Forum / Chris Okum's HARMONICA further thoughts

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  David Ackley

  Jun 19, 01:08am

  One of the problems faced by self-published works is that of breaking through to serious critical appraisal, a state as ghettoized as any other aspect of publication, reserved as it is for established writers who by their very reputation and the fact that they've been extensively curated somehow deserve more critical attention than us laborers in the outer boroughs of "literature." Self publishing is certainly the most distant of these boroughs, although looked at historically it's a little hard to see why: Walt Whitman's canonical LEAVES OF GRASS in its first iteration was self-published, and some of the early classics of modernism, like ULYSSES first appeared through the agency of friends of the authors before they were noticed by commercial publishers. At any event, literary quality, whatever that might mean at a given historical moment, judging by the number of best sellers that have sunk into oblivion mere moments after their arrival is hard to equate with the attention, critical and otherwise, that seemed obligatory upon their mere appearance, whatever hosannahs were raised on the occasion.

  So, theoretically at least, and perhaps factually, as I'd argue, that HARMONICA was self published should be no indication at all of its literary quality.

  What is literary quality anyway? Good writing? Well, at least in part, Dreiser's AMERICAN TRAGEDY, which many including myself, would argue is the best candidate for the elusive "Great American Novel," of the 20th century is almost universally acknowledged to have some of the worst writing of any novel of its era shy of Thomas Wolfe. Perhaps not so paradoxically , Frederick Jameson has said, in fact, that what is best about it is also the badly written: Go Figure.

  Relevance? The surest way, it would sometimes seem to a quick artistic demise, is to write a novel that is au courant. Writers of tecnhologically timely novels, with lots of cell phones, robots, AI etc. be warned.

  To be truthful, nobody really knows what literary quality is, beyond our own subjective assessments, which are time-bound and in the end, informed by nothing other than our interests, somewhat informed by the extent of our own reading so that a work can be compared to others as well as a historical understanding of where it might be slotted, or escape slotting in the ever expanding universe of literary endeavors.

  But if you think, as I do, that that very expansion, is dependent on works that push existing boundaries, including the conventions of form, subject matter, and voice among other matters, it seems necessary to include works for consideration like HARMONICA that represent serious attempts to probe the established limits and determine if they are in fact that they were only boundaries, as easily crumbled as some Berlin Walls .

  It might even be that HARMONICA is in essence some new configuration of fiction that will open doors of possibility that had never before been perceived. Because, who knows? One thing is sure, when the new arrives on the scene, it is hardly ever noticed.

  Until it is.

  One would do well to consider what the book is.
  It claims to be "A Novel." On consideration, that seems, itself , a bowing to convention, though perhaps the last the book will offer.

  If "A Novel," is supposed to offer a narrative through time, more or less chronologically ordered, then this aint it. HARMONICA, quite deliberately inverts chronology , starting twenty five or so years into our future and proceeding backwards until it ends at a point in the 1970's.

  Each entry, of 1 to 3 pages occurs as a putative quote or series of quotes, or paraphrases, or comments expanding from what seem to be a series of unrelated texts, each of which has been imagined by our author, each entry headed by the title of the imaginary work, the name of the author and occasionally the publisher, or agency which has produced the document. I mention agency, because some of these purport to be government documents, a few of which are objectively clinical analyses of various experiments performed on subjects, usually resulting in madness, extreme pain and occasionally death. Regrettably at the expense, in the mind of the document's author, of the experiment's success. This is, among many other examples in the work, deadly funny.

  And one characteristic of the work is how it reproduces, often at their considerable expense, the cliches of expression of each work, so that the invented work, of a type, both displays and somehow parodically devours itself and its own pretenses.

  (I'm a little time-bound here, so I'll leave off for the moment and come back as I can. But all I mean to try to demonstrate, is that HARMONICA is original, inventive, compulsively readable, and as a literary contribution far more interesting than much of that which claims our attention these days.)

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  David Ackley

  Jun 20, 02:16pm

  I should note that this is not strictly or even very much for Chris'es benefit, since my experience suggests that an author is likely to meet any interpretation/review/critical analysis with feelings of revulsion which come from the acute sense of "that wasn't what I meant at all," combined with that of the abject failure that comes with it.

  But to commit your work to public view is to submit it to the sort of "creative misunderstanding," that readers necessarily bring in order to take possession of it, to necessarily wrest it out of your hands. So, with apologies, Chris, I go on...

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  David Ackley

  Jun 21, 02:33pm

  Form is an inescapable component of HARMONICA but problematical to discuss, since for the most part readers, except of the professional sort, aren't particularly drawn to fiction for its formal aspects, rather more likely according to its subject matter. The latter is certainly of interest in HARMONICA, so I'll confine myself to only brief remarks on its form.

  What seemed noticeable to me, were its reverse or inverted chronology and its deliberately "fragmentary," sections. That's in quotes because I'm not sure "fragments," correctly characterizes them. But that its entries begin with the latest into the future, 2050 something, and end with the deepest in the past, 1970 ish, is suggestive. The idea being something like, "this is what we will have come to," extending back to "this is how it all started," more or less. The this is and the it being perhaps, at a rough guess, inasmuch as the books quoted from are each, examples of "discourse," a regression in public discourse, of language itself in decay, as the combination of political lies, self-serving corporate-speak, advertizing sales pitches, and contentless entertainment has done its termite-like work on the ability of language to communicate anything resembling truth. Here the mechanism is a content of rather dead-pan parody, perfectly done.

  As to the sections themselves, though I have no idea whether Chris is familiar with this, in that they all purport to be Quotations from a selection of imaginary books, the whole resembles a thought of Walter Benjamin's, to compose a book entirely of quotations. Except of course that the spin of this work is to make these quotations from books that pretty much don't exist, except in the imagination of the author. Although they do propose a temptation to imagine with him the entire, missing, content of each book. And indeed, the imaginary author, along with the world, past, present or yet to come, that provided the "conditions of possibility," for such a work, with its limitations, weird pre-occupations and outrageous circumstances. Which is kind of fun.

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  David Ackley

  Jun 21, 02:38pm

  One brief further detour on self-publishing: An article on "Lady Chatterly's Lover," in this week's New Yorker, points out that, aware of censorship restrictions in the US and Britain, Lawrence opted to self-publish the first edition in Italy.

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  User Deleted

  Jun 22, 04:37am

  That is a radically acute and close reading of the book and much appreciated David. The reverse chronology serves the purpose you indicated as well as playing into the running motif of people in the book(s) who claim to be able to see into the future and predict what will come of us, which is, of course, an absurdity along with being an improbability. The fact that the reverse chronology explains nothing of how what ended up happening happened is my critique regarding the idea that fiction writers' highest aim should be prophecy. No one predicted the world we are currently living in save maybe Philip K Dick if you squint pretty hard and Baudrillard if you squint a little less hard. And regarding parody, if I have managed to reach a tone that resembles blank parody, I'm perfectly happy with that, Frederic Jameson be damned. Our culture right now is empty, devoid of content, satire, humor or critical bite. I only want to record the world as I feel it is right now so that one day I can look back and revisit it. Maybe then I can get a little closer as to what was happening right now, because fuck if I know. All I know is that I'm scared all the time. I'm waiting for the metaphorical shoe to drop.

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  User Deleted

  Jun 22, 04:47am

  Oh, and as for Benjamin, I'm a huge fan and consider him pretty much one of a handful of great thinkers of the first half of the 20th Century. The Arcades Project is one of the my favorite books, as is the best 21st Century version of that book, Kenneth Goldsmith's 'Capital,' which blew my mind a few tears back when I read it. Also a big fan of Flaubert and his ideas about books and how they're all in a conversation with each other from one age to another.

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