Forum / Chris Okum's HARMONICA; An Appraisal

• 
  David Ackley

  Apr 12, 03:21pm

  
  Certain terms come to mind from the slurry and dialectic of the Postmodern in consideration of Chris Okum's remarkable, and actually innovative "Novel," HARMONICA. "Collage," "Mashup," "blurring of the lines between forms," and so on. In a shallow sense they might even seem to briefly apply, until the text itself detonates them one by one. Even the word "Novel," is offered up as a description, and then demolished about three pages in.

  But Okum is nothing if not precise in his language, and if we take 'novel,' as adjective rather than noun; in the age where everything recycled purports to be new, this sees the word suddenly resurrected, shucked of its slimed-over skin and recharged with lost energy: HARMONICA never seen before, is indescribably, ineluctably New.

  This is in part the problem it presents for the intrepid critic, where the temptation is always to fall back on the familiar, praising by implied comparison with this or that famous forbear, and demonstrating the point by pulling out a shard, image or line from here and there in the work to plunk it down beside something ostensibly similar from Joyce, or Mallarme' or Nathaniel West or some other Who-shot-John notable. Inevitably, this is a falling back, a diminishment a decline from this book, whose interest lies simply in its distinctiveness. There are no safe places of the familiar, no place for us to hide in false comparisons, and in this lies both the book's challenge and its pleasure: I exist, it says to the reader, Make of me what you will.

  One can easily say what it's not, as long as it's understood that these are not Lacks, not to be understood as deficiencies, but simply the result of choices made in other directions: There is no single narrative line, no 'main character,' if there is something to be described as "plot," it is so encompassing as to escape an easy summary.

  What is there, in lieu of all these familiar crutches?

  Let me try to describe what it is:

  A work in several hundred discrete and in terms of subject, disparate, sections, each of which claims to be excerpted from some other text-- a novel, a sociological or political economic tome, a first person work of either auto-fiction or memoir, and so on through multiple shifts in style, tenor and subject matter. It is, in the author's own description, a " book made up of books." But then, if any of these books are actual books, and there may be, most are books that are in turn products of the author's imagination, whose tenor we can only infer from the putative quotations on offer.

  The paradox the work presents, is that while each of these sections is both a fragment, in some cases further disassembled into seemingly random quotes, the experience of reading them is neither clouded in obscurity, nor perversely experimental, but lucid and accessible. The putative author, narrator, or voice rendered in each section all seem to share the desire, almost desperate at times, to be heard clearly and understood. And if at times, as happens, the experience rendered takes a sharp turn, dive, or plummet into some place or perception entirely unanticipated, it is because, as life has a way of doing to us, the subject, just like us, never saw it coming.

  I refrain from saying more, except that for someone willing to take the trip, HARMONICA plays beautifully and is a reading experience like none other. What more can one ask?

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