Charles Bernstein | Recalculating / 2013

the poetics of bewilderment

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Bernstein Recalculating (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013)

 

Given the wide range of his publishing, teaching, and performative activities, it is hard to imagine that this year’s collection of poems, Recalculating, is Charles Bernstein’s first full-length collection of new poetry in seven years. Of course, that does not include the wonderful selected poems published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in All the Whiskey in Heaven (2011). Nonetheless, there is something different, almost groundbreaking, about a work which, through its title, admits of a “change of direction” resulting from a wrong or mistaken turn.

 

     The “turn” for Bernstein is nearly everything: the tragic death of his daughter, Emma, old age (or, at least, the recognition that one is growing older), and the not-so-simple vicissitudes that define themselves in maturity. And this is, accordingly, a darker, mature work—not that anyone could possibly describe Bernstein’s work to be without seriousness of purpose before this. Some might argue that Bernstein has, from the very start, written in a mature voice, as if he had almost been born as an older man. But there was a kind of brightness—despite the darkness sometimes of the subject matter—in early works such as “Sentences My Father Used” or “Controlling Interests,” a lightness of method in his “clumsy, clumpsy” approach to language. As Bernstein admits, time and again, in this new work—something I don’t think he would have claimed in his other works—he seeks “not to remember,” (“I write to forget”) and, as he brilliantly expresses it through a variation of Baudelaire’s “Enivrez-vous,” a desire to remain drunk (even if one may also be drunk on poetry or virtue), or as he expresses it in the little poem “Later”:

 

                           Wake me when the movie’s over

                           Let me sleep till then

                           Wake me when I care no longer

                           To ever get sober again

 

This kind of darkened vision appears over and over in Recalculating, as, in often heart-breaking admissions, this professor of poetry (and Bernstein, more than anyone I know might be described throughout his life as one who professed his passion for poetry) questions his own limitations, his own knowledge:

 

                           Each day I know less than the day before. People say that you

                           learn something from such experiences [presumably Emma’s death];

                           but I don’t want that knowledge and for me there are no

                           fruits to these experiences, only ashes. I can’t and don’t want

                           to “heal”; perhaps, though, go on in the full force of my dys-

                           abilities, coexisting with a brokenness that cannot be accom-

                           modated, in the dark. (“Recalculating”)

 

Or, as he quotes Wilde in “The Truth in Pudding”:

 

                           But the world will never weary of watching that troubled soul

                           in its progress from darkness to darkness.

 

     It is not that Bernstein has abandoned his older ideas; indeed, this poet has always sought out what he describes as a “poetics of bewilderment” (“How Empty Is My Bread Pudding”). And his push toward fragmentation in the form of “disjunction, ellipsis, constellation” (“The Truth In Pudding”) would have been equally at home in his early book of poetics Content’s Dream, where he argued for a language that moves toward denseness and opacity in order to “actually map the fullness of thought and its movement.”

       Yet, we also recognize that something stylistically different in occurring in this most recent work. Bernstein has often in the past combined what might call “poetics” with “poetry,” refusing to distinguish between the two, the one being what the poet creates in writing his “poems,” but the major works of Recalculating take that even further, combining in five larger works—“The Truth in Pudding,” “How Empty Is My Bread Pudding,” “Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums, & Implausibly Deniable Links,” “Unready, Unwilling, Unable,” and “Recalculating,” what might be described as a combination of diary-like comments, aphorisms in the manner of Stein and Wilde, poetic quotations, and personal revelations. Strangely, these multi-genre works seem to be the most representative in this volume of Bernstein’s thinking, as he winds his car of the mind through the twisted streets of his thinking, braking, even stopping momentarily to move forward again with gusto. The result not only defines what the poet means by “recalculating,” but represents what he clearly perceives as his winding journey through life, moving on through “disjunction, ellipsis, constellation,” and, perhaps, most importantly, a now flawed memory.

      If Bernstein argues that he wants to forget, he is also desperate to remember, to bring all the assimilated (and even his unassimilated) past into a new future. This poet has often “recreated” the works of other poets, but in this volume we note that Bernstein is, at times, almost repeating the structure of one of my earlier books, After, rewriting, reinterpreting, and remaking poems by figures as various as Baudelaire, Pessoa, Leevi Lehto, Osip Mandelstam, Sylvia Plath, Frost, Régis Bonvicino, Wallace Stevens, Cole Porter (via Chaucer), Walt Whitman, Paul Celan, Velimir Khlebnikov, Paolo Leminski, Juão Cabral de Melo Neto, Victor Hugo, Guillaume Apollinaire, William Wordsworth, Nerval, and even me (a work that certainly captures the sense of the poem on which it was based). Some of these are among the strongest works in this volume, particularly the Baudelaire, Hugo, and Apollinaire imitations; but all are interesting in that they reveal a great postmodern poet (Bernstein’s definition of “Postmodernism”: modernism with a deep sense of guilt) exploring international poets of the past and present.

       In “The Jew,” dedicated to Jerome Rothenberg, and certainly among the best of works of this volume, Bernstein takes on voices of legendary rabbis, using the often convoluted and sometimes inverted logic of the Talmud to make another “turn” in the voyage, often toppling many seemingly logical propositions. Even more tellingly, the poet, at points, returns to his own past poetry, toting up the most frequent word choices in his earlier poetry collection Girly Man, with its satiric title-poem that points to then-California governor and movie-actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and creating a poem through the last words of his early masterwork “Sentences My Father Used.” Along with homages to fellow friends and poets, this collection can be seen—although certainly not exclusively—as a kind of self-reflective, meditative map of Bernstein’s life, a true “recalculating” of what the voyage to date has meant, and where he might be going in the future. And, in that sense, despite the usual humor and high-jinx of all of Bernstein’s wonderful poetic explorations, it is a “darker” book.

     I say that, obviously, with some distress; it is always a bit startling when the total optimism of one’s youth meets up with “Charon’s Boat” (the title of one of Bernstein’s poems).  Or as he expresses the difference in “Today Is the Last Day of Your Life 'til Now”: “I was the luckiest father in the world / until I turned unluckiest.”

     If things take a turn into a darker road, more frightening for both poet and his readers—I say this as a long-optimistic poet whose most recent book itself is titled Dark—these poems also continue a long trip begun as early as the poem “Long Trails of Cars Returning from the Beach,” of 1978, in which the traveling poet also gets ensnarled in traffic, unable to move forward. And its first Whitman-cum-Ginsberg inspired lines “I saw the power / of the word in / legend,” almost mirrors Bernstein’s somewhat darker position today: “The poem is a constant transformation of itself.”

      The works of Recalculating brilliantly reveal just that realization as they turn in on themselves and the sources behind the originals from which these works have risen like phoenixes to express a possible new present. Like a naughty schoolboy, Bernstein scrawls across one of his pages “I will not write imitative poetry” 16 times, and despite his use of numerous pre-existent sources, he lives up to his promise.

 

Los Angeles, August 28, 2013

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (August 2013).

César Aira | The Literary Conference / 2010

appropriations

by Douglas Messerli

 

César Aira The Literary Conference, trans. from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (New York: New Directions / Pearls, 2010

 

Argentinian writer César Aira’s The Literary Conference is a tale about writing, about the forms a writer uses and the way he borrows from the world around him in order to create. And in that sense this short fiction is also a vast metaphor for the process that Aira himself employs in order to create the more than sixty books he has published over the past decades.

 

    On the surface, at least, Aira’s work is a literary disaster: in a mish-mash of genres including the book’s early adventure, rags-to-riches tale, and legend of the “The Marcuto Line”—a vast cable that inexplicably connects to a pirate treasure buried deep in the ocean, Aira spins an out-of-control tale of pop-fiction with postmodern literary aspirations.

     Seemingly by accident, the “hero” of our tale, also named César, discovers the secret of the “line,” retrieving the treasure and reaping a huge fortune. Although he promises to reveal how he had accomplished later in his story, he never does so—at least in any direct method of story-telling. The remainder of the tale blends science fiction, a kind of vampire story, a thoroughly hackneyed piece of drama, and a satire on the literary establishment, while employing the narrative jumps, leaps of logic, and sometimes absurdly romanticized language of South American television soap operas. In short, The Literary Conference, as the author admits, has little coherence, moving forward at breakneck pace with little logic of plot or character. Figures—such as César’s former lover, Amelina—are mentioned, dropped, and reappear briefly again before disappearing totally from the narrative. The great Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes—whom our now wealthy hero hopes to clone in order to create an army of literary thinkers through which he can control the world—makes only a brief appearance, speaking words of congratulations to César that even he does appear to hear or recall:

 

                      The hall had a bad echo. Everybody was shouting and nobody could

                      hear anybody else. I accepted the congratulations with the gracious-

                      ness of a perfect idiot. I watched lips move and smiles appear,

                      sometimes I moved my lips, too, and drank, and smiled again; my

                      face was hurting from holding that grimace for so long. That was

                      even how I received Carlos Fuentes’s words.

 

The only time Fuentes again appears is as a blur in the back of his Mercedes Benz as he rushes to the airport to escape the Venezuelan city of Mérida where the conference has been held.

     The only character who is given any dimension, is a beautiful young scholar Nelly, a friend of Amelina, who dances with our aging hero for a night and helps him save the city from a force of gigantic blue worms through a coup de théâtre worthy of comic-book storytelling. It seems that César’s plot to steal, through a tiny wasp-like drone, a pinch of Fuentes’s DNA has gone awry, scooping up instead a miniscule dot of the author’s bright-blue tie, which the cloning machine has reproduced into the endless army of silk worms (worms literally made of silk). Instead of obtaining world domination, César saves the day by positing a huge exoscope (inexplicably a prop in his play performed at the conference) between the worms and the sun in order to burn his own creation, as if burning his own book.

     The clue to this concatenation of literary methodologies—precisely the kinds subjects that are at the heart of most academic literary conferences—is what the author admits in the mid-point of his book: he is a kind of literary vampire:

 

                     Vampirism is the key to my relationships with others, the only

                     mechanism that allows me to interact. Of course, this is a metaphor.

                     Vampires, as such, do not exist, they are merely a hook on which to

                     hang all manner of shameful parasitism that need metaphor to come

                     to terms with themselves. The shape that metaphor takes in me is

                     special, as I said. What I need—which I suck from the other—is

                     neither money, nor security, nor admiration, nor, in professional

                     terms, subject matter or stories. It is style.

 

     By style, Avila clearly does not me their linguistic style, but rather the essence of his victim’s being, the thing that makes each of us special. The writer, at least this writer so he claims sucks that “essence” from each figure he meets before his “victim” dries up, wilts and becomes vacant, whereupon he moves on the next individual and the next.

     Of course, since he is speaking of style and metaphor, so too does César derive his plots and characters in this fiction from others, creating a cacophony of only slightly interconnected texts that openly reveal his desperate need—any fiction writer’s need—to keep moving forward as his thoughts rush on and on through his creation, without turning back.

     Aira, in other words, uses a mad appropriation of nearly discontinuous narrative to reveal both how a fiction writer creates and the dangers that lie within such an unreflective mode. In a sense, he has put his own fiction into a kind of bi-polar state of mind, with dramatic highs and depths of mediocrity (such as his self-admittedly dramatic farce concerning a three-way affair between Adam and Eve) which stand in as metaphors of the process of fiction writing.

     As Aira portrays himself and others like such as Fuentes—who in some of his own works has combined politics, science fiction, surrealist passages and other genres—the very thing which often delights readers sometimes empties the world for its creator, who, a bit like an ouroboros, eats away his own existence in attending to his tale. Fiction, for Aira, appears to be an appropriation of life itself which can bring real life into focus or send it off into frightening fantasy which threatens our actual existence. His The Literary Conference does both, sometimes in the very same instant.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2010

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (June 2010).