The Awful Possibilities

in my last post i mentioned having read two novels recently that featured similar plot elements and other things and wrote about one of them, which was jesse ball’s samedi the deafness, and mentioned i would write about the other, gary indiana’s the shanghai gesture, next time. now it’s next time and i will write about the shanghai gesture, but first full disclosure:

the shanghai gesture was published by two dollar radio and i submitted work to them a while back. i needed to mention this because my response to the novel was generally positive. of course, i submitted work to the publisher because they publish work that i respond to positively. this is the kind of weird loop that only small press fiction writers can get themselves into (because no one would question if a writer from one of the conglomerates were to review a book by another writer from the same conglomerate, even in one of the big venues — because the work is so important that it simply must be discussed by the best — and because no one cares what poets do). so now that my conscience is clear –

i ain't got my baby and i'm feeling wrong

my brother came into this coffee shop where i hang out. i was reading the shanghai gesture. when i put it down to talk to him, he picked it up, turned it over, read the blurb on the back that said it “… reads as though Cormac McCarthy had rewritten Austin Powers,” and told me that it sounded fucking terrible. i told him to read a random passage from the book; he read for a minute and said the book sounded great.

i mention that not to shame the blurber (though it is pretty tone deaf) but to point out how difficult this book is to contextualize. in my last post i mentioned that indiana used old-timey language. cormac mccarthy also uses (or is known to use) old-timey language. indiana and mccarthy use two very different old-timey languages.

when most of us talk about cormac mccarthy’s style, we mean his style in blood meridian (in the books leading up to blood meridian, the debt to faulkner is near insurmountable, as good as the ones i’ve read can be; the books after tend to be stylistically dilute versions of blood meridian, though at least one of them is good) (thus sayeth me). blood meridian fuses the rhetoric of the king james bible with the tradition of the southern gothic (there’s plenty of overlap there, and also with faulkner) with the literature of the west and a good helping of melville.

i don’t see much trace of any of this in the shanghai gesture. here is the second sentence of the book:

Reports of Petrie in languorous flight through the velvet-shrouded parlors of his monstrous Victorian folly, of static levitation, even tales of Petrie clinging spiderlike to the plaster grape-and-putti moldings that lined the ornate ceilings of those musty rooms, suffocated by curio cabinets and incunabula, were rife not only in the hushed confabulations of Those That Know, but a topic of idle gossip among the raucous sailors, coney-catchers, fishwives, and floozies who trolled Gin Lane and its tributary alleys at Land’s End.

mccarthy would have used the word “and” at least twice as many times in a sentence of that length. but both the language and structure of the sentence suggest a different era and different influences, anyway. first, it’s long and fairly formal. it piles on adjectives in a way that most sentences these days don’t, and the diction is high, even if the subject matter is not so. it’s full of britishisms (“coney-catchers” etc) and archaic word choices (“incunabula” where book might have worked) and the references that help establish setting (“gin lane” and “land’s end”) point to the old world.

the gin lane example doesn’t just establish setting. i think it’s also suggesting a time period (though the use of the word “victorian” in the first clause shows that indiana is just referencing the period, not setting the book then), an aesthetic orientation for the text, because gin lane is a fairly well-known print by the satirist william hogarth. hogarth, a visual artist, was contemporary or roughly contemporary with writers like henry fielding, tobias smollett, laurence sterne, and alexander pope. i guess what i’m saying is, i came to the conclusion pretty quickly that gary indiana was updating 18th century satire for the 21st century.

and the fact is, he does a great job of it. i should actually end that sentence with “as long as you weren’t hoping for suspense.”

remember how i said that this book, like ball’s, hinged on a plot to destroy the world? well, it only hinges on that plot as far as indiana needs it as a skeleton for his riffing. when he doesn’t need it any more, he just makes it disappear altogether (and almost literally).

this didn’t bother me at all. in fact, i appreciated it. the riffing is the point, and in combining an old mode of satire with new(ish) things to satirize — fu manchu mysteries, globalization, the “war on terror,” technophilia — indiana has made something worthy of the writers mentioned above (as well as jonathan swift, whose meticulous, disgusted depictions of unpleasant bodily functions may even be one-upped here).

still, it’s maybe unfair to writers who would attempt something like what indiana has attempted that we tend to call every extended piece of made-up prose a novel, because that is the only definition by which the shanghai gesture is a novel, and, while after reading the first few pages of this book, i didn’t expect or want it to fulfill any of the writer’s workshop notions of the novel — ie, i didn’t want more of the mother (do they still use that one in workshops?) — i would have liked to see the scenario indiana set up play itself out.

instead, we seem, at the end, just as the world is about to be destroyed, to end up in a scene from a classic noir called the shanghai gesture, which i haven’t seen, so i can’t give a great evaluation of the success of the move. i could imagine the strawman workshop i invented above using the word metafiction here (WHICH DOESN”T APPLY AT ALL), but that’s not my worry. my worry is that someone who has written a truly vicious, arguably misanthropic (in a way we need) book might expect to sway me with a slightly corny mysticism as a way of putting a bow on it. i understand the idea that the plot to blow up the world is a red herring (with obvious political referents), but would it have been more effective to let the plot dismantle itself?

i used to ask that same question of my students after teaching nabokov’s bend sinister.

so whaddya say two dollar radio? you want to do a book together?

i read two books in the last week, and both of them featured plots to blow up the world or a significant portion thereof. the fact that i read them consecutively is a coincidence, but now i want to write about them as if it wasn’t.

beyond the plots to blow up the world, they have several other things in common that i can think of off the top of my head:

• the narrative voices of both novels attempt to sound old-timey
• they both utilize elements of detective fiction, particularly protagonists (in the sense of main characters) who function as investigators
• they both rely heavily on digression and what might be called absurdist plot twists
• they both take place in an unspecified era that blends elements of the present and past

that said, they use these aspects to drastically different ends and are otherwise very different novels. one is jesse ball’s samedi the deafness; the other is the shanghai gesture by gary indiana. i will post about the former now and the latter next time.

the first thing that struck me about samedi the deafness was the language. that sounds like a redundant thing to say about a novel, but it was particularly true of my experience with this book because, while everything i’d heard about it was positive, everything i’d heard about it was vague as well. in other words, i had no idea what the books was about, so i just followed the language.

as i mentioned, ball seems to be trying to employ a kind of high syntax to give the book an old-timey, or maybe timeless, feel. it works most of the time, but he has a tendency to insert prepositional phrases in odd places. this can be effective when done occasionally. it can be grating when done constantly. here are phrases from sentences in three consecutive paragraphs on the first page of the novel (italics mine):

“… the clouds that had gathered near and made of themselves rain all through the night…”

“James bought from him a newspaper …”

“… there was in James a small sadness …”

none of these is wrong, one of them is nice, but cumulatively and in such a tight space, they seem to indicate, not so much a style, but a stylistic tic, and i occasionally felt like i was reading something in translation (i understand ball was living in europe when he composed this). while i know it’s pointless to guess at an author’s intention, these phrasings didn’t feel intentional — the only mood they effectively set for me was mild annoyance, and there was no payoff for it in the plot.

i say the only mood they set for me, etc, but that’s not entirely true. you can get a different mood by disregarding the author’s intentions like so:

i have a friend who used to make fun of me for having gone to bard college by pronouncing it “bahd” and using a ridiculous “high” rhetoric that bore no resemblance to the way anyone has talked ever. if you read samedi the deafness in that voice, the mood might be funnier, but it wouldn’t match the book at all.

the other thing about the prose that jumped out at me often was a tendency toward vagueness which also leads to some howlers. for example: “Anyone who leaves their house deserves what they get.”

while i try to avoid using plural pronouns to indicate gender neutrality, i’m not a prescriptivist and i know there are places where it’s appropriate. whether it’s appropriate here or not, that sentence is a damn mess. to be consistent it would have to read “anyone who leaves their house deserves what they gets.” better just to start from scratch.

you could argue that that phrasing comes from the fact that the passage is written in a close third person, but no you couldn’t. james sim, the protagonist, a “mnemonist” (attention all authors: please no more quirky made up jobs), doesn’t seem to worry about gender neutrailty for the sake of political correctness. his love interest is frequently referred to as a “girl” and really, he seems more like the type to use “one” for gender neutrailty anyway.

but like i said, this contributes to a vagueness. here is another sentence that is all vagueness (and also mixes up pronouns):

“If she was the agent of someone else, and they in turn were working for someone, then who, ultimately, had given the order to follow him?”

this kind of enigma-wrapped-up-in-a-riddle-and-tied-with-a-mystery logic can have its charms, but the sentence itself seems to me emblematic of the book itself: when it misfires, it confuses abstraction and vagueness. abstraction is always fine (boiling things down to their essences without getting mired in the details); vagueness is abstraction’s perversion (murky, gives the impression that the author is aiming for abstraction because he or she doesn’t know the details him or herself).

here is a bulleted list of people who i can think of right now who do abstraction well over the course of a novel:

• samuel beckett
• thomas bernhard
• maurice blanchot
• franz kafka
• marie redonnet

is it a coincidence that they are/were all european? i don’t know.

fancy, man

now for the plot to blow up the world:

the novel picks up steam once james sim gets wrapped up in the plot, but, for me at least, the author seems more invested in the love story being played out at the same time, and i also was more interested in that. the plot itself is very teen angsty (to simplify: sometimes the world gets so fucked up you have to break shit), but the author seems so earnest it’s hard to tell where he stands in relation to it.

i think the problem here is that there is no control in the experiment. the behavior of the characters is defined neither by their situations nor by any internal consistency. take, for example, james sim. sometimes he’s a whiny coward, sometimes he’s a stoic intellectual, sometimes he’s callous, and sometimes he’s a chivalrous tough guy. very much like real people, yes. but we’re given access to his thoughts through the close third person technique, and still there doesn’t seem to be any method to it.

his attitudes are an afterthought, like, in order for this weird shit to happen, he has to respond this way right now. as opposed to, weird shit has happened, how would a guy like this react?

i’m assuming it’s not quite that cut and dry. my guess is that ball has some sort of meta-method he’s applying to the text, and i’m not against that. however, when the plot is based on the faultiness (or not) of memory and the human tendency to lie, i think you really do need an archimedian point inside the text, as opposed to one imposed from without.

one of the things you always hear when you hear about jesse ball is that he writes his books very quickly. it would be tempting to blame what i see as problems with the book on that. but i’m actually not tempted to do that at all (one of the things i’m always telling my writer friends is to get on with it; it’s never going to be the bible). i think it may actually boil down to the likelihood that ball and i are focused on very different things.

all that said, there’s definitely something here. ball is capable of writing very well, and some of the individual passages are quite beautiful. i particularly liked a section that included a description of a couple “trapped in a Studebaker beneath an overturned timber truck. They were speaking to each other very quietly, saying what they supposed were their last things.”

an excellent essay at the point about david foster wallace. i mean that. in fact it would be almost perfect if the axiom it rested on were true, or at least not presented as axiomatic. but it is presented as axiomatic, and from some of the stuff i’ve been reading lately (and in some cases all my life), it is threatening to become the party line not only on david foster wallace but also on literature in general, so let me sound my barbaric yawp, ok?

Confused, alienated and inauthentic though it might be, subjective consciousness still existed—and it was still the business of the novelist to describe it.

this is the last sentence of the first paragraph of the essay. a thesis, then, if you want to get all composition class about it.

first, if the “the” before “business” were replaced with an “a,” i might be able to get behind this claim a little, but to say that it is “the business of the novelist to describe [subjective consciousness]” is reductive because it seems to suggest that “description” should be priority number one. what about prescription? and couldn’t the business of the novelist be to relate a series of events (or even just write a series of nice sentences) with descriptions of subjective consciousness rising out of that relation as an ancillary benefit? and of course, there’s an accusation implicit in that statement as well — the accusation that there are novelists who have rejected “the business of the novelist” by not describing subjective consciousness, as though that were possible.

see, the thing about subjective consciousness is, it all depends on where you locate it. a novel without a single sentient character would still describe subjective consciousness assuming it was written by a human being (and if a computer, or a million monkeys with a million typewriters, managed to produce a novel randomly, our own subjective consciousnesses as readers would project a subjective consciousness on author and text). furthermore, a novel that goes deep into the heads of its characters, you know, the kind that does the business of the novelist, also describes subjective consciousness, though not of those characters (who don’t exist, and if they did, we would be getting not a description of their subjective consciousnesses, but a description of their author’s interpretation of their subjective consciousnesses) but of its author.

everybody in the world get this through your head — every utterance, act, noise, drawing, step, fuck you, etc. produced by a human is a product of subjective consciousness, and you will never have unmuddled access to any subjective consciousness but your own, by definition, and your own access to your own may also be muddled. it’s part of the fun of it all.

all right, ok, i'm feeling you

but this isn’t the most troubling part of the thesis. the most troubling part is the word “still.” “still” implies some doubt as to whether anyone is still human. doubting the subjective consciousness of anyone is not beautiful or thoughtful or artistic — it’s neurotic and juvenile. even if your intentions are good, worrying about whether you or anyone else is human is a smokescreen. it’s also dangerous. here’s why:

you know that there are still humans because you doubt that there are still humans. in order for someone to doubt that there are still humans, there have to be humans as we’ve defined them. this was taken care of back in the early 17th century. it also never really needed taking care of. but by this method you can never prove anyone else is human. i hope, then, that you decide to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

but the doubt itself is a smokescreen because you know fucking well we’re all still humans. your just avoiding asking or dealing with why we’re all such a bunch of assholes.

finally authenticity. the essay’s author goes on to discuss authenticity in great detail, but is really discussing several different notions of authenticity at once. a book, for example, can’t be authentic or inauthentic. it’s just a book. let me use the obvious example:

james frey’s memoirs may not actually relate any of his actual thoughts or experiences, but it’s not the book that’s inauthentic, nor is it james frey’s subjective consciousness (which nobody but james frey has access to), but just james frey as he performs himself, that is, the subjective consciousness that he describes.

now, if i wanted to write the novel of james frey’s inauthenticity, i could write a 600 pager full of henry james-style interior monologues where he struggles with whether or not to present his life as it was lived, or i could write two paragraphs, one describing what happened, another describing his idealized version of it. all of these would be equally authentic and none would be james frey’s subjective consciousness.

to bring this back to dfw and the essay on him and then to end:

the essay’s author, in contextualizing the story “the depressed person,” writes:

What the depressed person wants to do, she tells her therapist, is “somehow really truly literally ‘share’” her pain; Wallace wanted to “share” too. Great fiction, he once said, engaged its reader in a “deep, significant conversation with another consciousness …”

speaking for myself, that is, describing my own subjective consciousness to yours, i’ve never felt that the depressed person really truly literally shares anything but the symptoms of depression even if it does operate on other, more metaphorical, levels. it describes them well, and it’s annoying as hell. but i don’t feel them, nor do i feel for the depressed person. maybe i feel for anyone who has to deal with her.

but if you look elsewhere in the same collection you can find plenty of examples of a real attempt at sharing, a real connection. there are places you can feel what wallace is trying to do, even if you can never experience the subjective consciousness of wallace or his characters.

over at hobart, jed berry has challenged all comers to a literary feud. at least that’s how i read it, though the way he describes it, it sounds a little bit, i don’t know, civil or something. probably a rope-a-dope. either way i won’t be taking him up on his offer because jed is so nice that i don’t know if i’d be able to get up the head of steam i’d need to properly feud with him and also because i suspect he’d crush me in his own dandy-ish way. so it falls to you. go on, make your name.

here is where, if i did the internet right i would jump to wikipedia and provide a fascinating list of past literary feuds. instead i will consider who i might like to feud with. this is tough because, well because most writers are complete idiots (i would say “these days,” but i don’t know what it was really like before these days) and also, as anyone who has been in an mfa program in the last, say, 20 years will tell you, while there’s plenty of gossip and backbiting among writers, it’s almost impossible to get any two to disagree in public about anything substantive. i mean, even dale peck’s celebrated “hatchet job” on rick moody was really more like a high school basketball coach’s motivational speech — “i’m so hard on you ‘cuz i expect better, kid.”

you guys are doing it wrong

so, then, feuds:

my earliest ideas for feuds were on some “kill your idols” type shit (anxiety of influence without the anxiety or influence; oedipus complex without the oedipus complex plus more complexity). they were, in this order:

• bradford morrow
• david foster wallace
• mary karr
• brian evenson

morrow was a professor where i did undergrad. i considered him my nemesis because he never once let me into his workshop. he got off the feud list because, though he’s an accomplished novelist, he’s best known as an editor,and i wanted this to be, not just strictly a literary, but a writer feud. david foster wallace was eligible until we lost him. (i mean that respectfully — he was an amazing writer and i regret never having met him and i’m sorry for the suffering he endured.) mary karr is brilliant and i bet a great feuder who probably fights dirty. in grad school i watched her get brutal over some saint augustine. unfortunately, we have zero interests in common, so i would get preoccupied by sitting back and letting her do her thing, i.e., it would be entirely aesthetic. brian evenson is, i think, probably the best writer of his generation, but presents the opposite conundrum karr does — i agree with pretty much everything he says, which would make for a suck feud. evenson would be still be eligible if he would launch the first attack, but it would have to be about something important to me, like me or one of my friends.

with feuds, though, it’s better to stick to your generation.

probably my best feud option, peer-wise, would be adam levin. we’re evenly matched intellectually (i hope he doesn’t mind my saying that) and we like and dislike a lot of the same stuff. even better, we attack from different angles — i’m a philosophy/theology guy (kierkegaard!) and adam’s a psychology/social sciences master (skinner!) — and usually end up converging on the same place: the effectiveness of sentences, the need for a book to justify its existence, the minutiae of judeo-christian law, etc.

unfortunately, adam is the guy whose huge manuscript i posted about a while back. that manuscript has since been accepted and will be a book soon (best news!), so it would look pretty disengenuous if we started feuding now. lack of forsight on my part. not to mention, everyone who knows me knows he’s among my best friends.

this is harder than it seemed like it would be. i should have just gone the fascinating list of literary feuds route.

okay, here’s one: keith gessen. i think he’s the best critic of his generation and a very good fiction writer. he also has feuded well before (though he acted kind of mellow when his book came out). here is a list of reasons i would feud with him if he still has the eye of the tiger:

• he’s dismissive of the style i write in. i think. maybe just of my writing.
• his co-editor on n + 1, marco roth, just won a pew fellowship whereas i was only a finalist.
• in his book, he quoted an obscure song from a rap mix i gave him, but did not acknowledge me as the rap authority i am in said book.

i know that these are incredibly petty reasons for a feud, but feuds are often started for incredibly petty reasons. so i am willing, for the sake of literature.

you know that thing about icebergs that hemingway wrote and that creative writing professors always want to tell you hemingway wrote like it’s the best advice?

here, i found this on wikipedia:

If a writer of a prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

“of a prose” sounds a little mannered, or actually just weird, but i’m not going to go looking around to see if it’s a typo. otherwise, duh.

i recently reread the sun also rises because, having been accused on many occasions of lacking subtlety (literature-wise), i decided to teach myself subtlety by studying an iceberg invented by the inventor of icebergs. i enjoyed it more than i had on previous reads. it’s a book about a guy who loves and is loved by the most beautiful woman in the world but it can never work because the cong blew up his specials and hemingway was spending too much time on icebergs to invent something practical like a mouth or sex toys. you know, subtle, like that baudelaire poem about the guy from nantucket.

i know it doesn’t look good when i play dumb. blame it on my lack of subtlety or the fact that i’m not actually dumb. anyway, let me just get to the point:

subtlety is not what happens, in a book or anywhere. what happens is just what happens. and for fuck’s sake you won’t look more subtle when you write an iceberg in which nothing happens, just boring. and also, every book can only be the tip of an iceberg because nothing can cover everything, not even everything that it’s “about,” not even infinite jest. hence the “duh” up near the top of the post. mfa professors, please find a better thing to say.

one of these things is stuffed

but my point is more subtle than that, so it has to be stated explicitly:

if what most people talk about when they talk about subtlety with regard to literature these days were proper subtlety, then subtlety would be either impossible or pointless by now. that’s because everything these days is permitted on the page. scratch that. almost everything verbal is permitted almost everywhere.

here is an example of what i’m talking about:

a while back i was waiting in line at the post office and the middle-aged woman in front of me was talking loudly on her cellphone about getting artificially inseminated. back when hemingway was writing, there might have been reason to write “subtly” about something like that.

but! that doesn’t mean that a contemporary novelist couldn’t create subtle reasons for her to get artificially inseminated or, even better, why she was talking so loudly about it on her cellphone in line at the post office. maybe she hope to be mentioned on a lit-blog one day.

contemporary novelists and bloggers: please do not write about this woman. she is boring and unsubtle.

my final point is, there’s always more, which is why that iceberg comment is so obvious, like when my lit professors decided to introduce me to the radical concept of subjectivity, and later, inter-subjectivity.

in my first novel, when the guy who huffs gasoline all the time gets shot, he explodes.

that said, there are signs that an iceberg isn’t subtle enough. here are a few of them:

• it includes the phrase, “and the moral of the story is…”
• it isn’t a satire and characters say things like, “no one undertsands me” or, conversely “i really feel like you understand me”
• the subtitle begins with, “a novel of …”
• it is fiction and has a subtitle
• the names ayn rand or chuck palahniuk are on the cover

thank you. i really feel like you understand me. now plumb my depths.