modernism – Page 4 – Second Slope

Oh, banana!

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW
Thomas Pynchon
Penguin, 2000

Some discrete moments jumped out at me in part one of GR, “Beyond the Zero,” this time.

During the Banana Breakfast sequence, just before Pirate serves that disgusting amount of food, we get a paragraph about the Banana Breakfast smell.

Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night’s old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjurer’s secret by which — though it is not often Death is told clearly to fuck off — the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations…so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning’s banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind secret blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects….

It’s not a principal or dominant odor in the scene, this Banana Breakfast spell. It seems to operate more “rhizomatically.” We have permeating molecules that do an intricate weaving. “Meander, repossess, prevail.” The word choices, the way they focus on aimlessness, a dispersed and groundless movement, reclamation — these seem like positive things in this world.

The banana fragrance is a kind of model, for weaving together narratives maybe, but also a model for resistance against the books primary situation, which is the proliferation of technology, of the development of productive forces driven by imperialist war.

(GR is a WWII novel that is so clearly actually about everything that came after. Its length and heftiness as a physical book alone suggest that the post war world is so immediately and absolutely different that it’s as if it has come into being all at once.)

This resistance is also one against “Death,” like the persistence of humanity in our genetic material. The death drive in GR is not necessarily nihilistic, since there does seem to be a real afterlife or paranormal dimension in this world, and the multiple mad scientists in the novel are trying to breach it.

Another micro-meditation, this time a little digression in the middle of the Adenoid set piece.

In the thirties balance-of-power thinking was still quite strong, the diplomats were all down with Balkanosis, spies with foreign hybrid names lurked in all the stations of the Ottoman rump, code messages in a dozen Slavic tongues were being tattooed on bare upper lips over which the operatives then grew mustaches, to be shaved off only by authorized crypto officers and skin then grafted over the messages by the Firm’s plastic surgeons…their lips were palimpsests of secret flesh, scarred and unnaturally white, by which they all knew each other.

Another thing about GR being a cold war novel set in WWII is that it resembles a spy novel more than a soldier narrative. There’s a pithy notion that the code technique conceals writing but makes the operatives recognizable, like the icon of a secret society. These spies and soldiers are atomized and dispersed like the banana odor molecules. I haven’t looked it up yet, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the mustache thing, silly even compared to the Adenoid, were real. Pynchon’s surrealism is usually reinforced by something from empirical reality, either historical or scientific.

This digression only exists to explain the absence of one character who was needed for the Adenoid taking over London like the Blob. The narrator inhabits northern chauvinism, the “Ottoman rump,” and the same bit of language makes a contrast between assholes and mouths, maybe. Plastic also jumps out on a re-reading, not just for the plot, but the plasticity of Pynchon’s style.

A bit later, Jessica is hanging out at a seance and talks to the practitioner Milton Gloaming.

“Automatic texts,” girl-nervous Gloaming frowns, nods, “one or two Ouija-board episodes, yes yes…we-we’re trying to develop a vocabulary of curves — certain pathologies, certain characteristic shapes, you see–“

“I’m not sure that I–“

“Well. Recall Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort: if we plot the frequency of a word P sub n against its rank-order n on a logarithmic axes,” babbling into her silence, even her bewilderment graceful, “we should of course get something like a straight line…however we’ve data that suggest the curves for certain — conditions, well they’re actually quite different — schizophrenics for example tend to run a bit flatter in the upper part then progressively steeper — a sort of bow shape…I think with this chap, this Roland, that we’re on to a classical paranoiac–“

“Ha.” That’s a word she knows. “Thought I saw you brighten up there when he said ‘turned against.'”

“‘Against,’ ‘opposite,’ yes you’d be amazed at the frequency of this one.”

“What’s the most frequent word?” asks Jessica. “Your number one.”

“The same as it’s always been at these affairs,” replies the statistician, as if everyone knew: “death.”

Well if this isn’t the book in miniature. The search for patterns and meanings in the contingency of automatic writing, a contingency that’s not absolute because it’s still mediated by the human, by the mechanical practice of human writing. And it confirms the statistical analysis reported in this paper, which is what moved me to reread this novel even though school’s starting up.

Notice the narrator’s tone, which seems to take up Roger Mexico’s infatuation with Jessica. And the “bow shape,” which is what links together the arc shape of bananas, rainbows, and rocket trajectories.

“Babbling into her silence.” It’s a nice phrase. I’m noticing that this is something he likes to do. A linguist would explain it more eloquently. But Pynchon likes to use nouns that are supposed to indicate (abstract?) states in this way. Like how later on a room is “filled with noon,” light from a V2 blast.

To touch on the plasticity thing earlier, Pynchon will simply cram any old things together. Like “were-elves.” Pynchon writes as if Henry James experienced ego death during a psychedelic experience, and renounced the psychology that his brother studied, the human dimension of psychology that his baroque prose captures so precisely. And now he writes pretty much in the same way but to prove the opposite point. The difficulty of James (at least for us goldfish brained millennials) is at the syntactic level: fiction has a certain logic to the order of details in the narration, and James’s prose ain’t that, because he’s capturing the bombardment of tiny enigmatic encounters that make up practical life. Pynchon is a similar bombardment, but not of psychological moments, just a lot of mise en scene material. It doesn’t get clearer than in the musical numbers, (more than anything else, I drive myself mad over what the tune for these lyrics are, if there is even one to set them to), when the prose becomes so telegraphic that you’re basically reading a deranged movie treatment or screenplay. Scenes are usually set with discrete details, and their relationships, and even what character’s subjectivity we’re aligned with, gets put off. Which makes sense, because the names of Pynchon’s cast are so wacky, we would have nothing to go on if the events were narrated conventionally. Imagine “Pirate Prentice woke from a dream…” instead of what we’ve got. The names are labels. The point is that the narration represents what it’s like to experience Pynchon’s mock reality, part epic, part satire, a little Libertinage, a little Rabelaisian grotesque, a little Picaresque…

One other thing about the Pynchonian character that I’m undecided on. They don’t have psychology in the realism sense but many of them have dossiers, thanks to which the system can command their ids through knowledge of their fetishes. With all of the atomization and immanent weaving through the structure noted above, and the usual litany characterizing denatured modern capitalism it evokes (fragmentation, alienation, etc.), is the Unconscious in this book’s world a kind of personal property, the closest thing to representing identity as we’ll get?

Pynchon is also an interesting node for the realism-modernism discourse. GR can be claimed for either camp because either its techniques do more to capture the chaos and absurdity of material life and demystifies the practical ideology put up by so-called realist fiction; or it is an absolute break from the novel’s naturalized drive to represent reality, withdrawing into a fabulous realm of raw imagination, on an infinite quest for self-determination, becoming the central text of the postwar American wave of metafictional experiments.

But like any modern classic, GR does a lot of work to understand you as well. There’s a reference to Dutch painting in the sequence with Frans van der Groov and the dodo birds. This comes in the middle of a long paragraph describing the compulsive slaughter of the dodo birds in Mauritius.

Once he sat all day staring at a single white dodo’s egg in a grass hummock. The place was too remote for any foraging pig to’ve found. He waited for scratching, a first crack reaching to net the chalk surface: an emergence. Hemp gripped in the teeth of the steel snake, ready to be lit, ready to descend, sun to black-powder sea, and destroy the infant, egg of light into egg of darkness, within its first minute of amazed vision, of wet down stirred cool by the southeast trades…. Each hour he sighted down the barrel. It was then, if ever, he might have seen how the weapon made an axis potent as Earth’s own between himself and this victim, still one, inside the egg, with the ancestral chain, not to be broken out for more than its blink of world’s light. There they were, the silent egg and the crazy Dutchman, and the hookgun that linked them forever, framed, brilliantly motionless as any Vermeer. Only the sun moved: from zenith down at last behind the snaggleteeth of mountains to Indian ocean, to tarry night. The egg, without a quiver, still unhatched. He should have blasted it where it lay: he understood that the bird would hatch before dawn. But a cycle was finished. He got to his feet, knee and hip joints in agony, head gonging with instructions from his sleeptalkers droning by, overlapping, urgent, and only limped away, piece at right shoulder arms.

The Vermeer reference is an obvious move. And it seals the deal on the the stillness and pictorialism of the above description. The “wet down” retrospectively takes on painterly lighting. Another reference to the notion of the “ancestral chain” of genetic continuity. Not sure what the sleeptalkers are. These lines are packed with moments of realism, drawing links to human world, and human details. And that’s because realism vs. modernism is a metaphysical opposition, when realism is always a moment in modernist writing practice. Jameson says they are independent methodologies. Maybe so. Reading GR, or any of the supreme metafictions, you wonder if there was anything at one and the same time so sturdy and so fragile.

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW

High modernism: from situation to ideology

A SINGULAR MODERNITY: ESSAY ON THE ONTOLOGY OF THE PRESENT
Fredric Jameson
Verso, 2002, p. 199

Yet the late modernists took that modern vision of the artist who is more than a mere artist as their model: and here we meet the paradoxes of repetition, which, as has so often been said, can never take place in any first time, but is always second when it first happens. I can try to say this another way by suggesting that the situation of the first or classical modernists can never be repeated since they themselves already exist. The classical modernists came into a world without models (or at best with religious and prophetic ones), a world without any pre-existing social role to fill. For they did not for the most part wish to become professional artists in any standard nineteenth-century sense of the métier and the apprenticeship. Nor did they wish to endorse a system of artistic genres in which the task of the artist is simply to replicate a given form and to supply new examples of it (with whatever distinctive twist). These first moderns seeks support in patronage wherever possible, rather than in the market; and for the learning of the métier, they substitute fantasmatic images of the supreme works of the past, such as Dante’s Commedia. Their freedoms are utterly blind and groping; they know no identifiable public (‘I write for myself and strangers,’ Gertrude Stein famously said). And in the absence of any determinate social status or function — they are neither artists in the conventional sense nor intellectuals — they borrow all kinds of windy notions of genius and inspiration from the Romantic era, and surround themselves as much as possible with disciples who endorse these private languages and offer a simulacrum of the new Utopian community.

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.

Crypto currents

I have a little review up at Entropy Mag, a venue I really admire. “Jae-in Doe” might as well be essay of this year as well!

Reader reception ought to be a big part of a materialist literary criticism. More specifically, we should be monitoring the ideology of literary culture, and that’s not just the ideology articulated inside literary texts, but how these literary texts get deployed by reviewers, the press, and the academy. What political lines do such deployments serve?

Nowhere does our literary culture betray itself as an organ for western capitalist imperialism better than in that bugbear “totalitarianism.” What hath Hannah Arendt wrought?! That signifier is how liberals merge two into one: they conflate Nazism and revolutionary socialism in the 20th century together. One of these delivered the world from the other. That historical reality alone ought to suggest that this conflation is an irresponsible thing to do.

And it only ever seems to demonize communism rather than fascism. (At least fascists are still pro-capitalist.) Even Arendt herself was bashed by other intellectuals for applying her concept to Israel. Nazi Germany and non-western states are the only politically correct targets.

(And now people want to merge two into one again, and subsume totalitarianism into terrorism. How will we ever keep our account of the enemy straight with all this blending?)

Anyway, I happened to have been reading a lot of Jewish mystical texts and Benjamin and phenomenology last year. It was fortuitous that LICHTER, a really enjoyable short book if that wasn’t clear in my review, was put out by NYRB Classics. I love this outfit and their cool covers, but it’s funny that their back copy for THE SEVENTH CROSS, a novel set in Nazi Germany, and deals with Nazism and only Nazism, nevertheless must use the T-word.

The story of this novel’s production, how it slipped by the censors in socialist Romania, is of course a perfect candidate for the T-word cottage industry in the literary press. And indeed after glossing other reviews in the respectable venues, I tried to offer a modest alternative take.