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The Perpetual Thud of a Distant War

8/31/2014

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Brief Encounters With The Enemy. Dial Press (Random House), New York.

In W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, the narrator embarks on a disturbing process of reflection in which the horrors of a colonial nation, perpetrated far from its borders, are projected back onto the geography of the homeland and its people--a projection that is apprehensible in both spectral and physical traces, subtle and obvious, carved into wood, flesh, and air. The connection between Belgium and the Congo is always there, simmering below the surface, alive in the minor, unbearable aspects of day-to-day life. Even in the 1960s, for instance, Brussels is still tainted, as it were, by the virus of a colonial past:

Indeed, to this day one sees in Belgium a distinctive ugliness, dating from the time when the Congo colony was exploited without restraint and manifested in the macabre atmosphere of certain salons and the strikingly stunted growth of the population, such as one rarely comes across elsewhere. At all events, I well recall that on my first visit to Brussels in December 1964 I encountered more hunchbacks and lunatics than normally in a whole year…The hotel by the Bois de la Cambre where I was then lodging for a few days was so crammed with mahogany furniture, all manner of African trophies, and pot plants, some of which were quite enormous among them aspidistras, monsterae and rubber plants reaching almost to the twelve-feet-high ceiling, that even in broad daylight the interior seemed darkened with chocolate-colored gloom.

Similarly, in Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s 2013 collection of grim and gripping short stories, Brief Encounters with the Enemy, we are confronted with the “chocolate-colored gloom” of chronic geopolitical conflict, refracted back onto a long-decayed home front. In counterpoint to Sebald’s works, Sayrafiezadeh’s visions take place in an American dystopia, a parallel universe consisting mainly of an unnamed urban sprawl at the end of decades of decline. A cook in a dead-end job with little hope of advancement becomes fascinated with a newly hired waitress who appears to be anorexic; a low-level manager at Walmart is compelled to steal merchandise in the pursuit of a sexual obsession, bracketed by the texts of former co-worker now serving in the war zone. A congenitally disabled janitor strives for a better life, lashing out against a patronizing society while seeking love. Alienated urban victims of a stagnant economy, immersed in dead-end work, react to their hopeless surroundings with soul-crushing ambivalence drenched in cynicism. Even when a young cartographer finds mildly satisfying work, it’s naturally offset by a hostile office environment and the urban decay that surrounds him.

In many ways, this material is age-old stuff, but with a twist: these depictions of lower-middle-class millennial malaise and hopelessness are set, in classical absurdist tradition, against the looming buildup, execution, and escalation of an ever-ubiquitous war (sound familiar?) in an unnamed foreign land. The distant war--frequently susceptible to fetishized, dubious-sounding events, like the taking of a “peninsula”--weaves itself into and out of the storylines: ever-present in people and places, infused in the atmosphere through varying degrees of omnipresent force.

Because of this creation of a coherent and frightening fictive world, the book’s collection, as a whole, succeeds in being more than the sum of its parts. Many of the stories have stood alone in the past, selected by a veritable “Ivy League” of publications, such as the Paris Review and the New Yorker. Read as a single body of work, the repetition of various tropes, characters, situations and phrases is starkly evident. Everyone works in a cubicle; everyone hates his onerous job; everyone is ultimately part of the machinery of war. In college-level academia, this type of recycling sometimes gets you hauled before the disciplinary committee; in writing, it’s seen as branding consistency, like Jasper Johns painting flags or Pete Doherty singing about being high. With a closer reading, the repetition in Brief Encounters is additive and has a suturing effect, bringing together the collection as a cohesive whole.

The aggregation of the stories makes clear that Sayrafiezadeh has accomplished, depending on how you look at it, a feat that is either totally brilliant or too cute by half: using little more than formal conventions, he has made an actual war into a fictional one--and thus has effortlessly converted a boring and faceless urban environment from a realist set piece to a dystopia. The war, of course, is real; yet the very reluctance to name it, or to discuss it in recognizable topical terms within the real-life discourse, pulls it into the realm of a fake event, right up there with the destruction of the Death Star or the Elves departing Middle-Earth. And once we have a major fake event, nothing in the fictive world can be taken for granted. Specifically, it’s gloomily implicit to the reader--even if Sayrafiezadeh never abuses the point--that everything can get even worse than it is in real life. Potentially a lot worse. The war is woven in and out of each of the narratives as an ever-threatening beast of chance, rolling the dice of destiny: it doles out glory, death, or more often a generalized anxiety, subconsciously consumed by individuals and by society writ large. Baudrillard would be proud.

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The government’s long arms are omnipresent, even if the relevant war zone is halfway around the world. In one story, a loner confronts racial fear, dysfunctional public transportation, and the crushing power of the state while dealing with the troubles of an undocumented friend. More obvious are the recurring stories of the ordinary people-- cubicle dwellers, mailroom boys, and unemployed--who find their lives somehow altered by the distant conflict. Disaffected young men join the military in search of identity and social approval. Back home, as if things weren’t bad enough in dystopia, the weather is always too hot or cold. As several of the characters state, it’s unfortunate that the soldiers have to come home during a spell of unusually cold weather; war is hell.

Brief Encounters contains recurring instances of superficial and ubiquitous displays of nationalism, which are invariably accompanied by compulsive and unquestioning support for the prevailing foreign military policy. Micheal Billig, a prominent British social scientist, coined the term “banal nationalism” to describe what he called “the everyday representations of the nation, which build an imagined sense of national solidarity and belonging amongst humans.” This concept is repeatedly demonstrated by the hapless inhabitants of Sayrafiezadeh’s world, not least as a sub-textual critique of the nature of the American war-society:

Sitting in the back of the J-23B with the air-conditioning barely working, I stared out the window as we crawled through residential neighborhoods whose houses were all hung with flags. There was no breeze, and the flags hung limply. Some of the homes displayed the MIA and POW flags from bygone wars, and every so often there’d be a sign stuck in a window that said PEACE or NO WAR or something to that effect, but those were few and far between, and for the most part everyone was on the same page.

In another piece, the narrator’s coworker hosts a party before his departure to basic training and then subsequent deployment to the war. The atmosphere is described in bland, devastating detail:

Joey Joey was on the deck with everyone I hadn’t seen in a long time. Everyone had put on weight. The flag was out and it was waving in the breeze. The breeze felt nice. It was going to be a nice spring. “If more people made an effort to keep the flag out,” someone said, “we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today.” Everyone agreed.

The same protagonist is bombarded by propaganda on public transportation:

I would recline in my seat with my cup of coffee and stare at the advertisements above my head of the handsome young men in their spotless uniforms, standing on the beach or a mountaintop, smiling at the camera and draping their arms around their buddies’ shoulders as if they were having the time of their lives. “You too can help,” the advertisements read. “You too can make a difference.”

The nationalistic messages that permeate life lie in stark contrast to the onerous day-to-day life depicted throughout Brief Encounters. These displays of patriotism go beyond mere cultural representation: they are part and parcel of a statist agenda by which dissent is muted and pressing domestic and local concerns are lost in the noise. The narrators in Brief Encounters comment cynically about these nationalistic themes, but at the same time see no reason to cease passively consuming and accepting the government’s conclusions with spineless compliance. After all, that’s what everyone else is doing.

Perhaps relatedly, the collection’s strengths lie in evoking the sentiment of a distant war; on the single occasion when Sayrafiezadeh tries to depict an actual war, it’s awkward. Contrary to what some might say, this is not necessarily because, unlike actual veterans-turned-authors like Phil Klay of Redeployment fame, or the author of Fobbit, David Abrams, Sayrafiezadeh is an elite, latte-sipping New York man of letters who’s never been to war or spoken to anyone who has done such a thankless thing. Nor is it because Sayrafiezadeh lacks the adequate imagination. The fundamentally structural problem, we suspect, is that the war simply is not a part of the universe that Sayrafiezadeh has so cleverly constructed, which consists of the unrelenting impact of war on things that are not war. Or, put another way: in an imaginary (we hope) world where everything revolves around war, war is the Derridan center. Once you actually get there, there isn’t a hell of a lot to say about it. Perhaps we shouldn’t be trying.

Mr. Sayrafiezadeh’s work is extremely compelling, well crafted, and compulsively readable. It forces the reader to confront the past 12-plus years of constant war and its effects on society. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald keenly observed the lingering effects of Belgian colonial oppression, which he compared to a cancer continuing to mestatize. Sayrafiezade’s examination of the incessant war drum, and its impact on the spirit of a nation, is not after the fact but real time.

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In Each Instance, Imagine The Beloved

8/18/2014

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Laura Maurello, The Tenants of the Hôtel Biron. Guernica Editions, Canada.

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In La Folie Baudelaire, Roberto Calasso’s magisterial book on Baudelaire and his circle, the most compelling essay shines a spotlight on Medieval War Scene, a mysterious early painting by Edgar Degas that is notable for the meaninglessness of its violence. That this violence is directed towards several women in unexplained states of undress is even more chilling:

The air is frozen, motionless. No one will witness this; no one will ask why. What is being experienced here is a new way of killing for which a certain calm is necessary. The victims form a group but not yet a mass--and they can make no appeal for help, in the silence of the countryside. An image that is like a new kind of subject for meditation. We do not know if the horsemen are soldiers, criminals or executioners.

In this violence, Calasso argues, is a premonition of modernity. The ordinary guys on horseback foreshadow the bureaucrats who will one day sign the paperwork for the battle of the Somme, or perhaps the camps at Dachau.

Of auxiliary interest to Calasso is the categorization of the painting, which in the French salon system was a critical identifying feature of any artistic endeavor. Medieval War Scene was, by all accounts, accepted as a painting in the time-honored “historical” tradition. Presumably, at some point in medieval history, there must have been violence against women by men on horseback; the actual historicity of the specific events, however, appears to be unknown. What do you call a painting that refers back to historical events that have no articulated place in history? It belongs to the realm of historical fiction: a type of exercise where plausible events of varying degrees of historical legitimacy are described in the style of a fictional narrative, often without the baggage of fact.

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In The Tenants of the Hôtel Biron, the richly researched novel by Laura Marello, a cast of household names inhabits a hotel--among them Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, and Eduard Steichen. The main plot centers around Rodin’s mistress, the sculptor Camille Claudel, who bears the brunt of both bohemian and petit-bourgeois social codes as she fights for artistic recognition and personal freedom. The book, consonant with Wikipedia, suggests that certain members of Claudel’s family had it in for her; eventually she is permanently incarcerated in a French asylum. Framing this sorry tale is the central conceit that Steichen is collecting letters and narratives from his old friends to form a book, perhaps this very book, which would place The Tenants of the Hôtel Biron squarely in the species of “false document.” Henri Rousseau speaks of Rodin’s passionate childhood and rocky path towards artistic fulfilment; Steichen provides a laundry list of turn-of-the-century artistic projects involving Rodin, Henri Matisse, and Picasso; Nijinsky contributes several pages of “Spiritual Exercises.” Claudel provides her letters to Rodin, the last of which begins on this note: “I am going to die now. I will not be joining you in hell, because, as you know, my sins of hubris, martyrdom, bitterness, exaggeration, and the excessive way I cherished my own victimization, hurt no one but myself.”

Like Medieval War Scene, The Tenants of the Hôtel Biron pushes the boundaries of a genre. Whereas Medieval War Scene seems to have no specific basis in fact, The Tenants of the Hôtel Biron has little basis in fiction. With the possible exception of Claudel’s twin sons by Rodin, whose existence and survival are somewhat speculative, there appear to be no significant fictional characters. A typical page is jam-packed with black-letter historical events, well-known names that have survived the test of decades, and very little else:

The Friends of the Louvre Society gave a tour of the Hôtel Biron today. It regularly gives tours of historic buildings and, since the state is considering restoring it, we were on the society’s list. We were notified in advance of the tour, so we were all able to be on our best behavior (e.g. Cocteau wasn’t in the midst of throwing a wild party; Rodin refrained from drawing women in erotic poses; Rilke kept his windows shut and did not recite yesterday’s work to the garden at the top of his voice; Matisse managed to keep his pupils from imitating his style when copying the plaster model; and Miss Claudel was nowhere to be found).

Ordinarily, a work of faithful historical fiction focuses on the desiderata of every day--the unobservable space of solitude and interiority in which people take out the garbage, look out the window, and reflect on matters that have little immediate cultural significance, such as a sex act or a piece of furniture. Examples of conventional historical fiction about artists or scholars would include, for example, Arrogance by Joanna Scott (Egon Schiele) or The World As I Found It by Bruce Duffy (Ludwig Wittgenstein). In other words, historical fiction generally focuses on what cannot be said in normal intellectual or creative discourse. Yet, in an unusual departure from the genre, The Tenants of the Hôtel Biron does none of these things. There is no omniscient narrator purporting to know everything that Erik Satie was thinking as he sat at the doctor’s office, no fly on the wall peering at Steichen on his toilet. Instead, The Tenants of the Hôtel Biron fictionalizes the self-representations--the official masks and personas--that well-known public figures, in an imperceptibly different alternate universe, might have presented to the outside world.

Due to the novel’s smoothness of execution, this mechanism is more disconcerting than it initially seems. For instance, Ms. Marello’s work institutes a complex double-voicing whereby the fictional Picasso writes statements about art that the actual Picasso, as reimagined by Marello, perhaps might have wished that someone would think that he had written, even though it appears that he never literally wrote them:

Matisse said his feelings and his way of expressing them were inextricable. Matisse left the Fauve tribe to paint other pictures. He found a balance between what he felt and how he painted. He made colors move, condensed meaning, followed the desire of the line.

What red-blooded artist writes to usurp the historians and critics in this manner? Clearly, an artist who believes himself, at the time of writing, already to have ascended to the immortal realm of big-H History--in other words, the same person who later declares:

Rousseau wanted to paint poorly but couldn’t. He painted well in spite of himself. People call this Primitivism. [paragraph break] Kandinsky says Rousseau’s reality is greater than ours. Rousseau showed in the Salon des Indépendants from 1886 to 1910.

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On one level, Ms. Marello’s work is an act of subversion that contextualizes the voices of well-known male artists within the story of a lesser-known (and equally talented) woman. More intriguingly, it is a documentation of the devastating and tyrannical control that life apparently exercises over art. How does a story break free from the facts? One strategy is simply to make some things up. Eduard Steichen did not actually compile a series of narratives by Rousseau, Rodin, Claudel, Nijinski and Satie into a book. It is conjecture that Claudel had twins or, if so, that they grew up knowing that she was their mother. But Claudel hints, in the closing pages, that there is another strategy. “I have finally succeeded in erasing myself,” she declares, “I have tried to grow smaller and smaller in this ludicrous world of the asylum, so that one day I might cease to exist, and at that moment I would finally have some peace.” Years of harsh discipline in the asylum have given her, at least this victory: “No one looks at me, speaks to me, or even utters my name. I have become invisible.”

The erasure is not only a metaphor for a feminist tragedy, which of course Claudel’s story is. It is implicitly a symbol of the erasure of the self that occurs as a corollary to the making of all great art. It isn’t particularly that Picasso or Rodin don’t care about the course of their lives, or that Nijinsky considers himself insignificant. It is that, in the end, the distressing, salacious details--the hectic exhibitions and petty rivalries--are simply noise. Art absents itself from such endeavors, just as Camille Claudel furiously absents herself from the coterie of successful men who formed the foundations of modern painting.

In its strongest and most compelling episode, The Tenants of the Hôtel Biron closes with its final offering: not the torment of Claudel or the flamboyant one-liners of Picasso, but an invocation to the reader under the guise of meditation. “Remind yourself of what you want and desire,” Nijinsky repeatedly exhorts us, “Review your life. Recall to mind each person you have loved, looking upon them year by year, period by period….In each instance, imagine the beloved.” Surely, such a resort to interiority must be viewed, more than anything, as a sort of retreat. Ms. Marello’s perceptive and richly textured work, with its subtle horrors and disappointments, explains why such a retreat is necessary.

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A Clock Museum Is Not a Refuge

8/8/2014

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Kathie Giorgio, Learning to Tell (A Life) Time. The Main Street Rag Publishing Company, Charlotte, NC.

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Tibetan Buddhism, through the teachings of the Samsara, offers a poignant lesson: there are no refuges to be found. Attempts to escape life’s trials and its inherent instability are likely to fail. Any sanctuaries in which we immerse ourselves are found to be ineffective barriers; more often, they turn out to be loci of self-destructive behavior--even if a refuge is nothing more than a warm and comfortable house of antique timepieces, located in an obscure town in Iowa that is curiously host to an innocuous flow of horologically focused tourism.

In Learning to Tell (A Life) Time (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2013), Kathie Giorgio’s 2013 sequel to her 2011 Home for Wayward Clocks, the book’s protagonist, Amy Sue--nicknamed Cooley--has seemingly found her physical and emotional haven: a museum of clocks doubling as a residence in the town of What Cheer, Iowa, which has served as both home and shelter for the better part of 16 years. With the catalyst of her mother’s death, however, a torrent of past trauma roars through the walls of the clock museum like water through a broken dam. Cooley’s mother, Mara Rose, herself a child of abuse, finds respite from her beleaguered past in the bottom of a bottle--or, chillingly, through the infliction of pain onto her daughter. Cooley eventually flees to the cottage of antique clocks, bequeathed to her from its former owner--a father figure who was instrumental in her escape from her home of horrors at the age of 16. (Older men figure into the narrative, in extreme inflection points throughout the story, as predators or saviors--in some cases both, a dissonance that will be hard for some readers to digest.)

Like mother, like daughter: the seemingly innocuous museum, just as much as chronic alcoholism, presents a physical and psychological dead-end. While Cooley’s mother faces an early and lonely death, Cooley herself seems superficially comfortable--yet is trapped in a socially confining and unrealistic stasis that becomes increasingly unsatisfying as her elder housemates die off or fall ill. Other than a brief sojourn to college, Cooley chooses to stay relatively isolated from society over the past 16 years, ensconced in the museum of clocks. In contrast to her mother, whose sexual abuse stemmed from a chance interaction with a close neighbor in the early 1970s, Cooley’s assault came about via the early days of Internet chat boards. Sixteen years later, she seems to have little knowledge or understanding of Facebook or the Internet in general. An early passage reflects this feigned or intentional ignorance:

They were getting close to her house when Andrew asked suddenly, “Are you on Facebook?”

“What?” Cooley was feeling groggy, whether from the afternoon, the pain, or the pain meds, she couldn’t say.

“Facebook. Online. You know, the place where people find their friends and stuff.”

Cooley was vaguely aware of Facebook, but she really didn’t use the internet for much. The internet could be a dangerous place, and so were internet friendships. Cooley knew that. She knew that better than anybody. She used eBay and Craigslist to keep an eye out for clocks to add to James’ collection, and she wrote a few emails, but that was about it. “No, I’ve never done anything like that. Why?”

Cooley’s response is a textbook case of dissociative disorder, foreshadowing the revelation of trauma that she has suffered--in no small part to the Internet--over a decade before. The clock museum and its inhabitants offer Cooley a perfectly seductive hiding hole from the world. The reader is led to believe that it is the comfort food of real estate: a veritable “hobbit hole,” deeply set into a cozy section of a Shire-like world.

Facebook takes on an increasingly prominent role in the book as the story progresses. The techno-social zeitgeist giant allows Cooley to reengage with new and old contacts, as well as pursue a parallel investigation and confrontation with her now-deceased abuser, who has a multifaceted online history of his own. In short, the protagonist reemerges from her shell both physically and virtually. Cooley’s relationship with the Internet, riddled with ambivalence, raises questions that lurk in the corner of the narrative. What can we understand--and what can we never understand--about her view of online presences and personas, traumatized as she was by an early-adopter version of the Internet that was, by all accounts, simply a dematerialized version of the Wild West?

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Mrs. Giorgio crafts a complex and compelling history, populated by a sprawling web of predators and victims that intersects one unfortunate family throughout time and space. Physically abused by her alcoholic mother, Mara Rose, and ignored by an emotionally absent father, at first Cooley is merely a victim in a long line of victims. Mara Rose’s downward spiral is painfully stark, its connection to past trauma clearly delineated by the obsessive nature of ordering and stacking empty bottles of liquor, wine and beer. The early days of secretive drinking and its techniques eventually lead to unfettered, 24-hour-a-day binging that is described in glaring detail. After Cooley reaches adulthood, mother and estranged daughter are oppositely charged ions, never to be found in each other’s presence; necessary measures are taken by both parties to avoid unwanted contact (no small feat in a small town in Iowa). In the midst of this sordid cycle of avoidance, however, the power of unconfronted truths beckons. When Mara Rose dies, Cooley finds clues about her mother’s hidden and dysfunctional past--a search that soon reveals as much about herself and her own abuse. The message and challenge of the book is clear: confront your past and its trauma, or it will consume you. As a constant reminder of this message, a subtle yet powerful undercurrent of consuming fire is found throughout the narrative.

The book is at its best while tackling the most disturbing aspects of Mara Rose’s past abuse and progressively problematic drinking. The Lolita-like relationship, with its disturbing but extended experience of consensual rape, is unforgettable and jarring. Vividly painted images set a powerful tone for the events: seemingly small things, such as the sharing of freshly squeezed lemonade or the early experience of smoking, are described in sinister and careful detail--perhaps as a literary proxy for acts that are too horrifying to state aloud. Unsurprisingly, Mara Rose has a narcissistic mother and an unavailable father. The reader is compelled to ask: just how many generations back does this chain of dysfunction go? Even Cooley, years later, is sucked into her mother’s shoes. She reads an old, preserved note from the predator, and feels, for a moment, a sentiment of love and tenderness:

Cooley wanted to be angry at Brian James Sonnenborg too. She really did. She wanted to rip up the note and the sketchpad and she wanted to shred every photo. But it was hard to turn away from the love in the note, as twisted as it was. It was still love. Yet picturing it, picturing a ten-year old girl and a fifty-one year old man, a ten-year old girl who likely hadn’t even kissed a boy or even held his hand, made Cooley want to turn her face away and gag.

The reader, like Cooley, may become suddenly disgusted. We are drawn less into the mind of the pedophile than into the terrifying world of Mara Rose. These pivotal years scar Mara Rose permanently, setting the stage for Cooley’s tumultuous upbringing. Her mother’s is a jarring discovery for Cooley: she has managed to be part of a common crime, repeated across generations. The story is an old one, but the point of the book is not the cautionary Lifetime movie in which the characters seem to live, but rather the nuances of how people react to traumatic stress. Cooley has won, but why? The question of what makes her resilient is prominent--and unanswered. Perhaps there is no answer. This lacuna in the book points to the ongoing existential dilemma which is faced by all people, survivors of abuse or not. What makes one person a victim and another person a predator? Does halting a seemingly endless, multi-generational cycle of abuse actually require direct engagement? To this last question, the author firmly appears to answer yes. A curious implication of the book is that, regardless of what ghosts might be in a person’s closet, a comfortable life as a curator for the Clock Museum of What Cheer, Iowa--and the life of social isolation that it permits--is a trauma of its own.

Even Cooley appears to recognize the dangers of slipping too far into the comfortable cocoon of the clock world, when she recalls her initial experience of her benefactor and the Museum:

…and Cooley remembered sometimes finding James with his forehead against the glass that covered the grandmothers face. Usually, he had his hands on what he called the clock’s shoulders, the molding that rolled around the face and out beneath it. From her shoulders, the molding curved around her body and down to her feet, widening there, forming what looked like the skirt of full-length form-fitting dress. The first time Cooley caught James like this, she asked him what he was doing and he startled backwards, jerking the clock, setting off a cacophony of discordant chimes.

“Just…resting,” he said. He quickly opened the clock’s door, slipping his hands between her weights, bringing her back to peace.

“Resting?” Cooley was sixteen at the time, still new to the Home. She knew James loved clocks, that he had a connection with them somehow. But still. This was weird.

The image of a man talking to and obsessively caressing a clock, in a house devoid of any organic life and sound, is as devastatingly rendered as any description of Cooley’s harrowing past.

Kathie Giorgio’s book presets a powerful narrative, and she has crafted compelling characters in this story. It is a laudable example of a high-quality work that hides in the dense forest of independent books, and we hope to hear more from her soon.

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The Perpetual Thud of a Distant War

In Each Instance, Imagine The Beloved

A Clock Museum Is Not a Refuge

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