BERNEVAL

Salman Rushdie’s narrator, Saleem, in Midnight’s Children is prone to reading history in associative terms and it is perhaps fitting that we hereby bring the final paragraph of the novel in close proximity to a scatological moment — an almost castaway waste of a moment — that occurs near the end…

Midnight, or thereabouts. A man carrying a folded (and intact) black umbrella walks towards my window from the direction of the railway tracks, stops, squats, shits. Then sees me silhouetted against light and, instead of taking offence at my voyeurism, calls: ‘Watch this!’ and proceeds to extrude the longest turd I have ever seen. ‘Fifteen inches!’ he calls, ‘How long can you make yours?’ Once, when I was more energetic, I would have wanted to tell his life-story; the hour, and his possession of an umbrella, would have been all the connections I needed to begin the process of weaving him into my life, and I have no doubt that I’d have finished by proving his indispensability to anyone who wishes to understand my life and benighted times; but now I’m disconnected, unplugged, with only epitaphs left to write. So, waving at the champion defecator, I call back: ‘Seven on a good day,’ and forget him.

Saleem may be modest about his production of shit but magnificent in the scope of multitudes that his writing pours out onto the page in those final epitaphs. He spirals off into the untold.

Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred millions five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, all in good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.

Enormous. Flood of human essence. Appropriate for a novel where the principle interlocutor is called by our narrator his dung lotus, Padma. We as readers are still focalized by this one point, this interlocutor, but we are bereft of her response. Stuck. Having to refigure in a Saleem-like fashion the connections between the untold story of the one unabashed shit producer and the multitudes whose stories are foreshortened and come to figure a return of the same but not same sons which morph into the genderless children. Privacy is forsaken. Peace unattained.

And so for day 1091
08.12.2009

Beside the non-fiction of The Evidence of Things Not Seen by James Baldwin one puts the short story by Toni Cade Bambara “Madame Bai and the Taking of Stone Mountain” in Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions. The title announces something as accomplished what the story hints as yet to come. Madame, the self-defence instructor, poses a series of questions and each of the questions initiates a description of the ruminations of the protagonist.

“One question, daughter.” Madame says it in English.

[…]

“Stone Mountain,” Madame says finally […]

The question is followed by a politicized description of the relief carved into a cliff (a relief depicting a tribute to Confederacy generals). The reader is made to understand the monument receives a particular meaning depending on one’s subject position (“Tourist trap entrapment of visiting schoolchildren lured under the spell of the enslavers of Africans and the killers of Amerinds, lewdly exposed mammoth granite rock of ages the good ole boys think they can hide in from history”) — it is all told with rather more urgency and finesse in the short story. The questions continue.

“What is it for?” Madame asks […]

There follows a piece of bravura writing where our protagonist in a series of truncated sentences is not only describing its function (“[t]o rally the good ole boys, to dispirit the young, to celebrate the.”) but also its destruction (“Five sticks of dynamite shoved in just so […] A people’s army could.”). It is an oratorical gesture that prepares Madame’s striking final words which end the story

“Stone Mountain is for taking,” she says.

Without quoting large swaths of the story, I do no justice to the intensity. I do want to be clear that the whole section of Madame’s apparently simple questions and the train of thought they provoke follows a very detailed description of how the authorities withdraw from investigating the murders of Black children (“Wholesale defection begins in June when the headlines around the country announce that the monster’s been nabbed. […] One man, two counts, and amnesia drifts in like fog to blanket the city.”)

Look up images of Stone Mountain. Read Bambara’s story. Understand Baldwin’s “virtuoso polemic” (Kirkus Review). And believe that changing culture is massive work. Good work. Ongoing work. Necessary work.

And so for day 1088
05.12.2009

It was in reading Against Interpretation cover to cover in the order the essays appear instead of selectively in what ever order piqued my curiosity (I had years ago consulted the “Notes on Camp”) that I noticed that the end of the essay on Happenings made a beautiful introduction to the penultimate essay in the book “Notes on Camp” which originally appeared in the Partisan Review. So the juxtaposition of “Happening” ending and “Camp” beginning is an artefact of later placement. Yet how very telling that we leave off with a consideration of audience only to pick up a concern with sensibility.

Comedy is not any less comic because it is punitive. As in tragedy, every comedy needs a scapegoat, someone who will be punished and expelled from the social order represented mimetically in the spectacle. What goes on in the Happenings merely follows Artaud’s prescription for a spectacle that will eliminate the stage, that is, the distance between spectators and performers, and “will physically envelop the spectator.” In Happening this scapegoat is the audience [1962]

Susan Sontag provides here in “Happenings: an art of radical juxtaposition” a marvellous key to reading the difficult-to-describe sensibility of the 1964 “Notes on Camp”. There too audience plays a role:

The peculiar relation between Camp taste and homosexuality has to be explained. […] Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

I am reminded of the comments years later by Fran Lebowitz on connoisseurship and the gay public of the New York City Ballet. Somehow along the way we have lost the scapegoat and the monopoly on camp or moral seriousness. Still worth remembering the history.

And so for day 1086
03.12.2009