The wandering I

God, hes left as on aur oun.

The wandering I.

So yes I said I was going to re-read Zimiamvia, yes, but the thing about pulling the book off the shelf (it’s a big dam’ book) and assembling the supplemental texts and monographs and picking up a new notebook and finding the right pen is it all becomes, well, a Thing, and Things can be put off, and I anyway I also said, which I didn’t tell you, or at least not here, I said the other thing I might do would be to start pulling together my various disparate thoughts on cinematic prose into something of a defense if not a manifesto (I am not the sort for manifestoes, ask anyone), but the trouble with that is everything I’d have to say is prescriptively reasoned from principles I’m applying myself, which don’t end up describing anything but what it is I’m trying to do, which, I mean, seems more than a little indulgent—what I really ought to be doing is to survey the field, marshal some (other) examples, draw from them what it is this cinematic prose, this screen-like æsthetic, is doing, or trying to do, but there again, see, I’m assembling tasks and goals and texts to find and read and would you look at that, it’s also become a Thing.

And anyway, besides: a lot of the cinematic stuff downright sucks.

Which is maybe why some sort of defense, I mean certainly not a manifesto but maybe a set of some sort of proposed, I dunno, guidelines? considerations? alternatives? something, anyway, is perhaps, maybe, in order, to show a way to make it better, if it’s bad, or at least lay out some possibles that might be could be reified with some modicum of thought, but—but. That would entail pretending what it is I’m doing, or think I’m doing, is in any way better or more considered or grew from thoughts worth the thinking; would mean setting myself up however haphazardly as an expert, or at least an authority, which is unseemly; and now this Thing is rapidly becoming a Chore, and so we set it aside, I mean, I’m behind on the next novelette as it is, you know, the actual doing of the cinematic prose I’d be thinking of talking about instead. So! Zimiamvia it is.

Except.

I was clearing out old browser tabs, as one does, and fell into reading a Baffler take on the post-postmodern novel, as one does, and here, in this article I’d originally opened God knows how many months ago, about (in part) a novel I’m, and no offense or insult intended here, but I’m not at all likely to ever want to read, honest, it’s called UXA.GOV, which was apparently blurbed as “an unhinged occupation of the cinematic mechanism of Robbe-Grillet’s novels of the ’70s,” which novels the article goes on to describe as novels in which “tropes of cinema and genre fiction are playfully misappropriated as vehicles for Robbe-Grillet’s perverse preoccupations.” —And, I mean, I knew the name, Alain Robbe-Grillet: French, experimental, perverse, sadist, misogynist, that’s what’s jotted on his index card in my memory cabinet, in which he’s filed next to George Bataille (French, experimental, sadistic, perverse, and their names both end in disappearing consonants) who, because his most famous book or at least the title I can most readily bring to mind is Histoire de l’œil, the Story of the Eye, is filed next to that comic Jodorowsky wrote for Mœbius, the Eyes of the Cat (Chilean and French, perverse): thus, a glimpse of my personal filing system. —So! Here’s Robbe-Grillet, the French experimental sadist, and I’m being told his fiction, or at least what was written in and around the ’70s, is cinematic, and, well.

(If I’d been paying attention, I might’ve noticed him earlier—there he is, after all, in the introduction to Marco Bellardi’s Cinematic Mode in Fiction, mentioned with Hammet and Vittorini and Ballard as possible touchstones, but I was mildly dreading the approach of something called the “para-cinematic mode,” and skipped on by.)

Curiosity sparked, I went surfing, which is still possible, even in an enshittified age, and found, thank you, London Review of Books, here’s Robbe-Grillet railing against Balzac’s

omniscient, omnipresent narrator appearing everywhere at once, simultaneously seeing the outside and the inside of things, following both the movements of a face and the impulses of conscience, knowing the present, the past, and the future of every enterprise

and here he is, insisting on the primacy of the object, the material, the surface, denying even the possibility of depth:

The reader is therefore requested to see in it only the objects, actions, words and events which are described, without attempting to give them either more or less meaning than in his own life, or his own death.

But—but! Be careful: here he is with the rub of the green:

…no sooner does one describe an empty corridor than metaphysics comes rushing headlong into it.

The visible world is merely their skin. So I’m nodding along with the beat, here. —The point, for me, with the idea of cinematic prose or the screen æsthetic or whatever we’re going to end up calling it, cinematic, I think, it’s cooler, but anyway, the point has always been not so much to ape or mimic or reproduce this or that technique of cinema qua cinema in prose, to write a montage or a pan or a smash-cut: that can be done, sure, certainly, and is even a part of it, of course, but it’s not the point. The point is to take the limitations imposed and implied by the form of cinema and apply them as ground rules and organizing principles to prose—tennis, as more than one poet has noted, is no fun without a net. So:

The point of view is at all times relentlessly focused on a specific here and a particular now: no speculating forward or ruminating backward, no pondering elsewhere, idly or otherwise.
No conclusions are ever directly drawn. No inferences are explicitly made. Judgment is out of the question; metaphor and simile become unfortunate compromises.
What is described is limited to what might be perceived by a camera, or a microphone. Anything else—touch, weight, temperature, smell or for God’s sake taste—they’re all too suggestive of a body, and thus of a subjective presence, and are to be avoided.
Essentially, and crucially: there is no interiority, whatsoever. Interiority is the bunk.

What’s being evacuated, in the end, is any trace or notion of a narrator—which is patently absurd, of course: narratives must have narrators; tales must have tellers; what am I trying to hide? And where? —But there’s power in hiding, in cloaking, in what’s done where you can’t see: negative space is a vital component of any composition. I’m building empty corridors with the hope that you, dear reader, will fill them with metaphysics—but the shapes of those corridors can’t help but suggest and direct whatever ghosts you bring.

It’s not as if I set out to write like the cinema, or was impelled in that direction by a disdain for the smugly blinkered omniscience of so many third persons. The technique and the philosophy assembled themselves concurrently, as I was tinkering with stories and criticism way way back in the day on alt.sex.stories.d: something about pornography would seem to encourage a flatly objective approach, and a narrator to get out of the way. (For me, at least. Mileage varies, and all.) But at this much later point, I mean—this is how I write the epic, and the epic is what I write; I need to be able to say something entertaining if not intelligent about it, at salons, and cocktail parties; thus: technique, and philosophy.

Still: it was some kind of surprising to see arguments that I might very well have been making issue from the fifty-year-old pen of the soi-disant bad boy of French letters, a maître à penser of the nouveau roman whom, and no offense or insult intended here, but I’d never been all that interested in reading—it’s validating, sure, I suppose, but also disconcerting, what with the perversion and the sadism and the misogyny and the hebe- and pædophilia, and what with these arguments being made about and in service of the writing of his own infamously pornographic works. These are hardly new or unique or surprising arguments, but it’s still very much a this is the guy I’m standing next to? moment.

The library had copies of Project for a Revolution in New York and Recollections of the Golden Triangle, squarely within “the cinematic mechanism of Robbe-Grillet’s novels of the ’70s,” so I snagged them to have a look for myself, as one does. —Right off the bat, Project is a first-person text, and Recollections—well—features first-person narration; rather than being evacuated, the narrator’s right there, in the way, hectoring, chiding, speculating, inferring. What’s cinematic is more piecemeal, aping, mimicking, borrowing: a very visual approach, yes, as well as a cavalier abruption of transitions that tends to be noted, and commented upon, as it goes. (An earlier novel, Jealousy, seems ironically rather closer to my mark, with its deliberately if conspicuously absented narrator, but even here, dialogue’s condensed, summarized, subject to the judgment of someone supposedly not there.) —Project has an appealingly slippery beginning, and I very much enjoyed the energy of the opening of Recollections, but: and you can tell me all you like that the tortured women and girls are not women and girls but texts subjected to figurative mutilations, it’s all metaphor: and I wouldn’t want to dismiss him as little more than a dirty old man: still. The dirty old man bits are boring. —He’s excessive, yes, but very (sadly) conventional in his excesses; somewhere along my Robbe-Grillet surf I bumped into someone noting that his taste in lingerie is very Victoria’s Secret, which bon mot I’ve lost and can’t directly cite, apologies. His id is freed, sure, to set down whatever he might like from his subconscious, but none of it’s interrogated or investigated—merely indulged.

And it’s all a little too Screwfly out there right now to put up with any of that for whatever else might be on offer.

The only reference to any world outside of this setting is the description of a global economy whose elaborate rules and regulations, tariffs and taxes, aim at collecting wealth, either to maintain social status, or to support a corrupt state or government whose interest in money is rivaled only by its own complicity and participation in the perpetration of sexual torture. The socio-economic world of the book might not stand up to scrutiny as a model republic, but it does, overall, reflect Robbe-Grillet’s mistrust of laws, authority, and righteousness.

—the Translator’s Preface to
a Sentimental Novel

Speaking, then, of women in trouble—I noticed the other night that Lynch’s Dune had returned to Netflix, so I put it on as I was cooking (pasta with the simple kale sauce, I think); I like the rhythms of it, the soothingly whispered internal monologues, the charming hoke, Brad Dourif’s tightly hinged mentat, Big Ed drawling Stilgar’s stilt, and dang if those worms aren’t still somehow majestic. But this time I happened to look up from whatever it was I was doing (slicing ribs out of kale leaves, maybe, while the water built to a boil) as the leaving Caladan sequence began—

—and was struck by a couple of notions as it unreeled. The first, as the bizarrely mutated and poorly matted Guild Navigator floated up through spice-soaked light to fold space, and travel without moving, is that this time, I was immediately, almost painfully struck by how unutterably similar the moment is to a moment in Part 8 of the Return: the Giant, floated slowly up in a corner of the extra-dimensional movie theater, tilts supine as a glittering galaxy is spun about his head, and the golden pearl of Laura Palmer that he creates is doubled by the worlds the Navigator spits. —So utterly unexpected, so magically, shockingly beautiful, those painfully awkward forty-year-old special effects striving to depict something impossible, this electrifying connection with something so much sleeker, more assured, just as mystifyingly impossible. The hair stood up on the back of my neck; I went back to slicing kale.

The other notion, less disruptive, more germane: a moment earlier in the Dune clip—it’s all a bit stagey, elements almost collaged onto the screen, a planet, a moon, the great distant column of the heighliner, the gracefully orderly arcs of countless Atreides shuttles lofting slowly, stately toward it. Nothing looks or feels “real”—the lighting, the motion, the construction of the ships—but the effect is still somehow effective. It’s satisfying, in a way that meticulously worked out computer models with reams of lore behind every panel and strut to show us what it “really” would’ve looked like would not, could not, I mean I’ll step it back to might not, but that meticulousness and the working-out and the drive toward a “real” obviates the dreamlike meditativeness Lynch is striving for, that would short-circuit depiction and perception to reach straight instead for the experience, in all the many and varied senses of the word, the world, of something so unutterably impossible. —I found myself thinking of, of all things, Ladyhawke, and of how the transformations were not depicted, no, but suggested—shots of eyes, and feathers, a wing, spread, and the rising sun, which were all so much more effective, so much more satisfying, than the most “realistic” depiction of Michelle Pfeiffer morphing into a hawk could ever have managed to be.

An objective medium—cinema—reaching for subjectivity when its stock-in-trade fails. A subjective medium—prose—reaching for objectivity to force those moments when its stock-in-trade will fail. —In either case, in both cases, by frustrating expectations of what can or should or ought to be done, by leaving negative a space that positively should’ve been filled, the art, the expression, invites requests demands allows the reader, the viewer, the audience to step in, to fill in, to become the God of this or that particular gap, to assemble these subjective glimpses into a rendering of what it might’ve objectively been like, to shuffle these objective glimpses until the subjective meaning of them all becomes graspable if not clear.

Cinematic prose; prosaic (ha!) cinema. Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking of. How’ve you been?