In the Field, I am the Absence of Field

I read Martin Glaz Serup's book The Field on a plane right from New York City to Portland, Oregon. I was flying across the continent for the weekend and brought this along as my reading matter for the trip west. Still, almost three months later, the book stays with me. It's not merely that I remember it; it is that is sometimes appears in my life. It is manifested before me. Probably because it actually reminds me of my life. (NB: This is a book where the protagonist is a field.) It is manifested within me.

This is a book where the protagonist is a field. But not a usual field. As becomes clear from this sentence:

The field in sun, the field in snow, the field alone and with others, the field in the field with the Boy Scouts by a bonfire.

Particularly: "the field in the field."

This booklength prose poem told in episodes is defined by two features. The first is that the main character is said to be a field but acts as if he, for it is a he, is a middle aged man beset by ennui and general disaffectedness. He is an anonymous man in an anonymous post-industrial and probably suburban landscape that has no principal attractions. The second defining feature of the book is that it is told in an affectless, totally unemotional manner that befits this character.

The best experience of nature the field has had was at the fair ground in Roskilde; it went up in a little aeroplane, there were four people in the plane, it was very intimate, nature is beautiful seen from above, the plane was red.

So how effective is a book of about a boring run-of-the-mill suburbanite told with language as flat as possible?

Very. And the reason is because the book is filled with everything (wondering, humor, despair, revulsion), yet all of these pieces come into play in an unadorned way. Emotion is not adorned by emotionality. Sex is not discussed erotically. Everything is told as if it is everything else. The world is white and vanilla, because the field is white and vanilla.

The field is a lot.

The story of an extraordinarily ordinary man, one with many thoughts, but one whose thoughts are subdued, held in placed, tied tightly to their moorings, and unable to escape. Stories are told, but they do not connect (except via style and character). They do not tell a story. There is no story arc. Just a flat line, indistinguishable from death.

The book is held in place by its ordinariness, but it vibrates. It is a book spinning in place between two opposing forces. On the face of it, it is a story of nothing, of nothing much, of a nobody, and there is nothing to say about it, and the book says it all. But, on the other hand, the book is a satire against meaningless life, the pursuit of empty happinesses, the life lived without thought and serious intent.

The interviewer doesn't understand either, what do you mean, he asks the musician, the musician answers: no fear, no envy, not evil. This reassures the field somewhat, it sounds like an artist's slogan, so the musician is a typical artist: no doubt good at his thing, but detached from reality and non-committal.

If I collect everything together I know about this book, I am left with only one thing, the only thing the book is made out of: words. And the words work. When I think of this book, I am reminded most forcefully of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which was presented to us as a novel, but maybe it too was a poem. The "chapters" of The Field vary in length as in Faulkner's book. The various narrators in Faulkner often speak in a flat affectless way. And yet we are pulled in. The plan was red; my mother is a fish.

There is no story here, just vignettes of a life. Sometimes just a line: "The field feels ashamed of taking pictures." Sometimes two. Sometimes a paragraph taking up a third of the page. Sometimes a paragraph taking up most of a page. And, once or twice, the story grows out of control and onto a little bit of a second page.

The field sometimes thinks it's unhappy in a mild and ordinary way that makes it happy because it thinks that it's probably perfectly normal, and that makes it happy because it thinks things could be much worse, which makes it afraid because it thinks things could still get much worse, so it tries to think of something else.

The book presents the movement of thinking, a way of thinking through a life, or living through a thought. Even when the thoughts are small. Some of the thoughts are painful, or should be, but they are presented to us as if shrouded in rolls of cotton batting. We can't feel pain because of the protective padding of the words.

The field cannot feel the pain either. Because he has made himself so. Because he is an enterprise of human activity rather than a human being. Because he has given up his humanity. Because he sits, still but thinking, as a representation of what we shouldn't be. And it is too late for crying.

So he breathes and he goes on. He is a field. He is a screen. He is white enough that we can project ourselves onto him and view ourselves as if looking into a mirror.

When the field puts its ear to the ground it can hear a faint humming.

Dipping back into this book tonight, the whole thing comes back to me, and I am humming with its words, with the suppurating yet beautiful humanity of its blank and banal destitution, with the idea that this writing is inspiring in its ability to present the uninspiring in a moving and intellectual way, in a manner that shows us that we are human intellect and bodies of beating hearts. And need to remember that. And need to honor both those halves of our Manichaean wholes.

_____

Serup, Martin Glaz. The Field. Translated by Christopher Sand-Iversen. Les Figues Press: Los Angelese, Calif., 2011. US$15.


ecr. l'inf.