stuck

Postmodernity does strange things to time. We feel, for instance, that we live in a world in which everything is speeded up: it's hard to keep up with the pace of innovation, the ever-new updating of technology, the merry-go-round of fashion, the wildfire rapidity of the media, the voraciousness of the TV and blog-driven news cycle, the instantaneousness of email and the Internet, and so on.

And yet while some things speed up, others slow down. Above all, the literal transport of people and commodities is getting slower rather than faster. In the air, the mid-twentieth century vision of supersonic passenger travel is long tarnished and dusty: Concorde never became a going concern and was retired with nothing to replace it; most contemporary jets are flown at less than their top speeds, so as to conserve fuel. The same goes on the seas: as The Observer recently observed, modern cargo shipping is now geared towards "super-slow steaming," and trading vessels take longer to cross the oceans than did nineteenth-century sailing clippers. Meanwhile, on land, the density of traffic in contemporary cities means that road traffic has actually slowed as cars have replaced horses as the primary means of transportation: in London, for example, the average off-peak vehicle speed dropped from 12 to 10mph over the course of the twentieth century.

Don Delillo's Cosmopolis takes such paradoxes of speed and time and would run with them if only it could. Unfortunately, however, its tale is set in a stretch limo that takes all day to cross midtown Manhattan from East to West. So it crawls, instead, albeit very luxuriously, stuck in traffic. But there is plenty to distract us within. For this is a limo that is fully equipped with plasma screen TVs, a microwave oven, a toilet, marble floors, cork-lined walls to keep out the ambient noise, even a map of the solar system on the underside of the roof. It may be a slow ride, but there are plenty of distractions along the way. Indeed, if there is a cosmopolis here, it is not New York, however much the crosstown journey manages to take in a presidential motorcade, a rapper funeral, an anti-capitalist riot, and myriad other encounters in between. It is, rather, the wired automobile as a node for the receipt and transmission of information: some of its screens show the currency markets in real time; others display the news from across oceans and continents; still others are closed-circuit TVs that repeat (in fact, anticipate) what's happening in the car itself.

It's possible that the cosmopolis may become smaller still: at one point the limousine's owner, a twenty-something plutocrat by the name of Eric Packer, uses his wristwatch to hack into various financial systems and wipe out someone else's multi-million dollar wealth. This same watch has a camera that is "a device so microscopically refined it was almost pure information. It was almost pure metaphysics" (204). At the novel's end, it is on the watch screen that Packer sees or foresees his own death. It's perhaps a sign of the novel's (or the author's) slight datedness that this digital aleph is a watch rather than a smartphone. In any case, the idea remains the same: space and time can become so concentrated in one point that perhaps it doesn't matter how slowly we travel in physical space. Or equally, thanks to this instant availability of information, there's no longer anywhere to run in any case: the car can stand in for the office; there are ever-fewer in-between spaces where we might be out of range of the call of capital.

We might say that the limousine incarnates a smooth space of capital flows that is folded within a rather stickier space of midtown traffic jams and public disturbances, even if (as the novel suggests) these can be effects of the system itself: a turbulence that is innate to the market.

But still the body and its cloying materiality intrudes: the point of the whole lugubrious journey is that Eric is a billionaire in search of a haircut. En route, he also has regular meals as well as a prostate examination and at least three sexual encounters. Some of these diversions can be more or less easily accommodated within the vehicle's sedate progress along 47th Street: the doctor who examines Eric's prostate is picked up from the sidewalk and does his business in the car while his patient talks to one of his financial advisors. More generally, Eric's security detail, under the command of a terse man named Torval "whose head seemed removable for maintenance" (11), are trained to cover his every move and report on the latest warnings from a higher-level "complex" that studies possible threats and dangers to the slow-moving voyage.

Gradually his protection unravels, and Eric finds himself reduced to a naked body on a West Side street--though still as yet in the service of the image, for the occasion is a film shoot for which he has become an impromptu extra. The story doesn't end there, however, and in a derelict building even as he dreams about "the master thrust of cyber-capital" and its promise "to extend the human experience toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment," Eric finds that "his pain interfered with his immortality" (207). His pain is "too vital to be bypassed and not susceptible, he didn't think, to computer emulation" (207).

Moreover, the past also intrudes. Packer's paid theorist has told him that "the past is disappearing. We used to know the past but not the future. This is changing" (86). And yet it turns out that Eric's slow march westward is towards the past, not the future. He has been heading towards one particular barbershop, bypassing many others that are more conveniently located, for reasons of nostalgia and familiarity. Despite all his obsession with change and his constant impatience at the fact that even language cannot keep up with the pace of technology, he chooses to return to the barber who has always cut his hair, and who cut his father's hair before him. He is drawn to the repetition and to the patina of age: "This is what he wanted from Anthony. The same words. The oil company calendar on the wall. The mirror that needed silvering" (161).

The body is not yet as far in the future as it wants to be, Delillo suggests. And yet it is precisely this temporal lag, this sluggardness, that provides comfort. It's only in the barber's chair, seeing himself in the mirror (rather than in the various CCTV screens that have surrounded him all day), that Eric finally "remember[s] who he was" (165). Here he can speak, confide in people and trust them: "It felt right to expose the matter in this particular place, where elapsed time hangs in the air, suffusing solid objects and men's faces. This is where he felt safe" (166).

Eric is wrong, of course. He is not safe in the past, which catches up with him in the form of a vengeful former employee that he himself has long forgotten (if he ever really knew him). But even Eric's sticky, all too corporeal end is a matter of putting things right. In the end, Cosmopolis is a paean to memory, and to the stickiness of both things and the language used to describe them.

But in a pitiless analysis of its language and style, James Wood excoriates this novel, and not without reason. He's right, for instance, to say that what he calls the story's "nineteenth-century heart" is never fully animated. In the end, we don't really care for or about Eric Packer and his fate. What stays with the reader is the surreal, postmodern shell, rather than the turn to humanism that Delillo wants us to take alongside his unfortunate but unlikeable protagonist. So be it. Some novels crawl along and never quite reach their destination, getting stuck along the way.

Still, Wood goes too far when he argues that "Cosmopolis, so eager to tell us about our age, to bring back the news, delivers a kind of information, and delivers it in such a way that finally it threatens the existence of the novel form." This book, and others like it that present us with what we might term a science fiction of the now (a vision of the future set firmly in the present day), supplement rather than compete with cultural theory or criticism. The attempt may not finally come off, but for all his techno-dystopianism what Delillo is offering is something along the lines of the plasma screens that line Eric Packer's limousine: a version of what is to come that is almost infinitesimally but (precisely for that reason) uncannily ahead of what we actually have to live through in our own lives and bodies. This is what science fiction does, and it can only do so as fiction (rather than as futurology), with the freedom to speculate and to invent, if also therefore to fail.

Zeitoun

America can be a maddening and frustrating place. Indeed, what is best about America--its boundless optimism and energy, its refusal to listen to naysayers--is also precisely what is so maddening. Moreover, this is as true (perhaps more so) of those who are not-quite Americans, who are in the process of becoming American. After all, nobody believes more in the American Dream than those who have yet to face up to the American Reality.

But the point of the American Dream is also that it is so often unfazed by its encounter with reality. Dave Eggers's Zeitoun is a tale of one immigrant's experience in America: a man who sees the very worst of that country, but who (we are told by the author recounting the story) still stubbornly continues to believe. Indeed, is this not why Eggers, a writer otherwise notable for his sense of nuance and irony, not least about the fashionable overuse of the term "irony," has chosen Abdulrahman Zeitoun as the subject of his latest book?

The concluding words of Zeitoun, which are the last part of the "Author's Thanks," are dedicated to Zeitoun and his wife Kathy, who by this point we know have been through an appalling experience in New Orleans at the hands of Hurricane Katrina and (more horrifying still) the security services' ferocious over-reaction in the aftermath of the hurricane. Eggers rightly praises the couple's courage, which "knows no bounds," but then concludes by upholding "their faith in family and country [that] renews the faith of us all" (337).

Yet this is a story that, by rights, should destroy any faith in country, even as it does very much remind us of the virtues of family--in this case what is very much a translnational and transcultural family whose shared passion is more the water that divide (and link) different countries, rather than any one homeland in particular.

The Zeitouns are Syrians who, we are told, repeatedly try to turn their backs on the sea, but to no avail. Abdulrahman's father, Mahmoud, was born on Arward, "the only island off Syria" where "most boys grew up to be shipbuilders or fishermen" (23). Mahmoud himself worked on cargo boats criss-crossing the Eastern Mediterranean until one day he fell off a schooner's main mast and found himself at sea for two days, clinging to a barrel, until he washed up ashore again in northern Syria. From that day he moved to the mainland, searching for a house as far inland as possible, and pronounced an edict that none of his children would go to sea. But in the end he settled on a home not fifty feet from the shore, and his sons were soon following his wake in their fascination for the water.

An older son, Mohammed, became a long-distance swimmer. Another, Ahmad, became a sea captain until he settled down in Malaga, Spain. Other Zeitouns found their way to Saudi Arabia. Abdulrahman himself spent ten years serving on multinational crews from Greece to Japan, Lagos to London, until eventually finding himself in the USA where he settled on dry land, met and married Kathy, an American convert to Islam, and had three children. In New Orleans, he became a successful businessman as owner of a company of painting contractors and manager of a collection of rental properties. But his attempt, too, to turn his back on the sea failed when Katrina swept through, broke the flimsy levees, and let the waters flood in.

As Kathy and the kids, along with most of the city's population, seek safety and shelter elsewhere, Zeitoun stays. With the stubborn optimism of a hard-working immigrant, and as someone with no great fear of the elements, he felt he could do better weathering the storm and looking after his property. In the eerie silence that followed the hurricane, he paddled through the flooded streets in an old canoe, giving help where he could to its stranded inhabitants. He rescues people from their houses and feeds abandoned dogs, all the time bemused and angered by the failures of the police and other authorities who speed around in fast and noisy fan-powered boats. In his canoe, slowly and quietly navigating the waterlogged streets, Zeitoun is more attuned to the faint sounds of trapped home-owners and pets. But even when he does pass information on to the police, they seemed peculiarly uninterested in humanitarian rescue. Born out of paranoid fears of a city out of control, the official mandate, it seems, is security.

Here Zeitoun is caught up in a decidedly un-natural tragedy. Along with a couple of other fellow-survivors, he is forcibly apprehended by a posse of armed law-enforcement agents and taken to a secure facility that has been swiftly constructed in the downtown bus terminal. Known as "Camp Greyhound", with its open, wire-fenced cells, its prisoners' orange jumpsuits, and its guards' callous insensitivity, the place bears more than a passing resemblance to other sites of extraordinary force and discipline such as Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

Indeed, Zeitoun soon finds himself an exemplary subject of the current US state of exception. His detention, at the hands of a Federal Emergency Management Agency that has been folded into the post-9/11 Department of Homeland Security, abrogates all the conventional safeguards of a liberal judicial system. Zeitoun is not registered, not read his rights, not given access to a lawyer or a telephone. For all the world--and for his wife who has taken refuge in Arizona as much as for his brothers and sisters in Syria or Spain--he has simply disappeared. He has become a non-person. This is Kathy's worst fear: as the Moslem wife of an American born in the Middle East, "she had not wanted their family to become collateral damage in a war that had no discernible fronts, no real shape, and no rules" (252).

Zeitoun spends almost a month incommunicado but unarraigned, uncharged, in Camp Greyhound and then the nearby Elayn Hunt Correctional Center. His companions, less lucky still (and with less property as security to secure bail when they are eventually charged), spend up to eight months incarcerated. When he finally managed to reunite with his family and return to the devastated city, at least the worst he has to face is mere incompetence: FEMA give them a trailer to live in, but no keys to access it. But there is never any attempt to compensate him for his experience. A lawsuit seems pointless: "Zeitoun's ordeal was caused [. . .] by systemic ignorance and malfunction. [. . .] This wasn't a case of a bad apple or two in the barrel. The barrel itself was rotten" (307).

With the suspension of all the usual guarantees, with the conversion of the state into a rogue force unconstrained by liberal niceties, "anything could happen. Anything had happened" (314). Or as Zeitoun reflects during his imprisonment, "there was something broken in the country, this was certain" (262).

Eggers tells us that Zeitoun's conclusion is that "New Orleans, his home, needs no speeches, no squabbling, and no politics. It needs new flooring, new roofing, and new roofing, new windows and doors and stairs" (323). Perhaps we can take this two ways. If politics is simply equated with speeches and squabbling, then fair enough; and yet that means that New Orleans (and the USA as a whole) needs as much as anything a new politics. A new political constitution has to be built, even if it is never finished, just as a city is never ultimately completed but always in a process of (re)constitution.

Eggers, however, reads this anti-politics as an affirmation of "the faith of us all" in America. For Eggers, the system merely requires supplementing with charity--and the book's profits are to go to a mixture of good causes under the umbrella of a "Zeitoun Foundation." We need to go back to work, he suggests, with our faith in America renewed, ultimately unquestioned. And he uses this tale of a Syrian American immigrant and his family, a people of waters and the trade routes that are global rather than national, to articulate his decidedly conservative patriotism. Moreover, it is a patriotism that the story of Zeitoun--and that of so many others who have been caught up in a state of exception that itself knows no borders--should by rights decisively negate.

farce

Towards the end of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, Chip, one of the central characters, muses about a script he has been trying to write, which is entitled "The Academy Purple" and concerns the sexual shenanigans between a college professor and a female student. His revelation, which comes as he is trudging towards a desolate Baltic border post trying desperately to get home from Lithuania in time for Christmas, is that the script's problem is a matter of tone: he recalls another character's comment that the chaotic situation in Eastern Europe was merely "tragedy rewritten as farce. All of a sudden he understood why nobody, including himself, had ever liked his screenplay: he'd written a thriller where he should have written farce" (534).

With this, Franzen indicates his awareness of the problem of tone that afflicts his own novel. In the final analysis, I think, the story we're reading is intended to be tragedy: it concerns a family with a father who is rapidly slipping into dementia; a mother afflicted by remorse, frustrated desire, and a sense of social inferiority; and three children who are all, in one way or another, a mess, not least the middle child Chip who has been thrown out of his job in a New England college precisely for his sexual shenanigans, but also the elder son Gary who is caught between nostalgia, pity, and contempt for his parents, and the younger sister, Denise, who fiercely guards her privacy only to discover it has long been compromised.

Franzen writes sensitively about the problem of aging--both the increasing helplessness of old age, and the dilemmas of middle age--and the ways in which family relations and roles are forced to shift as time goes on, against the resistance of entrenched habits and prejudices. His first-person-perspective portrayal of dementia is particularly good, catching the disorientation and the uncertain processing of affect into emotion as an old man tries to make sense of sensory stimuli that he can't immediately interpret. Here, for instance, is the erstwhile patriarch as he tries to eat lunch:

Denise left the kitchen and took the plate to Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest, youngest moment provided no guarantee that you'd be able to grasp it again a moment hence. [. . .] which was why, rather than exhaust himself playing catch-up, he preferred more and more to spend his days among the unchanging historical roots of things" (66).

And yet much of the book, especially those sections devoted to Chip and to his mother, Enid, is rewritten as farce and is concerned less with the "historical roots of things" than with a rather superficial (if quite funny) mode of entertainment. Chip's misadventures at college, for example, come straight from the campus novel genre à la David Lodge, while almost any scene involving Enid soon becomes a comedy of manners for which the character plays simply the rather obvious role of hectoring mother and/or judgemental snob with not quite enough status to carry her snobbery off. Here she is, for example, on a cruise where even the most tragic of episodes are ultimately played for laughs:

She veered to a cushioned bench and slumped and did, now, burst into tears. God had given her the imagination to weep for the sad strivers who booked the most el-cheapo "B" Deck inside staterooms on a luxury cruise ship; but a childhood without money had left her unable to stomach, herself, the $300 per person it cost to jump one category up; and so she wept for herself. She felt she and Al were the only intelligent people of her generation who had managed not to become rich. [. . .] But then, through her tears, she saw a sweet thing beneath the bench beside her. It was a ten-dollar bill. Folded once. Very sweet. (309-10)

To put this another way: some characters are given the possibility of self-awareness, and so allowed redemption (this is the case of Denise and even, surprisingly, Chip); others are denied self-awareness, and this is their tragedy (Alfred); but for others, Enid above all, the failure to understand themselves and their world is merely the occasion for humor.

There's nothing necessarily wrong in a book's slipping between tragedy and farce. And there are passages of both in The Corrections that are very good indeed: I liked Denise's story, for instance, whose elements of high bedroom farce (as she has an affair both with her boss and with her boss's wife) add to rather than detract from its meditations on the role of a younger sister and daughter who is devoted to her work but not so good at connecting with people.

The problem, rather, is that too often the shift between genres, between the two moods in which the book is written, appears almost arbitrary or a matter of indecision rather than discretion. Of course, in this sense the novel accords with the affective dilemma signalled by the phrase "I'm not sure whether to laugh or to cry." All messed-up families (and no doubt all families are messed up) can be viewed either with amusement or with despair, and when you are involved in them you often have to alternate between these responses in order the better to survive them. And yet here, too often we do know when we're supposed to be laughing and when to be crying: it is not so much that we can't resolve the difference between tragedy and farce, as that the way we are led between the two of them is a matter of re-writing, rather than re-reading.

Re-reading tragedy as farce (or vice versa) would be quite a different experience from the repeated exercises in rewriting (however virtuoso) that characterize Franzen's book. But the novel would have to do better to persuade us, for instance, that the fact that that midwestern town in which Alfred and Enid still live is called St Jude, for the patron saint of hopeless causes, is less of an easy joke than the naming of the "Deepmire" hospice in which Alfred ends up.

It is not that there has to be some hidden depth to the names, some solid substance attached to the signifiers, though this is a book that has much, at times, to say about the real, and the relationships between images or indices and things: "How could people respond to these images," wonders Enid at one point, "if images didn't secretly enjoy the same status as real things? Not that images were so powerful, but that the world was so weak" (303). But the mother here is too quickly identified with the image, just at the father is too quickly identified with the "roots of things," which is after all no more (and no less) than another image.

More generally, too often the names and the images (and even the things) that Franzen conjures up are too one-dimensional, allowing for only one reading or affect at a time, rather than forcing us, as in the best literature they do, to hover uncertainly between many, to realize their multiplicity.

Kermode

I learn from "Thinking Blue Guitars" (and now also from obituaries such as The Guardian's) that the distinguished British literary critic Frank Kermode is dead.

Years ago, as a student at King's, I wrote a dissertation on "Cambridge English." My aim was to undertake a Bourdieusian analysis of the university's English Faculty, to see the disputes that had marked it in terms of the clash between different forms of capital and prestige.

It was a fun project, and along the way I tried to contact a number of people connected with significant episodes in the Faculty's history. I wrote, for instance, to L. C. Knights, one of the last surviving members of the Scrutiny group, and though he was too ill to travel or correspond at length, he did send me a couple of nice letters written on a mechanical typewriter, with his own somewhat shaky ink corrections.

And I phoned Frank Kermode, who was happy enough to talk to an (over-)eager young undergraduate such as myself, and invited me round to dinner. I drove up from London to Cambridge, to meet him at his house on a leafy lane somewhere out near Homerton.

I don't remember much about that evening, except that dinner was roast chicken followed by port with an apple accompaniment, and that Sir Frank (newly knighted) was extraordinarily generous with his time and his conversation. We talked about the impact of Theory on Cambridge, the so-called Structuralism affair with Colin MacCabe (though Kermode emphasized that MacCabe was never, in fact, fired or, as Wikipedia currently has it, denied tenure), about figures such as Raymond Williams and Christopher Ricks, and in general about the rather turbulent period from the 1970s to the (then) present of the early 1990s. For our chat was right around the time of the campaign, led largely by the more reactionary elements within the English Faculty, to deny Jacques Derrida an honorary doctorate.

What I remember most was a comment towards the end of this long discussion about the various feuds and fights that had occupied the sundry members of the English department almost from its origin. Ultimately, Kermode observed, all of this was of little consequence. Somewhat surprised, I asked what did matter, then? Oh, he replied, as far as the university was concerned the Humanities as a whole were almost irrelevant. We were like paddlers in the shallows. The immense sea of resources and attention belonged to the Sciences.

I don't think that this sense of marginalization concerned Kermode particularly. It was merely a reminder of how little was at stake in academic politics, and an attempt to dampen down my youthful impulse to see all this in terms of heroic narratives involving (pro-Theory) angels battling (anti-Theory) demons.

I also wonder now whether both his sense of perspective and his choice of aquatic metaphor were inspired by his experience in World War Two, when he served in the Navy in the icy waters of the North Atlantic, and was on the Hood off Iceland, shortly before it was sunk by the Bismark. Such memories might also have made him regard the shallows as sometimes a rather better place to be than the deep sea.

Meanwhile, if anything characterizes Kermode's own criticism, it is surely its restraint and delicacy but also its astuteness, its almost deceptive modesty as Kermode tenaciously pursues some subtle textual point.

unforgivable

Ethan Canin's America America is, as its title suggests it sets out to be, a Great American Novel. It ambitiously portrays a vital part of the core of US society over several generations... indeed, to trace the process by which what was once vital becomes sclerotic and corrupt, and what was once core becomes marginal. Moreover, it shows us the dark underside of even the most refined elements of North American civilization--to demonstrate how it was always in some sense corrupt, and how violence underpins (both undermines and enables) the best of intentions. And yet Canin's aim is not so much to denounce as to explain, to portray the inevitable ambivalences that undo and sustain American liberalism. Finally, the novel is also, simply, great: it's a quite marvellous achievement, beautifully written, with an extraordinarily measured and thoughtful tone.

The story begins in 2006, with a funeral in small-town upstate New York. Senator Henry Bonwiller, a beacon of New England progressive politics, has died at the age of 89. An impressive crowd turns up to pay their respects, as the establishment mourns the loss of one of its own but also (as with any figure who has made their share of enemies as well as friends) to ensure that he is at last safely dead and buried. Among the crowd is Corey Sifter, middle-aged editor of the local paper, the Speaker-Sentinel, but here now for personal rather than professional reasons. Sifter's life has, we discover, long been bound up with that of the deceased senator. So although the newspaperman initially presents himself as something of an outsider to the social elite gathered by the graveside, it soon emerges that he, least of all, is hardly untainted by the slight whiff of scandal that still surrounds the Bonwiller name.

The novel then shifts to the early 1970s when Corey, as the sixteen-year-old son of a local plumber, is called in to help fix a broken sewer on the estate of a prominent landowner, Liam Metarey. Metarey is taken by the young boy's industriousness and desire to please, and so gradually hires him to do more and more jobs around the estate. Soon young Corey is also invited into the house itself, and not always to work. Gradually he becomes the older man's protegé, enjoying a remarkably intimate relationship with the entire Metarey family, though always with the recognition that a vast gulf of class difference divides him from them. Frequently, this combination of intimacy and distance, with all the awkwardness that attends it, plays out in Corey's relations with Metarey's young daughters, Christian and Clara. Clara, particularly, likes to tease the young interloper, both to remind him of his subordinate status but also to indicate her interest in whatever he's up to.

But Corey isn't really up to anything particularly nefarious. He is portrayed (though we should remember that this is all from his own perspective) as a hard worker who merely likes to be liked by these people who have had so much power and influence in his community. Indeed, Sifter presents himself as rather naive, and the point of narrating his story in extended flashback is so that the middle-aged man can judge the youth he once was, not so much for his drive and ambition but more for not asking enough questions about the circles he finds himself frequenting. Everything comes to a head as Metarey decides to back a rising political star for what will turn out to be a campaign for the presidency. And so we turn to Senator Bonwiller again.

Bonwiller, it turns out, is something of a Ted Kennedy figure: well-meaning, perhaps, and voice for the unions and the working class, but tragically flawed. In an incident reminiscent of Chappaquiddick, Bonwiller's political hopes are derailed and, more to the point for the novel's purposes, Corey finds himself involved in the attempt to cover up the scandal. Again, it is not that the young man is calculating in his actions; more that his unwittingness is what makes him useful, and what allows him to be used. Fundamentally, the novel is telling us that neither ignorance (on Corey's part) not good intentions (in different ways, on the parts of both Bonwiller and Metarey) are sufficient alibis. Corey finds himself at the dark heart of a political morass that brings tangible human suffering. The fact that he only realizes this later (and perhaps never fully realizes it at all) is no proof of his innocence.

It's perhaps inevitable that a Great American Novel should be a tragedy that involves the loss of innocence, the failure of high-minded aspirations, and the slip of social masks. Here, the tragedy is threefold: it is Bonwiller's, it is Metarey's, and it is Corey Sifter's. In the end, however, the Bonwiller story is mere pretext or catalyst. The real interest lies in the relation between Metarey and Sifter, as the servant comes to stand in for the patriarch's missing son. For almost despite himself, Sifter comes to be an inheritor, both literally and figuratively. Metarey pays the the young man's education, for instance; and ultimately (a fact that isn't revealed until we are a long way into the narrative), Sifter also marries into the family. Sifter "makes it," and if he never achieves quite the same position as Metarey had, this is merely because that position can no longer be filled or is no longer relevant: the big estate is sold off, and developed for suburban housing and fancy apartments. As Corey's father says on surveying the scene, "That's the way progress is. It's always half criminal" (375). But of course, as Corey himself replies, it alway was half criminal: "that's a hell of a lot of land for one family" (376). Any inheritance is mixed: it's right that there should no longer be local oligarchs such as Liam Metarey; but the fact that they have disappeared doesn't mean that the mark they've made in the American way of life is gone. It's merely buried, a trauma lying in wait to be rediscovered by succeeding generations.

Ultimately, this is a book that's more about history than about politics in the strict sense of the word. Or rather, it is about politics as affect, as the bid to either harness or forget deep-rooted feeling, "a primal battle that is more charismatic and animalistic than either ethical or reasoned" (394), and about history as it is constituted by affects and habits that are never fully available to consciousness. By this, Canin is referring both to the fickleness of the potential campaign donors who have to be wooed by lavish parties and also to the engrained habits and affections of ordinary people. Sifter spends the entire course of this tale trying to understand such processes of loyalty and betrayal: ultimately he himself is both the most loyal and the most traitorous of all. He feels, it's suggested, that it's only with a certain distance that he can sift (as his name suggests he should) through his legacy--America's legacy--to piece together the clues of the scandal of violence at its heart. But in distancing himself from his own roots, he also loses sight of the "ingenuity of the American working class man" (436). There is here no Copernican position from which any final judgement can be made, except for the realization that we are all guilty whether we know it or not.

Sifter recognizes that in the end there is no redemption for him. And not because he has been himself bad, but because he'd "been involved in something--not that [he] did something, but that [he] was involved in something--something unforgivably wrong" (332). The only hope is for a subsequent generation: both his own daughters and a young woman reporter with who he has a rather similar relationship of mentor and protegée that he once enjoyed with the thoughtful and generous Mr Metarey. And yet it is was precisely because of such thoughtfulness and generosity that Sifter had become embroiled in the unspeakable evil at the core of the narrative. And it was precisely in order to make amends, to leave a good legacy, that Metarey had embroiled him in it. In lieu of redemption, then, even for subsequent generations, we are left merely with a few reflections, deliberately limited, homely, and simple:

that love for our children is what sustains us; that people are not what they seem; that those we hate bear some wound equal to our own; that power is desperation's salve, and that this fact as much as any is what dooms and dooms us. That we never learn the truth. (455)

This is truly a brilliant novel, not least in the restraint that leads it only to these quiet conclusions, a restatement of "the old verities" that we will necessarily have to forget before we can re-learn them. It is, moreover, in the best sense a deeply humanistic novel: about the making and unmaking of humanity itself.

distasteful

Stewart Home is something of a cult writer, and as such rather an acquired taste. Not that he wants to make it easy to acquire the requisite taste. Indeed, Jenny Turner suggests in her review of 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess for the London Review of Books that the reason this novel is so full of lurid and not particularly erotic hard-core sex scenes is that

It’s an insurance policy taken out against the possibility that a reader might somehow get past all the other blocks and barbs put in to repel her and find the text beautiful, or identify with the narrator, or otherwise recuperate the work in the conventional way.

I feel sure that this insurance policy works well enough, though it no doubt helps that most of the rest of the novel is a mishmash of unconvincing characterizations, half-baked book reviews, snippets of cultural theory, and inconsequential action that hardly adds up to a plot.

Still, there is something fascinating about the book, in perhaps the same way that bad pornography can itself be simultaneously a source of horror, wonder, and not a little humour. Moreover, 69 Things is a bracing challenge to what we may like (as well as dislike) about the dominant model of English novel-writing today.

On his own website, Home describes himself as "radically inauthentic" and characterizes his work "across a variety of media including performance, music, film, writing, installation, graphics etc." as follows:

I have attempted to continually reforge the passage between theory and practice, and overcome the divisions not only between what in the contemporary world are generally canalized cultural pursuits but also to breach other separations such as those between politics and art, the private and the social.

In this line, the intent of 69 Things is very clearly to breach the boundaries between (for instance) high and low culture, good and bad taste, and narrative and cultural criticism. In itself, of course, it fails in this attempt because it does, after all, fall too easily under the label of "cult" fiction, which is the category that is allotted precisely to such works that set out to undo the very practice of categorization. And yet despite this almost pre-emptive move by which the market of cultural taste marginalizes any threat to its overall mechanisms of classification and hierarchization, the very violence and obscenity of Home's writing is still perhaps enough to give at least pause for thought. This, presumably, is the basis for Turner's rather grandiose assertion that "I really don’t think anyone who is at all interested in the study of literature has any business not knowing the work of Stewart Home."

The novel's premise is that a little-known cult novelist called K. L. Callan (apparently, Home's own birth name) has written a book entitled (yes) 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, in which he outlines a grotesque conspiracy theory concerning Princess Diana's death and the subsequent fate of her body. According to Callan, "Diana had actually been strangled to death Thugee-style at Balmoral by an unknown assailant," the security services had than passed on her corpse to Callan himself, and he in turn "decided to take Diana around the Gordon District Stone Circle Trail as a means of luring tourists to the prehistoric delights of ancient Aberdeenshire." Rumour had it, what's more, that Callan's interest in Diana's corpse was more than simply touristic; many assumed "that he was the last man to give the people's princess a proper seeing to" (67). On the tracks of this bizarre story, then, a man called Alan (who had once been known as Callum) has decided "to repeat the heroic journey detailed in 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess" (67), testing its feasibility by hauling a ventriloquist's dummy by the name of Dudley, weighted down with bricks for true authenticity, to all the sixty-nine stone circles described in the original text. He also takes with him a woman, called Anna Noon, whom he has met by chance in an Aberdeen bar; it is she who tells most of the tale we are reading, and she also who is the primary object of Alan's (and sometimes, most disconcertingly of all, Dudley's) sexual attentions at each of the prehistoric sites they visit. Along the way, Alan tells her about books and she reads his library as he is slowly disposing of it, preparing for his death. For Alan has come to Aberdeen to die, and Anna's role is "to help him act out his death" (1).

So we have a gross send-up of the many conspiracy theories that circulate around contemporary celebrity, alongside the image of a prolonged death by narration or by reading as Alan passes on his literary prejudices: "Alan admired Kathy Acker but said he could never read through to the end of her books" (16), J. G. Ballard's Cocaine Nights "didn't have a lot to recommend it" (47), Robert McCrum is a "literary time-server" (78), W. G. Sebald a "voyeuristic professor" who purveyed "clichés and inanities" (96), while Julian Cope's "drug-addled brain appeared incapable of producing coherent thought" (98), and so on. Interspersed between these snatches of guerrilla literary criticism are the numerous sex scenes, whose tone can vary within the same paragraph from parodies of delicacy ("My love descended upon me like shadows at dusk enveloping a pretty country town" [114]) to hard-core cliché ("I felt his dear hands groping between the lips of my palpitating sex [. . .]. I murmured that Alan should fill up my cunt, how hot it was in its longing for his prick" [114]).

In the process, as both literary student and sexual object, Anna experiences something of "an exchange of subjectivities" (23). Or as she puts it later, "Alan was melting into me. [. . .] If I could not expel Alan, then I had to gather him up, not to imprison him but to integrate him into my being" (141). And that is Home's challenge, too: the other side of the avant-garde's inevitable recuperation by the cultural marketplace is that even the most shocking of texts have somehow to be integrated, if not imprisoned. Home is daring us to "gather him up."

I don't think that the means by which Home will be recuperated is through humour: for all its plentiful flashes of a rather dark and mordant wit, 69 Things is not particularly funny. So I'd disagree with Nicholas Lezard (to be fair, reviewing a different Home novel, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie), who comments that "what's lovely about Home is that he uses laughter to make you think". There's nothing very "lovely" (or, indeed, "homely") about Home; his aesthetic of shock means that the affect here is almost all intended to be negative.

Other means of gathering up the avant-garde are either critical praise or public indifference, and surely Home gets plenty of both. But the combination of distastefulness in 69 Things, combined with its forceful assertion of a decidedly eclectic taste (all those harsh judgements against mediocrity!), puts the onus on us, its readers, to reconsider our own likes and dislikes. "OK," Home seems to be saying, "so you don't like this. Fine. What do you like, and why? Be as aggressive about your tastes as I am about mine."

Finally, this is of course also a book about ruins, and about what can be done in and with ruins: take the corpse of a dead princess on an extended walking tour; converse eruditely about books and history; fuck and be fucked. The one point at which (I think) Anna Noon has a rather brighter idea than Alan is where she suggests that the two could (mis)treat other cultural sites just as they were scandalously acting out in and on the prehistoric remnants of north-east Scotland:

I suggested that we should visit all the supermarkets in Aberdeen and treat these excursions in much the same way as our trips to stone circles. Alan insisted that it would be difficult to have sex in those stores that lacked customer toilets. I told him that he was missing the point, which was poetic, he had to imagine himself living 3000 years from now and pretend he was visiting ruins. (103-4)

This is also the "poetic" force of Home's book as a whole: that we should view the hallowed (and the unhallowed) institutions of the contemporary cultural marketplace as though they were ruins, act out their demise, and feel free to do in them what we like.

YouTube Link: Stuart Home on 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess and the market.

resurrection

Roland Barthes's analysis of photography, Camera Lucida, claims that photography is ultimately a question of affect, and famously delineates two forms of affect that photographs may provoke, or that provoke our interest--perhaps even our obsession--in photography.

First, the studium is "general interest" or "a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment" to photography as cultural or historical documentation (26). We may be curious or intrigued; our interest may "even [be] stirred sometimes," but in the end our investment in photography for what it tells us (say) about the conditions of life fifty years ago--or about the scenery or customs of distant lands, or even about our friends' children or summer vacations--derives from or constitutes no more (and, I'd add, no less) than an "average affect, almost from a certain training" (26).

Second, however, the punctum is what "break[s] (or punctuate[s]) the studium"; it is what "rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me" (26). Often the punctum arises from a detail, perhaps at the margins of the image: Barthes's own examples, taken from news photographs of the Nicaraguan revolution, include two nuns crossing a road, a "corpse's one bare foot," "the huge eyes of two little boys," or the rag covering a guerrilla's face (23-5). If the studium is "of the order of liking" (27), the punctum by contrast invests the experience of viewing a photograph with a certain shock or surprise, perhaps even disgust, that reveals something of the viewer's desire.


Barthes is undoubtedly more drawn to the punctum than to the studium. If we can more or less equate the studium with habit--for what is habit but "average affect" or, perhaps better, affect that has been averaged out?--then Barthes is concerned with rediscovering the ways in which photographs break our sense of routinization, of the everyday. If "Society is concerned to tame the Photograph" (117), Barthes's concern is to show that photography remains wild, untamed. And if the "two ways of the photograph" are to be "mad or tame," then there is no question than that Barthes prefers madness, or what he also terms "the photographic ecstasy" (119).

(Pierre Bourdieu, on the other hand, might be someone who is more interested in photography as habit, as a regularized affect that coincides with a "certain training"; it would be worth returning to Bourdieu's own book on the subject, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, with this distinction in mind. It would enable us to provide a more generous, let us say, or perhaps simply more complex understanding of photography and "general interest.")

Barthes is interested in the punctum as what supplements the routinized, banalized practice of photography ("it is an addition" [55]) but is "nonetheless already there," ready to prick or shock the unwary observer. Even, indeed, the most everyday snapshots, he suggests, have something "scandalous" about them in that, by "attest[ing] that what I see has indeed existed," they have "something to do with resurrection" (82). Hence "the Photograph" (and note the capitalization, for this in Barthes's view is the essence of photography) "astonishes me, with an astonishment which endures and renews itself, inexhaustibly" (82).

This astonishment brings interpretation to a halt. Perhaps strangely for someone known as the founder of semiology, of the "science of signs," who made his name in Mythologies with astute readings of the semantics of the image, Barthes is not here particularly interested in "reading" the photograph. Affect undoes or bypasses the mechanisms of signification and perhaps the symbolic order as a whole. If the studium allows for and indeed motivates interpretation, the punctum actively resists it: "the studium is ultimately always coded, the punctum is not" (51). Moreover, the punctum is somehow blinding, in that it opens up to what Barthes terms a "blind field" (57). Hence the paradox that "in order to see a photograph well, it is best to turn away or close your eyes" (53), for "to shut my eyes [is] to allow the detail to arise of its own accord into affective consciousness" (55).

(For this reason among others--the punctum as supplement, for instance--Barthes is especially close to Jacques Derrida in this book; see my comments on Memoirs of the Blind.)

We should not be surprised that for Barthes photography is essentially about the body ("What does my body know about Photography?" is his initial question [9]), and about "the return of the dead" (9) not simply as resurrection but as the return of death itself. The sense of astonishment or shock provided by the photographic detail is redoubled (or underwritten) by what Barthes calls "another punctum" (96); for if it is astonishing to realize that what I see has indeed existed, this shock owes to the simultaneous awareness that it no longer is. Death, and so time, is encoded in the photograph. Seeing a photograph of his mother as a young child (and much of this book is sparked by reflections on his mother, recently dead, as he scans through old photographs "looking for the truth of the face I had loved" [67]), Barthes realizes that "she is going to die: I shudder [. . .] over a catastrophe that has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe" (96).

But photography does not merely register temporality and hence death. For Barthes, photographers are themselves "agents of Death." The photograph "produces Death while trying to preserve life" (92; my emphasis). This is then the second way in which photography is comparable to religion--or even takes the place of religion in that it provides a new location for Death now that religion does not have same hold it once had:

Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death. Life / Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final click. (92).

Photographs perform the scandalous miracle of resurrection, but at the price of reminding us of, or even imposing upon us, the catastrophic and uncompromisingly final death that makes that resurrection necessary--and agonizingly desired.

aimless

It is perhaps too easy to call Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled "Kafkaesque," and yet from the Central European setting to the befuddled narrator trying to make sense of a vaguely nightmarish world in which there seem to be hidden connections that he can't quite discern, it is Kafka who is surely the reference point here.

One major difference, however, between The Unconsoled and (say) The Trial is that the problems besetting Ishiguro's narrator and protagonist, a pianist by the name of Ryder, come because he is celebrated, rather than persecuted. But as time goes on, the line between celebration and persecution becomes increasingly blurred, and what begins as mere befuddlement approaches closer to nightmare.

Ryder has been invited to give some kind of recital in an un-named town that features a hotel in which Frederick the Great may once have stayed, run by a manager who is a little too eager to be of service; a historic Old Town with a Hungarian Café at which the hotel's porters relax, gossip, and give rousing displays of their bag-handling prowess; a more modern, windswept housing estate a bus-ride away in which a committee of busy-body housewives rule the social roost; and a series of other more or less shadowy locales and colourful but slightly creepy characters.

Just about everyone that Ryder meets declares themselves incredibly honoured to make his acquaintance at last, and almost all of them have some little favour to ask--if it is not too much trouble, though they swear that it will surely not take more than a minute or two. The hotel manager, for instance, would like the great pianist to glance at some scrapbooks his wife has put together; the hotel porter hopes that, in the speech that Ryder somewhat belatedly finds he is due to give at the recital, he may spare a moment to mention the work done by porters such as himself; and so on and so forth. All these small favours add up, most of them come to take up much more time and effort than anticipated, and soon Ryder finds he is slowly being suffocated by these small requests for kindness.

At first sight, people are simply being over-familiar. But in fact Ryder starts to realize that some of these new-found acquaintances are familiar, and include old schoolfriends strangely displaced. Others should be rather more familiar to him than they are. Above all there is Sophie, the porter's daughter, and her son, Boris. She treats the distinguished visitor as though he were her estranged lover, and her son as though he were Ryder's own offspring, and soon Ryder is almost convinced that she is right. Everything seems to resonate some dim memory somewhere. And if everyone has some small stake in Ryder's visit--the housewives' committee, for example, aggrandize themselves with the honour of looking after the musician's parents--in some cases Ryder slowly realizes that he, too, has some kind of stake even though he can't fully work out what it is himself.

It is tempting to try to come up with a rational key to this otherwise mysterious story. Is the answer, say, that Ryder is suffering from amnesia, shock, or delusions of some sort? There are certainly hints towards such narrative "solutions," and there is for instance no doubt that very many characters are in the grip of a variety of delusions--not least concerning the role of art and the way that this obviously much-anticipated visit by a celebrated musician might improve the profile and prospects of the town. And yet, on the one hand, there are a number of strange occurrences that really can't be fully explained away: space and time both appear warped, as when Ryder finds his childhood car rusting in a field outside a reception given in his honour. We find it hard to discern any hard border between delusion (or dream) and sanity (or consciousness); both are delineated with the same measure of realism. Moreover, on the other hand, it is as in Kafka precisely the search for logical explanation that gives rise to the greatest madness. Here, too, it is a bureaucratic logic (if in the form of making things easy for an honoured guest, rather than difficult for a suspected criminal) that ultimately throws up the "utterly preposterous obstacles everywhere" that are "quite typical of this town" (388).

In the same vein, it is hardly spoiling the plot to reveal that the recital never ultimately goes ahead... and, indeed, that it never particularly matters, either for the plot or for the experience of reading the book. In the end, if there is any logic to the long-anticipated event at all, Ryder slowly discovers that it has less and less to do with him. However much he is told he is the centre of the fuss and activity all around him, he comes to see that really he is only an excuse at best, a vehicle for other people's desires to play out as they try to position themselves within the community, or to reposition the community itself. The means by which they establish their positions is art, or the (often rather abstruse) discussion of what is apparently defiantly difficult modern art--in some ways The Unconsoled is almost a case study in the (il)logic of Bourdieusian symbolic capital. And finally even the art itself hardly matters.

So Ryder finds himself, as the book ends, a "rider" on a tram whose route is an apparently endless circuit of the town, or perhaps a rhizome that brings everything together. For "you can go anywhere on this tram" and it seems to offer its riders a full breakfast of "eggs, bacon, tomato, sausage" (533). Soon the pianist, now that the time for the recital has come and gone suddenly at a loss if no longer as lost has he once was, is happily eating and chatting, in no hurry to get off or go anywhere in particular. Despite everything, "Things had not, after all, gone so badly," he muses (534). He might even agree with his new friend: "Oh yes, this is a marvellous tram" (533).

And perhaps The Unconsoled, for all its gloomy title and Kafkaesque ambience--and the title is justified by the fact that everyone here is wounded in some way or another, and consolation would require some portion of the resolution that Ishiguro refuses--resembles somewhat the tram with with which the novel finally and rather arbitrarily ends. Perhaps it's because we ultimately don't care enough about the petty squabbles that occupy the townsfolk so, but the book turns out to be a sort of Kafkaesque comedy: rather aimless, and mysterious in its constant circuitous motion, but the journey alone is enjoyable enough for a while, even if it means we miss our stop a few times.

fray

The notion of rewriting or creatively adapting a classic text is hardly new. From Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea to Apocalypse Now or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the idea is to take a cultural ur-text from which in some way we cannot escape, and to reform it for contemporary concerns or sensibilities.

Sometimes the aim is simply to recontextualize or update a story that is now thought to be stale or over-familiar (as with the numerous reimaginings of Shakespeare such as 10 Things I Hate About You). But often these always parasitical texts also present strong misreadings that are implicit, or even explicit, critiques of the original; Rhys's novel could be the (by now itself classic) instance of such a critical rewriting.

J. M. Coetzee's Foe belongs to this tradition, but in some ways his text is as much an unwriting of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as it is a revision or extension of the original. Coetzee purports to reveal and so undermine the writing strategy that gives us Defoe's book; Foe is a parasite that aims to kill its host by imaginatively troubling the very process of its production. It poses as less supplement than antidote.

Hence, then, the novel's title. In the first instance, "Foe" is a deformation of the name by which we have come to know Robinson Crusoe's author. It strips him of the claim to privilege that Daniel Foe attempted to assume when he changed his name to Defoe in order to imply some kind of aristocratic lineage. But second, Coetzee's book also treats Defoe as the enemy of the story that Coetzee, or his proxy Mary Barton, wishes to tell about desert islands, so-called savagery, but above all story-telling and writing itself.

Barton is Foe's protagonist and, in one way or another, its narrative voice. To remind us of this notion of voice, the first two-thirds of the novel is written, literally, in quotation marks: this contains Barton's own account of her arrival on a desert island in which Cruso (for so she spells his name) and "his" man Friday are already established, of the trio's rescue by an English merchantman, and of Cruso's subsequent death on the voyage home; it also includes her increasingly anguished letters, from various lodgings in London, to the author Daniel Foe to whom she has entrusted her story with the hope that he will produce a polished account of her travails. The final third of the book (apart from a very brief section that is more of an epilogue) then consists of Barton's conversations with Foe when she finally tracks him down to find out what kind of narrative the author is making of her experience.

The problem for Barton is that, at least initially, she doesn't trust herself to put things into suitable words. She is told by the captain of the ship taking her to England that hers "is a story you should set down in writing and offer to the booksellers" but replies that "a liveliness is lost in the writing down which must be supplied by art, and I have no art." To which the captain responds that "the booksellers will hire a man to set your story to rights" (40). Enter Daniel (De)Foe, then, as the man who will set Barton's story "to rights."

Setting Barton's story to rights, however, introduces a series of apparent wrongs. For one thing, art seems to require embellishment. Life on the island was, after all, on the whole rather boring, not least because Cruso had been far from an entertaining conversationalist: so engaged was he in interminable agricultural labors that he had "nothing left to talk of save the weather." Barton therefore muses at the time that "Cruso rescued will be a deep disappointment to the world; the idea of a Cruso on his island is a better thing than the true Cruso tight-lipped and sullen in an alien England" (34-5). It is Foe's task, then, to preserve the idea of Cruso from the disappointing reality.

This embellishment, though, further requires a whole series of other changes. Passion has to be added to the mix: if there was "too little desire in Cruso and Friday: too little desire to escape, too little desire for a new life," then something needs to be done because "without desire how is it possible to make a story?" (88). And as a counterpoint (or perhaps, prompt) to desire, Foe injects also fear of exotic difference and strangeness: the island needs to be under the threat of encroaching cannibals, even though Barton herself notes that "As for cannibals, I am not persuaded" for "I saw no cannibals; and if they came after nightfall and fled before the down, they left no footprint behind" (54).

No footprint: Foe's task, his art, is to supply signs such as the famous footprint in the sand that will conjure up the range of affects that may transform Barton's tale into one that satisfies English readers' desires for... well, desire itself.

His enterprise is made easier, though its result all the more troubling, by the fact that not only is the sullen Cruso no longer around to disappoint would-be interlocutors, but Friday is mute, his tongue mysteriously removed by person or persons alone (other "savages"? Cruso himself?). The subaltern subject can only have his tale told for him: "The true story will not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday" (118). And yet Friday's silence pervades the book, garnering almost physical presence as it is compared to "smoke [. . .] a welling of black smoke" (118).

Soon Barton, if not Foe, realizes that Friday's story, which will remain forever untold, "is properly not a story but a puzzle or hole in the narrative" (121). Foe is apparently set on making up for this unfillable hole at the center of his story "by inventing cannibals and pirates," but Barton continually and resolutely rejects such narrative solutions to the problem of mute subalternity.

So if Cruso is sullenly and uninterestingly silent, and Friday is mute because of some unnameable and unlocatable violence, Barton's own lively but resistant voice, which gives Foe its substance, will in turn have to be silenced so as to give proper literary form to the text that will become Robinson Crusoe. The third and final silence, then, is the silencing of Barton for the sake of the story. As she herself imagines it, Foe will come to think "Better had there been only Cruso and Friday. [. . .] Better without the woman" (72).

The paradox, as Barton observes it, is that she is both essential to the story ("Yet where would you be without the woman?" [72]) and at the same time resistant to the process of story-telling and the sureties that it seems to require: "I am not a story, Mr Foe," she asserts (131); "But now all my life grows to be story and there is nothing of my own left to me. [. . .] Nothing is left to me but doubt. I am doubt itself. Who is speaking me?" (133).

If then, Robinson Crusoe is a tale of destitution overturned or compensated for by (male) hard work and ingenuity (though as I have suggested, some markers of the doubt that undoes its claims remain), Foe is an account of a different kind of destitution: of the way in which in which literature itself is a means by which to deny the subaltern (woman) her questioning, doubt-filled voice, and to project other desires onto the mute subaltern (savage) that remains.

Foe is a reminder, moreover, of what Barton terms "the life of a substantial body" even though that life is "abject. It is the life of a thing" (125-7). Barton consistently affirms substance and "substantial being" (90) while recognizing the power of writing and the way that even substance can be written out, written over, or lost. "Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr Foe," she entreats (51).

Foe suggests that that only way to do justice to such loss of substance is to take up arms against the writers of the classics, to undo their claims of authorial mastery--though of course one of the many ironies of this contest is that the masterful Coetzee emerges from the fray with substantial authority himself.

Thursday

Reading Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is a somewhat uncanny experience. You know, or you think you know, the general lineaments of what has become a classic narrative and founding myth of modern civilization's relationship both to nature and to (purportedly) premodern barbarism. This is, after all, a familiar or even over-familiar story. Crusoe is the name of a seventeenth-century castaway who reconstructs a civilized life on a remote island with primitive tools; he finds a footprint on the beach and realizes he is not alone on the island; he subsequently is aided by and tutors his man "Friday."

Presumably at some point Crusoe and Friday are rescued, but the story as it exists in popular consciousness doesn't have (and perhaps doesn't need) any particular conclusion: it is a tale about origins, not conclusions. Any destiny the tale may imply is that incarnated in the process of gradual civilization itself, a process that is (it's suggested) without any fixed end.

Coming to the book itself, however, is a disconcerting reminder of how much is omitted, simplified, or corrupted as narrative becomes myth. For Defoe's novel bears at times little more than a passing resemblance to this idea of Robinson Crusoe that has become embedded in our cultural (un)consciousness.

To begin with, the story as told by Defoe takes an awfully long time to get to the famous island. Crusoe isn't shipwrecked until almost forty pages in, and before that point he's already had a whole set of other adventures and misfortunes: a terrible storm in the North Sea on his maiden sea voyage; kidnap and captivity at the hands of Barbary Coast pirates; escape across the North Atlantic, in the company of a young Spanish Moor, Xury; and a stint as a planter in Brazil.

So the origin (if the book is really a story about origins) is several times deferred or, perhaps better, foreshadowed and so repeated in advance. The North Sea storm anticipates the hurricane that will shipwreck Crusoe's boat in the Caribbean; his captivity in North Africa will be duplicated by the sense that his island home is a prison; his negotiations with Xury are a preemptive mirror of his relationship with Friday; and his life as planter foreshadows his attempts to establish agriculture as a castaway. By the time that we get to the founding moment, when Crusoe finds himself alone on his island, everything is already repetition.

A similar doubling can be found in the narrative provided of and on the island itself. For while the book opens as more or less standard first-person (pseudo-)autobiographical narrative, at the beginning of his sojourn Crusoe also starts to keep a journal, which he includes more or less verbatim in his account of those early days and months. So the same events are often told twice: once by Crusoe as novelistic narrator, and a second time in quotation as it were, by Crusoe as character. (Compare 37-56 with 57-61.) And so although the journal is intended initially as a kind of therapy--so "as to deliver my thoughts from daily poring on them, and afflicting my mind" (53)--this doubleness threatens a kind of narrative madness, the possibility of an endless proliferation of accounts. What, after all, if in the journal he had written up the process of writing the journal itself? An aporia threatens to open up, of narratives redoubled like reflections in multiple mirrors.

After a while, Crusoe appears to realize the senselessness of this procedure by which everything has to be described twice--a senselessness brought on ironically by an activity designed to give sense to his experience. As such he notes, for instance, of one construction he had made that "This wall being described before, I purposely omit what was said in the Journal" (61). Not long after, the conceit of quoting the journal is abandoned altogether or rather, as its conclusion or the end of the citation is never signaled with anything like the clarity that its introduction had apparently merited, the journal and the broader narration seem simply to blur one into another. What is quoted becomes part of the frame, and so the written account becomes part of the "real" world of the narrative. This, of course, in turn mirrors the strategy of the novel as a whole, which purports to be the true story of a castaway mariner, in other words to propose that the character's narrative is one with that of the world itself, that "his story" is simply history.

Another surprise, for me at least, was that the famous footprint in the sand turns out not to be Friday's; my assumption that it was collapses a whole sequence of events. The "print of a man's naked foot on the shore" (122) comes almost exactly halfway through the narrative; but Friday doesn't arrive on the scene for another forty pages (163). Again, then, there is a strange delay. Here, however, it's a case of the sign preceding the thing; the two, which in my understanding of the story had been closely associated, are in fact much more loosely related.

More generally, in the novel as a whole signs are quite tenuously related to things. For the most part, in fact, Crusoe seems quite uninterested in naming or charting what he finds in this unfamiliar territory. He tells us early on that he calls his land "the island of despair" (57), but that name is never used again; perhaps like "primitives" are supposed to do, he sees little need to give a name to an environment in which he is fully immersed. But rather more strikingly, he makes no attempt either to follow the standard colonizing practice of naming the various geographical and topographical features that constitute the island: none of the bays or hills or woods have any signifiers attached to them; at best, he calls his initial settlement his "sea-coast house" (82; subsequently his "castle" [122]) and his inland outpost his "country-house" (82). Nor, though he notes his unfamiliarity with much of the island's flora and fauna, does he bother to come up with words for them, either. Indeed, overall Crusoe is remarkably uninquisitive about his surroundings: he doesn't even care to do much in the way of exploring--which is why the regular visits of so-called cannibals from the mainland escape his notice for so many years.

In short, Crusoe's attitude is far from that of the typical colonizer, however much he does at various points consider himself the "prince and lord of the whole island" (118). He shows little or no interest in surveying, mapping, and so symbolically or even actually securing the territory that he considers his.

The one exception to Crusoe's peculiar inhibition regarding naming is, of course, his manservant to whom he famously gives the name "Friday" because that was "the day I sav'd his life; I called him so for the memory of the time" (163). And yet this, too, is a remarkably uncertain signifier: Crusoe has repeatedly told us that he relatively soon lost track of the days, despite his best efforts. In an early fever he feels he surely "lost a day in [his] accompt, and never knew which way" (76), so Friday should by rights be either "Thursday" or "Saturday" or even (if Crusoe has tried to compensate for his error, either one way or the other) perhaps "Wednesday" or "Sunday." In any case, the notion that the name will help fix memory and time is surely an illusion, as Crusoe should be fully aware.

In short, then, Robinson Crusoe turns out to be a rather odd and even singular book. It most certainly fails to ground in any secure way the various narratives of origin that claim it as some founding example loaded with significance, whether these be the fantasy of heroic self-fashioning (the economists' "homo oeconomicus") or the black legend of anti-heroic imperialism (the postcolonialists' ur-colonizer). If anything, it actively destabilizes such accounts, by demonstrating the unknowability and precariousness of origins, narrative, and signification in general. Which is a striking conclusion to take from a book that supposedly has none.

To put it another way, Crusoe's tale is best understood as more of a posthegemonic anti-narrative in which the many affects that mark the castaway's long isolation soon undo any claims to construct hegemonic narrative. And yet, of course, in the popular (un)conscious those stories continue regardless.

annoyance

Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage presents itself as the account of a failed attempt to write a book about D. H. Lawrence. Or rather, it is a failed attempt to write a "sober, academic study of D. H. Lawrence" (1) because, ultimately, Dyer's book does still claim to be about Lawrence, if obliquely--or perhaps not obliquely enough.

The book is only obliquely about Lawrence in that so much of the narrative concerns the ways in which Dyer manages to procrastinate over his self-assigned task, often quite hilariously so. For instance, instead of reading about Lawrence he finds himself reading about Rilke, who himself wasted time agonizing about Rodin's words about the necessity of work:

I should have been working on my study of D. H. Lawrence and instead I was idling over Rodin's words. Il faut travailler, rien que travailler. I should be writing my book about D. H. Lawrence, I said to myself, everything else should be subordinate to that--but who can tell where that task begins and ends? Some huge benefit may yet accrue from reading Rilke's letters. The more I read, in fact, the more convinced I became that a better understanding of Rilke was crucial to an understanding of Lawrence. (20)

And yet Dyer's book is rather more directly about Lawrence than the standard academic monograph, in that Dyer is concerned less with reading secondary literature on Lawrence ("the vast majority, the overwhelming majority of books by academics," Dyer tells us, "are a crime against literature" [102]) than with going where Lawrence went and, as far as possible, experiencing what Lawrence himself experienced.

In short, Out of Sheer Rage is a sort of gonzo literary criticism; he himself terms it "method" criticism (128). Rather than read Lawrence (because although Dyer does seem to have read plenty of Lawrence, he tells us precious little of that reading), the aim is to track Lawrence's own apparently aimless wanderings from Derbyshire, across the Mediterranean, and on to Mexico and the Southwest USA, and so to feel something of what Lawrence himself may have felt in those same places. Rather than interpretation, Dyer gives us affect.

This affective approach to Lawrence may seem to be peculiarly appropriate, given that this is a writer whose work is after all often concerned with intensity, spirit, and feeling, except that the prevailing affect in Dyer's traipse in Lawrence's tracks turns out to be lassitude, frustration, and boredom. If academic criticism is from the start ridiculed (perhaps particularly for a subject such as Lawrence) as spectacularly missing the point, the attempt at affective encounter would likewise appear, at least as Dyer presents it, to be inevitably doomed. For instance, when he finally reaches the site of Lawrence's house in Taormina, Dyer first finds roadworks and "a Moscow smell of petrol" and then, seeing a plaque verifying that this is indeed the place, comments:

We had found it. We stood silently. I knew this moment well from previous literary pilgrimages: you look and look and try to summon up feelings that don't exist. You try saying a mantra to yourself, "D. H. Lawrence lived here." You say, "I am standing in the place he stood, seeing the things he saw...", but nothing changes, everything remains exactly the same: a road, a house with sky above it and the sea glinting in the distance. (60)

New Mexico is similarly disappointing: Santa Fe "didn't quite live up to the immense romance of the name" (213-4) while Taos's one distinguishing feature ends up being the fact that it has "an unrivalled concentration of terrible artists" (216).

If this book is born "out of sheer rage" (the quotation comes from Lawrence himself, writing a book on Thomas Hardy that "will be about anything but Thomas Hardy I am afraid"), perhaps that is because it effects a transmutation of Lawrentian rage ("Lawrence was angry even in his sleep," we are told [160]) to what we might call a characteristically Dyersian minor irritation and petty annoyance. Dyer shows his talent for petty annoyance particularly in his relations with his girlfriend, who accompanies him on much of his journey and with whom he frequently squabbles. He himself, near the end, concludes that his own book is ultimately about despair, but really it's a peculiarly affectless despair, a depression that he defines as "the complete absence of any interest in anything" (227).

But in a final twist of a book that is full of the kinds of twists and turns that constitute uncertainty, general unease, and restlessness rather than high drama, the pursuit of Lawrence, however dissatisfying and even trivial ("Could such a simple quest really have required such a disproportionate investment of effort?" Dyer askes [226]) turns out to be therapeutic. The voyage itself at least staves off the utter meaningless and depression that otherwise, it's suggested, awaits us. We all need some vague sense or irritation, we're told, that keeps us in a kind of Brownian motion that attempts to salve minor dissatisfactions:

Our lives are actually made up of lots of tiny searches for things like a CD we are not sick of, an out-of-print edition of Phoenix, a picture of Lawrence that I saw when I was seventeen, another identical pair of suede shoes to the ones I am wearing now [. . .]. Add them together and these little things make up an epic quest, more than enough for one lifetime. (230-1)

Hence it is that "One way or another we all have to write our studies of D. H. Lawrence" (231) and "the best we can do is to try to make some progress with our studies of D. H. Lawrence" (232).

And yet, perhaps appropriately, I find this conclusion disappointing. Dyer would say "But of course!" The apparent profundity, however, is plucked out of nowhere. And the fact that a book that is rather interesting on what we might call an affect of disinterest and fragmentation, of never being able to resolve the elements of what we imagine must once have been a coherent whole, ends up as a form of consolatory self-help in renaming these petty parts an "epic quest"--indeed, ends up taking a sort of smug satisfaction in dissatisfaction--well, I find it mildly annoying.

ambassador

Artist Jamie Hilder enrolls as a "Downtown Ambassador" and then records a video in which he plays the part but also interpolates a view of the city of Vancouver not usually provided to tourists. This involves revealing some of the conflicts behind the ways in which Vancouver represents itself, such as by-laws to remove the homeless from the streets, hypocrisy regarding the indigenous presence in the area, and homophobia determining the site of the West End's AIDS memorial.

Via Performance, Place, and Politics.

ohm

Christopher Petit's Radio On is a chilling portrait of Britain in the late 1970s. As with David Peace's more recent novelistic portrayals of Yorkshire in the grip of Rippermania, Petit's film suggests that violence and unsavory hidden networks underpin (but also undermine) the ennui and repetitive routines of an almost affectless daily life.

Unlike Peace, however, Petit has no great desire to prove the conspiratorial thesis that promises (as all conspiracies do) to give meaning to what is superficially odd or opaque. Rather, he prefers to surf the affectless surface itself, fascinated by the strange quirks and eddies that arise out of a life of constant (often mechanized) motion without particular end.

Hence, though the film's plot involves a man named Robert who takes a road-trip to Bristol to find out why his brother has committed suicide, with the implication that he may have been involved in some kind of hard-core pornography ring recently busted by the police, in the end the protagonist seems hesitant to discern any kind of ultimate truth. As he comments to a German woman whom he picks up on the way, the reason for his journey turns out to be strangely unimportant.

The quirks and eddies of the trek include a brief episode with an apparently psychotic army deserter whom Robert picks up as a hitch-hiker. He's been traumatized, it seems, by his tours of duty in Northern Ireland; but again Robert has little interest in probing much further, choosing instead to throw the man's stuff out of the car and drive on when the ex-soldier stops to take a piss. Instead, Robert is rather more amused by the gentler figure of a petrol station attendant (played by Sting) who is too distracted by his rock and roll fantasies and idolization of Eddy Cochran to bother with manning the till or taking money from customers.

Together, Robert and Sting's character sing a version of Cochran's posthumous hit "Three Steps to Heaven", which declares that "the formula for Heaven's very simple / Just follow the rules and you will see." There's no greater indication of the distance between the early 1960s and the tail end of the 1970s than the fact that such simplicity, or even such aspirations, are totally out of place. But the link between then and now is that music remains central.

For this is a film almost entirely devoid of dialogue; and even when characters do converse, they speak past rather than to each other. For instance, there are a couple of long sequences of untranslated German; in Radio On, language is part of our alienation, not a means to counteract it. Music, on the other hand, while it may reflect the repetitiveness and routine of our humdrum lives (Bowie's "Always Crashing in the Same Car"), perhaps also offers the possibility of connection and even heroic insistence on affect (Bowie again, with "Heroes/Helden," or Wreckless Eric's "Whole Wide World").


Indeed, before Robert hears about the suicide, he gets a package in the post in which his brother has sent him three Kraftwerk tapes. So it is this German band, whose constant theme is our uneasy relationship to technology and mass production, that come to dominate the film's soundtrack. The movie ends as Robert's car fails to start, and he is unable to crank the engine as the vehicle is poised on the edge of a disused quarry. So he puts one last track on the car tape player, Kraftwerk's ironic anthem "Ohm Sweet Ohm," and takes the train back to London.

As the quasi-manifesto seen in the dead brother's flat says, "We are the children of Fritz Lang and Werner von Braun. We are the link between the 20’s and the 80’s. All change in society passes through a sympathetic collaboration with tape recorders, synthesizers, and telephones. Our reality is an electronic reality." Ultimately, Britain in the seventies is not quite "home," and is by no means homely, but it may be that postindustrial (post)modernity gives rise to its own culture, and its own (electronic) reality in which we may find some uncertain facsimile of "ohm."

YouTube Link: the film's opening (almost entirely dialogue-free) ten minutes; the whole film can in fact be seen, in segments, on YouTube.