CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
O ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
THE SCOFIELD
THE SCOFIELD
MYKL WELLS
THE SCOFIELD “It is my weakness as an author (so the critics have always said) that I appear incapable of presenting a theme energetically and simply. I must always wrap it up in tissue upon tissue of proviso and aspect; see it from a hundred angles; turn laboriously each side to the light; producing in the end not so much a unitary work of art as a melancholy cauchemar of ghosts and voices, a phantasmagoric world of disordered colors and sounds; a world without design or purpose; and perceptible only in terms of the prolix and the fragmentary. The criticism is deserved, of course: but I have often wished that the critics would do me the justice to perceive that I have deliberately aimed at this effect, in the belief that the old unities and simplicities will no longer serve. No longer serve, I mean, if one is trying to translate, in any form of literary art, the consciousness of modern man. And this is what I have tried to do.”
A Thin Veneer of Consciousness
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CONRAD AIKEN, BLUE VOYAGE
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“The ambiguity in Aiken’s novels derived not from faulty writing, as was frequently suspected, but from his insistence that it was an essential condition of consciousness…. In only one realm was Aiken an unvacillating servant—in his priestly dedication to the pursuit of consciousness.” CATHARINE F. SEIGEL, THE FICTIVE WORLD OF CONRAD AIKEN
“Conrad did have a world view and it emerges in his criticism. It is, to use a phrase that Matthiessen borrowed from him and used in his book on Henry James, the religion of consciousness. The development of consciousness in scope and refinement—the finding of the word that reveals a new facet of consciousness—is the great historical movement to which a writer should attach himself. But Conrad’s great notion attracted little attention.”
CONRAD AIKEN, USHANT
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Conrad Aiken, 1950
“Gnowthi seauton—that was still the theme, the open sesame, Freud had merely picked up the magic words where Socrates, the prototype of highest man, had let them fall, and now at last the road was being opened for the only religion that was any longer tenable or viable, a poetic comprehension of man’s position in the universe, and of his potentialities as a poietic shaper of his own destiny, through self-knowledge and love. The final phase of evolution of man’s mind itself to ever more inclusive consciousness: in that, and that alone, would he find the solvent of all things.”
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
MALCOLM COWLEY, LETTER TO ALLEN TATE, NOVEMBER 21 st, 1973
THE SCOFIELD
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Scofield Thayer
TABLE OF CONTENTS
2
Sculpture by Gaston Lachaise
Thoughts on Conrad Aiken: A Prelude to Great Circle
24
Commentary by Graham Greene
A Thin Veneer of Consciousness
2
Painting by Mykl Wells
Figure from Utriusque Cosmi #1
24
Drawing by Robert Fludd
Conrad Aiken, 1950
3
Photography by Unknown
A Selection from Great Circle
25
Fiction Excerpt by Conrad Aiken
Table of Contents Beyond Which Lies the Dark
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Letter from the Editor by Tyler Malone
Six Inches of Brick Separated Me from the Tragedy of My Boyhood Photography by Phil Hanrahan
Selections from An Outline of Psychoanalysis Introduction to Wake 11
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29
30
Philosophical Excerpt by Sigmund Freud
Letter from the Editor by Seymour Lawrence
Skull with Burning Cigarette 1883 Phrenology Chart
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31
Painting by Vincent Van Gogh
Foreword to Conrad Aiken’s Selected Poems 17
Essay by Harold Bloom
List of Works by Conrad Aiken
Conrad Aiken Ports of Entry Recommended Reading by Various Authors
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18
Palimpsest: The Deceitful Portrait
36
Poetry by Conrad Aiken
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Conrad Aiken Selected Bibliography
32
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Drawing by Unknown
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Vague Glimmer of a Head Suspended in Space
TABLE OF CONTENTS
40
The Scarlet Door
59
Essay by Phil Hanrahan
Lithograph by Odilon Redon
41
Essay by Conor Higgins
45
Photography by Unknown
Toward a Completion of That Great Circle: A Conversation with Joseph Killorin
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50
56
57
Fiction Excerpt by Iben Mondrup
Tadeus Langier, Zakopane Photography by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
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Critical Excerpt by Ian Kluge
Below, I Saw the Vaporous Contours of a Human Form
The Narrator and the Madman: King Coffin’s World of Uncertain Ends
Simpler
Poetry by Emily Dickinson
A Selection from Justine
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77
78
Essay by Sam Allingham
Fiction Excerpts by Various Authors
You Left Me—Sire—Two Legacies—
A Selection from Conrad Aiken’s Philosophy of Consciousness
Lithograph by Odilon Redon
Interview by Tyler Malone
The Streams of Our Consciousnesses: Expressing Consciousness in the Written Word, Pt. I
71
Painting by Kip Omolade
58
84
Poetry by Josephine Rowe
The Biographer’s Tale: A Conversation with Edward Butscher
85
Interview by A. M. Davenport
Figure from Utriusque Cosmi #2
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Conrad Aiken, 1960
Diovadiova Chrome Kitty Cash IV
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Drawing by Robert Fludd ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
Toward a Copernican Word: Psychoanalysis Through Conrad Aiken’s One-Eyed Cather
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Selection from Conrad Aiken: Cosmos Mariner
TABLE OF CONTENTS
87
Diovadiova Chrome Tia I
109
Painting by Kip Omolade
Biographical Excerpt by Edward Butscher
Two Poems A Selection from the Entry on “Consciousness” from A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine
97
Dictionary Entry by Charles A. Mercier
A Selection from “Idiosyncrasy and Tradition”
Poetry by Carmen Giménez Smith
Five Attempts 99
Critical Excerpt by Conrad Aiken
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111
Essays by Matthew Vollmer
Haunting
119
Lithograph by Odilon Redon
101
Photography by Byron Hooks
A Selection from Nicomachean Ethics
From the Mystical Text to the Machine: Aesthetical Approaches to Consciousness 102
Philosophical Excerpt by Aristotle
Between the Poles of the Conscious and the Unconscious Poetry by Kabir
Struggle
Essay by Germán Sierra
A Selection from Ushant 103
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Photography by Robert Demachy
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126
Autobiographical Excerpt by Conrad Aiken
The Streams of Our Consciousnesses: Expressing Consciousness in the Written Word, Pt. II
129
Fiction Excerpts by Various Authors
Diovadiova Chrome Karyn II Beyond and Beneath Blue Voyage
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134
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Conrad Aiken Historical Marker
Painting by Kip Omolade
The Life in the Fiction Essay by Mark Schorer
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Essay by Nathan Goldman
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Shifting and Transitory Windows: A History of the Stream of Consciousness Technique
TABLE OF CONTENTS
138
Essay by Thomas Murphy
A Selection from Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences
171
Philosophical Excerpt by René Descartes
This Consciousness That Is Aware
152
Poetry by Emily Dickinson
“Exactly Like You” from Unbearable Splendor
153
Poetry by Sun Yung Shin
The Blood Beating in His Brain: Where Is Consciousness in the Modern Novel?
172
Essay by Jason Tougaw
The Thinker
180
Sculpture by Auguste Rodin
Roots Run Deep
157
Painting by Mykl Wells
A Selection from Between Life and Death
On the White Bench: Thomas Bernhard’s 3 Days 158
181
Review by Jon Bartlett
Fiction Excerpt by Yoram Kaniuk
A Selection from “The Day Before the Daybreak”
Interview by Tyler Malone
I’ve Got the Coffin—You’ve Got the Body: On the Friendship of Conrad Aiken and Malcolm Lowry
Conrad Aiken and the Eternal Re-Currents: Ceaselessly Pushed Forward and Borne Back 165
Autobiographical Excerpt by Conrad Aiken
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185
Essay by Tyler Malone
Ushant
Essay by Dustin Illingworth
A Second Selection from Ushant
Critical Excerpt by R. P. Blackmur
198
Satellite Image by Spot Image
168
The Mismeasure of Consciousness Essay by Enzo Tagliazucchi
199
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Platted a Crown of Thorns: A Conversation with Christof Koch
184
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Wheatfield with Crows
TABLE OF CONTENTS
202
Painting by Vincent Van Gogh
The Streams of Our Consciousnesses: Expressing Consciousness in the Written Word, Pt. III
Great Thinkers on Consciousness
222
Quotations from Various Authors
203
A Selection from The Fictive World of Conrad Aiken
225
Critical Excerpt by Catharine F. Seigel
Fiction Excerpts by Various Authors
Figure from Utriusque Cosmi #3
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208
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
212
Sorties, Series, and Spirals: Conrad Aiken and “These Old Familiars”
Transcript of Speech by David Chalmers
Seascape at Saints-Maries
232
Essay by J. T. Price
Drawing by Robert Fludd
How Do You Explain Consciousness?
You’re a Literary Man, Conrad Aiken: An “Unsuccessful but Undefeated” Life in Letters
Painting by Vincent Van Gogh
235
Painting by Vincent Van Gogh
236
Essay by Joanna Hodge
213
Philosophical Excerpt by John Locke
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Aikenesque
246
Recommended Reading by Various Authors
221
A Thought-Tormented Essay: Themes and Variations Essay by Daniel Rathburn
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Fiction by Josephine Rowe
A Selection from Essay Concerning Human Understanding
245
Painting by Mykl Wells
Essay by Stephanie Tilden
What Passes for Fun
The Abandonware
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Down Kaleidoscope: Aesthetic Consciousness in Conrad Aiken’s Blue Voyage
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252
Essay by Ted R. Spivey
Letter Excerpts by Maxwell Perkins
263
Poetry Excerpt by Conrad Aiken
The Divine, Difficult Pilgrim
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266
Painting by Kip Omolade
Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of: Literary Critics on Consciousness in Literature
What It Might Mean to See: Peter GodfreySmith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
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283
Interview by Conor Higgins
Starry Night
Lithograph by Odilon Redon
282
Drawing by Robert Fludd
Human and Non-Human Consciousness: A Conversation with Peter Singer 271
281
Review by Megha Majumdar
Figure from Utriusque Cosmi #4
Critical Excerpts from Various Authors
To Edgar Poe (The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Toward Infinity)
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe Painting by Vincent Van Gogh
Essay by Jack Hanson
Diovadiova Chrome Janderie II
279
285
Painting by Vincent Van Gogh
Unresolved Issues
272
Fiction by Nicolas Sampson
On Our Nightstand
286
Recommended Reading by Various Authors
Old Man in Sorrow (On the Threshold of Eternity) Painting by Vincent Van Gogh
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CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
A Selection from “Senlin: A Biography”
Thoughts on Conrad Aiken: Selections from an Editor’s Letters
278 Big Appetites Painting by Mykl Wells
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Depth Psychology and Aiken’s Vision of Consciousness
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Covering Aesthetics and Symbology: A Conversation with Michel Vrana
TABLE OF CONTENTS
290
A Graveyard
302
Poetry by Marianne Moore
Interview by Kate Jordan
View of the Sea at Scheveningen
291
Painting by Vincent Van Gogh
A Creative Movement: A Word from Conrad Aiken’s French Translators
292
303
Photography by Mark Coggins
A Selection from “Appendix A: Conrad Aiken” from Collected Poems
303
Critical Excerpt by David Markson
Commentary by Philippe Blanchon and Joëlle Naïm
Queer Martini
Conrad Aiken’s Grave Bench
295
Cocktail Recipe by Paul Zablocki
A Selection from The Unconscious: The Fundamentals of Human Personality
304
Philosophical Excerpt by Morton Prince
Photography by Phil Hanrahan
Panel of Dead Authors
297
Comic by Charlie Meyard
Death of the Author
298
Comic by R. E. Parrish
The Aiken Family Business
Long-Forgotten Letters and Disturbances of the Heart: An Introduction To Conrad Aiken’s Final Letter, Addressed to Me
305
Essay by David Crumm
A Letter to David Crumm, July 30th, 1973: Final Correspondence
308
Letter by Conrad Aiken
298
Masthead
309
Dramatis Personae
310
Comic by Unknown
The Frisch Questionnaire Responses by Carmen Boullosa
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Portraits by Prisma
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Conrad Aiken… This Way…
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Conrad Aiken’s life, like the best of his work, was a great circle. It began in Savannah, Georgia, in a red brick row house at 228 E Oglethorpe Avenue. After years in New England and abroad, he returned decades later to that quaint, crumbling Southern metropolis to live in a house adjoining the one he grew up in as a child—the same street, the same block, the same row, with the same bricks under foot, besieged by the same specters. At the age of eleven, he had been forced to leave his childhood home and move to Massachusetts after stumbling upon his parents’ dead bodies. His father had shot his mother and then himself. This left a psychic wound which would haunt Aiken for the rest of his days. It is on this scar tissue that his work is largely writ. Aiken, the 1969 recipient of the National Medal for Literature, was best known as a poet. His collection Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929. He went on to serve as the Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress in the early 1950s. He won both the National Book Award for Poetry and the Bollingen Prize for his 1954 edition of his Collected Poems. Just before his death, in 1973, Governor Jimmy Carter made him Georgia’s poet laureate. Though poetry was Aiken’s main mode of expression, he was as gifted as a critic, novelist, and short story writer. As one of the first authors to grasp the relevance of Sigmund Freud to literature, his work often coupled an exploratory push forward with a coiling back
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inward to the past, to the self, to consciousness. It has been argued that Aiken’s interest in consciousness and psychoanalysis stemmed from his need to come to terms with how this early trauma affected and directed the rest of his life. While that may be an oversimplification, one can easily see how a psychoanalyst wouldn’t be worth his salt if he couldn’t make hay of it. Regardless of the reasons, though, there is no denying that consciousness was Aiken’s major thematic preoccupation. He has been called both the “priest of consciousness” and the “bard of psychoanalysis.” When asked if he had been influenced by Freud, Aiken responded: Profoundly, but so has everybody, whether they are aware of it or not. However, I decided very early, I think as early as 1912, that Freud, and his co-workers and rivals and followers, were making the most important contribution of the century to the understanding of man and his consciousness; accordingly I made it my business to learn as much from them as I could. And so he did, incorporating all he learned into his work. Many of the modernist writers were fascinated with consciousness—this preoccupation wasn’t particularly unique—but none explored it as comprehensively as Aiken throughout their entire oeuvre. In his work, he acted as both analyst and patient, diving into the oceans of his own consciousness, plumbing their depths. Catharine F. Seigel—a critic whose study, The Fictive World of Conrad Aiken, is excerpted in this issue—argued that, while he courted ambiguity at every turn, “in only one realm was Aiken an unvacillating servant—in his priestly dedication to the pursuit of consciousness.” Consciousness truly was
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
Beyond Which Lies the Dark
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Aiken’s secular religion; striving to understand one’s own consciousness was a sacred act, one he believed was the noblest of human endeavors. In 1932, when The Nation asked a number of public intellectuals to make personal statements of belief in a piece aptly titled “What I Believe,” many of those involved, seeing a second World War on the horizon and a country already deep in the Depression, understandably expressed some didactic and prescriptive political opinions. Conrad Aiken’s contribution, however, pleaded “Let us be as conscious as possible.” Always drifting on his own currents, Aiken emphasized the importance of exploring and expanding consciousness even, and especially, in such dangerous times:
beyond which lies the dark.” We include in this issue content from and about intellectuals who have spent their entire lives exploring that small bright circle of our consciousness—writers, philosophers, and scientists like Sigmund Freud, David Chalmers, Emily Dickinson, Peter Singer, Aristotle, René Descartes, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Kabir, Christof Koch, John Locke, and Carmen Boullosa. Though there aren’t many Aiken experts left, we managed to wrangle contributions from some of the best out there. Aiken’s biographers Joseph Killorin and Edward Butscher are both interviewed here, and the latter offered us an excerpt from his unfinished second Aiken biography. Two of the writer’s own granddaughters, Joanna Hodge and Lizza Aiken, also both appear in these pages. David Crumm, a student to whom Aiken wrote his final letter, reflected for us on the missive he received from the priest of consciousness. We include scholarly material on Aiken from literary critics and academics Harold Bloom, R. P. Blackmur, Mark Schorer, Ted R. Spivey, Catharine F. Seigel, and Ian Kluge; as well as new essays on Aiken by Jason Tougaw, Phil Hanrahan, Stephanie Tilden, Sam Allingham, J. T. Price, Nathan Goldman, Jack Hanson, and many more. Conrad Aiken, it must be said, is the reason this literary magazine exists. It was in order to spotlight him and his writing that I created The Scofield. Though we began with one of my other favorite writers, David Markson, the goal was always to work up to an issue on Aiken, who had been Markson’s literary grandfather (through the link of Malcolm Lowry—who was mentored by Aiken and acted as mentor to Markson). I first encountered Conrad Aiken in the 1920s literary magazine, The Dial, hunched over a machine, reading microfilm in the New York Public Library. At the
Consciousness is our supreme gift. Not only does it contain—in every sense—all that we value, but also it is the fundamental and indeed the only means by which we are able to value. To see, to remember, to know, to feel, to understand, as much as possible—isn’t this perhaps the most obviously indicated of motives or beliefs, the noblest and most all-comprehending of ideas which it is relatively possible for us to realize? So in creating an Aiken issue of The Scofield, there really was only one option for our corresponding theme. While we have already published an issue focusing on the theme of identity, the theme of consciousness allows us to dig deeper into this territory of the self. Consciousness, after all, is perhaps the only thing we can know, so it warrants a more thorough examination. When Aiken described this all-too-human predicament in his poem “Palimpsest: The Deceitful Portrait,” he explained that we can only see “the small bright circle of our consciousness,
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same time, I was reading about him in the memoirs and biographies of the modernists. I read items—some undoubtedly exaggerated, others perhaps apocryphal— about how he introduced Ezra Pound to T. S. Eliot (so without him, the world would be sans The Waste Land); about how he’d written a book that Sigmund Freud kept on his desk, and that some were claiming was Freud’s favorite novel (Aiken’s second novel, Great Circle); about how H. D. had actually attempted to get him psychoanalyzed by Freud (though this, unfortunately, never came to fruition); about how he had played a major part in solidifying Emily Dickinson’s place in the canon (as the editor of one of the early posthumous collections of her poems); about how he recognized the genius of William Faulkner as early as 1927 (seeing through the flaws of Mosquitoes and predicting, in a review for the New York Post, the future prominence of the man of Yoknapatawpha County); about how, on James Joyce’s deathbed, the author of Ulysses was reading his poetry (specifically, The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones); about how he not only mentored Malcolm Lowry, but served in loco parentis for the young writer who would go on to pen Under the Volcano (and whose first novel, Ultramarine, was an admitted imitation of Aiken’s own Blue Voyage—so much so that Aiken had joked that Lowry should just call it Purple Passage). Yet, for all the interesting tidbits I discovered about his life, it was his work that really wowed me, leaving me breathless, in a way few authors ever have. I devoured the poems, the stories, the novels, and Ushant, his “naughtybiography” (a pun on “autobiography”). The sentences were like music, spiraling symphonies; the form seemed meticulously designed and, simultaneously, tossed off in the most natural way; the exploration
of consciousness always felt to me both intimate and universal. I was shocked that so few people—even the most well-read of my mentors and peers—had even experienced the work of this master of poetry and prose. To me, he belonged with Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot, yet I never saw him listed among their ranks. Harold Bloom, who has graciously allowed us to republish his introduction to Aiken’s Selected Poems, was a rare exception. He placed Aiken among his twelve great American poets born in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, situating him among the major names of American poetic modernism. Bloom admitted, though, that “Aiken never was much in fashion, and he seems now to have very few readers indeed.” Why, I wondered, had Aiken never been much in fashion? How had he remained, in the words of Louis Untermeyer, “our best known unread poet”? There are a number of potential explanations for this. Here, I will focus on just three possibilities. The first is that he didn’t play the game like he was supposed to; he didn’t feel comfortable trying to carve out a niche in the lit scene. Once Ezra Pound chastised Aiken, whom he called a “poor blithering ass,” for not attending a literary dinner “as he had been instructed to do, with Amy Lowell and Wyndham Lewis and the rest.” But Aiken always held the literary community at arm’s length—he was neither an ambitious networker nor a shameless self-promoter. He didn’t like that if a writer “persisted in the attempt to remain independent of all groups, choosing one’s literary friends simply where one found them, or liked them, and regardless of political sides or currents, one was at once suspect.” Mostly, Aiken was painfully shy, avoided going out, and rarely promoted his work in public. As his friend and literary executor, Joseph Killorin, explained,
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“He could reveal himself in writing daringly, but he was terrified of appearing in person.” This leads to the second potential explanation for Aiken’s having never achieved his rightful place in the pantheon: that his work, which involved what Killorin called a “calculated self-exposure,” was accused of delving too deeply into his own consciousness, alienating potential readers. Some critics believed this literary “navel-gazing” had nothing to say to a larger audience, that he seemed to just be working out his own psychological issues on paper, with no interest in plot or message. I couldn’t disagree more: exploring the micro of his own consciousness—that small bright circle, beyond which lies the dark—was the only way to properly explore the macro of big-C “Consciousness.” How else could one attempt the Herculean labor of exploring consciousness without first and foremost laying one’s own consciousness bare? In Ushant, Aiken asked:
but some argued that it was disjointed and ambiguous. Seigel claimed that ambiguity was “the unpardonable sin of which Aiken was most frequently accused.” In the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, when he wrote the majority of his work, much of what was in vogue at least pointed toward the political and, often, was outrightly didactic. Aiken refused didacticism. He thought that if he was going to explore the nature of consciousness through his literature, then the work would have to be, like consciousness itself, fragmentary, ambiguous, and always in flux. Aiken, as brilliant a critic as a poet and fiction writer, diagnosed his own predicament perfectly early on, through the words of Demarest, the protagonist of his first novel, Blue Voyage:
For if it was the writer’s business, or the poet’s, to be as conscious as possible, and his primary obligation, then wouldn’t this impose upon him the still deeper obligation of being conscious of his own workings, the workings of his psyche, and of the springs and deficiencies and necessities and compulsions, the whole subliminal drive which had made him a writer to begin with, and along with the work itself, to present, as it were, the explication—? Wouldn’t this be the next mandatory step, the artist’s plain duty? that he take the machine apart, and show how it worked? The third potential explanation follows from this question—for not only did critics complain that his work was too obsessed with consciousness and psychoanalysis,
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It is my weakness as an author (so the critics have always said) that I appear incapable of presenting a theme energetically and simply. I must always wrap it up in tissue upon tissue of proviso and aspect; see it from a hundred angles; turn laboriously each side to the light; producing in the end not so much a unitary work of art as a melancholy cauchemar of ghosts and voices, a phantasmagoric world of disordered colors and sounds; a world without design or purpose; and perceptible only in terms of the prolix and the fragmentary. The criticism is deserved, of course: but I have often wished that the critics would do me the justice to perceive that I have deliberately aimed at this effect, in the belief that the old unities and simplicities will no longer serve. No longer serve, I mean, if one is trying to translate, in any form of literary art, the consciousness of modern man. And this is what I have tried to do.
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To translate, in every form of literary art—poetry, fiction, autobiography, criticism, drama, etc.—the consciousness of modern man is certainly what Aiken tried to do. Did he achieve his goal? It can merely be said that he approached it, and in doing so got closer than any other author I can think of to an understanding of consciousness and an expression of that understanding in art. But of course he would fail. It’s written into the title of that experimental autobiography, Ushant, which takes its name from a treacherous island whose rocky shore ships were wary to approach, but which is also a pun on the perpetual disappointment of any attempt to wholly understand ourselves, or others, or, in fact, anything: “You shan’t!” After all, beyond which lies the dark… In 1973, after a long life in letters, Aiken died in his hometown of Savannah, where he was buried in the beautiful, macabre Bonaventure Cemetery, under giant oak trees draped in Spanish moss, next to the graves of his parents. His gravestone takes the form of a bench on which is written: “Cosmos Mariner—Destination Unknown.” With this epitaph, it is apparent that even in death, he continues pushing out in his quest, and one can only assume by the use of the word “mariner,” coiling back into his own consciousness, for the sea always to Aiken represented the depths within one’s self. While Aiken was still alive, Malcolm Cowley, in a 1952 issue of Wake (the only magazine before The Scofield, as far as we know, to ever release an entire issue dedicated to him) speculated that “the discovery—one can hardly call it rediscovery—of Conrad Aiken is coming soon.” In his book on Aiken in 1978, critic Harry Marten mentioned Cowley’s optimistic statement and lamented that the discovery “seems as far away as ever.” With much of Aiken’s work now out of print and his name most often
encountered as a footnote in other writers’ biographies, Marten couldn’t have imagined how much farther away it would seem in 2017. In Blue Voyage, Aiken wrote that it is “impossible to present, all at once, in a phrase, a sentence, a careful paragraph—even in a book, copious and disheveled—all that one meant or all that one was.” While we know we can’t offer a complete portrait of Conrad Aiken, all that he meant or all that he was—even in our magazine’s massive issues, copious and disheveled as they are—we hope the pages that follow spiral in on themselves, as Aiken would have wanted, continually returning to his pet themes and personal obsessions; we hope these pages follow the great circle of his life, tracing the arc as best we can; we hope they offer enough of a chaos, a vacillation, an ambiguity, to do the chorus of his multiform consciousness justice; and, in doing so, most of all, we hope to finally facilitate that discovery—the one Cowley claimed could hardly be called a rediscovery—of the man David Markson claimed as “our last authentic man of letters”: Conrad Aiken, the priest of consciousness, the bard of psychoanalysis, cosmos mariner, destination unknown…
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SEYMOUR L AWRENCE
UNKNOWN
Introduction to Wake 11
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1883 Phrenology Chart
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—— Written by Seymour Lawrence, the editor of the literary magazine Wake, this is the introduction to Wake 11. Until the issue of The Scofield that you are currently reading, Wake 11, released in 1952, was the only issue of a magazine focused on the work of Conrad Aiken.
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
When this special number was first suggested to Conrad Aiken, he was more fearful than flattered…. “Don’t do it! It’s suicidal. I’ve never been fashionable or in the public eye.” His response may very well have been justified; lesser poets than Aiken have received less neglect. One of our few men of letters. And the totality of his work has been impressive: poetry, novels, short stories, criticism, drama—with rare distinction. In all of them, a seasoned joie de vivre and an ever-renewing exploration. Celebration of life and penetration into recesses. To remove the veil momentarily and peer into the half shadows; and in the removal, to widen the sea of vision. Promethean, and with it the god Pan summoning a strange music. By invoking the nameless, to lure it into view. The experiments have been subtle, not pyrotechnic. A quiet progression, without vogue or publicity, a devoted movement forward through various routes. And always, always these two processes alive: of celebration and self-exploration. This number is dedicated to Conrad Aiken’s achievement.
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Conrad Aiken Selected Bibliography Fiction Blue Voyage (1927) Great Circle (1933) King Coffin (1935) A Heart for the Gods of Mexico (1939) The Conversation (1940) The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken (1960) The Collected Novels of Conrad Aiken (1964) Nonfiction
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Priapus and the Pool, and Other Poems (1925) Selected Poems (1929) John Deth, A Metaphysical Legacy, and Other Poems (1930) The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones (1931) Preludes for Memnon (1931) Landscape West of Eden (1934) Time in the Rock; Preludes to Definition (1936) And in the Human Heart (1940) Brownstone Eclogues, and Other Poems (1942) The Soldier: A Poem (1944) The Kid (1947) The Divine Pilgrim (1949) Skylight One: Fifteen Poems (1949) Collected Poems (1953) A Letter from Li Po, and Other Poems (1955) Sheepfold Hill: Fifteen Poems (1958) The Morning Song of Lord Zero, Poems Old and New (1963) Thee: A Poem (1967)
Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry (1919) Ushant (1952) A Reviewer’s ABC: Collected Criticism of Conrad Aiken (1961)
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Earth Triumphant (1914) Turns and Movies, and Other Tales in Verse (1916) The Jig of Forslin: A Symphony (1916) Nocturne of Remembered Spring: And Other Poems (1917) Charnel Rose (1918) The House of Dust: A Symphony (1920) Punch: The Immortal Liar, Documents in His History (1921) Priapus and the Pool (1922) The Pilgrimage of Festus (1923)
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If you’re interested in Conrad Aiken, but have no clue where to begin, here are some recommendations for you from some writers and scholars intimately connected with Aiken and his oeuvre. Matthew Daddona on Selected Poems by Conrad Aiken One approaches Conrad Aiken the way one sees a statue one has learned about or seen pictures of in textbooks, and, now, standing next to it understands its radiance and reverence, but is not intimidated by its presence. The person and the statue are one, hallowed by the very humanity that connects them. Aiken is that statue: monumental and traditional and somewhat untouchable. But however formal or traditional his poems may seem on the surface, they are modern in their personal embrace of metaphysical themes many other poets insist on touching with stiff fingers; Aiken revels and delights in them. In his poem “Cyclads,” Aiken writes, “Terror of time, they murmur, equals the terror of space / All cancels out, in the end, they say, and the end is nothing.” In another, “Counterpoint: Two Rooms,” Aiken compares and contrasts the experiences of two neighbors who occupy rooms on top of one another, and concludes, “His youth— far off—he sees it brightly walking / In a golden cloud... wings flashing about it... / Darkness / Walls it around with dripping enormous walls.” That darkness, yes! But also the PAGE 18
fearlessness with which he repeats “Walls,” first verbing it and then using it as a noun, as if trying to solidify the mood. It’s this repetition of language that doubles down on Aiken’s pursuit of said darkness, getting us there in a methodically playful way. There is a lot of “you” in Selected Poems—that is Aiken’s address to the second person (his lover, his muse, sometimes to his self), but I think they are all meant to involve the reader, too, to ask of your permission to be so close as to feel as one body. Scott Cheshire on Great Circle by Conrad Aiken Conrad Aiken’s second novel Great Circle is the greatest portrayal—heart, soul, body, and mind—of the angry and saddened cuckolded husband ever set on paper. (It’s no wonder that Sigmund Freud supposedly loved the book and kept a copy of it on his desk.) It’s a masterpiece that rages and swirls from its first inventive page until the last—ranging from its opening section of high lyrical modernism; to a section of dreamy, Faulkner-like nostalgic glimpses; to poetic streams of pure dreaming consciousness; to one of my favorite pieces of writing ever, a one-hundred-page rant from Andrew Cather—our antihero—aimed squarely at his psychiatrist. It is sublime. The novel is hilarious, and also frustrating, fast-paced most times, and glacial at others, like nothing you’ve ever read before. A fractured narrative told with the keen eye of a poet. It also contains one of my favorite examples of a writer’s not subtly buried (but wonderfully relevant) claim to his rightful artistic fame; this from Andrew Cather, incidentally (and conspicuously here,) not a writer, but with a bad whisky hangover, trying to lift his own spirits:
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Conrad Aiken Ports of Entry
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Mark de Silva on King Coffin by Conrad Aiken In his college days Conrad Aiken took classes with the Harvard aesthetician George Santayana. Later he would say these profoundly shaped his poetics, impressing on him that poetry, great poetry, must have philosophical heft. Style, language, music cannot suffice. Rather, poetry, as he put it to the Paris Review, should “begin by understanding, or trying to understand.” So too should fiction, if one goes by King Coffin, Aiken’s third novel. All of his books show a keen interest in consciousness, which will surprise no one, as it was the preoccupation of modernism itself. But Coffin goes far beyond mere interest. Here Aiken gives life to the proposition that the everyday world of experience might just be consciousness, and a single, solitary one at that: Jasper Ammen’s. Ammen is a Harvard student himself, though Coffin is not a campus novel and classes are hardly mentioned. Aiken’s hero has a strongly Nietzschean bent—not uncommon, even now, among students at the better PAGE 19
universities—and decides early on that the purest act of a great man, one that might confirm his ascendancy above the herd onto a higher, freer plane of existence, is the murder of a perfect stranger. There is, clearly, more than a little of Raskolnikov in Ammen, and most of Coffin is given over to describing the hero’s Dostoevksian mission of scouting the ideal victim (an unsuccessful adman named Jones, it turns out) and setting him up for the kill. If this were all there were to the book, it would stand as a stylishly written, cerebral crime-novel—Aiken’s prose is fine, poised, pleasingly intricate. What makes Coffin distinctive and important, though, is its idealistic Hegelian themes rather than its Nietzschean ones. In planning the murder, Ammen slowly strips Jones of his agency, both by predetermining the specifics his fate (where, when, and how he is to die), and, leading up to this, by shadowing his every movement, following him down streets, spying on him from a car, leaving notes and placing phone calls to him, all with a view to quietly impelling Jones to act as his instrument, his puppet. Over the course of the book, we witness Ammen effectively absorb the stranger into his own subjectivity. But that’s not quite right. There is an obverse to this that Aiken brings to light. In studying Jones’s behavior so that he might take control of the man, master him, Ammen is forced to track him very closely, often on foot, literally walking in his footsteps. In doing so, his view of the world, being dictated by Jones’s movement, begins to mirror his victim’s. The two men’s consciousnesses merge, and neither can be said to be entirely in control. Rather, as Hegel would have it, each of them determines the other. This is Aiken’s prime achievement in Coffin, then: the precise and patient rendering of Ammen’s black hole of a self, showing how its relentlessly inward pull leads,
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The insufferable vanity of the human being, who identifies with everything greater than himself! I identified myself with Michelangelo. With Shakespeare. With Melville. I was their grandchild. And why not, after all. I inherit them. They produced me, I couldn’t escape them. They taught me how to suffer. They taught me how to know, how to realize, gave me the words by which I could speak my pain. They give me the pain by giving me the words. Gave my pain its precise shape, as they gave me their consciousness. As I shall give my pain, my consciousness, to others.
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curiously, to a kind of self-annihilation. (It is fitting that Aiken titles the final chapter of the book “The Stranger Becomes Oneself.”) I know of no other work of fiction that more convincingly elides the line between the inner and outer world, the subjective and objective, and gives us such a lucid and curiously noble picture of the distorting force of megalomania.
Demarest), Cynthia tells him, happily, she’s engaged! Predictably this news—that he’s irrelevant as a suitor, and indeed, that the whole trip he must now suffer through has become entirely useless—sends Demarest into a spiral of despair that looks like the setup for a miserable remaining 2/3 of a book. But Aiken’s prose style explodes the story from the inside out into a bloom of glorious Modernist absurdity that transcends the physical limitations of your typical sea-voyage story. Highlights include a thirty-page-long stream-ofconsciousness digression tracking Demarest’s wild swing of thought as he struggles to fall asleep; an extended segment of overheard scraps of dialogue overlaid into a loud, sweeping, and nonsensical pastiche; imagined conversations that range from absurd moral considerations to meta-musings on the function of art (“Gosh! Now, suppose we were all of us just—” says one. “Characters in a novel? Yes! Every now and then one experiences that sense of a complete dissociation of personality, when one seems to evaporate under the glare of one’s own eye.”); and a string of never-sent letters. Aiken filters this variety of forms through a maximalist prose style, and asks a young artist protagonist too self-aware for his own good to navigate and narrate all of it. The result is infuriating and charming by turns, as should be any good metamodern interrogation of the forces of art, love, and selfdetermination.
Ashley Strosnider on Blue Voyage by Conrad Aiken Blue Voyage, Conrad Aiken’s first novel, is a perfect jumping-off point for anyone unfamiliar with his prose. Though some autobiographical details of Conrad’s life track through across the backstory of this novel’s protagonist, it’s in the book’s lush intellectualism and unbridled musings that the reader gets a sense of the real Conrad Aiken—a master stylist above all else. The novel’s protagonist, William Demarest is a writer, too, and a pining lover on the verge of what he thinks of as a midlife crisis—though he’s only in his thirties, tops. His plays are actually being produced, and he may not be quite the failure he thinks he is, except in love. After a year of sending letters to a woman named Cynthia he fell for on a previous transatlantic trip—letters, it’s worth noting, Cynthia never answered— Demarest goes all in and sends his actual self, wrapped in all the trimmings of manic anticipation. The story starts as a charmingly episodic waltz through harmless encounters with other semi-intriguing passengers, until, in high spirits after an amusing dinner, Demarest and another passenger sneak up onto the firstclass deck for an evening stroll, where they come face to face with the longed-for Cynthia herself. Also bound for London, headed home after a few months in New York (during which she didn’t even get in touch with PAGE 20
Tyler Malone on Ushant by Conrad Aiken Though he would continue to write poetry after the 1952 publication of Ushant—his uncategorizable book-length “essay” which is often referred to as an autobiography— Conrad Aiken, in a preface to a collection of his first
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three novels, explained that it was Ushant that was “the statement of the writer at the end of his career.” So one can look at Ushant as, in some sense, the culmination of his life in letters, the capstone. Of course, to Aiken enthusiasts, it’s no surprise that his crowning achievement and definitive statement would come in the form of something autobiographical, as much of his poetry and fiction had been, from the very beginning, a form of psychoanalytic wrestling with the writer’s own past, own self, own consciousness. But to merely call Ushant an autobiography or memoir is to miss the point. Unlike most biographical texts, the purpose of Ushant isn’t merely to provide readers with little details about the author’s life, for them to pick up these tidbits like seashells on a sandy seashore. (Admittedly, though, there are fascinating moments relived and interesting facts recounted, including some involving Malcolm Lowry, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound—who appear as Hambo, the Tsetse, and Rabbi Ben Ezra, respectively). Aiken explained, “Ushant does tell you all you really need to know—names don’t matter, nor places, nor times, these are inessential: it’s what D. did or didn’t do, what he felt or didn’t feel, and then what he thought about it, that matters, and this you have.” For if those little seashells of biographical info are what one wanders into Ushant in search of, then one risks missing the beauty of the beach itself, especially the undulating waves, currents of an unknown and perhaps unknowable consciousness crashing onto our shore, attempting or approaching a connection. Ushant borrows elements from poetry, fiction, essay, sermon, dream, myth, philosophy, science, and psychoanalysis, and weds these modalities to an autobiographical re-examination of the writer’s life, a spiraling back inward while voyaging out toward
a destination both known and unknown. The main character, D., is Aiken, but he is also Demarest, the protagonist from Aiken’s first novel, Blue Voyage, who already was, in his own way, a version of the author. But if, from one angle, Ushant is a re-voyaging through Blue Voyage, it is one which understands the strengths and weaknesses of that original blueprint: “Too much Cynthia and Smith, and too little of the bare-assed truth about Demarest.” Aiken spent his entire literary career mining his own psyche in order to examine and understand the nature of consciousness itself. When fiction and poetry could no longer help him to dive deep enough into the self, Aiken sought to find a new form, and the result is Ushant. In 1952, Aiken explained to Lowry, his friend and literary progeny, “It grew, all by itself, into a New Shape, its own, a spiral unwinding of memory into a spiral projection of analysis: it has a design, and yet it would be hard to say what it is.” Many people avoid approaching Ushant precisely because it seems treacherous to reach, like the island from which it gets its name, and because it would be hard, even upon approach, to say exactly what it is that is being reached. But perhaps the best way to circle closer to an explanation of Ushant is to quote Lowry in a 1954 letter to his mentor, “I ought to say that Ushant is obviously one of the best books ever written.” I concur. Brian Smith on The Collected Short Stories by Conrad Aiken Conrad Aiken is probably best known as the author of “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” which tells the tale of Paul Hasleman, a boy growing increasing distant from
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his schooling, from his family, from everything, and daydreaming, instead, of the falling, white sheet of snow. It is Aiken’s most anthologized story, and one of the few things he wrote which still manages to pop up here and there. Otherwise, he’s—sadly—mostly forgotten. The beauty and power of “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” are difficult to deny, and this story alone offers enough reason to resusitate Aiken’s reputation. The best part of diving into Aiken’s Collected Short Stories, though, is that there are equally valuable treasures around every corner. Though “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” is the go-to classic, other brilliant stories are everywhere in these pages: “Life Isn’t a Short Story,” about a writer pondering a story in a diner; “Gehenna,” in which a nameless character wrestles with his own consciousness and its inherent paradoxes; “Your Obituary, Well Written,” reportedly based on Aiken’s time with dying author Katherine Mansfield; “Mr. Arcularis,” focusing on a man sailing to England to recuperate from an operation; “The Night Before Prohibition,” where a married man reminisces on an affair; “The Orange Moth,” detailing the struggles of a writer overtaken by envy of his more successful, though less talented, contemporaries; etc. These stories act as great ports of entry for readers new to Aiken, as the best of them properly initiate a reader into Aiken’s fictive world in short bursts: especially in terms of both his aesthetic modes and his thematic interests. These stories often hone in on Aiken’s pet theme— consciousness—and they explore it in many classically Modernist ways, utilizing the stream of consciousness technique, free indirect discourse, metafictional play, mythopoetic webs of tropology, and psychoanalytic principles.
Andrew Mason on A Reviewer’s ABC by Conrad Aiken Conrad Aiken is, as David Markson called him, “our last authentic man of letters.” While it’s easy, in trying to revive Aiken’s legacy, to focus on his poetry and his fiction, which admittedly both deserve greater examination, there is a third type of writing that he mastered, that we should not let be forgotten, and that was his literary criticism. Aiken wrote essays and reviews on just about all of his contemporaries and many of his forebears. The insight in these criticisms is uncanny; he had a preternatural ability to read his fellow writers. A number of these pieces are assembled in the phenomenal collection A Reviewer’s ABC. In its pages, we read about William Faulkner, Emily Dickinson, Katherine Mansfield, Anton Chekhov, T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Dylan Thomas, William Carlos Williams, Thomas Mann, Gertrude Stein, and so many more names we still study today. David Markson claimed that Aiken’s “criticism would remain seminal if only because he was virtually the first American to recognize Faulkner, or for that matter—credat qui vult—the relevance of Freud to literature.” In addition to being an early supporter of Faulkner, he also championed Mansfield and Joyce from the beginning, saw in them the spark of genius before many others did. Not to mention that he was a big part of solidifying Emily Dickinson’s place in the canon (through his editing of her Selected Poems). Whether or not a reader agrees with him on any given writer or work, one often finishes an Aiken essay feeling that their understanding of the writer, of the work, of the word, and of the world, have all shifted, even if just slightly.
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Novels in which—your students would beg you to know—“nothing happens” are a personal favorite. A man goes to the post office to check for letters from his lover. He takes his little daughter on walks, gives her a bath, and tucks her in. He argues with his wife, he plants some lilies, he muses about the backyard cesspool with a repairman. He talks with his friend Jim (who is what we would today call a “freegan”) and he argues with his wife some more. He reflects on the sea and the weather. Conrad Aiken’s Conversation belongs on the same shelf as Mrs. Dalloway or Ulysses, if not in competition, then at least for comparison. Here we have 1940s Greenwich Village bohemians transplanted to Cape Cod, a less familiar and more muddled setting than interbellum London or fin de siècle Dublin, but with the same stream of consciousness popularized by Aiken’s near-exact contemporaries. The pseudo-zen “we are all one” insights the protagonist has while walking through the New England seaside landscape, as well as repeated observations that his wife is pretty when she’s angry, will seem a bit outdated to the modern reader. But that’s sort of the point: the book is a kind of literary artifact—no one speaks like these characters anymore, the “hipsters” of their time. Conversation is like an unusually shaped shell, one that pushes you to imagine the sort of mollusc which once lived inside it. Dustin Illingworth on A Heart for the Gods of Mexico by Conrad Aiken If Conrad Aiken’s A Heart for the Gods of Mexico is discussed at all these days, it is generally only in the
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context of Hambo, the novel’s revealing portrait of Aiken’s friend and pupil Malcolm Lowry. And a fine, fierce, and tender portrait it is; however, to focus solely on the Lowry angle is to underplay Aiken’s gleaming, death-haunted vision. The monotonous journey of an express train from America to Mexico, in service of a tragic death-bed wish I will not spoil, is really a journey across seasons, ages, forms of being. Hambo, as it turns out, is merely an appetizer; the feast is in the language.
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Mary Duffy on The Conversation by Conrad Aiken
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GR AHAM GREENE
ROBERT FLUDD
Thoughts on Conrad Aiken: A Prelude to Great Circle
As Mr. Eliot found that the way to revitalize contemporary poetry, which was dying of the romantic tradition, was to go back to earlier and unexhausted influences, so Mr. Aiken, aware of the equally blind alley into which the novel had been led (it is still possible to hear reviewers chirping in praise of the latest stillborn novel, “the true Dickensian touch”), has chosen, instead of the verbal experiments of Mr. Joyce, to cast back to the first metaphysical poets, the Jacobean dramatists.
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Figure from Utriusque Cosmi #1
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It would be unfair to a very original novel to give the impression that it is a pastiche of the past. The mind it describes is contemporary; the solution of the problem set is contemporary; the images used are contemporary. Mr. Aiken no more imitates the Jacobeans than Dickens imitates Fielding. But finding it impossible to describe a modern consciousness by working in the accepted tradition, which has only been modified since the Victorians, and not willing to break with the past entirely as Joyce has done, he has linked the novel to the poetic tradition. This is to beat a new road; one man cannot do it, and it is to be hoped that Mr. Aiken will find fellow workers.
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Why be in such a hurry, old fool? What good is hurry going to do you? Wrap yourself in a thick gauze of delay and confusion, like the spider; hang there, like the spider, aware of time only as the rock is aware of time; let your days be as leisurely and profound as months, serene as the blue spaces of sky between clouds; your flies will come to you in due season. Must you always be running desperately from minute to minute? Have you such an appetite for action? Have you such a passion for decisions? Must you always be snatching your hat from its peg in Shepard Hall, Shepard Street, Cambridge, Mass., and rushing out to an encounter with some one, with any one, with every one? Must you forever be listening for the telephone to ring, or the doorbell; hoping that it will be Floyd, with news of a wild party; or Celia, who wants you to dance with her at the Brunswick; or Bert, drunk, with a new poem which he is frantic to read to you; or a total stranger with the keys to hell? By all means accept the invitation to hell, should it come. It will not take you far—from Cambridge to hell is only a step; or at most a hop, skip, and jump. But now you are evading—you are dodging the issue. You do not really desire to drink with Floyd at a wild party, nor to hear Bert’s poem, nor to dance hieratically with Celia in the Egyptian room; you do not even desire to go to hell with a total stranger, for, after all, Cambridge is hell enough. What you really desire is the simple finality of action, or of decision; you have yet to learn the most elementary
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facts about life. And what, my dear Andrew Cather, are the elementary facts of life?… Why, you poor idiot, you know them perfectly well, or you ought to, at thirty-eight. Permit yourself to be sifted by time, slowly,—be passive— wait. Learn to rot gently, like the earth: it is only a natural rot that is creative. The least violence, the least hurry, the least eagerness for action or decision, the least forcing of the issue—! Damn—blast—putrefaction. The tendency of his thought becoming unbearable, he jumped up, snatched his ticket from the window sill beside the Pullman chair, and bolted toward the smoking car. A pale girl reading a magazine listlessly, her knees crossed under green satin: she looked up at him with wan evocation. She was bored, she wanted to talk to some one, her reading of the magazine was only a pretense. Too bad, darling—but I’m afraid it can’t be easily enough managed. The conductor, in a chair at the end of the car, counting tickets and making notes with a pencil. The green curtains over the men’s room awry, and a fleeting vision of a sad salesman, cigar in hand, who stared uncomprehendingly at the sliding Rhode Island landscape. His suitcase, cracked at one seam, stood on the black-leather settee. Poor devil— on his way back to Boston, from Bridgeport, defeated; the other salesmen had been before him. He was cursing the trees, the hills, the wind, the infrequent drops of rain that grazed the windows, leaving chains of fine beads; he was cursing them without seeing them.… Then the corridor between cars, swaying violently, knocking and bumping, with the little iron stepping-stone which was always to be avoided by the wary foot: it creaked and sidled. He stepped over it, smiling, and entered the smoking car. The familiar smell of soot and tobacco smoke, of stuffy plush and foul spittoons—garboons!—arched his nostrils: he felt more
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A Selection from Great Circle
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masculine, and more at home, as he chose a chair in which was a newspaper. The Premier of France was ill. The boxing commission of New York had disqualified Zylenski. Prices were lower on the big board, owing to the usual week-end profittaking. The President had received a committee of boy scouts: photograph of a weary handshake. Miss Dolores Vargas, new star of the talkies, was said by her friends to be engaged to a prominent Chicago banker: photograph of Dolores waving a handkerchief from the rear platform of a train. The Maroons had beaten the Bruins in overtime. The boll-weevil was moving north, a drought in the east Sierras was causing serious alarm about the water-supply in Nevada, Oswald Morphy, well-known author, was dead, Klenkor would remove corns and bunions quickly and painlessly in two or three applications…And the murderer of Jennie Despard, Providence schoolteacher, had not yet been apprehended. An automobile salesman was missing from his home in Putnam, and while the police authorities declined to state that they connected this in any way with the murder, they admitted that they were anxious to ascertain his whereabouts. Mark Friedman. A married man with two children: his wife was prostrated. Best of luck to you, Mark: you’ll need it. And she probably deserved it, too—though was it entirely necessary to do it with a hammer? Still, there is no accounting for tastes. The poor man might have been in a hurry. Hurry—hurry—hurry—everything was hurrying. The train was hurrying. The world was hurrying. The landscape was hurrying. The wheels rushed blindly over the rails, over the joints, over the switches: rat-te-tatte-tattle-te-tat-te-tump-te-tattle-te-tee. The locomotive driver, or the fireman (it was probably the fireman), was obsessed with the panic of speed, and blew prolongedly
and repeatedly on the whistle. Scarcely a minute was left unpunctuated by the moan of the whistle. Horses in twilight-brown pastures threw up their tails and galloped away for a moment, turning alarmed heads. Birds darted in clouds, zigzag, off wires, swooped, circled, glided to rest again. The whole world, it seemed, was to be made conscious of the important hurry of the train. For wasn’t this train, this Knickerbocker Limited, like everything else a consummation of eons of evolution? Wasn’t it the categorical imperative? It was achieving its terrific destiny. Like the daisy in the field, or the honeysuckle, or the hummingbird, or the fungus, it was pushing its way blindly and terribly to its end. Nothing could stop it. Nothing?… And here was himself also, Andrew Cather, hurrying from point to point on the earth’s surface, describing his swift little arc: and all these things were a part of him, a symbol for him. Here was this eternal rush, of which the external speed was merely an index, a portent, of the internal panic. Panic! God forbid. Was it anything so bad as panic? Must one always be taking things so seriously? Must this fever in his brain be forever urging him to a passion for consummations? Calm yourself, old fool. Survey this row of dead faces opposite you: these hard business men, these watchers of ticker tape, these casters of balances, these signers of important letters and foreclosers of mortgages. Do they allow themselves to be rushed into decisions? Do they walk at midnight, hatless, in a rain, plopping through puddles, because of a secret anguish in the heart? When their offices are closed for the day, and the stenographers are gone, and everything is quiet, do they stretch themselves on the floor in paroxysms of weeping? Absurd. They have no hearts. Or if they have, they have learned the secret of the granite: they are silent, they wait, they fall instinctively into the
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slow rhythm of the stars, everything at last comes to them. But you, you poor idiot, you simulacrum of a soul—good God, what a fool you are. Here you go, outstripping with speed of mind the speed of this train. You are already in Cambridge, you are already noiselessly letting yourself into your flat in Shepard Street, you are already standing, just inside the door, and listening to hear if your excellent wife Bertha is at home. Not a sound—not a whisper—not the creak of a board. You cast a furtive look at the chairs in the hall: what is it that you are expecting, or even almost hoping, to see? A hat? A man’s hat? No, you avert your eyes from the thought. You had not really expected this. But you are curious, just the same, and that is why you are here, three days before she had expected you. It is like a melodrama. But that has nothing to do with it. If life chooses to imitate a cheap melodrama, why then it is obvious enough that you have to behave like a character in a melodrama—a ridiculous hero with a permanent expression of long-suffering, or a villain with violent mustaches. And so you are acting the part: you are stealthy, you walk swiftly and softly on the balls of your feet, you half hold your breath as you approach the sitting room, you crane your neck at an unnatural angle in your endeavor to reassure yourself that there is indeed no one there… But supposing there should be some one? Ah. This is what you really want. You really want to find some one there. Do not deny it—do not pretend. You are deliberately seeking a catastrophe—you are yourself in the act of creating a disaster. You want to see your life violated, broken in two, your precious secrecy exposed in a yellow light of pure horror. Could you not have avoided this? Could you not have ignored Fred’s letter? My dear Andy: it’s none of my business, perhaps, and probably you’ll be the last to thank me; that’s always what happens,
but I wouldn’t be doing my duty to you as a friend if I didn’t write to tell you—Oh, Christ. Why read it again? Why remember it? Why act upon it? Why not get off at Providence and return to New York, precisely as if it were a return to sanity? It was growing dark, they were crossing a river, a row of lights sped across rain-sodden ice, a lamp was lifted in a farmhouse window. Whoooo— whooooo—the demon fireman blew his whistle again, prolongedly, nostalgically, into the gathering gloom, rain began pattering again on the train roof and grazingly along the windows, came and went in flaws of needles. My dear Andy, it’s none of my business. My dear Andy, it’s none of my business. But whose business was it, then? Was it Tom’s? Was it Bertha’s? Was it God’s? Perhaps it was nothing at all. Perhaps they were merely playing duets. Side by side on the long mahogany bench, leaning together, leaning apart, Tom the bass and Bertha the treble, the Haydn Surprise, the Drum-roll Symphony, his foot on the pedal, her hand on the page. Shall we take that again? We’ll start at G in the second bar. Haydn duet, hide and do it. The clock was ticking, the curtains were drawn. Shepard Street was outside in the rain, everything was cosy, everything was peaceful, New York was far away, merest of whispers in the southwest, and Andy—what was Andy? A ghost behind the music, a shadow beside the hearth, an echo in the corridor. He was an old raincoat in the cupboard, a towel in the bathroom, a napkin ring in the sideboard, a name on the letter box. He was a handful of bills on the hall table, a catalogue of secondhand books, a pair of rusty skates in an old trunk. And the cocktail shaker on the Japanese tray, the shaker that leaked, Tom holding it muffled in a handkerchief, shaking it over the hearth while he laughed—come on, Andy, let’s have another round—the night is young—let’s get well
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oiled and go and see Dynamite Gus—come on, Bertha; come on, Andy—I’ll pay for the taxi—we’ll have some arak at the Greek’s, and ringside seats at the Garden. Have you read the Childermass? Let’s experiment with the Kieseritzky gambit, or the fianchetto. The new record of the “Love of the Three Oranges.” Let’s walk to Fresh Pond in the rain, visit the pumping-station, or drop a tear on the tomb of Henry James. Plymouth for the weekend. Chocorua. A game of poker at the new bookshop. Come on, Bertha, come on, Andy, I’m back from a faculty meeting and I want to raise hell. Tea at 3:30. Meeting at 4. The committee appointed to prepare a minute on the life and services of the late John Jacob Morrison, Professor of English, Emeritus, will present the minutes to the faculty. Recommendations from the administrative board for changes in the Regulations for Students in Harvard College, of which the most important is that section 14 be amended as follows. Let’s discuss methods of suicide. Potassium cyanide. Tell Bertha you’re spending the night with me, and we’ll take Louise and Molly to Concord. Treason! Treason! The treason spoke innocently through the Haydn, rose softly and guilelessly under the fingers of Tom, under the onyx signet ring, under his long brown hands, the wrists held high and arched, under the wedding ring on Bertha’s fourth finger, on whose inner surface was a fine incised inscription. Treason chimed with the chiming clock, a present from Tom, wreathed itself in a water color of nasturtiums, shone softly on the opened score from a shaded lamp. Where is Andy? Andy’s in New York, said the bass. Come on, Bertha— This must stop, this turmoil must stop. The Maroons had beaten the Bruins in overtime. The Prince of Wales had been thrown by his horse Beautiful Blonde Sues Millionaire Scion for Heart Balm. American Womanhood
Purest in World, says Bishop. Tax Scandal Shocks Senate. Rain will be followed by snow. Unseasonable warmth soon to end. Blizzards in far West, Denver under three feet of snow, villages in Rockies cut off from the world. Krazy Kat Is On His Way. Says you? Says me. Utilities Lower on Curb. Love Baron Leaves Hollywood. Oh, yeah? —You can’t teach ’em a thing. —You can teach ’em, but they won’t learn. —They don’t want to learn. —Believe me, I’m through. —God! And those hotels. —Never again for me, no sir. —Say, porter, what about a cigar. Pack of cards, informative bid, clubs, diamonds, pass. Amherst Quintet Invades Crimson Territory Tonight. Lapp Life Studied in Racial Investigation. The Lapps are a nervous class of people and would be termed neurasthenics…where a stick was whacked against the side of a tent, the inhabitants fainted from fright… God’s Providence is our inheritance. One hour to Boston. Once more the train gathered speed, fled through dwindling suburbs into the night, whistled for crossings, devoured immense spaces of darkness, clattered past interminable strings of freight cars on a siding, swooped over bridges, lurched, steadied, whistled again and again. Small stations whirled past, dimly lighted, their wooden platforms glistening with rain, their names telescoped with speed. Hurry—hurry—hurry—everything was hurrying, the world was hurrying, the night was hurrying. The bells for a crossing chattered madly ahead, rose to a higher note, fell away behind to a sad minor murmur, were lost. He closed his eyes. The back of his hand rested against the cold glass of the window, vibrating; smoke stung his nostrils; long lights flew beside him in bright parallels;
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THE SCOFIELD
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Six Inches of Brick Separated Me from the Tragedy of My Boyhood
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this was Andrew Cather. Calm yourself, you idiot—pull yourself together—you must regain control. Think of New York, the stars in the Grand Central Station, the girl who dropped her ticket at the gate, blushing as she stooped to pick it up, looking over her shoulder. Think of the fern-fringed fountain in the lunchroom at the hotel, old Rodman scratching his beard with a pencil while he figured the cost of the textbook, the marble clock, the rows of brass keys behind the desk. Mr. Cather, please— Number 218—Mr. Cather, please. Fred’s letter. My dear Andy, it’s none of my business. It’s none of my business. Think of the blocks of ice in the urinals, the disinfected sweetness of the telephone booths, the silent corridors of plush, the stealthy chambermaids with jingling key rings. Drive down Broadway at night, as if flying into the heart of a vast fiery opal. Take the express and change to a local at 14th Street. Climb the dirty stairs to the elevated, reading all the enameled advertisements, clacking through the heavy turnstile with a nickel.
PHIL HANR AHAN
THE SCOFIELD
The starting point for this investigation is provided by a fact without parallel, which defies all explanation or description—the fact of consciousness. Nevertheless, if anyone speaks of consciousness, we know immediately and from our own most personal experience what is meant by it. Many people, both inside and outside the science of psychology, are satisfied with the assumption that consciousness alone is mental, and nothing then remains for psychology but to discriminate in the phenomenology of the mind between perceptions, feelings, intellective processes, and volitions. It is generally agreed, however, that these conscious processes do not form unbroken series which are complete in themselves; so that there is no alternative to assuming that there are physical or somatic processes which accompany the mental ones and which must admittedly be more complete than the mental series, since some of them have conscious processes parallel to them but others have not. It thus seems natural to lay the stress in psychology upon these somatic processes, to see in them the true essence of what is mental and to try to arrive at some other assessment of the conscious processes. The majority of philosophers, however, as well as many other people, dispute this position and declare that the notion of a mental thing being unconscious is self-contradictory. But it is precisely this that psychoanalysis is obliged to assert, and this is its second fundamental hypothesis. It explains the supposed somatic accessory processes as being
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what is essentially mental and disregards for the moment the quality of consciousness. ——— In the course of our work the distinctions which we denote as mental qualities force themselves on our attention. There is no need to characterize what we call conscious: it is the same as the consciousness of philosophers and of everyday opinion. Everything else that is mental is in our view unconscious. We are soon led to make an important division in this unconscious. Some processes become conscious easily; they may then cease to be conscious, but can become conscious once more without any trouble: as people say, they can be reproduced or remembered. This reminds us that consciousness is in general a very highly fugitive condition. What is conscious is conscious only for a moment. If our perceptions do not confirm this, the contradiction is merely an apparent one. It is explained by the fact that the stimuli of perception can persist for some time so that in the course of it the perception of them can be repeated. The whole position can be clearly seen from the conscious perception of our intellective processes; it is true that these may persist, but they may just as easily pass in a flash. Everything unconscious that behaves in this way, that can easily exchange the unconscious condition for the conscious one, is therefore better described as “capable of entering consciousness,” or as preconscious. Experience has taught us that there are hardly any mental processes, even of the most complicated kind, which cannot on occasion remain preconscious, although as a rule they press forward, as we say, into consciousness. There are other mental processes or mental material which have no such easy access to consciousness, but which must
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
Selections from An Outline of Psychoanalysis
SIGMUND FREUD
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THE SCOFIELD
SIGMUND FREUD
VINCENT VAN GOGH
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Skull with Burning Cigarette
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—— Translated by James Strachey.
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be inferred, discovered, and translated into conscious form in the manner that has been described. It is for such material that we reserve the name of the unconscious proper. Thus we have attributed three qualities to mental processes: they are either conscious, preconscious, or unconscious. The division between the three classes of material which have these qualities is neither absolute nor permanent. What is preconscious becomes conscious, as we have seen, without any activity on our part; what is unconscious can, as a result of our efforts, be made conscious, though in the process we may have an impression that we are overcoming what are often very strong resistances. When we make an attempt of this kind upon someone else, we ought not to forget that the conscious filling up of the breaks in his perceptions—the construction which we are offering him—does not so far mean that we have made conscious in him the unconscious material in question. All that is so far true is that the material is present in his mind in two versions, first in the conscious reconstruction that he has just received and secondly in its original unconscious condition.
THE SCOFIELD
The last poem in Conrad Aiken’s Collected Poems— Second Edition (1970) is a vigorous doggerel, “Obituary in Bitcherel.” Aiken died three years later, at eighty-four, but the final couplet of his self-obituary seems definitive: Separate we come, separate go. And this be it known is all that we know. I write in July–August 2002, having reached my own seventy-second birthday, and having just read through Aiken’s Collected Poems again. I never fell in love with Aiken’s poetry as I did with Hart Crane’s and Wallace Stevens’, but I have been reading it with pleasure and profit for more than a half-century. Aiken never was much in fashion, and he seems now to have very few readers indeed. He was a much more distinguished poet than such contemporaries as John Peale Bishop and Archibald MacLeish, mere imitators of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Aiken, a close friend of Eliot and a good acquaintance of Pound, is independent of them. Eliot had concealed links to Tennyson and Whitman, while Pound overtly acknowledged Browning and (more agonistically) Whitman. Aiken was an overt High Romantic, saluting Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Browning, Whitman, and Francis Thompson. He might have added Tennyson and Emerson, since his Romanticism was eclectic, rather like that of Wallace Stevens.
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Even at his best, in his two sets of “Preludes”— Preludes for Memnon (1931) and Time in the Rock (1936)— Aiken cannot sustain comparison wih Stevens, but who besides Eliot, Frost, and Hart Crane can? Recalcitrant Romantic as I am, I rank Aiken with W. C. Williams, Pound, H. D., Marianne Moore, Ransom, all poets in his generation now much admired and studied. Aiken’s flaws are palpable enough: his rhetoric is too consistently eloquent, and frequently he gives us poetry rather than poems. And yet it is poetry, cognitive music, free of all ideology, and courageous in confronting family madness, solitude, death-as-annihilation, chaos. With so “musical” a poet as Conrad Aiken, it seems odd to speak of his “austerity,” a quality rightly associated with the Wallace Stevens of the later phase, 1942–1955. There are uncanny resemblances between Aiken’s Preludes and Stevens’ Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, but I doubt any influence of Aiken upon Stevens. The affinity, to a Stevensonian like myself, is deeply interesting: Preludes for Memnon (or Preludes to Attitude) XXIII–IV particularly anticipate Stevens of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction: The clouds flow slowly across the sky, the idea Slowly takes shape, and slowly passes, and changes Its shape in passing. It is a shape of grief, Plangent and poignant. It is a comic gesture. It is a wound in air. It is last year. It is the notion,—flippantly held and lost,— Of next year, with a burden of coarse disasters, Or the year after, with a burden of boredom. The leaf has come and gone—it was hard, bright, brittle, Bare thorns, sparkled in light, and now is lost,—
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
Foreword to Conrad Aiken’s Selected Poems
HAROLD BLOOM
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THE SCOFIELD
The sunrise burns you to an incandescence. And sleep, annihilator of the all and nothing, Makes of your wings a demon’s wings, that winnow The freezing airs of chaos. Upward he soars from nothing, and his wings Are marvelous with dew; or downward plunges To the sublime Gehenna whence we came. There too his wings are wide; and there he hangs, Magnificent, in madness and corruption, Master of outrage, and at home in shame. Perhaps Stevens, on some level, recalled this in the magnificent flight of the Canon Aspirin’s Angel in Notes, yet the analogue transcends any possibility of influence: Aiken and Stevens are Lucretian poets, allied by a cosmic nihilism and an Epicurean refusal to mourn. They both exemplify the American Sublime, a secular transcendence in the wake of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, and both of them subtly satirized T. S. Eliot’s New Christianity, as here in Section LXI of Preludes for Memnon, that slyly parodies Ash Wednesday, published just a year before:
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Shall we, then, pay the sentimental stop, And flute the soft nostalgic note, and pray Dead men and women to remember us, Imaginary gods to pity us? Saying We are unworthy, rather, to be remembered, We are unworthy to be remembered, mother, Remember us, O clods from whom we come— The Preludes invoke Blake and Shelley, implicitly against Eliot. Aiken knew his own tradition of High Romanticism, and deserves to take his place with W. B. Yeats, Stevens, D. H. Lawrence, and Hart Crane as a late carrier of that central poetic mode. This new edition of Selected Poems is the right way to begin with Aiken, whose total body of poetry is rather daunting. After the Preludes, the new reader of Aiken will seek out, for himself or herself, his or her own favorites in this volume. My own include some that once were anthologypieces, and some others always neglected. I begin with those I possess by memory: Senlin: A Biography, II, 2, his “Morning Song”; “And in the Hanging Gardens,” “Sea Holly,” and many from the Preludes. But there is also the extraordinary, twenty-five page visionary poem, Landscape West of Eden, which is one of Aiken’s masterworks. So are The Kid and “Mayflower,” rekindlings of early American history. The elegy, “Another Lycidas,” and “The Crystal,” the summa of a poetic career, serve together as something close to a concentration of all of Aiken into two inevitable works. Here Aiken refinds himself in Pythagoras, imaginative brother:
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
And so you poise yourself, magnificent angel,— Bird of bright dream, brief soul of briefer knowledge,— In the pure aether of a thought, unthinking Of endings or beginnings. And the light Of change and unknown purpose hues your wings. The cloud, that hangs between you and the moon, Darkening all things, darkens also you.
HAROLD BLOOM
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How shall we hold the eclectic Conrad Aiken together, so that we can see him clearly in the idea of his crystal? His best clue (to me) comes at the end of Section XLII of Time in the Rock: who would carve words must carve himself, first carve himself; and then alas finds, too late, that Word is only Hand. There is not Eliotic “incarnate word”; there is only the hand of the artist. The idea necessarily is shared with the geniuses of Modernism, Joyce and Proust, Matisse and Picasso. Aiken’s autobiographical essay, Ushant (1952), is written in the shadow of Joyce’s Ulysses, as is Blue Voyage, perhaps the best of Aiken’s novels. And it is Joyce, not Eliot, or Pound, who is the fecund major influence upon Aiken’s poetry. Aiken’s diction tends not to be original, a weakness that he transformed into a relative strength. Whether he quite surmounted his overt reliance upon traditional modes of figuration, I sadly doubt. There he contrasts unfavorably with Hart Crane, as with Stevens and Eliot. The problem (or part of it) ensued from Aiken’s hardthought conviction that he could best extend his reader’s “general awareness” by playing upon, rather than against, traditional associations. Associative rhetoric became Aiken’s prime resource, and reflected Freud’s lasting
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influence upon him. And yet Aiken truly had an American Gothic sensibility, echoing Hawthorne’s and Poe’s, and that kind of sensibility drowns in associative language. Such gorgeous failures as the “symphony,” The Charnel Rose, and John Deth: A Metaphysical Legend testify to this miasma in Aiken. The true questions for me are why and how Aiken makes it work as often as he does, since he does not want to (and cannot) make it new. On the surface, Robert Frost is rarely innovative, but that is illusive: Frost is cunning, and radically original. The ironies of Frost’s best poems are largest where they are least evident. Aiken rarely implies the opposite of what he says, and the reader schooled by Frost, Eliot, Stevens, Hart Crane can come to feel that Aiken does not know where to curtail or qualify his continuous assertions. And yet eloquence, in Conrad Aiken, can take on the American Romantic force that Emerson prophesied and Whitman exemplified. There is a fire in Aiken’s best poetry so idiosyncratic that I want to call it the refiner’s fire, alchemical and breaking out beyond all limits. Section XIV of the Preludes for Memnon shares in the mythmaking audacity of Shelley and Blake, though it has more in common with Victor Hugo in the sublime madness of his long cosmological poems, God and The End of Satan. —What did you see? —I saw myself and God. I saw the ruin in which godhead lives: Shapeless and vast: the strewn wreck of the world: Sadness unplumbed: misery without bound. Wailing I heard, but also I heard joy.
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It would be for this Apollonian fountain of the forever unfolding, the forever-together, ourselves but a leaf on the fountain of tree, that we would return: the crystal self-shaping, the godhead designing the god. For this moment of vision, we would return.
HAROLD BLOOM
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Wreckage I saw, but also I saw flowers. Hatred I saw, but also I saw love… And thus, I saw myself. —And this alone? —And this alone awaits you, when you dare To that sheer verge where horror hangs, and tremble Against the falling rock; and, looking down, Search the dark kingdom. It is to self you come,— And that is God. It is the seed of seeds: Seed for disastrous and immortal worlds.
HAROLD BLOOM
figure. But he is a vitally refreshing poet, now more than ever, when extra-poetic considerations tend to govern reputations, in the academy and in the media. If you read and enjoy Conrad Aiken, then you have been in search of authentic poetry, and you have found it. —— Reprinted by permission of Harold Bloom.
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A reader can choose to be skeptical of this harmonic abyss, but rhetorically it does come at us with open palms, offering another venture at the beyond. Aiken, unlike Whitman, did not contain multitudes. But, like such greater poets as Stevens, Eliot, and Hart Crane, Aiken is another of Whitman’s numerous progeny in our national literature. In a very different mode, one could add W. C. Williams, Ezra Pound, and A. R. Ammons, and in a mode all his own, John Ashbery, our major poet since the death of Stevens. Time, which forgives authentic poets everything, forgives Aiken his incessant eloquence, a generation after his death. I could wish that Aiken’s wordconsciousness had been as acute as his general concern with consciousness, but that again would ask Aiken to have been Hart Crane or Eliot. Aiken was not, as Ben Jonson rightly said of John Donne, the first poet in the world for some things, but only a handful or so ever are. Too accomplished to be judged a minor poet, Aiken nevertheless is too obsessive to have been clearly a major
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It is the answer that no question asked.
THE SCOFIELD
The Deceitful Portrait Well, as you say, we live for small horizons: We move in crowds, we flow and talk together, Seeing so many eyes and hands and faces, So many mouths, and all with secret meanings,— Yet know so little of them; only seeing The small bright circle of our consciousness, Beyond which lies the dark. Some few we know— Or think we know. Once, on a sun-bright morning, I walked in a certain hallway, trying to find A certain door: I found one, tried it, opened, And there in a spacious chamber, brightly lighted, A hundred men played music, loudly, swiftly, While one tall woman sent her voice above them In powerful incantation…. Closing then the door I heard it die behind me, fade to whisper,— And walked in a quiet hallway as before. Just such a glimpse, as through that opened door, Is all we know of those we call our friends. We hear a sudden music, see a playing Of ordered thoughts—and all again is silence. The music, we suppose (as in ourselves) Goes on forever there, behind shut doors,— As it continues after our departure, So, we divine, it played before we came. What do you know of me, or I of you? Little enough…We set these doors ajar Only for chosen movements of the music: This passage (so I think—yet this is guesswork)
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Will please him,—it is in a strain he fancies,— More brilliant, though, than his; and while he likes it He will be piqued…He looks at me bewildered And thinks (to judge from self—this too is guesswork) The music strangely subtle, deep in meaning, Perplexed with implications; he suspects me Of hidden riches, unexpected wisdom. Or else I let him hear a lyric passage,— Simple and clear; and all the while he listens I make pretence to think my doors are closed. This too bewilders him. He eyes me sidelong Wondering “Is he such a fool as this? Or only mocking?”—There I let it end. Sometimes, of course, and when we least suspect it— When we pursue our thoughts with too much passion, Talking with too great zeal—our doors fly open Without intention; and the hungry watcher Stares at the feast, carries away our secrets, And laughs…but this, for many counts, is seldom. And for the most part we vouchsafe our friends, Our lovers too, only such few clear notes As we shall deem them likely to admire: “Praise me for this” we say, or “laugh at this,” Or “marvel at my candor”…all the while Withholding what’s most precious to ourselves,— Some sinister depth of lust or fear or hatred, The sombre note that gives the chord its power; Or a white loveliness—if such we know— Too much like fire to speak of without shame. Well, this being so, and we who know it being So curious about those well-locked houses, The minds of those we know,—to enter softly, And steal from floor to floor up shadowy stairways,
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
Palimpsest:
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THE SCOFIELD
If you are clever you already see me As one who moves forever in a cloud Of warm bright vanity: a luminous cloud Which falls on all things with a quivering magic, Changing such outlines as a light may change, Brightening what lies dark to me, concealing Those things that will not change…I walk sustained In a world of things that flatter me: a sky Just as I would have had it; trees and grass Just as I would have shaped and colored them; Pigeons and clouds and sun and whirling shadows, And stars that brightening climb through mist at nightfall,— In some deep way I am aware these praise me: Where they are beautiful, or hint of beauty, They point, somehow, to me. This water says,— Shimmering at the sky, or undulating In broken gleaming parodies of clouds, Rippled in blue, or sending from cool depths To meet the falling leaf the leaf’s clear image,— This water says, there is some secret in you Akin to my clear beauty, silently responsive To all that circles you. This bare tree says,— Austere and stark and leafless, split with frost,
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Resonant in the wind, with rigid branches Flung out against the sky,—this tall tree says, There is some cold austerity in you, A frozen strength, with long roots gnarled on rocks, Fertile and deep; you bide your time, are patient, Serene in silence, bare to outward seeming, Concealing what reserves of power and beauty! What teeming Aprils!—chorus of leaves on leaves! These houses say, such walls in walls as ours, Such streets of walls, solid and smooth of surface, Such hills and cities of walls, walls upon walls; Motionless in the sun, or dark with rain; Walls pierced with windows, where the light may enter; Walls windowless where darkness is desired; Towers and labyrinths and domes and chambers,— Amazing deep recesses, dark on dark,— All these are like the walls which shape your spirit: You move, are warm, within them, laugh within them, Proud of their depth and strength; or sally from them, To blow your Roland’s horn against the world. This deep cool room, with shadowed walls and ceiling, Tranquil and cloistral, fragrant of my mind, This cool room says,—just such a room have you, It waits you always at the tops of stairways, Withdrawn, remote, familiar to your uses, Where you may cease pretence and be yourself. And this embroidery, hanging on this wall, Hung there forever,—these so soundless glidings Of dragons golden-scaled, sheer birds of azure, Coilings of leaves in pale vermilion, griffins Drawing their rainbow wings through involutions Of mauve chrysanthemums and lotus flowers,— This goblin wood where someone cries enchantment,— This says, just such an involuted beauty
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
From room to quiet room, from wall to wall, Breathing deliberately the very air, Pressing our hands and nerves against warm darkness To learn what ghosts are there,— Suppose for once I set my doors wide open And bid you in…. Suppose I try to tell you The secrets of this house, and how I live here; Suppose I tell you who I am, in fact, Deceiving you—as far as I may know it— Only so much as I deceive myself.
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And so, all things discern me, name me, praise me— I walk in a world of silent voices, praising; And in this world you see me like a wraith Blown softly here and there, on silent winds. “Praise me”—I say; and look, not in a glass, But in your eyes, to see my image there— Or in your mind; you smile, I am contented; You look at me, with interest unfeigned, And listen—I am pleased; or else, alone, I watch thin bubbles veering brightly upward From unknown depths,—my silver thoughts ascending; Saying now this, now that, hinting of all things,— Dreams, and desires, half-wishes, half-regrets, Faint ghosts of memory, strange recognitions,— But all with one deep meaning: this is I, This is the glistening secret holy I, This silver-winged wonder, insubstantial, This singing ghost…. And hearing, I am warmed.
Snow falls and melts; the eaves make liquid music; Black wheel-tracks line the snow-touched street; I turn And look one instant at the half-dark gardens, Where skeleton elm-trees reach with frozen gesture Above unsteady lamps,—with black boughs lifted Against a luminous snow-filled grey-gold sky. “Beauty!” I cry. My feet move on, and take me Between dark walls, with orange squares for windows. Beauty; beheld like someone half-forgotten, Remembered, with slow pang, as one neglected. Well, I am frustrate; life has beaten me, The thing I strongly seized has turned to darkness, And darkness takes my heart…. These skeleton elmtrees— Leaning against that grey-gold snow-filled sky— Beauty! they say, and at the edge of darkness Extend vain arms in a frozen gesture of protest. Voices are raised, a door is slammed. The lovers, Murmuring in an adjacent room, grow silent, The eaves make liquid music. Hours have passed, And nothing changes, and everything is changed. Exultation is dead, Beauty is harlot,— And walks the streets: the thing I strongly seized Has turned to darkness, and darkness rides my heart.
You see me moving, then, as one who moves Forever at the centre of his circle: A circle filled with light. And into it Come bulging shapes from darkness, loom gigantic, Or huddle in dark again. A clock ticks clearly, A gas-jet steadily whirs, light streams across me; Two church bells, with alternate beat, strike nine; And through these things my pencil pushes softly To weave grey webs of lines on this clear page.
If you could solve this darkness you would have me. This causeless melancholy that comes with rain, Or on such days as this when large wet snowflakes Drop heavily, with rain…whence rises this? Well, so-and-so, this morning when I saw him, Seemed much preoccupied, and would not smile; And you, I saw too much; and you, too little; And the word I chose for you, the golden word, The word that should have struck so deep in purpose,
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Of thought and coiling thought, dream linked with dream, Image to image gliding, wreathing lights, Soundlessly cries enchantment in your mind: You need but sit and close your eyes a moment To see these rich designs unfold themselves.
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These things you ask for, These you shall have…. So, talking with my first wife, At the dark end of evening, when she leaned And smiled at me, her blue eyes weaving webs Of finest fire, revolving me in scarlet,— Calling to mind remote and small successions Of countless other evenings ending so,— I smiled, and met her kiss, and wished her dead; Dead of a sudden sickness, or by my hands Savagely killed; I saw her in her coffin, I saw her coffin borne downstairs with trouble, I saw myself alone there, palely watching, Wearing a masque of grief so deeply acted That grief itself possessed me. Time would pass,
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And I would meet this girl,—my second wife— And drop the masque of grief for one of passion. Forward we move to meet, half hesitating, We drown in each others’ eyes, we laugh, we talk, Looking now here, now there, and both pretending We do not hear the powerful prelude begin To throb beneath our words…. The time approaches. We lean unbalanced. The mute last glance between us, Profoundly searching, opening, asking, yielding, Is steadily met: our two lives draw together… …” What are you thinking of?”…My first wife’s voice Scattered these ghosts. “Oh nothing—nothing much— Just wondering where we’d be two years from now, And what we might be doing…. And then remorse Turned sharply in my mind to sudden pity, And pity to acted passion. And one more evening Drew to the usual end of sleep and silence. And, as it is with this, so too with all things. The pages of our lives are blurred palimpsest: New lines are wreathed on old lines half-erased, And those on older still; and so forever. The old shines through the new, and colors it. What’s new? What’s old? All things have double meanings,— All things return. I write a line, delighted, (Or touch a woman’s hand, or plumb a doctrine) Only to find the same thing, known before,— Only to know the same thing comes tomorrow. This curious riddled dream I dreamed last night,— Six years ago I dreamed it just as now; The same man stooped to me; we rose from bondage, And broke the accustomed order of our days, And struck for the morning world, and light, and freedom. What does it mean? Why is this hint repeated?
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And set so many doors of wish wide open, You let it fall, and would not stoop for it, And smiled at me, and would not let me guess Whether you saw it fall…. These things, together, With other things, still slighter, wove to magic, And this in turn drew up dark memories; And there I stand. This magic breaks and bleeds me, Turning all frustrate dreams to chords and discords, Faces, and griefs, and words, and sunlit evenings, And chains self-forged that will not break nor lengthen, And cries that none can answer, few will hear. Have these things meaning? Or would you see more clearly If I should say “My second wife grows tedious, Or, like gay tulip, keeps no perfumed secret”? Or “one day dies eventless as another, Leaving the seeker still unsatisfied, And more convinced life yields no satisfaction”? Or “seek too hard, the eyes at length grow callous, And beauty shines in vain”?—
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The Vague Glimmer of a Head Suspended in Space
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What anguish does it spring from, seek to end? You see me, then, pass up and down these stairways, Now through a beam of light, and now through shadow,— Pursuing silent ends. No rest there is,— No more for me than you. I move here always, From quiet room to room, from wall to wall, Searching and plotting, weaving a web of will. This is my house, and now, perhaps, you know me. Yet I confess, for all my best intentions, Once more I have deceived you…I withhold The one thing precious, the one dark thing that guides me; And I have spread two snares for you, of lies.
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Psychoanalysis Through Conrad Aiken’s One-Eyed Cather In a series of lectures presented between 1915–1917, Freud famously includes psychoanalysis among the three “great outrages upon [humanity’s] self-love.” The first two attacks upon these “narcissistic illnesses” come about through scientific revelations. Though he concedes Alexandrian doctrines posited a similar theory, Freud attributes the first wound to Copernicus, whose heliocentric model demoted our planet to a cosmic fragment whirling around our solar system’s pitiless nucleus. Earth in orbit becomes another crumb in what Freud called “a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable.” Darwin casts the second great blow to humanity’s self-love, revealing that humans do not occupy the apex of the animal kingdom, that we are not specially created or separate from nature. Freud writes that Darwin “relegated [man] to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him.” We are not “the end” of evolution; instead, we’re just another blind step in a sequence of erratic mutations. Though we may not readily admit it to ourselves, we have not shed our animal nature—we have repressed it. Finally, Freud argues the third attack upon our cosmic vanity strikes in the form of psychological research “…which is endeavoring to prove to the ‘ego’ of each one of PAGE 41
us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind.” In order to confront and describe these invisible and largely unknowable forces shaping our psychic lives, psychoanalysis advocates that humanity look inward, and through speech, bring forth unconscious stalemates into conscious experience. But as Freud knew, individuals who forced themselves to confront these powerful inner-horrors rarely emerge from such subjective analysis unscathed. Looking inward, we may never discover the source of a deeper truth to which we identify. Perhaps the unconscious is itself a speaker, an utterer of an unbearable truth that, instead of freeing us, forces us to deal with a potentially more troubling inner-truth. Humanity’s narcissistic assessment of its place in the universe thus adopts a circular nature—indeed we once thought ourselves at the middle, the center of the universe, of nature and of experience—but Darwin and Copernicus redraw the anthropocentric relation: center and periphery go topsy-turvy. In turn, the terror in Freud’s discovery suggests humanity does not even live at the center of herself; we are always outside, other to ourselves as well as other people. As his thought develops, the unconscious becomes not merely a repository for our animalistic drives and disturbing, larval thoughts, but itself a site that speaks. Rather than a dart lodged in a perfect bull’s-eye, perhaps “man” is better described a rogue pockmark on the wall. Aiken’s early psychoanalytic masterpiece, Great Circle, interrogates these points of psychological tension though one-eyed Andrew Cather, the novel’s recently cuckolded protagonist. Cather’s journey inward probes the connections between repetition, language, narcissism, and Aiken’s most recurrent theme through his oeuvre: the
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Toward a Copernican Word:
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Aiken always returns to the human need for an escape, for the daydream, for a language to live in. Whether we are writing, speaking, feeling, or thinking, we are always enacting a narrative: Isn’t it amazing how even at such a moment, when one is absolutely broken, dissolved, a mere whirlwind of unhappiness, when one walks without knowing or caring where one is going, nevertheless one still has to dramatize oneself, one sees oneself as a pitiful figure under an arclight of snow, one lifts a deliberately tormented face to the storm, and despite the profundity of one’s grief, there is also something false in it too. Freud’s conceptual framework influences Aiken as early as 1912, yet Great Circle portentously winks at poststructural psychoanalysis. By adapting psychoanalytic theory into the voice of his protagonist, Aiken’s repetition, return, and escape into language structures his self-love as much as his self-loathing. If in “Remembering, Repeating, Working-through” Freud notices how “the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, he acts it out, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it….” then, as Cather described, there is falsehood even in grief. The narrative doesn’t read entirely as an act of remembrance, but rather as an act of invention, enlivened by the poetic language of the protagonist. The dance of thought, language and trauma is one of an orbital nature. If at the core of Freudian theory, the pleasure principle emphasizes the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, why would old One-Eyed Cather constantly revisit his most troubling memories and fantasies? Why does he childishly fixate on how Bertha
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problem of consciousness. Though mostly employing the protagonist’s stream-of-conscious narrative, the novel takes upon a self-reflective tenor which continually stabs at the familiar cluster of nerves at the center of the story: Cather’s return to a childhood trauma, his narcissistic reveling in the psychic torment of the present. Told in four parts, the novel’s first sequence chronicles Andrew’s jealousy and his discovery of his wife Bertha’s infidelity with his best friend, Tom. Part two is an impressionistic take on childhood memories in Duxbury, culminating in the discovery of Cather’s mother’s infidelity and death, which undoubtedly influence the protagonist’s own failures in marriage. In the third section, imbued with more drunken soliloquy than dialogue, Cather speaks to a psychoanalyst friend as a means to work back to the origin of his misery. In the final sequence, written as a tangled knot of dream and memory, Cather discovers some form of psychic release. As Graham Greene writes in the introduction to Great Circle, the four parts “might be described as thought, memory, speech, and action.” In a 1933 review of Great Circle, James Hilton of The Bookman writes, “It is a sign of this Age of Frustration that there seems to be two principal ways in which intelligent modern writers react to the world about them—that of Attack and that of Escape.” Hilton claims Aiken is a fighter, one who throws a brick of vitriol at homo sapiens similar to Swift’s denunciation of the Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels. But perhaps at the heart of Aiken’s art lies the fourth wave in a Freudian assault directed at humanity’s self-love: a combination of attack by and escape into language. Aiken’s greatest achievement as a fiction writer is in his dramatization of Freudian theory with a self-reflective, even self-loathing quality. Psychoanalysis itself is subject to attack (particularly in part three), but
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Where is honesty then? I don’t believe we’ve got an honest bone in our souls. We’re all colossal fakes—the more power we have, the more ingeniously and powerfully we fake. Michelangelo—what the hell. Did he ever tell the
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truth? Or Shakespeare? No, by God, they went on lying to their graves, nothing said, their dirty little mouths twisted with deceit, their damned hearts packed full of filthy lies and blasphemies. In a novel largely concerned with self-examination, the question of honesty, then, extends to the author; indeed it is difficult to entirely separate Aiken’s life from Cather’s experience. In a New York Times expose on Aiken in 1964, Frederick C Crews writes: His heroes are adept at psychoanalyzing themselves; Andrew Cather in “Great Circle,” for example, sees the casual link between his mother fixation and his infidelities, and he suspects that he has unconsciously followed the parental example in willing himself into the role of cuckold. Yet Cather, and Aiken himself, rage against these inferences that have been made all but inescapable for the reader. It would seem that he is using his plots to learn the truth about himself, and that a part of him continues to resist what he must nevertheless say. The result is a curious blurring of the authorial point of view. This blurring of Aiken’s point of view is best illustrated in section two, wherein Cather gives a detailed account of a traumatic childhood discovery in Duxbury. Thick marine smells pervade the otherwise happy memories of childhood holidays, replete with descriptions of conch shells and coves over-grown with beech-plums. Contrasted with Cather’s rancorous monologues, part two provides a mostly-lovely sojourn for a reader more familiar with Aiken’s poetic ability.
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“always did have an eye for athletes—hairy ape stuff.” He both does and doesn’t consent to this mental imposition; it seems that some inner voice, one out of his control, conjures up these painful symbols from somewhere, self-imposed or not. Implicit in the title lies a question: why do we relive our traumas, over and over, in a great circle of psychic penance? We shape our being-in-the-world with words. Humanity speaks; we’re the subject, the one who chooses her words, the one in control. Without us, the words, symbols, and sounds don’t exist. But to frame Aiken’s language in this way is to think in a somewhat preCopernican approach. As the heliocentric model shows the sun doesn’t revolve around earth, Aiken shows that language doesn’t revolve around man. Man revolves around language—it’s our source of light, of heat, of life. For humanity, words are something we’re entirely dependent upon but ultimately helpless against. When language runs the show, our words, our bodies, and even our desires are overwritten with these powerful signifiers. Our traumas return as language from somewhere beyond our control, haunting us as a dream, a memory, an affect, a word. In this realization, Aiken sees opportunity for invention. Beneath his self-indulgent soliloquizing, Andrew toils with a troubling revelation: if humanity is dishonest with itself by nature of its psychological/ linguistic constitution, how can honesty persist between lovers, husbands, wives, friends, or analysts? If we can’t know our self, how can we know those closest to us?
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In a connection to psychoanalysis, Aiken adopts a topological treatment of Duxbury, setting a psychic landscape for the joys and terrors of childhood (and later adulthood). The topological model put forth by Freud emphasizes the importance of location when discussing the nature of human reality. Topology is about delimitation—of separation—of space. Language and landscape are about difference. Instead of thinking of conscious experience as something entirely internal, the second section of the novel understands the importance of dwelled-in language; words are where we live. As Freud understood with his topological model of the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious, these intersecting psychic forces are something inhabited, not just something thought. Understanding of memory as a place rather than a thought offers an eerie connection to Aiken’s own experience. Taken as a modernist work of early autofiction, the connection between consciousness and language takes a new shape when paired with Aiken’s biography. Though Graham Greene denies that Cather is a mask for the author, a reader familiar with Aiken’s childhood may have a different understanding of the protagonist’s condition. At the end of part two, One-eyed Cather’s mother and uncle David, in the throws of an affair, both drown in a sailing accident. This childhood memory persists as a source of tension through the remainder of the novel, serving as a morbid psychological backdrop for Cather’s personal and marital failures in adulthood. It is difficult to ignore that Conrad Aiken’s father, who had unexpectedly descended into madness, tied his eleven-year-old son to a bedpost; then (according to Aiken’s own writing), the young Conrad heard two gunshots nearby and discovered his parents’ bodies at the scene of a murder-suicide.
Language’s relation to consciousness and trauma becomes a topology in itself. Rather than being something spoken, language is lived-in: it is a place with ridges, valleys, streams, and tectonic forces of which we have no awareness or control:
In adopting language, in overwriting our bodies and minds with signifiers, we shed our animalistic nature, thereby surrendering ourselves to the power of words and images. Though this grants the power for self-reflection, we shudder before the immensity of this inner topology that we can only hope to navigate—never control. The unconscious is a speaker. An inner-voice possesses us, overwriting our fates over which we have little say. By getting an analysis and, a protagonist, an author to talk, daydream, dream, or narrate a traumatic event, we enter the realm of words, a system of understanding that preexists us. Trauma or fixation suggests a deadlock, a blockage, a stalemate. In analysis, the patient attempts to symbolize those points of fixation that have not yet been coded by the world of language. Analysis, similar to writing, is ultimately descriptive, giving shape to the inner-blockages for which
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Have you ever looked at a map of the brain? It’s like those imaginary maps of Mars. Full of Arabia Desertas, canals, seas, mountains, glaciers, extinct volcanoes or ulcers. The pockmarked moonface of the mind. And all that strange congregation of scars, that record of wounds and fissures, is what speaks and acts. I speak with it, you listen with it. What the hell. What have I got to do with it? Nothing. Something hurts me and I act. Something else hurts me and I speak. If I could act, I wouldn’t speak. Voila, all your bloody psychology in a nutshell.
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we do not yet have words or understanding. Is writing a novel itself a form of analysis, of uncovering or making conscious inner-knots of presymbolized traumas? Perhaps Cather’s narcissism is itself a cypher for the artistic process. When the unconscious enters the picture writerly intent (or intent itself) changes color. Does the author’s inner voice shape the narrative, and to what degree does the narrative provoke her inner voice? Toward the end of his diatribe with a psychoanalyst friend, Cather laments:
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Conrad Aiken, 1960
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As the narrative disintegrates into a confluence of dream and voice, Cather hopes to become a scrambled jumble of partial drives, his very body disorganized by the imposing power of language. The mirror usually presents us with a unified image—a construction. Aiken’s project acknowledges that in perception there expands a gap between our knowledge and our acquisition of that knowledge; if our past is merely a remembered system of signifiers, of airy images, then our knowledge of it is a linguistic drama. In the end, Cather can only hope to regress, to return to the pre-verbal, where his memories and his body have not yet been bound by knotty words.
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The truth is, there’s not a damn thing or person or idea in the world you can trust, not one. You’re alone. You run about falling in love with people, with things, with flowers, with surfaces, with weather, with ids and quods and quids, and what the blazes do you get in return? Nothing: only a fleeting reflection of your own putrid little face flung back at you crookedly from a broken mirror. Isn’t that it? Have I lost my self-love?…I think I’ll be a pansexualist, and become a child again.
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A Conversation with Joseph Killorin
In December 1939, Conrad Aiken wrote in a letter to Malcolm Lowry, “Everything comes round and back, the eternal return.” It is well known that the return— in its many forms: memory, self-reflection, recurrence, the circle, the spiral—was a crucial trope in the Aiken oeuvre, with his poetry and prose often coiling back inward, both structurally and thematically, as much as pushing outward, but it is important to understand that, in a pattern that seemed to follow the arc of his narrative designs, his life, too, whorled back in on itself. If Aiken’s life, then, can be seen as a great circle, it was in the return to Savannah, Georgia—the scene of both the grisly murder-suicide that forever changed him and the seemingly idyllic childhood which had preceded it—that the arc of his life began its return approach. Back in his hometown, he befriended Joseph Killorin, a local literature and philosophy professor, thirty-seven years his junior. This friendship, by all accounts, was a highlight of the last decade and a half of Aiken’s life, the two often meeting multiple times a week to talk into the wee hours of the morning over martinis. After Aiken’s passing in 1973, Killorin acted as the executor of his estate, the editor of his Selected Letters, and the author of an as-yet-unpublished biography. I spoke with Killorin, one of only a handful of people still alive who had an intimate connection with the man Malcolm PAGE 46
Cowley called “the buried giant of twentieth-century American writing,” to unearth what this buried giant was like in his golden years, as the arc of his life moved toward a completion of that great circle. TM: Of Aiken, you wrote: It is rare that the conscious direction of a poet through the whole body of his work—over so long a career as fifty years, and in each succeeding period with greater autobiographical candor—is to put his reader in possession of everything significant for an accurate and deep understanding— psychoanalytic, if you wish—of his own life. Do you think this “calculated self-exposure”—this mining of his own consciousness and letting these innards be the foundation of his work—hurt his reputation or made it harder for his work to find the larger audience that some of his contemporaries found? JK: I’m not sure about that. He was an extremely careful writer. It took him a great deal of time to complete any particular work, poetry or fiction. The exposure of consciousness was a kind of credo with him. I would say that he placed immense value on trying to come at the idea of exposing his own consciousness as clearly as he could. He was by no means a spill-it-all writer. He had an immense sense of design and sound. He did see it as his job to expose the excitement he felt daily. I can put it in a personal way: I always knew when I was with him that there was something working in him that he was unable to suppress. It was this constant observation of what he was observing, of how he was
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Toward a Completion of That Great Circle:
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observing. To me this was a sign of the inability of genius to stop working. TM: I wonder, then, what you think are some of the main roadblocks standing in the way of his success? Why hasn’t he achieved the recognition that people like me and you think he so clearly deserves? JK: Well, I think there’s a simple reason—though it may not be the only reason—which is that he had a shyness that prevented him from advertising himself. He would never appear in public. The one or two occasions when he actually took a gig to read his work, he was miserable, and everyone agreed that it was miserable. He could reveal himself in writing daringly, but he was terrified of appearing in person. TM: You wrote in the introduction to the Selected Letters that “there is no doubt that conversation was Aiken’s favorite sport.” Could you talk about his favorite sport and how he played it? What were conversations with him like? JK: There was an excitement on both our parts when they were coming up, which was often, sometimes several times a week. I was dean of a college, and I’d get off work and go to his house. His wife, Mary, was glad to have me because it meant she could escape. She would fix a bottle of martinis, and we would start in right away. He always read all the newspapers, and he would often begin by telling me what was happening on my little island of Tybee, how many mares we had at the time, and all that sort of thing. Then, we very quickly would get off to all sorts of subjects. We often spoke of memories. He loved to be reminded especially of works that had once meant something to him. One of the reasons we got along so well is that we were almost exactly alike in what we had read.
I can remember, for instance, that we once got off on Walter Pater. I mentioned a piece by Pater called “The Child in the House” and this conversation recalled to him the enormous effect that essay had had on him. TM: Walter Pater famously claimed that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” which feels apropos, because Aiken’s writing is some of the most musical of his modernist contemporaries. Did you ever speak about the musicality of his writing? JK: No, not exactly, but the musical part of verse he clearly loved. I’d read to him his own work and he’d read back to me. Most of the recordings of him reading his own poems are recorded by me. As a reader, he was very slow, very Bostonian in his pronunciation. I would say he was a quiet, almost uninflected reader, but it was as if he was thinking about what it was he was saying. The music just came out that way. TM: Aiken was one of those exquisite men of letters who was as comfortable writing poetry as fiction, criticism, drama, and autobiography. What do you think he most wanted to be known for? His poetry? His fiction? His criticism? JK: The truth is he was driven to fiction—short stories, first—for the need of money. Short stories and novels sold. He was beloved, I’m not sure if you know this, by Maxwell Perkins. I’ve got all Maxwell Perkins’ letters to him. Perkins was attempting to get him to write “the Great American Novel.” While he couldn’t necessarily do that, what he wrote instead were novels which were the essence of turning the interest in consciousness into fiction—Blue Voyage first, and the other really important one, of course, is Great Circle. This business of the fiction led to years and years of preparing for what came out as Ushant. When my
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biography comes out, I’ll have in it all of his notes that he wrote on an occasion when he was coming back from Spain with Malcolm Lowry and his wife, and he was taken with the idea of a group of people reading a book and being simultaneously in it—a very complicated kind of looking at looking at looking. That’s what eventually became Ushant, much later, when he had the time to do it, when he was at the Library of Congress. TM: Could you talk a little bit about how you met and befriended him? JK: I knew his poetry long before I met him. I hadn’t read his prose, but I knew his poetry, and I knew that he was born in Savannah, as was I. When he moved here, his wife asked me to come to a gathering, and I did. We took to one another right away. He asked me to stay that evening, and we just kept talking, and that continued from there until...well, the rest of his life. TM: How did you end up becoming the executor of his estate? JK: He asked me to be. That’s all. He asked me to do the letters first. By that time, I had met, through him, practically all of his old friends and talked with them at length about him. So he began turning over to me, everything that came to him, letters and so on. When he died, Mary got me to arrange his papers for a sale to the Huntington Library. That was her collection that I did that with. Then, I had my own collection for writing the biography, which I completed years ago. I had a series of really serious illnesses, so while I finished the biography some time ago, I hadn’t added the footnotes, which are obviously crucial. So it’s now at Harvard and they’re trying to arrange someone to fill in the footnotes. TM: Ted Spivey in his book Time’s Stop in Savannah quoted you as saying the city of Savannah
was “the lodestone of the poet’s life.” Could you talk about what Savannah meant to him and why you call it his lodestone? JK: Well, I only mean that in the sense that his first eleven years, ending in the tragedy, the murder-suicide, were lived here. He had spent a good part of his life trying to remember everything he could about Savannah. He had a wonderful memory. TM: The return to Savannah seems so important to him. One of the great paradoxes in his work—there were lots of paradoxes, of course—but I’m interested specifically in the pushing out, the exploration, versus the return, the circling back. I was wondering if you could talk about his interest in those dual, opposing currents? JK: Well, he gave me his desk around the time he went to a nursing home, towards the very end. My wife opened the desk and there was a poem in there, and it was about the nursery floor and returning to the nursery floor. That’s the last one I quote in the biography. Everything was for him that great circle. It all was. Rooms, streets, houses— he knew every brick in the sidewalk in front of his house on Oglethorpe Avenue—and that devotion to place was very strong in him. There was this emphasis on coming back to where he began, because his childhood, up until that last year, had really been very happy. If you look at the Selected Letters, towards the very end, I quote a long section from Ushant about Savannah. He has several letters there about the city, which he found ideally beautiful. I admit, it had its charm, but it was an old, decaying Southern city. TM: What was the process like in choosing the letters for that collection of Selected Letters you edited of his?
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None of us knows in what direction poetry and the other arts will turn—that’s part of the cruel fascination of being interested in the arts as you are, and keeping your head about it. If there is anything good in my poetry people like yourself will find it. That’s all we can hope for, and goodness knows it’s enough. Would you say he died saddened that he had never been given the credit or respect he felt was his due? Or do you think he was hopeful that a reconsideration would come post-mortem? What was his sense of his own legacy at the close of his life? Or was he not concerned with such things? JK: Of course, he continued, like any sensible author,
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to hope that he would get published more and read more, but at the end that wasn’t a major drive in his life. The night before he died, I remember, we had a long conversation about George Moore. The dear, old mind was going on at full speed to the very end.
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JK: I attempted to choose letters not entirely tracing the writing career but the movements in that arc of the great circle. There wasn’t much from the beginning, of course, but from Harvard on, there were. Really, I simply chose what seemed to me to follow his life through that great circle, as well as I could. TM: Thinking back on the Selected Letters— though I’m sure it’s been years since you’ve read them—are there any that have stayed with you? Any passage or moment from those letters that you still remember? JK: The one he wrote to his cousin after the murdersuicide when he says, “We are all well here,” at the very beginning of the letter. That knocked me over and has stuck with me. TM: The final letter to David Crumm is so sweet and so sad, and such a perfect way for the Selected Letters to end. Aiken wrote to him:
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THE SCOFIELD
The cabby pulls up; reined in, the horse moves stiffly as the carriage turns; homeward bound; trotting again; in even measure the cab vibrates to the horse’s trot; again that monotone movement; a long-drawn crack of the whip; another carriage catches us up, goes ahead; why are we moving so slowly? Two very old people on the pavement there; noise of the wheels; a gentle jolting; again the Parc Monceau, the rotunda; in a quarter of an hour we shall be back. What will Leah say to me? I shall accompany her in, yes I certainly must go in; with her I shall enter the bedroom; ah but will she let me? The other day she insisted on my leaving her at once; yes, but more often I stay till she begins to undress; must be careful to ask her leave to enter when we are at the door; she will get down first; she’s on my right, near side; yes, at the least she’ll let me see her to her room. And then…what will she say, will she at last allow me to stay the night? Most unlikely; and, in any case, I’d refuse to do so; a quarter of an hour in her bedroom, while she’s taking off her coat and hat; that will be splendid; but supposing she really wants me to stay, after all she must guess that one day or other she will have to let me, it’s inevitable; it looked as if she fixed things up so as to be free to-night; ah, to-night if it were to be…! Or not to be. Anyhow she must make up her mind; she can’t imagine this
sirens bloom in the fog over the harbor horns of all colors everyshaped whistles reach up from the river and the churn of screws the throb of engines bells the steady broken swish of waves cut by prows out of the unseen stirring fumblingly through the window tentacles stretch tingling to release the spring tonight start out ship somewhere join up sign on the dotted line enlist become one of hock the old raincoat of incertitude (in which you hunch alone from the upsidedown image on the retina painstakingly out of color shape words remembered light and dark straining to rebuild yesterday to clip out paper figures to simulate growth warp newsprint into faces smoothing and wrinkling in the various barelyfelt velocities of time) tonight now the room fills with the throb and hubbub of departure the explorer gets a few necessities together coaches himself on a beginning better the streets first a stroll uptown downtown along the wharves under the el peering into faces in taxicabs at the drivers of trucks at old men chewing in lunchrooms at drunk bums drooling puke in alleys what’s the newsvendor reading? what did the elderly wop selling chestnuts
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
Expressing Consciousness in the Written Word, Pt. I
Platonic love business will continue indefinitely; I’ve never led her to believe that, far from it; and she mustn’t imagine she has such a hold over me that I will put up with anything and everything for nothing in return; what a problem it all is! That long line of lights is getting nearer, the Boulevard Malesherbes; always moving on, the carriage; but why should she be more willing to-night than yesterday? —Édouard Dujardin, We’ ll to the Woods No More (Trans. Stuart Gilbert)
The Streams of Our Consciousness:
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whisper to the fat woman behind the picklejars? where is she going the plain girl in a red hat running up the subway steps and the cop joking the other cop across the street? and the smack of a kiss from two shadows under the stoop of the brownstone house and the grouchy faces at the streetcorner suddenly gaping black with yells at the thud of a blow a whistle scampering feet the event? tonight now but instead you find yourself (if self is the bellyaching malingerer so often the companion of aimless walks) the jobhunt forgotten neglected the bulletinboard where the futures are scrawled in chalk among nibbling chinamen at the Thalia ears dazed by the crash of alien gongs the chuckle of rattles the piping of incomprehensible flutes the swing and squawk of ununderstandable talk otherworld music antics postures costumes an unidentified stranger destination unknown hat pulled down over the has he any? face —John Dos Passos, The Big Money
Do you know Cosimo, Lee? Living like some animal, not answering for even a pupil like Bronzino, and keeping dead bodies in a trough, to study the bloat? Was that Cosimo or Pontormo? Though El Greco too, that name alone! Or with his studio forever in darkness, to create by the fires within? And in Toledo at the same time as Saint Theresa, maybe knowing Saint John of the Cross as well? And that impossibly gorgeous story about Van der Goes, Fern? Almost out of his mind with melancholy from painting so many broken Christs, until he could only work when friars comforted him by singing psalms? Or Van Gogh, Lee, oh my God!—eating his paints? And what they did to beautiful Modgiliani, taking a death mask and not knowing how? Yes, yes. And that girl, so lovely, and with his child, who leaped from a window only days after he? —David Markson, Going Down
Or like Giacometti, Fern. Those three or four years before Ferrin, until I finally understood Giacometti. Because my own life pared down and down until only that sliver remained… And Goya, Lee? Or people like Grünewald, and Bosch? Fuseli? For so long, the only ones whose vision I could identify with, because of my. And not only at school, but with all of Ferrin’s books in the house too, she said. And yet all I remember half the time are things like Michelangelo wearing his boots to bed. Or Titian, not dead until ninety-nine, and even then it took a plague…
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it was hard to believe in one’s self after that…did Wilde’s parents or Shelley’s or Goya’s talk to them like that…but it was depressing to think in that vein…Alex stretched and yawned…Max had died…Margaret had died…so had Sonia…Cynthia…Juan-Jose and Harry…all people he had loved…loved one by one and together…and all had died… he never loved a person long before they died…in truth he was tragic…that was a lovely appellation…. The Tragic Genius…think…to go through life known as The Tragic Genius…romantic…but it was more or less true…Alex turned over and blew another cloud of smoke…was all life like that…smoke…blue smoke from an ivory holder… he wished he were in New Bedford…New Bedford was a nice place…snug little houses set complacently behind protecting lawns…half open windows showing prim interiors from behind waving cool curtains…inviting…
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VARIOUS AUTHORS
like precise courtesans winking from behind lace fans… and trees…many trees…casting lacy patterns of shade on the sun dipped sidewalks…small stores…naively proud of their pseudo grandeur…banks…called institutions for saving…all naive…that was it…New Bedford was naive… after the sophistication of New York it would fan one like a refreshing breeze…and yet he had returned to New York… and sophistication…was he sophisticated…no because he was seldom bored…seldom bored by anything… and weren’t the sophisticated continually suffering from ennui…on the contrary…he was amused…amused by the artificiality of naiveté and sophistication alike…but maybe that in itself was the essence of sophistication or…was it cynicism…or were the two identical…he blew a cloud of smoke…it was growing dark now…and the smoke no longer had a ladder to climb…but soon the moon would rise and then he would clothe the silver moon in blue smoke garments…truly smoke was like imagination… —Richard Bruce Nugent, “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade”
to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise? Ten times over I must essay the task, must lean down over the abyss. And each time the natural laziness which deters us from every difficult enterprise, every work of importance, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of to-day and of my hopes for to-morrow, which let themselves be pondered over without effort or distress of mind. And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of limeflower tea. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks’ windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more
Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too much confused; scarcely can I perceive the colourless reflection in which are blended the uncapturable whirling medley of radiant hues, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate to me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste of cake soaked in tea; cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, of what period in my past life. Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far
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faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. —Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff)
attack. Sara was shaking her head in the darkness. You should be well Harold. Then why wont you come out? Harry tugging on the door and rattling the knob, but it was locked on the inside. Harry threw his hands up in despair and disgust. See what I mean? See how you always gotta upset me? He walked back to the set and unlocked the chain, then turned back to the closet. Why do you haveta make such a big deal outta this? eh? Just ta lay that guilt shit on me, right? Right????—Sara continued rocking back and forth—you know youll have the set back in a couple a hours but ya gotta make me feel guilty. He continued to look at the closet—Sara silent and rocking— then threw up his hands, Eh, screw it, and pushed the set, carefully, out of the apartment. Sara heard the set being rolled across the floor, heard the door open and close, and sat with her eyes closed rocking back and forth. It wasnt happening. She didnt see it so it wasnt happening. She told her husband Seymour, dead these years, it wasnt happening. And if it should be happening it would be alright, so dont worry Seymour. This is like a commercial break. Soon the program will be back on and youll see, theyll make it nice Seymour. Itll all work out. Youll see already. In the end its all nice. —Hubert Selby, Jr., Requiem for a Dream
Harry locked his mother in the closet. Harold. Please. Not again the TV. Okay, okay, Harry opened the door, then stop playin games with my head. He started walking across the room toward the television set. And dont bug me. He yanked the plug out of the socket and disconnected the rabbit ears. Sara went back into the closet and closed the door. Harry stared at the closet for a moment. So okay, stay. He started to push the set, on its stand, when it stopped with a jerk, the set almost falling. What the hells goin on here? He looked down and saw a bicycle chain going from a steel eye on the side of the set to the radiator. He stared at the closet. Whatta ya tryin to do, eh? Whats with this chain? You tryin to get me to break my own mothers set? or break the radiator?—she sat mutely on the closet floor—an maybe blow up the whole house? You tryin to make me a killer? Your own son? your own flesh and blood? WHATTA YA DOIN TA ME???? Harry was standing in front of the closet. YOUR OWN SON!!!! A thin key slowly peeked out from under the closet door. Harry worked it out with his fingernail then yanked it up. Why do you always gotta play games with my head for krists sake, always laying some heavy guilt shit on me? Dont you have any consideration for my feelings? Why do you haveta make my life so difficult? Why do—Harold, I wouldnt. The chain isnt for you. The robbers. Then why didnt you tell me? The set almost fell. I coulda had a heart
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What was rising in her was not courage, she was substance alone, less than human, how could she be a hero and want to defeat things? She wasn’t a woman, she existed and what she had inside her were movements lifting her always in transition. Maybe at some point she had modified with her wild force the air around her and no one would ever notice, maybe she had invented with her breathing new matter and didn’t know it, merely feeling what her tiny woman’s mind could never comprehend. Throngs of warm thoughts
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THE SCOFIELD
VARIOUS AUTHORS
sprouted and spread through her frightened body and what mattered about them was that they concealed a vital impulse, what mattered about them was that at the very instant of their birth there was the blind, true substance creating itself, rising up, straining at the water’s surface like an air bubble, almost breaking it…. She noticed that she still hadn’t fallen asleep, thought she would still surely crackle on an open fire. That the long gestation of her childhood would end and from her painful immaturity her own being would burst forth, free at last, at last! No, no, I want no God, I want to be alone. And one day it will come, yes, one day the capacity as red and affirmative as it is clear and soft will come in me, one day whatever I do will be blindly surely unconsciously, standing in myself, in my truth, so entirely cast in what I do that I will be incapable of speaking, above all a day will come on which all my movement will be creation, birth, I will break all of the noes that exist in me, I will prove to myself that there is nothing to fear, that everything I am will always be where there is a woman with my beginning, I will build inside me what I am one day, with one gesture of mine my waves will rise up powerful, pure water drowning doubt, awareness, I will be strong like the soul of an animal and when I speak my words will be unthought and slow, not lightly felt, not full of yearning for humanity, not the past corrupting the future! what I say will resound fatal and whole! there will be no space in me for me to know that time, man, dimensions exist, there will be no space in me to even realize that I will be creating instant by instant, not instant by instant: always welded, because then I will live, only then will I live bigger than in my childhood, I will be as brutal and misshapen as a rock, I will be as light and vague as something felt and not understood, I will surpass myself in waves, ah, Lord, and may everything come
and fall upon me, even the incomprehension of myself at certain white moments because all I have to do is comply with myself and then nothing will block my path until death-without-fear, from any struggle or rest I will rise up as strong and beautiful as a young horse. —Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart (Trans. Alison Entrekin) The vet did not quite turn around to see her when he said the place to aim for and hit was the exact intersection of the chalk lines, the unmistakable center of the frontal bone between the eyes. “No,” the girl said, this time only half aloud. “No.” She thought This is the illusion and the real time is night, and the condition not waking protest because I am lying in bed asleep with this letter held under the pillow in my hand. The vet is not breathing like that through his nose, but is it my own breathing. I am lying in bed asleep and these are the monsters of childhood: the reptile disguised as authority in dark blue wool with dandruff on his shoulders, the shape my mother has taken now the monument erected to all childhood fear. I am saying “no, no, no” in my sleep and they cannot hear me. The smell of hay and horse is memory and the light is cool and blurred like just-remembered light while the tide of breathing rises and ebbs, rises and ebbs with the strange deep machinations of the heart in sleep. If you cannot give sight to a horse, not only to this horse but any horse, to the finest grandest pedigreed champion of them all, you hand it death like a third eye through the forelock, you give it its peep at paradise through one small black-lipped hole. You do this for the horse, not for the owner nor for the world, but for the bony, mysteriously limbed and soft-mouthed beast who is stumbling in silent panic from darkness to darkness. You shatter his brow at one stroke for him the
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THE SCOFIELD
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way a strong man’s fist shatters the frail panels of a door to let in the light, and the constant dream of nothing in his inconstant world of rippling skin, twitching shoulder, flicking ear splinters like glass splintering loud at night. You are awake, Brigand, toss your mane. The dream of blindness has ceased, darling. You are no longer sightless, you are dead. “No!” she cried out, putting her knuckles to her teeth. “No! They won’t do it! I won’t let them do it!” —Kay Boyle, The Crazy Hunter
it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby
No human words bespeak the token sorrow older than old this wave becrashing smarts the sand with plosh of twirléd sandy thought------Ah change the world? Ah set the fee? Are rope the angels in all the sea? Ah ropery otter barnacle’d be-----Ah cave, Ah crosh! A feathery sea —Jack Kerouac, “Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur” God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature PAGE 55
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THE SCOFIELD
THE SCOFIELD
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You Left Me—Sire— Two Legacies— You left me—Sire—two Legacies— A Legacy of Love A Heavenly Father would suffice Had He the offer of— You left me Boundaries of Pain— Capacious as the Sea— Between Eternity and Time— Your Consciousness—and me—
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. —James Joyce, Ulysses
EMILY DICKINSON
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VARIOUS AUTHORS
THE SCOFIELD
An orange spot in the dark. A meteor has fallen. I head that way. Toward the heat. And the house. The flames are orange. They stretch up in the sky red licks the wood burns. My house is burning. People are here. They’re standing around the house that’s mine, and they’re watching it, or are also just now arriving. They shout. They draw, push, urge me forward. I’m standing next to the hedge. The flames leap hop, hop, hophophop from wall to roof to bush. My phone’s in my pocket. I can’t get it out. I think I’ve forgotten it’s there. No. I have it. And here comes Vita. She has a phone. She’s dialing. She says: Hello. She says it. My house is burning. The flames are black, leaping. You can’t save it, Vita says, she says: What’ll you do? Dry-powder extinguishing. Then the workshop collapses. It groans, cants outward tumbles inward. Settles onto the lawn pumps embers onto my hands. A child screams and cries. Mom screams the child screams for a mom. And there she is. I can see her. In flames. The fire devours a breast and an arm melts down to fat. Bent Launis shouts. They’re coming, they’re coming. The sirens seethe of wheels. A massive firetruck. A massive firetruck is coming. Firemen spring out, spring over great gaps, pull out the hose, turn on the spigot, pull on their masks, pump water onto the house and onto the workshop. The farmhouse roof squeals, bows, is warped, is coming down. Snaps. Falls. Ends. First there’s a headache and a throat and a person prone on a couch. They belong to the hands, which hurt. It’s me. It’s me that is me. I’m sure of that now. A growth on
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the couch, a cushion-wedged tumor. I’ve woken up on Vita’s couch, still in my clothes. I reach for something. A bottle maybe. No. A body. I reach for a body. I’m in Vita’s house. It’s Vita’s body I’m reaching for in the light from the window. Morning falls onto my boots. I lean forward to loosen the laces and see that there’s mud on the floor. Or vomit. My fingers won’t, and the laces snarl. Now she comes from the bedroom, parts the drapes with her hand, steps in or out. It’s not a Dream, it’s Reality in a shirt she looks like a young girl who fibs. Or a ghost, the way she blends with the drapes. “I’m here,” I say. “You’re here,” she says. “Indeed.” “Indeed.” “You need to sleep.” “I need to wake up.” “You stink.” I’ve got a uvula in my mouth and a tongue that’s swelling. I can barely get Vita down, it’s so crowded in there. She’s almost transparent with her eyes she’s seen my house. “Let’s go down and see it,” I say. “I’d like to see it, too.” “It’s not going anywhere,” she says. “In any case, you should do something about your hands first.” I’d like to go to the bedroom with her. She’s probably going to change clothes. Oh, won’t you stay with me? Go down to the house with me, won’t you? You and me. C’mon. I head into the hall and look at myself in the mirror. Strange. My head looks too small for my shoulders. Shrunken. My mouth looks like an asshole. Is that really me? Yes. You.
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
A Selection from Justine
IBEN MONDRUP
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IBEN MONDRUP
THE SCOFIELD
IBEN MONDRUP
STANISLAW IGNACY WITKIEWICZ
I splash some water on my face. It’s so still around my face soaks the liquid up. Vita is somewhere else in the house, I don’t know where. “I’m doing it,” she says from that place, “Now I’m really leaving.” She evaporates. Three two one. I think. —— Translated by Kerri A. Pierce. Reprinted courtesy of Open Letter.
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Tadeus Langier, Zakopane
THE SCOFIELD
I almost met Conrad Aiken’s second wife. The year was 1989. I’d spent the morning in Harvard’s Houghton Library, its rare books and manuscripts archive, looking for information about Emily Hale, a Boston-born actress and theater teacher. Hale, I’d recently learned, had played a significant role in the life of Aiken’s friend T. S. Eliot: first love, quasi-muse, a figure encrypted in poems and plays, recipient of a thousand-plus letters. But the thing that most intrigued me was a period of her life after she’d left Boston in 1920. She’d spent the next nine years teaching theater and elocution at a Milwaukee women’s college five blocks from where I grew up. Fascinated by the thought of this Eliot confidante sharing her theater passion with the daughters of Polish and German immigrants in my hometown, I pitched Milwaukee Magazine on a Hale profile and got a greenlight. Which is how I found myself on the doorstep of one of her former students, hoping for memories. I knocked, the door opened, I said, “Do you remember Emily Hale,” and the 84-year-old onetime star of the Downer Women’s College theater club exclaimed, “Emily? Emily had verve!” I tell this story as I think it helps explain my behavior after learning that Milwaukee native Clarissa Lorenz, second of Conrad Aiken’s three wives, was alive and well at ninety and lived a few blocks from Harvard. I learned this from Louisa Solano, owner of Cambridge’s venerable Grolier Poetry Bookshop on Plympton Street across from Harvard Yard. I’d gone there after the Houghton and a visit to the Harvard Book Store where I’d picked up a copy of Aiken’s collected short stories.
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I was on an Aiken kick at the time. Lyndall Gordon’s two-volume T. S. Eliot biography had led me to the Savannah-born poet (and Hale), and Edward Butscher’s exceptional 1988 biography Conrad Aiken: Poet of White Horse Vale sealed the deal. Psychoanalytic in approach, it introduced me to a witty, handsome, heavy-drinking, deeply anxious, cerebral dynamo of a writer, a man ruthlessly dedicated to his craft, supportive and combative with colleagues, at ease with children and cats. A limerick lover. A Beethoven fan. A sex-obsessed philanderer. A narcissist beset by regular nightmares. A borderline personality perhaps, ego both extravagant and tenuous, the self experienced as unreal or absent. A literary wizard, turning out distinctive poetry, novels, short stories, letters, book reviews, criticism, an autobiography. One of the first to champion Emily Dickinson and William Faulkner. A tweedy, pipe-smoking father of three with Ivy League manners and bourgeois needs who could be unconventional, even radical, of thought, rejecting god and religion, demystifying sex and desire. And Aiken was a man who lived life deeply, daily, afraid of going insane. His father had been mentally ill. His sister Elizabeth developed schizophrenia (she goes unmentioned in Ushant, his brilliant, difficult, arrestingly confessional 1952 autobiography). William Aiken, a New Englandraised Savannah eye surgeon, manic-depressive, used to beat young Conrad, whipping him with rubber tubing, once holding his hand in a gas jet, leaving it permanently scarred. And one morning when Conrad was eleven, his father murdered his mother Anna and shot himself. The boy heard them argue, heard his mother scream, heard shots. He never forgot the sight of their bodies on the floor. “Finding them dead,” he writes in Ushant, a book
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
The Scarlet Door
PHIL HANR AHAN
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PHIL HANR AHAN
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whose story is told in third-person narration, “he found himself possessed of them forever.” Clarissa Lorenz does not appear in the chapters of the Butscher biography, as its chronicle ends in 1926, shortly before she met Aiken while on a profile assignment for the Boston Evening Transcript. (A projected volume two never appeared.) However, she is the first person thanked in its acknowledgements: “Clarissa Lorenz Aiken was unstinting with her aid over an extended period of time, frequently tracking down obscure items and answering an endless river of pesky questions.” So when I came across her 1983 memoir Lorelei Two: My Life with Conrad Aiken during my Aiken kick, I knew the name, and just as I was excited to learn of Emily Hale’s Milwaukee years, here I was thrilled to discover Lorenz was from my town. Daughter of German-American Louis Lorenz, owner of a small macaroni factory, she had turned herself into an able freelance writer by her mid-twenties despite being yanked out of school at seventeen by her father, who read her diary one day and was so outraged by what he found he ended her education and put her to work in a pennant factory. Musically gifted, adventurous by nature (“I had to experience everything,” she writes), and passionate about writing, Lorenz won a fellowship to the Boston Conservatory of Music in 1920 and continued to freelance, building on journalistic skills she’d acquired as a staffer for an Illinois military newspaper called Army Recall. By the end of the 1930s, she’d had two pieces published in The New Yorker, one of them a short story, and in Lorelei Two (the title derives from Aiken’s pseudonym for her in Ushant), she harnesses six decades of experience bringing people and occurrences alive in words. I thought of Lorenz while in the Grolier that day, since in 1929 she and Aiken had lived five floors up in this
very building, a 1901 Harvard-owned Beaux Arts brick and stone residential structure called Hampden Hall. Both writers recreate this period in their memoirs. “And what a summer that had been, of all those summers and loves,” Aiken sings, hitting notes of nostalgia as he often does in Ushant. They shared the summer with twenty-year-old aspiring English novelist and Aiken disciple Malcolm Lowry. A fan of Aiken’s 1927 autobiographical first novel Blue Voyage (dedicated to Lorenz), Lowry had sailed from England to be mentored by Aiken, with payment supplied by Lowry’s cotton-broker father. “The bewildered parent in question,” Lowry wrote, “would be willing to pay you 5 or 6 guineas a week.” Lowry arrived, Aiken remembers, “with broken suitcase and dirty socks and taropatch, and the much-thumbed blue-covered exercise book in which were the neatly penciled first fragments of Aquamarine.” The taropatch was Lowry’s beloved ukulele, “Aquamarine” his sea-voyage first novel Ultramarine, published in 1933. Lowry filled “the bleak corridors of Hampden Hall with a hauntingly beautiful flow of American jazz.” Meanwhile, the owner of the Grolier brought “the loan of an armful of books and a ham sandwich, in exchange for a snort of gin.” The two-room apartment was decorated with Aiken’s prized Marsden Hartley painting Blue Mountain. Classical music resounded on his gramophone. Or “Malc” would be in a corner strumming “Negro spirituals.” Jack the doorman used to hand Lorenz her mail with a “conspiratorial wink,” as she was cohabitating with a married man in conservative, easily scandalized Cambridge. Both memoirs remember the night Aiken and Lowry got in a drunken tussle, laughing, fighting for possession of the heavy porcelain toilet lid. Lowry let go, the lid slammed Aiken in the face, and he dropped,
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My snapshot showed an athletic, wholesomelooking youth, a cherubic smiling face, brown wavy hair, and nautical blue eyes. Nothing suggested the alcoholic who documented the horrors of alcoholism in his novel Under the Volcano and eventually destroyed himself like Dylan Thomas, with whom he had much in common. I’d entered the bookstore in hopes of adding another Aiken volume or two to my growing collection. I was in luck. I found a surprisingly affordable first-edition of Preludes for Memnon, a 1931 collection Butscher deemed masterful. This effort, Butscher argues, represents the first successful synthesis of Aiken’s Romantic and fin-de-siècle “decadent” poetic influences with two other thoughtstreams, one philosophic, one psychoanalytic. Inspired by the cognitive boldness of Emerson, Nietzsche, Henri Bergson and Santayana, the latter a Harvard philosopher who advocated for a philosophic poetry, Aiken had also been reading deeply in Freud since his undergraduate days. Quickly grasping the revelatory worth of depth psychology, he’d been trying for years to forge a haunting, symbolic, melodious poetry grounded in secular reflection and psychoanalytic “self-exegesis,” as he once termed his lyric mission to his brother Kempton. Aiken himself
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realized Preludes for Memnon marked a breakthrough. In Ushant, he repeatedly cites “the consistent view” achieved in its 63 beautifully oblique lyrics, a verse integrating thought, image, epistemological savvy, and probing interior exploration. The fact that most of Memnon was written when Aiken and Lorenz were together gave it extra value in my eyes. But even better was the flyleaf signature: “George B. Wilbur, M.D., So Dennis Mass Oct 16 - 1931.” Wilbur was one of Aiken’s best friends, a bond begun at Harvard. Called “Jacob” in Ushant, a man ever ready to talk to his friend about “ego-projection” and Aiken’s eternal “longing for position and security” after a “destroyed childhood,” Wilbur was an eminent psychiatrist with a psychoanalytic practice. Editor-in-chief of The American Psychoanalyst from 1946 to 1963, he spent years talking informally with Aiken about his struggles, conversations easy to have as Aiken often owned or rented Cape Cod cottages. It was in fact Wilbur’s Cape Cod home where Aiken and Lorenz lived together for the first time, in the summer of 1927. Wilbur and his wife were abroad. Aiken’s wife, Montrealborn Jessie McDonald, a Radcliffe grad student when they met in 1911, was back home in seventeenth-century Jeake’s House in Rye, England, with their three children, John, Jane, and Joan. Chatting with Grolier owner Solano, I mentioned that I’d been in the Houghton’s T. S. Eliot archive doing research, that I was bingeing on Conrad Aiken, and that I had just finished a fantastic memoir by his second wife Clarissa Lorenz. Ms. Solano knew the book and shared the same high opinion. Then she said, “Clarissa comes in sometimes. She lives in the neighborhood.” My heart jigged. Clarissa Lorenz was still with us and nearby? I knew immediately I’d try to look her up,
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concussed, nose broken, gash on his forehead destined to scar. “An irresponsible young dipsomaniac” was Lorenz’s first impression of Lowry, but in time she would come to adore this hilarious, electrically verbal Englishman and feel “maternal” toward him. Her affection shows in a marvelous photo she took of Malcolm Lowry standing outside Hampden Hall that summer. Of the image, Lorenz writes:
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feeling lucky that day and having just experienced some of the most rewarding encounters of my life interviewing Milwaukee octogenarians about Emily Hale. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her book, as moving, wise, witty, vivid, and artfully composed as anything I’d read. I don’t recall it even occurring to me that she might know some things about Hale, given her ex-husband’s friendship with Eliot, her decades in the Boston area, and the fact that she got serious about Aiken the same year Hale, in Milwaukee, reconnected with Eliot via letter following years of silence. Not wanting to put Ms. Solano on the spot by probing for more information, I said goodbye, raced to Harvard’s Widener Library, grabbed a phonebook, and turned to the “L” pages. I was hustling because my flight home left in four hours. My eyes scanned. There she was: “C. Lorenz.” I raced to a payphone and called. No answer. Since I had a little bit of time, I decided to just head to her apartment building, curious to see it. Today I remember nothing about the building. I just remember seeing her name on a mailbox in the vestibule, a resident exiting the lobby door, and the world’s biggest Clarissa Lorenz fan taking the opportunity to slip inside. Moments later I stood before her door. I knocked. No answer. So I sat down on the floor, pulled out a Cambridge postcard, and used my copy of Preludes for Memnon (once George Wilbur’s copy) as a little tablet-desk to write Clarissa Lorenz a note. I expressed my enthusiasm for her book, noted our shared Milwaukee roots, and in all likelihood apologized for my somewhat unorthodox way of connecting with her. Then I slid the postcard under her door. I’ll always regret not getting to meet the person I’d come to know in this book. Just as I regret not reaching out to her again. I’m not sure why I didn’t. I flew home, wrote my Emily Hale article. Life moved on. The piece
published in November. Twenty-five years old, full of youthful optimism and exuberance, I sent it to Cynthia Ozick, who’d just written about T. S. Eliot for The New Yorker, and to Lyndall Gordon. I got nice notes back from both women. (“How splendid that he interviewed pupils from this early phase of her career,” Gordon writes of my article in a footnote to her 1999 one-volume biography T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life.) Lorenz died in 1992. The information arrived via a Google click. Just as another click informed me that her magnificent book, from the University of Georgia Press, is no longer in print. Just as a third click provided her family’s Teutonia Avenue home address in 1905, when Lorenz was six. These were days when she would pick posies and “invent little waltzes for Papa,” hoping to please him, hoping for a smile, which seemed never to come. “Don’t ever die, Mama, promise,” she pleaded that year, worried about the health of her mother, pregnant for a sixth time, her younger brother ill with scarlet fever. And this was a neighborhood, that stretch of Teutonia Avenue, where the Lorenz children were known as the “Macaroni Kids” and where a few years later Clarissa would be nicknamed “Jerry” after an excitable neighborhood horse. ——— “One of the frankest literary memoirs of the century,” leading Aiken interpreter Ted Spivey calls Lorelei Two in his 1997 Aiken study Time’s Stop in Savannah. The memoir excels as a portrait of people and eras, as a woman writer’s story, as a demonstration of memoir’s power to distill life and feeling, and as a Milwaukee historical record. But as Ted Spivey suggests, its candor—the way it tells it like it is, or was—registers unforgettably.
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This book keeps it real like few I know. And it does so unshowily, calling no attention to its bold chronicling, its devotion to accuracy and the truths, happy and honorable ones, those ugly and painful, marking our lives. Its lucid, direct, vanity-free approach to warts-and-all telling sets it apart from Ushant, a book that while fearless itself in many ways, as well as beautiful, brainy, and entrancing, is indirect of form—helixing chronology, involuted, Jamesian language, that third-person narration, the pseudonyms— and impressed with its own confessional bravado. Lorenz’s memoir stays true to her ten years with Aiken, years that included betrayal, cruelty, and terror, without producing bitter literary fruit or a payback chronicle. There’s no trashing of Aiken or lugubrious score-settling. And it’s not like Ushant would have softened her view of things. She appears there as a comely cipher, recipient of some generalized ill treatment (“Poor Lorelei Two!” Aiken writes), and is mostly offstage in a book where Aiken devotes six pages to detailing the affair he conducted with a young Rye woman right under Lorenz’s nose. The passage of decades had to have helped (“Time does heal,” she writes late), though throughout these years there was never any escape from Aiken reminders, she points out, as he kept releasing books and she kept running into reviews, profiles, and interviews. Re-released in 1971, Ushant occasioned an ecstatic Howard Nemerov essay in the New York Times Book Review. “All authors try to write the world, but only a very few teach us how to read it,” the piece concludes, a notice exceeded in zest only by Mark Schorer’s 1952 NYTBR rave: “One of the most profoundly original documents to have come out of the United States in many years, an almost stunning outpouring of prose, an incredibly subtle reconstruction of ‘the soul’s landscape.’”
Aiken’s Ushant choice to name his wives after a deadly Rhine River siren, calling them Lorelei One, Lorelei Two, and Lorelei Three, and to name his mistresses, in the aggregate, the “Loreliebchen,” would have held special sting for Lorenz. She grew up in a German-speaking home (Sprech Deutsch! her “Prussian autocrat” of a father used to shout) and attended a Catholic grade-school where the kids memorized Heinrich Heine’s famous poem “Die Lorelei” in German. The poem was set to music by numerous nineteenth-century German composers, including Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt, and Lorenz may even had a setting in her piano repertoire. She does not engage directly with this Lorelei business in her memoir (nor does she say much about his philandering), but instead taps into her rueful wit and uses Aiken’s unkind moniker for her title. That she never made peace with Ushant would seem to be suggested in her twelve-page introduction where she outlines his life and literary legacy. She shares glowing statements from Aiken critics and reviewers commenting on other works, but when it comes to Ushant includes only two disapproving quotes. A reviewer for the New York Times daily opined, “It would have been better for Mr. Aiken, a Conrad in quest of his youth, [to] speak out in plain English.” And the Herald Tribune added: “Mr. Aiken cannot bring himself to say ‘I.’ He is a third-person ‘D.’ throughout. His three wives appear as Lorelei One, Lorelei Two, and Lorelei Three, but he is less explicit about them than about the ‘Loreleibchen’ of whom he boasts.” As for her own take, she writes, “I found his literary odyssey heavy going without a dictionary.” ———
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Rueful wit colors the book, freeing her candor to confront her life’s darkest episodes to an effect powerful and poignant, not punishing or aggrieved. She belabors nothing, narrating matter-of-factly, inserting dry asides, despite handling material on virtually every page capable of rousing deepest emotion. “To hell with my tragic view of life; your mild derision is much better,” Aiken remarked to her early on when she teased him about an awkwardness. The younger Lorenz had the wit without the rue. “Little Jerry is forever blowing bubbles, but they are bubbles of mirth and laughter,” a 26-year-old Eugene Jolas, future founder of the Parisian literary journal transition, wrote in her memory book when she left her cub reporter’s job at Army Recall, the newspaper of a sprawling Illinois military base and Army hospital. Jolas, whom Lorenz calls her “mentor,” was on the editorial staff. Lorenz’s gift for gentle wisecracks and comedy was notable enough that the Chicago Tribune ran a story to mark her departure. “There are long faces at the Fort Sheridan hospital. ‘Jerry’ is leaving today—‘Jerry,’ whose gladsome smile and cheerful, zippy disposition have kept the whole place humming with happiness for the last two years.” Lorenz saw horrors at this hospital. At one point she was assigned coverage of an amputation, as it happened. In one of many gutpunch passages in Lorelei Two, she writes:
More shocks and sadnesses were to come. Among them was the fate of her best friend from home, Nancy Shores, a young woman Lorenz describes as her “only literary contact in Milwaukee…an Irish poet, hellion, and sparkplug.” They met in high school, discovered a shared love for writing, critiqued each other’s stories. In a passage of devastating detail and distilled life, Lorenz develops her sketch of this daring, pretty Irish-American force of nature:
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——— More than once in Lorelei Two, that mild derision Aiken noted is directed at herself. “We are too soon old and too late smart,” Lorenz writes at one point, reviving a “Milwaukee expression” she heard in her youth. It captures the flavor of her retrospection, one where she casts her gaze back more than a half-century and sees herself making
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Lorenz then quotes Shore’s last letter to her friend. In it, Shores uses her private nickname for Lorenz, and opens, “Dear Jiggs, I still think of you as a serious and troubled high-school kid, thrown out of the nest too soon…. Can I possibly persuade you to be good to yourself?”
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Morale was high among the maimed and paraplegics—at least among those I observed. I wrote letters for the heroes of Soissons, ChateauThierry, Verdun, and Saint-Mihiel, for the armless and the illiterate. I sat with the dying and read to the blind…. I learned to spot the potential suicide, the boy brooding over the families of innocent Germans he had killed.
Nancy loved to shock people and stick pins into the smug and hypocritical. Wild, precocious, with a gamin shrewdness, she thumbed her nose at the world. Father banned her from the house, and my brothers deplored her sacrilegious influence and flippancies…which I thought the height of sophistication. She was the classmate most likely to succeed. But alcoholism claimed her in later years, and she was found dead in a New Jersey hotel surrounded by empty sherry bottles.
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mistakes, overlooking clues, overestimating her own strength. When Aiken friend Harry Murray, legendary Harvard psychologist at the Harvard Psychological Clinic where Lorenz had a job in 1927, says the poet, “a law unto himself,” will take her “to hell and heaven and back again,” and then asks if she’s strong enough to handle him, she quips airily, “Oh yes, I’ve got the constitution of a horse.” And if her portrait of Aiken is far from flattering, she’s equally willing to place her own younger self before the mirror and be candid about what she sees. When once Aiken accused her of embracing the role of “the wronged wife” for psychological reasons, she rejected the charge at the time but looking back decades later, she observes someone “collecting grudges and complaints and alibis for criticism often warranted, and using guerrilla tactics.” Reflexively self-examining, Lorenz is hard on herself in this memoir (too hard, sometimes, I felt), whether she’s discussing her tortured relationship with her father, her writing career, or her years as a wife. Nor is she under any illusions about human subjectivity (what Aiken in Ushant calls the view from “the little headland of oneself”). “As the second of Conrad’s three wives,” Lorenz writes in a brief preface, “I realize that an ex-wife’s reminiscences are apt to paint an incomplete picture. I can only try to do as honest a job as possible.” Two other sentences in this superbly concise opening introduce us to the delicate calibrations and control—that trickiest of lines she has to walk, being true to herself and to Aiken—sustained throughout the book, and suggest what to expect once we enter what she calls “the story of my marriage.” The first reads: “Adjusting to life with a dedicated man of letters was a unique challenge worth documenting.” And the second: “Let future historians
judge my presentation of the delights and disasters of life with a genius.” Happily for us, the book is much more than the story of her marriage, though that alone, given its material and Lorenz’s gifts, would indeed be book-worthy. Lorenz’s effort is a full-blown, ceaselessly vivid autobiography, the story of a personal odyssey, which places it on the same literary ground as Ushant. As does its candor about weakness and mental struggle. Confess, reveal, unmask! Aiken preached over and over in his work, letters, and interviews. In Ushant, he knocks his younger self for insufficient exposure in Blue Voyage, for not “putting all the cards on the table,” for telling “too little of the bare-assed truth” about Demarest, his alter-ego. Aiken “wrote his autobiography his entire life,” notes Catherine Seigel in her 1993 book The Fictive World of Conrad Aiken. And as biographer Edward Butscher makes clear, Aiken’s growth as an artist hinged on developing ways of disclosing both his childhood trauma and his straying, egocentric, at times callous adult self. (“Don’t ignore the Aztec in me,” he warned Lorenz by letter early on, “—the cold, cruel, relentless, heartless, inhuman, brooding, self-centered and essentially fugitive animal… that I terribly am.”) He sounded his disclosure theme the very first night he met Lorenz. During “the fatal interview,” as he calls it in Ushant, the future winner of the 1930 poetry Pulitzer called himself a “psychoanalytic bard,” Lorenz wrote, one intent on “recording human emotions honestly.” Cutting a “robust figure in brown tweeds,” his “blue eyes behind black-rimmed glasses burning like klieg lights,” Aiken continued: “Since I believe a poet should unmask, I keep writing about my inner world, hoping to produce a complete portrait of a mind.” He returned to his theme two nights later when they met for a date rather than as subject and profile.
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——— Six years later, Aiken used his credo to strike a blow against Lorenz. This never-faithful husband, who had a pathological obsession with female infidelity and subjected his second wife to the worst of it, violated her privacy and, doing as her father did in 1916, read her diary. His reaction was similar as well. Enraged, Aiken ordered her to destroy pages that captured his ugly side. With great reluctance, she complied, and “never ceased to regret it.” (Henceforth she diary-wrote in shorthand.) During their fight, Aiken accused Lorenz of dodging the full truth about herself, claiming she indulged in diary “obliquities.” When she asserted that she’d been truthfully exploring everything she felt, capturing her “real, candid self,” the psychoanalytic bard and prominent book critic snapped back: “I found little candor or soul-searching. It’s rather a device to smear me. And how you would enjoy the role of a wronged wife.” Whatever the nature of her 1932 diary, obliquity is not a charge you could level at her memoir. Bravely and openly, Lorenz addresses her alienation from her father, a pre-Aiken affair with a married man, a New York abortion, a miscarriage during marriage, the ergot she PAGE 66
took to prevent another pregnancy, her near-brush with suicide, a lengthy post-divorce depression, and decades of partnerless solitude. She also references an early incident, sexual in nature, that together with her father’s coldness and the death of her mother when she was eleven left her damaged as she entered adulthood, she suggests. “A traumatic episode in adolescence increased my dread and confusion,” she writes, citing an extreme teenage anxiety about sex. “Marriage took on a sinister quality. Men were beasts, conjugal relations an assault, childbirth degrading and often fatal.” Unable to recall details of the trauma, she would submit to both hypnosis and sodium amytal treatment in later years in an effort to therapeutically retrieve memory. She’s brave and candid in her portrait of Aiken, too. It’s a rounded one, though. Along with documenting his pain-causing behavior (much of it not included in the litany of “shameful, shameless” actions, Aiken’s words, he catalogs in Ushant, a book Butscher finds selfmythologizing, “never as candid as its author professed,” and an “idealized portrait of the prodigal artist”), Lorenz also captures qualities that appealed to men and women alike. There was his intellect, his wit, his powers of speech (shy in public, he was a mesmerizing private conversationalist; his “verbal pyrotechnics” wowed Lorenz), his dedication to his art, his support for fellow writers, his enjoyment of his children. He was always telling the kids stories, and wrote them long letters when separated; Jeake’s House, Lorenz makes clear, came alive when John, Jane, and Joan were under its roof. He encouraged Lorenz’s writing. Her praised her gifts. (“You have genius—Genius—GENIUS—and I love you,” he wrote early on; unbeknownst to me, that letter already sat in the Houghton in 1989, donated by Lorenz.) Aiken had
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The couple ended the evening sitting in rocking chairs holding hands inside a candlelit Boston bookstore after hours (its owner, an Aiken friend, had left a key under the mat). The reddish-haired, cigarette-smoking, eloquent student of Sigmund Freud told his fellow writer: “You should dig up your memories, become aware of everything. Pain, isolation, rancor, guilt, self-hatred—get it all out as I do in Blue Voyage. How else can you know who you are?”
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a charming affection for the village of Rye and its people. And he could be vulnerable. He could reveal fears, frustrations, his need for love. During their first week together, he cried—for the first time in thirty-five years, he told her. Later, fearing abandonment, he said to her, using a pet name, “Motherless waifs have to stick together. Save me, Critch.” Even in his public writing, Aiken could reveal vulnerability. In his well-reviewed first collection of reviews and literary criticism, Scepticisms, from 1920 (a book Butscher rates as one of the most impressive critical volumes of its era), Aiken writes rather extraordinarily of the anxieties, the insecurities, of “poet-critics”—artists like himself, or, say, T. S. Eliot, who entered the era’s cultural and aesthetic debates by publishing incisive works of criticism: “Our utterances are apt to sound authoritative and final. But do not be deceived! We are no surer of ourselves at bottom than anybody else is. We are, in fact, half the time, frightened to death.” (Chicago poet-critic Maxwell Bodenheim objected to this, remarking in a letter sent to Aiken after Scepticisms was published: “We are not all afraid in the way you suggest.”) In a good mood, Lorenz wrote of her husband in her diary in 1932, he could be “an absolute angel. Loving and thoughtful.” But in a bad mood? He could be terrifying. Alcohol played a role: “The misogynist surfaced whenever he drank, turning him into a demonic stranger.” Aiken drank a shocking amount during their marriage. “Conrad averaged four to five strong martinis before lunch and again before dinner,” Lorenz reveals. And unless the couple had a social event, the man who insisted to Lorenz he was a “normal” not a heavy drinker, and who defends alcohol in Ushant as “insulation” for the mind, would be
out the door alone at 6 pm to spend the night in a pub. Sometimes, with a friend, he would try to crawl to all fifteen of Rye’s watering-holes. Mornings would find him dropping aspirin into gin. Referring to his breakthrough 1931 poetry collection, a sage-green copy of which I had picked up at the Grolier that day, Lorenz writes, “He admitted he was never sober while writing the Preludes.” Bipolarity and a severe madonna-whore complex fueled the demonic stranger. “I’m manic-depressive. Advance one day, retreat the next,” says Aiken-ish hero Andrew Cather, a heavy-drinking Harvard academic in Great Circle (1933), another portrait in the author’s gallery of unstable, alcohol-dependent intellectual men. Aiken’s fragile brain chemistry is referenced in a harrowing passage in Ushant where he speaks of having days where “he knew himself to be insane” and just has to ride it out. As for his misogyny, Lorenz felt the full weight when she revealed the affair she’d had with married “Carl.” “Pandora’s box” was opened, Lorenz remembers. Aiken labeled her “promiscuous,” said he “deserved a virgin,” accused her of deceiving him, denounced her “come-hitherish ways,” and demanded she detail every second of her time in bed with a man he feared had been a superior lover, a “sexual athlete.” At one point she even feared she might “get a bullet in the head,” the fate of his mother. (Aiken did own a pistol and once drunkenly shot a hole in the wall of their Hampden Hall apartment.) “Carlitis,” as she termed it, went on for months. He interrogated Lorenz daily about men. Unable to control his obsessive thoughts, he even retraced some of the north-of-Boston routes she’d driven with Carl. “Mesmerized by the poet, I despaired of the man,” she writes of this period. And yet somehow they survived “three years of turbulence” and on a February day in 1930, in the
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Rutherford, New Jersey home of poet William Carlos Williams, Lorenz became Aiken’s second wife. As ever, our memoirist keeps it real: “My shoes pinched, I felt silly in a fur toque and eye veil, my otter jacket, a hand-me-down, was decorated with an orchid. Throughout the ceremony I reflected on the absurdity of the marriage vow; pledging to love and honor one another seemed as asinine as guaranteeing sunshine every day of the year.” Since they’d long been living together like man and wife, the nuptials struck Lorenz as “mere abracadabra, like adding a cupola to a gingerbread house.”
her friend to help draft her 1936 autobiography Oil Paint and Grease Paint. In a book of brilliantly sketched people, Knight might shimmer with the most life of all. “Warm, vibrant, spontaneous, she symbolized Mother Earth to me, her china-blue eyes sparkling with fun, her yellow hair looped around her ears,” Lorenz remembers. “Laura could laugh at herself, remembering more gaffes than triumphs.” At its worst, this life? Shades of the winter Jack Torrance caretakes the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining. “I lived in perpetual fear of and for Conrad,” Lorenz writes of a period in 1932 when Aiken’s grip on sanity was slipping, his behavior cruel and accusatory, his love of the old gabled house, with its eleven drafty rooms and tradition of ghosts, seeming to greatly exceed his love for his wife. One night, drunk, paranoid, suspecting Lorenz of having an affair with Paul Nash, he began to throttle her, bellowing, “Come on, confess, you goddamned whore!” Only a neighbor’s concerned shout snapped him out of his murderous trance. “I don’t want to frighten you, Critch,” he said during this period, “but I really think I’m going insane. My mind does the queerest things. The words get all mixed up when I try to think or speak…” Not long after this he tried to commit suicide. While alone in a movie theater, Lorenz experienced a sudden intuition and raced home to find her husband unconscious on the floor in the kitchen of Jeake’s House, all the gas jets on the stove turned on. She dragged him to safety.
——— The book moves on to her married life. At its best, this existence featured two accomplished writers working and supporting each other, living in a marvelously historic house on cobbled Mermaid Street in Rye, mixing with a dazzling group of English literary and visual artists. “I sat entranced in a new and glittering world,” writes this daughter of the dour Milwaukee father who terminated her education and branded her a schwindelkopf (a “spinning head”). The Aiken’s social circle included poet and playwright Robert Nichols, modernist landscape painter Paul Nash, and surrealist painter Edward Burra. “Malc” Lowry brought his comic magic. Lorenz met her “idol” George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy’s widow, poet Hilda Doolittle, lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall, and the future author of The Yearling Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. She became close friends with celebrated English portrait painter Laura Knight, who in 1936 become the first woman ever elected to the Royal Academy. Laura Knight valued Lorenz’s warmth, adventurous spirit, and humor, and thought enough of her writing ability that she hired PAGE 68
——— Nearly sixty years later, in January 1990, I stood on Mermaid Street outside Jeake’s House, looking up at the gables, taking in the ivy-covered brick facade, the
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wall plaque citing 1689 as the foundation-stone year, the ancient wooden door. I took in the wonderfully narrow, steep street, lined with Georgian and half-timbered medieval houses, a thoroughfare as photographed as any in England. I was on a three-house literary pilgrimage. Next stop was Lamb House, Henry James’ last residence, just around the corner from the top of cobbled Mermaid. And the previous day, trying to ignore an unseen barking dog, I’d climbed a wall into the private grounds of the Cotswolds estate Burnt Norton outside Chipping Campden, where Emily Hale walked in a rose garden with T. S. Eliot in 1934, the two discussing whether they might now finally come together. Apparently Eliot told her he could not commit and Hale went back to America. Though they continued to write each other for the next twenty years, the relationship never advanced beyond correspondence and visits and eventually Eliot remarried.
inside as well, “the cries of the lost, the valedictions of the dying,” asserting that this human pain gave the house “character” and “dignity,” aestheticizing, supremely, as he does throughout Ushant. I liked the throwaway details: T. S. Eliot playing pingpong inside Jeake’s, “all knees and elbows”; Squidge the cat, Conrad and Clarissa’s cat, “cat of a hundred names,” as Aiken hails the animal in his memoir, pushing into the Times of London newspaper every morning as the bespectacled lover of felines tried to read at the long refectory table. Aiken wrote a number of enduring stories in Jeake’s House, up in his third-floor study overlooking the English Channel, “a chilly eyrie” with a “view through a large picture window of schooners’ masts floating past chimney pots,” Lorenz writes in her memoir. It was here, in Jeake’s, where Aiken wrote his incredible short story “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” about a boy edging toward a psychotic break, hallucinating snow, sweet, peaceful, world-muffling snow, cold and beautiful, falling on a steep cobbled street. Details from the street I was on fill the story. Lorenz typed it, giving her a glimpse, she wrote, of the “anguish of creativity” Aiken daily felt. He wrote his best novel, Great Circle, in Jeake’s. Freud had it in his waiting room. Under the pen name Samuel Jeake Jr., for four years, Aiken covered the English scene for The New Yorker in its “London Letter.” And he wrote most of Preludes for Memnon up there. “The time of genius,” wrote Aiken scholar Frederick J. Hoffman of these Jeake’s years. “Conrad did much of his best work during my tenure,” Lorenz writes in her book’s penultimate paragraph, that word tenure, so bittersweet, rueful in its quiet wit. I thought of two more Jeake’s moments. One unhappy, one happy. Not long after getting married, the
Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. These were the words, from Eliot’s beautiful poem “Burnt Norton,” first of the Four Quartets, that had drawn me to the grounds of the seventeenth-century manor house. Standing before Jeake’s, I thought of how many details and stories of life inside I’d encountered reading the memoirs of Lorenz and Aiken. The latter positively rhapsodized about the house, singing, “And by how many noble or beautiful or delightful spirits had it been lighted and blessed! Lighted by love, lighted by laughter…” The poet then nodded to the sorrows and anguish experienced PAGE 69
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PHIL HANR AHAN
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I followed [Conrad] into a bat’s cave smelling of dust, mold, mice, and ghosts, the vestibule festooned with cobwebs, wallpaper in shreds. A dark passageway led to the kitchen, the only window over the sink looking out on the garden, a jungle of weeds…. Leaded windowpanes, buckled floorboards, one bathroom for eleven rooms. How had Jessie managed? Unable to change Aiken’s mind about a Jeake’s sequel, she lamented: I had crossed the Atlantic filled with joyous expectations of making a fresh start in new surroundings, only to be hooked into history, our bones to mingle with those of the other three Jeakes. Nothing would change. Conrad was determined to live in the past. Four years later, Lorenz made a much happier entrance. The couple had just spent some good months back in the Hampden Hall apartment in Cambridge. She was pregnant as they walked up Mermaid Street. Aiken was in a buoyant mood. Jeake’s House and the town felt welcoming: “We saw Rye through a rainbow—red-tiled houses higgledy-piggledy, gulls flying from the church PAGE 70
spire as the gilded quarter-boys struck the hour, Mermaid Street cobbles sprouting new grass, the brass knocker shining on the scarlet door.” Not long after this Lorenz miscarried. And two years after that, the couple separated, with a divorce to follow. Lorenz walked out of the scarlet Jeake’s House door for the last time. ——— She saw Conrad Aiken only one more time before he died in 1973, survived by his widow Mary Hoover, a Boston painter. It was 1960, New York City. She was in town to promote her book Junket to Japan. She caught sight of him ahead on Fifth Avenue and, swallowing her pride, ran after him, calling his name, “heart thumping.” They made small talk. Aiken quipped that he was “enjoying poor health.” He mentioned inviting her to visit him some time but nothing came of this. The encounter was brief. As he walked away, she regretted not telling him something. She regretted not telling him that “living with a poet who had touched so many lives” enriched her own life “immeasurably.” She ends her book with more of that brave, wondrous candor, speaking of how she never found another partner after Aiken. She speaks of her solitude: While I miss the love and affection we all crave…I manage to fare reasonably well…. Solitude isn’t necessarily isolation. It depends on your outlook and inlook…. I’m thankful for my piano and my writing. Every day begins and ends with music, and the curiosity of a teen-age journalist hasn’t
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couple sailed to England. Aiken soon engineered a way to restore himself in the house he’d lost in the divorce, renting it from a trust that held the property for his children. Already queasy at the thought of moving into what she thought of as “Jessie’s house,” Lorenz sunk even further when she entered the 230-year-old abode, unoccupied, neglected, for a couple years:
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PHIL HANR AHAN
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KIP OMOLADE
diminished with the years. There’s not nearly enough time to do all I plan to do before the Grim Reaper beckons.
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Diovadiova Chrome Kitty Cash IV
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She goes on to mention the desire to be remembered for something. And as she says goodbye to us, her reader, using that marvelous, one-of-a-kind writing voice of hers, she plays her last note: “I would be happy to leave just a flower or a melody as proof of my existence on earth. In the meantime I’m learning contentment from my cat, Mouser.”
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Throughout his writing career, Conrad Aiken has been consistently concerned with three main themes, consciousness, identity, and the evolution of consciousness in a Heraclitean universe in which everything is subject to constant change. For Aiken, consciousness is primarily self-consciousness for which reason the quest for consciousness and identity are closely related. We cannot be fully conscious without true knowledge of who (and what) we are. However, the Self of self-consciousness is a far more complex entity than we might think not only because it exemplifies the processes at work throughout the entire cosmos but also because it potentially includes the whole universe within itself. Depending on which state of consciousness dominates at a particular moment, the Self can be either the microcosm or the macrocosm. Aiken’s theories are radically subjective insofar as according to them the only way to know other human beings and the universe is by means of a thorough exploration of ourselves. The reasons for these beliefs are to be found in his allegiance to the idealistic philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer. According to Kant, all knowledge is a product of the human mind,
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which receives raw data from the external world and processes it until we have an image of what we suppose is the “external world.” However, we can know nothing about this “external world” or “noumenal world” beyond that it exists as a source of data. All knowledge is, therefore, inescapably subjective—though not entirely random since human beings as a whole tend to process the data in similar ways. Because we are locked into a world of our own perceptions and images, science and metaphysical beliefs do no more than tell us about the workings of the human mind. What we call facts and “things” are simply ideas we have, that is, interpretations of data from the noumenal realm. From a Kantian point of view, our situation looks solipsistic. However, Schopenhauer found a solution that Aiken adopted. By going into ourselves, by pursuing a course of radical subjectivity, we can, in fact, through ourselves, know all things because all other things and beings are exactly what we are—expressions of the universal Will in perpetual creative process. Subjectivity leads not only to self-discovery but discovery of the cosmos as well. For this reason, almost all of Aiken’s long poems are dominated by characters who seek themselves and consciousness by means of concentric consciousness, inward turned reveries and dreams, or by long, highly subjective soliloquies that are really self-explorations conducted aloud. However, the fact that we live in a constantly changing universe complicates the quest for identity and consciousness. If everything is in perpetual state of flux, it is simply impossible to achieve a stable identity, and if that is the case, it is impossible to reach any final conclusion about who or what we are. Without any stability or consistency that endures through time, the whole concept of “identity” becomes meaningless. This puts us into a
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
A Selection from Conrad Aiken’s Philosophy of Conciousness
IAN KLUGE
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IAN KLUGE
IAN KLUGE
seemingly untenable situation: we desire to know who (and what) we are, but we live in a universe that, by virtue of its ever-changing nature, frustrates the discovery of such knowledge. Without this stable identity and the self-knowledge it provides, we can never attain genuine consciousness, and consequently, can never evolve our consciousness. Thus, we seem doomed to lifelong frustration. On one hand, we experience an imperative to know our identity, while on the other, the cosmos seems designed to prevent us from acquiring such knowledge. Aiken adopts a radical solution to the problem. According to him, our most basic identity is as the being who seeks his identity. More than anything else, we are the quest for identity, we are the very process in which we seem trapped. This leads to the paradoxical conclusion that as long as we pursue identity and consciousness as though we did not have them, we actually do have them, whereas, if we delude ourselves into thinking that we have achieved a stable identity and consciousness, we have, in fact, lost them. The process is our identity and this process will never end, not even with the seeming termination of physical death; all that changes is our form insofar as we live on through our effects in the lives of others. The effects we initiate become causes in the lives of others and there is no conceivable end to such a causal chain. According to Aiken, human beings have basically two modes of consciousness, inward turned concentric consciousness and outward turned eccentric consciousness. The Self oscillates between these two states of consciousness. In the former it is wholly absorbed in its inward life, whereas in the latter it focuses on the outer world in which it lives and on its outer, more public identity. In the eccentric state of consciousness, the Self is more “objective” and aware of how others might see it.
Complicating all this is Aiken’s belief that just as the dream egos of concentric consciousness are projections of the dreaming Self, the eccentric Self as seen in the world is no more than the inward-turned projection of the universe itself. In effect, Aiken’s universe is like a set of Russian dolls or Chinese boxes with an infinity of levels and worlds. Indeed, we have many identities in many worlds. The quest for a single identity is utterly futile and, for both good and evil, we must accept our multiplicity. As already indicated, the concentric consciousness predominates in Aiken’s major long poems. In this phase of consciousness, the protagonist explores himself by means of dreams and reveries in which a variety of dream egos—projections of himself—act out all kinds of dramas and fantasies. Having such imaginative, vicarious experiences is essential because no single human life can live out all of his or her potential lives. Yet, these imaginative experiences too are an essential part of our identities and must be included if we really wish complete knowledge of who we are. Thus, imagination plays a vital role in discovering our identities and attaining consciousness. We cannot rely on memory in the quest for identity and consciousness because there is no reliable way to distinguish a remembered fact from an imagined episode since both are simply ideas we have. Other challenges the Self experiences in its pursuit of identity and consciousness are alienation from various unacknowledged and unwanted dream egos, the unreliability of the mind itself as a source of knowledge, solipsism, narcissism, and the discovery that a perpetually changing Self is ultimately a “zero,” a nothing or “no thing.” Furthermore, the Self discovers that it must make a world for itself because it cannot simply inherit a ready-made world of concepts and beliefs without betraying its innermost nature.
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IAN KLUGE
In Aiken’s thought, consciousness has a history, that is, stages of development through which it must pass in its evolution. The first stage in the development of consciousness is divisive consciousness in which the Self distinguishes between itself and the surrounding world and believes that these distinctions are real. There is a division between me and not-me, between the perceiving subject and the perceived object. This stage of consciousness originates in the experience of terror from which the Self must not recoil, but rather, learn to use. At this point language emerges as a correlate of consciousness as the Self learns to say “I” to distinguish itself from its environment. Indeed, as Aiken’s later work makes clear, there is no essential difference between language and the world, all of nature being a language as well. The second stage in the development of consciousness is narcissistic consciousness, symbolized most dramatically by the man cutting faces for himself in the mirror or, in a mental equivalent, imagining how he must appear to others. In this higher stage of evolution, the subject / object dichotomy remains, but it is no longer a distinction between me and not-me. In other words, the Self is actor as well as the audience and critic. However ludicrous the Self may appear in this stage, it has, nonetheless, taken a step forward because, even though the subject / object division still exists, we no longer have a division between me and not-me. In this stage, the Self also discovers its god-like nature. The third stage in the development of consciousness is synoptic consciousness, in which the Self experientially overcomes the subject / object division between itself and the world and recognises that it and others are, ultimately, one. By clever word play on the word “sum”—which means “I am” in Latin—Aiken conveys the idea that the
Self realises its identity as the consciousness, the sense of “I am,” of the entire universe. It becomes aware that although it is ontologically distinct from the world, it is not necessarily isolated from the world, since love, a key factor in this drama, dissolves the Self’s usual boundaries and opens the Self to the rest of creation. In synoptic consciousness, the Self comes into full possession of its highest possible development at that point in history by realising its oneness with the processes that make up the cosmos. However, we must understand that the three stages of consciousness may occur at higher or lower levels, that, for example, the moment of synoptic consciousness for a child is less inclusive than such a moment for an adult who has dedicated his or her life to the evolution of consciousness. Even moments of synoptic consciousness are temporary because the Self’s development is never complete. As soon as one instant of supreme consciousness has been reached, the quest for a still more advanced, more inclusive form begins. This forward motion towards ever more sophisticated forms of consciousness is the evolution of consciousness. To evolve, the Self must realise that all progress depends on accepting the fact that old, former identities must not only be abandoned, but also actively killed in what we have called “creative suicide.” We must learn how to practice “the art of dying.” Murder— metaphorically, of course—also plays a role. If the Self wants to evolve it must be able to overcome (mentally speaking) all others who, for whatever reasons, block its development. Aiken has several images of “creative suicide,” the most interesting being what we have called “suicide by God.” For Aiken, God is the ideal Self which we struggle to achieve; once we have reached it and “become” god ourselves, we must immediately start again
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struggling to reach a greater God yet. In other words, for Aiken, the idea of God is a lure that entices us onward in the evolution of consciousness. The other lure is love, symbolised by Aiken as the “Eternal Feminine” who calls us to an endless pursuit. How, then, are eccentric and concentric consciousness, the three stages of consciousness and the evolution of consciousness related? The answer is relatively simple. The Self begins in the eccentric, outward state of consciousness, which is also divisive consciousness since it makes an absolute distinction between itself and the world. In the quest for identity, this state of consciousness is inadequate. The Self thus turns inward to concentric consciousness, which is first correlated with narcissistic consciousness and then with synoptic consciousness. We have, therefore, the following progression: eccentric / divisive consciousness leads to concentric / narcissistic consciousness and then to concentric / synoptic consciousness. Once concentric / synoptic consciousness has been reached, the whole process begins again at a higher, that is, more consciously inclusive, level. This, broadly speaking, is Aiken’s philosophy of consciousness. This study has richly confirmed the truth of Stephen Tabachnick’s claim that Conrad Aiken’s work possesses “a characteristic that much contemporary poetry and fiction lacks: a real coherence, a staggering thematic and symbolic unity, a philosophical argument, that stretches forty years” (Tabachnick, “The Great Circle Voyage of Conrad Aiken’s Mr. Arcularis”). On the basis of these criteria—coherence and “thematic and symbolic unity” (ibid.)—there is little doubt that Aiken’s work rivals the achievement of Ezra Pound’s Cantos which also developed a philosophic argument through nearly a thousand pages composed over several decades.
It is precisely on this point that a possible reason for Aiken’s neglect becomes clear. Whereas Pound deals with history, politics, culture and financial issues whose relevance is readily apparent, Aiken deals with epistemology and metaphysics, subjects whose relevance to daily life and public concerns is not so easily seen. Furthermore, the knowledge needed to at least begin making sense of Pound is more widespread among readers of serious literature than detailed considerations of abstract epistemological and metaphysical questions and how we might experience them in our daily lives. Pound requires new readers with a certain general knowledge about the Odyssey and Greek mythology, the Renaissance and American history, and, at its most far-flung, Chinese history and Confucius. On the other hand, Aiken demands readers and critics come intellectually equipped with a good understanding of the theories of Heraclitus, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud to mention only the most prominent. Given the difficulty of approaching Aiken’s work, the question becomes, Is it worth the effort? Does it provide rewards that justify the struggles involved? Perhaps he has been neglected because he demands too much for too little. In my view, there are at least three reasons why the exertion required to comprehend Aiken are worthwhile. The first—and this alone should make Aiken of great interest to all philosophers and philosophically inclined readers—is that Aiken’s work is a detailed exploration of how various philosophical positions are actually experienced in ordinary life. What are the everyday ramifications of Heraclitus’ views about flux and our sense of identity, for our moral standards, for our yearning for stability, for our love affairs and even the simplicities of having breakfast? What is the personal meaning of saying
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that we create our phenomenal world from data from an ever unknowable noumenal realm? What happens to words like “truthfulness,” “loyalty,” “love,” “I,” “you,” “good,” “evil” and “God” if Kant is correct? Aiken thought he was and explored the ramifications of this view through the course of everyday life. For this reason alone, Aiken’s poetic works are invaluable to everyone interested in philosophy as a relevant activity not just for a few academics but for all thoughtful human beings. In short, Aiken’s work is an original and outstanding contribution to the “Great Dialogue” among the philosophers. The second reason why the effort to understand Aiken is worthwhile is the aesthetic values of his poetry. Indeed, this is what has kept his work alive even among those who do not fully understand the intellectual sophistication underlying the beauty. This study has not paid too much attention to this aspect of Aiken’s poetry because there was enough challenge in explicating his “system,” yet, if nothing else, Aiken has written some of the most exquisite love poetry in modern times. It is hard to imagine love poetry more touching than “Music I heard with you was more than music / And bread I broke with you was more than bread” (Collected Poems, 18) or
However, this is not to confine his finest work to the sub-genre of love poetry. He demonstrates an amazing capacity to use startling and beautiful images to express philosophical ideas, as in “Precious chameleon of the human soul” (Time, XC, 752). Those familiar with his philosophy of change will find this image even more effective than those who appreciate it simply for its beauty. In addition to the beauties of imagery, Aiken’s work exemplifies an unusual gift for crafting memorable lines:
Beloved, let us once more praise the rain. Let us discover some new alphabet, For this, the often-praised and be ourselves The rain, the chickweed, and the burdock leaf, The green-white privet flower, the spotted stone. And all that welcomes rain; the sparrow , too,— Who watches with a hard eye, from seclusion, Beneath the elm-tree bough, till rain is done. (Preludes for Memnon, VII, 505)
A consideration of Aiken’s use of images and symbols as well as the craftsmanship of his lines is, of course, another study. At this point we shall have to confine ourselves to drawing attention to the high aesthetic values of Aiken’s work and trust that interested readers will explore them for themselves. In addition to the aesthetics and philosophical sophistication, Aiken’s poetry has at least one other attribute that makes it appealing, though to a somewhat narrower audience. This is his wide-ranging humour, from
The language and the landscape are the same, And we ourselves are language and the land (A Letter from Li Po, XI, 913) or, from his earlier work,
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
We hold them all, they walk our dreams forever, Nothing perishes in that haunted air, Nothing but is immortal there, And we ourselves dying with all our worlds, Will only pass the ghostly portal Into another’s dream; and so live on Through dream to dream, immortal. (The Jig of Forslin, V, 8, 115)
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IAN KLUGE
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IAN KLUGE
ODILON REDON
the obscene and the lewd, the lurid, the morbid and black, the metaphysical and literary to the mad. His clever use of parody and puns is highly reminiscent of Joyce’s Ulysses, a book that has a tremendous impact on him. Aiken’s skill with in these areas mark him as one of the twentieth century’s great literary humorists. These three great attributes will, I believe, ensure that Aiken’s work survives until the development of a larger audience willing to take the time and effort needed to enjoy the virtues of his poetry. When that might be is anyone’s guess, though I hope that the present work and its companions will make a viable contribution to that end.
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Before, I Saw the Vaporous Contours of a Human Form
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—— Republished courtesy of the author, Ian Kluge.
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King Coffin’s World of Uncertain Ends I. There is a moment, roughly forty pages into Conrad Aiken’s third novel King Coffin, when the protagonist, Jasper Ammen, first sets eyes on the man he wants to kill. By this time Ammen has been waiting for the ideal victim for five chapters, but when the quarry finally arrives he does so by chance—a faceless, anonymous stranger, appearing out of the crowd. [The stranger] had come up the sloping ramp of concrete from the Arlington side, walking rather slowly, with his head a little down; he seemed to be hesitating…. He walked with an odd jauntiness, his feet turned out, and his head on one side. There was something birdlike about him, and the shape of his coat, which was too long for him, and had a heavy collar of cheap fur, somehow accented this. Lowering one shoulder, he turned neatly into the door of the train. The man appears unremarkable, and yet Ammen is drawn to him automatically, almost unconsciously. Indeed, his facelessness seems to intrigue Jasper, and he begins to follow this mysterious stranger, observing the man more deeply. First we get precise physical details: the “blue eyes PAGE 78
behind their formless spectacles,” “the red pencil in a red notebook,” until slowly the stranger coalesces into a full person, complete with personality: “the face…not young, showed unmistakable lines of care and age…but in contrast to all this was a quite definite boyishness and delicacy in the small neatness of the head…it was a boy grown old; a boy hardened prematurely, by whatever chemistry, into a man.” As with a detective in a thriller, the longer our protagonist is in the stranger’s company, the clearer he becomes to us. We feel the thrill of secret information. But our Jasper Ammen is not a detective; if anything, Aiken’s chase sequence is a parody of a thriller. His protagonist is quite possibly a psychopath, and the longer Ammen spends in the stranger’s company, the more we realize that his observations are highly disordered, slowly turning sour: “the eyes were a good blue, very deep, but inward-looking: self-centered. The mouth, under its short fair mustache, had about it a small air of authority. A tyrant in his own Lilliputian world: a domineering ant. A little bully.” Soon enough, every pretense of objective narration falls away, and Ammen becomes fixated on the man’s weakness, which he sees as justification for death: “The.. little homunculus, the enforced dignity of a man of small stature, the pathetic truculence of the weak. The sort of ridiculous boldness which is quintessentially an invitation to death: the one-who-wants-to-be-killed.” He even finds the man’s name ridiculously perfect. “That it should turn out to be a Jones…almost too good to be true!” The more the stranger, Jones, conforms to Ammen’s vision of perfect mundanity, the more agreeable a victim he becomes. The chase takes no more than a few hours, but by the end of it our protagonist is convinced that, through the power of observation, he has captured a stranger as a whole. “He had entered the stranger’s little world…taking
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The Narrator and the Madman:
SAM ALLINGHAM
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SAM ALLINGHAM
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SAM ALLINGHAM
SAM ALLINGHAM
possession of it…the whole little life was beginning to lie open, like a familiar book.” In order for Jasper to murder his perfect stranger, he must first come to know him completely, as one might come to know a character within a novel. The final image is a central one: the world as book, the murderer as reader, or better yet, author. King Coffin is not really a story about murder, for the promised act never actually occurs; nor is it a book about psychopathology. It is really a novel about authorship, and its consequences. Jasper Ammen’s particular brand of psychopathy consists in imagining himself to be the narrator of all existence, and his downfall occurs when Aiken reminds us that he is, in fact, only a character—that there is an entire world outside of his mind, which he cannot seem to see.
narrative, streamlined and brutal, which reduces human beings to pawns on a narrative chessboard. From the start of the novel, Aiken draws us into Ammen’s conception of a world in which other people function only as objects of manipulation. Here he is in the first paragraph, taking in the Harvard campus from his sixth-floor window:
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[He] did not intend to have any disgusting emotional dealing with [Gerta and Sandbach], none whatever. Not that he wasn’t, of course, profoundly curious about their little mutual fever…but that pleasure he was already, and deliciously tasting. What they must learn was that he could intrude, but not they
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Like many modernists, Conrad Aiken was obsessed with the psychopathology of consciousness. The plot of King Coffin—what plot there is—centers on Ammen’s mental breakdown; the secondary characters routinely comment on his relative insanity, and Jasper himself worries over the fate of his brother, Kay, who succumbed to mental illness at an early age. But to consider the novel only from a psychoanalytic perspective is to miss the full complexity of its narrative structure, as many of Aiken’s contemporary critics clearly did. Aiken had the misfortune of achieving his greatest fame during the heyday of Freudian literary criticism, and such critics tended to read his fiction reductively, as if their narrative mechanisms were primarily psychoanalytic exercises. There is more going on here than simply an exercise in psychological realism. Aiken wants to use Ammen’s disordered perspective as a comment on the function of narrative itself: or a particular kind of
The conflation of the world-as-it-is with the worldof-the-imagination is central to Ammen’s consciousness. Even before the idea of a perfect murder occurs to him, he is obsessed with manipulating others, not necessarily for any end, but simply to prove to himself that he, alone, is beyond the possibility of manipulation. As he savors the prospect of monitoring the actions of his one-time romantic interest, Gerta, and his former Anarchist compatriot, Sandbach, Ammen’s pleasure comes from maintaining a strict delineation between manipulator and subject.
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II.
The tower was his strength, the trees were his strength, the evolving and changing of the light were merely, as it were, the play of his thought over an earth everywhere his own; and the clear abyss of twilit sky, the lucid profundity into which he now figured himself as looking not upward but directly and amazing downward, was simply his own mind.
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III. The novel-within-a-novel is a murder story, in a way that King Coffin itself is not—in a sense, it represents what King Coffin might have been, had Aiken chosen to write it by his protagonist’s standards, and not his own. For Ammen, life is corruption and disorder, and death a form of purity; he is happy only insofar as he can reduce the world down to a series of narrative scenes: “I’m thinking of writing a story about it,” he tells his friend, Toppan, in reference to the murder. “I’ve even got the title for it—King Coffin.” His friend responds: “That’s a swell title. Real up-to-thehilt Nihilism.” Throughout the novel, Toppan (along with most of Ammen’s social circle) chooses to believe in the distinction PAGE 80
between the imaginary novel and the actions he is planning. The power Ammen holds over his friends rests in their insistence on distinguishing between fiction and reality. Ammen himself makes no such distinctions; if anything, he marshals all his powers to attempt to impose the conventions of narrative onto a world that seems increasingly chaotic. There is something sad about Ammen, even in the beginning of the novel, before his confidence is shaken. For all his attempts to lecture his friends on the Neitzshean übermensch—“to injure and destroy is natural,” he tells his enthralled friend Toppan, “it’s life itself: to deny that is to deny life”—Aiken is careful to show the cracks in his reductive (and typically undergraduate) reading of philosophy. We see this in his sensitivity towards his friends’ criticism of his plan (which they think of as “research for a novel”): It was all very well for Toppan to say…that there wasn’t any point in going on with it after a certain time—how could Toppan know anything about it…. It was comparable to the artist’s intuition of the completed work of art: Jones was in the process of becoming an artifact. He remembered saying to Gerta—“an action could have the purity of a work of art….” Wasn’t that still true? Ammen has considerable trouble ordering his life into a work of art. He is constantly judging the moments of his existence as if they were scenes in a story, weighing their relative worth, their “naturalness.” After his first visit to Jones’ home, Ammen is troubled by the details that don’t fit into the overall narrative of murder he’s been imagining in his mind’s eye: “What was the trained nurse
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Ammen’s pleasures are the pleasures of perspective, of dramatic irony; whenever he wants to learn about his potential victims, our protagonist simply strides into their unlocked rooms and reads their diaries, as if he were existing in some early English novel. Not for nothing does Jasper insist—partly to manipulate his friends, but also because he does not fundamentally distinguish between imagination, fiction, and reality—that his plan to murder Jones is in fact research for a novel, also entitled “King Coffin.” These metafictional flourishes suggest that, far from simply a work of psychological realism, King Coffin is in fact a complex Chinese box, in which its protagonist struggles to turn an invented reality into something real: to bring his novel-within-a-novel to life. All of this is a dark commentary, not on psychosis, but on the psychotic processes of fiction-making: its obsession with order, and the way it hungrily subsumes the workings of life.
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further possession of him.” The ownership of Jones, the ability to manipulate him totally, as an author might, is something Aiken wants us to watch, and to evaluate, both for its success and for the foolishness at the heart of the project. For weeks Ammen follows Jones, memorizing his route, his business, his home life, but his understanding of his potential victim’s world remains shockingly small. This meta-commentary is most evident on the night he uses a complimentary ticket to lure Jones to a theater. Ammen sits nearby, evaluating Jones as the play continues below them, and his opinion of the performance is a snobbish indictment of inferior narration:
It is possible to imagine “King Coffin,”—the novel of psychological realism, the novel of murder, the “pure” novel—ending here, just as it might have in Jasper Ammen’s mind. But Aiken does not give his protagonist the satisfaction.
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Jones there, in his box, sniggering at the stupid and laboriously obscene jokes, the fools clowning under an arranged light, the silly music, the rows of gaping idiots—all this was the reductio ad absurdum, the ultimate monstrosity of life; the awful perfection of the commonplace, the last negation of all values. And if Jones was the negative, he himself was the destructive positive, the anonymous lightning which was about to speak the creative Name.”
IV. Ammen’s attempt to render Jones immortal through art is cut short when an usher draws his victim out of his box
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for—if that was what she was? And the child’s cot…” He reassures himself that these details “might not contribute anything to the ease or success of the final action…but they certainly contributed something…almost as good.” Like a competent novelist, he is happy when his inventions have the air of reality: “The Alpine Street episode had been profoundly and beautifully natural, it was essentially the right sort of thing…” The would-be author is forever in conflict: he wants to see the world as it is, completely, while also demanding it conform to the limits of his narrative, right down to the death of his main character. But this isn’t the only difficulty that troubles Ammen. Whenever he moves beyond his small tale of murder, Aiken reminds us that the flow of life, with all its attendant chaos, is deeply disturbing to his protagonist. He dislikes being pressed against people on the trolley, and he loathes the conversation of others, which is rendered in a kind of ticker-tape chaos. At one point, while scanning the newspaper—a dizzying array of last rites and Sunday parties, baseball games and infected feet—he refers to human life as “this ridiculous ant-hill, the activities of these ridiculous ants—Jones among them—” Clearly, Ammen’s narrative project is an attempt to bring meaning, not only to the life of his victim (whom he claims is just waiting to be murdered) but also to existence in general. In this, Aiken seems to be indicting, not just Ammen, but the whole project of realist fiction. By hewing so closely to his protagonist’s disordered perspective, Aiken shows us just how odd, hollow, and eerily authoritarian the process of imaginative narration can be. Ammen’s desire is not to so much to murder Jones as it is to know him completely. As he explains to himself after his discussion with Toppan, “his purpose had not been so much to ask advice as simply to talk about Jones, and in talking about him…to take
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and into a waiting car. Jones’ wife has gone into labor, so Ammen follows Jones back to his house, where he observes the action from the outside. He still plans to murder Jones, somehow, but he soon realizes that such a murder would be a farce:
Yet, Ammen does not find it so easy to walk away. Jones’ baby is stillborn, and, overwhelmed by grief, he removes himself from the web of manipulations that would have led to his death. Increasingly unable to accept a life without Jones—and increasingly shunned by his former friends, who are unnerved by his growing strangeness—Ammen follows his former victim to the baby’s funeral. He feels “curiously ashamed and guilty… impossible to avoid the contamination, the sense of complicity and betrayal: it was himself who had done this, his own mind had conceived this dishonesty. And it was Jones who had been betrayed. To be standing here—to be seen standing here now—” Why does Ammen continue to imagine the world in this way, as if Jones is his character, someone he can betray? Even after his story has been thoroughly ruined, he continues to conceive of his inability to murder Jones as primarily a narrative failure. As a narrator, Ammen could have provided him with a perfect apotheosis; his appearance as just another mourner consigns Jones to the mundane horror of life itself, “the contamination.” “That this elaborate structure should amount only to this…” Ammen thinks, about the funeral, “This absurd little ritual in the rain.” Without the comfort of a tidy murder story, life succumbs to meaningless chaos. Not just for Jones, of course— Ammen has long since passed the point where he can extricate himself from his dependence on an orderly plot. After Jones buries his child and departs, Ammen briefly considers running after him, but, as before, cannot bring himself to bridge the gap. He feels “as if life itself were going away from him, moving farther and farther away”—as indeed it is, as Jones moves beyond his reductive imaginings. He has not been able to take possession of Jones’ existence, and when he tells himself
There was no sense in this; it was stupid and meaningless, it might even be dangerous; nothing was now to be gained from loitering here, despite his reluctance to go away in the very middle of what was so obviously a “scene.” He could ring the doorbell, of course, making some pretense of an inquiry, participate thus more intimately, perhaps even converse with his victim face to face—but to look up once more at the lighted windows on the third floor, to observe that now everything there was still, no shadows in motion, was also to decide that this too would be meaningless. Why not ring Jones’ bell, if his objective all along has been to kill him? The answer, of course, is that the kind of murder he will commit is more important to Jasper than the act itself; to murder Jones in his home would entail entering into the “scene,” which Ammen considers impossible. All along he has insisted on remaining anonymous to Jones, right up to the moment of the murder—to maintain the relationship between author and character necessary to create “pure” art. But now that his understanding of Jones has begun to unravel, this relationship begins to come apart as well. “It was curiously as if Jones had deserted him,” Ammen thinks, “as if the alliance between them had been denounced; as if he were now, precisely, walking away from the very thing which most clearly symbolized his own reason for living.”
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“the thing is finished,” we cannot be sure whether he is referring to King Coffin, “King Coffin,” or any number of lives: Jones’, the baby’s, his own. It is natural, then, that the narrative should end with Jasper’s attempted suicide. Again, one may be tempted to apply a reductive psychological reading: unable to control someone else’s life, our protagonist attempts, instead, to control his own. But, this would be to miss out on the rich strangeness of the ending, with its odd levels of metatextuality. First of all, Ammen insists on ending his life not in a moment of solitude, but on the knife’s edge of a possible plot twist. Before returning to his house and turning on the gas, Ammen sends a note to his former lover Gerta, telling her to come to him—but he insists to the messenger that the note be delivered exactly at eleven, timing his own suicide attempt so that Gerta will find him only if she responds immediately. If Ammen’s pursuit of Jones sometimes feels like a parody of a detective novel, this feels like a parody of melodrama: the same sort of hackneyed plot he had found so disgusting in the opera house where he contemplated murdering Jones. Most strangely, Ammen insists on reading, just before he succumbs to the gas: a section from a book by D. H. Lawrence on psychoanalysis: “When a child stiffens and draws away, when it screams with pure temper, it takes no note of that from which it recoils…. Like a man in a boat pushing off from the shore, it merely thrusts away, in order to ride free, ever more free. It as a purely subjective motion.” It is as if, thwarted by life, Ammen is returning to literary theory to find the freedom he seeks: a freedom in which there is no outside world whatsoever, only the splendid isolation of the mind. But this is exactly the view of the world that the Jasper Ammen novel “King Coffin” might have presented us;
Aiken’s King Coffin is less concerned with psychopathology than what might exist beyond it. Even as he attempts to construct a tidy narrative of the world in which he is sole master, Ammen’s final vision betrays another reality in which uncertainty opens outward into a world of unknown possibility:
So much is uncertain about this ending—in outcome, in perspective, even in grammar—those uncapitalized, questioning clauses that show Ammen’s mind falling away in waves. But that is precisely the point. By exposing the narrative world of the psychopath, with its reductive characterization and stale plot, Aiken wants to show us how such a story is hostile to life, in all its chaotic complexity. It is not for nothing that Aiken lets his story hinge on the two poles of existence no one in the world can possibly control: birth and death. In overwhelming Ammen’s intended “King Coffin,” the story of a perfect murder, King Coffin becomes a novel that reveals itself as the story of a world that exists just beyond its protagonist’s reach—a world of mingled death and life, of uncertain ends, of sun on water.
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By this time, Jones would have got back to the shabby little house in Reservoir Street—the grave at Mount Auburn would have been filled—the khaki-clad messenger was sitting in a subway train on his way to Beacon Hill. And Gerta—would she be there? would she come? was she standing there at her open window, with an apple in her hand, looking down over the roofs to the morning sunlight flashing on the Charles River Basin? wearing the white Russian blouse?
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Simpler This much for sleeplessness—it makes things simpler, trims the fatty reasoning from thought
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though nobody would have stopped me (let me make you laugh, at least) Simple.
For instance: Yes. I am in favour of this ruined stone wall the mossy tumbled rocks and slack barbed wire I am in favour of these brittle woods with deer crashing through (though how is it that a few leaves still cling to the trees? Have clung there all winter?) I am in favour of you, stubborn kite that will not lift into the air (lemme try anyway)
recalling: the huge apricot drifts of mulched birchbark, all fallen limbs, sudden as deer and soft as feathers the most beautiful thing I saw and so I did not take a photograph
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recalling: the last of last year’s snow seeping into last year’s ground (same region, different woods)
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Today, the last of the snow seeped into the ground
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A Conversation with Edward Butscher
Nearly thirty years ago, upon the publication of his biography Conrad Aiken: Poet of White Horse Vale, Edward Butscher wrote, “I remain committed to the notion that a modern biographer cannot afford to ignore insights garnered from other disciplines, whether psychological, philosophical, or from more impressionistic realms where specialists refuse to tread.” Aiken himself could not have imagined a more ideal reader of his work than Butscher. In Butscher’s biography, we come as close as possible to possessing Aiken forever. AMD: As Conrad Aiken’s biographer, what are some of the major occurrences of his life that determined his artistic sensitivity? EB: The gestation of Aiken’s “aesthetic sensitivity” had obvious roots in the trauma inflicted by the tyranny of an increasingly unstable (paranoid) father and the perceived infidelity (untrue) of a negligent mother. Its climax was the murder-suicide of his parents when he was eleven and consequent loss of his home and his three siblings, who were separated from him. The psychological impact in terms of his early pursuit of literary forms and evolution of a performing self is covered pretty specifically in the early chapters of my biography, as well as his subsequent academic pursuit of both Freudian and Jungian materials. Jung less important than Freud, at least until the Preludes perhaps, at least partially…. Freud helps shape and drive all of his work, verse and fiction.
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AMD: When you consider Aiken—his past and its attendant tragedies—do you find the artist to have triumphed? EB: The artist indeed triumphed and enabled him to survive, despite the petit mal (term used by him in Ushant for inherited mental illness of his father), by feeding on the blighted family romance of his childhood tragedy. The misogyny and Don Juanism of his mother complex (Jungian) were simply part of the price paid for that triumph. AMD: How did Aiken’s reputation as one of America’s “best known, least read poets and man of letters” affect him? EB: Winning awards, such as the Pulitzer for his Selected Poems, helped his preserve his conviction that he was an unrecognized genius, which had its own ego compensations. AMD: Aiken was a mentor to Malcolm Lowry. Lowry was a mentor to David Markson. Could you talk a bit about their connection? And would you speak to your relationship with Markson? EB: David, of course, wrote his thesis on Under the Volcano, and he and Aiken shared both Lowry and a desire to create fictional Joycean works. I met and interviewed David early in my research on the Aiken bio, and he became a friend, mostly via the phone and those wonderful letters of his, to me and my wife Paula. AMD: Your biography covers the first half of Aiken’s life. What is the status of the second biography which would cover the second half? EB: Alas, the victim of the inertia and mental lacunae of an aging brain, the second volume languishes, although I have recently returned to it…but candor demands I add that I suspect it will never emerge.
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The Biographer’s Tale:
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Figure from Utriusque Cosmi #2
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AMD: Aiken wrote a poetic experimental autobiography (Ushant). I’m curious of your thoughts on Ushant and how you feel that avant-garde memoir complements your more straight-forward biography? EB: It’s a valuable source material, of course, handled with care, and an artistic statement with an effective, circular, Joycean structure that does elevate memoir into an art form. AMD: There are some who say that knowing the biography of a writer isn’t useful because it doesn’t help you read his work. They would say you should only pay attention to what is in the text. Aiken’s texts, though, use biographical elements very heavily. Why is knowing Aiken’s biography so crucial to an understanding of his work? EB: This New Critic supposition is useful enough for explicating texts, but biographical knowledge is valuable for adding another level of meaning to the work, becomes itself literature to that extent.
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In the years 1926 and 1928, C. F. Atkinson’s English translation of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West appeared. Seeded with biological metaphors, Spengler’s thesis, which rejected a linear or rising-curve reading of history in favor of a closed morphological system, posited that social evolution was limited to tidy repetition of cultural stages, the extraordinary advances in science and social utilitarianism in Western (“Faustian”) civilization signaled the arrival of its winter stage—another Teutonic “Twilight of the Gods.” This pessimistic allegorizing of Modernism, which had an American forerunner in Henry Adams’ phase theory suited the post-war sense of nihilistic desolation apotheosized in Eliot’s The Waste Land. Edmund Wilson was largely alone in detecting the personal material palpitating below The Waste Land’s Laforguian orchestration. As glacially divided from self and others as Eliot and limbering toward “a sort of nervous breakdown,: Wilson was extracting a scary mirror when he drilled below the poem’s lyrical dramaturgy to expose its roots, “nothing more or less than a most distressingly moving account of Eliot’s own agonized state of mind during the years which preceded his nervous breakdown. Never have the sufferings of a sensitive man in the modern city chained to some work which he hates and crucified on the vulgarity of his surroundings been so vividly set forth: PAGE 87
“It is certainly a cry de profundis if ever there was one— almost the cry of a man on the verge of insanity.” It was in November that Eliot exchanged his American citizenship for an English one, completing the transformation of identity commenced months before with his conversion to the Church of England, though Peter Ackroyd believes he “remained a Calvinist or perhaps even a Gnostic in Anglican clothing.” Ackroyd also convincingly diagrams the psychological engine driving Eliot’s scramble for haut bourgeois safety and away from the increasingly exigent demands of a sick wife: “He wanted an object for intense feelings which was not human in order to heal a personality which threatened to shatter apart.” The outward metamorphosis was completed as well, impeccably attired in Lyndall Gordon’s felicitous portrait: “As Eliot shed his American youth, he cultivated the front of an English gentleman…he surrounded himself with the props of respectability: the correct city uniform, the dark suit and spats, the rolled umbrella, the deferential attentiveness, the voice so measured as to sound almost dead-pan.” A future vow of celibacy, another way of fending off a parasitic wife (and animal self), would further insulate him from the “Madding Crowd,” though still poet enough to tell the London Shakespeare Association on March 18, 1927, “What every poet starts from is his own emotions,” which may be “his nostalgia, his bitter regrets for past happiness.” Aiken’s emotional situation did not differ significantly from Eliot’s, at least in the sense of heightened ego pressures during mid-passage, but he could not bring himself to imitate his friend’s conversion process, which he would damn as a retreat, “the saddest I ever saw,” from their common wrestle with reifying an embattled but
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A Selection from Conrad Aiken: Cosmos Mariner
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dilating consciousness at the brink of self-immolation. Frederick R. Karl has hypothesized that “implicit in Modernism and its ideologies is the principle of selfdestruction.” Freud’s self-analysis, for example, “his vast poem of self,” albeit heroic in intent, came close to personal and professional suicide, because it, like Proust’s reordering of memory, represented a radical break with previous notions of time, emphasizing recalled time at the expense of the present, this tending toward disintegration. Contemptuous of any escape from science and empirical reality into organized religion, and Eliot was shrewd enough about himself to know that he would never be free of doubt—“My own beliefs are held with a skepticism which I never even hope to be rid of”—Aiken found his aesthetic and philosophic answer in a risky lyrical plunge into consciousness which would function as his religion and artistic rationale, “expanding consciousness” its Socratic ethic, the “enacting consciousness” (Blackmur’s apt phrase) its modus operandi. The means were two series of “Preludes—his Cantos, as it were, “a deliberate attempt to see how useful a kind of free Jacobean blank verse could be for a real continued piece of fragmentary soul-searching”— that Aiken, many years later, said he began in 1927. Like his artistic progress, a matter self-measured on each true artist’s personal scale with an egocentric indifference to audience reactions, Aiken’s public career in 1927—the year Le Temps Retrouve was published posthumously, as was Kafka’s Amerika, Pound was given the annual Dial award, Henri Bergson garnered the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Hollywood produced its first talkie, The Jazz Singer—had visibly flourished. His poems, stories, and reviews surfaced regularly in a variety of journals and newspapers and in several anthologies. BlueVoyage would have 6,000 copies in print by February
2, 1928, earning $1,585 in royalties to date. Most important, in Scribner’s Maxwell Perkins, Aiken had found an enthusiastic, hawk-eyed editor who nurtured his male authors with paternal solicitude—he had five daughters at home—and a prestigious mainstream publisher willing to in vest in promoting his books. At one point (November 23) he had tried to persuade Perkins—“I merely fire this suggestion into the air”—to have Scribner’s take over and reissue his earlier out-of-print poverty volumes, which did not happen, but the editor would soon warm to the idea of publishing a hefty Selected volume. A sign of Aiken’s growing literary stature was the appearance on the scene of Houston Peterson, a Fresno, California native who, after graduating from Pomona College in 1919, had moved east to earn a M. A. in philosophy at Columbia University, where he stayed on as an assistant, then a lecturer “in the philosophy of literature, which seems to be my specialty.” A newly married Peterson had met Havelock Ellis in 1925 and interviewed him extensively over the summer of 1926 for a book he was writing on his thought, Havelock Ellis: Philosopher of Love, recently finished and scheduled for publication in 1928. His next project was to tackle Aiken’s poetry, using it as his “principle theme” for “a contrasting study in complexity and chaos.” Lorenz claims that Peterson’s planned analysis of Aiken’s oeuvre “gave Conrad cold feet—better written after he was dead, if at all, he said,” but Aiken’s written reaction to Peterson and subsequent boast about the idea to Perkins belie this. Not that his negative comment to Lorenz was fabricated or does not articulate a genuine feeling from the mare’s nest of his psyche. Rather, the dismissive pose was intrinsic to his poet posture, which automatically denied (and thus defied)
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the reality that the prospect of a text based on his work by a philosophy professor had the value of reaffirming his own inflated view of himself and his art, particularly in the matter of his verse’s “ideas.” He painfully remembered Eliot’s sneers at his philosophic ignorance during “that year of the dinners at the Greek restaurant” with George Boas and him—Boas had recently written him, and Aiken’s reply again resurrected the chest-punch of Eliot snidely informing him “that the trouble with me was that I didn’t know the meaning of words.” Aiken’s later letter to Peterson (June, 1928), written after a “swell” party they had attended—“I heard from Linscott it got even sweller after I left”—makes clear his positive attitude toward the latter’s self-chosen critical task: “Far from having any misgivings about the book, I am being eaten up by raging curiosity. And Scribner’s, to whom I mentioned the thing as still in the projective stage, were as excited as myself…After being told for fifteen years by almost all the reviewers…that my work lacks intellectual content, it’s a godsent relief to have some one detect an idea or two in it.” In the sub rosa race against time and Eliot, Peterson’s study seemed to have given him an edge of sorts in making him the first to have a whole book devoted to his work. In the same letter to Peterson, Aiken attempts to weigh the various influences on his career’s development and the ambivalent friendship with Eliot: “Just between ourselves, there has been something very queer in this: something analogous to the curious relationship between Melville and Hawthorne”—apparently unaware of or defensively blind to the strong homoerotic component in Melville’s almost fawning admiration of the handsome Hawthorne, although in Great Circle (1933) he would shackle Melville to Michelangelo and Shakespeare as “bisexual wonders
of the transient world.” He goes on to pitch himself as sailing in the opposite direction from Eliot, who “has always moved toward Rome and Aristotle,” and underlines his early support for Eliot’s poetry, which was never reciprocated, his rival and friend having “never especially liked my poetry.” Though destined to fall further behind Eliot’s sprint to celebrity, Aiken did win a personal battle in the final month of 1927 when Lorenz succumbed to his pleas for her to take a cheap apartment he had found in his own building. “By early December,” Lorenz writes, “I had capitulated. I would be going back to Cambridge.” The return to Hampden Hall and quarters near to Aiken, for whom she could play housewife and mistress, proved more congenial than anticipated, in part because, despite her rebellious streak, she was a traditionalist in her basic gender assumptions. Whether darning his socks or making curtains for his apartment or preparing home-cooked meals to save him from the cafeteria fare he disdained, she remained steadfast in her notions of female duty and potential glory as a helpmate, a nurse of genius. The embarrassing letter to Armstrong was forgiven, if not forgotten or completely understood. Lorenz’s perplexity about Aiken’s action in this instance intimates that she did not fathom the analysand quality of his rational self, the tendency to psychoanalyze all experiences, what daughter Jane subsequently denigrated as “psychobabble” in staunch British fashion, however personal or contrary to normal rules of decorum. The process itself, being oral and categorical, acted like a bomb expert’s robot to deactivate possibly dangerous material while detaching (and hence bolstering) a besieged ego. Unknown to her until decades later, Aiken had discussed their relationship with her own sister-in-law, Margaret,
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over cocktails, reading her “bits of Jessie’s letters,” and defending his selfishness on the grounds that “a great love demanded great sacrifices”—in spite of Margaret’s undisguised disgust, “he kept coming back for more.” Of course, the thick letter to Armstrong was more than a reflex extension of Aiken’s tedious analytic compulsion and legitimate intellectual stance. Its context and richly over-determined content incorporated a desire to draw his closest English friend even closer to him as he fought off an unconscious terror that his written wish—for Armstrong to replace him at Rye—might come true. In this year when his third novel, The Stepson, was published, Armstrong had abandoned London to move in “with his friend and colleague, Anthony Bertram, in a small thatched-roofed cottage in the village of Sutton,” not far from Rye, where he “continued visiting Jessie and the children on weekends.” In addition, by objectifying and thus reducing the siren-like Lorenz, whom he still needed, to the status of a sexual case history, Aiken perhaps sought to break her hold on him, distancing and debasing her on the icy lab table of science to satisfy his displaced rage against Jessie’s enormous maternal power—after intently reading Blue Voyage for the first time and learning the grim details of the Savannah tragedy from Robert Taylor, Lorenz realized at last that her volatile lover “was looking everywhere for his mother.” Freudian comprehension, however, does court the risk of condoning human evil. It would meld with Lorenz’s orthodox gender views and residual Catholic programming to soften or suppress future revolts against a man who would abuse her at times as badly as her father ever had, which in itself could then be embraced as deserved punishment. There was a cultural imperative at work in all of this as well. Cowley’s memoir-history, Exile’s Return,
and Cowley himself was a father surrogate to the bingeprone, self-destructive Hart Crane, recalls that the “1920’s had their moral principles, one of which was not pass moral judgments on other people, especially if they were creative artists.” In England on January 11th of 1928, Thomas Hardy, eighty-eight years old, died quietly at home. In a grisly ceremony, his heart was buried in his parish churchyard at the same hour that his ashes were being interred in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Cathedral. On March 20 Charlotte Mew, age fifty-nine and under appreciated, though Hardy had once hailed her as “the best woman poet of our day,” would kill herself by swallowing disinfectant. And W. B. Yeats, age sixty-three, published The Tower this year, probably his most consistently brilliant collection of lyrics, the title poem of which asks, “Does the imagination dwell the most/ Upon a woman won or a woman lost?” For Aiken the question was central as he labored to juggle (without losing) the two women bisecting his heart and nourishing his poetic art. In one of his iconoclastic essays, Ezra Pound, Yeats’ pupil and school master, who knew that “most important poetry has been written by men over thirty,” would subsequently declare that “apart from Yeats, since the death of Hardy, poetry is being written by Americans.” Aiken’s second “Prelude” from February of 1928 mourns the cold new fact that “Hardy is dead” and contemplates (from the bed where the speaker lies beside his mistress) those writers who preceded him or will soon join him in the hovering darkness: And James and Conrad dead, and Shakspere dead, And old Moore ripens for an obscene grave, And Yeats for an arid one; and I, and you—
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Aiken had taken Lorenz to Manhattan for a brief Christmas break, meeting Peterson and Perkins there and attending a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. But, as the January 3, 1928 letter to Eliot confirms, his sense of loss anent Jessie and the children was unrelieved: “My family is in Rye, my heart in my mouth.” He also expressed a hope “to float over in June.” By February 14th he was writing the children to apologize for not sending them Valentines and to share a pathetic dream he had in which he discovered a new square in London and “explored all over it, and looked around everywhere for a nice house in which we might all live.” Unsuccessful, he did come upon a pub but once inside found nothing to drink: “It was sad.” February 27th was the date of his parents’ deaths, the day Aiken used to enter the cemetery to shed a drop of blood upon their graves, and this February delivered another roundhouse punch that nearly unhinged him. Toward the end of the month he received a letter from Jessie announcing she had fallen in love with and wanted to marry Armstrong, consequently initiating divorce proceedings. “A pity,” she wrote, “it all had to end this way.” Wish had fathered the deed, as it often does when fantasy endeavors to convert fear into its opposite. Aiken exploded, Lorenz reports, “got drunk, went berserk and staged some target practice in his bedroom.” Fortunately for his next-door neighbors, Albert Bushnell Hart, Harvard’s distinguished Professor of American history, and his unwed sister, none of the bullets penetrated the adjoining wall. The psychological blow to Aiken was almost as wounding for Lorenz, who now had to deal with her lover’s emotional duplicity. When she tried to soothe him by pointing out that Jessie’s action spared him from having to make “a painful decision,” his scornful
response was devastating, “Oh Christ, your obtuseness… can’t you see that my children are now irrevocably lost to me? It’s a double betrayal.” Unable to hide from such a wrenching rejection, Lorenz took refuge in his obvious mental imbalance as an excuse to cling to their new life together in Hampden Hall, which soon resumed its relatively smooth course. She had agreed to edit the letters of John Ruskin to Rosa Bonheur for two elderly sisters, and acting as hostess to the legion of visitors and loiterers occupying Aiken’s apartment at various times as it “became an intellectual salon for poets, including Theodore Spencer, Robert Hillyer, John Holmes, and Kenneth Patchen”—the last named the beneficiary of a fund put together by Aiken and Murray to save him from an onerous day job. “I would ask Conrad for sonnets as casually as a housewife orders lamb chops,” Lorenz rhapsodizes, “and for a time he obliged with flattering dispatch, still insisting my deafness to poetry didn’t matter.” The second “Prelude” drifts purposively, as it must, from the lament for the recent and distant and soonto-be dead to the supposed salvation of the immediate sensual moment in union with the lingering aura of those “magic names” as the speaker commands his beloved—in essence a rephrase and reversal of Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”—to partake of his depressive state: Stare at the ceiling, where the taxi lamps Make ghosts of light; and see, beyond this bed, That other bed in which we will not move; And, whether joined or separate, will not love. Writing the “Preludes,” hosting friends and colleagues, drinking “dubious bootleg alcohol diluted with canned
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grapefruit juice,” and quarreling with and making love to Lorenz were proven methods of survival, sources of pleasure—Aiken had not shot himself or her, substituting gesture for deed, as poets must. In March, he lost another psychological prop when he was fired from his tutor post on the grounds of “moral turpitude,” because “four graduates called at the office in University Hall to protest that the author of Blue Voyage was not a fit teacher for the young,” or, as he explained in a letter to Eliot, “politely fired: which is to say, ‘there is no vacancy in the tutorial department next year.’ I was offered some lectures in the summer school, and refused.” But Aiken had plenty to keep him busy, although he would later abandon plans to sail to England. Besides finishing out his tutorial chores—“Young men gallop up to me all day for advice about Anglo-Saxon, or whether they should read Chaucer or not, or whether or not to come back to college next year, or how to make money during the summer”—and working on various reviews and the “Preludes,” he had signed a contract with Random House to compile a comprehensive anthology of American poetry for their Modem Library series, the manuscript of which was due June 1. When he wrote Eliot, he also sent off a letter to the children, the first in four weeks, mostly to chat about his social activities, playing chess with his office roommate, Hunty Brown, seeing Charlie Chaplin in The Circus (“very funny”) and spending a weekend at the South Yarmouth cottage with the Spencers, who bunked there while he stayed at the Crists. His letter also related three disturbing dreams, the first of which involved reading about a shipwreck in a newspaper only to discover himself listed among the drowned. A second newspaper account “even added that they had found my body and identified it.” This led to his
asking himself, “In that case who the deuce am I?” The other two dreams spoke directly to his trepidation about losing the Rye nest. In one he returned there to find a young neighbor boy “dancing with your Mama, and I was amazed, so I spanked him with a fire shovel.” The third was more mournfully overt: “I dreamt I came back to Rye and looked for the children and couldn’t find them. I was told that they had all got engagements for parties, and I couldn’t see them. So I was very sad and sat down by the Tillingham under a lime tree and watched the ducks.” The unease allegorized in the dreams was reinforced by a nagging sore throat, a steady gain in weight, and yet another accident, getting his finger caught in an elevator door. An April letter to the children complains of a bronchial cold and having his teeth filled but stresses how full his time is, asked, for instance, by the Savannah Poetry Society to judge a poetry contest while “trying to snatch a moment to make a book of short stories ready for an English publisher.” The week prior he saw off his brother Kempton in New York on the latter’s way to Guatemala, and the night before he had Delano Potter, “dear, ever-giggling, powerful Del” (115) over for dinner before he left on his racing schooner for Spain. The underlying motif, however, remains true to a dirge’s selfpitying form: “I adore Jeake’s House. I dreamt last night I was going to Rye on a bus.” A truer gauge of his mental state was a desolate letter to Untermeyer, whom he had not heard from for quite a while, asking, “Am I to see you again in this life?” Aiken’s May 20 letter to the children indicates that he still harbored hopes of sailing over in July, asking, “[W] ill you give me the pleasure of allowing me to see you this summer, say in July, if I should come to London?” But a light-hearted letter to Jane on June 15th, the same day
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Herbert Hoover was nominated by the Republicans for President, chatted about seeing brother Robert’s children, Fred, Peter, and Betsy, two days earlier and a visit to the Belmont home of the Taussigs one night without alluding to a possible visit. Five days before, the Milwaukee Journal had published Lorenz’s “An Old Grad Goes Back to Harvard,” which used Aiken and his reminiscences as her narrative fulcrum. In late June she herself decamped for Cape Neddick, Maine to sort out, type up and organize the Ruskin letters belonging to her spinster employers, staying in a large Victorian house they owned there and working in a “spacious, gracious room overlooking the garden.” Perhaps the separation was necessary, at least for her. Aiken had revealed his affair with Elizabeth, “a married woman living in Oxford,” and his sexual relationship with Carolyn Reilly in America while she was involved with Carl. Her first letter to him from Maine (June 29th) admitted, after sighing over a lack of mail from him, “Each time we part I fall in love all over again.” But his response was “a cold letter” in which he harped upon a liaison she had had with Carl in Manchester. Lorenz’s return missive angrily asked, “How can you bring up the Manchester trip again after telling me you had spent that same weekend with Carolyn?” Typically, his rant was softened by the enclosure of a gift and more conciliatory note, which enabled her to reassert a maternally indulgent attitude: “Thank you for the soap, and your note served as a poultice after I’d groped my way through your frigid letter. Oh you can be so angelic when you want to, and so diabolic when you don’t want.” How diabolic had been apparent when he warned her with caustic honesty about the monster dwelling beneath
his other, more social selves: “And don’t, for heaven’s sake, ignore the Aztec in me—the cold, cruel, relentless, heartless, inhuman, brooding, self-centered and essential fugitive animal (a kind of newt) that I terribly am.” Such a seemingly excessive self-condemnation, recognized only in retrospect as encapsulating a profound self-insight, had scant impact on Lorenz, who was already committed beyond reason, wrapped firmly in the arms of Aiken’s mesmerizing older man’s charms and literary aura. By midJuly she was back from Maine, and they were planning a ten-day stay in Nantucket the following month, to “rest and work and swim and eat.” Lorenz’s return did not relieve Aiken’s feelings of rejection and loss. On July 2Ist he was writing the children, Joan (“Fidzy”) getting her own note, to bemoan his outcast state. Firuski was in town for a few days, but the Linscotts had left for a two-week vacation in Maine, Cambridge thus “not so nice. Because it’s pretty lonely here nowadays; and I’m terribly homesick for Rye.” He related yet another long dream about Jeake’s House in which he arrived there as usual by train only to find “everything changed,” and a set of snooty English servants “looked at me as if I had no right to be there.” Entering the back porch, he came upon a large tea party of English strangers, and “they all looked askance at me when I came out. Nobody got up, Mama didn’t introduce me to any of them, a dismal silence fell, it was apparent I was not wanted.” Aiken’s sense of abandonment was sharpened when August 8th passed without a sign of the children, but when he wrote on August 13th, a day before leaving for Nantucket, he sidestepped their slight of his birthday and chatted about the forthcoming trip, the Modem Library anthology—“I’ve got way behind on it…. It’s a long job, though, and I fear it may take me several months”—and
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a visit from his brother Robert, who had gone off in his Buick “to Worcester, where he is building a house.” He also had another dream for them, devoted to Joan: “I was walking around the gun-gardens with Fidzy, and we had a doll’s pram with us, and the doll kept falling out, and I kept picking it up.” By September 7Ih, back in Cambridge with Lorenz, he was still brooding over the children’s neglect of his birthday and continued silence: “It’s almost a month since I last heard from you; and never a birthday present from you, not even a birthday card.” The integration of Armstrong into their domestic affairs, always a familiar presence but now presumably treated as something more than a family friend, could have only increased his anxiety about a permanent displacement from their lives, a disquiet reflected in a drive down to the Middlesex School “to see how it looked.” A month later, writing to Jane alone in response to a letter from her received that morning, he would exhort her to cheer up because her birthday was coming soon, which gave him another opportunity to air his outrage over their dereliction: “And fie for shame, why didn’t any of you children remember my birthday this year? Never a word from any of you, not so much as a measly card, far less a present. Do you think that’s a nice thing? I assure you I was very much disappointed.” He also passed on another dream, pregnant with wish fulfillment, in which “you and John and Mamma and Fidgy came to Boston. And you and I and John decided to go to Bermuda to live!” September was an important month for Aiken, having been asked by Perkins to think about putting together A Selected Poems. Aiken wrote his editor that he had discussed the prospect with Unseat, who “proposed a ‘selected’ edition, of fairly portly size: say 400 pages, on
thin paper,” which would include “thirty or forty pagers of new short things.” He also promised to get down to a new novel by winter: “At present my domestic situation is too tangled and depressing to permit of sufficient detachment, not to mention the economic. And it’s still in the cards that I may have to o to England in November to facilitate settlement of the tangle”—as early as June 3ra Aiken had written to Perkins about a possible “interim novel, not quite as hefty as Blue V…. Probable title (don’t laugh) ‘Cambridge, Mass.’” On the 14th of the month, Scribner’s published his second collection of short stories, Costumes By Eros, which was dedicated “To the Five J’s “—Lorenz thus smuggled into the family via her “Jerry” nickname. Two of the fourteen stories, “A Conversation” and “A Man Alone at Lunch,” which he had carefully avoided having Lorenz type up for him, who “fumed” when she later read them, overtly vent some ‘of the jealous rage he harbored against Carl and her. In “A Conversation,” later dubbed “Autobiographical” by Aiken, as was “A Man Alone at Lunch,” the story is told through a dialogue overheard on a train by an English lecturer between an unknown man and woman in which the former discovers how promiscuous the woman he loves truly is: “One man after another for ten years.” In “A Man Alone at Lunch,” where the narrator is given Lorenz’s pet name of “Jerry,” and his girlfriend is “Elizabeth,” Carl appears as “Schmidt,” a Svengali “with that hypocritical dark power of his, that curious halfhypnotic power of his over” Elizabeth’s soul. “She was Schmidt; she was his creation,” to the extreme that “when she kissed him, Jerry, it poisoned the kiss for both of them.” At tale’s end, which has little real story to it, after a dream of fleeing to an Edenic Spain with Elizabeth, the speaker (hectored by a need for an operation and a
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(echoing Blue Voyage) into an aesthetic conundrum: “How can one project, in satisfactory form, this desire for annihilation?” Haunting details from his Savannah childhood again emerge, images of that “small boy in a blue sailor suit, with a knotted silk tie, himself that small boy” and the two water snakes in a store window he witnessed eating one another’s tails, but spark no analog search for psychological depths. Instead, “State of Mind” settles for a ghost story, three men on a train, all of who, like the train itself at the end, dissolve into nothing, into fantasy, which is a clever twist of the snake circle but too shallow to achieve the literary intensity mandated by the speaker’s dilemma. But the final sentence amplifies the larger story of Aiken’s malaise in the fall of 1928, the regressive, self-devouring way in which his mind gnawed at the bundle of misery he had loaded on himself: “Himself in retreat, in full retreat, in disorderly retreat, from a world of memories altogether too painful.” Despite such revealing and potentially powerful confessional moments and themes, Costumes By Eros is not a very impressive collection. Most of the entries are more anecdote than tale, elaborated into interior dramas with convincing acuity at times, but rarely able to generate sufficient narrative tension to transcend their ordinary means. Their value is often biographical rather than literary, as in “The Necktie,” based upon a minor episode in Uncle Potter’s on-going double life, but sweetened into triviality. It does give a glimpse into Edith and Alfred Potter’s marriage, Edith’s “long martyrdom to headaches. Headaches and jealousy,” saddled with a husband who “kept so young-looking,” while she “was aging fast,” a husband still a Prufrock in his now unfashionable high collars and rich ties, his well cut suits and undeniable appeal for the other sex.
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shrinking cash supply) is busy calculating how much is needed to buy food and pay carfare but determined to telephone his beloved to find out “by means of a guarded question, whether she yet sees Schmidt.” Stretched on the rack of the increasing possibility of losing his children, the other major component of his tortured state is confronted nakedly in “I Love You Very Dearly.” It takes the form of a letter written by Howard Bond, age sixty and residing in Paris, to his married daughter, from whom he has been estranged for a number of years—the story had been suggested by a similar letter Aiken had come across in the library of a friend, perhaps Firuski. The daughter is called “Wintry,” which obviously derives from Aiken’s pet name (“Winks”) for Jane, his favorite, and constitutes his way of saying the difficult things he could not say to her in his actual letters. With remarkable self-awareness, for instance, Aiken apologizes for his paternal lapses: “I guess there isn’t a worse father in the world. I made all your lives perpetual torment, with my eternal fussiness about meals and food and neatness, and my irascible outbursts over nothing at all. There is a sort of cruelty in me that I never was able to control.” Rationalization is not far behind, to be sure, as he tries to justify his infidelities with a schoolboy alibi, philosophizing that “the human animal is fickle, faithless, has a roving appetite (as regards love) and when he is tied down by marriage is always wanting to break out of the cage and go exploring.” Decades in the future, when queried about the degree of autobiographical content in his short stories, Aiken labeled his mental condition at the time as a period of “personal tension,” which in “State of Mind” presents a depressed, suicidal narrator contemplating “a puddle sidewalk” littered with debris and defeat that leads
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darkness is sought, an erasure of the memory of the dead woman at the core of his suffering: And let no Theseus-thread of memory Shine in that labyrinth, or on those stairs, To guide her back; nor bring here, where she lies, Remembrance of a torn world well forgot.
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An event in Linscott’s life is at the heart of “The Professor’s Escape,” which is slightly ironic in view of the editor’s lack of a college degree. The most successful story in the collection, “Spider, Spider,” aptly characterized by Lorenz as “a autobiographical incident about a Don Juan seduced,” exhibits a Lawrentian flair and bite in its dissection of a sophisticated female’s wrestle with an outmatched male. Of course, the siren’s victory over the man she wants and the weaker woman he has fallen for was another way for Aiken to attack a strong female— Lorenz has suggested that she was a version of Beatrice Taussig—as done in “The Woman-Hater” and “Field of Flowers” as well. Costumes By Eros—epigraphed, significantly, with a quote from Othello in which the Moor envisions the chaos that would “come round again” if Desdemona should prove unfaithful—was not a commercial or artistic success, as reviews and sales figures would soon confirm, in spite of Aiken’s evident skills and mining of confessional material. His touch of genius remained poetic, and it was in the on-going “Prelude” sequence where he was able to construct effective vehicles for his angst and conflicted psyche. When The Second American Caravan came out on the 24th of September, it contained “The Dream,” the third prelude in the Memnon series. The poem is redolent with loss, true to its nightmare motif, and combines a tear with sleep and “some gigantic dream” that “shakes/ The secret-sleeping soul” and ushers the speaker into a seaside hell “where bones of ships and rocks” intermingle, the gulls falling “in a cloud upon foul flotsam there.” God is called upon to release “the sore soul” from “this bondage of harsh dreams,” which is related to the descent into the labyrinth by Theseus, who was saved by Ariadne’s thread, although here the peace of
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CONSCIOUSNESS (conscius, aware of; from con or cum, and scio).—To the question, “What is meant by consciousness?” no answer can be given. Consciousness is not susceptible of definition. It is an ultimate fact, it is the ultimate fact, of our existence. We cannot go behind it. All other things are definable in terms of consciousness, but consciousness itself is not definable nor describable. We know it, so far indeed as we can properly speak of knowing that in us which knows, only by the contrast of its parts. We are conscious that there is a world of objects outside us, in which we are and in which we move, and we are conscious that the centre of this world is a self which knows and feels. Upon reflection we find that of the world around us we know nothing directly except by the different conscious states that occur in us, which we attribute to its action, and of ourselves we know nothing directly save that we are a continuum of conscious states. Each object that we see and recognise we know only as a bundle of feelings. We know it by its colour, which is a feeling, by its shape, which is an inference—i.e., a PAGE 97
process of consciousness founded on the basis of feelings of movement, by its distance, which is again an inference founded upon memories of movement; by its position, which is similarly known. Of ourselves we have gained a knowledge of our bodies in the same way as we have gained the knowledge of other objects. The body that is thus known, and that moves freely among other objects, is associated with the consciousness of which all these feelings form part, and which we refer to when we speak of our “self.” We have arrived at the conclusion, how, it is not necessary here to explain, that there exists around us a world of objects which possess the property of so acting upon us as to arouse in us thoughts and feelings, and we distinguish, as separate from this external world, an inner world of thoughts and feelings which compose our consciousness. The two sets of things we regard as totally and absolutely distinct. Each is a separate world—a universe by itself. There is a universe of matter around us and a universe of mind within. The events of the one are to some extent mirrored in the other, but their nature and composition are totally different and cannot be reduced to common terms. The one consists of particles and movements, the other of feelings and thoughts, and we can no more think of mind and matter in convertible terms than we can imagine a particle of iron to become transformed into a feeling of anger, or the revolution of a wheel to become the remembrance of the date of a battle. There are three aspects from which consciousness may be regarded. (1) Consciousness may be regarded by itself, apart fror material phenomena, with reference to its variations and its components, and without having regard to anything outside itself.
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A Selection from the Entry on “Consciousness” in A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine
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(2) Although the world of consciousness is entirely separate and distinct from the world of matter and force, so that no action is possible either of mind on matter or of matter on mind, yet it is found that the states and processes of consciousness invariably accompany states and processes of the matter which composes the superior portions of the nervous system. No condition of consciousness can occur without the occurrence of some corresponding condition in the higher nerve regions; nor can any change take place in these higher nerve regions without the accompaniment of a mental state or process. The two occurrences are, however, entirely distinct, are carried on in different worlds, and can best be understood by regarding the mental condition as a shadow of the nervous action. When certain events take place in the higher nerve regions, then certain thoughts, feelings, volitions arise in consciousness. The one change cannot be called the cause, nor even the antecedent, of the other, since they are, as far as we know, simultaneous, but the two changes, separated as they are by a hiatus more absolute than that which divides any one material phenomenon from any other, are yet connected so closely by bonds of time, of degree, and of quality, that they have been considered, and possibly may be, obverse and reverse aspects of the same occurrence. The second point of view from which consciousness has to be examined is, therefore, with reference to the conditions of the nervous action with which it is necessarily associated. (3) Not only is every phase of consciousness the shadow of some condition of the superior nerve regions, but it is at the same time the mirrored representation of some condition in the world outside of us. A feeling of heat may be regarded introspectively, as more or less in degree, or in comparison with a feeling of cold; the field
of examination remaining confined within the limits of consciousness. Or the feeling of heat may be studied with reference to the particular seat and quality of the agitation of the nervous molecules of which it is an accompaniment, and in such a case the field of examination remains confined within the limits of the organism. But in the third place, the feeling of heat may be examined in connection with the agent in the outside world—the thermal vibrations of particles—with whose action upon the body the feeling of heat in some way corresponds. So with a train of reasoning; we may follow the argument step by step and compare the mental processes by the succession of which the conclusion is reached, as is done by the logician; and in so doing we have direct regard to nothing outside the limits of consciousness itself. Or we may consider these mental processes in connection with the nervous processes of which they are the accompaniment, and trace the correspondence of the laws which regulate the one set of processes with those which regulate the other. Or, thirdly, we may compare the several stages of the process of thought with the actual phenomena about which we are reasoning, and note whether the conclusions that we reach correspond with the facts. This is the third of the aspects from which consciousness may be regarded.
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If, as contemporary psychology practically enjoins upon us, we reduce the distinction between the “rich” poetic nature and the “shallow” one wholly, or almost wholly, to the matter of sensibility, we are, of course, only making the most elementary of beginnings, and the further problems which arise before us, whether we approach as psychologists or as critics, are endless and baffling. This we are indeed prepared for. We do not pretend, as some seem to think we do, to have solved, with this simple hypothesis—or even, for that matter, with the more fundamental Freudian hypothesis of which it is a corollary—the nature or limits of poetry. We make only a beginning: and one which shows in some regards singularly little advance from the Aristotelian doctrine of catharsis. Our “beginning” is more importantly a matter of attitude: we do not shrink, we see no reason for shrinking, from inquiry, even into the nature and function of poetry; and we believe that there is no valid reason for withholding from this sphere of man’s activity the power of analysis which he has employed in others. It should be enough that we admit the speculative character of our undertaking, and admit that what at most we hope to accomplish is, as it were, to carry the first lantern or two into the cave— perhaps only to indicate its size, its ramifications, or even the fact that in so airless a place few lights are of any value. PAGE 99
For of the complexity, the ramifications which result from even so simple a hypothesis as our matter of sensibility, the briefest glimpse affords testimony…. If we suppose our hypothesis to be true, then perhaps, in its light, we shall see the main stream of poetry, as it flows down to us from the past, a little more freshly. Without meaning, for the moment, necessarily to attach undue value to the term “breadth,” do we not see this stream “broadening” as it comes nearer to us? Poetry, it is clear, must have begun very simply: Homer represented a stage of it already highly complex; Euripides represented a stage elaborate and sophisticated. And while every so often in the history of poetry has arisen a great figure, or group of great figures, and while it is by no means certain that those figures are progressively “greater” each than the last (it might be argued quite the other way), yet it is incontestable that in a certain sense the stream of genuine poetry, in proportion as man has extended his experience, whether outward or inward, has constantly widened. The process is one of accretion. What the first poet says, what he renders “conscious” cannot, obviously, be repeated word for word by the second poet; the second poet, unhappily, will find certain areas already explored, and he must choose between making good his claim to those areas by making finer use of them than was made by his predecessor, and finding new areas of his own. And here we come to the matter of “sensibility.” For these areas are the areas of potential awareness; and in the shadowy struggle between poet and poet, for possession of this or that area, sensibility is the only weapon. The first poet found it sufficient to say “tree”: but the second poet was compelled to be more specific. And this necessity to be more specific has been the lot of the poet ever since, a necessity which becomes
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A Selection from “Idiosyncrasy and Tradition”
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merely to hoist sail was to find India. Nowadays the poet who is “original” is the exception. It would seem, therefore, that the number of poetic precipitates inducible from the various arrangements of sensibility and environment is not infinite. And it might be further contended that we have already obtained a seriously large proportion of such possible precipitates, and perhaps, also, those that are of greatest value. Assuming at any rate that this situation is true, and leaving out of account the occasional “great” or approximately “great” or saliently successful poet (the poet who finds a relatively broad new area of the potential awareness, or sheds across an “old” broad area a sharp light from a new quarter), let us perceive with sympathy the predicament of the lesser but genuine poet who faces it. He lacks the power for re-shaping any large area of the consciousness he inherits: he lacks the gift of seeing any large area which is new. The material with which he most passionately desires to deal has been, alas, beautifully dealt with a thousand times before. If he is to avoid being a mere traditionalist (and by assuming that he is a genuine poet we assume that he will) how will the slight but clear “newness” of his sensibility manifest itself? The answer is obvious: it will manifest itself precisely as a refinement of an aspect or aspects of the inherited poetic consciousness; and whether this refining is aesthetic or kinesthetic or ethical or philosophic, if he carries it far and sharply enough it will leave him for us as one of the long line of idiosyncratic poets, the poets of unique temperament, brilliant, but lacking final power on a broad basis, the poets whose function it is, iota upon iota, to widen our stream of consciousness. These are the poets who illustrate for us most clearly the slow process by which poetry is extended to embrace all that man is capable of feeling or
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always more tyrannous. Poets now come into a world in which, at first glance, it would seem that the areas of potential awareness have been all but exhausted. Tract after tract has been explored, exploited, rendered commonplace, “traditionalized.” Old elements, it is true, can be re-combined to give new effects, to yield areas which are, in fact, new; but can that process go on indefinitely? It would seem that there must be some limit. One may also derive a temporary hope from the variability of “environment” (in its richest and most complete psychological sense) since that may well be considered ambivalent with sensibility. But temporary, surely, that hope must be when we observe with what amazing rapidity all the forces of society tend towards a levelling, a uniformity, of environment—by law, by education, by tradition, by language, and finally by the inheritance of the art itself, the inherited poetic consciousness, which would seem to be rather terrifyingly complete. How complete this is, this exhaustion of the areas of potential awareness, is made clear to us by the extraordinary, the ever-increasing number of excellent poets who, despite their excellence, produce poetry which we call “commonplace,” poetry too repetitively in the tradition. Some of them, had they lived a thousand years ago, when the inherited poetic consciousness might be said to have stood in ratio to ours as one to five, might have been great: today they are overwhelmed. Most of them would have been as unsuccessful then as now, temperaments in which not even the most favourable of environments could arouse the extra iota of sensibility which results in the new contribution. There was a time when merely to be a poet was, ipso facto, to be “original,” since unexplored poetic continents lay on every hand, and
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perceiving. It is no ignoble fate. For in this class belong all poets, with the exception of the dozen or so who are transcendent.
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—— This selection originally appeared as part of a review of The Complete Poems of Francis Ledwidge in The Dial, 1920.
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If we look deeper into the nature of things, a virtuous friend seems to be naturally desirable for a virtuous man. For that which is good by nature, we have said, is for the virtuous man good and pleasant in itself. Now life is defined in the case of animals by the power of perception in that of man by the power of perception or thought; and a power is defined by reference to the corresponding activity, which is the essential thing; therefore life seems to be essentially the act of perceiving or thinking. And life is among the things that are good and pleasant in themselves, since it is determinate and the determinate is of the nature of the good; and that which is good by nature is also good for the virtuous man (which is the reason why life seems pleasant to all men); but we must not apply this to a wicked and corrupt life nor to a life spent in pain; for such a life is indeterminate, as are its attributes. The nature of pain will become plainer in what follows. But if life itself is good and pleasant (which it seems to be, from the very fact that all men desire it, and particularly those who are good and supremely happy; for to such men life is most desirable, and their existence is the most supremely happy) and if he who sees perceives that he sees, and he who hears, that he hears, and he who walks, that he walks, and in the case of all other activities similarly there is something which perceives that we are active, so that if we perceive, we perceive that we perceive, and if we think, that we think; and if to perceive that we
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perceive or think is to perceive that we exist (for existence was defined as perceiving or thinking); and if perceiving that one lives is in itself one of the things that are pleasant (for life is by nature good, and to perceive what is good present in oneself is pleasant); and if life is desirable, and particularly so for good men, because to them existence is good and pleasant for they are pleased at the consciousness of the presence in them of what is in itself good); and if as the virtuous man is to himself, he is to his friend also (for his friend is another self): if all this be true, as his own being is desirable for each man, so, or almost so, is that of his friend. Now his being was seen to be desirable because he perceived his own goodness, and such perception is pleasant in itself. He needs, therefore, to be conscious of the existence of his friend as well, and this will be realized in their living together and sharing in discussion and thought; for this is what living together would seem to mean in the case of man, and not, as in the case of cattle, feeding in the same place. —— Translated by W. D. Ross.
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
A Selection from Nichomachean Ethics
ARISTOTLE
ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
ARISTOTLE
THE SCOFIELD
K ABIR
ROBERT DEMACHY
Between the Poles of the Conscious and the Unconscious
—— Translated by Rabindranath Tagore.
Struggle PAGE 103
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CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
Between the poles of the conscious and the unconscious, there has the mind made a swing: Thereon hang all beings and all worlds, and that swing never ceases its sway. Millions of beings are there: the sun and the moon in their courses are there: Millions of ages pass, and the swing goes on. All swing! the sky and the earth and the air and the water; and the Lord Himself taking form: And the sight of this has made Kabir a servant.
THE SCOFIELD
NATHAN GOLDMAN
NATHAN GOLDMAN
Conrad Aiken’s first novel, Blue Voyage, pays proper tribute to the ocean’s un-plumbable essence and its sway over the human imagination. The novel follows protagonist William Demarest on an eight-day voyage across the Atlantic. As Demarest boards the ship, he senses immediately and intuitively the immeasurability of what will soon surround him: he thinks, “O Thalassa! Thalassa!”—the Greek word for the sea and an ancient name for its primeval spirit—“Unmerciful sea.” However human beings may strive to conquer the sea, it evades understanding and control. Demarest sees in it an image of his aloneness: “He was already fairly launched into the infinite,” reports the narrator, “the immense solitude.” Of his imminent journey, he reflects: “Alone with the sea for eight days: alone in a cage with a world of tigers roaring outside.” He means the waves’ cacophony, about which he has already shown concern. He worries over “the sound of waves crashing against black portholes at midnight” and soon seeks solace in the bar, which he decides will “be his sitting room for eight days,” for the “sound of the sea came softly here, muted like the hush heard in a conch shell.” In naming this sound in animal terms—a world of tigers— Demarest evokes the ocean’s animality. This is crucial to the sea’s strangeness. Though swift death to mammals’ lungs (all the more glory to our strange cousins who continue to make it their home), the ocean teems with life of an utterly other kind. PAGE 104
We share almost nothing with fish; we don’t dwell or reproduce or think as they do. To choose to eat them is, for many, not a difficult decision. Literary-minded vegetarian discourse is overrun with Max Brod’s story about Kafka’s aquarium encounter. Gazing into a tank of fish—eye to eye?—Kafka said to them, “Now at last I can look at you in peace. I don’t eat you anymore.” Aiken’s novel A Heart for the Gods of Mexico provides a clue as to what makes possible an encounter such as Kafka’s. Two characters prepare to dine at an oyster house. One says, “This place gets me. What with all them feerocious red lobsters about, and that bowl of tomalley”— the green paste that acts as lobsters’ pancreas and liver, a delicacy to some—“and old George here opening oysters as easy as winking—sometimes I just can’t bear it.” His dinner guest responds, thoughtfully, “There’s something about marine life, and the fruits of the sea—it must be an atavism, when you were a tadpole and I was a fish.” This exchange acknowledges the alienness of sea life—the first speaker suggests a visceral discomfort with it—but casts it as an alienness that, fundamentally, lies close to home. Human discomfort with sea creatures is traceable to their embodiment of a prior stage in our development: the sea from which we’ve emerged but which we cannot fully escape. Marine life, taken to be primordial, is the inhuman cast as pre-human: an alterity that lurks deep within our depths. Aiken’s treatment of the ocean as unknowable, infinite, and foreboding in Blue Voyage does not prevent him from seeing and tracing its link to human beings’ understanding of ourselves. It is along these very lines that Demarest, shortly after boarding, makes the connection, as he faces himself in a mirror: “He looked long into his
ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
Beyond and Beneath Blue Voyage
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
———
NATHAN GOLDMAN
own eyes, so unfathomable, as if in an effort to understand himself, and—through his own transparent elusiveness— the world.” The link hinges on the word unfathomable, which recasts the marine measurement of the fathom as a cognitive action. The self, like the sea, evades determination and limitation by sounding line or thought. The sea becomes an image of Demarest’s unfathomability even to himself. Our relation to the ocean names, too, our alienated relation to ourselves.
Aiken’s prose it is not—despite an echo of Demarest’s hallucinatory likening of his essential self to a fish: “Rose Quartz, white Quartz, gneiss. And did you see that little trout hiding among them? That was my very me. My little trout soul”—but bear with me. While Kafka encountered his fish in an edifice constructed for human edification, Thompson meets his in its natural habitat. He comes closer than Kafka to the marine consciousness, for Thompson is concerned not only with his own experience of the encounter, but also with the fish’s. To the fish’s frantic motion Thompson ascribes a nascent desire to speak. In the verse’s final lines, his words become hopelessly garbled—a gesture toward the fish’s lack of language and thus inability to meet Thompson mind-to-mind. But it is in the music that the sea-thinking reaches its depths. Guitarist Joey Santiago’s haunting, three-note, distorted melodic lead line blares as if from some strange center of the sea. His hypnotic thrum, Thompson’s squealed undersea encounter, Deal’s otherworldly siren song, drummer David Lovering’s tide-steady beat—together, they evoke the ocean in all its tantalizing appeal and insurmountable strangeness. After consulting with the friend whose band introduced me to Pixies, I bought their second full-length album, Doolittle—their best, my friend assured me. It was one of the few CDs I brought along to play on my portable CD player when my family ventured overseas to attend my aunt’s wedding in Hawaii. With the Pacific out of sight below me, I played Doolittle over and over. My devoted listening continued when we reached land: Thompson’s alternate screeching and sweet singing buzzed against my ears as I sat poolside. No wonder we place so many pools in places where the ocean is easily accessible. What’s a pool but an ocean desalinated, made shallow, given borders?
——— Would it be absurd to suggest that some of the richest American thinking about the sea and its creatures as truly alien, yet also essential to human beings, arises in the songs of a rock band called Pixies? At age 12, I heard a friend’s band perform “Where is My Mind?”, the song that brought Pixies a measure of post-breakup fame when it appeared in the final moments of the film adaptation of Fight Club. This strange, spacey song—still revelatory, despite being exhausted by overplaying—turns, in the second verse, to the sea. The lyrics are famously difficult to decipher (Internet disputes on the topic abound), so what follows is my best attempt. Octaves below bassist Kim Deal’s ethereal oo-ing, lead singer Charles Thompson IV (stage name Black Francis) sings: I was swimming in the Caribbean Animals were hiding behind a rock Except little fish Bump into me, I swear He’s trying to talk to me, said, “Wait, wait—”
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NATHAN GOLDMAN
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
THE SCOFIELD
THE SCOFIELD
NATHAN GOLDMAN
NATHAN GOLDMAN
To place pools beside the ocean is to give ourselves over to the illusions of agency, stability, the simple self. If Surfer Rosa—Pixies’ first full-length album, on which “Where is My Mind?” appears—features the band’s first oceanic evocations, Doolittle marks their total sublimation of the ocean into their songs’ thematic interests and sound. Pixies’ aesthetic is indebted to American seaside music—the vocal melodic innovations of The Beach Boys, the guitar antics of surf rock band The Ventures—but while groups such as these often keep the ocean at a distance, treating it as an occasion for a party, Pixies (like Aiken) confront the ocean in its terrible, wonderful otherness. The third track on Doolittle, “Wave of Mutilation” (also recorded in a beachside-ready “UK Surf” version), reimagines an ocean suicide as an escape from the drudgery of terrestrial existence and redemption in something fully other:
murder on the ship. The possibility appeals to Demarest, though the appeal concerns him. He reflects: “Death. Murdered at sea. Demarest dead, with a hole in his head. A murder at sea—why was the idea so peculiarly exciting and mysterious? Blood—blood—blood—throbbed the ship’s engines.” The ocean returns as an explicit subject on Doolittle’s seventh track, “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” an environmental parable. Speaking about the ocean as imagined in the song, Thompson told an interviewer, “On one hand, [the ocean is] this big organic toilet. Things get flushed and repurified or decomposed and it’s this big, dark, mysterious place. It’s also a very mythological place where there are octopus’ gardens, the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, mermaids.” In the song, these aspects of the sea—the muck and the divine—collide in the doomsday joke of the first verse, which finds pollution choking Neptune:
I’ve kissed mermaids, rode the El Niño Walked the sand with the crustaceans Could find my way to Mariana On a wave of mutilation The link between death and the sea interested Aiken, too. In Blue Voyage, during a chess game, a character named Silberstein tells Demarest and others about a “full-fledged clairvoyant” on the ship who has told him there will be a
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From the banal to the surreal, Thompson traces the many possible manifestations of the ocean’s power. Though less linguistically adventurous than Aiken’s prose, this song attempts a sea-summoning akin to the moment in Blue Voyage in which Demarest makes his most concentrated attempt to bring the sea under speech’s sway: What form to represent the sea? Seaweed-bearded, arms of green water and fingers of foam; coralbranching; eyes wide, hollow, glaucous, where
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
[…]
There was a guy An underwater guy who controlled the sea Got killed by ten million pounds of sludge From New York and New Jersey
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Cease to resist, giving my goodbye Drive my car into the ocean You think I’m dead, but I sail away On a wave of mutilation
THE SCOFIELD
Aiken’s attempt here is staggering, his language beautiful, but Demarest seems aware that no language, no human conception, can conquer the ocean. He is brought to this search for a marine mimesis by a meditation on Caligula, who, “much troubled by dreams, dreamed nightly that a figure—a form—a shape—vague and terrifying and representing the ocean—came to him speaking.” How striking and strange to imagine a representation as a vague figure. This articulation admits the impossibility of precision in representing a force that defies representation. ——— The ocean’s elusiveness and illegibility recur as motifs throughout Blue Voyage. It’s not only “the infinite,” but also “the gray waste,” an “ultramarine abyss,” and—again and again—“the unvintagable sea,” that which offers up no nourishment for human beings. The sea becomes the very confounding of human ambition. Its unknowability is a rebuke to the Enlightenment’s claim that all things bow to human understanding and rule. It’s the negation of land, which emblemizes a firm place to stand, the possibility of making a home—and also Enlightenment epistemology’s terrible twin, colonialism. PAGE 107
Moreover, as the powerful claustrophobia of Blue Voyage attests, the ocean is everywhere. “For everywhere,” Demarest thinks near the novel’s end, “the sea is the sea.” It mocks him: “the sea everywhere, the unvintagable sea, many-laughing.” On the novel’s final page, he is led to a series of metaphysical quandaries—“What was a ship?… What were human beings? … What was a world?”— brought to them because he has become “startlingly conscious of the fact that [he is] at sea; alone with the infinite; alone with God.” It becomes clear how we might read the novel’s opening, in which Demarest asks the taxi driver who is bringing him to the ship to stop at a corner drug store, for it “had suddenly occurred to [Demarest] that he had forgotten his sea sick pills,” which he needs, for they are a “charm against sea serpents.” The sea’s monsters stand in for the sea’s monstrosity, which can make a human being existentially ill. Though Demarest hopes to stave off this sea sickness of the soul, another embraces it: Cynthia, the woman Demarest is travelling in search of, whom he happens to meet on the ship, leading to half a novel’s torment. In Blue Voyage’s extraordinary fourth chapter—a thirty-three page modernist adventure in the form of a single conceptually and temporally digressive paragraph—Demarest remembers a moment from his previous marine encounter with Cynthia: On board—Cynthia on board, stretched out in a sea berth. Like a dead fish. “It’s rather nice—” she was saying to Billington as I approached—“to be seasick, and just lie there feeling like a dead fish!” … “But I don’t want to feel like a dead fish!” I cried, and she gave her exquisite laugh, gay and understanding.
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
phosphor bubbled slow-winking, blue and lemonyellow, vitreous, moon-mocking. And the voice? The dithering crack of two boulders smitten together under the sea? The short cruel resonance of submarine bells? The skirling lollop of a wave running vortical into a dripping cavern, weedhung, wagging anguishedly like a tongue against the horny barnacled palate, and then out again, inarticulately noisy?
NATHAN GOLDMAN
ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
NATHAN GOLDMAN
THE SCOFIELD
NATHAN GOLDMAN
Existential unease disturbs Demarest, but it delights Cynthia. This moment highlights the bitter irony of Demarest’s unmistakable misogyny, which erupts often in the novel in the form of his constant underestimation of the women he encounters, who are to him sex objects, conversational playmates, or idealized sprites. “Something light and beautiful in women after all,” he thinks, “in spite of their boringness and curious mental and emotional limitations.” Demarest doesn’t extend his interpretation of the human soul as partaking in the ocean’s unfathomability to women. For all his pondering, his misogyny keeps his thinking in the shallows. This struggle between surface and depth— epistemological as well as oceanographic—is key to Blue Voyage. Through Demarest, the novel traces the human attempt to get beneath the surface of things. Demarest obsessively strives against superficiality (the sea’s surface) and toward profundity (its dark depths) but is inhibited at every turn by his own limitations. The result is a constant stream of failures, both banal (his frequent choice of chess, cigars, and booze over reading, writing, and thinking) and fundamental (his low estimation of women and eager participation in the ship’s men’s misogynistic talk). He certainly makes strides. The stream-ofconsciousness chapter carries him deep into the kind of lyrical reverie he seeks and allows his temporary escape from idle talk, culminating in his most authentic submission to the ocean’s inexplicability, which he absorbs into the very rhythm of his pulse: “In my left ear my heart te thrum te thrum. The Sea. Sea. Sea. Sea.” Though it doesn’t directly cite the sea, the chapter that may show most keenly its effect on Demarest is the one comprised of drafts of a letter he intends to deliver
to Cynthia to express his dismay over discovering her on the ship, engaged to be married and having evidently excised him from her life. The first draft—pompous, verbose, and self-involved—details a childhood memory, by which he hopes to establish intimacy: “It really seems to me,” he writes to her, “that there is something exquisitely appropriate in this: it seems to me that in this there might be some hope of really touching you.” The second draft is shorter and more direct, but mostly unchanged in its affect. Each subsequent draft is briefer, truer, less ponderous, until the fifth, which reads simply, “Sick transit!” The sixth and final draft is not really a draft at all, but a non-draft—a nothing:
The double ellipsis is prose’s nearest approximation of the ocean’s profound wordlessness. The chapter sees Demarest move from the superficial pomposity of waves’ noise to the deep sea’s solemn silence. But the transformation is far from total. The novel’s final pages reveal Demarest’s failure to transcend his surface self. After finding himself in a dinnertime discussion of race relations with his friend Smith, Demarest pushes back firmly on Smith’s racism: “You can’t condemn a whole race because of their color! Good Lord, I never heard anything so childish!” But he wavers when Smith asks about his thinking on intermarriage. Though Demarest isn’t strictly against it and says so, he also admits, “I’ve got strong enough primitive racial feelings in me to make me feel that any crossing of species is a mistake.” Yet he outrages Smith with his assertion that he
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
SIX ...... (Not written.)
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NATHAN GOLDMAN
THE SCOFIELD
NATHAN GOLDMAN
KIP OMOLADE
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Diovadiova Chrome Tia I
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
would permit his sister to marry outside her race. Smith, dismayed, erupts, causing a minor scene in the dining hall. This causes Demarest to regret his meager critique of Smith’s racism: “[Demarest] was made to feel, for a flash, the isolation with which a race punishes its individuals for excessive individualism, for disobeying totem and taboo. Outcast. Pariah…. How idiotic of him, to discuss such a thing, with such a man, in such a place!” When Smith offers an olive branch, Demarest accepts it. For all his desire to escape the confines of his society, to think deeply, beyond and beneath surfaces, Demarest again retreats into the comfort of the simple, the stable, the known. The sound of the ship at sea that has become a part of him pulses through the novel’s final page, now bearing a hyphen that signals its total attachment to him: te-thrum te-thrum. But what has the ocean truly taught him, taught us? Nothing, if it cannot bring us beneath the known, into the other, beyond the narrow limits of our selves.
THE SCOFIELD
CAR MEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH
I have seen evidence of a universe with our same face. This was in dreams sent to me from where contrails are walkways on the galactic serpent. I feel dogs are a drug, and I also believe the death of common goodness is a form of horizontal oppression perpetuated by the very wealthy. Phase One: YouTube comment streams. Phase Two: the death of innocents for infotainment. I believe the self-flagellation-industrial complex squeezes me into a metaphorical training device for literal training of the body and the mind, while they numb the part of my brain where self-love thrives. Zombie: the new Keatsian urn. I believe in the theory that we build countless avatars away from ourselves. We become layers encased in layers. My conspiracy theory is hollowed out of the blankness the screens make of us. I believe that reunification would involve some anti-puritanical touching to start things off. There’s one about an end to buying, but we’re supposed to believe it is panacea to all ills, or we’ll be stoned to death. I believe that if Goddess came back, they’d be sent to Guantanamo. Children are prior to language, the legislators PAGE 110
Being There The small dog flew against scenery wet with its its conjuring. I was dreaming meta, aware of awareness. I was dreaming the duplicity of thinking. The small dog was Platonic in its cuteness, was an echo in history, and I was the avatar of a mind I once was, diligent in her curiosity, the hollow of that mind now dense with memes and laments. I was a container disguised as a poet.
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
Conspiracy Theories
of the world. Their unformed poems are prophecies trampled by words. One more: love is a hologram that disturbs the air because it is matter. They release a gas that kills it in us, though dreams tell me if they keep it away from us, it’s something we should have, something we should take.
ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
Two Poems
CAR MEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH
THE SCOFIELD
Observatorium Years ago, I taught a class in a room that clearly had not been designed to be used as a classroom. I know this because it was barely large enough to hold fifteen desks and also because there was a window through which we could view the class next door, a class that was perhaps three times as large as our own. “Wait,” one of my students—a young woman—said, on the first day of class, “Can they see us?” I assured her that they could not; I’d visited the other classroom—the one we could see—and knew that if you looked at the window from the other side, you would see your own reflection, nothing more, no matter how close you got to the mirror. Every day, we arrived to this tiny classroom and did our best to arrange the desks in a circle—actually, it was more of an oblong rectangle—so that students could see each other as they discussed the stories that they’d written and brought to class to politely nitpick to death, but also to give the impression that while I might be the teacher of record, I was more of a leader, and that all voices and opinions mattered equally. Little attention was given to the window, though I’d often catch students absentmindedly staring at the next class during workshops, and I too might sneak a glance or two after having assigned an in-class writing prompt. One day, as an exercise in observation, and because the window was there and I figured it ought to be put to some use, I asked my students to leave their notebooks on their desks and gather at its edge. “So… what exactly do you want us to do?” one student asked. PAGE 111
“Just watch,” I said, “without talking, for five minutes.” So we approached the window; there, silently, we watched. The students on the other side appeared to be taking a test. A girl folded a stick of gum onto her tongue. Another kid scratched his temple with the eraser on his mechanical pencil. A teacher—a young woman—erased the whiteboard. I watched my students watching. “This is so creepy,” one girl whispered, and when I asked her why, she said, “I don’t know, it just is.” What I wish I’d said, but didn’t, was that maybe it felt uncomfortable to do something together that we normally did in private. It wasn’t the watching of others without them knowing that we found “creepy,” per se—we all watched others without them knowing all the time, and if we thought about it, we might arrive at the conclusion that we’d been doing this kind of watching for as long as we could remember. I could’ve asked my students if anyone had spent time recently with a baby, since a baby was the only type of human who was allowed to stare to her tiny heart’s content at other people without being shamed, at least until she reached an indiscriminate age, and her parents began— out of nowhere—to insist that staring at another human being was rude. I could have posited that the vast majority of my students had surely sat in a public place—a city park, perhaps, or a mall, assuming they spent time in malls anymore, which I doubted—and watched people go by, making up stories about said people based on assumptions about the things other people were wearing: jorts, weaves, mom jeans, nose rings, fox tails that had been clipped to the backs of their pants, whatever. I could have reminded them that they likely watched people all the time— on buses, in restaurants, in libraries, during football games—and that they likely stole glances, especially if the person being watched was incomprehensibly beautiful or,
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
Five Attempts
MATTHEW VOLLMER
ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
MATTHEW VOLLMER
THE SCOFIELD
MATTHEW VOLLMER
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division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past. This timeless insight brings about a deep radical change in the mind.” As it turns out, I didn’t do any of these things. I was too curious about what my students had seen when they looked into the classroom next door, and whether or not someone had noticed something I hadn’t, or if any of them had noticed the things I had also noticed, so I told them to open their notebooks and write down what they had seen during their five minutes of unabated observation, and after letting them scribble for a few minutes—surely not long enough for anybody to finish—I asked for a volunteer to read what they’d written. Then, I waited for someone—anybody—to raise up a hand.
It was too hot to cycle—my phone estimated 100% humidity—but I suited up anyway, donned my jersey, reverse-high-heeled-click-into-the-pedal shoes, gloves, a Camelback, and the bib my wife begs me to let her take my picture in, because she thinks when I flex while wearing it I look like a lame version of an early 20th century strongman, and headed up to Alleghany Street, past the multimillion dollar house whose design—what with its cornices and columns—implies that its owner’s architectural aspirations veer somewhere between “gothic university building” and “federal reserve bank.” I’d just returned from the Blacksburg Farmer’s Market, where the dog and I had met my wife after her Saturday morning run, and where we bought tomatoes and green beans and Thai basil and two frozen chicken breasts vacuum-sealed in plastic but no beef because our regular provider—a little dude with an overbite and a goatee and ratty baseball
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
Hands Up
ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
sometimes even more fascinating, hideously ugly—and that they did so naturally without even thinking about it, until they realized what they’d been doing and stopped, or continued to steal glances, albeit in a more covert manner. I could have attempted to lead a discussion about the differences between American homes and Dutch homes, and what it said about Americans that they were more likely to draw the curtains or blinds in the evenings, whereas the Dutch didn’t even own curtains or blinds, and that their living rooms were stages upon which they proved they had nothing to hide. I could have provided autobiographical examples of my own watching, which would have likely included how, for ten years, we lived across from a house that was visited at least twice, if not three times, by a tiny little man who drove a tiny white pickup truck and carried two tiny dogs beneath each arm, and though we knew that the tiny man’s brother lived in the house, we couldn’t ever understand why the tiny little man visited so often, and so we couldn’t help, when we pulled our curtains aside just enough to see him walk briskly from his truck to the front door, but suspect the worst. I could have shared the idea that one of my friends gave me, years ago, an idea I know that he got from somebody else but can no longer remember who, that we humans are what the universe has grown in order to see itself: 8 billion self-reflexive periscopes. I could have introduced a quote by a person who was a far superior thinker than I, who said, “Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. When man becomes aware of the movement of his own consciousness he will see the division between the thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this
MATTHEW VOLLMER
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cap who wears the same Fahrenheit 451 T-shirt every week and always takes the time to inform interested customers that cooking a steak should begin with “a NASA hot grill”—wasn’t there, so we left, walking up Main Street, past a series of not-yet-opened vendor tents lining the sidewalks for our town’s annual street festival, whose vendors include purveyors of homemade dog treats, photorealistic paintings of Appalachian landscapes, hand forged metal items, candles, jewelry, and various kinds of meats on sticks. I crumpled a Guns Save Lives sticker I’d peeled from a telephone pole into my fist, tossed it into a flowerbed, and thought of what I might say to the guy at the Guns Save Lives tent who stands there for twelve hours a day—Glock holstered proudly to his belt—handing out stickers to passersby, many of whom press the orange, circle-shaped slogans, as if pledging allegiance, over their hearts. I wanted to point out that, as catchy a catchphrase as “Guns Save Lives” might be, there were undoubtedly a number of other things in the world that were better at saving lives, such as doctors, CPR, medicine, bed rest, seatbelts, a Mediterranean diet, clean water, blankets, flare guns, and love. I generated this catalogue as I crested one of our town’s tallest hills, bracing myself for the long, fast descent into a nearby valley, during which I dreamed about having the road to myself, or at least renting a ten mile or so strip of it for an hour, so I could safely wear headphones, as this might help me kill the two-headed, week-long earworm that’s been living in my head, and which repeats—with a relentless urgency—either the name “Lakshmi Singh” or the chorus from “Hands Up” by the band Blood Orange. Lakshmi Singh is a reporter from National Public Radio; the name Lakshmi is the name of the Hindu goddess of wealth and prosperity. “Hands up, get out,” is what police officers often shout at suspects
but which, in the wake of recent deaths of young black men who have been shot by police officers, has become a rallying cry for protesters. Devon Hynes is the name of the person—a young black man from England—behind the musical act Blood Orange, and on the day his latest album dropped, and on which the song “Hands Up” appears, he dedicated the record—a collection of groovy, falsettopowered R&B numbers—to people who had been told that they were “not black enough, too black, too queer, not queer the right way.” I hoped the music could be for me, too, a person who not only wanted to understand what all that might mean, but also to get outside himself, who often took long bike rides on a dangerous two lane road because it led out of the town where he lived, past a bulwark of an imposing mountain that today—what with a gray cloud hovering over its summit—looked vaguely volcanic, not because he had some kind of death wish but simply so that he could escape the banalities of his life for an hour and so that he could say hi to the little church whose sign said “ALL ARE WELCOME,” and hi to the faded metal placard hanging from a pole on the side of a barn that said, “PET Pasteurized Milk” and hi to the cows knee deep in the creek, whose swishing tails called to mind the beasts’ moist, fly-bombarded orifices, how the patient blinking of their long-lashed eyelids is an exercise in learning how to be longsuffering, a trait I’ll admit to having a deficiency; for instance, I stopped twice during my ride to scoop creek water into my face, thought once again to inspect an orange newt whose head had been crushed into the asphalt. I took a picture of the little newt, and after tagging it “#exoticroadkill,” I noticed the video I’d shot on the way to the ATM this morning, before I met my wife at the farmer’s market, the one of a justhatched cicada. The insect—on its back, centimeters from
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its brittle shell—pedaled its legs helplessly. I’d attempted to video my finger as it flipped over the bug, intending to post this video to Instagram, so as to give the world a glimpse of my largesse slash magnanimity, but when I watched it again, I noted that I’d totally screwed up the camera angle, and missed the part where I turned it over, at which point I discovered that the cicada’s left wing had been folded backwards, and didn’t appear to be functional. Although I hoped that it might right itself, I didn’t stay to find out; in the end, I posted only the beginning of the video, where the iridescently green and prominently eyeballed insect, who had waited seventeen years to emerge from the ground where it’d been hibernating, had come up for air, successfully emerged from its shell, only to spin its legs in vain.
lived in a back room closet of my grandparents’ house, and that my aunt knew that I had not played with the doll because Teresa had told her so, and that the doll was so lonely that sometimes, at night, when everyone else was asleep, she slipped outside, to talk to Phillip, a statue in the shape of a naked boy who was perpetually holding onto a tiny pecker from whose tip a bit of black hose extended— ostensibly for use as a fountain, though I’d never seen him employed in this manner. Because I knew that my favorite aunt would have heard about the clowns—it was, after all, international news—and because I hoped she might have some kind of inside scoop, I sent her a text that said, “What’s up with all the clowns?” A few seconds later, she replied, said she didn’t know, and that the whole thing might be made up. What wasn’t made up, however, was the hurricane my aunt was currently watching at a radar map at her best friend’s house on the Isle of Palms; it was headed straight for them. In an attempt—more or less—to be funny, I asked if her friend had a “hurricane closet,” a reference to the “storm closet” that my aunt and cousins would retreat to when my cousins were kids, whenever they received word of impending storms. No, my aunt said, her friend did not have a hurricane closet, nor had any closet in my aunt’s home ever been designated specifically as such, but she did have something she referred to as a “storm box,” which contained a lantern and batteries and a weather radio; during storms my aunt would bring this storm box, along with blankets and pillows and candy and games, into a closet, where she and my cousins would wait for the thunder and the rain to pass them by. As someone who has enjoyed, from time to time, hiding in dark places, I always thought it would be fun to enter a closet during a storm and listen to the weather radio and play cards and eat M&Ms from
Stormbox According to CBS news, clowns have been making random appearances in Greenville, South Carolina, emerging—in one case—from a wooded area behind an apartment complex to whisper and make “strange noises,” flash “green laser lights,” and attempt to lure children, using “large sums of money,” into the woods. Though I did not recognize the name of the apartment complex— Fleetwood Manor—I did recognize the name of the city, which, as it turns out, is where my mother and her siblings were raised, and where all of them, except for my mother, now live, including my favorite aunt, who become my favorite because she did things like throw her long blond hair over her head like Cousin It from the Addams family and let me eat chocolate mousse for breakfast and send me tapes upon which she told me that she was sad to hear that I had not played with her doll Teresa, a three-foot doll who PAGE 114
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one of those huge, “family-sized” bags and see the faces of my cousins lit by lantern light while thunder boomed overhead, but, as it turned out, I never visited my aunt’s house during a thunderstorm or a tornado or, for that matter, severe weather of any kind. Still, I like the idea of having a “storm box”—and although the kind my aunt assembles makes a certain degree of sense, I think I’d prefer to own one that, once opened, could actually create a storm: I imagine lifting the lid, retreating to a safe distance, pressing a button on a remote, and wiry tentacles of lightning shooting out crazily, into the atmosphere, where they would attach themselves to whatever clouds they could find, and tow them together, overhead, and then somehow produce the necessary instability and thus convection required to instigate a storm. Although I’m fairly certain no box like this currently exists, a Swiss company called Meteo Systems claims that their Weather Tec Emitter Systems can charge naturally occurring aerosol particles which then are then “advected” into clouds by convective updraft, thus “influencing” ice particles and “enhancing” rainfall, a system that could be helpful—or so they claim—in arid conditions. Likewise, the Beijing Weather Modification Office, which employs over 37,000 people, claims to have the ability to produce rain by firing rockets loaded with chemicals into the sky, and “seeding clouds” to produce rain, as much as 55 tons of it per year. Of course, it is difficult to say for sure whether or not the rain that subsequently falls after a so-called “cloud seeding” is the result of nature or man, and as pleasant as it may be to imagine rain transforming scorched deserts into lush grasslands, there’s no way to predict what the potential consequences might be, so perhaps it is better not to interfere, and better, in the case of an approaching storm, to seek shelter with the
comfort of a storm box, or to do as my family did when I was younger, and as I do now with my own and only son, which is to find a place outside—a covered porch works best—to stand and observe the unfolding drama, far enough away from the main event to convince yourself that there’s nothing to worry about, but close enough so that, as the rain mists your face, you feel the need for human contact, so you place an arm around your son’s chest, which is itself a kind of storm box, if you allow yourself to think about your son’s body and its capacity to act as a container of sorts and to imagine its internal workings as a kind of endless tumult, what with its ceaseless—at least until the day it ceases—flow of blood, the driving engine of which is of course the boy’s heart, whose rhythmic and steady beat—especially at times like these, when rain-lashed trees sway in wind, and lightning flashes brighten the night—you are grateful to feel against the palm of your hand, as it is no more fathomable than storms, or clowns, or favorite aunts, or artificial rain, or dolls that come alive at night, or the fact that you emerged from nowhere to see it all, and to nowhere will someday— but perhaps not just yet—return.
Of all the animal carcasses I have seen on my bike rides this summer—snakes, skunk, raccoon, opossum, deer, newt, and a disemboweled frog whose uncrushed leg thrust itself out of a bloated mass of guts like a Swamp Thing appendage—there is none whose final moments of living I enjoy imagining less than the turtle. Something about the cracking of its shell and the subsequent crushing of its insides, thus reducing it to a flattened oval on the asphalt, makes my skin crawl. I’ve always liked turtles,
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always liked to watch them shrink into their shells, and thinking of them now brings to mind a cartoon—it may only have ever existed in my mind—from the 1940s that depicted the interior of one of these shells as a posh living room where a green, droopy-eyed fellow—the turtle himself—wearing a robe and slippers relaxed in an easy chair with a pipe and a newspaper, suggesting that the inside of the shell was much bigger than it appeared from the outside, an idea which, of course, would make a flattened turtle carcass all that much more disturbing, since who can say that this is not how a turtle feels, more or less, after he retreats into its home? Thanks to a dude at the local bike shop I frequent—a guy who is often wearing a T-shirt printed with the schemata for Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon—I doubt I’ll ever be able to hear the word “carcass” and not remember that it is the name given to the protective interior layer of a bicycle tire—one that safeguards the tire’s sidewalls, which means that the phrase “I am riding on two carcasses” now often enters my head, unbidden, when I’m cycling, as it did a few days ago, when, as I coasted down the mountain, into the valley, I had a bad feeling; on the other side of the two lane, cars were speeding past, sometimes five at a go, with little maroon pennants whipping on plastic sticks affixed to the driver’s and passenger side windows. Inside, humans, mostly senior citizens, wearing clothes imprinted with university-approved logos, were on their way to the stadium. I couldn’t help but think I’d made the wrong decision by traveling this route on game day; though there were no cars headed out of town, there were a great many headed into it. At some point, I would have to turn around and become subsumed by this traffic, which also meant that I would become something of a problem for the drivers of these vehicles, especially if they approached me
as I was rounding a sharp curve, since, if they wanted to avoid the possibility of a head-on collision, they’d have to slow down significantly, at least until enough space opened up to safely pass. On any other day, I could’ve kept riding in my current direction; game time was approaching, and traffic would eventually die down. But thanks to the generosity of friends who had left town for the weekend and had to get rid of their tickets, I too was headed to the game, a gladiatorial contest about which I cared very little, aside from the fact that the event embodied the very definition of “spectacle”: a kind of organized madness whose conventions were predictable but no less astonishing, thanks to the staggering enormity of the crowd, which, once the familiar riffs of a popular heavy metal song began to play, would soon be jumping up and down and howling inside a stadium that, what with its stonework and castle-like turrets, was truly colossal. So, eventually, I turned around. Knowing that cars would keep coming, I conscientiously kept to the right side of the road, clinging more or less to the white line that separated travelable road from shoulder. A honk—sustained enough to sound indignant—made me flinch, and a red car, an American sedan of indeterminate make, passed me; the driver flipped me the bird. Because nothing sends me into an incandescent rage quicker than a bully behind the wheel of a moving vehicle, I flipped him the bird, too, cursed loudly, and began pedaling furiously. I knew it wasn’t likely, but on the very slight chance that he might have to slow down, or stop, I thought I might catch up. I searched every driveway I passed, even though I knew that the people who lived on this road were less likely than those who used it as a thoroughfare to honk and flip people off; cyclists who glide from plateau to the valley are simply part of the world in which they live, and there
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would be no more sense in flipping off a cyclist than a deer feeding at the road’s edge. I didn’t know what I would say to the guy if I caught up to him, except to ask him, in as self-righteous a timbre I could muster, what in the holy hell he thought he was doing, and why I, as a cyclist exercising his freedom to make use of one of my local thoroughfares, deserved to be honked at, much less given the bird. Already, my mind was generating assumptions about the bird-flipper: he was a meathead, a country boy, a self-congratulatory right-winger, he had a conceal carry permit, thought climate change was a hoax, used to play a little football himself back in high school, dipped tobacco and trashed the spit bottles before his girlfriend could find them, thought it wasn’t possible, if a driver knew what he was doing, to drive recklessly, no matter how fast he was going, didn’t like having to share the road with anybody, much less cyclists, especially if they fancied themselves serious enough to wear those corny-ass getups that made them look like flaming homos, and didn’t much care for homos, flaming or otherwise, in fact would not disagree with the notion that gays could eat shit and die, or that they played a significant part—as did trans people, immigrants, socialists, hippies, druggies, and Arabs—in this nation’s moral and spiritual decay. I couldn’t imagine how gratifying it would feel to tell him off, to get in his face and, surging with adrenaline, yell. Of course, if tensions escalated, I’d be a goner—I am not a fighter, and despite constantly getting into tussles and impromptu wrestling matches at the boarding school I attended long ago, I’d never had enough practice, much less confidence, to become a proficient fighter. I wondered then if maybe the driver of the red car was somehow in charge of this situation, that maybe it hadn’t simply been a random bird flip to somebody who presented a less masculine version of
himself, and that maybe the guy was waiting for me, like those fabled drivers who skulk around at dusk without headlights and who were actually initiates into “Blood” gangs, waiting for cars to flash their lights at them, an action that the driver of the non-headlight-burning car would respond to by following the headlight flasher, with the intent to claim the initiate’s first murder. Maybe the antagonizing of cyclists was something that the driver of the red car got off on, and if one of the riders he flipped off shot him a retaliatory bird, the driver would park his car up ahead, and find a place to lie in wait, hiding behind a tree or a bush, listening for the zip of approaching bike tires, at which point, he would step into the road and swing a crow bar or tire iron at the rider’s head. I imagined glasses shattering, the astonishing burst of pain radiating from the point of impact outward, the skid of flesh against asphalt. I imagined playing dead long enough to hear the squeal of his tires as he pulled away. In such a condition, I wondered if I would be capable of tapping out 911 on the screen of my phone, and despite the blood burbling in my mouth, mumble, “Help.” I would be too scared to touch my face, to know the extent of the damage, knowing that despite whatever reconstructive magic surgeons might work, I would never be the same again. It may not surprise you to learn that this scenario failed to play itself out, and that the driver of the red car did not see me, nor I him, and no doubt I, as an idiot who would have the nerve to ride a bicycle on a road made for cars, am long forgotten, while the driver of the red car will continue to live a life inside my head, the inside of which, like his own, is far too vast to measure, filled with a stadium’s worth of faces he has seen but never known, and ones that, despite his efforts, he will someday forget.
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Maybe it was because I had been re-reading “Emergency” by Denis Johnson, particularly the part where a guy named Terence Weber enters an ER with a knife stuck into his only good eye—his other eye was made of plastic or glass—and out of which he can still, rather miraculously, see, but I felt a pressure that seemed to originate, somewhat painfully, from the back of my left eyeball. This is it, I thought, my sight is finally going. For years, I’d been bragging that, despite the fact that my work required the most careful attention to detail, and made great demands on my eyesight, I didn’t need to wear glasses—I hadn’t worn glasses since I was 11 and misdiagnosed by an optometrist with farsightedness—and if anyone asked if I wore contacts, I’d proudly say no, adding, if I was feeling especially cocky, that the last time I had a physical, a nurse wrote down in a file that I had above average vision. But nobody I bragged to was impressed; they merely shrugged or shook their heads or rolled their eyes, and predicted that the end—at least for my sight—was near, since 42 was the age when your eyes—if they haven’t already have gone—go. I’m 42. This is my 43rd fall. I am, more or less, in the prime of my life. I have good health. I exercise regularly, to clear my head but also because when my phone tells me that I’ve burned 1052 calories, I interpret that as a license to eat whatever I want. I send a check to a bank every month so that my family and I can live in a modestly sized, well-built home with wood floors and crown molding and sturdy doors and windows that open and lock easily. In my fenced backyard, there’s a patio at whose edges I’ve plunged the ends of Tiki torches. My wife loves me, and I her; our son has a big heart, quick feet, and a drive to succeed in school and at play. My walk to town takes me through a field where, this summer,
clover and Queen Ann’s Lace and cornflower bloomed, grasshoppers flicked from plant to plant, and butterflies flapped crazily. I get paid to talk to people about art, and I know, every time, where my next meal is coming from. Although I sometimes worry that a stranger will unleash a semiautomatic weapon and start mowing down anybody within range, I don’t walk the streets wondering whether or not I will be judged by the color of my skin, nor do I have any fear that a cop piloting a low-flying chopper will see me, with my hands up, and say, “That looks like a bad dude, might be on something.” In short, so filled to the brim is my wealth that I can’t help but imagine that there is something lying in wait, just beyond the reaches of what I can perceive; another way of putting it is that it feels, sometimes, as if I have stumbled into the eye of the storm, and this gives me the impression—and of course it must be true—that something will eventually arrive to upset the utter calm and bankable routine of my present days, when I wake up and scroll through my various social media streams, pour myself a cup of coffee, and while my wife makes my son breakfast, walk the dog around the neighborhood, up the golf course hill, where the sun rises above a field of wheatlike grass and pale blue mountains resemble frozen blue waves. Upon my return, I eat breakfast, clean up the dishes, read, write, shower, ride my bike to campus, hold office hours, teach my classes, ride my bike home, pour a cocktail, play a popular song I’ve figured out (thanks to YouTube tutorials) on the piano, connect my phone to a Bluetooth speaker so I have a soundtrack for cooking, eat dinner on a back patio while tossing scraps to the dog, watch my kid try to place shots on a backyard goal into the upper 90, help my wife bring in dishes for cleaning, take the dog for a walk so as to check to see if tonight’s sunset is Instagrammable, hug
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my kid goodnight, watch TV with my wife—last night we watched a Burmese python swallow an alligator, and thanked God we didn’t live in Florida—until we can’t keep our eyes open, then fall asleep, waking to start the whole thing—more or less—all over again the next day. I like to think of my body as being well, but have no way to see inside it, and don’t enjoy going to the doctor, and know that a body that seems more or less healthy can quickly fall into disrepair, as did the body that once belonged to my father-in-law, who a few years ago was carrying barbecue in Styrofoam clamshell boxes into his house when he fell in the carport and hit his head and his wife found him minutes later, dazed and bloodied, and how he went into the hospital, where doctors said he had very little time left to live, because his liver was failing him, and how, when we’d visited him, he was out of it, and how he appeared to be in the throes of one hallucination or another, and would struggle to lift, with trembling hand, an invisible cigarette to his puckering lips and take a drag. What pleasure he derived from this phantom smoke, if any, I cannot say, but the image reminds me that no matter how much I promise to remember these present days, they too will someday dissolve, the memory of them, like the memories of the indigenous people who wandered upon this verdant plateau, and like the white settlers who drove them away, and like the thousands of students who stream here every year to study and party, will be accessible only by God, and if I didn’t live long enough to devolve into raving lunacy, a final darkness will envelop me, after which, I have to admit, I have no way of saying for sure what will happen.
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Aesthetical Approaches to Consciousness I. In the Western mystical tradition—from Augustine’s Confessions to Dostoevski’s Prince Mishkin—a new state of consciousness, regained from a returning trip from extasis, is often materialized in an alegorical mystical text. Thereby, consciousness materializes by turning around in a journey that, in the Christian faith, would end with death and the subsequent appearance in the presence of God. Mystical consciousness implies becoming one with death while refusing to fulfill the desire to die. It’s ouroboric—it interrogates itself about its own ontological status. One of the most famous verses in the Spanish literary tradition—“I die because I do not die,” from Teresa de Ávila’s poem Vivo sin vivir en mí—resumes the paradoxical nature of mystical consciousness. After extasis, she has believed to have travelled beyond the limits of human knowledge, embodying a flesh-changing experience that escapes rationalization. Deeply erotic, the mystical experience is an aesthetic experience as well as a technological one: the retro-necromancy of the rot god that whispers [input] hears [blackening] and goes back [out-put/ ek-stasis].1
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Mystical texts favor the fleshy lexicon of touching and tasting to convey that, in the mystic’s feeling, the returning trip from an altered state of consciousness has left an awareness of altered-state possibilities that cannot be easily communicated through a standard narration, and therefore they should be transmitted by using material metaphors that involve non-declarative memory traces. According to the neuro-philosopher Thomas Metzinger,2 non-declarative experience is available for attention and and sensory-motor control, but not for cognition—so the attempt to put them into words summons a void, and it’s in this void where consciousness swims. David John Roden and Eugene Thacker, among others, locate experiences in which there is a radical gap between perception and conceptualization in a realm of “dark phenomenology” that characterizes life itself: It would seem that the life common to all living beings is ultimately enigmatic and inaccessible to thought, since any given instance of the living (as subject or object) is not life-in-itself, but only one manifestation of life. It seems there is some residual zone of inaccessibility that at once guarantees that there is a life-initself for all instances of the living, while also remaining, in itself, utterly obscure. It is precisely as living subjects, with life given as objects for us as subjects, that we are cut off from, and yet enmeshed within, life in itself.3 When confronted by darkness—inner, cosmological, or abyssal darkness—, humans build a machine. Darkness could only be addressed through speculative aesthetics4 (which involve engineering new domains of experience5).
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From the Mystical Text to the Machine:
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Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half
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In the meanwhile, consciousness remained a philosophical fetish for cognitive neuroscientists (the latter work of John C. Eccles and Fanrcis Crick are good examples), and for the human sciences in general, because it seemed to involve a particularly dynamic set of complex biological arrangements that looked unnecessary for survival. It looked like, as Steven Shaviro recalls, a superfluous luxury, a Bataillean “expenditure without return.” Furthermore, the word “consciousness” itself was regarded as problematic because its wide use to “insert” idealistic principles in the natural sciences—evoking concepts that have been deployed largely in fortifying the comfort of what Wilfred Sellars calls the “manifest image,” the inherited, traditional human self-conception. II. In many speculative fictions involving androids (Ex Machina, Blade Runner, the Alien and Terminator sagas, etc.) there is a recurrent scene in which the protagonist suddenly discovers that some other main character is not a human being, but a robot. Up to that point, the android had been all human to the protagonist—and, by
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the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.7
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This is why consciousness and machines appear so intimately entangled—both are distinctly human modes of exploration6 —that contemporary imagination often confuses them. The irruption of “conscious machines” is one of the most illuminating myths of our epoch just like gods were the major myths during most of the time humans have been on earth. Twentieth-century neuroscience worked on presenting mystical experience as a neurochemical/ neurophysiological disfunction but, as it happens with mental illness, this does not mean that human consciousness has not been enriched by it. The ungraspability of extasis shows that our brains—even the augmented collective cognition system we’re part of—are no match for the Universe. Actually, it’s not unlikely that what we consider reasoning today was initiated thousands of years ago by our ancestors’ exploration of the limits of human sensory-motor systems. For modern literature, early scientific discussions about consciousness helped to give shape to a poetic structure of the self—informed by the writings of William James, Sigmund Freud, and Henri Bergson as much as by Michel de Montaigne, Blaise Pascal, Fiodor Dostoevski, and some of the nineteenth century’s mystic artists such as William Blake—that runs across the work of Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett, among many others. For modernists, writing was a way to let consciousness flow from some— Freudian or not—hidden unconscious, and style was somehow synonymous with that flow:
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extension, to the unadvised viewer. However, once the machinal nature of the interlocutor has been exposed, after we realize that we’ve been fooled by the android’s human appearance and behaviour, the fiction of consciousness is automatically replaced in the viewer’s imagination by the programming fiction. This common narrative “revelation” resource is not just proper to science-fiction, but also popular in the fantastic genre (when the supernatural nature of a character is revealed), horror stories, and in mystical texts. The difference in that particular case is that revelation involves a particular dialectics of consciousness versus programming, which often translates as free will, autonomy and self-control versus determininsm, predictability and calculation. Consciousness, however, has nothing to do with free will. Consciousness differs from programming because the former is a way to deal with the unpredictable—it can’t be reduced to a set of rules, no matter how complex and exhaustive it might be—so we are entitled to mistrust the android’s predictability because it might be a delusive tool hiding human intention (i.e. the secret intentions of its programmer). No matter if the android goes on behaving in a more humane way than humans themselves: it would do it as an imitation game, because it has been programmed by humans to fake humanity. While it lasted, android consciousness was the mask, the persona, the often unintended act itself of fooling humans into believing that it was human. “Human cognition is thoroughly heuristic,” writes R. Scott Bakker, “which is to say, thoroughly dependent on cues reliably correlated to whatever environmental system requires solution.” Bakker follows Nietzsche, Sellars, Rorty, Metzinger, Churchland and others in the scientific/philosophical tradition of eliminative materialism
for which consciousness is a delusion, a fiction, or a side effect of heuristically-processed, ecologically-driven neural activity. For Bakker:
Consciousness is, indeed, a fiction, but eliminative materialism does not seem to fully understand what a fiction is. A fiction is not a solution but an open question; an ongoing hypothesis, a journey—and more specifically a returning trip from the outskirts of our capacities to grasp reality. It involves heuristic rules but it’s never a set of fixed, heritable rules. The adventurous bundle of fixes mentioned by Bakker has not been selected in some past time, but it’s being selected as the environment—which has never been stable or predictable—changes. Moreover, the environment is certainly “dark”, but not a radical “out there” we would need to adapt to. It is an assemblage of recursive feed-forward and feedback loops among all the elements of reality, including human beings. We’re part of the environment, and we change it while it changes us. We have become such an essential part of our environment that we have called our present epoch “Anthopocene.” Consciousness is a fiction, and by being a fiction it’s a paradox, a tale told to guide organisms around cognitive
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we happen to be a certain biological solution to an indeterminate range of ancestral environments, an adventitious bundle of fixes to the kinds of problems that selected our forebears. This means that we are designed to take as much of our environment for granted as possible—to neglect. This means that human cognition, like animal cognition more generally, is profoundly ecological. And this suggests that the efficacy of human cognition depends on its environments.8
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morphospaces (the ensemble of all “cognitive shapes” an organism might be able to adopt across space/time) ranging from the assumption that they know that they know to the rejection of ignoring that they don’t know. But consciousness is also an instrument to explore the limits of that cognitive morphospace and the result of an evolutionary adaptation for recognizing otherness. Life works as a permeable metabolic insulation-from-otherness occurring through membrane exchange. Consciousness, as perceived by the individual, reflects the complexification of otherness-recognition patterns, continuously evolving into an apparently-enclosed semiotic system known as “self.”
thus recognizable and understandable by humans. Much recent philosophical thinking has been so concerned about dismissing human exceptionality that it has approached this problem in two extreme ways: either consciousness does not exist (or it’s an irrelevant side effect of data processing), or it’s a general property of complex systems, so it might emerge as a consequence of computation. Either machines will have to become conscious when their abilities to learn and process reality equal the human ones, or they would never become conscious because consciousness is unnecesary, as Steven Shaviro writes in a commentary of Perter Watts’ novel Blindsight:
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The critique of human exceptionality often overlooks evolutionary-shaped human uniqueness. Consciousness is the consequence of a particular human-environment interaction and, despite being a recent phenomenon in the history of the Universe, it looks like a remarkable evolutionary advantage. Consciousness should be explanable by the same physical laws that (try to) explain any organism-environment interaction: not so different, for instance, from the shape or color-shifting abilities developed by other species. Adaptative advantages are
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The second question often addressed by speculative fictions is: what happens to machines when they acquire (humanoid) consciousness? Not surprisingly, almost all those narrations develop around how conscious machines would interact with humans, and most often they reproduce the delusion scheme. Humans seem to be, one way or another, necessarily fooled by machines—no matter if machines are conscious, autonomous and intentional, or not. Maybe humans are built to be fooled—les non-dupes errent, famously wrote Jacques Lacan—and consciousness represents a practical way to take an evolutionary advantage from being fooled. The hypothesis of consciousness’ emergence in nonbiological media is based on the functionalist assumption that “a mind” would spontaneously appear when a system is complex enough, independently of the components of the system. In this view, consciousness is something that could be acquired—and, by anthropomorphic extrapolation, any consciousness should be similar to human consciousness,
Blindsight suggests…that consciousness is dysfunctional, a “creaking neurological bureaucracy” that is always getting in the way. It does not help us very much in the struggle for survival. Indeed, consciousness imposes heavy costs upon any organism that has it. In times of danger, “advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence”. And even at the best of times, “It wastes energy and processing power, self-obsesses to the point of psychosis”.
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contextual, not general—in this sense they are not transferable to other organisms exactly as they are. Consciousness is an exaptation of neuronal functions, not a byproduct of computation. It’s a performance of the body for a Deleuzian becoming across the limits of the cognitive morphospace. It is a morphing process, thus an aesthetical one. It is not a byproduct of reason or of nonrational experience, but the same possibility of irrational aesthetic experience in an unpredictable environment where machine accuracy fails. Stuart Kauffman9 wrote that an organism is a hypothesis on the environment. In taking already existing phenotypic features and detourning them to new uses, organisms explore what Kauffman calls the “adjacent possible of the actual,” and thereby expand the range of actuality in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways. Organisms are radically contingent, not deployed in probability fields, and all science can do to know their evolutionary dynamics is to describe them afterwords. As Elie Ayache explains:
Both Kauffman and Ayache reckon that probabilistical thinking requires knowing in advance the “sample space” within which all possible outcomes are contained. However, biological and techno-cognitive evolution change the very shape of this space itself. Organisms are improbable, they exist beyond the very category of probability because they don’t just choose among already-existing possibilities, but change, or expand, or even annihilate what is possible. All the unknown and unpredictable possible changes of the sample space comprise what I have been calling the “cognitive morphospace” of an organism. Organisms, as Ayache once wrote about the market, “propose a way of thinking of the future that is no longer mediated by knowledge.” While organisms are hypotheses about the environment, machines are meta-hypotheses—similarly to how, in Ayache’s terms, financial derivatives open the way to derivatives on derivatives, to bets on bets. Machine consciousness, if it ever emerges, would require the overcoming of probabilistical computing in order to navigate futures no longer mediated by their own knowledge. Consciousness would be, at least for humanbuilt machines (or artificial intelligences which may evolve around the human cognitive morphospace), metaconsciousness: an untotalizable, para-deterministic space of knowledge about human knowledge. The problem faced by cognitive neurocomputing is that no one has been yet able to clearly separate “subjectivity” from “objectivity.” It is possible that the boundaries of the scientific method—the same limits that made it so successful in producing performative and reproducible models of reality—might require to set this problem aside. Until now, neither eliminativist pressumptions nor functionalist/neorrationalist proposals
Probability theory and the metaphysical category of possibility are based on the notion of “states of the world” (or possible worlds) […] Contingency is a very general category that is independent of the later division of the world into identifiable states or the recognition of the different possible worlds that the world might be. Metaphysical thought later works contingency into the notion of separable possible states. However, pure and absolute (and initial) contingency only minimally says that the world or that the things could have been different.10 (Emphasis is mine)
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Bogost and Harman both provide aesthetic responses to Nagel’s dilemma. For Bogost’s analogy and Harman’s allusion do not claim to reconcile first-person phenomenological introspection with third-person objective observation and scientific experimentation. If anything, they suggest that such a reconciliation is impossible. Instead, Bogost and Harman offer approaches that are irreducible alike to first person identification and to third person verification. These analogies and allusions are not empirically testable; but they also cannot be determined by means of reason, intuition, or eidetic reduction. Rather, they unfold in an aesthetic dimension: one that is neither scientific nor strictly philosophical, and that is oblique to both subjectivity and objectivity. Such an aesthetic approach is programmatically that of science fiction. (Emphais is mine.) Human and non-human beings belong together in networks across which agency and consciousness are distributed. Maybe the best way to approach the study of consciousness is by first admitting that it’s a peculiar, aesthetic, and erotic way to explore a perpetually unknowable otherness—that it is never there, it can’t be programmed, but can be written. It is precisely its inaccuracy, fictionality, and heuristic character— alternative and complementary to both computation and conceptual normativity—what provides it with the ecological robustness required in a cognitive morphospace
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that, from our viewpoint as humans, is necessarily anthropic but shouldn’t be anthropocentric. ——————————— 1 Anonymous. Depressive Noise Symposium. 2016 2 Metzinger, Thomas. Being No One. The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. The MIT Press, 2003. 3 Thacker, Eugene. “Darrklife: Negation, Nothingness, and the Will-To- Life in Shopenhauer.” Parrhesia 12, 12–27. 2011 4 Shaviro, Steven. Discognition. Repeater, 2016. 5 Mackay, Robin; Pendrell, Luke and Trafford, James. Speculative Aesthetics. Urbanomic, 2014. 6 It is arguable that consciousness might be a distinctly human feature. Consciousness has been attributed to many organisms such as other non-human mammals, cephalopoda or slime molds by several neuroscientists and philosophers. However, a general theory of consciousness (like, for instance, discussing if human consciousness is qualitatively or just quantitatively different from other organisms’ cognitive milieu) is well beyond the scope of this article, so I am specifically referring here to what we commonly understand as “human consciousness.” 7 Woolf , Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume III, 1923–1928. Harvest Books, 1980. 8 Bakker, R. Scott. “Crash Space.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 39: 186–204, 2015 9 Kauffman, Stuart. Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. Basic Books, 2010. 10 Ayache, Elie. The End of Probability. The Best Writing on Mathematics, 213, 2013
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have allowed us to undo the knot. Maybe it was never meant to be undone. As Shaviro says:
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—Beginning without beginning, water without a seam, or sleep without a dream, or dream coterminous with sleep and the sleeper; flux and reflux, coil and moil; participation and concentration compounded, and then resolved again; participation and dispersal, then the subtle or violent catalysis, reorganization, the wave setting off in a new direction, the influence deflected, lapse and relapse, lapse and collapse, but out of the falling the magnificent rearising, out of the scend the pitch, out of the course of the ship the sheer, or the sheer of the ship towards stem and stern, the infinitesimal ship like a tiny luminous dream in the terrible, yes, lethal, yes murderous, sleep of the sea—and yet not in any sense separate, ship from water, dream from sleeper, wave from wave, particle from particle, drop from drop, electron from nucleus, world from world, but all together participating and dispersing, participating and again concentrating, wave-shaped and then plane-shaped, crest-shaped and then trough-shaped, revolving or secretly still, the numbers constant for each element, limited and finite yet part of an infinite series—: Spout, whale! Blow your conch, lost fisherman off the dangerous shores of Ushant! lost pilot casting a soaped lead in the tempest that howls towards the coast of Tralee! Dive through your pearly rainbow, laughing dolphin! Halloo, old scavenger gull! Scream downward towards your divine wrack, cormorant! We are all true brothers in the devilish dance together, whale and Pole Star, the sunken ship and the drowned man’s last dream, the last dream floating godward like a lost sigh from the sea, a
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lost cry from the dark whelmed cabin, where water and carved woodwork, seaweed and rivet, red carpet and the wandering plankton, now and forever dance the divine timeless dance together! —yes, beginning without beginning, wave out of wave, shape out of shapelessness, the remembered out of the forgotten; like stem out of thresh or stern out of thrash, or island out of sunshot mist; the roundness looms out of nothing; and the sound, the bell, the horn, tolls out of silence, wails into silence, lost, lost, lost, lost, lost: and yet not lost at all, but turning ever further through the rings within rings and rings beyond rings of the one and only beginningless and endless dream—; yes, like the Gulf Stream lifting its leviathan snake-length through opposing and reluctant water, water flung against water, sea-thrust hurled against sea-thrust; northward and eastward bearing its long largesse of kelp and wreckage, bladder-wrack and broken crates, grapefruit and sponges, the jellyfish undulant as a transparent digestion in the Sargasso Sea of steamy, vast, fructifying and oh so deliberate rhythm of generative movement—while southward and westward, hugging bleak shores only warmer than itself, the Arctic Stream bells before it under crepitant Northern Lights the great slow flocks of the icebergs, ruminant among dazzling floes of waste and ice, those that heave slowly on the invisible wave, making visible the wave as a movement of white under blue; snow, snow, snow, under the scream of the sea-eagle and the blue-eyed seal—; water revolving swift spokes through water, current coiling through current, sleep and dream interchangeably immersed as they, the one visible and transparent in the other, the long timeless translucent flow of memory under the glass of eternity—:
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Take now your cross-bearings, O mariner! Level your small bright sextant at the last pale folding away of the headland, the last winking of the last eye of light! This is the departure. this coast will perhaps be seen no more. Seen no more? Departure from what? Nantucket Lightship? Bishop’s Rock? The Straits of Belle Isle, or the fantastic goblin-haunted fiords that lead, or mislead, to some ghostly Northwest Passage? But who ever truly departs or ever for that matter truly arrives? Does the solar system, the great fiery organon of the universe itself, ever depart or arrive? And how then shall a mere ship or a mere human make landfall, and indeed of what land? Something we fetch with ourselves, like the pilgrim bringing home with him his bright phial of dust from Bethlehem, or a tear-bottle of water from the Ganges or Jordan? Do we put down forever automatically before us like a carpet the unalterable world that we are and have? Or if not unalterable, never wholly old or wholly new? Two bells. Tin-tin. And then repeated, farther off, more faintly. Tin-tin. Something has been sighted off the port bow? Or it is one o’clock in the morning? One in the afternoon? The dog-watch? The middle watch? One o’clock in the dark of the sea. And into the sleep of each of the twelve sleepers who lie in the narrow bunks, longitudinal or transverse, of Cabin 144, the sad little sound interpolates itself as a part of his dream, a tiny signal forward or backward. Or so, at any rate, in the mind of one who lies awake, the two sounds precipitate the thought; and raising himself on one cramped elbow and looking toward the porthole, past the double tiers of motionless figures, he thinks again of the singular determinism that rules the ideas of those who wake. What does each of them bring to the bellsound, whether it is the watchman’s sighting of a ship or
the chronometrical and astronomical measure of time? For himself, he has at once, plainly visible through and around, over and under, the small dim scene before him, a vaster and more appalling vision: the universe is a clock, the stars, suns, moons, comets, nebulae, are the burning jewels of that majestic invisible mechanism, into which, perhaps, the great horologist is this very minute gazing fixedly through his inquisitorial eye-piece. Is it going as it should? Is it gaining? Or losing? And the jewels on which this divine and dreadful mystery so marvelously pivots, restraining and directing the obscure compulsion, the primum mobile, are they perhaps beginning to show signs of wear? The great Gaze looks long and steadily into the dark central recesses of the Movement, the enormous spaces of the nothing in which time moves, and yet always seems to remain in the same place, as if it were somehow consumed by its own motion, motion sinking into itself; but does the Gaze observe also, as it were at the very center of all this catastrophic and instantaneous eternity, another, and very different gaze, an outward-looking gaze, the gaze of the one who lies awake in Cabin 144 on a ship, this ship, at sea? A gaze which calmly, quite calmly, and certainly without despair, turns itself upward and outward to the other, and even beyond it, to the outermost, the Question? But the smaller gaze at this point checks itself, draws back with a motion as of inhibited vanity or pride: for it at once sees that this vision too is only an infinitesimal and fleeting particle, a dustmote, projected no doubt on the downward and inward rays of that other. The pride, if pride there may be, must be at most a participatory pride. The smaller vision, if as true, and even perhaps as necessary, is merely perhaps a coefficient of the greater; a tiny island-awareness in the ever-conscious, ever-luminous
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chart of the great cartographer’s dream. Yes, the large and the small, simply; and if there is to be obeisance in one direction, should there not be obeisance in the other as well—? Are they not all in one ship together? In this dim cabin together? Exactly (as D. now remembers) like the small intensely vivid wood-engraving of a lantern-lit cabin interior; everything aslant in the wildness of the storm; the lamp alone perpendicular, as it hangs from the ceiling over the spread map on the table; that cabin in which the four doomed mariners of Falconer’s “Shipwreck” contemplate, in the small symbols of print on a chart, the inevitability of their death by drowning on the marble rocks of a lee shore. The relationship, then—(said D. to himself)—was that of the finder of the camera to the landscape which it “finds,” and in which it is found: the two are in fact participants of one scene. And is the finder the “I” as well as the eye? the one who sees, the one who knows, the one who is consciousness? But here again all was divisible, all was relative. The frightened boy who slept fitfully in the bunk below, kept awake now by D.’s own snoring and now by that of the mad Swiss in the far corner, and who, when he did sleep, awoke from a repeated nightmare of bombs falling, falling at approaching terrible intervals, crumpcrump-crumpcrump-crumpcrump up the dark Irish Sea towards Liverpool, like a man stomping with heavy steps towards a murder, towards Calder, towards Hoylake, along the sandy edge of the links, then at the last minute veering away, and down the Mersey to Paradise Street, he too had his finder, and in it drew at this very moment his own strong draught of the infinite. And yes, the mad Swiss, too; for D. saw now that cropped head, propped on the pillow on the upper berth in the far corner, glared furiously, wide awake, at the blurred eye of the toplight above him: as last night, and the night before, lying there fully dressed,
his anger still unappeased. The frightened boy (half English, half American) feared the return to Liverpool, feared the raw ruins, the dreadful changes that lay in wait for him like spectres, and that already, in his dreams, reached wraithlike fingers towards his heart; feared but was also fascinated: he must go and see. But the mad Swiss, why was he so angry, so plunged into his own chaos, merely because he must return to his sister’s villa on a crag perched above Airolo, with its vines, its grapes, its wines? Surely this was better than to go on painting those outlandish houses in Alberta, day after day, week after week, year after year, with no or little knowledge of its people, its language, its customs? Fifteen years, and even now his conversation in English consisted almost entirely of “god-damn, god-damn, god-damn!” over and over again, viciously, venomously, repeated, and interspersed with crude fragments of what might once have been a yodel. But why the anger, when, after all, this voyage, for him, was a return to home, his household gods, his own soul’s landscape? Why? Yes, each had his own, and each, like himself, must intermittently, all his life, return thither—for did one ever truly escape, ever—(after a certain point)—change it? The frightened boy even in his recurring nightmare was already again busily searching, and shaping as he searched, the half-familiar, half-strange landmarks and boundaries. The hated school on Cape Cod, where his foreignness had made him unpopular with the native children, and his diction had been derided, the remembered streets at Wallasey, ferries hooting on the yellow sunstreaked Mersey, double-decker trams trundling along the waterfront—already in these images he was prophesying his own ambiguous landscape, the landscape in which he would always be uncertain.
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Expressing Consciousness in the Written Word, Pt. II And indeed there will be time To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— (They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”) My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin— (They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”) Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume? —T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” “Why didn’t you try?” Why not? Why was she not going to try? Eve would, she was sure in her place…. Why not grimace and be very “bright” and PAGE 129
“animated” until the end of the term and then go and stay with the Bergmanns for two months and be as charming as she could? … Her heart sank…. She imagined a house, everyone kind and blond and smiling. Emma’s big tall brother smiling and joking and liking her. She would laugh and pretend and flirt like the Pooles and make up to him—and it would be lovely for a little while. Then she would offend someone. She would offend everyone but Emma—and get tired and cross and lose her temper. Stare at them all as they said the things everybody said, the things she hated; and she would sit glowering, and suddenly refuse to allow the women to be familiar with her…. She tried to see the brother more clearly. She looked at the screen. The Bergmanns’ house would be full of German furniture…. At the end of a week every bit of it would reproach her. She tried to imagine him without the house and the family, not talking or joking or pretending…alone and sad…despising his family…needing her. He loved forests and music. He had a great strong solid voice and was strong and sure about everything and she need never worry any more. “Seit ich ihn gesehen Glaub’ ich blind zu sein.” There would be a garden and German springs and summers and sunsets and strong kind arms and a shoulder. She would grow so happy. No one would recognise her as the same person. She would wear a band of turquoise-blue velvet ribbon round her hair and look at the mountains…. No good. She could never get out to that. Never. She could not pretend long enough. Everything would be at an end long before there was any chance of her turning into a happy German woman. Certainly with a German man she would be angry at once. She thought of the men she had seen—in the
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streets, in cafes and gardens, the masters in the school, photographs in the girls’ albums. They had all offended her at once. Something in their bearing and manner…. Blind and impudent…. She thought of the interview she had witnessed between Ulrica and her cousin—the cousin coming up from the estate in Erfurth, arriving in a carriage, Fraulein’s manner, her smiles and hints; Ulrica standing in the saal in her sprigged saffron muslin dress curtseying…with bent head, the cousin’s condescending laughing voice. It would never do for her to go into a German home. She must not say anything about the chance of going to the Bergmanns’—even to Eve. —Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs
I’m too hot and the heat loves me. My head is still going round and round and the salt is sweet from the little clean tide washed canals. They are dreams these Breton women. They are gulls. French. Not frogs. Not hawks. Gulls. Seapeople with wings. How can I ever go further than this? —H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Asphodel
Havre. This was Havre, Havre. Havre. Small boys looking like thin anaemic little girls dressed up in tight short hideous unbecoming little trousers, with curls (some of them) shouting after them, “Engl-eesh, Engl-eeesh. Beefsteak.” “O Clara they think we’re Engl-eesh.” The little boys had persisted and shouted until Hermione had had to turn, stick her tongue out at them, thank them, Messieurs for their hearty welcome to their beautiful patrie where in America they were all taught French children were so polite vous savez till they disappeared and the market was a mass of wine coloured carnations, what were they? “O yes, thank you, Madame Dupont, oeillets, we want some bunches.” “O God, stick your face in them Fayne Rabb. Where have they come from? Wine, wine, they smell of wine, sopsin-wine.” “O God Clara look, look they’re wet and smell them and how cheap, nothing, all these for only (work it out) about ten cents” and Madame Dupont was scolding “you are always so—extravagant. It is extravagant reckless Americans like you Mademoiselle Hermione who spoil our people.” Sops in wine. I shall go mad with it. Yes, I know
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Demarest was amused. A wild little person, he thought: a baggage. Small, impertinent, pretty, with large dark eyes far apart and challenging, and the full mouth a little somber. An actress perhaps. As he went out of the saloon into the corridor he heard her laughing—a fine bold trill, by George! She was losing no time…. Crucifixion. Why do we all want to be crucified, to fling ourselves into the very heart of the flame? Empedocles on Etna. A moment of incandescent suffering. To suffer intensely is to live intensely, to be intensely conscious…. Passionate, perverse refusal to give up the unattainable—dashing ourselves blindly against the immortal wall. “I will be crucified! Here are my hands! Drive nails through them—sharp blows!”… He looked at his face in the cabin mirror, under the caged electric light, and marveled that such madness could go on behind so impassive a forehead, eyes so profoundly serene. He looked long into his own eyes, so unfathomable, as if in an effort to understand himself, and—through his own transparent elusiveness—the world. What was it he wanted? What was it that was driving him back? What was this singular mechanism in him that wanted so deliberately, so consciously, to break itself? A strange, a rich, a deep personality he had—it baffled and fascinated him. Everybody of course, was like this,—depth beyond depth, a universe chorally singing, incalculable, obeying tremendous laws, chemical or divine, of which it was able to give its own consciousness not the faintest inkling….
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He brushed the dark hair of this universe. He looked into its tranquil black-pooled eyes. Its mouth was humorous and bitter. And this universe would go out and talk inanely to other universes—talking only with some strange minute fraction of its identity, like a vast sea leaving on the shore, for all mention of itself, a single white pebble, meaningless. A universe that contained everything—all things—yet said only one word: “I.” A music, an infinite symphony, beautifully and majestically conducting itself there in the darkness, but remaining forever unread and unheard. “Do you like cigarettes?” says one universe to another. “No, I prefer a pipe,” says the second/ “And what is truth?” says one universe to another. “Truth is pleasure,” answers the second. Silence. The two universes smoke cigarettes and pipes…. And this universe sees another, far off, unattainable, and desires passionately to approach it, to crash into it—why? To be consumed in the conflagration, to lose its identity? … Ah—thought Demarest, drawing on his sweater—if we stopped to consider, before any individual, his infinite richness and complexity, could we be anything but idolatrous—even of a fool? He looked again into his reflected eyes, but now with a long melancholy, a mingling of pity and contempt. Know thyself! That was the best joke ever perpetuated. A steaming universe of germ cells, a maelstrom of animal forces, of which he himself, his personality, was only the collective gleam. A hurricane of maggots which answered to the name of Demarest. —Conrad Aiken, Blue Voyage
the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far, far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defenceless against a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the window. They needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q—R—. Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the urn, and proceeded. “Then R…” He braced himself. He clenched himself. Qualities that would have saved a ship’s company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water—endurance and justice, foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then—what is R? A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard people saying—he was a failure—that R was beyond him. He would never reach R. On to R, once more. R— Qualities that in a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the Polar region would have made him the leader, the guide, the counsellor, whose temper, neither sanguine nor despondent, surveys with equanimity what is to be and faces it, came to his help again. R— The lizard’s eye flickered once more. The veins on his forehead bulged. The geranium in the urn became startlingly visible and, displayed among its leaves, he could
It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say,
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see, without wishing it, that old, that obvious distinction between the two classes of men; on the one hand the steady goers of superhuman strength who, plodding and persevering, repeat the whole alphabet in order, twentysix letters in all, from start to finish; on the other the gifted, the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the letters together in one flash—the way of genius. —Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
things, it’s the air among the things, that’s enough, that I seek, like it, no, not like it, like me, in my own way, what am I saying, after my fashion, that I seek, what do I seek now, what it is, it must be that, it can only be that, what it is, what it can be, what what can be, what I seek, no, what I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, they say I seek what it is I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, what it can possibly be, and where it can possibly come from, since all is silent here, and the walls thick, and how I manage, without feeling an ear on me, or a head, or a body, or a soul, how I manage, to do what, how I manage, it’s not clear, dear dear, you say it’s not clear, something is wanting to make it clear, I’ll seek, what is wanting, to make everything clear, I’m always seeking something, it’s tiring in the end, and it’s only the beginning. —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I’m something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast, and that I seek, like such a beast, with my little strength, such a beast, with nothing of its species left but fear and fury, no, the fury is past, nothing but fear, nothing of all its due but fear centupled, fear of its shadow, no, blind from birth, of sound then, if you like, we’ll have that, one must have something, it’s a pity, but there it is, fear of sound, fear of sounds, the sounds of beasts, the sounds of men, sounds in the daytime and sounds at night, that’s enough, fear of sounds all sounds, more or less, more or less fear, all sounds, there’s only one, continuous, day and night, what is it, it’s steps coming and going, it’s voices speaking for a moment, it’s bodies groping their way, it’s the air, it’s
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Ah…. That’s better!…. Now, Gustl, collect your thoughts, make your final arrangements! Tomorrow morning will be the end…. Tomorrow morning at seven…seven o’clock is a beautiful hour. Haha!—At eight o’clock when school begins, all will be over…. Kopetzky won’t be able to teach—he’ll be too broken up…. But maybe he’ll know nothing about it yet. No need to hear about it…. They didn’t find Max Lippay until the afternoon, and it was in the morning that he had shot himself, and not a soul heard it…. But why bother about whether Kopetzky will teach school tomorrow…. Ha!—Well, then, at seven o’clock—Yes…. Well, what next? … Nothing more to consider. I’ll shoot myself in my room and then—basta! The funeral will be Monday…. I know one man who’ll enjoy it: the lawyer. The duel can’t take place on account of the suicide of one of the combatants…. Wonder what they’ll say at
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If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heavens. No more damned magic. You hate me and I hate you. We’ll see who hates best. But first, first I will destroy your hatred. Now. My hate is colder, stronger, and you’ll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have nothing. I did it too. I saw the hate go out of her eyes. I forced it out. And with the hate her beauty. She was only a ghost. A ghost in the grey daylight. Nothing left but hopelessness. Say die and I will die. Say die and watch me die. —Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
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There was no use asking himself what he was doing there at that time and with that group, those dear friends strangers still yesterday and tomorrow, people who were but a fleeting episode in place and time. Babs, Ronalds, Ossip, Jelly Roll, Akhnaton: what difference did it make? The same shadows from the same green candles. A binge at its highest moment. Doubtful vodka, terribly strong. If he could have conceived of an extrapolation of all this, understanding the Club, understanding the Cold Wagon Blues, understanding La Maga’s love, understanding every thread that would become unraveled from the cuff of things and reach down to his fingers, every puppet and every puppeteer, like an epiphany; understanding then, not as smbols of some other unattainable reality perhaps, but as agents of potency (such language, such lack of decorum), just like lines of flight along a track that he ought to follow at this very moment, disentangling himself from the Eskimo pelt which was so delightfully warm and so scented and so Eskimo that it was frightening, getting down to the level of things, down, down in a solo flight, down to the corner, the corner all by itself, Max’s café, Max all by himself, the streetlight on Rue de Bellechase where…where alone. And maybe from that moment on. —Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch The summer waned. When September came, Eugene quit his work and, after a luxurious day or two in Norfolk, started homeward. But, at Richmond, where there was a wait of three hours between trains, he changed his plans suddenly and went to a good hotel. He was touched with pride and victory. In his pockets he had $130 that he had won hardily by his own toil.
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Mannheimers?—Well, he won’t make much of it…. But his wife, his pretty, blond…. She did not seem disinclined…. Oh, yes, I would have had a chance with her if I’d only pulled myself together a little…. Yes, with her it might have been something altogether different from that broad Steffi…. But the thing is, you can’t be lazy: it’s a question of courting in the proper way, sending flowers, making reasonable conversation…not: meet me tomorrow afternoon at the barracks!…. Yes, a decent woman like her—that might have been something. The captain’s wife at Przemsyl wasn’t respectable…. I could swear that Lubitzsky and Wermutek…and the shabby substitute— they all had her, too…. But Mannheimer’s wife…. Yes, that would have put me in a different social circle. That might almost have made me a different man—she might have given me more polish—or have given me more respect for myself—But always those easy types…and I began so young—I was only a boy that time on my first vacation when I was home with my parents in Graz….Riedl was also along…she was Bohemian…. Must have been twice as old as I—came home only the following morning. —Arthur Schnitzler, Lieutenant Gustl (Trans. Richard L. Simon and Caroline Wellberyfa)
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KIP OMOLADE
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Diovadiova Chrome Karyn II
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He had lived alone, he had known pain and hunger, he had survived. The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart. He thrilled to the glory of the secret life. The fear of the crowd, a distrust and hatred of group life, a horor of all bonds that tied him to the terrible family of the earth, called up again the vast Utopia of his loneliness. To go alone, as he had gone, into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth—it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that. He thought of his own family with fear, almost with hatred. My God! Am I never to be free? he thought. What have I done to deserve this slavery? Suppose—suppose I were in China, or in Africa, or at the South Pole. I should always be afraid of his dying while I was away. (He twisted his neck as he thought of it.) And how they would rub it in to me if I were not there! Enjoying yourself in China (they would say) while your father was dying. Unnatural son! Yes, but curse them! Why should I be there? Can they not die alone? Alone! O God, is there no freedom on this earth? —Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
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“Life Isn’t A Short Story,” a little known work of Conrad Aiken’s, ought to be among the first documents in the demonstration materails of all people who profess to “teach” the writing of fiction. It is about a story writer who “had run out of ideas; he had used them all; he was feeling as empty as a bath-tub and as blue as an oyster.” This drudge of imagination is having his breakfast—sitting in the window of a white-tiled restaurant, staring rather vacantly out into a busy city street, suddenly catching sight of a woman who might, if she were fatter, serve as the physical model for the woman in a story he is thinking about: for he isn’t, after all, it seems, quite empty. The story. The seed of the story had been planted in his mind as, passing through the lounge of a theatre, he overheard phrases of a greeting—As I live and breathe and In the flesh. I am alive and You are alive, these phrases translated themselves in his mind, and that, alive and not alive, was, he saw, the difference between life and a short story, even as he thought of his character, Gladys, a plump, vulgar creature who cannot tolerate such clichés, so plump and vulgar, any more readily than she can tolerate her simple and unrefined husband. So, sitting in the restaurant window, he imagines the proper town for Gladys to live in (Fitchburg, Massachusetts seems right), imagines her apartment, imagines her story, which is the story of her intolerable marriage. Meanwhile, a horse-drawn laundry wagon has pulled up in front of the window, and story writer’s eye rests on the dejected horse, beaten by rain, while the story, through all its grimy fatalities, grows in
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his presumably disengaged, vacantly staring mind. When it reaches climax, we know not only that the whole, dreary life of the street outside, bleary and rain-soaked, has been assimilated into the atmosphere of the life of Gladys and her husband, but we know also, as the writer does not know either, that Gladys’s poor old drone of a husband is the horse that pulls the laundry wagon. With their identification, the story is finished. Then we follow the horse up the street. “What did he think about, as he plodded from one dirty restaurant to another, one hotel to another, carrying towels? Probably nothing at all; certainly no such sentimental thing as a green meadow, nor anything so ridiculous as a story about living and breathing. It was enough, even if one was a slave, to live and breathe. For life after all, isn’t a short story.” Life isn’t a short story because life, that spavined hack, keeps going on its rounds and never meets a climax; but a short story is life because, no matter where it may go all through its middle, it begins in life and it ends there, and if we look twice, we will see that its middle, too, is the street outside the window. A story by Conrad Aiken, in the characteristically fine middle, seems to rear up on its hind legs and throw its head into white clouds among patterned stars, or it seems to race down into abysses of peculiar horror and shrill alarm, but all the time, poor creature (and poor creatures that make it up), it is out there in the street, stodgy in the rain. At the same time, there was the awful commonplaceness of the two phrases, the cheapness of them, the vulgarity—they were as old as the hills, and as worn; aeons of weather snd aeons of handshake lay upon them; one witnessed, in the mere hering of them, innumerable surprised
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The Life in the Fiction
MARK SCHORER
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Puzzling, indeed, since it all starts in the lounge of the Orpheum, with a couple of plump blondes, and then at once loops out into space and history and mystery and the perfect terror of human experience as it plods through its generic hysteria, most of the time not knowing where it is, whether in the rainy street or in the stifled scream, when it is always in both. This is a story by Conrad Aiken: a horror all wrapped in an actuality, a fantasy all rooted and real all rooted in real detail. “For the most part, this companion seemed to be nothing but a voice and a wing—an enormous jagged black wind, soft and drooping like a bat’s; he had noticed veins in it.” He had noticed veins in it. If one defined the rhetorical mystery of this sentence, of this juxtaposition of the mad anatomy and the graphic physiology, one would probably have defined the effect of Mr. Aiken’s fiction. Just as the structure of these stories characteristically develops in the effort of the material to assert a reality beyond or below its mundane shape, so their drama characteristically arises within an individual mind as it struggles to break over the edge of its own limitations. This whole considerable body of fiction, long and
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short, has, for this reason, a central core of formal as of psychological concern, an implicit, primary unity that marks it over and over as the product of this imagination and no other, as the work of this author. In one story, at least, the implicit becomes the explicit. “Gehenna” has as its protagonist an urban Everyman (“Smith, or Jones, or Robinson, or whatever his name happened to be”) who reflects at the outset, “How easily…our little world can go to pieces! And incidentally, of course, the great world…” and then contemplates the imminence in the materials of consciousness of that disorganization of reality that is madness. But is that disorganization any less real than organization? In an instant it will be as if I had stepped through this bright cobweb of appearance on which I walk with such apparent security, and plunged into a chaos of my own; for that chaos will be as intimately and recognizably my own, with its Smith-like disorder, as the present world is my own, with its Smith-like order. Here will be all the appurtenances of my life, every like and dislike, every longing or revulsion, from the smallest to the greatest; all the umbrellas—so to speak—of my life, all the canceled postage stamps and burnt matches, the clipped fingernails, love letters calendars, and sunrises; but all of them interchanged and become (by change) endowed with demonic power. At a step, I shall have fallen into a profound and perhaps termless Gehenna which will be everywhere nothing but Smith. Only to the name of Smith will the umbrellawinged demons of this chaos answer.
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greetings, innumerable material congratulations on the mere fact of being still alive. The human race seemed to extend itself backwards through them, in time, as along a road—if one pursued the thought one came eventually to a vision of two small apes peering at each other round the cheeks of a coconut and making a startled noise that sounded like “yoicks!” Or else, one simply saw, in the void, one star passing another, with no vocal interchange at all, nothing but a mutual exacerbation of heat…. It was very puzzling.
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…step by step, just as I pace to and fro across the four rugs from Persia which cover the floor; item by item I would tear down the majestic fiction which is at present my self and the world, and item by item build up another. Exactly as one can stare at a word until it becomes meaningless, I can begin to stare at the world. In his bathroom, he stares at a doorknob, and through a kind of self-hypnosis, he allows the process to get under way, only, at the last moment, through another effort of that will, to rip himself out of this new prison that his consciousness is building. He goes to bed and dreams of “a small glass aquarium, a square, of the sort in which goldfish are kept.” I observe with surprise that there is water in one half of it but not in the other and in spite of the fact that there is no partition, this water holds itself upright in its own half of the tank leaving the other half empty. More curious than this, however is the marine organism which lies at the bottom of the water, It looks, at first glance, like a loaf of bread. But when I lean down to examine it closely, I see that it is alive, that it is sentient, and that it is trying to move. One end of it lies very close to that point at which the water ends and the air begins; and now I realize the poor thing is trying, and trying desperately, to get into the
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air. Moreover, I see that this advancing surface is as if sliced off and raw; it is horribly sensitive; and suddenly, appalled, I realize that the whole thing is simply consciousness. It is trying to escape from the medium out of which it is created. If only it could manage this—! But I know that it never will; it has already reached with its agonized sentience, as far as it can; it stretches itself forward, with minute and pathetic convulsions, but in vain’ and suddenly I am so horrified at the notion of a consciousness which is pure suffering that I wake up…. The clocks are striking two. It is at this margin, at this edge where, without barrier, the water of daily human experience stands against the wall of air that is outside it—it is at this margin that Conrad Aiken’s fiction is written. And thus it asks its great questions: “Was the North Star hung at the world’s masthead only in order that on a certain day in a certain year an ugly wallpaper should be glued on the walls of this room?” Human tragedy exists because of the suffering that must inhere in a consciousness that can ask the question at all. It persists, with life itself, because the clocks in the city do strike, and with their reverberations, draw the invisible circles around that consciousness, saving it for its order, yes, but in the very act of saving it, re-committing it to an area within which questions must be asked. We have, I think, no other body of fiction like this— so centrally coherent, its very coherence derived from a contemplation of the intransigence of that incoherence that lies scattered on all sides of us, and above and below.
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This possibility of the altered kaleidoscope of being and the further possibility of altering that kaleidoscope by an act of will fascinates Smith—or Jones or Robinson. “Perhaps I could achieve this gradually,” he thinks,
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A History of the Stream of Consciousness Technique
“The isolation of individuals ought not to deceive us: something flows on underneath individuals.” —Friedrich Nietzsche While “stream of consciousness” has become a household term in the field of literary criticism, and still works as an apt descriptor of a certain strain of twentieth-century experimental fiction, a cursory sweep through the dynamic range of literature to which it has been applied is enough to complicate any thoroughgoing definition of the term. Broadly speaking, it describes a kind of fiction that experiments with narrative form, language, and even typography, in order to better express a character’s internal flow of thoughts and sensations. It is related to the “interior monologue”—a formulation first applied by the Russian critic Chernyshevsky, in 1856, in an article on the works of Tolstoy, and later defined by French writer, Valéry Larbaud, as “an expression of the most intimate thoughts, the most spontaneous, which seem to form themselves unconsciously and to precede organised discourse.” Much ink has been spilt in rather useless squabbles about which term contains the other. Elsewhere, artificial boundaries have been drawn in the effort to ascribe precise formal characteristics to each. In reality, the PAGE 138
two terms emerged in different circumstances, yet overlap in meaning. There are two principle modes for the radical expression of subjectivity proper to stream of consciousness narration: that of direct monologue, often in the first person and presented with little authorial mediation and no assumed listener; and free indirect discourse, which is written in the third person, and darts back and forth between the events of the world and the character’s thoughts in response. There are however, many hybridized forms and each author develops a unique idiom; so I would suggest that rigid distinctions are not useful in defining the genre. Dorrit Cohn, in his masterful study Transparent Minds, clarifies many of the banal terminological arguments by enumerating the plurality of operative modes that have been used for this manner of writing, which he calls “spectral stenography.” Either way, stream of consciousness fiction is that which prioritizes the inner voices of the character over authorial interventions, and eschews conventions of literary language in order to achieve psychological realism—long gone is the omniscient narrator of the naturalist novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Robert Humphrey noted in Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel, another problem that arises with the term is that it is “doubly metaphorical; that is, the word ‘consciousness’ as well as the word ‘stream’ is figurative, hence, both are less precise and less stable.” Consequently, it can be applied to a large range of novels based on wildly varying models of “consciousness,” using a wide array of differing techniques to create a sense of the “stream”—a tension that will lead to a wholesale rejection of its first official literary application. Discomfort with the label is not unexpected, especially since, as Oliver Sacks pointed out in his New York Times article, “In the River
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Shifting and Transitory Windows:
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——— The term was first applied to literature by May Sinclair in 1918, in a review in The Egoist of Dorothy Richardson’s monumental thirteen-volume Pilgrimage (1915–1917): “In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on.” Although in many ways Sinclair’s review does locate certain signal features of these novels, Richardson took serious umbrage with the “stream of consciousness” characterisation, stating that “amongst the company of useful labels devised to meet the exigencies of literary criticism it stands alone, isolated by its perfect imbecility.” Her problem with it, only slightly exaggerated in this quotation, is the same problem described above by Humphrey. It imposes a single model of consciousness, the flowing, ever-changing stream, when, as she later noted: definitions of consciousness vary from school to school and are necessarily as incomplete as definitions of life. And this, superficially regarded, does seem to exhibit a sort of stream-line. But his consciousness sits stiller than tree…its central core, luminous point…though more or less PAGE 139
continuously expanding from birth to maturity, remains stable, one with itself, throughout life. While the figure of the stream of consciousness may ostensibly correspond with her technique, it does not correspond with her philosophical model of character development, which she regards as expansion from a core rather than perpetual evanescence, chiming thus with Samuel Beckett’s position in his monograph on Proust that “the only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth.” She even proposed that “fountain of consciousness” might be a more palatable image, suggesting, as it does, a spring from some unchanging source. In any case, this is the point at which the phrase enters literary discourse. If Sinclair’s review was the first to apply it to the emerging form of the modernist psychological novel, the term stream of consciousness had been floating around in its own right as a metaphor in the field of psychology for years. Its coinage is commonly attributed to William James, who, in The Principles of Psychology (1890), in a famous chapter entitled “The Stream of Thought” said: There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought. If we speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their shades.
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of Consciousness,” neuroscientists still have no complete explanation of what constitutes consciousness or the extent to which it resembles a stream. It even seems possible that the stream is an illusory holistic effect resulting from the concatenation of basically discrete moments, as was initially proposed by David Hume. However, as a provisional term, a catchall for the convenience of readers and critics alike, it has remained adequately descriptive.
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technique. As Fritz Senn has noted, we find this maxim reformulated in Ulysses by Leopold Bloom, who reflects that “it’s always flowing in a stream, never the same… life is a stream.” Later in Finnegans Wake, the River Liffey refigured as Anna Livia Plurabelle comes to represent a stream of universal consciousness, as Joyce writes “totum tute fluvii modo mundo fluere” (“the whole world flows serenely, like a river”). In Becket’s novella The Expelled, the tramp narrator asks a policeman “would you like me, I said, without thinking for a single moment of Heraclitus, to get down in the gutter?” These examples also serve to highlight a concern common to the stream of consciousness novel: the reflexive meditation on the process of consciousness itself. We see this developed admirably in the novels of Conrad Aiken. William James’ brother, Henry, can also be seen as a theorist of consciousness, at least with respect to its figuration in fiction. While his prose may to be too formally conventional to be put directly under the banner of stream of consciousness, the psychological realism at play, especially in works like The Turn of the Screw, certainly approaches it. In his popular essay “The Art of Fiction,” he writes: Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particular in its issue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative—much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius—it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of air into revelations.
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The call for a new language to describe the vagaries of the flow of thought would appear to jell well with the present day notion of what the stream of consciousness novel achieves. However, it is interesting that he specifically targets the state of phraseology, syntax, and vocal inflection as being inadequate for the expression of the flow of thought, since these are the precise aspects of discourse that stream of consciousness novelists will go on to experiment with. Further, James did not actually coin the metaphor. The psychologist Alexander Bain, in The Senses and the Intellect (1855), a work with which James was no doubt familiar, described the holistic phenomena of consciousness thus: “The concurrence of sensations in one common ‘stream of consciousness’—on the same cerebral highway— enables those of different senses to be associated as readily as the sensations of the same sense.” This usage of the term has been largely ignored but it is obviously getting at much the same thing. Nonetheless, James’ model of consciousness as a system undergoing continuous change was something of a novelty. Along with the new theories of subjectivity posited by Pierre Janet, Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud; it certainly helped to form the intellectual backdrop for the interior turn in the novel. Elsewhere in his “Stream of Thought” chapter, James refers to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus’ famous dictum that “One can never step into the same river twice” to describe the ceaseless flow of thoughts. He states, with a flourish that would make Proust weep, “however we might in ordinary conversation speak of getting the same sensation again, we never in strict theoretic accuracy could do so.” This fragment of ancient philosophy would later be evoked by both James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, names virtually synonymous with the stream of consciousness
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Consciousness here is well represented spatially, but not temporally—the analogy of the stream would seem to do both—although the stirrings of temporal flux can be discerned in the idea of the conversion of “pulses of air”. By tracing the usage of the term interior monologue, it’s possible to go back even further. Humphrey defines interior monologue as: “the technique used in fiction for representing the psychic content and processes of a character, partly or entirely unuttered, just as the processes exist at various levels of conscious control before they are formulated for deliberate speech.” Gleb Struve, in his essay “Monologue Intérieur: The Origins of the Formula and the First Statement of its Possibilities,”2 writes:
formalized—even anticipating aspects of postmodernist fiction. All the same, one of Struve’s noted figures from the early history of the representation of consciousness in fiction and philosophy—the writer, philosopher, and encyclopaedist, Denis Diderot—did make some especially insightful observations. In his Elements of Physiology, he wrote with extraordinary beauty that “we are instruments endowed with sensibility and memory; our senses are so many keys that are struck by surrounding nature and that often strike themselves.” Not only does this image of the psyche anticipate the later synoptic theories of consciousness of Bain and James, it also mirrors the process evoked in stream of consciousness fiction: the nexus between memory, imagination and phenomenological sense perception. The keys being struck by the outside world correlate with the “sense impressionism” at play in stream of consciousness novels and the keys “striking themselves” correlate to the operations of memory and fantasy weaving the past and future into the present. The key passage in Elements of Physiology for the discussion at hand comes with this image of the mind as a book:
In one form or another, to one extent or another, inner monologue has certainly been used in literature for a long time. The names of Diderot, Sterne, and Defoe have all been mentioned in this connection. Some germs of inner monologue have even been found in medieval literature. Its use in modern times is, however, something clearly different and closely connected with the growing “psychologization of the novel.” I would suggest that this “psychologization” he describes is the characteristic that distinguishes the interior monologue, in its earlier manifestations, from modern stream of consciousness writing—the latter having leveraged the new psychological theories emerging around the turn of the twentieth century. The other difference lies in the fact that, earlier examples used the technique inconsistently, though Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) certainly explores the possibility of space with this form of literary experimentation before any of it was
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In order to explain the mechanism of memory we have to treat the soft substance of the brain as a mass of sensitive and living wax, which can take on all sorts of shapes, losing none of those it received, and ceaselessly receiving new ones which it retains. There is the book. But where is the reader? The reader is the book itself. For it is a sensing, living, speaking book, which communicates by means of sounds and gestures the order of its sensations; and how does it read itself? By sensing what it is, and displaying it by means of sounds.
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Tolstoy is interested in observing how an emotion, arisen spontaneously from a given situation or impression, and succumbing to the influence of memories and the effect of combinations supplied by imagination, merges into other emotions, returns again to its starting point and wanders on and on along the whole chain of memories; how a thought, born of a primary sensation, is carried on and on, fusing dreams with actual sensations, and anticipations of the future with reflections about the present. Once again we see a preoccupation with the different temporal factors that form consciousness—how the influence of “the whole chain of memories” and the “anticipation of the future” are both necessary in a description of a character’s sensations at any given moment in time. The focus on the point of an emotion’s emergence resonates with later explanations of monologue intérieur. Thus the Russian psychological novel, the works
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of Doestoyevsky and Turgenev included, can rightly be said to represent a forerunner of stream of consciousness fiction. ——— The earliest example of a continuous, unmediated discourse with the self appears in Edouard Dujardin’s Les lauriers son coupés (The Laurels are Cut, translated by Stuart Gilbert in 1938 as We’ ll to the Woods No More). Originally published in 1887, in serial form, in the magazine Revue Independante, this book would go on to be acknowledged as having an important influence on Joyce’s writing of Ulysses. Dujardin was involved with the writers of the Symbolist movement, such as Rémy de Gourmont, Paul Valéry and Stephen Mallarmé, who were exploring the possibilities of combining prose and poetry. Mallarmé, in the introduction to his typographically frenzied prosepoem “Un coup de des n’abolira pas du hasard,” extolled the virtues of “the naked use of thought.” Their work is also haunted by the psychological preoccupations of the decadent novel, the most prominent example being Husymans’ À Rebours. A further influence is found in Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues—notably “Andrea del Sarto,” “The Bishop Orders his Tomb,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” and “Caliban Upon Setebos.” Finally, along with the theatrical techniques of the aside and the soliloquy (the plays of Racine and Shakespeare’s Hamlet were important for Dujardin, who was also a playwright), the deeply psychological libretti of Richard Wagner also had a significant influence on Les lauriers sont coupés. After the recognition of the unique position of his novel by Joyce and Larbaud led to a resurgence in his popularity, Dujardin himself felt
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The mind thus conceived, as a book that reads and writes itself, presents an image entirely appropriate to this sort of fiction. The stream of consciousness technique attempts to communicate this “order of sensations,” displaying it within a narrative frame. What the author tries to do is to capture these acts of reading and writing the self. Later in his essay, Struve discusses the fact that the “inner monologue formula” was, as previously mentioned, first applied in 1856 by Russian critic Chernyshevsky, in reference to the psychological realism of Tolstoy’s works. He quotes a passage from Chernyshevsky which does seem remarkably prescient:
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compelled to write an essay on the monologue intérieur, in which he claims: “In the pure state, the Wagnerian motif is an isolated phrase which always includes an emotional meaning, but which is not linked logically to those which preceded it or those which follow from it, and it’s here that the interior monologue proceeds.” This leitmotif technique would later be taken up by Schnitzler and Joyce. Dujardin’s novel is often dismissed by critics as dull and uninspired, but it does contain some exhilarating passages. The narrator is a naïve young man named Henry Prince who is obsessively preoccupied with Lea, a young actress who is, it seems, only interested in his money. The concentration of narrative focus on a relatively short span of time would prove to be immensely influential. The quotidian detail—Prince pondering his social engagements, reflecting on Parisian cultural life, enjoying a meal—is later recognizable in Leopold Bloom’s activities in Ulysses. A passage where Prince sifts through his love letters to Lea, the reader effectively reading along with him, bears resemblance to Leopold and Molly’s intense reminiscences about their own relationship. The musical influence on the novel is also quite striking. At the end, Prince cycles all the events of the day through his memory, in the manner of a ritornello. One scene, wherein he is walking to Lea’s house and hears a song in the street, is described in dazzling prose:
alternated, calm, of a very sweet anguish. The illustration of the effect of music on a character’s thoughts, and in particular the interpellation of the two in the writing, will later resurface in the “Sirens” chapter of Ulysses. Dujardin’s claim in a letter to Vittorio Pica, dated April 21, 1888, draws attention to further concerns that will be taken up by Joyce:
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This mention of stylistic modulation within chapters, paragraphs, and words, paves the way for the structural considerations that will preoccupy Joyce in his writing of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as a quick glance at the Linati schema for Ulysses makes immediately apparent. The efforts of both Valéry Larbaud and Dujardin assured that the monologue intérieur would continue to have a rich life in France.3 However, Dujardin’s essay-afterthe-fact is problematically dissonant with what he actually achieved in Les lauriers, and seems to better describe Joyce’s writing than his own. His main motivation is to prove he was the absolute first to use the technique. Either way, it remains an important document in the history of stream of consciousness fiction, and provides a useful definition of interior monologue as being “in the order of poetry, without a listener and not uttered…through
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The calm of a voice which is born under a calm landscape, in a calm love, and the very content desire of a voice being born; and the voice responding, equivalent and higher, upward, quiet and thin, ascending in desire; and again it rises; the growth of desire; under the always naïve site and in these naïve hearts, the monotonous ascent,
the life of the soul is a continuous entanglement of lyric and prose; the novel which would like to tell the life of the soul will be balanced incessantly between poetic exaltation and the ordinary matter of quotidian life. The gain of romanticism was the union of the comic and the tragic; we are aiming for, and not merely by a juxtaposition of varied chapters but within the same paragraph and even phrase, that of the rise and fall of the soul.
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which a character expresses his most intimate thought, that which is closest to the unconscious, before any logical organization—that it to say in its nascent state—by means of direct phrases reduced to a syntactical minimum.” As indicated, the other reason for the renewed focus on interiority at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, was the development of new theories of human subjectivity. In the wake of what Foucault, in the The Order of Things, described as the Enlightenment’s invention of man as an epistemological category, new models of the self began to proliferate. Henri Bergson famously said that “the major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the substance of the mind.” It is hardly a coincidence then, that the next successful application of the interior monologue was in Arthur Schnitzler’s Lieutenant Gustl (1901). Schnitzler emerged from the same milieu as Freud—the decadent world of turn-of-the-century Vienna. Freud’s important contribution to this form of literature was the idea that we are not entirely in control of ourselves, but are governed by unconscious, conflicting desires. In a letter to Schnitzler on May 4, 1922, Freud wrote:
the polarity of sex and death. Schnitzler was aware of Dujardin’s novel. In a letter to Georges Brandes dated June 11, 1901, he writes that the form of Lieutenant Gustl was “first suggested to me in a story of Dujardin’s entitled Les lauriers sont coupés. Only this author did not find the right material for his form.” Schnitzler had been experimenting with similar techniques in earlier short works, notably “Erbschaft” and “Der Andere”, but it was really with Lieutenant Gustl that he became confident in its usage. Here the reader is presented with a narrator who is a rather nasty Lieutenant in the Austrian army—deeply misogynistic and anti-Semitic. At the start of the novel he is insulted by a baker as he leaves a concert. He spends the rest of the night, his pride wounded, planning to kill himself, until the next morning when he discovers—with great joy—that the baker has died of a stroke. Use of the inner monologue reveals the contradictions and obsessions of Gustl’s interior life, and the irony that behind the rigorously disciplined exterior of the solider lies a maelstrom of conflicting thoughts. He reflects that, “I feel as if I were forever telling myself a story.” Schnitzler also engages the leitmotif as a device to chart Gustl’s preoccupations: his thoughts return to his current mistress, the insult, his family, the duel with a lawyer he is supposed to have at 4pm the next day and so on. A literal manifestation occurs in the morning when, groggily wandering the streets of Vienna, he hears a snatch of music from the previous night: “Where have I heard that melody before? Holy God! Last night! It’s the melody from the oratorio!” There is however, in the end, essentially no character development. After learning of the death of the baker, Gustl reverts once again to being a macho buffoon as he turns his thoughts to the upcoming duel: “Just wait my boy, I’m in wonderful form…I’ll knock you
I shall make you a confession…I have been struggling with the question of why I have never in all these years, made an effort to meet you…I think I have avoided you out of a hint of fear of finding my own double…. When I read one of your beautiful works I seem to encounter again and again, behind the poetic fiction, the very presumption, interests and conclusions so well known to me from my own thoughts…. Your ability to be deeply moved by the truths of the unconscious, the recurrence of your thoughts to
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Remarkably, there is something resembling a zoetrope in Swann’s Way, namely the “magic lantern” kept by the narrator’s bedside as a child, a feature which has been the subject of much discussion: Someone had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window. This “shifting and transitory window” comes to represent the narrator’s own consciousness, a metaphor for its operation. As Howard Moss notes, in his book Proust’s Magic Lantern, “[besides the lantern itself] Proust uses two other methods to demonstrate the relativity of time to perception: direct statements about it, and indirect shifts in the structure of the novel itself…” Deleuze and Guattari in their book on Proust, contend that Recherche is not really about memory, but about the process of writing. The narrator needs to come to terms with his relationship with the past in order to proceed to write about it. If we allow that it is not the events of the past that are on display, but the consciousness of the narrator in exploring them, Proust’s work can be allowed a more prominent place in the history of stream of consciousness literature. Certainly, the structural concerns of his novel would go on to have an enduring influence.
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to smithereens.” Schnitzler employs the same sophisticated dashing around between future and past as Dujardin. This pattern is consistent with Freud’s Studies on Hysteria—a text that Schnitzler read—in which he states that “Causation can work backward as well as forward…events may gain traumatic significance by deferred action or retroaction, action working in reverse sequence to create meaning that did not previously exist.” The other relevant psychoanalytic principle here is that of free association. In fact, Robert Humphrey contends that “all stream of consciousness fiction is greatly dependent on the principles of free association,” elaborating that: “Three factors control the association: first the memory, which is its basis; second, the senses, which guide it; and third, the imagination, which determines its elasticity.” Here again is this tripartite structure woven into one: memory as past, sense impressions as present (the actual), and the imagination as future (the possible). Schnitzler would go on to write another novel in the same style, Fräulein Elsa (1924). The stream of consciousness technique continued to be in employed in Germany, particularly in Hermann Broch’s novels The Death of Virgil and The Sleepwalkers, and in the works of Robert Musil and Arno Schmidt. Finally, Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time (1913–27) might not quite seem to fit into the bracket of early stream of consciousness fiction, concerned as it is with the past rather than the immediate flow of thought. Yet, it does contain many musings on the nature of consciousness and was enormously influential on other writers in the genre, in particular Virginia Woolf. William James, in his psychological description of the stream of consciousness, questions whether the experience of continuity might be an illusion analogous to the zoetrope.
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Returning once more to Dorothy Richardson, we’ve noted that her work marks the point at which interior monologue first entered English language literature, even if she rejected the specific terminology that was applied. She was, like Dujardin, greatly influenced by the Symbolists and attempted to infuse her prose with poetic qualities in order to better portray the life of the mind. Pilgrimage charts the development of a single character, Miriam, on her path to becoming a renowned writer (something that unfortunately never happened to Richardson in her lifetime). In this sense, she can be fruitfully compared to the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, concerned as he is with making his mark on the world of letters, despite his multitudinous digressions into memory. In fact, the metaphor of flow and streaming does crop up a number of times in her series—take for instance, this passage from the first volume, Pointed Roofs, in which Miriam has just awoken from a pleasant dream and finds the sensations lapping into the waking world: She felt that her short sleep must have been perfect, that it had carried her down and down into the heart of tranquillity where she still lay awake, and drinking as if at a source. Cool streams seemed to be flowing in her brain, through her heart, through every vein, her breath was like a live cool stream flowing through her. In keeping with other stream of consciousness authors, Richardson clearly sees the personality as an extension in time. This unchanging part of the personality is comparable to the Freudian unconscious, Freud
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having said in the Interpretation of Dreams that, “In the unconsciousness, nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten.” Woolf was very impressed by Pilgrimage, and credited Richardson with having developed “a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender.” This concern with the writing of femininity will be echoed in Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva’s later theorisation of écriture feminine. The beginnings of Joyce’s experimentation with narrative techniques to represent consciousness can be seen in his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The earlier sections which take place when the protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, is still a child, exhibit a rather abstract sense impressionism. As the novel continues, Stephen’s awareness grows from this initial stage of nebulous sensations, alters through various stages of self-development, and culminates with an epiphanic realization that inspires him to become a writer. Joyce was clearly influenced by the German Bildungsroman here, but the modularity of style, altering as appropriate to the developmental stage of the character, was an almost entirely new element. Although it is written in third person, free–indirect discourse, all of the action takes place in the echo chamber of Stephen’s mind: “nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him”. The initial draft of the text, now published as Stephen Hero, doesn’t actually show this technique, so the reader is able to chart the ways in which Joyce implemented it. As Dorrit Cohn describes Portrait, “the text weaves in and out of Stephen’s mind without perceptible transitions, fusing outer reality with inner reality, gestures with thoughts, facts with reflections.” Consider this passage:
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———
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The narration is totally enmeshed with the thoughts of the character. The repetition of “soft liquid joy” as a refrain at the beginning of the paragraphs, echoed in expressions like “soft peace” and “soft long vowels,” illustrates a similar preoccupation with musicality and the leitmotif as that encountered in Dujardin and Schnitzler. Note that Joyce does many things here which would commonly be regarded as bad style. The so-called “overuse of modifiers,” the omnipresent bugbear of today’s creative writing industry, which was also a trite golden rule at the time, is totally ignored—Joyce gleefully over-qualifies every utterance in order to better capture flights of consciousness and attain the level of psychological realism he is seeking. It’s not easy to determine where Joyce’s model of psychological development comes from, for he was certainly no fan of Freud (cf. the derisive “jung and easily freudened” gag in Finnegans Wake). The confessional mode of St. Augustine probably played a part here. In an
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illuminating essay, entitled “A Portrait of the Artist” that was rejected from Dana magazine all the way back in 1904, Joyce wrote: The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait for, so capricious are we, that we cannot or will not conceive the past in any other than its memorial aspect. Yet the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only. The vision here of the individual’s present as a mere phase inscribed in a larger process is telling. Again there is the necessity of considering how the past feeds into the present. As Bergson writes in Matter and Memory, the “pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth all sensation is already memory.” Joyce always considered the question of the relation between writing and time. In Ulysses, the imperative is to “hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.” Ulysses itself constitutes a veritable cornucopia of influential forms of stream of consciousness narrative—the most famous, of course, being the prolonged interior monologue of Molly Bloom in the final “Penelope” chapter. However, the multi-voiced “Wandering Rocks” chapter, which moves freely between the streams of consciousness of a host of characters, probably provided the form for Woolf’s The Waves and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying; whereas an effective means of externalizing of the depth of the respective psychologies of two characters, is demonstrated in the “Circe” chapter, in which Stephen and Leopold imbibe hallucinogenic absinthe.
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A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory and he felt in his heart the soft peace of silent spaces of fading tenuous sky above the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying through the sea-dusk over the flowing waters. A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft long vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal, and soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come forth from his heart like a bird from the turret, quietly and swiftly.
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deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life.” This struggle to maintain individuality amidst the noise and busyness of city life required a coeval form of expression. Rilke’s narrator, Malte, declares that he is “learning to see” and observes that: everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of…. What’s the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I’m changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it’s obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can’t possibly write to strangers. Thus the alienation of the metropolis prompts a turn inward, and a newfound recognition of changes in subjectivity. In her essay “Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf raised a notable rallying cry for the stream of consciousness narrative: “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.” Many of her own novels exhibit features of this technique. Mrs Dalloway (1925), follows a “day in the life” of a protagonist in much the same way as Les lauriers, Lieutenant Gustl and Ulysses do; while To the Lighthouse (1927) describes the modulation of a consciousness orbiting around the leitmotif of the lighthouse. It is however, in The Waves that her most
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With Finnegans Wake, Joyce takes on the world of dreams and universal history, insisting that: “One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wide-awake language, cut-and-dry grammar and go-ahead plot.” Here stream of consciousness is elaborated via even more experimental language, and the condensation of whole fields of meaning into single mutant phrases and portmanteau words. In his essay on Finnegans Wake, “Dante…Bruno. Vico…Joyce,” Beckett contends that “here form is content and content is form,” and that Joyce’s “writing is not about something…it is that something itself.” As Jacques Lacan demonstrates in his seminars collected in Le Sinthome, with Finnegans Wake, Joyce eschews the normal reader/writer communicative relationship by taking a third person position in relation to his own flow of thoughts while writing the text. The reader observes the act of writing itself, the germinal point where meaning is construed. Joyce’s influence on the stream of consciousness technique is incalculable and can be traced in nearly all subsequent experimental writing concerned with treating consciousness directly. The emergence of the city novel marks another important development of the history of the form. Besides Ulysses, the prime examples of this genre include Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1913), John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925), and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)— all of which make use of the stream of consciousness technique to varying degrees. It seems as if the isolation of the individual in the new urban environment demanded a new means of capturing internal feelings. It may be useful to consider the opening of Georg Simmel’s essay, “The Metropolis and Modern Life,” where he contends: “The
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In The Waves, Virginia Woolf—who made all of her life and work a passage, a becoming, a kind of becoming between ages, sexes, elements and kingdoms—intermingles several characters— Bernard, Neville, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda, Suzanne, and Percival. But each of these characters, with his or her name, its individuality, designates a multiplicity (for examples, Bernard and the school of fish). Each is simultaneously in this multiplicity and at its edge, and crosses over into the others. This polyphonic quality allows for the cross-fertilisation of the thought streams of all the members of the group. The exposition of each of the individual personalities is intensified by their juxtaposition. As the character Dora complains, “I hate all the details of the individual life. But I am fixed here to listen”. Each chapter is preceded by a mediation of various aspects of waves, which become symbols of the ebb and flow of the protagonists’ respective consciousnesses. Many of William Faulkner’s novels also belong to this tradition but it is in the The Sound and the Fury (1929) that his experiments are the most startling. The title comes from a passage in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “it is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” The first chapter of the book is a monologue by Benji, a mentally impaired adult-child who constantly dips into the past in interruptive passages demarcated with the use of italics. The complex relationship with time is not a philosophical experiment but an expression of the
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character’s unique condition. His thoughts are marked by extreme indeterminacy—a difficulty working out what is happening to him. “I wasn’t crying, but I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t crying, but the ground wasn’t still, and then I was crying. The ground kept sloping up and the cows ran up the hill.” This lack of access to the world, his own body, and the linear flow of time are modelled seamlessly: the minutiae of these indeterminacies could perhaps only be expressed with a stream of consciousness approach. ——— Turning to Beckett’s fiction, we see what might be interpreted as the representation of pure consciousness without any of the framing accoutrements of the traditional novel. Some of his texts are entirely interior— sustained monologues depicting characters who are at some sort of remove from the world. The only narrative perspective offered is that of the characters’ own voices: authorial meditation slips away completely. The progression of Beckett’s trilogy, Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnameable (1953), is accompanied by increasing syntactical looseness and, on the part of the characters, a deeper and deeper withdrawal from the world into a self that becomes less and less stable. From the barely keeping it together Molloy, to the rapidly unravelling Moran, to the dying Malone, to the dead or perhaps never-having-existed Mahood, this cavalcade of increasingly amorphous characters forms a Dantesque descent into a psychological underworld—a “journey” that would not be possible with straightforward narrated prose. The character of Molloy is lost amidst a torrent of fragmented memories. He flits between them, never allowing them to coalesce into a narrative that could tell
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interesting innovations lie. Deleuze and Guattari were especially taken by the expression of mulitiplicity in this novel, summarizing it thus:
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But for a long time now I have been hearing things confusedly. There I go again. What I mean is possibly this, that the noises of the world, so various in themselves and which I used to be so clever at distinguishing from one another, had been dinning at me for so long always these are old noises, as gradually to have merged into a single noise, so that all I heard was one vast continuous buzzing. The volume of sound perceived remained no doubt the same, I had simply lost the faculty of decomposing it. The noises of nature, of making and even my own, were all jumbled together in one and these became unbridled gibberish. By the time we reach Mahood in The Unnameable, there is simply a voice speaking in a totally undefined
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place. Alarmingly, he seems to be both aware and dismissive of all the other M–characters that came before him in Beckett’s fiction: All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone. But I just said I have spoken of me, am speaking of me. I don’t care a curse what I just said. It is now I shall speak of me. But when he tries to speak of this “I,” he realizes that he’s not quite sure who that is…“I of whom I know nothing.” This is consciousness reduced to a bare minimum, with nothing to speak about. Mahood does not receive sense impressions, but rather tries—and fails—to simulate them with language. He is cut off from the circuitry of phenomena. All that remains is for him to speak, which does not appear to be much comfort in any case. The inability to record the events of the world satisfactorily was, at one point, a major criticism of the interior monologue; perhaps that was the reason so many authors opted for free indirect discourse instead. As far as Beckett was concerned, this was a useful operative mode for the expression of a profound ontological uncertainty about the status of consciousness in the world. In France at least, Beckett is strongly associated with the nouveau roman movement, comprised of writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simone, Marguerite Duras and Michel Butor. Many of these authors employ the stream of consciousness technique in their work. However, the writer who applied herself most diligently to the form was Nathalie Sarraute. Her book Tropisms is a collection
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him anything about his current situation: “These things, what things, come from where, made of what? And it says that here nothing stirs, has here stirred, will here stir, except myself, who do not stir either, when I am there, but see and am seen…” He struggles to locate himself in time and space, an affliction that will continue to beset Malone and Mahood to an even greater extent. What differentiates these monologues from previous stream of consciousness writing is the purposeful failure to achieve a conscious present—something that had previously been the aim. Flights of memory, fantasy and repression were used as tools to achieve that end; whereas here they serve to make the character’s position more ambiguous. Beckett’s Malone, lying in his bed and waiting to die, retreats into his own mind, having been left with nothing else to do. However, even this space becomes incoherent, plagued by noise:
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of very short pieces written in a fashion that does not resemble much of what came before or after it. She defined these tropisms (a term taken from biology meaning the instantaneous reaction to a stimulus) as:
projections of other people in the second person. In fact, Gustl also often refers to himself in the third person, a reflection of his pomposity. Woolf frequently had her characters pose themselves questions. In the identity vortex of Finnegans Wake, characters frequently blur into each other and change names. However, Sarraute was really the first to use this technique with such technical precision. In doing so it becomes possible to chart the affects that others have on us, the way in which we introject imaginary versions of them into our minds. Carlos Fuentes’ novel The Death of Artemio Cruz, in which the title character’s stream of consciousness is conjugated according to the Freudian schema: the ego is the ‘I’, the accusatory superego the ‘you’ and the id the ‘he’, offers a similar example of internalised grammatical persons.
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——— In conclusion, it is clear that the advent of the stream of consciousness mode marked a major paradigm shift in the history of the novel. Impacted by nineteenth century psychological theory and concurrent stylistic developments in prose-poetry, it provided a means for philosophical ideas regarding the composition of the mind to be enacted in fiction, and allowed narrative prose to reach heights of lyricism never seen before. The form is still being employed to this day; Eimear MacBride’s successful The Lesser Bohemians is a recent example. The evolution of new formal approaches for tackling the heady questions of consciousness and phenomenology will probably continue. In Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (2001), neuroscientists Edelman and Tononi argue that recent research regarding the serialisation of consciousness shows that “Being is a process, not a thing, consciousness is
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This notion of hewing close to the point at which thoughts emerge is similar to other critical definitions of the stream of consciousness—the “nascent state” was mentioned verbatim in Dujardin’s definition. The idea of getting “beneath the words we speak”, a state before selfconscious articulation is also familiar. In Sarraute’s prose the personal pronoun is often shifted, even though the monologue is still emanating from the same character, harking again back to Dujardin’s essay in which he stated that “in the monologue, the second and third person are really a disguised first person”. Consider this example: “Now she was grown, little fish grow big, yes, indeed!, time passes past, oh! it’s once you’re past twenty that they years begin to fly by, faster and faster, isn’t that so? They think that too?” Such complex shifts in register occurred before this point. For example, in Les lauriers and Lieutenant Gustl, where the protagonists often speak to themselves or
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movements, of which we are hardly cognizant, [that] slip through us on the frontiers of consciousness in the form of undefinable, extremely rapid sensations. They hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak and the feelings we manifest, all of which we are aware of experiencing, and are able to define. They seemed, and still seem to me to constitute the secret source of our existence, in what might be called its nascent state.
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——————————— 1 It has been argued (weakly) that this and only this is what is meant by the term “interior monologue,” as in Lawrence Bowling’s “What is the Stream of Consciousness Technique.” Such reductively stylistic discussions ignore both the difference contexts in which “stream of consciousness” and “interior monologue” emerged and the fact that both terms have haphazardly been applied to first person monologues and third person free indirect discourse. 2 Gleb Struve, “Monologue Intérieur: The Origins of the Formula and the First Statement of its Possibilities,” PMLA, Vol. 69, No. 5 (December 1954), pp. 1101–1111 3 Prominent later French proponents would include Andre Gide in Paludes (1855), Valery Larbaud himself in Amants, heureux amants (1923) and Mon plus secret conseil (1927), Oulipo writer Raymond Queneau in Les derniers jours (1935), Louise René des Forêts in Le Bavard (1946), the work of the nouveau romanciers, in particular Nathalie Sarraute with Martereau (1953), Jean Cayrol’s Les corps étrangers (1964), Albert Cohen’s Belle du Seigneur (1968) and Paul Edmond’s La danse du fumiste (1979). Many of these works have been ignored in Anglophone discussions of stream of consciousness and remain untranslated.
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This Consciousness That is Aware This Consciousness that is aware Of Neighbors and the Sun Will be the one aware of Death And that itself alone Is traversing the interval Experience between And most profound experiment Appointed unto Men— How adequate unto itself Its properties shall be Itself unto itself and none Shall make discovery. Adventure most unto itself The Soul condemned to be— Attended by a single Hound Its own identity.
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both continuous and continually changing. Conscious states typically flow seamlessly and maintain a high degree of coherence over time.” In in many respects, stream of consciousness fiction seems to have already captured this experience. What is certain is that a literary approach that accounts for both the consistencies and disjunctions of thought will always be desired, and the potential possibilities for further experimentation seem inexhaustible.
EMILY DICKINSON
ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
THOMAS MURPHY
THE SCOFIELD
The words he uttered were no longer understandable, apparently, although they seemed clear enough to him. —Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung / The Metamorphosis You’ve had yourself stolen, haven’t you? There is someone who looks exactly like you, isn’t there? —Kim So-un, “The Disowned Student,” The Story Bag: A Collection of Korean Folktales It is now known that a fetus dreams. Infants make memories, memories not accessible to the older mind, but perhaps to other systems of the body, older systems than our frontal lobe and other parts of our brain that developed later in our evolution.
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____________________. We were breast-fed and bonded. Did you know that fetuses have a developed sense of smell? And, as soon as three days after birth, newborns are able to recognize their own mother’s amniotic fluid. The indelibility of the scent of maternal milk follows soon after—at two weeks old, a baby can distinguish her mother’s breast milk from that of another. Though we humans often give less attention to our sense of smell than we do to other senses (sight, sound, touch), for babies—and perhaps all of us at all stages of our lives—it is primary. For at least the first two months of life, a baby prefers the unmistakable scent of her own mother to any other odor. We were born in or around May of 19__. Unknown are our birth date or our name. Slipperiness of a shared time. One is an object, easily laundered and transferred. Relocated and reassigned. Physically safe, perhaps, and fed and sheltered, but without one’s first materials and self and home: one’s mother, one’s ur-body.
Dreams occur during REM sleep, which, according to Dr. Charles P. Pollak, director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital, is “an evolutionarily old type of sleep that occurs at all life stages, including infancy, and even before infancy, in fetal life.”
A few months after our birth, on August 15, 1974, Park Chung-hee, the military dictator of South Korea, who had declared himself “president for life,” was the target of an assassination attempt by Mun Se-gwang. This violent incident resulted in the death-by-gunfire of Park’s wife, Yuk Young-soo, and a high school student who was part of a choir performing at the ceremony.
We cannot find our original family is unknown to us. No access to stories about our fetal life, or to the body of the mother who was the creator, protector, and nurturer of that our life. We were with her Her until we were about
Our country, a people with a continuous history of over five thousand years, has been left divided since the end of the Korean War, that peninsula-wide trauma that resulted in tens of thousands of children being made available
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
“Exactly Like You” from Unbearable Splendor
SUN YUNG SHIN
ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
SUN YUNG SHIN
THE SCOFIELD
Perhaps our father and mother were people from the north, refugees to the south, ultimately trapped below the thirtyeighth parallel. Perhaps they were married but we were the fourth child, one too many. Perhaps our mother was raped by a taxi driver. Perhaps our parents were involved in an extramarital affair and could not be together. Perhaps our father died, or moved away. Park’s daughter, Park Geun-hye, now sixty years old, who was a young woman of twenty-two when we were born, was very recently elected president of the Republic of Korea, the first woman to hold this office. She, being the daughter of a dictator, among other things, is a figure of controversy. Underneath (or merely behind) the machinery of politics, we wonder what dreams her mother, Youngsoo, had while she was pregnant with Geun-hye. What maternal stamps and stains marked her, competed or melded with Chung-hee’s heritable contributions? Could they have predicted that the mother, the First Lady of a despot, would give way, in this manner, to the daughter? ——— Traditional beliefs regarding fetal life: Koreans count the gestation period as the first year in a child’s life. It is believed that the mother’s thoughts, behaviors, and PAGE 154
feelings during the pregnancy will have a formative influence on the well-being of the fetus, so the prenatal period is called the education period for the unborn child. A dream may predict the kind of person the unborn child will be. Someone very close to the child to be born—the mother, grandfather, or other close relative—is likely to have such a significant premonition-like dream. During the second six or seven months of our life outside the womb, in our post-fetal life, we surely dreamed. We also experienced three families, three mothers during that time. A foster family cared for us until we were adopted by an American couple, to which we were delivered at the age of thirteen months, or, about one year in American-time, while, in Korean-time, we were over two years old. Now we ourselves are a mother, with a daughter and a son. We remember well their slow fetal metamorphoses. Our sleep was highly interrupted by various expected discomforts. Did we loan them our sleep? What dreams did we give them? Many fetal dreams never make it outside the womb. The making of a human—our large brains, those frontal lobes, that capacity for memory, planning, and cruelty—is energyintensive and complicated. Many things can go awry. Apparently, many embryos “know” there is something wrong with them and thus efficiently self-destruct, making way for the next embryo that may have a better chance at survival outside the womb’s plush red palace.
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for adoption to the West, first to the u.s. The profound disruption of the end of Japan’s colonial occupation, the brutal civil war, and the aftermath orchestrated by the u.s. resulted in unprecedented political and social change.
SUN YUNG SHIN
ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
SUN YUNG SHIN
THE SCOFIELD
In Greek mythology, the god of dreams, Morpheus, was winged and could assume any form. His domain, δῆμος ὀνείρων, the land of dreams, was near the underworld, home to Night and her children. Dreams departed Morpheus’ realm through two gates. Poets often referred to the two gates leading from this dominion of dreams. The gates were made from the protection, the ferocity, of animals. One gate—ivory (ἐλέφας / elephas), one gate—horn (κέρας / keras). The dreams themselves were divided; truth through the horn half-door, false dreams passed by the ivory gate. The natural world enclosed, protected, and opened out to give the dreams freedom. Ever inside the gated domain stood an elm tree that served as a kind of coatrack for the winged dreams made by the Oneiroi. These dreams hung there with their secrets. As we task our memory-organ to re-member our life in Korea, we breed dream after dream. False dreams? Truthful dreams? Hanging? Phantom shaped? They drop like ripe fruit, then disappear before hitting the ground, preventing bruising, rotting. Dreams are ephemera and have no body to violate, no flesh to decay. They can remain fresh as the wind, recycled like hot rising vapor from the ocean, into the frozen clouds, and eventually back into the crashing black water, the source of all dreams, the living body of our planet. ———
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A few years ago, we had our first dream set in Korea in which everyone, including us, was speaking Korean. A grandmother and a hut and a doorway figured prominently. There might have been a fire. There might have been daylight. It was brief but vivid. We woke up changed, an altered person. Transformed. In Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa awakens one morning to find that he has become a monstrous vermin (Ungeziefer: an unclean beast not fit for sacrifice). Readers are not privy to the transformation itself, nor to any rational explanation for the radical change. It can be read as, among many other things, a metaphor for the arbitrariness of punishment in an indifferent, hostile universe. Though there is a hospital right across the street from his room, no attempt is made to either bring Gregor there or fetch a doctor from it. It looms, inaccessible. Another meaning of the transformation, which is not mutually exclusive with other readings, is that Gregor has become, in body, that which he was “in soul,” something akin to a beetle, a mindless drudge carrying food from world to nest, over and over again. Gregor, a traveling salesman, brings money home to his family, again and again. The Samsa family lives in a society that is primarily an impersonal bourgeois economy, a culture that values commerce over every other human activity. Late in the story, a large, bony, wild haired “char woman” (a stand-in for the archetypal witch, although bemused and practical rather than wicked and rapacious) addresses Gregor as “you old dung beetle.” Dung beetles live on the dung from other animals and can roll dung balls
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SUN YUNG SHIN
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SUN YUNG SHIN
THE SCOFIELD
SUN YUNG SHIN
SUN YUNG SHIN
many times their own weight. Some dung beetles also eat decayed vegetation, similar to Gregor, who found that he preferred rotting food to the food he used to enjoy in his previous form. A metamorphosis (the Greek words for “change” and “form”) is one of the dung beetle’s life stages. A dung beetle may begin its life as an egg inside a dung ball. The egg hatches and the larva eats the dung for its nourishment until it emerges from the ball a fully formed adult—a singular evolution.
transcend by the end of his life—with his radiant embrace of music, with his peaceful, solitary death in the light?
Gregor was abandoned—by his employer, father, mother, sister, and ultimately one could argue, his god. Did he transcend? Did he ask for it? Did he have it coming, with his ridiculous delusions of self-importance and his complaints and his small-mindedness and his obsession with his sister’s changing states of un/dress? Did he
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How important is memory? The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has this to say about memory, an explanation of its complexity that comforts us and somewhat affirms our preoccupation with our fetal psychic amnesia: “Remembering is often suffused with emotion, and is closely involved in both extended affective states such as love and grief, and socially significant practices such as promising and commemorating. It is essential for much reasoning and decision making, both individual and collective. It is connected in obscure ways with dreaming. Some memories are shaped by language, others by imagery. Much of our moral and social life depends on the peculiar ways in which we are embedded in time. Memory goes wrong in mundane and minor, or in dramatic and disastrous ways.” Our fetal dreams, our memories, while unworded by us—and mundane, minor in the scheme of things— coalesce to form something: the abandoned, a student of ourself, a stranger, a double, one disowned and re-owned,
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In Kafka’s tale, Gregor devolves. He is transformed during sleep, and he spends the rest of his brief life in his bedroom, a space in which one should experience nightly rejuvenation but instead offers Gregor only a terminal prison cell. It becomes a den that accretes dust and filth, its furniture irrelevant as Gregor enjoys crawling on the walls and ceilings as he can no longer lie comfortably in bed, cannot sit on his settee or at his desk. By the end of his wretched, solitary life spent working to pay off his parents’ debt (the German word Schuld means both “debt” and “guilt”), he has shrunken, and his body can be placed into a small box. A paper coffin, like a grave made of something as flimsy as words. Easily hidden, buried, burned.
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By the time The Metamorphosis was published in 1915, Darwin’s The Origin of Species had been in circulation for fifty-six years.
Abandoned and then re-en-familied, re-kinned, an adoptee is many things, including, I would posit, both a form of ongoing transit and a re-territory, a re-form. This form takes on different meanings depending on the place, the language, and the people looking, listening. If our form is different, if we are no longer recognizable, if no one speaks our language, who are we?
THE SCOFIELD
SUN YUNG SHIN
MYKL WELLS
winged, made of polished horn, in debt, haunted by guilt, monstrous, arbitrary, punished, rewarded, nameless, and renamed.
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Roots Run Deep
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—— Reprinted by permission from Unbearable Splendor (Coffee House Press, 2016). Copyright © 2016 by Sun Yung Shin.
THE SCOFIELD
Somebody comes to the hospital and calls me Lazarus. I see before my eyes an ancient landscape. Land of the fathers. A monk in a brown robe came to visit. I asked him if Lazarus truly came back from the dead like me, and he said there were three witnesses with him, Mary Magdalene and her sister Martha, and I asked who else and he said, “God of course,” and smiled. I seemed in fact to be lying in bed and hallucinating, and then I knew I was hallucinating, and the truth was that it felt good to hallucinate because I was afraid to live again, death was comfortable, the return was insipid, unnecessary, I was afraid of getting back to life, of worrying about the rent, buying new trousers, calling my sister to ask how she was, contributing money to telephone solicitors. Here there is no phone, Miranda answers the phone, I have no need to talk, to justify myself, I’m fatally ill and I’m allowed to do anything, what will I do if I truly come back? The monk who came to visit me in the hospital sat next to me and I started talking with him because so far he’d been silent. He said he came from Germany but spoke fluent Hebrew, and he said, “You talk about Saint Augustine and Jerome and how Lazarus came back from death,” and I asked him how he knew that I talked about Jerome and Augustine, and he answered that he had read my books with quotations from Jerome and also “yearning for Christianity and love and hate for Christianity,” and he said it’s now 1967, “and you occupied and liberated and annexed,” and I was amazed at how it could be 1967, and he looked angry PAGE 158
and said, “The Talmud is a book of barren arguments about irrelevant matters. It’s religion without an ethos, without dogma, without a myth, without glory, without cathedrals, without mystery, without God, without music, without ceremony, without ritual, without beautiful painting, without Satan, with angels who are only messengers, without hell in heaven, without sin as painful as eternal sin, a religion that praises chattering, that teaches children ways of excommunicating woman, that teaches legal killing, that teaches that it’s permitted to kill mercilessly everyone God orders killed, a religion like that isn’t a religion, it’s rubbish. And what’s even more awful, you don’t have spiritual fathers, even your Messiah can’t really come, your Messiah is ultimately yearnings, because you didn’t believe the Messiah who came and who was called Christ.” And I told him that that’s what I love about us even though I’m far from being religious, and he got mad and said, “Religion without miracles is like a letter without a signature.” “In Judaism, which isn’t really religion,” I told him, “very few miracles happened for three thousand years, the walls of Jericho and the container of oil and Moses’ water from the rock, so the Jewish frequency of miracles is quite limited, and so there’s nothing really to wait for, and religion is a mystery,” and I told the monk that Dostoevsky wrote that Christianity is the miracle, the mystery, and the authority, and he said, “Christianity isn’t a vague muttering of prayers and concern with urine, castration, contempt for women, nakedness. And your children have to memorize when a woman is fit for intercourse. Where do you have mercy and glory and where do you have saints?” I waited for him to finish because I didn’t want to offend him, I didn’t want him to think I’m not polite because I’m an occupier, and I hurried to go with him to a small camp on top of the mountain to appease the soldiers
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
A Selection from Between Life and Death
YOR AM K ANIUK
ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
YOR AM K ANIUK
YOR AM K ANIUK
or maybe they were the youth corps, poor sons of occupiers, or go know who today. I spoke of our pure righteousness, of Jewish fate, of no choice, of rising and coming, of brothers sitting and “friends” as a mystical song that doesn’t exist in our reality, and about a nation that doesn’t give up excavations of its life, and about happy is he who dies with Tel Hai as his leader, and about the power of the brain and the brain of the power, and about when thou wast in thy blood Live, and about a land of desert and glory, and about God from the mountains, and about paratroopers weeping at the Western Wall, and he heard, he smiled and he was silent, and before we parted, he said, “The occupier will choke on his occupation.” Did that happen? Maybe I’m coming back very slowly to some sanity. The doctors decrease the dose of drugs. They take me as a drunk and within a few days I finally have to come back to sanity, but in stages, very slowly, and so I live in constant fear of what I remember, if it was or wasn’t, and of my life in the world of black-and-white. The bloodpressure meter still feeds the monitor and my dear ones are at the edge of nothingness and I hear voices that sound as if they really want me to come back. Naomi my daughter looks at me. I want to kiss her because she brings me love but I don’t have real and true lips to kiss her.
diaper on me. I notice that something is missing, I look in panic at the belly and don’t find the belly button that had been there for seventy-five years and I ask, “What happened to my belly button?” And Miranda looks with a smile and she doesn’t find it either and I call Jay on the cell phone and tell him I lost my belly button and he says, “Look on the side of the belly,” and I and Miranda look on the side of the belly and he says, “See, there’s a little pleat,” and I look and see that there really is a miserable little pleat, and Jay says to me, “Note, in the pleat there’s a notch,” and I look and admit and am comforted: I see a small notch that was once my beautiful belly button. “Find it?” he asks. “What did those surgeons have against my belly button?” I ask. “Why did the bastards move it?” Everything looked like a cosmic exercise against me because I lay here alive and couldn’t die. Here, look at me in my shame, daughters of Jerusalem. I’ve fallen alive like those who fell in Pompeii, and after they were filled with plaster, they looked like the human beings they had been before they were devoured, and I look at them and think that Lazarus, with whom I was compared, would have said they didn’t understand him. That he really didn’t want John the Baptist’s Martha and Mary’s sister and Mary, the sister of Jesus, to see him when he was abandoned to death and woke up from the tomb. I would have told him he didn’t know it but he lived in a world that isn’t anymore. And I want to ask him the meaning of the chapter “from dust you came and to dust you shall return.” I wasn’t born of dust, I was born of millions of years of prehuman and then human evolution, I’m the end of hundreds of millions of years of existence and the end of my parents and my parents’ parents. I came from distant grandfathers, from ancient generations, from Sabbateans in Ukraine and Frankists in Tarnopol, from one who was Rabbi Akiva and from Simeon
——— Four months later, in our house on Bilu Street, where I’m now lying in bed, it’s the end of August and I’m free of hallucinations, of the hospital, and of the illness, and I move a little, and am ugly and old. I didn’t have the courage to jump out the window, and the apartment is on the ground floor and there are bars, and Miranda, the apple of my eye, my darling, next to me in bed, puts a PAGE 159
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CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
THE SCOFIELD
THE SCOFIELD
YOR AM K ANIUK
bar Yochai, and like every one of us I was born from the vicissitudes of historical longevity, because in our loins we complete the circle we are destined to complete because we are destined not to be born but to die. All of us ultimately are edges of people. All of us are the completion of a season of life. In my life I gave life to my daughters so they would die without being connected to the sins of their father. Doesn’t God say to Cain, “and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire and thou shalt rule over him”? And I thought the desire for sin is the drug of life. “Thou hast sinned” is a light to us. At our door it lies. We lust for it. But do we really have to rule over it? I talk with Sarah my mother. Miranda says I abandoned Sarah while she was alive, that I mistreated her. That I made her cry. I didn’t know how to love her, and then she got old and I was bad to her and she was good to me. Now I lie and try to restore Sarah my mother. Suddenly I miss her. I exploited her, and damaged her good name. I didn’t pity her. I didn’t know how to love her. Every morning, Sarah my mother would do her hair and go to the clinic in old Ramat Aviv and sit and wait a long time without complaining and without pushing, and was examined. And that’s how they’d kill cancers when they were still small. The doctors died of old age and diseases, but others came and the clerks were also replaced, only she remained every day, except the Sabbath, and would sit and wait for examinations. And would triumph over all the cancers but she remained so alone since Moshe my father died on her, because in my family you don’t die, you die on others, as a kind of revenge. “If you drown,” my mother would yell on the seashore, “I’ll kill you.” And Moshe my father left her with his death and that was a kind of infidelity to her from him, and I also left, and my sister Mira left to live her life.
Basically, it’s good to die to prevent suicide. I don’t like deformations. It’s hard for me to look at myself now. All my life I’ve served beauty. I love beautiful people. I don’t live well with hunchbacks, ugly women, and, like Moses our Teacher, I don’t like what looks too ugly to stand in the Tabernacle, so they said no to the lame, no to scabies, no to leprosy, no to blindness—those poor wretches won’t get to see God, but if there’s something in the body that can’t be seen, cancer for example, oh, that’s all right. But what’s strange is that if something looks ugly and perverse, like leprosy, why is it bad in the eyes of the Hebrews, who determined and didn’t really follow “Favor is deceitful and beauty is vain” and “Don’t look at the jar but what is in it”? We didn’t make beautiful jars here. If the Tabernacle really looked like research suggests it did when it was restored, there’d be no reason to look at it. When you’re sick everybody runs away from you, there is no greatness in us, no aesthetic, we’re old, take up space, empty the state treasury with our sickness and have no reason to live, we’re idiots who cling to life and have no grief for ourselves, but only self-pity. Self-pity is bad for the soul. And the basis of aesthetics is that it has no God.
In the end, I came back to life. One day, a procession of doctors came. They examined me. They didn’t look at me. They read the charts written by the night nurses, hanging as usual on the bed. Suddenly one of them said, “That’s it, got to go forward. We’ll take out the catheter and the feeding tube, but you’ll have to sit in a chair they’ll bring here, and we’ll see.” Everything happened very fast. Taking out the feeding tube was painful, but it was great to be free after two months. I found the voice that had abandoned me and I
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started saying a few words. Miranda came to learn my voice and seemed amazed, as if she had forgotten how it sounded, and Naomi came and nurses came to congratulate me, and then they ordered me not to drink until the sores healed. They let me lick cotton dipped in water, but I couldn’t drink, and liquids no longer flowed from the feeding tube and I dried out. That was a Calvary. I pleaded with them to let me drink. They explained to me that I couldn’t yet. I was willing to donate my heart to Jay Lavie’s transplant department in Tel Hashomer if they gave me even one glass of water for it. A whole heart for one glass of water! Licking cotton dipped in water didn’t help, and I imagined I was sitting in a cart full of locked bottles of water, I tried to open them with my teeth, and meanwhile orderlies came and put me into a blanket. By now I weighed as much as a small child, the puffiness of my body, which had looked so ugly for months, was beginning to vanish—I lost maybe twenty kilos—and they put me in an easy chair and I was asked to sit in it for a whole hour. I didn’t enjoy it. They wanted the body to get a bit round, my muscles to start working. After three months of lying, sitting was bad and hard. A swarthy, vigorous girl came and started working with me and made me raise my fingers a little. She asked me to want more and to be a little more generous and ambitious, and I tried, the word “ambitious” worked on me, and a few days later I managed to lift a finger for a moment and make a few movements and today I don’t remember what they were, and then it was decided to let me drink. I wanted to drink as much as possible but I couldn’t swallow and almost choked. They told me it had been decided to take me off the respirator. They examined everything that had to be examined and warned me that it would be hard, that it took a lot of time to take some patients off the respirator
and that at Tel Hashomer there was even a course for weaning from the respirator, since confidence in breathing is crucial. They told me not to despair. That was a moment of vague dread, and suddenly I felt alone in the world without the respirator that had been like a mother to me. I was a three-month-old baby and they cut me off from my mother’s breast. I sat in bed, leaning on the pillows and for the first time in months I breathed real air. The window next to me was open. Outside it was blazing summer. A thin wind blew inside and I filled my lungs with air and I was dizzy and my eyes were laughing, and I felt it in the roots of my hair and I was like a drunk and I smiled. They stood above me and said they had never seen a real smile on my face, a smile of someone who came out of the garbage, and now they see and admit to me that that was ideal, a gift, and some nurse said, “Look, we finally did good work here!” It felt good to breathe. The lungs filled with air and the fog that flowed from the machine no longer hummed in my ear. Today it’s hard to remember exactly what the feeling was. It seemed to liberate in me a shame about myself. For what a weakling I was. I don’t like wine, and when I was a drinker I’d drink whiskey or brandy or vodka or beer, not wine, but the feeling was what many people attribute to wine. After half an hour, I was choking a little and they connected me to the machine again. First they put an oxygen mask on my face. Instead of weeks, within three days, I was breathing on my own. I had a new series of tests, and now I was fed up with the place. Everything looked disgusting. I’m breathing, get me out of here. I’m alive. —— Translated by Barbara Harshav. Reprinted courtesy of Restless Books.
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THE SCOFIELD
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A Conversation with Christof Koch In the King James Version of the Bible, Mark 15:17 reads, “And they clothed him with purple, and platted a crown of thorns, and put it about his head.” One definition of the verb “plat” is “to braid,” which is the meaning intended in Mark 15:17, but another definition of “plat” is “to map or to plot.” Earlier this year the Allen Institute for Brain Science made headlines when they mapped, or platted, some neurons in the claustrum of mice. The claustrum is a thin layer of nerve cells in the brain which many believe may be crucial in the development of consciousness. When the institute created 3D reconstructions of these neurons, they discovered a neuron that has axons which wrap around the entire brain. Christof Koch, the president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, claimed that the axons resembled a “crown of thorns.” I spoke with him in the wake of this discovery—in search of how this might help our understanding of consciousness, what this might have to do with “Integrated Information Theory,” and where this might lead us in the future. TM: The Allen Institute for Brain Science made some breakthroughs recently in mapping neurons in the claustrum of mice. What were you looking for when you set out to map these neurons?
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CK: To understand the brain and how it generates conscious experience, whether it is the sight of minion yellow, the pitch of a dissonant tone, or the sharp pain of an inflamed tooth, we need to understand the way neurons are connected to each other. We know from earlier studies done in mice and in humans, that the claustrum, a thin sheet of nerve cells underneath the cortex and above the basal ganglia, is the most highly connected structure in the brain. However, what was not known is how individual neurons, rather than large populations of thousands or millions of claustrum neurons, are connected. Indeed, nobody previously had ever identified individual excitatory nerve cells with such vast tangled connectivity. TM: Specifically, you found a neuron that wraps its way around the entire cortex. How did what you found confirm or change your opinions on the claustrum’s relationship to consciousness? CK: The fact that individual neurons in the claustrum project very widely to many, many cortical regions seems to imply that this structure must have a very general function, implicating not just a single modality—such as vision, memory, or emotions—but many. Francis Crick and I had used the metaphor of the claustrum as the conductor of the cortical symphony, synchronizing the activity of the far-flung cortical dominions.
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Platted a Crown of Thorns:
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TM: You mentioned that when you mapped these neurons, they looked like a “crown of thorns.” What made you choose that obviously religious simile? CK: I grew up in a devout Roman Catholic family with the iconography of “crown of thorns,” which is what the axons—the output branches of nerve cells—of these claustrum neurons resemble. TM: You mapped neurons in the claustrum of mice. How can we be sure that the claustrum of mice would be comparable to the claustrum of humans? CK: The brain of all mammals is quite similar in its architecture. It takes an expert neuroanatomist, armed with a microscope, to distinguish between a pea-sized chunk of brain taken from a mouse, a monkey, and a person. Our brain is big, but other creatures—elephants, dolphins, and whales—have bigger ones, including a larger neocortex, the jewel in the crown of the nervous system. Neither at the genomic nor at the synaptic, cellular, or connectional levels are there qualitative differences between mice, monkeys, and people. Thus, we can’t be sure until we repeat such an experiment on human claustrum neurons—something impossible at this point in time—but it is a reasonable hypothesis. TM: Your current ideas on a theory of consciousness revolve around what is called the “Integrated Information Theory” (IIT). How would you describe IIT to a layman? And what, in a basic sense, does it have to say about consciousness? CK: IIT is a very sophisticated, quantitative theory that makes specific predictions and inferences about consciousness, the circuitry underlying it and the extent to which non-biological systems, such as computers, could be conscious. IIT says that, roughly speaking, the ability to experience anything is a basic property of
complex systems. We live in a universe in which complex systems have two aspects—an external aspect accessible to anybody else, including the instruments of science—and an internal aspect, the lived experience, only accessible to the subject him-, her-, or itself. One of its consequences is that your mind is not software running on a computer called your brain. Your brain is the most complex piece of highly excitable matter in the known universe; however, the computational metaphor that is so dominant in our age and culture is not useful to understand the brain as a physical system, nor how it gives rise to conscious experience, nor the way it feels to be the owner of that brain. TM: Would you say IIT is an attempt to circumvent what David Chalmers called “the hard problem of consciousness”—the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious, how and why we have qualia— by changing the starting line and, thus, reversing the trajectory of the investigation? By starting with consciousness rather than starting with the physical? CK: Yes, that is correct. TM: So ITT explains that consciousness has five axioms: intrinsic existence, composition, information, integration, and exclusion. In other words, what we can assume about consciousness is that it: exists, is structured, is specific, is unified, and is definite. How can thinking about these five apparent properties of consciousness get us closer to understanding what consciousness is and where it derives from? CK: IIT assumes these axioms as given (just like axioms in mathematics). Think of these five axioms as transcendental properties of any experience. Any experience, no matter of what, exists, is structured, is
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specific, is unified, and is definite. That is the universe in which we find ourselves. “Why?” you may ask. I don’t know. Just like I don’t know why I find myself in a universe in which the laws of gravity and of quantum mechanics appear to hold. “Can I imagine a world in which a system obeys these five axioms and does not feel like anything?” Yes, in principle this is a linguistically meaningful sentence, but I don’t live in such a world. It is similar to asking “Can I imagine a universe in which the laws of quantum mechanics do not hold?” Yes, I can imagine such a world, but I don’t happen to live in such a world. TM: How does this all relate to the oft-debated topic of “artificial intelligence,” and specifically “artificial consciousness”? Do you think in the near (or distant) future, there will be conscious beings of our own making? CK: Intelligence is quite different from consciousness. What DeepBlue, Watson, self-driving cars, and AlphaGo demonstrate is that machines can have narrowly-defined intelligent behavior but without any sentience. Indeed, intelligence is quite different from consciousness. The latter is an intrinsic property of complex systems while the former is dependent on the way a complex system interacts with its environment. Intelligence is an extrinsic, interactionist property of certain types of adaptive systems. TM: What do you say to functionalist critics of ITT? Why does a functionalist view of consciousness not appeal to you? CK: Consciousness is an intrinsic property of complex systems (technically, systems in a state that have causeeffect power upon themselves); it is not about input-output relationships, which is what functionalism is all about. Certain systems, like brains, have an inward-facing surface
(philosophers call this the first-person perspective)—what it feels like to be them—and an outward-facing surface— the way they look and act to outsiders (the third-person account). Other systems, such as digital von-Neumann computers have a minute first-person perspective (this can be shown formally), even though they act in a very complex manner, including being able to simulate human behavior. Yet while computers can simulate behavior they can’t simulate experience—that can only arise out of a real physical system acting on itself. One could, in principle, build computers that have an architecture similar to the brain (so-called neuromorphic machines) that could have higher levels of consciousness, that have high cause-effect power. TM: So where do you and the Allen Institute for Brain Science go from here? Now that you’ve mapped those neurons in the claustrum, what comes next in your search for an understanding of consciousness? CK: We seek to understand the detailed structure of these claustrum neurons, who they connect to, who they receive input from, and what happens to the animal if, using modern neuroscience tools (such as optogenetics), these neurons are turned on and off. Ultimately, these results will need to be extended from the mouse to the human brain to understand the mystery of human experience, of human consciousness.
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On the Friendship of Conrad Aiken and Malcolm Lowry “To C.M.L.” Conrad Aiken dedicated his novel Blue Voyage to his second wife, Clarissa Lorenz, though when Malcolm Lowry first read the book in 1927, he fervently believed it had somehow been dedicated to him (Clarence Malcolm Lowry). While this may be an irrational conclusion, it is perhaps understandable to those of us who have ever identified so closely with a text we were willing to bend reality in order to bind ourselves more tightly to it. Certainly, it was presumptuous; and yet, all things considered—taking the whole of their lives together— perhaps, somehow, it was dedicated to Lowry. They had not yet met each other. This is of little importance. “I have lived only nineteen years and all of them more or less badly. And yet the other day, when I sat in Lyons…I became suddenly and beautifully alive.” Lowry’s first letter to Aiken is sycophantic, rich, allusive, embarrassing, curiously weighted—in short, everything one might expect from a precocious introductory missive. Despite the self-consciously, almost absurdly literary tone (“The great grey tea urn perspired”), PAGE 165
one can already detect a language of destiny, of starcrossed inevitability, a kind of self-induced fatalism: “It seems quite fated that I should write this letter just like this on this warm bright day while outside a man shouts Rag-a-bone, Rag-a-bone.” Though neither knew it at the time, they had taken the first step of an almost thirty-year friendship. “I suggested we use the lid of the W.C. tank and each take hold of one end of it and wrestle for possession of this thing…I got it away from Malcolm but fell right over backward into the fireplace and went out like a light.” Lowry asked his father if Aiken might become his tutor for the summer. After meeting the necessary conditions (that is, gaining admission to Cambridge), the elder Lowry consented. Malcolm arrived in Massachusetts at the end of July, 1929, ukulele and battered suitcase in hand. To celebrate his arrival, Aiken orchestrated an impromptu wrestling match for which the prize was the porcelain lid of the toilet. During the struggle, Aiken fractured his skull while falling into the fireplace and was rendered unconscious. This seems somehow too appropriate; were it plot, I would call it heavy-handed. While Lowry idolized Aiken’s literary production, their relationship was more akin to an older and a younger brother, something much closer and coarser than mentor and pupil. They drank, fought, wrote, discussed poetry, ravaged prose. They were kindred spirits, “uncannily alike in almost everything,” as Aiken had it. This dangerous intimacy was a spark already dreaming of conflagration. “I’ve got the coffin – and you’ve got the body.”
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I’ve Got the Coffin— You’ve Got the Body:
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After “that wonderful summer” ended, they were back together in roughly a year’s time, Aiken having moved his family to Rye. While Lowry pursued his B.A. at Cambridge, the Rye house became something of a second home to him. As before, though, this was not the typical in loco parentis relationship. The two men stayed up late playing raucous ragtime songs for which Aiken wrote the lyrics: “I’ve got the coffin – and you’ve got the body.” They were notorious for their lengthy drinking bouts, closing the Ship and Mermaid Inns, becoming (in Clarissa’s remembrance) “muddy, blood-streaked apparitions.” There was a disastrous javelin throwing competition in which Aiken, “hurling his javelin in the pitch-dark of a channel fog…had also launched himself into space, and had fallen ten feet down into rich Saltinge mud.” The escapades began to hinder Aiken’s work on his novel-in-progress, as he admitted to G. B. Wilbur in 1930. “How much longer will Conrad put up with this madman?” wrote Clarissa. Surely Aiken himself was considering the same question.
wished to continue playing “conscious starfish” to Aiken’s “unconscious oyster,” passing off countless Aiken phrases and narrative bits as his own, including the William Blackstone material from Under the Volcano. Aiken’s feelings about this theft, which he found more disturbing than the other plagiarisms, can be found in Ushant: “… what more natural than that Hambo [Lowry] had at once, without so much as a by-your-leave, taken over the Blackstone idea as his own.” His dedication of The Kid to Lowry, though, would seem to imply that he had come to accept their “literary symbiosis”: “…from One Rolling Blackstone to another.” One begins to wonder: what is a coffin without a body?
“I have sat & read my blasted book with increasing misery: with a misery of such intensity that I believe myself sometimes to be dispossessed, a spectre of your own discarded ideas…”
With the success of Under the Volcano, Lowry threatened to usurp his mentor’s position. Though Lowry had planned on his masterpiece being something of “a gesture on the part of a grateful pupil to his master,” Aiken experienced paroxysms of jealousy and bitterness. His affection for Lowry had for some time fallen prey to “a greater and deeper rivalry, that of the pride of mind.” He told his son John that his own “haughtybiography” Ushant was an explicit “act of revenge” against Lowry. Its publication marked a lasting break between the two writers. At that point, they hadn’t seen each other in seventeen years.
“…as a piece of literature it is a genuine bona fide first cut off the white whale’s hump, godshot, sunshot, bloodshot, spermshot, and altogether the most aiken-satisfying book I’ve wallowed in for a generation…o baby, o baby, o baby, it’s marvelous Malc…”
“Good night, disgrace.”
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As their relationship deepened, Aiken became concerned that he was failing his student, his brother, by not allowing him to develop his own subjective aesthetic. After reading Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea, the novel lost forever in a 1944 cabin fire, Aiken commented, “My own influence has again been bad…I think it’s time you cut yourself adrift from all these here ghostly doppelgangers and projections and identifications and let loose some of your natural joy…” For his part, Lowry
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Their reunion would come in 1954. Ideally, it would have rejuvenated their affection for one another; in point of fact, it was something like a death knell. Lowry showed up drunk and disoriented. He “drifted into a kind of rapt silence…gazing at nothing; perhaps an hour passed in which he spoke to no one at all, nor did he move from his chair.” What once would have been forgiven as the hijinx of a son or a pupil could no longer be countenanced by the aging Aiken. “Goodnight, disgrace” were his parting words. Lowry, sobering finally, becoming aware of what he was losing, followed his master of three decades outside into the night. The two began to wrestle in the street, as in the old days. Finally, a taxi appeared to remove Aiken from Lowry’s life forever. “Those next moments,” David Markson remembers, “gazing into the empty street where only now a small rain, like a mist, had begun to fall, Lowry could not have appeared more sober. ‘He is an old man,’ he said. ‘And now I will never see him again.’” He never did.
their friendship? Touchingly, in their later years they often wrote to one another about the early times, gathering by the river, long evenings in the Mermaid’s Inn. There is a profound ache in Aiken’s words, one he more than earned: “And there, only a few bright seconds later, you and I were to appear…”
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Lowry wrote these words in 1952. He would be dead in five years, having drunk himself to death in Chalvington with Ripe. (The coroner would famously write of a “death by misadventure.”) Given the tragedy of Lowry’s life, there is a tendency to cast a violet, melancholy light over his history with Aiken. This is, I think, unfair. Theirs is a correspondence marked more by its energy and intensity than by any impulse toward death. They lived and loved, briefly, as brothers, father and son, master and apprentice, victim and victor. Could Under the Volcano, could Ushant, exist without the crucible of
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“I have always looked upon him as a father, besides which he is one of my best friends, and so we have never lost touch.”
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Yes, Hambo would undoubtedly have made an attempt to link these two abortive suicides: perhaps indeed he had done so, at one of those bibulous and eloquent sessions at the Ship, or in the dining-room at Saltinge: or even on the voyage to Gibraltar, at a time when already the strain imposed on them both by D.’s pseudo-guardianship—for Hambo’s despairing father had in effect placed D. in loco parentis—was beginning to elevate and illuminate the friendly rivalry between them into something else. For hadn’t Hambo already, or at any rate D. and Hambo together, analyzed the necessity that lay there in hermetic pattern between them, that in some sense and inevitably the son must “destroy” the father, castrate or crucify him? And hadn’t D., like the farouche John, tacitly admitted that this death was already within him—working itself out to the surface—in this attempt at suicide? Beyond the pleasure principle!—hadn’t it, in both instances, been just this need of the organism to die, a secret, or even explicit, confession that the cycle had been completed, the semantic statement finished? To be sure, in these discussions, which, D. had often thought, since, had sometimes achieved a quite astonishing pitch of divination—and a kid of cooperative, and hallucinatory, alcoholic brilliance of statement unique in his experience, the two minds and psyches complementing—and complimenting!—each other in a moving braid of analysis as closely woven as the serpents in the uraeus of an Egyptian king—in these
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competitive flights of semi-mystical dialogue, as between his projected “Dr. Quicksand and Mr. Tattletale,” or “Dr. Saltpetre and Mr. Joyprong,” there had been, as time went on, a steadily and perceptibly increasing pressure, on the part of Hambo, to hasten this very process of “death,” on the part of D.; and no matter how far out into the empyrean they might soar, in their joint pursuit of “truth,” or how diaphanous might be their analysis of its apprehensibility, or how sacred and Daedalian and dedicated must be the office, vis-à-vis mankind, of the writer, the poet, as they vied with each other in envisaging it, nevertheless almost invariably at the end they would come back to that question of the creative moritura in D., and, from dear young Hambo’s viewpoint, the obvious desirability of D.’s getting on with it. Was the attempted suicide, tout court, a confession of failure? And had Hambo been quick to seize on the fact, and to try to take advantage of it? Not that it wasn’t all brought up, or dropped again—between drinks and the pyrotechnical ping-pong games on that splendid “refractory” table so beloved of Squidge, the cat of cats—always with the utmost of urbanity and good humour, not to say hilarity: it was a game, a ritual, an exercise, and a debate, all in one; but also, as in that weight-lifting at St. Cath’s of which Hambo was so proud, it was a deadly serious testing of strength, in which the steel was occasionally, for a flash, just visible, and now and then the blood drawn. The element of confession, confession of failure, had certainly been present, and had been voluntarily offered up by D., in these discussions; and of course this had quite contradicted D.’s easy assumption, at the time, that there was nothing to be ashamed of, and that he had no regrets, no feelings of remorse. The truth was that D. had himself not yet begun to understand how comprehensive
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A Second Selection from Ushant
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had been his betrayal of all that he most profoundly and integrally set store by, the very light by which he had proposed to live. What sort of priest of consciousness was he who would himself be the first to take flight from it? and hadn’t this been a double betrayal? For, quite apart from the failure in his career, his work, wasn’t there also that obligation, as pointed up by grandfather—both to the ancestors and the descendants—of transmitting the preciously learned inheritance? Weren’t the three little D.’s, and his work, in this regard, practically synonymous? There was no doubt of it; and it could hardly comfort D., when later he had begun to realize it, that it was only the title of a film at the Saltinge cinema that has enabled him to undertake those neglected obligations anew. One could make excuses: as in his citing of the family petit mal, the wearing out of the neural sheathing: it was even arguable that in this sense what had happened was predestined, and inevitable, and that the act, in the end, and as it had so fortunately worked out, provided its own cure. Weren’t his dreams, his whole lifetime of dreams, that unparalleled parade of monstrous fantasies and malformations, convincing enough evidence of this? The obsession with death, with abnormal sensibility and death, informed them everywhere: the reek of decay and dissolution and corruption arose from them every morning of his life. The solitary dark tombstone, for instance, on which was merely the inscription SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ARKOMON AGAIN. That pitiful sensitive pig, as reported in Purple Passage, with the oh so tender and transparent wings, bitten by the dog. The tiny wounded and discolored pig (ah, that pig of grandmother’s) creeping timidly along the curbstone, for shelter against the terrible dangers of the street, and with one eye so luminously sensitive that it continuously, in
response to the light, expanded itself like a bright bubble and burst in sparks of agony, only then to reinflate and burst again, while the pathetic creature stumbled blindly from one fearful peril to another. Or that other, that dream of the comic strip’ series of drawings; a dream in which D. was himself rapidly making the drawings, which then as rapidly became the thing itself, the real thing; a series of portraits or cartoons, of D.—D. in the process of dying; D., hurrying towards his death, into death; in each new panel the figure becoming more gaunt and skeletalized, the eyes further sunken into the hollow eye-sockets, the ribs more nakedly prominent, as it ran, stumbled, and fell, towards the sea—desperately trying to get to the sea, with some obscure notion of then swimming out into the sunset, into the light: until, in the final panel of all, the skeleton, at last bare, now lay prone, with empty and out-stretched hands, on the beach at the water’s edge; disclosing, within the rib-case, where the heart should have been, but itself rotten and falling apart, and with crumbling amulets among the perishing pages, a copy of The Book of the Dead;—what was one to make of that little comic-strip-tease, which was to have been entitled, a trifle sardonically, “D. Gets Going”—? And they had been as innumerable as dreadful, those dark spoutings from the foul unconscious: to fall asleep in the evening was automatically to submit once more to a lethal flooding by those bitter and mortal waters. What would breakfast have been, all these years, at South Yarmouth, or Inglesee, or London, or Saltinge, whether in the consulates of Lorelei One or Lorelei Two—or now in the blest consulate of Lorelei Three—without those dreams, the ritual narration of those dreams? They had become as indispensable a part of the order of the day as the punctual arrival of Squidge, or Squarryongs, the Cat of a Hundred Names,
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been drawn: inward, or outward; one would follow those contours and travel those roads, those seas, make landfall of those shores: they were there, waiting, below the horizon, those houses, those countries, to be lived in and loved: even to the perhaps unattainable—or approachable only at peril of shipwreck—Ushant.
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with a skidding slide up onto the Times at the end of the refectory table, or the endless variations, for the children, at bedtime, of the never-ending—and never-ended—serial story, The Jewel Seed. Yes: it was perhaps interesting to consider the waking life, the conscious life, and in all its multifoliate ramifications, too, as merely paralleling, in such improvisational fashion as it could, this deeper and darker force which lay there forever below, a constant and coefficient, a measure and reminder. The pressure of this towards death, and the hesitations, the pauses, the deviations, the avoidances—and even the acceptances— which this unceasing pressure must incessantly be evolving for itself and himself: as if the conscious and the unconscious were engaged, had always been engaged, in a dance, the most intricate and surprising and involved and contrapuntal of dances, and this dance, in which light and darkness were the partners (or all and nothing) was one’s life: it was against this pressure, and out of it, that his work, his loves, his hatreds and fears, his gettings and begettings and losings, his fruitful or fruitless travels, his visions and his mischiefs, had found their— as now it appeared—implicit self-shapings. For now, how preordained it all seemed to have been! as if, from the very outset, from the shadow of the first palmetto leaf at Savannah, and from the first stammered syllable for the first raindrop seen darkly descending against the limitless sky, or felt warm on the hand, the alreadyconceived design had begun to unfold itself with stealthy purpose and foresight, and with entire command, into an incredibly increasing complexity of meaning. That shape, which was to be the shape of oneself, and the shape of one’s “view” from the little headland of oneself, was immanent, was already there: that map had already
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Accordingly, seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; and because some men err in reasoning, and fall into paralogisms, even on the simplest matters of geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for demonstrations; and finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts (presentations) which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects (presentations) that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am (COGITO ERGO SUM), was so certain and of such
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evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search. In the next place, I attentively examined what I was and as I observed that I could suppose that I had no body, and that there was no world nor any place in which I might be; but that I could not therefore suppose that I was not; and that, on the contrary, from the very circumstance that I thought to doubt of the truth of other things, it most clearly and certainly followed that I was; while, on the other hand, if I had only ceased to think, although all the other objects which I had ever imagined had been in reality existent, I would have had no reason to believe that I existed; I thence concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing; so that “I,” that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such, that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is. —— Translated by John Veitch. CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
A Selection from Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences
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Where is Consciousness in the Modern Novel? Good God—Good God—said the blood beating in his brain. —Conrad Aiken, The Blue Voyage I. Aiken Conrad Aiken’s work is new to me, but what I’ve found there feels familiar. Like so many modernist novelists— and the writers they’ve influenced—Aiken’s vision of the quotidian is profuse. Because daily life means so much, but also because consciousness of daily life is a secular miracle. And because consciousness offers writers so much material, for experimenting with words and forms that simulate its vicissitudes. Like his peers and heirs, Aiken locates consciousness nowhere and everywhere. Consciousness is immaterial, but erupts into matter. “Good God,” it says, speaking through blood beating in the brain of William Demarest, protagonist of Aiken’s The Blue Voyage. Modernist novels are famous for putting consciousness at the center of aesthetic experiment, developing formal means of representing psychological interiors. The term “interiority” became pervasive in literary studies after interior monologues and stream of consciousness became the primary focus of the big modernist experiments. Along with Aiken’s novels, Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, The Sound PAGE 172
and the Fury disrupt literary conventions to find formal means of representing what mental experience feels like— to portray and reflect on the intricacies of consciousness. It’s a tradition with many heirs, including Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, Don Delillo’s White Noise, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and, most recently, a host of novels in the emerging genre of the twenty-first–century neuronovel, including Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker, Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, and even, in some respects, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. Collectively, a century of such novelistic experiments provoke a question: Where is consciousness in the modern novel? Inside bodies? Or skulls? Or brains? Or characters? Not exactly. “Interiority” is so standard a term that we’ve forgotten it’s a metaphor, one that conflates the fact that our brains reside inside our skulls with the idea that our mental experience must also live in a container. The Oxford English Dictionary documents the use of the term interiority to mean “inner life” to a text published in 1701, though it doesn’t list uses of the term to describe a literary technique until the 1960s. Google Books’ Ngram Viewer, which searches digitized texts dating to 1500, reveals marginal use of the term throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a rapid rise in use during the 1960s to the present. In its usage, the term both encompasses and obscures the inexorable interplay between body, mind, and environment central to the literary experiments it describes. In an essay entitled “Re-Minding Modernism,” literary critic David Herman offers a way of thinking about modernism that undoes—or at least complicates— the “inward turn.” Herman draws on Jakob von Uexküll‘s Umwelt theory to enlarge the modernist portrayal of
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The Blood Beating in His Brain:
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Oh damn you amateur analysts and all your pitiful abstract jargon. Why can’t you say what you mean? Why can’t you call a spade a spade? What the hell’s the difference between the soul and the subconscious and the unconscious and
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the will. Or between castration complex and inferiority complex and Oedipal complex. Words, Evasions. Vanities, on the part of the respectable analyst. Nicht war. For the love of mud, define any one of them for me, so I’ll know absolutely what they mean. Or tell me where they reside in the brain. Have you ever looked at a map of the brain? It’s like one of those imaginary maps of Mars. Full of Arabia Desertas. Canals, seas, mountains, glaciers, extinct volcanoes, or ulcers. The pockmarked moonface of the mind. And all that strange congregation of scars, that record of wounds and fissures, is what speaks and acts. I speak with it, you listen with it. What have I got to do with it? Nothing. Something hurts me and I act. Something else hurts me, and I speak of it. If I could act, I wouldn’t speak. Voila. All your psychology in a nutshell. Cather is a drunk, prone to raving, having an extended argument with his friend Bill. His demand—“tell me where they reside in the brain”—is nonetheless an expression of a persistent theme in modern novels. His description of the brain, “the pockmarked face of the mind,” suggests an ambivalent and ambiguous attitude about the relation between physiology and phenomenology. Cather insists that he speaks with his brain, but its “congregation of scars” suggests there’s more to the story. In The Blue Voyage, Aiken’s protagonist William Demarest traces another thread of that story: What was it that was driving him back? What was this singular mechanism in him that wanted so deliberately, so consciously, to break itself?
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consciousness that entangles the brains, minds, bodies, and worlds of its characters. In Herman’s description, an Umwelt is “an animal’s environment in the sense of its lived, phenomenal world.” The Umwelt of a bat and a beaver will be very different, because of their differing biologies and their different environments. As Herman observes, Uexküll stresses the idea that no two individuals in a species will experience the world in identical ways and uses a human example to illustrate: “The best way to find out that no two human Umwelten are the same is to have yourself led through unknown territory by someone familiar with it. Your guide unerringly follows a path you cannot see.” Herman’s goal is to challenge the assumption that literary modernism is primarily characterized by an “inward turn” that implies a strict dualism between mind and body. Instead, he argues “the storyworlds through which modernist texts guide readers constitute a staging ground for procedures of Umwelten construction.” In other words, modernist texts entangle minds, bodies, and worlds. In that sense, he argues that writers like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce “suggest how narrative itself forms part of the cultural equipment by means of which humans seek, with more or less success, to transform unknown territories into negotiable places.” Interiority, Herman argues, is not all about interiors. In Great Circle, Aiken’s protagonist, Andrew Cather, asserts a behaviorist concept of human psychology in a rant against convoluted psychoanalytic theories:
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Demarest describes himself as a universe subject to laws, “chemical or divine.” The “I” of his personality contains everything, but the closest he can get to finding his identity is by running his fingers through his hair. Under that hair lies a skull and under that a brain, just as under his personality lie innumerable unconscious experiences that drive him to act. He’s a pebble on the shore of his consciousness. Aiken is not alone in his ambivalent characterization of consciousness—as both material and immaterial, or not quite either. Writers from Virginia Woolf to Paul Beatty mix and blend the physical and non-physical in their experiments; Aiken’s emphasis on the role of flesh and blood in the making of immaterial experience resonates with the opening of Ellison’s Invisible Man, the pebbles of his ecological metaphor with the famous tide pools of Isherwood’s A Single Man.
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II. Woolf, Ellison, Isherwood As I mentioned earlier, neuronovelists are contemporary heirs to modernist experiments with interiority. Ian McEwan went so far as to rewrite Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway for the age of neuroscience. Re-reading Woolf in the age of the neuronovel, the materiality of her characters’ streams of consciousness is impossible to overlook. As she describes it in her essay “Modern Fiction,” Woolf sought to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind” and “trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each site or incident scores upon the consciousness.” The atoms and “scores” in this sentence tend to be overlooked, but they are fundamental to Woolf’s revolutionary narrative techniques. Woolf’s characters don’t hold brains in their hands; she didn’t write revisionist mysteries. But she did portray the materiality of experience, and she suggests that her goal is to represent the ways consciousness may be changed—or “scored”— through experience. In Mrs. Dalloway, for example, the bustle of London streets and the grandeur of Bourton Hall are constitutive elements of the “interiority” Woolf portrays. “The throb of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body,” she writes in the famous passage when Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith witness the chaos of traffic created by a stopped car purportedly occupied by the Prime Minister. As the passage continues, the effects of this car reverberate from the sun and through Clarissa’s pursed face, finally “scoring” Septimus’ combustible psyche: The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window; old ladies on the tops of omnibuses spread their black parasols; here a green, here a red
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A strange, a rich, a deep personality he had— it baffled and fascinated him. Everybody of course, was like this,—depth beyond depth, a universe chorally singing, incalculable, obeying tremendous laws, chemical or divine, of which it was able to give its own consciousness not the faintest inkling… He brushed the dark hair of this universe. He looked into its tranquil blackpooled eyes. Its mouth was humorous and bitter. And this universe would go out and talk inanely to other universes—talking only with some strange minute fraction of its identity, like a vast sea leaving on the shore, for all mention of itself, a single white pebble, meaningless. A universe that contained everything—all things—yet said only one word: “I.”
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In passages like this, Woolf mixes and blends her characters’ interior monologues by mingling their responses to the environmental stimulus they share. We feel the “throb of the motor engines” through the lens of two filters. Clarissa has been watching Septimus, imagining what life feels like for him. Now they both feel the traffic as they watch the car come to a halt. As the passage progresses, Septimus’ fragile psyche dominates, his shell-shock the catalyst that makes the world waver and quiver. But Woolf makes it clear that Septimus’ symptoms are an exaggerated form of a sensitivity to environment shared by Clarissa—and, presumably, “every one” of the people on that street looking at that motor car. Throughout the novel, the mental experience of characters is interactive, rather than strictly internal. In fact, Woolf goes so far as to suggest that consciousness may be shared. “They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort,” Clarissa reminisces about the passionate friendship she once shared with Peter Walsh:
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They sat on the ground and talked—he and Clarissa. They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort. And then in a second it was over. He said to himself as they were getting into the boat, “She will marry that man,” dully, without any resentment; but it was an obvious thing, Dalloway would marry Clarissa. And then in a second it was over. Woolf portrays consciousness as a roving, transmittable process. She alludes to the environment’s capacity to “pulse through an entire body.” As she did with Peter Walsh, Clarissa almost shares experience with Septimus Smith, via their overlapping environment and physiology. They share the scene of the accident, but occupy different positions within it—and different angles from which to view it. They share human physiology, but occupy different bodies with vastly different personal histories. Consciousness may pulse through bodies, or beat in bleeding brains, but you can’t find it there. Shared experience is elusive. The title of Ellison’s Invisible Man is a condensed, lyrical comment on the intricate play of the material and immaterial in consciousness—a comment extended in the novel’s opening passage. I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie extoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of
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parasol opened with a little pop. Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the window with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out with her little pink face pursed in enquiry. Every one looked at the motor car. Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated. And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.
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Poe’s spooks are immaterial; Hollywood’s ectoplasms give them physical form. Ellison’s narrator is both. He is flesh, bone, fiber, and liquids. He is mind, a projection of the minds of the characters who inhabit the novel with him. He is also a collection of words, that add up to a portrait of his consciousness. The words are matter, printed on the page, which become immaterial in the minds of readers, even while they etch themselves in their brain cells. We will only understand racism, Ellison suggests, when we pay attention to material and immaterial dimensions. We can legislate the material, but the immaterial is more amenable to the tools of art. About the social and economic aspects of Harlem, Ellison writes in his 1948 essay “Harlem Is Nowhere,” “I am here interested in its psychological character.” In many ways, Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man is an early neuronovel influenced by Modernist experiments with representing consciousness that, like Invisible Man, is more emphatically political. Isherwood’s protagonist, George, is a professor grieving for his lost partner Jim. His grieving is solitary. The homophobia of his world curtails communal mourning rituals. In response, he narrates himself in ecological terms, as an organism, his brain and body commingling with an environment fundamentally changed by the loss of his most intimate
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companion. George lives on the margins of social life, but he’s intimate with biological life. Isherwood opens the novel with George waking uneasily into consciousness, his brain almost bullying him into reluctant action: Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deducted I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what’s called at home. But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until— later or sooner—no, not perhaps—quite certainly: it will come. Fear tweaks the vagus nerve. A sickish shrinking from what waits, somewhere out there, dead ahead. But meanwhile the cortex, the grim disciplinarian, has taken place at the central controls and has been testing them, one after another: the legs stretch, the lower back is arched, the fingers clench and relax. And now, over the entire intercommunication system, is issued the first general order of the day: UP. The subjectless am and now of the first sentence indicate a fringe state on the cusp of awareness, evolving fairly quickly into a feeling of identity in time (similar to the key scene from Powers’ The Echo Maker, when Mark Schluter wakes from coma). The narrator is reluctant to resume a
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hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me. Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a biochemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come into contact.
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life, or an identity, whose meaning is so strongly defined by Jim’s death. Like so many more recent neuronovels, Isherwood portrays George’s brain with agency: His fear of living “tweaks the vagus” nerve. His cortex is a “grim disciplinarian” that manipulates his body and issues commands. His body is an “intercommunication system.” George wrestles with his brain throughout the novel. He worries that his students see him as “a severed head carried into the classroom to lecture to them from a dish.” He laments that they “don’t want to know about my feelings or my glands or anything below the neck.” As he tries to sleep, “the brain inside the skull on the pillow cognizes darkly”—enabling him to consider “decisions not quite made,” decisions “waking George” can’t face. When he sleeps, “All over this quietly pulsating vehicle the skeleton crew make their tiny adjustments. As for what goes on topside, they know nothing of this but danger signals, false alarms mostly: red lights flashed from the panicky brain stem, curtly contradicted by green all clears from the level-headed cortex. But now the controls are on automatic. The cortex is drowsing; the brain stem registers only an occasional nightmare.” The novel ends with his quiet death, from a stroke: “Cortex and brain stem are murdered in the blackout with the speed of an Indian strangler. Throttled out of its oxygen, the heart clenches and stops. The lungs go dead, their power line cut. All over the body, the arterials contract.” Isherwood narrates George as an organism, using the language of physiology for a double effect, creating both clinical distance and bodily intimacy. George’s thoughts and feelings aren’t enough. We need to get inside his body to understand his grief. Isherwood’s novel ends with George’s death, but it’s not a gloomy tale about a man dying of grief. George finds
chances for life while he grieves—and Isherwood is careful not to portray this as a contradiction, but as a crucial nuance in what it means to be a human organism. If the merging of bodies is central to Isherwood’s novel, it’s not limited strictly to human bodies, or even biological ones. The novel’s most famous scene features George contemplating tide pools at the beach on the night he will die:
The tide pools are an explicit metaphor for consciousness. George’s body—with its “skeleton crew”—is akin to the rocks, holding his identity together. The pools, sloshing over with life forms, are akin to his physical, phenomenological, and social components of his identity. They splash into others; the sea splashes into them; the tide goes out, and they evaporate. George’s body, like the pools, is alive with “queerer possibilities” than his world recognizes. By implication, the same must be true for The Majority. Isherwood’s sly move, in 1964, was to cast George as an allegorical figure, a representative of the
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Just as George and the others are thought of, for convenience, as individual entities, so you may think of a rock pool as an entity; though, of course, it is not. The waters of its consciousness— so to speak—are swarming with hunted anxieties, grim-jawed greeds, dartingly vivid intuitions, old crusty-shelled obstinacies, deep-down sparkling undiscovered secrets, ominous protean organisms motioning mysteriously, perhaps warningly, toward the surface light. How can such a variety of creatures co-exist at all? Because they have to. The rocks of the pool hold their world together. And throughout the day the ebb tide, they know no other.
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variety of humans, queer creatures like him, intercorporeal and sparkling with undiscovered secrets.
brain where conscious life may be extinguished; and, finally, Thomas Harris’ Hannibal, made notorious through Ridley Scott’s film adaptation of the scene in which Hannibal sautés the living brain of a Justice Department officer and feeds it to FBI agent Clarice Starling. Critic Marco Roth coined the term neuronovel in the journal N+1. Roth decries the “rise of the neuronovel” by way of comparison to the genre’s predecessors: “What has variously been referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological novel or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the brain becomes the mind.” Roth is not alone in his skepticism about the neurocentrism of recent developments in contemporary literature, arguing that they may capitulate to or reinforce the bold speculations and reductionism of what some have called our culture’s neuromania. Roth makes the extreme claim that “the new genre of the neuronovel” may be a sign of the novel’s “diminishing purview” because it replaces what he sees as the complexity of psychological realism with neurological reductionism. In their essay, “Brains in Literature / Literature in the Brain,” Francisco Ortega and Fernando Vidal are more careful to delineate a range of literary responses to neuroscience: “neuronovelists differ—at least in their writings—in their commitment to treating humans as ‘cerebral subjects’ characterized by the fact of being brains.” Ortega and Vidal are critical of a tendency among literary writers and scholars to defer to neuroscience’s empirical aura, and they object to representations that reduce human beings or literary characters to “cerebral subjects,” but they don’t see these problems as a defining feature of literary responses to neuroscience. Critiques like these make a point worth considering, but they risk reinforcing a strict divide between
III. The Novel in the Age of Neuroscience In the past two decades, a growing number of novelists (and memoirists) have turned their attention to the confounding gap between what we’re learning about the physiology of the brain and the various forms of immaterial experience that emerge from it: consciousness, imagination, feeling, emotion, affect, memory, self. An astounding number of these novels are revisionist mysteries of one kind or another). In his essay “Rise of the Neuronovel,” Marco Roth makes it clear how widespread the phenomenon is, including: Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, narrated by an autistic child detective; Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, whose protagonist is an unwitting detective with Tourette’s Syndrome; Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, narrated by a psychiatrist suffering from paranoid delusions; Richard Powers’ The Echo-Maker, whose protagonist suffers from Capgras Syndrome, leading him to suspect that his friends and loved ones are imposters; and McEwan’s earlier novel Enduring Love, whose villain’s exotic diagnosis results in a delusion that the novel’s protagonist loves him. In addition to the novels Roth examines, we might add Powers’ Galatea 2.2, Lauren Slater’s Lying and David B.’s Epileptic, whose focus on the brain as physical object is fundamental to the blending of fiction and memoir; Teju Cole’s Open City, narrated by a psychiatric resident whose observations about urban life are filtered through his work with people suffering from mental illness; Haruki Murakami’s IQ84, in which the heroine perfects an assassination technique involving a needle designed to invade a tiny spot in the PAGE 178
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the brain and the self, or the material and the immaterial. In that sense, they oversimplify, or even undo, the complex and contradictory representations that have defined the modern novel since the days of Woolf and Aiken. The inflammatory titles of two controversial books illustrate a major—and I would argue, false—debate raised by all this neuromania: Neurobiologist Dick Swaab’s We Are Our Brains: A Neurobiography of the Brain from the Womb to Alzheimer’s and American philosopher Alva Noë’s Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. The “you are your brain” / “you are not your brain” debate is possible because of the paradox created by rapid advances in the neurosciences that raise more questions than answers. But neuronovels and brain memoirs offer a way out of the binary installed by the rhetoric of this debate. Of course, their writers have varying motives and methods for making brains central to their literary experiments, but nearly all of them use narrative to ask a set of questions the laboratory sciences are not equipped to answer: What roles might the brain play in the making of identity, the experience of embodiment, and the shaping of social relations? Put more simply, they emphasize the “you” in the “you are or aren’t your brain” discussion. They invite readers to consider vicissitudes of identity more capaciously represented through story, rather than argument, by linking the experience of living with a brain to particular characters, voices, and plots. Fortunately, the theoretical neurosciences frequently approach the question with new ideas and new rhetorical frameworks. In their book Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (2013), Joelle Abi-Rached and Nikolas Rose argue that “at their most sophisticated… are struggling toward a way of thinking in which our
corporeality is in constant transaction with its milieu.” For example, early in Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain, Michael Gazzaniga encapsulates the epistemological conundrum: “The physiochemical brain does enable the mind in some way we don’t understand and in so doing, it follows the physical laws of the universe just like other matter.” Gazzaniga’s concern is a social one. A strictly determinist interpretation of his claim that the “brain does enable the mind” might suggest humans are not responsible for our actions. To counter this idea, Gazzaniga argues that “the mind…constrains the brain.” In order to explain mind, he argues, we need to think in terms of layers, including “the micro world of subatomic particles” and “the macro world of you and your buddy high-fiving over the Super Bowl.” If mind is composed of tiny particles and social relations that do not obey the laws of physics, then it is a “dynamic system” requiring some mechanism to give it coherence. For Gazzaniga, that mechanism is the self, the responsible agent. The self inhabits social and environmental worlds whose input enables it to think and feel—in other words, have a mind—that “constrains” the brain’s physiology, which at the level of the subatomic, must already be disobeying laws of matter anyway. For Gazzaniga, you are not simply your brain. Like Gazzaniga, Antonio Damasio, and Joseph LeDoux both identify as materialist neuroscientists, but also like him, their theories do not simply reduce selfhood to brainhood. Damasio argues that consciousness arises when an “organism” interacts with “objects”— and in the process creates images of that object that alter the organism’s “map” of its own physiology and its relation to the world around it. The map, of course, is a representation, composed of neural networks but also what
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Damasio calls the “chemical bath” or “internal milieu” of bodies. Bodies regulate life through making patterns of meaning, but those patterns mostly elude consciousness. LeDoux, the original author of the sentence, “You are your synapses,” has recently turned to anthropology to refine his explanation of the brain-self relationship. In his most recent book, Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety, LeDoux invokes Claude Levi-Strauss’ concept of bricolage to explain how fear and anxiety may be “assembled from nonemotional ingredients.” Levi-Strauss’ bricoleur is a self assembled from “items that happen to be available” in her social context. LeDoux includes among the items of social life “persons, objects, contexts, the sequence and fabric of everyday life.” He argues that “In the brain, working memory can be thought of as the ‘bricoleur,’ and the content of emotional consciousness resulting from the construction process as the bricolage.” While LeDoux’s focus is on the physiology of feeling, he does more than create an illustrative analogy when he casts working memory as bricoleur. He suggests that neuroscience benefits from sociological and anthropological theories of the self and emphasizes the interplay of brain physiology and social life. In other words, like Damasio, Ledoux demonstrates “a way of thinking in which our corporeality is in constant transaction with its milieu”—and this is a way of thinking that’s fundamental to the history of the modern novel’s experiments with representing consciousness. Interiority is not all about interiors.
The Thinker
—— Portions of this essay are excerpted from Jason Tougaw’s forthcoming book, Touching Brains: Literary Experiments in 21st-Century Neuromania (Yale University Press). PAGE 180
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Thomas Bernhard’s 3 Days
In June of 1970, experimental filmmaker Ferry Radax convinced Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard to sit for a televised portrait. Or, perhaps it was Bernhard who insisted on sitting. Radax had initially wanted to cast Bernhard in nine discrete scenes portraying the filmmaker’s interpretation of the author’s life and work, each taking a day to film. Bernhard, reluctant to serve as a prop illustrating Radax’s interpretations, insisted on a mere three days of filming, and on choosing a single location himself. In what Bernhard describes in his brief notes on the film as a “search that became utterly preposterous to find a suitable locale,” he settled on a white park bench in a Hamburg suburb. The action of the resultant film, Thomas Bernhard—Three Days, relies upon Radax’s painstaking manipulation of perceived space through extreme closeups, shots from extraordinary distance and height, blackouts, and several sequences mediated through monitors and other equipment, while Bernhard, for the most part, rests on the white bench and speaks extemporaneously. Blast Books has now published a book version of this film, from which publisher and book designer Laura Lindgren has translated Bernhard’s monologue, and carefully selected ample stills. While most of the film’s text has long been available in its original German (published by Suhrkamp alongside the transcript for Radax’s subsequent Bernhard collaboration, Der Italiener), Lindgren’s translation is a revelation, making available to English-speaking readers a relatively early example
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of Bernhard’s unique voice speaking outside of the constraints of narrative or dramaturgy. This is not to say that the Thomas Bernhard encountered in the pages of 3 Days is necessarily speaking candidly, or strictly autobiographically, but rather that the reader is treated to another worthwhile facet of the difficult and layered Bernhardian persona. The frowned-upon temptation to lump Bernhard in with his narrators is abetted by the anecdote which appears, like a prologue, before the “First Day” section of the film. Bernhard recalls the frustrating impossibility of his memorizing his lines during his years as a theater student, and attributes this inability to his decision to leave the school. “This comes to mind,” says Bernhard, because in The Lime Works I can’t get past this single same sentence: that is, the protagonist Konrad, in fifteen years is still only at the first sentence of a study he has wanted to write for twenty years, which just never works out for him. Bernhard goes on to recount how Konrad dreams that he finishes his study, that his wife discovers that he has completed it, and outraged at his not telling her, destroys the manuscript. The dream ends with Konrad’s wife telling him, “Now you can start all over again and struggle another twenty years with that sentence.” It seems out of character for Bernhard to compare an example of futility from his fiction, which are not hard to find, with an example from his own life. Moreover, it is also peculiar that Bernhard conflates himself with his character, saying that he himself “can’t get past this single same sentence.” Bernhard may have simply misspoken (a possibility underscored by Suhrkamp’s decision to
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On the White Bench:
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In short: in my books everything is artificial— which means all figures, events, incidents play out on a stage, and the stage is totally dark…. Figures appearing within a stage area, on a stage platform, are more clearly recognizable by their contours than if they appear in a natural light, as in the usual, familiar prose. At the time, these comments would have appeared to indicate that Bernhard had sublimated his dramatic aspirations into his writing of fiction. However, Bernhard’s reasons for so frequently invoking the stage are probably related to the primary reason that he was in Hamburg in
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the summer of 1970; A Party for Boris, Bernhard’s first full-length play, was then in rehearsal for its debut at Hamburg’s Schauspielhaus. Bernhard did not know that this play would be a success, and that it would lead to a prolific parallel career as a playwright. His writing for the theater, today still underrepresented in his translated oeuvre, perhaps allowed the author to move ever farther away from “familiar prose”; after all, in 1970, what were arguably Bernhard’s greatest and most singular novelistic works were still far ahead of him. 3 Days does offer some true-to-life insights and observations that would reappear much later, more fully fleshed out, in subsequent works. For example, anecdotes relating Bernhard’s abiding love for his grandfather, his first year of life spent in a hammock on a reeking fishing trawler, and a mention of his love of cemeteries (an allusion to his grandmother’s penchant for trolling graveyards and mortuaries to lift young Thomas up to view corpses), all receive more detailed treatment in Gathering Evidence, the book collecting five memoirs Bernhard penned between 1975 and 1982. Some utterances only come to life when regarded in the light of later biographical findings: when Bernhard calls his writing, “the conversation with my brother that does not exist, the conversation with my mother that does not exist,” he is referring to the nonexistence of conversations with his emotionally abusive and distant (and by then deceased) mother, and with the half-brother whose family name Bernhard was denied. The notion that Bernhard’s embattled prose stands in for those discussions which never took place lends their fury added gravitas. And yet, a major delight in witnessing Bernhard speak in the manner he does in 3 Days lies in forgetting about fidelity to Bernhard’s life, and instead yielding to
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leave this passage out of their edition), or this might be a bit of artful misdirection, inviting a direct comparison between the author and his creation. The difference in relative outcomes for Bernhard and Konrad, of course, is that while Konrad is doomed to never writing a word, Bernhard abandoned his fruitless acting ambitions for a very successful career as an author. Later, perhaps in order to bolster his image as a perpetually embattled artist, Bernhard claims in these pages that writing prose is “the most horrible,” and also “the very most difficult.” He enumerates all of the other disciplines that he mastered or could have mastered, noting, “I could have done something completely different. I learned a good number of other disciplines, but none horrible.” One such abandoned discipline, presumably less horrible, is theater; Bernhard notes that he “could have become an actor or director or dramaturge. There was a time when that had [him] very captivated. It was very exciting…” Another instance where theater is invoked in is explaining the constant darkness in Bernhard’s books:
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the temptation to conflate author and persona, to enjoy Bernhard’s own contradictions and spleen. For example, at one point Bernhard chaffs at the constant implication that he is a “tragic, gloomy poet,” that “the books are gloomy, the characters are gloomy, and the landscape is gloomy, and so that means—the man now seated before us too is gloomy…”. The complaint, lodged by the sullen man slumped on a park bench, is appended by the admission that, “Then again, of course I am hardly a cheery author”! Another pleasure that 3 Days yields is an infrequent but penetrating poetic poignancy. In one passage, Bernhard languishes in the melancholia of Vienna, illustrating it with the slow decline of an aging shopkeeper pouring sugar into a sack, and young people in parks and cafés: “Suddenly you notice, this is no longer a young man anymore; he acts like a young man—probably like I act like a young man but am a young man no more. And this compounds over time and becomes quite nice.” Such lyricism, in gentle service to melancholy, is scarce in Bernhard’s prose. To read it while viewing a still of Bernhard anxiously twirling a twig in his fingers is oddly affecting. It is true that 3 Days largely does without the loping, musical cadences of Bernhard’s signature marathon sentences, and for the most part lacks the tonic notes of his obsessively repeated key phrases. Nevertheless, readers acquainted with Bernhard’s fiction will frequently find themselves in familiar territory while reading 3 Days; while by his own reckoning speaking “coincidentally” and “haphazardly,” Bernhard remains firmly in character, holding forth in a “state of extreme irritation.” The italicized intensifiers, the irascibility, the monomania, are all as present here as they are in the mouths of Bernhard’s protagonists.
Laura Lindgren’s name does not appear on the jacket of her impressive translation and design of 3 Days, but her good taste, painstaking attention to detail, and apparent love of her subject all speak volumes. Lindgren’s literary design work in recent years, particularly on graphically lush books by Robert Walser and Emily Dickinson, serve to add crucial and beautiful dimensions to our understanding of these great authors. 3 Days is an astonishing document of an author in his prime, and a worthy addition to his translated body of work in English.
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More interesting is the predicament of the consciousness that knows. Consciousness seems always to stop short of its object, and is defined by its limitations. There is a gap, a chasm, all round it, which is the gap between what we know and our knowing. As out knowing shifts, grows, diminishes—as we know more or differently or know that we know less—we proceed through disillusion. Knowledge is the terrible key to that ignorance in which, if we turn the key, we shall lock ourselves; and there is no unlocking. Yet a mind may not use its ignorance; ignorance is a condition to be achieved, like grace, and is not a weapon; the weapon is knowledge, a sharpening, a definition, of the fragments of consciousness. The pursuit is full of victory and assertion; the most formidable sensations are vanquished. The end of denial and annihilation; the abyss surveyed by consciousness widens, consciousness topples and is engulfed. In our ends are our beginnings. Betweentimes we are conscious of more or less. Mr. Aiken’s mind is deeply concerned with the terms of this predicament, and all his Preludes are analogues, examples, answers, of the thematic questions: What do I know? how much more may I know?—of myself, of you whom I love, of this which I see, of this which I do not see. He does not ask why? or to what purpose? or by what method? He limits himself, as a poet should, to the PAGE 184
qualitative, devouring What. He wants only a language for his sensations and his feelings, so that he may the better know them. his poetry is not animated by an idea, it is obsessed by the need of feeling. It is not directed by faith, it is qualified by assent to what he feels. It does not run, confronted by life, to the statuary fastness of logic, it resorts to the constant piety of meditation. It is not rigid and right, but amorphous and honest. It is consciousness—a particular agony of knowledge and ignorance—expanding itself. —— This is an excerpt from an essay that originally appeared in Poetry in April 1932. It is republished by permission of R. P. Blackmur Papers (C0227), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
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A Selection from “The Day Before the Daybreak”
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Ceaselessly Pushed Forward and Borne Back I. Approaching Without Approaching —approaching without approaching, voyaging toward Ushant (Conrad Aiken’s experimental autobiography) and Ushant (the island whose treacherous shoreline, destroyer of a thousand ships, wrecker of all who wish to make landfall, gives that book its title), toward any and all Ushant, of which there are an infinite number, knowing “you shan’t” set foot on those shores, yet attempting the feat regardless, that inward and outward movement, pushing out and circling back, toward some sublime crystallization of a multiform text, a multiform oeuvre, a multiform life, a multiform cosmos, toward the self and toward the universe, one within the other, both within each other, and the currents which, chaotic yet ordered, discordant yet consilient, individual yet choral, flow betwixt and between— It is on this precarious trajectory, spiraling ever closer to the unattainable, yet remaining perhaps just as far from it, that I approach the work of Conrad Aiken and try to engage with it without reducing it, while conceding that reduction is all I am able to do—what I will do, am already doing... The limits of criticism are the limits of language. As Aiken wrote in his first novel, Blue Voyage, “To speak is to PAGE 185
simplify, to simplify is to change, to change is to falsify.” Yet silence is not an option. There has been too much silence around Aiken and his writings—“a conspiracy of silence,” in the words of critic Mark Schorer. Aiken has, it seems, slipped into a silent snow which has all but whited him out, erased him, so that what is left is a personal secret for those of us who have taken these blue voyages on a great circle approaching Ushant, those who have travelled with William Demarest and Andrew Cather and John Deth and Osiris Jones and Paul Hasleman and Mr. Arcularis and D. and the oh so many others that populate his writing, those who have read, are reading, will continue to read the work of the poet, novelist, and critic whom Marianne Moore called “Diogenes’ one honest man, fearing only to displease himself.” II. The Sea Will Have You —a body of work like a body of water, and knowing the futility of fathoming, of counting the fathoms, of these unfathomable oceans, yet diving ahead to plunge to their depths and, indeed, to still attempt to plumb them; we must do this, for it is in the sea, and only in the sea, only in those swirling currents of tumult and those submarine caves and marianas trenches where sunken galleons of our past, of our ancestors and their ancient armadas, lay strewn, that we can approach some exegesis of Aiken’s oeuvre; unlike biblical exegesis, though, this secular version does not descend from on high in the form of revealed truths, but bubbles up from below, from within, from unseen and unseeable abysses, from the sea, the sea, in the form of fluctuating complications— “Thalatta! Thalatta!” was the cry, according to Xenophon in his Anabasis, of the ten thousand Greeks
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Conrad Aiken and the Eternal Re-Currents:
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But he was goaded by that roar of throats, He hated them, they had no strength, no nerve, They did not dare to strike beyond the floats, They clung to ropes...While he, with dip and swerve, With face turned back, and brown arm’s tireless curve, Fought with the sea’s alternate fall and rise, Burst through, shook water out of mouth and eyes. ... He was alone, exultant, with the sea, He had flung earth away, his soul was free... From this first collection up through Ushant and beyond, the sea remained what he called a “perpetual preoccupation.” In fact, the poet admitted in that
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experimental autobiography that he “had been claimed by the sea,” writing: You will lie down behind the nearest shelter, but in vain: in vain will you tie the futile cords of the life-jacket: useless, too, to clamp and bolt the black eye of the porthole: the sea will have you, has already, under your innumerable other names, sought you out and embraced you, whether behind the sheltering deckrail, or in the smashed lifeboat, or picked out of the alleyway by the green triumphant wave, or sealed up forever in your dark cabin, like a bee in amber. The sea had sought Aiken out, had embraced him in his infancy (or before, in the wet of womb). Some of his earliest memories, in fact, were on the stoop of his childhood home in Savannah, Georgia, imagining an ocean surrounding the steps. In these formative moments of make believe, the stoop “had been a ship,” as he articulated in Ushant: So that as one descended the worn brown steps one of course moved closer and closer to the water, the ocean, that imaginary ocean which was so incomparably more real and fascinating than any mere Atlantic, or Bay of Biscay, was ever to be. This surrounded and washed up against the stoop on all sides, this far-extending sea: it began with the brick sidewalk, roared east and west along the block, and so out of sight. One can imagine the child setting off on countless voyages from his stoop-ship, sailing to New York, to Boston, to
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expressing their joy, their relief, their exultation, when they finally saw the Black Sea after days and nights wandering Persia. Yes—“The sea! The sea!”—it meant they would survive; it meant they had returned; it meant they were once again home, among the Greek city-states. Conrad Aiken referenced this cry in Blue Voyage, and its echo can be heard throughout the rest of his oeuvre—a recurrent whisper, “like the hush heard in a conch shell: Sh—sh— sh.” “The sea! The sea!”—one cannot overestimate its importance to Aiken’s work. It was there from the beginning, already lapping at the shores of even his earliest poems. The poem “Youth,” for example, from his first collection, Earth Triumphant, published soon after his graduation from Harvard, told of a young ubermenschtype named Jim, whom we meet on a beach. Disgusted by his fellow beach-goers, he leaves the shore for the more perilous currents in order to get away from these vile people, using his athletic body to cut through the waves:
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London, passing carefully the perilous shores of an island perhaps not unlike Ushant, that titular island which would form the focal point of much of that autobiography, the unattainable, the “You shan’t!” In addition to those stoop sea voyages of the child’s imagination, another factor that catalyzed this perpetual preoccupation with the sea, from that early age, was the decision by the poet’s father to build a boat—yes, an actual boat—in their backyard. He failed, unsurprisingly, in completing it, but even in its incomplete form—or, indeed, precisely because of its incomplete form—that boat stayed with Aiken throughout his adult life: the father’s failed boat. In Ushant, he wrote, speaking of himself in third person:
actual ships as the poet grew, yet each push out to new adventures was merely a reconfiguration of those juvenile journeys, each voyage merely the eternal return to those initial imagined purple passages on the stoop and in the backyard. Aiken’s debut novel, Blue Voyage, is a semiautobiographical account of one such transatlantic crossing. In the novel, Demarest, a thinly-veiled version of Aiken, embarks on an eight-day sea voyage. The name Demarest, of course, can be separated into its constituent parts, becoming: de mare est (meaning: “of the sea he is”). Demarest is traveling to London to see a woman named Cynthia, though she doesn’t know he is coming. They had met on a previous trip, and though she has never returned his letters, he hopes to convince her to marry him. Early on, Demarest discovers, to his surprise, that Cynthia is currently aboard the ship on which he has set sail with the goal of going to visit her (though, of course, she is in first class, whilst he bums around in second class). She has been in America these past few months, and never even bothered to look him up. The disappointment is further compounded when he learns that she is now engaged. So the reader follows Demarest through this disappointment as he sails both the actual “unmerciful sea” and the streams of his own consciousness, approaching but never quite achieving the objects of his desire. Later on in Aiken’s artistic career, a similar setup, though infinitely more complex, formed the autobiographical Ushant, where D. (who represents both Aiken and Demarest) sets sail again for Europe, and dives into the depths of his own consciousness, analyzing all the journeys of his life, from that imagined stoop-ship in Savannah to those unattainable shores of Ushant, and all
Perhaps even now he was himself still occupied in building and launching and sailing that adventurous little Argonaut: that unbuilt boat was the Grey Empress, at this moment, and all the countless other ships he had sailed in, forever pointing a hopeful bow in a new direction: towards Liverpool tonight, as on the first of all occasions from Quebec, with the Scotch carpenter, and Ebo playing his fiddle on the steerage deck: towards foaming Ushant and moaning Cherbourg: towards Gibraltar and Ceuta: towards Naples, and the broken rim of Vesuvius, and Pompeii, deserted and mortuary in April rain: all these, and all the others, of course they were the unbuilt boat in the backyard, he had been building it ever since. Those sea voyages on the stoop and that unbuilt boat in the backyard were replaced with real sea voyages on
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the others in between. Ushant looks at his past, present, and future on the same plane, letting the whole life form patterns, not by the progress of time and space, but through the spiraling framework of the oceanic currents of consciousness. It’s not difficult to see how Aiken’s main symbolic preoccupation (the sea) might easily link up to his main thematic preoccupation (consciousness). We speak of the literary expression of consciousness already in aquatic terms: the “stream of consciousness,” as William James depicted it in The Principles of Psychology. But Aiken’s view of consciousness is not merely of one flowing stream, but of a whole unruly ocean. The sea, treacherous and deep, with its waves of simultaneous chaos and order, is a nearperfect embodiment of Aiken’s conception of his own confounding consciousness: “the confusion of one’s own sea,” as he wrote in Ushant. The sea is that unconquerable primitive thing which would be futile to try to tame or order, yet which hints at some underlying primordial order that preexists us. “What form to represent the sea?” Demarest asks in Blue Voyage—and one can extrapolate to the larger question of Aiken’s writing: “What form to represent consciousness?” Throughout his life’s work, Aiken tried to answer this question, finding forms that might approximate consciousness, and the most persistent form he utilized was that seemingly formless ocean of competing currents. “I’m always dreaming about the sea,” Andrew Cather admits in Aiken’s second novel, Great Circle. In his preceding novel, Aiken had given Demarest his own thoughts of Caligula, who also dreamed of the sea, “dreamed nightly that a figure—a form—a shape—vague and terrifying and representing the ocean—came to him speaking.” But Cather and Caligula are just two of
many ciphers through which Aiken explored his own seadreaming. His biographer, Edward Butscher, claimed Aiken’s sea-dreams as one reason why Edgar Allan Poe held such an important place in the young poet’s pantheon: “Poe’s tightening grip on his imagination derived as well from their common reaction, persistent and mysterious, to the sea and to dreams, their conjunction in intimating the presence of reality beyond mere consciousness.” Ushant also begins with the conflation of the sea and dreams: “—beginning without beginning, water without a seam, or sleep without a dream, or dream coterminous with sleep and the sleeper.” Of course, sea-dreams aren’t too difficult to psychoanalyze, at least according Great Circle’s Andrew Cather: “We all know what that means, don’t we? I’m going to be born again one of these days. Oh, yes, we rise again. Back to the womb, and forth once more we swim, like the mighty hero of the Kalevada, after nine months in submarine caves.” This connection of the sea to the womb, to the amniotic fluid, to our prenatal existence, is important. There is a longing in Aiken to return to something— to this womb state, to one’s past, to those moments of great shift in one’s life, to one’s ancestors—to grasp the unknowable, to seize one’s consciousness. In a later novel, A Heart for the Gods of Mexico, sea-life gets compared to our fetal origins: “There’s something about marine life, and the fruits of the sea—it must be an atavism, when you were a tadpole and I was a fish.” This return to our earlier stages of development, to our atavistic connections to our ancestors, which becomes crucial in our understanding of the “great circle” (or perhaps the “great spiral”?) of Aiken’s thematic mythos, also helps to solidify the connective
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tissue between the sea and consciousness, for those “submarine caves” of the womb are also the “submarine caves” of our psyches. We are all de mare est—we have all come from the sea, we are all of the sea, and we all have a sea inside of us, which we are perpetually beckoned to return to, and which may be the only thing we can ever come close to knowing: our consciousness. (“That small bright circle,” as Aiken wrote in one poem, “beyond which lies the dark.”)
though, in a way, he was always spiraling toward that capstone to his career. What Seigel was alluding to was the fact that, in his fiction and his poetry, he continually mined his own life, his own history, his own psyche, his own consciousness, for the grist he then turned into art. All writers do this to some extent, but in Aiken we find a special case. Perhaps because of the childhood trauma he experienced—at the age of eleven, he walked in to find the dead bodies of his parents after his father shot his mother and then himself—Aiken would forever be haunted by the past, returning to it, reliving it, reviewing it, reexamining it, and rewriting it, turning it always into art. He admitted a huge debt to Sigmund Freud and spent his life performing a form of literary self-analysis, casting himself in the dual role of patient and psychoanalyst. This was done not out of narcissism, but out of a kind of solipsism, an admission that any knowledge must begin as self-knowledge: he examined his own microcosmic consciousness because it was the only way to investigate a macrocosmic universal idea of consciousness. How else could one attempt the Herculean labor of exploring consciousness without first and foremost laying one’s own consciousness bare? In Ushant, Aiken phrased the question this way:
III. The Plural Mind in the Plural Universe and the Plural Universe in the Plural Mind —moving away, for a moment, from the image of the sea, from those breaking waves and battling currents, to focus on Conrad Aiken’s conception of consciousness, independent of his most utilized of symbolic forms, turning instead to the various other forms he attempted to give it, in order to find a unifying principle or defining quality, in order to approach a definition—“definition” being one of “the keystones of Aiken’s theoretics,” according to critic Frederick Hoffman; definition being something Aiken continually reaches out for and circles back on—therefore, like the author himself, we go off in search of a definition of that mysterious thing called consciousness, which is simultaneously unknowable yet potentially all we are ever able to know, and which Aiken, knowing this, spent his whole life and career exploring and exploiting— Catharine F. Seigel began her book on Aiken’s fiction, The Fictive World of Conrad Aiken, with the following declaration: “Conrad Aiken wrote his autobiography his entire life.” By this she did not mean that he spent his whole life working on the autobiographical Ushant— PAGE 189
For if it was the writer’s business, or the poet’s, to be as conscious as possible, and his primary obligation, then wouldn’t this impose upon him the still deeper obligation of being conscious of his own workings, the workings of his psyche, and of the springs and deficiencies and necessities and compulsions, the whole subliminal drive which had made him a writer to begin with, and along with the work itself, to present, as it were,
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In Aiken’s estimation, the artist’s role and duty was to explore “that small bright circle of consciousness.” In an interview with the Paris Review, Aiken stated that the plan was always to “give myself away, to such extent as I could bear it, as to what made the wheels go round. Feeling that this was one of the responsibilities of a writer—that he should take off the mask.” This giving himself away, this taking off the mask—or as his friend and literary executor, Joseph Killorin, called it, this “calculated self-exposure”— became his modus operandi. While other artists tied themselves to fashionable philosophies and political ideologies, the only belief Aiken continually espoused was this belief in the importance of perpetual self-examination and the movement toward self-knowledge. He believed, according to an article in The Nation, aptly titled “What I Believe”: “If we begin by understanding ourselves, as far as we can, we progress thus toward an understanding of man and his potentialities. This seems to me a sufficient field for belief and will. Let us be as conscious as possible.” Aiken’s writing shows a man trying to be as conscious as possible, trying to give form to that consciousness. Yet the question remains: “What form to represent consciousness?” Aiken gave us numerous answers—all imperfect, but all closing in on some defining form. In Blue Voyage, he described consciousness as a subway system: “Thought was moving in his brain. Like a train in a dark subway. A red spark coming nearer through the darkness, gliding round curves. Other thoughts too, going in other directions.” This image of a series of dark tunnels with thoughts like little lights on trains moving in various
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directions fits nicely with much of what Aiken thought of consciousness, but it still perhaps feels too ordered, too architectural, even if it is a subterranean architecture. In his story “State of Mind,” Aiken used other images to approach consciousness: One’s mind was like this—a puddled sidewalk littered with such odds and ends. Or like this exposed cellar which he was now passing, whence the building had been removed: a chaos of rubbish, piles of mortar and dead bricks, plastercovered beams, twisted pipes, a bed spring, a scarred radiator lying on its side, and at the bottom of all, a melancholy wreck of a furnace, its torn pipes gushing cold air. And the rain falling gently and impatiently on it all. The mind as a chaos of rubbish, too, feels Aikenian, yet there must be more to it than that, no? Is the mind merely an empty lot filled with the detritus of the past? Mustn’t it also have some drive toward futurity? Isn’t the life of the mind one that moves forward rather than merely stagnating? In a 1915 letter to a friend, Aiken mentioned a metaphor for consciousness that he said truly haunted him: A single human consciousness as simply a chorus: a chorus of voices, influences. As if one’s sum total of awareness and identity were merely handed to one progressively and piecemeal by the environment. As if one were a mirror. As if one were a vaudeville stage across which a disjointed and comparatively meaningless series of acts was perpetually passing. This flux being one’s being.
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the explication—? Wouldn’t this be the next mandatory step, the artist’s plain duty? that he take the machine apart, and show how it worked?
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The world outside and beyond (but within oneself too)—the microcosm, with full awareness of the laws and limitations of microcosm (but in love with it, just the same, and proud of its prismatic importance) receiving into itself the macrocosm, a world within a world. Critic Ian Kluge further explained this interchangeable microcosm/macrocosm of consciousness and cosmos in his book Conrad Aiken’s Philosophy of Consciousness: However, the Self of self-consciousness is a far more complex entity than we might think not only because it exemplifies the processes at work
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throughout the entire cosmos but also because it potentially includes the whole universe within itself. Depending on which state of consciousness dominates at a particular moment, the Self can be either the microcosm or the macrocosm. So the plural mind in the plural universe is also the plural universe in the plural mind—the microcosm is the macrocosm, and the macrocosm is the microcosm. Because of this, and the “eternal problem of language,” Aiken wrote in Ushant that this plural mind “must forever partly escape the flung net of symbol.” No symbol is complicated enough to signify a signified that is omniessent. This problem, of course, being eternal, is already there in Aiken’s first novel, Blue Voyage: “Impossible to present, all at once, in a phrase, a sentence, a careful paragraph—even in a book, copious and disheveled—all that one meant or all that one was.” Though it is impossible to present all that a consciousness means or all that a consciousness is, the image of the sea offered a sort of shorthand for Aiken. He would use other forms—the chorus, the exposed cellar, and the subway system being just a few examples—but it was the sea that remained for Aiken, even knowing its deficiencies, the best symbolic approach, and so he would return to it again and again and again, his own personal tropological eternal recurrence. IV. Currents, Re-Currents, and Recurrence —beginning with “—beginning without beginning,” in medias res—and not just in the middle of the plot, but in the middle of the thought—making entrance at a seemingly arbitrary point in the orbit, because a circle has no obvious starting point, no clear port of departure, just
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So what do all of these consciousness tropes have in common with one another and with the sea? Consciousness is depicted in Aiken’s work as always in flux, always fragmentary, always multiform. The concept, found in Ushant, of “a plural mind in a plural universe.” This plurality inside mirrored the plurality outside; a complicated man reflected a complicated cosmos, and, in turn, a complicated cosmos reflected a complicated man. And every man, Aiken admitted in Blue Voyage, is infinite, rich, and complex: “If we stopped to consider, before any individual, his infinite richness and complexity, could we be anything but idolatrous—even of a fool?” Solipsistically, we may only be able to know ourselves, but if every man is then an island, each island is a reflection of the universe. We are all universes: “A universe,” Aiken described in Blue Voyage, “that contained everything—all things—yet said only one word: ‘I.’” This was the “staggering drama” in which “every living being was involved,” according to the Aiken of Ushant:
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—beginning without beginning, water without a seam, or sleep without a dream, or dream coterminous with sleep and the sleeper; flux and reflux, coil and moil; participation and concentration compounded, and then resolved again; participation and dispersal, then the subtle or violent catalysis, reorganization, the wave setting off in a new direction, the influence deflected, lapse and relapse, lapse and collapse, but out of the falling the magnificent rearising, out of the scend the pitch, out of the course of the ship the sheer, or the sheer of the ship towards stem and stern, the infinitesimal ship like a tiny luminous dream in the terrible, yes, lethal, yes murderous, sleep of the sea—and yet not in any sense separate, ship from water, dream from sleeper, wave from wave, particle from particle, drop from drop, electron from nucleus, world from world, but all together participating and dispersing, participating and again concentrating, wave-shaped and then plane-shaped, crest-shaped and then trough-shaped, revolving or secretly still, the numbers constant for each element, limited and finite yet part of an infinite series— In this opening passage of Ushant, we find the sea (and, therefore, consciousness) as the great deconstructor—
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folding and unfolding binaries. Everything is, as Aiken wrote in the story “Gehenna,” “a whirlwind of opposing forces.” Opposing forces—those thematic and symbolic currents flowing through the brine of our brains—show up everywhere in Aiken’s writing. Some of these continual currents and re-currents which we find conversing and dispersing throughout the body of work are chaos and order, life and death, love and hate, love and loss, love and sex, art and sex, art and life, the ancestors and the self, destiny and will, pre-determination and selfdetermination, sea and land, surface and depth, stillness and movement, mother and father, light and dark, body and mind, the self and the universe, the knowable and the unknowable, the finite and the infinite, outward and inward, linear and circular, voyage and return, progress and regress, progress and process, etc. For each of these, whole dissertations could be written on their treatment in Aiken’s writing, but we must round toward a broader base, toward an understanding of how these binaries interact with one another. To do that, it helps to examine one of his foundational binaries, what Aiken called the “bi-polarity of his childhood”: Savannah and New Bedford, the opposing poles of his youth. This binary is later mirrored by another bi-polarity of place, in adulthood: America and England. But Aiken’s work reveals that all binaries are in flux, especially in terms of their relationship to one another. For example, Savannah doesn’t statically link up to either America or England. At various moments, it aligns itself with the one and then the other. Obviously, on the one hand, Savannah is in the United States, and therefore aligns with his American childhood, with those original thirteen colonies, with the American character that has
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the never-ending ascent and descent of curves, the vertigo of unceasing revolution, Ushant’s first paragraph opens into a world of currents and re-currents—the back and forth, the ebb and flow—where the waves, in constant flux, churn like one’s thoughts, memories, dreams, and desires—
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Hadn’t he, ever since, every time he set sail for England, actually been setting sail for that carpeted floor, on which the copy of Tom Brown’s School Days still lay open at the luminous fragment of verse? Hadn’t time stood still, ever since, at that echo of a moment, that phrase of incantation? And hadn’t his entire life been simply a locus bending itself again and again, after no matter how many interruptions and diversions, as of wars, or storms at sea, to this limit, this perhaps unattainable limit, this imperative and imperishable Ushant? These forces merge with one another, form strange bonds, so that no current is ever merely one directional. Every current joins and works against other currents, in a constantly shifting cycle: “water without a seam.” Even in that beginning (without beginning) paragraph of Ushant, in the words “lapse and relapse, lapse and collapse,” we witness binaries coming into being, falling apart, and rearraging. Before our very eyes, lapse/relapse becomes lapse/collapse. No one monad is inextricably linked with its opposing monad—each forms and deforms and reforms multiple binaries. This is why in Aiken we find instances where love is contrasted with hate, and others where it is contrasted with loss, and still others where it is contrasted with sex; sex, itself, being contrasted with more than just love, as well (for example, with art). This pattern of binaristic mutability—where each pairing
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exists in waves of creation and destruction, atrophy and regeneration, flux and reflux—is a continual process. It is, perhaps, the one constant in Aiken’s oeuvre: particles reconfiguring themselves in relation to other particles, movements crashing into other movements, aligning and unaligning, realigning and dealigning—they move, move, move, move, move...yet remain curiously still, too, in what Aiken described in Ushant as “a kind of static-dynamic, a stillness of motion round an invisible center.” These binaries can be viewed as lines, yes, where each pole rests on an opposing end, yet these lines also seem to bend—and if you give a steady curve enough time and space, it will inevitably form a circle. Ouroboric—like the two water-snakes in his story “State of Mind”—these binaries consume their own binaric selves. They form that anarchic ocean (which is not exactly anarchic, and also not exactly an ocean), each current flowing with and against an infinitum of alternate currents in an eternal recurrence (of eternal re-currents), an unending collusion/collision of waves and tides, of particles and drops: “the confusion of one’s own sea.” V. Great Lines, Great Curves, Great Circles, and Great Spirals —and so the currents of Conrad Aiken’s oeuvre are seemingly infinite, working in harmony and cacophony, chaos and order, collusion and collision, but there are two currents that necessitate their own in depth examination here: there is the push out (symbolized by the line, ever exploring, ever moving forward, progressing outward, into new territory, into the universe, into the unknown) and there is the return back (symbolized by the circle, ever coiling, ever being borne back, turning inward, into the
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evolved since those colonial times; on the other hand, as he explained in Ushant, through the connection of his childhood love of Tom Brown’s School Days, Savannah aligns itself with England as well:
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past, into the self, into consciousness), and these two major currents (out and in, forward and back, line and circle, progress and process) form the spiraling shape of Ushant and, also, of the entire body of work— From the beginning of Blue Voyage, Demarest feels some desolation, nostalgia, and confusion as he surveys the cabin on the ship that will be his home for the next eight days:
own past, own consciousness). While Great Circle is, by Aiken’s design, a giant loop, the writer admitted in his notebooks that it “ends virtually where it begins except that more items have been brought into view.” (In other words, Great Circle may return, may be circular, but the circle also involves some fluctuations, some push into new directions, because “more items have been brought into view.” The view has expanded, evolved, progressed, even though it circles back.) There is a tendency to focus solely on the roundness of Aiken’s works—the repetitions and recurrences of much of the poetry, the great circle of Great Circle, the cyclical deaths and rebirths of Conversation, the spiral shape of Ushant, etc. This is not wrong per se, for Aiken clearly designed the works to contain these structural rings. Viewed in the right light, his is certainly an oeuvre of concentric circles. These works all tend to ring around the not-so-rosy (sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken) center of that tragedy in his youth, that core component of his being, the un-re-attainable parental murder-suicide (a symbolic Ushant, if ever there was one). But it is important, before spinning in Aiken’s cleverly designed circles, to first see the counter-movement, the recurrent against recurrence, that exists in his work as well. Every circle begins with a progressive line; every return must be a return to something that originally trekked out, propelled forward. It is perilous to focus solely on the “beginning without beginning,” without admitting that even that “beginning without beginning” is indeed a beginning, of sorts. Aiken’s interest in self-knowledge, in psychoanalyzing himself, in returning to that block in Savannah—as he did in his writing and his life—was also an interest in cosmos exploration, in engaging with the world, in pushing out toward some unknown destination.
And suddenly a feeling of unutterable desolation came over him, a nostalgia made only the more poignant by the echoes it brought of other voyages. Ah, that incurable longing for escape, for a spider’s cable by which he might swing himself abruptly into space or oblivion! But this time, was it an escape or a return? This question sets up a conflict of motion which undergirds the rest of his body of work: on the one hand, there is the pushing forward, the progressive movement, the perpetual escape, the linear path, the voyage out; on the other hand, there is the bearing back, the cyclical process, the eternal recurrence, the circular return, the dive inward. These seemingly opposed movements are quite literally writ into the titles of his first two novels: Blue Voyage and Great Circle. Blue Voyage could be said to represent that linear voyage out (especially by someone who has yet to read it), and Great Circle could be said to represent that circular inward return (by a similar someone). Neither book, though, is a perfect embodiment of either of these movements, for both contain the currents of the other. The voyage in Blue Voyage is certainly a voyage out, but it is also, in a way, a return voyage (to Europe, to Cynthia, to the sea, to the self, to Demarest’s
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To reminisce, to recall, to remember, to summon up to the sessions of sweet silent thought...this was the ultimate essence of life; and it was precisely in proportion to one’s ability to combine a maximum
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of just such awareness of the past with the nexus of the moment, and the then going forward, that one accomplished, with any grace, any beauty, the “precarious gait we call experience.” One needs to reminisce to go forward, just as one needs to go forward to reminisce. This “precarious gait” needs the push forward, of course, but it also needs the cyclical motion (of remembrance, of return, of recurrence). It is true that circles ring round Aiken’s entire body of work. They appear as a structural device in many of his poems, short stories, and novels (some of which have been mentioned here already). Aiken was attracted to Nietzsche’s idea of the “eternal recurrence of all things.” He wrote to Malcolm Lowry in 1939, “Everything comes round and back, the eternal return.” Even his life appeared to follow the form of the “great circle.” He returned to live his final years in Savannah, in a house next door to that childhood home where that tragedy took place—the same street, the same block, the same row, with the same bricks under foot, besieged by the same specters. Even in a silly little book like A Seizure of Limericks, Aiken meditated (humorously) on the circle: Said a curve: I’m becoming hysterical, It is hell to be merely numerical. I bend and I bend, But where will I end In a world that is hopelessly spherical? In a world that is hopelessly spherical, the circle seems as close to an approximation of a pure form as Aiken could come, yet he still believed in something he called “the
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(It helps to remember that the epitaph he chose for his grave reveals this movement: “Cosmos Mariner— Destination Unknown.”) “Forward into the untrodden!” we read in Aiken’s classic short story “Mr. Arcularis.” So, yes, Aiken is propulsive, always reaching out, always exploring. In that push out, there is a grasping toward the unknown, toward the universe, toward knowledge, toward that ever-elusive “definition” of things. Frederick Hoffman explained, “The urge to definition, to design, which is a fundamental fact of the artist’s emotional life, is a form of the imagination pushing out toward the world of matter, creatively reshaping it, remaking it.” Yet from that urge to push out toward a definition comes the necessity for continual reexamination. In Aiken, a definition is never static. “Again and again, Aiken approaches definition,” Hoffman wrote, “all but grasps it, sets it aside (as being not definition but a suggestive glimpse of it), and begins the process once again.” Definition involves drawing a line out into the world, but if one feels a responsibility to truth, it can’t end there. Language is messy, recursive, tautological. Definition merely approaches a thing, gives a “suggestive glimpse,” but never captures it. It is the asteroid that never actually hits the planet, but is whipped into orbit around it. From the line, gently curving, grows the circle. When a character in Ushant says to D., “to reminisce was weakness: it undermined one’s freedom always to ‘go forward,’” he denies that this is so:
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Of course I do believe in this evolution of consciousness as the only thing which we can embark on, or in fact, willy-nilly, are embarked on; and along with that will go the spiritual discoveries and, I feel, the inexhaustible wonder that one feels, that opens more and more the more you know. It’s simply that this increasing knowledge constantly enlarges your kingdom and the capacity for admiring and loving the universe.... A small but brilliant advance made today by someone’s awareness may for the moment reach a very small audience, but insofar as it’s valid and beautiful, it will make its way and become part of the whole world of consciousness. So in that sense it’s all working toward this huge audience, and all working toward a better man. If there can be progress, this complicates a true return. While it is possible—and, to Aiken, essential—to loop back, it is also true that upon returning, the thing that returns and the thing that is returned to have both been altered. He wrote in Ushant, “We will not be here again, or if we come, neither it nor ourselves will be the same.” The nature of flux, then, is too messy for the perfection of the circle. When one returns, it isn’t to that same exact point in order to trace that same exact curvature, rounding the bend in one’s earlier footsteps. The return is crucial, but it also, crucially, contains fluctuation and evolution. Aiken needed a more complicated form—one which was circular
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but also progressive, which returned but also reached out(/ in) toward the unknown. What he finally found was the “New Shape” of Ushant. The structure of that autobiographical exploration was a furthering of the fluctuations of line and circle, of progress and process, of outward and inner movement. He described it to Malcolm Lowry in a 1952 letter: Frankly, I don’t know what to think of it. It grew, all by itself, into a New Shape, its own, a spiral unwinding of memory into a spiral projection of analysis: it has a design, and yet it would be hard to say what it is. It seems to me, if I may be presumptuous, to achieve a kind of livingness, as of a living presence right beside you, that is perhaps new: or maybe it’s a new “order.” This is why, even more than the “great circle,” the “great spiral” is the most appropriate Aikenian form. It is still flawed, much like the symbol of the sea, imperfect in its “definition” and “design”—but it comes closest to sublimity. The “spiral flux” of Ushant is the crowning achievement of his oeuvre, but the whole body of work can be seen in this shape, spiraling toward that “spiral flux.” When he described the circle of Great Circle (that the novel “ends virtually where it begins except that more items have been brought into view”) what he was really describing was a “spiral flux”—a shape that both circles back to the beginning, but is slightly changed, its positioning askew, with more items brought into view. This is the motion that Hoffman uses to describe Aiken’s poetry: “a constant forward-retreat-encircling motion, the language and the lines moving ahead hesitantly toward statement, never quite satisfactorily achieving it.” The spiral is an imperfect
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evolution of consciousness,” a movement of the individual and the society toward “a better man.” In his interview with the Paris Review, he spoke of this belief in progress:
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VI. Failing Without Failing —approaching, once more, forevermore, without approaching, circling round some understanding of Aiken’s work, which has haunted me from the moment I first discovered his poetry in an issue of the 1920s literary magazine The Dial; I have since stood outside of his homes in Savannah—the childhood home where he stumbled upon his parents’ corpses, and the house next door where he lived as an adult, circling back to that same block with those same bricks in the sidewalk and those same stifling specters in the Southern air; I have sat on his gravebench, with the epitaph “Cosmos Mariner—Destination Unknown,” the stone, grayish-blue in the rain, my jeans wet from where I sat; I have devoured the work: the poems, the short stories, the novels, the essays, the reviews, the letters, and Ushant—my love, Ushant; I have returned to them again and again, but even after all these years, the writing confounds me—graspable only in fragments, in particles, in waves, in currents, in fluctuations—I fail it, and it fails me, in the way that only the best work can fail and be failed— The only way to describe what a piece of art like Ushant is doing is to recite the text word for word. It is doing, in other words, what it does; it is moving the way it moves. Any exegesis is a falsification, yet we still must, as readers who care to keep the work alive, attempt an approach. As Aiken approached the treacherous shores of Ushant and Ushant, we too approach the treacherous shores of his life’s work. He failed; we fail. But why the long face? PAGE 197
When I read a line in Ushant like “Yet the attempt must be made; had been made: must be made again,” I feel the re-currents in Samuel Beckett’s famous dictum, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Each piece of Aiken’s writing can be seen as a port of call in a grand voyage which pushes out and circles back, always approaching this thing called consciousness, yet never quite making landfall. Aiken’s Ushant, that crowning achievement, is admittedly still unsuccessful. And yet what is successful? What could possibly be? Is there ever such a thing as an unequivocal success? How could there be when language itself is an imperfect medium through which to express consciousness? How when consciousness itself is an imperfect medium through which to understand the world? “I am no longer foolish enough to think that I have succeeded,” Aiken had Demarest write in one of the many unsent letters in Blue Voyage, “I am in process of adjustment to the certainty that I am going to be a failure.” Ushant, like the best art, merely fails better. In fact, looking at the whole of his work, in the same way that Ushant looks at the whole of his life, where all exists beyond time and space on a plane, or in a chaotic ocean, or along a spiraling form, we see an oeuvre which ever tries and ever fails, but consistently fails better. Ushant and Ushant—one’s own personal Ushant, too—call us like sirens to their shores—to make landfall or to die trying. But we are not an Odysseus—no, we will never make it home, nor to Ushant, nor to any final destination more permanent than a port of call—we are merely a Sisyphus, ceaselessly pushed forward and borne back, yet rather than rolling a boulder up a hill, we sail a ship through the seas of consciousness, on currents and re-currents, eternally,
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(yet more perfect) circle: in the spiral there is progress and process, the movement returns but also pushes out in a new direction.
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ever hoping to make landfall, ever trying, ever failing, cosmos mariners moving toward destinations unknown and perhaps unknowable yet still worthy of the attempt to know—
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Some time ago, I dreamt I received a green and small but sturdy turtle as a gift. It was, at first, a happy dream, full of happy imagery: the turtle eating lettuce or carrots from my hand, walking slowly but methodically across the lawn, its limbs and bright eyes occasionally retreating under its shell. I was beginning to develop a bond with the animal when an insidious thought slowly started to creep into my mind. The turtle behaved as a normal turtle would, yet something seemed odd and out of place. I felt that its movements were becoming too predictable, almost mechanical. I failed to sense enough complexity in whatever the turtle did—I could not tell precisely the reason why, because I never owned one in my life. It just felt that way. Put simply, I suspected that the turtle was not a real, biological animal, but instead a mechanical copy, a sham, or to use a term from Ridley Scott’s 1982 dystopian sci-fi noir Blade Runner, a “replicant.” Replicants are strange entities in the universe of Blade Runner. The film tells the story of a future when humankind has mastered the craft of creating robotic entities, identical to real animals or human beings in almost all aspects. In this context, telling apart a real being from its artificial counterpart involves sophisticated equipment and trained personnel. Throughout the film, PAGE 199
II. Although many people would not admit it, humans care deeply about animal consciousness. For some, the prospect of having to extinguish a consciousness to have dinner is more than enough to cause major changes in their dietary habits. The problem here is not the meat per-se, since scientists are currently developing means to grow artificial
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however, it is clear that the robotic entities are considered inferior to real animals or humans—the former are treated almost like slaves, given short lifespans and mercilessly destroyed following any attempts of rebellion. The question now sits deep in my mind. Why could I not be happy with my mechanical turtle? Something was missing, maybe the same thing replicants lack. It has clearly nothing to do with behavior nor appearances. I suspected my turtle lacked consciousness—a subjective and unique point of view so far only found in the small portions of privileged species that contain brains. I needed to know whether my turtle had a brain. That was when my happy dream turned into a nightmare. I turned the animal upside-down, and using a knife carved into its belly, cutting through skin, flesh and bones, the blade soaked in blood. I dismissed all this immediately as a clever biomechanical gimmick: as in the case of Blade Runner’s replicants, biological tissue could be faked. So, I turned to the skull and cracked it open. Inside it I found a small, weakly pulsating lump of flesh. I squeezed it with my fingers and it became undone, without anything artificial to be found within its boundaries. Its brain was real, the turtle was real, but now it was dead. Then I woke up.
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meat without killing an animal, a method that is not raising many objections. The problem is just about consciousness. If we had a way to quantify precisely the degree of conscious awareness an animal has, we could make better-informed decisions about its role in our food chain. We have many reasons to believe that the following is not the case, but if cows were discovered to lack conscious awareness, being only empty shells unable of undergoing subjective states such as suffering, then many vegetarians would stop raising objections and resume eating meat. I believe that measuring consciousness in animals is not only a matter of life or death. We would like to know, for example, how conscious our pets are. Nobody would like to discover that their beloved dog or cat is actually a mindless automaton. That was the feeling I had in my dream about the turtle. I was so desperate that I felt compelled to examine it in the most invasive way, digging my way into its brain to discover its true nature, and killing it in the process. If a method to accurately measure conscious awareness were ever discovered, I hope at least domestic animals qualify as conscious, for their own sake.
we are trying to find a thermometer for measuring consciousness. Animal consciousness is an important issue; however, we are actually more concerned with human consciousness. For example, we want to see if vegetative patients have residual consciousness so that they may recover. If it is discovered that a patient is unconscious beyond recovery, relatives might want to stop life support. It is clear that our thermometers must be very accurate. I personally think that developing an accurate thermometer for consciousness (without even knowing what consciousness is or how it works) is a realistic goal that could be completed within our lifetime. The benefits would be huge. A long and intricate list of neurological examinations could be replaced by gathering brain data for a short period of time and then applying the adequate algorithm. As I write these lines, prototype systems for this sort of work are being tested in different research hospitals around the world. The uncertainty faced by the doctors and relatives of a patient with impaired consciousness could be suddenly dissipated. The most feared possibility, that of a conscious patient trapped within a paralyzed body (known as “locked-in syndrome”) could become almost impossible.
III. In fact, like many other contemporary neuroscientists, my work revolves around developing a method to measure consciousness from data we gather with the help of technologies to peep into the living brain. The first and fundamental step to understanding consciousness is to have a way to quantify it. A similar situation happened on the early days of thermodynamics: before temperature was revealed to be the kinetic energy of microscopic particles, it had been necessary to measure it accurately. Nowadays, PAGE 200
IV. However, after my dream I began wondering if we are paying enough attention to the ethical problems of developing thermometers for consciousness. I do not doubt that our attitude towards animals would change if we ever discovered they lack conscious awareness. Should we use a thermometer for measuring consciousness in different animal species and risk changing our relationship with
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them forever, treating them like mindless drones from that moment on? Human beings who were in a persistently unconscious vegetative state were euthanized in the past. If we regard consciousness as synonymous with humanity, we might not see a problem with such a decision (I personally do not see any). A dead brain within a living body raises the question of the need of keeping that body. Living brains within dead or agonizing bodies are an entirely different matter: we might soon see the first attempt to perform a “head transplant” from a diseased body into a healthy one—the only organ transplant in which I would rather be the donor instead of the recipient. However, the real ethical conundrum is not using the thermometer for consciousness in vegetative patients, but in healthy awake individuals. Do we want to risk discovering that consciousness—not unlike other traits such as intelligence, kindness or fitness—is intrinsically variable across individuals? Since being human almost equates to having human consciousness, such discovery would imply that some humans are more human than others. And what if certain individuals are not conscious at all? We are not aware of any theoretical reason why normal human behavior should require conscious awareness— philosophers have speculated about this possibility by conceiving “zombies,” unconscious beings that behave identically to conscious human beings. In a world with increasing population and shrinking resources, should we execute all individuals below a certain level of conscious awareness? From the perspective of extinguishing a human subjective point of view, it could be argued that such executions would not constitute murder, being more similar to the scraping of computer hardware instead. In the event of war, should all soldiers
be recruited among the consciousness-impaired? And, again, paralleling certain events in Blade Runner, should we inform unconscious human beings of their status? If so, what should we expect as a reaction? And does it matter at all, since their reaction cannot be accompanied by any meaningful subjective state such as fear, suffering or surprise?
In the 1981 work The Mismeasure of Man, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that attempts to determine human intelligence from biological measurements should not influence the decisions we make as a society concerning individual potential for achievement. However, Gould never stated that we should not try to research the biological basis of human intelligence. He warned us against the reductionist position of quantifying it with a few numbers. Faced with similar ethical challenges, I do not suggest we stop researching the possibility of numerically quantifying conscious awareness. However, in my view, we should protect by all means the privacy of individuals’ own levels of conscious awareness. Nobody should be forced to be measured with a thermometer for consciousness, and if it happens, nobody should have access to the data except for the users themselves. We do not know if certain individuals behave as conscious when in fact they are not—this is a remote possibility. It is likely, however, that some individuals may have higher levels of conscious awareness than others. Why should laws protect the rights of entities that might not feel, suffer, enjoy, or simply exist as a unique point of view in the universe? There is no easy answer to this
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hypothetical question, but I sensed a possible answer after my dream. Perhaps we should do so to protect ourselves from the disgrace of destroying something so similar to a conscious being that, next time, we might not even care for such an apparent subtlety.
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Wheatfield with Crows
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Expressing Consciousness in the Written Word, Pt. III This was where I saw the river for the last time this morning, about here. I could feel water beyond the twilight, smell. When it bloomed in the spring and it rained the smell was everywhere you didn’t notice it so much at other times but when it rained the smell began to come into the house at twilight either it would rain more at twilight or there was something in the light itself but it always smelled strongest then until I would lie in bed thinking when will it stop when will it stop. The draft in the door smelled of water, a damp steady breath. Sometimes I could put myself to sleep saying that over and over until after the honeysuckle got all mixed up in it the whole thing came to symbolise night and unrest I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray halflight where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who. I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies PAGE 203
hovering a long way off. Benjamin the child of. How he used to sit before that mirror. Refuge unfailing in which conflict tempered silenced reconciled. Benjamin the child of mine old age held hostage into Egypt. O Benjamin. Dilsey said it was because Mother was too proud for him. They come into white people’s lives like that in sudden sharp black trickles that isolate white facts for an instant in unarguable truth like under a microscope; the rest of the time just voices that laugh when you see nothing to laugh at, tears when no reason for tears. They will bet on the odd or even number of mourners at a funeral. A brothel full of them in Memphis went into a religious trance ran naked into the street. It took three policemen to subdue one of them. Yes Jesus O good man Jesus O that good man. —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury They were the cars at the fair that were whirling around her; no, they were the planets, while the sun stood, burning and spinning and guttering in the centre; here they came again, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto; but they were not planets, for it was not the merry-go-round at all, but the Ferris wheel, they were constellations, in the hub of which, like a great cold eye, burned Polaris, and round and round it here they went: Cassiopeia, Cepheus, the Lynx, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and the Dragon; yet they were not constellations, but, somehow, myriads of beautiful butterflies, she was sailing into Acapulco harbour through a hurricane of beautiful butterflies, zigzagging overhead and endlessly vanishing astern over the sea, the sea, rough and pure, the long dawn rollers advancing, rising, and crashing down to glide in colourless ellipses over the sand, sinking, sinking, someone was calling her name far away and she remembered, they were in a dark wood, she heard the
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The Streams of Our Consciousness:
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wind and the rain rushing through the forest and saw the tremours of lightning shuddering through the heavens and the horse—great God, the horse—and would this scene repeat itself endlessly and forever?—the horse, rearing, poised over her, petrified in midair, a statue, somebody was sitting on the statue, it was Yvonne Griffaton, no, it was the statue of Huerta, the drunkard, the murderer, it was the Consul, or it was a mechanical horse on the merrygo-round, the carrousel, but the carrousel had stopped and she was in a ravine down which a million horses were thundering towards her, and she must escape, through the friendly forest to their house, their little home by the sea. —Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
It was dusky in the dining-room and quite chilly. But all the same Bertha threw off her coat; she could not bear the tight clasp of it another moment, and the cold air fell on her arms. But in her bosom there was still that bright glowing place—that shower of little sparks coming from it. It was almost unbearable. She hardly dared to breathe for fear of fanning it higher, and yet she breathed deeply, deeply. She hardly dared to look into the cold mirror—but she did look, and it gave her back a woman, radiant, with smiling, trembling lips, with big, dark eyes and an air of listening, waiting for something…divine to happen…that she knew must happen…infallibly. —Katherine Mansfield, “Bliss”
What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss—absolute bliss!—as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? … Oh, is there no way you can express it without being “drunk and disorderly”? How idiotic civilisation is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle? “No, that about the fiddle is not quite what I mean,” she thought, running up the steps and feeling in her bag for the key—she’d forgotten it, as usual—and rattling the letter-box. “It’s not what I mean, because—Thank you, Mary”—she went into the hall. “Is nurse back?” “Yes, M’m.” “And has the fruit come?” “Yes, M’m. Everything’s come.” “Bring the fruit up to the dining-room, will you? I’ll arrange it before I go upstairs.”
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But the trouble with making yourself feel better by thinking of bad things that other people had done is that you are the only one who is rounding up the stray bad things. No one but yourself bothers to make a collection of disasters. For the time being you are the hero or the villain of the thing that is uppermost in the minds of your friends and acquaintances…. Two kids looked at Julian and said hyuh, but they did not hover thirstily and wait for him to offer them a drink. He wondered about that again, and as it had many times in the last year and a half, Age Thirty stood before him. Age Thirty. And those kids were nineteen, twenty-one, eighteen, twenty. And he was thirty. “To them,” he said to himself, “I am thirty. I am too old to be going to their house parties, and if I dance with their girls they do not cut in right away, the way they would on someone their own age. They think I am old.” He had to say this to himself, not believing it for a moment. What he did believe was that he was precisely as young as they, but more of a person because he was equipped with experience and a
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permanent face. When he was twenty, who was thirty? Well, when he was twenty the men he would have looked up to were now forty. No, that wasn’t quite right. He had another drink, telling himself that this would be his last. Let’s see: where was he? Oh, yes. When I was forty. Oh, nuts. —John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra
It is indubitably often that she is as denied to soften help to when it is in all in midst of which in vehemence to taken given in a bestowal show than left help in double. Having noticed often that it is newly noticed which makes older often. The world has become smaller and more beautiful. The world is grown smaller and more beautiful. That is it. Yes that is it. If he liked to live elsewhere that was natural. If he was accompanied. Place praise places. But you do. Partly for you. Will he he wild in having a room soon. He was not very welcome. Safety in their choice. Amy whether they thought much of merry. I do marry del Val. I know how many do walk too. It was a while that they did wait for them to have an apple. An apple. She may do this for the Hotel Lion d’Or. —Gertrude Stein, “Hotel François 1er”
He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench. —Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Trans. Natasha Wimmer) It was a very little while and they had gone in front of it. It was that they had liked it would it bear. It was a very much adjoined a follower. Flower of an adding where a follower. Have I come in. Will in suggestion. They may like hours in catching. It is always a pleasure to remember. Have a habit. Any name will very well wear better. All who live round about there. Have a manner. The hotel François 1er. Just winter so. PAGE 205
Beloved You are my sister You are my daughter You are my face; you are me I have found you again; you have come back to me You are my Beloved You are mine You are mine You are mine
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Is there a break here? Or is it our breath together? It’s what’s between us, or we share. A relation, which we are all. And what a time for a breath or break. Before we’ve half begun. Which we are always doing, aren’t we? It’s the best time. A breather now. For hear us falling. Toward the horizon albiet oblique, for we imagine it isn’t our natural state. We are some power to be here and to have changed toward life even to think distinct from these angels lately to be heard speculating in us as if they were learning to hope. We deserve to know what is in us. —Joseph McElroy, Women and Men
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Our leaders strain every nerve and with success, to get the next war going, while the rest of us, meanwhile, dance the fox trot, earn money and eat chocolates…. And perhaps…it has always been the same and always will be, and what is called history at school, and all we learn by heart there about heroes and geniuses and great deeds and fine emotions, is all nothing but a swindle invented by the schoolmasters for educational reasons to keep children occupied for a given number of years. It has always been so and always will be. Time and the world, money and power belong to the small people and shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing…eternity…it isn’t fame. Fame exists in that sense only for the schoolmasters. No, it isn’t fame. It is what I call eternity…. The music of Mozart belongs there and the poetry of your great poets. The saints, too, belong there, who have worked wonders and suffered martyrdom and given a great example to men. But the image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it or hands it down to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity…. It is the kingdom on the other side of time and appearances. It is there we belong. There is our home. It is that which our heart strives for…. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness. —Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf I hear Michael in the bath, I whet Margaret’s knives. Or it is 3 or 4 a.m. and I turn the key, turn the knob, avoid the empty goldfish bowl that catches the glitter off the street, feel the skin of my shoes going down the hallway to their door. I stand whispering our history before that door, and slowly, so slowly, I step behind the screen in my own dark room and then, on the edge of the bed and sighing, start
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I have your milk I have your smile I will take care of you You are my face; I am you. Why did you leave me who am you? I will never leave you again Don’t ever leave me again You will never leave me again You went in the water I drank your blood I brought your milk You forgot to smile I loved you You hurt me You came back to me You left me I waited for you You are mine You are mine You are mine —Toni Morrison, Beloved
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peeling the elastic sleeves off my thighs. I hold my head awhile and then I rub my things until the sleep goes out of them and the blood returns. In my own dark room I hear a little bird trying to sing on the ledge where the kidneys used to freeze. Smooth the pillow, pull down the sheets for me. Thinking of Reggie and the rest of them, can I help but smile? I can get along without you, Mother. —John Hawkes, The Lime Twig
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Right now you have a movie playing inside your head. It’s an amazing multi-track movie. It has 3D vision and surround sound for what you’re seeing and hearing right now, but that’s just the start of it. Your movie has smell and taste and touch. It has a sense of your body, pain, hunger, orgasms. It has emotions, anger and happiness. It has memories, like scenes from your childhood playing before you. And it has this constant voiceover narrative in your stream of conscious thinking. At the heart of this movie is you experiencing all this directly. This movie is your stream of consciousness, the subject of experience of the mind and the world. Consciousness is one of the fundamental facts of human existence. Each of us is conscious.We all have our own inner movie, you and you and you. There’s nothing we know about more directly. At least, I know about my consciousness directly. I can’t be certain that you guys are conscious. Consciousness also is what makes life worth living. If we weren’t conscious, nothing in our lives would have meaning or value. But at the same time, it’s the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe. Why are we conscious? Why do we have these inner movies?Why aren’t we just robots who process all this input, produce all that output, without experiencing the inner movie at all? Right now, nobody knows the answers to those questions. I’m going to suggest that to integrate
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consciousness into science, some radical ideas may be needed. Some people say a science of consciousness is impossible. Science, by its nature, is objective. Consciousness, by its nature, is subjective. So there can never be a science of consciousness. For much of the twentieth century, that view held sway. Psychologists studied behavior objectively, neuroscientists studied the brain objectively, and nobody even mentioned consciousness. Even 30 years ago, when TED got started, there was very little scientific work on consciousness. Now, about 20 years ago, all that began to change. Neuroscientists like Francis Crick and physicists like Roger Penrose said now is the time for science to attack consciousness. And since then, there’s been a real explosion, a flowering of scientific work on consciousness. And this work has been wonderful. It’s been great. But it also has some fundamental limitations so far. The centerpiece of the science of consciousness in recent years has been the search for correlations, correlations between certain areas of the brain and certain states of consciousness. We saw some of this kind of work from Nancy Kanwisher and the wonderful work she presented just a few minutes ago. Now we understand much better, for example, the kinds of brain areas that go along with the conscious experience of seeing faces or of feeling pain or of feeling happy. But this is still a science of correlations. It’s not a science of explanations. We know that these brain areas go along with certain kinds of conscious experience, but we don’t know why they do. I like to put this by saying that this kind of work from neuroscience is answering some of the questions we want answered about consciousness, the questions about what certain brain areas do and what they correlate with.
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How Do You Explain Consciousness?
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But in a certain sense, those are the easy problems. No knock on the neuroscientists. There are no truly easy problems with consciousness. But it doesn’t address the real mystery at the core of this subject: why is it that all that physical processing in a brain should be accompanied by consciousness at all? Why is there this inner subjective movie? Right now, we don’t really have a bead on that. And you might say, let’s just give neuroscience a few years. It’ll turn out to be another emergent phenomenon like traffic jams, like hurricanes, like life, and we’ll figure it out. The classical cases of emergence are all cases of emergent behavior, how a traffic jam behaves,how a hurricane functions, how a living organism reproduces and adapts and metabolizes, all questions about objective functioning. You could apply that to the human brain in explaining some of the behaviors and the functions of the human brain as emergent phenomena: how we walk, how we talk, how we play chess, all these questions about behavior. But when it comes to consciousness, questions about behavior are among the easy problems. When it comes to the hard problem, that’s the question of why is it that all this behavior is accompanied by subjective experience? And here, the standard paradigm of emergence, even the standard paradigms of neuroscience, don’t really, so far, have that much to say. Now, I’m a scientific materialist at heart. I want a scientific theory of consciousness that works, and for a long time, I banged my head against the wall looking for a theory of consciousness in purely physical terms that would work. But I eventually came to the conclusion that that just didn’t work for systematic reasons. It’s a long story, but the core idea is just that what you get from purely reductionist explanations in physical terms, in brain-based terms, is stories about the functioning
of a system, its structure, its dynamics, the behavior it produces, great for solving the easy problems—how we behave, how we function—but when it comes to subjective experience—why does all this feel like something from the inside?—that’s something fundamentally new, and it’s always a further question. So I think we’re at a kind of impasse here. We’ve got this wonderful, great chain of explanation,we’re used to it, where physics explains chemistry, chemistry explains biology, biology explains parts of psychology. But consciousness doesn’t seem to fit into this picture. On the one hand, it’s a datum that we’re conscious. On the other hand, we don’t know how to accommodate it into our scientific view of the world. So I think consciousness right now is a kind of anomaly, one that we need to integrate into our view of the world, but we don’t yet see how. Faced with an anomaly like this, radical ideas may be needed, and I think that we may need one or two ideas that initially seem crazy before we can come to grips with consciousness scientifically. Now, there are a few candidates for what those crazy ideas might be. My friend Dan Dennett, who’s here today, has one. His crazy idea is that there is no hard problem of consciousness.The whole idea of the inner subjective movie involves a kind of illusion or confusion. Actually, all we’ve got to do is explain the objective functions, the behaviors of the brain, and then we’ve explained everything that needs to be explained. Well I say, more power to him. That’s the kind of radical idea that we need to explore if you want to have a purely reductionist brain-based theory of consciousness. At the same time, for me and for many other people, that view is a bit too close to simply denying the datum of consciousness to be satisfactory. So I go in a different direction. In the time remaining, I want to explore two crazy ideas that I think may have some promise.
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The first crazy idea is that consciousness is fundamental. Physicists sometimes take some aspects of the universe as fundamental building blocks: space and time and mass. They postulate fundamental laws governing them, like the laws of gravity or of quantum mechanics. These fundamental properties and laws aren’t explained in terms of anything more basic.Rather, they’re taken as primitive, and you build up the world from there. Now sometimes, the list of fundamentals expands. In the nineteenth century, Maxwell figured out that you can’t explain electromagnetic phenomena in terms of the existing fundamentals—space, time, mass, Newton’s laws—so he postulated fundamental laws of electromagnetism and postulated electric charge as a fundamental element that those laws govern. I think that’s the situation we’re in with consciousness. If you can’t explain consciousness in terms of the existing fundamentals—space, time, mass, charge—then as a matter of logic, you need to expand the list. The natural thing to do is to postulate consciousness itself as something fundamental,a fundamental building block of nature. This doesn’t mean you suddenly can’t do science with it. This opens up the way for you to do science with it. What we then need is to study the fundamental laws governing consciousness, the laws that connect consciousness to other fundamentals: space, time, mass, physical processes. Physicists sometimes say that we want fundamental laws so simple that we could write them on the front of a t-shirt. Well I think something like that is the situation we’re in with consciousness. We want to find fundamental laws so simple we could write them on the front of a t-shirt. We don’t know what those laws are yet, but that’s what we’re after. The second crazy idea is that consciousness might be universal. Every system might have some degree of
consciousness. This view is sometimes called panpsychism: pan for all, psych for mind, every system is conscious, not just humans, dogs, mice, flies, but even Rob Knight’s microbes, elementary particles. Even a photon has some degree of consciousness. The idea is not that photons are intelligent or thinking. It’s not that a photon is wracked with angstbecause it’s thinking, “Aww, I’m always buzzing around near the speed of light. I never get to slow down and smell the roses.” No, not like that. But the thought is maybe photons might have some element of raw, subjective feeling, some primitive precursor to consciousness. This may sound a bit kooky to you. I mean, why would anyone think such a crazy thing? Some motivation comes from the first crazy idea, that consciousness is fundamental. If it’s fundamental, like space and time and mass, it’s natural to suppose that it might be universal too, the way they are. It’s also worth noting that although the idea seems counterintuitive to us, it’s much less counterintuitive to people from different cultures, where the human mind is seen as much more continuous with nature. A deeper motivation comes from the idea that perhaps the most simple and powerful way to find fundamental laws connecting consciousness to physical processing is to link consciousness to information. Wherever there’s information processing, there’s consciousness. Complex information processing, like in a human, complex consciousness.Simple information processing, simple consciousness. A really exciting thing is in recent years a neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi, has taken this kind of theory and developed it rigorously with a mathematical theory. He has a mathematical measure of information integration which he calls phi, measuring the amount of
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informationintegrated in a system. And he supposes that phi goes along with consciousness. So in a human brain, incredibly large amount of information integration, high degree of phi, a whole lot of consciousness. In a mouse, medium degree of information integration, still pretty significant, pretty serious amount of consciousness. But as you go down to worms, microbes, particles, the amount of phi falls off. The amount of information integration falls off, but it’s still non-zero. On Tononi’s theory, there’s still going to be a non-zero degree of consciousness. In effect, he’s proposing a fundamental law of consciousness: high phi, high consciousness.Now, I don’t know if this theory is right, but it’s actually perhaps the leading theory right now in the science of consciousness, and it’s been used to integrate a whole range of scientific data,and it does have a nice property that it is in fact simple enough you can write it on the front of a t-shirt. Another final motivation is that panpsychism might help us to integrate consciousness into the physical world. Physicists and philosophers have often observed that physics is curiously abstract. It describes the structure of reality using a bunch of equations, but it doesn’t tell us about the reality that underlies it. As Stephen Hawking puts it, what puts the fire into the equations? Well, on the panpsychist view, you can leave the equations of physics as they are,but you can take them to be describing the flux of consciousness. That’s what physics really is ultimately doing, describing the flux of consciousness. On this view, it’s consciousness that puts the fire into the equations. On that view, consciousness doesn’t dangle outside the physical world as some kind of extra. It’s there right at its heart. This view, I think, the panpsychist view, has the potential to transfigure our relationship to nature,
and it may have some pretty serious social and ethical consequences. Some of these may be counterintuitive. I used to think I shouldn’t eat anything which is conscious, so therefore I should be vegetarian. Now, if you’re a panpsychist and you take that view, you’re going to go very hungry. So I think when you think about it, this tends to transfigure your views, whereas what matters for ethical purposes and moral considerations, not so much the fact of consciousness, but the degree and the complexity of consciousness. It’s also natural to ask about consciousness in other systems, like computers. What about the artificially intelligent system in the movie Her, Samantha? Is she conscious? Well, if you take the informational, panpsychist view, she certainly has complicated information processing and integration, so the answer is very likely yes, she is conscious. If that’s right, it raises pretty serious ethical issues about both the ethics of developing intelligent computer systems and the ethics of turning them off. Finally, you might ask about the consciousness of whole groups, the planet. Does Canada have its own consciousness? Or at a more local level, does an integrated group like the audience at a TED conference, are we right now having a collective TED consciousness, an inner movie for this collective TED group which is distinct from the inner movies of each of our parts? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I think it’s at least one worth taking seriously. Okay, so this panpsychist vision, it is a radical one, and I don’t know that it’s correct. I’m actually more confident about the first crazy idea, that consciousness is fundamental, than about the second one, that it’s universal. I mean, the view raises any number of questions, has any number of challenges, like how do those little
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bits of consciousness add up to the kind of complex consciousness we know and love. If we can answer those questions, then I think we’re going to be well on our way to a serious theory of consciousness. If not, well, this is the hardest problem perhaps in science and philosophy. We can’t expect to solve it overnight. But I do think we’re going to figure it out eventually. Understanding consciousness is a real key, I think, both to understanding the universe and to understanding ourselves. It may just take the right crazy idea.
Seascape at Saintes-Maries
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—— This is the transcript of a TED Talk, reprinted here under Creative Commons License. Copyright TED. To view the video of this talk by David Chalmers, please go to TED.com.
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Aesthetic Consciousness in Conrad Aiken’s Blue Voyage
Twelve years before her encounters with Conrad Aiken would inspire the plot of his novel Blue Voyage, Reine Ormond stood for her uncle John Singer Sargent’s 1908 painting Cashmere. Many of Sargent’s paintings were modeled on Ormond, but this one stands out against other portraits of her and her family as more experimental. Cashmere features a group of seven girls, likenesses of Sargent’s niece, who was eleven at the time. The group walks in the same direction against a mottled, earth-toned background. Sargent puts each figure in a different pose, as though the painting was a study, drafts rather than a finished product. The repeated representations of the girl draw attention to the painter’s perspective, undercutting the realism of Sargent’s image by reminding us that the two-dimensional figures are representations of a threedimensional person. These multiple likeness of Ormond and the placelessness of the painting’s background create a dreamlike effect, which Sargent, using Orientalist tropes, augments with the girls’ dresses. Each figure wears a white shawl, which all but one girl drapes over her head. The cloth is bordered with the teardrops shapes of batik, a Kashmiri pattern copied and renamed “paisley” in Scotland. Such Orientalist touches common from the period of the British Raj channel Western tropes—and clichés—of the East as an object of mystery. In addition, the cashmere is a popular object of consumption, a
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product and propeller of empire; we are subtly reminded that the young, white girl is decorated with the materials and aesthetic of British imperialism. Like Sargent’s painting, Blue Voyage imagines and reimagines Ormond, placing her as both an object of the artist’s gaze and a bearer of a British culture undergirded by imperialism. In Blue Voyage, Ormond is fictionalized as Cynthia Battiloro, in a nod to the Greek goddess of the moon and, perhaps, the word “cynicism.” Aiken’s playful use of symbolic names extends to his protagonist and avatar in the novel, William Demarest, whose surname can be translated as “being of the sea” and also recalls his use of “my dearest” in his apostrophes to Cynthia. Demarest, an American playwright, travels from New York to London in search of Cynthia, whom he had met the year before on a similar crossing. Just as Aiken, improbably, ran into Ormond again at sea, Demarest finds Cynthia on board the same Liverpool-bound Atlantic liner, where she cheerfully tells him she’s engaged. This unfortunate encounter happens early in the voyage and their interaction is brief: they exchange a few pleasantries and comments on the coincidence. The book ends before the ship reaches Liverpool, and in that time Demarest does not run into Cynthia again. If we thought Demarest was on a quest, this plotline is quickly dismissed. Cynthia is no waiting Penelope, and Aiken’s references to Homer’s Odyssey serve to deflate our protagonist rather than compare him to the epic hero. Demarest’s run-in with Cynthia is an “Incredible! Anticlimax!” to the story. The novel almost mocks Demarest’s lack of purpose as the sound of the ships bells call out the time, cut into Demarest’s thoughts, and remind the reader that the voyage is progressing whether or not our protagonist has a reason to head to Liverpool.
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Down Kaleidoscope:
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This subversion of convention is not surprising, given that Aiken, as critics often point out, dismissed the need for plot in his novel.1 Composed between 1922 and 1926, Blue Voyage was Aiken’s attempt “to make a statement of the would-be artist and just what made him tick and what was wrong with him and why he went fast or slow.”2 To do so, Aiken uses Demarest, a “psychotic and literary creature,” whose particular neuroses—his “inferiority complex,” his “erotomania,” and the always-present pain of his parent’s death—color his perceptions. The other characters on board are seen through Demarest’s “kaleidoscopic” consciousness (to borrow a term from Aiken).3 This was a technique the author acknowledged: describing his work in progress to Robert N. Linscott, Aiken says the novel views the other characters “through Demarest’s eyes,” and aims to “present his own particular psychological problem indirectly in the course of his musings on these others and meetings with them.”4 Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Blue Voyage uses a stream-of-consciousness narration and experiments with techniques of representing a waking and sleeping mind. We view the other passengers on the ship through Demarest, but at different angles through the course of the chapters. Aiken’s sketches of the character based on Ormond, like Sargent’s illustration of her as a child in Cashmere, remind us of the artist’s perspective and give us the sense that Demarest is trying out different ways to define her, though he never settles on one. Scattered recollections, fantasized dialogues, and fragments of literary allusion present Cynthia as a phantasm. The reader never really learns if Cynthia reciprocated the flirtation or if Demarest simply inflated their connection from the year before. He explains that he experiences Cynthia as an “after-sense” that is sometimes “appalling” (a term which, like many
other descriptors assigned to her, connotes whiteness). Demarest feels this ghostly “after-sense” when he “reenacts” his encounters with her; he remembers looking for her everywhere in Manhattan, but he especially expect to find her in the “Aeolian Hall, or in the Museum…or behind the Rodin.” In fact, he learns that Cynthia had been to New York, without calling on him. His search for her among these cultural institutions thus makes sense but also remains misaligned with her actual movements and motivations. Refracted through Demarest, Cynthia is associated with “civilization” because of her appreciation of art and her seemingly inherent cultural refinement. Demarest is at times skeptical of this refinement, at times cowed by it. A pervasive figure in Demarest’s consciousness, Cynthia becomes a source of aesthetic judgments and European cultural authority. Demarest constantly worries that she will reject his manners, his opinions, and, especially, his writing. She also becomes a site for Aiken to explore the validity and source of aesthetic judgments, a theme that occupies his literary criticism. In addition to seeing her as an aesthetic judge, Demarest often seems to evaluate Cynthia as art. He tries to paint his appreciation of her as a disembodied appreciation for form, though this proves to be a struggle for him. Demarest has a litany of associations for his “BELLE DAME SANS MERCI”: “Queen Cynthia” is a “maiden,” “snow cold and pure,” “white as the moon,” and a “heavenly presence.” He sees himself as her inferior: she travels first class where Demarest also has an acquaintance named “Purington.” Intellectual, refined, and chaste, Cynthia is also “vain,” “snobbish,” and “fiery at heart.” Even as he tries to imagine his love for her as a love for an idealized, incorporeal love, Demarest calls Cynthia a
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“chimera,” the object of mythological quests and a monster of mixed parts. Aiken suggests that Demarest’s idealized image of this woman may be pure illusion, creations of his “psychotic” and “literary” mind. In doing so, the novel explores aesthetic criticism’s attempt, in Aiken’s words, to remove “the emotional appeal of [art’s] content” and to “be left free for an enjoyment purely aesthetic.”5 Demarest’s ambivalent reactions to Cynthia and her artistic judgments proceed along two routes. Demarest struggles with the rejection of bodily pleasure that Cynthia’s version of cultural attainment seems to entail. He also subtly links her and her rarified circle with the materials of empire, a move that questions the deracination of aesthetic judgment Aiken diagnoses in his fellow critics. Both of these routes explore themes from Aiken’s Freud-influenced literary criticism. The critical essays Aiken wrote during the first decades of his career took up Freud’s concept of art as sublimation, a redirection of prohibited desires and drives into socially acceptable ones. Because feelings and unconscious desires guide our appreciation of art, Aiken was especially critical of the notion of a “pure aesthetics” or a universal idea of good art. Beauty, like Cynthia, is compared to a myth, and in seeking after it, with “eyes as cloudily bright as the chimeras they see,” the critic, “gives himself up to the fine ecstasy of pure theory.” Instead of a categorical understanding of beauty, Aiken argues that aesthetic evaluations are rooted in a “pleasurable feeling.” Enjoyment of art is actually “the profound satisfaction we feel when through the medium of fantasy, we escape from the imposed limitations into an aggrandized personality and a harmonized universe.” The aesthetician aims to “eliminate all emotional accidents” to focus on the formal arrangement of a work. In contrast, Aiken suggests not
only that form and content are inseparable, but also that emotion, an essentially physical reaction, still guides our response to so-called form or style. Consequently, Aiken does not see a real basis for the distinctions between high and popular art, though, in making this point, he reinforces these differences: “the critic…cannot, with a sneer, dismiss the tastes of the vulgar.” Genres like “the dime novel or shilling shocker, the lurid melodrama and explosive farce” cannot be rejected as “bad or inferior art.”6 Even though his criticism takes a hard line on theories of “beauty,” Aiken’s novel often tries to imagine Cynthia using terms from such idealized aesthetics. Demarest understands his love for Cynthia in contrast to his embodied feelings for other women. In a fantasized dialogue with Cynthia, which takes place after his unexpected run-in with her, Demarest opposes her intellectualism and chastity with “physical desire.” His language echoes the terms of Aiken’s literary criticism: My feeling for you is wholly sublimated: I can trace in it no physical desire. I should fear and distrust any impulse to bring your tall body into contact with mine. I should like only to live with you in some strange rarefied world,—cold, clear, translunar and spacious; a world of which you know the secret, and I do not; a world of the subtle and the fragile of the crepuscular and the vitreous, of suggestions dim but precise, of love inexpressive and thought unconcealed. Demarest piles on descriptors to try to conjure Cynthia but also tries to avoid giving her corporeal form. The realm she inhabits is “strange” to him. Demarest does not seem to know how to really capture this idealized “world” he
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would occupy with Cynthia, and he implies that moving into this space might break its fragile spell. He can only define it as thin or translucent, the love and thought that builds that world are imagined through negation (“inexpressive” and “unconcealed”). Demarest demonstrates the difficulty of holding together this idea of a bodiless, aesthetic appreciation. His stream-of-consciousness struggles with distilling his reactions to Cynthia’s beauty from his desire for other women. Describing the male passengers who linger in the smoking room with him, Demarest wonders, “If one could only keep separate the things one liked! Bawdy conversation with Silberstein—chess or literary conversation with Hay-Lawrence,” the former a fellow American, the latter an English gentleman slumming it in second class. Demarest typically keeps Cynthia in the realm of aesthetic purity, but he entertains the possibility that her refinement is a constant struggle against the realities of her humanity, rendered as base in Demarest’s mind: “You too, Cynthia—who knows? What concupiscent preoccupations, only fleetingly conscious and perhaps obscure, do you perpetually conceal?” Demarest cloaks Cynthia in a veil of chastity and social graces, only to wonder what the veil covers. His gaze at other women on board and his recollections of past love affairs further question Demarest’s ability to sustain his chastened image of Cynthia. The novel starts to wonder, though, why beauty cannot be ascribed to physical pleasure, the origin Aiken attributes to aesthetic judgements in his criticism. Describing a tryst with another woman, Demarest considers, “[t]his experience, although sensual and sexual in origin and fundamentals, nevertheless had a certain beauty.” In Blue Voyage a fellow passenger in
second class, Pauline Faubion, serves as Cynthia’s foil: she has the “vulgar” tastes Demarest both desires and denounces. Faubion (whose name rings of falseness or perhaps even a faux Albion) claims she is returning to England, but Demarest hints that she may be a huckster in the vein of Anita Loos’ Lorelai Lee.7 In contrast to his sterile appreciation for Cynthia, Demarest becomes “flushed” when he thinks of how he’s attracted to her, a “small, impudent, brazen baggage of a vaudeville queen.” If Cynthia’s cultural refinement “conceals” her physical desires, Faubion’s theatrical qualities (she travels with a bushel of dresses and intermittently sings lines from popular songs) inversely reveal her openness to physical desire. Faubion indeed knocks on Demarest’s door one evening, though we do not find out if he accepts her advances. Demarest seems uncomfortable with containing multitudes. His feelings for Pauline upset his idealized desire for Cynthia. During an imagined dialogue with Cynthia, Demarest erupts, “Oh Faubion. Ah! A pang. You see that gleaming pang, Cynthia?” This synesthesia muddles the difference between his enlightened love and his bodily drives. This is a problem for Demarest, and he constantly imagines his fellow passengers judging him for this inability to excise his “vulgar” tastes. Thus, Demarest complains that “he wanted the fine and rich freed from the ‘social’”—he wants the value of cultural productions to be divorced from the people who make these evaluations. While this may help safeguard ideas like pure beauty from the vicissitudes of human judgment, freedom from the social also allows him a license to indulge in pleasures he considers embodied: “every so often he wanted a good deep foaming bath in the merely vulgar. An occasional debauch was imperative,—whether it was only a visit to
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a cheap vaudeville, with its jazz, its spangles, its coarse jokes.” The conflict between Cynthia and Faubion analogizes these two sides of Demarest’s desire. However, these sides are not diametrically opposed. Demarest’s interest in Faubion does not simply make him feel guilty about straying from his love for Cynthia. Instead, their presence together in his thoughts upsets the coherence of each. Faubion unearths a resistance to the refinement he reveres in Cynthia. In Faubion, however, this resistance does not offer some settling truth or better option. Instead, when Faubion erupts into his consciousness, Demarest loses his grasp on what made Cynthia a repository of meaning in the first place. Demarest fantasizes about being able to separate refinement from the people who judge this quality. However, as Demarest tries to imagine Cynthia’s aesthetic superiority as ahistorical or disembodied, Aiken reminds us that it is actually intertwined with her aristocratic origins. In his real-life dealings with Reine Ormond, Aiken seems both drawn to and dismissive of the social milieu she represents. Ormond was an aristocratic Englishwoman, who was artistic, and connected with the Pre-Raphaelites. Yet Aiken seems ambivalent about the merits of her connections. In a letter to Robert Linscott, Aiken mentions his second sea-borne encounter with Ormond, who was travelling with her uncle Sargent and her mother. Details from this real-life encounter show up in Blue Voyage, especially the social slights he feels: Mrs. Ormond’s dismissal of the poet George Moore, for instance, becomes Cynthia’s mother’s comment, which Demarest both objects to and internalizes as a slight on his poor taste in literature. Aiken complains to Linscott, “really, of all the disgusting bad manners, provincialism, conceit and snobbishness
I’ve ever encountered, this is the worst. Sick transit glory Ormundi!” The letter continues, “Another light on English manners. They’re so damned afraid of the great contaminating world.”8 Aiken’s letter delineates and then undermines the cultural and social circle represented by Ormond and her aristocratic connections. His imagery is filled with conflicting tensions between impurity and containment. He parodies the saying “sic transit gloria mundi” to suggest the ephemeral nature of his admiration for the family’s “glory.” The cosmopolitan Ormonds almost always seem to be travelling, but their English manners are meant to set them apart from anyone outside their upper-class European circle. Aiken imagines the aristocratic air that encircles the Ormonds as a shield against “contamination” of the “world.” At the same time, Mrs. Ormond’s behavior is “disgusting,” (perhaps even “Sick”) and this distaste he shows for their “snobbery” suggests that their shield itself may be contaminated. Aiken’s amalgamation of associations for Ormond— manners, taste, status, but also hypocrisy and blindness— not only informs Blue Voyage’s depiction of Cynthia but also Aiken’s understanding of the purpose of the novel genre. Describing Virginia Woolf, Aiken tempers his praise with the worry that her technical brilliance and experiments with the novel form can be “sterile.” Reading Woolf, we focus on the “frame” of the picture and attend to the illusion the writer creates. This attention to art as art comes from a “disciplined consciousness” and that shines through Woolf’s characters. Her discipline limits the scope of the “real life” she can present. Woolf’s circumscribed orbit of high society has been shaped by “centuries of tradition.” Her characters have “a consciousness of wellbeing and culture,” in which “discrimination on every
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They hear rumors of the sea itself, that vast and terrifying force that lies somewhere beyond them, or around them, but they cherish a sublime faith that it will not disturb them; and if it does, at last, break in upon them with cataclysmic force, a chaos of disorder and undisciplined violence, they can find no language for the disaster.9 Art can draw boundaries, keep out truth, rather than reveal it. The instinctive “discrimination” that belongs to the “gentle people” of Woolf’s novels keeps them bound together and distanced from “anything so coarse” and the “raw stuff of life.” Demarest describes the “exquisite oldworldliness, the dim, deep constellations of refinements and manners amid which [Cynthia] so stately moved.” The “old-worldliness” is both “deep”—somewhere inside like an instinct—and an aura that travels with Cynthia. Compare Aiken’s description of Woolf to D. H. Lawrence, who seems to have veered too far in the other direction. Lawrence is one for whom “nothing is of importance save a violent, unthinking outpouring of feelings and perceptions; unselected, unarranged, and expressed with conscious disregard for personal dignity.” His novels are “very much alive in their own peculiar way” but “not good works of art.” Lawrence’s “sex crucifixion” seems to be part of the reason for Aiken’s characterization of him as disordered.10 Life, associated with chaos, embodiment, and sexuality, is opposed to art, associated with order, distance, and abstraction. Aiken links Lawrence to “primitive ritualism,” a move that reinforces a civilizational hierarchy Aiken at times seems to dismiss.12 PAGE 218
Demarest’s musings on Faubion and Cynthia rehash this problematic and imperialistic tension between primitivism and civilization: Demarest characterizes his desire for Faubion as “savage.” At the same time, the steady association between Cynthia and idealized “civilization” is interlaced with the imagery of British imperialism. While trying to describe Cynthia as pure abstraction, a celestial light shining above his dull sublunary self, Demarest hints at the material realities which sustain her rarified world, and which the categories of whiteness and civilization attempt to exclude. Like the figures in Sargent’s Cashmere, Cynthia connotes otherworldliness, but, in fact, she is clothed with the worldly products of empire. Several times, Demarest draws attention to the “striped and diamonded jersey of richly mingled Hindu colors,” using here “Hindu-bright elbows” as a substitute for her full presence. Demarest hears snips of nostalgic conversation from a fellow passenger, an army Major, who reminisces on his days in Turkey, (“I haven’t spent two years in Constantinople for nothing,” to which Demarest gives his Orientalist and eroticized reply, “Have you got any photos of your harem?”). Demarest wonders—out of the blue—if Cynthia will marry a captain in the Belgian army, a move that links her European colonization, from which the recently-waged First World War was fallout. This post-War context is never an explicit topic of Demarest’s musings; Aiken includes these notes on imperialism almost as atmosphere or backdrop. They may seem irrelevant at first, but when read against his attempt to sterilize Cynthia’s aesthetic judgments—to imagine them as a kind of Platonic ideal—they work to bring these judgments back into the particular, the accidental, and the contingent. They remind us that the whiteness he associates with Cynthia is not just abstract,
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conceivable plane, has become…instinctive.” They live a “sea-pool life,” which is a “cool illusion”:
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but also racialized. The purity of her circle—like Woolf’s discrimination—is a guard against the “raw stuff of life.” This “stuff” may not simply be the savage or vulgar drives of the mass of humanity, but the colonial violence that props up Cynthia’s seemingly detached world of aristocratic manners and elevated taste. This is not to say that Aiken enacts a consistent critique of imperialism or disorients the poles of savagery and civilization he evokes in his novel and in his literary criticism. However, Demarest’s desire to understand and isolate the “aesthetic” creates the agitation that propels the narrative’s exploration of artistic consciousness. The realities of embodied emotion as well as the questionable value of the post-War European civilization Cynthia represents burst in with the most discontent whenever Demarest tries to distill a clear notion of pure, transcendent beauty.
3 This phrase is from Aiken’s 1927 review of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories; see Conrad Aiken: A Reviewer’s ABC: From 1916 to Present (1958), 298.
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11 Ibid, 258.
2 This comment is from an interview by Robert Hunter Wilbur, “Conrad Aiken, The Art of Poetry No. 9,” The Paris Review, (Winter–Spring 1968 no. 42).
4 From Aiken’s 8/24/20 letter to Linscott, Killorin (1978), 94, emphasis Aiken’s. 5 These comments on aesthetic evaluation are from Aiken’s 1923 essay, “A Basis for Criticism,” Aiken (1958), 56-57. 6 Ibid, 61–64. 7 Aiken, in fact, wrote a negative review of 1925’s Gentleman Prefer Blondes, using many of the same terms he uses to characterize Faubion. See Aiken (1958), 208-210. 8 Joseph Killorn, ed. The Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken, 64. 9 See Aiken’s 1927 review of Virginia Woolf, Aiken (1958), 390.
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10 See Aiken’s 1924 review of D. H. Lawrence, Ibid, 256.
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1 Harry Marten, Edward Butscher, and Mary Martin Roundtree discuss Aiken’s views on the form of the novel and suggest that he dismissed plot in order to stress the autobiographical or poetic elements of his prose (See respectively “Conrad Aiken’s Absolute Fiction: Blue Voyage and Great Circle”, ELH 45 (1978), 325-342; The Poet of White Horse Vale (2010), and “Conrad Aiken’s Fiction: ‘an inordinate and copious lyric,’” Southern Quarterly 21.1 (Fall 1982), 9). Aiken’s claim to Robert N. Linscott (from a letter I discuss below) makes it into critical discussions of Blue Voyage: “The action, I hear you cry? Almost none, in the accepted sense” (see Aiken’s 8/24/20 letter to Linscott, in Joseph Killorin, ed, The Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken (1978), 94).
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Somewhere close to the end of things, we drive past a pond and see that only its frozen surface remains, two inches thick and half an acre across, just levitating there. How is this possible? we ask ourselves, and we stop the car to look. The pond’s surface has frozen around a stand of bulrushes, and that’s what is propping it up now—all those thin, hollow stalks—as though it were the canopy of some modest structure, something we might assemble on a beach or in some other treeless place to keep the sun off the babies. Everything beneath the ice has drained away, everything that was not solid. Where the bulrushes stop, so does that unlikely architecture; here is the edge of the frozen sheet, clean and deliberate as a crosssection, the fogged blue of seaglass. We can see where the bulrushes pass through the ice, spearing it, reaching on up into the January sky and holding the pond surface up there triumphantly, three feet above the ground. Beyond the bulrushes, the surface lies in hard white pieces in the empty bed, shattered like an opaque mirror. The babies want to crawl in under there and play, but we don’t let them. A few broken stalks and the ice ceiling might collapse and crush them. But we understand the impulse. They have only recently learned to walk, to fling themselves clumsily between what they have and what they want. You and I have been upright for decades (not having gained much grace for all that) and still we’d like to walk out onto it, onto the lofted ice, to see if this implausibility can hold our weight. But we are superstitious. Because even though we can envisage the chain of events that
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might cause such a thing to happen—a blocked drain, a snap freeze, an unblocked drain, the surprising but not impossible strength of bulrushes—it is still magic. It is magic in the sense that there is no metaphor you can build out of it that will not undermine its magic. We stand at the roadside looking out at it for ten or fifteen minutes, holding tight to our daughters who flap belligerently at the ends of our fingers like poorly-trained kestrels. Then we get back into the car and drive it to your sister’s house, where the salmon is overdone and nothing extraordinary happens. Where we try with our rickety metaphors, and can not even get them to judder across the table. We watch them fall over between the salt shaker and the cruet stand. Your sister grows tired of humouring us and begins clearing the dinner plates with their neat little piles of translucent bones. What passes for fun with you two, she says. Christ Almighty. Several hours and many miles before the uplifted pond, I had prayed in a vague and wordless sort of way to whatever nameless thing we entreat when we do not believe in God. It’s hypocritical, you’ve told me this. To still want signs. To scratch for evidence of pre-destiny— something bigger than ourselves with its chin above our heads, its paws upon our shoulders. Something to tell us Yes, go on, this is the way to go. But at your sister’s table we are still working with what we have. What we have is whatever hasn’t drained away. I say this aloud. I am that dumb. I wind it up and I let it go, watch it teeter then topple over (salt shaker, cruet stand) before it gets to you. Sitting right there across from me.
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What Passes for Fun
JOSEPHINE ROWE
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Consciousness makes personal identity. But it is further inquired, whether it be the same identical substance. This few would think they had reason to doubt of, if these perceptions, with their consciousness, always remained present in the mind, whereby the same thinking thing would be always consciously present, and, as would be thought, evidently the same to itself. But that which seems to make the difficulty is this, that this consciousness being interrupted always by forgetfulness, there being no moment of our lives wherein we have the whole train of all our past actions before our eyes in one view, but even the best memories losing the sight of one part whilst they are viewing another; and we sometimes, and that the greatest part of our lives, not reflecting on our past selves, being intent on our present thoughts, and in sound sleep having no thoughts at all, or at least none with that consciousness which remarks our waking thoughts—I say, in all these cases, our consciousness being interrupted, and we losing the sight of our past selves, doubts are raised whether we are the same thinking thing, i.e. the same substance or no. Which, however reasonable or unreasonable, concerns not personal identity at all. The question being what makes the same person; and not whether it be the same identical substance, which always thinks in the same person, which, in this case, matters not at all: different substances, by the PAGE 221
same consciousness (where they do partake in it) being united into one person, as well as different bodies by the same life are united into one animal, whose identity is preserved in that change of substances by the unity of one continued life. For, it being the same consciousness that makes a man be himself to himself, personal identity depends on that only, whether it be annexed solely to one individual substance, or can be continued in a succession of several substances. For as far as any intelligent being can repeat the idea of any past action with the same consciousness it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present action; so far it is the same personal self. For it is by the consciousness it has of its present thoughts and actions, that it is self to itself now, and so will be the same self, as far as the same consciousness can extend to actions past or to come. and would be by distance of time, or change of substance, no more two persons, than a man be two men by wearing other clothes today than he did yesterday, with a long or a short sleep between: the same consciousness uniting those distant actions into the same person, whatever substances contributed to their production.
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A Selection from Essay Concerning Human Understanding
JOHN LOCKE
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Richard Dawkins noticed: “When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge.” Stephen Hawking stated simply: “I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program.” Vladimir Nabokov described it in more poetic terms: “The marvel of consciousness—that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being.” In the words of António Damásio: “I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.” Yet Carl Jung claimed: “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” “Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us
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through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.” Explained Sigmund Freud. “Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.” Analyzed Henry Miller. “His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.” Wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Consciousness is a disease.” Diagnosed Miguel de Unamuno. E. M. Cioran felt: “Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.” “Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.” Thought Aldous Huxley. Max Frisch realized: “It is only the consciousness of a nonexistence which allows us to realize for moments that we are living.” Erwin Schrödinger admitted: “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” Jean-Paul Sartre determined: “Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.”
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Great Thinkers on Consciousness
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“Nobody knows what either sleep or waking consciousness is, even though these two have long been seen as the two sides of being: part of life’s unvarying diurnal rhythm.” Confessed Siri Hustvedt. Michio Kaku concurred: “There are about 20,000 papers on consciousness with no consensus. Nowhere in history have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little.” Alan Moore thus opined: “Consciousness, unprovable by scientific standards, is forever, then, the impossible phantom in the predictable biologic machine, and your every thought a genuine supernatural event. Your every thought is a ghost, dancing.”
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” Surmised Albert Einstein.
“Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one’s consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.” Claimed Albert Camus.
“The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains.” Was Napoleon Bonaparte’s take.
“A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.” Declared Leo Tolstoy.
Or, as Grant Morrison put it: “Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in.”
Zadie Smith said: “Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.”
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“Consciousness being finite, it can only in theory comprehend, and feel with, all things. Theoretically, nothing is unknown to us, and nothing can surprise or alienate us. But if imagination can go everywhere, it can only go to one place at a time. It is therefore that we have surprises in store for each other—we reveal to each other those aspects of the infinite which we had momentarily forgotten.” Deduced Conrad Aiken.
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Christopher Hitchens conceded: “No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.”
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What is there in thee, Man, that can be known? Dark fluxion, all unfixable by thought, A phantom dim of past and future wrought, Vain sister of the worm— —Samuel Taylor Coleridge,“Self-knowledge” Conrad Aiken wrote his autobiography his entire life. From his first volume of short fiction, Bring! Bring! and Other Stories, in 1925 and his first novel, Blue Voyage, in 1927 to his professed autobiography, Ushant, in 1952 (and in most of the poetry before and after these dates), he sang variations on the same song. Saying this does not mean that Aiken, like all writers, merely drew on an imagination informed by personal experience; rather, it means that Aiken actually recycled a myriad of specific, often minor incidents (for instance, a walk with his mother to the post office) and the one major incident in his life (the shooting of his mother by his father and his father’s subsequent suicide) over and over again. And just as Aiken had one story to tell, he wove the narratives on a single philosophical loom: a theory of expanding individual consciousness. Any responsible study of the modern novel should confront the works of Conrad Aiken. Even the broadest survey of the psychological novel should use Aiken’s fiction as a touchstone, and no study of the lyrical novel PAGE 224
should neglect Aiken’s singular contribution. Yet most criticism of the modern novel routinely ignores Aiken. Such contemporary critical indifference follows from Aiken’s limited readership thought his long career. While obviously nothing can be done about Aiken’s neglect when he was writing most of his fiction, occasionally, as we know, a writer’s reputation is established posthumously. Classic examples include Edward Taylor, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and to some degree Malcolm Lowry— all marginally recognized in their own day; subsequently, through perceptive though belated criticism, they have assumed their rightful reputations. In each case, the role of the critic was to reintroduce the writers and to teach people how to read them, and this is precisely what must be done for Aiken. Almost forty years ago Aiken identified a similar problem with readers coming to the prose of William Faulkner. Writing for the Harvard Advocate, Aiken acknowledge that even the most devoted of Faulkner’s readers (of which he considered himself) “must find, with each new novel that the first fifty pages are always the hardest, that each time one must learn all over again how to read this strangely fluid and slippery and heavily mannered prose, and that one is even, like a kind of Laocoon, sometimes tempted to give it up.”1 Advising readers on how to approach Faulkner grew out of a long admiration on Aiken’s part for the Southern novelist, dating back to 1927 when Aiken’s was the voice crying in the wilderness prophesying a literary career for the author of Mosquitoes!2
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A Selection from The Fictive World of Conrad Aiken
CATHARINE F. SEIGEL
——— An evaluation of Aiken’s fiction written between 1925 and 1940 must have as its focus a thorough understanding
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and appreciation of Aiken’s singular theory of evolving consciousness. Aiken’s commitment to consciousness colors everything that he wrote: five novels, five volumes of short stories, twenty-five volumes of poetry, drama, autobiography, and even two volumes of criticism. Yet the importance that Aiken placed on consciousness and its evolution went virtually unnoticed by reviewers and has never been seriously studied by literary critics. Why this is so is as difficult to determine precisely as it is to be certain why, in general, Aiken was discounted. One could speculate that his “theory” was too simple to command attention, that it lacked philosophical pyrotechnics, or that it was too “romantic” for the intellectual climate of the 1920s and 1930s. However, such indifference to the philosophical concept at the heart of his work surely contributed substantially to Aiken’s neglect. The centrality of autobiography for plot and consciousness for theory will be the thread that runs through this study of Aiken’s fiction. The criticism is undertaken with the expectation that such explication of his works might open up Aiken’s fiction, making his singular philosophical insights—which remain undeniably relevant—and his innovative, complementary, often complex poetic prose style available to a new generation of readers.
Northerners on both sides, the family had moved to the South for reasons of Dr. Aiken’s health, and Conrad Potter Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia, on 5 August 1889 (in a boarding house, “and not a particularly distinguished one,” he once boasted, enjoying the contrast with his Mayflower roots). The young Aiken lived in Savannah with his two brothers and a sister until he was dramatically and painfully orphaned in February 1901, when his father murdered his mother and then committed suicide. The children were immediately divided among several relatives, with eleven-year-old Conrad moving to his mother’s native New Bedford, Massachusetts, to live with an aunt and uncle (who agreed to take “one male child”). Young Aiken attended Middlesex School in Concord and then Harvard, from which he graduated in 1912.3 As a child, Aiken insisted that he was going to be a writer, and he never digressed from the intention. He recalls at length in his autobiography his first encounter with the magical word poet, in the epigraph to Tom Brown’s School Days: “The poet of White Horse Vale, Sir, with liberal notions under my cap.” But Aiken’s “liberal notions” were destined to hinder his literary recognition; they always kept him out of step with his contemporaries. I. A. Richards, for instance, acknowledged that Aiken’s early application of Freudian principles to literary analyses was, unfortunately, far ahead of its time. Shortly before his death on 17 August 1973, Aiken remarked to an interviewer that one of the few things that he continued to read were the newspaper comic strips because they were consistently a “step ahead of public opinion.” Aiken might well have been describing his own art. One first thinks of “modern” in terms of technique: Woolf’s and Joyce’s stream of consciousness, Eliot’s and Pound’s elliptical lines, for example. Imposing itself,
——— For a writer who won almost every coveted literary award—the Pulitzer, Bollingen, the National Medal for Literature, and others—Conrad Aiken remained a very private person throughout his long life. He was the first of four children born to Anna Potter Aiken and Dr. William Ford Aiken, a Harvard-educated physician. Although PAGE 225
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apt to be a lonely one, lonelier, spiritually, than the poet whose advance, or invention, as in the case of Hopkins, was in the texture of poetry rather than in the nature of the statement for which the texture was designed. A poet like Hopkins might be likened to the bird who is embarrassed by the, as it were, anti-social conspicuousness of his plumage, especially if his lot is cast among sparrows; but a poet like Donne is unhappy because, willy-nilly, he flies himself right out of sight.4 The totality of Aiken’s modern artistic vision constantly eluded reviewers, who would respond to a part of the novel and praise or damn the whole for the part. It is painful to see how frequently reviewers, when they bothered with his fiction at all, misread Aiken. For instance, a critic for the New Republic, in a review of Aiken’s third novel, King Coffin, abhorred his negative attitudes, his “pessimism, his sense of a civilization past the age of belief or hope.”5 The critic clearly failed to realize that Aiken’s insistence in that novel, as in all his writings, on the primacy of individual consciousness precluded any such categorical generalizations about civilizations and that “pessimism” was an impossible label for a truly realized Aiken character. For example, in Blue Voyage,
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Demarest, Aiken’s own spokesman (by Aiken’s admission and insistence), is aptly characterized by one of his fellow voyagers: “We ought to be sorry for him. More to be pitied than blamed. After all, he’s an idealist: a subjective idealist.”6 Then, too, Aiken’s preoccupation with the evolution of the individual’s consciousness frequently resulted in his being viewed as a passivist, a self-indulgent non-doer, caught up in his own mental labyrinth. Even so loyal a supporter of Aiken as Malcolm Cowley chastised him for his noninvolvement. In reviewing Bring! Bring! and Other Stories, Cowley observed: This dangerous passivity, the neglect of logical thought, the distaste for action (growing into a contempt for action): all these are symptoms of the malady which afflicts the more intelligent writes of our time. Their books are concerned with people who drift, accept, surrender to their passions. A strain of inherited agnosticism, applied first to God, then to society, has finally centred in the self. They are palsied with doubt; afflicted, characters and authors, with an atrophy of the will.7 But the unpardonable sin of which Aiken was most frequently accused was ambiguity. Again this follows from reading an Aiken novel with expectations derived from more traditional paradigms. Such criticism misses the very point that for Aiken ambiguity was the most distinctive quality of the modern mind, and also that the ambiguity in Aiken’s novels derived not from faulty writing, as was frequently suspected, but from his insistence that it was an essential condition of consciousness. Robert Linscott,
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technique here is immediately apparent. But Aiken, in applying the term to himself in a BBC interview, defined it less in terms of the technique that made him “modern” and more in terms of a mind-set—moral or religious. In that sense, he saw, for instance, Donne—and by implication, himself—as far more “modern” than Hopkins, but he also allowed that a modern poet was
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Aiken’s literary agent and good friend, wrote to him crystallizing his difficulties in placing Aiken’s short stories by projecting an imaginary scenario with the editor of Atlantic when faced with considering Aiken’s “Strange Moonlight” (incidentally, Aiken’s favorite short story): “‘What’s it all about’ he’ll bark and to a sorry task explaining to a hardboiled editor that it isn’t an incident but an emotion in rhythm. ‘But my subscribers’ he’ll say, ‘want something solid and something tangible, something that can be laid hold of and bitten into—— ’”(26 November 1922, HHL MS. Aik 3766). Aiken should have been recognized as writing in a viable tradition that might well be called continuity of American ambiguity, with its roots in Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman (all of whom Aiken acknowledged as important to him), but the prevailing taste in American prose fiction of the 1920’s and 1930’s, when Aiken was writing most of his fiction, was for immediate accessibility. Related to the criticism of Aiken’s ambiguity was the impatience with his apparent inconsistencies. One fairly typical critic charged that Aiken obviously had not subjected his ideas to an “intellectually rigorous scrutiny. That is not to say that he is unintelligent or unthinking, but only that in the end his skepticism is not consistent. The result is a paradox: the ‘philosophical’ skeptic is also a poetic philosopher.”8 Aiken—echoing Whitman’s “I contradict myself? I contradict myself”—would have added, “Of course.” Such apparent ambiguities and inconsistencies were not limited to his fiction but likewise characterized his literary criticism, where one might assume Aiken would have liked to suggest that his conclusions followed from some carefully and logically structured paradigm. Instead he cautioned the readers of Scepticisms: Notes
on Contemporary Poetry, his first volume of criticism: “Our utterances are apt to sound authoritative and final. But do not be deceived! We are no surer of ourselves at bottom than anybody else is. We are, in fact, half the time, frightened to death.”9 Almost forty years later in his second critical volume, A Reviewer’s ABC, Aiken candidly admitted: “The inconsistencies I could, indeed, have eradicated. They remain because it seems to me that in so relative a world they may have a kind of value. One is least sure of one’s self, sometime, when one is most positive” (ABC, 34). In only one realm was Aiken an unvacillating servant—in his priestly dedication to the pursuit of consciousness. His commitment to the theory coupled with his insistence on the redemptory role of the artist demanded that he teach a reader how to come to terms with his or her individual consciousness. This would logically follow from Aiken’s painfully honest pursuit of his own consciousness in each of his novels. A thorough understanding of the place of consciousness in the Aiken canon should allay the most persistent criticisms of his novels: that, in addition to being inconsistent and ambiguous, nothing happens in them; and that they have no artistic unity. What for so long was seen as Aiken’s lack of control over his form will come to be recognized as his form. Aiken’s prose runs essentially counter to Francis Fergusson’s definition of the dramatic form of the novel as one in which a situation leads to a decision that effects change. A partial explanation for Aiken’s neglect was that he did not fulfill the reader’s expectations for a novel within these traditional boundaries. Like the readers of Faulkner whom Aiken had early instructed, we must also be taught how to read Aiken’s unique contributions to the emerging twentieth-century American novel.
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Such instruction must begin with the recognition of Aiken’s theory of evolving consciousness, continue with a close observation of this theory at work in his fiction, and culminate in an examination of his strange and beautiful novel/autobiography, Ushant, where the biographical, psychological, and philosophical forces that contributed to his Weltanschauung coalesce.
field for belief and will. Let us be as conscious as possible” (“What I Believe,” 80). Some forty years later—after an international war of hitherto unimagined dimensions, after the nightmare of the holocaust, and after the surrealistic perfection of the means for the annihilation of the human species—when Aiken was interviewed on his eightieth birthday, he unhesitantly replied to the question about whether there was any longer a workable ethic for man, “Yes. The main thing is to know thyself.”12 While many moderns struggled with the viability of any systematic epistemology, Aiken insisted that by virtue of being born one was initiated into a structure. “One is ‘here,’” Aiken insisted, “simply, involved in a scene and sustained by it. We are born if a system, and into it, and our birth is our first act of acceptance” (“What I Believe,” 79). Beyond that Aiken was uncertain about the choices of believing or not believing, living or dying, one could make, but he concluded, “Will it be safe to say that it is the function of the sane, or healthy, to live, or believe, and of the insane, or unhealthy, to disbelieve and die? And in this respect can we say that belief is perhaps a measure of energy, as courage is perhaps a measure of desire?” (“What I Believe,” 79). Thus Aiken saw merely staying alive, even on the simplest plane of consciousness, as heroic, and for this reason he held all humanity in reverence. Yet this does not suggest that Aiken was proposing a mere animal faith limited to satisfying primary instincts— to eat, to sleep, to keep warm. Rather as one moved up the scale of civilization, one inevitably ascended the scale of consciousness, moving into a world of ever-increasing ambiguities and abstractions. Aiken explained the steps:
——— In 1932 Nation surveyed several American public figures to determine what they really believed in at the time. “To ask a man what he believes is perhaps tantamount to asking him why he lives,” answered Conrad Aiken.10 Since it was a Depression year, as well as one in which the war clouds were gathering on the international horizon, most replies were economic or political in focus. Edmund Wilson’s was fairly typical: “I believe that the discussion of other matters must wait until the problems of the social classes, with the political and economic questions they involve, have been definitely settled.”11 But consistent with the pattern of his entire life, Aiken was listening to a different drummer and answered the survey with an outline of his belief in the primacy of the individual consciousness, essentially the philosophy by which he lived his entire life. To an age desperately seeking concrete “answers” from its literary prophets—for instance, the sorts of societal salvation suggested by Auden, Dos Passos, Dreiser, and Steinbeck, or the invitations to religious or mythic explanations offered by Eliot or Pound, Aiken only contributed the disquieting consolation of a celebration of consciousness: “If we begin by understanding ourselves, as far as we can, we progress thus toward an understanding of man and his potentialities. This seems to me a sufficient PAGE 228
as he becomes more conscious, not only is he farther and farther removed from the level of
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Aiken was particularly sensitive to the growing expectation in his own day that science would provide relief—in the form of explanations—to man’s metaphysical angst. He warned that one should not ask of science more than it can give: “the infinite everywhere precedes and succeeds the finite which is our little field of observation…the fact remains that the limits of knowledge are ultimate, not immediate…and we can never reach them….The conscious life of man becomes therefore an absolutely unanswerable, but relatively answerable ‘Why?’” (“What I Believe,” 79). While such a conclusion is less than comforting, Aiken was confident that once the individual realized, or, perhaps more to the point, would admit, that there were no absolute answers, he would gradually cease struggling
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to believe in formal systems: “I can see no reason why man will not presently give up all major beliefs…and simply surrender itself to what is perhaps the first principle of his own present state as a conscious creature—an inexhaustible curiosity” (“What I Believe,” 79). About this time Aiken expressed the same conviction in a long poem, “Time in the Rock”: Mysticism, but let us have no words, angels, but let us have no fantasies, churches, but let us have no creeds, no dead gods hung on crosses in a shop, nor beads nor prayers nor faith nor sin nor penance: and yet, let us believe, let us believe.13 It is on this final realization by the individual that within oneself are the answers—or the questions—which are finally one and the same—that Aiken insisted in each novel. The problem, however, never engaged the sensibilities of a wide-reading audience. A New York Times reviewer was certain that the novel King Coffin (1935), like the two that preceded it, Blue Voyage and Great Circle, would not be popular because Aiken was appreciated only by a “minority that is spiritually…attuned to him.” The reviewer pinpointed why the writer was out of touch with most readers: “Aiken believes man is his study. Not man in love, man at work, man in hate or in grief, but that vast, dimensionless universe that exists within man.” Aiken’s “study” undoubtedly began early and unconsciously. Commencing with the violent death of his parents when he was young, Aiken came to realize prematurely that he was absurdly a part of, and in many ways dependent on, a seemingly quixotic, perhaps even perverse and random, world. Therefore he came early to
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simple animal faith, or the level on which he can quite simply accept it, but also his credulity is itself weakened. More and more his faiths must recommend themselves to reason; with each successive plane of awareness new terms for faith must be found—less concrete, more abstract, more comprehensive. From religion he perhaps moves to philosophy, from philosophy to science—and from science to what? In recent years we have seen that even when he reached the realm of pure observation, he is still sometimes not content—here we have the extraordinary spectacle of the scientist endeavoring to force a shotgun marriage between science and mysticism. This is interesting, if only because it so conveniently proves how strong is our inherited will-to-believe in something vaguely “divine.” (“What I Believe,” 79)
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Consciousness is our supreme gift. Not only does it contain—in every sense—all that we value, but also it is the fundamental and indeed the only means by which we are able to value. To see, to remember, to know, to feel, to understand, as much as possible—isn’t this perhaps the most obviously indicated of motives or beliefs, the noblest and most all-comprehending of ideas which it is relatively possible for us to realize? To understand all is not merely to forgive all—it is also to accept all, and on whatever plane one wishes. If to be a genius is to be…an extender of man’s consciousness, then there can be no monopoly of genius by the few; it is the common inheritance of all mankind. (“What I Believe,” 80) Such conviction led Aiken to believe that consciousness was the essential reason for writing. First,
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writing it all down—as accurately as one dared—was therapeutic for the writer, a medium through which he could come to terms with his existence. Second, what he wrote could become a handmaiden to the reader’s pursuit of his or her own consciousness. To this end, Aiken was absolutely insistent about the proselytizing role of the writer through self-revelation. After reading a new collection of Malcolm Cowley’s poetry in 1919, Aiken expressed disappointment in his friend’s neglect of this primal obligation. He chastised him for being too preoccupied with technique and too little with self: Somehow you’ve forgotten to get down to the real business of the poet: viz., consciously or unconsciously to give the lowdown on himself, and through himself on humanity….The stuff is so good, and yet so (somehow) superficial! As if you’d adopted one palette after another and demonstrated your skill, but nevertheless avoided the final business of self-betrayal. Aiken made no attempt to disguise the fact that he took his own advice quite literally and throughout his life wrote variations on one theme: the particular pursuit of consciousness in the life of Conrad Aiken, writer— its peculiar risks, its exacting responsibilities. It is not surprising to find that the conflict in four of Aiken’s five novels is within the mind of an artist. Demarest, the protagonist of Blue Voyage, is a playwright; in Great Circle, Cather is a tutor and writer; Noni, the central character in A Heart for the Gods of Mexico, is a musician, and Blomberg, the narrator, is a reader of novels for a publishing house; and in the last novel, Conversation, Kane is a painter. (The exception is King Coffin, in which Jaspar
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look into himself, both to assess what blame for events rested with him and to discover what resources there were within himself, so that he could depend as little as possible on the capricious external world and on the shallow systems that men had fabricated to explain it. Aiken’s own internal voyage—his autobiography, then— is to a greater and lesser extent the subject of each novel—beginning with Blue Voyage. This first work, which treats the protagonist’s lonely inward journey as he travels outward on an ocean liner, provides a textbook introduction to Aiken’s whole philosophical world. By the end of the novel, William Demarest understands and even accepts all the “MISERY” (the word acts as a refrain) to fictionalize his conviction that there is, finally, only one explanation, and that is consciousness:
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Ammen is a student.) Finally in Ushant the author and the persona—D.—totally merge; the mask is dropped, and the dimension of consciousness is exhaustively explored in the life of Conrad Aiken.
9 Reprinted in Conrad Aiken, A Reviewer’s ABC (Connecticut: Meridian Books, Inc., 1958), 26 (hereafter cited as ABC).
——————————— 1 Conrad Aiken, “William Faulkner: The Novel as Form,” Harvard Advocate 135 (1951): 13. 2 Ironically, Faulkner, as an undergraduate at the University of Mississippi in 1921, wrote a review of an early Aiken work, Turns and Movies, holding out the possibility of a delayed recognition of Aiken’s genius: “It is interesting to watch, for— say in fifteen years—when the great poet will be left. Perhaps he is the man.” Carvel Collins, ed., William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1962), 75-76.
10 Conrad Aiken, “What I Believe,” Nation 135 (July 1932): 79 (hereafter cited in the text). 11 Edmund Wilson, “What I Believe,” Nation 134 (January 1932): 98. 12 Bill Winn, “America Going to Dogs? Poet Aiken Says No,” Atlanta Journal, 21 January 1968, 6A. 13 Conrad Aiken, Collected Poems, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) 674 (hereafter cited as CP).
3 See Edward Kutscher, Conrad Aiken: Poet of White Horse Vale (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), the first of a projected two-volume biography.
6 Conrad Aiken, The Collected Novels of Conrad Aiken (New York: Holt, Rineheart and Winston, 1964), 141 (hereafter cited as CN). 7 Malcolm Cowley, “The Orange Moth,” Dial 79 (December 1925): 508. 8 E. P. Bollier, “From Scepticism to Poetry: A Note on Conrad Aiken and T. S. Eliot,” Tulane Studies in English (1963): 102.
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5 Robert Lovett, “Melody of Chaos,” New Republic 79 (May 1934): 81.
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4 Conrad Aiken, “Personal Anthology,” produced by P. H. Newby, BBC, 1 April 1954. Manuscript in the Conrad Potter Aiken Collection at the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California, Aik3766 (hereafter cited as HHL MS.).
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An “Unsuccessful but Undefeated” Life in Letters Question number one that scholars, critics, and even, some time ago, the writer himself have asked with respect to Conrad Aiken: Why has his work not been more widely read? Suggesting an answer in her essay “Conrad Aiken: His Hour Come Round At Last?” Catherine F. Seigel points to the focus of Aiken’s fiction, his captivation with the “amorphous inner world of consciousness,” the place where the personal becomes universal. “His method for creating this particular world of inner consciousness,” she writes, “is to dispense quickly with objective reality, to strip his characters of their factual, objective selves, their physical features, professions, class, education, and so on.” Always inclined to shun cliques and trends, and never comfortable reading in public, Aiken avoided in his fiction the sort of features on which accessibility tends to hang its hat. This poetic inclination to slip free from personal narrative arcs and carefully delineated exterior context in which things happen in observable sequence—a love, in short, for lyric abstraction—effectively stranded his novelistic output on its own little island. This is not an uncommon fate, however, for literary endeavors, and not one to which the writer proved in any way oblivious or aghast, at least if we take him at his word. In his youth, he attended Harvard with and served as PAGE 232
literary counterpart to T. S. Eliot when the famous poet arrived in England, the two defining themselves against each other’s example before World War I, a relationship whose literary outcomes might be said to include the birth of modernism. What clique could have topped that? Aiken was an individualist above all, sitting across the café table as New Criticism gestated behind Eliot’s shrewd eyes; afterwards in the shadow of Eliot’s ever-widening fame, Aiken could not be bothered to heed Ezra Pound’s exhortations to spend more time with the right people— Pound, destined for Fascist Italy, really thought he knew. “One mustn’t on any account stray from the chosen circles,” Aiken ventriloquizes in his crowning work, the autobiographical Ushant: …if one showed the least signs of dallying with other groups, or persisted in the attempt to remain independent of all groups, choosing one’s literary friends simply where one found them, or liked them, and regardless of political sides or currents, one was at once suspect. Funny how that works, as if the pursuit of literary prestige were some sort of racket, a function of interlocking cliques, which it is, unless…we put any stock in the myth of the heroic solitary: Aiken’s “frontiersmen, pioneers…outlaws… those who preferred to seek and find alone,” the American individualist tradition embodied by Melville, Hawthorne, and Dickinson. It was a tradition, Aiken was driven to confess in Ushant, that he saw as hopelessly defunct with the advent of the 1920s: corporate radio broadcasts, automobiles, skyscrapers, universalizing spectacles of American mobility and transference that worked to break the ice of sexual repression, to bring people together in
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You’re a Literary Man, Conrad Aiken:
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common consciousness. “The time was past,” Aiken writes, “when the solitary giant needed indeed to be a giant if he were to withstand an almost fatal solitude, or the restrictive, and even crippling effects of lonely soliloquy…” I wondered myself what to make of Conrad Aiken when The Scofield announced its next issue. I wondered how best to make an approach to his work, and chose Ushant as a starter. The oscillation between homes resonates as the text’s thematic heart, the book itself a kind of pioneering autofiction on the summit of Aiken’s novelistic output, a long, immersive comment on his own consciousness, and lived experience, and traumas, and desires—a criticism of himself and of his own work. A (partial) bill of lading: one grandfather, a Massachusetts minister; two uncles; one mother, murdered by one father… that father, slain by his own hand; one child, Aiken, who discovered the bodies (“finding them dead, found himself possessed of them forever”). Three marriages; three children from the first; two continents, the USA and England; two American homes, one North – Brewster – one South, Savannah; one literary protégé, Malcolm Lowry; one abiding captivation with the study of psychology; one self-inflicted wound, a divorce brought on by his infidelities; one suicide attempt, a gas stove left on so as to fill the kitchen in the center of which Aiken sat while the flies on the ceiling, one by one, dropped to the floor. Recovery, renewed joie de vivre, and always the nourishing book-centered companionship: “A time of blooming, of profusion, of hard work and endless debate; of good food, good drinks, and good living. But a time of competitive stress also, of unceasing literary sauve-qui-peut… Which of them would survive?” Survive in the literal sense, but also, in that other, more rarified one: Who will be read tomorrow? Countless journeys, a
profusion of publications. One sensible, doting, well-to-do aunt who once wrote to him: “You seem always to enjoy life there so much, you seem always to be having such a good time, and to see so many people! I don’t know how you do it, and with so little money!” Aiken recognized that his self-described “bi-polarity,” or state of flux between homes, might in fact underlie all of his writing, all of his yearning, because “once one felt at home, one would have no more to learn, or would have become so relaxed as to be no longer capable of learning; and one’s very purpose for having come there at all…would be no longer valid.” Ushant’s governing metaphor, a pun on You Shan’t!, that old mantra of New England Puritanism, was inspired by a World War II boat trip to England where the elder Aiken and younger Malcolm Lowry noticed a passing island, Ile d’Ouessant, and, at least in Aiken’s imagination, began to riff on the Anglicized version of its name, infusing the word with grand meaning: Ushant, and all that it stood for, the hoped-for and miraculous light that guarded the subtle and treacherous approaches to the most dangerous of coasts, the most rewarding of landfalls, the vision beyond the shoals and rocks, had now begun to form itself as the place and idea, the spiritual locus as well as the genius loci, towards which all his life must inevitably move. At the launch of any literary endeavor, much less the dream of a life-spanning career, most of us must feel some trepidation no matter our age—who are we, after all, to think our words matter so much as to merit a published book? To put yourself on page in writing is
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an individualist pursuit: self-defining, and therefore somewhat frightening—the exposure, the judgments to be leveled—not to mention the monetary aspect, the somewhat straitened prospects thereof. It’s a roll of the dice, in other words, and, no, not at all like it used to be in the old days, when a writer could be a writer, and Eliot and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein would stroll down the boulevard together, caroling a joyful modernist tune…or wait, that’s not true, wasn’t there always that foreboding aspect lying ahead for each individual, a destination, a personal fate, both feared and desired? It is the most consuming question of any book-fevered life—where will the pursuit lead? (look how quietly each volume sits there on the shelf)—and, indeed, though the terms may vary, the most consuming question of any life. As Aiken puts it with respect to Ushant, the idea, in Ushant, his book: “Where would they all get to? Would they arrive—now or ever—at anything in the least resembling what they had hope for? Would anyone?” Consciousness is what Aiken championed as the great prize, there to be attained by all—and yet Ushant, in its difficulty, and in the dangers the island’s shoals represent, suggests the approach may not always come trouble-free: “Was it perhaps only in the profoundest experience of annihilation, and of the dissolution of all hope and pride and identity, in the great glare of cosmic consciousness, that one could regain one’s power to value?” Aiken himself, if transparently, struggles on the page with his own values: his view of women, of racial distinctions, of sexuality, his representative stances perhaps just to the left of prejudice and sometimes running right into it. Adolescent Aiken, in the process of arriving at his experience of masculinity, felt a need to idealize his deceased father, the murderer, even at the expense of his mother. Some of these reflections are
eyebrow-raising; at the end of his life Aiken, an isolate, rarely accepted visitors and had soured generally on the world of literature outside his own window. As the scholar Joseph Killorin writes, he “lived strictly by his principle that anonymity—a steadfast refusal under social-pressures to publicize his personality—is essential to the artist’s work.” In Aiken’s words: “Our writers must learn once more how to stand clear, in order that they may preserve that sort of impersonal anonymity, that deep and pure provincialism, in which the terms approach universals.” The immaculate quality of the prose is there for all to encounter: a trans-Atlantic mirror of sorts to Virginia Woolf, Aiken gave himself up to be gazed on by successive generations, quite consciously, in his mind, for the sake of literature, which he believed in as an ascendant cultural project geared toward the betterment of humankind. His descendants, or kissing cousins, would seem to include, not only contemporary writers of autofiction, but Jack Kerouac in his beatific splendor and personal troubles from which travel presented a shimmering promise of escape, and Fellini of 8 ½, not to mention the lyric songwriters who have sought to transmute some vision of their own far-flung experiences and conscious reflections into romantic myth. Consciousness, it turns out, may not always be the great prize. For some, if not all, pleasure consists in the opportunity to escape it. In ways, these reflections of Aiken’s have aged, and in others—almost shocking, how many, for a present-day writer to find—his work retains its hold, those underlying universals applicable across decades to the literary pursuit. As Catherine F. Seigel details, one critic called Aiken, “famous for not being famous enough”; another pointed to a career “shrouded in a conspiracy of silence”; one more remarked, “He is an incorrigible victim
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of modernity,”; a walker of the Marxist line declared Aiken “not attuned to present material conditions of society.” On top of this, Aiken’s each and every novel arrived to low sales. When a literary journal communicated during his lifetime that that it intended to feature him in a special issue, Aiken responded: “Don’t do it! I’ve never been fashionable or in the public eye.” In the light of Ushant, we might ask collectively why write for publication when that writing, if not sooner, then later, is certain to be forgotten, to sink beneath the turbulent surface, reviewers beneath the waves of debut novelists, debut novelists beneath the waves of more successful debut novelists, more successful debut novelists beneath etcetera, etcetera, up to and including the most widely embraced, critically championed novelists not content to be themselves as god hope they would be but cannot afford to be at the risk of complacency…. Looking over their Aikens at the few other Aikens as far out in the waters as they Aiken, each aspiring to reach that one final Aiken, the deciding achievement to make manifest that yes you did it, the Aiken you lived, the sacrifices you Aikened, the wounds you Aikened, and those you inflicted, love found and lost and found again, all of it, all for this very Aiken, to be understood and prized in your time and even beyond Aiken, unless of course the Aiken loses its allure at some uncertain point, words falling like so many Aikens beneath the waves while those of another writer, perhaps not yet known, rise and rise and rise, despite all odds to the contrary…. On this prospect, we can reflect—till human voices wake us, and we Aiken.
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Conrad Aiken and “These Old Familiars” I. Preliminary Orientation Points It was my hope that in a serial form—separate poems, but constituting some kind of mathematical series—and series does seem to be not only a probability but an inherent necessity in nature—I could approximate some sort of spiral approach to what I thought, in this psychological predicament, so desperately needed to be said. —Conrad Aiken, “Preface” to Preludes (1966) Conrad Aiken’s Preludes were republished in a single volume in 1966, as he says he had always hoped they might be, and, with this experiment in writing, I am here marking their re-arrival, some fifty years later. The two series of poems, Preludes for Memnon and Time in the Rock, first appeared in 1930 and 1932, so Aiken—or should I call him Conrad?—was reflecting back across a time lag of thirty years. My copy of this text, which appeared from Oxford University Press in 1966, carries the following dedication: For the Hodgkins from the Aikens these old familiars with love 1965. PAGE 236
He was of course my grandfather. “These old familiars” is a wonderful phrase, which marks Conrad’s close relation with a series of accompanying voices, not the least of whom would be Samuel Jeakes, of Jeakes House, Mermaid Street, in Rye, where he lived with his second wife, Clarissa, before the Second World War. Samuel Jeakes was the seventeenth-century inhabitant of the house, who haunted it, in a friendly way, supposedly regularly conversing with Conrad, and certainly seen by his younger daughter, Joan. Conrad writes in his “Preface” of his concern for a relation between being and speaking, “of the world and of the word,” in response to which I find myself wondering how much phenomenology he had read: Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead are referenced, from time to time, Whitehead, after all, was by then teaching in Boston, from 1920, but he does not reference Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, with whom I am more familiar. I wonder what he would make of the differences between Husserl and Heidegger, on thinking the interdependence of word and world. Could we have talked philosophy? II. The Conversation: Speaking with Ghosts The characters in this novel are entirely imaginary, and any resemblance they have to real persons, living or dead, is therefore quite accidental. —Conrad Aiken, The Conversation (1940) The Conversation; or, Pilgrim’s Progress: A Domestic Symphony was published in 1940 and its frontispiece bears this usual disclaimer, as given in italics. It is, however, clairvoyantly biographical: a novel about a man, clearly Conrad, mistreating his wife, clearly his first wife, Jessie,
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Sorties, Series, and Spirals:
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who complains that he has stopped even providing her with the simple pleasures of intelligent conversation. Her complaint is all the more poignant since Conrad was marked out by his capacity to bring around himself a group of friends who talked and talked into the night: frivolous and serious, intimate and carefully distanced, succinct and long drawn out, in all the registers of friendship and enmity. He sure knew how to party, and late into his seventies, the martinis flowed at Thunderbolt, near Savannah, Georgia, and at his parents’ grave in Bonaventure Cemetery, outside Savannah, into which he proposed, in due course, to insert himself. At the end of the novel, with quite staggering ineptitude, he offers the insulted wife the option of having another child; in the real world, Jessie had finally divorced him in 1929, after yet another series of affairs and yet another series of abandonments, this time in Sussex, England. Throughout the novel he depicts himself as wrapped up in himself, or absent, chasing jobs, and other women, in Boston, Massachusetts. In his mode of modernity, Aiken is still in that style of the one sage speaking for the many, and the multiplicities of voices to which he listens are all arriving in the one resonating space of his own artificing, rather than distributed across a series of self-modifying receptive sites. His sensibility is a distribution of sense, but not across multiplicities of persons, with the full implications of a radical interdependence of meanings, within and across linguistic groupings. He himself is the multitude. The little local shufflings of Greek and Latin, Sanskrit and French, to which he and his friends and peers, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, are prone, are mere upper class elite versions of a far more radical polylingual reality out of which they have arisen and to which they must return. The registers
of Derek Walcott and Andre Brink have the intimated characteristic of self-displacing multivocality, to which perhaps the carefully crafted polylogues of these high moderns play precursor. The old question is whether it is possible to open up a route to getting a response from the dead, about how they wrote and thought and lived. The conversation would be worth having, but I do wonder how much he might have listened. Bergson’s preoccupation with time as duration, and Whitehead, on particle-events, resonate strongly within and alongside the stated interest for Freud, Einstein, Darwin and Nietzsche in the “Preface” to the Preludes:
He wants us to know he is well read: if we could talk, I could provide him with the makings of a reply. Ethics will need to go by way of a confrontation with an inheritance within the philosophical tradition of a toxic European anti-Semitism; and time has, perhaps, irreversibly split between a “now-time” or duration of lived experience, and a function as an objectified historical index. Read Walter Benjamin, read my books. Did I end up reading and teaching philosophy, in order to be able to talk to him of time and the rock, which elegantly poses a
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For where was one to go, of what to stand upon, now that Freud on the one hand and Einstein on the other, with the shadows of Darwin and Nietzsche behind them, had suddenly turned over our neat little religious or philosophic systems into something that looked alarmingly like pure mathematics? Where was poetry to go, and the word of which it was made, and the beliefs that sustained it? And where too was ethics to go and all that had depended on those vanished credos?
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question to Heidegger’s worldless stone? The impact of such a grandfather can be neither described nor measured. The credos, of course, have not all vanished, with fundamentalisms striking back from many directions. Ethics has attained a reincarnation in the necessary opening to the claim of known and unknown others, both finite and infinite, between current alterities, and an alterity to come. The single unified moral imperative of Kant’s fact of reason is blended into imperatives, both heard and unheard. Perhaps he intimates this in the last canto of Time in the Rock:
and I counted the doors, with chalk marks to make sure of no double counting and I think we made it either forty or forty-two, excluding all cupboard doors. He writes: “these preludes were planned to be an all-out effort at a probing of the self-in-relation-to-the-world, the formulation of a new Weltanschauung.” To Husserl’s contrast between a natural attitude and philosophical attitude, Conrad seeks to add a third, a poetic attitude, in which a new relatedness may emerge, from a reforging of the language of the imaginary. Husserl, he may have read, but Heidegger, clearly not. For Heidegger has reservations about the status of the term “Weltanschauung,” which presupposes what it seems to put in doubt, a stance from which the world may be inspected. Husserl has the rather marvelous term, “Wesensschau,” an inspection of essences, a term which Heidegger did not hold in esteem, but which I think Conrad would have liked. With that bad Nazi, Conrad would have had in common only the thought that there is a time of need, in which poetry may play some function (und wozu dichter in duerftiger zeit?). Did Conrad read Hölderlin? Surely, yes, and, like Hölderlin, like Hephaestus, Conrad beats away at the iron ore of the inheritance, from Shakespeare and Jonson, Blake and Wordsworth, to Whitman and Dickinson. He is constantly trying to reassure himself that he has a genealogy and a lineage, and that it is enabling, rather than stifling. The family myth has it that his travels on liners, on his many Atlantic crossings, were accompanied with a box of books containing the complete works of Shakespeare and Milton, reading them all in the course of each voyage. My mother inherited the copies of these from him, and on the death of our mother, my sister and I shared them out, I have the Milton, she has the Shakspere (Conrad’s preferred spelling). I was the youngest of his five grandchildren,
It is the other, it is the separate, it is the one Whose touch was strange, who with a eyeglance Sounded and wounded you who went then Quickly to another world. The future horizon is marked for us, as it was not so clearly marked for him, by the urgency of climate transformations and the ravages of fossil fuel exploitation, both human and material. The logistics of mass migrations are displacing personal biographical uncertainty as the locus for poetic self-doubt. These forces of otherness transcend, in power and mystery, the mystery of these other people, or other materialities, who thus sounded and wounded him. Was he, like me, suspicious of the Nietzsche of the “will to power”? Did he who made the lamb, make thee? The “Preface” is signed “Brewster, Massachusetts, August 1965,” and was presumably written that summer in the house on the Cape, 41 Doors, which Conrad and his third wife, Mary, bought with the proceeds of some chance inheritance she came by from some conveniently mortal relative. That first summer on the Cape my sister
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once, after another summer visit, he gave us copies of his books, The Kid to my sister and The Soldier to me, with a dedication “for Joanna, and her grand strategies,” in the same distinctive spidery handwriting. The last section of this serial poem concludes: In the last war of all we conquer ourselves. Look, home from the desert, soldier: to the regenerate heart of the desert of the heart come home: and know that this too needs heroes, and endurance, and ardour. Now I had forgotten that, and find it comical: for I must be the least strategic person I know. III. Voyage Out: My Inner Ear I had and have no name without it came perhaps the wet and still-by-night-dew-tightly-twisted morning-glory tiger at evening drinking by moonlit water and the all-thinking skin of the earth in which we move are a part are single and same all one hate all one love. —Conrad Aiken, Thee
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the younger daughter of the second child. We called him Coony, which he liked; the grown- ups called him Cahoun, for reasons wholly obscure to me, and Coony was the version of that we could manage. The name merged him for me into some symbiosis with a couple of strange natural phenomena to be found, we were told, on the Cape. These phenomena were described to us as reasons for not going wandering in the woods, as we might have done on the South Downs in England: raccoons, skunks, poison ivy, and something called the mulberry swamp, of which Mary had painted a remarkable picture, consisting mainly of arabesque purple lines and wide white gaps. She was my introduction to abstract expressionism. Mary Hoover, his third wife, “a lovely little painter lady,” he had met in the late thirties, described thus to my mother, who then cooked and drove and managed and sometimes still painted, for the best part of forty years. The grown-ups always referred to him in the third person as “Conrad.” He was thus in the best tradition tripartite: familiarly as “Coony,” interpellated as “Cahoun,” and embalmed as “Conrad.” To the impossible conversation I might have had with him, I would have brought too much German philosophy and not quite enough French, much novel reading, and not enough poetry, and an all-consuming rage against the careless masculinisms of the traditions, within which we all find ourselves. The only time I recollect him actually talking to me was when he once asked what I wanted to do, when I grew up. I recall gazing back at him in speechless incomprehension, at the startling thought: as though I have a choice in the matter. Chance, I am sure, has brought me out where I am, which perhaps marks the metaphysical gap between his search for a worldview and my certainty there is no such thing. This prompts me to another memory: when we were leaving the Cape
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In my inner ear, where some suppose themselves to hear the sound of the sea breaking on Dover Beach, or, off Nantucket Sound, the booming of whales, or the wild winds, off Cape Horn, I hear my grandfather’s unmistakable Boston Brahmin accent, reading the opening lines of Thee, or retelling the story of the Quaker cousins, who would greet him when a child with the phrase: “How is it with thee, Conrad?” He, of course, had the horrific childhood to beat all horrific childhoods, discovering his mother shot by his then suicidal father, in the front upstairs room of the house, on Oglethorpe Avenue, Savannah, Georgia. As children, we surely knew this dire story, and Conrad’s heroic run three blocks down the road, to the fire men lounging outside the Savannah Fire Station, to rush back and help, too late to save either life. As chronicled in “Obituary in Bitcherel”:
them tended to me with a carefully proffered brown bowl. My sister must have summoned him, for I was in no fit state: goodness only knows where the parents had vanished to. On the way back, a taciturn French ship’s doctor calmly lanced the painful abscess which had formed in my left armpit, the consequence of too much ice cream and brownies, Coke and crisps, hamburgers and chips, and all those irresistible, deleterious American indulgences; and maybe just the strain of being children around a Great Man, who must be deferred to: a monument to something called poetry, talking more to Heraclitus, to some originary polemos, and his oneiromachia, than to us. When we got back to England, I recall disappointing trips to a local Wimpy Bar, opposite Wimbledon Station, where some ghastly apology for a hamburger was inedibly offered up to us, a spam substitute, with none of the requisite trimmings. My mother, in response to our patent dismay, started making real burgers, at home, with beef mince, and fried onions, and spices, but alas it was not the same. My memory, though, is also that Conrad and Mary came down to the docks on the lower West Side, at the Port Authority, to wave us gleefully into berth. They were warmly welcoming, and waited patiently while the customs men found the oranges my sister and I had providently, but illegally, hidden in our suitcases. An enormous black Customs man found them and confiscated them, roaring with kindly laughter at our cast-down faces. I remember the heat of New York, the impossibility of sleeping in that heat, and leaning, with my sister, out of the window, high above the sidewalk, to watch the yellow cabs and cop cars with their alarming flashing lights and klaxon sirens flowing interminably along the street below. It was entirely magical to be thus transposed. We had been up with the lark to watch the halo of the Statue of
And the morning quarrel and shots, and then four orphaned children taken north again. He was I think eleven years old at the time, making the first of the many major removals in which the pattern of his life consisted, and always swinging back and forth across the Atlantic, tracing out a loop of indecision. We made the great voyage out by sea from Southampton, to New York, when I was five years old, that first time, on a French Line ship, maybe the Île-de-France, sailing on an island of wholly undefined expectancy. Beef broth was served to passengers lying recumbent, wrapped in bright red blankets on deck loungers by charmingly offhand French seamen in Querelle of Brest matelot trousers and pom-pom hats. They were casually kind, amused even, by two rather overwhelmed, rather English, little girls. I had the vomits as we crossed the Irish Sea, and one of
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Liberty rise over the horizon, as so many had done before, and it occurs to me how different it is to arrive by sea to the New World, and that by air it is no longer a New World into which one arrives, but the familiar world of airports and passports checks, and of systems sorting people into groups of desirable and undesirable aliens. Later, in Washington DC, taking the boat for the day trip down to Washington’s home town, I was forcibly struck by how the sightlines on the return trip place the White House, Capitol Hill, and the Lincoln Monument in a fine triumphal staging which no longer works, since only the absent-minded tourist now arrives from the sea. That summer on the Cape is a blur of confusion. I think I learned to swim at some lakeside school for swimming, holding on to a thick rope, running parallel to the shore, and kicking until suddenly it was possible to float without holding on. We went to the beach, bay-side for swimming, ocean-side for barbecues, sunsets, and exposure to a wild forceful sea of surging waters. There were always long complicated negotiations about who was to drive, and how many cars, and where the children were to be squeezed in, which I think have left me with a permanent suspicion of driving in convoy. Conrad remained at home for these trips, writing, or sleeping, or dreaming in his atmospheric study. The space of writing had an immense and unstated ambience of the inviolable, like the shrine of some household god, unquestionable. We were introduced to a world dependent on the automobile, but still strangely inflected by the atmosphere of slinging a leg over the back of a horse, and heading out West. America was not like England, but it wasn’t like the movies either, for here people lived and talked and ate and slept and breathed. It was hot, there was sand, and a drug store with a soda fountain, and a sign saying “No Huntin’, no Shootin’,
no Nothin’,” which caused my parents much hilarity. Mary made drawings of both me and my sister, but turned only the drawing of my sister into a painting because, she said, I was “too young to have a face formed by character.” You can see it rankles to this day, but she had noticed that I squinted in my right eye, and only thereafter, on our return to England, did my regular trips start up, to the eye hospital and to Mr. Gillan, at the Tite Street Hospital, London, who did that operation to fix the squint. My mother and I would change trains at Vauxhall, walking through a goods yard full of boxes of bananas, and redolent of that sweet smell, which will for me always be associated with Mary. I think of Mary, and of my mother, and those bananas whenever I have my eyes tested. Mary was curious and kind, and somehow engaged with those two lost children, although I suspect I, at least, was not especially communicative, nor endearing as a child, but rather timid, and silent, broken only by sudden utterly unpredictable outbursts of uncontrollable rage and grief, for who knows what lost cause. When Mary died, we were asked if we would care to receive anything in memory of her, and I asked for a painting. Some time later it arrived: a wonderful view of the flight of steps, descending steeply to the salt flats, outside the Ypres Arms, in Rye, Sussex, England. It was kin in style to the painting of the mulberry swamp and all the more valued by me. It arrived swathed in brown paper, with many labels and official customs stamps, and I was suddenly reminded of her curious habit of sending to us clippings of cartoons, the funnies, from the U.S. papers—the New York Times, I think. For that summer we had made acquaintance with Walt Kelly, and Pogo, the possum, and Howlandowl, and all the denizens of Okefenokee Swamp. The Pogo argot entered our daily
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lives, subliminally, and somewhere Albert, who I rather think was both female, and an alligator, is still lying back on a punt, smoking cigars. The political references were way above our heads, but irresistible: the charm of the drawing and characterization; the outrageously surreal conversations, interrupted by ascents into, and descents from, pole propelled punts; and the waters of this southern swampland. There is somewhere an image of Pogo clinging to the pole, stuck in the mud, as the punt sails serenely on without him: these are indelibly planted in my imagination. It made Christopher Robin look impossibly twee. And, for a long time, I was unclear about the difference between Walt Kelly and another Walt, Walt Whitman, who was mentioned, rather as you might mention an absent relative, certainly more than that other Walt, Walt Disney, who was deemed utterly uninteresting. Mary painted a fine portrait of my father, young, blue-eyed, surrounded by tiger lilies and looking rather scared. She used a palette knife for both face and for his characteristic yellow linen short-sleeved shirt, merging the two into one surface, of scarcely covered-over anxiety. It is alarmingly acute about his default modes of fear and flight: I have it still. We had somehow entered her imaginary, as she has entered mine.
I am sitting on the back seat of an all-American automobile, above the transmission box, and the whole world is wailing around us, wind lashing rain into the windscreen, and my father, in the front passenger seat, leaning round to see if we are still there, wide-eyed and stage-struck, waving the customary cigarette with his right hand, up by the rearview mirror. He, of course, is sitting on the right-hand side, and we are driving weirdly on the right-hand side of the road, as you do in North America. I cannot recollect who is driving, but we are on our way to Provincetown, where Mary and Conrad, and, I think, my mother, had already gone, earlier in the day, in a different car. We are going to a performance of Mr. Arcularis, transposed from Conrad’s short story into a play, by some aficionado, at the Provincetown Theatre, and Conrad has been there all day, working with the actors, or so we have been told. The journey goes on and on, with sudden, unannounced stops for someone to jump out into the storm and pee, out on the right-hand side of the car, into the wailing wind. In memory, I can no more distinguish between the real wind on the road and the fictional wind in the wings at the theatre, where Mr. Arcularis wanders from deck lounger, to hospital gurney, to death bed, accompanied by those attendant voices which Conrad seems always to have carried with him. When I think of him at the end, ill in that Savannah hospital, packed full of the chemicals to contain the processes of bodily malfunctioning, I hear those wailing voices. Here is a pair of paragraphs from the short story:
IV. On the Cape: Passages and Dreamlands We are the necromancers who once more magically make visible the night recapture that obscure obscene delight fathom its undertow and in one net fish up foul fables we must not forget. —Conrad Aiken, “Oneiromachia”
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But give us time, thought Mr. Arcularis, give us time, and we will bring back with us the nightrime of the Obsolute. Or was it Absolete? If only there weren’t this perpetual throbbing, this
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It does not take much wit to spot the doubled father here, and the shift from a home, with an actual father, Oglethorpe Avenue, to some surmised reconciliation with a Holy Father, at the end of life. Supposedly Sigmund Freud had a copy of Conrad’s novel, Great Circle, in his consulting room in Vienna: man discovers wife cheating with friend, has a fit, goes to rant at an analyst, and then comes to some kind of resolution, in a series of almost parodic inversions of the actual pattern of Conrad’s life, where nothing appears ever to have been resolved. Freud could have read the short version, in this short story, which even refers to “The Great Circle.” Here are the absent father, the workings of thanatos, and a surface formed of puns and ludic word play, to slide over the anxiety that words, and worlds are disconnected, floating in a meaningless void, at best filled with wild winds and driving rain, and at worst with a faint disorienting dampness of scarcely visible fog. His writing could provide a long appendix to Freud’s Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. By chance, I was in Vienna, August 1973, when I heard by telegram from my mother that Conrad had died,
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and that I should look in the press for his obituary. For some reason, I took against Vienna, and hurriedly returned to England, not even pausing to visit the now empty apartment in Berggasse, from which all Freud’s belongings were transported in 1938. Oddly, he was not sent to the camps, but, after international outcry, in part originating from the United States, and under the surprising supervision of the SS, he was dispatched to Hampstead, where the contents of that apartment now adorn the Freud Museum. Conrad had seriously thought about asking to go into analysis with Freud, but the time and place did not arrive, the journey impossible, the price prohibitive, and he would have been in every sense resistant. The copy of the short stories I am consulting bears the inscription: For Jane and Alan with love and Christmas Stockings from Mary and Cahoun Brewster 1960 with no indication into whose stocking these should be put. The fly leaf announces: “This new volume is the definitive Aiken, the collector’s Aiken.” V. Union Square: New York, NY Fanfare of northwest wind, a bluejay wind announces autumn, and the equinox rolls back blue bays to a far afternoon. —“A Letter from Li Po” I am standing on a dais in an upper room, off Union Square, downtown New York, which belongs to some poetry collective. It is April 2003, thirty years on, and I
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iteration of sound, like a pain, these circles and repetitions of life- the feeling as of everything curling inward a center of misery… Suddenly it was dark, and he was lost. He was groping, he touched the cold, white slippery woodwork with his fingernails, looking for an electric switch. The throbbing, of course, was the throbbing of the ship. But he was almost homealmost home. Another corner to round, a door to be opened, and there he would be, safe and sound. Safe in his father’s home.
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have volunteered to do a reading of Conrad’s poems, on the occasion of the publication of the not really new Selected Poems. I have asked various people I know in New York to come to this event, but none of them have shown up. We stand in an empty room, with dusty posters and a mixed collection of chairs and tables. This is not glamorous. The agent asked my mother, or my aunt to come, but they say they are too old to travel, and too old to read in public, and maybe they do not want to read Conrad’s poems: maybe they are conflicted. But they are pleased I want to do it, and I fix a date with a colleague at Fordham to go and talk there about Walter Benjamin, critique and invention, in honour of the day job. In honour of her friendship with my aunt, Clare Bloom is to read from A Letter from Li Po, and I am the warm up act. I have chosen to read “Sea Holly,” “Mayflower,” and “Dear Uncle Stranger.” The representative from Oxford University Press startles me by adducing the details she has culled from the academic profile page of my university job as a Professor of Philosophy: I gaze at her in surprise and say: “I wasn’t expecting that: I suppose I thought I was here as some kind of medium, and not as myself, a deputy or delegate from the family.” The audience is audibly charmed by this, and I turn my gaze to them: the room, which is more a hall, is now packed out. There must be a couple of hundred people, more I am sure for Clare Bloom, than for Conrad. Charles Schlessiger is pleased, and smiles encouragingly, like the supportive adopted uncle he has become, first as Conrad’s agent, and then agent to my aunt, and to Joan Aiken Enterprises. He has taken me to an early dinner and made supportive and encouraging noises, the perfect agent. I read the first poem, then I explain about Conrad, and his enthusiasm for genealogy: for the ancestor who came over with the Mayflower, and
the language which came with him; and about Conrad’s circular genealogical tree, showing the lines of ascent from himself to this Richard Delano, who, by all accounts, was no good, and stole from some of his fellow travellers. It was on this man’s account that Conrad thought he was some kind of cousin to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for whom he wrote the very fine memorial poem, “Crepe Myrtle: F.D.R: April 12, 1945.” What he doesn’t seem to have grasped is that more important than where you are from, is where you are going to. Sorties, series, and spirals are the words he uses to describe himself in that 1966 preface to the Preludes. The words flow across the page in a chaotic mixture of the fine and the embarrassingly unguarded, the delicate and the crass. The heritage turns up in undigested chunks, that tiger is illuminated by Blake’s wonder at nature. Conrad’s Preludes deliberately echo and subvert, with new added twentieth-century anxiety Wordsworth’s solemn self-affirmations. Ushant, another of his strange portmanteau joke words, and its strange partially anonymised characters, is pretty much unreadable without a dramatis personae, to explain from whence these phantom creatures have come. His memory is sedimented with meanings derived from his encounters with actual people, and long dead poets, re-imaged in their role as contributing to his lexicon of the imaginary; the novelty is not so much the remarking that this is what writers do, but that he seeks exhaustively to trace its workings in his own case. And in my memory, they are laughing and laughing at an unending series of jokes and word plays, scandal mongerings and insightful analyses of a grand poetical tradition. Who is the “they”? A group of admirers and drifters, gathering around a moth, about to go up in smoke. But that moth has its moment, insisting that we
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are all somehow to be inserted into tradition, and might even inherit it, this babel of voices, all going on somewhere else, in some other room, but audible and ownable. It is a sixth element, inheritance, like the wind and the waters, the fire and the earth, and the anxiety which turns into iron in the soul, and into print on the page. Rest: be at peace. It suffices to know and to rest. For the singers, in rest, shall stand as a river whose source is unending for ever. —“Hallowe’en”
Conrad Aiken, The Conversation or Pilgrims’ Progress: A Domestic Symphony (London: Rodney Phillips Green, 1940). Conrad Aiken, Preludes: Preludes for Memnon, Time in the Rock (London and New York Oxford University Press, 1966). Conrad Aiken, The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1960). Conrad Aiken, The Collected Poems 1916–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Conrad Aiken, Selected Poems with a New Foreword by Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Joanna Hodge, Heidegger and Ethics (London and New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis, 1995. Joanna Hodge, Derrida and Time (London and New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis, 2007).
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The Abandonware
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If you’ve read Conrad Aiken, and you’re looking for books by other authors who write in a similar style to Aiken, here are some recommendations for you from readers of Aiken and the Aikenesque. Andrew Mason on Ultramarine by Malcolm Lowry Of Malcolm Lowry, Conrad Aiken wrote in a note in 1971, “Blue Voyage he knew better than I did—he knew it by heart. Its influence on him was profound and permanent.” In fact, Lowry was so enamored with Aiken’s debut novel that he wrote a letter to the writer, striking up a correspondence. Any reader of both authors can see the markings of Aiken’s writing on Lowry’s texts, including his masterpiece, Under the Volcano. Especially, though, the influence of Aiken’s first novel, Blue Voyage, can be seen everywhere in Lowry’s debut, Ultramarine. Ultramarine tells the story of “ordinary seaman” Dana Hilliot’s first voyage as a mess-boy on the Oedipus Tyrannus, a freighter bound for the Far East. Though the tale is based largely on the journals Lowry kept on his own first voyage to various Asian ports as a young man, it is clearly filtered through his reading of Aiken’s Blue Voyage. In a letter to Aiken in early 1933, Lowry admitted of Ultramarine that it was “parasitic on Blue Voyage.” He explained, “Blue Voyage, apart from its being the best nonsecular statement of the plight of the creative artist with the courage to live in a modern world, has become part of my consciousness, and I cannot conceive of any other way in which Ultramarine might be written.” PAGE 246
Aiken later wrote, “The fact is that we were uncannily alike in almost everything, found instantly that we spoke the same language, were astonishingly en rapport; and it was therefore the most natural thing in the world that a year later, when difficulties arose between him and his father, I was able to act as mediator (I had by then returned to Rye), and, as a result of this, for the next three years, in loco parentis. I became his father.” Aiken, who became a lifelong friend and father-figure to Lowry, once joked that Ultramarine was so close to Blue Voyage that Lowry should have just called it Purple Passage. But just because Ultramarine is somewhat derivative of Blue Voyage and, perhaps, not as brilliant as Under the Volcano, doesn’t mean that Ultramarine is something that should be forgotten or left unread. It is the debut of a master, who was under the tutelage of another master. Lizza Aiken on The People in the Castle by Joan Aiken Conrad Aiken was a complicated character and clearly a challenging father. His own early tragedy—the violent death of his parents and subsequent upbringing separated from his siblings—obviously affected him deeply. Sadly, life, geography, and world events meant that his own children were separated from him for much of their early lives. However, he was clearly a powerful influence on them; they all remembered the wonderful stories he told them when they were young, and all three went on to become writers themselves. Joan, his youngest daughter, has become the most celebrated Aiken offshoot, producing over a hundred works of children’s and adult fiction, most notably The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and its sequels. But Joan Aiken had a special regard for short stories, and felt not only that
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Pamela Axe on Poems by George Santayana George Santayana is mostly known as a philosopher, literary critic, and poet, but his influence in the land of letters extends far beyond his own work by nature of the fact that he was a Harvard professor from 1889–1912. During that time, some of his students included T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Conrad Aiken— four of the greatest modernist poets. As Aiken said, “Santayana was the real excitement for me at Harvard.” Edward Butscher claims in his biography of Aiken that “The Sense of Beauty (1896) was almost a required text for the literary clubs and student publication staffs.” Santayana’s poetry and criticism was a huge influence on the poetic development of a whole generation of modernist writers—whether they went to Harvard or not—but Aiken’s poetic development, even more than most, can be traced directly back to Santayana. In fact, while Sigmund Freud and James Joyce are often seen as the figures who loom largest in Aiken’s cabinet of influences, I would argue that George Santayana is as great an influence on Aiken’s writing as either of those other two titans. So, it would do fans of Aiken some good to go back and read the poems of the man Aiken called “the kindliest of living philosophers,” his professor and mentor, George Santayana. Nathan Wiley on Stories by Katherine Mansfield Conrad Aiken called Anton Chekhov “possibly the greatest writer of the short story who has ever lived.” He admitted to learning much from him, and he found a fellow Chekhovian traveler in one of his contemporaries, Katherine Mansfield.
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they sprang from a deep source of inspiration, but that to catch and craft an idea into a story was a particular skill that she developed over the years, making them some of her most memorable writing. Part of this skill came from reading and studying the work of others, including the work of her father. Joan Aiken explained, “He and my mother parted when I was about three and I didn’t see him again until I was seven or eight, but by that time I had already discovered and read to myself two of his classic short stories which I had found in an anthology of creepy tales in my stepfather’s house.” The stories were “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” and “Mr. Arcularis.” She later wrote, “These two stories had a terrific effect on me.” While reading the second of these ghostly stories, she admitted to not being scared because she “so admired the structure” and “was impressed with this ingenious box-within-a-box framework, and the way all the different themes knit together.” She added, “I didn’t get to read the beautiful story ‘Strange Moonlight’ until I was in my late teens. Then it gave me a strong feeling of how much ought to be packed into a good story, which the reader may dimly perceive but not consciously understand.” Independent publisher, Small Beer Press, have recently published three collections of her stories, the latest of which, The People in the Castle, came out earlier this year to great acclaim. As Rose Fox wrote in Publisher’s Weekly, “The language is simply splendid, so evocative, as though the stories were actually very dense poems.” Fox goes on to quote from one of the stories: “‘Did you see anyone?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘The room was too full of music.’” This could almost be a line from a Conrad Aiken poem. So if you’re looking for something Aikenesque, check out one of the other literary Aikens, particularly Joan Aiken, and her new collection, The People in the Castle.
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Miss Mansfield is brilliant—she has, more conspicuously than any contemporary writer of fiction one calls to mind, a fine, an infinitely inquisitive sensibility; a sensibility indefatigably young which finds itself in the service of a mind often cynical, sometimes cruel, and always sophisticated. One has not read a page of Miss Mansfield’s book before one has said, “Chekhov”: but one has not read two pages before Chekhov is forgotten. What provokes one to say “Chekhov” is the fact that almost alone among writers of fiction in England and America Miss Mansfield has followed Chekhov in choosing to regard—in being compelled to regard?—the short story “form” not as the means to the telling of a tale, and not always or wholly as the means for the “lighting” of a single human character, but rather as the means for the presentation of a “quintessence,” a summation of a human life or group of lives in the single significant “scene” or situation or episode; and, by implication, the illumination, thus, against a sombre background (the sombreness being given by absence of values, in the objective world; absence of express concern on the part of the author) of life itself. This, one observes, is the method of poetry.
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Brian Smith on The Moviegoer by Walker Percy Ted R. Spivey wrote a book called The Writer as Shaman: The Pilgrimages of Conrad Aiken and Walker Percy. Before reading Spivey’s take on the two writers, I wouldn’t necessarily have thought of them as linked, but now they seem inextricable from one another. His argument is that these two “men of letters”—a distinction more grand than mere “writer”— though they grew up in different times, in different places, and with different aspirations, both have a simple principle underlying their work: that the split between science and art is one of the fundmental problems facing the modern man. “Both Aiken and Percy,” Spivey claims, “are among that small group of people who in the second half of the twentieth century have maintained a living connection with those earlier masters of the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, and the ancient world who took into full account both man’s science as well as his experiences in the arts and in religion.” They are both interested in the pilgrimage, and its potential for Joycean epiphany. They both, therefore, become not merely “men of letters”—a lofty enough distinction—but “divine pilgrims” (to use Aiken’s term). Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, though perhaps not Aikenesque on the surface, does share some core interests with Aiken’s writing. The Moviegoer is the story of Binx Bolling, a stock broker who finds more meaning in film and literature than in his own life. Bolling, like many of the characters we meet in Aiken’s poetry and prose, searches for greater understanding of his own consciousness and of the cosmos in which his consciousness exists: “What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple; at least for a fellow like me. So simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”
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Rather than convince you of Mansfield’s Aikenesque qualities, I’ll let Aiken convince you of her Chekhovian qualities, which I think will be enough to help you see the thread between Aiken and Mansfield, and persuade you, by proxy, of her Aikenesque genius:
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Themes and Variations
In Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” Gabriel Conroy remembers a line he wrote in a review of Robert Browning’s poetry. The Dedalus-like protagonist repeats to himself, “One feels that one is listening to a thought-tormented music.” The phrase was the first of many that would come to haunt my thoughts about Conrad Aiken’s writing. I discovered it one gloomy Sunday this October in the last pages of Dubliners. That same evening, as I turned to Aiken’s novel Great Circle, Conroy’s words crystalized into a near-perfect description, I thought, of Aiken’s language and style. While “thought-tormented” seemed to capture the duality and neuroticism of the novel’s prose—of its effort to put down on the page everything filtering through the protagonist Andrew Cather’s mind—“music” reflected the prosody of Aiken’s sentences and paragraphs as a whole. I especially admired how naturally the novel shifted between the high and low registers of Cather’s thoughts (“Haydn duet, hide and do it” reads one such example), to a description of the landscape, to the news in the paper. It came as no surprise then, when I read Harold Bloom, in his foreword to Aiken’s Selected Poems, cite Joyce as Aiken’s “major” influence. For no one was more concerned with the arrangement of words, of syllables and sounds, than Joyce. Aiken felt this. In his novels, and more effectively in his poetry, we see the writer make a similar attempt; using the rhythm and structure inherent in language, Aiken seeks to PAGE 249
create a music that would bring the chaos of modern life— the cacophony of existence, one could say—to “one mood of wonder” (Preludes for Memnon, IV). Listen. ——— In his essay, “The Mechanism of Poetic Inspiration,” included in A Reviewer’s ABC: Collected Criticism of Conrad Aiken, the poet describes himself as being, “in reality in quest of a sort of absolute poetry, a poetry in which the intention is not so much to arouse an emotion merely, or to persuade of a reality, as to employ such emotion or sense of reality with the same cool detachment with which a composer employs notes or chords.” Aiken is “Not content to present emotions…or sensations for their own sakes” but instead “takes only the most delicately evocative aspects of them, makes of them a keyboard, and plays upon them a music of which the chief characteristic is its elusiveness, its fleetingness, and its richness in the shimmering overtones of hint and suggestion.” Part of the problem of writing about Conrad Aiken is that he is his own best critic. His poems reference and interrogate themselves, question their own existence. They defy easy explanation because elusiveness is their very nature. As opposed to Eliot, whose words seem to contain a certain sharpness and severity, the words in Aiken’s poems flow brilliantly and naturally together like instruments of a symphonic orchestra. What’s more, this method is congruent with Aiken’s philosophy of mind and consciousness, which, as numerous critics have observed, owes much to the works of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer. To quote Ian Kluge, from his companion to Aiken’s Preludes for Memnon, “Kant did not believe that the stimuli
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A Thought-Tormented Essay:
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——— For the narrator of Preludes, chaos is a virtue. “Hang up your mind for the intrusion of the wind,” he tells us. Then later, “There is nothing so suits the soul as change.” In the next stanza, the theme of identity continues: You have no name: And what you call yourself is but a whisper Of that divine and deathless and empty word Which breathed all things to motion. You are you? But what is you? What is this thing called you? the answer? Laugh, and forget yourself; despise, and change; Hate, or do murder, love, beget, despair. PAGE 250
Go down and up again, go in and out, Drink of the black and bright, bathe in the bitter, Burn in the fiercest, and be light as ash. Perhaps what I admire most about Aiken’s Preludes is the way in which you can see (and hear) the mind working on the page; one can feel the poem progress. I kept coming back to this quote from Ben Lerner’s first novel, where Adam Gordon, a poet, thinks to himself “I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed….” Reading Conrad Aiken’s Preludes (which, maybe it’s worth noting, I had to request my library pull from “remote storage” in order to check out) one feels this directionality. A kind of smooth lyrical march guides one toward the endings, which are not really endings but simply well-placed pauses in the music. Like Rimbaud’s Illuminations or Rilke’s Duino Elegies, one need not dive deep into the text in order to scavenge some meaning, rather, Aiken’s Preludes—the poet’s major work—radiates its depth at the surface level, and at the sonic level. Take this, from “Time in the Rock”: But having seen the shape, having heard the voice, do not relate the phantom image too nearly to yourself, leave the bright margin between the text and page, a little room for the unimagined. Can you hear it? As T. S. Eliot wrote in his essay, “The Music of Poetry,” “The music of verse is not a line by line matter but a question of the whole poem.” Furthermore, a musical poem is not merely melodious, but, as Eliot notes, “has a musical pattern of sound…[and]
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from the external world came to the mind in any organized and coherent fashion; rather, the mind receives a barrage of stimuli…then actively organizes these stimuli into an intelligible and sensible world picture.” In other words, Kant did not believe we could ever know the world as it actually is—what he calls the “noumenal” realm—thus trapping us in the “world-as-it-is-known”, or the phenomenal. Schopenhauer, though, offered an escape. He believed that by turning inwards instead of outwards, by maintaining what Kluge calls “an attitude of radical subjectivity,” we could learn something about this elusive, constantly changing world. In Schopenhauer’s view, all of the world lies within the individual; to gain knowledge of the universe, we need only investigate ourselves. We see this, almost explicitly, in Preludes. For example, “You are all things, and all things are your soul.” (Preludes for Memnon, VIII).
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of meaning.” It may be hard to convey this pattern, this balance, then, without quoting an entire poem, but if one listens closely to any of the above passages, they should find at least a trace of Aiken’s lyrical power. His ability to commingle high poetic registers with more debased tones gives us an impression of music in the language of everyday. John Ashbery, America’s greatest living poet, is similar in this way. The word “difficult” plagues interpretations and commentaries of both poets’ work. But why? “Understanding is not a requirement,” wrote Creeley. “Poetry doesn’t mean anything,” pleads Lerner’s Gordon. We don’t need to understand either poet’s work in order to enjoy it, because it’s gorgeous in its own right. It expresses nothing but itself, like music. In a noted example, W. H. Auden, after awarding Ashbery the Yale Younger Poets Prize for his debut collection Some Trees, famously confessed to have not understood a word of the book. But he still knew it was great writing—he could hear it.
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Awake, o gentle reader. Listen. Out of the world’s harsh and thickening discord, find peace. Like Aiken, find harmony.
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What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living…
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Lastly, I want to leave you with this quote from musician John Cage, who created music out of otherwise cacophonous sounds. He wrote:
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I. In the 1920s when Sigmund Freud was becoming a major influence upon both writers and literary critics, Conrad Aiken, as deeply Freudian as any writer in the period, was incorporating in his work the insights of other psychologists—Alfred Adler, C. G. Jung, and Otto Rank chief among them. Aiken would be one of the few members of his literary generation who would accept the influence of Freud without, like Eugene O’Neill, making him absolutely central to his work, or, like T. S. Eliot, ignoring him altogether. One of the chief reasons that Freud never became central to Aiken’s work is that Aiken was even more interested in a psychology involving human consciousness than he was in the unconscious mind, that central category in Freud’s psychology. Freud himself took a highly conscious and analytical attitude toward the unconscious mind, an Aiken fully approved; but for Aiken the necessary plunge into the unconscious mind was but one step toward a fully developed human consciousness, springing in large part from the development of the human visionary function. Aiken was a quick to give full credit to Freud as the founder of modern depth psychology, but he never believed in the kind of rigid orthodoxy concerning Freudianism that the master demanded of his own PAGE 252
followers. Thus Aiken took much from Alfred Adler’s theories concerning the inferiority complex and the human need for a fully developed social life if human consciousness is to reach the peaks it should. He borrowed from Otto Rank ideas concerning the hero, and he took much more from C. G. Jung in the area of myth, symbol, and dream. My extended analysis of Aiken’s use of depth psychology in my book The Writer as Shaman: The Pilgrimages of Conrad Aiken and Walker Percy (Mercer University Press, 1986) points to the concept that as a writer who used depth psychology extensively Aiken represents primarily a fusion of the insights of Freud and Jung. Thus he seems to resemble James Joyce, whose literary vision is based in part on a fusion of the ideas of these two psychologists. And yet even to the end of his life Aiken would never admit how much he owed to Jung. In a conversation with Conrad Aiken I had in 1965, I asked him what he thought of C. G. Jung. “Too mythopoeic,” he said, smiling. He did not want to pursue his brief answer, so we went to other matters concerning depth psychology and to how he first met Erich Fromm. His answer concerning Jung, however, and the smile that went with it, have haunted me ever since. Freud clearly is the depth psychologist who most influenced Aiken. As the poet himself said in an interview in The Paris Review: “Freud was in everything I did.”1 In the same interview Aiken also said he was influenced to a lesser extent by Jung and other depth psychologists who worked with Freud early in the century. Since Aiken is one of the most mythopoeic men of letters in our time, we cannot assume that Jung was less important to him than was Freud. In fact, Aiken the man was as mythopoeic as his poetry. Therefore it would seem that the word too in the statement “too mythopoeic” is the important one.
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Depth Psychology and Aiken’s Vision of Consciousness
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Personally Aiken was deeply influenced by his father and his father’s profession, which was medicine. Intellectually, Aiken was always linked to the science of the nineteenth century. Also in The Paris Review interview Aiken said that he learned from his grandfather, William Potter, the Unitarian minister of New Bedford, “a determined acceptance of Darwin and the rest of the scientific fireworks of the nineteenth century.”2 It would not be surprising then that Aiken always looked askance at a conscious view of life that was largely based on the wisdom contained in myth and poetry. Aiken, however, needed the wisdom of both Freud and Jung to achieve his poetic vision. He needed the hard truths of Freud, couched in the language of medical science, to help him face disintegrating powers within himself. In addition, Aiken felt the need for the less empirical wisdom contained in myth and poetry, for certain basic symbols—archetypes as Jung called them— to achieve a vision of a reintegrating power working both in the individual and in his society. One should never think of an artist like Aiken as taking wholesale the insights of Freud and Jung into his poetry, but one should rather see depth psychologists and artists working together to define areas of psychic disintegration and to denominate essential symbols of reintegration. Anyone familiar with Freud and Jung knows how much they learned from creative writers— Freud himself kept one of Aiken’s novels on a table in his waiting room for his patients to read—and, of course, the debt of writers to the depth psychologists is too well known to document. In fact, a central thread running all though Aiken’s work, especially seen in Ushant, is his insistence that the self-knowledge gained from Freudian psychology was the beginning of the journey that would end eventually in religious affirmation of the divine Self at the center of man’s being.
What Jung called the archetype of the Self, symbolized by the mandala, is basic to Aiken’s vision of reintegrating power. Without this symbol, Aiken might well have been overcome by the chaos that is always a part of his work. The Self, for Aiken, is that necessary center which holds and abides, the creative center of man which the ego must journey in search of if it is not to be torn to pieces by the splitting powers of other possessive and destructive egos. Aiken has the same sense of mythic quest that Jung reveals throughout his work, and both of them learned this sense of quest from such mythic writers as Goethe, Melville, and Nietzsche. Moreover, both Aiken and Freud have that sense of clinical detachment associated with good doctors, and Freud has an even stronger sense of detachment than either in his best work. Dealing with images of myth Aiken is most like Jung, but facing the power of destruction that the pilgrim inevitably encounters, Aiken is always borrowing strength and understanding from his master Freud. Aiken as we find him in anthologies and in the literary criticism of our time is best known for his presentation of images of possessiveness and destruction. Aiken probably learned more from Poe than from anyone else about the literary handling of those images of pain and death which troubled his imagination from early age to the end of his life. He has in fact called Poe his literary grandfather, saying that “he was the first of us to be ‘international.’”3 He also learned this truth from Poe and the other Romantics whose stock-in-trade was psychic pain: do not allow oneself to be drawn too closely to the subject matter, do not lose one’s critical detachment. Morbidity and masochism are prices one pays for too personal an attention to pain and death. As a follower of Freud, Aiken learned to temper his Poe-like attraction to
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the dark side of existence with the careful distancing of clinical detachment. Aiken saw that Poe and Baudelaire and their many followers struggled against the dangers of living on the fringe of psychic agony by, among other things, cultivating the vision of eternal beauty. But the nineteenth-century Romantics were at their weakest in dealing with the problem of how the poet moves beyond dangers that threaten his total extinction to a realization of the stabilizing powers of the beauty they loved. What these Romantics needed was a reliable guide to show them a path leading to a stable and creative personality and to direct their first steps on that path. Aiken’s Harvard teacher George Santayana was the poet’s first important initiatory guide, probably because he could in his subtle mind hold poetry and philosophy in tension without denigrating the value of either. After Santayana, Aiken chose Freud, who received more of Aiken’s attention than Santayana ever got. Freud’s clinical terminology, coupled with his use of myth to illuminate his researchers, showed Aiken how best he could deal with the problems of his own fragmented life as well as with the problems of a fragmented historical period which Aiken learned to accept with all or most of its chaos. Freud’s analytical mind reinforced Aiken’s own tendency for analysis. Louis Untermeyer has said that Aiken was too much the analyst for his own good and the reader’s good.4 But it is Aiken’s penchant for analysis that serves to protect him from the dangers of too great an exposure to the destructive powers within himself and the world. Poe and Baudelaire show powers of analysis as strong or stronger than Aiken’s in some of their work, but they were also caught up in Romantic separation of head and heart; that is, when they explored the twisted heart and wounded psyche they left too much of their head behind.
Aiken and his close friend T. S. Eliot would not be so led by this Romantic heresy concerning the nature of man, which is to say they looked beyond the obvious dualism to an underlying unity of head and heart. The result was that Eliot moved toward the development of a modern mythopoeic power in his Quartets with Aiken reaching his in Preludes. Freud showed Aiken how to analyze and understand those fixations on parental and other images that result in the psychic wounds which Freud called neuroses and psychoses. But Freud also gave him a vision of Eros, of that love power which includes but is greater than man’s sexuality. Eros for Freud became, as he grew older and more philosophical, that reconciling power that could put together what analysis separated. The meaning of man’s psychic wounds was revealed in dreams and in the power of Eros manifested in dreams. From first to last in his creative work Aiken would follow Freud’s belief that through dreams one could encounter not only those powers which block the progress of the soul but also meet the powers of Eros, which unify the warring elements of the psyche. From his earliest work through the major achievements of the Preludes and Ushant, Aiken would pursue the powers of Eros. Popular Freudianism would deny the deeper insights for repressed contents, but a few pioneers like Aiken would work out in detail the scientific and philosophical insights of the father of depth psychology. Yet there is a dualism in Freud’s thought that only mythopoeic insights like those of C. G. Jung could overcome. It is Freud’s dualism of Eros and death, which a contemporary Freudian philosopher like Norman O. Brown would explore in his book Life Against Death without ever finding the necessary connecting link. For Jung and for the wisdom of myth the link is found in the truth of
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The mandala refers to both cosmic unity and to that inner core of man Jung sometimes calls the Self, sometimes the Cosmic man, which unites all of an individual’s warring contradictions. An approach to the mandala can lead one to a vision of existence which sees Eros as not pitted against death but as a continuum that contains birth-death-rebirth, a unity of existence that sees beyond all the pairs of opposites. Chuang Tsu says of Tao: “To take the phenomenon of rise and fall, growth and decay, it does not regard rise and fall as rise and fall, and it does not regard growth and decay as growth and decay.”6 While Freud never really got beyond the Western tradition of science and philosophy, which viewed existence in dualistic terms, Jung, with the help of Eastern philosophy and various mythologies of the world, accepted the mystical insight contained in the mandala, which says in effect that unity underlies opposites. Aiken, who also learned from the world’s religions and mythologies, began with the insight of the mandala because he was from early in his career a follower of the New England transcendentalism of his grandfather Potter. Furthermore, he added certain mythic dimensions to this transcendentalism, dimensions gained from Jung and from his own encounter with dreams and myths.
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Freud, as Aiken tells us, is in all he wrote. Yet there is always in Aiken a stronger sense of mythic journey, or pilgrimage, as Aiken often called it, than we find in Freud. The great psychologist provides an enormous amount of clinical material concerning the powers that block the individual’s development, but he does not often show us those powers which release the soul. He invokes the figure of Eros without showing us its powers at work. Aiken, as a poet, uses Freud to help him identify the images of disintegration, but, like Jung, he shows us the additional images of re-creation. The images that accompany the powers that block the development of the psyche and that test the pilgrim on his journey are two kinds: bewitching images and images threatening pain and death. The dark images of pain and death threaten to annihilate the soul, which is tempted to draw back into the shelter of the images of past pleasure. But to retreat is to lose the creative powers of the unconscious mind through what Freud called fixation, a state resulting in a growing isolation accompanies by fear, despair, and hate. But if the pilgrim, affirming the unity symbolized by the mandala, pushes on past both the destructive and the bewitching images that lured him to give up his journey for what appeared to be endless pleasure, he will be rewarded by a vision of unity which offers renewed creative powers. As a brief example of Aiken’s pilgrimage I will briefly refer to those poems of the 1920s he called “symphonies,” poems that comprise The Divine Pilgrim. In such long poems as The Charnel Rose and The Jig of Forslin he records the pilgrim’s encounter with the witch-temptress and with the image of the creative, life-giving woman whom Jung called the archetype of the anima. The temptress
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It is an age-old symbol that goes right back to the pre-history of man. It is all over the earth and it either expresses the Deity or the self; and these two terms are psychologically very much related, which doesn’t mean that I believe God is the self or that self is God.5
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the symbol called the mandala, that figurative statement consisting of a center and a periphery. As Jung says:
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is a parental image whom, in Freudian terms, the libido becomes fixated on, but the anima, or goddess as I shall call her, also begins to appear more frequently as Aiken’s poetry matures. In his early poems the goddess is glimpsed, but the poet is far more concerned with the withdrawal of the ego into fantasies of sexual pleasure. These fantasies in turn lead to dreams of lust and horror and of manias that make up, for instances, part three of The Jig of Forslin. Bewitchment by one’s ego—which Freud calls narcissism—as well as bewitchment by the parent of the opposite sex—Freud’s Oedipus and Electra complexes. These image fixations frustrate psychic growth and halt the pilgrim’s journey. But there are other images which can awaken a renewed vision of the free flow of Eros. One of the great symbols of the renewed pilgrimage is the goddess, or anima, of whom Joseph Campbell says: “She is the paragon of all paragons of beauty, the reply to all desire, the bliss-bestowing goal of every hero’s earthly and unearthly quest. She is mother, sister, mistress, bride.”7 For Mircea Eliade, a leading authority on shamanism, myth is in fact the recording of “the various and sometimes dramatic breakthroughs of the sacred (or the ‘supernatural’) into the World.”8 The goddess then is one of those images of sacred, or supernatural, powers that bring with them the power to release the psyche from bondage to other images that seduce and destroy the pilgrim. In Priapus and the Pool Aiken depicts a pilgrim held in bondage by a possessive sexuality, represented by the image of Priapus, the classical god of male procreative power. The poet goes into a detailed study of the connection between possessive sexuality and the narcissistic lover who has fallen in love with his own image in a pool. The poem ends with the pilgrim encountering the inner nature of the desired woman, who, while destroying others, is caught up
in her own narcissism. She is Medusa: “For she could not see / The World she turned to stone and ash./ Only herself she saw….”9 In recognizing the witch who has tempted him in many guises, the pilgrim cries out his rejection:
The witch herself is isolated and in her loneliness would posses and devour; for this reason her touch bears no fruit but turns the pilgrim to stone who looks too long. The possessive love of witch and vampire is soul-destroying lust, not the fruit-bearing love that accompanies psychic growth. But it is not enough simply to denounce evil; to overcome it one must have help from the higher beings who come to the aid of the pilgrim. In Priapus and the Pool these figures appear to be the poet as lovers from Atlantis, a symbol of a lost paradise where love was always giving and receiving and not, as in our fallen world, a mixture of joy and cruel possessiveness. The speech of the divine lovers affirms the higher life toward which the pilgrim moves: Thereafter, they are as lovers who Over an infinite brightness lean: ‘It is Atlantis!’ All their speech; ‘To lost Atlantis have we been.’ (CP, p. 394) Atlantis is one of Aiken’s symbols for man’s lost Eden. Man seeks not only a relationship with the inner self, but a union with other souls who have achieved contact with
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You, whose beauty I abhor— Out of my brain Take back your voice that lodges there in pain, Tear out your thousand golden roots That thrust their tentacles in my heart But bear no fruits. (CP, p. 396)
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their inmost being. Throughout his artistic career Aiken continued to say that man is drawn by dream and vision to seek the lost Eden, a land where love of self and love of others is fully perfected. Without both the belief in and the brief visionary experiences of Eden that come along the way of the journey, man either sinks into despair, or turns in violence and possessiveness on his fellow man. Or he may turn to his own inner being and become possessed by an image of some bewitching beauty that he believes to be Eden. In his most famous short story,“Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” Aiken dramatizes the withdrawal of a child into a world of his own creation where snow is the delightful and bewitching image of contemplation. The boy has been held in a possessive oedipal relationship by his mother, but no longer is she the bewitching image of contemplation. The boy comes to see her as the hated witch whose spirit he drives away with those dreadful words near the end of the story: “‘Mother! Mother! Go away! I hate you.’”10 The child’s possessive and hateful mother, and his cruel, punishing father have taught the child no mythic wisdom. Overcome by their hatred and possessiveness and lacking the wisdom necessary to overcome evil, he withdraws into what he thinks is a “seamless” world of snow, which occupies all his thoughts. The whisper of the snow, resembling “enormous whispering sea-waves,” calls sirenlike to him that in the world of snow everything will be made all right. But it is a false harmony, this world of the schizophrenic, and it leads to remoteness, to cold, to sleep—which is to say, to death. In Freudian terms, the boy transfers his libido from the oedipal image of his mother to the snow, which is an image of the perfection of the remembered womb. This story can and should be read in Freudian terms, but without seeing
the Jungian aspect of the story one would miss Aiken’s mythic insight in this masterpiece of the art of the short story. The boy is a victim of archetypal possession. He is gripped by an image which, trance-like, holds him in a state of suspended pleasure. Thus bewitched, he lives in the delusion that he has entered the “seamless” world of Eden. The archetype of paradise holds him until he dies or is rescued by one who can dissolves the witch spell. In an essay called “Emerson’s Early Thought,” Professor Lewis P. Simpson speaks of what can happen to one who, like Emerson, became caught up in the glory of the archetype of the Self: “Family, friends, servants—all fade as the Self in the flow of the currents of the Universal Being becomes part and parcel of God. The flow of Being is away from the human community.”11 Possession by an archetype seals one off form both the human and divine relationships that are a part of the journey of the pilgrim. Aiken has referred to himself in The Paris Review as “a continuance of my grandfather,” who was a New England transcendentalist and a friend of Emerson’s, but he never denies community.
The pilgrim who is possessed and held by an archetype falsely believes he has reached the end of his journey, but the pilgrim who continues to move one the earthly plane knows that he has many battles to fight and many images to encounter. Above all he must encounter the image called by Jung the shadow, the image of chaos and destruction, and overcome it by affirming the one eternal life symbolized by the center of the mandala, that lifeflow that is present when the archetypes appear as polar opposites in tension.
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III.
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In “Tetélestai,” an early poem that prefigures The Preludes, Aiken reminds us of Freud using images of castration and the death wish, but it is the Jungian archetype of the Self, symbolized by the Christ in every man, that gives coherence to the poem. The protagonist is presented as an ordinary man, an anti-hero in fact, who nevertheless affirms the Self, or archetypal hero, at the center of his being. He thus affirms the divine center of every human psyche, exemplified by the archetype of the Self, which is not a possession because, Aiken shows, the poet suffers crucifixion by the chaos within himself and within the world without being destroyed. The chaos monster is one form the archetype of the shadow takes in myth, threatening the pilgrim with destruction, achieving its ends by convincing the soul that only it exists, that its powers are such that no should can stand against it, that the should is in effect nothing and should accept the final disintegration. This is the meaning of possession by the archetype of shadow. The protagonist of the poem is in fact nearly convinced by the despair of chaos that he is nothing more than dust. But even in despair, at the end of long crucifixion, the protagonist can ask: “Take the soft dust in your hand—does it stir: does it sing?/Has it lips and a heart? Does it open its eyes to the sun?” (CP, p. 298). “Does the dust dream?” he asks, for Aiken sees the ability to receive the messages of the unconscious as one of the great signs of the soul’s immortality. He who would forget the ordinary man “who went down under the shoutings of chaos” must himself turn homeward with the same dreams in his brains that burn in the life of the crucified man: “Blow the dust out of your hand,/With its voices and visions, tread on it, forget it, turn homeward/With dreams in your brain…” (CP, p. 299).
Tetélestai is the Greek word meaning “It is finished” and is Christ’s last statement on the cross. Aiken thus affirms the Christ in every man. Throughout his work Aiken calls on such archetypal figures of liberation as Christ, Buddha, and Socrates. But Aiken never becomes fixated on the image of the liberator, as pseudo-religious poets do. To escape fixation in a time when most religious icons have the effect of bewitching the beholder, Aiken always insists on the truth of the mythic journey, which tells us that each man must accept his own crucifixion, his own testing both by pain and pleasure, and at the same time must receive his own visions. Men must not only call on the liberating help of gods, but they also must reactivate that god within themselves that Jung called the Self. Here we have the wisdom of both Emerson and Grandfather Potter, but because Aiken also was immersed in the wisdom of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, he could evoke a deeper pain than the transcendentalists ever knew. Aiken could also face the shadow of death. “The Poet in Granada” deals with the overcoming of death by the archetypal hero. Written in homage to the poet Lorca, killed by the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, the poem depicts a mythic hero (unnamed) who accepts death in the midst of a crowd in a Spanish city in a time of peace. Unaware of the meaning of death because they had denied the mythic truths, the crowd clings together in order to forget the pain of schizophrenic isolation. But the delusions and destructive emotions which accompany isolation are ever with them. They are caught therefore in the “sowing of the seed of blood” (CP, p. 658). Instead of celebrating the mythic journey of Christ, religion mirrors the hate and lust of the people. The Spanish city in its peacetime slumber, which is soon to be interrupted by the agony of war, is filled with “The gross priests…with great
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bellies, the wine-bibbers” (CP, p. 654). The ritual of the people has become the bullfight; but, like the Dionysian rites described by Heraclitus as belonging to Hades, this secular ritual drives men mad. For Aiken dogma and ritual in the twentieth century have sunk into disrepute. The lone seeker, denying the rituals of the crowd, must journey alone and must find fitting mythic symbols in nature and in the life around him. Aiken’s archetypal hero in the poem is not Lorca but simply the mythic poet who takes upon himself the archetypal role of Christ. Thus he accepts death as a part of the great unity of life:
nature to evoke the undifferentiated energy of the cosmos: “a hard land of sure rock and sweet orchard, the wide air / blameless as soulless, and wholesome as a handful of / thyme” (CP, p. 658). In spite of all men can do, the earth and air remain inviolate, awaiting a new mythic vision that will restore man to his true self. In “Changing Mind,” a remarkable poem placed at the end of The Divine Pilgrim, Aiken spells out the meaning of the crucifixion in the life of the pilgrim. Suffering and death are seen in the poem as tests necessary for overcoming the illusion of basic separateness, which causes narcissism. Again Aiken shows the he who denies unity and affirms separateness falls in love with his own image as well as with other images which seem to offer pleasure, particularly the parental images. The poem begins with the protagonist being called to come under the water into the darkness, that is, to descend into his soul. Within the should he finds what Aiken in the preface to the poem calls “the constituent particles of himself” (CP, p. 872). These particles are the various psychic forces which he has inherited as part of the racial memory, as Aiken calls it. But also under the water he finds Narcissus: “O Alba! Look! While thus Narcissus sleeps / Under the river, and beside him keeps / Conscious and yet unconscious my bright soul!” (CP, p. 281). But a new god appears: “Out of the east / The blue god looms, and with him come new worlds” (CP, p. 281). When he descends into this soul, the pilgrim receives the help of a god who aids him in overcoming Narcissus, symbol of the bewitching ego that traps part of the pilgrim’s powers. The descent into the soul also brings into the pilgrim’s view other powers. He sees the dark god Mephistopheles, symbol of the destructive power, that archetype Jung calls the shadow. And the shadow shows him a crucified woman, symbol of wounded feminine
Father, if it be Thy will, decide these things for us, let not these decisions be left to simple men, put Thy wisdom into our hearts, bring to pass Thyself whatever things seem good to Thee. (CP, p. 653) The role of the mythic poet is to submit himself to the divine unity in order to overcome death. Identified both with Christ and with the sacrificial god of many myths, Aiken’s poet becomes “the god, the veiled mystery.” Thus the true poet shares in the mystery of Christ’s crucifixion at all times, entering the city unseen to face God’s death and passion over and over until at last man is set free from the fear of death. In the modern Spanish city Easter has lost its meaning, but the trumpet of the bullfight “sounds for the sowing of the seed of blood, the living/ seed of blood, whence shall come / the harvest of murder and murder/…” (CP, p. 658). But after the “harvest has been scythed,” and “the hatred and murder / finished,” the divine harmony remains, in time bringing innocence again to man. At the end of the poem Aiken uses a scene from
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powers within the soul. The shadow is the final forces to be overcome each day. Every day the pilgrim fights a giant and is defeated. But each crucifixion by the giant means a victory over narcissism. The voices of the creative psychic powers cry out: “‘Alas, Narcissus dead, / Narcissus daily dead, that we may live!’” (CP, p. 287). Christ and Socrates also dwell within the poet, and they come with others to Golgotha, the scene of daily crucifixion within the skull of the poet. The mythic poet, finally, is identified with the man who fights every day, though always weak and sick: “Daily I fight here, / Daily I die for the world’s delight / By the giant blow on my visible heart!” (CP, p. 287). Man’s inherited powers of the soul can only grow when the pilgrim accepts the help of the god and continues to fight the forces arrayed against him. The process of being released from possessive, bewitching images is long and slow and is in Aiken’s work a continuing journey. The deepening of the pilgrim’s love flow and visionary powers, which is the result of the continued mythic journey, brings to the pilgrim glimpses of a new land of great joy and freedom: “…while I / Dreamed that I swam, and with that swimmer came / Into the southeast of forgotten name” (CP, p. 283). He swims with a god, and the land is a paradise whose name he has forgotten. Aiken has always been sailing into the soul and into the world only to find once again—but only momentarily—the joys of childhood unpossessed by the bewitching images. It is the joy of child-like wonder, of a time before evil made its ugly appearance. For the pilgrim there are many journeys and many glimpses of the archetype of paradise, but finally only one journey leading to one great vision still unseen by man in his present condition. Conrad Aiken needed for a time the guidance of a mind like Freud’s, a mind steeped in science
and skepticism[sic], but one also adventurous and philosophical. He had such a mind himself, and he never lost it. But he also had a mind receptive to the wisdom of myth, which rejects the false dichotomy of dualism and monism, a dichotomy that Freud never sought to go beyond. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud says, “our views have from the very first been dualistic, and today they are even more definitely dualistic than ever before— now that we describe the opposition as being not between ego instincts and death instincts but between life instincts and death instincts.”12 He goes on to say, “Jung’s libido theory is on the contrary monistic.” Freud is wrong about Jung in this respect. Jung’s theory of libido, or psychic energy, is based on the mythic concept of the mandala, which is a symbolic statement uniting the concepts of dualism and monism. Although the Freudian influence is easy to document, it is impossible to say how much Jung influenced Aiken. But Aiken, in going directly to myth and to his own dreams, as Jung did, incorporated the mandala concept into his own work and thus, like Jung, went beyond Freud’s either/or philosophy. The mythic philosophy of the mandala is monistic in that a One is always posited, but this One is also seen as manifesting itself in a dualistic tension between opposites, which appear as pairs of opposites like anima and animus, hero and anti-hero, miraculous child and wise old person. The practical result of accepting this viewpoint is that one accepts good and bad as equally a part of the One. Therefore bad is also good because it is a part of the harmonic manifestation of the One. Thus the One is affirmed in all events; therefore a Chinese sage can say that the wise man sees the good and calls it good and sees the bad and calls it good. The practical result of dualism is that supposedly “good” force
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is always relentlessly and fanatically fighting a “bad” side until in weariness the “good” gives up and collapses in to the arms of that “bad” side he has always fought. Simply stated, in the modernist context, it is this dualism which drives us on to make war on all manners of evils only to find the more we make war the stronger the evils get. Many examples of mythic affirmation can be found in Jung’s writing, and, as I have suggested, the same kind of affirmation can be found in Aiken’s work. A final example is Aiken’s poetic drama The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones, in which the poet, like Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake, foresees emergence once again of the god within man. Thus the anti-hero Jones moves out of darkness into light and manifests the hero-god Osiris dwelling at the center of his being. This emergence into heroism and light, however, can only happen through an encounter with the heart of darkness, with that shadow, that chaos, which threatens total destruction of the world. By invoking the powers of heaven, the anti-hero moves through chaos into heroism and immortality. Two lines in the play sum up its meaning: “I have not shunned the god at his appearance.” This line is too followed by “Chaos—hurray!—is come again.” In Aiken the apocalyptic theme finds it full expression. Whereas the thought of the apocalypse can arouse feelings of horror in some people, Aiken welcomes the chaos associated with an apocalyptic vision because he knows that the divine pilgrimage leads through chaos to a god-like renewal of man. Jung too saw our chaos-ridden century as a time of the “transformation of the gods,” and in both his work and his life he showed forth a wisdom and a joy that spring from invoking higher powers and from pushing into the storm. Frank O’Connor once said that after visiting Yeats he always felt like a thousand dollars. The same was true
for me of Aiken. I remember talking to him once in the Regency house on Oglethorpe Avenue in Savannah. He was in his late seventies and had suffered enough to have embittered and destroyed lesser men and was still enduring the kind of neglect America often gives its men of letters. He talked freely of his own life’s pilgrimage and I suddenly exclaimed: “There was so much suffering in it.” He gave me one of his warm smiles and spoke not in pain but with a mild joy, “And it all began right over there.” He pointed a finger at the walls of the room while he spoke. On the other side of that wall was the house where in 1901 his father killed his mother and then killed himself, leaving the eleven-year-old boy to find the bodies. Thus began the pilgrimage of Conrad Aiken in the most devastating chaos any child could ever know. Aiken was no saint, but he was a modern priest of consciousness who had dug deeply into his own unconscious mind. He was also a man on a mythic journey, one who had known many consciousness expanding visions. As a mythic quester he resembles C. G. Jung more than any other depth psychologist. Their journeys were similar because they were both based on a similar vision. I believe, in speculating on connections between Jung and Aiken, that the poet spoke as an American who knew that most Americans cannot accept the ripe philosophy of one steeped in centuries of European thinking, as Jung was. Most Americans must have a wisdom stated in pragmatic and analytical terms in the manner of Freud, who explored human sexual difficulties and related them to love in its many forms, but the growing interest in myth and vision has led to an increased interest in Jung’s work. A way of brining Freud and Jung together might in time be found in the work of Otto Rank, whose influence on Aiken is reflected in
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the poet’s approach to humanity’s quest for an authentic heroism. But no matter what psychologists we find to help us in our liberating journey beyond the behavioristic materialism of a B. F. Skinner, our best modern writers will be present to aid psychology in its necessary work. And among those writers who did not hesitate to plunge into the chaos within their own souls and who passed through that chaos into a deeper conscious awareness of the meaning and value of human existence stands the name of Conrad Aiken.
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11 Lewis P. Simpson, The Man of Letters in New England and the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1973), p. 83. 12 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Bantam, 1959), p. 93.
——————————— 1 “Conrad Aiken: An Introduction,” The Paris Review (Winter/Spring, 1968), p. 117. 2 Ibid., p. 118. 3 Ibid. 4 “Conrad Aiken, the Poet, Is Dead at 84,” The New York Times, August 1973, p. 28. 5 Richard I. Evans, ed., Conversations with Carl Jung and Reactions from Ernest Jones (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964), p. 62.
7 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949; rat. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1956), p. 234. 8 Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 6.
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6 Lin Yutang, ed., The Wisdom of Lao Tsu and Chuang Tsu (New York: Modern Library, 1943), p. 192.
10 Conrad Aiken, The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1965), p. 234.
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9 Conrad Aiken, Collected Poems (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), p. 395.
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A Selection from “Senlin: A Biography” Senlin, walking before us in the sunlight, Bending his long legs in a peculiar way, Goes to his work with thoughts of the universe. His hands are in his pockets, he smokes his pipe, He is happily conscious of roofs and skies; And, without turning his head, he turns his eyes To regard white horses drawing a small white hearse.
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Bury it under land or sea, You cannot bury it save in me.” It is as if his soul had become a city, With noisily peopled streets, and through streets Senlin himself comes driving a small white hearse… “Senlin!” we cry. He does not turn his head. But is that Senlin?—or is this city Senlin,— Quietly watching the burial of its dead? Dumbly observing the cortege of its dead? Yet we would say that all this is but madness: Around a distant corner turns the hearse. And Senlin walks before us in the sunlight Happily conscious of his universe.
He taps with his trowel against a stone; The trowel sings with a silver tone. “Neverthless, I know this well. Bury it deep and toll a bell, PAGE 263
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Senlin walking before us in the sunlight Regards the hearse with an introspective eye. “Is it my childhood there,” he asks, “Sealed in a hearse and hurrying by?”
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The sky is brilliant between the roofs, The windows flash in the yellow sun, On the hard pavement ring the hoofs, The light wheels softly run. Bright particles of sunlight fall, Quiver and flash, gyrate and burn, Honey-like heat flows down the wall, The white spokes dazzle and turn…
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Difficulty: we’re always talking about it. To read, to write back, to remember. It’s all difficult. Then there’s time, the general lack. I don’t know whether this condition is distinctly modern—this overwhelming sense that, whatever time it is, it’s too late to begin—but it has been said enough that I expect it is at least partially true. If we start with Dickinson, Mallarme, Whitman, and end with, say, Auden, so much of modern poetry is obsessed with time, ran-out or otherwise. In his Four Quartets, Eliot insists that “To be conscious is not to be in time.” The religious sensibility at work here is distinct, if not as distinctly orthodox as Eliot might have liked. It is tinged with the English Romanticism he spent his early years denigrating: Keats’ soft pipes can be heard without strain. So too can Shakespeare’s sweet sessions. But, then, a gently austere version of Protestant Christianity mixed well with the English poetic tradition (may, in fact, have produced it, given the ubiquity of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer), and one sees, after struggling through its and his attendant nastiness, why Eliot was so attracted to it. An analogy can be made with Eliot’s college friend and collaborator, Conrad Aiken. Each were descended from grandfathers who were Unitarian pastors—Aiken’s a fiery dissident in New Bedford, Eliot’s a doctrinaire educator and philanthropist in St. Louis—and each lived some of his adult life in England. But while Eliot stayed abroad, PAGE 264
converted to Anglicanism, and became a British subject, Aiken never renounced his Unitarian roots. He eventually returned to Savannah, Georgia, a strange move, but one that reveals the degree to which he was willing to dive into the dark and face what waits there. Courage undoubtedly plays a role here, but so, too, perhaps, does compulsion. Is there enough courage in a single heart to face what Aiken chose to face, unless the choice was not wholly his own? It was in Savannah, the Hostess City of the South, where he had been raised by prominent, wealthy, New England-born parents; his father was a brain surgeon, and the family was affable and respected. And then, early one winter morning, for reasons no one can know, his father murdered his mother and then shot himself. The eleven year-old Conrad, not far off and, one imagines, asleep, woke to discover the lifeless bodies. Reading The Divine Pilgrim in the light of this information becomes at the very least a matter of adjudicating the question of what it means for a poem to be “autobiographical,” or, better, whether any poem can not be autobiographical: I heard a story, once, of one who murdered, For what, I cannot remember; but he murdered. With a knife’s greedy edge, or with white hands— What does it matter? The swift deed was done… That was a sombre sea-pool to explore— Strange things are on that floor. The past, Aiken seems to tell us, bleeds, perhaps without end. The work of the poet is not necessarily to stem the flow, but to record how it is strange, before it settles into merely a dark stain. Again, a parallel can be drawn with his more famous friend. From “Little Gidding”:
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The Divine, Difficult Pilgrim
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Of course, Eliot suffered no such trauma as did Aiken, but the two nevertheless shared concerns—metaphysical, political, above all religious—that seem tinged with something like parental blood. The greatest fear, perhaps, is that the final act has occurred before you even took the stage, that whatever you have is borrowed, even left behind. From the murder-suicide of one’s parents to the murder-suicide of Europe in World War One, this fear asserts itself with overwhelming force, and in the prevailing despair, poetry serves, if it has any function at all, merely to slow time down: not to bring back the day, but to extend twilight, to forestall total darkness. In “The Cyclads,” Aiken evokes the hopelessness associated with the running-out of time, or, worse yet, the running-alongside-time, with the horrible experience of decline in no way salved by the hope of progress, to say nothing of transcendence: Terror of time, they murmur, equals the terror of space. All cancels out, in the end, they say, and the end is nothing. And all between, a nothing in borrowed clothing. Common modernist tropes all, but in Aiken’s hands they remain vigorous, even if the vigor is that of the chill in the night. In this case, it is due in part to Aiken’s deep familiarity with, even reverence for, the tradition of English poetry. Can the same be said of Pound’s half-baked nostalgia, or the (slightly-too-often) lifeless
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experiment of Williams? In a bad review of the 2004 reprint of Aiken’s Selected, the reviewer insists over and again that the poet, chronologically modern though he may have been, was unable to accomplish anything new. Leaving aside the irony of clinging to the “make it new” maxim a century after it was first said, the implication here is that if traditional resources are at work in a text, the author must either be ignorant of or uncritically beholden to them. How, then, is Aiken’s poetry so difficult? In the midst of the long “symphonies,” as he called them, one can find pockets of transparency, but by and large the experience of reading his work is, beyond the pure pleasure of his tonal instinct, akin to deep-sea diving. Take this excerpt from one of his expertly-crafted sonnets: Now water’s self, shy singer among stones, Vowelling softly of his secret love, Can murmur to green roots such undertones, Nor with low laughter have such power to move. No rival— none. There is no help for us. Be it confessed: I am idolatrous. The complexity of his spiritual and poetic inner life extends far beyond tired literary slogans, and the longer one stays with it, the more a theological indication becomes unavoidable. I say indication and not something stronger because Aiken maintains with many of his fellow modernists a deep unease about the deep interrelation between poetry and theology. But whereas others sought to supplant, embrace, or even ignore the divine, Aiken willingly remained in fraught, vivid ambiguity. The beauty of the natural images he conjures is astounding in itself, but unlike for his Romantic predecessors, it is not enough. He could well have written Geoffrey Hill’s lines, that
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There are flood and drouth Over the eyes and in the mouth, Dead water and dead sand Contending for the upper hand.
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“God / Is distant, difficult.” So too is poetry that attends to such questions. Again from The Divine Pilgrim:
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As gloomy as this vision can be, Aiken is able to present with equal force the other side of things, namely, the joy of creation, even of mere existence. The final lines of this stanza are speaking to the divine that is so distant and difficult and, almost with a rueful shake of the head, giving praise. Festus, the god he addresses, was cast from Olympus and only allowed back after he became a master sculptor. Here, perhaps, is yet another definition of the poet’s task: to make something so enduring that it invites back the divine presence and, even if in a distant time, is accepted.
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It is not Buddha, it is not Confucius, Jesus, or Mephistopheles; Not a dream, less than the dream of a dream… It is myself alone,— Touching with hands a world of ancient stone; Summoning gods from it,— how fugitive and vain! — Summoning gods to walk on the delicate shine of air, Weaving out of the rock a gossamer Vast as the world is, that therein might fall A dew of stars! … Ah, Festus, Festus, Festus, How always about you, greater than the world you dream of, Rises immortally beyond you your own self’s wall!
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Literary Critics on Consciousness in Literature
Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits…. It is nothing joined; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let’s call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life. —William James, The Principles of Psychology (1888) In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on…. In identifying herself with this life, which is Miriam’s stream of consciousness, Miss Richardson produces her effect of being the first, of getting closer to reality than any of our novelists who are trying so desperately to get close. —May Sinclair, “The Novels of Dorothy Richardson” (1918) Let us perceive with sympathy the predicament of the lesser but genuine poet who faces it. He lacks the power for re-shaping any large area of the consciousness he inherits: he lacks the gift of seeing any large area which is new. The material with which he most passionately desires to deal has been, alas, beautifully dealt with a thousand times before. If he is to avoid being a mere traditionalist (and by PAGE 267
assuming that he is a genuine poet we assume that he will) how will the slight but clear “newness” of his sensibility manifest itself? The answer is obvious: it will manifest itself precisely as a refinement of an aspect or aspects of the inherited poetic consciousness; and whether this refining is aesthetic or kinesthetic or ethical or philosophic, if he carries it far and sharply enough it will leave him for us as one of the long line of idiosyncratic poets, the poets of unique temperament, brilliant, but lacking final power on a broad basis, the poets whose function it is, iota upon iota, to widen our stream of consciousness. —Conrad Aiken, “Idiosyncrasy and Tradition” (1920) It has taken Mr. Joyce seven years to write Ulysses and he has done it in seven hundred and thirty pages which are probably the most completely “written” pages to be seen in any novel since Flaubert. Not only is the anecdote expanded to its fullest possible bulk—there is an elaborate account of nearly everything done or thought by Mr. Bloom from morning to night of the day in question—but you have both the “psychological” method and the Flaubertian method of making the style suit the thing described carried several steps further than they have ever been before, so that, whereas in Flaubert you have merely the words and cadences carefully adapted to convey the specific mood or character without any attempt to identify the narrative with the stream of consciousness of the person described, and in Henry James merely the exploration of the stream of consciousness with only one vocabulary and cadence for the whole cast of moods and characters, in Joyce you have not only life from the outside described with Flaubertian virtuosity but also the consciousness of each of the characters and of each of the character’s moods
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Nothing But the Stream to be Conscious Of:
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made to speak in the idiom proper to it, the language it uses to itself. —Edmund Wilson, “Ulysses” (1922)
natural and unimpeded movement of thought. But only the images are set down—not the patterns. Rhetoric, itself, becomes merely a tool of thought and knows no other syntax than that of the mind. The novel becomes an amorphous record of cerebrations showing no conscious effort on the part of the author to analyze or to arrange. It is the reader who must turn the kaleidoscope and determine the patterns that the novel will present to him. —L. C. Hartley, “The Sacred River: Stream of Consciousness: The Evolution of a Method” (1931)
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The reality which one shows to the reader without intermediary is no longer the thing itself—the tree, the ashtray—but the consciousness which sees the thing; the “real” is no longer only a representation, but rather the representation becomes an absolute reality since it is given to us as an immediate datum. The inconvenient aspect of this procedure is that it encloses us in an individual subjectivity and that it thereby lacks the intermonadic universe; besides, it dilutes the event and the action in the perception of one and then the other. Now, the common
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Defined, the stream of consciousness method is the method of fiction by which the author seeks to reveal life or character by setting down the undisturbed flow of the character’s thought. The process takes into account more than one level of consciousness. It is all-revealing: it presents the character’s inhibitions, his hidden urges, his subconscious impulses. The effect is that of a presentation of a cross-section of the hero’s mind at work. Series of images, connected or disconnected, important or unimportant, are shifted before the reader’s eye as bits of colored glass are shifted in the kaleidoscope. The patterns formed are patterns that are the natural result of the
If I were to bound its range, I would mention Montaigne and Pascal, and not merely because they are in such extreme opposition to each other but because in their opposition they are necessary to each other, each is enough similar to the other to make possible a real and continuing opposition, the naturalistic skeptic with his sense of mystery, the mystic with his hard sense of naturalistic fact, both with their knowledge of the world and their need to speak to men in it. From the high ground between these two radical minds have flowed the best streams of modern consciousness. —Lionel Trilling, “The Life of the Novel” (1946)
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But the author, of course, plunges with you. He takes you inside his head, or, as it were, into a roomy divingsuit, and, once down in the middle of the stream, you remain the author, naturally, inside whose head you are, though you are sometimes supposed to be aware of one person, sometimes of another. Most of the time you are being Bloom or Dedalus, from the inside, and that is Joyce. Some figures for a moment bump against you, and you certainly perceive them with great distinctness—or rather some fragment of their dress or some mannerism; then they are gone. But, generally speaking, it is you who descend into the flux of Ulysses, and it is the author who absorbs you momentarily into himself for that experience. That is all that the “telling from the inside” amounts to. All the rest is literature, and dogma; or the dogma of timeliterature. —Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1928)
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characteristic of the fact and the action is that they escape subjective representation which grasps their results but not their living movement. In short, it is only with a certain amount of faking that one reduces the stream of consciousness to a succession of words, even deformed ones. If the word is given as an intermediary signifying a reality which in essense transcends language, nothing could be better; it withdraws itself, is forgotten, and discharges consciousness upon the object. —Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? (1948)
phrases, the variations of speed within these sentences, the rhetorical accumulation of emotionally charged epithets, the roaring Beethovenish-coda perorations, are some of its features. Sterne, however, is the chief master of prose melos before the development of “stream of consciousness” techniques for presenting thought as a process revived it in our own day. In Proust this technique takes the form of a Wagnerian intertwining of leitmotifs. In Gertrude Stein a deliberate prolixity of language gives to the words something of the capacity for repetition that music has. But it is of course Joyce who has made the most elaborate experiments in melos, and the bar-room scene in Ulysses (the one called “Sirens” in the Stuart Gilbert commentary) is, if somewhat acrobatic, still good evidence that the prose techniques just discussed have an analogy to music which is not purely fanciful. —Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (1957)
Stream of consciousness is one of the delusive terms which writers and critics use. It is delusive because it sounds concrete and yet it is used as variously—and vaguely—as “romanticism,” “symbolism,” and “surrealism.” We never know whether it is being used to designate the bird of technique or the beast of genre—and we are startled to find the creature designated is most often a monstrous combination of the two. —Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (1954) The literary tour de force by which this is accomplished is an object of pleasure in itself, though the explanation lies on the surface: in the meanders of his frequently mistitled essays Montaigne gives us the strictest kind of thoughtpursuit, the absolutely original stream of consciousness. Our moderns—Proust or Joyce—seem apprentices in comparison. —Jacques Barzun, “The Man-Mountain” (1957) The prose of Milton, like his verse, is at its best full of “true musical delight,” though of course of a very different kind. The enormous periodic sentences with their short barking
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The whole “stream of consciousness” movement is a return from an exaggeratedly masculine literature to a feminine one. Wherever fiction turns from outdoors to indoors, from field to boudoir, from flight to love, from action to analysis, from reason to sensibility the female persona becomes, even for male authors, an inevitable mouthpiece; and the female author assumes—as in the novel’s earliest decades—first importance.” —Leslie Fiedler, Foreword to Caesar R. Blake’s Dorothy Richardson (1960) The emergence of the stream of consciousness novel in contemporary fiction has provoked much controversy, but the basic issues involved still remain vague and unexplained. The new form of narrative has been variously defined, not infrequently from conflicting points of
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view; its origins are traced to sources which fail to reveal the real creative impulse behind this new mode of representing human experience. All this confusion results from a fundamental misunderstanding of the underlying intention of the new novelist, who does not conceive character as a state but as a process of ceaseless becoming in a medium which may be termed Bergson’s durée réelle. —Shiv K. Kumar, Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1963)
the speaker is aware of the fact that he is narrating to someone (who may even exist within the fictional space), the enunciation here, consisting of an ‘unedited’ and im-mediate flow of consciousness, can be said to have the predicates [+MENTAL] and [+SIMULTANEOUS]. The speaker “speaks” without his knowledge and to no one in particular, and the speech act seems to coincide temporally with the moment of the narrative (even if that act dwells on events that have happened in the narrative past). The epic preterit employed here in the stream-ofconsciousness sections does not signify “pastness” in the same way that it does in conventional first person. There is betokens perspective, control, and a degree of understanding. Here there are no such implications; the preterit indicates only that the mental event happened some time in the past. These features of NARRATIONAL SPACE themselves transform the reader’s relation to the narrative. —Carl Darryl Malmgren, Fictional Space in the Modernist and Post-Modernist American Novel (1985)
The speaker of these phrases looks forward keenly to the end of his task, frequently promising that we are near the end of the first, second, or third part, and rejoicing especially in the final paragraph, only to be thwarted by the Finnegan-begin-again trick mentioned above. In short, the whole book refuses to employ the ordinary referential qualities of language, and frustrates ordinary expectations as to the relation between a fiction and “real life.” It is as if the old stream of consciousness were used in a situation where there is nothing but the stream to be conscious of. —Frank Kermode, “Beckett Country” (1964) In terms of fictional space, The Sound and the Fury may be described in the following manner. By adopting what has been generally termed the stream-of-consciousness method of presentation (for three-fourths of the narrative), Faulkner gives to his NARRATIONAL SPACE two essential features. First, as in other ‘first-person’ forms, the enunciation of the speaker is ‘dropped’ into the space of the fictional world that it ‘shares’ with the actants, toppoi, and events of the fiction (whether those events be empirical or mental). This transformation of SS may be described as follows: SS (authorial) => SS (actantial). Second, in contrast to traditional ‘first person,’ where
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For the stream of consciousness is essentially a mode of truth-telling. Its origins lie in the stage soliloquy. The character steps up to the audience, and reveals the flurry of his soul. Even when a character uses the stream of consciousness to deceive himself, (as, say, Emma Woodhouse does in Austen’s novel, or as Faulkner’s characters frequently do), the mode serves truth, because it allows us to see that the character is mistaken. Such characters are knowable to us, if not to themselves, and the stream of consciousness is the optic through which we can spy on their dishevelled knowability. —James Wood, “Addicted to Unpredictability” (1998)
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In Joyce and Woolf, narrative is pared down to a minimum; the great crises in the lives of the characters are alluded to fragmentarily in memory, while the immediate focus is on the habitual and the quotidian. It is not surprising that the action of the greatest of all stream-ofconsciousness novels takes place on one ordinary day. —David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel (2002)
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To Edgar Poe (The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Towards Infinity
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I agree that familiarity of form is most conducive to the reader’s comfort, and that feeling at home with its ‘rules’ increases readerly enjoyment. Joyce’s Ulysses, which (after, say, Dickens and George Eliot and Trollope) seemed to have no rules at all, was hard going for its earliest readers, though certainly not nowadays, when stream of consciousness has become commonplace. Eliot’s The Waste Land was once dauntingly impenetrable; today its technique is ho-hum. The very concept of “rules” means familiarity, knowing what to expect; but even revolutions eventually evolve into the humdrum. As for constraining or guiding a line of thinking, isn’t that for sermons and tracts? —Cynthia Ozick, Interview with The Millions (2016)
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Forty-five years old. Male. Starched shirt, jeans, family— wife, two daughters, a son—a job at the bank. Dental plan. A 401K that has almost recovered to pre-2008 levels. Brown leather couch at his disposal. He lays on it, looking at the ceiling, blinking frequently. Sitting in a heavy chair across from him is the psychiatrist, fifty-five years old, salt and pepper hair and eyebrows, slender build, tanned, black shirt, black blazer, with decades of experience to fall back on and a glass coffee table on which to place his coffee mug and books. A carefully constructed barrier, the table is an obstacle in the form of decoration, separating doctor and patient. One may lean over its shiny egg-shaped surface—no corners or sharp edges—to shake hands, one may gaze across it, maybe even lay a hand on it, a smartphone, gently, reminded that the process of therapy is delicately crafted, and centered. The room hinges on what takes place around it, like a wheel on an axle. No self-respecting wheel is without a hard outer rim, of course. The psychiatrist knows that, so he has lined the walls of his office with oak bookcases, thick heavy lacquered shelves bursting with thick volumes concerning therapy and the human condition, philosophy, history, natural sciences, even literature. Holding everything together, like spokes, is the rest of the furniture, most prominent of which is the couch, where the patient is laying, a huge leather couch, camel brown, stitched with fine silk thread, it stands on chrome legs, pointing toward the desk. The desk, a great big oak piece, handcrafted, is placed not parallel to the window, as one would expect, PAGE 272
or across it, but in a corner, diagonally, adjoining two bookcases. In front of it are two low wooden chairs lined with a piebald hide. In the far end of the room a polar bear fur rug stretches fluffy and snow white across the black marble floor, its head and front paws pointing to the center of the room, where the psychiatrist is sitting on a great black leather chair—a Swedish antique with plumped-up armrests and golden trimmings—arranging his notes. The coffee table points to the window, completing the setup. Session One. “Name?” “Thomas.” “Last name?” “Aster. With an E—and one S.” The psychiatrist nods. He is holding a dark blue clipboard layered with sheets of paper, scribbling on the top sheet with a pencil, the graphite tip scratching the paper with the intensity of little vole claws tearing at dry earth. The image flashes through the patient’s head despite his effort to remain focused on the questions, as the psychiatrist instructed him a few moments ago. It’s Thomas’ first visit. He’s never been to a shrink before, hadn’t seen the need to, so far, despite his various anxiety problems and runaway mind, but his sister-in-law recommended Dr. Rezniak. Slightly unconventional, but very effective, she’d said. One of the best. You should most definitely try him out. At first, Thomas had resisted, insisting he could deal with life on his own, no need to involve someone else in his private affairs. But one day, after he woke up breathless, his heartbeat touching 180 BPM and his head stretched and throbbing like his penis after a dose of Viagra, he decided it was time to visit a professional. “Father’s name?”
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“Hermes.” “Mother’s name?” “Aphrodite.” “Complicated childhood, I take it?” Thomas blinks five times in rapid succession, saying nothing. Dr. Rezniak notes it down. Scratch-ratch-ratch. Thomas lies about parents’ name? Or tells the truth, poor bastard. Extremely apprehensive, defensive. The psychiatrist pauses, tapping the clipboard. He passes his thumb over the metal clip, under which a reserve pencil is clamped. People talk on and on and on, so one must be prepared. Sexuality issues, family issues, he notes down, and then pauses again, thinking about the weekend. His wife’s birthday is in two days and he hasn’t bought her a present. Note to self—check the jewelry store on Goldwater. He needs to organize a party, too. He doesn’t want to, not this time. Things haven’t been going well between them for years, but the past few months have been atrocious. Throwing a party and pretending everything is fine, is a distraction, a fancy, toxic, elaborate way to conceal the underlying problem. They need to spend some time apart to assess their situation and come up with answers, or, better yet, questions. They need to understand where the frustration comes from. Argue, if they have to. Separate for a while. Anything but this ridiculous charade. He looks up at Thomas. No response or acknowledgment from the client to my jibe about his parents. Interesting. Dr. Rezniak places the tip of the pencil in his mouth. The gritty taste of graphite numbs his tongue. Eyes fixed on the questionnaire resting on his lap, he ponders on the term: Clients. That’s what they call them now. Not patients. Better this way. What is a patient anyway? A sick person? Someone with patience? People who are unwell tend to be
very agitated. Look at him. A calm and affable exterior, a storm raging inside, eating him up, inch by inch. So tightly wrapped he can’t speak up. Caution, handle with care. A porcelain man in a society of porcelain men and women carrying the world on their sensitive shoulders, wondering why everything is faltering, why things can’t be fixed like everything else, with the wave of a magic wand. Why do we have to talk about things? He doesn’t like talking about things, himself most of all. All he needs— wants—are the keys to the pharmacy. Pop a pill, problem solved. Thomas is not comfortable. He’s feeling nervous. It’s Dr. Rezniak. He can hear the knives in the doctor’s mind rubbing against each other. He knew he shouldn’t have come here. He paid good money for this session, so it better turn around, fast. What kind of a question was that? Difficult childhood? Of course it was! It was difficult and complicated—yes, that’s the word the doctor used, complicated, but that’s not what I’m here for. How can a psychiatrist be so blunt? How can he infer something about me from my parents’ names? That’s what the kids at school did – pick up on every little detail, on every single inconsistency, and made a mockery of it. Of me. The office is perfectly quiet. Situated at the top floor of a converted eighteenth-century brick mansion on a quiet neighbourhood street in Ash Downs, it’s as if there’s no one in the building. Not even the secretary outside. Dr. Rezniak is leaning on the armrest, nodding his head. He’s been watching Thomas with interest but now wants to dislodge the session. Leaning slightly forward, he coughs, a delicate and gentle little cough, the sound of which rips through the room with surprising viciousness. It’s a statement of some kind, to which Thomas realizes he has to respond. He doesn’t want to. He shifts in his seat,
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the leather fabric groaning under his weight. The noise, embarrassing as it is, soothes him. It’s a statement of its own, one to counter the demands of the shrink, buying him some time. His comfort doesn’t last long. Thomas feels the doctor’s gaze pour over him, a sharp stare enveloping him and scanning him and patting him down like some kind of animal, or criminal. Just like at the airport. Fucking airport. He hates flying precisely because of that. He doesn’t want strangers touching him, or judging him, or looking at him with the assumption he’s done something wrong, until proven otherwise—wiped down for explosives, nothing there—bags through the scanner, no hazardous material—you’re free to go, sir, have a nice day!—and even then they look at him as if he’s a crook, promising to catch him next time. He hates being filtered through a sieve that doesn’t acknowledge his past behavior, his record, his performance and character, subjecting him to the same indecency over and over again. But he has to do it, his job requires him to meet with clients all over the country so he shuts up and passes through the machine, again and again. Stay calm, in control. Keep a lid on it and don’t worry about it, it’ll be fine, if you do your job. Bullshit! I did my job and the economy crashed. I bought and sold the CDO’s like my supervisors told me to, tossing millions of people in poverty. We defrauded our clients. Is that what being a good citizen is about? Doing my job is what crushed my retirement fund. “Well?” The psychiatrist is staring at Thomas. His brown eyes are intense, glinting inside his tanned face, eyelids narrowed. “Well what?” “Complicated childhood?”
“Yes, it was.” “Very complicated?” Thomas swallows hard, pondering the question and the logic behind it, looking for the appropriate response, and just as he’s about to protest, Dr. Rezniak yells, “Shit!” Thomas jumps up from his seat, eyes boiling over with panic, but Dr. Rezniak extends his arm, leans forward and motions an apology. His face is calm, reassuring, slightly exacting, crowned with a wrinkled brow and firm lips. The two men stare at each other for a moment, looking for ways to return to normality. Thomas isn’t so sure. Mouth jacked open and limbs shaking, he lies back down on the couch and rubs his legs with his sweaty palms. The psychiatrist scribbles something down. What the hell is he writing? I wish he’d stop. Nervous and squeaky. Face like a mouse when alarmed. Needy eyes. Probably lazy or entitled, not to the point where he has developed a nasty character, but enough to become a burden on others. Pathologically dependent. A beached seal. Find out more about his family. Dr. Rezniak nods to himself as he writes things down. He’s scribbling fast, the sound of the graphite on the paper soothes him. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Thomas fidgeting. Not responding well to my taking notes. Check for symptoms of paranoia. Still hasn’t confronted me about my cursing. Probably thinks it’s a test. Note to self—I must get myself checked out. I can’t handle this much longer. Motherfucking shitballs pissface. Coprolalia! I can barely keep it under control. Must talk to Dr. Carson. He’s the only one I can trust with this. Thomas is watching the psychiatrist curiously, trying to understand what is happening. This is the weirdest experience of his life, even weirder than the time he attended the seminar on The Power Of Seizing Today’s Extraordinary Moments, a bunch of people chanting
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Seize the Moment, Seize the Moment, followed by a series of lectures on how to nurture your inner nurturer, how to fuse it with your inner predator and turn yourself into a machine of achievement, all without having a negative thought, or deep pockets. All you had to do was attend six seminars, introduce ten friends to the gig, chant at the top of your voice, remembering to smile all the time, and half the fee would be reimbursed to you within six months. An $897 discount for a lifetime of liberation and achievement. The crap people come up with. But this—this makes the seminar look like a gathering of sages. Is this guy for real? Dr. Rezniak licks his lips. The client is watching me. Scrutinizing me. He’s curious. Let’s see what he does when I stop taking notes. He stops. Silence, so much of it, it becomes audible. Thomas turns his head back to the ceiling, unclasping his hands from his belly and touching the couch. The client is touching the leather fabric. Wiggles in it and makes rude noises. He’s trying to breathe lightly but can’t. He must be sweating underneath his clothes, I can smell it. He’s desperate to escape, to creep inside his shell and pretend he’s not here. I need to prod him out of his bubble. He remembers his wife’s birthday. I need to find a way out. Goddamn party! I hope it rains and the whole neighborhood floods. Dr. Rezniak looks up. “The question, please,” he tells Thomas, raising his chin. “I’d like you to answer it. Your childhood—was it complicated?” “It was. Very complicated.” “I bet it was.” “Excuse me?” “Nothing…” Dr. Rezniak runs his pencil down the list, focusing
on the next set of questions. Age. Profession. Hobbies. Regular stuff designed to put the client at ease, steer him in a casual manner into a conversation. This is his bread and butter, a great way to massage his way through a person’s psyche and locate the knots and nerves. But lately he has no patience for it, he’s feeling rather unwell—note to self: my coprolalia is a symptom of a greater dis-ease. So are my martial problems. I mean marital. Interesting slip. Bring it up with Dr. Carson, and consider it in the meantime—he must do something about it. Last week a couple of clients got up and left mid-session, calling him a quack, vowing never to return. What bothered him most was that he wasn’t bothered by it. He was glad to be rid of them. What if his condition is symptomatic of something he doesn’t like about himself, or his professional life, a specific element he wants to escape, or change? Is his recent loathing for his clients a side effect of his condition, or is his condition a sign that he’s losing interest in his profession, maybe even life in general? He certainly isn’t enjoying life, and not in agreement with the way things are set up. The system has become a vector of a disease too easily manufactured, more effect than side effect, the process increasingly possessed by the destruction of the human spirit. Humans are sacrificed on the altar of automation to create robots of flesh and blood, biology with entrails of stone and steel. The survivors of today’s pressures. The non-glass individuals, the monsters. Kudos to them for enduring. Why work against their evolution? It’s like working against gravity—no, more like saying gravity is bad. He doesn’t want to stand in their way anymore. If anything, he should speed up the transformation by crushing the glass people once and for all, clearing the way ahead for those able to withstand today’s pressures.
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The intercom rings, shattering his reverie. Dr. Rezniak excuses himself to Thomas, who is looking at him sideways, and picks up the call at his desk. It’s his secretary, Mrs. Fenchurch, asking if he needs her. It’s twenty-five after three but something personal has come up and she needs to leave right away. He smiles and tells her to go – yes, he’ll lock up, yes, he’ll make sure to eat something hot, and his wife’s birthday is in two days. Back in the black leather chair, Dr. Rezniak picks up his clipboard and rubs his temples with clenched fists, trying to ignore the annoying smirk on Thomas’ face. He makes a mental note on it and rubs his hands together. The room feels a little chilly but he doesn’t care, he knows it’s all in his mind, a temporary reaction to his secretary’s sudden departure. Wonderful Mrs. Fenchurch! His practise would collapse without her. What could have happened to unsettle her so? He can hear her through the door, faintly, locking the files and cabinets, then taking the stairs, her tall heels clicking their way down the marble staircase until they’re gone. Tired, his head buzzing, Dr. Rezniak goes through his notes. They appear alien to him, as if someone else wrote them. Lines of stray comments about glass people and broken psyches and a lardy soft man laying on his couch, wasting his time. He rubs his eyes and turns to the window. The sun is slanting across the room, catching the oaken office and part of the bookcases in its overexposed, yellow-white beam. The golden letters on the black leather spines explode with brilliance. Some of them seem to disengage themselves and float up in the air. Books. If only people read them, there would be much less strife in the world. Then again, if everyone were well read, who would do the dirty work? Who would pay taxes, or be a secretary? Who would require professional assistance? He rubs his
legs and looks out the window, at the blue winter sky. January. The emptiest time of the year. Best time to close shop and fly to an exotic island, leave the world behind, the holiday hangover, the bareness, everything. Rent a house by the beach and read books and go swimming in the high tide and eat in local restaurants among people on vacation, not having to pretend all day. But first—first he has to get through this goddamn pissfucking session! Thirty minutes to go. Twenty-eight, if you discount the two minutes used to wrap up and see off his client. One glance at Thomas, a quick glance. The client has stopped grinning. Dr. Rezniak touches the metal clip of the clipboard. Refreshingly cold and solid. He taps it gently with the tip of his pencil. Tick. “Your childhood, Thomas. It must have been very confusing.” “Yes, it was.” “I bet it was.” Tick. “It must have been screwed up.” Tick. Thomas turns his head and stares at Dr. Rezniak. The psychiatrist is smiling at him as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening. “Hermes and Aphrodite. You can’t make this shit up.” Tick. Thomas bites his lips, feeling his heartbeat rise. His arms are shaky, restless, and his head is throbbing. He lifts his knees and brings his feet back, sitting up and wrapping his hands around his shins. His shoes rest on the leather couch, the soles making an imprint on the leather. More scribbling from the psychiatrist’s direction. Thomas wipes his neck with both hands and licks his sweaty upper lip. Scratch-ratch-ratch-ratch. Tick. He squints his eyes. The sunlight in the room is too bright. It’s catching the edge of
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the couch, turning the camel-brown leather bright yellow, and also catching the psychiatrist, causing his face to fade into shadow. His body is turning into an outline, his eyes are glinting with—can it be? Amusement? Is he actually having fun? “Well?” says the psychiatrist. “Well, what?” “Your childhood. You said it was complicated. I made a comment on it, not a very appropriate one.” “Two comments. You made two inappropriate comments.” “Yes, I made two comments. You found them inappropriate.” “I wish you’d stop mentioning my childhood.” “Is there any particular reason?” “It feels like you’re being deliberately insensitive and rude.” “I see. How does that make you feel?” Thomas weighs the answer for a moment. “Like a piece of garbage,” he says, his voice breaking. “It makes me feel like a piece of garbage.” “Maybe you are a piece of garbage.” “Excuse me?” “I said, maybe you are a piece of garbage.” Thomas sits straight up and places both feet on the floor. He brushes back his thin hair and stares at the doctor. The doctor is staring back at him with a deadpan expression, arms resting on the armrests, one leg over the other. Immaculate leather shoes glinting in the afternoon sun. The halo around him growing, as is the shadow on his front features. Thomas shakes his head and exhales in a way that resembles laughter, scratches his cheek, his nails rasping against the day’s stubble, gets up and kicks the psychiatrist in the chest. A big, nasty slam kick with the
bottom of his foot that sends Dr. Rezniak tumbling back, the heavy antique chair falling over, the clipboard flying through the room. Thomas lunges forward, striking at will. The coffee table is smashed, glass shards everywhere. The doctor stumbles up to his feet but Thomas grabs him and throws him into the bookcases, over the low chairs, over the couch, into the broken glass. He drapes him with the polar bear rug and kicks him repeatedly and at will, in the face, back, ribs, groin, and throws books at him, great big leathery tomes with sharp edges and thick spines, the paper rustling and tearing as volume after volume goes flying at the doctor—How do you like them notes, motherfucker? How do you like them now?—and then stomps on him, stomps on the spread volumes with his heels, and then, when he thinks he can’t go on anymore, his lungs burning and his head exploding, he grabs hold of the nearest bookcase and pulls. He pulls it until his eyes feel they’re going to pop out of their sockets. The bookcase starts to tip, the books sliding out and falling in a great avalanche as the entire piece topples and crashes to the marble floor. For a while everything is still. The only thing moving is Thomas, sobbing on the couch, his face buried inside his hands. The room is strewn with debris, torn books and broken glass, toppled chairs, a toppled bookcase. The wall looks violated, missing a great tooth. The sun is slanting in the room like a spotlight, the black marble floor singed with white pages. A few of them begin to move with a faint rustle, the rustle turning into a scrape of pages rubbing against leather and gravity. Out of the rubble a hand appears, followed by a bleeding face, an elbow, another elbow. Dr. Rezniak crawls out of the book mount, one leg caught under the wreckage of the bookcase. He reaches for his clipboard with shaking hands, blood dripping from his face on the top sheet, unclamps the reserve pencil and starts
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writing. Scratch-ratch-ratch-ratch. Thomas lifts his head from his hands and stares at the doctor, his face a mask of incredulity. The doctor is propped up on his elbows, grinning, blood pouring down his broken face, scribbling words on paper, frantic, licking his lips and laughing without making a sound. He underlines something, lifts the pencil ceremoniously, brings it down—period—taps the metal clip with the pencil—tick—flings the clipboard at the Thomas’ feet and lays his head on an open book. Without looking at the notes, Thomas storms out of the room. He bangs the door shut on his way out, so hard, it bounces back open. The door hangs ajar, revealing Dr. Rezniak in a pile of debris, his head on a blood-soaked book. The doctor groans, pushes against the floor and lifts his head, blinking through the blood, and the pages tear off. He looks around with the page stuck to his face. He’s shivering, and the pain is kicking in. The slightest motion in his face and hands causes the glass shards inside him to sting. Grimacing, and with great effort, he frees his leg from under the shelves. His femur feels shattered, a sharp pain rising all the way up his spine. His mouth is full of blood. He spits a great gob of it on the floor and leans on his side, resting on his elbow, his hands turned upright, scrubs. His four o’clock will have the shock of her life when she comes up the stairs. If she comes. He’s had a few cancelations this week. The idea soothes him. Let her come and freak out, or not come. His five o’clock will find him, or his six. All he wants to do now is lay there and let time pass. Bask in the beauty of his wreckage. Taking deep breaths, he turns his head to the window. The sunlight is pouring over him and his face feels warm. He closes his eyes and leans his back on the shelves, smiling.
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Selections from an Editor’s Letters
On first seeing the manuscript of Conrad Aiken’s debut novel, Blue Voyage, as described in a letter to Margerie Lowry (Malcolm Lowry’s second wife) But what was curious about Blue Voyage was when it came here I was greatly excited, and was only troubled because it seemed unfinished. So I wanted to talk to him. I went to Boston on various business, and could not run him down until the end of the day, and then by phone. I told him how great was our interest, but that it seemed to me unfinished. From his response, I saw that he thought I meant that the ship ought to get to port, or something like that. He said he didn’t see how anything could be more completely finished, and asked if we wanted it. I quickly thought even if it is a fragment, to my way of thinking, it is amazing, and we’ll take it at that, and I said so. I was troubled about it though—until a few days later his agent brought in the last third, or perhaps the last quarter. In other words, they had done to us in a sense what we did to you. They had mislaid what made it seem to us unfinished. Conrad was naturally perturbed about this, but he loyally stood by his agent nevertheless. ———
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On whether Conrad Aiken’s Blue Voyage was an imitation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, as described in a letter to Margerie Lowry No, it was never an imitation of Joyce. Conrad had been investigating the vein in which it lies long before Joyce. I suppose it might have been influenced by Ulysses, but I never thought of it that way. Way back in the beginning he had been conscious of what Joyce later became conscious of, because of the events in his life and the revelations of modern psychology. He never was an imitator, nor could have been. ——— On Conrad Aiken’s second novel, Great Circle, as described in a letter to Conrad Aiken It’s certainly not an “easy” book, nor a pretty one, but I think it’s effective, myself, and a profounder thing than Blue Voyage. ——— On Conrad Aiken winning the Pulitzer prize for his Selected Poems, as described in a letter to Thomas Wolfe Aiken won the Pulitzer prize for poetry, since you left I think, and this had a good effect on the sale of his book, doubled it, in fact. Perhaps this happened before you left, but it pleased me so much that he should have got this recognition, and the resulting sale, that it is still in my mind, and that makes me speak of it.
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Thoughts on Conrad Aiken:
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——— On Conrad Aiken’s comments regarding F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, as described in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald By the way, I was talking to Conrad Aiken whose opinions are worth something, and his opinion of The Great Gatsby is as high as any. I told him how depressed we were at the first reviews, and how I really thought the book had been injured by them because it did not gain the immediate impetus that good reviews would have given. He said, “Well now everybody knows anyhow what it was, and what Gatsby means.” ———
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The first reviews appear tomorrow. Those in the Times and the Herald Tribune are perhaps the most important, and both are admirable, particularly the Herald Tribune. It is not that it speaks more highly of the book than the Times, but it shows better understanding, and it is a signed review, which gives it more authority. The author of it is Conrad Aiken.
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
On Conrad Aiken’s review of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in the New York Herald Tribune, as described in a letter to Ernest Hemingway
THE SCOFIELD
Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Octopuses, like us, recognize individual humans, and have been known to squirt and soak particular researchers. They escape from tanks. They play with objects that aren’t food. In order to shut off bright lights, which irritate them, they have been known to shoot water at switches, shortcircuiting the network. And this following anecdote from Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds about a cephalopod researcher named Jean Boal makes it easy to imagine the crab-loving octopus as a kind of human being, miffed by the poor lunch options at the lab: One day Boal was walking down a row of tanks, feeding each octopus a piece of thawed squid as she passed. On reaching the end of the row, she walked back the way she’d come. The octopus in the first tank, though, seemed to be waiting for her. It had not eaten its squid, but instead was holding it conspicuously. As Boal stood there, the octopus made its way slowly across the tank toward the outflow pipe, watching her all the way. When it reached the outflow pipe, still watching her, it dumped the scrap of squid down the drain.
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Ha! But imagining either that the octopus is so similar to us as to be human-like, or that it is so different that we cannot imagine its experience of the world, is the kind of simplistic categorization that Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds rejects. Through this brilliant and rigorous exploration of the evolution of consciousness, and of cephalopods’ sentience, Godfrey-Smith challenges us to recognize intelligent interaction with the world whose form and method might be so different from ours as to seem irreconcilable with our comprehension of experience and knowledge. As the book tells, in 1988, scientists became interested in a woman code-named “DF,” who was brain-damaged and almost blind; she could only see vague patches of color. Still, she could respond effectively to the objects around her. In an experiment, she was able to post letters through a slot that was placed at different angles, even though she could not describe or indicate the angle of the slot. The surprising revelation that came from studying DF was that complex visual information could be processed by the brain without the experience registering, in our consciousness, as the experience of “seeing.” If that discovery helped scientists reconsider what it might mean to “see,” and whether that category of experience might be apprehended in multiple ways, then this book shows how the study of octopuses continues to offer similar challenges to modes of experience as we understand them. For example, octopuses can “see” with their skin, as it is sensitive to light. At the same time, their skin responds to what it “sees” by changing color. What is it like to “see” with skin, and to have color-change as an indicator of aggression, or boredom, or as random chatter? Seriously considering this question means we have to make an earnest effort to imagine what it is like to have a nervous
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What It Might Mean to See:
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Figure from Utriusque Cosmi #4
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system which is profoundly unlike our own brain. The octopus’ nervous system is spread throughout its body, so that the body is not really a separate object governed by the nervous system, but rather is suffused by capacities for comprehension and intelligence. In that disparity between the processing of information (the door slammed on your finger, say) and subjective experience (pain), where do we locate consciousness? This is the great question driving Godfrey-Smith’s book. That the exploration of this question demands intimate encounters with octopuses and cuttlefish is a vital reminder that consciousness, as experienced by us, is probably one kind—not the only kind—of dynamic interaction with the world. In the octopus behaviors described in this book, what emerges is an argument not only for the diversity of forms of consciousness, but also for the complexity of such forms. In repeated dives to a site he began calling Octopolis, fifty feet below the surface of the sea off the east coast of Australia, Godfrey-Smith observed numbers of octopuses in their dens, wandering, “high-fiving” (extending one arm to greet/explore a newcomer), fighting. This consideration of a different model of consciousness is humbling not only for how it puts us in our place—what would communication look like if we could communicate with our skin? What modes of expression might we have, and how might language as we know it interact with such expression?—but also for how it animates discussion of the oceans. The book closes with a brief discussion of “dead zones” in the oceans, regions which, pushed by human stresses, are no longer able to support animal life. When we neglect our oceans we sacrifice the lives of creatures as magnificently intelligent as octopuses.
ROBERT FLUDD
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For Aiken’s fiction, consciousness presents itself as a linguistic curse. The narrative line through his work is one of return: his characters experience the present as a torturous barrage of sensory stimuli, and as a moment opens before them, painful memories and fuzzy predictions wriggle through their brains. In works that aim toward a language for consciousness, especially the novels Blue Voyage and Great Circle, Aiken’s topology of progress, regression, and self-awareness picks out a picture of strife in mental experience. Indeed, for Aiken, the human animal is necessarily sick; we are cursed by what recurs. Philosophy also returns to a dialogue with the past, exhuming and reconfiguring forgotten concepts. To dig around our ideas automatically opens questions about the questioner, the subject, the human, and what grants its status as such. To be sure, the philosophical inquiry into the moral status of non-human animals questions the status of the human animal. Peter Singer is one of the most renowned living moral philosophers and a critical figure in the animal liberation movement. A Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, he specializes in applied ethics from a utilitarian perspective. In his influential 1975 work, Animal Liberation, Singer returns to the capricious distinction between human and animal, arguing that
CH: What do you see as the fundamental difference between human and non-human animal consciousness? Do you prefer to use the term “sentience”? PS: I have no strong preference between the terms “consciousness” and “sentience.” But the question seems to assume that there is a fundamental difference between human and non-human animal consciousness. Why should we believe that there is, for example, a fundamental difference between the consciousness of a chimpanzee and that of a two-year-old child? Or for that matter, between the consciousness of a dog and of a profoundly cognitively disabled human being? As these examples indicate, I don’t think that species membership determines the kind of conciousness a being has. Still, you might say, a cognitively normal human being older than, say, five, has the ability to use language and to think about the past and future, and perhaps abstract concepts as well, in ways that no nonhuman animal can. That’s true, and it may show that such humans are self-conscious, and think of themselves as existing over time, in ways that nonhuman animals do not. That’s an important difference, but not in consciousness itself, rather in something additonal that goes beyond mere consciousness.
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Human and NonHuman Consciousness:
animal rights should be based on their capacity to feel pain rather than their intelligence. The seminal text popularized the concept of “speciesism” and serves as a philosophical foundation for much of the discussion surrounding ethics and non-human animals. In our interview with The Scofield, Singer discusses the role of human consciousness with regard to ethics, art, and power.
A Conversation with Peter Singer
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CH: What are your favorite representations of non-human animal consciousness in fiction, poetry, or other works of art? PS: Perhaps my all-time favorite is Rudyard Kipling’s depiction of the wolf pack led by Akela in The Jungle Book and in other Mowgli stories. I first read it as a child, and it has stayed with me, notwithstanding the crude oversimplifications in so many children’s movies and cartoons. Kipling’s interest was in lessons for humans, rather than in accurate accounts of the lives of animals, but he still aroused my interest in the question of what the lives of wolves really are like, and how social mammals like wolves organize their lives together. Richard Adams managed to convey a wonderful sense of what rabbits are like in Watership Down, as well as telling a fine tale. I also like his polemic against animal experimentation, The Plague Dogs. More recently, I thought Ceridwen Dovey showed remarkable empathy for animals in Only the Animals. Most recently, I’ve enjoyed my friend Christine Townend’s novel Moti: An Indian Elephant, in which she draws on her time in India working with the organization Help in Suffering to protect elephants and other animals. CH: To what degree do you understand or explain ethical positions as having a relationship with human consciousness? How might this connect to a discussion about egoism? Does this relate to impartiality in ethics? PS: Although it is now clear that some basic ethical concepts, such as fairness, have their origins in the social lives of our primate ancestors, it remains true that only humans develop ethical principles and use them to justify their behavior. But just as, say, white males must be careful that their judgments also take account of the
interests of women or blacks, so we humans must take care to include the interests of non-human animals in what we do. We can do this by taking what the great nineteenthcentury utilitarian Henry Sidgwick called “The Point of View of the Universe.” It’s a metaphor, of course. Sidgwick didn’t actually think that the universe has a point of view, but he did think that we can detach ourselves from our own particular interests—and even our national, racial or species interests—and give equal consideration to the similar interests of all sentient beings. CH: How does time influence the nature of human vs. non-human animal consciousness? PS: Our ability to plan for our future—including the distant future—means that we have interests that are different from those of beings who cannot do this. Again, it is a matter of degree rather than of kind—some animals do think about the future, and plan ahead. I’m thinking here not only of chimpanzees or other great apes, but also birds. Scrub jays, for example, have been shown, in carefully controlled experiments, to plan for the future in ways that are not simply instinctive. CH: Will human narratives like science, history, fiction, film always fail to capture non-human animal experience? Do you see technological developments as a possibility to understand these questions concerning consciousness? PS: Advances in the brain sciences may help us understand what non-human animals are experiencing, but to really capture the subjective experiences of another being—human or animal—goes beyond anything that science can do, now or in the foreseeable future. CH: You have discussed how utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick’s view that objective morality can be derived from fundamental moral
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axioms that are knowable by reason. For our readers, could you describe how this relationship with reason and ethics may/may not connect to questions concerning consciousness? PS: Sidgwick argues, and I agree, that without consciousness there would be no value, and hence no ethics. The only things that are intrinsically valuable are states of consciousness. In his view, states of consciousness such as pleasure or happiness, are of positive intrinsic value, and states such as pain or suffering are of negative intrinsic value. Everything else is only instrumentally valuable—that is, valuable because it leads to more pleasure or happiness or less pain or suffering. I agree with Sidgwick and the other hedonistic utilitarians that without consciousness there would be nothing of value. It is still possible to hold that view, and have a wider sense of what is of intrinsic value than the hedonistic utilitarians do, for example to include knowledge, beauty, dignity, justice, and freedom as intrinsic rather than instrumental values. But those values also presuppose consciousness.
VINCENT VAN GOGH
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VARIOUS AUTHORS
VARIOUS AUTHORS
If you’re looking for interesting books to read, here are some recommendations for you from writers, artists, and intellectuals that we know and trust. Matthew Specktor on Transit by Rachel Cusk I’m half-ashamed to admit it, but lately I’ve had trouble reading much contemporary fiction. The novel—that form to which I’ve devoted my entire adult life—seems frequently antiquated, doddering, a little beside the point. Enter Rachel Cusk, whose Transit is-or-isn’t quite a novel (it purports to be, but its impossible to know how much invention garlands its skeleton of presumed autobiographical fact; Cusk herself is on record as saying she finds fiction of the conventional, invented sort “fake and embarrassing”) in the same way her previous Outline was or wasn’t quite either. A highly alert, disaffected, urban woman wanders through a series of encounters with the narratives of the people around her. (The encounters are very much with the narratives, as opposed to with the people themselves.) The book is essayistic, discursive: closer to the lateral, peripatetic sprawl of W. G. Sebald than to the self-focused autofictions of Knausgaard, Ben Lerner, Jenny Offill, etc. Perhaps this is what saves it, makes it seem—to me, at least—like a way out. Instead of magnifying or lightly distorting her own experience, the book’s narrator turns relentlessly outwards, scanning the stories around her with forensic intelligence. She behaves like a novelist, in other words. And for as long as I’m with her, my faith in fiction is restored. PAGE 286
The stories in Melissa Yancy’s collection Dog Years, elegantly and tragically track characters facing mortality and its precursors. Yancy manages this with a light and careful hand, threading into her stories the almost amnesiac ways in which we suppress the swiftness of time’s passing. The title story follows Ellen, a molecular geneticist racing to find answers for her son’s rapidly worsening muscular dystrophy. The tale begins in the most blameless, and bland, American setting—a large suburban supermarket as the family argues over brands of cereal. Plates excite Ellen and draw her away from the “paralysis at the cereal aisle” by invoking the idea of entertaining in preparation for summer but by the end of the paragraph she realizes that “the plates are on sale because it is the end of summer, not the beginning.” It is only a few paragraphs following from this that the reader is told that her son’s life will be “a short life” so why not let him get the cereal he wants. This same inability to grasp on to time, and the sudden disbelief that comes with acknowledging just how much of it has passed, is at the forefront of “Firstborn.” We meet Laurie, an aging mistress, who is desperately cleaning her apartment in preparation for her niece to stay a night before the two are to embark on a postponed trip to Paris—postponed by a rather considerable seventeen years. Explaining away her inability to get things in order, Yancy writes that “Laurie had a tendency to let time get away. She had tried different techniques to slow its progression, but it only accelerated it.” What begins as portrait of a fiery urbanite boasting of her ability to live untethered, an expert on exotic Paris beside her simple Juicy Couture wearing niece, ends as a story of an alcoholic woman left alone in her late years, her memory declining, with only the nostalgia for a long dead lover left
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On Our Nightstand
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Hannah Lillith Assadi on Dog Years by Melissa Yancy
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for comfort. These and the other stories in this collection creep up on you, slowly and subtly. They end far from where they began, and show that it is through the smallest mishaps, the tiniest cracks, that our vast warehouses of pain and the remorse over what has been lost thunder to the surface.
protagonist accompanying a mentally ill friend on a trip to India. As she spirals into a state of full-blown suicidal manic psychosis he ends up with more on his hands than he bargained for. Galgut is a master at capturing the unspoken tensions between individuals. The prose is spare, tight, and evocative—charged with an emotion that cuts through the misted remembrances. At first reading I found In a Strange Room, as a model, too lean, too close to the bone, for the project I had imagined for myself. I return now, regularly, as a more experienced writer. Each time I find more to admire. This book has become one of my touchstones, an elegant example of the way personal experience can be pared down to its essentials and explored through the lens of time and memory. It remains, for me, some of the most meditative and precise writing about what it means to be grounded, in one’s self and in relation to others; the allure of the road and the ambiguity of home; and most vividly, the way that all truth lived is, in essence, a fiction.
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Natashia Deón on We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge American eugenics refers inter alia to compulsory sterilization laws adopted by over thirty states that led to more than 60,000 sterilizations of disabled individuals, the mentally ill, African-Americans and those who belonged to socially disadvantaged groups living in the margins of society. In this time when America is looking back on herself critically, to her history and to the accuracy of the narratives she’s told herself, about herself, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, is a necessary exploration of eugenics—an attempt to create a master race—and racism in America. The story is told by Charlotte, the
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I originally came to In a Strange Room, as a seeker, if you like, looking for ways to tell a story, the only story I have to tell—my own. I bought the book after a reading, and commented to the author, South African writer Damon Galgut, that, while he published his first novel at 18, I had stopped trying to write at about the same age, deciding I wanted to live a little first. However, I was completely unprepared for the messy and complicated path my life would take. So we spoke about the challenge of gleaning a story out of the detritus of life lived. He pointed to my newly signed copy of his 2010 Booker short-listed novel, and admitted that in this, of all his works, he felt he had most closely captured the essence of his self. Autobiographical in tone—a quality reinforced by a main character named Damon and the occasional narrative shifts from third person into the immediacy of first person and back again—the novel is divided into three sections. The first two parts, “The Follower” and the “The Lover,” involve travel and more or less unresolved interactions and attractions between the remembered Damon character and a couple of men he meets while he frets and wanders through parts of Europe and Africa plagued by a restless inability to settle himself. The final section, “The Guardian,” sees a more mature and stable
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Joseph Schreiber on In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut
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teenaged daughter of a black family chosen to live in an apartment at a scientific institute with a young chimpanzee named Charlie who the family must welcome as family. This experiment leaves the Freeman family isolated in an all-white community, and when Charlotte discovers the history of questionable studies done by the Institute, the family comes undone. I recommend Kaitlyn Greenidge’s We Love You, Charlie Freeman for its unwavering look at racism, for its wit, humor, and seriousness as it reintroduces this dark corner of our American past so that we can understand it and deal with it today.
nature as ascendant in status—an Englishman, a nabob, a nobleman and, finally, the heir apparent to the Mughal throne. Each brings into her life a distinct sense of worth and of loss. Her presence is for them the catalyst of change. A change whose scope overflows from individual destinies into nationwide fate. To give more details would be to spoil a superb read. It should be noted, however, that in the narrative the rhythm of Urdu verse is always present. The characters speak in lines reminiscent of the work of well-known poets, quoting, in some cases directly, from their work. Such use, which should have resulted in something terribly artificial, feels natural and organic. The fact that the author, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi—a recognized critic and researcher in Urdu literature—gets away with such a ploy, gives the full measure of his mastery.
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Rumaan Alam on The Victim by Saul Bellow Love is rare. When it comes, my instinct is to cede to it. A few years ago, I picked up O Pioneers on a whim, then spent months reading everything Cather wrote. It ended like every love, the both of us used up. An obsessive approach, in romance or reading, leads to disappointment. Now, I try to pace myself. I’ve moved on, to Saul Bellow, whom I try to keep at bay as you might the boyfriend who’s no good. I’ve always accepted as article of faith that Bellow is a genius. But his sentences! They’re like being eyewitness to a miracle, the water you’re drinking transformed into wine. Even Henderson the Rain King, which is basically claptrap: every sentence! The Victim, Bellow’s second novel, was published when he was 32—not exactly juvenilia, nor exactly the muscular, musical sentences the man would someday write. But it
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What would possess one to read The Mirror of Beauty, an almost 1000-page book, written by a first time novelist, translated from a foreign language? In my case, it was a love of the poetry written in that language—Urdu. The reviews spoke of a two-century narrative, conceived around the literary tradition of Mughal India, with a cast of characters that included poets such as Ghalib, Dagh Dehlavi, and Bahadur Shah Zafar. After opening the book, however, it became apparent that the author intended to weave a far richer fabric. His intention is to encompass the history of the subcontinent, developing multiple story lines in a twocentury span. Everything in his vision is fluid, everything is vast and everything is linked with a central character, that of Wazir Khanam. Wazir Khanam is a woman who, in a world strictly circumscribed by tradition and religion, chooses to frame her life in her own terms and expectations. Her successive partners are as diverse in
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María Barrera-Agarwal on The Mirror of Beauty by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi
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MYKL WELLS
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Big Appetites
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does contain (spoiler, I guess) one of the more affecting deaths of a child I’ve encountered in a book and it’s a welcome reminder that even if you feel at the top of your game in your thirties, it’s possible you’ve not even got started yet.
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K ATE JORDAN
K ATE JORDAN
Covering Aesthetics and Symbology:
KJ: How would you describe the design aesthetic you were going for in these reissues of Aiken’s fiction? MV: I believe the aesthetic could be best described as contemporary with a nod to the period of the books, colourful yet worn, and somewhere between impressionist and surreal. I’ve always been a fan of Magritte, and while these covers aren’t in the style of his work, they do have nods to his particular kind of surrealism. KJ: All six involve some sort of silhouette, often in profile. Was there any significance to this recurring motif? MV: I felt a balance of the solid colour field, and at least one “white” and one “black” element worked well to drive the series design. The cameo style profiles are PAGE 290
an excellent way of evoking characters without drawing anything too specific. KJ: There are six books and each gets one of the six primary or secondary colors for its color palette. But some go against what might be the more obvious choice. (Surprisingly, Blue Voyage is not the one to utilize blue, for instance.) Was this a conscious decision? And how did you decide which would get which color? MV: I do remember specifically wanting to stay away from blue for Blue Voyage, as it felt too on the nose. I preferred the cold blue colour for the idea of a corpse in King Coffin, and I reserved red for the idea of conflict in The Conversation. The yellow for A Heart for the Gods of Mexico was influenced by the idea of the sun beating down. As for the rest, they were more or less instinctive choices. KJ: Could you go a little bit into the symbology on some of these covers? MV: I tried to create little stories on each cover, using the symbols of the figures. For example, Blue Voyage has the two silhouettes overlapping, to indicate how the two characters lives intertwine, with the woman’s being lighter to indicate that she is a memory. For Great Circle, the
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Though we tell ourselves not to judge a book by its cover, let’s face it, we all do judge books by their covers, at least in our initial assessments. So design, it must be admitted, is an important part of bookselling. Though much of Conrad Aiken’s work is still out of print, Open Roads Media has recently put his five novels and collected short stories back in print—or, well, at least in “digital print.” The covers Michel Vrana designed for these e-books are exquisite and deserve to have actual print editions. We had a short conversation covering his aesthetics and symbology for the look of this series of digital reprints.
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A Conversation with Michel Vrana
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smaller figure is literally the “child within” the protagonist, with the electrical bolts symbolizing painful experiences. With Conversation, a book about the conflict between art and human relationships in a domestic crisis between man and wife, the silhouettes are facing away form one another, framed in pictures on a cracking wall. The cover for the Collected Short Stories directly references the short story within of “Mr. Arcularis,” the story of a dream voyage a man takes while he is dying on an operating table. Finally, King Coffin and A Heart for the Gods of Mexico both feature some literal symbols on the cover, but also have clues of other elements of the stories, daggers for murder, city and mountains for voyage.
View of the Sea at Scheveningen
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A Word from Conrad Aiken’s French Translators
I. Philippe Blanchon on Conrad Aiken and the Art of Translation Up until recently, Aiken was hardly translated in France. His poetry even less. How did I discover it? Simply through the importance Malcolm Lowry granted it. I had to read it, translate it and translating is reading with the necessary acuity. Being a poet, translating is also writing and working the verse. I should point out that very early I was attracted to Anglo-Saxon poetry, for fundamentally it stayed out of the Parisian avant-garde dogmatism. It could reinvest both the lyrical and the epic field. As a young man I wished to write poetry in which narration would also find its place and would consequently hold what the art of prose had provided since Henry James, Proust, up to Joyce. This was the reason for my enthusiasm when I discovered Aiken’s Senlin: A Biography. Thus, it is not by accident that I translated—apart from Senlin—The Coming Forth of Osiris Jones and The Morning Song of Lord Zero. We know that Aiken multiplied poems with embodied characters: Selnin, Forslin, Osiris Jones, etc. Firstly and merely I translated them in order to read them. Since translating is a reading as much as a writing exercise, may I insist, this discovery was most valuable. While translating Aiken, I had to face metrics PAGE 292
problems—to me they are just as important in my own language—and I was delighted by his lack of dogmatism in these questions. He used canonic verse—as the hexameter—just as much as the so-called free verse. The way he uses them in turns is most stimulating. Density, its semantic and ringing density, is always the characteristic feature of Aiken verse. I even believe that this density has possibly discouraged a few. I make a point of it because in discussions with other French poets, themselves translators, when it came to Aiken’s poetry, it appeared that his work was either, most often, unknown, or rejected for its apparent “classicism”, or even worse, for provoking “allergies.” It’s a fact. All the more reason to publish it after translation. I wanted it to be talked about, I wanted to show that his “classicism” was only apparent; to show its thematic and technical richness. As he mixes history and biography, mythology and psychology, philosophy and science—soon I’ll publish a translation of the poem “Crystal focused on Pythagoras. As for the real allergic, what can we do? It’s this density, I come back to it, that gives its value and singularity. And it’s here that I hope to convince the greatest number. Reproducing it in French was most enthralling. While adopting his way of turning inside out the same object, following its curves, we grasp how it conditions its singular syntax and his work on sound, by rhyme, repetition and alliteration. Translating Aiken implies a specific concentration so as not to leave out any of the complexity of his words often allusive, so as to adopt his developments made of ellipsis, metaphors and narrative fragments, while working on syntactical equivalences. Finally, so that the poem in French is not a simple literal translation, one must work on syllables as subtly as possible. By and large, one cannot reproduce a
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A Creative Movement:
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II. Joëlle Naïm on Conrad Aiken and the Art of Translation “Faithful, unfaithful, just more of the same” —Henri Meschonnic In 2012, Olivier Gallon, the head of the publishing company, La Barque, asked me to translate “Silent Snow Secret Snow.” I did not know at all this author beforehand. It was the very first time I was to translate a literary text. This was a new experience for me. I immediately felt in tune with the intense and fragile young character, Paul, and his shaken vision of reality. Coincidentally, when I was translating the poem, it was snowing quite heavily in Paris. These snowstorms, very rare nowadays, took me away from my worktable, transported me on another plane, so to say. I felt in touch with Paul Hasleman. At times, “Silent Snow Secret Snow” shattered my consciousness of reality. Isn’t that the power of great texts only? Enveloped in the translation of this poignant tale, I found myself going through the same doubts and schizophrenia as the young hero. Paul’s ruminations about the snow, his illusions or delusion, helped me to understand my own difficulties, those of choosing the right word, and the schizophrenia of my position, moving from one language to the other. PAGE 293
The narration threw light on some aspects of my work. I was indeed hoping that, on one hand, this instable position “in-between” would help me abandon the illusion—a key word of the text—that the translation could be read as an original text; on the other hand, that it could lead me to discover words and expressions that I would not have used otherwise in a text of my own. The three short stories I translated—which were published two years later at La Barque, “Strange Moonlight” and “State of Mind”—are particularly good examples and introductions to Aiken’s world, to his Weltanschauung, his imagination and craft. They are among the more personal short stories of the poet and resonant of his inner self. They contain some of his main themes and imagery: childhood, madness, death, the relation to nature, to the parents, the sea, the attention to minute things, mud…To translate Great Circle is another story. The novel is a world in itself, and Aiken’s novel is the novel of a poet. This author, like all great authors, is a tree. His roots plunge deep in the cultural humus of both his country and Europe, into its myths, philosophy, and art. He is obviously a classic writer. But he throws his boughs and branches toward the sky of the future, experimenting new possibilities with a rare freedom, talent and shutzpah, humor too, disregarding any schools of thought or avantgardes. Conrad Aiken is a truly original American voice that has also been nourished by those of the Old World— Dante, Shakespeare…and to us, Europeans, sounds very genial and modern. The density of Aiken’s Great Circle, its wide cultural and human scope, the diversity of its writing, tones, and themes, the intimate subtle intricacies of the hero, Andy, as well as the complexities of the syntax, the riches of the
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meter without running the risk of deviating dangerously from the original, and above all without weakening it. In Aiken’s case, one had to concentrate on the meaning— with its references and hints—taking into account the multitude of its metric variations and its alliterative echoes.
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journey from one language to the other—helped me overcome my own weaknesses in this fight to translate such a difficult text written by such a talented author.
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vocabulary—rare, archaic, slang, poetic, and sometimes coined by himself, with even deliberate bizarreries—such as “sheep chewing their cud”—demand a lot from the translator. I had the impression of translating four different novels, one for each chapter. And again, frustrations and perplexity, when confronted by the choices between sound, rhythm, and meaning, especially when you know the importance of music and poetry for this writer; with the puns as well, i.e. the juxtaposition of two realities in one unique expression that you can practically never render fully. This book is a jewel case full of baroque pearls, shining, irregular, broken, never the same…or a wild mountain river, erratic, violent, but the image of life itself. I would not be tempted to smooth the pearls, to tame the torrent, as Andy attempts to do in order to make his dream more attractive—to “touch it up like a photographer; you know, just to make it a little brighter.” “Traduttore, traditore,” everybody knows this famous adage that sounds as an Aikian pun. It is usually understood as an unavoidable though unwilling infidelity to the original language; but, unexpectedly, I was forced now and again to be unfaithful to my own language, in order to make it more…relevant (ou relevante, this word can be understood in both languages). For instance, “Judas tree” translated literally so as not to lose the allusion to Judas; the correct translation would have been “arbre de Judée.” Judas, the traitor per se; and treason being one of the important motives of the novel. “Arbre de Judas,” as a far echo of the original text. The translation of a book is the deepest reading, as Philippe Blanchon remarked. It also gives you the opportunity to read it as an actor would act, to live it. The joy I had doing this translation—a creative movement—a
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2 ounces gin 1 ounce Cocchi Americano Rosa 1 dash orange bitters 1 olive, as garnish Stir in ice for 30 seconds (you want a decent amount of dilution). Strain into a chilled cocktail glass or coupe. Add the olive. (For extra credit, use fresh snow instead of ice.) ———
Why he, Paul, chose the main spirit, gin, for his cocktail is easily understood: Conrad Aiken, author of the psychologically symbolist “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” loved to imbibe martinis on a regular basis; and because gin is the main ingredient in a martini—not vodka, never vodka—the choice, to Paul, was obvious. As he reached for the bottle of Dorothy Parker American gin, smiling at the sheer literariness of it, he imagined Aiken at the beginning of his career, with his college chum Thomas Stearns Eliot:
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two editors huddled together over copy in the Advocate office, their clinking glasses echoing throughout the hallowed halls of Harvard, sipping—no, downing!— martini after martini. Ah, the life of the Ivy League editor, pulsating with power and possibility… But why Paul chose Cocchi Americano Rosa instead of the familiar dry vermouth—well, that is the crux of crafting this cocktail. After Paul read Aiken’s short story, he found himself in a state of altered reality (much like the story’s young hero, also named Paul), his thoughts aroused by the words on the page, such as “preciously concealed” and “beautiful trinket” and “deliciousness”—words that eventually led him to a cocktail shaker, gin, and bottles of fortified wines lining the shelf of his refrigerator. They beckoned him like harlots at a bordello, with their silky robes hanging loosely from their shoulders, mimicking the half-peeled labels of the French and Italian vermouths and quinquinas that were ripe for the taking. But Paul was not attracted to the soft and herbal femininity of the dry French vermouth. No—something deep inside him hankered for something unique, something a little wilder, with more flair. Something pink—that forbidden color among men. Yes, pink would do just nicely. A pink martini. So he reached for the gelid bottle of Cocchi Americano Rosa that he just the day before picked up at the local spirits shop—a picture of a crowing, striped cock emblazoning its label—unscrewed its top, and took a sip. Its faded fuchsia spread across his palate, reminding him of some long-ago moment when something else pink sweetened the back of his throat, warming his entire being with floral piquancy—yes, the memory now came into sharp focus. White zinfandel. But this was different—more adult, less gimcrack.
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Queer Martini
PAUL ZABLOCKI
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PAUL ZABLOCKI
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—— Photograph of Queer Martini by Steve Schul.
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Conrad Aiken... This Way... CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
(Mixing the Cocchi and the gin created a spark, redolent with the promise of fulfilling some hidden desire.) But he knew instinctively—he always relied on his instincts, because in his time on earth, second-guessing always lead to limp results—that mixing the splendiferous pink liquid jewel with the bracing herbaceousness of gin was not enough. Something more was needed to tame the flames of sugar and bring out the flavors inherent in both spirits. A uniter, if you will. The uniter proved to be easy: orange bitters. “Bitters makes it better,” a motto oft heard from men and women behind the stick, flashed before his eyes, but because he was still in an altered state, feeling the effects of Aiken’s Poe-like composition, the motto’s letters began to cloud his vision—like the secret snow that continuously falls in young Paul’s vision in the Aiken tale. The secret snow that he keeps hidden. The secret snow that he finds “queer” but exhilarating. The other Paul, however, the one mixing the martini, the one who writes you the tale of discovery you are reading at this very moment, will not keep his secret hidden—no, he wishes to share with you this recipe for what he hopes will become, for you, a holy trinity. One that you will turn to in your hour of need, when comfort from a cocktail is the only solace that will quell the humdrum of a quotidian existence. Paul wants you to make a Queer Martini soon. And to garnish it with an olive. At first, your mind will wallow in confusion: “Why, this drink is pink, but a briny olive sits at the bottom of the glass. What is this supposed to taste like?” Don’t be afraid of the pink. Embrace it. Let the pinkness turn you on.
PHIL HANR AHAN
ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
PAUL ZABLOCKI
THE SCOFIELD
CHARLIE MEYARD
CHARLIE MEYARD
Panel of Dead Authors
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CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
This issue’s theme is consciousness. What do you think the most important thing to know about consciousness is?
THE SCOFIELD
R. E. PARRISH
UNKNOWN
Death of the Author
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CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
The Aiken Family Business
THE SCOFIELD
Many know the “Proust Questionnaire,” which Marcel Proust didn’t actually create, but made famous by answering two similar questionnaires at different points in his life—and which Vanity Fair has since prominently featured in their issues. Lesser known is the “Frisch Questionnaire” which Max Frisch created in 1967 and which is included in his Sketchbook 1966–1971. Below author Carmen Boullosa answers Frisch’s questions. MF: Are you really interested in the preservation of the human race once you and all the people you know are no longer alive? CB: Not sure. But I do not doubt a tree (one, specifically) should survive my people and me. I even wrote a novel about it. I do not know if the tree I have in mind is long gone, but it’s very probable, and I guess another one I’m now seeing in my backyard could be it—it’s a magnificent tree, robust, generous, enormous. A neighbor we once had hated the tree because it shaded and “dirtied” his patio with its leaves. MF: State briefly why. CB: A tree is a tree, and a human could be as an insensible man as my neighbor was. Men have this attraction to death and order. MF: How many of your children do not owe their existence to deliberate intention? CB: None. I desperately desired them both. It was an urge to have them. Something selfish, I accept. I needed a
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daughter, first, then I needed a second child, a son, and I had them both. MF: Whom would you rather never have met? CB: My stepmother. And two or three of my friends— whom I do love, or once upon a time loved. MF: Are you conscious of being in the wrong in relation to some other person (who need not necessarily be aware of it)? If so, does this make you hate yourself – or the other person? CB: Can’t find an answer to this. I’m too self-centered. I am aware I am sometimes “in the wrong” against me, blaming myself more than I deserve—it’s my Catholic education. And I do hate me—hate the me that blames, and hate me—the one who’s blamed. MF: Would you like to have perfect memory? CB: Only when I feel anxious. Usually, I love to have memory gaps, it makes me encounter things as if they were brand new. I feel the best while reading a book, I find an exquisite passage, and then stumble into a colored mark I made years ago in the margin. The un-remembered and the re-remembering affords a second helping of joy. MF: Give the name of a politician whose death through illness, accident, etc., would fill you with hope. Or do you consider none of them indispensable? CB: Donald Trump would make a perfect corpse, but I wouldn’t feel “hope” if he passes away—only relief, and some malign satisfaction. He’s already an undead (“un muerto viviente”) and smells a bit as if he were a Confederate. But he’s replaceable. His zombie-ism is contagious. MF: Which person or persons, now dead, would you like to see again? CB: Today, my sister, María José, who died at fifteen, when I was twenty. But the encounter would be rough.
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
The Frisch Questionnaire
CAR MEN BOULLOSA
ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
CAR MEN BOULLOSA
CAR MEN BOULLOSA
MF: Which not? CB: Same. It would be too painful. I’ve abandoned her—hurts too much to think of her. MF: Would you rather have belonged to a different nation (or civilization)? If so, which? CB: In fact, I think I do belong to a different nation and time—if not “civilization.” I’m a nineteenth-century Latin American woman writer, unknown to your contemporaries. I belong here. If I were to choose, I would rather belong to your time—though not to America, not. I’m doomed. I am from nineteenth-century “Nueva Granada”—that country that Bolívar invented and only lasted some years. And I split my time between Brooklyn and Coyoacán, irreconcilable regions that abhorred each other. MF: To what age do you wish to live? CB: Forty-two. I would have been six years older than my mother. But I crossed that line twenty years ago; I’m two decades older than my desired age of death. Now that I’m in a none desired territory, I choose to live till ninety, if I’m in the same shape my grandmother was, which was quite perfect, never sick, bright head, never a visit to the doctor. Work, work, work, on whatever she chose. She moved, left her home, when she was ninety, and thought it was preferable not to climb three sets of stairs—to her bedroom from her work—and left Mexico City for even more favorable weather. MF: If you had the power to put into effect things you consider right, would you do so against the wishes of the majority? (Yes or no) CB: Yes! MF: Why not, if you think they are right? CB: No, they’re not. MF: Which do you find it easier to hate, a group or
an individual? And do you prefer to hate individually or as part of a group? CB: An individual. Groups are blurry for me. It would be easier to hate a group. But easy is not my forte. I don’t like “easy,” not in my writing, nor in my life. Never a group. In a full subway car, I can’t hate the whole; I even feel bonded with the crowd. I can’t understand how or how come. There’s something that resembles happiness: finally, I’m part of a group, that I could hate or love, but a group at least. I can only hate the man who’s inappropriately rubbing his body against me. It’s too easy to hate him, precisely him, though the truth is he is not an exception. He belongs to a group. But I don’t hate his group; I hate him. MF: When did you stop believing you could become wiser—or do you still believe it? Give your age. CB: I gave my age already, sixty-two (I like the number!). I’ve become dumber every year since I ended my forties. It’s painful, but true. Well, also I have to say I have understood that there’s some wisdom in my dumbness. I’m less arrogant, more an observer, more an inquirer. Less of a preacher. All that might add to some sort of wisdom. MF: Are you convinced by your own self-criticism? CB: Yes, and also not. I’m self-critical all the time. Twenty-four hours a day. And at the same time, as I do not trust myself, I can think I’m not self-critical, but indulgent or paranoid (they’d add to the lack of self-criticism). MF: What in your opinion do others dislike about you, and what do you dislike about yourself? If not the same thing, which do you find it easier to excuse? CB: I have no idea why others dislike me. I know that the reason some others don’t like me is not the reason why I flee from me. As per me, I only know I’d rather be
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CAR MEN BOULLOSA
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THE SCOFIELD
CAR MEN BOULLOSA
somebody else. That’s why I write novels. I’m an escapist, not a memoirist. MF: Do you find the thought that you might never have been born (if it ever occurs to you) disturbing? CB: Not really. There is something warm and comforting in imagining I could observe my grandmother and my mother without me playing any role in their lives at all. There’s so much to watch in those two characters— as per my grandmother, I have many things I would love to know about her teens. How did she live the violent years of the Mexican Revolution? How did her “Padrino” treat her when her father died and her mother left her to his protection? She would have never told me the truth. I would need to be nonexistent to get what I want. As per my mother, there is so much I need to see. Also, things she would have never told me. How could she, such as she was (critical by nature, zealous about women’s space in society, deeply religious), adore her father with no reservations? My grandfather was not exemplary on the girls’ front, and he had collaborated with Garrido Canabal, the governor at Tabasco who banned religion and any form of Catholic cult. I’ve drawn my answers—that he had been as a kid himself a captive of the “rebels” of the Mexican Revolution, etc., but I need to hear her own. MF: When you think of someone dead, would you like him to speak to you, or would you rather say something more to him? CB: I routinely spend lots of time talking, arguing, explaining things to my dead. My mother, my grandmother, my father’s parents, much less with my sister. I can talk. But the idea of touching them is quite disturbing. MF: Do you love anybody? CB: Yes I do.
MF: How do you know? CB: My skin is my counselor. MF: Let us assume that you have never killed another human being. How do you account for it? CB: Honestly, no chance I could have murdered anybody, even the thought is out of my limits. But this question opens a window: When I was young, I had a fish tank, and spent time observing the animals, fascinated by their colors and forms. Not only once, I felt panic at the thought I could kill them, my hand in their water, a little squeeze, all the magic gone, that easy. The idea horrified me. I felt horror. The horror of myself. MF: What do you need in order to be happy? CB: To write, and read. Mainly write, also read. I do it daily. I’m not ashamed of saying I’m happy. A simple soul, easy to please. MF: What are you grateful for? CB: My childhood. Even more of being able to remember passages of my childhood. It’s for me an intense pleasure. MF: Which would you rather do: die or live on as a healthy animal? Which animal? CB: I would love to live on a mustang. A hypothetical horse that would never get tired of his running non-stop in the plains. No humans, no arrows, no nothing in sight, but sky, lakes, the feel of the air, the smell. Much better than being inside a coffin or turn into ashes.
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CAR MEN BOULLOSA
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
THE SCOFIELD
THE SCOFIELD
Man, looking into the sea— taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have it to yourself— it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing but you cannot stand in the middle of this: the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave. The firs stand in a procession—each with an emerald turkey-foot at the top— reserved as their contours, saying nothing; repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea; the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look. There are others besides you who have worn that look— whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer investigate them for their bones have not lasted; men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave, and row quickly away—the blades of the oars moving together like the feet of water-spiders as if there were no such thing as death. The wrinkles progress upon themselves in a phalanx— beautiful under networks of foam, and fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the seaweed; the birds swim through the air at top speed, emitting cat-calls as heretofore— the tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, in motion beneath them
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and the ocean, under the pulsation of light-houses and noise of bell-buoys, advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink— in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness.
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
A Graveyard
MARIANNE MOORE
ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
MARIANNE MOORE
THE SCOFIELD
MARK COGGINS
DAVID MARKSON
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Conrad Aiken’s Grave Bench
Incidentally he was our last authentic man of letters, also. His criticism would remain seminal if only because he was virtually the first American to recognize Faulkner, or for that matter—credat qui vult—the relevance of Freud to literature. Is there any modern short story writer with a table of contents that can cast a shadow upon “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” “Your Obituary, Well Written,” “The Night Before Prohibition,” “Mr. Arcularis”? Aiken’s five novels go unread, yet Blue Voyage and Great Circle contain passages of sustained “interior” angst surpassed only in Under the Volcano and the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury. Moreover, lush and sensually self-indulgent as it appears, the layered experimentalism in Ushant may make it the one autobiography of our time demanding use of the word genius. And the poetry. Was there, finally, more than music? Why was the one book that James Joyce felt it “urgent” to read, in the last days of his life, Aiken’s Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones? Why is there so much of Aiken’s “Senlin” in “The Waste Land”? A better man than we knew, I suspect. Better, and more permanent.
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
A Selection from “Appendix A: Conrad Aiken” from Collected Poems
THE SCOFIELD
Viewing as a whole the phenomena we have studied, we see why it is that personality is a complex affair in that in its make-up there enter many factors, some acquired and some innate. Each of these is capable of more or less autonomy and upon their harmonious cooperation depends the successful adaptation of the personality to its environment. It is, we may say with almost literal truth, when these factors work to cross purposes that a personality ceases to be a harmonious whole; just as the individuals composing a group of persons, a football team, for example, when they fail to work together and each strives to fulfill his own purposes, cease to be a single team. Consciousness is not a unity in any sense that the term has any significant meaning beyond that which is a most banal platitude. The “unity of consciousness” seems to be a cant-expression uttered by some unsophisticated ancient philosopher and repeated like an article of faith by each successive generation without stopping to think of its meaning or to test it by reference to facts. Neither a reference to the evidence of consciousness or to its manifestations gives support to the notion of unity. The mind is rather an aggregation of potential or functioning
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activities some of which may combine into associative functioning processes at one time and some at another; while again these different activities may become disaggregated with resulting contraction of personality, on the one hand, and conflicting multiple activities on the other. The unconscious, representing as it does all the past experiences of life that have been conserved, is not limited to any particular type of experiences; nor are the subconscious and conscious processes to which it gives rise more likely to be determined by any particular antecedents, such as those of childhood, as some would have us believe. Nor are these motivated by any particular class of emotional instincts or strivings of human personality. The instincts and other innate dispositions which are fundamental factors are, as we have seen, multiform, and any one of them may provide the motivating force which activates subconscious as well as conscious processes. Impelled by any one or combination of these instincts unconscious complexes may undergo subconscious incubation and in the striving to find expression may work for harmony or, by conflict with other complexes, for discord. CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
A Selection from The Unconscious: The Fundamentals of Human Personality
MORTON PRINCE
ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
MORTON PRINCE
THE SCOFIELD
An Introduction to Conrad Aiken’s Final Letter, Addressed to Me I got the letter 43 years ago, but it took 30 years for me to get the message. Originally, as a teenager, I took Conrad Aiken’s personal note as a shot in the arm to pursue my own creative instincts. I went on to study creative writing and comparative literature at the University of Michigan and began a long career in journalism and eventually in publishing. Aiken’s brief letter was one of many early sparks that sent me on that course in life—but, then, I didn’t fully understand his message until the spring of 2005. That’s when I was invited back to Goodrich, my tiny hometown in rural Michigan, to address the spring gathering of a venerable group of women in that community who were interested in literature, education and the general betterment of their village. They wanted me to talk about how Goodrich prepared me for my career. The centerpiece of my talk became the story of the Aiken letter. In the spring of 1973, as a senior at Goodrich High School, I was impatient with my English teacher’s slow pace. I was eager to focus on an exotic poem in our literature textbook, “The Morning Song of Lord Zero”
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by Aiken, before the school year ended. Perhaps I was an unusual student, but I looked forward to a classroom discussion of that poem and I was eager to write an essay speculating on its meaning. I was crushed when my teacher announced that “we only have time left for the famous writers in our book,” so we would skip Aiken. I strongly objected, but she silenced me in short order. That teacher and I had a robust, intellectual sparring match that year and, after meeting her again years later, I realize we both enjoyed these spirited exchanges. Occasionally, I let my urge to win these arguments get the better of my judgment. Earlier that year, I had to apologize to her for an over-the-top rebuff in class. As the end of the year neared, I saw a way to triumphantly win this final argument. I wrote a letter to Aiken, pouring out my disappointment over skipping his poem in class. I hoped to be a writer, someday, I told him. I explained that my English teacher had sought to dismiss both of us, preferring to cover famous writers in our waning weeks—most notably Emily Dickinson. I stood up for “Lord Zero” in class. Then, I wrote to Aiken: “My instructor replied that Miss Dickinson was accepted as a great poet and that Mr. Aiken was not.” I concluded my missive with this affirmation: “I, for one, as lowly a critic as I am, enjoy your works.” Aiken replied, calling my classroom appeal on his behalf “delicious.” He encouraged me to pursue writing. And, I was absolutely thrilled to get his note in the mail. Yes, indeed, I would dare to pursue writing! That’s how I thought about the exchange at the time. I had little sense of what his note really represented. For years, I must admit, I completely forgot our exchange. Aiken’s true message didn’t begin to materialize for me until I got an email in early 2005 from Joan Graham,
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
Long-Forgotten Letters and Disturbances of the Heart:
DAVID CRUMM
ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
DAVID CRUMM
DAVID CRUMM
a writer on Cape Cod who wanted to tell me about “an amazing coincidence.” My byline had cropped up in an article in the Cape Cod Times through the Knight-Ridder wire service—on the same day Graham was pondering the final scene of a play she was drafting about Aiken’s life. She wanted to close her play with a scene in which characters would read the two final letters. Until she saw my name in her local newspaper, Graham said she had no idea that the boy from Goodrich in that final exchange had, indeed, pursued writing as a vocation. When I telephoned Graham, she delivered the detail that stunned me: “Didn’t you ever realize, Mr. Crumm, that you received the last letter he ever wrote?” I had no idea. There was no hint in his note to me that, at age 84, he lay dying in a hospital in Savannah, Georgia. In his final days, Aiken had chosen my letter from his mailbag to answer. I could not even recall his exact words until I dug through dusty boxes in our basement and finally re-read our exchange from 1973. What he was doing in that final note was sending his spiritual epitaph to a kid in rural Michigan—without a clue that I might somehow be the right recipient for what turned out to be such an important letter. At the time, I was so young that I didn’t have a clue what the great poet meant. I was an eager consumer of newspapers at that time, but I can’t even recall seeing an obituary of the poet. Since learning the news about that exchange of letters, I have made it my business to learn about Aiken’s life. Volumes by and about him now line a shelf in my home library. I shake my head and chuckle every time I re-read our letters. I had no clue, as a teen-ager, that Emily Dickinson’s fame had been one of Aiken’s greatest triumphs after he steadfastly urged others to consider the
depth of her work. No wonder he selected my letter from his mailbag for his response that day! What a bittersweet irony! In a small-town classroom far away, his Emily Dickinson had not only triumphed—she had completely eclipsed him. Throughout my career, now, I’ve reported from around the world on a wide range of subjects—from the surprisingly peaceful revolutions that toppled Soviet domination in Eastern Europe to the hopes for peace in the Middle East. Through it all, though, the central theme has been the spiritual aspirations that animate each human life. For a number of years, my byline with Knight-Ridder was Religion Writer for the Detroit Free Press. Throughout all of my work in journalism and now in publishing, I have specialized in works that identify and lift up the human spirit—while celebrating the diversity of our human family. I’ve often written and said in public that my work comes down to one, single spiritual question: “At the end of a busy day, did anything I accomplished today have any lasting value?” That’s the question that moves individuals, families, communities and entire nations around the world. And that’s the question Aiken focused on his note to me, writing: “If there is anything good in my poetry, people like yourself will find it. That’s all we can hope for, and goodness knows it’s enough. The effort alone is worth it.” He was telling me that the trick in responding to this nagging question about whether there’s any lasting value in our lives is that we don’t need to answer the question! Instead, we can approach each day holding fast to a confidence that, ultimately, compassion and creativity do matter.
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DAVID CRUMM
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
THE SCOFIELD
THE SCOFIELD
DAVID CRUMM
Reading further about his own fascination with Dickinson, in recent years, I’ve come to see our exchange of letters as part of a larger, ongoing pattern of letters that so many of us send out into the world—hoping to connect. I like to pause in wonderment at how Aiken responded when he first ran across Dickinson’s now-famous “Letter to the World.” Of course, their two lives never crossed. She died in 1886 and he was born three years later. But her letter remains out there for all to receive:
DAVID CRUMM
obedient to who-knows-what— we seek to chart disturbances of the heart.
Can you remember what I remember? Are we of one substance? Are we flesh or stone? Yet brought by solar synthesis together, comedians of the soul’s capricious weather,
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At some point in Conrad Aiken’s life—he got the message of that letter. He made it a part of his own vocation to send such letters back into the larger world— even to a kid in a village classroom way up north in Michigan. I pulled “Lord Zero” from my shelf again this week and re-read Aiken’s words with wiser eyes. A few lines from the poem capture these magical connections across time and space for readers with hearts and minds to hear them:
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
This is my letter to the world, That never wrote to me,— The simple news that Nature told, With tender majesty. Her message is committed To hands I cannot see; For love of her, sweet countrymen, Judge tenderly of me!
THE SCOFIELD
CONR AD AIKEN
A couple weeks before Conrad Aiken died on August 17th, 1973, the writer dictated the following letter to Mary Aiken on July 30th. A high school student named David Crumm had written him telling him that his teacher had skipped an Aiken poem in their text, and instead taught a poem by Emily Dickinson. The teached claimed, according to this student, that “Miss Dickinson was accepted as a great poet and that Mr. Aiken was not.” The irony of this, of course, is that Dickinson had not been accepted as a great poet during her lifetime or even soon after her death, and it was, in fact, one Mr. Conrad Aiken who, in editing one of the early collections of her poetry, helped solidify Dickinson’s place in the canon. The student claimed that he read and enjoyed Aiken’s The Morning Song of Lord Zero, and then wrote, “I would imagine that you do not fashion yourself the greatest poet of all time, but I, for one, as lowly a critic as I am, enjoy your works.” The following response would be his final letter. Dear David Crumm: What a delicious go-it-your-own way enterprising and intelligent letter about Lord Zero! Good for you. No, I don’t have any great notion about where I stand as a poet. That will be taken care of by those wiser people who come later on the scene than we do. Thus, as in their turn, those opinions too will be revalued over and over. PAGE 308
Yours sincerely, Conrad Aiken
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
Final Correspondence
None of us knows in what direction poetry and the other arts will turn—that’s part of the cruel fascination of being interested in the arts as you are, and keeping your head about it. If there is anything good in my poetry people like yourself will find it. That’s all we can hope for, and goodness knows it’s enough. The effort alone is worth it. Meanwhile let me thank you for standing up for Lord Zero, which, perhaps you would like to know, is one that I myself have a sneaking fondness for.
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A Letter to David Crumm, July 30th, 1973:
CONR AD AIKEN
THE SCOFIELD
MASTHEAD
MASTHEAD
Masthead Editor-in-Chief: Tyler Malone
Editors-at-Large: Mark de Silva Mira Jacob Matthew Specktor David Ulin
Creative Advisor: Alyssa Bishop
Editors: Matthew Daddona A. M. Davenport Mary Duffy Sarah Heikkinen Conor Higgins Joseph Schreiber
Dramatis Personae Portraitist for Issue 2.2: Prisma
Editorial Assistant: Sergio Mendez Daniel Rathburn
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Creative Director: P. T. Smith
Social Media Strategist: Adam Reece
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
Managing Editors: Scott Cheshire Dustin Illingworth
Creative and Technical
ISSUE 2.2 SPRING 2017
Editorial
THE SCOFIELD
Joan Aiken was an English writer specializing in supernatural fiction and children’s novels. She was the daughter of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Conrad Aiken. In this issue, Lizza Aiken recommends her story collection The People in the Castle in our Aikenesque section.
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Lizza Aiken is a writer and the curator of her mother Joan Aiken’s estate. In this issue, she recommends Joan Aiken’s story collection The People in the Castle in our Aikenesque section Rumaan Alam is the author of Rich and Pretty. His new novel will be published in 2018. In this issue, he recommends Saul Bellow’s novel The Victim in our On Our Nightstand section. Sam Allingham is the author of the short story collection The Great American Songbook. He lives in Philadelphia. This issue features his essay “The Narrator and the Madman: King Coffin’s World of Uncertain Ends.”
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
Conrad Aiken is was an American author who was equally proficient in poetry, fiction, and criticism. In 1930 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Selected Poems and in 1954 he received the National Book Award for Poetry for his Collected Poems. An underappreciated master of twentieth-century letters, Aiken was one of the first writers to wed psychoanalytic precepts to his work, which always set out to explore the complexities, ambiguities, and inconsistencies of consciousness. When he died, David Markson called him “our last authentic man of letters.” This issue is based around his work.
PRISMA
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THE SCOFIELD
PRISMA
Pamela Axe is a Canadian poet currently residing in Los Angeles, California. In this issue, she recommends George Santayana’s poetry collection Poems in our Aikenesque section.
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Jon Bartlett is a writer from Northampton, MA. His work has appeared in Bookforum and Music & Literature. This issue features his review of Thomas Bernhard’s novel 3 Days.
Jacques Barzun was a French-born American historian. This issue features an excerpt from his essay “The Man-Mountain” in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.”
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
Hannah Lillith Assadi received her MFA in fiction from the Columbia University School of the Arts. She was raised in Arizona and now lives in Brooklyn. She is the author of the novel Sonora. In this issue, she recommends Melissa Yancy’s story collection Dog Years in our On Our Nightstand section.
Our Nightstand section.
María Barrera-Agarwal is an attorney, writer, and translator. She is also the author of seven published books of essays and one of poetry. In this issue, she recommends Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s novel The Mirror of Beauty in our On
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Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and scientist whose writings covered a variety of subjects, including physics, biology, logic, poetry, theatre, and politics. This issue features an excerpt from his philosophical text Nicomathean Ethics. “Beginning to Write After Clarice, After Clarice’s (Echo and Dub Versions).”
PRISMA
THE SCOFIELD
Saul Bellow was a CanadianAmerican writer. In recognition of his literary achievements, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is also the only writer to win the National Book Award three times. His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, and Herzog. Rumaan Alam recommends his novel The Victim in our On Our Nightstand section. Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet. In 2010, New York Times columnist Dale Peck said that his work was “the most significant literary achievement since World War II.” He is widely considered to be one of the most important Germanspeaking authors of the twentieth century. A review of his novel 3 Days appears in this issue. PAGE 312
R. P. Blackmur was an American literary critic and poet. This issue features an excerpt from his essay “The Day Before the Daybreak.”
Philippe Blanchon is a French poet and translator. He has translated texts by authors such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, E. E. Cummings, and Conrad Aiken. This issue features his commentary “A Creative Movement: A Word from Conrad Aiken’s French Translators” (co-written by Joëlle Naïm). Harold Bloom is an American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. This issue features his foreword to Conrad Aiken’s Selected Poems.
CONRAD AIKEN CONSCIOUSNESS
Samuel Beckett was an Irish novelist, playwright, director, and poet. He is considered by many to be one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. This issue features an excerpt from his novel The Unnamable in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Carmen Boullosa is a Mexican writer and poet. Her work includes the novels Texas, The Great Theft, and Before. She has won five New York Emmy’s for the TV show, Nueva York. She answered the Frisch Questionnaire for this issue. Kay Boyle was an American writer and political activist. She published more than forty books, including fourteen novels, eight volumes of poetry, eleven collections of short fiction, and three children’s books. This issue features an excerpt from her novel The Crazy Hunter in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Edward Butscher is the biographer of Conrad Aiken, Adelaide Crapsey, and Peter Wild. He lives in East Hampton, New York. A. M. Davenport interviewed him for this issue. This issue also features as excerpt from his as-yetunpublished second biography of Aiken, Conrad Aiken: Cosmos Mariner. David Chalmers is a philosopher of mind whose characterization of consciousness as “the hard problem” has set a very high bar for understanding the mind. A transcription of his TED Talk is featured in this issue. Scott Cheshire is the author of the novel High as the Horses’ Bridles. His work has been published in AGNI, Electric Literature, Guernica, Harper’s, One Story, and the Picador Book of Men. He is a Managing Editor at The Scofield and lives in New York. In this issue, he recommends Conrad Aiken’s novel Great Circle in our Ports of Entry section.
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Roberto Bolaño was a Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist. He was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008 for his novel, 2666. This issue features an excerpt from his novel 2666 in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Julio Cortázar was an Argentine novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom. This issue features an excerpt from his novel Hopscotch in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.” Malcolm Cowley was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist. He contributed one of this issue’s epigraphs.
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David Crumm is an author and journalist who reports on the impact of religion on American life. This issue features his essay “Long-Forgotten Letters and Disturbances of the Heart: An Introduction to Conrad Aiken’s Final Letter, Addressed to Me.” Rachel Cusk is a Canadianborn novelist. In this issue, Matthew Specktor recommends her novel Transit in our On Our Nightstand section.
Matthew Daddona is an editor, writer, and reviewer living in New York City. He is a founding member of FLASHPOINT, a jazz and prose improvisation group, and has been involved in numerous poetry and art collaborations. He is an editor at The Scofield and is currently working on a novel. In this issue, he recommends Conrad Aiken’s poetry collection Selected Poems in our Ports of Entry section.
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Mark Coggins is both an author and photographer. His images have been exhibited across the country, including galleries in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. His books have been nominated for the Shamus and the Barry crime fiction awards. His photograph Conrad Aiken’s Grave Bench appears in this issue.
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Mark de Silva is the author of the debut novel Square Wave, which was released by Two Dollar Radio in February of 2016. He holds degrees in philosophy from Brown (AB) and Cambridge (PhD). After several years on the editorial staff of the New York Times’ opinion pages, he now freelances for the paper’s Sunday magazine, while also serving as a contributing editor for 3:AM Magazine and an editor-at-large for The Scofield. In this issue, he recommends Conrad Aiken’s novel King Coffin in our Ports of Entry section. Robert Demachy was a prominent French Pictorial photographer in the late 1800s and early 1900s. His bichromate print Struggle appears in this issue.
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Natashia Deón is a 2017 NAACP Image Award Nominee and author of the criticallyacclaimed novel, GRACE (Counterpoint Press), which was named a New York Times and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2016. In this issue, she recommends Kaitlyn Greenidge’s novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman in our On Our Nightstand section. René Descartes was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician. He is considered to be the father of modern western philosophy. This issue features an excerpt from his book, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences. Emily Dickinson was an American poet during the mid to late 1800s. Most of her poems were published posthumously, though she is now almost universally considered to be one of America’s most significant poets. This issue features her poems “You Left Me—Sire—Two Legacies—” and “This Consciousness That Is Aware.”
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A. M. Davenport is a writer and an educator in Brooklyn, NY. He is also an editor at The Scofield. He interviewed Edward Butscher for this issue.
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John Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist. He is best known for his U.S.A. trilogy. This issue features an excerpt from his novel The Big Money in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.” Mary Duffy is a writer, editor, and genealogist at work on a book about the Jewish refugee crisis prior to America’s entry into the Second World War. She is an editor at The Scofield. In this issue, she recommends Conrad Aiken’s novel The Conversation in our Ports of Entry section.
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Edouard Dujardin was a French writer. He is known as being one of the earliest users of the stream of consciousness literary technique. This issue features an excerpt from his novel We’ll to the Woods No More in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.” T. S. Eliot was a British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic, and poet. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature in 1948. This issue features an excerpt from his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.” Shamsur Rahman Faruqi is an Indian poet and Urdu critic and theorist. In this issue, María Barerra-Agarwal recommends his novel The Mirror of Beauty in our On Our Nightstand section.
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Hilda Doolittle was an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. She was associated with the Imagist poet group with included such members as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington. She published under the pen name H. D. This issue features an excerpt from her novel Asphodel in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Robert Fludd was an English physician in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He is best known for his contributions to occult philosophy. His figures from Utriusque Cosmi are featured throughout this issue.
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appears in this issue.
Max Frisch was a Swiss playwright and novelist. His works focused on problems of identity, individuality, responsibility, morality, and politics. He was one of the founders of the Gruppe Olten. The Frisch Questionnaire
Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic and theorist. The literary theory of criticism he developed in Anatomy of Criticism is considered to be one of the most important developed in the twentieth century. This issue features an excerpt from his book The Anatomy of Criticism in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.”
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Leslie Fiedler was an American literary critic. This issue features an excerpt from his foreword to Caesar R. Blake’s Dorothy Richardson in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.”
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist who is now considered to be the father of psychoanalysis. His theories, including the Oedipus Complex and dream interpretation, have helped shape modern psychology, and have been both criticized and utilized as psychology has evolved. This issue features excerpts from his book An Outline on Psychoanalysis.
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William Faulkner was an American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, playwright, and poetry. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. His 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury, was ranked sixth on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century. This issue features an excerpt from his novel The Sound and the Fury in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Nathan Goldman is a writer living in Minneapolis. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Literary Hub, the Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, Full Stop, and other publications. This issue features his essay “Beyond and Beneath Blue Voyage.”
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Our Nightstand section.
Kaitlyn Greenidge lives in Brooklyn. Her first novel We Love You Charlie Freeman, from Algonquin, was released in June 2016. In this issue, Natashia Deon recommends her novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman in our On
Phil Hanrahan is a writer and editor currently shuttling between Wisconsin, New York City, and Ireland. Author of Life After Favre, he is working on a new book telling the story of the Burren College of Art, a fine arts institution located in western Ireland’s stony, floral, sea-framed Burren region. This issue features his essay “The Scarlet Door.” His photographs of Conrad Aiken’s Savannah also appear throughout this issue.
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Peter Godfrey-Smith is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center and Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. A review of his book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness appears in this issue.
Graham Greene was an English novelist. He is thought by some to be one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. This issue features excerpts from his introduction to Conrad Aiken’s novel Great Circle.
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Damon Galgut is a South African playwright and novelist, known best for his novel The Good Doctor. In this issue, Joseph Schreiber recommends his novel In a Strange Room in our On Our Nightstand section.
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L. C. Hartley was a critic and professor of English at the North Carolina College at Raleigh. This issue features an excerpt from his essay “The Sacred River: Stream of Consciousness: The Evolution of a Method” in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.” John Hawkes was an American novelist. His best known works include The Lime Twig, Second Skin, and The Blood Oranges. This issue features an excerpt from his novel The Lime Twig in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Hermann Hesse was a German-born Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. His best-known works include Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. This issue features an excerpt from his novel Steppenwolf in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.” Conor Higgins is a writer and professor. He interviewed Peter Singer for this issue, which also features his essay “Toward a Copernican Word: Psychoanalysis Through Conrad Aiken’s One-Eyed Cather.” Joanna Hodge is a professor in the Philosophy department at Manchester Metropolitan University, and a specialist in transcendental philosophy and phenomenology. She is the author of Heidegger and Ethics and Derrida on Time, as well as many scholarly articles in her field. This issue features her essay “Sorties, Series, and Spirals: Conrad Aiken and ‘These Old Familiars.’”
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Difficult Pilgrim.”
Jack Hanson is a graduate student at the University of Chicago. His work has appeared in the Hopkins Review, the PN Review, the Quarterly Conversation, and elsewhere. This issue features his essay “The Divine,
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Robert Humphrey was a writer and critic who wrote Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel. He was an associate professor of English at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina. This issue features an excerpt from his book Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.” Dustin Illingworth is a managing editor at The Scofield. His work has appeared in the The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also a contributing editor at 3:AM Magazine. This issue features his essay “I’ve Got the Coffin—You’ve Got the Body: On the Friendship of Conrad Aiken and Malcolm Lowry.” He also recommends Conrad Aiken’s novel A Heart for the Gods of Mexico in our Ports of Entry section.
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William James was an American philosopher and psychologist. He is considered by many to be one of the greatest philosophical thinkers from the United States. This issue features an excerpt from his book The Principles of Psychology in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.” Kate Jordan is a graphic artist and designer. She interviewed Michel Vrana for this issue.
James Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet. Author of such works as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, he is widely regarded as the preeminent figure of the Modernist avant-garde and one of the greatest authors of all time. This issue features an excerpt from his novel Ulysses in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Byron Hooks runs Latitude 34 North. His photograph Conrad Aiken Historical Marker appears in this issue.
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Yoram Kaniuk was an Israeli writer, painter, poet, theatre critic, and journalist. An excerpt from his novel Between Life and Death appears in this issue.
Frank Kermode was a British literary critic. This issue features an excerpt from his essay “Beckett Country” in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.”
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Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. Kerouac, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, is considered to be a pioneer of the Beat Generation. His best known works include On the Road, The Dharma Bums, and Big Sur. This issue features an excerpt from his poem “Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur” in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.” Joseph Killorin is the executor of the Conrad Aiken estate and was a friend of Aiken’s towards the end of his life. Tyler Malone interviewed him for this issue.
Ian Kluge is a poet, playwright and independent philosophical scholar. He taught high school English and Comparative Civilizations for almost thirty years. He has published two books on Conrad Aiken. An excerpt from his book Conrad Aiken’s Philosophy of Consciousness appears in this issue.
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Kabir was a fifteenthcentury Indian poet whose work influenced the Bhakti movement. An excerpt from his poem “Between the Poles of Consciousness” appears in this issue.
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Shiv K. Kumar was an Indian English poet, playwright, novelist, and short story writer. He was a Professor of English in Osmania University. This issue features an excerpt from his book Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.” Gaston Lachaise was a French-American sculptor. His bust of Scofield Thayer appears in this issue.
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Seymour Lawrence was an independent book publisher and founder of the literary journal Wake. His introduction to the Conrad Aiken issue of Wake appears in this issue. Wyndham Lewis was an English writer, painter, and critic. This issue features an excerpt from his book Time and Western Man in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.” Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Born to a Jewish family in Western Ukraine, Lispector migrated to Brazil as an infant amidst World War I. All of Lispector’s work has been marked by her intense focus on interior emotional states. This issue features an excerpt from her novel Near to the Wild Heart in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Christof Koch is an American neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural bases of consciousness. He is the President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute of Brain Science in Seattle. From 1986 until 2013, he was the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology at The California Institute of Technology. Tyler Malone interviewed him for this issue.
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Megha Majumdar is a writer and assistant editor at Catapult. Her work has appeared in venues including Guernica, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub. In this issue, she reviewed Peter Godfrey-Smith’s novel Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
David Lodge is an English author and literary critic. This issue features an excerpt from his book Consciousness and the Novel in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.”
Carl Darryl Malmgren is a writer and critic. He has taught twentiethcentury literature and literary theory at the University of New Orleans since 1980. This issue features an excerpt from his book Fictional Space in the Modernist and Post-Modernist American Novel in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.”
Malcolm Lowry was an English poet and novelist best known for his 1947 masterpiece Under the Volcano. In this issue, Andrew Mason recommends his novel Ultramarine in our Aikenesque section. He is also the subject of Dustin Illingworth’s essay “I’ve Got the Coffin—You’ve Got the Body: On the Friendship of Conrad Aiken and Malcolm Lowry.” In addition, this issue features an excerpt from his novel Under the Volcano in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
Tyler Malone is a writer and professor of English. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Scofield and a Contributing Editor for Literary Hub. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Huffington Post, The Millions, and elsewhere. He wrote the Letter From the Editor for this issue. He also interviewed both Joseph Killorin and Christof Koch. In addition, this issue features his essay “Conrad Aiken and the Eternal Re-Currents: Ceaselessly Pushed Forward and Borne Back.” He also recommends Conrad Aiken’s experimental autobiography Ushant in our Ports of Entry section.
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John Locke was an English philosopher and physician. Considered to be one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, he is commonly called the “Father of Liberalism.” An excerpt from Essay Concerning Human Understanding appears in this issue.
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Joseph McElroy is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. This issue features an excerpt from his novel Women and Men in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.” Charles A. Mercier was a British psychiatrist and leading expert on forensic psychiatry and insanity. An excerpt from A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine appears in this issue.
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David Markson is the author of the widely-acclaimed novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress. His final four novels provoked Ann Beattie to admit that “no one but Beckett can be quite as funny and sad at the same time as Markson can.” An excerpt from “Appendix A: Conrad Aiken” from his poetry collection Collected Poems appears in this issue. In addition, this issue features an excerpt from his novel Going Down in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Andrew Mason is a Brooklynbased writer and reader. In this issue, he recommends Conrad Aiken’s collection of criticism A Reviewer’s ABC in our Ports of Entry section and Malcolm Lowry’s novel Ultramarine in our
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Katherine Mansfield was a prominent Modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and eventually settled in England, where she befriended the likes of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. In this issue, Nathan Wiley recommends her story collection Stories in our Aikenesque section. In addition, this issue features an excerpt from her short story “Bliss” in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Iben Mondrup is a trained visual artist from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She is also the author of four novels, including Justine and Godhavn. An excerpt from Justine appears in this issue. Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. This issue features her story “A Graveyard.”
Toni Morrison is an American novelist, editor, and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Her most notable works include The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, which won her the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. This issue features an excerpt from her novel Beloved in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Thomas Murphy is a writer and independent researcher based in the United Kingdom. This issue features his essay “Shifting and Transitory Windows: A History of the Stream of Consciousness Technique.” Joëlle Naïm is an artist, author, and translator. She has translated some of Conrad Aiken’s fiction into French. This issue features her commentary “A Creative Movement: A Word from Conrad Aiken’s French Translators” (co-written by Philippe Blanchon). Richard Bruce Nugent was a writer and painter. This issue features an excerpt from his short story “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Charlie Meyard is a guy who likes to draw the funnies. His comic strip The Panel of Dead Authors will appear in each issue of The Scofield.
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Kip Omolade began his art career as a graffiti artist while interning at Marvel Comics and The Center for African Art. He continued his studies at The Art Students League of New York and earned a BFA at the School of Visual Arts. His work is available directly or through Opera Gallery Hong Kong and Opera Gallery Singapore. His paintings are featured throughout this issue. Cynthia Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist. This issue features an excerpt from her interview with The Millions in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.”
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R. E. Parrish is an online cartoonist. As of September, she will be living in Silistra, Bulgaria, where she will be working as a Fulbright ETA. Her comic strip, Death of the Author, appears in this issue.
Walker Percy was an American author, perhaps best known for his debut novel, The Moviegoer. In this issue, Brian Smith recommends his novel The Moviegoer in our Aikenesque section. Maxwell Perkins was one of the most influential and celebrated book editors of the twentieth century. He nurtured the talents of some of the most important figures of American Modernism, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Conrad Aiken. This issue features a collection of comments he made about Conrad Aiken.
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John O’Hara was an American writer. This issue features an excerpt from his novel Appointment in Samarra in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Morton Prince was an American physician who specialized in neurology and abnormal psychology. An excerpt from The Unconscious: The Fundamentals of Human Personality appears in this issue. Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist, best known for his seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time. This issue features an excerpt from his novel Swann’s Way in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Daniel Rathburn is a writer living in East Lansing, Michigan. He is also an editorial assistant for The Scofield. This issue features his essay “A ThoughtTormented Essay: Themes and Variations.” Odilon Redon was a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughstman, and pastellist. His lithographs are featured throughout this issue.
Jean Rhys was a Dominican novelist, best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea. This issue features an excerpt from her novel Wide Sargasso Sea in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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J. T. Price has lived in Brooklyn since 2001. Excerpts from his first novel, The Unfamous, have appeared in The New England Review and The Brooklyn Rail. This issue features his essay “You’re a Literary Man, Conrad Aiken: An Unsuccessful but Undefeated Life.”
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Auguste Rodin was a French sculptor. A photograph of his sculpture, The Thinker, appears in this issue.
Josephine Rowe is an Australian writer, and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction. Her debut novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal is forthcoming from Catapult. She currently lives in Tasmania. This issue features her poems “What Passes for Fun” and “Simpler.”
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Nicolas D. Sampson is a writer and producer. His feature movie Behind The Mirror won an award for best thriller in the Manhattan Film Festival. He has lived in Tempe, Arizona; London, UK; and Nicosia, Cyprus, and loves a long drink in a short glass. This issue features his story “Unresolved Issues.” George Santayana was a Spanish-American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. In this issue, Pamela Axe recommends his poetry collection Poems in our Aikenesque section. Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the development of the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology. This issue features an excerpt from his book What Is Literature? in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.”
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Dorothy Richardson was a British author and journalist. She was one of the earliest modernist novelists to use stream of consciousness as a narrative technique, as seen in her sequential series of thirteen novels, Pilgrimage. This issue features an excerpt from her novel Pointed Roofs in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Mark Schorer was an American writer, critic, and scholar born in Sauk City, Wisconsin. This issue features his essay “The Life in the Fiction.”
Joseph Schreiber is a writer based in Calgary, Alberta. He runs a blog called Roughghosts and is an editor at The Scofield, and a contributor at Numéro Cinq. His writing has also appeared at 3:AM Magazine and Minor Literature(s). In this issue, he recommends Damon Galgut’s novel In a Strange Room in our On Our Nightstand section.
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Catharine F. Seigel is the author of The Fictive World of Conrad Aiken and was formerly a professor of English at the Rhode Island School of Design. An excerpt from The Fictive World of Conrad Aiken appears in this issue. In addition, she contributed one of this issue’s epigraphs. Hubert Selby, Jr. was an American writer, best known for his novels Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream. This issue features an excerpt from his novel Requiem for a Dream in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.” Sun Yung Shin is a Korean American poet, writer, and educator. This issue features her poem “Exactly Like You.”
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Arthur Schnitzler was an Austrian author and dramatist. This issue features an excerpt from his novel Lieutenant Gustl in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Germán Sierra is a neuroscientist and fiction writer from Spain. He has published five novels—El Espacio Aparentemente Perdido, La Felicidad no da el Dinero, Efectos Secundarios, Intente usar otras palabras, and Standards—and a book of short stories, Alto Voltaje. This issue features his essay “From the Mystical Text to the Machine: Aesthetical Approaches to Consciousness.”
Brian Smith is a writer and teacher. He lives in New Orleans and admits an unhealthy obsession with Walker Percy. In this issue, he recommends Conrad Aiken’s story collection The Collected Short Stories in our Ports of Entry section and Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer in our Aikenesque section.
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Peter Singer is an Australian moral philosopher. He is perhaps best known for his 1975 book Animal Liberation. Conor Higgins interviewed him for this issue.
Carmen Giménez Smith is publisher of Noemi Press and author of five books, including Milk and Filth. She co-edited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing, an anthology of contemporary Latinx writing (Counterpath Press, 2014). The poems in this issue are from a forthcoming volume in the City Lights Spotlight series. This issue features her poems “A Set of Conspiracy Theories” and “Being There.”
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May Sinclair was the pseudonym of Mary Amelia St. Clair, a British writer of poetry and prose. She was also a significant critic who is credited as the first to use the term “stream of consciousness” in a literary context, in an essay discussing the novels of Dorothy Richardson. This issue features an excerpt from her essay “The Novels of Dorothy Richardson” in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.”
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Ted R. Spivey was Professor Emeritus of English at Georgia State University. His publications include over a dozen books, such as The Writer as Shaman: The Pilgrimages of Conrad Aiken and Walker Percy and Time’s Stop in Savannah: Conrad Aiken’s Inner Journey. This issue features his essay, “Depth Psychology and Aiken’s Vision of Consciousness.” Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. This issue features an excerpt from her poem “Hotel François 1er” in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Ashley Strosnider is a writer and editor living in Nebraska, where she is the Managing Editor at Prairie Schooner. In this issue, she recommends Conrad Aiken’s novel Blue Voyage in our Ports of Entry section. Enzo Tagliazucchi is a physicist and neuroscientist using different tools to research human consciousness. He studies both when the lights go out—sleep, anaesthesia, coma—as well as when they flash uncontrollably— psychedelics and dreams. This issue features his essay “The Mismeasure of Consciousness.” Scofield Thayer was the publisher and editor of The Dial from 1920 to 1926. He is the namesake of The Scofield. A bust of him by Gaston Lachaise appears in this issue.
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Matthew Specktor is a writer. Some of his work includes the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book of film criticism. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Black Clock, and other publications. He is a founding editor of the LA Review of Books, and an editor-at-large for The Scofield. In this issue, he recommends Rachel Cusk’s novel Transit in our On Our Nightstand section.
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Jason Tougaw is the author of The One You Get: Portrait of a Family Organism (forthcoming, Dzanc Books) and Touching Brains: Literary Experiments in 21st-Century Neuromania (forthcoming Yale UP). He teaches at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. This issue features his essay “The Blood Beating in His Brain: Where is Consciousness in the Modern Novel?” Lionel Trilling was an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher. This issue features an excerpt from his essay “The Life of the Novel” in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.”
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Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter. Known for his bold colors and dramatic, impulsive, and expressive brushwork, he is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. His paintings are featured throughout this issue. Matthew Vollmer is the author, most recently, of Gateway to Paradise. The work featured in this issue of The Scofield will reappear in a collection titled Permanent Exhibit, to be published by BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2018. He teaches at Virginia Tech. This issue features his essays “Five Attempts.” Michel Vrana can’t imagine a world without book covers. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his son and pug pal. Kate Jordan interviewed him for this issue.
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Stephanie Tilden researches nineteent-century transatlantic literature, with a focus on voyage narratives. She lives in Providence, RI. This issue features her essay “Down Kaleidoscope: Aesthetic Consciousness in Conrad Aiken’s Blue Voyage.”
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Nathan Wiley is a guy who reads often and writes on occasion. In this issue, he recommends Katherine Mansfield’s story collection Stories in our Aikenesque section. Edmund Wilson was an American writer and critic. This issue features an excerpt from his essay “Ulysses” in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.” Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz was a Polish writer, painter, philosopher, playwright, and photographer. His gelatin silver print, Tadeus Langier, Zakopane, appears in this issue.
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Thomas Wolfe was an American novelist, best known for Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again. This issue features an excerpt from his novel Look Homeward, Angel in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.” James Wood is an EnglishAmerican literary critic, essayist, novelist, and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. He is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. This issue features an excerpt from his essay “Addicted to Unpredictability” in our compilation of literary critics on consciousness in literature, “Nothing But the Stream to Be Conscious Of.” Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the foremost Modernists of the twentieth century. She is often considered one of the greatest writers in the English language. This issue features an excerpt from her novel To the Lighthouse in our compilation of depictions of consciousness in literature, “The Streams of Our Consciousness.”
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Mykl Wells is an international award-winning artist working in Tucson, Arizona, well known for his monumental cardboard sculptures and intricate oil paintings. His paintings are featured throughout this issue.
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Paul Zablocki is a writer and editor from Brooklyn, New York. He develops cocktail and food recipes for Cocktail Buzz, and is a contributing editor to Diner Journal. Some of his recipes appear in the Gourmet-inspired cookbook The Way We Ate. He created the “Queer Martini” based on Conrad Aiken’s short story “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” for this issue.
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Melissa Yancy is a fiction writer whose work has appeared in Glimmer Train, One Story, Prairie Schooner, Zyzzyva, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. In this issue, Hannah Lillith Assadi recommends her story collection Dog Years in our On Our Nightstand section.
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