MAKIN: JOYCE + BECKETT + ASHBERY = WHAT?

Seeing Makin’s artistic output through these three aesthetic lenses is to provide an attempt at exegetical interpretation. Still, this is my meaning glossed from his work. No amount of academic jargon or interpretive frameworks will negate the fact that this framing is exterior and subjective. Do not misunderstand this as some attempt at an assertion couched in authoritative finality or singularity of meaning. Art is too slippery and manifold to yield to such uniform pretensions. One man’s literature is another man’s pornography, while pornography can become a sacred text in another person’s interpretation. While the concept of queering the text can involve academic, cultural, ideological, and political ramification, the same procedures can be enacted upon the text for the fun of it. As Allen Ginsberg proclaims about his generation in Howl: “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,” and Zippy the Pinhead says, “Are we having fun yet?”

Work, Dwelling, and Mourning avoid simple categorization and interpretation. Because of this, censorious thugs would walk away confused and perplexed, unable to find a fixed target, albeit in the occasional f-word or easy-to-spot vulgarity. The censor operates on the presumption they know what they are talking about and can therefor make value judgments for other people based on these aforementioned presumptions.

These novels simply expose the narrow-gauge ideological bias inherent in the current campaign of aesthetic vandalism and the utter stupidity perpetrated by censorious morality police on both Left and Right. Censors are garbage humans of zero worth. Art only exposes how quickly they become cultural punchlines, an asterisk on the vast canvas of aesthetic achievement.

To read these works is on par with reading Ashbery’s epic poem Flow Chart, looking at Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, or screening David Lynch’s Inland Empire. For the latter, the lay observer remains ignorant of Bosch’s symbolic system, but remains fixed upon the spectacular images. Understanding the complex theological systematics of Bosch is unnecessary to enjoy the painting. Roger Ebert wrote about Lynch’s film,

“Inland Empire opens and contracts in your imagination while you watch it—and you’re still watching it well after it’s left the screen. It’s a long but thoroughly absorbing three hours (perhaps necessary for a movie that continually readjusts perceptions of time), but I feel like it’s not over yet. It’s still playing in my head, like a downloaded compressed file that’s expanding and installing itself in my brain. This David Lynch, he put his digital virus in me.”

In a similar vein, when asked about Eraserhead, David Lynch said it was his most spiritual film. When pressed by the interviewer about why, Lynch refused to elaborate. Work, Dwelling, and Mourning can be appreciated in the same way. One just need not elaborate why. It simply isn’t necessary.

Makin’s project also has parallels with Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s multi-volume Drafts, at once self-referential, linguistically playful, and formally daring. To read Work is to appreciate it as a work (of art) and to work (at reading it). Similar to how Drafts refers both to the temporary nature of the poetics (as a written draft) and the ephemeral nature of existence (as drafts of wind blow things about). Work is both heroic struggle and pagan relic. Makin creates literature that read simultaneously as communiques from the future, archaeological fragments from a vanished civilization, and witty commentary on the present. It is polysemic as anything from the Wake, yet, to borrow the cliché, he keeps his cards close to his chest, the prose opaque and allusive, challenging and closed-off like Beckett’s ascetic prose, and yet at the same time can be conversational in the sideways strangeness found in John Ashbery’s poetry. Taken together, it presents several obstacles to the reader, but the rewards are numerous for those willing to partake in this exotic fruit of contemporary literature. See these novels as non-commodities, since the bizarre sentences and atrophied narratives could be seen involving the sunk-cost fallacy. That implies art has some set price and reduced it to the tawdry ordinariness of an investment-object. Reader engagement with these three strange novels is a truly unique experience. It is worth the time and the effort, if for nothing else than the abstract pleasures harvested from the texts.

CODA: WHAT THE MEANING OF MEANING MEANS

It is a truism that humans are meaning-making creatures. What Makin does in his literary projects is create meaning by both stripping down and overloading language with meaning. He abhors proper names and geographical places, jumping off from the cliff Beckett created in Worstward Ho. He mines specific disciplines (archaeology, botany, etc.) for their jargon and terminology, and creates neologisms, akin to what Joyce did in both Ulysses and Wake. It seems both a species of stream of consciousness and plumbing deep down into the unconscious to see what can be discovered. Like Ashbery’s poetics, the phraseology is fragmentary and elusive, attempts at narrative. The fact they can be read in any order bespeaks a further subversion of traditional narrative norms. (A close parallel is Chris Ware’s Building Stories, which is a box full of comics in different formats that can be read in any order, although they focus on a specific set of characters and a specific setting.)

While the notion that “These works are whatever you make of them,” seems like a concession to relativist anarchy, it should be noted that the Wake has an entire industry built around trying to interpret the text and glean its full meaning. Although humanity will be interpreting the Wake until the heat death of the Universe, Richard Makin’s works afford no easy answers, no shortcuts. Even though these challenges can make a literary work intimidating or off-putting (see Pound, Ezra, and The Cantos), one can’t help but find reading these works a joyous enterprise. A sideways reference or a particularly gnomic expression can produce genuine literary enjoyment. Not every literary work needs to have its message proffered in discrete spoonfuls. One doesn’t look at the works of Jackson Pollock or Gerhard Richter and expect a simple answer to the question, “What does it mean?” Nor should a literary work have inherent worth if it is as simple to interpret as a North Korean political poster. There is merit in ambiguity, subversion, and weirdness. One doesn’t read Thomas Ligotti and expect a clear explanation of whatever nightmare cosmologies lurk behind the fabric of everyday reality. Can’t we just, ya know, enjoy things?