by Joshua Cohen
The book is dedicated, however, “for E.”
V and E (no relation)? Or V.E. (as in the Day, May 8, 1945)? Neither. Both.
W, or The Memory of Childhood is not as convolutedly arranged as the vowel-voided masterpiece that preceded it and certainly plainer in plan than the masterpiece that followed: La Vie mode d’emploi (Life, a User’s Manual, 1978). The basic tenet here is alternation. The “W” sections—the purported fictions of Perec the child, “made literary” by Perec the adult—are presented in italics in odd-numbered chapters. The autobiographical sections—the purported facts of Perec the child, “made correct” by Perec the adult—are presented in roman in even-numbered chapters. And that’s it, ostensibly. Absent is all the author’s most notorious trickery: the predetermined chapter lengths and character groupings (in every sense of the word “character”), the cycling of settings and even of activities (eating, sleeping, art-creation, ménages à trois, and more)—all that listmaking, author-as-martyr-to-data craziness for which Perec was venerated even before he died of cancer at age forty-five.
* * *
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FORTY-FIVE WORDS:
Today, all survivors of atrocities are expected to “testify” or to “bear witness,” as if after having been deprived of every other trapping of civilization the last token to be taken from them must be their imaginations—their privileges of self-reinvention, and even of self-doubt.
Page 45 of W:
“Most of them are swallowed up by the sea in the first three or four hours, but some kind of hope gives certain survivors the strength to live on for days, weeks even. A few years ago, one such was found more than five thousand miles away from where he had been shipwrecked, lashed to a barrel, half eaten away by seasalt […]”
Perec’s books are among the greatest to have been written about the Holocaust, chiefly because the Holocaust barely appears in them. Or barely appears in them as anything but a system. A pitiless, constantly operating system that converts humans into fictions. Into self-fictionalizing fictions.
Perec/Peretz in Hebrew——happens to be the root of such words as “break,” “breach,” “gush,” “spurt,” “jet of water.”
AUTO-FLNEURISM
ON TOM MCCARTHY
A NOVEL CHARACTER EMERGED FROM THE mists of Second Empire France and roamed the boulevards of Romantic culture, seeking to connect their disparate objects and events into the cohesive beauty that technologized urban life was proposing as elusive. This man was Baudelaire’s flâneur, but not only—this master of accents and disguises, this master of personas. In depressing St. Petersburg he was the anonymous hero of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. In depressing Kristiania, he was the anonymous hero of Hamsun’s Hunger. He was Malte Laurids Brigge, lonely in Paris, in Rilke’s Notebooks. He was Antoine Ronquentin, lonely in Bouville, which is a city so forlorn that it doesn’t even exist, except in Sartre’s Nausea. It took Walter Benjamin—a Marxist German Jew who’d spent WWI translating Baudelaire—to sense this man’s pale precarity and sadness, and to sense them as being kindred to his own, and endemic to a type. He decided that all these narrator-characters separately wandering through cities as if their cities were already books weren’t quite aesthetically aimless, but desperate—for meaning, for money; they were casualties of capitalism feverishly scavenging the marketplaces for discarded old symbols to link together again and sell back to the public as new.
WWII spared this type, but left the metropoleis in rubble. Many of the best avatars went abroad—as W. G. Sebald did, leaving Germany for England. All of Sebald’s books were narrated by solitary German émigrés virtually indistinguishable in biography from the author himself, who tramped through multilingual archives, libraries, museums, and cemeteries, to collect materials on the history of Germany’s war crimes for use in essays that faded in and out of fiction; some of it original, some of it appropriated from earlier, which is to say guiltless, writers from the German margins, like Kafka (Jewish), Adalbert Stifter (an Austrian chronicler of the countryside), and Robert Walser (a Swiss writer who spent much of his life institutionalized), whose sentences Sebald adapted without acknowledgment. These silent borrowings were frequently accompanied—antiillustrated—by black-and-white photographs that the author or his surrogates collected on rambles and were unable, or unwilling, to caption.
Since Sebald’s death in 2001 his influence has only grown, especially outside of Germany—rather, especially in countries that fought Germany, and remained fascinated by its madness. To be sure, it’s Sebald’s techniques that are thriving—his pondering of a set of facts in situ, as a means of interpreting himself—while his preoccupation with the Holocaust has been transposed to more-current crises. It helps, on a first reading of Sebald, to have already read your Benjamin, and Adorno, Wittgenstein, and Freud. But it doesn’t help, on a first reading of Sebald’s heirs—say Geoff Dyer, Teju Cole, and Ben Lerner—to have already read your Sebald. Their books come off as too weak to shoulder the comparison, as the writer-narrators—who share traits if not also names with their authors—practice backpacker-flânerie through the major capitals in the style not of exile but of tourism or study-abroad. Certainly Dyer’s Jeff (in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi), Cole’s Julius (in Open City), and Lerner’s Adam (in Leaving the Atocha Station) and Ben (in 10:04) are still doing the most serious work of trying to patch a creative self out of the strangers they meet and the artworks they experience, and the way they go about it is often intelligent (Lerner), compassionate (Cole), and droll (Dyer). Still, all of those books of self-alienation through travel are suffused with the shaming suspicion that a ticket home will always be available—even if that’s only because everywhere in the world can feel like “home,” or much of it has been homogenized to resemble it, at least. But globalization isn’t the novelist’s fault, or not completely.
Further complicating this generational transition are computers, which make getting lost or losing touch nearly impossible and the occupation of symbol-scrounging more efficient: Online is the ultimate semiotic trash-heap, and, given its ubiquity, its corruption of the imagination appears absolute. There’s just too much of everything to repackage for a writer to still be bothering to invent. This, finally, is the theme of Satin Island, a trenchant travesty of the Sebald genre by Tom McCarthy, the British avatar of the transnational writer-in-residence avant-garde.
Satin Island opens in Turin—rather, at its airport, Torino-Caselle. The narrator—the browser or curator of this tricksy text—is referred to only as U. This man with the second-person name is a British anthropologist employed by a consulting company called the Company to advise on branding issues, most recently for the undefined Koob-Sassen Project. (This has to be a reference—and online supports my hunch—to Hilary Koob-Sassen, a multimedia artist friend of McCarthy’s and the son of Saskia Sassen, the Dutch sociologist who coined the academic/PR term “global city.”) U. is stuck idle at the gate, without a plane to board; U.K.-bound airspace is closed due to an unidentified private jet flying rogue. He cracks his laptop and wastes his wait by searching—which means delivering a mini-disquisition on—the Shroud of Turin, with a vehemence that suggests his regret at not having visited the relic offscreen. He contemplates Jesus’s crown of thorns and likens its shape to that of a hub airport. He searches “hub airport,” and educates himself, and so the reader, on how the most convenient terminals are designed like wheels, whose spokes facilitate “communion between any two spots […] despite no direct line connecting [them].” Further clicked links tell him and so tell us that the hub model is used “in fields ranging from freight to distributed computing.” A childhood memory intervenes: U. recalls coasting his bicycle downhill and being unnerved by the property of backpedaling: “that you could move one way while rotating the crank in the opposite direction contravened my fledgling understanding not only of motion but also of time.” He feels this way again now, despite being older a
nd grounded: “the same awkward sense of things being out of sync, out of whack.”
As the pages mount, no true plot unfolds, though the circular meme keeps expanding: Crowns/hubs/bicycle wheels morph into pools of oil, jellyfish, deployed parachutes, and the tawaf (or the circumambulations of Muslims around the Ka’aba), and though each symbolic correspondence is attached to its own incident in the news—an oil spill, and the case of a skydiver who died of a sabotaged chute—none involve U. as anything other than a witness to the cycle, a victim of the mechanization of the associative mind. Pursuing media patterns compels him to create “Present Tense Anthropology™,” a discipline he has the patience to proprietize, but not to develop. And it keeps recommending, but also frustrating, topics for the “Great Report,” which the Company has commissioned to be “The Document, the Book, the First and Last Word on our Age.” Needless to say, U. will never finish writing it. Or he will and this is it. Or, perhaps, all of Satin Island is just the result of a flaw in the file’s transmission—in the way that its title reproduces how the words “Staten Island” appeared to U. in a dream. A roughly round spit of land whose vast garbage dump is now defunct: U. becomes obsessed with this most maligned of boroughs, but, while in New York to deliver a lecture, never makes time to hop the ferry for a visit.
FROM THE DIARIES
THE ONLY CARAVAGGIO IN RUSSIA
B keeps insisting that this painting at the Odessa Museum is the only Caravaggio in Russia, though Odessa isn’t in Russia and the painting’s not a Caravaggio.
MY FRIEND’S ESTIMATION OF HIS GRANDFATHER, A FORGOTTEN HUNGARIAN PAINTER
“It was like he’d only seen, seen and misunderstood, one Cubist painting in all of his life—one day, as if by accident, in Paris—before returning directly to Budapest and attempting to imitate it. Rather, before returning directly to Budapest and attempting to nationalize it. To make Cubism Hungarian. For him that was enough.”
THE DEATH OF CULTURE, AND OTHER HYPOCRISIES
ON MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
I CALL IT THE NEWSPAPER PROBLEM: About a decade ago I wrote an essay on contemporary poetry for a newspaper that will remain nameless and had the occasion to quote a line by “Eliot.” The editor sent back many changes, the most minor but telling of which was that the quotation was now attributed to “the English poet T. S. Eliot.” Vaguely piqued, I asked what the editor was trying to clarify: Was he afraid readers wouldn’t realize the quotation came from a poem? Or was he afraid readers might confuse the Eliot who wrote it with, say, George Eliot, the pseudonymous author of Middlemarch? Anyway, I noted that the “English” qualifier was misleading: Though T. S. Eliot had taken British citizenship, he’d been born in America. The editor, then, sent on another suggestion: “the American-born English poet T. S. Eliot.” I, having lost all the patience I had as a twenty-something-year-old, replied by modifying that tag to: “the American-born, British-citizen English-language poet, essayist, dramatist, teacher, publisher, and bank teller Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965),” after which the editor finally got the point and canceled the assignment.
Of course, it’s tempting, even now, to keep spinning that description out, into “cuckold, chain smoker, cat fancier, and anti-Semite”—not just to have my revenge, but also to demonstrate how culture works or doesn’t. I can’t help suspecting that if I were writing a decade or so in the future I would be expected—despite all information being findable online—to explain what a “bank teller” or “publisher” was, not to mention what it once meant to write criticism, as opposed to a consumer review.
Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society is a nonfiction diatribe by Mario Vargas Llosa, or (should I say) by the Spanish-language Peruvian novelist, lapsed Catholic, last living public face of the Latin American “boom,” and 2010 Nobel laureate in literature Mario Vargas Llosa, the author of over two dozen previous books. The subject of this one is “our” lack: of common culture, or common context, common sets of referents and allusions, and a common understanding of who or what that pronoun “our” might refer to anymore, now that even papers of record have capitulated to individually curated channels and algorithmicized feeds. Notes begins with a survey of the literature of cultural decline, focusing on Eliot’s “Notes Toward the Definition of Culture,” before degenerating into a series of squibs—on Islam, online, the preeminence of sex over eroticism, and the spread of “the yellow press”—most of which began as columns in the Spanish newspaper El País. All of which is to say that Vargas Llosa’s cranky, hasty manifesto is made of the very stuff it criticizes: journalism.
Vargas Llosa’s opening essay reduces its Eliotic urtext to its crassest points, but my own version here must be crasser: After all, I have six browser tabs open and my phone has been beeping all day. Eliot defines culture as existing in, and through, three different spheres: that of the individual, the group or class, and the entire rest of society. Individuals’ sensibilities affiliate them with a group or class, which doesn’t have to be the one they’re born into. That group or class proceeds to exercise its idea of culture on society as a whole, with the elites—the educated and artists, in Eliot’s ideal arrangement—leveraging their access to the media and academia to influence the tastes of the average citizen, and of the next generation too. As for what forms the individual, it’s the family, and the family, in turn, is formed by the Church: “It is in Christianity that our arts have developed,” Eliot writes; “it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have—until recently—been rooted.”
“Until recently” refers to the year of Eliot’s essay’s publication: 1943. Vargas Llosa departs from there, to examine the work of George Steiner, whose 1971 book In Bluebeard’s Castle was a caustic reply to Eliot, from the perspective of the counterculture, which both Steiner and Vargas Llosa define as “postculture.” In Steiner’s account, which, again, I’ll have to abridge, the post-Napoleonic supremacy of the European bourgeoisie caused culture to fall into tedium and decadence, becoming the outlet for the “transcendence” formerly promised by religion, only now transmuted into the form of “explosive, cataclysmic violence” (the quotes are Vargas Llosa’s). “For Steiner,” Vargas Llosa writes, “European culture did not simply anticipate but it also desired the prospect of a bloody and purging explosion that took shape in revolutions and in two world wars. Instead of stopping these blood baths, culture desired to provoke and celebrate them.” In other words, God died as the last casualty of the Napoleonic Wars, and the wars of the century that followed laid waste to the human. What remains is the reign of what Vargas Llosa calls “the spectacle”: techno-entertainment and capital.
So, a history that begins with Eliot’s Anglo-American expatriate striving proceeds through refugee German-Jewish anxiety and ends with the communist, poststructuralist French: Guy Debord. Now we’re ready for what used to be called, with colonial scorn, the fringes, the frontier: South America. But instead of pointing out that the most interesting literary culture on the planet, post-1968, was being made by Cortázar (Argentina), Donoso (Chile), Fuentes (Mexico), García Márquez (Colombia), Puig (Argentina), and, hey, himself, Vargas Llosa instead mourns the lack of an audience, as if novels ever could, or should, make the same box office as a blockbuster.
It’s here, in the essay “The Civilization of the Spectacle,” that Vargas Llosa falls into contradiction—exhorting more people to read more, even while decrying the deleterious effects of “democratization”:
This is a phenomenon born of altruism: Culture could no longer be the patrimony of an elite; liberal and democratic society had a moral obligation to make culture accessible to all, through education and through promoting and supporting the arts, literature and other cultural expression. This commendable philosophy has had the undesired effect of trivializing and cheapening cultural life, justifying superficial form and content in works on the grounds of fulfilling a civic duty to reach the greatest number.
But Varga
s Llosa doesn’t stop at that. Later in this essay he notes: “It is not surprising therefore that the most representative literature of our times is ‘light,’ easy literature, which, without any sense of shame, sets out to be—as its primary and almost exclusive objective—entertaining.” And if you need more to file under the Grumpy Old Novelists rubric: “Chefs and fashion designers now enjoy the prominence that before was given to scientists”; “The vacuum left by the disappearance of criticism has been filled, imperceptibly, by advertising”; “Today…people usually play sports at the expense of, and instead of, intellectual pursuits”; “Today, the mass consumption of marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, crack, heroin, etc., is a response to a social environment that pushes men and women toward quick and easy pleasure.”
Even if Vargas Llosa is correct, there’s a difference between being correct and being stylish. The psychology’s too obvious, applicable equally to a novelist as to a reader: To complain about the death of culture is to complain about dying yourself. It’s a displacement of mortality. Vargas Llosa turned eighty in 2016. I take no joy in kicking an old man when he’s down. I’d rather reread his earlier books, and remember how his character Zavalita expressed rage—expressed Vargas Llosa’s previously productive rage—in Conversation in the Cathedral: “He was like Peru, Zavalita was,” Vargas Llosa wrote there, because Peru and Zavalita had both “fucked up somewhere along the line.”
But where? When was the fuckup? Vargas Llosa’s novels have never hesitated to traffic in the same high-low blend he now bemoans. It’s impossible to think of the way the narration is split among cadets at a military school in The Time of the Hero, or the way the teeming jungle causes timelines to mix in The Green House, without thinking of film; it’s impossible to recall Vargas Llosa’s stint as a TV talk-show host without finding its fictionalization in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, later adapted for the screen itself; Who Killed Palomino Molero? and Death in the Andes owe much of their plotting to noir. And then there’s the lowest, the nadir: politics. Vargas Llosa, abjuring the inevitable socialism of his youth, ran unsuccessfully as a pro-American candidate for the Peruvian presidency in 1990; The Feast of the Goat and The Dream of the Celt are rife with intellectuals who deign the compromises of diplomacy and dine out at the laden tables of neoliberalism.