Richard Milner's Blog
August 28, 2018
Deconstruction: A Brief History of Seven Killings
I recently finished “A Brief History of Seven Killings” and was so strongly moved by it that I needed to take a break from reading. Granted, I read “To Kill a Mockingbird” on a cross-continental flight since then (and could, and might, write a diatribe in response), but Harper Lee’s mainstay is so wholesome and inoffensive and indisputable in its moral rectitude that I felt it served as an antiseptic balm to the laceration I received when reading Marlon James’ astounding, utterly moving 2015 Man Booker-winning novel.
Naturally, this will take a bit of explaining.
Fundamentally, “A Brief History of Seven Killings” is a story of war for the soul of Jamaica, centered around Kingston in the 1970’s and featuring various factions of power consolidated across Kingston’s boroughs. But this war is not a war against external political forces, which are present, yes (the CIA pitting itself against the rise of Communism in the Caribbean, an American journalist working for Rolling Stone, a Cuban bombs expert working to destabilizing the region), but serve more to exacerbate the innate tension between those forces who believe they represent the “true” Jamaica, when they are, more or less, only representing their own interests.
A Brief History is a tragically self-destructive portrait of a country fighting itself and dying by its own hand (with some nudging from external power interests). Kingston is a place where the vulnerable and the helpless are caught in the crossfire of the machinations of mob dons and their followers, no matter how necessary those dons are to maintaining overall stability in the country. The entire plot is ignited by a singular event: Bob Marley’s Peace Concert in 1976. Bob Marley’s practical deification and hallowed place in the greater cultural zeitgeist becomes the fulcrum by which self-interested parties pursue their own ends to the ultimate detriment of Jamaica.
It’s the voice of the novel that give it its heft and electric power. The voice provides the main thread of continuity throughout the piece, from character to character, location to location, and even decade to decade. This voice of is the Voice of Jamaica itself, metonymically manifest in the Jamaican language – the diction, the dialect, the slang, the so-called curse words, the rhythm, the subtext – which is itself the greater Voice of the book’s message. James has used Jamaican to create a megaphone of communication through which the spirit of Jamaica can speak to the ears of the globe (at least those who read this book and are willing to listen).
On this note, characters in the book are constantly critiquing and evaluating each other’s language, their turns of phrase, the slang they deploy, and the corruption of their native tongue at the hands of influences such as American TV. Characters are incessantly comparing each other’s language against what is truly “Jamaican” and using it as a dividing line to define outside from insider, ignorant meddler from perspicacious sage. The text even culminates in a conversation between one of the main characters, Nina, who immigrates to New York, and another Jamaican woman recently dispossessed who challenges Nina’s origin and identity by scrutinizing the authenticity of her language. The voice of the text is not only a character, therefore, but it is the central character of the entire piece. James himself was born in Jamaica, and not a single thing about the dialogue or the setting seems inauthentic or disingenuous. In fact, the entire narrative could be defined as a linguistic study, or a character study of Jamaica as extant in its native tongue.
The voice is given room to breathe, ramble and soliloquize because even though there’s a lot of micro-events that compose the greater events of the story, i.e., a lot of “plot” that happens, the large-scale events can be boiled down to one or two major occurrences, namely the attempted assassination on Bob Marley’s life and Josie Wale’s murder spree in a Queen’s crackhouse. The real plot occurs in the space between the events, where moment-to-moment interactions and travails create a portrait of a span of time rather than trace along it in tandem. While we do track certain individuals along linear, sequential sets of actions, on a whole we more or less drop in on relevant instances of action along the greater timeline, those that have repercussive effects down the line. All in all, this bottom-up engineering imbues the text with a mythological feel, as though we’ve been privy to the secret actions of historical figures, the behind-the-curtain truths of events that are, by the media, treated with the broadest, most reductionist strokes.
In this way, if “A Brief History” is often hard to read, it’s because it’s designed to be. The brutality on display is so offhand, so careless, so savage and so vividly portrayed – domestic abuse, torture, gun violence, pitilessness and remorseless when faced with the sufferings of others – that I had to put the book down on more than one occasion. The brutality wore me down, and I sense that it’s left a mark that if not permanent, has made it hard for me to stomach other depictions of insensitivity or aggression across other media.
There are comparisons on the book jacket to Quentin Terentino, of which I’ve read Marlon James has grown tired. I understand why, especially given such an ironic misunderstanding of the violence on display in the novel. Focusing on this aspect of the narrative risks missing the greater point. These comparisons are a bit inaccurate, besides, and are likely, in my opinion, an attempt to glamourize and make appealing what may otherwise turn some readers away (especially if they’re not willing to admit the everyday truth behind potentially sickening level of viciousness, contempt, and disregard for human life).
Terentino creates stylized, arguably glorified depictions of absurdly violent people and action that come across as over-the-top caricatures. This is an aesthetic choice borrowed from grindhouse and noir. No one would ever reasonably argue that his films are what you’d describe as “realistic”, the closest being Django, which is intended to be an overcome-the-oppressor power fantasy (rightfully so). So if the reader envisions a level of violence and treatment of human life as inherently self-destructive, brimming with the chaos of violent caprice and cruel intent, contemptable, but then removes all glitz and fashion from it, strips of its comic book framing devices and its cinematography that champions the money shot of a brain-spilling gunshot or the close-up of an ear lopping, then you’re left with raw, brutal antagonism that is in no way championable. This is the reality that James is presenting to the reader, and we should not try to glamourize it any more than we should try to oversell it. It’s supposed to be terrible, and that’s it. That’s the point.
But make no mistake: Kingston and Jamaica are not to be pitied. That’s clear from the author, as well. Towards the end of the book James embodies all that’s beautiful and vicious and magnificent and contradictory about Jamaica in Nina’s meal at the small Jamaican restaurant in Queens. The food is headily spiced, raw and explosive, alive and messy. Wherever the characters of the story are, the survivors of the hell of the 70’s-90’s, they take their hell with them. They can only survive by safeguarding inside themselves the artifacts of a home that is both lovely and damaged, in the same way that the characters in New York can only survive by carrying along with them their most damaged parts into a new land.
Including Nina, a variety of characters carry the narrative and flesh out the backdrop of events and provide context for pieces of the story that, if included to a more pervasive extent, would have come at the expense of the novel’s current strengths. Instead, we weave in and out of discrete instances of time with several focal individuals such as Papa Lo and Josey Whales whose own conflicts – as much against themselves as against anyone else - represent the unchanging nature of a Jamaica that stubbornly resists but finds itself in desperate need of the very thing it resists. Jamaica, as a character itself, does the things it does to survive in a harsh world, but in so doing harms its own survival. Instead, it is forced to change by necessity, but only ever in the smallest ways possible, because to do otherwise means to avoid changing, tragically so, its true, self-injurious self. But it is a self that in the end belongs wholly to Jamaica, at the very least, no matter what meddling may have lent itself towards the nation’s creation. That sums up the final sentiment that the book and James convey: pride. And I don’t mean the Biblical sin of Pride in an injurious, wrongful sense, but the doggedness of spirit that spits in the face of forces that insist on causing shame and denigration. Another word for that might be self-respect.
This is not anything that an outsider needs to understand, and not anything that anyone who comes from a poor, violent place needs to convey, and there is also no need even for the expression of basic sympathy or the search for common ground across various backgrounds of suffering. There is no need for me to reach out and say, “Yes, I understand in some way what it must have been like for you down in South Kingston because I, too, grew up in a ghetto.” The text makes it clear, like I mentioned before, that this attitude is not welcomed. No platitudes of half-hearted first-world kindness, no false altruism or highfalutin philanthropy, no anecdotes about token Jamaican friends, no discussion of that one time you actually went to an honest-to-goodness Jamaican place that was so, so authentic, so much better than that other place uptown, believe me: none of it. Don’t try to pretend you understand, even when shown fragment after fragment, moment after moment, and mote after mote of detailed information in this novel.
So if this is not the purpose of the text, then what is? It’s not an antagonistic stance towards readers that James has taken, not really, and the text doesn’t really have a chip on its shoulder, no. James is saddened and in mourning, a permanent kind of mourning that needs to stay alive in order to honor Jamaica and what it’s citizens have endured. That’s part of the reason for this book, it seems to me. Stripped of the desire for pity or sympathy from readers, we as readers are left with a text that seeks to inform and make us aware. It seeks to tell us about a story we definitely haven’t heard before, from a place that’s been highly used and appropriated and misunderstood, in part because of the very music and Rastafarian culture that brought the country into the modern limelight (that and only that; not real aid or international integration of shows of respect), and to let us know that we shouldn’t generalize, presume or tokenize about a place we really know nothing about.
And this sentiment, the one apparent in this novel, is applicable towards any nation or people of whom we are not a part but may know in passing or in a cursory way, or maybe even have visited. But a visit or a friend of a friend or pieces of art, even those as magnificent as the music of Bob Marley, are only one piece of the story. The rest of the story and the people it contains and those create it happen, happened, and are happening right now behind the scenes. It’s the off-camera people, the out-of-sight people, the unknown and unheard, the locally notorious and the internationally hidden, all of them who make the true, full story of a country for which even a Booker Man Prize-winning novel of great length can be considered only a brief history.
August 14, 2018
Theory: Poetics vs. Hermeneutics
Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus - Chicago Museum of Art
When we use words like “style” to describe a writer or artist of any medium, we tend to use the word as a catch-all that defines ineffibilities and abstract qualities that are themselves hard to define. Not sure how to describe or substantiate the phrasal cadence of Salman Rushdie? Let’s say he has a “kinetic style”. Sure. We can also talk about related words like “tone” or “voice”, or slightly less ambiguous terms like “pace” or, as read above, “rhythm”.
But amidst all this, time and again, I find myself coming back to a single, central question. It is a question that relates to the well-known, much-discussed dwindling attention span of the age, the pragmatism of literature since the Modernist era of the early 20th century, and the terseness of texts that shun nested clauses, intransient verbs, whole parts of speech like adverbs or even adjectives, and other such nonsensical adornments as rules of thumb, as though there are any rules at all to “style”. Sadly, in my experience, this kind of myth is perpetuated at all levels of education.
The first question is: Comprehensible? Check. That’s it. There are no second questions. Write what you want, so long as you’re happy with the result. Write what you want, so long as you’re happy with the task itself. Write what you want, so long as your goal is not enhanced commercial viability through the positioning of your novel on the top shelf of the new fiction section of Barnes and Noble. Rules of thumb like “keep it short” are rules of marketability, not creativity. They are rules of distribution, not substance. They are publisher’s rules, and market’s rules, which are not the same as the adages of artists. It all depends on the goal. See also: Finnegan’s Wake and much of what is considered revered literature. Funny how so many classic texts would be shunned like lepers nowadays. Texts are good because they were good at the time of their making, yes, but also because they still matter, at least in the way that all history matters.
So how streamlined or simplified is the text of novels in an era of micro-blogged character counting? Sadly, I don’t have any parsed, raw data because this essay isn’t being written for a sponsored and funded PhD. But in an era of blockbusters – across all media – where people hoover up facts and want to “get to the point” faster than ever, there is an increased focus on narrative and plot to the inevitable exclusion of ineffables such as tone or voice. It’s difficult to lift up both simultaneously. Yes, there is perhaps among certain circles of inclined individuals a desire to delve into abstractions of voice, subtext, technique, etc., but I’m talking about a trend in literature that’s been snowballing, with degrees of up and down, for a century. World War I was the cutoff, more or less; its bombs and gas masks and the cracking of the spirit of a generation. I’m talking about a trend that’s reflected in the literary theory that’s developed in response to the trend, itself then used to interpret texts in the manner of the age and subsequently influence further texts and future theory. The cause causes a cause-effecting effect. Ouroboros.
So to test this: next time you talk to someone about a book or a movie try using the word “voice” to describe the piece and see how long it takes for the listener’s eyes to turn to glass. Then follow it up by saying, “and then this thing happened,” and watch them reboot. Plot, not technique, takes precedence.
Before moving forward, it’s necessary to define a couple terms which yes, run the risk of being reductionist academic parlance, but which are nonetheless useful in focusing our attention. Those words are poetics and hermeneutics.
If you’re not familiar with the two terms, the first will at least be recognizable (or even pronounceable). Yes, there is a connection between poetics, as a theoretical construct by which we view literature, and words like poetry and poetic. We colloquially say something is “poetic” if it is evocative or ornate in composition. Flowery, you might have heard. There are features of the text that pop out and demand attention. The words depict themselves as peculiar enough; different enough from everyday speech to stand out and be recognized as something we might call poetic. It’s clear, on sight, that this written group of words, phrases, fragments, clauses, etc., constitutes poetry. We can define poetry then, very generally, as a body of text composed in a poetic way. Whether lyric, epic, dramatic, or none-of-the-above, it doesn’t matter for the purposes of this breakdown.
Contrarily, hermeneutics is an approach we employ when asking ourselves what the text means, regardless of whether or not it’s composed in a poetic fashion. Hermeneutics are inherently ontological and emphasize an examination of the text at hand in a decontextualized way, rather than focusing on the factors that contributed to its making. It makes more sense that prose is often subject to a hermeneutical inspection, hand-in-hand with the rise of the novel and sequential narratives as we moved into the modern age, from Neoclassics, to Victorian literature and into Modernist texts, Avant Guarde, the ever-poorly defined Post-modernism, and so on. You implicitly understand what a hermeneutical approach is if you’ve ever chatted with a friend after seeing a movie and asked, “So what was that about?” The word “about” being synonymous with “meaning”, as in, “What was the meaning of the movie?” What was the point? Get to the point. The point, the point. No time, no time. Point and purpose seem to be the same.
Of course, this isn’t just an exercise in esotericism or slapdash literary theory, or a refresher of Marshall McLuhan’s rudiments on Media Ecology and the Information Age. Terms like poetics and hermeneutics potentially don’t matter aside from what they reveal about narratives, whether they are books or movies or plays or TV shows, and they reveal quite a lot. It’s not the terms itself that matters, it’s what the terms indicate, and these two terms alone can help us crack the code of an entire text.
As a writer, I personally take especial pleasure in playing with words. Tumbling them around, smashing them together and squishing them like putty. I care how sentences crackle or moan, or jerk off a page, or thunder or shower, or how well the clauses, like waveforms, from one to the next, fall into a marching rhythm, or how the prose conveys silence through a liturgical scarcity of punctuation, or haste, or how off-the-cuff neologisms and compound adjectives promote new and fascinating ways of envisioning familiar objects or actions. But I not just care about the mere fact of it, I care about the how of it. How, in a technical sense, are these feats achieved? What are the tools needed?
Or in other words, you could say that I am personally more interested in the poetics of a text rather than the hermeneutics. I am more interested in what techniques the author, director, artist, etc., use to convey their voice and meaning rather than what the meaning itself is. Plot is subordinate to method.
This is a perspective that’s fallen out of fashion in the past 100 years, and to an extent the 100 years prior, moreso and moreso, as stated, concurrent with the rise of the novel rather than the poem as the dominant form of written literature and literary expression. It also coincides with shifts in political current starting with the Renaissance away from the plutocratic fidelity of the Medieval ages and towards the democratic egalitarianism (supposedly) of the modern age. Don’t tell me what it means, let me figure it out: that’s the idea. At least, in terms of the overall weight of this span of time.
This tendency is exemplified specifically in the rise of the United States as the dominant global cultural force of the 20th century, which is important to mention for the sake of context and vanguards of modern literature. Trends and precedents established in the bedrock of American cultural ideology have extended outward, as always, through its media and popular culture and into the rest of the world to help steer the zeitgeist. Let’s not kid ourselves and pretend to need to discuss whether or not arts and entertainment shape people’s outlooks and perspectives, and shape what they themselves come to expect from media, which then influences those creative projects which rise in public consciousness. The cause causes a cause-effecting effect.
To be specific, the rise of New Criticism as a theoretical treatment of literature in the early 20th century, hand-in-hand with Modernism and the associated tilt away from focusing on the author as an idolized mastermind, reflects the United States’ inherent anti-intellectualism and detestation of class discussion. The whole bedrock of American ideology is, after all, founded on anyone being able to do anything, to rise to the top, attain their dreams, be all they can be, etc. etc., and any information to the contrary is often received with scorn and disbelief and decried as unreal and untrue. I.e., freedom “fails” because people fail at freedom, not because institutions and cultural precedents influence human behavior. Certainly not. We’re far beyond that, right? Those who’ve “made it” are used as examples that demonstrate the truth of the prevailing ideology, and those who haven’t are seen as exceptions to an extant, unquestionable law (despite those people constituting the vast majority of working people).
This line of inquiry ties together with the general discussion of poetics versus hermeneutics. Literature has, over the course of the last century, generally become more terse, crisp, direct, and undecorated (again, with exceptions). We’re talking huge hits here. Sales. Grabbing people’s attention. Greater strain on time. Writing “page turners”. Concise sentence structure. Henry James? Hell no. Get that shit out of my face. I’ve got tweets to tweet. Fiction, and all the arts, have been pushed further and further towards a pure “products”, no matter how the still unexcised core spirit remains intact. This shift in trends, as related to the influence of American culture in particular, has led to a complete inversion of how fiction is digested. We’ve turned from poetics to hermeneutics.
Literature, until the late 1800’s, was founded on knowledge of, and recitation of, the classics, as in, “How well do you know Plato’s Republic?” “How well can you apply its evident principles to your life, especially within a Judeo-Christian context?” This approach represents a bias that necessitates, inherently, a kind of idolization of the text at hand, an acquiescence to the superior wisdom of “natural law” and the comprehension therein of the author himself (usually him, not her), also defined in part by the era within which he lived. This necessity of idolization, in turn, completely opposes the aforementioned foundational ideology of American egalitarianism. This kind of force tends to work against the deep reading of texts and the related application of theory and linguistics. It works against poetic application, in other words.
It’s not only, therefore, fashionable to evaluate texts nowadays based on a hermeneutical approach, but it’s a bit easier. We can stick to the apparent facts of the case. We need not dig into hoity-toity realms of polysyllablism. We can talk about what something “means”, and only that, rather than probe into the methodology and techniques that created that “meaning”, which themselves necessitate a certain vocabulary and baseline of knowledge that are not as easily accessible. It’s far easier to watch a five-minute video breaking down JJ Abrams’ lightning technique (flares, we know), rather than go to film school. In the digital era, especially, we crave minutely digestible version of complex ontologies, and while claiming that there are “more and more things vying for our attention” lose potentially hours a day to the sinkhole of internet bric-a-brac. What does it amount to? Over the course of a year, likely weeks of life. Yes, I’m getting off topic.
So how does this fit into the poetics vs. hermeneutics dichotomy? Simply put, it’s integral for writers to be able to break down their craft to the nuts and bolts if they want to have access to a full palette of tools to make what they want to make. When writing, I want to know how to produce an effect. I want to be able to call up a set of discrete, applicable techniques and tools of prose to produce whatever output I want. Yes, each work is different. Yes, the needs of a particular text change in accordance with the text and are in a state of constant flux over the entire duration of the text’s completion. But that rejoinder is too easy of an escape route from doing some unattractive, inglorious labor of prying apart the atoms of a single sentence. But it’s not enough to simply say what something is, to identify the results of technique, and to thereby know the facts of it. We’ve got to dig to the substance, the sediment and texture of a narrative, where process and theory converge. Rhyme, rhythm, pace, tone, nested clauses, split predicates, transitional phrases, all of it. Language *does* need to be called out as LANGUAGE, and not dimmed to a whisper so that no one hears.
Of course, there is a bit of reverse engineering to be done. We’ve got to agree on what the meaning is before we can begin to ask how the meaning was generated. It’s simply the case that, in the past, meaning was assumed. It was shared. Sweetness and light. Aristotle is my bro, bro. Ivanhoe is badass. Now, in something resembling a post-post-post-ad-infinitum-post-modern world, meaning and values and intent are no longer agreed upon, and are in fact the source of more fractiousness than ever, whether we’re talking about a simple vlog or an entire news broadcast network.
It becomes incumbent on us to decide what meaning is, yes, but only a first step before prying that meaning open so we can identify the tools used to build it. The tools we use to deconstruct our literature, in all its forms in all its media, can be used across other disciplines. This can be daunting, but it’s a fantastic opportunity nonetheless, one inimicably tied to the maundering hopelessness and sloppy wrath of the times. It is all the more incumbent on us, then, to not simply say, “Yeah, that story was cool. What was it about? Well, a drug dealer, I guess.” It is the arts and its manifold vessel – media – that perform the task of self-critique and self-evaluation in a society, as well as the more obvious task of revealing who we are as a people. It is necessary, therefore, to evaluate the how as well as the what, and to understand how precisely these vessels of meaning are delivered to us.
Otherwise, we dull our openness to powers of awareness, and at the same time, dangerously shrink our vigilance against powers of coercion.
August 4, 2018
Deconstruction: The Name of the Rose
Before settling into a discussion of The Name of the Rose, it’s best to dispel any visions of Sean Connery (William) and Christian Slater (Adso) monk-robing their way through 1986’s grayscale trudgefest. I watched the film after finishing the book, and if you watched it and enjoyed it, fantastic. If you didn’t watch or enjoy it, then take heart. The novel is a cornucopia of details, notions, visions, language, subtlety, subtext and tone in comparison. The film is the single stroke of a single color next to the canvas of a kaleidoscope.
However, this is also what preventing me from admitting, for a while, that I really, really loved The Name of the Rose. And make no mistake, I do.
My initial – and eventually subverted – reaction was that text was overly dialectic. For the first 150-200 pages (it takes a lot to convince me) I felt as though each conversation and each plot point was merely a didactic centerpiece – Adso interjecting during William’s monologues – and method for Eco to expunge some conundrum of historical-theological-literary theory that he’d been mulling over in his head for twenty years. There was nowhere for his saturation of mental information to go, and there was also no real pressing, inner thralldom driving Eco to write fiction; he just had a cool idea for a story and filled it with a lot (A LOT) of facts that practically spilled out his skull the second they found an avenue for release. At least, this is what it felt like for the first third of the book, till I got accustomed to his style and saw what I believe his purpose was.
Until then, it was the tone that held me. I found it odd that a playful tones, almost whimsical at times and sardonic at others, knowingly pervaded the text like a wink. That combined with fascination at how one mind could apparently house and redistribute into prose an athenaeum’s worth of knowledge.
The light, nearly carefree tone was especially interesting given the hefty topics at play (medieval monks, their prayer time, penance, morally nuanced discussions about Biblical interpretation, the afterlife, libraries full of hand-copied tomes, lost pince-nezzes). The main character William doesn’t really have what you’d describe as a conventional “arc”. Instead, the arc belongs to the main character’s companion and monk-in-training Adso. William more or less confirms what he already knows, but Adso’s naivety and youth are fully overturned by the time he’s penning the book as its narrator.
In fact, at first I wondered entirely at the need for Adso’s character, which seemed only there to supply quiet interrogatives or exclamations that served to galvanize William’s next litany about medieval history, Christian theology, the fastidiousness of monks’ various roles as record-keepers and the daily routines that bound them across the abbeys of Western Europe and the UK. If Adso was not present, I reasoned, there would be no need for the text to be presented as a sort of epistolary piece, a fragment of text about something else. We could simply have the narrator tell the events as they occur. However, I do understand the purpose behind presenting the events of the story as an eyewitness account. Mundanity serves to balance the eventual extremes of ancient conspiracies and secret societies embedded in both the architecture of the narrative and the architecture of the abbey, its dusty texts and suppressed history. If you’re wondering what Dan Brown might write after thirty years of professorship and linguistics training, then by all means, pick up this book instead.
William himself is a wry English monk, a veteran clergyman and ex-inquisitor who’s “come to the light” about his own faith and renounced his inquisitorial status but still serves the church as a sort of ingenious 13th century Sherlock Holmes with a cowl. In this book he and his reputation are off to solve an insidious set of increasingly devious murder mysteries in a far-flung, but revered abbey known for its replete, arcane library and selectivity of those who access it. But this is all window dressing. The true story, most simply, is about Christendom’s struggle for its central identity within layer upon layer, century upon century of human corruption that has served to distort and mask a very simple, universal truths rather than reveal it. And of course, this is already the case by the time the book is set in the 14th century. I wonder what William would think about televangelists and mega-churches.
William’s wisdom and insight are the key to the entire piece of work. He is a skeptic, possibly even agnostic, and most certainly an early precursor to modern secular humanists (read: Catholics). It’s as though the wryness of his wit and wisdom are the means of expressing his awareness of the ultimate transience of his theology in a literalist, pedantic sense – the rituals, the clothing, the phrases, the trappings, so to speak. The resultant playfulness of tone is doubly a means for the reader to find an emotional escape route from the corruption of those beliefs, factions of infighting monks, the remnants of inquisition and torture, and the wrongful use of public power for cruel, personally motivated ends.
In this way Eco approaches a brutally serious set of topics in an almost airy and very self-aware way, which in turn marks the ultimate vindication of William’s core Christian beliefs – charity, love, understanding, care – because they are embedded in truths of the natural world and human familial and tribal structures that transcend any form of generation-to-generation institutionalized dogma. William, as Eco’s mouthpiece, shrugs, “What are you gonna do?” towards the twisted underbelly of Christianity around him. But, it’s because he’s accepted the ultimate impermanence of the individuals responsible, and even of his faith itself, in a liturgical sense, full of ever-shifting “truths”, that he is able to approach the events of the book with a certain acceptance that seems to at times border on nonchalance.
The playfulness of the tone also seemed to me a way for Eco to indicate to us, the readers, that he is in on the joke of his own nerdy, compulsive need to deconstruct every minor detail of Benedictine or Franciscan chronology and clash of power between the Pope and various groups vying for his favor or taking up arms against his overly centralized power.
As to the name of the book itself, there can be no clearer sign (literary pun!) of the semiotician in Eco. The edition of the book I myself have (Vintage, 2004) is a gorgeous edition with thicker paper and a lovely, bold cover art that includes in the back a bit of a background story from Eco regarding the creation of the book. He basically hand waves, “The name just sounded good”, but I’m going to go an additional step of unraveling how the title of the book does in fact tightly relate to the text at hand in a completely non-random way.
When looking at the name of the book, it’s clear simply by mouthing the words The Name of the Rose that the title is a puzzle of sorts, or a call to interpretation. It’s an outstretched hand that presents itself as a force to pull you inward that at the same time hints that you’ve got to be on your toes while you read if you want to pick up on the subtext, symbolism, etc.
The most obvious question there is to ask is: “Well, what is the name of the rose?” At least, this was my first read on it. Like, maybe the rose’s name is Bertrand, or Jesse, or Calliope. But then I saw the title as a sort of placeholder for an actual proper noun. In others words, what if the name of the book actually was Meredith or Krystal, and that name *was* the name of the rose. Instead, the title as it is more or less means, The Unspoken Name of That Rose That Is Named but Not Known. It’s as though the name of the rose was omitted and asks you, the reader, to find out what it is, or why it matters.
So then, why does it matter what the rose is named? This question is, given Eco’s background, very clearly semiotic. In short, the name of the rose is important because it is the only way to know that one, particular rose. And roses, on a whole, like any other group of nouns, are composed of individuals with shared characteristics. So if I use a word like “rose”, it’s a signifier that calls to a sign – the word on paper – which itself is an abstraction of a type of flower. Even though we have a fairly decent shared idea of what a rose is, and even though it’s a qualified species of a genus, none of us bring to mind the same image of a the object is I simply say the word “rose”.
Likewise, if I say crayon, or car, or lion, we can generally agree upon what these things are because they are concrete and fairly inflexible, much more so than words like integrity, normal, or worthy. And we can say: yes, a car is a car because of its clearly defined details, such as windshields and four wheels and a steering wheel inside, and a gear shift and a dashboard, etc. etc. A lion (if male) has that puffy fur around its neck called a mane, and is likely of a sandy color to better blend into the savannahs where he resides, and so on. But beyond that, we have to go to the most detailed level in order to truly know an individual, even as that individual is representative of a group and shares characteristics with the group.
If you get a new dog from the local shelter, it is no longer simply a dog, it is Rufus or Screwball or Tiptoe. It becomes a singular, individual thing that is no longer merely a type of thing – dog – but is unique and can be known on a one-on-one basic. It matters more, so to speak, on a personal level. Name it and it stays. Name it and know it. Name it and it’s hard to tear it away. Name it and it’s yours. Even the writer(s) of Genesis cite this understanding when they bestowed the power of naming on Adam. It represents true knowledge, awareness, and stewardship.
This semiotic backdrop speaks to us, the readers of The Name of the Rose, about how we ought to approach the text itself. No longer should we read about concepts like monks and abbeys as random, faceless dudes in cloaks in stony places scribing away by daylight only to rest their cramped hands on the way to pray at Nones. Here, in Eco’s text, is a way to get to know these monks as real, living individuals who were, fundamentally, no different from us. This idea is bolstered by the narrative itself, which presents all the monks in the story not as chaste, hopelessly pious individuals with no sense of the real world and what drives humans’ hearts, but as corrupt, derisive, even depraved individuals who are either just trying to make the best of their circumstances, or striving to collude via power plays and petty interpersonal struggles, using weaponized politics or abstract theology as an excuse for cruel behavior. Sound familiar?
At present, if I walked up to a random pedestrian in the street and said, “Hey, what do you know about medieval monks?” I’m betting the most I’d hear in response is, “Uh, yeah, they wore grey robes and lived away from people, right?” But now, because of Adso’s personal account (the narrative of the text) we can know these monks (read: roses) for who they actually were. We can know them by name. If this echoes the recent, brilliant film Call Me By Your Name, then ding ding ding, you’ve got an idea what the title of that movie (and its source material) mean.
And so what is the name of the rose? It’s each proper name in the text, each character and each life, the ones that Adso himself, decades after the events of the book, hasn’t forgotten, down to the details. The Name itself is a willingness to approach holy men as simply men, or any person as a person removed from the intrinsic biases of assumed power, group identity, or surface-level characteristics, and to see the fundamentals beyond role, station, or personal power. The name of the rose, whatever it is, is the only way to know the individual, and through the individual know the universal: a common person, fellow-feeling and identical in loves, desires, fears, and animosities. Truthfully, I can’t think of a better use for fiction, nor an era for which this lesson is more sorely needed.
August 1, 2018
Recommencement
from The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan
I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t know who I am, because then I’d be placing unwarranted blame on an awful lot of folks. Casting stones, first the splinter out of your eye, so on and so on and all that fairness. I say “unwarranted” because there’s no blame, no fault to be had at all, on any side. The truth is, I’ve done my active best to avoid what I’ve never wanted: scrutiny, vulnerability.
There’s no need to be unrealistic and pretend that each success (however defined), or each reader garnered, isn’t another mote placed on the scales of expectation, balanced against all the empty weight of creative pathos on the other side. It’s also nonsense to think that any artist, writer or otherwise, will simply succeed, outright, because of reputation and credentials. Fair-weather friends are made far fairer when placed side by side the loyalties of fair-weather fans, especially in an age of internet rantbile.
But things that need to emerge will emerge all the same--likely raving--if not emerged leashed. The modern demands of “self-marketing”, “branding”, public-facing personas, all that (yes) disgusting waste of precious lifetime, is a fundamental problem for those of us who enjoy anonymity, privacy, and quietude, and for those of us who want to create for creation’s sole sake, but also want to make a living: eat, wash, wear clothes, have refrigerated food, and generally pretend at what passes for civility these days. It's also a problem for the Byronesque among us for whom writing is an expurgation of trauma and devilry. A need.
The idea of the hermetic, cabin-in-the-woods artist of pure integrity and valiant penury--and all the benefits of victimization derived therein--is not a new one. We can look to the “fuck you” era of 90’s counterculture. We can look to the aggressively anti-sellout ethic of the 60’s. We can look directly at the antiauthoritarian heart of original Americana and the Westward expansion, that same strange heart that also demands strength of law, military, and an inevitable consolidation of leadership.
The notion of an artist who is never heard but used nonetheless as a one-way mirror of social comparison, of giving/never-receiving, comes from a very solidly traceable path of European medievalism. It’s a mishmash of “unrequited love” poetics that predate the rise of Bildersrogen and don’t-look-at-me-I’m-too-chaste Clarissas and Pamelas and their resultant archetype of purity, generations prior to the birth of the modern novel in the Neo-classical period of Western literature and its legitimization a mere hundred and twenty or so years ago as a serious art form, round characters and all (thank you, Mr. Forster). This is all before Hemingway stepped onto the scene with his famous piece of modernist advice, “A Farewell to Adverbs!”
But since writing must be a thing of brick and mortar, a thing done because you happen to be inspired at 9:00 am every morning, and not simply Baphomet’s steam nostriling up from the unconscious, and not simply something kept for you and you alone, unread and away from cruel eyes, the question becomes: how to reconcile the purely selfish need for psychological dialectics with the emotional brutality of commercialism?
Again, not a new conundrum. Patronage to the arts--commissions of sculptures, musical pieces in honor of newly ascended royalty and the like--is a form of funding far more traditional than point-of-sale, and has by necessity addressed this seeming-contradiction, as a result producing wonders of creative power that we revere, historically, culturally, wonders that we just might be able to use to convince the aliens to not blow us all away when they weigh against those wonders our collective vices and stupidities.
And a book: a book is a conversation. Literature is a bi-directional relationship, no matter how passive the act of reading might seem, or how little of a role the reader might seem to have in the production of works. Yes, writing is one of the most solitary acts of creation possible, one that undoubtedly attracts a certain type of individual. And no, readers don’t physically scrawl or type the words that land on the page. I also don’t mean that readers play a role by “speaking with your wallet” or by letting the market decide, or any of that late capitalist rhetoric. I mean that literature can’t breathe unless it’s being ingested, interpreted, and pondered. Art requires a receiver, a receptor for the signal, not just a source and a vector or wave along which to move.
And now, lo-and-behold: we have in this age websites like Patreon.com, a beautiful and long-needed answer to the Gen-X corporate-hatred kerfuffle of the late twentieth century.
But even so, as the phrase goes, we all must answer to a higher authority, and even a site dedicated to generating merit-based, self-sustaining income for artists must ultimately, and perhaps justifiably, place power in the hands of the non-artist, the one who is consuming and not producing the thing being consumed. In and of itself, this is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, but simply a system of definable inputs and outputs. Subjectively though, and ultimately, it means that I and other writers/creators must place our trust and livelihood and demonized, excoriated souls in the hands of readers/consumers, and readers being, well, human, this isn’t exactly a comforting notion. No offense. Recall what I said earlier about aliens. Let’s just hope they’re less fickle that we are. It’ll make annihilation painless, at least far more painless than the slow bake and salinized rise of climate change.
Before firewalking it might be beneficial to practice a bit. To know yourself well enough to not transpose the image with the real thing. I’ve had to take a long while off the proverbial grid the past few years to know myself and push myself, creatively, to find out precisely what I’m capable of as a writer, to ascertain what I really want to say, how I want to say it, and to determine exactly what I do and do not need from this art.
No, I will never be a social media mendicant begging for hollow love. But, I still must exist in this forum. I must “put myself out there”, I know. I need to make of myself a presence in the machine. That’s why this whole thing is difficult. And if that sounds baffling to you, or preposterous, or straight up ponderous bullshit, and you’re wondering “what’s the big deal, brah?”, please remember that all predispositions fall along continuums, whether it be IQ, interest in professional sports, visual vs. auditory memory acuity, sexual preference, or any damn thing at all. Outliers help define the stodgy middle of the bellcurved belly. And right now we’ve got a big, fat social media belly full of micro-celebrity vainglory somehow taken for virtue.
But maybe I can just let be. Maybe a public face can actually be my own face and not the face of a self-aggrandizing sellout. Maybe this reinvention of a career can be simpler than I imagine. Yes: that’s what this post has been driving towards. Ironically so, because in the end I’m talking about simplification, reduction, listener-speaker, a roundtable, an athenaeum.
So here’s the plan:
I’m going to be recording videos of me reading my own work. Take a piece of short fiction, split it up into segments sensible to the text, of a reasonable length (7-10 minutes might be a good cutoff), and record those as individual videos. Think of audiobooks except the audio has a video. So, a videobook. A campfire. An intersection of literature and performance art. A story read to a group by the guy who wrote it.
We have, in the internet, a kind of revised phase of literature as oral tradition. A way to connect, face-to-face, and essentially listen, not “read”, to the voices of the greater tribe. The difference is, the tribe is not necessarily confined to local geography. We have, I admit, already moved past the sequential, linear print phase of human history that has given us so much erudition and technological/scientific progress, no matter any setbacks, by way of the proliferation of the printed word and our ability to free up more headspace because we need not remember every damn thing we’ve heard; we can just jot it down and reference it later. The trick, of course, is to enable “deep reading” and allow us to focus on a task long enough, and a complex enough task at that, to come to the resolution of a problem or the construction of a piece of work that was not previous allowable in a pre-print era, at least not without greater difficulty. This is one way to articulate Media Ecology 101, and I completely ally myself with Media Ecology as a discipline and theoretical construct.
Media Ecology may help to answer the question of why I would presume anyone would listen to a guy reading fiction in online videos. I adore the rhythmic, auditory quality to the written word. When we read something, it’s not simply a bunch of strange symbols on a page. There is a *voice*. That’s the term we use, rather intangibly and encompassingly: voice. Colloquially, voice means style, tone, pace, structure, meter, even typographic elements, and a whole bunch of other intangibles all wrapped together. And so: how about I simply give that voice voice?
I want to reach across the divide of the internet and the page to connect with a community of people, either according to the writer/reader paradigm, or speaker/listener paradigm. I want to challenge the notion that a public face must be a fake face cynically constructed solely for the purpose of disgusting words like “networking” and “branding”. I want to be real out here in there.
This is one of the purposes of writing, really: to enartifact yourself. To make of yourself a future relic. To enshrine, perhaps. To use the rules of language to place a small little token of being into a set of words bound and readable like a breadcrumb for anyone willing to give chase. A horcrux, if you’ve read Harry Potter. To leave an imprint and a riddle. The print era allowed this gift to explode and race its way into home after home of an everyday, literate public. The internet has turned that singular big bang into a multiverse.
However, in the grand scope of human history, the print era is a relative anomaly, and the modern digital era is an even slimmer sliver. Self-publishing has helped to democratize the sources of creative fiction, regardless of quantity or quality, but writing, as a discipline, no matter if it belongs to self-published individuals or traditionally published individuals, is still some kind of a mystic black box. Oooo, a writer. By my experience leading writing groups and writing workshops this kind of response typically means either, a) there is little to no awareness of the ground-level on the speaker’s part about the grunt work of writing, or b) flippancy.
I feel that there might be a better public, non-professional understanding of filmmaking, musicianship, canvas-painting, perhaps even game development, more than writing. There is simply more exposure, more exposés, more insight into processes that are more glamorous to watch or record, or are more easily reduced to deconstructible bits. Want to learn how a writer gets shit done? Ok. Watch this guy stare at this screen for two hours with his lips pursed and his fingers occasionally spidering. Very hard to explain or make concrete from the abstract. Also not nice to look at. Much less cool than footage of Andy Serkis in a green-painted room with little white balls stuck to his Velcro-suited body as he does an impression of a sentient chimpanzee.
And so we must ask: What is literature’s place in the modern world, at least literature in the sense that it’s generally known? The shift to the modern, digital era represents not a wholesale obliteration of deep reading, but a re-evaluation of how we define communication between writer and reader, source and receptor. On the subject of the aural quality of language, I keep hearing certain words come up again and again when talking about the circulation of information on the internet: conversation, dialogue, voice.
There is something inherently auditory about written material. Babies listen first, then speak, then read, then write. Storytelling began as an oral tradition to pass down knowledge, history, and wisdom in a form more memorable than lists and raw instruction. But the written word is unique. Minimally, it’s unique in the way that each medium speaks uniquely. We all know this inherently when we do things like compare books to movies. Of course there are differences because media and their respective languages – their tools, their strategies of conveying information, their strengths – all of them are different.
When looking at the changes that the written word has undergone in the past couple decades, including reading habits, market expectations, digitization, and economic trends, it becomes clear that there is more yet to uncover. We have not collectively discovered or defined the role that the former dominant medium has in the current era. We have work to do to suss it out, and it is at this point that I want to snipe. I want to play with text and see what potential ways there are to reconstruct the relationship between writer/reader and speaker/listener, and to find out what untapped potential still lives in an esteemed, traditional artform. This is where Patreon comes into play.
On that note, monthly Patreon supporters will receive e-books of all of my written works as they are written, whether short or long-form. I will also be frontloading my output after re-launch by making available short fiction from my completed, unpublished backlog to help me catch up with the current flow of work through this period.
Additionally, and perhaps most pointedly, I will be posting recordings – orations, I’m calling them – of short fiction alongside the re-launch of the site and the corresponding release of e-books to Patreon supporters. E-books will be available in epub, pdf, and mobi formats, and aside from the video orations themselves each work will have companion videos serving as deconstruction essays of the work at hand. All of the videos will be available to anyone, supporters or not, and they will be posted on my website, my Patreon page, and of course, YouTube. I think it’s suitable, in this day and age, to incorporate lessons from other media and approach literature in a dramatized form that harkens back to its oral roots.
You can think of Patreon support as a subscription service to my work, which gives you access to anything I write in e-book format in addition to supporting me as I write, record, upload, and curate the accompanying audiobooks (in video format) in addition to fleshing out the usual gamut of online essays and social media presence. As for essays, they will be available on my website as well as Patreon, and will be focused on three literary topics: deconstructions of works, technique, and ethics in literature.
Another part of me (smaller by the day, I admit) is concerned by this venture and its possible corruption of the traditional, romanticized artform of fiction, short stories, etc., that means so much to me. However, that’s exactly the rejoinder: *all* its artforms. There is no rigid boundary to the definition of literature any more than there is to the content it contains. Past shifts in literary tradition have always seemed incongruous with then-history. So, my concerns in this regard are immediately made moot.
Another part of me thinks this all sounds like an inherently horribly egotistical thing to do. Or at least, fears this is the case. Why would I presume you would stop to listen and care about what I, this one guy, have to say? Truth is, I have no idea. I have no idea if anyone will care. But, my desire for a particular result is separate from the need to conduct this experiment in fiction, voice, and theory. No guaranteed outcome is needed to drive me to do it.
As for the future and stretch goals: I would love to include things like online Q&A sessions, orations of classic texts, and even mentoring. It all depends on the amount of the support I receive. For now, let’s keep it simple and produce an output that can help justify such lofty, future ambitions.
I’ll be including all relevant links at the bottom of this post (essay, really). If you choose to support me, I hope to justify your faith in the very near future. This is an experiment that I hope to conduct together, a way to rethink and rediscover the written word and its connection to our oral past, digital present, and post-human future.
But I should stop here. This is a mere commentary, possibly a disclaimer. It’s not fiction, not a holy text, not at all. And just like the contrast of the wracked Byronist’s inner motivations at odds with the external pressures impugned by a place in the outside world: for the moment let’s embrace the contradictions as non-contradictory, and in so doing be able to adore literature and its messaging and its insights and maybe even start to see past its text to whatever truths it encodes.
Here’s to the very next step, and the one after that.
June 1, 2017
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