Reading Style

by Jenny Davidson

  I don’t like: white Pomeranians, women in slacks, geraniums, strawberries, the harpsichord, Miró, tautologies, animated cartoons, Arthur Rubinstein, villas, the afternoon, Satie, Bartók, Vivaldi, telephoning, children’s choruses, Chopin’s concertos, Burgundian branles and Renaissance dances, the organ, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his trumpets and kettledrums, the politico-sexual, scenes, initiatives, fidelity, spontaneity, evenings with people I don’t know, etc.

  The items on each list are concrete, vivid; they give the sense of a personality. More than that, though, the format of the list—its teasing combination of revelation and withholding—tells us more about Barthes than his expressed dislike for strawberries and women in slacks (Ludwig Wittgenstein also hated it when women wore trousers). A shape or structure is then bestowed on the fragment by the turn in the paragraph that follows:

  I like, I don’t like: this is of no importance to anyone; this, apparently, has no meaning. And yet all this means: my body is not the same as yours. Hence, in this anarchic foam of tastes and distastes, a kind of listless blur, gradually appears the figure of a bodily enigma, requiring complicity or irritation. Here begins the intimidation of the body, which obliges others to endure me liberally, to remain silent and polite confronted by pleasures or rejections which they do not share.

  (A fly bothers me, I kill it: you kill what bothers you. If I had not killed the fly, it would have been out of pure liberalism: I am liberal in order not to be a killer.)

  From “anarchic foam” emerges a figure, and yet it is only “the figure of a bodily enigma”—it is the unreadability of the list rather than its cohesion or comprehensibility that interests Barthes, and the parenthetic aside of the final paragraph represents an arabesque of further definition, one that reminds me of Adorno’s aphoristic suggestion, in Minima Moralia, that “the precondition of tact is convention no longer intact but still present.”9 It is as though Barthes is too courteous to request the reader’s empathy, the inconsequential or unreadable aspects of his notation retaining for the writer a discreet corona of privacy.

  Perhaps the clearest contemporary descendant of this Barthes, Barthes the sentence-writer, is the American critic and poet Wayne Koestenbaum; at any rate I cannot think of another writer in English who so strongly combines that level of intellectual sharpness with a baroque, sometimes dandyish style and sensibility. Koestenbaum’s 1995 book Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon is difficult to place, generically. It’s cultural criticism, for sure, but it’s also something like a series of prose poems: the cover of the Plume paperback edition I possess features a familiar photograph of Jackie Kennedy in pink pillbox hat and coat against a luridly acidic green background, the colors drawing the eye and calling to mind the Lilly Pulitzer palette. Each short section has a title—“Jackie and Ordinary Objects,” “Jackie and Synesthesia”—and the order of the proceedings is associative, linguistic rather than argument- or narrative-driven in any obvious sense. In musing on how Jackie infuses ordinary objects with meaning, Koestenbaum suggests that press accounts during Jackie’s time in the White House emphasized her association with ordinary things partly “because icon Jackie was herself objectified, a commonplace petite chose in mass consciousness”:

  Everything ordinary that Jackie did, owned, or discovered becomes evidence that (1) Jackie is really just one of us, despite her elite veneer; (2) we, despite our relentlessly ordinary lives, are secretly magnificent, because we share plain objects and practices with Jackie; (3) icon Jackie is an unpretentious object in the American home, and that’s why she is fond of ordinary things—she identifies with them. Whatnots are her peer group.10

  It’s the last sentence in which Koestenbaum’s distinctive style can most clearly be heard—that mouthy “whatnots” catches the attention (a whatnot is much the same thing as a knick-knack, a tchotchke, but it is a far more evocative term in its own right, an arch little word that seems nonetheless to express something fundamental about language, its strengths and its shortcomings). Our relationship with Jackie, Koestenbaum insists, works by contiguity and association: by the trope of metonymy, in which the part stands for the whole and meaning is created by proximity rather than substitution.

  Someone quotes Jackie using the word “delish.” “Delish”! What an ordinary, slangy word. Jackie said “delish.” Maybe Jackie and I have something in common: we share delish. We share era-specific conversational banalities. (91)

  One hears that Jackie said, while on her restoring mission, “Look at that Lincoln cake plate.” What is a cake plate? I didn’t know there was a special variety of plate called “cake plate.” But Jackie knew, and she pointed to it. “Cake plate” becomes another molecule in the Jackie pointillism—another detail, mysterious, unsymbolic, that helps to compose icon Jackie. (93)

  “Jackie and Synesthesia” offers a fuller vision of what this sort of cultural criticism might do. Synesthesia simply refers to the neurological phenomenon by which an object conventionally comprehensible in one sense is perceived in terms of another (letters or numbers and colors, smells or tastes and sounds—recent research suggests that mild forms of synesthesia are much more prevalent than previously believed). Synesthesia the term thus becomes the license for unbridled association—synesthesia “permits us to reconstruct Jackie,” Koestenbaum says, and then he moves into an extraordinarily baroque associative fugue: “For example, when I think ‘Jackie,’ or see a picture of Jackie, several objects, confections, or incidental ‘treasures’ (as Jackie might have called them) come to mind. I think of the perfume called Jicky, by Guerlain; I think of Chiclets chewing gum; I think of petits fours; and I think of enameled clip-on earrings” (195). In subsequent paragraphs, Koestenbaum delves deeply into each of these terms (“The name ‘Jicky’ itself seems halfway between ‘Jackie’ and ‘sticky.’ The idea that a product called Jicky exists, waiting to be bought, excites me: icon Jackie behaves like a product but one can’t buy her, she is off the market”). The sound of the words themselves is as crucial here as the senses they serve:

  Petits fours: petits fours are the sort of French dessert (like mille-feuille) that in the 1960s I considered fancy. Petits fours are square, with hard butter-cream frosting and soft tea cake inside, lined with jam. The inside of a petit four isn’t a treat; its outside is—for the same reason (hardness, resistance, sheen) that the coat of a Chiclet pleases. I have always liked sugary glazes, and therefore appreciate petits fours, or the idea of petits fours, via the word “glacé,” which enters the sphere of Jackie through the kid gloves she wore to the Inaugural Ball, described in one account as “20 button white glacé kid gloves” which successfully avoided “wrinkle or downward sag.” The gloves’ perfection—no wrinkle, no sag—comes by virtue of the property called “glacé.” A second route through which “glacé” and “Jackie” meet, in my imagination, is through the word “chignon.” I think of Jackie’s classic bouffant as a chignon: the word “chignon” (whose origin is “chain”) recalls a kind of glazed cruller shaped like a twist (were they called “glazed twists” or “French twists”?). (196–97)

  This is brilliantly associative, and also willfully unmotivated by anything other than the feel of words in the mouth (it is surely not coincidental that so many of these words are also for things that one savors on the tongue, or perhaps I too am excessively partial to sugary glazes?).

  The Jackie book does seem to form a network of meaning; elsewhere, Koestenbaum takes even further Barthes’s injunction to cut things up, to work in fragments. In “My ’80s,” he serves up an autobiography in fragments; it is an essay I mentally juxtapose to an equally striking though quite different short prose piece by Luc Sante, “Commerce,” which also chronicles a time and a place—New York at the end of the 1970s—long gone.11 Neither “My ’80s” nor “Commerce” is an exercise in nostalgia (as Carl Wilson says, “Nostalgia tends to neuter critique”).12 Both pieces adopt a nonchronological method of ordering: Koestenbaum’s sentences are more show-offy, extravagan
t, while Sante works in an understated idiom that at times seems even to forego style altogether (in the sense that the accoutrements of classic noir proclaim themselves less style than antistyle). Koestenbaum sometimes adopts Oulipian methods (he is partial to the sort of “I remember” refrain pioneered by Joe Brainard in 1970 and played with by Perec and Kenneth Koch, among others, before Harry Mathews adopted it for his “remembrance” of Georges Perec in The Orchard, published in French in 1986 and in English translation in 1988), but here he is surely writing under the sign of Barthes and of Susan Sontag, whose expressed preference (in “Notes on ‘Camp’”) for “the form of jottings, rather than an essay” as she tries to capture “this particular fugitive sensibility” (276–77) provides another kind of license for Koestenbaum’s modus operandi (“I swore allegiance to the aphorism,” Koestenbaum writes at one point [133]). Here are a few of his fragments:

  My mind was on écriture feminine as applied to homosexuals. I was big on the word “homosexual.” I read Homosexualities and French Literature (edited by George Stambolian and Elaine Marks). I read Hélène Cixous. On a train I read Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (translated by Richard Howard): I looked out dirty windows onto dirty New Jersey fields. I began to take autobiography seriously as a historical practice with intellectual integrity. On an airplane I read Michel Leiris’s Manhood (translated by Richard Howard) and grooved to Leiris’s mention of a “bitten buttock”; I decided to become, like Leiris, a self-ethnographer. I read Gide’s The Immoralist (translated by Richard Howard) in Hollywood, Florida, while lying on a pool deck. I read many books translated by Richard Howard. In the ’80s I read The Fantastic by Tzvetan Todorov (translated by Richard Howard) and meditated on the relation between fantasy and autobiography. I brought Richard Howard flowers the first time I met him (1985), in his book-lined apartment. He assured me that I was a poet. (128–29)

  Too many of these sentences begin with the first-person singular pronoun. Later I may jazz up the syntax, falsify it. (129)

  Despite my best efforts, I existed in history, not as agent but as frightened, introspective observer. I began to fine-tune my sentences—a fastidiousness I learned from Moore’s prose. Precise sentences were my ideals, though in practice I was slipshod and sentimental. I began to seek a balance between improvisation and revision. I revised by endlessly retyping. (133)

  The balance between mind, eye and ear here is striking and unusual. In the first fragment, for instance, the cerebral flourish of the initial sentence is self-mockingly deflated by its more “mouthy” successor (the meaning comes through because of the feel of the words in the mouth, helped out by those slightly campy quotation marks). The repetition of Richard Howard’s name is humorous and affectionate while the mention of a specific year in parenthesis is undermined by its location immediately following a rumination on the relationship between autobiography and fantasy. The fragment refuses cadence, structure as a whole—it is a paratactic collection of sentences, a sequence rather than a structure. But these longer paratactic fragments are also balanced by shorter, sharper ones, more aphoristic reflections, reflections with a shape: this is the explicit subject, indeed, of the second fragment given earlier, in which syntax is jazzed up and falsified, the kind of cutting or syncopation that Barthes commends. The sentence “I revised by endlessly retyping” is not perhaps an aphorism as such, but it has the cadence of aphorism; it summarizes and punctuates the fragment it curtails. The cumulative effect of the piece as a whole is something I cannot do justice to here, but it produces a curiously moderated form of self-knowledge, a few parts pathos tincturing the near-clinical self-examination: auto-ethnography conducted under the sign of style.

  “My ’80s” could never be mistaken for a short story; its allegiance is more clearly to the essay, despite its unorthodox shape and structure. (It is possible that I am predisposed to think this because of its subsequent inclusion in the Best American Essays volume, but the piece was originally published in Artforum, and these two sites of publication confirm the reader’s sense that this is autobiographical criticism, and in that sense non-fiction.) Sante’s “Commerce,” on the other hand, feels much more like a short fiction, though I have the impression, as a reader, that everything he writes there is true to the best of his knowledge. The title conjures up notions of buying and selling and exchange but also that eighteenth-century sense of commerce as something close to conversation: this ethnography will not center on the author himself but on transactions he observed. The whole piece feels more clearly selected, crafted, shaped than Koestenbaum’s (Koestenbaum is an artist of excess, Sante one of concision), so that taking pieces out of it does more comparative violence in this case to the shape and meanings of the piece as a whole, but here are a few of my favorite fragments:

  One morning as I was walking up First Avenue, a dog ran past me with a dollar bill in its mouth. A few seconds later a fat man came puffing by in hot pursuit. (102)

  For years there was a general store, of the most traditional sort, on 9th and Second. I did my photocopying there, bought aspirin, string, drywall screws, mayonnaise, and greeting cards on various occasions. You could not imagine that they could possibly carry the exact spice or piece of hardware or style of envelope you needed, since the place was not enormous, but invariably an employee would disappear into some warren and re-emerge with your item in hand. In my memory I am always going there during blizzards. Another sort of general store stood on the corner of 14th and Third. It may have had another name, but its sign read “Optimo.” It was cool and dark inside, with racks of pipes and porn novels and shelves of cigar boxes and candy. Of its two display windows on 14th Street, one featured scales, glassine envelopes, and bricks of Mannitol—the Italian baby laxative favored by dealers in powder for stretching their merchandise—and the other held shields, badges, and handcuffs. I often wished that Bertolt Brecht had been alive to admire those windows. (106–7)

  Meaning here is created not by the selection of words in the sentence but by the juxtaposition of sentences and the choice—the paratactic choice—to sequence these bits like beads on a string, rather than subordinating them into an essay with a clear beginning, middle and end. The chaos and senselessness of this New York emerge, and yet also the patterns that create meaning out of disorder. I would say that there is no argument here, not even an oblique one. Neither is there a story. It is an exercise in seeing what’s left when we take away all the conventions and continuities of storytelling, leaving only the bare identities of time and place as the framework for stimulating intellectual and emotional response.

  The final fragment is deliberately incomplete and yet horribly conclusive:

  When S. inherited his father’s estate, although it was not a major sum, he promptly retired. That is, he quit his job, moved into a room in the George Washington Hotel on 23rd Street, and took his meals at the doughnut shop on the corner. He read, wrote, strolled, napped. It was the life of Riley. He might have continued in this fashion indefinitely had he not made the acquaintance of cocaine. (112)

  This is a highly ascetic choice for closure—Sante resists even the temptation to use the foreboding dot-dot-dot of an ellipsis in this conclusion in which nothing is concluded. We are left in a curious tense, an ongoing past which we know must have found its period not long afterward, a tense that refuses pathos and melodrama and leaves us instead with the structural sense that this piece is a kind of ourobouros, its tail clamped delicately between its teeth. The emotional drama emerges entirely from the tension between the author’s desire to record and retain these ephemera—“these fragments have I shored against my ruin”—and the spare verbal aesthetic, in which no superfluous word is allowed to remain in the prose. As different as “Commerce” is from Perec’s “Attempt at an Inventory,” both memorialize in list-like format as a way of locating and describing an intense sense of loss. These short prose forms fall between essay and story, and for me they capture something especially pressing and poignant about human l
ife, its compulsions and tics; they also underline the extent to which even the deepest consolations of reading and writing can only ever be partial or inadequate.

  8

  Details That Linger and the Charm of Voluntary Reading

  George Pelecanos, Stephen King, Thomas Pynchon

  A lighter interlude after that solemn conclusion: not all is lost. Certain details linger in the mind long after the novels in which they appear have largely faded from memory. Here, for instance, is a sentence that I can’t quite decide whether I love or hate. It is a line from Julia Glass’s Three Junes, a man’s description of fixing a puppy’s hernia by hand when he was a boy: “I still recall the sensation of pushing the lump of flesh back through the muscle wall in that taut little belly, using just the tip of my right middle finger. It felt like forcing a marble into an elastic velvet pouch.”1 I am tempted to adduce it as a happy instance of self-consciously “fine” writing mobilized in the service of character development and the themes of the novel as a whole, and yet there is something gratuitous, distracting, self-indulgent about it. It seems to me costly to stud one’s narrative prose with observations of this sort, though it’s probably easier to get away with it in a first-person narrative than when writing in the third person; in the latter case, the author risks losing the goodwill of a reader who may prefer not to be asked to admire the author’s own lavish powers of noticing and notating.