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EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES by Tom Robbins

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A review of EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES (Tom Robbins) by Joseph Suglia

Literature has always had a hard time justifying itself.  And how could it justify itself?  Literature does no work.  Nor does it ground itself in any socially productive activity or engagement.  Not only does literature not serve the interests of society, often, in fact, it seems to playfully subvert these interests, though only in a powerless and purely “theatrical” way.  Departments of Literary Studies seem to have been designed to disguise the “fact” of literature’s essential frivolity.

Literary artists often have bad consciences.  Consider the fact that Don Quixote seems to be a novel that is directed against novels–against the chimeras of literature and of literary language.

No novel seems more flamboyantly frivolous than Tom Robbins’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976).  The work is often breathtakingly, magically, and intoxicatingly eloquent–and also, at times, bombastically written, ostentatious, empty, and light as air.  It is easy to be seduced and enchanted by the playful language of this work.  But one must nonetheless ask oneself: “What is the point of it all? Where is this book going? Why was it written?”  Perhaps these are questions that go against literature’s essence.  Perhaps the purpose of this book–and the purpose of literature–is purposelessness.

Sissy Hankshaw is all thumbs.  In Richmond, Virginia, where she was born and raised, the gigantic-thumbed girl is ostracized because of her so-called “deformity.”  When she reads in a dictionary that the thumb affords the hand a greater “freedom of movement,” she decides to use her strangeness to her advantage by becoming the very “spirit and heart of hitchhiking” [47].  As she traverses the United States and beyond, she meets and marries a Native American and asthmatic watercolorist from Manhattan named Julian who, unlike Sissy, has renounced his difference from the dominant collective.  Since she is perpetually in a state of motion, Sissy departs from her husband and takes up a modeling assignment given to her by “the Countess,” the misogynistic magnate of a feminine deodorant firm, on the Rubber Rose Ranch, an exclusively female-staffed, Western-themed beauty salon for older women who want to juvenilize their appearances.  Under the leadership of neo-cowgirl revivalist Bonanza Jellybean, the cowgirls take possession of the ranch and claim ownership of the whooping cranes that populate it–a species that is imperiled by a technologized, male-dominated society that offsets the balance of nature.

If this narrative sounds silly, that is because it is.  This is not to suggest that the work is meaningless or without “theme” (to mention a meaningless word).  Of course, it is possible to “thematize” any work.  One can always pretend to have “excavated” its “themes” (whatever this word is supposed to mean), to enumerate them, and to present them to the reader.  There is in the book an unapologetic environmentalism, the “allegory” of burgeoning feminism, and the championing of social misfits, freaks, deviants, lunatics, outcasts, and other “endangered species”–in particular, the novel celebrates hitchhikeresses and cowgirls, both of whom represent women who affirm their differences from male-defined normality.  According to the logic of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the sick are normal, and those who attempt to normalize themselves are the sick; by denying their singularity, the latter mutilate themselves.  And yet all of these “themes,” as serious as they might seem, are tossed off with such gleefulness that their seriousness as “themes” is eroded.

The book’s frivolous style of writing casts light on what one might call its “politics of playfulness.”  Even Cowgirls Get the Blues joyfully affirms the irruption of the frivolous and the extraordinary in everyday life and the rupturing of our sedimented responses “in a rational world where even disasters are familiar and damn near routine” [49].  An earthquake, to use one of the book’s many of metaphors for strangeness, interrupts the rhythms of ordinary life and thereby opens up new spheres of possibilities, breaking open the fabric of the normal and powering a more vital experience of the world–this is a “concept” that is clearly inspired by the philosophy of surrealism.  Sissy Hankshaw, with her massive thumbs, has a destabilizing effect on one’s rigidified perceptions.  Through her difference from others, she reminds the more “normal” characters in the book that the world is multiple, that stability is not rigidity, that the most “authentic” experience of life is one that is afforded by ceaseless movement.  As she explains to Julian, “I’ve proven that people aren’t trees, so it is false when they speak of roots” [80].  Hitchhiking is here a figure of endless motility–perpetual movement without origin or goal, motion for motion’s sake.  Systems, the book suggests, that do not incorporate the instability of motion–that is to say, that do not include chaos–are doomed to destruction.  Systems that are air-tight and shatterproof not fortuitously resemble fascist dictatorships; they attempt to impose order on disorder, they prefer homogeneity to heterogeneity.  As a result, they unravel, for the extraordinary can never be contained or managed.  Every system has “chinks” and leaks.  In order for systems to endure, they must bear disorder within themselves.  Stability and instability are–paradoxically–conjoined.  As Sissy remarks to her psychiatrist, Dr. Robbins, “Disorder is inherent in stability” [208].

And yet, even beyond this cluster of meanings, the work’s most essential “theme” (to mention this empty word one last time) is simply the joyous dance of language; its eloquence is absolutely overpowering.  When confronting the eloquence of someone like Tom Robbins, the literary critic should step aside, bow out, walk off the stage, and let the author take the floor.  Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is replete with surrealist disanalogies more striking than the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.  So exuberant is his writing that the author throws a party for the hundredth chapter of his book.  What Friedrich Schlegel once said of Diderot could also be said of Tom Robbins: Whenever he does something truly brilliant, he congratulates himself on his brilliance.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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V. by Thomas Pynchon * Thomas Pynchon V Analysis * Inherent Vice Thomas Pynchon

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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE FACTS ON FILE COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN NOVEL

An Analysis of V. (Thomas Pynchon) by Joseph Suglia

“Suppose truth were a woman…”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

All readers undergo a voyage to discover hidden meanings–a voyage which is also a passage of self-discovery.  Like most meta-fictional narratives, Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V. (1963) is about the act of reading itself and the possibility or impossibility of self-reading.

Never has reading seemed so lugubrious.  The plot concerns Stencil, the son of a now-deceased British foreign officer, who, accompanied by eponymous “schlemihl” Benny Profane, half-heartedly searches for the elusive “V.”–who might be a woman, a thing, a concept, a sewer rat, or nothing at all.  Stencil is a reader, broadly understood: He attempts to interpret the meaning of an initial.  Reading is here a process without progress and without terminus: Stencil never succeeds in identifying the initial’s referent.  As his name implies, Stencil can only trace the outlines of that which he seeks; his search is, to a certain extent, a fruitless yearning for truth.

To put an end to the process of reading would be to lose one’s human spontaneity.  For this reason, “V.” must never be found.  If “V.” were found, Stencil would become indistinguishable from an inanimate object.  The search for “V.” is the only thing that distinguishes him from a thing: “His random movements before the war had given way to a great single movement from inertness to–if not vitality, then at least activity” [55].  Both Profane and Stencil are terrified of the world of objects.  They fear their stasis, their contagious inanimateness.  The inanimate objects that populate Pynchon’s narrative often resemble human beings, such as the beer tap that is shaped in the form of a “foam rubber breast” [16].  Human beings, conversely, are themselves often functional and machinelike: e.g., Benny Profane’s jaunts resemble the idiotic up-and-down movements of a yo-yo; Rachel’s words are described as “inanimate-words [Profane] couldn’t really talk back at” [27], etc.  All of the “characters” in the novel are threatened by the lifeless world of things.  Stencil needs to search for the inaccessible in order to separate himself from the inanimateness of objecthood, in order to avoid freezing into a thingly state: “He tried not to think, therefore, about any end to the search. Approach and avoid” [55].  If “V” were found, it would be necessary to lose it again and to reinitiate the search.

Readers are implicated in this impossible quest, involuntarily placed in the position of code-breakers.  Like Stencil, they obsessively ask themselves, “Who, then, is V.?”  Because the identity of “V.” is never completely given, the solution to the code seems to withdraw abyssally into darkness.  Without an answerable meaning, the “alien hieroglyphic[-]” [17] seems to exist on its own terms.  The book’s center, it would seem, is not some intentional content that would lie behind or beyond the code, but, rather, the code itself.  The cipher itself is illuminated, not its meaning.  The point of interpretation is no longer to identify a transcendental meaning or theme, but rather to sift through the fragments and details of the narrative, the ill-fitting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.  The unanswerable question “Who, then, is V.?” incites us to return to the forgotten or neglected world of appearances.  Bluntly stated, the disconnected pieces of Pynchon’s narrative are what is essential, not the “whole” to which they would belong.

Pynchon’s novel is an anti-adventure story about the plight of reading.  It challenges us to interpret something–the initial “V.”–without thinking in the categories of totality or universality.  The particular clues in the story do not relate to the universal.  Any interpretation that thinks in the language of totality or universality, in this context, is doomed to failure.

V. concerns the failure of reading and self-reading.  Stencil’s obsessive yet ultimately grim and joyless quest is to discover his own provenance (the search for “V.” is, to a certain extent, the search for his own father, der Vater in German) and therefore to discover his own identity.  And yet there is no definitive conclusion to the process of self-reading; therefore, there is no definite self-understanding.  Stencil’s identity is determined by the impossible which he seeks: “[H]e was quite purely He Who Looks for V.” [225].  If this process had any finality, he would be nothing at all–that is to say, nothing more than a thing, one thing among others.

The task of reading, then, must remain an infinitely provisional task.  Brenda remarks to Profane in Malta: “‘You’ve had all these fabulous experiences. I wish mine would show me something.’ / ‘Why.’ / ‘The experience, the experience. Haven’t you learned?’ / Profane didn’t have to think long. ‘No,’ he said, ‘offhand I’d say I haven’t learned a goddamn thing'” [454].  Stencil and Profane are led on an issueless quest–as are those of us who follow them.  The absence of anything like a decipherable meaning forces us to think about why we read: The book reveals our desire to discover order in chaos, to impose structure and coherence on entropy (disorder and stasis), to implement systems where there is none.

According to the metaphorics of V., the search for meaning is more imperative than the meaning that is sought.  Such is the significance of the non-questions that populate the book–questions that are unshelled of the interrogative form: “What are you afraid of” [36]; “Do you like it here” [40], etc.  These questions without questions remind us that, when approaching this book, we must pose questions without hankering after results.  The question is its own answer.  The answer is the question’s misfortune.

P.S. The novel has a sterile, lifeless prose style.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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IRREVERSIBLE by Gaspar Noe

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A review of Irreversible (2003) by Joseph Suglia

Irreversible (2003): The traces of other films are indeed perceptible on its canvas.  And yet it is absolutely singular, absolutely unlike anything else in the history of cinema.

People go on and on about how “disturbing” this film is.  On a surficial level, the film is “disturbing,” of course.  But I personally found the film just, morally unambiguous, and even beautiful.

It is simultaneously the ugliest and most beautiful of all films.

The film’s message is not, as most people claim, that “time destroys all things.”  This is a painfully banal cliche, and, yes, it is plastered onto the surface of the film as if it were a wheatpaste poster.  The film’s reverse order gives the lie to this stupid cliche.  We are discussing a film that contradicts its own title: Irreversible reverses everything.  The film says: Yes, time destroys all things, but time itself can be destroyed.

Because the camera swirls around in a disorienting way at the beginning of the film (and at other points, as well, suggesting the reversibility of time), the spectator is initially unaware that the film starts with a scene of brutal vengeance.  Nor does one understand, at this point, why this vengeance takes place.  This effect of disorientation prevents the spectator from forming a moral judgment and either condemning or endorsing the bloody act of revenge.

The final scene of bliss (the “end” of the film is its chronological beginning) contains such pathos that it is absolutely overpowering: Now the spectator finally recognizes (a recognition that comes by way of a feeling) that rape destroys human life.  The woman who is raped, Alex (Monica Bellucci) is mourned at the close of the film (against Beethoven’s seventh symphony); her assailant, whose violation mirrors her violation, is not.

Marcus is Alex’s current lover.  Pierre is Alex’s former lover, an older man.  Pierre shows infinitely more devotion toward Alex than her boyfriend: He is the true spirit of revenge in the film.  Marcus, by contrast, is self-absorbed, stupid, and morally weak: Out of fear, he is reluctant to avenge the crime committed against his girlfriend.

Does Pierre resent Alex for having chosen another man over him?  There is evidence of this in the film.

If you are a man, this film will make you feel ashamed that you are.

In the bedroom scene, Marcus reveals that he is the rapist’s double.  Watch this scene carefully, and you will see what I mean.

Likewise, Marcus is quite similar to the anonymous passer-by who witnesses the rape in the tunnel (the tunnel is a figure that is used throughout the film and is evocative of the rectum) and yet does nothing to prevent it.

Those who run from the theater in horror are just as cowardly as that passer-by.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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Chuck Palahniuk Is a Bad Writer / SNUFF by Chuck Palahniuk / A Review of SNUFF by Chuck Palahniuk / A Bad Review of One of Chuck Palahniuk’s Books, Which Are All Bad / A Bad Review of a Chuck Palahniuk Book / A Negative Review of a Chuck Palahniuk Book / Chuck Palahniuk Is a Bad Writer

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On SNUFF (Chuck Palahniuk) by Joseph Suglia

If it sustained itself over countless eternities, a roomful of typing monkeys would eventually recreate every library in the world, reproducing every word in every volume.  This theorem, known as the “infinite-monkey hypothesis,” could also be applied to Snuff (2008) by chuckpalahniuk.  After vomiting eight completely worthless books, each a static repetition of the one before, chuckpalahniuk has finally generated something worthy of being read, much in the same way that an eternal scriptorium of monkeys would also generate at least some books that are worthy of being read.

While I am not an admirer of his previous fiction, Snuff does something that chuckpalahniuk’s earlier efforts failed to do: It addresses the conditions of its possibility and reception.  Here we have a hive of drones waiting to consume the body of their pornographic priestess.  They are very much like those who consume Snuff–an unintelligent, slovenly, shallow, hastily written, messily constructed McFiction sandwich larded with an impasto of moldy tartar sauce.

The words “dude” and “kid” are used more than any others, the font is so large that your grandmother could read it through her cataracts, and the “research,” such as it is, extends no further than Google.  Not merely is chuckpalahniuk’s language impoverished in relation to that of other published writers; he is not even able to write on the level of a sentient adult.  Indeed, the “author,” a forty-six-year-old man at the time he disgorged this vomitous book, writes as if he were any unremarkable twelve-year-old American boy.  Here are some representative examples of chuckpalahniuk’s prose:

“Those tests that Shelia had dudes take, the clinic reports most dudes had to bring, none of that’s foolproof” (128).

“The locker-room smell of some dude’s bare feet, we breathe that smell like [sic] those cheeses [sic] from France that smell like your sneakers in high school that you’d wear in gym class all year without washing them” (52).

“High school,” indeed.

It is depressing that chuckpalahniuk has yet to craft a style.  One might claim that his infantile, agrammatical manner of expression IS a style, that he is only miming the illiterate stupidity of his characters.  If that is the case, why does every one of chuckpalahniuk’s characters sound exactly like the next, giving the form and body of his work the disturbing appearance of an unsynchronized Christmas carol sung by a chorus of stuttering lobotomy patients?  chuckpalahniuk’s syntax is irritating, tedious, inane, and torturous to read: SUBJECT + PRONOUN + VERB + OBJECT.

If read as a work of art, one will fail to do justice to this book.  Snuff is by no means art; it is a cultural production and, like all cultural productions, is the reverberation of the time and place in which it was written.  Despite his intellectual and rhetorical shortcomings, chuckpalahniuk has succeeded in producing something that perfectly captures the cultural moment.

Joseph Suglia

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A review of DERMAPHORIA (Craig Clevenger) by Dr. Joseph Suglia

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A review of DERMAPHORIA (Craig Clevenger)

by Dr. Joseph Suglia

Did you know that most self-anointed “Alpha” men are, in fact, “Beta” men?  And that most “Beta” men are, in fact, Omega men?  Craig Clevenger is an Omega man who thinks that he is a “Beta” man.  Chuck Palahniuk is a “Beta” man who thinks that he is an “Alpha” man.  As all Omega men do, Craig Clevenger slavishly imitates the “Beta” man.  Craig Clevenger apes Chuck Palahniuk’s this-is-how-pre-teens-talk writing “style,” which is no style at all.

Clevenger’s Dermaphoria (2005) will excruciate you with its illiteracy.  Consider the following sentences:

1.)    “Clumps of hair had melted together around one of his ears, which had swollen into a knot of blistered cartilage” [91].

How could clumps of hair melt together?

2.)    “He was sobbing as he spoke, trying to snow me with some cheap excuse like some eight-year-old while spitting out a stream of expletives with ‘hospital’ thrown in every three or four words” [Ibid.].

What?  This sentence is scarcely intelligible.  How could someone “snow” someone else with a single “excuse”?  “Like” should never be used conjunctionally.  Taken literally, the phrase “some cheap excuse like some eight-year-old” means that the “cheap excuse” is like an eight year old.  Will MacAdam/Cage publish anything that comes over the transom, and did they copy-edit this book, or was the effort too herculean for them?

3.)    “I slip my fingers beneath your shirt to the slice of flesh above your hips that feels so good in the dark but you hate so much” [109].

Read literally, the final clause means that “you” “hate so much” in general, that “you” hate everyone and everything.  The context suggests, however, that “you” hate “the slice of flesh above your hips.”  A slightly less illiterate, slightly less irritating way of writing the sentence would be: “I slip my fingers beneath your shirt to the slice of flesh above your hips that you hate so much but that feels so good in the dark.”

4.)    “Some kid approached me with no finesse whatsoever, and asked me for ecstacy [sic]” [137].

Now, this is a sentence that only a beefhead would write.  Could Clevenger have come up with a more exciting verb than “to approach”?  Evidently not.  The comma is superfluous, and do I really need to point out that “ecstacy” should be spelled “ecstasy”?

5.)    “He was wearing tan work pants and dark brown work boots, and with the combination of colors, dark grey and tan, sitting in the sharp daytime shadows of the dilapidated desert house, he’s invisible” [97].

“He’s” is not the contraction of “he was.”  There is no contraction for “he was.”  When Clevenger writes, “dark grey,” doesn’t he mean “dark brown”?  The chuckies don’t care about such errors; after all, they aren’t very detail-oriented, are they?  Page after page, Clevenger is foundering and floundering, flailing and failing.  He cannot write.

Mencken once pointed out that most bad writers have congenital deficiencies–to write clearly, after all, one must think clearly.  But I would say that the converse holds, as well: To think clearly, one must write clearly.  Clevenger does not know how to write because he does not know how to think, and he does not know how to think because he does not know how to write.  He is inarticulate and slow-witted.

Clevenger is an experienced writer of literature in the same way and to the same degree that a eunuch is an experienced lover.  He has no relationship to literature other than a negative relationship or the relation of a non-relation.  His sentences sound like Metallica lyrics.  It is not fortuitous that Clevenger’s Work in Progress is called Saint Heretic: One can hear in the title resonances of Saint Anger, an album by Metallica.  As most chuckies have done, Clevenger has spent more time listening to heavy metal than he has reading books.

Craig Clevenger is a chuckling chucklehead.  He is nothing more than a soldier in Chuck Palahniuk’s army of mentally incapable Everymen.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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Dave Eggers is a Bad Writer / A review of YOUR FATHERS, WHERE ARE THEY? AND YOUR PROPHETS, DO THEY LIVE FOREVER? (Dave Eggers) by Dr. Joseph Suglia

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A review of YOUR FATHERS, WHERE ARE THEY?  AND THE PROPHETS, DO THEY LIVE FOREVER? (Dave Eggers)

by Dr. Joseph Suglia

One of the most important claims of anti-foundationalism–what is usually called “postmodernism,” the making-fashionable of anti-foundationalism–is that nothing has a single, unified meaning and that systems that pronounce single, unified meanings are fascistic.  Anti-foundationalist writing / film opens and multiplies meanings.  No matter what you say about an anti-foundationalist work of art, you will be wrong: Another interpretation is always possible.  We are all familiar with the rapid occlusions of commercial writing / film–once an alternative meaning appears, it is just as quickly shut out.

Dave Eggers is sometimes referred to, erroneously, as a “postmodern” writer.  It is important to correct this misinterpretation.  Dave Eggers is not a “postmodern” (read: anti-foundationalist) writer.  He is a lazy, slovenly commercial writer who has an unattractive prose style.

Eggers’s most recent catastrophe, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? (2014), could have been written in two hours.  It is entirely composed of dialogue–an easy move for a lazy writer such as Eggers.

The dialogic novel is certainly nothing new.  The dialogic form can be found in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930), Henry Green’s Nothing (1950), Charles Webb’s 1963 novel The Graduate, and Natalie Sarraute’s satirical novel Les Fruits d’or (1964).  John Fowles’s A Maggot (1985) qualifies, though it is not entirely told in dialogic form.  Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is, arguably, a quasi-dialogic novel.  There has never been a stronger novel in this subgenre than the great Roland Topor’s Joko’s Anniversary (1969) (in French: Joko fête son anniversaire), one of the most underrated novels ever published.  And of course, there is Chapter Fifteen of Joyce’s Ulysses (the so-called “Circe” or “Nighttown” episode).  Sadly, most dialogue-driven novels these days are proto-screenplays.  Since the 1960s, most commercial novels have been proto-screenplays, and this, I would argue, has led to the death of literature.  (For reasons of economy, I cannot pursue this argument here.)

The title is taken from The Book of Zechariah [1:5].  The book’s learnedness ends there.  In a style that owes nothing to Zechariah, Eggers will condemn American Society for not giving Young American Men what they are owed.

Eggers’s prophet is Thomas, a thirty-four-year-old American.  His maleness, his age, and his Americanness are all important to understanding this novel as a cultural document.  Why the name “Thomas”?  We’re supposed to think of Thomas Paine (use contractions, or Eggers will get angry at you).

I write that Thomas is “Eggers’s prophet” because he has the same political convictions as Eggers: The money that the U. S. borrows from China should not be used to subsidize foreign wars, but instead should be used to finance space exploration, education, health care, and public television.  Thomas whimpers:

“You guys fight over pennies for Sesame Street, and then someone’s backing up a truck to dump a trillion dollars in the desert” [42].  This is only one of the many jewels with which Eggers’s novel is bejeweled.

Eggers would like to persuade us that his prophet is a normal, likable young man, but his attempts at making Thomas seem likable and normal are nauseatingly hamfisted.  Thomas is “polite,” “nice,” and “friendly” and says repeatedly that he has no intention of killing anyone.  Because Thomas tells us that he is a “principled” person (on page 7 and then again on page 84, in case we missed it), we are supposed to believe that Thomas is a principled person.  There is very little logos in the novel, but there definitely is a great deal of ethos.

And a great deal of pathos.  Unhappily, all of the pathos is artificial, particularly the pathos that is communicated when Thomas “falls in love” with a woman he sees strolling on a beach.  The emotions in this book have the same relationship to real emotions that the fruit-flavors of chewing-gum have to real fruit.

Eggers would like to persuade us, then, that Thomas is a principled young man who kidnaps an Astronaut, a Congressman, an Overeducated Pederast Teacher, his own Mother, a Police Officer, a “Director of Patient Access,” and a Hot Woman; each of these characters is a lifeless stereotype.  Such a rhetorical strategy would be difficult for even a serious and careful writer and because Eggers is neither (don’t say it with a long I, or Eggers will get angry at you), the outcome resembles a railway accident.

Thomas is an Angry Young Man of the same pedigree as Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris, James Holmes, and Jared Lee Loughner.  And why is he angry?  Because his “friend” Kev never got on the Space Shuttle.  Because Thomas’s life didn’t turn out the way he wanted it to.  Don’t we live in America?  Aren’t Young American Men promised success and happiness?  Thomas rails against the Congressman:

“You should have found some kind of purpose for me” [37].

And: “Why didn’t you tell me what to do?” [Ibid.].

Why, Daddy, why didn’t you tell me what to do?  Why didn’t you “find a place” for me [47]?  Isn’t there a safe and secure place in the world reserved specially for me?  Why doesn’t the world need ME?

It is so sad that Thomas was promised success and happiness (by whom?) and that he never received either (say it with a long E or Eggers will grow irate with you) of these things.  It is so sad that Kev never got on the Space Shuttle.  Thomas unburdens himself to the Congressman: “That just seems like the worst kind of thing, to tell a generation or two that the finish line, that the requirements to get there are this and this and this, but then, just as we get there, you move the finish line” [34].

The world owes us success and happiness, doesn’t it?  And when we don’t get it, we get real angry!  Much of the novel is based on the mistaken idea that Young American Men are entitled to success and happiness.  And Thomas represents all disenfranchised Young American Men.  As Thomas says to the Congressman–his substitute “father”–at the close of the novel:

“There are millions more like me, too.  Everyone I know is like me…  [I]f there were some sort of plan for men like me, I think we could do a lot of good” [210; emphasis mine].

This is the worldview of a stunted, self-pitying, lachrymose adolescent.  It is the worldview of Dave Eggers.

To return to the opening paragraphs of this review: Eggers, hardly an anti-foundationalist writer, thinks that life is essentially simple and that everything should have an unequivocal meaning: “You and I read the same books and hear the same sermons and we come away with different messages,” Thomas laments.  “That has to be evidence of some serious problem, right?” [45].

It has to be!

Perhaps the novel would be endurable if it were well-written, but Dave Eggers is a mushhead with all of the style of a diseased hippopotamus.  He draws from a stock of words that is available to most English-speaking humans.  He writes familiar things in a familiar way.  He has a problem with people who say “either” with a long “I,” but misuses the word “parameter” (twice, by my count).

The spiritlessness with which he writes is dispiriting.  The prose is lenient.  Serpentine sentences are superseded in favor of a simple syntax.  Apparently, I am one of the few people alive who enjoys reading sentences that spread across the page as flourishing trees.

Despite its many flaws, the book will be praised for the same reason that audiences laugh while watching Saturday Night Live: Most human beings are followers and do what they think they are expected to do.

Joseph Suglia

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David Foster Wallace Is a Bad Writer: Part Five: INFINITE JEST / David Foster Wallace Was a Bad Writer / Is David Foster Wallace Overrated? Is INFINITE JEST Overrated? Critique of INFINITE JEST / Criticizing INFINITE JEST / Criticizing David Foster Wallace. A Critique of David Foster Wallace: Part Five: INFINITE JEST / David Foster Wallace Is Overrated

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A Critique of David Foster Wallace: Part Five: INFINITE JEST

by Joseph Suglia

The writings of Lessing and Kant are the magna opera of the German Enlightenment.  The works of Novalis and Schelling are the magna opera of Early German Romanticism.  Joyce’s Ulysses is the magnum opus of European Modernism.  The poems of Trakl and the films of Murnau are the magna opera of German Expressionism.  The films Un Chien andalou (1929) and L’Age d’Or (1930) are the magna opera of French Surrealism.

Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace is the magnum opus of American Hipsterism.

What is a “hipster,” you ask?  A hipster is one who has what Hegel described as an “unhappy consciousness”: He is a self that is at variance with itself.

* * * * *

Anyone who has spent any time in academia will instantly recognize Wallace’s pedigree upon opening this book.  Wallace was an academic writer.  Unhappily, all connotations of “academic” are intentional.  That is to say, the book is both fantastically banal and seems to have been composed, disconsolately and mechanistically, in a registrar’s office.  It is not arbitrary that the narrative begins in the Department of Admissions of a tennis college.  The language here recalls the world of registration- and withdrawal-forms and the world of classrooms where works such as this are spawned, dissected, and pickled—the world of the academic industry.

Wallace: “Matriculations, gender quotas, recruiting, financial aid, room-assignments, mealtimes, rankings, class v. drill schedules, prorector-hiring… It’s all the sort of thing that’s uninteresting unless you’re the one responsible…” [451].

I wonder if anyone besides Wallace has ever found these things interesting.

Since no one else has taken the trouble to encapsulate the narrative, permit me to attempt to do so here.  The novel seems to have two diegetic threads and a meta-narrative.  The first thread concerns the incandescent descent of Hal Incandenza, teenager and tennis student, into drug addiction.  (Well, no, it isn’t quite incandescent, not quite luciferous, at all, but I liked the way that sounded.)  The second outlines the shaky recovery of Don Gately, criminal, from Demerol.  The “woof,” I imagine, details the efforts of a cabal of Quebecois terrorists to inject a death-inducing motion picture of the same title as this book into the American bloodstream.  All of this takes place in a soupy, fuzzy future in which Mexico and Canada have been relegated to satellites of the onanistic “Organization of North American Nations.”  Predictably, and much like NAFTA, America is at the epicenter of this reconfiguration.

It is hard to care about any of this.  If Wallace had written fluidly, things would have been otherwise.  It is not that the book is complex, nor that its prose is burnished (if only it were!).  The problem is much different: The sentences are so awkwardly articulated and turgid that the language is nearly unreadable.  You will wish that someone would fluidify the congested prose while struggling with the waves of irritation and lassitude that will weave their way through you.

There is literary litter everywhere.  No, “nauseous” does not mean “nauseated.”  No, “presently” does not mean “at present.”  Such faults are mere peccadilloes, however, especially when one considers the clunkiness of Wallace’s language.  A few examples:

1.) “The unAmerican guys chase Lenz and then stop across the car facing him for a second and then get furious again and chase him” [610].  I am having a hard time visualizing this scene.

2.) “Avril Incandenza is the sort of tall beautiful woman who wasn’t ever quite world-class, shiny-magazine beautiful, but who early on hit a certain pretty high point on the beauty scale and has stayed right at that point as she ages and lots of other beautiful women age too and get less beautiful” [766].  It would take more effort to edit this see-Spot-run sentence than it did, I suspect, to write it.

3.) “The puppet-film is reminiscent enough of the late Himself that just about the only more depressing thing to pay attention to or think about would be advertising and the repercussions of O.N.A.N.ite Reconfiguration for the U.S. advertising industry” [411].  This is a particularly representative example of Wallace’s heavy, cluttered style—a sentence larded with substantives.

4.) “So after the incident with the flaming cat from hell and before Halloween Lenz had moved on and up to the Browning X444 Serrated he even had a shoulder-holster for, from his previous life Out There” [545].  So… Lenz moves “on and up” to a knife… “from” his previous life?  If this is a sentence, it is the ugliest I’ve yet read.

To say such a thing would be to say too little.  Nearly every sentence is overpoweringly ugly and repellently clumsy.  Not a single sentence–not one–is beautiful, defamiliarizing, or engaging.  I am sorry to write this, but Infinite Jest is a joylessly, zestlessly, toxically written book and the poisonous fruit of academic bureaucracy.

* * * * *

A few valedictory words: It would be tasteless–raffish, even–to malign the literary estate of a recent suicide.  Wallace was nothing if not intelligent, and his death is a real loss.  Had he lived longer, he might have left us books that impress and delight.  Let me advise the reader to avoid this plasticized piece of academic flotsam and pick up and pick at instead Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, his one tolerable book, his true gift to the afterlife and the afterdeath.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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A review of A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING (Dave Eggers) by Dr. Joseph Suglia

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A review of A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING (Dave Eggers)

by Dr. Joseph Suglia

All novels may be taxonomized into three categories: There are novels of plot, novels of character, and novels of language.  A novel of plot is driven by a story that could be synopsized without damaging the novel itself.  Simply read an outline of the plot, and there is no reason for you to read the novel.  A novel of character creates–or should create–living-seeming, recognizably human figures.  But these figures, of course, are nothing more than fabrications, nothing more than chimeras that seem to breathe and talk.  A novel of language makes worlds out of words.

Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for the King (2012) is a novel of character, I suppose, but it doesn’t really work as a novel of character.  Nor does it work on any other level.  It must be said of this miserable little drip of a book that it fails as a plot-driven narrative, that it fails as the portrait of a character, and that it fails as a work of language.

PLOT

Eggers has the tendency to write novels that are based on American high-school standards.  You Shall Know Our Velocity–a novel that is as sincere as those fraternity boys who raise money for the homeless–is based on On the Road.  The Circle is based on Nineteen Eighty-Four.  A Hologram for the King is based on Death of a Salesman and En attendant Godot (the epigraph is from Beckett’s play: “It is not every day that we are needed”).  En attendant Godot is about the stupidities of faith, the stupidities of eschatology, and the infinitely postponed arrival (or non-arrival) of the Messiah.  And yet Egger’s Messiah arrives!  If Eggers wanted a classic about the degradations of growing old on which to model his tale, he should have turned to Bellow.  Henderson the Rain King, anyone?

Alan Clay is a semi-employed fifty-four-year-old former bicycle manufacturer who is contracted by Reliant, a major IT company, to introduce King Abdullah to a holographic projection system.  The inaction takes place in King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC), Saudi Arabia.  Every day, Alan and his enviably young colleagues wait in the desert for the arrival of King Abdullah.

Novels do not need to be realistic, but they ought to be convincing, and the question of probability comes up more than a few times.  If Alan is indeed “superfluous to the forward progress of the world” [75], why is he employed by the largest IT company of that same world and promised $500,000 if he succeeds in persuading King Abdullah to purchase the holographic projection system?

The novel is a novel about late arrivals, and Alan and his “Other” are forever arriving late to the party: Alan is too late to save his neighbor Charlie Fallon from self-drowning, Alan wakes up late on the day of his scheduled meeting with King Abdullah, Alan is “too late” (read: “too old”) to be sexually potent, King Abdullah himself arrives late, etc.  I would advise prospective readers to never arrive.

CHARACTER

As synaesthetes know, everything has a color.  Eggers’s washout is not exactly an iridescent character.  He is relentlessly grey.

A character should be, to paraphrase the Hegel of Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, an assemblage of Alsos.  That is: A character should not be one thing.  A character should not be simple.  A character should not be one-sided.  A character should be this AND ALSO that AND ALSO that.  Each of these traits should contradict one another.  Since human beings are complexly self-contradictory, why should characters not be, as well?

Regrettably, Eggers’s main character is flatter than a Fruit Roll-Up.  Alan is a never-was and has never been anything besides a never-was.

While waiting for King Abdullah, Alan meets (guess who!) two sexually prepossessing young women: a gorgeous blonde Dutch consultant named Henne and a Saudi physician named Zahra Hakem who is intrigued by the knob-like excrescence on the back of his neck.  At one stage, Alan imagines that his cyst has sexual powers.  I could imagine the entire novel centering on the sexuality of Alan’s cyst, but no, that would have been too daring.  This is a Dave Eggers novel, after all.

Each appointment leads to a sexual disappointment.  Henne offers Alan sexual release in the bathtub of her hotel room, but Alan prefers the “purity” and “simplicity” [177] of the bath water instead.  Dr. Zahra swims topless with Alan (this, apparently, is done all of the time in Islamic countries), but her toplessness does not lead to a toplessness-inspired act of sexual release.

Eggers simply cannot let his ageing protagonist be sexually uninteresting to women.  Even though the novel pretends to be an allegory about the downfall of America in an age of globalism, it is really an all-American wish-fulfillment fantasy.  Are we credulous enough to believe that the generously breasted blonde Dutch consultant is sexually desperate?  And that Dr. Zahra lusts after Alan’s knobby cyst?  Apparently, Eggers thinks that we are.

LANGUAGE

Eggers is more of a summarizer than he is a dramatizer.  He tells more than he shows.  An example (from the novel’s opening salvo):

[Alan] had not planned well.  He had not had courage when he needed it.  /  His decisions had been short sighted [sic].  /  The decisions of his peers had been short sighted [sic].  /  These decisions had been foolish and expedient.  /  But he hadn’t known at the time that his decisions were short sighted [sic], foolish or expedient.  He and his peers did not know that they were making decisions that would leave them, leave Alan, as he now was–virtually broke, nearly unemployed, the proprietor of a one-man consulting firm run out of his home office [4].

Now, a hard-working writer would do the grueling work of showing us Alan’s failures and shortcomings rather than telling us about Alan’s failures and shortcomings.  Eggers is less of a writer than a publicist.  The passage quoted above reads as if it came from a query-letter addressed to a literary agent.

Wading through the brackish waters and the fetid marshlands of Eggers’s prose is not much fun.  I never once got the impression that the writer was groping for the right word.  To say that Eggers’s prose style wants elegance and richness would be a gross understatement.  His word choices are banal and obvious, his vocabulary is restricted, his writing style is plain, his paragraphs are dull.  To describe Alan’s dispute with Banana Republic over a one-time purchase that has killed his credit-score, Eggers writes, doltishly, “Alan tried to reason with them” [138].  This sentence could not have been written any more unpoetically and is yet another instance of the lazy “telling” of an unqualified writer rather than of the laborious “showing” which is incumbent on every responsible writer of fiction.

Eggers’s writing is so bad that it is almost ghoulish.

I have heard it said of Eggers that he is a man who is “easy on the eyes,” and I have no doubt that this is true.  (His lecteurial admirers have a purely phenomenal interest in the writer.  That is to say, they don’t care about the writing; they are only interested in the writer qua man.)  Though I am not an adroit evaluator of male beauty, I suspect that Eggers-the-Man is indeed “easy on the eyes.”  It is a pity that the same could not be said of the books that he types.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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Corregidora / Corrigenda – by Joseph Suglia

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Corregidora / Corrigenda

by Joseph Suglia

A typical response to genocide is the injunction to remember.  All of us have heard the words “Never forget!” in reference to the Shoah.  Most are familiar with Kristallnacht, with the Names Project, also known as “the AIDS Quilt.”  The March for Humanity memorializes the mass-murder of Armenians by Ottoman Turks.  Every year, at this time in April, the Rwandan government urges its citizens to kwibuka—the Rwandan word for “to remember.” To kwibuka, to remember the countless Tutsis who were slaughtered in the massacre of 1994.

But how should one respond when genocide is misremembered?  Is the misremembrance of genocide superior to the forgetting of genocide?

Which is worse, distortion or oblivion?

Is it worse to minimize, for example, the number of Armenians who were killed at the beginning of the twentieth century, or to forget that the genocide of Armenians ever occurred?

The most dominant medium of the twentieth century was the cinema, and the cinema still has the power to shape, and to misshape, collective memory.

Over the past seven years, a talentless hack filmmaker named Quentin Tarantino has manufactured films that I would not hesitate to describe as “genocide pornography.”  That is to say, these are films that would turn genocide into an object of consumption, an object of enjoyment.  These are also films that disfigure historical consciousness.

Thanks to Quentin Tarantino, the succeeding generation might believe that the Jews defeated the Nazis.  Thanks to Quentin Tarantino, they might believe that Hitler was assassinated.  They might believe that, in general, African slaves rose up and overcame their enslavers.  They might believe that every African slave in antebellum America was a free agent.  Not an insurrectionist like Nat Turner, but an action figure like Django.

But what if misremembrance were not a disfiguration or a distortion of memory?  What if misremembrance plays a constitutive and formative role in memory itself?

Freudian psychoanalysis has something to say about the interpenetration of remembrance and misremembrance.

At the earliest stage of his career, between the years 1895 and 1897, Freud formulated what is called “seduction theory.”  Seduction theory is based on the idea that sexual trauma is pathogenic—that is, that sexual abuse produces neuroses.

Freud rejected seduction theory in 1897, but this does not mean that he silenced the voices of abused children.  From the beginning of his career until its end, Freud never ceased to emphasize that sexual trauma has pathological effects.

Why did Freud reject seduction theory?  Because it was too linear, too simple, because it did not take into consideration the supremacy of the unconscious.

The memory of sexual trauma, Freud recognized, might be repressed, sublimated, externalized, transferred, reintrojected, reimagined, or fictionalized.

This does not mean that when children claim that they have been sexually abused, they are lying.  It means, rather, that experiences of abuse pass through the imagination and the imagination passes through the unconscious.  Seduction theory did not take the imagination—die Phantasie—into account and therefore had to be abandoned.

The unconscious, as Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fleiss, does not distinguish between fact and fantasy.

It is difficult for a victim of abuse to acknowledge his or her trauma directly, and Freud knew this.  Sexual trauma, after it occurs, does not manifest itself directly or immediately, but epiphenomenally—that is to say, symptomatically.  It shows itself in disguise.  It dramatizes itself.  It retraumatizes.  It might be phantasmatically reconstituted.

From the Freudian standpoint, remembrance and misremembrance are not mutually exclusive.

There is a third form of misremembrance that I would like to pause over.  It is the kind of anamnesis or déjà vu when an individual recollects not her own individual history, but the history of past generations, the history of her ancestors.  Cultural memory, seen from this perspective, would be a form of misremembrance.

Such misremembrance could only be figured in art.

The literature of Gayl Jones reminds us that the remembrance of personal trauma always contains a cultural dimension, that all memory is misremembrance.

The past that you have experienced is not the past that you remember.

When I first heard the title of Jones’s first novel — Corregidora  (published in 1975) — I thought it was “corrigenda.”

Corrigenda: a list of errors in a published manuscript.

* * * * *

At the novel’s opening, lounge singer Ursa Corregidora is shoved down a staircase by her husband, Mutt — a catastrophic blow that results in her infertility. After she renounces her husband, Ursa enters into a relationship with Tadpole, the owner of the Happy Café, the bar at which she performs. Like all of her significant relationships with men, this second relationship proves disastrous and is doomed to failure.

Every man in the novel, without exception, sees Ursa as a “hole” — that is, as a beguiling and visually appealing receptacle to be penetrated. The narrative suggests this on the figural level. A talented novelist, Jones weaves images of orifices throughout her text — tunnels that swallow and tighten around trains, lamellae such as nostrils, mouths, wounds, etc. Although one of Ursa’s “holes” is barren, another “hole” is bountifully “prosperous”  — her mouth, from which the “blues” issue. A movement of sonic exteriorization corresponds to a counter-movement of physiological interiorization.

It is easy to be trapped by these more immediate, socio-sexual dimensions of the narrative. Corregidora might seem, prima facie, to be nothing more than another novel about a woman imprisoned in abusive and sadistic relationships with appropriative men. But the meanings of Corregidora are far more profound than this.  A “transcendental” framework envelops the immediate narrative and casts it in relief, thereby enhancing its significance.  We learn that Ursa is the great-granddaughter of Portuguese slave-trader and procurer Corregidora, who sired both Ursa’s mother and grandmother.  Throughout the course of the novel, the men in Ursa’s life take on a resemblance to Corregidora — and this resemblance sheds light on both the sexual basis of racism and the tendency of some oppressed cultures to take on the traits of imperialist hegemonies.  According to the logic of the novel, the children of slaves resemble either slaves or slave drivers.  Even within communities born of slavery, the novel suggests, there persist relationships of enslavement.  “How many generations had to bow to his genital fantasies?” Ursa asks at one point, referring to Corregidora the Enslaver.  As long as hierarchical relationships form between men and women in the African-American community, Jones’s novel suggests, there will never be an end to this period of acquiescence; Corregidora will continue to achieve posthumous victories.

As long as hierarchical relationships form between men and women in the African-American community, the novel suggests, the enslavers will continue to achieve posthumous victorious.

As long as hierarchical relationships form between men and women in the African-American community, the novel suggests, the segregationists and the white supremacists will continue to achieve posthumous victories.

To return to the opening statement of this essay: A typical response to genocide is the injunction to remember. Although her infertility robs Ursa of the ability to “make generations” — something that, she is taught, is the essence of being-woman — she can still “leave evidence,” can still attest to the historical memory of slavery.  All documents that detailed Corregidora’s treatment of his slaves were seemingly destroyed, as if the abolition of slavery abolished memory itself.  According to the injunction of the Corregidora women (Ursa’s ancestors), one must testify, one must re-member, one must “leave evidence.”  And yet memory is precisely Ursa’s problem.  Memory cripples her.  Throughout the novel, Ursa struggles to overcome the trauma of her personal past.  And this past — in particular, the survival in memory of her relationship with Mutt — belongs to the larger, communal past that is her filial legacy.  Her consciousness is rigidified, frozen in the immemorial past of the Corregidora women.  This “communal” past is doomed to repeat itself infinitely, thus suspending the presence of the present — and, in particular, Ursa’s individual experience of the present.  Her individual experience of the present is indissociably married to her personal past, and her most intimate past is, at the same time, also the past of her community.  The words that Ursa uses to describe her mother could also apply to Ursa herself: “It was as if their memory, the memory of all the Corregidora women, was her memory too, as strong within her as her own private memory, or almost as strong.”

At the shocking and unforgettable close of the novel, the past and present coincide almost absolutely.  When, after twenty-two years of estrangement, Ursa is reunited with her first husband, the historical memory of slavery is superimposed and mapped onto their relationship. Both Ursa and Mutt become allegorical figures, each representing slave and slaveholder, respectively.  The present-past and the past-present reflect each other in an infinite mirror-play until they both become almost indistinguishable from each other.

At the juncture of both temporalities is an inversion of power relations that comes by way of a sex act.  Ursa performs fellatio on her first husband.  Oral sex replaces oral transmission.  Here we have the perpetuation of a traumatic past, and yet it is a repetition with a difference.  Fellatio is disempowering for the man upon whom it is performed; dangerously close to emasculation, it is experienced as “a moment of broken skin but not sexlessness, a moment just before sexlessness, a moment that stops just before sexlessness.”  For the woman, by contrast, it might be an act vacant of all sensuality, one that is abstracted of all emotional cargo.  Fellatio might infuse the performer with a feeling of power’s intensification; its objective might not be the enhancement of erotic pleasure, but of the pleasure that comes with the enhancement of one’s feeling of power.

By playing the role of the guardian of memory, Ursa dramatizes the intersection of her individual past with a communal past.  The paralysis of historical consciousness sets in: “My veins are centuries meeting.”

End of quotation, and the end of the essay.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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EVERYONE IS SO LITERAL THESE DAYS: A review of MIN KAMP: Volume One (Karl Ove Knausgaard) by Dr. Joseph Suglia

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EVERYONE IS SO LITERAL THESE DAYS: A review of MIN KAMP: Volume One (Karl Ove Knausgaard) by Dr. Joseph Suglia

“If you are unhappy, you must not tell the reader.  Keep it to yourself.”–Isidore Ducasse

“Why is everyone so literal these days?  I was speaking metaphorically.”–Mahler (1974)

“Every mind needs a mask.”–Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu

“Every profound mind needs a mask.”–Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft

Min Kamp (2009-2011) is the 3,600-page autobiography of Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard.  Though the title has Hitlerian resonances, it ought to be stated that the first volume has no perceptible anti-Judaic content.  There is no evidence that Knausgaard is a fascist purifier or an ethnic homogenizer.  One could say, charitably, that by calling his book Min Kamp (the exact same title of Hitler’s memoir in Norwegian translation), Knausgaard has de-Hitlerized the title.

Knausgaard told the BBC: “I tried to write a novel for four or five years.  I wrote every day.  This is what I do, you know?  It’s kind of hard to fail every day.  But I was looking for something, and at the end, I was so frustrated, I told myself, I just write it as it was, you know, no tricks, no nothing.”

Knausgaard has indeed written a book that is almost completely devoid of irony, of figure, of metaphor, of simile, of literary language.  Min Kamp seems a transparent book.  In it, the author appears to disclose himself as he is.  He seems to present his life immediately.

On page 18 of the English translation, the author describes an early experience with sardines:

“This evening, the plates with the four prepared slices awaited us as we entered the kitchen.  One with brown goat’s cheese, one with ordinary cheese, one with sardines in tomato sauce, one with clove cheese.  I didn’t like sardines and ate that slice first.  I couldn’t stand fish; boiled cod, which we had at least once a week, made me feel nauseous [sic], as did the steam from the pan in which it was cooked, its taste and consistency.  I felt the same about boiled pollock, boiled coley, boiled haddock, boiled flounder, boiled mackerel, and boiled rose fish.  With sardines it wasn’t the taste that was the worst part–I could swallow the tomato sauce by imagining that it was ketchup–it was the consistency, and above all the small, slippery tails.  They were disgusting.  To minimize contact with them I generally bit them off, put them to the side of my plate, nudged some sauce toward the crust and buried the tails in the middle [???], then folded the bread over [????].  In this way, I was able to chew a couple of times without ever coming in contact with the tails, and then wash the whole thing down with milk.”

Upon reading this passage, I had a number of questions: Were the sardines grilled or pickled?  Were the sardines salty, and does Knausgaard have an antipathy for salty food in general?  What does Knausgaard think of whitefish?  Surely, he has eaten lutefisk before–this is a fairly well-known Scandinavian dish.  On page 377, we are given an answer:

“Lutefisk lunches with friends, well, that wasn’t a world I inhabited.  Not because I couldn’t force down lutefisk but because I wasn’t invited to that type of gathering.”

What of clams?  What of crustaceans?  Does he favor crab?  Does he enjoy shrimp?

The author answers this last question on page 150:

“Shrimp is what I loved most.”

He also favors American cuisine:

“Hamburger, fries, hot dog.  Lots of Coke.  That’s what I needed.  And I needed it now” [151].

We learn more than anyone would ever want to know about Knausgaard’s non-mainstream, avant-garde musical proclivities:

“The year before, when I moved, I had been listening to groups like The Clash, The Police, The Specials, Teardrop Explodes, The Cure, Joy Division, New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Chameleons, Simple Minds, Ultravox, The Aller Vaerste, Talking Heads, The B52s, PiL, David Bowie, The Psychedelic Furs, Iggy Pop, and Velvet Underground…” [88-89].

The point of this passage is to show readers that Knausgaard is cool.  He is nothing like the unhip residents of Tveit (“In Tveit there was no one who had even heard of all these groups” [89]).  Yes, it is true that this passage resembles a rather typical response to a social-networking inquiry (“What Are YOUR Favorite Bands?”).  Yes, it is true that any dolt could write such a list, but Knausgaard’s past is more important than your past, and despite appearances, he is not a literary fraud.

His brother Yngve is not quite as cool as Karl Ove.  Flicking through his brother’s CD collection, Karl Ove discovers a number of Queen CDs:

“When Freddie Mercury died, the revelation that shocked was not the fact that he was gay but that he was an Indian. / Who could have imagined that?” [269].

Again, don’t expect any irony here.  What you will discover instead is acres and acres of dumbed-down self-pity; the morose self-pity almost never ends.  Dumbed-down self-pity was never Proust’s deal, yo.  The result is gruelingly gruesome over-hyped tripe.

The hype surrounding this book is to be expected.  Min Kamp is exactly the sort of commodity that would hystericize consumers in Europe and America at the beginning of the twenty-first century.  And not merely because of the author’s manifest good looks.  Yes, it is true: If Knausgaard were unattractive, no one would know of him or his autobiography.  Yet there is another, deeper reason for the predetermined hype.

We live in a culture of unconditional literalism.  It is hard to decide what is the worst feature of this culture: its illiteracy or its literal-mindedness.  Originally, media theorists theorized that the internet had metamorphic powers, that you could be anything or anyone you wanted to be on the internet.  If you are old, you can become young; if you are a woman, you can become a man, etc.  However, the precise opposite has happened: On social-media sites, people expose themselves in all of their banality and triviality.

When one reads a genuine work of literature, one is able to inhabit the selves of the characters within that work.  One assumes their personae.  One translates one’s essence into someone who is entirely different from the reader.  For a number of hours, you can become King Macbeth or Emma Bovary.  Fiction is adultery by other means.

In the culture in which we live, there are no disguises or masks.  Everyone is precisely what one appears to be.  Our digital selves tend to be identical to our real selves.  This is the most painful joke of the twenty-first century: If you want honesty, go to the internet.

Why translate your essence into another human life?  The impulse to project oneself into another self has decayed.  The unconditional literalism of the internet has led to the erosion of empathy, of fellow-feeling, of the love for one’s brother and sister.

The internet has killed the human soul.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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An Analysis of TWELFTH NIGHT, OR, WHAT YOU WILL (Shakespeare) by Joseph Suglia / TWELFTH NIGHT, OR, WHAT YOU WILL by Shakespeare: An Interpretation / Summary / Analysis

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An Analysis of TWELFTH NIGHT, OR, WHAT YOU WILL (Shakespeare)

by Joseph Suglia

Bedre godt haengt end slet gift.

Better well-hanged than ill-wed.

—Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Crumbs

Better well-hanged than ill-read.

—Joseph Suglia

The wildness of this frantically antic and antically frantic play extends to its title: Twelfth Night, Or, What You Will.  The Twelfth Night is the Feast of the Epiphany, which, in various forms of Christianity, commemorates the visitation of the Magi to the Baby Jesus.  It commonly takes place on the sixth of January, twelve nights after Christmas.  The Feast of the Epiphany has its roots in the Ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia, the Feast of Saturn, which celebrated the Winter Solstice.  Twelfth Night, Or, What You Will is a yuletide play, but it is also a saturnalian play.  In Roman Antiquity, on Saturnalia, hierarchy was inverted.  The King was deposed, and the mob took over the city.  And yet this rising ochlocracy was purely theatrical; it was nothing more than a sham, nothing more than a show.  The inversion of ordinary relations was temporary and staged.

Disorder is likewise invoked in the subtitle of the comedy: What You Will.  The subtitle is evoked in the text, twice.  “[T]ake it how you will” is said by Andrew Aguecheek in the third scene of the second act.  “Take it how you will”: Interpret my words in any sense you please, for words very quickly become “rascals” and easily grow “wanton,” as the Clown puts it later in the text [III:i].  The intended meaning of a word speedily slips into its opposite or into a meaning other than what the speaker or writer intended.  Take my words how you will, Augecheek seems to be implying, for it won’t matter, one way or the other.  Language slides; it flows where it pleases.  In the first scene of the third act, the Clown compares a sentence to a chev’ril glove that may be turned inside out—the wrong side is easily turned outward, and the intended wittiness of a sentence easily devolves into witlessness.  Witticisms swiftly become witlessisms.  Though he is praised by Uncle Toby for his linguistic skills, Augecheek is hardly a wordsmith.  He lacks facility in basic English (he doesn’t know the word accost), in basic French (he doesn’t know the word pourquoi), and in Latin (he is ignorant of the phrase diluculo surgere).

“What you will” is spoken by Olivia in the fifth scene of the first act.  “What you will” could be translated as: “Anything you say.”  Or: “Anything you want.”  Or even: “Who cares?”  Or (and this is not too much of a stretch): “Whatever.”  Quodlibet.  All hail disorder!  Let chaos reign!

And chaos does indeed reign.  The customary order of things is turned upside down—hence, the chaos of the play.  It might be worth pausing over a few of the characters and their lunacy, their fettered reason.  As Olivia says to Cesario-Viola, “[R]eason thus with reason fetter” [III:i].

Count Orsino is a proto-Romantic personage and anticipates the Knight-in-arms of Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” as well as Goethe’s Werther.  A dandified dreamer, he is of a certain age, neither young nor old, both unyoung and unold.  As Malvolio phrases it, he is

[n]ot yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for
a boy; as a squash is before ’tis a peascod, or a
cooling when ’tis almost an apple: ’tis with him
in standing water, between boy and man [I:v].

As Romantic protagonists will do, Orsino is forever sighing over a love that he doesn’t even want reciprocated—the love of Olivia, which, if we take his advice to Cesario-Viola seriously, he appears to think will be short-lived:

[B]oy, however we do praise ourselves,
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,
Than women’s are [II:iv].

Orsino’s mind displays various colors; it is “a very opal,” as the Clown poeticizes it [II:iv].  He changes his mind in the first lines of the play—first, he wants music to play; then, suddenly, he wants it to stop.  It is not merely Orsino’s mind that is Protean—the entire play is a play of shifting surfaces.

The crepuscular Uncle Toby seems to do most of his socializing after sundown.  He is a fanatical nyctophiliac: Instead of preferring to be active during the day, he prefers to be active at night—and justifies his noctambulations by saying that by staying up late, he goes to bed early: “To be up after midnight and to go to bed then, is early: so that to go to bed after midnight is to go to bed betimes” [II:iii].  The customary order of things is again reversed.

Sebastian and Viola, twin brother and sister, board a ship together, and both end up separately in Illyria.  For reasons that escape me, Sebastian disguises himself as a character named Roderigo; he befriends a fellow traveler named Antonio during the voyage.  The ship capsizes and wrecks.  Sebastian loses his twin sister in the storm.  The homoerotic passion that Antonio has for Sebastian is plangent: Antonio declares himself servant to Sebastian after Antonio saves Sebastian’s life.  In the fourth scene of the third act, Antonio mistakes Cesario-Viola for her twin brother and is baffled when s/he does not recognize him.  It is as if we were reading or watching an immeasurably more sophisticated version of The Comedy of Errors.

Viola’s gender is shifted: She becomes Cesario, the myrmidon of Orsino; Olivia falls in love with Viola while the latter is dressed as Cesario.  The play does not hint at lesbianism as much as it hints at andromimetophilia, and andromimetophilia—the fetishization of women who dress as men—is one of Shakespeare’s most insistent fetishes.  Viola becomes other-than-what-she-is, and Olivia wishes that Cesario were the same as what he appears to be:

OLIVIA:  Stay.  I prithee tell me what thou think’st of me.

VIOLA:  That you do think you are not what you are.

OLIVIA:  If I think so, I think the same of you.

VIOLA:  Then think you right.  I am not what I am.

OLIVIA:  I would you were as I would have you be [III:i].

Viola transmutes herself into Cesario and is then beloved by Olivia.  Sebastian transmutes himself into Cesario and is then beloved by Olivia.  The Clown transmutes himself into Sir Topas and torments Malvolio.  One character after the other metamorphoses into another.

Amid the maelstrom of all of these transformations and inversions, there is one Aspergeroid character who is boringly moralistic and selfsame, until he, too, is drawn into the maelstrom: Malvolio.

Malvolio is a natural-born killjoy.  Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to name him the one anti-saturnalian character of the play.  He refuses to let anyone have any fun.  He is an enemy of drunkenness, and drunkenness, as everyone over the age of twelve knows, is transformative.  He looks down upon the poor, even though he is poor himself.  Rightly is he called a “Puritan” [II:iii] by Maria—to paraphrase something that Mencken once wrote, a Puritan is someone who suspects that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.  The imaginary betrothal of Olivia and Malvolio will result in an interdiction against Uncle Toby’s dipsomania.

Maria writes a counterfeit love letter in handwriting that resembles that of her mistress, Olivia.  Malvolio, who is such a narcissist that he believes that every word of praise must be directed at him and that every word of praise that is said about him must be genuine, is taken in by the forged letter.  Malvolio must be the scapegoat of the play, since he is the only character who is anti-fun and anti-revelry.  He is the sacrificial victim, for he refuses to dance to its swinging and swaying motions, all of its manic undulations.  He is catfished, and as any conscious victim of catfishing would do, swears his revenge and does so in the unforgettable line “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” [V:i], thus opening the portal for a sequel to the play that might be entitled Thirteenth Night, Or, The Revenge of Malvolio.

Even more humiliatingly, Malvolio is gulled into wearing ridiculous yellow stockings—yellow is a color that Olivia detests, since it reminds her of melancholy, something from which she has been suffering since the death of her brother—and smiling inanely in Olivia’s presence.  His smiling will be seen as inappropriate by Olivia, who, again, is still undergoing the work of mourning.

Though this might be a superficial remark about a play that is only superficially superficial, let me set down that Twelfth Night, Or, What You Will has the virtue of being the most theatrical of Shakespeare’s comedies and problematical plays.  Most of the utterances are short; one character speaks after the other in machine-gun succession.  There are few lengthy and lapidary soliloquies.  This kind of staginess is unusual for Shakespeare.  The fact that Shakespeare was ever a dramatist is one of life’s greatest mysteries.

The value of this insane play resides in its bouleversement of all relations.  Bouleversement: This was one of Georges Bataille’s favorite words and indicates the woozy overthrow of propriety, decency, and stability.  The world is turned on its head.  Never has topsy-turviness been presented with such elegance.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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LIPSTICK JUNGLE by Candace Bushnell

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A review of LIPSTICK JUNGLE (Candace Bushnell) by Joseph Suglia

Looking down on the cityscape, she sees skyscrapers that seem like tubes of lipstick.  Much as a lipstick tube is a metallic, phalliform receptacle containing an allegedly ‘feminine’ substance (though I cannot grasp how the opalescence of fish scales is ‘feminine’), women now dwell within the structures that men created.  The novel suggests that men and women belong to opposing camps.  It is now men who are ‘de-masculinized’ and women who are virilized, who are masculated, who assume sovereignty; it is women who take on all of the symbolic traits of maleness (according to the metaphorics of the novel).  The difference between women and men is absolute, the novel implies.  The separation between them might be ontological, stable, fixed, but power is not.  Power is dynamic, kinetic, mobile: “If you can wield it, you have it.”  And now women have the power.  They are ruling the world.

So goes Lipstick Jungle, the novel by Candace Bushnell.

In this imaginary universe universally dominated by women, women act in a way that is conventionally “masculine” and men act in a way that is neither “masculine” nor “feminine.”  Men are either ridiculously spineless, endearingly brainless, or flamboyantly insane.  Some of them are sex-mannequins (Kirby Atwood); others are Icarian billionaires (Lyne Bennett and Victor Matrick) — falling or already fallen, paving the way for the baronesses who will usurp their place in the Lipstick Jungle.  Some of them are oviphages (“egg-eaters”) (Kirby); others have a distaste for les oeufs brouillés (Seymour).  And then there are the vaguely exotic man-parasites that populate the novel as if they were so much vermin.  Bushnell’s racism / nationalism / class arrogance is evident on every other page.

Unlike the swinging femmes of Sex and the City, the women of Lipstick Jungle do not have an enduring interest in sex.  They are solely interested in power, wealth, and class.  Their beauty is self-illuminated.  Sex might be a pastime or a release, but it is not a goal.  Nor is the family of much importance.  Children were nondescript leeches and noise-makers.  It has been said that a baby’s first sound is usually a version of “mother.”  At that stage, the infant ceases to be an infant (the word infant, after all, means “devoid of speech”).  In this book, a baby’s first word is “Money!”  If you strip away identity, what remains is the naked desire for cash, the most fundamental of human impulses.  Even prior to the assumption of an identity, the human animal desires the power to purchase.

Each huntress is defined not by the men who surround her, but by the products she owns or wants to own.  Nico O’Neilly’s most essential features are represented by a diamond.  Victory Ford is defined by her “black American Express card” — since she, after all, is also a credit card.

Victory Ford, Wendy Healy, Nico O’Neilly — the three “protagonists” are three versions of a single self.  We move from the description of one character to the next.  When the narrative centers on one character, the others vanish, as if they were chimeras of her imagination.

Lipstick Jungle never critiques the culture; it repeats the values of the culture unreflectively.  To suggest that “women ought to be ruling the world by imitating men” is neither a revolutionary insight nor a challenge to the culture.  Would this suggestion not keep the world intact?  Would this suggestion not re-stabilize anti-female sexism and misogyny?

Seen from this perspective, the female characters of Lipstick Jungle are hardly women at all.  This is not a form of second-wave feminism.  This is not a Beauvoirian feminism.  This is not a philosophy in which women are summoned to come into their own as women.  This is not any kind of feminism.  Its philosophy is a particular kind of gendered Darwinism.  Women must adopt negative male traits, the book proposes, in order to achieve sovereignty, must become men in woman costumes.  The philosophy of Lipstick Jungle is not feminism, and it should not be considered as a work of feminist fiction.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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WHY I CAN’T STAND GEORGES BATAILLE / BLEU DU CIEL / THE BLUE OF NOON by Georges Bataille

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WHY I CAN’T STAND GEORGES BATAILLE
by Dr. Joseph Suglia

I discovered Bataille at the age of eighteen.  Here was a French Nietzschean who wrote strident essays and excessively explicit novels.  What was there not to like?  Throughout my eighteenth and nineteenth years, I read the oeuvres of Bataille, alongside the works of Heidegger, Derrida, and many others.

Around the age of twenty, my relationship with Bataille underwent a change.  I could no longer stand to read his writings.

La Littérature et le Mal (1957) destroyed my love for Bataille.  The book is almost unreadably silly.  Bataille argues, with the most incredible casuistry, that literature and evil are the same.  Literature evades collective necessity.  Evil evades collective necessity.  Both literature and evil evade collective necessity.  Therefore, literature IS evil.  However, this does not seem to imply, according to Bataille, that evil is literature.

This is a bit like saying: A duck is not a zebra.  A chicken is not a zebra.  Therefore, a duck is a chicken.  However, a chicken is not a duck.  This is the logical fallacy known as affirmative conclusion from a negative premise.

“Hegel, la Mort et le Sacrifice” (1955) troubled me, as well.  I had read enough of Hegel to know that Bataille was making intellectual errors, was misinterpreting Hegel.

Bataille’s misinterpretation of Hegel may be summarized thus: Human beings sacrifice the animal parts of themselves in order to become fully human.  Nowhere does this statement appear in the Gesammelte Werke of Hegel. Hegel writes instead: [Der Geist] gewinnt seine Wahrheit nur, indem er in der absoluten Zerrissenheit sich selbst findet.  When he writes that the Spirit finds itself in a state of absolute shreddedness, Hegel means that the human mind exteriorizes itself as an object and restores itself from its self-exteriorization.  The human mind is both itself and outside-of-itself at the same time.  There is no sacrifice of the animal for the sake of the human.

In L’Érotisme (1957), Bataille’s thesis is that death and eroticism issue from the same source, and many of his arguments are unforgettably convincing.  But his opening argument is both banal and irrelevant: Bataille contends that the relation between sex and death is apprehensible at the microbiological level: When the ovum is fertilized, it is demolished.  The ovum “dies” in order to form the zygote.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the phenomenology of eroticism, nor does it have anything to do with the phenomenology of mortality.

Last month, I read as much as I could endure of the fragments collected in The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge.  These are the incoherent screechings of a lunatic.

* * * * *

THE BLUE OF NOON: A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia

According to Georges Bataille’s autobiographical note, Le Bleu du ciel (“The Blue of the Sky”) was composed in the twilight before the occupation of Vichy France.

The descending night darkens these pages.

Dissolute journalist Henri Troppmann (“Too-Much-Man”) and his lover, Dirty give way to every impulse, to every surfacing urge, no matter how vulgar.  Careening from one sex-and-death spasm to the next, they deliver themselves over to infinite possibilities of debauchery.  A fly drowning in a puddle of whitish fluid (or is it the thought of his mother, a woman he must not desire?) prompts Troppmann to plunge a fork into a woman’s supple white thigh.  The threat of Nazi terror incites a coupling in a boneyard.

Their only desire is to begrime whatever is elevated, to vulgarize the holy, to pollute it, to corrupt it, to bring it down into the mud.

By muddying whatever is “sacred,” they maintain the force of “the sacred.”

As a historical document, Le Bleu du ciel is eminently interesting.  It offers unforgettably vivid portraits of Colette Peignot (as Dirty) and the “red nun” Simone Weil (as Lazare).

It is also the story of a man who is fascinated with fascism and the phallus, of someone who loves war, though not for teleological reasons.  It is the story of a man who celebrates war on its own terms, who nihilistically affirms its limitless power of destruction.

As the night spreads, the blue of the sky disappears.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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GILES GOAT-BOY by John Barth

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THE UNIVERSAL UNIVERSITY: On GILES GOAT-BOY (John Barth) by Joseph Suglia

With his imposing fourth novel, Giles Goat-Boy: or, The Revised New Syllabus (1966), John Barth stopped writing stories and started writing stories-about-stories and stories-inside-of-stories.  The meta-fictional dimensions of the novel are apparent from its first page onward.  A “Publisher’s Note” informs its readers that Giles Goat-Boy is rumored to have been generated by WESCAC, a super-computer that–as one learns later in the text–has “commenced a life of its own” [86] and has taken over a mythical Super-University.  According to the logic of Giles Goat-Boy, the horizons of the University are the horizons of the universe, the “microcosm” stands for the “macrocosm” (a conceit derived from Joseph Campbell); it seems, then, that WESCAC, having completely taken over the universal University, would have produced the very text that we are reading.  This clever meta-fictional device displaces the individual voice of the author, of course, but also reflects the sources that make its writing possible.  If the author wanted to write a work that refers ceaselessly to the conditions of its production, he succeeded.  A sprawling epic about mythological heroism in an age of all-consuming computerization, Giles Goat-Boy resembles the infinitely self-referring spreadsheet of a constantly self-renovating and self-activating linguistic super-computer.

Giles Goat-Boy is many things.  It is a Bildungsroman that charts the gradual socialization of an individual subject.  Raised by goats, messianic savage George Giles strives to become the new “Grand Tutor” of the University and reprogram WESCAC.  In fact, it is George who is reprogrammed.  Following the classical form of the Bildungsroman, the novel ends with the disappearance of the hero’s identity insofar as he is absorbed into the computer’s complex machinery.  Deep within Axis Mundi, the belly of the computer, George submits to WESCAC his student identification card.  In doing so, he loses his name and remerges as “The Founder.”  Like Wilhelm Meister, George’s character is stamped by an external authority that grants him his socially reconstituted selfhood and, thereby, his validity.

Giles Goat-Boy is also a complex theological and political allegory.  The University is a stage upon which various world-historical conflicts are dramatized and enacted.  “The Quiet Riot” allegorizes the Cold War.  The Campus Riots are the world wars.  The Bonifascists represent the National Socialists; the Moishians represent the Jews.  The West Campus represents the West; the East Campus represents the East in general and the Soviet Union in particular.  WESCAC is the atomic bomb.  “New Tammany College” represents America.  Getting “flunked” is equivalent to damnation; passing is equivalent to salvation.  The “Dean O’Flunks” refers to Satan; the “Old Founder” refers to Jehovah.  Each of the oppositions mentioned above is dialectically synthesized at the novel’s close.

Most importantly, however, Giles Goat-Boy is an extraordinarily elaborate practical joke.  As with most postmodernist works, the reader doesn’t quite know whether to take any of its meanings seriously, but suspects that one shouldn’t.  Allegory, for instance, is merely one of Giles Goat-Boy’s many language games.  Perhaps one should take “J.B.” at his word when he writes–or is alleged to have written–that “language is the matter of his books, as much as anything else, and for that reason ought to be ‘splendrously musicked out'” [xvi].  Nonetheless, one of its reputed authors maintains that the book should not be dismissed as ‘a work of fiction’: “Excepting a few ‘necessary basic artifices,'” Stoker maintains, Giles Goat-Boy is “neither fable nor fictionalized history, but literal truth” [xi].  This is also doubtful.  “Literal truth” might not refer to a truth on the other side of language, but rather, a linguistic elaboration or fabrication of truth.  “Literal truth,” in this context, would be a truth that is composed of letters.

Giles Goat-Boy is a world of veils and yet these veils do not mask deeper verities.  As authoritative as it might appear, Giles Goat-Boy abdicates its own presumptions of authority.  The “Publisher’s Disclaimer” disclaims–or, at least, problematizes–all of the book’s claims.  According to the “Disclaimer,” the alleged author, “J.B.” renounced his authorship.  He claimed that he is merely the editor of the manuscript in question, which was tailored by one “Giles Stoker” or “Stoker Giles.”  The latter claimed, in turn, that he is the editor of the manuscript, which was manufactured by the automatic computer, WESCAC.  The computer also renounces the book’s authorship.  Giles Goat-Boy‘s authorship, it would seem, is infinitely regressive.  No one wants to admit having written the thing.

Barth’s future meta-narratives (Lost in the Funhouse, Chimera, Letters) will become increasingly more involuted, vine-like, and entangling, increasingly more extravagant, bombastic, and bloated, and increasingly more irritating, self-fascinated, and densely imbricated.  Some readers, overpowered by Barth’s stale verbiage, will bow to his turgidity.  Others will remember, wistfully and nostalgically, Barthes’ best novel, The End of the Road–a sour and cruel novel, to be sure, but also an infinitely more powerful and engaging one than Giles Goat-Boy.  Whereas The End of the Road comes about as the shock of a physical hammer blow, reading Giles Goat-Boy is a bit like having one’s mind EAT-en by an all-embracing cybernetic parasite.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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A Critique / Refutation of OUTLIERS by Malcolm Gladwell

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A Critique of OUTLIERS (Malcolm Gladwell) by Dr. Joseph Suglia

According to Nietzsche, Kant writes what the common man believes in a language that the common man cannot understand.  Malcolm Gladwell, it must be said, vigorously reaffirms what the common man believes in a language that the common man CAN understand, thus flattering the common man and “making him happy.”  “To be made happy”: a Gladwellism for “to be satisfied with a consumer item, such as a book by Malcolm Gladwell.”

In Outliers (2008), Gladwell argues, in essence: “It is better to be mediocre than it is to be brilliant!”  Perhaps that is too blunt of a truncation, but the book seems to welcome such simplicity.

We are introduced to Chris Langen, “the public face of genius in American life” [70], who nonetheless works in construction and “despairs of ever getting published in a scholarly journal” [95].  Langen fails because he was raised in abject squalor, and his mother “missed a deadline for his financial aid” [98].  By contrast, Robert Oppenheimer, a “success” for his complicity in the atomization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was “raised in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Manhattan” [108].  Other actors within the community-theater proscenium include Marita, a twelve-year-old from an impoverished family who gives up her evenings, weekends, and friends to slave away in one of New York City’s most rigorous and competitive middle schools.  She will succeed, Gladwell suggests, because she “works hard” and is given a “chance.”  Indeed, Bill Gates was a “success” because he was given unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal at the age of thirteen.  The Beatles were a “success” because they forced themselves to perform eight-hour concerts in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962.  Along the way, the reader is pepper-sprayed with anecdotes about Korean aviation and Kentuckian aggression that have no apparent relevance to the thesis of the book, except to “demonstrate” that one’s “cultural legacy” sometimes has to be jettisoned in order for one to become “successful.”

Gladwell is arguing, in nuce, that success–euphemistic for “financial prosperity”–corresponds not to one’s intelligence, but rather to opportunity and social savoir-faire.  The thesis isn’t so much false as it is banal.  Of course, one must have social skills and opportunity to be “successful.”  And yet I would contend, pace Gladwell, that even social skills and opportunity are not enough, by themselves, for an individual to succeed financially.  Life never brooks such easy recipes (or follows such “predictable courses” [267], to use Gladwell’s language).

What, precisely, does Gladwell mean by “intelligence”?  The author hypostatizes the Intelligence Quotient Test and thus subscribes to the false supposition that intelligence can be quantified and measured.  If you receive 180 on the Intelligence Quotient Test, in other words, then you are a super-genius.  Now, I did score [number redacted] on the I. Q. Test, but that, in itself, is no guarantor of my genius.  Intelligence is an impalpable thing, and there is no necessary relationship whatsoever between one’s intelligence and the I. Q. examination, just as, following Gladwell, there is no necessary relationship between one’s I. Q. score and “success.”

Moreover, Gladwell ignores the temporal differences that separate his stories.  Oppenheimer lived in an America that was less intimidated by, and envious of, intelligence than the America of the twenty-first century.  I differ from Gladwell, and my counter-thesis is the following: Even if Langen possessed superior social skills, it is very likely that he still would have failed in life.

Why?  Because the culture has become a home for Swiftian Lilliputians, ever-ready to manacle down any Gulliver who comes their way.  Yes, Gladwell is correct in suggesting that geniuses almost always fail and the mediocre almost always triumph, but he completely misses the reasons.  You cannot possibly succeed if you are a genius unless you camouflage, to a certain extent, your intelligence.  We are living a culture that, instead of lionizing intelligence, disdains it.  Those who possess a higher intellect than the multitude are looked upon with acrimony and mistrust.  Such is the “leveling-off” or equalization of all distinction to which polymaths and geniuses have long since grown accustomed.

Similarly, there is the impulse in this book to anathematize genius, as if genius were some kind of cancerous polyp that should be excised.  It is not difficult to detect a certain defensiveness in Gladwell’s anti-intellectualist posturing, not merely as if the myth that genius equals success needed to be debunked, but as if genius, in itself, were something intrinsically negative, threatening–damaging, even.  Gladwell, non-genius, is content to attack genius in Outliers with the same vehemence with which he attacked critical thinking in Blink.  And for exactly the same affective reason: Gladwell is as intimidated by genius as he is cowed by critical thought, for which he substitutes anecdotes lifted, quite uncritically, from single sources: books by John Ed Pierce, Richard E. Niebett and Dov Cohen, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin…

Gladwell’s most ardent admirers–non-brilliant readers who want reassurance that their non-brilliance is a formula for success–sigh plaintively and bleat.  And the mediocre shall inherit the Earth.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Niccolo Machiavelli argued that the expansion of power comes from opportunity in the early sixteenth century.  But he qualified: from opportunity and through cleverness (virtù in Italian).

Joseph Suglia

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TREE OF CODES by Jonathan Safran Foer / WRITING WITH SCISSORS – by Dr. Joseph Suglia

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WRITING WITH SCISSORS: A review of TREE OF CODES (Jonathan Safran Foer)

by Dr. Joseph Suglia

“[Schulz’s] writing is so unbelievably good, so much better than anything that could conceivably be done with it [?], that more often than not I simply wanted to leave it alone.”
–Jonathan Safran Foer

He should have left it alone.

What does one do if one wishes to become a writer but lacks verbal talent?  If one is Jonathan Safran Foer, one mutes and mutilates magical masterpieces.  Tree of Codes (2010) is an anti-book, assaulting language, crushing words under the weight of optical imagery, a non-book in which words serve a merely ornamental function.  It is an atomic weapon that is pitted against verbality, against writing, against the Word.  It is the stifling of a book, a sequence of stillnesses.  There is more writing–more expressive language–in Max Ernst’s collage novels.

To construct this monstrosity, Foer took an English translation of Bruno Schulz’s magisterial Sklepy Cynamonowe (“Cinnamon Shops,” 1934).  (Please note: The book is NOT called “The Street of Crocodiles,” no matter what Foer might tell you.)  Foer then carved blocks of text out of the English translation, excising Schulz’s beautiful prose poetry, scissoring it up.  Anyone who finds this practice innovative should consult the work of Tristan Tzara, Brion Gysin, and Raymond Queneau.

Here are two of Foer’s vicious eviscerations:

“The demands were made more loudly, we heard him talk to God, as if begging against insistent claims” (28).

“Knot by knot he loosened himself, as unremarked as the grey heap swept into a corner waiting to be taken” (39).

SPAM poetry.

Refrigerator-magnet poetry.

The first problem with Foer’s cut-up is that he chooses the wrong object.  Knock, knock!  Schulz wrote in Polish, not in English.  What on Earth is the point of cutting up, mucking up, mashing up, and rescrambling the English translation of a Polish novel?  Polish is frightfully difficult to render into English.  If you would like evidence for this assertion, take a look at any English translation of Jan Potocki, Bruno Schulz, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, or Witold Gombrowicz.  Consider, for instance, Alastair Hamilton’s translation of Gombrowicz’s Pornografia.  Hamilton translated a French translation of the novel into English: His is the translation of a translation.

Secondly: The ingenious Bruno Schulz–a writer more gifted than Kafka, in my estimation–did not have to dazzle his readers with glistening typographies.  He let language do the work.  He let his beautiful prose speak for itself.  If Schulz’s book is the richest book Foer ever read (it is one of the richest books I’ve yet read), why disembowel all of that richness?  We know the answer: Because Foer feels condemned by the richness, threatened by the richness, punished by the richness.  Foer the Hipster, who is incapable of expressing himself inventively in writing, chainsawed the work of a great author, an author who intimidated him.  Foer’s venomous envy and hatred of Schulz are unmistakable.

Snip, snip, snip!  Pare it down!  Tear it up!  What we are left with is an absolute abomination, something far worse than a book burning.  It is one thing to immolate a great book such as “Cinnamon Shops.”  It is quite another to replace a great book with a papier-mâché dummy, an Ersatz effigy, a kitschy replica.  Nothing more malicious in the literary arts could be imagined.

In the republic of letters, Jonathan Safran Foer will be remembered as a slicer, shearer, and shredder of literature.  He is at home in a culture that is tawdry, boring, and stupid and that is becoming tawdrier, more boring, and more stupid by the day.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

Postscript: STREET OF CROCODILES = *TREE* OF C*O**D**ES

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Chuck Palahniuk Is a Bad Writer / RANT by “Chuck” Palahniuk

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RANT (“Chuck” Palahniuk) by Joseph Suglia

Even “Chuck” Palahniuk’s most devoted followers will have a hard time getting through Rant (2007), a book about thrill-seeking that is devoid of a single thrill.  As insipid as they are, at least Palahniuk’s other books are EZ-2-Read.  Rant, however, is not merely stupid–it is also deadeningly, mind-numbingly tedious.  While trudging through its pages, the essence of boredom was revealed to me.

Rant is compact of babbling voices.  Each voice narrates a piece of Buster Casey’s life, a Typhoid Mary who has caused rabies to percolate throughout the United States.  But there is nothing to be learned about Casey after the sixth page (Pages One through Six are titled, imaginatively, “An Introduction”), and what we have already learned is never vividly or convincingly described.  To be absolutely explicit: The plot doesn’t move.  It stagnates.  There is no progression.  No motor drives the narrative.  Nothing is narrated between Pages Seven through 319 that hasn’t been narrated in the first six pages.

Anything that seems to be remotely original comes from somewhere else.  The book’s epigraph was pilfered from Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994), the oral-biographical structure was pillaged from Stephen King (Carrie), the “Party Crashers” narrative was filched wholesale from J. G. Ballard’s Crash, a narrative that dominates the book to such an extent that it would have been better titled Ballard for Kindergarteners or Ballard Made EZ.  (Casey is Vaughan from Crash.  Yes, there is repetition in Crash, but it is repetition with purpose, repetition with nuance, repetition with difference.  Here, there is only the infinite repetition of the Same.)  The Tarzanesque pseudo-sentence “How the future you have tomorrow won’t be the same future you had yesterday” (Pages Four and 253) was pocketed from French poet and thinker Paul Valéry (“The problem with the present is that the future is no longer what it used to be”).  The illiterately worded statement “History is, it’s just a nightmare” (p. 60) was lifted directly from Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.  (Not that Palahniuk has read Valéry or Marx, mind you. He has admitted that his information largely comes from talking to those he meets at parties and from his followers.)  Even the rabies motif was thieved.  David Cronenberg’s Rabid (1976), anyone?

Rant is littered with pop-nihilistic syllogisms, statements of the obvious that are presented as “deep truths”: “Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere” (p. 12).  Who doesn’t know that car-salesmen mimic the body-language of potential clients?

The subhuman prose is even more galling than the book’s content.  Nearly every other sentence contains a double subject.  For instance: “The flight attendant, she asks this hillbilly what’s it he wants to drink” (p. 2).  A slightly less awkward, slightly less annoying, grammatical way of writing the “sentence” would be: “The flight attendant asks a hillbilly what he would like to drink.”  Palahniuk, however, insists on multiplying the subjects in his sentences ad nauseam, with unbearably irritating results.  Palahniuk’s defendants claim that he isn’t really as dimwitted as he seems to be, that his narrators are merely functionally illiterate.  If that is the case, they must explain why Palahniuk interviews in a functionally illiterate manner, why he writes “essays” in a functionally illiterate manner, and why every character in his universe is functionally illiterate, including those who hold doctorates.  If Palahniuk is merely impersonating a lobotomized orangutan on heroin, why would he write essays and speak in exactly the same simian language?

And so we have the grating misusage of the word “liminal”–over and over and over and over again…  We have Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D., who uses phrases such as “prohibitions to [sic] bestiality” (p. 82).  We have teachers who say things such as “That Elliot girl, she told me the Tooth Fairy left [the coin] in exchange for a tooth she’d lost” (p. 52) and “Money you don’t work to earn, you spend very quickly” (p. 54).  We have Lowell Richards, teacher, who uses the phrase “indirectly and obliquely” (p. 99).  Whenever Palahniuk tries to write as “the smart people” do, he reveals himself as a half-wit.

And we have unspeakably hideous sentence fragments such as: “The ice melt and disappear” (p. 2).  Whenever Palahniuk tries to revise a cliche, such as Andy Warhol’s overly cited declaration “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,” he comes up with a monstrosity: “In the future, everyone will sit next to someone famous for at least fifteen minutes” (p. 5).  Palahniuk’s revision makes no sense: I’m assuming that “everyone” includes “the famous,” which implies, of course, that in the future, the famous will also sit next to the famous.

Perhaps most offensively, Rant croaks out, in a particularly infantile passage, that AIDS is a “disease” that has been “spread” by a single carrier–that it is a “disease” like any other disease–when, in fact, AIDS is a syndrome of diseases, a pandemic, for which no single individual is accountable.

Allegedly, “Rant” refers to the sound that babies make when they vomit.  Now, I’ve never actually heard a baby make such a noise, but perhaps one should take the “author” at his word.  The title seems perfectly appropriate.  Simplistic, stupid, superficial, tedious, and derivative, Rant is the verbal equivalent to chunks of infantile regurgitate.

The same could be said of all of Palahniuk’s “works,” which are not based on the imagination (the “author” seemingly has no imagination whatsoever), but rather on whatever he is leafing through at the present moment.  As I stated above: Palahniuk has admitted that his books are collages of interviews he has had with random people in bars and at parties, as well as the four or five non-fiction books he leases from his local public library every time he sits down to write a “novel.”  The rest of the information is “Googled.”

Regrettably, Palahniuk is an incompetent “borrower.”  There is often the question, in his books, of relevancy. In Survivor, there is a longish passage on lobster-eating that was apparently lifted word for word from a book on dining etiquette.  What, precisely, does this passage have to do with Survivor’s narrative?  Answer: Absolutely nothing.

Palahniuk wrote Lullaby in three weeks.  I’m not entirely certain how much time it took him to disgorge Rant.  My guess would be two weekends.  I don’t say this to praise Palahniuk, as if he were capable of fashioning a well-crafted novel in two weekends with the dexterity of a Picasso, who could toss off a painting in an afternoon.  Rant is writing-workshop trash.  It reads as if it were a live-journal or Web-log written by a subnormal high-school stoner, retched out and fraught with galling errors.

Palahniuk’s followers worship their leader as if he were a god.  But God is not an artist.

Neither is Chuck Palahniuk.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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AGAINST “BIZARRO”-FICTION

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AGAINST “BIZARRO”-FICTION by Joseph Suglia

A “bizarro” is an unimportant writer of fiction who pays very little attention to language.  S/he has no literary background, is generally undereducated and semiliterate, “reads” comic books, plays video-games, and gawks at the cinema of David Lynch and Takashi Miike.  (The bizarros are ignorant of the fact that Lynch created films not out of the hunger to be “weird”–at least before he succumbed to his internet fanatic base and produced the self-parodic Inland Empire (2006)–but on the basis of an original experience.  His films were never intended to be “strange.”  They were attempted exteriorizations of dreams.)  You will never hear a bizarro intoning the name Jan Svankmajer or Fernando Arrabal (“Who?”).  Nor will you listen to them twittering over the work of any serious literary artist.  I doubt any one of them has ever penetrated the oeuvre of Jose Donoso, Horacio Quiroga, or Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio (“Who?”).  Perhaps after reading this report, they will.

Bizarro cannot be accurately described as a literary movement, since it is neither literary nor a movement, precisely understood.  The bizarros write for one another; the primary readers of bizarro-fiction are other bizarro-writers.  This, among other things, makes bizarro more of a cult than a movement.  The word “movement” is too grand, too historic in its connotations to be applied to the bizarros.

The bizarros are enjoined to write about things they consider, by mutual agreement, strange, curious, uncanny, eldritch, transmontane, ultramontane (though they do not use these words; they prefer the high-school casualisms “weird” and “bizarre”).  Self-conscious strangeness is insipid, of course, not to mention banal, especially in a culture in which bizarreness is parlayed for the sake of commercial effect.  How bizarre is the bizarre when one can see dancing lizards and city-destroying carrier pigeons in Superbowl advertisements?  Lady Gaga makes bizarro-fiction superfluous.  The bizarre is, these days, the most marketable of commodities.

Inherent to the structure of every addiction is the disavowal of that same addiction.  Much in the same way that cigarette addicts claim not to be addicted to cigarettes, the bizarros habitually claim that they are not “trying to be weird,” that their fiction is not “weird for the sake of being weird.”  But who believes them?  Firstly, it is difficult to ignore that their cult has anointed itself “bizarro.”  Secondly, they praise one another on the internet for conceiving “weird” imagery (even though this selfsame imagery inescapably turns out to be stale, boring, and derivative) and “weird” characters embroiled in “weird” situations.  Thirdly, anyone who reads a word of their fiction can perceive a fetishization of the uncommon.  There can simply be no other impulse behind so much abominably written inanity, an impetus which is a perversion of the vain desire not for innovation but for “difference.”

It would be imprecise to say that the bizarre obsesses the bizarros.  (“To obsess,” etymologically, means “to impinge on,” “to attack,” “to besiege,” “to beleaguer”).  Their interest in the bizarre is a purely formal rather than a visceral one.  Their bizarreness is a false bizarreness, an ungenuine bizarreness, a programmatic bizarreness.  The bizarros stylize what they consider “weird.”  But nothing is “weird” anymore.  That which was once considered “weird” is, paradoxically, the ordinary and the average.

A diluted and unlettered absurdism, bizarro is a silly, infantile fetish.  Much like sexual urination, it is a fetish that I do not share and that is therefore of purely sociological interest to me.  An ornithologist is not a bird.

The bizarros ought to learn that language matters, that narrative matters, that literature is not a playground for the talentless, that writing should have to do not with the writer’s insecurities and vain desire for difference but with writing.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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THE YELLOW WALLPAPER by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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An Analysis of THE YELLOW WALLPAPER (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

by Joseph Suglia

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE FACTS ON FILE COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN NOVEL.

In 1887, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was committed to a sanitarium in Pennsylvania run by one Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the popularizer of a cure for female hysteria. Every female hysteric, according to Mitchell, should be placed under the watchful supervision of a (male) physician.  He must oversee the strict regimentation of her body’s habits.  Such vigilant monitoring is a conditio sine qua non for any physician who wishes to cure the patient of her malady.  She must submit unquestioningly to the physician’s will and obey all of his prescriptions — one of which, invariably, is the injunction to do nothing. Bed-rest is compulsory and should be vigorously enforced.  The patient is to be placed in a state of perpetual invalidism; all forms of activity to which she is accustomed must be invalidated.  Above all, she must not write.

Five years later, Gilman published the novella The Yellow Wallpaper, a slightly veiled polemic against Weir Mitchell (the physician is even mentioned explicitly in the text) and the “cure” to female depression and hysteria that he advocated.  The narrative is written from the perspective of a woman who undergoes a nervous breakdown.  What we are reading is her diary, which charts her gradual mental deterioration.  The narrator and her husband/physician, John, have rented an ancestral house for a summer.  John prescribes for the narrator a “rest cure” that is clearly indebted to the teachings of Weir Mitchell.  She is prohibited from writing; she writes nonetheless, perhaps to spite him.  Isolated in her room and completely inactive except for her writing, the narrator becomes transfixed by the sickeningly grotesque wallpaper that surrounds her.  She projects her self into the convoluted patterns of the paper and imagines a feminine figure–not necessarily a “woman,” but rather a “shape… like a woman”–entangled in the radiating network of festooning fronds and vines.  The feminine shape escapes from the wallpaper’s intricate web and is seen “creeping up and down” in the “dark grape arbors” of the courtyard.  In the final scene of the work, the narrator, who has seemingly lost her mind, tears off the wallpaper and crawls and “creeps” “smoothly” across the floor and over John, who has collapsed lifelessly after seeing his wife wriggling and writhing on the ground.  Since all of this is composed in the present tense, apparently she is writing as she is creeping.

Two orders of writing are figured in the novella.  On the one hand, there is the language of the yellow wallpaper, which spreads its sprawling patterns, its fecundating, fungoid forms, all over the room in which the narrator is confined–this is clearly representative of the language of medicine and maleness.  On the other hand, there is the ideolect of the female narrator, who frees herself by writing in defiance of her husband’s orders.  Writing is here figured as a mode of activity–which, for Mitchell, is a quintessentially male practice (women who are active, according to Mitchell, ape men).

Little known in the century in which it was written, The Yellow Wallpaper was rediscovered in the late twentieth century and has become what is easily one of the most “over-interpreted” works of fiction in the last few decades.  Most interpreters have pointed to the novella as a figuration of female liberation in modernist fiction.  Despite its seeming simplicity, they invariably point to the text’s so-called “ambiguities” and “contradictions,” the most glaring of which is the manner in which the novella ends; most seem to believe that the novella ends complicatedly and equivocally.  Does the narrator, in fact, achieve liberation?  Or does she not?  John, it is often said, faints to the floor, and fainting, as we are told too often and erroneously, is somehow “feminine.”  Therefore, the narrator has perhaps achieved a “victory” over John.  (One should also call attention to the fact that John is referred to, in the final scene, as “that man,” his proper name having been replaced by a demonstrative pronoun and a common noun.)  And yet the narrator is also reduced, at the close of the novella, to the status of a worm or a snake, crawling and creeping across the floor along a self-ordained path.  She certainly seems to have “precipitated” into what is usually described as “madness”–a “madness” that is attributed not to her “imaginative power and habit of story-making,” but rather to her husband’s profession.  Her progressive “improve[-ment]” has resulted in a regressive deterioration.  Because of this central ambiguity between “positive” and “negative” meanings, the novella seems, at once, a celebratory and affirmative “portrayal” of female liberation from a constraining, male-dominated order and an elegiac, despairing cri de coeur that proclaims the seeming impossibility of liberation from tyrannical maleness.

The notion that this is an interesting “ambiguity” or “contradiction” escapes this reader.  Far richer literary works of art were produced by women a few decades after The Yellow Wallpaper was written.  The writings of Daphne Du Maurier (born in 1907) and Shirley Jackson (born in 1916) are far richer, more macabre, and more complex than those of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  No one with a modicum of a scintilla of a tincture of a shred of a mote of a jot of an iota of rationality would deny that The Yellow Wallpaper has a didactic character, and, with the exception of a few trite “ambiguities,” its meanings are almost completely self-explanatory.  The simplicity of the work may explain the multiplication of critical discourses that it has generated.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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CHRONIC CITY by Jonathan Lethem

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A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia — CHRONIC CITY by Jonathan Lethem

Creativity is a gift that Athena denied to Jonathan Lethem.  She instead bestowed upon him the ability to absorb isolated media images, though the power to meaningfully synthesize these images is another arrow missing from Lethem’s quiver.

Lethem’s latest is Chronic City (2009), and it is the worst novel that I have ever read.  Considering the fact that I have wasted much of my life reading bad novels, this is really saying something.

Our narrator is Chase, a nondescript, vacant out-of-work actor whose wife died in outer space.  Chase, it seems, has died in inner space.  He is dead inside and made of plastic.  We know nothing more about our “protagonist”–he is a cipher–and therefore it is difficult to care about what happens to him.  Chase meets Perkus Tooth, an “eccentric popular-cultural critic,” in the offices of the Criterion Collection in Manhattan, and a vaguely homoerotic friendship develops between the two characters.

Perkus Tooth, Chase discovers, is a neighbor.  Tooth burrows himself in his warren, searches for “chaldrons” on eBay, and glides through Wikipedia.  Both friends drink Coke and eat cheeseburgers.  They make rather obvious cultural references–Marlon Brando and Mick Jagger are the two names that surface most frequently in their speech.  Not much else happens–which would be fine, if this “not much else” were engagingly written.

Perkus introduces Chase to a lost, early, and completely fictitious Werner Herzog film called Echolalia, which “documents Herzog’s attempts to interview Marlon Brando…  Brando doesn’t want to give the interview, and whenever Herzog corners him Brando just parrots whatever Herzog’s said” [5].  Having seen much of Herzog’s work and having taught his cinema at a university for five years, I was very puzzled by this unrecognizable pastiche.  Herzog has ignored Hollywood and its unionized actors until just very recently, when he migrated to Los Angeles.  The idea of interviewing Marlon Brando would have repelled him.

At this point, on Page Five, it dawned on me what I was reading: Chronic City is a hipster Bildungsroman, a document of hipsterism in early twenty-first-century America that future historians will use in an attempt to understand how this malady could have infected and corrupted our already vitiated and hollow culture.

Let me explain what I mean by the word “hipster.”  A hipster is an illiterate nerd.  Neither Perkus nor Chase read very much in the book, and their references are almost exclusively cinematic or musical.  Not to mention, mostly exoteric.  The closest they come to approaching literature is by way of Kafka: Perkus recites a passage from Kafka’s “Forschungen eines Hundes” at one point (in bad English translation).  He neither discusses the story’s form nor its meaning.  This is very telling.  Both hipsters do what all hipsters do: They merely stockpile and warehouse cultural detritus without thinking about what any of it might signify or how it is constructed.  And so both characters mindlessly compile references to cultural trash, without any purpose or sense of an overarching project.  They might as well have an encyclopedic knowledge of vegetables: “Have you ever eaten a carrot?”  “Did you know that there exists an orange cauliflower? I read about it on Wikipedia.”  And so forth and so on.

The point to be made is the following: Lethem’s hipsters are not readers.  They are not thinkers.  They are not artists.  They are not creators.  They are not even scholars of cultural trash.

They are repositories of media junk.

The same could be said of our esteemed writer.  His mind has not been formed by the study of great authors, his writing is unsupported by broad learning, and he seems to suffer from analphabetism.  He produces sentences in a rattling, mechanistic, depressingly vapid style.  He lacks verbal power.  Here is Lethem’s description of a vase: “It had a translucence, perhaps opalescence would be the word, like something hewn from marble the color of a Creamsicle” [90].  Would it be too much to ask Lethem, a writer who was nominated by the Kirkus Review as one of this country’s finest, to look up the words “translucence” and “opalescence” in a dictionary before using them?  And when the nodal point of his fictional universe is Manhattan, when entry into The New Yorker is seen as a kind of transcendence, that one essential spiritual quality that all fictionists must possess is lacking: empathy.

To return to my thesis: that Chronic City is a hipster Bildungsroman, a novel of self-formation which charts the progressive hipification of its main character until he becomes thoroughly hip.  “Being hip” means being seen by the right people with the right books, the right CDs, and the right DVDs.  At the end of the text, Chase reads “Ralph Warden Meeker’s” Obstinate Dust, a faux novel inspired by that unread magnum opus of hipsterism, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.  He meets the glance of a stranger: “Once in a while on the underground trains I look up and see another rider with a copy of Meeker’s bulky masterpiece in their [sic] hands, and we share a sly collegial smile, like fellow members of some terrorist cell” [465].

Upon reading this passage, I experienced something like a vomitous epiphany, a negative revelation that powers me to refine my earlier definition of “hipster”: A hipster is a consumerist who affects a superior consciousness, who pretends to be superior to the consumerist culture that has swallowed him.  Yes, he drinks Coke and eats cheeseburgers just like the rest of mainstream America.  But he listens to Neutral Milk Hotel and buys Jonathan Lethem books, and that makes it all OK.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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GIRL GONE ROGUE: On Sarah Palin

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GIRL GONE ROGUE: A review of GOING ROGUE: AN AMERICAN LIFE (Sarah Palin)
by Dr. Joseph Suglia

The title of Sarah Palin’s martyrology, Going Rogue (2009), is richly significant.  “Rogue” can mean “renegade” and thus point to Palin’s illusory departure from the ever-redefinable “political” and “media elites,” as well as from the McCain camp.  Reactionary politicians, these days, like to style themselves as “mavericks”–when, in fact, they represent this country’s most powerful insiders.  They endorse tax cuts for the affluent; they serve the gluttonies of the wealthiest financiers, corporate executive officers, and industrialists in America.

A slight logogriphic substitution would transform “rogue” into “rouge.”  The title, then, could be rendered: The Reddening of Sarah Palin.  (“Rouge,” in particular, recalls a shade of lipstick. Would “rouge” refer to the pig’s lipstick-smeared mouth?).  Red, obviously, is the color of the Republican Party, but it is also the color of passion and evokes rage and lust.  It is, as well, the color of fury, of blood, of rapine and viciousness.  It is the color of ecclesiastics, of cardinals.  In the iconography of National Socialism, black swastikas were emblazoned on red backgrounds.

This is a book that is drenched in red.

There is discussion of the animals Sarah Palin enjoys slaughtering, the caribou and moose she takes pleasure in shooting, the salmon she skins.  A photograph of the Arctic Huntress beaming with the psychosexual thrill that comes from killing game, the bloodied corpse of a caribou under her heel.  “I love meat…  [I] especially love moose and caribou.  I always remind people from outside our state that there’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals–right next to the mashed potatoes” [18-19].  Little commentary is required; what is said is clear.  The only room for animals, even endangered animals, is inside of us.  Kill animals and then interiorize them, kill animals that prey upon those other animals we want to interiorize: “[W]e had to control predators, such as wolves, that were decimating the moose and caribou herds that feed our communities” [134].

I wish someone would tell Sarah Palin that to decimate means “to kill every tenth being.”

Sarah Palin thinks that animals exist only in order to be devoured by human beings.  That is their purpose, their end, their divinely ordained telos.  As if it were a “red kite” [83], she tells us, her mind is connected by an invisible string to the mind of God.  She has immediate access to the divine understanding: “If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?”

In other words,

1.) Animals can be meat–meat that is devoured by human beings.
2.) Therefore, animals exist only to be devoured by human beings.

We have here both a non sequitur and a teleological argument. It is equivalent to saying:

1.) The human hands may be used for strangulation.
2.) Therefore, the human hands exist only for the purpose of strangulation.

The color red may connote the blood of animals.  It may also connote shame.  One is reminded of the red face of the unnamed Alaskan politician who observes Sarah Palin with horror as she gleefully breastfeeds her daughter on a radio program: “I acted like I didn’t see the shocked look on the politician’s face as he turned red and pretended it didn’t bother him at all” [67].  In a single image, the flocculent creaminess of lactate mingles with the blood that rises to the politician’s cheeks.

Red reappears when Sarah Palin douses herself, Countess Bathory style, in the blood of political martyrdom or of “the popular political blood sport called ‘the politics of personal destruction'” [352].  Seldom has self-imposed victimhood been exploited so meretriciously as it is here.  Sarah Palin bemoans the fact that she was “slapped with an ethics accusation” [355].  And yet which “ethics accusation,” precisely?  There are many.  That she misappropriated her governorship for personal and political gain?  That she used the Alaska Fund Trust to cadge gifts and benefits?  She never tells us.  She merely dismisses all ethical grievances as personal attacks issued by the monolithic Left: “One of the left’s favorite weapons is frivolous ethics complaints” [363].

Sarah Palin’s silence over her ethical misconduct is only one of the many silences that perforate Going Rogue.  She never attempts to wash away the record of her ignorance of Africa, the Bush doctrine, or NAFTA.  Certain things are so shameful that they cannot be erased with lies.  Let me cite one more instance of this studied silence: As Mayor, our gentle authoress called for the banning of “objectionable” books from the Wasilla Public Library.  She claims to have merely asked librarian Mary Ellen Emmons, “What’s the common policy on selecting new titles?” [77].  And yet nowhere does Sarah Palin, meek and mild, mention that she fired Mary Ellen Emmons two days after this conversation took place.  So many of this book’s pages are devoted to assaulting her critics (169 out of 234, by my count), but those criticisms for which she has no rejoinder, those words and actions that are truly indefensible and cannot be mangled, are consigned to a willful silence.

The name of whoever wrote this book is unknown, but it is attributed to a ventriloquist’s doll, a cue-card reader, a red harpy, a Venus in Carmine.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED by Jonathan Safran Foer

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EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED by Jonathan Safran Foer

Though I have no idea what he looks like, on paper, Jonathan Safran Foer is a dumpy magician garbed in a tattered black cape with a red velvet underside, waving his hands wildly, brandishing a cane purchased at Woolworth’s, a shabby magician’s hat propped on his balloon-shaped head, forever mugging and attention-grubbing, radiating spittle and a desperate need to be liked, nasalizing the same stale jokes ad infinitum, while the audience laughs wanly and with painful politesse.  His overeager face comes too close to yours, his tongue impending over his lower lip, which is bespattered with saliva.

Consider Foer’s massively popular Everything is Illuminated (2002).  While it is not the worst book that I have ever read, it is easily the smarmiest.  Nearly every page is dripping with dollops of cynically contrived pap, mawkish kitsch that appeals to the child in all of us.  You know, that child who is beguiled easily and who doesn’t know the difference between art and tripe.

The novel is structured according to two temporal continua.  The first continuum is narrated from the perspective of Alexander Perchov, The Loveable Ukrainian Tour Guide of one “Jonathan Safran Foer” (also known in the text as “the hero” and “the ingenious Jew”).  “Foer” is searching for the woman who saved his grandfather from death at the hands of the Nazis.  To create Alex’s language, the writer takes ordinary sentences in English and substitutes certain infelicitous words for more felicitous ones.  This gimmick grows tedious after the first three pages, and nothing, of course, is more uncouth than an American writer who mocks the speech patterns of those who speak English as a foreign tongue.  Alex’s malapropisms, however, are more pleasant to read than “Foer’s” prose in the second continuum, a turgidly narrated history of Trachimbrod, a Ukrainian shtetl, from its foundation in the late eighteenth century until its destruction during the Second World War.

Both continua are interlaced–as the first continuum culminates in the discovery of Trachimbrod by “Foer” and his tour guide, the second culminates in an account of the mass murder of its inhabitants; the fatality of Alexander’s grandfather is superimposed on the fatality of “Foer’s” grandfather, and so forth.  The point, plangently, is that “everything” in the present is “illuminated” by the past.  The alleged “cleverness” of this narrative device escapes this reviewer.

Every one hundred pages or so, a striking passage or sentence emerges from the thick, grey, monotonous mass that surrounds it, a passage or sentence that seems, at first glance, almost profound.  And, on further examination, these profundities reveal themselves as specious banalities.

Let me allude to two examples of Profound Truths in Everything is Illuminated:

“God loves the plagiarist…  God is the original plagiarizer… the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror” [Olive Edition, 185].

In other words, if you paint a portrait of yourself, you are “plagiarizing” yourself.  If you photograph yourself in a mirror, you are “plagiarizing” yourself.  To say that the creation of man was an act of plagiarism is to void the word “plagiarism” of all meaning.  There is, nonetheless, genuine theft in Everything is Illuminated: Foer does God’s work by pilfering the entire final section of David Grossman’s See Under: Love, “The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life.”  Foer isn’t so much influenced by Grossman as he is dominated by him.

Another “profound” moment:

“The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer” [360].

Foer here forgets that active forgetting (a term taken from Nietzsche, aktive Vergesslichkeit) is the same thing as inert remembrance.

Friedrich Schlegel once said of Denis Diderot: Whenever he does something truly brilliant, he congratulates himself on his brilliance.  In my essay on Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, I write the same thing about Tom Robbins.  The term brilliant must be supplanted in the case of Jonathan Safran Foer, however: Whenever he writes something sentimental, Foer congratulates himself on his easy sentimentalism.  It is difficult to sell a crowd-pleasing novel about the Shoah unless everything is sentimentalized.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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WOMEN by Charles Bukowski – A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia

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WOMEN (Charles Bukowski): A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia

The work of Charles Bukowski affirms the destruction of literature.  I am not suggesting that the author is not a literary artist.  I mean, rather, that he is actively committed to destroying all traces of literary language in his writing.  He attempts to destroy the language of literature by presenting himself as he is, without disguise, subterfuge, or literary artifice–a practice of writing that places his work at the furthest distance from the oeuvre of Kafka, Mallarmé and Blanchot.  If one takes the author at his word, even in his writing, Bukowski is not a figure composed of paper and words but, rather, a real human being.  This myth–one that Bukowski supported throughout his life–is the basis of the fascination surrounding his work and the reason for its cult-status.

Generally speaking, people are attracted to books that lead them to the existence of the human being who created them.  And in no other work does Bukowski seem to exhibit himself as purely as he does in Women (1978).  Nothing else could account for the book’s enduring appeal and seductiveness.  Yes, it is true that the main character has a pseudonym, Henry Chinaski, and there is a publisher’s note that reads, “This novel is a work of fiction and no character is intended to portray any person or combination of persons living or dead.”  And yet there are seemingly no other masks or precautions.  Throughout this work, Bukowski, apparently, shows himself as himself, revealing to the reader his self in all of its ugliness and misanthropy.  Women would serve as an instance of the author’s ecce homo, as a permutation of his self-manifestation.

It is no accident, from this perspective, that Women is almost completely devoid of novelistic qualities.  What is remarkable about the work is the bluntness of its “style,” its total reliance on ordinary language and the junk that is stockpiled in its every corner–that is, the superabundance of digressions, seemingly culled from the surfaces of everyday life.  Because of its coarse and digressive character, Women doesn’t read as if it were a novel; instead, it resembles a raw document of an experience, a bloody chunk excised from the tissue of ordinary life.  Perhaps this is the reason for the work’s perpetual repetitiveness.  Each scene of the “narrative” (if the book has one) follows exactly the same pattern: 1.) Chinaski meets a woman who is invariably significantly younger than him and who, in most cases, knows and admires his work.  By having coitus with young women, Chinaski hopes to achieve victory over death, a kind of sexualized immortality.  And perhaps this is also the reason why he writes (“My art is my fear”).  (The women in the novel, in turn, are drawn to Chinaski partly because of his meta-literary reputation and partly because of the way in which he describes women in his books.  As a self-portrait, Women resembles nothing more than a literary personals advertisement–an authorial seduction tactic that is perhaps far more common than most would believe.) 2.) He has some form of sexual intercourse with the woman.  Repeat.  Intermittently, there are also poetry readings, noisy breakups, trips to a racetrack, and laconic conversations with friends, acquaintances, and strangers.  Nothing extraordinary happens.  Chinaski’s account of his life is as uneventful and banal as most lives are thought to be.  To the charge that his book is repetitive and tedious, the author could have always replied: “This is my body.”  A book that is repetitive and tedious may express a life that is repetitive and tedious, and if one accepts that the book documents an engagement with life, how could one fault the author for this?  Like the Eucharist, the book would immediately communicate the body and blood of the author; his real presence would come forth purely from the pages.  Women‘s material character as a book would disappear in order to show the life of the one who fabricated it.  There would be a sacramental communication without communication between the author and reader.

Throughout the pages of Women, the reader watches a cavalcade of women moving in and out of Chinaski’s life.  One bout of copulation is succeeded by another.  Each of Chinaski’s sexual encounters resembles a form of violent appropriation, the besmirching is what is sacred or the slaughtering or maiming of a wild beast (“one animal knifing another into submission”).  It is not fortuitous that racetracks and boxing matches serve as the backdrop for much of the inaction of Women, for sex, according to the logic of this book, is a sport–indeed, it is the bloodiest sport of all.  A confrontation in which death itself is at stake.

A man who says, “All women are *****s” or “All women are angels” usually generalizes his experience of one woman.  Misogyny and philogyny are two sides of the same envelope.  It is to Bukowski’s credit that the women he describes are heterogeneous and non-interchangeable.  They each have unique traits; each one is singular (“Every woman is different”).  The names of the women are Lydia, Dee Dee, Nicole, Mindy, Laura (renamed “Katherine” by Chinaski), Joanna, Tammie, Mercedes, Cecelia, Liza, Gertrude and Hilda, Cassie, Debra, Sara, Tessie, Iris, Tanya, Valerie, and Valencia.  We learn about their idiosyncrasies and their styles of speaking.  And yet, for Chinaski, none of them occupies a permanent place in his life.  Bukowski’s protagonist swallows every woman he meets and vomits her back up.  He then stalks and “murders” new prey.  (Or is he the one who is stalked? In this text, it is never clear who is the seducer and who is the seduced.)  Each woman belongs, theoretically, to a non-finite series.  Some women reappear in Chinaski’s life only to disappear again just as suddenly; later, they sometimes reappear again (this is particularly true of Lydia).  The series ends with an interruption that comes by way of a renunciation: Chinaski refuses a young girl named Rochelle and feeds a cat a can of tuna fish.  But the series could, theoretically, continue ad infinitum.

Although he defines himself as a writer, Chinaski prefers women to writing: “‘You’re good enough with the ladies,’ Dee Dee said.  ‘And you’re a helluva writer.’  [Chinaski replies:] ‘I’d rather be good with the ladies.'”  He disdains what is called “literature”; in fact, all literary topics disgust him.  Writing is, for him, merely a vicissitude of life; it is an addiction (“an insanity,” he says at one point), but no more gripping than any of his other addictions–such as horse-betting, drinking, and sex.  Writing is indeed a compulsion but only one compulsion among others.  All of his compulsions are variations of what Bukowski calls elsewhere the “American Wet Dream.”  That dream, of course, is to acquire and to accumulate as much of a thing as possible.  More money.  More sex.  More drink.  More of everything.  As everyone else, Chinaski is “sick on the dream”–the dream of gross acquisition and accumulation that defines American culture.

Chinaski is addicted to writing fiction in the way that an alcoholic is addicted to booze. But to what extent is his work fictive?  “I write fiction,” he says at one point.  “You mean you lie?” asks Gertrude, a member of his seraglio.  His response: “A little. Not too much.”  This statement is reminiscent of an ancient paradox: A man who comes from a city of liars claims that he is lying.  Is he telling the truth?  What is the status of Chinaski’s statement?  The first-person narrator of a work described as a “novel” claims that he lies a little, not too much, thus implying that what he writes is mostly true–this would apply, of course, to the narrative that he is composing in the literary present.  How should one read the words of a character (himself a literary fabrication) in a literary fabrication who claims that his written narrative is mostly true?  Should one regard it as a “fictive” statement?  Of course, that would be the customary literary-critical response.  But what if one takes Chinaski at his word?  What if one accepts Bukowski’s premise that the protagonist does indeed directly represent the author?

Chinaski says during the conversation quoted above, “Fiction is an improvement on life.”  Perhaps it is not the case, then, that Bukowski expressed himself purely in his writing.  And although it might be the case that writing is merely one compulsion among others for his protagonist, perhaps it was not so for Bukowski.  Perhaps Bukowski did not write in order to live but, rather, lived in order to write.  Perhaps he did not base his novels on his own life but, rather, modeled his life on the protagonists that he created.  If this is so, the writing of Bukowski would indeed constitute the work of literature in the strongest sense of the word–that is, what is “composed of letters.”  For Bukowski, perhaps life was not the foundation of literature.  Perhaps literature, rather, was the foundation of a shattered life.  Literature as compensation, as evidence of an insufficiency: “People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.”

Joseph Suglia

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