Hic Sum

photos: Paul Auster (Lotte Hansen), J.M Coetzee (Bert Nienhuis)

In his review of Here and Now, Letters 2008-2011, (New York Times Book Review, 3/16/13) Martin Riker remarks, “Arriving at the end of the print-letter tradition, Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee’s collected correspondence, ‘Here and Now,’ is all about new beginnings.” Whether these letters will compete with Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, James Agee and Father Flye and a host of other literary and historic figures who have thrived in the epistolary form, only time will tell. But one thing's obvious from the pictures of the two writers that accompany the review. They are the last of a generation of writers that modeled their publicity photos on the great writers and creations of the past. Lotte Hansen’s photo of Auster’s makes him look like Mr. Kurtz after he saw the Heart of Darkness.  Bert Nienhuis photo of Coetzee is more stoic; he looks a little like Conrad himself, set against a background of civilized vegetation. The self presentation of most writers today is more veiled by the ironies that their own works offer. Sam Lipsyte, George Saunders, and the Bens, Lerner and Marcus, don’t look this way. You might say that our post-modernist generation suffers from an anxiety of the anxiety of influence in which they discountenance a form of photograph that makes them look like they are this year’s contribution to the canon. One can love Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but one wouldn’t wish O’Neill’s existence on one’s worst enemy.

The Golden Vanity

Photo: Coffee House Press

Ben Lerner’s The Golden Vanity which appeared in the June 16^th New Yorker is a story about a subject that will ring a bell with anyone who’s had problems with their teeth. Extraction is the ostensible area of concern and the catalyst for what transpires is the choice of a local or the I.V. anesthetic, twilight. “The difference between twilight sedation and local anesthesia was not primarily a difference in the amount of pain, but in the memory of it,” Lerner’s protagonist identified simply as “the author” remarks. “The benzodiazepines calm you during the procedure, yes, but their main function is to erase your memory of whatever transpires.” Actually “the author” functions as both a character in the story and an analogue for what might be called the executive function of the brain. In an age in which we're increasingly conscious of consciousness in its neurological, psychological and phenomenological aspects, Lerner offers up a piece of fiction that is Descartes (to the extent that it delves into the very question of what makes us thinking animals) written in the style of Pascal’s Pensees, to the extent that it’s rendered in aphorism, not on the subject of God and man, but about man and thought. All the musings of “the author” partake of the Kantian dichotomy between noumena and phenomena. For instance, here is the author on meeting a character named Hannah who may or may not exist. “Would you know what he meant if the author said he never really saw her face, that faces were fictions he increasingly could not read, a reductive way of bundling features in the memory, even if that memory was then projected into the present, onto the area between the forehead and chin.” While students of neuroscience might recognize this as an example prosopagnosia, a condition characterized by the inability to identify faces (and mentioned later in the story), it’s employed here to exemplify pareidolia, which the author’s Hannah describes as occurring “when the brain arranges random stimuli into a significant image or sound.” The locutions of The Golden Vanity are delectable. The author’s therapist Dr. Roberts sits in front of “a tactically inoffensive abstract painting, rhythmic brushstrokes in lavender , blue, green—very competently executed visual Muzak.” There are other characters, his brother, his sister-in-law and his nephews (one of whom is named Theo—after van Gogh’s brother?), Liza who seems to be the author’s significant other and whose “characteristic” was “to begin an activity by claiming she’d have not part in it.” We all know people with that kind of negative capability. However, you never know never know who or what is real or not. But then again, isn’t that what happens when you go to the dentist and get numbed up?