by Lucy Ives
Roxanne is a retelling of Edmond Rostand’s popular 1897 play, Cyrano de Bergerac, itself a fanciful version of the life of Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655), a real person and early instance of that paradigmatic literary figure, the libertine. The libertine, recognizable since the seventeenth century, if not before, is usually thought to be a symptom of the emergence of democracy in France. This character hates society’s laws and loves the roiling dynamics of nature. Not content to acquiesce to the supposedly civilizing influence of Christian systems for the orderly reproduction of humanity (marriage, chastity, prohibition of crime), the libertine transgresses in the service of freedom—a freedom the libertine believes is perfectly natural and therefore good.
Cyrano is less overtly sexual and violent in his fictions than his eighteenth-century inheritors—Choderlos de Laclos, the Marquis de Sade, Crébillon fils, et al. A guy who wrote under a pseudonym, i.e., a shortened version of his own name, he poked fun at a degenerate aristocracy, adored the picaresque mode. His libertine tales are designed to convince readers of the beauty of intellectual and social independence; atheism, too, perhaps. He was an early science fiction writer and legendary with a sword. His best-known novel, Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon, an autofictional account of travels to outer space, is said to have influenced Jonathan Swift. It was published two years after his death.
As I was saying, when I began writing this novel, I thought of him or, rather, sort of thought of him. I thought of the fictional Cyrano invented by Rostand and of his need for a proxy to speak words of love, all of which I managed to associate with Steve Martin. But I wasn’t thinking about love, exactly, or, for that matter, Steve Martin. I was really only thinking about the proxy part of the situation, about writing, about a world in which it might be convenient not just to have such a proxy, but to be that proxy. That is the world I have created in Loudermilk, in which a proxy is not an accessory to a comedic plot resulting in happy marriage but rather the main event, the hollow hero we can’t look away from, though in truth we know little enough about him.
Loudermilk is a libertine. That much I can tell you. We encounter him during the academic year that leads up to the Swift Boat controversy of summer 2004, a mythological ruse that seems either to have altered American politics forever or to be the symptom of some other transformative event more difficult to name. This gambit followed, as we know, on the heels of a war waged to rid a foreign nation of a three-letter acronym.
Loudermilk is a figure of numbness, bravura, and excess, a fabulist who has appeared late enough in modernity and the history of democracy to be less at odds with the civilizing influence than, for example, Sade. Loudermilk has flirted with student government. He’s not, on the whole, terribly opposed to institutions. Loudermilk enjoys a good court battle and a nice contract. He likes to play with serious, bureaucratic stuff—and email. He’s friendly with administrators.
Indeed, Loudermilk’s self-generated status as a fake poet and fake person, with a name that seems like a joke, could be explained by the need to have easy access to sex and cash. However, if we take a closer look at Loudermilk, this explanation hardly seems sufficient. First, we know that Loudermilk is already rich; second, his carnal successes and apparent familiarity with socially acceptable forms of violence are unavoidably his own. Thus, Loudermilk’s wish to exist as a proxy for Harry’s writing, for Harry’s “voice,” cannot be explained with recourse to the well-known story about vice and the satisfaction of worldly needs. I emphasize this point because Loudermilk does so very much to make us believe that this is what he is up to. He makes us dream—fantasize, even—that he is taking advantage of Harry’s writing in order to “get” something, in order to obtain some freedom that he could not otherwise access.
But Loudermilk doesn’t need Harry to obtain pleasure or even power. Rather, Loudermilk does what he does because he can do it. He does what he does because the stakes of his chosen school are so bathetically low. He does what he does because of the existence of institutional structures that produce the illusion of self-expression, along with the related illusions of self-determination and liberty. Loudermilk does what he does in a society in which there is, allegedly, no “natural” audience for poetry—in which poetry and its audience must, necessarily, be invented by the institution. Loudermilk decides to participate in this game of invention on his own terms. If the institution wants to render Loudermilk’s self-expression false, a gesture accomplished merely in order to obtain a fellowship, then so be it! Loudermilk will go one step further: he will be already false, already a pastiche, already a construction.
Loudermilk, c’est moi.
But that is not all I have to say to you; otherwise, I would have written an opinion piece instead of a novel. The reason that this is a novel instead of an essay has to do with the nature of the libertine and what the libertine—always a fictional entity—makes possible. As I’ve attempted to suggest, the libertine is not just enticing and law-breaking; the libertine is a sort of philosophical construct. I’ve put him before you here precisely because he does not live in the sense in which you or I do. He is a figment of democracy, an ever-flourishing side effect of its ideals, a ghost whistling through databases and hovering over staff meetings. But although the libertine is not real, the entities that give rise to him (institutions, the law) have a vital and domineering reality. Far from being crushed by these, Loudermilk thrives on their banal hypocrisy, attempting to make it his own, an engine that drives him, a weird form of sex. Loudermilk comes after Sade and has gone one infinitesimally small step further than that great master of our pleasures. Loudermilk is an American and thus takes great pride in seeking petty advantage. He is also—and here is his greatest achievement—normal rather than perverse and, most perverse of all, on the whole, fairly average.
LUCY IVES
2018
Acknowledgments
This novel was something like a decade in the writing (I’m afraid it may even have been more). My first thanks go to college friends at the Harvard Advocate for Sunday-morning conversations regarding poetry that somehow came to form the basis of this book. You all know who you are; I wrote this for you. I also want to thank Andrew Durbin and Katy Lederer, who read very early versions of the manuscript during a time when I was struggling to understand it. What is here is different, and that is partly because of you. Thank you both for so kindly reading and listening to me. Thanks, too, to Eliot House, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Millay Colony for offering much-needed space and time as I pieced together a final draft. I would like to note that the writers and editors of The Atlantic of 2003 and 2004 furnished detailed and indelible language I mined to create Harry’s poems—and that Abraham Adams heroically watched Roxanne. Special thanks to the i-Vigilante/Subaru Wars club-band for a certain beautiful holiday.
I am very grateful to Chris Clemans, who is a literary agent, yes, but also a sort of kindred spirit and one of the best readers I have ever encountered.
Lastly, I would like to thank the inspired Yuka Igarashi and everyone at Soft Skull Press for their clarity, thoroughness, and enthusiasm for this project, which was born of a strange rage to tell a story about poetry and deception. Yuka: Thank you for helping me see how to do what I had for so long wanted to do. It seems like a miracle, but I have the sense that this is what you do every day.
LUCY IVES is the author of the novel Impossible Views of the World. Her writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, the Baffler, frieze, Granta, Lapham’s Quarterly, Vogue, and at newyorker.com. For five years she was an editor with the online magazine Triple Canopy. A graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a PhD in comparative literature from New York University. She currently teaches in the Image Text interdisciplinary MFA program at Ithaca College, as well as in NYU’s XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement Master’s program. She is the recipient of a 2018 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Gra
nt.