Aris Fioretos, The Gray Book

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 18.35 ( Spring - Summer / printemps - été, 2001):188-9.

Aris Fioretos, The Gray Book. Stanford: Stanford UP/"Meridian, crossing aesthetics," 1999; 151 pp.; ISBN: 0804735379 (hbk.); LC call no.: BH151.F4913; US$19.95

I don’t know what y’all are having, but I like to order my theory extra-crazy. Over the top? Sweetie, I like the kind of book where there simply is no top, where nothing exceeds like excess. Thus, I find myself simply smithereened over the Gray Book. Here is a book that is willing to smash its wee knees dancing around for my delectation. Fioretos describes his essay as an attempt to plumb a something ambiguous that inheres in literature, an “indifference that makes a difference”, and in so doing, he describes a great many grey things that are like this ambiguity: pencils, the ocean, fog, tears, sleep, and smoke. This mode of composition results in many an ornate metaphor, several of which are fun to follow for clauses at a time. Fioretos is also a fool for alliteration, internal rhyme, and wordplay. He’s mad, I tell you, simply mad, for writing prose that is pretty persistently precious, orchidaceous, and peacocky. Hasn’t he seen the segment from 60 Minutes, “Excessive Alliteration: Always Extremely Annoying?”

This is one of those topics, friends, where I speak as one who has been spoken to. I, too, am a shameless sucker for a string of successive serial consonants, and so help me if I don’t rhyme – all the time. A dear friend, upon perusal of my master’s thesis, volunteered to pay for electroshock therapy, if indeed the old bite-bite bzzt-bzzt would stem the almighty tide of rinky-dink tricks that fairly flowed from my every clickity-clack. That sort of thing can get cute. Bad cute. Beauty pageant of shellacked and sequinned five-year-olds cute. Trying cute. Too cute. Fioretos has a deft touch by times, and does funny things hither and thither that are laugh-out-loud. There’s one page that ends with a great chunk of tasty Kafka, suffixed only with an authorial “There you go”. That cracked me up. But on the very facing page, cheek by jowl with that last little deadpan stunner, was “hook, line and sinker”. It wasn’t the phrase that floored me; no, it was the fact that the little letters fell across the page like they, themselves, were a sinking line. Must I be the grumpus, the gray-templed, dusty antiquarian, who grouses and heaps calumny? I don’t mind a little typographical trickery by times – I’m sure there’s some cummings and Mallarmé in one of these bloody boxes of books – but, boy howdy, did it start to crank on my nerves when I was reading the Gray Book.

The only way I think we can do justice to this mixed bag of clunkers and gems is to take a stroll through a single page, one representative of the simultaneity of greatness and the merely grating that makes up the Gray Book. The page, gentle reader, is numbered 127, and it begins with a rip-snorting list that reads, “interruptions, diversions, intermezzos, digressions, changes, revisions, amendations, lacunae, deviations, insertions, delays, pauses, parentheses... , additions”. These are the stuff of gray literature, and each and every one of them is certainly swell. However, this deeply agreeable list is then followed by the phrase, “punctured bicycle dragged across cobblestones”, in – you guessed it, chum-bouncy-wouncy, up-and-downy, rumpy-bumpy type, as though the letters themselves were being dragged across cobblestones. Eee-ouch! Me grasp head in pain. Me remember Deleuze and Guattari circa 1000 Plateaus: “typographical tricks alone do not suffice.” I bade my poked eyeball to sally onwards, only to find the lovely declaration that gray literature takes place in the fracture of the story, not its finish, a claim that drags a bunch of delicious d’s behind it: “deceit, desire, and disjunction... destabilization... dissimulation... distance and duplication”. Then, Fioretos, the suave Swede, out and out quotes John Shade, of Pale Fire fame, and I am utterly in his power. He hauls out the Vlad, and leaves me all swoony and aflutter like I’m thirteen and crumpling Tiger Beat in my sweaty little paws. Fioretos is not merely stylistically giddy; he’s also a compulsive quoter, and all the names he chooses to check are tasty pudding indeed.

Do you doubt me, gentle reader? The scrolling credits of the grey canon read thusly; Nabokov, Stein, Beckett, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Kafka, Ashberry, and Homer. Consequently, the man is capable of KOing me with a quote whenever I start to get skeptical about the sheer ornateness of the prose. Fioretos’ reading of the stone-sucking scene in Beckett’s Molloy is elegant and nuanced, and he lays down some sweet, sweet sentences on the always-wonderful Walter Benjamin as well. The choice source selections sway me to forgive Fioretos his digressions and excesses. All these writers make me positively giddy as the schoolgirl that I, in fact, am; I can hardly fault Fioretos for his overwhelming enthusiasm. Who hasn’t, in a fit of lit-fueled enthusiasm, gotten a little loopy, a little loony, with the ludic? Why, I hardly think that one should be able to dub oneself a scholar until one has gotten all hopped up on the Baudelaire, say, and penned a positively violet vale of empurpled prose. The danger, of course, with Fioretos’ effusive style and diffuse observations, is that one starts to wonder, “wow, is there anything that gray isn’t like?” Nevertheless, I’ll still take twenty-three punchline-drunk, punning pranksters like Fioretos meandering through a muddle of metaphors over one dead flat rigorously serious scholarly book.

laura penny
SUNY Buffalo