The Devil Never Sleeps

by Andrei Codrescu

  The radical act under such circumstances is to erase or overthrow the record, either in favor of tabula rasa—through revolution—or by writing one’s autobiography. I’m using revolution here to mean anarchy, i.e, the moment of the burning of the Office of the Registrar and the Archive of the Secret Police, but it’s just a symbolic trope. Such “revolution” is no longer possible since our biographies are no longer centralized but spread farther than most individuals travel, with bits and pieces lodged and multiplied in databases that are everywhere and nowhere at once.

  We moderns, or postmoderns, are overwritten. Overinscribed. Overrecorded. The modern state is an automatic overproducer of individual biographies. The necessity to control every aspect of human existence, down to and beyond the molecular level, is an automatic function of the bureaucratic machine. The overabundance of biography is also a result of democracy. In theocratic societies only kings and nobles had biographies. Subjects were known only by their functions: butlers, weavers, blacksmiths, buttressers, picklers, seamstresses, moat diggers. The nameless serf layers below the professionals were known only as “souls.”

  Souls don’t have biographies, they have only a collective life and, if they are good, a private afterlife. The modern state and increasing democracy gave these souls back their bodies, unique bodies with the marks of identity on them. The body is the biography. It is the body, gained through social revolutions in the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries, that provides the records of the state and is now overproducing enough data to create not just the individual to whom it belongs but other bodies as well, whether fictional or cloned.

  The only way to subvert one’s official biography is to rewrite it. Autobiography is the opposite of the biography insofar as it is the individual’s attempt to escape the description of the state. Some autobiographers might deny this, pointing to their use of official records, etc., but in effect, their texts exist for the purpose of challenging those records. When one begins a tale with the words “I was born in Pontoise in 1456,” one will spend the rest of one’s argument, indifferent of whether one was born in Pontoise or not, on decrying or apologizing for that fact. The misfortune of being born—to paraphrase Cioran—along with all the other misfortunes deemed fit for the record, is what autobiographers target for destruction. Every autobiography is an antisocial, subversive act aimed against the recorded facts of one’s life.

  Autobiography subverts the data-heavy body by attempting to give back the individual his soul, to return the body-specifics to the collective matrix. Autobiographers aspire to be serfs of undifferentiated energy. Autobiography subverts not only the state but the body, which is the biography authored by the state. The autobiographer makes a claim to immortality. The body is, of course, mortal, and the state, while it encourages reproduction, is fond of occasional house-cleaning.

  And now along comes virtuality, which empties the body and makes possible the overwriting of the soul. To give just one example: the Paper Body of the President has grown so vast in half a century it is quite impossible to see. The librarian of Jimmy Carter’s presidential library in Atlanta told me that Roosevelt, who was a four-term president and oversaw some of the most dramatic events of our century—the Great Depression, World War II—had less than half as many papers as Carter, a one-term president. The librarian dreaded to imagine the size of Clinton’s White House archive where every e-mail is backed by a hard copy and every copy is copied. When such dimensions are reached, the body becomes invisible. Proportion dictates that monuments cannot rise above a certain height without disappearing. The Body of the Nation, following closely on the Body of the President, is likewise drowning or dissolving in biographical overabundance.

  Just in time, virtuality and unlimited memory rushes to our defense. Bill Gates mounted on a chip is to biography and the state what Joan of Arc on her horse was to Orléans and to France: a Savior of the Code, the Guarantor of the infinity of the form. In the virtual world we can rewrite our biography, autobiographomanicize to our heart’s content. We can also change identities altogether, slipping out of bodies and genders quicker than it takes to change clothes. We can shape-shift across species, we can spin in the changing rooms of MUDs (multiuser dungeons) as fast as we want. Virtuality has put evolution on fast forward. But this Darwin-on-speed mode is only as good as the data, which is to say that the disembodied soul made possible by the computer is programmed by a writing that is neither less nor more than the abstracted biography of the state. Which is, of course, the abstract of all the biographies of individuals. This tail-swallowing is only seemingly generative of soul. The freedom to muck around in the aesthetics of identity is a game. Virtuality means just that. The textual metarmophosis of the virtual autobiographer is as bound by the fundamental program as the body is to the state.

  More tragically, the creation of any fiction of identity is only an admission of the bondage to state, time, and language. What, then, is the state of autobiography in a sea of drifting facts that can fit with ease anywhere, in a world where collage is the predominant mode of expression? And where the image, composed in whatever manner one wishes, remains uniformly contained? Is there an approach that does not require the reinvention of a moral system? Which, given the tattered remains of such systems, adrift across the sands of a psychology in retreat before machines, is, you have to admit, no easy task.

  2.

  Autobiography! What a bourgeois conceit! What odd presumption that one’s life matters enough to write about. One writes autobiography either to escape life or to make some if there isn’t enough. In any case, the activity bares the pattern and makes escape—from that point on—difficult unless one writes one autobiography after another, each one in flagrant opposition to the one that came before. Serial lives like (concomitant) sentences.

  I have done that—to my embarrassment. My first autobiography, titled modestly, The Life & Times of an Involuntary Genius, was written in the third person with a long section—a letter to my first love—in the second. By removing myself, at age 23, from the scant facts of my life, I was hoping to create a listenable story, much the same way that someone calling a help line might say, “I have this friend with a problem.” Of course, the reason I wrote an autobiography at such a tender age was that I had the problem of all tender-aged people, namely, I was unknown. By telling this tale of a young man with an exemplary life story I was hoping to remedy that situation. The advantage of writing at such a tender age was that I remembered everything or nearly everything that happened to me. I had the benefit of only a few events, earth-shattering as they might have seemed to me, and I used them to create an initiatory structure. I had no ax to grind but I had (already!) some excuses to make. I left my country and my girl and I felt bad about it. By writing those things down I recast them to appear heroic: I wasn’t a traitor, I was an exile, a hero. History came to my aid there, with its long and distinguished list of exile-heroes.

  My second autobiography, In America’s Shoes, picked up where the first one left off, at the beginning of my life in America, and it was a first-person record of the rapid process of becoming American. I felt that by changing countries and languages I had literally been born again. In this sense, I was not starting where I’d left off, but from my new birth in 1966 in Detroit, Michigan. Furthermore, the book is mostly about my life in California, a part of America where the remaking of one’s identity was the chief business of the inhabitants. This book is less a record of the past as a writing of the present in its becoming past. The speeded-up nature of time in America is the real subject of this work. In America, I had noticed from the very beginning, the future becomes the past before anyone could possibly understand it. I was hoping to invent a way by which thinking about the past could be made as fast as the transformation itself. The Gogolian sentence, as I understood it from Nabokov’s description, with its endless clauses, rolling open parentheses, and constant digressions, was the tool for such enterprise. This book is an autobiography-on-the-run, a “me
ditation in an emergency,” as Frank O’Hara put it. It is also an American book because it made use of the “open field” as theorized by Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, and others, which is to say that it rode the wave of time even as it explained the drowning.

  My third autobiography—which was never published—was intended as an autobiography from everyone else’s point of view. I mailed out about a hundred questionnaires to friends and acquaintances asking them a number of questions like: “When did we meet? What did we do? What happened afterwards? How do I figure in your life?” I got back a great variety of answers. Some writers took the questions as an opportunity to reminisce scrupulously, others as a license to invent. There were true and fantastic stories in the mix, all of them stylistically incompatible. I realized a number of things: First of all, I was not as important to others as I was to myself. My friends’ accounts of our moments together were tawdry and pale compared to how I conceived of them. Second, one’s biography from the perspective of others was as loosely connected as subatomic particles: Immense spaces sat between events, attracted only by forces too weak to make a compelling fiction. The biography provided by the state was more substantial than the memories of my friends.

  Lately, the autobiographical enterprise has been enjoying great popularity in this country. The imprecise and fuzzy word used to describe this new, hot product is “memoir.” I understand the rationale. “Memoir” bypasses even the minimum requirements of the genre as we understood it until now. “Memoir” recognizes the fallibility of memory, the impossibility of ordering what is recalled randomly. What “memoir,” like “autobiography,” does not relinquish, however, is the right to claim an initiatory structure. These things that happened to me, both forms say, retell an exemplary initiation. The hero leaves home in search of self-fulfillment, encounters many dangers, is transformed into an adult, and returns to slay the dragons of conformity by becoming the head of the household. Or something like that. The endings, in recognition of established postmodern findings, are sometimes open-ended. What is sure is that they do not end in the death of the hero, like novels, because an autobiographer cannot fake his own death. By not dying, the hero of an autobiography always triumphs. The form is implicitly optimistic and as such, American. We do not, in this country, believe in endings: we believe in success. We want to hear stories of triumph. Which is why you will hear only Europeans proclaiming “the death” of this or that, whether “history” or “politics” or “God” or “philosophy” or whatever. We like to think that those things are only metaphors for the “death of Europe.” Things in this country do not die, they collapse in a data-subconscious from where they can be retrieved by your zip-drive. The American form of parting with the past is amnesia. We simply forget things by storing them away in our data banks. We have more computer memory in this country than the rest of the world combined. This memory allows us to do computation on a scale impossible before, computations so vast that they allow for the discovery and transformation of everything, including our identities and species. But, as I said before, this is only virtuality. What happens in the bodied world is another story.

  What happens in the bodied world is that the collapsed pasts, presents, and futures that we forget as soon as we create them continue a nonvirtual existence in us that gives birth to a great number of monstrous, grotesque, unforeseen fleurs-de-mal, of which “memoirs” are but one product.

  What kind of literature is the memoir?

  The coincidence factory that is the novel lends its machinery to the manufacture of autobiography—a risk-free loan since there is hardly any wear and tear on the machines. The facts that are made to coincide are preexistent. The novel, on the other hand, is rough on these machines because it forces them to manufacture the facts as well as fit them together.

  What machines are there in the coincidence factory?

  Perhaps we should first ask what coincidence is. According to Bill Moyers’s recovering-addict son, William Cope Moyers, “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”5 As my friend Laura says, God needs to remain anonymous because if we knew who and where he was we’d kick his ass for some of these coincidences … like, let’s say, turning eighteen when they give a World War. And furthermore, my friend Kuniko says, there may be many gods and they are all forgetful.

  The writer, on the other hand, openly piles coincidence on coincidence in order to create a fate (a book) and advertises his presence at every seam. We know who and where the writer is at all times in a book: He is wherever two unlikely events or characters meet and he is that which puts them together. The postmodern writer has tried to elude this trap by making his presence obvious, by displaying the stage mechanics, a subterfuge intended paradoxically, to obscure his presence. If everything is visible everything is seamless: The Logos is at all times in motion, an ocean, everything is part of it. It is a fine theoretical dodge, but no book can be endless though it can (ideally) be porous. Language itself, all on its own, operates under a set of very strict rules and it displays a terrifyingly cogent machinery, a web that is symmetrical, geometrical, the same in every sound, syllable, word, utterance, story. So who needs to crudely manufacture coincidence when coincidence is inescapable?

  We manufacture toys, don’t we? It’s a process: First we know that the Logos is connected at all points with whatever it passes through. Then we pretend not to know it and call this willful ignorance Mystery, as a palliative against the terror of the real mystery of connection, coincidence, and ineluctability. Then we create our version of a cogent Logos from the artificially willed blind spots where we have disconnected our consciousness. Eureka, we have a novel. We have a story. In the case of an autobiography, the job is a bit harder because we have to ignore not only the tedious cogency of Logos but the facts of our lives such as they are, courtesy of a selective memory. To spin the facts into crude coincidence, fit them into the procrustean bed of the book, takes a will greater than that of the novelist, an ignorance deeper than that of a simple spinner of tales. We who pretend to tell our lives are the lowest among writers, a tribe not known for its integrity in the first place.

  How can a pretender to the job of god have any integrity?

  As for the machines themselves, they are the traditional ones of fiction: plot, dialogue, characterization (1 almost wrote “cauterization”), exposition, etc. The once-taken-for-granted sobriety of the autobiographer has been pretty much abandoned by the memoirist. Re-created dialogue, falsified plot, impressionistic characterization, and self-serving exposition are pretty much standard—sometimes covered with a thick syrup of lyricality that passes, in some circles, for poetry. Where the circumspect autobiographer of forty years ago might say, “I hear those words from a half century ago as if they were spoken today,” and then goes on to make them up, the contemporary memoirist no longer bothers. With this sort of touch there is little, as I’ve said, wear and tear on the machines of fiction, but what is lost in accuracy is not gained in imagination. Many of today’s memoirs, with a few notable exceptions, namely those of scientists and camp survivors, are just fairy tales, primitive novels intended to palliate a public seized by the fear of failure. Failure is un-American. The confessional mania that possesses us today has emptied the nation’s closets on television, on radio, in newspapers, in memoirs. Nothing is hidden any longer, but the desire for what is hidden is increased a hundredfold. The open maw of insatiable media need, and the public desire it stimulates and frustrates, demands more and more from the ransacked closets. But fear not: The production of false memory is a booming business. False Memory Syndrome is no longer limited to pop psychologists and their distressed charges, it is the status quo of the moment. The memoir is a skeumorph. Which is to say, a content-empty form anyone can put their stuff in, like Etch-A-Sketch.

  Against Synchronicity

  We, the people of this earth who are neither rich nor particularly good-looking, like synchronicity. Synchronicity makes us feel important
. When synchronicity happens, we believe that the universe has not forgotten us after all. We believe also that synchronicity happens to the rich and photogenic more often than it does to the not-those. Surely, it is only coincidence, fortunate happenstance, and lucky junctions—aspects of synchronicity, that is—that account for wealth and good looks. But a closer look reveals something quite unsettling. Everything is synchronous, there is nothing that doesn’t rhyme with something else, no matter how strange or unlikely. Synchronicity rules chaos with an iron hand, and it is only the merciful defense of some kind of brain filter that keeps us from going mad seeing how it all fits together. When this brain defense wears thin, we see the mind-boggling connectiveness of every event in time and space, and reel from the nausea of unrelenting synchronicity.

  My brain’s defenses were pretty thin the evening I went to a Jungian Elvophile houseboat party at the Lakefront in New Orleans. The Jungians were in town for a conference, and they had gotten together on the houseboat to celebrate their latest addition to the gallery of archetypes: Elvis. It was a blue velvety evening and the breeze off Lake Ponchartrain ruffled fetchingly the Blue Hawaii and other Elvine-costuming of the guests. Of all the professionals who gather for boat parties anywhere in the world, the Jungians are the greatest believers in synchronicity. They achieve this belief through the study of dreams and the application upon these dreams of a gridded array of frozen timeless figures called archetypes. Anyway, I asked a Jungian analyst where she was from, and she said, “San Francisco.” “Funny,” I said, “I’m going to San Francisco tomorrow to speak at the San Francisco State University about baseball.” “No, you’re not,” she said, “You’re going to the University of San Francisco to speak about baseball, and I am the boss of the man who hired you to speak.” We both agreed that this was synchronicity indeed, come to the help of my confused mind. Moments later, an architecture professor made a comment about museums that resembled exactly something I’d written that day. A few moments after that, a Republican pathologist bemoaned the hijack of the Republican party by the Christian right, which had been the exact subject of an earlier conversation with a Methodist minister who had recalled for me a dream I had had exactly two weeks before. As the evening progressed, synchronicity became so palpable you could touch it. The cardboard cutout of Elvis watched over all this from behind the piano. The Elvis lookalike bartender with the pastedon sideburns poured whiskey in thick déjà-vu glasses the likes of which I have at home.