February 19, 2004

Subject: Kane X. Faucher’s review of Solid as Echo

Dear Mr. Faucher,
Mr. Davidson
and Editors of The Danforth Review,

Sometimes language unnerves the understanding: sometimes we have a hard time figuring out what someone is saying and this may even be intended by the speaker. One might think of Rimbaud’s remark, “Je est un autre” (lit. “I is an other”), and wonder why he chose to so conjugate the copula. Reflection may, in turn, reveal a disconcerting and disheartening truth that he was attempting to express - the poetry of the remark might unfurl upon analysis. And we would recall Wallace Stevens’ words on the subject:

“Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.”

(The Man with the Blue Guitar, Part XXXII)

“…the work and the re-view operate on two planar models imbued with their own specific trajectories that intertwine and intercalate their functions.”

Now, for anyone who understands, even vaguely, the theory of functions the inclusion of “intertwine” and “intercalate” is quite redundant: any two functions that intersect, that is share some non-empty set of points, “intertwine” but, of course, they also “intercalate.”

A “planar model” is really just a three-dimensional model of something (say, the human body), so named because it is constructed out of crude ‘planar’ shapes (say, a rectangle for the torso and two smaller ones for the legs etc.). The idea the reviewer has in mind is of two crude shapes whose paths of motion intertwine. So, in plain English, the review and the work function like two crude figures who follow paths that intertwine. Now, for most folk this is a mute figure and, let me add, a decidedly heavy-handed one: nothing in the metaphor obliges one to frame it in terms of mathematical concepts. So the insights it offers, and I haven’t found any, are quite superfluous to the mathematical language which could confuse a reader unfamiliar with graphics programs in computer science.

Of course, the metaphor embodies a decidedly routine ploy popularized by, for one, Derrida. The idea is that both Mr. Faucher and the poems are in a process of creating new meaning - this is obviously what Mr. Faucher intends. But, strangely, all Mr. Faucher does is to comment on this phenomenon, to note it: it carries no import for his review at all. Why? Well, for one, I don’t think Mr. Faucher is interested in actually examining the ideas he putatively traffics in - he like words, but not what they mean. It would require work to show that Faucher and the poems are mutually interpretive - and it is unclear that such rigor is something to which Mr. Faucher is suited, in any case, he fails to demonstrate it in this review.

Take another line of Mr. Faucher’s review:

“The first is on the order of the work (itself coextensive rather than prior or latter to the review)…”

Clearly, from what he has said earlier, the review and the work are NOT coextensive. Two functions, for instance, would be coextensive if and only if the lines on the two-dimensional graph representing them had the same points in common, i.e. the two lines would really just one line. In this case, however there is no “intertwining” or “intercalation”: there is only the one following the other. My only conclusion from this confusion is that the reviewer doesn’t actually know what ‘coextensive’ means in this context. This is hardly a fault, but it does seem strange that he would brandish this ignorance so recklessly - perhaps, it is of a piece with his proclivity for yelling at his neighbors?

One could let such things go. After all, mathematics is a difficult field, one can’t help but slip-up occasionally (even at so elementary a level). But Mr. Faucher commits his (mis)understanding to other dimensions of inquiry.

“With apologies to Kant, a.e.m.’s Solid as Echo traffics in the dynamical sublime…”

Kant’s notion of the dynamical sublime is used with particular attention to natural phenomena. Thus, for instance, consider volcanoes and thunderclouds, as Kant remarks,

“…our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them becomes all the more attractive, the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place. And we like to call these objects sublime because they raise the soul’s fortitude above its usual middle range and allow us to discover in ourselves an ability to resist which is of a quite different kind, and which gives us the courage [to believe] that we could be a match for nature’s seeming omnipotence.”
(The Critique of Judgement, § 28)

In other words, something ‘traffics in the dynamical sublime’ when it stimulates in us an appreciation of it’s fearsome power, which prompts our belief that we could confront its power. Perhaps, a.e.m.’s poems have such an effect, though there is no evidence given, no allusion to any of the poems. Notice also that the ‘apologies to Kant’ are unnecessary provided Mr. Faucher understand what he is saying: his remark can be understood as an attempt to capture his impressions of the poetry in Kant’s vocabulary. But given his ‘apologies’ it is unclear he appreciates what it is he is saying. Mr. Faucher could also have expressed his impressions of the poem in terms those not familiar with Kant’s aesthetics could appreciate, that he didn’t bespeaks an unfortunate intellectual laziness: unfortunate because he is reviewing books for the benefit of the public. (Presumably, the remark ‘apologies to Kant,’ is intended to coyly reveal, though in effect it belies, Mr. Faucher’s knowledge of Kant’s discussion of aesthetics.)

The unfortunate thing about Mr. Faucher’s review is not, however, his endless allusions (he appears unable to utter a single sentence that doesn’t refer to some thinker - if you find one, let me know, the gauntlet is thrown), but, rather, is the fact that even if one appreciates what he is saying, very little has actually been said. There are a few rather uninteresting points, for instance, that the poetry “is a chaos(mos) that grounds and destabilizes its own ground in an infinite act of re- and de-constructing its borders, frontiers, limits and foundations” is merely a banal appropriation of one of Derrida’s insights intended to suggest that somehow the poems subvert themselves (in terms of what? Plot machinations? Descriptions? What are the ‘borders, frontiers, limits, and foundations’? Maybe Mr. Faucher was caught-off guard by some typos that resulted in gibberish). Similar, Mr. Faucher remarks that “Were we to focus on the mere signified order of violence (beheaded cats, hung doubles, potentially murderous rural folk…) we would take the mask for the face and effects for causes” attempts to squeeze the poetry into a Deleuzian theoretical mold. The point seems to be to suggest that the ‘signified order of violence’ (in plain English, the violent events) in the poetry are really just manifestations of some underlying thing - again, it is unclear what. Notice that even if we were watching a Jerry Bruckheimer production, we could say the same of it’s ‘signified order of violence,’ if that’s your idea of a good time.

I could, of course, marshall more facts for my case, but I assume the reader gets the point. There is, of course, a deeper question. Why does Mr. Faucher feel obliged to write thus? Well, ‘with apologies to Freud,’ I believe that Mr. Faucher evinces a surprising and sad reaction-formation. Young Mr. Faucher once had the (now suppressed) realization that he had nothing original or insightful to give to the world of literature and philosophy, yet, he yearned to walk with giants. One day he happened upon a few works by Derrida, Deleuze and others, and found that what his former, now latent, self construed as mere recapitulations and unoriginal thoughts, could be transformed (with the aid of obscure vocabularies and metaphors) beyond recognition. He could parade about in his new technicolor coat, to borrow a metaphor from Tim Rice (another hack), without danger of being lampooned or (worse yet !) ignored. If others criticized his thoughts he could retort “you simply do not understand my words,” or “I am trying to express myself as purely as possible,” or “there is no notion of ‘right,’ ‘reasonable,’ ‘original’ or ‘clear’” and on and on.

Unfortunately, this parable ends where it begins, it is the serpent’s tail that is the mouth: the endlessly consuming ending that is also a beginning (endlessly) - an endless end (wrap your head around that one!). Even with his appaling metaphors (“at the elbow of a.e.m.’s sonority”) and his twisted vocabulary, the problem with Mr. Faucher’s review isn’t that it is willfully obscure: but that it foolishly believes it has achieved insights, rather than mere repetitions (the usual ones, not Deleuze’s - nudge nudge, wink wink!). He believes his already dead metaphors and vocabulary have achieved what without the dressing they could not achieve: insight and imagination. He must use the rotted names, those of Derrida, Deleuze and others, because without them the rot of/that is/in his own ideas will be revealed. To suppose that the dead names and words will do what you could not do without them, what you couldn’t say in a vocabulary all could understand, is a woefully nihilistic stance: because one cannot stand agon with greater minds, one denies their greatness altogether. The great lords of language - Joyce, Beckett, Dickinson, Celan, Stevens, Shakespeare, to name a few - have imaginations that are not assuaged by any mere vocabulary and it is no accident that even the most difficult of them - say Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake - embody in their difficulty an imaginative strength and richness that encourages analysis and examination.

The moral of the story, Mr. Faucher, is that if you cannot re-imagine the spade, for God’s sake just use the rotted name and call it a ‘spade’ !

Regards,
Abel Rechaufe