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thehairsplitter · 9 years ago

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These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins

by Kevin O’Rourke, August 19, 2015

Nate Ragolia, There You Feel Free, Black Hill Press 2014

Diffusion; or, What PoMo Has Wrought “Nontraditional” works of literature that play postmodern games with genre and form present special problems for reviewers. At their most experimental, as in Nate Ragolia’s 2014 novella There You Feel Free, multi-genre, formally inventive books can read less like books than works of art that so happen to be written down and published as “books.” How does one discuss the usual things discussed in fiction reviews (characters, plot, whether the conflict is satisfactorily resolved) when such things are not a book’s primary concern? What does one say about a work like There You Feel Free that is less interested in telling a story than imparting a series of impressions?

That There You Feel Free’s publisher Black Hill Press classifies the book as a “novella” at all seems almost an accident of classification: well, what’s a publisher to do? It’s gotta be something! And sure, much of There You Feel Free is indeed a novella, albeit one without chapters or page numbers or clear plots to follow (more on that later). And its opening pages are comprised of a poem. Namely, a modern, hipster-culture-focused rewrite of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” with endnote reference numbers. Here’s an example:

Unreal youth, Under the bandannas and slick shades Mr. Nick Diamonds, the Unicorns lead Unhappy, with pockets of guitar picks R.I.P. his band: a full crowd on site, Said idiomatically He’d much rather move to the Islands now Followed by a vacation to the mainstream.58

So then: not only is There You Feel Free a mixed-genre book, and one that makes prodigious use of endnotes (the above reference number corresponds to an endnote in which a character listens to the Unicorns’s 2003 album Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone? and then gets angry at the TV show How I Met Your Mother), it’s also a book steeped in appropriation. Rather, therefore, than attempt to write a straightforward review of this book—which without burying the lede too much, I enjoyed—what follows takes a page, so to speak, out of Ragolia’s book and will jump around a bit. Stick with me folks; we’ll get there together.

Appropriation, Plagiarism, Sourcing, and Homage

In 1996, the British writer Christopher Hitchens published an essay in Vanity Fair titled “Steal This Article,” on plagiarism. Which article includes a portion of “Waste Land,” a poem by one Madison Cawein, published in 1913. Portions of which, Hitchens noted, are quite similar, suspiciously so, to the much more famous “The Waste Land,” by T.S. Eliot. Which was published in 1922. Take it away, Hitch:

Madison Cawein was a Cincinnati pool-hall cashier who died one year after his “Waste Land” was published. It was printed in a Chicago magazine of which Ezra Pound—Eliot’s friend and mentor—was European editor. Eliot had submitted a poem of his own to this very magazine. Moreover, in the self same issue in which Cawein’s “Waste Land” appeared, there was also an essay by Pound on poetry in London, which it is highly unlikely that Eliot would not have wanted to read.

Hitchens’s point being that the similarities between Cawein’s poem—

I looked at the man; I saw him plain; Like a dead weed, gray and wan Or a breath of dust …

—and Eliot’s—

And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

—are striking enough to raise the worst question one can raise about an artist’s work: is it plagiarism? What if it isn’t authentic? What if, ahem, the work is stolen?

If plagiarism is writing’s greatest bogeyman, then appropriation is plagiarism’s mild-mannered cousin. Though appropriation doesn’t present nearly the severity of problems that plagiarism does—it can be argued that appropriation is a mere tactic while plagiarism is an overt act of dishonesty (intended or otherwise)—appropriation does present similar issues. As in: like plagiarism, appropriation is essentially an act of theft, of using others’ work or products as the basis for your own. It uses, and no amount of author’s notes or artist’s statements can obscure that fact. Even at its best, appropriation intentionally twists the thing it is appropriating; at its worst, appropriation co-ops and distorts (see any number of essays on cultural appropriation for evidence).

Appropriation is There You Feel Free’s bread and butter. After all, the book uses “The Waste Land”—an incredibly famous (albeit possibly half-plagiarized) poem written in the aftermath of World War I, a war that caused millions upon millions of deaths—as the jumping-off point for a mixed-genre poem/novella about the condition of an incredibly privileged, narcissistic, pop-culture-obsessed subset of Western youths. Namely, Millenials.

What’s more, this book—which by appropriating “The Waste Land” at least implicitly compares the condition of said hipster Millenials to that of youths who survived World War I, or came of age in its aftermath, a time marked by a dearth of young men or at least young men who hadn’t been touched by the war—begins with an honest-to-god rewriting of said famous poem, which has become so famous that it seems like no one teaches it anymore (never mind the fact that it’s a modernist document of the highest degree, abounding in obscure references and lapsing into Ancient Greek whenever the hell it wants, for effect, which makes teaching difficult).

All of which prompted two initial reactions on my part:

Disbelief: What? An actual rewrite of “The Waste Land”? Who does Ragolia think he is?

Incredulity: Is Ragolia really comparing Millenials, the “me me me generation,” to the post-WWI generation?

Neither of which reactions, I admit, are particularly conducive to clear-headed, review-minded reading. But such is the power of appropriation: it has a nasty way of overwhelming or obscuring authorial intent, especially when the piece being appropriated is well-known enough that readers, or viewers, might already have a relationship with the original work of art. It is akin to casting enormously famous A-list actors in character roles: as much as I’m supposed to see Ethan Hunt, superspy, hanging from a building in Dubai, what I really see is Tom Cruise, movie star, pretending to be a superspy, hanging from a building in Dubai. Back to There You Feel Free and its use of “The Waste Land.” Though its opening pages left me initially skeptical of the book, it works. While I don’t think the book’s first section, a literal rewriting of “The Waste Land,” with lots of reference numbers to endnotes sprinkled throughout, works, as a whole the book is an interesting, compelling project. However, the book’s best work—its meat, if you will—is all to be found in its endnotes. More about that later—to get to those endnotes, one must read through Ragolia’s reworked “The Waste Land,” titled “The(se) Waste(d) Land(ings).”

Which can be a slog. Though the poem is occasionally effective, it mainly feels like an exercise. Which is not to say it contains nothing to admire; “The(se) Waste(d) Land(ings)” is an impressive facsimile of “The Waste Land,” down to replicating the syllable count of the original. For comparison, here are the opening lines of both poems:

The Waste Land

1. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

And now Ragolia’s:

The(se) Wasted Landings

1. The Surreal of the Kid

Polaroid’s the cruelest myth, framing Youth out of Instagram, recreating Memory and history, spilling Sepia tones into spring scenes.

Ragolia’s “updated” version of “The Waste Land” maintains a remarkable faithfulness to the original for its entire length. But it is a cheap sort of homage, impressive more for how closely it follows its source material than for its effectiveness as its own poem. It gives the impression of having begun as either a workshop piece or a writing exercise.

And as far as There You Feel Free as a whole is concerned, the opening poem seems to function less as an important part of its book than a carrier for the endnote reference numbers that will send the reader to the book’s most important section, its endnotes. For in an inversion of form, most of There You Feel Free’s bulk is found in the book’s endnotes, which calls for a discussion of its own.

On Endnotes, On Structure, On Sincerity

So now a brief discussion of endnotes. Or, more properly, a discussion of what we might call contemporary literature’s appropriation of endnotes: using endnotes to supplant rather than support the text; making the endnote the thought itself rather than an afterthought; using endnotes in such a way that they cannot be ignored, in the way ‘normal,’ academic endnotes—short, dry, informative but dull—can be.

Blame for such a use or misuse of endnotes can be placed pretty firmly at David Foster Wallace’s feet. Though other literary writers have used of foot- and endnotes, Wallace is perhaps the most infamous and frequent user thereof. His 1996 novel Infinite Jest (full disclosure: I have read Infinite Jest several times, cover to cover) features nearly 100 pages of endnotes, including several mini-stories and a (fictional, mind you) character’s entire, lengthy (fictional) filmography.

Ragolia’s There You Feel Free also makes extremely prominent use of endnotes. In fact, much of the book is comprised of endnotes: of its 200-odd pages, There You Feel Free’s “The Waste Land”-appropriating “The(se) Waste(d) Land(ings), only takes up 21 pages. The rest of the book, which is somewhat annoyingly unpaginated, is comprised of various notes, errata, and full-on short stories that refer back to “The(se) Waste(d) Land(ings).” Which is a nice subversion of the subject/reference endnote dynamic, a la Foster Wallace, except for what may be There You Feel Free’s biggest issue: the endnotes, particularly the longer character stories to be found therein, are much more interesting than the book’s take on “The Waste Land.” I did not use two bookmarks when reading this book; at no point did I look up a note’s reference number to see how that note fit into the poem’s structure. I read on.

I read on, in part, because I’ve always resisted writers’ clever attempts to turn books into interactive texts around which readers are supposed to jump, turning from page 10 to page 224 and then back to page 9 as if the book were a physical puzzle as opposed to document intended to be read from front to back. But I also read on because much of There You Feel Free’s supposed end matter—it is, after all, unpaginated—makes for compelling reading.

The endnotes’ subjects—the sometimes-intersecting lives of a series of young characters, all trying to find their way in the world—flow into one another and change without much if any pronouncement that they are doing so. But rather than hampering the reading experience, the artifice of telling There You Feel Free’s main stories via endnotes ends up being quite effective. Because the endnotes are ordered by number, as opposed to being organized in a more traditional chapter-and-verse fashion, they often read nonlinearly (except of course for their relation to the book’s opening poem). Moreover, if There You Feel Free has a main theme it is confusion; the book’s form therefore follows its content

For example, note #27 is a definition of the game of kickball, followed by a brief history thereof, and the self-referential sentences “The second canto of “The(se) Waste(d) Land(ings) isn’t about kickball at all. Except for when it is.” Note #28 is about a character named Cheyenne and a group of friends who play kickball under the nom de guerre the “Knit Kickers.” Note #29, meanwhile is an ‘excerpt’ from an On the Fashion Beat (which I presume is not a real magazine) article about tights: “Tights are the new pants... Pop your perky bottom into a pair of black ones and you’ll never go unnoticed.” Such abrupt changes in subject and tone are typical throughout the book.

Of particular interest is the story of the character Doug Valentin, a quasi-agoraphobic social media addict whose seems to exist to comment on Millennials and how obsession with the Internet can be unhealthy. For example, several Valentin endnotes end with variations on the refrain “I have 457 friends. I’m popular. I’m very happy. Life is good.” to underscore the fleeting nature of social media fulfillment; with how many of your Facebook “friends” are you actually friends? And so on. An example, from what I’m pretty sure is a manifesto Valentin authored (part of the fun and frustration of There You Feel Free is that one is sometimes unsure of who is speaking or who is the subject of a given note):

We can find the answers we want, but we’ve forgotten how to do the research. We can make connections easily, but we’ve forgotten how to make them last. We have transformed into a generation of talkers who use all of the tools the digital world affords us to continue talking, entertaining, honing, and discrediting.

We each own a pulpit, so no one is in the audience.

This is powerful stuff, and a concise, damning critique of a generation lampooned as overly Internet-obsessed. But despite the heavy tone of the above, the book ultimately ends on something of a hopeful note, echoing the ending of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which I will quote at relative length:

I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow Le Prince d’Acquitaine à la tour abolie These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih

As Eliot notes in his own poem’s endnotes, a “a feeble translation of” of “shantih” is “the Peace which passeth understanding.” Thus a poem that begins in April—the “cruellest month,” in which lilacs are bred out of a dead land, “mixing / Memory and desire”—ends with transcendent peace. Or hope (signaled by the repetition of the word, as if in supplication) for peace. Or simply a recitation that peace, peace, peace, exists.

Befitting its genesis in appropriation, There You Feel Free ends similarly. As noted, the book’s endnotes are comprised of the sometimes-intersecting stories of individual characters, the final one of which is that of Nick, a thirty-five-year-old erstwhile musician who has seen his dreams of being an artist fade into the banality and disappointment of unattached adulthood. The book ends on a (perhaps somewhat mawkish but touching) scene of Nick finally getting together with Riley, with whom he’d previously been friends, after being as oblivious to her quietly loving him as only a single man wallowing in his own sadness in a studio apartment can be:

Nick’s feet don’t touch the sidewalk as he walks home. When he gets inside, he takes out his guitar and plays. He starts to write a new song. It doesn’t need to mean anything. He just wants it to flow out of him. Being alive now, in this life, with his choices is a glorious thing.

The final endnote of the book relates back to the final line of “The(se) Waste(d) Land(ings),” which is “Dulcet dulcet dulcet.” Echoing Eliot’s final endnote to “The Waste Land,” Ragolia defines “dulcet” as: “(especially sweet of sound) sweet and soothing (often used ironically).”

Except of course that I don’t believe he’s using it ironically. After I finished There You Feel Free, I began to wonder if all of the “experimental,” postmodern devices Ragolia used in the book—the appropriation, the endnotes, the nonlinear structure of the characters’ stories—was a veneer for a much more straightforward book about a series of young friends trying to find themselves, ending on a note of most definitely uncool hope. Certainly embedding such a story in a grander, nonlinear project of appropriation (of “The Waste Land,” no less) is one way to make what might have been a rather milquetoast piece of a young writer’s bildungsroman much more interesting and clever.

Regardless, There You Feel Free is an affecting book, even if it (in the opinion of this reviewer) stumbles out of the gate. It is also a fine example of what small presses like Black Hill—which calls itself a “publishing collective,” so you know they’re small—can do. One can hardly imagine a large, New York-based publishing house taking a chance on such a challenging, formally experimental (yet nonetheless engaging novella) that rewards attentive reading. Dulcet dulcet dulcet.

…

Kevin O’Rourke lives in Seattle, where he works at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. His first book, the essay collection As If Seen at an Angle, is forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions.

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