The Reading Experience

Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction (Work in Progress)

(All three chapters as single pdf available here.)

Chapter 1: Sorrentino the Poet 

    There is no question that Gilbert Sorrentino considered himself first of all to be a poet. He began his writing career not just writing but also reviewing and publishing poetry, most prominently in the little magazines he edited, Neon and Kulchur. While it now seems almost certain that Sorrentino will be remembered primarily as a writer of fiction, certainly that fiction is sufficiently unconditional in its rejection of the traditional core elements of fiction—plot, character, setting, theme—and so unmistakably focused instead on creating alternative formal arrangements of language that it is considerably more than a fancy to say that essentially Sorrentino remained a poet throughout his whole body of work, whose key aesthetic assumptions are recognizably embodied in the poetry as well as the fiction. (Continue)

Chapter 2: Sorrentino the Realist

    The publication of Sorrentino's first novel after he had established himself as a poet—at least in those quarters of the poetry world whose notice would have meant the most to him—perhaps conveys the impression that writing fiction was a kind of literary second thought. Even while Sorrentino continued to write lyric poetry for the remainder of his life, the succession of novels that followed the publication of The Sky Changes in 1966 certainly did soon enough foster the perception that he had altered his career course to become primarily a novelist. But a proper appreciation of Sorrentino's whole body of work can be gained only be recognizing that the poetry and the fiction are not divergent practices, that the fiction represents Sorrentino's effort to engage with language for the purpose that also motivates the poet: sounding out the artistic possibilities that can be realized through the imaginative arrangement of words. (Continue) 

Chapter 3: Sorrentino the Metafictionist

    Part 1: “Of and For Itself”: Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

    Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things marks a clear turn in Sorrentino’s conception both of the formal requirements of a novel—of fiction in general—and of the specific imperatives implied by his own aesthetic inclinations as a writer. Indeed, while this turn is obvious enough to anyone considering Sorrentino’s career in retrospect, it must have been apparent to Sorrentino, even if he did not begin writing this successor to Steelwork having explicitly determined to make it. Although the move from Sorrentino’s first two novels to Imaginative Qualities could be characterized as the final abandonment of literary realism, the alternative he embraced is even more sweeping. If both The Sky Changes and Steelwork retained a loose allegiance to realism (the latter even more tenuously), neither novel cast its realism in conventional narrative form. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things takes its divergence from conventional form to the point that realism becomes simply extraneous. (Continue)

    Part 2: "Walking Around Inside": Mulligan Stew

    In many ways, the publication of a novel like Mulligan Stew in 1979 should not have seemed especially startling. Not only had it been preceded by Sorrentino's own Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, perhaps the most radical work of postmodern metafiction to have yet appeared, but the entire period in American fiction from the early 1960s to the late 70s was notable for the number of writers employing a kind of iconoclastic, "carnivalesque" comedy--the term used by Bakhtin to describe a spirit of comedic abandon that subjects everything in its purview to parody and mockery. The black humor of Heller and Vonnegut explicitly adopts this attitude, while the equally mordant if less readily categorizable comedy of writers such as Stanley Elkin or Thomas Pynchon participate in this spirit as well. Although not indulging in quite the sort of outrageous self-parody characterizing Mulligan Stew, novels like William Gaddis's JR, Robert Coover's The Public Burning, and John Barth's Letters nevertheless were equally ambitious, comedically extravagant novels published in the mid and late 1970s (Letters the same year as Mulligan Stew). (Continue)

Still to come (tentatively): 4) Sorrentino the Anarchist; 5) Sorrentino the Craftsman; 6) Sorrentino the Oulipian; 7) Sorrentino the Aesthete; 8) Sorrentino the Moralist;  9) Sorrentino the Humorist 

The Temporal Compression of Daydream Experience

A brief synopsis of S.D. Chrostowska's The Eyelid (Coach House Books) certainly makes it sound like a work of science fiction or fantasy, or perhaps a futuristic dystopia: a man given to idleness and daydreaming, recently unemployed and occupied mostly with sleeping, meets a man who claims to be the "Ambassador of the Free Republic of Onirica," literally the land of dreams. This man, Chevauchet, recruits our narrator, after leading him on visits into other people's dreams, to join him in his mission to combat the modern plague of sleeplessness and to restore the value of reverie and dreams. Eventually the narrator begins to recruit people to go underground with him (literally) and symbolically resist society's increasing intolerance of sleep and dreams (they impede productivity, of course) by, well, sleeping. Unsurprisingly, the mission doesn't end well.

However, the reader who would thus expect The Eyelid to conform to the expectations we might have of fantasy fiction would probably be disappointed with this book. It does not render its story in the scenic, episodic way a work of fiction prompted first of all by a commitment to narrative would, as the story that finally gets told is secondary to the essentially expository discourse offered by the narrator, a very learned and allusive discourse incorporating 16th century French philosophy, neoplatonism, modern political theory, and numerous other references to European intellectual history. Most of these disquisitions are summaries of Chevauchet's philosophy of dreaming and its roots in dissident thinkers and emancipatory ideals. "Novel of ideas" is a label that certainly does fit  The Eyelid, although even here its ideas are not the occasional subject of conversation or remain merely metaphorical and emblematic; their explicit exposition by the narrator is the primary focus of much of the novella.

Perhaps the most sustained act of storytelling in The Eyelid occurs when Chevauchet takes the narrator on the journeys into the ongoing dreams of various dreamers, an endeavor in which, the narrator tells us, "Chevauchet made himself my Virgil, a genial cicerone through the circles of Hell and along the terraces of Purgatory, raising my hopes of Paradise." The narrator witnesses "dreams of love," dreams of dread," and other types of night-dreams experienced by the dreamers of Onirica, which, as we come to understand, is really a kind of distillation of dreaming, Chevauchet its keeper. But it is not only the night-dream (over which we have less control)  that Chevauchet seeks to protect but also daydreams and reverie, which can be more fruitful sources of human creativity. 

This series of scenes is relatively brief, however, as the focus switches to the exposition of Chevauchet's theories about the importance of dreaming to human fulfillment and, ultimately, the narrator's act of resistance against a society that eventually tries to eliminate dreaming altogether by simply forbidding it, substituting for it a mind-numbing drug that induces a "beatific state of high-functioning sleeplessness." (The novella is nominally set in Paris, but it is a Paris that has been absorbed into a "Greater America" that has imposed its exploitative ways on much of the world.) This drug, CI, might be a supercharged kind of opioid, but its effects might also reflect our now all-pervasive virtuality: "The masterminds of CI sought by degrees to replace all natural creative imagination with artifice. They claimed it was for the sake of quality control: optimized content and better use of time, what with advances in the temporal compression of daydream experience. In reality, it was to abolish mental activity that was off the grid and went untracked."

In the end, Chevauchet disappears, presumably enfeebled by the cessation of dreaming, leaving the narrator to persevere with his own meager rebellion, but soon enough his clandestine sleep sessions are discovered, and he must flee for his life--unsuccessfully, as it turns out. Thus the novella as a whole does advance a narrative, however interrupted or suspended at times, beginning with the recently unemployed narrator meeting Chevauchet on a park bench and ending with his presumed death. But it finally conveys less the impression of a story told than of a story added to a philosophical rumination on the ebbing of introspection and imagination in the 21st century, a reverie of its own that can be categorized as fiction because the story is quite obviously all made up, while the ruminations filtered through the characters seem just as obviously to reflect the thinking of the author.

Is this necessarily a problem, though? Since the author clearly does not intend to offer a conventional dystopic narrative but to use the conceit of dystopia to directly contemplate the actually existing conditions that might lead us to such a state, we can't really say that the book fails to fulfill its ambitions: It couldn't be called an aesthetic failure if its purpose is not primarily aesthetic to begin with. Finally the fantastic elements in conjunction with the frequent expository passages lead me to regard The Eyelid as an allegory, but an allegory of the pre-modern kind in which the allegorical meaning is not concealed within the symbolic design of the story, to be released through interpretation, but lies plainly on the surface, communicated directly.

An appreciation of this novella thus depends on the reader's acceptance not just of the allegorical mode but of this particular undisguised version of it. For myself, I can say that the book certainly does conceptualize the effects of our current hypercapitalist culture and its brutal work ethic in a way I find illuminating and insightful, although I confess I am also less able to take from it the sort of aesthetic gratification I normally hope to find in works of fiction. Still, when I consider whether the insights Chrostowska provides are more emphatically and memorably expressed in the form she has chosen than might be the case in more straightforward critical discourse, I would have to say they are.

Just Weird

Guillermo Stitch is not the sort of writer who is going to get a lot of mainstream press coverage--the very title of his novel Lake of Urine (Sagging Meniscus Press) seems an immediate thumb to the nose where the mainstream is concerned--but such discussions of his work that can be found (mostly on blogs) use such terms as "bizarro," "new weird," and "absurdist" to characterize his fiction. It is easy enough to see why such terms would suggest themselves as appropriate to a novel like Lake of Urine, but while they might apply up to a point, this novel finally doesn't very comfortably fit into any of these categories.

"Weird" and "bizarre" would each certainly apply to Lake of Urine as simply a general description of the novel's setting and various plot turns (although it can't really be said to have a straightforward plot), yet to the extent each is also more specifically identified with the kind of fiction that such adjectives have come to designate--"bizarro fiction," "the new weird"--the novel falls short of (or exceeds) the definitions given to these modes. While Lake of Urine has its disgusting moments--particularly in regard to the lake in question--it really lacks the full punkish grotesquerie associated with bizarro fiction, and its weirdness doesn't quite take it into the realm of science fiction but is just, well, weird (often rather amiably so).

"Absurdist" doesn't quite capture the quality of the novel's humor, either. Historically speaking, an absurdist novel distorts reality in order to unsettle our notions of the "reality" of the real, or even to sharpen our perception of the real. The comedy in Lake of Urine, however, which follows on directly from its weirdness, serves Stitch in his effort at what is called world-building, even if it is an out of phase and peculiar world. Indeed, this seems to be the primary aesthetic ambition of the novel: to get us to accept its peculiar world as itself "real," at least as far as language and the tools of fiction can work to create this illusion.

As if to underscore the urgency of this task, Lake of Urine offers numerous passages like this, especially at the beginning of chapters:

Two pairs of heavy brocade curtains emit two razor-sharp slits of hard light into the cool, quiet gloom. One of these lines dissects the plum and bamboo motif of the upholstery on a cabriole sofa that sits in the middle of the room--laser-like as it cuts across the floorboards and splits the oriental design from floor to high, curved back.

A reading table is tucked behind the sofa and on it stands a lamp. From the lamp, a gas tube winds upward like a charmed cobra to a ceiling fixture overhead. . . .

The descriptions of the particulars of this world are, as here, almost minutely exact ("the plum and bamboo motif"), not unlike what we might expect to find in a straightforwardly realist novel. In fact, one could say that this is a realist novel, except that the writer's realism presumes a world in which a man wishes to measure the depth of a lake so attaches first a dog and then a woman to the end of his very long rope and plunges them to the bottom (neither return), another woman (the dead one's sister) escapes her home town to the city and almost immediately becomes the CEO of a very large corporation (admittedly she seems at least as competent and well-informed as the other members of the company's board), and, at the novel's conclusion, the dead woman (her name is Urine, hence the novel's title) is herself resurrected from the lake as something like a zombie. The novel's task is to convince us this world makes its own kind of sense, not to suggest that our own reality lacks it.

There are elements of satire in Lake of Urine, but it tends to be of the rather mild and somewhat obvious sort, as in the scenes depicting Norambole (the surviving sister) interacting with her colleagues in the boardroom, an amusing enough send-up of the shallowness and cupidity of corporate values but really more just a part of the comic eccentricity of the characters' behavior in the novel than biting satire of the world outside it. This eccentricity almost necessarily makes most of the characters in the novel two-dimensional, but this does not really affect our ability to accept both them and their world as provisionally convincing fictional creations.

Perhaps the least caricatured character in the book is Emma Wakeling, mother of Urine and Norambole. About half of the novel is in fact narrated by Emma, as she tells, in reverse chronological order, the stories of her eight marriages. (Urine and Norambole were the product of the first.) These chapters are enjoyably outrageous, Emma's pride in being a master at masturbating the men in her life ("He would squeal and cry like a girl while I did it") providing especially hilarious moments. Her manual dexterity aside, Emma is not exactly a man-pleaser; she uses her skills to control them, although this does not prevent her from making some pretty bad choices in husbands. We are also offered scenes from Emma's childhood, which among other things, gives the novel some historical grounding, enhancing the overall exercise in world-building.

Lake of Urine as a whole is enjoyable. Its "bizarre" elements--including the potentially unsavory ones--do not make it a less agreeable work but help it rise above whimsy or "quirk." But, in succeeding at building its off-kilter world, paradoxically by using the strategies of realism, does this novel also enhance our appreciation of the ways in which the evocation of the irreal extends the aesthetic horizon of the novel? Should we be content with the world that is built, or should the way of building hold its own interest, so that such worlds do not come prefabricated? Do these things matter? Perhaps not, not always. Lake of Urine is unlike most other novels, which makes it admirable enough.

On Dodge Rose

My essay on Jack Cox's Dodge Rose (a "cold take" on a less recently published work) is now available at Splice: 

Finally it seems to me that Dodge Rose provokes reflection on two different conceptions of “experimental fiction”. One focuses primarily on the subversion of familiar form for its own sake, without necessarily emphasising the reconfiguration of form anew. The other is also concerned to challenge pre-existing form, but as well is still occupied with creating form, however unwonted. If we simply acknowledge the formal eccentricities of a novel like Dodge Rose but don’t much ask that they transcend mere eccentricity or caprice to achieve some sort of aesthetic continuity, I, for one, would find the work ultimately disappointing. The quirks of Dodge Rose threaten to become just quirks on their way to an unorthodox but ultimately intelligible political critique, unless we recognise its aesthetic effects as being at least as fully realised as its message.