PLR vol.1, no.2 (July, 2003)

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P L R

volume 1

issue 2

Lonesome Hearts and the Failed Community Aleš Debeljak

He did not answer. Her voice seemed to come to him from a great distance. He kept driving. Snow rushed at the windshield. He was silent and watched the road. He was at the very end of a story. —Raymond Carver, Put Yourself in My Shoes I still remember the moment when I first realised that although I understand and indeed speak the Latin of the contemporary world, that fact alone is not enough to provide an insight into the true secrets of the American soul. To understand the essence of American culture requires more than regular attendance at high school English lectures. It requires something like a humid evening in New York. My friend Igor and I were heading to a big party. Igor’s friend, a painter, threw it in her loft to celebrate the opening of her exhibition in Soho. About forty, perhaps fifty people circled round the room, sizing the place up, drinking beer and testing their skills at small-talk. I was enjoying myself immensely when the group I had just joined suddenly discovered that one of those present was in New York City for the first time: a “hometown boy.” It was immediately clear to me that this was meant in a derogatory way, indicating someone who sticks to his hometown like a drunkard to a barstool. Yet, I must admit that it would take me much longer to fully understand the metaphysical depth of this perfunctory teasing initiated by the smug group only because the hapless guy had been foolish enough to reveal his condition. I didn’t yet grasp the context that had suddenly made of the involuntary laughing stock the personification of an exception or a white crow, as we call it in Slovenia. Later, in the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student at an American university and had acquired the “insider’s” understanding of my fellow students’ cultural environment, I witnessed the recurrence of such an episode in which almost precisely identical roles applied. This time, however, the casualty was a student who turned out to have gone to school—from kindergarten to the master’s degree which he was about to receive—in the same state, even worse, in the same city. My fellow-students, who hailed from both East Coast and West as well as points in between, reacted just about the same way as the previous group. Their scornful response contained a pitiful subtext. In a country where a third of the population changes their place of residence about once a year, permanent rootedness is perceived as a negative which implies weakness, indecision, immaturity and, worse, is the antithesis of individualism. To be one’s own, to start from scratch, to burn all the bridges after having crossed them—that is considered to be the most attractive possibility that America in her supreme mythic dimension promises to those that respond to her allure. Regardless of individual religious beliefs, Slovenian culture as a whole is steeped in ritual-infused Catholic tradition, with mothers who keep their beloved offspring at home for as long as possible, like hens protecting her chicks. The impulsive desire to leave home is still a rarity, while it drives so many American teenagers in predominantly Protestant shoes to pack up and bid farewell to a home and hearth. Let’s leave aside the fact that in Slovenia, the tiny independent republic on “the sunny side of the Alps,” there is almost no real possibility for a destiny-altering change of address and that an apartment is almost impossible to rent at a reasonable price. Moreover, there is the sheer symbolic weight of family meals, formal Sunday lunches, extended family ties and, in particular, the omnipotent figure of the mother who has dominated the life and literature of the Slovenians and has been critically assessed by many writers. These elements shape the spiritual characteristics of the Slove-

PRAGUE LITERARY REVIEW

nians and no doubt prevent them from gaining a really comprehensive insight into the enormous stock of energy needed for and the predicaments embedded in the American doctrine of radical individualism. America’s high regard for individualism and freedom is in large part hinged on its unique history. In many aspects, the United States remains the legacy, the reality and the dream of people who left everything behind and set off for new shores, people who turned their back on the past, cast off the chains of tradition and dared to test the boundaries of the unknown. Their tenacious

july

2003

(nature, the future, the individual), is still very much present in the American mentality. Indeed, if one wanted to achieve what is nearly impossible by summarising the rich contrasts in the American character in a single metaphysical dilemma, one could do worse than to look somewhere within the uneasy tension which distinguishes the relationship between the individual self and the community. Popular imagination has often proved to be excellent terrain for detecting traces of global changes. It is no coincidence that at least a partial solution to the riddle of the stubborn maintenance

Photograph by Errol Sawyer, 2002 commitment to the values of self reliance comes from pioneers and trail blazers who advanced ever onwards in search of new challenges, experiencing the dizzy freedom of those bound by nothing more than their own capabilities. The myth of the fearless frontiersman who trusts nobody, relies only on himself and lives in a contradictory state of “permanent temporariness,” in a poorly defined space where stability (culture, memory, community) goes hand in hand with uncertainty

of individualism can be found in the contextual layers of those “local” artistic genres which, in regard to their structure, do not essentially depend on European moral and social paradigms. Here I refer, in particular, to the Indian adventure stories, Western narratives and hard-boiled detective novels where the “American experience” is expressed in its purest, raw and least processed form. The opening up of the wild West—by gold miners, lumberjacks, trappers and hunters, entre-

Frank Zappa’s Poetics of Orality: Exploring the Maximalist Body

traverses his oeuvre from the menacing overtones of “Hungry Freaks Daddy” on Freak Out to the blown-up rotten teeth on the cover of the posthumous Everything Is Healing Nicely (1999). Drawing upon an anecdote told by Lowell George, who was a member of the Mothers of Invention before he left to form Little Feat in 1970, Watson traces the roots of Zappa’s “dental continuity” to the reification of the body by the Nazi regime: Lowell George enters dental continuity because of his part in a semi-improvised pantomime. The albums I’m featured on most prominently haven’t been released yet. There was a ten-album set in the works— one side had me as a German border-guard interviewing each of the band members, asking them about the condition of their gold fillings and things like that. This points to the reduction of the human body to an object by the Nazis, the notorious piles of gold teeth removed from victims’ mouths before they were sent to the gas chambers. That this is not merely an historical outrage is shown by the fact that the banks that handled such loot are still in operation today. That human beings are not composed of pure spirit is of course emphasised by using Meat as a name. . . . The grubby fingers that pull away the lips of the old Jew in order to see if there is gold worth preserving before he is exterminated, extracting the element of exchange value before the subject is disposed of, finds an analogy in the X-ray machine, which also sees past lips and cheek to the teeth. The industrialisation of death. The rationalisation of mass extermination into the banality of an economic transaction. The baring of the teeth that permits the extraction of the gold performed in a grotesque caricature of the technical gesture of the dentist. The threatening quality of the

Michel Delville The centrality of orality and, in particular, dental aesthetics to Zappa’s work reaches a climax in the cover of the double album Uncle Meat (1969), a Cal Schenkel collage comprising, among other things, two sets of teeth juxtaposed with one another. The first belongs to an old man wearing a salt and pepper moustache and whose lips are pulled up by the dentist’s forefinger during a check-up. The man appears to possess at least one gold tooth. The second one is a black and white photograph of a set of false teeth. The lower part of the front cover features another series of apparently broken or damaged teeth glued to some mixture of paint, bread crumbs (which may or may not be the “dried muffin remnants” of the artist’s breakfast) and other unidentifiable organic material. On the back cover there are polarised photographs of the members of the Mothers of Invention as well as three x-ray slides of teeth and a skull bearing the inscription “1348,” the year of the first outbreak of bubonic plague in Europe. The gatefold sleeve features a girl lying (and apparently posing) in an early 20th century dentist’s chair on which Schenkel has glued a photograph of a dentist’s x-ray machine. In his illuminating sub-chapter on Uncle Meat, Ben Watson discusses the political significance of dental continuity in Zappa, a concern that

preneurs and speculators, pioneer homesteaders and ranchers, desperados and indeed anybody else who scrambled over the Rockies hoping to find a better life in the promised land of California— represents the immediate socio-historical basis for the origin of the mythology of the frontier. Yet this mythology doesn’t embody the drive for constant experimentation, transience and a daring shift to the outermost boundaries solely in the geographical sense; it also manifests itself in the spiritual realm. Indeed, it is because of the genuine desire for freedom that this mythology has remained so closely tied to the ups and downs of the mentality of those who live in a land which stretches between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. It defines and conditions the ways in which the American “self ” time and again differs from all others. Digging in the rich treasure-trove of stories about the ambiguous ethics of determined individualists who are never bound by ties strong enough to anchor them to a community or to prevent them from riding slowly off into the sunset, one can encounter the whole mythology of the frontier. Mysteriously simple stories in which the personal failure or success of a hero invariably indicates a comprehensive social drama are picturesquely clear in, for example, J. F. Cooper’s novels about the brave frontiersman Daniel Boon, the sentimental tales of “the self-made man” by Horatio Alger, in the immortal Westerns starring John Wayne and his lonesome saddle, even in the stories about the private dicks Philip Marlow and Sam Spade. One could even spare a glance at beatnik prose, at the cult hippie movie Easy Rider, not to mention the Hollywood trilogy about that out-of-the-ordinary archaeologist named Indiana Jones or the cinematic marathon of sequels about the trigger-happy hero of moral rectitude, Rambo. Scholars of American mass culture would be quick to stress the important differences among this panoply of heroes. Sure, I am aware of them. Yet from the larger perspective of a fundamental mythological background, such detailed differences are but tokens in the game of academic hairsplitting. In my opinion, it seems impossible to deny the fact that all these popular icons of the mass imagination are—after all is said and done— merely mutations of the oldest American myth, namely the fable of how an individual’s value and ethical capital are based on unconditional love of freedom and a concomitant aversion to commitment, obligations and integration in a broader community. The depth of the dilemma borne of radical individualism is clearly revealed in a close reading of these narratives. The more the heroes can—and, as a rule, do—live beyond the everyday pressures generated by middle-class lifestyle that includes career, family, public and political obligations, the more to their advantage. Socially celibate, they remain morally incorruptible, and are consequently able to unveil the clandestine sins of a society which is seldom grateful. The precondition for truth and its right to be upheld, or enforced, is (continued on page 14)

record cover is reinforced by the Gothic letters in which the title of the album is inscribed. The reference to 1348 re-emerges in the song “Dog Breath, In the Year of the Plague,” which suggests that the illustrations were, at least to some extent, the result of a collaboration between Zappa and Schenkel. In addition to evoking the commodification of bodies in Nazi Germany, the themes of death and dentistry that pervade the cover of Uncle Meat also alert us to the huge symbolic potential of teeth extraction in Western culture. The stealing of the golden teeth of the Jewish victims evokes other forms of physical exploitation of the human body, such as that of the lower classes who, like Fantine in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, were encouraged to sell their teeth to the rich in the 18th and 19th centuries, at a time when “live transplants” were in vogue. The equation of dental with moral corruption in the popular and artistic imagination is also widely documented. In precontemporary iconography, the extraction of teeth often amounts to the extraction of evil and sin from the conscience of man. The consumption of sugar in 19th century Holland was repeatedly denounced by preachers and one of them, Abraham a Sancta Clara, went as far as retracing the root of rotten teeth to original sin: “We unfortunate humans! We all have toothache and suffer ever and always from the teeth with which Adam bit the forbidden apple.” In a similar register, the quack dentist and his patient who feature in the central panel of Bosch’s Haywain triptych confers to the dental symbolism a religious dimension by associating bad teeth with a battery of deadly sins. As David Kunzle

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