What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Read online

  The body as a commodity wouldn’t have surprised Karl Marx. But what surprised me, in looking back at the Fetishism of the Commodities chapter of Capital, was to see that Marx himself had been influenced by the Gothic—and/or, that the Gothic had been for him a viable way to analyze the commodity form.

  Here Marx writes of the mysterious quality of the commodity form. He says: “The table continues to be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing that transcends sensuousness . . . it evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will. The mystical character of the commodity does not therefore arise from its use-value . . . it is nothing but the definite social relation between men which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order therefore to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own . . . I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are commodities . . .”

  A little later in his narrative Marx refers to a hidden secret. He imagines how commodities might speak. In these passages Marx, a Gothicist, refers to the “grotesque,” and spices his discourse with “transcends,” “mystical,” “wonderful,” “misty,” and “fantastic.” He animates the commodity form—anthropomorphizes it, as when he wonders how it would speak and then he goes so far as give it voice or dialogue. The things he imagines so vividly represent the hidden labor and relations of people and in the way he conjures them brings to my mind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and further the Golem story that Frankenstein was based on.

  In that story, the Jews create a man of clay to protect them, to represent them, the most famous Golem that of Rabbi Low’s creation in the 16th century. Rabbi Low has to destroy the Golem when he runs amuck and cannot be controlled by his human creator. In Marx’s version of capitalism, the commodity form seems to be its uncontrollable Golem. I like looking at what Marx wrote in this section as allegorical, as a kind of narrative fiction that uses as its antihero protagonist the Golem named commodity form.

  It’s interesting to reflect on why Marx would use the Gothic to talk about and render the effects of capitalism. And, to bring the question up to date: What I am doing in an anthology titled The New Gothic. And why does it exist? Perhaps the current enthusiasm for the Gothic, for horror as a genre in the U.S. and England, is in part a reflection of contemporary life, specifically life under postindustrial multinational capitalism, a capitalism under, in and through which we writers labor and produce, and a powerful way of articulating and representing that condition. Inescapably, the new Gothic will also be a handle, a fad, a marketing tool, but this does not alter its value, to me.

  These days the west gloats over the demise of communism, the premise being that democracy and capitalism are synonymous. The demise of totalitarianism from the left or right is something to be happy about, but I’m left wondering what capitalism offers, apart from a certain economic system, to the spirit that haunts our Gothic stories, and to a sense of how society should be run, to a sense of what common goals can be. Dog-eat-dog and survival of the fittest are appropriate metaphors for not just the capitalist ethic but also for the production of gothic perambulations. In our country without adequate health care and housing, a country first decimated by Reagan’s criminal grotesqueries and Bush’s new world order, what more credible form is there?

  M is for Mordant

  The Final Plot

  Some writers believe they control their fictional worlds, and nothing else; others that they are conduits for a story—words arrive, characters write themselves. (Few believe they have no control at all over what or how they write.) But even if one can imagine dying or being dead, one can’t represent it autobiographically. The impressions and scenes that can be imagined will have been nourished by others’ deaths—those witnessed, heard or read about. (Duchamp’s tombstone epitaph, “After all, it’s always the other one who dies,” means it’s always the other’s story, too.) The way being dead actually feels, a lack of all sensation, supposedly, can’t be described, depriving human beings of certainty about life’s afterlife; but, conversely, fomenting, with death’s partner sexual curiosity, a drive for knowledge.

  Ones who know they are dying, those physiologically at death’s door, and also those who pathologically fear death, might want to rush life’s conclusion and kill themselves. Suicides, or self-murderers, as the Dutch put it, can select the method, day and hour, and direct the last narrative, up to a point. Despair, significantly and regularly, overrides choice and strips it of volition. And, how being dead feels will also elude a suicide’s capacity to know. (Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that it was “the one experience I shall not describe.”)

  When death progresses naturally, which can be slow-going, over days or months, unless from a high-impact, head-on car crash, when organs fail fast, depleted of blood and oxygen, there comes a stunning withdrawal: people, like other animals, remove themselves psychically and physically from the known world. A person goes elsewhere, while the body works hard to shut itself down. One is “actively dying,” hospice workers say. Death is oxymoronic until it finishes its work.

  On ordinary days, a depressive has her funeral to fantasize, an activity that reassures with sad, cozy comfort. When required in actuality, planning it will probably be discomforting. A dying person may type, scrawl or dictate a list of demands or wishes for a service or memorial, exerting a sort of posthumous control. (The list can also be a preemptive strike against the omissions or excesses of fond others). A funeral might be plain as a pine coffin or theatrical. One who is dying might have specified songs, musicians, speakers and kinds and colors of flowers, or, if possessed of minimalist inclinations, wanted no displays or eulogies, just a plaintively beautiful song. (Both may have designated worthy charities.)

  For a writer’s funeral, words could seem superfluous, though there can never be enough, also. Selecting speakers raises unique problems. Most particularly, eulogizers script themselves. Some will mumble, overcome or shy, while others will improvise on humiliating episodes in the dead person’s life. All jokes will be on the dead. (Most people will speak primarily about themselves.) In fantasy, a depressive mourns herself and watches the abstract procession, loving the inconsolation of others; but soon her morbid pleasures are jolted by the awkwardness of social situations, pre-and post-death. Inclusions, exclusions, who speaks first, last? (Funeral rites survive, and have changed historically, for the living.) Planning an actual funeral might allay worry or generate more.

  For writers and nonwriters, other kinds of writing than suicide notes can be left behind. A letter might confess secret loves and hates, with recuperative gestures of remorse and forgiveness. Or, it could be a screed against the living. A death essay could be an “avant-fin” manifesto, raving mad, or setting out rational principles for existence. (A treatise on melancholy risks mawkishness and unoriginality.) The essay could haltingly document one’s protracted departure (exquisitely incomplete).

  Any of these compositions might supply a reason to live fully while dying, but inciting, for writers, a specific anxiety. The final text could cause a cascade of revisionist views of the individual and body of work, staining both, and lasting until everyone who knew the writer had died (considered in Buddhism an individual’s “second death”).

  Most likely, one will have scant energy for planning and writing in the final stages of life. (There are exceptions, who prove the rule.) Meeting death, sometimes called “the maker,” though really the unmaker, is essentially debilitating, so its specific conditions dominate and alter the living. A dying person may have no ambition or desire to control anything during the process (in itself unburdening). One’s death, though, will likely be written about by someone else or, even more likely, no one. Most deaths go unremarked. So-called “ordinary people” ge
t thousands of hits on YouTube, when killed by a usually docile lion on an ecological safari or pushed in front of a train. (The living identify with the pathos and meaninglessness of random, final endings like these.)

  An ignominious death recasts an entire life as unintelligent and witless. A relatively healthy person moves an old, huge TV set or a five-drawer steel file cabinet, which, unbalanced, leans, starts falling, its weight unbelievable, gains velocity, collapses, and crushes one beneath it. (Domestic deaths invariably make foolish last impressions.) An ignominious end is beyond prediction. But the great majority of deaths will be common, following a predictable course indicated by one of several illnesses, resulting in complete organ failure. Sherwin Nuland, in his book, How We Die, refutes the contemporary delusion of living forever by defeating the ageing process. He insists, almost too vociferously, that human beings will die sooner or later, because of the wear and tear on the body, also known as old age, which is not a disease. But if one believes people are dying as soon as they are born, then living itself is an illness overcome only by dying.

  Near to death, people usually don’t speak or have last words, hospice workers say, especially not those profound or pithy final utterances compiled in books.

  Thomas Carlyle: “So this is Death—Well!”

  Aleiester Crowley: “I’m perplexed.”

  Ulysses S. Grant: “Water!”

  Emily Dickinson: “Let us go in. The fog is rising.”

  Goethe: “More light!”

  Edgar Allan Poe: “Lord help my poor soul . . .”

  Washington Irving: “Well, I must arrange my pillows for another weary night!

  When will this end?”

  Gertrude Stein: “What is the question?”

  Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Tell them I had a wonderful life.”

  If a dying person had her wits about her and enough bodily function—swallowing becomes impossible—she might be able to come up with a line or two. But this also can’t be plotted. (Spoken and written communications not close to death are technically not deathbed statements.) Withdrawing from life for days or weeks, one is expected to be silent and uncommunicative, or will communicate but be misunderstood. (The writing of Ivan Ilych’s death, hospice workers say, is eerily close to how dying people feel; they wonder at Tolstoy’s prescience.)

  Since what death feels like is unknowable, most people fear it, and dying, particularly in great pain. In this time, as no other before, unless wishing to suffer mentally and physically, a patient can receive palliative care and medicines that make the “transition,” a hospice term, from life to death painless or nearly painless. (Many believe hospice speeds death along, but often it prolongs what life is left.) Against all reason, which death conquers easily, a few want to feel pain, not to remain as lucid as possible and say their good-byes, but as self-punishment for past bad acts and guilty consciences.

  Hardly anyone wishes “to die badly.” In the late Middle Ages, when the concept of “artes moriendi” was formulated, the ideal of “a beautiful death” emerged, and it thrived through the 19th century. “Dying well” has replaced “dying beautifully” and is rigorously enforced by post-mortem judgments. People aren’t supposed to struggle at the end, people should be “ready to go” and “accepting,” and opprobrium is cast on those who aren’t ready and willing, on those who “died badly.”

  This ultimate indictment glosses and assesses a human being’s last trial. (To die smiling makes it easier for the living.) But in the matter of dying and death, mortal judgments, like most received wisdoms concocted of exasperating pieties and galling stupidity, should be eliminated. Only death’s uninitiated would espouse these moralisms.

  Of death, mortals are absolutely ignorant. The dead, fortunately, are beyond caring.

  N is for New York

  Downtown’s Room In Hotel History

  Whatever facts support their findings, biographies and histories are also inventions that rely upon human imagination and fascination. Conscious and unconscious interpretation, inclusions and exclusions alter our record-keeping. Often memory is cast as “ours,” history “theirs,” but sometimes the two battle: suddenly you—in this case, I—find your writing inside exhibitions and books that represent a period under investigation.

  Since childhood, I have gorged on biographies, real-life crime, and literary and cultural histories: Abigail Adams, Bloomsbury, the Surrealists, Freud’s circle, the Cambridge spies, Leopold and Loeb, Americans in Paris. Other lives summoned possibility, freedom, difference; I could imagine people unlike any I knew at home. Then I saw Paris for the first time. Its streets were not paved with bohemians and I realized my bedtime readings were also fairy tales. So there’s a beautiful irony to my inclusion in a cultural designation called Downtown.

  Under this rubric, an assortment of art, film, video, music and writing from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s has returned for scrutiny and appreciation. There have been two exhibitions, “East Village USA,” at the New Museum in 2004–2005, and, in early 2006, “Downtown: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984,” at the Grey Art Gallery, and an anthology, Up is Up But So is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974–1992, edited by Brandon Stosuy. Like others included, I am doubtful about Downtown’s significance as well as resistant to being placed inside a “scene,” as if living on a film set or behind glass in a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History. Others may see you as part of something of which you feel no part. So, I reject some of the claims made for Downtown, but I’m also curious about its purposes for the present. Given its apparent return or resurgence, Downtown appears, at least, to have been a moment, or had its moment, because it has taken a room in the historical imagination.

  Usually a term exists in opposition to another, but what is Downtown’s opposite? Uptown makes geographical sense, but Downtown is and isn’t a place. It’s also a virtual or mental space. Downtown might mean lower class, but most musicians, writers and artists arrived from the upper and middle classes. If Downtown means avant-garde, mainstream would be its opposite and also incorrect, since many straddled both: Patrick McGrath, Ann Magnuson, Dennis Cooper, Peter Hujar, Barbara Kruger, Richard Hell, Richard Prince, Eileen Myles, Nan Goldin, Eric Bogosian, Reno, Spalding Gray, Gary Indiana, Patti Smith, Richard Foreman, to name some. Downtown comprised many disciplines, and there was crossover between them.

  Literary readings happened in galleries and clubs, artists formed bands, poets wrote plays, and musicians published poetry. And, during this brief moment in time, without an overarching plan or script, some people acted in synch, or merely coincided, clustering in some of the same spaces, partaking of the same events.

  Watergate, Punk, Vietnam, civil rights, women’s and gay rights, Minimalism, conceptualism, Warhol, anti-aesthetic and anti-narrative theories, these movements, ideas and events were both background and foreground, a kind of political and cultural geography, for Downtown. Earlier art and culture played an influential role: David Wojnarowicz revered Rimbaud, Kathy Acker plagiarized Dickens, and Cindy Sherman recreated a social history in her “Film Stills.” As practiced in various art forms during this time, appropriation was parody and homage.

  But styles and practices varied too widely to call Downtown a movement; there was no coherent aesthetic. Cool and hot, figurative and abstract; narrative films; non-narrative video; political art; conceptual and text-based work; graphic sexual photographs; streetwise fictions; gothic fantasy; New York School poems; transvestite; lesbian and gay theater; performance art; AIDS manifestoes: formally, the work was all over the map.

  Downtown didn’t represent waving fields of wheat, crumbling barns and open skies. It was urban, the city Downtown’s trickster muse whose characters’ celebrations and problems, visions and traumas, as well as rats and heroin overdoses, were sources and material.

  Historically, the city developed along with industrialization and modernism. In early 20th-century New York, Djuna Barnes apotheosized the city as the exemplar of the mod
em, while in Paris, Walter Benjamin anointed the flaneur, Kazin’s walker in the city, modernity’s citizen. Ecstatic or frightening, the city became a metaphor of freedom, change and chance. It thrived on speed, just as the Futurists wanted, and had a center, so it could be captured as an image by its inhabitants.

  Downtown’s shows and parties, held inside a small perimeter, allowed for quick comings and goings. You never had to stay; you could usually walk home. This cosmopolitan life, rootless, maybe, sometimes unheimlich, uncanny, ordained that home wasn’t necessarily homey. The city grew fields of the unfamiliar and unexpected, which trumped the humdrum. The city’s virtues and Modernist values—such as strangers and strangeness—were the small town’s vices and fears.

  In a sense, this Downtown of thirty years ago presented America in a new guise. It was no longer small, homogeneous towns complacent with simple pleasures. In Downtown’s music, art, writing, the city represented America, as it was. America was gay and straight, women and men, of all major religions, some minor, believers, nonbelievers, with conflicting values, both high and low, whose manifestations suggested varieties of obsession, disgust, beauty, pleasure and despair. Notably, Downtown was overwhelmingly white, though living inside a city that wasn’t. Many of us didn’t notice our white skin and European stock. Nominally international and without prejudice, debunkers of the so-called real America, Downtown was also American, racially divided like the rest of the country.

  Today’s city is post-modern; it sprawls; the walker sits behind a wheel; the crowd is Internet community. Modernism was a European and American phenomenon, no matter from whom it borrowed, while post-modernism is resolutely global. Seoul, Los Angeles, Peking, Tokyo and London are exemplars, though New York City has finally embraced its growing boroughs. If I were an historian, I might declare that Downtown signified the last hurrah from the last inhabitants of the last and premier modernist city.