Seven Red

What do you get when you mix a bit of Foucault’s biopower with Debord’s spectacle, and imagine it as fiction in the style of more experimental Delillo (like, say, Cosmopolis) presented in the, well, austere prose style of a Paul Auster? That would be Benoit Duteurtre’s stark little novella The Little Girl and the Cigarette, the prolific young French writer’s only book appearing in English translation.

Yes, this really is the book’s cover, and I’ll leave it to Gunther Kress and the image semioticians to work out its implications. The thing to note here is that the little girl and the cigarette appear in different scales, indicating different planes, a choice between the two. Now, she is probably going to take this as my argument against quitting smoking (the babygirl and the cigarette), but it’s really not. For now it’s enough to say that the choice bumps up against the title, “the little girl and the cigarette,” the mysterious absence of which on the cover portends the tension played out in the novella.

The book develops three main plots which could be said to incorporate a single theme: LONG LIVE LIFE. As we know, Foucault saw modernity as the emergence of a new form of power, called biopower or the biopolitical. Rather than the monarchical power, which could make die (or let live), this new form of power was concerned with life, the ability to make live (or let die). Capital punishment is the form of monarchical power, the more brutal the better. Medical bureaucracy is the form of biopower, and gentle, now. Dutreutre’s novella seizes on this distinction to draw out the dystopia of biopower.

In the first plot, Desire Johnson, a dim-witted or brilliant convicted murderer faces the very gentle lethal injection. All he wants is a cigarette, his right according to the archaic Article 47 of the Law (and yes, the Law is a Kafkaesque presence in TLGATC). But in this near-future nameless country (though obviously France, despite the mention of President Bush Boulevard), smoking is prohibited in the prisons – and pretty much everywhere else, for that matter – for the health of both the prisoners and the guards, so the warden faces a conundrum: let Johnson smoke, and thereby violate the prohibition, or forbid him from smoking, and thereby violate his rights according to Article 47. Like all good bureaucrats, he defers to a higher power – the Supreme Court. Johnson’s case becomes a media spectacle, with the nation divided over whether he should be allowed his request, debates throughout the city about the paradox of preventing a condemned man from harming his health, machinations by a giant tobacco company to use the case for advantage, headlines and breathless reportage. Throughout it all, Johnson is almost impassive, although he seems to understand that granting his request will require sending him out of the prison, during which time he can make his very spectacular escape, with the paradoxical help of ubiquitous surveillance.

In the second plot, a first person narrator tells his own story of the current absurdity. The nation so much believes in life – in making live – that it has glorified children over everything, since they are at once life and future life. The narrator – a minor government researcher and avowed epicure – despises this development, and despises children of all ages. He wonders what will happen to the 40-60 year old men, the most oppressed group in the society, he thinks. He also smokes like a chimney, though his habit now requires him to engage in illegal bathroom smoking, since the administrative offices of the city have been turned into a daycare center in which children run wild (according to him). He complains bitterly about this, but the other people seem to prefer the children to his rantings. This isn’t even a nanny state; it’s a permissive parent state. During one of his bathroom smoke operations, he forgets to fully bar the door, and a little girl walks in on him. He kicks her out, hissing “Get out of here, you stupid idiot!” Of course, this infraction snowballs into a massive criminal charge, called crimes against children, with all the insinuation, and ultimately outright accusation, of sexual abuse. He is even forced to undergo a mock prosecution in a children’s court, the mayor’s attempt to relieve the daycare center/administration building’s children of their psychological trauma (though everyone admits they have a long road of therapy ahead – especially the little girl).

In the third plot, told in third person, a terrorist group called John Wayne’s Conscience have taken a multicultural and decidedly multi-aged band of hostages; the terrorists support (and this is pure Debordian snark) better conditions for terrorism. Rather than offering the hostages for ransom or just publicly offing them, however, they arrange a reality TV show – called A Martyr Idol – which will require the hostages to perform for an audience of voters, with the loser getting the head-cut-off treatment. Perhaps the funniest sentence in the book, then is the following:

For the first test of this morbid competition, the disciples of John Wayne had organized a karaoke contest.

At first, few people vote, but when the Kuwaiti wins the first round (the rules of the contest, which includes singing as well as Jeopardy-like game show fare, are extremely complex, and Duteurtre doesn’t really bother explaining them), and when Desire Johnson, now a celebrity, advocates for the hostages, the whole world begins watching and voting – the game has turned into a global media spectacle. At times, this part of the story seems the most forced, a bit like a thought experiment in which we are asked to consider the absurdity of the 9/11 attacks as spectacle, and what it would mean to truly grasp the synoptic logic of contemporary spectacle as a tool for terrorism (the 9/11 guys were amateurs in this regard, seems to be the argument). Whatever value there may be in showing up the strange imitative relationship between terrorism and contemporary media, Duteurtre still manages to convey that hooked-in sensibility, with the global public debating who is more deserving of life among the various hostages. And isn’t this really what we’re secretly and sometimes not so secretly debating when we watch American Idol or Survivor?

Needless to say, the three plots intersect and build together towards the terrifying – because mild – conclusion.

To read TLGATC, you’d think its author was an American reactionary, peddling the worst kind of libertarian tripe and white male anger. The whole smokers’ rights uprising is classic libertarian fare, and almost as noxious (and obnoxious) as thick tobacco exhaust hovering in a crowded bar (and I smoke!). Moreover, even minor characters have their nationality and ethnicity mentioned with an audible sneer, as if the narrative itself is mocking some multiculti quota system, real or imagined, for the arts. The first person narrator’s pathetic belly-aching about the fate of 40-60 year old men is similarly Limbaugh-esque in outlook and effect. When you learn that the author is actually a French anarchist, however, you might get a little reflective. The full administration of life is just as obnoxious in the story, as is the drooling adulation of the Child, the backfiring and anti-scientific anti-pollution programs, and the deep hypocrisy of particular versions of multiculturalism.

Perhaps the big move in America was not the co-opting of 60′s counter-culture by the right wing, but the co-opting of turn of the century anarchism by that vicious version of American capitalist libertarianism, a theme also taken up to brilliant effect in Pynchon’s stunning Against the Day (about which more later). We know the libertarians inveigh against the so-called “nanny state,” and so good liberals are meant to harrumph and call them children, and thereby argue for the effectiveness of good government. As Foucault and others argued in France, this response is not particularly useful. Yet to do the opposite would seem to support the free market system against regulation (the master articulation of the contemporary and not-so-contemporary right wing). This was always the quandary of the May 68 thinkers. And it’s the quandary contemplated in its French context by The Little Girl and the Cigarette. In the American context, we might ask What has become of American anarchism?

The contemporary left almost cannot contemplate the conflict between support for the state apparatus as a regulatory arm aimed at social amelioration and condemnation of the state apparatus as some kind of “Big Brother” type repression engine. Look at the relative value of the Central Intelligence Agency, which is one week the noble Bush resistor, and the next week a depraved pack of torturers, one week a terrifying surveillance mafia, the next week the supporter of the very upright Ms. Plame-Wilson. The left’s relationship to the state apparatus turns out to be just as incoherent and childlike as the awful me-me-me-ism of the libertarians. The first group substitutes the good state for the bad state, a laughable contrivance; the second substitutes the market for the state, an absurdity because the market requires a state (see uber-moron Lou Dobbs and the densely stupid support that has glommed on to Ron Paul). And lurking in there somewhere is the tradition of American anarchism, filleted and vivisected into the libertarian zombie. But is there and can there be an American anarchism that isn’t immediately capitalist and reactionary libertarianism in practice? Or are we constantly pushed into the choice between the little girl and the cigarette?

I remember when I used to drive up to college through the heart of the orthodox Jewish summer playgrounds: US 17, upstate New York, pretty much from the New York State Thruway to the once great resort areas around Monticello, now empty husks as a result of cheap airfare to Miami and points south, devastation with a brokedown racetrack. You’d get about 20 miles west of the Thruway and you’d start seeing these joyful yellow signs proclaiming the impending arrival of Moshiach. Yes, Moshiach is coming! Tell everybody waiting for Superman, that they should try to hold on the best they can…

This is the theme for Michael Chabon’s alternative history noir, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The alternative history here is not – for Americans, anyway – as disastrous as that of one of Chabon’s likely models, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. In Dick’s story, the Germans and Japanese have won World War II, and San Francisco, like the rest of the West Coast, is under Japanese occupation. In Chabon’s story, things unfolded a little differently. The Germans apparently beat the Soviets, which prolonged the war just long enough to have the US nuke Berlin in 1946. Some devastating war happened with Cuba in the early 1960′s (although one wonders why it would, given the alternative course of Russia).

But, more importantly for the story, there is no Israel. The small group of Zionists who tried to establish the Jewish state in the late 1940′s were ejected (literally pushed into the sea, as the saying goes) by an Arab coalition, while the great powers stood by. The Jews are still, in 2000, in the “big black lake of Diaspora” (202). Specifically, the US government allowed some Jews to temporarily settle in a god-forsaken corner of Alaska, and soon 2 million Jews came to those shores. They live in a very temporary semi-autonomous zone called the District of Sitka, which is soon to revert (the dreaded Reversion) back to US federal control, likely to be handed over to the Tlingit Indians, or the BIA. But in those 50 or so years, the refugees have built up a whole civil structure, cities, towns, governments, restaurants, sects of various orthodoxies, criminal gangs, and street names: a whole culture of Jewish Alaska. Everyone in the Sitka District speaks Yiddish, reserving what the narrator calls “American” for expressions like “Fuck You,” “Fuck your mother,” and “What the fuck?” (Nobody, of course, speaks Hebrew, but perhaps some scheming American Zionists.) There is a history of conflict with the native Tlingit, riots and half-breeds, seething hatred. With Reversion, it’s quite clear that this entire Jewish culture will disappear, as nobody seems assured to get residency permits for the reverted District, and the political environment in the US seems, well, unfavorable. “Strange times,” as the characters in the book continually remind us, “to be a Jew.”

In the midst of this brilliantly imagined world, Detective Meyer Landsman – your typical hard-boiled, sharp-eyed, drunk Jewish Alaskan gumshoe – must solve the murder of a heroin addict who had the bad luck of catching a bullet in the back of his head in Landsman’s very own fleabag (is there any other kind in noir?) hotel. The heroin addict may or may not be the vaunted Tzaddik – the Messiah of this generation come to redeem his people in the Holy Land. It would be difficult to go much more into plot than that without revealing the many twists and turns Chabon had fun performing for the reader (she says too many twists and turns for her liking). To speak in more general terms, I think we see in TYPU an interesting attempt to make sense of terrorism, and experiment which perhaps inverts some positions to determine whether some commonplaces about terrorism hold. And it seems more terrifying not when we’re asked to think differently about terrorism, but when we recognize it in its sparkling, Messianic sameness – emanating from the hills and tunnels of Tora Bora or the strange, cold Untershtaat of Jewish Alaska. These changed positions are easy enough to pull off, I guess, a kind of elementary thought experiment, maybe Ethics 101.

Where Chabon is more ambitious is in building the reminder of homelessness. The clarity with which Chabon sketches the District of Sitka is all the more devastating when we realize that it will really be gone in 15 weeks, this whole culture. And yes, this whole piece of fiction, this elaborate construction no more solid than a Jewish town under the ultimate sway of gentile government. And that so many other towns, whole functioning towns with little histories and places like homes are gone too, for the Jews in Spain, England, Poland, Germany, but also for so many others, gentiles, Africans, corn people, Sioux, Sunni, Shia. Our cities are fictions, and delicate ones. The simple thought experiment so happily deployed these days (what if it was you who…) takes on more heft in this context, for we are asked not merely to identify temporarily with the terrorist, but also to despise them temporarily, but at the same time. Of course, sophisticated people believe that holding contradictory notions is easy enough, and that people who are unable to do it are really the ones with the problem. TYPU suggest that its not that easy, really, and even if you can do it, you really haven’t solved or imagined anything.

They’re still waiting for Moshiach, I’d wager, up on US 17, in their buses out of Brooklyn, the black hats. They should read TYPU; it’ll tell them this: He hasn’t dropped them, forgot them, or anything…It’s just too heavy for Superman to lift.

In any case, I feel like I’ve done a good foray into contemporary (Jewish) lit, having read Lethem and two Chabon’s for the month. Now I’m on to…I’m gonna do it…you can’t stop me…Against the Day. I’m already 200 pages in, again. I’m really getting the feeling of what it must have been like to read Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973; this is also a book that responds to the problem of terrorism (and maybe Pynchon always was that, our Proust for the blasted cityscape). Strangely, like Kavalier and Clay and TYPU, I’m reading about the goddamn Arctic and Antarctica. What’s with the cold these days, fellas?

Last March, although he couldn’t make it to babygirl’s first birthday party, our friend booga face nevertheless provided a wonderful gift, Taro Gomi’s book Everyone Poops:

Or rather, we thought it was a gift at the time, not knowing that it was a ticking time bomb that would eventually rule our very lives. You see, an elephant makes a BIIIIIIIIG poop. A mouse, on the other hand, makes a tiiiiiiiiiiny poop. I know this because I am forced to read these relatively obvious statements of relative shit sizes sixty times a day on average. babygirl looks around confusedly and then announces “Poo booo’k,” meaning that she demands, then and there, yet another reading of Everyone Poops. No medieval theologian studied the intricacies of the Holy Scriptures with the same care and breathtaking commitment that babygirl devotes to the “Poo booo’k.” Which side is the snake’s behind? What does whale poop look like? These questions are never answered by Gomi, but they serve as spurs to endless speculation. When Gomi advises us that he’s “just kidding” about his assertion that “a one-hump camel makes a one hump poop” while a “two-hump camel makes a two-hump poop,” it’s good for a laugh, but we feel perhaps the joke is on us, after all.

And so I note in this public forum, for whole the world to see, that we hereby pledge vendetta against booga face and his progeny.

OK. I’ll admit it. I literally teared up, lip quivering and all, at the end of Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I finished yesterday after clutching it as train reading for about two weeks. Then again, I literally teared up, lip quivering and all, at the end of Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, my train reading for the previous two weeks. she tells me that I probably won’t cry like a baby at the end of Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, but I think she underestimates my capacity to be affected. I remember reading a line in Gravity’s Rainbow when Enzian gives a light to his Russian brother – neither aware that they have the same father – and Pynchon goes into some melodramatic contemplation of all the times two brothers, unknown to each other, must have exchanged such small cordialities; I damn near lost it on the 7 line for that one.

That admission out of the way, I want to quote a passage from Kavalier and Clay that may relate to some of what I’ve been saying about exit here (or show it up for the aesthetic and apolitical fluff that some may already think it is). It’s a bit long, but worth it. If you’ve read K & C, you know that the novel revolves around a comic book character called “The Escapist,” one of whose creators is a Czech Jew trained in the escape artist trade. Here’s the passage, which I’ll quote without commentary, if only to shield myself from comparisons to Chabon’s prose:

He thought of the boxes of comics that he had accumulated, upstairs, in the two small rooms where, for five years, he had crouched in the false bottom of the life from which Tommy had freed him, and then, in turn, of the thousands upon thousands of little boxes, stacked neatly on sheets of Bristol board or piled in rows across the ragged pages of comic books, that he and Sammy had filled over the past dozen years: boxes brimming with raw materials, the bits of rubbish from which they had, each in his own way, attempted to fashion their various golems. In literature and folklore, the significance and the fascination of golems – from Rabbi Loew’s to Victor von Frankenstein’s – lay in their soullessness, in their tireless inhuman strength, in their metaphorical association with overweening human ambition, and in the frightening ease with which they passed beyond the control of their horrified and admiring creators. But it seemed to Joe that none of these – Faustian hubris, least of all – were among the true reasons that impelled men, time after time, to hazard the making of golems. The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something – one poor, dumb, powerful thing – exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and straitjacket of physical laws. Harry Houdini had roamed the Palladiums and Hippodromes of the world encumbered by an entire cargo-hold of crates and boxes, stuffed with chains, iron hardware, brightly painted flats and hokum, animated all the while by only this same desire, never fulfilled: truly to escape, if only for an instant; to poke his head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics, into the myterious sporot world that lay beyond. The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited “escapism” among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life. (582)