The Dick Gibson Show and The Franchiser strike me, who is always approximately me, as the most noble and surpassingly emblematic novels of the great Jewish-American literary lion Stanley Elkin, who struggled with and worked through lifelong chronic illness, as they are the most boastfully crass and single-minded yet open-armed and warm in their pursuit of shuck-and-jive American hucksterism lingo and bravura, almost recognizable from the pages of Sinclair Lewis except that Elkin’s peerless pursuit of finessed language and form first pays homage to and then surpasses Saul Bellow. Arriving directly after The Franchiser, The Living End is a long novella or short novel in three discreet parts, presented as a “triptych,” each piece originally published in a separate journal, concerning death, passage to the afterlife, and what happens after you get there, either on the winning or losing side, may God help you. The Living End begins with Ellerbee, liquor store proprietor, his enterprise repeatedly victim to “burly, hopped-up and armed deprivators, ski-masked, head-stockinged,” his finances top tier boondoggle, his luck sure as shot on all the working gauges. He’s supporting the families of his fallen-in-battle clerks: there is George’s widow, and then there is the comely, red-headed Dorothy Register, now de facto single mother in her early twenties, her husband Harold a quadriplegic vegetable. And after all is said and done there is Ellerbee’s charming but mean-spirited wife May. Ellerbee has decided he is going to sell the liquor store to the strong-arm syndicate that's been making depreciating offers, a syndicate he suspects is robbing him and shooting his employees. Kind, unselfish Ellerbee gets approved for a loan and buys a new liquor store, High Spirits, the real estate upmarket, a better neighbourhood…like where he and his wife used to lived, before their house burnt down. The grey market syndicate robs the store and shoots Ellerbee dead. When Ellerbee asks the angel of death if there is an afterlife, the angel of death says “Oh boy.” Heaven, it turns out, seems pretty inclusive, colourfully nondenominational. There are mosques, cathedrals, and synagogues. Heavenly choir, pearly gates, ambrosia, manna, harp-plucking angels, halos. It’s all there for the soul to behold. Ellerbee meets Saint Peter and Saint Peter with gleeful sadism banishes Ellerbee to hell for no reason. Elkin, on the beam, Jackson: “Hell was the ultimate inner city. Its stinking sulphurous streets were unsafe. Everywhere Ellerbee looked he saw atrocities. Pointless, profitless muggings were commonplace; joyless rape that punished its victims and offered no relief to the perpetrator. Everything was contagious, cancer as common as cold, plague the quotidian. There was stomachache, headache, toothache, earache. There was angina and indigestion and painful third-degree burning itch. Nerves like hideous body hair grew long enough to trip over and lay raw and exposed as live wires or shoelaces that had come undone.” There is nobody sinless enough to get to heaven and no this is not a dream. Does not God’s own bitterness and indulgence read sinful to you, dear reader? What of his apocalyptic wrath!? And what of ill-used Jesus, hands crippled by nails such that they cannot any longer form fists? Life doesn’t stop dying, maestro, and it doesn’t stop living either. Paradiso, Purgatorio, Inferno. Death is wasted on us. We don’t seem to learn anything.
Along with the painter Albrecht Dürer, argues Fernand Hallyn in his book The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler, Kepler believed that the organic unity of man and the celestial realm “is based on number.” Hallyn has the harmonic correspondences of whole and part, genus and species, operative at any number of levels, existing in a homogenous Euclidean space and corresponding to the introduction of synecdoche into truth and method, which supplants simpler metaphors of mimesis. Ultimately, Copernicus had believed his system was superior to Ptolemy’s not because of his own superiority with mathematical calculations—with number—but rather because Ptolemy’s system was not “sufficiently pleasing to the mind,” a statement that cannot help but suggest aesthetic rather than mathematical criteria. Copernicus additionally finds his astronomy more satisfactory because he believes it represents a more enlightened way of relating to God. In writing about the sun, Copernicus demonstrates “lyricism and proliferation of devices such as the rhetorical question, enumeration, asyndeton, metaphor, and comparison.” His bottom-up concentric/vertical cosmology evokes Dante’s Divine Comedy. Placement of an altar in a church, a matter of the situation of symbols or signifiers within a composite symbolic order, is a major issue of Copernicus’s day, running parallel to the questions Copernicus is asking himself regarding how to situate celestial bodies in terms of one another, with the sun, of course, now central. He keeps God primary, but he deviates from Copernicus, presenting new ways of conceptualizing man’s relation to God and the heavens, Hallyn arguing that these developments indicate the heliocentric revolution’s Mannerist turn. Kepler emerges in the context of 17th century arguments concerning whether of not symmetry is a necessary precondition for beauty. Tycho Brahe doesn’t believe the heliocentric universe constitutes legitimate symmetry, whether it is “pleasing” or not. Johannes Kepler’s cosmology is one of perverse ellipses and all manner of confounding motion, appropriate to his own historical epistemic and its space-time. Visual aesthetics are always transmissible across demarcated lines and elements imported from rhetoric and literature find themselves intertextually interpolated into Kepler also. Kepler says of music that it is “a construction […] so rational and natural that God the Creator has impressed it upon the relations of the celestial movements.” His equations establishing the harmonic relations of planets were subsequently transcribed into musical notation. For Robert Fludd, another Mannerist esoteric, the monochord is the central organizing symbol of cosmology, equivalent to the sphere in Kepler. A dazzling autobiographical passage of writing from Kepler, cited by Fernand Hallyn: “This man was born with the destiny of devoting much time to difficult things that are repulsive to others. In his childhood, he undertook versifying before the proper age. He attempted to write comedies, chose the longest psalms to learn by heart…. In poetry, he tried first to write acrostics and anagrams…. He then undertook the most difficult of diverse lyrical genres; he wrote Pindaric verses, dithyrambs. He embraced unusual subjects [such as] the sun’s repose, the source of rivers, a view of Atlantis through the clouds. He delighted in enigmas, searched out the most subtle figures of speech; he amused himself with allegories, wove the tiniest details into them and even teased them by the hair…” In 1608, Kepler writes a dizzying bit of speculative theory—framing it as a dream, this being an ever-reliable literary device for throwing the hounds off your scent—in which he imagines astrology as it might be practiced by a person situated on the surface of the moon.
The Trigger Effect (David Koepp, 1996)
The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010)
It used to be much more common that you would hear wise and distinguished writers, like those dragged out and tarted-up in Donald Hall's Old Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions, advise young aspiring writers wondering how it's all done that anybody who can tell a joke properly can write a story. Right, but whose properly are we talking about here, hmmm? Your properly told story might just look an awful lot to me like damage to my personal property. You could sue them for libel, Jennifer Juniper, on account of clear and quantifiable damage to earning power, but you've been walking the streets for years wearing a big ridiculous placard that says you don't want no bullshit Rotarian earning power or something like that, mmm. First you make your bed and then you leap on it, Jennifer Juniper. Is it true that you only feel like you have power when you've tapped all the power from the city and its huddled, shivering citizenry? Do you remember The Trigger Effect starring Elisabeth Shue? It's about a serious blackout and how short a time it takes for nothing whatsoever to work anymore after you've noticed some of them maybe aren't working quite right. I honestly used to think I could survive a nuclear war if I just sat it out drinking bourbon and watching movies, but this was never what I was ultimately aspiring to. Everybody in grad school who knew me at all well knew that my plan for after was to pump gas and write poems and make love, living hard until I couldn't take it anymore, hopefully having some kind of modest success with the writing at some point and ultimately retiring to a quiet place in the country, hopefully with a wife, where I could execute my patented razzmatazz with heightened lucidity and sensible time-management. There used to be a lot of middle aged men on the prairie who took that long to find their ass and set up shop. I should run for sheriff. A woman I did not love but with whom I was for a good while regularly intimate once told me that I was a hard person to love, and I told her that she was only saying that because I was being an absolute piece of shit in that present moment. Are you excusing yourself? she asked. I wouldn't know how to restrain me! I like fairly vanilla sex because I am reticent to turn myself into a circus act...again. "I did not deceive myself for a moment as to the way," writes Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, "sea, danger—and success!" Well, a Wagnerian naval fleet would very much not be my scene and I am not at present time in anything like my prime, no sir. "I could maybe hold my Claire for a little while," writes Ben Marcus in his fantastic 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet, "hold her so tight that perhaps it would not hurt so much when together we landed in the world below."
Donovan, "Jennifer Junniper"
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