everything but life itself
by Douglas Messerli
Martin Nakell Settlement (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2007)
The narrator of this tale, the former Governor of the Emergency Settlement for the Western Quadrant, has obediently taken up his post at the resettlement community only to be himself betrayed by his government; his wife and daughter, he is told, have been put under “protection”—in reality, he quickly perceives, imprisoned; at the time he writes this story he has heard of their deaths, his daughter having committed suicide.
Much of Nakell’s narrative—his third major work of fiction to
date—recounts the Governor’s friendships with various figures who reach the
outpost, including Tassiossu, Lucinda, Meleq, Grammatico, Klaus, Guillemette,
Abanno, Rivka, and, in particular, Alina, a woman with whom he has fallen in
love. The actions of these figures provide Nakell’s text with a series of rich
and profound tales told in a manner somewhat similar to that of the great
American fabulists John Hawkes and Robert Steiner.
Tassiossu is a student of art, particularly of the art of the Madonna on
which he has become a quasi-authority, lecturing to his friends and the
settlement citizens about the various Madonna’s painted throughout history and
how their depiction relates to the period in which they were created.
Meleq is a writer who has ceased to write, quoting only from one page of
his previous manuscript—a page, he is convinced, that, when he has completely
comprehended it, will restore his desire to write again.
Lucinda presents violin concerts that may remind one of pieces by John
Cage and other contemporary composers in which one or two plucks of the strings
reverberate in a silence wherein listeners are forced to perceive the “music”
in the context of the sounds of the surrounding world.
Grammatico, Klaus, and Guillemette constitute the Gruppo delle Macchine
Terribli, a group of performers who seem straight out of a Marinetti manifesto,
creating magnificent machines that perform, somewhat like gigantic puppets, in
vast expanses of air and earth.
Abanno, a man with endless energy, helps plan and operate various
activities in the settlement to save its citizens—as the government becomes
more and more disinterested in their survival—from certain death, helping to
create and maintain a water-producing facility.
Alina tells the narrator of the soldiers who came to kill her and her
family and how she was saved by one young soldier (a story that changes in each
of its various tellings); by her allowing the boy to kiss her, by her seducing
the young man, or willingly abandoning herself to lust and rape. Each time the
tale is told, the narrator caresses Alina’s body as if to assimilate her new
and deeper revelations.
When the citizens of the settlement abandon it in hopes of survival
elsewhere, the remaining narrator attempts to describe his own daily
activities, from his frugal culinary attempts to his studies of various subjects,
including the natural world around him, and his daily journal entries, which we
are now apparently reading.
All this activity, past and present, is overwhelmed in Nakell’s story by
his hero’s isolation and his seemingly endless speculations on why he continues
to write down the story of a world that no longer exists. I created just such a
figure in my own Letters from Hanusse,
a man writing a series of letters to a woman who possibly no longer exists and
will certainly never receive them; so I am sympathetic with the dilemma with
which Nakell’s narrator is faced. Yet upon my first reading I found this narrator’s
repetition of these concerns somewhat overbearing as time and again he ponders
the question only to discover new reasons for his act. Gradually, however, I
came to perceive this less as a repeated trope than as the actual focus of the
novel. And in this sense, Settlement
develops into a work less about an exotic world, a presentation of a strange
amalgam of human types, than a tale about art itself. By work’s end, we hardly
wonder any more if the marvelous character types with which we have been entertained
are “real” or figments of the narrator’s imagination. Mimesis becomes
unimportant. What increasingly matters is why the narrator even bothers to
write. What leads human beings to pick up pen or pencil, to type or key in, day
after day, a story or net of stories when we all know that even if the work
finds a small audience it will eventually come to nothing, will have no
audience, that the earth itself will some day collapse or explode! What lies
behind our mania not just to write, but to create!
Is Alina lying each time she tells the story of her young soldier/lover
and her brush with death? Is Meleq deluded in his belief that one page of his
work will reveal why he should write? Are the members of the Gruppo delle
Macchine Terribli mad in their grandly conceived and theatrical contrivances?
Is Lucinda a fraud in her demand that the listener discover the world in the
two or three notes issuing from her instrument? The settlement’s former
Governor must himself ask these questions day after day as he sits alone in
what seems to be a world of his own making. Neither author nor narrator can
answer the question why even the ancient caveman created the hand-painting in a
cave near the settlement; was it “an object of beauty? awe? tragedy? comedy? ecstasy?
fate?” “…Did he say to himself: Look
what you’ve done.” When does the act of creating become an object of art?
There is, happily, no one answer—art is many things, perhaps everything but life itself. And so our
artist is inevitably left in a world emptied of everything and everyone save
what he can (re)create.
Los Angeles, July 20, 2007
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2008).
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