*this text is from H’s dissertation titled
“The Neuter (or The Neutral) and The Site of Writing:
Reading Blanchot, Barthes and Three Queer Poets
(Schuyler, Cooper and Kitchell)”
****Copyrighted for SUNY at Buffalo, ProQuest and H
This chapter explores different, yet indifferently resembling
(1) figures of the neutral, in the cases of three queer poets: James Schuyler, Dennis Cooper and Mike Kitchell (aka M Kitchell). The intent of writing this chapter is not to provide author studies in a comprehensive manner, though partly as a result, it might offer a view of their poems or texts in relation to the figures of the neutral in writing. As I discussed in earlier chapters, the idea of the neuter or the neutral is undefinable
(2) and only displays
(3) itself as various figures of languishing in writing, coming close to silence and the invisible, in writing’s impossible approach to the dead or the other in disappearance and absence. The neuter or the neutral is, in writing, a silent and actively self-negating force or non-site to remain against any representation and categorization through language. The non-site of the neutral prefers to become elusive, opaque and unknowable in the language of poets who would rather displace, liquidate and soften their assertions and identities as if worn-out and fissured little specks, closer to the silent dread and echo, inside the space of writing, ultimately for the sake of writing.
In link to that, I use the adjective “queer” as a
transitory and incidental word, if not an
insignificant one, which does not reveal any fixed or identifiable gender.
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1 Dennis Cooper’s
Dream Police copyright page marks that “All resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” This is not a unique statement for Dennis Cooper’s. Anyone who likes to defend the fictiveness of the text would like to put this on the copyright page. However, indeed, coincidence has been an important ethic for Dennis Cooper’s writing in that he confuses the subjects in his text to the degree that they are much different as to come to resemble each other indifferently, in coincidence, or a chance marking or inscribing on the page. It’s similar to how Blanchot writes the resemblance of bodies in the site of the neuter, which is the zone of difference in indifference for the act of writing.
2 Regarding the neuter (or the neutral) as a force which resists its definition, please refer to the chapter 1 (in this dissertation) where I discuss its irreducibility to a certain concept or even to the idea of the other as an approachable entity. 1-5.
3 Regarding the appearance of the neutral in its display of figures instead of its direct definition, please refer to the chapter 3 (in this dissertation) where I discuss Barthes’s tendencies to display the multiple neutrals, instead of its construction as a concept. 97.
4 Even though my project is distant from Eve Sedgwick’s projects (in that I do not explicitly deal with psychoanalysis, its involvement in queer theory and its cultural performative extension for utopian and reparative reading of queer subjectivity and affectivity), I think the following remark from Sedgwick is worth mentioning to explain my motive for reading of queer poets. “In the short-shelf life American marketplace of images, maybe the queer moment, if it’s here today, will for that very reason be gone tomorrow.” I think that perhaps it is already that “tomorrow” where the queer moment or the word queer does not seem to hold any revolutionary gender meaning due to its submission to market place banality even in theories. However I
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Rather, my use of this word implies a pleasing and suffering
(5) attraction, tendency, and perhaps love toward another (the other) in the act and mark of writing. Also, my approach to love (or attraction and friendship) shared in queerness among the poets in my attention comes from reading of Georges Bataille’s prose of
love in
The Little One (Le Petit) and the extension of that reading to writers in this project. Bataille writes that “[…] I break the tie that binds me to others. I tolerate no fidelity to this bond. No one loves how is not led to break it. The complete act of love would be to throw myself naked into the night, in the street, not for a prostitute but in order to live an impossible by myself in so sure a silence.”
(6) The writers I read here are in love with
evil (or
ache, which might be a better translation for my continuing emphasis on languor in writing, as a translation of the French word
Mal) in the sense that they are disinterested in anything else than writing in their submission to
the night, which forces them to exhaust themselves and write for
nothing,
in and toward silence. (This is also what I have discussed in relation to
other night in my Blanchot chapters.) Of course, I write this chapter in affinity to other queer writers with the intention that I write I am queer or homosexual myself as much as they are. The intention of writing for the queerness is cardinal in this project as much as being queer indicates an exclusion from the normative social narratives and relations surrounding heterosexuality. This exclusion has suppressed me and my friends especially in the way of writing and its effect (experience) in writing’s extreme erotic confusion, vacillating in force of pleasure and suffering, to the degree of wounding and collapsing the self toward nothing. However, my remark that inscribes that I am queer and that I write for queer writers only turns itself to the obverse, toward its difficult and unanalyzable secret in marks which do not build any kind of a community of love and friendship outside of the writing. I would not develop my writing for queerness to any further social confessions and political appropriations either outside the domain of writing for queerness as a passage of writing toward the unknowable and ungraspable other himself, who does not speak for his work.
(7) I refuse to make my writing for
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also agree with Sedgwick in that she writes “[…] a counterclaim against that obsolescence: a claim that something about
queer is inextinguishable. Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying,
troublant. The word “queer” itself means across – it comes from the Indo-European root- twerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English
athwart.[…] The queer of this essay is transitive – multiple transitive. The immemorial current that queer represents is antiseparatist as it is antiassimilationist. Keenly, it is relational, and strange.” Sedgwick’s queer vision is valuable for me in that it continues to prepare the transitory non-realm of “queer” writing that does not assimilate itself to conflictual politics and interpretation surrounding queers in the conventional sense of categorization (of subservient identities and divisions). Please read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), xii-xiii.
5 Regarding an understanding of the one and the other (you) as a force, or pleasing and suffering relation, Barthes states: “What would happen if I decided to define you as a force and not as a person? And if I were to situate myself as another force confronting yours? This would happen: my other would be defined solely by the suffering or the pleasure he affords me.” Roland Barthes,
A Lover’s Discourse, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 135.
<< Qu’est-ce que cela donnerait, si je décidais de te définit comme une force, et non comme une personne? Et si je me situais moi-même comme une autre force en face de ta force ? Cela donnerait ceci : mon autre se définirait seulement par la souffrance ou le plaisir qu’il me donne. >> Roland Barthes,
Fragments d’un Discours Amoureux, (Paris : Seuil, 1977), 162.
6 Georges Bataille,
The Little One in Louis XXX, trans. Stuart Kendall (London: Equus Press, 2013), 13.
7 My attitude that attempts to remain in opacity and secret while writing for the queerness only as a transitory and insignificantly loving writing is somewhat connected to Nicholas de Villiers’s book
Opacity and the Closet: Queer tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol. I am with de Villiers, as much as I detest the sexually intrusive and political interrogation toward queer subjects while I also hold a
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these poets a realistic and explicit queer theory in particular, out of my attitude that follows Roland Barthes’s preface to Renais Camus’s
Tricks: 25 Encounters. Barthes writes “they (25 encounters) speak homosexuality, but never speak about it: at no moment do they invoke it (that is simplicity: never to invoke, not to let Names into language – Names, the source of dispute, of arrogance, and of moralizing. [...] Renaud Camus’s narratives are neutral (
drifting: in my word), they do not participate in the game of interpretation. They are surfaces without shadows, without ulterior motives. […] Tricks might suggest haikus; for the haiku combines an asceticism of form and a hedonism so serene that all we can say about pleasure is that it is
there (which is also the contrary of interpretation.)”
8 Like Barthes in his commentary on
Tricks, I am simply interested in observing the queering—fragmenting and dispersing—movements of writing through these poets. I am also interested in speaking for them through my writing as they are not able to speak for their own work. This also continues my appreciation of Barthes’s queer writing in
A Lover’s Discourse and
Incidents, with its rhythms and minutiae of writing which deliver the nuance of writing where loving writing itself abounds. This queer writing does not present a settlement in a visible region of relation and knowledge about its movement and activities, as
“the ghost ship (le vaisseau fantôme)” 9 (of loving) wanders through the infinite realm of writing toward an unknowable otherness where “I,” a writer, withdraws as no one:
the other. In defense of the inclinations (or transitory bents) and writing the nuance toward the other, I would insist that the reason I choose these three queer poets is rather
simple. First of all, I hold a recurring
affinity with their texts. With respect to the affinity, or the difficulty of living with the beloved text, I borrow its idea and attitude from Alain Robbe-Grillet’s essay (along with the interview with Barthes), “Why I love
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distance from de Villiers’s book, with my disinterest in alternative politics of living the self, linked to queerness, which has not been the purpose of this dissertation. While I write the subjective despair and pleasure that I read in the written life and work of poets, this is only reflected as a force of writing in my insistence that writing happens in a realm of attraction to the neuter, which is forcefully invisible and silent, apart from the way of living which seems like an important discourse that entails many political narratives for de Villiers and Foucault, as well, to live as a self as a known cultural figure, in a real social dimension.
8 Roland Barthes’s Preface to
Tricks, in
Tricks: 25 encounters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981)
9 Barthes, Fragments d’un Discours Amoureux, 117.
10 Regarding the unknowable otherness in the unreal realm of writing, Barthes writes: “[H]is opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.” Barthes,
A Lover's Discourse, 135.
11 In a similar context, I would like to mention the word affinity from Wayne Koestenbaum’s essay “Notes on Affinity” in
My 1980s & Other Essays, (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux: 2013), 278-281. In this essay, Koestenbaum writes that “by announcing to myself that I felt affinity with that phrase, I was destroying other pacts, other possibilities of sociability, belongings, conformity, communicability. Even these sentences I’m now writing prove how damaging that affinity – or any affinity? – was; for by letting myself fall under its sway, I gave up comprehensibility. I decided: I’ll side with what I can’t understand in Brahms’s phrase; I’ll side wide with the possible rottenness of an object I might one day love.” Even though Koestenbaum writes with Braham’s phrase to explain “affinity with” or “siding with,” it is similar to the way I write the word affinity. The intimacy that I feel to the text that writing does and undoes has nothing to do with a real friendship, a real love in sociality. Rather conversely, this affinity could hold the possibility of destroying other social demands and bonds, in the attraction that writing with those texts, unfolds, toward its space, which is essentially absent and only prolongs its scriptibility, by some sort of languishing perversion of going-on for nothing.
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Barthes (1978).” In the essay, Robbe-Grillet questions his affinity with Barthes’s text or text-person, by writing “How does it feel when one of his texts is going around in my head? How do I live with that text?”
(12) which involves a sickening (aching) bent to the text and forces one to write for the text. In the same vein, Barthes in
A Lover’s Discourse, also writes “I have an Other-ache”
(13) (“J’ai mal à l’autre”
(14)) in relation to the text due to an enjoyment of the text and an undecipherable wound with it, in looking at it and also consequently, unavoidably writing for it. Like Robbe-Grillet and Barthes, my having an inexplicable affinity with the text or with the impenetrable force or nuance of the text would be the
first condition for study of the text. And this also would be the practice of the ethics of the neutral in the realm of the text, as the goal of reading is not in analyzing the text but in receiving the text as a condition for giving [sacrificing] writing to the received text, while it ruins oneself further in the domain of writing. Secondly, these are unsung poets who deserve special attention, in their
questioning of what writing achieves, which is firstly and lastly a silence or a nuance of desire in my poetic studies in relation to queer writing. In other words, my interest in poems by these three poets is in what a poetic word questions or demands with its marked state of silence and its impersonal echoes. This is a place, as Maurice Blanchot writes, where the form of their poems emerge, and also vanish, with unaccommodatingly confusing and scattering effect in the entire bursting landscape of the text itself, where all minor elements of writing pass. Indeed, these three poets are writing and living at the
almost invisible and inaudible limit of language, speaking-blankly and speaking-silently, with the field of fragmenting the text of all.
Dennis Cooper and Mike Kitchell consider themselves “dead” in order to be disqualified from all that is “other than death”—this disqualification resembles Blanchot’s attitude in his remark “I die before being born”
(15) (as a neutral and spectral condition for writing which transforms “I” to an impersonal no-one, courtesy of the neuter at the core of writing). Unlike them, James Schuyler is actually dead and no longer writing, though the difference between “virtual death” and death does not distinguish the other two poets from Schuyler in their abandonment from a deservingly exhaustive study of their work. Indeed, despite the large amount of work that remains to be read and approached with any kind of poetic rigor, Schuyler is the least studied of the
New York School of Poets. The designation “
The New York School of Poets” is itself unsuitable for Schuyler in that it is an unnecessary and snobbish designation in consideration of the variety of poetic styles and humble attitudes toward the joy of writing and generous friendship through each other’s’ work, rather than being a group of highly educated and urbanized poetic movement at the center of New York.
(16) Despite being alive, Dennis Cooper and Mike Kitchell see themselves as
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12 Alain Robbe-Grillet,
Why I Love Barthes, edit. Olivier Corpet, trans. Andrew Brown (Malden: Polity, 2011), 6.
13 Barthes,
A Lover’s Discourse, 57.
14 Barthes,
Fragments d’un discours amoureux, 69.
15 Maurice Blanchot,
The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 101.
16 David Lehman, the author of
The Last Avant Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, notes that “Paradoxically, one of the ways the New York School of poets was avant-garde was in resisting the “movement” mentality with its inevitable solemnity and penny-ante philosophizing. In 1968, an article about Ashbery, Koch and O’Hara appeared in the New York Times Book Review with the effect, Ashbery said, that “a lady wrote Kenneth Koch asking for the address of the New York School of Poets because she wanted to enroll in it.” A second effect was that Ashbery was asked to speak on a panel as a representative of the New York School. He spent most of his speech explaining his objections to the term.
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"ghost writers” who are dedicated to demonstrating, in their act of writing, a quivering anamnesis and mnemosyne of dying and death on the side of the impersonal other, while their real lives and careers remain unresolved mysteries. They don’t have regular jobs and they don’t teach literature with positions at any sort of institution. They hold a
pure position—“pure” in that their position is connected to writing alone—each as a poet and writer, which was also the case of James Schuyler during his life. Due to living in insecurity and instability, which is profoundly linked to unknowable tendencies of their work, as much as they’d prefer to hide the real turmoil behind the appearance of writing, the poetic wish of these poets is sometimes, simply and quietly, expressed as a good-bye to a continued life as a poet, either fictional or autobiographical,
(17) while questioning what writing is and how to disappear with writing, every-day.
For these three poets, every-day or the day is already transformed into the
realm of writing and passes as if fading itself to insignificance in the atmosphere of the night. James Schuyler writes in the poem “Song” in
The Morning of the Poem: […] “Tennis nets hang / unused in unused stillness / A car starts up and / whispers into what will soon be night. / A tennis ball is served. / A horsefly vanishes / A smoking cigarette. / A day (so many and a few) / dies down a hardened sky / and leaves are lap-held notebook leaves/discriminated barely / in light no longer layered.”
(18) Here a hanging tennis net appears as if it displays a pure this-ness, and Schuyler repeats “unused in unused” in double structure. However, this doubling by repeating the same word “unused” with “in” inside two words, has the effect of making the meaning of the word “unused” cloudy or snowy, which increases the hiddenness of the poem. And “a tennis ball,” “a horsefly” and “cigarette” are for a “nothing-day” (let’s not forget that there is also a poem titled “A Nothing Day Full Of” from
Other Flowers (19)). “A tennis ball,” “a horsefly” and a “cigarette” don’t add to the day or to the text. They simply appear and vanish, like smoking dirt. And the poet goes on “A day (so many and a few) / dies down a hardened sky / and leaves are lap-held notebook leaves / discriminated barely / in light no longer layered.” Schuyler’s writing delivers the void of sentiment in a suspended, alien landscape of nothing. He feels that an anonymous day (not
the day), passing like a dying down, is similar to the leaves that end up without difference, like any other dead leaves that no longer get layered-light in the tree. While Schuyler’s observation happens in a rather pastoral landscape, a similar sentiment, of loss and falling, passes through the other two poets’ texts without pastoral atmosphere. In the work of the other two poets this sentiment arises in unique forms; words are slurred,
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As he saw it, New York had little to do with it. …… and though they (poets) were all very different from one another, they were called the New York School because they were friends.” David Lehman,
The Last Avant Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 27.
17 Paul de Man’s remark of “autobiography as defacement” is helpful in seeing the indistinctively blurry relation between the life of these three poets and their work in its invisibility: “It appears, then, that the distinction between fiction and autobiography is not an either/or polarity but that it is undecidable. But is it possible to remain, as Genette would have it, within an undecidable situation? As anyone who has ever been caught in a revolving door or on a moving wheel can testify, it is certainly most uncomfortable, and all the more so in this case since this whirl gig is capable of infinite acceleration and is, in fact, not successive but simultaneous.” Martin McQuillan, edit.,
Deconstruction: A reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 173.
18 James Schuyler,
The Morning of the Poem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 17.
“A poem (A Nothing Day Full Of)
19 A nothing day full of / wild beauty and the / timer pings. Roll up / the silvers of the bay / take down the clouds / sort the spruce and / send to laundry marked / more starch. Goodbye/ golden- and silver- / rod, asters, bayberry / crisp in elegance and / small fish stream / by a river in a water.” James Schuyler,
Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 84.
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undetermined and affirm nothing, in both attention and hesitance to passing surroundings. This attitude is situated not in real time or the real day: the work infinitely skids real time, in every word and in all prose. With the word “skid,” I do not mean to imply that any of these three poets race with their words, especially in their poetic work. Rather, their consciousness of the interval of writing is distanced, as if it prefers to be abandoned, from an accelerated time in reality, while the syntactic movement and visual and aural echoes of words virtually overwhelm the text-field to the degree that the minds of readers become inactive, if not wounded—close to the experience of aphasia and amnesia. Readers of Cooper and Kitchell note that the effect of the text is “mind-blinding” or bruising to the threshold of utter disorientation, oblivion or even somatic illness, which creates a fear of reading and speaking of the text they have read. This is not the effect of the actual speed of writing in their work. It is rather the opposite. Even when the marks of the words spill and spin out on the page in their work, the dimension of time of the word “a day” or any word, is withdrawn as if it is a dream of “no one,” which one can’t retrieve with comfort and precision. But discomfort and haziness of memory—perhaps in link to nothing (as in the neuter)—does not appear or sound like an experience of heroic tragedy either: it simply affirms nothing in writing. Rather, it affirms confusion of why nothing or the act of writing nothing is affirmed, and this isolates the experience of the text or the poem-words within the minimal marks of forlorn silence and breaching aches where even the ultimate image of nothing desolates itself.
Wayne Koestenbaum, who as a reader of James Schuyler focuses on Schuyler’s writing on nothingness, also comments on Dennis Cooper’s work: “he [Dennis Cooper] exhibits ambitious ambitiouslessness – confusing our notions of ‘career;’”
(20) Dennis Cooper (and also Mike Kitchell) doesn’t believe that he could change the world, or even his own life, by writing. In writing, both Cooper and Kitchell mistrust in the conception of real life out of their writerly career as, for them, the writing in the love of writing is separate from career concerns. Writing in the love of writing highlights the aesthetic virtues and pleasure which hold singular importance in their ambition, and this attitude in seeing literature (or writing) intensifies itself with what they write and perform. If there is any ambition in their work, it is deliberate and aesthetically humbles the work to the limit of doing nothing and of undoing the work in the attitude of creating the work, as if their works are realizing the
worklessness (désœuvrement) discussed by Maurice Blanchot. Their attitude in working is displayed within their work as if they are absolutely fine even though they pass and vanish
today. (Here
today perhaps repeats and resounds the silence of a small death as in the “willow leaves,”
(21) of James Schuyler’s everyday poetic window, through which he simply looks out, aside from the real world.)
There is a dilemma in that if they quit writing a poem in order to completely disregard the real world that affects or depresses their minds, there is no way for them
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20 Wayne Koestenbaum, “32 Cardinal Virtues of Dennis Cooper,” in
Dennis Cooper: Writing at the Edge, edit. Paul Hegarty and Danny Kennedy (Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2008), 187.
21 The first poem titled “Invocation” in James Schuyler,
Other Flowers (Uncollected poems) goes: “Scatter your lines like willow leaves/a summer storm tears at the weeping withys/sprinkle with words this sheet as the wind/cross-ventilates and veils the yellow floor with dust/pollinate, a poem/or at least a sneeze/the tops of the clouds are clear/in bulk and turning edge/the bottoms are fused with sky while the Beekman Tower/begins to burn in an evening fury/deeper than gold/ […] / speak/a few light words/quick and true/as the pigment-was it pink-Felix/Pasilis worked into the still wet ground/barely contrasted/who stops to count the waving willow leaves?/from here, blended strokes/wavering for the storm is passed/summer is more than come/so come,/say what I should say/in a few bright naming words” Schuyler,
Other Flowers (Uncollected poems), 3.
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to express their exhaustion and desire to write. In this way these poets resemble the exhausted figure of Rimbaud who still desired to write, exceeding the weariness which serves the neuter of writing. They still write even though they desire only
a few quiet words to respond to the world which demands productivity, without a place for them to be and to have their literary names. And this desire is written only at the limit, in great weariness and literary rejection—while its expression is discreetly off-stage—which is often deceptively shown as a playful idleness and weakness, as in inadequate or inoperative language which says nothing, despite its apparent performance of saying something. Even though their (Dennis Cooper’s
(22) and Mike Kitchell’s
(23) ) activities seem wild and anarchistic on the internet—which is essentially or inessentially the non-site
for an experience of the no-space of life—their living is devoid of images of living persons and there is no hyperbolic pretense whatsoever in saying that they are indeed a silent and
extremely matte (24) figure as a poet or text-person. This matte silence resounds as well in James Schuyler, who remains with an epitaph
(25) of “a poet” on his grave and books, in its stillness, with an unbreakable and unexplained absence and silence, which might be the look of the neutral.
For James Schuyler, Dennis Cooper and Mike Kitchell, writing is not useful for any kind of communication or publicity in real life. Its irreplaceability and inimitability,
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22 Cf. Dennis Cooper’s Blog entitled
The Weaklings (The same title as his recent poetry book,
The Weaklings (XL)) is here:
http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/ and the Dennis Cooper online archive is here:
http://www.dennis-cooper.net/23 Cf. Mike Kitchell (aka M Kitchell)’s website is here:
http://topologyoftheimpossible.com/24 I borrow the term matte from Nicholas de Villiers,
Opacity and the Closet: Queer tactics in Foucault, Barthes and Warhol (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), especially from the chapter “Matte Figures: Roland Barthes’s Ethics of Meaning” in a similar sense that de Villiers states that Roland Barthes, for instance in his biographical writing, splits subjects and personal pronouns to the variety of “he,” “you” and sometimes “I” as if spoken by a character in the novel. (de Villiers,
Opacity and the Closet, 67) So gender-fluid or identity-fluid impersonalization or depersonalization occurs in the act of writing by Roland Barthes, and this multiplication of the subject makes the subject position insignificant, inessential or
disappointed (which is Barthes favored term) as if they have nothing to speak for the authority or position of themselves. Instead, this confusion and exhaustion in multiple subject positions is linked to their desire to leave from the position (as one is exempt from the military service) as an author who controls the narrative and the meaning of the text and to render oneself or ourselves in the plane of being unseen and undecipherable, like the silent loved other who lost the mouth, unlike the self who continues monologues to possess and understand the other, as in Barthes’s
A Lover’s Discourse. My study is distanced from Nicolas de Villiers’s interest in tactics of insignificant utterance in the case of queer performativity or fictive writing in the sense that the three poets I read are more warning and death-alarming and echoing of death’s inhumane entropy, while keeping the serene and low-keyed tone in the space of writing than Barthes’s tactful position with a certain elitist and bourgeois rationality reserved. However, the way de Villiers connects the term matte to the opacity of the queer subjects influenced me to read three poets in my studies in the realm of an unknowable queerness even more with their writing which denies the public norms of being queer and which does not cooperate with the public question and demand of what it is to be queer.
25 Wayne Koestenbaum writes this “Quoth a plaque on Manhattan’s Twenty-Third Street: DEDICATED TO THE MEMOIR OF JAMES SCHUYLER POET AND PULITZER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR OF THE MORNING OF THE POEM AMONG OTHER WORKS, WHO LIVED AT THE CHELSEA HOTEL FROM 1979 UNTIL HIS DEATH IN 1991 PRESENTED BY FARRAR, STRAUSS & GIROUX JULY 1993 ---- On a public epitaph, words divided into centered lines, broken, resemble poetry, if only visually” quoted in Wayne Koestenbaum,“Epitaph on Twenty-Third Street,”
My 1980s & Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2013), 95.
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perhaps its existence as a loving dedication to nothing emerging from the void of the neutral, characterizes writing as writing. And if what matters in writing is found in sociality or the communality of writing it is a
friendship of words that poets give to each other, in anticipation of or elegizing their
untimely death with ambiguous nuance and with an inapproachable tone, to the ultimate distance and separation from each solitary region, even when they call themselves lovers or friends in an ordinary sense. There is only a friendship (and even love) of words to present itself as a writing whose essence is the failure of language and the absence of avowed love, as Maurice Blanchot writes with
friendship, which I have discussed in the first chapter. This friendship is present in Schuyler’s elegiac writing, Cooper’s poems being regularly dedicated to dead individuals that occupy a minor corner of the popular consciousness, and Kitchell’s quest towards an “impossible love.”
Whatever Barthesian affective criticism attempts to seduce and console itself in the region of privileged friendship and even, perhaps, the collective nature of it—as Barthes was also aware of in the experience of
punctum, looking at the photograph of his beloved and absent mother in the mornings that followed her death
(27)—there is no possibility of endorsement or redemption toward another body in the text and the text-image, due to the absence behind it. Indeed, Barthes even writes, on January 17, 1979, “gradually the effect of absence grows sharper: having no desire to construct anything new (except in writing); no friendship, no love, etc.”
(28) Likewise, in the region of writing or the text, even when there are streams and sparkles of memoirs, exchanges of letters, commentaries, reviews and blurbs, what is affirmed can be only the impersonal marks of the voiding insect-like buzz without social or political bonds: the movement of the neutral. This reminds us of Emily Dickinson’s poem: “heard a fly buzz when “I” died in the stillness in the room,” which alludes to the room of writing and also awaiting death, with an insignificant and inhumane tone, which is no longer the speaker’s or anyone else’s. This is perhaps linked to why these three poets write blankly, without any expectation of a response, instead demanding the silence, even when they write “I love you” as if writing an intimate confession. As Roland Barthes writes in “Je-t’-aime/I-love-you,” this might be
a proffering of nothing, simply released, returning language and message to “a deaf and doleful world of signs;”
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26 Roland Barthes beautifully writes about poetic or Hymnal-dedication to the “minor god” (the other) in
A Lover’s Discourse: “To that God, O Phaedrus, I dedicate this discourse…” “One cannot give language (how to transfer it from one hand to the other?), but one can dedicate it – since the other is a minor god. The given object is reabsorbed in the sumptuous, solemn utterance of the consecration, in the poetic gesture of the dedication; the gift is exalted in the very voice which expresses it, if this voice is measured (metrical); or again: sung (lyrical); this is the very principle of the Hymn or Anthem. Being unable to give anything, I dedicate the dedication itself, into which is absorbed all I have to say.” Barthes,
A Lover's Discourse, 77. Indeed, many of Schuyler’s poems are dedicated to someone with no expectation that they will reach that someone as much as language is not transferrable to another [the other.]
27 Barthes,
Mourning Diary, 139. “Afternoon with Michael, sorting maman’s belongings. Began the day by looking at her photographs. A cruel morning begins again (but had never ended). To begin again without resting. Sisyphus. (June 11, 1978)” Even with the contact with the photograph, his (Barthes’s) suffering continues in his solitude. It can’t be shared with someone else. And the touch with the image-text, which is the photograph of his dead mother, only makes him collapse further apart from it. Writing “love” at the edge of absence repeats only that way, aside from the possibility of endorsement and sympathy, whose virtues or truths are not simply rejected either. But that belongs to the region of sociality. In relation to the death, a writer is no one who collapses alone and bursts into tears, which is writing, in the room next to sociality and its commitments.
28 Ibid., 224.
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delicately inaudible and sobbing [mourning] repetitions of language only for the expenditure of writing, with no pertinent answer and guarantee of reciprocation for it.
(29) Mike Kitchell’s writing transmits this release of impossible love in relation to death in a mostly silent and quivering way, which possibly makes the reader doubt language that would normally carry an imagined certainty and assertion in his mind, tied to the solidity of language and its meaning. Kitchell’s words are rather inclined to fall asleep, pulled down within the tomb of the text, for the effusion of nothing with failing and fleeing language in a paradoxically
writerly desperation, moving and yet un-moving, closer to the experience of the dead, which could be Kitchell’s own posthumous impersonal, as in Dickinson’s room of the stillness.
For the poets I read, what remains is a
writing of only the neutral, when language fails to connect everything thanks to its inner voiding, closer to death which demands a separation of writing from the real world. It is also a page for
a third language which is an unlocatable, threshold language (such as a language which contains the word queer), reverberating a nuance (nuance being a figure of the neutral for Barthes) which releases writing from any signified meaning in writing. A third language, which enhances an insignificant and passing nuance inside the writing, only seduces another (texts or text-persons) and attracts toward the text-space, unwilling to possess other bodies or meanings. The unattainability of meaning is necessarily tied to the unknowable realm of death and dying: resembling the muteness of the dead (and the other), inside the text. Poets write in the realm of utter solitude, and they are closest, while also most distant, to the other in the mourning act of writing for the beloved dead and for the self, sacrificed in writing, when they are unable to say “me” with any force in the realm of writing. Blanchot’s repetition of “him, him, him” in
Step Not Beyond reminds us of this distanced and even textually-visualized impersonal language in its repetition of the word “him,” unceasingly replaced and vaporized, almost like the weather—which is a metaphor of nuance while overcoming a metaphor itself, as in a nuance delivered with haiku’s fading of metaphors—in Schuyler’s poems, by the infinite marks of the void-word in writing.
(30) Even though the subject matter and attitudes of these three poets vary, each poet’s relation to poetry or writing is simple. In their poems, their bodies and desires are infinitely subdued as if they are incapable of seeing any future. Instead, they repeat a quiet mourning for the dead whom they personally or impersonally (as an artist or writer) love(d) or simply glanced. And there is also the interstice of silence, perhaps that of death, as in little lapses or breaks of writing in each prose and line, as if they are always saying a
first and last word posthumously, remembering from their deathbed, where their writerly consciousness and reflection splits into the indefinite, a most confusing and most acutely pulled-back and forth region in the middle of life and death. These three poets are attempting the experience of this middleness with the force of the form that drives the text to the blank experience of reading, which makes the reading impossible. In this way, they are writing for the silence of the other, incapable of speaking for itself; the timidly queer, depressed dead boys, as in Dennis Cooper’s Weaklings
(31); today, sometimes
a few days, sometimes
a dinner, sometimes
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29 Please read Barthes,
A Lover’s Discourse, 147-154.
30“As if there had reverberated, in a muffled way, this call, a call nevertheless joyful, the cry of children playing in the garden: “who is me today” “who holds the place of me?” and the answer, joyful, infinite: him, him, him.” Blanchot,
Step Not Beyond, 7.
31 Dennis Cooper,
The Weaklings (XL) (Brooklyn: Sententia Books, 2013)
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home, sometimes
weather as in James Schuyler’s special endearment
(32);
California, sometimes
a dark rented apartment, sometimes
a palace, sometimes
a coffin, sometimes a
nightmare, and sometimes
plants and
rocks as in Mike Kitchell’s occult-geometric experience of earth and landscape.
(33) The poets’ writing of such queer textual bodies corresponds to the manner in which Francis Ponge writes “things” as words and gives them the loving, bursting and felicitous presence as things in writing, replacing their rarity, absence and death in the real world.
Schuyler, Cooper and Kitchell often write in a very “flat” or “dumb” language borrowed from all possible everyday materials. They don’t rely on any particular literary period or tradition for their stylistic choices, even while they are influenced by dead authors or artists such as Walt Whitman and Fairfield Porter for James Schuyler, Arthur Rimbaud and Robert Bresson for Dennis Cooper, and Georges Bataille and James Lee Byars for Mike Kitchell, among many others. What interests each poet is the form of language found in everyday life and a desire that faints in any split second. And they like to look at how they wander and buzz
en masse. Besides, they detach themselves from the every-day and transfer it to meticulous forms of writing, where the text delivers a certain kind of serenity and experience of a blinding light, which might happen after the moment of death being observed by the victim of the death, not being able to change the scene of the after-death. They display things and bodies lovingly enough to freeze and forget them in a real world, as if they are taking snapshots of them, and by doing so, they provide a secret region of wishy-washy renaming, leaving them alone to pass with an aesthetic irresponsibility of writing and its cruising. Each poet’s desire to approach things with language or writing is
disappointed and leaves on the page
the blank image of words, even when their desire is trying to pierce the secret bodies of the other. They simply look around at everything that surrounds them. Each is hesitant to speak for what surrounds them in their poems, and compensates by giving each thing an inapproachable distance of words, even with an apparently frightful and rather horrifying experience in the encounter with the other. To varying extents, they are disturbing poets, outside of any tradition or poetic convention. However, they are similar in the sense that their poetic attitude is
most relaxed and
rather free, in a most profound failure to approach the other, as they are aware and express that the other evades and hollows the desire in the episteme (alongside the doxa) onto himself (the other) and is deprived of language to respond to the approach. Reflecting on this failure in connection to the other through language, Barthes writes: “the other is disfigured by his persistent silence, as in those terrible dreams in which a loved person shows up with the lower part of his face quite erased, without any mouth at all; and I, the one who speaks, I too am disfigured; soliloquy makes me into a monster: one huge tongue.”
(34) Perhaps these three poets are able to remain blank in their writing by acknowledging that the writing returns to the murky soliloquy of the “
tongue,” falling to a void of no-where away from where characters and their communication reside.
A. James Schuyler (not exposed here) B. Dennis Cooper My interest in Dennis Cooper’s work came first from reading his fiction like many of Dennis Cooper’s readers and specialists.
(35) I read his work after studying Maurice
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32 James Schuyler,
Collected Poems, (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995)
33 Mike Kitchell,
Hour of the Wolf, (February Zine-Club Release) (San Francisco: Void Editions, 2013)
34 Barthes,
A Lover’s Discourse, 166.
35 Regarding Cooper’s fiction, while there are numerous essays available on internet, including Kitchell’s writing on Cooper’s, and also some amount of academic works
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Blanchot and I came to appreciate it as a form that realizes the radical passivity and visual experimentation of textual and emotional reduction. In addition to this, I appreciated its almost imperceptibly floating expression of horror through the impersonal enigma surrounding death and its equivalence of agony to Blanchot’s own work in our literary age. My Blanchot studies are attuned with Cooper’s work in the sense that his writing creates an impersonal zone where narrative and characters become ultimately buried in blank confusion and fear of the void, written with repeating terse forms, rhythmically moving with an admonishing tone in the text. For instance,
My Loose Thread (2001) is a work in which a brisk series of dialogues and descriptions drives the marks of death and murder to an almost dispersed emptiness of the fictional construction “of what happened” within the work. Dennis Cooper, being a queer author, often deals with themes of questioning whether someone is gay-or-not, attraction and crush, which, in the work, are also related to ambiguous motivations for violence. Despite this, what I look for in his work, more than that kind of superficial emotional confusion which still relies on the presence of characters and their attempts to identify themselves, is
a domain of the void, where those kinds of questions and intrigues are controlled and constructed to ultimately lose their content or desire with a textual effect that also marks an absolute negation such as “I can’t.” I see this radical passivity, that diminishes desire even in the middle of pleasurable forms, as an encounter with the neuter, which slides on the surface of the text and takes the text to a “
white” (illegible and impenetrable) experience of extremely forced confusion, close to death, in the forceful void of the neuter,
(36) which does not exist other than in the space and effect of the text.
Dennis Cooper’s poems are less read than his novels. It might be perhaps that his poems are often less sexually graphic than his novels which are well known, specifically the Georges Myles Cycle:
Closer (1989),
Frisk (1991),
Try (1994),
Guide (1997) and
Period (2000), and additionally,
My Loose Thread (2001),
God. Jr (2005), and
The Marbled Swarm (2011), among many others. His dry, mechanical and also emotionally devastating prose style does not appear as strongly in most of his poems. Some might say his poems are miniature pieces in support of his fiction.
(37) However
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that deal with Cooper’s work as blank fiction, please read Dennis Cooper:
Writing at the Edge, edit. Paul Hegarty and Danny Kennedy, (Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2008) as it features various essays, other forms of writing and also drawings, mostly on Cooper’s fiction.
36 Regarding white experience of the text in relation to the neuter, please return to the section where I discuss the impersonal (depersonalizing), un-working and blinding experience of the textual effect, in chapter 1 in this dissertation. 21-25.
37 Mike Kitchell reviews
The Weaklings (XL) in the online literary magazine, HTMLGIANT:
http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/25-points-the-weaklings-xl/ and comments on Cooper’s recent poetry book,
The Weaklings (XL) in particular that “The book strikes me as important and strong, despite being titled “The Weaklings,” and as such sits as a sort of intertextual “side-note” to Cooper’s entire career as a novelist.” I partly agree with Kitchell’s reading of Cooper’s poems as a space of sexual destruction and fear that continues Cooper’s novelistic world and challenges the perception of ordinary sexual desire in the world to the limit that Cooper, as a novelist, can be a sexual murderers of young boys, as it’s true that Dennis Cooper writes poems that depict sexuality and very speedy and taunting poems in some parts. But my attention to Dennis Cooper’s poems is due to his language; its tone and tempo, not to mention the general image of his poems, which are much softer, though not mellow, and I would like to take my more nuanced or veiled position than Kitchell’s more Bataille, Blanchot, de Sade, and Robbe-Grillet influenced reading of Cooper’s work, closer to a pornographic imagination. At the same time, I read Kitchell’s work also less destructive than he speaks for himself. I think there is much more of the secret and its effusion and loving site of warmth, for the other, in Kitchell’s work itself, which does not contradict a great affirmation in Bataille’s dread and annihilation, either.
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my interest in Cooper’s poems is peculiar. And as Dennis Cooper sees his poetry separate from his fiction, I would like to insist on this separation despite an occasional similarity in minimal form and extreme confusion.
(38) This separate attention to his poems is in that Cooper understands his own limit in the text and does not directly pull out what pleases him, always keeping a distance from the characters and subject matters in his work. (He also expresses in an interview from around the time he wrote
The Tenderness of the Wolves,
(39) he started to want to understand his subject matter even with his personal flaws and strengths, rather than understanding himself and perhaps his own desire.
(40)) In his poems, his mourning for the weaklings, mostly gay teenage boys, is gentle without easy empathy, and affectively moral, (as in Robert Bresson’s gaze toward the weak in his films,) without hypocrisy. It might be almost impossible to find the poet himself who has penned the work on the myriad sensitivities of unprivileged and victimized queer boys who are also involved in sex work, at least in the virtual context of the poems. Cooper also writes attentive poems for those queer males who have had to trade their bodies for a normative homosexual desire, which helps to reveal why the socially unprivileged boy’s awareness of being homosexual itself does not lead to anything subversive or liberating in terms of gender politics. However, Cooper avoids politicizing this in a direct manner. One might wonder if it is possible to construct queer theories out of Cooper’s perceptions and words because Cooper’s focus is in attention, love and distance, and silence in relation to the other—the other, for Cooper, is a young queer boy who is socially impoverished and sexually depraved—rather than objectifying queer subjects and their experience as something to theorize. He as an invisible writer inside a poetic space, would rather sit with the other,
hear and write what they
would have murmured at the moment of their unexplained disappearance and even the unresolved consequence, which merely flickers inside his poems. He also gives
ears to what a symphony of noise would be like after their abandoned and mysterious death or withdrawal from the world, which is repeated at the end of many of his novellas as well. He writes
understanding yet detached poems for the obscure voice of often anonymous or pseudo-anonymous “weak” queers who have never before received such attention. His poems speak to these boy’s silence and, with Cooper’s words, their silence echoes back to the site of the poems, which unfortunately does not reside in real life, through the impossible (impossible, as much as receivers can’t hear it back) dedication of Cooper, who is also no one other than the
hands unfolding echoing tombs for the other.
While Cooper himself often expresses that he is simply one who wishes to write a poem, he has been a poet and poetry magazine editor for a long time. He started writing poems when he was a teenager, and in 1976 he launched Little Caesar, a magazine with poems that were heavily inflected with the punk culture of the time. However, even now, he does not really consider himself a masterful poet for a good
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38 Regarding Cooper’s separation of his poetry/poetics from his fiction, please refer to his interview with Dazed digital magazine:
http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/17701/1/dennis-cooper39 Dennis Cooper,
The Tenderness of the Wolves, (Trumansburg: Crossing Press, 1982)
40 Regarding the importance of
The Tenderness of the Wolves for Cooper’s work direction change, please read the Interview of Dennis Cooper, Conducted by Robert Gluck:
https://www .sfsu.edu/~poetry/narrativity/issue_three/gluck.html41“In 1978, Dennis Cooper started Little Caesar Press, which wound up publishing 24 books of poetry and fiction by young and established contemporary authors (Joe Brainard, Amy Gerstler, Eileen Myles, Peter Schjeldahl, Elaine Equi, Ronald Koertge, Gerard Malanga, Tom Clark, et. al.), as well as the first and only English language translation of Arthur Rimbaud's final work, "Travels in Abyssinia"” Quoted from
http://www.dennis-cooper.net/littlecaesar.htm_______________
reason, committing himself to the ambitious idea and practice of
an amateur (42) (Dennis often calls himself “Wannabe” on his blog) who loves to love to write (a poem,) as in
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. In an interview with the magazine Dazed & Confused (2013), to the question “do you think of your poetry as a honed-down distillation of the fiction? A lot of the same sorts of things come up…” he answered, “Yeah, maybe. My poetry’s a lot less complicated and confrontational than some of the things in my novels. I think of them separate. I’m not really very confident in my poetry; it’s not like how I am with my fiction. I feel like I understand what I’m doing as a fiction writer, but poetry’s a big experiment: I don’t feel like I really understand the form very well. And also poetry almost always comes out of some kind of emotion, and it’s just about representing emotions. My fiction is really constructed and has all these kinds of complicated things I do to make it work. I guess
The Weaklings (43) could be seen as a way into the world I write about. Maybe it’s a way into the nice part of me, the tenderness of my work. Sometimes with my fiction, people don’t tend to see that so much.”
(44) Dennis Cooper mistrusted the idea of a reciprocated romantic love during the period when he wrote
The Tenderness of the Wolves under the bleak influence of James Schuyler and Robert Bresson. To discuss what Cooper means with the word “tenderness,” in his poems; a meaning which is not the conventional meaning of tenderness in reciprocated romantic love, I would like to look at one of his early poems from
The Tenderness of The Wolves (1982). Dennis Cooper himself admits that this book of poetry and prose is his first serious book,
(45) written after his exposure to Robert Bresson’s poetic cinema (which draws from the void that surrounds suicide, victimhood and death). The book was also written under the influence of his cardinal poetic figure of influence: Arthur Rimbaud, who has always remained present in the forms his work uses as well as his own spiritual pursuit.
In this light, I would like to look at one of his poems, “Being Aware,” in
The Tenderness of the Wolves: Being Aware
Men are drawn to my ass by
my death-trance blue eyes
and black hair, tiny outfit,
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42“L'amateur ~ The amateur: The Amateur (someone who engages in painting, music, sport, science, without the spirit of mastery or competition), the Amateur renews his pleasure (amator: one who loves and loves again); he is anything but a hero (of creation, of performance); he establishes himself graciously (for nothing) in the signifier: in the immediately definitive substance of music, of painting; his praxis, usually, involves no rubato (that theft of the object for the sake of the attribute);he is—he will be perhaps—the counter-bourgeois artist.” Barthes,
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 52.
43 Dennis Cooper,
The Weaklings (XL) (Brooklyn: Sententia Books, 2013)
44 From Dazed Digital,
http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/17701/1/dennis-cooper45“My book The Tenderness of the Wolves was the first time I attempted to write in a serious way.” From “The Interview of Dennis Cooper,” conducted by Robert Glück ,
https://www .sfsu.edu/~poetry/narrativity/issue_three/gluck.html46 Cooper,
Tenderness of the Wolves, 18.
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while my father is home with
a girl, moved by the things
I could never think clearly
Men smudge me onto a bed,
drug me stupid, gossip, and
photograph me till I’m famous
In alleys, like one of those
Jerk offs who stare from
The porno I sort of admire
I’m fifteen. Screwing means
more to the men than to me.
I daydream right through it
while money puts chills
on my arms, from time this to that
grip. I was meant to be naked.
Hey, Dad, it’s been like this
for decades. I was always
approached by your type, given
dollars for hours. I took a
deep breath, stripped, and they
never forgot how I trembled.
It means tons to me. Aside
From the obvious heaven
when cumming, there’s times
I’m with them that I’m happy
or know what the other guy
feels, which is progress
Or, nights when I’m angry,
if in a man’s arms moving
slowly to the quietest music –
his hands on my arms, in my
hands, in the small of my back
take me back before everything.
Cooper’s words in this poem are genuine as much as they are empty and thus, even more so, emotionally affecting in the sense that they endearingly warp the form of words into intractable marks, while maintaining a deflated tone without much emotional fuss and embellishment of what Cooper observes. Here his deflated tone is a figure of the neutral which enables the infinite
shift [drift] of the characters, the crimes and the emotions to the realm of the unreal without imposing a solid truth tied to a linear narrative. The intractable or obtuse marks of words, such as the impeccable package of gift as noted in Roland Barthes’s
Empire of Signs, alongside formal gestures, with their own internal emptiness or nothing,
(47) paradoxically force the reader to receive the words as an experience of her own, without resistance to its obvious meaning, unless a reader is obsessed with finding an overflowing meaning. Here I would like to look at Cooper’s words in the poem, where he speaks from the perspective of a 15-year-old. “Men are drawn to my ass by” and
other details. Here the advance set forth in “drawn to my ass by” remains incomplete, with a prepositional ending, in need of further explanation. But this first line is already enough of a seduction to the word “ass.” Of course, the word “ass” does not necessarily represent the body part in the real, physical world. In this poem, it is the core of the text that attracts the rest of the poem (and let us not forget that the core of the text is the neuter, attracting the rest of writing and also writing’s disappearance). Then, the poem continues “while my father is home with / a girl, moved by the things / I could never think clearly.” This mildly frustrated yet controlled expression of the young boy’s queerness, in contrast to the father’s non-marital heterosexual encounter with a girl, obliquely demonstrates an idea of how homosexual desire works. But it does not aggressively oppose the logic of stereotyped sexuality. It just simply says
“I could never think clearly.” Cooper keeps the poem’s nuance only in confusion. And the sexual act toward the 15-year-old boy continues with the mixture of the 15-year-old’s radical passivity to whatever it means to men who bed and photograph, him almost to death, or the fantasy of celebrity which is indeed what the young boy cares about. At
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47 Roland Barthes,
Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 65-68.
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the same time, one can’t simply conclude that Dennis Cooper, a poet, is sympathizing with the young boy. What men do in this sexual scene could be an allusion to an act of writing at the hand of a poet toward the other (or the minor) who appears briefly in the text of the poem and can’t defend himself. The boy’s desire is faint if it is present at all, expressed only as “the porno I sort of admire” and “given dollars for hours.” And also, calling “Hey, Dad,” rather youthfully and innocently, obscures whether the 15 year old is calling his father, someone who has bedded him, or the Christian archetype of Dad/Father, believed to present an ordinary heterosexual relation to the world, in whom this young boy does not have a positive faith. This is expressed with his saying, in the passive scene, “and they / never forgot how I trembled.” A strange kind of ecstatic, yet tender utterance overcomes the text. Who is saying this line? It may be the boy who remembers and mirrors the moment of trembling, but instead of speaking directly, he is stating it as “they / never forgot.” But it may be just a third person observation from outside the linguistic space of the poem, which further confuses the narrative inside the poem. This memory is fractured by a line-break and there is no certain image of a scene; rather, only a very faint feeling of pain from a little boy who can’t speak his position, as if everything is quite blank and okay, perhaps when it shouldn’t be okay in our understanding as readers. To return this narrative of a confused perspective and emotion to the realm of writing related to my question of the neuter, the figure of the “me” in the poem is virtually diminished and dissimulated to the figure of the “small one” who feels and understands the weight of his existence in this realm of erotic night. The diminished “me” recalls a naked girl in Bataille’s
A Little One, in the remark that “One day, a naked girl in my arms, my fingers caressing the crack of her arse. I spoke to her gently of the “the little one.” She understood. I didn’t know that they sometimes referred to It in this way in brothels.”
(48) Of course, I am not objectifying the ass as something to replace “the crack of her arse,” and possibly represent “IT.” Rather I am simply suggesting the agony and its futility circling the most humble thing on the human body, which might be stated as a “small/ass.” The “small/ass” governs the shifting narrative here, a narrative which ultimately does not offer any scene other than this “littleness,” which is an unknown void that invites hands to caress the pages. Despite the 15 year old saying “it means tons to me,” when one can see that this text writes and hides
nothing of “the small” (void) of its other-side.
In order to approach Cooper’s negative vision of religion and its relevance to a voiding poetic space, I would like to read “An Ariel View”
(49), also from
The Tenderness of the Wolves:
An Ariel View
When God thinks, “Your turn,”
light soaks the grass in your pipe
hat’s pulled down over your head
and you groove into the ground
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48 Bataille,
The Little One in Louis XXX, 14.
49 Ibid. 87.
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And then He is confused:
“Did I make the right decision?”
Was the child an appropriate scapegoat?
What did it do to deserve this?
His anonymous, grey head
Drops in puffy, shop worn hands:
The palm of a dilettante
Who does his work by suggestion
He loves the glimmering earth
He loves all that springs upon it
He hates to slip one thing into darkness
Thus, when He does, He is tortured.
He is bored, pissed, feeling strange,
His eyes hard to read clearly,
His hips dark with longings;
A child dims where it’s beaten.
He is amused and then guilty.
His lips are lava which has cooled,
His mind as wild as the tree tops,
As dope touched to match, breath.
Dennis Cooper is well known as an atheist, which might connect him to his artistic model Robert Bresson who was a catholic but believed in God only in a negative vision of His absence. Here I would not take the position of defending or criticizing what Cooper himself says ultimately as an atheist. I suspect Cooper’s statement of atheism is not intended to prevent readers from appreciating the form, technique or affective virtues of his work, as much as Bresson’s films, for instance, do not have to be read as Catholic films that speak for God allegorically due to the religious faith he expressed. Responding to Cooper’s anti-religious self-identification, I simply would like to point out that, in this poem-“sky-view,” (“An Aerial View,”) there is a great dropping of God as “He” to the ground of the text and “He,” like an empty signifier—as much as God is a signifier—repeats a futile act. It is extremely unclear who He is in this text. However, it might be a third person, the impersonal, who uses writing to position the child as a sexual victim in the work and also who is not a master of writing, as the poem goes on with “His anonymous, grey head / Drops in puffy, shop worn hands: / The palm of a dilettante / Who does his work by suggestion.” It somewhat expresses the poet’s shyness and confusion in writing, whether a poem or perhaps any other work of his. And this line continues, “He hates to slip one thing into darkness / Thus, when He does, He is tortured.” This sounds very simple. But it marks the difficulty of writing that brings something to the darkness of nothing with a question of the darkness of the unmarked “what,” with “eyes hard to read clearly” and with “hips dark with longings” which reaches the state of extreme confusion with blindness and again positions “hips” (or ass) as the core of obscure desire. As Kitchell also comments,
(51) what is exciting in Cooper’s writerly world is that there is not much space for the penis, even as a signifier. Instead, phallocentric motives are often treated as something that does not deserve further remark. When there is an orgasmic light, it dims or fades like the body of the child, seen inside the text, “where it’s beaten” like a trace of writing. And when the strange game of writing seems to have ended, it remains as a silent and absent laughter in a mixture of amusement and guilt for nothing that has been achieved. The poem diminishes the difficulty of doing or writing to a tiny flickering (neither absolutely present nor absent light), like the ass as a desired object, dimming on the body of child, putting a match to dope, or a flame vanishing with a little breath. In Dennis Cooper’s poetic world, the atmosphere of confusion and humble defeat, both on the side of a violator and a victim to the degree that their distinction becomes a subjectless nuance of dread or insignificance—which is the only countenance of the neuter which guides and looks back the scene of language and leaves it, hiding itself in indifference—when confronted with desire hovers in the air as an effect of the text.
Cooper’s words hide an easy sympathy and the true pain of loss in the heart of the poet, unlike the insincere panic often found in linguistically depicted scenes of death, by approaching death silently, in the dedication of the writing for the death. Perhaps, like Wayne Koestenbaum’s unusually genuine blurb on the back of
The Weaklings (XL), the mourning space presented in Cooper’s poems resonates in my
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50 I would like to point out that in Mike Kitchell’s review on Weaklings (XL), despite “An Aerial View” not being in the collection of
Weaklings (XL), Kitchell defends Cooper’s murder of young boys as a metonymic force in his work, which is the unreal.
51 Ibid. Kitchell writes, “One of the things I repeatedly find exciting and remarkable about Cooper’s work is how it intensively explores male sexuality without being phallocentric. In Cooper’s world, the penis is like a rag tossed to the floor while the ass is like a golden ticket to heaven.” Of course, there is a sovereign humor in saying ass is “a golden ticket” in Kitchell’s commentary, as much as he is a Bataillean. It is true that, for Dennis Cooper, his queerness is not defined by the penis or by phallocentric desire. But he does not obviously castrate the penis either. Simply, it’s something much deflated. And it is not even the object that induces a fear into anyone in his text. Perhaps, it could explain how Cooper’s pornographic imagination differs from a normative and popular penis-centered view in its erection and movement-oriented pornographic world.
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appreciation of Cooper’s unusually detached way of mourning, by way of writing. Wayne Koestenbaum writes, “Dennis Cooper’s poems are the heart- the core- of his divine oeuvre. Pure genius, they are tender and deadened, breathing and stupefied. A secret formalist, he fastidiously packages and trammels consciousness, which gives his cameos an aura of total authenticity. He never fakes it. As a consequence, I idolize and internalize every word he writes.” Unlike the minimal and simple words found in Cooper’s poetic world, Koestenbaum’s blurb is rather verbose. However, it is true that Cooper’s poems deliver a genuine subterranean echo to the inner feeling of a reader, often utterly without comedy, especially when it comes to death and mourning, and its invisible truth in the unreal space of the text. Before I discuss this aspect of Cooper’s work through a few poems, I would first like to quote and comment on the ending of his novella,
My Loose Thread (2001), where the death scene most exemplarily reaches the negative ecstatic moment of confusion among Cooper’s texts:
“Gilman shoots in front of him. That’s the first thing. His gun was aimed at a small crowd of guys who start crouching or moving around. I think he got a girl. Then I can’t see anything because the people between us are running. There he barely is. He stopped walking. I think he’s trying to see who he’s shooting. Then he walks slowly into the school. He’s gone. Everyone around us sits down again, laughing nervously and talking. I don’t really know them. Will just started talking to them and other people we don’t even like. I think a few of them are crying. I keep thinking Gilman stopped, or was tackled and stopped by someone. Then I’ll hear another shot. They’ve gotten weirdly far apart. So I guess he finally cares about who’s getting killed. Maybe they’re even people he knows. Eventually the shooting just ends. Maybe when he started to care who was dead, he realized he could die. Or he finally figured out what he wanted to do, and either did it or knew that he couldn’t. Maybe the last shot was aimed at himself. It sounded like all the others.” (52)
My interest in addressing the shooting scene of
My Loose Thread is that it displays the collective confusion, to a visionary degree, of a mechanical derangement of acts in indifference, in a mixture of fear and lust, in the middle of a crime. One can read it again “everyone around us sits down again, laughing nervously and talking. I don’t really know them. Will just started talking to them and other people we don’t even like. I think a few of them are crying.” In this strange scene, everyone becomes the other who loses herself, enough to talk to each other, not knowing each other, even laughing and crying. The last line, “it sounded like all the others” is about gun-shots. However in this scene, it also sounds like all the others who are there, shot or about to get shot. Cooper’s short and brisk sentences create the sound and image of a superficial, yet truthful, indifference between different shots, different deaths and different people, which puts the writing closer to the site of the neuter of the third person and third language that my dissertation project has been discussing. This strangeness, in an almost automatically written crime scene, deflowers the humane heart at the core with an absolute sadness, a sadness found in the sovereignty of icy-hot chaos, and perhaps even in an ecstasy beyond comprehension. This could be likened to something that one could find in Robert Bresson’s films, such as
Mouchette (1967). In the film, there is a bleak suicide and narrative-shifting disappearance (in the water) of Mouchette (who has already been depersonalized to an almost wordless
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52 Dennis Cooper,
My Loose Thread (Edinburgh: Canongate books, 2003), 121.
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figure, resembling a hunted rabbit); the scene is detached and impersonal, featuring ephemerally dreamy surroundings with trembling shrubs and rippling water at the end of film.
Dennis Cooper himself wrote an essay on Robert Bresson’s work. In “First Communion: Robert Bresson” published in
Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback and Obituaries,
(54) Cooper praises Bresson’s films in their stylistic balance between a personal vision in connection through art and a sterile emotion and logic, which pierces the heart of an audience more effectively, almost on an inhuman level. Cooper writes “his work communicates an unyielding, peculiarly personal vision of the world in a voice so sterilized as to achieve an almost inhuman efficiency and logic. The result is a kind of cinematic machine whose sets, locations, narrative, and models (Bresson’s preferred term for actors) function together as an unhierarchical unit so perfectly self-sufficient that all that is revealed within each film is the disconcerting failure of the models to fulfill Bresson’s requirements. Their emotions resonate, despite a conscientious effort on Bresson’s part to make them move about and speak as though they have none. The fact that the actors, unlike any other aspect of Bresson’s films, are driven by individual feeling draws attention almost by default, and creates a relationship with the audience so intimate that it’s almost unbearable in its aesthetic restrictions.”
(55) What is equally fascinating in Cooper’s and Bresson’s work is that they achieve a very present emotional impact with the use of non-characters, similar to the impersonal elements in the text, despite the restriction of form.
The last scene from
My Loose Thread by Cooper embodies this. It communicates an unspeakable emotion through a minimal and controlled form of language. This “Bressonian” effect comes forth in one of Cooper’s poems
Late Friends for Robert Piest. The end of the poem
Late Friends goes this way: “while you turn endlessly in water beneath the world, your pals are behind, dating your girlfriends, seduced by your buddies. They french-kiss and roll across the things that you loved, like they’re putting out a fire.”
(56) The disappearance of Robert Piest (who was 15 years old when
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53 Also, in the interview with Robert Glück in the Narrativity Magazine/Journal, Issue 3 (located here:
https://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/narrativity/issue_three/gluck.html) Cooper admits that “My third important model (in addition to Rimbaud and de Sade) was and is Robert Bresson, but I didn't find his work until I was in my early twenties. His films made my work start to fall into place.” And he continues “His work is so powerful and meaningful to me that I find it almost impossible to talk about. It's like his influence dawned on me rather than being something I studied into being. It's something to do with his work's concision in relationship to the ephemeral and chaotic nature of his subject matter. And that it's nothing but style and form on the one hand, and completely transparent and pure on the other. It's only concerned with emotional truth, and, at the same time, it works so hard to exclude all superficial signs of emotion. It's bleakness incarnate and yet it's almost obsessively sympathetic to the deepest human feelings in a way that can only read as hopeful. It's religious art and, yet, despite Bresson's avowed Catholicism, it seems not to depend on any religious system for answers or comfort. The fact that Bresson only used non-actors inspired me to create characters in my work who were non-characters in a sense -- that is characters who seem both unworthy of the attentions of art and incapable of collaborating with art in the traditional sense. That relationship between Bresson and his 'actors' was very key to me.”
54 Dennis Cooper,
Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback and Obituaries (Harper Collins, 2010).
55 Ibid., 294.
56 Cooper,
Dream Police, 88-89.
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he vanished) is related to the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy. However, Gacy’s narrative is important to neither myself nor Cooper. Unlike the accusations against Cooper’s fantasy of murdering young boys, queer or not, many of Cooper’s poems about the young victims of mysterious crimes are fictively re-written. Cooper’s focus is on transforming the characters in question into “uncharacters” (impersonal, minor elements in the text and its effect) and the erotic effusion in the textual space that surrounds them. The interiority of the victim is not touched. It remains unknown. Looking at the disappearance of the character, what interests me is that there are multiple murders in the text. First, the character is reported to be murdered in the text and, secondly, the character’s death and submergence beneath the death become, repeatedly, more and more forgotten, with a marked indifference to the atmosphere of anonymous desire and lust aroused after his death. Forgetting the disappearance into the infinite absence (the effect of the neutral) happens in Cooper’s poems thanks to the writing, and paradoxically this forgetting is the only way to remember the death. So there is no image of the character anywhere in the poem-space. Cooper’s mourning or funeral for missing persons leaves the text as if he is setting the vanishing “on fire” like a pyre that keeps the text burning to combustion. Cooper’s mourning is not sappy. But it is no less sad, devoid of any comedy or farce.
Cooper’s presentation of the chaotic diffusion of both characters and meaning within the text continues in his rather recent poem collections. In this regard, I’d like to turn to the book
Weaklings (XL) (2013). I will first look at the poem, “The Body,”
(57) written in the 1970s, by focusing on its negative question of disappearing characters and places in writing, an irresolvable question which increasingly scaffolds and de-composes Cooper’s current projects:
The Body
Not the kid who dreamt it would be a magician. Not the kid who thought it could survive anywhere like an astronaut. Not the kid who would pass out on sidewalks like it was his sleeping bag. Not the kid who would drug it and try to escape like its hostage. Not the kid who would plant it in front of my TV for days at a time like he was a piece of my furniture. Not the kid who said if he disappeared I wouldn’t even notice like it was a magician. Not the kid whose dead body was so unbelievable that I yelled at it, How the fuck could you do that?
In this poem, “The Body,” Cooper repeats “Not the kid” at the beginning of each line. This poem might not be Cooper’s most well-written poem, but by repeating the phrase “not the kid,” the poem negates its title and leads us to discover that there is no body in the text even while there are various permutations of a desire to have a body, even though the body (of “the kid”) is marked and present as a signifier and seems to live and dream in the text. But ultimately the body is displaced in the text, endorsing and mourning for the text, even the dead body marked in the text is impossible. This is why Cooper repeats the negation, in desperation of the inaccessible body and the dead, which is merely like a sleeping bag, a junkie who hopes to escape his furniture-like state of being. We often say writing is magic because it marks something on the page and creates a present there, and some even read the effect of disappearance in the text; as is the case with Blanchot, Cooper and others see this as magic. But Cooper does not give a place to anything beyond the poem-text. Rather he questions the idea of place with the line, “Not the kid who said if he disappeared I wouldn’t even notice like it was a magician. Not the kid whose dead body was so unbelievable that I yelled at it, How the fuck could you do that?” Even the act of disappearance is questioned
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57 Cooper,
Weaklings (XL), 19.
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and perhaps is not worth noticing. And nothing, even the death and the corpse, is believable; indeed on the surface of the text the repeating negation makes a poet yell, “How the fuck could you do that?” rather like the shout of a kid who only utters a
question. Of course, there is no answer. In this poem, repeating the negation of the presence of the kid and the kid’s negativity wraps up the surface of the poem toward the darkness of an empty mirroring of the surface and makes it marked only in the invisible and unknown world. And the poet still does not know how it happened, as there is no origin of signs or writing whatsoever in the text-space. To further elaborate the placeless, origin-less and even endless (due to the automatic textual disappearance) characteristics of Cooper’s poems, I would like to look at “The Snow Globe” from
Weaklings (XL):
The Snow Globe
A shaky flashlight beam illuminates a stiff. Is that the boy you hit? It’s prone beneath the snow wearing your overcoat and dirty, scotch-taped glasses. Yes, sir.
He had a deep depression, the worst one in our short lives’ storied history. It reduced him to a speck. The storm helped. That snowball hid a rock.
You froze to death ten feet from here under white out conditions. It took years, this glass of scotch, and a cheap crystal ball to find the body.
He hobbled through a blur and hurled his snowball at my head. That missed. Later, he’s lit by a jittering beam. Once this ugly little globe was the whole earth.
“The Snow Globe” holds sparkles of snowflakes inside of it. Many are fond of this object and fetishize it as a miniature of winter on earth. But what Cooper reflects in the snow globe is sad and ugly. The snow may be an allusion to the inner body of desired bodies, like cotton in Dennis Cooper’s obsession with taxidermy and his, at times, illusion of human bodies as taxidermy as well. While Cooper’s inclination to snow in many of his poems and theater works is apparent, he always prefers fake snowflakes. It’s not because he thinks fake snowflakes are more pure than natural snowflakes. Rather, this preference comes from the fact that he is interested in the unreal of
everything in the space of writing and art. In this poem, the snow globe is the space where an unknown dead boy is transformed into a speck, which is insignificant. It is again unclear what the poet is looking at. The reference point of what to look at is elegantly shifted and “hurled” at “under the white condition,” “a cheap crystal ball,” “my head” and “Once this ugly little globe was the whole earth” and
virtually removed in this movement. Still there are arrangements of words and an atmosphere that makes this poem-space resemble a subconscious region of death, filled with dread and utter sadness, without an image to pin down, other than the thought of a word, “a speck” again, which might be too little to hold an image for anything.
In addition to his poems, I would like to look at Dennis Cooper’s blog, briefly, in order to further think about the experience of the unreal or non-site of writing. On his blog, his usage of the internet to present something every day is itself unreal. It is not that the information he presents is incorrect, which may matter or not. The information each blog-post presents is collected through the internet which everyone uses to gather
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58 Cooper,
Weaklings (XL), 42.
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information by browsing, like cruising the body of another, in a way to attempt to satisfy voyeurism and all possible aberrant forms. But paradoxically to the blog visitors, Dennis presents the space of a no-place, where only signs seduce each other and any contact and dwelling there are not possible. There is no obligation for visitors or commenters to be there and communicate with each other. It is as if the space almost becomes a neutral
atopia where Barthes ironically desired to be, free from responsibility and hierarchical social demands, despite Barthes’s not expecting this
atopia to be real or locatable (in fact, Barthes opposed this). As much as Barthes could not discover the
atopia of drifting (the principle of the neutral) in a certain region, Cooper does not expect the blog to be an ideal place for writing or, to put it differently, a place where writing inhabits and settles, through the presentation of the images and texts with multidimensional interests. Paradoxically, Cooper presents his blog space as a realm to be negated and driven to absence with its internal cacophonic rhythms and insignificantly reverberating chaotic sound of faux communication, which is even more dreadfully enhanced with the visitors’ engagements. The internet becomes a more absent or semi-absent, separate ghost or echo land to visit where one ultimately questions the truth of visitation itself and forgets its repetitions. In a separate spectral zone in the form of the internet (where one can copy and replace everything as the contemporary form of life and literature cannot escape it, even in the name of Avant Garde) Cooper’s blog invites visitors to the horror of distance, emptiness and the void of desire, especially when a visitor informs an intellectual resource. It is not that Cooper, as a blog host, is mocking the intellectual desire and its distribution. It is an experiment to degrade that desire itself to create a simple ownerless dropping of minimal and useless gift, which explodes into the non-space as a buzzing of signifiers and non-hierarchical dialogue that also passes away. Cooper treats every visitor plainly and equally as replaceable and reused, abandoned information from the wasteland of the internet and perhaps the only irreplaceability there is the experience of utter defeat and a futile engagement in public communication, like the experience of
the neuter as an undefinable and dreadful island and its eroding silence. In this sense, I would like to close my reading of Dennis Cooper with the blog-day
What Islands from his blog on March 28, 2014. “The World” is only one example among many islands, failed and incomplete or disappearing, which Cooper collected randomly under the subject of artificial and abandoned projects of islands, with the title of “What Islands.” Looking at their almost aesthetically beautiful vanishing, of course, Cooper only remains to question, with “What” as he does in the poem of the body I discussed earlier. The aesthetically selected images of the islands aim to gather attention from blog visitors in the fantasy of a distant utopian region, only enhancing the paradox of the emptiness and weariness of a desire to escape. This might be an image of the neutral that Blanchot and Barthes wanted to see, separate from the real world, but could not see (as much as the project of the neutral is inherently abdicating in its presentation and its territory while remaining a question of “what” in the Outside of the text—as is the case of these cancelled and drowned faux islands).
Entire post of “What Islands” with island images is available here: http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.fr/2014/03/what-islands.html?zx=4b15dba898ab619
'The World, the ambitiously-constructed archipelago of islands shaped like the countries of the globe, is sinking back into the sea, according to evidence cited before a property tribunal. The islands were intended to be developed with tailor-made hotel complexes and luxury villas, and sold to millionaires. They are off the coast of Dubai and accessible by yacht or motor boat. Now their sands are eroding and the navigational channels between them are silting up, the British lawyer for a company bringing a case against the state-run developer, Nakheel, has told judges. "The islands are gradually falling back into the sea," Richard Wilmot-Smith QC, for Penguin Marine, said. The evidence showed "erosion and deterioration of The World islands", he added. With all but one of the islands still uninhabited – Greenland – and that one a showpiece owned by the ruler of Dubai, most of the development plans have been brought to a crashing halt by the financial crisis. […] Penguin claim that work on the islands has "effectively stopped". Mr Wilmot-Smith described the project as "dead".' -- The Telegraph’ (59)
C. Mike Kitchell (aka M Kitchell) (not exposed here) Conclusion: The Neutral, Languor, and Queer Poetics This dissertation project began with the idea that the literary and reflective value of Maurice Blanchot’s writing cannot be viewed within a historically prevalent sense of theory or discourse. I approach Blanchot as
a writer, or
a poet: one who marks and creates a poetic dimension using words and their capacity for limit-experience. What fascinates me in Blanchot’s poetics is that he presents the illusion (the unreal) of language and, at the same time, eludes this illusion to the point of vanishing into an invisible silence. This double-movement is linked to the idea and practice of worklessness (désœuvrement). The French word
désœuvrement (worklessness) that Blanchot uses to characterize the pattern and effect of his writing can be also translated as in-action, idleness and inertia; effects which are placed in the paradox of the act of writing. Blanchot’s later writing, in particular, is well known for its use of fragmentary prose that displays the multiplicity of worklessness in writing to an extreme degree. In order to examine this theme, my project regards the idea or the site of the neuter as a principle for Blanchot’s unique importance as a writer and a thinker. I insist that this neuter appears as a primordial figure in Blanchot’s writing, from his earlier fictional and theoretical work through the last days of his writing, though in this project I was not able to probe the work of Blanchot’s later period, such as
Awaiting Oblivion (L’Attente l’oubli, 1962) and
Writing the Disaster (L'Ecriture du désastre, 1980). With respect to elements of Blanchot’s later work, I consider this project a conceptual and methodical preparation. This preparatory act centers on the idea of the neuter in order to consider why fragmentary writing is necessary for Blanchot, and in future studies I am interested in pursuing a connection between “the fragment word” and its textual forgetfulness,
(60) as theorized in
The Infinite Conversation (L'Entretien infini, 1960).
My intention in discussing Blanchot’s writing and his ideas of the neuter is not limited to making an exclusive contribution to a lineage of reading Blanchot’s work. I have focused on the idea or site (ultimately, non-site) of the neuter in the work of Blanchot
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59 The original Telegraph article “The World is sinking: Dubai islands 'falling into the sea': The islands were intended as the ultimate luxury possession, even for Dubai” was published on January 20, 2011, by Richard Spencer:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/dubai/8271643/The-World-is-sinking-Dubai-islands-falling-into-the-sea.html60 The texts (and the images) on the blog day “What Islands” are collaged by an artist Dennis Cooper .
Please read “The Fragment Word” and “Forgetful Memory” in The Infinite Conversation, for further reference. Maurice Blanchot,
The Infinite Conversation trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 307-317.
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because I consider it a route to the demand of writing, which can be extended to the question of writing in a region different from that of spoken language. This question further addresses the question of what writing is, what the space of writing looks like, what the book is, and what writing demands of a writer in the act of writing. I propose that the idea of the neuter in Blanchot’s poetics is a vigilant and indestructible core which unfolds the site of writing (which is the text) to the limit of communication and knowledge: an unfinished non-site of silence and invisibility. The neuter is also related to the figure of the night, or to be more precise, the
other night (autre nuit). The other night, or the border (edge) of night, cannot be reduced to an ordinary understanding of night in opposition to day time. Indeed, I observe that the figure of day and the border between day and night are further explicated by reading “Literature and the Right to Death” in
The Work of Fire and
The Madness of the Day. These texts negate the definite meaning of any word in an infinitely suspended and disappearing pattern of the text, which is ultimately absent in its dis-appearance. In Blanchot’s text, the word “day” appears at the edge of itself and escapes its dwelling inasmuch as the word “night” can be readdressed in proximity to
the other night. With this impenetrable and inaccessible word-experience, I suggest an experience of the in-between space of words—for instance,
Midday and
Midnight—in relation to the irreducible
other without proper images or descriptions. I consider this middle-word, like a neuter, a ground-less and origin-less force for the unending act of writing at the limit of language. In light of this, I also address the limit-experience as a “white or blind experience” that shines a “virtual” light on words, accompanied by silence, as this experience carries our perception to the limits of seeing and hearing the word-text. The way in which Blanchot composes his sentences, together with his reflective thoughts, necessitates and deactivates the textual presence in an absolute ‘virtual light’ of poetic silence. This is further explored in the repeating intervals or incisions of marking, as in a stopping (arrêt) like the instant of death which carries everything to absence.
To continue my emphasis on what the neuter activates in the act of writing, especially within a poetic dimension, my second chapter examines Blanchot’s essays on Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud. Blanchot’s reading of Mallarmé has been much more discussed than his reading of Rimbaud throughout Blanchot scholarship and criticism. I suspect that this is due to the fact that Blanchot’s dedication to an ultimately inactive or ineffective language—as worklessness (désœuvrement) in the dimension of writing—resonates more with Mallarmé’s idealistic quest for a pure dimension of poetry than Rimbaud’s poetics. Blanchot’s important work on Mallarmé’s
Igitur, and the experience of mid-night, in which writing is withdrawn to an inaccessible absence in relation to the space and experience of death and dying, is explicitly tied to Blanchot’s ideas of the neuter and worklessness. The connections that can be easily drawn between Mallarmé and Blanchot’s idea of “pure” poetics often obscure the importance of Rimbaud in Blanchot’s oeuvre. Rimbaud’s split attitude to poetry (regarding the innovation and abandonment of words and the poetic imagination) is often considered in contrast to Mallarmé’s idealization of poetry. In Blanchot’s reading of Rimbaud the failure of language and its form is tied to a demand for sleep and rest. The great fatigue present in Rimbaud’s later life is more directly related to Blanchot’s concerns. While there is a special resemblance between Blanchot and Mallarmé in their modernist poetic pursuit of autonomous language and also in the profound experiment of disappearance and silence within the region of writing, Rimbaud’s place in Blanchot’s poetics is peculiar. Blanchot’s relationship with Rimbaud sheds a light on the more enigmatic episodes in his essays on Mallarmé, considering the relation to Mallarmé’s impersonality and its deadening state as a condition and experience of writing. This is connected to the im-possibility of writing and the ruined form of language in the experience of weariness, languor and futility, entering the non-site behind and beneath the space of writing, where the other dimension, and the neuter, act as an extinguishing force. Regarding weariness and fatigue, Blanchot addresses this further, and more theoretically, in
The Infinite Conversation. Roland Barthes later takes the idea of weariness and fatigue into consideration in his languishing quest to mark the neutral toward
the other in absence or nuance in semi-absence, which is unknowable and inclined to be silent. Rather than reading Barthes as a writer who suggests an easy pleasure and jubilant hedonism, my third chapter continues addressing the writing of despair at the limit of language that began in my study of Blanchot. This is focused on the idea of neuter that appears in the various figurations of infinite negativity in writing, approaching the impossibility of dying and its inaccessible dimension of solitude. With this idea of the neuter and its figuration in writing, we are still left with the question of the possibility of writing when it appears that there is no more space for freshness, no room for an innocence of language or the utility of experimental innovation.
With this concern, in my third chapter, I turn my attention to Roland Barthes’s later writing and his Collège de France lectures (1977-1978) on the Neutral. These writings and lectures are in relation to a writing of the text which attempts to realize a place of the neutral and utopia (or
atopia). However this is not an easy task for Barthes. For Barthes, the desire for writing is parsimonious or
matte; it is against the desire to speak libidinally. Even in relation to the other, when there is no desire of possession, writing begins in solitude and in distance. Writing happens in the dimension of impersonality or self-abdication, as Barthes repeatedly discusses in his fictive biography
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Barthes desires a writing space free from any image-repertoire or language based paradigm of political, ostentatious or “bullying” writing, which he opposes in order to be on the side of the practice of the neutral.
It is true that both Blanchot and Barthes articulate a different connotation of the neuter (or the neutral) in their work. Leslie Hill points out each understands the neuter/the neutral differently in the sense that “for Blanchot the Neuter was what preceded all manifestation, challenging the privilege of the visual, for Barthes it was the opposite, as the infinite detail of the figures described in Le Neutre (the Neutral) testifies; it was what manifested itself without end within the interstices and discontinuity of the paradigm.”
(61) However what Hill argues might be misleading. For Blanchot, the neuter follows the text, which is activated in an invisible movement. Blanchot refrains from defining the neuter, though he lets it appear in the text with force. For Barthes, the neutral is connected to the
punctum in the image and is not something visible: it lacks a familiar code. The experience of
punctum, perhaps, is closer to the experience of the invisible which pierces perception without attaining shape in a specific image. Images, for Barthes, vehemently suppose an absence of things behind them, which Barthes addresses. With this said, Barthes is still concerned specifically with writing. What troubles him is language, which sits in relation to the text while negating the presence of the world. The
punctum is forceful and affecting because behind every image death and absence are invisibly present. This idea of absence prevails in the work of both writers. And indeed, Barthes, as early as in
Writing Degree Zero, explores a neutral white writing, referring to both Blanchot’s work and Mallarmé’s poetics regarding an imageless textuality.
However, as I discuss in the third chapter, there is a more important and nuanced difference between Blanchot and Barthes’s writing. If death is the primary motivation
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61 Leslie Hill,
Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame press, 2010), 136.
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for writing in Blanchot’s work, love is the primary motivation for writing in Barthes’s work. The possibility of love is extremely vague and deterred, as we read in Blanchot’s fictional work. In his theoretical work, Blanchot never considers love, he only considers friendship as an exceptional concern of writing. Unlike Blanchot, even though love is not something to possess for Barthes either, Barthes does not give up the place of love in his desire and this motivates a prolonged languishment of writing. This languor is a pleasure for Barthes, and this desire for love (or writing for love) merges with his approach to the neutral. Barthes varies the figures of the neutral with miniscule fragmentation and nuance in order to oppose arrogance, doxa, paradigm and any kind of bullying. This practice of the neutral makes writing extremely difficult and tiring, as it always tries to escape the possession of meaning through the text. As much as this attempt to escape possession is futile, a dedication of love for the other, with the diffusion of impossible desire alone places it inside the text. His
Mourning Diary exhibits scarcity and suffering due to the difficulty of writing in absolute distance to the other, his dead mother (who is the only person he loved). In
Mourning Diary and other works of the same period, Barthes writes with rarefied forms, closer to the blank and the silence, which is the essential characteristic of the neutral. This is discussed in his lectures on the Neutral, where the topic of keeping-silent and speaking very simply with
matte nuance is addressed. Ironically, through the difficult practice of the neutral in writing, what Barthes learns is the absence of utopia and his solitude in writing outside it.
In the final chapter, as a case study of the neutral, I read three queer poets, though these poets’ queerness is, deliberately, not addressed with the aid of any specific discipline of gender studies outside their own texts and others chained to their dedication to writing. As I note in the chapter, I attempted to explain why I am inclined to the texts of these three queer poets in that I feel a difficulty in living with their texts thanks to their dizzying circulation in my head that invites me to write for them, in love with evil or with the ache (The French word,
Mal) for writing itself. But this explanation about affinity remains inexplicable at its center as it can’t reveal the core of my attraction to their texts and the motivation for examining their writing, other than their (and my) submission to
the night for writing. And in this submission to
the night (an unreal realm of writing), which encloses the invisible bodies of writing to its inside by way of progressing word by a word (prose by prose), one awaits the repeating disappointment that engages writing with an intractable insignificance, thanks to an unheard and
ungraspable attraction to the act of writing. As addressed in my commentary on Blanchot and Barthes’s ideas of the neuter/the neutral, there can only be an attraction to writing within the realm of writing. In Blanchot’s terms, it is an attraction close to death. In Barthes’s terms, it is an attraction close to love or desire. The neuter or the neutral, in writing with the text of others, activates itself inside of that attraction. The work of these three poets, instead of defining the neutral, provides an opportunity to discuss how the neutral displays itself. The goal in examining this work is to display the various figures of the neutral. Even though they write in different styles, these poets are similar in the sense that they write toward what they observe with a silent and blank tone, demonstrating the emotion of confusion and unevenness. They don’t assert anything certain in their experience and instead they simply write where writing carries them with silent language, as if they are already dead. With Schuyler’s poems, there is a nuanced (wounded) indolence and a rather blank, yet silently disturbed, attitude toward loss and love which is often portrayed as an attention to weather in the uncertain middle of catastrophe and bliss. In Cooper’s poems and other works, queer figures exhibit a radical weakness in the chaotic echo that surrounds death and murder. In Cooper’s works, I pay attention to his tender, yet bleakly distanced mourning for the dead, in the dissatisfaction that there is
no place for them. With the work of Kitchell, I try to present the space of writing in an erotic effusion, with inscriptions of the “word-photograph” that renders the text almost
unreadable. In Kitchell’s work, this causes a great confusion in an encounter with words and prose that emit some kind of sovereign light—a light which casts a vertiginous (out of joint) delight upon words and further into the space of the book. The experience of this sovereign light happens as if the text and the book were designed to exorcise both the image of the real world and the image of its textual work, with the hypnotically rumbling pace [pas in French] of textual elements that exhaustively circumambulate and thus overwhelm the pages to the zero degree of nothing to gaze and hear, which is the hyper-experience of written imagelessness and silence. As a practice of the neutral, I also conducted interviews with Mike Kitchell by repeating questions in a text-based manner leaving space for a poet to write of his work in a writerly and fictive way, if not as a poetic act. This method of interview is modeled after Barthes’s practice of the ethics of the neutral and his writerly and
opaque ways of being interviewed, without revealing the truth, avoiding questions which corner the interviewee in an aggressively intellectual fashion in order to dictate the “correct” answers for the questions. There is no point in questioning which of these poets’ work is closer to the masterful way of practicing the neutral in the domain of writing. All that one can do is to display any of the neutral’s various figurations with nuance and a tone of affection towards what one displays, without insisting upon anything definite or conclusive. The ethics of the neutral in relation to writing (within poems and texts) is perhaps turning an interpretation of the text into a receiving of the text, to the degree that this receiving deflowers (neutralizes) the core of reading’s intent and removes the self from the writing. I consider what I write of these three poets as a practice of the neutral by way of putting myself in a silent region of writing where there is no longer an intention or voice of myself, other than the echo of the text I receive and reverberate in the enclosed room of my writing. Aside from this, I would abandon writing.
The question that remains in this project, which is not directly addressed throughout, would be of the rather unsaid queering motivation for the trajectory I have followed. What is the motivation for beginning with Blanchot’s figuration of the neuter, detouring to Barthes’s practice of the neutral, and arriving at three
queer poets? Of course, at this point, there is no identifiable characteristic for being queer, especially in the realm of writing. I’d like to suggest that, more and more, in relation to poetics, it is
unfashionably (62) simple and also difficult to discuss queer authors. In being queer myself, in writing where I am like no-one, there is a radically passive abdication of the image-world and of its accumulation, which is always replaceable and exchangeable, unlike the irreplaceable, transitory other, even when it comes to gender. I propose this dissertation project to be against identity, including identifiable multiplicity of gender and its assertive politics and aggression. Identity is quickly assimilated to the power-structure of the hetero-patriarchal paradigm and its linguistic and theatrical domain.
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62 Regarding the attitude of being unfashionable, Roland Barthes writes, “Subtracted from the book, his life was continuously that of an unfashionable subject: when he is in love (by the manner and the very fact), he was unfashionable (démodé). […] But suppose Fashion (La Mode) were to make an additional turn of the screw, then this would be a kind of psychological kitsch, so to speak.” Barthes,
RB by RB, 125. This attitude of being unfashionable is linked to my attitude of being in love with aching (French word
Mal) for the text and writing it. Despite its being futile kitschness of being in love for writing, so to speak, it’s worth noting that loving writing for loving the text itself is irreducibly unfashionable (out of mode), which is both simple and difficult to practice especially when writing (for queerness) is requested to survive with its prevalent mode of constructing and provoking gender and their market values, saying as if everything could turn queer in a sellable and imitable way, which I meant with the idea of a verisimilitude of “queerness.”
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Against identity I look for the minimal act required in the writing of a poem-word which might effuse the absurdity of language, and also language’s concomitant politics, toward the silent and
matte field of writing in an experience of humility at the limit of language. Pursuing queer poetics might sound like an exercise in futility when considering the verisimilitude of "queerness" that exists today. However, I would like to shift all contention surrounding being queer into an unfashionable way of being an insignificant, yet lovingly “minor” other, in an extremely small, almost silent and invisible, unreal dimension of poetic writing: a poetic writing that exists for nothing, at the risk of extreme languor.
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p.s. Hey. Distinguished local H recently completed a dissertation that H has been hard at work on ever since joining the blog's gang of regular locals and contributors. And H kindly offered a section of said dissertation to me to post on the blog. It turns out that the section H gifted us has a fair amount to do with my own writing, my poetry specifically. Obviously, this is a great honor to me, and it also makes me feel a bit shy and self-conscious to house something so directed toward my work here, so ... yeah, ha ha. It's an excellent thing, and I hope you will devote some time to reading it this weekend. It's longish and rich, so, if need be, obviously feel free to bookmark it for a more thorough exploration later. But, yes, if you don't mind giving it your attention and speaking to H about what you think, that would be really great, and it would also help me feel less self-conscious, I think. Anyway, there it is. Thank you all, and, of course, my huge gratitude to you, H, for writing so beautifully and carefully on my work and for allowing this place to be part of its home. ** Bacteriaburger, Hi, Natty! Your new book sounds just great. I'm excited to read it. Well, Warhol's films are, in part, an exploration of 'boringness', so I suppose caution in that regard should be taken. Wow, 'Brothers', yes. That'a a very interesting porn film, and, in fact, it was the first porn film I ever saw. Jason Sato aka Norman Yonemoto ended up becoming a very close friend of mine. In fact, he and I wrote wrote two porn scripts together back in the early '80s when he was directing porn films for Matt Sterling. He was going to direct the films, but they were deemed too experimental, and no one would finance/produce them, sadly. I wondered when I saw that article about the queer commune if that was the one where you're planning to move. Weird. Yeah, I would guess that what with people's infintesimal attention spans these days, it will be forgotten soon enough. Wild, man. ** Tosh Berman, Menken's films are quite beautiful and very singular, very unique. Worth an exploration. Are you in Japan now, I forget? ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yeah, I had always vaguely heard that 'VW' was based on Menken and Maas's relationship, and it was interesting to find that confirmed. She's great in 'Chelsea Girls'. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Your big trip is over. So glad it was a blasting success. That Inver link led to your post, but the restaurant does sound dreamy, and I'll give it a google. I love nature as beauty, but thinking about art is a pretty worthy opponent. ** H, Hi. Thank you 'in person' for this weekend. Yeah, I'm very honored, and just, yeah, thank you so very much. NYC is many amazing things, but clean is not one of them. People talk about Paris as being dirty too, but I think I'm too smitten with the place to see the dirt here as anything but romantic. ** Steevee, Hi. Yes, I know about the call to boycott the film. I think that's as stupidly knee-jerk and reactionary as when the Christian contingent did the same to 'Last Temptation'. It just seems so fucking predictable given the widespread mania these days to shut down things that could potentially be disruptive. I mean, it's not like there isn't going to be a very vocal, public argument against the film's accuracy, assuming it turns out to be a whitewash, that won't permanently effect perception of the film's accuracy. Arguing that point while also asking that the subject of criticism not be seen seems really chickenshit and lacking in thought to me. I liked Emmerich's 'Day After Tomorrow' and 'Stargate' okay in a cheap fun kind of way, but, of course, they're hardly great films or anywhere close. ** Styrofoamcastle, Hey! I think today could be okay, but the film stuff is still in high gear, and tomorrow I know I can do it, so maybe we should talk tomorrow (Sunday). When do you get up in the morning and achieve enough consciousness to talk? ** Hunter, Hi, Hunter. Welcome back. It's good to see you! I'm good, crazy busy at the very moment, but good overall. Living in or even visiting NYC is something one should definitely do. It's utterly unique in the world and amazing. It just didn't turn out to be the right place for me personally to live. Oh, I guess I said what I think about the 'Stonewall' movie situation up above to Steevee, if you want to read that. I mean, if the film is revisionist and was built and fashioned via some director's or studio's idea of how to appeal to 'a broad audience', that's least surprising thing in the world. People knew that film was being made years ago. It would have been a lot more productive if the people who are so outraged by the film's seeming inaccuracies had worked to lobby the film's makers upon the public announcement that it was going to be made or while it was in the process of being made to get it right and accurate rather than just exploding in outrage after the fact. But lobbying isn't as much 'fun' as becoming part of a mob of angry voices online. I don't know. I know little about the film. I saw the trailer. It looks like a Hollywood film. It probably has its heart in the right place, even if it's factually compromised. It has and will cause a big public discussion about what actually and really did happen. Ultimately, I think the film will just be another film, and the real history that is brought to the fore and to the public's attention will be what's important. I guess that's what I think? How are you? What's going on? ** Misanthrope, Cool, Menken fans are a rare and enlightened bunch, so welcome to the cult. Glad you liked the readers stack, thanks. Yow, poor Cena. Awesome that you're all better. Whoo hoo! Monday's your birthday? You're a 10 guy too? That explains, like, everything. Well, I guess it doesn't, but it's nice to think that it does. Wow. I'll wait to wish you the best one 'til then. Enjoy your last two 43 year-old days. ** Okay. Again, if you could find some time to read H's piece or part of it this weekend and say something, anything at all here about that, I would be very grateful to as you, as would, of course, the mighty H. See you on Monday.
