Poetry in Prose

There’s no getting around the fact that Ben Lerner, author of the novel Leaving the Atocha Station, is primarily a poet, having published three collections before this foray into fiction. It’s not, in itself, a criticism. Beautifully written and keenly observed, the novel is more than passable as a sustained piece of fiction, coherent and effective at characterization, and with a number of compelling scenes.  But in his narrator’s concern with issues of translation, his asides on the function of poetry and the aesthetics of verse quoted in prose, and his pointed choice of words and phrases like “insufflation,” “hemic,” “the law of excluded middle,” to carry his meaning, Lerner imports the economy of language and density of thought more commonly associated with poetry.

Leaving the Atocha Station documents the stay in Madrid of Adam Gordon, a young poet on a fellowship in early 2004, tracing his development as a poet over that period. Gordon’s project, as described to the fellowship committee, is to produce a long, research-driven poem on the lingering effects of the Spanish Civil War on present-day Spaniards. The actual project Gordon has undertaken is more nebulous—a mystery even to himself—and not explicitly concerned with poetry. He avoids the other fellows and foundation staff and spends most days alone, reading Tolstoy and visiting a local art museum. Eventually he makes friends with locals, and is drawn into Madrid’s arts culture.

The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment . . . then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited for the coffee. When the coffee was ready I would open the skylight . . . and drink my espresso and smoke on the roof overlooking the plaza where tourists congregated with their guidebooks on the metal tables and the accordion player plied his trade. In the distance: the palace and long lines of cloud.

This early passage encapsulates Gordon’s approach to his time in Spain as well as Lerner’s direct, borderline laconic, prose style. Gordon is forever modulating his state via spliffs, tranquilizers, alcohol, and “white pills” (probably antidepressants) that he self-administers in varying doses according to whim. Lerner documents moments like these in a straightforward, clipped style, alternating them with the rambling yet incisive intellectual meditations of Gordon’s internal monologue.

Lerner’s evocation of place is one of the novel’s great strengths. His use of Madrid as a backdrop is nearly as inspired as his choice to place Gordon there in 2004. Asked by his girlfriend, Isabel, why he is studying Spain and Franco now, instead of America under George W. Bush, Gordon can only make pretentious replies even he finds unsatisfying: “‘The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media,’ I said, meaninglessly.”  When Isabel further challenges him, he greets her anger, “with silence, so as to allow her to imagine an array of responses I was in fact incapable of producing,” in his rudimentary Spanish. His clumsiness with the Spanish language parallels the inherent difficulty of his relations with other people—Isabel doesn’t remain his girlfriend for long—which in turn evokes the myriad difficulties Gordon has with poetry.  Even when he stumbles into a historic moment for Spain, it serves to rouse him only briefly: as all of Madrid masses for street demonstrations, Gordon pursues Teresa, a translator whose polite disinterest in Gordon as anything more than a fellow poet and friend is maddeningly clear.

Gordon is daft, arrogant, and petulant, while also being thrillingly sharp in his internal monologue. Lerner integrates a number of engrossing mini-treatises into the text in the guise of Gordon’s stream of consciousness. Reading the work of John Ashbery on a long train ride, Gordon notes that although Ashbery’s poetry uses “language that implied narrative development—‘then,’ ‘next,’ ‘later’—such  terms were merely propulsive.”  It’s a credit to Lerner’s facility sustaining the world of Gordon’s heightened, drug-addled intellect that such an observation feels not only unforced but fresh and engaging.

That observation also suggests a way of reading Leaving the Atocha Station. Time passes, and occasionally one of Gordon’s actions leads to something, but mostly the framework suggesting narrative development is, indeed, “merely propulsive.”  The novel is full of fascinating ideas, often displaying beautifully repeating patterns and surprising connections, but it falls short when it comes to plot. Lerner derives some narrative excitement from the historic moment mentioned above, and a bit more from Gordon’s pursuit of Teresa, and a tiny bit from his dilemma over whether to remain in Spain at the end of his fellowship. But by and large the novel’s events, such as they are, feel desultory, a string of occasions about which Gordon can pontificate. Combined with Lerner’s somewhat cool tone, the result is often a sluggish read.

But it seems fair to conclude that crafting a white-knuckle thrill ride was not Ben Lerner’s intent in taking on the novel.  As much as the novel is about anything, it is about Gordon fighting his way to an uneasy peace with poetry.  Where he begins the novel somewhat cynically, assembling meaningless poems by taking random phrases and then translating and mistranslating them, by novel’s end Gordon has reached a place of greater comfort in his relationship to poetry.  He arrives there by way of an almost-mystical process of gaining experience and confidence. It’s the same slow artistic growth encountered by any artist, and here it is rendered carefully, in invisible increments, by Lerner.  Poets, poetry readers, and especially fans of Lerner’s work will likely be excited, and rightfully so, to explore the author’s fascinating meditations in this new and fertile form.

Adam Reger is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program in fiction. He is the author of U.S. Navy Pirate Combat Skills.

Tweet

Brick Lane by Monica Ali
(Scribner, 2003)
Eileen Y. Lee

“If God wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men.”

Monica Ali’s most recently published novel, Untold Story, is the “what-if” tale of Princess Diana—what if the glamorous icon had not died in a Parisian car crash and instead had moved secretly to Midwest America with a new identity and taken up the simpler life?  The book was released in the UK during the run-up to this past year’s royal wedding media extravaganza.  Ali, however, started her writing career in different waters with the socially aware Brick Lane, the story of a married Bangladeshi woman living in London public housing.  This first novel thrust the Dhaka-born, Oxford-educated author into the literary stratosphere, earning her a nod as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, while Brick Lane was short-listed for the Man Booker prize.

The beating heart of Brick Lane is Nazneen, a village girl who is sent to London for an arranged marriage to a 40-year-old man.  Part immigrant story and part meditation on the fate of women from a particular religious and cultural background, the novel is ultimately focused on Nazneen’s transformation from passive Muslim housewife into an individual possessed of free will who says, “I will decide what to do.  I will say what happens to me. I will be the one.”  This transformation happens—but not before one begins to wonder whether her richly-detailed life will simply collect dust as the narrative moves from 1985 to the months following September 11^th.

During its quiet unfolding, Brick Lane flits between Nazneen’s childhood memories of her sorrowful mother and letters from Hasina, the sister she had to leave behind in Bangladesh.  The letters depict a life filled with hardship and small joys, all written in Hasina’s broken English and naïve voice.  Even shocking details about her own rape and then a story about a friend burned with acid as punishment is told in several letters rather matter-of-factly.

As a chronicle of Nazneen’s marriage, Brick Lane is delightfully comical and at other times, sadly painful.  Early on, Nazneen learns to put aside any “high notions” of herself when she overhears her husband, Chanu, on the telephone: “Perhaps when she gets older she’ll grow a beard on her chin, but now she is only eighteen.  And a blind uncle is better than no uncle.  I waited too long to get a wife.”  Pretentious Chanu is continually the source of a good chuckle whenever he rails against the “ignorant types” of British society or forces his wife to listen to his pedantic speeches on philosophy or his “first love,” English literature.  “Have you heard of Richard II?” he says, “It’s not easy to translate.  Give me one minute.  This is a wonderful passage.”

Chanu is as equally proud of his university degrees as he is of his numerous framed certificates from night classes and correspondence courses on such varied topics as cycling and IT communications.  Driven to improve himself, yet ineffectual in his career, Chanu speaks constantly of a promotion that the reader—and Nazneen, as she grows more insightful—knows he will never get.  While a gentle soul, he can sometimes be heartless towards Nazneen, such as when he condescendingly mocks her suggestion to go to Dhaka to locate Hasina, who leaves her love marriage and must fend for herself in Bangladesh’s capital city.  He says:

“Shall I pack a suitcase?  Perhaps you have prepared one.  I shall go to Dhaka and pluck her instantly from the streets and bring her back to live with us.  On the way, I could pick up the rest of your family and we could make a little Gouripur right here.  Is that what you have in mind?”

It is only because of Ali’s sensitive regard for her characters that Chanu does not become a caricature of a husband.  Chanu eventually garners his own sympathy as his full portrait is painted, showing that he is a decent husband, loving father to their two daughters, and a man of quashed ambitions in a society that lumps him together with every other dark-skinned immigrant.

At its most incisive, Brick Lane is a sustained study of both its major and minor characters.  Even when the novel’s plot languishes midway through, the supporting cast in Nazneen’s life continues to shine.   Her best friend, Razia, is feisty (“Do you know why I’m going to learn English?  So that when my children start telling dirty jokes behind my back, I’ll be able to whip their backsides.”), but chooses to turn a blind eye to her son’s worsening drug addiction until nearly all the furniture in their home is sold.  She lives a life that matches her independent spirit only after her controlling husband is killed in a factory accident by the crush of “seventeen frozen cows.”  If there is a villain in Brick Lane it is Mrs. Islam, the elderly, sweet-tongued usurer lady, who will bring along her thug sons to enforce payments in the neighborhood.  Her changing relationship with Nazneen is woven throughout the story.

The most pivotal character is the decisive community organizer, Karim, who also delivers clothes for Nazneen’s sewing jobs and is therefore able to cross the threshold into her domestic world.  His appearance as her younger lover comes as a surprise, as is Nazneen’s decision to start attending radical Bengal Tigers meetings at his encouragement.  This is the first time the outside world penetrates her narrow life—as talk of the World Trade Center attacks comes to dominate the local meetings and her family’s mailbox becomes the target of a “leaflet war” that seeks to draw or erase the battle lines between “native” and “Islamic” elements.

Nazneen finds herself in turmoil over her relationship with Karim.  At these times, Ali’s graceful writing can unfortunately veer towards romance novel territory with such sentences as this: “Unbidden, a memory of Karim came, entering her as he entered her, tearing apart her passive soul.”

Karim sees Nazneen as a concept of maternity and security (“A Bengali wife.  A Bengali mother.  An idea of home”) and hopes they may marry, but time is running out as Chanu aspires to take his wife and daughters back to Bangladesh.  In the end, Nazneen’s choice is not between her husband and Karim, or London and Bangladesh, instead she must decide to be the director of her own destiny.  For those who have waited patiently for the dust on the pages to be swept away, the last chapters provide a frenetic energy and offer an ending filled with hope and new beginnings.

Eileen Y. Lee has a B.A. from Vassar College and a J.D. from Boston College Law School.  She studied abroad in London for one year and counts it as one of her favorite cities in the world.

Tweet

Powers of Attraction

Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive offers an illustrated history of Pierre and Marie Curie, whose partnership and research changed the world—for better and for worse. This 2011 National Book Award finalist cannot be called a picture book, though, or even a book with pictures. The former suggests something suitable for young children, and though its cover and spine glow in the dark, Radioactive wouldn’t work well as a bedtime story. Yet, “a book with pictures” isn’t quite right either, because the images are not subordinate to the text; to the contrary, they’re absolutely vital to the narrative’s success. The most pleasing term I’ve found to describe Radioactive—from sources ranging from The New York Times to NPR to Vogue—is a “visual” or “graphic” biography.

Redniss dedicates the first part of her book to the Curies’ lives prior to their discovery of radioactivity. We learn about Pierre and Marie’s upbringings, early romances, and eventual meeting in a Paris laboratory. Redniss quotes the Curies at length, selecting and arranging their words to allow these two long-deceased lovers to tell their story. The overlapping dialogue provides a vivid portrait of a relationship built not only upon love, but upon a shared passion for science:

MARIE: “He caught the habit of speaking to me of his dream of an existence consecrated entirely to scientific research, and asked me to share that life.”

PIERRE: “It would, nevertheless, be a fine thing . . . to pass our lives near each other, hypnotized by our dreams, your patriotic dream, our humanitarian dream, and our scientific dream.”

The second part of Radioactive occupies nearly four times as many pages as the first. It concerns the repercussions of the Curies’ research and the latter half of their relationship, which ends tragically with Pierre’s death. As one may expect, this marks a significant shift in the book. Suddenly, Marie is left to juggle multiple roles alone: mother, professor, Nobel Prize-winning scientist. Her later research and subsequent affair with another scientist—and interestingly, the work and relationships of her children—occupy significant space in the latter part of the narrative.

Throughout the book, Redniss’s own writing style takes a backseat to story. Her straightforward voice mingles with those of her subjects, a pleasant contrast to the lyrical quality of the quotes:

After four years of steady labor, four hundred tons of water, and forty tons of corrosive chemicals, on March 28, 1902, they managed to extract one tenth of a gram of radium chloride.

MARIE: “I shall never be able to express the joy of the untroubled quietness of this atmosphere of research and the excitement of actual progress.”

With the constant companionship that accompanied their research, the Curies’ love deepened. They cosigned their published findings. Their handwritings intermingle in their notebooks. On the cover of one black canvas laboratory log, the initials ‘M’ and ‘P’ are scripted one atop the other.

Aside from directly chronicling the Curies’ history, Redniss relates radioactivity to period developments such as the X-ray, spiritualism, and Art Nouveau. She also makes frequent leaps forward in time to visit the contemporary uses (and misuses) of radiation: a boy being treated for cancer, the bombing of Hiroshima, the accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the technology needed to protect and dispose of nuclear materials. The majority of these cutaways worked quite well, though some felt a little too abrupt and even tedious compared to the main plotline.

And amidst all of this, supporting and enhancing the narrative, is the art. Redniss’s drawings are unearthly, eye-catching, and faintly grotesque. This is “a tale of love and fallout,” after all, so the oversized eyes and curving limbs and strangely delicate hands suit Radioactive’s inherent strangeness. Redniss also used a process called “cyanotyping” to give some of the images a beautifully surreal, luminous appearance, like a negative image lit from beneath. Yet, I often stopped reading to wonder: “Who is that man, and why does he have three eyes, two noses, and two mouths? What is this mass of green and yellow meant to signify? . . . And why is that person suddenly naked?”

Color, text placement/shape, and the use of empty space also affect the reading experience in Radioactive. In the black and while illustrations at the beginning of the book, Pierre’s story occupies the left-hand pages, while Marie’s occupies the right. When they meet, this pattern starts to dissolve; their quotes are placed on the same pages, and they begin appearing in color illustrations together. This is a clever gesture to how Pierre and Marie’s lives ran parallel to one another before finally veering into a relationship.  And the chapter’s name? “Symmetry.”

While much of Radioactive is illustrated by Redniss’s own hand, she also includes copies of historical documents and photographs. More of the latter would have been a welcome addition to this book, as there are only three realistic renderings of Marie in the book, and none of Pierre. (While the book’s subtitle gives them equal billing, Radioactive offers more attention to Mme. Curie. Every chapter opens with a quote from her; two pages are dedicated to listing “luminaries, flora and fauna” of Poland, her homeland; she is the one illustrated on the cover. This imbalance isn’t too much of a problem, as Marie’s experiences are textured enough to fill these rich pages.)

Page by page, this book confronts traditional notions of what nonfiction “should be” and what the form can accomplish. By challenging the boundaries of its medium, Radioactive doesn’t just leave its reader looking forward to Redniss’s future material, but also the works that it might inspire other artists to create—a fitting outcome for a story about discovery and transformation.

Maria Sholtis is a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. Follow her on Twitter here.

Tweet

On the Rollercoaster

Open any of Bob Hicok’s collections, and I suspect you’ll be dazzled by poems plumbing the depths of the self as they skim the fascinating, frustrating surface of contemporary American life. Using a neo-surrealist net to capture heart, humor, and the sublime in one cast, Hicok’s best poems do not merely entertain—they teach my mind to function in patterns I can only call Hicok-esque for at least an hour or so after I’ve put them down. In an intimate, chatty tone, I find myself prone to narrating my thoughts to myself, often surprised by whip-smart connections between the observed world and my mind’s internal workings that I suspect Hicok’s poems have trained me to make. Pun, sarcasm, retort, leaps of logic that at times assume mystical proportions meet the absurdities of a morning’s passage through a subway station or a trip to the market. As the effect fades, I know I’ve experienced the full power of what Elizabeth Bishop termed the “mind in motion.” I know it’s what I expect out of poetry.

Winner of the 2008 Bobbitt Prize, This Clumsy Living (2007) stands out among Hicok’s books. Balancing craft at the level of both the individual poem and the book is a hard-won achievement for any poet, but it is particularly gratifying to see a poet of prodigious strength one-up himself. Where Hicok’s earlier books were less adept at organizing his bountiful energies into a coherent emotional arc, This Clumsy Living succeeds beautifully—perhaps, in part, by beginning with an admission of clumsiness.

A quick read down the Table of Contents shows the oscillation of Hicok’s energies: “The busy days of my nights” abuts “A poem with a poem in its belly” and “Waiting for my foot to ring” with “War story,” all in the mysteriously-titled first section “Twenty-three windows.” Real-world narrative flashes chronicle the speaker’s wrestling with political and social events in everyday life, a drive that springs from the Whitmanian well of “full report,” even as the speaker soothes himself by engineering temporary escape via surreal leaps in time and space that always manage to lead him back to the indelible fact of “this clumsy living.” “If we could solve that equation, we’d be happy,” Hicok poignantly suggests.

Yet, what are the chances of solving such an equation, Hicok’s book seems to ask. In “The New Math,” math is a rhetorical structure Hicok recognizes not only as “strange,” but imperfect. We cannot rest easy with a single solution any more than we can disown our drive to try to reduce our problems. Poetry’s algebra may be a fraught construct, the poem whispers to us, but its process just may deliver a bit of happiness along the tortuous path.

Hicok would probably be the last to say we shouldn’t have fun with either the world, our psychological attempts to diminish loss, or poetry. This Clumsy Living keeps an emotional balance by swinging between extremes of existential terror and a lively absurdist humor. “Her my body,” about the inability of poetic thought to soothe a speaker imagining cancer striking his beloved (“If you are comforted / by this thought you are welcome / to keep it”), is followed by the zany, zippy “The busy days of my nights,” where our speaker meditates on zombie films (“writers struggling with the inbred / mutant Appalachian cannibal dialogue”), and the aforementioned Elizabeth Bishop (“remembered the ladybug / walking across ‘At the Fishhouses’ open on my desk”).

The shifts in tone that occur from poem to poem are well-matched in a greater variety of forms than appear in previous books. Hicok experiments with the lengthy stanza shape typical of his earlier work, a narrative flow eschewing visual pacing (stanza breaks, etc.) in favor of compact density. While individually such an effect is excellent, in a book full of such poems I find myself experiencing the pleasant exhaustion that comes from preparing for the same rollercoaster ride over and over again. Not, per Jerry Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that—Hicok’s earlier work conveyed a sense and vision of his American moment, most notably in terms of the dissolution of the working class in his home state of Michigan and American foreign policy. (May we hope for Hicok’s response to the labor protests earlier this year?)

Hicok also avoids the over-writing afflicting his earlier books, whether as a result of an inability to kill his proverbial darlings or an understandable desire to perform for his usually-rapt audience. Most markedly, the word “which” appears much less frequently. (I say this as one also afflicted by the curse my seventh grade English teacher referred to as “whichery and thattery.”) Ultimately, how could I not be filled with admiration for a poet who manages to write a lovely lyric stanza about shit-eating dogs, thanking deer for their scat at the same time as he is able to turn a discussion of his mother’s morbid obesity into a loving paean to mothering in “Documenting a Decision”?

A fat body resembles a pregnant body, resembles hope, start. ( . . . ) This is more the way of the mother than the father. ( . . . ) This is my prayer: Lord, make me round.

Reading poetry is not only about the pleasure we take in the artifact of a finished poem—it is also about the journey of the poet. This Clumsy Living witnesses a gifted poet taking a leap. Hicok’s neo-surrealist impulse pushes his earnest lyric narrative mode just off-balance, keeping conversational tones from feeling either tired or disingenuous. The poems’ speaker is aware he navigates an imperfect world with imperfect tools, but also sees no other way to go about it—the very essence, perhaps, of Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” If reading This Clumsy Living feels at times like being on a rollercoaster—emotionally and visually, tonally and metaphorically—through Hicok’s mental countryside, we do well to remember he warned us, and then sit back and enjoy the ride.

Mandy Malloy is a writer and graphic designer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Hunter College’s MFA program and a 2011 Norman Mailer Colony Fellow, her poems have appeared most recently in The Portland Review.

Tweet

Personal Folklore

“Everything necessary to understand my grandfather,” says Natalia Stefanovi, the narrator of Téa Obreht’s debut novel The Tiger’s Wife, “lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife and the story of the deathless man” (32).

Though narrated by Natalia, the novel’s true protagonist is her grandfather, a respected physician who has just passed away in a remote village in the former Yugoslavia. Natalia, a newly graduated doctor, is on a humanitarian mission to vaccinate orphans in nearby Brejevina, just across the border. (Natalia takes pains, in light of the still-fresh wounds of the Balkan conflicts, to leave nations and ethnic identities undefined: “Twelve years ago, before the war, the people of Brejevina had been our people,” she writes. “The border had been a joke” (15).) Natalia’s present-day tale gives the novel its overarching frame, while her grandfather’s two interwoven stories provide The Tiger’s Wife with a rich, folkloric atmosphere.

In the story of the deathless man, Natalia recounts her grandfather’s tales of a series of encounters with Gavran Gailé, who claims to have been cursed with the inability to die. Gailé appears for the last time on the eve of a massive bombing campaign, a harbinger of the wave of destruction to come. The deathless man challenges everything the grandfather has based his medical career upon, hinting at the presence of a world beyond what can be observed scientifically.

The grandfather’s other story concerns a freed tiger that haunted his boyhood village over the course of a punishing winter, and the local butcher’s wife who fell in love with the creature. The woman, deaf and mute in addition to being a “Mohammedan” brought back to the village by the butcher, is mistrusted by the villagers as an outsider. Her connection to the tiger, which she draws to the smokehouse with offerings of meat, thrills and fascinates the boy, who is already obsessed with the exotic images of the tiger Shere Khan in The Jungle Book (a recurring touchstone throughout The Tiger’s Wife). He watches in dismay as the villagers hunt the tiger, a clear symbol of their fears of the world outside their village.

The two tales, braided around Natalia’s present-day story, come together brilliantly in the novel’s third act. Gavran Gailé refuses to remain a mere piece of folklore from the past, as Natalia has her own encounter with him. Obreht pans out from the story of the villagers’ panic over the tiger to describe an isolated place cursed by history. The episode with the tiger “became the unifying memory that carried them into the spring, through the arrival of the Germans with their trucks, and later their railroad, which the villagers were made to build; and finally the train, the rattle and cough of the tracks that pulled them awake at night (every time they thought don’t stop here, don’t stop) . . .” (337).

War pervades The Tiger’s Wife without quite appearing on the page, at least not for long. When Natalia recounts her teenage years, spent flaunting imminent bombings by staying out all night with her friends, the war itself remains a distant rumor, a constant threat of obliteration that arrives only after the city’s residents have begun to dismiss it. Obreht wrings more pathos from the war by describing its effects on the distressed and starving inhabitants of the city’s zoo than by showing the bombs falling:

“[F]or weeks and weeks after the bombing ended, Zbogom the tiger continued to eat his own legs. He was docile, tame, to the keepers, but savage on himself, and they would sit in the cage with him, stroking the big square block of his head while he gnawed on the stumps of his legs. The wounds were infected, swollen, and black” (302).

The Tiger’s Wife overflows with stories, evoking a land rich in complex, contentious history, with unclear boundaries between the personal and the political, the historic and the mythological. The grandfather’s tales span two transformative wars, describing a nation ripped from peaceful isolation into uneasy modernity. His stories, on their face the stuff of tall tales told to children, are as relevant to the future of this region’s people as the day’s current events.

Obreht writes in a strong, clear prose style that’s well-suited to the folkloric quality of much of the novel. The book’s only real weakness is the more rushed, less distinguished prose in much of the present-day thread; Natalia seems relatively less substantial, less distinguished, set against the deathless man and the tiger’s wife.

Still, it’s a forgivable lapse: Obreht seems to have too many good, old stories to tell, too many compelling legends to share, to linger for too long in the present.

Adam Reger is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program in fiction. He is the author of U.S. Navy Pirate Combat Skills.

Tweet

A Man Who Says No

An Algerian born working class Nobel laureate, Camus wrote fiction, plays, essays, and speeches. And he looked all the world like Humphrey Bogart. In The Rebel he asks: how can one respond to the experience of absurdity, without turning to nihilism and suicide, or the tyranny and murder that too often follows revolution? Assuming rebellion is “an essential dimension of human experience”, Camus examines how the rebel should act, and what the terms and consequences would be of that action. He considered this book-length essay a counterpart to his celebrated Myth of Sisyphus, and in it he takes on the massive concepts of value, freedom, and justice. Like the rebel, his method is provisional—and necessarily so. He progresses by associative leaps, metaphors, and delicate particulars.

Camus begins by describing a certain kind of rebel whose impetus is the experience of outraged innocence, an insulted sense of dignity: the feeling that something has “gone on too long” or someone has “gone too far”. Rather than respond destructively or try to replace what oppresses him, this person “pleads for life, undertakes to struggle against servitude, falsehood, and terror.” In this sense the rebel is unlike the heretics (“evil, be thou my good”) and the radical leaders (“we must force them to be free”) who set themselves on the level of their enemies regardless of consequence and “side only with themselves”. After sketching the characteristics of the ideal rebel, epitomized by none other than Ivan Karamozov, Camus establishes a genealogy of those who thought and acted in response to the metaphysical demands of their times. He moves from Sade to Baudelaire and the “dandies”, to Stimer, Nietzsche, Lautreamont, and the surrealists. His observations about these men and the aesthetics that guided them are full of critical admiration special to those who study out of love and necessity.

“More a writer than a philosopher.” — Advisor’s note on Camus’ dissertation

The latter part of the essay sketches a history of rebellion by surveying the stages of the French revolution, then turns to rebellion and the act of artistic creation. The artist refuses the salvific myths of otherwordly justification, even of social or political progress towards an ideal state. The artist makes this refusal in favor of adapting and stylizing the experience ready at hand on its own terms, creating a world out of and within this one. In the closing section, Thought at the Meridian, Camus draws on all of his stylistic powers in a statement of determination and encouragement. Facing and accepting limits is his strongest advice for rebels who refuse to assimilate the characteristics of those they stand against: “The revolutionary mind, if it wants to remain alive, must therefore return again to the sources of rebellion and draw its inspiration from the only system of thought which is faithful to its origins: thought that recognizes limits.” This sense of measure offers a treatment for the malady of nihilism, and an alternative code of action for the rebel.

After its publication in 1952, (he had just recovered from a relapse of tuberculosis), most of the French intellectual circle would have nothing to do with him. Sartre’s main complaint was Camus’ rejection of Marxist-Leninism—the kind of political action that he had found imperative as a responsible thinker. There was a big fuss about The Rebel’s wrongs and weaknesses. Camus not only lacked large-scale political strategies, he lacked a systematic understanding of many of his sources. More than that he lacked a logically stable method of argument. In The Philosophical Review, David Sachs spoke for a significant group of critics when he observed of The Rebel that “claims are made in the name of logic, but where ‘logic’ occurs, it sometimes would be better to read ‘tendency’ or ‘drift’…Camus gives the impression of employing a procedure and reaching a conclusion more original and profound than in fact they are”. He wasn’t playing by the rules.

It may be possible to read Camus’ “drift” more generously—as a method adopted not out of laziness or ineptitude, but as an extension of his concern with rebellion. This long essay evidences a conceptual and expressive refusal to capitulate, not only to political ideologies, but to conventional modes of inquiry, a generic regime, or as Sachs puts it, “procedure”. The mode of reasoning Camus refuses (or fails) to participate in prescribes how a good thinker thinks. Modeled after god himself, a voice in the dark void of the universe, conventional reasoning predisposes its participants to singular positions and enforceable claims. Linear, not addressing what it deems irrelevant or unworthy, its power is brutally formulaic, predictable, and closed. Any interlocution is highly manipulated. As revolutions end in oppression, so conventional reasoning perpetuates reductionism under the myth of an ideal language for thought.

Camus takes issue with the premise of universal reasonability in The Rebel and elsewhere. For him, people are reasonable but the world is not. This gap is what interests him. And it is reason in the face of its disastrous context—the experience of the absurd, the mind against its limits, the conditions of life—that Camus engages. Drowning men don’t dance. Even if it were possible it would be unbefitting. Many a professor has smiled with tender condescension at the tattered works of Camus stuffed in the pockets of their students. But those who marginalize Camus as a “good writer but messy thinker” may be missing his true value. His insistence endears; his prose addresses the senses and emotions as well as the intellect. His ideas make sense on their own terms and his methodology, while provisional and limited, has integrity to his subject rare even in those who think clearly.

Andrea Applebee lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tweet

Gina Ochsner weaves together the perspectives of multiple characters living in a slum-like apartment building in Perm, a city in post-Soviet Siberia, in her introspective first novel, The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight. The characters the reader spends most time with are Olga, whose job at the newspaper The Red Star is to “translate” distressing news stories into more palatable terms; her son Yuri, a young vet damaged by the war who prefers to spend more time with fish than people; Azade, a lavatory attendant who longs for the home her Muslim parents were forced to leave; and Tanya, a museum coat-check girl who dreams of losing weight so she can work as an airline stewardess among the clouds.

When the novel opens, Tanya, Yuri, and the other workers at the “All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum” are informed that they will be visited by a group of Americans who want to donate a substantial amount of money to the Russian museum they find most promising. Much of the novel is spent preparing to impress these American women when they visit. Their arrival sets off a comical series of misunderstandings as it becomes clear they are looking for a romanticized version of Russian culture, not the difficult and often dirty reality these characters live from day to day.

Ochsner (and her characters) deal with these realities with grim humor—for instance, one of the “perks” of working a museum job for months without a paycheck is free use of the toilets. These quirks of Ochsner’s humor are often emphasized by magical realism. In the first chapter, Azade’s husband Mircha, commits suicide by leaping from the roof of the apartment building. But he sticks around for the rest of the novel, his ghost running around voicing opinions while his body—unable to be buried in the still-frozen ground—lies on the trash heap.

But the gritty humor of these details is always held in balance with the genuine struggle the characters must face because of them, and their psychological consequences. Yuri hides from the world in a cosmonaut helmet left behind by his dead father. Olga despairs of the ability of language to convey truth. Tanya, an artist at heart, records her thoughts and observations of clouds in a notebook she carries with her, but cannot express herself to anyone. Working in a museum where all of the exhibits are cheap forgeries and imitations, Tanya tries to recreate icons of the Madonna and Child with chewing gum, popsicle sticks, and eye shadow, which promptly drip and turn into brightly colored smears.

Always this was what came of her attempts to think in hues and gradations of saturation; this was what happened when she tried to knuckle an understanding of her own life as it ticked from shade to hue. This was what came of her attempt to depict love in any form, even if it was from stuff as low and humble as wet coloured flour smeared on ice-cream sticks. (183)

Although Tanya feels that she has failed in her attempt to create something beautiful, to reach the transcendent through her humble materials, the reader cannot help but feel that she has achieved it simply through trying, through believing that it is possible.

The above passage is typical of Ochsner’s lyrical prose. Her pages are saturated with beautiful language, almost to the point of leveling out the perspectives of the different characters. As Yuri ice-fishes with his head encased in his helmet, the reader might have a hard time believing his thoughts could be as poetic and profound as those that Tanya records in her notebook. And perhaps her thoughts, along with the poetic longings of Azade for a home she doesn’t fully remember, would have even more weight had the language been moderated with other characters.

However, the characters themselves remain distinct. Each is occupied by different problems, has a different rhythm to their thought, and their own desires. These characters are all real people, complete with flaws and prejudices and insecurities that separate them from each other. Tanya says: “Suffering, if beautifully done, is an art form.” In the end, it is their suffering that brings these characters together, as well as their hopeful struggle to bring beauty and meaning to their lives.

Rosemary Callenberg lives in Western Pennsylvania, where she is working towards her MFA in fiction at the University of Pittsburgh. It is here that, among other things, she teaches, writes, and pursues her love of beauty and of words.

Tweet

Dimming the Illumination

At 8:17 p.m. on a Friday, people begin to see pain as auras of light. This is the premise of Kevin Brockmeier’s recent novel, The Illumination. Early in the story, a recent divorcée named Carol Ann slices her finger with a kitchen knife and goes to the hospital. There, she encounters her roommate, Patricia, a car crash victim who arrived with a journal of her husband’s love notes. Patricia believes her husband died in the accident that fatally wounded her, and she cannot bear to read his adoring words. However, she feels compelled to share them with Carol Ann. Patricia’s internal injuries flare like a supernova, and then slowly ebb after she flat lines.

This event initiates a series of chapters that follow the journal’s new owners: Carol Ann, who is making her way back into the dating scene; Jason, Patricia’s self-mutilating husband; Chuck, an abused boy with a skewed view of society and pain; Ryan, a missionary who is only spreading the “Good News” in memory of his religious sister; Nina, an author who believes she can speak with her deceased fiancé; and Morse, a telepathic homeless man. Regretfully, the story could have ended with Jason. He and Carol Ann have full, complex plotlines, while the other characters seem like an afterthought used only to illuminate different types and degrees of pain.

Events in the chapters are nonlinear and each main character appears in the background of a previous chapter. After Carol Ann’s doctor discovers the journal and convinces her to return it, the divorcée’s chapter culminates in her greeting Jason as he hobbles up her steps. But readers never see their confrontation. Carol Ann’s chapter ends there, and during Jason’s chapter, the scene between them is condensed into a three-sentence summary. This is the first break in what had been thorough prose. Brockmeier had set up a scene of heart-wrenching anticipation, but then concentrates on photojournalism, self-mutilation, and what could be interpreted legally as corruption of a minor. The journal Jason strove to find lays unwanted on a coffee table and suddenly, the worst month of his life is rendered inconsequential.

From there, Brockmeier passes the journal among a succession of long-suffering owners, focusing more on the characters’ relationship with the text than their supernatural inclinations. Chuck, who steals the journal, is a little boy who can see pain from inanimate objects. But Brockmeier does not explore the concept of residual energy or an object’s ability to retain a person’s memories or emotions. Rather, he concentrates on the abuse Chuck receives from his parents and the boy’s attempts to restore the book by reapplying the cover and ironing the pages. He thinks the book is in pain, instead of retaining pain. Eventually, he admits defeat and gives it to Ryan, who has encountered harrowing experiences but cannot die. Ryan, who is curious about the love notes and takes the journal for something to read, forgets it in a hotel’s nightstand, where Nina finds it. She is grieving the loss of her fiancé and is nursing perpetual canker sores that hinder her ability to communicate. She falls in love with the journal and places it on her bookcase, where her son finds and trades it to the telepathic Morse in exchange for a role playing game’s rare manual. This is where the journal’s timeline ends.

Notably, although Brockmeier provides beautiful imagery of the Illumination, he does not explore the psychological or emotional implications of people seeing each other’s pain as light. Most of the characters are not embarrassed by the varying coronas their bodies emit, nor do they try to hide them—instead, they are fascinated. For example, Jason is more fixated than humiliated by a bowel irritation that illuminates his anus with tiny sparks that are visible through his jeans. Only Nina seems discomfited by how the auras highlight her illness. Furthermore, Brockmeier skims over larger controversial issues like the suffering of animals. He mentions bursts of light radiating from a dog as children throw rocks at it, squirrels and possums exploding into rolling fireworks as they are struck by cars, and two men discussing the newfound empirical evidence that “the lower creatures of the world” feel pain. But that conversation is a one-sentence description of a talk show. There are no zoo or park scenes, and no one has pets. Brockmeier mentions pain from inanimate objects and emotions more than sentient animals. Perhaps this lack of analysis and self-consciousness is a form of magical realism—the characters continue living as if the light had always existed, and very few show concern.

Brockmeier’s unique, often sublime descriptions left this reader captivated and wondering whether his style would remain uniform throughout the story. He is skilled at employing dramatic irony; though the readers know the journal’s history, the characters can only speculate on it. However, Brockmeier’s tendency to accelerate the narrative by telling the readers what happened, rather than showing them, produces distance between the narrator’s voice and the characters’ actions. Readers are never plopped inside a character to experience events. This lack of intimacy seems odd in a story where the characters have uncomfortably accurate knowledge of one another’s personal ailments. A third person point of view further enhances the distance because each character’s dialogue or writing echoes the narrator’s voice.

Readers who are drawn to magical realism and speculative fiction might enjoy The Illumination. The visual descriptions are captivating and the writing is sophisticated despite the distant and uniform voice. Yet, readers might ultimately be more interested in the journal’s voyage than in the characters themselves.

Nicole Bartley is an escape artist. Her specialties include writing and reading science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, and folklore. She received a bachelor’s degree from Slippery Rock University for creative writing and journalism, and is an MFA candidate in the fiction track at Chatham University. She is determined to maintain a career around books.

Tweet

If you’ve heard of Alan Moore, it’s probably for his groundbreaking work on comics like Watchmen, From Hell, V For Vendetta, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, all of which contributed to the respect that has emerged for comics as an art form over the past 20 years. Possibly you only know of him through the terrible movies adapted from those books—but let’s hope not. Moore had the good sense to take his name off those projects and tends to be pretty grumpy about movies and superhero comics in general when asked about them in interviews. Instead, he prefers to talk about more arcane subjects like history, religion, and magic.

Moore’s become known as an authority on that last subject. On his fortieth birthday he declared himself a magician, devoted himself to occult studies and started worshipping an old Roman snake god. It sounds crazy until you hear him explain magic as the manipulation of symbols (like words) to alter people’s consciousness (like stories), and that there basically is no difference between the word “spell” (as in to spell a word) and the word spell (as in to cast a spell). Then it only sounds kind of crazy.

In the mid-90s, during one of Moore’s periodic withdrawals from the world of comics, he wrote a prose book that explores his ideas about magic and the tenuous relationship between big ideas like truth, fiction, and history. Originally printed in paperback in 1996, Voice of the Fire was largely ignored, but Moore’s American comic publisher later went ahead and produced a beautiful hardcover edition featuring book design by Chip Kidd, an introduction by Neil Gaiman (the most successful comic writer to cross over into novels), and illustrated plates by José Villarrubia. The book was once again largely ignored.

Within half a page, it’s easy to see why the book remains an afterthought in Moore’s body of work. The opening chapter, told from the viewpoint of a half-witted prehistoric youth who can’t tell the difference between waking and dreaming, is as hard to follow as any book in the English language. And it’s not exactly lyrically on par with Joyce. Take this passage for example:

There is not grass on high of hill. There is but dirt, all in a round, that hill is as like to a no-hair man, he’s head. Stands I, and turn I’s face to the wind for sniff, and yet is no sniff come for far ways off. I’s belly hurts, in middle of I.

There are 50 more pages where that came from!

Yet, over the course of those 50 pages, you can’t help but feel for this wandering pre-historic half-wit surrounded by powerful forces he can’t even put a name to, let alone understand. And the limited language begins to work its particular kind of magic, especially when the boy struggles to “glean that one may say of thing while thing is not,” an apt description of magic, fiction, history, or a lie.

From the tale of the man-child, Moore moves through time with a series of first-person narratives taking place in and around his hometown of Northampton. The reliability of these narratives vary, but themes of deception, betrayal, and disillusionment repeat themselves throughout, as do images of giant black dogs, one legged cripples and sacrificial fires. If you were interested in making distinctions, you’d be hard pressed to decide if Voice of the Fire is a novel, a set of interconnected stories, or something else altogether.

Some of the chapters could work alone as short stories, some more as character sketches. In every chapter, it’s impressive how expertly Moore inhabits each of these narrators, from a Bronze Age murderess to a hobbled and aging crusader to the disembodied head displayed on a pike outside the city gate, giving them a voice that’s uniquely theirs. This talent for first person narration carries over from Moore’s comic work, where he uses caption boxes (previously been reserved in comics for exposition or redundant descriptions of the action on the page) to render carefully crafted internal monologues.* In fact, he’s so convincing that many readers associate the views of Watchmen’s ultra-conservative, homicidal vigilante Rorschach with Moore himself.

Another of Moore’s formal concerns from comics that apply to his only novel so far is the depiction of time. Moore frequently uses the visual nature of comics to challenge standard perceptions of time. For Doctor Manhattan of Watchmen all of time happens at once, leading Moore (and artist Dave Gibbons) to juxtapose images from different periods in the character’s life in a narrative that’s just as associative as it is linear.

Many chapters in Voice of the Fire display a similar concern with time, crosscutting between flashbacks and present tense action, but what’s more interesting is how the novel as a whole deals with time. It spans centuries in what seems like a linear narrative, but images keep repeating, characters from the past appear before a more contemporary one in inexplicable visions, and key plot elements of disillusionment and treachery constantly recur. The book seems to ask, are we all as helpless as that half-witted manchild from chapter one, unable to tell the difference between waking and dream, “a thing that is become a thing that is not”? Yet as the book progresses and characters repeatedly march towards despair and doom, it becomes exhausting. Maybe we all have the same basic story, but do we have to read it over and over again?

Moore, however, rewards the intrepid reader with an absolutely stunning last chapter, which begins with the author typing the final words from the previous chapter. We arrive then, all the way from prehistory to present tense. We follow Alan Moore through the process of trying to find an ending to his novel in what is part first-person narrative (which never uses the words “I” or “me”), part metafiction, part essay, and part history lesson.

Despite a few rough spots, Voice of the Fire puts the reader right into the head of a unique and visionary artist, one who is prone to believing in a mad idea or two and is nearly convincing enough to make the reader believe, too. By that criteria, the book might quite possibly be an incantation in and of itself.

Steve Gillies is a 3rd year MFA student at the University of Pittsburgh and co-editor in chief of Hot Metal Bridge. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Artifice Magazine, The AV Club, and the American Journal of Orthopedics.

* Readers interested in Moore’s process for these first-person narrations should read his essay “Writing For Comics,” where he describes how he imagines every psychological and physiological detail of his characters, to the point where he stumbles around his room shouting and pretending to be Etrigan the Demon. That’s dedication to craft.

Tweet

Shifty Positions

Anna Moschovakis’ second book, You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake tackles a great tangle of cultural systems with the probing wit and intellectual sensitivity announced in her first book, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (Turtle Point Press, 2006). Bookended by two shorter poems, four long poems comprise the meat of You and Three Others, taking their titles (as she notes in the Acknowledgements) from books she stumbled upon by chance.

Moschovakis hammers her found materials, chosen for a “bold stand toward their topics and the twentieth-century world they inhabit,” into various poetic shapes: lists, epistles, journal entries, theatrical dialogue, and even social networking posts. Yet the lyric mode provides a bass line for the collection, giving a heartbeat to her poems’ modal riffing.

The opening poem titled simply “[prologue]” announces:

The problem is I don’t care whether I convince you or not
In a perfect world I would be able to convince you of this

Everybody should always have a position on everything
We take our positions with us, like folding stools to the beach
The stools, when we abandon them, fade to the same color

Characteristic of Moschovakis’ earlier work, “[prologue]” launches a grammatical argument, shuttling through verb tenses as a means of exploring different angles of her concern about the speaker’s “position” (a sticky allusive term calling to mind a slew of possible applications) to her reader, and vice-versa. Moving by line from the indicative to the conditional to the more personal and unstable modal tense of “should” then back again, verb tense takes on a concrete symbolic function, much as our “positions” become “folding stools” we take with us, then “abandon.”

The book’s first long poem, “A Tragedy of Waste,” takes this movement between “positions,” or formal code-switching, a step further by weaving text from a Labor Bureau publication into lyric. “At the beginning of 1917 there were housewives / children, old people, sick people / fields, factories, stores, offices” sets an academic, factoid-y tone, which the lyric speaker’s (or positioner’s) voice interrupts with pronouncements such as: “This taxes the imagination. Too many studies have begun / and ended in the middle.” Breaking prose “facts” into lines of “poetry” highlights intrinsic tensions between what is said and what is buried in what is said, but it is the lyric moment that raises the emotional ante, turning text into poetry:

Human wants:

First the necklace of bone
then the shift of leather

tea, tobacco, and gambling

in other words

ten men could live on the corn
where only one can live on the beef [.]

In seven terse lines, the “study” above reaches a political and economic conclusion we can presume previously taxed the speaker’s imagination. If “[f]rom these definitions, one must pick / and choose,” lyric meditation (among poetry’s other tools) offers us a better path to the heart (both literally and figuratively) of our world’s contradictory “positions.”

Moschovakis’ concerns are not purely extra-literary, however. In “Death as a Way of Life,” a modal fist-fight pitches purplish prose against philosophical observation with interesting results:

Man dies, that is nothing

but
      when a woman sits on the edge of her bed, in front of a window, and lets down her red silken hair, threading it through her delicate fingers as it cascades in waves down her porcelain back, which reflects the moon’s silvery mood, so that any man privileged enough to catch a glimpse of her falls directly to his knees, blind, lost, panting for breath [ . . . ] still he has no regrets, and he welcomes death, invites it, knowing as he’s never known anything before that his life wants for nothing [ . . .]

Shifts in line, syntax and diction pull us from a creepy, faux-logical world where “[w]ith seven bullets, you could shoot a woman / in both breasts, both ovaries, her vagina and clitoris / with one bullet left for a target of choice” to a veritable cauldron of overwrought Romance. There is a Joycean sensitivity to rhetoric at work in these poems, as well as great humor. Though the idea of using bullets to target a woman’s sexual organs is not funny, the drastic code-switching that occurs in the two pages between it and the longer excerpt above collapses rhetorical forms so quickly that a reader might guffaw as much out of surprise as out of amusement at Moschovakis’ deftness of hand. Indeed, her control of and sensitivity to language’s ends and means saves her poems from falling into the trap of elliptical faux-irony plaguing many of her contemporaries.

What is at stake in You and Three Others is perhaps the messiest of modes, the human sensibility—that which does not dare lay claim to a systematic organizing principle, and which certainly feels itself weakest in the race for Progress. Both in the multiple sense of the global community as well as in the prime sense of the individual, You and Three Others bears witness to the web of forces burying the human cost of some of our “greatest” achievements—the establishment of the United States on the backs of its native peoples and ecology, the rise of capitalism at a similar expense, and, of course, the Internet’s uncertain terrain. As Annabot (the “chatbot” in “The Human Machine”) says to the machine when it declares “The Brain, the brain—that is the seat of trouble”: “My brain, whose brain? Those who feel, feel.”

HUMAN MACHINE: I ought to reflect, again and again, and yet again, that all others deserve from me as much sympathy as I give to myself. I place my hand over my heart.

ANNABOT: I cannot feel your hand.

HUMAN MACHINE: I cannot feel your heart.

If the book has any weaknesses, they are perhaps most evident in “The Human Machine,” where some of the lyrics risk self-referential obliquity. However, even the few off-key moments remind the reader that a particularly human consciousness accompanies us for the duration of the book’s journey—”Anna is a Capricorn. Her eyes are blue. Her favorite color is blue[.]“—whether in the form of the “you” co-opted in “A Tragedy of Waste,” or the cyborg Annabot and her foil Anna of the Five Towns (both a gloss of the author’s first name). That reminder comforts the reader even as it challenges her to consider her own position within the systems confronted by Mochovakis’ verse.

You and Three Others never loses focus of its concern with selves, and demonstrates a rare ability to speak convincingly about said selves through a complex web of modes that maintains a lyric voice while simultaneously critiquing the means that voice chooses. That Moschovakis is able to keep the emotional energy alive even as her poems remain unapologetically entranced with the ostensible anti-poetry of the systems she investigates is a contradiction that is as impressive as it is satisfying.

Mandy Malloy is a writer and graphic designer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Hunter College’s MFA program and a 2011 Norman Mailer Colony Fellow, her poems have appeared most recently in The Portland Review and Blood Orange Review.

Tweet