Television is Furniture

“With echoes of The Great Gatsby,” the cover blurb by Michiko Kakutani goes, “Joseph O’Neill’s stunning new novel provides a resonant meditation on the American Dream.”

If a writer is ever going to bring his quilll-as-spade to an urban setting to unearth the long-sought after American Dream, no doubt that each shovelful will be dumped somewhere in the Hudson River. For New York, to those who come to this country from distant shores, is America. It is where baseball means the Yankees (that coming from a Mets fan), where skyscrapers mean The Empire State and Chrysler buildings, where banking means finance, where money means wealth, and most poignantly, where America means opportunity. New York has the unique alchemical power to illuminate, inflate, and clarify, even as the buildings overhead blot out the sun.

Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland” concerns two such men from distant shores. Hans van den Broek is a Carraway-esque dabbler in the New York life, albeit updated for the 21st century. A millionaire, van den Broek is set adrift in his own existential currents after his wife and child return to London (her childhood home. Hans is from the Hague.). The events of September 11 force the couple out of their Tribeca loft and into the Chelsea Hotel, but also jar them apart. Hans is left in New York, his adopted home of just over four years, turning the broken shards over in his hands and trying to understand how it all came to pass.

Hans reveals early on that he eventually makes it back to London and to his wife and child, so his story is not a matter of much suspense. More, Hans’ story is another alchemical New York story, of chance made fate. Chance being the moment when Hans picks up cricket, his  childhood pastime, and while watching a dispute where an opposing player draws a gun on the umpire, Hans watches in frozen panic as said umpire calmly dissuades the man from the course of action he’s started on. That umpire is Chuck Ramkisoon. Soon enough their divergent worlds overlap on the wicket (the cricket pitch) and Hans, lonely and desperate, becomes enchanted by the mysterious man.

O’Neill is able to convey a unique aspect of New York that I’ve never read before, but which many are familiar with: that there is nothing quite like being alone in a city of eight million. Alone in his rented room at the Chelsea Hotel, staring into the rectangle of space beneath his couch and the floor, Hans can only hope that there are people out there just like him, feeling as lost and inert as he does. There is the sense, conveyed by the very inhabitants of the hotel itself, of crowds, of other lives pressing in and passing by, of a vibrant world right outside the window that is still somehow beyond Hans to access. Chuck Ramkisoon, however, provides him with access, some instruction, and mostly someone who Hans can admire for the quality that he himself specifically lacks: energy. And whatever other mystery and violence Chuck secrets in his life, Hans is simply grateful for the man and his endless kinetic machinations. Hans is a quiet, hesitant man, a relativist maybe, or maybe a man who simply has never known the immediate, possessive power of unhinged devotion toward anything.

“Netherland” is a moving story of grief, loss, hope and love. van den Broek’s descent and eventual reuniting with his wife, is a gift of Chuck Ramkisoon (and therefore a gift of New York and America), whose self-assurance and decisiveness create a clever foil. Chuck is a man who moves and who–metaphorically and quite literally, by teaching Hans to get his American driver’s license–provides the comfort and space to allow the hesitant man to move as well. Movement. Industry. Such things are thought to be the pillars of the American Dream. After all, what is more American than a driver’s license?

What is particularly beautiful is how O’Neill writes New York City, with all the lurid remembrances of a former lover. The sidewalks rarely overflow with tourists and the streets seem vacant, at worst smeared over with the shine of recent precipitation. Trees are noted on sidewalks and the nostalgic remove of the West Side Highway provides the opportunity to crease a smile as he notices team upon team of cricketers pressed together on one of the narrow spits of green that Manhattan has to offer. It does not always remind a New Yorker of the city he wakes up to each morning, but it does whisper across the instrument’s strings the hot breath of moments all of us who live here have at one time or another felt. Maybe these images of Hans’, looking back after everything has already come to pass, are the last gift New York will ever give those who leave it: memories not clogged by complaints of the people and pushing and car horns and overstuffed, overpriced restaurants, but those moments when the city’s tremors rattled our eyes and New York became for an instant the setting for some of life’s more perfect moments.

Few people see a 3,000 page novel and think to themselves “Sure, I’d love to get scoliosis carrying that around the city,” even after the pages have been mercifully broken up into 3 hardbound volumes. Fewer still have occasion–or desire–to layabout and read such a book for a second time. I’d read and enjoyed “The Baroque Cycle” a few years ago, but while looking over my bookshelves before a Thanksgiving trip to Charlotte, I grabbed the first volume “Quicksilver,” and was drawn back in immediately. And what went from having something to nostalgically enjoy for a few hours to and from CLT became another, holidays-long, subtly satisfying reading experience.

Those familiar with Stephenon’s “Cryptonomicon” will recognize the names Waterhouse and Shafttoe. They will also know that by employing them Stephenson lets the reader know that he’s in store for a lot more than some clever storytelling and wordplay. Stephenson cut his teeth as the king of cyberpunk with “Snow Crash” and “The Diamond Age,” imagining dystopian worlds corrupted by the very technologies meant to better them. In “Cryptonomicon” Stephenson turned his gaze to the past and World War II, creating parallels between the Allies efforts to decrypt German codes, and that of the prospects of a modern-day impenetrable data haven. “The Baroque Cycle” takes historical fiction to the level of epic.

Stephenson’s great asset is to make what could essentially be rudimentary freshman history courses (albeit on rather opaque topics) both humorous and dramatic, to present scenes with a clever, unique pen, and, most formidably, to imagine complex stories within a framework of modern history. In “The Baroque Cycle” Stephenson takes a mighty swing at explaining the birth of modern governance, finance, and commerce, all through the intrigues and adventures of Waterhouse (Daniel) and the Shaftoes (brothers Jack and Bob).

The first book opens with the journey of Daniel Waterhouse in the winter of 1713. An old acquaintance, a mysterious alchemist by the name of  Enoch Root arrives in Boston where Daniel has spent the prior two decades establishing the Massachusetts Institute of Technological Arts. Root arrives from New York just in time to see some witches put to the stake and bearing a message from a woman Daniel knew when she was merely a child–Princess Caroline of Hanover. The Princes needs him to return to the city of his birth, London, and attempt to mediate a long-standing dispute between his longtime friends–and the world’s two most celebrated natural philosophers–Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Daniel, at 60-some years, understands that this is no mean request. It is a request that requires him to leave his wife and only son in Boston, make a dangerous winter crossing of the Atlantic, and involve himself in politics that he had long ago put in his past.

Daniel’s journey back to England gives Stephenson occasion to flashback 50 years to final days of the English Interregnum, before Charles II returned to England and restored the monarchy. It was during this time, all those years ago, when Daniel, a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, befriended one Isaac Newton.

It’s tempting here to dive into every plotline that knots the great muddle Stephenson throws at you. But to do that would require a book-length review. Suffice it to say that as the story is introduced, the maelstrom of politics and religion and the parallel developments in what is blandly understood in 1655 as Natural Philosophy have all been asimmer for just long enough for their essential differentiators to begin pushing these groups apart, and as is inevitable, dividing the acolytes of their respective sects into warring factions. Stephenson’s gift here is not losing sight of his goal, which is not to give us a history book, but to tell his characters’ stories. As I’ve said to friends who I’ve told about the book: It’s not about the men who did great things. It’s about the guys behind the guys who did great things.  Stephenson’s genius is to have imagined just what experiences and relationships would allow Daniel Waterhouse and the Shaftoes to do the things they do.

So what’s it about then? In brief: It’s a telling of the emergent underpinnings of the modern world; the establishment of banks, paper money, the gold standard, stock exchanges, biology, Newtonian physics, technology, and the cultivation of power in every sense of the word. And within this epic moment, it is about rare, adaptable men put in impossible situations. There are swashbuckling piratical exploits and the subtlest political slight-of-hand. It is about men mastering fear as well as being mastered by the binding nature of love. At turns you’re reading an old high-seas romance, at others an instruction on the failures of developing an organizing structure to a library. (No really. It was apparently difficult to figure out.) In one scene Jack Shaftoe paints himself in liquid phosphorus to thwart an attack of Indian highwaymen, hoping against hope it doesn’t dry and explode before he can wash it off. In another Daniel Waterhouse will be operated on to remove a life-threatening kidney stone by none other than his good friend Robert Hooke, who promises him:

You may bite down on that if you wish, or you may spit it out and scream all you like–this is Bedlam, and no one will object. Neither will anyone take heed, or show mercy. Least of all Robert Hooke. For as you know, Daniel, I am utterly lacking the quality of mercy. Which is well, for it would render me perfectly incompetent to carry out this operation.”

There are cudgel-weilding Malabar pirates and quick, suave asides that serve the same purpose by the Sun King Louis XIV in jealous ballrooms at Versailles. Japanese ronin and the [English] King’s Own Black Torrent Guards will attack and retreat. There are ear-biting English Lords, French cryptographers (for how could we get a Stephenson book without a little cryptography?), street fights involving Russian Tsar Peter the Great and a one-armed assassin, and mini-lectures on the making of watered steel and The Engine for Raising Water by Fire (you’ll understand). Stephenson will take you around the world as the first, silk-thin lines of a global economy thread, and the reader will be rewarded with an adventure as impossible as it is engrossing.

Eight Days ~ James B. Stewart

Rational Irrationality ~ John Cassidy

The Pay Problem ~ David Owen

I have a friend who subscribes to the New Yorker, but refuses to read “Talk of the Town” because it’s too liberal. It’s a reasonable position. No one is ever going to accuse Hendrik Hertzberg of unbiased analysis. As for me, I like a little liberal logic in my politics. The danger with most publications is that the editorial bias bleeds into the rest of it. Or worse, opinions on the publication as a whole are biased based solely on the editorial content. Regular readers of such publications probably know otherwise, but it’s still nice to be reassured. Which is why, if you’ve been reading the other stuff in the New Yorker over the past month, you’ve been getting a lesson in an all too rare, idealized form or reporting.

“The most important week in American financial history since the Great Depression began at 8 A.M. on a Friday in the middle of September last year.”

Such is the introduction to “Eight Days,” written by James B. Stewart, who then commences with an account of the fall of Lehman Brothers and the restructuring of the American financial industry. By now the story has been hashed, rehashed, reheated, and tossed out. Certain financial instruments were used which caused the companies that bought and sold them to be unprecedentedly leveraged. The music stopped. The piper had his hand out. He didn’t take IOUs. “Eight Days” is the first of three articles that appeared over the next month that illuminated not only what happened to bring on the crisis, but who the people where that tried to mitigate it, which decisions were made when, and how the mysterious world of finance works. And doesn’t quite.

In its uniquely-scented New Yorker style with all those wafted, high brow East-Coast intellectual presuppositions, its oblique, allegorical lead-ins, and sly, intricate pacing, the reader is educated on a historical moment in American history. “Rational Irrationality” begins with the story of the Millennium Bridge, which upon opening, had to be immediately shut and re-engineered due to a wobble caused by pedestrians walking in step. The article goes on to illuminate how a single rational move by a single, rational entity (a bank), if repeated over and over by other entities, can create an unstable situation. And “The Pay Problem,” as you might have guessed, focuses on the question of regulating executive pay. When brought together, a case is being made. And though it’s not quite as simple as this, I’m going to try and outline that case (very briefly).

1. Executive success is measured in terms of stock price and company profit.
2. Executive pay, however, is often guaranteed or, at worst, tied to stock price at the time of their exit.
3. Executive interest, therefore, in most cases, is focused on immediate financial gain.
4. When certain tools that should be considered risky work out and make money for the company, that success breeds more of the same.
5. Successes like that in the financial industry are imitated by competitors.
6. Gains are spread throughout all levels of the industry, even involving regulatory bodies themselves.
7. Risk across the entire industry increases.
8. A single failure at any one point along the line creates a rippling effect that can bring down the whole industry.
9. Logical corrective mechanisms by one institution are, just as before, imitated across the industry.
10. Industry wide constriction only exacerbates the problem

What the New Yorker does best, I think, is provide the context, the biographies and backgrounds, the proper lighting and set design, with which the reader may better observe the theater of world politics, business, and art. But the uniqueness of most New Yorker articles, and these three in particular, is in their intense focus on the people involved. After all, financial markets do not occur organically in nature. Only human, after all. And humans are, as we’ve seen, all to prone to mistaking emotion for reason and immediate gains for solid, long-term ethical practice. Rarely in a daily, where the business cycle is usually too short to provide anything but the story in medias res, do you get the satisfaction of feeling–after a single article–that you’ve been given a good, clear picture of what is going on or what happened. This is what the New Yorker does. It is the foundation of minutiae upon which informed opinions might be made.

These articles explained not corruption–because corruption implies a breach in legality–but instead developed layers of a motif too difficult to get at directly: the subtle power of greed in a market economy and its effects on an entire industry. It’s important to remember however, that the articles and the brief outline above are not an indictment of financial executives. The stories present a case against unbridled greed. “Greed,” after all, “is good.” Who doesn’t like Gordon Gecko? But what the New Yorker articles beg is the question of ethics. How best aught the ethics of an industry be set and monitored so as not to wreck an economy?

If time is most often described in terms of a line then let’s just stick with that. Dark line on white background. Looking a little closer you might see little scribblings notched along it, noting important dates above and below. But let’s look even closer. Take out our special timeline scissors and snip two ends, the first around the turn of the twentieth century and our second at, say, 9 August 1975. Then let’s bring this smidgen of time up to eye level, and turn it sagittally so we can look through it like a telescope. It is not a solid but not quite hollow, the inner-walls undulating with minute hills and declivities, myriad and growing from the walls inward, toward that tiny speck of common air that remains true through the entirety. As an illustrative example, we could cut off a single day in time’s line and bring it up to eye level and these hills and valleys would be too many and varied and interlocking to ever really be able to locate a single independent one; the surface area so subtly ridged and dipping that measurement is near impossible, the space it occupies seemingly infinite. Hold onto this image. It is as good a way as I can think of to try and understand what William Vollmann is attempting in “Europe Central.”

Short stories of true lives, fictionalized for drama’s sake, connected both historically and for the book’s structural sense, and understood with the kind of empathy for victimhood that only someone like Vollmann could achieve, “Europe Central’s” action manages to convey the violence of and between two totalitarian states whose real losses are generally obscured by the very numbers used to describe them. This is where our snippet of time comes in. The relationships and connections of Vollmann’s characters are manifold, too many to adequately number, and pressed together in spaces of time too fraught with other, often more historically significant moments. What is, after all, one in a lot of millions? And in the midst of such an epic historical moment, Vollmann manages to pan and zoom through the fog of great history, to brush aside the grandiose plodding twists and turns of battles won and lost among massive states, to peer in on the small personal histories that were all, in one way or another, disfigured by the violence of not just war but also the violence of abusive, dehumanizing power.

Victims of street crime, muggings and dime store robberies, are often said to be the victims of “senseless violence.” And by using such a description the acts can be slid under a corner of the community rug and assigned as outliers, fringe acts of the criminally perverted unleashed on those unfortunate enough to be caught in the crosshairs of sheer bad luck. As much as dealing with cruelty can be, this is a pleasant thought, allowing us to think that the people who commit such acts are the rarest minority, lost to mainstream society, mentally unbalanced, jaded, maybe–charitably–victims of circumstance and the poor socialization of others. Whatever the filter, the motive of categorizing violence as senseless remains the same: to describe it away and assign it to a negligible phyla of human activity. In the world Vollmann reveals to us in “Europe Central,” The Third Reich and Stalin’s Russia and the unfortunate bystanders who lived between and around them while they were in place, is a world where the fringe violence of petty theft and the like are superseded by the closed-fist constriction of thought and activity by the state itself.

Such a description still remains too vague to do real justice to the breadth of this book. Vollmann is able to convey the gradual, iterative failure of the lives he describes as they are worn down in the teeth of these governments; lives that otherwise–he suggests–would likely have turned out differently, happier and more complete–whatever those words might mean. He masterfully squashes any impulse two compare Germany or Russia to the United States and in the process creates a variety of narrative voices cleverly designed to evoke the inherent evil of the governments while never to removing his eye from the kaleidoscope long enough to make judgments about Reich or the Iron Curtain. In Vollmann’s Europe, there is nothing that lay beyond.

Vollmann examines two nations whose structure was founded not upon the respect of the human as individual, but rather on the need for rigorous–and if necessary, violent–adherence to certain standards of not only personal conduct but thought. Essentially the ironing out of human difference until the populace is reduced to interchangeable parts meant only to serve the state apparatus. Artists in these nations were gauged by how well their art supported the image and consciousness demanded by the state. Professional advancement predicated on how well one’s decisions supported the prevailing leadership and its ideals, governments whose ideals themselves were somewhat nebulous and gray enough to support the whims of caprice. The governments of “Europe Central” were bent on sheering off the portions of the populace who could not conform to those demanded standards. How does a human being cope with the vast state apparatus designed to re-engineer human action into a submissive, goose-stepping, ubiquitous one and all?

Answer: It crumbles. Slowly. Becomes something less than human. Or it dies. Or, maybe worse, maybe better, it gives itself over and in the process pawns its liberty for an ersatz life. “Europe Central” is the best book I’ve read that describes the minute violence of control when brought to bear on every individual of a nation.

A few nights ago, a friend brought out a slender bottle of golden wine, which someone had left on her table months ago without explanation. It was Hungarian, its label incomprehensible to us (although Peasant Glasses recognized the word for “sweet”). We opened it on the balcony, with the sunset glowing in the west, BBQ coals glowing at our feet, swallows wheeling overhead: it was sweet, rich, honey-graped. Cloying at first, until you grasped the complexity and found yourself reaching for the bottle, studying its color, pouring a second glass.

A memorial at Krudy's birthplace

I thought of Gyula Krúdy.

Krúdy is new to me, a prolific and melancholy writer of the first few decades of the last century. He is one of the giants of Hungarian modern literature, all but unknown in the English-speaking world. His boosters compare him to a Magyar Proust, with some reason – Krúdy is a voluptuary, losing himself in sensual detail, more interested in conveying the impression of being at a place and a time than in telling a story. Like that sweet wine, his writing can be cloying if gulped, easily dismissed if sipped and put aside; but in the right dose it is intoxicatingly beautiful.

Much of modern and pre-modern literature is defined (at least in the eyes of the West) by the experience of the English or French in WWI. For intellectuals of those countries, the war was both catastrophe and enlightenment, a horrifying demonstration of just how corrupt the world had become, a proof of the flimsiness and falsehood of beauty.

Hungary’s experience was different. Bound into union with Austria after a failed revolution in 1848, Hungry was already a nation in decline, growing economically but politically powerless. When the Central Powers lost, the country was helpless, invaded by even the weak Romanian army and dismembered; losing much of its territory to Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia in a treaty that still infuriates right-wing radicals there today.

Krúdy is by no means a political writer; but in the works available in English, most written before the end of the war in 1918, this sense of conscious cultural twilight is thick enough to taste. “The Adventures of Sindbad” is a collection of stories, most in Budapest or in the countryside, about an amorous eponymous adventurer who may or may not be dead or a ghost, may or may not be 300 years old, but spends his time revisiting the lovers of the past for moments of brief, beautiful and painful reminiscence.

“Sunflower,” a novel that itself is a series of barely connected chapters, is much the same: lovers entranced by their love, or by the intoxication of loving. A young gambler, the beautiful girl he loves who flees to the countryside, the old aristocrat who hides himself on a remote island to play his violin and die of heartbreak (or the idea of heartbreak), the country rake who meets his match drinking with the daughter of an adulterous ghost. These are histories, and tall tales, not a story.

Krúdy writes in metaphors. You can see him, slightly drunk, scribbling at a table at twilight, writing without benefit of editors or time to think beyond the next few pages (he was always poor, a gambler who died penniless). They tumble one after the other until he is lost inside the metaphor itself, and it becomes the content of the sentence instead only a device. Here he describes an insomniac’s feelings at dawn, fearful, with flitting unstable thoughts:

Night shatters like a worn-out curse. At the call of that crazy bird, the sluggish, motionless curtain of darkness begins to stir. Other sounds filter from the far distances. Perhaps it is the wild geese passing high overhead, following their obscure paths, obeying a mysterious command to cross night’s vast gulf like wandering souls conversing in otherworldly tongues.

But cocks’ crow signals the arrival of those never-glimpsed vagabonds who stand stock still under your window in the dead of night, with murder in their eyes, guilt and terror in their eyes. Come morning, they regain their original shapes and turn into solitary trees at crossroads or hat-waving, curly-haired young travelers with small knapsacks and large staffs, humming a merry tune and marching bright-eyed toward distant lands to bring glad tidings, fun and games, new songs and youthful flaring passions to small houses that somnolently await them. There they sit down at the kitchen table, earn their dinner by telling glorious tall tales, help pour the wine, chop the wood, nab the fattened pig by the ear; they also repair the grandfather clock that had not chimed in forty years and leave in the middle of the night, taking along the young miss’s heart as well as her innocence…

These stories are written in the language of their subject. Where Proust seeks to evoke, Krúdy writes about seducers in the language of seduction itself. He is a thoroughly, avowedly untrustworthy narrator, in precisely the same way that his seducers spin pleasant, intoxicating lies to women who believe not a word, but who fall in love despite their unbelief.

The sweetness is tempered with melancholy, with comic asides that show he’s laughing at his own foolishness, and with a gleeful disdain for the constrictions of reality. At the close of one early story, Sindbad the lover dies and is reborn in the afterlife as a sprig of mistletoe attached to a nun’s habit. This turns out to be far more boring than expected, and he does everything to shake himself loose, and get back to a town that he knows:

Sindbad had fallen between the rails: trains passed over him, firemen threw fiery ashes over him and a piece of greaseproof paper landed in his vicinity, containing the remnants of a well-chewed leg of duck. This unpleasant neighbor attempted to strike up some kind of relationship with him, but Sindbad pretended to be asleep until night came, then succeeded in escaping without being observed, leaving the rails behind and drifting into the town which he immediately recognized…

The gold miners’ wife sat in front of the mirror, combing her hair. She had long golden hair and the comb ran lightly through it like a boat gliding across the water. Up and down moved the comb – at that moment it was the proudest utensil in the whole house, not surprisingly, since in its previous life it had been a mere dancing master in one of the outer suburbs of Pest….

Everything is alive. Everything is touched with personality and history and melancholy. Everything is drunk on its own impressions, comic and beautiful. It must be taken in measured servings, like everything intoxicating. But a draught of Krúdy should be in everyone’s bookshelves.

Krúdy resources online:

• Wikipedia: Gyula Krúdy
• New York Review of Books: Krúdy
• Hunlit: Krúdy bibliography
• A history of Hungarian literature: Krúdy

A bit of context, for what its worth: The book takes place in the Zone, the war zone of Europe at the end of World War II and the months immediately following Germany’s surrender. Lieutenant Tyrone Slothtrop (of the Massachusetts Slothtrops) is shooed out of London because no one quite knows how to make sense of the fact that every time the guy gets laid in city, that part of town gets hit by a rocket. He’s sent by a sinister man named Pointsman out onto the continent in search of the S-gerat, an item supposedly stored in the body of one of the German rockets (no one even knows whether or not the rocket in question was ever fired). This is much too brief to even be a plot synopsis for such a complex book, but it a start.

Well, what’s the point? If one does even the most casual search of the online archive surrounding Pynchon’s mammoth Gravity’s Rainbow there are interpretations and thematic explanations from literati high and low, people well versed in the subtleties of Tarot, the A2, the A4, physics, religion. Everything. All more qualified than your correspondents here at TiF to tell you what it’s “about.” If you want an answer take a look at your search results in Google. But instead of cribbing the discussion from someone else’s brains let’s just plow ahead and talk rainbows for a moment.

The rainbow has a duality. It has its romantic lore and its decidedly unromantic and reductive  science. We can ask what is a rainbow and talk to someone about light and atmospherics, yawn, or we can talk about the spectacular beauty of those fading indefinite pinks, greens, and blues, colors streaking across the sky, disappearing somewhere before landfall. We can think back to our own memories of our own rainbows, maybe when we were 8 and let out by our babysitters, pushing our swings as squeaking high as our flimsy father-built sets would allow when we looked up at the apex of our latest push to the nearby hillside behind our family’s house, and saw our very first one. There was no end it. It reached out from somewhere invisible in a long dewy arc, sparkling colors against the clearing afternoon sky, and down past our field of vision. We were transfixed, for that single instant, with something greater than science. Rainbows are beautiful not because of the science that creates them, but for the romantic notions they inspire in us. Carry that tidbit with you if you’re going to read this book.

*****

Gravity’s Rainbow also works in its own dualities. Us and Them, or They as Pynchon often puts it. The They always in control, condescendingly and forever allowing the story’s pawns their illusion of freedom. They’s power lay in controlling world markets and capital and industry and governance. They create the Weimar economy, the Depression, FDR’s election, circumstances for war, and They manufacture the tools used to fight it. And They, after enough of Us have been destroyed, after enough progress has  been made in science and enough fear and mourning generated, roll up their tanks and troops and open the Zone for Their own approaching peace. Nothing for them is unforeseen or unaccounted for. The representative of Us, for the duration of the book, is Slothtrop, but no one is immune to Their control. Everything is connected because They connect it. It is a paranoiac’s world. And the Zone is a paranoiac’s paradise.

And Tyrone Slothtrop, uber-paranoiac and he of the giddy, rocket-impacting erections, comes early to understand that They control him. It begins in Nice with the Pavlovian Octypus attacking Katje. Slothtrop begins to see the marionette’s hands and the strings spraying down from the aether into the Zone. His paranoia grows as his search for the S-gerat continues. Nothing can promise him control of his own inertia. The rockets stop falling upon reaching the continent, but the glowing white corneas of They continue in the darkness, Prime Movers of Slothtop’s search for Rocket #00000.

But control in Gravity’s Rainbow is not only the invisible They. S&M returns again and again to the fore. General Pudding, a leader of the Allied Command, can be found in a London basement, early in the book, begging with all his masochist heart to be defiled and humiliated. And Katje’s unrequited need to be punished. Their punishment for her is to leave her wanting more of it. She will always exist, wanting to be destroyed. Greta, who in her submission during von Goll’s film brought her a daughter, a young woman who became the perfect object of submission. There is, throughout the book, a hunger by characters for their own personal release, their final destruction which would allow an escape from control. It is the sole and stated cultural mission of the tribe representing the black Schwarzkommando, whose tenets dictate that the dignity of freedom can only come when their kind finally cease to exist on Earth.

Slothtrop is both a threat and a slave. As much black-and-white racism as there is in this book, it is Slothtrop who represents the truest slave, and in turn represents what slaveholders feared most: the uprising. He could seemingly dictate the rocket’s flight, and therefore in some way held sway over Death. Their control of Slothtrop is a means for Them of attempting to control Death, to cheat it.

But these heretics will be sought and the dominion of silence will enlarge as each one goes down…they will all be sought out. Each will have his personal Rocket. Stored in its target-seeker will be the heretic’s EEG, the spikes and susurrations of heartbeat, the ghost-blossomings of personal infrared, each Rocket will know its intended and hunt him, ride him a green-doped and silent hound, through our World, shining and pointed in the sky at his back, his guardian executioner rushing in, rushing closer…

In this one lovely passage Pynchon finds his refutation for the heresy of They and control. The rocket is of course literally an agent of Death, but also, in a personal way for each of us, Death itself. It is the Rocket we are all born with. We will never know when or where its impact will come. Some of us, like Slothtrop, might be thrilled by it, aroused by it, while others might hide from it, eschewing smoke and drink, taking up yoga, jogging, filling quiet spaces with noise so as not to hear it’s knocking. Built for us and launched at birth, each rise and fall unique to pitch and yaw rates of our own lives. Slothtrop’s search for the 00000, the rocket containing the S-gerat, is the search for his end, the search for a way to cut the puppeteer’s strings.

In response to Mr. Borland’s post on 2666.

One of the great, well-trod themes of Roberto Bolaño’s was his endless flouting of the literary rule book (from NYTimes.com “…Bolaño seems to make sport of violating nearly all of the foremost writing-school rules…”). The obvious example from 2666 (and others) is that of the writer-as-principle. Bolaño makes it work by never touching the third rail—ignoring the hand-wringing act of writing itself, or even the protagonists’ concern with it—and focusing instead on Archimboldi’s life when he is not at his typewriter, out in the ordinary world. Or he does so by creating a panoramic, focusing on others with whom Archimboldi shares it.

Benno von Archimboldi is never seen at his typewriter, pounding out strange titles or thumbing his yellow-paged thesaurus, but neither is he seen brushing his teeth or wracked by self-doubt or worried for his livelihood. And it is as much true for the poets in The Savage Detectives and By Night in Chile as it is in 2666. The artists Bolaño imagines are dispassionate about ordinary life the way a judge is intended to be about the law. His artist-characters interact with people, but Bolaño manages to make the spheres of interaction between writers and “ordinaries” as small as might be the intersection of circles in a Venn Diagram. There is, in Bolaño’s world, a firm and permanent separation between the artist and the world he inhabits (and reacts to, interprets, ignores, disdains, etc.). Artists move among us, but are not of us.

And I think, after reading a few of his books, that there is a motive in Bolaño’s separation. By decrying, and I’ll nod to John here, that all in the world collapses into pain eventually—the ultimate implication being that we must scrounge our meaning/pleasure/redemption where we can—Bolaño makes his case for the relevance of art. And it is a strong argument, written with more imaginative eloquence than most philosopher/novelists (think Kundera with more of everything, including, in 2666, misogyny) will likely ever muster. But it also betrays a serious bias by Bolaño. Artists, to Bolaño, are crazy, but crazy in the way prophets might be thought of as crazy. The prophet, after all, is distinguished not only by his message (or art, as it were), but also by his presenting it as something universal. By subjecting themselves to criticism and ostracism and ridicule of others, all in the service of this impelled need to create a universal or deliver a message, the artist and the prophet both reach toward something that might be characterized as divine. And it if you take it for granted as I do that God is very much a figment of humanity’s imagination, it very well may be that art is the only honest-to-goodness universal we can share and that also endures. And so all of this sounds pretty darn reasonable. Like I said, Bolaño makes a good case.

But.

There remains the sticky issue of everything collapsing into pain. It’s this premise that, as I thought about Bolaño and 2666 (and John’s post), I found was what I just could not abide. To put it very broadly: existence, to Bolaño’s characters, is the experience of pain and the experience of finding ways to negate that pain. And so, for Bolaño’s artists, everything collapses into pain, and they in their collapse offer up art in the same way Jesus offered his body: a sacrifice for the rest of humanity. The prophet turned martyr. When you stop to think about it, it’s no wonder why so many other writers are exalting this guy. His writers are demigods. And I don’t like it.

And it’s not that I just don’t like it. I disagree with it. The people that say existence is forever collapsing into pain are only slightly more interesting to me than those who are always building it up toward a heavenly eternity (ok, the collapsing into pain folks are a lot more interesting, but only because the God/life-is-good folks are just so abhorrent that I felt the need to add this parenthetical about them). Both pain and pleasure, suffering and redemption, are experiences in life, but neither is what it’s all about. And before you ask “Okay smart guy, what’s it all about?” think for a moment about what it’s all about to you. I personally like to think that maybe it’s about nothing. Maybe existence is neutral, neither a moral good or bad, and therefore entirely up to us as [relatively] liberated agents to define. Bolaño’s premise doesn’t work for me because I don’t think existence is as bleak as he did. And even if it is, just because artists create something universal doesn’t make them, as human beings, in anyway more valuable or better than anyone else. Which gets me to my second point.

The more I think about it, the more I find it a little condescending. While exalting artists on the one hand, Bolaño seems intent on destroying all things ordinary (And before you quibble about “what’s ordinary?” let’s just call it everything not artist-related). The normal, average souls in 2666 are raped and brutalized into unidentifiable pulp. The rest, those somewhere above serfdom but below the demigods are to varying degrees mad, cold, indifferent, depressed or blandly passive. The relationship between the psychiatrist and detective walled off into a barely verbal, almost animal experience. The critics of the first section have devoted their lives not to creation, but reaction to Archimboldi’s creations. They are frivolous acolytes. Love for them is as elusive as their object of study. The professor who slips into madness worrying about his daughter. The reporters too weak to cover the murders. The American detective from across the border who blunders into his own death. These people are all assailable. The artist Archimboldi, however, strolls through battlefields without the slightest worry in the world. He cannot be touched. But the quietly content, hardworking factory girls can be. Over and over. The earnest can be. Those with aspirations only of living an ordinary life, whatever that is, are invisible, and therefore expendable. All the while the truly invisible Archimbaldi remains safely off-camera. And true, Bolaño takes pains acknowledge tragedies both great and small, but he also, in his never shying away from them, in his almost relish of describing them, seems at the same time to be shrugging and saying “Well, it happens.” He would rather be a demigod remembered for all time, or be dead, than be somewhere in the middle, just another ordinary guy who appreciates the smallness of his own existence.

In which we ponder the question: Why, in 2666, does Roberto Bolaño link the Santa Teresa murders and the vanished German writer, Benno von Archimboldi?

No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them, thinks Oscar Fate, and wonders where he had heard this. The frightened Mexico City reporter, terrified she will be killed for writing about the Santa Teresa slayings? Or the giant fucking albino German, imprisoned for the crimes?

No one pays attention, but they affect everything and everybody. They are the gravitational center of Bolaño’s book, a singularity, unobservable in their truest nature, at the moment of their commission; like a black hole, they are visible only through their effects on the world around them, and through the debris they leave behind. Mutilated corpses, visions of pain and suffering, copycats and conflicting theories. A city that twists itself in psychological knots not only to assimilate the events, but to render them horrifyingly mundane.

If Santa Teresa alone was the sum of 2666, the novel might be an explication of Bolaño’s original reference, in Amulet:  “a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.” But instead, twin threads tie the novel’s parts together: the murders, and the mysterious German writer, Archimboldi, whose nephew is ultimately accused of the crimes, and whose presence in Santa Teresa is felt but never seen.

* * *

Late in the final part, already withdrawn from society, his wife dead, his legend growing, Archimboldi meets a French essayist who tells him of a home, a refuge, for vanished European writers. They travel there together and find the other writers watching television, playing petanque and drinking wine, collapsing at the dinner table (though in truth the writers are not writers at all, or at least not in the sense imagined; Archimboldi discovers he has been brought to a sanatorium, and these are ordinary people, simply old or crazy). The essayist lives in a small room with only a single element of personality displayed, an apple on a plate, which at night, when the lights are out, “smells as strongly as Rimbaud’s Voyelles.” Yet it too, like everything, will collapse in the end, the old man explains. “Everything collapses in pain, he says. “All eloquence springs from pain.”

The old man’s apple, the knowledge or wisdom of the writer: Everything collapses in pain, and from this tragedy can be constructed something beautiful, eloquence, art, perhaps even an illusion of meaning. But this construction is no more permanent than its source. It too, like everything, collapses. This doesn’t mean that art is futile; indeed, without it there might be only pain. Nor does it eliminate or justify the original pain. It is only part of a cyclical process of creation and recreation, a temporary aestheticization of the experiences of life.

Writers vanish – perhaps because they understand this process too well? Or because they remember what society has tried so hard to forget, and this makes it impossible to live a life in public? Archimboldi keeps in touch with only a single person, the Baroness, the wife of his publisher (who becomes his publisher), who has never read a word he has written. She presses him to come back to Germany, to reappear, to speak to journalists. “In my worst nightmares,” he tells her. If he returns, people will ask him questions, ask him to explain, ask him for answers. But he doesn’t have answers, knows (as they don’t) that isn’t the point. He has given them his books, and that is all he has.

* * *

Archimboldi is a Prussian, born of an age to be drafted into the Nazi army. In Germany, fighting across the Soviet Union, reading the journals of a vanished Jewish writer, finally murdering a hapless Nazi functionary who had ordered hundreds of Jews killed because he could think of nothing else to do with them; across all this stretch of 20th century history, he is able to witness atrocity, to be in it but not of it. He walks through firefights, his commander says, as if he wasn’t there or the quarrel wasn’t with him, and nobody can hit him despite his height. He watches, and rarely even goes so far as to judge. He sees pain, and from it comes eloquence, but the price is his own identity. He loses his name, and then he vanishes from the world, leaving only his books behind, and an idea of himself, his nephew’s dream, a giant rescuer who never quite arrives.

Women vanish, killed in terrible ways. Writers vanish, Archimboldi vanishes, perhaps because the knowledge gained in transmuting experience into eloquence, and seeing this collapse back into pain, is too much to share.

* * *

Bolaño left notes that indicated his belief in a “hidden center” beneath the “physical center” of the novel. We as readers can’t see the killings as they happen, or the pain and terror of the murdered women.  We can’t read Archimboldi’s books, or even (with a few minor exceptions) discern their subjects. Even Archimboldi himself, though we follow the external course of his life and see the objects of much of his thought (the sea, Ansky’s journals, his half-mad wife), remains largely mysterious to us.

What we see are the effects of these things on the world, the way that unseen experiences become part of the texture of others’ lives. In Santa Teresa, we see the police and residents cope with increasingly unforgettable horror, see the twisting of society that takes place as the reality of unimaginable pain slips slowly past people’s defenses, and colors their everyday thoughts. For the critics of the first, almost innocent, portion of the novel, the truth of Archimboldi’s life is unknowable, but they too are changed by the process of probing this blank spot, of chasing him finally to a place which has nothing to do with his biography, and everything to do with who he is.

No one in this novel experiences true revelation, in the sense of understanding even so much as their own private corner of the world. Flashes of illumination are fragmentary, hallucinatory or dreamlike. Even Archimboldi, confronted with the essayist’s apple, fails to understand the old man’s words. Understanding entails a reference to meaning, and the cycle of pain, its rebirth in eloquence and re-collapse into pain has no external meaning beyond its own existence. Art can never justify pain, can never serve as an apologia for something as terrible as the Santa Teresa murders, or the killing of hundreds (or tens of millions) of Jews on the edge of a Polish village, or even the crucifixion of a megalomaniac, horse-hung Romanian general. Archimboldi can only offer a dream of rescue, not the reality.

But without Archimboldi, without the eloquence, we have only Santa Teresa. And that is a thought more horrible than its alternative.

I’ll speak for myself. We’ll talk about books here, some that we read together, some that we won’t, some ambitious, some not, some beautiful and some that we’d already have forgotten unless we took the time to put our thoughts down.

If something comes of it, good. Reading is enriched by writing about it afterward, or arguing, or even just relating the story to an interested listener. Doors open, scenes unfold more subtly than at first glance, ideas flower from seeds.

I don’t pretend to be a critic. Sometimes there will be analysis here, more often questions explored or paths of associations followed until they run out in some dusty cul-de-sac.

Comments are welcome, though the public nature of this blog is more a convenience than a performance or display. Readers aren’t expected. But a conversation would nonetheless be a lovely thing.

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