Silver Fragments

1. At a certain point in the past decade zany and orotund seriocomic American novelist Stanley Elkin, a victim of chronic illness and gone since 1995, has risen to the very top echelon for me and I think I prize only Robert Coover higher in the whole of the American Lit pantheon, sea to shining sea, forever may your barge ride large. Elkin likened his own work and process to those of his friend William H. Gass and Saul Bellow, Lion of Letters, a Jewish and American writer like Elkin, though technically he was born in Montreal. Elkin feels a fraternal bond with Gass and Bellow because he believes they are the three of them above all “stylists.” In truth, they are to a man veritable pontiffs of style, its ne plus ultra. A few years back I found myself returning to Saul Bellow, a man whose writing I had not appraised since I was a teenager, and even then merely by way of having read but a single book. Obviously, all writers have a style and establish means to work their stye out within adaptable parameters (form, plotting, structural conceits, full-on architectural overview), but what Elkin means when he dishes us up stylists is that some literary artists are unusually attentive to the possibilities of language and the marvellous balletic performances that can be engineered sentence to sentence when writing down sentences is your chosen way of life. If Bellow is not a brass band blowing the roof off the joint to quite the extent Elkin is, there can be no denying that both writers will tend to present the reader with a highly-idiomatic scree of superhuman language pizzaz and infectious bonhomie. Again, Elkin dealt with chronic illness his whole life, and yet he’s somehow the jolliest prose stylist I’ve ever read. Bellow and Elkin are writers attentive to the joys of language as well as of much else native to bittersweet life. Language is immanent to and proper to life lived by human animals and other kinds too. Idiomatic language humanizes through comedy, absurdity, and pathos. A person is not fired in a Saul Bellow yarn, they are given the “shove-ho.” If you’ve never read it, you should do yourself a favour and scoop a copy of his third and most widely-beloved novel The Adventures of Augie March, a Chicago-and-beyond Bildungsroman whose author and protagonist both have so much get-up-and-go you almost worry about coinciding cardiac events. Social mobility, the sensibility born of good-humoured ironic opposition, Napoleon’s legacy of a nobility promising itself available to the marginal, and the notion that a man’s destiny might well serve as his guiding principle: the novel is about Augie’s relationship with his destiny, his individual piece of the greater universal wholeness. “My mind was already dwelling on a good enough fate.” If you forget he said that there’s a pretty good chance Augie will say it again later in some whole other way. Shall we also do the proper dainty bookclub thing and pause and consider that name? Augie March. Auger, august, march, the god Mars. A beautiful little poem about destiny and its pursuit, all on its own. How might Stanley Elkin pause to offer an encompassing statement on man’s condition and the bigger picture? Well, here he is in 1987’s The Rabbi of Lud: “I atoned, not quite grieving but getting warmer and aware of the immense, twisted tonnage of complex grief in the world at any given time, in any given place, some tight amalgam of woe and rue and complicity and fear. Grief like a land mass, like the seas, complicated as weather seen from high space or the veiled, tie-dye smudge of the alloy earth itself."

2. Overwhelming pleasure, blinding divine horror, annihilating ecstasy. “The sexual act poses a threat to our being because it places no limit on experience,” writes Ken Hollings in an essay on Georges Bataille called “In the Slaughterhouse of Love.” “During the act, the body no longer has limit or definition: it is dissolved into a storm of sensations which are violently superimposed and fluctuating. The effect that this has upon our consciousness can only be expressed negatively: in terms of exclusion and absence. The contemplation of the sexual act begins and ends in darkness and silence because it is contained by a law of exclusion which operates at the extreme limits of language and lucidity.” We’re definitely somewhere in Wilhelm Reich country—this sounds like the ultimate death metal orgone blast to beat the band (the sun notwithstanding). Naturally, anybody who has ever had an orgasm should basically get it. Yukio Mishima named Georges Bataille along with Witold Gombrowicz and Pierre Klossowski, the latter a one-time friend and collaborator of Bataille’s, as among his favourite Western writers, specifying shared habits respective of “an anti-psychological delineation, anti-realism, erotic intellectualism, straightforward symbolism, and a perception of the universe hidden behind all of these, as well as many other common characteristics.” Part of the vulnerability of the sex act lies in the fact that we cannot wear masks and dissemble when we have sex the way we normally might do. For Bataille, there is in sex as in panic “a certain lacerating consciousness of distress.” Additionally, there are ideas of limit and “unbearable surpassing,” the precise way in which mysticism and debauchery become wound like serpents. Bataille’s academic specialization was anthropology and that’s where he got much of his juiciest material. Among the most astonishing and provocative examples is a short vignette called “The Dead Man” which was written in the middle of the Second World War, probably near Normandy when Bataille was suffering from tuberculosis, but was not to see publication until after his death. It depicts a frenzied collective spree, but in a hyper-fragmented mode and with an uncommon level of general ghastliness, involving a golden shower, feces, vomit, and a dwarf who happens to be a fantastically disreputable count. An act of copulation is described as “hand to hand combat, unbelievably bitter.” In the end, impassive permanence trumps transient relations on the planetary surface. Ken Hollings draws a connection between myths explored by Bataille and the discovery of “several oceanic cultures where a whole community would react to the death of their chief by entering into a prolonged period of frenzy. They gave themselves over to murder, looting, arson, and sexual excess, continuing to do so until the decaying flesh had fallen away from the dead chief’s bones. At this point normal patterns of behaviour reasserted themselves.”

3. What do we find in Bleak House, a tale told by Charles Dickens? Hypocritical society ladies with prized charities, Law as Law of Cost, crime scene protocols, cemeteries, infirmities, public hygiene, dandyism, compound interest, and death by Spontaneous Combustion (!) G.K. Chesterton asserts of Charles Dickens that with this novel called Bleak House the great author has moved away from meandering quixotic narratives and towards something much more like what fancy 20th century critics might be inclined to call “the systems novel.” “When we come to Bleak House,” writes Chesterton, “we come to vital change in artistic structure. The thing is no longer a string of incidents; it is a cycle of incidents. It returns upon itself; it has recurrent melody and poetic justice; it has artistic constancy and artistic revenge. It preserves the unities; even to some extent it preserves the unities of time and place. The story circles round two or three symbolic places; it does not go straggling irregularly all over England like one of Mr. Pickwick’s coaches. People go from one place to another place; but not from one place to another place on the road to everywhere else.” I have always thought of human culture as analogous to ongoing weather systems and in a way I think of the “cycle of incidents,” especially as here theorized, as a kind of weather. What Chesterton means to index later by “sinister and unnatural vapour” is verily obviously the famous London fog, a comforting and renowned return visitor throughout the Dickens corpus, huffing and puffing and blowing its showy smoke. Is it not the absence of a fixed, univocal, and coherent perceptible field, no matter how exhaustive the vision, that ultimately finds its analogical equivalent in that great fog of fogs? Doesn’t this sound fishily like the most postmodern shit you ever heard? Please, don’t even get me started on Miguel de Cervantes and Laurence Sterne. Was it always postmodern? I don’t know, was was ever was? The systems novel has ascended to a plateau where it can address chaos theory, the second law of thermodynamics, and something soon to be known as quantum entanglement as least once we’ve gotten to the supreme Austrian modernist Hermann Broch (1886-1951), who writes in Sleepwalkers that “there are irrational forces, that they are effective, and that their very nature impels them to attach themselves to a new organon of values, to a total system which in the eyes of the Church can be no other than that of the Antichrist.” Sounds like more weather to me. Forces of industrial, military, and broadly institutional modernization set in motion acceleration and entropy. What will they have left behind to speak for them? Open pit mines, a sea full of trash, atomization and diminishment of neurological capabilities, a less and less habitable planet, mass extinction. Let us be grateful then that Broch has a sober and practicable precept for us: "we feel the totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives.”

4. Anne F. Garréta was the first woman ever admitted to Oulipo, or the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, a loose and fairly informal guild originally kick-started by Raymond Queneau whose mandate was to bind enterprising literary renegades set on using mathematical and other formula as well as generative constraints in order to produce literary compositions of varying length. Garréta’s debut novel Sphinx is not only a jaw-dropping masterpiece, it is uncannily congruent with Oulipo methodologies (though she would not be affiliated with the organization for some while yet). Sphinx is engineered from a constraint that makes it both a groundbreaking work of generqueer literature and an impressive feat: it tells a love story to whose two central participants no gender is allocated, tricky to pull of especially in the original French, a language whose grammar is intricately gendered. Somehow, I like Garréta’s subsequent novel Not One Day even more than Sphinx. If Sphinx formulated and compounded an amorous relationship unmoored from fixed gender binaries but nonetheless imperilled by inflexible polarities of dominance and subjection (as in many a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Not One Day reflects upon years and many lovers, elaborating a "rhetoric of desire," revealing an author who has found herself in wavering and variable roles insofar as her couplings and close calls have been concerned, and who has come to possess a fairly untroubled grasp of the special tenuousness of human connection. Both Sphinx and Not One Day made me think of Roland Barthes' A Lover’s Discourse, Sphinx most especially because of the passages in which the author presents a profusion and enumeration of rites of amorous agony whereas in Not One Day it’s about the attention, doting, ritual, and enumeration. Not One Day also made me think of Chantal Akerman's 1982 film Toute une nuit, a probable influence on Garréta and major personal favourite that I finally got to see on the big screen the last time I was in London. Akerman’s film depicts multiple fragmentary encounters between numerous pairs of lovers or possible lovers. In the "Ante Scriptum" which prefaces Not One Day, the author lays out the contours of the project she has set for herself: she is to spend five hours on each brief section over a set span of time, not using notes or in any way preparing things in advance, working solely from memory and in-the-moment inspiration, in order to record reminiscences on either lovers, women she desired, or women who desired her. The sections are to be written in no prescribed order, merely as things come to her, the women depicted in each given a brief code name (E*, D*, Z*, etc.), the sections finally arranged alphabetically by name of corresponding female subject. The sections are named for the night they were written in the sequence of composition, but appear in a different order, hence the scrambled index at the front of the book. Garréta: “Writing at the whim of memory twists and turns on uncertainty. Like desire itself, never assured of its end or its object.” The book’s core ten sections of reminiscence are beautifully crafted and invigorating, filled to the brim with indelible, poignant, sometimes irreverent images. The author of Not One Day is the furthest possible thing from a dilettante, signalling her specialized knack by briefly comparing novels to cars: "any amateur mechanic knows upon initial inspection the type, its most common pathologies, and the structure of its engine. There are a few common models, a minuscule amount of rare ones that force you to revise your understanding, oblige you to dismantle them completely to understand their workings. We encounter more family sedans on the roads of literature than Ferraris or prototypes.”

5. Philippe-Paul de Ségur served as Napoleon’s aide-de-camp during the infamous and fantastically disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia by the enterprising Emperor and his Grande Armée, consisting as that behemoth was at outset of more than half a million men. Ségur would publish his firsthand account of the debacle in 1824, over a decade after the events themselves transpired, the Emperor having in fact been dead for about three years. The original printings of Ségur’s account would rapidly sell out and the book would quickly be translated into all the languages then operative in Europe. Many took exception to some of the facts, deeming certain elements exaggerated. Ségur would even fight (and win) a duel over the veracity of his testimonial. His grandson would introduce an abridged version of the text in the late 19th century. Philippe Paul de Ségur came from a wealthy and connected French family left impoverished in the wake of the French Revolution (his father having narrowly avoided arrest), and as a young man he had fledgling literary aspirations on which at first he failed to make good. Finding himself temperamentally disposed to a military career, he quickly rose up the ranks in Napoleon’s forces, finding himself a trusted intimate of the leader. Ségur was present as Napoleon remade Europe, triumphing in one brazen military campaign after another, seizing territory and placing functionaries in important leadership roles hither and yon. Russia would be the first time the Emperor disastrously overextended himself and would mark the beginning of his legendary downfall. Ségur’s account of this epic folly is written with considerable literary verve, setting out to both make and unmake myth, and the author himself serves as detached commentator, entirely removed from the events as active agent. Not only did Napoleon lose Russia, he lost the near entirety of his overwhelmingly massive army. Both Napoleon and Hitler failed to heed the warnings of advisors of sound sense because their previous impossible triumphs had conditioned them to believe themselves infallible. Like Napoleon, Hitler would himself conquer much of Europe, finding himself opposed to both England and Russia, and would see Russia as the latest of a series of strategic dominoes, a prelude to direct confrontation with Great Britain. Also like Napoleon, whose disaster he knew all too well but nonetheless failed to avoid repeating, Hitler would face a Russian strategy of strategic retreat and scorched earth. Military leaders have continued to fail to heed the warning, especially when they overvalue the efficacy of shock and awe within the context of asymmetrical warfare. Philippe Paul de Ségur, elegiac for the moment: “So great expeditions are crushed by their own weight. Human limits had been exceeded. Napoleon’s genius, seeking to transcend time, climate, and distance, had as it were got lost in space. Great as his capacities were, he had gone beyond them.”