Packet Five: The aesthetics/ethics dyad
I want now to produce a two-headed packet; it really needs two heads, trust me (by the way, this is not the first time Invidicum has recalled for me Brodsky’s novel Dyad, but I digress).
On page 1089 we find the Master speaking, contrasting himself with other Masters (bad ones) who are so in love with, so invested in their stories and especially their characters that they “smear beneficence like putti poop on the ceiling of this great big Sistine Chapel of an Underworld we call life.” His work is not compromised because he does not become so infatuated with his characters that he cannot see both light and dark. Strangely, he phrases this as not giving in to the temptation of “punishing” his characters either—as if it were an either/or situation. Here it gets even stranger. His image begins to blur in the effort of crossing over to his character world and they in turn flicker in an equally impossible movement toward his. He says of them they:
… have no choice, after all, but to crave whatever Life in this World dictates…. Whereas He has the ability to stand, without a craving to His name, outside Life in the World—to turn His back on Life—and prove thereby that He’s in fact worthy of exorbitant Self-love after all. So, as it turns out, He’s the intersection of ethics and aesthetics—the spot on the moral map where ethics transubstantiates into an aesthetic. -p 1091
He, the Master, eschews craving (thus envy and every other human foible), escaping even life in the world, when he enters into the fiction world that he creates—it is everything to him, more “real’ than reality (my word and my quotes). But such a separation is only possible in the form of renouncing life itself. If “exorbitant Self-love” is somehow the transubstantiation of the author into the Master who in turn subsumes Himself into His creation it is nevertheless a rabbit hole hard to follow.
The strangeness of this passage is echoed on page 1152 (surely one of the strangest pages in all of literature) when in the mayhem of the mass shooting one of the victims is the Master himself administered to by Melanctha. When she touches Him He echoes Dante: “Perché mi scerpi?” once again linking the Master to a renouncing of life. Only the pain, He assures Melanctha, allows Him to speak to her. And so He is not “rebuk[ing]” her—just giving her a “chuck on the chin”—the gesture echoing His refusal to “punish” His characters but also a nod to the “beneficence” so derided in bad masters, altogether creating a weird chiasmus of emotions and concepts, demonstrating a fusion of creator with creation such that the two cannot be separated without doing harm—i.e. the Master needs the work, wholly identifies with it or the doing of it and the work cannot be discussed without an inquiry into who/what the “Master” is. But just as we saw in the case of James’ “I” we cannot say with certainty who the Master is (see below).
As for the aesthetics/ethics dyad, In Invidicum the Master sacrifices all for his characters, “transubstantiat[ing] ethics into an aesthetic.” As I see it, in the real world (overrated though it may be) Brodsky’s aesthetic becomes an ethical matter. It is very rare, but there are cases in literature when a line is crossed where aesthetics becomes a matter of ethics, and we see this in Invidicum. Brodsky’s voice, his style is so strong, so relentless, and so unwavering that it becomes a moral force in itself, as it was for Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and when have we seen a writer like this in the United States, and when have we more needed such a one? He has Melanctha (a writer) say, “the practice of Art is an affront… to injustice” (p 931) and indeed, in a passage such as we find ten pages prior to this Brodsky is clearly outraged by the incongruities of life. Here is a parenthetical remark on suffering indignities “for no apparent reason”:
(the phrase strikes him as screamingly funny—almost as funny as the just-crowned cancer victim’s obligatory why me? [although he’s already made up his mind many times over never to give Life the satisfaction of hearing him utter it, who knows what he’ll end up saying or doing in a pinch or when push comes to shove or when the axe starts to fall ever so brutishly, as if it can fall in any other way?]) -p 921
More to the point (phrases like “more to the point” and “to sum up” are a running joke in Invidicum, to once again digress…), the way Brodsky writes cannot be separated from what he writes. The two are so completely bound together (and if you should begin to lose sight of it, although I hardly see how, he is there throughout to remark on the novel’s making—the why the how and the wherefore) that neither can be discussed without reference to the other. And so we will have to wangle—I’m sorry, wrangle—with the Master some more.
Packet Five: Who is speaking?
The great paradox of Invidicum is that its torrential style (another example: it is nothing less than extraordinary that in a novel of such length a breathless energy is produced such that packets can be left hanging for the reader to fill in as the author rushes on, adding to the breathless surge while simultaneously creating a little space to catch the breath) is the strongest I know and yet the question who is speaking? is nestled in its very core. The question is asked throughout and it is deployed in a variety of ways, for example in the term “wordflow” by itself and in concert with the term “worldflow” (the two aren’t in sync), and in the idea of words as “the latest and oldest sort of self-driving vehicles [with] a will of their own… always… shamelessly having the last word—making a mockery of… thoughts…” -p 888 (or how about this one: “thoughts are obviously nothing more than floaters in Language’s jaundiced eye… -p 527). Here and in previous novels we encounter the danger that language, as if with a will of its own, imposes meaning on the speaker/writer. And in Invidicum, with repeated use of the word “pharmakon” we recall Derrida’s revisiting (because we never left it) the scene of the original crime: Plato’s Phaedrus.
I’ll leave Derrida for the reader to peruse on their own (“Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination). I prefer Foucault, and because the question who is speaking? is so insistent I went back and read Foucault’s article “What is an Author?” for the first time in many years and found that my recollection of it was faulty. The article now seems timely to me, even without considering AI, in the alternative sets of questions Foucault envisions:
…overturning the traditional problem, no longer raising the questions: How can a free subject penetrate the density of things and give it meaning? How can it activate the rules of a language from within and thus give rise to the designs that are properly its own? Instead, these questions will be raised: How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules? In short, it is a matter of depriving the subject of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse. (p 221 Essential Works Vol 2)
We encounter a radical destabilization of the “subject”—to use Foucault’s term—throughout Invidicum. In the next paragraph Foucault touches on the “great danger with which fiction threatens our world,” that danger being the unchecked “proliferation of meaning” which the author is understood to be the progenitor of as the genius behind/before language who creates. But in fact, Foucault says, the author is actually “the principle of thrift,” he “limits, excludes, and chooses” (here his thought is linked to Blanchot with his emphasis on silence and space in literature, and with the importance of unknowing in the play of literature for Beckett). And so we see Brodsky spotlight the drama between the endless streaming of language/meaning (the “menstruum of immiscibles” p324) always facing the unending task of choosing, editing, and excluding, not in order to round-off, define, or seek closure (those “last refuges of scoundrels”), but in order to— Oops, I almost let the wordflow get me there. Unless a mockingbird needs an “in order to” sing, which admittedly may happen in some discourses, but not the present one.
Each “character” embodies this drama: suddenly visited via the drug with superpowers of articulation yet never feeling like the master of their own speech which is virtually interchangeable with every other character’s speech (“originality’s an overrated belch” p 615).
And then there are the strange circles a reader of Invidicum finds themself running in, mind-fucked from multiple directions, cf. Melanctha Herbert quoting her favorite poem (Blake). A fictional character—in name at least—created by another writer (Gertrude Stein) is taken as a character by Brodsky and as that character quotes another writer (Blake). The material of the novel—the psychic content, as it were—seems to be not literature per se, but language itself. Not in the sense of one (the Author) who is outside the novel (a God-like Master), but both in and outside simultaneously just as one is inside language even as language is outside of one. And so the question keeps appearing: who is speaking?
With the sets of questions in Foucault’s final paragraph:
We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? …. With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express….? Instead, there would be other questions, like these: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions?…. What difference does it make who is speaking? -p 222
and in the penultimate paragraph in which Foucault says, “I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear….” I don’t know what people may have thought about this in 1969; Foucault could not have envisioned AI, but with AI we could very well be on the threshold of such a change. But for our present purposes, I think Invidicum sits at the penumbra of the two sets of questions, showing the inadequacy of the first, pointing to the value of the second.
One possible answer to the final question, “What difference does it make who is speaking?” is it makes all the difference (there’s that pesky Frost again) to the speaker. One has no choice (sorry Bob), if one’s language and hence one’s thoughts are not to be entirely and hopelessly hijacked by any number of discourses in the ocean of language, to —become a Master! But this is an endless task fraught with uncertainty at every step (“for what is life but one long audition for a role that’s unplayable” -p 217). Just like being an authentic human being—the work never ends.
Auguste Rodin, Portrait of Camille Claudel with a Bonnet, WikiArt
Packet Six: High in the hammock of loose ends
On page 554 Melanctha asks a question:
… the form of language is constructed with quite another aim than to stoop to letting the form of thought—of the life-world—be recognized. And what is that aim, after all?
The question goes unanswered and this hanging question is one of the spaces that allows the novel to breathe. However the reader is certainly free to answer it on their own, and it’s not as though Invidicum doesn’t provide any help. Here are three such aides:
p 767: … language was supposed to be transparent (unseen unheard), a mere means to an untimely end, a tool to be immediately disabled by the wielder at his first dim suspicion that the wielding could go all sorcerer’s-apprentice on him and turn into… an aesthetic phenomenon in its own right.
p 800: … only Beauty allows [the Master] to transcend self-hate…
p 853: … to renounce the impossible task of adumbrating the ghost of Firstness forever (and get on with the business of exercising desperate ingenuity for its own sake—for the sake of darkling playfulness).
And then “Life is a very sloppy artist,” we are told (p 75), “it refuses to mop up after its own false starts.” This is a recurring motif. I think it’s fair to say Invidicum revels in the tangles and dares you, reader, to leave them untied. On page 168 we are told that by being so sloppy “Life carv[es] out a future.” Not only is it a beautiful idea, but I think it’s at the heart of a certain conception of beauty. It is behind some excellent passages on Rodin, and no doubt it is why Michael Hafftka was tagged to provide drawings for the novel.
Not that there aren’t other forms of beauty. One might wonder why, of all people, Brodsky seems to admire George Balanchine the most. Is it because Balanchine is a supreme maker, like Bach, a flawless editor, to paraphrase Foucault, who somehow manages over all the growths, ravages, and false starts of life to convey a beauty that exists entirely for its own sake, an entirely human phenomenon that may help to compensate for our blight on this suffering planet? This question (and others) rattle in my mind when I read Brodsky, and as someone who has never felt the need to choose (classical or modern? it’s all art to me) I love that I can hold Céline and Balanchine on the same breath, as it were (and it was!) when I think about Brodsky’s work. These are, after all, the kinds of “opposites” I hold when I make my own, and, after all, if we are to be made beings only, but not also makers, then can we say of ourselves that we truly live?
The Mockingbird Sings 