4: Shortcuts

PRIMARY:

• Jhumpa Lahiri, The Unaccustomed Earth (2008)
• Lydia Davis, Can’t and Won’t (2014)
• Diane Williams, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine (2016)
• Ben Lerner, “The Polish Rider” (2018) [read and listen here]

SECONDARY:

• Kasia Boddy, The American Short Story Since 1950 (2010)
• Merve Emre, “Timeless Quickies”, NYRB, Feb 21, 2019 [here] *
• Jonathan Evans, The Many Voices of Lydia Davis (2016)
• Fiona Green (ed.), Writing for The New Yorker (2016)
• Ben Lerner, “Damage Control”, Harper’s (2012) [here]

Pre-Class Notes

— For Diane Williams’ Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, I’d like to focus on ‘Girl with a Pencil’ and ‘A Mere Flask Poured Out’. Time permitting, I’ll try to add some comments on ‘The Skol’ as well.

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For Lydia Davis’ Can’t and Won’t, I’d like to look at ‘Reversible Story’; ‘Notes During Long Phone Conversation with Mother’; ‘The Letter to the Foundation’;’ Flaubert and Point of View’; and ‘Local Obits,’ if possible. Happy reading!

From Lahiri’s ‘Unaccustomed Earth’, I would like to look at the final three stories; ‘Once in a Lifetime’, ‘Year’s End’, and ‘Going Ashore’. [RJ]

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Firstly, I’d like to preface my comments by saying that (by some very Lerner-esque coincidence) I bought the “wrong” edition of ‘The Polish Rider’ for this class. Not knowing it was a New Yorker essay, I ordered a physical copy off Amazon – you can find the version I purchased here, if you’re interested. Because of this, I had a slightly different (and very meta) reading experience of the short story.

In ‘The Polish Rider’, the narrator (a Lerner-like figure, an academic, a writer, an art lover) helps Sonia, a Polish artist, search for two paintings that she left in the back of an Uber before the opening of her show. I was surprised and intrigued to learn that Lerner’s story incorporates fictionalized elements of an event that actually happened in real life, to Lerner’s friend, the artist Anna Ostoya. 

In my edition, the non-fictional story sits alongside the fictional one, and both are framed by photographs and artworks produced by Anna for the edition. I thought it was interesting to contrast and compare fiction with reality here, and see what Lerner took from the real-life experience and incorporated into the story. 

In 2015, Anna told Lerner that she had recently lost two of her canvases in the back of an Uber. In real life, Ostoya’s paintings were based on Artimisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes”:

Lerner ‘didn’t want to minimize the loss of the paintings’ but ‘he did feel like there was something conceptually rich, maybe even beautiful, about what had transpired.’ (Ben Lerner and Anna Ostoya, The Polish Rider, MACK 2018, pp. 44-45). So he decided to write reality into the short story. But not an exact replica of reality – he would change things ever so slightly: ‘He would write a version of Anna’s story, he resolved,’ and ‘he’d insert a version of himself, a writer who wanted to recuperate the lost canvases through prose’ (Lerner and Ostoya, p. 53).

In the non-fictional essay, Lerner’s project for ‘The Polish Rider’ begins to take shape: and the narrator’s mission becomes an act of ekphrasis that restores Anna’s lost paintings through literature: ‘For several years he had been obsessed with the relationship between fiction and the other arts, hard started to think of fiction as a curatorial form, a medium in which you could stage encounters with other media, real or imagined; for him, fiction was fundamentally ekphrastic.’ (Lerner and Ostoya, p. 53)

However, even in his act of ekphrasis, Lerner changed the actual paintings that were lost. Feeling that ‘the complex history of Gentileschi would overwhelm the story’ (Lerner and Ostoya, p. 53), instead, he found another series of paintings by Ostoya, depicting a famous kiss between two men, the critic Benjamin Buchloh and the conceptualist Lawrence Weiner: 

‘He intuited that, metaphorically, a lost kiss would ground the story more than a lost beheading, could stand for the ekphrastic kiss of genres, and so he decided he would have Anna, whom he would call “Sonia,” lost “The Kiss” painting, thus crossing his nonfiction Anna with his fictional writing about Sonia.’ (Lerner and Ostoya, p. 53) 

However, finding that the real-life painting of Buchloh and Weiner were ‘just as overwhelming as Gentileschi’, he decided that he ‘needed Sonia to leave unreal canvases in the Uber.’ (Lerner and Ostoya, p. 54). For this fictional painting, he chose the well-known motif of the “social fraternal kiss” between Brezhnev and Hoenecker, a work that was ‘almost Anna’s’, and which opened up a whole Cold War thematic to Lerner. He writes that he drafted the story in a couple days – and thus his work of fictionalized ekphrasis was born.

As you can see, the notion of ekphrasis quickly starts to become narratively complicated. There is not only the real-life story about Anna, and her actual paintings of “The Kiss”; but now also the fictional “Sonia”, and her fictional painting of a different historical kiss. Notice, also, in the quotations above, that the non-fictional essay is written in the third person; in each of the variants, Lerner appears as a character inserted into varying degrees of fictionalised events. 

Here’s the kicker to this very meta rollercoaster: later, Ostoya decided to paint the fictional works that Lerner had invented, thus transforming the fiction into real-life art, in an act that Lerner calls ‘a reversal of the standard ekphrastic temporality’, ‘a gesture that would utterly transform the story without changing any of the words.’ (Lerner and Ostoya, p. 58-59). 

As the narrator in The Polish Rider writes: ‘This will be an entirely different piece of writing if it accompanies the returned paintings rather than taking their place… And, if the paintings aren’t found, we’ll publish this, the story of their loss and recuperation through literature – make a little book that includes the installation of shots of the two canvases before Sonia took them down to clean them up. Or maybe she’ll repaint them?’ (Lerner, ‘The Polish Rider’)

I thought this strange encounter with Lerner’s metanarrative really spoke to the thoughts about art that he puts forward in his essay, “Damage Control” in Harper’s Mag. There, he argues that ‘modern art is inseparable from the destruction of modern art’ (“Damage Control”). Linking destruction with loss, he writes about his encounter with an exhibit by the “Salvage Art Institute (SAI)”, which sampled the inventory of a large insurance company’s “total loss” art: the pieces that have been damaged beyond repair, and are now, legally speaking, worthless.

However, rather than being worthless, Lerner argues that the damaged artwork rather becomes ‘art outside of capitalism’: ‘an object freed from the market — freed without being shattered or spit on or torn.’ He felt that ‘Each work had been redeemed, both in the sense that the fetish had been converted back into cash, the claim paid out, but also in the more messianic sense of being saved from something, saved for something.’ (Lerner, “Damage Control”)

Is this what the narrator (and, by extension, Lerner himself) is attempting to accomplish in his search for Sonia’s (or Anna’s) lost paintings? I’m not quite sure – but chasing down this ekphrastic rabbithole was absolutely fascinating. I know I’ve gone completely overboard with this note, but I hope you enjoyed the introduction to the Ostoya-Lerner co-edition. I thoroughly recommend it! [CK]

– As we’re hoping to do a bit of close reading in class this week, I thought I’d do the same in my pre-class note. I’ve selected the below story from Lydia Davis which, in part, is a close reading in itself. 

Though most close readings resist a chronological approach, in this case I think it’s best to begin at the beginning. If it weren’t for the word ‘only’ in the middle of the first sentence, this opening would be merely a statement. But as with Ames’s ‘just’ in Gilead, ‘only’ is quite powerful here. Onlytwo paragraphs long, and yet, we infer, so much is happening. From this first sentence we also know that the story we’re reading isn’t the one the paragraph describes – we’re one paragraph short. This story exists relative to the one it describes. 

Maybe I’ve got B-Course essays on the mind, but it seems to me that this story, short though it may be, creates quite a large sense of spatiality. The title of the story turns printed text into place/space, but this is more disorienting than it is grounding. We have to imagine the text of another story on another page in some other text before we can comprehend the formal dynamic the narrator is trying to put forward. ‘The end’ is pushed away from ‘the beginning’ (perhaps a stretch here, but ‘up to’ seems to further this distance and reinforce the spatial aspect of the story – you would read ‘up’ the page to find the beginning); the parenthetical ‘(in the first paragraph)’ reflects a need to clarify the whereof the story; ‘and they’re in the very middle of it’ attempts to specifically place the characters in this ‘dense’ confusion.

I’m particularly interested in the word ‘intent’, and its recall of the idea of intention. The two clauses of this sentence in fact seem to contradict one another – if the speaker is so intent, so focussed, how is their back turned from something within it? The implication of this line is a sense of fragmentation: if ‘this work’ refers only to the second paragraph, then two paragraphs in the same text can function as separate works – a very interesting idea. The other implication is a dynamism of text that contradicts the fixed spatiality of printed word implied by the title, the idea that the text might get ‘up to’ something when no one’s looking. These ideas are indeed contradictory but not mutually exclusive – the page gives space for the characters mentioned in the title to move within.

The introduction of exclamatory phrases is somewhat frantic, contributing to a building sense of anxiety in response to a lack of control – it seems the narrator would much rather their characters stay put. The line ‘And they’re not very far away!’ indeed suggests the physical distance I detailed above, but also indicates that the author loses control of the characters almost immediately after they have written them. With the phrase ‘he seems’, the author becomes a reader, analysing without certainty the dynamic between these other characters despite having created this dynamic themselves. The work the author has created has become ‘dense’ and ‘dark’ even to them, but now that they have ‘left’ it, they can only watch on as the paragraph takes on its own life.

Between the reference to ‘intent’, the obvious loss of control, and the suggestion that the author becomes a reader the second the text exists, the conclusion I draw is that the author we take as this story’s narrator is a Barthesian one, and this story details the effect of The Death of the Author. [RF]

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I’m very sorry for the delay in posting this note, I’ve been ill the last few days and late across the board. I’m glad I got to read Caroline’s note before writing mine though – I had no idea about the Gentileschi, etc. sides of the ‘Polish Rider’ genesis, and found it fascinating all around. (As a side-note, ‘The Polish Rider is also the title of a Rembrandt: an aristocrat riding a horse through a murky landscape)

As my own little layer to add from biography to the ‘ekphrastic rabbithole’, I thought I’d mention my own life half-parallels art, contexts-collide type story. I lost my phone (far less interesting) in an Uber about six months ago, and faced the same Kafka-esque spirals of deferral and faceless ‘reaching-outs’ as Sonia in the story. The phone, however, was still on, and the I could track it online. I found it the next day looping London in mocking circles closer and further from wherever I was – all over the place, north, south, east and west, twitching across boroughs with every refresh of the page. Clearly it was still in the Uber, but I could only send a request for the driver to call me: he would do so immediately, but when I picked up it was just dead air – with the suggestion, maybe, of someone breathing on the other side. 

And so ‘The Polish Rider’ echoed very true. There wasa kind of voyeuristic excitement/frustration in this game, a tendency towards unreality and self-dramatisation: casting oneself in the role of the amateur detective, or (one of Lerner’s games of parallel) the Cold War surveillance man behind the screen. Technology and systemisation, the whole faceless, teasing Uber network, provided a strange, alienated narrative, with ‘I’ pitched against something quite intangible in the quest for the lost phone. In an accompanying interview to the story, Lerner says that ‘this is where fiction become politically interesting to me, how it can represent – and how it can make felt – the inextricability of self and systems’. 

One temptation of this ‘inextricability’, this everyday reliance on vast, overlapping webs of ‘systems, private and public, aboveground and under’, is the tendency to look for the pattern of a ‘system’ wherever it might help – because the pattern might indicate a meaning. Despite the obvious absurdity, it was hard not to project some kind of significance onto the Uber routes I saw flashing along the computer map like a cop monitor, to trace them tentatively like Paul Auster might in The New York Trilogy (another author who writes himself into his own detective stories) and try to ‘see’ a logic in their arbitrary blips. We see the same with Lerner’s connection of the Ghostbusters address and the Shakespeare Sonnets, the portent of the ‘55’: 

‘The traces of a mysterious system. They lend the world a certain handmade quality. As if someone has reached out.’

As the human side doesn’t reach out, as we get shunted between start-up desks and blocked numbers, it’s very possible to yearn for different kinds of reaching out, the suggestion of some other Prime Mover / fate / coincidence / system, something ‘handmade’ in the imagination.

This is all very much in the ‘systems fiction’ vein, in the company of Pynchon, DeLillo, and so on. Here, the art theory or ekphrastic element tames the more paranoid side you might see, for example, in Pynchon, but there is a kind of exhilarating madness the writing builds towards throughout the story as it gets drunk on its own possibility: see the image of Lerner composing at the standing-desk, delirious, buzzing (‘a painted kiss is anti-literary, anti-ekphrastic, says the coffee’), and feeling for once as a writer that he’s doing something real,something now–  that he’s just as legitimate as Modigliani paint-spattered in his studio, Giacometti with his cut hands. I was reminded too of Strindberg’s Inferno, his obsessive gleanings of portent and possible narratives in the street names of Paris, the number of letters on a statue base. ‘The signs that mock me as I go’ (Joyce).

Then, the next day, the Uber (mine, not Sonia’s) stopped. I had found, it became clear, where the driver lived. And now I faced something like Sonia’s conundrum in the police station: does she ‘harass an immigrant driver who was just following the rules’? Do I try go to my driver’s house (opposite the ‘Al Kaashil’ mini-market)? Do I ring the landline and maybe interrupt a family? Do I report him and risk his job? In the end, I got him to ring me again (dead silence, then off) and left a tentative message saying I’m sure he wasn’t at fault but I was pretty certain the phone was in his car, perhaps behind a seat – and I mentioned his address. He called soon after, drove it to my house (I wasn’t in), and dropped it through the letterbox. Somehow, without any conversation, without any face-to-face interaction, the situation had resolved itself: the phone was found as Sonia’s paintings weren’t, from the driver I couldn’t even remember the face of but somehow knew where he lived. It was some some strange, uncomfortable intimacy, some Haneke-like overlap of incompatible worlds.

Lerner has a central line in the story: ‘Systems that can’t communicate, can only kiss’. It’s this kind of overlap, these collisions and shared points, which seem to interest him so much. Brezhnev and Honecker, random encounters and media memories, real life (whatever that means) and art. ‘That sort of thing’. [MBW]

Post-Class Notes

Phew! I have begun writing this note. I’ll be keeping it short because we did manage to discuss a lot of very different things on Monday. Expect another “Phew!” at the end. I couldn’t think of a cool opening for my note, so I wrote one for the note about my note. Such is the cryptic art of my note about by note. I believe that makes me clever. Isn’t this art-ier? Ben Lerner’s Polish Rider tries to negotiate the case that some art is art-ier, therefore could be more valuable than other art. That’s just wrong. Exchange-value is determined through a system of social-relations. All value is, in a sense, arbitrary – it isn’t inherent to any object but produced socially. The determining of value, therefore, is very prone to influence. Capital promotes the value of art through advertising, in order to create more capital. Oobah Butler – evil genius – explains it better than I can, here.

At some point during the discussion, Dr. Kalisch talked about the division of art into the curatorial and the epiphanic. This stuck with me and I kept thinking about how the epiphanic art is also curatorial in a way because it tries to represent the pure experience (that is, sensory,  pre-reflective, pre-linguistic articulation) of epiphany and realisation through its own medium (what I mean to suggest is that the epiphanic is not the epiphany itself). I’m thinking on the lines of Lacan’s symbolic and the real.

Moving on to Lydia Davis – I’d like to begin by offering a fist-bump to Michael (Pusic) because I didn’t enjoy reading her either. In fact, I was so pained that I ended up calling my most well-read friend in Delhi (this guy was reading Germaine Greer in 7^th grade) who helped me to come up with an assortment of mean tweets and offered to cyberbully Ms. Davis on my behalf. I politely declined my friend’s offer and after Jane’s presentation brought my own philistinism to my attention (“the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass”), I’m glad I did so. Jane explained Davis’ writing, quite brilliantly, as “one mark of impression on an empty space – like a skyscraper.” Davis collapses the boundary between the reader and the author through a deliberate lack of craft – the logic of the work itself is the work, rather than the plot. Now that I know how to approach it, I can read Davis’ work but I won’t enjoy it because it still feels like she’s forcing a feeling on me.

Diane Williams – a breath of fresh air! Reading her didn’t induce any claustrophobia at all, a quality I’ve come to appreciate after having read Lydia Davis. Martha put it beautifully that Williams’ character-figures are built on relationships, invented and suspended without a self beyond their role. However, her brevity and lack of too much description could be read as a reserving of space for the potential other world to come in – not an emptiness but an open-endedness, perhaps an invitation for the readers to bring their own meaning into the mix.

I was psyched when Rhona picked the triptych from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth. The chapters are in continuous dialogue with each other, teasing the reader’s desired union of the characters. I use the word “teasing” because I recognised a very familiar pattern here – Bollywood bad boy from Bombay, rich, individualistic and direct, let go of by Bollywood good girl from Calcutta, delicate and rooted. We Indians write the same story over and over again, just a little differently. The desire for release from identity (temporary/permanent) remains the common thread between all modern South Asian literature, and if I may be bold enough to say so, very evident in Lahiri’s identification of herself as an American writer. Not that it’s a bad thing, but it is self-fashioning. Fin.

Phew! [Mehvish Siddiqui, M.S.]

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I thought I’d use my untimely (read: late) note this week to, firstly, in Lerner-esque fashion, draw your attention to this short blog post I wrote a few years ago on 10:04, and the idea of a curatorial novel. Secondly, I thought I’d share a few of my notes from Lerner’s talk at the Tate last week, in which he talked about his new novel, The Topeka School, as a kind of ‘pre-history’ of our political moment, one that looks back to the 1990s and what he called a ‘therapist version’ of the end of history thesis we’ve spoken about in class in connection to Franzen, and which Lerner also related to the decline of 60s radicalism we discussed in relation to Egan. Asked about temporality in his new book, Lerner suggested that every novel involves a kind of ‘time travel’, though to me, what I’ve read of the new novel suggests that Lerner is less interested in the play of temporality, than in a play of voices, and at the talk he spoke about the ventriloquism of the novel’s narrative voice. He also confirmed that Topeka School was very much the third volume completing a trilogy, along with Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 – worth bearing in mind if you’re working on Lerner.