Grand Hotel Abyss

I saw at Rigorous Intuition the news that Theresa Duncan and her partner Jeremy Blake had evidently committed suicide. My first thought was, “Who is Theresa Duncan?” But after two minutes’ poking around her blog I learned that she wrote for Artforum a comparative piece on Kill Bill and Lost in Translation that I long ago clipped out of the magazine and taped into a notebook that I’ve been carrying around with me for the last three years.

This particular issue of Artforum was given to me by friends who lived in Portland, ME, and whom I was then visiting immediately after my graduation from college. This was around the time of the beheading of Nick Berg, an event used by the right-wing to bolster the case that “we” were at war with wicked barbarians in Iraq. However, a number of bizarre events surrounding the murder raised suspicions about its perpetrators and their motivation. At the time I recall even moderate liberals wondering aloud if Berg’s murder were not staged by agents of the US government.

While in Maine, I drunkenly opined that Berg was probably involve in the whole unfolding catastrophe, from September 11 to Iraq. On my return home, I took a newspaper article on Berg and, without reading it, cut it into its constituent paragraphs, put them in a carrying case for M&Ms, shook them up, drew them at random and taped them into the same notebook in which I had saved Duncan’s article. (This practice was based on the cut-up technique popularized by William S. Burroughs, in which a text is randomly re-arranged in order to take advantage of chance’s capacity for revealing hidden or implicate meanings.)

My reading of the re-assembled, disjointed article issued only one surprise: the frequency with which Berg was recalled by relatives as being interested in repairing electrical towers. “He was a tower guy,” one relative recalled. This means sweet fuck all, of course, and I am, on most days of the week, a rationalist and an anti-cabbalist, though I have been known to frequent occult bookstores, and my adolescent heroes were the PoMo warlocks Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Anyway, Berg was a tower guy, and this information sat a few papers’ widths’ from Theresa Duncan’s masterful demolition of Sofia Coppolla’s hymn to the patriarchy (which, by the bye, you can read here.)

What does this have to do with the untimely demise of Ms. Duncan? Well, it seems that she was caught up in some spooky shit of her own. One blog post in particular details her and her partner’s harassment both by a certain “church” which starts with a Scient- and ends with an -ology and by persons associated with a certain rich guy connected with the mob and possibly also with higher powers than that.

There is, I would caution you, no point to my observing these tenuously connected events. I trawl conspiracy theory websites to scare and entertain myself, and only half believe what I read there. I don’t know what happened to Ms. Duncan; I will probably never know; and to be honest with you I don’t want to know. There is that famous moment in The Red and the Black when Mathilde de la Mole elects Julien Sorel to be her lover because he is the only man in the room who might plausibly do something daring enough to warrant his decollation by the powers that be. I am not Julien Sorel. My rebellion against society goes only so far as my commitment to spend as much time unemployed as possible. More and more, I lose my public-spiritedness. More and more, I come to think that revolutionaries talk as much rubbish as reformists.

Interestingly, or maybe not, the only two professors I’ve ever had who showed any interest in conspiracy type matters were quite opposed on the question.

One was a Marxist, an old-fashioned Leninist type, and though he never came out and said so, he seemed to believe that the rise of deconstruction in U.S. academe in the late ’70s/early ’80s, spearheaded by ex-Nazi de Man and inspired by the Nazi Heidegger and the proto-Nazi Nietzsche sure was suspicious. I thought I saw a twinkle in his eye when he mentioned CIA funding of abstract expressionism.

On the other hand, my other conspiracy-minded professor was himself part of the deconstruction in-crowd, BFF with JD, the Dark Lady and others. He was more or less an anti-Marxist, or anti-Hegelian anyway (”Lukacs is boring!” he once declared), and yet he would frequently mention weird goings-on in the Middle East and even once entertained us with a large excursus on Leo Ryan, George Moscone, Harvey Milk, Jim Jones etc.

As for me, I’m convinced that all the more plausible conspiracy theories are true. But this is not really what I meant to say. RIP Theresa Duncan.

He made too many enemies
Of the people who would keep us on our knees
—XTC

Today I finished J. M. Coetzee’s 1983 novel Life & Times of Michael K. This is the second Coetzee novel I’ve read, the first being the harrowing, controversial Disgrace. I’ve also browsed around a lot in his later criticism, that collected in Stranger Shores and Inner Workings.

I would say anecdotally that he is a major figure for my generation of writers and intellectuals. Why? Ezra Pound in his ABC of Reading wrote of those authors whose works the ephebe was safe in reading an hour before he or she took up the pen. Coetzee is such a writer. His style is one, in Joyce’s phrase, of scrupulous meanness. The scrupulousness, not the meanness, makes him an essential figure in an age of cant and bombast. Whatever his other virtues and vices, the knowledge of the value of words for which he praised Defoe in one of his essays makes him appealing after an orgy of the vatic/phatic in international novels and high theory.

In Life & Times of Michael K, Coetzee describes the journey of a hare-lipped Coloured man from Cape Town to the country and—after passing through several labor and re-education camps—back again during a civil war in South Africa. The first and longest part of the novel gives K’s journey, first with his mother and then with her ashes, up through his sojourn in the re-education camp in attentive, descriptive, quiet prose through K’s eyes. This section reaches its climax when, after escaping a labor camp back to the abandoned farm where his mother may or may not have been born, he grows his own pumpkins by dark of night while hiding out by day in a burrow. In these pages, Coetzee recalls Defoe in his careful descriptions of tools and labor, and attains an unanticipatedly high register in his evocation of K’s attunement to the earth and its cycles.

Eventually, he is captured by the army, who suspect him of guarding supplies for rebels. They send him to the second camp, and his stay there occupies the novel’s second section, narrated this time by the doctor in the camp, an educated white man of liberal sympathies. The imprisoned, starving K refuses to eat, telling the doctor that after the pumpkins he has grown, no other food tastes good. The doctor’s confrontation with this refusal, and with K’s seeming freedom from all teleologies, prompts him to what amounts to an eloquent paraphrase of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” and Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (AKA “Theses on the Philosophy of History”). It’s hard to say whether we’re meant to sympathize with the doctor’s reading of K’s life as an allegory for how meaning can erupt into a system without being claimed by the system’s terms. He wants so badly to be K, but can only describe him—largely in the terms of other systems, which perhaps lends more aesthetic credibility to the echoes of Kafka and Benjamin. It reminds me a bit of Lewis Carroll’s parodies of Wordsworth, in which the latter’s “egotistical sublime” was reduced, justly or unjustly, to sheer moral obtuseness.

In the brief final section, K returns to Capetown and meets up with some shady characters: a man demonic in his sense of fun, accompanied by his sisters, who may or may not be merely his whores. One of them gives K a blowjob, an experience that brings him shame, before he returns to his mother’s small room to rest, fantasizing about finding company on his journey to freedom from all the “camps” springing up to claim human beings.

This aspect of the novel famously disturbed Nadine Gordimer’s admiration for it back in the mid-’80s. She found K’s near-anarchism and political quietism to be a slight against the liberation struggle of black South Africans and an unfortunate derogation of the intellectual’s duty to aid such struggles. She censured him in terms derived from Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, saying that he had failed to provide in his novel the integration of the hero’s destiny with the destiny of his society, which is the primary task of the novel form in an age when the social totality is not immanent. Whether Gordimer still thinks this way, I don’t know. She’s not wrong: Coetzee in this novel is more Heidegger than Lukács (philosophically, I mean, not politically). Now that the particular struggle of South African blacks has ended, Gordimer’s criticism seems off the mark or irrelevant. This discloses a law of literary transmission about which we ought to be ambivalent: posterity doesn’t care whether you served or deserted.