Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns by Rob Hawkes

My review of Rob Hawkes's Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns: Edwardian Fiction and the First World War is in the current issue of Modernism/modernity (20.3).

Rob Hawkes’s engaging study of “misfit moderns” positions Ford Madox Ford alongside writers like Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Richard Aldington, and Rebecca West, all of whom in some way have an uneasy relation to modernism, either as non-modernists against whom the modernists defined themselves or as not-quite-modernists who never achieved the centrality of Joyce or Woolf. While these writers all have a place in Hawkes’s study, Ford is the primary focus, “the misfit par excellence” (22), because while he was an Edwardian like Bennett and Wells, he also wrote two modernist masterpieces, making him both a central figure within modernism and not fully of the period. Ford’s writing “occupies aesthetic territory between the conventional realist novel and high modernism” (2), a position of “in-betweenness” that, far from making Ford a “peripheral figure on the margins” of both Edwardians and moderns, “constitutes an acute and exemplary responsiveness to the conditions of modernity” (3).

Clandestine Encounters: Philosophy in the Narratives of Maurice Blanchot

My review of Clandestine Encounters: Philosophy in the Narratives of Maurice Blanchot edited by Kevin Hart (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) is in the upcoming issue of Modern Philology (111.2) and also currently online for subscribers. This is an exceptional collection of essays for anyone interesting in Blanchot's work in general, but especially for those interested in his difficult, haunting fiction and other unclassifiable narratives. Each essay focuses on a different work and is arranged chronologically, from his earliest récits to his final autobiographical narrative L’instant de ma mort. Highly recommended.

Review in the TLS

My book was reviewed by Lauren Arrington in the In Brief section of 26 July 2013 Times Literary Supplement. 

As Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination progresses, Bonikowski's arguments gain momentum, coalescing in his powerful point that in the aesthetic sublimation of the death drive, modernist fiction can 'sustain the pleasures of life.'

Narrative 2013

I'm presenting a paper on Barbara Comyns at the Narrative Conference in Manchester, UK, this June. Here's my abstract:

Lightness of Voice and the Levitating Narratives of Barbara Comyns

The British writer Barbara Comyns wrote eleven well-received novels from the late 1940s to 1990, but she has been largely neglected in terms of scholarly attention. (The MLA bibliography lists one academic article, and she is briefly noted in a handful of monographs covering mid-century British fiction.) My paper seeks to bring renewed attention to this overlooked writer by focusing on what most commentators have mentioned admiringly, but only in passing: her distinctive voice. Drawing on James Phelan’s description of voice in Narrative as Rhetoric, I will examine how voice connects to both character and plot in two of Comyns’s novels: Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950) and The Vet’s Daughter (1959). I will argue that Comyns’s use of voice creates narrators particularly attuned to the undercurrent of violence that subsists within social relations. These narrative voices, spoken in homodiegetic narration by young women, are often described as simple, matter-of-fact, honest, and naïve. But another quality is also present, an “authority of address” and “method of seduction” (Davis viii, x), a “marvelousness,” “childlike wonder,” and “lightness (in Calvino’s usage of the term)” (Evenson vi). These voices, both naïve and seductive, straightforward and full of wonder, create uncanny effects in Comyns’s often darkly comic narratives, presenting the narrators as both ignorant and knowing: ignorant of normative social conventions while possessing an outsider’s knowledge of the violence that lies within them. If these narrators are often the passive victims of violence, their traumatic knowledge (Hartman) uncannily lifts them above these experiences, offering them the means to find a language for the traumatic effects of violence that that would not otherwise find expression in the normative discourses surrounding them. This lifting-above—literalized in the surreal and Gothic touches found in Comyns’s work, such as visions and levitation—is what accounts for the clear-eyed wonder and lightness of the voice.

Works Cited

Davis, Kathryn. Introduction. The Vet’s Daughter. By Barbara Comyns. New York: New York Review Books, 2003. vii-xi.

Evenson, Brian. Introduction. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. By Barbara Comyns. Urbana, IL: Dorothy, a publishing project, 2010. i-vii.

Hartman, Geoffrey. “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies.” New Literary History 26.3 (1995): 537-63.

Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination

My book Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination: The Death Drive in Post-World War I British Fiction is now available from Ashgate Press.

Looking closely at both case histories of shell shock and Modernist novels by Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf, Wyatt Bonikowski shows how the figure of the shell-shocked soldier and the symptoms of war trauma were transformed by the literary imagination. Situating his study with respect to Freud’s concept of the death drive, Bonikowski reads the repetitive symptoms of shell-shocked soldiers as a resistance to representation and narrative. In making this resistance part of their narratives, Ford, West, and Woolf broaden our understanding of the traumatic effects of war, exploring the possibility of a connection between the trauma of war and the trauma of sexuality. Parade’s End, The Return of the Soldier, and Mrs. Dalloway are all structured around the relationship between the soldier who returns from war and the women who receive him, but these novels offer no prospect for the healing effects of the union between men and women. Instead, the novels underscore the divisions within the home and the self, drawing on the traumatic effects of shell shock to explore the link between the public events of history and the intimate traumas of the relations between self and other.

From an interview with Mary Caponegro:

"I work from ideas and images and abstractions—from an impulse to conflate the sensual and the abstract, and from an impulse to generate a species of music. For a writer such as myself, who wishes to blur the line between fantasy and reality, a crisp delineation of character and setting, etc. would not serve my purpose—whereas the creation of a mood or texture might be utterly crucial. Plot might be quite intricate, but in ways likely comprised more of nuance than event. I suppose that in my work, character tends to become merely a prop for voice, and often there are very few characters, perhaps only one speaker who refers to other characters and whom the reader experiences only through that 'central intelligence.' But when characters do figure, they might have quite defined attributes. My interest is, I think, to explore them more from the inside out than from the outside in, if you will—laying bare their psyches through involution of syntax, as if syntax itself were the objective correlative—rather than giving a host of external details from which the reader can deduce internal 'truths.' One could view my work as a fiction of the psychological epiphenomena of event. My tendency toward abstraction may be felt by some conventional readers to hold them at a distance, but I hope the psychological intensity compensates for this."

Norman Fischer, from his essay "Do You Want to Make Something Out of It?":

The reason we need art so desperately I would say is that the world and we ourselves persist in being made. There is something exhausting and troublesome in the madeness of the world and in the madeness of ourselves. What is made has always the quality of limitation or unsatisfactoriness. Madeness captures us into a vicious cycle of desiring more madeness or better madeness, and the madeness we get only makes us want to make improvements or additions. Art making is an anti-making. It is an anti-making because it is a making of what is useless--this is what makes art art, that it is useless, that it doesn't do anything, that it is something inherently unmade and this is the source of its liveliness. Any piece of art stares us in the face with the fact of its being what it is uselessly, it is a record of a person's commitment to the confrontation with the made, a confrontation one is bound to come away from second best, and yet one does it, and reaches a peak of exaltation in the doing of it, and the art work facing the viewer or hearer is a phenomenal testament to that useless confrontation, which by virtue of its supreme failure, calls our life into question. If you really look at a piece of art or hear a piece of music or poetry or see a dance, you walk away wondering about your life. This is what these objects are supposed to do, this is why artists make such sacrifices in the doing of what they do--because this doing is the undoing at least temporarily of what has done them in in their lives and would do them in to the point of death or madness if it weren't undone in the process of making art.

Wigleaf is featuring two stories of mine this week: "The Old Church" and "Sister Finds a Box." Check out the postcard I sent, too.

My story "None of Your Business" is the web feature at Hobart today. I've been reading daily since they rebooted the web site, and it's been spectacular. Very happy to be part of it.

I am very happy to see "Bible Camp" on the long list of Wigleaf's Top (Very) Short Fictions of 2012. Thanks to Scott Garson and Ravi Mangla for including my story and for creating this list every year, which is such a wonderful resource for everyone interested in the form of the short short story. (Here's the link to the Top 50.) I see that Ravi is stepping down from his role as Series Editor for this list and that Lauren Ellen Scott will take over, along with Mel Bosworth, Erin Fitzgerald, and Sean Lovelace. It'll be exciting to see what the next year will bring.

My story "Little Man" is in Fairy Tale Review (The Grey Issue), guest edited by Alissa Nutting. It will debut at AWP this month. I'm really excited to see the issue. Just look at the list of contributors. From the web site:

"2012’s Fairy Tale Review (The Grey Issue) is our eighth annual issue and will debut at the 2012 AWP Convention in Chicago, going up for sale at SPD at the same time. It is a themed issue, dedicated to lost boys and lost girls. In the Editor’s Note, Alissa Nutting, author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, writes: “ Getting lost is one of the most widely used narrative vehicles of all time. Once characters become lost, they can stumble upon anything—it’s a light speed bullet train between credibility and suspension of disbelief. Falling down a rabbit hole or stepping off the trail in a labyrinthine wood can transport a character to another world entirely in a manner of seconds.” Contributors to The Grey Issue are Seth Abramson, Matt Bell, Molly Bendall, Wyatt Bonikowski, Brittany Cavallaro, Maile Chapman, Mimi Chubb, Tara Goedjen, Sara Gong, Carol Guess, Aireanne Hjelle, Desiree Holman, Ashley Elizabeth Hudson, Shane Jones, Jessica Joslin, Krystal Languell, David Lasky, Stacey Levine, Oksana Marafioti, Adam McOmber, Christopher Merkner, Benjamin Nadler, Andi Olsen, Lance Olsen, Daniela Olszewska, David James Poissant, Gretchen Steele Pratt, Imad Rahman, Matthew Salesses, Kevin Sampsell, Davis Schneiderman, J. A. Tyler, Lee Upton, Laura Van Den Berg, Rob Walsh, Jillian Weise, Kellie Wells, Elizabeth Clark Wessel, Deborah Woodard, John Dermot Woods."

My story "Bible Camp" is in the new issue of SmokeLong Quarterly, chosen by xTx when she was Guest Editor. I mentioned this a couple weeks ago, but what's new is the short interview that xTx did with me about the story, which you can read here.

If you're in the Boston area and have a chance to see Jim Shepard read either tonight at Newtonville Books or tomorrow night at Harvard Bookstore, do so! Not only is he an incredible writer and his new collection, You Think That's Bad, one of the best short story collections I've read in recent years, but he's a very entertaining reader of his work. Even more, he's a great guy and generous with students, as we found this past April when he accepted my invitation to visit Suffolk University to give a reading from the new book and meet with creative writing students. Go see him read. Buy the book. Read stories about apocalyptic floods in the Netherlands, the invention of the Godzilla monster, the 15th century mass murderer Gilles de Rais, and many others, and marvel at his ability to be so damn convincing about all of it.

I'm happy to announce that my story "Bible Camp" is featured this week at SmokeLong Quarterly, chosen by Guest Editor xTx, author of Normally Special. And it is accompanied by some beautiful art by Shannon Reynolds.

An eclectic summer reading list so far:

Sisters by a River, Barbara Comyns's first novel (1947)

Hangsaman, Shirley Jackson's second novel (1951), which I re-read along with a handful of favorite Jackson short stories, "The Daemon Lover," "The Beautiful Stranger," "The Tooth," and "The Rock." Also her children's book, The Witchcraft of Salem Village (1956).

A bunch of Tintin books, which I'm reading with my daughter, along with Tom McCarthy's Tintin and the Secret of Literature, which I'm not reading with my daughter.

Currently reading Rebecca West's The Meaning of Treason and the new collection of previously uncollected prose The Essential Rebecca West.

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The internet is a lovely thing. In doing a bit of Google-searching on William Joyce, the British fascist hanged for treason who is the subject of the first essay in West's book mentioned above, I was reminded of David Britton's Lord Horror novels and comics, none of which I've actually read, but in which Joyce appears ("Lord Horror" is a play on Joyce's radio broadcast nickname "Lord Haw-Haw"). Following some links I came across the work of artist John Coulthart, who produced with David Britton the Lord Horror comic Reverbstorm, and who has a blog full of fascinating reading. (He's working on something new with Alan Moore called The Soul as well.) One of his recent blog entries, among other interesting items, links to China Miéville on Lord Horror and other alternative histories of note, including the film Notting Hill (see link and also below).

Meanwhile, on one of my favorite web sites, Montevidayo, Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson are writing about China Miéville, monsters, kitsch, and jouissance.

I'll leave with this quotation from Miéville's summary of Notting Hill:

"To celluloid, and a movie of brilliant, chilling, minatory vision. Roger Michell and Richard Curtis's is a dystopian image of contemporary London after the triumphant rise of some unseen fascist authority. With searing rage, the film underscores the totality of this victory, this dreadful alternative path, in its depiction of Notting Hill, famous for its Afro-Caribbean community and culture, as successfully ethnic cleansed. An area defined by diversity, the history of the British Black Power movement, the Mangrove restaurant, Claudia Jones and social struggle, is, with satire more bitter than Dean Swift's, stripped of people of colour, the streets instead wholly populated with mindless, twittering, wittering, lily-white rich. There is no more Carnival, with its history in struggle and play, nor shall there ever be again. A bravura cinematic hell to be shelved alongside Pasolini's Salò."

"Then I decided that this disorder and this dilemma, revealed by my desire to write on Photography, corresponded to a discomfort I had always suffered from: the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical; and at the heart of this critical language, between several discourses, those of sociology, of semiology, and of psychoanalysis--but that, by ultimate dissatisfaction with all of them, I was bearing witness to the only sure thing that was in me (however naïve it might be): a desperate resistance to any reductive system."

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Charles Burns's X'ed Out makes me hope the next volume comes out much more quickly than Black Hole, which took ten years. First of all, the book looks beautiful, over-sized and brilliant color, reminding me a bit of those reprinted hardcover EC horror comics that I subscribed to as a young teenager. Burns has mashed up EC with Tintin into a kind of horror-adventure dreamscape. It's hard to keep track of the narrative, the multiple times and spaces Burns is playing around with. We open with a Tintin look-alike following his dead cat into an exotic, desert village, where a guide eventually helps him find something to eat--eggs--and tells him that a woman they see passing is the new queen of what appears to be a large beehive (this serves as the cliffhanger that ends the book). This part of the narrative--which we cut back to throughout the book--appears to be the vivid dream world of the main character Doug, who has been in some sort of accident (he has a bandage on his head), has haunting memories of his father, and has been (still is?) involved in an intense relationship with a photographer who has a predilection for pig fetuses and self-mutilation. Doug is something of an amateur performance artist who wears a Tintin mask and calls himself Nitnit while playing a tape of ambient noise and reading cut-up text inspired by Burroughs.

Also, large red speckled eggs make multiple appearances.

The above makes this work sound jumbled, as cut up as Burroughs perhaps, but instead of frenetic energy, we get cool, elegant, and haunting threads of story and a tension between playful wry humor and the earnest yearning of teenage angst. But what impresses me most about Burns's work, and this is true of Black Hole as well, is way the narrative follows an associative dream logic, in which repeated images surface in different contexts, vibrating with a palpable meaning that remains out of reach. The narrative is circling something (what's in those eggs? what's through that hole?), a navel, as Freud might call it, "the spot that reaches down into the unknown." One never knows what will emerge--part of the pleasure of this sort of narrative--but it will likely be both horrifying and fascinating, it will repeat itself endlessly in different guises, it will never fully come to light.

Leslie Scalapino (1944-2010)

Obituary
Ron Silliman's extensive list of links, which includes some of her essays and poetry, audio readings, and reviews and discussions of her work.

One of the first books I began reading this summer after grades were due was Scalapino's selected poems It's go in horizontal (reviewed here in Jacket), and I am looking forward to reading her most recent book, Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows (reviewed here at Tarpaulin Sky).

Reading Scalapino is having your mind patiently fractured, your grammar interrupted by another grammar, and by mind and grammar I mean also perception of the body, of the social and political as outside crossing inside, being thought one word at a time, word and pause, pause and word. You must pay attention.

Wigleaf has announced its Top 50 very short fictions 2010, selected by Brian Evenson. I'm happy to say my story "The Devil Called Satan Had Me for a Snack" made the list (see the stories in Action, Yes on the sidebar), and even happier to be in the company of such excellent work, both on the Top 50 and the long list. Editor Scott Garson is a great champion of this form, and he's doing a real service to writers and readers in highlighting these fictions and the journals that publish them, as he's been doing for the past few years. His foreword and Evenson's introduction are both worth reading. Garson is right that this is a "boom time" for very short fiction (which Garson's rules for selection define as under 1000 words), largely because of the editors of web journals who support this new-ish genre and the "real openness," as Garson puts it, that the form demands of both writers and readers. As Evenson writes, "The future of short-short fiction seems to me increasingly to be found online."

Those who braved the weather to walk against 55-mph winds and sideways rain and make their way to Suffolk University's Poetry Center in the Sawyer Library, overlooking Boston's Granary Burying Ground (one of my favorite views in the city), this past Thursday evening were rewarded with J. Robert Lennon's lively reading of stories from Pieces for the Left Hand, Oulipean exericses (e.g., sentences made out of every letter of the alphabet), and, the main event, a brand new and very funny short story about a college campus tour. Lennon is an engaging and inspiring speaker, and a great guy all around. I had a wonderful time chatting with him about our mutual love of David Foster Wallace, our interests in genre fiction, and hobbies such as music, cooking, photography, and raising chickens. Those hobbies are mostly his, by the way. How he has time to get any writing done is a mystery to me. He was also an excellent additional voice in that day's fiction workshop, which I'm sure the two students whose stories were discussed especially appreciated, and we all learned from.

If you don't already know Lennon's work, I urge you to seek it out. Pieces for the Left Hand, his collection of 100 (!) short short stories about a small town in upstate New York, and Castle, a haunting gothic novel that becomes a surprisingly relevant commentary on our post-9/11 world, are his most recent, and his best, in my humble opinion.