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Samuel Delany: The Motion of Light in Water

6 November 2005 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been thinking for a while about what to say of this book. It’s a personal book, mostly (but certainly not totally) bereft of the hardcore cultural theory that attracted Delany later in his career. It is a relatively straightforward memoir of Delany’s childhood, ending more or less with the end of his marriage to poet Marilyn Hacker, and most of the book chronicles their life in the East Village in the early 60s. As it is a record of what was important to him during the largest developmental stages of his life, and what he remembers of it, the best assessment I can offer is how it differs from what I would expect a recollection of this sort to contain and the conclusion that Delany is a very, very different person from me, and not only in the obvious ways.

The summary: Delany grows up in a somewhat harsh but well-adjusted black family in Harlem, attends Bronx Science, and marries Marilyn Hacker at around age 18 after impregnating her (it ends in a miscarriage). They move into an East Village apartment together and both devote themselves to writing, sometimes taking odd jobs. Delany sells a science-fiction book and quickly writes four or five more over the course of the memoir, books that he implies are precocious juvenilia. He writes a libretto for an opera by an older composer, meets Auden, plays guitar in folk clubs. Delany is already identifying as gay, but there’s no evidence that I could detect that Hacker later would. Delany voraciously explores the world of anonymous and non-anonymous gay sex in New York and struggles with the definition of himself as a gay black writer. He and Marilyn eventually split up and he heads off to Europe and parts unknown for new adventures.

These are the basics, and they make for a unique and historically significant document. Here are the odd bits:

First, despite what a singular figure Delany is (is there another writer anything like him?), he seems so willing–no, compelled–to identify as part of a group. The ideas of blackness, gayness, writerness, etc., weigh very heavily on him, and he pursues them in an realistic (not nominalistic) fashion, as though they were Platonic gestures that he imprecisely embodies. His actions, he points out on several occasions, stem from these identities. They do not limit him, not in the slightest, but he uses them to give definite shape to his existence. He readily heads into this sort of abstraction.

This tendency towards universals is complemented by a visceral physicality. Delany apparently remembers raw sense data from decades previous with a vigor that I can hardly apply to last Saturday’s dinner. This is most apparent in his descriptions of his sexual encounters on the docks and elsewhere, but it pervades every event he describes, until I could imagine the character of the walls in his apartment and

We have the body and the mind. Where is the spirit, Plato’s third component of the individual? For the most part, it feels noticeably absent. I’ll put it this way: were I to write of my life in my late teens and early 20s, it would first off be a lot less interesting than Delany’s life. What it would chronicle would be the intersection of shifting but undoubtedly myopic views of the world with shifting but confused interactions with other people. This is not at the forefront of Delany’s chronicle. When he meets people, he describes their appearance, their demeanor, and what they talked about. If they have sex, he describes that. But there is little emotional introspection or cross-examination, at least not by my standards. Hacker herself remained quite opaque to me; many of her poems are quoted, but even they seem to leave her as an observer more than a subject.

All of this comes to a head when Delany is institutionalized for panic attacks. He suffers from acrophobia amongst a host of other odd phobias, but his approach to them is anything but Freudian. Even in the hospital, his pathologies do not seem to ever touch emotion. In earlier years I would have called this simply impossible; now I can believe it, but it is hopelessly distant from how I interact with the world.

I think of Proust saying that the artist must not waste time with useless conversations and must devote himself in isolation to his art. Proust admits his failure to do this for much of his life and solves his problem but withdrawing from society entirely to achieve the necessary distance. Delany? He appears to have had the distance from the very start, as well as the ability to maintain it even when in intimate physical and verbal contact with another person. No isolation was necessary.

Or Lay Myself Down By Sorrow’s Side

2 August 2005 / / 0 Comments

With all my books 2500 miles away, I’m left without the ability to write substantively about Rameau’s Nephew (weird!) and Robert Walser’s The Robber (which, incidentally, has given me the toughest time of finishing it of any short book since Notes from Underground). So I figured I’d loosen the reins a little and wander through the detritus in my head that I usually leave well-covered.

Genealogy of Metaphysics: what was it that caused the shift from the master dichotomy of real/unreal to the slave dichotomy of real/fake? The loss of authority/authenticity in young American authors (see Eggers, Foer) indicates a preoccupation with returning to an imagined time where every utterance was a statement of the real, as opposed to the supposed fakeness that surrounds us that everyone is fed up with. The term “irony,” which once signified a sophisticated sort of social satire that required a certain amount of intelligence to appreciate, has become to devalued to the point where it simply signifies insincerity, the positive referent not being a specific target but simply the mores of society. The “return to sincerity” movement folks are no better since they are acting the part of ignoring what they know to be ever-present: this inauthenticity. In the goal of people to return to a pre-Enlightenment, tradition-directed (to use David Riesmann’s term) society in which one’s words emerge organically from one’s position in society, they forget that this is not especially possible in the greater culture, which in turn speaks of their own disingenuousness. To continue with Riesmann’s terms, it is not legitimate to be fomenting a rebellion in ingenuousness when you are using borrowed terms; you remain other-directed. In Heidegger’s phrasing, they are as unthrown into the world as anyone, but this is the constituent state of post-Enlightenment modernity. Real/fake denotes a qualitative judgment once removed from the matters at hand, a tertiary quality once removed from color and twice removed from shape and form. Real/unreal merely judges ontology, which is to say, treats the former as a gestalt. In the slave irony mentality, the rise of Menippean satire stems from the lack of an authentic culture to critique. When people are divided between faux-authentic personae and a nascent state of mind, satire directed at the personae loses its teeth, as the personae have an impenetrable defense, namely that they are personae. Less-directed Menippean satire pursues the idea behind the real/fake culture itself by repeatedly invalidating it, making the effort more transcendent, but also leaving itself open to the charges that such satire is pointless. It is not pointless so much as it is easily made obsolescent, as it is internalized and melded into that which it satirized. It is built upon faster than any other genre.

A little too much Kenneth Smith there, I think. Another route. There has been too much talk of the fragmentation and delinearization of personality. In the presence of a more global culture than ever before, placing more universal restrictions on the outlines of acceptable thought, why should we look at ourselves as fragmented, or “shattered” as one wag decided to put it? Only because there is a prejudice that a self constructed from bits and pieces of media dreams should somehow hold less integrity than one of the shared prejudices of a close-knit community. So we go “bowling alone”? The idea of the integrity of a mind (or of minds) being corrupted by distant, unresponsive influences is as illusional as the idea that these shared universals will eventually create a group mind on the order of the techno-utopians’ fabled singularity. Without wanting to fall into a trap of evolutionary psychology, the cognitive schema of the mind is probably far more static than people seem to imagine. Which makes those social schemas, of authenticity for example, all the more important, since they are firmly dynamic.

A little memory about times past. When I was 17 or 18, I heard existentialism called an adolescent philosophy. I thought, “How can something so fundamental, something that strips things down to bare reality, be termed adolescent?” But could I have expected myself to answer back when told “Existence prececes essence,” “Existence and essence of what?”, not being able to identify such words as properties rather than implied particulars? Freud’s achievement was in the clear artifice of his schema, rather than in the deceptively fundamentalist appearance of so much recently fashionable social thought. I was suckered like many others. Fiction writers and poets are always the most susceptible to amenable schemas. They are their lingua franca.

All right, that’s enough. I would never publish this if it were for posterity, but the idea of a Coming Attractions is more appealing if you don’t have to live with it in plain sight for the rest of your life.

Brett Bourbon: Finding a Replacement for the Soul, cont.

27 March 2005 / / 0 Comments

(Please see Part 1.)

A third disanalogy between Wittgensteinian and everyday criteria indicates that, and why, although Wittgenstein’s immediate audience was the empiricist tradition of philosophy, his views are going, or ought, to offend an empiricist sensibility at every point — which is only to say that this conflict is an intimate one. Go back to the first element of my lay-out, the one I label “Source of Authority”. There one finds “American officials”, “I”, “Africans”, “Anna Freud”, “Shanley”…Wittgenstein’s source of authority never varies in this way. It is, for him, always we who “establish” the criteria under investigation. The criteria Wittgenstein appeals to–those which are, for him, the data of philosophy–are always “ours”, the “group” which forms his “authority” is always, apparently, the human group as such, the human being generally. When I voice them, I do so, or take myself to do so, as a member of that group, a representative human.

Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (18)

This quote illuminates some of the problems that Bourbon faces in separating the human from the non-human (e.g., machines). When Wittgenstein uses “we” to generalize over a metaphysically strict notion of people using language (which seems to me a more precise term than “human”), the criteria used are de facto implied by the usage of the words themselves. A word means by virtue of its use, and authority stems from use rather than, for example, a particular set of sense data.

Bourbon does not quite have that avenue open to him, since he is interested in a criteria of being human. What for Wittgenstein was an effect of usage is here inverted, as language takes on a role in elucidating what it is to be human. If the book is to answer this question, he has to engage in debates such as, “Women, narratives, poems, and the like can be understood (1) as expressive of human beings or (2) as analogically like human beings” (170). To do so he cannot rely on language use alone, but on language’s interaction with certain types of ontology (say, “what it is to be human”). This, I think, is the most radical move made in the book. Not coincidentally, there is a tension between the “we” and the “I” in the book–both are used liberally–that implies a more voluntary notion of humanity than the version that Wittgenstein mandated. But for all that, it sometimes is straightforardly ontological:

Human beings could cease to be human only if the world were not our world. (204)

The challenge is set here: to find a version of humanness that has in its very ontology a relation that is illuminated by our relationship to the non-propositional language in fiction.

To this end, the book alternates between passages in high analytic philosophy style (especially Davidson) and much more freewheeling reveries that owe a little to Heidegger and Levinas, but not that much. Sellars is one philosopher who I’m pretty weak on, but from what I can gather, Bourbon draws on his response to Quine in some of the more technical passages. There could be a little John McDowell in there as well, but I’m really not qualified to tell. While Bourbon is concerned with literature, philosophy and more importantly, philosophical forms of argument, take precedence over literary theory and its forms. Apart from a short passage criticizing Helen Vendler and John Ashbery of “philosophical infelicities” (for taking a facile view of meaning in literature), there is little attempt to engage with literary analysis.

The early part of the book attempts to clear some territory, using analytic-styled arguments to push literature out of the realm of philosophy by claiming that fictional sentences are non-propositional. I.e., they do not contain truth values, and therefore do not actually reflect any correspondence to reality. As such, they are nonsense. Here he dispenses with much literary analysis, saying that poems are “provided with content by conceptual means: unjustified conceptual means” (10). Further:

If it [a poem] is going to be valuable as a means of reflecting upon ourselves, then it cannot be because it offers us theories, or places to test our theories. What kind of test would that be since our interpretations can rig the results? (11)

In other words, since whatever correspondence is mandated by an act of interpretation, the meaning of a fictional text is imposed on it, rather than contained in it. Rather (and the significance of this will be clear later), “their value will come out of nonsense.”

He then dispatches the versions of humanity offered by Keats and Henry Adams. Keats in his view sees humanity as an unnatural (or non-natural) phenomenon, capable of motivation in contrast to the non-intentionality of nature. This, he says, is insufficient; it is a definition by contrast and negation. The gloomier Adams offers an inversion of Keats’s bright view, portraying humanity as a meaningless “dynamo” of fireworks and little else in this wonderful passage from “Vis Nova”, near the end of The Education:

Every man with self-respect enough to become effective, if only as a machine, has had to account to himself for himself somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed. There, whether finished or not, education stopped. The formula, once made, could be but verified.

The effort must begin at once, for time pressed. The old formulas had failed, and a new one had to be made, but, after all, the object was not extravagant or eccentric. One sought no absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it. Among indefinite possible orbits, one sought the orbit which would best satisfy the observed movement of the runaway star Groombridge, 1838, commonly called Henry Adams.

(Also see Ray Davis’s quotation of Adams for similarly grim times.)

Bourbon rejects this too as ultimately nihilistic and begging the question of the initial axiom, which I will quote a third time:

Human beings could cease to be human only if the world were not our world. (204)

Ergo, humanity is not merely a dynamo. Poised between the pre-modern conception of the soul and the existing deterministic, mechanistic view, Bourbon proceeds to nonsense, as embodied by the non-propositional sentences of fiction. His primary exemplar is Finnegans Wake.

Now, to claim Finnegans Wake as a representative of literature is disingenuous, since it is one of the most marginal and extreme works of fiction ever. But I don’t believe Bourbon is doing that; rather, he identifies FW as portraying the aspects he’s interested in in their rawest form, devoid of the facile interpretations that can be placed on the “plots” and “characters” of most books. Without these misleading interpretive constructs, we can get down to business.

For example, the “characters” in FW are not characters at all, but arrangements of assorted things and people that are designated by sigla and/or initials like HCE and ALP. HCE, standing for “here comes everybody”, “Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker,” etc. Such a thing resists one particular sense; “We have to learn to recognize HCE, but we also have to learn what it is we are identifying” (175). But from the argument that fictional sentences lack sense and are non-propositional, this seems an impossible feat. Thus:

FW would seem to exemplify all these ways of falling into confusion,
all of the ways words, sentences, and persons slip into obscurity. (175)

It is here, I think, that Bourbon sees the commonality with Wittgenstein, who in his later work explicated “language games” as holistic systems of linguistic practice; i.e., that words themselves lack a definite representative meaning, but rather gain what sense they have through their use between people. But what sort of language game is being played in fiction, where the use is explicitly nonsensical (so Bourbon says), and the activity is taking place not between two people but between a set text and a reader? Wittgenstein (in the view of David Pears, at least) mandated that a language be used between two people before it can properly be called a language; a language invented and used by one person who had never met anyone else would not properly be a language at all. That is not what the Wake deals in, but neither is it quite normal communication either. It is in this space between Wittgenstein’s idea of a language game and a solipsistic non-language that Bourbon fills in his idea of the human.

To be continued…

Sci-Fi Novels for Liberals

23 February 2005 / / 0 Comments

Since I don’t know any longer what socialism is, I don’t know if I’m qualified to judge China Mieville’s list of sf/f works for socialists. It’s such a heterogeneous list that the set of books seems unnecessarily short. With such diverse reasons for inclusion as genre subversion, utopia, satire, and working class sympathies, the list could have easily been expanded. Socialism evidently contains multitudes.

So instead, here’s my own list of works for liberals: specifically, liberals of the United States of around this time. And there is one theme in particular that these books reflect, which is how myths (i.e., lies) occupy the collective mind of society. More than anything George Lakoff has to say about “frames”, the idea of collective myth is one that the Republicans have embraced with great success, while the Democrats have utterly lost the fabled images of strong workers and social welfare that once fueled them. This is less about the content of these myths than the compelling aspect of their totality.

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

The ultimate novel of how we forget our past and recollect it as fable and allegory.

Olaf Stapledon, The Flames

Amazing, and amazingly depressing, novella of rise and fall of an alien society around a shifting religious myth. As much a tale of the Crusades as a prediction of America’s fundamentalist near-future, it’s frightening.

Mark Geston, Lords of the Starship

Neoconservative/Straussian politics put into play in a post-apocalyptic world. Not too uncommon a theme, but Geston’s book is one of the comparatively few negative portrayals of it.

Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

Smith was a Kennan-esque Cold Warrior, and in between the more cutesy bits, his work has a Kissingerian sense of realpolitik, depicting a point in the future where government must intervene to alter people’s existential senses of themselves.

R.A. Lafferty, Fourth Mansions

A tall tale about secret powers at work. As a conservative Christian, Lafferty is rather good at playfully saying “Damn it all” to the world. More Hawthorne-influenced than it at first appears.

Kobo Abe, The Ark Sakura

Nuclear and survivalist paranoia from a Japanese point of view. The handful of main characters spend so much time locked in an underground cavern that they nearly create their own reality.

Carol Emshwiller, Various Stories

I’ll have to go back and pick some specific ones, but there is such a constant undercurrent of societal expectations being undermined in her work that nearly anything of hers seems to fit the bill. Probably the name I was most disappointed to see missing from Mieville’s list.

Bernard Wolfe, Limbo

Crazy Freudian dystopian novel that’s at war with itself, but so fevered that its societal hysteria is more vivid than most.

American Writers of the 1950’s

21 April 2003 / / 2 Comments

Eudaemonist goes after Randell Jarrell’s Portraits from an Institution:

I now understand why people go ga-ga for Kerouac: general American fiction of the 1950s was rotten…When seen against the backdrop of such insipid, feeble prose as Jarrell’s, where flashes of wit last no longer than a firefly’s flickering (and provide, if I may say so, rather less illumination), Kerouac’s writing, for all that it is petulant, adolescent, and puerile, at least has some spark.

(Jarrell was not the only poet to try his hand at a campus novel. Weldon Kees’s Fall Quarter is quite dull and loses its way early on, torn between social criticism and an unwillingness to indict as viciously as Kees did in his essays.)

Speaking as an avowed detractor from the beats, seeing them as an anti-intellectual offshoot of more self-conscious European surrealist/dadaist movements, I always saw the 50’s as a time of post-war retrenchment. Popular genres (mystery, sf) had been established and were being elaborated on and toughened. William S. Burroughs, not quite a beat, was still writing sordid books like Junky and Queer (not published until later, but still…) that derived from Nelson Algren’s work of the 1940’s. Authors like Hubert Selby and John Rechy would follow this arc in the 60’s, but it is not typical in any way of the 50’s. Likewise with John Barth’s first two novels, which would not have stood out had he not drastically shifted tacks afterwards.

On the more socially conscious front, Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis’s complaints did not yet seem appropriate again (and their writing was far too clunky to stand on its own aesthetically), and Faulkner’s Southern chronicles became rote and nearly pastoral. Faulkner still won the Pulitzer–twice–seemingly by default, once for the failed stretch of A Fable, which reads like an intentional shifting of weight to “larger” (not really) issues.

But there are several 50’s authors that had and continue to have a huge impact on writing style and people’s expectations of the demarcated beast that is “American fiction.” J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Richard Yates all got their start in the 50’s, and none ever really made an impact beyond what they accomplished in that decade. Even Bellow, who held some of himself back for later, spawned upstarts Philip Roth and Joseph Heller before he could wrangle back any significant influence, and settled for becoming an elder statesman who would write books about Allan Bloom. All of them outlined areas that became de facto concerns in what could get published.

Cheever and Yates both specialized in malaise. Cheever’s version had darker, more perverse undercurrents to it (submerged homosexuality quite large among them), while Yates stuck to the surface of things and painted anomie devoid of content. Cheever may have had the richer vision, but Yates was more precise, he knew exactly what wall he was hitting, time and time again, while Cheever wandered.

Bellow was dabbling in a self-mythology based around the already-forming detritus of Jewish intellectual circles of past decades, which were fast being reduced to the parochialism of The New York Review of Books (as well as Irving Kristol’s neoconservative movement, but that’s not literary). But hardly less than Cheever and Yates, he was working on a blank slate of American culture based around a middle-class that hadn’t dominated when Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis had been writing. The context of all of their writing was post-Freudian psychology, the self-defeating self-reflection that produces neurosis. With much less of the weight of history than corresponding European novels of the same time, they drew from the sociology of the moment, and constructed a view of middle-class intellectual and non-intellectual life that produced its own problems. It revolves around the psychology of the little gesture, the meager possession, the sentimental attachment, and the bland statement. These took on specific associations, so that every fictional character looking at a gray building or working in a garden or cooking dinner or walking down a sidewalk came to signify certain things about American life.

Many, many American fiction writers have been dealing with this landscape since, from John Updike to Raymond Carver to Grace Paley. Salinger introduced an element of religious or quasi-religious purity in his work, which was later developed by Walker Percy, among others, but as I get older I see Salinger more as a peculiar variation on the other three, glorifying a narcissistic but extremely personal and effective view of family as a non-historical response to Yates and Cheever’s monotonic views. It is a less robust response than Bellow’s, which has made it harder to imitate. That hasn’t stopped people from trying, though.

These are far from the only movements, but in terms of disproportionate impact, I think the figures above stand out. Many literary magazines today print stories that almost exclusively conform to the boundaries set out: ahistoric, neurotic, drawing from quotidian symbols. And I don’t believe there has been a group since that has had anywhere near as much impact. (For a while, I thought Don DeLillo was doing pretty well in reorienting the field towards a more reductionistic, impersonal psychology, but scions like Steve Erickson and Stephen Wright seem to have faded fast.)

In comparison, there are the roads not taken, those of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and even Nabokov, whose Pnin is a less claustrophobic statement on the social life of the academy. There is Flannery O’Connor, whose pacing and plotting were appropriated, but not her modern gothic sensibility. And there’s William Gaddis, whose The Recognitions I never finished, but who was clearly working towards a more epic, contextual tableau, even if he seemed to get mired in the details.

In sum, then, the 50’s still seem a flagship decade for one of the most dominant breeds of American fiction, as well as its height. There is little that Christopher Tilghman writes about that could not be gleaned (albeit indirectly) from Richard Yates, thirty years earlier. Lorrie Moore adds a touch of Bellow’s eloquent mythologizing to very similar material. Which is to say, there are clearly identifiable “American writers of the 50’s,” in a way that there aren’t of subsequent decades. It’s as though time has stood still.

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