by Joshua Cohen
By contrast, the techniques that Lish imposed on his own fiction, and that he advocated for decades in the notorious non-MFA writing workshops he ran after leaving Knopf (workshops in which he mentored, among others, Amy Hempel, Christine Schutt, and Diane Williams), are considerably simpler to articulate. “Recursion” is Lish’s fancy term for unfancy “repetition”; “consecution” is a catch-all concept for the ways in which the grammatical or phonic qualities of a word, or the structure of a sentence, can be brought to bear on the choice of the word or the structure of the sentence that follows; “swerve,” meanwhile, is Lish’s method for frustrating “recursion” and “consecution,” by introducing into the body of a fiction a theme, or narrative vantage, which hadn’t been used before, and is not logically, structurally, or phonically expected. This trinity of techniques is so prevalent in Lish’s work as to read like a trinity of tics. Take the fiction entitled “The Practice of Everyday Life,” in which the recursion abounds, the consecution hinges on the polysemy of “come” and the opposition of “out loud” and “aloud,” while the swerve is accomplished with the belated identification of the narrator’s audience or occasion:
What is it? You think it’s me? If it’s me, then, okay, then I’m not arguing, then it’s me. But what I mean is am I just being too stippy-minded all of the time? Because some of the time I think I am all of the time being just too stippy-minded for my own good. Like take this word come which they use. How come it’s come? Didn’t you ever stop to think I don’t get it how come it’s come? How come people don’t say go? You know, I’m going, I’m going, I’m going! I just for once in my life would like to hear somebody screaming my God, my God, I’m going! Oh, but they can’t, can they? They say they’re going and you think they’re making a peepee. You say to somebody I’m going, the first thing they’re going to think about you is what are you doing, are you making a peepee? Remember when your mother said to you will you please for godsakes go already? Remember when your mother would stand outside the door and say to you I don’t have all day, so for godsakes will you please go already? My mother used to do that. My mother used to say make and go. Make was to, you know, make was for you to make a number two, whereas go, go meant do the other one. It was like make was like this productive thing, wasn’t it? You make and, presto, if you did it, you made something. There was like this poiesis involved. It was like taking a dump was like having this poiesis which was involved. Okay, I am just thinking my thoughts out loud. Or how about this—how about aloud? You don’t hear people saying aloud anymore. Who says aloud anymore? But so who’s in charge of these things like this—humanity saying out loud instead of saying aloud? Remember when everybody used to call it a Coney Island Red Hot? There were these places that sold you these frankfurters and they called them Coney Island Red Hots. Forget it. You’re not interested. I was just over at my friend Krupp’s.
Etc., etc., etc.—for another two pages.
Gary Lutz, a fiction writer and another of Lish’s former students, once described his teacher’s verbally verberating aesthetic as one “in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax.” He was particularly taken with Lish’s idea of consecution, while I myself am particularly taken with Lutz’s description of the idea of consecution as a “procedure by which one word pursues itself into its successor by discharging something from deep within itself into what follows” (italics mine).
* * *
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SITTING HERE IN MY BARCA, reading the Collected Fictions of Gordon Lish, I could be doing anything else. I could be describing my Barca, for one, the color and texture of its upholstery; I could be describing the room surrounding my Barca, for another; the room’s shelves and what is on them and how the items got there—but that would be literature and so a betrayal of Lish, for whom even furniture is made of language, and who would be more interested in whether I called the room’s other seating element a “sofa” or “couch” (“davenport”? “chesterfield”?) than in any of the tales I might tell of the people who have sat there.
But while Lish’s work can always be likened to self-pleasure, self-pleasure—mine and yours—cannot always be likened to Lish’s work. It is the person, however, the singular first person, that makes Lish’s inky spurting truly seminal. The first person, the ascendant voice of the past two centuries—from Dostoyevsky’s underground origins to Beckett’s authorial endgame—is today the shrillest voice of daily expression: the online overshare, the chat-window confessional. What once was literature—revelatory direct address—has become blogorrhea: the timestamped account of what happened this morning, of what our peeves and attractions are, of what we do to ourselves and one another by night. Lish was former laureate of that plaint, of its degrees of self-knowledge, its valences of tone. If Lish’s soliloquies have any counsel for today’s solipsistic culture it’s this: Every “I” will always be a fiction; every first person is the last person you were.
FROM THE DIARIES
FOUR FACTS I LEARNED IN A BAR ON STATEN ISLAND
In 1992, tuition at NYU was $15,620/year. In 1996, the starting salary of an associate at Lehman Brothers was $72,580/year. Since 2008, Budweiser has been owned by the Belgians. No one hires bankers over forty.
A SUCCESSFUL MAN IN CHICAGO IS COMPLIMENTED ON HIS SUIT
“This thing? This is the seventeenth suit I’ve ever owned!”
LIP SERVICE
ON ARETHA AND BEYONCÉ
TO BEGIN WITH, TWO VERY different women sang two very different songs. At Obama’s first inauguration, in 2009, Aretha Franklin sang “America,” aka “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” In 2013, at Obama’s second inauguration, Beyoncé sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Or did she? Which is to wonder, does lip-synching to your own recorded track (or, as the cable babblers put it, “prerecorded track”) really count as singing?
And so the controversy swelled, like horns through a swirling string section.
Let’s do away with the stupidities: Lip-synching to someone else’s recorded track is crazy fraud or hapless karaoke; lip-synching to your own recorded track, which is what Beyoncé did, makes sober professional sense, especially if you’re the opening act for one of the most widely broadcast events on the planet. Especially too if you’re performing outside, where it’s hard to hear your live backing band and the January temperature is just north of freezing—voices chap and crack before the skin does.
About Aretha’s performance, I have nothing bad to say. It’s true that she’s older than she used to be (who isn’t?) and that she lacks the energy she used to have (who doesn’t?), but she’s still as brilliant as it gets, the best American singer since, at least, the invention of the wax cylinder phonograph. Most critics attribute Aretha’s preeminence to a combination of her voice’s natural flexibility and her mastery of tonal inflection (the smoky turning sweet, the sweet turning tart and ironic); others cite her sensitivity to “word-painting” (to making “sound-pictures” of the lyrics, as in when she extends the word “freedom” into “free—freedom—freeeedom,” or the phrase “let it ring” into “let it ree-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-reeng,” tolling out the blue notes). All of this is true. But what’s incredible is how she’s been able to maintain that preeminence, namely by ensuring that she keeps the essence of her voice the same even as her range—her vocal register, once gigantic—has diminished. Singers tend to find their tension toward the upper echelons of their registers, and many like to pretend they’re having difficulties hitting a high note they can confidently hit, in order to bring a sense of drama to the proceedings—to turn the song into a struggle. Aretha never used to do that too much—perhaps out of pride or perhaps because, like Annie Oakley, she could hit anything. But now that she can’t, the difficulties are apparent—the difficulties are real, and so the drama’s real too. The notes might be lower but the stakes are higher.
Beyoncé’s performance held its own fascinations. I’m sure it would’ve sounded just a
s engineered and glossy if she’d been singing live. She is that type of professional. She has managed her life. Not for her (or not yet) Aretha’s multiple bad marriages, bad record deals, weight issues, and alcoholism. That said, even with all her diva-control, Beyoncé definitely ended up with the worse song. “America” is a regal hymn, whose tune derives from the Commonwealth anthem “God Save the Queen,” or “King,” depending on who’s reigning. “The Star-Spangled Banner,” by contrast, is bombastic anacreontic macaronic pseudomartial beer hall music.
Beyoncé loosened up midway, after “the bombs bursting in air,” when she abruptly tugged out her in-ear monitor, which apparently was giving her problems. This, I have to say, took a brass vagina, or whatever the female equivalent is of burnished metal balls. It also made her more casual and you could tell from her face, or I convinced myself I could tell, that, having given herself a taste of “free—freedom—freeeedom,” she wanted more. She wanted to be able to embellish on the spot and let the moment guide her glissandi. Instead, out of respect for the presidency or for the 20.6 million who were spectating, she was condemned to sing along to the recording exactly as she’d made it, in a session with the Marine Band the night before. What this was, then, was a lesson not just in the glories of spontaneity, but in the ways in which one can become locked into certain ways of performing, which is to say, locked into certain ways of being, which might appear more safe or reassuring initially, but are actually more dangerous and limiting when put into practice. It’s a lesson that Obama himself might’ve benefitted from, when considering the national security policies of his second term.
WIKI:
WHAT I KNOW IS
W. I. K. I.
What. I. Know. Is.
What I Know Is: I would like to address the topic of knowledge in the novel.
What I Know Is: That to address the topic of knowledge in the novel is also to address the topic of knowledge outside the novel.
What I Know Is: This is inevitable, going outside.
What I Know Is: The seasons are changing to fall.
What I Know Is: A “wiki” is a site that is collaboratively created by its users.
What I Know Is: I found this out online.
What I Know Is: My search for the definition of the word “wiki” took all of .54 of a second, though my reading of the search results took longer (took so much longer that it’s still ongoing).
There is a lesson to be derived from this.
Now more than ever we must insist on differentiating between being able to know something and actually knowing it.
This difference can be calculated in time.
But not only in time. And the difference doesn’t have to be calculated.
* * *
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WHAT I KNOW IS: Sometime in the spring of 2007, a friend of mine was traveling in Germany and, after visiting me in Berlin, made a pilgrimage—as is customary for Americans, and for Jews, and I’m sure for many other types of people—to the site of the former Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar. Writing me about the experience once he’d returned to the States, he said he’d found the exhibitions at Buchenwald to be “painstakingly accurate and tasteful.”
What I Know Is: About a decade later I was back in the States myself and sleepless and struggling to write an obituary of Imre Kertész, the Hungarian-language, Germany-residing Nobelist, and a survivor of the Buchenwald camp. In the course of my research I made a pilgrimage—as is customary for journalists on deadline—to the Buchenwald wiki, which described the postwar renovation of the camp into a memorial and museum as having been “painstakingly accurate and tasteful.” In other words, the wiki for Buchenwald—in the edit by a user named Redactosaurus—described Buchenwald in the very same words as did my friend.
What I Know Is: There are only four conclusions to come to: 1) Either my friend read the wiki and unconsciously plagiarized its description, or 2) my friend read the wiki and consciously plagiarized its description, or 3) my friend wrote the wiki and so was merely plagiarizing himself, under the username Redactosaurus, or—the last conclusion—4) given the ten-year gap between identical quotations, this was all just a very strange coincidence.
What I Know Is: “Painstakingly accurate and tasteful.”
What I Know Is: Strange.
I never know whom to trust.
And I can’t help but wonder whether you trust any of what I’ve just told you.
* * *
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WHAT I KNOW IS: I now have the same mistrust for news that I used to have for novels.
What I Know Is: Technology has made both more “unreliable.”
All books today are digitized—at least all books that are written today are digitized, novels very much included. They’re lumped into the matrices with all the other content. “A piece of prose is a piece of prose is a piece of prose,” as Gertrude Stein might, or might not, have written, depending on what site you read.
Contemporary scholars, then, with just the click of a key, can tell you which German or Hungarian or Holocaust survivor or YA author uses the most adjectives, or adverbs, per sentence, per paragraph, on average, or when split infinitives were a thing, or not a thing, in Anglo-American prose (by women of color, whose first editions sold over ten thousand copies). The study of novels, especially, is becoming, or has already become, the study of data. Every Dickens novel has been mined. Every Dickens character described as having a very short nose, or a very long nose, or a very twisted nose, has been tagged. Deconstruction—unconscious betrayal, or betrayal by the unconscious—is for the microchips now.
That said, it’s also a fact that novelists have access to the same tools as do the academics, and can act preemptively in their own defense. Novelists can search through their own texts and eliminate repetitions, fixations, manias—they, we, can obliterate our own subliminal thoughts in the hopes of forestalling the psychologizing of readers intent not on pleasure but on profiling.
This double act—the academic or critic using technology to drill into the psyche of the writer, the writer using the same technology to frustrate that drilling—results in a curious double bind: Who, here, is doing the censoring?
If I know that all of my words might one day not be read consecutively, or even read at all, but merely treated as an etymological, syntactical, and grammatical, tranche, to be analyzed and monetized by search algorithms, wouldn’t the honorable response be to try to sabotage that system and write against its parameters—which is to say, to plagiarize, or not to write at all?
BOUNDLESS INFORMANT
ON GREENWALD’S SNOWDEN
FIRST, COLLECT ALL THE DETAILS you can on everyone you’ve ever encountered—this will serve to “alienate” or “dehumanize” them, and turn them into “characters.” Second, search this trove for connections among the characters—links of behavior, temperament, ideology, vocabulary—because it’s the connections that make a plot. Third, settle on the character with the most or just most interesting of those links to narrate the plot, or to be narrated through it by an omniscient third person. This is how you write a novel. This is also how you operate an intelligence agency.
The NSA is a thoroughly modern organization. Its techniques are those of Kafka—who anonymized his suspects under the alias “K” and extended to them only the presumption of guilt—and of Nabokov, who venerated artifice, loathed psychology, and insisted that the role of the novelist was that of a “wizard” or “puppet-master,” tugging the strings and making the characters dance. A more direct association might be made with Joyce’s Ulysses, which so intensely monitors Leopold Bloom that he seems less a person than a welter of metadata about Dublin, June 16, 1904.
Modernism has always sought to impose form and structure—and so fate—on a character, as opposed to letting it arise out of a character’s essential “nature.” Today we are nothing if not characters a
cting out the roles of our lives for the reading and rewriting of our intelligence minders, but what makes our predicament postmodern is that we know it. Confirmation has come courtesy of the journalist Glenn Greenwald and his source, the NSA contractor of conscience Edward Snowden, a character so decent that John le Carré or Frederick Forsyth would’ve blushed before conceiving him.
Greenwald’s No Place to Hide is a hybrid, beginning as an airport thriller recounting the author’s contact with Snowden and ending as a course text on the global amassment of digital communication. Like many thrillers, and like many course texts, it seems to be the work of a committee. Though Greenwald’s is the only name on the cover, the NSA deserves its credit too. Almost the entire latter half of the book consists of charts and graphs made by that agency and obtained by Snowden; when it comes to PowerPoint presentations, America remains second to none.
Throughout both halves, Greenwald, a civil rights lawyer by training, invokes the First Amendment as a guarantee of his right to interpret the Fourth—the Constitution’s protection against warrantless search and seizure, adopted in response to the writs of assistance, which licensed the British to occupy and confiscate the property of colonists. A cloud born of server clusters, traffic through underwater cables and satellites in orbit—such is the contemporary condition of what that amendment so quaintly calls our “houses, papers, and effects.”
In December 2012, Greenwald—who has lived in Brazil with his partner, David Miranda, since 2004, in protest of U.S. antipathy toward same-sex marriage—receives an email from “Cincinnatus,” a cybernym that promises vague disclosures; all Greenwald has to do is install the encryption software PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) on his laptop. But Greenwald, perpetually on deadline, blows him off.