Mark Twain made fun of a common enough fantasy: imagining your own death and what people around you would say about you. That fantasy is kin to another that you often bump into on social media: imagining what historians of the future will say about your time. Unsurprisingly, these future historians will mouth the opinions of the fantasizer. If you hate deficits, you will imagine future historians all in a fluster over deficits. And so on.
But you don’t need a historian to know which way the wind blows. Especially when you have the newspapers.
This is why I think that Chuck Schumer’s interview in the NYT is not only a grim portent of what is to come (spoiler: Trump triumphs, Dems roll over), but a window into what went before.
Imagine the first decade of this century – the century of the American maladjustment. It begins with an election that the Democrats won, and then graciously let the Supreme Court decide against them. Thus, we begin with George Bush, who soon enough shows an incompetence even beyond our imagination by fundamentally letting 19 rednecks from the Middle East hijack planes and ram them into the WTC and Pentagon. Bush was warned, but he was not going to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, Clinton, and do the elementary work of paying attention to warnings issued to him by the CIA. Not our rancher.
And so we were off on both the global war on terror and Bushonomics – in which Bush did follow his predecessor, Clinton, and basically staved off the recession that would have followed the collapse of the tech bubble by a combination of tax cut driven deficits and using the expanded and deregulated credit powers of the financial sector to allow each and every individual household to pile up on its own deficit. And thus, like Vulcans, America fucked up Afghanistan, Iraq and its own domestic economy.
The 00s were a uniquely flatline when it came to the rise of American incomes – the only rise was in the incomes and wealth of the top ten percent.
Now into this abyss of mismanagement and murderous externalities, think back to the resistance. Doesn’t bring anything to mind? Oh surely you remember the Daschles, the Gephardts, the Dem party in full ham mode! In the midst of this was the senator from New York, Chuck Schurmer. Who, as we know from his interview, was just backslapping and getting views from his Republican colleagues as they exercised in the Senate gym. A pastoral scene in the midst of Bushian bliss.
Here’s the Senator himself: “The last time he [Trump] was president, which is the closest experience we have with him — and admittedly, the world has changed some, particularly on the media side, how it works — we kept pushing and pushing and pushing and chipping away. And when he went below 40 percent in the polls, the Republican legislators started working with us. He was at 51. He’s now at 48. We’re gonna keep at it until he goes below 40. Look, I talk to a lot of these Republican legislators. I’ve worked with them. Some of them are Trump devotees. But many of them don’t like him, don’t respect him and worry about what he’s doing to our country. Right now he’s so popular they can’t resist him. I mean, so many of them came to me and said: “I don’t think Hegseth should be defense secretary or R.F.K. should be H.H.S. But Trump wants him. He won.” The Republicans would like to have some freedom from Trump, but they won’t until we bring him down in popularity. That happened with Bush in 2005. It happened with Trump in 2017. When it happens, I am hopeful that our Republican colleagues will resume working with us. And I talk to them. One of the places is in the gym. When you’re on that bike in your shorts, panting away next to a Republican, a lot of the inhibitions come off.”
This is a rather incredible summing up of our current history by a man who played a role in it. And that role is, ostensibly, that of a politician. But the astonishing lack of urgency, or a sense that politics is anything more than a game without serious stakes, played between GOP and Democratic boys in the gym, is what flashes out.
Why is Schumer even in politics?
It makes you wonder. Did something, perhaps, happen between 2001 and 2005? Well, in Schumer’s account, what happened is: his GOP colleagues started working with him, over at the end there. That’s all that counts!
I lived through the Bush years and spent way to much time thinking about the things that count. It drove me a little crazy. And what drove me even crazier than Bush was the Democratic Party’s complete and utter lack of urgency. It was revelatory. The Democratic Party emerged from the Clinton presidency with no discernible ideological project. And the Democratic appartchiks seemed to be happy with that. From Schumer’s account, they were just waitin’ around for their GOP buddies in the gym.
Which is what I thought, way back then. It is as if the firemen in the firehouse decided that their main job was to play cards, and to heck with all those people rushing in reporting fires. Fires come and go! Don’t get your pants in a wad. Now say, what should I do with this full house? Maybe bet fitty cents on it?
At random, I’ll quote this story from October 7, 2002 from the Houston Chronicle.
“Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said the Democratic-led Senate, over the next week or so, will overwhelmingly approve a resolution giving Bush the go-ahead to invade Iraq if necessary to eliminate any effort to develop or use weapons of mass destruction.
"We've got to support this effort," Daschle said during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press. "We've got to do it in an enthusiastic and bipartisan way." Daschle said the vote would be lopsided, with roughly 75 senators or so supporting the resolution.
But lawmakers are nervous about handling the issue correctly, Daschle said. "This is the first pre-emptive, unilateral authorization of the use of force that we've ever passed."
Luckily for all of us, Daschle had only two years left in the Senate gym, when his place was taken by a Republican who walloped him in the Senate election that year. But those two years – they actually went by. Historians of the future will note that two years is 730 days. 730 days of watching the Republicans clobber Democrats whose only belief was in the corny rhetoric they’d been taught by consultants was the cat’s meow, really moving to the voters, those “hard working people” (never ‘not so hard working people’ – those latter, also called your billionaire donors, don’t get a shout out in the speeches).
In the aftermath of the 2004 elections, I wrote something that I feel was touched by the spirit of the future, not that I knew it – writing does have that automatic, channelling side:
“This was more than an election – this was the reversal of the Civil War. Jeff Davis, through one of those ironies of history, won through the party headed by his old enemy, Abraham Lincoln.
So what does it mean that the strongest power in the world, at the moment, is the Confederate States of America?”
My summing up of the CSA was that it meant inevitable badness. And the CSA party then gave birth to the CSA party now, led by Trump. There was little good news as the boys in the Senate gym were sweating out their fundraising dinners. But I did find a little good news. Which, God willing, we will find reproduced in 2028:
“Even I see one 'ray of hope' in the election -- Tom Daschle, a leader of utmost smallness, a stunted mediocrity whose instincts have lead the Democrats from defeat to defeat, was defeated himself.”
Noam Chomsky, in an interview with Alexander Cockburn, said an interesting thing about models:
“When you study natural objects you have to abstract away from irrelevant phenomena that can obscure nature. This is called idealization (which is a bit misleading because it actually carries you closer to reality). If you study the planets, for example, it helps to think of them as points which have mass and move in elliptical trajectories around other points. Of course, the planets are not points-a point has no dimensions-but if you treat them as such, you can predict and understand the solar system more clearly. That is a model. Scientists have to do this all the time when studying complex phenomena-which is why they do experiments instead of taking photographs of whatever is outside their windows.”
So much for observatories.
But… I actually like this idea of this person taking photographs of whatever is outside the window. Who does that? Is it a discipline? Is it art?
Is the picture outside the window an irrelevancy? Does it have a place in political science?
There was, in the sixties, an idea that the novelist – especially a novelist named Norman Mailer – could look out the window and use his sixth sense, his novelistic sense, to tell you what was going on in the culture. You didn’t need a weatherman to tell you where the wind blows – you need a novelist.
Science is immanently routinizable. You don’t need an Einstein to work the computers at CERN. Once you have the formula, it can go into a program and then you “experiment”. The novelist’s equipment, though, is not so routinizable. Mailers spawn Tom Wolfes, and Tom Wolfes intuit on a very reactionary platform, rolling out doorstoppers for the country club crowd.
Yet yet yet – my own intuitions about the political have long been bent by what I want – the form of justice I would like to see established, given the capitalist/folkloric machinery at play. And I have corrected for this by thinking that I am so out of sorts, such an exception, that my view must be a minority view, and I would have to eat neolib pablum the rest of my life.
I think that we are all choking on that pablum now. In the U.S., in Europe, in South America, in India, in East Asia, the rejection of choices pushed by the right has presented itself as one way out, while the center keeps asking: do you want a little more pablum?
But the solution to Oliver Twist’s problem surely can’t be: a little more gruel, sir.
In 1922, Thomas Mann was invited to observe and confirm an
experiment in Fernbewegung, or telekinesis, at the Munich mansion of a well known paranormal impressario,
Dr. Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing, in Munich. Schrenck Notzing, the “Spirit
baron” as Mann, and the newspapers, called him, had the ability to indulge his
quest for the paranormal due to a marriage that made him a wealthy man. He had
accordingly fitted up a “laboratory” of sorts in his home. Mann was just one of
several celebrities – for instance, Gustav Meyrink (author of The Golem) and
Ludwig Klages (an important figure in the science of graphology, and a
graphomaniac in the accepted German scholarly style – his book on the divide
between intellect and soul, runs to 1,400 closely printed pages, which I’ve
save my eyes from toxic myopia and my mind from clutter by never reading) – who
made their way to Schrenk Notzing’s Palace on Max-Joseph-Strasse to witness his
mediums, his repertoire of paranormals, perform their acts – events that were
part experiment, part party spectacle.
The Palace was not very far from Mann’s own residence in
Munich. And Mann, who in his essay on the experiment describes himself as “falling
into the hands of occultists”, was always fascinated by the erotics of the
divide between the here and the beyond – the Diesseits and the Jenseits
Heather Wolfram, in her book The Stepchildren of Science,
about the German interest in the paranormal from the Wilhelmine Empire to the
Nazi era, begins with Mann’s visit as either a dialectical image or a
cautionary tale.
I’d speculate that what piqued Mann’s interest here was that
the medium who was spotlighted for the evening was a young adolescent named
Willy Schneider.
“The aim of this experiment, conducted amidst an eclectic
mix of household items, medical instruments and photographic equipment, was to
observe, record, and analyse the strange psychological and physical phenomena
associated with the experimental subject: an Austrian medium named Willy
Schneider (1903–71). Seated in a semi-circle facing the young man, the
participants held hands, talked and sang, straining their eyes in the dim red
light that enveloped the laboratory in the hope of seeing an ectoplasmic limb
or a telekinetic movement.”
A Tadzio in another Venice completely, where the canals were
filled with ectoplasm and the city hovered above them as a phantom. To complete
the picture, Willy’s contact spirit was named Mina.
In the essay Mann wrote about this experience, he turns to imagery
based on class – in particular, the protoclass of servants. Occultism, in fact,
he labels a “maid’s room metaphysics”, and he notices that few of the spirits
that are conjured up in the rooms where seances are held are plebes. There is
something classical in this. Mann references the famous case of a Mr. Krall in
Ebersfeld, who claimed his horse, Mohammed, could mentally calculate the cube
roots of numbers:
“Is human value a criterium of the truth? In a certain
sense: yes. I overheard a man, whose behavior and costume put him on the border
of the occult region, Herr Krall from Elberfield, he of the calculating horse,
say: “If there are spirits, we have reason to wish ourselves a long life,
because nothing could be more childish, senseless, confused and pitiful as the kind
of existence led by these thing, as we can judge after their supposed
manifestations.” Which is reminiscent of the famous utterance spoken by the
shadow of Achilles on the Cimmerian beach, at the spiritist séance of Odysseus:
“Worthless and senseless the Pelidian calls the existence of the dead, and the
pagan sense likes to always so view the idea of life after death, without at
the same time mistaking this life as a truth, a credo, a fact. Against this,
the innate Christian mindset has a hard time taking on board a beyond in which
everything is dumb, miserable and useless as on our familiar plane: and as it
not infrequently happens that a medium at the table channels an intelligence,
as the spirit of Aristostle or Napoleon Bonaparte, but we are soon satisfied on
the grounds of taste to justify the judgment that this is not Aristotle or
Napoleon at all, but only act, as if they were, which is why human values have
a standing in studying these manifestations.”
Mann’s mind, wandering from the calculating horse to the
poor spirit of Achilles conjured up on the Cimmerian shore, does something to
my mind. It is something that is outside of criticism – it is an act, a brief
act, of falling in love. To fall in love with an image is no argument, no claim
to truth – but it is very much a part of the novelist’s art. This may be why
Mann was willing to see the medium, why he “fell into the hands of the
Occultists”, with all his bourgeois equipment and class prejudices. Mann saw
the relationship between the artist and the rhapsode, shameful as this might be
in the age of mustard gas and movies.
Of course, everything eventually ends up in Mann’s real
work, and so too did the visit to Schrenck-Notzing end up in The Magic
Mountain, in the chapter near the end entitled: Highly Questionable. The sexual
and the beyond, here, eros and Thanatos, Tadzio and Willy Schneider, join hands
here:
“Edhin Krokowski’s lectures had taken an unexpected turn
after all these little years. His researches, dedicated to psychic dissection
and the dream life of his patients, had always had a subterranean character,
the whiff of the catacomb. Of late, however, although the transition had been
so gradual his audience had scarcely noticed, his interests had moved in a new
direction, toward magical, arcane matters; and his fortnightly lectures in the
dining hall—the sanatorium’s main attraction, the pride of its brochure—which
were always delivered from behind a cloth-covered table in an exotic, drawling
accent, to an immobile audience of Berghof residents and for which he always
wore a frock coat and sandals, no longer dealt with masked forms of love in
action or the transformation of illness back into conscious emotion, but with
the abstruse oddities of hypnotism and somnambulism, the phenomena of
telepathy, prophetic dreams, and second sight, the wonders of hysteria; and as
he discussed these topics, philosophic horizons expanded until suddenly his
audience beheld great riddles shimmering before their eyes, riddles about the
relationship between matter and the psyche, indeed, the very riddle of life
itself, which, so it appeared, might be more easily approached along very
uncanny paths, the paths of illness, than by the direct road of health.”
Convalescence – the Nietzschian plunge into illness as the
road to knowledge – takes us to strange places.
The editors of his letters, where the texts are raw, have decided that Yeats’ spelling was idiosyncratic. That’s a good word. It doesn’t have the same word-injuring psychosis, the same serial killer among the letters, that is baked into dyslexia. Rather, it understands that spelling is a curious procedure, full of mirrors and disorientations. A spell, as Yeats (who at one point belonged to the same organization as Aleister Crowley, the Golden Dawn) was always aware, was a matter of magical summoning. Spelling, too, is a magical summoning, made domestic by our schoolrooms and four hundred years of rules, so that the words appear under our pens. That the first words we learn to spell are often animal names makes complete sense from this point of view, for animals were, after all, the first things humans drew. But there’s a certain graffiti impulse that lies just outside the spelling book, under which we run away from the rules concerning what to write on and how to write it, and go cave man for real.
Edmund Wilson once remarked that F. Scott Fitzgerald mispronounced more words than any other educated person he knew. And Fitzgerald took as his orthographic guide his own sense of how a word should look, and sometimes how he remembered how it should look. I don’t think he cared. As Mencken points out in his survey of American orthography, from Benjamin Franklin to Noah Webster, Americans have been going at the English language as one in need of the American stamp. “Grounding his wholesale reforms upon a saying by Franklin that “those people spell best who do not know how to spell, i.e. who spell phonetically and logically, he [Webster] made an almost complete sweep of whole classes of silent letters…”
Dyslexia, of course, is not simply a matter of phonetically adjusted lexical alterations, but a sort of difference in the regard cast on the printed or written word that sees bushes and entanglements where we who are lexic have been taught to see only the flow and the norm.
In M.J. Philpott’s A Phenomenology of Dyslexia:The Lived-body, Ambiguity, and the Breakdown of Expression, he gives a succinct description of the condition:
“Dyslexia is marked by delay in acquiring advanced linguistic functions such as grammar, and general slowness in completing written and reading tasks . With some variations, the key features of dyslexia are widely accepted as entailing difficulties in learning to read and/or spell, much of which stems from problems of ordering and sequencing letters/words/digits, e.g., reversing the letters within a word. Other problems that can occur as a correlate of these difficulties could involve trying to locate abstract notions, such as identifying a left or right side of a perspective, or trying to locate the days of the week.”
Philpott’s article takes seriously the subjective end of the dyslexic situation – he is, himself, a dyslexic. Between the ages of six and seven, he had to deal with his school’s disapproval of his “laziness” – after which his parents found a school that dealt with dyspraxias of various kinds. But, as he writes, “although I have learned to cope through various self-monitoring strategies, my handling of structuring a piece of writing, the time it takes to complete, and elementary writing/spelling and reading mistakes are still highly problematic.”
Here, though, is the part that interests me the most in this phenomenologically oriented account:
“A second, and perhaps deeper phenomenon, involves problems related with maintaining the flow or sequencing of language. This is associated with problems I have with the slowness of my linguistic tasks, for although I am not necessarily distracted from my task, it is as though the momentum of my work starts to slow right down, or even stop altogether. As I experitence this phenomenon—although I can be composing a sentence quite easily and lucidly, and although it feels as if a certain momentum is underpinning my composition quite unknown to myself, and through no effect of what could be crudely termed “inattention”—I will suddenly realize that the composition process, indeed the page/screen itself has lost all its vivacity, and the momentum that carried me before has completely broken down.”
I recognize this. Not only in my own writing practice, but in the letters of writers like Flaubert and Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka. In the career of Pessoa and Robert Walser. And it makes me wonder if there is not some distinct, historically conditioned dyslexic instance in the field of writing that comes into play in the nineteenth century, at the same time as the thick realistic novel, where the loss of vivacity is part of the drama of composition. Flaubert’s letters are an extended witness to this loss and recovery, this dyslexic instance.
That instance is a great secret watermark in, for instance, the poetry of modernism, in the working towards failure which so often seems to be summoned by it to, as it were, countermand it.
The Emergency...British soldiers stop a man trying to carry his baby through a barbed-wire barricade on the Catholic Falls Road area of Belfast. (Photo by James Jackson/Getty Images)
Burns begins her novel with an utter spoiler of a sentence that pretty much states the case:
The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died. He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man.
Fleshed out, this means that the novel follows a parallel between the events that befall the narrator as she is sexually stalked by a reputed IRA honcho and the events that have befallen Belfast itself in the years of the “troubles”, especially in her Ardoyne neighborhood in Belfast, which is Catholic and working class. But here I run into a wee problem, because even if I could sum up the book like this, I would have to admit the fact that nowhere does the book mention Belfast or Northern Ireland or the British or the IRA. All those names are blocked, all those names are not here. Somebody McSomebody is here, but his name is not here. The milkman is here, but his name, at least so far as the narrator knows at this point, is not here. As we will soon discover, the narrator’s name is not here either. This is not a minor detail, this is not something we can read over, if we want to read. So our first order of business to ask the question: why have the names fallen off the map of the territory covered in this novel? Why does Burns give herself the difficult task of creating a story out of a seeming bonfire of proper names?
The Emergency…British soldiers stop a man trying to carry his baby through a barbed-wire barricade on the Catholic Falls Road area of Belfast. (Photo by James Jackson/Getty Images)
To answer this question in part, back up for a moment – consider the role of the proper name in all histories, sacred or profane. The proper name seems to be unique to human communication, although who knows what goes on among dolphins. Presumably at some point they were invented, just as making fire was invented. One could even say the human comes about with the proper name. Tarzan, even, seems to have a sense of proper names – because if he didn’t, the whole me Tarzan – you Jane schtick wouldn’t make sense. You might be able to train your dog to respond to the sound of its name, but your dog is never going to use or mention your name, or even in the cells of its poochy consciousness think of you with relation to your proper name. All of which makes proper names fascinating to the philosopher, because what is going on here? Why do we need names?
Anna Burns narrator is called variously “middle sister”, “maybe-girlfriend,” “daughter”, etc. Her friends and relatives are similarly dubbed by what Bertrand Russell called “denoting phrases” – and even those with proper names, we quickly learn, don’t bear real proper names, but names denoting the fact that they seem like the type of person who might bear a particular kind of proper name – for example, something very English sounding. Except that, to continue with this and show what semantic quicksand lies within the story of Burns’s novel so that the reader, as well as the characters within the novel, never know whether the next step is going to completely suck them down, Britain and England are not dubbed with their proper names either – they are invariably “over the water” or “the state”. And even Ireland or Northern Ireland or Belfast is not dubbed with its proper name, so that it becomes a linguistic shift – a “here”, a “there”, a “this side of the street”, a “region”, an “our community” and “their community”, gaining its semantic sense from the speakers position within a semantic web (which is technically known in linguistics as a shifter). So for instance when we read that a couple who lives near the narrator’s “maybe-boyfriend” is named Nigel and Jason, we are not to think that they are “really” named Nigel and Jason. The reason that they are named Nigel and Jason is that they have been collecting, for anthropological reasons, names that were “banned” in the “community” – itself unnamed, but obviously the Catholic side of Northern Ireland – which is such a peculiar thing to do that it seems like the kind of thing people over the water might do, and over the water, as is well known, Nigel and Jason are common first names. Maybe-girlfriend raps out a list of illegitimate names:
The banned names were: Nigel, Jason, Jasper, Lance, Percival, Wilbur, Wilfred, Peregrine, Norman, Alf, Reginald, Cedric, Ernest, George, Harvey, Arnold, Wilberine, Tristram, Clive, Eustace, Auberon, Felix, Peverill, Winston, Godfrey, Hector, with Hubert, a cousin of Hector, also not allowed. Nor was Lambert or Lawrence or Howard or the other Laurence or Lionel or Randolph because Randolph was like Cyril which was like Lamont which was like Meredith, Harold, Algernon and Beverley. Myles too, was not allowed. Nor was Evelyn, or Ivor, or Mortimer, or Keith, or Rodney or Roger or Earl of Rupert or Willard or Simon or Sir Mary or Zebedee or Quentin, though maybe now Quentin owing to the filmmaker making good in America that time. Or Albert. Or Troy. Or Barclay. Or Eric. Or Marcus. Or Sefton. Or Marmaduke. Or Greville. Or Edgar because all those names were not allowed. Clifford was another name not allowed. Lesley wasn’t either. Peverill was banned twice.
Names, as one can see, that are all male: over and above the politics of the right name and the wrong name are the politics that decrees that women’s names don’t or at least shouldn’t have such power because women themselves shouldn’t have such power, that is, political power.
“The banned names were understood to have become infused with the energy, the power of history, the age-old conflict, enjoinments and resisted impositions as laid down long ago in this county by that country, with the original nationality of the name not now in the running at all.”
We are only really beginning with the politics of the name, however, when we enumerate which names are and are not allowed, and which gender’s names are politically charged and which one’s are not, for the levels of non-naming are multifold and the the quicksand is deep. It is not simply in the “community” that the name has become a fatal object of conflict: even in the narrator’s own family, names have been stripped off, torn out, left unvocalized. The process was started, paradoxically, by the paterfamilias, the usual legal guardian and carrier of the name, the male namer whose family name is carried by the son and the daughter, who in this case – as in so many in his domestic life – flips the role, becoming the unnamer even as he is, himself, unnamed, abandoning our primogenitor Adam’s perogative in the name business. Which is the point at which we hit our own family unnames, such as Mom and Dad, which are the ultimate psychoanalytically charged shifters since my correct use of “Mom”, for instance, is directed towards a woman who bears another, legal name, and can’t be arbitrarily transferred to other women who have not either borne me or exist as my step-mother. Except in cases where for one reason or another a woman has become a “Mom” to people outside of the legal and/or biological relationship of motherhood, which is an exception that proves the rule that the rules all have exceptions in a language, as language is, among other things, a huge swap meet.
But to return to middle sister’s Da:
He saw me though, even if unsure which daughter I was. That, of course, could have had nothing to do with dying, because da, when he’d lived, always had been in a state of distraction, spending overlong hours reading papers, watching the news, ears to radios, out in the street, taking in, then talking out, the latest political strife with likeminded neighbours. He was that type, the type who let nothing in except it had to be the political problems. If not the political problems – then any war, anywhere, any predator, any victim. He’d spend lots of time too, with these neighbours who were of the exact fixation and boxed-off aberration as him. As for the names of us offspring, never could he remember them, not without running through a chronological list in his head. While doing this, he’d include his sons’ names even if searching for the name of a daughter. And vice versa. Sooner or later, by running through, he’d hit on the correct one at last. Even that though, became too much and so, after a bit, he dropped the mental catalogue, opting instead for ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ which was easier. And he was right. It was easier which was how the rest of us came to substitute ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ and so on ourselves.
This primal scene of unnaming, this negation of the mythic impulse (an impulse that depends so crucially on naming that one mythographic theory in ancient times was that myths were created to explain names), gives us our orienting disorienting points to make it across a narrative that expands in all directions like some crazy banyan tree. So if, instead of substituting names for denoting phrases as if I knew, beforehand, where all this was happening and who it was happening to, the story in its own terms would go something like this:
Middle sister, who seems to be 18, comes from a functionally dysfunctional family in an unnamed community where the social forces in conflict consist broadly of the renouncers of the state and their forces versus the defenders of the state and their forces, with the defenders of the state coming from outside the community – the paramilitaries from the other side of the street – or over the water – the soldiers and spies and hit squads – plus the police, and the renouncers consisting of paramilitaries, gangsters, the community opinion at large, and the spies and killers and rapists which may or may not be operating on their own or in connection with others. Being functionally dysfunctional in this neighborhood means taking a certain number of casualties – a renouncer son shot and killed, another disappeared, a daughter who the renouncers have threatened to kill if she ever comes back to the community (sister’s crime is to have married an enemy). Middle sister’s survival technique consists of keeping her head down, or in a book – she reads nineteenth century novels while walking to work. Keeping a book up as a shield allows her, she thinks, to disappear, instead of being thought bananas or in some way so marginalized that she became a matter of unease for those in the community. As well, she has a maybe-boyfriend in another region that she has not told her mother about, or her sisters or brothers-in-law. So this is the state of play of Middle Sister’s life in the community and way of keeping alive and unmolested in the community with its overt downgrading of women and frank thrusting of second class citizenship, if that, upon women when the Milkman, driving a large white van (from which, it is Middle Sister’s theory, his nickname Milkman came from) stops and offers her a ride. In offering her a ride and making a few remarks that show that he knows where she lives, he knows her habits, he knows her routes, he makes it obvious that he has been stalking her and, by the very fact of stalking, claiming her, which reflects on his position in the community as both a respected paramilitary boss and a gangster like figure who seizes what he wants. That simple, sinister offer starts off a general rumor and unraveling of Middle Sister’s life. On the one hand, it is obvious that the sinister Milkman is pursuing her for sexual reasons, even grooming her to become his whore, in spite of the fact that he is married, older, and a paramilitary of high and mighty violence; and on the other hand, the rumor mill starts that she has indeed accepted his offer and become his whore, as though the offer itself was irresistible, a conclusion that is agreed to by the rumor that her mother, her mother’s friends, and even the girl gang girlfriends of other paramilitaries have decided to believe about middle sister. To fight this rumor means, however, expressing to other people the facts of the rumor, which might have sinister consequences for, if not middle sister, then maybe-boyfriend, since making it too clear that she is refusing the Milkman would make all too clear what she suspects about the Milkman and his kind, an opinion that is both bound to bring down sexist contempt as well as the suspicion that middle sister is, like her first sister, the one who has fled, an enemy of the community. The social rules here are as complex, and take as much tact, as the rules in a Henry James novel, with the difference that if the community’s way of doing things had been applied by Milly Theale in Wings of the Dove, she would have simply blasted Kate Croy and Merton Densher in the face with a throw-away .38 snub-nose before the end of it.
The forward flow of the action here is marked, then, by the meetings with the Milkman, meetings that eerily never flesh out the Milkman, who is very fleshly while remaining very shadowy. He does nothing in the book that is more overtly violent than to show up, open his van door, and invite Middle Sister in. Show up again and again in the narrator’s path. Show up again and again in the community’s judgement that she is involved with the Milkman, that she is having sex with the Milkman, that she is the girlfriend of the Milkman, that she is the whore of the Milkman, that she is so connected to the Milkman that it might be dangerous for people to be in line before her at, say, a chip shop, or dangerous to take her money for food, which puts her in situations she so resents that sometimes she wishes she were really the girlfriend of the Milkman and that he would kill these people who think she is the girlfriend of the Milkman. It is enough that somehow, because of his desire for her, she is marked as his in the community’s mind, with all the bad mojo that this transfers to her and her every act. No denial on her part lifts the spell that is never spelled out by anyone, since to actually talk about the killings committed by a presumed renouncer boss in the community is to betray, on some obscure level, the community, and thus bring down on oneself the wrath of the renouncers in their various degrees and forms, who are semi-legitimately defending the community from the murderous soldiers and the murderous friends of the soldiers and the State. Around each event in going forward in this terrible progress through the somewhat impalpable medium of a community perception that transforms as nothing else does the narrator’s subjective being into a symbolic object determined by others, there arise explanations and side stories that go backwards and forwards in time, all of which abut in or spring forward from various forms of grotesque violence.
2.
Burns has as strong a sense of the grotesque as that which marked Flannery O’Connor’s work, even though they work from different premises towards their conclusions. It is interesting to compare them.
O’Connor founded her misfit vision on Pauline grounds: we see now, but as in a mirror, darkly.
Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.
The Christ ravaged and violently racist South of O’Connor’s experience and art, (along with its coeval New South of businesses and Babbitry), was seen through the lens of her marginality as a Catholic; however, she never doubted that she was part of the whole.
Burns is as conversant with inversion and upside-downness as O’Connor, but she absolutely doubts that there such a thing as a whole man, or that the theological is anything more than a dodge, or that to be a part of a community will ever protect one from being a victim of the community. The fragile aids of literature, friendship, love, and family are not founded in any absolute. Maturity consists in understanding this, but maturity might not help you survive, which has a way of deflating the value of maturity in communities where survival is at a premium.
In her first book, No Bones, the sound track is up very loud and styling, and the names are all there, as are the dates, which are assigned to every chapter, going from 1969, the year of the first riots in Belfast, to 1994, the year of the cease fire. The novel traces, in short story-like chapters, the development of Amelia Lovett, from the time she was nine and collected her first lovely fat black rubber bullets as the British soldiers came to the Ardoyne neighborhood and shot them at rioters to her release from an English mental asylum and her decision to let her numerous dead bury their own dead in the last chapters of the book, a sadly typical trajectory of Irish exile in England. The book is chock-a-block with horrors: the year when Deerhunter made Russian roulette popular among Amelia’s boy classmates; the year her brother Mick and his wife Mena decided to rape Amelia; the year they killed Mick; the year she was actually raped by the Bronagh McCabe, a woman of such a monstrous and fascinating outline that she almost carries away the book. The novel is overwhelming, and, one feels, a little out of control, a debut effort that has so much to get rid of that we can sometimes feel a little left out as readers, as though this were the author’s own cathartic overload, a narrative bulimia.
Milkman is structured much more carefully, and does without the surrealist touches that blur the dividing line between fantasy and reality in No Bones; but it is as militantly grotesque. There are scenes in it that I want to tell other people about, the way I like to refer, in my mind, to certain of the scenes in O’Connor’s short stories – the Misfit who kills the Grandmother, the Bible Salesman who runs off with the artificial leg of the secular, spoiled daughter of a good Christian woman, etc. What Yeats called his Circus Animals – star attractions that transcend the scenes in which they have a logical place and point, acquiring an emblematic aura. When Burns turns to the grotesque, the trigger warnings come out, although they are weak tea when it comes to a place where real triggers are being squeezed without any warning at all. I think one of the central scenes that sums up not only of the community’s troubles in the novel but of the troubles of all the occupied, low intensity warfare places (Baghdad, Beirut, Ferguson Missouri, Belfast) is the mass canicide staged by the state soldiers. Like many things in Burns’ work, the event references a reality: the British army really did engage in a considerable amount of dog-murder, particularly in the Ballymurphy section of Belfast in the early 1970s, when dirty tricks undertaken by the British soldiers and their allies and their spies were at their height. The riff goes on for pages, beginning with a quote from the movie Rear Window from a woman who finds her dog poisoned:
‘Which one of you did it? … couldn’t imagine … so low you’d kill a little helpless friendly … only thing in this whole neighbourhood who liked anybody. Did you kill him because he liked you, just because he liked you?’
To the narrator, this explanation seems like the most natural one in the world. Of course, in the movie we find out that the dog’s poisoning is a clue to a murder, but the narrator has, by this time, witnessed dog murder on the mass scale.
As for myself, it seemed to me, at nine years old, that there were so many of these dogs that the district could never have contained the overrun of them, that the soldiers must have bussed in extra, but once the locals started to identify and to claim them, they claimed all of them, every single one. Also to my child eyes, and to those of third brother who was standing beside me, it seemed the heads of all these dogs, amidst this huge stack of dogs, were missing. We thought they’d been beheaded. ‘Mammy! The heads! They took the heads! Where are the heads?’ we cried. ‘Where’s Lassie, mammy? Where’s daddy? Have the brothers found Lassie? Where’s daddy? Where’s Lassie?’ And we tugged at her coat, then third brother began to cry. His crying set me off, then the both of us set off all the other children. Then the last surviving dog began to howl as well. There were many of us that day, many children, and we huddled and clung to our adults. So at first there was the silence, then there was our crying, then, at the sound of our crying, the adults galvanised themselves into action and set their shock aside. They began to deal with the massacre, with the males – young men, older men, renouncers, non-renouncers – beginning to wade through the slimy, pelty mass. They disentangled the heavy sogginess and the swampiness to differentiate one body from another body, passing each through and along the chain to whoever had come to claim it, was waiting for it, to bring it home on go-carts, in prams, in wheelbarrows, in supermarket trolleys or, more often, bundled up as something that used to be alive in their arms.
The slaughtered dogs here are not simply symbols of a breakdown in human ties, but a questioning of whether symbols are enough, of whether, like proper names, at certain moments of violence and terror we simply dispense with them. Whether the old latin tag about “man being wolf to man’ fits for ‘man being wolf to wolves’ and finally for ‘man being wolf to dogs’. Whether, at the end of this deductive labyrinth, we will find any kindness left.
3.
In 2010, Carolyn Dean wrote an article about styles of reporting or memorializing atrocity in the 20th century for History and Theory. Entitled Minimalism and Victim Testimony, it detected, in the first post-war generation of memoirs from Holocaust survivors, and historians of the Holocaust, a horror of excess, or emotion. Rather, to bear sufficient witness, one had to avoid all exhibitions of emotion, which would lead to the sort of kitsch that dishonors the victims. The bones of this aesthetic are laid down before the camps, in the great books about World War I, where all the rhetoric of Victorian moralizing seemed inadequate and somewhat criminal when applied to the trenches.
Minimalism in its varieties is a sophisticated style characterized by aesthetic and emotive restraint. It originated in the 1960s and was most prominent in visual art and sculpture that emphasized the sheer contingency of the art-object by reducing it to “what you see.” Eventually minimalism simply described any aesthetic form marked by anti-sentimental austerity, and it is this now generic usage of the term to which I refer. Minimalist narratives resist hyperbole in order to avoid the potential conversion of suffering into kitsch, voyeurism, or sublimity by following a dictum the writer W. G. Sebald attributes to Walter Benjamin: “I think Benjamin at one point says that there is no point in exaggerating the already horrific.” Even when not explicitly minimalist, some of the most nuanced Holocaust representation is anti-sentimental, refusing affective identification in order to undermine the restoration of the wholeness or “feel-good” qualities of redemptive narratives that often encourage sentimental over-identification with victims or the narcissistic appropriation of their experience. Experimental efforts by writers such as Charlotte Delbo and Aharon Appelfeld stress silence and use various devices to undercut affective over-identifications with victims. Delbo, for example, uses a lyrical but graphic account of the ever-incomplete effort to wash herself in Auschwitz, a passage whose elegance distances the reader sufficiently to render her experience imaginable and yet unsettling.
The minimalist style in testimony, as Dean also observes, has now become itself a historical object, one subject to criticism. Why, after all, is kitsch, the creation of emotional effects that are disproportionate to the quality of the representation, so much to be feared, when one of the casualties of atrocity is a full emotional response? As the stock of our atrocities accumulate, they seem to count against the results of emotional restraint as a stylistic choice, and the prestige of minimalism has declined to the point where it is not even, sometimes, recognized by the contemporary reader, who confuses it with minimalization. This is unfair, a judgment doled out by an ignorant posterity – but containing some grain of truth, perhaps, in as much as the minimalist response refuses to consider its own stylization. Burns approach to her subject matter, her embrace of a grotesque aesthetic even as she plays with identity-transforming language, shows that the dualism between minimalism and, for lack of a better word, melodrama now seems like a false narrowing of options. There are many lessons one can take from Milkman, all of them dark. As a novelist, however, she does show us one thing: there are more detours to get us to the heart of darkness than are dreamt of by realists, or by holders-of-the-line. And most likely we will have to go down all of them if we dream of “redeeming” the victim without endlessly recycling punishment and reprisal until climate change does us part.
