Showing posts with label Critique. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Critique. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Erika M. Nelson, “One of Innumerable Antigones”
Erika M. Nelson
One of Innumerable Antigones:
Burial Rites / Rights and Belonging in Dragica Rajčić’s “OnLoveSeas”
The issue of burial rights takes center stage in Dragica Rajčić’s play “OnLoveSeas” (Aufliebeseen, 2009), as the main character, the dead foreign guest worker Mena, a modern Antigone of sorts, waits patiently in the “waiting room of eternity” for official notice of whether she can be buried in her adopted homeland of Switzerland. Her quest to find a final resting place, portrayed as a restless, extended experience of bardo, unnerves the audience, much as the classical Antigone’s “living death” of being sentenced to die enclosed in a tomb as a punishment for defying the king’s authority and insisting that her brother’s death be performed according the proper burial rites, has haunted the stage since classical antiquity.
Unlike the figure of Greek tragedy, however, renowned for her fierce defiance and noble courage in life, Rajčić’s Mena appears far less heroic: she is a simple woman in her forties, described as a consciously conscientious rule-follower who recycles everything and meticulously records the destruction of her homeland in notebooks. Having fled the prevailing war in her country in search of asylum, she comes to Switzerland
To clarify the situation, it is not that she cannot be buried in Switzerland Switzerland
In Mena’s case, bureaucratic oversight and communication challenges betweenSwitzerland
In Mena’s case, bureaucratic oversight and communication challenges between
Express letters are faxed so that the woman could be buried as quickly as possible in Janjevo, her hometown. That is how it stands in the official papers but the civil servant wrote Vanevo and the faxed letter gets lost halfway on account of the war.
The manager of the refugee center that housed Mena composes a letter meant to resolve the situation at hand. The letter, however, does little but give insight into the difficulties of dealing with Swiss German bureaucracy. In long-winded circumlocution, the manager indicates that Mena “cannot linger not eternally on the grounds and at the costs of the community.” He recognizes that this case exemplifies “a particular instance of an extreme case of an exceptional situation” might fall under the “conditions of our contractual obligations for the accommodation of such temporarily needy war refugees.” Appealing to “the humanitarian spirit, with which we should attempt to accommodate the woman according to her customs,” he suggests seeking permission from the municipal council to possibly bury her in the local cemetery, understanding however that “such investigations require a certain length of time according to the customs of the country” and the council might be able “to address it at the latest in the next specially scheduled session, in order to give final approval on the decision of whether and how long the remains of this woman stay with us.”
The process however is thwarted once again—this time due to a computer error. As the manager is about to send the document via email, he hits the “enter” key and the computer screen goes blank. The letter is permanently lost. Though he intends to address this issue with his bosses, he hesitates addressing this issue once he realizes that it might cost him his job. Increasingly, the community and its representatives appear to have little interest and only bureaucratic headaches in burying its immigrant population. The bureaucratic responses result in an endless cycle of never-ending paper-pushing and pondering.
Mena understands that she cannot stay forever lifeless on the floor of the exile home at the expense of the municipality. Mena’s restless search for a final geographic resting place to call ‘home’ inadvertently becomes enmeshed in the web of larger questions of belonging and acknowledged presence, specifically in regards to those marginalized.
At the heart of the classical Antigone story is the question of how a proper city-state should be ruled according to differing interpretations, allegiances, and applications of justice, dike, and laws, nomos. Sophocles’s Antigone addresses as few other texts can the depths of human suffering to destructive forces of nationalistic fervor, terror, blind greed, and misuse of power, while ennobling the virtues of altruistic humanity and responsibility for another. Written in the fifth century at a time of imperialist attacks on Samos Island
In Sophocles’s version, the new Theban king Creon fails miserably, learning wisdom only after great suffering and the loss of his son Haemon. In a dramatic appeal before his death, Haemon, who is also Antigone’s betrothed, attempts in vain to dissuade his father, King Creon, from condemning his bride to the “cruelest” death for her honorable actions. Arguing on the grounds of social conscience, Haemon warns: “But I hear whispers spoken in the dark/ On every side I hear voices of pity/ For this poor girl.” Haemon’s attempt to change his father’s heart and thwart off perceived and unwanted gossip from citizens who disapprove of the cold-hearted, punitary actions against Antigone end in vain.
Similarly, Rajčić’s version appeals to a sense of common decency and humanity, as the actions lead to what Rajčić describes as “a chain of no-longer-get-out” situations. As George Steiner suggests, the “linear logic [of the play] is carried along by the idea, not the person.”[1] The “idea” revolves around the question of justice, dike, and it application in law, nomos. The classical conflict between King Creon and Antigone, and the Swiss bureaucracy and Mena, results from differing interpretations of allegiance to the law. In the Classical version, the state, represented by King Creon argues that traitors, even if royal by blood, should not be given the same sacred burial rites as heroes. Rajčić’s play calls into question whether a similarly arbitrary use of logic prevails in regards to Switzerland
Rajčić, like the classical Antigone, appeals to nomos, understood here as a concept deeply rooted in religious concepts of laws, customs, and principles governing human nature and humane action. Religious argument, however, is noticeably absent in Rajčić’s work. She does not introduce Mena as a Muslim or a Christian. For her, this is not the central issue in the piece. Nevertheless, at the time of the play’s premiere, precisely this issue was hotly debated in many Swiss municipalities, where Muslim citizens requested a change in burial accommodations in order to bury their dead according to Muslim traditions.[2]
For Rajčić, the personal is political, and Rajčić’s re-imagined Antigone emerges as one of innumerable Antigones for modern times, immigrant style, who reminds us, as George Steiner suggests that:
Whenever, wherever, in the Western legacy, we have found ourselves engaged in the confrontation of justice and of law, of the aura of the dead and of the claims of the living, whenever, wherever, the hungry dreams of the young have collided with “realism” of the ageing, we have found ourselves turning to words, images, sinews of argument, synecdoches, tropes, metaphors, out of the grammar of Antigone and of Creon. Indwelling in our semantics, in the fundamental grammar of our perceptions and enunciations, the Antigone-and-Creon syntax and the myth in which they are manifest are “specific universals” transformative across the ages.[3] (138)
These ‘specific universals’ honor our sense of common humanity and are not to be obliterated or nullified by authorial indifference or short-sightedness. Rajčić’s play echoes Antigone’s insistent stance that her brother’s life, like Mena’s and any one else’s, though void of any particular historical significance, is nevertheless not insignificant. Even in the silence of her death, through the very association with the Antigone material, Mena gives “vital shape to our sense of self and of the world” (Steiner Preface).[4]
Rajčić’s play “OnLoveSeas” premiered in St. Gallen’s Stadttheater in 2009, under Ralf Grunwald’s direction and with Ephgenia Hodkevitch’s set design. The piece, commissioned by the theater’s director Peter Schwieger, served as a representative piece of Switzerland Switzerland
Aesthetically Rajčić’s play works against this political backdrop, chronicling human experiences of emigration and exile, expertly navigating the terrain in the wake of loss and displacement. Hodkevitch’s set design invokes the image of an empty eye, with a ladder –like a splinter—stuck in its center. It is an internalized landscape of reverie, memory, and wandering consciousness that mediates time and space, willfully crossing over the boundaries of life and death. The wasteland landscape of the stage set also includes four “bombed out” nutshells that serve to encapsulate Mena’s life in three characteristic phases of childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, with the forth shell remaining untrodden and thus unknown.
Imagined as encasings “recently broken by an invisible hand,” the nutshells provide shelter in which three actresses of various ages act out the conglomerations of memories of Mena’s life. A lonely disembodied male voice is heard from off stage, speaking on behalf of the civil servant as a voice of authority that announces each next official step in Mena’s burial process. Mena’s family exists only in recollected memories from the past, as lingering presences distantly involved in and displaced by the war raging on her in homeland, Mena remains an isolated, seemingly unassuming figure with little prospect of ever finding peace. As experiences and words ramble incessantly throughout the piece as a never-ending cascade of unstoppable insights, Mena is tossed on the seas of love and indifference. Ultimately, Rajčić’s piece appears as a lugubrious parting without end, as the actresses assemble, disassemble, and return to the same or similar constellations over and over again. The piece’s complexity disorients commonly-held perceptions of time and location, while reorienting the public to immigrant experiences of exile’s alienation, disorientation, and miscommunication.
“I am extinguished,” Mena states, before questioning “how can you say you are extinguished to the already thousands of times you’ve been extinguished and lived?” Mena’s spirit seems destined to wander in between transitional spaces of memory and recollection, uncertainty and loss. The poignant breaks and ruptures in Rajčić’s portrayal of such experiences expose the successes and failures of Switzerland
Notes:
1. G.H. Gellie, Sophocles: AReading Melbourne : Melbourne University
2. The established Swiss law of secularization and keeping religious agendas private, considered progressive in late 19'“ century as it aimed at establishing religious freedom between the Catholics and Protestants, has become the source of much debate at the end of 20" and the beginning of the 21st century, as Switzerland’s “new” religious diversity, in particular the adherents of the Muslim faith, has requested separate burial grounds in order to follow traditional burial customs. Currently an estimated 90%-92% of the Muslim population inSwitzerland Switzerland Today,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford Switzerland ,” In Re-thinking Non-Discrimination and Minority Rights, ed. M. Scheinin and R. Accommodating Religious Diversity in Switzerland Turku : Institute for Human Rights, Abo Akademi University , and Deutsches Institut für Menschenrechte , Berlin
3. George Steiner, Antigones.Oxford : Oxford University
4. As Walter Benjamin suggests in his theory of translation as survival, the afterlife of this text might have vanished from its original context, yet nonetheless the work deeply influences the message at hand. (Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”, in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 71-82.)
5. Tobias Hoffmann, Theater der Zeit. Vol. 2000, 09; 58-59.
1. G.H. Gellie, Sophocles: A
2. The established Swiss law of secularization and keeping religious agendas private, considered progressive in late 19'“ century as it aimed at establishing religious freedom between the Catholics and Protestants, has become the source of much debate at the end of 20" and the beginning of the 21st century, as Switzerland’s “new” religious diversity, in particular the adherents of the Muslim faith, has requested separate burial grounds in order to follow traditional burial customs. Currently an estimated 90%-92% of the Muslim population in
3. George Steiner, Antigones.
4. As Walter Benjamin suggests in his theory of translation as survival, the afterlife of this text might have vanished from its original context, yet nonetheless the work deeply influences the message at hand. (Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”, in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 71-82.)
5. Tobias Hoffmann, Theater der Zeit. Vol. 2000, 09; 58-59.
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Dr. Erika M. Nelson is an Assistant Professor at Union College University of Texas at Austin
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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance
Benjamin Norris, “Meaning as Meaning is Meaning”
Benjamin Norris
Meaning as Meaning is Meaning:
Doing as Showing in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons
“There is no reason to struggle to interpret or unify either the whole of Tender Buttons or any part of it, not only because there is no consistent pattern of meaning, but because we violate the spirit of the work in trying to find one.”
--Marianne DeKoven, A Different Language
In reading Tender Buttons, one finds Gertrude Stein wresting words from their traditional associations, challenging basic structural and syntactic conventions in order to refresh an English language that she thought was suffering from a deadening habituation. In doing so, Stein is forced to operate within the constraints of the language and literary heritage that she seeks to undermine—as Derrida explains, when one challenges a discourse, she unavoidably accepts the premises of the discourse that she is refuting (Derrida 881). Stein uses this dependence upon linguistic and literary conventions, however, as a way of forcing readers to confront their own habituated patterns of reading. Following Derrida’s theory that “the quality and the fecundity of a discourse are perhaps measured by the critical rigor with which [its] relationship…to inherited concepts is thought,” the success of Tender Buttons is precisely because of its relationship to the conventions with which it ruptures (Derrida 889). Defying the fundamental notions of genre, Stein uses common words within a form that resists classification; by imitating the structure of a dictionary while refusing to provide stable, comprehensible ‘definitions,’ Tender Buttons functions neither as truth utterance nor fictive utterance, instead inhabiting an alternative position that is perhaps both at once.
To create a text that actively experiments with linguistic and artistic theories, Stein demonstrates her ideas rather than discussing them, using each of the prose poems in Tender Buttons as an enactment of a theoretical principle. In a concise passage that describes the text’s function as a whole, Stein closes the “MUTTON” section by explicitly admitting the didactic quality of such an experiment, writing, “Lecture, lecture and repeat instruction” (Stein 26). The content of her ‘lecture’—which is necessarily as much in freeplay as the words that constitute it—may be usefully considered in terms of four experimental gestures that allow Tender Buttons to enact meaning rather than provide it:
(I) Calling for a new form of interpretation that demands a new critical vocabulary
(II) Defining the object in itself rather than using its sign—drawing attention to the artificiality of a linguistic ‘cover’
(III) Creating new word combinations and contexts that allow for the perpetual freeplay of language and the constant shifting of meaning
(IV) Using an unconventional structure that challenges grammatical principles and addresses sound as a fundamental organizing principle of language.
NEW INTERPRETATIONS.
Although Tender Buttons demands a new way of interpreting the text, Stein reveals both the reasoning behind her method and how to approach it, explaining in “ROOMS,” “show the choice and make no more mistakes than yesterday. This means clearness, it means a regular notion of exercise” (Stein 51). Stein alerts the reader that she is not providing meaning like the writers of “yesterday,” but is rather showing the choice that the writer and reader have in determining the infinite uses and meanings of words. In this context, interpretation becomes an active process by which, according to Barthes’ theory, “the Text…asks of the reader a practical collaboration” (Barthes 904). The “clearness” that Stein mentions is in the reevaluated means and purpose of interpretation—rather than searching for the singular, elusive conclusion of what the text means, the reader and writer treat the text as an end in itself, the meaning existing within the “exercise” of interpretation.
Prefiguring many of the arguments in Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” Stein’s work embodies Sontag’s claim that “the function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that is it what it is” (Sontag 14). In creating sentences that resist exact explication, Stein forces the reader to locate meaning outside of explicative efforts. She draws attention to the actual existence of an object rather than its figurative meaning; in “ROASTBEEF,” she writes, “a thing is there, it whistles, it is not narrower, why is there no obligation to stay away…” (Stein 23). She deictically locates the existence of a “thing,” but does not provide the necessary context for the reader to be able to guess what the “thing” is or what it could mean; it is enough that it is “there.” Rather than attempting to answer the riddle, ‘what is something that whistles but is not narrower,’ the reader is encouraged to “stay away” from explication and allow the arbitrary word, “there,” to develop an infinite number of signifying possibilities based on the little context that she does provide—doing so allows the text to exist in a constant production of meaning. The ‘supplementarity’ generated by a form that allows for constant fluctuation allows Tender Buttons to resist what Sontag calls, “the modern style of interpretation,” which “excavates…[and] digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one” (Sontag 7). Because of the ‘writerly’ nature of Stein’s work, there is no “sub-text” to be found and laid to rest; the reader constantly contributes to the meaning by imagining new signifier-signified relationships.
Anticipating that most of her contemporaries would not be prepared to undergo the radical shift in reading that Tender Buttons demands, Stein claims in “ROASTBEEF,” “The whole thing is not understood and this is not strange considering there is no education” (Stein 22). During the time of its publication in 1914, experimental texts like Tender Buttons were in extremely small circulation, often only read by other artists, writers, or patrons. Thus, most readers had received “no education” in how to deal with aggressively Modernist texts, and for the uninitiated reader, “the whole thing is not understood” because of the alienating language and form. At certain points in the text, Stein explicitly tells the reader how to approach her interactive instruction; in the beginning of “Rooms”—which DeKoven argues was actually the first section written—Stein declares, “Act so that there is no use in a centre” (Stein 43). Without the critical discourse of Derrida and other post-modern theorists, however, many readers undoubtedly did not know how to act as though there was no center, much less what that center was. As Jayne Walker argues in The Making of a Modernist, Stein not only decenters language, she “unseat[s] both the subject and Western logic as privileged centers and guarantors of truth” (Walker
DEFINING OBJECTS UNDER THEIR COVER.
As a writer invested in issues of representation—like her Cubist and Dadaist contemporaries—Stein questions the ways in which verbal representation deceptively covers the actual qualities of the thing being described. In her lecture, “Poetry and Grammar,” Stein addresses the inability of a noun to represent and contain the elements of the thing that it identifies; she writes, “things once they are named the name does not go on doing anything to them and so why write in nouns…as I say the noun is the name of a thing, and therefore slowly if you feel what is inside the thing you do not call it by the name which it is known” (Stein 14). Attempting to make apparent the divergence between identification and representation, Stein applies her theory in Tender Buttons by describing the “objects” and “food” not by their names, but by how she perceives what is “inside the thing.” Arguing that such a representation actually focuses the text’s attention on the individual’s perception, Michael Kaufmann argues, “she is not attempting to see the inside of objects but rather to see the inside of the human mind, of language” (Kaufmann 452). Because such a radical shift in representation necessitates a new awareness of human perception, Stein does indeed confront the “inside of the human mind.” She does so, however, as a way of understanding the interconnectedness between the active human mind and the “inside of objects”—each of which is dependent upon the other’s existence. In order to allow the reader to recognize the signified concept rather than the signifier used to identify it, Stein’s process of definition involves two methods: revealing the artificiality of a linguistic ‘cover,’ and showing how words’ meanings are constantly unstable because of their contingency upon contexts of difference and similarity.
In “OBJECTS,” Stein’s definitions repeatedly draw attention to the distinction between the actual existence of the object and the word that represents it. Directly addressing the ‘cover’ of language, she writes in “GLAZED GLITTER,” “Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover” (Stein 3). She begins the entry by questioning the possibility of defining an object, asking, ‘what is nickel, aside from the noun used to identify it?’ To begin looking “inside” of the object, she must acknowledge that it “is originally rid of a cover”—that is, that the metal exists apart from the designated linguistic sign that identifies it. The remainder of the passage, however, becomes more an interrogation of language than a definition of nickel. Stein treats the conventional use of linguistic signs as an attempt to contain meaning—a sanitizing effort to ensure singular interpretation. While she states that the organizing act of “cleansing” a word’s multiplicity may appear “charming very charming,” she challenges the appearance of a word’s inherent, natural meaning, claiming, “It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving” (Stein 3). Though “giving” could refer to the reader and writer assigning meaning to objects, it is impossible to determine exactly what the phrase is suggesting; instead, we may interpret how it is suggesting. It is unclear whether or not the pronoun “it” has an antecedent, the verbs “borrowing” and “giving” do not have an explicit subject, and there is “certainly” something that has “showed no obligation.” By withholding from the reader the essential parts of a sentence that help define each of its constituent parts, Stein forces the reader to recognize the way in which the linguistic ‘cover’ of an object is contingent upon on its context and is perpetually in flux.
In “A SUBSTANCE IN A CUSHION,” Stein plays off of the multiple meanings of “cover,” addressing both the literal cloth “cover” that the cushion has, as well as its figurative linguistic “cover.” Probably addressing a reader reluctant to accept the freeplay of her language, Stein says, “Supposing you do not like to change, supposing it is very clean that there is no change in appearance, supposing that there is regularity and a costume is that any the worse than an oyster and an exchange” (Stein 3-4). The “regularity” and “costume” of an organized system are again described in sanitary terms—it is “very clean” because the meaning is contained—but she points to its artificiality, calling it an “appearance” and a “costume.” In comparing the conventional ‘cover’ of words with her own use of them, she enacts the theory that she is discussing, offering readers an “oyster and an exchange” once they “Come to season”—“season” demonstrating the possible fluctuations in meaning as it at once signifies the conventional divisions of the year, while also carrying the associations of “see” based on the idiomatic phrase ‘come to see.’ Using the same image of language as a ‘cover,’ in “A METHOD OF A CLOAK” Stein says, “all this which is a system...makes an attractive black silver” (Stein 6). The “system” here is an attempt to paint over the actual object, making everything appear to be the same “attractive” color. Throughout the text, however, Stein demonstrates how words are dependent upon contexts of similarity and difference, making it impossible for language to conform to the singularity suggested by such an artificial “system.”
To show how words are dependent upon their relation to other words—and how our perception of objects is dependent upon the context in which we perceive them—Stein both states and demonstrates how words’ meanings are constantly fluid. In the more didactic moments that Stein states her theories, she explicitly addresses the relativity of perception. For example, in “A RED HAT,” Stein explains, “If red is in everything it is not necessary,” meaning that a color cannot exist if there is nothing in opposition to define it (Stein 8). Because an object’s difference essentially affirms its own distinction, she writes in “CRANBERRIES,” “see the way the kinds are best seen from the rest, from that and untidy” (Stein 29). Seeing things “from the rest” makes the context as important in defining the object as the object itself; by creating a text that presents various contexts that are in a state of flux, Stein shows how this dependence upon difference allows words to signify an infinite number of possibilities. As important as the dependence on difference, though, is the ability of words to change based on contexts of likeness or similarity—by placing words next to one another they may draw unlikely comparisons that elicit new signification. As Stein says in “A CHAIR,” “a spectacle is the resemblance between the circular side place and nothing else,” indicating that unlike the color red—which she defines in opposition of other colors—a spectacle may be defined in its similarity to the “circular side place” and an ordinary event (“nothing else”). But rather than merely stating the contingency of a word’s meaning, she demonstrates it within her prose—as she says in “ROOMS,” “it shows more likeness than anything else…it means a unison between use and exercise” (Stein 46). Enacting her artistic principles provides her with a way of prying beneath the words’ ‘covers,’ forcing the reader to recognize that the words are constantly at play, and the meaning is constantly shifting.
WORDS PLAYING, MEANING SHIFTING.
To create the “unison between use and exercise”—a way of doing rather than showing—Stein places words in unfamiliar contexts, allowing their meaning to fluctuate based on their surroundings. Beginning with the title of the text itself, Stein chooses words with multiple meanings whose context does not reveal which meaning she intends for the word to signify. By providing her readers with the interpretive freedom of deciding the words’ meaning(s), Stein avoids the appeal to authorial intention by which the author becomes, as Foucault explains, “the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning” (Foucault 780). Instead, Stein becomes the provider of proliferation, offering from her word combinations a multitude of possibilities that the reader must help to provide. While Markus Poetzsch suggests that her deictic language and extra-textual references implicate Stein within the text, she resists authoritative presence in Tender Buttons (Poetzsch 948). Discussing the author’s authority over interpretation, Barthes explains, “The author is reputed the father and the owner of his work: literary science therefore teaches respect for the manuscript and the author’s declared intentions” (Barthes 903). Although Stein asserts various ways in which she would instruct a reader to read her text, the constant shift of meaning requires that she relinquish her authority over interpretation. Neil Schmitz, another critic engaged in this debate, argues, “the power struggle of interpretation ceases when everything to be said is said at once” (Schmitz 1215). For Tender Buttons, however, the “power struggle of interpretation” is deferred because she relocates the meaning of her text—“everything” that is said is not necessarily the most important thing; the way in which it is said is instead more important. While the mere construction of the sentences inevitably points toward an authorial origin, the signifying abilities of the imaginative word combinations suggest a self-referential space, granting Tender Buttons the appearance of autonomy.
Showing the ability for words’ conventional meaning to change entirely when removed from their habituated context, Stein writes in “A SUBSTANCE IN A CUSHION,” “dirt is clean when there is a volume” (Stein 3). Because of the associations of dirtiness that “dirt” carries, the phrase initially appears either paradoxical or nonsensical. But by understanding that Stein is removing words from their conventional associations, the reader may consider “dirt” as the naturally occurring substance that it is, as “clean” as the grass or soil around it. Recognizing the “dirt” itself rather than the connotative meanings that arise from its signifier, the reader is able to see that the linguistic ‘cover’ actually lends itself to a freeplay in which the word may constantly develop new associations. Experimenting with the ability of connotations and associations to alter a word’s meaning based on an unfamiliar context, Stein writes in “BREAKFAST,” “A white cup means a wedding. A wet cup means a vacation. A strong cup means an especial regulation. A single cup means a capital arrangement between the drawer and the place that is open” (Stein 27). While any attempt at explication seems futile, one notices that the associations within the phrase become increasingly complex (and obscured) as the sentences progress. While the connection between “white” and “wedding” is not difficult to recognize, the connection between “wet” and “vacation” becomes harder to parse (“wet” possibly as a body of water traveled over), and the connection between “strong” and “especial regulation” seems impossible to determine. The explication of the associations, however, is less important than the imaginative connection formed between seemingly arbitrary concepts. As Walker
“concrete nouns and adjectives call things to mind, and syntax can bind them together in startling new combinations… [the] sentences are systematically patterned to foreground the most fundamental logical operations of syntax. But the freeplay of substitution and combination that these grammatical structures contain defies their inherent logical order” (
Considering that Stein presents readers with familiar words in familiar sentence structures, there seems to be nothing logistically challenging about Tender Buttons. But it is because of Stein’s refusal to abide by habituated rules of context that make conventional methods of interpretation so difficult. In a simple list like, “A seal and matches and a swan and ivy and a suit,” Stein presents common nouns that denote multiple meanings—by not providing her readers the necessary context, they cannot decide which meaning to choose, and the sentence develops a multitude of signified possibilities (Stein 4). Likewise, she crafts many sentences that do not allow for the reader to assign parts of speech to the individual words. In one such example—“it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again”—it is unclear whether “green” is a noun and “point” is a verb, or if “green” is an adjective and “point” is a noun (Stein 4). Stein generates this confusion with the indefinite article “a” and the adverb “not”— parts of speech generally skimmed over and considered insignificant. The word “green” is conventionally preceded by an article only when it is an adjective, but the sentence resists such a reading because the adverb “not” suggests that “point” is a verb. By conventional grammatical rules, the sentence is impossible to untangle, and thus exists in a constant tension between the multiple readings. While it forces readers to question the rules of grammar and structure, it also forces them to recognize the function of every word, even those that are generally seen as inconsequential to the meaning of the sentence. In drawing attention to the act of reading itself, Tender Buttons asks readers to confront the ways in which the structure of language systematizes patterns of reading and prompts us to skim through language rather than understanding and interrogating it.
STRUCTURE, SOUND AS STRUCTURE.
Stein’s efforts to create a continuous presence draw attention the paradoxical idea of structure that Barthes calls, “a system without end or center” (Barthes 902). By manipulating conventional rules of structure, Stein shows how structure—on the level of both the sentence and the text as a whole—actively assists Tender Buttons in the constant production of meaning. From punctuation to syntax, Stein undermines the essential elements of structure in order to show the ways in which they help shape meaning. Demonstrating how comma usage—or lack thereof—influences verb attributions and can change how a sentence is read, Stein writes, “eating a grand old man said roof and never never re soluble burst…” (Stein 36). Without the rhythm of pauses that commas provide, the syntax of her sentence initially (and comically) suggests that someone or something is eating a “grand old man.” Only after the reader recognizes the “grand old man” as the subject rather than object may she may insert the necessary pauses in the sentence. In a more extreme example of how commas effect the way we perceive sentences and organize thoughts, Stein asks, “Is it so, is it so, is it so, is it so is it so is it so” (Stein 37). While the beginning three clauses are visually and perceptively easy to read because they are demarcated with commas, the final three “is it so” clauses are slower to read because they become less rhythmic and visually difficult to distinguish from one another. The sentence does not so much say anything as it does demonstrate something; for this reason, many early reviewers and critics saw such sentences as complete nonsense.[1] But rather than nonsense, it was one of Stein’s tasks to reconsider notions of ‘meaning’ within literature, prefiguring Woolf’s idea of placing the emphasis in a different place.
Generally overlooked as an organizing principle of language and structure, sound plays an important role in generating meaning throughout Tender Buttons. In experimenting with the meaning of sound, Stein focuses on three aspects of the aural function of language: the ability of sound and repetition to free a word from its semantic qualities, the sound of words versus their appearance, and words’ ability to evoke concepts or qualities based on their sound. Demonstrating the ability of sound to overshadow semantic meaning, Stein uses traditional literary devices like assonance, consonance, and alliteration, but in new contexts. In “A PIECE OF COFFEE,” she writes, “The sight of a reason, the same sight slighter, the sight of a simpler negative answer, the same sore sounder…” (Stein 5). By choosing words whose vowels and consonants imitate each other, the phrase develops a rhythmic quality that allows the reader to focus her attention purely on the sounds of the language instead of the signified concepts.
As the sounds of the words become extremely important, Stein plays with the distinction between words’ visual appearance and their aural quality, manipulating words to appear one way and sound another. She often does this by presenting an article and a noun on the page that when read aloud combine to form a different noun. For example, in “TAILS” and “LUNCH,” she uses the phrases “A rest,” “silk under wear,” and “a corn,” each of which signify different concepts on the page than when read aloud as “arrest,” “silk underwear,” and “acorn” (Stein 31). Furthermore, by pointing out the distinction between appearance and sound, she shows how our perception of words’ sounds may change based on the context in which we encounter them. In “SAUCE,” Stein writes what initially appears to be a nonsensical sentence: “Sauce sam in” (Stein 37). After approaching the next section, “SALMON,” however, the reader may reinterpret the sound of “sam in” to form one word, “salmon.” Such experiments force the reader to recognize the ability for language to suggest various meanings at once, depending on how the words are approached. She shows that despite the apparent order of written language, sound is just as much of an organizing principle of language’s meaning. Furthermore, she shows how a speech rhythm alone may evoke meaning regardless of the words contained within the rhythm. In “ROASTBEEF” she writes, “Lovely snipe and tender turn, excellent vapor and slender butter, all the splinter and the trunk, all the poisonous darkening drunk,” evoking William Blake’s “The Tyger” merely by imitating its recognizable poetic meter (Stein 22). As she claims in “ROOMS,” “Harmony is so essential,” not only as a supplement to a text’s meaning, but as a foundation for the meaning itself (Stein 44). Later in “ROOMS,” she writes, “No breath is shadowed, no breath is painstaking and yet certainly what could be the use of paper, paper shows no disorder” (Stein 47). In her phrase, “breath” acts metonymically for speech, suggesting that the sounds of words are necessary because they show the inherent disorder of language, whereas “paper”—a metonym for written words—attempts to conceal the “disorder” of language.
CONCLUDING AND CONCLUDING.
In her “Descriptions of Literature,” Stein reveals the exploratory nature of her texts, saying, “A book naturally explains what has been the result of investigation” (Stein 472). Reducing Tender Buttons to the status of an experiment, however, trivializes the accomplishments of a text that never ends, that is never finished meaning and signifying. While critics like Christopher Knight consider her work a “failed quest,” such thinking assumes (and imposes on Stein’s work) a linearity that Stein herself does not propose (Knight). Whereas a “quest” presupposes an eventual, sought-for destination, Stein’s texts are not meant to find and rest at a final answer. Describing the function of such a form, she states in “A PLATE,” “A splendid address a really splendid address is not shown by giving a flower freely” (Stein 7). Rather than creating a readerly text that provides meaning (“giving a flower freely”) and disengages the reader, Stein constructs a “splendid address” that is constantly addressing through its continuous shifting of meaning. The value of such an endeavor is apparent, for as Stein states in “A SUBSTANCE IN A CUSHION,” “there is some venturing in refusing to believe nonsense” (Stein 4). While she may be suggesting that readers should find meaning within her own work and refuse to believe that it is nonsense, the phrase also suggests that readers should refuse to believe in the conventional idea that literature has the ability to restrictively contain meaning (for Stein, such a notion is ‘nonsense’). Whichever meaning the reader finds more convincing, though, is not important: the multiplicity, the simultaneous existence of contradictory meaning, the venturing are all important.
Note:
1. See, for example, Michael Gold’s review, “Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot” from The New Masses, in which he states that her texts “resemble the monotonous gibberings of paranoiacs in the private wards of asylums.”
Works Cited:
Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David Richter. Boston
DeKoven, Marianne. A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing. Madison : University of Wisconsin
Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David Richter. Boston
Kaufman, Michael Edward. “Gertrude Stein’s Re-Vision of Language and Print in ‘Tender Buttons.’” Journal of Modern Literature, 15.4 (1989): 447-460.
Knight, Christopher J. “Gertrude Stein, “Tender Buttons,” and the Premises of Classicalism.” Modern Language Studies 21.3 (1991): 35-47.
Poetzsch, Markus. “Presence, Deixis, and the Making of Meaning in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.” University of Toronto
Schmitz, Neil. “Gertrude Stein as Post-Modernist: The Rhetoric of ‘Tender Buttons.’” Journal of Modern Literature, 3.5 (1974): 1203-1218.
Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York
Stein, Gertrude. “Descriptions of Literature.” A Gertrude Stein Reader. Ed. Ulla Dydo. Evanston
Stein, Gertrude. "Poetry and Grammer." Toward the Open Field Poets on the Art of Poetry. Ed. Melissa Kwasny. Middletown
Amherst : University of Massachusetts
Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. Mineola: Dover
Walker, Jayne L. The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein. _____
Benjamin Norris is a recent graduate of the College of William New York City
_____
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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance
Chuck Richardson, “Generation Breakdown”
Chuck Richardson
GENERATION BREAKDOWN:
A SURVEY OF SHORT-FORM GUERILLA FICTION
* AVANT-POP: FICTION FOR A DAYDREAM NATION, edited by Larry McCaffery, Black Ice Books, 1993.
* PP/FF: AN ANTHOLOGY, edited by Peter Conners, Starcherone Books, 2006.
* 30 UNDER 30: AN ANTHOLOGY OF INNOVATIVE FICTION BY YOUNGER WRITERS, edited by Blake Butler and Lily Hoang, Starcherone Books, 2011.
The desire to generate pleasure makes falsification a fictional necessity, both in its reading and writing.
This falsification can feel like spraying graffiti on the perceived modes of narrative bound truth operating in the heart of most fictional activity. And, sometimes, it ends up repressing the strange, new and/or tense, favoring instead what it might prefer to consume, or deem beautiful, in its own oddly new-fangled, uneasy situation…falsely writing away in the margins.
So “generation breakdown” seams a double entendre meaning broken/breaking production and chronological/evolutionary brokenness. But reading and writing appear regardless, representing personal evolutions in human thought that are neither linear nor chronological in their private, lived-in experience. Chronology is simply not the way such reading-writing works. It’s not the way we actually make sense of things, which resembles tagging, categorization and ownership more than rational thinking. The universe is information and our nervous system automatically soaks it up. The truth is nonsense, but reason seams to seem true.
So most readers want some sense of how things seem to be unfolding over time. They want to observe a particle-wavelength order amid the chaos, and I might be one of them. I like making believe the whole of life is a narrative slipstream and I’m just sluicing away...another psychic mutation voicing his evolving web of things…vibrating.
Accordingly, I’ve decided to adhere to a loose chronology, imagining the realities experienced in these un-commercial, unconsumed and mostly ignored delicacies of pioneering guerilla fiction. I wanted to catch a glimpse of their overall story, their imaginary development, and try to see the fiction of their nature rather than the nature of their fiction. I wanted to feel something odd, fresh and edgy from somewhere beyond myself.
I chose these three texts because each in its own way promises a variety of exciting and bizarre forms that seem to replace ethics with aesthetics. I also believe they show the overall condition of seriously playful fiction in an increasingly conservative and therefore oppressive and repressive United States over the last 20 years, or generation [I think, however, we might be witnessing the return of the repressed in the OWS movement, which seems to be riding huge uncanny waves]. A hundred years from now, all these authors will be considered contemporaries. It might then be noted that the women were better writers than the men, though there were fewer of them represented, and a rather small number of anthologized minority writers, considering the alienation apparently shared by most of those included. This, of course, might be a valid, even necessary topic for some future review.
But nonetheless, let’s start at the “beginning.” In his introduction to Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation, Larry McCaffery writes that Kathy Acker refers to deconstruction as “decuntsrtuction.” Acker was, in my opinion, the most important American fiction writer of the 1980s-90s. I spell construction “cuntstruction” to conjure up her rebel spirit, hopefully sucking it into this uncertain, frustrated criticism.
The principles governing fictional cuntstructions are always philosophical on some level. By “philosophical” I mean the adequate writer takes into consideration each element of her fiction, selecting it and de-selecting it according to what makes sense in the particular situation, which is the present cuntstruction, the one enabling the current cuntition of things as one perceives them occurring out there on the page. And the framework in which all this occurs, the system making it all possible, seems the individual reader-writer’s imagined “philosophy,” or system of thinking. In this way an imagined philosophy becomes an ideology becoming a grammar, which is to say a “fiction” revealing how it feels describing what one thinks is happening—conveying some idiomatic apocalypse, perhaps.
That’s not to say all fiction is philosophical, only that all adequate fiction has a philosophical dimension in its emergence as a poetic object. And that object, if it’s fictional as opposed to nonfictional re: pretensions about factuality, has an apocalyptic or revelatory function in the reading-writing mind.
It also seems to me that passable art might be unavoidably political at such a revolutionary moment in human evolution, especially if one feels, as Raoul Vaneigem did in 1968, that “We are living under a permanent curfew. Not just the cops—the geometry.”[i]
And from where I’m sitting, r/evolution—philosophical and political—is, perhaps, where it’s at these days for playfully serious art in any genre or form.
AVANT-POP
AND THE DISRUPTION OF CULTURAL AESTHETICS
One might say the whole of Larry McCaffery’s fiction for a daydream nation is something of a schizoid-tantric response to late-stage capitalism that’s striving for something, sometimes anything, via orgasm, jouissance or “psychic orgasm” in particular.[ii]
AVANT-POP has been an underground, countercultural icon at the edge of the “literary” world since its publication by Black Ice Books in 1993.
Earlier examples of the genre might include Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, Robert Coover’s The Burning Game and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.
What makes a work fall into the avant-pop genre is its appropriation and recontextualization of pop culture icons to disturb the aesthetic sensibilities of the at-large culture.
Following in the footsteps of the Civil Rights and peace movements of the 1960s, avant-pop writers sought to alter the rules of ordinary conduct and public deportment through diverse methods, using all the required literary means. Consider…
A REBELLION WITHIN THE SENTENCE
This authoritarian, calculated and quantified shape of things is the focus of Acker’s “Politics.”[iii] Why does she use what punctuation she does? What does her apostrophe mean? The period, why does she use it so sparsely?
Acker’s text requires that the reader control the flow and rhythm of language for herself:
…every male’s a pimp in this cruddy society caters to his lousy moneyed disease you get fed it from birth and can’t get away except by severe disruption…[iv]
…no one else thinks like this anymore I say angelic I’m sick of fucking not knowing who I am.[v]
Those are the last lines. The narrator doesn’t know who she is; she knows her price for fucking, but not its value. The narrator’s value, or meaning, relates to her identity and interests, which are inherently political and wrapped up in the absented grammars and dictions of the language she speaks. Ultimately, the narrator seems to seek her soul beyond the merely human world in things she can’t omit, objects unlike commas that can’t find representation on the page.
What are the political aspects and scales of language and power, diction and grammar…and how can we fuck with them to become ourselves? What does it mean to subvert the norm on the “sentence level” the way Acker does?
Ishmael Reed does it in Mumbo Jumbo [vi]—“This is a psychic epidemic…This belongs under some ancient Demonic Theory of Disease…“ … “‘Jes Grew is the boll weevil eating away at the fabric of our forms our technique our aesthetic integrity,’ says a Southern congressman. ‘1 must ponder effect of Jew Grew upon 2,000 years of civilization,’ Calvinist editorial writers wonder aloud.’”[vii]
No typos there. The absenting of commas in the list is the “showing” of the “boll weevil eating away at the fabric of our forms”…and the Calvinist writers are “wondering aloud,” not writing, so they’re making Freudian slips, showing the uncanny, the return of the repressed, as a form of Jes Grew occupying its own space.
Acker similarly wants to subvert the very forms of language by seeking out the “romantic” worthwhile in a throwaway pornographic world.
She makes political significance of the rare period, equating its placement with money and death. She minimizes the period as a means of writing decently in an indecent world.[viii]
OF SADISTIC STYLE
This revolution in beauty and war on ugliness involves challenging the way we view things while looking for new ways of sketching reality. That and the un-masochistic desire to not take this shit anymore.
The most interesting art rebels against routine and the authorities dependent upon it. So “The Elements of Style by The Marquis de Sade/Painstakingly Translated By Derek Pell” fascinates with its voluptuous advice.
Pell’s a master of puns and innuendo, the gist being that style and grammar are “sadistic” [and fun].
This excerpt, from a short and very rare book published by Permeable Press, intended as a satire of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, is beautifully and amusingly illustrated as if it were made in Sade’s time [by someone who ate moldy bread, perhaps[ix].
The advice is solid and funny:
…a title should never exceed the length of the author’s penis [I wonder if Pell followed this rule? If so, I’m impressed by his ruler].
“Vir-tu-ous.” Might mean ‘objectionable,’ ‘disconcerting,’ ‘distasteful.’ Select instead a word whose meaning is clear: frig-id.
Dead meat. Sometimes means ‘blind date.’
Avoid the use of qualifiers. Rather, very, little, pretty—these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words.
Do not explain too much…[x]
RE: SCHIZOID LESBIAN MYTHOLOGY
Another point of fiction is to make our experience of life more intensely involved with the life of the world soul. And in the hands of Eurudice, that can be as humorous as it is terrifying.
In “Once Upon A Real Woman,” she writes of bereaved Ela, whose “cunt” has “ran away,” and who “needs the energy of a crowd.”[xi] Ela goes out on the town and gets picked up by a large lesbian with stubby fingers who takes her home. Each has their first orgasm in some time.
Eurudice, through gorgeously written prose, relays the strange relationship between these [apparently] two lesbians:
…with breasts bulky and hard like grapefruit… At once Ela drops her silver head face down into the stranger’s stupendous cleavage and wonders if she could actually manage to decuntate such a huge woman.
The firelight flares in her big eyes, and they in turn flare in the mirror. She is stunned by the unworldly flowerlike youth that looks back at her, animated with shrill pleasure like a choking girl on a rollercoaster. She suddenly resembles her cunt. A new thought blazes through her mind: ‘Am I my own lost cunt?’ The fire blazes up. Ela wants to jump in it…Meanwhile, in the same city, her cunt is flooding the world market, oblivious to Ela’s complex predicament.[xii]
The gender-twisting, huge-clitted, big-ass lesbian who picks Ela up goes by some 35 names, all ending with the letter “a:” Proserpina, Desdemona, Aspasia, Hecuba, Beiruta, Hilda, Wanda, Cassandra, Great Barbarella, Imelda, Hedda, Mata, Leona, Thelma, Zsa Zsa, Charlotta, Sandra, Renata, Vanna, Aglaia, Lola, Oprah, Aretha, Ofra, Isadora, Acapella, Yalta, Belinda, Matilda, Malta, Ida, Paola, Luella, Lucinda, and Helena.
It seems to me Eurudice has penned an onanistic tale of a possibly tantric sex experience that Ela has with her self—her schizoid lesbian szygy working its way into being her singular identity [a singularity of self] called “Ela.”[xiii]
“Once Upon A Real Woman” reads like something of a sexual mythology responding to contemporary changing gender models, showing the dream-state experience of sex in a hyper-evolutionary phase…what a Tibetan Buddhist might call “natural liberation” via orgasm.
AND THE DEAF, DUMB & BLIND KID’S A KILLER
One writer worthy of greater representation than he gets here is William T. Vollmann, whose “San Diego , California , U.S.A.
Nature, not a human individual’s libido, seems the core of identity. The fact one is an Earthling trumps race, class and/or gender as the source and root of one’s being. Looked at from the standpoint of genetics, this seems irrefutable.
Various word-beings or characters representing human beings fail to hear their own voices and are, therefore, disobedient to their deepest selves.
By not hearing Nature—be-ing dis-obeir [xiv]—by placing one’s self both at the core and rim of the wheel, staining all the spokes in between with one’s me-ness—with civilization—with wildness forming against you beyond every boundary, informing every frontier within and without via every imagination...projections manifesting actualities mingling voices forming Nature—hearing and unhearing, speaking and unspeaking—where the narrator not only struggles with his aggressive tendencies against civilization, but also his suburban existence, which consistently provokes his violence against himself…Nature….and it.
But also, inexplicably, his desire to murder others of other species expands his homicidal urges into the whole of Nature—the entire universe—leaving us to ask what the killer’s limit is? Or, better, what’s the new city
Are we entropy?
In the words of Dirty Harry: “A good man’s got to know his limitations.”[xv]
JAFFE
WHERE WHATEVER YOU PISS ON IS YOURS
One of the defining voices of Avant-Pop and PP/FF is self-described “literary terrorist” Harold Jaffe, who expresses the disruptive method this way: “…find a seam, plant a mine, and slip away…”[xvi]
In Avant-Pop’s “Sex Guerillas,” Jaffe describes a squad or cell of “sex guerillas” that meet daily for themed group sex.
For instance, on “Tough Tiddy Thursday” the narrator meets “s/he” in a hotel lobby and has sex in a public elevator. Other days include “Furry Fisted Friday” and “Mambo Hipped Monday” where Uno, Dos, Tres, Quatro, Cinco, Seis—the participants are numbered, not named—meet at Wells Fargo bank at noon, stand together in a long queue, and feel and grind each other up until they’re tossed out by the bank guards.
Jaffe uses a first-person present-tense voice—a narrator named “Dos” who likes tattoos—to re-present a daisy chain of events, an accumulation of acts and characters that consistently forces the establishment’s authoritarian hand by planned artfuck attacks every day:
One gang sprays on a stanchion, competing gang sprays on a billboard. Media compare them to animals scenting territory. Well, what do you think art is?…TV claims we’re black and brown males, gangbangers, child abusers, drug abusers, but that’s a lie. We’re females, males, in-betweens, all colors…The mind police are beside themselves…TV can’t report it ‘live’ because everyone and their mom is nekkid.[xvii]
It seems that, perhaps, according to Jaffe, art=sex=rebellion=literary/sexual terrorism. In his infamous mantra, quoted above, the “seam” seems the perceived spatial mechanism between the spectacle of popular culture and the life we actually experience as private individual human beings.
I think it’s what weaves and stitches together that membrane between the apparent singularity that seems “me” and the schizophrenia that seems everything else—two or more totally different dimensions, scales and/or aspects.[xviii]
It seems to me the suture binding black American skin to white American skin, sewing together the paranoia of the powerful to the paranoia of the weak, where each sadly finds out they were right about the other, and how their correctness only exacerbates the gaping wound left by Eros’ struggle against Thanatos, the will to live in the face of ever-impending death, the wound wanting stitches/sutures/sutras to form their tantric weave…an Arabesque carpet to fly away on.
Jaffe’s still at it 13 years later in PP/FF’s “Clown,” where an untrustworthy narrator, “captivated by extremity” [sex-crime serial killers in particular], recounts his relationship with John Wayne Gacy.
The narrator’s so dishonest and amoral one almost feels sorry for Gacy, almost as if it were punishment enough that serial killers attract these kinds of people. It’s the narrator’s depravity we see, not Gacy’s. The narrator basically gets off being a cock tease for the fat pathetic prisoner.
Jaffe’s “seam” in this case ties the guilt of the convicted to the guilt of those who are fascinated by them. The mine planted in the space between, in the gaping wound, seems the dishonest relationship the narrator starts with the condemned man. He slips away days before Gacy’s execution, leaving him all hot and bothered, and refuses to return his calls.
Tick-tick-tick.
The seam, detonated by the narrator’s hostility, feels every bit as twisted as Gacy’s line of reasoning. What’s uplifting about it seems Jaffe’s ability to get inside the perverse dishonesty that captivates many human minds and reveal it, as honestly as possible, through a narrator whose voice leaves lingering doubts about one’s apprehension of the situation, which end up feeling like pieces of unexploded psychic ordinance.
Tick-tick-tick.
I also highly recommend Jaffe’s Straight Razor, a collection of stories from Black Ice Books with “visuals” by Norman Conquest; and Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guide to Post-Millennial Culture, from Starcherone, which exposes the estranged and violated elements of society and their methods of going beyond their tense conditions toward something conversant with actual autonomy…where the self might value its self in new ways, perhaps…
Or not.
PP/FF
CONJURING VISIONS
OF THE PURE AWAKENED LAND
OF THE PURE AWAKENED LAND
As things increasingly take shape in forms created by machines designed by others operating on alien motives [things like grammar and script],[xix] the necessity for overtly philosophical yet flirtatious, irrational texts rises [rather than going down as one might imagine].
For such texts to be possible, reason must regulate the vast surging ocean of data and intelligence that’s at everyone’s fingertips.
I think of “Falling Moon, Rising Stars” by Christine Boyka Kluge, which is one of my favorite pieces here for the way the author’s subconscious seems lucidly rendered to make terrifying sense.[xx]
Consider these from Kluge’s “Falling…:”
…Three other human polliwogs follow a beam of light to a lozenge-shaped hole in the sky. My babies!…Alice lies on her back in her sticky tarp in her strange backyard, looking up at where her miracle quints have vanished, zipped up in the twinkling night like five lost stars … Like a Portuguese man-of-war, the placenta glides over the fertile soil, releasing eggs to merge with the sprouting seeds. Then it sinks into the teeming ground, absorbed like summer rain … He [her alleged 18-year-old boyfriend, Alban] places [his brain] on the awakening soil. Pulsating vessels descend from [it] like pewter hoses, spouting blinding light. He lets his life run out in rivulets of brilliance, down into his sacred garden. There it flows to feed the planted constellation of his hungry, starry-eyed children, the true reason for his visit to Earth, for his one hundred year residency in an eighteen year old body, adolescent flesh guided by hormones. He is exhausted, extinguished by interplanetary passion and obsessive love.[xxi]
Kluge seems to show how a kind of Panspermia might work in a biocentric narrative. Pitting the impregnation of an 80-year-old woman within the impregnation of the planet dramatizes the scales and degrees of the biosphere’s living operations as they re-make each other on cosmic scales via frictive-transgressive activities that permeate one into the other, higher into lower, narrower into wider by varying degrees of organisms forever self-replicating into elsewhere, etc. & et al, getting ickier and stickier as they go.
ADORATION
Daryl Scroggins’ masterful “Prairie Shapes (A Flash Novel),” seems to paint the picture of the possibility of an infinitely compassionate universe.
Heartbreakingly beautiful, its theme seems manifold and systemic: two artists whose hearts are drawn to beauty live in a cycle of eternal recurrence, where genetic memory seeps into their art like wistful de ja vus, leading them toward each other then pulling them apart.
Here, topicality isn’t so much taboo, as Conners suggests in his introduction, as ignored, which means choices were made in its formation that were inherently sur-econmical [xxii] and philosophical:
Scratches on a wooden calendar showed the woman’s birthday was near, and the man had nothing to give her that was not already hers. She laughed when he asked her what she liked that she didn’t have. She told him there was nothing she didn’t have. And when he pressed her she laughed and said she wanted knowledge of what the hawk sees. She wanted colors that produced a reliable sound. And she wanted a bowl of shaved ice, dark with the juice of blackberries.[xxiii]
Spoiler Alert: He dies trying to get her birthday present, and the love starts all over again…I think.
That’s my conclusion, anyway. Call me a romantic.
OF CULTURAL DEMOLITION
For the most part, however, William Gass’s question of what the world would be like if people could respect each other the way I’m respecting this sentence’s composition, remains unanswered.
Cultural demolition artists and poet-guerillas like Kent Johnson serve up the apocalypse of our fundamental ignorance in “Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, or ‘Get the Hood Back On.’”
Johnson performs corrective, satirical surgery on the pretentions of patriotic soldiers fighting for America
“Lyric Poetry…” gradually exposes the cruelty of so-called decent American torturers, the fat, smug everyday faces of horror. As the uncomfortable truth unfolds we discover no one seems immune from the disease of our national sins, that even poets, especially the kind supported by the Poetry Foundation[xxiv], perhaps, may find themselves situated as Johnson’s target.
Poets may not drive [xxv], but they do volunteer to go to war and commit atrocities on some level like all the other volunteers.
The final paragraph begins: “Hi there, Madid, I’m an American poet …and I know I live quite nicely off the fruits of a dying imperium.”
Poetry in service to the nation, which is to say politics rather than beauty, is complicit in the crime: “I’m going to box your ears with two big books of poems… poetry is hard, and people go up in flames for lack of it every day…I want you to take this self-righteous poem, soak it in this bedpan of crude oil, and shove it down your pleading, screaming throat.”[xxvi]
“Lyric Poetry’s” essence seems a zeitgeist with a decidedly dark undercurrent.
30 UNDER 30
YET INNOCENT?
If it’s not too far a stretch to move from Sade and Abu Ghraib to the problem of being young and powerless [like a 23-year-old Lynndie England, perhaps?], consider Danielle Adaire’s excerpt, from Selma, in which the amorphous and confusing educated middle class journey from grad school to group home, from student-teacher to consumer-patient, is documented in such a way that England’s journey from a selective-mute aspiring storm-chaser and West Virginia trailer park ingénue to Babylonian torturess can pop to mind, and then, of course, Justine.[xxvii]
Adaire’s narrator bares the shortcomings of language via diary entries: “The more I read the more I feel indicted by my convictions” that we are “patients” not “consumers,” nonetheless acutely impotent except for the expression, via fiction, of unsaid powerlessness.
Adaire’s narrator expresses, like Justine [aka Therese] a certain ennui regarding ambition, perhaps in light of a lurking future hiding just around the corner that suggests everything will work out regardless of her status, so everything’s good for today. Lynndie, on the other hand, was also bored, but ambitious. The future she saw was more uncertain. Rather than writing about it, she went to war.
There seems a kind of strength, however, in each kind of naiveté. Is it masochism that Adaire’s dealing with? Is sadism Lynndie’s thing? Imagine if we could, as Gass suggests, “adore one another the way the poet adores his words or the painter his colors”…deleting and scratching each other out at will…seeking a final solution to the forms we seek, perhaps not knowing what we’re doing…being Lynndie England or Danielle Adair’s narrator or any “younger” person unprepared for the situation they perceive themselves in.
The difference, of course, is the direction of their respective journeys. England
I, too, wonder with Gass “what the astonishing result” would be if each movement, in whatever direction, was felt as a movement toward something more worthy than a flight from something less worthy.[xxviii] There may be a reason that, as I believe, most of us are born artists but culture, which seeks unity, kills the talent off.
It’s complicated, but in the end isn’t it best to simply have a loving heart and move forward from there?
I think all the writers in these three anthologies have loving hearts. The biggest difference is how they seem to respond to that love. The “younger” ones seem less adept at taking strength from what they love, as if they feel the times require more brains than heart.
I don’t know, but I feel that opinion’s somewhat wrong. We need more heart…and brains.
AGAINST HIS OWN SOUL
Matt Bell’s “Jumpman vs. the Ape” confronts nature in the form of his own rage, hatred and delusion, manifesting itself in the way he perhaps plays what seems like a video game, the imagined stakes making it real and meaningful: An ape like King Kong has snatched his girlfriend and climbed to the top of a skyscraper that’s collapsing under the great ape’s tantrums.
Bell’s “hero’s journey”[xxix] is that each time he rescues his girlfriend she rejects him, he falls to the bottom, the game starts over, and it gets harder for him to climb to the top and save his girlfriend from his own hatred, anger and delusion manifesting itself as Kong, which he furiously destroys only to be rejected, once again, by his love interest…that which leads him on, and he “can’t help but feel like this is at least a little bit her fault” for giving the big Ape the wrong idea by being friendlier to him than she should have been. That makes him angry, and rightfully so.
It instantly reminded me of Sisyphus and the highly entertaining 2010 movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.[xxx]
Is he or any of these “younger” writers moving forward from the avant-pop rebelliousness of the 1970s to 90s and the genre-bending works of the last decade, or simply stunned and absorbed by the accelerating warp-speed of spatial change the whole connected world’s apparently experiencing? As artists are they taking a step back from or a step into their perceived situations? And if it’s the latter, what innovations are servicing their introversion? Could we ever see any of them hitting the streets? Or do they seem preoccupied by other things?
I don’t know. I’ll leave that for more judgmental readers to discern for themselves, but I will say the younger writers feel more conservative overall when reading them than their somewhat older colleagues. They seem less optimistic about the way things may eventually work themselves out. Who could blame them?
Or, maybe, they’re dealing with the fact it seems almost impossible to shock the sophisticated reader, who’s read, seen and heard just about everything by now. The old style literary terrorism doesn’t work anymore. Readers today seem immune to it thanks to having been inoculated some time ago.
What kind of R&D’s happening in the literary weapons department? The new form of guerilla warfare seems directed more at the system of self than the external culture. Could the idea of self-immolation be an effect of an alienating, introverted technology that had yet to emerge when “older” colleagues formed the earlier texts? Was the earlier, more extraverted and arguably relevant and effective fiction “better” because its “producers” were not shaped by their i-Phones? Does the difference in approach reflect the difference in the technology being used?
Is one way better than the other? Can this new strain of introversion prove as virulent as its extraverted ancestors? I may be going out on a limb, but I think the under 30-year-olds are accustomed to being “alone together” and together alone, allowing their gadgets to define the formation of ways they inter-relate with the world, prosthetically and vicariously. And if they’re not really used to it, they’re at least more open and prepared for it than some of their “older,” possibly more outwardly focused colleagues, or at least those whose writings seem to spotlight externalities and surfaces and such from whatever interior reality can be established. In the case of the “younger” writers, we seem to be starting with perceived surfaces and working inward.
And then again, as introverted as their writing may be, it’s more interconnected than ever, perhaps a thousand times more viral, potentially at least, than anything available to Acker and Jaffe even a decade or two ago.
The means by which we can write are changing so quickly it’s difficult to ensure we can read things properly. So, I just don’t know. I only have my opinions. It seems uncertainty’s more my thing than introverted-extraverted approaches to fiction, but I’m not too sure about that, either. Both feel useful, even necessary.
I think it all depends on the situation, which depends on how I perceive it all.
CUNTCLUSION: DISENTERING/DECENTERING GENERATION BREAKDOWN
As I’ve suggested, it’s the general desire to serve and consume meat and potatoes, to feed the broadest range of people in order to make the most amount of money and increase the production-consumption-work rate, which these anthologies and the writers therein are trying to break down, or at least humanize.
It’s also something of a generational survey of how “innovative” writers are reflecting and effecting the rapidly changing realities of their times…or not.
So “generation breakdown” seems a double entendre that, in light of the current global political-economic situation, means broken production as well as a generational survey of living American weirdoes who write fiction to measure the ineffable drift of things as a way of revealing the fictionality of chronology, life’s apparent unfolding, the way one might discover the river’s water by getting wet and its direction by hopping a raft. Eventually, one arrives at the sea. The river doesn’t end, it explodes, and the old means of travel are no longer adequate.
The main thrust of all three compilations seems to me a potpourri of discontented identity politics and disobedience—dissing in general, come to think of it—which then seems to gel into a horrifying can of delightfully writhing, open-ended worms, spewing playfully all over the inadequacies of the cultures that brought them there.
But all said it seems the most relevant material in this survey might be the oldest. I think the Avant-Pop crew had the advantage of better understanding what it was they were up against. The editor, McCaffery, asks in an interview elsewhere: “…If you consider yourself a radical, dangerous, subversive artist, how do you do that in an age in which radicalism itself is so easily appropriated and recycled as ‘alternative’?”[xxxi]
I get the feeling that these “younger” writers, at least in the works anthologized here, have given up on this idea all together. Popular culture was until recently the main source of national myths, notions of identity and narrative archetypes.
But now it seems we’re entering a post-pop culture phase where traditional consumers and media may be collapsing, where large feedback loops are breaking apart and re-joining in to more but smaller feedback loops with greater potential, matching revolution with evolution so chaos can spar with entropy. The so-called “younger” writers’ works make sense to me in this context. If external reality does not function, move inward.
Coover, Barthelme, Burroughs, Acker, Jaffe and Reed, among others, recognized the importance of mass media’s ascendance to the creation of meaningful fiction, particularly American fiction. They weren’t afraid to go outside, look around and do something.
Who will be the writers that recognize the descent of mass media and probe its psychological effects? Who will be the ones that relay visions of a humane, post-external introverted world where we realize that information’s too big to be monopolized?
One can’t help but wonder what’s really next for paper fiction as forms of information keep evolving.
I think we need to find out.
Etc.
TOPICS/TAGS: 30 Under 30, Kathy Acker, Danielle Adaire, Arabesque, Authoritarianism, Avant-Pop, Donald Barthelme, Matt Bell, Beyond The Techno-Cave: A Guerilla Writer’s Guide to Post-Millennial Culture, Black Ice Books, William S. Burroughs, Blake Butler, Joseph Campbell, Chaos Theory, Peter Conners, Norman Conquest, Robert Coover, Guy Debord, Deleuze and Guattari, Dirty Harry, Entropy, Eros and Thanatos, Eurudice, Evolution, John Wayne Gacy, William H. Gass, Grammar, Hero’s Journey, Lilly Hoang, Identity Politics, In The Penal Colony, Harold Jaffe, Kent Johnson, James Joyce, Justine, Franz Kafka, King Kong, Christina Boyka Kluge, Alexander Laurence, Magnum Force, Larry McCaffery, Monomyth, Mumbo Jumbo, Mythology, Panspermia, Derek Pell, Permeable Press, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture, PP/FF, Ishmael Reed, Revolution, Marquis de Sade, Schizoanalysis, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Daryl Scroggins, Situationism, Starcherone Books, Straight Razor, Strunk & White, Tibetan Buddhism, Raoul Vaneigam, William T. Vollmann
Notes:
xiii. In Chaosmosis, Guattari explains that schizoanalysis complicates and enriches the reading-writing process and/or method, moving it to a consistency of bifurcation and differentiation, seaming its way into an “ontological heterogeneity.”
i. Vaneigem was a Situationist theoretician whose slogans were popularized in the 1968 Paris
ii. Raymond Federman said the best translation for what Roland Barthes means by “jouissance” in The Pleasure of the Text is “psychic orgasm.” He said this while introducing Barthes’ work at SUNY, Buffalo
iii. I once saw Acker speak, and what I remember most about it was her fascination with Situationism and Spectacle and how William S. Burroughs was onto the same thing in his work many years prior to 1968.
iv. Avant-Pop, p. 161.
v. Ibid, p. 165.
vi. Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed, Scribner, 1972.
vii. Ibid, p. 5, 17.
viii. One of Acker’s primary concerns in her talk was the never ending search for new ways of “living decently in an indecent world.” Her writing was a reflection of her evolution and life. There seems very little space between signifier/signified in Acker’s fiction, in my opinion.
ix. See Ergot, a mold on rye-bread related to lisurgic acid, a key ingredient in LSD, that when consumed can cause hallucinations. The images here resemble 18th-Century pornographic cartoons, the kind that might be circulated in pamphlets.
x. Avant-Pop, pp. 49-81.
xi. Avant-Pop, p. 83.
xii. Ibid, p. 83, pp. 91-2.
xiii. In Chaosmosis, Guattari explains that schizoanalysis complicates and enriches the reading-writing process and/or method, moving it to a consistency of bifurcation and differentiation, seaming its way into an “ontological heterogeneity.”
xiv. Etymology for “obey:” late 13c., from O.Fr. obeir, from L. oboedire "obey, pay attention to, give ear," lit. "listen to," from ob "to" (see ob-) + audire "listen, hear" (see audience). Same sense development is in cognate O.E. hiersumnian. See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=obey&allowed_in_frame=0.
xv. What Dirty Harry repeats several times in the classic, Magnum Force. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCOhtv8CDeU&feature=related.
xvi. See Jaffe’s interview with Eckhard Gerdes at http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~hjaffe/gerdesinterview.html.
xvii. Avant-Pop, p. 114, 119.
xviii. I think this somehow relates to Acker’s oft-stated desire to “explode the duality.” To be honest, I’m ambivalent about such a motive. It seems simultaneously disintegrationary and unifying. Each side becomes isolated, composing only itself. A new unity forms, but before long it loves itself so much it must replicate itself, knows another is needed for that to occur and a new integration forms. It’s all cycles and phases. Acker and her contemporaries seem to recognize the phase they’re in as requiring disintegration, and write accordingly, striving for decent language amidst all the babble.
xix. I think of Kafka’s apparatus in “The Penal Colony.”
xx. “Terrifying” in the way Burroughs’ Dr. Benway is terrifying—hilarious.
xxi. PP/FF, pp. 128-9.
xxii. The economy of economics.
xxiii. PP/FF, p. 66.
xxiv. Johnson’s son and another poet have been persecuted/prosecuted by the Lilly-endowed Poetry Foundation. See http://www.chicagoreader.com/gyrobase/poetry-foundation-clamps-down-on-activists/Content?oid=4844017&mode=print.
xxv. From The Information by Martin Amis: "Poets don't drive. Never trust a poet who can drive. Never trust a poet at the wheel. If he can drive, distrust the poems ...," p. 3. Also see: http://reading-everyday.com/238/Amis,%20Martin%20-%20The%20Information%20(v1.0)_split_000.htm#_Toc34560419.
xxvi. PP/FF, p. 27.
xxvii. The full title is Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue. It’s the story of a young woman in pre-revolutionary France
xxviii. William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life, p. 287.
xxix. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell describes the hero’s journey in terms of Joyce’s “monomyth.” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero%27s_Journey.
xxx. See http://www.scottpilgrimthemovie.com/.
xxxi. See http://www.altx.com/int2/larry.mccaffery.html for a McCaffery interview with Alexander Laurence at AltX.
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Chuck Richardson is the author of two novels, Smoke and So It Seams, and an e-book Dreamlands: 3 Fictions, all from BlazeVox[books].
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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance
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