by Douglas Messerli
Christopher Middleton Loose
Cannons: Selected Prose (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014)
“The antigram
calls for (and should arouse),” Middleton asserts, “the most scrupulous thrift,
panache, and refinement in writing as such.”
As a lover of
genres, I’m always willing to accept the notion that an author is attempting to
mine new territory, is exploring boundaries of what we think we know or, more
importantly, how we read something that, simply because of its surface
appearance, we think we recognize but does not necessarily conform to what we
have experienced in the past. Any knowledgeable reader can cite numerous
instances of significant authors’ works being dismissed simply because they
didn’t seem to fit into the confines of more normative perceptions of a
particular genre. I have often repeated in these My Year volumes just such occurrences in connection with writings
by Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, and numerous others. And even as the publisher
of two books from which nine of these 33 prose works were selected—In the Mirror of the Eighth King (1999) and Depictions
of Blaff (2010)—I must admit that I originally had difficulty, despite my
immediate appreciation of the writing, defining their genres. The works of the
former volume I simply ascribed to be very personal prose meditations, and the
works of Depictions of Blaff I
suggested to myself and to others as being an unusual kind of short prose
fiction. And I must admit that rereading those works in the context of the
others, I more thoroughly enjoyed them as being cryptic and mysterious prose
works with no narrative solution to their meanings.
Middleton is also
one of the well-read and informed academics (without being an academic writer)
I know, and some of his remarkable prose works read somewhat like satires of
pedants discoursing on esoteric information—a bit like Raymond Queneau’s
OULIPO-inspired writings—ramblings of a charming madman. Certainly all of the
Blaff works might fall into that category, as well as pieces such as “From the
Alexandria Library Gazette,” “Manuscript in a Lead Casket,” the frightfully
futuristic “A Memorial to Room-Collectors,” and “The Turkish Rooftops.”
Other works focus
their attention on intense observation, revealing what is clearly Middleton’s
art-critical facilities, often featuring a work or a series of works of
art—prose works such as “Louis Moillon’s Apricots (1635),” “The Execution of Maximilian,” “Le Déjeuner,”
“A Polka in the Evening of Time,” or, on a more enigmatic level, often involving what is not seen or is
only somewhat visible in “Balzac’s Face” and “The Gaze of the Turkish Mona
Lisa.”
Still others
appear almost to be meditations on history or, more specifically, the
possibilities of history or, at least, recreating what might soon become history: “The Birth of a Smile,”
“A Bachelor,” “Nine Biplanes,” “Or Else,” “Cliff’s Dwarf,” and “In the Mirror
of the Eighth King,”
But all do share
what the Introducer of this work, August Kleinzahler, describes as forces of
that are “subversive” and “ludic,” “liminal” and “disruptive,” in favor of any
pre-conceived or determinative experience. Time and again, what might at first
seem narrative, is transformed through metaphor into an animistic or even
spiritual moment which one might describe as dissipating any plot- or
character-based evocation. Although “Nine Biplanes,” for example begins with
what seems to be a very specific time and narrator, an “I” located in 1940, the
author redirects the reader’s attention throughout until what began as a
concrete image has been miraculously transformed into a grotesquely unseen
world, invisible from the eyes of the work’s original seemingly narrative
voice. The work begins:
Summer 1940: I opened the double glass front door of the rambling
country mansion, school, and saw nine biplanes flying low, in close
formation, and slow; the lower edge of what I saw is a ruffled green
mass of trees.
What immediately declares itself to be a story in which any
seasoned reader can predict will be a tale of the discovery of evil in an
seemingly innocent world, a tale of gradual recognition of the child-like
narrator that within the “beauty” of what he first excitingly glimpses, there
is all the horror of destructive hate. In a sense, Middleton’s prose work,
indeed, is about just such issues, but the way he reveals that is radically
different from what we might expect. By constantly shifting viewpoints after
that introductory paragraph to other scenes within the school, moving in and
out of different adult and child perspectives, and by placing events is a
shifting time that jumps from place to place—from Hué, An Loc, Barcelona,
Norfolk, a French road, a certain Moscow elevator in 1937, etc.—Middleton pulls
us out of a limited here and now to a surrealist perspective that questions our
very assumptions. Yes, by work’s end, we do indeed encounter an evil world, but
it surely is not the like one we first expected:
A
child, instead of looking downward, now looks outward, and still
cannot awake, the inability to awake being, like an arm’s reach or
the tilting of a head, part of his condition. With hacked-off hands he
constructs for himself someone else, old, scribbling. Amid the
droning clatter of the motors, a bell of pink fire suddenly sounds.
…he listens to the flying metal blare and does not see the girl’s head
rolling across the gravel to his toecaps.
As if this brutal image—all the more horrific because it
goes unnoticed—were not enough, Middleton moves away from the purely visual
human-based perceptions, to the aural and aromatic sensations of the now
horrific landscape overseen by the animals who, with the destruction of human
beings, continue to inhabit it alone:
The sounds are people running in plimsolls, knock of the red leather
ball on the willow cricket bat. A smell of linseed oil in the thatched
pavilion. But the pilot’s head is wrapped in leather: the pilots are
going to knock the Germans for six, if they can find them, behind
the pavilion, between the pavilion and the woods, where you could
hear the cock pheasant scream before any thunderstorm, or, in the
evening twilight, quietly see rabbits feeding, their ears laid back
along
their little skulls.
I think no series of
passages can better depict what Middleton, himself, has characterized of his
work as being “the animular miniaturism of short prose.” He continues, apropos
the work described above, “In the pregnancy of these antigrams, a naïve
attention of curiosities of nature, as to outlandish freaks of behavior…has
been interiorized and subtilized into crystalline intelligence fathoming its
language at outer limits of the imaginable.”
Accordingly, I’ll
gladly go along with Middleton’s definitions of his own writing. Call these
works “antigrams” if you want, a stunningly original genre that I hope others
might emulate.
Yet, I can’t help
feeling that part of the author’s insistence on our refraining from describing
these works as “short short narratives” or “prose poems” has to do with
Middleton’s somewhat old fashioned notions of the borders between prose and
poetry. I’d be willing to describe all of Middleton’s writings, just like those
of Gertrude Stein, as being variations of poetic expression. For it is, as
Kleinzahler perhaps unintentionally argues, Middleton’s imaginatively lyrical
approach to experience (what Kleinzahler calls the author’s “primal and
unpredictable sources of lyrical expression”) that most characterizes his art,
whether it be these short “prose”-oriented works or his more straight-forward
“poems.” several volumes of which Middleton has published described as such.
One cannot read
the works of Serpentine, for example,
without recognizing just how completely immersed in the linguistic as opposed
to the narrative his writing is. The opening paragraph from “This Is Lavender,”
for example, reads:
This
is lavender and how it grows large blue caterpillars run parallel
up
their slopes and down in convex furors never stop following con-
tours
a whole field of ripples flows in large blue caterpillars lavender
caterpillars large and blue running and flowing up and down and
whole
blue ajoining fields are solid blue until you move and then the
whole
sold blue lavender field swishes open like a fan.
Another passage, this from his fractured fairy-tale, “From
Earth Myriad Robed,” reads:
Rope
sole of a razouteur. Dust beaten out of it. A puff of dust beaten
out of
a rope sole in a small French hotel, old oak beams overhead. In
the
puff of dust, vestiges of a village dancing floor. A dancing floor in
the
dust in a land soaked in blood. The features of Elif: mop of tight
black
curls, dolphin eyebrows, immense dark eyes, small straight
nose,
her breath from lips parting. Elif in her satin dress, pale golden
satin
with a blue sash. And the pounding of the music, in the village
dust,
the puff of dust gone, Elif gone, into the smoke.
A moment later the female figure speaks in a language that
might put the Russian Trans-rationalists to shame (after all, Middleton is also
a brilliant translator):
—Tais
da efendim (so she said, standing near)
bu
ghejeh
ti
thelis ti theleis efendim
surieyebilir musunuz yakoondala
—oosa
ana tanta asnula kyriye
ishmek ishki inghiliz tek ort poro
tek ort poro yabanchuh…ti theleis?
[This goes on for another half page and into the next.]
I’ll grant, there may be more Turkish and even other
European root-words in here than I can fathom. But it is clear, nonetheless, as
I previously argued for the so-called fiction writer, Ronald Firbank (see My Year 2012), that any meanings we
glean from these passages arise not from rational recognition of the signs, but
from an emotional and perhaps irrational sensations of its semantics.
Perhaps there is
no other work that better describes Middleton’s poetic aspirations in all this
new collection than the “prose” piece he titles “A Postcript of the Great Poem
of Time.” In this work he speaks of a poem just as he does of the “antigram,”
as a kind of spore that combines with other spores to become globules, which
then collide with others of their kind to briefly articulate a kind of “rotary
syntax” (like sestinas, or anagrams, or even the “speech of the dead”). The
poet’s “spores” bounce (creating rhythm), smell (like “coffee…pinewoods, the
iodine sea-coast, cordite, and many smells that exist, like ghosts, only in the
memory”), and voice themselves. But their most notable quality, like nearly all
of this poet’s works, is their “trailing off,” their transformation into
“snippets”—something close to what I described earlier as the sensation of the
work dissipating into space:
Into
each snippet, however, are built the outlines, now marked, now
fading, now gone again, of a waiting room. Over the heads of the
multitude inside, stiff in sedimentations or moving about as the
travellers strike their antiquated attitudes, the roof lifts
majestically
and
on every side the walls expand, roof and walls perform an
immense and constant inhalation, constantly (in the illusion of
this
idiom, rotary or anagrammic) the space expands, the furniture
dwindles, and it is less and less like that any transport will ever
arrive, for the waiting room is coming to encompass, inescapably,
whatever journey might have imagined itself into these multitudi-
nous
heads.
Whether you want
to describe such a work as a antigram or simply as a very effective poem, I
don’t care, but I will certainly join the writer in that “waiting room” in
order to encounter his work, as he puts it, “at random,” as I get ready to
“pass it by reading again.”
Los Angeles,
February 15, 2015
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions
(February 2015)
