Thomas McGrath
Copper Canyon Press ($20 paperback, $35 cloth)

by Josie Rawson

It's been nearly a half century since the long, single file of actors, writers, artists, and other usual suspects—poet Thomas McGrath among them—answered the call to testify before the McCarthy House Subcommittee on Un-American Activities. What happened during those inquisitions is old record: some of those invited danced, some stonewalled, some let loose against the disgraceful procedure of it all. And some—too many—lost their livelihoods and good names after refusing to play by the rules. In 1953 the committee blacklisted thirty-six-year-old McGrath, who in short order got booted from his teaching job at Los Angeles State College, as much, it seems, for his allegiance to that “grand old bitch” the Muse as to socialist causes.

In a kind of loose-ends exile over the next few years, and in the off hours between odd labor jobs, McGrath composed the first of what would become four parts of his epic masterwork, Letter to an Imaginary Friend. Parts One and Two were put into print by Swallow Press in 1962, Parts Three and Four by Copper Canyon Press a full twenty-three years later, in 1985. Now Copper Canyon has put the quartet finally together into one full, righted, and definitive edition, coming as close to doing justice to McGrath's tsunamic imagination as possible by making use of drafts, notes, and other sources not previously available.

Much that's already been said of McGrath's opus in its several incarnations bears repeating. Critics hailed the first installment as a “tremendous odyssey of sense and spirit,” the second as evidence that lightning does strike twice, and the two taken together as the great revolutionary poem of the American heartland. Sam Hamill introduces this new 400-pages-plus Letter as, above all else, “a grand work of memory and recovery,” full of lyrical intensity and cinematic in scope.

The poem moves like some kind of treasure-laden train from station to station in a dreamed-to-life terrain—from McGrath's native North Dakota to the golden coast of California to Portugal and beyond. As it snags on time warps and event horizons that skew the chronology of Letter's pseudo-autobiographical narrative, the poem memorializes for the record lives and landscapes wiped out by grubbing religions (especially Catholicism) and the second world war, and damns the aftermath: what he sees as the American turn away from compassion and toward the every-dog-for-himself panic state.

McGrath once remarked in an interview that he was born into a time when he felt compelled to denounce much through his writing. That may be true, but not a complaint: one would be hard-pressed to find a more musical polemic than Letter in the English language. Here are the shipyards and dark barns, the wildcat strikes and cameo appearances of courage, the graveyard shifts and grimy rigs-all delivered in elegant diatribe against the users and profiteers that grind the working-class body to ash and spirit to dust. McGrath, bottom line, is damned good at damning:

Bandits . . . murderers in medals holding hands in the
catch-as-catch-can dark
With the carking, harked-back-to, marked-down virgins
of the stark little towns
Where, once, their paper histories dropped on the
thin lawns
And rocking porches of the dead-eye dons and the
homegrown dream-daddies
Now stiff with their war-won monies.

This is captivating but not easy reading. Taking his cue from Einstein's dictum, “Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler!”, McGrath sets himself to complicated work that doesn't take well to quick description. Letter is a slippery missive on the page: its dictions switch registers from stanza to stanza or even mid-line, from that of an erudite scholar to a bully-pulpit unionizer to a sort of addled medium babbling glossalalia in rhyme. Its vernacular language is shot through with a litany of rare words—elecampane quislings chippying around the pelagic and dandiacal catafalques—that recommend keeping a good dictionary in reach. Its cast of characters is immense, including figures from McGrath's childhood, his later mentors, fictional interlocutors on the order of Berryman's Mr. Bones, a role call of esteemed provocateurs (Che Guevara, Big Bill Haywood), and a steady supply of hot-thighed madonnas from the writer's “great kingdom of Fuck.” Its irregular but usually six-beat lines spill out across the page, bouncing off both margins, and bring to mind and ear the form and cadence of Whitman, some Ginsberg, some Bible, some intoxicated elocution of long gone Emerald Islanders.

Best of all, Letter to an Imaginary Friend licks its fingers and burps at the table. Polite it is not—and the better for it when McGrath turns from his populist vitriol to what may be his most abiding talent: that of bestowing praise—grace, even—on the common, the unruly, the inconsolable, those McGrath chose to side and sing with and for whom “the world is too much but not enough with us.”

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Rain Taxi Print Edition, Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter (#8) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 1997

Perspectives On Ergodic Literature
Espen J. Aarseth
Johns Hopkins University Press ($14.95)

by Rudi Dornemann

In this book, Espen J. Aarseth has created a key text for future critical and creative work in the field of electronic writing. It's a particularly brave undertaking, since there are so many different kinds of electronic texts, most continually mutating and evolving. In succeeding, Aarseth has created a particularly valuable guide. What he does right is simple: he's general when he should be general and specific when he should be specific. Cybertext's strength is in the balance it strikes between those two perspectives; its future utility is in the bridge it builds between them.

From the first line, Aarseth marks out the territory he'll examine, defining the title neologism. In the term cybertext, Aarseth is not using cyber in the popular connotation “computer-” or “machine-”. Instead, he's returning to the sense of information theorist Norbert Wiener's coinage cybernetics, where cyber means “control”—in particular, control through the give and take of feedback loops. Aarseth, then, shifts emphasis away from the text's inner software mechanism and onto the complete system of text plus user. Nothing inherently electronic or necessarily high-tech in this idea; Aarseth sees the I Ching, Apollinaire's Calligrammes, Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes, and various other works on paper as cybertexts just as much as anything currently being done on computers.

Aarseth examines various terms and approaches to electronic literature, carefully testing what really is and isn't useful. Out go familiar (and overhyped) terms like “nonlinear” and “interactive;” in comes the suggestive concept of “cyborg aesthetics.” He also finds some value in certain semiotic approaches to electronic texts and constructs his own descriptive typology of cybertexts, electronic and otherwise.

The book moves through entertaining and informative close discussions of four kinds of electronic texts: hypertexts, computer adventure games, computer-generated texts, and the collaborative environments called MUDs. With a strong of sense of the history and development of each, Aarseth provides insight into the dynamics of these species of cybertext. He does not settle for easy applications of, for instance, poststructuralism to hypertexts or narratology to adventure games. Instead, he works out where such methodologies are valid and where they fail, then develops new approaches as needed.

Even though it's unlikely that the field of electronic literature will reach a stasis point anytime soon, the ideas Aarseth develops (including the hypertext dynamic of aporia and epiphany, the “intrigue” at work in the adventure game, and the general concepts of cybertext and ergodic literature) will continue to be useful in the future. While new forms will emerge, existing forms will continually shift and change, and some forms will fall away (as the chapter on adventure games reminds us), what Aarseth has discovered about current forms will help us to understand—and create—the forms of tomorrow.

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Rain Taxi Print Edition, Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter (#8) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 1997

On Nature, Culture, And Story
Gary Paul Nabhan
Counterpoint ($25)

by Michael Wiegers

Roger Risley has lived on the Olympic Peninsula for well over two decades, having come here from Buffalo to avoid school and slip under the radar of the Vietnam draft. Instead of in a classroom, he has worked in the rain and heat, planting seedlings in the yawn of clearcuts and hauling driftwood logs and stones in his canoe, to be milled and used to build his house. All the while he has studied the birds around him. He has learned how Steller's jays mimic red-tailed hawks and Clark's nutcrackers—a bird which hasn't lived on the peninsula for decades. He's heard jays imitate mockingbirds (a bird which itself mimics other birds) and grackles imitate RV alarms; he has witnessed hummingbirds poking at gasoline dripping from machinery, evidently thinking they were finding the alcoholic sugarwater junkfood of backyard birdfeeders. While clamming together, Roger has shown me how a stretch of beach where a week earlier we had gathered a half-dozen huge rock crabs was now filled with crows, crows that wouldn't be there looking for the clams if crabs capable of snapping their skinny legs were still there. Despite his land-learned knowledge, Roger is relegated to seasonal, temporary work for the Department of Fish and Wildlife, where he often seems to know more about this area and its habitats than his degreed coworkers.

What does all this have to do with Gary Paul Nabhan's Cultures of Habitat? Nabhan is an ethnobotanist who practices conservation notonly with the facts and figures of research and education, but also with direct experience and by listening to stories of people, like Risley, who work in and learn from their natural environments. As Nabhan expertly illustrates, an effective conservation movement cannot rely solely upon politicians, scientists, and activists, but must also learn from those who are “native” to an area.

The word “native” is loaded and in using it Nabhan indirectly raises complex, explosive questions. Who is native? For example, is an American Indian whose diet is snack foods and soft drinks more native than the gardener who preserves heirloom seeds indigenous to her region? What role might local oral history play in the face of computer models and cultural hybridization? How can science learn from the vocabulary and narrative of indigenous legends and myths? In twenty-four compelling essays, Nabhan illustrates the importance of interactions between humans and their surroundings, between plants and pollinators, between animals and weather—each instance witnessed in an effort to explore and reclaim what it means to “belong” in one's landscape rather than simply to exploit it.

Of course Nabhan could easily bog down in the semantics and commonly held beliefs of the environmental movement. Issues such as sustainability and biodiversity would then simply remain ideas. Too often conservationists pick up the tired mantle of Thoreau or celebrate the superficial qualities of indigenous peoples, translating their practices into a call for simplification. Yet plants and animals—nature—aren't simple, and the land management practiced by natives isn't either. Nabhan's genius is that he explores and embraces the complexity of habitats, taking into account the most difficult and dominant creatures—humans.

As Nabhan points out, we can't even begin to talk about the plants and animals that make up biodiversity when we are destroying the cultures and languages which know them best and which have named them: “Soon, whatever we can read about biodiversity will be written in less than five percent of the languages that have existed since Gutenberg's print revolution.” The majority of the world's insects are unnamed by western scientists, yet they are the critical mortar which holds habitats together. How can we protect complex habitats if we don't even know what to call their members and if we are exterminating the languages which describe them?

Indigenous persons are intrinsic to habitat survival. Nabhan writes of showdowns between native Guatemalans and loggers, of the importance of Aborigine burning practices, of traveling to the site of a remote Sand Papago settlement with one of its former residents, only to find it plowed under an extensive monoculture of onions.

Despite the bleak picture of a world hell-bent on homogenization, there is hope. Hope in the form of Cora Baker, a Hidatsa woman who still gardens in “the old way,” in the form of people like Roger and writers like Gary Paul Nabhan. We must tell the stories. As Nabhan says:

To restore any place, we must also begin to re-story it, to make it the lesson of our legends, festivals, and seasonal rites. Story is the way we encode deep-seated values within our culture. . . . By replenishing the land with our stories, we let the wild voices around us guide the restoration work we do. The stories will outlast us.

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Rain Taxi Print Edition, Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter (#8) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 1997

Memory And Life Writing
Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber
translated by Eric Prenowitz
Routledge ($17.95)

by David Clippinger

Rootprints is a wonderful introduction to the complexity of Hélène Cixous' ideas and the various types of her writing. The text offers an intermediary position between the forms of theory and the forms of fiction; it is a hinged door that opens onto both her theory and fiction, and demonstrates that either path is worthy of serious exploration.

Cixous' place in the literary theory canon is firmly established; her widely anthologized essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” is usually granted a cornerstone position in feminist post-structural theory. So it may seem somewhat surprising to stumble upon this remark early in Rootprints:

What is most true is poetic because it is not stopped-stoppable. All that is stopped, grasped, all that is subjugated, easily transmitted, easily picked up, all that comes under the word concept, which is to say all that is taken, caged, is less true. . . . There is a continuity in the living; whereas theory entails a discontinuity, a cut, which is altogether the opposite of life. I am not anathematizing all theory. It is indispensable, at times, to make progress, but alone it is false.

Cixous' theoretical texts are indeed “circulated and appropriated,” as she says—”they were made for this, by the way”—but the body of her fiction has been relatively neglected. While not disparaging her theoretical writings, the above comment touches upon the root of the matter: her novels aren't read because they reflect multiplicity and irreducibility, while the theoretical texts offer a more limited and limiting perspective—a perspective that fiction must strive against.

Writing that resists categorization reflects the ever-unfolding, ever-evolving nature of living, and if nothing else Cixous' work argues for the absolute contingency of life and writing. Rootprints demonstrates that the autobiographical figures largely into Cixous' own written life, offering a re-vision of her theoretical texts; its concluding section, “Albums and legends,” attempts to unearth the roots of Cixous' writerly desires within the scope of her family genealogy. The autobiography moves effortlessly through time and weaves a rich tapestry of events, experiences, and people that deepens the context of her writing, offering wonderful insights into the entire body of Cixous' work. In fact, the final section can be regarded as the triumphant enactment of Cixous' theory. An excellent primer to one of literary theory's major thinkers Rootprints also contains a series of theoretical “appendices,” including an appreciative essay by Jacques Derrida and theoretical “vignettes” on the writing of Cixous by Mireille Calle-Gruber.

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Rain Taxi Print Edition, Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter (#8) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 1997

Conversations About Rainer Werner Fassbinder
edited by Juliane Lorenz
Applause ($25.95)

by Jack Granath

Chaos as Usual contains thirty-eight interviews with people close to the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Approaching such a book, I expected to come out on the far end juggling thirty-eight rival sketches, thirty-eight contradictions, thirty-eight possible Fassbinders. Instead, the book presents a remarkably consistent account of this famously enigmatic man.

From “pater familias” to “ruthless despot,” Fassbinder turns up on page after page in the familiar auteur garb of autocrat. The book swarms with lively anecdotes of Fassbinder tormenting his actors, throwing tantrums, seizing control of certain projects, sabotaging others--everything you expect from a man who had The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant lurking inside him. Limitations of the interview format sometimes conceal the larger significance of these colorful stories, but several of the speakers tease their way toward it, digging beneath the gossip to make connections between this psychology and the work it produced. Actor Ingrid Caven, for instance, explains that Fassbinder “was like an open wound, a fact he tried to hide, to camouflage. But it was why he instantly sensed people's weaknesses in their gestures and their voices. That weakness was his great strength, and it became a powerplay he thoroughly enjoyed.” Actor Gottfried John makes another subtle observation, rooting out the contradiction between Fassbinder's need for absolute control and the revolutionary intention of his work: “I remember being utterly amazed that a group who was working on a project about moral courage, about resistance against meaningless orders, would uncritically follow the orders of their master, as he was already called in those days.” These insights (and many others like them) play an important role in the book, echoing through later interviews, making patterns out of the gossip-spatter.

The same mechanics apply to another subject that surfaces in nearly every interview, the speed at which Fassbinder worked. Ten films in a year and a half, films made in a week, a film re-edited overnight, fifty-four setups a day. The actor who breaks with Fassbinder, saying, “I need a rest. . . . I've picked up sinusitis and an ulcer, I simply have to take a cure”; another who travels with him, tearing “across the countryside at 130 mph,” covering “in three and a half days what I had managed myself [on a previous trip] in two months”; the producer who offers Fassbinder “a million marks to do nothing for a year” (and is refused).

Even minor pauses in the working process caused him depressions which, in turn, accelerated his working mania.

He was panting for the next scene that was already spilling out of his head.

One has to understand that he was literally rushing through his life.

We didn't need any speed in those days. All we needed was a dose of Fassbinder.

I admit that these anecdotes and soundbites are the most memorable and compelling part of the book for me, but they also introduce the main problem in assessing Fassbinder's work, the fact that, as colleague after colleague attests, Fassbinder “wasn't interested in perfection.” As one interviewer poses the question, “How did he reconcile his enormous ambition to the blunders he made?” Were these blunders (spotlights creeping into the frame, underlighting in Berlin Alexanderplatz, blown lines thrown in thanks to his one-take method) extraneous to the work or an important part of it? Again, those comments that burrow beneath the level of anecdote suggest intriguing links between the psychology and the work. Actor and director Margarethe von Trotta, comparing Fassbinder with Pasolini, muses on people who “derive special spiritual and creative power from their excesses.” Actor Elisabeth Trissenaar shapes a similar sentiment from Fassbinder's impatience during rehearsal: “[H]e lived for that extreme concentration that culminates in a single, brilliant moment.” I realize that these fragments don't end in a solution, but they seem to stumble toward one, to point the way.

Perhaps the answer is as simple as cinematographer Michael Ballhaus puts it, that “Fassbinder needed a certain tension born of spontaneity,” but another frequent observation complicates this view. Most of those who worked with him comment on the “borders,” the “boundaries” that Fassbinder pushed them across. They remark on “the reverence with which he laid bare the actor's soul,” on his “refreshingly blunt way of steering a person toward his own highest capacities,” on his “amazing antennae.” The films themselves often seem secondary, process elevated above artifact, the intersection of lives above the shadows recorded on film. Editor Juliane Lorenz puts it well:

[H]e had a special talent for forcing others to live up to their creative potential. He felt responsible for them. He turned those people into actors, production managers, and so on. Nobody starts out as a star or an actor, an editor, whatever. You need somebody who believes in you, and that really means love.

Whether or not shooting a scene seventy times to get even with someone amounts to “love,” Chaos as Usual conveys the enormous passion that Fassbinder brought to his work. More conventional approaches may fill the gaps that an interview leaves behind, but they will have a hard time matching the adrenaline of this book, the spirit of Fassbinder mixed up in it somehow, alive and on the go.

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Rain Taxi Print Edition, Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter (#8) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 1997

Kathy Acker

by Joshua Beckman

In Tijuana, Mexico, on Saturday November 29 at 1:30 in the afternoon, Kathy Acker, novelist, performance artist, and first wonder of the underground world, passed away at the age of 53. Suffering for eighteen months from breast cancer, and after two mastectomies, she eventually moved to an alternative cancer treatment center, where she fought for the last four weeks of her life. It is not, however, this struggle that we will remember her for.

Born in 1944, Acker was the child of German-Jewish parents, who lived on New York's ritzy Sutton Place and made their money in the glove business. Despite a trust fund that helped to support her, life there was far from easy. Her father abandoned the family just before she was born and her mother took her own life thirty years later. At eighteen, Acker left the house and supported herself by becoming a stripper. It was around this time that she began writing. In her first book, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula, she began an investigation that would continue through the rest of her work, writing, "Intention: I become a murderess by repeating in words the lives of other murderesses." It was her desire to bring to life the fluid and political nature of identity.

In her most famous book, Blood and Guts in High School, she describes the main character's father as her "boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father." The reader must move wildly around as the characters become different people, or simply show the different people they are. Her characters, not unlike Gertrude Stein's, twist themselves, through strange repetition, into new ways of being. In an interview with S. Lotringer she spoke of her world as both mythical and modern, "In my world people don't even remember their names, they aren't sure of their sexuality, they aren't sure if they can define their genders." It is not confusion, but complexity, and in life she played on these borders as well, her gold-toothed grin and leather jacket making its way through contemporary philosophy as easily as San Francisco sex clubs.

Criticized and censored for her experimental nature and the incorporation of other writers' texts into her work, she explains, "What I'm doing is simply taking text to be the same as the world, to be equal to non-text." "I wanted to explore the use of the word I . . . So I placed very direct autobiographical, just diary material, next to fake diary material. I tried to figure out who I wasn't." She believed in words and in the text's limitlessness, its ability to live beyond the control of its creator. While this did not win her many friends in staid literary circles, she did excite a community of artists and philosophers who had already begun to tackle issues of appropriation and subjectivity.

In her last years, her ambition to "understand the fullness of what it is to be human" did not waver. She left San Francisco to be with a lover in England, went on tour with the Mekons (who had made a companion CD to her book Pussy, King of the Pirates), and even wrote an article about her cancer experience called "The Gift of Disease." Her long obsession with body work (specifically weight training) turned into a quest for alternative cures, and though this quest has tragically ended with her passing, it is this unceasing curiosity, this determination to push her own fiercely personal work deeper, that will live on and continue to challenge everyone who dares to pick up her books.

Click here to purchase Blood and Guts in High School at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Print Edition, Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter (#8) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 1997

“The Plug”

By Stephen Dixon

I did a coupla readings for my last novel, Gould, and at one of them a guy in the audience said "Were you influenced by Thomas Bernhard?" and I said "Why, because of the long paragraphs? To tell you the truth, I know he has a great reputation but I started two Bernhard books and I didn't think he did the long paragraph that well. They were repetitive, a bit formally and almost too rigidly written, and I often lost track of the story in them, and other things why I didn't like them, although what, I forget." "No," he said, "or maybe that, but also because Gould is a character in one of his books too, The Loser. I just thought it was too much of a coincidence that you hadn't read a lot of him and been influenced," and I said "Gould? That guy's name in his book is Gould? I thought I made up that forename," and he said "Glenn Gould," and I said "No, my character is Gould Bookbinder and he doesn't play the piano though I think he does love Bach above all composers and especially the composition Gouldberg Variations," and he said "That's another thing. The first part of your novel is about variations of a single theme, abortions, right?—or that's what you said," and I said, "So, another coincidence. But you made me interested; I'll read The Loser." I didn't, though, but a month later a colleague of mine asked if I'd ever read Bernhard's The Loser andI said "Why, because of the long paragraphs, though he only seems to have one paragraph a book, and because of the name Gould, though I don't know if you know—" and she said "I do: first name, not last name. But I was thinking you'd like him. The two of you do a lot of the same things. The urban settings, dark but comical nature of your characters, their dislike of so many things, though your narrators for the past ten years of your work have been fathers to the extreme as well as loyal husbands, while none of his main characters seem to have children and they never marry either or have sex, at least not in the books," and I said "This is a double coincidence, your bringing up The Loser and someone at a recent reading bringing it up, or maybe 'coincidence' isn't the right word. And sure, I understand it: Gould, the name, and my love for losers, and the long paragraph, so I'm going to read that book, I promise; the next book I start will be The Loser." "What're you reading now?" she said and I said "I forget; what am I reading now? It can't be too interesting if I don't know what it is. It isn't interesting, in fact, so I'm going to buy a copy of his book today." Usually I put things like this off, or just forget it, but this time I didn't. I have to have a book to read and The Loser sounded like the one, but more out of curiosity, which isn't a good reason for me to read a book, than because I was interested in it as literature. So I bought it that day, started it that night, and loved it. There's my literary criticism. The single paragraph worked. So did Glenn Gould as a supporting character and Horowitz in the background. The book was funny and deep and crabby and dark and obsessive. He had his Gould and I had mine and the coincidence of the two of us using the same name, though his last but first and mine first but second, and intrigued, maybe for the same reason—I don't know what his is but mine is that I can't write anything anymore but in a single paragraph—by the long paragraph is, well . . . I lost my thought and apologize for the disarray. I liked it because it was intelligent, or should I say "I also liked it because," and it was short, though took me a long time to finish, relatively speaking, since my eyes aren't what they used to be and eyeglasses don't do what they used to do for me and my body gets tireder faster than it used to and after a long day of work, and every day seems to be a long day of work, only a little of it my writing, I don't have that much time to read the book, which is the only way I like to read: I want to read it, I want to read him. And after I read it I wanted to immediately read another Bernhard book, that's the effect the first one had, so I got Woodcutters and read that and loved it and thought it was better than The Loser, funnier, crabbier, darker, more opinionated and artistic, he did things in this he didn't in the other, trickier literary things: the guy sitting in the chair three quarters of the book, never getting out of it, just observing and thinking about what he observes, like someone out of Beckett's novels but better, though Bernhard must have lifted it from Beckett, at least spiritually—do I know what I'm saying? Let me just say there was a very Beckettian feeling about Woodcutters. Anyway, after that one I immediately got another one, Yes, and didn't much like it—it was older Bernhard, early Bernhard, it didn't take the risks, it didn't compel me to read, and it had paragraphs, I think, and I got The Lime Works and it was only so-so, and I thought "Have I read the very best of Bernhard or is it that his later works are better than his early ones?" and so got Old Masters, one of the last books of Bernhard, I think, and thought that the best one, again the man sitting in a chair, though it's a couch in a museum, and it was even more vitriolic than Woodcutters, and next immediately read Concrete and thought that a very good one and I'm now reading Correction and liking it and I will probably read The CheapEaters, without even thinking "early, late, middle Bernhard," what do I care anymore? I just want to continue to read the guy, though a German professor at Hopkins where I teach told me there are more than twenty Bernhard novels, not all of them translated but all of them to be translated, and I told her maybe that'll be too many for me to read, but you never know. I asked this woman "By the way, this Austrian writer Stifter, he mentions in Old Masters, he's not a real person, is he?" and she said "Oh yes, very famous, a traditionalist, not too well known in America," and I said "Amazing what Bernhard gets away with. Imagine an American writer working into his texts such excoriations of other writers, including contemporaries, which Bernhard does too. And knocking the Academy and prize givers, as Bernhard does in almost all his books: in America writers claw each other to get prizes and, you know, throw up on the hands that pin the medals on their chests and stuff the checks into their pockets. Some of his thoughts are a bit odd and wrongheaded if not occasionally loony," I said, "but most I agree with. And after reading a lot of him, in addition to all the other similarities people have mentioned—well, really, just two people—and I don't think the first ever read my work, just picked it up from the reading I gave and what was on the book jacket—is . . . oh, I forget what I was going to say." I want to end this by saying I haven't been so taken by one writer since I was in my mid-twenties and started reading everything Saul Bellow had written up till then. And in my early twenties, I read one Thomas Mann book after the other, probably not completing his entire oeuvre but getting close. And before that, when I was eighteen, I read everything of Dostoevski's that had been translated. And I forgot Joyce and my mid-twenties when I read everything he wrote, though his corpus wasn't by any means as large as Mann's or Dostoevski's. And one last note: Please don't think I'm writing this as a plug for my own Gould. Or that what I just said in that last sentence is an additional plug. I hate writers who plug their books, who sort of work in a reference to their books, especially the new ones, whenever they can. I only brought up my book because it's consequential to this inconsequential minor essay on Bernhard and that if I hadn't written a book called Gould I probably wouldn't have read The Loser and, of course, after that, another half-dozen Bernhard books. Did I use "inconsequential" right, then? Perhaps even to call this an essay is absurd, though to call it inconsequential and minor isn't. But I hope I just did what I always like to do and that's to belittle my own work and show myself as a writer who's part bumbling semimoron. And also done what I've never done in print before, so far as I can remember, and my memory isn't that good, and that is to plug the work of someone else and write even in the most exaggerated definition of the word an essay. "Exaggerated" isn't the word I meant, I think, but I'm sure you know what I mean even in my probable misuse of it.

Thomas Bernhard's latest book in English translation is The Voice Imitator, available from the University of Chicago Press. Stephen Dixon is the author of eighteen widely acclaimed works of fiction, including the National Book Award nominated Interstate.

Click here to purchase The Loser at your local independent bookstore

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Rain Taxi Print Edition, Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter (#8) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 1997

The World of Graphic Novels

by Eric Lorberer

For those who still think of comic books as being dog-eared denizens of drugstores and newsstands, there's a world of graphic novels beyond the wire rack. The latest milestone in the effort to get this point across is Roger Sabin's Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels (Phaidon Press, $59.95); with illustrations on every one of its pages, the book is a lavish production you'll be proud to put on your coffee table. But it's also a conversational and accessible tour through the murky, cultish, and sometimes complicated history of this marginalized art form, and therein lies its strength. Passing on the tired debate about whether comics are "Art," Sabin looks at the growth of the medium and finds that comics—from Mad magazine to Japanese manga—show development, innovation, and a profound engagement with the culture that habitually ignores them.

It is in fact Sabin's appreciation of context that makes this book so winning. Understanding both the climate of reception (questions of audience, political and economic factors, race and gender issues, etc.) and that of production (aesthetic palates, changes in technology, marketing strategies), Sabin shows the form being molded by subtle or not-so-subtle pressures from both sides. After an excellent first chapter detailing the pre-and early history of comics, he then follows different strands down the timeline of history, a thematic approach that only loosely attempts an overall narrative for the industry's development. The book's middle chapters focus on the various kinds of content (humor, action, etc.) associated with the medium, and Sabin leaves these discussions open at crucial junctures, allowing him to pick up their threads in later chapters—and thus demonstrate how contexts of time and culture interact with and affect the content. Ultimately, it is the artists' growing desire for political and self- expression that comes to the fore as the industry becomes less (or at least differently) formulaic and more friendly to the creative impulses that seed these mass-produced texts.

For all the information packed in his prose, Sabin writes clearly and engagingly about this vast subject. The one aspect he rarely mentions is that of artistic technique, yet with so many different styles represented, one can simply keep an eye on the illustrations to see how motifs and structures repeat or get reinvented, how different approaches to line and text result in different effects. An excellent bibliography refers the reader to a panoply of books about comic art, ranging from critical exegeses by semiotic or Marxist theorists to works more concerned with the nitty-gritty by comic artists themselves. In a genre that is too often associated with its weaker products, Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels is a smart history of "the ten per cent of comics that make things interesting."

Much of that ten per cent is put out by the publisher NBM, whose "Comics Lit" imprint offers graphic novels of varying approach but consistent quality. The phrase might lead one to think these will be illustrated classics, along the lines of Moby Dick summed up in ahandful of four-color pages. Not so. Most of the works are original fictions, often by writers from Europe where, as Sabin points out, Hergé's Tintin comics blazed a trail for comics to be seen "as suitable for anyone between seven and seventy." And those that are closer to the classics spirit, such as Peter Kuper's adaptations of short stories by Kafka or Rick Geary's ongoing Treasury of Victorian Murder, are still worlds apart from the reductive approach of classics for kids. These books open out; they invite the reader to question the narration rather than be lulled by it; most importantly, they bring to the originating text a graphic approach that utterly complements it. Kuper's Give It Up! (NBM, $14.95), for example, brings his nightmarish woodcut style to Kafka's inimitable fables, creating tone poems of black humor the master would be proud of. Geary's Jack the Ripper (NBM, $14.95) is equally well executed, a dizzying array of detailed line drawings which tells the Ripper tale from the point of view of "an unknown British gentleman who lived in London during 1888-1889 and closely followed the increasingly savage killings." Based on actual journals, this personal, layman's perspective provides the perfect counterpoint to Geary's meticulously researched renderings. It should at least be briefly noted that both Kuper and Geary push the envelope of the very language of comics in their highly distancing lack of dialogue balloons.

Another variation of the classics illustrated genre is Martin Rowson's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (The Overlook Press, $26.95). Rowson's artwork is a dead-on imitation of eighteenth-century British satirical cartoonists (whose "skill for exaggeration and ironic juxtaposition of words and pictures set an aesthetic template that has endured to this day," Sabin rightly notes). But again, this is no easy version of the real thing; slashing and burning his way through Sterne's proto-postmodern text, Rowson peppers his Tristram Shandy with self-reflexive scenes of himself doing research on the "graphic thesis" we're reading. This leads the author/artist to match wits with "a merry troupe of leaping French deconstructionists," crash headlong into an Oliver Stone film version of the book, and so on. The spirit of Sterne's book animates this graphic novel so well that it should be a hit with English majors, but it's hard to imagine what anyone else would make of it.

Rowson's book is about as far away from comics as the graphic novel can get; more familiar territory can be found in Kingdom Come (DC, $14.95), a thought provoking morality play from the home of Superman, Batman, and other iconic heroes. This is what Sabin calls a "revisionist superhero story," a genre which takes a darker look at these costumed adventurers. DC arguably catapulted comics into the consciousness of adults with two such revisionist graphic novels released in 1986: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, which imagined a Blade Runner-ish future for the hero, portraying him as nearly psychotic by enhancing the obsessive, violent, and judgemental aspects of the character; and Watchmen, an intricately structured 400 page tale in which the heroes are as phony, conniving, egotistical—as complex—as the rest of us, and which definitively proved that "graphic novel" could be more than a marketing euphemism. Kingdom Come follows in this vein; when the paragons of humanity abdicate their social responsibility to do good they leave chaos in their wake, and end up nearly causing armageddon by fighting each other instead of the bad guys. It's not nearly as successful as its esteemed forebears—some elements of the revisionist approach seem to be wearing thin—but to anyone reared on the exploits of the "Justice League of America" it's still a new and sophisticated chapter in the reworking of a mythology. And while the auteur approach in comics is more prevalent in independent works it's evident even here; Kingdom Come is beautifully hand-painted rather than produced by the assembly line.

If books such as those mentioned above show how comics can explore the bombastic realm of mythos, Dan Clowes' Ghost World (Fantagraphics, $19.95) makes clear that the form has the potential to turn inward as well. Ghost World is a quiet tour de force; Clowes brings a haunted lyricism to the story of two teenage girls and their tortured search for self-definition. In any form it would be astonishing how well Clowes has captured the psyche of the iconoclastic Enid and her best friend Becky; in the graphic novel it's especially impressive that their pathos shines through the panels. And the ghost world is our world, of course, the one where we don't fit in; where other people become either our amusement or our pain; where our loved ones fill their heads with television transmissions instead of feelings. The television, in fact, is a major character in Ghost World, constantly on and saying nothing, and the entire story is cast in its eerie, monotonous blue light. Clowes' stark examination of personal angst and deftness with narrative bring to mind Bergman's Persona (check out that cover). Writing about Clowes' previous work—the more surreal but far less tender graphic novel Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron and the angry/ironic vignettes that appear in his regular comic Eightball—Sabin points out that unlike most comic artists, Clowes "was prepared to explore more abstract territory."

If you want to know more about individual artists' explorations, look no further than Dangerous Drawings (Juno Books, 24.95), an anthology of interviews that includes a wide range of "comix and graphix artists." While about half of those represented are other young turks who, like Clowes, are busy making the world of graphic novels a better place, it's good to hear from a few artists who remember when the "alternative" was "underground," and it's also good to hear from some young "fine" artists who have been powerfully influenced by comics. The book leads off with a lengthy conversation with Art Spiegelman, whose influence on comic art is so enormous that he's mentioned frequently throughout Sabin's book (only R. Crumb is mentioned more); his Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus gave the graphic novel its greatest taste of respectability, and his controversial covers for the New Yorker, discussed at length in this interview, showed the power of the art-punk aesthetic that unifies these otherwise very different artists. Editor Andrea Juno consistently asks the right questions; the book also includes lots of photographs and reproductions to offer visual aids to the discussion.

"In the end, if the official arbiters of taste will not acknowledge comics' cultural value, then at least this means that the form remains a 'free medium'—and there are not many of those left," writes Sabin. Yetlet's hope that his book and the other works mentioned here—along with the dozens of incredible comic artists not mentioned in this particular survey—get a little more recognition. Theirs is a literature whose power and potential are just now beginning to be explored. It would be a shame if no one were watching, because the world of graphic novels is far from a ghost world where only the old forms drone on.

Click here to purchase Comix, Comics & Graphic Novels at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Give It Up! at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Jack the Ripper at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlman at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Kingdom Come at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Ghost World at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Dangerous Drawings at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Print Edition, Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter (#8) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 1997