Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Ralph Ellison's Endless Revisions
Ralph Ellison's failure to publish a finished follow-up novel to Invisible Man during his lifetime has baffled critics and scholars of American literature. While a posthumous text, larger than Juneteenth, is imminent, the scholars who edited Ellison's volumes of writing into the forthcoming book to be published by the Modern Library suggest that Ellison's embrace of word-processing technology led Ellison to revise, repeatedly, already well-crafted sentences. Anyone fascinated as I am about how how technologies, particular the digital computer, alter the way we think and write will want to read
Saturday, December 02, 2006
Other Voices, Public Works
My review is rather short, due to editorial constraints, not choice. Other Voices is primarily a journal of new fiction, so it reserves only a few pages for reviews. The maximum number of words permitted was 750. I had much more to say about Grimes' short fictions, and my first version was about three times as long (and even in this draft I was aspiring to be concise).
At some point I expect to return to this material and incorporate it into a piece of literary criticism - a review essay rather than a book review. The distinction might not be immediately apparent to those not in the field, but it's a difference that matters.
On the topic of appearances, you might not know it, but I spent several weeks on this review, reading and rereading Grimes' stories, pinning down the ones that best exemplified the elements I wanted to foreground in my review, and, of course, writing and rewriting countless drafts of this essay. As I mentioned previously, Cris Mazza provided some excellent editorial assistance, enabling me to make cuts that were extremely painful. After spending hours crafting a few sentences, watching the words rapidly disappear as you hold down the delete key can be an agonizing.
But here's the really frustrating part: I've been told that since Other Voices is creative, not academic, journal my efforts won't count for much in terms of professional advancement. I can put the review down on my CV, sure, but book reviews, particularly ones appearing in a non-peer-reviewed publication won't count for much, if anything, in the eyes of most hiring-and-promotion committees. Such reviews are not regarded as real scholarship and might even be viewed as a diversion.
I appreciate the need to make a distinction between academic and non-academic writing, but given the systemic economic exploitation of intellectual laborers that is pandemic to academia, especially in the humanities and English departments in particular, there should be some credit given for efforts to write and speak to a non-specialized audience.
That's not likely to happen anytime soon. The paradox is that as university and scholarly presses publish fewer titles, the professions continues to raise the bar when it comes to the publications necessary to get - and remain on - the tenure track.
At least I'll know Public Works thoroughly when I teach it. If nothing else, the review could work to kickstart a class lecture. That's assuming, of course, that the teaching opportunities remain there. One shouldn't presume anything, particularly when it comes to work and universities, both public and private.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
The $2.97 Gallon of Pickles, Sam Walton's Neoliberal Reality
In my English and American Fiction class this semester, one of the ideas we're returning to regularly is the claim - often identified with postmodern, or post-Nietzschean theory - that 'reality' (as opposed to the Real) is inherently fictional. Variations of this claim - which understandably sounds rather esoteric to some ears, a piece of New Age obscurantism - I try to explain informs the way many people go about their business in a neoliberal world in which The Market is revered and feared like Zeus or some other fickle Greek god.
The following quote, from "The Price of Pickles" an essay by John Lanchester on Wal-Mart
illustrates how economic fictions shape our reality in mundane and profane ways:
And the Wal-Mart reality, as critics have explained, is all about maximizing profits, which often means that people, particularly workers, and the environment must be exploited.
The following quote, from "The Price of Pickles" an essay by John Lanchester on Wal-Mart
illustrates how economic fictions shape our reality in mundane and profane ways:
Wal-Mart is about price, so much so that it has created a reification of cheapness, in which cheapness becomes a mystical quality, a Ding an sich or fundamental essence, separate from questions about utility or practicality or how on earth a thing can be put on sale for such a price. Charles Fishman, in his punchy and valuable book The Wal-Mart Effect, cites the example of Vlasic pickles, the most popular brand in the US. Wal-Mart talked Vlasic into pricing the pickles so that a gallon jar was on sale for $2.97. That is a bizarre, surreal price for a gallon of pickled cucumbers; no one had ever seen such a jar outside a deli, and no one had any real use for it, since even if you’re a pickleholic you’ll only manage to eat about a quarter of a gallon before the remaining pickles go mouldy. It had never occurred to anybody that there was such a thing as a market for a gallon jar of pickles. Even so, priced at $2.97, there was something so magnetising about this Brobdignagian vat of pickles – something so alluring about the way it embodied the Platonic ideal of cheapness, in and for itself – that Wal-Mart was soon selling 200,000 gallons of pickles a week. The ‘scary part of the Vlasic story’, as Fishman points out, is that:
The market didn’t create the $2.97 gallon of pickles, nor did waning customer demand or a wild abundance of cucumbers. Wal-Mart created the $2.97 gallon jar of pickles. The price – a number that is a critical piece of information to buyers, sellers and competitors about the state of the pickle market – the price was a lie. It was unrelated to either the supply of cucumbers or the demand for pickles. The price was a fiction imposed on the pickle market in Bentonville. Consumers saw a bargain; Vlasic saw no way out. Both were responding not to real market forces, but to a pickle price gimmick imposed by Wal-Mart as a way of making a statement.
Wal-Mart is so big and so powerful that it is in effect defining its own reality – creating its own products, and a market for them, by sheer act of will.
And the Wal-Mart reality, as critics have explained, is all about maximizing profits, which often means that people, particularly workers, and the environment must be exploited.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Kundera on his novel:
Much to consider here, but what grabbed my attention was the analogy Kundera makes between totalitarianism and postmodern technocratic society. He sees the two forces as similar in that they work to infantilize the population by denying people a sense of history. Memory and irony are presented as two potential counterforces. I may want to bring Kundera's views - and the literary aesthetic that they imply - to bear on the American postmodernists about whom I'm writing.
First question: How durable is the link Kundera makes between totalitarianism and technocracy? At what point does the comparison break down and why?
Second question: How do Kundera's remarks about totalitarianism, made, I believe, in the mid 1980s and based on his first-hand experience of living under Soviet rule, apply to the world today: a neoliberal world order of global networks in which the U.S. is said to be the sole superpower?
This story is not allegory. But my book is a polyphony in which various stories mutually explain, illumine, complement each other. The basic event of the book is the story of totalitarianism, which deprives people of memory and thus retools them into a nation of children. All totalitarianisms do this. And perhaps our entire technical age does this, with its cult of the future, its cult of youth and childhood, its indifference to the past and mistrust of thought. In the midst of a relentlessly juvenile society, an adult equipped with memory and irony feels like Tamina on the isle of children.
Much to consider here, but what grabbed my attention was the analogy Kundera makes between totalitarianism and postmodern technocratic society. He sees the two forces as similar in that they work to infantilize the population by denying people a sense of history. Memory and irony are presented as two potential counterforces. I may want to bring Kundera's views - and the literary aesthetic that they imply - to bear on the American postmodernists about whom I'm writing.
First question: How durable is the link Kundera makes between totalitarianism and technocracy? At what point does the comparison break down and why?
Second question: How do Kundera's remarks about totalitarianism, made, I believe, in the mid 1980s and based on his first-hand experience of living under Soviet rule, apply to the world today: a neoliberal world order of global networks in which the U.S. is said to be the sole superpower?
Monday, May 01, 2006
Public Works
This review is supposed to be under two pages, double spaced. Obviously it needs some cutting. But where?
Christopher Grimes, Public Works. Normal, IL: FC2, 2006. 200 pp. $15.95, paper.
Our most base desire, generally speaking, is to reduce and reduce matter into quantifiable nothingness, the last digit of pi that closes the circle for instance. Reduction to our ilk is an animal’s instinct for blood. Words, pictures, sculptures, buildings and nebula are like rabbit droppings on a field of snow from which we strive to infer the meal who produced them.
The Nobel Candidate in physics who makes this observation may be right, but her interpretation-as-scatology analogy does nothing to alleviate my anxieties about writing an overly reductive review of Christopher Grimes' debut short-fiction collection. Bottom line: this is some good shit. Grimes' short fictions are always clever and often profound, and aficionados of the masters of postmodern minimalism (Kafka, Calvino, Borges, Beckett, Barthelme) and maximalism (Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, Coover, Wallace) must read Public Works. Grimes successfully fuses the maximalists' art of expansion - their will-to-master excessive amounts of information - with the minimalist's art of retraction - their sensitivity to the material signifier's tendency to short-circuit and generate surreal interference patterns.
If the great challenge facing contemporary writers is to make our globally networked systems of communication and exchange more intelligible, a project that by no means calls for a mimetic aesthetic, then Christopher Grimes promises to be an exemplary postmodernist. Although the most ambitious and successful postmodern fiction in recent years has been prodigious meganovels like Infinite Jest, Mason & Dixon, and Underworld, Grimes' fiction demonstrates that hundreds or even thousands of pages aren't required to address global complexity. Grimes brings a systems sensibility to short fiction, writing about potentially massive topics under extreme constraints. The short fictions range from about six to eighteen pages, the very short fictions from one to four pages, and even the novella is under forty pages, including extensive footnotes from Minot, North Dakota's Code of Ordinances. Rather than trying to give a gloss on a number of these stories (which would prove difficult since the tales tend to morph unexpectedly), let me comment on the way three exemplary fictions offer a vision of systemic interconnectedness that challenges the individualist ideology that dominates most political and fiction representations.
The narratees of the opening fiction, "Customs in a Developing Country: A Prefatory Story," are foreign visitors, tourists and businesspeople, who, whilst having their bags inspected by an alternately brusque and gregarious customs officer prone to puzzling digressions, receive a lecture on acculturation. The lecture is the story, and its genius resides in the way it interpellates readers as foreigners, a move that aligns Grimes with an authority figure whom we—sophisticated readers and free subjects vigilant about the need to ‘question authority’—will initially tend to regard ironically. After all, from the predominant neoliberal perspective—devoted to the efficacy of private enterprise and free-market’ initiatives, derisive of government (public works) programs, etc.—the customs officer appears as a somewhat anachronistic authority figure: a petty civil servant or a pretentious bureaucrat from a 'backwards' country.
Precisely because he is a petty authority not to be taken seriously, the customs officer functions as, if not exactly an author surrogate, than certainly a viable analogue for an ‘experimental’ literary writer (remember Melville) who, in an age of corporate-media conglomerates, cannot expect to be published by a commercial press and must turn to an independent press dependent upon funding: so, these fictions are literally public works. But Grimes makes it difficult to sustain our sense of ironic distance and superiority towards the customs officer. He does, after all, seem to be looking out for our best interest. And despite his severe tone and an exaggerated sense of self-importance, he provides some prudent and pragmatic travel tips designed to keep our “most private possessions” especially our (sense of) identity, safe and secure. Along with cautionary anecdotes about identity theft, polite conversation, and sexual mores, the customs officer advises us on how not to “insult the natives” as Zsa Zsa Gabor (a quintessential postmodern celebrity, a “hopelessly artificial creature,” more famous for her fame—her catchphrases, her social connections, etc.—than her talent) did during her visits by displaying a palpable “lack of interest” to her hosts and committing “countless...social blunders” whenever she spoke.
Of course, Grimes has set a trap for readers. Through the customs officer, whose lecture espouses, however obliquely, values typically regarded as progressive—the benefits of multiculturalist tolerance, the grotesqueness of celebrity culture, the necessity of remaining attentive to cross-cultural semiotic and linguistic differences, etc.—Grimes suggests that these values have become banal platitudes providing ideological cover for more systemic political and economic exploitation. His lecture repeats truisms that have become multiculturalist cliches: “embrace the common sense that a people foreign to you will live in a manner that is foreign to your sensibilities. You are somewhere new. Perhaps try to appreciate its novelty” (18). But while it’s easy to “appreciate” superficial cultural differences (blue toilet paper) or minor inconveniences (low water pressure) can we truly appreciate a culture comprised of “proud, haughty people” (18) where “prisons are used prophylactically” (17).
Advocates of Criminal Year legislation support a mandatory year of incarceration for the “young and simple-minded” (17) on the grounds that the experience will prepare the prisoners for the future by giving them a taste of reality, a reality understood to be difficult and unfair. In what these conservative advocates imagine as sort of pre-emptive strike on utopian fantasies of social change, only the prisoners who bribe the warden can expect to receive any kindness while in prison. This system of bribery will condition the prisoners to “feel what it’s like to have the infinite possibility of their dreams reduced to the singularly ugly and hard business of living” (17). Suddenly we realize that we’ve in a fascist regime, and when the officer, cast in the role of a contemporary Virgil guiding us into postmodern purgatory, remarks, “like everyone else who passes through here, there was no way to know where her [Zsa Zsa Gabors'] visit was going to lead. It’s ironic, a vicious, vicious irony that we are made to labor under. You will please keep this in mind as you strike out now amongst us,” his words sound doubly ominous. First, when we recognize the implicit threat; then when we realize that this “developing country” feels uncannily like our own homeland. A vicious irony indeed.
“The Public Sentence” is an eight-page, single-sentence story concerning a more benign civil servant, a young Doctor, the Assistant Regulator of Flowage for Bismarck, ND’s Public Works, who is struggling to respond to a bizarre environmental accident—a sewage spill and a “burgeoning turtle population” (24) that threaten the Missouri River ecosystem—for which he is partly to blame. Just how blameworthy is the multi-million-dollar question raised by this comic tale about 'agency panic' and the tragic tendency we humans, as egocentric individuals,, have for misunderstanding and misrepresenting systemic complexity. While a simple mechanical error, the Doctor’s failure to “close the outflow seals of the sedimentation lagoon” (25) directly led to the “raw sewage overwhelming the tertiary system,” assigning responsibility for the subsequent problems proves infinitely more difficult. Was the “bad advice given... by the Indian Municipal Government in Delhi,” which recommended releasing a species of turtles that “subsists on decaying matter” into the river, the “true and primary source” of the eco-catastrophe? Perhaps. But why didn’t the Emergency Advisory Committee foresee that the Midwestern Americans, unlike the Dehlians, wouldn’t keep the turtle population in check by eating them? Now, the swarms of turtles present a “collective shock to our senses matched only by how shockingly quick we are to lay blame when, truly, no one contributing factor can be blamed” (24).
I can't begin to recount the number of mini-narratives, from the Doctor's courtship and marriage of an Argentinean musician to turtle-eradication plans designed serve as “cultural events,” Grimes packs into this digressive tale. I can, however, cite for your reading pleasure the following sentence fragment which, in the growing annals of American Literature about waste and excretory systems may rank up there with Slothrop's mythical descent into the sewer in Gravity's Rainbowand the various riffs and ruminations about shit> and civilization that course through Underworld:
...each one of us now, who haven’t the vaguest notion of how our public waste is directed through a system second in complexity only to that one posteriorly balanced above it, who have, until this moment, been perched blind as bats on the great public commode without once having occasion to think past our ankles, down the wrought iron throat that connects us to the municipal digestive system, the intestines of tunnels, conduits and channels, the brick-lined bowels that release into the newly vulcanized slag tanks churning the corporate volume flowing from our homes and businesses for, individually, we are more concerned with by whom the sound of the soft scrape of toilet paper is being heard than we are with the workings of the sophisticated mechanism to which we are just then affixed...
The final story I want to discuss features a narrator who, speaking colloquially, we might say is 'full of shit.' Narrated by a self-absorbed psychotherapist perturbed by her inability to cure a client and friend exhibiting acute “automobile anxiety,” “Moving Vehicles” lampoons the presumptuousness of narrative therapy, which vulgarizes deconstructive and psychoanalytic theories concerning the way our experience of subjectivity is thoroughly mediated through language and symbols by reducing them into banal self-help slogans: the ‘healing power of narrative,’ ‘we are the stories we narrate to ourselves,’ etc.
The story begins with the therapist describing how the nomadic Kirghiz tribespeople annually cross the “wide and turbulent” Irtish River with their flocks of caribou in reach winter grazing lands. The “old and infirm” unable to make the dangerous crossing are left behind with enough provisions for a few days, but only after a ritual in which the Kirghizes express their love and say their final goodbyes. Although this poignant anecdote would seem to illustrate the sacrifices required for a pre-modern community to sustain itself, our narrator finds it a “perfectly instructive one for inclusion in the therapeutic environment,” where it serves to accommodate clients to the “ambiguous future” that characterizes neoliberal 'risk societies.' She unironically repeats the Kirghizes' story to her clients as a parable about the individual's need to make lifestyle choices. It serves, for example, “to illustrate how they must each say goodbye to things in their individual pasts—former lovers, unreasonable expectations of each other—in order to move to the other side of the river” and “to suggest how they had the option to leave their relationship behind…so they could continue on as healthy individuals."
Unfortunately, we learn, our narrator hadn’t figured out how to apply the story to her friend’s Pauline’s phobia, and her musings on this “intolerable” situation eventually leads to a startling revelation: Pauline was hit by a car and will probably die. Up to this point we’ve enjoyed laughing at the therapist’s ridiculous psychobabble psychobabble, but now we see how her native commitment to of a world shaped entirely by individual acts of renarrativization and her crudely materialist view of language (which she likens at one point to kitty litter covering up, you guessed it...) render her oblivious to the real suffering and death of other. So the story closes with the therapist’s imaginary (and strangely racialized) account of Pauline’s accident, which ends abruptly as she is utterly unable to imagine the moment when Pauline presumably went unconscious. This failure of imagination, it seems, parallels the therapist's constant failure to reflect upon the ethics of her multicultural appropriations and her utilitarian approach to narrative. At the risk of sounding overly reductive, I want to suggest that Grimes' collection provides a public service by presenting readers the opportunity for serious and fun reflections on our postmodern, or neoliberal, condition.
==
Not happy with the ending, and I need to fix all the typographical errors that resulted when I cut and pasted from Word to the blog, but it's getting late and I've been before a monitor for most of the past 14 hours. Ugggh.
Christopher Grimes, Public Works. Normal, IL: FC2, 2006. 200 pp. $15.95, paper.
Our most base desire, generally speaking, is to reduce and reduce matter into quantifiable nothingness, the last digit of pi that closes the circle for instance. Reduction to our ilk is an animal’s instinct for blood. Words, pictures, sculptures, buildings and nebula are like rabbit droppings on a field of snow from which we strive to infer the meal who produced them.
The Nobel Candidate in physics who makes this observation may be right, but her interpretation-as-scatology analogy does nothing to alleviate my anxieties about writing an overly reductive review of Christopher Grimes' debut short-fiction collection. Bottom line: this is some good shit. Grimes' short fictions are always clever and often profound, and aficionados of the masters of postmodern minimalism (Kafka, Calvino, Borges, Beckett, Barthelme) and maximalism (Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, Coover, Wallace) must read Public Works. Grimes successfully fuses the maximalists' art of expansion - their will-to-master excessive amounts of information - with the minimalist's art of retraction - their sensitivity to the material signifier's tendency to short-circuit and generate surreal interference patterns.
If the great challenge facing contemporary writers is to make our globally networked systems of communication and exchange more intelligible, a project that by no means calls for a mimetic aesthetic, then Christopher Grimes promises to be an exemplary postmodernist. Although the most ambitious and successful postmodern fiction in recent years has been prodigious meganovels like Infinite Jest, Mason & Dixon, and Underworld, Grimes' fiction demonstrates that hundreds or even thousands of pages aren't required to address global complexity. Grimes brings a systems sensibility to short fiction, writing about potentially massive topics under extreme constraints. The short fictions range from about six to eighteen pages, the very short fictions from one to four pages, and even the novella is under forty pages, including extensive footnotes from Minot, North Dakota's Code of Ordinances. Rather than trying to give a gloss on a number of these stories (which would prove difficult since the tales tend to morph unexpectedly), let me comment on the way three exemplary fictions offer a vision of systemic interconnectedness that challenges the individualist ideology that dominates most political and fiction representations.
The narratees of the opening fiction, "Customs in a Developing Country: A Prefatory Story," are foreign visitors, tourists and businesspeople, who, whilst having their bags inspected by an alternately brusque and gregarious customs officer prone to puzzling digressions, receive a lecture on acculturation. The lecture is the story, and its genius resides in the way it interpellates readers as foreigners, a move that aligns Grimes with an authority figure whom we—sophisticated readers and free subjects vigilant about the need to ‘question authority’—will initially tend to regard ironically. After all, from the predominant neoliberal perspective—devoted to the efficacy of private enterprise and free-market’ initiatives, derisive of government (public works) programs, etc.—the customs officer appears as a somewhat anachronistic authority figure: a petty civil servant or a pretentious bureaucrat from a 'backwards' country.
Precisely because he is a petty authority not to be taken seriously, the customs officer functions as, if not exactly an author surrogate, than certainly a viable analogue for an ‘experimental’ literary writer (remember Melville) who, in an age of corporate-media conglomerates, cannot expect to be published by a commercial press and must turn to an independent press dependent upon funding: so, these fictions are literally public works. But Grimes makes it difficult to sustain our sense of ironic distance and superiority towards the customs officer. He does, after all, seem to be looking out for our best interest. And despite his severe tone and an exaggerated sense of self-importance, he provides some prudent and pragmatic travel tips designed to keep our “most private possessions” especially our (sense of) identity, safe and secure. Along with cautionary anecdotes about identity theft, polite conversation, and sexual mores, the customs officer advises us on how not to “insult the natives” as Zsa Zsa Gabor (a quintessential postmodern celebrity, a “hopelessly artificial creature,” more famous for her fame—her catchphrases, her social connections, etc.—than her talent) did during her visits by displaying a palpable “lack of interest” to her hosts and committing “countless...social blunders” whenever she spoke.
Of course, Grimes has set a trap for readers. Through the customs officer, whose lecture espouses, however obliquely, values typically regarded as progressive—the benefits of multiculturalist tolerance, the grotesqueness of celebrity culture, the necessity of remaining attentive to cross-cultural semiotic and linguistic differences, etc.—Grimes suggests that these values have become banal platitudes providing ideological cover for more systemic political and economic exploitation. His lecture repeats truisms that have become multiculturalist cliches: “embrace the common sense that a people foreign to you will live in a manner that is foreign to your sensibilities. You are somewhere new. Perhaps try to appreciate its novelty” (18). But while it’s easy to “appreciate” superficial cultural differences (blue toilet paper) or minor inconveniences (low water pressure) can we truly appreciate a culture comprised of “proud, haughty people” (18) where “prisons are used prophylactically” (17).
Advocates of Criminal Year legislation support a mandatory year of incarceration for the “young and simple-minded” (17) on the grounds that the experience will prepare the prisoners for the future by giving them a taste of reality, a reality understood to be difficult and unfair. In what these conservative advocates imagine as sort of pre-emptive strike on utopian fantasies of social change, only the prisoners who bribe the warden can expect to receive any kindness while in prison. This system of bribery will condition the prisoners to “feel what it’s like to have the infinite possibility of their dreams reduced to the singularly ugly and hard business of living” (17). Suddenly we realize that we’ve in a fascist regime, and when the officer, cast in the role of a contemporary Virgil guiding us into postmodern purgatory, remarks, “like everyone else who passes through here, there was no way to know where her [Zsa Zsa Gabors'] visit was going to lead. It’s ironic, a vicious, vicious irony that we are made to labor under. You will please keep this in mind as you strike out now amongst us,” his words sound doubly ominous. First, when we recognize the implicit threat; then when we realize that this “developing country” feels uncannily like our own homeland. A vicious irony indeed.
“The Public Sentence” is an eight-page, single-sentence story concerning a more benign civil servant, a young Doctor, the Assistant Regulator of Flowage for Bismarck, ND’s Public Works, who is struggling to respond to a bizarre environmental accident—a sewage spill and a “burgeoning turtle population” (24) that threaten the Missouri River ecosystem—for which he is partly to blame. Just how blameworthy is the multi-million-dollar question raised by this comic tale about 'agency panic' and the tragic tendency we humans, as egocentric individuals,, have for misunderstanding and misrepresenting systemic complexity. While a simple mechanical error, the Doctor’s failure to “close the outflow seals of the sedimentation lagoon” (25) directly led to the “raw sewage overwhelming the tertiary system,” assigning responsibility for the subsequent problems proves infinitely more difficult. Was the “bad advice given... by the Indian Municipal Government in Delhi,” which recommended releasing a species of turtles that “subsists on decaying matter” into the river, the “true and primary source” of the eco-catastrophe? Perhaps. But why didn’t the Emergency Advisory Committee foresee that the Midwestern Americans, unlike the Dehlians, wouldn’t keep the turtle population in check by eating them? Now, the swarms of turtles present a “collective shock to our senses matched only by how shockingly quick we are to lay blame when, truly, no one contributing factor can be blamed” (24).
I can't begin to recount the number of mini-narratives, from the Doctor's courtship and marriage of an Argentinean musician to turtle-eradication plans designed serve as “cultural events,” Grimes packs into this digressive tale. I can, however, cite for your reading pleasure the following sentence fragment which, in the growing annals of American Literature about waste and excretory systems may rank up there with Slothrop's mythical descent into the sewer in Gravity's Rainbowand the various riffs and ruminations about shit> and civilization that course through Underworld:
...each one of us now, who haven’t the vaguest notion of how our public waste is directed through a system second in complexity only to that one posteriorly balanced above it, who have, until this moment, been perched blind as bats on the great public commode without once having occasion to think past our ankles, down the wrought iron throat that connects us to the municipal digestive system, the intestines of tunnels, conduits and channels, the brick-lined bowels that release into the newly vulcanized slag tanks churning the corporate volume flowing from our homes and businesses for, individually, we are more concerned with by whom the sound of the soft scrape of toilet paper is being heard than we are with the workings of the sophisticated mechanism to which we are just then affixed...
The final story I want to discuss features a narrator who, speaking colloquially, we might say is 'full of shit.' Narrated by a self-absorbed psychotherapist perturbed by her inability to cure a client and friend exhibiting acute “automobile anxiety,” “Moving Vehicles” lampoons the presumptuousness of narrative therapy, which vulgarizes deconstructive and psychoanalytic theories concerning the way our experience of subjectivity is thoroughly mediated through language and symbols by reducing them into banal self-help slogans: the ‘healing power of narrative,’ ‘we are the stories we narrate to ourselves,’ etc.
The story begins with the therapist describing how the nomadic Kirghiz tribespeople annually cross the “wide and turbulent” Irtish River with their flocks of caribou in reach winter grazing lands. The “old and infirm” unable to make the dangerous crossing are left behind with enough provisions for a few days, but only after a ritual in which the Kirghizes express their love and say their final goodbyes. Although this poignant anecdote would seem to illustrate the sacrifices required for a pre-modern community to sustain itself, our narrator finds it a “perfectly instructive one for inclusion in the therapeutic environment,” where it serves to accommodate clients to the “ambiguous future” that characterizes neoliberal 'risk societies.' She unironically repeats the Kirghizes' story to her clients as a parable about the individual's need to make lifestyle choices. It serves, for example, “to illustrate how they must each say goodbye to things in their individual pasts—former lovers, unreasonable expectations of each other—in order to move to the other side of the river” and “to suggest how they had the option to leave their relationship behind…so they could continue on as healthy individuals."
Unfortunately, we learn, our narrator hadn’t figured out how to apply the story to her friend’s Pauline’s phobia, and her musings on this “intolerable” situation eventually leads to a startling revelation: Pauline was hit by a car and will probably die. Up to this point we’ve enjoyed laughing at the therapist’s ridiculous psychobabble psychobabble, but now we see how her native commitment to of a world shaped entirely by individual acts of renarrativization and her crudely materialist view of language (which she likens at one point to kitty litter covering up, you guessed it...) render her oblivious to the real suffering and death of other. So the story closes with the therapist’s imaginary (and strangely racialized) account of Pauline’s accident, which ends abruptly as she is utterly unable to imagine the moment when Pauline presumably went unconscious. This failure of imagination, it seems, parallels the therapist's constant failure to reflect upon the ethics of her multicultural appropriations and her utilitarian approach to narrative. At the risk of sounding overly reductive, I want to suggest that Grimes' collection provides a public service by presenting readers the opportunity for serious and fun reflections on our postmodern, or neoliberal, condition.
==
Not happy with the ending, and I need to fix all the typographical errors that resulted when I cut and pasted from Word to the blog, but it's getting late and I've been before a monitor for most of the past 14 hours. Ugggh.
Sunday, September 18, 2005
The Alleged Failings of Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown
I've been following the reviews for Salman Rushdie's new novel, Shalimar the Clown and the bulk of them appear to be negative. Is that because it is simply mediocre work of literature, or is Rushdie being evaluated according to inflated standards that were established by the tremendous critical claim his early works, e.g., Midnight's Children received? Writing in The Nation, Lee Siegel notes that recent Rushdie reviews have presented a common narrative about Rushdie's artistic trajectory: the fall from an artistic state of grace. Siegel then proceeds to argue that the critcial consensus is correct: Rushdie has lost his subtle artistic touch and "seems to be writing novels that insisently annoate and reiterate what he believes to be a priori truths about life." And the main a priori truth that Rushdie reiterates concerns connectedness, the extent to which our lives are intertwined with others.
Unfortunately, Siegel suggests, Shalimar the Clown fails to present us with believeable characters and as a consequence never achieves the level of intimacy necessary to illuminate Rushdie's vision of the world's connectedness.
Siegel's damning judgments include the following:
The last remark, actually the final paragraph of the essay, interests me most, because the underlying claim presented here - that Rushdie presents us with a post-ideological vision in which people's differing beliefs about what's true or false are effectively rendered irrelevent - is one that Walter Benn Michaels makes against many 'postmodern' texts, both fictional and nonfictional.
The artistic challenge facing today's novelists, it would seem, is to write narratives that are genuinely dialogic, i.e., that present us with characters who [Internet connection acting funky; will save & follow this up later]
Unfortunately, Siegel suggests, Shalimar the Clown fails to present us with believeable characters and as a consequence never achieves the level of intimacy necessary to illuminate Rushdie's vision of the world's connectedness.
Siegel's damning judgments include the following:
"Alas, there is not a single real, intimate moment between characters in this book; not a single scene or situation unfolding according to its inner laws, away from the disheveling hurry of the novel's judgments and opinions; and barely any dialogue."
"Rushdie hastily comments on his characters and their milieus from the outside; he never gives them an inner life out of which they can act and speak for themselves."
"Max, for example, seems less a character than somebody's ego-ideal: i.e., the construction of a flawless self-image in response to feelings of humiliation and shame."
"But Rushdie himself apparently doesn't believe that we're all connected, because he portrays some of the people in this novel's world as if they lived on an alien planet."
"But so confused is this book beyond its complacent clarities, beyond its easy, all-embracing, platitudinous politics that its story finally undermines its theme. (Even the name "Noman," seemingly heavy with all kinds of significance, drifts through this mess of a novel into a portentous meaninglessness.) By attributing, as Rushdie does, the central violence in Shalimar to jealousy rather than to ideology, he is unwittingly affirming that people's stories are not alike; that whereas ideology funnels diverse thoughts and feelings into a single, pinpoint intensity, experience--for example, the experience of jealousy--shapes each person in a different way. Only tyrants delude themselves into seeing people and places as one undifferentiated mass, to be manipulated at will. Only tyrants, that is, and writers whose egos have been scarred and then inflated by the fury of tyrants."
The last remark, actually the final paragraph of the essay, interests me most, because the underlying claim presented here - that Rushdie presents us with a post-ideological vision in which people's differing beliefs about what's true or false are effectively rendered irrelevent - is one that Walter Benn Michaels makes against many 'postmodern' texts, both fictional and nonfictional.
The artistic challenge facing today's novelists, it would seem, is to write narratives that are genuinely dialogic, i.e., that present us with characters who [Internet connection acting funky; will save & follow this up later]
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Recombinant Culture and Literary Remixes
In a short essay for Wired magazine, William Gibson characterizes our current historical moment as "a peculiar junction, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist," although the latter is rapidly becoming the cultural dominant. Gibson's observation and his corresponding claim that our new recombinant technologies are redefining what it means to be human are, of course, familar assertions in postmodern and media studies.
I'm archiving this piece for future use in the classroom because it concisely introduces several ideas, not all of which I agree with entirely, in no-bullshit prose: (1) Burroughs' innovative cut-up method differs from plagiarism (2) from the perspective of a recombinant artist "[m]eaning...seemed a matter of adjacent data," and (3) the notion of copyright and intellectual property that developed in the 20th-century has become obsolete, a burden to new creativity.
Thanks largely to arguments presented by Walter Benn Michaels, I've come to believe that idea #2 is wrong because it confuses intentional meaning with signifying effects (see his The Shape of the Signifier). And as Burroughs' writing about his use of the cut-up method makes clear, the juxtapositioning and arranging different texts (or data) is an intentional act that is not purely random.
I'm archiving this piece for future use in the classroom because it concisely introduces several ideas, not all of which I agree with entirely, in no-bullshit prose: (1) Burroughs' innovative cut-up method differs from plagiarism (2) from the perspective of a recombinant artist "[m]eaning...seemed a matter of adjacent data," and (3) the notion of copyright and intellectual property that developed in the 20th-century has become obsolete, a burden to new creativity.
Thanks largely to arguments presented by Walter Benn Michaels, I've come to believe that idea #2 is wrong because it confuses intentional meaning with signifying effects (see his The Shape of the Signifier). And as Burroughs' writing about his use of the cut-up method makes clear, the juxtapositioning and arranging different texts (or data) is an intentional act that is not purely random.
Sunday, January 02, 2005
Tropes and Topoi in Postmodern American Fiction (and Theory)
Dangerous Communication.
The Book of Daniel. Doctorow, E.L. (1971):
"Susan had communicated with me; just that; at if now in our lives only extreme and dangerous communication was possible, nevertheless the signal had been sent, discharged even, from the spasm of soul that was required--and that was the sense of summons I felt sneaking up over the afternoon like a blanket of burned space around my ears. And all my life I have been trying to escape from my relatives and I have been intricate in my run, but one way or another they are what you come upon around the corner, and the Lord God who is so frantic for recognition says you have to ask how they are and would they like something cool to drink, and what is it you can do for them this time" (30).
This passage concerns the imperative to act that Daniel Isaacson Lewin feels in the aftermath of his sister's suicide attempt. Indeed, Susan's suicide attempt is precisely the "dangerous communication" being alluded to in this passage. Daniel has just come upon the package of "Gillette Super Stainless blades" (29) in Susan's Volvo. This tableau triggers a kind of perverse epiphany for Daniel, prompting him to recognition of sorts. At this moment, "Daniel got the picture," that is, he experiences a sense "of being summoned." Doctorow leaves it up to his readers to figure out what exactly this summoning entails and whether or not the breakthrough or epiphany that Daniel experiences is productive. I would argue that the fact that moments later Daniel will be tormenting his wife in the Volvo, possibly branding her ass, suggests that we should be skeptical of the entire premise of "dangerous communication," even though the text we are reading, Daniel's book, is being presented as something of an outgrowth of Daniel's sense that he must communicate.
The way I prefer to read this passage is to regard it as a scene of political interpellation. Daniel is hailed by Susan to acknowledge his connectedness to the relatives from whom he has "been trying to escape" (30). What makes the interpellation political is that Daniel's parents are the Isaacsons, internationally infamous Communists who were executed as atomic spies. At this moment in the novel, Daniel realizes that he cannot deny or run from his parent's political legacy, which others will always associate him with. What Daniel must confront is the fact that because he is 'always already' identified with the Isaacsons, he must choose how he will position himself in relation to their political beliefs. This confrontation is traumatic and both Susan and Daniel respond to it with violence. Susan attempts suicide and Daniel torments Phyllis, his wife. This is all to suggest, I think, that "dangerous communication" is a shorthand way of equating violence with the transmission of meaning, or, more generally, of equating force with understanding (an equation common to postmodern fiction and theory). Ultimately, I think Doctorow would have us recognize the falsity of the novel's "vicious eroticism," that is, the sadistic sex scenes in which Daniel attempts to teach Phyllis by testing her bodily limits are intended to demonstrate the error in construing learning as the transmission of experience. (See also: fantasy of transmitted experience).
Dissemination, communication as.
The Book of Daniel. Doctorow, E.L. (1971):
“Susan had communicated with me; just that; and if now in our lives only extreme and dangerous communication was possible, nevertheless the signal had been sent, discharged even, from the spasm of the soul that was required—and that was the sense of summons I felt sneaking up over the afternoon like a blanket of burned space around my ears” (30, italics mine).
This passage is one of the most important in the entire novel as it (1) establishes a link between the text’s vicious eroticism and what I take to be a typically postmodern of communication as a material act of (bodily) transmission and (2) imagines this communicative act to be foundational to a character’s sense of self-identity. The point of Daniel’s epiphany in the parking lot is not simply that he recognizes Susan’s suicide attempt to be a specific type of communication (extreme and dangerous) but also that now this is the only possible mode of communication available to the Isaacson children. By italicizing some of the peculiar words Daniel uses to describe Susan’s suicide, I’ve tried to foreground the abject, erotic and material manner in which imagines communication as dissemination. Daniel does not speak here of, say, what Susan might have meant by her suicide or the beliefs that could have contributed to her decision to take her own life. Instead, of the message, Daniel focuses on the signal, which he figures using a blatanly sexual image—it is a load of semen being ejaculated from a spasming body. (See also: dangerous communication).
End of History (or post-historicism)
Revolution at the Gates. Zizek, Slavoj.
"...the First World and the Third World can no longer be simply opposed as distinct political unities: they are developing more and more within each political unity (state, city)? So when, a decade ago, Francis Fukuyama launched his pseudo-Hegelian thesis on the 'end of history', he was right, although not in the way he thought: in so far as the proper opposite of history is nature, the 'end of history' means that the social process itself is more and more 'naturalized', experienced as a new form of 'fate', as a blind uncontrollable force" (Zizek, Revolution at the Gates).
Vineland. Pynchon, Thomas. (1990):
Frenesi and Flash living in the witness protection program in Vineland: “They had both been content to leave it that way, to go along in a government-defined history without consequences, never imagining it could end, turn out to be only another Reaganite dream on the cheap, some snoozy fantasy about kindly character actors in FBI suits staked out all night long watching over every poor scraggly sheep in the herd it was their job to run, the destined losers whose only redemption would have to come through their usefulness to the State law-enforcement apparatus, which was calling itself “America,” although somebody must have known better” (Vineland 354).
The Book of Daniel. Doctorow, E.L. (1971):
"Susan had communicated with me; just that; at if now in our lives only extreme and dangerous communication was possible, nevertheless the signal had been sent, discharged even, from the spasm of soul that was required--and that was the sense of summons I felt sneaking up over the afternoon like a blanket of burned space around my ears. And all my life I have been trying to escape from my relatives and I have been intricate in my run, but one way or another they are what you come upon around the corner, and the Lord God who is so frantic for recognition says you have to ask how they are and would they like something cool to drink, and what is it you can do for them this time" (30).
This passage concerns the imperative to act that Daniel Isaacson Lewin feels in the aftermath of his sister's suicide attempt. Indeed, Susan's suicide attempt is precisely the "dangerous communication" being alluded to in this passage. Daniel has just come upon the package of "Gillette Super Stainless blades" (29) in Susan's Volvo. This tableau triggers a kind of perverse epiphany for Daniel, prompting him to recognition of sorts. At this moment, "Daniel got the picture," that is, he experiences a sense "of being summoned." Doctorow leaves it up to his readers to figure out what exactly this summoning entails and whether or not the breakthrough or epiphany that Daniel experiences is productive. I would argue that the fact that moments later Daniel will be tormenting his wife in the Volvo, possibly branding her ass, suggests that we should be skeptical of the entire premise of "dangerous communication," even though the text we are reading, Daniel's book, is being presented as something of an outgrowth of Daniel's sense that he must communicate.
The way I prefer to read this passage is to regard it as a scene of political interpellation. Daniel is hailed by Susan to acknowledge his connectedness to the relatives from whom he has "been trying to escape" (30). What makes the interpellation political is that Daniel's parents are the Isaacsons, internationally infamous Communists who were executed as atomic spies. At this moment in the novel, Daniel realizes that he cannot deny or run from his parent's political legacy, which others will always associate him with. What Daniel must confront is the fact that because he is 'always already' identified with the Isaacsons, he must choose how he will position himself in relation to their political beliefs. This confrontation is traumatic and both Susan and Daniel respond to it with violence. Susan attempts suicide and Daniel torments Phyllis, his wife. This is all to suggest, I think, that "dangerous communication" is a shorthand way of equating violence with the transmission of meaning, or, more generally, of equating force with understanding (an equation common to postmodern fiction and theory). Ultimately, I think Doctorow would have us recognize the falsity of the novel's "vicious eroticism," that is, the sadistic sex scenes in which Daniel attempts to teach Phyllis by testing her bodily limits are intended to demonstrate the error in construing learning as the transmission of experience. (See also: fantasy of transmitted experience).
Dissemination, communication as.
The Book of Daniel. Doctorow, E.L. (1971):
“Susan had communicated with me; just that; and if now in our lives only extreme and dangerous communication was possible, nevertheless the signal had been sent, discharged even, from the spasm of the soul that was required—and that was the sense of summons I felt sneaking up over the afternoon like a blanket of burned space around my ears” (30, italics mine).
This passage is one of the most important in the entire novel as it (1) establishes a link between the text’s vicious eroticism and what I take to be a typically postmodern of communication as a material act of (bodily) transmission and (2) imagines this communicative act to be foundational to a character’s sense of self-identity. The point of Daniel’s epiphany in the parking lot is not simply that he recognizes Susan’s suicide attempt to be a specific type of communication (extreme and dangerous) but also that now this is the only possible mode of communication available to the Isaacson children. By italicizing some of the peculiar words Daniel uses to describe Susan’s suicide, I’ve tried to foreground the abject, erotic and material manner in which imagines communication as dissemination. Daniel does not speak here of, say, what Susan might have meant by her suicide or the beliefs that could have contributed to her decision to take her own life. Instead, of the message, Daniel focuses on the signal, which he figures using a blatanly sexual image—it is a load of semen being ejaculated from a spasming body. (See also: dangerous communication).
End of History (or post-historicism)
Revolution at the Gates. Zizek, Slavoj.
"...the First World and the Third World can no longer be simply opposed as distinct political unities: they are developing more and more within each political unity (state, city)? So when, a decade ago, Francis Fukuyama launched his pseudo-Hegelian thesis on the 'end of history', he was right, although not in the way he thought: in so far as the proper opposite of history is nature, the 'end of history' means that the social process itself is more and more 'naturalized', experienced as a new form of 'fate', as a blind uncontrollable force" (Zizek, Revolution at the Gates).
Vineland. Pynchon, Thomas. (1990):
Frenesi and Flash living in the witness protection program in Vineland: “They had both been content to leave it that way, to go along in a government-defined history without consequences, never imagining it could end, turn out to be only another Reaganite dream on the cheap, some snoozy fantasy about kindly character actors in FBI suits staked out all night long watching over every poor scraggly sheep in the herd it was their job to run, the destined losers whose only redemption would have to come through their usefulness to the State law-enforcement apparatus, which was calling itself “America,” although somebody must have known better” (Vineland 354).
Friday, October 15, 2004
Tips on Teaching Lolita
The following remarks were originally posted on Scott Rettberg's blog in response to comments he made about teaching Lolita this semester. Scott's reflections were prompted, in part, by his reading of Mark Edmunson's essay "All Entertainment, All the Time."
Scott,
I taught Lolita last spring and experienced the same difficulty you describe: getting the students to get beyond their impulse to condemn Humbert Humbert's reprehensible behavior and to reflect upon Nabokov's artistry.
Here’s what I found worked well to overcome this obstacle.
I look forward to hearing or reading more about your students’ responses to Lolita. Good luck!
Scott,
I taught Lolita last spring and experienced the same difficulty you describe: getting the students to get beyond their impulse to condemn Humbert Humbert's reprehensible behavior and to reflect upon Nabokov's artistry.
Here’s what I found worked well to overcome this obstacle.
1. Read the annotated edition. We read The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel Jr. Appel's introductory essay and his useful annotations cue students in to things such as Nabokov's intricate wordplay. This edition costs a bit more, but is worth every penny.
2. Beware the Morality Fallacy. Explaining why reading literature for a moral lesson is lame. Every semester, I typically give a lecture in which I explain what I like to call the 'morality fallacy,' which is based on the premise that art and literature differ from a sermon and that it is a critical error to evaluate art or literature as though they were merely models for right, proper or 'politically correct behavior.
3. Explain your affective reaction. I asked students to reflect carefully upon their feelings toward Humbert. In which passages did they find him most reprehensible, and where did they find themselves feeling some pity for him? After pinpointing some of these passages, including, of course, the account of the first seduction, we discussed how the narrative strategies Nabokov deployed via his unreliable, pompous, but nonetheless rhetorically savvy narrator, encouraged particular emotional or affective responses.
4. Read smart literary criticism. We read several essays from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: A Casebook, edited by Ellen Pifer that do a great job of addressing issues such as (1) how the novel can be read as a romance in a parodic mode ("Parody and Authenticity in Lolita) (2) why Humbert is only partially successful in his rhetorical manipulations ("The Art of Persuasion in Lolita") and (3) how Humbert's attempts at self-exoneration lead him to denigrate America ("The Americanization of Humbert Humbert").
5. Screen both versions of the film. We watched both Stanley Kubrick's and Adrian Lyne's film versions of Lolita and discussed how the two movies approached the novel differently, particularly in the extent and manner in which each film leads us to identify with Humbert. I argued that Kubrick treated the book as a black comedy and emphasized the outrageous humor in the novel, whereas Lyne emphasized the more melodramatic aspects of the narrative. The result, as I saw it, was that Lyne's Humbert, played by Jeremy Irons, seemed more authentic and elicited more pathos from viewers, due in part to his awkwardness, whereas Kubrick's Humbert, played by James Mason, emphasized the cultivated aloof, somewhat arrogant European. I highly recommend screening both versions, in part because doing so will demonstrate how time constraints and the need for a certain cinematographic consistency require filmmakers to adhere more strictly to one genre than novelists, who are more free to vary the 'tone' of their work.
6. Discuss Lolita as a popular culture phenomenon. We also read Michael Wood's essay "Revisiting Lolita (also in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: A Casebook) which was written as a response to the 1997 media controversy surrounding Adrian Lyne’s film. Wood addresses important issues including how filmic constraints are both limiting and enabling when remediating a work of fiction into a film and how the term "Lolita" has entered our vocabulary and why the colloquial use of the term signifies something vastly different from Humbert and Nabokov's use of the term.
7. Let the master have his say. Finally, before beginning the novel, I familiarized students with some of Nabokov’s views on aesthetics and literature.
• “I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere.”
• “Now if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.”
• “Let me suggest that the very term ‘everyday reality’ is utterly static since it presupposes a situation that is permanently observable, essentially objective, and universally known.”
I look forward to hearing or reading more about your students’ responses to Lolita. Good luck!
Saturday, May 01, 2004
I Love The Unknown
On both a personal and a professional level, I'm pleased to report that
But seriously (as Derrida said to Searle) as a friend of The Unknown, I'm glad to see that the fellas got their shit together and not only archived this beast (which, judging from recent posts on
Were I to pimp The Unknown to Paula Geyh and the other Norton editors, my argument on behalf of the work would be that it is an exemplary piece of what Deleuze dubbed "minor literature," and that the major tongue they were twisting was that of the pre-millenial literary establishment. This hypertext appeared at a time when the literati were begrudgingly shocked into acknowledging that the printed word has always been a network technology for establishing connections between readers, and The Unknown can be read as a testimonial to a joyful belief that the publishing industry, just like the music industry, was in the midst of losing its grip on the dissemination of art. Obviously, this historical moment hasn't played itself out.
The Unknown deserves to me read for more than socioeconomic or historical reasons. I think it demonstrated that metafictional irony hasn't exhausted its potential, and that self-reflexive writing was more necessary than ever in a culture where everything seems to be choreographed for a voyeurs. The also reminded those who forgot that metafiction needn't be smug and smarmy or cold and impersonal. Somewhere Donald Barthelme was laughing.
I realize that I'm using this post as a way to avoid grading final exams. But before I return to the grading, a bit more on the Deleuze... I know it's something of a cliche to talk about hypertext as an embodiment of Deleuzean concepts like the "rhizome" or "the body without organs," but in the case of The Unknown, it really makes sense. A major trope in the hypertext (in the tradition of Burroughs, Pynchon, etc.) is how intoxication can function to reinscribe disembodied information within the realm of the all-too-human.
The Unknown carry on the migratory, masculinist tradition in American Literature that Deleuze & Guattari so admire (Melville, Miller, Kerouac, etc) and in tracing their quasi-autobiographical line of flight across American (a fictional book tour), they managed to make it funnier through parodistic power riffs on intellectual tropes like the death drive, the will to power, etc. that permeate so much of literary modernism. Were Deleuze still with his, I think he'd appreciate The Unknown, though he'd probably refer the fellas to the passages in A Thousand Plateaus advocating the practice of getting high on water.
Thanks to accolades bestowed upon it by Robert Coover, The Unknown stand a decent chance of being remembered the annals of e-literary history. Not that Scott, who, when he is in his carny barker mode can make Mark Leyner appear modest, is likely to let that happen. But it takes more than a streetstoopid, self-promotional machine to spread the word. Reliable access is key, and it's good to know that (God forbid) should this gonzo crew push things too far & disappear forever into cyberspace, or some dungeon created by John Ashcroft for domestic threats to Homeland Security, The Unknown will remain available for reading.
But seriously (as Derrida said to Searle) as a friend of The Unknown, I'm glad to see that the fellas got their shit together and not only archived this beast (which, judging from recent posts on
Were I to pimp The Unknown to Paula Geyh and the other Norton editors, my argument on behalf of the work would be that it is an exemplary piece of what Deleuze dubbed "minor literature," and that the major tongue they were twisting was that of the pre-millenial literary establishment. This hypertext appeared at a time when the literati were begrudgingly shocked into acknowledging that the printed word has always been a network technology for establishing connections between readers, and The Unknown can be read as a testimonial to a joyful belief that the publishing industry, just like the music industry, was in the midst of losing its grip on the dissemination of art. Obviously, this historical moment hasn't played itself out.
The Unknown deserves to me read for more than socioeconomic or historical reasons. I think it demonstrated that metafictional irony hasn't exhausted its potential, and that self-reflexive writing was more necessary than ever in a culture where everything seems to be choreographed for a voyeurs. The also reminded those who forgot that metafiction needn't be smug and smarmy or cold and impersonal. Somewhere Donald Barthelme was laughing.
I realize that I'm using this post as a way to avoid grading final exams. But before I return to the grading, a bit more on the Deleuze... I know it's something of a cliche to talk about hypertext as an embodiment of Deleuzean concepts like the "rhizome" or "the body without organs," but in the case of The Unknown, it really makes sense. A major trope in the hypertext (in the tradition of Burroughs, Pynchon, etc.) is how intoxication can function to reinscribe disembodied information within the realm of the all-too-human.
The Unknown carry on the migratory, masculinist tradition in American Literature that Deleuze & Guattari so admire (Melville, Miller, Kerouac, etc) and in tracing their quasi-autobiographical line of flight across American (a fictional book tour), they managed to make it funnier through parodistic power riffs on intellectual tropes like the death drive, the will to power, etc. that permeate so much of literary modernism. Were Deleuze still with his, I think he'd appreciate The Unknown, though he'd probably refer the fellas to the passages in A Thousand Plateaus advocating the practice of getting high on water.
Thanks to accolades bestowed upon it by Robert Coover, The Unknown stand a decent chance of being remembered the annals of e-literary history. Not that Scott, who, when he is in his carny barker mode can make Mark Leyner appear modest, is likely to let that happen. But it takes more than a streetstoopid, self-promotional machine to spread the word. Reliable access is key, and it's good to know that (God forbid) should this gonzo crew push things too far & disappear forever into cyberspace, or some dungeon created by John Ashcroft for domestic threats to Homeland Security, The Unknown will remain available for reading.
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