Laura Wexler
Scribner ($24)

by Jack Gilden

In the rural Georgia counties of the late 1940s black and white agitation over the red clay produced blizzards of snowy cotton, and black picked it and white paid for it and in the end they dumped it into machines that separated the seeds from the fibers and the fibers became strands and the strands became useful things like sheets for white and ropes for black.

This is the raw material from which Laura Wexler weaves Fire in a Canebrake, a nonfiction novel about the true-but-still-unsolved mystery of "The Last Mass Lynching in America." Georgia is Eden here, a verdant paradise of honeysuckle meadows, trickling streams, plank bridges, dusty roads, corn liquor, and taboo sex. God is very much alive, if only a faint rumble in the distance. And the people—black and white—are weevils in the garden, malevolently grubbing cotton until there is no cushion left between them.

Wexler takes us to this setting, back to 1946 and the infamous Moore's Ford Incident in which four blacks—Roger Malcom, Dorothy Malcom, George Dorsey, and Mae Murray Dorsey—were lynched by an indignant white mob. The victims weren't strung up; they were cut down by a hailstorm of more than 60 close-range shotgun blasts. The resulting sound, caught by the ears of one nearby, was likened to "a fire in a canebrake."

Ostensibly, the catalyst for the killing was Roger Malcom, a black tenant farmer who had stabbed his white landlord, Barnette Hester. The two were former boyhood playmates now separated by their life stations and their involvement with the same black woman, Malcom's wife Dorothy. Sticking a blade in Barnette Hester wasn't enough to kill him, and it probably wasn't enough to fetch 20 men with shotguns either. But the second male lynched in the attack, George Dorsey, was rumored to have slept with white women.

The case quickly became notorious, provoking outrage and horror all over the United States. Nevertheless, the murder investigation was doomed from the start. Local law enforcement officials were likely participants in the crime. President Truman took notice, but the federal government was largely a toothless dragon since its jurisdiction was narrow to the point of impotence. The FBI was dispatched in unprecedented numbers but to no good effect. Whites "protected" each other, or else. "If I had anything to do with the lynching and my brother reported it," one local man stated, "I'd kill him."

Blacks weren't much help either. The entire race had been bludgeoned into silence. There was some hope that the presence of federal agents would coax the truth from them, but the FBI wasn't built to protect or serve these citizens. There were only three black agents in the entire Bureau, and one of them was J. Edgar Hoover's aging chauffeur, who had been elevated to the title only as a means of placating the NAACP.

In fact, intense investigation by local law enforcement, the FBI, and a grand jury all came to nothing. No one was indicted. No one was ever convicted.

That no one would pay for the crime was a scenario predicted just four days after the lynching by the brilliant editor of the Atlanta Constitution, Ralph McGill. He wrote with aching poignancy: "Even though they (the killers) never come to justice, they . . . will wonder to themselves how it was that they, who some mother nursed and cared for to rear them to manhood, dreaming dreams for them, managed to come to do murder. They will begin to realize that they have taken human life and are cursed of God."

Wexler's prose is not nearly as stylistic, but it is certainly no less damning. She doesn't exert herself to tell you that the whites in this story are crude, violent, and ignorant beyond comprehension. They're happy to tell you themselves. "I knew a fellow who knew a nigger who had lived in Africa and he'd boiled up his father's head and made soup out of it and ate it," one apparent anthropologist lectured a visiting newspaper reporter. "That's the kind of people niggers is. . . . "

Her descriptions of the black community, though unvarnished, are tempered by the depressing conditions in which they functioned. Their lives were wasted tilling other people's land for a chump's wage. The political system disenfranchised them. The judicial system ignored their grievances. And the law failed to protect them when their transgressions against white supremacy delivered extemporaneous brutality upon their heads.

Though Wexler never solves the mystery of the crime, she nails its skulking nature, sacrificing this lynching upon the altar of the lynching phenomenon. She lays bare before us the internecine world of Moore's Ford, though if we gnaw at its bones too intently we may miss the flesh and marrow of our own times. Moore's Ford begat Harry S. Truman's civil rights agenda which begat Strom Thurmond's segregationist presidential campaign which begat Trent Lott's statement that America would have been better off had Thurmond won.

In January 2003, Lott resigned his exalted position of leadership in the United States Senate just as Fire in a Canebrake was rolling off the presses. The symmetry is all the more outlandish because there is still no federal law against lynching in the land of the free.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

Barrett Watten
Wesleyan University Press ($27.95)

by Brent Cunningham

The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics is a work of academic literary and cultural theory made up of eight chapters, each an essay Barrett Watten has written over the last ten years. While the specifically Russian version of "Constructivism" does show up periodically in this work (largely in the person of El Lissitzky), this is much less a book for Russian scholars than for those interested in literary theory, contemporary poetry, and American cultural studies. At the same time, Watten knows a lot about a lot: his interests run the gamut from poetry and poetics (especially the Language School of which Watten is a prominent member) to American modernity, Fordism, American photography and art, political theory, New Historicism, Detroit techno, Detroit city planning, psychoanalytic theory, continental philosophy, and, yes, Russian art, architecture and art theory.

Watten is aware that it is not particularly earth-shattering in academic circles to point out that all these areas (art, theory, culture) have their social "constructedness" in common. Instead, the book seeks to give both theoretical and cultural specificity to the subtleties of Watten's particular notion of the constructed. He does this, in part, by stressing two other (at times equally general) concepts which he clearly sees as unifying forces for his diverse interests: materiality and negativity.

By materiality, Watten means to indicate both the social context in which writing occurs (in turn conceived as both its "historical referents and utopian prospects") and the stuff of art itself (language, paint, sound). Materiality not only leads to Watten's essay on the history and uses of restricted vocabularies as "material" constraints in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jackson Mac Low, Louis Zukofsky, and Kit Robinson, but also provides a convenient bridge to analyses of art, film and music. By defining all avant-gardes by this "irreducible" materiality, Watten is free to range over multiple art forms and diverse cultures, while also keeping a "materialist" politics in sight.

Watten's "negativity" (or "refusal") is even more complex than his "materiality." And no wonder, since he is pulling from a daunting range of thinkers: "I have employed six interlocking accounts of negativity in the course of my analyses: following Hegel, Foucault, Kristeva, Zizek, Lacan, and Heidegger." Nor does Watten choose between the "cultural, psychological, and formal aspects" of negativity: "This refusal may take the form of an explicitly oppositional poetics; or it may be self-negating even to the point of withdraw from society or suicide; or it may involve a radical reconfiguration of the formal possibilities of a genre or medium and their cultural significance." Nevertheless, the concept is sharp enough to help structure an impressive summary of Slavoj Zizek's understanding of the Lacanian Real, to provide a useful reading of Stan Douglas's photographs of downtown Detroit, and to highlight a number of insights into the poetry of Robert Grenier. Negativity also seems to be at the heart of Watten's critique of Charles Bernstein's arguably more positivist (or as Watten is willing to put it "universalist") views of difference and identity.

At the same time, Watten's reliance on somewhat borderless concepts such as materiality and negativity has the significant drawback of risking abstraction and opacity. Although The Constructivist Moment is much more lucid than his previous critical book, Total Syntax (Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), Watten's style can still be quite difficult to penetrate. For some readers this density will be intriguing, while for others it will be frustrating.

This objection can be made even more precise by looking at the architecture between disjunctive sections of Watten's essays and between the essays themselves. Transitional phrases and repeating motifs have the effect of implying connections, continuity, and correspondences between sections. While highly suggestive at times, this technique often forces Watten's most provocative tableaus to appear as mere components in larger arguments, a labor they cannot always accomplish. A case in point is Watten's brilliant reading of Gertrude Stein through the automobiles she owned and through her attitude toward her cars and Henry Ford, by itself a section worthy of Roland Barthes. The section makes the point that modernist writers like Stein were not separate from their social matrix despite their being read by scholars for precisely their autonomy and distance from that matrix. Contrary to those scholars, Watten instead finds the "genius" of a Stein in her ability to foreground her writing in the conditions of her age, so that it becomes "an imitation, or form of parallel play, of that [Fordist] mode of production."

Leaving aside the possible objection that an imitation is also a distancing, even autonomy by another name, the real problem comes in the next section. There, Watten delves into the formation of Language Poetry in the 1970s ("an abrupt transition," Watten admits) in order to argue that "a pragmatic sense" of what Stein meant by genius is exactly how the Language School was historically formed: by accretion rather than invention, by immediate responses to material problems, and more specifically by "a sequence of innovations within a form of organization that developed between writers in magazines such as This." This is all consistent, according to Watten, with the accretive manner in which Ford's assembly line came into being.

Unfortunately, here the extension of Watten's "assembly line" comparison actually undercuts Watten's original insights regarding Stein, for now the metaphor must bear not only the work of Gertrude Stein but also the social formation of the Language Poets. While it might be compelling to hear Watten explicitly argue that the products of artistic social formations are equivalent to the art works of individuals, he does not make this argument. The looseness of his point (and the stretching horizon of the trope) ends up implying little more than this modernist writer and this postmodern literary movement have some relation to the invention of the assembly line, or maybe to assembly lines themselves, or maybe to both.

Even inexact conflations of this sort would be interesting were Watten to explain the necessity for the network of implied and overarching arguments and resonances this book features—that is, to talk specifically about why he uses the linked form he uses in these essays, and thus to perhaps expose his own devices, revealing academic argument to be as much a "construction" as any of the cultural products he investigates.

This may very well be one of Watten's points, if not an explicit one. But although such an overt move does not happen, there is still a great quantity of solid information and suggestive theorizing in this book by a writer and scholar deeply and personally obsessed with contemporary poetry, art, and theory. So personally involved, in fact, that Watten regularly uses his own work as examples. Some readers may object to having a core participant in the Language School try to historicize and valorize the very movement he helped create, but I suspect most readers will find it engaging to watch Watten leap from couch to chair, from analyst to analysand, from academic to poet. Whether the entire effort is an idiosyncratic approach to academic discourse or another document in the ongoing history of Language Poetry will be up to individual readers and scholars.

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Curtis White
HarperSanFrancisco ($23.95)

by Steve Healey

Destined to inspire numerous café debates and become the pop-intellectual scandal of the season, Curtis White's latest book is an enormously ambitious and wide-ranging polemic. Clamoring for more socially engaged imagination in America, he especially scolds those who consume a kind of cultural mediocrity packaged as liberalism lite (aka the Middle Mind)—and, ironically, those who are most likely to read this book.

The secret skeletal system of White's too-small, 203-page opus is a daringly affirmative proposal to awaken in America a more sublime yet pragmatic creativity that's willing to challenge dominant ideologies. This discussion—beginning, ending, and emerging at crucial moments throughout the book—shows White at his most convincing, both tonally and intellectually. Calling on Stevens's notion of a constant interplay between reality and imagination, Kant's sublime that is evocative but indeterminate, and later, Derrida's metaphysics that keep moving and changing, White fashions a complex vision of an active and relevant imagination that has public consequences while avoiding the stagnation of a more managed, corporate creativity.

Art, of course, is the form this sublime force most often takes, and White even offers various contemporary examples of which he approves, including Radiohead's Kid A and David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Both of these works, he argues, achieve their socially imaginative profundity by eschewing obvious political messages and easy moral conclusions, and letting their formal elements do the talking. "Art is most properly useful," White says, "when it doesn't know exactly what it is about," when it avoids "self-certain didacticism" and tries to "lead us away from communication as domination" through a certain "inarticulateness."

The rest of The Middle Mind addresses the disease for which the social imagination is the remedy, and this is where White spits the venomous vituperations that will no doubt offend many readers and become—another irony—the book's marketing force. The introduction neatly targets "the media, academia, and politics, the three areas of public life that provide the vehicles for the great antagonists of the imagination: entertainment, orthodoxy, and ideology." As promised, the book's core chapters slay these antagonists in short order, and while much of what White says is smart and necessary, he often puffs up his enemies with too much straw, strays into regions of "public life" he knows little about, makes unsupportable statements about broad groups of people and practices, and generally employs a blistering sarcastic tone that's meant to be funny but often comes across as contrived and sloppy.

Chapter 1 focuses on media entertainment, and this is primarily where he defines and attacks the Middle Mind, that diluted and consumer-oriented brand of social awareness and artfulness. Terry Gross's Fresh Air, Joe Queenan's Balsamic Dreams, and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan are notable Middle Mind icons that White nails to his crosses. These potent cultural brokers certainly deserve criticism, but White's method is often dubious and haphazard. Among his favorite tricks, for example, is to fabricate exaggerated quotations and present them as if spoken by the objects of his ire, then slam these caricatures for having said something so vapid and corrupt.

It's unfortunate that White's critical mode is poorly executed at times, because his ideas have great potential salience and insight. It's vital that the Middle Mind be battled because—as White points out—it exists in denial of itself, and it's quickly becoming the major safety valve that allows liberal market democracy to expand its hypocrisies around the globe. Chapter 2—which rakes the academic left, especially those Cultural Studies-entrenched English departments—does well to point out that the "fundamental lack" of institutional critics is that they don't "look at texts from the perspective of artists," relying instead on a rationalist, abstract, and disembodied jargon. And Chapter 3--which takes on the massive beast of current politics—cogently spotlights "a New Censorship which functions by making everything known and naked to a paralyzing degree."

White doesn't analyze enough how these adversaries of the imagination work together to form the current American cultural machine, or what historical conditions have allowed them to dominate, and he largely disregards consumer and advertising culture (don't Mastercard's "priceless" commercials, for example, exploit contradictions at least as damagingly as Terry Gross does?). Although The Middle Mind begins a much-needed exploration of our deceptively muddled culture, it sometimes reads like a rough draft of what could be a watershed work of criticism. I eagerly await the revised and expanded edition.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

Philipp Blom
The Overlook Press ($27.95)

by Allison Slavick

The phenomenon of collecting has been documented for around 500 years. Early on there were reliquaries, studiolos, and the Kunstschrank, an ornamental piece of furniture with multiple drawers filled with objects that were metaphors for life. Then came the cabinets of curiosities that documented the freaky and weird, all those fascinating deformed fetuses and unicorn horns outside the realm of human understanding. Later, when objects were arranged in a more orderly fashion, according to advancing scientific knowledge, they became illustrations of the supremacy of the rational mind. Eventually, the science-based methods of display were transferred to art, and paintings were no longer hung according to the whims and aesthetic sensibilities of the curator. Subsequently, collections went from instruments of exploration to instruments of conservation and museums as we know them today were formed. Mix all this up with various human renaissances and revolutions, mass production (it democratized collecting and shaped the American aesthetic), differences among male and female collectors, class issues, the drinking habits of Peter the Great, and manipulative art dealers and you have a charming book of profound intelligence, insight and wit.

In To Have and to Hold, Philipp Blom illustrates the ideological differences in collecting through colorful biographies of collectors who were lurid, weird, daring, polymathic, and dark, and considers them from every angle in the context of social change. And collectors are a weird bunch. Take Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), whose collections formed the basis of the British Museum. As the last of the "universal" collectors, an inventory of his collection included "stones of the kidney and bladder" (756 of them); "medals, ancient and modern" (23,000 of those); and "miscellaneous things not comprehended with the foregoing, both natural and artificial" (2,098 of those). If Sloane was chaotic, then Linnaeus was the Type A of the collecting world. His taxonomic influence on collections of all kinds cannot be overstated, but even with the few pages that are devoted to him the proportion seems about right—there is too much more to tell.

Having been popular for centuries, the trade in sacred bric-à-brac is given a lot of attention. Twenty-nine sites in Europe alone claim to possess a holy nail from the cross; three sites have claimed to have the holy navel; sixty-nine churches have claimed to have drops of breast milk of the Holy Virgin and eight sites in France have claimed to have the true foreskin of Christ. What do you do when there aren't enough pieces of the Holy cross to go around? You create a myth that explains that the cross, like a starfish, regrows when pieces are removed.

Blom also provides a fascinating chronicle of Giulio Camillo, the Diderot of the Italian Renaissance. Part primitive internet, part performance art installation, Camillo's system of information storage and retrieval was an architectural device into which spectators could insert their heads and look toward an amphitheater's seven rows of seats where various mnemonic devices were displayed. Those who gazed upon the "Theatre of Memory" were said to become fluent orators, having memorized the world's knowledge; in this way, Camillo collected memories. Does this seem odd? Blom depicts Casanova as a collector of lovers and a contemporary opera fan as a collector of philanthropic experiences. He brings all this together as cogent and convincing discourse, balancing skepticism with well-placed respect and a refreshing irreverence toward the follies of the wealthy.

There is so much more of interest here: the early years of the Louvre, J.P. Morgan's books and art (and, incidentally, his nose), Charles Wilson Peale's explanation of what every good collection should contain, the transformation of museums from private holdings to public trusts, all told with a pleasantry of language, subtle humor and a humble erudition.

Are collectors happy? Blom is generous in his assessment of the human condition, with the air of a compassionate caretaker at a state mental hospital. There's nothing that can be done to help collectors, as they cannot help themselves. Happiness isn't found within the objects, as they are "expressions of a state, not its agents." The disillusionment of collecting buttresses us from facing the world, until the next conquest—a rare butterfly, an autograph, a first edition—brings contentment.

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André Breton
Translated by Simon Watson Taylor
MFA Publications ($29.95)

by Jay Besemer

Autumn 2002 saw a strange conjunction in the art world. In November, it was announced that André Breton's collection of Surrealist and indigenous paintings and objects would be put up for auction. Coincidentally, the publishing arm of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had just weeks earlier announced its republication of the long-out-of-print English translation of André Breton's masterful book Surrealism and Painting. Readers of English once again have access to that important volume, though its availability has sparked very little fanfare; the sale of the contents of Breton's 42 rue Fontaine home is apparently accorded far more worth than the work of the man himself and the ongoing efforts of the Surrealist movement which he founded.

While Surrealism and Painting is not "about" Breton's collection, the essays concern many of the elements and artists represented in it. By placing the book's new availability in the context of the so-called "Breton auction" I hope to illuminate the interplay between established critical views of Surrealism, the press, and this collection. Collectors and critics are newly interested in "classic" Surrealism—pre-1945 Surrealism—largely in terms of its influence on contemporary big-ticket artists. This interest is partly what had forced the sale itself, by driving up the insurance premiums on Breton's collection to a level untenable to its caretaker, Breton's daughter Aube Elléouët. How symptomatic of the peculiar myopia of criticism that so much attention should be paid to the value of the "artifacts" of classic Surrealism, and that this attention should take place almost completely in art history's star chamber!

Except for Mark Polizzotti's introduction, this new edition of Surrealism and Painting is the same as the 1972 version of the English translation, put out by Harper & Row, based on an expanded 1965 French edition of the original 1928 work. To grasp its true worth we must turn to the text, attending to the author's arguments and examples, ignoring the approved commentary.

"The eye exists in its savage state," begins Breton's title essay. Further:

The need to fix visual images... has led to the formation of a veritable language which does not seem to me any more artificial than spoken language, and about the origins of which it would be fruitless for me to speculate. At the very most, I owe it to myself to weigh the present state of this language in exactly the same way that I would weigh the present state of poetic language and, if necessary, to recall it to its true principles.

Note Breton's emphasis of the unity of poetic language and visual language. In this, "eye" and "tongue" are linked; the recognition of painting as a form of poetry, and of poetry as a form of universal human action, have always been key elements of Surrealism. That "savage state" is also essential, with the characterization "savage" being stripped, in Surrealism, of its pejorative sense. For Breton, the true principles of visual language, and spoken language, are poetic, and therefore, by means of contrast with "civilized" language, savage—undirected, dreamed, automatic perhaps; certainly spontaneous. I'll return to these "true principles" momentarily. For now, let's say that for visual images to be able to form their own spontaneous, poetic language, those who make them must work with an understanding of the universality of poetic experience, and must be allowed to go where this leads them.

These poetic obligations contribute nothing to the notion that the destiny of the work of art is to be sold, then displayed in a museum, and thus accrue monetary value. In fact, poetry (whether visual, verbal, or other) finds its truth only when the destiny of a work is absolutely irrelevant to its making; when the process is invaded by notions of time and "value," poetry and process both degrade and disappear into cliché and the facile. This is one major theme of Surrealism and Painting. Breton's experience with "professional" collectors and his intimacy with many visual artists showed him the woeful sequence again and again: innovation and excitement; recognition and self-sufficiency; stagnation and retreat into previously-approved methods and products.

This is why Breton devotes so much time and space to Picasso's work, implying that he is Surrealist in spirit if not in name, and recognizing that any appellation, even that of "surrealist," would limit Picasso's work. For Breton, Picasso was a Surrealist in that his visual language, at least at that time, had never left its true principles behind. If Picasso did not completely submit his work "to a purely internal model," as Breton argued was necessary for the plastic arts, he afforded the internal model at least as much weight as the external. He also remained an innovator and a risk-taker for most of his artistic life. To recognize this constant innovation took a certain perceptiveness, a certain contagious enthusiasm, which Polizzotti in his introduction interprets as hero-worship or wishful thinking. Candor and effusiveness can be unsettling in a critical work, but they do not indicate an unrefined viewing. On the contrary, Breton's eye, savage and refined, saw in Picasso an honest adept of the poetic experience, one whose creative outpouring broadened the realm of the possible and the marvelous.

Practically speaking, poetry is art and art is poetry—it comes down to a simple choice of medium, materials, and method. It could be said that the real job of art history and criticism is to justify why this or that art work has been sold, while the job of the critic or historian of poetry is to explain why poetry can never sell (while loudly declaiming its deep spiritual importance). In neither case does either type of interpreter seem to care much about the things which fall outside their training. Picasso, while we're on the subject, was also a fine poet, but this is not well-known, nor is Breton particularly celebrated for his ironic, gorgeous collages and assemblages. Perhaps this is because written poetry is of little commercial interest to art dealers, and because Breton's visual works were created mainly as gifts, not intended for sale. What is considered valuable by interpreters of creative output determines what said interpreters present as valuable to those outside their field of familiarity. Through the narrow focus of study, they have cut the surrounding panorama from the frame, showing instead a single stone at the edge of a forest.

What André Breton considered valuable examples of visual poetry—of pictorial Surrealism—does not always impress contemporary art historians. For every Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró or Pablo Picasso for the collectors to paw, there was a Maria Martins, a Degottex, a Toyen or an Hérold to be shrugged at and dismissed as "minor." Breton's intent, in the texts of Surrealism and Painting, was not to tell the privileged why they should open their wallets. Instead the goal was to expose his readers to works which were Surrealist by participation or by affinity (such as works by "autodidacts" like Henri Rousseau and by the institutionalized mentally ill), and thereby further define or exemplify the changing parameters of one form of Surrealist action. Sometimes his clarifications did not actually make matters clearer, and he did contradict himself occasionally. In the 1942 essay on Tanguy, for example, he delineates painting and poetry into separate "spheres."

There is also the uncharacteristically reductionist label of Surrealism as an "art movement" in the 1944 essay on Enrico Donati. While this might be passed off as a translating error, I believe it was deliberate on Breton's part, though not done by choice. Because of its date, I would suggest that this description of Surrealism came from the injunction under which Breton was granted temporary asylum in the U.S. during the second World War: no revolutionary politics allowed. We have the State Department to thank for this additional confusion. Still, the initial paragraph of that essay deserves extensive quotation for its relevance today:

The almost total bankruptcy of the critical spirit which is a mental characteristic of wartime periods has again registered profound effects on the development of the arts and the interplay of ideas involved in that development. For several years now, we have been obliged, willy-nilly, to live in an unremitting atmosphere of edification, each of us supposed to bear witness to the great good that is being accomplished by the paradoxical means of carnage and destruction. The coercive powers which effectively control the world today, not content simply with taking lives, demand also that we should one and all sacrifice our basic standards of intelligent judgment: the journalists have taken it upon themselves to bring the intellectuals to repentance.

Indeed. Breton's work, his collection, and his right to speak for himself are still in the grip of "coercive powers."

The Gold of Time in the Time of Gold

Fast forward: in June, 2003, Art in America includes a tiny mention of the disruption of the Breton auction by "latter-day and would-be Surrealists." The headline: "Breton Auction Breaks Records." The piece itself is misleading, attributing the widely-circulated petition against the sale (and calling on the French government to buy and administrate the collection) to Surrealist protestors. In truth, the French Surrealist group boycotted the auction and had nothing to do with the disruption mentioned in Art in America. Instead, Surrealists issued statements against both the sale and the petition. Entitled Surrealism Is Not for Sale! The Gold of Time in the Time of Gold and Who Will Embalm the Embalmers? these statements are factual as well as political, explaining how the collections came to be placed on the block, correcting journalistic errors concerning the sale and the Surrealist movement, and clarifying the position and qualifications of the "Breton Committee."

The mysterious exclusion of these documents from the "official" discourse on the auction and Breton's work can be explained by one simple fact upon which all parties, regardless of motivation, are likely to agree: The statements do not fit within the established art history or art market paradigms. What is outside a paradigm does not completely exist to those within it. When Surrealism speaks in its native tongue its colonizers show their disapproval by mocking, "interpreting," or pretending not to hear.

External commentary has disproportionately determined the popular conception of the Surrealist movement. Interpretation takes the place of experience, and allegedly disinterested discussion is given more weight than the movement's continuing discourse. Bound and gagged, its naked throat is forever on the block. Reduced from a distance to a series of totems, André Breton and the Surrealist Movement are at even greater risk of being seen as nothing but chapters in art history and "rooms" in government-endowed collections. All those who want to prevent this kind of entombment should explore the great, slow-beating heart of Surrealism and Painting on their own, and let Surrealism speak for itself.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

Ray Bradbury
William Morrow & Company ($24.95)

by Ryder Miller

Once touted as "the worlds greatest living science fiction writer," Ray Bradbury remains one of the best writers of short genre fiction, having successfully written short stories in the fantasy, science fiction, horror, and detective traditions. Bradbury got past the boundaries of genre writing when he was anthologized along with writers accepted by the literary establishment, and eventually became a staple of high-school English classes. He won an O. Henry award, and publicly criticized McCarthy in The Nation in the 1950s, all of which helped him to escape the boundaries of science fiction. Yet though he inspired the ire of some science fiction writers by being "too" successful, he never became too mainstream to alienate the cult aficionados. It's this Bradbury, author of such classics as The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 (which he claims to have written in nine days) that has been the tough act the later Bradbury has had to follow—or maybe as older readers we are harder to charm. Nevertheless, Bradbury's latest short fiction collection, One More for the Road, shows that he is still a master of the short form, still able to charm and inspire wonder with his stories.

One More for the Road contains twenty five stories in a variety of modes, and like much of Bradbury's recent work—the author is presently in his eighties—it evokes mortal concerns. In "Autumn Afternoon" an old women gets worried about a young girl who always writes everything down, and an old man haunts the golf course in "Fore!" and the neighborhood in "Time Intervening." The book also consistently explores Bradbury's preoccupation with it, that thing that crops up between people so we can better defend ourselves from each other. But the tales are, as to be expected, wondrous. Bradbury invokes the fantastical in "Beasts" and "Diane de Forét," and adds new dimensions to time travel stories in "Quid Pro Quo" and "The F. Scott/Tolstoy/Ahab Accumulator" (in which a character goes back in time to meet some famous authors). Many of the best stories involve what transpires between men and women, with Bradbury sometimes expressing discontent. But also present is Bradbury's enthusiasm for life and the wonders of childhood.

Bradbury's work is often characterized by emotional outbursts and richly developed metaphors, reflecting his interest in infusing his prose with the poetic impulse. In the afterword to One More for the Road he reveals that "ninety-nine percent of my stories were pure image, impacted by movies, the Sunday funnies, poetry, essays, and the detonations of Oz, Tarzan, Jules Verne, Pharaoh Tutankhamen, and their attendant illustrations." One More for the Road does this as brilliantly as ever, exploring not only the consequences of the fantastical and macabre, but also the wonders and emotions of life. Though his stories are not always meant for children, Bradbury has the ability—still—to reach the child in all of us.

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Sherman Alexie
Grove Press ($24)

by Anne Bergen-Aurand and Brian Bergen-Aurand

"That's Sherman, not Shaman." At a reading for this new short story collection at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Alexie responded to a question with that quip. While it garnered the laugh it was obviously meant to, it also conveyed a serious message, one Alexie has been trying to get across for years. Like much of his other work, this collection of nine stories challenges the many stereotypes people have about Indians (which is Alexie's preferred term for Native Americans), including those held by Indians themselves.

Alexie's characters are clearly exhausted with expectations of magic, spiritualism, and salvation, and they are too impoverished, too homeless, too sexually distracted, or too overwhelmed by the fallout of September 11th to heal anyone else. In "The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above," the narrator's mother, Estelle, becomes the guide for a group of guru-seeking white women, though from her son's point of view, "Of course she wasn't a magician. She was a mess! She failed parenting quizzes!" He goes on to ask, "What is it about Indians that turns otherwise intelligent, interesting, and capable people into blithering idiots? I don't think every white person I meet has the spiritual talents and service commitment of a Jesuit priest, but white folks often think we Indians are shamanic geniuses." The collection dwells on that question, asking Shaman-seekers everywhere to reconsider their quests.

This is the pull of Alexie at his best. Ten Little Indians recalls The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Reservation Blues, and the screenplay for Smoke Signals—all works in which failures and successes develop between the reservation and the other world, even when the two never come into direct contact. The most important struggles evoke new definitions of what it means to fail and succeed on both sides of the reservation border. Most of all, Alexie's work puts forth a funny, sexy, and biting challenge to static definitions of either side of the hyphen in American-Indian.

Like other prominent Indian writers such as Louise Erdrich and James Welch, Alexie describes contemporary characters straddling identities, ethnicities, economic situations, and cultures, but in these pages Alexie brings this balancing act to the present moment. He writes about devout Catholic Indians and Indians who know the words to every Hank Williams song. He writes about Indians who work the Seattle docks, political aides who are Indian, Indians who teach American history at community colleges, and globetrotting Indians who sell ideas. Their boundaries and self-identifications often lack coherence and are filled with contradiction; like Whitman's speaker in "Song of Myself," they "contain multitudes." William, the salesman in "Flight Patterns" doesn't "want to choose between Ernie Hemingway and the Spokane tribal elders, between Mia Hamm and Crazy Horse, between The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Chief Dan George." The Brady Bunch meets fancy dancing as Alexie performs the quintessential postmodern pastiche of drawing deeply from mass and tribal culture.

It would be easy to see how these characters grow to hate the white hegemony that demands they "Go back where they came from." However, Alexie's stories draw their characters between the worlds of white racism, white vanity, white rage, and white ignorance, and those of white compassion, white genius, and white poetry. This cosmopolitanism and the ills and benefits which accompany it come across clearest in the two dominant stories of the collection: "Lawyer's League" and "What You Pawn I Will Redeem." Here Alexie refuses to let anyone off the hook. An Indian taunted by a racist does not have the right to lash out without consequences. An Indian grandmother's stolen fancy-dancing regalia must be reclaimed through hard work.

Because of this complex culture, almost all of the characters here are searching for identity and remain split. They are never wholly able to trust in either side of the divide and are rarely trusted wholly in return. In "The Search Engine" a student who finds a book of poetry written by a Spokane Indian 30 years earlier feels a connection that leads her on an arduous trail to find the poet and speak with him. When she finally tracks him down, he explains that he is "not really a Spokane Indian"—he distrusts his own identity as Indian because he was "adopted out and raised by a white family." In "Lawyer's League" we meet Richard, whose father "is an African American giant who played defensive end for the University of Washington Huskies," and whose mother "is a petite Spokane Indian ballerina who majored in dance at U-Dub." Richard remarks "genetically speaking, I'm a graceful monster. . . . culturally speaking, I'm a biracial revolutionary leftist magician with a twenty-foot jumper encoded in my DNA." And in "Can I Get a Witness," a woman who is disconnected from her husband, sons, and her own life finds opportunity for escape as she steps out of the rubble of a terrorist explosion. All these stories are about belief and disbelief, and their specific contradictions, self-questioning, and deceptions reflect a skepticism of official accounts of September 11th and the erosion of an imagined American way of life.

In this way, Ten Little Indians is tied to an American psyche haunted by the destruction of the World Trade Center, the continued scapegoating of people of color, and the unconsidered proclamations of the innocence of the victims. The events of September 11th appear in a handful of stories and are clearly present in the minds of some of the characters, but in "Can I Get a Witness," they have a prominent role. As a woman who has just survived the explosion delivers her diatribe about reactions to the attacks, the reader is left wondering if the trauma she has endured only minutes before has made her thinking frenetic and absurd or clearer and more insightful.

In the end, Ten Little Indians tells the tales of a group of exceptional people who are average and of average people who are exceptional. More reminiscent of Raymond Carver's episodic What We Talk About When We Talk About Love than the geographically contained Sherwood Anderson of Winesburg, Ohio, Alexie's stories are "ambiguously ethnic," mourning, delighting, and devious in that ambiguity. These characters are transients, confused and untrusting, who are sometimes steadfast and sometimes tempted by fatalism. Yet, when they cry too easily, meet en route to the airport, or dance in a Seattle intersection, there is something ever so slight and grand they redeem.

The unresolved lesson of Ten Little Indians comes from a few lines in the first story. "Maybe Indians are just big-footed hitchhikers eager to tell a joke! That wasn't a profound thought, but maybe it was an accurate one. But can you be accurate without profundity? Corliss didn't know the answer to the question."

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

Yasmina Khadra
Translated by Linda Black
The Toby Press ($19.95)

by Kevin Carollo

How can you forget when you spend your time betraying your memory, and your nights trying to piece it together again like a cursed jigsaw, only for it to go hazy again when dawn comes, over and over again. Every day. Every night. Endlessly.
We call that obsession, and we think that naming it is sufficient to triumph over despair.
What do we really know about obsession?
—Yasmina Khadra, Wolf Dreams

Forgetfulness is a property of all action.
--Nietzsche

How do we make sense of violence, and what good can come of making sense of it? To name is not enough.

Yasmina Khadra, a pseudonym of Mohammed Moulessehoul, offers intensely stark and provocative portraits of the culture of violence in contemporary Algeria. His most recent offering to an English-speaking audience, Wolf Dreams, stands as a natural extension of his In the Name of God, which also documents the entwined nature of political corruption, fundamentalism, and violence in late 1980s-early 1990s Algeria. A more literal translation of this earlier novel's title would be The Lambs of God (Les agneaux du Seigneur). As the title suggests, Khadra's latest work explores the process of becoming-wolf, i.e. the turn to violence in order to assert absolutist parameters to Algerian national identity.

The attempt to make sense of violence through literature is a brave act, one that defies the obsessive and repetitive history of postcolonial Algeria. That Khadra, an officer in the Algerian army for 36 years, wrote these novels under a pseudonym, hints at the risk involved in documenting ongoing national violence. In such a context, the ritual forgetting of history has resulted in brutal factionalism. Khadra's work responds to the rise of fundamentalism with a profoundly humanistic and historical formulation: Algeria cannot exist as a nation without tolerance for its many religious, linguistic, regional, cultural, and political factions. Of course, to recognize the historical and cultural hybridity of Algeria constitutes an affront to its many fundamentalisms. Ironically, perhaps, Khadra's novels are fighting words.

Wolf Dreams focuses on Nafa Walid, an aspiring actor who starts working as a chauffeur for a wealthy, "Westernized" family. The novel narrates his turn from serving the debased bourgeois elite to getting caught up in the military-religious fervor of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). It then follows the increasing violence after the FIS is banned in 1992 and other radical groups take over. Through the novel's main character, Khadra portrays fundamentalism as deriving from a decidedly non-fundamentalist amalgam of factors. These include a reaction against class privilege, a frustration with political and economic corruption, the loss of historical memory between generations, and the search for a meaningful self amidst great inequity and national infighting. As Nafa becomes inured to the wolf culture of violence, he starts to embody its most obsessive qualities.

In turn, Nafa's descent into violence corresponds to "Algeria . . . plunging headlong into the irrevocable."Khadra is a master at articulating the fragmented national consciousness of Algeria through the obsessive eyes of the individual. (Born close to the beginning of the Algerian revolution for independence, in January 1955, and "entrusted to the military institution at age 9," Khadra has understandably referred to himself as "a little bit the actual history of Algeria.") The novel's periodic switch between first- and third-person narration helps maintain this tension. The need to discriminate between individual and nation—and the wolf from its pack—also questions the absolutist notion that "You can't have one foot in the east, and one foot in the west. "The difficulty presented here lies in taking another step, in maintaining a sense of national and individual consciousness not defined by the irrevocable footprints of East and West.

Wolf Dreams envisions the role of art as that which has the capacity to connect us to history, to compel us beyond obsession. In the novel, artists signify the most suspect of Algeria's subjects; consequently, they offer the most illuminating commentary on the impasses to forming a cohesive nation-state. Nafa notes:

Sid Ali, the bard of the Casbah, told me that Algeria was the biggest archipelago in the world--made up of twenty-eight million or so islands. He neglected to add that the oceans of misunderstanding that divide us are the darkest and vastest of the entire planet.

The mere recognition of national fragmentation has a distinct and powerful political valence to it. The suggestion that "In Algeria, there's no destiny. We're all at the end of the road" contravenes any fundamentalism which assumes that Algeria must become an Islamic state, culturally coherent, or some sort of pure "Eastern" nation.

At the end of the road, there is an alternate path. Khadra's compelling depiction of contemporary Algeria suggests a morally complex trajectory: the way out of repeating an obsessive history of violence begins with remembering it. The move beyond moral absolutism, and towards belief in the validity of nationalist hybridity, defines the political currency of today's best postcolonial literature. To read Khadra is to intuit this richer world.

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Jonathan Lethem
Doubleday ($26)

by Eric Lorberer

Holding up Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March as the Great American Novel, Martin Amis praises the book's "fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its qualmless promiscuity. In these pages the highest and the lowest mingle and hobnob in the vast democracy of Bellow's prose. Everything is in here, the crushed and the exalted and all the notches in between."

If those are the qualifications for the category—and if you add the obvious hook that the Great American Novel must assess our peculiar national character, then I think they are—then the same could be said for Jonathan Lethem's glorious new book, The Fortress of Solitude. In setting, it takes us through Brooklyn, Berkeley, Indiana, Vermont, North Carolina, among other places that comprise the country. More importantly, it soars above our streets and stoops, our colleges and communes, our airwaves, our prisons, our lives.

The plot is simple: Dylan and Mingus, the two main characters, grow up. Despite their iconic names they are no mere symbols. Dylan is a white boy in a mostly black Brooklyn neighborhood, and it seems like one of those unpredictable twists of fate that the more extroverted Mingus, son of a semi-famous soul singer, befriends him. Life is full of lessons for young Dylan as he negotiates the social complexities of childhood in an urban environment—

Let me see it: you saw a basketball or a pack of baseball cards or a plastic water gun by taking it into your hands, and what happened after that was in doubt. Ownership depended on mostly not letting anyone see anything. If you let a kid see a bottle of Yoo-Hoo for a minute he'd drink what was left in it.

—and these lessons add up to the person he becomes. Likewise for Mingus, whose power to protect is as intermittent and enigmatic as his graffiti tag "Dose"; and for Arthur Lomb, with whom Dylan is "doomed to friendship"; and for Robert Woolfolk, the recurring antagonist in Dylan's personal drama; and the list goes on. Lethem has rendered all his characters, and their seemingly fated trajectories, with the messy, incontrovertible reality of life.

The book's structure is likewise exquisite: The Fortress of Solitude is an elaborate off-kilter diptych held together by a finely-wrought hinge. The first (and longest) section of the book, "Underberg," chronicles the boys' youth in their corner of Brooklyn—itself in the beginning throes of a transition from "Gowanus" to the tonier "Boerum Hill"—during the '70s. Here, the world (and all its nuances—Lethem excels at drawing out the texture of the decade, saturating his prose in a warm bath of pop-culture particulars) is viewed from a mythical, authoritative remove. This omniscient point-of-view is delightfully in keeping with the magical realist touch of having Dylan and Mingus discover that the power of flight—that core comic book fantasy—is real: "The elongated rectangular grid of these streets, these rows of narrow houses, seen from above, at dusk in late October: imagine the perspective of a flying man. What sense would he make of the figures below . . . Is this a mugging? Should he swoop down, intervene?"

After the text-warping fulcrum of the 10-page "Liner Note," the second part of the novel, "Prisonaires," catapults us into the '90s and shifts to the first person—letting Dylan tell the tale that was always, at heart, his own. It also gives Lethem free reign to dig into the meat of his American epic. For this is largely a novel about race, and although Dylan and Mingus had plenty of opportunities both to confirm and cross the barriers between black and white, the older Dylan can give more reasoned expression to the issue:

The word throbbed between us, permitting no reply from me. I could visualize it in cartoonish or graffiti-style font, glowing with garish decorations, lightning, stars, halos. . . . Though it had been more than once around the block of our relationship, nigger was that rarity, an anti-entropic agent, self-renewing. The deep ugliness in the word always sat up alert again when it was needed.

The section also smartly invokes the increasingly gargantuan pink elephant of American incarceration, from Dylan's proposed screenplay about "the Prisonaires" (an incarcerated singing group) to his gripping account of visiting his old friend in the stir: "We were being transformed into inmates, I began to understand, as our reward for asking to go inside."

Lethem's America is one that contains multitudes: it is only a long day's ride in a rental car that takes Dylan from the bowels of a correctional facility to a utopian, Richard Brautigan-flavored farm; only a commuter flight that takes him from a harrowing argument with his girlfriend to a hilarious Hollywood pitch meeting. And there is so much more—experimental film, motherless sons, drugs and guns, a science-fiction convention, power, sacrifice, the relentless turning of the karmic wheel. Yet perhaps ultimately The Fortress of Solitude is a novel about the complicated nature of friendship:

Dylan Ebdus's friendship with Mingus Rude lived in brief windows of time, punctuation to the unspoken sentences of their days. . . . There was nothing to do but pick up where they'd left off, pool what they still had in common. What was new in the other you pretended to take for granted, a bargain instinctively struck to ensure your own coping on the other end.

XTC sang: "Deep in your fortress of solitude, don't mean to be rude, but I don't feel super." Jonathan Lethem has exploded the sentiment into a gorgeous novel of epic sweep, replete with loss and vision—a truly great Great American Novel.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003