Mario Incandenza’s James Incandenza’s O.N.A.N.tiad

Now reading: Infinite Jest.

Since my first reading lo those many years ago, I had forgotten, more or less completely, about Mario Incandenza.  Which is sad, since Mario is such a lovely, strange, mysterious character.  (Also, in a completely inappropriate way, he reminds me of Buster Bluth, from Arrested Development, both in his childlike nature and in his uncertain parentage: whenever it’s mentioned that Mario might be Charles Tavis’s son, I start hearing that soap-opera music they used for Uncle Oscar’s heavy-handed hints about Buster.)

Mario had a premature and very weird birth after Avril’s “hidden pregnancy.”  It sounds like nothing so much as the baby in Eraserhead.  Now he’s bradykinetic (slow of movement and response) and has shriveled S-shaped arms and can’t stand upright.  Allusions are made to robots, spiders, the mentally retarded, and homunculi, when it comes to Mario, but none really apply for anything but physical appearance.  He also seems to be utterly without irony, ulterior motive, or disturbing doubts about his family, unlike everyone else in said family.  He loves Madame Psychosis’s radio show for reasons he can’t explain and is more or less traumatized when she goes off the air (as a result of her overdose/suicide attempt).  He was extremely close to James “The Mad Stork” Incandenza, his father(?), and helped on his films.

In fact, he created a parody/homage to one of those films: The O.N.A.N.tiad, described in the note 24 filmography as an “Oblique, obsessive, and not very funny claymation love triangle played out against live-acted backdrop of the inception of North American Interdependence and Continental Reconfiguration.”  (Here’s what appears to be a simple error: the JOI original is listed as 76 minutes in the filmography but said to be four hours long in the text.)  It’s “anti-confluential,” meaning it resists the trend to tie all the threads of its narrative together in a nice little package, a school of filmmaking JOI helped to create.  (Presumably in reaction against Magnolia, or Crash, or another look-how-we’re-all-connected-and-depend-on-each-other film of 1996’s future.)  On Interdependence Day (Nov. 8th) every year, when the continent “celebrates” the creation of the Organization of North American Nations, the E.T.A. students and staff watch Mario’s version, made in a broom closet with puppets.  We get DFW’s (or Hal’s?) ekphrastic description of it.

In this way we get a lot of the complicated geopolitical background and exposition for the novel.  And part of the point here is how mediated this exposition/background is: we’re watching a homage of a parody of world events which were really, it would seem, much less important to JOI than the affair he thought Rod “the God” Tine was having with French-Canadian operative Luria P., which served as a kind of allegory of the affairs he thought his wife was having with French-Canadian operatives more or less all the time (and perhaps accurately).  There’s an interesting comment that “somebody else in the Incandenza family had at least an amanuentic hand in the screenplay.”  Who?  Avril?  Hal?

(Sidebar: there have apparently been theories floating around about Avril’s “amanuentic hand” being more or less all over this book, and it’s true: she seems to be lurking everywhere, especially in the French-Canadian separatist shenanigans.  Lots of little intimations in the footnotes, here.  And it does make you wonder about that head in the microwave…)

And through this filmed puppet-show we meet “Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner,” leader of the Clean U.S. Party, surprise winner of the U.S. election, utter obsessive about hygiene and cleanliness, possibly a real-life puppet for Rod “the God” Tine, head of the Office of Unspecified Services.  (This possibility, emphasized in Mario’s remake, is downplayed by the narrator, which is interesting.)  The Johnny Gentle/Rod Tine relationship, and the whole “experialist” Gentle presidency, is more or less uncomfortably familiar, after eight years of Bush/Cheney.  Experialism could be construed as just being the opposite of imperialism, in that it involves forcing other countries to take your land, but there’s really a much more complicated relationship between the two concepts, experialism really meaning something more like exploiting the danger of your enormous and even obvious power to do whatever you want with parcels of land that you’ve “generously” “given” to other countries who you railroad into being or at least publicly acting like your allies.  It involves finding an “external Menace to hate and fear,” even if it’s just something you’ve made up, or that was made up or impotent but that you’ve actually made real and potent through either your bungling or your Machiavellian scheming.  (See: Quebecois terrorist groups.)  Hell, I’m sure there are whole dissertations in the works about DFW’s experialism and its Bakhtinian implications or whatnot.

The best part of the movie, by the sound of it, is the newspaper-headline interludes, flashing us through swaths of history a la old movies and (more commonly) homages to old movies.  DFW creates this great mini-narrative, in the narrator’s ekphrastic descriptions of the headlines, about a “Veteran but Methamphetamine-Dependent Headliner” who writes incredibly long run-on headlines that are basically articles in themselves, and we follow this meth-addict headline-writer from his gig at a major newspaper to smaller and smaller towns where he continues to be unable to kick either his meth or logorrhea habit.  (And, of course, a self-reflexive joke on his own run-ons and stylistic quirks, since the headlines are more or less quintessential DFW-style headlines.)

I actually wouldn’t be too surprised if someone did make this movie, someday.  I’d watch it, even if it was “openly jejune.”

Tear Off Your Own Head

Just finished: Been Down So Long It Looked Like Up to Me.

Tear off your own head

Tear off your own head

It’s a doll revolution

-Elvis Costello

This is not an advice column, but I’m going to go ahead and give some anyway: you probably don’t need to read this book. But if you’re interested in Pynchon, you might want to take a look at his introduction sometime. (Mine is a 1983 Penguin paperback, which I believe is the first with the intro.) It’s surprisingly heavy on the personal detail, rather tellingly uninterested in much of the book itself, and seems to have been written while Pynchon was writing or at least planning Vineland, since the phrase “karmic adjustment” pops up.

But there are some interesting things in the book — it’s overstuffed, is all, and rather pompous — including its use of ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is the description of an artwork in a medium different than that artwork (although it’s often used for descriptions of books within books, too): in this case, there’s the use of jazz rhythms and descriptions of other music, but there are also paintings. I tend to be a sucker for this in literature: it’s one of the things I love Paul Auster for (the movies were the best part of The Book of Illusions, for instance). The most important painting here is kept rather cryptic, but in a useful way. And it strikes a strange chord (to engage in ekphrastic metaphor) with the Elvis Costello song quoted above.

It’s a mural-sized canvas by Calvin Blacknesse, Gnossos’s friend, advisor, and guru. Blacknesse is, apparently, a figurative painter, rather out of step with the art-world trends of his time, even anachronistic, I should think (although there may be a hint of early psychedelia, here). His canvases appear to be heavy on symbolism and mythological imagery. When we first meet him, he’s painting “the dark goddess.” Here’s our first brief description of the painting most important to Gnossos: “That one with the tapestry look, a beheading. Must have it sometime.” Gnossos then goes on a very bad mescaline trip in the Blacknesses’ house, and is terrified of the painting. “No, I saw him,” he says of the figure in the painting. “He cut his head off. All by himself.” (This leads to one of the funniest scenes in the book, the tripping Gnossos fleeing to the bathroom to hide all the razor blades to protect the family from themselves.)

Nevertheless, he takes the canvas and installs it over the mantel in his room. Like a lot of ekphrastic devices, it serves, I think, as a kind of compact allegory of the character with which it’s identified. Gnossos is, indeed, on a mission to tear off his own head, it would seem: his quest to receive a vision, to get out of his own skin, to remain “Exempt”: from death, societal convention, and ordinary consciousness. In another funny touch, the canvas nearly falls on him when the spurned Pamela attacks him with a knife: “the nearly decapitated profile rushed at his own.” Funny picture, a man in profile presumably with a knife cut through most of his throat, with the medieval look of a tapestry.

Some more lines from “Tear Off Your Own Head”:

What’s that sound?

It will turn you around

It’s a doll revolution

They’re taking it over

And they’re tearing it down

It’s a doll revolution…

(Costello wrote this to be recorded by the Bangles, I’m told, and they did so, after his version was released. It’s a very sixties song, for a very sixties-sounding group.)  At the end of this book that’s exactly what’s happening: Alonso Oeuf, Gnossos’s nemesis, has successfully led a coup of the university administration with a demonstration of thousands of students who will do pretty much whatever they’re told. A doll revolution.  I suspect it’s supposed to be read as a microcosm of the university unrest of so much of the sixties, with both its good elements (increased academic freedom, decreased repressive sexual regulations) and its ugly (wankers who play at being revolutionaries following the mob’s every whim).

Gnossos has an ambivalent relationship with the real: he wants the mystical “real,” as his name implies, the layers of reality behind the mundane. But he’s terrified when a vision does strike — it happens to be a death-vision, unpredictable as visions tend to be — and when real death occurs, he’s rather unprepared for it. He’s a kid, and an unlikeable one at that. Anyone who says “Oh, Thanatos baby, kiss my wicked tongue” as he threatens to jump off the side of a boat for a lost love is not terribly likeable, or prepared for the reality of death.

The Top Ten Goofs of Vineland

Just finished: Vineland.

In case my scintillating analysis hasn’t convinced you to read (or re-read) Vineland, I’m listing below my ten favorite jokes, digressions, fables, and goofs (the majority of the book, really). Print it out, take it with you to the library, enjoy in air-conditioned splendor. (Plus, if you don’t check it out, the Feds can’t track you and your dangerously socialist borrowing habits!)

In paginated order:

-The first chapter is almost completely detachable, a zany, slapstick, perfect little mini-narrative of lumberjack-themed gay bars, Valley girls, DEA agents, transfenestration, and, of course, the Tube. Read it. Pretend it’s a short story.

-The Marquis de Sod commercial, p. 46-47. Please tell me a California landscaping company has co-opted this schtick by now.

-Takeshi’s adventures at Wawazume Life and Non-Life, p. 142-48. The inevitable Godzilla subplot.

-Sister Rochelle’s alternate version of the Garden of Eden, p. 166. Pretty close to the heart of the book’s sex stuff.

-The crazy preacher on p. 213 who interrupts the weather crew. This whole chapter about the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll is pretty great, actually.

-Weed’s adventures with Dr. Larry Elasmo, p. 225-229. Pynchon does Kafka!

-The Federal Emergency Evacuation Route, p. 248-49. Believable and paranoid.

-Brock on the airplane, p. 277. What the little girl sitting next to him shouts made me laugh harder than anything else in the book, but it’s also more than a throwaway. Great paragraph.

-The Noir Center, p. 326. Bubble Indemnity! (The whole interaction of Prairie and Che is great, actually, and I’m deeply impressed by how Pynchon use of Brent Musberger to make maybe his best point about how TV’s affected us: our desire to “be the one to frame,” to comment on our world and our lives rather than to act, to move.)

-The running gag of biopics starring wildly unusual actors, culminating on p. 370-71. This is a movie that must get made. (Just after this there’s a movie about the ‘83-84 NBA playoffs with the Lakers as heroes, the Celtics as villains, but let me remind you that Pynchon’s always commenting on how the Tube distorts events, so I don’t think he’s necessarily a Lakers fan. Please, God, let it not be so.)

Some of the songs are funny, too, and there’s a passage in the last paragraph which might (it’s a very qualified might, even) explain the cartoonish sections of the book (more metafiction, if you choose to read it that way).

Odin’s Revenge

Just finished: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

One last brief note on Gibbon’s book. I was happy to find a glancing reference to one of my favorite passages in the whole work in the final chapter. Early in the work (chapter ten), Gibbon speculates on the origins of the Goths, and of the Nordic religion. He proposes that “we can easily distinguish [in the Edda] two persons confounded under the name of Odin — the god of war, and the great legislator of Scandinavia.” Things get really fun after that: Gibbon speculates that, if a real, human Odin had existed, he may have been the chief of a tribe dwelling near the Black Sea, until Roman troops approached. I have to quote directly from him after that:

It is supposed… that Odin, yielding with indignant fury to a power which he was unable to resist, conducted his tribe from the frontiers of the Asiatic Sarmatia into Sweden, with the great design of forming, in that inaccessible retreat of freedom, a religion and a people which, in some remote age, might be subservient to his immortal revenge; when his invincible Goths, armed with martial fanaticism, should issue in swarms from the neighbourhood of the Polar circle, to chastise the oppressors of mankind.

A real-life Odin creating the dark, bloody Nordic religion and ethos as a way to, eventually, avenge his expulsion from his native lands by the Romans! A flight this fanciful is fairly uncharacteristic of Gibbon, and it carried him away, I think, just as it did me; he clarifies in a long footnote that the story “might supply the noble groundwork for an Epic Poem, [but] cannot safely be received as authentic history.”

His book took up so much of his life — twenty years — that Gibbon had plenty of time to reconsider his earlier writing. Anyone who loves this book loves Gibbon’s last chapter, probably the best known part of the whole work, in which he discusses the causes for the ruins of Rome’s ancient buildings. He takes the opportunity to downplay the damage done to Rome by the Goths and Vandals, and in a very loosely connected footnote his embarrassment at his earlier theory is palpable: “I take this opportunity of declaring that in the course of twelve years I have forgotten, or renounced, the flight of Odin from Azoph to Sweden, which I never very seriously believed. The Goths are apparently Germans…”

Nevertheless, it’s one hell of a theory, and it would, indeed, make a great epic poem, were people still writing such things.

The Theatre of the Closed Book

Now reading: The Art of Memory.

Frances Yates had this theory, okay? And it seems to have been a bee in her bonnet. I can imagine her attempting to explain it, in the necessary deep detail, to acquaintances at cocktail parties, who’ve shown a polite interest in her esoteric project. It involves Shakespeare in a tangential way, so of course it’s interesting. But like so many other attempted reconstructions of his life and times, it is wildly circumstantial, a theory built on great stretches of the imagination and wild postulations of four-hundred-years dead peoples’ associations, readings, motivations. It’s cool, but kind of unbelievable.

As Yates herself says, to take this theory out of the context of her book on the development of the art of memory from classical rhetorical skill to occult Renaissance ritual for approaching divinity is to make it seem… kind of incomprehensible. But here are the basics. The English philosopher and mystic Robert Fludd developed a memory system, building on the systems of Giordano Bruno and Giulio Camillo. Actually, Fludd describes two arts of memory: the “round art,” similar to Bruno’s occult use of astrology and images symbolizing the zodiac, and the “square art,” more like the medieval system of using images of “corporeal things” like men and animals placed in memory rooms.

Like much of the discussion in this book on the Hermetic Renaissance philosophers, Yates’s discussion of Fludd is based somewhat on conjecture, because so much of what they wrote seems (to us, at least) willfully obscure, as if withholding a secret or writing only for the initiated, a secret cabal. But she seems right in saying that Fludd proposes to combine these two arts, and to do so in rooms which Fludd calls “theatres.” Engravings of such theatres are included in the second volume of his gigantic work Utriusque Cosmi Maioris Scilicet et Minoris… (1619). Fludd does seem to say, at one point, that he intends his art to be done using “real” places, not imaginary ones (like the grand imagined cathedrals of medieval memory I speculated on in an earlier post).

Therefore, Yates believes Fludd’s theatre engravings are based on actual theatres — or, to be more specific, the stages of actual theatres. Through a torturous series of associations, she convinces herself that Fludd has given us an image of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. I don’t really buy it, although it’s a really cool theory and you can tell how excited she was by the idea. At least the theatre-rooms Fludd included in his work do seem to give us some sense of how an Elizabethan and Jacobean stage might have looked (assuming the engraver, probably a German, was given adequate instructions).

But the really fascinating part of Yates’s argument is what she extrapolates from the physical layout of Fludd’s book. On two facing pages there are engravings of the zodiac symbols and spheres of the planets (a round image), and Fludd’s main theatre-room (thought by Yates to be an image of the Globe). (See both images here, figs. 25 and 26, a little over halfway down the page. Sorry, I struck out looking for a better image of the full pages.) If you know your Elizabethan stage history, you know that the ceiling covering the rear part of the stage is thought to have been painted with an image of the night sky, or other representations of the stars, and was called “the heavens.” Drawing on this tradition, Yates speculates that the position of the two engravings is meaningful: when the book is closed, the round image of the heavens will cover or be on top of the square image of the stage, just as the heavens of the stage cover the lower realm where most of the action took place. The round and square arts of memory are thereby combined, just as the position at which some scenes took place in Shakespeare’s plays can be meaningful and symbolic — think of Prospero in the Tempest, appearing ‘above’ in one scene: the magus, his superior knowledge keeping him above the fray of human foibles.

I can’t remember seeing the position of text and image in a work used in this way before. That the position of the text when unread could be important! Great idea, and I love the symbolism, and it is certainly tempting to think about the influences the Hermetic ideas going around in England at the time might have had on Shakespeare and the Kings’ Men and James I himself (to whom Fludd dedicated the first part of his book). Speculation, but fun speculation.

Teeth and the Man I Sing

Just finished: Sharp Teeth.

One last, short note on this.  I didn’t think about it much until I finished it — maybe I have allusion-fatigue after Welty — but the arc of this book’s plot does have some interesting parallels to the ancient epics, and especially the Aeneid.  It’s there explicitly in the first line, “Let’s sing about the man there…”

You have Lark losing his pack, wandering and finding comfort with a kind woman, then founding a new pack and going to war.  There are bits of Aeneas and bits of Odysseus here.  There’s maybe a sly reversal of the Circe myth in the story of Bonnie and Lark, in that unlike Circe changing Odysseus’s crew into wild beasts, Lark changes from dog to man under her nose, as she sleeps the sleep of the drugged.  Bonnie seems to kind of be Dido and Circe and Calypso and Penelope, at various times.

There’s also Venable’s great soliloquy in the third book (p. 175), on the violence to the earth done by the sprawling L.A. megalopolis.  The taming of the Italian wilderness, and the violence of that civilizing, is a theme that runs through the Aeneid, as well.

It’s all fairly subtle, and restrained.  Does seem to be there, though.

Things Get Weird Past Cathay

Now reading: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.

Mandeville’s been in cartographic/touristic/historian mode for a while, but he really lets it all hang out near the end of the book. After he’s described the Mongol lands and China, he just starts repeating whatever he’s heard (or embellishing whatever he’s read, perhaps). A couple of choice examples from chapter 29:

Maybe the most famous cock-and-bull story here is the one which the editor speculates might be hearsay about Korea: “There there grows a kind of fruit as big as gourds, and when it is ripe men open it and find inside an animal of flesh and blood and bone, like a little lamb without wool. And the people of that land eat the animal, and the fruit too.” Even weirder, Mandeville gets all world-weary and says it’s no big deal, since in England they have trees whose fruits bear geese if they fall on water. Uh, yeah, sure.

An interesting apocalyptic story, too: according to Mandeville the Gog and Magog references in Revelation are to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, which are trapped in a mountainous land. When the Antichrist appears, a fox will dig a hole into this land from just outside the gates that were built by Alexander the Great to hold these Jews in, and since they don’t have foxes there they’ll be so intrigued that they will chase him and dig after him and thereby escape their prison. It’s got a very old, very Freudian, very ugly-early-medieval-folklore feel, this story.

No, It’s Not a Bait Shop

Now reading: Good Omens.

Here’s an unexpected delight: Newton Pulsifer and Anathema Device (great names in this book) in the car, desperately trying to figure out how to avert the Apocalypse:

“….They say that Armageddon will come about because of the Antichrist being good with computers.  Apparently it’s mentioned somewhere in Revelations.  I think I must have read about it in a newspaper recently…”

“Daily Mail.  ‘Letter from America.’  Um, August the third,” said Newt.  “Just after the story about the woman in Worms, Nebraska, who taught her duck to play the accordion.”

Nebraska is actually mentioned a number of times in the book–surprising, for the work of two Brits–but Worms?!  Worms is a tiny, unincorporated town in central NE, kind of near Grand Island.  Named, I believe, after the town in Germany where Luther defended his criticisms of the church–the famous (ahem) Diet of Worms.  It is home to one of the world’s most delightfully named bars: the Nightcrawler.  Jaime and I once attempted to visit, but we went on a Saturday night and, believe it or not, the place was packed.  I think it was Prime Rib Night or something.  Anyway, it’s supposed to have great bar food.

I could only wildly speculate on how Gaiman (or Pratchett–but I suspect Gaiman) came across this bit of American arcana.  Delightful, though, to imagine the pasty, black-clad Brit drinking PBR with the locals at the Nightcrawler on a Husker game night, is it not?