Nicholson Baker's "Vox" and the "problem" of erotic literature

The synopsis on the back of my copy reads:

Vox is a novel that remaps the territory of sex—sex solitary and telephonic, lyrical and profane, comfortable and dangerous. It is an erotic classic that places Nicholson Baker firmly in the first rank of major American writers.

And these are some of the plaudits the book received in hardcover:

“A brilliantly funny, perversely tender and technically breathtaking erotic novel.” —The New York Times

“A remarkable tour de force...Vox is hilarious...a delightful novel.” —Alexander Theroux, Washington Post Book World

“Imagine Chagall being commissioned to do the illustrations for The Joy of Sex.” —Michael Upchurch, San Francisco Chronicle

“This is Ravel's 'Bolero' played out on the page.... The conversation gets sexier and sexier and...well, I'm too wrung out to go on.” —Louise Bernikow, Cosmopolitan

I don't put much store by blurbs, but fair enough, I liked the book too. However: Chagall? No. Ravel? No (maybe Satie at his more ironic). And dear Louise, please tell me what it means to be “too wrung out to go on”? “Go ahead, whisper it in my little ear...”

The temptation is to start out a post about something like this with a disclaimer going something like this: “Well, I'm writing about this stuff 'cause you know you can be intellectual about this stuff, everybody knows that who's heard of the Marquis de Sade, so just back off, guys, it's not like I read this stuff a lot, or like I even enjoy it, duh...”

Well, I'm not going to patronize you (whoever “you” are). The fact is that while I don't read erotic fiction as much as I do, say, detective fiction, I've certainly read some books that belong to this much-neglected (or much-pretended-to-be-neglected) genre. I'd say that, as in most genres, about half of them were probably not worth reading all the way through except for the their forensic value. Probably six, seven, eight of them were interesting enough for me to remember in some detail, and two or three are works of high literary caliber.

I first became interested in these books about the middle of high school. I didn't have much money, really no money except what my parents gave me or I could scrounge from the change lying around the house. Also, my parents were careful not to permit us to have access to the Internet in any part of the house that wasn't public—or, I might be tempted to say, “explicit”.

Also, I couldn't have brought myself to buy a porn magazine if you'd convinced me I could exchange it immediately for the complete later works of Wittgenstein. Well, maybe, but just. (By the way, reading his war diaries reveals that he understood this kind of thing very well.) Furthermore, I kept seeing this section at Half Price Books, ensconced in as unobtrusive a place as they could find, quietly facing a wall of Fiction & Literature (whatever the hell that means) between Poetry and African-American Literature.

This location was obviously very convenient, permitting the embarrassed shopper to glance down the spines of the small but concentrated Erotica section, or even to pull out a title and flip through it (always being careful to keep the covers angled at least a little bit down towards the floor and one's, er, erogenous situation under control), while pretending to be either the Romantic, sensitive, Byronic type or the open-minded, culturally heterogenous, Liberal (in the American sense) type who's read For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf and now thinks that it was so great that a big studio finally made a movie that was so socially relevant and...

Anyway, it was just too much temptation, literally and literarily. I managed to steal a number of volumes from there during the next couple of years, and at first I only appreciated them for their “coarser” elements. But the truth was, I wasn't blind—not even in, um, ecstasy—to the quality or lack of it in these books. For example, I once (more or less by accident) stole a volume of poems by Pierre Louÿs.

Now, that's not a book that was written just to help facilitate late-19^th century masturbation sessions. And today I know, thanks to all those wonderful books that help you learn how to sound smart when talking about literature, that his work represents a real achievement in the Parnassian school, being one of the very, very few read outside of France to this day, and a real forerunner of Mallarmé, whom I like but not as much as I probably would if I were better at reading French.

But that's not really what I set out to discuss in this post. I just felt like I should go out there and let everyone know that, yes, real people do read this stuff, and that it's actually literature, as opposed to pornography—not that I'm sure what literature means—and clearly more affecting and effective than most.

Vox is a good read. A high-velocity read, which is what I say when I mean that a book is a “quick read” but want to sound more intelligent. A book that propels you through its pages. This is all the more remarkable because no one aspect of the book is all that compelling.

The style is virtually nonexistent, which is appropriate since the whole thing is virtually nothing but dialogue, with the traditional “he said” and “there was a pause” stuff—which, very correctly, Umberto Eco tells us remain wary of nonetheless. But the characters aren't that affecting either, neither likable nor unusual enough or well-drawn enough to be all that persuasive.

But then again, that may be one of the keys to this book's success, which it was financially and remains artistically. Baker (I've never read a single other word by this guy, though he's been pretty prolific) makes/lets these people talk and talk and talk, and because they're talking about sex we keep wanting to read what they're saying. And then a weird thing happens: we begin to care about them. Because along with all the details of their fantasies and unorthodox encounters, we learn a lot about “who they are” and “what matters to them” even though they don't say these things straight out.

Actually, what I just said is very wrong in at least one regard: I said “along with” when I probably should have said “through”. Details about people's sex lives or fantasies are absolutely part of “who people are” and “what matters to them.” People tend to downplay this, perhaps out of some vestigial Romantic, transcendent idealization of love, life, and our bodies.

This book argues, without arguing, something very, very important: that real intimacy can be achieved by embracing and exposing our darkest regions. And I suspect that real intimacy (and here I'm not only speaking of sexual relationships) is not possible without this.

A few remarks on the formal aspects of Vox, always so important in the process of redeeming a work of erotic fiction: the long dialogue form (when non-demonstrative and non-philosophical) lends, as I said earlier, a certain velocity to a work of fiction, actuating as it does the unity of time. An interesting question is raised here: is it possible that there is also active the unity of place?

Aristotle formulated his rules in an era when “place” and “communication” (at least in the direct, person-to-person sense) were closely tied. Yelling across a valley was about as far as you get and still send a coherent message; this sort of case would certainly have maintained the unity of place in classical theatre.

There is also, despite the digressive nature of the dialogue, very much a unity of action, as anyone who is familiar with the purposes of such phone calls can imagine. Funny, but I think not many people would consider this a “neo-classical” piece of writing, but in a certain sense it's exemplary. (Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist is another interesting example in this regard.)

Also, and I might be flying way off into left field here, but is it possible that in a world were individuals are constantly bombarded with advertising both consciously and unconsciously, that a book like Vox is the only way to maintain or experience any honestly unfractured account of human experience? I don't know, but I think Ballard would have admired this book at least in it's formal aspect.

Another thing to think about: this book was first published in 1992. It's so old that Monica Lewinsky is supposed to have given (along with several other things) a copy of Vox to President Clinton during their (supposedly oral-sex-only?) affair.

So what would a novel dealing with similar issues of sexuality and properly engaged in the “moment” of its creation look like today? I shudder (or perhaps on the literary traditionalist in many shudders) at the thought of a novel written in the form of a conversation copy-and-pasted from a cyber sex chat room.

And even that's “old hat” (kind of like the phrase itself? there has to be a word for expressions that embody themselves, like “sesquipedalianism”—please let me know if you know what it is): we've got “sexting”, and I have no idea what else is waiting in the wings for our poor, overfed libidos.

Another artifact of its age is the way the characters express themselves: I really didn't buy a lot of the way they talked, and I actually have to take back what I said about it being an artifact of 1992. I just think Baker has a much better ear (if that's what you use) for ideas than he does for dialogue. I'd give you an example, but I'm tired and there's a dozen or three on nearly every page. Of course I'm exaggerating, but that's how is sometimes feels.

Although I really liked the book, I think it's doubtful that this book, or any book, has “firmly” placed Nicholson Baker “in the first rank of major American novelists,” even just among the living. But maybe I'm wrong. Writers like Nicholson Baker should write a lot more books, because you never know when you're going to write your masterpiece, and in fact you may not ever know, because it may not be recognized until long after your death. But that's no reason not to write it.

Okay, one more thing: there's a long-standing problem, as Foucault points out somewhere, in the West in general and certainly in its literature of not being able to talk about desire very well. It seems to make people uncomfortable, and I think that's why erotic literature remains so maligned and also of a fairly low quality, or at least with fairly low aims.

So I just want to say that there are some very different strains in erotic fiction, and people should pay attention to these: one is the novel whose focus or driving force is power, domination, and discovery—the Marquis de Sade, Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski (maybe); the other is about pleasure, desire and what we modern people would describe, if we were forced to label it as something, love—Sappho, Ovid, Louÿs, John Cleland, Anaïs Nin.

By the way, I'd contend that Anne Desclos/Pauline Réage's Story of O very much belongs to the latter tendency: despite its sadomasochistic trappings, it is very much a love story.

Also, it's probably no accident that this second camp was staked out by truly classical writers and bolstered by writers of a very neo-classical mindset. As for the “Divine Marquis”, he remains a man astride fate, partly inside and partly outside the past, his time and even our own. Who knows when his ideas will truly, succinctly converge with history, like a scalpel finding a tortuous but perfect path through soft flesh between bone, cartilage and tendon—we have, perhaps, come close, but I pale at imagining what that future day would look like.

Memorandum on William Seward Burroughs II, aka "William Lee"

“Hitman for the apocalypse in trench coat and snap-brim fedora, William Burroughs steps out of his life and into his fiction like a secret agent charged with the demolition of all bourgeois values.” What a sentence. I'll never get the chance to be the one who it wrote now because J.G. Ballard did it first, back in 1991 at the start of his review of Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of...

And maybe it's a good thing I won't be able to write that sentence, because in a sense it belongs to a time that was already passing away when Ballard penned it (literally; he wrote everything longhand). It is probably accurate, though, because Burroughs—as beloved as he is to me—belongs mostly to an imagination, to a set of dreams, that is gone. We've moved past the viability of “the demolition of all bourgeois values;” wouldn't it be nice if things were still that simple? If they ever were.

Reading Burroughs now I can see that, like many other writers of speculative fiction, too many and too few of his waking nightmares and fever dreams have come to pass: we live in a world where “One Nation Under CCTV” is spray-painted on a public building and then hailed as art, without any corresponding alteration in the status quo (the UK continues to be the most surveilled state in the world, 63 years after Orwell finished 1984 on his deathbed: take a look at this):

You can run a government without police if your conditioning system is tight enough but you can't run a government without bullshit.

Not that that should be taken as too emblematic of Burroughs' writing. Although nobody is likely to accuse him of subtlety, subtlety sort of doesn't enter into it: Burroughs speaks to each reader to the degree that they will listen. Burroughs' novels (or books, whatever they are) are, as Umberto Eco writes “machines for generating interpretations”—these are truly “open works,” his specially-engineered “soft machines”.

Burroughs himself might have been disappointed to see his aura of impenetrability and subversiveness dissipating on the Fiction & Literature shelves at Barnes & Noble, but then again he probably would have seen it as symptomatic of a certain mode of civilization, which is true. However, the very ubiquity of various of the great postmodern raconteur's ramblings—for example, the free online availability of literally hours upon hours of his voice reading or lecturing or babbling—gives credence and potency to two of his favorite images: the virus and the tape recorder. In a sense, history and William Burroughs seem to have proved William Burroughs right.

“Do you understand your orders, Mr. Lee?”

Re-Watching "High Tension", or How to Watch a Movie?

The other night, I watched the horror movie High Tension for the second time. I first saw it after it came out on DVD in the US in 2005 or 06, when I was in college. I like horror films, but nothing like the way that people who love horror films love them—those people kind of scare me, quite a bit more than any of the movies do.

Anyway, the first time I saw it, I thought it was good, but kind of meaningless: everything seemed to be done really well, it was tight and realistic, and—in short—the movie lived up to its title. But there didn't seem to be any message in the film, nor any formal aspect of it that really interested me. At the time, I didn't recognize any name from the credits except for Giannetto di Rossi, the acknowledged master of special effects make-up.

I watched it with my two roommates at the time, both of whom also watched a lot of movies. I think my then-girlfriend was there, too. Either way, I never really thought about the movie after that, except as another one that I'd successfully checked off on my list of every movie ever made.

I had a very different experience the second time around. For one thing, I rented the movie with a purpose, an idea in mind. Recently, I'd become more and more interested in a group of films and filmmakers collectively referred to as the “New French Extremity”, “New French Extreme”, or “New French Extremism”—whichever. I'll be referring to it as “NFE” from here on.

I became interested in them, dweebish as this sounds, because I saw a potential connection between them and the ideas of George Bataille, who in works such as Story of the Eye, Ma mere, and Literature and Evil sketched out and demonstrated his conception of storytelling as transgressive by its very nature. This can be seen most clearly in Pascal Laugier's film Martyrs, in which aspects of Bataille's biography as well as his thinking seem to be referenced.

High Tension belongs to the NFE (“genre” or “sub-genre” doesn't really seem appropriate) and in a way has flown its flag overseas, at least in the US. By this point a lot of the names on the back of the DVD case meant something to me. Alexandre Aja, the co-writer and director, had rebooted The Hills Have Eyes, and to honest I liked his version better than Wes Craven's original. Grégory Levasseur, Aja's writing partner and the “artistic director” of High Tension, was also heavily involved in that project, and the two of them have worked together on every film the other has made. Philippe Nahon, the brutal, monolithic serial killer of the film, has had a role in every one of Gaspar Noé's film, starring in his short Carné and his first feature-length I Stand Alone (Tout contre seul). Cécile de France I immediately recognized from her role as the curiously-attractive butch lesbian in L'Auberge Espagnole and its sequel Russian Dolls.

Above all of this, I recognized something else much more important: this movie really takes it's time; it's an exercise in exactly what you'd expect it to be—creating tension in the audience. From a few minutes into the more or less hour and a half running time, the suspense begins and doesn't let up until the end credits roll.

As the co-writers claim on their commentary track: “It's not really about the story so much, it's about the direction, about creating the tension.” From that angle, I have give this film a lot of credit. It knows what it is an isn't ashamed or afraid of it. Aja and Levasseaur are young filmmakers, but already they're great technicians—technicians not only of the concrete aspects of filmmaking (cinematography, sound design, etc.) but also extremely adroit at a certain type of narrative.

So, like I said, I enjoyed this movie a lot more the second time I saw it. But this fact reveals something about the experience of a work of art: on the one hand, you can look at, read, or listen to something without knowing anything about it—not for example where it belongs in the huge superstructure of genre that surrounds the world of individual films—or, on the other hand, you can know all sorts of things about it: who created it, why, how, where, when—you can even read entire books about a movie, a symphony or another book before you experience that work yourself. While I think that instinctively a lot of people (myself included) would feel compelled to say that the first of these two ways is better, now that I'm really considering it I'm not so sure that case is that clear.

After all, the second time I watched High Tension I experienced it in the second of the above ways and enjoyed it much more than I did the first time I watched it. I'm not saying this would be true of everyone; after all, the movie achieved its relatively high level of success in this country without most viewers knowing anything about it except that it was supposed to be a really intense horror film. Those people by and large got what they were looking for; maybe they were surprised to get in a package postmarked “Paris, France” but that's about it—the movie is, after all, far more indebted to American models than to French or European models generally. (You could make an argument based on the NFE the French New Wave et al. that this is always true of French film.)

But to me, High Tension isn't just a movie I liked that happened to be French. It's a movie that aside from the very suspenseful experience of watching it fits in my mind into a network of other things: the aforementioned Bataille, the other films and filmmakers of the NFE, as well as the American movies and directors who inspired Aja and Levasseur (e.g. Maniac, Wes Craven). In this way, I saw a lot of things I might not otherwise have noticed or thought important in High Tension, and it's one of those movies that I enjoyed almost as much with the DVD commentary track as without it.

Which way is better, I have no idea. But there does seem to be a gulf separating these two ways of watching movies. Maybe it's more a matter of attitude, or approach, because to be honest no one except an aborigine (and maybe even them anymore) can watch a movie in anything the pure state of innocence that the opposition I presented above implies. This purity doesn't exist because in today's world we are exposed to a bombardment of sights and sounds and learn from a very early age to make dialectical sense of what becomes, as we grow older, a more and more synthetic world. We are all familiar (even if we are unconscious of being so) of the “logic” (“language” might be a better word) of standard film editing: the 180° rule, shot-reverse-shot, etc., etc., etc.

And that's just the beginning; for almost no one will High Tension be their first horror film (if that happened it would probably be some kind of mistake) and so the enormous question of the prejudices of genre conventions comes into this conversation, which I'll have to stop here because I'm really too tired to go onto to deal with it.

Tom Wolfe's "The Painted Word" and "From Bauhaus to Our House"

I'd like to start out by saying that I don't have any kind of apology ready for why I'm writing about two books published three decades ago. I'm sure I could come up with one, but the fact is that I got them at a used bookstore for next to nothing, saw that they complemented each other, and because to me Wolfe is one of the most readable journalists out there.

The Tom Wolfe of The Painted Word (1975) and From Bauhaus to Our House (1981) is an angry Wolfe, but happily angry (perhaps “generously angry” as Orwell once said about another Chronicler of His Times) and this condition of somewhat goodnatured irritation is probably due to the fact that these two books allow Wolfe to engage in what may be his favorite pastime, calling “Bullshit!”

Both Painted and Bauhaus appeared in Harper's before their publication as stand-alone volumes, and acknowledging the journalistic nature of their individual conceptions and the slant of Tom Wolfe's oeuvre as a whole really help in understanding these books' goals and messages, many of which they share. They are neither, as many people incorrectly categorize them, works of “art criticism” or “architectural criticism”, although there are moments, particularly in the later, more strident Bauhaus, when the author's own prejudices show through the scrim of his arguments.

What these two books/articles/essays are at their core are works of social criticism—as is virtually every piece of writing, nonfiction and fiction both, that Wolfe has ever produced. Seeing them as something else will mislead the reader, as happened to a lot of critics at the times of publication. Wolfe isn't trying to make sense of art or architecture per se, which in the context of the 20^th century he might very well consider a crazy idea, but instead to understand the social relationships inherent in the “art world” or between architects and their clients.

Up front, it's got to be said that Wolfe has no positive response to the contemporary situation as it stood in the 1970s and 80s, i.e. what should be done about all this stuff that pisses him off so much. This is typical of Wolfe, and he can make a good argument that putting forward any kind of propositions for what art or architecture should be isn't his place. However, this contrasts with his criticisms and ideas regarding fiction writing (of which he was a practitioner) put forward in, among other places, Hooking Up, and also regarding the question of what place literature holds in a world of multimedia.

Enough foreplay (something I also recall Wolfe touching on in Hooking Up): so, what are these two books about? Well, aside from the obvious—Painted concerns art, Bauhaus architecture—they are run-downs of what went on in these sometimes enigmatic and often abstract realms of human endeavor (and commerce) during the 20^th century, or as much of that century as Wolfe had seen up until the time he was writing.

Firstly, in Painted, Wolfe hammers and riffs repeatedly on a few observations/accusations:

(a.) The “art world”, as it is so often called, in fact involves a mind-numbingly small number of individuals; Wolfe sets the number at “approximately 10,000 souls—a mere hamlet!—restricted to les beaux mondes of eight cities."

(b.) During the 20^th century but not much before that, theory began to precede creation, and dictates the criteria not only of art criticism but of art's conception as well.

(c.) Since the 1920s, art has come to mean a game played with avowedly antibourgeois rules – and played only by artists, theorists, and the same elite whose culture is supposedly “under attack” within such an antibourgeois paradigm. Epatéz les bourgeois, ¿ne pas?

(a.) This is true, and annoying, given that art in one form or another ends up being consumed by so many of us. It irritates me to think that a small group of people decide what gets made and what doesn't, but then again I think it's got to be our (the “public” as Wolfe calls us) fault, since we don't really seem to do much to encourage art at its source, just consume it in whatever form we are given it. But at least on this point I share the author's irritation.

(b.) Theory, its rise and dominance, especially in the six and a half decades since WW2, is a really interesting thing. The fact is that this is true not only of the art world, where it's probably most thoroughly enshrined, but also in architecture (as we'll see) and literature, where literary criticism and theory is seen by some as the “final frontier” of philosophy, or something like that. It's interesting to live in a time—and maybe not a good thing, at that—when the rules get written before the game is played, as counterintuitive as that may seem. It gives some perspective to recall that J.S. Bach didn't own any books on music theory, yet his work embodies the structures and patterns that are now considered musical orthodoxy—there could be no projects of atonality or serialism without Bach as their bête noire.

(c.) Another curious situation, and I think one of the things that makes Wolfe, the conservative, even reactionary Wolfe most angry: Who do these artist people think they are, these leeches? Well, there I slip into the kind of polarizing attribution that I dislike in Wolfe's writing, central as it is to what passes for argumentation in much of these two books. But I'll discuss this more later.

As for Bauhaus, Wolfe argues variations of the following points:

(a.) Everybody except an elite group of architects, including himself, hates the International Style.

(b.) The client (that is, whoever commissioned the work) has little say in determining any part of the design aside from the functional requirements (e.g. the number of conference rooms or offices needed).

(c.) The International Style rests on a fundamentally antibourgeois ideology, despite the obvious paradox that the bourgeoisie or it's representatives in a capitalist society (to take up John Dewey's definition of government) are the ones paying to have these buildings built.

(d.) That the world of architecture is basically a world of “compounds”—in the U.S., mostly located within large elite institutions of higher learning such as Yale, Harvard, MIT—and that those who do not tow the ideological line are cast out and ostracized as heretics. This argument gives Wolfe the chance to repeatedly use the words “anathema”, which he seems to enjoy.

Now, I'll just take these in turn as well:

(a.) The revulsion which Wolfe alleges is a part of every right-thinking person's reaction to the International Style that has, it's true, come to dominate so much of the 20^th and now the 21^st century is one of the most important and basic things you have to believe in order to agree with Wolfe's essay. Now, I'm not saying I know much about architecture, but frankly I don't feel any particular revulsion to a lot of the examples he gives in his book (which reproduces a number of small black-and-white photographs of buildings he discusses). Neither do I think that many people in general share his all-out hatred for it. Most people have either grown up or lived long enough in the kind of place that the US is to not see anything strange about the coexistence of traditional forms (many of them anachronistic) with more modern, International Style-inflected architecture. No one seems to notice anything strange about it or mind; this in itself is interesting in terms of American culture, but because of the polarity of Wolfe's argument he can't discuss this: every normal person has to simply hate this shit, no questions asked. As an example of what I mean, take a look at this from the second paragraph of Bauhaus:

Every child goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating-machine replacement parts wholesale distribution warehouse. Not even the school commissioners, who commissioned it and approved the plans, can figure out how it happened. The main thing is to try to avoid having to explain it to the parents.

(b.) I don't really know what to say to this one. This is the least well-documented of Bauhaus' assertions, seemingly based for the most part on things people told Wolfe that other people said. Or not even that: sometimes it's just how Wolfe feels about a building, assuming that the people who paid for it think something similar or even care very much. What Wolfe seems to be overlooking is the possibility that the individuals or companies who paid for these buildings to be built might have hired these architects because they wanted something that was “cutting edge” or “avant-garde” or whatever. Something “with it,” as I think they used to say back in Wolfe's day.

In fact Wolfe's objection to the way (in his account of things) the client-architect relationship appears to work is based on the idea that the client (whether they be an individual or a large group, like the board or directors at a large corporation) has really, firm ideas on what type of building they want, how they want it to look, what “style” they want it to be. I think this is a little doubtful. We're not talking about an 18^th century folly on Robert Walpole's estate, we're talking about something that at least in the case of large buildings (company HQ's, civic museums, etc.) is almost an advertisement as much as a functional building.

Take a look at the cover of my mass-market paperback copy of Bauhaus: I think in terms of architecture I'm a fairly middle-of-road kind of American guy. I'm sometimes impressed by a nice big building with lots of glass and interesting angles, but I like a nice solid building with some decorative or traditional touches. But look at that picture again—I'd take the Modernistic “glass box” over that Victorian birthday-cake P.O.S. any day.

(c.) That the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, etc. were ideologically leftist and incorporated fairly radical ideas into their manifestos and into their designs as well, there is no doubt. After all, they wrote manifestos saying so. It's ironic that though their ideas started out as a way to, for example, design better housing for workers, or especially in Corbu's case to redefine the idea of the city in terms of an idealized proletarian utopia that he really never did anything to help arrive except draw pictures of it, these guys all ended up “selling out” to varying degress, either by designing buildings for the bourgeoisie or else (and this is probably a greater dogmatic sin, in retrospect) entering those elite institutions aforementioned to train a generation of American architects who didn't care about ideology except inasmuch as it determined their aesthetic choices when designing something.

(d.) As I mentioned earlier, Wolfe has carries a real dislike for “compounds”, these in-or-you're-not cabals that, in his view, largely determine who is considered a “true” architect and who isn't. In the chapter “Heretics”, Wolfe mentions some people who were ostracized from the compounds, as he tells it usually as the result of building a single building in contravention of prevailing orthodoxy.

What this means, however, is hard to tell, because Wolfe also tells us that these things did virtually nothing to affect these architects commercial prospects, many of who had far, far more prolific careers than the “compound” architects that Wolfe seems to take so seriously while simultaneously taking every opportunity to poke fun at them.

So what, I'm left wondering, does their supposed domination of “the world of architecture” add up to? Not much, apparently, unless you're an architect.

Since this is neither a tract nor an academic essay, but a polemic whose main concern is probably more or less to entertain the literate middle class and upwards of the United States, there are no notes and little rigor, except in “sticking it” to anybody with a facial deformity, unhappy love life or professional jealousy who happens to cross Wolfe's stage at any point. However, it is very clear that for someone who is not in any sense an expert on what he's writing about, Wolfe knows a hell of a lot.

While going to great length to give the impression that everything he's telling us was pieced together from snippets of cocktail conversation in the fashionable drawing rooms of Madison Avenue, it is very clear that this man has read widely and in detail about his subject, including coming to grips with what must be for him some epicly stultifying theorectical works. Then again, at times he seems to eat that stuff up, if only to spit it back out like poison in passages like this, where he discusses Greenberg being one-upped in his antibourgeois pretentions by Leo Steinberg:

Greenberg had always argued that the Old Masters, the classic 3-D realists, "an illusion of space into which one could imagine oneself walking," whereas—to the everlasting glory of Modernism—you couldn't walk into a Modernist painting and least of all into an Abstract Expressionist painting. . . . Just a minute, said Steinberg, but you're talking about a "pre-industrial standard of locomotion," i.e., walking. Perhaps you can't walk through an Abstract Expressionist painting—but you can fly through. Right! You could take a space ship! Just look at a de Kooning or a Rothko or a Franz Kline. Look at that "airy" quality, those "areas floating in floating in space," those cloud formations, all that “illusionistic space” with its evocations of intergalactic travel. Why, you could sail though a de Kooning in a Mercury capsule or a Soyuz any day of the week! All along, the Abstract Expressionists had been dealing with “open atmospheric effects.” It was aerial “double dealing,” and it did “clearly deny and dissemble the picture's material surface”--and nobody had ever blown the whistle on them!

Wolfe is fond, overly so, of the exclamation mark, and makes corresponding overuse of it. He also attempts to summon up a carnivalesque atmosphere through various devices and tactics of the 18^th century “storm in a teacup” school. And another thing that is evident in the above paragraph: Wolfe's extremely entertaining and highly suspect use of free indirect style. He puts a lot of words in a lot of people's mouths, and while this may help them and their conflicts to better “come alive” on the page, at the same time it intentionally attempts to mislead the reader into thinking that these words are more or less exactly what a person thought, what they must have said in private conversation or in their diary or when talking to themself in the bathroom. (Yes, I just used “themself”.) This, and the humorous juxtaposition of two discordant registers, is the explanation for Wolfe's always fluid and often comedic use of direct quotation.

As Wolfe himself makes clear, even if he doesn't realize it himself, the art market drove on this vicious cycle, encouraging as it did the conditions where theoretical revolution and artists' submission to the tenets of various schools and -isms were the correct economic decision, if little else. In fact, the three choices seemingly open to artists was, and probably still are (a.) give in, make a living and maybe get rich, (b.) do your own thing as starve, or (c.) get another job, either totally giving up art in disgust or becoming reduced to the status of an “amateur” painter. Talk about a Catch-22 of the soul, huh, Tommy Boy?

Sometimes I wonder how I've ended up reading so much of Wolfe's work, when my sensibilities are and always have been in many ways opposed to his. There is a constellation of reasons for this seemingly incongruous fact, and they include: (a.) his ubiquitous cultural gaze, (b.) his prolific and popular career, which gives him a kind of default relevance, and (c.) his almost unsurpassed, 100 mph style, which though quirky, idiosyncratic and sometimes very irritating is among the best of the best journalists'.

So why does Wolfe write stuff like this? Partly I think he's a performer doing a routine, this particular routine being taking the mickey out of people who behave very self-importantly. Partly, like most performers, he's wanting us to love him, both for what he is—a great guy with words, really laugh-out-loud funny sometimes—as well as for what he's not—in this case, not one of those silly bastards.

He also very clearly identifies with the bourgeois with whom he was raised and educated, and probably as a cultural critic he has to take a slightly condescending, paternalistic attitude towards them in order to perpetuate his own myth of identification (look at that suit: what could be more late-19^th century eccentric gentleman than that?)—a myth that many artists and writers abandon for exactly the opposite kind of myth, something he actually discusses is Painted and alludes to in Bauhaus (Gropius, for example).

Michel Houellebecq's "Atomised"

My copy of Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires bears the English (and British) title Atomised; in the US, Knopf published the same translation (by Frank Wynne – credit where credit is due, he won the IMPAC for it) under the more literal rendering The Elementary Particles. Just thought I'd get that out of the way first thing. Published in French 1999, English translation 2000. But I've always had trouble swimming with the current of time, so. . . .

Houellebecq's (what a name!) novel tells the story of two half-brothers: Michel Djerzinski, a successful molecular biologist well-respected in his field, and Bruno Clément, a sometime secondary school teacher, civil servant, and (pseudo?) reactionary poet and journalist. Both share a common, absent, hippie-inflected mother who deserted both of them early in childhood to more fully live out her burgeoning New Age ideals. “God is dead, but my hair is perfect.”

There are two ideological valences in which this narrative, and the characters within this narrative, orbit. One is that of 20^th century scientific discovery and progress: big ideas in theoretical physics, molecular genetics and high-level mathematics (quantitative and otherwise) are name-dropped and much more than that. At times concepts of a high order are explicated or elaborated with such facility and clarity as to put modern textbooks to shame.

The other is the etiology through time of a set of (once) counter-cultural ideas and practices, traceable as a related group back to the 1950s, which have been absorbed, transformed or otherwise neutralized through their encounters and conflicts with Society at large; in simplified terms, it's the “lovable leftism” that gave us beatniks, then hippies, and finally the various iterations of New-Ageism, a trajectory that is traced until we arrive in the “fin du millenium” France of the late 90s, washed up like a sodden book whose pages are intact but whose ink has been bleached out by the sea's salinity.

While Houellebecq clearly identifies with both Michel and Bruno, and in a very definite sense presents them as victims of a type (though not necessarily the same type) he never spares them, not for a second. I don't think it's too much to say that a certain level of “spiritual autobiography” is detectable throughout the novel, but I don't want to get hung up on parallels between the life of the author and the lives of his characters. Instead, a word about the style.

The writing is lucid and direct, rather unflinching but not, in my opinion, indulgent when it comes to graphic sexual description or the depiction of views – racist, misogynistic, etc. – that are wrong prima facie. The long sections that I alluded to earlier – and they are often deliberately set apart from other parts of the narrative as such – in which anecdotes of the idealism of past decades are related, or long disquisitions on the nature of some scientific whatever, present interesting questions as to the nature of the narrative voice.

When first reading the novel, I assumed that at least the technical expostulations were a form of rather reckless free indirect style, originating as a voice in the character of Michel, as consummate and lucid a brooder as fiction has produced. Much of the narrative regarding things like feminism, nudist resorts, gurus and the like came somehow (or so I assumed) from Bruno. And much of it does indeed, but that's half or less than half of the "truth" by the end of the novel's Epilogue.

One interesting and very effective tactic that the novel employs is to tell us something that's really heart-wrenching – a good example would be the profound, unrequited love of the young Annabelle for the young Michel – and then go off on something that appears to bear no relation to either what's just been related or the story as a whole, something like the Macmillan hypothesis or the potential uses of two mathematical principles in combination.

This produces a cold, alienating effect, but also forces a dialectical situation on the reader, sometimes generative of very interesting ideas. It can't be said that the method is subtle, but the seeming lack of subtlety throughout the narrative seems to be a a conscious choice on Houellebecq's part.

But unfortunately, the key to the narrative voice is not revealed until the final pages of the novel, and I think it's worth not spoiling it for any potential reader. I'll say just these, probably useless words about the matter: the framing device of the story is, while not wholly consistent or plausible in and of itself, the sort of thing worthy of Vonnegut or Burroughs, although the style in very, very different from either of them.

When it first came out, Atomised/The Elementary Particles caused quite a bit of controversy, mostly in France, despite or probably because of being a huge bestseller both at home and (almost as rare as Mendelevium in nature for a French novel) abroad as well. Houellebecq has been accused, not unlike his character Bruno (against whom these accusations are probably fairly made) that he is a mentally sick reactionary, that he hates women and has at best a paternal attitude towards minorities, etc., etc., etc.

While I could say a few words in defense of reactionary writers of great ability and importance – Céline, for example – I wouldn't want to give the idea that either (a.) I think those kinds of ideas are justified in any way, or (b.) that there's validity to these claims made against Houellebecq. And he's not just a Francophone Martin Amis, the great prose stylist and Muslim-hating linguistic pedant – although this book reminded me a lot of Money. Or maybe that's exactly what he is?

Those who have leveled their polemical guns at Houellebecq are the same kinds of people who would consider Sade, Bataille or Klossowski nothing more than pornographers. Although putting it that way maybe doesn't put the author of Atomised in a very good light or the right kind of company. One possible account of the situation would be to say that France is a stupid culture plagued by stupid and meaningless internal controversies that no one else could care about if they wanted to, a culture that produces some of the best writers, filmmakers, painters and, to a lesser extent, composers in the world.

For what it's worth, I think this is more or less what Houellebecq thinks, too: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/03/michelhouellebecq.france.