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.

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)