Journal #4

Return to Book Reviews (this time about language)

Apologies for the recent inundations of everybody’s email inbox. I’ve had the briefest moments of respite from a cyclopean workload and the next weeks to month will ikely leave me with not much time for anything else. So I’m frontloading material for my lovely subscribers in the event of a pause. One of my favorite things I developed on this blog last year were book reviews and the recent journal entries kind of sucked but I also committed myself to them so I’m smashing the two together.

The Silence—Don DeLillo—I read The Silence in one sitting in the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport in the hours before a pre-dawn flight; it was the last book in my exploration of DeLillo’s ‘late’ era. “…late works are the catastrophes”—something often overlooked in Adorno’s statement here is that late works deny “harmonious synthesis” and this is precisely what lends them their catastrophic character. This is certainly true in DeLillo’s late batch of novels, which grow ever-shorter, more abstracted, shot through with uneven tone, pacing, the affect of exhaustion and a generalized lack of resolution. This is writing under the shadow of a death at once deeply personal and cosmic.

The novella opens with Jim Kripps and Tessa Berens. I don’t remember what the character of Jim does for a living, but Tessa is a poet and editor for an online organization that helps people with hearing loss and dementia. They’re en route Paris to Newark, hoping to land in time to attend a friend’s superbowl party. They pass the time discussing atmospheric temperature, plane speed, a muted dialogue of momentum, variables and numbers. The plane begins to shake, the numbers that Jim is studying go haywire. Some sort of abstract apocalypse in the external wold is taking shape and the plane is going down.

Back in New York City, at the apartment of Jim and Tessa’s friends, the football party is cut short by the television screen switching off. The phones go dead. The power is out. DeLillo never lets us in on what causes this total shutdown of the grid, but the character of Martin—“a man lost in his compulsive study of Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity”—narrates the various possibilities. Maybe a stand-in for DeLillo himself, Martin’s dialogues form the bulk of the work’s text. He begins with “the Chinese”, “algorithmic governance”, a “selective internet apocalypse”.

As the book progresses, Martin’s ruminations become as fragmented as they are visionary. “Are we living in a makeshift reality?”, he asks midway through, “A future that isn’t supposed to take form just yet?” Diana, Martin’s former teacher, becomes aroused, considers having sex with Martin but declines to act. The thoughts become isolated (“Data breaches”, he says. “Cryptocurrenices.”) By the end he’s moved towards meditative parables of the end times:

In the second silence all heads turn towards Martin.
He speaks of satellites in orbit that are able to see everything. The street where we live, the building we work in, the socks we are wearing. A rain of asteoids. The sky thick with them. Asteroids that become meteorites as they approach a planet. Entire exoplanets blown away.
Why not us. Why not now.
“All we have to do is consider our situation”, he says. “Whatever is out there, we are still people, the human slivers of a civilization”.
He lets the phrase linger. The human slivers.

The Silence presents itself as an enigmatic text. Deceptively short, with hardly any plot to speak of, it would be easy to dismiss it as the work of an author far past his prime, trotting out cliches and buzzwords. I’m not sure I agree with the litany of reviews that take what is probably DeLillo’s last work as a exhausted recycling of older themes. There is clearly something taking place below the overt level of the text: passages and words form odd resonances with one another, they zig-zag throughthe oblique turns of the story. That something isn’t being directly said is signaled by the repetition of the words ‘secret’, ‘crypto’, ‘covert’.

Example: Martin speaks of the possibility that they’ve been thrust into a “future that isn’t supposed to take form yet”. Several pages later he speaks of one of his own students who dreamed of words—Umbrella’d ambuscade. The student later found that ambuscade translates ‘ambushed’; he had dreamt “of a word he’d never encountered”. In both moments there is a future preceding the present thing that would make it possible. Future anterior.

The Umbrella’d ambuscade itself is puzzling. It’s nonsensical. There’s a kind of Joycean quality to it, this impossible wordplay—and so it’s unsurprising when Diana finally commits herself to a long free-form monologue, she turns right to Finnegan’s Wake, landing on a phrase that has haunted her. Ere the sockson locked at the dure. The phrase is generally interpreted, by Joyceheads, as being an allusion to the Saxon invasion (‘the Saxon locked the door’/‘the Saxon looked out the door’). This folds evocatively into the possibility, raised throughout the text, that The Silence’s apocalypse is a war scenario. Yet we’re never invited into the meaning of the phrase and Diana confesses her own confusion about its significance.

In these same passages Diana drops references to the arrow of time. In physics, time’s arrow is entropy. The universe is headed towards greater and greater disorder and randomness and, ultimately, heat death. Martin subjects his audience (and the reader) to a dirge of disciplines: “Thaumatology, ontology, eschatology, epistemology… Teleology, etiology, ontogeny, phylogeny”. The book is eschatological (it is explicitly apocalyptic) and it is a kind of thaumatology (the inexplicable doomsday is a sort of miracle, albeit one inverted). And it is about epistemology: not in the sense of knowing about the world, but instead of tracing of what happens when our systems complexify beyond our capacity to understand, much less control. Apocalypse here and now becomes equivalent to epistemological breakdown—civilization carried across to the very failure of language itself.

Poetry is perhaps the only zone where the limits of language are truly tested and probed, where it is pushed to the point where what cannot ever said can be, just for a moment, glimpsed. Tessa the poet, sitting in the bedroom of Diana’s apartment (she and Jim somehow survived their plane crash), thinks of her craft. “There is a poem she wants to work on, tomorrow… the first line bouncing around in her brain for a while. In a tumbling void”.

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis / The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore - On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973—Sometime after reading The Silence, I got it in my brain to try reading Lacan directly. I don’t know what synaptic misfire took me from the former to the latter since there’s no overt relationship there, but I’ve always had vague intuitions about this branch of psychoanalysis and a deep attraction (albeit filtered through my superficial understanding) to the concept of the Real. Plus I really wanted to know more about knots.

And so the month before last, I went down to the McNally Jackson Seaport and purchased The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The guy working the register was interested. Why was I reading Lacan? For whatever reason I felt a rush of embarrassment, mumbled something about Mao to him. He told me had tried to read Lacan recently as well. He also said he couldn’t make heads nor tails from it. It felt pointless, he said.

Each afternoon after work I’d amble down to the river, drink overpriced beers and watch the rolling waves move across the water, some pulled by the currents towards one another. They’d collide, temporarily shift form, then resume their trajectories (this is called ‘superposition of waves’). I’d try to read The Four Fundamental Concepts. The bookstore guy was right: this makes no sense. Everything slides about, the topic shifts sentence to sentence. Everytime I thought I was grasping something it slipped right through my fingers.

The only things I came away with were the things I already partially understood. The unconscious is structured like a language. Objet petit a. There’s also the gap—the breakdown of the signifying chain that discloses the still-veiled unconscious—which is a beautiful notion. Try as you might to have language disclose meaning, it is endlessly deferred or incomplete. There’s another wonderful bit where he writes that God belongs to Real—God, or something approximating a god (a final determing concept for all concepts or Great Mover of causes, is something that can never be assimilated into symbolization. This is pure negative theology, in the most extreme (but also traditional) sense of the word.

Encore (Seminar XX) made even less sense, but I enjoyed the reading experience much more. “The signifier is stupid”. “…love is the sign that one is changing discourses”. “…as long as things are said, the God hypothesis will persist”. “People do History precisely in order to make us believe that is has some meaning”.

We’re treated to a protracted discussion of phallic jouissance—that is, jouissance has been structured by the symbolic order—and jouissance that moves ‘beyond’, the jouissance that escapes the symbolic order and cruises towards the Real (this is at least how I’m reading it, potentially overdetermined by years in the Deleuzian trenches that I’ve now climbed from). This is a terrifying jouissance, it’s a matter of limits and rupture, and Lacan found it easiest to approach it through the mystical tradition. St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila—note that we’re back in the domain of negative theology—become the points of reference. Ecstatic mysteries, experiences of the divine as trembling libidinal terror and awe, felt not only in the mind and the soul but in the contours of the body itself.

Encore is also where we get (part of) the famous argument that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship. Will I keep reading Lacan? Maybe, but likely not anytime soon.

The Apple in the Dark—Clarice Lispector—Late last year was the time of a big Lispector kick, partly under the influence of Thomas Murphy. I loved The Hour of the Star (reviewed in November), and I was at first turned off, but came to greatly appreciate, Agua Viva (reviewed at the beginning of January). I had begun The Apple in the Dark immediately following Hour, but quickly hit a brick wall. The book was tense, the prose—while good—lacked the lush and seductive character of that later work. Hour was short: a brief tale of a young girl, impoverished and empty, who dies at the moment that hope arrives in her life. Her story swirls into and collapses into that of the narrator, the language bending and weaving itself into a delicate web of deceptively strong poetic firepower. Apple, by contrast, is dense and heavy. I had to chip away at it for months, returning to it repeatedly despite not wanting to.

Agua Viva takes the most abstract moment and ineffable moments of Hour and runs with them: a sense of plot and directionality is entirely evacuated. It’s a book about stripping things away: all the structured ornaments that hang about literature in a bid, perhaps a desperate one, to let words sing out upon themselves and nothing else. If the unconscious is structured like a language (see above), Lispector operates not only if that is a truism, but that the implied inverse is also real: that language brings the unconscious to the surface. Cutting down the pure base of one exposes the other to the light, but only if we allow that this is light is itself shadow.

Apple, on the other hand, felt burdened to me. There’s plot, a glacier-like pace, a moment by moment recounting of a man who has abandoned civilization, flown into a jungle exile, and happened upon a ranch populated with adversaries and kindred spirits. It confused me why Lispector called Apple the most personal of her novels, the one closest to her own sense of spirit.

After finally putting the book to bed after months of trying to pick away at it, I began to realize where it stands in relation to her later work, espcially Agua Viva. That book was an experiment to get beyond language through the use of language (the only way out is through), and Apple is where she sets that task out, not as a formal experiment, but as a plan of action. She approaches it disembodied through the ‘protagonist’, Martim, a man of the rational world—he’s an engineer—who removes himself from that world in order to exist on an elemental level. He’s the trees and the insects and the animals of the forest.

Consider what she said of the novel’s writing process:

Every morning I typed. I copied it eleven times to find out what I was trying to say, because I want to say something and I still don’t know for sure what. By copying I will understand myself.

And what becomes of Martim, near the novel’s end?

Martim was no longer asking the name of things. It was enough for him to recognize them in the dark. And to rejoice, awkward.

And then? Then, when he went back out into the brightness, he’d see the things he’d foreseen with his hand, and would see those things with their false names.

Unfinished Essay on Marx and Shakespeare—Kantbot—People are in for a treat when this thing drops. Did you know that Marx utilized English-language editions of Shakespeare to improve his command over the language while he was writing for The New York Daily Tribune?