The Fourteenth Blackbird

A happy phone call with Rajeev who perennially encourages me to blog more frequently and fearlessly (and hankers, for some reason, for my grad schooly stuff)--

This may be a one-off affair or maybe I will try to contemplate my work a little better and be a better baby critic. I finished Ulysses, a labor of love certainly to be labored over for years to come, and was asked to respond to a little bit of criticism in a public forum. So below is the response which is heartfelt if dilettante. Hi to Joyce! Ask me again in a few years and maybe I'll know more.

In 1959, a UVA student asked Faulkner about Absalom, Absalom! in the language of Stevens: “it is more or less a case of thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird with none of them right?” The circuitous, palimpsestic body of Ulysses makes me ask the same. Cixous says that Joyce is “writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles,” each of which wears its own “garment of writing” such that “the code and the message, the surface and the depths, are confused with one another." The shrine/opera of “Sirens,” the catalogue/Generals Exam of “Oxen of the Sun,” the catechism/epitaph of “Ithaca” all aspire towards their own point of view, the summation of which should be a “total manifestation of reality through language” and the work itself a “Multilanguage." But the heterogeneity of styles—garment after garment after garment, the removing, the putting on—is not only wearisome, but eventually becomes non-productive, homogenous “equivalent matter” (an exhaustion acknowledged by “Eumaeus”). The key to comprehensibility, Cixous tells us, entails a situation wherein the artist must “exile himself from the created sphere...to survey the universe from the outside; to escape from time, space, and immediacy." Such an exile would be perspectival clarity from the outside, or, as Faulkner answered, one’s “own fourteenth image of that blackbird which I would like to think is the truth.” Exile, Cixous draws from Portrait, is the place where language finally presses meaning out of “the gross earth” of experiences, showing instead “an image of beauty." Though Molly is not much different than Stephen or Bloom in many ways (she, too, has a lot of “gross earth” to her), “Penelope” does suffice as narrative exile, and does “press out” beauty in the exhale that is the final pages. Perhaps, though, the exile of “Penelope” has nothing to do with Molly and everything to do with Joyce’s having achieved a total saturation of styles, of multilanguage, where nothing more can be explored: thusly exiled from Ulysses, the precipitate is something like truth.

In getting at what Ulysses is about—or, as is perhaps easier, what Bloom is about—there are two ways of knowing. Through Bloom’s/Joyce’s subjective, imaginative stylings, the “noble accents/ And lucid, inescapable rhythms,” we get one level of understanding, and through the objectivities of Bloom’s/Ulysses’ reality we get another: “the blackbird is involved/ In what I know” as well. Ulysses before “Penelope” is an “enlarged, totalitarian epiphany that includes space and all moments” and synthesizes chaos “by wrapping it in a ‘verbal clothing’." It is a fleshy-fluxy “epiphany-as-cosmos” where “objects are drawn into the epiphany;” a string of Blooming chaos is anchored in Dublin in June exclusively by the objects of his observation. Objects are “certain focal points... isolated from reality and set in context which it illumined and which caused its soul to show forth clearly." Insofar as they are narrative anchors and insofar as they have the supreme capacity to mold and guide consciousness out of time, objects are supremely important to our understanding of Bloom. Not only is each chain of his thought tethered (however obliquely) to a totem (potato, soap, sideboard) but there is a “speech of objects” themselves: the Zeusian crack of the table in “Ithaca” is “one sharp warning noise from the unconscious is sufficient to set in motion all the mechanisms of memory."

But, as Cixous reminds us of Ephesus’s river, the flow/flux/flesh of life cannot be the same on either side of any given grounded moment. As we wondered with “Circe” and “Oxen of the Sun”—is there stable content to be had that exists outside of the style? What just happened amidst the play of language? Sure, there is comprehensible forward motion of the narrative when Stephen swats the chandelier at Bello’s, and this type of moment grounds the imaginative in the possible. However, the ashplant does not emerge unchanged after having swatted the chandelier, and our perception of Stephen evolves irreversibly as well. The verbal clothing of the moment always changes even the solidest objects, and any solidity that has built up as an understanding of who Bloom is or what Ulysses is saying is easily felled when the next parallax view comes: “The river is moving./ The blackbird must be flying.” Kristeva agrees that instabilities of writing and of content contribute to the quicksand underneath: “there coagulates an unstable image, on the point of toppling over into flesh and signifier." The flesh and the signifier—Joyce’s multiplicity of styles, the various “language garments” being worn, as well as the practicalities of June 16^th and its soaps and trotters—are all equally unstable as images. There is no “right way;” no episode or train of thought emerges as singularly truthful. These are the many blackbirds, presented, to our chagrin, without a verdict.

To the even greater chagrin of, Cixous smirks, the “not sufficiently familiar” reader (but who could possibly be sufficiently fit to read Ulysses?) the “reassuring space of the traditionally built novel is not given here as objective, but is reconstituted by an inner gaze which at once makes it subjective." The allusive soap bar and the pocket potato that have enraged, grounded, and befuddled us as we have followed Bloom are of no importance to Molly. Boylan’s betting tickets that weigh so heavily upon her husband, Milly’s cup that suspends him diachronically, and all the other “phenomena of senescence” that illuminate him brightly, if briefly, in “Ithaca” likely would have no conversation or “interchanges of looks” with Molly.

Furthermore, Kristeva describes the flexibility—and subsequent difficulty—of identity, saying Joyce presents a “liquidation, liquefaction, of both feminine and masculine, in the flow of a style, halting at no one identity—whether personal, ideological, or sexual—but knowing them all." Like style and objects, identity, too, is split up into fragments, into “being and non-being”, into “movement, kinesis, metabolism." Though Cixous does qualify the possibilities of narrative saying that Ulysses is a “limited polycentricity, rather than an unlimited formless multiplicity,” I have my doubts. I do not think Molly is special in or for providing perspective: the “exile” could have been from any character who is not Bloom and not Stephen. Nor do I think it is integral that the final perspective be a woman’s. In the course of Ulysses we have seen a “plastic, polymorphic, polyphonic” multiplicity of identification and identity, beginning with Stephen in Bloom and Bloom in Stephen (“Stoom,” “Blephen?”). We have seen, as in “Circe,” Bloom as woman, Bloom as man, as ancient, modern, animal, vegetable, and mineral, all of these identities imminently reversible and simultaneous (which is what makes them, much to the dramatist’s delight, so perturbingly, fascinatingly unfit to stage). The key to its “exile” effect is simply that Molly’s chapter exists slightly afield from this schema of identifications, and rather than having the same interlocking, reversible potentiality of identities, her chapter seems to exist to be just another, tighter way of looking at the blackbird of Bloom. As Kristeva says, “it concerns the male-artist who is stated with a final appropriation-identification." Molly’s Einfühlung makes Bloom surface as newly tender, but also more real than he has been since 10:00AM: contextualized, effective, and stable. The river of Bloom is never going to be the same from one June 16^th to the next, but Molly’s look shows it to be, at the very least, mappable and navigable. “The assimilation, in the final monologue, of the character of Molly by the narrator” solves some of the reversibilities of Bloom as well (kind/unkind, dull/smart, male/female, embodied/unembodied, for example). While Joyce, through the novel, “does not imagine himself to be or to contain the world,” and neither, of course, do Bloom or Molly (though Stephen might), he does assemble it. And the fourteenth image of the blackbird, or the perspective of exile—a tender, slumbering, fixed Bloom, ultimately knowable—only comes by virtue of the thirteen other blackbirds, the time before exile, the remarkable assembly.

You can listen to Faulkner tell the truth here.

Sailboats on the Charles

"The main thing I would have liked to know is that Harvard is a very decentralized institution and that it can be very hard to get information here."

-From the Harvard First Year Introductory Materials, nestled amongst tidings of balance and time management.

So I go to Harvard now, and my favorite problem that I've had so far is not being able to find out who owns the boats. When I went to Aquatics to take my sea worthiness swim test they passed me off to Athletics. Athletics passed me off to Activities, and Activities said the boats are maintained by Aquatics.
Clearly the boats are all at a sleepover, and they've pitted their parental bureaucratic bower against its alliterative self.

Solstice

Last weekend I saw John Crutchfield's new play in Asheville, Solstice. It's about two twenty-somethings, one of whom lives in a horrible apartment (where the play takes place). His downstairs neighbor, "Sparky", is a crack whore, though costumed in Limited Too, etc., etc., a few other creepy details. Our introduction to Sparky is the moment one of the male friends hears her having a hyena-like orgasm through the thin walls. But instead of the actress actually making the hyena sounds or whatever, we only get mugging from the guys and a lot of lines about how impressed and disgusted and intrigued they are at this unbelievable noise.

This play was supposed to the The Magnetic Theater's first attempt at realism. A few things earlier in the play struck me as failing this attempt. Their in-house lighting designer, whose other work I have absolutely enjoyed heretofore (witty lighting--heck, noticably positive lighting--seems a significant accomplishment in itself [attn designers: I do not mean to discredit your work!]), amplified a fist fight in the very first scene with a strobe. You're not fooling anyone! Strobes don't happen in real life!

But beyond these inconsistencies, the whole thing had a really smooth, interesting flow. The Sparky character was very well drawn and beautifully acted, but I was concerned by our introduction, which seemed unfair in two ways:

1) Hypersexualizes before we get a chance to meet her, then there is so much extra effort needed to explain her hypersexualization in a worthwhile way

2) Why deprive us? If you're going to make an introduction to a character that's two guys reacting with extreme facial gymnastics over this hyena orgasm, why are we not invited? Why is the actress playing Sparky not invited?

My friend Monica has this great story (that I will likely misrecall here) about presenting an idea to a writing instructor where the most incredible sight happens in the next room (I think it was talking dolphins revealing the meaning of life or something). The audience emerges in absolute intellectual and spiritual ecstasy, their lives changed forever by what they've just seen. Her instructor's reaction was something like "that's idiotic. Just put the dolphins on stage."

So which play would I rather see?

My full review, posted where it is safe from edits:

"Every playwright wishes the back of their file cabinet looked as good as John Crutchfield’s. It is hard to believe that his latest potent, heartwrenching piece, Solstice, now in its second weekend at the Magnetic Theater, ever had a humble beginning.

The Magnetic Theater, known throughout town (and, progressively, throughout the region) for producing exclusively original work of excellent quality, has been fostering Solstice for some time now. When the Field’s team began developing work in 2009, Artistic Director Steven Samuels demanded the full body—even the so-called dregs—of each artistic associate’s work. “He said, ‘show me everything you’ve written,’ so I pulled this from the back of the file cabinet,” humbly says Crutchfield, who also directed the production. What began as a one-act student show at Appalachian State has been workshopped several times since the theater’s birth in late 2010, and now boasts an ensemble and design team that have turned what Crutchfield calls “a tense little play” into a truly powerful, committed, and important production.

Solstice is smart and true and painfully good.  The Magnetic’s first concerted effort at realism, it tilts fearlessly towards the darkest spaces of the psyche. “I was bothered by some questions,” Crutchfield says of developing the piece, “can one remake oneself? Can one really change?” For a playwright, and a theatre, whose work has heretofore been characterized by the whimsical, the highly theatricalized, and, at times, the ridiculous, Solstice is a daring and incisive straight answer.

The play concerns three twenty-somethings caught, on the shortest night of the year, in a run-down apartment in a southern metropolis. Innocently enough, it explores the transitioning friendship between Carlton (Scott Fisher) and Eugene (Glenn Reed), but the unspeakable boils blackly right underneath the skin of this remarkable piece. Characterizing the bile of Solstice with astonishing nuance is Lisa Smith as Sparky, “a nice kid and a crack whore” who lives in the apartment downstairs.

And such an unsuspecting skin! Each of the three good-looking white kids who, with a shower and slight change of costume, could walk comfortably onto the set of “Glee”, we find plagued (with immediacy, and poetry, and gorgeous execution now expected of Crutchfield’s writing) with gruesome predicaments. Crutchfield is, in his own characters’ words, a bit of a “Socrates getting busy,” juxtaposing a rigorous catechization of human character with the more immediate concerns of a good pizza and/or a good lay.  “I wanted to show a rational approach to life alongside its irrational undercurrents,” Crutchfield says. Throughout the work, Crutchfield succeeds in weighing the quotidian laments of his young characters (a girlfriend who has decamped in favor of a “Kerouac-O” cross-country trip, bad cell reception, no groceries in sight) against layered moments of inconceivable repugnance.

This tension plays out most subtly in the minutiae of direction and acting as well. Eugene at one point declares a vehement hatred for Carlton’s music while he sits down for more; he deftly delivers the looming question regarding Sparky: “how can a hippy chick be fake?” Glenn Reed is quite moving in this incredible role. The actor’s boyishness plays well—so well that Reed could do much less and still be successful. Fisher’s is a superlative performance as Carlton, and Crutchfield’s humor oozes from his delivery, cadence and posture. It’s worth reiterating Smith’s talents, which exceed her years and do justice to the intense and finely-crafted Sparky.

My single qualm with Solstice concerns the theater’s apparent lack of confidence in this break from their previous work. The Magnetic promised of Solstice “Fisticuffs! Strange noises! A wooden sword! A Darth Vader mask! The return of the repressed! An attractive girl wearing an apron and little else!” and in so doing catalogued precisely the production’s weakest moments. Smith, for instance, is indubitably attractive in her cake-baking habiliments, but Sparky’s story is crippling and Smith’s ability to tell it beautiful, so why rob focus? Crutchfield needn’t have injected the absurd into Solstice’s richest moments: they are, after all, abundantly rich. A handful of unwelcome glimmers of misogyny and gaggy reliance on properties betray the wisdom and maturity of the theater being made and discredit the audience’s ability to understand—and enjoy themselves during—a stripped-down display of human truth.

As this was a swing at realism, I did question the marriage of deft technical naturalism (the sound and glow of the city culled from the black as Carlton cracks a window) to the hyperbolic-imaginative that we have come to expect of the theater’s work (out-of-place strobe lights and heavy metal to open the show). Call me a purist, but I think this project would have greatly benefited from sound and lighting that more thoughtfully reflected the—dare I say it—normalcy of Crutchfield’s words. Such inconsistencies suggest that there is still work to be done, but without doubt, Solstice is tremendously successful. Moreover, it is a significant moment for Crutchfield, and proves, perhaps for the first time, that the Magnetic Theater is a sound home for this level of seriousness. This finely designed and beautifully structured play closes February 4^th, and it would be a shame to miss it."

Some of My Favorites, 2011

It has been a strange year for entertainment: huge amounts of movies (my boyfriend has netflix), a loaded but desultory reading list that dropped from novels over tea at 7:00AM into criticism and theory at 2AM halfway through the year. Some great concerts and plays, though I would have loved more of those nights. Without further ado:

Books
the tastiest of the classics:
The Beautiful and the Damned- F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Moveable Feast- Ernest Hemingway
Wise Blood- Flannery O'Connor
Howards End- EM Forster
The Voyage Out- Virginia Woolf

and a few sundries:
The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction- Nicholas Dames
The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects- Charles Altieri
Why Do We Care About Literary Characters?- Blakey Vermeule
That Used to Be Us- Tom Friedman (inflammatory, and I disagree, but in a healthy way)

Concerts
Joe Pug at the Grey Eagle
Mount Moriah and Mandolin Orange at LAB
Bon Iver at Raleigh Amphitheater
Gillian Welch at the Orange Peel

Films
Blue Valentine
La Fille Sur le Pont
The Tree of Life
The Debt
Incendies
Beginners
Melancholia

Performances
Ruth (Magnetic)
Songs of Robert (Magnetic)
Middletown (Manbites)
Glass (LGP)
Henry V on Trapeze (Delta Boys)
Endgame (The Gate Theater at Historical Playmakers)
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Playmakers)

Frontiers

I love art. I love literature.
Sometimes, though, I get so saddened by the spaces in between them. The brushed-over program note of a dramaturg. The embarrasment of a sloppy adaptation. The limitations. The ennui.
In my life I have so many radiant examples to fuel each love: a family that has been, for almost a century, nourished by a feast of fiction. We share the delights of a juicy poem like secret fruits. I have sat in beautiful places all over the world and wept at the last page of a book. I crave French literature like I have some palpable, sickening deficiency because I can't read it fluently. I admire deeply those who read well, often, and to the point of taxation. It is one of the most enduring parts of my center. It is a home.
The other home, of course, is theater. At one point when I was about 16, I had been benched for the umpteenth time in JV basketball. I came to my mother, wrecked, self-disparaging. She finally said outloud what I had wanted to hear: stop doing what you're bad at, and do-- do fully, and dutifully--what you love. I had a home, and, it turned out, a future and an adulthood in the theater. I let it happen. I am endlessly proud of my peers in the theater, endlessly admiring of my mentors, endlessly aspirational myself. I see the structures and shape underneath the future of American theater and I am excited about it.
This duality is strange and stark. My family doesn't know or understand those shapes and structures underneath drama, or what it would really mean to have a career as an artist. My friends--the luminaries!--maybe see books in an analogous way: a hobby, a private world. Separate. Distinct.
Let me return, briefly, to the spaces in between:
Several times in my life I have tried to understand the bridges. Find out what they are, fantasize about becoming an influential architect of one of them. I try to understand the transgressive innovations of Modernism, the instinct to overhaul, and the ingredients of the success. 1910!
I think there is a frontier out there; it would mark an end to this division, and represent something new about the human imagination, power of expression, and consciousness. I don't know what it is. I don't know how to begin to excavate it. But, perhaps more profoundly than I am called to understand anything else about humanity, I feel compelled to understand it and move something forward.