Today on the CCLaP Podcast, it’s the conclusion of A Podcast Dreadful, the center’s 12-part serial-fiction audiobook anthology taking place every Monday this autumn. Today’s episode includes: “Steamhouse,” part 12 of 12, by Davis Schneiderman; “The Pool,” part 8 of 8, by Jim Ruland; “The Gothickers,” part 12 of 12, by Keith McCleary and Sophia G. Starmack; “Cure,” part 4 of 4, by Ben Tanzer; and “Dr. Lazarus Faust and the Anarchist Masquerade,” part 12 of 12, by Karl Wolff.
Posted in Podcast Dreadful, The Internet, theater
Tagged culture, fantasy, fiction, maximalism, philosophy, politics, pop culture, religion, science fiction, series, the internet
I recently reviewed A Spy in the Ruins, by Christopher Bernard. I talk with him about the novel’s genesis, the writing process, and the need to maintain autonomy in public art.
Tell us about the genesis of A Spy in the Ruins?
Of course. Its genesis was curious and highly circuitous. I began it in the late spring or so of 1996. I was just getting over a deep personal crisis, and hadn’t worked on a major project since completing the libretto and music of an opera two years before. I was hungry to do something of some magnitude, since I’ve discovered, much as I enjoy writing shorter pieces, I’m most content when I also have a large, ambitious piece underway, to warm and lighten the background of everything else I do – something that is big enough and unusual enough to challenge me, even frighten me a little. At the time, I had a part-time editorial job, with my mornings free. I felt, obscurely, that there was a book in me trying to get out – I had already written several book-length fictional and nonfictional works, number of plays, short stories and essays, an embarrassingly vast journal, many poems, etc., so I had a feeling for what a book feels like inside my mind; there is a distinct difference between the larval stages of a poem, a story, a play, a novel, etc., that I have learned to note, and heed.
One morning, after waking and sitting in my robe on the bed in my apartment in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, while drinking tea, I decided to try something I’ve used a number of times over the years when I felt an urge to write but lacked a subject: “randomizing,” or free-associating on the page. The very first words that rang out in my mind’s ear were “Flung. Out. Far.” Those words set off a chain of associations leading to a description of a walk through a ruined city that ran on for a several pages and seemed to form a complete, if rough, prose poem, ending with the rather oracular words “Your turn,” whose meaning, at the time, baffled me. (The “ruined city” I recognized immediately as a metaphor for the crisis I had gone through and the feeling of overwhelming personal failure it had left me with.)
The next morning, again wrapped in a robe and sipping tea, I came back to this short piece, and free-associated off the strange concluding words, but soon ground to a halt; it hit me that those words formed a conclusion, and if I broke the previous day’s “prose poem” in two, I had the opening and ending of a much longer piece. And thus it transpired. The opening three touchstone words, after much massaging, now appear a few pages into the book, but the final pages of Spy are very close to that initial, dreamily free-associated passage.
The book took nine years to complete, from that initial morning until the final touchups on the proofs, which my publisher generously indulged up to the final weeks before publication in 2005. I intended the book, at first, to be about 200 pages; the aim was to create a completely free-associational text, to create a (hopefully) hypnotic, addictive, liminal mood in the reader, but after a few weeks, I found the free associations generating characters and scenes, even stories, that were linking up to my deepest and earliest memories.
I was not sure where all of this was going. I wrote slowly, only one or two pages a day, and over the long course of composition, I found, every six months or so, the direction of the book changing. Except for roughly half-a-year around the turn of the century, when the Gale Group asked me for a lengthy autobiographical essay, I worked on the book continuously, almost always in the mornings before going to work, a time when I feel closest to the “dream time” out of which my better inspirations, as I’ve learned the hard way, usually come.
I generally dislike the modern realistic “novel” as a form, so I conceived A Spy in the Ruins from the first as an “antinovel,” though, as has been pointed out, Spy in fact does what many a conventional novel traditionally does – in particular, the Bildungsroman, a novel describing a person’s development and “sentimental education.”
One point that might be of interest is the title: for most of the time of writing, it was “Ruins: A Kingdom,” which, in a way, sums up the book’s secret theme: the creation of a thing of beauty and meaning out of a waste of wreckage that preceded it. (One of the images hovering in the back of my mind while I wrote the book, though it never ended up in Spy, was the well-known broken-plate paintings that Julian Schnabel made in the 1980s.) I only settled on “A Spy in the Ruins” (one of several other titles contending since the beginning) in the last year of the book’s creation.
What was the writing process like?
It was similar to what I’ve often used in the past, and still use now. In general, I find I need several things before I can produce a long piece: a compelling beginning (though this may, and almost always does, change; for example, the current opening of Spy were some of the last pages I drafted), an equally compelling ending (which also often changes), and an overall structure that is new to me, and challenging – indeed, something I’m not sure I can pull off. Finally, I need a voice or tone or style, singular or multiple, that is unique to the piece – not “my voice” but the “work’s voice.” You see, for me writing is less an act of self-expression, which I feel is inevitable whatever I do, than an act of exploration, discovery, and creation – for me, writing is primarily making an object out of words. The words write the text; I put them down, edit them, delete them, substitute them, rearrange them, until they form as satisfactory a sequence as I can make. The words often surprise me – and the greater the surprise, the better. I sometimes say that I work on a piece until I can no longer recognize its author.
I never knew how long Spy was because I didn’t number the pages until the very last draft. I wrote the book in longhand on legal pads and only later typed the MS into a computer and did most of the revisions on my big, ugly battleship-gray Presario laptop.
How did you establish the tone and the style(s) for Spy?
Entirely intuitively, though of course I was influenced by the modern writers who have taught me how to write, from Alain Robbe-Grillet to Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard and (in his film scenarios) Ingmar Bergman. Each section needed a different approach and tone, from the dramatic frame story (more a dream than a story) to the dreamlike farrago of imagery of the opening chapters, to the film scenario section, to the chapter of crossed destinies and the interview with the dying at the end.
What is Caveat Lector?
Caveat Lector is a literary and arts webzine (www.caveat- lector.org) that began in the late 80s and early 90s as a Xeroxed guerrilla zine, dropped surreptitiously in cafes and bookstores in the Bay Area, New York, and Seattle, devoted at first exclusively to the work of the principals – poet, playwright and novelist James Bybee; composer, fiction writer and philosophical essayist Andrew Towne; writer, theater director and collagist Gordon Phipps; and myself – then gradually opened out to work by our friends, and later, after Poet’s Market discovered us, to poets, writers and artists around the country and eventually abroad. We went online several years ago, and now also include music, the visual arts, audio streams of poems, and short films on our website (the other principals have moved on; I now co-edit and co-publish with writer and musician Ho Lin). Recently Ho and I retired the print version, and intend to publish every couple of years an anthology of work from the webzine. With Berkeley’s Regent Press, we have also published a small line of books; Spy is a Caveat Lector book, as are the novels September Snow and Runes of Iona by Robert Balmanno.
In this era of austerity and defunding public arts venues, how can artists who push the envelope remain relevant?
That is, and has ever been, the challenge of challenges. But, if you are genuinely challenging the powers that be, it is naïve to expect them to fund you; if they do, it’s only because they don’t find you very threatening.
I can only speak to literature and to print and online publishing. I think of myself as what the northern Europeans call a “social individualist,” with the emphasis on “individualist.” For me, autonomy in art is the “one thing needful.” Caveat Lector has not yet applied for a grant, partly because I don’t quite trust the conditions that enchain many grants. Foundations can be both controlling and capricious, to say nothing of obsessed with trends and fashions, “political correctness,” and other things that are irrelevant when not antithetical to art. And I have seen too many small organizations inadvertently destroyed by the grant-game and the false hopes it tempts them into indulging.
My advice, for what it’s worth, might seem rather hard: don’t depend on public funding of any kind, and even less so on the corporate handout. Try to depend entirely on your own resources. This is the only guarantee you have that you will control your work and its reception. Control is freedom, and art is about freedom – of mind, of imagination, of expression – or it is nothing at all.
Any writing projects in the works? Any follow-ups to Spy?
After Spy I needed to pursue an entirely different direction. I was also a bit stumped: how move ahead in Spy’s direction? I couldn’t see past it; for a time, it threw a shadow over everything I could imagine, let alone write. Spy was far and away the best thing I had ever written – it’s certainly the closest to me, the most personal of my writings. And trying to “better” it would be worse than foolish. Spy is an audacious, provocative, inwardly turning book. I needed a rest from its brand of experimentation, and I needed to “return to the surface.”
My next two books were more outwardly focused: two collections of short fictions, In the American Night (which includes most of the short fiction I‘d written since the late ‘70s) and Dangerous Stories for Boys (all of which were written over the last several years). I also drafted, and continue to tinker with, a book that straddles the inward and outward, a philosophical parable called Voyage to a Phantom City, which pays off a number of literary debts to, among others, Paul Bowles, Graham Greene and Robbe-Grillet.
Very recently, I have wanted to return to the “inward” explorations that made Spy such a compelling venture for me, and I seem to have found a way to move back into that enticing pocket of my imagination. I can’t discuss it now – it’s too young, fresh, and vulnerable to survive the icy air of a premature publicity. Suffice it to say it’s a kind of formalist-expressionist prose poem, a chain of impacted and mutually embedded image repertoires, in which I pursue an idea that has come to dominate my approach to literature over the last two decades: I’m trying to apply some of the lessons of abstract-figurative painting and conceptualism in the visual arts and art music of the last century to long fiction (Spy was partly an exploration along similar lines).
Who are some of your favorite writers and/or artists?
I’ve mentioned a number of the writers already; I must include Henry James and Marcel Proust, and, at the other end of the spectrum, Herman Melville, among prose writers; among the poets, Rimbaud, Donne, Shelley, Dickinson, Eliot and Bishop, Montale, Pessoa (a discovery of the past few years), and “the prince of clouds,” Baudelaire. Henry Miller is the only 20th century American writer who, despite his enormous flaws, ever spoke to me with complete conviction; above all, he wasn’t just “writing” and he didn’t have much time for “literature.” He saw writing and literature in the right perspective – as worth little in themselves, and certainly not worthy of reverence, except as aids to life and to happiness.
Sartre, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are the philosophers I most often turn to, and argue with; also Ortega y Gasset, Berdyaev (a recent discovery) and Unamuno, for their strenuous consolations. Spy was nourished by Heidegger; I read Being and Time at least twice through while writing it. (I do not consider myself an existentialist, or if I am one, I am of a very peculiar kind, but I have always been fascinated by them; I often disagree with their answers, but they insist on asking the right, even if unanswerable, questions.) My favorite literary critics are shamelessly contradictory: George Steiner, Roland Barthes, and Terry Eagleton, and they duke out my own ambiguities between them.
I must include the painters Edvard Munch and the Expressionists (Emil Nolde, Conrad Felizmueller, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and Max Beckmann among them), and the Americans Albert Pinkham Ryder and, for very different reasons, Joseph Cornell. Pablo Picasso is an eternal inspiration. The photographers Eugene Atget, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, among others, and the entire array of modern visual artists inspire me more than do most of the writers; contemporary writers, at least in the United States, seem to have abandoned art for publishing, though there are still a few interesting writers, such as Imre Kertesz and Laszlo Krasznahorkai, in Europe. The composers Bruckner, Mahler, Shostakovich and Britten have special niches in the “shrine.”
There are many others of course, but these have long been the governing deities in my small, private pantheon.
Posted in books, Interviews, The Internet
Tagged books, capitalism, caveat lector, christopher bernard, culture, economics, fiction, film, interview, maximalism, philosophy, politics, pop culture, religion
A series dedicated to literature in translation whether classic or contemporary.
Originally published as Les Beinveillantes.
Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell
HarperCollins (2009)
NB: These remarks will be classified in The Critic’s Notebook. Unlike a more tightly constructed and formal book review, these notes will possess a larval nature: impressionistic, half-formed, spontaneous. It stands as a record of my first impressions as well as operate as raw material I will mine when I prepare a more in-depth critical analysis. This later analysis will also cover William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central (2005), Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (1959), and William Gass’s The Tunnel (1995).
First Impressions:
1. An overall assessment has me borrowing Nathan Rabin’s My Year of Flops terminology. In this specific case: Fiasco.
2. Other categories for the Kindly Ones:
a. Difficult
b. Controversial
c. Problematic
3. Difficult:
a. European-style paragraphing (no paragraph breaks for dialogue).
b. Epic size. Does scale mean an inherent value or profundity? Cf. volumes from The Song of Ice and Fire, Atlas Shrugged, The Bible, and so on.
c. Untranslated German military ranks.
d. Numerous characters to keep track of.
4. Controversial:
a. Prize-winning. It won the Prix Goncourt in 2006, putting it in heady company, including Michel Houellebecq, Marguerite Duras, and Marcel Proust.
b. The sexuality of Dr. Maximilien von Aue. Reviewers have categorized Aue’s sexuality as “deviant.” (The construction of Aue’s sexuality will be further explored in the last category, since it is highly problematic.)
c. Aue’s sexuality has a certain grindhouse quality to it, giving the novel a sensationalist and exploitative gloss. One thinks of Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, the Night Porter, and the Damned.
5. Problematic:
a. The narrative is at war with itself.
b. What is it? At once a realistic historical novel and a mashup of the Orestia.
c. The novel starts strong, but ends weak.
d. Two major narrative demerits:
i. Aue’s head wound suffered in Stalingrad.
ii. Murder of parents (but with no memory of committing the act).
e. These major plot devices get built upon until it becomes implausibility heaped on implausibility. (Aue’s advancements in rank and the police investigation. The investigation begins as a real threat to Aue’s life and prestige, and then it devolves into a ridiculous farce.)
6. While the novel is loaded with excessive violence and explicit sex, these things aren’t inherently bad (Cf. Gravity’s Rainbow and Funeral Rites).
7. Do narrative fiascos have their own value to readers and critics? What can critics extract from works that fail?
a. What do we mean by fail? Not move units off the bookshelf? (The Nathan Rabin-esque flop.) Baffled/horrified/negative critical reception? (Fiasco and/or Secret Success.)
8. Father & Son:
a. Jonathan Littell is the son of American espionage writer Robert Littell. The Littell the Elder author of The Company, a multigenerational epic about the CIA.
b. With The Company and his other works, R. Littell tells the history of the US intelligence community via the “Jewishness” of the characters (Cf. Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, etc.).
c. Jonathan Littell’s grandparents were Russian Jews who fled Russia and settled in the United States.
d. Both Jonathan and Robert reside in France.
e. Jonathan Littell reframes his Jewish heritage with a narrator who is an SS jurist (i.e. an elite within Nazi German society).
i. Littell further complicates this with Aue’s sexuality (see below) and Aue’s Alsatian heritage. Alsace-Lorraine was German territory from 1871 to 1918 and re-annexed by Germany after the fall of France in 1940, then returning to France in 1945. Alsace is a border province, lacking the historical credentials of a province within the German Altreich. The sexuality and Alsatian heritage make Aue a luminal character, existing on the boundaries of society.
9. Aue’s Sexuality:
a. Max had incestuous relations with his sister, Una, when they were children.
b. Max and Una are twins.
c. Lacking the presence of Una, Max can only become sexually aroused via anal sex.
d. Does this make Max a gay character? To this reader, a resounding no. But this requires further explanation, since this shouldn’t be confused with “Homosexuality is a choice” parroted by the deranged, hypocritical, and ignorant of the Modern Theocratic Right.
e. Can “gayness” even operate as an accurate label for a scenario this contrived?
f. The contrivance is created for the purposes of the narrative fitting into the Orestia, since the play cycle has its fair share of demented sex and violence.
g. This contrived sexuality is odd given the very real history of Germany’s many thriving gay subcultures (the Prussian military, Weimar Berlin, and the SA).
Posted in book reviews, books, Critic's Notebook, film, Translation Tuesdays
Tagged book reviews, books, culture, economics, fiction, film, maximalism, philosophy, politics, pop culture, religion
Described by Anna Sears as “A Bildungsroman hallucinogenic in its intensity,” A Spy in the Ruins by Christopher Bernard constructs a postapocalyptic anti-narrative replete with verbal richness, political aggression, and erotic tenderness. The back cover blurb by Jack Foley asserts Spy “is a book not for the faint of criticism.” A book this intense, word-drunk, and ferocious demands a proper dissection and investigation.
Spy is an idiosyncratic book about the Sixties and the moral consequences. At the same time, it encompasses much more in formal experimentalism and in vicious verbal assaults. The only other fiction where one encounters lacerating indictments “our vexed, complicated, technomiserable situation” (again, Jack Foley) are in the works of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Alexander Theroux, and Thomas Bernhard. Despite the formalistic challenges presented in the text, an almost physical immediacy haunts the text.
While the current trend in literary circles is to bow before the Cult of the Sentence, crafting polished gems befitting the pages of the New Yorker, Bernard rips apart and defiles the sentence. It takes a while to adjust to the flow of the novel. Bernard creates scenes with run-on unpunctuated sentences followed by. Brief. Breaks. In the text. This is off-putting at first, but eventually this becomes a means to instill a specific tone for the novel. With the breaks and the run-ons, Bernard’s style balances between that of a prose poem and an epigram.
The plot of the novel follows the life story of “the solitary one,” an unnamed (for the most part) male whose formative experiences include some political activism in the Sixties. Divided into ten chapters with an overarching framing device, Spy follows the Solitary One from birth to death. Besides the narrative style, the first half of the novel is notable for its insistent vagueness. There are discrete scenes and characters, but lacking in proper names and location. It creates a mythic, dream-like quality, apropos since Foley (again) compares Spy to Finnegans Wake. (In his blurb, Foley likens Spy to both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, a comparison the novel almost achieves.)
The only time the novel really fails to deliver is in passages obviously set in the Sixties but seemingly clouded in a willful vagueness. The Kennedy assassination is described as a leader killed in a Southern city. It is only when the accretion of historical facts lean against the mythic edifice of the novel that things begin to strain.
The Solitary One endures a brutal upbringing, only leavened by his nascent sexual experiences with a female schoolmate. But his upbringing drain these erotic scenes of their joy and later corrode and curdle in his later relationships. The last sections involve him enduring a one-way conversation with his former lover. The scene possesses a vicious mood with the Solitary One desperately wanting to answer, but prevented by his deteriorating health.
Prior to that, Spy has chapters increasing in specificity. A screenplay has a Him and Her where we see a relationship fracture amidst the earnest political discussions one witnesses in bright-eyed college students. The ninth chapter begins as an espionage novel and ends as a Therouvian indictment of modern culture’s shallowness and rot. Characters get specific names, but we are unsure whether this is a realistic depiction or whether the hospitalized Solitary One is making this up in his head, retconning the past to make his mistakes more palatable. The chapter is less Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy than Malone Dies.
Bernard marries the formal experimentalism of James Joyce with the unflinching emotional brutality of Samuel Beckett. Written in 2005, A Spy in the Ruins has a bold experimentalism welded to a strident and intelligent point of view. It stands toe-to-toe with Infinite Jest, Angels in America, and The Savage Detectives as an epic that has a lot to say and does so in a new invigorating way.
Posted in book reviews, books, Critical Appraisals, film, Poetry
Tagged bildungsroman, book reviews, books, capitalism, catholic, catholicism, chaos, culture, economics, fantasy, fiction, film, gay, hippies, maximalism, philosophy, poetry, politics, pop culture, religion, science fiction, Sixties, TV
© F.X. Tobin
I’m published!!! My short piece, “The Anarcho-Libertine Manifesto, 2nd Iteration” (page 31) has been published by Paraphilia Magazine. In a nutshell, I call for the arts to be dangerous again and to not be afraid to use lush and opulent language.
Posted in The Internet
Tagged aesthetics, culture, economics, fiction, film, literature, manifestos, maximalism, non-fiction, Paraphilia, philosophy, poetry, politics, pop culture, religion, science fiction, sex, the internet
Posted in book reviews, books, CCLAP Fridays
Tagged architecture, book reviews, books, communism, culture, economics, maximalism, non-fiction, photography, politics, pop culture, science fiction, Soviet Union, Taschen, USSR
The first part in a series dedicated to examining the science fiction and fantasy films from 1979 to 1989. The series will investigate whether these films possess certain ineffable qualities missing from today’s films of the same genres.
Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you an assassin?
Willard: I’m a soldier.
Kurtz: You’re neither. You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.
Why are we beginning a series devoted to the science fiction and fantasy films of the 1980s with Apocalypse Now? Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam War film holds the key to unlocking what made Eighties science fiction and fantasy films so great. It’s an unlikely beginning, especially since John Carpenter’s classic horror film Halloween, was released the previous year.
Apocalypse Now, while still a War Movie, has several characteristics that make it closer akin to the Fantasy genre. There is a Knight on a Quest in search of a Mythical Object guarded by a Monster. In the film, the Knight is Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), accompanied by the crew of a small patrol boat. They travel up the Nung River in search of Colonel Walter P. Kurtz, at once the Object and the Monster. In addition, Apocalypse Now is a visionary film. To be a visionary, one has to look at the same thing but in an entirely different way. While the War Movie has a long and storied history, Coppola created a unique cinematic experience, cobbled together from a script by the conservative scriptwriter John Milius and narration written by war journalist Michael Herr. What resulted was a depiction of the Vietnam War as a hallucinatory carnivalesque nightmare. The effects of the Vietnam War on the domestic side would not be covered with this extended unflinching hallucinatory nightmare until Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998).
At the time of its release, the closest antecedent to Apocalypse Now was Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967), itself an extended indictment of the ravages and excesses of industrial capitalism. In terms of science fiction and fantasy film, Apocalypse Now’s title is telling. Unlike, say, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome or The Dark Crystal, which are both post-apocalyptic films, the apocalypse is now. The soldiers in the film seem morally adrift and numbed to the world, only attuned to finding sex or the next drug fix. Chef reads a newspaper article about the Charles Manson murders, the murders mirroring the actual atrocities of My Lai. Surrounded by madmen, murderers, and mayhem, the world seems at an end. The apocalyptic setting and the horrific montages make the film much more than a faithful transcription of a Southeast Asian conflict.
The End is the Beginning is the End
Apocalypse Now came at the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s unrivalled critical and commercial success. The film also represents the terminus of the American New Wave, Coppola belonging to a membership that included Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. Coppola’s success began in 1972 with The Godfather and continued with The Godfather: Part II (1974) and the Conversation (1974). Marlon Brando gives a landmark performance as Colonel Walter P. Kurtz, his presence a potent admixture of military and intellectual genius, Nietzschean amorality, smoldering sexuality, and tribal godhood.
The release of the film came during a revolution in the world of cinema. Gone were the days of the freewheeling director and hands-off producers. Apocalypse Now came two years after Star Wars (1977, George Lucas), a film that redefined the Hollywood blockbuster, and the Empire Strikes Back (1980, Irvin Kershner). While not a cinematic flop, the film’s cost overruns and numerous other issues would make produces much more reluctant to give a visionary like Coppola massive budgets and little creative oversight. The Eighties would see the rise of empty spectacle, family-friendly pap, and marketing juggernauts. Apocalypse Now is a self-contained epic, not a node in a massively orchestrated marketing and merchandising operation.
Apocalypse Now vs. Apocalypse Now Redux: a Defense for Both
In criticism, especially film criticism, an overarching trend exists where “the director’s cut” has more credence than a film released by the studio system. The phenomenon exists because of the Auteur Theory championed in academic circles and the larger trend of the search for Authenticity™. When discussing Apocalypse Now, fans, critics, and audience members become divisive regarding which version is better. Many see the original Apocalypse Now as the better film and Redux as a travesty. (Thankfully, Coppola’s film was about the Vietnam War and not a Jedi insurgency, thus giving the world a Director’s Cut without CGI dewbacks and Greedo shooting first.)
My opinion splits the difference. I enjoy both, but both versions are radically different films. Even at nearly three hours, the original Apocalypse Now possesses an insistent pacing and momentum. It is the more economical, pared-down film.
I enjoy Redux because it delves deeper into this nightmarish world. Characters are expanded, entire set pieces are added, and Captain Willard comes across as a different person.
The issue of pacing becomes more pronounced with Redux. Even the original is lacking in traditional battle scenes. After Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore’s (Robert Duvall) aerial assault on the Vietnamese village, the only military “action” are isolated skirmishes and the Do Long Bridge stalemate (less a battle than a siege).
The majority of the film is Captain Willard reading the Kurtz’s dossier. The normal narrative trajectory of a war film is the reverse: skirmishes leading up to a climactic battle. The film operates under a series of anti-climaxes. In the end, Willard finally reaches the Kurtz Compound to realize the Colonel is not there. When he does return, there are several conversations and finally Willard taking down Kurtz at the very end of the film.
Redux includes two extended scenes which were cut from the original: the crew meeting the Bunnies and the French Plantation Scene. In the latter, Willard tells Roxanne Sarrault (Aurore Clément) that he doesn’t intend to return to the United States following his mission. It’s a major difference and the film narrative becomes altered, since this throws into question why he should continue his mission?
The longueurs and anti-climaxes heighten the viewer’s sensitivities. The waiting, the meditation, and the visuals combine to create a cinematic experience both hypnotic and excessive. The artificiality of Carmine Coppola’s score plays off against the claustrophobic and ruthless nature of the Cambodian rainforests. The score becomes integrated into a whole by the editing, cinematography, and sound design.
The film is a non-traditional candidate for a science fiction or fantasy film, but it excels in its fantastic visuals and the meticulous worldbuilding. Standing at the crossroads of the American New Wave and Eighties Action Spectacle, Apocalypse Now prepares the way for films set after apocalypses (Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the Dark Crystal), those indicting the inhumanity of bureaucracy (Brazil), and the organized madness of modern existence (They Live, Buckaroo Banzai, Bladerunner).
Posted in 80s SFF, film, nature
Tagged 80s, apocalypse, asia, capitalism, catholic, chaos, communism, fantasy, film, hollywood, maximalism, movie reviews, politics, pop culture, religion, science fiction, series, Vietnam, war
The representation of Hell as a cartographic region has its origins in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante adapted the imagery already present in medieval painting and sculpture to comment on his political situation and his own scientific and theological beliefs. He populated it with real people, including political heroes and villains, good popes and bad popes, adulterous princesses, and monsters human and mythological. On Dante’s spiritual journey, he traveled with the Roman poet Vergil down the various circles of Hell and then up Mount Purgatory. Finally, led by his beloved Beatrice, he journeyed through the heavenly spheres until he was in the presence of God.
The Divine Comedy remains a challenge for readers, since the intricacies of 14th century politics of Italian city-states is not an easily accessible avenue. While Ezra Pound used the Divine Comedy as a template for his epic, labyrinthine, and fragmentary work The Cantos, the artists profiled here use other means to gain entrée into the darkness and tortures of the Inferno. Seymour Chwast adapts Dante’s epic by creating a world full of characters from noir films. Gary Panter takes his beloved character Jimbo into the Inferno and Purgatory, studding the surreal punk odyssey with characters from pop culture. Finally, Wayne Douglas Barlowe travels to Hell to paint landscapes and portraits of the inhabitants. He creates malevolent views and horrifying visages with the steady hand of a disinterested observer, more naturalist than moralist.
Hell, like art, depends on the tastes and temperaments of the creator. We create our own hells, as the clichéd saying goes. Those hells can be inhabited by contemporary politicians, pop cultural footnotes, or biological horrors.
Dante’s Divine Comedy, adapted by Seymour Chwast (2010)
Seymour Chwast of Pushpin Studios has adapted the Divine Comedy in a series of illustrations. Given the scope and ambition of Dante’s epic trilogy, Chwast has had to economize. But the poetics of visual economy are what make this work stand out, because the artist is famous for his graphic design. (Chwast is one of those graphic artists many have seen, yet few know him by name. His 1967 “End Bad Breath” anti-Vietnam poster is a classic.)
Placing the Divine Comedy in a noir setting places the work in a time more familiar to modern readers, at least in terms of the visual grammar. Flapper girls and pipe-smoking detectives exist in our collective memory more easily than the political machinations and theological debates of 14th century Italian city-states. The Black and White Guelphs are now rival gangsters. Beatrice is a demure dame. Chwast makes the monsters and the tortures playful looking, an ironic visual commentary to the horrors of the Inferno. With the horrors of Treblinka, Abu Ghraib, and My Lai, a three-headed dog seems a bit gauche. While the medieval theocratic world of Dante has long since faded, at least in post-Enlightenment Europe, the horrors will be all too familiar.
Chwast’s adaptation is no substitute for Dante’s original, although that was probably not his intention. A familiarity with the original will give readers a better appreciation of the illustrations. But a familiarity will be necessary, since there is little in the way of commentary or notes. In that department, check out Penguin’s annotated editions.
The playfulness and economy of Chwast’s images place him in the tradition of William Blake and Gustave Doré, both illustrators of the Divine Comedy.
Jimbo’s Inferno by Gary Panter (2006)
Gary Panter came to prominence in the heyday of the punk movement. His style is dense, jagged, and darkly humorous. In the Eighties Panter created the sets for Pee Wee’s Playhouse (1986 – 1990, CBS), providing a surreal and anarchic take on tacky postwar pop culture. Panter also worked with Art Spiegelman in the seminal comix magazine RAW (1980 – 1991). Under the creative direction of Spiegelman, RAW offered a venue for avant-garde, international, and underground cartoonists and visual artists. The decade saw the emergence of comix as legitimate visual art. (The more mainstream comics owned and published in DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, etc. being considered “art” is a separate but interrelated debate.) Gary Panter’s cover for Raw Volume 2, No. 1 (the issue subtitled “Open Wounds from the Cutting Edge of Comix. ”) reduces the Ernie Bushmiller character to a Picasso-esque smudge.
Panter has taken a different track than his fellow artists with Jimbo’s Inferno and Jimbo in Purgatory. While Spiegelman tackled his inner demons and the legacy of the Shoah in the award-winning autobiographical Maus I & II, Chris Ware dealt with the interior life in the austerely drawn Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth. Panter goes in the opposite, using the ubiquitous Jimbo to travel to the depths of hell and the terraces of Purgatory. Jimbo resembles Bart Simpson with his spiky hair and snarky naïveté.
True to his punk heritage, Panter chooses a mall as the location of the Inferno. “Don’t try to pass a pop quiz on Dante’s hell based on a reading of this comic: it won’t work,” says Panter in the opening passage. “[C]anto by canto, characters are fused, action inverted, parodied, subject to mutation by my odd memories and obsessions and my odd whims, sentences are clipped.” Instead of Vergil, Jimbo travels with Valise, his parole robot.
During his journey, Jimbo encounters drug addicts, monsters, robots, traffic jams, and space aliens. Instead of the Western Canon that Dante “sampled,” Panter uses the grammar of pop culture. And at the end of the volume, Panter lists “thirty-three best loved vinyl recordings” (the Inferno had thirty-three cantos).
Fantagraphics has produced a lavish volume with huge pages and a gilt cover that oddly reminiscent of Gustav Klimt (if Klimt was in a Los Angeles punk band).
Jimbo in Purgatory by Gary Panter (2004)
Jimbo’s Inferno charted the journey of Gary Panter’s eponymous hero through the hellscape of the modern mall. Jimbo in Purgatory continues with Jimbo and Valise, his parole robot, this time traveling through a Purgatory re-imagined as an “infotainment testing facility.” Panter opens the volume with a short introduction on the life and times of Dante. He lays out Dante’s literary legacy, since the Divine Comedy directly influenced Geoffrey Chaucer, Giovanni Boccaccio, and James Joyce.
The book is a scant thirty-three pages and measures even larger than Jimbo’s Inferno, but the cover retaining Inferno’s faux Klimtian gilt highlights. Jimbo and Valise travel and encounter various pop cultural icons as they quote excerpts from Dante, Boccaccio, Joyce, dirty limericks, and numerous other sources. The sources are referenced at the bottom of each page, but are unnumbered, adding a challenge to interpretation. Dante’s Purgatory begins with Dante and Vergil meeting Cato. Panter has Jimbo and Valise meeting Cato Fong, Inspector Clouseau’s houseboy and martial arts expert. Jimbo and Valise also converse with the disembodied head of the Westworld character played by Yul Brynner. At the end of Dante’s tour of Purgatory, he finally meets his long lost love, the luminous Beatrice, the personification of beauty and innocence, a terrestrial counterpart to the Virgin Mary within Catholic doctrine. Within the subversive grammar of Panter’s vision, Beatrice is portrayed as Twiggy (real name: Lesley Hornby). Twiggy fame and notoriety originated in her thinness as a fashion model.
Throughout the book, Panter maintains a rigid almost mannerist division of panels. On some pages, the narrative moves forward. On others, the panels split up a massive picture. The division of images and architectural design harkens back to another monument of Christian doctrine, the Sistine Chapel, itself an innovative amalgamation of Christian and Greco-Roman classical imagery.
The volume ends like Jimbo’s Inferno: with a list of thirty-three albums that Gary Panter fancied, from the well-known (Electric Ladyland, The Jimi Hendrix Experience) to the rare (Science Fiction, Ornette Coleman) to the just plain odd (Music for Robots, Forrest J. Ackerman). Using the grammar of pop culture and sampling the Western Canon like an encyclopedic DJ, Panter spins an epic journey. A hallucination and a dream that plays like a labyrinthine knock-knock joke.
Barlowe’s Inferno by Wayne Douglas Barlowe (1998)
Wayne Douglas Barlowe has a successful career as an illustrator for fantasy and science fiction books. Even if one doesn’t know him by name, his style is unmistakable. While fellow illustrator Boris Vallejo takes his cue from the noble tradition of the American pin-up, Barlowe renders his subjects with the disinterested expertise of a natural history illustrator. Barlowe’s pictures retain the flavor of John James Audubon. What Audubon did for birds, Barlowe does for Guild Steersmen, dinosaurs, and Overlords. The Audubonian emulation continued with the publication of Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials (1979) and the companion volume Barlowe’s Guide to Fantasy (1996). In each book, the aliens or mythological creatures possess a physical presence that bespeaks a plausible reality. He designs these beings with a meticulous anatomical accuracy. Beneath the fantastical exteriors (scales, skin, fur, etc.), one can observe the bones and muscles.
Barlowe gave vision to his own imagination, not the ideas of others, in Expedition: Being an Account in Words and Artwork of the 2358 A.D. Voyage of Darwin IV (1990). The world and creatures are entirely fabricated, but the book itself has a feel of a National Geographic feature article. Writing as a participant on the voyage, Barlowe and a fellow alien species travel to Darwin IV. The planet presents an alternate evolutionary track with varieties of animals in a coherent ecological system. Unlike Earth, the animals lack jaws and eyes, Barlowe theorizing Darwin IV experienced a prolonged period where the sun was blocked by clouds or fog. The results are visionary, beautiful, and thought provoking. (Barlowe brought this same artistic and scientific rigor to the creature design of Avatar, the only saving grace in that otherwise overlong, tedious, morally simplistic cinematic train wreck.)
Barlowe’s Inferno brings together the two strands of his previous work and welds them into a uniquely innovative version of Hell. He reprises his role as the artist-traveler, in this case working like a netherworldly John Singer Sargeant painting portraits and landscapes. Instead of the Post-Reconstruction nouveau riche and the Grand Tour, we see Belial, Lilith, and Molech. Instead of cathedrals and canals, we see the teeth of Leviathan crushing cities made of bricks, the bricks made of souls hammered and smashed into place, Procrustean and sadistic. Because Barlowe’s work espouses a natural history ethic, he also included the portrait of an Australopithecine demon, a kind of Darwinian Cain and a wry callback to the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. A “firstborn” chews a soul in the desolate landscape, the creature a remnant of the original inhabitants of this alien environment. Barlowe posits that Hell was colonized following Satan’s Fall in the same manner of human colonizations. The fallen angels became demons and then dominated the landscape in the manner akin to human deforestation, urban development, and gentrification. Demons have designer handbags, this time made from filleted human skin.
Barlowe renders the textures with haunting precision. Demons have skin like stone and the damned have bodies warped like funhouse mirrors, their stony bodies morphed into ironic tortures. The book, a combination travelogue-natural history catalogue, makes, to paraphrase Milton’s description of Hell, “darkness visible.” Barlowe’s darkness is culturally diverse, physically horrific, and uniquely visionary. It represents a modern homage to Dante’s Inferno and a daring extrapolation on the theme of damnation.
Brushfire by Wayne Douglas Barlowe (2001)
Wayne Barlowe returns to Hell in this slim volume. Subtitled “Illuminations from the Inferno,” he presents the reader with a series of frightening visions, simultaneously horrifying and erotic. A civil war brews in Hell between the Demons Major Sargatanas and Astaroth. The reader is shown Astaroth’s Herald and Standard-bearer. The Herald is “marginally humanoid” with two wings sprouting from a malformed mouth sitting within the middle of its chest. It appears like a wicked parody of the term vagina dentata. On another page, a succubus beckons with stony skin and cloven feet. The eroticism is alienating, since one can’t escape the fact her skin is cold stone. We see Hannibal and his Army of Souls, reminiscent of the Deadites from the classic film Army of Darkness. The picture gives no quarter to anything like camp or humor as in the Bruce Campbell cinematic masterpiece.
Continuing the multicultural aspect of Hell, Barlowe depicts a group of Behemoths, huge beasts of burden to Sargatanas. Stabled like giant horses, the Behemoths used to be chamberlains, viziers, and court officials of Chinese emperors. One need not go far these days to find an appropriate public official deserving this treatment in eternal damnation. One might be less eager to start pointless wars if one had this punishment as a reward.
One of the most frightening visages Barlowe depicts is that of a Scourge. It is “a winged and limbless enigma” with the face like that of an African mask. Morphologically perverse, its classification remained that of a demon. Its purpose was to subjugate souls. “Without flocks of them there could, and probably would, be complete chaos in the streets of Dis.” While the inhabitants of Hell exhibit bodies bent, broken, and battered, twisted into incoherent shapes, and subject to chaotic tortures, its leadership and organization is rigid, authoritarian, and orderly. The stark contrast between these two phenomena gives Barlowe’s vision a ferocious punch.
One on the last page, the reader sees a battle-scarred veteran from wars in Hell. He gives General William Tecumseh Sherman’s expression that “War is hell” a physical form and then turns it into a sick joke. One is thankful that soldiers only have to die once when they are involved in armed conflicts. In Hell, soldiers are given no such luxury. They unquestioningly obey the fickle orders of their sadistic superiors, suffer horribly, and then fight again and again. The prospect of such an existence is numbing to even contemplate.
Wayne Barlowe again delivers with his dark illuminations. Even today, with our myriad horrors and catastrophes, our everyday sadism and incompetence, art can show us there can be something even more horrifying.
Posted in book reviews, books, Critical Appraisals, nature, TV
Tagged asia, book reviews, books, catholic, catholicism, culture, fantasy, fiction, film, hippies, hollywood, horror, maximalism, philosophy, poetry, pop culture, religion, science fiction, series, sex, TV, war
Reappropriation: Camp, Kitsch, and Sincerity
“When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything outlandish.” – “Notes on Camp” [1965], Susan Sontag
“Need more clarification? To his fans Liberace was the epitome of cultured taste, but of course we know he was kitsch. However, unlike the not-quite-weird-enough musical stylings of ABBA, say, or the Village People, Liberace-style kitsch is so weird, so outré, that hipsters find it impossible to appropriate as cheese. Liberace didn’t make his work inappropriable on purpose; others, however, have. The director John Waters, for example, described his (excellent) early films, which lovingly celebrate kitsch in an extreme, even terrifying way, as “trash.” He did so in order to prevent hipsters from fake-appreciating his work — as they’ve done with, e.g., the films of Ed Wood. Deploying the term “trash” was a brilliant anti-ironic maneuver on the part of a master ironist.” – “Kitsch, Camp, and Cheese,” Hilowbrow.com [June 5, 2010], Joshua Glenn
Beneath every hipster opinion is a root of contempt. For the popular, for the mainstream, the straw men are various and sundry. A similar position of championing the unpopular involves camp and kitsch. Unlike the fake-appreciation of hipsters for Pabst Blue Ribbon and the accoutrements of working class garb, fans of camp and kitsch embrace certain cultural products with a passionate sincerity. Camp and kitsch, while similar, are not the same, although the popular press and consumers often confuse the two.
Camp reappropriates culturally disreputable works in a kind of counterintuitive appreciation. A work that is generally abhorrent and awful (example: Zak Snyder’s 300) can be repurposed. As a standard action film, 300 represents the nadir of the genre. But what if one watches it as a comedy? The Heavy Metal Librarian asserts:
I predict that, in ten years, 300 will have the same type of following that Rocky Horror Picture Show has today: ie, it will be aired after midnight at theaters in college towns all over the country, attended by audiences of gay men and people dressed up in costumes from the movie, who will recite the dialogue word for word, throw popcorn at the screen, and laugh uproariously at parts that are supposed to be deadly serious. After all, the only real difference between the two movies is that the latter is intentionally campy. (from the post, “Wank the Spartans”, Heavy Metal Librarian, September 14, 2009)
300 is unintentionally campy and pretty hilarious when read that way. Sontag differentiates the Camp from the bad by the outlandishness of its execution. 300 fits the bill. The Heavy Metal Librarian catalogues 300’s outlandishness:
300 is one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen in my life.
I was reminded of the film’s brilliance when it made its television debut this past weekend. Seriously, it’s perfect. What other movie gives you:
- Howlingly bad dialogue (“because freedom isn’t free” sounds like something from George Bush’s wet dream)
- Rampant homoeroticism (buff, chiseled, shaven-chested Greeks prancing around in underwear and capes) in an allegedly tough-guy war movie
- An enemy, the Persians, who manage to simultaneously look like a cross between an al-Qaeda training video and a Gay Pride parade from Mordor
- Said enemy led by Xerxes, a ten foot tall Rupaul clone obsessed with making people kneel in front of him
The undeniably homoerotic element in the movie is its most amusing aspect. After all, there exists a high correlation between people who think that Islamofascists are hiding under their beds and those who believe that Teh Homosexual Agenda is attempting to subvert their children. The fact that this crowd loved 300 constitutes further scientific proof of the Foley/Haggard Theorem (“The Degree of one’s Homophobia is Directly Proportional to the Depth of one’s Closet.”)
The same reading could possibly be made for John Wayne’s performance in The Green Berets, but most definitely for his turn as Genghis Khan.
Kitsch is a much harder beast to cage, since it is typified by terrible artistic production. Embracing Art Nouveau lamps and Busby Berkeley musicals can be Camp. Embracing Keane paintings and the Left Behind series is kitschy. Unless one sincerely believes the idiosyncratic Bible interpretation of the Left Behind series, it is a challenging work to champion, let alone read, on any level. Where Camp succeeds in surely executed outlandishness, Kitsch fails because of shoddy craftsmanship.
Camp
Kitsch
This brings us to a reckoning point: Sincerity. (The weasel word “authentic” will be avoided, mainly because of the associations with fake-authentic cultural products.) Can one appreciate a disreputable genre or film or book with sincerity without falling into the traps of Kitsch and Camp?
Up next, Nathan Rabin!
Posted in books, Critic's Notebook, film, TV
Tagged book reviews, books, capitalism, chaos, culture, fiction, film, gay, hollywood, maximalism, movie reviews, non-fiction, philosophy, pop culture, series, the internet, TV
Years of experience has brought with it a fondness for the demanding read. My reading selections are promiscuous, omnivorous, and ecumenical. I’m an enthusiast for the Modern, the Experimental, and the Unclassifiable. I also enjoy reading space fantasy novels published by the Black Library. As a critic, I enjoy plumbing the depths of pop culture, high culture, and places in between.
One of the experiences I enjoy I will call the Demanding Read. This essay, the first part of two, will explore the Demanding Read in terms of fiction. The second essay will focus on non-fiction. Given that each reader possesses a different background, taste, and experience, the Demanding Read should be seen as a highly subjective category. In terms of this essay, the term “demanding” connotes difficulty, challenges, inaccessibility, and exhilaration. With challenging demands, the rewards offered to the reader can be highly enjoyable.
I recently finished Laura Warholic by Alexander Theroux. An encyclopedic magnum opus about love, lust, sex, democracy, and spirituality, the novel overflowed with references to high and low culture. Some chapters read like encyclopedia entries, closer to essays than narrative. Theroux’s linguistic acrobatics matched his boundless energy and outrage at the current state of affairs for the United States, the world, and humanity in general. The dust jacket summary calls the novel “maximalist.” The Fantagraphics hardcover I own runs 878 pages of small print. Theroux also boasts a vocabulary and knowledge as intimidating as Will Self. Caveat emptor.
Take a representative paragraph:
“What can I say? He looked like Evan Dando of the Lemonheads. Très slanky,” explained Laura who, in spite of it all, insisted all along she wanted to be with Eyestones. How could anyone ever trust such a person, he wondered, even if he loved her? After she had moved down from Newburyport to Cambridge other names were mentioned. He once saw her talking to a black man, a quop-nosed goon in a porkpie hat, unshaven, with a batik handkerchief tied round his head. Was this Jamm the Wesort, the person whom she had several times alluded with no further clarification, except to say she had met him in some night-school art class in which she said she was enrolled? Other names and shadowy figures mentioned but who she claimed were only acquaintances were Dave, Lamont, Dan. She referred to men as “snacks,” their penises as “beer cans,” their company “jive time.” And yet for all her efforts men always ignored her after being with her once or twice and never called back. Over time, he had learned, even worse, that she had had at least one abortion, maybe more, and diseases like retroflexio uteri and myoma and ovarian tumors. She seemed to be offering almost to wrest it from craven cowardice a kind of information-warfare that, even if defiant, carried in its frankness what absolved her – what she hoped would absolve her – from deceit. Still, it was all rather like the low expectation of no longer existing in, by, with, or for someone, anyone, whom she might love. Listening to her, Eyestones wondered what ever happened to the power of profundity of love, the long-lost world, say, of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered when the beautiful Syrian, Erminia, who desperately in love with Tancred and finding him fallen in combat, cuts off her hair to staunch the bleeding? It was a world of from which Laura, suffering so, self-excluded herself. Oh but she knew she was right. Thank you, trollop.
The paragraph reads like a short story, nearly self-contained and propelled by a narrative drive. The numerous references (Evan Dando, retroflexio uteri, Jerusalem Delivered, quop-nosed, etc.) place demands on the reader. How many readers would get both the references to the band the Lemonheads and the plot of Jerusalem Delivered? It is no wonder twenty years separate Laura Warholic from Theroux’s last novel, An Adultery.
Evan Dando
Jerusalem Delivered by Tasso
While the novel is demanding in its linguistic and cultural references, the narrative itself follows a straightforward arc. Digressions, rants, monologues, essays, fables, and other devices throw the narrative off course, but the narrative itself is easy enough to grasp. The novel, distilled down to its ur-narrative, is a love story. In this way, Theroux approaches the torment and damnation of the lovers found Graham Greene’s novels.
On the opposite pole, far from Alexander Theroux’s satirical maximalism, is the novel How It Is by Samuel Beckett. Written in 1961, originally in French, translated by the author, the book has three chapters and covers only 147 pages. Following the tour de force of the Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable), Beckett continues in his quest to strip writing (and by extension, fictional narrative) down to its basic elements. How It Is involves a narrator meeting Pim, carrying tins in a sack, and being submerged in mud. The usual descriptors for Beckett apply here: surreal, absurd, symbolic, bleak, tramps, and minimal.
Unlike the paragraph from Laura Warholic, long and bursting with references high and low, driven forward with narrative energy and verbal acrobatics, How It Is comes across as ambiguous and inert. Eraserhead in print.
Here’s a representative paragraph:
paradise before the hoping from sleep I come to sleep return between the two there is all all the doing suffering failing bungling achieving until the mud yawns again that’s how they’re trying to tell me this time part one before Pim from one sleep to the next
The reader must figure out where each thought ends and where the next begins. The lack of punctuation demands the reader pay attention. This becomes challenging because the narration encompasses attributes working against each other. The text becomes self-defeating and self-destructive. The narrator seems unable to finish a coherent thought or is easily distracted. The paragraph is both a run-on sentence and a series of fragments. Allusive and opaque, linear and circular, minimal and expansive, the prose represents a slow-motion freeze-frame of Barthes’s famous Death of the Author. But who is the author? Where is the author? What is the author doing? The reader can never be sure, although there are many compelling theories. The prose itself offers no final and definitive clues.
In the end, How It Is shows a speaker, at once powerless and downtrodden, combating the imminent defeat of negation by talking. Talking and talking and talking, even if the talk lacks narrative sense. The talking is a “stain upon the silence,” to quote Beckett. It is what every writer wants to do. To leave something that is more permanent than ourselves. “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!” Hamlet said.
Magneto and Dr. X wait for Godot.
Posted in books, books I'm reading, Critic's Notebook
Tagged alexander theroux, books, fiction, maximalism, minimalism, philosophy, religion, samuel beckett, UK, UK fiction
