Sestina

 I have done it again with my return

Here, defacing another memory.

Blurred body fracturing a gem of light

That bursts against my skin, a glass bloom blown

Into incoherent murk. Captured time

We save that image endures, eternal

I transgress and am fixed in eternal,

Arrested motion. No hope to return

To make myself the scene a second time.

But I do. Imposturous memory

Eddies in city’s discarded loess, blown

Skywards to live in death, a ghost of light

Divided self – half particulate light –

Agitated photons in eternal

Foment, elating in Sun’s tailings. Blown

Out in arcing gouts; enacting return

To be remade on screen, as memory.

Imperfect, unlapsed record of that time

I crept into your frame. It was that time

You were taking a photograph, and light

Stained my face, mingling my memory

With yours. And I am caught in eternal

Half turn: curtain of hair; helpless return

To long lorn youth and hot, hard feeling blown

Like molten glass. Batavian tears blown

To silt the larynx of the world. In time

I will dredge the past from dumb throats; return

Reborn as image, impossibly light.

I will rise and fall in air, eternal,

And through dismissive cirrus my memory

Vibrates in waves that silent memory

Mouths along infinite vectors. Wind blown

Leaves clutch themselves and dance eternal

Rounds. I pass the peculiar Gothic light

Bound to buttressed stone, too scared to return.

Forgive my memory. It will, in time,

Be one more blown breath, a false aether light

Can bend to will its eternal return.

The Son of Man in Parliament Square

Banded light breaking soft across his chest,

He stands defaced and fixed like stone, as dawn

Settles on our square, and workers, tourists,

Furtive lovers shoulder past his forlorn

Frame, once famed, perhaps, though nevermore. It’s

No surprise to those who knew him best.

Which I did not. I do not know the times

He went striding past the pediments and

Portes cochères, ignoring those who stared at

Coal-black horses – heads starred with a white brand;

At soldiers astride in their blue cloaks that

Shrouded flanks, croups – the geldings’ arching spines.

 

Farther on, before his eyes filled with green,

He’d walk beneath the portico, among

Whose ionic columns children ran and hid;

Stare across at where revolution, one

January morning, had begun; ask – did

Charles shiver beneath his shirts, but unseen?

Think now – divine right forced to account,

Or botched corpse, mortal proof, never in doubt?

 

He was the apple of his mother’s eye;

He was his Father’s supplicant;

He wore without complaint the shirt and tie –

The Son of Man in bowler hat.

 

Farther, past inert Haig, he could see

The monument to those he helped inter.

About him raw wind skirred, its direction

Unclear, spreading leaves on his face to blur

Those, after Eden, marked for election,

Which he shunned, trusting that posterity

Would save him from reprobation. For thine

Is not power, nor glory; for thine is

Not the first act – thou must enact. For this

Is the vocation of the palatine.

 

Approaching now the orchard fruiting stone,

Where malum flowered first and found its essence

Coddled in petrified inflorescence.

(His elbow backwards broken as he’d grown;

His shoulder hanging lower than it should;

His tendons fusing slowly to his bones;

A body that articulates the tone

That marks the time before his desuetude.)

 

The pylon bears the empty tomb before

The First Lord’s black steel cage: the sacrament

Of absent life and death – what could remain

But memory caught in ageless present?

Now, those who pass will helplessly profane –

For language, though imperfect, must endure.

 

He once helped others see the hidden signs:

The words entwined among the spreading roots

Of words

Which blindly beg for rain to seep into

Their bark,

Composed of dense solutes,

Which then dissolve and flow into the deep

Aquifers coursing through unconscious minds.

 

His calling still persists, though now we claim

It otiose and something to efface,

For wonders are now felt to be the truth.

The hierophant lies dead, and in his place

We stand and fancy to divine the smooth,

Immortal certainties we use to frame

Our concupiscent vanities and fears.

It may be we are better off

Alone –

Confessor, intercessor, whispering

To ourselves,

Dowsing above the unknown

Snarl of roots in griming clod, the

Longing

For the unmasking cataract that clears

The ground on which we kneel before the tree,

And wait for fruit to fall and set us free.

 

At last now at the square in which he rests

Among the unpleached lime trees, stripped of leaves.

Where Churchill, Palmerston, and Peel help guard

The sward from Palace, Court, and Church. Sheaves

Of palm fronds trampled into mulch have marred

The stones on which he stands as he divests

Himself of time. His immanence is place –

One never saved for him inside the House

Divided by decree; eroded by

The wracking squalls of time that also douse

His mind, when seized by dreams that he can die

And look for his own consecrated space.

 

A servant once, a servant evermore –

It’s no surprise that passers-by ignore

His longing to eradicate the trace

Of the apple hanging before his face.

Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis

Don DeLillo’s great strength as a writer is the quality of his prose, which at its best is simultaneously engaging and estranging. If Updike’s fictional project is to give the mundane its beautiful due, DeLillo’s is to make the mundane beautifully strange. DeLillo stumbles, however, when his prose’s luminosity is yoked to philosophical banality. Because its subject is often late-capitalist society’s flattening of affect, DeLillo’s fiction will risk seeming banal. The biggest problem, however, is when his prose seems enamoured of its own affect and forgets what wider point it is supposed to be in service to.

Like much of DeLillo’s fiction, Cosmopolis is set in New York City; but whereas previous novels evoked the dilapidation of the Bronx, Cosmopolis takes inspiration from the blank faces of Manhattan’s skyscrapers. At home in this world of surface is the novel’s protagonist, Eric Packer: a multi-billionaire currency trader who reads Einstein’s special theory of relativity in English and German, likes inscrutable white paintings featuring ‘knife-applied slabs of mucoid color’, and is so obviously a caricature of postmodern ennui that it’s difficult to care very much about him (8). He conducts abstruse discussions about cyber capital, and he really wants a haircut; in classic postmodern style, he treats both equally seriously.

All Cosmopolis’s action occurs on one particularly hectic Manhattan day, during which the US Presidential motorcade (‘Just so I know. Which president are we talking about?’ Packer asks) and a rapper’s funeral cortege gridlock New York, such that traffic ‘speaks in quarter inches (11).’ Rat-flinging anarchists are also protesting globalisation. Nonetheless, Packer sits in his armoured limousine and buys stupefying quantities of yen; his portentous justification: ‘Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first (21).’ His recent marriage remains unconsummated, but he has perfunctory sex with one of his (female) bodyguards, and, separately, with an artist. His chief of finance masturbates while she watches him undergo a prostate exam, which he receives in the limo because he is apparently willing to be driven to a barbershop but not to a doctor’s surgery.

Insouciant and capricious, Packer presumably gives his security detail nightmares because he often hops in and out of his car unannounced. Occasionally and by chance, he even encounters his wife. Security is not, however, this day pro forma, because there is a ‘credible’ security threat, and as is common in DeLillo’s work, assassination is coyly implied (101). Packer loses first his then his wife’s fortune to the abstractions of the currency market, but though financially ruined the loss energises him: he luxuriates in the physicality of the street, undresses, lies naked with three hundred others, and becomes a passive extra. Ultimately, he meets his would-be assassin, and the novel ends with him ‘alive in original space, waiting for the shot to sound (209).’

Cosmopolis is often dismayingly silly, but some serious points should be made about it. The blurb’s comparison of it to a prose poem is accurate: there’s the same focus on cadence and on lapidary compression. But these aesthetic qualities seem to be only self-referential and hermetic, as though DeLillo is so obsessed with being rhetorically convincing that he forgets what he is trying to convince the reader of. The prose evokes a world in which technology deforms subjectivity – ‘Why die when you can live on a disk?’ – but this future of bodies-without-organs cannot sustain a reader’s interest, for two main reasons.

Firstly, Eric Packer is not a likeable protagonist. While likability is not essential for artistic success, if it is absent, there should be compensation elsewhere. Richard III succeeds because Richard is charismatically perfidious[1]; Packer’s speech is euphuistic and pretentious, and his actions – ‘an aesthetics of interaction’ – are so couched in abstraction that even when he does kill someone the act feels empty and stylised (86). Packer’s ‘coldest prospect’ is that no one is out to kill him after all, but we have little interest in his sorrow (169).

Secondly, DeLillo’s best novels – such as Libra and Underworld – tend to use history, particularly the Kennedy assassination, as a structuring metaphor, and this gives the narrative traction and purpose. These novels treat history as an attempt to impose a narrative upon endlessly proliferating social and cultural forces; history’s legitimacy is questioned, such that it begins to look more like an officially sanctioned conspiracy. The Kennedy assassination; 9/11: it seems impossible to write these events’ histories in a way commensurate with their significance. And since significance is in the eye of the beholder, who gets to decide what an authentic history comprises?

Suspicions regarding objectivity and questions of authenticity are evident at Cosmopolis’s crux: ‘To pull back now would not be authentic. It would be a quotation from other people’s lives. A paraphrase of a sensible text that wants you to believe there are plausible realities, okay, that can be traced and analysed (85).’ The novel exists squarely and incorrigibly in a world of simulacra, in which things are ‘quoted’ but never experienced; whither subjectivity when everything is second-hand? (The rap lyrics on pp. 137-138 probably come closest to something vital and authentic.) Cosmopolis’s diagnosis of contemporary culture may well be accurate, but its insights are hardly novel; it wants to be satirical, but it offers only existential zaniness and criminality as alternatives to cultural enervation.

The novel’s conclusion echoes The Crying of Lot 49’s agonising deferral of understanding: both Oedipa Maas and Eric Packer wait passively to learn their respective fates. Oedipa is a suburban housewife who may have sought transcendent meaning in vain, and Packer is a hyper-capitalist who realises that life is not crystalline, immured, but corporeal. The former is tragic, the latter could have been: a meditation on subjective loss and final redemption. Ultimately, Packer’s nemesis, Benno Levin, tells him, ‘You should have listened to your prostate (199).’ It is a final reminder, if it were needed, that Eric Packer is an asshole.

Works Referenced

Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (London: Picador, 2011)

---

[1] See, for example, ‘Conscience is but a word that cowards use’ (Richard III, V.3.310).

Rhetoric and The Jurassic Park Franchise

Good commercial fiction is extremely effective at concisely presenting otherwise prolix or esoteric information. Good commercial fiction makes this information seem vital to the plot, and communicates it in a maximally interesting way: the tone should thrill, not lecture. By these standards, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and its sequel The Lost World are not good commercial fiction: Lost World even opens with Ian Malcolm delivering a lecture. The former novel, however, manages something the latter does not; while its lectures are usually pretentious, its discussion of chaos theory is rhetorically convincing and soothing.

            This rhetorical coup is not a consequence of plot twists or of evocative prose. Crichton tends to favour declarative and compound sentences, so when the prose is clunky it is usually unobtrusively clunky. Sometimes, however, the semantic redundancy is unintentionally funny:

To whom should he send [the lizard]? The acknowledged expert was Edward H. Simpson, emeritus professor of zoology at Columbia University, in New York. An elegant older man with swept-back white hair, Simpson was the world's leading authority on lizard taxonomy. Probably, Marty thought, he would send his lizard to Dr. Simpson (Jurassic Park 20).

As is SOP with most thrillers and crime novels, Jurassic Park opens with suspicious and indeterminate death and injury. A construction worker’s chest is sliced open: his boss claims an industrial accident, but the wounds’ ragged edges appear saliva-foamed; a mysterious, apparently bipedal, lizard bites an eight-year-old girl holidaying in Costa Rica. Laboratory analysis (of saliva, again) reveals a protein so off-the-charts massive that the lab… well, we never find out what the lab does next, since its sole job is to confirm the growing sense of weird malevolence. Scientists and medics soberly resist the allure of speculation, but indulge the girl’s claim that the lizard that attacked her walked upright.

Actually, a trope common to both books is that children tend to be smarter, more observant, and more resourceful than adults, though the third film pushes this to ludicrous extremes by having Eric – a cherubic, soft-lashed, Haley Joel Osment-type – survive alone for a month on a dinosaur-infested island, during which time he discovers, and becomes proficient in the use of, gas grenades. This juvenile appeal is not a sophisticated bit of rhetoric, particularly when apposed with Ian Malcolm, celebrity chaos theorist, pontificating on the extinction of the human race; the notion that salvation lies in emulating children’s innate inquisitiveness is crushingly trite.

Crichton is not, however, responsible for the Jurassic Park series’ rhetorical nadir. Each book, and each film except the last, reinforces the notion that velociraptors are ferociously intelligent killers eager to flense and disembowel. They assuredly do not have a softer, domestic side: ‘The young [raptors] looked thin, undernourished. Poking around the periphery of the carcass, they were cautious, backing away whenever one of the adults snapped at them (Lost World 184).’ But with no source text to adapt, the latest movie gives the raptors an incongruous maternal upgrade. A paleontology student steals two raptor eggs, and the raptors are presumably mightily pissed-off. They trap the surviving characters but circle them, making aggrieved, uncannily corvine honks; and Alan Grant growls, ‘They want the eggs, otherwise we’d be dead already!’ But not content with this perspicacious display, nor with returning the eggs, Grant takes out a mould made of a fossilized raptor’s resonating chamber, which, ok, no one knows how it works, but he blows into it and produces a squawk that so nonplusses the raptors that they eventually leave. Admittedly, Jurassic Park’s premise already stretches scientific credulity, but this scene dissolves the last patina of plausibility; its rhetoric is flat-out invidious: it endorses a fallacious anthropomorphic compassion, legitimizes Dr. Doolittle-grade communication fantasies, and equates science with tendentious speculation. It is a scene that has zero regard for the viewer’s intelligence.

So yes, the obvious point: science fiction continually blurs the line between fact and fantasy. But the first Jurassic Park novel is rhetorically effective because it flatters the reader into believing she understands concepts that appear prima facie complicated, and it allays any nagging suspicion that the account with which she’s been presented is radically over-simplified. Chaos theory, and the domain of non-linear equations, ranks with rocket science and brain surgery as shorthand for intellectual difficulty, though the novel quickly retreats from the mathematical terminology of strange attractors in favour of folksy analogy:

If I have a weather system that I start up with a certain temperature and a certain wind speed and a certain humidity – and if I then repeat it with almost the same temperature, wind, and humidity – the second system will not behave almost the same. It'll wander off and rapidly will become very different from the first. Thunderstorms instead of sunshine. That's nonlinear dynamics. [It’s] sensitive to initial conditions: tiny differences become amplified (Jurassic Park 60).

This is the famous butterfly effect, and the rhetorical coup is the implied equivalence between it and the strange attractors mentioned on the previous page. This elision of the specific with the general implies that understanding an analogy is sufficient to an understanding of complex mathematics. Elsewhere, Crichton’s descriptions of how dinosaur DNA is extracted and of how the wildly complicated park is run are economical; comparing DNA sequencing to ‘putting a puzzle together’ is glib, but the confluence of high- , albeit quaint, technology (e.g. Cray supercomputers) and putative screenshots of a DNA molecule is undeniably cool, and evokes an atmosphere of genuine scientific possibility.

            It’s a shame, then, that irritatingly large percentages of Jurassic Park and The Lost World are devoted to Ian Malcolm making portentous pronouncements: ‘scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. […] There is no humility before nature (Jurassic Park 257).’ And each disquisition is usually followed by another character’s failure to understand it, so the point gets iterated. Rhetoric requires an understanding of its intended audience, something the novels and films evince maybe 49% of the time. But as Aristotle counseled, it is easier to blame than to praise.

Works Referenced

Crichton, Michael, Jurassic Park (London: Random Century, 1991)

--- The Lost World (London: Century Books, 1995)

Jurassic Park III, dir. by Joe Johnston (Amblin Entertainment, 2001)

Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers

Cynthia Ozick’s erudition is formidable, though it is not the claustral cerebration of Umberto Eco. It seems appropriate, however, to mention erudition up front, because The Puttermesser Papers is an awfully smart book but also an awfully humane one, though its humanity really becomes apparent only in its final section. The word awful, as admixture of fear and reverence, carries weighty metaphysical connotations (viz. Fear and Trembling); consider the verse from which Kierkegaard took his title: ‘as you have always obeyed – not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence – continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling’ (Philippians 2. 12). For salvation, we always look up to something bigger than we are, something beyond our capacity for expression; this invokes not fear of the unknown but fear of the cannot-be-known: something absent and ineffable that still holds us in thrall. No wonder we tremble.

            Ozick’s collection of short stories explores, variously, female desire, the perils of art mediating life, and the nature of language. There are riffs on origins and purity, George Eliot, and John Milton. The scope is intimidating but is leavened by witty, stylish prose; this description of an Upper West Side apartment’s bathroom is a gem:

The bathroom sink, if you should happen to locate it in the dark (the light switch will be permanently hidden), is embroidered with the brown grime of its ancient cracks, like the lines of an astrological map; the base of the toilet, when you flush it, will trickle out a niggardly rusty stream (195).

Ruth Puttermesser, the stories’ eponymous heroine, is probably the sharpest knife in the drawer, though ironically her name means ‘butter knife.’ She dreams of becoming mayor of New York and transforming it into a city of aesthetic ideals: not just any ideals but Platonic ideals. Though a devotee of Socrates (she starts a political party called the ‘Independents for Socratic and Prophetic Idealism’), Ruth best identifies with his most famous student; her deference to Plato is worthy of her biblical namesake. Plato’s theory of the Forms holds that abstract ideals must lie behind our perceptions, but these ideals will be perpetually out of reach, their ‘completion deferred’ (66). But while in some sort of theosophic trance, Ruth intuits a possible solution to uniting the ideal with tangible: she creates a golem. Definitionally down-to-earth, the golem, we are informed, ‘is above all a realist’, though its Platonic link is nominally maintained when it christens itself Xanthippe (70). (Somewhat nonplussed by her creation, Ruth initially tries to name it Leah after Jacob’s less-favoured wife.)

This allows Ozick to dramatize a particular post-structuralist preoccupation: do we wield language or vice versa? Ruth imprints her golem’s forehead with ‘three letters that are the Hebrew word for truth’ (46), but as Xanthippe, animated but not alive, becomes language’s manifestation, Ruth quickly loses control over her. She is Ruth’s ‘amanuensis’, but her tone is ‘erratic’ and an ‘awful pastiche’ (51). Ruth’s own language often fails to impress: when ordered to make Ruth’s bed, Xanthippe interprets ‘make’ as ‘makeover’ and buys a Statue of Liberty lamp and a ‘blue bedspread [covered] with pictures of baseball mitts’ (52). Xanthippe’s defence, ‘all the stores around here are closed on Sunday’, does little to placate Ruth: ‘When I said to make the bed I just meant to straighten the blankets, that’s all.’ An early caution: if one cannot control language, one cannot control a golem.

This odd couple kvetching is fun and keeps the story’s high-conceptual concerns from weighing too heavily; but more fun, and more ambitious, is the way in which Ozick mixes linguistic play with an examination of female desire.

In Timaeus, Plato adduces an idiosyncratic contribution to the science of sexuality: the titular character portentously attributes ‘all varieties of disease’ to a malevolent womb ‘wandering in every direction through the body, clos[ing] up the passages of breath’. (2607-2609) Ruth has internalised this ancient fear of unchecked female sexuality, and has effectively sublimated desire to idealism.  She irks her lover by reading aloud from Plato’s Theaetetus, though in the passage she reads, Socrates warns of ‘the Thracian maidservant who exercised her wit at the expense of Thales, when he was looking up to study the stars and tumbled down a well (23).’ Ruth is both maidservant and Thales, but though chaste, her creation Xanthippe is gravid with sexual yearning.

Ozick cleverly alloys ideas of linguistic uncertainty with gender. Male desire inevitably trumps female desire: after all, foundational to Freudian theory is the notion that a girl envies her father’s phallus. Xanthippe, however, upends this binary: her libido and her waistline grow, and her ‘despairing will’ to procreate terrorizes New York City, which ‘sweats and coughs in her terrifying embrace (86-87).’ Libidinal language has run amok, and no one is prepared for incarnate female desire. New York politics may be used to sex scandals, but not on this scale.

The golem tale is an obvious centrepiece, but Puttermesser Papers’ last story is the most affecting.  Ruth perpetually substitutes art for life, to the extent she imagines herself to be George Eliot; when she dies she attains the paradisiacal ideal she craves, but at a cost. Paradise is necessarily timeless, and ‘where there is no time, there is no endurance.’ (234) Ruth may be ‘perfectly fulfilled! – in her sexual parts, in the golden beauty of her child, in the gold of Plato’s eyes, and in the newest heat of her mind,’ but her joys are evanescent. The final pages are gorgeously, unbearably sad: ‘everyone who is supernally happy in Paradise, happier than ever before, will soon become preternaturally unhappy, unhappier than ever before.  A dream that flowers only to be undone will bring more misery than a dream that has never come true at all (234).’ It may be a variation on the ‘better to have loved’ cliché, but Ruth has loved knowledge, and her knowledge inheres her Fall. She aspired to the Platonic ideal, and the world seemed all before her, but through Eden she must take her solitary way.

Works Referenced

Cynthia Ozick, The Puttermesser Papers (London: Vintage, 2000)

Plato, Timaeus <http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rac101/concord/texts/timaeus/files/timaeus1.html#2605>

Introduction

Dear Person Reading This:

I have started this blog to try to alleviate writer’s block, and to get me habitually producing work. It will feature reviews-cum-essays of books and maybe the odd film, and each piece will be c. 800-1000 words long. The format will be essayistic, hopefully in a non-pejorative sense, and there’ll probably be a focus on themes rather than on plot. Artistic criticism has, I think, two primary functions: to advise a reader whether the art being discussed is worth consuming, and to evaluate the aesthetics of said art to help a reader form her own critical opinion. The pieces will probably be biased towards the latter; it remains to be seen whether this will be to their detriment.

Updates may be a bit irregular, particularly at first. Comments are welcomed but please keep them civil.

I hope you enjoy reading my work.

Alex