Category: Uncategorized

Life after the dinosaur

THE PHYSICS OF SORROW
Georgi Gospodinov, tr Angela Rodel
Open Letter, 2015

As every schoolchild will know under full communism, the ways you think and behave are in large part determined by the conditions of your existence. Approaching my third year in NYC, these days I’m constantly reading something off of two outfits: NYRB Classics and Open Letter.

With the exception of Merce Rodoreda, a class unto herself, the Open Letter novels I’ve read all share by chance a similar vibe.

So PHYSICS OF SORROW seems at a glance like Fresan-lite. Subjective, fragmented, wistful boyhood memories, limpid prose style, keystones from literary history. Their structures are on the same road: novels made of self-contained novellas that nevertheless posit a total work linked by motifs. Gospodinov’s touchstone is the Minotaur myth, a monster who was abandoned as a child, locked away in a labyrinthine dungeon until his slaughter. A ghastly childhood experience, and one that pulls and pushes itself away from the other theme, the socialist experience of Bulgaria, similarly abandoned by history. Bulgaria has been through a lot, like any other Eastern European nation that found itself to be a buffer state between the Ottoman Empire and tsarist Russia, and later Nazi Europe and the USSR. The 1980s are presented in this text as a “History of Boredom.” The pall of quietude that settles after the restoration of reactionaries, a lull in the inter-imperialist train wrecks that write the history of modern capitalism, finds a reflection and a quiet pathos in these wistful titled fragments, accumulated in different chapters that work like thematic folders.

It’s a lean novel because its structure is more rigorous. For all of its constellations it is decisively linear, which is more accurate to the archetypal labyrinth designs, less about being lost and more about a circuitous line that provokes contemplation.

It is also as I read it extremely self-reflective, so that the I pronoun, an empathetic boy who grows up to be a writer, the speaker, is the trajectory of the modern novel. It starts in a carnival, which like a section on Dziga Vertov’s documentary in later chapter, embodies these fragmented and concept-driven contemporary narratives, becoming montages of attraction, a root in surrealism and the Arcades. As a boy, the narrator could embody the lives of others, even a slug as it’s being swallowed by the boy’s grandfather. Likewise, the realist novels of the great tradition, with their omniscient narrators, could embody all figures that appear in a novel’s landscape. But this capacity dissipates along with childhood, and it’s interesting to track the change in material and form in each chapter; the relative coherency of the early parts becomes more and more unworkable,  Every chapter might have a different hint to the text’s function. It’s like a time capsule for memories, to be opened in the future after humankind has reset after an apocalypse. Or it’s like an ark (a nod to MOBY-DICK, which has a good joke about Noah Webster’s ark), where the fragments are like beasts safeguarded from annihilation and the slaughterhouse.

There are a lot of cute ideas. Forget storytellers; there is a chapter on the story buyer (with story sellers), where immaterial narratives are traded about, their exchange value expressed in flower petals and other ephemera. Or what if, following quantum physics, “the lack of an observer presupposes all manner of combinations,” and therefore a novel is not an inert “work” without the reader, but existing in a totally different way?

The fun of this formal arrangement for novels is that montage of attractions mentioned above, the diverse range of material arranged in little bits. Who knows which ones will strike you most? For me it was a fragment in the chapter “Time Bomb (To Be Opened After the End of the World)” called “Future Number 73.”

Many years after the apocalypse, life springs up again and after several millennial man makes a reappearance. These new post-apocapytites develop more or less the same as earlier people did, not counting a few insignificant deviations (mutations), for example, the fact that they are incapable of abstract thought. Clearly, nature or God learned a lesson from the previous, less-than-smashingly successful experiment and has made some healthy adjustments.

Looking it over now, there’s lot of implicit points here about how PHYSICS OF SORROW is a post-Marxist novel both historically and ideologically. The sarcasm regarding ideological struggle is hard to miss. Nevertheless, Marxist principles and methodology (its forms, at the very least) endure as indelible memories or vestigial structures. It remembers the vulgar Marxist view of history as an “evolution.” But it’s a touch Romantic: if only we didn’t have abstract thought, we wouldn’t be so willing to kill and die for ideas. Romanticism holds capitalism in contempt because capitalism, in its scientistic arrogance, tries to illuminate the mysteries of the world by illuminating it through the same measure (exchange value, price). It instrumentalizes the world by making everything in it part of a market of exchangeable commodities. Similarly, the Enlightenment, which postmodernism attacks mainly to liquidate Marxism, articulates a colonial philosophy in which reality can be apprehended an assimilated into a perspectival representational space — everything can be mapped out. These attitudes are damningly close to the premise of dialectical materialism, that everything unknown in nature can be disclosed. And that mediations, not necessarily untrustworthy for the same reasons that Romantics attacked commodity logic, language, map-for-the-territory, is precisely the explanation that your consciousness is determined by the conditions of your social being.

Notice that it’s either “nature or God.” Historical materialism did no better than religious or metaphysical master narratives, imbuing its sequence with a transcendental purpose, a teleology. And it’s  true that the revisionists at the time of the second international presented Marxism in this way. The more existential wing of modernist writers seem to merge together the fundamental human-nature contradiction into a more metaphysical kind of angst.

The “New Ones,” this post-apocalyptic race who do not think abstractly, find a time capsule, including three phrases from Bulgarian socialist propaganda. They change their organization to meet the ways of the fore-fathers. Prepared and trained for the sea of life. They open schools in the oceans. “On land they started to feel like beached whales. And life gradually returned to the sea. (What an evolutionary step backward.)

The socialist family — the basic cell of our society. “And that, true to the second line of the Testament, they filled the sea with wooden cells. Every newly married couple received one as a wedding present and lounged in it of their own free will.”

To spill your blood for the homeland. “Three times a year they celebrated the Day of Greaet Bloodletting, on which they injured themselves, so as to offer up spilled blood to the Homeland.

Future 73 is a doomed civilization. They hilariously interpreted an alien text literally. But it’s not unlike how socialism did get exported, or xeroxed, in a mechanical way in Eastern Europe which led to a great deal of contradictions. Lenin in STATE AND REVOLUTION recognized that there ought to be multiple types of proletarian dictatorships, since bourgeois dictatorships obviously take on different forms depending on ideological and national characteristics.

So like Fresan’s THE INVENTED PART, and probably FOX by Dubravka Ugresic, which is next, PHYSICS mixes fiction and essay, stories and concepts of all types, into an indeterminate subjective space. And the novel suggests (as Fredric Jameson suggested in the 70s) that this indeterminate space is not unlike the space of legends, of the classical world. Gaspodinov makes an interesting remark in the second chapter that the ancient world is modern human’s childhood (a riff on a famous or infamous point by Marx), it’s odd that their mythology contains few kids as we know them.  Later on, in the Time Bomb chapter, we read:

The unlikeliest things can turn out to be… Hexameter, for example. If something is said in hexameter, then historically and practically speaking, it has an infinite expiration date. The whole of the Trojan War is preserved in the capsule of hexameter. If that story had been stuffed into any other form whatsoever, it would have given out, gone sour, gotten torn up, crumbled…Hexameter turned out to be the longest-lasting material.

Hesiod, in his Works and Days, has left behind a true survival kit with instructions. If something happens to the world and people come who don’t know anything, thanks to this book they will learn which month is good for sowing, which for plowing, when a boar or a bellowing bullock or hardworking donkey should be castrated.

It also includes these favorite instructions:

One should not urinate facing the sun while standing erect, but
One should remember always to do it at sunset and sunrise.
Nor should you piss on the path  or next to the path when out walking;
Nor should you do it when naked; nighttime belongs to the blessed.

After humankind has destroyed itself and begins once again as children, they’ll have to be potty trained.

Notes & fragments: method of choice for the obsessive storyteller

THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENTLEMAN
Laurence Sterne
Modern Library, 2004

THE INVENTED PART
Rodrigo Fresán, tr. Will Vanderhyden
Open Letter, 2017

ALL FOR NOTHING
Walter Kempowski, tr. Anthea Bell
NYRB Classics, 2018

Chapter 10 of Volume 4 of TRISTRAM SHANDY declares itself the “chapter upon chapters.” And the chapters in this book are really short, sometimes just a line, and in one case cut out, with the pagination jumping ahead (and even this has a pointed joke behind it, having to do with a Christian taboo against odd numbers on the recto page). Rather than chapter breaks, they practically function a lot like space breaks in contemporary fiction.

Breaking for a new chapter is described as an instinctual impulse.

— A sudden impulse comes across me — drop the curtain, Shandy — I drop it — Strike a line here across the paper, Tristram — I strike it — and hey for a new chapter! (222)

The only rule for the serious writer, according to Tristram, is to obey these sudden impulses. Any other rules should be destroyed, burned to keep the author warm. “[I]s a man to follow rules — or rules to follow him?” (Ibid.)

But this chapter is for his opinions on chapters, not his writing process.

Is it not ten times better than to set out dogmatically with a sententious parade of wisdom, and telling the world a story of a roasted horse — that chapters relieve the mind — that they assist — or impose on the imagination — and that in a work of this dramatic cast they are as necessary as the shifting of scenes — with fifty other cold conceits, enough to extinguish the fire which roasted him. (223)

There you have it, lots of short chapters make the book easier to read. When you have something serious, like a roasted horse story (another term for shaggy dog story), chapters help organize the drama, while also affording room for “cold conceits” — ideas, concepts, and themes — which cool down the intensity of the narrative events.

And TRISTRAM SHANDY is an amazing book, in which all the forms of writing available to the landed gentry, and indeed to the aristocracy, like the sermon, are churning together. Closer to rhetoric than style, every short chapter is a dwelling on a moment, usually the pettiest moments in terms of literal plot, like walking down a staircase, that are comically protracted in the narration. But that dwelling is shaped by belles lettres, backed by a classical elite education system.

That’s why the end of this chapter has Tristram bullying us with his knowledge of classical literature, including criticism, with a long footnote in french. All to tell us to read and understand things, like Avicenna, who wrote books “de omni scribili” which is a pun on de omni scibili, of everything knowable; the former means “of everything scribbled,” and that’s a good description of this novel and the fragmentary, discursive form of creative writing we’re talking about.

Avicenna is famous for reading Aristotle’s METAPHYSICS 4o times, and memorizing it, without ever understanding it. There’s also an anecdote about Licetus, who was born as a five-inch fetus.

*

In a section of THE INVENTED PART called “Many Fêtes, or Study For a Group Portrait With Broken Decalogues,” Fresán bundles together notes marked off by a typographical dagger, that have to do with Fitzgerald writing TENDER IS THE NIGHT, biographical business with Hemingway, the Murphys, and even some material on Dickens.

He starts with a note about the biji.

† “Have you read all these books?” she asks.

† The biji (筆記) is a genre of classic Chinese literature. “Biji” can be translated, roughly yet more or less faithfully, as “notebook.” And a biji can contain curious anecdotes, nearly blind quotations, random musings, philosophical speculations, private theories regarding intimate matters, criticism of other works, and anything that its owner and author deems appropriate. Do samurais interrupt the conversation of their katanas to write down something that occurs to them in the precise instant of blood and steel? (303)

This is basically the wikipedia article with some embellishments, and it’s a good description of Walter Benjamin’s ARCADES PROJECT as well as “books of commonplaces,” and even the poetics of the social media feed.

The bijis here are notes toward a new novel by the protagonist (who has dispersed himself into the universe after breaking into the Hadron Collider) that will be his ultimate statement on his parents, who are kind of a mystery, caught in a photograph by Man Ray, and the meaning of Fitzgerald’s problematic novel in their lives.

And he arranges and unarranges these pages, telling and deluding himself that he’s revisiting the biji genre, so he doesn’t have to admit that they are, in reality, just the windblown tatters of fallen standards and the still-smoking ruins of something that he wanted to build but that came crashing down. The broken pieces of a temple he believed in or needed to believe in. The shrapnel from an explosion extracted, piece-by-piece, from the wounded but surviving body of something, of someone. The loose phrases of that thing  — trying to swim underwater and hold his breath — he wanted to write so badly, but couldn’t, a while back now, sometime during the great droughts that marked the Crack dynasty.  (304)

A similar kind of rhetorical “dwelling” on the subject is at work here, but less oral in its nature than Sterne. These are post apocalyptic fragments, a familiar image from modernism. (As a side note, the middle segment of an earlier section, “The Place Where the Sea Ends so the Forest Can Begin,” has no paragraph breaks, but it has two narrating voices, or the same voice speaking from different space-time positions, which are distinguished by the normal font and a typewriter font. This also makes things easier to read!)

† “Writer’s aren’t people exactly.” — Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon.

† Exactly, Scott. Writers are people who, inexactly, always prefer to look away, toward another part — the invented part. (Ibid.)

The dagger: used for a footnote after the asterisk is taken. Here it suggests a text made entirely out of secondary footnotes. Each fragment is suggesting a totality that is unseen, does not exist, namely the unmade book.

Is this feasible, a self-contained piece of writing that nevertheless structurally posits a larger work? Like studying a painter’s palette that was used for an unseen, unknown masterpiece? Can one think of lyrical essay writing, or “creative nonfiction” if you prefer (I don’t), in this way?

These notes also serve as the framing concepts of the entire, large, seemingly formless novel, but dislocated from the “edge” of the work and concentrated in the midway point, a very fun mashing of spatial models.

Maurice Blanchot used a typographical mark in his fragments — in an unconscious way they feel appropriate for notes, for enumerations, for listing. And also, the novel opens by bringing the visual character of punctuation to our attention, where the question mark has

the shape of a fish or meat hook. A sharp and pointy curve that skewers both the reader and the read. Pulling them, dragging them up from the clear and calm bottom to the cloudy and restless surface. Or sending him flying through the air to land just inside the beach of the parentheses. (11)

Just like in Adorno’s infamous essay, punctuation and typography have this hieroglyphic quality. Of all the marks, it’s the em-dash that beguiles Adorno the most. The interruptive line seems to materially embody the dialectic of continuity and rupture between sentences and thoughts. There is a fascinating contradiction in the function of the dash (and think of all of the dashes of different lengths and characteristics in Sterne, taking the directionality of language to the extreme) as well as the clean space break. The gap that is created is also a link, through association or implication or any other kind of relationship, imprecisely evoked. Nevertheless, in the “constellation,” which is yet another way to talk about fragments and bijis, the lines drawn between the nodes of actual material are actually the greater presence in the work.

What about the dagger? Does it look more like a cross, or more like something else?

Lastly, the evocation of the biji is a different self-justification than Sterne’s deceptively frivolous reasoning. Does modernism revolt against tradition? In one sense it does: Adorno talked about seeking out that which was taboo in mainstream, familiar art. Duchamp’s fountain is a ur-text. But also, extreme modern art can be defended in a more legalistic way, by looking up precedents, usually in the ancient world. Here we appeal not to militant futurism but an alternative temporality, a different set of repeating forms.

*

Finally, ALL FOR NOTHING does not read like a sheaf of notes, but rather a stereotypical realist novel that got crammed with space breaks. Early on, it focuses on an odd aristocratic family in a mansion in Prussia in the last days of the Third Reich, while a string of visitors comes to call, including a Nazi violinist.

Peter was asked if he had ever danced. ‘Come here!’ said Fraulein Strietzel, showing her bad teeth, and she grabbed the boy and gave him his orders: left, two, three; right, two, three. The boy took hold of her, very clumsily, and felt himself pressed close to her body, which was flat as a board with some protuberances, quite different from his mother’s soft, warm body.

*

But it really was very odd in the drawing room, and then the air suddenly went out of the whole thing, like a balloon deflating, and they sat down by the fireside again. The gramaphone was turned off.

*

Peter said he could go get his microscope. What about looking at flies’ legs under it? But no one pursued that idea any further. (41)

These are still intervals in the action, but they’re very tiny. And using white space in this way has its own subtle effects. Within these vignettes, even at their most continuous, it’s like the characters are drained of any conventional interiority. The narration can get away with more free indirect discourse and dialogue summary. There is a disconcerting sense of time being finite, a revolt against the stability of representation and the subject, without any gimmicks — unless using lots of space breaks is a gimmick.

There is a wide range of possible degrees to which these sections can assert their autonomy, halting the motion of the plot or narrative in order to meditate on their content, as well as the extent of the structuring role they play in the whole text. As worked over as the narrative may be, the vignettes combined with all the song lyrics and lines of verse give the impression of a historical scrapbook, similar to other works by Kempowski.

I used the word “affords” earlier, which is a concept from design. Specific forms “afford” specific qualities, and these affordances are determined by the material (cotton affords both fluffiness, or breathable fabric). With David Markson on one end and Bolaño or Pynchon on the other, the fragment can have a minimalist or a maximalist employment. Fragments may be convenient (rejection of coherency as a standard), but at the same time they indulge curiosity. As mainstream forms lose their conviction, these lines of influence are always available.

AFFORDANCES OF THE FRAGMENT:

  • Ease of reading, looks tidy on the page.
  • Autonomy, resisting closure, but also linked to the rest through good placement.
  • Flexibility, used by maximalist and minimalist writers alike.
  • Malleability, as opposed to the “durability” of conventional realist fiction.
  • A more collectivist ideology, against bourgeois individualism and possession.
  • “Epistemophilia,” the love for knowledge, exploring what we can know, rather than seeking representation or transcription of reality.
  • Lightness, digression, experimental, yet compact with rich thinking; indulging one’s obsessions.

PS: I took the affordance concept from

FORMS: WHOLE, RHYTHM, HIERARCHY, AND NETWORK
Caroline Levine
Princeton UP, 2017

Chinese translation: rains of New York

In short, when I remembered New York, I was not in my depth. Breakfast fruit juice, national Scotch whiskey and soda water, and the relationship between romance and the elephant and wax in Twisted Teddy’s House of Horrors. Which is from hot to the high temperature of the cold two hours. The wind blows through my chest. The bar’s video screen also shows high quality homosexual pornography: across his partner, facing the camera, his free dick car corner of the swing metronome bar. Barber shop, you can get shaving at three in the morning. Spend a little time for Amnesty International! Time out New York, read the full text, people! One night, Union Square is on track, my normal route is blocked. I spent more than an hour in those broken pillars, such as war ruins, welding wires exposed to the subway. Reminds you of singing in the prison. Advertising filled with a smile from each wall; life is not tragic. Columbia Medical School’s experimental addiction treatment notice shows the most horrible lines of cannabis, coldest buds from flawless lips. Cigarettes. I put thumb and index finger around the metal rod, roll, fear, now is warm, but not really make a difference. I still put my bag on my bed and forget where.

Poem, May 2017

1 Thank god for the left ear behind which a boil likes to return. 2 Thank god for the right ear, always infected, pink from being the favored side for sleeping. 3 Thank god for the left eye,  in which a clot floats, like a fibrous strand, easy to notice and easier to forget, my oldest friend. 4 Thank god for the right eye, where the lid sags the most, hiding the fold. 5 Thank god for the left nostril, where air doesn’t go, and swells shut from infection. 6 Thank god for the right nostril, which I never appreciate.  7 Thank god for the mouth where all the senses are one.