BOOK REVIEWS
BOOK REVIEWS
Threefold Suppression
AUDIO
Raymond Federman. Shhh: The Story of a Childhood.
Starcherone Books, 2010.
Raymond Federman’s final novel, Shhh: The Story of a Childhood, operates by the agency of four persons: Federman-author, Federman-narrator, Federman-editor, and Raymond Federman. The first assembles the text, the second embodies it, the third challenges its identity as it progresses, and through it all the fourth, a silent but unmistakable personage who is Raymond Federman, stands at a distance, observes, wrings his hands, laughs, cries, and haunts the undertaking. Such splintering of the authorial person has long been a staple of postmodern fiction; but it may be that in no other Federman novel is the presence of Raymond Federman himself so prominently, if shrewdly, implanted.
A synopsis is easily furnished, as the novel provides its own on page 217, in the form of a letter to an Italian graduate student.
Here we see clearly the first three persons: Federman-author has composed the explanatory note; Federman-narrator is cited directly; and Federman-editor provides the “voices [that] constantly interrupt the narrative,” against whose objections and sarcasm Federman-author must continually defend himself, so that Federman-narrator may continue telling the stories that the novel comprises.
But what of the fourth Federman, a human being: how has he found his way into a work of fiction? This question involves the dilemma of history. After all, if surfiction is, as Raymond Federman has elsewhere asserted, “the kind of fiction that constantly renews our faith in man’s imagination and not in man’s distorted vision of reality,” by what other means, then, might history escape the very same charge of distortion? In fact, history is nothing more than our shared fiction: our uneven, overwrought, sketchy, protean, and above all imagined collective story. History is a people’s novel in progress.
It is impossible to forget that Federman, who was born in 1928 and who “changed tense,” to use his own expression, in late 2009, represented the last generation of Holocaust survivors. As all eyewitnesses to the twentieth century’s most infamous crime cease to exist, the Holocaust faces a depressing new crisis: it becomes wholly the property of history. As such, it is no longer something known, even recalled. It becomes essentially legend.
Raymond Federman made a career of treading the line between, on one hand, eschewing “man’s distorted vision of reality” in favor of sophisticated narrative apparatus and, on the other, repeating, with all its historical weight, the anecdote of that day in July 1942 when he hid in a closet, while Vichy officers carried away his parents and sisters and sent them to Auschwitz. He has never sentimentalized, nor does he here. But aware that he would soon change tense, he seems to have infused Shhh, his last utterance, with an unprecedented urgency. If ever he was to convey the horror that as a youth he watched occur, he had better do it now. And so the writing involves more than ever a tension between Federman the devoted practitioner of surfiction and Federman the French Jew orphaned by Nazis.
Of course, none of this is overt. The fourth Federman never speaks (and how could he?). All urgency is carried off by sleight of hand. The novel plays on an ambivalence regarding the matter of truth itself. Certain passages are willing to assert historical accuracy outright.
Federman, do you think it’s necessary to go on and on with those sordid details of your miserable childhood?
I have to be specific in describing the conditions of our life in France before the war so that people will understand why I had to escape from there, and what I became today. A good Californian bourgeois who spends his time telling stories and playing golf. What I am describing is historical.
And later:
I’m not going to censor my childhood just to please the reader. What I am telling here is historical. That’s how we lived in those days. In the 1930’s. I say it as it was.
But we know to avoid taking this too much at its word. And presently the text shifts.
Well that’s the story of those few days of wandering during which my childhood vanished behind me. At least, that’s what I’m able to reconstruct from the holes in my memory. Perhaps next time I’ll remember another version.
And:
Federman when will you finally tell the real story of what happened to you after you came out of the closet. All that sounds so invented.
It is invented. Well, it’s reinvented. It had to be. Do you think that I lived all my life preserving the details of this adventure.
Eventually, Federman-author even grows openly defensive.
Don’t come and bug me with this question of responsibility and of duty to memory. Le devoir à la mémoire.
Me, totally amoral as I am, lost in my head, me who should have changed tense a long time ago, how can I be responsible towards what I write? What do I owe to memory?
Responsible writing is always false, because responsibility is a lie. One believes onself responsible, but in fact one is only pretending to be.
Those who exterminated my family believe themselves to be responsible for cleansing humanity of a vermin—Ungeziefer.
[...]
To remember is to play mental cinema that falsifies the original event. Souvenirs are fiction.
Allowance of these poles amounts not to a contradiction, but to a manner of approaching the paradox of all narrative. Even while denying the possibility of an accurate telling and lashing out against the hypocrisy of proclaimed duty to personal memory, Federman makes a point to acknowledge the existence of “the original event.” We would be mistaken to choose between “I say it as it was” and “the holes in my memory.” The closet story must be told—he told it repeatedly for decades—but on Federman’s particular terms. Let’s keep in mind that in the French language, story and history are identical (l’histoire).
Ultimately, Shhh is a drama of suppression. The first is the simplest and most direct: a mother’s final word to her son—“chut!” (shhh!)—as she hid him in a closet to save his life.
With that shhh my mother was saying to me: If you keep quiet. If you say nothing. If you remain silent. You will survive.
The second layer of suppression occurs through Federman-editor, who continually finds fault with the novel on numerous levels, “warning [Federman-author] to avoid agonizing realism and decadent lyricism, and especially not to exaggerate too much.”
But it is the third suppression, one that never speaks, one that the reader must hear behind the voices of Federman-narrator, Federman-editor, and Federman-author, one that we discern only by placing this novel against its historical backdrop, that, even from behind speech, most stridently cries out. History’s suppression resides in the narrative dilemma that defined Federman’s aesthetic, the incompatibility of the event and the telling. The novel’s loyalty to both elements—the exigency of a postmodern aesthetic and the necessity of speaking a horrible truth—is more than impressive; it is heroic.
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“…a plot is only later…”
AUDIO
Leslie Scalapino. Floats Horse-floats or Horse-flows.
Starcherone Books, 2010.
A book’s difficulty relates to the expectations one brings to it. The truism holds fairly well that an artwork will give most to those who let it teach them how to approach it. Leslie Scalapino’s Floats Horse-floats or Horse-flows, then, is difficult only to the degree that its reader insist it be a different book. There is, to my knowledge, no formula for reading Leslie Scalapino. One will need to be open and not least of all alert, and presently the text will disclose its particular logic. The result is unparaphrasable and stunning.
Floats Horse-floats or Horse-flows—“based,” as the text immediately declares, “on the notion of ‘alexia,’ word-blindness” (* see clinical definition below)—denies us action in a typical narrative sense, which is to say action described, offering instead a groundwork for action within the reading moment. This amounts, at once, to absolute removal and absolute engagement; the text informs the reader of nothing, while the reader, proceeding within the text, proceeds informed.
Their language is only to be the event itself (the same as) being, is then, before the physical motions outside.
So, Floats owes little to space, and if it owes nothing to time, that is because its action is never past and is even present only insofar as it is potential (“Becomes floats”).
Nevertheless, Scalapino stops at forgoing action entirely, and numerous situations emerge throughout the book’s relentless wordplay: a hartel (more commonly hartal in English), which is in India a period during which shops close for mourning or to represent passive mass resistance; a mining accident; antelope poaching in the Himalayas, which Scalapino even ties to a 2006 film called Mountain Patrol; an experience of throat cancer and its treatment; and the Darfur crisis. These circumstances emerge in a syrrhesis that carefully circumvents customary narrative.
Among numerous amorphous and intertwined figures cited in the text, a woman, sometimes named Chrysanthemum, lodges even in the midst of Floats her complaint against Scalapino’s method, which that method summarily answers.
Woman asks are you ever affected by the impossibility? (Of what? asked.) Of the present (the present as: everything being in it at once), because then the linear couldn’t ever take place, she says. (If one is continually striving to be in the present—where? she thinks this, always attempted derailing, is merely intellection not occurrence.) But it doesn’t! (In the present, “the linear” a long stream doesn’t take place. Not in the past either—and to be future is not there then.)
It’s not only this insistence on a linear, narrative present that incites apologia. Elsewhere she addresses complaint from the opposite pole:
Ron had (friend who’s feudist) blistering the hides of others said abridgement or any plot means “transparency” as a negative wherein all interwoven seems real. The individual is consumed in capitalism by their actions being (and seen by them in) the outside’s delusion of a whole reality as the individual sees events fed to them in as [while] [being] the outside’s ordered certainty. The origin as authority. In a given, a plot is or transpires as this transparency, he says silkworm, in which wired only receiving we’re quiet. In mine, a plot is only later, is events to see, a vehicle unplanned any actions unknown [going on] before their being known 2. But he says plot is any action, in it is already description (even if unknown before it occurs?) and creates this delusion of our being contained: capitalism’s separating us from reality. Disrupt there being events at all anywhere.
Floats endeavors to escape the pitfall of plot, in its customary use, by reliance on suggestion alone, through wordplay and ingeniously recurrent fragments. The text does not refer but evokes, even provokes.
Even silently to herself the way it was spoken gave an event a shape. Her thinking any event with this intention, of the event as a shape, it was a motion.
Scalapino peppers the text with rare and obsolete English, likely to impose on the reader the alexic’s experience (“…unknown words create a future”). Proceeding from such a hypothesis, it may be tempting to leave those terms unfamiliar. But frequently an unusual word is immediately defined (e.g., “Ahead of time yet in extropia both eyes turn outward…”). Additionally, words often cluster on the basis of similar appearance and sound, while their lexical definitions may differ greatly.
Ahead of time in extropia both eyes turn outward all the children there are outward both those Lost and those abandoned. To others always, they are. Even were it to apply to the senator, it wouldn’t; because he has a sense of neutrality the effect of the funnel, a state either exiguous or surplus—is equality. No exhuming thoughts-memory, exigency is seen “to exhort” merely as if from outside in others having both eyes turned outward seeing nothing is either in their center or ahead.
Without fully leaving behind the sense of extropia, of the turned-outward, the text detours through four additional words made with the ex- prefix. The five ex- words have little in common, but placed together they achieve an irresistible mutual gravitation, and the reader’s consciousness moves in a kind of semantic blend, wherein it is suddenly fitting that those disparate meanings relate.
In other instances, Scalapino plays deliberately with admixtures of authentic and false cognates, such as in the following passage:
Silver Wattle of a tree simulative wounds silvertip the bear—the deb then—his running ochre evening ocellated which the habitual red eating couldn’t see much less comprehend ocean pout swimming near by oblivious even to bare eye. So she does have difference!? The people the family existing in ochlesis dip in the ocean. The family having produced this one ocker infantile at forty-some male unknown to us, the mother of whom producing in a darkened room incubates herself as ochlophobia, there is ochlocracy that if “only the family” is nevertheless mob rule, outside too.
The Greek okhlos is “mob,” and so ochlesis, ochlophobia, and ochlocracy—disease caused by overcrowding, fear of mobs, and mob rule—are cognates. Ochre is a yellowish mineral and its corresponding pigment; ocellated is spotted as though with numerous eyes. And ocker, it turns out, is Australian slang for any uncouth, boorish person. Ocean, appearing twice, enriches the conglomeration of oc- words. None of this veers far from Floats’s thrust, which is alexia, a disorder realized through the eye (Latin, oculus).
These notes pertain only to certain aspects of a complex book’s mechanism. It would be impossible to write an orthodox review of Floats Horse-floats or Horse-flows, since this would call for description of the book’s effect, and Floats yields no such option. Not only is one never finished with a Scalapino text, but in a sense one never begins: that is if to begin means to claim a fixed point from which to navigate. Throughout a decades-long career, Leslie Scalapino strove to occlude fixity—narrative fixity, conceptual fixity, even semantic fixity. An appropriate review leaves all possible room for the fluidity she admirably achieved.
* alexia: An inability to comprehend the meaning of written or printed words and sentences, caused by a cerebral lesion. Also called optic alexia, sensory alexia, visual alexia, to differentiate from motor alexia (anarthria), in which there is loss of the power to read aloud even though the significance of what is written or printed is understood. Stedman’s Medical Dictionary
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Satiric Proximity in Gilbert Sorrentino
AUDIO
Gilbert Sorrentino. The Abyss of Human Illusion.
Coffee House Press, 2010.
The quality of satire’s effect involves its proximity to its target. In most instances, we encounter any of three levels of satire: the righteous, the vengeful, and the cautionary. The first level, representing the greatest distance between author and target, demonstrates satire in its lowest form. The posture of the righteous satirist is simple, that of the superior person indulging in censure or ridicule of the inferior. The vengeful satirist works from a somewhat closer position to the object of ridicule. In this case, an author has presumably suffered humiliation—has taken the position of the inferior—and uses the satirical form to turn the tables, pointing out the faults and foibles of those who have injured the satirist. The third classification yields the most responsible and substantive effect. Cautionary satire reflects the fears of the author, which bear out awareness that no one is immune to those attributes under scrutiny. In this way, the cautionary satirist stands closest to the satiric object; whereas the righteous targets them, and the vengeful targets you, the cautionary targets us.
For now it was clear to him that the couple he had thought of with such dismissive contempt for so many years, had thought of him in the same way.
Gilbert Sorrentino, among the finest, if too little known, writers of the second half of the twentieth century, exemplified this cautionary brand of satire. Despite a reputation among skimmers for ruthless pessimism and misanthropy, Sorrentino’s attacks were never borne out of malice—were neither righteous nor vengeful. The works effectively show us what not to be, what not to succumb to, through their excellence in craft and their scathing treatment of those who proceed from the assumption that it all really is just as easy as it looks (often, his targets were dilettantes and poseurs within the arts, particularly in literature). In Mulligan Stew (1979), Sorrentino sustained so thorough an attack on the novel’s third-rate literary protagonist that this work alone would have been sufficient to secure his distinction as curmudgeon and snob. Still, even in that ostensibly brutal novel, a sense of but for the grace of God—or, maybe more precisely, but for the grace of one’s own vigilance—obtains and even grows from start to finish.
It is an ethical matter. With respect to the meanness one finds in a Sorrentino novel, the work displays perfectly that too often ignored distinction between man and maker. One finds no cause to call Gilbert Sorrentino a vicious person. But in matters of craft, whether with respect to his own or another’s work, Sorrentino graded on a straight scale, and the objective, always, was excellence. In an interview with John O’Brien, available through the Dalkey Archive Press web site, he states:
In The Abyss of Human Illusion, Sorrentino makes a point to frame the same problem strictly within the boundaries of making art.
More stories than we care to acknowledge are poignant yet wholly banal, and perhaps those that we insist on as poignant are not that at all, but are, rather, bathetic, sentimental, saccharine, or even more dreadful, creakingly “worldly.”
Reading this work—a series of fifty vignettes, linked by tone rather than narrative continuity, and followed by several pages of inconsistently reliable notes by the author—it is easy to be reminded of a classic of cautionary satire, James Joyce’s Dubliners, whose portraits are unforgiving without being simply cruel. There we see individuals damned to varieties of paralysis that Joyce himself understood he would have to identify in order to avoid. But these two books came to life at opposite ends of their authors’ careers. Joyce composed the fifteen Dubliners stories in his early twenties, whereas Sorrentino wrote Abyss in his mid-seventies, and, as we learn in Christopher Sorrentino’s introduction, “referred to [it] matter-of-factly as ‘my last book,’ finishing it a few weeks before his death in May 2006.”
A good argument can be and has been made for the opinion that everyone killed in war is killed in vain, but it’s the dying man’s job to point out that we survive in vain.
So how does an author’s proximity to death affect the matter of satiric proximity? With Abyss, Sorrentino is for the first and last time writing only for us, no longer for himself as well. Aware of making his last book, he has no choice but to cast himself in a retrospective stance, as though already postmortem. The result is not essentially different, but this time more pressing, more absolute. Viewed from the extremity, all options appear mercilessly definite.
But since life is, essentially, a series of mistakes, bad choices, various stupidities, accidents, and unbelievable coincidences, everything played itself out just as it should have….There is no way to bargain with life, for life’s meaning is, simply, itself.
Still, the message remains the same as ever: get it right. A lackluster effort is as bad as (or worse than) no effort at all. Most of Abyss’s targets are leading lives and producing work, though invariably doing so lazily, without courage and with unimpressive result. Sorrentino finds an apt image to frame his disapproval. Again, from the O’Brien interview:
We do find a fair amount of throwing up in The Abyss of Human Illusion. In one segment, it is an unpleasant old man’s last act before death:
On the landing between the ground and second floor, the old man stopped, stood straight for a moment, then bent over and vomited black, grainy blood, once and then again.
Elsewhere, throwing up is linked with a less literal manner of death, with mediocrity and failure. Unimpressed by a friend’s selected poems, one figure begins to react physically.
He turns a page and feels a touch, a nudge, a slight caress of nausea, and then, quickly, it overwhelms him, his stomach tumbles and writhes and cold sweat pops out of his brow and scalp. He puts the book on the desk, the pages flat on its surface. His shirt, he realizes, is soaked and he gags, then rises to rush to the bathroom when he realizes that the nausea has passed.
This reaction relates not only to the friend’s failure; the protagonist is himself just as much under eye.
And yet the poems sickened him. He is on the edge of feeling shame: doesn’t he like poetry? Did he ever like it? Is everything he’s ever said or thought about it a lie, accompanied by a pose and a fake biography, pushed this way a little, turned that way a little more, overall, a shabby clutch of faded aesthetics. Maybe. Perhaps. It’s too late to care.
Like Dubliners, the vignettes treat life in its diverse stages—in fact, like Joyce’s collection, which traces the human journey in fairly strict chronological fashion (its satirical edge growing sharper as it goes), Abyss’s first few segments involve children. But it may be in treating of the very old, which the youthful Joyce could view only from an imaginative distance, that Sorrentino gives his final work both its most resonant and its most merciless tones.
He had recently received a letter from a dear friend, who, it so turned out, died soon after. He took the letter from his files one morning, before he started what he now thought of as “work,” scare quotes flaring, and found in it what he was sure he had read. The friend had confessed to him that his last book was, indeed, his last book, that he had given up or lost—it made little difference—the ability and the desire to write another word. His friend lamented the fix that he was in, but his frustration seemed forced, it seemed a position taken because of proprieties, the old truisms about art: a writer who cannot write, how sad, how tragic. It was a role his friend was playing. So it seemed, so it was.
He sat at his desk, and read the letter again. He wished, oh how he wished it wasn’t so, but he was choked with envy of his friend’s sterility: not to be able to write, not to want to write, to be, as they say, “written out,” or, more wonderfully, “burnt out”—lovely phrase! But it was a gift that had not been given him, and, he knew, despairing, that it would never be given him. He was doomed to blunder through the shadows of this pervasive twilight, until finally, perhaps, he would get said what could never be said.
Of course, Joyce’s attacks were never so frank. Sorrentino measures eloquence and vitriol with the facility of an American Catullus. Of his contemporaries, only Thomas Bernhard could make disapproval so effectively funny. In The Abyss of Human Illusion, Gilbert Sorrentino—cautionary satirist and poet of disapproval—manages one final time to paint affirmation in negative space.
