The game of dress up: male novelists/female characters

Angela Carter once wrote that she read novels when growing up for, among other things, insights into being a woman. She read the English writers of the period – a period when Leavis’s “Great Tradition” – and naturally she read D.H. Lawrence – the Leavisite candidate for the truly great English writer (Virginia Woolf being bashed for snobbishness and Joyce for being not sound). As Carter writes, “I smelled a rat in D.H. Lawrence pretty damn quick.”

This does not mean she dismissed Lawrence as an artist. But he was the kind of novelist she wanted to pit herself against, moving aside that stone on the English novel – up to and including my quasi Christian metaphor of the stone being moved aside, the kind of resurrectionary theme Lawrence was all about.

One of her insights into Lawrence involves, well, the same problems that I think about when writing fiction with female characters. 

It has to do with dress-up.

If you read Raymond Chandler, you will notice that, for all of Marlowe’s tough guy gestures, he has the heart of a clothier, a Hollywood costumer. Take this from The High Window:

‘She was wearing a brownish linen  coat and skirt, a broadbrimmed straw hat with a brown velvet band that exactly matched the color of her shoes and the leather trimming on the edges of her linen envelope bag.”

Her linen envelope bag! The fetishizing aura overflows – as auras tend to – when we reach that fashion accoutred bag. Freud isn’t in it, brother.  How many of us know what an envelope bag even is? On the other hand, Marlowe is a product of Hollywood, no bones about it, so that we read these heroic descriptions without wondering too much about this information, as why does Marlowe even know about an envelope bag?

Lawrence, as Carter notices, is also indefatigably fussy about women’s clothing. For all that he was after an encounter with the dark gods buried in Etruscan vases, he was always going on about what his women were wearing. Carter has some great remarks about Women in Love, his “most exuberantly clothed novel” which  “furthermore, is supposed to be an exegesis on my sex,

trusting, not the teller but the tale, to show to what extent D. H. Lawrence personated women

through simple externalities of dress; by doing so, managed to pull off one of the greatest con

tricks in the history of modern fiction; and revealed a more than womanly, indeed, pathologically

fetishistic, obsession with female apparel. Woman in Love is as full of clothes as Brown's, and

clothes of the same kind. D. H. Lawrence catalogues his heroine's wardrobes with the loving care

of a ladies' maid. It is not a simple case of needing to convince the reader the book has been

written by a woman; that is far from his intention. It is a device by which D. H. Lawrence

attempts to convince the reader that he D.H.L., has a hot line to a woman's heart by the

extraordinary sympathy he has for her deepest needs, that is, nice stockings, pretty dresses and

submission.

Yet Lawrence clearly enjoys being a girl. If we do not trust the teller but the tale, then the

tale positively revels in lace and feathers, bags, beads, blouses and hats. It is always touching to

see a man quite as seduced by the cultural apparatus of femininity as Lawrence was, the whole

gamut, from feathers to self-abnegation. Even if, as Kate Millett suggests, he only wanted to be a

woman so that he could achieve the supreme if schizophrenic pleasure of fucking himself, since

nobody else was good enough for him. (The fantasy-achievement of this ambition is probably

what lends Lady Chatterley's Lover such an air of repletion.)”

I’m sure that my own games of dress up, as much as I research them and try to think of the clothing in terms of the choice of the wearer rather than the judgement of the observer, as much as I agonize over the style of the clothing and the styling it evidences, are cons as well.  On the other hand (he said, defensively)  the way my male characters dress is, as well, a bit of a con, in as much as these are fictions. Clothing is so helpful because it is, as well, a an attempt to fictionalize – wearing clothes might warm us, but it also shields us, helps us stagemanage our bodies, gives us a feeling of being ourselves as characters.  It is true, often, that there are breakdowns in the clothing game in fiction. To give a movie instance – I just rewatched  Terminator (yes, this lockdown is dragging) and the Schwarzenegger character successfully clothes himself in pants and shirt that come from a person maybe four sizes smaller than him, without ripping, while the human from the future – I forget his name – steals trousers from a drunk tramp without noticing once that these trousers are well pissed in. They even fit him, the human from the future, I mean.

This is supremely not having an eye for clothes, and it is unusual in a Hollywood film.

The clothing option doesn’t necessarily make the character. I can know and feel many of Dostoevsky’s characters without remembering his descriptions of their clothing, because they are perfunctory – unlike Tolstoy’s, or Lawrence’s. That is the deal with characters, male or female, and what they wear – wearing is meaningmaking. I think that we go from the clothing in when we make characters. I don’t think of my female characters, oddly enough, as naked. And that is perhaps a fault. God, as he made abundantly clear in Genesis, definitely meant us to be naked.

“Who told you that you were naked?” asked the LORD God. “Have you eaten of the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?”

And thus the Lord God learned that his characters do have their own lives.    

Why the Labour party should split up

The leaks about the Labour party that came out last week have been, I think, largely overlooked, partly because the same media that sympathized with overturning Corbyn and collaborated on the project doesn’t really want to revisit the story. But it is definitely an exemplary story.

The leak shows that the rightwing of the party – the third way people, the Blairites – spent much of their time in the election against Theresa May, which Corbyn just missed winning, doing things like dissing black members of the party, knowingly diverting and wasting party funding, and goldbricking in order to bring about a Tory victory. The thinking was, the Tory victory would then overthrow Corbyn.

Now, every leftist is, by nature, paranoid, for good reason: if you attack powerful forces, it is common sense to think they will attack you back and operate in the sneaky ways they have operated to get, say, tax breaks and shit. But the whole Corbyn moment was premised on the idea that Labour is still a viable party for the left.

In America, this is often viewed in terms of… America. American provincialism, right? So that Labour is the Democratic party, the Conservatives the Republicans, etc. However, this seems to absurdly de-contextualize Britain, which, in spite of its Brexit, still has more similarities, as far as its political system goes, to a European country than to the U.S. In Europe, over the past twenty years, we’ve seen an enormous breakup of the Left. In France, the Socialists have simply disappeared. In Germany, the SPD is now on par with the Greens. In Italy, the Communists metamorphosed into many combinations, all of which packed a smaller and smaller political punch, until the ultimate Third Way politician, Matteo Renzi, a historic failure.

In Britain, the context is rather similar.  Colin Kidd in the LRB in 2012 has argued that Labour without Scotland would be a permanent minority party, and that divorce from Scotland has come to pass. Ross McKibben at the same mag pointed out that Labour dropped from 54 seats in Scotland to 1 in 2015.  Just last week, a Guardian columnist, Andy Beckett, pointed to the ten year run of Tory rule and asked, justly, whether Britain had turned into a one party “democracy”, like the Christian Democrats in postwar Italy.

All of this poses a question: if the center right is so ardent about keeping its Blairite claws into Labour,  and if Labour has no map to victory for the foreseeable future, why continue to contest possession of a moribund property? Why not start a separate party, a Corbynist party, using Momentum’s infrastructure to begin with?  Parties do die. Or evolve into something totally different. Corbyn’s moment in the Labour party looks more like the last hurrah for a once vital Labour left than the future.

One can easily imagine the realigments that would take place while the Tories rule for the next decade, as looks most probable. A green-red coalition with a British Left party – a Center coalition between a Blairite Labour party and the Lib-Dems – and the dominant Conservatives, sometimes allied with various ephemeral fascist parties.

Of course, I am discounting one of the major realignments that could well happen: the further split up of the UK, as Scotland becomes independent and Northern Ireland votes to reunite with Ireland. One thing seems probable to me, though: Labour is dead as a vehicle for the “left”. It will never happen.

Sometimes,like today, I fail to feel

Sometimes, like today, I fail to feel
Sensibility, like my lost shadow's sister
follows me around all blank and peel
and I'm all what's up mister

from room to room, from closet to closet
a numbskull under the skin
which I display in the bathroom in close-up
-selfy with a death's head grin.
-Karen Chamisso

an anthropology of the 1 percent

Ethnographic field studies of peasants, hunter gatherers, farmers, powerful village men, etc. are common. Field studies of rich American families are less so.   Off hand, I can only think of George Marcus’s studies of  rich Texas families in Houston and Galveston, which was nevertheless full of insights.  Marcus uses a term that the muckrakers used – dynastic wealth. His view of wealth is still wedded, however, to the notion of the family, especially in terms of male heirs.

Myself, I think that we should look at modern wealth from the perspective of the “house”. This is akin to the dynastic perspective – we think of the “house” of Windsor, meaning, vaguely, parts of the extended family of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. A house his, on the one hand, a concrete building, and, on the other hand, a synecdoche for the entirety of the property. “Members” of the house can include servants, as well as the less endowed cousins, aunts, uncles and others who have some claim on the property.

In Marcus’s work on the rich, the invisibility of wealth is one of the great structuring themes. It is mostly the case with the non-wealthy that their visible environment, from car to apartment to house, is their real wealth. The asset of most Americans is a house – although many have a few stocks, the vast majority of stocks and other financial instruments is owned by the wealthy. These things are wealth, too, but they can’t be seen the way chattels can. Marcus proposes a parallel with the Kauli, a people in New Guinea:

“In talking about the people of the other world, the Kaluli use the term mama, which means shadow or reflection. When asked what the people of the unseen look like, Kaluli will point to a reflection in a pool or a mirror and say, "They are not like you or me. They are like that." In the same way, our human appearance stands as a reflection to them. This is not a "supernatural" world, for to the Kaluli, it is perfectly natural. Neither is it a "sacred world," for it is virtually coextensive with and exactly like the world the Kaluli inhabit, subject to the same forces of mortality .... In the unseen world, every man has a reflection in the form of a wild pig . . . that roams invisibly on the slopes of Mt. Bosavi. The man and his wild pig reflection live separate existences, but if something should happen to the wild pig, the man is also affected. If it is caught in a trap, he is disabled; if it is killed by hunters of the unseen, he dies.”

The Kaluli reference is not a mere affectation, but a way of making something intelligible that is beyond “inherited” wealth.  I have to quote Marcus at length, here:

  The dynastic fortunes that I have studied in Texas over the past few years are complex creations of various kinds of experts and of lineages of descendants two to four generations away from founding entrepreneurial ancestors. A dynasty is commonsensically a family, but after much experience with this form of social organization, I find that it is primarily a fortune instead. Concentrations of old wealth, however, have no one particular locus or materialization; in short, they have no presence. Rather, a fortune has multiple, simultaneous manifestations within a variety of interconnected but isolated social contexts that encompass the long-term fates and daily lives of literally hundreds of people. In initiating my research, I followed common sense and took the family-literal flesh-and-blood descendants, and particularly those who seemed to be leaders or in positions of authority-for the dynasty. I soon discovered in their here and now lives the profound influence of the equivalent of the unseen world among the Kaluli-the complex world of highly spec- ialized expertise that through an elaborate division of labor, not only structured the wealth but, also, created doppelganger facsimiles of the descendants-roughly similar to the Mt. Bosavi wild pig reflections of Kaluli persons-variously constituted as clients, beneficiaries of trusts, wealth shares in computerized strategies of investment, and accountants' files. While the unseen world is richly registered through sound and imagery in the here and now of the Kaluli, it distinctly is not among the descendants within dynastic families.”

These houses, I propose, are what is at play, anthropologically, in the ownership of corporations. The idea of the stock market as a way of transferring ownership to more efficient managers is not born out by anything in our real economic experience. But these complex transfers of ownership as the politics of various houses – this makes much more sense. The great houses in medieval and early modern Europe were founded, above all, on a warrior ethos – they were seized in wars, they warred with each other, and they warred outside of Europe in crusades and, eventually, in the massive war against the indigenous peoples and culture of Africa, the Americas, and Asia.  

a great debut novel

The list of great debut novels is short – although some of them are the greatest of novels. Don Quixote might be considered a debut in two ways – it is the debut of the modern novel, and a debut novel. There’s Dead Souls, the Pickwick Papers, Madam Bovary, Decline and Fall, The Sun Also Rises, V.

There’s also Chiendent, Queneau’s first novel, which has been translated as Barking Tree or Witchgrass. Americans are more familiar with crabgrass, which holds the same place in our lawn mythology as chiendent in France. The principle of the weed – of the invasion of an alien thing that is much like the real thing – in this case grass – but somehow not is a beautiful structural metaphor for what Queneau was doing. My own novel, Made a Few Mistakes, boosted one of Queneau’s brilliancies – the idea that falsehoods can take life and motive power, moving people to do absurd things under false premises. An idea that is put into a literally Cartesian framework in Chiendent, as a plain clerk, traveling in his usual routine in a metro from work to his half built suburban home, has an actual thought. That is, he notices something in a store window that he has walked past hundreds of times. In that moment, he begins to take on substance – which is noticed by a sort of flaneur, an authorial stand-in, who sees him literally becoming “rounder” . And as our clerk, named, sadly enough, Etienne Marcel – which happens to be the name of our own street, once it gets past Beaubourg, an existential coincidence I never dreamed would happen the first time I read this novel – continues to think, he continues to substantify, rather like an a Cartesian eucharist. A silhouette becomes a person.

The silhouette to person transformation would be a high concept gimmick save for the fact that the novel is also about an entire slice of Parisian life, from flaneurs to petty crooks, from anonymous letters and stalkers to Marcel’s odious step-son, Théo, a sort of Rimbaud gone to seed early. Queneau’s novel was published in 1935, under the impulse of his break with the surrealists and his reading of Ulysses. Ulysses was that rare novel that seeded others, much as punk bands formed from members of the audiences that watched the Sex Pistols. There’s Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Faulkner’s Sound and Fury, Doeblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Queneau – and this list is just off the top of my head.

Of them all, I think it was Queneau who thought hardest about how to construct a novel – and among this crew, he is the only one who saw how funny Joyce is. The French have a great sense of farce – unappreciated I think in the Anglo world, save for the Anglo appreciation of Molière – and Queneau is an expert farceur, without the sometimes heavy breathing, the Playboy jokiness, of Labiche. His coincidences hit because you don’t really see how these events are going to collide. Especially in as much as he views events like a mathematician – Queneau, like Musil, was a trained mathematician, a rarity among novelists or among fucking anything – I mean, how many math postgraduates do you know? So for Queneau, the distribution of coincidences is held to a rigorous schemata, the base of which is a sort of Cartesian algebra.

Descartes is known for having reduced geometry to algebra – or at least made that a program. His calcul géométrique would have made Descartes a famous figure in intellectual history outside of his Meditations and Discourse on Method. Similarly, the algebra of character positions, within the framework of the Parisian world of things in motion, produces a number of collisions which are prefigured by the “channels” or vectors involved – the circulation of traffic, of letters, of vacationers, of clients in bistros, etc. - but not totally determined from the point of view of any one character. This is the limit of thought, so to speak, which Etienne, as he substativizes, bumps into. Of that which one cannot calculate, one cannot think clearly. Hence, the opposition between the thought and the bump.

Farce is characteristically about sex and money. They are inherently farcical because they are the object of our most ardent calculations – and farce is nothing if not calculated – and yet in the world of farce, as in the real world, we often miscalculate. In fact, miscalculation is heir to farce’s premise, since sex and money are also wildcards, jokers in the pack.
Farce, it turns out, is an excellent way to approach the city. Queneau’s work – Chiendent, Pierrot mon ami, Loin de Rueil, le Dimanche de la vie, and Zazie dans le metro – is an extended study of Paris, from Parisian pronunciation to Parisian working class quarters to popular amusements – which is one of the great novelistic undertakings of the twentieth century to my mind. It has not been as influential as Celine, but it is as funny – when Celine is funny – and without the meanness that creeps into Celine as he became more of a monster.

So, for a good time - go out and read Queneau!

Two poems by Karen Chamisso

I. Unnamed

Found-and-pound her little mut me

Found-and-pound we all become

Found-and-pound was she

Tubed up so that the broken drum

Of her lung could still functi

Myself the one whacked out without conjunction

I woke with her bad breath in my mouth

After her death everything went South

For a long while.

II. Pastoral, maybe

My poem fell into the wrong crowd

as I was visiting the  Garden Center

in my SUV with  and Jake, our gardener, driving.

Huh huh huh

To buy me a magnolia stellata sapling or a loud

Japanese plum  - huh huh huh

It peered instead at the bottles of Ortho Orthene on the shelf

“kills the queen and destroys the mound” it read to itself

And suddenly it knew that it had taken a side

Huh huh huh

When Troy was destroyed with every kind of  -cide

Hum hum hum

So don’t think a flower, carefully etched, can save you

From returning to the mound with some kind of bait

And thus I pushed my cart through the Garden Center gate.

The Breaks

 

Breaks on a bus, brakes on a car 

Breaks to make you a superstar

Breaks to win and breaks to lose

But these here breaks will rock your shoes

And these are the breaks

According to Robert Craven’s 1980 article on Pool slang in American speech, breaks – as in good break, bad break, those are the breaks – derives from the American lingo of pool, which is distinct from  British billiard terms. The difference in terminology emerged in the 19^th century, but  he dates the popular use of break (lucky break, bad break, the breaks) to the 20s.

 I love the idea that this is true, that the Jazz age, the age of American modernity and spectacle, saw the birth of the breaks. If the word indeed evolved from the first shot in pool – when you “break” the pyramid of balls, a usage that seems to have been coined in America in the 19^th century, as against the British term  – then its evolution nicely intersects one of the favored examples in the philosophy of causation, as presented by Hume.

Hume’s work, from the Treatise to the Enquiry, is so punctuated by billiard balls that it might as well have been the metaphysical dream of Minnesota Fats – excuse the anachronism – and it has been assumed, in a rather jolly way in the philosophy literature, that this represents a piece of Hume’s own life, a preference for billiards. However, as some have noted, Hume might have borrowed the billiard ball example from Malebranche – whose work he might have read while composing the Treatise at La Fleche. But even if Hume was struck by Malebranche’s example and borrowed it, the stickiness of the example,  the way billiard balls keep appearing in Hume’s texts, feels to the reader like tacit testimony to Hume’s own enjoyment or interest in  the game. Unfortunately, this detail has not been taken up by his biographers. When we trace the itinerary of Hume as he moved from Scotland to Bristol to London to France, we have to reconstruct ourselves how this journey in the 1730s might have intersected with billiard rooms in spas and public houses. In a schedule of coaches from London to Bristol published in the early 1800s, we read that there is a coach stop at the Swan in St. Clements street, London, on the line that goes to Bristol, and from other sources we know that the Swan was famed for its billiard room. Whether this information applies to a journey made 70 years before, when the game was being banned in public houses by the authorities, is uncertain. 

 One should also remember that in Hume’s time, billiards was  not played as we now play American pool or snooker. The table and the pockets and the banks were different. So was the cue stick  – , it wasn’t until 1807 that the cue stick was given its felt or india rubber tip, which made it a much more accurate instrument. And of course the balls were hand crafted, and thus not honed to a mechanically precise roundness.

2. 

If, however, Hume was a billiard’s man, one wonders what kind he was. His biographer Hunter speaks of the “even flight” of Hume’s prose – he never soars too much. But is this the feint of a hustler? According to one memoirist, Kant, too, was a billiards player  – in fact the memoirist, Heilsberg, claimed it was his “only recreation” – and he obviously thought there was something of a hustle about Hume’s analysis of cause and effect, which is where the breaks come in.

There’s a rather celebrated passage in the abstract of the Treatise in which Hume even conjoins the first man, Adam, and the billiard ball. 

The passage begins: “Here is a billiard ball lying on the table, and another ball moving towards it with rapidity. They strike; and the ball which was formerly at rest now acquires a motion.” 

Hume goes on to describe the reasons we would have for speaking of one ball’s contact causing the other ball to acquire a motion. The question is, does this description get to something naturally inherent in the event?

“Were a man, such as Adam, created in the full vigour of understanding, without experience, he would never be able to infer motion in the second ball from the motion and impulse of the first. It is not anything that reason sees in the cause which makes us infer the effect.”

This new man, striding into the billiard room, Hume thinks, would not see as we see, even if he sees what we see. Only when he has seen such things thousands of times will he see as we see... “His understanding would anticipate his sight and form a conclusion suitable to his past experience.”

Hume’s Adam is an overdetermined figure. On the one hand, in his reference to Adam’s “science”, there is a hint of the Adam construed by the humanists. Martin Luther claimed that Adam’s vision was perfect, meaning he could see objects hundreds of miles away. Joseph Glanvill, that curiously in-between scholar – defender of the ghost belief and founder of the Royal Society – wrote in the seventeenth century:

“Adam needed no Spectacles. The acuteness of his natural Opticks (if conjecture may have credit) shew'd him much of the Coelestial magnificence and bravery without a Galilaeo's tube: And 'tis most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much of the upper World, as we with all the advantages of art. It may be 'twas as absurd even in the judgement of his senses, that the Sun and Stars should be so very much, less then this Globe, as the contrary seems in ours; and 'tis not unlikely that he had as clear a perception of the earths motion, as we think we have of its quiescence.”

However, this is not the line that Hume develops. His Adam has our human all too human sensorium, and is no marvel of sensitivity. Rather, he belongs to another line of figures beloved by the Enlightenment philosophes: Condillac’s almost senseles statue, Locke’s Molyneaux, Diderot’s aveugle-né. Here, the human is stripped down to the basics. Adam’s conjunction with the billiard ball, then, gives us a situation like Diderot’s combination of the blind man and the mirror – it’s an event of illuminating estrangement.

3.

Hume’s point is to lift the breaks from off our necks, to break the bonds of necessity – or rather to relocate those bonds. In doing so, he and his billiard balls are reversing the older tendency of atomistic philosophy, which was revived by Gassendi in the 17^th century. Lucretian atoms fall in necessary and pre-determined courses, the only exception being that slight inexplicable swerve when the atoms contact the human – hence our free will. Hume, who had a hard enough time  with Christian miracles, did not, so far as I know, discuss the Lucretian version of things even to the extent of dismissing it.

To be a little over the top, we could say that the eighteenth century thinkers disarmed necessity, exiled Nemesis, and the heavyweight heads of the nineteenth century brought it back with a vengeance, locating it – in a bow to Hume, or the Humean moment – in history. Custom. From this point of view, Hume was part of a project that saw the transfer of power from God and Nature back to Man – although we are now all justly suspicious of such capitalizable terms.

4.

But the breaks survived and flourished. There is a way of telling intellectual history – the way I’ve been doing it – that makes it go on above our heads, instead of in them. It neglects the general populace, the great unwashed. Book speaks to book. To my mind, intellectual history has to embrace and understand folk belief in order to understand the book to book P.A. system.

Which is why we can approach the breaks in another way.

In 1980, I was going to college in Shreveport, Louisiana. I went to classes in the morning, then worked at a general remodeling store from 3 to 10. I worked in the paint department, mostly. At seven, the manager would leave for home, and Henry, the assistant manager, would let us pipe in whatever music we wanted to  - which is how I first heard Kurtis Blow’s These are the Breaks. I also first heard the Sugarhill Gang’s Rappers delight this way, and I still mix them up. I heard both, as well as La Donna and Rick James, at the Florentine, a disco/gay bar that I went to a lot with friends – it was the best place to dance in town. Being a gay bar, it was always receiving bomb threats and such, which made it a bit daring to go there. We went, however, because we could be pretty sure that the music they played would include no country or rock. It was continuously danceable until, inevitably, The Last Dance played.

At the time, I was dabbling a bit in Marx, and thought that I was on the left side of history. At the same time, 1980 was a confusing year for Americans. The ‘malaise’ was everywhere, and nothing seemed to be going right – from the price of oil to the international order. There were supposedly communists in Central America, African countries were turning to the Soviet Union, and of course there was the hangover from the Vietnam War – the fantasy that we could have won that war had not yet achieved mass circulation, so it felt like what it was, a plain defeat.

I imagined, then, that the breaks were falling against a certain capitalist order. In actuality, the left – in its old and new varieties – was vanishing. Or you could say transforming. The long marches were underway – in feminism, from overthrowing patriarchy to today’s “leaning in”; in civil rights, from the riots in Miami to the re-Jim Crowization of America through the clever use of the drug war; and in labor organization, from the union power to strike to the impotence and acceptance that things will really never get better, and all battles are now rearguard.  

My horizons were not vast back then – I didn’t keep up with the news that much, but pondered a buncha books and the words of popular songs. But I knew something was in the air. As it turned out,  Kurtis Blow’s breaks were not going to be kind to my type, the Nowhere people, stranded socially with their eccentric and unconvincing visions. However, after decades of it, I have finally learned to accept what Blow was telling me: these are just the breaks. That is all they are.

You’ll live