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.

If Aenglish Were a Language (Part 7)

phunkie read / write / remix

Like nature, history is not revengeful. Unlike vulgar versions of rebellion, authentic resistance is utterly desensitized to and illiterate in the vocabulary of ossification and destruction. It is also highly responsive to the changes history brings about. Only in a peaceful/peaceable manner. The remix is sound sensitive. It is attuned to the music of the epoch. It is also sensitized to the sound enduring Chronos’s hindrances. So is Huxley’s narrative to the complexity within which at times antithetical, yet not antagonistic, aspects of diversity are interlaced. States such as sadness and happiness are quite possibly among the most angular interlocutors in the quirky conversation. Maybe it is the very unlikelihood of the communication such as the one between them that ensures even for the music chronologically contextualized to spill comfort over the supporting silence (Point Counter Point 24-5).

Perhaps. If so, one would have to thank the very quirkiness of the ambiguity it grants one with. To be misled to think that certain discursive models cultural realities impose on one are the only legitimate ones can indicate the possibility that such an imposition can be refused. Thus, the moment of entrapment could be an instant when a redescription starts to occur. It can be the moment of an insight into the realm of disambiguation of the confusion caused by the delusionary idea about the totality of discourse. It can also signal the potentials of acknowledging somnambulist tendencies of the claim to human omnipotence. It is to seek vibrant interpretations of social relations, not denying but rather reading cultural vocabularies in the key contrary to what they are trying to impose on one as the only valid way to look.  

The inspiration to seek other angles comes from a fruitful understanding of the notions such as class, uprising, and solidarity. The germ of the thought can certainly be found in Huxley’s ruminations about the matter. But, perhaps, it cannot be claimed for the novel of Huxley’s to be a class manifesto. Just as it can be said that Julien Temple’s documentary is not precisely about music scenes. So is Stewart Home’s book Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock suggestive of being not exactly about punk. It does ponder the vital class related ideas. Yet, it presents them in the light of the vacillations unique in their capability to render bewildering discursive magnitude perceptible:”class is actually a fluid category” (10). So is the genre which he is trying to delineate and polemicize. He points out “fluid nature of Punk as a musical genre” (Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock 12).

Disambiguation here might emerge precisely from the recognition of the elusiveness of the subject and the potential such a character provides in terms of remapping discursively conditioned cultural realities. First, by establishing a clear distinction between certain concepts, Home indicates the realm of interpretation capable of fueling a fruitful socioscape. For example, contemplating upon the punk era, he observes:”there was no such thing as a Punk band, there were only Punk records” (Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock 15). He rightly notes the intricacy of perceiving the phenomenon of the likes of punk in the cultural context that he, not without reason, accentuates to be a feature of a postmodern inclination toward a proliferation of margins.

In a time when the multiplicity of isolated underprivileged enclaves make little contribution to social cohesion, one can undoubtedly question such political vocabularies in accord with Home’s challenging the idea of punk being the opposition to the mainstream when the meanings of both notions have undergone harsh destabilization and have been threatened by further relativization (Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock 17). And yet, to acknowledge such a state of affairs is only to draw more from the source of further disambiguation of cultural realities and to realize that even if punk bands proliferated and fluctuated with the fluctuation of mainstream, margins, monetary dictatorships, oppressive mechanisms of social control, fabricated historicized narratives, and other culturally conditioned means of manipulation, and distorted perception of power / power relations, it by no means afflicts the subversive, transformative potential of punk rock.

We might not know whether the victorians had been like they were presented in the pageant in Woolf’s novel Between the Acts. More likely, we may imagine them through the lens of the portrayal of a subculture responding against some of the values with which victoriana distributed the imposed sunsets and dawns. Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (2002): “With their syphilitic, archaic language – ‘vile’, ‘poxy’, ‘bollocks’–and this costume which theatricalized poverty, the Punks were the Postmodern children of Dickens” (374).

Instead, being aligned with other vibes, one would, perhaps, rather be humble enough to persevere in forging postfuturist supracultural remapping in the key of the remix. As the offspring of the mafotherphunkie legacy, an-antibabylonian-renegade-of-Dickens, hic & nunc / anticarpe diem poetics reintegrates reading-writing, unshakably distancing it from robozombie vulgarization threatening to transform it into yet another commodity readily available for instant consumption massively and to dissolve communal cohesion of fellow cyborgs.

In the intersection of the time axes—recuperating the past, reimagining the future, and resurrecting the present--the remix reveals transformative potentials of language both as a challenging and as a redemptive means of communication preserving peaceful/peaceable resistance to noise : subtonic hi-fi DJing in the service of the wholesome sound of creation.

If Aenglish Were a Language (Part 6)

you cannot fight the peace of the universe

If in Between the Acts the narration conspires with characterization through the paradoxical dialectics of the vacillations in the tone, primarily resulting from the inexplicable emergence of the nearly sublime out of the pedestrian, in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928), the effect is manifested as a result of an interplay in question, only in a kind of reverse. Specifically, unlike the space provided in Woolf’s novel so the narrative can breathe, engaging the reader in an akin sort of activity, Huxley’s narrator is almost omnipresent. Each page, every single sentence, syntagm, phrase, morpheme, phoneme is loaded with narrating voices. All is noise in this novel of his. And yet, as the story is unfolding, it turns out that not all is as noisy as it seems. In addition, it, at least, is not all that noisy all the time. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point:”’Why should triviality be so fascinating? Or is there something else besides the triviality that draws one?’” (126).

What’s wondrous about the narrative technique in question is, again, a strange interaction between the narration and characterization. In the unwrapping of the storyline, it becomes apparent that the impression of the overcrowded narrative comes from the role each character has in that what comprises the novel. How those voices constitute the narration is also the way the storytelling shift occurs in the most astonishing of manners. Namely, not only do they participate in weaving the narrative tissue, but the way they are constructed is, at the same time, how the story is told. They, in a word, manage to take over the narrative. One might be prone to claim that it is, consequently, a weakness of the storyline, but few things can be more erroneous than such a statement, given the layered structure of storytelling at large, as well as this one in particular.

First, the seeming weakness could stem from the confusion of the notions such as individuality and individualism, unity and uniformity, crowd and community, noise / sound / music. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point: “Each is always alone and separate and individual. ‘I am I,’ asserts the violin; ‘the world revolves around me.’ ‘Round me,’ calls the cello. ‘Round me,’ the flute insists. And all are equally right and equally wrong; and none of them will listen to the others” (23). Then, one realizes that how the characters inhabit the world of Huxley’s novel is the way of making the omniscient narrative voice humble itself in front of the individual vernaculars of the novel-dwellers.

The characters’ taking over the narration is a silent rebellion. Quite noisy at that, one might say. So noisy at times that, being preoccupied with duties of higher priority and greater significance, one seems not to be able to hear it. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point: “Diminished and in fragments, the B minor Suite came floating up from the great hall to the ears of the two men in the laboratory. They were too busy to realize that they were hearing it” (30).  The intricacy and appeal of Huxley’s panoramic social portrayal of the birth of the new world between two wars lies predominantly in the whatness of the story. From it, of course, is borne the howness of the peculiarity with which alternating cycles of noise and silence are being remixed.

If in Between the Acts the characters speak of fragments, see the world as a broken mirror image, talk in fragments, feel like ones, Point Counter Point presents to the readership the characters that can be perceived either as rudimentary, atavistic, minimalist, reduced, or a combination of some of the features fused to epitomize the clime of the world plagued by new values. In the onset of an economic dictatorship, not unlike the system of values propagated nowadays as a dominant cultural paradigm, these were more often than not defined in monetary terms.

Coupled with it, possibly in a mutually conditioned relationship, is a desperate pursuit of amusement. Not unlike the exhaustion by superficial, forced forms of entertainment known to the dwellers of modern day culture, the world portrayed in Huxley’s novel is similarly hollow amid the plethora of ecstatic and euphoric battlefields against boredom. Sites of fun. Dens of intoxication. Streets covered with evaporations, saturated with torpor, conjuring disenchantment as the sun rises and swipes the magic of the night (Point Counter Point 148).

When the night climaxes in its decay that sees its early hours with first appearance of dusk, noise of the sweaty, crowded amusement joints dissolve in the vapor of boredom. One can only hear sad music of a failed attempt to conquer and shape the totality of experience according to one’s perception of how changes in the world and the notions such as individuality and communality inform one another. The world has become a timespace offering to the inhabitants to emphasize certain aspects of experience, while disregarding the others. The speed at and with which societal relations are being redescribed echoes the progress with which linguistic descriptions proliferate. It also reverberates with the dynamics of the self-disintegration of bewilderment.

In the long aftermath of the Enlightenment, modern babylon offers myriad ways to reaffirm the significance of rationality. Or, so babylonian tower would want one to believe. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point: “The intellect’s been exalted as the spiritual upper classes; the spiritual lower classes rebel’” (128). In a time of fluctuating, discursively conditioned categories, one wonders how to articulate the rebellious classes in question. The body for sure is part of the vocabulary. So might be the heart. But, how to understand such an elusive constituent of the communication channel is an enigma in its own right. In Virginia Woolf’s novel, it is now childless (Between the Acts 100-1), now broke (Between the Acts 113), then dry (Between the Acts 119), and again melting (Between the Acts 130). It is motherly (”for a mother must ask, if daughters she has” Between the Acts 169). Above all, it is human (Between the Acts 176).

To imagine how such unlikely interlocutors negotiate a hierarchy within discursive games is not an easy task. How they position themselves within a broader context of power relations is perhaps most suggestively presented in the debate over the issues of burning importance for the protagonists of Huxley’s novel: “’The only result of your progress,’ he said, ‘will be that in a few generations there will be a real revolution—a natural, cosmic revolution. You’re upsetting the equilibrium. And in the end, nature will restore it’” (Point Counter Point 58).

The advent of science enlightened the world with a blessing that humans gradually started to misinterpret and assumed the meaning of words that to a high extent confused them. Not only did the new paradigm create a sense of omnipotence that some individuals wholeheartedly accepted, but it also introduced a vocabulary of culture that enabled a proliferation of vocabularies and discursively conditioned realities calling for reconfiguring. Neither stigmatizing the paradigm per se nor divinizing it, one is rather prone to question how it reflected in the realm where social relations were becoming increasingly dependent on and, indeed, subjugated to the idea of progress not galvanizing, but rather weakening the flourishing of human potentials. Huxley observes an instance of such a perplexing situation:“They’re telling him that the laws of nature are useful conventions of strictly human manufacture and that space and time and mass themselves, the whole universe of Newton and his successors, are simply our own invention” (Point Counter Point 153).

The world became a mosaiclike image describable from diverse points of view. Each description seemed to be equally valid and not lacking in competitiveness with others. Such an arena, featuring numberless candidates for the privileged discourse, mirrored the overarching sentiment of commodity culture. And yet, none seemed to be sufficient to provide a comprehensible picture of how the world spoke. Trying to decipher the versatility of the complexity in question, humans tended to adopt what appeared to be the lexicon of correspondence between their own and the ways the world was. Huxley portrays a segment of an attempt to grasp kaleidoscopic cultural realities in the vocabulary they were trying to impose on one:

’Because the essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen. For instance, one person interprets events in terms of bishops; another in terms of the price of flannel camisoles; another, like that young lady from Gulmerg,’ he nodded after the retreating group, ‘thinks of it in terms of good times. And then there’s the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees, professionally, a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want to do is to look with all those eyes at once […]’. (Point Counter Point 192)

Not that there was no solid basis for thinking of an individual in terms of multitudinousness, but the way it was perceived proved as somewhat misleading. Its trickster character can be said to, in a way, have tricked itself into believing in the imposition of multiplicity as the dominant expressive mode in which valid statements can be uttered, revealing the vocabulary of the world, matching the ways in which humans could navigate their ways through it. And yet, within a bewildering cacophony, Huxley’s character seeks:“Where was the self to which he could be loyal?” (Point Counter Point 194).

For some, it was a specific intellectual capacity that occupied the centrality of the endeavor:

The essential character of the self consisted precisely in that liquid and undeformable ubiquity; in that capacity to espouse all contours and yet remain unfixed in any form; to take, and with an equal facility efface, impressions. To such moulds as his spirit might from time to time occupy, to such hard and burning obstacles as it might flow round, submerge, and, itself cold, penetrate to the fiery heart of, no permanent loyalty was owing. The moulds were emptied as easily as they had been filled, the obstacles were passed by. But the essential liquidness that flowed where it would, the cool indifferent flux of intellectual curiosity—that persisted and to that his loyalty was due.  (Point Counter Point 194)

For others, it might be religion. There were those who chose to divest themselves from loyalty as such. But, then, they found themselves inexplicably trapped within the liberty, i.e., the characteristic they ascribe to such a state:

But always, whatever he might do, he knew quite well in the secret depths of his being that he wasn’t a Catholic, or a strenuous liver, or a mystic, or a noble savage. And though he sometimes nostalgically wished he were one or other of these beings, or all of them at once, he was always secretly glad to be none of them and at liberty, even though his liberty was in a strange paradoxical way a handicap and a confinement to his spirit” (Point Counter Point 195).

Instead, some opted for other choices: “She felt as though she were melting into that green and golden tranquility, sinking and being absorbed into it, dissolving out of separateness into union: stillness flowed into stillness, the silence without became one with the silence within her” (Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point 355).

Just as uncritical reading of social relations based on dominance-ridden polyphony can conjure a dissolution of clear distinctions between sameness & difference, unity and uniformity, individuality and individualism--to name a few—so can a belief in progress without a critical distance from its aspect in which radical utilitarianism paradoxically converges with self-referentiality may  entail a misinterpretation of advanced technologies in the service of creativity. Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011):

At first glance, armies of refrigerators and dishwashers sending messages back and forth to servers might not have much bearing on literature, but when viewed through the lens of information management and uncreative writing--remember that those miles and miles of code are actually alphanumeric language, the identical material Shakespeare used--these machines are only steps away from being programmed for literary production, writing a type of literature readable only by other bots. And, as a result of networking with each other, their feedback mechanism will create an ever-evolving, sophisticated literary discourse, one that will not only be invisible to human eyes but bypass human altogether. (225)