reader on the outside of its principals' souls (if those grotesques could be said to have souls). And while Blood Meridian does display some humor, it is the blackest and driest humor I've ever read. Suttree is broader and more compassionate; it even has a fart joke. Blood Meridian, at least in my estimation (and many critics will contend this notion) has no flawed episodes; much of this results from the book's own internal program–it resists love, compassion, and even human dignity. In contrast, Suttree is punctuated by two deaths the audience is meant to read as tragic, yet I found it impossible to do so. The first is the death of Suttree's child, whom he has abandoned, along with its mother. As such, he is not permitted to take part in the funeral, observing the process rather from its edges. The second tragedy is the death of Suttree's young lover in a landslide. The book begs us to empathize with Suttree, just as he often empathizes with the marginal figures in the novel, but ultimately these tragedies are a failed ploy. They underwrite a sublime encounter with death for Suttree, an encounter that deepens and enriches his character while paradoxically freeing him from the burdens of social duty and familial order. McCarthy is hardly alone in such a move; indeed, it seems like the signature trope of American masculine literature to me. It's the move that Huck Finn wishes to make when he promises to light out for the Territory to escape the civilizing body of Aunt Sally; it's the ending that Hemingway was compelled to give to Frederic Henry at the end of A Farewell to Arms; it's all of Faulkner, with his mortification of fatherhood and the dramatic responsibility fatherhood entails. It is a cost analysis that neglects any potential benefits.
But these are small criticisms of a large, beautiful, benevolent novel, a book that begs to be reread, a rambling picaresque of comic and tragic proportions. "I learned that there is one Suttree and one Suttree only," our hero realizes, but this epiphany is set against a larger claim. Near the end of the novel, Suttree goes to check on an old ragman who he keeps a watchful eye on. He finds the man dead, his shack robbed, his body looted. Despairing over the spectacle's abject lack of humanity, Suttree cries, "You have no right to represent people this way," for "A man is all men. You have no right to your wretchedness." Here, Suttree's painful epiphany is real and true, an Emersonian insight coded in the darkest of Whitman's language. If there is one Suttree and one Suttree only, he is still beholden to all men; to be anti-social or an outcast is not to be anti-human. Self-hood is ultimately conditional on others and otherness. To experience the other's wretchedness is harrowing; to understand the other's wretchedness and thus convert it to dignity is life-affirming and glorious. Suttree is a brilliant, bold, marvelous book. Very highly recommended.
[Ed. note---Biblioklept originally published a version of this review on November 27, 2010].
Airships, Barry Hannah's Cult Classic of Violent Humor
In his 1978 collection Airships, Barry Hannah sets stories in disparate milieux, from the northern front of the Civil War, to an apocalyptic future, to the Vietnam War, to strange pockets of the late-twentieth century South. Despite the shifts in time and place, Airships is one of those collections of short stories that feels somehow like an elliptical, fragmentary novel. There are the stories that correspond directly to each other — the opener "Water Liars," for instance, features (presumably, anyway), the same group of old men as "All the Old Harkening Faces at the Rail." The old men love to crony up, gossip, tell tall tales. An outsider spoils the fun in "Water Liars" by telling a truth more terrible than any lie; in "Harkening," an old man shows off his new (much younger) bride. These stories are perhaps the simplest in the collection, the homiest, anyway, or at least the most "normal" (whatever that means), yet they are both girded by a strange darkness, both humorous and violent, that informs all of Airships.
We find that humor and violence in an outstanding trio of Civil War stories (or, more accurately, stories set during the Civil War). The narrator of "Dragged Fighting from His Tomb," a Confederate infantryman relates a tale of heroic slaughter with a hypberbolic, phallic force. Observe—
I knew the blueboys thought they had me down and were about ready to come in. I was in that position at Chancelorsville. There should be about six fools, I thought. I made the repeater, I killed four, and the other two limped off. Some histrionic plumehead was raising his saber up and down on the top of a pyramid of crossties. I shot him just for fun. Then I brought up another repeater and sprayed the yard.
Later, the narrator defects, switches to the Union, and claims he kills Jeb Stuart, a figure that towers over the Civil War tales. The narrator of "Dragged Fighting" hates Stuart; the narrator of "Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed" is literally in love with the General. In contrast to the narrator of "Dragged Fighting," the speaker in "Knowing" — an avowed "sissy" whom the other soldiers openly detest — hates the violence and madness of war—
We're too far from home. We are not defending our beloved Dixie anymore. We're just bandits and maniacal. The gleam in the men's eyes tells this. Everyone is getting crazier on the craziness of being simply too far from home for decent return. It is like Ruth in the alien corn, or a troop of men given wings over the terrain they cherished and taken by the wind to trees they do not know.
He despairs when he learns of Jeb Stuart's death. In the final Civil War story, "Behold the Husband in His Perfect Agony," a Union spy is given the task to communicate news of Stuart's death through enemy lines. Rather than offering further explication, let me instead point you, dear reader, to more of Hannah's beautiful prose, of which I have not remarked upon nearly enough. From "Behold the Husband" —
Isaacs False Corn, the Indian, the spy, saw Edison, the Negro, the contact, on the column of an inn. His coat was made of stitched newspapers. Near his bare feet, two dogs failed earnestly at mating. Pigeons snatched at the pieces of things in the rushing gutter. The rains had been hard.
The short, descriptive passage rests on my ears like a poem. Hannah, who worked with Gordon Lish, evinces in his writing again and again that great editor's mantra that writing is putting one sentence after another.
Although set in the Vietnam War, "Midnight and I'm not Famous Yet" seems an extension of the Civil War stories. In it, an officer from a small Southern town goes slowly crazy from all the killing, yet, like the narrator of "Dragged Fighting," he presents himself as a warrior. Above all though, he laments that the war has robbed him of some key, intermediary phase of his late youth, a phase he can't even name—
The tears were out of my jaws then. Here we shot each other up. All we had going was the pursuit of horror. It seemed to me my life had gone straight from teen-age giggling to horror. I had never had time to be but two things, a giggler and a killer.
This ironic sense of a "pursuit of horror" pervades Airships, particularly in the collection's most apocalyptic visions. "Eating Wife and Friends" posits an America where food shortages and material scarcity leads people to eating leaves and grass — and then each other. In "Escape to Newark," the environment is wildly out of balance—
In August it's a hundred fifty degrees. In December it's minus twenty-five and three feet of snow in Mississippi. In April the big trees explode.
A plan is made to "escape" these conditions via a rocket, but of course there's not enough fuel to get past Newark. In Airships, modes of flight are transcendent but ultimately transient. Gravity's pull is heavy stuff.
Just as Hannah's war stories are not really war stories, his apocalypse tales are really about human relationships, which he draws in humor, pathos, and dark cynicism. In "Green Gets It," an old man repeatedly attempts his suicide, only to fail again and again. His suicide note, written to his daughter, is scathing and shocking and sad and hilarious and wise–
My Beloved Daughter,
Thanks to you for being one of the few who never blamed me for your petty, cheerless and malign personality. But perhaps you were too busy being awful to ever think of the cause. I hear you take self-defense classes now. Don't you understand nobody could take anything from you without leaving you richer? If I thought rape would change you, I'd hire a randy cad myself. I leave a few dollars to your husband. Bother him about them and suffer the curse of this old pair of eyes spying blind at the minnows in the Hudson.
Your Dad,
Although Hannah explores the darkest gaps of the soul in Airships, he also finds there a shining kernel of love in the face of waste, depravity, violence, and indifference. This love evinces most strongly perhaps in Airships trio of long stories. These tales, which hover around 30 pages, feel positively epic set against the other stories in the collection, which tend to clock in between five and ten pages. The first long story, "Testimony of Pilot," details the development of a boyhood friendship over a few decades. It captures the strange affections and rivalries and unnameable bonds and distances that connect and disconnect any two close friends. The second of the long tales is "Return to Return," a tragicomic Southern drama in the Oedipal vein (with plenty of tennis and alcoholism to boot). As in "Testimony of Pilot," Hannah finds some measure of redemption, or at least solace, for his characters in their loving friendship, yet nothing could be more unsentimental. The final long story, which closes the collection, is "Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt," a daring work of stream of consciousness that seems to both respond to — and revise — Katherine Anne Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall." The story concludes (and of course concludes the volume) with a vision of love that corresponds to the imagery of The Pietà, a kind of selflessness that ironically confirms the self as an entity that exists in relation to the pain of others.
I could keep writing of course — I've barely touched on Hannah's surrealism, a comic weirdness that I've never seen elsewhere; it is Hannahesque, I suppose. Nor have I detailed Hannah's evocations of regular working class folk, fighting and drinking and divorcing and raising children (not necessarily in that order). Airships is a world too rich and fertile to unpack in just one review, and I've already been blathering too long, I fear, when what I really want to do is just outright implore you, kind reader, to find it and start reading it immediately. Very highly recommended.
[Editorial note: Biblioklept published a version of this review on March 20th, 2011]
"Smite early and often" (Another Riff on Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day)
1. The passage I'll be riffing on today is hardly the funniest or most dazzling piece of writing I've encountered so far in Thomas Pynchon's massive, shaggy novel Against the Day. However, I think this stretch of writing neatly and concisely illustrates the perspective (maybe world view is a better term; hell, we could even go with fancy-pants Weltanschauung here) of who I take to be the novel's most prominent villain, ruthless robber baron Scarsdale Vibe.
More significantly, I think this passage illustrates the ways that Pynchon's big novel analyzes American history and illuminates the contemporary American zeitgeist.
2. The block quote citations are continuous, although I'll be interrupting. The passage starts at the very bottom of page 331 and goes through 334 in my hardback Penguin first edition.
3. Okay, so a bit of context:
Our scene is mostly a dialogue, or a monologue really, between Scarsdale Vibe and his Other, Foley Walker, who took Scarsdale's place in the Civil War, took a bullet to the brain, and now, like so many of the characters in Against the Day, has special powers (he can hear voices that tell him how to invest (Scarsdale's) money in the market).
Back at Pearl Street, the two Vibes were sitting over brandy and cigars.
"A tough one to figure, that kid," Foley opined. "Sure hope we ain't got another Red in the root cellar like his old man."
The "kid" here is hero Kit Traverse, and his old man — the "Red in the root cellar" — is the recently-deceased-on-Scarsdale's-orders Webb Traverse, the Kieselguhr Kid, enemy of the captains of industry.
Scarsdale is backing Kit in the hopes that he'll become "the next Edison" — and not, significantly, the next Tesla.
5. (Tesla v. Edison—another set of doubles in the book.
Tesla, Serbian-American, mad magician, prophet of science, seer of the invisible, wants to provide free power for all is clearly allied (in Pynchon's book, that is) with the unions, the Traverses, labor—the good guys.
His double, Edison: American-American, reputed idea-thief, dog-electrocuter; Edison, a hustler who sweated out idea after idea, perhaps gracelessly; Edison, whose methods and inventions could generate corporate profits.
Tesla remarked of Edison, after his death: "he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense").
6. Note that Scarsdale wouldn't hesitate to kill Kit:
"Our duty would be no less clear. There are hundreds of these abscesses suppurating in the body of our Republic," an oratorical throb creeping into Scarsdale's voice, "which must be removed, wherever they are found. No other option. The elder Traverse's sins are documented—once they were brought to light, he was as good as lost. Should there be moral reservations, in a class war, about targeting one's enemies? You have been in this game long enough to appreciate how mighty are the wings we shelter beneath. How immune we are kept to the efforts of these muckraking Reds to soil our names. Unless—Walker, have I missed something? you aren't developing a soft spot."
As Scarsdale's was not the only voice Foley had to attend to, he erred, as usual, on the side of mollification. He held out his glowing Havana. "If you can find a soft spot, use it to put this out on."
"What happened to us, Foley? We used to be such splendid fellows."
"Passage of Time, but what's a man to do?"
"Too easy. Doesn't account for this strange fury I feel in my heart, this desire to kill off every damned socialist and so on leftward, without any more mercy than I'd show a deadly microbe."
"Sounds reasonable to me. Not like that we haven't bloodied up our hands already here." Scarsdale gazed out his window at a cityscape once fair but with the years grown more and more infested with shortcomings. "I wanted so to believe. Even knowing my own seed was cursed, I wanted the eugenics argument to be faulty somehow. At the same time I coveted the bloodline of my enemy, which I fancied uncontaminated, I wanted that promise, promise unlimited."
Foley pretended his narrowing of gaze was owing to cigarsmoke. "Mighty Christian attitude," he commented at last, in a tone as level as he could make it.
Here we see Scarsdale's hatred of organized labor, of anything that impedes on his profits, get tangled into the ideology that underwrites this conflict. He even cites the conflict as "a class war." This class war interweaves into his personal life: he is usurping the coveted "bloodline of my enemy" by attempting to adopt Kit.
7. The scene then takes on a religious dimension, exploring a "Mighty Christian attitude":
"Foley, I'm as impatient with religious talk as the next sinner. But what a burden it is to be told to love them, while knowing that they are the Antichrist itself, and that our only salvation is to deal with them as we ought."
Pynchon's villain here sounds like so many figures on the contemporary American Evangelical right, who repeatedly conflate their political/cultural enemies with "Antichrist" as a means to avoid the Jesusian imperative to love the Other.
8. Remember, wealthy Scarsdale—his father, really—was able to buy a deferment from the Civil War; Foley took his place:
It did not help Foley's present mood that he had awakened that morning from a recurring nightmare of the Civil War. The engagement was confined to an area no bigger than an athletic field, though uncountable thousands of men had somehow been concentrated there. All was brown, gray, smoky, dark. A lengthy exchange of artillery had begun, from emplacements far beyond the shadowy edges of the little field. He had felt oppressed by the imminence of doom, of some suicidal commitment of infantry which no one would escape. A pile of explosives nearby, a tall, rickety wood crib of shells and other ammunition began to smolder, about to catch fire and blow up at any moment, a clear target for the cannonballs of the other side, which continued to come in, humming terribly, without pause. . . .
Foley has actually fought and been wounded and risked. He's literally put skin in the game.
In contrast, Scarsdale Vibe was able to continue amassing and controlling wealth—just like other robber barons who bought deferments and then profited from the war (Andrew Carnegie, J.D. Rockefeller, and Jay Gould, just to name a few).
(Hey, can you think of any wealthy American men in contemporary times who avoided serving in a war but made ludicrous sums as war profiteers?)
9. Note how Scarsdale, claiming "My civil war has yet to come," pitches the conflict between capital and labor in terms of a holy war:
"I didn't have my war then," Scarsdale had been saying. "Just as well. I was too young to appreciate what was at stake anyway. My civil war was yet to come. And here we are in it now, in the thick, no end in sight. The Invasion of Chicago, the battles of Homestead, the Coeur d'Alene, the San Juans. These communards speak a garble of foreign tongues, their armies are the damnable labor syndicates, their artillery is dynamite, they assassinate our great men and bomb our cities, and their aim is to despoil us of our hard-won goods, to divide and subdivide among their hordes our lands and our houses, to pull us down, our lives, all we love, until they become as demeaned and soiled as their own. О Christ, Who hast told us to love them, what test of the spirit is this, what darkness hath been cast over our understanding, that we can no longer recognize the hand of the Evil One?
Note the xenophobia here, the fear that the dark Other with their "garble of foreign tongues" will try "to pull us down, our lives, all we love." Good thing this poor rich captain of industry will fight for Real America!
10. Scarsdale, weary from carrying his White Man's Burden:
"I am so tired, Foley, I have struggled too long in these thankless waters, I am as an unconvoyed vessel alone in a tempest that will not, will never abate. The future belongs to the Asiatic masses, the pan-Slavic brutes, even, God help us, the black seething spawn of Africa interminable. We cannot hold. Before these tides we must go under. Where is our Christ, our Lamb? the Promise?"
Seeing his distress, Foley meant only to comfort. "In our prayers—"
"Foley, spare me that, what we need to do is start killing them in significant numbers, for nothing else has worked. All this pretending—'equality,' 'negotiation'—it's been such a cruel farce, cruel to both sides. When the Lord's people are in danger, you know what he requires."
"Smite early and often."
And there it is: The ideological veneer of demagoguery quickly gives way to the violent impulses seething underneath. Scarsdale's Real America has no place for equality and negotiation. Just smiting.
11. And then quoth Foley:
"Hope there's nobody listening in on this."
I can't help but read this as a joke, an echo (pre-echo?) of Nixonian paranoia. The direct recognition that there is a gap between intention at the core and the way that intention is represented (hidden) on the surface (in language, in gesture).
12. But Scarsdale is unafraid:
"God is listening. As to men, I have no shame about what must be done." A queer tension had come into his features, as if he were trying to suppress a cry of delight.
"But you, Foley, you seem kind of—almost—nervous." Foley considered briefly. "My nerves? Cast iron." He relit his cigar, the matchflame unshaking. "Ready for anything."
Scarsdale's God is the god of the white man robber baron Real American capitalist, and "God is listening" not because he is omnipresent but because he is on Scarsdale's side.
13. Foley doesn't quite buy this resolve:
Aware of the Other Vibe's growing reluctance to trust reports from out in the field, Foley, who usually was out there and thought he had a good grasp on things, at first resentful and after a while alarmed, had come to see little point these days in speaking up. The headquarters in Pearl Street seemed more and more like a moated castle and Scarsdale a ruler isolated in self resonant fantasy, a light to his eyes these days that was not the same as that old, straightforward acquisitive gleam. The gleam was gone, as if Scarsdale had accumulated all the money he cared to and was now moving on in his biography to other matters, to action in the great world he thought he understood but—even Foley could see—was failing, maybe fatally, even to ask the right questions about anymore.
Foley, who actually served in war, "who usually was out there," can see that Scarsdale can only see what he wants to see—the Other Vibe lives in "a moated castle" as a "ruler isolated in self resonant fantasy," blinded by the lights of his xenophobic ideology, which has moved beyond mere money to pursue some other greater power.
14. Foley, so far anyway, proves an important contrast, a balance even, to Scarsdale's zealous evil. Through his eyes we can see the effects that isolation have taken on Scarsdale, who is becoming increasingly paranoid, anxious—crazy even. Scarsdale is completely divided from the men and women who create his wealth—he doesn't understand (let alone empathize with) the average American—yet he sees himself as the God-appointed, self-created savior of America (an America with no place for equality or negotiation). The ways in which this passage diagnoses certain attitudes in contemporary American politics/big-business strikes me as so transparent that I won't remark on them at further length. Pynchon's novel documents the tail-end of the Gilded Age through the end of the Great War, showing us that the conflicts of the past are the conflicts of today—and tomorrow.
The Never-Ending Torture of Unrest | Georg Büchner's Lenz Reviewed
Composed in 1836, Georg Büchner's novella-fragment Lenz still seems ahead of its time. While Lenz's themes of madness, art, and ennui can be found throughout literature, Büchner's strange, wonderful prose and documentary aims bypass the constraints of his era.
Let me share some of that prose. Here is the opening paragraph of Lenz:
The 20th, Lenz walked through the mountains. Snow on the peaks and upper slopes, gray rock down into the valleys, swatches of green, boulders, firs. It was sopping cold, the water trickled down the rocks and leapt across the path. The fir boughs sagged in the damp air. Gray clouds drifted across the sky, but everything so stifling, and then the fog floated up and crept heavy and damp through the bushes, so sluggish, so clumsy. He walked onward, caring little one way or another, to him the path mattered not, now up , now down. He felt no fatigue, except sometimes it annoyed him that he could not walk on his head. At first he felt a tightening in his chest when the rocks skittered away, the gray woods below him shook, and the fog now engulfed the shapes, now half-revealed their powerful limbs; things were building up inside him, he was searching for something, as if for lost dreams, but was finding nothing. Everything seemed so small, so near, so wet, he would have liked to set the earth down behind an oven, he could not grasp why it took so much time to clamber down a slope, to reach a distant point; he was convinced he could cover it all with a pair of strides.
Büchner sets us on Lenz's shoulder, moving us through the estranging countryside without any exposition that might lend us bearings. The environment impinges protagonist and reader alike, heavy, damp, stifling. Büchner's syntax shuffles along, comma splices tripping us into Lenz's manic consciousness, his mind-swings doubled in the path that is "now up, now down." We feel the "tightening" in Lenz's chest as the "rocks skittered away," as the "woods below him shook" — the natural world seems to envelop him, cloak him, suffocate him. It's an animist terrain, and Büchner divines those spirits again in the text. The claustrophobia Lenz experiences then swings to another extreme, as our hero, his consciousness inflated, feels "he could cover [the earth] with a pair of strides.
And that baffling line: "He felt no fatigue, except sometimes it annoyed him that he could not walk on his head." Well.
The end notes to the Archipelago edition I read (translated by Richard Sieburth) offer Arnold Zweig's suggestion that "this sentence marks the beginning of modern European prose," as well as Paul Celan's observation that "whoever walks on his head has heaven beneath him as an abyss."
Celan's description is apt, and Büchner's story repeatedly invokes the abyss to evoke its hero's precarious psyche. Poor Lenz, somnambulist bather, screamer, dreamer, often feels "within himself something . . . stirring and swarming toward an abyss toward which he was being swept by an inexorable force." Lenz is the story of a young artist falling into despair and madness.
But perhaps I should offer a more lucid summary. I'll do that in the next paragraph, but first: Let me just recommend you skip that paragraph. Really. What I perhaps loved most about Lenz was piecing together the plot through the often elliptical or opaque experiences we get via Büchner's haunting free indirect style. The evocation of a consciousness in turmoil is probably best maintained when we read through the same confusion that Lenz experiences. I read the novella cold based on blurbs from William H. Gass and Harold Bloom and I'm glad I did.
Here is the summary paragraph you should skip: Jakob Lenz, a writer of the Sturm and Drung movement (and friend and rival to Goethe), has recently suffered a terrible episode of schizophrenia and "an accident" (likely a suicide attempt). He's sent to pastor-physician J.F. Oberlin, who attends to him in the Alsatian countryside in the first few weeks of 1778. During this time Lenz obsesses over a young local girl who dies (he attempts to resurrect her), takes long walks in the countryside, cries manically, offers his own aesthetic theory, prays, takes loud late-night bath in the local fountain, receives a distressing letter, and, eventually, likely—although it's never made entirely explicit—attempts suicide again and is thusly shipped away.
Büchner bases his story on sections of Oberlin's diary, reproduced in the Archipelago edition. In straightforward prose, these entries fill in the expository gaps that Büchner has so elegantly removed and replaced with the wonder and dread of Lenz's imagination. The diary's lucid entries attest to the power of Büchner's speculative fiction, to his own art and imagination, which so bracingly take us into a clouded mind.
In Sieburth's afterword (which also offers a concise chronology of Lenz's troubled life), our translator points out that "Like De Quincey's "The Last Days of Immanuel Kant" or Chateaubriand's Life of Rancé, Büchner's Lenz is an experiment in speculative biography, part fact, part fabrication—an early nineteenth-century example of the modern genre of docufiction." Obviously, any number of postmodern novels have explored or used historical figures—Public Burning, Ragtime, and Mason & Dixon are all easy go-to examples. But Lenz is more personal than these postmodern fictions, more an exploration of consciousness, and although we are treated to Lenz's ideas about literature, art, and religion, we access this very much through his own skull and soul. He's not just a placeholder or mouthpiece for Büchner.
Lenz strikes me as something closer to the docufiction of W.G. Sebald. Perhaps it's all the ambulating; maybe it's the melancholy; could be the philosophical tone. And, while I'm lazily, assbackwardly comparing Büchner's book to writers who came much later: Thomas Bernhard. Maybe it's the flights of rant that Lenz occasionally hits, or the madness, or the depictions of nature, or hell, maybe it's those long, long passages. The comma splices.
Chronologically closer is the work of Edgar Allan Poe, whose depictions of manic bipolar depression resonate strongly with Lenz—not to mention the abysses, the torment, the spirits, the doppelgängers. Why not share another sample here to illustrate this claim? Okay:
The incidents during the night reached a horrific pitch. Only with the greatest effort did he fall asleep, having tried at length to fill the terrible void. Then he fell into a dreadful state between sleeping and waking; he bumped into something ghastly, hideous, madness took hold of him, he sat up, screaming violently, bathed in sweat, and only gradually found himself again. He had to begin with the simplest things in order to come back to himself. In fact he was not the one doing this but rather a powerful instinct for self preservation, it was as if he were double, the one half attempting to save the other, calling out to itself; he told stories, he recited poems out loud, wracked with anxiety, until he came to his sense.
Here, Lenz suspends his neurotic horror through storytelling and art—but it's just that, only a suspension. Büchner doesn't blithely, naïvely suggest that art has the power to permanently comfort those in despair; rather, Lenz repeatedly suggests that art, that storytelling is a symptom of despair.
What drives despair? Lenz—Lenz—Büchner (?)—suggests repeatedly that it's Langeweile—boredom. Sieburth renders the German Langeweile as boredom, a choice I like, even though he might have been tempted to reach for its existentialist chain-smoking cousin ennui. When Lenz won't get out of bed one day, Oberlin heads to his room to rouse him:
Oberlin had to repeat his questions at length before getting an answer: Yes, Reverend, you see, boredom! Boredom! O, sheer boredom, what more can I say, I have already drawn all the figures on the wall. Oberlin said to him he should turn to God; he laughed and said: if I were as lucky as you to have discovered such an agreeable pastime, yes, one could indeed wile away one's time that way. Tedium the root of it all. Most people pray only out of boredom; others fall in love out of boredom, still others are virtuous or depraved, but I am nothing, nothing at all, I cannot even kill myself: too boring . . .
Lenz fits in neatly into the literature of boredom, a deep root that predates Dostoevsky, Camus, and Bellow, as well as contemporary novels like Lee Rourke's The Canal and David Foster Wallace's The Pale King.
Ultimately, the boredom Lenz circles around is deeply painful:
The half-hearted attempts at suicide he kept on making were not entirely serious, it was less the desire to die, death for him held no promise of peace or hope, than the attempt, at moments of excruciating anxiety or dull apathy bordering on non-existence bordering on non-existence, to snap back into himself through physical pain. But his happiest moments were when his mind seemed to gallop away on some madcap idea. This at least provided some relief and the wild look in his eye was less horrible than the anxious thirsting for deliverance, the never-ending torture of unrest!
The "never-ending torture of unrest" is the burden of existence we all carry, sloppily fumble, negotiate with an awkward grip and bent back. Büchner's analysis fascinates in its refusal to lighten this burden or ponderously dwell on its existential weight. Instead, Lenz is a character study that the reader can't quite get out of—we're too inside the frame to see the full contours; precariously perched on Lenz's shoulder, we have to jostle along with him, look through his wild eyes, gallop along with him on the energy of his madcap idea. The gallop is sad and beautiful and rewarding. Very highly recommended.
"All Our Figments and Alogisms" | The Kafkaesque, Borgesian, Phildickian Worlds of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
At some point I acquired the notion, probably a fair one, that comparing writers to other writers is critically lazy. At the same time, writers write after other writers, through other writers, to other writers, against other writers, in other writers, out of other writers, on top of other writers, and so on. Literature is archaeological. And if I'm honest, a lot of the time it's the comparison to another writer that prompts my interest in a writer I haven't read.
Let me get to what I was getting at:
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky: Russian, 1887-1950: His collection Memories of the Future: Seven stories in spirited translation by Joanne Turnbull: Available in English from the good folks at NYRB: It's the sort of book that deserves its own book. Etc.
In lieu of writing that book, quite beyond my power, I'll compare Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky to some other writers in the hope of piquing your interest in this neglected master.
You knew I would start here.
Four years senior to Krzhizhanovsky, Mr. Kafka of Prague was our Russian writer's contemporary (if we want to use our postmodern imaginations). I was tempted to simply type "K" for Kafka, but they are both K. Kafkaesque is invoked frequently enough to potentially sap the adjective's potency, but consider that the same nebulous yet very real forces that shaped (warped?) Kafka (which, in turn Kafka shaped (warped) in his own writing) shaped (warped?) Krzhizhanovsky. Unseen, displaced authority, alienation, and absurdity, yes, but also humor, the line of hysteria, the constraining order that induces madness. The nightmare of modernity.
From "The Branch Line":
"Speaking in more modern terms," the fine print went on, "our nightmares, weighing as they do on the brain, gradually form a sort of moral ceiling that is always about to come crashing down on one's head: some of our customer's call this 'world history.' But that's not the point. The point is the durability, unwakeability, high depressiveness, and wide availability of our nightmares: mass-market products good for all eras and classes, nighttime and daytime, moonlight and sunlight, closed eyes and open."
If Kafka was Krzhizhanovsky's psychical contemporary, Mikhail Bulgakov (Russian, b. 1891) is his geographic one. Both men were writing through (and to some extent, against) the Russian Revolution, rendering the crowded buzz of new Moscow in manic strokes. Humming under the surface of Bulgakov's masterpiece The Master and Margarita is the threat of disappearance, the loss of personal space, but also absurd humor. These themes run through the seven stories collected in Memories of the Future, but perhaps evince most strongly in "Quadraturin" (maybe Krzhizhanovsky's most famous story), where furtive bachelor Sutulin obtains a samizdat device that expands his tiny apartment—ad infinitum into limitless space and terror.
From "Quadraturin":
In their sleep and in their fear, the occupants of the quadratures adjacent to citizen Sutulin's eighty-six square feet couldn't make head or tail of the timbre and intonation of the cry that woke them in teh middle of the night and compelled them to rush to the threshold of the Sutulin cell: for a man who is lost and dying in the wilderness to cry out is both futile and belated: but if even so—against all sense—he does cry out, then, most likely, thus.
So much of Kafkaesque applies to Borgesian, and perhaps I've quickly run up against one of the central problems of comparison: The originary: The source of the source: Primary (etc.). No matter. Krzhizhanovsky's modernism is Borgesian: Tale-telling: nested tales, circular tales, winding tales, labyrinths and mirrors, trap doors and hidden texts (motives), narrators who tell us a story as if it's just a distraction in the middle of some bigger story we won't get to hear—yet. Could there be a more Borgesian title than "The Bookmark," a tale loaded with hundreds of tales. (Okay, maybe not hundreds, but still loaded with that Scheherazade programming, that infinite looping…).
From "Someone Else's Theme":
And an invented person makes the greatest impression, naturally, on the seemingly not-invented, real person who, upon finding his reflection in a book, feels replaced and redoubled. This person cannot forgive his feeling of double insult: here I, a real, not-invented person, shall go to my grave and nothingness in ten or twenty years, whereas this fabricated, not-real "almost I" shall go on living and living as though it were the most natural thing in the world; more unforgivable still is the awareness that someone, some author, made you up like an arithmetic problem, what's more he figured you out, arrived at an answer over which you struggled your entire life in vain, he divined your existence without ever having met you, he penned his way into your innermost thoughts, which you tried so hard to hide from yourself. One must refute the author and vindicate oneself. At once!
It might be easy to go to Poe for a comparison: He's famous for his tales, and Krzhizhanovsky is a tale-master—whereas Hawthorne's estimable short stories are often overlooked because he happened to write what may or may not be The Great American Novel. But Hawthorne's dark romantic imagination, his weird sci-fi streak, and his wry sense of humor offer a better frame of reference for Krzhizhanovsky's contours. Krzhizhanovsky is also fond of Hawthorne's closing gambit, the "It-was-all-a-dream-or-hey-was-it?" maneuver. Both writers practice allegorical destabilization in their deeply darkly ironic parables. Soul detectives.
From "The Branch Line":
He knew from experience that dreams, like the thieves in the parable, come unseen, they slip under foreheads, trying to avoid the eyes, and only there—under the cranial roof, safe and sound, sprawled the brain—do they throw off their invisibility.
Krzhizhanovsky directly invokes several Russian writers by name, including Gogol and Turgenev, but Fyodor Dostoevsky seems to pop up the most. This makes sense. Dostoevsky is Krzhizhanovsky's parent-writer. Or maybe Raskolnikov is. Or maybe the Underground Man is. Like Dostoevsky, Krzhizhanovsky crafts alienated loners and thrusts them into absurd moral quandaries.
From "Red Snow":
Resignation to one's fate takes practice. Like any art. Or so citizen Shushashin maintains. He begins every day—after putting on his shoes and washing his face, before throwing on his jacket—with an exercise. Again, the expression is his. This expression works like this: he walks over to the wall, puts his back up against it and stands there in an attitude of utter resignation. For a minute or two. And that's all. The exercise is over. He can begin to live.
Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman channels Crime and Punishment via the dream machines of Hawthorne, Wells, Verne et al—all elements we might find in Memories of the Future. And of course O'Brien is Kafkaesque, Borgesian, etc. The stories-within-stories, the fake philosophers, the hefty strawmen, the dreams, the nightmares…Must I draw this out?
From "The Bookmark":
'I remember I tossed all night, my elbows bumping against the hard theme that layers our entire life. My pen, as soon as I dipped it in ink, wrote Animal Disputans. That was the title. Next came…Perhaps this doesn't interest you?'
'Please go on.'
'I took the title and the first verses of my song, if you will, from an old and long-forgotten book by the Danish humorist Holberg. This book—Nicolai Klimmi Her subterraneum, I believe it's called—describes the fantastic adventures of a traveler who winds up, I can't remember how, inside the Earth. The traveler is astonished to find that inside the planet, as inside a hermetically sealed vessel, lives a race with its own hermetically sealed State system, way of life, culture, everything that is customary in such cases. Over time the life of these undergroundlings—once rife with wars and conflict, cut off, hidden away beneath miles of crust—sorted itself out and settled into a harmonious routine. The problems of the hermetically sealed were all solved, everything ironed out and agreed upon. But in memory of those long-ago wars, Nicolai Klimmi tells us—no, please listen, it's rather touching—the land's noblest and richest magnates raised animal disputans. There isn't anything to argue about in an isolated country where everything has been determined and predetermined in saecula saculorum but these disputants were trained for the purpose, fed a special diet that irritated the liver and sublingual nerve, then pitted against one another and forced to argue till they were hoarse and foaming at the mouth—to unanimous laughter and merry halloos from the lovers of old traditions…
I think we can all agree that Memories of the Future could be the title of a Philip K. Dick story, right? The story of the same title (the longest in the collection, a novella, really) strongly recalls Dick, channeling him through time travel, and Phildickian themes course throughout the book: Paranoia, identity crisis, cynicism, the realization that the waking life might conceal alternative consciousness…
From "The Branch Line":
Haven't we managed to unify dreams? Haven't we hoodwinked humanity with that sweet million-brain dream of brotherhood, a united dream about unity? Flags the color of poppy petals flutter above the crowds. Reality is fighting back. But its blazing suns don't frighten the newly ascendant underground. Sleepers' eyes are shielded by eyelids. Yesterday's utopia has become today's science. We'll break the backs of facts. We'll rout their status quos: you'll see those status quos turn tail and run. If an 'I' should rise up against our 'we', we'll hurl him down a well of nightmares headfirst. We'll hide the sun behind black blots, we'll plunge the whole world into a deep, static slumber. We'll even put the idea of waking to sleep, and if it resists, we'll gouge out its eyes.
While reading Memories of the Future, I sometimes pretended that Krzhizhanovsky (and his doppelganger writer-protagonists) were versions of Boris Abramovich Ansky, the dissident Russian writer who appears (via diaries and fragments) in "The Part About Archimboldi" in Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Sure, I brought some of that metatextual layering with me, but Krzhizhanovsky's Borgesian stories repeatedly destabilize the notion of an authoritative narrator or storyteller, like matryoshka dolls that open into eggs that open into dreams and nightmares. Like Bolaño's work, Krzhizhanovsky's writing skates across an abyss of horror. The Krzhizhanovskian milieu shares psychic space with the Bolañoverse—in particular, both writers seem to love to walk their characters through graveyards.
From "The Thirteenth Category of Reason":
That's how it always is: first you call on your friends, and then—when the hearses have delivered them—on their graves. Now my turn too has come to exchange people for graves. The cemetery where I go more and more often lies behind high crenelated walls and looks from the outside like a fortress: only when the fighters have all fallen will the gates open. You walk in—first past a chaos of crosses, then past the inner wall—to the new crossless cemetery: gone are the monumental statics of the old human sepulchers, the massive family vaults and stone angels with their penguin-like wings grazing the earth: red metal starts on thin wire stems fidget nervously in the wind.
By way of conclusion, I'll submit that Krzhizhanovsky is just as notable for his divergences from the writers I've listed above as he is for any similarities. There are also plenty of names that could be added to the list above, and readers of Krzhizhanovsky will likely protest that I've failed to underscore the political underpinnings of his writing (for the record, the seven stories in Memories of the Future clearly respond to (and in many ways protest and satirize) early Soviet politics and lifestyle, but Krzhizhanovsky's approach is coded, oblique, and in this sense, timeless).
I'll end with with another citation from "The Thirteenth Category of Reason," a story that plays with Kant's twelve categories of conception. Krzhizhanovsky's work is always dialogic; he's always performing voices, but occasionally one slips through that I take to be a more direct version of the author's own. Here, Krzhizhanovsky offers a possible thesis statement for his project—his desire to write outside the confines of reason, his desire to find meaning in "all our figments and alogisms":
For you see, all those who are off (I won't look for another definition) or, rather, out of their heads, evicted, so to speak, from all twelve Kantian categories of reason, must naturally seek refuge in a thirteenth category, a sort of logical lean-to slouched against objective obligatory thinking. Given that the thirteenth category of reason is where we entertain, in essence, all our figments and alogisms, the old gravedigger may be useful to my projected cycle of "fantastic" stories.
That projected cycle of fantastic stories is Memories of the Future.
"On the Knocking at the Gate, in Macbeth" — Thomas De Quincey
"On the Knocking at the Gate, in Macbeth" by Thomas De Quincey
From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth. It was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account. The effect was, that it reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yet, however obstinately I endeavored with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect.
Here I pause for one moment, to exhort the reader never to pay any attention to his understanding when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind. The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind, and the most to be distrusted; and yet the great majority of people trust to nothing else; which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes. Of this out of ten thousand instances that I might produce, I will cite one. Ask of any person whatsoever, who is not previously prepared for the demand by a knowledge of perspective, to draw in the rudest way the commonest appearance which depends upon the laws of that science; as for instance, to represent the effect of two walls standing at right angles to each other, or the appearance of the houses on each side of a street, as seen by a person looking down the street from one extremity. Now in all cases, unless the person has happened to observe in pictures how it is that artists produce these effects, he will be utterly unable to make the smallest approximation to it. Yet why? For he has actually seen the effect every day of his life. The reason is—that he allows his understanding to overrule his eyes. His understanding, which includes no intuitive knowledge of the laws of vision, can furnish him with no reason why a line which is known and can be proved to be a horizontal line, should not appear a horizontal line; a line that made any angle with the perpendicular less than a right angle, would seem to him to indicate that his houses were all tumbling down together. Accordingly he makes the line of his houses a horizontal line, and fails of course to produce the effect demanded. Here then is one instance out of many, in which not only the understanding is allowed to overrule the eyes, but where the understanding is positively allowed to obliterate the eyes as it were, for not only does the man believe the evidence of his understanding in opposition to that of his eyes, but, (what is monstrous!) the idiot is not aware that his eyes ever gave such evidence. He does not know that he has seen (and therefore quoad his consciousness has not seen) that which he has seen every day of his life. But to return from this digression, my understanding could furnish no reason why the knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect, direct or reflected. In fact, my understanding said positively that it could not produce any effect. But I knew better; I felt that it did; and I waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable me to solve it. At length, in 1812, Mr. Williams made his début on the stage of Ratcliffe Highway, and executed those unparalleled murders which have procured for him such a brilliant and undying reputation. On which murders, by the way, I must observe, that in one respect they have had an ill effect, by making the connoisseur in murder very fastidious in his taste, and dissatisfied by anything that has been since done in that line. All other murders look pale by the deep crimson of his; and, as an amateur once said to me in a querulous tone, "There has been absolutely nothing doing since his time, or nothing that's worth speaking of." But this is wrong; for it is unreasonable to expect all men to be great artists, and born with the genius of Mr. Williams. Now it will be remembered that in the first of these murders, (that of the Marrs,) the same incident (of a knocking at the door soon after the work of extermination was complete) did actually occur, which the genius of Shakspeare has invented; and all good judges, and the most eminent dilettanti, acknowledged the felicity of Shakspeare's suggestion as soon as it was actually realized. Here, then, was a fresh proof that I was right in relying on my own feeling in opposition to my understanding; and I again set myself to study the problem; at length I solved it to my own satisfaction; and my solution is this. Murder in ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this reason, that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life; an instinct, which, as being indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind, (though different in degree,) amongst all living creatures; this instinct therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of "the poor beetle that we tread on," exhibits human nature in its most abject and humiliating attitude. Such an attitude would little suit the purposes of the poet. What then must he do? He must throw the interest on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with him; (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them,—not a sympathy of pity or approbation.) In the murdered person all strife of thought, all flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one overwhelming panic; the fear of instant death smites him "with its petrific mace." But in the murderer, such a murderer as a poet will condescend to, there must be raging some great storm of passion,—jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred,—which will create a hell within him; and into this hell we are to look. Read More
I Riff on the Cloud Atlas Movie
1. Cloud Atlas is neither the bizarre trainwreck I thought it might be, nor is it a disastrously wrong-headed reinterpretation of David Mitchell's novel.
2. It's actually about as faithful an adaptation as one could expect.
3. A major deviation from the novel:
The filmmakers (the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer) of Cloud Atlas chop up and rearrange the novel's six sections such that each section's individual arc (e.g. exposition, climax, dénouement, etc.) runs concurrently with the other narrative arcs—like braided strands—whereas the novel nests them—like matryoskha dolls.
It's very clear why the filmmakers would wish to use a more traditional grammar, but the effect is often more taxing than rewarding—the work's themes of eternal recurrence are overstated (yet somehow underdeveloped), pressed repeatedly on the viewer. There's little breathing room.
4. Another (possible) deviation from Mitchell's novel:
The filmmakers cast their company (including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, and Hugo Weaving) in multiple roles, so that each actor portrays a new character in each section. Mitchell's novel played with the idea of eternal recurrence subtly, using a comet-shaped birthmark as a linking signifier. The film adaptation overloads the theme, creating the impression of a system that simply doesn't inhere through the plot unless the viewer chooses to impose it (granted, certain actors tend to be cast in villainous roles or heroic roles—but there isn't a coherent system of correspondences between the actors and the characters, despite what snippets of dialog would wish the viewer to believer).
5. The biggest problem with casting actors across a variety of roles:
The effect is extremely distracting—especially when actors are playing characters across gender or across race (especially the film's notorious use of "yellow face," which is problematic on many levels, not the least of which is that the make-up and prosthetics just look awful—and the part of the yellow face that's worst to me (and perhaps the least-remarked-upon) is the awful fake "Asian" accents that the white actors use, with mangled intonations, etc. Disastrous).
The gambit may have worked (only may) if the filmmakers had cast actors who could actually pull it off. Denis Lavant, Tilda Swinton, and Gary Oldman all come to mind as actors who inhabit their roles to such a degree that the character transcends them (in plainer language: Gary Oldman is excellent at not looking like Gary Oldman). Tom Hanks—well, Hanks is wonderful at balancing charm with profound gazes—but he looks just like Tom Hanks in every damn scene he's in, whether he's playing a contemporary British gangster (maybe the low point of the film) or a post-apocalyptic tribesman (which, let me just shoehorn this in here real quickly—I imagined the Zachry of the novel to be like, much, much younger than mid-fifties). Halle Berry looks like Halle Berry, even in white face. And Hugo Weaving doing his Nurse Ratchet impression…well, leave it alone, leave it alone.
6. One thing the film does very well:
Stylized action sequences. We might expect this—the Wachowskis gave us The Matrix trilogy—but I was surprised at how well these moments fit into the film. There must have been a temptation to wedge shootouts and battles and cool cityscape sequences into the film, but these pockets of action are used sparingly, effectively buoying the film.
7. Another thing the film does well:
Explore the themes of slavery (and slave-master dynamics) that are central to Mitchell's text.
8. The biggest thematic short-coming of the Cloud Atlas film:
Its muddled handling of eternal recurrence. In my review of Mitchell's novel, I suggested that the book was overtly investigating the relationship between Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence and his infamous and often misunderstood übermensch. Granted, the film does posit history as a cycle of domination and submission, and also suggests that figures who wish to break or disrupt or upset this cycle will be assassinated or martyred—but the film elides the novel's Nietzschean impulses in favor of New Age contours. There's a broad, hippy-dippy streak of faux-spiritualism to the film that's too syrupy to swallow. (In full disclosure, dear reader—I prefer a healthy dose of bitter with any sweets).
9. Another problem:
The music. It's not that the score by director Tom Tykwer and two collaborators is bad—it's fine, I suppose—it's that the filmmakers rely too heavily on music to stitch their story strands together. The effect is at times simultaneously dulling and claustrophobic.
10. An extension of the previous point:
This is perhaps the biggest shortcoming of Cloud Atlas: Its compression. The film runs to an epic three hours, but somehow feels rushed.
There's not enough space for characters to develop, and because the film has created a system through which characters are essentially reiterations of previous "selves," the changes that the characters do undergo seem like fore drawn conclusions. Perhaps the most drastic example comes in the fabricant Sonmi-451. She's an emblematic character to the narrative, a messianic figure, and her catechism provides the novel's perhaps strongest exploration of what it means to be human and free. While the film hardly botches the Sonmi-451 segment, it doesn't devote enough time to showing her revolutionary arc.
11. I know, I know—the film is already three hours, and here I am asking for more.
Suggestion: Cloud Atlas might have been much stronger as a twelve part miniseries, giving its characters and themes room to breathe and grow.
Another suggestion: Cloud Atlas as a one-man theatrical show starring, I don't know, Gary Oldman (?). 75 minutes tops.
12. My criticisms might seem overly nitpicky, and to be clear, they are from the perspective of someone who read and enjoyed the book first. Still, I hate to fault the Wachowskis and Tykwer for their ambition, scope, technical prowess, and, oddly, their restraint. The film is far more focused and coherent than it has any right to be and its themes come through clearly. The filmmakers show a deep respect for Mitchell's novel as well as the film's audience while at the same time offering their own personal interpretation of the source material. When Cloud Atlas stumbles or outright fails, it does so on its own terms—which is why I think the film ultimately succeeds.
Jangly George Saunders — Tenth of December Reviewed
"For me, the litmus test is always language," George Saunders told Charlie Rose in a recent interview. "If the sentences are kind of jangly and interesting, then I know how to proceed."
Saunders composes stories syntactically: his themes and plots and characters emerge from the right jangle, the right discordant note that simultaneously pleases and disturbs. This technique shows in his latest collection Tenth of December, a showcase for Saunders's estimable verbal prowess and a reminder that he is one of America's preeminent satirists.
Tenth of December also reveals some of Saunders's limitations, the biggest of which is that he seems to write the same few stories again and again. Granted, these stories are sharp, funny, puncturing criticisms of American life—satires of corpocracy and the ways commerce infests language (and hence thought); satires of how late capitalism engenders cycles of manufactured desire and very-real despair; satires, ultimately, of how we see ourselves seeing others seeing us in ways that we don't wish to be seen. Perhaps Saunders writes the same plots repeatedly because he thinks we need to read them repeatedly—and there's certainly pleasure and humor and pathos in Tenth of December—but there isn't any territory explored here that would be unfamiliar to anyone who read CivilWarLand in Bad Decline or Pastoralia.
Take "Escape from Spiderhead," one of the stronger entries in December. This is pure Saundersville, a story nudging weirdly into a skewed future that might come too-true too soon. Said spiderhead is a prison command center where wardens subject their inmates to language and desire experiments, using drugs like "Verbaluce™, VeriTalk™, ChatEase™" (lord does Saunders love incaps) to manipulate the prisoners' minds and bodies alike (all with consent, of course).
The story is a biting and often painful exploration of how our desires and actions might be constrained and controlled by others. It's also an excellent excuse for Saunders to flex some of those verbal muscles of his:
He added some Verbaluce™ to the drip, and soon I was feeling the same things but saying them better. The garden still looked nice. It was like the bushes were so tight-seeming and the sun made everything stand out? It was like any moment you expected some Victorians to wander in with their cups of tea. It was as if the garden had become a sort of embodiment of the domestic dreams forever intrinsic to human consciousness. It was as if I could suddenly discern, in this contemporary vignette, the ancient corollary through which Plato and some of his contemporaries might have strolled; to wit, I was sensing the eternal in the ephemeral.
"Escape from Spiderhead" is one of several tales in December that ultimately posit selflessness and empathy as a metaphysical escape hatch, an out to all the post-postmodern awful. It's a near-perfect little story, which is why it's too bad when Saunders essentially repeats it (right down to the Verbaluce™/amplified language conceit) in "My Chivalric Fiasco." (Perhaps "My Chivalric Fiasco" was necessary though; it provides the sole "weird theme park" story requisite to any Saunders collection).
An equal to "Spiderhead" is "The Semplica Girl Diaries," the collection's strongest condemnation of how capitalism engenders bizarre ethical positions within families, between neighbors—and even countries. The longest story in the collection, "The Semplica Girl Diaries" purports to be a harried middle class father's diary, a conceit which gives Saunders plenty of space to jangle.
Our poor narrator just wants to keep up with the Joneses, a serious character flaw that often results in hilarious hyperbole. He takes his family to the birthday party of his daughter's classmate. This classmate's family is wealthy, perfect, glowing, healthy, innovative, happy:
Just then father (Emmett) appears, holding freshly painted leg from merry-go-round horse, says time for dinner, hopes we like sailfish flown in fresh from Guatemala, prepared with a rare spice found only in one tiny region of Burma, which had to be bribed out, and also he had to design and build a special freshness-ensuring container for the sailfish.
Set against such a pristine backdrop our hapless narrator's own life seems stressful and shabby:
Household in freefall, future reader. Everything chaotic. Kids, feeling tension, fighting all day. After dinner, Pam caught kids watching "I, Gropius," (forbidden) = show where guy decides which girl to date based on feeling girls' breasts through screen with two holes. (Do not actually show breasts. Just guy's expressions as he feels them and girl's expression as he feels them and girl's expression as guy announces his rating. Still: bad show.) Pam blew up at kids: We are in most difficult period ever for family, this how they behave?
I love how Saunders works I, Gropius in there—his dystopian touches work best when they are simultaneously over-the-top (idea) and graceful (delivery of idea). These moments of humor don't deflate the extreme anxieties that "The Semplica Girl Diaries" produces; rather, the humorous, hyperbolic eruptions add to what turns out to be a horror story.
Like the narrator of "The Semplica Girl Diaries," the eponymous would-be hero of "Al Roosten" is painfully attuned to how others might/do see him. "Al Roosten" is one of several of December's exercises in how we see others seeing us (set against the backdrop of how we desire others to see us, etc.). The story starts at a charity auction where local businessmen are being auctioned off (including Roosten's rival Donfrey—an echo of Emmett) and then heads precisely nowhere (or rather, remains entirely in poor Roosten's skull). First paragraph:
Al Roosten stood waiting behind the paper screen. Was he nervous? Well, he was a little nervous. Although probably a lot less nervous than most people would be. Most people would probably be pissing themselves by now. Was he pissing himself? Not yet. Although, wow, he could understand how someone might actually—
That sentence-interrupting final dash precedes the intrusion of the "real," phenomenological world into Roosten's consciousness. There's much of James Thurber's "Walter Mitty" in "Al Roosten"—and, indeed, much of Mitty in Saunders generally—perhaps because Saunders's jangles lead him to explore the strange gaps between thought and action, reality and imagination. It's worth sharing a few paragraphs of Saunders's technique:
Frozen in the harsh spotlight, he looked so crazy and old and forlorn and yet residually arrogant that an intense discomfort settled on the room, a discomfort that, in a non-charity situation, might have led to shouted insults or thrown objects but in this case drew a kind of pity whoop from near the salad bar.
Roosten brightened and sent a relieved half wave in the direction of the whoop, and the awkwardness of this gesture—the way it inadvertently revealed how terrified he was—endeared him to the crowd that seconds before had been ready to mock him, and someone else pity-whooped, and Roosten smiled a big loopy grin, which caused a wave of mercy cheers.
Roosten was deaf to the charity in this. What a super level of whoops and cheers. He should do a flex. He would. He did. This caused an increase in the level of whoops and cheers, which, to his ear, were now at least equal in volume to Donfrey's whoops/cheers. Plus Donfrey had been basically naked. Which meant that technically he'd beaten Donfrey, since Donfrey had needed to get naked just to manage a tie with him, Al Roosten. Ha ha, poor Donfrey! Running around in his skivvies to no avail.
We can note here the transitions between what the world sees (in those first two paragraphs) to how Roosten sees the world seeing him. This is Saunders at perhaps his finest, showcasing a meticulous control of free indirect style; Roosten is simultaneously pathetically endearing and loathsome. He is attractive and repellent precisely because we understand him—what it is to see him, but also what it is to be seen in the way he is being seen.
The titular story, which closes the collection, also offers a Walter Mittyish figure, a "pale boy with unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs and cublike mannerisms" who sneaks off into the woods to fantasize about the Lilliputian "Nethers" who might try to kidnap his crush Suzanne (whom he's never addressed, of course). "Somewhere there is a man who likes to play and hug, Suzanne said," the poor boy imagines. Again, this is Saundersville, where we laugh out loud and then reprimand ourselves for our cruelty and then engage, empathize, say, Hey kid, I've been there too…
"Tenth of December" is a sort of rewrite of two stories from Pastoralia, "The End of FIRPO in the World" and "The Falls." I suppose I don't mind, but I wish that Saunders's jangles might lead him to new plots. Despite its rehashing of these earlier stories, "Tenth of December" delivers possibly the strongest case for empathy-as-transcendence in the collection. Our boy gets a shot at actually living up to his haircut—he'll valiantly help a suicidal terminally ill man, who will, in turn, help him. What the story illustrates best though is how impulse precedes action and action precedes thought, how action can be shot through with memory:
He was on his way down before he knew he'd started. Kid in the pond, kid in the pond, ran repetitively through his head as he minced. Progress was tree to tree. Standing there panting, you got to know a tree well. This one had three knots: eye, eye, nose. This started out as one tree and became two.
Suddenly he was not purely the dying guy who woke nights in the med bed thinking, Make this not true make this not true, but again, partly, the guy who used to put bananas in the freezer, then crack them on the counter and pour chocolate over the broken chunks, the guy who'd once stood outside a classroom window in a rainstorm to see how Jodi was faring with that little red-headed shit who wouldn't give her a chance at the book table, the guy who used to hand-paint birdfeeders in college and sell them on weekends in Boulder, wearing a jester hat and doing a little juggling routine he'd—
There's that dash again. Dare I liken it to the dashes of Poe, of Dickinson? Maybe, maybe not.
I've shared some highlights of December, which I believe outweigh its weaker spots, unremarkable pieces like "Puppy," a transparent exercise in how class in America inheres through a system of seeing/not-seeing others, or "Exhortation," an amusing but forgettable memorandum that reads like Saunders-doing-Saunders.
"Home" is really the only story I would've left out of December. It's the story of a war veteran trying to reintegrate into a society that flatly reiterates "Thank you for your service" while doing precisely nothing to actually thank the vet. Saunders's sentiments are clearly in the right place, but the story rings false and hollow, its authorial anger overriding the humanity of its characters. At its worst moments, "Home" gives us a world of shuffling grotesques whose quirks preëmpt any possibility for genuine pathos. Saunders, usually in command of language, seems strained here. And it's not a strain of venturing into new territory; no, all of Saunders's tricks and traps are on display here (including an unexplained/unexplored substance called MiiVOXmax). Perhaps that's the problem. Perhaps there's too much of the author in the story.
And maybe that's why I like the short, visceral two-paragraph perfection of "Sticks" so much–it seems freer, sharper. At fewer than four hundred words it's easily the shortest piece in the collection (and the shortest thing I've read by Saunders). "Sticks" condenses the harried middle class hero of almost every Saunders tale into one ur-Dad, stunning, sad, majestic. It's also the oldest story in the collection, originally published by Harper's in 1995, which means it predates the publication of all his other collections. I don't know why Saunders included it in December but I'm glad he did. It breaks up some of his rut.
That rut, by the way, is a pleasure to roll through—a fast, funny pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. Saunders is very good at highlighting our culture's ugly absurdities, and he usually does so with moving pathos. And if his jangly sentences are their own raison d'être, then so be it. They are harmonious and sour, soaring and searing. Recommended.
Tenth of December is new in hardback from Random House. You can read many of his stories online for free.
A Riff on Paul Thomas Anderson's Film The Master (Including a Take on the Ending)
1. I finally saw Paul Thomas Anderson's 2012 film The Master last night. I'm going to riff on the film. Fair warning:this riff will contain spoilers—I'll talk about the film's final scene, for instance (and if you just want to read about the ending, scroll down to point 23, after the embedded video).
2. The first hour of The Master is probably the best thing PTA has done.
3. The Master begins on a beach somewhere in the South Pacific. These are the final days of WWII. Navy boy Freddie Quell (portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix), solitary from his fellows, pours from a can of the mystic moonshine he brews into a coconut he's hacked open with a machete. He then drinks the potion and mimes chopping off his hand with the machete. After this, he humps a woman made of sand and jerks off into the ocean.
4. The idyll of the Pacific beach contrasts strongly with Quell's tortured psyche—it's clear from the film's first few moments that he's borderline deranged, a sex-obsessed alcoholic who was damaged long before the war.
5. Quell is also a profoundly talented chemist (or alchemist) capable of brewing strange cocktails mixed from whatever's at hand. These potions intrigue Lancaster Dodd (henceforth Master, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), who samples a flask and asks Quell to brew more. Quell says he'll make Master something different from that first batch, asking him, "How do you want to feel?"
6. "How do you want to feel?"
This question governs The Master, and the film is at its best when probing and plumbing these depths.
7. Back to my second statement: The first hour or so of The Master is probably the best thing PTA has done. Freddie Quell is an intriguing figure, a desperate madman who recapitulates the crimes of Oedipus where ever he goes.
He is The Misfit of Flannery O'Connor's story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," trying to match faith to the phenomenal world.
He is Jonah, fleeing angry Yaweh, stowing away on a ship.
8. The first scenes of The Master borrow liberally from the Terrence Malick playbook:
The opening scene on the beach strongly recalls the opening of The Thin Red Line, and the subsequent scenes where Quell maybe murders a man and then must run feel like the opening minutes of Days of Heaven.
Like Malick, PTA lets the gorgeous cinematography convey meaning; dialog passes through the background of the film.
9. The dialog begins when Quell meets Master, charismatic leader of "The Cause." You know of course that Master is based on L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology. It's worth pointing out that the film isn't really about Scientology, or cults, or charlatans—although these points are explored, for sure—it's really about the search for meaning, for stability. For some kind of peace.
10. The friendship—and friendship-as-dialog—between Master and Quell is by far the most compelling part of The Master, and the film's best scene is a long episode where Master initiates "Processing" with Quell—delving into the man's founding traumas to purify his spirit. I usually hate to laud actors, but Hoffman and Phoenix are sublime here, fully inhabiting the characters through the scenes deep emotional shifts.
The Master never surpasses this scene.
11. Indeed, the biggest failure of the film is that there's no moment in its back half that can respond to the Processing scene. The film's final scene attempts to mirror it in some ways, but the attempt lacks the weight. It's off balance.
12. I feel the need to preface what I'm about to write by saying very clearly:
Paul Thomas Anderson is an extremely gifted auteur, a filmmaker who has, moreso than perhaps any of his contemporaries, continued in the (anti-)tradition of the New Hollywood films of the seventies. I would rather watch a PTA film than a film by just about anybody.
The guy has a real problem sticking the ending. His films fail to cohere, to transcend the sum of their parts. This might be an editing issue or a plotting issue or something more commercially-driven, like running time. I don't know.
13. Exceptions to PTA not sticking the ending:
Punch Drunk Love, easily his most concise and focused film, a long short story from a filmmaker who works in sprawling novels.
Possibly Boogie Nights, which sags in the final third but is nevertheless buoyed by an energetic scene featuring Alfred Molina, a mixtape, some cocaine, and fireworks. (This scene is lifted from Robert Downey Sr.'s Putney Swope, by the way).
14. For the most part though, PTA's films swell outside of the margins that their own narratives establish in the beginning of each film (I'm not sure if this sentence makes sense—what I mean is that the films' endings fall apart w/r/t the films' beginnings).
In There Will Be Blood, PTA uses a stunning, violent, unforgettable final moment as a punchline to the film. It's probably what most of us remember, and it's certainly a great way to close the epic. Still: When I rewatch Blood, I start to become impatient with the film's meandering after its thrilling opening hour. I start to anticipate the horrific punchline.
15. The easiest example to point to of PTA's undisciplined sprawl is Magnolia. I can't think of a film with a stronger opening that so quickly devolves into Altmanesque chaos. Which is the point, yes, I get—but Magnolia, again, is a PTA film which can't live up to its first hour. (Again, PTA covers over the back end's sloppiness with a marvelous final scene).
16. So, to return to The Master: I went into the film with high expectations—hoping that this would be the film by PTA that coheres, that is more than just a collection of fantastic performances and amazing scenes. And for the first hour, I was enthralled: I cared deeply about Freddie Quell, found his strange passions heartbreaking, was moved by his bizarre relationship with Master.
And the film is great—it really is—but it's not as great as I wanted it to be. (Which, yes, I know, says nothing about the film and everything about me).
17. The film's seams start to show after the magical sea voyage from California to New York. The first few scenes in New York are fascinating (especially when Master is confronted by a skeptic at a party), but as the The Cause moves back West over land, PTA increasingly relies on montages and shorter scenes that seem like placeholders to cobble together the film's longer sections.
18. The last truly transcendent scene is where Master sings "I'll Go No More A-Roving," and it comes at almost exactly the half-way point of the film's 138 minute running time.
19. All kinds of interesting stuff happens after the "Roving" scene—and PTA seems content to raise more mysteries than he resolves, which I'm fine with—but a long montage showcasing the different Processing techniques of The Cause sucks the energy right out of the film.
20. What follows is a lot of meandering, a lot of unexplained—or worse, unexplored—moments between characters that shift focus away from the relationship between Master and Quell.
21. Maybe I want a longer edit of The Master.
22. Here's a 20 minute reel of cut footage:
23. And what about the ending of The Master? As I tried to convey in points 13-15, PTA usually closes with a very strong scene or image. With the exception of There Will Be Blood, I'd argue that the final moments of PTA's films generally depict moments of love, redemption, or reconciliation. The Master fits into this trend. How so?
24. Okay: So The Master is in some ways formally Oedipal.
Quell's crimes are two-fold: He kills a man who he says reminds him of his father and he has sex with his aunt. The film leaves open the possibility that both of these crimes—crimes he confesses to Master during Processing—are simply displacements for the more direct sins of killing his real father and fucking his real mother.
The Oedipal tensions that underwrite the film are strongly on display in the relationship between Master and Quell: Master is in love with Quell; Quell needs a father figure. All sorts of weird familial displacements ensue between Master's family members and Quell.
The Oedipal theme also evinces in the film's motif of breasts, bellies, and other pregnancy images. While not many of The Cause's ideas are expressed clearly in The Master, the idea that all founding traumas are recorded in/on the soul is made plain several times. Put another way, all people are subjected to traumas that exist in pre-Oedipal, pre-lingual, pre-conscious states.
Quell wants to return to the womb to correct or ameliorate or avoid these traumas. The impossibility of achieving this desire drives him to self-medicate with his homemade brews and to see sex in everything.
The film ends with Quell having sex with a stranger he picks up in a bar. They laugh heartily—another of the film's motifs—laughter as a measurement of joy, but also dejection, also hysteria, also fear, also irrationality, also no language, just laughter—they laugh heartily, and in a shot that foregrounds his sex partner's large breasts, Quell begins Processing her.
25. We then get the film's last line, delivered with laughter: "Stick it back in, it fell out."
The referent of the "it" is, on the surface level, Quell's penis, but it also serves as a substitution for Quell himself, who would like to return to a mother, to start again in a new life. (The scene, a riff on Quell's first Processing with Master, can also be read as the displaced sexual consummation between the two men).
The film's final image gives us Quell lying down next to the woman made of sand, her huge breasts erect, dominating the shot; he curls into her, peaceful, serene, fetal. The shot is deceptive: It suggests reconciliation or even redemption, but the memory of peace is just one fragment of Quell's terribly fragmented life. Significantly, the moment comes from the beginning of the film. If Quell is to be reborn and live again—as Master believes all people are—it is clear that he has not transcended his base animal urges.
When Quell awakes, he awakes to trauma.
26. Having riffed on the film's end, I think the film is probably better than I gave it credit for earlier. It's a cold Sunday. I think I'll watch The Master again.
Flann O'Brien's Novel At Swim-Two-Birds Is a Postmodernist Masterpiece of Comic Storytelling
The vibrant force of storytelling in Flann O'Brien's excellent first novel At Swim-Two-Birds threatens to overwhelm reader and narrator alike—and what a strange joy it is to be overwhelmed. This novel overflows with stories; its plot threads twist into each other, break out of each other, erupt into new ideas, characters, riffs, sketches. First published in 1939—the same year as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake—At Swim-Two-Birds seems light years ahead of its time—indeed, this is a book that is still ahead of its time.
Summarizing At Swim-Two-Birds is difficult but worth attempting. We have an unnamed narrator, a student living with his uncle who doesn't think much of how his nephew spends his time. Our narrator likes to imbibe large quantities of porter and wax philosophical with his friends about his literary projects. These projects, our narrator's riffs and scribblings, begin to take on lives of their own: they intersect, overlap, intermarry, degenerate and regenerate.
The book's opening paragraph announces the novel's intention to disregard the classical unities of action, place, and time:
Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.
First, we meet "Pooka MacPhellimey, a member of the devil class," a hobgoblin of Irish folklore (he turns out to be a thoughtful and polite fellow). Then, there's John Furriskey, who "was born at the age of twenty-five and entered the world with a memory but without a personal experience to account for it." Furriskey is the literary creation of another of the narrator's literary creations, one Dermot Trellis, a grumpy old man who writes Westerns; Trellis (an author, it's worth reiterating) is the eventual antagonist of the novel, the target for all of the other characters' vengeance. The third opening offers up Finn Mac Cool, "a legendary hero of old Ireland."
Much of the early part of At Swim-Two-Birds features Finn Mac Cool holding forth on all matters Irish in wonderfully baroque and hyperbolic passages. Here's a snippet (a long one!), featuring Finn on the ideal man:
When pursued by a host, he must stick a spear in the world and hide behind it and vanish in its narrow shelter or he is not taken for want of sorcery. Likewise he must hide beneath a twig, or behind a dried leaf, or under a red stone, or vanish at full speed into the seat of his hempen drawers without changing his course or abating his pace or angering the men of Erin. Two young fosterlings he must carry under the armpits to his jacket through the whole of Erin, and six arm-bearing warriors in his seat together. If he be delivered of a warrior or a blue spear, he is not taken. One hundred head of cattle he must accommodate with wisdom about his person when walking all Erin, the half about his armpits and the half about his trews, his mouth never halting from the discoursing of sweet poetry. One thousand rams he must sequester about his trunks with no offence to the men of Erin, or he is unknown to Finn. He must swiftly milk a fat cow and carry milk-pail and cow for twenty years in the seat of his drawers. When pursued in a chariot by the men of Erin he must dismount, place horse and chariot in the slack of his seat and hide behind his spear, the same being stuck upright in Erin. Unless he accomplishes these feats, he is not wanted of Finn. But if he do them all and be skillful, he is of Finn's people.
It's hard not to feel something of Joyce in the passage (I'm particularly reminded of the Cyclops episode of Ulysses), and O'Brien's narrator name-checks Joyce (along with Aldous Huxley) in the first few pages of the book. The narrator's comically mechanical and precise descriptions also recall Joyce. Joyce and O'Brien drew from the same well of mythology, but O'Brien more keenly attunes his focus on Irish legend and folklore in At Swim-Two-Birds, while Joyce's project skews to archetypes. Similarities and divergences aside, there's something strangely fitting about O'Brien's Finn Mac Cool dreaming his way into other characters' lives in At Swim-Two-Birds, as if this Finn is the psychic twin of Joyce's Finn.
Indeed, such a reading would fit neatly into our young narrator's ideas about the function of character in literature:
Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet. The modern novel should be largely a work of reference. Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before – usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would effectively preclude mountebanks, upstarts, thimble-riggers and persons of inferior education from an understanding of contemporary literature.
This decree strikes me as wonderfully post-postmodernist. That the "modern novel should be largely a work of reference" finds its suitable echo over half a century later in the note-card novels of David Markson (and other reality smugglers). The citation above serves as a metatextual description of At Swim-Two-Birds itself: O'Brien's narrator framing the various tales that erupt in the novel, but also undoing the frames, allowing his characters to converge, to tell their own stories (and within those stories characters tell other stories…).
In its finest moments (of which there are many), At Swim-Two-Birds operates on an ad hoc logic that it creates and describes in motion, a kind of improvised dream response pattern. Most books, particularly postmodern books, teach the reader how to read them—that is, most novels provide keys, hints, and reading rules early enough in the text to allow perceptive readers to interpret (subjectively, of course) what the novel is doing. O'Brien's novel in toto, with its discontinuities, gaps, eruptions, and juxtapositions, paradoxically is its own discrete, unified key.
But I seem to be getting bogged down in a bit of literary theory, which is not my intent at all.
Instead, let me draw attention to a wonderful extended jaunt in the middle of At Swim-Two-Birds where the Pooka MacPhellimey enters into an ersatz quest with the Good Fairy, two cowboyish thugs (or thuggish cowboys) named Slug and Shorty, the poet Jem Casey, and the mad King Sweeny. This ragtag band sets out to bequeath gifts to the forthcoming child of Miss Lamont (the creation of a creation of a creation). These episodes unfold in comic bravado, their slapstick rhythms recalling the manic but precise energy of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and the linguistic brio of the Marx brothers. This miniature picaresque is tempered in sweet pathos for poor crazy Sweeny who must be plied forward with the promise of a feast. The poor man, broken, starving, and living solely on watercress, falls into despair. What eventually moves him? The force of language:
And getting around the invalid in a jabbering ring, they rubbed him and cajoled and coaxed, and plied him with honey-talk and long sweet-lilted sentences full of fine words, and promised him metheglin and mugs of viscous tarblack mead thickened with white yeast and the spoils from hives of mountain-bees, and corn-coarse nourishing farls of wheaten bread dipped in musk-scented liquors and sodden with Belgian sherry, an orchard and a swarm of furry honey-glutted bees and a bin of sun-bronzed grain from the granaries of the Orient in every drop as it dripped at the lifting of the hand to the mouth, and inky quids of strong-smoked tabacca with cherrywood pipes, hubble-bubbles, duidins, meerschaums, clays, hickory hookahs and steel-stemmed pipes with enamel bowls, the lot of them laid side by side in a cradle of lustrous blue plush, a huge pipe-case and pipe-rack ingeniously combined and circumscribed with a durable quality of black imitation leather over a framework of stout cedarwood dovetailed and intricately worked and made to last, the whole being handsomely finished and untouched by hand and packed in good-quality transparent cellophane, a present calculated to warm the cockles of the heart of any smoker. They also did not hesitate to promise him sides of hairy bacon, the mainstay and the staff of life of the country classes, and lamb-chops still succulent with young blood, autumn-heavy yarns from venerable stooping trees, bracelets and garlands of browned sausages and two baskets of peerless eggs fresh-collected, a waiting hand under the hen's bottom. They beguiled him with the mention of salads and crome custards and the grainy disorder of pulpy boiled rhubarb, matchless as a physic for the bowels, olives and acorns and rabbit-pie, and venison roasted on a smoky spit, and mulatto thick-tipped delphy cups of black-strong tea. They foreshadowed the felicity of billowy beds of swansdown carefully laid crosswise on springy rushes and sequestered with a canopy of bearskins and generous goatspelts, a couch for a king with fleshly delectations and fifteen hundred olive-mellow concubines in constant attendance against the hour of desire. Chariots they talked about and duncrusted pies exuberant with a sweat of crimson juice, and tall crocks full of eddying foam-washed stout, and wailing prisoners in chains on their knees for mercy, humbled enemies crouching in sackcloth with their upturned eye-whites suppliant. They mentioned the leap of a fire on a cold night, long sleeps in the shadows and leaden-eyed forgetfulness hour on hour – princely oblivion. And as they talked, they threaded through the twilight and the sudden sun-pools of the wild country.
I've perhaps overshared here, let our characters babble on too long—but the verbal dexterity of the passage above illustrates O'Brien's rhetorical force, the force he lends his characters in order that they should move their insane and desperate friend forward. There's a sublime alchemy at work here, where imagination turns into words and words turn into food and drink.
I also fear these big chunks of text I've pulled from At Swim-Two-Birds don't highlight O'Brien's extraordinary talent at rendering speech. The dialogue in this novel is hilarious but nuanced, its ironies rarely if ever remarked upon by intrusive attributions. That O'Brien's narrator's characters (and their characters…) speak through the layers of texts adds to the book's juxtapositions.
These juxtapositions will perhaps confuse or even alienate many readers. At Swim-Two-Birds can be read as an attack on the classical unities of action, place, and time. O'Brien's novel is a send-up of stability, order, and tradition. Some of the novel's best moments are its strangest indulgences, as when O'Brien (or his narrator) gives the novel over to citations from imaginary antique texts, or allows his characters to indulge in a seemingly endless recitation of obscure facts, or satirizes the moral dangers of tea-tasting. These moments seem to erupt from nowhere, bizarre, wonderful, joyous.
At Swim-Two-Birds lacks the cohesion of theme and voice that characterizes O'Brien's other masterpiece, The Third Policeman, but this is hardly a deficiency. At Swim-Two-Birds is one of those rare books that actually deserves to be called dazzling, a critic's crutch-word that mars too many blurbs. Its dazzle derives from its rhetorical force, its humor, and its openness to experiment with not just the novelistic form, but the form of storytelling itself. And it's here that O'Brien's novel is most real—he captures the strangeness of storytelling, its mutability, its crazy rhythms. Ultimately, this is a novel unconcerned with providing pat answers and clear solutions. I loved this book, loved reading it—and then immediately rereading it. I'll let O'Brien get the last word:
Answers do not matter so much as questions, said the Good Fairy. A good question is very hard to answer. The better the question the harder the answer. There is no answer at all to a very good question.
Holy Motors Is A Strange Cinematic Prayer
"Beauty! Beauty! Beauty!" a photographer coos as he snaps shots of supermodel Kay M in a crowded graveyard. A manic beastman interrupts the shoot, knocking down onlookers, chomping on flowers, and quickly diverting the photographer's attention, lens, and mantra: Turning his camera on the little goatman, enthralled, he repeats, "Weird! Weird! Weird!"
For many viewers, this might be all that French director Leos Carax's latest film Holy Motors boils down to: "Beauty! Beauty! Beauty! Weird! Weird! Weird!" (And, of course, all the unsettling space along that strange axis). However, it would be a mistake to think that Holy Motors is simply an excursion into the bizarre. The film's initial scenes pile on absurdity after absurdity with no context (or recognizable film grammar) for audiences to latch to, but that absurdity eventually coheres into a profound essay on what it means to be actors in a life where both audience and director remain unseen to us. Ultimately, Holy Motors asks viewers to consider what it means to have agency: Are we subjects? Do we drive ourselves? Or are we driven?
Like many films that create their own idiom (or even genre), Holy Motors isn't for everyone, but I think it rewards (or confounds) viewers who are willing to submit to its alienating grammar long enough to pick up enough of the lingo to engage in what is really a very rewarding, funny, and moving story. And, like many films that create their own idiom, Holy Motors is probably best experienced cold, with no forewarning. In that spirit, I'll present the trailer (all that I knew of the film going in, aside from atmospheric buzz); my comments after the trailer will contain spoilers and are aimed more at those who've already seen the film (although everyone is welcome of course).
Most of the reviews of Holy Motors have focused on the way the film comments on filmmaking itself. In his review at AV Club, Mike D'Angelo establishes the context for HM-as-state-of-film pretty clearly:
Jean-Luc Godard famously suggested that the best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie. With Holy Motors, the year's most electrifying whatsit, Godard's fellow French filmmaker Leos Carax has taken that idea one delightfully absurd step further. On its surface, this absurdist ode to analog's death at digital's hands seems to echo a number of recent essays eager to perform the last rites on cinema, or at least on its status as our dominant dream factory. Yet Holy Motors is such a bravura, go-for-broke exploration of what movies can do—is so thrillingly, defiantly alive—that it contradicts its own mournful thesis at every turn.
I'm not going to argue that Holy Motors isn't about films—it's very clearly about directors, audiences, cameras, watching, and, most of all, acting. Indeed, this is the most visible, surface-level plot of Holy Motors: a man, Monsieur Oscar (a superb Denis Lavant) , is driven over the course of one day in a white limousine to a series of "appointments" where he acts out bewildering scenes in the service of god-knows-what. The opening scene of Holy Motors shows a film audience; significantly they are all asleep. Then a man awakes—it's the director Leos Carax himself—in a hotel room that slowly shifts into a faux-forest in a dream-logic shot worthy of Lynch. The man inserts a key into the wall/forest and enters the cinema. So, yes, Holy Motors organizes itself around cinema-as-trope.
But I think Holy Motors is far more profound than a metatextual, postmodern gimmick: It's not really a film about filmmaking (although, of course it is)—it's really a film about spirituality in a world where people seem to be increasingly disconnected and alienated from each other. Where people are asleep, like the audience at the beginning of the film. Where people do not see.
This theme becomes evident in the first of Oscar's appointments. When we first meet him, he appears to be an extremely wealthy businessman with a loving family. (Viewers who cling to the idea that the first Oscar we meet is the stable, true version or identity of Oscar will find themselves too confused to trace meaning from Holy Motors; this was the case with the unfortunate gentleman behind me during the screening, who, at film's close, asked his friends Hey, why do you think he didn't go back to his house?). Oscar is picked up by Céline, who drives him in an enormous white limousine from appointment to appointment. In his first appointment, Oscar takes on the role of a crippled crone, who says that for years all she's seen are feet and cobblestones; her eyes downcast, she does not see the faces in the crowd she begs from, just as they, in turn, do not see her. Significantly, she wonders if she will die—but her thought is not a piece of dialogue, but perhaps Oscar's own sentiment. We will come to see that although he can feel weary, sick, and tired, Oscar is apparently immortal
Oscar's potent life force is on prominent display in the next two episodes. In one appointment, he plays an acrobat in a CGI studio, showing off extreme physical prowess, which soon slides into a writhing, monstrous sexuality in a scene that is simultaneously icky and sexy—a comment on modern filmmaking techniques yes, but also an illustration of creative power, fecund and wild.
These themes carry over into the next appointment, where he turns into a sewer-creeping Pan-figure, an underground spirit that recalls forest creatures from antiquity, but mythic and nightmarish. On a hilarious rampage in a Paris graveyard, he comes upon super model Kay M (Eva Mendes), who figures here as an idealized woman-as-object. The little goblin/Oscar steals her of course. The segment plays out as a series of bizarre mythic allusions, moving through (and inverting and disrupting) Beauty and the Beast (Beauty! Beauty! Beauty! Weird! Weird! Weird!) to Cinderella to Bluebeard to Sleeping Beauty to a riff on the Pietà. The imp redesigns Kay M's outfit, fashioning it into a burqa, then disrobes to show off his proud erection. The episode condenses so much of the mythic-historic-allegorical relationships between men and women—and in particular, how narratives present (and amplify) those relationships.
Holy Motors is very much about male-female relationships, a facet of the film probably ripe for a much more detailed critique than I'm going to offer here, other than to suggest that these relationships fall squarely into the film's rubric of subject-object relations. Suffice to say that almost all of Oscar's appointments are with women or girls (and to boot, his most "real" relationship is with his driver Céline).
After his goatman episode, Oscar plays a cruel father picking up his daughter after a party. Juxtaposed against the absurd violence and bizarre sexuality of the preceding episode, the father-daughter scene's simple realism unfolds with throbbing menace that's difficult to bear. (The guy next to me walked out at this part, never to return). Up until this moment, Carax has used absurdity almost as a bludgeon—but the emotional connection between the daughter and her father/Oscar ups the ante considerably: the daughter seems to genuinely, emotionally believe that Oscar is her real father. It's here that the structuring grammar of the film becomes more available to the audience: Is the girl just another actor? And if so, what does that say about the family we thought was Oscar's?
We're also given more clues to Holy Motor's mystery when an unidentified man appear's in Oscar's limo. Their conversation implies that Oscar is an actor who performs these scenes for an audience he will never see; not only that, he cannot see the cameras, and he will never see the director. He is an actor completely severed from agency, let alone stable identity. He is driven from assignment to assignment, unable to step back and see the bigger picture of his work, let alone make lasting connections with other people.
Then we get a spirited entr'acte, an accordion jam led by Oscar that builds and swells into a march that reinvigorates the film into its second half. The halfway mark finds Oscar meeting his only male appointment, a gangster named Theo he must assassinate. We see immediately that Theo is yet another character played by Denis Lavant; the murder that ensues is a bizarre piece of almost vaudevillian humor, culminating in both Theo and Oscar, dressed alike, dying from matching stab wounds. One of the two men returns though, and seems, after a few minutes of replenishing rest, no worse for wear despite a life-ending wound to the jugular. Oscar's identity is thus even more complicated—is it really Theo that returns? Or does that even matter at this point?
The film then reemphasizes Oscar's apparent immortality; he spies a banker—the man he was when we first meet him in the film—and makes an unscheduled appointment, jumping out of the limousine to kill the man (again, played by Lavant). After this unscheduled murder he's gunned down by the banker's bodyguards who riddle him with bullets. ("Aim for the crotch!" one exclaims in a hilarious line that picks up on the film's motif of male sexual power). The back-to-back murders clearly figure as a type of self-erasure, but they also highlight the strange fact that Oscar cannot die.
Oscar then starts to break down a bit. He's tired. He starts drinking heavily. He also abandons his American Spirits for what appear to be marijuana cigarettes. In this state of decay he soon takes on the role of a man on his deathbed attended by his loving niece—his "angel" (the pet name recalls the father-daughter appointment—the daughter was also Oscar's "angel"). The scene plays out like a melodrama, but we also see that Oscar is genuinely touched by his interaction with the niece—he even asks for her real name. Again, we get the sense that these actors are playing parts in someone else's story, little fragmentary bits that they cannot comprehend, scenes that fail to add up to something more, something lasting. The scene so deeply affects Oscar because it represents his fantasy perhaps—to quit, to die, but also to have mattered, to have been loved, to have led a meaningful existence. Carax punctures the sentiment with the radically absurd moment of Oscar getting up right after his character has died.
Oscar's need to connect becomes most evident in what may or may not be an unscheduled appointment. He runs into a another Holy Motors operative—literally; their two white limousines collide under the bright lights of the abandoned La Samaritaine department store. This other operative, or agent (or angel?—perhaps) is Eva Grace, or Jean in her upcoming role. The two share a spare half hour before their next appointments, walking through the decay of La Samaritaine up to the roof top. The store is littered with mannequins, suggesting the disposable nature of identity in Holy Motors. Eva Grace and Oscar emerge on the rooftop into a decayed garden, where she sings a song in the old Hollywood musical style. With her cropped blonde wig, Eva Grace strongly recalls Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music here. The song touches on what I take to be a past scene between Oscar and Eva Grace—a shared moment, a shared scenario, but one spiked with the loss of a child. What's really lost though is a shared future.
Now's as good a time as any to bring up the dense religious allusions here—Oscar and Eva are Adam and Eve in fallen Eden, in the decayed world. The failed Samaritaine alludes to the parable of the good Samaritan Jesus tells in the Gospel of Luke, recalling Oscar's first appointment as a homeless crone who receives no charity—not even a sympathetic look—from the people around her. And while I'm riffing on allusions and names: Oscar is parceled from the director's name (Leos Carax), but it also (intentionally or not) recalls the bald statue awarded to films. The name Theo clearly echoes God, tapping into the film's religious/metaphysical theme, as does Eva Grace. Céline, Oscar's driver (and best and maybe only friend) means of heaven or heavenly—again a religious allusion—but it also echoes the bitter misanthropist Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
The scene with Eva Grace plays out to its tragic end and Oscar rushes headlong into the stability of his limousine, and then breaks down in despair. "We have to laugh before the night is over, because who knows if we'll laugh in the next life," he tells a sympathetic Céline. The message seems plain, even pedestrian, but it's also set against the backdrop of intense existential despair. Laughter—momentary, brief, and ultimately ephemeral—is the only medicine that might help Oscar in a world where he has no agency. Carax allows Oscar and Céline to share a simple laugh before he's driven to his last appointment.
Oscar walks up to a house to meet his last appointment of the day; it's clear that he will sleep there that night with his "wife and child" and leave again in the morning in his limousine—a loop that repeats with difference. The scene unfolds to a hyperbolic torch song that spells out the film's questions of immortality and what it might mean to live a life again (and again and again). The song introduces extreme sentimentality to the narrative, but just as it threatens to overwhelm the tone of Holy Motors, Carax delivers the best punchline I've seen in a film in years. The final image of Oscar with his "new family" is absurd, moving, and hilarious—it also underscores the film's questions of human agency.
We then see Céline—along with dozens of other drivers—returning their limos to Holy Motors headquarters. Céline dons a mask and makes a phone call to announce that she's "coming home" — she apparently has an identity outside of Holy Motors, one not afforded to Oscar. The final scene at first appears as another absurd, even silly moment—the limousines talk to each other. Their dialogue though quickly becomes philosophical, as they dwell on their own impending obsolescence, their own ties to humanity will be severed. In near-unison, they agree, and close the film with an "Amen" — Holy Motors is a prayer.
A prayer for what and to whom then? To a director—a god—who won't reveal the big picture? To the things that drive us, that move us to places and situations beyond control? To the sleeping audience, the would-be mirror that greets us (or, more to the point, can't greet us) at the film's opening? I've over-summarized Holy Motors here in an attempt perhaps to see it again—to reimagine what I saw last night. (Had the theater offered a second showing I would have sat through it). I don't have an answer to the questions I've just posed, and I'm not sure if seeing it a second time (or a third or a fourth . . . ) will yield more. But Carax has given us the kind of film that warrants repeated viewings. Holy Motors is destined to be a cult classic not just because of its wild absurdity and visual flair, but also because it presents a dramatic and compelling—and perhaps maddening—puzzle for its viewers. Very highly recommended.