In the Beggarly Style of Imitation Page 7

  The critic of English literature feels more often than not that his or her job is to bring Spenser, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton alive to the current generation. We should understand that responsibility as a tradition that is centuries old. The philosopher has the same responsibility for Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, Descartes, Kant. Film is rather odd in that it has a super-truncated history. When does the first artist actually appear in the cinema? Do we want to be super-generous and say Méliès? Or be more restrictive and say Eisenstein? Or are we going to be middle-of-the-road and say it’s D.W. Griffith? We’re still trying to sort out what it is that might be worth keeping, even as we recognize that pretty much nothing is going to be kept as significant art past the next fifty years.

  Cinema is like sand-painting (the comparison was Brakhage’s). Once it, as a physical matter, disappears… and it’s an art that’s really tied to a very fragile physical matter. Much more than half of the films made are permanently lost. Our understanding of the hierarchies of the art form—who are the important figures?—that game is doomed and everyone kind of recognizes it. The task of the critic in film is much more melancholy than the task of the critic in literature. The literary critic has reason to believe what they care about will survive. The film critic has a strong suspicion that despite everything, despite efforts of cinematheques and restorers, we’re losing this particular struggle. It’s a source of great distress when the study of video games creeps its way in to the study of cinema: it portends that we’ll have to move on from cinema to other things that amuse the young. I-don’t-care formulations like, “Why are we fetishizing celluloid?” or “Isn’t cinephilia, like its name suggests, some kind of pathology?” are all things that suggest to me that everybody’s getting ready to abandon the cinema. And that means they’re going to be abandoning the artist in the cinema, the idea of preservation for the future.

  The critic of the fine arts has the advantage that the things she wishes to understand, to contextualize, are worth gazillions of dollars. Whereas with a film, which has already had its commercial run, is never worth gazillions of dollars. In fact, it’s worth very, very little. There’s no Christie’s for Antonioni prints. The cinema’s triumph resulted because it was an art made under the conditions of industrial reproduction. That same historical feature dooms it. There’s no film equivalent to an altarpiece in a small village in Italy that turns out to be a masterpiece and gets carted off to a museum in New York. I mean that’s a fetish object. There might have been a print of Nosferatu in a Danish mental hospital—and there was such a discovery twenty years ago—but there could be another in a forgotten cinema basement in Duluth, too.

  The art critic can be sure that, barring the collapse of civilization altogether, there can be edition 200 of Doom or Halo and it won’t affect the cultural value of that Italian altarpiece. There’s some sense in which the moving visual culture will now say, “This is what’s happening, baby!” but not Brakhage, Antonioni or Godard. The cinema is coloured by its own obsolescence in visual culture, more so than the already-survived obsolescence of pre-Raphaelite art or the Byzantine icon. “That stuff’s gonna live on forever. Well the cinema, ehn.” As a preserver then, well, I think if you were a student in music and you didn’t know Brahms, you’d be deficient. You’d be like a doctor who didn’t know what to do with the respiratory system, only what to do with the digestive system. It doesn’t make any sense.

  In cinema, the view that if you’re a kind of accredited film student you should be chasing after the Chris Markers, Antonionis and Eisensteins—that’s not really the culture, except among the few. Instead, it’ll be things coming in and out of fashion. So—and I might say this is true of critics generally—film critics generally don’t feel a responsibility for the whole thing that film is. And this is worse amongst filmmakers. Filmmakers feel no responsibility for the tradition in which they work. Those who do are exceptional.

  Triolet

  Itchy Bang

  Indecision faire

  Ceki li envie

  Mo senti moi connecter

  L’aube pour ene nouvo l’idee

  Li pou vini bientot

  Pena sentiments

  Lotte fine arrete

  Prend so medicine

  Li manque conviction

  Mais li pu met moi

  Dans mo place

  Dans so talon

  N’importe quand

  Mo pu sorti

  Dans mo la chambre

  Et mo pou dire

  Si to refuse tout

  L’emotion dans to la vie

  To formation l’esprit

  Pu dans ene vitrine

  Si to croire voleur

  Vivre dans luxe

  Blier qui to doire moi

  Mo plein dans Triolet

  Vieux batiaras pas capav payer

  Li paraitre stupide

  So les bas Wolford

  Et so la chaine en acier

  De toute facon, mo…

  Perce trou dans so la tete

  Enleve tout so tracas

  Bane vagabonds

  Capave detruire to la foi

  Dans l’humanite

  N’importe quand

  Mo pu sorti de mo cachot

  Et mo pu prier

  Si to refuse tout

  L’emotion dans to la vie

  To formation l’esprit

  Pu dans ene vitrine

  Si to croire voleur

  Vivre dans luxe

  Blier qui to doire moi

  Indecision runs

  Any way it does

  I’ll feel connected to

  The dawning of a new idea

  Any day now

  Empty sentiments

  Lotte’s off

  Her meds

  She lacks conviction

  But she’ll cut me

  Down to size

  In her heels

  Any day now

  I’ll stumble

  Out of this room

  And I’ll say

  If you deny all

  The feelings in your life

  Your mind’s design

  Is on display

  If you believe

  In the luxury of thieves

  Forget the debt and what I said

  Bored in Triolet

  Old fustilugs can’t pay

  He looked a stupid thing

  In Wolford tights

  And manacled steel

  Anyway I…

  Drilled his head with holes

  Relieved him of his woes

  A press of idlers

  Can destroy your faith

  In humanity

  Any day now

  I’ll stumble out of this cell

  And I’ll pray

  If you deny all

  The feelings in your life

  Your mind’s design

  Is on display

  If you believe

  In the luxury of thieves

  Forget the debt and what I said

  All Songs by Kaartikeya Derwish (Mauritian Countryside Plenitude Publishing Company)

  The Slump

  Juvenilia

  “Hideous, unfetching—give sense to the feeling, to that muckheap of judgements a chink of light we can all proudly, not bemusedly, take stock of! If your reader does not understand you, you do not, in a simple manner of speaking, understand your reader. Don’t send those searching eyes on me. Direct that reproving gaze inward, to the person that responsibility for such failure is appropriately intended.”

  For Cornelia, the words provoked sulky outrage. She reached across the table for the jumper she had abandoned earlier, intending to wring it in substitution of Cepecauer’s mortar mixer of a neck. She folded in the starfish-like sprawl and remembered the wheedling she’d received from a student named Gyk Zatylny whom she’d met in one of the campus commissaries; Gyk had sung the old man’s praises, referring admiringly to the latter’s grasp of sublimity and his puzzling brand of peg-legged psychology, th
e latter of which formed an untoward alignment with the reception aesthetics that had lately fascinated that side of the Atlantic. Compelled in such a way (and if truth be told, hoping to smooth the rough edges of her writing), she had enrolled in the course with eagerness, and even more daringly perhaps, optimism. Realizing now that Gyk’s mouth would prove just as fitting a visualization, her fingers tightened around the clump of clothing just as she caught the gaze of the lurching windmill holding the room’s attention.

  “Cornelia, your disapproval is going to fast become legendary in this classroom if you continue to regard me that way. What is it exactly that you are beginning to… um… take umbrage with? You don’t, uh, see the sense of what I’m saying?”

  The eight pool floats along Cornelia’s line of sight ended their confederated approval with a rubbery shift in bodies that echoed down the spare, almost unmanned room. They looked on expectantly, some with interest, others with panic, unfamiliar with the forms of disfavour that went beyond marking up columns of their notebooks with the despising annotations Cepecauer’s body seemed to suggest.

  “Well, I can see that you make some very convincing—”

  “Because you must realize that what I’m giving you,” Cepecauer interrupted, “is the life expectancy… experience you ask of me when you walk through those doors. Who’s in the mood for an anecdote? When my ex-wife read my first book, she strained her neck to look at me—her way of condemning the vanity of my scribblings, you see. Very melodramatic, this woman, suffering in the womb, like. ‘Ronald,’ she would say. For emphasis, saying my name as if it had one syllable: ‘Runld, one of our marriage—or this pitiful reflection of it—will survive this trespass because I cannot live with the idea of sharing a bed with a purveyor of such colourless…’ Something along those high-flown lines. Anyway, I was within my rights when I told the arch-witch she wasn’t exactly helping me weigh the alternatives. If she’d spent half the time normally wasted on repining at the gym, well… Somewhere—don’t ask me where—it is said that literature is supposed to double your pleasure, like having a frig alongside a mirror; alas, the only thing a reflection ever doubled on that bloated sow was from the waist down… What was I saying? My options were very easy, though limited, even before weighing them. I’m getting sidetracked. I can tell you can tell.”

  Cepecauer paused for effect. “Therefore, I sold ten thousand copies of my book. Hardly a hard sell—the decision I mean, not the book! The point being, not exactly to the contrary of what you may be thinking—put your hand down, Cornelia—that you can in fact change a horse in midstream—again, not the book. Also, that sometimes conviction, persistence—such qualities as can only take you so far—are not enough in this dogsy-dog world. Personal sacrifice alone will not see you the rest of the way through.” He turned his back to the class, the rancorous angling of his shoulders directed at one person alone. “In your cases, the humility that is entailed by the positioning of your seats.”

  The day ended with a sense of defeat Cornelia was stiff-lipped about preventing, even if it came at the cost of the self-possession by which she abided. She felt as if her body had been unsettled by Cepecauer’s appearance, his suggestive pointing when alluding to former lovers working a similarly lamentable magic over her imagination. It was better to envision the last three hours of her life having been enacted in a dumb show so that dignities could be preserved, stomachs left unchurned. A victory would have meant countering Cepecauer with the scores of objections normally advanced in the face of such blustering, though she immediately realized the futility of the endeavour.

  The mere thought of sharing anything in common with a scurrilous blatherer—even something as incidental as opposite sides of an argument—made her reach for the starry hollow of the sky. Imagining the hideous conflation of their limbs and faces, the spider-­child of their synchronous minds, wrought as much chaos over her as the idea of their disentanglement; the way Cepecauer droned on about “sharing byways” with a reader, “toiling and moiling with a companion fair,” provoked other hopeless imaginings, and she recognized that such assignment-returning overtures would always come burdened with the honorary reader’s own outmoded sensibilities. Her biggest fear was Cepecauer handing back a writing sample in the future, sputtering a winking eyeball in her direction while proclaiming: “Fine work, Darteris. Very fine. Could have set it better myself if I tried.” Or alternately: “Fine work, Darteris. Very fine. Couldn’t have set it better myself if I tried.”

  Cornelia vowed never to read Cepecauer’s work because the fear of his influence was too great, looming large like a winding sheet. He had been, Gyk avowed, something of a phenomenon in the past, a glory-lapper who wished to slip in between the cracks left unused by more capable writers and who had succeeded in that role due in no small part to assiduity. He allied himself with the Rough Gruffs who spoke with disaffection about the opposite sex, exploring their literary bodies in terms of how parts were proportioned in relation to each other, sexual compliance somehow ridiculously deriving from those arrangements. Such writers referred to the female form as a gamesman makes reference to a trampoline, describing the exact degree it would resist or admit human force, and using the same caddish terminology in which such athletes are wont to dabble in their ignoble kingdom of sport: the mangy, disease-ridden street corner. Gyk had even once related how Cepecauer’s novel The Honeysuckle Fleet vainly attempted to ennoble the figure of the onanist as a tortured repentant, frustrating his climax so as not to sully the stature of his revered object of arousal.

  This circumspection around Cepecauer, however second-hand in its acquisition, was in some respects justified. It was true that he came loaded with false promises, but it was also accurate that as an esteemed novelist, his talents could undoubtedly prove beneficial in some vague, presently undetermined way. A semester’s worth of doddering writer’s intuition had to come at a cost, and only by enrolling could Cornelia find out if its value would be offset by a writerly provincialism.

  Cornelia’s mind returned to the fateful present. She briskly gathered her things, made her exit from the classroom, and stepped outside where the brackish air felt rough on her uncovered arms. She saw Cepecauer head off in another direction and felt relieved to walk untroubled and without evasions. The sight of her college commons room soon occasioned another return to old thoughts though, this time to the exact moment when Gyk had successfully overcome her reservations about the course.

  “Gyk, it’s altogether simple,” she had emphasized plainly. “What have I to learn cooped up in a class that on the face of it serves as the glorification of a living man’s reputation? The extravagance of the idea! Let me guess. How to end all of my stories with henpecked men? No, better yet, with snipe hunts! There are some people who can’t stand to admit failure when it’s staring them blankly in the face.”

  Gyk had stifled a laugh. “It sounds silly when you say it like that.”

  “My saying it has nothing to do with it sounding silly. What I want to know is if breezing through them is in any way relevant.”

  “I should think so. When you hear what I think they’re about, or what’s potentially worse, of what actually happens in them, you’re inclined to believe that it’s all this twaddle about money being the easiest thing in the world to come by next to standing downwind of a woman’s temper, of finding a job you can’t bear or how a man’s access to sex is like his access to a good deli. But there’s beauty in those stories as well—albeit shame too—which is what makes it so unoriginal to want to dog pile.”

  “Then I imagine the experience is likely to bore me. Isn’t learning how to make the same mistakes as a man inclined to view them as triumphs a problem for you? He’d be of practically no use to me unless he retracted every word he’d ever published, and he’s not liable to do any such thing. I think considering enrolment has been a miserable error in judgement.”

  “Pshaw! That’s an irrational fear if I ever heard one. Won’t be the outcome of attendin
g a few classes—writing like him, I mean. It’s not like you go on talking to me and expect to assume my feelings on any matter. It’s quite the reverse, what with you being so headstrong. You know he’s starting a new imprint with his publisher, don’t you? You never know with these things, might lead to something promising. In any event, what you’d be going for is his input on your work—if it’s in fit condition with publishing standards.”

  “I know what passes these days for standards, Gyk, and it has nothing to do with being published.”

  The couple had then rounded a curve along the walk of the college’s main building and tramped their way through the mutinous stork’s bills that girdled the bronze war memorial outside Cedar Hall. As they rushed swiftly past the surge of students near the entry doors, Cornelia almost failed to notice Cepecauer amid the maelstrom of tumbling bodies, a wiry gravel bar defiantly standing his ground.

  “If he knew those standards,” Cornelia continued, “wouldn’t you think he’d be at home slogging away on a book making good on that knowledge rather than wasting it on us? Why am I always so suspicious of those who are in a position to instruct what they so ineptly cannot put to good use?”

  “Sour grapes are always in season.”

  She had looked away from Gyk’s face for a moment only to see Cepecauer hunched awkwardly over some papers. Cepecauer looked up and locked onto a face he instantly recognized. Unaccustomed to resisting opportunities to discuss his favourite subject, he’d stuffed his notes away into his briefcase and outstretched a friendly hand to Gyk from thirty feet away.