The Devil Never Sleeps (14 page)
Read The Devil Never Sleeps Online
Authors: Andrei Codrescu
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n these days of confessional frenzy, voluntary and coerced, every story is under suspicion. From writers wallowing in the details of affairs with famous people to witnesses spilling their guts under oath, the land is awash in hypocrisy. It is therefore, oh, so refreshing, to receive a nine-page handwritten letter from a housewife named Char Smith in a small town in West Virginia.
n these days of confessional frenzy, voluntary and coerced, every story is under suspicion. From writers wallowing in the details of affairs with famous people to witnesses spilling their guts under oath, the land is awash in hypocrisy. It is therefore, oh, so refreshing, to receive a nine-page handwritten letter from a housewife named Char Smith in a small town in West Virginia.
In 1989 Mrs. Smith, touched by the plight of Eastern Europeans emerging from decades of authoritarian rule, was moved to help a Romanian family. By no means rich, Mrs. Smith was able to contact and visit a family in the town of Piatra Neamt, and strike a friendship that has endured for ten years. During these ten years, she has seen a tremendous struggle to survive as living conditions for these people worsened. “It's almost ten years since the revolution,” she writes, “and look where they are now. I've tried to give this family hope ⦠but though they appreciate my support, my words aren't meaning as much anymore.”
Mrs. Smith writes movingly of the details of this family's life, their fight to insure an operation for their adopted daughter, their loss of faith in the future. She rails against the indifference of the Western world after the Cold War and berates our media for telling us next to nothing about the suffering of real people. But her own despair lives most tellingly in that simple assertion
of fact: “my words aren't meaning as much anymore.” Here is the entire relationship of our overaffluent West to the quickly dimming world behind the former Iron Curtain. Our words, whether the words of free-market ideologues, democracy preachers, consumer visionaries, or simple, good-hearted people, do not mean much anymore. Romanians have heard them all, and things are getting bleaker. They have McDonald's and Coca Cola and the rare sympathy of a few pure souls like Mrs. Smith, but their survival is precarious. The magical West brought many things but not a quick way out of the past.
of fact: “my words aren't meaning as much anymore.” Here is the entire relationship of our overaffluent West to the quickly dimming world behind the former Iron Curtain. Our words, whether the words of free-market ideologues, democracy preachers, consumer visionaries, or simple, good-hearted people, do not mean much anymore. Romanians have heard them all, and things are getting bleaker. They have McDonald's and Coca Cola and the rare sympathy of a few pure souls like Mrs. Smith, but their survival is precarious. The magical West brought many things but not a quick way out of the past.
As the IMF licks its wounds over the loss of billions to ex-KGB thieves, and NATO re-creates the Hapsburg Empire, you have to wonder what's in store for Mrs. Smith's friends. Left outside the nouveau NATO-Hapsburg Catholic world, they seem relegated to a life understood only instinctively and compassionately by a good soul like the very rare Mrs. Smith. Is that how all stories end?
I kept cringing, as I read the handwritten, crowded, nine-page letter, that something truly awful might come from this story of unselfish friendship. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something terrible and scandalous to be revealed. But there wasn't. There was only love for a family far away and the despair of living in a world that doesn't care. And that was the most awful thing of allâwithout a punch line, without a dramatic denouement.
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n communist Romania in the 1950s, my classmates were multi-ethnic and spoke a variety of languages. In my class we had Romanians, Germans, Hungarians, Serbs, Jews, Gypsys, Szekelys, Bulgarians, and Greeks. We spoke a hodgepodge of languages and got along fine because it was forbidden by the government to speak ill of people's nationalities or origins. Our parents were too afraid, at least during Stalinism, to tell us the horrible history that had brought all these different people together. They didn't tell us about all the fighting, over hundreds of years, over the same piece of real estate, or about the slights and insults, real or imagined, recorded in the collective memory and kept alive by hundreds of small sayings, sentimental songs, drunken ditties, morbid fairy tales, and musty chronicles.
n communist Romania in the 1950s, my classmates were multi-ethnic and spoke a variety of languages. In my class we had Romanians, Germans, Hungarians, Serbs, Jews, Gypsys, Szekelys, Bulgarians, and Greeks. We spoke a hodgepodge of languages and got along fine because it was forbidden by the government to speak ill of people's nationalities or origins. Our parents were too afraid, at least during Stalinism, to tell us the horrible history that had brought all these different people together. They didn't tell us about all the fighting, over hundreds of years, over the same piece of real estate, or about the slights and insults, real or imagined, recorded in the collective memory and kept alive by hundreds of small sayings, sentimental songs, drunken ditties, morbid fairy tales, and musty chronicles.
Without knowing it at the time, I had the misfortune of belonging to one of the top-hated categories. I was Jewish, from a Hungarian and Polish background, and my mother, who was Jewish, had remarried a Romanian from a part of the country hated by everyone, including the local Romanians. I didn't know that my hometown had been the subject of territorial disputes between the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman empires, then between the nations of Romania and Hungary. These facts were relayed to us in a highly comforting version in history class, a version that blamed all misfortune
on class relations and tensions within economic systems. And was this version wrong? Not necessarily. The problem with it is that it left out the one unpredictable element that usually renders nonsensical the best theories, namely, people's deep-seated and emotionally unassailable stupidity.
on class relations and tensions within economic systems. And was this version wrong? Not necessarily. The problem with it is that it left out the one unpredictable element that usually renders nonsensical the best theories, namely, people's deep-seated and emotionally unassailable stupidity.
This stupidity, which is one of the great unanalyzed factors in all history, not just that of the Balkans, is composed of the belief that the stink of one's family and tribe is vastly superior to the familial stink of the neighboring tribe; that your language is wittier or deeper; that the sounds you make when you wail away about your love for the muddy ravine in which you were conceived is much, much more melodic than the wailing of your neighbors; that the smoke-darkened icons cut out of old magazines that hang on your wall are true representations of the only gods worth praying to, and that the gods and prayer habits of the people over the hill are unspeakable offenses that will cease only when you have killed them. This kind of stupidity is like a sturdy weed: you can weed several times a day and, in the morning, there it is again.
In 1989 the official narcotic ideology that went by the name “socialism” was officially kaput, but the people who had been in charge were not kaput at all. Their way to hold on to power was to remind people of the undying hatred they once felt for their neighbors. Suddenly, all those sentimental songs and nasty ditties recording all the slights suffered throughout history at the hands of people with whom they had gotten along just fine for about forty years, bubbled up and started intoxicating everybody with the bittersweet juice of eternal victimization.
Among the mobsters who percolated out of the communist apparatchik muck after 1989, Milosevic of Yugoslavia is the worst. He stripped his country and his people of all the three conditions necessary for the eradication of historic stupidity: peace, a good economy, and good leadership.
This is all the more tragic since Yugoslavia, even while still part of the great socialist camp, had already made more economic progress than all its other Balkan neighbors. We, in Romania, looked with envy at the standard of living of Yugoslav workers and to their freedom to travel and to bring money back home to build private homes and start small businesses. And, indeed, you have to go no further than the Olympic Games in Sarajevo to see a prosperous, Western-style city, in which young people in blue jeans listened to rock ân' roll on their Sony Walkmans and filled up the coffeehouses
and bars, flirting and talking across ethnic lines, without any self-consciousness. Today, the beautiful city of Sarajevo is in ruins, more than half its people dead or in exile, its fine historical buildings piles of rubbleâall of it courtesy of Milosevic, the man who today cries foul because his murdering thugs are being checked by NATO bombs.
and bars, flirting and talking across ethnic lines, without any self-consciousness. Today, the beautiful city of Sarajevo is in ruins, more than half its people dead or in exile, its fine historical buildings piles of rubbleâall of it courtesy of Milosevic, the man who today cries foul because his murdering thugs are being checked by NATO bombs.
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or my literary generation, exile had only one direction: France. When my mother and I made the momentous decision to leave our homeland forever, my interests and hers differed. I looked forward to being in the company of Tristan Tzara, E. M. Cioran, Paul Celan, and Eugen Ionesco, the great French-bound exiles of previous generations. My mother, on the other hand, looked to the bourgeois comfort of America. I despised her for this utilitarianism and vowed to conquer France as soon as I could get away from my mother's America, which she imposed on me by the sheer force of her seniority and economic clout.
or my literary generation, exile had only one direction: France. When my mother and I made the momentous decision to leave our homeland forever, my interests and hers differed. I looked forward to being in the company of Tristan Tzara, E. M. Cioran, Paul Celan, and Eugen Ionesco, the great French-bound exiles of previous generations. My mother, on the other hand, looked to the bourgeois comfort of America. I despised her for this utilitarianism and vowed to conquer France as soon as I could get away from my mother's America, which she imposed on me by the sheer force of her seniority and economic clout.
The romantic myth of exile was possible in its full, unexamined glory only in the mind of an adolescent in the mid-sixties of our century. At that time, alienation was philosophically fashionable, even necessary, and exile had become the crème of alienation, the acme of youthful despair. We maintained the generation gap with all the assiduity of housemaids. Every removal from home, from my very real exile to a precollege Grand Tour of Europe on a shoestring, was gravely experienced by my contemporaries as existential estrangement (in different concentrations, of course; the metaphorical containing, usually, only 10 percent of the potency of the real thing).
The reality of exile, visible in a realistic light several decades later, had in
fact been very different for my predecessors. Far from a celebration of estrangement, it had been heartbreaking. For Cioran, the author of
Un précis de decomposition,
his condition was a prompt to suicide. Paul Celan, whose parents were murdered by the Nazis, saw his continued existence as a mistake and committed suicide, finally, in Paris. Ionesco, who had taken Europe by storm by pointing a mirror at its absurd manners, was situated at the intersections of two totalitarianisms, a position that was hardly playful. Tristan Tzara, who had founded the Dada provocation, became a communist, which was a form of artistic suicide very much like a real one. The list of literal and metaphorical suicides of Romanian exiles is long, and the same is true for exiles from every other country who had the misfortune of being born in one of the century's dark decades.
fact been very different for my predecessors. Far from a celebration of estrangement, it had been heartbreaking. For Cioran, the author of
Un précis de decomposition,
his condition was a prompt to suicide. Paul Celan, whose parents were murdered by the Nazis, saw his continued existence as a mistake and committed suicide, finally, in Paris. Ionesco, who had taken Europe by storm by pointing a mirror at its absurd manners, was situated at the intersections of two totalitarianisms, a position that was hardly playful. Tristan Tzara, who had founded the Dada provocation, became a communist, which was a form of artistic suicide very much like a real one. The list of literal and metaphorical suicides of Romanian exiles is long, and the same is true for exiles from every other country who had the misfortune of being born in one of the century's dark decades.
The Devil's Art:
Autobiography
Autobiography
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am going to address two forms of life-telling: the automatic and the palliative. The first was once, but is no longer, vulnerable to social revolution, the second is a perennial placebo, and the subject of this essay.
am going to address two forms of life-telling: the automatic and the palliative. The first was once, but is no longer, vulnerable to social revolution, the second is a perennial placebo, and the subject of this essay.
Let's start with the first: Is it possible to have a life without having a biography?
On the face of it, the answer would be yes, but on further thought I'd say that, yes, before the advent of the modern, bureaucratic state it was possible. The bureaucratic state, however, inscribed every individual with the infrastructure of biography. You can even say that the state invented the individual by means of biography. The individual is someone with a recorded birth, marriage, school attendance, property deeds, employment record, and death certificate. The individual is the writing that defines him. It is not possible to be an individual without a biography. It is illegal to be an individual without a biography. The state sees to itâthrough the recorded infrastructureâthat each individual has a unique biography. The official infrastructure is filled out over a lifetime by the modern individual with a network of paper trails: correspondence, inter-office memos, faxes, e-mail, tape and video recordings. There is little difficulty in biographing anyone
alive after the mid-eighteenth century in Europe or North America, and what little difficulty there is has to do with the overabundance of data and the need to select. The biographical act of the state is automatic and increasingly weighty while the biographical subject is increasingly baroque and circumscribed.
alive after the mid-eighteenth century in Europe or North America, and what little difficulty there is has to do with the overabundance of data and the need to select. The biographical act of the state is automatic and increasingly weighty while the biographical subject is increasingly baroque and circumscribed.
The radical act under such circumstances is to erase or overthrow the record, either in favor of tabula rasaâthrough revolutionâor by writing one's autobiography. I'm using
revolution
here to mean anarchy, i.e, the moment of the burning of the Office of the Registrar and the Archive of the Secret Police, but it's just a symbolic trope. Such “revolution” is no longer possible since our biographies are no longer centralized but spread farther than most individuals travel, with bits and pieces lodged and multiplied in databases that are everywhere and nowhere at once.
revolution
here to mean anarchy, i.e, the moment of the burning of the Office of the Registrar and the Archive of the Secret Police, but it's just a symbolic trope. Such “revolution” is no longer possible since our biographies are no longer centralized but spread farther than most individuals travel, with bits and pieces lodged and multiplied in databases that are everywhere and nowhere at once.
We moderns, or postmoderns, are overwritten. Overinscribed. Overrecorded. The modern state is an automatic overproducer of individual biographies. The necessity to control every aspect of human existence, down to and beyond the molecular level, is an automatic function of the bureaucratic machine. The overabundance of biography is also a result of democracy. In theocratic societies only kings and nobles had biographies. Subjects were known only by their functions: butlers, weavers, blacksmiths, buttressers, picklers, seamstresses, moat diggers. The nameless serf layers below the professionals were known only as “souls.”
Souls don't have biographies, they have only a collective life and, if they are good, a private afterlife. The modern state and increasing democracy gave these souls back their bodies, unique bodies with the marks of identity on them. The body is the biography. It is the body, gained through social revolutions in the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries, that provides the records of the state and is now overproducing enough data to create not just the individual to whom it belongs but other bodies as well, whether fictional or cloned.
The only way to subvert one's official biography is to rewrite it. Autobiography is the opposite of the biography insofar as it is the individual's attempt to escape the description of the state. Some autobiographers might deny this, pointing to their use of official records, etc., but in effect, their texts exist for the purpose of challenging those records. When one begins a tale with the words “I was born in Pontoise in 1456,” one will spend the rest of one's argument, indifferent of whether one was born in Pontoise or not,
on decrying or apologizing for that fact. The misfortune of being bornâto paraphrase Cioranâalong with all the other misfortunes deemed fit for the record, is what autobiographers target for destruction. Every autobiography is an antisocial, subversive act aimed against the recorded facts of one's life.
on decrying or apologizing for that fact. The misfortune of being bornâto paraphrase Cioranâalong with all the other misfortunes deemed fit for the record, is what autobiographers target for destruction. Every autobiography is an antisocial, subversive act aimed against the recorded facts of one's life.
Autobiography subverts the data-heavy body by attempting to give back the individual his soul, to return the body-specifics to the collective matrix. Autobiographers aspire to be serfs of undifferentiated energy. Autobiography subverts not only the state but the body, which is the biography authored by the state. The autobiographer makes a claim to immortality. The body is, of course, mortal, and the state, while it encourages reproduction, is fond of occasional house-cleaning.
And now along comes virtuality, which empties the body and makes possible the overwriting of the soul. To give just one example: the Paper Body of the President has grown so vast in half a century it is quite impossible to see. The librarian of Jimmy Carter's presidential library in Atlanta told me that Roosevelt, who was a four-term president and oversaw some of the most dramatic events of our centuryâthe Great Depression, World War IIâhad less than half as many papers as Carter, a one-term president. The librarian dreaded to imagine the size of Clinton's White House archive where every e-mail is backed by a hard copy and every copy is copied. When such dimensions are reached, the body becomes invisible. Proportion dictates that monuments cannot rise above a certain height without disappearing. The Body of the Nation, following closely on the Body of the President, is likewise drowning or dissolving in biographical overabundance.
Just in time, virtuality and unlimited memory rushes to our defense. Bill Gates mounted on a chip is to biography and the state what Joan of Arc on her horse was to Orléans and to France: a Savior of the Code, the Guarantor of the infinity of the form. In the virtual world we can rewrite our biography, autobiographomanicize to our heart's content. We can also change identities altogether, slipping out of bodies and genders quicker than it takes to change clothes. We can shape-shift across species, we can spin in the changing rooms of MUDs (multiuser dungeons) as fast as we want. Virtuality has put evolution on fast forward. But this Darwin-on-speed mode is only as good as the data, which is to say that the disembodied soul made possible by the computer is programmed by a writing that is neither less nor more than the abstracted biography of the state. Which is, of course, the abstract of all the biographies of individuals. This tail-swallowing is only seemingly
generative of soul. The freedom to muck around in the aesthetics of identity is a game. Virtuality means just that. The textual metarmophosis of the virtual autobiographer is as bound by the fundamental program as the body is to the state.
generative of soul. The freedom to muck around in the aesthetics of identity is a game. Virtuality means just that. The textual metarmophosis of the virtual autobiographer is as bound by the fundamental program as the body is to the state.
More tragically, the creation of any fiction of identity is only an admission of the bondage to state, time, and language. What, then, is the state of autobiography in a sea of drifting facts that can fit with ease anywhere, in a world where collage is the predominant mode of expression? And where the image, composed in whatever manner one wishes, remains uniformly contained? Is there an approach that does not require the reinvention of a moral system? Which, given the tattered remains of such systems, adrift across the sands of a psychology in retreat before machines, is, you have to admit, no easy task.
Autobiography! What a bourgeois conceit! What odd presumption that one's life matters enough to write about. One writes autobiography either to escape life or to make some if there isn't enough. In any case, the activity bares the pattern and makes escapeâfrom that point onâdifficult unless one writes one autobiography after another, each one in flagrant opposition to the one that came before. Serial lives like (concomitant) sentences.
I have done thatâto my embarrassment. My first autobiography, titled modestly,
The Life & Times of an Involuntary Genius,
was written in the third person with a long sectionâa letter to my first loveâin the second. By removing myself, at age 23, from the scant facts of my life, I was hoping to create a listenable story, much the same way that someone calling a help line might say, “I have this friend with a problem.” Of course, the reason I wrote an autobiography at such a tender age was that I had the problem of all tender-aged people, namely, I was unknown. By telling this tale of a young man with an exemplary life story I was hoping to remedy that situation. The advantage of writing at such a tender age was that I remembered everything or nearly everything that happened to me. I had the benefit of only a few events, earth-shattering as they might have seemed to me, and I used them to create an initiatory structure. I had no ax to grind but I had (already!) some excuses to make. I left my country and my girl and I felt bad about it. By writing those things down I recast them to appear heroic: I wasn't a traitor,
I was an exile, a hero. History came to my aid there, with its long and distinguished list of exile-heroes.
The Life & Times of an Involuntary Genius,
was written in the third person with a long sectionâa letter to my first loveâin the second. By removing myself, at age 23, from the scant facts of my life, I was hoping to create a listenable story, much the same way that someone calling a help line might say, “I have this friend with a problem.” Of course, the reason I wrote an autobiography at such a tender age was that I had the problem of all tender-aged people, namely, I was unknown. By telling this tale of a young man with an exemplary life story I was hoping to remedy that situation. The advantage of writing at such a tender age was that I remembered everything or nearly everything that happened to me. I had the benefit of only a few events, earth-shattering as they might have seemed to me, and I used them to create an initiatory structure. I had no ax to grind but I had (already!) some excuses to make. I left my country and my girl and I felt bad about it. By writing those things down I recast them to appear heroic: I wasn't a traitor,
I was an exile, a hero. History came to my aid there, with its long and distinguished list of exile-heroes.
My second autobiography,
In America's Shoes
, picked up where the first one left off, at the beginning of my life in America, and it was a first-person record of the rapid process of becoming American. I felt that by changing countries and languages I had literally been born again. In this sense, I was not starting where I'd left off, but from my new birth in 1966 in Detroit, Michigan. Furthermore, the book is mostly about my life in California, a part of America where the remaking of one's identity was the chief business of the inhabitants. This book is less a record of the past as a writing of the present in its becoming past. The speeded-up nature of time in America is the real subject of this work. In America, I had noticed from the very beginning, the future becomes the past before anyone could possibly understand it. I was hoping to invent a way by which thinking about the past could be made as fast as the transformation itself. The Gogolian sentence, as I understood it from Nabokov's description, with its endless clauses, rolling open parentheses, and constant digressions, was the tool for such enterprise. This book is an autobiography-on-the-run, a “meditation in an emergency,” as Frank O'Hara put it. It is also an American book because it made use of the “open field” as theorized by Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan, and others, which is to say that it rode the wave of time even as it explained the drowning.
In America's Shoes
, picked up where the first one left off, at the beginning of my life in America, and it was a first-person record of the rapid process of becoming American. I felt that by changing countries and languages I had literally been born again. In this sense, I was not starting where I'd left off, but from my new birth in 1966 in Detroit, Michigan. Furthermore, the book is mostly about my life in California, a part of America where the remaking of one's identity was the chief business of the inhabitants. This book is less a record of the past as a writing of the present in its becoming past. The speeded-up nature of time in America is the real subject of this work. In America, I had noticed from the very beginning, the future becomes the past before anyone could possibly understand it. I was hoping to invent a way by which thinking about the past could be made as fast as the transformation itself. The Gogolian sentence, as I understood it from Nabokov's description, with its endless clauses, rolling open parentheses, and constant digressions, was the tool for such enterprise. This book is an autobiography-on-the-run, a “meditation in an emergency,” as Frank O'Hara put it. It is also an American book because it made use of the “open field” as theorized by Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan, and others, which is to say that it rode the wave of time even as it explained the drowning.
My third autobiographyâwhich was never publishedâwas intended as an autobiography from everyone else's point of view. I mailed out about a hundred questionnaires to friends and acquaintances asking them a number of questions like: “When did we meet? What did we do? What happened afterwards? How do I figure in your life?” I got back a great variety of answers. Some writers took the questions as an opportunity to reminisce scrupulously, others as a license to invent. There were true and fantastic stories in the mix, all of them stylistically incompatible. I realized a number of things: First of all, I was not as important to others as I was to myself. My friends' accounts of our moments together were tawdry and pale compared to how I conceived of them. Second, one's biography from the perspective of others was as loosely connected as subatomic particles: Immense spaces sat between events, attracted only by forces too weak to make a compelling fiction. The biography provided by the state was more substantial than the memories of my friends.
Lately, the autobiographical enterprise has been enjoying great popularity
in this country. The imprecise and fuzzy word used to describe this new, hot product is “memoir.” I understand the rationale. “Memoir” bypasses even the minimum requirements of the genre as we understood it until now. “Memoir” recognizes the fallibility of memory, the impossibility of ordering what is recalled randomly. What “memoir,” like “autobiography,” does not relinquish, however, is the right to claim an initiatory structure. These things that happened to me, both forms say, retell an exemplary initiation. The hero leaves home in search of self-fulfillment, encounters many dangers, is transformed into an adult, and returns to slay the dragons of conformity by becoming the head of the household. Or something like that. The endings, in recognition of established postmodern findings, are sometimes open-ended. What is sure is that they do not end in the death of the hero, like novels, because an autobiographer cannot fake his own death. By not dying, the hero of an autobiography always triumphs. The form is implicitly optimistic and as such, American. We do not, in this country, believe in endings: we believe in success. We want to hear stories of triumph. Which is why you will hear only Europeans proclaiming “the death” of this or that, whether “history” or “politics” or “God” or “philosophy” or whatever. We like to think that those things are only metaphors for the “death of Europe.” Things in this country do not die, they collapse in a data-subconscious from where they can be retrieved by your zip-drive. The American form of parting with the past is amnesia. We simply forget things by storing them away in our data banks. We have more computer memory in this country than the rest of the world combined. This memory allows us to do computation on a scale impossible before, computations so vast that they allow for the discovery and transformation of everything, including our identities and species. But, as I said before, this is only virtuality. What happens in the bodied world is another story.
in this country. The imprecise and fuzzy word used to describe this new, hot product is “memoir.” I understand the rationale. “Memoir” bypasses even the minimum requirements of the genre as we understood it until now. “Memoir” recognizes the fallibility of memory, the impossibility of ordering what is recalled randomly. What “memoir,” like “autobiography,” does not relinquish, however, is the right to claim an initiatory structure. These things that happened to me, both forms say, retell an exemplary initiation. The hero leaves home in search of self-fulfillment, encounters many dangers, is transformed into an adult, and returns to slay the dragons of conformity by becoming the head of the household. Or something like that. The endings, in recognition of established postmodern findings, are sometimes open-ended. What is sure is that they do not end in the death of the hero, like novels, because an autobiographer cannot fake his own death. By not dying, the hero of an autobiography always triumphs. The form is implicitly optimistic and as such, American. We do not, in this country, believe in endings: we believe in success. We want to hear stories of triumph. Which is why you will hear only Europeans proclaiming “the death” of this or that, whether “history” or “politics” or “God” or “philosophy” or whatever. We like to think that those things are only metaphors for the “death of Europe.” Things in this country do not die, they collapse in a data-subconscious from where they can be retrieved by your zip-drive. The American form of parting with the past is amnesia. We simply forget things by storing them away in our data banks. We have more computer memory in this country than the rest of the world combined. This memory allows us to do computation on a scale impossible before, computations so vast that they allow for the discovery and transformation of everything, including our identities and species. But, as I said before, this is only virtuality. What happens in the bodied world is another story.
What happens in the bodied world is that the collapsed pasts, presents, and futures that we forget as soon as we create them continue a nonvirtual existence in us that gives birth to a great number of monstrous, grotesque, unforeseen fleurs-de-mal, of which “memoirs” are but one product.
What kind of literature is the memoir?
The coincidence factory that is the novel lends its machinery to the manufacture of autobiographyâa risk-free loan since there is hardly any wear and tear on the machines. The facts that are made to coincide are preexistent. The novel, on the other hand, is rough on these machines because it forces them to manufacture the facts as well as fit them together.
What machines are there in the coincidence factory?
Perhaps we should first ask what coincidence is. According to Bill Moyers's recovering-addict son, William Cope Moyers, “Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.”
5
As my friend Laura says, God
needs
to remain anonymous because if we knew who and where he was we'd kick his ass for some of these coincidences ⦠like, let's say, turning eighteen when they give a World War. And furthermore, my friend Kuniko says, there may be many gods and they are all forgetful.
5
As my friend Laura says, God
needs
to remain anonymous because if we knew who and where he was we'd kick his ass for some of these coincidences ⦠like, let's say, turning eighteen when they give a World War. And furthermore, my friend Kuniko says, there may be many gods and they are all forgetful.
The writer, on the other hand, openly piles coincidence on coincidence in order to create a fate (a book) and advertises his presence at every seam. We know who and where the writer is at all times in a book: He is wherever two unlikely events or characters meet and he is that which puts them together. The postmodern writer has tried to elude this trap by making his presence obvious, by displaying the stage mechanics, a subterfuge intended paradoxically, to obscure his presence. If everything is visible everything is seamless: The Logos is at all times in motion, an ocean, everything is part of it. It is a fine theoretical dodge, but no book can be endless though it can (ideally) be porous. Language itself, all on its own, operates under a set of very strict rules and it displays a terrifyingly cogent machinery, a web that is symmetrical, geometrical, the same in every sound, syllable, word, utterance, story. So who needs to crudely manufacture coincidence when coincidence is inescapable?
We manufacture toys, don't we? It's a process: First we know that the Logos is connected at all points with whatever it passes through. Then we pretend not to know it and call this willful ignorance Mystery, as a palliative against the terror of the real mystery of connection, coincidence, and ineluctability. Then we create our version of a cogent Logos from the artificially willed blind spots where we have disconnected our consciousness. Eureka, we have a novel. We have a story. In the case of an autobiography, the job is a bit harder because we have to ignore not only the tedious cogency of Logos but the facts of our lives such as they are, courtesy of a selective memory. To spin the facts into crude coincidence, fit them into the procrustean bed of the book, takes a will greater than that of the novelist, an ignorance deeper than that of a simple spinner of tales. We who pretend
to tell our lives are the lowest among writers, a tribe not known for its integrity in the first place.
to tell our lives are the lowest among writers, a tribe not known for its integrity in the first place.
How can a pretender to the job of god have any integrity?
As for the machines themselves, they are the traditional ones of fiction: plot, dialogue, characterization (1 almost wrote “cauterization”), exposition, etc. The once-taken-for-granted sobriety of the autobiographer has been pretty much abandoned by the memoirist. Re-created dialogue, falsified plot, impressionistic characterization, and self-serving exposition are pretty much standardâsometimes covered with a thick syrup of lyricality that passes, in some circles, for poetry. Where the circumspect autobiographer of forty years ago might say, “I hear those words from a half century ago as if they were spoken today,” and then goes on to make them up, the contemporary memoirist no longer bothers. With this sort of touch there is little, as I've said, wear and tear on the machines of fiction, but what is lost in accuracy is not gained in imagination. Many of today's memoirs, with a few notable exceptions, namely those of scientists and camp survivors, are just fairy tales, primitive novels intended to palliate a public seized by the fear of failure. Failure is un-American. The confessional mania that possesses us today has emptied the nation's closets on television, on radio, in newspapers, in memoirs. Nothing is hidden any longer, but the desire for what is hidden is increased a hundredfold. The open maw of insatiable media need, and the public desire it stimulates and frustrates, demands more and more from the ransacked closets. But fear not: The production of false memory is a booming business. False Memory Syndrome is no longer limited to pop psychologists and their distressed charges, it is the status quo of the moment. The memoir is a skeumorph. Which is to say, a content-empty form anyone can put their stuff in, like Etch-A-Sketch.
Other books
The Maiden Bride by Rexanne Becnel
The Smoky Mountain Mist by PAULA GRAVES
A Chance in the Night by Kimberly Van Meter
The Guardian (Coranite Chronicles) by Yip, Egan
The English Lily (Tales of the Scrimshaw Doll) by Wheeler, Kae Elle
The Night Has Teeth by Kat Kruger
Love Finds You: A Helena's Grove Novella by Ivy Alexander
Indelible Ink by Matt Betts
Surviving the Fall: How England Died by Cross, Stephen