Longer Views (34 page)

Can I think of half a dozen works written in this century of the same length that are as brilliantly structured? Camus's
La Chute
, Davenport's
The Dawn in Erewhon
. . . .

But these are Russ's esthetic peers.

9. “What shall I do with this body I've been given?” asks Mandelstam. When, one wonders, was the last time he asked it? In his cramped Petersberg apartment? or in the death camp where, near mad, the elements and ideology killed him . . .?

10. At 1:45, just before we were ready to go down to Port Authority to catch the 2:45 bus up to Amherst, Dennis stood at our New York kitchen window, looking out at the snow dropping toward Amsterdam Avenue, five stories below. “To think, I used to sleep outside in that shit.”

Me: “That must have been fun.”

Dennis: “Yeah, it was so much fun, I'm gonna get a snow-making machine for my room.”

How much context is needed to make sense of such ironies?

11. A poetic bestiary: Rilke's swan and panther, Moore's buffalo, moose, snail, fish, and jellyfish; Bishop's fish, rooster, and moose; and Davenport's medusa. To read them all one after another is to reinvest with energy and incision the range of sensual relations between the animal and the natural.

12. “Public life on television is more real than private life in the flesh,” explains a character from the sound track of Cronenberg's unsettlingly astute
Videodrome
, shortly before he undergoes a negative industrial birth in which his belly swallows a gun. But the fact is, public life—the life known, understood, and finally constituted by society—has always felt
more satisfying than private life. That's what lies behind the conflict thrashing at the center of Romanticism to render private life public.

13. The decade of the eighteen-sixties gave us three extraordinary novels. All of them could be described as turning on a single theme—the republican revolutions that had wracked the century so far in France, Germany, and Italy:

Hugo's
Les Misérables
.

Flaubert's
L'Education Sentimentale
.

Verne's
20,000 lieues sous la mer
.

All read in the same month—what a dialogue they construct with one another!

14. I am the sweeping tapestry of my sensory and bodily perceptions. I am their linguistic reduction and abstraction, delayed and deferred till they form a wholly different order, called my thought. I am, at the behest and prompting of all these, my memory—which forms still another order. I am the emotions that hold them together. Webbing the four, and finally, I am the flux and filigree of desire around them all.

Perhaps, though, I am only the interpretation of all of them—that I call reality. (Do I write with my pen? Does another daemon hold the pen and write with it?) Am I the sexual surge and ebb that cannot quite be covered by any of the above, but that impinge on all the others and often drown them? What of the bodily apparati in general, as they fall, pleasingly or painfully, into the net of myself? I am always an animal excess to the intellectual system that tries to construct me. I am always a conscious sensibility in excess of the animal construction that is I. And that is why I am another, why my identity is always other than I.

15. “Things are more like they are today than they have ever been before,” announced American President Dwight D. Eisenhower during one of his '50s terms of office. And in 1989, on first reaching the Peruvian Altoplano, American artist Gregory William Frux remarked: “Sure is alto. Sure is piano.” Reams have been written explicating the remark of German philosopher Martin Heidegger: “Nothing nothings.” And on more than one occasion I have been known to remind my daughter: “Remember, no matter where you go, there you are.”

16. Laura Bohannan's delightful 1966 essay, “Shakespeare in the Bush,” while it makes some interesting cross-cultural points, seems to me to work even better as a kind of sf parable about discourse and rhetoric—specifically what happens when certain rhetorical figures are moved from one discursive field to be read within another.

The parable dramatizes what happens to the “universal appeal” of
Hamlet
when its plot is retold in a culture in which the sort of borderline sibling incest Claudius and Gertrude indulge is not only acceptable, but
de rigueur
, where, though magic is quite real, the concept of a ghost is unknown, and where there is no distinction between a scholar and a witch; where strict moral proscriptions preclude all intergenerational violence—and madness is always the result of witchcraft.

Even a cursory review of the plot will reveal that
Hamlet
, retold within such a discursive matrix, is a very different story from the one told in Anglo-European culture. In fact it is arguable that, within such a discursive matrix, the story we know as Hamlet cannot be told at all.

The question becomes interesting, however, when we start to explore the metalanguage necessary to begin translating one set of discursive assumptions, codes, and expectations into another. Such language is “theory.” And, generally speaking, theory must proceed with extreme care, at great slowness, and must risk being rhetorically, at least at the beginning, even more incomprehensible than the rhetoric it is being used to explain.

17. . . . Every day I read a little French because it is such a pretty language. Does that make me a rascal? and then I can't help walking around every day, a bit, in the winter countryside. Does that prove I am indifferent to a great deal of suffering?—Robert Walser, Letter to Hesse, November 15, 1917.

The sheer bulk of John Addington Symonds's letters—three eight-hundred-fifty-plus-page volumes—suggests a totality they do not, alas, possess. While it's true that scarcely a month goes by, between Symonds's 14th year (1854) and his death from tuberculosis at his home in the Zauberberg country of Devos at age fifty-three (1893), that is not represented by two, three, or more substantial epistles, the totality of his life is still not to be had from these often informative, deeply moving, and frequently brilliant missives—if only because letters do not provide such totality.

The editors seem to have been taken in by the illusion of that totality as much as anyone. One senses it all through their astute and often revealing commentary. In the “Biographical Introduction” we find them writing, “Gustavus Bosanquet [Symonds's adolescent playmate] readily saw the humorous and the comic in life, a capacity which in Symonds seems deficient in his published work no matter how often personal accounts in other people's (like H. G. Dakyns's and T. E. Brown's) letters have stressed it” (p. 31) . . . as though a man may not be jolly in person and serious when he writes—even letters.

Or, again, when pooh-poohing Symonds's later protestations that he was miserable during his school days at Harrow because “[t]he letters to
his family written during this period contain fewer complaints than letters written by most adolescents away from home for the first time,” and thus (they decide) it was only in retrospect that Symonds's Harrow days seemed miserable to him (p. 32) . . . as though a brilliant, sensitive, gay child must of necessity commit all the details of his misery to the letters he writes to his father and sister at home.

As a child, I went to a summer camp where all outgoing letters were read by the camp director and all incoming letters were read to the campers by this same tyrannical woman—which simply made it impossible to communicate to parents about either the emotional or the material horrors of the place; and I can recall as an adult in my thirties writing a letter to a very good friend, while a somewhat deranged lover of mine wandered about the apartment wrapped in a sheet and threatening suicide—I had to stop writing to argue a knife out of his hand. But, when, a day later, I resumed the letter, the incident did not go into it, because the letter had begun—and therefore, even though I was writing to a very good friend, was obliged to end—concerned with other things. The incident of the sheet and the knife never made it into my most personal journal, either—because the same lover had a habit of browsing through those notebooks and, if he found any reference to himself, became furiously angry.

The incident has never ended up, through any transformation, in my fiction—because the man dreaded both the publicity and the distortion such a transformation represented as much as he dreaded anything else in the world, and he repeatedly drew promises from me that I would never use anything in his unhappy life in a fictive rendering.

But the conversations we had that day shook me to the bottom of my being; and they informed me about depths of human misery I have never been able to forget; and that meant that I who finished that letter was not I who had begun it. But though it was a most personal letter, I doubt any of what I learned in the midst of writing it showed in its text—although what I learned of personal despair and fear that day still informs the whole of my life, more than a decade on.

This is as close as the incident has gotten—or will ever get—to becoming a text . . . far closer than it ever got to any text written at the time.

The larger point is, however, that letters—especially the letters of someone who writes a great many of them—only play in one section of the personal spectrum (different, of course, for each of us).

But when they play there as deftly and articulately as Symonds's letters play, perhaps the editors can be forgiven for feeling they have been privy to the range, harmonies, and scale of the “whole” man, and that all claims that he was other than the letters present him (even at the very
hour of their writing) must be taken as errors—rather than as additions or expansions.

As letters play in one range, journals and diaries play in another; and the material of fiction plays in another still. It is hard to explain to any researcher—whose relation to writing is often very different from the titanic relations to the written held by the researched subject—that precisely in the real and obsessive writer, none of these ranges is privileged.

To be sure, overlaps between ranges occur.

But even that does not mean the whole scale is ever completely—is ever any more than partially—filled in.

For even with the most assiduous practitioner of all the intra- and extra-literary genres (letters, journals, memoirs), he or she still experiences the vast majority of her or his life outside language written to friends, spoken to friends, to the self, or to the public. Thus the researcher must never forget that the researcher's purpose, no matter how much material present itself, must always lean toward an understanding of something in excess of the material.

Should we call it discourse . . .?

18. Yesterday, to make sense of a Sherlock Holmes story, my daughter had to look up the word “beeswing” in the OED, and discovered it meant the film forming on wine after it's stood out a goodly while.

19. Essex Hemphill notes (in
Ceremonies
, p. 39) that when viewing Mapplethorpe's “Man in Polyester Suit,” it is impossible “to avoid confronting issues of exploitation and objectification.” That body without a head, in which the hands alone tell us the body is black, with its big, flaccid cock loose from its fly, masked in a suit that, through the title, carries the connotations of white working class tackiness, if it cannot call up such questions, is just not doing its job. The disingenuously cool, racially neutral title works to that end:
You
bring up the racial questions, it all but instructs the viewer. Some thoughts, however, after reading Kobena Mercer on Mapplethorpe in
Transition
51: what Mercer misses (or doesn't quite hold on to) is that Mapplethorpe's photos, especially in
The Black Book
, sit on a particularly troublesome border. They are art photographs. But they are saturated with the visual rhetoric—smooth studio backgrounds, high contrast lighting, and compositional fragmentation—of advertising photographs. Much of the disturbing quality of these erotic images comes from their generic ambiguity.

The advertising photograph always makes a coherent statement: “I've got it. You want it,” it says. But the rhetorical configuration by which it says it renders such a message completely different from, say,
the message of Walker Evans's and Dorothea Lange's photographs of rural Depression men and women.

The art photograph says merely: “Look at this carefully—for its esthetic aspects.” And, so, Mapplethorpe . . .?

To place the erotic into the frame of art is a standard Western move that goes back to the very beginnings of representational art, if not before. Precisely to the extent we are familiar with the tradition, Mapplethorpe's photographs, both in
The Black Book
and in his other homoerotic collections, shift between these twin, insistent statements, to all their viewers, male, female, gay, straight, black, and white. The problem is: What does such an interplay of messages mean, when the speaker of the messages is a white southern gay photographer, dead of AIDS, and the objects advertised/presented are a series of beautiful and intensely phallocised black male bodies?

The picture is ironic, outrageous—shocking? It is that last alone that renders it banal. It is only there that, as a black viewer (and a black gay viewer at that), I am back at the realization that white artists constantly use blacks to represent the extremes they refuse to picture about themselves, i.e., to invent their own normalcy. Whether it is black singer Jennifer Holliday's over-the-top performance of “And I Am Telling You” under white director Michael Bennett in
Dreamgirls
, or the jaw-dropping violence of the forced separation scene of the two black sisters in white director Spielberg's
Color Purple;
whether it is the black female nudity that the white producers of
Les Ballets Africains
wanted to (but were not allowed to) put on Broadway in the fifties, or indeed “Man in Polyester Suit”: all suggest the oddly childish scenario of the white kid urging the black kid to go a little further, to violate expectations, to break accepted boundaries just a bit more than any comparable white singer/actor/ model has done till now. Is it collaboration? Is it exploitation? The effects are indisputably powerful for both white and black audiences. At the same time one notes that it is not what black directors Isaac Julian or Spike Lee are doing with
their
white actors—pushing them to outrageous, electric, audience-paralyzing depictions of whatever.