Lonesome No More: Writing and the incoherencies of genre.

[First published August 5, 2021.]

In Kurt Vonnegut’s science-fiction novel Slapstick, the protagonist, a would-be messiah elected President of the United States, institutes as his main and only policy the creation of new family ties between Americans by assigning clusters of them new middle names:

“As I said in my speech,” I told him, “your new middle name would consist of a noun, the name of a flower or fruit or nut or vegetable or legume, or a bird or a reptile or a fish, or a mollusk, or a gem or a mineral or a chemical element—connected by a hyphen to a number between one and twenty.” I asked him what his name was at the present time.
  “Elmer Glenville Grasso,” he said.
  “Well,” I said, “you might become Elmer Uranium-3 Grasso, say. Everybody with Uranium as a part of their middle name would be your cousin.”
  “That brings me back to my first question,” he said, “What if I get some artificial relative I absolutely can't stand?”
“What is so novel about a person's having a relative he can't stand?” I asked him. “Wouldn't you say that sort of thing has been going on now for perhaps a million years, Mr. Grasso?”

This is a brilliant piece of idiocy, or maybe the other way around, that strikes at the heart of the American thing as it’s manifested in our literature and culture. As D.H. Lawrence notoriously remarked in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” Vonnegut’s fiction attacked each of those things: the hardness, the isolation, the stoicism, and the violence. No wonder I was drawn to him when I was younger, like so many other disaffected teenagers. He had put his finger on what seemed like a personal failing and turned it into a universal affliction, glorified by the word “American.”

I’m probably not lonelier than most, definitely not lonelier than some. I have a wife and family and friends; I have an enviable job as a professor; I get to talk about books all day, and write them, too. But since I was very small I’ve had an alien feeling or a feel for the alien, a feeling onto figures from movies and comic books: E.T., Superman, R2D2, and the list goes on. Sometimes I identify as the alien, robot, or replicant. Sometimes I’m the only human being in an alien world. It’s probably the human condition, if not specifically the American one. But I’ve always taken it personally.

I found a recent profile of the novelist Alexandra Kleeman in The New York Times all too resonant:

When she began writing, she started with poetry, since it didn’t require her to create fully formed characters. “Writing realist fiction seemed like such a high bar for me,” she said. “It involved understanding people so well that I could never hope to get there.”

So she takes comfort in genre: sci-fi, the post-apocalyptic, detective stories. Kleeman met her husband, the novelist Alex Gilvarry, at a Don DeLillo reading in 2013, and the two still swap Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith books at their home in Staten Island.

I don’t know why it took me so long to connect the dots that are made here to practically overlap: I became a poet for the same reason I was (I am!) a genre fiction fan, because I too could never hope to get there. To realism, that is—the holy grail of the diminished enterprise we call literature.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Kleeman and Gilvarry meet at the points of a triangle: two of the great genre writers, Chandler and Highsmith, plus Don DeLillo, a metonym for the highest ambitions of twentieth-century postmodernism, who in the latter stages of his career seems to be turning into—wait for it—a science-fiction writer.

The problem of other minds, and others’ experiences, and otherness. Poems can thematize this with the slipperiness of their syntax; I read John Ashbery and am oddly comforted by the evidence of his own slapstick sense of isolation, as expressed by his tendency to follow the syntax of narrative even as each line undoes the premises of the line preceding it. Science fiction, of course, takes otherness as its subject: beginning with Frankenstein it confronts the violence that comes of projecting disavowed parts of oneself onto others. But realist fiction is something else again: it depends upon a discourse of mastery, of an understanding not just of “the human heart” but of the forces channeling its course that go by the names of class, gender, and race.

By "realist fiction” I mean a kind of social novel that reached its apogee in the 19th century and which never went entirely away, in spite of the challenges of modernism (which privileged subjectivity and the movements of consciousness) and postmodernism (which undoes the legibility prized by George Eliot, et al through its paranoid proliferation of overdetermined plotlines).

The latest “non-genre” challenge to realist fiction goes by the name of autofiction, though I think Brandon Taylor is more precise when he calls it “the contemporary novel of consciousness” and brilliantly compares the autofictional aesthetic of Rachel Cusk, et al, to “the Brutalism of the 1960s with its striking visual austerity and insistence upon materiality and shunning of anything that might impede the honest expression of that materiality.” The writers of this kind of novel have confessed impatience bordering on nausea with the devices of storytelling—a nausea that in Cusk’s case stemmed from the sense that nonfiction, too, was a dead-end. From a 2014 interview in The Guardian:

"Without wishing to sound melodramatic, it was creative death after Aftermath. That was the end. I was heading into total silence – an interesting place to find yourself when you are quite developed as an artist."

For almost three years, she could not write, she could not read. Novels seemed especially pointless. More and more – like Karl Ove Knausgård, whom she cites – she felt fiction was "fake and embarrassing. Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous. Yet my mode of autobiography had come to an end. I could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry." Using herself as the "template" was judged by some readers as a "wilful exposure of self, a washing of dirty laundry in public".

“Once you have suffered sufficiently”—I’m not entirely sure what she means here. The suffering of being pilloried for writing too frankly about one’s divorce? Ordinary human suffering? Or the peculiar suffering of the almost autistic personality revealed by Cusk’s self-description in her Paris Review interview, which I found by turns exquisitely painful and revelatory to read?

I have come through a similar crucible, possibly generational in nature, hinged on my sense of the deep unknowability of the things that a writer, a fiction writer especially, are supposed to know. This has required me to thematize my ignorance via various literary devices. In many of my poems I follow the Ashberyan (and I think Emersonian) path of dissolving my statements line-by-line, holding them in suspension, a pathetic solution in every sense. In my first novel the unknowable figure of my own mother is transmuted so many times that she dissolves in the transcendent pattern of the quest, like the figure in the carpet.

In my most recently published book, I stage a confrontation between two writers who represent on the one hand the deadly solipsism that became the spirit of National Socialism, and on the other the question of how people can live together without falling into mindless tribalism and scapegoating. That sounds intellectual and abstract, but if nothing else I hope the present essay hints at how deeply personal Hannah and the Master is.

My forthcoming book How Long Is Now is my most autofictional novel yet, returning obsessively to the unknowable ground of my parents before they were my parents. Beautiful Soul focused on my mother; my father takes center stage in the new book, but everything that happen takes place under the asterisk, the fig leaf of fiction, which will hopefully direct the reader’s mind along the path that maps my ignorance rather than taking the narrative for “a true story.”

And yet like Brandon Taylor I am nostalgic for the coherence of realist fiction, as beautifully expressed in this paragraph:

I start to long for scenes and description and a body and temporal relations to things. I start to long for the authorial presence to make some sense of the morass of narrative. I start to crave the old familiar structures of meaning-making. I start to wish I could pick up a book and not feel like I’m eating at one of those deconstructed restaurants where they charge you fifty dollars for some leaves on a plate with some paste.

For me following this path requires genre. I’ve been writing science fiction novels lately, though none of them have yet gotten into print, and they thematize on the level of plot my concerns with otherness, social knowability, and loneliness. Novel #1 imagines the moral and structural failings of a utopian community created by latter-day Transcendentalists; novel #2 recasts Emily Dickinson as an AI hologram upon whom the fate of civilization depends; novel #3, just completed, follows a cybernetic werewolf teen on a quest to discover her origins in postapocalyptic California. Writing these novels gifted me (and my eventual readers) with the pleasures of realism Taylor describes, yet they had to be speculative to circumvent the twinned dead-ends of autobiography and social incoherence.

I have more thoughts on coherence and its social and literary significance, as refracted through a summer in which I read a great deal of James Baldwin, whose Socratic methods of essay and fiction-writing struck me as deeply salubrious in a time of shallow affirmations and denunciations. But this post is already pretty long!

I am not sure yet what this blog, or newsletter, or whatever it is, will become. Maybe a return to blogging as in the high old days of the Aughts. Maybe a space for breathless confessions and shamefaced retractions. Maybe this will be the last entry. Who knows?

Now it’s time to melt some cheese and do some editing, and then maybe to write some more.

Dissonance and Dissidence

The news is full of disaster, nearly all of it self-inflicted. Beirut has been leveled by criminal negligence and the United States lies prostrate under Covid for pretty much the exact same reason. Our atmosphere has been supercharged with carbon that will deal greater and yet greater calamities to us until the very structure of our civilization begins to fray. Yet where I sit in our sunroom the morning is cool and beautiful and quiet. It’s too much for one body to hold.

It’s the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. In a New York Times article, Anne I. Harrington writes about Claude Eatherly, the only member of the Air Force team that executed the attack to have publicly expressed remorse. Harrington invokes the anti-nuclear activist (and Hannah Arendt’s first husband) Günther Anders’ concept of “the Promethean gap” between what our civilization is capable of and the inability of any one person to bear responsibility for it. The concept rhymes with Arendt’s “banality of evil,” which she claimed arose from the refusal of Eichmann and other Holocaust perpetrators to stop and think about what they were doing. I return, as I have so often, to Shelley:

“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. ”
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry" (1821, 1840)

Here we have another husband-and-wife team: as Arendt proved to be a more popular and controversial figure than her ex-husband, Percy Shelley has been overmatched in the popular imagination by his wife Mary, whose novel Frankenstein;, or, The Modern Prometheus remains the most vivid structure of feeling for capitalist modernity’s subjugation of the individual to a vast and unaccountable “empire of man,” paradoxically in the name of individual assertion and the right to property. The Creature of Victor Frankenstein—far more eloquent in the novel than the grunting behemoth of the Universal monster movies—achieves “the poetry of life” by recognizing his enslavement and the refusal of others, even and especially his own creator, to recognize his humanity.

We seem to be incapable of rising above ourselves, of grasping the poetry of life, except in the face of a terrifying Other, who appears to us as Frankenstein’s Creature, a figure of esoteric or jigsawed features of humanity that, like the thoughts of the “genius” that in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”, “come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” This echoes the Creature’s description of his infant powers of expression before he learns to speak: “Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again.” It seems in this historical moment that we too lack the language to express our sensations, and that far too many of us, in the face of horrors, have allowed ourselves to be frightened into silence.

On this blue sunshine morning with its soft airs, I struggle to retain the ability to feel in the face of all that numbs us—our collective creation that functions through a sinisterly disavowed collectivity. The cult of American individualism, with which I am infected, just as I am infected by racism and by all the other evils that come of thinking oneself exceptional, does not oppose or resist collective action—it is collective action of a malignant kind that yields up the most significant decisions to a faceless or imaginary authority. That authority oppresses the individual (who may resent that oppression or fall into conspiracy theories) because he refuses to see himself represented by it. Frankenstein and his Monster are mirror images of each other, one flesh, like father and son or Cain and Abel. But the father in this case refuses to take even Abrahamic responsibility for sacrificing his Isaac; the left hand does not know what the knife hand is doing. The blood of our brother cries out to us from the ground. It is our own blood.

Robert Duncan said that “Responsibility is to retain the ability to respond.” He said this in part to justify his refusal to respond as an activist to the horrors of the Vietnam War, accusing his interlocutor Denise Levertov of following into the same war-logic as the war’s proponents in her opposition to it. Duncan was short-sighted and cruel, though sincere enough in his attempt to live out Blake’s dictum, “Opposition is true friendship.” But in essence he was rehashing the claim of another visionary poet living a political struggle, W.B. Yeats, who said, in a sentence from his essay “Anima Hominis” that I sooner or later share with all my students, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” For Yeats, the poet is in pursuit of something he calls “The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, [that] comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality.” That passion follows not the path of certainty assumed by rhetoricians but that of negative capability as described by John Keats in a famous letter: ““capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The refusal to calculate, of irritable reaching, enables the poet to make sympathetic contact with the anti-self, in a parenthesis from conventional morality. The “poetical character,” as Keats put it in another of his letters, has no character in the conventional sense: “It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen…. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - and filling some other Body.”

The libertarian American refuses the task of “filling some other Body,” won’t act to protect others or even himself by wearing a mask to deflect contagion, won’t imagine that he has any responsibilities to those others who lack “identity” with him. In our history, most of the positive, organized, collective actions to fight monsters have required a monster upon which we’ve projected our imperial impulses: the South in the Civil War, the Axis Powers in World War II. It takes a powerful “they” to coalesce Americans into an “us,” which is why “the invisible enemy” has failed to overcome the partisanship that is the immediate cause of our plight. The “near enemy”—feminists, BIPOC, Democrats, etc.—has taken precedence over the “far enemy,” even though it’s the far enemy that infects our lungs, that has shattered our economy and shuttered our schools. How much more incapable are we of mobilizing against climate change, a monster of our own creation that we compulsively disavow?

In 1849 an American poet spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax that he could have easily afforded, because he refused to pay or be part of a “government which is the slave’s government also.” Thoreau is misremembered as a privileged Harvard boy whose writings have proved enabling to a million libertarian narcissists (I’m not going to link to it, but a libertarian think tank recently published an article comparing Elon Musk’s refusal to shut down the Tesla production line in the face of Covid restrictions to Thoreau’s “Civii Disobedience”—the real title of which, btw, is “Resistance to Civil Government”). But I think of his willingness to go to jail as a poetic act in Keats’ sense, a willingness, if only for one night, to “fill in for some other Body”—the body of the slave, or the body of a soldier poised to lose his life in an imperialist war. He did not propose to speak for these others, but he placed himself affectively in their position. It is as if Victor Frankenstein had chosen to experience the exile to which he had condemned his Creature, if only for a time. It was an exercise of the poetic faculty—of the quarrel with oneself—that not incidentally resulted, after the fact, in one of the finest pieces of political rhetoric that this country has ever produced, and the model for something finer and more consequential, Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

Walt Kelly, Pogo, Earth Day 1971

Walt Kelly, Pogo, Earth Day 1971

“What are poets for in a destitute time?”—so asked the problematic yet inescapable Martin Heidegger, one of the subjects of my forthcoming (I swear!) book Hannah and the Master. The other subject, and the book’s heroine, is Hannah Arendt and her struggle to think and feel a place for the displaced person she was as a German Jew fundamentally from birth. Arendt’s work is flawed—she bore an acute blindness to American racism—but she too did the poetico-political work of imagining American individuality not as some kind of invulnerable and exceptional fortress but as a human condition that had to be struggled for. “Apparently,” she wrote tartly in the 1943 essay “We Refugees,” “nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.” We are all this new kind of human beings—there is nothing really new here. What is potentially new, in Arendt’s sense of natality, is our response.

For now, while I write this, I stand in, uncomfortably and fully in, this body that is in a comfortable apartment in a seemingly untraumatized part of the world—and I apprehend in the body of constricted breath, the panicked body, the fight-or-flight body of the people of Beirut, of people hooked up to ventilators, of parents who have been separated from children who have been interned in undisclosed locations. Not for a moment do I confuse my privileged condition with theirs. But I have a duty to imagine the lives of others as that which supports and cohabitates with my own.

Out of cognitive dissonance, dissidence—my hope for change, for this time.