Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (part 3/1)

The Sound of Refacement : The Hybrid Word in Glamvoid

Strangely Akin : The Setting as a Social Commentary

Q : How does one tell the dream of the sublime in a dedivinized world?

A : By telling a story about scoring.

In the world in which all solid dissolves into the traces of their own insubstantiality, an apocalypse does not reveal anything. Such a world rewards its dwellers with hardly anything more than an awareness of the implausibility of such a status. It tends to reduce them to occupants of mutable spatiotemporality void of any affinity to perseverance. Elusiveness of the surrounding entails an increasing capacity for ever further eroding of the constituents enabling the environment to be called so. In such a world, mediated experiences tend to assume the status they themselves deny. Mediation that almost forgot that it is integral to the dazzling world of glamacams, wall screens, visionplex, portapops, telebugs, and other sound-vision machinery seems to be not just what happens in the world of omniconnectivity, but the very world. The world that feeds on the ecstatic almost forgot that thriving on glamour is an advanced version of highly commoditized social relations. In such a world, commodity knows no difference between what is sold, how it can be bought, who does the trade, and other subtleties of such complex socialties. Or, so somnambulist logic wants one to believe.

In the world in which all solid dissolves into the traces of their own insubstantiality, an apocalypse does not reveal anything. Such a world leaves little room for immersing oneself in the very activity, be it even a crudely antikinetic variant of dynamics. Instead, it’s all about scoring. It is a dystopian world. One might even be prone to identify such a world with the classification of Jeff Noon’s novels. One might be tricked to think that formal interventions as experimental storytelling means are solely tales of bland surfaces, faceless facades of architectural specimens in a world of unanchored signifiers. Few things are more erroneous than such assumptions. We don’t buy it. If Noon invents a world, it communicates doubts, affirmations, disentanglements, disambiguation, reintegration within secret passages through noise in the communication channel. It, in other words, disrupts dystopian narratives with a slightly different cyberpunk shade of storytelling.

Where oxymoron and paradox are in a mutually fuelling relationship--the world populated by characters whose bodies are but diverse responses to parasite signals--Noon’s stories weave a strangely invigorating nexus consisting of the setting and social commentary told in the key of the poetics evaporating from electric spores, sleazy surfaces, high voltage flashes, paralyzing static, electrifying euphorias,  self-referential arena of the spectacle, imperialism of the ocular plugged into itself, self-dissolving insipidness of the exhaustion by insatiable thirst for thrill, darkness of aloof hotel rooms, emptiness of freeways, spaces of crowded loneliness, solitude in glamvoid. If Noon invents a world, it is a stunning portrayal of the mutually conditioning relationship between reading-writing and cultural realities. It is language against noise.

Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (Interlude One)

Interlude One : Homage To Caledonia

“That prickly, electric self-consciousness just doesn’t suit me and nor does a joyless chemical appetite for sweet things.” Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth 

All night they were shop crawling. Long enough to check out the stores that comprised the city. Shops spreading citywide. Nine in total. Or, so they say. What they bought in each of them might not be purchasable. Might not be translatable in fiscal terms. More sensed in the traces of the ghost tale they took everywhere they went. No matter which shop it was.

It is woven into the smell of the night that opened its wide wings to fold them in an embrace of the shop-all-nite adventure. The embrace emanating the warmth of midnight blue smoke emerging from the hair of the ghost tale. The smoke charged with electric sparks radiated from the petals of the night…the air full of the shadow tale…

How many nights of shop cruising it takes to realize that there might be more than just nine, one wonders. How big the city is that is comprised of more than just nine, one wonders. How to shop in a store beyond the traces of all the echoes, undetectable by a night-shop compass, unutterable in the language other than that of an ethereal hour glass, one wonders :

language, not mafotherphunkie letters.

Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (part 2/4)

How Modern Tradition Is : Sweet Music & the Remix

Low Tech Poetics : re / con / sti / tute

Playfully, yet not lacking in critical edginess, the remix focuses on resistance to noise & worshipping the wholesome sound of creation. The idea and the practice of the remix to a high degree relies on the disambiguation—disentangling-- of the misconception about the totality of discourse. This implies a balanced dialogue within a mutually conditioning relationship between the linguistic sphere and cultural realities. Various components comprise the dialogue in question. Some of them include aspects of culture such as education, knowledge, and the realm of letters. They owe their discursively contested nature to being unified under the common hub—language. As such, they share certain characteristics of it. Language resists total verbalization. It is susceptible to imperfect articulation. In a word, it is not omnipotent. By extension, neither is education, nor knowledge, nor letters. This might create a sense of shortage in these spheres. Rightly so. Further, it might indicate kindred weakness that humans share. Thankfully so. It is precisely the humbleness enabling such an acknowledgement that constitutes the source of reintegrating potential.

In Ian McEwan’s novel Sweet Tooth, these culturally conditioned phenomena are interlaced on many levels. Serena obtains a degree in mathematics from the University of Cambridge. However, during the college years and onwards, she is dedicated to her passion for literature. It enables her engagement in Sweet Tooth and brings her to the world of T.H. Haley, a Brighton based PhD student whose dissertation looks at Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. His storytelling qualifies him for the Austen Prize and funds provided via Sweet Tooth, thereby unburdening him from the drudgery of college teaching, and, consequently, ensures his committing to writing. Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth: ”The Sweet Tooth Faerie Queene had delivered Tom from academic struggle” (213).

The public and the private in this novel meet under a shadow of highly suspicious production of knowledge, intolerable ignoration of the critical distance between the object and the meta levels, fabricated information at the obfuscating intersections between mediation and the unmediated, and the role of public discourse in mainstreaming distracting techniques generated through accentuating the spectacular, vulgar, conspiratorial, controversial. The characters of Serena and Tom in such a scenario merely keep the reader’s awareness of the fallibility of cultural categories, thereby reconfirming the aforementioned weakness of that what possibilizes their contested character in the first place—language. Imperfect, erroneous, incomprehensive. Like humans. And yet, abundant in the reconstituting potential. So is education. So is knowledge. So is the realm of letters.

Ian McEwan empowers the characters in the way and to an extent that reflect the dialectic in question. The narrator is unreliable only to the point suggestive of the limits of both storytelling and human power. This makes McEwan an antiromantic of the sort that recuperates romanticist attributing a divinizing feature to poetry. In accord with the parlance of Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), it could be inferred that McEwan’s narrative technique indicates a capacity romanticism overlooked. Not undervaluing either the significance of poetry or of those who create it, the restraint Rorty requires with regard to the proliferation of quasi divinities, and yet sustaining the investment in the creative, is perhaps what makes Serena’s narration both questionable and reliable. That’s probably a basis for the trickstery of  the inexplicable and unutterable vacillating trust between her and T.H. Haley.

A take on such sinuous, yet profoundly stable, trustworthiness is marvelously articulated in Jeff Noon’s piece “The Ghost on the B-Side” (metamorphiction) offering a remixing narrative demonstrating the beauty of playfulness, imaginative plenitude, and experimentation being no less joyful and inspiring because of their  limits and the quirky power of weakness. Not only does he celebrate the legacy of literary cut-ups, albeit in a slightly modified sense—attuned to the sound of modern day technologically advanced context--but he primarily brings to awareness the possibilities of play within the literary.

Given the prism through which Noon filters literary experimentation, the textual meets audio and visual expressive modes in the form of hybrid poetic imagery. What makes the remixing device specific is the understanding of the remixed version: it can be perceived either as a piece in its own right or an old-school, mirror image, B-side ghost text of the source piece. He calls it dub fiction.

One cannot stress enough Noon’s insistence on the correlation between the newly emerged remixes and the source, since the nexus is vital for the nascent meaning arising out of jumbled imagery and dub chunks. Out of cacophony—awashed in the glory of poetic imagery, resistant to distracting messiness, a standalone piece, bearing witness to the reintegrating potential of the fruitful dialogue between change and preservation. Like low tech poetics.

To fine-tune the stance, one might want to look at the verisimilitude of attempts to approach the idea of remixing, as presented in Simon Reynold’s article “Versus: The Science of Remixology” (1996). He detects the tendencies amongst the artists of the period that spell out in monetary terms that what is salient in music. More precisely, the “versus” approach to sampling from different sources implies an adversarial attitude resulting in remixes that echo the source in a slightly different fashion in comparison to Noon’s dub fiction. In the “versus” approach, the relationship between the remixer and the remixee reflects the competitiveness that plagues cultural realities. Its outcome are remixes that focus on the economic aspects of copyrights and authorship, rather than the playful side of remixing. In order to validate themselves, they rely on the process that threatens the very idea of creativity within such endeavors and, instead, operates within a very limited sphere of--dare one say--rather mechanistic procedures aiming to generate songs. As Reynolds aptly observes, it relocates music-making more into the realm of science and ignores the instinctive. In a word, it is desensitized to a crucial ingredient of all dub.

The attitude that pays little attention to the conjunction between the source code and the B-side shadow piece reflects certain aspects of culture susceptible to distractions to the point of oblivion. To fail to monetize one’s work might not be the imperative, but to prioritize monetizing within a music-making process is a slightly different matter. We don’t buy it. We prefer the fellowship of learners firmly anchored in humbleness to a nihilo-cannibalist arena. We celebrate genuine exchange between and among interlocutors. The remix resists the treatment of samples that deconstruct the source to the point of unrecognizability. Instead, it rejoices in playfulness. If for Joe Rose of Enduring Love part of it means to indulge in the expression of genetically inscribed human emotions (4), then for Theo of Saturday, it means to immerse oneself in the sources of exchange that music offers:

But is there a lifetime’s satisfaction in twelve bars of three obvious chords? Perhaps it’s one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world […] When player and listener together know the route so well, the pleasure is in the deviation, the unexpected turn against the grain. To see a world in a grain of sand. (27)

If the remix is the approach to and manifestation of reading-writing, it is concerned with the mutually conditioning relationship between the linguistic realm and cultural realities. If part of the thematic regards the questions about the relationship between and among vocabularies, then it tends to contextualize the debate with the interplay between tradition and current idiosyncrasies. Neither nostalgia for a glamorizied, idealized past, nor projection into a lionized, romanticized future, the approach renders tradition  remixable, just as contemporary realities are. The remix focuses on hic & nunc  / anticarpe diem approach to the polemic : remapping the past, reimagining the future & resurrecting the present.

Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (Part 2/3)

How Modern Tradition Is : Sweet Music & the Remix 

was yo prose genetic structure, one wonders

Perhaps, one such situation finds Serena snooping on Tom’s work-in-progress. On principle, he does not believe in revealing his current writing. Serena is either overly curious or unreasonably responsible with regard to her professional task. Either way, secretly reading her lover-writer’s works, she discovers an aspect of storytelling that reinstates some of the postulates helpful in sustaining the constancy of awareness in an encounter with a piece of literature. First, she finds a story told by a specter apish narrator  presenting musings about his writer-lover. She is trying to cope with the hindrances obstructing the advancement of her second novel. Serena finds herself in an eddy of storytelling. Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth: “Only on the last page did I discover that the story I was reading was actually the one the woman was writing” (224). What a story!

She then decides to switch to another guilty reading. She picks Tom’s piece entitled From the Somerset Levels. It turns out to be a story about father and daughter in pursuit of the mother. Not only the fact that they do not find her is devastating. Not even their ending up dying in each other’s arms is what colors the narrative in an irredeemable apocalyptic shade. What constitutes the backbone of the story is the journey itself. It is a nightmarish struggle with dystopian scenery generated through a wicked collaboration of social ills, corrosive relationships, and a radically antieco environment. Instead of concrete, the streets are glazed with feces. It seems that everything is upside-down in that doomdom including sewage which appears to be overground – exposed and freely pouring the content readily available to whoever happens to be around. No wonder father and daughter are infected by bubonic plague.

Lethal filth rules urban spaces that not only incorporate the very notion of decay, but are one. It is a society with no societal institutions, system with no functioning infrastructure. It is an urbanity with no denizens. It is a dysfunctional, totalitarian state thriving on vague memories of the times when electricity meant something and served the inhabitants, when telecommunications existed and mattered. It is the world climaxing in the triumph of nihilo-cannibalist orgies. Or, so somnambulist logic wants one to believe.

Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth: “All that functions, though barely, is government itself” (225). It is an image of what once was civilization and now is in the state of irrevocable agony. Haley makes a decisive move in the narrative line contextualizing it within recent history. Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth: ”It’s made clear elsewhere that civilisation’s collapse began with the injustices, conflicts and contradictions of the twentieth century” (226). 

Later, when she can freely discuss the novella with T.H. Haley, Serena asks if things get better in this anticapitalist tale of toxicity and is given an unshakably negative answer. But, that’s Haley’s story. Later, in the coda in absentia, one is reminded about the aspect of reading-writing Serena discovered previously when nosing the ape story. Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth:

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust. (224)

When that contract was, one wonders. One would be prone to ponder if it is still in power, even if Haley knows no sleepless nights. How early summer sunshine smile-showers the cottage of his imagination, one wonders. Perhaps, part of the answer can be sensed via the reflections of the character of Joe Rose in McEwan’s novel Enduring Love:

I saw the same joy, the same uncontrollable smile, in the faces of a Nigerian earth mama, a thin-lipped Scottish granny, and a pale, correct Japanese businessman as they wheeled their trolleys in and recognized a figure in the expectant crowd. Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness. (4)

Whether Joe’s imagination generates the same gleaming outpour as Haley’s does might not be decipherable. But, one thing is pretty certain : Joe is no stranger to restlessness spanning the space from sunset to dawn. Were he a writer, would the consistency of his fiction be the same as that of the actual world? Could those two be different kinds of consistency? If so, is it still possible to talk about the consistency of each without identifying them? Were Joe a writer, what kind of universality could be ascribed to the genetic structure of the characters of his stories?

The impalpable substantiality of such an ethereal inquiry may be perceived via a meditation about the impossible music played in McEwan’s novel Saturday:

There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they’ve ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself. (176)

A glimpse might easily be of the guardian signpost smile so sovereign in its humbleness, as it fills the cottage from the memories of the times bygone and casts rays on whatever fallible context one might find oneself in.

            Perhaps, one such situation is indicated in the supposed coda in absentia in McEwan's novel Sweet Tooth. In the letter to his reader, after the publicized scandal about the Sweet Tooth operation, his being funded by an intelligence service, and his lover being an undercover agent, Tom retrospectively observes the relationship between him and Serena. As much as he acknowledges numerous untruths of hers, he admits a number of secretly paid visits, talks, and exchange of information. The visit to his family now including corrected details. The visit to her family. Disagreeably, pot fuelled conversation with Serena’s sister and her partner. Attending the service of their bishop father. Upon his return to London, being fed from the source of information provided by Max--Serena’s colleague, former lover, co-worker at the Information Research Department. Prior to the trip back to London, tipsy days and nights in a hotel room, so he could digest all the heavy nourishment he was given. Avoiding her that Christmas. Because there was too much to filter. And to sift, to process, it takes a bit of time and insulation. To purify the communication channel, disambiguation is needed.

            The character of Tom is identified negatively--apparently, he is unlike Othello (Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth 354). Tom confesses that the acquired cognizance about Serena’s identity of an intelligence agent makes him assume a similar role: he spies on her and reports back about her. Thus, he contributes to establishing a relationship based on mutual betrayal, and yet, the paradox of it being that there was no single aspect of it that was not authentic. Amid the narrative of radical mistrust, out of the whirlpool of the oscillations between doubt and suspicion, sustained is the inexpressible, yet unbeatable, indisputable presence of the persevering allegiance. 

            If there is a layer of toxicity in McEwan’s novel Sweet Tooth, it is in the service of travesty. If travesty has significance in this book, it is in the service of learning how to read : invigorating critical / creative capacities. If such a process is challenging, it is because a piece of literature calls for an engaging attitude. It is perhaps the reason why learning how to read such a demanding piece equips one with a vocabulary with which to approach cultural realities. One is provided with a vocabulary serving both as a form of peaceful/peaceable resistance to stupefyingly cacophonic amalgamation and as the way of worshipping the aspects of radiant inspiration. It is also a stunningly friendly source of subversive lyrical interjections—quirky genre-bending enclaves--sustaining the much needed alertness and, simultaneously, alleviating the hardship of such a strenuous task.

Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (Part 2/2)

How Modern Tradition Is : Sweet Music & the Remix

hic & nunc / anticarpe diem Suspension of Belief

Were Sweet Tooth a sonnet, it might be of a somewhat unusual structure. It would be characterized by an extended couplet, whose first verse opens with Serena’s starting to explore the world of T.H. Haley’s—soon to become a lover of hers—fiction (136). The other is a sort of coda in absentia (albeit not necessarily in the very literal sense) : Tom’s letter to his reader, crowning the novel with the mastery of mediation.

Excelling in reading, Serena not only perfects and solidifies the reliability of herself as the reader, but also enables the reader of the novel regain trust in the story despite the occasional, not always easy challenges. As for the writer’s letter, it turns out to be the most exquisite of narrative devices, as it simultaneously epitomizes the mediating role of epistolary form and, paradoxically, subverts mediated messages by re-establishing the centrality of immediacy as the source, the vehicle, and the basis of the mutual trust between the reader and the text.

However, the trustful reciprocity is not easily won. As the novel unfolds, or, rather, wraps into a labyrinth of mistrustful alleys, the reader is confronted with similar doubts the narrator-reader, Serena, faces. The reader of the novel might not necessarily be an MI5 employee. S/he does not have to fake her profession and present her/himself to her/his parents as a worker for the Department of Health and Social Security. S/he needs not be an agent on the Sweet Tooth mission. Likewise, s/he does not necessitate choosing an artist to be the recipient of the funds allegedly provided by the Foundation and distributed to the awardee via Freedom International, reportedly for the purpose of the promotion of freedom of speech. Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth: “Woe to the nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power” (98). None of these need not be part of the identity of the reader, but s/he may, nevertheless, sense the disguises, the doubt, the travesty.

The labyrinth in which no one trusts anyone and everyone doubts everybody else reverberates with contemporary cultural realities that call for disambiguation. The tone is indicative of certain aspects of such a culture. It is so strangely calmative that it seems quite impossible that such a sedating effect hides no surprises. And it does. The charm of the storytelling has the capacity to suck one into a blurry miasma of mixed boundaries, mistaken guesses, confusing assumptions: ”like a polyphonic chorus” (Sweet Tooth 114). The obfuscation renders the past decades translatable into the cultural vocabulary of the twenty-first century. A glimpse of the contrast between postwar austerity and economic rejuvenation, a portrayal of the sinister turn of the posthippie era that leaked into the recession of the seventies under a monstrous disguise of liberation bringing nationwide access to mind altering substances in the form of a status symbol, class rebellion, intellectual emancipation, sexual liberties, self-improvement, and/or source of income is not entirely different from contemporary cultural climate. There might be divergences in the redescription of power relations, mainstream, countercultures, and their crypto variants, but the core of the phenomenon – the use of drugs as a means of oppressive social control – is more or less the same.

The enchanting steadiness of the tone makes no effort to protect the reader from slight disruptions within the melliferous flow. Thankfully so. Otherwise, it would not be possible to suspend belief towards such a magnitude of cripplingly manipulative mechanisms. The soothing mellowness of the narration, despite the occasional dramatic moments, is by no means set to create a sense of an oneiric drift into an illusion of eternal carefreeness. On the contrary, it keeps and refines the reader’s sensitivity to the subtleties of storytelling : it offers choices between what is and what is not trustworthy. At times, everything is so suspicious that it resembles Haley’s story about Neil Carder. Plagued by ambiguity, it exudes the distrust informing quite a few among the aspects of contemporary culture: ”It seemed so unlikely that people were tempted to think it might even be true” (Sweet Tooth 137). Such an atmosphere of heightened doubt and suspension might be ascribed to the genre. Rightly so. Otherwise, there would be no signposts to distract the reader’s search for the clues along the erratic pathways.

Such a seeming climate of constant alertness might be evocative of the state of ceaseless anxiety, but the reader knows better. There are disruptions of a different kind in this narrative— interjections that reconsolidate the trust in the stability of the tone so pacifying that one might be tempted to doubt its authenticity. Sometimes, to endure noise in the communication channel it takes a bit of restlessness of Serena’s sleepless nights. Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth: ”For most of the night I lay on my back with the covers pulled up to my chin, listening, thinking in circles, waiting for the dawn to come like a soothing mother and make things better” (80). And it does. It does so it feels like a nostalgic reminiscence of a cozy cottage in the country welcoming early summer sunshine so refreshing in gentleness that its smile inhabits the heart to cast its rays on whatever fallible context one might find oneself in.

Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (Part 2/1)

How Modern Tradition Is : Sweet Music & the Remix 

What One Talks about When Reading a Genre

If there is travesty in Ian McEwan’s novel Sweet Tooth (2013), it is manifested in the realm of the tone. If there is a correlation between characterization and the tone, it is of a very specific nature. If there is an interconnectivity between the two and the plot, it is certainly in the service of the message.

Speaking of the tone in this peculiarly conventional narrative is to unpack the submerged sphere of the storytelling flow. Tackling this knot within which traditional narration meets contemporary quandary is to dive into the darkish shades of characterization deployed in the form of contours rather than fully fledged images. Penetrating that conundrum is to let the sequences comprising the plot constitute the message : borne out of the seeming cacophony and its not infrequently demonstrated capacity to bewilder and mesmerize.

The manner in which the tone carries the narration is parallel to the way characterization empowers the crocky characters with a restrained impact on the storyline, thus delineating the very specificity of this literary element. Namely, what makes it so singularly intricate is, dare one say, the vitality of the tangential, which is not to be mistaken either for centrality or marginality. More precisely, the character of Serena From is sketched so its narrating maneuvering is sovereign enough to keep the reader’s allegiance, and yet, sufficiently seductive to allow for possible wandering along the erratic pathways engendered by the echoed characters such as that of Jeremy, Tony, Max, Tom, or other--named and unnamed alike.

The peculiarity of such a narration lies in its relying on mediation. And yet, the manner in which the message is conveyed is somewhat incomparable with the literary procédé implemented in other books of McEwan’s. Specifically, the narrator in Sweet Tooth is certainly very different from the one in Black Dogs (1992). Its incapacity to contain the narrative (that weird beauty of weakness) is portrayed through the use of epistolary form, and yet, the afflicted totality of the reliability upon such narration is surely disparate from how the storytelling device in question is incorporated in Enduring Love (1997). What is submerged in the unuttered is part of the thematic regarding the reflections about philosophical tensions such as that between the public and the private, which features a discrepancy in comparison with the treatment of the issues in Amsterdam (1998). 

And yet, not everything is so very diverse in the novel Sweet Tooth.  If there is a thread that ensures a continuum throughout the oeuvre of this twentieth & twenty-first century bard, it is imbued in the significance that the surface layers of the narrative have for the message emerging from the hidden depths. To say this is to inevitably relativize the notion of the surface. It is also to invoke the relevance of the persistence of the themes such as human relationships and communication. To acknowledge this is nothing short of recognizing language as an epitome of the power of weakness : erroneous, imperfect, elusive, and yet abundant in the sources for recuperating imperfectness through disclosing the very limits of it. Like humans.

If there is a node holding the web of McEwan’s storytelling by and large, it might be the subtlety with which seemingly minor scenes are woven. One of them is the farewell pub scene (or, so it seemed at that moment) showing Serena and her friend--soon to be a former colleague, since she is just about to be fired—Shirley. It is not the conversation between them that carries the narrative line, but rather the adjacent scene depicting the band gradually occupying the stage. The suspension of the confidential messages presumably to be exchanged before Shirley leaves MI5--the same agency Serena works for--is suggested through a slightly delayed emergence of the band on the stage. Like a frozen moment between the soundcheck and the concert.

The tension suspended across the elusiveness of the semi-decipherability of the withdrawn words is dissolved by the establishment of the sovereign presence first of the drummer (132), then of the bass player (134). The encounter between the two colleagues / friends in the pub demarcates the intensification of the conspiratorial, bewildering flow within which introjection and projection between and among the characters generates similar intersections with other narratives, notably those by T.H. Haley. Shirley expects to hear from Serena the secret that would illuminate her being sacked. Serena anticipates to be given the explanation for being under suspicion and, consequently, being spied on. The shared experience of being under surveillance entices hopes for the unknown to be revealed. However, neither has the information the counterpart needs. Instead, the mounting confusion is sabotaged by the opening chords of the track coming from the stage hosting the band assembled. Shirley disappears without saying goodbye. Serena stays sipping the remnants of the drinks, then she goes home. A hazy cab ride and a tipsy afternoon mark the beginning of her enhanced learning how to read the prose of Thomas Haley. Or, simply, learning how to read.

 If it constitutes the thread upon which the nodes within the web of Ian McEwan’s storytelling are based, it is most vividly suggested through the nexus between the aforementioned frozen moment and the passion McEwan infuses in the depiction of the artistry of guitar playing in Saturday (2005). Almost oxymoronically, typically colliding emotions characterize the wonder of Theo’s wizardry: ”At the heart of the blues is not melancholy, but a strange and worldly joy” (28).

If there is a travesty in Sweet Tooth, it is to be sought along the lines suggested in this mesmerizing observation about the genre. If the travesty is manifested in narrative fabric, it is at least twofold. If the reader seeks the thrill in the vertiginous euphoria of spy novel and/or any akin genre, it might disable digging the concealed connection between the surface and profound realms of the story. Or, some such relation.

Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (Part 1)

Distrustful to the Core : Subversive Lyricism of the Tales of Toxicity

“The world does not speak. Only we do” (6). That’s how Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) lets his demetaphysized theory reach the reader. That’s also how dispersed insulated destinies of denizens look to an eye of an urban dweller amid muted spaces separating habitats scattered across the vast, desertlike cityscape in a faraway corner of planet Earth, somewhere on the west cost of the USA.

As if the cohesive tissue holding the  infrastructure were dissolving in the haze of detached, dispassionate, and, above all, disinterested individuals torpidly accepting the impossibility of bonding without falling into a trap of bondage. As if the hollowness of the irresponsiveness of the world were persuasive enough to convince one that there might be an equation between individuality and individualism, between unity and uniformity. As if a massifying cultural amalgamation were capable of depriving one of the right to refacement, the right to the remix.

Dennis Cooper’s novel Try (1994) epitomizes such a social drought, simultaneously portraying desolateness of inner spaces. In such a scenario, what might seem to be resonating actually does not. Because there is no sound to ensure reverberation. Because there is no silence either to alleviate the rebarbative lack of reciprocity impossibilized by its linguistic false pair—muteness. Or, so somnambulist logic would want one to believe.

The characters in this carefully worded novel, elegantly peppered with a combination of an impeccable verbal expression and a lavishly sleazy streetwise linguistic articulation, seem to be mere projections of dystopian reflections of the architecture almost embodying an idea of an archipelago consisting of incompatible, incommensurable, and irreconcilable individuals increasingly sagging into the inverted version of both the notion of selfhood and communality.

Ziggy, a teenager, on the surface deeply deranged as a consequence of having been molested by both of his adoptive gay fathers, finds a semi-consolation in editing the zine for the sexually abused named after the song “I Apologize” by his favorite band Hüsker Dü. He wanders in a staticky miasma of his room stuffed with evaporations from bodily crevices and encrusted secretions leaving decorative traces on the sheets, just as they seem to be caking micromaps on his belly. The ambience is nothing short of the savagery of the perversity his adoptive uncle Ken, Brice’s brother, exercises somewhere within a scarcely identifiable locality of that urban desert.

Agonizing over his emotional tumult, Ziggy is tempted to seek refuge in an embrace of that creepy quasi-relative of his. Calls him. Ken is busy, though, shooting a porn video, but offers to accept being paid a visit by the frustrated adopted nephew. Perhaps under the proviso that Ziggy contributes to the movie, starring Robin, a teen Slayer fan, out of his mind on whatever substance generously supplied by the director himself as a, so to speak, foreplay of what in the aftermath of porn rites--playing the tape now backwards, now forwards--looks like a necrophilic continuation of the  cinematic extravaganza. However, it’s the wee hours of the morning. Ziggy stays at home.

Distances between habitats feel like intergalactic spaces, as inaccessible as veins are for another solitary insomniac, somewhere in a faraway enclave of the city. Perhaps even farther feels the place where his temporarily unsettled innerness can find what Ken seems to be able to provide. A boy is sitting in front of the computer. Nodding heavily. He’s all hooded, baggy eyes, minimized pupils, scarred skin, bulbous intermuscular tissue. Loaded beyond belief, he is zoning across the screen displaying scraps of text which he tends to see as a novel-in-progress. Spacey traveler through lonely orbits of denial:”According to books he’d admired, heroin was supposed to make certain outdated necessities like love, friendship, sex obsolete, and it works in a way” (Try 150). Drifting through an ongoing oneiric archipelago seen through the slits of his contracted, bloodshot eyes, the distorted scenery appears as saturated with noise of oblivion as is the flow in the communication channel hindered by the impossibility to overcome the spell of disaffection. Air as buzzy as the threat of withdrawal. Or, so heroin speaks.

Unfathomable distances between humans in the city of Los Angeles seem to be bridged when Roger, one of Ziggy’s fathers, flies over from New York to indulge in a sex rampage with his adopted son, while his ex-partner, the other father of his, named Brice, is busy quenching his own insatiable carnal  thirst elsewhere, most probably with some of insignificant others. Across the city, in another of its lonesome pockets, a friend called Calhoun  is in incessant search of the ultimate oblivion within the safe grip of the sovereign power of heroin addiction:”How does one tell somebody this fucking peaceful to give it up, that he has to go back to functioning properly in one’s conception of the world?” (Try 138). He has succumbed to the deceitful idea about the totality of an intense, yet utterly false, immersion. Or, so somnambulist logic wants one to believe.

“Meanwhile, the world’s disinterested” (Try 114). In the room dimlit by an insipid play of electric circuits and seductive reticence of the screen of his laptop, Calhoun seems to be living in the night that knows no dawn to relieve it from the heavy imagery of clogged needles, stained cotton balls, filthy cookers / sooted spoons, syringes storing days, weeks old remnants of dried blood, once the concoction of horse dissolved in water was sent to soothe the alarmingly disbalanced biochemistry and feed starved, withdrawal-ravaged cells. Radically distrustful towards Ziggy’s angular, yet strangely unembellished, emotionality and his unadulterated naivety, Calhoun sets out on an endeavor to dissect the semantic imprecision and misperception of one, in his view, of the most misleading notions humanity conjured up in order to turn a blind eye to and avoid facing the harsh edges of the world. Despite all the allure Ziggy’s unmistakably attractive physique confronts him with, he resists. He is not gay. Once he even had this girlfriend Josie, but since then, he’s been immersed in the dream of disinterestedness.

To such a vocabulary, desensitized to verbal infatuation, the whole world is but a locale indifferent to whatever can be said about it. To such vocabularies there is no threat of insularity because there is no concept of interconnectivity to be abandoned. To such linguistic acrobatics there is no sense of miswording since all that is available to one is but signifiers as polyvalent as descriptions of the world are. Well, almost.

It is not impossible to fall into a temporary trap of the possibilities linguistic polyphony presents one with. It is not impossible to be temporarily tricked into thinking that strongholds of isolation are all communality is about. It is not impossible to momentarily mistake the antithesis of self-grandeur for deindividualization. And yet, it is quite probable that such a heroin-induced, or,  suchlike delusion is an echo of what contemporary cultural realities are trying to impose on one as the model on which to base thinking. Thoughts, however, are unlike bland facades staring from each and every urban site depthless in its hollowness, styleless in its aloofness, unanchored in its hard-headed denial of historical imagination, unmovable by numberless variants of distorted, inverted versions of turning the cold of boulevards into the pathways connecting the dwellers and solidifying communal cohesion. Within such devastatingly dystopian imagery, a friendly reminder imbues into narrative fabric a slightly modified shade of storytelling colors.

As in Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 (1986) Terry Eagleton tirelessly calls for disambiguation, one is reminded that nowadays it seems that the dream of authenticity might not be an outmoded category because it was not supposed to be among the postulates to base the vision of the world on in the first place. In contemporary culture, authenticity appears to be more rendered redundant than proved untenable.  The modern world sees oscillations between remembering and forgetting combined in the most astonishing of manners. Among them, one is particularly indicative of a shamefully compromised deviation of what actually is available to the community of humans. Thus, in accord with Eagleton’s observations, one would be prone not to accept the invincibility of authenticity to be a result of there being “no longer any subject to be alienated and nothing to be alienated from” (132).

In Dennis Cooper’s novel, consolation sought on the surface narrative of extreme brutality and graphic aggression cannot be found in those misleading sites. Instead, it emerges from the tacit subtlety of his prose that subverts the crudeness of deceitful tales. The peculiar robustness woven into the unverbalized lyricism is perhaps best suggested through the characterization, particularly the way the elusiveness of Calhoun lends to the story a touch of humanness that Ziggy in his disarmingly open admiration makes even more prominent. These characters symbolize the approach to the theme of the body: between the putrid and the pristine. One of the scenes  most evocative of the power of weakness is perhaps that of the threesome-style orgy in which the fathers’ uninhibited sacrilege of the familial and/or age related moral norms is disrupted by their son’s hesitant request:”’I’ve got some heroin in my jeans pocket. Can one of you get it out for me? ‘Cos I think I’m going to cry’” (176).

The subversion comes creeping like a sound in a psychobilly track, opening with an ominous bass drum pedal phrase, joined by a fuzzy bassline, continuing throughout the narrative, gradually allowing the shining guitar chord to dissolve the tension, only after it was foreshadowed by a gentle breeze of the ride cymbal, imbuing in the literary fabric a note decisively distinct, unmistakenly different from what cultural realities are trying to impose on one as the way to think.

Like Ziggy’s unreservedly offering an oasis of purity amid a desert of intoxication and detachment, Cooper’s idiom is evocative of the concept of vulnerability sensed as a vehicle, rather than a self-referential motive. It is persistent in simplicity, yet steadfast in being neither simplistic nor sentimental. The disambiguation of this intricate story of toxicity prevails as the novel is heading towards the closing scene with a verbal bravado as sparse in emotional articulateness as it is abundant in many other things, but, above all, in the lyrical potential exuding through the interstices of the communication between the reluctant interlocutors.

There are sound responses arising from emotional ruins, from cacophonic cultural amalgamation. There are creative / critical voices in contemporary culture capable of inspiring the potential for peaceful/peaceable resistance to noise. There is vivacity within such vernaculars enabling the endurance of the distinctions between individualism and individuality, between uniformity and unity. There is vibrancy in such responses that can ensure recuperation of the right to refacement, the right to the remix.