Eve after Anthropocentrism: A Review of Sandy Florian’s [speak and spell]
by Robert Savino Oventile
Before publishing [speak and spell] in the Black Warrior Review’s Chapbook Series, Sandy Florian had already proven herself a formidable talent. Consider her works Telescope, The Tree of No, Prelude to Air from Water, On Wonderland & Waste, and Boxing the Compass, each as distinct in style and tone from each as they all are from [speak and spell]. Florian walks away from repeat performances. Yet repetition and retelling become cruxes in [speak and spell], formally, thematically, and interpretatively.
What do we have? Except for a section of margin-to-margin text of just over two pages in length, each of [speak and spell]’s thirty-five pages consists of a sprinkling of words, phrases, and occasionally sentences artfully placed about the page in question. As with Florian’s writings generally, [speak and spell] defies easy generic classification: a set of poems? a short story? a drama? a sequence of textual canvases obliquely forming a narrative, something like the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman’s cycle The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani? Another venue for the publication of [speak and spell] would be an art gallery able to accommodate thirty-five three-foot by five-foot canvases, each a page of the text, with a thirty-sixth canvas, the title page, located at the gallery’s entrance.
For the curator, writing the informational/interpretive placards to accompany each canvas would be a challenge. Imagine those placards quote from [speak and spell]. The notion of “organic unity” suggests each part of a text manifests the whole: a quote stands as a synecdoche of the work. With [speak and spell], in quoting any of the words, phrases, or sentences, the interpreter loses the positioning of that word, phrase, or sentence on the given page and in relation to that page’s other words, phrases, and sentences. To quote from [speak and spell] resembles reproducing and attempting to discuss in isolation a single brushstroke from a painting. Or, since on many of the pages the composition invites the reader to consider several available syntactic possibilities, to quote from [speak and spell] is like trying to explicate an Alexander Calder mobile by examining a detached piece resting immobile on a table. More than most literary works, [speak and spell] resists quotation, due to the dynamic particularities of spacing and iteration burgeoning on the pages. When I quote from [speak and spell], I will lose those particularities. My quotes will be “quotes.” But should I assume [speak and spell]’s spacings and iterations only perform organic unity? Besides organic relations of synecdoche, the words, phrases, and sentences of [speak and spell] also revel in their myriad and contingent metonymic juxtapositions. Perhaps each sentence, phrase, and word even enjoys retreating into an abyssal withdrawal, as if each were a black hole or an object, as Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology defines the term: “a genuine reality deeper than any theoretical or practical encounter with it” and “deeper than any relations in which it might become involved, whether with humans” or with any entity whatsoever, animate or inanimate (9, 10).
What if the gallery’s curator were to begin with some commentary on [speak and spell]’s themes? The curator could place next to the title-page canvas a placard stating, “In this series of works, Sandy Florian engages the Biblical tradition, including the Adam and Eve story and the divergent notions of ‘the beginning’ evident in Genesis 1 and John 1.” Taking such a thematic tack, the curator might have the easiest time writing the placard for a page late in [speak and spell] on which words curve down sinuously. Since at least one aspect of the arrangement of the words on this page mimes visually the words’ referents, a description may provide a reasonably verisimilar notion of the page in question. The curator might write, “The artist positions words to form an s-curve suggestive of the body, motion, and track of the Biblical serpent. These words are readable as a sentence: ‘then back to the thicket slunk the serpent’ (211).”
[speak and spell] does conjure the Adam and Eve story. Yet Florian concerns herself with the seeming inevitability with which that story reconvenes in the near foreground or the far background when an author working say in English attempts to tell a story or when a reader seeks to decipher said story. Adding to the reader’s challenge, and specifically to the critic’s interpretive challenge, Florian stages within [speak and spell] a critic who insists on “teaching us to retell his own story about adam & eve” (194). To review [speak and spell], I need to invoke the Adam and Eve story. Yet, when I do so, I move from writing about [speak and spell] to being implicated in [speak and spell]: I am a critical interpreter insisting on, and on the retelling of, the Adam and Eve story.
A repeat performance of the Adam and Eve story: how might an author walk away from that? Perhaps in writing Paradise Lost (which ends with Adam and Eve walking away) John Milton offered a hint: retell the story, yes, but do so allowing literary innovations and inventions to spark in an authentic repetition. And to provide further assistance James Joyce might offer the words from Ulysses about how the umbilical “cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh,” Joyce imagining those “navelcord[s]” as phone lines: “Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one” (32). Phones ring joyciferously in [speak and spell]. A telephone ring calls for a response, for a “Yes, hello? Who’s there?,” though in the moment of the ring the respondent responds (or not) without knowing who is calling or about what, at least prior to any form of caller ID, yet even caller ID remains another ring: in principle, any phone user, perhaps a human, can encounter a phone and dial. Even with caller ID, at the other end of the line anyone might have dialed to talk about anything. Consider this May 13, 2014 Huffington Post headline: “Hero Dog Shows Up Lassie, Uses iPhone To Call 911 And Saves Owner’s Life.” On December 9, 2010, the BBC website reported, “Cat Calls Police in Swansea Dialing 999.” The canine (who does rescue work) intentionally placed a call. On a phone table the cat was just lolling about asleep with a paw twitching in dream and incidentally tapping the telephone’s nine button. The feline unintentionally placed a call. The Athena Picture Agency provided the BBC a photo of the inadvertently cop-calling cat. An orange tabby, he looks unapologetic and unconcerned.
In [speak and spell], each word, phrase, and sentence rings. Who or what is calling about what or whom? Among the work’s characters, only some are simply or at all human, intentional, sentient, or animate. At one point, a phone chimes in: “a telephone without teeth or tongue” begins to ring: “gringring” (199, 200). [speak and spell]’s initially disorienting pages perform for readers, or lead readers to perform with awareness, the event of reading: registering the asemantic existence of marks on a page, harkening to the marks’ calls (“gringring”), and appropriating those marks semantically to determine addresser, addressee, and meaning. Through the reading event, an agon occurs within [speak and spell] and between [speak and spell] and the reader. An agon over what, over whom? To explore this question, let us consider a few of the characters in more detail, remembering that only some are living, sentient, intention bearing, or human. [speak and spell] prompts the question: can any human claim to be, without qualification or limit, alive, sentient, and intentional? The word “characters” can mean letters, but here I intend the word to refer to [speak and spell]’s fictional personages, animals, things, etcetera, though [speak and spell] wants to play with the distinction between “character” as letter and “character” as fictive person, animal, thing, etcetera: “i have one black eye” (211). And, given the mobility of syntax at work, to count the characters in [speak and spell] remains a precarious enterprise. For the moment, let us hypothesize that the work includes 1 + n characters. Please stay on the line.
Glancing at the work’s first page, the reader sees mostly non-italicized words, with a few words in italics at the bottom of the page. Among various sentences, the non-italicized words may form the following: “here i sermon[,] with my enchanting beak[,] of the mad, mad end of my appetite for speak” (186). The first character the reader encounters would speak or “sermon” about an “appetite” for speaking, but specifically about the “end” of that craving. No sooner does the character state this purpose or intention than the character speaks of another who listens. The character speaks about the listener’s strength: “how strong is he” (187). Are these words an exclamation (“how strong is he[!]”) or a question (“how strong is he[?]”)? Appearing without punctuation, the words can function as either or both. The character setting out to sermonize (to speak) about the end of the character’s gusto for speaking does so with a critic listening to, making sense of, and taking notes about the character’s speech: “how strong is he who harkens me & makes a faraway sense[,] noting in his little notebook all my ill-motions, ill-gestures, ill-twitches, ill-looks” (187). The character designates the critic as male. The critic’s notes appear in [speak and spell] in italics. For example, when the character speaks of the various ill features the character believes that the critic is noting down, the critic adds, “illness of the lips” (187).
While the character tells us the critic is male, does the character answer to the interpellation he, she, or it? The critic does refer to the character as “it,” though with the connotations of reification and abjection hovering about this pronoun usage (197). Given our new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene, with all sorts of entities beginning to speak up, the English pronoun system may require an overhaul. Perhaps contemporary English needs a wider variety of pronouns. Whether the character is male, female, human, animal, intentional, unintentional, animate, or inanimate [speak and spell] leaves ambiguous. Again, about the critic, the character offers the words, “how strong is he.” The character and the critic enter into a contest, an agon. The character may be exclaiming, “how strong is he[!]” The character may be questioning, “how strong is he[?]” in the sense of, “Will I be able to prevail over the critic in winning him over, or will the critic prevail over me in dispensing with me?” However, the question “how strong is he[?]” might also be asking, “Is the critic strong enough to enter into the contest with me?” This review’s thesis is that the imaginative and artistic strength of [speak and spell] justifies this last reading. Perhaps others, in other reviews, will attempt either to challenge or to verify this thesis. There is the literary event [speak and spell] is, and then there is the “faraway sense” any critic makes of that event.
The critic within [speak and spell] initially harbors doubts as to whether the character will be able to succeed in the character’s effort to speak about the end of the character’s hunger to speak. At the bottom of the text’s first page, the page on which the character begins to sermonize, the critic notes that the character does so “as deaf dolls hang tongueless from the tongueless tree” (186). Will the character succumb to the fate of these dolls? A threat of silence manifests, and the hanging dolls imply executions or suicides, though in the Platonic-Christian tradition, every suicide partakes of execution and every execution partakes of suicide. Consider the apostle Paul’s attempt to make us an offer we cannot refuse: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (King James Version, Rom. 6.23). Every human death becomes an execution. Paul would have us imagine that at the end of the living and dying process, death as capital punishment awaits as the payment for the debt we owe for our sin, a sin we committed willfully, iterating Adam’s willful sin. Paul imagines death as a capital punishment arriving to us from Adam’s and our own wills and so arriving as a kind of suicide. And who brought Adam to his willful sin? Eve did, who was brought to hers through speaking with a serpent.
In [speak and spell], the critic would neither be the character’s executioner nor prompt the character to suicide, the mirage of suicide, the mirage of execution. Yet the critic does undergo a vision of some unspecified entity “stringing up & burning down each shrieking freak on holy week” (198). The critic envisions the fate threatening characters who dare to speak as resembling a lynching or an auto-da-fé. The character proceeds in the context of a severe pressure toward silence. The greater an author’s ambition, the greater this pressure is. The critic contributes to this pressure, as the critic would teach the character “to retell his own story about adam & eve.” In The Tree of No, Florian retells the Biblical story of Adam and Eve through retelling Milton’s story of Adam and Eve. One way to read [speak and spell] would be as a meditation on and narration of the state of imaginative mind of an author attempting a work of audacious ambition.
Among much else, The Tree of No is a work of appropriation. To write The Tree of No, Florian stole words, phrases, and sentences from myriad authors and sources: writing as robbery. Consider how the character in [speak and spell] describes the acts of speech the character would commit (the brackets are the character’s): “why, i’d rather commit a robbery [make a speak] commit a good robbery [make a rum speak!] dispensing femmy shrieks & squeaks to a better place, like time square” (189). Think of Eden before the fall, all innocence, “nature,” and proper order, and then think of New York’s Times Square without prudish clean-up efforts though with full respect to the feminine, the animal, the unintentional, the inanimate. The character associates speech, and the character’s speech, with the feminine, with the animal (“a marmoset squeak” [188]), with the inanimate (“a telephone without teeth or tongue”), with the impropriety of robbery. The character distinguishes this speech from having to speak “more consciously,” that is, from having to speak “less dreamily” and under intention’s supervision (197).
Or rather, in retelling the Adam and Eve story, the character narrates Adam and Eve as facing pressure to internalize burdensome restrictions on their speech. In the character’s retelling, avatars of the “hangman god” (Joyce 175) drive Adam and Eve out of Eden and, dangling a noose before them, discipline the pair’s speech: “Notables were organed out, leading the pair by the noose, teaching them to speak more consciously, more broadly, more correctly, more generally, more properly, less richly, less dreamily, less prettily, less daintily” (196–97). To the speech lessons of the noose-wielding “Notables,” “He assented, but she dissented” (197). The character narrates Adam as caving to the “Notables” and Eve as resisting them. The critic teaches the character to retell “his,” the critic’s, Adam and Eve story. In doing so, the character underscores how the story is Eve’s too. The character’s retelling reminds readers that in Genesis Adam speaks formulaically and in obeisant response to God, but Eve speaks inventively, with personality, and in prelude to enacting her desire boldly. Before Eve’s creation, God announces to Adam the prohibition of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (2.16–17). Next, as the reader deduces, Adam conveys the prohibition to Eve. Then, when speaking to the serpent, Eve repeats God’s words, yet with a difference, adding about the forbidden fruit, “neither shall ye touch it” (3.3). When the character in [speak and spell] retells the story of Adam and Eve, the character retrieves the Eve who refuses to give way on her desire.
The critic notes the strength of imagination the character exhibits (“there is no note this bucket can’t sound” [195]), but after the character’s first installment of retelling the Adam and Eve story, the critic accuses the character of “coiling false oracles” (197). Yet the critic eventually does indirectly acknowledge the sublimity at work in the words he confronts: “if this were a different book i would imagine it occupied the same place of prophecy for it seems to be the very highest point of heaven, the very apogee, the very crown of language” (210). Here the critic exhibits weakness. Sublimity touches the critic through the character’s words, but the critic can only register that sublimity as displaced onto and misrecognized in a “different book.” And then, with the book actually before him (un)thought in terms of some hypothetical book elsewhere, the critic proceeds with praise evocative of sublimity, yes, but of a sublime to which the character’s sermon and retelling of the Adam and Eve story constitute a counter-sublime. The critic derives his hyperboles from praise of Christ as the sublime “apogee.” For example, Saint Thomas Aquinas argues in his Summa Theologica that Christ, Christ’s risen body, occupies “the very highest point of heaven” (Davies 34). Being the Logos, the Word, Christ would be, as the critic states, “the very crown of language.” Yet this Christian sublime envisions, at least in Paradise Lost, the eventual silencing of Eve (and of beasts, and of the inanimate, and of the unintentional) in the apocalyptic end of time when God will become all in all.
[speak and spell] ends as follows: “in the beginning was the apocalypse of all femmy shrieks & squeaks & in the beginning was the end” (215). [speak and spell] begins with the character stating an intent: to speak “of the mad, mad end of my appetite for speak.” Perhaps the critic’s most difficult challenge is to discuss [speak and spell]’s beginning/end motif. Troping this uroboric rhetorical commonplace, [speak and spell]’s character travels in august company. T.S. Eliot begins his poem “East Coker” with, “In my beginning is my end” and ends the poem with, “In my end is my beginning” (1, 209). In Hamlet, Shakespeare has the Player King declare, “But orderly to end where I begun” (3.2.201). Aristotle argues that all speakers riff on this beginning/end topos and that this topos necessarily links to that of the possible and the impossible. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle claims that in speaking, an orator inevitably asserts “that a thing has happened, or will happen in future,” and therefore the orator necessarily deploys “the topic of the Possible and Impossible” (129). Why? Aristotle elaborates: “Let us first speak of the Possible and Impossible. It may plausibly be argued” as follows:
That if the beginning of a thing can occur, so can the end; for nothing impossible occurs or begins to occur; thus the commensurability of the diagonal of a square with its side neither occurs nor can begin to occur. That if the end is possible, so is the beginning; for all things that occur have a beginning.
(129, 130)
If X began, X can end, and if X ends, X must have begun. Aristotle weaves into his discussion of the “Possible and Impossible” claims about the event of any possible thing: “nothing impossible occurs or begins to occur.” By “impossible” Aristotle implies something that begins yet never can end or that ends yet never did begin. The things with beginnings and ends are the possible things, and the end of any possible thing is implicit in the beginning of that thing, just as the end implies the beginning. For example, in [speak and spell], the very instant the character’s speaking begins testifies to that speaking’s end. An impossible speaking or word would begin without the possibility of ending or end without ever having begun.
Therefore Aristotle might have trouble with the Gospel According to St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God” (1.1–2). If the reader were to interpret the Word as preexistent, eternal, and so only participant in yet uncontaminated by “the beginning,” there would remain the problem for Aristotle of how, without beginning, this Word could end, that is, on the cross. A Christian death-of-God theologian might argue that, well, the Word was preexistent and eternal, yet with the Creation (“In the beginning God created” [Gen. 1.1]) the preexistent Word underwent a beginning, the beginning of incarnational creation, and the Word’s end on the cross was implicit in that beginning. Or does the incarnation story include a double impossibility: a Word without beginning ends (on the cross), a Word without end begins (in the resurrection)? This dual impossibility would occur just so the Logos, Christ, may end where he began, as the Word on high sublimely above and beyond all the words. As the critic notes in misrecognizing the character’s speaking as “a different book” instantiating the Word, “it seems to be the very highest point of heaven, the very apogee, the very crown of language.”
Perhaps the doom of the character’s speaking is to undergo this misrecognition and so to suffer a silencing, the silencing of the character’s speech in the Word. And perhaps in this manner the beginning of the speaker’s “appetite for speak” implies that appetite’s end. Or perhaps the character, in speaking, would solicit the event of another impossibility (distinct from a Christian impossibility) and so evade the fate of the character’s words disappearing through their misrecognition as a version of or as incarnating the Word. Let us consider this other impossibility. We will need to take a detour through Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Italian sonnet “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” Prominent beaks adorn kingfishers. “[W]ith my enchanting beak,” says Florian’s character. [speak and spell] echoes and explodes “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” or rather, Florian would retrieve and countersign the explosion Hopkins allows in his sonnet’s octave yet retroactively and belatedly defuses in his sonnet’s sestet.
In his sonnet’s octave, Hopkins coins the verb “to self” as he celebrates how all things speak and spell their singularity:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. (5–8)
“Each mortal thing does one thing and the same” insofar as each enacts its self: “myself it speaks and spells,” and the speaking/spelling of the self is the doing of the self, both the doing the self does and the doing the self is: “Whát I dó is me.” This selfing manifests visually when in the sunlight “kingfishers catch fire,” their plumage shimmering (1). This self-enactment happens audibly “[a]s tumbled over rim in roundy wells / Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s / Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name” (2–4). Hopkins’ birds, rocks, and bells speak and spell: they all “self.” Whether geologic or human artifacts, whether insensible or sentient, all things, stones, bells, and kingfishers “ring” out their “name[s].” The octave can seem written by an object-oriented ontologist who finds kingfishers, stones, and bells to harbor a withdrawn reality the objects’ interactions with sunbeams, wells, or clappers hint at, though a reality unexhausted by and irreducible to the objects’ sunbeam-centric, well-centric, clapper-centric, or anthropocentric appropriation. The octave can seem written by the author of Genesis 1, whose god lets the skies, waters, lands, and creatures burgeon out flourishing: something of the cacophonous differentiation at work in the Genesis 1 creation persists in the sonnet’s octave.
Or the octave’s wondrous explosion of speaking and spelling entities can seem written by the Florian of [speak and spell]. Yet the cacophony in [speak and spell] flourishes moment to moment from page to page while the ordering silence of the Word approaches. The octave of Hopkins’ sonnet resounds with multitudinous speaking, yet consider the silent glances of the sestet:
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is--
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces. (9–14)
In the gap between the sonnet’s octave and sestet, sin and death intervene; through the crucifixion grace arrives, and through grace each may for God embody the Word, Christ. And the being in Christ that pervades the sestet may retroactively specify the name the octave's bells call out: Christ. J. Hillis Miller argues that in the octave all things “mean one thing and the same: the beauty of Christ, in whom they are created,” exemplifying “the omnipresence of Christ” resulting from Christ being the all-creative Word or Logos (315, 323).
The Greek word for word logos can mean “to speak” and derives from a root meaning to gather into a rational order (Luft 79). The Hebrew word for word davar derives from a verb meaning “to speak” and carries the meanings of act and thing, implying a burgeoning dynamism (79). John would assimilate the Genesis 1 “In the beginning” to his gospel’s “In the beginning,” in effect a highly problematic reduction of davar to logos. Hopkins’ move to assimilate the davaristic creation traceable in the octave to the logocentrism active in the sestet posits an eventual gathering of all into the presence of the Word. In this gathering’s final triumph, John’s “In the beginning” would emerge as the end, the unwelcome coup de grâce, of Genesis’ “In the beginning.” Jacques Derrida argues the impossibility of evading logocentrism. Wandering from the logocentric, [speak and spell] lets the impossible happen, if only for the interval of a reading.
What do we have? Except for a section of margin-to-margin text of just over two pages in length, each of [speak and spell]’s thirty-five pages consists of a sprinkling of words, phrases, and occasionally sentences artfully placed about the page in question. As with Florian’s writings generally, [speak and spell] defies easy generic classification: a set of poems? a short story? a drama? a sequence of textual canvases obliquely forming a narrative, something like the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman’s cycle The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani? Another venue for the publication of [speak and spell] would be an art gallery able to accommodate thirty-five three-foot by five-foot canvases, each a page of the text, with a thirty-sixth canvas, the title page, located at the gallery’s entrance.
For the curator, writing the informational/interpretive placards to accompany each canvas would be a challenge. Imagine those placards quote from [speak and spell]. The notion of “organic unity” suggests each part of a text manifests the whole: a quote stands as a synecdoche of the work. With [speak and spell], in quoting any of the words, phrases, or sentences, the interpreter loses the positioning of that word, phrase, or sentence on the given page and in relation to that page’s other words, phrases, and sentences. To quote from [speak and spell] resembles reproducing and attempting to discuss in isolation a single brushstroke from a painting. Or, since on many of the pages the composition invites the reader to consider several available syntactic possibilities, to quote from [speak and spell] is like trying to explicate an Alexander Calder mobile by examining a detached piece resting immobile on a table. More than most literary works, [speak and spell] resists quotation, due to the dynamic particularities of spacing and iteration burgeoning on the pages. When I quote from [speak and spell], I will lose those particularities. My quotes will be “quotes.” But should I assume [speak and spell]’s spacings and iterations only perform organic unity? Besides organic relations of synecdoche, the words, phrases, and sentences of [speak and spell] also revel in their myriad and contingent metonymic juxtapositions. Perhaps each sentence, phrase, and word even enjoys retreating into an abyssal withdrawal, as if each were a black hole or an object, as Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology defines the term: “a genuine reality deeper than any theoretical or practical encounter with it” and “deeper than any relations in which it might become involved, whether with humans” or with any entity whatsoever, animate or inanimate (9, 10).
What if the gallery’s curator were to begin with some commentary on [speak and spell]’s themes? The curator could place next to the title-page canvas a placard stating, “In this series of works, Sandy Florian engages the Biblical tradition, including the Adam and Eve story and the divergent notions of ‘the beginning’ evident in Genesis 1 and John 1.” Taking such a thematic tack, the curator might have the easiest time writing the placard for a page late in [speak and spell] on which words curve down sinuously. Since at least one aspect of the arrangement of the words on this page mimes visually the words’ referents, a description may provide a reasonably verisimilar notion of the page in question. The curator might write, “The artist positions words to form an s-curve suggestive of the body, motion, and track of the Biblical serpent. These words are readable as a sentence: ‘then back to the thicket slunk the serpent’ (211).”
[speak and spell] does conjure the Adam and Eve story. Yet Florian concerns herself with the seeming inevitability with which that story reconvenes in the near foreground or the far background when an author working say in English attempts to tell a story or when a reader seeks to decipher said story. Adding to the reader’s challenge, and specifically to the critic’s interpretive challenge, Florian stages within [speak and spell] a critic who insists on “teaching us to retell his own story about adam & eve” (194). To review [speak and spell], I need to invoke the Adam and Eve story. Yet, when I do so, I move from writing about [speak and spell] to being implicated in [speak and spell]: I am a critical interpreter insisting on, and on the retelling of, the Adam and Eve story.
A repeat performance of the Adam and Eve story: how might an author walk away from that? Perhaps in writing Paradise Lost (which ends with Adam and Eve walking away) John Milton offered a hint: retell the story, yes, but do so allowing literary innovations and inventions to spark in an authentic repetition. And to provide further assistance James Joyce might offer the words from Ulysses about how the umbilical “cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh,” Joyce imagining those “navelcord[s]” as phone lines: “Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one” (32). Phones ring joyciferously in [speak and spell]. A telephone ring calls for a response, for a “Yes, hello? Who’s there?,” though in the moment of the ring the respondent responds (or not) without knowing who is calling or about what, at least prior to any form of caller ID, yet even caller ID remains another ring: in principle, any phone user, perhaps a human, can encounter a phone and dial. Even with caller ID, at the other end of the line anyone might have dialed to talk about anything. Consider this May 13, 2014 Huffington Post headline: “Hero Dog Shows Up Lassie, Uses iPhone To Call 911 And Saves Owner’s Life.” On December 9, 2010, the BBC website reported, “Cat Calls Police in Swansea Dialing 999.” The canine (who does rescue work) intentionally placed a call. On a phone table the cat was just lolling about asleep with a paw twitching in dream and incidentally tapping the telephone’s nine button. The feline unintentionally placed a call. The Athena Picture Agency provided the BBC a photo of the inadvertently cop-calling cat. An orange tabby, he looks unapologetic and unconcerned.
In [speak and spell], each word, phrase, and sentence rings. Who or what is calling about what or whom? Among the work’s characters, only some are simply or at all human, intentional, sentient, or animate. At one point, a phone chimes in: “a telephone without teeth or tongue” begins to ring: “gringring” (199, 200). [speak and spell]’s initially disorienting pages perform for readers, or lead readers to perform with awareness, the event of reading: registering the asemantic existence of marks on a page, harkening to the marks’ calls (“gringring”), and appropriating those marks semantically to determine addresser, addressee, and meaning. Through the reading event, an agon occurs within [speak and spell] and between [speak and spell] and the reader. An agon over what, over whom? To explore this question, let us consider a few of the characters in more detail, remembering that only some are living, sentient, intention bearing, or human. [speak and spell] prompts the question: can any human claim to be, without qualification or limit, alive, sentient, and intentional? The word “characters” can mean letters, but here I intend the word to refer to [speak and spell]’s fictional personages, animals, things, etcetera, though [speak and spell] wants to play with the distinction between “character” as letter and “character” as fictive person, animal, thing, etcetera: “i have one black eye” (211). And, given the mobility of syntax at work, to count the characters in [speak and spell] remains a precarious enterprise. For the moment, let us hypothesize that the work includes 1 + n characters. Please stay on the line.
Glancing at the work’s first page, the reader sees mostly non-italicized words, with a few words in italics at the bottom of the page. Among various sentences, the non-italicized words may form the following: “here i sermon[,] with my enchanting beak[,] of the mad, mad end of my appetite for speak” (186). The first character the reader encounters would speak or “sermon” about an “appetite” for speaking, but specifically about the “end” of that craving. No sooner does the character state this purpose or intention than the character speaks of another who listens. The character speaks about the listener’s strength: “how strong is he” (187). Are these words an exclamation (“how strong is he[!]”) or a question (“how strong is he[?]”)? Appearing without punctuation, the words can function as either or both. The character setting out to sermonize (to speak) about the end of the character’s gusto for speaking does so with a critic listening to, making sense of, and taking notes about the character’s speech: “how strong is he who harkens me & makes a faraway sense[,] noting in his little notebook all my ill-motions, ill-gestures, ill-twitches, ill-looks” (187). The character designates the critic as male. The critic’s notes appear in [speak and spell] in italics. For example, when the character speaks of the various ill features the character believes that the critic is noting down, the critic adds, “illness of the lips” (187).
While the character tells us the critic is male, does the character answer to the interpellation he, she, or it? The critic does refer to the character as “it,” though with the connotations of reification and abjection hovering about this pronoun usage (197). Given our new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene, with all sorts of entities beginning to speak up, the English pronoun system may require an overhaul. Perhaps contemporary English needs a wider variety of pronouns. Whether the character is male, female, human, animal, intentional, unintentional, animate, or inanimate [speak and spell] leaves ambiguous. Again, about the critic, the character offers the words, “how strong is he.” The character and the critic enter into a contest, an agon. The character may be exclaiming, “how strong is he[!]” The character may be questioning, “how strong is he[?]” in the sense of, “Will I be able to prevail over the critic in winning him over, or will the critic prevail over me in dispensing with me?” However, the question “how strong is he[?]” might also be asking, “Is the critic strong enough to enter into the contest with me?” This review’s thesis is that the imaginative and artistic strength of [speak and spell] justifies this last reading. Perhaps others, in other reviews, will attempt either to challenge or to verify this thesis. There is the literary event [speak and spell] is, and then there is the “faraway sense” any critic makes of that event.
The critic within [speak and spell] initially harbors doubts as to whether the character will be able to succeed in the character’s effort to speak about the end of the character’s hunger to speak. At the bottom of the text’s first page, the page on which the character begins to sermonize, the critic notes that the character does so “as deaf dolls hang tongueless from the tongueless tree” (186). Will the character succumb to the fate of these dolls? A threat of silence manifests, and the hanging dolls imply executions or suicides, though in the Platonic-Christian tradition, every suicide partakes of execution and every execution partakes of suicide. Consider the apostle Paul’s attempt to make us an offer we cannot refuse: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (King James Version, Rom. 6.23). Every human death becomes an execution. Paul would have us imagine that at the end of the living and dying process, death as capital punishment awaits as the payment for the debt we owe for our sin, a sin we committed willfully, iterating Adam’s willful sin. Paul imagines death as a capital punishment arriving to us from Adam’s and our own wills and so arriving as a kind of suicide. And who brought Adam to his willful sin? Eve did, who was brought to hers through speaking with a serpent.
In [speak and spell], the critic would neither be the character’s executioner nor prompt the character to suicide, the mirage of suicide, the mirage of execution. Yet the critic does undergo a vision of some unspecified entity “stringing up & burning down each shrieking freak on holy week” (198). The critic envisions the fate threatening characters who dare to speak as resembling a lynching or an auto-da-fé. The character proceeds in the context of a severe pressure toward silence. The greater an author’s ambition, the greater this pressure is. The critic contributes to this pressure, as the critic would teach the character “to retell his own story about adam & eve.” In The Tree of No, Florian retells the Biblical story of Adam and Eve through retelling Milton’s story of Adam and Eve. One way to read [speak and spell] would be as a meditation on and narration of the state of imaginative mind of an author attempting a work of audacious ambition.
Among much else, The Tree of No is a work of appropriation. To write The Tree of No, Florian stole words, phrases, and sentences from myriad authors and sources: writing as robbery. Consider how the character in [speak and spell] describes the acts of speech the character would commit (the brackets are the character’s): “why, i’d rather commit a robbery [make a speak] commit a good robbery [make a rum speak!] dispensing femmy shrieks & squeaks to a better place, like time square” (189). Think of Eden before the fall, all innocence, “nature,” and proper order, and then think of New York’s Times Square without prudish clean-up efforts though with full respect to the feminine, the animal, the unintentional, the inanimate. The character associates speech, and the character’s speech, with the feminine, with the animal (“a marmoset squeak” [188]), with the inanimate (“a telephone without teeth or tongue”), with the impropriety of robbery. The character distinguishes this speech from having to speak “more consciously,” that is, from having to speak “less dreamily” and under intention’s supervision (197).
Or rather, in retelling the Adam and Eve story, the character narrates Adam and Eve as facing pressure to internalize burdensome restrictions on their speech. In the character’s retelling, avatars of the “hangman god” (Joyce 175) drive Adam and Eve out of Eden and, dangling a noose before them, discipline the pair’s speech: “Notables were organed out, leading the pair by the noose, teaching them to speak more consciously, more broadly, more correctly, more generally, more properly, less richly, less dreamily, less prettily, less daintily” (196–97). To the speech lessons of the noose-wielding “Notables,” “He assented, but she dissented” (197). The character narrates Adam as caving to the “Notables” and Eve as resisting them. The critic teaches the character to retell “his,” the critic’s, Adam and Eve story. In doing so, the character underscores how the story is Eve’s too. The character’s retelling reminds readers that in Genesis Adam speaks formulaically and in obeisant response to God, but Eve speaks inventively, with personality, and in prelude to enacting her desire boldly. Before Eve’s creation, God announces to Adam the prohibition of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (2.16–17). Next, as the reader deduces, Adam conveys the prohibition to Eve. Then, when speaking to the serpent, Eve repeats God’s words, yet with a difference, adding about the forbidden fruit, “neither shall ye touch it” (3.3). When the character in [speak and spell] retells the story of Adam and Eve, the character retrieves the Eve who refuses to give way on her desire.
The critic notes the strength of imagination the character exhibits (“there is no note this bucket can’t sound” [195]), but after the character’s first installment of retelling the Adam and Eve story, the critic accuses the character of “coiling false oracles” (197). Yet the critic eventually does indirectly acknowledge the sublimity at work in the words he confronts: “if this were a different book i would imagine it occupied the same place of prophecy for it seems to be the very highest point of heaven, the very apogee, the very crown of language” (210). Here the critic exhibits weakness. Sublimity touches the critic through the character’s words, but the critic can only register that sublimity as displaced onto and misrecognized in a “different book.” And then, with the book actually before him (un)thought in terms of some hypothetical book elsewhere, the critic proceeds with praise evocative of sublimity, yes, but of a sublime to which the character’s sermon and retelling of the Adam and Eve story constitute a counter-sublime. The critic derives his hyperboles from praise of Christ as the sublime “apogee.” For example, Saint Thomas Aquinas argues in his Summa Theologica that Christ, Christ’s risen body, occupies “the very highest point of heaven” (Davies 34). Being the Logos, the Word, Christ would be, as the critic states, “the very crown of language.” Yet this Christian sublime envisions, at least in Paradise Lost, the eventual silencing of Eve (and of beasts, and of the inanimate, and of the unintentional) in the apocalyptic end of time when God will become all in all.
[speak and spell] ends as follows: “in the beginning was the apocalypse of all femmy shrieks & squeaks & in the beginning was the end” (215). [speak and spell] begins with the character stating an intent: to speak “of the mad, mad end of my appetite for speak.” Perhaps the critic’s most difficult challenge is to discuss [speak and spell]’s beginning/end motif. Troping this uroboric rhetorical commonplace, [speak and spell]’s character travels in august company. T.S. Eliot begins his poem “East Coker” with, “In my beginning is my end” and ends the poem with, “In my end is my beginning” (1, 209). In Hamlet, Shakespeare has the Player King declare, “But orderly to end where I begun” (3.2.201). Aristotle argues that all speakers riff on this beginning/end topos and that this topos necessarily links to that of the possible and the impossible. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle claims that in speaking, an orator inevitably asserts “that a thing has happened, or will happen in future,” and therefore the orator necessarily deploys “the topic of the Possible and Impossible” (129). Why? Aristotle elaborates: “Let us first speak of the Possible and Impossible. It may plausibly be argued” as follows:
That if the beginning of a thing can occur, so can the end; for nothing impossible occurs or begins to occur; thus the commensurability of the diagonal of a square with its side neither occurs nor can begin to occur. That if the end is possible, so is the beginning; for all things that occur have a beginning.
(129, 130)
If X began, X can end, and if X ends, X must have begun. Aristotle weaves into his discussion of the “Possible and Impossible” claims about the event of any possible thing: “nothing impossible occurs or begins to occur.” By “impossible” Aristotle implies something that begins yet never can end or that ends yet never did begin. The things with beginnings and ends are the possible things, and the end of any possible thing is implicit in the beginning of that thing, just as the end implies the beginning. For example, in [speak and spell], the very instant the character’s speaking begins testifies to that speaking’s end. An impossible speaking or word would begin without the possibility of ending or end without ever having begun.
Therefore Aristotle might have trouble with the Gospel According to St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God” (1.1–2). If the reader were to interpret the Word as preexistent, eternal, and so only participant in yet uncontaminated by “the beginning,” there would remain the problem for Aristotle of how, without beginning, this Word could end, that is, on the cross. A Christian death-of-God theologian might argue that, well, the Word was preexistent and eternal, yet with the Creation (“In the beginning God created” [Gen. 1.1]) the preexistent Word underwent a beginning, the beginning of incarnational creation, and the Word’s end on the cross was implicit in that beginning. Or does the incarnation story include a double impossibility: a Word without beginning ends (on the cross), a Word without end begins (in the resurrection)? This dual impossibility would occur just so the Logos, Christ, may end where he began, as the Word on high sublimely above and beyond all the words. As the critic notes in misrecognizing the character’s speaking as “a different book” instantiating the Word, “it seems to be the very highest point of heaven, the very apogee, the very crown of language.”
Perhaps the doom of the character’s speaking is to undergo this misrecognition and so to suffer a silencing, the silencing of the character’s speech in the Word. And perhaps in this manner the beginning of the speaker’s “appetite for speak” implies that appetite’s end. Or perhaps the character, in speaking, would solicit the event of another impossibility (distinct from a Christian impossibility) and so evade the fate of the character’s words disappearing through their misrecognition as a version of or as incarnating the Word. Let us consider this other impossibility. We will need to take a detour through Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Italian sonnet “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” Prominent beaks adorn kingfishers. “[W]ith my enchanting beak,” says Florian’s character. [speak and spell] echoes and explodes “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” or rather, Florian would retrieve and countersign the explosion Hopkins allows in his sonnet’s octave yet retroactively and belatedly defuses in his sonnet’s sestet.
In his sonnet’s octave, Hopkins coins the verb “to self” as he celebrates how all things speak and spell their singularity:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. (5–8)
“Each mortal thing does one thing and the same” insofar as each enacts its self: “myself it speaks and spells,” and the speaking/spelling of the self is the doing of the self, both the doing the self does and the doing the self is: “Whát I dó is me.” This selfing manifests visually when in the sunlight “kingfishers catch fire,” their plumage shimmering (1). This self-enactment happens audibly “[a]s tumbled over rim in roundy wells / Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s / Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name” (2–4). Hopkins’ birds, rocks, and bells speak and spell: they all “self.” Whether geologic or human artifacts, whether insensible or sentient, all things, stones, bells, and kingfishers “ring” out their “name[s].” The octave can seem written by an object-oriented ontologist who finds kingfishers, stones, and bells to harbor a withdrawn reality the objects’ interactions with sunbeams, wells, or clappers hint at, though a reality unexhausted by and irreducible to the objects’ sunbeam-centric, well-centric, clapper-centric, or anthropocentric appropriation. The octave can seem written by the author of Genesis 1, whose god lets the skies, waters, lands, and creatures burgeon out flourishing: something of the cacophonous differentiation at work in the Genesis 1 creation persists in the sonnet’s octave.
Or the octave’s wondrous explosion of speaking and spelling entities can seem written by the Florian of [speak and spell]. Yet the cacophony in [speak and spell] flourishes moment to moment from page to page while the ordering silence of the Word approaches. The octave of Hopkins’ sonnet resounds with multitudinous speaking, yet consider the silent glances of the sestet:
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is--
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces. (9–14)
In the gap between the sonnet’s octave and sestet, sin and death intervene; through the crucifixion grace arrives, and through grace each may for God embody the Word, Christ. And the being in Christ that pervades the sestet may retroactively specify the name the octave's bells call out: Christ. J. Hillis Miller argues that in the octave all things “mean one thing and the same: the beauty of Christ, in whom they are created,” exemplifying “the omnipresence of Christ” resulting from Christ being the all-creative Word or Logos (315, 323).
The Greek word for word logos can mean “to speak” and derives from a root meaning to gather into a rational order (Luft 79). The Hebrew word for word davar derives from a verb meaning “to speak” and carries the meanings of act and thing, implying a burgeoning dynamism (79). John would assimilate the Genesis 1 “In the beginning” to his gospel’s “In the beginning,” in effect a highly problematic reduction of davar to logos. Hopkins’ move to assimilate the davaristic creation traceable in the octave to the logocentrism active in the sestet posits an eventual gathering of all into the presence of the Word. In this gathering’s final triumph, John’s “In the beginning” would emerge as the end, the unwelcome coup de grâce, of Genesis’ “In the beginning.” Jacques Derrida argues the impossibility of evading logocentrism. Wandering from the logocentric, [speak and spell] lets the impossible happen, if only for the interval of a reading.
Works Cited
Aristotle. Rhetoric. Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. Aristotle: Rhetoric and Poetics. New York: Modern Library, 1954. 1–218. Print.
The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.
Davies, Oliver. Theology of Transformation: Faith, Freedom, and the Christian Act. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.
Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Print.
Florian, Sandy. Boxing the Compass. Las Cruces, NM: Noemi, 2013. Print.
---. Prelude to Air from Water. Denver: Elixir, 2010. Print.
---. [speak and spell]. Black Warrior Review 40.2 (2014): 185–215. Print.
---. Telescope. Notre Dame, IN: Action, 2006. Print.
---. The Tree of No. Notre Dame, IN: Action, 2008. Print.
---. On Wonderland & Waste. San Francisco: Sidebrow, 2010 Print.
Harman, Graham. The Third Table/Der Dritte Tisch. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012. Print.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Poems and Prose. Ed. W. H. Gardner. London: Penguin, 1963. Print.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage, 1986. Print.
Luft, Sandra Rudnick. Vico's Uncanny Humanism: Reading the “New Science” Between Modern and Postmodern. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. Print.
Miller, J. Hillis. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers. New York: Schocken, 1963. Print.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Gordon Teskey. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. Print.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Print.
Aristotle. Rhetoric. Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. Aristotle: Rhetoric and Poetics. New York: Modern Library, 1954. 1–218. Print.
The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.
Davies, Oliver. Theology of Transformation: Faith, Freedom, and the Christian Act. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.
Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Print.
Florian, Sandy. Boxing the Compass. Las Cruces, NM: Noemi, 2013. Print.
---. Prelude to Air from Water. Denver: Elixir, 2010. Print.
---. [speak and spell]. Black Warrior Review 40.2 (2014): 185–215. Print.
---. Telescope. Notre Dame, IN: Action, 2006. Print.
---. The Tree of No. Notre Dame, IN: Action, 2008. Print.
---. On Wonderland & Waste. San Francisco: Sidebrow, 2010 Print.
Harman, Graham. The Third Table/Der Dritte Tisch. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012. Print.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Poems and Prose. Ed. W. H. Gardner. London: Penguin, 1963. Print.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage, 1986. Print.
Luft, Sandra Rudnick. Vico's Uncanny Humanism: Reading the “New Science” Between Modern and Postmodern. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. Print.
Miller, J. Hillis. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers. New York: Schocken, 1963. Print.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Gordon Teskey. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. Print.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Print.
|
Robert Savino Oventile (PhD, English Literature, UC Irvine) is Associate Professor of English at Pasadena City College. He has published essays and book reviews in Postmodern Culture, Jacket, symplokē, and The Chicago Quarterly Review, among other journals. His poetry has appeared in The New Delta Review, Upstairs at Duroc, and The Denver Quarterly. He is the author of Impossible Reading: Idolatry and Diversity in Literature and of Satan’s Secret Daughters: The Muse as Daemon (both with the Davies Group).
|