The Frame

Final Notes on Cosmopolis

As a follow-up to my weak post on DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, I want to provide some highlights from an excellent review of the book by The American Prospect’s Mark Greif.

In my last post, I was trying to put my finger on why DeLillo’s musings on the supermarket in White Noise succeeded, but why his musings on hip-hop in Cosmopolis failed. According to Greif:

DeLillo’s strength in the past came from his ability to show the limitations of people trying to hold on to the patterns they craved. He stood characters on the pivot between sense and senselessness. There is a moment in White Noise (1985) when Jack Gladney, exposed to vapors from a toxic cloud, has his chances of survival calculated by an infallible computer. It concludes he’s already dead. That moment captured what it feels like to live enmeshed in numbers, patterns, algorithms — and still be able to look down at your two hands and see nothing changed. DeLillo wanted to know what it was like to be a statistical person, or a historical personage (as in Libra or Underworld), and still a living person.

In Cosmopolis, the patterns Eric finds in hip-hop are not essential but superfluous. Eric does not “hold on” to hip-hop, or “crave” it. And hip-hop is such a flamboyant system that it hardly holds the same allure as one undiscovered, a pattern not yet traced.

The best part, according to Greif:

The texture of the novel is its most interesting feature. Characters appear and disappear. Eric’s route isn’t mapped and the chronology isn’t altered. Only one aspect of space-time is affected: The narration starts to take apart our experience of interior, of private spaces. Eric’s apartment unfolds, revealing a fantastic existence. We discover its expansion, as details grow like crabgrass: A rotating room erupts here, a shark tank there, and the apartment itself has “forty-eight rooms.” Eric’s limousine perfects this strangeness. Visitors stand up and leave it as if it were a bedroom. The floor is made of marble. The space contracts and widens.

And the worst:

As for the politics of the novel, don’t even bother. You can’t doubt that DeLillo’s heart is in the right place. In the mouth of Eric’s “chief of theory,” however, a semi-academic named Vija Kinski, the book repeats watery versions of the stupidest analyses of the present, which are so unmindful of real conditions as to be neither of the left nor the right.

Now Reading: Kierkegaard's Either/Or Pt. 1

I’m taking a Philosophy course in Existentialism (what’s college without a course in existentialism) and we will be reading a ton of Kierkegaard, including Either/Or, Concluding Unscientific Postscript…, The Sickness Unto Death, and Philosophical Fragments.

I was surprised that we won’t be reading Fear and Trembling, but am glad to tackle some  of his longer/harder stuff. As you will soon find out from what I write on Kierkegaard, I don’t know much about him. Stay tuned for some ignorant posts on an important philosopher.

I expect to trample over his statement: “It is exactly right not to be understood, for one is thereby protected against misunderstanding.” He would probably prefer that I am unable to write about him at all, which would indicate that I do not understand him rather than misunderstand him. Here’s to hoping I get him right.

Blood Meridian: Singling Out the Thread

We learn a lot  about the judge in chapter XIV from his dialogue with Toadvine (pg. 198-199). He apparently keeps his ledger as a way to control nature, “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent” (198). And later, “Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will be properly suzerain of the earth” (198). The judge acknowledges “creation” and a ruler besides himself—he defends his use of the word “suzerain” by explaining that it differs from a “ruler” because it “rules even when there are other rulers” (198).

The judge apparently imagines his work of documenting objects of nature as making them “stand naked” (198), perhaps by stripping them of their context in nature, or in his words, “singling out the thread of order from the tapestry” (199()? Could this relate to scalping where a vital part of a human being is removed from its context, and becomes merely a receipt of a kill?

Misreading White Noise

My response to 52books’ review of Don Delillo’s White Noise, which may or may not still be one of my favorite novels:

Maybe you were expecting too much from the narrative. The story was not meant to “grab” you. Isn’t a big part of this book playing with the idea of plot (it always leads to death)? DeLillo’s not Michael Grisham or Tom Clancy or whatever.

Your review is a disappointment. I am surprised that your review does not even try to understand all the stuff about death, simulacrae, etc. in the novel? This superficial review of the book makes me think that your whole project is detrimental to your reading experience. If you have to just gloss over these books to keep on schedule, what’s the point in reading them at all?

Originally posted as a comment by marshponds on 52books using Disqus.

Agency in Duras' The Ravishing of Lol Stein

2.

In class we talked about how in Modernist texts, thoughts do not carry the same privileged status that they carried in previous works. This is because Modernism treats thoughts not as voluntary actions, but things that merely happen. In Modernist texts, characters do not think and then act, but rather think and act. Thought and action are not necessarily linked. Perceiving thought and action this way leads to a revised understanding of agency as well. Acknowledging this tenuous relationship between thought and action, Modernist works portray agency as a problematic concept, and often suggest that agency is an illusion.

I found this class discussion helpful in my understanding of The Ravishing of Lol Stein. While reading the novel, I wondered about Lol’s passiveness in marrying John Beford, for example. At one point in the novel, Lol explains that she felt she “never had a chance to choose [her] life.” Just as the novel describes thoughts as things that happen, Lol’s life seems to be something that happened to her.

Our discussion in class did not, however, illuminate another question I had been thinking about: why Jack describes love as a form of “possess[ion]” (82), and “control” (97). Jack equates having an affair with Lol to becoming “bent to her will” and “consumed” (97). He also talks about wanting to “possess [Tatiana] completely” (82). Making love appears to consist of taking or offering one’s agency to another. How does this conception of love relate to our discussion of agency? (I understand that this is supposed to be a weekly essay, not question, but how does one write anything pertaining to Duras that doesn’t end in a question mark?)

Words and Facts in Duras' The Ravishing of Lol Stein

1.

One of the most interesting pages, for me, in The Ravishing of Lol Stein is page 106. On this page, Jack and Lol speak for the first time in privacy, and Lol reveals herself to have watched Jack and Tatiana make love. Lol, describing the scene between Jack and Tatiana, states that “Tatiana was naked beneath her dark hair.” This sentence affects Jack profoundly. He describes it “explod[ing],” and “blow[ing] the meaning apart.” He describes himself as “no longer understanding that it means nothing.”

I am interested in Jack’s reaction to this sentence because in some ways it resembles my own reaction to this novel. At times while reading the novel, I “failed to understand” the sentences—specifically the sentences where Tatiana or Lol seemed to suddenly appear in Jack’s presence, even though these appearances do not make logical sense within the novel. Such sentences “blow the meaning apart,” on a logical level, but also suggest something profound: that a linear narrative cannot capture memory, identity or reality.

I find it interesting how the articulation of Tatiana’s nakedness seems to change the “fact” of her nakedness. Jack is taken aback by the “intensity of the sentence,” not by the intensity of the fact. The words have the effect of “transform[ing]” the fact; the words place Tatiana “between Lol Stein and [Jack].” Somehow the words have altered the fact, as Jack describes, “the fact no longer contains the fact.”

Before I write something stupid (if I haven’t done so already), I need to admit that I don’t know what to make of this last line. Like Jack, I find this sentence “impossible to make any sense whatsoever out of it.” If I had to, I would guess that he is getting at the point that words fail to capture meaning; words do not function as neat and tidy signifiers, but become their own “facts.” Lol is not merely describing Tatiana naked, but bringing her “between” them; by describing Tatiana naked, Lol has initiated a new relationship between the three of them. If Jack is suggesting that words are not merely signifiers but their own facts, that would explain the baffling sentences throughout the novel; I am expecting them to signify something, to be representational, but they are merely facts in themselves that may not fit neatly with the other facts.