Notley on Crime Fiction in Encyclopedia

By happy coincidence, in light of my last post, over breakfast this morning I was thumbing through the enormous Encyclopedia A-E, which is full of wonderful things, among them Alice Notley's excellent entry on Crime Fiction. The entry is seven and a half large pages long, and includes three samples of Notley's own poetic work inspired by her reading of "trash novels." Toward the beginning of the entry she suggests that the crime genre exemplified by writers of the past thirty or so years like Michael Connelly, Harlan Coben, Jonathan Kellerman, James Lee Burke, Dennis Lehane, et al., taken all together, functions like a collective poem:

A poem is more than a word machine: it is the experience of reading it and having it in one's head, thus an ambiance, a sensory-intellectual passage, a fluid room. Unstrictly speaking, this whole group of books is a poem, however badly or cynically most of the books are written.... Story-wise the demand is to repeat the old story. (I must have wanted this myself.) A story repeated becomes a poem. You already know what the salient moments will be like, so you skip much of the book and search for certain words, the ones evoking a city or locale and a protagonist's character traits, the crime, the anguish, the name of the murderer, the confrontation; some of these books I seem hardly to have read a word of. "Page-turner" actually refers to not reading but literally turning pages.

* * *

Notley sets James Ellroy head and shoulders above the great mass of contemporary popular crime writers, applauding his prose as "fiction, and language, coded into music." Having recently read The Big Nowhere, I would have to agree. "When I discovered Ellroy," continues Notley, "I wondered why I'd bothered with that other shit, but after I'd read most of him I went back to it." She doesn't say directly whether she also reads much of the crime fiction of the decades preceding the ones she focuses on, but the quality in Ellroy she mentions, the sense of noir compressed noir music he manages to evoke so skillfully, is for me the dominant characteristic of the fiction I was discussing in my last post. Contemporary writers like Kellerman (whom Notley disses entertainingly) are by and large preoccupied with events unfolding, case developments (the plot thickens!), occasional violent confrontations and altercations. All these things happen in the older stories too, of course, but there they are continually in tension with something more like pure style, a dizzying tangle of moods and textures whose eventual resolution--or rather, the resolution of the plot elements they obscure--happens almost "under the table." Raymond Chandler was the master of this effect, but even the countless quickie paperbacks of the period share in it to a far greater extent than most of what is written today. Here is a passage from Wade Miller's Guilty Bystander (1947), chosen pretty much at random:

A buzz sounded at the squat switchboard against the wall and Smitty turned to it. The clean newness of the black panel with its metal-rimmed holes struck a jangling note in the hotel's atmosphere. The board silently gave notice that at times the Bridgway rooms housed--or hid--more important persons than waterfront bums and border drifters. The warped letter box atop the switchboard stared into the lobby with two dozen square sockets, counteracting the suggestion with bland disreputability.

And here's a passage from Jonathan Kellerman's Therapy (2004):

The Bartell house was ... a hulking, flat-faced wedding cake set behind a pitiful front yard that was mostly circular driveway. White fencing topped with gold finials shielded the property. A security sign promising ARMED RESPONSE hung near the electric gate. Through the fence, double doors with frosted-glass panes were backlit teal green. Above them, a giant porthole showcased a white-hot chandelier. No vehicles in front; a four-car garage provided ample shelter for automotive pets.

I think I've been fair to Kellerman here by selecting a passage that, to its credit, paints a convincing picture of a certain kind of suburban nouveau-riche architecture. The porthole is a nice touch. But this is as good as it gets. The bulk of the book is dialogue, as is true of most crime bestsellers in this genre now. And it's not interesting dialogue! Miller's paragraph, on the other hand, does all kinds of things at once: it sets a mood, it lays the groundwork for important plot points, and it sets the elements of the scene into an animated interplay of description and psychological symbolism. The chandelier behind the porthole in Kellerman is never more than a vivid snapshot; the letter box in Miller is practically a supporting character. And yet, nothing about Miller's prose is overwritten. It's all economical, tight, snappy. There is nothing in it like the preciousness of "automotive pets."

* * *

Notley concludes her entry with a provocative meditation:

I see that living requires me to face the fact of the murder over and over. This is what I know, and this is a knowledge I share with crime fiction. Perhaps contemporary poetry has become too reticent for my taste.

Sweerts' Clothing the Naked

Clothing the Naked, ca. 1661
Michael Sweerts (Flemish, 1618–1664)
Oil on canvas; 32 1/4 x 45 in. (81.9 x 114.3 cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Michael Sweerts' "Clothing the Naked" is one of my favorite canvases in the Met. The painting depicts one of the seven traditional Christian Acts of Mercy, all seven of which are treated by Sweerts in a separate series (as far as I know, this piece is not part of a series, but an isolated work). The depiction of the clothing of the naked in the Seven Acts of Mercy set, like the other acts such as the burial of the dead, tending to the sick, and so on, is very different from this one in its mode of composition and presentation; it contains multiple full body figures in a detailed urban setting with fairly elaborate perspective, and the focus is more on the larger context of the act than the individuals performing and receiving it.



In the stand-alone "medium shot" treatment of the theme, in contrast, there is no discernible background at all, and each of the two figures stands with his face in more or less full view of the spectator, each taking up roughly half of the visual field. They are so evenly balanced against each other that what assymetry there is is striking: the figure on the right dominates by virtue of his imposing finery, his notably paler complexion, and his encroachment onto the other's space with the white linen shift he extends to him. He also is either slightly taller, or stands more fully erect, or both. His head is tilted so that his tall fur hat seems almost to threaten to topple into the other half of the frame--an effect that is enhanced by the naked man's posture, which is just this side of defensive cringing. The naked man's head is tilted toward the other as well, a bit less dramatically. In general the men resemble each other, and both assume somewhat Christlike positions. It is difficult to say whether they meet each other's eyes directly; it is possible to see their gazes as just missing, or caught in the moment just before or after they connect.

The painting is a perfect mesh of readability and unreadability: depending on the assumptions and expectations you bring to it, it yields entirely contradictory, or at least entirely separate, meanings. From what I've seen, a standard critical take on the piece has been that it successfully conveys the magnanimous grace of the giver and the grateful humility of the receiver, and that the formal homology between the two men asserts a bond of common humanity that transcends their differences in social station. In terms of the artist's probable intentions, there is much to commend this view: apparently Sweerts was a devoutly religious missionary whose acts of charity and worldly self-denial are well-attested. When I first saw the painting, however, the depiction looked to me--and to the person I was with--like a merciless satire on class piety. The pallor on the giver's face evoked a masklike frozenness that concealed only thinly a sense of self-satisfied hypocrisy; the receiver's averted stance and tense physical attitude evoked resentful distrust. Each man seemed to regard the other with his own aspect of impatience or disdain.

One could also view the painting as a complex scene of carnal attraction: the bodily and facial mirroring of the figures, the interplay between dominant and submissive elements, and the transitional situation of dress/undress all contribute to this sense, which is by no means incompatible with either of the two other interpretations. There are several other works in Sweerts' corpus that would give precedence for a homoerotic theme.

What do the naked man's parted lips signify? a meek voicing of thanks? a sotto voce oath of contempt? a breathless, voiceless expression of desire?

What surprises me much more than the undecidability of such questions is the untroubled confidence with which generations of commentators pronounce their decisions. Poetry is problematic enough, but as overdetermined, aporetic, and equivocal as language may be, it has nothing on visual images. At least words can pretend to bear or provide definitive glosses. With pictures ... well, all I can think of is the famous scene at the end of Queen Christina, the close-up of Garbo's face, where it seems that the deepest, most profound thoughts and emotions imaginable surround it like a halo--but when asked by adoring moviegoers how she had attained to such a sublime range of expression, she explained that she simply put on the blankest look she could possibly muster.

The Poetic Aura

The “aura” surrounding an original artwork, as Walter Benjamin imagines it in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” is a function of its material singularity: “its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” One stands in awe of a painting by Leonardo, for example, partly because of the bare fact that it is a determinate “it” in space and time, an “it” that can only be viewed within a strictly delimited set of spatial coordinates. To witness the artwork in person is thus akin to a religious ritual in which the viewer partakes directly of the object’s presence. This presence is dissipated, Benjamin argues, when mass reproduction of art objects makes viewing possible within a much larger, increasingly deferred set of conditions. To view a photograph of the Mona Lisa is thus to remove the aura from the equation, or at least to weaken its energy.

Benjamin mentions poetry, and indeed, literature in general, only in passing throughout the course of his essay. “The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story,” he remarks at an early point in the piece, adding however that “within the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly important, case.” Presumably, he means that print is particularly important as a technological innovation which accelerates the spread of mass literacy, and thus lays the groundwork for a transformation in class consciousness.

In what way, if at all, do Benjamin’s concepts of the “original” and “authenticity” apply to literature?

“The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity,” Benjamin writes. “Chemical analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish this, as does the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the fifteenth century.” What this does not address is the fundamental difference between the bronze and the manuscript as types of artwork. The aesthetic content of the bronze artifact consists in its entire being: it manifests that content directly to the eye of the beholder, as an organic aspect of its materiality. The manuscript, on the other hand, manifests two different levels of artistic value: the value that it possesses by virtue of its provenance as an “original,” and the value that it possesses by virtue of what the author actually wrote on it. Or, one may say that the bronze too manifests value on both a historical and an aesthetic level, but that in it the two levels are superimposed so as to appear inseparable. “The whole sphere of authenticity,” Benjamin asserts, “is outside technical—and, of course, not only technical—reproducibility.” It is plain to see how this is true of the bronze, but in the case of the manuscript, it is a dubious conclusion: isn’t literature, whether oral or written, reproducible by its very nature? And yet, don’t we speak all the time of literary authenticity on a level beyond the mere identification of a material “original”?

Would any version of a poem other than its original manuscript form be considered to be diminished in “aura”? What if the poem was composed on a word processor? Is it only the original saved file that possesses the aura? Or does the aura disappear as soon as it is saved into a file, and is no longer an active field of composition on the computer screen? Or is all written/typed poetry aura-poor, in contrast to aura-rich oral poetry?

It does seem that something like Benjamin’s conception of aura can be—and often is—imagined as part of our response to poetry and poetic publication. One example: the limited-run, limited-distribution chapbook vs. the mass-marketed perfectbound edition. More broadly, first editions of any sort vs. later editions. Note that none of all this need be confined to poetry; the same idea could be applied to the discographical concerns of the audiophile, for example.

In fact, the context in which this variation on aura makes the most sense in general is that of collection. If connoisseurship works on two levels in the classical visual arts model (one of spectatorship and one of acquisition) those levels are collapsed into one on the literary model (the connoisseur covets not necessarily the only edition, but certainly the most limited edition). Whereas, in the classical visual model, scarcity is built in as a fact of composition, in the literary model, scarcity itself is in a sense manufactured (I say “in a sense,” because of course all editions are limited in one sense, as a necessary consequence of there being finite materials).

It seems reasonable at first thought to propose that, rather than the manuscript or first draft, the live reading is the most immediate parallel in poetry to the existence of an original in painting or sculpture. But really the true parallel here is between the reading and an artist-attended exhibition or unveiling of the completed work: both are occasions whose social function is generally dominant over any artistic function, and both depend on the separate, prior existence of the artwork itself. It is true that attendance at a reading often enhances the auditor’s experience of the work: hence the commonplace that so-and-so’s reading of a particular poem “opens up” the poem for the listener (or, alternately, proves disappointing). But importantly, the poem as heard live and the poem as read on the page are very different kinds of experience, whereas viewing an original painting and viewing its reproduction differ only in visual intensity (vividness of color, texture of paint and canvas, etc.) and in the degree of cultural status associated.

For the poem or novel or other written work, the privileging of material “authenticity” is rendered irrelevant both with respect to there being any “original” object that assumes primacy over later copies (though a subsidiary value adhering to the physical means of transmission may emerge for the bibliophile), and with respect to there being an ideal condition of live performance in which the poem’s “true” nature is realized (pace any number of ultimately unconvincing arguments in support of the latter notion).

One way of theorizing the poetic aura is to say that the two values I’ve pointed at above—that of the physical edition and that of the live reading—generate the effect of a greater, organic value imagined to emanate from a center of originality somewhere “within” the poem itself. If one examines the matter closely, one is forced to admit that this effect is phantasmal, but it is nevertheless a convincing illusion, and thus it facilitates the same ritual function as the aura surrounding other works of art.

If “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art,” and if this is so because “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition,” what does this say about an art, like writing, which has always been not only subject to reproduction, but wholly dependent on it for its very being?

If we accept Benjamin’s central premise, it would seem that one of three things must be the case: either the printed text, as a medium inextricable from mechanical reproduction, has never been and can never be possessed of an aura, or the aura of the printed text resists withering in some special way. Further, if the latter is the case, it remains in question whether the printed text’s resistance to withering was only contemporaneous with that period prior to the advent of the mechanical reproduction of the other arts, and subsequently, by whatever sympathetic process, was lowered so that the aura of the printed text perished as well; or whether its resistance continued unabated, so that the printed text today remains attended by the aura in a way that the other arts do not. (Or, if we reject Benjamin’s premise regarding mechanical reproduction, but grant provisional coherence to his notion of the aura, there is of course the possibility that he is simply wrong, and that the aura persists in copied works of art—visual or otherwise—no less than in originals.)

All of this depends on how precisely we understand what Benjamin means by “aura” in the first place, if what he means is in fact cogent past a certain point. Here is the passage in which he elucidates the metaphor at length:

The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to natural ones. We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

TO BE CONTINUED