I absolutely loved Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood, which is nominated for a few Oscars this year, including Best Picture. (Boyhood is too good to win best picture; I’m fine with that prize going to Iñárritu’s faux-art film Birdman). A rich and sentimental evocation of “reality,” Boyhood synthesizes the best elements of Linklater’s previous films, and like many of those films—Slacker, the Before trilogy, Waking Life, Dazed and Confused—Boyhood isn’t really about anything. Of course it’s also kinda sorta about everything: family, love, growth, education, life. Etc.

The central formal device of Boyhood—namely, that Linklater shot the film over twelve years using the same actors—has been remarked upon at great length by others, so I won’t touch on it, other than to say that I found watching Ellar Coltrane’s Mason grow up profoundly moving. The aesthetic experience of Boyhood is its greatest pleasure, much like its sister film The Tree of Life. And although Boyhood’s aesthetic power relies in large part on our witnessing its characters grow and age, its emotional tenor, its vibe, inheres from scene to scene.

There are many wonderful moments in the film, some more memorable than others, but a favorite of mine takes place at an overnight “camping trip” in a house that’s still under construction. Mason is maybe, what, thirteen here?—I’m not quite sure, but he tells his mother the truth about where he’s going, if not entirely the truth about what he’ll be doing there…which is, what? Not much really—the younger kids hang out with the older kids, drink a beer or two, lie about sex—stuff kids do. The scene captures the same not-quite-boring hangout vibe that permeates Dazed and Confused and Waking Life—a kind of familiar realness.

Linklater is a master at evoking a sense of place. And this place, this house—it’s simultaneously boring, calming, and horrifying. One one hand, we’ve been there before—the abandoned house, the empty parking lot, the little switch of trees that aren’t quite woods, not really—the free space where we can play at being adults. On the other hand, Boyhood has allowed us—or maybe I should not extend my pronoun to the plural? No?—Okay: Boyhood has allowed me, this viewer, a kind of paternalistic view of Mason (“my-son”) who is, after all, growing up before our very eyes (sorry for slipping back into the first-person plural there). And here Linklater has young Mason—whom we trust to do the right thing and all but still—here Linklater has staged Mason & co. in an abandoned house full of scrap wood and power tools and circular saw blades which the young men are of course throwing into the sheet rock with gleeful abandon.

I flinched as the blades flew forcefully past Mason and his friend; in any other film they would have to cut into flesh and bone, be tools for forces tragic or comic. Plot devices. But in Boyhood they are the toys of boys playing at growing up. Nothing happens. No grievous injury or terrible death—the sort of thing that usually licenses, I don’t know, the central character’s maturation. Not even a comic wound. Nothing. The blade-throwing is just normal bored stupid teenage amusement. It’s the sort of thing that Mason’s mom—and a paternalistic viewer like me—might find horrifying—You could get very badly hurt, Mason!—but he doesn’t. He’s fine. He’s alive.

For me, this particular scene—not the strongest or the strangest or the most memorable or moving—is nevertheless a key moment in Boyhood, not just because it disrupts audience expectations (the film is full of such gentle disruptions), but because it engenders and then discharges my own parental anxieties. That’s a form of catharsis, I guess, but not a catharsis of tragedy. It’s catharsis for reality.

William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion, new from University of Delaware Press, collects academic essays and memoir-vignettes by a range of critics and authors to make the case that Vollmann is, as the blurb claims, the “most ambitious, productive, and important living author in the US.” I interviewed the book’s editors, Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes, over a series of emails.

If you live in NYC (or feel like traveling), you can check out the book launch for William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion this weekend, hosted by Coffman and Lukes (4:30pm at the 11th Street Bar).

This is the first part of a two-part interview.

Biblioklept: How did William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion come about?

Daniel Lukes: The starting point would be the MLA panel I put together in January 2011, called “William T. Vollmann: Methodologies and Morals.” Chris’s was the first abstract I received and I remember being impressed with its confidence of vision. Michael Hemmingson also gave a paper, and Larry McCaffery was kind enough to act as respondent. Joshua Jensen was also a panelist. I kept in touch with Chris and we very soon decided that there was a hole in the market, so to speak, so we put out a call for papers and took it from there.

One of my favorite things about putting together this book has been connecting with – and being exposed to – such a range of perspectives on Vollmann: people seem to come at him from – and find in his works – so many different angles. It’s bewildering and thrilling to talk about the same author with someone and not quite believe you are doing so. And I think this started for me, in a way, at least as far as this book is concerned, with reading Chris’ MLA abstract.

Biblioklept: I first heard about Vollmann in connection to David Foster Wallace (Wallace namechecks him in his essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”). A friend “loaned” me his copy of The Ice-Shirt and I never gave it back. When was the first time you read Vollmann?

Christopher K. Coffman: I first encountered William T. Vollmann’s work about ten years ago. At the time, I had just finished grad school, and as my dissertation work had been focused on aspects of modern and contemporary poetry, I had let my attention to contemporary prose slip a bit. When I realized this had happened, I starting reading a lot of recent fiction. Of course David Foster Wallace’s books were part of this effort, and I, like so many others, really developed a love for Infinite Jest and some of the stories in Girl with Curious Hair. My memory’s a bit fuzzy on the timeline, but my best guess, given what I know I was reading and thinking about at the time, is that in my reading around DFW I discovered the Summer 1993 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction with which Larry McCaffery had been involved, and that the interview with DFW in that issue–along with the WTV materials themselves–woke me up to WTV and his work. I can’t say enough about how important Larry’s championing of WTV has been, and continues to be. Of course, one could say that about his support for so many of the interesting things that have happened in fiction during the past three or four decades. His interviews, his editorial work, the part he played with the Fiction Collective …. the list of the ways that he identifies and promotes some of the best work out there could go on for a while, and no one else that I know of has done it as well as Larry has for as long as he has. Anyway, as I was pretty much broke at the time, my reading choices were governed in large part by what I could find at libraries or local used bookstores, and The Ice-Shirt was the first volume I came across in one of these venues. I was already a huge fan of The Sot-Weed Factor and Mason & Dixon, and the entire Seven Dreams project very much struck me as a next step forward along the trajectory those books described. As a consequence, I immediately started tracking down and reading not only the rest of the Dreams, but also everything else I could find by WTV.

What about The Ice-Shirt that really won me over, aside from my impression that this was another brilliant reinterpretation of the historical novel, is that WTV was clearly bringing together and pushing to their limits some of my favorite characteristics of post-1945 American fiction (structural hijinks of a sort familiar from works by figures like Barth and Barthelme, a fearlessness in terms of subject matter and the occasional emergence of a vatic tone that reminded me of Burroughs, an autofictional element of the sort you see in Hunter S. Thompson). Furthermore, as a literary critic, I was really intrigued by two additional aspects of the text: the degree to which The Ice-Shirt foregrounds the many ways that it is itself an extended interpretation of earlier texts (the sagas on which he draws for many of the novel’s characters and much of its action), and the inclusion of extensive paratexts–the notes, glossaries, timelines, and so forth. In short, this seemed like a book that united my favorite characteristics of contemporary literary fiction with a dedication to the sort of work that I, as a scholar, spend a lot of my time doing. How could I resist? It took my readings of a few more of WTV’s books for me to be able to recognize what I would argue are his other most significant characteristics: his global scope and his deep moral vision.

As for your also having begun reading WTV with The Ice-Shirt: It’s an interesting coincidence to me that we both started with that book. I have always assumed that most people start into WTV via either the prostitute writings (which have a sort of underground cache by virtue of subject matter) or Europe Central (which is of course the book that got the most mainstream attention), but here we both are with The Ice-Shirt. WTV has indicated he sees it as under-realized in certain ways, but I am still quite fond of it, even in comparison to some of the later books.

DL: I first encountered Vollmann thanks to a Los Angeles rock band called Nature, who released a self-titled album of bizarre proggy industrial rock  in 1995 on Zoo Records, and then promptly disappeared. In the CD booklet there was the quote “So fear repetition not; there remain many seas of blood and cream to be traversed,” which is from the “advertisement” at the opening of Butterfly Stories. I was intrigued and wanted to know more: I had made a habit of discovering writers via rock musicians, and I was also exploring the underground, counterculture literature of angst (Octave Mirbeau, Hubert Selby, Sylvia Plath, James Havoc, Mark Amerika, etc). When I chanced on the book – a remainder copy of the US edition (with its garish purple Ken Miller cover photograph of three Asian girls) in a discount bookstore in London where I was living – I found its depiction of loneliness and despair uniquely powerful and compelling. I had read plenty of bleak and miserable books by then, but none quite like this; none that seemed to go about the business of self-destruction in such a vital and gleeful way.

I then moved on to Whores for Gloria, The Royal Family, and The Atlas, and kept going. Around the same time I also came across Michel Houellebecq, who writes about alienation and desire in different yet comparable ways.

Biblioklept: Houellebecq is also similar to Vollmann in the sense that they are both controversial authors. Both strike me as writers who might be talked about more than actually read.

CKC: I absolutely agree that Michel Houellebecq and Vollmann have a lot in common in terms of the fact that they are controversial. I have read most of Houellebecq’s books, but not all of them, so I am less of an authority here than I am on Vollmann. MH does strike me as less competent as a stylist in French than Vollmann is in English. That point aside, I would argue that there is much of value in MH’s works and also that there is a lot that warrants a reading of these two authors in tandem. In some ways, I think that Plateforme [Platform] is MH’s most Vollmannian book: it deals with a setting, events, and character types familiar from works like Butterfly Stories. What I think it lacks is the sort of ongoing and explicit self-critique that WTV usually offers. Too, my reading is that MH’s point of view tends to be only that of opposition, while one of the things I find most valuable in WTV’s works is his shuttling between satire and a much more constructive and celebratory stance: he not only moves beyond some initial perspective to a critique of it, but reaches beyond that critique as well. I cannot see MH writing, to mention just a few instances, the final sections of The Royal Family; some of the tales in Last Stories and Other Stories, which find beyond death some sort of value; or the moments of more sympathetic attitudes to Gerstein in Europe Central.

I think that Daniel would vote for Les Particules élémentaires [The Elementary Particles], but I’d say La Possibilité d’une île [The Possibility of an Island] is MH’s best. However bleak those final pages of that latter book are in terms of the success of humanity, they do seem to offer something that is beautiful in its own dismal way. And, it is that going beyond the acceptance of total failure, or—to state it better—in the exploration of the beauty of failure, that Vollmann excels, and from which I think MH too often retreats. What WTV gives us is, at its best, and in rough terms, a recovery of the sacred in the profane. Perhaps my favorite passage of WTV’s comes in the final pages of Fathers and Crows, and sees Kateri Tekakwitha walking among modern urban prostitutes. It is a unification of elements that have been divided for so many years for so many poorly conceived reasons, but it is also a vision of a certain kind of redemption. And it is heartbreakingly beautiful, as well. The only things I can think of that even come close to this in contemporary fiction are the best moments of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and the works of László Krasznahorkai.

As for MH and WTV being read less than they are discussed: I would guess this is true of most serious authors. How many people have read more than a few pages of Finnegans Wake (or, for that matter, Dante’s Commedia) but still remark on it? Also, I think MH is read much more in France than WTV is in his native country. One reason I was so excited when I first got in touch with Daniel is that he was pretty much the first person I met who had really read WTV—but I do not have the impression that something equivalent would have been the case if I were reading MH in France. I got an email earlier today from an acquaintance who keeps in something like regular contact with WTV, and he tells me that WTV has agreed to offer comment to some French media outlets about the Charlie Hebdo events. One of my hopes is that some of those comments at least touch upon MH’s work, as his connection to what has happened in Paris has been well-advertised, and I have to imagine WTV is considering this.

DL: It is interesting that Chris raises the issue of satire in WTV. I have a back and forth with one of my advisors about whether Houellebecq is a satirist or a tragedian at heart: he argues the former, I the latter. Vollmann certainly has a strong satirical voice, which he often employs strategically to punch upwards at power. For example the portrayals of power brokers in You Bright And Risen Angels, or the hypocritical businessmen in or The Royal Family and its chapter “An Essay on Bail.” Humor and comedy are a constant presence in Vollmann’s works and he adopts grotesque, absurd, or abject humor, as a defense against the violence of life. I do feel however that it is the sincere, even tragic voice in Vollmann that tends to transcend the satirical one, even if satire helps it get there; that Vollmann’s vision of life is predominantly a tragic one, though laughing in the face of tragedy is probably our best bet. When there is irony in his writing, I find that it is often tragic irony: perhaps this is one element in his writing that irks seekers of comic irony. I keep coming back to that N+1 piece and wondering why “sincerity” should be such a literary crime.

In what ways do you feel that readers who actively dislike Vollmann are justified in their critiques? What do you dislike about Vollmann’s writing and why? I sometimes feel that people responding to WTV are responding more to a caricature than his actual writing. But then again, what do you think it is in WTV’s work in particular that invites that?

Biblioklept: What I dislike about Vollmann’s writing is a fairly common critique: There’s too much. Take an early section of Imperial, where there’s this shift from this amazing journalistic adventure story into a lengthy introspective piece on Our Hero’s love life. At the same time, Too Much is why Vollmann is such a fascinating writer. He jettisons much of what’s unbearable about the postmodern tradition—there’s no navel-gazing over genre, persona, performance, truth and lie, etc.—just a desire to access big-ell Life—and life is Too Much. There’s no dithering. There’s this great moment in Laurent Binet’s postmodern fiction HHhH where the narrator-persona raves about how he wished that he’d written Europe Central because it does what his own book likely can’t. Binet’s narrator describes the first eight page chapter as “endless” and “magical.” I think those words mediate what’s electric about Vollmann’s prose.

DL: Binet also seems to suggest that Europe Central does not sustain that tone, and I disagree with that. I read the book one long gloomy week or so in March 2005 and was thoroughly absorbed. Incidentally, we were in talks with Binet about him contributing something, but it didn’t work out.

CKC: I can’t say I mind the fact that there is a lot of WTV to digest. It seems to me that to let this bother one as a reader or as a critic is like getting upset, to pick an author to whom I’m fairly indifferent, because there is a lot of writing by Joyce Carol Oates. I don’t get annoyed by the volume of her output, but I also don’t read it all. I guess my attitude is basically that there are more than enough books to keep me busy, and I’d rather spend more time celebrating what I like than attacking what I don’t, unless the latter is particularly unavoidable and egregious. I very much think WTV is working in the tradition of maximalism and the encyclopedic novel. I understand that these sorts of writings are not to everyone’s taste, and if that is true one can always turn to a writer like Raymond Carver. I prefer a world that has both of these kinds of authors, and others besides. Furthermore, I would argue that the bagginess of WTV’s books is part of their appeal: as your remarks indicate, the sometimes seemingly obtrusive inclusiveness is his method. His approach is inductive, as is evident most clearly in Rising Up and Rising Down. To include less information, to explore fewer case studies or to say less about the author’s perspective, is to deny the world and life some measure of its complexity.

Of course some problems come with this approach to writing. WTV does have a few sentences that are real clunkers, and I sometimes find myself thinking “well, he could have structured this part of this book more tightly ….” But I would not want to trade the glorious diversity his work offers for some more unified or graceful effort. Too, there are many, many amazing sentences and some brilliant solutions to formal challenges that far outweigh the moments when things don’t quite come together. I would point to a lot of what goes on in the Seven Dreams for the best examples of where his approach best serves his subject matter.

But, to get to Daniel’s question: I definitely think most objections to WTV’s work are driven by misinformation and too casual readings. That said, it is also the case that some objections to his writings are justified. I still can’t work myself over to a full appreciation for his presentation of a lot of the women in his novels. I see how sympathetic and even holy his female characters are, and he makes empathy the key element of his moral vision, but there is still a blind spot there that I can’t quite work through. At the same time, I admire enough about his work that I am willing to stay with it even when it gives me pause. And I think those people who critique his efforts–whether those critiques are sound or not–are responding to a similar provocation that is, in part, intentional. He won’t put down his gun just because you want him to; he won’t stop visiting prostitutes just because it makes me unsure of some piece that features such activities; and, he won’t shy away from portraying the marginalized as potentially guilty, rather than entirely vindicated in all of their actions by virtue only of their victimhood.

Biblioklept: I think Christopher’s just summed up a lot of what repels—and attracts—readers to Vollmann. I get a lot of emails and other interactions from readers of this blog who want to know a good starting point for Vollmann—-the sheer volume of output can be daunting. Any thoughts on a good gateway text for interested readers?

CKC: Should a gateway text be an author’s most typical book, or his most accessible? I think that Europe Central is WTV’s most accessible fiction, but I’ve also seen commentators bemoaning its length and complexity, so maybe I’m a bad judge of this. I teach “Red Hands” to my undergraduates, and they seem to appreciate it well enough. Some fans–including Wallace and Franzen–who ran into WTV’s work early in his career were apparently really won over by The Rainbow Stories. Whores for Gloria and The Rifles strike me as the most condensed of his books, and I think The Rifles also offers the best combination of careful structure, typically Vollmannic subject matter and aims, and high metafictive play. I guess, as with any author, the most excellent introductory WTV text depends more on the reader than the writer. I came to WTV after steeping myself in things by authors like Barth, Pynchon, and Burroughs, and WTV’s relatively accessible for readers comfortable with the work of figures like that. On the other hand, I don’t know that someone who spends all of her or his time with less ambitious fiction will ever become a reader of WTV. I imagine most readers are somewhere in between the extremes mentioned in the preceding sentences, and that’s why I’d recommend Europe Central: it doesn’t have the possibly-objectionable subject matter that something like Butterfly Stories offers, and neither is it as imposing conceptually as are some of the Dreams. Yet, it will satisfy readers looking for an ambitious and daring novel. You can shelve it alongside Littell and Binet.

To shift gears and head off-road into the nonfiction: I suppose some readers might want to start with WTV’s essays. I was surprised–when we were getting proposals for our book, and as I later talked with WTV readers who aren’t contributors to the book–just how many people are won over by Poor People. It strikes me as a worthwhile book in numerous ways, but something about how it is stitched together doesn’t sit right with me (I feel this way about Riding toward Everywhere and Kissing the Mask also). We’d have to go way off-track for me to get into the specifics of my reservations about these volumes, but I would point out that I don’t have this troubled reading of all of the nonfiction–Imperial and Rising Up and Rising Down are especially fulfilling according to my criteria. Too, the work of some of our contributors, and I’d especially mention here Chandler’s chapter, went a good way to winning me over to accepting some formal elements of books like Poor People that I’d resisted before we started this project. I’ll end this rambling non-answer with an example of someone who comes close to reading WTV but holds back in the end: my wife, who is really knowledgeable about and widely read in the essay as a genre (she’s working on a book about Didion), is a fan of WTV pieces like “Let’s Get Lost.” But, she has practically no interest in most of his novels and short stories.

DL: I would say don’t start with Kissing The Mask, unless you have a specific interest in Noh theater. I came away a bit disappointed with that book: it felt to me too much like a collection of notes or drafts that could have done with further shaping and revision, though I did enjoy its extremely comparative flights between eras, locations, and genres

I find Poor People and Riding Toward Everywhere, published within less than two years of each other, to be two very focused, readable, accessible books which go deeper into two of Vollmann’s key preoccupations. Either book could serve as a good introduction.

I would say start with The Atlas: I like to think of it as a “remix album/b-sides collection” of his early-middle period. It’s a good way to enjoy Vollmann in bite-size chunks and flashes, to get a sense of what he’s about and how his writing works and enchants. Also it contains “Lunch” which is one my all-time favorite Vollmann pieces.

CKC: Daniel’s complaint about Kissing the Mask is pretty much my own about that book (as well as one or two others). That is, that it could use additional “shaping.” I cannot help but note that we are here voicing the sort of charge that is leveled regularly at WTV’s works: that they need a better editorial hand. This is actually a useful extension of some points I was trying to make earlier. While WTV’s method and vision demand a hyper-inclusive encyclopedism, this quality brings with it a dangerous corollary: at some point too many too disparate things may be in the box, and the sides of the container will collapse. He walks that narrow line between excessive inclusion and careful selection with great daring. This is why I am always interested to see how he has structured his texts. The musical motifs of Europe Central help in this regard; the mutability central to Seven Dreams allows him to get away with a lot; and the geographic / palindromic structure of The Atlas is pretty rigid in its way. When the formal logic of the whole is less developed or clear, some readers will intuitively balk–and this portion of readers will sometimes include, apparently, even those among the audience who are otherwise fans. Some people have less tolerance for deformation than do others, and WTV readers tend to need a lot of such tolerance. When he succeeds, as I would argue he usually does, the result can be a tour de force. When he fails, it can be a real mess. Yet, this is also part of what I mean when I say that WTV has won me over enough that I am not going to get off the train just because it made a few unadvertised stops. I am curious to see how he handles the challenge of the next book, and part of that challenge will (of course) always be a matter of form. So one litmus test for potential WTV-readers is just how far one thinks the walls of the box can be strained before it starts crumbling. I like to see them pushed to the point where the joints are just starting to crack, and I think a lot can be learned by studying a text that goes beyond that, as well. Beyond all of these assertions, I would remind myself that the seeming failure of formal coherence can be a great way to imply other sorts of failures–in aspects of the subject matter, for instance. So, I always have to wonder if my objection to the failure of coherence that I perceive in, say Riding toward Everywhere, is not instead my having overlooked WTV’s use of formal incoherence as a means to indict the political and economic terms that are undermining certain other sorts of values dealt with in the text (freedom of physical movement, the dream of American self-determination, &c.). For this reason, too, I tend to be pretty accepting of formal decisions evident in WTV’s works for which I do not (yet) quite understand the rationale.

[Context/editorial note: I’ve been meaning to read Evan Dara’s latest novel Flee for a while now, and when Biblioklept contributor Ryan Chang told me he’d be reading it as part of a contemporary literature class I decided to join him. This is the first part of a two-part discussion which took place over a few weeks of emails. — ET].   

Edwin Turner: So you’re reading Evan Dara’s Flee for a class, right? What’s the name of the class again? What are some of the other texts in the class?

Ryan Chang: Yeah, a class called 21st Century Fiction: What is Contemporary? We started out reading Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo and Acker’s Empire of the Senseless. We just finished reading Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad (awful), and we’re moving onto Chaon’s Await Your Reply and Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Everything, up to Pynchon, has as its central conflict the dissolution of the subject vis. the postmodern. Perhaps because of the spatialization of time (Egan, Reed) or a steroidal fungibility of a self because of technology (Chaon). The awareness of how deeply we are disciplined by master narratives (Acker). We’ve yet to get to Blake Butler’s There Is No Year and Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker, which I’m looking forward to after the Chaon and Egan who, in their attempt to write novels critical of the contemporary (more so of Egan, who does nothing but neuter the very real state of late capitalism’s terror into entertainment), do not make it past the merely interesting. I liked the Egan much less than the Chaon; part of the problem is the prose style, I think — it’s characteristically white American, shaped by sentimentality and preoccupied with the syntax of conventional form. In other words, the blueberry muffin prose styles betray the experimental forms in which they’re enveloped.

ET: I always have to look up the word fungibility. Dara’s Flee seems to fit into that early theme you mention, the conflict of the dissolution of the subject, which is both the book’s formal rhetorical strategy, but also its plot program, encapsulated (maybe) on page 45: “What is the weight of we?” What do you make of Dara’s style here? Like initial impression?

RC: I’m about ~40 pages in. I think I mentioned in the Books Acquired thing I wrote that Dara, stylistically, is hitting hard on Gaddis. Admittedly, I’m most familiar with the late Gaddis — Carpenter’s Gothic. (Agape Agape, too, but this is, of course, his letter to Bernhard.) I like that both focus on voice, on streams of speech that collide or blur into each other. The Gaddis influence is more of an echo than anything.
Specifically re: Dara — the interruptions, digressions and hesitations immediately struck me as something like a Tragic Greek chorus that, having incurred some sort of its own trauma (and not acting only as the all-knowing unconscious of the play), is completely disoriented, confused of its own purpose. But amidst the cacophony–or something like a directed cacophony towards the reader–they are still unwittingly functioning as a chorus. They’re giving us the stage for Flee’s story, hinting quietly at the book’s central plot conflict. Also naming characters (Carol, Rick, Marcus, etc), which is now more intriguing to me at the passage from p.45 you mention. What’s also different in Carpenter’s Gothic is, while that whole book remains on one diegetic level (as far as I can remember, it’s been a few years) because no narrator ever announces itself, in Dara, there’s a blurring of diegetic arenas, a refusal to centralize any narrative authority. Ok, so, re: dissolution of the subject: It seems that not only are the chorus members interrupting themselves, but they’re also interrupting the narrator as well. Each left-margin emdash cuts the narrator off, in a way, if you will. That scene when they’re pitying Rick, acting as a narrator with dialogue tags. The commonly individuated voice of the narrator is subsumed into the characters’ diegetic arena; a tension between the collective and individual implicit in prose structure alone. It also seems, by “36,551,” that whatever the population is fleeing from is not collectively driven (ie., the pity for Mark’s poorly planned meetings for something, we don’t know what yet), but selfishly driven. And in the flattening power of numbers, that selfishness — a hermetic individuality — becomes collective. There is a kind of infinite distance between I and we that, perhaps, the book is trying to trace? Or its relationship in the temporality of the novel is a perpetual expanding/contracting relationship, like a rubber band?

As far as I am in the book, the interruptions and digressions also have a hysteria to them that points to something the chorus is ignoring even in the face of the beginnings of a series of rude awakenings. Each voice just bemoans this dissolution of themselves; but, especially in the scene where Rick is, like, torn apart for his idea in service of the township, each voice is just narcissistically concerned with how it’s going to inconvenience them, rather than the potential worth of Rick’s idea.

ET: I teach an introductory American lit class, and today we were talking about Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily,” which I think offers this wonderful example of a first-person plural narrator, this kind of limited chorus that is not-quite omniscient, not-quite omnipresent, and hardly omnipotent. It’s this weird we that seems able to transcend time, but not space—it can live for more than eighty years but it can’t see into Emily Grierson’s house. Its limitations are human; its limitations are the limitations of all the members of a community. I had your email in the back of my head while I was riffing on all this today—that, yes, the we is this fiction that we all subscribe to (hey look, I just used it!)—it’s our linguistic tag for culture, religion, whatever—but it requires some other—a you, I guess, that we can all point to, an Emily Grierson that’s only part of the we by paradoxically not being a part of the we, by defining the we…Flee doesn’t seem to have that other, at least not in the first seven chapters anyway, although it does foreground two protagonists in Rick and Carol—something that Dara’s first novel The Lost Scrapbook does not do. The Lost Scrapbook is far more polyglossic than Flee also, which again reminds me of Faulkner’s story in its unified we-ness—Flee‘s narrative voice somehow unifies entropy, breakdown, the chaotic rumbling becomes this throbbing tone of dissolution (“There’s no here here,” page 79), where the narcissistic flight of each member of the community paradoxically underwrites the viability of a community, the possibility of a community…

RC: I’m deeper in now, at Chapter “X,” so let me riff about this we some more. The more Carol/Rick seem to take up page-space, the more apparent it is that narcissism is Flee‘s central motif, and collectivity–the possibility or failure of–its central theme. As in our last exchange [on Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04], I’m reminded of Whitman’s line in “Democratic Vistas”:
 

Subjection, aggregation of that sort, is impossible to America; but the fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me.

​–Oh, my. I mean, I look around and…and what is my context? What can I do — can I mean — what can I possibly do that would–

​–Am I just a receptacle? Am I not supposed to have some bearing on things? I look and see and look and see. But one thing I do not see. Where am I in–?

Perhaps this impossibility of a collective is a dialectical relationship, then, built on some fiction “before” the we (perhaps the originary fiction that exists outside of time, that inaugurates the possibility of writing/thinking the fictional we), where the I needs a we in order to be that I, to be secure in a space wherein the I is coordinated by other I’s, which means that a we is constructed from the I‘s projection onto the fiction of the we. Maybe? This we would always point to this “before” fiction, and rely on the projection of I’s, which the we would reflect back onto an/the I. Was that English?

And later, when a voice reflects that standing in the same spot–eg., staying in A-burg–is moving backward in time. Fleeing is recontextualized as a move for progress. It foregrounds the emptiness in the American dream, the “before” fiction that is produced for us, to keep us fixed in the imposed, sanctioned narrative, that was always there. Dara concretizes this we very early in the book — on page 17, a voice (a professor perhaps; now I think it is Marcus) says something about a Tertullian presence of absence. The town is this space that, given that the economy works as it’s supposed to, promotes the veneer of collectivity. Of a small town community, when it is really just a zone for neoliberal capitalism to sustain itself; an abstract narcissism, one that produces its own flow and consciousness — the result of developing capitalist production to a logical extreme. It sells the idea of community to A-burg. In the absence of viable jobs, of an inability to pay bills, all bets are off.

Back to Carol/Rick/Ian. There’s little sense that Carol & Rick are in love; Carol keeps distance between them; ‘Thanks, man,’ is a favorite phrase of hers, often after sex. We’re ostensibly meant to root for them because of their separation from the cacophonous chorus, but when Carol decides to start Hire Ground–an unemployment agency, for God’s sake; they’re taking advantage of the housing crisis in the same self-preservational, narcissistic way that the flee-ers are–we’re meant to see that they are not only no different from the chorus, but perhaps worse. Because they think it is doing A-burg good, that they’re rebuilding it. Too, that they “adopt” Ian, and form this haphazard nuclear family unit, we’re also meant to see a) that late capitalism has made the family unit completely fungible, a variable in which to stabilize the flow of capital and b) the impossibility of even this supposed basic collective. Micro forms of the collective — the couple, the triad, etc. — show, as if in relief, the mere fungibility of late capitalistic collectivity.

Of course, there is a different kind of collectivity at stake for Dara; a collectivity that, perhaps, allows us to live outside the forces of administration, as Adorno has said. That’s what I’m wondering now — are the conditions for imagining a fictional we in which “real” collectivity, however it is defined, can exist completely precluded from us? That is, at least in Adorno, the ability to imagine a life undamaged relies upon the damage in everyday reality. What is more important — the ability to imagine that undamaged collectivity, or living it? Does Dara ask, in Flee, “is there a different way to live?”

ET:  Well hell, Ryan, you’ve given me a lot to chew on here. (And used “fungiblity” again, too!). So I’ll work through that last question first:

Does Dara ask, in Flee, “is there a different way to live?”

Maybe all, or most, strong/strange literature asks “Is there a different way to live?” — or maybe, to rephrase that: “Is there a different way to imagine?”

I think Flee offers a description here of the we without necessarily giving us a prescription for the “undamaged collectivity” you bring up, and that description is sort of Deconstruction 101 stuff—that yeah, there is no we without the possibility of fleeing the we, dissolving the we. No presence without absence.

This theme is shot through the novel—I think of the moment where one of the voices points out that he comes to know another A-burgian through his absence: “Now that he’s not here, I see him everywhere” (94). The chapter “336” is full of these moments that speak to what you describe above as “the originary fiction that exists outside of time, that inaugurates the possibility of writing/thinking the fictional we.” On page 151:

–But of course. We’re joining the future. Everything everywhere turning into bits, into dust, to data, to imperishable prickles, and now we are too…It must happen here, when here is transvestite everywhere. And so we vanish. Do you get this?: Fear of vanishing begets vanishing. For by vanishing we become stronger – we become eternal. Dematerializing we find diamond-solidity. Anti-dimension can only expand. Non-being is the best defense. Only absence lasts forever.

Your analysis and your questions above reminded me of “Some Principles of Democracy and Deconstruction—American or Otherwise” by A. Samuel Kimball, who I was very lucky to have as a teacher and mentor in graduate school. Kimball:

Democracy and deconstruction name the namelessness of a we, the people in relation to this people’s unimaginable possibilities of collective self-identification to come.

And:

For this reason democracy and deconstruction locate the we in a future that transcends any possible transcendence of time, and therefore that remains utterly contingent and extinguishable, able to be obliterated in an apocalypse of the name.

Working from Derrida, Kimball suggests that

. . . democracy and deconstruction demand of the citizen to come an attitude of radical forgiveness and hospitality [and] entail a radical affirmation—that is, they are ways of saying “Yes?” or “Who’s there?” in the absence of any determinate voicing.

Radical forgiveness, hospitality, asking Who’s there?—are these ways to live “outside the forces of administration”?

More Kimball:

Thus, democracy and deconstruction require an incessant work of critique.

Flee is one such critique.

And finally from Kimball’s list:

Democracy and deconstruction are inseparable from the fictionalizing, virtualizing power of literature.

In the spirit (of the spirit) of the fictionalizing, virutalizing power of literature—and in the spirit of Flee’s formalizing rhetoric, I’ll let the novel speak back. From pages 154-55:

–What is the preceding unsaid, the imposed premise in whose conditions we rattle, the implicit postulate that, with our every whim and volition and gesture, we continue, modify, extend, affirm, even through de-affirming it? What is that statement, that referent, that no one will say, or can say with rigor and conviction? The central and determining predicate that can no longer be brought forth? Why can we never get to the one organizing proposition that, in no uncertain terms, will–

Well?

A. The first time I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Inherent Vice, I was in the middle of rereading Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49, which I hadn’t read in fifteen years. I remembered the novel’s vibe, its milieu, but not really its details.

B. I read The Crying of Lot 49 and then immediately reread it. It seemed much stronger the second time—not nearly as silly. Darker. Oedipa Maas, precursor to Doc Sportello, trying not to lose the thread as she leaves the tower for the labyrinth, rushing dizzy into the sixties.

C. Another way of saying this: Inherent Vice is sequel to The Crying of Lot 49. Any number of details substantiate this claim (and alternately unravel it, if you wish, but let’s not travel there)—we could focus on the settings, sure, or maybe the cabals lurking in the metaphorical shadows of each narrative—is The Golden Fang another iteration of The Tristero?—but let me focus on the conclusions of both novels and then discuss the conclusion of PTA’s film.

D. A favorite line from a favorite passage from The Crying of Lot 49: “the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself.” Paranoia as a kind of sustained hope, a way to find meaning, order, a center.

E. The final pages of The Crying of Lot 49 find Oedipa trying to make sense of the labyrinth (my emphases in bold):

For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth. In the songs Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard sang was either some fraction of the truth’s numinous beauty (as Mucho now believed) or only a power spectrum. Tremaine the Swastika Salesman’s reprieve from holocaust was either an injustice, or the absence of a wind; the bones of the GI’s at the bottom of Lake Inverarity were there either for a reason that mattered to the world, or for skin divers and cigarette smokers. Ones and zeroes. So did the couples arrange themselves. At Vesperhaven House either an accommodation reached, in some kind of dignity, with the Angel of Death, or only death and the daily, tedious preparations for it. Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.

There is either meaning, or there is not meaning.

F. This passage comes after Oedipa drinks a lot of bourbon and decides to drive “on the freeway for a while with her lights out, to see what would happen”—precursor for the final moments of the novel Inherent Vice, where Doc—alone—drives around LA in a fog both literal and metaphorical.

G. Doc is solitary but joins a convoy of other drivers whose lights create a transitory community, ad hoc, meaningful but bound to dissolve.

H. This dissolution is prefigured in a scene just a page or two before. Doc has just met with Sparky, a character from the novel’s ARPANET plot (elided from the film). Sparky: “It’s all data. Ones and zeros. All recoverable. Eternally present.” Doc’s reply—“Groovy”—indicates a soul perhaps more at peace with the undecidable than Oedipa is.

I. Or maybe Doc, six or seven years after Oedipa’s lead, has assumed the alien paranoia necessary to navigate America. Maybe.

J. Paranoia: Paranoia, again, as the means to make the chaotic cohere.

K. The most frequent negative criticism that I’ve heard about Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Inherent Vice: The film is incoherent. (Let Dana Stevens’ review at Slate stand as a representative example).

L. I don’t think that this criticism is particularly strong—the film coheres thematically around paranoia, and can be succinctly summarized in its own terms:

M. No but hey that’s some fuzzy precis there, bro, thou protest–What’s the film about, man?

N. Let’s let the novel answer:

Sauncho was giving a kind of courtroom summary, as if he’d just been handling a case. “…yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever. May we trust that this blessed ship is bound for some better shore, some undrowned Lemuria, risen and redeemed, where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpire…”

Land, hope, possibility. The old good vs. evil deal.

O. You said you’d talk about the film’s conclusion, man.

True.

P. Okay, so there are a couple of differences between the conclusions of the novel and the film. PTA makes his film cohere around the Coy narrative—this ends up being Doc’s good deed, his major success. While the same is true in the book, Anderson’s film is more sentimental in its treatment of the Coy/Hope/Amethyst narrative, more affecting—and more hopeful—than Pynchon’s novel.

Q. (Parenthetically: Owen Wilson was great as Coy. Still, I like to imagine a world where frequent PTA collaborator Philip Seymour Hoffman didn’t die of a heroin overdose but lived to play Coy Harlingen, who also didn’t die of a heroin overdose).

R. Another tonal difference between film and novel is PTA’s treatment of the Bigfoot/Doc relationship, which again is perhaps more sentimental in the film—certainly in the final scene between the two, when it becomes clear that, despite what he says, Doc is, in a sense, Bigfoot’s partner. His brother’s keeper.

S. The most significant difference though in the conclusion of the film is its insertion of Shasta into the final scene. Again, there’s a touch here of PTA’s sentimentality (I use the term admiringly, to be clear); of the resolution that, y’know, resolves, that points toward reconciliation, hope, love, forgiveness, gratitude. (This is the ending of Punch-Drunk Love, Magnolia, Boogie Nights, The Master…). Doc has a final partner in Shasta Fay, a warm body to traverse the fog with. But is it all in his head? Just his imagination? Is Shasta Fey Hepworth really there? Am I being paranoid?

T. The last few seconds of the film are a simple aesthetic marvel. Shasta, the film’s feminine trace, flipping from Flatlander back to hippie chick, from zero to one, lays in a languid haze against Doc’s shoulder, the car encased in night noir fog. Doc seems steady yet unnerved, stolidly paranoid. In the last few seconds, an intense light shines on his face, seems to break through Johnny Greenwood’s woozy dark ominous score.

U. What does Doc see?

His expression: The edge of a smirk? Is there a moment of insight here?

V. And then Chuck Jackson’s “Any Day Now” comes crashing into the audio with a martial pep that contrasts Greenwood’s somber score and the visual cut to black. The tune’s intro keyboard riff moves from a zany romp to a minor key depression in the span of a few seconds, and Johnson plaintively sings: “Any day now / I will hear you say, ‘Goodbye, my love’ /And you’ll be on your way /Then my wild beautiful bird, you will have flown, oh /  Any day now I’ll be all alone.” Is this what Doc sees? That Shasta will fly?

W. So I suppose Inherent Vice is a film about looking: Looking into, over, about; looking under:

X. I wrote this riff for myself. I wrote it in the hope of pinning down the conjunctions and disjunctions between these narratives that have been rattling around in my silly skull. But all it’s done is made me more confused.

A few weekends ago, I spent several days primitive camping on a tiny, rocky island off Cape Canaveral. The weather was miserable and the fishing was poor, but the company and bourbon offered cheer. Still, by the time I got home I was terribly sore, thoroughly damp, and inhabited by one of those hangovers that sets up shop inside one’s soul as a kind of second-consciousness, coloring the world a dreadful surreal blue. I wanted to see my family, but they were out playing tennis. There was a small stack of packages waiting for me though—review copies for this blog—with Jon McNaught’s Birchfield Close neatly nestled atop. After showering, I lay on my soft soft bed in the afternoon, read through the brief poem-novel-comic, and drifted into a gentle warm hazy nap. It was the most marvelous medicine. Sublime.

I read Birchfield Close again later that night and then every night for a week. McNaught’s work—see his longer novel Dockwood—is its own aesthetic experience: Minimal, gentle, tranquil, but also evocative and complex. Birchfield Close is (maybe) the (non-)story of two lads who climb upon a roof and spend the day observing (or not observing) their neighborhood.

They see birds and people, dogs and snails, balloons and bikes (etc.), all rendered in gentle gradations of orange-pink and grey-blue and black-black.

In one of my favorite little episodes, one boy reaches for a branch. His imagination transmutes the branch into a rifle, and a play-shooting spree ensues.

Birchfield Close is comprised entirely of such moments, yet none of its episodes feel discrete. Rather, each panel pushes (pushes? That’s not the right verb!) into the next, a miniature gesture that creates—that somehow is—the entire work. The effect is soothing.

I’ve read Birchfield Close a dozen times now (read? Is that the right verb?), and I’m still (happily) unsure what commentary McNaught might be making on media. The story is full of images of “entertainments” that may or may not be at odds with the neighborhood’s ambiance: a handheld video game, a banal soap opera, a pop song on the radio. In another favorite episode, we move from rooftop to an airplane flying through the sky to the actual inside of the airplane, where a passenger watches Nemo’s reunion with his overprotective father. On the next page, we are treated to the imaginative forms that the clouds might take—formations that the airplane passenger, wrapped up in viewing Finding Nemo on a tiny headrest screen, perhaps misses. But if there’s a judgment here, McNaught seems to leave it to the viewer to suss out. As we pan back down to the boys on the roof, we see that one remains watching the clouds, shaping them in his imagination (or perhaps he’s sharing an imaginative vision with the airplane passenger), while the other boy has returned to his own tiny screen to play a fighting game. He misses the sunset.

Or does he miss the sunset? Maybe it’s simply part of his own aesthetic experience with the game, a peripheral, environmental occurrence, one he enjoys as transitory and ambient, an event promised to repeat again and again. I like this second reading more, as it fits neatly with my own reading experience of Birchfield Close—the book is an ambient aesthetic experience, calming but quizzical, deeply enjoyable—physical: light, color, the touch of the fine thick paper. I’ve tried to capture some of that reading experience here but have undoubtedly failed. Better you read see think feel for yourself.

Birchfield Close and other books by Jon McNaught are available from the good people at Nobrow Press.

[Context/editorial note: I’d been meaning to read Evan Dara’s latest novel Flee for a while, and when Biblioklept contributor Ryan Chang told me he’d be reading it as part of a contemporary literature class I decided to join him. This is the second part of a two-part discussion which took place over a few weeks of emails. We discuss the book’s conclusion, including what some people might think of as “spoilers.”

Read part one of our discussion of  Flee.

The tl;dr version of all of this: Both Ryan and I loved Flee, a 2013 novel about the citizens of a New England town who, uh, flee, for reasons never made entirely clear.  I claim that “Flee is maybe the best novel (so far, anyway) to aesthetically and philosophically address the economic collapse of ’08.” Ryan called it a book “for people who like books to fuck with them and then be their friend.” And I agree with him. — ET]

Ryan Chang: Right–Flee doesn’t prescribe a future, or at least an alternative future. “841” testifies to this. The A-burgian upstakers are no different from the new settlers, rejoicing in the bargains to be had in the town. Carol and Marcus quietly disappear (Spoiler alert). Flee is overall hesitant to prescribe, I think. In my previous e-mail, I was thinking out loud a bit, trying to see if something in the book was pointing to these spaces of the “nonidentical” as Adorno calls it; that Flee as an aesthetic object figures, in exactly what isn’t said, the suffocating presence that squeezes the life out of A-burg, could figure a moment of possibility in absence. Some kind of fracture that, even if it is a failure (as A-burg is, I think), is a temporary moment of reprieve from the administered life.

I’m not sure what the forms of Kimball’s “radical forgiveness” and “hospitality” would be, if he points to them — especially of the former. And is it only that the literary artists get to have all the fun of democracy? Exactly where does democratic critique happen off the page? I’m wondering because it seems that the form of popular critique — save from public protest and other distortions of space — are infected with exploitative capital, with ideology, unwittingly going along with the system that saves the banks before humanity. Additionally: to whom–or what–is forgiveness granted? Hospitality seems more tangible to me, but the phrases Yes? Who’s There? imply exclusion rather than inclusion to me. As if at the door of democracy, the speaker hesitates. Should not a radical affirmation continually say yes rather than no at the door? The questioning yes is skeptical. I wonder if a self-consciousness and -becoming out of administration is required. The molectular make-up of the present absence that suffocates A-Burg and, implicitly, whatever other small town, would have to be transposed, if you like, into another key. To mention Lerner again (briefly) — do you remember that scene in the book, with the first hurricane, the (eventually fictional) threat of Irene destroying the infrastructure as a moment when disparate communities — who would otherwise keep to themselves, much like the voices in Flee – begin convening? That was just a way of getting to the epigraph of the book: “Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.”

Or have I misread the Kimball?

For Horkheimer & Adorno, it rests in this nigh-messianic shift of perception of our past and our future that glimpse, momentarily, a humanity (as it stood, for them, there was no humanity. Only administration). I am reading a chapter from Ulrich Plass’ Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘Notes to Literature’ for another class right now. Here is Plass, on a theme in Adorno’s essay “The Essay as Form”:

​…[One] can scarely fail to hear an echo of one of the most persistent themes of Adorno’s essay, namely, the theme of the universal realization of homelessness beginning–mythologically–with Odysseus, and fulfilled–negatively–with the destruction and displacement brought about by administratively organized terror and destruction.

​Indeed we commence in homelessness, and the appropriation of Enlightenment ideals by capital gave us another myth — that of progress; in the American key, that of suburbia, of the family, that of the home — that was always tenuous, contingent to the illusion of stability produced from unceasing economic growth. This is the narrative momentum in Flee. Here, perhaps, Kimball is helpful, because I was about to type: “Adorno’s catastrophe isn’t immediately ours,” but that is a problematic sentence because it is immediately ours. It is humanity’s destruction writ as large as no one could imagine. I am all for radical affirmation, but does Kimball’s democracy have a border? Is it the door? Is it the Yes? Who’s There? And if Flee is such a critique–I agree with you–does it also achieve a kind of shifted consciousness, does it see democracy differently?

Perhaps “X” could be such a moment. It is a dark, dark chapter. It’s cruel and all-too-real. The way Dara reels us in with Marcus. The hope and then the gradual subsumption into the market, that his affective attachments know no other way except participation in the very system that destroyed whatever sense of home A-burg produced. And the shims — stand-ins for that sense of home, but really showing in staggering, violent relief that there is no home. Only–wait for it–fungible units of potential profit. If I can interpret out of Chapter “X” what Dara is trying to figure: a failure. Marcus, though we’re sympathizing with him, isn’t that much different from the rest of the squanderers, right? He’s one of the few left with a job, but it isn’t clear exactly why he keeps working. The infrastructure has stopped — didn’t the municipality shut down the gas lines or something? Who’s coming to check the lights? But he works, in some vain hope of a redemption, which is the myth that Americans are sold. Even in the face of nigh-complete abandonment, Marcus is still plugging away. There’s a moment earlier in the book when a voice is waxing off about the ritual of ritual — what’s needed of Marcus is not to start a new collective within the system — especially in the language and forms that avail itself to usurpation by City Hall (ie., “Hire Ground”) — but to fail. I have been trying, parallel to our conversation (or perhaps inside the conversation; I’m not sure, I’m putting this here in case we have to edit this whole sentence out) to think of “841” as the punctuation mark of the Too-Big-To-Fail allegory, perhaps in Benjamin’s sense (the death’s head allegory, that it is the trace evidence of catastrophe). The promise in the negativity of “X” is that it is wholly different from the A-Burg we know for the whole book. As the town repopulates — the chance is lost for the circumstances that blows away the suffocating present-absence in the town. Radical affirmation and inclusivity could have presented themselves as the only option for the re-build of a home. I’m going off of this because of its temporal setting — had the banks failed, who could’ve known what the future would’ve been? The new future, in the absence of administration? No one, which is frightening, but it is at exactly that edge that could’ve also promised something better.

So: that Flee doesn’t prescribe, but virtualizes (especially in “X”), is a good thing: it points elsewhere, outside of the book, beyond our experience of time. To the possibility of a possibility, maybe? But the Kimball is apt: critique must be incessant, and literature is its strongest force.

What did you think of “X”?

Edwin Turner: Well I loved “X.” It’s almost like a perfect little sci-fi short story—almost like a Twilight Zone episode minus the pulp. I wonder how reading it first—or even on its own—would change the reading experience.

You’re right that Dara reels us in with Marcus, who’s been there at the peripheries of the novel. He becomes the protagonist that the Hire Ground crew simply couldn’t become. Marcus’s failure is fascinating. He tries to practice a kind of radical gratitude, but there’s a sense—especially at the end of “X”—that his gratitude is solipsistic, narcissistic—masturbatory even. We learn early in the chapter that he jerks off to mental images of Laura Linney, who later turns up in one of the gratitude mantras he recites before falling asleep. His gratitude prayer is really a form of consolation—hedonistic consolation at that.

And of course he fails at the end of “X” to perform—I’ll go back to Kimball via Derrida here—radical hospitality to Carol. He can’t affirm her existence—can’t ask her, “Yes?” When he does sort of have a breakdown and realizes his failure, it’s kind of too late, I think. He transmits his gratitude through a medium. Like the neighbor whom he shares music with, or the lights that he watches dance at night, there’s a lack of real human connection here. Marcus’s experience of gratitude is wholly internalized. He wants to share but can’t. When he does actually have an opportunity to talk to someone (outside the old record store), he’s belligerent. He can’t turn his imaginative conception of gratitude into action.

And yet I don’t think Dara is condemning him, or satirizing his efforts. Marcus is an idealist, even though his will to self-improvement eclipses his wish to do unto others, to help others (and save the town, too). Marcus’s epiphany is entirely secular, it seems to me, despite his wishes for transcendence. The big-G he latches onto is Gratitude, not God, although I think he’d like the G to name both, to be the name of the name. Indeed, Dara elides references to churches in A-burg—he shows us only stores, commerce, and government. Notations of the spirit, when they appear, are othered, non-Western—the Tibetan prayer wheel, for example, which gives people access to “the ritual of the ritual” (the spirit of the spirit—an abyssal structure, to use another Derridean term). Later, Marcus invokes Sumerian cosmology, gamelan music, and the “Indonesian creed that God is found in dissonance.” In the next line, the narrator—finely tuned into Marcus’s reeling consciousness—tells us that our hero’s “G-energy is becoming limitless.” I read the line ironically. Marcus’s will is to transcend, to find a gratitude that says, Yes yes yes, Thanks thanks thanks, outside of a human economy (time and place)—but this is impossible. He wants to be radically open to a transcendence-to-come, but fails when it arrives at his door. He closes, he rejects. His gratitude is ultimately limited to/by his imagination and his memory.

The most interesting moment of “841” for me—and I agree with you that it punctuates the book, returns the narrative to a kind of normalized continuum—are the notations about the families from Sierra Leone. What do you make of that?

RC: I didn’t catch the Linney connection, which is brilliant; I totally agree with your reading of “X.” There are a lot of ways to think about how “X” juxtaposes itself with the rest of the chapters. It names itself as a literary artifact/time stamp with the Roman numeral but also separates itself from that narrative because it doesn’t fit perfectly in the novel’s structure, both linguistically and architecturally. You’re right that Marcus becomes the protagonist that Hire Ground couldn’t be. It’s interesting to think of Hire Ground against Marcus vis. their narrative function, because their plot lines are about how they can’t practice hospitality, or don’t have the tools in which to practice it. They’re failed forms of coupling, of the base minimum unit of collectivity in A-Burg. Hire Ground figures this failed family unit. Carol and Rick are a couple of convenience, of [produced] necessity, wonderfully noted in Dara’s choice to have Carol always say “man,” like they’re bros, after sex. They attempt to practice a radical hospitality by accepting Ian, no questions asked, but HG falls apart for two reasons. Firstly, that Marcus & Rick’s hospitality is almost masturbatory; they’re self-preserving via the HG scheme, taking advantage of a bad situation and turning it into a profit for themselves; it’s why John from City Hall eagerly wants to contract them into municipal work. Secondly, Ian is a kind of orphan, his own fleeing confirms that he was never interested in rebuilding the town. Of practicing hospitality. So too: Rick. HG isn’t making him money, so he skips town for an academic job. All this as if to say that the family can’t work in the way that neoliberalism sells it as. They’re being sold a form of the family through the vocabulary of business, but it can’t work, because it’s grounded in self-preserving narcissism.

It’s a similar trajectory for Marcus, but something is much more sinister about “X.” You’re right that Dara isn’t condemning him; I think the narrative sympathizes with him. Pities him. Because his mode of practicing hospitality is too embedded, like HG, in idioms of neoliberalism. It is a (western) secular realization, for sure; the book never explicitly mentions a western theological system or God or Jesus or anything like that. The pairing of hospitality vs. “Eastern” traditions; Bertrand Russell; Omnilectics. It’s as if the book is trying to constellate, a la Benjamin, a different history for Marcus so he can make a future that is radically inclusive. But it ultimately fails.

For one, I think the difference in language between “X” and the rest of the novel is indicative. “X” and the interpellated Carol/Rick/Ian sequences are not afraid to name. To say, to express, whereas the rest of the chapters can’t. They categorically can’t define, can’t definitively say this is the bad thing, and that is the solution. How they’re unified is in the emdash, the hesitation-interruption; it is a negative marker of collectivity, all in the not-said. “X” and the HG sequences, in their ease of expression, show that there’s something else that’s limiting them. I’ll try to connect this to the line you cite about G-Energy. I agree, it should be read ironically, because the irony is that once that force that’s beyond space & time (Kimball’s transcendental future) is named, it is no longer transcendent. It’s a name, and it’s syntax is something that might be found for a private Yoga studio or on the bottle of a Dr. Bronner’s competitor. Language can’t communicate, it’s a limit, yes yes yes… So becoming attuned to that “presence of presence,” the trace of the graffiti’s “we was here,” to its transcendental possibility of “we is everything,” means a kind of true communication. But what is that? I think that answer is in Kimball…Kimball’s theses seem to imply that a democracy — which is resonating with Whitman and Adorno, I think — is always a not yet. And Dara’s resonating frequency here is flickering in and out of it; literature as a virtualizing structure can’t even do this. But it can approach it. It has to asymptotically approach it (eg., “X”), and necessarily fail. Because language is a limit, will always be a limit.

It’s funny; it seems that both “X” and “841” both fall in step to a kind of weird correspondence. “841” is the 11th chapter, and this: “And, well, with so many people filing for Chapter 11 here, there were some very fine oppor–“. Filing for Chapter 11, an admission of bankruptcy–both financially and perhaps morally/spiritually–reproduces the momentum. There could be a reading that says that the Sierra Leone families are the patsies in a kind of commodified hospitality on the part of the government, that it’s another form of economic colonialism. A forced hospitality rebranded as hospitality, a “government program.” It’s also interesting that one of the voices says “…the British had to go in and get out all the foreigners” (234).

What do you think?

ET: I can’t believe I didn’t see that “X” was Ch. 10 and “841” was Ch. 11—yes, the bankruptcy thing, yes, totally—Flee is maybe the best novel (so far, anyway) to aesthetically and philosophically address the economic collapse of ’08. (He writes, having only read a few others—in fact, Auster’s somewhat forgettable Sunset Park  is all I can summon this minute).  I kept reading the title “X” as a kind of algebraic variable, an indefinite article set against the other chapters’ (seemingly solidly) referential titles.

And on referentiality/indefiniteness—-

I like that you’ve brought up the graffiti here—which, tellingly, Marcus mocks. The second graffito communicates—in the absence of its sender—and, as you rightly state, points to a transcendental wish in three perfect parts: the “we” (who?), an “is” that seems to transcend copular status, and then that oh-so-indefinite pronoun everything. Marcus fails to read through its possibilities: We is everything; We is everything; We is everything—etc. But why should Marcus try on different readings? He’s human.

Your note that the families from Sierra Leone might represent a “forced hospitality rebranded as hospitality” reminds me that the etymological root of “host” is “ghostis,” meaning stranger. This root also give us hostility, hospital, hostage….and it encapsulates the strange relationship between host and the hosted (as Derrida has written about in Of Hospitality and elsewhere). “Pure,” open, absolute–indefinite—hospitality is never fully possible—it requires always a dominance, an enforcing of boundaries on the part of the host—an imposing of definitions. The Sierra Leoneons help, perhaps, to define the “new” A-burgians (the “A,” its own algebraic variable) as the “rightful” (dominant) hosts. The hegemonic culture reifies itself in this way, through the specter of the other—here is “the reproduction of the momentum,” perhaps.

At the same time there’s a kind of sympathy there that some of the “new” A-burgians evoke towards the families from SL—but, yes, a sympathy doubled in the power of the host to be sympathetic, a sympathy that is not radical openness to any kind of future (any kind of we, or democracy, or whatever). Again, I’m not sure if this is condemnation as much as it is description. “841” returns us to the emdash, a technique that “unifies” (to use your term) the otherwise (supposedly) heteroglossic/polyphonic voices of Flee. The emdash is “hesitation-interruption,” but it also links,unifies (maybe). There are two sides to its pole, and if they push the words apart they can also link the words together.

Final thoughts of Flee? Good book? Who’s it for?

RC: We had a lot to talk about in Flee. There’s so much else that didn’t get addressed, because it couldn’t: Marcus’ theory that goes beyond dialectical thought, that goes beyond Boethian idealism and Hegel’s dialectics, the latter a system in which most, if not all, of the understanding of western thought and history has been filtered through. Whatever Omnilectics is. Bruegel. The Bertrand Russell quote I couldn’t track down. How does that constellation of artists and thinkers function? What is Dara giving is here? Who’s Ezra? Neil?

I’m beginning to shift my reading of “X,” slightly. Upon re-reading, it seems that Marcus has always been invested in a kind of masturbation. The radical gratitude is the myth itself, not a salve against the deserted town, nor the the way I had it before. It seemed that, initially, it had been something very genuine for Marcus, hence our connection to him as a character, the devastating outcome. But that the system subsumes it because of Marcus’ no-recourse, that it is always there in front of us for the entire chapter, is even more devastating. What’s eliminated is the narrative’s pity. See here: he mentions that he’ll set up a charitable fund for the Second Congo War. That he’ll market A-Burg as a backdrop for any movie. Also note in this small paragraph the return of the emdash. It is a signal of his return of the distended voices we’ve grown accustomed to for most of the novel, and a sliver of what Marcus’ “true” motivations are…

I liked this book a lot. I haven’t read The Lost Scrapbook or The Easy Chain, but Flee was incredibly rewarding…a strong, strong book. There’s not only attention paid to the aesthetic of the novel — the rhythms of the individual sentence, the tightly woven constellation-form of the book — but to its commitment to resisting easy narrative closure, to give the audience what it wants: pure entertainment, pure release from the tension of everyday life. This is not to say its function is primarily polemical or pedagogical. This was definitely a book that sucked me in and fucked with me a bit, and at the end, it said, “Okay, but it’s not really okay. But we have books.” This book is for people who like books to fuck with them and then be their friend.

ET: That’s a lovely description there, your last line—I feel like I should let it be the last line of the conversation, but the structure here is me replying to you, so: Yes, this is a book for people whole books to fuck with them and be their friend.

Yuri Herrera’s sharp, thrilling novella Signs Preceding the End of the World opens with calamity. A sinkhole — “the earth’s insanity” — nearly swallows our hero before we can properly meet her:

I’m dead, Makina said to herself when everything lurched: a man with a cane was crossing the street, a dull groan suddenly surged through the asphalt, the man stood still as if waiting for someone to repeat the question and then the earth opened up beneath his feet: it swallowed the man, and with him a car and a dog, all the oxygen around and even the screams of passers-by. I’m dead, Makina said to herself, and hardly had she said it than her whole body began to contest that verdict and she flailed her feet frantically backward, each step mere inches from the sinkhole, until the precipice settled into a perfect circle and Makina was saved.

This opening passage sets the tone of Signs Preceding the End of the World. Makina will repeatedly plunge into and out of danger as she treks from her village in borderland Mexico into the weird world of the Big Chilango–the United States.

Makina crosses the border to find her estranged brother, who left the village years ago with the dubious plan of claiming some land (supposedly) owned by his family. (Reader, mark the symbolism there). Makina’s mother prompts her journey, but she’s also aided by a trio of adversarial gangsters—Mr. Double-U, Mr. Aitch, and Mr. Q. At the end of the first chapter of Signs, Mr. Q summarizes Makina’s impending quest (and the novella itself) in terse but eloquent language:

You’re going to cross and you’re going to get your feet wet and you’re going to be up against real roughnecks; you’ll get desperate, of course, but you’ll see wonders and in the end you’ll find your brother, and even if you’re sad, you’ll wind up where you need to be.

Mr. Q plays seer in his short monologue, just one example of the novella’s mythic overtones. Or maybe the word I want is undertones: Signs Preceding the End of the World opens with the earth swallowing victims; underworld mobsters send a hero on a night-quest over rough waters and alien terrain; aided by an underground network, Makina must traverse labyrinths and mazes and dark spaces; and, yes, the book ends underground. This is subterranean fiction.

The mythic dimensions of Signs work so well precisely because of the novella’s concrete contours. Herrera’s prose (in Lisa Dillman’s marvelous English translation) is somehow simultaneously compact but expansive, each detail vital. (Reading Signs Preceding the End of the World, I finally understood what might be meant by that critical placeholder “muscular prose” — there is no fat here, but the book is in no way thin). Take for example an early passage wherein Herrera establishes Makina’s grit. As she boards a bus headed north, Makina faces ogling and harassment by two men — “hardly more than kids, with their peach fuzz and journey pride.” One sits next to her, uninvited, emitting bad intentions:

Makina felt the first contact, real quick, as if by accident, but she knew that type of accident: the millimetric graze of her elbow prefaced ravenous manhandling. She sharpened her peripheral vision and prepared for what must come , if the idiot did persist. He did.

After the boy brushes Makina’s thigh, she breaks his finger:

Makina turned to him, stared into his eyes so he’d know that her next move was no accident, pressed a finger to her lips, shhhh, eh, and the other hand yanked the middle finger of the hand he’d touched her with almost all the way back to an inch from the top of his wrist; it took her one second. The adventurer fell to his knees in pain…

(The notation of the “adventurer” strikes me as both funnier and crueler as I read it again now to type this out).

Signs is full of exhilarating moments, sharp, economic turns, both at plot and sentence level. To use its own term, the book “verses,” moves, exits, shifts. Verse is Dillman’s smart translation of Herrera’s own neologism jarchar. Dillman writes in her translator’s note that jarchar derives from “jarchas (from the Arabic kharja, meaning exit), which were short Mozarabic verses or couplets tacked on to the end of longer Arabic or Hebrew poems written in Al-Andulus, the region we now call Spain.” Note here, dear reader, the synthesis, the shifts, the hybridization, the semiotic openness of Dillman’s verse. The word encapsulates not just the book’s rhythm and tone, but also its spirit of transmission, transmogrification, and change.

For all its versing and speed though, Herrera’s novella is often contemplative (and poetic), as when Makina observes “the anglogaggle at the self-checkouts…how miserable they looked in front of those little digital screens.” Or when an old Mexican (who says he’s “just passing through,” despite having lived in the U.S. for fifty years), explains Americas’s favorite pastime to Makina, who’s stunned by the architecture of a baseball stadium:

Every week the anglos play a game to celebrate who they are. … One of them whacks it, then sets off like it was a trip around the world, to every one of the bases out there, you know the anglos have bases all over the world, right? Well the one who whacked it runs from one to the next while the others keep taking swings to distract their enemies, and if he doesn’t get caught he makes it home and his people welcome him with open arms and cheering.

The passage condenses realism and mythology, and shows how that very condensation underwrites so much of our own understanding (or misunderstanding) of U.S. America. The book’s mythic aesthetic is not an anesthetic to dull the cultural-political-economic realities of the borderland; rather, Makina’s quest taps into the deeper roots of story-telling and sharpens the stakes for character and reader alike. The mythic subterranean is real: In the labyrinth under the surface, tunnels disregard borders.

Makina, navigating that labyrinth, sees a future, hears it in the speech of the “homegrown” transplants making a new life in the U.S.:

They speak an intermediary tongue that Makina instantly warms to because it’s like her: malleable, erasable, permeable; a hinge pivoting between two like but distant souls, and then two more, and then two more, never exactly the same ones; something that serves as a link.

Makina finds in the language “a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born. But not a hecatomb… not a sudden absence but a shrewd metamorphosis.” For Makina,

It’s not another way of saying things: these are new things. The world happening anew, Makina realizes: promising other things, signifying other things, producing different objects.

Language here promises a future of new things and a new we. Later, a character remarks of the anglos: “They want to live forever but still can’t see that for that to work they need to change color and number. But it’s already happening.” As Signs shuttles to its thrilling conclusion, Herrera engages the costs and payoffs of that change.

Personal and expansive, dense but compact, Signs Preceding the End of the World offers its readers a timeless and timely epic in miniature. Highly recommended.

Signs Preceding the End of the World is new in paperback and ebook from And Other Stories.

I’m safe here at my office, away from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I almost certainly would not dare to write about it were it proximal. If the book were here with me, its text would infect me, and I’d replicate it in chunks here for you, dear reader, to sort out (or not sort out) as you wish (or do not wish).

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I’m almost finished with Gravity’s Rainbow, which is how I know that I’m not finished with Gravity’s Rainbow. I’m going to have to read it again. (I want to read it again).

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I’m about fifty pages from the last page—just got through/endured/delighted in/icked and acked at the Gross Suckling Conference, or, as I like to think of it, the alliterative abject dinner party.

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Gravity’s Rainbow is filled with more abject imagery than any novel I’ve ever read.

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I mean abjection here in the general sense of degradation, etc., but also in the specific sense that Julia Kristeva uses in Powers of Horror:

The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled. The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you—it is now here, jetted, abjected, into “my” world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.

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Forgive me for citing at such length, but perhaps Kristeva summarizes some aspect of Gravity’s Rainbow that deeply interests me: The core of the novel (the core that Pynchon atomizes, decentralizes, scatters like his main man Tyrone Slothrop)—the core of the novel rests on love and death, me and not-me: “How can I be without border?” The war and its corpses and rockets and dissolutions.

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Gravity’s Rainbow’s abjection at time seems to contest the Circe episode in Ulysses—oh Pynchon’s pigs!—our author contends with Joyce at the trough of literature.

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And the end here—oh what the hell is happening here at the end here?! What is happening to Slothrop—dissolving? Scattered? Orpheus? All those Maenads. Mouth harp and lyre.

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Slothrop down the toilet.

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Pynchon, Patron Saint of Toilet Humor—and Toilet Seriousness.

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So this riff seems to be dissolving. Maybe a few comments on the reading experience, no?

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Well it’s difficult. Very very difficult. I’m trying to think of a more difficult book.

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Gravity’s Rainbow’s rhetorical shifts are scattered, slippery, messy, dreamy-nightmare slushystuff. The camera speeds through space time consciousness, no respecter of borders and zones. The narrative is always out there ahead of the reader (or behind the reader, or above the reader, or below the reader), snaking and shifting and spinning, barreling into modes and methods often utterly alien. Sometimes there’s a guide, but can we trust it? Ulysses—yes—difficult, yes—but each episode of Ulysses adheres to its own kind of rhetorical logic, one that the reader might learn, follow, and explore (But hey wait, you say, You need to reread Gravity’s Rainbow, just like you reread Ulysses, then you’ll see the rhetorical (il)logic). …and, too, Ulysses had a few major maps there for its readers (Homer, Hamlet). Gravity’s Rainbow, sure, there are templates, but Pynchon explodes them, inverts them, subverts them, hides them, mocks them, adores them (How do you know? Are you sure?). 

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Biting his thumb at cause and effect.

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Drugs sex and jazz. 0s and 1s. Kong and his lady friend.

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But wait sorry pardon me—my thoughts scattered there. Yes, the reading experience—what engages and compels and sustains me most in Gravity’s Rainbow is the aesthetic pleasure (and aesthetic revulsion) of the novel: more than the plot, more than the meaning, it’s the dazzle and confusion I love.

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But then yes ah! That dazzle and confusion, those atomized particles: They crash back into each other, resolving into plot and into meaning, into strange connections. Synapses. Sections of the mosaic cohere—but the bigger picture, hesitant, irresolute, scattered.

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Can I promise more to come? I’d like to take another shot. I’d like a do over please. Safe here in my office, I wish I had the book with me.

Well: “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before [—]”

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So. Okay. So I finished Gravity’s Rainbow on Friday night, and reread the opening section (and more than the opening section) on Saturday morning, resisting a compulsion to immediately return to the beginning.

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So: Okay: Right?

The ending of Gravity’s Rainbow cycles back to the beginning (like Finnegans Wake): Blicero’s rocket, screaming across the sky—yes? no?—to invade the dreams (?) of psychic Pirate Prentice? The book: a loop, a Möbius strip, a film, its reels discombobulated, jostled, scattered…

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“…it’s all theatre,” we learn on the book’s first page (page 3); the book ends in a theater—the Orpheus Theater!—where maybe scattered Slothrop is the leading man, scattered, we find ourselves in him, parts of him—where the audience demands, on the book’s last page: “Start-the-show!”

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“You’re putting response before stimulus,” Spectro shakes his head at Pointsman, early in “Beyond the Zero,” the first section of Gravity’s Rainbow—does this describe the beginning/end of the novel? (“It has happened before”).

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Or, a bit earlier even, at the seance, (page 32), Gloaming describes one kind of plot: “…we should get something like a straight line” — but then gives us another kind of plot — “…however we’ve data that suggest the curves for certain —conditions, well they’re actually quite different—schizophrenics for example tend to run a bit flatter in the upper part then progressively steeper—a sort of bow shape … classical paranoiac—” Is this the shape of Gravity’s Rainbow?

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—but right this moment it’s that final dash that intrigues me—this in a novel full of dashes, this in a novel that name-checks Emily Dickinson, Eternal Empress of Dashes—the fragmented conclusion is full of dashes, lines obliterated by more perfect, straight lines, simultaneously connecting and disconnecting—like the novel’s final line:

“Now everybody—“

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Or just the “Now—” of the little fragment before the final fragment “Descent.”

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Or the second-person address a few pages previous (757), when Pynchon assassinates us (“you”), complicit with Richard Milhous Nixon: “Your guts in a spasm, you reach for the knob of the AM radio. ‘I don’t think—‘“

(I don’t think therefore I am not).

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(Or is this just the death-fantasy Zhlubb/Nixon admits to: All theater?)

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(Oh and hell Zhlubb’s adenoid?!)

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Where was I—?

Okay: So: Well:

That dash at the end—an invitation back to the beginning?

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The questions I have are many, and many of the questions I have might result from attending to sections of the plot (Slothrop, Roger and Jessica, Pointsman’s complaints) at the expense of attending to other sections of the plot (Blicero, Enzian).

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But the rhetorical technique hides the plot, like Slothrop’s desk buried under mounds of detritus. (And this is the aesthetic pleasure of reading Gravity’s Rainbow).

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Aesthetics though: Light and sound: This is a major element of the plot that I need to attend to in my rereading.

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So: I put a lot of question marks in this riff (and I threaten to write more as I reread)—so I’ll end with a question:

Good books/essays (preferably not-too-academic-in-tone) about Gravity’s Rainbow, dear readers?

I enjoy rereading more than reading. Returning to Moby-Dick, 2666, Ulysses, or Blood Meridian reveals so much more: More depth, more art, more structure, more precision, more humor, more pain, more more.

Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow is all more. Rereading Gravity’s Rainbow is like reading it for the first time, or, rather, more precisely, that is how I am experiencing it now—with clarity—compelled as I was to immediately circle back through its loop again.

Gravity’s Rainbow’s cohesion hides (hides is not the right verb) under detritus, in the flux of objects and concepts that tangle and unravel throughout the text. Indeed, the novel’s themes seem to repeat (with difference, with opposition) in the lists and rants that lard it.

A simple, early example comes on page 18, where Teddy Bloat turns spying eyes over our hero Tyrone Slothrop’s desk, where “Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom…” In A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel, Steven Weisenburger points out that “Among the list of objects on Slothrop’s desk are items, allusions, and brand names left in his wake throughout the novel.” Weisenburger proceeds to sift through these layers, pointing out connections, and offering (as always) helpful page numbers which attest how damn precise Pynchon’s novel is.

I picked up Weisenburger’s Companion on solicited recommendations from Twitter folk and readers of this blog, and I’ve found it unobtrusive and helpful so far. Weisenburger’s introductory essay is especially good, and foregrounds his intertextual approach to his Companion (he all but namechecks Mikhail Bakhtin: “Gravity’s Rainbow sets in motion ‘the Night’s Mad Carnvival’ (V133.38) of intertextual entertainments”; a few lines later, he describes the novel as a work of “encyclopedic heteroglossia”). Weisenburger also quickly helped to (re)confirm my sense that GR loops back into itself, its end cycling back to its beginning: “Gravity’s Rainbow is ‘heterocyclic’ (V249.26): rings are looped together in still larger, polymerized rings, looped together in the still larger cycling of its four parts.”

I’m about halfway through the second of those four parts, “Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering,” but still playing catch-up with the Weisenburger. I sometimes skim—sometimes with undue pride (Hey I got that reference on my own, thanks anyway Dr. W), and sometimes, admittedly with a vague but cheerful boredom (Weisenburger has an occasional tendency to lay out Pynchon’s source texts in detailed detail).

The Companion is at its finest, in my estimation, when Weisenburger extrapolates from his sources and contexts into GR’s deepest themes, like here, where our introduction to Gottfried (a seemingly minor character) branches into etymology, mythology, and comparative religion:

(My favorite moment here is probably where Dr. W poses that question about Pynchon knowing Branston and Grimm, and then immediately answers it (in what I like to pretend is Robert Evans’s voice)).

While Weisenburger’s Companion often enlightens and clarifies, so does simply (or not so simply) rereading Gravity’s Rainbow enlighten and clarify the first reading. I’m thankful that I didn’t use Weisenburger’s book on my first full trip though GR. Sure, Companion hazards a number of plot spoilers, which I imagine would annoy many readers. But more significant to me is that using Weisenburger’s annotations as a first-timer’s guide through Pynchon’s detritus would have likely spoiled the aesthetic effect of that detritus. It would likely have spoiled some of the richness in the rereading that I’m enjoying so very much now.

I recently talked to Derek Pyle about his project Waywords and Meansigns, which adapts James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake into a new musical audiobook. Derek worked for years as half of Jubilation Press. Printing the poems of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Thich Nhat Hanh, and William Stafford, Derek’s letterpress work can be found in the special collections of the New York Public Library, Brown University, and the Book Club of California. Derek co-founded Waywords and Meansigns in 2014 and became the project’s primary director in 2015. While living part-time in Western Massachusetts, Derek produces Waywords and Meansigns in eastern Canada.

Biblioklept: What is Waywords and Meansigns?

Derek Pyle: Waywords and Meansigns is a collaborative music project recreating James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Seventeen different musicians from all around world have each taken a chapter of Finnegans Wake and set it to music, thereby creating an unabridged audio version of Finnegans Wake.

Finnegans Wake is an incredible book, but it’s notoriously difficult to read. One hope of the project is to create a version of the Wake that is accessible to newcomers — people can just listen to and enjoy the music. To maximize accessibility, we are distributing all the audio freely via our website. But the project does not only appeal to Wake newcomers — as we’ve seen so far, a lot of scholars and devoted readers are also finding Waywords and Meansigns an exciting way of interpreting and engaging with Joyce’s text.

Biblioklept: How did the project come about?

DP: In 2014 I organized a party to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the publication of Finnegans Wake. To celebrate we decided to listen to Patrick Healy’s audiobook recording of Finnegans Wake, which is 20-odd hours long. The party, as you can imagine, lasted all weekend — we actually listened to Johnny Cash’s unabridged reading of the New Testament that weekend too. There was very little sleep, and fair amount of absinthe.

A lot of people really rag on Healy’s recording, because it’s read at breakneck speed. I actually like it though — he creates a very visceral flood of experience, which is one way of reading, or interpreting, Finnegans Wake. But during the party I started wondering about other ways you could perform the text, and that’s when I came up with the idea of approaching musicians to create a new kind of audiobook.

As it turns out, a lot of people seemed to think my idea was a good one. We’ve had no shortage of musicians willing to contribute, including some really cool cats like Tim Carbone of Railroad Earth and bassist Mike Watt, who currently plays in Iggy Pop’s band The Stooges.

Biblioklept: Watt rules! I love the Minutemen and his solo stuff. He seems like a natural fit for this kind of project, as so much of his music is based around story telling. I imagine the musicians involved are composing the music themselves…are they also recording it themselves?

DP: Yeah, it’s very cool to have Watt on board. Turns out he’s a huge fan of Joyce — he recorded a track for Fire Records in 2008, for an album of various musicians turning the poems of Joyce’s Chamber Music into songs. Mary Lorson, of the bands Saint Low and Madder Rose, also played on that Fire Records album, and she’s collaborating with author Brian Hall for our project.

To answer your question, yes, all the musicians are recording their own chapters. Since we have contributors from all around the world — from Berlin to Amsterdam to British Columbia — it would be a logistical nightmare to figure out where and when to record everyone. Not to mention the cost of it. One of the really cool things, I think, about this project — for everyone, it’s a labor of love. No one is making a profit, off any of this. People are just doing it because they love Joyce, or they’re obsessed with Finnegans Wake, or it just seems like a fun challenge to think creatively in this unique way. Either way it’s a pursuit of passion. That’s why we will distribute all the audio freely. There’s this phrase in Finnegans Wake, “Here Comes Everybody!” We’re having fun with Finnegans Wake and everybody is invited to the party.

Biblioklept: What are some of the approaches the artists have taken?

DP: There’s a really cool range. One purpose of the project is creating an actual audiobook — albeit one that’s performative — so some of the chapters are more or less straight through readings of Finnegans Wake, with music as a way of creating atmosphere. On the other hand, the Western Mass art punk band Dérive played this really rocking set of music, that swings between noise rock and say, Miles Davis’s electric band. That’s something I would listen to just for the music.

Mariana Lanari and Sjoerd Lejten from Amsterdam, they really paid attention to Joyce’s text, and created music in response. In the first chapter of Finnegans Wake, it’s said that Joyce laid out all of the book’s major themes, like how a symphony begins with an exposition of themes. So Mariana and Sjoerd, they actually sampled sound bytes and borrowed other passages from the rest of the chapters, which is just such an inventive way to replicate Joyce’s method of developing intratextual meaning.

I also really impressed by Tim Carbone’s chapter. Tim is a fiddler in a well known “new grass” band [Railroad Earth], which is like the bluegrass musicians who play in the lineage of the Grateful Dead and other jambands. I knew his music would be on point, because he’s such a talented musician as well as producer, but I was blown away by what he was able to evoke on a literary level. I’m not sure how to explain it, except to say he really opened a portal into Joyce’s text.

Biblioklept: How would you respond to those who might say that listening to a musical version of Finnegans Wake is not “really” experiencing it?

DP: Well, I think there are many, many ways to read Finnegans Wake. That’s part of what makes the book so much fun. Our musical version is one way of doing it. That might not be for everyone, but then again, utilizing a few dictionaries and five or six secondary academic texts — such as Roland McHugh’s Annotations and Joseph Campbell’s Skeleton Key — also isn’t for everyone. I would hope that some people will read along with their book with listening to the music.

My friend Rebecca Hanssens-Reed, she’s translated this comment from Borges:  “[Finnegans Wake is] a book that so many will have bought and probably none will have read beyond the first few pages. It seems important to read it in one sitting, all at once. How one might do this is unclear. Perhaps God could accomplish such a task.” Of course, it would impossible to read the whole thing in one sitting. But could you listen to the whole thing, all at once? It’d be an extreme 30 or so hours, but yes, our music will make that a possibility. As someone who has listened to the whole thing, a couple of times straight through — that Patrick Healy audiobook, sans music — well maybe it didn’t put me in the realm of the gods like Borges suggests, but… all I can say, it’s worth it.

Beyond that, you know, I think Waywords and Meansigns showcases some of the different ways different people approach Finnegans Wake. In the Wake, Joyce was really interested in the writings of Giambattista Vico, an 18th century Italian philosopher. Joyce took his ideas to explore how plurality and multiplicity give rise to increased meaning as well as increased chaos. Take for example, the Tower of Babel. When the Tower crashes, you suddenly have an explosion of possible meanings; you have hundreds of people now speaking different languages. This multiplicity can lead to a real richness, because your possibilities for meaning have expanded tenfold. And yet you also have a great deal of confusion and chaos, because no one can communicate effectively in the other’s language. Of course, this is not just about mere words, but the idioms, cultural referents, histories and worldviews that are embedded within language.

Again, that’s the notion of “Here Comes Everybody.” Not everybody’s going to dig it, but that’s the way of the world — we don’t all get along, we don’t even understand each other, and a lot of the time we are so embedded within our own perspectives that we can’t even recognize our lack of understanding. Of course, that’s a position of extreme relativism, and there are those who see the world much more universally. Joyce is looking at the world universally — in the Tower of Babel he also sees Humpty Dumpty and all the king’s men who couldn’t put Humpty back together again, and he sees the Fall from Grace, and he sees Finnegan’s fall from the ladder — but he’s also exploring the extremes of relativism, where meaning becomes so individualized as to be totally idiosyncratic and therefore impenetrable. That’s the whole of Finnegans Wake of course, idiosyncratic and impenetrable, filled with meanings that we’ll never decipher fully.

One of my favorite assessments of the Wake comes from a letter to Joyce, written by HG Wells. Upon reading some of Joyce’s early drafts of the Wake, Wells wrote, “Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousand I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?”  Wells doesn’t seem to hate Joyce’s book, however, he just isn’t interested in it. Which is fine. Some people won’t be interested in Waywords and Meansigns either — and knowing the contentiousness of academics, some may actually hate it. Wells, I think he’s aware of the irony, he closes his letter to Joyce with a couple of sentences that sum up the Wake perfectly: “I can’t follow your banner any more than you can follow mine. But the world is wide and there is room for both of us to be wrong.”

Biblioklept: When do you anticipate the completed project being released?

DP: So we’re actually doing two separate editions of Waywords and Meansigns; both will be unabridged, all 17 chapters. When we first put out the call for musicians, there were so many folks we didn’t want to turn away. So the first edition will debut very soon — 4 May 2015. Then the second edition will debut sometime during the coming winter, with a whole new cast of musicians.

Biblioklept: Have you ever stolen a book?

DP: Ha, that’s a great question.

In the 6th grade my mom told me about this poet Allen Ginsberg. My mom was sort of a hippie, but not quite — she was a business woman into the human growth movement in the 70s — so she knew Ginsberg was cool, but I don’t think she realized how much of his writing is just softcore gay porn. Anyway, she said to check this cat out, so I got Howl from the local library. I was blown away. My dad had a Xerox machine back then — I photocopied the whole book.

Beyond that, I’m a little ashamed to think maybe I’ve never truly stolen a book. As a kid I stole a few dirty magazines… and in middle school I had a secret place for keeping the books my parents wouldn’t let me read. I was particularly fascinated by Marilyn Manson’s autobiography. But I think I paid for that.

A couple of days ago I posted a brief excerpt from Jules Siegel’s March 1977 Playboy profile “Who is Thomas Pynchon… And Why Did He Take Off With My Wife?” The excerpt came from an excerpt posted on the Pynchon-L forum, but most of the article had been removed at the (apparent) request by Siegel. Several folks sent me the whole article though (thanks!) and I read it.

Siegel was briefly a Cornell classmate of Pynchon’s in 1954, and they remained friends (in Siegel’s recollection) for at least two decades after. During this time, Siegel claims that Pynchon wrote him dozens of letters, which were ultimately sold at auction (along with much of Siegel’s property) to help pay for a hip replacement. Material from the letters soak into Siegel’s sketch of Pynchon’s progress, along with several stoned/drunken adventures that would not be out of place in V. or Mason & Dixon or Gravity’s Rainbow, or really, any person’s young life.

A competitive anxiety reverberates under the piece. “We were friends, maybe at some points best friends, very much alike in some important ways,” Siegel writes. “We were both writers,” he boldly writes. Siegel reminds us that “In Mortality and Mercy in Vienna, Pynchon’s first published short story, the protagonist is one Cleanth Siegel,” but protests he doesn’t see himself in that hero.

The competitive anxieties culminate in the big reveal that (spoiler!) Thomas Pynchon had an affair with Siegel’s second wife Chrissie. There’s probably a Freudian reading we can append to the details that Siegel offers about Pynchon’s sexual prowess: “He was a wonderful lover, sensitive and quick, with the ability to project a mood that turned the most ordinary surroundings into a scene out of a masterful film—the reeking industrial slum of Manhattan Beach would become as seen through the eye of Antonioni, for example.”

Or maybe these unsexy details are just a sign of Playboy’s editorial hand. Wedged gracelessly between ads for vibrators and nude greeting cards, Siegel’s lines often reek of 1970’s Playboy’s rhetorical house style, a kind of frank-but-(attempted)-sensual glossiness that contrasts heavily with Pynchon’s own sex writing. At times I found myself reading Siegel’s prose in one of Will Ferrell’s more pompous accents.

Even worse is the casual sexism of the piece—which again, may be attributable to Playboy’s editors. Siegel, on his first wife (sixteen when he married her): “She was so wonderful a lover, generous and easily aroused, but I was too callow then to appreciate her.” Of his second wife: “It is easy to underestimate her intelligence, but it is a mistake. She is obviously too pretty to be serious, conventional wisdom would have you believe.” Of one of Pynchon’s girlfriends: “Susan has red hair and is breathtakingly beautiful, with the voluptuous body of a showgirl. Like Chrissie, she is much brighter than she looks.”

More interesting, obviously, are the (supposedly) real-life details that inform Pynchon’s fiction. Siegel notes some of the contents of Pynchon’s Manhattan Beach apartment: “A built-in bookcase had rows of piggy banks on each shelf and there was a collection of books and magazines about pigs.” Pigs, of course, are a major motif of Gravity’s Rainbow. Another detail that seems to connect to GR: “On the desk, there was a rudimentary rocket made from one of those pencil-like erasers with coiled paper wrappers that you unzip to expose the rubber. It stood on a base twisted out of a paper clip.” Siegel lets us know that he knocked the rocket down. Pynchon puts it back together; Siegel knocks it down again.

(Parenthetically: Siegel’s evocation of Pynchon’s Manhattan Beach days fits neatly into my picture of Inherent Vice).

In accounting details of Pynchon’s alleged affair with his wife, Chrissie, Siegel shares the following:

Once, out on the freeway, she told him that we had all gone naked at the commune, he professed to find that incredible and dared her to take off her blouse right there. She did. A passing truck hooted its horn in lewd applause. He loved her Shirley Temple impersonations—On the Good Ship Lollipop sung and danced like a kid at a birthday party. They talked about running away together.

It is hardly possible here not to recall the episode early in Gravity’s Rainbow wherein Jessica Swanlake removes her blouse in the car on a dare from Roger Mexico. Is Siegel daring the reader to extrapolate further? Extrapolation, paranoid connections—isn’t this part of Pynchonian fun?

In that spirit, I’ll close with my favorite moment from the article.

“You know the W.A.S.T.E. horn in The Crying of Lot 49? The symbol of the secret message service? Every weirdo in the world is on my wave length. You cannot understand the kind of letters I get. Someone wrote to tell me that the very same horn was the symbol of a private mail system in medieval times. I checked it out at the library. It’s true. But I made it up myself before the book was ever published, before I ever got that letter.”

The lines are supposedly from Pynchon himself. Siegel even puts them in quotation marks—so they must be real, right?

This is the part of the not-review where I include a picture I took of the book to accompany the not-review:

This is the part of the not-review where I briefly restage Lydia Davis’s publishing history to provide some context for readers new to her work.

This is the part of the not-review where I submit that anyone already familiar with Lydia Davis’s short fiction is likely to already hold an opinion on it that won’t (but could) be changed by Can’t and Won’t.

This is the part of the not-review where I dither pointlessly over whether or not the stories in Can’t and Won’t are actually stories or something other than stories.

This is the part of the not-review where I state that I don’t care if the stories in Can’t and Won’t are actually stories or something other than stories.

This is the part of the not-review where I explain that I have found a certain precise aesthetic pleasure in most of Can’t and Won’t that radiates from the savory contradictory poles of identification and alienation.

This is the part of the not-review where I cite an example of identification with Davis’s narrator-persona-speaker:

This is the part of the not-review where I claim that I used scans of the text to preserve the look and feel of Lydia Davis’s prose on the page.

This is the part of the not-review where I say that some of my favorite moments in Can’t and Won’t are Davis’s expressions of frustrated boredom with literature (or do I mean publishing?), like in the longer piece “Not Interested.”

This is the part of the not-review where I point out that Davis’s speaker-narrator-persona expresses frustration with the act of writing itself:

This is the part of the not-review where I dither pointlessly over distinctions between Davis the author and Davis the persona-speaker-narrator.

This is the part of the not-review where I point out that (previous dithering and frustration-with-writing aside) writing itself is a major concern of Can’t and Won’t:

This is the part of the not-review where I say that many of the stories in Can’t and Won’t are labeled dream, and I often found myself not really caring for these dreams (although I like the one above), but maybe I didn’t really care for the dreams because of their being tagged as dreams. (This is the part of the not-review where I point out that our eyes glaze over when anyone tells us their literal dreams).

This is the part of the not-review where I transition from stories tagged dream to stories tagged story from Flaubert, like this one:

This is the part of the not-review where I say how much I liked the stories from Flaubert stories in Can’t and Won’t.

This is the part of the not-review where I mention Davis’s translation work, but don’t admit that I didn’t make it past the first thirty pages of her Madame Bovary. 

This is the part of the not-review where I needlessly reference my review of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis and point out that that collection is not so collected now.

This is the part of the not-review where I pointlessly dither over post-modernism, post-postmodernism, and Davis’s place in contemporary fiction. (This is the part of the not-review where I needlessly cram in the names of other authors, like Kafka and Walser and Bernhard and Markson and Adler and Miller &c.).

This is the part of the not-review where I claim that nothing I’ve written matters because Davis makes me laugh (this is also the part of the not-review where I use the adverb “ultimately,” a favorite crutch):

This is the part of the not-review where I point out that Can’t and Won’t is not for everybody, but I very much enjoyed it.

This is the part of the not-review where I mention that the publisher is FS&G/Picador, and that the book is available in the usual formats.

Pynchon in Public Day is tomorrow, May 8th–that’s Pynchon’s birthday if you’re keeping score. (He’ll be 78 tomorrow. Last year I put together links for his auspicious 77th birthday).

For the past couple of years, I’ve seen the phrase Pynchon in Public pop up in my Twitter timeline, often as a hashtag. I had a (willfully) vague idea about what Pynchon in Public was all about–like, reading Pynchon publicly, posting the W.A.S.T.E. horn in public places, leaving books about. Making the secret sign. Etc.

But so and anyway: I’ve been reading or re-reading Pynchon more or less non-stop for the past two years, after diving for reasons I can’t recall into Against the Day, following that up with Mason & Dixon, and then going through The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice again. (In the deepest and most sincere spirit of my Pynchon-reading-experience, I abandoned Bleeding Edge twice during this time). I’m rereading Gravity’s Rainbow now after just having finished it (after years of false starts). Reading it again is like reading it for the first time, and as I progress (and sometimes retreat) through the Zone, I experience a sympathetic fragmentation, a scattering, a sense that the novel is consuming me. Another way of saying this is that Gravity’s Rainbow is a scary book, and all of Pynchon is scary in the sense that it’s all just one big book. It kinda sorta worms its way into the ear of one’s consciousness, wriggles (Ruggles?) behind the old brainpan, performs a paranoid song and dance routine. Other fun and games too.

Wait, what?

Sorry. I didn’t mean to riff about myself so much there. What the hell is Pynchon in Public? I’m getting to that. What I meant to do in the last paragraph was maybe offer some kind of interpretation as to Why is there a Pynchon in Public day?: To spread the infection? To share? Declare? Perform publicity in the (supposed) absence of the man himself?

There is a website, of course. From Pynchon in Public:

Suggestions for the day itself:

• Reading books, in public, by or about Thomas Pynchon.
• Reading work of his ‘heirs’, such as David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, Rachel Kushner, Neal Stephenson and Dave Eggers.
• Reading work of authors who have cited Pynchon as an influence. These include: Don DeLillo, Ian Rankin, William Gibson, Alan Moore, Bruce Sterling and David Cronenberg.
• Organising a local version of the W.A.S.T.E. postal network, as described in ‘The Crying of Lot 49′. See www.plot49.com and Silent Tristero’s Alternate Mail Project for some UK local examples.
• Organise a ‘Philately Gone Wild’ club night. Patrons could come dressed as their favourite Pynchon character, covered in mute post horn symbols in body paint or Weimar era cabaret stars.
• Launching model V-2 rockets in an appropriate safe open area.
• Adopt a Pynchon character’s name for the day.
• Promiscuous posting of the Muted post horn – Start using the muted post horn symbol as often as you can. Ideas include: business cards, stickers, button badges, real or temporary tattoos, notes in newsagents windows, mail-art, avatars on Facebook or other sites, razor cut in a haircut, on bookmarks left in library books and on a T-shirt as you jump up and down in front of local news crew covering a soap star opening a supermarket. W.A.S.T.E. Please remember to obtain permission form property owners or managers before posting.

Launching a V-2 model rocket sounds like a bit of fun, but I’m probably not sufficiently prepared. Obtaining permission does not sound like fun.

But maybe I’ll make a bookmark or something–put the muted horn on it, say, visit my favorite local indie bookstore, and slip it in some unsuspecting volume. And maybe on the back I’ll crib a line or two from a favorite poem of mine, this old dead American poet from whom Frederick Slothrop bagged his epitaph:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

In the last minute of “Hotel Blue,” the fourth track on his new LP Simple Songs, Jim O’Rourke belts out his lines with an emotional directness we haven’t heard in his work before. He sings, and sings with a sincere presence and confidence perhaps previously absent from his fine work. The song builds from a few strums of acoustic guitar into a crescendo worthy of Harry Nilsson.

Like Nilsson (or Nilsson’s hero Randy Newman), O’Rourke’s work is saturated in a dark humor that’s perhaps easy to ignore because his music sounds so  pretty. Simple Song’s first track “Friends with Benefits” reveals that welcoming-repulsing impetus in its opening lines: “Nice to see you once again / Been a long time, my friend / since you’ve crossed my mind at all.”

The initial moments of “Friends with Benefits” feel like an overture, unfurling in little episodes that recall O’Rourke’s 2009 suite The Visitor. The track eventually coalesces and climaxes in Terry Riley violin strokes, reverberating, decisive guitar lines, and stomping drums.

These musical elements continue throughout the album, which is often driven by piano riffs cribbed from all your favorite ’70s groups. Standout track “Half Life Crisis” bounces along in a Steely Dan strut, punctuated by Brian May guitar squiggles. Dissonant orchestral touches creep into the song’s final moments, recalling some of O’Rourke’s more “experimental” work—but also calling back to The Beatles.

Simple Songs feels like the culmination 0f some of O’Rourke’s projects over the past decade, and it made me revisit them. The Visitor sounds almost like a sketchbook for this record,and All Kinds of People, the record of Burt Bacharach songs O’Rourke recorded with various vocalists, feels in retrospect like a practice run at a personal pop record. Simple Songs builds on O’Rourke’s previous two “pop” records (Eureka and Insignificance), and even though it’s not named after a Nic Roeg film, it completes a trilogy of sorts. (But I hope this is more than a trilogy, to be clear).

The emotional intensity promised in “Hotel Blue” returns in the album’s closing tracks. “End of the Road” sees O’Rourke singing—not just talk-singing, but really singing—over McCartney piano and strings. “If you were at sea / They’d throw you overboard,” our misanthrope suggests. And in the final rousing track “All Your Love,” O’Rourke sings, “I’m so happy now / And I blame you,” before promising that “All your love / Will never change me.”

I’m not very good at writing about music, and really, writing is no substitute for listening. You can stream the album now at NPR—just do it over a real sound system or at least with some proper headphones. It sounds too good for your laptop’s tinny little noise holes.

Simple Songs is out on vinyl, etc., from Drag City next week.

Those who would contend there’s more to Fury Road, that would protest I’m missing some depth here, might refer me to the film’s feminist motifs. Yes, this is a film that critiques and rebels against patriarchal authority (going so far as to spell out its message in big block letters even). Maybe there’s a Freudian or Lacanian analysis in there too: Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa (she’s the real star of the film—Tom Hardy’s Max is a bland substitute for old crazy eyes Mel), shorn of both hair and an arm (castration symbols, no?) driving an enormous phallus (one dangling a big testicle full of fuel, power, no less) across the desert wastes, plunging it violently ahead to save some concubines (their eminence derives from their non-mutant genes and marvelous cheekbones—like Zack Snyder’s 300, Fury Road always privileges ideal body types over aberrations).

Where was I? It doesn’t really matter.

Ah, yes: I claimed that the movie obviates criticism.

Fury Road is a product, a commodity that successfully camouflages its very commodification. It’s fan service for our post global id.

The film has been nearly universally praised, as a quick tour through the aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes shows. I’ll lazily pull from RT’s pull quotes lazily: “This movie will melt your face off,” promises Christy Lemire. (Uh, okay). For David Edelstein, seeing the film a second time “became about digging the spectacle – not to mention the hilarious sexual politics.” (Were they really “hilarious”?) “An A-plus B-movie that at times feels almost like a tone poem to early-’80s excess,” writes Christopher Orr, who may or may not know what a tone poem is. Mark Kermode, a crank whom I generally admire, calls it “an orgy of loud and louder, leaving us alternately exhilarated, exasperated and exhausted.”

I stuff these quips in  here to show how Fury Road precludes any real criticism. Like I said up front, it does what it intends to do, and what it intends to do is show us something wholly familiar in a way that makes us think that we are not seeing something wholly familiar. But for me, anyway, Fury Road does feel familiar, like any number of movies I’ve already seen. Maybe blame it on Miller’s earlier Mad Max films. Maybe they colonized our cultural imagination so much that any strangeness in Fury Road is difficult to glean, hence the filmmaker’s central trick: Speed the damn thing up. Less character development, less bothersome talking.  

I cherry-tomato-picked the Kermode quote above, but his full review is more measured and insightful than that quote alone suggests. He ends with a warning: “…at two hours it’s more of a slog, battle-fatigue teetering on the edge of burn-out and even boredom.” Reader, I’ll admit to that boredom.

The first edges of that boredom actually creep in early, when we see how little is actually at stake in the film. Miller’s gambit is to keep Max constrained for the first quarter of the film—bound, chained, even muzzled. Tied to the prow of a rumbling car like some mythic figure, Max is relentlessly imperiled by spears and bullets and an apocalyptic sandstorm. But like some mythic figure, we know he’ll never die. Like the Roadrunner cartoons it so closely resembles, Fury Road imagines a slapstick world of zany cause-and-effect non-logic, producing kinetic anxieties in its audience that are ultimately relieved (over and over again) with a belief so strong that it cannot be suspended: Max will not die. Max can never die. There must be a sequel.

That promise of a sequel finds its affirmation in the film’s most clichéd final moments. (I’m going to discuss the end of the film now. Spoilers coming up—fair warning, eh?)

Max persuades Furiosa and the surviving supermodels concubines (one had to be sacrificed, natch) to return to Patriarchyville and defeat Bad Father and his Lost Boys. Max does this by oozing persuasive charisma mumbling something about “redemption” (what Furiosa needs to be redeemed for was probably explained at some point where my eyes and ears glazed over). They return, killing Bad Dad along the way, and losing Nux (natch), the only character in possession of elan. Bad Dad’s dead bod, presented to the huddled reeking masses of Patriarch-Town becomes the soil from which our New Utopia might flourish.

But of course Max won’t be sticking around for that. He and Furiosa share a clichéd nod, shorthand for “Hey I understand you and you understand me,” and Max—who has done everything he can to survive up to this point—turns to leave. To leave water, food, and stability. He doesn’t even stick around to heal or get a better ride and outfit for his service. The moment that a feminine (and tacitly maternal) order reifies a civilization presumably not entirely figured on infanticidal predation, Max leaves. I think here of the last words of Mark Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Huck promises to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

And that’s the fantasy, I suppose, promised in the post-apocalyptic and dystopian narratives that have become mainstream now: The fantasy of new territory outside of “sivilization,” to borrow Huck’s phrasing. One big do-over. Yet Max, after securing civilization’s reboot, will not remain to partake, but rather departs into the salt and sand that he has warned others against, bound for new adventures, new reboots. Another sequel.

In an early scene in “Person to Person,” the series finale of Mad Men, Joan Holloway tries cocaine for the first time. “I feel like someone just gave me very good news,” she beams, offering an advertising tag. The coke-sniffing detail seemed odd to me at first—perhaps it was another way for the series to signal the end of the sixties, to introduce the next drug, the next product to fuel future decades.

The final moments of “Person to Person,” however, show that the cocaine scene is an early reading rule. Joan’s testimony of the “Good News” comes from artificial inducement. Impermanent, intoxicating, and addictive, the coke here prefigures the Coke at the show’s end. Fittingly, Mad Men ends with a television commercial, the 1971 “I’d Like to Buy a the World a Coke” Coca-Cola ad.

The ad itself is a genius piece of propaganda: Buy a Coke, become a better person. Not feeling so good? Buy some more Coke. This ad strikes me as a prototypical example of what Slavoj Žižek would critique a few decades later as “the ultimate form of consumerism,” products that allow us “to be a consumerist, without any bad conscience, because the price for the countermeasure, for fighting consumerism, is already included into the price of a commodity.”

What’s the countermeasure, the counterforce then? All those supposed-values of the 1960s, which Don plunders for his career-restoring campaign. He cribs this vision of peace, love, and understanding from the New Age hucksters who are only too happy to take what’s left of our ad man’s money.

Don’s insight comes through a (purposefully facile?) moment of catharsis. In group therapy, a man takes the empty chair that Don’s counselor would have liked Don to fill himself. Don is spared testifying; the stranger will perform in his stead. He tells a story about feeling like a product on a shelf in a fridge, isolated, alienated. The core of his little monologue is about not understanding love, not knowing how to love or be loved. In a rare moment of empathy, Don has his big important cathartic release, and hugs the man, who has reminded Don of what Don already knew, but had been ignoring: People want to feel loved.

Earlier in the season, Don shot down an ad idea that had to do with love — “Love again? We always use that,” he says (or something close to that). But here, disconnected (almost all meaningful conversations in the episode are mediated through telephones), he’s reminded that what people want is touch, the sensation or feeling of love. And he can sell them that: The feeling of the feeling of love. 

Here’s the show’s last moments:

The pat montage ties an unusually neat bow on the series’ major storylines. I’d argue that it’s best read ironically, something of a send-up of our desires, our wish for the characters we “love” to experience “love.”

This ironic reading bears out in light of the notes that punctuate the conclusion. The meditation-leader promises “new lives…a new you,” words that might be used to sell almost anything, from soap to hope. A chime then initiates om meditation, and the series ends with three notes: The chime, a smile on Don’s face, and the opening bars of “I’d Like to Buy a the World a Coke.” The chime recalls a ringing cash register, and Don’s smile is an epiphany of how to sell love. Matthew Weiner ends his seven season project with an ad, a cynical joke on the audience. I loved it.

Or maybe my ironic reading is wrong. Maybe there isn’t a cynical joke on the audience here. Maybe the simple resolutions were the best Weiner et al could do. Maybe the show is just a really good-looking glossy prime-time soap opera (it is), and like all soap operas it was designed to sell soap.

Disney’s Fantasia is one of the better film adaptations of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. 

At least this thought zipped into my head a few weeks back, as I watched the film with my wife and kids. I was in the middle of a second reading of the novel, an immediate rereading prompted by the first reading. It looped me back in. Everything seemed connected to the novel in some way. Or rather, the novel seemed to connect itself to everything, through its reader—me—performing a strange dialectic of paranoia/anti-paranoia.

So anyway, Fantasia seemed to me an adaptation of Gravity’s Rainbow, bearing so many of the novel’s features: technical prowess, an episodic and discontinuous form, hallucinatory dazzle, shifts between “high” and “low” culture, parodic and satirical gestures that ultimately invoke sincerity, heightened musicality, themes of magic and science, themes of automation and autonomy, depictions of splintering identity, apocalypse and genesis, cartoon elasticity, mixed modes, terror, love, the sublime, etc.

(There’s even a coded orgy in Fantasia).

But Fantasia was first released in 1940 right, when Pynchon was, what, three or four? And Gravity’s Rainbow was published in 1973, and most of the events in that novel happen at the end of World War II, in like, 1944, 1945, right? So the claim that “Fantasia is one of the better film adaptations of Gravity’s Rainbow” is ridiculous, right?

(Unless, perhaps, we employ those literary terms that Steven Weisenburger uses repeatedly in his Companion to Gravity’s Rainbow: analepsis and prolepsis—so, okay, so perhaps we consider Fantasia an analepsis, a flashback, of Gravity’s Rainbow, or we consider Gravity’s Rainbow a prolepsis, a flashforward, of Fantasia…no? Why not?).

Also ridiculous in the claim that “Fantasia is one of the better film adaptations of Gravity’s Rainbow” is that modifier “better,” for what other film adaptations of Gravity’s Rainbow exist?

(The list is long and mostly features unintentional titles, but let me lump in much of Robert Altman, The Conversation, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, that Scientology documentary Going Clear, a good bit of stuff by the Wachowksis, The Fisher King (hell, all of Terry Gilliam, why not?), the Blackadder series, which engenders all sorts of wonderful problems of analepsis and prolepsis…).

Gravity’s Rainbow is of course larded with film references, from King Kong and monster movies to German expressionism (Fritz Lang in particular), and features filmmakers and actors as characters. The novel also formulates itself as its own film adaptation, perhaps. The book’s fourth sentence tells us “…it’s all theatre.” (That phrase appears again near the novel’s conclusion, in what I take to be a key passage). And the book ends, proleptically, in “the Orpheus Theatre on Melrose,” a theater managed by Richard M. Nixon, excuse me, Zhlubb—with the rocket analeptically erupting from the past into “The screen…a dim page spread before us, white and silent.” Indeed, as so many of the book’s commentator’s have noted, Pynchon marks separations in the book’s sequences with squares reminiscent of film sprockets —  □ □ □ □ □ □ □.

Film is of course only one aspect of Gravity’s Rainbow, and Pynchon’s treatment of film is not just film-as-art or film-as-narrative or film-as-entertainment, but also film-as-technical-production. Film as a literal medium—chemistry, technology. Sound. Light. Pynchon’s critique of Them is bound up in a resistance to the Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex. David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest, often posited as a sort of successor to Gravity’s Rainbow, attempts to treat film in a similar comprehensive fashion. Both critiques–GR’s and IJ’s—seem to me terrifically prescient, as our discussions of politics and culture, at least in the US, are increasingly mediated in mass entertainments.

Pointing proleptically to this prescience in his introduction to Pynchon (1978), Edward Mendelson rightfully characterizes Gravity’s Rainbow as a “national encyclopedic narrative,” writing that it “proposes itself as the encyclopedia of a new international culture of electronic communication and multi-national cartels.” He continues, claiming that “Gravity’s Rainbow is a book which hopes to be active in the world, not a detached observer of it. It warns and exhorts in matters ranging from the ways in which the book itself will be read, to the way in which its whole surrounding culture operates.”

Pynchon’s critique in Gravity’s Rainbow offers some occasional hope—a Counterforce emerges, true—but as the novel’s third line tells us, “It is too late.” Michael Seidel gives us a nice summary in his essay “The Satiric Plots of Gravity’s Rainbow“: “Gravity’s Rainbow in part tells the story of scattered individuals who unsuccessfully try to resist the advance of the new bureaucratic modern order.”

Seidel’s tidy summary is particularly useful if you want to convince a friend to read this book, I guess. A blurb to sell it to them, no? (Or you could just tell them about all the sex scenes. The many, many sex scenes). What I mean is that the book is extremely difficult–far more difficult than the books it’s most often compared to, Ulysses and Infinite Jest. If Gravity’s Rainbow does indeed wish to “be active in the world,” as Mendelson claims, it wishes to be active on its own terms, to colonize its reader, to bend the world to its own strangeness. To make one of its readers, as he sits on a leather sofa with his two children and one wife watching an electronically-disseminated animated entertainment, the film Fantasia—as he, the reader, sits there four decades after its publication, think that it, the novel, the book Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, is in fact the progenitor of the electronically-disseminated animated entertainment, despite its (the novel’s) publication happening some three decades after its (the film’s) initial dissemination.

I attribute my fantastical and ridiculous assertions about Fantasia-as-analeptic-adaptation-of-Gravity’s-Rainbow not to my own zany fancies, but to the novel’s strange powers. (But which hey, didn’t the novel help trigger those zany fancies…isn’t that how the book might seek to be “active in the world”…?).

This riff has been discursive and downright silly, a discursive silliness that authorizes me to close, perhaps evasively, by citing two of Pynchon’s American progenitors. The first I’ll cite is Walt Whitman, whom I’d argue is only a weak parent for Pynchon—not a parent at all, really, but a benevolent uncle, a friend of the family, large of spirit, encyclopedic, kosmic. The final lines of his great work Song of Myself recall to me the hero of Gravity’s Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop, whose fate is to be scattered, undone, disseminated, invisible to us:

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged,
Missing me one place, search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion, newish from University of Delaware Press, collects academic essays and memoir-vignettes by a range of critics and authors to make the case that Vollmann is, as the blurb claims, the “most ambitious, productive, and important living author in the US.” I interviewed the book’s editors, Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes, over a series of emails in a two-part interview. You can read the first part here. A few days after the first part of the interview posted, Lukes and Coffman hosted a book launch party in NYC for WTV: ACC; the pics in this interview are from that event (check out the Facebook page for more, including Jonathan Franzen reading from his piece on Vollmann).

Biblioklept: Let’s talk about the formal elements of William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion. The collection seems to balance essays of a more academic flavor with memoir-vignettes, personal accounts, and riffs.

Christopher K. Coffman: We decided early on to intersperse among the academic essays pieces by non-scholars, or by scholars writing in a non-scholarly mode. The goal here was at least two-fold. We wanted to offer something a bit more accessible to WTV readers who were not in academia (although I think the average WTV fan can follow scholarly arguments as well as many of us in academia can). Also, we realized that some people with a privileged view on WTV’s work–such as those of WTV’s book designers who contributed (Bolte and Speaker Austin)–could add something of interest and great value to audiences in and out of academia, and we wanted to make space for that. I would have to look back through the e-mail log to be sure, but I think Daniel first came up with the idea of soliciting shorter pieces from non-scholars, and that I then conceived the structural component. I am a huge fan of Hemingway’s In Our Time, and the contrapuntal play between the stories and the very short inter-chapters in that book served for me as a paradigm of what Daniel and I have tried to do in this regard. Of course, as soon as we brought up the example of Hemingway, we recalled that WTV does something similar in Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs, so he beat us to the punch even there. At any rate, my hope is that our readers find in the short chapterlets material that serves as a response to or as an extension of ideas presented in the more properly scholarly readings that surround those shorter pieces.

The second question of arrangement was the placement of essays and interchapters, and we here grouped according to subject matter as well as we could, without merely replicating what McCaffery and Hemmingson had done for Expelled from Eden. We also, obviously, made space for both Larry and Michael as the authors of the Preface and Afterword. Our intention there, insofar as I can speak for both of us, is to make it clear that we are trying to situate our contribution to scholarship on WTV in relation to the work that Larry and Michael have already done. Finally, I wrote the Introduction not only because one of us had to, but also because Daniel was spoken for in the sense that he already had material that formed the basis for the really great chapter that he contributed. Also, I found the chance to frame the book’s material via an introduction that dealt with WTV’s place in the landscape of post-1945 American fiction appealing. That said, while the introduction bears my byline, my ongoing conversation with Daniel during the past few years shaped my thinking about WTV as much as any original ideas of my own, so he deserves a lot of credit for the introduction as well.

Daniel Lukes: I’ve been going back over the timeline to see if Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou’s edited volume The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, which also features some shorter pieces, was an influence on that, but it looks like we took our approach independently. Though I will say their book did serve as a model in some ways of what ours could be. Dealing with the “non-scholarly” pieces has been for me one of the most exciting parts of putting this book together (the distinction between “scholarlies” and “non-scholarlies” itself being one of the various amusing frameworks that Chris and I have been carrying around throughout the process). From the beginning I thought it would be very helpful to have some of Vollmann’s literary peers chime in: you just don’t hear too much from them about him. So we reached out to writers we thought might be Vollmann readers: some just weren’t (I’d love to know if Cormac McCarthy reads Vollmann: the letter I mailed to a presumed representative of his returned unopened). Some were Vollmann fans/friends, but couldn’t make it for another reason; when Jonathan Franzen came through and expressed his enthusiasm for the project and willingness to contribute a piece, I felt some relief. And James Franco was a pleasure to work with. That said I think the primary value of the non-scholarlies is in the insights they offer into Vollmann’s world and writing practices, from those who have worked closely with him, in particular Carla Bolte, Mary Austin Speaker, and Mariya Gusev’s excellent and vivid pieces.

One of the reader reports remarked that our volume (I just accidentally typed “Vollmann”) seems to mimic his approach in its all-over-the-placeness. I do think this is on some level intentional. Vollmann plays with and outside the rules, and we certainly intended this book to be a lot more than merely a collection of essays, in order to attempt to do justice to that. We’re psyched that we got Larry McCaffery – the first major Vollmann critic – to pen a preface; and are sad that Michael Hemmingson’s afterword will I assume be his last word on Vollmann. With Hemmingson’s early death, Vollmann studies loses a hugely valuable voice. His support and encouragement of the book cannot go understated. There’s a ton of people we didn’t get or *almost* got for the book – we’ll have to save trying again with them for volume II, if it ever happens.

Biblioklept: Based on Vollmann’s prolific output, there’ll likely be a need for a second volume. I’d love to know McCarthy’s take on The Rifles or Imperial, which seem to me some kind of kin to Blood Meridian. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard his thoughts on a contemporary author. What about Vollmann? Did you contact him about A Critical Companion?

DL: We have been in contact with Vollmann at several points. Initially we invited him to contribute a piece to the book: he declined, but expressed support for the project. Then when it came to the extremely laborious process of securing permissions, he was very generous in allowing us to quote from works he retains the copyright to, even going so far as offering to waive his part of the fee in cases where the copyright was jointly held. We have invited him to our events, but he has declined on that front also. I think it’s fair to say that his position toward our work has been one of respectful distance.

CKC: Yes, as Daniel explains, we have been in touch with Vollmann a bit. While we obviously would have liked to have a piece by him in the book, I suspect his decision not to contribute probably allowed some of our authors to be more objective. No one had to worry about questions like “how will this less-than-glowing statement about WTV look when it is sitting next to a piece by WTV?” As a side note, this reminds me of something else that did not happen: I had hoped we’d get some proposals for chapters that advanced really antagonistic readings–essays that would devote most of themselves to taking issue with or aim at some fault in the books–but nothing of that sort came to us. Still, I think a chapter or two of that sort would have been valuable, and if there ever is a Volume 2, I’d love to see something like that in there. Making space for dissenting opinion is almost always a salutary effort.

Biblioklept: Vollmann’s latest, Last Stories and Other Stories has gotten some fairly antagonistic reviews. (At NPR, Julia Keller called it “pretentious and flabby and self-indulgent,” for example). Thoughts on the new tome?

CKC: I appreciate some of the criticisms regarding Last Stories and Other Stories, but most of the reviews I read were simply odd. I here mean “odd” in the sense that the reviewers seemed to me to be confused, and confused in a way that led them to the writing of reviews that almost explicitly asked the impermissible question: “now what is it that my readers are going to want me to say about a book like this?” The NYT’s second review of the book, by Kate Bernheimer, is a notable exception. This piece was one of the smartest I have ever read on Vollmann by anyone, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants a concise and incisive overview of what is best in his writing. It was also the one review I read that seemed to recognize that the sometimes suffocating nature of the book’s style (at the level of the sentence) and certain claustrophobic aspects of the book’s narrative structures are kind of relevant to a book that is about topics like death, entombment, and the seductiveness of the thanotic.

But, you asked for my take on the book. I sympathize with complaints that it feels less unified than it may. My understanding is that WTV has long kept notebooks with brief notes for projects, and that he periodically goes through them searching for inspiration. My speculation is that what we have in this book is a result of WTV’s realization on a recent look back through the notebooks that he had a number of ghost-story ideas, and that they would together make for an interesting collection. Some of this material is likely quite old, and may have seen earlier, aborted, realizations. I suspect, for instance, that “The Banquet of Death” had been visited before as a one act play–it is basically a piece of juvenilia–that is archived at OSU. I have not had a chance to check on this yet, but hope to get there this summer to confirm my suspicion. Some reviewers have read the opening stories as the heart of the book, and they are an essential addition to WTV’s work. Sarajevo and his experiences there are such key parts of the history of his writing that the retrospective examination of the desire for redemption, the difficulty of forgiveness, and the burden of guilt offered in these stories is important reading. Let me conclude with three additional points. In the first place, the global scope of this book recommends it; it is in that sense of a piece with Rising Up and Rising Down, Poor People, and The Atlas. Secondly, the volume’s fascinating and disturbing mix of desire and death is not only typical territory for Vollmann, it is at the root of almost all worthwhile literature from Aeschylus to Yeats. Finally, it is a book that demands a slow read, and that is an achievement to applaud. I have not yet put my finger on how it does this, but the Trieste and Bohemia stories in particular resist the reader who wants to rush. I remember meeting with Françoise Palleau-Papin last summer when I was about 100 pages into a first read of the text. She had not started it yet, and I told her I was totally absorbed by it, but that, in spite of giving it a lot of time, found my usual “page-per-minute” rate was way below usual. I am not a fast reader anyway, but reading Last Stories and Other Stories was for me like running in a slow-motion dream. Anyway, Françoise e–mailed me about a month later and reported the same experience. This phenomenon reinforces the strange and haunting nature of the text, in a fashion entirely appropriate for a book with stories as unnerving as is “The Trench Ghost.”

Biblioklept: Daniel, in your essay in the collection, “Strange Hungers,” you say that Vollmann’s “straight-up ‘sincere’ voice . . . has replaced the shifting protagonists and flowing, drunken liquidity of his 1990s fictions [offering] less room for dialectical maneuver.” You’re specifically discussing a shift in Vollmann’s treatment of gender from earlier stuff like Butterfly Stories to newer books like Kissing the Mask, but I think that the shift to a “straight-up ‘sincere’ voice” inheres throughout his themes. To what extent though is Vollmann performing “sincerity”?

DL: I do sense that WTV has over the last decade or so privileged a certain sincerity, often curtailing or sidelining the more extravagant, aesthetic, or literary elements of his writing in favor of clarity, the desire to be heard and understood. To me it feels as if the act of bringing attention to social issues (highlighting injustice, systemic oppression and violence, the everyday violence of global capitalist life), has become even more central to his work. Okla Elliott touches on this theme in his WTVCC essay: the move, not only in Vollmann, but in continental philosophers such as Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek, toward clarity, and away from the dangers of hermetic or esoteric obscurantism. I’m thinking, for example of The Rainbow Stories’ overt formalism, or The Royal Family’s strongly symbolic approach: in works such as these Vollmann seeks to make the harsh lives of the disenfranchised into something aesthetically transcendent or at least pleasing. Whereas in more recent works, such as Poor People, or his Harper’s article “Homeless in Sacramento,” he appears to tackle similar topics in a much more direct and less aesthetically-mediated way.

CKC: I concur that WTV is increasingly making a more straightforward (by which I guess we mean a less obviously artificial or sophisticated) kind of sincerity evident in his works.

That said, my sense is that this is less a matter of having intentionally changed course than it is a matter of having learnt how to do better (and / or more confidently) something he has been working at across his career. I particularly have in mind as a nagging example here An Afghanistan Picture Show. The Young Man in that memoir learns that his desire for engagement and heartfelt good intentions are pretty worthless, that he is not fit enough in the right ways to help to resolve the problem. So, he ends up presenting a story about what did not work. It is a good case of that space for masculine failure in WTV’s books about which Daniel has written: this character is not a total disgrace, but he is just as surely no Achilles. It is also, I think, something of a Kunstlerroman, in the sense that we see this authorial-character coming to a point where his words are all that he has to share. He may have failed in terms of his intentions, but he has a tale to tell of that failure, and it is an instructive one. In other words, WTV comes out of his Afghanistan experience having learned in one sense what it is his writing can do: not solve problems, but share them, and illuminate others who are ignorant in the same ways he was about the complexities of the difficulties we are facing as a culture, and as a species, in the arenas of war, desire, violence, art, and so forth. To the extent that the seemingly nihilistic diminishment of self has disappeared from WTV’s works, I would argue that it has done so because he has gone some way to surpassing the problem–he can more easily become a transparent eyeball now, an hombre invisible, a recording angel. This does not exclude the insertion of some authorial commentary, but it is a less self-preoccupied and aggressively self-critical commentary than is that directed at the Young Man, or than that devoted to Bug in YBRA and the Journalist in Butterfly Stories.

I would also point out that–in comparison to the nonfiction–the fiction preserves a greater degree of the dialectical movement that Daniel sees in the earlier work in general. I was actually curious to see what the next fictions after Europe Central would look like in terms of this quality, and my reading of Last Stories and Other Stories–particularly the Sarajevo and Mostar stories–is that the authorial figure in those tales can pretty easily be read in positive relation to the Young Man of An Afghanistan Picture Show. Too, these stories have plenty of the gritty abjection of which we became so expectant from reading the prostitute trilogy and the stories of the 1990s.

So, to get back to the original question: is this a sincerity that is being “performed”? My reading is that it always has been a performed sincerity, but that it is now being performed by a more mature writer.

I have a question or two on this front, if either of you would like to offer a perspective for me: is Dolores a furtherance of the impulse to self-destruction? To be more specific: is she a realization of this impulse in the realm of gender, or a way to circumvent the total loss of the self, or something else?

DL: Chris’s distinction between how Vollmann operates in his fiction vs his nonfiction is a good point. This prompts me to the following question I don’t really have an answer for: why does Vollmann dedicate much of his activity over the last decade to nonfiction, and what might his recent return to fiction signify? I recall how he says – in conversation with Karl Taro Greenfeld (quoted by Georg Bauer in his WTVCC chapter): “When I’m writing a work of fiction the sentence is most important. What I want is to create the most beautiful prose that I can. And when I’m writing a work of nonfiction I want to learn as much as I can about a particular reality.” So it would seem that his fiction is primarily driven by aesthetic considerations, and his nonfiction follows a quest for knowledge: one which often appears to be underpinned by some ethical purpose.

An interesting counterpoint to the earnest Young Man of An Afghanistan Picture Show might be the Zombie in The Rainbow Stories’ section “The Blue Yonder”: my reading of this figure is that Vollmann uses it to perform a kind of expiation of feelings of guilt at his literary exploitation of poor and unfortunate people. If you’ll forgive the recycling, this is from my dissertation:

An early character, The Zombie, in ‘The Blue Yonder: A Tale of Cleanliness’ in The Rainbow Stories accurately embodies Vollmann’s ambivalence and guilt about being a recording presence among the dispossessed, who takes from them more than he can possibly give back. The Zombie, scathingly dubbed a “A Nice Fellow,” is an authorial outgrowth, a homicidal component of the authorial consciousness (which is split into The Zombie and The Other); a Mr. “Hyde who feeds his desire by murdering homeless people by pouring Drano down their throats, and who is described with Lovecraftian abjection. Befriending the homeless, who lie blinking in the sunlight of the Golden Gate Park, or the frail and elderly who totter about their old people’s home, The Zombie bumps them off one by one, before killing himself.

“There’s undoubtedly a sadistic undercurrent in my work, just as there is in almost anyone who chooses violent subjects,” says Vollmann speaking to Larry McCaffery in “Moth to the Flame”: “What I wanted to do though, was get inside the Zombie’s head as well as the victim’s head. The Zombie obviously enjoys killing people in horrible ways and so if I’m doing my job, that enjoyment has to appear in the writing. In that sense, the enjoyment of violence is definitely in the work. Whether or not that enjoyment is actually within me is something I don’t know how to answer” (98-9). [1] McCaffery, Larry. “Moth to the Flame” (1991). In Hemmingson, William T. Vollmann. 98

I personally feel it’s this tension – between self-destructive and socially-engaged tendencies, this wavering, this conflict between doing the wrong and right things, that has produced some of his most riveting work: Larry McCaffery covers this duality well in his introduction to Expelled from Eden – “Adam Raised a Cain.”

As for Dolores, I am not sure I see self-destruction there, but perhaps a Deleuzian becoming-woman: another way of putting himself in the place of the other. A way to decenter himself and his experience of life as a man and understand male privilege. As he tells Tom Bissell: “Until I started doing the cross-dressing, I had no idea of what it was like to go out into the night and be afraid. That is what a huge portion of the human race has to go through, and I really get it now.” I wish I had been able to go to the reading with Genesis P-Orridge in San Francisco in February 2015, another artist who has in recent years experimented with performances of femininity. Both Dolores and Kissing the Mask focus on issues of technicality in different realms (theater, photography), perhaps as analogy for the performance of femininity, and then gender at large. Feminist and queer theory have been discussing gender as performance for a while now – in particular we may think of the work of Judith Butler. It’s fascinating to see Vollmann arrive at similar conclusions via different, and practical rather than theoretical routes.

CKC: Daniel, I think your reading of WTV’s transvestitism in relation to Deleuze’s concept of becoming-other is really accurate. As far as the differences between fiction and nonfiction, I think as well of his comments in the BookSlut interview about how he finds fiction harder to write than nonfiction. The point is repeated in the Mother Jones interview, too. Perhaps most importantly, I think the distinction is pretty moot in the case of a lot of his texts. The Seven Dreams, especially, do not really observe the generic boundaries.

That said, as for your question about what to make of the seeming return to fiction: my guess is that we see a few different things going on here. It may be that the National Book Award garnered by Europe Central gave WTV some leverage he did not have before, leverage that he could use to undertake (i.e., fund) some of his planned nonfiction projects. I am thinking especially of Imperial and the Japan books (Kissing the Mask & Into the Forbidden Zone). He got some magazine articles out that work before those books were complete, but the effort obviously also required a ton of additional time and energy–and money–that was not immediately going to translate into a paycheck. So, what we now have is in this sense less a return to fiction than a return to a normal balance between fiction and nonfiction, a return that is now possible because that some of his nonfiction projects have been seen through to completion. I wonder if a second element to consider is the phenomenon of a post-award delay. I have in mind those authors who win a major award (this seems to happen with some Nobelists) and then experience a kind of writer’s block, leading to no other books or books of an inferior quality only after a long delay. Of course Vollmann’s too steadily productive to be entirely stymied by something like an award, but perhaps the nonfiction was for him, in part, a way to catch his breath in the wake of the National Book Award.

Last Stories and Other Stories and the forthcoming Dying Grass are therefore, in my eyes, a catching up on fictional output now that some of the nonfiction is wrapped up. Too, this appearance of “catching up” is probably also the work of publishers trying to keep up, regardless of where WTV is with his various projects. I am hopeful that the release of this year’s novel will return WTV readers to the sort of balance between fictional and nonfictional volumes that we were led to expect in the early 2000’s. For instance, the rumored nonfiction book on energy (the coal mine and oil industry research, the Fukushima projects) will, I am guessing, overlap with The Cloud-Shirt in some way, sort of in the manner of Riding toward Everywhere and The Royal Family. Actually, I think we are already seeing that dialogue between fiction and nonfiction again. I have in mind the Japanese stories in Last Stories and Other Stories–they tread some of the same ground as Kissing the Mask.

Biblioklept: Pretty much everything I know about the Dolores project is via interviews—the long Bissell profile and the VICE interview with Heather Corcoran in particular—and reviews (the New Yorker piece by Stephen Burt seems especially perceptive)—so I’m reticent to comment on WTV’s performance of femininity at length. Burt’s critique of the Dolores performance is instructive, perhaps. He says that “Vollmann’s cross-dressing…is not an expression of deep identity”—a claim that (likely unintentionally) reinforces Butler’s (and other postmodernists’) viewpoints that there is no “deep identity”—only performance.

What I think Vollmann might be most interested in, ultimately (or maybe if I’m really sincere I’d write, What I’m most interested in, ultimately) is the aesthetics of the project—the arrangement, the photography, the presentation, etc. I like that the Greenfeld interview Daniel mentions perhaps confirm that Vollmann wrangles ethics through aesthetics and not ideology.

CKC: The Burt review of The Book of Dolores is interesting. I was a bit bothered by his implication that WTV has not considered the works of figures like Kate Bornstein. WTV has indeed read Bornstein, as is evident from the bibliographies in Kissing the Mask. WTV’s writing on gender and transformation is worthy of more attention. One could start with the story “The Green Dress” (and the early-1990s photo by Ken Miller of WTV in such a dress) and the section “San Francisco Transvestites 1987″ in The Ice-Shirt and run through the books to the cross-dressing material in Kissing the Mask, collecting along the way some really useful context for the Book of Dolores.

I would argue that, as your comments indicate, what is really going on in the Dolores book is the establishment of a parallel between cross-dressing and gender play and the technologies of aesthetic activities such as writing and photography. I spoke about this in January 2014 at an MLA convention, and Jeff Bursey’s February 2014 review of the book makes a similar point. While I do not mean to diminish the Dolores book as an exploration of gender, I find much more interesting the ways WTV finds parallels between the staging of gender and the media technologies and artistic practices used for that staging.

DL: This might seem like a frivolous question, but I’ll go ahead and ask it anyway: we’ve here and there discussed WTV in terms of other writers, but what do you think of artists in other genres comparable to him? I originally planned a dissertation chapter on the Tool singer Maynard James Keenan, who I was thinking of comparing to Vollmann on various levels: long-term visions, patience, melancholia, empathy and heartache. I recently watched Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, which might be argued comparable to Vollmann on some level for its interweaving of depressive realism, symbolism, citational quality, and sexual frankness. Gaspar Noe is another filmmaker who comes to mind, who mixes gritty realism with extreme violence and drug visions, and also within heavily symbolic frameworks. Any thoughts in this direction?

Biblioklept: You know, I often think of authors in terms of other media—I’ve been reading a lot of Pynchon lately, and his work seems to implicitly (and often explicitly) attempt to break the constraint of the page and move into other media (most notably cinema and song). I would argue that Vollmann has created his own genre, is his own genre (like William Blake before him). While I can imagine some films coming close to what he’s doing, Vollmann, unlike his hero Steinbeck who was often scripting stage plays in novel form, takes his reader places that only fiction can go. At the same time though, I think that Noe is a good example of someone who attempts to break the constraints of his medium through a range of techniques, like Vollmann—and like Vollmann these techniques are not always entirely successful, even if they do fascinate.

CKC: This is a good but very tricky question, and one I have not thought about enough to answer as well as I would like. I suppose my hesitation has at least two components aside from my lack of prior consideration. Firstly, although I see all of WTV’s work in various media as occupying overlapping spaces, there is perhaps some need in responding to this question to treat his writing as provisionally separate from his work in the static visual arts such as photography, drawing, book objects, and painting. I think that some good criticism is emerging on his work in these media–not least in the essays by Juvelis and Palleau-Papin in our collection. Secondly, WTV’s work is not marked by any one characteristic, but a convergence of several significant ambitions, and not many artists of other stripes are interested in exactly the same mix. We have mentioned already many of these points: formal innovation, historical consciousness (both social and artistic), global scope, moral engagement, and a daring with regard to subject matter that tends toward an interest in the abject. So, I suppose I am qualifying my response to the question by saying that I am speaking just of his fiction, and that I think we would be foolish to expect a perfect parallel in any artist working in another medium.

That having been said: I agree with Daniel that Von Trier is a really good comparison. His films do have many qualities reminiscent of WTV’s works. I am thinking off the top of my head of Dogville, Epidemic, and Europa, which display a good historical consciousness; The Idiots, The Boss of It All, and The Five Obstructions, which are formally and / or technically provocative; Medea, which demonstrates a sensitivity to national artistic heritage; and Breaking the Waves, which has a heavy dose of gritty abjection. I am a huge fan of a lot of Von Trier’s films, especially Antichrist, and I also was really pleased with Nymphomaniac. I always think of Michael Haneke as a peer of Von Trier, and I could see arguments for films like The Piano Teacher or The White Ribbon as treading some of the same ground as Vollmann does, but I do not think some of his other movies, material like Funny Games or Benny’s Video, are very much in the realm of WTV. In terms of other filmmakers: Glawogger should of course be mentioned, and I think one could make a case for some of Bela Tarr’s films, especially insofar as Eastern European literature has been such an influence on Vollmann. Actually, Jaromil Jires’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders might be interesting to re-watch with some of the Trieste and Bohemia stories from Last Stories and Other Stories in mind. Some Asian directors explore the sort of obsessive and visionary realms of desire familiar from the prostitute trilogy, the short stories, and The Atlas. I am thinking of things like Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses or Ki-Duk Kim’s The Isle. I wonder if anyone has ever made a film out of Kawabata’s Snow Country.

Outside of film, things are trickier, in part because we move away from the realm of narrative. As far as music goes, I think a lot of rock bands could qualify. I think the Rothacker piece from our book is pretty accurate, in that a lot of punk rock–especially the more politically intelligent stuff–is a good point for comparison. Fathers and Crows always reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s book Beautiful Losers, and I can see some of Cohen’s songs–both those of masochistic yearning and the more political ones, like his version of “The Partisan,” as related to some of what goes on in WTV. Patti Smith is pretty similar too, which I think of both because Edwin mentions Blake, in whom she is also interested, and because she has a WTV-like social consciousness, and a WTV-like debt to foreign sources and visual artists (Godard, Mapplethorpe, Bulgakov, &c.). Beyond that, I would say that we need some good criticism on musical connections I am under-qualified to write about, like WTV and Shostakovich. I found the material on Puccini and WTV in Daniel’s essay enlightening. I know the opera, but I am close to a total novice musically, and thus do not think as well as I would like about connections like that.

I guess I would end this response by saying that we should also recall WTV’s remark that he thinks of his literary contemporaries as stretching back as least to Hawthorne. When I ponder the static visual arts in relation to Vollmann’s fiction (again, I am bracketing his own work in these media), I would argue we very much need to adopt a similarly expansive sense of what the contemporary means. I can imagine some good arguments for Symbolist and post-impressionist influences on WTV: Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau, and Paul Gauguin and Henri Rousseau. Some more recent artists are also on something of the same page. Francis Bacon, for instance, or Martin Puryear’s latest sculptures (like “C.F.A.O,” which I think shares with WTV a debt to Agee and Evans), or maybe something like the work of Diego Rivera. We should mention Kathe Kollwitz, too. It is somewhat unfortunate that there are not more interdisciplinary academic journals interested in publishing material about connections like these, as they certainly are thought-provoking and under-treated.

DL: Another artist that comes to mind who one might productively compare with Vollmann is graphic novelist Chris Ware. His work is historically and socially grounded, with plenty of thick description and rich, carefully rendered detail, and also it is technically innovative, experimental, and challenging: encyclopedic and maximalist in form and content. Ware plays around with genre, voice, and discourse, introducing into his narratives such elements as fake and satirical advertisements, witty digressions, and defamiliarizing jumps between different genres and styles. His work seeks to create a world or universe through a strong and distinctive style, and as Edwin insightfully mentioned regarding William Blake, its own genre, even. Ware’s stories are based in a fundamentally tragic and sorrowful view of life, with themes of isolation, loneliness, and inability to communicate. The paradoxical disjunction between this often narrow emotional tone and the playfulness of his formal expression is the central node that holds together Ware’s narrative universe with such strength. I would say that Ware’s work is more introverted, or more interested in introversion, and dwells more on hopelessness, with less of Vollmann’s typical outward reach toward people and openness to the variety and spectrum of life. The age difference of a decade or so between them could also be a factor there.

Biblioklept: Ware is in the same strata of greatest living American writers as WTV. Shift: William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion is pretty expensive…

CKC: Yes. It was suggested that it be priced at $75, and we spent months arguing that this figure was way too high. Then we learned that it got listed at $90. The potential paperback is supposed to be around $45, but I would like to see it get down to $30. Price tags on books are a strange business at every level, at least to people who read for the reasons I do. When I was in grad school, I worked at a bookstore when I was not teaching. The guys who were ostensibly our store detectives always spent their time guarding the expensive volumes–the art monographs and computer books. I kept trying to explain that people who steal books need them to avoid going entirely insane, and that they therefore make off with things like Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, and Charles Baudelaire, not GUI programming standards manuals and poor reproductions of medieval altar decorations.

DL: We do intend to go back to the press and try to get the paperback price as low as we can. They do seem pleased that the book is selling well, so I hope the book’s success so far factors positively into their decision about the price. Obviously I would like the paperback to be as cheap and widely accessible as possible. Our audience is the community of Vollmann readers, not just professional literary scholars.

Biblioklept: Predictions: Where does/can Vollmann go from here?

CKC: Vollmann will go, so far as I can tell, wherever the hell he wants. Here are some somewhat informed speculations:

1. We are getting The Dying Grass this summer, and, from what I have learned about its form, it is going to blow some minds.

2. He is researching coal mining in West Virginia, the Fukushima disaster (still), and the Mexican oil industry for a book on fossil fuels. I hope this one is amazing–it is one of the big topics he has not yet addressed. It is also, I think, a development of his concern with pernicious technologies treated in a different manner in the Dreams, as well as in parts of Poor People.

3. I suspect the mining research is also related to his intentions with regard to The Cloud-Shirt, which has obviously been in-progress for more than two decades. It will be interesting to see if the uranium-mine material that may be in The Cloud-Shirt has a fairly direct connection to WTV at Seabrook. If such autobiographical materials become part of the narrative, some really convincing support for the unity of the whole oeuvre may come to light.

4. The Poison-Shirt is at some in-progress stage.

5. I expect more developments on the Dolores front. I do not think we shall actually see publication of How You Are, but something along such lines seems likely to me.

DL: Maybe it’s just me, but I feel that Vollmann has become more of a realist over time, more engaged with the real and thus committed to literary realism. I would like to see him, at some point in the future, move back and further into the symbolic, the speculative, the fantastic. I would love to read a science fiction novel by Vollmann. I doubt that will happen, though with Vollmann you never can tell.

Biblioklept: Have you ever stolen a book?

DL: Not that I can recall. I am guilty of spending a lot of time browsing used bookstores, and use cheap finds to direct my reading habits. For example I once found a perfectly good copy of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station for forty-eight cents in the bargain section of The Strand, which set off my Miéville reading streak. Those little “take a book, leave a book” libraries that pop up in random places can also be a great source. I recently found pristine copies of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth.

CKC: I can only think of one, although perhaps some old friends (or enemies) can remind me of others: I kiped a book about Anton La Vey when I was a child. I suppose no additional comment about that is needed.

A note on the context of the first reading, subsequent ventures, and this rereading

I bought David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest in 1997 when I was a freshman in college, as required by law. I attempted reading it a few times without really getting to page 100. (I did read and reread the short stories and the essays and Wallace’s first novel in that time though. None were assigned readings. The DFW Academic Industry was not a Thing yet).

The first time I read the book the whole way through was in the weird fall of 2001, the first fall I hadn’t returned to school because I had graduated from school, the fall of 9/11, the fall I moved to Tokyo the week after 9/11, packing the book in a smallish suitcase that the airport security guy had to take everything out of with his latex-gloved hands, removing every item, all the clothes and books, because I was traveling on a one-way ticket to a foreign land. It was in that weird fall that I finally read the book, reading mostly in the very very early a.m., sometimes reading for hours, reading too late, becoming addicted.

In years since, I’ve poked at rereadings, often looking for very specific passages/sections, and always meaning to do a full reread, but there are all those other big books that need to get read (and then reread).

Well so and anyway: This reread has been prompted by back-to-back readings of Gravity’s Rainbow, which I take to be the most obvious precursor text for Infinite Jest (and likely the greatest source of Wallace’s Oedipal anxiety if we want to get all Bloomian). I thought about Infinite Jest a lot while reading GR.

So far, like any rereading of a big encyclopedic novel, Infinite Jest seems much, much easier than my initial go through (although coming off GR almost anything would probably seem much, much easier). With the contours of the “big plot” in place (and the rhetorical dazzle of some of Wallace’s embedded-essays not as blinding as before), focusing on details, patterns, and motifs becomes simply more possible. (I don’t think I connected Hal’s clipping his toenails in Ch. 18 to the toenails Gately finds in Ennet House in Ch. 19 before, f’r’instance). (There are no actual chapter numbers in IJ, although there are circles separating chapters which can be counted).

A note to readers new to Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest is very long but it’s not nearly as difficult as its reputation suggests. There is a compelling plot behind the erudite essaying and sesquipedalian vocabulary. That plot develops around three major strands which the reader must tie together, with both the aid of—and the challenge of—the novel’s discursive style. Those three major plot strands are the tragic saga of the Incandenzas (familial); the redemptive narrative of Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, with Don Gately as the primary hero (socicultural); and the the schemes of the Québécois separatists (national/international/political). An addictive and thus deadly film called Infinite Jest links these three plots (through discursive and byzantine subplots).

Wallace often obscures the links between these plot strands, and many of the major plot connections have to be intuited or outright guessed. Furthermore, while there are clear, explicit connections between the plot strands made for the reader, Wallace seems to withhold explicating these connections until after the 200-page mark. Arguably, the real contours of the Big Plot come into (incomplete) focus in a discussion between Hal Incandenza and his brother Orin in pages 242-58. While that scene by no means telegraphs what happens in IJ, it nonetheless offers some promise that the set pieces, riffs, scenes, lists, and vignettes shall add up to Something Bigger. 

Some of those earliest set pieces, riffs, scenes, lists, and vignettes function almost as rhetorical obstacles for a first-time reader. The  novel’s opening scene, Hal Incandenza’s interview with the deans at the University of Arizona, is chronologically the last event in the narrative, and it dumps a lot of expository info on the reader. It also poses a number of questions or riddles about the plot to come, questions and riddles that frankly run the risk of the first-time reader’s forgetting through no fault of his own.

The second chapter of IJ is relatively short—just 10 pages—but it seems interminable, and it’s my guess that Wallace wanted to make his reader endure it the same way that the chapter’s protagonist–Erdedy, an ultimately very minor character—must endure the agonizing wait for a marijuana delivery. The chapter delivers the novel’s themes of ambivalence, desire, addiction, shame, entertainment, “fun,” and secrecy, both in its content and form. My guess is that this where a lot of new readers abandon the novel.

The reader who continues must then work through 30 more pages until meeting the novel’s heart, Don Gately, but by the time we’ve met him we might not trust just how much attention we need to pay him, because Wallace has shifted through so many other characters already. And then Gately doesn’t really show up again until like, 200 pages later.

In Infinite Jest, Wallace seems to suspend or delay introducing the reading rules that we’ve been trained to look for in contemporary novels. While I imagine this technique could frustrate first-time readers, I want to reiterate that this suspension or delay or digression is indeed a technique, a rhetorical tool Wallace employs to perform the novel’s themes about addiction and relief, patience and plateaus, gratitude and forgiveness.

I would urge first-time readers to stick with the novel at least until page 64, where they will be directed to end note 24, the filmography of J.O. Incandenza (I will not even discuss the idea of not reading the end notes, which are essential to the text). This filmography helps to outline the plot’s themes and the themes’ plots—albeit obliquely. And readers who make it to the filmography and find nothing to compel them further into the text should feel okay about abandoning the book at that point.

Two final notes before I close out this (unintentionally too-long) note:

There are many, many guides and discussions to IJ online and elsewhere. Do you really need them? I don’t know—but my intuition is that you’d probably do fine without them. Maybe reread Hamlet’s monologue from the beginning of Act V, but don’t dwell too much on the relationship between entertainment and death. All you really need is a good dictionary. (And, by the way, IJ is an ideal read for an electronic device—the end notes are hyperlinked, and you can easily look up words as you read).

—and—

Infinite Jest is a rhetorical/aesthetic experience, not a plot.

Some notes on Infinite Jest’s heteroglossia

One of my favorite things about rereading IJ thus far has been sussing out the ways in which the novel is predictive (of a future to come) vs. descriptive (of the time/space in which it was composed). The primary action in IJ happens in Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, which critics have worked out convincingly to be about 2009. The novel is set in a “future” which is now our past. A lot of the writings I’ve seen on IJ (admittedly I’ve avoided a lot) dwell on the tech aspect—the videophone bit, for example—which is all well and good. There’s an analog clunkiness to a lot of IJ’s tech, but the core idea of disseminated entertainment at your fingertips is pretty spot on.

I’m ultimately more interested in this rereading in some of the ways in which the narrator’s voice seems, well, dated. Wallace is attempting a kind of heteroglossia or polyglossia in Infinite Jest—which, sure, yes, he’s contesting Gravity’s Rainbow here—but there’s a certain streak to the narrator’s voice that’s tinged in what contemporary rhetoric would call white male privilege. What I find fascinating about this is that it’s my intuition that Wallace wants his novel to be inclusive, to bring in marginalized voices, etc. (all that stuff that yon Bloom, previously evoked in this riff, termed “The School of Resentment”). Arguably, the tinges I’m describing show up in phrases and terms that are Wallace’s characters’, not the narrator’s. A simple example comes in end note 91, where the narrator remarks on Gately’s use of the term “pillow-biter” that “it and the f-term are the only terms for male homosexuals he knows, still.” Gately doesn’t actually use the term “pillow-biter” in dialogue though; rather, we get the term via the third-person narrator’s free indirect habitation of Gately’s consciousness. Wallace’s intratextual notation of this speech showcases his heightened concern for language, for the names we foist on others.

It’s not always clear though when the narrator is inhabiting a consciousness (Wallace’s free indirect style can often be very free), so the narrator’s tendency to mark whiteness as a kind of baseline ordinariness evinces occasionally outside of any one character’s “voice.” Is it Hal who uses the vague term “ethnic” for anything not white? (Brilliant, precise, prescriptive, encyclopedic Hal, in conversation with Orin, refers to a presumably-specific type of music as “multicultural”). And when Hal indulges in mocking a trailer park denizen, even though Orin chides him, it’s hard not to feel Wallace having a laugh behind the scenes. Wallace’s command of the first-person voices he employs also sometimes falls flat, or, worse, evokes cringes, like Clenette’s narration (in supposed-Ebonics) in pages 37-38.

To return to where I started on the notes of this section, about the prediction vs description thing, I think that Wallace’s heteroglossia signals a will toward inclusion, multicultural perspective, diversity, etc., terms that I hope you will forgive the buzzwordiness of here, terms that I take to be very much at the center of this decade’s discussion of literature. Wallace’s predictive scope is to attempt, in language, a polyglossic/heteroglossic America, and he does this by trying to get out of his own (white male academic) head. The description of his own time is what he ends up with though—his heteroglossic attempt is strained, encyclopedic but ultimately feels monoglossic.

More to come.