Ben Spivey, Black God, Blue Square Press, 2012

Black is the color of night. It is the color we see when we close our eyes; when we sleep. And in sleep we dream, and in dreaming visions can arise. Hallucinatory dreamscapes are an invitation to the stratosphere of the mind, where awareness and perception exist as a whirlpool melting into each other, transcending the known. Ben Spivey’s Black God takes place in a realm where the rules are not fixed – it plays with the machinery through which the world continually creates itself. Every moment we are coming into being and passing away; this is our crisis of consciousness.

This is the dilemma of Cooper, the narrator of Black God, who lives by an infernal ocean and whose wife is slowly dying of a brain tumor. Cooper meditates on the ocean, the primal waters of myth, ruminating on transience, futility and loss, lest he perish – lest he dissolve into the universal emptiness without first finding lucidity and peace in the darkness:

I dreamed about a black god (hovering over the ocean. Standing on the tops of buildings. Hiding in binary code) placed a tumor in my wife’s head and it settled as an insolvable road map that led to only one place.

Sleep is like a tiny death; every metamorphosis is an imitation of death. This is the emptiness we carry through our lives. It creates a vacuum – a focused sense of urgency where waking life bleeds into the shadow world; where exigency can fuse with new revelations of being:

Her dreamy sleep induced by medications. Her pain dulled by the same thing. I thought: how much more? How much longer? There was a time when those concerns were relevant but that time had faded. I knew what was drawing near.

Black God is a reminder that darkness is our ultimate home. Darkness is oblivion – the ultimate nothingness from which we were born. This impossible discourse, this malady of the spirit evokes a beautiful sadness. The most appealing and singular parts of this novella express Spivey’s particular blend of depressive realism with hypnogogic fantasia. Black God offers alternate states of perception – awareness moving through unknown currents of elemental derangement. Time is more compressed and fluid. Time expands and contracts, as if it were more like liquid or air:

An ageless door swung. A clock ticked. The noise droned long after the hand moved onto the next second. That noise sustained too and the ticking (thickening) continued one onto another, another––the sounds and seconds stacked over each other, enveloping, encapsulating––another droned. Another moved, a tick. A clock hand keeping perfect time second to second, reverberated noise sustained, encapsulating. Tick. Enveloping continued.

Perception in Black God is a blur. This is where dreams take flight. Visions like the infernal ocean, violent waves, television static, swarms of crows, antique clocks washed ashore, and children with bird masks take on the significance of a chthonic reality just waiting for a full engagement. Substances like blood, salt and sand have a ritual potency. These emblems enact the dilemma of death in a world where shadows dance in the daytime, where the sublime reeks of pulsars and the ineptitude of time.

These altered forms of representation suggest a journey into a dreamlike psychic wilderness – what Swami Muktananda once called “plays of consciousness,” where vibratory patterns of colored light modulate between form and formlessness and lead into other dimensions. Whether this state is brought on by Cooper’s grief – as a sort of coping mechanism for his wife’s impending death, strengthening his endurance of loss – or whether this is simply how the world works in Spivey’s fiction, is unclear. But it still feels like something of a miracle: “Can you see me with your eyes closed? Yes.”

In Black God, abstractions feel tangible and interactive: “The nothingness of time sifted through my fingers.” Spivey is working with the machinery of oblivion – rays of black sunlight through which revelation makes itself known. This is a frequency, a supersensory signal intercepted by telepaths, artists, shamans, sorcerers, yogis and anyone else who is sensitive to it:

The rustic wood of the train and the aged wood of the home peeled away like skin and my vision played between what was there and what was also there. A kaleidoscopic transmogrification of the senses I’ve known – or felt to know since I could remember – into new signals, new stations that also felt real, were real.

Versed in the language of shadows, Spivey annihilates consensus reality and delves into the abyss of ulterior perception: “All of my senses were fading into another realm as I fell.” The focal point of Black God’s awareness is ever expanding, drifting toward a universal light that lies inside an abyss – a place of recognition and acceptance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Moran lives in Columbus, OH. His poetry and dream essays have appeared in places like Zhoupheus, West Wind Review, and red lightbulbs. He is the author of the chapbooks Night Giver (privately released) and Poison Vapors (Solar Luxuriance).

Other than perhaps Eileen Myles, Linh Dinh is the most ferociously political poet I read. I say that with the ringing qualification in mind that practically every poet in the Beat-Language-Conceptual-NY School and otherwise postmodern modes is practicing a kind of political poetry, which more commonly calls into question the connections between language, thought, political control and identity by use of verse concepts and grammatical, discursive and textual strategies. Indeed, the footnote that could be applied to the preceding sentence would reference a massive share of the significant poetry of the last fifty years. But when I say that Linh Dinh is a political poet, I mean that the political dimension of his poems is right there in the reader’s face. Dinh’s poetry resonates politically in a way that is distinct from the practice of political poetry during the postmodern era. Dinh’s poetry is one of political framing, whereby scenes, persons, attitudes, narratives and concepts are evoked to represent a social critique, a complaint about the health and treatment of the communities and culture the poet sees and experiences. But the poetry is not written straight, so to speak. It’s not neo-naturalism. Instead, Dinh’s poetry is aligned with literary modes of social satire, parody and farce. As a momentary starting place, these qualities are on full display in “Why Pay Taxes,” where the narrator describes his absolute diet of corn syrup:

You call it maize,
Hang it by Jesus.
I call it corn syrup.

Don’t want no Blue Ox or Red Bull,
Just give me a tall bottle of fizzin’,
Old fashioned, syrupy corn syrup.

Shurfine supposedly pork sausage,
Less than 99% corn syrup, exactly
The way I like it. Shurfine ketchup,
Approaching 200% corn syrup.

Subsidized by my 24/7 huffing and sweating,
Corn syrup oozes through my jiggling mass.
Sugar, let me rub some corn syrup on ya.

The tone is palpably tongue in cheek and unambiguously operates as a critique of the forced consumption of junk food, the most devolved consumerism. Yet the cartoonish imagery and descriptive language is so exaggerated that it spotlights the literary device being employed: the hyperbole that one consumes—and wants to consume –exclusively corn syrup, satirizes the absurd evil of the prevailing system, in which citizens pay taxes to subsidize the production of nutritional poison they ingest. This direct point of view and attack resembles less of a postmodern ethos than the kind of literature produced by Bertolt Brecht, with his reliance on the “gestus” or “gestic” act to reveal to his audience the social import of the drama’s narrative, or Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, for instance, in which he most famously proposed that starvation in Ireland could be remedied by eating Irish children, an obvious satire of England’s brutal imperial policies towards its occupied neighbors. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels also readily comes to mind, as does the work of Rabelais, Mark Twain, Vonnegut, and the engravings of the destitute and corrupt by William Hogarth. Roman satirical verse should be mentioned here as well.

Yet despite these historical or traditional affinities with the occidental canon (and surely there are writers of precedent in Vietnamese literature filtering through Dinh, as well), Dinh’s poetry nonetheless shares much in common with some of the most radical and experimental poetry of the postmodern era. In order to assess this connection, one has to back up a bit to examine the philosophical underpinnings of the role of political thought in postmodern poetry, which here means briefly turning to Marxist theory and its use and derivation in twentieth century poetics.

In his seminal critical work on the ideological underpinnings of Language poetry, The New Sentence, Ron Silliman writes in the first several pages of

[…] the subjection of writing (and, through writing, language) to the social dynamics of capitalism. Words not only find themselves attached to commodities, they become commodities and, as such, take on the “mystical” and “mysterious character” Marx identified as the commodity fetish: torn from any tangible connection to their human makers, they appear instead as independent objects active in a universe of similar entities, as universe prior to, and outside, any agency by a perceiving Subject. A world whose inevitability invites acquiescence. Thus capitalism passes on its preferred reality through language itself to individual speakers. And, in so doing, necessarily effaces that original connecting point to the human, the perceptible presence of the signifier, the mark or sound, in the place of the signified.

Silliman would not be held to speak on behalf of all so-called Language poets, particularly given the broadness of the Language poet label. But it is Silliman’s argument that poetry should highlight the unacknowledged commodification of language in order to embed in the fibers of that poetry an ideological resistance to capitalism which best explains the political nature of language poetry and its diverse progeny:

By recognizing itself as the philosophy of practice in language, poetry can work to search out the preconditions of a liberated language within the existing social fact. This requires (1) recognition of the historic nature and structure of referentiality, (2) placing the issue of language, the repressed signifier, at the center of the program, and (3) placing the program into the context of conscious class struggle…

Therefore, as Silliman explains through the words of Jack Spicer, one of Language poetry’s immediate precursors, poetry should be approached not from a mystical apprehension or acceptance of language but should “invade” the language:

Creeley talks about poems following the dictation of language. It seems to me that’s nonsense – language is part of the furniture of the room. Language isn’t anything in itself – it’s something which is in the mind of the host, the parasite that the poem is invading – five languages just makes the room structure more difficult and also possibly, more usable. It certainly doesn’t have anything to do with any mystique of English or anything else…

As with nearly any discussion of these politico-linguistic concerns, Silliman’s discussion sounds more like straight philosophy than what many would term literary criticism, but the consistent fascination of such concerns to postmodern poets and critics is grounded in the fact that the principles set forth by Silliman simply ring true, particularly to anyone who already reads Language poetry or, for that matter, criticism about it. That’s not intended as a slight, but rather is indicative of Silliman’s high philosophical and political charge for poetry, a threshold understanding of which for most (either by analogy to other art forms, such as experimental music and visual arts, or the philosophical architecture which surrounds it) likely is a prerequisite to reading it. And while one may not recognize Dinh’s work within Silliman’s Language poetry manifesto, his work is completely at home in the heart of its concerns.

However, this affinity reveals itself in the way Dinh’s work “flips” Silliman’s prescription “to search out the preconditions of a liberated language within the existing social fact,” so that Dinh’s poetry instead seeks out the “existing social fact” as the precondition to the use of language to liberate the subject from its ideological domination, thereby presenting a critique of urban social life as illustrated through the binding language, attitudes and effects of capitalism. What is left is a kind of postmodern grotesque, which is direct and devilishly funny but also multi-referential and complex in its implications.

In this way, Dinh is a serious poet, reflecting, like T.S. Eliot, a philosophical dissatisfaction and even disgust with the world, except where Eliot’s poetry looks at the world from the vantage of high culture and intellectualism, Dinh’s is looking up from the streets with its slang idioms and banalities, and what it reveals is, in his best work, a vivid acknowledgment of the harsh reality and tortured consciousness of the urban disenfranchised and poor. In perhaps his greatest subtle poem, “Box Shopping,” Dinh describes one’s fate at the bottom end of this bleak system of empty consumerism and commercial propaganda by virtue of a riddle-like recitation of advertising slogans, brands and product descriptions. It starts:

Going Home, Horizon, Cruise,
Wayfarer, Ambassador, Sleep.

Material: 18-gauge steel.
Finish: Brushed copper with Roman bronze shading
Or Neapolitan blue with slightly tacky wavy patterns.
Design: Square, diagonal or round corners, gasketed.

THERE’S NO SCIENTIFIC OR OTHER EVIDENCE
THAT A MODEL WITH A SEALING DEVICE WILL
IMMORTALIZE YOUR MORTAL AGGREGATE.

If not by the third stanza set out above in all capital letters, then by the sixth stanza, the first two lines of which read, “Interior width at body sides: you. / Interior length at body sides: you”, it is apparent that the poem narrates one’s search to buy a coffin, even though the words “coffin,” “casket,” “burial” or “death” appear nowhere in the poem. Instead, the coffin—Dinh’s “box”—is evoked solely through the language of advertising, product description, and marketing. Like an inversion of the jar in Wallace Steven’s “Anecdote of the Jar,” which functions as a metaphor of humankind’s creative powers that interplay with or even dominate the natural world, Dinh’s poem evokes the dominating metaphor of the coffin (and its symbolic twin, death) upon our civilization by layering the generic language of advertisement— “Adjustable mattress … / With a vast selection of pillows / To choose from …”, “Deep discounts on showroom samples. / Overnight Delivery— Flexible Financing”—with that of branding and socio-psychological marketing:

Interior: Nude Crepe or Champagne Velvet.
Embroidered Mama theme head panel,
Stars and Stripes or Lady of Guadalupe.
Silver or gold-colored fixed handles
With bright yet tasteful floral decals.

***
Going Home, Horizon, Cruise,
Wayfarer, Ambassador, Sleep.

***
Monterey, Carmel, Monte Carlo, Capri
Cote d’Azur, Lethe, Plymouth Rock.

The darkness in the poem resides not just in the notion of physical death, but also in the absence of its direct mention, so that it lurks not only as an undisclosed referent but also as a commentary on the kind of language used in the poem, which language enacts the living death of consumerism. And, thus, like an inversion of the jar in Stevens’ poem, or, say, the function of mass media in Marshall McLuhan’s work, it is the language of metaphor which interplays with but can also dominate the consciousness of humankind. The extreme of such language is not just propaganda, but the devolution of the quality and fullness of one’s existence, a condition akin to what the great twentieth century philosopher and psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm, terms “necrophilia” (i.e., the love of dead things) and the “having mode” of existence:

In the having mode, there is no alive relationship between me and what I have. It and I have become things, and I have it, because I have the force to make it mine. But there is also a reverse relationship: it has me, because my sense of identity, i.e., of sanity, rests upon my having it (and as many things as possible). The having mode of existence is not established by an alive, productive process between subject and object; it makes things of both object and subject. The relationship is one of deadness, not aliveness.

This deadness functions as a foil in much of Dinh’s work, spotlighting but also mocking the often crude, lively, street-wise monologues and lyrics that dominate his poetry. In many of Dinh’s poems, stunted lives (“A Few Days, Paid by the Night,” “One Dented Second”), twisted attitudes and psyches (“Refrain,” “Suggestions”), and sexuality graphically and often grotesquely rendered (“Eating and Feeding,” “You Don’t Know What’s Inside Of Me Yet”) results in a calling out and reflection of the brutal and deadening system that engenders such perceptions and existences.

But Dinh does not leave it at that the way a photojournalist might. Dinh’s approach, his art, is one that ensnares the reader into participating in the vision of the poem by laughing at it, which becomes a kind of acknowledgement of culpability on the part of the reader for the world that has created Dinh’s representations. This moral boomeranging is on full display in the poem, “The Moving Stink Spot of Tyson Corner,” in which the stink spot is described as everywhere, permeating the Tyson Corner shopping center with its nausea-inducing hauntings:

At Tyson Corner, a vast shopping emporium
In suburban Washington, there is a phenomenon
Known as the moving stink spot.

A browser at Foot Locker, for example,
Would suddenly be overwhelmed by a stench
Of open sewage or rotting flesh,
Causing him to retch or even vomit.
This torment would only last for a few seconds, however,
Because the stink spot had already moved on to its next victim.

The shopper can also quickly relieve himself
By simply stepping aside.

In reading this poem, I’m left with the unease of an impulsive laughter constrained by the contrary impulse to squelch it. In this way, Dinh’s poem reenacts on the reader the revolving sadomasochism of life on the receiving end of our neoliberalism, so that the humor of the poetry is also an enticement to receive the backhanded message that the reader too is complicit in our often ugly consumerist system (i.e., the Tyson Corner “stink”), but with the advantage (for most) of seeing the world’s harshest unpleasantness from afar. Indeed, this precise dynamic is enacted in “The Moving Stink Spot,” in which the poet notes that to “relieve” oneself from such stink requires only “stepping aside.”  In other words, Dinh puns on the word “relieve” (meaning also, of course, urination) which reinscribes the idea of a “stink,” thus implicating the shopper (or the reader) in contributing to the stink spot that haunts the shopping center, with its Foot Locker and that store’s near automatic associative connection to sweat shops and child labor. As in most of Dinh’s poetry, “The Moving Stink Spot” is viscerally funny but on closer inspection turns back upon the reader with its darker, political implications:  the more one “steps aside” or ignores the economic injustices upon which the large, shopping mall retailers rely, the more one contributes to it.

Because I am so unfunny in all of my writing, I tend to lay the highest praise on successful humor in literature. It’s not necessarily easy but easier to convey one’s ideas in a sober and serious manner. To make people laugh from what is written on the page is a difficult feat, particularly in poetry. First and foremost, then, Dinh’s great accomplishment as a poet is that he is funny. I can think of no contemporary poet that makes me laugh outloud page after page. This is a rare quality in any poet. That said, the importance of Dinh’s work is the fusing of his gift for humor with a deadly sharp eye for injustice and suffering, as well as an intuitive understanding of the role our ravenous capitalistic system plays in contributing to the difficult state of so many people’s lives. The political tactic of Dinh’s work is that no one turns from it self-satisfied, unscathed, unoffended, or without some level of squeamishness, thereby becoming involved with the poem; it becomes a relational experience and a challenge to the reader’s sense of the proper order of things, the status quo. By relentlessly keeping such urgent political implications right in front of our laughing faces, Dinh has staked a claim to our bookshelves and our conscience. We should all take him up on it.

About The Author
Gary Sloboda is a lawyer, writer and musician, not necessarily in that order. His poems and essays have appeared in such places as Drunken Boat, Rattle, EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts, and Exit Strata. He is currently writing a book-length collection of poems entitled Tremor Philosophies and a book of essays on contemporary poetry. He lives in San Francisco.

Jack Zipes: ‘The Irresistible Fairy Tale. The Cultural and Social History of a Genre.’ Princeton University Press, 2012.

Le Rochefoucauld remarked that few men would love had they not heard of it. In doing so he acknowledges the power of storytelling. Our current crisis sees corporate control of stories. In our Universities those areas devoted to studying them are being closed. These policies recognise the subversive and anarchic nature of narratives. Zipes once again reminds us of why and how stories nurture even lives in the most deprived of circumstances. Religion purveys absurdity and acquires its necessary charisma by dint of a deliberate Kierkegaardian offence against norms of rationality, empirical evidence and logic. So do military rituals, the contradictions of the Marxist party line, and belief in fairies. In our present intellectual climate absurd beliefs live in a kind of Strindbergian ménage with Reason and Empiricism. Daniel Dennett has written a naturalistic, scientific explanation of why and how religious beliefs have evolved in order to expose the fraudulence of its perpetrators. Zipes wonders about fairy-tale story-telling in a similar naturalistic manner. It’s a wonderful tale in itself. Zipes is as always impressively erudite but wears his knowledge like a linen suit.

He doesn’t seek to expose a fraud however. He sees fairy tales as still breathing. They are subversive expressions of a generosity with a long reach. They are at large in the keep of wimmin. They are used to collide against a misogynist social reality where wimmin still get a raw deal. They are from a past but not a tradition. Thus they can keep making new meanings. This is familiar territory to anyone reading the brave new fairy tales of Angela Carter, say, or those in Susana Medina’s ‘Red Tales’ where in one story, ‘The Space of the Tangible’, the heroine Elle transforms into a knight whose one true desire is to save the object of his/her desire and in another, ‘Where Butterflies Flutter Creating Chemical Turbulance’, the heroine’s desire is cannibalistic and sadistic: ‘… in the throat, between the gums, a kiss is a world: your sweat: I want to eat you, fuck you and leave you prostrate for days: sore, exhausted, deprived of movement: I want to bite you until it hurts. And I want to see you bleeding’ she says to her lover. It is a subversive depravity. Dali’s ‘Autumn Cannibalism’ is never far away.

Zipes has previously looked at Richard Dawkins’ notion of memes to explain how fairy stories replicate, evolve and disseminate. This is a thoroughly naturalistic approach to cultural evolution. He wrote ‘Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of the Genre’ in 2006. His approach here aims to fathom why and how they evolved and why we are compelled to make meanings out of our lives. He links fairy stories to metaphors in early language and communication. The oral roots are of central importance. According to Zipes, attempts to make writing primary are deplorable scholarly errors. He devotes a large appendix about this. Rebuffing Ruth Bottigheimer’s dismissal of the oral tradition, he accuses her of ‘sensationalist scholarship’.

He begins by explaining why and how these stories were told. He says they form the basis of our culture. Memes of oral tales in antiquity have enabled them to evolve. The nineteenth century tried to establish taxonomies but the stories are too fluid. Modern genres came about in the Enlightenment. These have ‘defined cultural artifacts and patterns, divided them rationally into disciples, and established rules and regulations for their study.’ Story-telling has been around for 300,000 years according to Melvin Kanner, so these are old old memes. Arthur Frank thinks human life depends on stories. Zipes thinks stories arrived simultaneously with speech. They were communicating knowledge and experience. Fairy tales were believed even though stuffed full of the miraculous, magical, fanciful and unreal because of the work they did. Zipes sees links between religious, patriotic, and fairy stories. The focus of a fairy tale are those transformations that render people and environments more suitable for peace and contented living. They always begin with a misfit and some consequential conflict. A fairy-tale is communication that invents the ways and means to resolve conflicting desires and instincts.

There are wonder tales which remain oral and literary folk tales which came from oral traditions mediated by manuscripts and print. These two types are inextricably dependent on each other. Arthur Frank in his book ‘Letting Stories Breathe’ doesn’t want to interpret stories because he resists the attempt to foreclose their meanings. He is influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘dialogic narratology.’ All utterances are essentially dialogic and depend on an interplay of different, sometimes conflicting, meanings. Frank thinks that stories don’t belong to the teller. They are on loan from shared sources. We use them to interpret ourselves and social reality. All the stories interweave with each other. Dialogic interpretation opens them to everyone. No voices are necessarily submerged or excluded. Stories can deceive and divide as well as tell the truth and harmonise. Stories are facts independent of any storytellers and should be studied as such so we learn about ourselves. Frank uses the term ‘breathe’ to capture the reality of stories.

Marshall Poe divides communication into eight elements: ‘accessibility, privacy, fidelity, volume, velocity, range, persistence and search ability.’ Poe says that ‘Evolutionarily speaking, we talk because we were the only primates who gained social status and therewith fitness by talking… Psychologically speaking, we talk because we must be heard.’ These are not equivalent however. No other primate has the capacity to talk as we do, so the issue of talk’s role in social status and fitness doesn’t enter the world of any other primate. It’s a physical limitation of the brain that explains this. But given that we have brains that enable talk, values have arisen from this ability. Early on, says Poe, ‘ speech is not so much a form of cooperation as a contest between speakers for the approbation of listeners.’ Relevance becomes a key. Telling stories is linked with commanding the world. Leaders mobilize stories better than rivals: shamans, priests, kings, queens, healers, ministers are examples. The stories mobilised and communicated have to be relevant to defeat rivals and persuade listeners.

Communication to control the world conflicts with speech for knowledge of the world and the self. The tension between these two ideas is embedded in the stories and oracy itself. Knowledge is determined by culture and genetics. Where a child is born will largely determine which stories she hears and transmits. Relevance will determine the stories and their success. The Chinese Whispers effect of omissions and accretions through retelling stories are accountable in the light of this rather than theories of transmission error. The role and function of the story is important in determining which elements are found useful and relevant.

Vladimir Propp discovered thirty-one functions in the Russian wonder tale. Alan Dundee calls them ‘motifemes.’ He says they can be found in most fairy tales, myths and oral tales about banishment and the fulfillment of a lack. These motifemes allow the expression of the complexity of biological life as experienced. Fucking, giving birth, child abandonment, abuse, hunting, casting spells, killing, gifting, rape, planting are the experiential grounds for many of these stories. The linear narratives of oral fairy tales map reality. It also applied to experience of cultural life, where specific references to customs, rituals, and beliefs are also expressed. Threats to communities, and quests undertaken for a civilization breathe new life into stories that reach beyond merely biological considerations. The interplay between these strands makes stories potent. Rape, sibling rivalries and fucking are prime grounds for well known tales such as ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’. They are hybrid narratives.

Andre Jolles connects legends, rumours, myths, riddles, proverbs, memoirs, case reports, fairy tales and jokes under the name ‘simple forms.’ Their functions are different but they are related because they are building blocks to more complex and literary narratives. The simple forms were used to shape experiences into relevance. Zipes thinks Jolles approach important but also incomplete, too abstract and oversimple. It excludes anecdote, fable, ballad and exemplum, animal tale and warning narrative, for example. But his work establishes how these forms were interconnected. Zipes discusses the development of the fable as an interesting case study of the general point about interrelatedness and relatednesss. Fables must always be understood in their socio-historical context but have universal appeal because they function to question power relations in societies, don’t always end happily even if resolved, ask listeners and readers to ask themselves how they would have reacted in a similar situation and therefore are enlightening and disturbing without being preachy. They illustrate something fundamental. Humans have choices to make.

Schiller is important: he says that Nature reveals what we lack and the possibility of harmony. A naïve morality grounds the fairy story according to Jolle’s reading of Schiller writing , ‘… the fairy tale confronts the world of ‘reality’ because this world of reality is not the world which confers values on a general valid way of life. It is a world in which the incidents contradict the demands of naive morality, a world which we naively experience as immoral. … the preoccupation [of the fairy tale] has a double effect: on the one hand , the preoccupation grasps and holds on to the world negating it as a reality which does not suit the ethics of the event. On the other hand, the preoccupation affirms another world in which the demands of naïve morality are fulfilled.’ Out of this emerges the counterworld of the fairy story. It is not the world of the teller or listener.

‘Puss in Boots’ is a good example of how what is important is the moral pulse of its strange counterworld. A supernatural cat persuades the king that his poor peasant master is worthy of the King’s daughter. Some say this is a ‘rise tale’ but the peasant who gets the girl is not its focus. It’s the cat (sometimes a fox, in Straparola a fairy, in Perrault a king’s messenger). Its about brains and cunning exposing the contradictions and pretentions of upper class figures. Ines Kohler-Zulch finds versions all over Europe, the Middle East, North and South Asia, North Africa and North America. Its cat motifs link with various supernatural associations – cat goddesses in ancient Egypt like Bast who was linked to the cult of Isis – witches and fairies elsewhere. Fairy tales like this ‘were told because they were told’.

Straparola used a master frame tale celebrating storytelling. He told seventy four. Fourteen were fairy stories. His stories deal with incest, fucking, sibling rivalry and jealousy, premarital sex and class struggle, slave/master relations and are told to be ‘mimetically relevant’. Zipes means by this phrase how stories, despite being without agency, remain memorable. Some stories become so well known they appear to be universal memes. Richard Dworkins introduced the term meme to name a unit of cultural transmission. Memes have been used to explain how children become acculturised and how cultures can be replicated. Perceived relevance helps memes to be passed on. Zipes says, ‘ Fairy Tales were not created or intended for children. Yet they resonate with them, and children recall them as they grow to confront the injustices and contradictions of so-called real worlds. We cannot explain why the origins of the fairy tale are so inexplicable and elusive. But we can elucidate why they continue to be irresistible and breathe mimetically through us, offering hope that we can change ourselves while changing the world.’

In chapter two Zipes demonstrates how it was the fusion of oral fairy stories and literature that served as the basis of all short narrative forms appropriated for print. Yet he insists that orality is still crucial for the creation and dissemination of fairy stories. ‘Fairy tale signifies belief in the supernatural, not the suspension of belief. We all believe in the extra-ordinary of Once Upon A Time. We need to believe. We all dream and breathe through our tales,’ writes Vincenzo di Kastiaux. If this is right then the fairy tale is not presenting alternative strange worlds in paranthesis. The miracles, supernaturalism and magic are expressions of our belief systems, values, rites and experiences first produced and reproduced orally. Despite print, painting, photography, film, radio and internet technologies fixing them they are still responsive to and relying on oral transmission. Zipes wisely demurs from trying to define ‘fairy tale.’ They weren’t called fairy tales until a woman called d’Aulnoy coined the term in 1697. She never said why. It was however a term signifying difference and resistance.

The stories were full of omnipotent fairies or gods and they were largely written by women from the Parisian salon culture. They were proof of the powers of women and showed them resisting and opposing the prevailing regulations of good manners and comportment that crushed women’s independence in public. Between 1690 and 1710 fairies dominated many of the tales being printed in France. Patricia Hammond writes: ‘ Both modernist advocates of women’s tales such as the Mercure, and detractors such as the clergymen Villiers, understood the fairy tale to be a female genre…’ The tales allowed them to live according to new standards of behaviour for a time. They were about transforming the relationship between men and women (although only of the upper classes). They stood in opposition to the court of Louis XIV and the Catholic Church. The worlds were ‘spectacular, absurd and naively moral.’ This is reminiscent of the early days of pop music where similar moves were made by middle and working classes. Paul Ginsty makes this more plausible by considering the link between fairy tales and the development of the divertissment feerie. Ballets, masques, opera, gala spectaculars were developed at this time, and Corneille, Moliere and Lully all got involved. They were ways of commenting on the narrow religiosity and misogynist tendencies of the Court, just as, say, Siouxsie Sioux was seen as telling stories opposing the class, race, gender, generational, sexual received wisdoms of Capitalism back in the day.

Midwives, nannies and childbirth also were important in the spreading of fairy memes. D’Aulnoy tried to get her nasty husband executed for plots against the king, failed and was in prison for a while whilst pregnant. Zipes comments that ‘… it was not by chance that she assigns the midwife or protector role to fairies in her tales.’ Fairies didn’t only substitute for the Virgin Mary, Jesus and Christian Saints. They were also capable of being used against themselves. People were steeped in rites and superstitions and so many stories also mocked these views. The stories were often carnivalesque. The rejection of literary discrimination was a refusal of constraint and allowed the genre to be rooted in great wedges of diverse source materials. Laurence Harf-Lancer claims the myths about the Moirai (Greek fates) and Parcae (Roman fates) as foundational. The Moirai prophesied newly born destinies. They link with the God Fauna, Goddess of eroticism and wild nature. She is ‘the Oracle’, ‘she who speaks Prophecy’ and ‘she who has your back.’ She’s a split image, one image being of both free sex and the courtesan that has fused into images of the bad witch.

‘ Bona Dea was supposedly the divine name of Fauna, wife of the archaic Faunus. .. Fauna is beaten with myrtle branches and tortured for drinking undiluted wine. In another version she refuses, even though drunk and battered, to give way to the incessant advances of her father, Faunus, who has his way with her after assuming the form of the serpent. In short, all the sources portray the cult of Bona Dea as an upside-down world…. It was also … deeply ambiguous. The seemingly contradictory attitudes of Bona Dea and her matrons towards wine, sex and men are somewhat reminiscent of the ambiguous status of the Vestals. The matrons both accept and reject undiluted wine and sex, signifying an ambivalence of masculine and femine, active and passive… Women did what they did in secret, at night, in a private residence and in disguise…’ This reminds me of Parmenides and the role of philosophy. Parmenides took a mystical journey to the halls of the night. This is a place of judgment, the place where the souls of the dead go. He is taken there by Night herself, a goddess serving as a councilor to Zeus in Orphic cosmologies. Night instructs Zeus on how unity should be preserved: she instructs: absorb all things. So Night is where a unifying cosmogonic phase is inaugurated.

Unity is a key to philosophy at night in Ancient Greece. Parmenides is the parade case for this issue. Night instructs the philosopher, ‘You must needs learn all things,/ both the unshaken heart of well-rounded reality/ and the notions of mortals, in which there is no genuine trustworthiness./ Nonetheless these things too will you learn, how what they resolved/ had actually to be, all through all pervading.’ Night first presents “the unshaken heart of well-rounded reality” and then “the notions of mortals, in which there is no genuine trustworthiness.”

The second way is discarded for the first: ‘Come now, I shall tell—and convey home the tale once you have heard—/just which ways of inquiry alone there are for understanding:/ the one, that [it] is and that [it] is not not to be,/ is the path of conviction, for it attends upon true reality,/ but the other, that [it] is not and that [it] must not be,/ this, I tell you, is a path wholly without report:/ for neither could you apprehend what is not, for it is not to be accomplished,/ nor could you indicate it.’ Night has much to say: ‘It is necessary to say and to think that What Is is; for it is to be,/ but nothing it is not. These things I bid you ponder./ For I shall begin for you from this first way of inquiry,/ then yet again from that along which mortals who know nothing/ wander two-headed: for haplessness in their/ breasts directs wandering understanding. They are borne along/ deaf and blind at once, bedazzled, undiscriminating hordes,/ who have supposed that it is and is not the same/ and not the same; but the path of all these turns back on itself.’ True reality is ‘ungenerated and deathless,/ whole and uniform, and still and perfect’ and messed up and missed by ‘aimless sight and echoing hearing/ and tongue.’ What to do? Night calls us out to ‘judge by reason the strife-filled critique/ I have delivered’ she says. True philosophy seems to reject the generated and deathly narratives of the earthly.

However: ‘Absorb all things’ says Night.

Harf-Lancer shows that there were two types of plots that were used to bring these fates into the fairy stories that transformed the medieval period. One was based on Mesuline. A fairy enters the human world, a human falls in love with her, they make a pact based on some prohibition, and the pact is violated and he loses his happiness and wife. The other is the Morgan le Fay story. A hero journeys into another world, stays there a long time, is allowed to leave on agreeing a prohibition and the prohibition is violated and he is expelled and dies. Motifs from both of these are taken up and transformed by d’Aulnoy. It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970’s that women writer’s recreated the stories so they identified with the powers of the witches and fairies.

Zipes is impressed by Burkert’s use of sociobiology to explain how the stories have evolved. Burkert links the functions of Propp’s morphology to biological needs. This is a crucial move in Zipe’s thesis that the oral traditions have precedence over literary forms. ‘Cupid and Psyche’ fairy stories were supposed to all derive from the written text of Apuleius. But this is countered by the idea that the written text is always ‘a variant of what has always been around.’ Apuleius inherited the Cupid and Psyche meme. The meme was trasmitted in an artifactual language that, according to Distin ‘evolved under adaptive pressure for more effective representation, and one of their representational advantages over natural language is that they can be detached form their human originators. This enables information not only to be disseminated over much greater expanses of time and space than the context of speech but also to shed the social associations of its human originators.’ Zipes disparages the approach to fairy stories by Disney. He calls them ‘blundering and distorted’ but even if the fraudsters of corporate power attempt to contain the meanings he shouldn’t presume that they have succeeded. The sexy stepmother in Snow White certainly provoked one of my first moments of erotic desire. As he says of the fairy tale generally, ‘Like Herman Melville’s White Whale, its essential truth will never be captured or defined. The irony of fairy tale’s cultural evolution is that it originated out of human necessity, and we are still trying to determine why fairy tale is still so irresistible and necessary.’ Disney is no exception.

Chapter four examines Catherine Breillat’s film of the Bluebeard story as an example of the memetic process of imitation, innovation and transformation. Perrault’s tale is shown as ‘part of a singular discursive process within the larger genre of the fairy tale.’ The literary and cinematic rendition of the story mark our continual interest in mass murder through supernatural stimuli. Perrault wrote his Bluebeard story in 1697. It is the ur-text about serial killers. The origins of the story are linked with Gilles de Rais, with Eve, with Pandora, with Minos of Crete who brought fatal consequences to the women with whom he had sexual relations, with the ‘Thousand and One nights’ and the virgin fucker and killer King Shahryar. This is territory Zipes has explored in ‘The Enchanted Screen.’ Perrault’s authorship is largely forgotten, overshadowed by Bluebeard. Zipes analyses the Breillart film ‘… as a filmic remake with an eye toward understanding how oral and literary tales have interacted with new media in a long historical tradition to form a fairy tale discourse that addresses changes in manners, attitudes and values.’

Bluebeard had its genesis in oral wonder and medieval literature. This is what the authors of the 1690s were all about, rewriting and remaking, and filmic renditions of the twentieth century pick up on the same process. Formalist textual and structuralist approaches to this are compromised by extratextual factors. Zipes argues that we require a link between orality, literacy, visual arts and technologies of representation to accommodate the fluidity of cultural genres and the interaction of the intertextual and extratextual conditions of specific times and places.

Literary formalists are limited because they perform close readings whilst excluding contexts. Folklorists universalize without noting specific sociocultural context and intertextual meanings. Zipes wants to find a way of meshing these approaches. He includes oralicity, the design of cover art and written and pictorial evidence of how nannies and lower class storytellers had influence on Perrault. Historical folklorist studies, Perrault’s narrative habitus, evolving fairy tales within a literary movement of literary innovation all contribute to how best to see the way memes work.

Breillat’s film of Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ is seen as part of the French feminist movement begun in the late 1960s, as part of a wave of fairy-tale films (including Catherine Hardwicke’s ‘Red Riding Hood’ which Zipes condemns as trivial commercialism) as is Breillat herself for her later version. ‘It is a film that reduces feminism to platitudes’ he sneers. But he thinks Breillart is nevertheless a serious feminist film maker. She is the first woman to make a film of Bluebeard. She transforms the story into one about women’s rebellion rather than victimization. She introduces two sisters who then enact a mirroring tale of response to the Bluebeard narrative. ‘One plot concerns the deep desire of a young girl, who wants to avoid poverty and live in a fairy-tale world. In the process she learns from Bluebeard, shares his loneliness, and strangely strokes his decapitated head after he is killed… The second tale is more about sibling rivalry and how a self-asserting young girl “twists” Perrault’s tale, so that she dominates and accidently kills her older sister. Perhaps she too, has unconsciously attained what she sought.’ They are tragedies that open up further stories.

Zipes broods on origins. The misogynist strands are clear and form distinctive elements of patriarchal societies. By focusing on prohibition, transgression and punishment and focusing on women’s assertion of their power Breillart turns Bluebeard into an intellectual loner that women desire and his death is merely a rupture in the Bluebeard discourse of serial killings where Breillart won’t have the final word. There are no final words.

Zipes then looks at the historical development of tales about witches such as Baba Yaga, looking at how witches are related to fairies and how witches are demonized to reinforce dominant stereotypes about women. Witches evolved out of ancient divinities and Goddesses. They gave birth to the Fates. They connect to ancient rituals and customs of the pagans. In the eleventh century venerated mother Goddesses gave us the Fates who are the ‘indisputable protagonists of all fairy literature.’ Witches function as fairies or sorcerers and owe their existence to pagan goddesses. The stereotype of the witch has been mimetically disseminated from the middle Ages to the present. Witches, fairies, wizards and magic were believed by most people up until the Renaissance. It became dangerous to admit this belief by the fifteenth century. Zipes looks at the connection between fairies and witches and the ‘deep roots in pagan and Greco-Roman beliefs’ via the Slavic great witch Baba Yaga.

Baba Yaga is both dangerous witch and maternal benefactress. She amalgamates shamanism, sorcery and fairy lore. There are many manifestations. Sometimes there are three sisters. Sometimes she is killed but comes back. She is inscrutable and too powerful for the devil to rule. God and storytellers can’t control her either. She decides who shall live and die, who will be helped and who not. She eats children and women – occasionally men. She is ugly. She tests people who come to her forest dwelling for advice. She’s maybe Mother Earth. She is the decisive figure. She is enmeshed with Russian blood. Survivors of encounters with Baba Yaga must have perseverance, kindness, obedience, integrity and courage.

Propp said that what ‘the compositional unity of the wondertale lies neither in the specific features of the human psyche nor the peculiarities or artistic creation, rather, it lies in the reality of the past.’ He’s describing the memetic evolution of tales. Where word to world fit there is the relevance that ensures that a tale will continue. Degenerating from initial relevance, tales found new resonance in different contexts. Yaga’s initial function is that of the donor. She is evolved from Mother Earth figures, ‘large, hairy and dangerous.’ These ‘Rusalki’ ‘were the initiators of young girls about to be wed… that … prefigured the Greco-Roman goddess Artemis/Diana.’ Baba Yaga seems a supercharged version with vast powers and seems to be ‘an amalgam of various pagan deities that underwent gradual transformation in the Greco-Roman period and early Middle Ages.’ She has forbearers in Romanian, Hungarian, Slovakian and other countries as well as relations with Perchta of Germany, the ur-figure for Frau Holle in Grimm. She’s the ‘majestic, dangerous figure of resistance to Christianity.’

The suicidal autodidact intellectual Ralston distinguishes Baba Yaga from traditional witches. Her powers are too vast to be merely a witch. She is Lamia, Striga, Troll-Wife, Ogress and dragoness… ‘the terrible female form which figures in the Anglo-Saxon poems as the Mother of Grendel.’ By paying tribute to some sort of mysterious great goddess the stories have been censored and banned. It is through the transformation of belief systems that goddesses were changed into witches and fairies. Witches and fairies were then denigrated and demonized.

Carlo Ginzberg looks at the ‘sabat’ which, he writes, ‘… illustrates the decisive importance, traceable over a very large cultural area, of the image of the traveler, male or female, in a trance in the world of the dead, in relation to the genesis and transmission of the narrative structure – and perhaps more ancient and certainly more durable – elaborated by the human species… Thus the stereotype of the sabbat represents a fusion of two distinct images. The first, a product of the learned culture (judges, inquisitors, demonologists) centered on the supposed existence of a hostile sect, inspired by the devil, members of which had to renounce their faith and profane the Cross and sacraments. The second image, rooted in folk culture, was based on belief in the extraordinary powers of particular men and women who – in a state of trance, and often in animal form or riding upon animals – travelled to the realm of the dead in order to bring prosperity to the community… the second image was much older than the first, and infinitely more widespread.’ Baba Yaga is a hopeful character because she resists people who invade her world and doesn’t mince her words.

On this account contemporary belief in witches and sorcery and supernatural are neither beliefs of the rural nor culturally underdeveloped. They are beliefs of ‘ultra-developed people who require continual innovations.’ Corporate storytellers like Disney fail to show the multi-dimensionality of the witch and portray her as simply evil. They are products of the male gaze and mass media manipulation of images of powerful women who often took the role of protecting virgins from male intrusion. Witches tangle with fairies in a competing set of narratives and images about violence and misogyny, resistance and domination within a patriarchy.

Persecuted heroines are also key elements in these stories. The stereotype makes them helpless, passive, obedient and industrious. Fairy stories were early stories where women were assertive, confident and courageous. Only towards the end of the nineteenth century were heroines starting to show characteristics of the witches and fairies. Zipes examines the women storytellers, collectors and heroines of tales of rape, incest, abuse and violation. Zipes gives us in full four stories as case studies collected respectively by Gonzenbach, Levesque, Nemcova and Busk – ‘The Snake Who Bore Witness for a Maiden’; ‘Marion’; ‘The Twelve Months’; and ‘Mari Wood.’ They are tales of ‘rape, starvation, attempted murder, physical and psychological abuse, and incest.’ They are difficult to find in anthologies. The heroines are cunning and resilient. Zipes gives smart biographical details of the four collectors to emphasise his point that notions of folk tales have been determined by a restricted repertoire that has excluded collections such as those of Busk et al. Zipes is interested in the way collections are collected and transmitted, so this is not a moralized point, rather it is treated as an interesting and relevant datum. Similarly, Zipes chides those who criticize the brothers Grimm for being more literary products than true to their oral roots. ‘There is nothing “immoral” in what the Grimms did… and nothing immoral in editing and appropriation. Yet it is crucial for the understanding of folklore, fairytales and cultural history that the complexity of the process of their collection be open to study and evaluated and compared with other collections.’ The fifth chapter brings to the foreground obscure, neglected and obfuscated figures of great significance from the past. As Zipes says: ‘ Hardly anyone – and this includes folklorists and fairy-tale scholars – knows anything about the tales of Laura Gonzenbach, Bozena Nemcova, Nannette Levesque and Rachel Busk, despite great advances made in feminist studies that led to the rediscovery of important women European writers of fairy tales from the seventeenth century to the present.’

The sixth chapter continues the examination of neglected fairy tales and looks at Giuseppe Pitre as a case study showing the ‘profundity of the oral tradition and why middle-class professionals turned to examining tales that stemmed from common people.’ Zipes notes that serious scholarship on fairy stories and folk talles generally is being eroded in Universities as Humanity Departments come under pressure. Folklore has become marginalized. The mass media spread uninform nonsense encouraging people to stop wondering about why we tell so many stories all the time. The new corporate culture of universities particularly in the UK and the USA misunderstands folklorists and denigrate historical, anthropological and ethnological work.

The studies were originally thought important as a new emerging society seemed to move away from folklore to science. Modern people however still heard folklore on the lips of the ‘backward portion of society’ where, according to Bronner; ‘ … the past was directed forward.’ Folk stories uncovered ‘a usable, hidden past’. The Brothers Grimm used their stories from the German past to foster a united nation. They were enormously influential in the transmission of folk tales from other countries and served as catalysts for work of other folklorists elsewhere. Giuseppe Pitre is an Italian folklorist whose obscurity masks his comparability to the Grimms that was noted in an obituary notice in 1916.

Pitre aspired to grasp the nature of the neglected Sicilian common folk in his work. His romanticism ironically made him more scientific and anthropological. He was dubious about attributing everything in folklore to relics of survival, but nonetheless agreed that ‘folklore was a conglomeration of relics that originated among primitive peoples; they were kept alive and survived through the comportment, belief systems, and customs of the common people.’ He thought people changed motifs from well known stories depending on their circumstances. ‘History should not be a list of men, in which their outstanding acts are registered, but the revelation of ideas, passions, customs and civil interests, in short, of the life of the people, of a nation’ he wrote. ‘The history of a people is confused with that of its dominators… [T]heir story has been taken and made into the same history of its governments without taking into consideration that they, the people, have a memory that is very different from that which is often attributed to them, whether it be from the side of the institutions or from the predominant powers.’ Collecting and studying fairy tales is a subversive political act. This is why the humanities are under siege at the moment. They are the departments and subjects that have counter-narratives to those of the prevailing corporate master narrative.

The past is endowed with present meaning. Storytelling in Sicily was about learning to survive a harsh life not live a moral one. Zipes quotes several story-endings that show this. ‘ And so they lived on as husband and wife, /While we toil away without a life.’ Zipes summarises succinctly: ‘Happiness is a fiction.’ This was what Pitre saw as the essence of Sicilian thinking about work, sex, religion, law, other ethnic groups, money and power. He was accused of excusing the mafia and other immoral things. Pitre was excusing nothing. He was identifying storytelling as a confrontation with everyday vicissitudes rather than contriving escapism. His Sicillian Cinderella, Ninetta, for example, is candid and extraordinary. She ‘… toys with a prince in his garden until he falls desperately in love with her. She constantly evades him, even at three different balls, until he is at his wit’s end. The prince’s father must intervene to save his son’s life, and actually proposes to Ninetta for his son.’ In his Sicillian Rapunzel ‘after the young girl is abandoned by her mother, she is brutally treated by an ogress. Yet instead of running away from the tower with a prince. She shoves the ogress into an oven and makes peace with her mother.’

Zipes says Pitre’s four volume ‘Fiabe, Novelle e Raconti Populari Siciliani’ is more important than Grimm. He was from the lower classes, spoke a Sicilian dialect and understood the people from whom he heard the stories. They are rough in style. They are disjointed. They have a ‘charming earthy quality.’ They show how literary the other collections, including Grimm’s, really are. Joseph Brodsky wrote: ‘art is not a better, but an alternative existence, it is not an attempt to escape from reality but the opposite; an attempt to animate it.’ Pitre’s approach embodies this.

[Picture: Saatchi Gallery]

In his last chapter Zipes explores further women’s contributions to ‘… contemporary fairy-tale drawings, paintings, sculptures and photographs.’ He sees these as offering a ‘metacritique of canonical print versions.’ The seventies saw a rise in feminism and the continuation of that time’s ‘fervor for change’ is what Zipes sees as animating present interest. Fairy tale topics have been treated for the last fifty years or so as being largely ‘in collision’, says Zipes, with traditional norms and conventional expectations of fairy-tale representations whose parade case is Disney. The new representations ‘… defy pulp-produced and sanitized images that publishers and media moguls have spread.’ This collision stems from feminist hopes of the late sixties, the civil rights movements and political reforms that were largely unfulfilled.

Zipes notes a largely hidden fact that 70% of artists in England who have become professional since the 1970’s are women. He comments that ‘ The worldwide rise of women artists is the greatest artistic revolution of this age.’ Paula Rego and Kiki Smith are key figures in the artistic representation of fairy-stories. Rego writes: ‘ My favourite themes are power games and hierarchies. I always want to turn things on their heads, to upset the established order, to change heroines and idiots. If the story is “given”, I take liberties with it to make it conform to my own experiences, and to be outrageous. At the same time as loving the stories I want to undermine them, like wanting to harm the person you love. Above all, though, I want to work with stories which emerge as I go along. It is something I have done in the past, and now I wish to do exactly that.’

Her works are surreal and disturbing reopenings of deep seated wounds, haunting scenes of horror, cruelty and comedy as in her 1989 series ‘Nursery Rhymes.’ Her works are perverse. She shows callous abuse and a voyeuristic society. She takes the side of women and children. She finds darkness in the stories. Peter Pan becomes brutal. Mermaids drown Wendy, Tiger Lily is mercilessly tied up, cannibalistic pirates take naked boys away, a crocodile swallows a dog and Peter looks weirdly older. Neverland is death’s realm. She exposes Barrie’s conception. Her Snow White collides with bromine Disney’s. Snow White is ‘brawny, solemn and mute’, dead and raped by her stepmother after eating the apple. Her ‘Red Riding Hood’ is optimistic. The mother cuts open the belly of a middle aged man to save her daughter.

Kiki Smith always makes Zipes think of ‘blood, the body, rupture, and movement.’ She painted the picture on the cover of the book. She is elusive and keeps all endings open. In this she is linked with eighties second phase writers of fairy stories such as Angela Carter, Tanith Lee and Robert Coover. Her ‘Little Red Rising Hood’ is not a wimp asking to be raped and killed as in Perrault’s version nor does she need a hunter to save her as in Grimm. She is heroic and various. Her wolves are friendly, protective and noble, as in Carter’s ‘The Company Of Wolves.’ Smith sometimes links this to St Genevieve, patron Saint of Paris who was born from a wolf womb. Her women are enigmatic and confident, even when nude and spinning wheels. Her Alice can both cry and be composed. Her heroines are multidimensional but she keeps the blood and gore.

Zipes looks at others. He concludes that all the women artists revise ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ because it alludes to rape ‘An entire book, ‘Afterouge’ has been devoted to the collective memory of artists and writers who have been affected by ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Vanessa Jane portrays her as brave and smart. Donna Leishman permits us to intervene in the narrative. Emma SanCartier shows a submissive wolf. Sarah McRae does too. Elena Sisto portays Snow White as a zombie. Dina Goldstein turns her Disney image into a trapped domestic drudge. Cindy Sherman uses dummies and prostheses to show fairy tales as nightmares. Miwa Yanagi emphasizes the struggle between young and old, bringing out the mysogeny of our culture. Polixeni Papapetrou is more optimistic. Rima Staines portays Baba Yaga as an oracular priestess, stressing the importance of ‘gaining and nurturing wisdom.’ Anna Gaskell shows ominous images suggesting abuse and manipulation. The father will never be forgotten in these, unlike in most fairy-tales. Meghan Boody shows somber adolescents in surreal scenes and poses to reveal oppressive conditions.

These are our wonder narratives. They make strong collisions. They are a way to talk back. Like Baba Yaga, they raise insolence into a limitless cosmic force. They don’t mince their words. They shake down grim powers even if, like Sicilian folk, they know that ‘happy ever after’ is just a fairy-story.

Julee Cruise/David Lynch’s sinister fairy story ‘Pinky’s Bubble Egg’ ends: ‘And the melody sounded forth again, this time, not from the realm of dreams but in what we call reality, which we all know is a joke.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

To my mind Henry James is a master of terror. Without bloodshed or the threat of guns, germs, or steel, James’s microscope fixes on the motivations that kill the human spirit. At the apex of the first half of his writing life is The Portrait of a Lady, a unique and pulsating work of art on the order of Leonardo, Shakespeare, and Beethoven—a novel about what James called “a certain young woman affronting her destiny.” Two versions exist: the original 1881 version and the revised New York Edition of 1907—both circulate freely today. How could this 130-year-old book slay me? How could its wisdom impact like a detonation? Not just with story, not just with character, but with sentences as stately as Dante’s terza rima in The Divine Comedy—lines like “She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet were still upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely…” “She” is Isabel Archer, the heroine, and she is looking at the ruins of Rome. James’s style flares and flowers out, compounding the story and sending the characters into a unique motion and awareness with each ornate sentence.

Along with the singular syntactical sensations generated by James’s 600-page masterpiece, the novel demonstrates how we become who we are, as perhaps no other novel I have read. This is mainly accomplished by examining the central character, Isabel. She is first seen as a young woman, fresh off the boat from America, looking at England askance, in search of experience but not knowing the rules or the local customs. Her insolence feeds off the sporting scene of high-stakes living as she feels the compassionate but still calculating and wanton eyes of her cousin, Ralph, and those of Lord Warburton, a man fully positioned and full of an endless supply of money. Isabel fends for herself very well; every ‘i’ is dotted as she holds up cautionary hands to the onslaught of men and women who wish to influence her until the appearance of Madame Merle, a woman of uncanny intellect and taste who brings the widower Osmond and his daughter Pansy into her trusting ken—figures who will lead to her downfall.

Most of what occurs in the novel passes in light of Isabel and her destiny, affronted or not. She is everywhere (the characters are in service of her) and James doesn’t let much happen without invoking her mind and her perceptions. The supporting cast wants to see her succeed—some only too well—as when Ralph convinces his dying father, Mr. Touchett, to leave 60,000 pounds to Isabel in his will, “to put it into her power to do some of the things she wants.” Though Ralph’s gesture is made with good intentions, he cannot conceive the unhappiness Isabel will grow into after she marries Osmond, enduring his suffocating lifestyle as the book hurtles toward one unforgiving ending. The heart of the story is, of course, money. Most of the characters, except Isabel at the beginning and to a degree Madame Merle, are very well off—even Osmond, an art collector, who, though he yearns for Isabel’s money, has enough to be comfortable when the reader first encounters him in Florence. Money changes the world as it changes lives. Money makes the most vicious cactus attractive to the healthiest hand and Osmond seduces Isabel to insure he will have hers.

As shown by how money complicates the human soul, life is flawed. We are fallible people and one of the reasons we read fiction is to read about other flawed persons, to see how they deal with their lot. All the characters in The Portrait contain idiosyncrasies and imperfections, rounding them into quiet and sprawling spheres of highest order and complexity, so each is a fleshy character with a specific number of hairs growing out of her and a memory full of her years lived, times of both happiness and confrontation. The characters on James’s pages give off scents the reader can distinctly smell—odors that come by vertiginous thought patterns as in the famous forty-second chapter where Isabel meditates on her troubled marriage, finding her life and her husband shameful:

Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feelings of failure. It was her deep distrust of her husband—this was what darkened the world. That is a sentiment easily indicated, but not so easily explained, and so composite in its character that much time and still more suffering had been needed to bring it to its actual perfection.

In this excerpt, James’s architectonic sentences heighten Isabel’s devastating discovery. The repetition of d-words (three in both the first and second sentences [“deep distrust”]), drive Isabel down into a dungeon of sorrow. But all around, alliteration strikes as in “high places of happiness,” “feeling of failure,” “easily explained,” and “composite in its character,” as well as the matched endings of “downward and earthward” and “restriction and depression.” While Isabel’s twisting emotions prefigure the coming tragedies, the ugliness of lost love is rendered in such poetic and vivid terms that its beauty makes what happens that much more harrowing.

Later in the same chapter, there is another searing section of self-discovery, as Isabel continues to fight the once eager love for her slippery husband. She tries to see how he charmed her but feels she cannot blame him too much as she built up the wrong picture of him in her mind:

Ah, she had him immensely under the charm! It had not passed away; it was still; she knew perfectly what it was that made Osmond delightful when he chose to be. He had wished to be when he made love to her, and as she had wished to be charmed it was not wonderful that he succeeded. He succeeded because he was sincere; it never occurred to her to deny him that…She had a vision of him—she had not read him right. A certain combination of features had touched her, and in them she had seen the most striking of portraits. That he was poor and lonely, and yet that somehow he was noble—that was what interested her and seemed to give her opportunity. There was an indefinable beauty about him—in his situation, in his mind, in his face. She had felt at the same time that he was helpless and ineffectual, but the feeling had taken the form of a tenderness which was the very flower of respect. He was like a skeptical voyager, strolling on the beach while he waited for the tide, looking seaward yet not putting to sea.

Osmond is a man who can’t feel himself. As much as he controls his life, he still attempts to command the world’s air not to enter his body—steeling himself into a damaged, damaging, and despairing wall of greed who does not to surrender to love, or let anyone around him feel it. As Isabel sees this, James sees all, but then why does Isabel go on? Why does she let herself be squashed? This great unanswerable question is held over her as it hovers over the reader and I can’t find any more satisfactory response to this than James’s own:

The obvious criticism…will be that it is not finished—that I have not seen the heroine to the end of her situation…This is both true and false. The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together. What I have done has that unity—it groups together. It is complete in itself—and the rest may be taken up or not, later. (The Notebooks of Henry James)

In real life, the need for money presses people into self-deception for the sake of gain. But how do people deal with the problems they harbor? Often they speak of something or someone in lieu of discussing themselves—the vicarious metaphor—yet these other people’s concerns are keenly reflected by their own. Because in The Portrait so many people’s interests are wrapped up with others’, the action of living vicariously never had a better handbook. One supreme example being toward the end, as Madame Merle and Isabel speak of the situation of Pansy’s marriage. Madame Merle is upset that Lord Warburton has left the city and will not pursue a marriage with Pansy any further. Isabel suggests Madame Merle discuss it with Osmond, to which she replies:

It isn’t information I want. At bottom, it’s sympathy. I had set my heart on that marriage; the idea did what so few things do—it satisfied the imagination.

Madame Merle had her heart set on a few marriages, most of all, that of Osmond and Isabel. Pansy is her daughter and even if she didn’t care what happened to Osmond, she knew that marrying the two would put Pansy in a privileged position, the money in Isabel’s bank funding Pansy’s future. As to the quote, Madame Merle (through ample deceptions) has more information than anyone in the novel, so her saying it isn’t information she wants is also one of the truest things she says. Her life has been a lie and she wants comfort. For a person to pretend her child does not exist, especially as she has a relationship with Pansy and speaks to her not always but often, is an awful life. The notion of “satisfying the imagination” is also intriguing. On one level Madame Merle is easing her conscience concerning Pansy and all the hopes she had. Yet for all of her flaws there is a kernel of truth in her dialogue. “So few things” do satisfy our imagination. The constant striving and struggle to succeed is our lot in life. No matter how much one accrues, one will ultimately want more to guarantee a time that no one has control over—the future. Ralph, Madame Merle, and Osmond all interfere on behalf of that evanescent, distant durée. Ralph’s machinations, along with Madame Merle’s and Osmond’s overthrowing of ethical bounds to satisfy their whims, conspire to destroy a young woman.

As William H. Gass says in Fiction and the Figures of Life:

…[James’s] moral anger is directed at all those who infringe human freedom, who make pawns of people, who feast on the poor, the naive, or the powerless, who use love to use…and in those sentences which mark the movement of his mind, his steady shift of position and deepening of view, we ourselves can complain of being caught–caged–victimized.

The beauty of James’s sentences victimizes us. The sinuous souls of humans caught are dramatized by James with a grand and clear perception. Words in any part of the text boil and reverberate, and set us smoldering, ashamed of what we do to each other throughout, as in the middle of the book, where Pansy listens to Madame Merle’s call for her to obey:

Pansy stared, disappointed, but not protesting. She was evidently impregnated with the idea of submission, which was due to any one who took the tone of authority; and she was a passive spectator of the operation of her fate.

This ghostly impregnation mirrors Pansy’s own half-acknowledged existence, as “evidently” becomes the triggering word, an adverb so wide and slick a saint would have trouble keeping upright on its icy surface. Would James have it any other way?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Greg Gerke’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, The Kenyon Review Online, Denver Quarterly, Quarterly West, Mississippi Review, LIT, Film Comment, and others. He lives in Brooklyn.

1.

“La mélancolie elle-même n’est qu’un souvenir qui s’ignore.”—Flaubert.[1]  Is this an instance of the false passive, or of a genuine reflexive?  Of memory neglected by an agent outside of it, or of memory ignoring itself?  For while an opposition may be drawn between a subject and his own memories, which take on for him a more or less foreign appearance—the mind’s furnishings, rather than the mind itself—it remains true that without these memories he has nothing, is nothing; that his entire mode of self-presentation—that is, of being—hinges on the constant resort to memory.

The memories that provoke melancholy—neglected, overlooked, forgotten—Flaubert’s verb suggests all these—relate, however obscurely, to duties unfulfilled.  The nature of what has been left undone in relation to the figures of memory is often opaque—the mere fact of my having a mother, for example, sometimes pains me inexplicably—because what we take to be the ideal form of our relation to others and to the world, our understanding of our duty to them, tends toward the vague, half-hearted, and commonplace, to the extent that it can be said to exist at all; perhaps because the enlargement of our understanding of the scope of our moral lives, of the effect our least actions have upon our social and physical environment, has been outpaced by the constantly multiplying amusements, temptations, and merely formal obligations to which we subject ourselves; we are morally confused and exhausted, overwhelmed by the variety of choices that face us and pulled at each instant toward novelty, and have shunted off our ultimate choices, to use Peter Singer’s term, those acts of moral reckoning wherein we tell ourselves the truth about our doings and their aftermath and begin at last to take ourselves seriously as moral subjects, into ever-receding tomorrow.  What is due from us is never clear, and melancholy is nothing more than the intrusion of this lack of clarity, and of the vital longing to dispel it, upon life’s constant progression-into—into love affairs, into acquisitions and enterprises—adherence to which seems to preclude attention to that longing.  Whereas the way is always paved for our instrumental undertakings, for our role in the self-perpetuating and self-aggrandizing impulses of society, to which everyone appears both party and partisan, when, in our hearts, it strikes us it might be better to live according to the dictates of our conscience, the path we are led to is fraught with solitude and uncertainty.

2.

Freud asserts:  “The hysteric suffers mainly from reminiscences.”  Hysteria, in this sense, is the acute form of bad conscience, whereas melancholy is bad conscience in abeyance. If hysteria was once thought to be the quintessentially modern form of neurosis, this relates to the profusion of choices thrust upon modern man, virtually all of which have a moral component but which are decided according to instrumental considerations; the memory of these choices, and of the compromised way in which we make them, continues to weigh on us, along with the intimation that we may someday be made to answer for them, and for the disregard of conscience that enabled them.  When the anxiety they provoke is no longer bearable, the sufferer breaks down.  The attacks of nerves frequently described in Chekhov, in “Terror,” for example, are studies of this sort of hysteria.

3.

If reading Chekhov makes us melancholy, it is doubtless because he is the writer most concerned with, and most effective at, rousing our conscience from its wonted slumber.  At times we are melancholy because of our own bad conscience; but at others—when we read “Heartache” or the last paragraphs of “About Love”—we are moved by glimpses of a world in which the moral imperative has been, or might be, obeyed.  A serenity pervades these examples, such as overcomes us before a painting of Vermeer’s.

4.

Having written the foregoing sentence, I began to think of Vermeer, and then of the death of Bergotte in Proust, after he had gone to see A View of Delft for the last time; and wishing to read again those pages, which describe this serenity exactly, I have taken down my copy of The Prisoner and written down the following passage:

All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there–those laws to which every profound work of the intellect bring us nearer and which are invisible only–- if then!–- to fools.

5.

It is not strange, then, that our response to Chekhov or to Vermeer should have the character of nostalgia, though we have never lived in the “different world” that Proust describes; what we reflect on is the image of that world we dreamed up perhaps when we were very young, when the idea of a moral life had already been imparted to us, and we had begun to envisage what it might be, but before we had grown used to the thought that it was a fiction to be left behind, like all those other fabrications of youth; and because its image is less fanciful than the rest of them, because it continues throughout our lives to throb, particularly whenever we or others depart from the quotidian to do or say something beautiful or true, and because it is into that image that we retreat, forever adding further to it, when the world’s cruelty or paltriness overwhelm us, its appeal is never silenced.

6.

What strikes us about Vermeer or Chekhov is the unobtrusive manner in which life’s passage is observed.  When the voices that normally obtrude upon the world are silent—chief among them our own—we feel as though these voices had hung about the world like a veil, and that for once, it has been rent; these voices, and their erstwhile concerns, were idle, and had only dissuaded us from truth.  The obtrusive element in our voices is the instrumental, expressed in vanity, sarcasm, calculation, pettiness, none of which is appropriate to truth in its moral aspect.

7.

If the vision of a life led according to the dictates of conscience is not without melancholy, this is foremost because, having been born into a world in which truth and goodness are eternally pushed aside in favor of ambition, egotism, and greed, we ourselves lapse inevitably into moral debility, and our awakening, regardless of the purity of spirit with which we conduct our lives thereafter, cannot address the failures of our past, which are frozen inside it as in amber; further, the person who follows the dictates of conscience knows that to do so is to forego the better part of those pleasures that had once made life bearable, that the world will misunderstand and mock his decision, and that whatever suffering he relieves or fails to bring about will be nothing compared to the misery in which the world is steeped, which will persist after he is in his grave.  But his melancholy is of a serene rather than hysterical character.

8.

Truth:  it is because of the constant reliance on this word and its subordinates that Nabokov, full of admiration for Chekhov’s art, still derides him as a purveyor of commonplaces.  What is easier, yet more mysterious, than to exhort that we be true?  Though moral conflict lies at the heart of Chekhov’s stories, his delicate treatment of it contributes little to our understanding of the episodes of our moral lives.  For the many times he writes of infidelity, we come away from his fiction with no clearer an opinion of how adulterers and their wounded spouses should act than that they should be true, and this is too general, too crystalline, to be of broad applicability.

This is not an aesthetic criticism:  in art, the creator’s object is an arrangement of effects and an elegance of structure, and in this respect, Chekhov’s instincts are often impeccable.  But if it is said to be in bad taste to dismiss a work for its didactic or philosophical shortcomings, it remains true that art inspires us to moral reflection, and to censure those reflections would be absurd.  Among other things, Chekhov is a refined moral observer, and as moral actors, we should strive constantly to refine our own such observations; therefore it would be wasteful to forego plumbing morality in Chekhov out of misplaced allegiance to art for art’s sake.

9.

 One of Chekhov’s stock characters is the penitent drunkard.  Through inveterate falsehood and sentimentality, he has squandered his credit with the world.  We should not say he is insincere, for at those moments when he declares his good intentions, he is convinced of the purity of his heart, but rather that he has no strength to live out the consequences of his words.  Without this strength, an honest existence is impossible; from the vestiges of his moral nature, he makes promises he is too weak to keep, and his life becomes a hysteric flight from them and from the people he has made them to; when he begins to yearn for truth, it is primarily for a kind of existence he need no longer flee.

For such a person, the maxim “Be true!” is curative, and as readers, we are moved by the humility that overcomes Chekhov’s characters in the course of their redemption.  But it is curious that those tales in which he plausibly presents a moral awakening in terms of its process are aesthetically of the second rank, while his finest ones, to which the term “nuanced” is often applied, either leave this process in suspension or pass over it diegetically, as with Laevsky’s and Von Koren’s transformations in “The Duel.”  It strikes me that a lack of clarity obtains in critics’ taste for praising Chekhov’s nuance and ambiguity, and that we must distinguish these terms’ ethical and aesthetic acceptations.  In aesthetics, ambiguity and nuance are desirable of themselves, and refer to certain irreducibles without which the work in question cannot properly be called art; whereas in ethics, nuance and ambiguity rather denote a depth of attentiveness than the renunciation of judgment.  In the end, ethical considerations strive for clarity in a way that distinguishes them from art.

10.

Those tales of Chekhov’s in which a moral conversion is rendered plausibly as a process fail aesthetically to the extent that their lesson is too easily generalized; having finished them, we extract their moral, and the subtleties that animated it fade.  In the masterpieces, where the conversion is either halted or alluded to elliptically, the ethical mechanics is shrouded by the imagery’s intensity.  Throughout Chekhov’s work, there is a constant struggle between the ethical and aesthetic impulses to outdo one another in force.

11.

Is an artistically satisfying reconciliation of the two possible?  Outside of popular art, which, while sharing certain characteristics, may be something qualitatively distinct from the high art of the past 150 years, the answer may be no.  The most prominent and rigorous attempt I know of must be the chapters concerning Lyovin’s evolution in his growth toward Kitty in Anna Karenina.  When I read this novel, the temptation to skip them is enormous; they have always marred the book for me, and lacked the luster of mimetic truth.  Are we simply more inclined to accept the etiology of a disaster such as Anna’s than that of a moral evolution like that of Lyovin?  It is true that what passes for evidence, amid the intellectual and aesthetic prejudices of our age, presses us to favor the possibility of collapse over redemption, so that descriptions of growth seem inherently false, and we prefer to take our inspiration and heroism from newspapers and memoirs, where they can be fact-checked.

But to emphasize our cynicism is to overlook a fundamental aesthetic principle that transcends passing attitudes towards morality and valor:  the need of tension to carry a story forward.  This relates to our own struggles for survival and mastery, which are projected into literature as into dreams:  what is unresolved invariably begs for attention, and we turn to it from what appears to be secure.  To the degree that we are assured that all will turn out well, there is no stake for us, and our devotion wanes.  When reading absorbs us, our attention feels necessary to carry the plot forward; we may know the ending, but the thought of it dissipates amid the furor of romance or the hail of enemy fire, just as the certainty that we are safe aboard an airplane is of no use to us in the midst of panic.

12.

Success narratives—guides to a better marriage or financial independence—also illustrate the process of moral evolution, and we may seek to impose their teachings on our own lives.  Though they share many features of fiction and may in fact be fiction, we accept them, they build tension in us, and we peruse them for their guiding principles as we would a novel for its resolutions.  The difference between a success narrative and an illustration of moral evolution in fiction is solely one of credence on the reader’s behalf:  whereas in our hearts we doubt we should redeem ourselves by marrying and retiring to the country, like Lyovin, we believe we might achieve “hot monogamy” by following the steps in the eponymous best-seller.

Supposing it were possible to bring to bear on fiction the same credence we grant newspapers, self-help books, and memoirs, would we maintain the reigning opprobrium on didacticism in art?

13.

We reject didacticism in literature as we do prescriptivism in life:  too simplistic, too reductive; extraneous when the matter at hand is clear, unsuitable when it is not.  Or should we rather say:  the morally unambiguous situation is not appropriate to literature.  Though it is widely accepted that hygiene is important for a healthy life, it is inconceivable that a novel should be written in praise of the benefits of hygiene.  A cautionary tale about the consequences of ignoring hygiene, though perhaps suitable for a child, would be insulting to an adult.  The just precept in literature is of interest in two cases:  when it is adopted quixotically, against the dictates of the protagonist’s world, or when it is broken by a character whose dignity is maintained, as in Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.  In the first case, the pleasure afforded is alternately projective and self-congratulatory:  either we identify with the hero, and his struggles, psychologically, become our own, or else we side with him against his oppressors; regardless, we bask in an impression of our own nobility that a sympathetic reading has conferred on us.  In the second, we confront tragedy, in the Hegelian sense of a conflict between two rights—the precept, and the character’s dignity in conflict with that precept—and are afforded two pleasures:  the intellectual thrill of the riddle and the emotional-aesthetic one of proximity to danger—to the contradictions that destroy the protagonist, but leave us happily alive.

14.

The cautionary tale is aesthetically inadequate because it does not respect the dignity of its characters.  When we speak of the requirement that a work of art be true, it is chiefly to this respect for dignity we refer.  But what do we mean when we speak of dignity?

Above all, in spite of those views of the subject that, since the early humanists, have stressed its innateness and inviolability, we must affirm it to be a reaction-formation, born of rebellion against circumstances, that distinguishes abuse from impersonal violence.  We cannot imagine the notion of dignity arising in a world devoid of threats to it any more than one of truth in a world free of ignorance and error.  To look into the nature of dignity, then, is rather to inquire into the circumstances that give rise to the feeling of indignity and lead the subject to armor himself with the concepts of dignity and indignity and imperatives to respect the former.

We need only invert those ideas of dignity that have come to us from the humanists and from Kant.  If we are told that dignity is inviolable, we should say that the concept of dignity exists to preserve the feeling of dignity from violation; if we read in Bettelheim that dignity is “man’s inherent ability to regulate his life,” we may note that in countless circumstances, man is unable to regulate his life, and as he finds this humiliating, he fabricates a concept, and a set of practices surrounding it—really more a set of customs and a manner of speaking than a concept—that guard him from this humiliation.  The root of the idea of dignity is impotent aggression, incapacity to fight back against humiliation; when Jean Améry strikes his aggressor in the face, despite the savage beating he incurs thereby, he affirms that this act constituted a restoration of his dignity.

But the role of altruism is also essential.  If the concept of dignity occurs to us in the course of our own humiliation, it does so equally, as an outgrowth of our empathy, when we observe the infliction of power on the defenseless, so long as we have not perverted our instincts by allegiance to some herd mentality.  This altruism forms the basis for our objections to the simplicity of cautionary tales as well as to the cruelty of caricature; the character has become real to us, but we see him as helpless against the depredations of the author, imposed on him from above; a remarkable example of this is Jean Améry’s defense of Charles Bovary against his treatment by Flaubert in Charles Bovary: Country Doctor; and many novels on behalf of the maligned serve to dignify their subjects against the mass of popular opinion, which is itself only a kind of badly written fiction.

Thus, of a great work of tragedy, we demand that the protagonist be noble; whereas comedy, which appeals most often to the vulturine instincts, has much of its basis in contempt for weakness and joy in the humiliation of others; and the tragi-comic involves a self-chastening according to which we dabble in cruelty before offering the beset character an out, and then reflect warmly on our magnanimity.

15.

 If we truly believed in the free agency of a gambler or adulterer, we could not grant them that empathy that is the animating force of stories.  Our recognition of such characters’ dignity lies not in our acknowledgement of their sovereignty, but in our sorrow when the illusion of it crashes against an ineluctable doom; not of their subjectivity, but rather their subjection; fundamentally, that is to say, of their capacity to suffer.

16.

What is moral ambiguity in a story, then?  A situation where suffering is inevitable.  Our reflection on it relates to competing claims of dignity, to the attempt to determine who is least deserving of a suffering that must be borne by someone.  While the intellectual puzzle of apportioning suffering begs for an elegant solution, relating to the universal instinct for justice, from an aesthetic perspective, this solution can never be definitive, lest the work in question devolve into didacticism.

[1] “Melancholy itself is nothing more than an unconscious memory,” would be an ironed-out but serviceable translation, but the structure Flaubert employs, the false passive or passive-reflexive, allows for the broader range of interpretations explored above.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adrian West is a writer and translator as well as a contributing editor at Asymptote. His work has appeared in numerous publications including McSweeney’s, Words Without Borders, and The Brooklyn Rail.  He has recently completed a novel entitled The Aesthetics of Degradation.  He currently lives between the United States and Spain with the cinema critic Beatriz Leal Riesco.

Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, Sarah Churchwell, Virago 2013

The reporter Nellie Bly, writing about F Scott Fitzgerald in 1922, instructed her audience not to ‘praise a book like that beautiful and damned thing just because a smart and undesirable lot of young nobodies call it literature. It is a pitiful thing to see a young man like Fitzgerald, with a wonderful talent, going as he has, but it is not too late for him, and here is hoping that he will do the great thing which he can and write a book which people would not fear to read aloud to their mothers and other decent folk.’ The NYT‘s Books of the Year roundup entombed Fitzgerald beneath a sediment of filler, with the brief comment that ‘Young Mr Scott Fitzgerald… continued his flippant mood in The Beautiful and the Damned.’ H L Mencken, also, dismissed The Great Gatsby as ‘no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that.’ Critics do not always recognise the timeless.

Fitzgerald’s novel haunted American culture for decades before Luhrmann’s movie adaptation. Something in us yearns for a looser and more sophisticated time. Mad Men‘s Don Draper (‘the advertisement of the man’) is a Gatsby of his day (and Fitzgerald did work in advertising for a time). The student narrator of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a working-class man who aspires to academic eminence (and is prepared to participate in a murder to get it) rereads the novel one night and is kept awake afterwards by ‘certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.’ In The Wire, an incarcerated D’Angelo Barksdale discusses Gatsby in his prison book group, theorising about the novel in pessimistic terms (‘Don’t matter that some fool say he different’) that certainly chime with his own sad fate. At the end of the Boston-based Cheers sitcom, landlord Sam Malone has to turn away a mysterious shadowy figure who approaches his bar after it has been locked up — so much like Gatsby’s ‘final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know the party was over.’ Although it is not mentioned in the text, I believe Stephen King’s The Shining owes a little to Gatsby. Jack Torrance is at heart a family man, but in certain inner chambers of his being he dreams of a Jazz Age fantasia, an endless party filled with glittering women, harsh merry laughter, ‘little love, not here, but a steady undercurrent of sensuousness.’ The Overlook — a semi sentient hotel once owned by the kind of cutthroats and bootleggers Gatsby associated with — gets him with alcohol and an endless Black and White Ball that reels on through the spectral eras. King epigrammed his novel with Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’: ‘But, in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent revel[...]‘

Here’s my theory: ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ is The Great Gatsby‘s literary antecedent. A rich nobleman, Prince Prospero, locks himself and his court inside ‘an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste.’ Outside, the plague known as the ‘Red Death’ is raging. This plague has ‘devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood.’ But Prospero does not care: he’s locked his castle up with furnaces and massy hammers and gates of iron, and inside he’s got all the booze, entertainment and ‘hale and light-hearted friends’ he needs. His halls presage Gatsby’s love of wild colour (‘The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout’) and his ‘gigantic clock of ebony’ would have hung well on Gatsby’s own mansion wall. As far as Prospero is concerned, ‘The external world could take care of itself’:

In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the ‘Red Death.’

Of course, Prospero’s fortifications are ultimately worthless. The Red Death holds sway over all.

The idea of the party seems bound up in the civilised mind with that of annihilation. Sarah Churchwell, in her chronicle of Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age, quotes a New York Times article of June 1922 that fretted over ‘a worrying new phenomenon known as the cocktail party, at which ‘inebriate’ persons of both sexes gathered; soon ‘animosities develop, quarrels arise, and not infrequently the end of the ‘party’ is some sorry form of the tragical.’ The American establishment was also rattled by the rise of the ‘flapper’ — independent-minded women, who knew books and liked a drink, who were not terribly interested in marriage and childbirth, who were promiscuous but always in control. Zelda Fitzgerald wrote a Metropolitan piece called ‘Eulogy on the Flapper’ which claimed that ‘Flapperdom… is making them intelligent and teaching them to capitalise their natural resources and get their money’s worth.’ At a time when women could still be arrested on charges of ‘incorrigibility’ this was strong stuff. (There is a fascinating recent article by Lisa Hix on the ‘working class flapper… a full-blown, grassroots feminist revolution’ which disproves the myth that bohemianism is confined to the idle rich.)

In January 1920 the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect, laying down a national ban on alcohol, with 1,520 federal agents tasked to enforce it. The experiment was such a laughable failure that we remember the 1920s as the apex of hedonism. Churchwell’s book is a wealth of anecdote on the counterproductivity of the prohibitionist dream. A joke in newspaper cartoons featured an old drunk, recovering from a twenty-hour binge, who complains that Volstead should be repealed: that way, he says, he might be able to cut down. Gangsters like Arnold Rothstein and ‘Lucky’ Luciano (and Jay Gatsby) flooded cities and towns with bootleg liquor, consumed with barely the pretence of secrecy. The rich carried on as they were in nightclubs and speakeasies; the poor drank backwoods rotgut that took their sight for days at a time. By 1922 a flotilla of boats had appeared off Long Island Sound, just into international waters and beyond the law’s reach: bootleggers could simply sail three miles out to buy their drink without fear of prosecution. One of Churchwell’s stories has a cop walking around a speakeasy, collecting bribes from every drinker in the place. When he reaches a group of patrons who confess that they have no money left for bribes, the indignant officer replies, ‘Well, I’ve a good mind to run you in!’ Enforcement could be more proactive, but did not always get better results. In one night of October 1922 police raided a joint on East Fourth Street only to find ‘a shower of cups, saucers, plates and cooking utensils thrown at them by staff. The owner’s wife knocked out one agent cold with a rolling pin.’

Pleasure seems to have a shadow side. The long boom of the Jazz Age was followed by the Great Crash of 1929. The reliance on organised crime for access to alcohol meant that revelry was intimately entwined with murder and corruption. There is the obvious physical recompense of the hangover, a neurochemical punishment for the good times of the night before. The insight that Churchwell brings is that Fitzgerald, to some extent, shared the puritan instincts of the Temperance league. He told a friend that ‘Parties are a form of suicide. I love them but the old Catholic in me secretly disapproves.’ He knew of the foul trade behind the glittering nights and wove references to contemporary crimes into his novels. He was concerned with social status, and said that ‘I have never been able to stop wondering where my friends’ money came from.’ He was sceptical of the powers behind the boom: ‘Fitzgerald recognised the Gilded Age tycoons and financiers for the glorified crooks they were’ — men like Charles Ponzi, whose name is now a byword for pyramid schemes of all types, and Jay Gould, the railroad baron and strikebreaker who once boasted that ‘I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.’ Like Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald was of the party and not of it, within and without. His own life, and Zelda’s, was cut off in dissolution and mental illness. He saw the Red Death coming. His credo was ‘Et in arcadia ego: beauty is not alone in the garden. Death is waiting there too.’

Churchwell brings the context to life without forgetting that the essence of The Great Gatsby is the nature of ideals and dreams. Gatsby was born a North Dakota farmboy, drifts into crime and leverages his way up the ladder through black business deals. His house is Prospero’s palace of dreams — ‘everything we can’t know, this divergence, this scope, this versatility, these enswirled individuals who laugh, flicker and vanish.’ Nothing is at it appears, the pages of the books remain uncut, nothing is as it seems. Indistinctness is the centre of beauty, and I only really understood Fitzgerald’s novel when some random student, in our seminar group, said that ‘Maybe dreams are only valuable if they remain dreams’ — a throwaway remark, something I’ve never forgotten.

By the time we meet Gatsby, he is in an impossible position: still scrambling for the light across the water, deeply in love with a woman who likes him, but not enough to leave her husband, and meanwhile reporters are swarming around his business empire and the Red Death is closing in. If circumstances had not got to him first, he probably would have shot himself. And towards the end of Careless People I began to feel that Fitzgerald (and Churchwell) was too hard on Gatsby, who was after all just a lonely man who wanted some friends to drink with. Churchwell draws the obvious parallels between the Jazz Age and the crash of 2008 (the Ponzi scandal was ‘a lesson that America would spend the rest of the century forgetting’) and she describes the American dream as an idea ‘that if you go to a different place, you can become a different person, that identity is just an accident.’ Clearly the 1920s model of free markets and good times had its problems. But the twentieth century would be ravaged by a very different set of ideologues — presaged in Tom Buchanan’s enthusiasm for Max Nordeau-type propaganda — that valued national and class identity all too highly. The religious-communitarian backlash in today’s Europe is almost as worrying. Sure, Gatsby, with his silver shirts and pink suits, was vulgar and pretentious. But where would we be if no one ever pretended to be something they weren’t?

It is difficult to do justice to Sarah Churchwell’s masterful book, in one a literary biography, an analysis of a fiction and a portrait of an era. It should be required reading for all students of American literature and The Great Gatsby — a novel both timeless and relevant to everyone, even your mother, and other decent folk.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals. He is reviews editor of 3:AM.

The Moon’s Jaw, Rauan Klassnik, Black Ocean 2013

We’re in the concentration camps, where the evils are always banal. And we have the usual itching from the usual twinset: the doting colluder, the wrung out opportunist. I turn and almost every page takes its lead from Catullus, loving and hating all at once, where every bit of tenderness will border on cruelty, its intent ambiguous, industrial – them white noise dogshit pigments of Klassnik’s gnawing cadences. For here, as in Holy Land, the rat has become the brain, and the asshole the cunt, and this is pornography, this is Artaud’s “overheated factory” beneath the skin, this is The Moon’s Jaw – hanging off. We know how ethics sours our goodness with its one thought too many, and it’s Klassnik’s method too, when he ruins a saint or dirties an innocent – all his limping vestiges of beauty, uglified. The snake’s jaw dislocates to accommodate a calf, and like this the moon will open, a hole inside a hole, back to kill us as it talks us out of death.

All sincerity is deviant, and The Moon’s Jaw knows this, and celebrates it and suffers it. In my hands there’s this bodily rejection of self-censorship, this ejaculation of fetters. And I was wrong: I thought Guyotat had dibs on this much cum. But I’m getting there, where the pain’s in the waiting, where the pleasure is, in the woods with my top as she takes a cheese wire to my gleam. But I’m being slowed down: the dashes and slashes and ellipses and colons and proliferating periods choking my orgasm like pictures of nun’s cunts weeping gleet over the ruffled heads of birds. His dashes like sutures on a skeleton, keeping together what’s already gone. And for all the cum and blood, there’s no sex and violence here, only sex-violence: a self-neutralising amalgam that’s the antithesis of titillation. Like the rat and his maze, the two have simply grown together. All opportunity for frisson done with, neutered.

In Vegas—Lilacs, boiling, cool, & dark—You begin to eat my ass:
Wiping yr mouth, from time to time—& glaring up at me: Like a
Vampire, a Lion, a Shaman—Swaying, bubbling, seething: Down
into every nerve. . . Cold white shores swaying… Till—At last—
You slide in a finger… Then two. Fist! Elbow! Shoulder! Head!
. . . & you’re inside me: & yr breasts are my breasts. Yr cunt—My
cunt. Yr slow dark heaving mouth—My slow dark heaving mouth.

These appetites are sick, and terminally so; they’ve crawled up inside other things and are dying there. And the softnesses here are those of the broken down hooker, the jaded porn star, who when she eviscerates herself does it cunt-first, exorcising the pleasure centre with a talon, with the heavy undercarriage of what we thought of once as made entirely of flying. Contaminated miscreations these, these “Chirping Gargoyles”, these “Dolphins moaning in gangrene.” And yet regenerations continue, the new creatures feeling themselves out, teething their cavities and bleeding gums on the need to be anything at all: anomalous creatures that have “learned to die. & not to.”

And again with the slowing down. As we drag out the death to the death, prolonging the half-blind horror of our interminable decay, until the only distraction left is that of fucking the shit out of it, cumming inside it and breeding siblings to it, gestating its mutated fetuses in vats of the stuff, and we drink it all down and we puke it all up – self-witnessing – and drink it again until the appetites that keep us here die. But they don’t die, so bury us this day in a river of tongues. For the appetite ignores us, like the cosmos we stabbed that didn’t even flinch. We’re barely the steam off its piss on a cold day. But I’m reminded he’s kindly, that there’s love in him that’s ferocious to leave, but still can’t get past the breath off the page, the way it smells like Dennis Nilsen’s drains. And I recall he was always just scragging himself, and that he found a way to hang around afterwards, to sample his own company. And he had sweetness in him, and light and tenderness, and what weakness, what need – I’ll “pour his ashes on my head in the healing sun.” And there, out the corner of my eye, those Sad Sketches of wardrobe interiors, their folded dead men – men no longer men, but concepts of what men do: externalisations, then, of that Mr Nilsen’s trauma.

You did up my hair—Holding it tight like I liked—& even tighter
as I cried out suddenly: Glancing over at a fetus in a jar. As though
it could save me—Crawl back into me—& fill me w/ milk.
Children, hands locked, dancing all round my gleaming body. You
painted me: & jeweled me. Posed me in bed: Dead, but reaching up
still. Lips parted slightly. Shining blue.

The world returns like a scene from a halal abattoir, our own materials fed back to us tasting of fear, our faeces gilded in opulent metals, in rubberised gold, in “cathedral meat.” And now it’s a choice, and you can blindsight gore or you can fuck it and eat it out, make origami storks and flowers from its skin, put your tongue down its throat and into its belly and lick clean the babies you put there. You can clean it all unrecognisable with the blackness inside your mouth. But when everything’s refulgent, there will still be pretty girls, their faces framed in roses, viewing themselves through two-way mirrors; a child killer cranking out one last sneer of semen into the metal of a death row latrine, there on the other side. And out the jaws of his keeper’s zipper, wilted and misshapen, a child’s sucked thumb. And there’s another mirror, with an Austrian man in it, and he’s washing his cock after visiting a son he borrowed and never gave back. And yet people still mean well. And then the shutters are gone, and the locked doors left open, and in the new light, “There’s no way out. But we don’t stop trying.”

Trakl tried and gave us twilights and poppies and celestial vaccines, and those toothless angels, poisoned, their useless wombs reconstructed from blue space and bloated with rats. And Klassnik? And Klassnik?… He’s here now to reiterate that having your cake is eating your cake, and that the cake is made from cum and from blood and from shit and from urine and from all manner of excruciations, but that still the cake gets baked, and that therein lies the flaw, and therein lies the dream of us, and of love, and soft grass and flowers and a moon’s silence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gary J. Shipley is the author of six books of various sizes. His work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in literary magazines such as The Black Herald, Gargoyle, Paragraphiti, nthposition, elimae, and >kill author, and in philosophy/theory journals such as continent and Glossator. More details can be found here.

Taipei, Tao Lin, Canongate 2013.

Tao Lin’s last book was titled Richard Yates not so much to signify that it had anything much to do with the writer Richard Yates (it didn’t), but to draw attention to the haphazard and inadequate nature of book titles generally. In a similar vein, Lin has stated that his new novel, Taipei, might just as easily have been called MacBook. As it happens, MacBook would actually encapsulate some of the formal manoeuvring we will soon see at work, but the novel itself would be completely devoid of all narrative drive were it not for ‘Taipei’, that very definite point in geographical space which hangs over the entire work, letting the reader know that at some point Paul, the novel’s heavily narcotised main character, will finally cease falling asleep at every party he has just arrived at. At some point, says the title, somebody is going to go somewhere.

Taipei is an aimless, auto-fictional account of an arbitrarily framed period in Paul’s life. It begins several months before his book tour, when Paul breaks up with his girlfriend, Laura. He visits his parents in Taipei, after which he withdraws from the world for several months. Upon re-entering, Paul takes a lot of drugs, goes to a lot of parties, takes a lot of drugs, goes on his book tour, takes a lot of drugs, enjoys a fleetingly enthusiastic friendship with Daniel, takes a lot of drugs, finds a new girlfriend, Erin, with whom he takes a lot of drugs, marries in Las Vegas and takes a lot of drugs honeymooning in Taipei, before their relationship begins to turn sour and they take a lot of drugs. The novel is so dutifully monotonous that the reader comes to view the introduction of stimulants as a genuinely dramatic event in a narrative hitherto somnolent with benzodiazepine and other muscle relaxants.

Drugs serve a purpose within the narrative, as they do in most ostensibly serious writing they appear in. But, as with a lot of such writing, it is difficult to get away from the idea that so much conspicuous illicit consumption is included at least partly for the benefit of the author’s own image. Drug-use is cool, and always has been – especially if the user is in some way artistic. Rock stars are all but obliged to take drugs at some point in their career if they are to maintain any level of subcultural credit. Meanwhile, Rimbaud famously speaks of visionary transcendence coming as a result of ‘a long, deliberate derangement of all the senses’. Huxley quotes Blake to suggest in long-tired tones that, on mescaline, the doors of perception are cleansed and everything appears ‘as it is, infinite’. Even weedy old Walter Benjamin wrote about the ‘magnificent constructions of light, glorious and splendid visions, cascades of liquid gold’ he experienced upon eating hashish in 1928. Those days are now gone, I think. It is no longer just the rock star, the artist and the romanticised down-and-out who take drugs; now everyone does it. Drugs have become democratised to the point where you can actually shop for them online. It has become a real contemporary issue. As a consequence of this, it would take a very naïve artist today to publically attach themselves to the idea of drug-discovered transcendence and truth. Tao Lin is about as far from naïve as you can get, and makes no such claims explicitly herein. Paul takes drugs with studied nonchalance and says he does so in order to feel ‘normal’. And yet, throughout Taipei, it always feels as if, by including so much drug-use, Lin is noncommittally drawing on a residual mythology to tacitly suggest that this, his cool new book, gets to the heart of timely and timeless truths at once.

In reference to the movie Eat, Pray, Love, which Paul and Erin watch on the flight to Taipei, we read of the movie’s ‘unacknowledged but knowing, it had seemed, usage of clichés’. That phrase – ‘unacknowledged, but knowing’ – seems fit to describe the rather sly manner in which Lin draws on this residual mythology, which is itself a cliché. It feels designed to fit, in fact, like some sort of acknowledgement, so that the phrase ‘unacknowledged, but knowing’ becomes self-cancelling and therefore ironic; what ‘unacknowledged, but knowing’ actually says is ‘knowing, and hereby obliquely acknowledged’. Not only is the phrase ironic in itself; it also ironizes Lin’s quiet (and, for me, problematic) appeal to the residual mythology of drug-use. Just as Lin is not naïve enough to explicitly endorse certain adolescent perceptions of drug-use, nor is he naïve enough let the text’s implicit statements about it go unironised. Lin, like his characters, is far too self-conscious for all that. ‘I’m doing it,’ says Paul. ‘I’m saying stereotypical things that people say while on mushrooms.’

The words ‘earnest’ and ‘earnestly’ appear over forty times in Taipei; that they have need to be called upon with such frequency gives you some idea as to default register of Lin’s narrative. This is a novel forever at work to ironise its own posturing, though careful never to dissemble it completely, since, I would hazard, this is precisely what will appeal most to many of Lin’s Vice-reading readers. The book is crawling with some truly execrable sentences. ‘Um, so, my debit card, either from cutting so much blow or being maxed out, isn’t working,’ says Daniel at one point ‘with an earnest expression’. Such authorial affect is usually undercut soon after. At a Q&A following a public discussion on the subject of ‘the hipster’, of all things, Paul is pleased to note that most of the questions are addressed to him, ‘although almost all were negative and partially rhetorical, including why he kept writing after the ‘excrement’ that was his previous book.’ And so we come to a point where, it seems, variations on the theme of posturing and ironic distancing will play themselves out at a comfortable, contrapuntal rhythm.

But don’t reach for your slippers yet. To read on from here, confident we’ve caught the novel’s tonal rhythm, would be to ignore those destabilising, dissonant movements where the use of irony is itself disavowed. At one point, Daniel is surprised to find Paul listening to Rilo Kiley, a band he thought Paul had only joked about liking. ‘Paul said he wouldn’t pretend he liked something, or make fun of liking something, or like something “ironically”.’ Later still, though, when he and Daniel are listening to music, Paul ‘clicked “Such Great Heights” by The Postal Service and said “just kidding.” He clicked “The Peter Crisis Jazz” by Don Caballero. He clicked “pause.”’ The characters in Taipei exist in a milieu where a certain style of self-consciousness, irregularly expressed in a need to place ironic distance between themselves and their emotions or actions (‘just kidding’), has a crippling effect upon all social interaction. What I’m most put in mind of is an episode of The Simpsons, where a grungy teenager says that Homer, cast as Cannonball Guy, is cool. His check-shirted friend asks, ‘are you being sarcastic, dude?’, to which he morosely replies: “I don’t even know anymore.” That Taipei, a thematically modish novel, should so recall an episode of a gesturally subversive, but ultimately mainstream television show that was screened in 1996, the same year David Foster Wallace published Infinite Jest, says a great deal about how far we haven’t come. (How long must a zeitgeist hang over us, I wonder, before it becomes just plain geist?) The characters in Taipei can’t listen to music together. They struggle even to accept a gift.

Paul noticed Laura looking at his pile of construction paper and said she could have some if she wanted, and she focused self-consciously on wanting some, saying how she would use it and what colors she liked, seeming appreciative in an affectedly sincere manner – the genuine sincerity of a person who doesn’t trust her natural behavior to appear sincere.

As a consequence of all this, Lin’s characters are unable to maintain any level of true intimacy. The novel starts with Paul ending his relationship with Michelle. Following this, a nascent relationship with Laura is not allowed to develop properly. For no apparent reason, he stops being close friends with Daniel, who promptly exits stage left. When Paul marries Erin, it is in the shared expectation that their relationship won’t last another five months, an expectation that, by the end of the novel, seems still too optimistic. Even within the novel’s romantic relationships, the characters very rarely bring themselves to have sex, either because they are so fucked up on drugs or, perhaps, because sex is a singularly unironisable act. Taipei, it seems to me, is a critique of irony-used-as-shield which itself uses irony to shield its own self-indulgences. This is both appropriate and extremely frustrating.

The relationship between drugs and irony is not limited to the novel’s low-level libido. In Taipei, the characters use both as a way of distancing themselves from their own emotions and behaviour. Paul claims he takes drugs in order to feel ‘normal’ – that is, not so self-conscious. On drugs such as MDMA, then, he becomes less inhibited in his speech, more confident in his actions. And while he must first thank the actual chemical effects of MDMA for this psychological transformation, there’s another element of it, I think, that comes from having at least the option to later write off any expression of emotion as mere drug-talk. For Paul, drugs are another way of not quite meaning what he says. ‘The next two times they ingested ecstasy,’ says the narrator, ‘they both felt what they termed “overdrive,” which for Paul was a whirring, metallic, noise-like presence that induced catatonia and rendered experience toneless – nullifying humor, irony, sarcasm, intimacy, meaning.’

More importantly for Paul, though, drugs constitute a means of controlling an emotional existence which, occurring unassisted, he never trusts entirely. He knows that if he takes LSD, he will not feel bored. He knows that if he takes MDMA, he will feel energised and outgoing. He knows that if takes Xanax, he will feel carefree and vacant. In Paul’s dramatic character, then, we observe an insecure young man who takes comfort in the secure laws of cause and effect, to which he has grown deeply loyal. In the authorial techniques of Tao Lin, we see much the same loyalty.

Lin is never content to allow the behaviour of his protagonist to be presented without a cause. Every word that leaves Paul’s mouth comes with a detailed analysis of the thought-process leading up to it. In the first few pages, as his relationship with Michelle is about to end, we read that Paul, ‘stared dumbly at the gently convex curve of her back, thinking with theoretical detachment that he should console her and that maybe the discomfort of her forearms against the thin metal of the fence had created a location, accessible only to herself, toward which she could relocate, away from what she felt, in a kind of shrinking. “Do you–“ said Paul, and coughed twice with his mouth closed. “Do you want to eat dinner with me somewhere?”’ This unwillingness to let anything go unexplained is not limited to the minutiae of social interaction; it also operates on a much grander biographical scale. In the early stages of the novel, just as the reader is getting used to Paul’s withdrawn, apathetic attitude to the world, the narrative leaps back in time to present a chain of events in Paul’s early life. It begins in first grade, when a classmate beat him at chess and another said his breath smelled, develops through to his sophomore year, when he turned on his mother so that she might start disciplining him, and concludes with his final days in high school, by which point his only remaining friend, Hunter, is described as ‘like an overworked stepfather or sensitive uncle to Paul, the mentally disabled stepson or silent, troubling nephew’. Immediately thereafter, the narrative returns to the present with an account of a long night spent moving from one party to another in a fog of Ambien and alcohol. In this juxtaposition, Paul’s self-consciousness and subsequent drug-abuse are explained, rationalised and, if need be, ‘forgiven’.

As much as Paul’s memories ‘had increasingly occurred to him without context’, they occur to us in clear and complete context. Indeed, despite the copious amounts of drugs taken by its protagonist, the narrative itself never falls into disorder. The reader is never disoriented. While an Ambien-headed Paul struggles to comprehend what is happening at the parties, we resolutely do not. True, Lin stuffs the occasional sentence with clauses at unusual syntactical junctures, making things momentarily difficult to grasp in full detail. But on the level of paragraph, page and chapter – the level on which experience and memory take place – we experience no narrative equivalent of a freak-out. On this level, the relationship between form and content is non-existent. Where Paul keeps losing his memory, and therefore his identity, the reader gets a smooth linear narrative with occasional, well-signposted flashbacks called in to neatly explain or clarify something about the psychopathology of present-tense Paul. In Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, a group of synthesised images is described as ‘less deceptive’ because ‘at least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images’. No such precaution is taken by the narrative voice of Taipei. The ability of language to convey thought in never called into question; in fact, the text often removes itself from free indirect style to directly quote Paul’s apparently verbalised thought-process. ‘Paul, staring at her calmly, thought “she’s definitely drunk” and “normally I would be interested in her, to some degree, but currently I’m obsessed with Laura.”’ Taipei may well be a thematically modish novel, but formally it amounts to a near-anachronism: a unitary psychological novel, told by a reliable third-person narrator willing to spell every last detail out in neutral tones that affect an impossible objectivity. Taipei is not what you’d call a writerly text. Everything is included, processed, and diagnosed.

When Paul and Erin visit Taipei on their honeymoon, they smuggle a box full of ecstasy, MDMA, Ritalin and LSD through customs. On one of the first nights there, Paul and Erin drop two ecstasy pills and a tab of LSD, grab one of their ever-present MacBooks and set off to Ximending, an area of Taipei that Erin says ‘looks like Times Square’. After a long, dispassionate conversation about their respective relationship histories, and a quick trip home to take more drugs, they start using the MacBook to film a movie called Taiwan’s First McDonalds, in which the pair speak to each other at length in ‘the voice’, previously described as ‘an unspecific, aggregate parody of (1) the stereotypical “intellectual” (2) most people in movies (3) most people on TV with a focus on newscasters and National Geographic-style voice-overs’. This has all the hallmarks of a real-life in-joke developed in the midst of an extended binge. It is just one of several examples of a personal in-joke making its way into this very public narrative. It doesn’t come off at all.

A few days later, as Paul is walking through Taipei, the novel seems to bare its soul to us. ‘Technology seemed more likely to permanently eliminate life,’ Paul thinks, ‘by uncontrollably fulfilling its only function: to indiscriminately convert matter, animate or inanimate, into computerized matter, for the sole purpose, it seemed, of increased functioning, until the universe was one computer.’ In a global context, there is very probably some truth to this observation. On a bus moving through Taipei, Paul is said to feel ‘like he could almost sense the computerization that was happening in this area of the universe’. As far as Paul’s character is concerned, however, his observation is an indisputable fact. He spends his honeymoon using his MacBook to make films of himself on drugs; he and Erin decide that, even when they are in the same room together, they will use Gmail chat to have difficult conversations with one another; after Taipei, Paul, Erin and two other friends snort heroin before going to the cinema to live-tweet an X-Men movie. Paul is very attached to his MacBook, which becomes one of the novel’s most significant motifs. It is perhaps for this reason that Lin suggested Taipei could as easily have been called MacBook, but to me it seems as if the MacBook is more than a mere motif; instead, it seems like the novel’s very model.

Just as technology is said to ‘indiscriminately convert matter, animate or inanimate, into computerized matter’, so Lin indiscriminately converts experience, interesting or uninteresting, into novelised experience. Take, for example, ‘the voice’: what I’m guessing started as utter shit-talk while Lin himself was on drugs is somehow deemed worthy to be used as narrative content. The same goes for live-tweeting X-Men on heroin, and any number of other such events in the novel. Lin seems to novelise all his experiences, just as Paul and Erin computerise all of theirs.

Taipei, then, is a novel-as-computer. Its characters speak impersonally and rationally about issues we usually think of as personal and irrational. ‘Sweet,’ Erin tells Paul. ‘You seem to encompass major things of what I want, in ways I feel like only segments of other people… have.’ Here, the concluding ellipsis seems to mimic that moment at the end of a program installation, where the time between 99% and 100% extends disproportionately. If this computer-based simile is only implied, everywhere else such similes are made quite explicit. Narrative phenomena are variously described as being, ‘like a cursor on the screen of a computer that had become unresponsive’; ‘supernatural and comical as a mysterious creature on YouTube’; ’like an amoeba trying to create a personal webpage using CSS’; ‘as if by unzipping a file – newsroom.zip – into a PDF’. ‘Memories,’ Paul realises at one point, ‘were images, which one could crudely arrange into slideshows or, with effort, sort of GIFs maybe.’

Told in the language of file names and code, full of programmatic characters all wired up by drugs, Taipei is a computer, a processor, a troubleshoot report. Right down to its luminescent front cover, it is every inch the MacBook of its alternative title: slightly pretentious, somewhat too sure of itself, this ultra-modern social signifier seems to use a different version of Word, but doesn’t really. MacBook, in sum, runs altogether too smoothly to ever hack for the frozen sea within us.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kevin Breathnach is a recent graduate of Trinity College Dublin, where he studied French and philosophy. His work has appeared in The New Inquiry, The Stinging Fly, the Quarterly Conversation and Totally Dublin.

Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, Finn Brunton, MIT 2013.

Pictairn in the South Pacific is the world’s capital of spam. 45 people live there. Niue and Tokelau are also spam superpowers, also in the South Pacific. Elsewhere Monaco is too, and Andorra. Their computers have been secretly commandeered. Brunton shows how spam has changed life on-line. Most of us only glimpse the tip of its vastness. Spam is not like sand or fog or malfeasance but is specifically ‘a product of particular populations distributed through all the world’s countries…’

The ‘botnet’ uses captured computers all over the world to send out millions of virtually cost free messages. Spam is a negative shape of the history of computer communities. They target people: ‘spamming is the project of leveraging information technology to exploit existing gatherings of attention.’ Brunton says ‘attention’ is a key ingredient in all on-line activity and Spam is the measure of the difference between what we can attend to and the power of technology to exceed our attentiveness. Spammers ‘work in the gulf between our human activities and our machine capabilities.’ Bryan Pfaffenberger talks of ‘technological drama’. Spam is part of a drama about who controls, what is needful, who gets hold of needed things – it’s part of the social and political arguments about these things. It is about what we value and what we ought to value. It is significant because it is neither clear who should win nor what winning would look like. The situation is new, the landscape vast and one that doesn’t stay still. It continues to evolve and Brunton has done a great job in clarifying the immense complexities of the subject. He carefully describes and illustrates his points and offers an engaging and enlightening narrative about a subject that is a murky shape-shifter.

Technological drama is familiar through sci-fi , cyber-punk and their derivatives. Revenge effects are rife in such dramas. Frankenstein is an ur-text for this. Brunton uses the history of heavier-than air flight as his example of how new technologies are co-opted into ideological values and visions. HG Wells warned that it would lead to fascist technocrats. Le Corbusier saw planes as ‘an indictment, an accusation, a summons’ for the future, putting all else to shame. D’Annuzio the fascist and Italo Balbo the commander of Italian North Africa used flight as a symbol of fascist glamour and futuristic dynamism. The USA saw flight as part of a democratic vision taking power abroad. Technology loads its drama with metaphor and dreams and we must ask whose metaphors and dreams they are. Brunton gives the cultural history of the metaphors cross-dressing spam, arguing that without understanding the contingent nature of these metaphors the actual trajectories of Spam can’t be grasped accurately. Brunton throughout is careful to warn us not to take anything at face value. Reading this you have to agree. Spammers and antispammers seem like mirror-images doing a twisty entangled dance.

An ‘impact constituency’ refers to those on whom technology lands. The politics of irrigation in Sri Lanka was a politics to keep farmers on the land away from technology so they could be taxed and controlled more easily. Household computers are now part of this kind of drama. Lewis Mumford talked about about the creation of a bureaucratic ‘megamachine.’ Ted Nelson resisted with the first hackers and his idea of ‘countercomputers.’ There are root paradigms in the drama but Brunton warns that these are neither precise nor simply true or false. ‘They draw their energy and vitality from their unsettled condition of irreconcilable struggle within which new technologies, political initiatives, and movements an be placed and contextualized.’ He discusses how these root paradigms are mobilized to generate response and understanding. Paradigms include ‘submission to the free market, the sanctity of human life, the vital and cleansing power of war… absolute freedom of speech, communal self-defence and self-organisation, the technological autonomy of the capable individual, the inevitability of destructive anarchy without governance… the centrality of commerce to society.’ These are familiar in much contemporary discourse.

Technologies exploit ambiguities of their own foundational purpose. Groups and individuals attach to the foundational paradigms and attach them to these ambiguities so they can feed off them. The complex indeterminacy of the Internet creates the space for Spam. Spam wastes our time for spammers gain. New forms are continually being invented. Twitter spam has now started. The development of ebooks has led to Spambooks. The vast majority of all email sent everyday is spam. The numbers are enormous. Those controlling this are diminishing. As is the general interest in it as filtering hides it from us.

Brunton says there are three epochs for spam. Epoch one goes from the 1970s to 1995. This is the time when the first conversations were taking place about how the networks should be ruled. ‘It closes with the privatization of the Internet and the end of the ban on commercial activity, the arrival of the Web, and the explosion of spam that followed the green Card Lottery message on Usenet in May 1994.’ The cast list of this part of the drama includes ‘ postnational anarchists, baronial system administrators, visionary protocol designers, community building ‘process-queens’, technolibertarian engineers, and a distributed mob of angry antispam activists.’

Epoch two is from 1995 to 2003, from the privatization of the network to the Dot com bomb and the passage of the CAN-SPAM Act in the USA. Spam diversified in this period and boundaries became muddied. Phase three is from 2003 to now. It’s about ‘algorithms and human attention.’ Spammers are facing new law enforcement, powerful spam filters and user-produced content tools. To survive, a criminal infrastructure is being developed using systems of automation and distributed computing across the globe. Free from the constraints of being legitimate, spam is able to be more creative within a hard-core criminal frame. It shades towards militarization.

Brunton discusses each epoch. The first includes a history of computer networks. This epoch was about building communities, managing scarce resources on networked computers, of marking and then stopping bad behaviour. Initially these were specific to types of machine, institutions and projects. The internet allowed these to talk together. It grew but most networks were isolated from others. They developed within their own protocols, codes and groups. Then supercommunities were started which allowed for greater communication and sharing across networks. Communities were porous and borders invisible. The term ‘community’ was freighted positively. ‘Spam’ was created as a provocation and limit test to the warm feel of these ‘communities.’ It highlighted the tension in the concept of community between infrastructure and expression, of capabilities and desire. Spam requires us to notice that even if nestled in a ‘community’ we are obliged to attend to our own infrastructures and consider in whose name are they operating. It’s a grab for developing self awareness and the possibility of refusal. It reverses the Deweyian idea of a community based on a ‘general interest’ and replaces it with a ‘reactive public’ that is forced against its will to pay attention. In these terms Spam dislodges complacency and compliance. It is a way of reminding us of our obligation to stick it to the Man.

The constraints limiting early computers contributed to spam development in the early phase. Repeated use of a single word was able to fill the infrastructure with a prank message more quickly than real messages. But it was more than merely a prank. ‘It acts as a provocation to social definition and line drawing – to self-reflexivity and communal utterance.’ Spammers self-defined. There were four types: royalists, anarchists, technolibertarians and parliamentarians. Royalists wanted responsibility of spammers to be in the hands of wizards (system admin staffers). Wizards work in a world of merit. It was a tiny world. It was a world profoundly different from the market and the compromises of democracy. The wizards were trusted because they could do the job. Cultures were blended: academics fused with militia and with wizards. This weird and unique culture was matched by the strange technological culture of computing manufacture. Microchip production, for example, takes place in a clean room measured in terms of particles larger than a micron. A surgery has 20,000 per square foot, a clean room one at most. This was the era of Paul Edwards’ ‘cold war computing’. Containment was the key idea: ‘a closed world space: enclosed and insulated, containing a world represented abstractly on a screen, rendered manageable, coherent, and rational through digital calculation and control … a dream, a myth, a metaphor for total defence, a technology of closed-world discourse.’ There was a bubble of trust and shared understanding.

It was a small local space the size of a small town populated by smart townspeople. In this early environment attention and bandwidth were scarce. Waste was a concern, and so too the definition of waste. Who gets to say what waste is? Systems developed were not from the market or the militia but from wizards working out their protocols. MIT Anti-Vietnam messages in 1971 emerged: THERE IS NO WAY TO PEACE. PEACE IS THE WAY’ was a seminal message. It was a quote from AJ Muste, a Christian pacifist and anti-Vietnam activist. Wizards began to hack these messages using their privileged position. Autodidactic hacker wizards were strangers to that alternative universe. They wanted minimal interference from outside. Rifts between the ‘community’ of users (market, academic, military) became exposed. The idea of junk mail and spam arose as ‘containment leaks’ and solutions of this small world were discussed in terms of personal self-regulation. Complex primatives grew: systems were pressurized to be learnable increasingly quickly.

As computing expanded into the home the more recognizable shape of spam emerged. Internet use used systems that were cheap to send things on but expensive to receive. The battle between users and powers that be became clearer to see. Wizards – now ‘barons’ –were able to censure information from other sites by refusing to copy messages from one site to theirs. Bryan Pfaffenberger is a key writer on this. All speech was allowed so long as it didn’t threaten to crash the system in some way. Spam was not abuse if understood in these terms. But the anxieties around developing netiquette seemed to encompass more than could be left in the hands of Wizards. Technolibertarians held that defensive software tools will provide a purely technological solution and no governance will be needed. But no one could find the badly behaved. In March 31, 1993 ‘a project designed to manage a threat to the social containment system for spam turned into a disastrous source of automated spam – to the social problems produced by the project of totally free anonymous speech, we can add technical problems of putting a stop to it.’

Parliamentarians wanted to regulate wizard powers and communities through votes and semi democratic structures. They wanted to control the Net before the Department of Justice officials started to get involved. Anti-spam social enforcement used prankish methods that were mirrors of the alleged spammers bad behaviour. These were the chivari, ‘a distinct network-mediated social structure, a mode of collective surveillance and punishment for the violation of norms and mores.’ The crisis of control led to sidestepping the wizards. Home based computer users moved from Usenet to the Internet. Canter and Siegel’s April 12ths 1994 ‘Green Card Lottery’ chivari attack on 6000 new groups underestimated the scale of its provocation. ‘Two individuals in Arizona had just enormously overconsumed the pool of common resources.’ Parliamentarians were too slow to respond. Counter-chivari counter bombed offenders and their hosting wizards. The outrage was that the original chivari attack had ignored the importance of salience. Spam became whatever was off-message.

Epoch two’s chapter is titled ‘Make money Fast.’ After the opening epoch we confront a ‘dense matrix of overlapping and interacting actors and forces – the infrastructure of network protocols, hardware and standards, activist groups, hackers, lawyers, demography – with feedback loops , arms races, struggle over resources, and reinventions all going into making spam.’ This epoch is about developing threads of the concept of community, entwining the capture of attention with making money, collective organization and the law. Spammers of this epoch ended up badly. They tended to be shallow and damaged people. In this time spam feigned respectability and in the end failed. In so doing it reshaped the web. To understand this epoch the book chunks it into four separate aspects: a struggle between a spammer and a vigilante anti-hacker; the second chunk chronicles an anti-spam battle on Usenet; the third examines the Nigerian 419 messages; the fourth is about the co-evolution of search engines and their spammers.

In this epoch Spam becomes a domain of proliferating niches looking for inexpensive and unregulated ways of getting audiences. Sex lines is an example, hosts in leasing countries structured business round taking a per minute cut of calls from the USA. Host countries made massive money. ‘Sao Tome kept approximately $500,000 of the $5.2 million worth of sex calls, using the money to start a new telecom system.’ This is strange. As Brunton puts it, ‘ lonely, sexually frustrated Americans unintentionally built telephone infrastructure for an island they had never heard of off the coast of Central Africa.’ Some spam self-described itself as legitimate, others as crooked and out for themselves. Many worked in between these two positions, ambiguous and grey.

Chivari campaigns became increasingly brutal and deeply invasive vigilante acts of social pillory. Before filtering and botnets and the war of algorithms it is possible to see the quotidian work of a massive spam operation. The miliuex was strange, involving ‘people in a complex relationship with legitimacy, accepting the cost of getting ripped off with some regularity in return for being able to operate largely outside the space of courts and contracts, in an informal part-criminal economy.’ Spammers exploited each other. Antispammers were considered sad geeks by the spammers. Spammers were just trying to make a living; antiapammers were ‘anti-commerce net-nazis’ etc. The anti spammers were annoying but not a deterant. Laws were slow even when they finally did catch up.

Antispam used Spam as a poison which when properly applied is its own antidote. Usenet had the ability to cancel previously sent messages if sent from the same author. Forged cancels allowed antispam erasure, which in turn led to mission creep and issues around authorization and targets. And what happened if bullies, bad actors and trolls got hold of the technology? The capacity to cancel messages wasn’t an unambiguous good. It set off endless cat and mouse chases between spam and anti spam, ratcheting up a Road-runner effect. In the Warner Bros. cartoon written by the brilliant Michael Maltese, Wile E. Coyote tries to catch the Roadrunner using elaborate plans. It was originally designed as a parody of Tom and Jerry but became popular in its own right. Its own momentum undermined its effectiveness as parody. Antispam finds itself in the same bind in this epoch. Antispam metaphors were difficult to construct to display why spam was negative. Thinking of the Internet as a space allows for spam to be seen as a violation of the spatial boundaries. But just as thinking about a hospital in terms of it just being a building would be an error, so too the internet as a space fails. Usenet is a protocol, but also twenty million people in active discussions without legal or proprietary control. Metaphors have consequences and so are important.

Virus has one set of connotations but other metaphors could have been used, such as weeds. Brunton argues that metaphors have influenced the way technologies have grown and practices with them. Virus picks up the idea of bodies being attacked from outside and needing external exterminators; weeds pick up the idea of gardens where care and pruning doesn’t rely on external bodies. Metaphors have long shadows and complex implications. Company fax.com was moving 800,000 unsolicited faxes a week by 2002. The 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act (amended in 1997 to allow prosecution of junk mail) meant you could take the business sending them to court and grab their assets. But this ‘doesn’t scale up to the rapidly growing population of spammers.’ The question was; ‘is it worth the … trouble to send off a search through the backwoods of Vermont for a potentially armed neo-Nazi whose profits are buried in caches of precious metals somewhere?’ Florida became a good place for spammers because it offered great protection for real estate from civil judgments combined with gentle antifraud statutes. Favourite products being shifted were herbal medications, stock touting, insider trading, porn, laundering and fraudulent philanthropic organizations. Spammers countered anti-spammers arguing they were legit businesses being pranked by extremist anti-capitalists. Free speech issues were being raised. But new antispam bills suggested a target not of bulk mailing but rather content. This was ‘chilling’ 1984 stuff for Brunton. Such bills failed in committee.

Techno solutions were considered. Spammers needed compliant or at least inattentive ISPs. Liability could be attached to these. A question was how to make this fair? ‘Watch where the new language is turning up and where the lawyers collect, usually in that sequence’ says Timothy Case. The relationship between the law and the Internet as a whole is thrown into clear relief by consideration of Spam. In 1996 antiapammers were beginning to develop new ideas. The charivari had a new official headquarters, NANAE, ‘complete with complex ideological discussions, in-jokes, and a great deal of slang and folk-lore.’ It was an archive of Spam in the making. Documents resembled a global police precinct. Its system admin tools began elaborate campaigns of surveillance, tracking messages and ownership of accounts to trace and identify spammers. But what could NANAE do once perpetrators had been traced? 9,600 baud squalks in the ear didn’t deter. The wizards in charge of this had to work out social strategies. They included giving detailed instructions of how to shop spammers to government authorities. They were geographically explicit and detailed. Government regulation resulted in making some Spam acceptable.

CAN-SPAM was introduced by John McCain. It held responsible either the sender or the entity advertised. It meant sender addresses had to be valid, ads had to be clearly marked as such and there had to be an unsubscribe option. It led to arrests. Robert Alan Soloway was caught for fraud, money laundering and identity theft in 2007. It didn’t slow down spam growth though. It created a phony reactive valid forms culture with huge batches of working email addresses created as free accounts all over the world. At the same time filtering technologies emptied out this rapidly self-legitimating culture of email marketers.

Paul Graham writes that the problem with the law against spamming was that ‘the worse class of spammers ignore them’. These would take over after the clear out caused by the filters changed the spamming universe. New Spam arrived ‘spun out of ancient stories and globalised ruin.’ Nigeria and 419 spamming started next. 419 is the Nigerian criminal code referring to advance fee fraud. It is the adopted name for the genre fraud abroad. These are not Spams for products but narratives about Globalizations’ failure from which you can profit. It is a persistent con. They are quaintly Dickensian and sinisterly corrosive. They play to romance. The scam is predicated on generally accepted understandings and feelings about society. Society is corrupt and the scam merely re-enacts the corruption of exploitation. It appeals to the idea that business is always corrupt and so it is a natural transaction being offered. They reenact tragic history involving ghosts of Halliburton, Enron, Shell, Swiss bankers and Nigerian corrupt elites betraying the people. They play on the cynicism of the recipient who thinks ‘Why not? Everyone else is doing this.’ The winners in the scam were not the guys working the internet cafes but their bosses, who were already the corrupt elite. Racially charged and stereotyped perceptions enabled it. How many responded to the scam? There are no clear figures. Shame and gullibility hide confessions. Nigeria has been scarred by being associated with spamming even though main spamming comes from the USA and then (much less so) China, Russia, UK and Brazil. 419 has added to the unease about Nigeria and fed into a disturbing and shameful racist discourse.

Nolywood is a subgenre of 419 films ‘devoted to the travails, disasters and moral turpitude of the scammers who prey on one another and their own people.’ A videotaped genre. Nkem Owob’s satirical movies are representative: ‘I go chop your dollar’ is his soundtrack for his ‘ The Master’. ‘ National Airport na me get am/ National Stadium na me build am/President na my sister brother/ You be the mugu [the fool, the mark], I be the master/Oyinbo [whte person] I go chop your dollar/I go take your money disappear’. The whole world is corrupted. Owob is figuring it out in our faces like a Nigerian Stewart Home.

The art of misdirection responds to readability. Techno readability use glyphs such as bar codes that are designed to be read by machines. Some elude human readability and are only machine readable. Counter-technologies design misdirection and camouflage. CAPTCHA (‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’) have been developed to detect the difference between a machine and human. The robot can be tricked, the human reached. In the next epoch of spamming involves co-evolution of search and spam.

Google frames the context and technological ground for epoch three merely because of its dominance. By February 2011 Google was source of 65-67% of all USA searches. Yahoo! and Bing and all others trail far behind. By now Google is essentially all there is. If all others shut down, nothing would change. The top three results on a Google search get 58% of the clicks. The key strategy of spammers is to be in the top three to optimize adverts carried there . Search engines have spiders, an indexer and a query handler. Spammers have their own spiders and harvesters and followed search engine development. Hidden at the bottom of innocuous pages (matching text colour to page background e.g. grey on grey) ‘lay a magma flow of obscenity and pornography, product names, pop stars, distinctive phrases, cities – whatever got a good return at the time.’ They exploited the human/ robot biface reading distinction as technology became more sophisticated. Third generation development in search technology ‘took the side effect of social side effects of a hypertext architecture… and folded it back into the system, treating it like any other form of data.’ Google built in social value into rankings, such as reputation, so that links were treated as measureable expression of social value. Robot reading couldn’t do this and so Google’s third generation took on the keyword stuffers and link farmers. Social value dampening is harder to spam. This damping factor is according to Brunton ‘underappreciated as an antispam strategy. It’s a subtle gradation of how rank passes through links, how far reputation can go before its effect decays into nothing.’

Boredom is the source of damping. This third generation approach is the source of Google’s dominance. It solved the problem of relevance to search and so reduced randomization caused by searcher frustration. Mass of citation and reputation produces a socially verified evaluation of social value. Spammers responded by creating their own artificial societies so that values could be skewed to their ends.

The third epoch is the epoch of this spam strategy and antispam responses. To filter spam in this new context requires identification of a spam corpus not confused with any non-spam e-mail corpus. This proves complex and mind bogglingly hard. Ongoing is the attempt to create a defining corpus out of the Enron collection of emails examined as part of the investigation into the crashed organization. ‘As a human document , it has the skeleton of a great, if pathetic, novel: a saga of nepotism, venality, arrogant posturing, office politics, stock deals, wedding contractors, and Texas strip clubs, played out over hundreds of thousands of messages. The human reader discerns a narrative built around two families, one biological and tied by blood, and the other a corporate elite tied by money, coming to ruin and allying their fortunes to the Bush/Cheney campaign’. Using this as a test case corpus it became clear how unclear it was how to decide which of the messages were spam and which weren’t. Its an ongoing piece of work to try and construct tools to create this Enron corpus. It is only a hope that the result will be the basis of a larger more representative public spam corpus. But this is slow work. Scientific communities trying to grip spam – indeed many things digital – are often too slow. Spam is too dynamic and changes too fast for the scientific antispammers.

Better is Paul Graham, a programmer of Lisp language and successors. His ‘Plan for Spam’ essay is very important. His plan wiped out spam as it existed then. But a new spam was invented that exploited his solution to the old spam. His plan involved a new form of filtering. ‘The tactics include an economic rationale for anti-spam filters, a filter based on measuring probabilities, a trial-and-error approach to mathematics, and a hacker’s understanding that others will take the system he proposes and train and modify it for themselves…’ It allowed machines to identify spam rather than humans. The degradation of having to get into the mind of a spammer is removed: a machine does that. Adopting a naïve Bayesian statistical analysis is the base of this. The analysis exploits the weakness of the spammer, which is that her text is in plain sight. Analysis of the probability of the text being a spam is simply a matter of statistics. Naïve Bayesian algorithms are good at inductive learning tasks such as classifying documents. And where a message is misidentified and put in a spam box it doesn’t take much time to redress the mistake. Graham’s plan was about speed. It was nothing like the patient corpora-building use of Baysesian anti spam initiatives of the scientific community. It was ramshackle, cheap, fast semifunctional and out of control. Graham’s was a chatty essay full of code examples not a technical research paper presented at an academic workshop. It went viral and had enormous impact.

The new filters killed off conventional spam language, it made it a lot harder to make money through sales and it vastly increased the failure rate of spammy messages. So new spam paradigms were developed. Spammers responded with litspam, literary cut-up texts statistically reassembled to take advantages of the Baysesian filters. Spam messages started to use the language of duplicitous language. Surrealist, dada, Oulipoean robot-made language messages Queneau and Le Lionnais wouldhave been proud of functioned as spam messages subverting normality via constraints to elude filters. Mass mailings stopped and bespoke ones started. Phising, identity theft, credit card scams, infecting computers with virus’s, worms, adware and dangerous and crooked malware emerged. Spam became more criminal, more experimental, massively automated. Literature was used rather than randomly using a dictionary (because most words aren’t used much). Most language falls down a very long tail. Sci-fi literature is often used by spammers for this reason creating an eerie po-mo self-referentiality. Neal Stephenson’s ‘Cryptonomicon’ is one such. Stephenson notes, ‘ When the Cryptonomicon spam was sent out, it must have generated an immune response in the world’s spam filtering systems, inoculating them against my literary style. So this could actually cause my writing to disappear from the Internet.’ Spam is 85% of all mail traffic on the other side of the filters.

The new epoch closed down any pretence of legitimacy for spammers. Without the constraint of having to act legit spammers had greater freedom to experiment ruthlessly. It targets the 15% stupids who respond to spams or don’t bother with filtering systems. These are the old, the confused, the second language users, and the new users. Splogging, content farms and social spam were developed. This was how the appearance of an alternative society came about. Sam Beckett didn’t think cut-up techniques were writing but plumbing. Splogging is plumbing: ‘lay the pipes, the tank, the cut-off valves, and then open the taps and leave the room. A splog production system will pull in RSS feeds from other blogs and news sources, chop them up and remix them according to rules, insert relevant links, and post the resulting material, hour after hour and day after day, with minimal human supervision.’ They are automatically garnered and generated to fit with Google’s search engine algorithms. Google makes 97% of its money from advertising. Spammers are thus making the greatest use of the technologies and economies available in a non-anomolous way. CAPTCHA is still a big hurdle for spammers. There are humans on poverty level wages being paid to fill in the characters because so far no robot is human enough to read CAPTCHA. Kevin Kelly asks, ‘What if spammers come up with an artificial intelligence before Google does?’

A worm is a single program operating across many machines. It exploits idle processing power, a parasite program able to operate on its own, unlike a virus that uses existing other programs. The bots they use then can be used to knock sites off line for days at end and ruin their reputation as reliable secure servers for enterprise clients. They are a transition from tool to weapon. Spam becomes a program in a botnet platform. This scales up the operation of spamming to something unbelievably huge. The whole internet and everyone using it is now the domain. This distrupted computer power creates a ‘victim cloud’ and controllers of these bots can monetize it by producing spam. Botmasters vie for control over these clouds. Making money requires snooping the captured computer files for usernames, passwords, email contacts, financial information, secrets and other useful material. This info is then sold to a thriving underground economy. Some sell their botnets as a whole. The market transnationally hops about. The spam economy isn’t a bad living. It’s better to lease a botnet than own one. Profits per ten credit cards is about $200,000.

The Storm Worm was a super worm unleashed in 2007. It was very fast but also startlingly powerful technologically. It acted as a vast spam factory. It has become a laboratory for anti-spammers experimenting and researching spam. Researchers keep encountering each other and the results of their work on this botnet. It is a case of postmodern self-referentiality. Who owns and created Storm is still unknown. Storm resists investigators. It has massive computing power and so retaliation is worrying. Africa will be the next botnet resource, home of about 100 million PCs, 80% infected with malware. Once these switch from telephone dialups to big cables then a huge population will be added to the cloud. This is coming. It will add to the prevalent racist discourse about Africa by setting it up as a Continent of stupids.This will be dispicable.

The militarization of spam is the latest phase. Email spam is a giant presence but is boring. DDoS attacks are the panic sources. They threaten to kill networks of companies and countries. Spamming becomes merely a minor incidental part of the system, ‘reinvented as part of a new language of threat.’ Estonia nearly lost their networks in 2007 when the government removed a contentious bronze statue of a Soviet soldier in Tallin. 128 distinct DDoS attacks over a fortnight against key sites brought this about, and resulted in ensuing conversations about the botnet role as geopolitical warheads. ‘Cyberwar’ became an attention-grabbing rhetorical phrase. Rapid response and knowledgeable security management offsets attacks. Talk of a ‘digital Pearl Harbour’ or Hiroshima was heard. Cyberwar doesn’t make you bleed but destroys everything. NATO was part of the response to the Estonian attack. The place of spam in the rhetoric changed the nature of spam talk. Spam spoken of as a minor irritant has become a norm amongst most users.

But as both threat and annoyance the Military discuss Spam in the shadow of the botnet as something sinister. Major institutions began to paint Spam as having potentially big consequences again. Spam and associated botnet technologies can be appropriated and co-opted into a variety of narratives. A criminal infrastructure has replaced ‘days when hundreds of dubious bit players with some office space , a couple of rented high-bandwidth connections, and a bunch of cheap PCs with off-the-shelf mail marketing software could build a business around stock touting and potency pills….’ Now there is a tiny remnant controlling over 80% of Spam. They generate the hundred billion-plus daily Spam message load. The biz is very centralized. As is its infrastructure. A population of a very small town affects part of the daily lives of the planets’ entire computer-using population. A small group of criminal spammers of talent and vision create the equivalent of the meat world’s Globalised criminal networks of covert markets and franchised criminal organizations developing efficient supply and demand operations of drug smuggling, counterfeiting and human trafficking. Infrastructures are brittle. A few arrests can leave huge holes but eventually newcomers plug the gaps. As our attention changes in complex ways – think of the way social media such as Twitter and Facebook have changed the scene – so Spam changes tack and its metaphors. Software finds it hard to keep up with the transition. ‘Spammers – the disbarred lawyers, impoverished con artists, would-be pornographers, credit card thieves, and malware coders – are the avant garde, the wildcatting exploiters of this transition.’

Bruce Sterling says of this great book: ‘ Finn Brunton has done mankind a service with this coldly objective analysis of a great human evil. The ghost in the machine is ourselves.’ The book is jammed with exciting detail and smart analogies. It prevents readers getting drowned in techno-babble. But Stering’s comments run a little against the grain of the book. Spam is not an evil because it isn’t a settled thing with a settled moral meaning. Brunton makes us pay attention to something we’d rather not pay attention to. In doing so he draws us to a complacency about our role as agents. The meanings of the book far outreach the Internet and its travails. There are messages here that line up with Jaron Lanier’s of ‘You Are Not A Gadget’ and ‘Who Owns the Future’. It asks us to be more aware of the shadow consequences and alliances our use of ubiquitous technologies brings about.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

The British Dream, David Goodhart, Atlantic Books 2013

Every polemicist needs a consensus to kick against. There is a habit in public discourse of prefacing an assertion with ‘You’re not supposed to say this, but -’ not because there is a genuine risk in expressing such views, but to add a frisson of danger and generate interest in arguments that are, in and of themselves, not that strong or interesting. So in the introduction to his critique of postwar immigration, the Demos boss David Goodhart writes that ‘unlike most members of my political tribe of north London liberals I have come to believe that public opinion is broadly right about the immigration story’ and complains that, when he has raised such concerns in the past, he was denounced as a ‘liberal racist’. It is an accepted convention that ‘we’re not allowed to talk about immigration’, even though the issue has dominated newspaper and parliamentary debate since the late 1990s.

This book has been hyped as big news because it is a critique from the left. But there is already an established leftwing critique of immigration. The Blue Labour movement, Frank Field, Trevor Phillips, much of the trade union left and countless CLPs have been on it for years. The argument goes like this. The dear departed Margaret Thatcher shattered white working class communities. To counter her aggressive individualism we need to build the community back up and place more value on group loyalty. Immigration undermines this because it dumps large influxes of foreigners on local communities, causing confusion and resentment. The capitalist bosses love immigration because all those Polish brickies and Somalian strawberry pickers let them undercut local wages and conditions. Liberals don’t see this because they are in hock to the equalities industry and have forgotten that class is more important than race. Worse, mainstream liberalism has become too materialistic and detached from ordinary people. You urban cosmopolitans don’t understand the working class soul. Immigration lost Labour the 2010 election because people felt they weren’t being listened to and that their legitimate concerns about immigration were dismissed too readily as racism.

Although I think Goodhart’s argument is basically flawed, I should say that in much of the finer detail he makes good points. He is strong on migration from rural Pakistan, which has led to entire towns being run by ethnic Mirpuri or Bengali cabals. In Bradford communitarian politics has got so bad that its voters elected George Galloway as a breath of fresh air. And Goodhart is right that Labour’s management of mass immigration was poor. Labour wanted the economic benefits from immigration, they wanted the ethnic bloc votes but they also wanted to crack down on immigration and keep hold of their white working class base. The result was a kind of institutional schizophrenia.

And multiculturalism can cover a multitude of sins. Over the last ten years, liberals have been reluctant to challenge cultural practices that are genuinely evil – forced marriages, female genital mutilation, sharia courts, prescription of dress, movement and socialising. When the BBC drama Casualty announced that it was going to feature an FGM storyline, this was news because mainstream society just hasn’t yet been able to confront these things. Labour refused to criminalise forced marriage because, as an internal review had it, ‘black and ethnic minority communities may feel targeted.’ Family law solicitor Chris McCurley commented that ‘I cannot think of another criminal offence that has been considered and rejected on the basis that the perpetrators may feel ‘got at’.’

However, immigration dominates British conversation to such an extent that it tends to be seen as the root cause for any negative change. In a response to Goodhart, Kenan Malik writes: ‘Feminism, consumerism, increased social mobility, the growth of youth culture, the explosion of mass culture, the acceptance of free market economic policies, the destruction of trade unions, the decimation of manufacturing industries, the rise of the finance and service sectors, greater individual freedom, the atomisation of society, the decline of traditional institutions such as the Church – all have helped transform Britain, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.  But it is immigrants who primarily have become symbolic of change, and of change for the worse.’ The victims of Islamic fundamentalism are mainly Asian – the suicide rate for Asian women is three times the national average – and I would argue that it is the perverse value we place on community and tradition, rather than immigration, that has let down so many marginalised individuals and outsiders within Asian communities.

But then, the immigration debate is a roulette wheel with a house spin on every number. If the immigrant gets a job, he is stealing jobs from British workers. If not, he is taking advantage of our bloated welfare state. If the immigrant wants to stay in the UK for the rest of his life, he is asking too much: but if he stays for only a few years before moving on, he is a mere ‘guest worker’ who has not made a proper connection. If immigrants cluster together in small enclaves, they are setting up ghettoes and refusing to integrate. If immigrants move into a white area, they are taking over and changing the area so that ‘it doesn’t feel English anymore’. It is completely circular, and Goodhart does not seem to recognise this.

Take his position on work. It is a long standing contention of anti immigration rhetoric that foreigners are taking working class jobs, and Goodhart laments that employers too often rely on foreign labour over homegrown talent: ‘to have millions of long-standing residents sitting at home on benefit while poor foreigners come in and take the jobs that they should be doing makes no sense for the country as a whole; it creates a kind of ‘Saudi Arabianisation’ of the labour market.’ But it is not the immigrant’s fault that we have written off entire generations of British people, that we can’t be bothered to educate our own or adequately prepare them for the workplace, that we have condemned generations of young people to low expectations and no life chances. If you can’t or won’t take advantage of the opportunities that are out there, someone else will. Maybe that’s not fair – but that’s how the world works.

Another complaint from Goodhart is that immigration acts as a brain drain on poor countries: ‘Malawi, for example, lost more than half of its nursing staff to emigration over recent years, leaving just 336 nurses to serve a population of 12 million… some rich countries, including Britain, have been importing doctors and nurses on a morally questionable scale.’ Unfortunate. Maybe if Malawi’s corrupt, human rights abusing government would share the wealth a little more, it would be able to keep more of its doctors. Again, the market does its thing. More bizarre is Goodhart’s position on humanitarian migration. ‘There is a strong case for tightening the legal framework for asylum,’ he argues. ‘When the UN Refugee Convention was established in 1951 the Soviet gulags were a reality and the Nazi genocide a recent memory. It was drawn up on the assumption that a small trickle of refugees might escape such totalitarian states and make their way to the west.’ The extraordinary implication here is that the Convention should be reformed because war and dictatorship aren’t really a problem any more. This will be big news to the victims of the Taliban, Assad’s ongoing slaughter and the Islamist invasion of Mali. I almost said North Korea, but Kim Jong-Un’s slave state doesn’t produce many refugees because the regime prevents ‘brain drain’ by shooting anyone who tries to leave.

The references above are taken from Goodhart’s introduction, the most striking and well written part of the book. The book degenerates after that, because Goodhart won’t answer the question: ‘What would you actually do?’ Critics of immigration are often reluctant to recommend policy changes, because they object to immigration on not just an economic but also a cultural basis. They can argue for zero net immigration, but any attempt to reverse the cultural changes since the Windrush docked would have to involve the deportation of BME second or third generation immigrants, the dismantling of communities, the demolition of mosques – basically, policies close to fascism. You may think I am exaggerating, but when the opponents of migration do come up with actual recommendations, they’re fairly sinister – for example, the Tory MP Julian Brazier’s argument for the rendition of asylum seekers to Kenyan detention camps.

So instead of clear demands, we get 381 pages of wonk. Goodhart told the Daily Mail that he had spent ’18 months of touring the country to talk to people about their lives for a new book’ but there are few quotes from either locals or immigrants in The British Dream, instead you get the impression that he has spent the entire eighteen months in his office, crunching numbers. He is compared to Orwell on the back cover, but he has not taken to heart Orwell’s instruction that ‘good prose is like a windowpane’. When you write paragraphs like ‘Values, meaning different and sometimes conflicting notions of how to live a good life, are in a way the problem, not the solution. It is shared experience and mutual interests, and the way these can be fostered by public institutions and public rituals, that are a better means for overcoming difference and creating a more transcendent in-group loyalty, a sense of fellow citizen solidarity, in a diverse era’ – you have already lost the argument. There are many interesting points, but no coherence.

Goodhart has coined the phrase ‘immigrationists’ to describe Philippe Legrain, Oliver Kamm and others who have more moderate views on immigration. And I admit that this is a debate that ‘immigrationists’ like myself lost a long time ago. The consensus is that immigration is a problem and nothing’s going to change that consensus. Labour brought in six Acts of Parliament related to immigration, and created a UK Border Agency which has become so bloated and overreaching that it hassles classical musicians coming to this country and has established compliance arms in universities which hassle lecturers to report anyone that the Agency deems ‘illegal’. The consensus against immigration is so entrenched that we have a Prime Minister running around telling Europeans not to come to this country because the weather’s bad and we don’t have any jobs. To the concern of business leaders, Cameron brought in a migration cap aspiration and restrictions on the family and student routes. Because of this, immigration has gone down. But notice that the public and media outrage about immigration has not reduced: quite the reverse.

My point here is that we are not dealing with rational demands, but a inchoate mess of curdled resentments. I agree with Goodhart that Britain is not a racist country compared to decades ago, in fact most people are smart and tolerant, but the country is still somehow being run for the benefit of the angry provincial with a chip on his shoulder the size of the Malawian national debt. We are chasing short term votes at the expense of what’s right and what works. And we give the impression that as a country we have nothing to say to the rest of the world except ‘Fuck off. We’re full.’

If that is the British dream, it’s time to wake up.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals. He is reviews editor of 3:AM.

By Anna Aslanyan.

Levels of Life, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Cape 2013

“The fact of the matter is, that if you take off from almost anywhere in southern England, you generally find yourself landing in Essex.” This is how Fred Burnaby, an English adventurer, explains ballooning to Sarah Bernhardt as he tries to win the actress’ heart. The early days of aeronautics are used in Julian Barnes’ latest book as a metaphor for, among other things, love and loss. “A gas balloon might explode, a fire balloon, unsurprisingly, could catch fire” – these are two possible outcomes of a flight, but also of a life lived “on the level”. Such metaphorical treatment starts in an intensive fashion and goes on for the first two parts of the book, before giving way to something a lot more convincing in the third, final one.

​In part two, within the space of a few pages, as the lovers converse, we hear that Burnaby “felt deflated”; then he confesses: “I fear I am still in the clouds, Madame Sarah”; finally, he gives up: “I cannot bandy metaphor any longer.” Yet, after Captain Fred is rejected by the Divine Sarah, the author dashes for another one: “The water was freezing and he had not so much as a cork overjacket to protect him.” Look here, the reader is tempted to say, upon this picture: “Her dressing gown is bleu de ciel, the colour of the sky in which they no longer flew” and on this: “I think it was the Earthrise that really kind of got everybody in the solar plexus…” The former is Barnes’ own invention, the latter a quote from someone Major General Anders. Where is he taking us? To la belle France? Or to Essex?

​Over the last five years, Barnes’ books have been getting thinner, less focused on literature and, now, more personal. One thing that has remained the same is their dedication: “for Pat”. Levels of Life also has a picture of the author’s late wife, Pat Kavanagh, on its jacket. On the pages, Barnes speaks publicly about her sudden death in October 2008 for the first time.

​The crucial point in the book comes with the author’s confession: “I did already know that only the old words would do: death, grief, sorrow, sadness, heartbreak.” It is those words that make it possible to discuss “death, that banal, unique thing” without slipping into bathos. Not everyone can do that. Barnes struggles with people using euphemisms: “to pass”, “to lose someone to cancer”. He is hurt by his friends’ refusal to talk about Kavanagh. “Afraid to touch her name, they denied her thrice,” and the widower, naturally, takes this denial very hard. One friend went as far as to suggest – on what turned out to be his wife’s last day – he take a long holiday and offering to look after his house and garden, which would be good for Freddie (their dog).

​Barnes is bitter about these betrayals, and can only hope that, as time goes by and his grief subsides, he can “annul the results of that examination which some friends passed and others failed.” Certain members of the literary establishment must be already rubbing their hands in anticipation of a guessing game: “Who’s got a dog called Freddie?” Some of his acquaintances, according to Barnes, have found him difficult to talk to, his grief “an embarrassment”. This is hard to imagine. In September 2008, a few days before an interview we had planned, Barnes emailed me to apologise that he was no longer able to make it. When I replied (having no idea what the reason was) suggesting he let me know if things change, I got another email from him, where he politely explained: things will not change.

​Perhaps our ideal is closer to “the writer who disdainfully forbade posterity to take any personal interest in him”, as Barnes said of Flaubert almost 30 years ago, than to someone who pours his heart out on the page. This is how we best like our authors. We want them to look away in pictures, the way Flaubert did, “because what he can see over your shoulder is more interesting than your shoulder”; we don’t want them not to smile into the camera, the Man Booker logo in the background. To quote from Flaubert’s Parrot again, “Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well alone? Why aren’t the books enough?” They may be enough – as long as they are proper, artfully conceived, literary novels: we want that stuffed parrot from the Museum of Rouen, not this live menagerie kept by Sarah Bernhardt in the rue Fortuny.

​It is probably no coincidence that Levels of Life evokes Flaubert’s Parrot in so many ways. At the end of the book, Barnes cites the passage from his 1985 novel that he read at Kavanagh’s funeral: “When she dies, you are not at first surprised. Part of love is preparing for death.” At first he was struck by his own prescience, having created a man in his early 60s, whose emotional state in the aftermath of his wife’s death had an uncanny resemblance to his own; “[o]nly later did novelist’s self-doubt set in: rather than inventing the correct grief for my fictional character, I had merely been predicting my own probable feeling – an easier job.” Some people think that a writer’s magnum opus is his or her life story. Levels of Life proves this to be wrong.

​Barnes talks about his thoughts of suicide, which have become less persistent once he saw himself as “the principal rememberer” of his wife. Killing himself would be tantamount to killing her again. This book makes you remember many things – including all Flaubert’s parrots – the author has breathed life into, which in itself is reason enough to keep reading, until you finally reach this: “You need your friends not just as friends, but also as corroborators.” Doesn’t the same apply to readers? And don’t they – we – have a responsibility towards the author who has given us so much? To avoid further generalisations, I’ll speak for myself. Levels of Life has left me with two desires. First, I want to find out which is the worse outcome, your balloon exploding or catching fire. Second, I want to read Barnes’ next book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anna Aslanyan is a translator and journalist living in London. She regularly contributes to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and writes for the TLS and a number of online publications. Anna’s translations into Russian include works of fiction by Tom McCarthy, Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd, Mavis Gallant and Zadie Smith.

Black Mountain College. Experiment in Art. Vincent Katz. MIT, 2013.

Juan Manuel Bonet says that ‘’methods of teaching art are in need of oxygen.’ Black Mountain College was an open-air American Bauhaus with plenty and then some. It lasted twenty-three years, from 1933 to 1956. It gave us Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Dorn, Levertov , Rauschenberg, de Kooning, Motherwell, Cage, Cunningham, Fuller, Noland, Greenberg and a whole bunch of other astonishments.

They formed an oppositional community to be understood in a special sense. There’s was a vagrancy away from an unbenign and benighted political reality. They were drawn to a visionary radiance of the self with tinctures of deep ecology. They sought a new human, the ‘virtuoso bacterium’ of Ted Hughes, rejecting the old ego and all its possessions in a bid to reclaim equality with all life. The education at the College was an education for Lear’s fool, Tolstoy’s vagrants and the whole Beckett plenum. What did they oppose? The wandering symbols of Satan. All those damned emblems. What did they create into? Nothing but the toothy certainty of ‘emptiness and error, nothing but this idiotic race that every man seems condemned to engage in for no gain and which seems rather, as in Kafka, to be the effect of some divine curse’, as Beckett puts it. It amounts to Milton’s ‘Insuperable height of loftiest shade.’

They were about seeing through conventional ‘malignements’, the crafty artfulness Rimbaud warns us about. They worked against all tedious uniformity that bends itself to duty. Such duty uses history as a barrier between selves and lives. Black Mountain College was about seeing, says Vincent Katz, and this suggests the Emersonian organic eye. The philosopher Kenneth Winkler’s deft readings of American idealism support this. He writes ‘… that American idealism rests, as George Santayana claimed, on the “conceited notion that man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil, is the centre and pivot of the universe.’ I summarise some of Winkler’s insights about Idealism because if Katz is right then the Black Mountain College owes much to this Idealist Americana. America likes its philosophy stereotyped as a go-to, scientific and urban (urbane) pragmaticism. But though American Idealism is practical it has a religious, green and eerie (mystic/wisdom) shimmer disturbing that self-appointed secular image. Perhaps from over here in Europe it’s clearer to see its metaphysical smoke.

Creeley points to this Idealism explicitly by making Emerson central to Olson’s poetry. Emerson manifests a nineteenth century reaction to American eighteenth century Puritanism. Jonathan Edwards, the greatest of the latter, presented a powerful Pantheistic world where every reality diminished through being subsumed into a single Divine substance. Autonomous individuality was erased in this fierce vision. Emersonian Idealism countered it, but never obliterated it. Like gothic ruins, struts of the old puritanism continue to poke through.

What drove Edwards to such an extreme vision? In defending the Calvinist doctrine of ‘original sin’ Edwards needed to show that any difference between my identity and Adam’s was not significant enough to prevent the transmission of a shared guilt. By dissolving all identity claims into a theory that made all such claims the result of an arbitrary Divine Will, Edwards argued that our identity with Adam is akin to the identity an adult has with their infant self. The identity is based on salient qualitites and relations that allow for vast differences that are nevertheless non-corrosive of that identity. Similarly, there are salient qualities and relations communicated to all via God’s Will that make each of us guilty of those sins committed by Adam.

The moral ineptness of this is hard to ignore. Adam’s sin contaminates all later generations only because God arbitrarily wills that it does so. This is Kafka’s world where innocence is the final proof of guilt. Edwards’ strange ontology is minimalist. A Divine substance is the sole agent in a universe of absolutely separated atoms and souls. The identity of anything with anying else is via God’s will. Perhaps the will of God creates objective reality, or perhaps merely a Divinely inspired Humean fictionalism.

Edwards’ Calvinism presents a powerful and disturbing sense of Pantheism, where God is the only substance, a dark eerie Gnostic onanism where our universe is merely a projected holographic spectacle of the Divine substance screened by and for itself. This unbelievably bold view severs the link between justice and human agency. It eliminates any notion of an enduring subject of change capable of receiving contraries and of making creative acts. Identity relies on God’s constitution. Believing everything to be Divine implies a sinister Pantheism. The connection between Calvinism and Pantheism was recognise by Emerson’s time, and accounts for an enduring suspicion of Pantheism. Channing wrote: ‘ The doctrine that God is the only Substance, which is Pantheism, differs little from the doctrine that God is the only active power of the universe. For what is substance without power? It is a striking fact that the philosophy which teaches that matter is an inert substance, and that God is the force which pervades it, has led me to question whether any such thing as matter exists: whether the powers of attraction and repulsion which are regarded as the indwelling Deity, be not its whole essence. Take away force, and substance is a shadow, and might as well vanish from the universe. Without a free power in man, he is nothing. The divine agent within him is every thing. Man acts only in show. He is a phenomenal existence, under which the One Infinite Power is manifested: and is this much better than Pantheism?’

The nineteenth century American Brahmin class recoiled from this vision. The country had moved from being a parochial theocracy to a secular democracy by the time Emerson confronted it. The early Puritans had become unreadable. Edwards was an offense. Calvinism and Pantheism were considered equally morally repulsive. Emerson’s organic eye confronted Edwards claims that God is the only active substance, that Humanity acts only in show, that God is the sole agent and power in the universe. He offers a benign Pantheisim as a replacement.

Emerson argued that it is wrong to place time between ourselves and God. He wrote: ‘The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poety and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?’ Emerson asked that we live spontaneously as if every moment was a new creation. He contended that there was a sense of ‘nature’ that was dependent on the integration of parts of a whole via ‘the plastic power of the human eye.’ For this the integrating eye is required, working as the poetical ego. This is a sign or type of the more ambitious ego of heart and mind. By integrating landscapes through the plastic organic eye we have the key to his Idealism. It can sound like Edwards’ Pantheism at times. But he resists it through a kind of anthropocentrism, creating four aspects of nature: beauty, commodity, discipline and language. He writes this in chapter two of ‘Nature’: ‘Whoever considers the final cause of the world, will discern a multitude of uses that enter as parts into that result. They all admit of being thrown into one of the following classes; Commodity; Beauty; Language; and Discipline’. Advantages owed , love of beauty, the vehicle of thought speak to the two cardinal facts that oppose Edwards: ‘ the one, and the two… Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak, or to think, without embracing both,’ he writes. ‘We live in succession, in division, in particles’ even as ‘ within man is the soul of the whole…’ Emerson insists on the immanence of the world. ‘The world! There is no other world.God is one and omnipresent: here and nowhere is the whole fact.’

It’s still Idealism. It is Idealism in the Berkeleyan sense – like Beckett, Emerson reads Berkeley carefully. Emerson resists Hume’s counter to idealism that says that the mind won’t allow idealism to be credible (regardless of whether it is true or not) by saying that culture, poetry, ethics, mathematics and science overrides the mind. So Emerson is an Idealist and even a Pantheist of a sort. But this is an imminent Pantheism, a type of Coleridge’s ‘another world but not to come.’ God is not transcendent. Emerson’s Pantheism is less sinister than Edwards. The synthesizing eye is not God’s and affirms’… the divinity of man. . . [as well as a] … debt to bread, & coffee, & flannel, & heated room.’

The organic poetic eye, so important to Emerson in bringing the objective world into a moral and sensible unity independent of God, is what a hundred years later the artists, writers and musicians of the Black Mountain College were seeking to extend. It was set up by John Andrew Rice, a colleague of John Dewey. He had been fired for establishing a Socratic enquiry-based curriculum at Rollins College in Florida in 1933. Rice wrote in 1935: ‘…those who are responsible for the founding of the College reverted to a form of government found in the older universities of England and once fairly common in this country, namely, government by the faculty, or self-government … [t]he idea of including a member of the student body on the Board was borrowed from the Middle Ages.’ Rice placed the arts at the centre of his Black Mountain College, although he didn’t want it to become an arts college. ‘There is no expectation that many students will become artists; in fact, the College regards it as a sacred duty to discourage mere talent from thinking itself genius: but there is something of the artist in everyone, and the development of this talent, however small, carrying with it a severe discipline of its own, results in the student’s becoming more sensitive to order in the world and within himself than he can ever be through intellectual effort alone.’

Joseph Albers was drafted in from the recently closed down Bauhaus to manage and inform the college art activity. He was strict and fierce. Later his style was thought too overbearing by some of the students. The Bauhaus had a strong social agenda, attacked the division between arts and crafts, attacked neo-classical and historicizing architecture, combined high with low arts, used industrial manufacturing technologies and techniques alongside art ones, was stylistically modern and socially democratic. It was accused of being Communist and the Nazis closed it. The combination of anti-modernistic education in the name of popularist sloganeering by right of centre politicians is depressingly familiar. ‘Immediate stoppage of Bauhaus funding. Foreign teachers must be dismissed without notice, for it is irreconcilable with the responsibility of worthy municipal leadership towards its citizens that German comrades go hungry while foreigners are handsomely paid from the taxes of a starving nation’ was a Nazi flyer. Josef and Anni Albers both came to the Black Mountain College from this.

Anni Albers established modernist weaving and argued that marginalized crafts could be developed into great art in the rights hands. She subtly critiqued the sexism of some of the initial Bauhaus positions. ‘Life today is very bewildering… We have no picture of it which is all-inclusive, such as former times may have had. We have to make a choice between concepts of great diversity. And as a common ground is wanting, we are baffled by them,’ she wrote in 1937. She saw creativity as standing in relation to a complex unknown: the terrible international situation pressurized art into a role as rebuilding. ‘Our world goes to pieces: we have to rebuild our world. We investigate and worry and analyse and forget that the new comes about through exuberance and not through a defined deficiency. We have to find our strength rather than our weakness. Out of the chaos of collapse we can save the lasting: we still have our ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, the absolute of our inner voice – we still know beauty, freedom, happiness … unexplained and unquestioned.’ She thought art built personal courage to continue.

Josef wanted education to be something rather than something that would get something. Similarly, art shouldn’t be subordinated to any ‘loftier’ end. He saw this as a step towards stopping the largely invisible dismissal of the unintellectual by intellectuals formed by a meritocratic education system. He said his goal at Black Mountain College was to open eyes. He explored tonal possibilities of colours developed in his series ‘Homage to the Square.’ He demonstrated that the geometric could be as free as freehand and freehand as abstract as the geometric. Fernand Leger visited in 1941 stressing ‘Truth’ in colour and form. He thought ‘pure tone in painting is reality.’ He said that ‘education, religion, the ‘decorative life’ are three inventions, three envelopes created to conceal truth.’ They were fighting the Nazis the best way they could at a time when the US state department wasn’t.

Lyonel Feininger saw the Cubists in 1911 and exhibited with the Blaue Reiter group with Kandinsky and Klee. Feininger compared oils with charcoal drawings, watercolours, photographs of unfinished works and elaborated and increased complexities in his work. His time at the Black Mountain group resuscitated his sense of dead identity. Fanny Hillsmith was interested in Klee when there. Ilya Bolotowsky had once studied in New York ‘s national Academy of Design in 1923 where ‘colour was known to be something rather evil.’ Then he worked with Afro-American William Henry Johnson who was a ‘fantastic colourist.’ With others he formed the American Abstract Artists group in 1936. He was at the Black Mountain College and his teaching influenced Kenneth Noland, who when at Black Mountain College studied with Albers, Bolotowsky, Cage, Clement Greenberg, Willem de Kooning and Buckminster Fuller.

Albers wasn’t interested in style but in technique and materials and so encouraged diversity. Xanti Schawinsky left Italy when the political scene was beginning to get grim in 1936. He collaborated with the composer John Evarts and had a vision for music and theatre and experimentation. ‘While the work at the Bauhaus Theatre aimed at the modernization of theatrical means and concepts, and had a definite professional and artistic scope, at Black Mountain college an educational crack at the whole man seemed to be in order.’ He didn’t understand the politics which tried to remove Rice from the college in 1938, and they caused him dissatisfaction and misery. Jean Charcot worked with Mexican muralists and tempered their ‘youthful violence with his culture and equanimity and illuminated [their] problems with lucid visions’ according to Jose Clemente Orozco. He was a formalist and connected to modern abstract art. He was described as embodying the ‘true spirit of purification’ in his art. Solids were defined by three co-ordinates without ‘unlimited spatial sensation with its romantic or impressionistic connotation’. Amedee Ozofant used surreal biomorphic elements in his work comparable with Yves Tanguy. His ‘Crazy Rocks’ of 1945 are shaped like Ernst’s ‘Robing of the Bride’.

Black Mountain was poor on accepting blacks and gays. According to Vincent Katz it never really came to terms with gays. This is disappointing. Jacob Lawrence in the 1940’s believed that painting put himself on canvas, an attitude linking him to the Abstract Expressionists. Leo Amino made insect-like beings in metal and complex combinations of casts in various colours. He had worked for a Japanese wood importer. He worked for a time with Chaim Gross who was a proponent of direct carving. He worked in polystyrene in 1946. He used translucent and transparent plastics. He liked transparency because ‘ the distinction between its physical aspect and surrounding space is less conspicuous’ whilst at the same time ‘refraction and optical illusion created by light on transparent form … actually intensify the difference, thus creating a greater sense of three-dimensionality.’ ‘Head with Horn’ in 1946 used colour as biomorphic surreal form.

Richard Lippold sculptured with humanistic strains and seems a precursor to large-scale visions of contemporary artist Anthony Gormley. He was interested in the music of John Cage and had evenings together with Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. He was interested in the use of two dimensions in Egypt and the Middle Ages. ‘Variation Within a Sphere’ of 1948 could also be seen as part of his exploration of time in painting, as well as spatial topology. Ben Shahn was Lithuanian and was ‘unwilling to regard man as of use value.’ The human was ultimate and he disputed that non-objective art was anti-humanistic. He used images that never generalized. He thought art should be used for social justice not merely formalist statements. He thought Aaron Suskind and Robert Motherwell failed to live up to this standard.

Motherwell taught at Black Mountain in the summers of 1945 and 1951 and his roots were in surrealism not Abstract Expressionist. Motherwell’s writings impacted on mid-twentieth century art writing. He wrote of Mondrian ‘ [Mondrian] has spent his life in the creation of a clinical art in a time when men were ravenous for the human…’ Motherwell disliked formalist perfection because it reduced the ego. The human had to renounce too much. His strange humanism is expressed when he writes: ‘ The ‘pure’ red of which certain abstractionists speak does not exist no matter how one shifts its physical contexts. Any red is rooted in blood, glass, wine, hunters’ caps, and a thousand other concrete phenomena. Otherwise we should have no feeling toward red or its relations, and it would be useless as an artistic element.’ He worked to disconnect himself from Cubism. Colour and oil paint redeemed his project to recuse himself from theory. Oil painting ‘continually threatens, because of its motility and subtlety, to complicate a work beyond the simplicity inherent in a high order of abstraction.’ He connects this complication and complexity to the ego and the humanistic. It connects to Beckett when he writes of wanting to punch holes through to the other side of language. Beckett, though often minimilist in his resources and abstract to a high degree, continually retains the threat of complication. Motherwell thought art couldn’t be taught but could be learned. A silence that perturbs and an erasure that mounts a formidable negative presence against positive reality haunts some of this, although perhaps more so in Rauschenberg’s white on white paintings.

Greenberg thought that if artists were to say what they had to say they had to free themselves of the geomentric cubist abstractionism that insisted on finish and rectangular and curvilinear regularity. The fugitive and informal were superior to any finished ultimatum. De Kooning and Gorky were criticized by Greenberg in this way. Black Mountain College had Abstract Expressionist teachers alongside Willem de Kooning. Franz Kline, Theodoros Stamos, Jack Tworkov, Estaban Vicente, Emerson Woelffer all taught and Robert De Niro and Pat Passlof were distinguished students. De Niro remained figurative. De Kooning at Black Mountain moved to break from his black and white abstract enamel painting. Pollock had appeared in 1949 and a year earlier de Kooning was reintroducing colour. De Kooning taught by waiting for the students to present their problems on canvas and then discussed options, unlike Albers who presented students with problems for them to solve. Elaine de Kooning was devoted to Wilem but was significant apart from him. She was doing surrealist shapes as late as 1947. She had a hot earthy palette.

Theodoros Stamos imagined the mountains of Black Mountain College as Chinese. Franz Kline relied on a black and white scheme and Greenberg commented that ‘… what is at stake… is the preservation of something – a main pictorial resource – that is suspected of being near exhaustion; and the effort at preservation is undertaken …. By isolating and exaggerating that which wants to preserve.’ Similar high stakes played out in Paris with Godot, Endgame and the rest of Beckett’s scrap with silence. Kline has been identified with an obsession with massive interactions of primal forms. Robert Creeley writes that ‘There are women who will undress only in the dark and men who will only surprise them there. One imagines such a context uneasily…’ and this is an old sturdy principle that makes dark absence of light. Kline is mysterious. He drew his paintings delicately and then painted them onto huge canvases. ‘Painting’ of 1952 was done at Black Mountain College and shows geometry going ‘haywire’. Jack Tworkov disn’t let his subconscious dominate his paintings like the other Abstract Expressionists were supposed to. He was a draftsman who didn’t exploit accidents.

John Cage wrote that ‘Any experimental musician in the twentieth century has had to rely on painters.’ Cage and Merce Cunningham contacted Black Mountain College in 1948 offering a performance. Cunningham and Cage worked separately having agreed a rhythmic structure then came together to perform. The performance of Eric Satie’s ‘The Ruse of Medusa’ was a highlight following Cage’s attack on Beethoven and the Romantics in his talk ‘In defence of Eric Satie.’ He worried about the decadence of Beethoven and rejected the emotional metabolism of tonality. He replaced them with indeterminacy and chance. The group working on this included Buckminster Fuller and one legacy of the college was the obligation to act, regardless of consequences. The unorthodox was a matter of going with your impulses. Chance operations were codified by Cage by tossing a coin three times and then picking out pages from the I Ching or Book of Changes. In 1952 he went back to the college and wrote a four hundred page score for a work of four minutes. He became interested in Robert Rauschenberg who was painting his white on white series. He then wrote 4’33”. He was also influenced by reading Artaud’s ‘The Theatre and Its Double’ from which Cage said ‘we got the idea from Artaud that theatre could take place free of text, that if a text were in it, that it needn’t determine the other actions, that sounds, that activities, and so forth, could all be free rather than tied together … So that the audience was not focused in one particular direction.’ Cage thought that the atmosphere at Black Mountain College was conducive to trying to work with such ideas. ‘Theatre-Piece No 1’ was the result.

Black Mountain College had a savvy innocence that meant they accepted the experimentalists of Vienna following the Anschluss. Members of Schoenberg’s circle arrived . It also recruited Afro-American scholars and musicians. The alto Carol Brice came, plus Roland Hayes the son of a slave, a student at Juillard and the first black winner of the Naumberg performance prize. At his recitals efforts were made to ensure that the audience was not segregated. In the spring term of 1946 black composer Mark Fax was hired. Henrich Jalowetz organized a celebration to mark Shoenberg’s seventieth birthday . John Sessions wrote of the college: ‘ The college, which is situated in the Blue Ridge Mountains, was founded by a group of idealists who believed that education is a kind of collaboration between individuals differing in experience and knowledge but between whom barriers arising from positions of authority are minimized to the utmost extent. In practice this results, as I was abundantly to observe, in an amazing freedom of discussion which to one coming quite unprepared from the outside world, is extremely impressive in its testimony to the maturity and seriousness of which young Americans are capable.’ Sessions sent a lecture from the college to Schoenberg who was very impressed. What impressed Sessions was Schoenberg’s ability to continue to go his own way without compromise and his remaining ‘ the most dangerous enemy of the musical status quo.’ The resistance to market driven music culture and continual experimentation overcame earlier dissatisfaction. Schoenberg was seen to summarise a fundamental musical crisis.

According to Calvin Tomkins Merce Cunningham was more traditional and depended on his powers of invention more than Cage. He was interested in translating events from ordinary life into dance. Sets were designed by Rauschenberg. Buckminster Fuller’s great aunt was Margaret Fuller, a leading feminist who had set up the Dial with Emerson. He analysed buildings and wondered about how to use technology to maximize the benefits of the maximum number of people. He had the idea of airlifting buildings to the needy all over the world. ‘Dymaxion’ was an advertising slogan combining ‘dynamism’, ‘maximum’ and ‘ions’. Fuller designed Dymaxion cars, buildings and bathrooms. The dymaxion Deployment unit was patented in 1941. The US military used it in the Persian Gulf and Pacific in WW 2. His Geodesic Domes are still important in thinking about how to solve global housing problems. He demonstrated them at Black Mountain College in 1948. Kenneth Snelson wrote that ‘ The mastery of universal forces tensegrity implies is meaningful, however, not simply because it will enable us to make larger structures. More important , and perhaps central to Fuller’s genius, is the insight his ideas gave us into universal order. That is an achievement which ranks him with other great poets, scientists and artists.’

Susan Weil went to Black Mountain College with Robert Rauschenberg. She didn’t like all the rules Albers had to run the college but got a lot from the drawing classes. Rauschenberg feared Albers fierce criticisms and never asked for them. Weil created ‘Secrets’ in 1949. Katz says ‘To make Secrets , Weil took a page from her journal, ripped it into judiciously-selected shreds, and assembled the bits in such a way that the edges float off the surface, giving the impression of scraps in a pile on a desk or floor. The tantalizing character of this work, in which communication is intentionally obfuscated, derived from Weil’s interest in fragmentation.’ What she learned from Black Mountain College was that what you learned at art college was invalid.

She worked with Rauschenberg and Twombly and Motherwell. Rauschenberg worked on his white on white series. Modern art became a state of elimination. Cage compared Satie and Rauschenberg’s vision. ‘We have … many examples in contemporary visual art of things brought to simplicity. I recall, for instance, the white paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, which don’t have any images. It’s a highly simplified situation that we are able to see things as dust or shadows carefully painted, [whereas] in Rembrandt, any other shadow entering the situation would be a disturbance and would not be noticeable, or if noticeable, a disturbance.’

Cy Twombly buries sexual fetish in a violent surface according to Motherwell. Peter Voulkos taught ceramics and transformed his idea of a pot. Ray Johnson was a student at Black Mountain College and became known for his mail-art work. He was influenced by Albers and Cage. He created moticos in cardboard and burned notes taken from Albers classes in 1950 in order to break free. His suicide in 1995 is a terrible and strange coda.

Beaumont Newhall taught photography at the college but said of himself that ‘Although I photograph, I am not a photographer.’ Clemes Kalischer was. He took portraits of Cage and Stefan Wolpe. Wolpe was described by Adorno as ‘an outsider in the best sense of the word.’ He embraced Dadaism and leftist politics, and had been driven out of Germany in 1933. He had been part of the Weimer Bauhaus. He had an amazing range: twelve-tone, modal systems of classical Arabian music, had worked with John Carisi, the arranger for Miles Davis, Elmer Bernstein and Mike Stoller. His music was organic, an ‘interplay of curves, a simultaneous release of waves.’ It was a musical field of intense gestures. Hazel-Frieda Larson created archetypical Black mountain photography: ‘ a classical yet modest sense of balance, tempered by a humanistic reverance for life expressed in her photograph’s gentleness of detail.’ Aaron Siskin made a shift towards abstraction in his photography. De Kooning, Kline and Tworkov admired his work. In 1951 he was the only photographer invited to show in the Ninth Street Show of Abstract Expressionist painters. His photo ‘North Carolina 10, 1951’ shows an open book on a floor. It links with Charles Olson’s ambitions for the literary life of the College.

Harry Callahan and Arthur Siegal were invited photographers. Jonathan Williams was a photographer but also multi-disciplinary. When Albers and Ted Drier left in 1950 the college entered its late phase, severed from links with its beginnings. Olson wrote his ‘Projective Verse’ essay in 1950. Poetry was a process of exploration or discovery. Lines were shaped by breath and speech not trad prosody. Organic forms emerging from a writing process was something associated with their approach. They wrote essays about this which put them in a slightly off key relationship to other contemporary groups such as the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance and the New York School. Line, syntax and page space are taken as key sites of poetic experiment. They saw themselves as flowing from Pound, W.C. Williams, the Objectivists, Gertrude Stein and H.D.. ‘Notes on Organic Form’, Ideas of the Meaning of Form,’ and ‘Towards an Open Universe’ are key texts.

Charles Olson became the dominant figure. He spoke of himself as an ‘archeologist of the morning.’ Merce Cunningham called him ‘a very serious elephant.’ Olson told everyone, ‘ limits are what any of us are inside of…’ He said, ‘I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Fulsom Cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here, large. And without mercy..’ Writers were always a presence throughout the college’s history. Thornton Wilder, Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, Irwin Panofsky, Anais Nin, Eric Bentley, Paul Goodman, Alfred Kazin visited or taught. Olson’s ‘Encounter at St Elizabeth’s’ confronted Ezra Pound and ‘Call Me Ishmael’ was a groundbreaking study of Melville. Olson wrote; ‘ There came a man who dealt with whiteness. And with space. He was an American. And perhaps his genius lay most in innocence rather than in the candor now necessary. In any case, he was not understood.’

Olson saw history as Herodotus’s ideas not Thucydides’ facts. He studied the Mayan glyphs of Lerma. A glyph acted in itself and carried additional weight for Olson. He thought primal forces were important. “Projective verse’ saw the page as a canvas, so words didn’t have to follow meekly after each other. The Concrete poets of Brazil were contemporaries. Robert Creeley was a staunch ally. Words could be abstract experiments rather than meditations on a theme. Writing from Lerma in Yukatan to Creeley he said, ‘ Christ, those hieroglyphs. Here is the most abstract and formal deal of all the things this people dealt out – and yet, to my taste, it is precisely as intimate as verse is. Is, in fact, verse. Is their verse. And comes into existence, obeys the same laws that, coming into existence, obeys the same laws that the coming into existence, the persisting of verse, does.’ Olson was incredibly sexist sadly, and so the atmosphere was poor for women. Dorothea Rockburne said of the college, ‘ It was a strange and wonderful place, but it was very sexist, and I’d never experienced that before. You would talk, and it was like you were invisible. Except as a sexual object.’ During this period the learning experience became less structured.

Robert Creeley said that if poetry was to move forward it would depend on Olson. Creeley was a significant advance for poetry. He visited Black Mountain in 1954 and 55. The college was dwindling by then. Olson and Creeley attacked academic poets in the 1950’s. Students at Black Mountain at this time include Ed Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer, Michael Rumaker and John Wieners. Olson considered Dorn to have ‘an Elizabethan ear.’ Like Duncan he accepted that incoherence would be a part of any event. Writing was about following the sounds. Duncan said that from the poetic organism came ‘something actually seen in the process of the poem, not something pretended or made up.’ The Black Mountain Review was initially an advert for students. The college by 1954 was in financial trouble and needed them. Creeley was still living in Mallorca at first. It was an attack on what Creeley and Olson saw as elitist modernism.

In its first edition it attacked Dylan Thomas and Theodore Roethke. Kenneth Rexroth was offended. The last edition was in 1957 and signs on the San Francisco Renaissance poets and the Beats, equally expansive types of underground writing. This was not only a natural but a strategic opening that threw the arc wide open, in tune with the proliferation of City Lights, Grove Press, New Directions, the Evergreen Review, Yugen, Big Table and Measure. Donald Allen’s ‘The New American Poetry: 1945-60’ came out of this, missing only the Deep Image and Subjective Verse poets because they were too linked with European poets such as Char, Ekelov, Lorca and Ungaretti and European avant-gardes. So no Bly, Kelly or Rothenberg. Olson and Creeley were looking to an alternative ego-structure to that in the mainstream. Everyone was to find their own bibliography.

Olson rejects Snyder, Lew Welch and Philip Whalen as San Francisco softheaded mystics. Duncan seemed to him too heritage influenced, drawing too much from English Romantics. He had questions for the nature-driven boys too, such as William Everson and Thomas Merton. He was against wisdom as such in his search for post-modern man. Wisdom as such was dismissed as ‘a completely adolescent address to the world in which he finds himself.’ The second review includes Artaud translations. Kevin Power describes Artaud as ‘ the dark angel of surrealism, uncontrolled and apocryphal, representing the initial pessimism and revolt of the group – the man who, as Breton said, went right through the mirror…’ Poems by Herman Melvile were also included because for Creeley he understood reality as ‘… the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things.’ Creeley too was ‘the figure of outward.’

The Black Mountain Review 3 saw Duncan’s first appearance with ‘Letters for Denise Levertov: An A Muse Ment.’ Cid Corman attacked Karl Shapiro and ‘… the Auden-American gang.’ He used the phrase ‘gorgeous dilapidation’ as a term of abuse. I’d have worn it as a badge of honour. The fourth issue had the only woman in the gang included so far, Denise Levertov. She was appreciated because she was able to maintain the rhythms of life in her verse without falling into the sloppiness of the Beats. Creeley wrote on Kline and another piece on Francis Parkman’s recognition of history. ‘By God Pomeroy, you’re here’. The fifth edition was an annual, bigger and the influence of Abstract Expressionist artists dominated. Duncan answers Olson’s charges against him in ‘Against Wisdom as Such.’ Duncan pleads guilty to the charges but thinks the glamour of English Romanticism can push him to a mystic reality bringing love and lust together.

Review 6 has a Dan Rice cover. Duncan discusses a new dimension in Olson’s writing, that of ‘internal sensation.’ Along with mastery of ear and eye mastery of the inner voice had been achieved. ‘On the level of reference, the gain from Whitman’s address to his cosmic body to Olson’s address to ‘the waist of a lion/for a man to move properly’ is immense.’ And he writes ; ‘I point to Emerson or Dewey to show that in American Philosophy there are foreshadowings or forelightings of Maximus. In this aesthetic, ‘conception cannot be abstracted from doing’, beauty is related to the beauty of an archer hitting the mark.’ Review 7 was the final issue. Allen Ginsberg was contributing editor. His poem ‘America’ was included. ‘America when will we end the human war?’ Keroac’s ‘October on the Railroad Earth’ is there too, plus sections of Burroughs’ ‘Naked Lunch’, poems by McClure, Snyder and Whalen and a section from Hubert Selby’s ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn.’ William Carlos Williams writes on Marsden Huntley and Ford Maddox Ford. There’s a negative review by Rumaker of ‘Howl.’ Creeley thinks it balanced. It says things like, ‘The poem does not contain itself … The poem builds to hysteria. The last section is chaos, the logical conclusion to the build-up. The poem scatters itself, finally, on its own pitiful frenzy. A way has not been found.’

The Black Mountain School was more interested in the formal use of the line than either the Beats or the New York school. Rumaker describes Creeley’s writing as ‘a scrupulous and highly exact examination of conscious processes. His own clearences, then as now, are in areas of excruciating wakefulness. If his demons are ‘conscious’ ones, they are, paradoxically, no less real and terrifying than those lurking in the dark under-roots of the unconscious. Yet much of the writing has the quality of dreams, in definitions of consciousness so newly realized that they have an other worldly aura, so foreign are they, seen from the prospect of his unique and stripped down acute angle of vision.’ He aimed to turn language into an active principle.

Vincent Katz, Martin Brady, Robert Creeley and Kevin Power have put together a superb overview. MIT Press have reproduced some wonderous pics. The College had no money in the end and was forced to close.

Something haunts all this. I return to the organic eye of Emerson. His eye is no passive absorber but is a restless interpolator seeking coherence. Schopenhauer makes a connection between the self, knowledge and sight: ‘ … the “I” is the dark point in consciousness, as on the retina the exact point at which the nerve of sight enters is blind, as the brain itself is entirely without sensation, the body of the sun is dark, and the eye sees all but itself.’ Roy Sorensen notes that this captivated Wittgenstein. ‘Wittgenstein interpreted the eye geometrically rather than organically.’ Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus, ‘ Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found? You will say that this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye.’ And Sorensen writes: ‘ If the self is a boundary of reality rather than an element within reality, there is a convergence between solipsism and realism.’ And he comments on the close alignment of Idealism with this perspectivalist solipsism. This is the recognition that Idealism taken through to its logical conclusion leaves us absolutely alone. And if Idealism implies the world is mind-dependent then a blindspot is a metaphysical impossibility. As such it’s false.

What is false doesn’t exist. But like Beckett in Europe, the imperceptible aversion to positive reality emancipated Rauschenberg, Cage et al. Because there was no life other than the false one life’s catalogued defects – including Edwards’ old sinister pantheism – became the mirror image of an erased ontology. This is the same post-mortem art that has Hamm cry, in ‘Endgame’, ‘certain of the incontestable boredom of existence’, as Adorno puts it,’What in God’s name could there be on the horizon.’ The mature grit in their art was the pathos drawn from theology that resists the terrifying consequences of nothingness.

The College’s Lake Eden campus is now used as a boys-only summer camp for Christians.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Peru, Gordon Lish, Dalkey Archive, 2013 (E.P. Dutton, 1986)

“Peru is true,” insists Gordon Lish in the introduction to this new edition of his masterpiece: “all too grievously true.” But empirical truth is irrelevant; the book achieves truth on terms of its own. Whether novels secrete a residual effet de réel (Barthes) or deploy the device of a false document (Swift, Defoe) they are defined by their formalisation of the force of truth; its rhetorical pressure, not its propositional content. As with wish-fulfilment, a book like Peru makes a bid to become true, in opposition to life, which is anyway worthless. Such a book is a black box, an object at odds with the world around it. Thus Peru’s truth lies not in its correspondence to reality, but in its consistency with itself. And this kind of consistency (a quality which Lish has called “consecution”) is what allows an artwork to stand alone, asserting its agṓn against all that is. Art authorises the impossible, and artistic truths are of the order of miracles.

For this reason, if Peru represents a “confession,” it is one carried out not in content (confessionalism as a literary genre) but in incantatory form: a performative speech-act addressed to God. The story’s specifics therefore matter less than the statement from which they stem: “there is nothing I will not tell you if I can think of it.” The thoughts that follow accrue truth through their telling. Gordon, 50, father and husband, catches a news clip of convicts fighting with knives under gunfire from guards. The struggle occurs, he later learns, on the roof of a prison in Peru. Subsequently, rushing his son to a bus bound for summer camp, he is struck on the head by the trunk lid of a taxi. Blunt force trauma triggers traumatic memory: reeling and bleeding, Gordon recalls how, aged six, he savagely killed an acquaintance while playing in a neighbour’s sandbox.

The act is portrayed with an objective coldness, which Peru’s early reviewers read in terms of narratorial psychopathology. Yet depth psychology is superfluous; personae in books are merely arrangements of surfaces, much like us. Peru’s apparent brutality results not from some folk-psychological category error, but only from art’s overriding imperative to present—to “make you see” (Conrad), to “incarnate the abstraction” (Pound on James), or to “characterise…an overall total experience” (Lish in Peru). Hence, “you have to imagine dents,” declares Gordon, urging us to envisage the murder: “like a trench—in his hair, in his head. Whereas with his face, it was more like a peach pit with some of the peach still left stuck to it.” The detail with which Lish describes the damage done to Steven Adinoff’s head by Gordon’s toy hoe—and even his callous play on Steven’s speech impediment (“nyou nyidn’t nyave nyoo nyill nyee!”) are crucial corollaries of the book’s pledge to tell all that is thought. Consistency of composition is extra-moral, beyond good and evil. In this respect, Peru proves Shklovsky’s dictum that “art is pitiless.” The final sentence of this passage, for instance, provides the sole reason for those that precede it:

I would have heard it if there had been screams. I heard the water sizzle. I heard the rubber bands. I saw everything—the big white buttons Steven Adinoff had, the blood which got on them, the dents in his hair, the dents which the hoe made in Steven Adinoff’s hair, the way the hoe bent Steven Adinoff’s hair down into them and how it stayed down there in the dents, got stuck there in them. Nothing is not seen, nothing is not heard.

Violence in Peru is compulsively visual—indeed, voyeuristic. Lish’s writing reflects a perceptual reflex; the narrative eye reacts as we would to graphic war footage, or to the car crash we want to but can’t look away from. When broken bodies open up to perception, injury yields ostranenie; the world’s deep structure disrupts our sensoria. In this sense, visions of violence can be visionary; ecstatic. From Gordon’s perspective, Adinoff appears to enjoy his death, as do the prisoners in Peru. Perhaps TV screen and sandbox alike are “evental sites,” as per Badiou—states of affairs which transform our access to truth:

Steven Adinoff knew the deepest thing of all, just like we all would probably prove we do if we suddenly ended up in the same setup as he did with me—plus as those men did with each other in Peru on the roof.

Within the world of the book, the word “Peru” points to a place of primordial wonder and horror, in which killing is innocently consensual, even erotic. Lish localises this liminal state in the sandbox, which we, eyes held open, are forced to behold. But the physical body is inside the soul, not vice versa; the sandbox itself is merely a memory, mediated by the mystery of infancy. This mystery is the true nucleus of Peru, a work which recounts what Nietzsche once called “the seriousness one had as a child at play”—or as Lish has lately put it, “homo ludens submitting himself… to the impressive sovereignty of his nature.”

Gordon at six is an alien entity, as we all were at that age. His amorphous mind is immersed in magical thinking. His reason for killing his rival arises from “rhyme,” and specifically his fantasy that he can “rhyme every word there is”—starting, in the sandbox, with the word “hoe.” The results approach religious glossolalia, and are the closest, he claims, “you ever get to feel to the fact that you yourself are God.” As an adult, watching two Peruvian prisoners bleed to death by an airduct, he likewise imagines that “maybe one of them in his mind was going like this… airduct, airduck, airluck, chairlug.” Here it becomes clear that the concept of rhyme, with its etymological root of “series” or “sequence,” is continuous with Lish’s credo of “consecution.” And Peru implicitly posits this principle—the practice of creation as recursion—not as an arbitrary artistic technique, but as a force of nature. For Lish, poïesis is intensely linked to instinct, just as it is for his key critical influences, Julia Kristeva and Harold Bloom. As spoken in the sandbox, and by the prisoners on the rooftop, poetic language is derived from a prior grammar of drives, of killing and dying and rising again—it is, as put in Peru, “the language of Peru.”

Peru itself is structured in strict accordance with this grammar; as always with Lish, a book is an object built up brick by brick. The section titles signal this explicitly: Peru is presented not as a novel but as a “property,” split into a “cellar” and “roof.” The book’s building blocks could even be parsed into classes. Firstly, objects, or fetishes: this class would include all humans and animals (there are no “subjects” in Peru, apart from the formal subjectivity of the work, which subsumes its contents) as well as recurring keywords such as “hoe,” “shoe,” “buick,” “gossamer,” “rake,” “sandbox” and so on. Secondly, sense-impressions: the sound of sprinklers spraying the lawns; the heat of the sidewalk; “the smell of citronella.” And then there is the associational logic that yokes these components together. Here, as in psychoanalysis, there is no such thing as “free” association. When the description “wet and pink-looking” proliferates across Adinoff’s harelip, a girl’s genitals (glimpsed during a game of “show me yours”) and a disfigured foot, the chain is tightly constrained by consecution—or what we might call, with Gordon, “rhyme,” by which “I don’t mean rhymes as we in general mean them. What I mean is like with like.”

Linking like with like means weaving a world; so while some readers would regard Peru’s narrator as solipsistic, the truth of his situation is that he is God. “I was just like God was,” Gordon recalls, since “I was the one who had to watch things for people, who had to see things… if I didn’t then it wouldn’t be.” For Lish as for Berkeley and Beckett, esse est percipi, and worlds and artworks alike require relentless attention. Gordon again: “when I was six, I thought that I had to keep everything, but everything, in my mind…to keep it all going.” These echoes of Beckett become more precise if Peru is compared to the latter’s late novella, Ill Seen Ill Said. In each, a deliberately limited lexical pool provides the “atoms” of a textual world—as it were, the grains of sand in the sandbox. These are then combined and recombined, raked over and over, in a recursive process whereby an artwork emerges from chaos into composition. In this way, the work is revealed as a world of its own; one whose language is its limit.

Accordingly, we cannot comprehend Lish’s contribution to literature without an awareness that composition cuts across ontology, not only aesthetics. For example, Jason Lucarelli has expertly essayed “consecution” as a writerly toolkit. But a more complete reconstruction of this concept would call for the following thought: consecution may be less a methodology than a metaphysic; a miraculating agent; an instance of spirit or pneuma submerged in the world. In Lucretius, the force of composition is described as a clinamen—our world is born from a “swerving” of atoms in their fall from heaven. Such is the purpose served by Peru’s perpetual swerving, rhyming and recursion. Each consecutive swerve steps closer toward a total curvature, an arc that delimits the work as a world apart. Peru is a paradigm of the artwork as a formally closed system. Hence, what has been called “consecution” is not a matter of mere wordplay; it is the way in which such a system defines its horizon.

What lies inside the horizon imposed by a hyperdense work of art? Peru’s consecutional poetry draws and then redraws a graph which is populated with more points at each pass. In so doing, it mirrors the temporal structure of traumatic memory—circling back on each of its objects again and again, in an eternal return of the same. This obsessive pressure, which the narrator declares has “turned me looking rearward for keeps,” has rightly been likened to Thomas Bernhard’s urge to “go back over everything.” In books by both of these authors, every event that occurs lasts as long as language is in motion: a text could be cut open at any point and disclose the same set of objects and forces; the same composition. But Bernhard’s fractal consecution differs from that of Lish, in that the latter exactingly brackets out “culture,” at least at the level of external reference.

For my part, I would side with an even more forceful extinction, in which each work of art is newly tasked with eradicating the existing tradition. Consistency overcomes history, exposing not a contingent set of experiences, but what Ashbery has called “the experience of experience”—or, as in Peru’s epigraph, attributed to Agamben, “the memory of memory itself.” When such revolutions are reached within works of art, they only endure in the time opened up by the work—briefly, but in that briefness forever. So, in poetry as in Peru, “the way you felt when you were six is the way you still feel now… it is always suffocating, the weather is always August.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Winters is a literary critic and theorist, and a co-editor at 3:AM. He writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Radical Philosophy and others. Links to his work are collected at Why Not Burn Books. Twitter: @davidcwinters.

No Medium, Craig Dworkin, MIT Press 2013.

Something has been fixed in. Something about nothingness, about unreadability and unwriterbility, about silence and absence, abjection and a special kind of boredom. Craig Dworkin’s book is about an aspect of this fix. He looks at “works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent.” He argues that “we should understand media not as blank, base things but as social events, and that there is no medium, understood in isolation, but always a plurality of media: interpretive activities taking place in socially inscribed places.” The last chapter gives a list of key examples of more than 100 scores and readings of ‘silent’ music.

Blanchot’s ‘gigantic’ de Sade impressed Beckett as being “jealous of Satan and of his eternal torments, and confronting nature more than human-kind.” Satan’s torments were in darkness, alone and in an eternity of ice. Jealousy is a feisty off-shoot of ambition. So why is de Sade jealous? De Sade is jealous of the perturbality of Satan. 120 days of Sodom reads like an accountant’s log. What disturbed Beckett when he read Kafka was the imperturbability. “I am wary of disasters that allow themselves to be recorded like a statement of accounts.” De Sade fails in his gigantic quest to be disturbed and so is jealous of Satan’s achievement. This links to the modern fix. In the modern fix there is a crucial disturbance freaking in blankness. There is an instinct in this stuff to not tone down what is mistakenly taken to be superfluous. Oddly, complexity and the amorphous can seem abstract. But they are correspondences of a desperate tormented plenum wriggling at the abyss. Torment in this mode stands time still, skips lives, makes space hard to cross. This is the liveliness of a “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

“You would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.” That’s Sam Beckett. Carl Andre says, “A thing is a hole in a thing it is not.” Dworkin starts to work out what he calls the logic of the substrate by examining the blank-paged poetry book Nudism in Jean Cocteau’s film Orphee of 1950. It is considered a pretentious joke in the film by Orpheus. Dworkin suggests that a sophisticated reading would get that it was a joke, but that a more sophisticated reading would refuse to get the joke. It depends on “how closely one reads a work that seems to ask only that it not be read.” At more or less the same time John Cage was delivering his ‘Lecture on Nothing’ where he said, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it.”

The title Nudism avoided Sartre’s ‘nothing’ of Being and Nothingness, as well as tinctures of any Dadaist nihilism, reified aestheticism, psychologism, or mystic Buddhism. For Dworkin its blankness is the metaphor of metaphor itself. Its name carries a ‘double-punch’ both suggesting and then denying its lubricious hint. It is a way in which everything is exposed, and as such is a moment of obscenity. Baudrillard writes: “The obscene is what puts an end to every look, to every image, to every representation … It is no longer the obscenity of what is hidden, repressed, or obscure; it is the obscenity of the visible, of the too visible, of the more visible than visible; it is the obscenity of that which has no more secrets, of that which is miscible in information and communication.” Dworkin thinks the internet and its technology has delivered universal obscenity.

Because there is “no outside vantage from which they can be perceived” everything is revealed and everything is nude. Dworkin says that “erasures obliterate, but they also reveal.” He suggests that by erasing words attention then is drawn to the paper and the dimensions of the book, the room in which its placed and so forth. Why does Dworkin refuse to consider the possibility of total erasure, where attention doesn’t stray? This is never discussed and the question is never raised. Roy Sorensen has noted a bias in thinking towards positive reality. But there are objects that are not reducable to positive reality. The concrete materialism of any media is irrelevent to these objects. The attention to the plurality of media of erased objects may be a failure of nerve before the absolute silence or blank space. Or perhaps it’s a reaction against classical exasperation. Given that life is pretty much unbearable except for millionaires these days, there’s something affectionate in the resourcefulness mobilising existence out of the very least.

Dworkin allows John Cage to be correct about silence. John Cage says that absolute silence is impossible. This is an error but not an offense. Nevertheless, silence, like shadows and holes, are absences of material objects. How to grasp their ontology is a challenge. Attempts to reduce talk of absence in terms of what it is an absence of fail. The hole in a donut is not part of the material substance of the donut. Nor is it another kind of material substance. Similarly with silence. Silence is just an absence of noise. It can be heard, just as a hole can be touched and seen, just as a shadow can be seen. But these are non-concrete objects. We can see that they are not subjective because we know they existed before minds evolved. They will out-live minds. So Cage is wrong to deny silence. Because modern artists, musicians, writers and philosophers have been repulsed by negative reality much of Dworkin’s thesis is based on Cage’s error. Philosophers talking about negative existence have been wooly like Heidegger on Holderlin, and can be accused of false advertising. They have refused to give full dues to negative existence. Silence, erasure, blankness have all been sites for discussing something less than absolute lessness, in that their silence is not really silent, their erasure not wholly erased, their blankness not absolutely blank. Dworkin is not wooly though, but detailed and immediate and economic. Jed Rasula has called him “the Barnum of a peculiar new circus called No Medium.” So his poetic imagination turns what I have pedantically called an error into an enchantment. The approach is the equivalent of camping in a fenestrated villa, on charcoal and the debris of period furniture.

The imaginary Cegeste’s Nudism book is merely a prop in a film (although designers Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin have realised an edition) but it serves as a starting point for Dworkin to discuss real life versions of unmarked pages submitted as literature and understood through the lens of Cage’s error. Lita Hornick’s Kulture imprint published a series of New American Poetry titles followed by a book by Aram Soroyan, “a five hundred page book bearing only a price ($2.00) and a copyright notice stamped under its cover.” Hornick was unconvinced even though she went ahead with the enterprise and most of them were pulped resulting in a big financial loss. Dworkin discusses the paper involved and invoked in this. Soroyan references Warhol pop art and minimalist sculpture when talking of the project. “What I was doing in writing a one-word poem during the sixties has long seemed to me to be the equivalent in language to the work of Andy Warhol in painting (his instant, simultaneous, and multiple images of Marylin Monroe) and Donald Judd in sculpture (his instant, simultaneous, and multiple metal boxes).” This seems like a commendable lust for learning rearing up amongst the ruins.

Marcel Duchamp discusses ‘the infrathing’, which is understood as “that point at which one can just barely begin to perceive a threshold between two states.” For Duchamp the state couldn’t be directly defined but could be “elaborated through examples.” He writes, “It’s something that always escapes precise definition. I have consciously chosen the word ‘thing’ because it is human emotional word and not a precise laboratory measure. The noise or music made by corduroy pants like these when one moves is tied to the concept of infrithin. The impression formed between two sides of a thin sheet of paper … something to be studied!” Duchamp tries to understand the issue in terms of moving from two to three dimensionality. This is obscure but since Duchamp philosophy has a better understanding of thresholds now.

Vagueness is the term of art philosophers have used for this subject. Roy Sorensen and Timothy Williamson have argued that thresholds are sharp but unknowable. The issue of the escaped precision that Duchamp mentions is therefore an issue of ignorance. Sorensen argues the ignorance is absolute because of the peculiarities of language that set up thresholds as false tautologies. As such, any initially identified precision brings with it a priori obligations to self destruct. There is an attitude of incredulity and futility that is overwhelming, and Duchamp intuited it.

An example makes it easier to see what he has in mind. His essay about ‘surface layer’ is helpful. “Attempting to place one planar surface precisely on another planar surface, you pass through some infrathin moments,” he says. Examples of pages being stuck together so that “all three edges line up edge to edge and have them conform to the registration of the other pages in the book” are discussed. The discussion of the display of opened journal pages is the focus of all this. Dimensions of the centerfold are important, as are supposed functions of positioning. An erased Playboy centerfold pinned to the wall by Friedman is discussed in terms of “the hands-free position of a masturbatory aid” and linked to Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased de Kooning Drawing and the blank pages of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman. The link is nailed with quotation from Chapter XXXVIII of Book 6: “To conceive this right – call for pen and ink, here’s paper ready for your hand.” Sterne prompts us to “paint her to your own mind – as like your mistress as you can – as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you.” Dworkin wants to draw the conclusion that “.. the blank page is culturally inscribed with an indelible text.” He says that the blank page is about copulation, and participation with the ‘virgin page’ is really all about masturbation. Derrida went on about this in an essay on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as if we needed its pedigree. But Dworkin reminds us to accept ignorance and pure weakness, where self devouring thought might not have to exist.

Friedman is contrasted with Sterne: “Sterne refrains so the reader may indulge; Friedman physically removes so that the viewer may mentally impose.” The Little Review blanked out all but one contribution. 1000 Hours of Staring (1992-1997) the blank is a relic. What provokes mental responses are ‘paratexts’ – “the gallery wall labels, catalogue essays, artist interviews, et etcetera.” The tenth number of the journal Gorgona of 1966 all the pages are blank. In a founding manifesto the neo-dadist group pronounced, “Gorgona does not speak of anything.” Dworkin refuses to address the paradoxical self-contradiction at the heart of any of this. Instead he refutes the declaration by insisting that there is an exception that rescues it from the paradox; he claims that it does speak to paratexts. He claims that “the contextual situation that permits it to speak at all is also the subject of its recursive, monotonous discourse.” What this offers is a victory for disorder over the pettiness of mind and soul.

The end of this is to produce the ‘anti-retinal’ art Duchamps dreamed of creating, a conceptual art that substituted the prolonged look with the knowing wink. Christine Kozlov’s 271 Blank Sheets of Paper Corresponding to 271 Days of Concepts Rejected. February – October 1968 may be the precursor of thousands of hours staring undertaken by Frank Uwe Laysiepen and Marina Abromovic in the 1980’s and Ian Wilson who refused to produce an artifact but sat in galleries discussing the works with visitors instead. The blank pages of Wilson were reminders of his position, in contrast with blanks functioning in iconic or metaphoric ways. The link between the blank page of literature and the blank canvas of art is explicit in Thierry de Duve: “the painter’s virgin canvas shares its whiteness with the writer’s blank page more than it does with other artifacts belonging to its own tradition, linen fabric included.”

Modernism included the readymade canvas as a picture but the readymade blank page prefigured modernism and so existed before aesthetic judgments could be produced. As early as 1913 Vasilisk Gnedov produced Poem Without End which was just a title with no subsequent text. It occurred in his collection Death to Art as the final poem as a “radical conceptual reductio of minimalist poetry.” Dworkin thinks poetry, unlike art, has forgotten its own history and refuses to continue with modernism. He writes, “Painting’s prolepsis meets its equivalent in poetry’s belatedness.” There’s a St Sebastian by Antonello de Messina that is a similar invasion into the human.

Dworkin thinks blank pages “tell the story not just about the development of modern art and literature, but about media themselves.” So for Dworkin we understand our times through examining “clear film, smooth phonograph discs, erased texts, blank compact discs, white canvases, silent music.” Media are activities in a social space rather than things. A robust materialism is countered by practices “that need not be discursive, representational, or even communicative at all.” What the media of media are is part of the question posed by blankness. The paper of a blank poem records the blankness of the poem but is not the medium of the poem. Dworkin suggests that the very notion of a medium is “caught between impossible chronologies” in this situation. If this is the very base of modernity then Dworkin is suggesting this as its resulting condition.

Dworkin takes two lessons from this. One is that the medium of art and literature require rigorous definitions, and the other is that media are not concrete objects. He cites with approval Robert Morris who says “from the subjective point of view there is no such thing as nothing.” This is a version of artistic nominalism whereby calling a thing art will make it art. It is conservative. By which is meant stable. The extremity of the gesture of blankness relies on well understood and stable conventions of social meaning. We are required to know that a painting hangs on a wall, a poem is transcribed in a book and so on, or else the gesture won’t work and the meanings of blankness disappear. De Duve says, of painting, “To call it a picture… means to acknowledge the presence of that historical convention in an otherwise mundane commodity.” Abby Smith says that “there is no object that exists outside the act of retrieval.” Kenneth Grahame asks, “When shall that true poet arise who, disdaining the trivialities of text, shall give the world a book of verse consisting entirely of margins.” Melville writes: “In essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour, and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning?” All this comes out of turmoil, and the attempt to find a motive to blow up all the previous dismal mixtures.

Nick Thurston published an edition of Blanchot’s L’Espace Litteraire in 2006 without Blanchot’s text but with his own marginalia as The Remove of Literature. Dworkin suggests the notes gesture towards more than just Blanchot’s erased text but to a ‘space of literature in general.’ This begins the second chapter looking at margins. The history of literary marginalia is long: they were known as adversaria scripta in the renaissance, and Coleridge, Horace Walpole, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Charles Darwin and E.A. Poe all created famous examples. William Blake annotated Joshua Reynold’s ‘Discourses’ and Swedenborg’s ‘Divine Love’ and ‘Divine Providence’, publishing his notes separate from their original sources. Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing is analogous to Thurston’s book, which in turn followed a Dadaist moment where Andre Breton erased lines of Picabia as soon as they were drawn. Nothing of this act was retained.

Rauschenberg’s work has been preserved; a surface of ink, crayon, with a shadow of the original drawing still visible. Schoenberg once said to John cage of an eraser at the end of his pencil, “This end is more important than the other.” Cage’s 4’33” was inspired by Rauschenberg’s ‘White Paintings’. But Cage thinks there is no such thing as silence. According to Cage, “even if we could listen in a vacuum, free from the imperceptible white noise of molecular space, we would still be awash in sound. As long as we are alive we never escape the systolic waves of the hermetic ocean tiding in the nautilus turns of the ear.” This is the enchantment of seeking the impossibility of ever being wrong enough, of being ridiculous and defenseless enough.

Foucault says Blanchot’s writing “lays bare what precedes all speech, what underlies all silence: the continuous streaming of language … A language not resolved by any silence: any interruption is only a white stain on its seamless sheet.” Blanchot, in his novel Le Tres-Haut, writes that “a relation is always a displacement.” Silence then is denied, and becomes instead merely “a series of shunted noises.” He writes: “Hard against me, an intermittent noise, of sand shifting and flowing over itself, a panting in extreme slow motion, as if someone had been there, breathing, preventing himself from breathing, hidden right there next to me.” Blanchot writes that “silence [endless resifting of words without content] … is precisely the profound nature of a silence that talks even in its dumbness, a silence that is speech empty of words, an echo speaking on and on in the midst of silence.” Dworkin hopes that through erasure writing can be recovered by attending to its essential detritus, its material media and its event. He suggests this retrieval comes by a palimpsest enacting a “double play of concealment and revelation”, a way of obstructing to make something visible. Andrew Gallix writes that “Words become visible; the bloody things keep getting in the way. From this perspective, the literary is what can never be taken as read.”

Blanchot plays with the etymology of palimpsest: it comes from the classical Latin meaning a parchment that has been written on again, which in turn comes from the Greek that means a parchment from which writing has been erased which again derives from Greek meaning ‘sand.’ Blanchot is talking about the literary equivalent of the silence that reveals the sound. In English ‘sand’ derives from old Teutonic ‘sandjan’ meaning ‘to send.’ So we have the removing and delivering of a message. Sand also denotes the bank of a river or the seashore, the marge or margin. Dworkin cites Keats’ ‘Hyperion’ here: “Along the margin- sand large footprints went.” Rauschenberg is left with similar marginalia; a label by Jasper Johns and the abraded gold leaf frame.

These margins are read in terms of Blanchot’s literature: “Literature does not confine itself to rediscovering in the interior what it tried to leave behind on the threshold. Because what it finds, as the interior, is the outside which has been changed from the outlet it once was into the impossibility of going out – and what it finds as the darkness of existence is the being of day which has been changed from explicatory light, creative of meaning, into the aggrevation of what one cannot prevent oneself from understanding, and the shifting obsession of a reason without principle, without any beginning, which one cannot account for.” This is an enclosed infinitely regressive dynamic. Stripped of an overbearing paradox, it is the temptation to be courageously imperfect and larval beneath some remorseless sky.

“In the solitude of work – the work of art, the literary work – we recover a more essential solitude … the person who is writing the work is thrust to one side, the person who has written the work is dismissed.” Thurston’s work, removing Blanchot’s text so that just Thurstone’s marginalia remain, is understood as an erasure of a work that has already announced its own disappearence. It is the “revelation of what revelation destroys.” It becomes a hole. It avoids being satire or farce because it presupposes the actual erased text. It is not marginalia as such – in the abstract – but relates to the main text and so maintains indexical force. That the main text is not there gives the enactment its contradictory strength: How can marginalia be marginalia without the presence of the original text? It matters therefore that Blanchot’s erased text says of itself that it seeks a condition of “indeterminate, elusive existence in which nothing appears, the heart of depth without appearance … meaning detached from its conditions, separated from its movements, wandering like an empty power, the simple inability to cease to be.” As a consequence the removal of this text makes the printed text of The Remove of Literature both marginalia and not. Dworkin calls this a condition of Neuter. The marginalia becomes an activity not a category. Foucault talks about “the movement of attraction and the withdrawal of the companion. .. opening into a neutral space.” It is to be dazed by the avalanche of one’s impossibility, of ones life spreading out and diluting into other lives, into failures and attempts. It is a harkening to the weariness, of seeking out the narrow bed to live out the failure of nerve passing and coming, of perturbations of every fragment of hell.

Blanchot seeks to identify this with “a relation of non-identification with themselves.” The paradoxical self-contradiction is in full flight here. Iago’s “I am not who I am” makes good on Blanchot’s promise to lose a text merely by trying to follow it. The potent word ‘being’ is defined by Blanchot thus: “a word the language protects by hiding it or that the language causes to appear by disapprearing into the silent void of a work.” This is the territory of Barthes writing at degree zero where he talks of writing in a colourless language, bleached. Dworkin puns with Blanchot’s name. The Remove of Literature becomes a sort of tomb for the Blanchot erased text. “When we speak we are leaning on a tomb, and the void of that tomb is what makes language true, but at the same time void is reality and death becomes being” says Blanchot. The paradox in question is analysed as a spandrel of language, a revenge effect of communication. It is a condition of communication that self-reference traps us.

A chapter on footnotes introduces the idea of literary prosthesis. Heriberto Yepezis is cited: “Nobody is going to believe that footnotes changed writing and reading. But they did.” Santayana wrote: “There are books in which the footnotes … are more interesting than the text.” Dworkin notes Gerard Genette who in turn noted the genres “on the threshold of literature” – dedications and insciptions, epigraphs and titles, prefaces, notes, bibliographic accoutrements and quotes approvingly Genette saying that “a text without a paratext does not exist.” For Dworkin, these are examples of paratexts that “seek to supplement, support and displace the body of the text” as marginalia do.

He traces the growth of notes to a mapping exercise by Daniel Spoerri in a work called Topographie. The growth becomes an hallucinatory enactment, of perverse amplitude, of the personally expressive and an objective impersonality. These twin elements have been competing since the beginning of modernism, and we can ask; are the paratexts “a vehicle for displaying the critic’s taste and breeding” or “a quasiscientific system for displaying the vicissitudes of textual transmission?” Edmund Spencer used such apparatus in his ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’. Pope, Swift, Fielding, Sterne, Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, Nabakov, Puig, Nicholson Baker, Danielewski, Perec, Pynchon all expand into this affray.

The accumulation of trash and these exercises in excess are bound up. In 1960 Armand Fernandez filled up the Galerie Iris Clert entirely with detritus. Robert Watt’s Table For A Suicide Event was a dark version of this type of sculptural collage. The Topologie book put the idea of the book in dialogue with style. The book was a kind of anecdote, a secret history. At the same time Warhol was doing his painting by numbers simulations. Historically the footnote – at first ‘bottom notes’ – was coeval with the development of book design that emerged from the Enlightenment. Typographical style conventions are inextricable from how these became used and what they could mean.

Simon Morris’s art book Interpretation erases all but the footnotes of academic writings and the call-out numbers are scattered. The academics try and reconstruct the original essays from the notes. Walter Abish writes a short story uses superscript notes pointing to empty references and changes the status of a pretty conventional story. The idea is to understand notes in terms of mention rather than use. Another idea is that structure becomes a theme. Artistic books play on dynamics between the material object and its metaphorical associations. Ballards’ The Index is an example of how these ideas have been used in a part sci-fi, part picaresque, part burlesque manner. Dworkin notes that “part of the fun of such a work … comes from trying … to imaginatively reconstruct the single coherent narrative to which the fragmented references might possibly obtain.” Peter Greenaway’s novel The Falls pretends to be a volume of a sequence of volumes recording a ‘violent unknown event’ working with structural coincidences of the German word ‘Fallen’. Dworkin writes that “Greenaway constructs a mirrored hallway of fictions and conspiracies engulfing one another so that every ground is at risk of being found out to be illusory.” The attraction of all these footnotes, indices and bibliographies suggest undivulged stories, indictments and disclosures. I am attached to dubious interpretation. I have no interest whatsoever in conquest.

Paul Fournel’s Banlieue, hints at suppressed violent incendiary narratives somewhere between Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distant Runner and Burgess’ Clockwork Orange. The theme is of gloss suspended, in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s “Any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support.” A chapter discusses ways in which visual works might have structures analogous to Western writing’s system of alphabet letters and words. The pixel is seen as a solution.

Why is photography art? It always enters into a dialogue (with its page or wall or portfolio) and a series. They were supposed, from the very start, to be haunted by buried histories. They contain a blur of aura. The copyright issue raises all this: are photographs found scenes or made objects? Zidlicky’s photographs permit materials to become substrates. Areas of erasure disrupt the representation. These areas are blacked out or blanched. Under their 3D imagery produced in a 2D picture lies unranked materials – salts, cellulose, halides, water molecules Dworkin thinks they “enact and figure the depthlessness of a figure without a face, without any primary or outward aspect, and they illustrate the false faciality of depth.” The face is given special focus for Dworkin because it is a system by which “sheer materials are legible as media.” In a discussion about Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the face Dworkin quotes them as saying, “the face has a great future but only if it is destroyed, dismantled. Why? Because the face is a conceptual map. Levinas sees the face as the irreducible other. It can’t be mapped onto a totalizing system attempting to comprehend the self and the other. On the road to the asignifying and asubjective.” I made this a paraphrase of Rimbaud’s “a child full of sadness / squatting, looses a boat as frail / as a moth into the fragrant evening.”

Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion is linked to another discussion about the paintings of Francis Bacon: “painting has two possible paths of escaping the figurative: towards pure form, through abstraction, or towards the pure figural, through extraction or isolation.” Bacon is an abstracter and isolator. “The face has lost its form by being subjected to the techniques of rubbing and brushing that disorganise it and make a head emerge in its place.” Whether the stars have floored him or not quite yet is a subterranean issue.

Levinas’ face is only understood in terms of the infinite responsibility we have towards the other. “For the presence before the face, my orientation toward the Other can lose the avidity of the gaze only by turning into generosity, incapable of approaching the other with empty hands. This relationship, established over the things hereafter possibly common, that is, susceptible of being said, is the relationship of discourse. The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we name the fact. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me.” The face for Levinas seems like a trapdoor opening to the theatrical underworld and its whirring mechanisms and costume storehouse. And its darkness.

We read into the face, and we read into photography. They are duplicitous but not insincere, like Jastrow duck/rabbits and Rorschach tests. They are a litmus test for the viewer. This links to translation. Translation is a kind of elegy. Robert Frost wrote that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Dworkin is interested in translations that are recognised as equals or improvements to the originals. Robert Rauschenberg’s 1951 series ‘White Paintings’ used commercial white house paint laid in using a roller. They were futuristic, linking with minimalism and conceptual art of the next decade. And backward-looking, linking with monochrome paintings such as Rodchenko’s 1921 Pure Colours: Red, Yellow, Blue and Malevitch’s Black Quadrilateral, Red Quatrilateral and White on White. Dworkin reads him as offering a “rebuke to his own contemporaries, casting a quiet, cold stare at the psychologised gestures and overwrought facture of abstract expressionism and offering an unheeded warning to the imminent egomaniacal spiritualism of Yves Klein’s self-branded blue.” John Cage saw them as “airports for shadows and dust.” Rauschenberg said ‘they had to do with shadows and the projection of things in a room onto the blank canvass.’

Cage sees the Rauschenberg paintings as prefiguring his own 4’33”. He ends a discussion paraphrasing William Carlos Williams: “Say it, no ideas but in things.” Dreyfus thinks that “the closer one approaches the conceptual the more the material presses in.” Rauschenberg said that “What interests me is a contact. It is not to express a message.” Dreyfus links this to Walter Benjamin: “Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point – establishing , with this touch rather than with the point, the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity – translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.”

In this way Rauschenberg is being translated by Cage. Translation is an enactment of touching. The danger of translation for Benjamin is that “the gates of language thus expanded and modified may slam shut and enclose the translator in silence.” At the end of this section Dreyfus reroutes translation: instead of elegy it now more an act of absorption and reverie, “in the way one might be lost in thought. Which is precisely the way thought can be found in materials, ideas lodged in things.” In discussing Zen for Record Dreyfus finds a dialectic between the promise of silence and the reality. On a vinyl record, silence is impossible. It is a record that only delivers an illusion of the illusion that we can get beyond facts. If anything, it helps us see what can be done a little better. It is a boundary work in the Duchampean sense, some activity done whilst dying is going on that is heavily involved in finding expression even if never actually finding it.

Dworkin returns to Cage. The 4’33’ is an experiment designed to show the audience that silence is impossible. Cage had heard his own heartbeat in an anechoic chamber in Harvard in an apocryphal segment of autobiography. This leads to the conclusion that the media are always legible in the message. Adorno’s theory of music is based on assuming “slight, continuous and constant noise.” Zen For Film accumulates more noise each time it is played. Viewing the film brings it closer to destruction. Hegel discusses Aufhebung which is a simultaneous preservation and cancellation. A different technology of record – eg a CD – would measure decay differently from that of a record. A lesson drawn by Dworkin is that pure medium is as unrealisable as pure silence. Webs of overlapping technological support “fatally complicate any account of a single, pure, essential medium. There are only ever media.” Another lesson is that Zen for Record shows that conceptual art is inextricably link to materiality.

This is a conclusion that has nowhere to be. It cannot be in front of nothingness, for if it were, it would cancel nothingness. No Medium is an exercise of visionary exile that doesn’t live anywhere. Apart from extreme perturbation I have not the faintest idea whether my preferences are vindicated by these samples. Bear in mind that I don’t think we can ever go too far, and that we need agitation and turmoil to get through to being ridiculous. Play-acting – both the pernicious kitsch competitive plethora type and the caricatured arterial-bursting existential type – is here substituted for acts without hope done in calm repose facing the turmoil of damnedness.

‘Damnedness’ spooks up too many theologies. So substitute it for a contrary, a Hebraic antithesis and chiasmus left hanging in a forlorn hope that the contradiction cancels expressiveness. I sound like someone mumbling from a protestant rest home. Dworkin’s book reminds us that even ideas of poverty and bareness are superlatives. It will be relevant for as long as we’re in turmoil, we want to be happy and all we’re good for on paper is going on into Beckett’s “silliness, ignorance, impotence and silence.” The last chapter is a trove for which Dworkin deserves our deepest gratitude.

A few days after reading this book I wondered how blank art could be erased. In the spirit of Dworkin I reckon a sophisticated reader will get the joke. Then a more sophisticated reader will refuse to.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Speedboat and Pitch Dark by Renata Adler, reissued by NYRB Classics, 2013

Do I need to stylize it, then, or can I tell it as it was?… Is that where it begins? I don’t know. I don’t know where it begins. It is where I am.

These lines, from the opening pages of Renata Adler’s second novel, Pitch Dark (1983), should rightly be read as a self-reflexive rumination on the fragmented and nonlinear prose style in her two fictional works, an endeavor to centralize the act of storytelling (and, with it, the conflicts between objectivity and subjectivity) begun by Adler when Speedboat was published in 1976. The impact of Speedboat upon writers as diverse as David Foster Wallace, Elizabeth Hardwick, and David Shields proves its status as a sui generis text. As Guy Trebay notes:

Speedboat … stamp[s] contemporary consciousness with its singular mark. Because the book prefigured by decades certain telegraphic forms of communication we now take for granted, it is easy to miss the point that Speedboat got there well before e-mails or Facebook or Twitter.

Because Speedboat in effect reinvented the novel with its unique mix of vignettes, kaleidoscopic and panoramic reportage, and a presciently liberal social commentary, Adler’s prefiguration of how contemporary life is ingested in—and therefore best understood by—fragments represents a stylistic shift in narration. As such, Speedboat is a seminal text in the history of the literary novel’s evolution. Now that it and its companion novel Pitch Dark have been reissued by the New York Review of Books after being out of print for some twenty-five years, one can read these texts anew, posit their importance to experimental fiction written in the wake of Speedboat, and also admire Adler’s gift for incisive social and personal insights that are still relevant and resonant to this day.

Both Speedboat’s and Pitch Dark’s narrators are reporters. In the former novel, Jen Fain shifts back and forth in time as she relates experiences at boarding school, graduate school, cocktail parties with academics, interviews conducted with people of different classes and races in her capacity as reporter, and the political conflicts that affect a liberal, bohemian social clique whose globetrotting always brings them back to Manhattan as if the city were a magnet. (These experiences are also Kate Ennis’s in Pitch Dark, but the later novel focuses more on Ennis’s psychological conflict than on the more external factors with which Speedboat is concerned.) As Adler eschews plot almost entirely, the vignettes Jen Fain offers form a whole only as one reads. Muriel Spark observes how, when reading Adler’s prose, “[y]ou have to piece it together as you would if you had picked up a stranger’s private journal.”

Although Speedboat is more of a public chronicle than a private document like Pitch Dark, it is still very much a subjective view of city life and how this affects an individual’s consciousness. Fain observes: “I find that many city people give their most minute attention to the ethics of found objects, small.” In many ways, this is one of the pressing issues in Speedboat: how the mundane encounters in our lives—the bureaucratic idiocies at the institution where Fain serves as an adjunct; telephone calls from PBS soliciting donations; international phone calls with bad connections, effectively rendering them party-lines (as Matthew Specktor has also termed Adler’s prose style in his piece in The Believer); the political and intimate disconnect one has with one’s lovers—are like pieces in a puzzle which can never be placed together into a concrete whole, and yet, if we are to make sense of our individuality, must somehow be mapped on to our subjectivities, even if our attempts fail: “Something lost in translation there, perhaps. Everywhere.”

And while “[p]eople seem to be unhappy in so many different ways,” Fain must incorporate the fragments of other people’s experiences in order to fathom her own. In this way, “the inevitable is being interrupted by strangers all the time,” thus affecting the narrative we attempt to construct for ourselves:

The plot of things separating, not so common, disintegration, breaking up. The plot of one thing following in the track of another, as in thrillers, chases. The plot of things parallel. Suspense, which has time as an obstacle to a resolution in the future. Nostalgia, which has time as an obstacle to a resolution in the past. Maybe there are stories, even, like solitaire or canasta: they are shuffled and dealt, then they do or do not come out.

Also affecting our narratives are, as Trebay believes Adler presages, our modes of communication and travel, which combine to further displace us from other people despite how necessary they are to the task of trying to understand our identities in relation to the world in which we live: “The jet, the telephone, the boat, the train, the television. Dislocations.”

Pitch Dark takes dislocation as its main theme. Like Jen Fain, Pitch Dark’s Kate Ennis is a reporter, and, to some extent, the social, cultural, and political background with which Speedboat deals is one the reader must keep in mind when reading Pitch Dark. Due to this, the two novels read as companion pieces, with the first-person narrators blending into each other, complete with shared experiences and a common worldview. (Indeed, in the second section of Pitch Dark, the narrator even becomes Adler herself, causing Spark to wonder: “Does Miss Adler mean to suggest that she herself is Kate Ennis?”)

Ennis’s main conflict in Adler’s second novel is whether to leave a married man with whom she has been having an affair for eight years. More poetic in both style and depth than Speedboat, Pitch Dark uses repetition to convey the circuitous meanderings of its narrator as she ponders whether or not to leave Jake (a conflict and character name that allude to Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater). Two oft-repeated refrains that get to the heart of Ennis’s mental state throughout the course of Pitch Dark are as follows:

You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life. Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?

And while Ennis muses on her past with Jake, her present is sullied by the fact that her identity—and Pitch Dark is very much Ennis’s quest for autonomy—is subsumed beneath Jake’s as well as the other events in her life. In her attempt to excavate herself, Kate’s internal journey is mirrored by an external one that moves from Manhattan to New York State, from Orcas Island to the Irish countryside.

Increasingly, Ennis’s travels give rise to feelings of paranoia and both cultural and self-dislocation: “I still have the sense, how to put this, that the land, even the sleeping country towns, know of me.” The titular section of Pitch Dark is the most plot-driven, but it is still very much interior in focus as Ennis deals with an ever-mounting sense of panic after a slight fender bender in a tiny Irish town, an incident that becomes a Kafkaesque nightmare involving a lorry driver as a bizarre “teamster” in a middle-of-the-night motorway ride to Dublin in a rented vehicle Ennis feels sure is under police scrutiny and which has hardly any gas in the tank. Spark is spot-on when she remarks of this section: “This is a superb piece of nightmare writing.”

Like Jen Fain in Speedboat, Kate Ennis discovers that to think of the self as unaffected by one’s environment is a flawed endeavor; to this end, both narrators realize that the act of storytelling in which the “I” is front and center risks missing material or else running against the problem of how to incorporate it: “Because it would be part of what I know, part of what I have to tell, that I understand something, not everything, but something…” In this way, the quote with which I began this piece comes to suggest that a fragmented, solipsistic style is the best way to unearth one’s identity from the events that shape (and sometimes destroy) it. Describing a diary she kept in her twenties, Ennis observes:

The penmanship was fine, still those clear, regular capitals. But the record was of moods. There were no events, few names, no facts, no indication of what happened… What few names there were appeared uncharacterized, and not part of any incident or sentence; and the moods were described only to the extent of being up or down, like a chart of the stock market or of an illness… The events simply were not there, and, more surprisingly, I could not reconstruct them.

The collective anxiety of Manhattan life portrayed in Speedboat, along with the more personal anxiety and paranoia experienced by Kate Ennis in Pitch Dark, are ones that are still resoundingly relatable to our lives today. As Specktor writes:

[Adler’s] work hasn’t dated: its depth of engagement on every level—with private life and the life of state—its comedy and perspective, its shrewd observation of everything from literature to politics to manners and back again, these qualities mark Adler’s work as fathomless, as damn near inexhaustible.

Adler’s work is an analysis of the individual in ”an age of crime,” as she phrases it in Pitch Dark, one in which “[v]ery few of us, it seems fair to say, are morally at ease.” As Jen Fain remarks in Speedboat, as she attempts to quell mass hysteria on a tiny charter plane “start[ing] down the runway of the Fishers Island airport”: “For flights I have these pills. … I counted and found I had enough painkilling pills for everyone.” Substitute Xanax for the Valium and Percodan scattered throughout Speedboat and Pitch Dark, and one has our world today, a world in which external realities affect our inner states of mind, a world we inhabit with others whose differences in some way become part of our own story: “As much as this is the age of crime, after all, this is the century of dislocation. Not just for journalists or refugees: for everyone.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
K. Thomas Kahn is a writer based in New York City whose criticism has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Quarterly Conversation, Bookslut, Music and Literature Magazine, The Millions, and other venues. He is the curator of @proustitute.

Double Bind: The Muslim Right, The Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights, Meredith Tax, Centre for Secular Space 2013

A lot has been said, a lot has been written, about the treachery of the Western left, its alliance with the religious far right, and its abandonment of solidarity and justice and freedom. You may well be bored of the discussion by now. Isn’t this just political positioning? We’re only really talking about a few extremists here, aren’t we? How do you define ‘left’ anyway? But ideas can impact in ways you haven’t thought about. If a bunch of placard-waving career activists organise a demonstration alongside the Muslim Brotherhood, that doesn’t matter. If the head of Human Rights Watch argues that Western governments should support the Muslim Brotherhood where it is trying to hijack the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt – that does matter. It changes people’s lives.

It is a surreal truth to face, but the fact is that to some extent the ideas of UK far left cults have spread into senior levels of international respected human rights organisations. Take, for example, Amnesty International. According to Meredith Tax, the writer and activist, Amnesty has a larger budget than some states, so what it does certainly matters. As a human rights organisation it had a duty to fight the American abuses of human rights. In a decision of catastrophic stupidity, the US state of the 1980s backed the Arab-Afghan mujahideen against the Russian invaders. The logic was that this was the Cold War, and the enemy’s enemy were our friends in the fight against godless communism. (Hey, they’re completely crazy, but at least they’re believers!) US money and equipment flowed through Pakistani intelligence services to Muslim Brotherhood organiser Abdullah Azzam, who set up an air bureau to get foreign jihadis into Peshawar training camps. Azzam had another rich friend: a young Saudi called Osama bin Laden.

Post 9/11, the Americans maintained their Saudi alliance, despite its incremental role in promoting jihadist propaganda. US abuses in the terror war included the systemic use of torture, and the legal and moral black hole of Guantanamo Bay. There are other, worse secret US black sites – Tax mentions Bagram, in Pakistan – but Gitmo captivated the world like a bloody comet: those kneeling figures in orange jumpsuits linger in the mind and stain the American ideal to this day. It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to be held in such a facility, but there have been numerous attempted and successful suicides, and allegations of torture, including sleep deprivation, hooding, forced positions and solitary confinement. Detainees can be held for years without a whisper of due process.

Amnesty’s response to all this was interesting. It partnered with an organisation called CagePrisoners, run by Birmingham-born Muslim Moazzam Begg. Begg became something of a cause celebre after he moved himself and his family to Afghanistan in July 2001. The timing was unfortunate. Six months later, Begg was arrested by the Americans, and ended up in Guantanamo via Bagram. Begg’s incarceration coincided with a growing liberal outrage about US black sites, the Iraq war and America in general. Artists and journalists mobilised against Gitmo. Michael Winterbottom made a sympathetic and well received documentary about the ‘Tipton Three’, a trio of Midland Muslims picked up by US intelligence on the way to a wedding in Pakistan; and Begg himself was featured in a West End play, Guantanamo: Honour Bound to Defend Freedom, written by the Guardian journalist Victoria Brittain and the novelist Gillian Slovo. Eventually, the then Labour government pressured the US to release Begg and some other detainees. President Bush, against the advice of US intelligence, agreed.

Back in the UK, Moazzam Begg threw himself into journalism and campaigning. He wrote for the Guardian, appeared on antiwar platforms and collaborated with Brittain on his autobiography, Enemy Combatant, in which he portrayed himself as a decent, devout family man who paid the price for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He moved to Afghanistan partly because of ‘the cost of living… Many people told me that we could live in the best area of Kabul for less than £100 a month’. He felt that the Taliban ‘had made some modest progress – in social justice and in upholding pure, old-style Islamic values forgotten in many Islamic countries.’ What was he mainly doing in Afghanistan? The general idea was to give ‘social value and assistance to those less fortunate than myself’ and, in particular, building a school: ‘The plan was to expand both boys and girls schools to incorporate secondary education – and a link to the Kabul University. We collected books, funds and stationery; together with computers, classroom furniture and playground apparatus… Though the girls’ school was not authorised by the strict Taliban regime, I still enrolled my own daughter at the school, and my son at the boys – though he was still too young.’ As Meredith Tax says, Begg presents himself as ‘a good-hearted, wide-eyed innocent who bumbles his way through world-historical events without really understanding what’s going on.’

Tax has a whole chapter on Moazzam Begg and CagePrisoners. Reading it, you are frequently shaking your head and wondering how even Victoria Brittain could be taken in by such an obvious front story. Tax points out that back in the late nineties, Begg ran a Midlands bookshop called Maktabah al Ansaar, which disseminated salafi-jihadist propaganda, was raided three times by UK authorities, and published a book by al-Qaeda operative Dhiren Barot, now serving thirty years for conspiracy to murder. During this time he met al-Qaeda fixer Mahmoud Abu Rideh, whose war stories inspired Begg’s relocation to Afghanistan. Begg’s stated activity there – building a school for Afghan girls – is absolutely key to his defence. The girls’ school gives a liberal gloss to both Begg’s account and the Taliban regime, and puts a dent in feminist criticism. Abu Rideh, interviewed by Begg, says that ‘We worked together to build that school… for girls in a place where the rest of the world was saying that the Taliban did not allow female education, when in fact Muslims were helping to set up schools, like yourself, for girls in Afghanistan.’ All very civilised. Except that the Taliban had already closed down all the girls’ schools. This particular school was set up by al-Qaeda’s treasurer to teach the children of foreign jihadis. Begg escaped the bombing of Kabul through Osama bin Laden’s Tora Bora caves, and a money order in his name was found in a Jalalabad training camp raided by the Northern Alliance in November 2001. All this, by the way, Tax gets from Begg’s memoir, interviews and tribunal statements that Begg does not dispute. She discounts his confession at Bagram which Begg says was extracted under duress.

No surprise then that Begg’s organisation CagePrisoners campaigned for some of the most vicious jihadi ideologues ever to walk the earth. Tax lists a rogue’s gallery that includes Abu Hamza, who turned the Finsbury Park mosque into a jihad recruitment centre; Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda theoretician who inspired the Fort Hood massacre, the Underwear Bomber and the stabbing of a British MP; and Khalid Sheikh-Mohammed, who helped organise 9/11, the ’93 bombing of the World Trade Centre, the Bali nightclub bombing and the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl.

Obviously, even jihadis are entitled to due process. Guantanamo should be burned to its foundations, and salt sewn into the ground. But it’s a massive deductive leap from arguing for due process, to arguing that everyone in Gitmo should be released regardless of what they have done or the evidence against them. CagePrisoners made that leap. Gita Sahgal ran Amnesty’s gender unit and was increasingly concerned about her organisation’s partnership with Begg’s crew. After going through CagePrisoner’s website, she found that ‘their goal was to obtain the release of such prisoners, rather than simply affording them fair trial and punishment by a properly constituted court… Supporting prisoners in this way is not simply an act of charity, but a form of religious support towards their theo-political goals.’

As Tax explains, human rights is based on the rule of law. Short circuit that and you don’t have a human rights organisation. Sahgal tried to get Amnesty’s management to understand this. In an internal memo she argued that:

To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment….fatally blurring the distinction between defending the rights of the individual and creating a narrative of innocence to suit our campaigning. This is a very old problem but it has currently reached its apotheosis in the decision to take Begg to Downing Street and to tour with him across Europe.

When that memo got no results, Sahgal went public with an interview for the Sunday Times. Three hours after that interview appeared, she was suspended.

CagePrisoners is an old tale but it is indicative of wider problems. The Great Game was a term for the swashbuckling imperial rivalry between Britain and Russia for Central Asian rule. It continued well into the Cold War with players like Kissinger and Nixon making alliances and manipulating peoples like Haig with his toy soldiers. Now the left has discovered its own version of the Game – where all that matters is strategic partnerships and the language of resistance, and secularism, liberty and the rule of law are discarded as bourgeois frivolities. The results for people who actually are fighting for freedom, particularly dissidents in Islamic countries, are disastrous. The antiwar left doesn’t support the rights of women: indeed, we know that the SWP, the driving force behind the antiwar movement, does not even support the rights of female activists in its own organisation. Forget the anti-imperialist rubric. Feminism is key to everything. It’s the only recent radicalism that has worked and has to be supported if the suffering in the Arab world will ever end. To paraphrase Orwell, hope lies with women.

With this in mind Sahgal and Tax have set up the Centre for Secular Space which aims to promote universal rights without concessions to misogyny, fundamentalism and lies. Meredith Tax’s book, Double Bind, can be ordered from there, and it’s essential if you want to understand the nasty little hole the left has dug itself into. I should also say that the CSS is a new organisation, it doesn’t have Amnesty’s huge corporate budget, and it badly needs donations.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals. He is reviews editor of 3:AM.

The Iraqi Christ, Hassan Blasim, Comma Press 2013

At one point in Hassan Blasim’s startling new collection, the author is asked a question that writers of the short form hear over and over again: ‘Why don’t you write a novel, instead of talking about all these characters – Arabs, Kurds, Pakistanis, Sudanese, Bangladeshis and Africans? They would make for mysterious, traditional stories. Why do you cram all these names into one short story? Let the truth come to light in all its simplicity.’

In the interviews I subsequently read, the Iraqi writer tries again and again to face down the conundrum. To Thresholds magazine he said: ‘In a novel, you have to talk about everything, you have to know about everything. But a short story is like me – I don’t know anything about life.’ He told the New Statesman that ‘we need to express the disaster of our lives in the Arab world in a language that is bold, up to date and not afraid’. Blasim also regrets ‘the tedious and nauseating refrain about the beauty and sanctity of the Arabic language because it is the language of the Quran and of the great tradition of Arabic poetry.’ Instead he writes in a terse, unsettling but nevertheless lyrical style. There is the same queer mixture of clarity and disalignment you feel while reading Kafka’s short stories. It is the terrible clarity that comes with fear, where every particle of the street seems fresh and crisp, and it seems like these are your last impressions of the world.

The language of disaster is fragmentation. Violence fractures everything. The living legacy of dictatorship and war is present in every word of every line. A senseless, sprawling chaos of religious terror, Ba’ath repression and collateral damage forms an unnerving background to the collection, like a sports commentary delivered by a jabbering maniac. Blasim’s Iraq is a place where you can go out for milk and cigarettes and get blown up by a car bomb. The title story, narrated from the afterlife, is about an Iraqi conscript forced into becoming a suicide bomber. Another story, ‘The Song of the Goats,’ explores an inter-family conflict between two brothers, one an embittered and emasculated Iran/Iraq war veteran, the other working for Saddam’s secret police. Blasim says that ‘I have nine siblings, and all my family in Iraq went off to do different things. I left to be a writer, one of my brothers went to study religion, and one joined the police. And all of us, we have different opinions about families and about life.’ The truth is never simple. It’s as Rumi says, so often we believe we see the whole world, when in fact we are holding just a fragment of a shattered mirror.

Blasim offers a new take on an oral culture. ‘The Song of the Goats’ features a competition where Iraqis clamour to give the most harrowing take on the war, and ‘Sarsara’s Tree,’ is about a corrupt NGO official who spins emotive stories of starving Africans to finance unnecessary projects, only to find himself caught up in genuine and frightening village lore. But Blasim is at his best when he’s surreal. On the occasions a terrorist attack hits the UK, bystanders say, ‘It’s like something out of a film,’ and I used to think that was a reflection of Western ignorance, our protected postmodern consumerist lives, but maybe it’s the same for people who actually have to live in war zones, and the unreality just gets deeper and more intense, until it seems to cover everything. The author tells us: ‘Violence in the city is like a nightmare. It’s real and not real… And it’s like dreaming too.’ In ‘The Hole,’ Blasim’s most affecting piece, a shoplifter is chased out of a supermarket by random gunmen, and falls into a twisting warren. Already down the hole are an old man and a dead Russian soldier. They chat and banter, and the narrator quickly makes peace with his new home. Then, a woman falls into the hole. ‘A blood analysis robot was chasing me,’ she says.

This spring is the Iraq war’s tenth anniversary. In British newspapers and blogs we have had a barrage of sanctimonious commemorations, and Adrian Mole style demo nostalgia pieces for the Grand March of 2003. I was on that protest too, and it’s striking that so many people’s politics, at least on Iraq, haven’t moved an inch in ten years. Young writers including Owen Jones and Laurie Penny write about the march as if it were the defining event of a generation, but say little or nothing about the experiences of other young people of that generation – the average age on Telic operations was twenty-one – who actually went out there and fought to get a fascist dictatorship out of power. Still more disturbing is the absence of Iraqi voices from the debate. If free thinking Arab writers are rarely seen on leftwing platforms, the least we can do is read their fiction. And Blasim’s short stories are a great contribution to the literature of this troubled, bloodsoaked country.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals. He is reviews editor of 3:AM.

Massimo Scolari, Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective, MIT Press 2012

Is there a subtle mistake that Bazin makes about the ontology of the photographic image that Godard imports wholesale and explicitly into his masterpiece Le Mempris? The mistake may be of no matter given the resulting fertility and creativity. But if it’s there then it does open a rift between what a creative artist thinks and what is really happening. And if, as Colin McCabe contends, Bazin’s 1954 ontological essay ‘places cinema in a cultural perspective that takes in the 4000 years from Egyptian funerary art…is absolutely crucial to understanding Godard’s oeuvre..[and]…is… the “axiom” from which all of Godard’s theorems derive’, then the error seems one that we should at least note, even if we approach it dialectically and without hostility. According to a fascinating essay by Jonathan Law in the pregnant new book Godard’s Contempt edited by McCabe and Laura Mulvey, works by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Roberto Rossellini as well as Godard are co-opted into what playfully might be called Bazin’s error.

Bazin says that still photography preserves the objects that they reproduce. This imports without questioning the notion that a single perspective ‘preserves the objects that they reproduce.’ But the photographic single perspective reproduces a phenomenology of seeing, of how things seem from such a perspective, rather than the thing itself. In other words, they reproduce how things appear from a single perspective. And of course the relationship between this and reality is not straightforward. Bazin’s further idea that photography can be objective because photographs can be taken without human presence is unconvincing. All that shows is that we have an instrument capable of autonomously reproducing single perspectival images and doesn’t speak at all to the idea of objective truth.

Secondly, Bazin refers us to the funerary practices of the Ancient Egyptians who ‘saw survival as depending on the continued existence of the corporeal body’ and statues as ‘the preservation of life by a representation of life.’ So does Bazin think the statues were representing how the dead appeared to us? This would then have them functioning as the photographic images. But if so, we would expect them to create statues like those made by Giacometti, whose figures are about showing in 3D form how figures appear, rather than how they are. Well, the Egyptian figures are not like Giacometti’s. But here’s the thing – the Egyptian statues aren’t like the classical statues that Marker in La Jetee, Godard in Le Mempris, Resnais in L’annee derniere a Marienbad and Hiroshima mon Amour, Rossellini in Viaggio in Italia reference either. The Egyptian statues aren’t 3D idealised models of reality but like with their drawings and paintings, are to be understood diagrammatically. The deep shadowing used in all the images of the statues in the films would make different sense to the Ancient Egyptians. Massimo Scolari’s sensational book doesn’t discuss these issues directly but after reading it there’s no doubt his subject is potentially corrosive of Bazin’s error.

Panofsky’s seminal book Perspective as Symbolic Form of 1927 dominates discussion of visual representation and secured the hegemony of central perspective in contemporary discussion of painted and drawn representation of 3D space. But this hegemony distorts history by obliterating alternatives. Parallel projection or axonometry was dominant at least twice in the last 2000 years. Greek vases, the art of Pompeii, Byzantine mosaics, the Italian Renaissance, and the historical avant-garde prefer it to central perspective. Leonardo da Vinci used axonometry even when perspective dominated. Axonometry first entered the west in the 4th century and still dominates in China. Scolari thinks Da Vinci chose axonometry because it better represented the space of an object. Perspective better represented the object in space. Drawing for mechanical and functional ends developed axonometrical approaches because they were able to prove the three-dimensional buildability of a plan better than central perspective.

Perspective was a formulated code by the end of the sixteenth century thanks to Alberti and Pieri della Francesca. Axonometry wasn’t. But Descartes thought perspective was dissembling, and in this Descartes reveals his military, pragmatic preference for clarity. Stone-cutters also preferred axomometry because it was more accurate than single perspective. Military architects demanded rapid measurements from plans and single perspective couldn’t supply that. Axonometry could. The Turkish threat after 1550 focused minds. Precision of drawing was a matter of life and death, disaster and glory. As Diego Gonzales de Medina Barba said, ‘an imperfection of a line could mean the loss of an army.’ Soldier engineers were uninterested in the seductions of perspective. For the next three hundred years military drawings of fortresses used axonometry but continued to call the drawings perpectival. To make the distinction between these approaches and Euclidan perspective adjectives such as ‘simplicity’ and ‘practicality’ and ‘common’ were added. A soldier-theoretician Giovanno Battista Belici (Belluzzi) said that in war: ‘one single view does not serve, since the whole has to be shown.’ Euclid’s theory of vision proposed ‘a visual pyramid’ where visual rays were sent out from the eye. Cleaned of metaphysics and biology by the fourteenth century it became a key to Renaissance perspective. It was unknown in China where representations of shadow are seen as obscuring stains. But the application of geometry in optics originally ignored Euclid and preferred Arabic formulations of Alhazen and Al-Kindi. Roger Bacon and Witelo thought these were more scientific. Light became ‘the original essence of the created being, the truths of reason of the unity, which produces space and time.’

This reverses the Euclidean view. Visual rays don’t emanate from the single eye to the objects, but from objects beaming back to the eyes. Bacon writes: ‘the universe from each of its points radiates influences in all directions, rays and species, so that each point is per se an active centre, a sort of eye sending species over the entire universe and receiving them from the entire universe.’ These light lines, the species, were physical, not Euclidean dimensionless abstracts. This gnomic tradition had nothing to do with perspective but rather preferred developing the idea of a Sun’s eye view, via a theory of shadows that conceived that such a Sun’s eye view could never see the unilluminated side of an object and whose represented didn’t require lines of sight to converge as in perspective. Parallel lines were always represented as parallel by convention, although there was controversy in the middle ages as to whether they converged in the vast distance or not. The middle ages lacked a concept of limit. That wasn’t developed until the seventeenth century by Desargues. Plotinus thought an image was to represent the appearance of an object and also its nous, the intellect and the universal soul. To do this we need to have the physical acquaintance of the physical nature of vision. On this view of Plotinus only close-ups could be true to the object seen, so depth was to be avoided in pictures, along with shadows which were obscure and empty of matter. The eye had to become ‘equal and similar to the object observed in order to contemplate it… one can never see the sun without becoming similar to it, and a soul can never contemplate beauty without being beautiful itself.’ He said ‘there is no point at which one can fix one’s own limits and say: this is as far as I am up to here.’ Perception ‘clearly takes place where the object is … to see, it is necessary to lose consciousness of one’s own being, it is necessary in some way to stop seeing.’ These ideas that condemned appearance influenced representational art throughout the Middle Ages.

Leaping forward into the last century Paul Klee in the Bauhaus in 1921 said, ‘the point of the entire process is simply to be able to exercise control’, that ‘accurate perspective drawing has no merit whatsoever, if for no other reason that anyone can do it.’ He thought ‘there is absolutely no necessity for a single viewpoint. For some time now, though not that long, we have been able to do without it.’ Klee talked about ‘stray centres’ and ‘stray viewpoints.’ Panofsky in a famous lecture at the Warburg talked about ‘fishbone‘ perspective. Scolari thinks Klee’s painting ‘Uncomposed Objects In Space’ of 1929 is not even a fishbone perspective because ‘perspective is so off centre’ Klee avoids fixing the ‘muddiness of reality’ to a human perspective. Scolari likens Klee’s approach to a musical pentagram, ‘a device for ordering notes that in no way dictates how they are to be composed.’

The vanishing point of perspective doesn’t appear in the picture, but creates the illusion of 3D space particularly effective in built environments. Perspective makes the painters body important by representing what appears in a person’s vision rather than what is actually there. But alternatives to creating illusions of depth and 3D were known to have been used hundreds of years before. The stray centres of Paul Klee were not new; they were around centuries earlier.

Ancient Egyptian pictures were also made with an understanding that what was being portrayed was not a physical object or organism but an ideogram, ‘with all the dislocations and rotations that the principle of maximum evidence imposes on a lucid exposition.’ Symbols survive such distortions, like letters survive bad handwriting. The advent of Christianity occluded the ancient artistic heritage. Christianity didn’t practice divination, preferring ecstasy and annunciations, allegories and strange signs. Christians were stubborn in their resistance to being part of the world.

Scolari writes of the Christian: ‘He is afraid of the dark Underworld from which the black dog, the rat, and the gigantic Ethiopian emerge. He is afraid of the “messages of temptations from Satan’s tribe of daemons.” The fear substitutes faith for knowledge. The Christian takes the fruits of science but doesn’t participate. Claudius Mamertus writes: “thanks to faith, the quiet believer inherits the fruits of science and harvests the fruits of labours in which he took no part.’ Augustine separates words from facts, virtue from gentes, form from content and so enabled Christians who felt isolated from knowledge to connect with learning. Classical culture became the profane history of Christianity, even though it was only fragmentary. Greek storytelling culture had been overwhelmed by the Roman engineering culture, now Christian detachment and isolation from the world returned it through that prism which ordered ‘love not the world, nor the things of the world.’

But this obstinate otherworldliness ended antiquity wherein Pharoes had guaranteed justice, Emperors clemency and philosophers truth. Greek classicism faded. Honour and dignity lost their meaning. What saved classical culture from being lost altogether? Islamic warriors were more curious and intellectually refined. By contrast Augustine and Tertullian closed down classicism. Augustine thought knowledge ‘morbid’ and experimentation to ‘scrutinize the secrets of nature… absolutely useless.’ Justine said that ‘everything that has been said righteously among men is the property of us Christians.’ Tertulian said that, ‘For us curiosity is no longer necessary after Jesus Christ, nor research after the Gospels.’

Plotinus was Egyptian and he had wanted to return to the idea that there were things behind appearance and so brooded on classical form and proportion, asking ‘why do perceptible beauties, images and shadows…descend into matter, order it, and then move us by its appearance?’ A quality without a number illuminates the thing and can be taken as beautiful only by someone possessing the same beauty, thought Plotinus, returning us to the ‘Thaeatetus’ of Plato. Augustine unbaptised had been even more Greek in his ideas of beauty. After Ambrose baptised him in 387 in Milan Augustine abandoned his Pythagorrean ideas. After April 24th that year Christian art began to forget the Greek virtues. Scolari says ‘Western painters were seized by figurative hypochondria.’ Church dogma contracted space and the frontal viewpoint of believers.

Habits of representation are obstinate and without political power difficult to change. Attitudes to difference are also stubbornly conditioned. Anti-illusionist Christian art strikes moderns as deficient. Yet medieval artists were required to represent the holy sepulcher simultaneously, resulting in figures of four or more sides being represented as circular or comparable with a circle. Copying wasn’t a matter of mirroring but of reproducing types. Greek originals proliferated, because each statue was an original copy of a type.

Christian art is not deficient but is different. Naturalistic elements and classical precision – a sign of Imperial arrogance – are replaced or played down. The silence of the Christian West, its closing down classical antiquity, meant that it was the Islamic east that maintained the tradition of Greek classicism. Justinian and Theodoria in the east restored Byzantium orthodoxy. After Justinian, Greek culture was reinforced. Greek replaced Latin. Painting was abandoning the world, says Scolari. Iconoclasm was severely restricted. 3D was replaced by a concrete space of man. Unexpectedly this led to the representation of depth using axonemetric techniques.

Shadows were banned because they detracted from clarity and were the equivalent of confused speech and bad grammar. Christian pictures placed objects that were important to liturgies and stripped away irrelevancies. Christian culture forbade worshiping pictures but tolerated their existence. Scolari writes that ‘on the eve of iconoclastic frenzy, the church could deny the adortation of images while at the same time leaving the art of icon painting to the byzantine monasteries, where it reinforced quietism and offered a theatre of memory for the Christian masses: it goes without saying that the images, conceived as a sublimation of writing, were absolutely necessary for the creation of the Christian mythos.’

Charlemagne pushed back against the loss of painterly memory in the West. Painting was to become not a badge of orthodoxy as in the East, but educative. Yet it didn’t become a mode of intelligibility, as it had been for Plotinus and the ancient Greeks. Greek art was conceived of as being just concrete history that the Frank admired and wanted to
use for his own Christian ends. His attitude freed art from orthodoxy and dogma and techniques of scientific illustration, geometry and cosmology were reintroduced.

Christians used the idea of the prototype to reveal the likeness of the object represented. It returned to the shadow as the prototype. In ancient Greek the shadow is the origin of the painting itself. ‘The shadow fixed the figure in an attitude that showed it off to its best advantage, in profile, like the everescent, dark impression of a seal magically representing its being’ says Scolari. Plato saw shadows as hypocritical and inexact, depending on sensory weakness. But though in ancient Egypt the dead king’s horror is darkness the shadow figure is a creative force and men’s shadows a manifestation of his being. Kings are the protective shadows of his soldiers. Peter cured the sick by touching them with his shadow. Muslims believed the dead and demons have no shadows. (But al-Biruni warned that at midday ‘men walk on the backs of their own necks.’) In equatorial space people stay indoors to avoid walking without shadows.

In the 1960 Visconti film Rocco e I suoi fratelli the protagonist remembers that to build a house a foreman must first throw a stone on the shadow of a sacrificial passerby to ensure the house has sure foundations. Sacrifices in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia were to create dark deposits that functioned as shadows. Laying the first stone is the neutered contemporary memory of this. Acts 5: 15-16 reiterates the magical power of the shadow. This adds to the power of Marker, Resnais, Godard and Rossellini as we read this back into their palleomodern mis en scenes, but it escapes any foregrounded Bazinean theory.

A distinction is made between projected shadows and shadows revealed as merely no light. As the latter they are merely gloomy. In classical art shadows are shown tonally. In 4th century Christianity shadows were concealing and obscure, containing the hiding devil who an onlooker might meet in his unknowing gaze and be sucked to hell. Illustrated classical texts were a storehouse for Christian iconoclasm. But scientific drawings survived impositions of iconoclastic rules. Islamic culture had tended these. These were independent of time and finite space, hence they denied the drawn line of the flat earth. ‘The cube has no memory’ is Scolari’s take on this. Plato saw it as a symbol of the earth. Expressed on a flat surface it was the cross.

Architectural elements were introduced but there are no seaports, rivers, woods, fields, mountains etc. Figures in the foreground are impassive, isolated from the world and sanctified in a strange aloneness and stillness. This again reminds me of Resnais and Marker and Godard and Rossellini. Cities portrayed as boxes ‘act as background, frame, separations’ and ‘this means the depiction withdraws from the judgment of a unitary vision.’ They work like significant pauses in poetry, lending also a rhythmic quality to the succession of scenes.

This is the use of stray centres as in Klee. By the twelfth century of modernity Latin substituted Arabic versions of Greek originals. Exegesis of Averroes brought Aristotle back into the arts. Averroes reintroduced the idea of double truth via questioning and introduced rational thinking to the Christian. Why is Aristotelianism significant? It eroded the idea of symbolism, where a figure is a figure and also a represented truth. It eroded pictorial representation that scattered knowledge. Geometry began to be used to hold pictures together as a single body of truth. Trees of virtue, cubes of elements, wheels of radiance and squares of opposition began to be formed. In these various attempts to impose order the painter could not fix a single viewer perspective.

The spectator commands nothing in Byzantine art. She is rather read from the infinite distance ‘by parallel visual rays that are without beginning or end, without interest or pity… an infinite distance seperates the sacred from the world that admires it.’ Christ never smiles because his face is fixed by the same distance. Pericles is fused with hierarchical Byzantine impassivity in Piero della Francesca. Everything else is the muddy flux of life, contingent and rattling about the surfaces in contrast to the calm solemnity of mystery plays. Man is a shadow dream whose stories are messed by the light of divine transfiguration, as Pindar explains. In the 13th century lives of saints replaced Christological themes. These in turn are then combined with lives of merchants. In this move artists were ‘asked to offer to the church the talent conceded to them by God so that the sacred might be brought closer to the common people.’ Dante is a key figure, opening the culture of monasteries to the laity.

Mercantile maths, abacus culture, Arabic numerals, positional notation, cities, spatial saint-lives in the boxes of Giotto and Duccio freed artists in the west from centuries of amnesia. Giotto introduced shadows to bring depth into these representations, replacing golden backgrounds with corporeality. ‘Painted figures stepped down from the architectonic structures that framed them and into real life.’ Time was reintroduced, replacing the circular timelessness of monastic time. Machines were built with levers and gears that calculated wealth of merchants. Bodies and earthly things were restored: Dante’s wood, Petrarch’s streams and Siennese good government appeared. Giovanni Dondi was a horological expert of the first half of the fourteenth century whose Astraium was more Leonardo than medieval. Occam freed physics from metaphysical obstruction. Philosophy was separating from theology, whereby anything not revealed was up for investigation.

So Scolari’s ‘descent from of the point of view’ from the thirteenth century onwards in Europe moved from people receiving the Christological rays of God shining an infinite number of eternal points of the universe into them, whereby ‘a brilliant splendor enfolds him and his existence becomes as sweet as honey,’ as Pindar said, to the single perspective where ‘[f]rom the infinite distance of parallel perspective, pictorial representations converged, perforating the veil that concealed reality behind the symbol: somebody looked inside the scene and traced the line to the horizon.’

Dante’s secular verse and the names of ex-voto donors to the window’s of Chartres cathedral signify this. The divine is diluted to the lives of saints and replaces Christological themes. In the early fifteenth century Brunelleschi and Donatello were measuring building elevations from a distance. Fibonacci and Pelacani de Parma’s old techniques were rediscovered. Distances were measured from the single point of a spectator to the highest point of a building. Similar triangles establish a proportional relationship between heights of an object and representation on a plane. Ptolemy’s Geometry and Optics have obscure roles in this, moving without theological impediment through these Roman developments. Scolari identifies 7th July 1436 as the beginning of the Renaissance when Leon Battista Alberti wrote to his friend Brunelleschi: ‘I desire that you before all others should correct my faults, so that I will not be savaged by my detractors.’ By the division of the visual pyramid by a single plane ‘that which was seen became that which was represented, and the extraordinary koine of the Renaissance began.’ In this move space was theatricalised, it became the point of view of the eye.

Scolari hints at the connection between the rediscovery of the single perspective and the vanishing point with the ability and desire to seek out new lands. The multiple perspective of the Egyptians is contrasted with this where the movement of frontiers outwards from the centre was merely a strategy for holding together its own territories and to keep the threat of the nine bows at bay – Asian, Libyan and Nubian threats. Scolari notes the date of Columbus’s discovery of America for Europeans as a rather retrousse coda.

Leopardi feared that the perfection of single perspective blocked the force of poetry. The mythical dimension retreats before the domesticated eye of the scientific eye according to this complaint. Homer remains the poet admired as an architect as well as poet, putting the form of the city in harmony with surrounding nature. Islam was hostile to painters who were seen as trying to compete with the creator and as such were equivalent to usurers and possessors of dogs.

The architectural model is a tool for architectural design. The model can initiate the architect into the unbuilt presence of a building. Its miniature form imitates stability where perhaps there is none, and can conceal compositional and distributional uncertainty. Vitruvian theories of architecture relegate the model to the material dimension of techne. It is the product, according to Vitruvian theory, of sheer manual skill. They were part of the job-lot cost, without special mention or attributional role. They are found long before Vitruvius ordained their low status in burial objects of Ancient Egypt, Etruscan Tombs, Mesopotamian reliefs and Roman Pompa Triumphalis. But it was not until the thirteenth century that they are discussed in architectural literature.

The fifteenth century saw a gradual erosion of preexisting Gothic architecture for the new Renassiance approaches and models became a way of showing what the new procedures and measurements would look like. They were a kind of guarantee that the plans would work, a kind of ‘writing for illiterates.’ The sixteenth century saw an increasing distinction between the conceptual stage of building and its practical stage. Models were used increasingly as a specialised form. Risk aversion, born out of disasters of Gothic architectural experiments, gave models increasing importance in reassuring Florentine masters of projected projects. Models however give the game away to rivals and competitors: Bruneschelli often hid models or else ensured his models never remained faithful to what was actually going to be built so that his secrets remained hidden. Later, models began to be built by other people and in the open to acute degrees of accuracy and diligence. The makers of models were master craftsman, despite Vitruvius snobbishly bad mouthing them. A Vitruvian legacy is still hegemonic in many western cultures wherever concept-work has higher status than craft-work.

Alberti broke with this bias, arguing that architectural projects were mental activities and models and sketches were essential. Filarete went further and opened them out as exercises of the imagination. They were necessary to allow ideas to gestate and change according to differently conceived notions. The model is a generator not what is generated. Francesco di Giogio Martini’s fortress drawings seem to do the same, as were the x-ray drawings of the dome cladding of Milan cathedral by Leonardo. These are drafts and flights of possibility and invention for the imagination to connect with rather than merely the record of a solution. Anti-Vitruvian architectural thought gathered force. Alvise Cornaro says models are necessary. Italian architects and military engineers experimented using models and drawings. This spread to France when Leonardo, Giocondo, Serlio and Castriotto worked there. The French Renaissance was indebted to this. Philibert de l’Orme only trusted projects that involved skilled modeling that show the idea rather than manufacturing skill, that show front and elevations in wood, card or stiff paper. The artist-scientist was a key anti-Vitruvian figure without which architectural masterpieces couldn’t have been built.

Models were used where geometrical theories of perspective were unknown. A 3D model substituted for any ignorance of math. Many of the fortification architects of the early sixteenth century were made using these. Models were an alternative to geometrical thinking. So in Venetian architecture of this time there are few drawings but many models. There is an impatience with the drawing of a single perspective by artisans and military leaders because ‘the only proportion that matters is the range of fire, for at the moment in which the projectile passes beyond the frame of appearances to shatter its target, all perspective is dissolved.’ What is at stake is not beauty but kingdoms and principalities. To hell with Vitruvius was the attitude of Gabriello Busca and Giovani Battista de’ Zanchi. Drawings are misleading. Models are the site of modification and transformation through the eye of the general. Pleasing drawings weren’t needed. By the end of the sixteenth century the model was a routine procedure for military architecture. By the eighteenth century the model functioned as a parallel projection drawing.

Drawings using the axonometrical perspectives improved on small models. Small models were often too small for details to be properly seen. Axonometrical drawings could be scaled up so that the generals could attend to everything in the minutest detail. Axonometrical drawings from a raised perspective allowed the scene to be surveyed but diffidence towards design reemerged and models again became predominant. Girolamo Fransesco Cristiani in his ‘Civil Engineer of the Serenissima’ writes: ‘already for some time the mathematicians have been induced to prefer the use of models over the use of drawings.’ He thinks models have the advantage of being ‘an idea that is material, made of wood, card, of clay or other’ and must replicate the thing it portrays so that it ‘corresponds in everything and in every way to the things represented.’ Models were the apotheosis of clear ideas, giving the imagination more ideas through direct images than any drawing could.

Scolari takes Brunelleschi’s model for the dome of Santa Maria Del Fiore in Florence and the Gheradi drawing as a focus of study. The collapse of previous domes led to this project. Giovanni di Gherardo Gherardi’s is the only extant drawing relating to the dome construction. In 1425 a third of the dome had been built but there were doubts as to whether the calculations were correct. Experts in practical arithmetic were brought in to calculate whether the project would work. Asserting his theoretical approach, Gheradi attacked the model building Brunelleschi as ‘someone who invents irrational things.’

Gherardi’s drawing was a supplement to his attack on Brunelleschi, adding to the rhetorical sleights of hand that linked the Florentine project with a completely separate project, the failed attempt to extend Sienna Cathedral. But Brunelleschi and Donatello during this time had surveyed Roman building heights using ‘strips of parchment…bearing the numerals used in the abacus.’ This referred to his awareness of how measurements varied in inverse proportion to the distance, and he had taken this method from his study and collection of ancient codices from the Greeks, just as Petrarch and Boccaccio had done with ancient literature and philosophy. Brunelleschi therefore reinvented perspective. One point perspective was born of architectural surveying. Sironi argues that his insights into the ‘ancient way of building’ was what Gherardi didn’t understand.

At this point we find drawings that can mix representation for appearance with representation for demonstration and reasoning. This contrast between single perspectival representation and diagrammatical representation means that some drawings address the eye of the intellect, others the eye of the body. Mistakes are made if inferences to one or the other based on prejudged assumptions of representation are made. What may seem obviously an attempted single perspectivalism may on further investigation be an attempted diagrammaticalism. Mathematical reasoning detaches us from the world of appearances, says Proclus commenting on Euclid. Plato’s Theatetus contrasts the bewilderment and confusion caused by attempts at representing appearances with line drawings without solidity and parts, the point and the line, which produce reasoning and clear thought.

Knowledge understood in terms of reasoning must represent figures and yet renounce them. Geometrical points are ‘without extension’ and lines ‘without thickness.’ Points and lines that appear, as they do in geometry, are therefore ontologically defective from this perspective. The diagram is the solution to this puzzle, is how such renunciation is enacted.

Aristotle said that only diagrams and sketches were appropriate for scientific illustrations. Diagrams are vital in Greek thought as demonstration figures. Geometrical figures are bodiless transparent entities, where construction not visual appearance was important. As the new single perspective was developed by Leonardo and others at the turn of the fifteenth century there are traces of this ancient knowledge being used alongside the new. Sironi brilliantly establishes this through investigating a strange almond shaped ellipse produced by Leorado’s fellow worker Pacioli. In a tour de force of detective work through a vast range of works that attempts to find out if the strange ellipse shape used in this early sixteenth century drawing had precedent in earlier representations that Pacioli would have had access to the classical origin of the axiometrical approach is established. Sironi finds evidence for the ranking of thought over sight in classical texts produced at the time of Aristotle and Ptolemy. The strangeness of Pacioli’s drawing is not a failure of understanding perspectival drawing – and therefore a lack of drawing skill – but rather an example of his drawing on this ancient axiometrical approach. He draws together evidence that many drawings were constructed transcribing what is measured rather than what is seen.

Vitruvious wrote that all machinery ‘is true and faithful imitation of nature’. The engineer and technician was thought a necessary magician by Plato and his culture. The bridge between the classical eras’ engineers and the sixteenth century Europeans was Arab scholarship. Roger II of Sicily recruited Islamic mechanics to his court. The Hohenstaufen Kings following him collected manuscripts of the preserved drawings. Al-Jazari’s Book Of Knowledge Of Ingenious Devices served as a model for other works known to Latin culture. This and other documents ‘kept strictly to showing such information as was absolutely necessary, without any concessions to aesthetics.’

In the thirteenth century machines were like monsters created by Hephaestus, forger of Achilles shield, used in war to throw large boulders and cross torrents, were scorpions, battering rams, bladed chariots, towers with bridges, later to become by the end of the next century trebuchets, crossbows, ballistae, armored towers with rams’ heads all created to terrorise the enemy and materialise brute fear. They were represented as diagrams not as representations of appearance. These drawings abandon the ‘comfortable, convergent vision of Greek space.’ No allowance is made for the presence of an observer in space. There are no indications of top or bottom or back and front. ‘Geometrically, the object is considered solely in terms of its measurements, and not according to the geometry of various viewpoints that examine the object from the exterior and from the distance.’ Sironi alerts us to this: ‘This is what distinguishes a painting from an architectural drawing and from the drawing of a machine.’

By the fifteenth century perspective began to influence machine drawings. As machines had made old walls round cities redundant, battlements of cities were redesigned. The art of war was revolutionised by French artillery at the end of the fifteenth century. Fortresses were built with greater rationality and precision. More complexity was built. Ditches were widened. Trajectories of missiles were calculated. War was no longer a glorious impulse of heroes and the knightly conduct of Orlando. Machines brought death from afar and ‘with hissing speed.’ A deafening empiricism was required to investigate how to proceed against such machines. Military engineers were asked to produce representations that corresponded with the geometrical power of the killing machines.

Through the development of the fortress builder a new empiricism swept aside scholarly abstractions. ‘Anatomy, mechanics, architecture, astronomy, pyrotechnics, hydraulics and pneumatics began to search in the real world for proof of the figures that had been passed down through ancient manuscripts to the era of Christopher Columbus.’ What developed in all this was a divergence from the perspective needed for the landscape artist by the artilleryman. Function doesn’t have a style but representations of function do.

When Jesuits imported single perspective to China as a vehicle of Christian iconography in the sixteenth century they entered a culture of axonometric representation. The Chinese found oil paintings disturbing. They found deep shadows troubling. The paintings were considered technical marvels but representationally inept. Euclidean geometry was not known to the Chinese then. Even when they had learned the rules of perspective they didn’t consider it a superior tool for realistic representation. Sir John Barrow quotes the Emperor: ‘On enquiry, I found that Castiglionne was a missionary of great repute at court, where he executed a number of paintings, but was expressly directed by the Emperor to paint all his subjects after the Chinese manner, and not like that of Europe, with broad masses of shade and the distant objects scarcely visible, observing, as one of the missionaries told me, that the imperfections of the eye afforded no reason why the objects of nature should also be copied as imperfect. This idea of the Emperor accords with a remark made by one of his ministers, who came to see the portrait of His Britannic Majesty, and said ‘that it was a great pity it should have been spoiled by the dirt upon the face,’ pointing, at the same time, to the broad shade of the nose.”

The philosopher Sorensen argues that the vanishing point is best understood as the inner limit of the picture, just as the frame is the outer limit. Neither are therefore represented in the picture. He thinks the self is the vanishing point of our self-identity. Wittgenstein defleshed the eye but retained an abstract single perspective for his philosophy. Do the Chinese refuse this metaphysical point? And returning to the discussion of the films at the start of this piece, has the single perspective infiltrated the creation and reception of these works to a degree that obscures their actual cinematic ontologies?

Scolari’s is yet another muscular book far cleverer than me, with footnotes and details that astonish, baffle and make reading a process that alternates abnormal contraction with relaxation in a ruthless back and forth autophagy. The mysterious last chapter on the Tower Of Babel seems to deflate and then eerily reverberates.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.