Ver novum

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The snow is gone now. A few dead leaves still lie in the gutter, blown about by the speeding Chevrolet, but the grass is beginning to turn green. Seen through the swept-back windshield of his car, the driver grips his big steering wheel and leans forward as if he were racing. Elsewhere in the picture, stylized whooshes of dust fly backward from the car and the police motorcycle speeding ahead of it, escorting from the lead. Accurate representations of readily observable phenomena, the whooshes signify that the driver's body language is accurate. He is racing.

Sitting calmly upright even though he is exposed to the wind, the motorcycle policeman is old. Watching from the sidewalk as the fast little parade races past them is a couple with a leashed dog. Their carefully layered clothes and the leash on the dog signify cautious middle age. But the Chevrolet's grinning, beefy driver is young. In the passenger seat beside him is a woman, also young, habited in a kerchief and a fully buttoned coat. 

Her clothing signifies stillness, demureness, and buttons fully buttoned wherever on her body they may happen to be. Her eyes are modestly downcast. Her happy half-smile, lips fully closed, signifies, "I have a secret -- but if you love me, you'll know what it is and I won't have to tell you."

Birth has been translated from biology to drama, and its playwright and set designer are at work on a comedy of manners. The middle-aged couple have a dog and a leash in symmetry with the young couple who are about to have a baby and a baby carriage. The motorcycle patrolmen is old because in comedy it's the job of a kindly old man to help the juvenile and the ingenue overcome the disorder of Act 1 and drive on to establish their continuity with the wise past. So we all know: in Act 3 the sign on the vacant lot will have given way to another suburban house, and the freshly exposed earth on the hill in the background will be covered with more houses, each with its garage. 

Half a century ago, for reasons that don't seem very comprehensible now, people who read books found vehicular comedies like this oh terribly upsetting, especially when they were engineered out of money and hard steel but marketed as if they were the unstable fabric of a dream. A journalist whose name actually was John Keats wrote a book about the awfulness of it all and called it The Insolent Chariots (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1958), and at the end of "For The Union Dead" (1964) Robert Lowell bellowed,

          Everywhere,

giant finned cars nose forward like fish;

a savage servility

slides by on grease.

Lowell's histrionic elegy was for the moral greatness of Robert Gould Shaw and the artistic greatness of the sculptor who memorialized his part in a war against servility. That war can't be continued now, says Lowell. It can't even be spoken of, because its moral language has been replaced by the silent impulses of the animal in us and in our society. We are now in labor with silence, waiting with downcast eyes for time to deliver us.

But the young man's budget-model car in the painting is the pale yellow-green of new grass on a spring morning, and Samuel Johnson said this about the happy ending into which Nahum Tate delivered King Lear.

A play in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life: but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded, that the observation of justice makes a play worse; or, that if other excellencies are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue.

In the present case the public has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity.

It seems to have turned out that Tate's excellencies weren't equal to Shakespeare's after all. On the other hand, I used to teach Robert Lowell a lot more than I do now. And what do you drive through the empyrean, Dr. Johnson: a professormobile like my own pure and moral 2005 Nissan Sentra, or something more cheery?

Asunder: "It is, before all, to make you see"

To mark the 35th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the front page of the April 4, 2010, New York Times Book Review came into our homes speaking of two novels about the Vietnam War. One of these, Karl Marlantes's Matterhorn, was a first book which (according to the reviewer, Sebastian Junger) took 30 years to write. "Reading his account of the bloody folly surrounding the Matterhorn outpost," breathes the awed Junger, "you get the feeling Marlantes is not overly worried about the attention span of his readers; you get the feeling he was not desperate or impatient to be published."

But then Junger quotes a sample of Marlantes's prose. It goes like this.

No, the jungle wasn't evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares.

Well, as Samuel Johnson said about the Metaphysical poets, "To write on their plan it was at least necessary to read and think." To write this passage, Merlantes seems to have read Conrad (Heart of Darkness), Emerson (the Divinity School Address -- "Evil is merely privative. It is like cold, which is the privation of heat"), and Hemingway (passim).

But "asunder"?

In prose that attempted an act of representation all the way down to the heart of language, the washerwomen on the Liffey once listened and sighed and wondered:

Waterhouse's clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it? (213)

"Asunder" is a word signifying separation in a definitive way. It is to "apart," say, as adieu is to au revoir. Whispering such significances through intervals between the words in its lexicon, Finnegans Wake would seem to be an instructive textbook in the language of loss of meaning, negation, and the subsumption of the human into wordless time. But Finnegans Wake doesn't seem to be part of the library underlying Matterhorn. If Marlantes and Junger and the New York Times Book Review had a theory of language in mind when they wrote their words down and showed them to us, it was probably not much more ambitious than the serviceable goal that Joseph Conrad had in mind in 1897 when he wrote his preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus":

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel -- it is, before all, to make you see. That -- and no more, and it is everything.

But on the day in 1975 when the helicopters took off from the rooftops of Saigon, could it still be everything? In its formal capacity of an agent of the power of the written word, the New York Times Book Review doesn't seem to believe that itself.

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Even the compositor's math will convince you of that. Of the four columns on this page, prose occupies the one on the left and the one on the right, but the two in the center are all a wordless image by an artist whose wordy name is reduced to a fine-print legality in the corner, Patrick Thomas. On the page, the wordless image is the only thing close to a work of art -- that is, a piece of representation capable of lifting us off the page. Remembering as we rise free of the undistinguished prose on its margins, we look back at the picture and see silhouettes of Blackhawk helicopters and F-4 bombers, of peace signs and a map of Vietnam. The color scheme is camouflage, and that helps us set the silhouettes to words of our own -- moralizing words, nostalgia words circa 2010.

But two more of the silhouettes are redacted versions of images that evoked words in their own time: Eddie Adams's 1968 photograph of South Vietnamese national police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan blowing a handcuffed prisoner's brains out and Nick Ut's 1972 photograph of a scattering crowd of screaming children fleeing before a napalm attack. America saw those images shortly after their artists interacted with history to bring them forth, and after that it was harder to read Heart of Darkness as simply as Conrad had written it -- and harder too, of course, to think about war as it had been thought about in Conrad's time. Something in the relation between a writer and his readers had been sundered. Thanks to photographic technology, some of the artist's responsibility for making us see had passed from the written word to an instrumentality of less mediated sight.

So it may be that Matterhorn will ultimately have less to say about the Vietnam War than Finnegans Wake. Situated on a borderline between direct seeing and direct speech, whispering to us in dream language of an experience that its words can never completely make us see, Finnegans Wake may be readable as an episode in the representation of the extreme. And in the way it places words before us as simply there, irreducible to any morality except its own grammar, it begins to seem, in certain lights, like a photograph.