"Cool Toys From Outer Space": Is Christian Bok a mad genius or an anti-poet?

Here's Christian Bok, interviewed in the latest Believer about his upcoming project:

 The Xenotext Project is responding to the millenial science of genetics. I'm trying to write a book of poetry in which I translate a single poem, through a process of encipherment, into a sequence of genetic nucleotides, and then, with the assistance of scientists, I plan to build this genetic sequence in a laboratory so that I can implant the gene into a bacterium, replacing a portion of its genome with my text. The bacterium would, in effect, be the poem.

 I've selected an organism that is widely regarded to be the most unkillable bacterium on the planet, an organism called Deinococcus radiodurans. [...] The microbe is basically so durable that, if I were to store a poem in the matrix of this organism, I would effectively be creating a literary artifact that (except perhaps for the Pioneer probes and the Voyager probes) would be one of the few objects so far created by humans to outlast terrestrial civilization itself. I am hoping, in effect, to write a book that would still be on the planet Earth when the sun explodes. I guess that this project is a kind of ambitious attempt to think about art, quite literally, as an eternal endeavor.

 I think the idea is fascinatingly weird and pretty beautiful on the conceptual level. However, this also strikes me as one of those ideas that's a lot more fulfilling to think about than to actually experience. 

 For example, Bok's most famous collection Eunoia, has a similarly high concept conceit-- each of the book's parts relies on one noun. Its the kind of baldly Oulipean poetic escape-artistry that makes writers like myself who still use their hands to count out iambs whistle through our teeth and sweat about the brow in sympathy. Here's the thing though-- Eunoia impresses because of the difficulty involved in writing it, not for the writing itself. Here's a sample from Chapter I:

 Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks-- impish hijinx which highlight stick sigils. Isn't it glib? Isn't it chic? I fit childish insights within rigid limits, writing schtick which might instill priggish misgivings in critics blind with hindsight. I dismiss nitpicking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I bitch; I kibitz-- griping whilst criticizing dimwits, sniping whilst indicting nitwits, dismissing simplistic thinking, in which phillipic wit is still illicit.

 I admire the acrobatics required to get that far, but I come away feeling like he hit the nail on the head in the excerpt's self-lacerating first part. "Isn't it glib? Isn't it chic?" he writes, and I have to say that's where it seems to end as well. It's a kind of stunt poetry.

 Of course none of this is new. You can look at the dada poets drawing words at random out of a hat and contextualizing the result as poetry, or Perec's A Void, a novel which excluded the letter E, or Queneau's Exercises in Style, or Tsepeneg's Vain Art of the Fugue and so on up to recent mainstream successes such as Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Let's even throw in hypertextual experiments like Pale Fire, Dictionary of the Kazhars, and Hopscotch.

 All of the above books I would call successful, more or less, at what they set out to do-- or at least I can say that upon finishing them I felt a pleasure and contentment that more than matched the preliminary excitement/amusement at their respective "trifling gimmicks" (to borrow Bok's phrasing). So what's the distinction, setting aside the rather brutal and pointless-to-argue discussion of fundamental authorial merits? 

I kind of want to look at it as a question of longevity-- a gauge of the work's ability to know just how long to draw itself out, when to stop doing tricks and either end or become something deeper. 

 In the first case, you have the dadas, who moved onto something new whenever audiences (or themselves) became comfortable with a spectacle. After all, if you expect it, it's barely a spectacle. It was all about transience, about keeping in a constant state of agitated "revolution" (or novelty, whatever)-- if they were diligent about anything it was about not letting a schtick live long enough to become stale. I'd also group the Oulipeans here, whose experiments are mostly play for the sake of play, completely ludic and unassuming. Queaneau's book is a lot of fun, but not much more than that, and it doesn't pretend to anything more than that, which is fine. P&P&Z, similarly, is a good joke that, while maybe not worth 14 bucks, is content with being read and laughed at and then forgotten about. Think of Artaud's quote, "Written poetry is worth reading once, then should be destroyed," or Bolano's Ramierz Hoffman writing poems in airplane-exhaust-- the obsalesance is not only forgivable but integral. Of course, speaking of Bolano, you also have the trick he and Borges pull off so well of sketching out a particular idea for a narrative or a literary movement in the context of a fictional bibliographic universe-- I love reading about Menard's Quixote but I don't know if I'd want to read Menard's Quixote itself.

 The other option, of course, is to give the reader a reason to give a shit beyond the initial oohs and ahhs of formal contortion. Pale Fire is a great, great novel, and not just because of the whole foot-note conceit. Same with Vain Art of the Fugue, which takes Queaneau's pleasantly glib idea (variations on "man walks onto a bus and..." and turns it into an existential love story. Then there are cases where the virtuosity is less tied up with the integrity of the narrative, but is sort of icing on the cake of a good story. Meno's novel gets some great ironic moments out of its Encyclopedia Brown trappings, but it would still be a good read without the decoder ring and cake recipes. 

 Its this latter category of books, the Nabokov and Calvino masterpieces, that I admire the most-- experiments are great, but without an emotional anchor it begins to feel cold and empty after a little while, overly clever at best and downright masturbatory at worst. I think this is where Bok and I most fundamentally disagree. In the same interview I quoted above, he says:

 To write a poem nowadays is tantamount to visiting a pioneer village, where you watch someone hammer out a horseshoe. To write a poem is to knit a doily for a candy dish. [...] I definitely want to make discoveries about language, and I think that poets are like the technicians at Area 51, reverse-engineering alien tools for use in the human world. I doubt that I'm going to get to play with cool toys from outer space if I do nothing more than write emotive, lyrical poems about my intimate, personal life. I think that poets need to be more ambitious.

 I think he's missing the point-- I think the kind of poem he dismisses there is precisely the most ambitious. It opens up the most guarded workings of another human life to the reader, it creates a relationship between reader, text, and author that is deeply humanizing. I admire his ambition (I guess), but it's the attempt to engage the living world through language that makes a great poet, not an attempt to engage language qua language  through language. What's his end goal?

 I'll end with another quote about technical innovation in poetry, from the opposite side of the spectrum. From the Preface to Paradise Lost:

 The measure is English heroic verse without rhyme, as that of Homer in Greek and of Virgil in Latin; rhyme being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched meter and lame meter; graced indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have explained them.

 What good is a formal constraint if it isn't for the greater benefit of the poem? When the technical limitations of your project prevent you from expressing what you've actually set out to say, there's no reason to hold onto it. I'm still impressed by the idea behind Bok's biological poem, but I hope that that starting motive isn't the end of his investment in it. I think a bad, hollow poem outliving the human race might be worse than no poem at all. 

 

 

 

More Literary Losers

Mark Servas of The Elegant Variation recently posted an article on BookForum detailing some of his favorite literary losers—those unlucky protagonists too dopey and inept to even qualify as antiheroes. It features some expected choices, like Lucky Jim’s Jim Dixon, Nabokov’s Pnin, and Graham Greene’s Quiet American, but also some pleasant surprises such as Arthur Dent and Ticknor’s eponymous hero.

It's a fun little article, but it left out some of my favorite fuck-ups-- so here they are, in all their pied beauty.

A Confederacy of Dunces, John F. Kennedy Toole

 Ignatius J. Reilly is an obese shut-in medievalist who lives with his mother, self-absorbed, misogynistic, and disgusting. Walker Percy described the character as a “slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one,” which is a fair enough description, if a bit generous. Toole’s account of Reilly’s attempts to get his shit together and land a steady job is one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read, and one of the greatest descriptions of New Orleans ever put to paper. Oh, he also masturbates to memories of his dead dog. Well.

 Kepler, John Banville

 In the history of science, Johannes Kepler is one of the greats, a pioneer of modern astronomy and one of the greatest early proponents of a heliocentric system. In Banville’s novel though, he’s a neurotic, flakey, and hysterically peevish man, an ur-Woody Allan born, tragically, 400 years before the therapist and the orthopedic shoe. A funny, expansive, and ultimately sympathetic look at the foibles of genius, the novel is worth picking up for the scenes with the Rabellaisian Tycho Brahe alone.

 At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien

 The unnamed protagonist of O’Brien’s metafictional masterpiece hits a little close to home for—an unemployed liberal arts student living off his relatives while trying, unsuccessfully, to write his masterpiece. At least I can proudly say that I hold my liquor better than O’Brien’s semi-autobiographical character, who spends a disquieting amount of the novel throwing up in various locales throughout Dublin.

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

In a Pynchon novel, you can safely assume that most if not all of the characters are off in some way, but none are more poignantly (and ickily) human in their depravity than Gravity's Rainbow's Dr. Pointsman. The stereotypical science dweeb, Pointsman makes women uncomfortable, men annoyed, and Pavlovian octopii homicidal. When he rhapsodizes about his masturbation fantasies, involving beautiful women and the Nobel Prize committee, it's difficult not to be grossed out-- and, to a certain extent, sympathetic. In a novel populated by larger than life characters, Pointsman is refreshingly banal, and although we don't want to see him prevail over the novel's heroes, we're at least a little relieved when he finally gets laid.

 Marcovaldo, Italo Calvino

 Although he’s better known for his more experimental fiction, Calvino’s short stories about a poor rural worker transplanted into an unnamed industrial city in Northern Italy are some of my favorites. Marcovaldo is something like a warmer, gentler precursor to Homer Simpson—an inept family man working a demeaning job, whose attempts to find a little happiness each day usually end up hospitalizing him in one way or another. Still, the twenty stories making up the story of Marcovaldo were written over the course of 15 years, and by the end Calvino tends to cut his protagonist a little slack. The very last story, “Santa’s Children,” is representative of the tone of the later pieces—charming, whistful, and a little bit haunting.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

 Poor Prufrock has no luck with the ladies, and can hardly even work up the nerve to open his mouth. On top of all that, he’s balding. Sometimes when I read this poem, Eliot’s virtuoso language sort of obscures the fact that at the heart of it, Prufrock is a total dweeb.

 L’ecume des Jours, Boris Vian

 Boris Vian’s hilarious, heartbreaking, incredibly strange novel (translated as Froth on the Daydream or Foam of the Daze or Chloe or Spray of the Days or…) has a lot of head-scratching bits in it, but few more peculiar than the main character’s best friend Chick, an amiable loser whose constant borrowing eventually drives the novel into tragedy. What’s he need all that money for? Simple—buying reams of books, discarded tissues, and hair clippings of the philosopher Jean-Sol Partre, a bizarre parody of Sartre. Chick ultimately proves that when you live in a surrealist wonderland like Vian’s Paris, fiscal insolvency doesn’t pay—at the end of the novel his heart is plucked out by the police for not paying his taxes.

 The Brief & Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

When we first meet Oscar, he’s a fat, lonely kid whose only pleasures are comic books and fantasy novels—in a subversion of the usual bildungsroman expectations, he remains fat, lonely, and nerdy through most of the novel, despite the efforts of various characters. In the end, he’s dead. Brief & Wondrous indeed, I guess—but at least he got a Pulitzer out of it.