Albert Mobilio | Games & Stunts / 2017

fun and games

by Douglas Messerli

 

Albert Mobilio Games & Stunts (New York: Black Square Editions, 2017

 

The characters of Albert Mobilio’s new work of fiction, Games & Stunts—Bean, Frank, Sandy, Jess, Doone and Jack—do little else in his work than play games  and speak of “stunts.” Yet the absurd games they play reveal a great deal about their personalities, and the way they behave with and to one another reveals much. Clearly, some of them might like deeper relationships, but basically everything in this fiction is a metaphor acted out in the ridiculous bedroom, bath, and parlor games.

      In a variation of “Bull-in-the-Ring,” the charging bull-man touches a pair of hands, saying “Here I buy.” Reaching a second pair of hands, he shouts “Here I bake.” A third pair is greeted with “Here I make my wedding cake.” But upon reaching the fourth pair of hands, he lunges forward, “Here I break through.” The author describes this as a “blood-sport,” with winners emerging red-mouthed and heaving.”

      In another game, titled “Elimination,” two “equal” groups take to the field, each forming a circle or a square. There are, however, two members, one from each side, outside this group with flyswatters. If they swat one of the other team members, he or she must step aside. The remaining members work together and, often, divide from their group, making the attacks easier. This process continues until everyone has had a chance with the swatter.

      “Pat and Rub” is an old stunt in which the player (in this case Jack) “to pat the top of his head with one hand and simultaneously rub his chest or abdomen with the other.” Complexity might be introduced by reversing hands.

     In “Matching Halves” a group of 20 strangers gather in a school auditorium or a parking lot. Each is given a picture (in this case photographs of anatomical body parts) torn in half, and is ordered the find the person with the other half. Hopefully the person behind “the other half” might be interesting as a temporary date for the night.

 

    Some games are far more dangerous, involving matches, razors, or knives. Others involve a number of balls thrown at the opposing victims. Some, like “I Doubt It,” “Do You Like Your Neighbors” and “Sesquipedalia” involve verbal conundrums. Still others, like “Broom Lever” and “Spoon Photography” involve special skills, real or imagined.

     The rules of the games and stunts represent much of fun of this fiction, but gradually we begin to know the players themselves. The self-assured Frank, their described “leader,” believes in his own powers, including an ability to read minds. Bean fantasizes about having sex with Jess—or anyone for that matter—always spouting words like an adolescent like tit and wank. Sandy, particularly, in her strange use of language, is a kind of born comic (to a comment by Jack—“…up yours. You wouldn’t notice,” Sandy replies, for example, “That hurts just hearing it go in.”).

     These figures seem to have little life together other than playing their games, which reveal not only their skills or lack of talent, but their dreams and desires, as in the game “Where Am I?” which hints at where they might like to travel.

     If by work’s end, these figures still remain simply stereotypes, the simple fact that, again and again, they have dared to take a chance with each other, putting themselves—as Mobilio quotes from Roger Callois’ Man, Play and Games—into a sense of uncertainty and doubt, opening themselves up to one another in a way that represents their vulnerabilities, tells us a great deal. The author, in a grand metaphor, suggests that all of our relationships might actually be thought of as a kind of subtle series of game playing, particularly in our sometimes gentle and at other times hostile gestures, queries, and prodding of one another.

     By giving them a name and wittily ascribing written instructions, Mobilio simply makes apparent what, in our personal relationships with friends and strangers, we often attempt to obscure and dismiss.

     I’d wish to see a drama of some of these some 46 games and stunts, which might make for a wonderful theatrical event. After all, the first part of Edward Albee’s great play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was titled, if you recall, “Fun and Games.”

 

Los Angeles, September 14, 2017      

 

João Almino | The Last Twist of the Knife / 2021

diary of an unintentional suicide

by Douglas Messerli

 

João Almino The Last Twist of the Knife, translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Lowe (Dallas/Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press, 2021)

 

In his 2017 fiction, now translated by Elizabeth Lowe into English as The Last Twist of the Knife, Brazilian writer João Almino established a series of difficult hurdles for himself, almost as if purposely creating near-impossible Oulipo-like challenges. The form of his work is a journal kept by a 70-some year-old narrator whose memory is slowly slipping away and who suddenly, for no  evident reason other than the couple has grown bored of one another, decides to leave his wife Clarice and—despite the long-ago warnings of writers such as Thomas Wolfe—to attempt to “go home” again, in this case the Brazilian backlands of the northwestern plateau where he grew up, where he purchases his old family homestead near the isolated town of Fortaleza.

 

        Our “hero,” who mistakenly still perceives himself as a kind of agèd Don Juan, imagines that he still might fit back into a community in which he and his family were always perceived as outsiders. He makes the purchase through his childhood girlfriend Patrícia, the daughter of the formerly wealthy landowner of the region who is also, somewhat inexplicably, our narrator’s “godfather,” who when the narrator’s own father was killed took him into his home with Patrícia and her brother Miguel to raise him. How, after all these years of absence, he might imagine the two could reignite his one-sided childhood passion, is never explained. Even on the airplane on his way back to his childhood world, our “hero” flirts with the female passenger who is seated next to him and religiously takes her cellphone number as if she might be another female conquest. We realize almost immediately that our narrator has lost all sense of himself in time and space.

       In many respects it is appropriate that the narrator is returning home, for, as Almino reveals, he himself is regressing to the mental capabilities of a child. Although he recalls some incidents in full, most of his narrative is abstractly presented without details, the story consisting primarily of names and vague events. Moreover, we are forced to read his fragmented journal entries in which he often forgets what he has previously written and which are highly contradictory with a strong sense of skepticism and actual distrust. He is the very definition of an unreliable narrator.

      As we slowly build up these entries scattered through a brief period we begin also to perceive truths which he has not yet unraveled, accordingly taking even some of the energy away from what also becomes a kind of slow detective tale, as the narrator attempts to piece back together the fragments he remembers from the past to make sense of his current behavior.

      Although, he was close friends with Miguel as a child—despite their social disparity in a society in which wealth and race determine nearly everything—he now finds the grown businessman, who continues to run his father’s estate, more interested in his married sister Zuleide than in him. The woman he imagined he might resume his childhood love communicates with our “hero” throughout the narrative only by letter, will later not even return his phone calls, and never actually comes into contact with him until a final abbreviated telephone message.

      The “hero’s” own son, Teodoro runs a hotel in Fortaleza; but the son, who is gay and in the narrative about to celebrate a civil marriage ceremony with his lover, seems distant from his obviously womanizing father, and our narrator’s two other sons, living in São Paulo, seem even more estranged, rarely communicating with either with their father or Teodoro.

      The central figure’s plans to farm the old estate which he has purchased with his last remaining funds are vague to say to the least, and he leaves the care of the house and land mostly his closest childhood friend, a black man Arnaldo.

       The narrative, accordingly, is filled with repetitions, gaps of information, clues that are rather obvious to us but seemingly incomprehensible to the narrator, and very little of the rich detail that so enlivens the great South American fictions of the 1960s and 70s. A typical passage reads like this one from May 22:

 

            Arnaldo lives on a little ranch very close to the one I bought; I can’t

            remember if I already mentioned this. It’s been years since I last

            saw him, but now we frequently communicate on WhatsApp. I still

            think of him as my childhood friend, a better companion than

            Miguel, Clarice’s brother, because he used to go everywhere with

            me, and I was always ready to tag along when he his farm chores

            or when he went hunting for tiús and preás. 

 

Yet when he finally arrives at his newly purchased ranch we hardly get another glimpse of Arnaldo, despite the fact that our narrator depends on him to farm his land.

       In short, on the surface the narrative actually says little since the narrator cannot make sense of his own experiences; yet given the clues he strews throughout his confused memories we learn a very great deal; and we ourselves are accordingly required to fill in the details with a far richer narrative that the fictional author himself might be able to provide.

      And slowly we do perceive even before the narrator does that his beloved “godfather” is also his father, having killed his “daddy” when the man demanded more money to keep quiet about the godfather’s relationship with his wife, the narrator’s seemingly saintly mother.

      Almost the moment our foolish narrator blunders back into his childhood territory, he attempts to sue both his “beloved” childhood friends, Miguel and Patrícia, demanding they provide blood samples so that through DNA testing he can prove whether or not he was also the godfather’s son, and therefore an heir to the estate.

      Despite the fact that our narrator has made his living as a lawyer, he quickly loses all of his legal pleas. This is, after all, a region where the local wealthy still maintain power over both social and civil matters. And obviously his legal challenges make any further communication with either of the people whom he thought he loved impossible. But even then our narrator won’t give up, imagining that someday he might be able to communicate fully once more with the beautiful Patrícia, who by this time must be a rather elderly dame.

       Even more disastrously, the narrator’s wife, Clarice, discovering that she has breast cancer, grows ill, is hospitalized, and dies, the narrator returning to Brasília to nurse her and recall the true adventures of his life were with her, not back in Fortaleza.

      By fiction’s end he resells his property to Miguel, who himself has just lost his family business, suggesting that the past which the narrator imagined at the beginning has now entirely collapsed.

      When our not so very bright storyteller finally realizes, as he puts it, “I must admit, it [the past] does not substitute for the present, the inherent difficulties of the unknown or the uncertain promises of the future,” the poor hero has no present and very little future left. 

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2021

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Fall 2021).

Gilbert Sorrentino | The Moon in Its Flight / 2004

runaway moon, or the duchess of lust

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gilbert Sorrentino The Moon in Its Flight (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004)

 

As a long fiction and short story writer, an essayist, poet, and teacher, Gilbert Sorrentino has several personas; and in his short stories he uses many voices, but there are two opposing voices I’d like briefly to explore.

     In about half the works of The Moon in Its Flight, Sorrentino, creates short linguistically focused tales in which characters are basically, as Martin Riker, writing in The Review of Contemporary Fiction has described them, “wooden puppets whose possibilities of movement and/or choice are confined within their small worlds to the predictable words and gestures available to their narrators.” Indeed, in these works—“The Dignity of Labor,” “The Sea, Caught in Roses,” “A Beehive Arranged on Humane Principles,” “Pastilles,” “Sample Writing Sample,” “Lost in the Stars” and others—the emphasis in not on character but rather on language itself organized around definitions, descriptions, lists, and other various structures. “Pastilles,” for example—a satire, in part, on New York School poetry guru Ted Berrigan—is structured around several recurring figures and images: Napolean and his battles, including his defeat by Lord Nelson; optical illusions; and lemons, to name three. “The Dignity of Labor” recounts four incidents between management and employees that reveal the necessary desperation of the latter:

 

“You will discover that the stationery on the shelves is nothing, really, other than good American paper and nothing but; nothing to be in awe of, letterheads or no. And you would do well to ignore the rumors suggesting otherwise. Rumors of all sorts are born and circulate in a large and virtually omnipotent corporation such as this one. They emanate, for the most part, from the “creative” divisions of the firm, the Professional Trash-Fiction Division, the Memoir Division, the Hip-Youth Division, the Sure-Fire Division, the Dim-Bulb Division, the Texas School-Adoption-of-Everything Division, the Devout-Christian Rapture-Mania Division, the Unborn-Child-Series Division, as well as those divisions that support what the company likes to think of as its old soldiers—those editors, publicists, accountants, and lunch-eaters who have made their lives into one long testament to their belief that they have done their best to make real for all humankind the kind of book that is both an exciting read and a contribution to the general culture of regular Americans….”

 

In these pieces, which are so sharply satirical that there is no attempt at mimesis, the author empties his tales of any remnant of humanity, going straight for the jugular vein, or centering his language on Oulipean-like devices that call attention to form over matter. There is no question that these works are tours de force of writing, but ultimately they entertain more than they evoke any substantial emotional response outside of laughter, even though we might recognize ourselves at the periphery or even at the center of the stories themselves.

     I prefer, however, what I’d describe as the “other” Sorrentino, a writer who, despite his often caustic demeanor and hard-boiled attitudes toward life in general, at heart, is a poet who detests while being attracted to sentiment, a kind of wise fool who desires to believe what he himself has determined is not worthy of belief. It is almost as if Sorrentino has never recovered from the recognition that many of his early childhood ideals were revealed to be false, an apparently devastating realization that he summarizes in a poem, “Razzmatazz,” the first the stanza of which reads:

 

“Young and willing to learn (but what?) he was the boy

With the sweaty face the boy of the Daily News

The boy of bananas peanut butter and lemon-lime

Who read Ching Chow waiting for the punch line

Who watched the sun more often than not a bursting rose

Swathe the odd haze and clumps of the far-off shore.”

 

The poem ends, in part, where it began, but the tone has moved from one of possibility to cynicism:

 

“Young and willing to learn (but what?) he was the boy

Who found that the fabled dreams were fabled

In that their meaning was their own blurred being

Who suddenly found his alien body to be the material

From which could be made a gent or even life. Life?

Young and willing to learn oh certainly. But what?”

 

In the long, final story of The Moon in Its Flight, “Things That Have Stopped Moving,” Sorrentino covers similar ground in a beautiful description of the narrator’s Sicilian father—clearly with autobiographical overtones—who, dressed in his white Borsalino suit and snap-brim fedora, bets his fellow ship-cleaning workers that he can walk through a Norwegian freighter—in those days Norwegian ships were known for their filthy conditions—“without getting a spot or smudge or smear of oil or dirt or rust on his clothes or hat.” To his then-young son’s amazement, he puts down a wad of cash and proceeds to walk through the Trondheim without a spot. In the context of a tale in which the narrator presents himself as a self-loathing slave to his lust for his friend Ben’s wife, Clara—so well-known for her sexual escapades with men that the narrator himself describes her as “a duchess of lust”—this dream-like image stands in opposition to what his father might have desired for him but which he, in his own generation, cannot obtain—a kind of sureness of self and grace in living. Cast out of Eden, perfection for the son has no appeal; it is the squalid, “filthy” little lives of his friends and him that drive him forward in what he himself describes as a “dementia.”

       In “In Loveland” the narrator tells the story of his collapsing relationship with his wife, a perfectly petite doll-like figure of a woman, who ultimately has an affair with the husband’s empty-minded former-employer and friend, Charlie, who finishes off their marriage, with the narrator’s wife’s encouragement, by imitating his friend in costume and manner—in short, by becoming and, symbolically, “replacing” him. In the middle of this typical story of failed love, however, Sorrentino posits a stranger, Hawthorne-like tale concerning an accident that occurred to his wife just before their marriage. Falling down a flight of subways steps—accidentally or on purpose—his fiancée is temporarily scarred with a huge scab over one side of face. The appearance of this scab somehow makes her appear almost as a stranger and, accordingly, increases the narrator’s lust for her. Indeed, from the marriage until the healing and disappearance of the scab, he is sexually aroused by her “new” face, so perfect on one side and so flawed on the other. As the “scar” disappears so does his fervor dissipate. Like the narrator of “Things That Have Stopped Moving,” this narrator is more attracted by the flaws of the woman than by the perfection his wife will later seem to represent to other men.

     In some ways Sorrentino is our most “American” writer, cataloguing as he does the psychoses of the child-adults of our society. Like Scott Fitzgerald, Sorrentino seems effortlessly to present a world where men and women merrily delude themselves with art, literature, alcohol, and drugs that they are living “happy” and meaningful lives, while in truth their dreary lives are almost completely empty. The author’s most Fitzgeraldian stories in this volume, “Pyschopathology of Everyday Life” and “Land of Cotton,” clearly present the phenomenon.

     The self-deluded characters of the latter story, Joe Doyle—who transforms his family name for Lionni or Leone to Lee, ultimately claiming he is a descendent of Robert E. Lee—his wife Hope and mistress Helen, whom he ultimately jilts as she lays dying of cancer, are obviously all self-deluded beings seeking a reality to match.

     The first story is representative, once again, of Sorrentino’s fascination with a seemingly Edenic world suddenly revealed as disastrously fallen. The two characters in this fable, Nick and Campbell, represent two aspects of American culture, the ordinary working man represented by Nick and the moneyed WASP, Campbell, living in what appears as an enchanted world. The tale reveals the growing friendship between the two office workers as Nick guides his friend through the lunch-time and after-work dining and drinking establishments of the city, of which Campbell seems to have no prior knowledge and is now fascinated to encounter each day before returning to his Connecticut home or his New York rendevouses at the Plaza, the Pierre, the Blue Angel, or Carnegie Recital Hall.

     The friendship flourishes until one day Campbell invites his friend to visit them in Connecticut, shortly thereafter presenting him with a stack of photographs of himself and his wife Faith, one of her which is nearly pornographic. Nick perceives the photo as a sort of tease, a direct assault upon his sexual desires, and is disgusted by what he senses is the husband’s attempt to use his wife as a lure to bring him to their home. Doubting, however, what he has imagined, he soon forgets it until another photograph, even more pornographic than the first is delivered to him, whereupon he recognizes that he is being encouraged to think of Campbell’s wife as a sexual companion. He is quite obviously aroused by the possibility, but continues to delay his visit until it is finally clear he will not make good on his promise. Campbell is depressed and reveals that, after a fight with his wife, he has met a young man who “sucked him off.” Nick’s decision to take a job in another city drives his friend into further despair which reaches its peak on the day of Nick’s departure, when he reveals his love for Nick and attempts to plant a kiss upon his lips.

     Sorrentino presents a world, in short, where love is not only impermeable and fleeting but is impossible, a world where passion is unfulfilled and even a kiss is potentially a dangerous event. Perhaps none of Sorrentino’s short tales reveal these facts more thoroughly than my favorite story of the book, “The Moon in Its Flight.” Unlike so many of the later works, trapped in a post-Edenic reality, Sorrentino allows this story of a budding love affair between a nineteen-year-old young man and a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl, Rebecca, to develop in a “summer romance,” when “The country bowled and spoke of Truman’s grit and spunk,” and the whole nation “softly slid off the edge of civilization.” As in Aberration of Starlight, the author here allows youthful clichés into his work, this time, not just for the purpose of artful satire, but as a support for the lovingly naiveté they reveal:

 

“The first time he touched her breast he cried in his shame and delight. Can this really have taken place in America? The trees rustled for him, as the rain did rain. One day, in New York, he bought her a silver ring, tiny perfect hearts in bas-relief running around it so that the point of one heart nestled in the cleft of another. Innocent symbol that tortured his blood.”

 

And later:

 

“Stars, my friend, great flashing stars fell on Alabama.

 

Reality, nonetheless, will not allow these lovers to exist; they have no place to which they might escape in order to fulfill their desires. In one of the most beautiful narrational intrusions he has uttered, Sorrentino cries out passionately (despite being equally mocking):

 

All you modern lovers, freed by Mick Jagger and the orgasm, give them, for Christ’s sake, for an hour, the use of your really terrific little apartment. They won’t smoke your marijuana nor disturb your Indiana graphics. They won’t borrow your Fanon or Cleaver or Barthelme or Vonnegut. They’ll make the bed before they leave. They whisper good night and dance in the dark.”

 

No apartment is available, and the couple, a mismatch when it comes to their families, drifts apart, only to meet again years later when they are both married to others. Only now can they finally culminate their love in sex, but despite the tears of joy and shame, they will never encounter one another again.

    I don’t think Sorrentino is arguing through these somewhat exasperatingly dreary tales that love is impossible. It is merely the false ideas and notions that surround the vision of oneself and the other that make it so difficult. It is clear that Sorrentino heartily longs for that “spotless” innocence of the past, but that he recognizes, just as surely, that that desire for “innocence” is the cause of the current emptiness and squalidness of his subjects’ lives. It is almost with a cry of despair that Sorrentino asks, “Who will remember // the past is past?” The furious frown he casts upon his characters can be seen as a stern warning to all that is doesn’t help a damn to invoke a childhood vision of innocence: life is not perfect, there is no “dream” to be found, no “rainbow” at its end, no coherent “America” even to be had. It is no wonder his narrators often struggle in their attempts to tell their stories and admit that something is missing in their revelations of the awful truths they find difficult to accept.

 

Los Angeles, May 25, 2006

Reprinted from Golden Handcuffs Review, No. 8 (Winter-Spring 2007).

 

Gilbert Sorrentino | Aberration of Starlight / 1980

the novel against itself

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gilbert Sorrentino Aberration of Starlight (New York: Random House, 1980)

 

In relation to his earlier fictions—Imaginative Qualities, Splendide-Hôtel, and Mulligan Stew—Gilbert Sorrentino’s Aberration of Starlight is perplexing, not in terms of linguistic style or content, but in its unabashed use of modernist structures and other narrative techniques. His three previous works—representing such genres as the mock-essay, the fantasy, and the anatomy—were explicit declarations against the novel and its domination of prose literature in the twentieth century. Yet Aberration of Starlight not only announces itself as a novel on its dust-jacket (although, one must admit, that the generic differences of which I am speaking have little to do with what the publisher chooses to call a work), but within its pages it generally behaves as one. Except for one section in each of its four perfectly balanced “acts,” this is a story which presents, primarily in objective narration, the viewpoints of four different characters, mimetically grounded in a specific time and place, whose interactions precipitate thematic dichotomies—“love and separation,” “youth and age,” “innocence and knowledge”—similar to those of the majority of works of twentieth-century fiction. The book, in fact, is imbued with a sense of ironic nostalgia that Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren—those doyens of modern narrative theory—might applaud.

     It is not that this fiction is “modern” as opposed to “postmodern,” or even “retrogressive” as opposed to “advanced,” that troubles one; it is just these kinds of categorizations and their mindless devotees which Sorrentino so brilliantly satirizes in Mulligan Stew. Rather, the problem is that in the context of the modern novel, Aberration of Starlight seemingly is not a very original work. In such a genre, Sorrentino’s literary fortes—his stunning leaps of logic, lists, litanies, and mimicries—for the most part are missing, and by the reader are missed. This is not to say that the book is without its obvious pleasures. The white-starched, sunlit world which Marie Recco, her son, father, and would-be suitor inhabit, superficially is as loving and longing a portrait of America as are Edward Hopper’s canvases. Like Hopper, Sorrentino captures the spirit of a people so splendidly naïve that, poised on the edge of World War II, they fail to comprehend their own potential to isolate and hate. The very similarities between Sorrentino and Hopper, however, point to what appears to be the novel’s failure. The reader has been here before, and, on the surface at least, Sorrentino has nothing new to say of it. Describing its characters as boorish and banal, Paul West correctly observes that the novel presents literary figures who,

 

“Instead of discovering or inventing compensations that would free them as characters, from the anonymous pattern of libido and denial, …back off into the twaddle that surrounds them. Their heads, and what little is in them, dominate the narrative, and keep on coming through direct, without much of the narrational intervention that could render shades of feeling they feel but can’t express. Indeed, the narrator, who shows up rarely, seems even more buried in the stuff of their lives than they are. (The Washington Post Book World, Sunday, August 31, 1980).”

 

With regard to objective narration and its inherently closed structures, it is as if in Aberration of Starlight Sorrentino has attempted to outdo the moderns. It is not that one necessarily demands a more “contemporary” fiction; it is simply that one is less satisfied by an anachronistic one.

     If such comments sound contentious, it is the result of Sorrentino having set up certain expectations in his previous fictions, which appear thwarted in this new book. But that very fact encourages one to speculate that this “novel” is not all it seems. There is, after all, that one section in each of the four portraits that does not conform to the prevailing structure of the book, that, in fact, in the prose romance as practiced by the majority of moderns, is clearly out of place. In each of these passages, the narrator intrudes upon his fiction, not only asking direct questions about his characters, but answering them with authorial knowledge not implied in the book’s other parts. For example, the plot of Sorrentino’s fiction gives the reader little indication whether Tom Thebus, the salesman to whom Marie is attracted, is a rakish Romeo “out to get a lay”—as Marie’s father describes him—or whether his interest in Marie is sincere. In most objectively narrative novels such information is conveyed through denouement or is left purposely ambiguous for the reader to piece together from what he or she has gleaned of the characters through their words and acts. But in Aberration of Starlight such impersonal methods are circumvented. “Was Tom indeed a maker of cuckolds?” the narrator asks.

 

“If rumor is to be given credence, the answer is “yes.” Three men putatively so served were: Lewis D. Fielding, a junkman of Ossining, N.Y., through his wife, Barbara; Alfred Bennett Martinez, a plumber of Ozone Park, N.Y., through his wife, Danielle; William V. Bell, a shop teacher of Paterson, N.J., through his wife, Joanne.”

 

Similarly, the reader is told outright that Marie is sexually afraid of men (p. 67), that her father “had energetically conspired in his own defeat” (p. 175), and numerous other pieces of trivial and useful information that radically work against the objective point of view which dominates the rest of the book.

     More important, in these four sections, Sorrentino occasionally permits himself the lists and litanies he scrupulously avoids elsewhere in the text. Concerning Marie, for example, the narrator asks:

 

“The names of some of her favorite poets?

 

Ella Wheeler Wilcox; Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff; Captain Cyril Morton Thorne; Burelson St. Charles MacVoute; Dinah Maria Mulock Craik; Edgar A. Guest; Josiah Gilbert Holland, Lorna Blakey Flambeaux; H. Antoine D’Arcy; Emma Simpere Furze; Alaric Alexander Watts; Mary Artemisia Lathbury; Blanche Bane Kuder; Jean Ingelow; Carruthers Sofa-Jeudi; Maltbie Davenport Babcock; Nixon Waterman.”

 

This is the stuff of Mulligan Stew and other earlier fictions. Not only are some of the names the same (an entire sheaf of poems by Lorna Flambeaux appears in Mulligan Stew), but the structure of such a listing is of the same kind of pattern that controls Mulligan Stew and Imaginative Qualities.

     One understandably is surprised in encountering such structures in the midst of a novel; and, accordingly, one is brought to question whether such passages are simply lapses in what otherwise is a carefully composed novel, or whether they are purposeful intrusions, and, if so, to what effect? I do not pretend to have answers to such questions of authorial intent; but it may be helpful to explore some of the implications of such structures, which, in turn, may suggest why Sorrentino uses them.

     The following is a typical listing from Mulligan Stew:

 

“What cannot Gold do?

 

A number of things, the more prominent among which are: make the pivot, shoot the rapids, differential calculus, speak Spanish, hit in the clutch, carry a tune, get a job, say not, walk a crooked mile, swim, hold his liquor, support his children, write a poem, play tennis, pay his bills, trim his beard, shine his shoes, take a shower, use capital letters, keep his sex life private, be proud, speak to an angel, take a little walk, boil lobsters, open clams, like women, cut it out, grow up, move to Yonkers, cease and desist, jump over the candlestick, act his age, fly a kite, go two rounds, catch a fish, make a salad, write a check, wash the windows, eat crow, crack corn, fly the coop, take a powder, go anywhere alone, bunt, write a play, stop the shit, cut the comedy, know Brooklyn, mind his business, sharpen his ax, make an apple pie, honor his father and mother, be a Jew, shoot crap, make a list, see himself as others see him, play pool, be joyful and triumphant, take off his hat, wash a glass, deck the halls, mix a Sazerac, be a clown, sing in the rain, jump with Symphony side, make ‘em  laugh, stand a ghost of a chance, button up his overcoat, love a mystery, get started, and shudder….”

 

The immediate purpose and effects of such a list are quite obvious. In this case, the narrator, punning on a cliché, transforms the thing, gold, into a person incapable of actions, triggering a series of new clichés, common expressions, song titles and idioms signifying acts. A listing such as this—this one is from a character’s scrapbook—has little to do with plot, character, place, or theme as readers of twentieth-century fiction have come to think of them. Attempts to relate these actions to characterization, to understand these things of which the character Gold is incapable, would miss the point: Gold has no substance as a character, he/it is merely a thing of language, a pun. There is an “idea” behind this combination of words: that of inaction, which Sorrentino expresses quite concretely; but one recognizes that this “idea” is far less important than the structure it takes. One might suspect, knowing Sorrentino’s writing, that there is a kind of Oulipean logic to this list. But, although one might contrive to find a thematic link in the passage, the very order of these verbal constructions work against any such attempt. For these do not represent a particular kind or even context of acts. “Sing in the rain” may relate to “deck the halls,” “be joyful and triumphant,” “be a clown,” “button up his overcoat,” and even “carry a tune,” but such musical references have little in common with “mind his business,” “sharpen his ax,” or “make an apple pie.” It quickly becomes clear that the focus here is on verbs and little else, on their everyday and idiomatic usages (“shine his shoes” and “stand a ghost of a chance”), on their rhythms and other patterns of sound (“wash the windows, eat crow, crack corn, fly the coop…”) and their syntax. And while there is a beginning and ending to this list of verbals (it opens with the clause, “A number of things,” and closes with the conjunction), one understands it as something akin to a catalogue, as something that, while complete in itself, retains the potential for continuance. The reader, therefore, does not experience the passages as something whole, as organic, even as developmental, but recognizes it as a linguistic sequence capable of being repeated indefinitely, as a pattern of language which—although operating within certain organizing principles—inflects no subordinations upon its constituent parts.

     The controlling mechanism of such a passage is not repetition, therefore, but progression. And one need only compare Sorrentino’s list with a passage from the work of another contemporary, William Gass, to understand the significance of this. In In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, Gass writes,

 

“The sides of the buildings, the roofs, the limbs of the trees are gray. Streets, sidewalks, faces, feelings—they are gray. Speech is gray, and the grass where it shows. Every flank and front, each top is gray. Everything is gray: hairs, eyes, window glass, the hawkers’ bills and touters’ posters, lips, teeth, poles and metal signs—they’re gray, quite gray. Horses, sheep, and cows, cats killed in the road, squirrels in the same way, sparrows, doves, and pigeons, all are gray, everything is gray….”

 

Superficially, Gass’s writing here seems to have much in common with Sorrentino’s; it is a list of things that share a syntactical relationship, that of noun to adjective, with the color gray. But a closer look reveals that Gass’s list functions in a very different structural context. Although they may seem potentially infinite in number, Gass’s nouns are made finite because they are secondary to repetition, are subordinate to the word “gray.” These nouns all point to the word “winter” (mentioned one sentence earlier in the passage) and refer the reader back and forward in each sentence to their adjective. The listing, accordingly, reveals itself as developmental, organic, and whole. Because the list is self-referential within Gass’s work, it is finite and complete. One experiences it less as a catalogue than as an inventory or compendious description. In other words, while progressive structures such as Sorrentino’s may contain repetition, structures of repetition such as Gass’s are not necessarily progressive.

     The structure of Gass’s listing, in its organicism and self-referentiality, is perfectly at home in the novel. In its potential of continuance, the structure of Sorrentino’s catalogue points away from its type; it is a sequence of a kind of construction; and, in that fact, it directs the reader’s attention from the temporal context of narrative towards space, towards the world of things he himself inhabits. Mimesis, the heart of modern prose, is undermined as the imitation is transformed into a thing itself: a catalogue of actions, a syntactical grouping of language.

     When such catalogues appear in profusion in a fiction, as they do in Mulligan Stew, the effect is devastating. Mimesis and its attendant hand-maidens, character and place, seldom survive. And that is just what Anthony Lamont, the character-novelist central to Mulligan Stew, encounters. Like many moderns, Lamont, an avowed “experimentalist,” manipulates style and content, while tying his fiction to organic structures of character and place. Unlike the great moderns, however, Lamont is what Pound calls a “diluter,” a follower of the inventors and the masters of a tradition, who produces “something of lower intensity, a flabbier variant” (“How to Read”). So inane is Lamont’s writing, so constraining his setting (a mountain cabin wherein the narrator, musing over the body of his murdered friend, awaits the police) that his characters rebel and attempt to escape their fictional confines. Unable to “master” his creations, and faced with what he sees as an increasingly valueless and hostile environment outside his fictional one, Lamont declines into paranoia.

      In a 1980 review of Mulligan Stew I suggested that Lamont’s insanity was a negative thing that left the reader with a vision of the world in which language is so denigrated that it brought into question his or her own existence. In a response to that review, Sorrentino wrote me that his intention had been to show that “as Lamont gets crazier he gets better.” My mistake had been to look at the fiction more in terms of content than of structure; I had made presumptions which had less to do with the fiction than with lived experiences. But it is in the structure, not in plot that Sorrentino reveals his concerns. As Lamont moves towards insanity, he gradually embraces the very catalogues, lists, indexes, technical manuals, and other enumerations that—while obsessing both his society and him—are seen as signs of the culture’s decay, and thus separates him from his fiction, from his idealized representation of life. As he embraces these, bit by bit, his fiction is invaded by the progressive structures inherent in his scrapbook. The following appears in the fourth to the last chapter of his novel Lamont’s novel, Crocodile Tears:

 

“In the meantime, our sinisterly slick magicians were extracting gouts of applause by a series of tricks that, so I assumed, were designed to “warm up” the audience, a large moiety of whom, I assure you, were drunkenly blasé, and replete with doubts and cynicalities of varying potency. These tricks were, according to Madame Corriendo, “wand inspired,” and, surely enough, in her long fingers she held a curious wooden rod of maybe a foot and a half long, atip at both ends with pointed caps of a metallic substance, perhaps metal itself! In some shape or other, I mean alloy, if you are with me. At the sight of this innocent-appearing chunk of wood, Ned Beaumont, his eyes watering in loathsome pusillanimousity, and his fingers, how do you say it? “plucking” on the tablecloth, breathed heavily and began to sweat onto the rather tasteful silverware that had been placed— and with inherent correctness, too—before him.”

 

Although this passage may at first seem to be descriptive, it actually has very little in common with conventional descriptive narration. What the narrator describes as a “series of tricks,” functions as a sequence that resists a coherent presentation of reality, that works against mimetic relationships. Although it is at first connected with the character Madame Corriendo, the phrase “wand inspired,” for example, directs one’s attention away from character or even action to a list of things in space: her long fingers, a “curious wooden rod,” and its metallic tips. The tips, in turn, permit the narrator to pun on “alloy” (a mixture of metallic substances and “to debase, to impair”); the object of the second meaning, is accordingly the subject of the next sentence, Ned Beaumont, whose actions, once again, point the reader away from the character and his actions to other objects: to the table, the tablecloth, and the “rather tasteful silverware.” Whereas the Gass passage continually refers the reader back to its subject, the writing here moves ceaselessly forward in what Gertrude Stein describes as the sequence of counting “one and one and one and one” rather than “one, two, three, four” (“Poetry and Grammar”). By the time Lamont reaches his last chapter—significantly titled “Making It Up as We Goes Along”—the progressive structure has taken over entirely. There is little difference between its sequence of dialogue and the list of “what Gold cannot do.” Both point to the world outside the fiction, and, in that sense, both create something “new,” something that follows its own language into being rather than merely using language to express the known or preconceived. And Lamont, in this regard, does become a better writer, an inventor of sorts. Yet he too, obviously, is a thing of words; and Mulligan Stew thus ends not with his writing, but with a three and a half page “will,” one final grand listing of the disposition of things. As in the works of Samuel Beckett, both characters and characters’ characters all are subsumed into the flow of words, are sacrificed to the endeavor of naming the imagined as things of sound and space into reality.

     In light of these concerns in Mulligan Stew it is almost unthinkable that such structures in Aberration of Starlight are unintentional “lapses” or even mere intrusions upon what is otherwise a conventional prose romance. The effects of such interruptive and progressively structured passages are too deleterious to the mimeticism inherent in the 20th-century novel to be disregarded in a fiction that appears to be imitating it. Let us imagine that in The Sound and the Fury—a novel organized as is Sorrentino’s around the viewpoints of four characters—Faulkner suddenly asked of Caddy, as Sorrentino does of Billy, “How did [s]he feel when [her] grandmother died?” and answered, “[s]he was frightened that she was not really dead because of how she looked in the funeral parlor.” Upon climbing the tree in her muddy drawers (the image Faulkner described as central to his novel), Caddy, in fact, is frightened by what she sees: her dead Damuddy laid out on the bed. But the reader is never told that. Faulkner’s reader must come to his or her conclusions based on Caddy’s later actions, her amoral commitment to things of the world. One is forced to evaluate her, in other words, as one would a living being, and the character is made to seem more real by that fact.

     Faulkner represents an extreme of objective narration. An omniscient narrator might simply tell the reader in passing how Caddy or Bill felt. But even so, by first asking the question, Sorrentino draws attention to himself, to the author, or, at the very least, to some imagined narrator of the work; and, in so doing he reiterates the fact that his character is merely a creation, a thing of words. When this is done several times, as it is in Aberration of Starlight, the whole begins to function as its own progressive sequence, as a series of authorial intrusions which, like the list of Gold’s inactions, point the reader away from any reality that the fiction is attempting to imitate, towards the world which reader and author cohabit outside the book. The fact that some of these particular questions and commands also are progressive in structure further helps to undercut the organicism and mimesis of the prose romance.

      Yet one must recall it is the extreme objectivism of Faulkner to which the rest of Sorrentino’s book seems to aspire. Such extremes are too radical merely to be sloughed off by calling Sorrentino, as Guy Davenport has, a “Late Eclectic Modern.” For these are reconcilable systems; as the fiction itself demonstrates, one cannot serve God and mammon both. Made conscious of his or her own world through the progressive structures, faced with knowledge that lies “outside the book,” so to speak, the reader gradually is placed in the role of voyeur in relation to Marie Recco and the other characters in the book. Sorrentino accentuates this feeling by framing several of his scenes as if in a photograph. The fiction begins, indeed, with the photographic image:

 

“There is a photograph of the boy that shows him at age ten. He is looking directly into the camera, holding up a kitten as if for our inspection, his right hand at her neck, his left hand underneath her body, supporting the animal’s weight. The sun is intensely bright, and he squints at us, smiling, his white even teeth too large for his small face.”

 

When, moreover, the author alternates such framing techniques with personal letters, interior monologues, and descriptions of intimate sexual encounters (“He pulled his fly open and yanked his hard-on out of his pants, then grabbed her hand and told her to look at him…”), the result is almost pornographic. Peering down from Gulliverian heights, the reader begins to comprehend how completely such techniques—all perfectly at home in the modern novel—close the fiction’s characters within a claustrophobic structure to which there is no direct access, only resemblance to real life.

     Such an impenetrable world is Lilliputian, a world inhabited by the near-sighted and small-minded. Each of the fiction’s characters, as Paul West notes, is unable break out of his or her behavioral patterns. But that is just Sorrentino’s point. As do his narrative techniques, his characters represent the extreme of the Romantic dichotomy of self and world; and, as such, they have fallen into solipsism. Those outside the self are transformed from individuals into cliché and epithet. A single paragraph must serve as example in a fiction pervaded by racial epithets, euphemisms, and exaggerated similes and metaphors.

 

“Dare I call you, Marie darling? Or should I address you, you swell thing, as Mrs. Recco, prostrating myself before your tiny feet in formality. Like a monkey in a tuxedo on a chain held by an old dago? And of course I beg you to forgive that terrible word knowing you, dear princess and Queen of sweetness were once married to a dago and so got your name. But I don’t hold that against you, not on your life, darling!”

 

Such writing may be funny, but its implications are horrifying. There is little possibility that anyone might escape from such a “prison-house of language.” In so solipsistic a vision, love and communication cannot exist; at book’s end, Marie, her father, son, and would-be lover are as frozen in time and place as the photograph with which the work began.

     It becomes apparent that what was first perceived as a bittersweet presentation of post-World War II America, is, in the end, an indictment of the modern novel and the vision inherent in its structures. By exaggerating those structures and juxtaposing them with the progressive structures of contemporary fiction, Sorrentino clearly demonstrates the dangers of any closure. In short, in Aberration of Starlight Sorrentino uses the novel against itself; the organicism of the modern novel turns in to swallow its own tale. Like its predecessors, this fiction explores, through its own telling, the nature of art, which, ultimately, Sorrentino seems to argue, is all any fiction can hope to accomplish. Imitation and ideas, he makes clear, have little to do with art. Writing in The Washington Post Book World, Sorrentino recently argued,

 

“For some reason, incomprehensible to me, [the] mimetic concept has all but defined the “important” novels of this country. We love our novelists to be seers, to have Important Ideas…”. (February 13, 1980)

 

The structures of Sorrentino’s fiction seldom stand for the world, but pointing outward, define and become one with the world; like the last chapter of Lamont’s Crocodile Tears, Sorrentino’s works make up the world as they go along. In his fiction it is as with starlight, what appears to be traveling at an angle to the direction of the observer—what appears as an aberration—actually travels in a straight line between the observer and its source.

 

Philadelphia and College Park, Maryland, 1980

Portions of this essay reprinted from “The Role of Voice in NonModernist Fiction,” Contemporary Literature, XXV, no. 3 (Fall 1984).