“Sorrentinian anecdotes: 1. A friend once told me that he got a blowjob while watching Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, which seems like the perfect antidote to Haneke’s gloomy Austrian National Socialist moralism, his sanctimonious pornography of violence. 2. Another friend, or the same friend, I can’t remember, who occasionally suffered from psychogenic impotence, said that a girl once quoted Prufrock to him when he couldn’t get it up, which was such a wickedly tender thing to do (such a relief compared to all the put-on politically correct anti-phallodeterministic caritas he was used to in those situations) that he remembers it as one of the most intimate experiences of his life. 3. I told him, as if to reciprocate his self-mortifying candor, that an ex-girlfriend of mine, who was a crypto-Catholic depressive, used to read Ash Wednesday whenever she wanted to avoid having sex with me. We agreed on the superiority of early Eliot…”
David Golding explains (along the way) how/why he couldn’t resist the “mimetic bug” in this meditation on Gilbert Sorrentino…
What is this phenomenon? This death that comes about? Of course, it is because the artist is not needed, but what has that to do with the artist? Rimbaud, we don’t need you. Hear? Rimbaud! I say we don’t need you!
It might have been Lorca who said that literature is dangerous. In Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, Gilbert Sorrentino, who incidentally was a great admirer of Lorca, apothegmatizes that homosexuality is not revolutionary, is rather “sexual reformism to rescue one from terror.”
Nevertheless, Lorca died, in part, because he was a homosexual as well as a great poet of the last or penultimate revolution*, while Sorrentino’s anti-hero Lou Henry is a bad poet, a bad translator of Lorca, and a bad (failed) heterosexual. But Sorrentino, following Joyce following Marx following Vico, wants us to understand that farce is tragic for the farcical.** Lou Henry is as much a victim, in his own way, of the Moloch of literature as Lorca was.*** His mistake was to read William Carlos Williams to autoerotic excess, to incorporate an invasive genius to the point of iconodulism, botanical fetishism, self-amnesia (Sorrentino’s mutinous insight, although one could also think here of Julio Cortázar, is to invert the hackneyed Romantic metaphor of demotic parasitism and the Artist in favor of a situationist cris de coeur, which is to say that we are all giants encumbered by a million strabismic and neurotic dwarves, if only we knew it, which we never will, because what would we know it with?) Literature is dangerous. If Lou Henry hadn’t become a bad poet, he could have become any number of better things. For instance? Sorrentino, one of literature’s great listmakers, suggests: “An editor at a publishing house anxious to keep up with ‘what’s happening’: A Tarot adept: An unlocker of the mysteries of astrology…An admirer of Nabokov…A Jewish liberal…A copywriter for an ad agency [too late, Leopold Bloom beat him to it]: A movie star ‘with ideas.’: A composer of folk-rock songs: An experimental novelist: A Communist: A Communist dupe: An anarchist: A revolutionary: A devotee of Paul O’Dwyer’s toughness and incorruptibility: a good poet.” But this list, like all enumerations of reveries of possible or imaginary selves, lands us back in the cloacum of fatalism, the Ouroborus of pessimism, the comedy of squirming conatus, the worm of the ego condemned to be itself by escaping itself, the futility of ejaculation****. Of course, Sorrentino, who has a touch of the Kafka about him, offers his characters the possibility of salvation, provided salvation remains a sterile syllogism (like Simone Weil’s God): “If I avoid the demons that maraud through my intelligence, I’ll write poems that are acceptable. I’ll always know that when the time comes I’ll confront these demons and out of the confrontation will come great poetry. The next step however is more difficult and can lead to total destruction. That is: the confrontation with the demons does not necessarily lead to the creation of great art (or any art at all). You can writhe in the darkest pit and filth of yourself and come up with some dull fragment of vers libre, indistinguishable from that of a hundred contemporaries. Thus pain does not guarantee anything. Art, you see, is not interested in your suffering. It is not a muse.” The Sorrentinian paradox can be formulated as such: Salvation lies in confronting the terror that dominates our lives (the old Socrates palaver). In order to confront the terror of being ourselves, we have to undertake the great and primeval exploits of the spirit (art, love, war/revolution). But the great and primeval exploits of the spirit are great and primeval because they transcend and mock our finitude. They are like the rose of Paracelsus, the immutable rose (the rose that emerges as a rose after being thrown in the fire). Paracelsus, who we are told is nothing under his mask, will not perform his miracle before any witnesses. It is only when he is alone that he scoops up the ashes and brings the rose back to life. Art–the glory of art, the essence of art, which could be our salvation–is always somewhere else. The characters in IQOAT are stranded in an obscure world of appearances, of images that swarm beneath the eyes, of imaginative qualities. As for the actual thing, the agalma we ceaselessly strive to know, we can only arrive at it apophatically, in the malaise and schizophrenic desire and hypocrisy and absolute epigonism of life itself.
Sheila Henry, Lou’s wife (also a bad poet, having apprenticed herself in the uniquely squalid school of radical chic bourgeois marriage), is chronically unfaithful because she loves her husband (she loves him almost as much as she hates him and works methodically towards his ruin). She fucks***** other men, it seems, both to torment her husband but also to delineate his absence, to consecrate her love for him by incarnating the opposite of love. Actual lovemaking with her husband is disappointing. The only time she appears to be satisfied is when Lou uses her mascara to make himself look like Che Guevara and sodomizes her with a candle. Sorrentino is not the only acerbic, left-melancholic writer fascinated and dismayed by the obscene, counter-revolutionary appropriation of Che’s imago by the bourgeois sexual imagination. Eric Hobsbawm truculently observes, in his essay on “The Revolution and Sex,” that a New York theatrical performance of a homosexual orgy invoking Che’s name would have nauseated the puritanical revolutionary (he adduces this blasphemy, as well as the pot smoke hovering over the barricades in Paris 1968, as indisputable evidence of the inanity of the New Left: then again, Hobsbawm probably didn’t think much of Che in the first place). In Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet, the virginal Uruguayan heroine chastises a woman who claims to have slept with Che but won’t elaborate on what he was like in bed (these kids, she says, by which she means the ill-fated generation of 1970s Latin American youth, so similar to Sorrentino’s characters in their delusional faiths and preordained failures, and yet ennobled by a genuine confrontation with danger, have a right to know what Che was like in bed). But no one will ever really know how Che fucked, or how any world-historical individuals fucked******. It’s a mystery: even Hegel neglected the subject. Sorrentino would have wanted to know. Not out of prurience, or not just out of prurience, but because it’s relevant to the question of what is left of the spiritus mundi after the death of the gods. What is being travestied, what is debased, when a writer manqué orgasms just as his partner quotes William Blake? Sex, or the Ideal, or both? The shabbiness and puniness of the present against the perfection of the past, or the spurious majesty of the past itself? Is it a revolutionary or despairing transgression to have sex miscegenate with art and revolution? Or is miscegenation beside the point, is it not simply a question of eternal eros collecting its debt wherever it can find it? In a world of total debasement, I think Sorrentino is telling us (telling me), the final and irrevocable debasement is to continue to believe in the inviolability of our past ideals: poetry after Auschwitz, etc.
Sorrentinian anecdotes: 1. A friend once told me that he got a blowjob while watching Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, which seems like the perfect antidote to Haneke’s gloomy Austrian National Socialist moralism, his sanctimonious pornography of violence. 2. Another friend, or the same friend, I can’t remember, who occasionally suffered from psychogenic impotence, said that a girl once quoted Prufrock to him when he couldn’t get it up, which was such a wickedly tender thing to do (such a relief compared to all the put-on politically correct anti-phallodeterministic caritas he was used to in those situations) that he remembers it as one of the most intimate experiences of his life. 3. I told him, as if to reciprocate his self-mortifying candor, that an ex-girlfriend of mine, who was a crypto-Catholic depressive, used to read Ash Wednesday whenever she wanted to avoid having sex with me. We agreed on the superiority of early Eliot. 4. When I lived in Oakland, I was briefly friends with an anti-Semitic poet from Tennessee, a Black Mountain zombie, who approached me at a coffee shop while I was reading The Cantos. One night he brought me along to a party where the guests were expected to take molly and dress up as their favorite German theologian. Like Borges, I have an abnormal fear of masks and costumes, and I don’t like drugs or saturnalian unseriousness vis-a-vis the so-called life of the mind, so I was fairly out of place. My poet friend, who was in all likelihood a bad poet, went as Karl Barth and ended up sleeping with a girl dressed as Meister Eckhart. A few weeks later he tried to kill me.
It occurs to me that Sorrentino’s principal theme is the failure of mourning, culturally and individually. Mourning for what? For the fact that we are ourselves and not someone else, not William Carlos Williams, for instance. His characters introject, cannibalize, the myth of the great artist, forgetting that the great artist is a myth, an effigy. What would the real, the noumenal, thing look like, shorn of its imaginative qualities? I suppose that in Sorrentino’s epoch, which was a decadent epoch, one could still hope to glimpse it. Doc Williams strolling amiably among the shrubs and wildflowers of Patterson New Jersey: Ezra Pound in his Tyrolean castle with his quarrelsome wife and concubine, a fascist’s stately retirement, perturbed only by the occasional bout of depression: Lorca in his Andalusian mass grave. And who are our masters, our myths, the ones who have spawned “the aberrant desires of a minority of the populace?”******* Don’t even talk to me about the reactionary utopian socialism of David Foster Wallace, or the philistine birdwatching, the Augustinian pretensions, of Jonathan Franzen. The New York Times says George Saunders is “the writer for our time.” I wouldn’t know because I’ve never read him.********
*All we can say for sure is that revolution is mausolean in Sorrentino’s ’50s/’60s New York
**This is the root of Sorrentino’s comedic pathos, a pathos that Marx, in his rarified and teleological misanthropy, would have found alien. But Marx was also a failed poet.
***I reject, as I believe Sorrentino would, the empirico-humanist scruple that would protest against the conflation of literature and fascism: Lorca was murdered by fascists, true, as Mandelstam was murdered by Stalinists, but both were martyred to poetry. Art, Sorrentino tells us, is implicated in the labyrinth or system of signs that constitutes our fate and our unfreedom. Art is a labyrinth of freedom (with both the subjective and objective genitive in operation): art is the paradox of freedom.
****Impossible to resist the mimetic bug if one wants to love or review. Something I learned from Proust, not Sorrentino, who might have also learned it from Proust.
*****The agonies of the erotic lexicon. Sorrentino cannot describe an act of fellatio without encountering a linguistic aporia. He cannot say “sucked off” without speculating that Guinevere “sucked off” Lancelot, and Cleopatra Antony, and Hero Leander, etc.
******Sorrentino on a rapacious Willhelm-Reichian cum “revolutionary”: “A deep interest in politics, radical of course. Which is not to say that his old age will not bring him a kind of reasoned conservatism…He’s going to buy a house up in the mountains with the money, so that he can get away from the Repression that’s coming. But–and this is good news–he’ll be coming into the city about two or three days a month, for sex. I recollect Lenin doing that, popping into Moscow once in a while for a little gash. He was always cunt-crazy, old Lenin.”
*******I have heard that Sorrentino taught Jeffrey Eugenides at Stanford. But as Sorrentino incessantly reminds us, the echt artist has a right to be a frivolous and philoprogenitive fornicator.
********I’d like to absolve myself of the charge of tyro’s envy, of literary rancor, of Underground Man paranoia, of bogeyman manufacturing, on the grounds that these things are endemic to the writer’s craft. Sorrentino: “As a matter of fact, Pound’s entire career, the tragedy of his career, might be said to consist of an obsessive need to create bogeymen in order to be able to dispel them, a need to create straw men so that he can knock them over. In other words, he’s very strange and literary.”
From February, 2013