Serge Gainsbourg's "Histoire de Melody Nelson" (1971)

THE ALBUM

Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971) is twenty-eight minutes of seamlessness stitched from shared riffs and melodies that return in swirled variants and disjunctions. Gainsbourg collaborated with composer Jean-Claude Vannier for this concept album dominated by what Tom Ewing has so aptly called “Herbie Flowers’ treacly bass” with its slow, sweved funk.

Again, Tom Ewing puts it so well:

That bass is the first sound you hear on Melody Nelson, quietly tracking up and down in a windscreen-wiper rhythm: Gainsbourg starts talking in French 30 seconds later, describing a night drive in a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. The album is routinely described as "cinematic," but the music is more of a mindtrack than a soundtrack—-a tar pit of introspection when Gainsbourg's brooding narrator is alone at the record's beginning and end, then giddy and savage by turns as he conducts his affair with the 15-year-old Melody across the short tracks in the album's middle.

Although Gainsbourg abandons his archetypal vocals in it, replacing them with a fuzzed breathiness, accomplished by drawing the mic close to the mouth, there is an intersection between myth and modern in it, a supple paean to Baudelairean decadence.

I think of line-breaks often when listening to this album because of the way it uses space and breaks to create a series. The music veers from freewheeling guitar, funk style bass guitar, spoken-word vocalizations, and lush, deep orchestrated string and choral arrangements by Jean-Claude Vannier who composed almost the entire music in collaboration with Gainsbourg for the album.

There are seven songs total, and the first and last songs are the longest, both running close to seven minutes and forty seconds a piece, built around the same bass lines (though Gainsbourg brings in a Greek chorus to round out the final song). It’s ethereal, funktastic, buzz-pocked, and trip-hopped.

Melody 7:37
Ballade de Melody Nelson 2:01
Valse De Melody (Version Instrumentale) 1:32
Ah! Melody 1:50
L'Hotel particulier 4:06
En melody 3:27
Cargo culte 7:41

Serge Gainsbourg does vocals and composition, while Jane Birkin enters as the persona of Melody, and carries those vocals. Alan Parker plays the electric guitar. Dave Richmond and Herbie Flowers play the bass guitar. Dougie Wright does the drums. Jean-Claude Vannier plays the piano, organ, harmonium, and cymbals. A French youth choir provides the choral voices at the end. Jean-Luc Ponty plays haunting violin parts.

As for influence, the album has “officially” touched musicians and songwriters from Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, Beck, Tricky, Air, Faith No More, Broadcast, Massive Attack, David Holmes, Cibo Matto, Portishead, Stereolab, Michael Stipe, and Neil Hannon.

*

Backstory. Gainsbourg had been writing chansons for a decade, and a feted affair with Brigitte Bardot prompted his most successful song-writing period. But Gainsbourg’s work was still classified as pop, still pop enough to win Eurovision.

For someone who considered himself an artist — and who studied painting before destroying most of his work in a moment of frustration— Gainsbourg did not rest comfortably with popular culture, or the forms of fame it promised. He still considered himself an artist, a mind of multiple mediums, so he vowed to make weighty, dark, novelistic art through the disposable medium of pop culture. He would subvert the sweetness of the chanson by bringing it into dialogue with other instruments and a story. A plot. Enter Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a book Gainsbourg admired for its relentless darkness. Darran Anderson says what fascinated Gainsbourg about Lolita was how it revolved around “the narrator, the male ego and all the obsessive, destructive decadence and delusion therein”:

Like the book, it is an album about the Beast, masquerading as a study of the Beauty.

*

Three years before this album, Gainsbourg met Jane Birkin on the set of Slogan, in which he played a rather louche Frenchman who falls in love with the attractive English lead, played by Birkin. The May ‘68 riots changed the air in Paris. Gainsbourg and Birkin fell in love. And so it began — a romantic and creative partnership whose duet, “Je T’aime…Moi Non Plus”, was quickly banned in both France and England. In 1970, Gainsbourg imagined the form he thought could carry his obsession for Birkin, and this form leaned into a cinematic score, an album which alternated between words, music, songs, images, and metafictional traces.

Jane Birkin, who had become Gainsbourg’s wife, served as both image, sound, and inspiration: she is on the cover art of the album; she provides the voice of Melody Nelson. The metafictional plot begins with the middle-aged male narrator driving his Rolls Royce Silver Ghost along a road at night, until he accidentally knows a teenaged girl off her bike. This is Melody Nelson, a young British girl, whom the narrator rescues and then takes to a hotel, where they have sex. The music carries us through this strange, sudden love affair with short asides and conversations between the couple. When Melody catches a plane back to her family in England, the male narrator is heartbroken, devastated. He performs an African Cargo Cult ritual in the hopes that it will cause his love to return. But magic doesn’t always do what we want— the threshold it crosses alters everything— and we are given to understand that the ritual causes a plane crash, presumably the plane carrying Melody home.

Gainsbourg had recently read of the African cargo cults that prayed for Western-built planes to crash on their land, believing these technological wonders to be gifts from the gods unfairly bestowed upon the wrong people. In order to keep his and Birkin/ Melody’s love pure, he decided, she had no choice but to die by his hands (fictionally-speaking). As an ode, bonkers; as an honest outpouring of one man’s obsessive love, timelessly fascinating.

Why does the cargo cult ritual cause the plane crash? Is it because the male narrator appropriated a ritual whose mastery he couldn’t claim? Does it reflect his subconscious longing that the beloved should die rather than be permitted to leave? Does the plane actually crash or is this part of the story the narrator offers to end his feelings for the beloved —to close the narrative?

Aside on Benjamin Biolay’s “Dans Le Merco Benz”

Before laying out Gainsbourg’s album, I want to note something that has always struck me, and yet elides most commentary on Benjamin Biolay’s early work, namely, Melody Nelson’s influence. Biolay definitely borrows a little in his video for “Dans Le Merco Benz”, which stars Chiara Mastorianni, his then-wife, whose voice also provides background choral vocals. Unlike Gainsbourg, Biolay focuses on the vehicle itself, the Mercedes Benz that has replaced the Rolls Royce as the car of European luxury.

Melody 7:37

The video for “Melody” was created by Jean-Christophe Averty, and it ran as a TV film in France produced several years after the album’s release.

Jane Birkin plays Melody both vocally and visually in this album. You can watch this “Melody Nelson,” where Jane Birkin joins as a background voice and the character. The background is critical. Melody is Serge’s invention.

Ballade de Melody Nelson 2:01

The ballade form here begins with a conversation between Gainsbourg and Melody in spoken word, which then shifts into melodic chanson form, with Melody’s voice serving as a soft instrumentation rather than a vocal. Here’s a translation:

HE: This is the story of
SHE: Melody Nelson
HE: Apart from me, no one ever held her
in his arms
Does this surprise you?
So be it.
She had love, poor
SHE: Melody Nelson
HE: Yes, she had tons
Though her days were numbered
14 autumns
15 summers

And it continues a bit more, to end with the speaker asserting the possessive form — “My Melody”— which he finishes by describing:

Precious little fool
You were the condition
Sine qua non

Valse De Melody (Version Instrumentale) 1:32

Gainsbourg borrows the waltz form to bring in music. And he subverts the stipulation of the title, namely, that this is an “instrumental version,” by singing softly through it— or insisting the voice is an instrument.

Ah! Melody 1:50

A sickness, I don’t know what I offer you.

L'Hotel particulier 4:06

This is where the love affair takes place, in the hotel. The setting. The drums soften the entry but also add layers which feel ominous. (Tom Ewing: “Gainsbourg's voice shudders with lust and dread, and the music responds, flares of piano and string breaking into the song over an impatient bassline.”)

En melody 3:27

Melody voulut revoir le ciel de Sunderland
Elle prit le 707
L'avion cargo de nuit
Mais le pilote automatique aux commandes de l'appareil
Fit une erreur fatale à Melody

Melody wanted to see Sunderland’s sky again
She took the 707
The cargo plane’s night flight
But the autopilot in control of the device
Made an error fatal to Melody

Cargo culte 7:41

In “Cargo Culte,” the final song, the speaker is looking for Melody — and he asks the Sirens where she is — and a chorus of Greek Sirens fills in the space between his spoken word chanson-style monologue. And repetition structures the mythos of the album: “Cargo Culte” returns to the melodies and motion of the first track, “Melody,” adding only those wordless chorales to dampen the return.

The montage of antiquated objects, the peripatetic searching, the drive to find Melody among curiosities form part Gainsbourg’s aesthetic in this album.

Jason Draper described its tonal energy best: “The closing Cargo Culte alone rises to such intensity, it’s virtually impossible to hear it without picturing Gainsbourg plunging the knife into his own heart before stabbing a Gitane out in the wound.”

The Making of Melody Nelson

Turning Jane Birkin into Melody Nelson was its own art. Belle Hutton explains how Melody’s red hair was prompted by a bad mood:

Gainsbourg was late to set, and when he arrived could see that Birkin had grown impatient. “He opens his briefcase, where he always carries his wads of ‘Pascal’ bank notes and packets of Gitanes, and pulls out an auburn wig – red, really – that he puts on his head to play the clown and make her laugh,” recalls Frank. “Suddenly the atmosphere relaxes. Then Jane tries on the wig, looks in the mirror, and becomes Melody.”

Tony Frank, the photographer who took the iconic cover photos, released a recent “booklet”, Bleu Melody, which includes contact sheets, proofs, behind-the-scenes imagery and slides from the shoot, a series of “Melody mementoes.”

The toy monkey which covers Birkin’s breasts in the cover photo was a personal treasure, a toy given to her as a child after her uncle won it at a carnival.

Tony Frank says that Birkin carried this monkey —her “Monkey”— everywhere in a large wicker basket that she used as a purse. Legend has it that Monkey wound up in Gainsbourg’s coffin after his death. It was Jane’s final gift to him.

Realizing that he’d created a memorable monster, Gainsbourg named his publishing company Melody Nelson in honor of his fictional muse—- but then got distracted, producing a new album of unremarkable acoustic songs that feel uncomfortably safe in comparison.

Tom Ewing notes that “Herbie Flowers, whose bass is the undertow pulling the album together, surfaced a year later playing on Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side", whose bassline is the first ripple of Melody Nelson's wider pop culture influence.”

“Since then it's been left to others—- Jarvis Cocker, Beck, Tricky, Air, Broadcast—- to pick up this record's breadcrumb trail,” Ewing adds. “But Gainsbourg's dark focus, and Vannier's responsiveness, aren't easily equalled.

Vannier on working with Serge: “It was really a collaboration: I wrote what I wanted, he wrote what he wanted.”

Here’s the video for “Melody Nelson,” where Jane Birkin joins as a background voice and the character.

Live performances & More on Jean-Claude Vannier

Gainsbourg’s partner in composition, Jean-Claude Vannier, also composed for Air, David Holmes, Stereolab, Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, Portishead, and Beck, whose 2002 track "Paper Tiger" from Sea Change is extremely close to the distinctive Histoire de Melody Nelson sound. Vannier has spoken more recently about his experiences with the making of Melody Nelson in an interview.

Vannier performed the album live at London's Barbican on October 21, 2006 with guest vocalists Jarvis Cocker, Badly Drawn Boy, Brigitte Fontaine, The Bad Seeds' Mick Harvey and lead singer from Super Furry Animals, Gruff Rhys. Vannier performed the album in its entirety alongside his own solo album L'Enfant assassin des mouches. Publicity for the Barbican concert revealed that the musicians used for the album were Dougie Wright, Big Jim Sullivan, Herbie Flowers and Vic Flick who all joined Vannier for the concert. The BBC Concert Orchestra, the Crouch End Festival Chorus and a children's string quintet were part of the show.

In October 2008 22nd & 23rd Jean-Claude Vannier performed the album live at the Cité de la Musique with guest vocalists Mathieu Amalric, Brigitte Fontaine, Brian Molko (Placebo), Martina Topley Bird, Daniel Darc, Clotilde Hesme, Seaming To. Also performing were Herbie Flowers (bass), Claude Engel (guitar), Pierre-Alain Dahan (drums). Jean Claude Vannier also performed the L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches. The Lamoureux Orchestra, the Yound Choir of Paris and a children's string quintet were also part of the show.

On August 28, 2011, Jean-Claude Vannier participated in A Tribute to Serge Gainsbourg at the Hollywood Bowl. The artists that performed Gainsbourg's songs that evening included Beck, Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl, Mike Patton, Zola Jesus, Victoria Legrand (singer of indie band Beach House), Ed Droste (singer of indie band Grizzly Bear) and Serge's son Lulu Gainsbourg. The second half of the evening included a performance of the album with Vannier conducting. Each of the album's songs were performed by different combinations of the evening's artists, backed by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and the Cal State Fullerton chorale. American actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt also participated in the album's performance.

On an interesting side-note, Lulu Gainsbourg now lives in NYC, and swears never to move back to France. But he has covered a number of his father’s songs, including Melody.

"Ecrire" by Marguerite Duras, an unofficial translation.

Marguerite Duras published this brief sketch, “Ecrire,” in French in the spring of 1990, the year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I’m leaving it here in my unofficial translation for those who might be interested.

*

There is the scandal . . . that of literature. I think literature is scandalous, because it is scarce and it drives people crazy.

In other times, I believed— I repeated this for decades—that anyone could write. I hymned this across every tonality.

I don’t believe it anymore.

I don’t know what it means to write, at all, but I know that everyone cannot do it.

I can have a written page, there. We can read it. The page is tangible. But I don’t know at all what will be on the next page before tackling it.

It’s very aleatory. Sometimes, we fear dying before the page is full, because we know, regardless. . . we know the benchmarks, we know the event we are aiming towards, but we must bring the text to that. One must make it happen, venture the entire voyage.

Writing, I think, is essentially an activity that requires one to think about death every day.

They have said I write about writing.

But I think everyone who writes, writes about writing . . .

Which is to say that this species of the word’s infinite indefiniteness, of the image, of the theme, of the memory, of love, these things must obstruct those people, those people who do not write.

There is a choice that operates, an organic choice that operates

When we don’t write, I don’t know what we do, I can’t even imagine, but we must continue in a forest that never closes, on you; because there, when we write, it is the forest that closes; you are trapped inside it.

I believe that by dint of writing, by living there, in the writing, I have arrived in a sort of monoculture, a mono-life, a life near monotone, the accidents being nothing but the books.

Notes on Antoine Volodine's "Minor Angels": Part 2

Homage, homage (homage, homage)
Is coming back around (is coming back around)
Coming back through you (coming back through you)
Is something I can't understand (something I can't understand)

”HOMAGE”

To pick up from where I dropped the ball, namely, somewhere between the angels and the archaoelogy, and proceed into Volodine’s novel, Minor Angels (translated by Jordan Stump) with carpool at my throat—

Names change; they designate nothing more than a moment in time. Volodine continues vexing identity by having the angels play double roles, living under different names, acting out different parts of themselves.

Identity is ‘fragmented’, and the names toggle between persons and cover stories. So we meet "Sofia" in the nursing home, where she sorts and delivers mail to the crones, and the role of letters is salvific, as letters carry the words of other worlds into the prisons of this one. But the experiments conducted on the crones to study their immortality are finished: scientific interest has moved on. What remains are the scent memories of apparatuses, rubber sheets, and dental prostheses. The smell of the future is rich in plastic apparatus!

Every angel does the grunt-work speaking for ghosts. There is no single voice that remains singular.

"Unknown martyrs and anonymous mostly red peoples spoke through the voice of the old women, and now they speak through the voice of Will Scheideman."

Here, Volodine applies what he has called "the practice of homage," allowing the voices of the missing to be taken up by others who refuse their disappearance, who reject the feel of ending, itself.

“I’ve never done something where the sound alone is already an entire film…
where there’s so much to hear simultaneously, because so much is being told.”

- Wim Wenders on Wings of Desire, with its overhearing angels

CRONES, EPIC CORRECTIVES, AND FAILED REVOLUTIONISTS

The post-cataclysmic landscape of Minor Angels includes the "battered facades" of big avenues, the "gaping wounds" where buildings once stood, the ruins of consumerist temples and shopping malls; this field of debris continues expanding, swallowing, enveloping the world. The "barbarism" of the present is laid, loosely, against the lustrousness of remembered revolutionary ideals. The background noise is the "roar of the marketplace," but the real sound, the anchor, is the "clapping of little waves, the clapping made by loving bodies in an embrace." There are prisoners and those who demand their own execution for betraying the cause – for allowing the mafias and capitalists to take over.

The 12th narract belongs to Varvalia Lodanka, one of the formative revolutionists, a “crone” who invokes the choral repetitions of Greek tragedy, retracing the litany "before us, we see," layering memories, names, and places from motion which resembles the percussive effects of  a jazz brush circling a top-hat drum. Lodanka names the offenders: "the multi-national mafia", the "duplicitous language" that erases the poor, the present, the folk wisdom. 

Will Scheidenmann slumps on the bed in Varvalia Lodanka's yurt, a place he never felt at home, imagining the sixteen years since he had left, and the time before his birth: "the time of the dormitory, where his grandmother's manipulated his embryonic form and growled over his body to fill him with their vision of the world." 

Annoyed by the disruptive voices of memory, Will, who "hates being interrupted when ... reciting a strange narract," realizes the crones know him so well that they recognize him in any costume, any voice, any uniform. 

After a crone calls him out on the narract, Will admits:

"I gave him that name so I wouldn't seem to be forever speaking of myself and never of anyone else. But it was me." 

It is always me or us in the post-exotic oneirism; the one includes the countless. The we invokes the silenced. Does this conflict with the speakers’ refusals to be indicted for the past, as one sees in the monologue on “what matters” written "in the language of today and no other”?

The past is not something he can be responsible for, the speaker assures the reader.

"To build new ruins without shame, or, at least, to live without shame in the endless ruins before them:" this is what Volodine's characters were free to do after "the corrective epic of our Varvalia Lodenko, her appeals for a massacre of the powerful, her nostalgia for a total abolition of every sort of privilege" had taken place. The question isn't whether Varvalia's daydream was "right-minded". To interrogate it in this way would be to re-enact its massacres in reaction, to answer by affirming the importance of the end. Varvalia's goal was "to rip out the human roots of unhappiness"; another angel admits to assisting her with assassinations on an as-needed basis. The matter-of-fact narrative tone isn’t quite confessional, nor is it penitent.

“Mao Zedong said that the revolution “is not a dinner party,” Volodine has said:

Post-exoticism stages stories and projects images that have nothing to do with elegant descriptions of “dinner parties.” The stories often take place in the ruins of war, after the disasters of ethnic cleansings, after failed revolutions, atrocious counterrevolutions, in societies where violence, social injustice, and capricious masters hold sway.

Books and stories preserve the past but they also defy it completely, and forge new fantasies that may become actionable as a future. “What we had called post-exoticism,” Volodine writes in J. T. Mahany’s translation of Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven:

“ . . . was a construction connected to revolutionary shamanism and literature, literature that was either written by hand or learned by heart and recited, as the administration through the years would sometimes forbid us any paper material; it was an interior construction, a withdrawal, a secret welcoming land, but also something offensive that participated in the plot of certain unarmed individuals against the capitalist world and its countless ignominies.”

Volodine has said a “backfiction” lies behind post-exotic narratives. Again, one senses an unarticulated loyalty on the author’s part—-something he wishes to say without being responsible for having said it. In that sense, he is a time-bound as the rest of us.

ASIDE WHEREIN MY TIME DIFFERS FROM THAT OF THE ANGELS

If I were a better person, I’d excerpt the long quotes on advantages and hypocrisy found on page 32. But no one has the proper time to fulfill the duties of imagining to be the person they determined as better. My time differs from that of the angels, in the fullness of its etc.

THE PORT OF THE “WE” WE MUST BE UNTO OTHERS

In narract 34, Malecka Bayarlag describes life on a ship in a port plagued by power outages, physical fights among sailors in hard-bitten poses. As a self-described “subhuman” with some knowledge of shamanism, Malika locates a town in Peru from the dreams of a woman he slept with, and the dreams pass through the bodies of lovers like settings. This is the setting Volodine and gives us, namely, the place as trumped by others who passed through prior. The perspective tangoes through multiple minds remembering lovers, beds, ports. These "interior worlds" impinge continuously on conversations between characters, as when a ship captain remembers "his most absurd convictions," namely the love a man has for a son back when sons existed, when fatherhood was a locus of identity.

Safe harbor vs. the Untermenge one must be to others. But safe harbor is simply the act of narrating —- or “narracting”— the story. Hannah Arendt’s ghost tips her cigarette holder over narract 41, in which Constanzo Cossu describes the mass displacements of the End-Times, and the significance of the refugee's legal status. The refugee tries to buy his way to safety with gold, but the ship will not accept him. He begs the watchman to let him on as a company baggage, or to be in the untermenge category, or even to be added as a "a cadaver . . . As miscellaneous merchandise" or a "found object."  Finally, he begs the watchman to accept him as "an extraterrestrial covered with ants,"  but the watchman does not reply. It's business as usual for borders.

“THIS CONFUSION OF ONE WORD FOR ANOTHER”

In a month without rain or magnetic storms, a narract shifts from Witold Yanschog to the second person address. The epistolary nature of the narract glimmers after claims of "shamanically-assisted copulation," which the speaker asserts as "this confusion of one word for another." 

"I wouldn't like to be penetrated by an admirer of the capitalist system,” one lover says to another in quotation.

A character quotes his love interest back to her across memory, and then overnarrates Witold Yanschog, who might "dream of her and her naked body as he lay on top of you."  The next line goes on to explain or qualify: “I say you, I used the second person singular to avoid continually saying Bella Mardirassian, and so it won't seem that I only talk about myself and my own experiences.”

This is how the son speaks to the crones who want to know what happened to their friends that were imprisoned. The fate of the disappeared is the hearth and hedge of this novel. At one point, Scheidemann does locate himself in time, saying he has been in the yurts for sixteen years since being pardoned. In the apocalypse, as in the beginning, "the distances were not on a the human scale.

Antoine Volodine in conversation with Jeffrey Zuckerman, Paris Review (July 8, 2015)

NEVER TRUST A NARRATOR OR A NARRACT

Hierarchy doesn’t vanish in Volodine’s post-apocalypse. Status-seeking behavior characterizes life in the camps. Loyalty to the nouveau-riche is frowned upon – better to identify as a "rubble-clearer." The questions posed by class-related identification are not elided.

And how effective, really, identity becomes when it buffs itself into a proper elite. Sex aside (for there is not enough of it), our species’ polymorphous perversity peaks at rationalizing massacres, genocide, and holy wars. Give us a gun and we’ll find something to shoot. Better still, send a cloud-carrying revelation across the green or the screen, a revelation that makes some of us part of a chosen, secret elect anointed to usher in the Future. *

Whether one calls it the Vanguard, the 144,000, the Saved, the Miraculous, the Remnant, the Q-Cave, Strauss’ Exoteric Readers, Bohemian Grovers, or the Billionaire League, the self-anointed Elect have everything to gain from disdaining the average and ordinary humans who deliver their groceries and struggle to budget healthcare deductibles. * Volodine's angels don't belong to a creed or nation; postexoticism, according to Volodine, remains a "foreign literature written in French."

Although there are many mothers, children are mostly absent from Volodine's scenes.

The world is old or middle-aged: it has lost its youth like a teen in an early fiction by Mircea Eliade.

Is this sort of lost youth consistent with the sort of Neo-Buddhism Voldodine has described? Is the absence of gender accomplished?

“The writer is a male-identifying human,” I said to my partner while reading Minor Angels on the small portion of sofa left to me by our dog.

“How can you tell?” he asked.

“I can just smell it,” I replied. “He thinks blood is tremendous and unusual. He fears like a man.”

To be clear, women play ‘leading’ roles in the novel— they drive the vehicles, they turn off the lights over their designer license plates at night. Yashreene Kagen, Linda Siew, each name too crowded by cultural resonances to provide a stable cultural referent. I think there are many ways to read this, and one of them is obvious: Volodine refuses to be read through conventional gender or genre commitments. The question of whether he earns this right is, I think, a different one. This confusion of one word for another makes interpretation shaky.

Never trust a narrator—- including yours truly.

OTHER “INFRASTRUCTURES OF THE APOCALYPSE”

Back on my bullshit, namely the last horse of the apocalypse, staring at the burning skyline and wondering if the end of teleology can lead us backwards-forward into a hopeful post-catastrophism.

Apocalypse trends in hard times, Dan Sinykin noted in “The End of the World As We Know It,” an essay surveying  literary apocalypso, or what he calls "a form concerned with the possibility of redemption through destruction." The Book of Revelation abandoned the prophetic tradition of warning against apocalypse, focusing instead on how the world would look when God brought it to an end. Prophecy assumes that humans can change their ways, or that one's actions have a relationship to outcome. Not so with the apocalypse's dead end: the warnings don't matter when it's over. Sinykin interrogates the doom-note created by the abundance of "Christian apocalyptic narratives that find a self-fulfilling prophecy in the devastation around us." 

By looking for signs of end-times, we commit to a sort of fatalism, an irrevocable despair that, to me, cannot be separated from the popularity of teleological takes. For it is teleology that abandons ontology for a reading of runes and signs, for a predicative direction that characterizes our ideas of Progress, apocalypse, salvation, exceptionalism. Sinkykin is right to notice salvationist dreamwork is tied to messianism—or, "the arrival of some transcendent rapture" that causes us to lean into fatalism (though I suspect this depends on one's position as a consumer or creator of time, as a spectator or maker of revolution). The idea of an ending foregrounds the marketplace of afterlives; it draws significance to belief; we choose which god, deity or lifestyle is preferable to rule the end-times. 

Enter Sinykin's discussion of Jessica Harley's Infrastructures of the Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex, which looks at writers working inside "colonial tradition" to imagine "forms of escape without salvation." Harley rejects what others take as Walter Benjamin's "redeemed time," aiming instead for a "non-utopian reorientation", a "narrative embrace of futurelessness," or what she calls "transfiguration."

If my lasso seems rodeos away from Volodine's minor angels, it may be due to our difficulty in imagining other ways of being, living, surviving, and thriving. Capitalist realism, which Mark Fisher defined as "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it," is as critical to Volodine's angels as it is to Harley's transfiguration. 

The most compelling hitch in Volodine's hierophany is it’s refusal to divest from hope. Instead, his characters invest in the look of longing, in memory, in places treasured by intimacy. The traces of angels sacralize the gaze. Volodine's postexoticism privileges the unseen and invisible: it is the immaterial that signifies. 

In a prior conversation, Volodine suggested that postexoticism de-fangs the apocryphal, normalizing the apocalypse as a condition rather than a party fetish, an aberrance, or a religious revenge-fantasy. This sounds like a way of welcoming Fisher’s encouragement to imagine the impossible, and to question the possibilities inherent in the construction of the definition. We leftists are terrible at this part—- the imagining, I mean; the labor of visioning a scene without staging the shoot-out and congratulating ourselves on how we have used the master’s tools to temporarily take over the master’s house. I am paraphrasing Audre Lorde because her voice is significant, and her theory remains critical.

There is money to be made from the problem-solving, self-helping passion of the neoliberal subject. Thinking outside the given formulations requires facing the terror of the unpredictable and losing old labels, nations, names, all the ways we know ourselves, all the ways we are known by others, all the assumptions that keep us from knowing how to live in the present. Or what the present involves.

What comes after the death of prescriptions for personal and collective self-actualization? Perhaps something collaborative, non-redemptive, anterior to eschatology. If apocalypse is insignificant, then Progress, itself, is challenged by the Volodine's commitment to narrative polyphony and non-linearity. 

Volodine as photographed in 2014 by Samuel Kirszenbaum.

AU FIN, NON-FIN!

I like Volodine’s eyebrows. And his Minor Angels.

The book jacket refers to Volodine as a "Slavic writer," which begs the old question of how much a group can “describe” us. Or what we hope to achieve by affiliating ourselves with such a description. And whether an affiliative description is an inscription, a thing that makes us, an identifier that flirts with the possibility of self-definition while absconding the labor of meaning anything.

Volodine drills holes in time and refuses to resolve the disorienting effects of such temporal fracking. I like that about him. Perforations in time won't kill us. Volodine's minor angels, like those demoted from the church canon, give us incisions in time which aren't incisive, cuts which aren't decisive in the way we have come to expect a progress of time, of the history that is part of a process requiring expert explanation. 

Conventionally, historians produce meaning by explaining the event (why a war begins, what ends it), and perhaps the momentum of directionality overdetermines the present in relation to the past or future. In the ambiguous terrain between imagination and reality, Volodine proffers no Hegelian climax, no proper end of history—there is a "journey towards nothingness" which layers narracts of tender, witnessed connection. But there is also a longing that feels radical in context. Where Guido Morselli's final fiction builds post-catastrophe from the loneliness of last-man syndrome, Volodine evokes a more sentimental post-disaster phase, where humans seek to preserve connections among themselves and their stories. 

I’m not arguing for pastoralia. There is no golden age worth huffing. A sentimental affection for stories doesn’t imply a longing for Edenic innocence. * Does innocence exist in story unmortified by sin and expiation? My daughter has stopped asking me to tell her a story at night.

Look, one comes to the post-catastrophic novel imperfectly, lugging the culture’s apocalyptic assumptions. Teleological ordering points towards finality, that dot of an end point in which time is fulfilled. I’m not sure it’s fair to say Volodine entertains teleology as much as he attempts to reveal a space beyond it. The dreams of the reader are the text. Dreams are precise because they aren't infected by capitalist realism—-they are as real as the inaudible pain of unwatered porch plants, and “listening” to the lamentations of plants widene our perception of the possible. 

There is an illicit metaphysicalism, a supranatural voyeurism, involved in perusing the dream-states of others.* Overhearing a dream is like reading a stranger's intimate letter.

As a communicative form, the dream is private, expressible, fragmented. In recalling our own dreams aloud, we become voyeurs of the self, voyeurs of the sleeping self whom we can never meet in real life, since to wake is to become a different self. There are so many selves in time, Volodine suggests. 

If the dialectical oomph of the American consumerist fetish for self-actualization mirrors our former commitment to historical progress, Volodine offers fiction against the self's final product. There is no ideal human, no final perfection. By expanding time to make space for the expunged angels, Volodine avoids overdetermined good vs. evil binaries. We read him to overhear the future, or enter the realm of anti-capitalist realism. "It's memories that I'm stealing," whispers Tom Waits. We're innocent when we dream.

Alternative Ways of Reading; i.e. the asterisks

“…once they’ve received the revelation that makes them part of a chosen, secret elect anointed to usher in the future.”: For the elitism of the vanguard, the hierarchy of status based on access to Party politics, see Henri Lefevbre's life-long effort to create a Marxist sociology that would dethrone the idea of labor as a solution to alienation.

“… and struggle to budget healthcare deductibles.”: Monks are interesting in that they withdraw from the world in order to save the world, and their vows to community are metaphysical commitments that balance between collective embodiment, devotion, and solitude, usually on the basis of their own vision or revelatory event. Unlike the monk who belongs to an order, the mystic heads for the desert and drafts maps from found signs. The mystics relationship to revelation is thicker, which is to say, their commitment to God is sustained by revelation more than ritual.

“A sentimental affection for stories doesn’t imply a longing for Edenic innocence.”: Does innocence exist in story unmortified by sin and expiation? My daughter has stopped asking me to tell her a story at night. “Things don’t happen in life the way they do in your stories,” she tells me when I offer an unsolicited one. The value of stories depends on the expectations we bring to our ontologies at any given moment in time.

“There is a sense of metaphysical illicitness, a supranatural voyeurism, in perusing the dream-states of others.”: For variations of the relationship between dreams and voyeurism, see Hugh Fulham-McQuillan's fabulous essay in a recent issue of Firmament (Sublunary Editions).

13 ways of looking at an allegro.

1

The son and I spent the better part of a phone conversation arguing about the meaning of allegro. The argument itself proceeded at a pace one might score as “allegro” in that it was lovely, angular, and filled with sharp edges that neither of us wished to soften. It is a pleasure to argue about language with my son, as it is a pleasure to argue about meaning with anyone who is genuinely interested in thinking— who finds thinking to be incredibly pleasureable, and that pleasurable to be incommensurable.

Despite our disagreements, the son and I concluded something unrelated to either of our contentions, namely, that allegro is a word used to describe a relationship between an object and its surroundings— it exists in relation to others. An atom alone in the universe cannot be allegro; there is no way to measure the movement of an atom without the presence of others atoms.

2

In music, allegro is a tempo marking used to indicate that the performer should play faster, more quickly, brightly. In ballet, it indicates brisk and lively movement. The definition is the denotation—the cold, hard bone of the word laid out before us on the table. Connotation is what clings to it, what hides inside the word; the sticky opportunities to add dimension and volume to a word—to make it shine differently after being modified by the addition of new objects.

Simply, connotation is a commonly understood cultural or emotional association that any given word or phrase carries, in addition to its explicit or literal meaning, which is its denotation. Playing the denoted meaning against the connoted meaning creates tension in poems. Poets can rely on connotations in order to inflect the way a poem touches or ruffles us, or defamiliarizing the world as we know it. When leveraged and played in relation to other words, a powerful connotation can infect a poem without explicitly declaring itself.

3

The simple stricture of "Vivaldi" by Stuart Dybek can tempt the reader into overlooking its elegance. The simple part is the motion: it begins by making a promise, then adding a qualification, then shifting into interrogative meditation before finishing with a rephrasing.

Dybek opens with the promise that he is going to tell us about meeting Vivaldi. He begins by describing a scene from a 19th century novel before breaking into a new stanza with a "no" —  an uncapitalized qualification, an amendment that returns to the promise. (But it returns to the promise without starting a new sentence, and this insistence on expanding duration is notable; there is something he decided here, something that meant to distinguish between a "No" and a "no").

In the second stanza, immediately after the “no,” Dybek tells us about a winter night around a city subway, or maybe a train.. More specifically, he lists the sounds of that winter night—the violin, the drunks wassailing, the implied echo of strings meeting metal on tracks. And there is a milk truck, which is a time-piece: it tells what time this is happening, maybe in Dybek's childhood, or the childhood of his parents, maybe in a book he has read in a scene he imagines.

And then Dybek drops an ellipsis to indicate a thought trailing off, a thought wandering alone down the tracks as the speaker turns to the reader and begins asking questions. "Has it never been so…?" The fourth stanza is made entirely from questions. Question after question. Addressed directly to you or me or the one simulataneously overhearing and listening and reading. It is the longest stanza in the poem (5 lines to the 3 and 4 of other stanzas). It wants to know where sound begins.  

I think I mentioned Dybek finishes musically, which is to say, he finishes with a rephrasing and a defamiliarized image.

[SON: The musical term for this isn’t “rephrasing” mom. You’re referring to the basic structure of harmony, and the way pieces reach toward closure by returning to themes.]

Fine. Let's look at the first line of the first stanza and compare it to the first line of the final stanza:

When I met Vivaldi it was dark,

When I closed my eyes,

Both are written in past tense to describe a moment that was present to the speaker. Both occupy the space that is the promise of meeting Vivaldi.

What do we know about baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi? Although he composed for multiple instruments, the only two instruments we know he was officially trained to play included the violin and the harpsichord. Again, first stanza:

When I met Vivaldi it was dark,
a ragman lashed at his horse's bells

And second stanza:

When I closed my eyes,
less than a ghost,
Vivaldi cupped a mouth harp
like a match against the wind.

What else do we know about Antonio Vivaldi? On September 18, 1693, Vivaldi was tonsured as a monk, and on March 23, 1703, he was consecrated. For his hair color Vivaldi was nicknamed the "red monk". Vivaldi never played a mouth harp. In fact, mouth harp is a word associated with the blues harmonica. Dybek ends on this very specific blues harmonica in the mouth of Vivaldi.

4

SON: Your allegro is not my allegro.

ME: There is no single allegro.

SON: Right. We can speak about a general allegro-like aura but the composer imagines (and scores) an allegro to mean one thing—- a thing that exists in his mind—-- and the pianist then interprets that allegro in relation to other notes and tempo markings. So, for example, I think Shostakovich’s allegro is different from Vivaldi’s, and that difference is only learned by studying the body of their work.

ME: This is true for poetry as well. The implicit associations that poets hold in relation to a certain word—- take “home” for example, or “tenderness” —- often emerge by studying their use of that word across poems, and determining how tightly they hold the word, which is to say, how rigid and fixed it is in their mind.

SON: So we agree that everyone's allegro is different, and this difference is what makes a performance unique. A conductor like Sergiu Celibidache has a very particular way of interpreting the way an allegro relates to what surrounds it in a symphony. My allegro, or the one I use as a composer —-my private allegro, if you will—- starts to change a little when I learn a new piece, and I get close to another allegro, a Beethoven allegro, for example. Even if I don’t realize it, I can’t go back to the private allegro I held before learning to play Beethoven’s.

ME: The anxiety of allegro influence!

SON: No, mom. Not anxiety—it’s just the way music works. Everything you hear and play changes what you can imagine hearing and playing and composing.

ME: Poetry is the same. That’s why reading poetry is how we learn to write poetry, or how the possibilities of our poetics expand. I’m thinking about the subterreanean intertextuality of these influences, these things we have heard or read and thus carry forward. I’m thinking about how it holds the capacity for humor and subversion. Just as defamiliarization (or "making the familiar strange") relies on subverting expectations, parody relies on tradition, on the words and scores of others, in order to refashion meaning. Intertextual references reach into a shared past and attempt to re-vision it in the present; a reference is a nod to influence.

5

“The Allegro” is a flash fiction of a piano piece composed by Erik Satie when he was 18. Dated September 9, 1884, it's his earliest known composition. "The Allegro" is also the first place in which Satie signed his name as "Erik" instead of "Éric". Satie was serving time in what he called the  "penitentiary" of the Paris Conservatoire in 1884, and finding his creative energy sapped. It was on a summer holiday visit to his hometown of Honfleur, on the coast of Normandy, that Satie wrote his first "known" piece, and the only music he'd ever compose in his hometown. The upbeat and earnest optimism of the Allegro won't characterize Satie's later compositions, which are more whimsical, melancholic, and biting. But even from the start, Satie's appetite for quotation shaped his music. Allegro quotes the popular song, Ma Normandie (1836) by Frédéric Bérat. There is even a bit of the refrain—- whose lyrics are "J'irai revoir ma Normandie" ("I long to see my Normandy") — tucked into the middle of the piece.

In a sense, Satie’s Allegro is also the first piece in which he displays his penchant for quotation as part of the composition. The son and I have talked about quotations in music and poetry at length. I leave my quotations of those conversations for another day.

6

SON: Don’t forget that we’re talking about tempo markings here: we’re talking about duration and the space between silence and sound. That’s Cage, right? The tempo-marking tells the performer how to play it. Play it quickly, briskly, brightly.

7

I’ve taught the “Allegro” by Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer many times—-because readers always find something new in it.

Basically, my thinking about this poem focuses lightly on structure, but takes more interest in Tranströmer’s use of language. We can notice the simple couplets, the sparsity of adjectives, the way in which these formal choices create a sort of dark, quiet room for the poem.

The speaker begins by telling us that he is playing Haydn–"I play Haydn after a dark day"–and then he does this wild thing that poets do, namely, he creates an unforgettable word in order to defy the given world. To push that little world to its limits.

"I push the hands deep into my haydnpockets," Tranströmer writes, and thus does he turn away from the emperor's demands. It is an act of private, intimate protest rather than a public gesture. You can't play a song on a piano with your hands in your pockets. By pushing these two words together, the poet gives us an attitude, a way of being, a way of describing how playing Hadyn is an intimate ecstasy. 

Tranströmer titled this poem after a tempo-marking in Haydn. By giving us this marking, we may find ourselves wondering which piano sonata he is playing, which particular allegro.

The allegro has its own history as the first section or part of a sonata. To have an allegro was a must for classical composers. But to have hadynpockets is to be someone who knows Transtomer's personal allegro: it is to know the neologism he created to resist the lure of kings.

8

SON: Composer Erik Satie didn’t use conventional tempo markings in his pieces. In fact, that short “Allegro” may have been his only allegro, and it was as a title.

ME: Why?

SON: He wanted to defy everything that the Conservatory stood upon for its authority. Unlike many of you adults who like to think you’re avant-garde, Satie was the real deal. He delegitimized himself and constantly refused respectability. He was performing his radicalism— he lived it. He lived with his rats and didn’t give a damn. I respect him for that.

ME: You say he didn’t give a damn, but I think he was quite pissed.

SON: I mean he didn’t care enough to try and fit in. He would never have accepted the sorts of things you all do for money. Playing in a Cabaret bar, to him, was part of being free.

ME: I, too, was nineteen once.

9

francine j. harris’ “Sonata in F Major, K.183: Allegro” is a stunning engagement of Scarlatti’s composition as played by Daria van den Bercken. The relationship between the music, the rain, the presence of Scarlatti in the sounds:

the women, who step in the street and yell
to anyone they loved once and it sounds like prelude if
Scarlatti hadn’t moved to Madrid

It’s hard not to get tongue-tied at the beauty of the enjambment here, and harris’ use of the field to drop into the relationship between Scarlatti’s composition and the streets experienced in Madrid. How “it sounds like prelude if”—and the line breaks on the conditional—-where the use of prelude is uncanny, it torques time in the poem, it reverses the motion of the women in the street somehow. The conditional continues:

would he have moved the notes diatonically as the rain falls up

a rood. ascends the scaffolding. It’s impossible to read The Street

The magic of a harris poem is this feeling that the space and the moment is becoming a book or a text, and here the speaker is reading “The Street” and the movement of the notes bears kinship with the strange reversal of the women’s calls of love. Such an arfully crafted composition, this poem.

10

My editor told me straight away I’d shown I had a nose for news. He was getting a bit irritated because all the documentary life-stories were so alike. However hard life might have been for the person in question on the other side, however respectable the reasons for his flight, there had gradually developed a stereotype story—-looked at journalistically—-that did violence to my editor’s professional instincts. And now we had a rather special case: this young man who, without any fuss, simply wanted to get something out of life, who hadn’t found what he wanted on the other side, and had got out. At last we had, not a tragedy, but an intriguing allegro, a fine specimen of the picaresque. We’d simply never come across anything so flatly hedonistic before. What more natural than to invite this young man to join the paper?

- Martin Walser, “A German Mosaic”

This is only time I have seen “allegro” used to designate a mode of the picaresque—-a literary genre rather than a way of playing it.

11

W. H. Auden’s “Words and Music" deserves a read in its entirety. I pass it quietly to you, for the insight on meter and composition.

From the same page in my notebook: Igor Stravinsky said an allegro usually involved several movements "of which one confers upon the whole work its symphonic quality namely, the symphonic allegro, generally placed at the opening of the work and intended to justify its name by fulfilling the requirements of a certain musical dialectic." On this view, the most critical part of the dialectic is in the development, which occurs at the center—and this is what Stravinsky took as "the symphonic allegro" (a.k.a. "the sonata-allegro").

12

In her Charles Haskins Lecture for 2001, titled “A Life of Learning”, Helen Vendler uses John Milton’s “L’Allegro” to make a point about judgement in literature:

From the time I was very young I continually asked myself, as I read through the works of poets, why some texts seemed so much more accomplished and moving than others. Why was Milton's "L'Allegro" more satisfactory than his "On the Death of a fair Infant dying of a Cough?" I believed, and still do, that anyone literate in poetry could see that the one was superior to the other. (Those who suppose there are no criteria for such judgments merely expose their own incapacity.) Still, to clarify to oneself and then to others, in a reasonable and explicit way, the imaginative novelty of a poem and to give evidence of its technical skill isn't an easy task. I've been brought to mute frustration by it when I know intuitively that something is present in the poem that I haven't yet been able to isolate or name or describe or solve. In chapter 12 of Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad remarks on "that mysterious, almost miraculous, power of producing striking effects by means impos- sible ofdetection which is the lastword ofthe highest art." I wanted, hardly knowing how, to detect the means of that power.

13

Finally, there is this qualified allegro used by Susan Sontag in her catalogue description of a similarly titled exhibition “In Memory of Their Feelings”— about the world created by Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and the endless physical dialogue which took shape between them. Allegro vivace.

Notes on Antoine Volodine's Minor Angels: Part 1

The surrounding arches of the domes located in the Hagi Sophia include mosaics of hexapterygons, the six-winged seraphs said to surround God’s eternal throne. To be so utterly wing-limbed in all directions seems fantastic, and there is this space in contemporary liteature where the fantastic supernatural meets science fiction. . .

“Backfictions”

Antoine Volodine is the primary heteronym used by a Russian-French writer and translator who won the French Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire, a prize usually awarded to science-fiction writers. Like Fernando Pessoa, Volodine makes use of multiple heteronyms (see Lutz Bassmann, Manuela Draeger, Elli Kronauer, etc.) to author his books. Like Guido Morselli, Volodine's books are often classified as speculative fiction or sci-fi. But, according to the writer himself in 1991, his writing could be called "Anarcho-fantastic post-exoticism." They—Volodine and his heteronyms— have published over 40 texts of what he later narrowed to "post-exoticism," the genre invented to publicly break the boxes literary critics tried to fit them inside.

“We are several authors, we are writing from an elsewhere that is in a prison, we are composing a foreign structure entirely out of texts, we all share the same egalitarian and revolutionary ideology, we are reclaiming a poetry rooted in equal measure within shamanism, bolshevism, magical realism, and oneiricism,” Volodine told Jeffrey Zuckerman and JT Mahany in a 2015 inteview, which also happens to be one of the most abundant resources I’ve found on Volodine, as conducted by Zuckerman, who is likely his most astute contemporary reader.

So Volodine tells Zuckerman and Mahany:

Most of our narrators have a shamanic way of telling stories. They speak to evoke history, but they also create characters to go with them, or instead of them, down the difficult path of fiction, their painful path toward memories, toward the present, or toward black space. Narrators assume this somewhat priestly function, and in this way, they don’t just tell stories, they also live them. Entering a post-exotic anecdote or image is often accompanied by a trance. The reader doesn’t simply watch a story—passively, objectively—he or she is invited to plunge into the image, into a cinematic succession of images, to psychically and maybe physically accompany the shamans who speak, repeat, and sing the story.

For these notes, I limit my digressive sally to Volodine’s novel, Minor Angels, as translated by Jordan Stump (University of Nebraska Press, 2008).

The Problem of Angels

I did not expect to fact-check angelology while reading this novel. Nor did I anticipate returning to the energetic relationship between constructions of free will and the pedagogies of neoliberalism. Yet there is a sense in which the difference between angels and demons hinges on this construction of loyalty to something larger, something divine that subsumes the self while eventually fulfilling it, or giving life meaning. There is this mystery in the fullness of time etc. * And there is the social significance of loyalty, a word that simulatenously defines and monitors our affiliations and creates notions of worthiness. We track loyalty’s tempo and meter the measurement.

In return for affiliative self-knowledge, the loyal pledge their allegiance, or fides, through the performance of declarative displays. As a ceremonial action, the rituals of fealty provide the believer with a community, a sense of belonging, and the possibility of t-shirt or branding device that announces this allegiance. Our loyalties simultaneously mark us and demarcate us from others. Contemporary brands have expanded these sources of community to include corporations (the war between Pepsi and Coke, etc). Experts on affiliative properity emerge to decode the affects and gestures. Markets provide expertise in everything from pore-size to perfect parenting. Late capitalism has made this so normative that we hardly notice—unless we are seeking kinship. *

As for the angels, muddled loyalty was their undoing. Unclear allegiance got them expelled from the kingdom of heaven and, later, the ecclesiastical canon. Early religious leaders knew that angels and demons were kinned, as reflected in monastic writings and illuminated manuscripts. The growth and expansion of religious institutions (i.e.bureaucracies, armies, institutions) made taking sides imperative (one can't very well ride both sides in a war). To serve heaven or hell is the final question. To question is the final question is to deny Christ. The “you’re either for us or you’re against us” binary complicates the the Pascalian wager of playing the field.

Set in post-apocalytic end-times, Minor Angels locates itself outside linear time. The last humans (and there are many) seek to keep the dying world through "revivification or revolution or simply through acts of memory," in Jordan Stump's description.

The pseudoapocryphal aura emerges from references to original book or revelation, a sort of subtextual dialogue with the idea of the “one true story”. Volodine’s fictional spirit-worlds blur the distance between embodiment and living. He is emphatically not a Christian. His theories of time and embodiment borrow from Tibetan Buddhism. His references to Bardo Thödol are accompanied by the claim that the Tibetan Book of the Dead is the putative Bible among prisoners, the single non-post-exotic text shared between the writers incarcercated in his stories. His interest in shamanism tiptoes round the rims of Mircea Eliade’s shamanic neo-paganism.

Do I parse Volodine’s beliefs because I sense the stirrings of a belief system in the novel? Am I curious about how paganism plays out with multiple creators dressed up as authors? The is a disconnect reminiscent of my failed efforts to see the magic in the autostereogram, or the hours I spent failing to spot the shapes in those psychadelic mall posters —- and that feeling of abandoning the promised epiphany, which may be another way of wondering if the disconnect is in my vision rather than the object it attempts to understand?

One creature on my shoulder says apocalypse is not possible without the presumption of linear chronology, the belief that all things are moving towards an end; a similar creature on my other shoulder says a world in which apocalypse is insignificant must also be a world in which historical Progress, itself, is challenged by post-exoticism's commitment to narrative polyphony and non-linearity. From where I stand, doubly-creatured, there is no mirror, no revelation. I don’t know which one is the angel and which is the demon. I suspect both are both, and distraction is immanent.

The Problem of Time as Encountered in Form: Anecdote v. Narract

Volodine (and the others) would abhor my attempt at synopsis. He would urge me, instead, to focus on how our understanding of time reflects what we want from it. And what we want matters: the skin between desire and temporality is central to Volodine's project. 

Time, desire, etc . . . the forms language gives us for wanting. The words my child just used to express a desire for food located in the near future where it is the idea of nearness, itself, that remains in dispute. My near-enough is her far-away, just Volodine's angels are present and simultaneously past. Apocalypse has happened, is happening.

Volodine’s time-sprawling narrative occurs in a Bardo-tempo, where a group of immortal crones consigned to a nursing home plot their revenge on society which forgot them. These crones were once revolutionists, and their hunger for revolution leads them to create a son, Will Scheidenmann, from discarded fabric and dust mites. Because a life patched from the refuse of poverty, fury and resentment will be vulnerable to pleasure, power, immediate gratification, Scheidemann is seduced by capitalism, entrepreneurship, and consumerism. The crone-mothers are furious—they brought capitalism back to life by concocting a son—and so they reclaim him, dragging him back to the yurt of his birth, where, like Scheherazade, Scheidenmann delays his punishment by reciting one narract a day.

One narract a day makes a collection. Scheidenmann’s "narracts" present themselves as narrative acts of resistance. Each one is named after the angel who narrates it. And each angel communicates in the post-epiphanic narract form, creating an iconography of unstable characters, each of whom is listed in an index of 49 minor angels at the end, after having "passed through our memory, one per narract."

The formal anti-modernism built into these divine sequences distinguishes them from anecdotes, a form which has moral ballast, or weight, built into it. Volodine himself, has made this comparison, saying the narracts are "something other than limpid, artless little anecdotes." This other than includes images intentionally constructed and informed by dreams, received images. (Yes, Mark Fisher’s theorizing comes to mind.)

If Rene Char’s description of the anecdote as a tale with moral ballast, or expectation, built into it, then Volodine asserts the narract's focus on aesthetic longing against that moral ballast. In Volodine's words, these are  "something other than limpid, artless little anecdotes;" a narract is a vignette which "captures a sitation's conflict...between recollection and imagination" by leaning on "poetic sequence" for its structure and organization, informed by dreams and received images. Informed by dreams and received images, the narract is delivered in shamanstic fashion, enabling its speaker to embody the past rather than return to it. Conceptually, the narract neologizes narration to the act of narrating, so that the narract becomes the story's embodiment.

Traces Between Translations

Each of the forty-nine "prose moments" is marked with "the trace left by an angel"— not as a savior but as a witness to each "place of exile” where those whom Volodine remembers and cherishes "go on existing as best they can".

We see this in the first narract, where the narrator speaks from inside a ruined time. Although this speaker is sad (thus seeking a "tear-fixer") his words are addressed to a Thou-like You, someone he thinks about often, and it is this thinking, itself, which seems worthwhile. The first speaker extols longing as a worthwhile form of action, a radical act at a time when we are measured by resumes, numbers, and achievements.

Longing achieves nothing, and yet, it acts on the mind in ways that leave traces. Narraction challenges the angels’ relation to endings.

Fred Zanfl is a writer who depicted the end of the species, a man who survived the coups and who refused to accept his own ending or death. Zanfl rejects extinction as "a fictive thing because it had never been described from within the mind of the one experiencing it. "I will stand on the railway of my death," Zanfl writes, in a narract which ends: 

I have carefully written these words. No matter what happens, let no one be blamed for my life.

Having used Marguerite Yourcenar's line "Let no one be accused of my life” as an epigraph, this last line (“let no one be blamed for my life”) struck me as an example of what Volodine has called the "anonymous intertextuality" in the post-exotic process. It is as if he allows Zanfl to overnarrate Yourcenar, with a slight modification.

Whereas Yourcenar asks that no one be accused of, or indicted for, her life, Zanfl asks that no one be blamed for it. If Zanfl is infected with Yourcenar’s traces, it is because Volodine wants a dialogue with the absent. The declarative "I" stands fully accountable; it disrupts the fatalism implied in Yourcenar's comment.

For contex, the line being translated from Marguerite Yourcenar's Fires, is: "Qu'on n'accuse personne de ma vie." To some degree, the semantic distance between blame and accusation is smaller in French, and one can't help wondering if these two lines resemble each other in their untranslated form. Tant pis, I lack a copy of Volodine in French, though I wouldn't be surprised if he plays in the present indicative tense.

The Part Where the Clock Struck Twelve

At 12:15 am on a Monday, one could read Volodine’s narracts as ruined revelations.

"Every finished work is the result of a collective creating," Volodine has said, and this multiplicity blurs a single authorial meaning.* Minor Angels doesn't intend to generate meaning within the reading experience itself (meaning arrives in the dreams which result from the reading), and much of the action takes place outside the frame. This way of looking at reading resembles a scripture, or an apprenticeship to revelation. It also indicts my present attempt to interpret it. All the more reason for me to continue it, tomorrow.

Unpursued Traces of Interest; a.k.a. end-notes

“In the fullness of time, etc.”: The thicker and more foundational our conception of free will,” the more cosmological and eternally-serious our conception of loyalty?

“Markets provide expertise in everything from pore-size to perfect parenting. Late capitalism has made this so normative we hardly notice—unless we are seeking kinship.”: I wear my declarative feminist t-shirt to flash a virtue-signal towards the like-minded (i.e. to find my people) and to assess the responses of others (i.e. which I interet as friendly or threatening).

Translators J. T. Mahany and Jeffrey Zuckerman described the uncanny similarities of their introductions to Volodine: “We both discovered Antoine Volodine, appropriately enough, in winter. One of us was sitting in a classroom overlooking bare trees, translating the first pages of Des anges mineurs. The other one of us had just read the same novel in English and was sleepwalking through the dark, snowy streets of Rochester recalling Volodine’s declaration that the novel’s meaning was “not in the book’s pages but in the dreams people will have after reading it.” See also Antoine Volodine in conversation with Jeffrey Zuckerman, Paris Review (July 8, 2015), where J. T. Mahany and Jeffrey Zuckerman call Volodine’s books “almost as dreamlike as their author himself”:

He writes under four (or perhaps five) heteronyms, including Antoine Volodine, and only the most basic facts of his biography are known: he was born in 1950, came of age during the 1968 student protests in Paris, and taught Russian in France for some fifteen years before devoting himself entirely to writing. His debut, Comparative Biography of Jorian Murgrave, appeared in France in 1985. It is the story, told by way of fragmented microbiographies, of an alien hunted down on Earth whose dreams are invaded by psychobiologists intent on making him talk. “There is no way I could call Biographie comparée a novel,” one befuddled critic wrote; others were swift to express their shock and delight at such an innovative author appearing in the frequently monotonous ranks of science fiction. In a matter of years, Volodine had became famous for his (and his heteronyms’) singular brand of writing.

“…blurs a single authorial meaning”:  I thought of scriptures, sacred books, the texts against which heresy is defined and punished—-and how the multiple authors of scriptures are taken as one speaker — and how this single meaning is also disrupted at the level of interpretation and embodied retelling.

An eternity against closure.

The last kite you flew.

The last kite you saw being flown.

These statements are notions of time in a poem, or how the poem tracks its relation to living.

Poems create their own time. Returning to—or revealing—the time of the poem at the ending offers the reader a sense of completeness that isn’t finite. The infinite is more complete than the finite. The infinite is the temporality of poetry. In some ways, we anticipate this infinite-facing direction in the poem, perhaps less so in prose, (although, when someone celebrates an essay that strolls this infinitude, they often describe it as poetic or lyrical).

One can take leave in a descriptive poem with an abstraction—with a numbing ray of sunlight that radiates around what came before—the cruelty of childhood, for instance.

Sometimes, the relationship between the title of the poem should be weighed against the final line, And I think that something is lacking in the poem's energy when the poem ends with the title line.

The voluminous reverb of the homophone. The slight of hand finds it easier to hide the sleight of hand, easier to slight the off-hand remark a squirrel huffs to its acorn. Alternately: getting up and walking around the poem, rather than sitting, expectantly, inside it.

Not punishing the poem for its stride – its way of moving – when it limps quietly towards the door rather than throwing a plate and stopping out.

Each book blows the mind a bit differently. Each text exists as a result of how the writer’s mind has been blown. This is a statement about socialization and experience and one’s relation to it on the page.

Against closure: Although overdetermined from a materialist standpoint, death remains to haunt its inheritance in humans, places, and events.

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Closure is often defined as a satisfying end to an event, where narrative or experience. But an ending, like a beginning, is culturally contingent; beginnings and ends vary across cultures, languages, grammars, and time. Even eternity changes, depending on the place in which one stands to discuss it.

"An ending is something we construct, not something that occurs in nature," Nancy Bern writes. Similarly, closure is something we construct in order to give an event discrete edges (an edgeless thing is difficult to discuss). The "satisfying end" is how closure is culturally constructed, and the construct offers a social script for how humans should respond to loss. "Closure talk frames grief as bad and therefore something that needs to end,” Bern continues. And this closure-talk “rhetoric implies that closure exists, and assumes it is possible, good, desired, and necessary."

“Chasing Closure” by Nancy Berns (PDF)

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Birthwort vase (1909) by Henri Husson and Adrien-Aurélien Hébrard

In a garden just outside London, John Berger listens as his friend speaks about an odd flower, a flower "like the breast of a tiny thrush in full song."

The flower, a birthwort, comes from Brazil. Its Latin name is Aristolochia elegans, which Berger’s friend says sounds like "a person, unique and singular. If you had this flower in your garden and it happened to die, you could mourn for it with its Latin name.”

"Which you wouldn't do, if you knew it as birthwort” —his friend adds.

Archaic language is singular and eeriely nostalgic – it jostles, demands attention, insists on being seen and tasted in its particularity, which may (or may not) evoke an unfamiliar time and place.  

The particular wants new words—it wants, like the lover seeking a nickname, the intimacy of diminutives. I take the use of neologisms and anachronstic language as ways of refusing closure in a poem. Anything that fumbles with the familiar unfamiliar (a.k. a. that multifaceted, irreedemanle demon named nostalgia) brings longing to the affective palette and texture of the poem.

"Farewell, she cried, and wept a twig of tears," wrote Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov in his strange poem, "The I-Singer of the Universong."

Hail to the images that estrange us from our grieving gestures. To weep a twig feels more permanent than a puddle.
A twig of tears is an anachronism. Anachronisms are the spice of bread and butter life. An anachronism is a word, object, or event “mistakenly placed in a time where it does not belong.” Feeling as if one does not belong anywhere sets some moments apart from the others.

“On Longing” by Susan Stewart (PDF)

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It is no secret that American culture industry stalks closure obsessively. The presence of shame when remembering the dead— to remember is to make present, to live with undecidability. We must live with our selves (or with the idea of our self as constructed, nurtured, sold, and self-caringly tended) in the face of uncertain duration. To the question of how the living live with the dead, John Berger replied:

Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egoism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as eliminated.

Shame appears as the lubricating silence that prevents us from losing face or social status by invoking the dead. Our eliminationist policy in relation to the planned obsolescence of contemporary technology. Eliminated. A word that has the sound of limb and limn buried inside its pit.

“A Reverse Alphabet for Finishing” by Lee Upton (PDF)

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Richard Avedon, Allen Ginsberg, poet, New York, December 30, 1963. (New Yorker)

James Baldwin wrote “For Nothing Is Fixed” as part of a collaboration with the photographer Richard Avedon. In it, Baldwin plays on the two meanings of fixed throughout the poem, where fixed means “repaired” or “set in place, immovable.” The lines are simple: lacking complex phrasing and ostentatious vocabulary. The lexicon is intimate, proximate, and deeply indebted to religious language and ritual.

It feels like a litany that cannot stop moving —- “the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing” — and nothing is fixed. Nothing stops moving long enough to be repaired. This is not redemptive in the religious sense, yet it holds the breaking, the brokenness, sacred; it hallows the faith between humans as a space of communion. Something in this pitch can never be “over”.

“Coin of the Realm” by Carl Phillips (PDF)

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HILTON ALS: “Nothing Personal” is riddled with these questions of identity—what makes a self?—a question that gave a certain thirteen-year-old ideas about the questions he might ask in this world: Who are we? To each other? And why?

NICK WARR: “The interruption of reading performed by the images confirms the irregular chronological dynamic of Sebald’s work. Constantly hindered, sent back into countless eddies and still backwaters, time, like the mineral water that is sieved through the salt frames of Bad Kissingen, percolates as much as it flows.

“Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’s Joint Examination of American Identity” by Hilton Als

”Six Photos from Sebald’s Albums” by Nick Warr

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"May my silences become more accurate," poet Theodore Roethke wrote in one of the 277 notebooks left behind after his death. Each notebook collected lines and images for poems, observations, quotations, craft notes to himself, etc. He didn't use all the lines and images in his poems — but he wrote them. And saved them. Here is an excerpt from one of his notebooks, a pep-talk if you will . . .

“A fake compassion covers many a sore . . . “ Roethke elected to end the line in an ellipsis, which is punctuation mark for dropping a trail of crumbs that continues thinking beyond the text. One dot is a period—-the symbol of closure. Two dots is a no man’s land or a typo. Three dots is an ellipsis—the whisper towards more.

And maybe “fake compassion” is part of closure’s affect, part of “covering” the sore in order to make others feel comfortable. The labor of pain is linked to the social responsibility of hiding the wound, or performing an aesthetic closure so that one’s pain doesn’t infect or contaminate others. Late capitalist regimes for managing pain hygiene are so rigorous; I’m intrigued by the way they command a sort of devotion resembling the religious.

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Jerzy Andrzejewsky wrote a novel in one sentence. Italo Calvino decided to write a novel with ten beginnings.  Raymond Queneau decided to write a set of ten sonnets whose corresponding lines could be replaced with one another. Jacques Roubaud decided to write a series of poems corresponding to the pieces of a game of ‘go’. Georges Perec vowed to write a novel in the amount of time Stendhal had spent writing one of his—and broke this vow, insofar as we know. “How can I possibly make myself understood?” Witggeinstein wonders across notebooks and papers. Who is this unified self that betrays us in infamous gardens at night on the eve before the event which will be taken to define us?

“The Rejection of Closure” by Lyn Heijinian

"Continuing Against Closure” by Lyn Hejinian

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2 pages from Steve McCaffrey’s 110-page binder containing “Carnival” originals, notes on panels, and other “early related typestracts,” ca. 1970s.

“Steve McCaffery kept 3-ring binders with originals of his concrete and visual poetry. Most of the poems are unique with an assortment of collage elements, colored and black pen drawings, and assorted typewriter (typestract) and type treatments.” (Granary Books)

K. IVER:  I like to start with getting my brain in a meditative state and asking myself, “What are you most unwilling to feel?” The Hua TouBuddhist meditation, meant to focus the mind, is often delivered from masters to students in the form of a question. An old one, for example: “Who is dragging this corpse around?” That one sparks a lot more curiosity and bewilderment for me than the egoism of “Who am I?” that Western Enlightenment offered. 

Interview with K. Iver on Poetic Closure by Mentor and Muse

“Discontinued Meditations” by Steve McCaffrey (PDF)

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MARY RUEFLE: I was reading the notebooks of the poet George Seferis (1900-1971) and had copied into the journal by hand my favorite passage, which was identical with the passage I had copied earlier in the day, believing completely that I had never encountered it before: “But to say what you want to say you must create another language and nourish it for years & years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, and with what you will never find again.”

”Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World” by Mary Ruefle
(with gratitude to Anthony Garrett for reminding me of this essay)

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Closure is attractive: it knows how to dress for the funeral. Formally, it presents itself as polish, smoothness, poise, competence. A line. A simple equation. Linearity leaves no dark corners, no secret crannies, no quiet nooks in which a child can disappear with a book. Where linearity lends itself to prediction, diagnosis, and marketing, Gaston Bachelard's "poetics of space" requires bends, triangles, shapes, spirals, and curls. There are polynomials and bad formulas. Every loss shapes itself differently without quite resembling a line.

In the culture industry, closure presents itself as a solution to the alienations of late capitalist community. The village is dead; the city needs more policing; the therapist is the new best friend; and a closure is a thing one can "accomplish" by paying money and following the correct plan or guru.

Because closure is subtly framed as an accomplishment, it gives rise to a scale, a metric of determination enabling  others (including strangers) to judge how far along in the process of closure their peers have come. "I'm on the third stage of grief." "Don’t get trapped in the fourth stage of grief!" "When are you going to get over it?" The language of closure infects the discourse of human relations with new hierarchies. What does it mean to "graduate" from the final stage of grief? What does it mean to "overcome" loss?

No one caters to the ideology of happiness like closure, the noun used to signify a timely end to grief. And it seems increasingly difficult to discuss the possibility that grief and happiness are not antithetical. Grief and happiness have coexisted in human bodies and cultures and languages throughout history. 

Closure satisfies the narrative propensity as developed by self-help and testimonial literature. It redeems and restores the troubled speaker. But it also limits the experience of grief or loss to a predetermined horizon with sign posts and names. It timelines the intimately unspeakable.

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“The skull of Mary Magdalene can be found in the South of France in the once Gallo Roman town of Villa Latta or Tégulata, which after the death of Maximin (one of Jesus’ seventy-two disciples), became St. Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume.” Sourced from the publishing house named after the Magdalene.

Marguerite Yourcenar's 'Mary Magdalene; or Salvation' came to her while studying St. John the Evangelist's fiancee, as depicted in The Golden Legend (a.k.a. Legenda sanctorum: Readings of the Saints), an illuminated hagiographical manuscript authored by Jacobus de Varagine around 1260 C.E. The story is collected in Fires, a series of dramatic monologues retelling ancient Greek stories or myths. In this collection, Yourcenar rides narrative temporality like the last horse of the apocalypse. She filled Fires (translated by Dori Katz) with voice-portraits that spoke on her behalf, from inside familiar archetypes and mythologies. Perhaps mythopoesis is always a speculative nonfiction. Focusing on its fragmented shapes and episodic displacements, a New York Times critic called Fires an "unwritten novel".  But Yourcenar made the "I" of nonfiction usable without assuming an autobiographical I. Her I is an unreliable narrator, as is every I, every eye, every eye-witnessed event. She believed everything in a person's life affected their art.

“Narrative Finality” by Armine Kotin Mortimer (PDF)

Resources on Poetic Closure from Mentor & Muse