A Review of Fragments

Early one morning near the middle of November 2008, a group of Green Lantern faithfuls hit the streets, inserting a fake section of newsprint into the Chicago free weeklies. Included was the following review of Fragments.

Fragments is a book. Once that has been established (fairly easy, that) everything else becomes difficult. It could find its place in the fiction section of a bookstore, or the philosophy, poetry, or literary criticism sections. None of these designations would be totally incorrect, but they wouldn’t feel especially right, either. A novel lacking true characters and plot, philosophy without an argument, poetry lacking verse, criticism without an object.  The one thing each has in common with the other is likewise the thing they all have in common: paper, filled with sentences, gathered and bound, easily shelved. Fragments is a book.

Each sentence stands alone, separated by a quarter of an inch white space from the sentences preceding and following it—a more significant stylistic constraint than you might assume.   As an extra foot in a line of Shakespeare or an awkward rhyme in a sonnet may shake the reader, an oddly placed semi-colon in Fragments affects the text to a similar degree.

There are two characters, a man and a woman, both unnamed. The reader knows so little of their fictional biographies that they can be read as archetypes or even as mere abstract textual pronouns.  At the same time however, they have just enough personal characteristics to defy such a simplification (“he freezes at the sight of household cleaning products, she is a maker of lists” ).  They interact, but they do so at such a remove from one another as to render the exchange nearly meaningless. When “he” speaks, we assume he is speaking to “her”, but his words are isolated on the page. When she responds, if she responds, it is pages later.   Sometimes the sentences are part of this non-conversation and sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are ideas one or the other entertains.  Sometimes they are quotes they have read.  Sometimes they are thoughts they’ve written down. Sometimes they are exposition.  Carl gives few hints about how to discretely categorize and place a sentence, although after a few pages the reader may eventually come to realize that she can is intuiting who is thinking and in what way.  And each time a reader returns to Fragments, she will find a different book.

When the reader grows comfortable with the book (and like many great books, it is the kind of book that one must grow comfortable with) she will notice that, in many ways, such distinctions are unimportant. Or, at least, they are of secondary importance. Fragments is primarily a meditation on the sentence. The sentence is protagonist.  It does what a protagonist does in most novels: views and shapes the world, and is, in turn, shaped by it.  David Carl has done well to perform this interrogation of it.

Fragments and Genre

The following letters are the first two from a series of correspondences between the Senior and Assistant Editors of The Green Lantern Press on the subject of the genre of Fragments

Dear Nick,

Once upon a time, Caroline and I had an interesting conversation about how to classify Fragments.  Of course we’d love to believe that a work of art, like a human being or an experience should transcend classification on some fundamental level.  On the other hand, we are a press and a press distributes and markets books in a world that depends on classification to function.  I cannot consider this book a work of philosophy or criticism because it does not submit itself to the methodical rigor that those types of thought entail.  To me, the closest genre I can fit this piece into is poetry.  I understand that this is a provisional category and that the piece resists any attempt to label it “poetry”.  I do think that this label, however, can be useful to an extent.  Poetry is a lot easier to write than prose, because it is shorter.  You can scratch out a poem in a few moments, and toss it aside if it is not quite right and start another one.  Fiction takes time and dedication.  The burden poetry takes on in order to right this inequality of effort is that poetry must be perfect.  Every line must be an example of the very best writing available to human culture.  There are many lines in this poetic-leaning work that betray a charm that would be entirely suitable as a moment in a work of fiction, but do not stand up to this test of poetry.  Some turns of phrase and idioms that are—if I may be so bold—a little bit selfish.  A poet is the ultimate perfectionist.  A poet must be a chess master, must have played out every move a reader might make to see that it upholds the standard of perfect and nearly unattainable beauty.  I think that perhaps this is the origin of the myth that poets are insane, drink irresponsibly and die young.   

 

There are lines in Fragments that I believe attain that perfection.  But there are many that I believe do not.  What I suggest for this book is to edit it as though it is poetry, even if it is not.   But why indulge in partial perfection when there are so many lines in this work that can blow you away, make you shake your head, alter your world view, suck your gums in delight and envy?  How wonderful would it be to have a tiny, sublime book filled with only the lines that knock a reader off his feet.  It is incredibly rare a reader has an opportunity to read such a book—and we are faced with the incredible situation of having the material to make one right in front of us.  I feel it is would be an injustice to both the world of readership and to our author to have the occasion to build such a book and cast it aside in favor of publishing a book that is a slough of near-perfection pinned up by bright points of true brilliance.

 

Yours truly,

Lily

 

 

Dear Lily,

First of all, as to the issue of classification. You’re right in saying that it isn’t a work of philosophy or criticism. One could argue that it is a philosophical novel, though that brings about its own set of problems and general silliness. After all, all novels, save for the most vapid, are philosophical. Despite being a story about a bunch of characters talking and falling in and out of love, Proust has a lot more in common with Augustine than he has with Danielle Steele. Fragments is, in a sense, written philosophically, but to focus on the philosophical aspect is like focusing on the “opera” half of “rock opera” when listening to Queen. Or something. But that’s neither here nor there. And while I agree with your ideas of how poetry must be written, I don’t think this is quite poetry either and to edit it as though it were poetry does the work a disservice.

 

In the end, although “we are a press and a press distributes and markets books in a world that depends on classification to function,” I don’t necessarily think it’s our job to supply those classifications. That’s why critics get paid the big bucks. We have to look at everything critically, of course, but I think our job is more to put these things out in the world and let the readers and the critics do with them what they will. Hell, I’d be pleased as punch if one bookstore put Fragments in the literature section, another put it in the philosophy section, and another stuck it in poetry.

 

The only way this classification process helps us is in the editing process. And, again, editing it as a novel is a hell of a lot easier than editing it as poetry. Another stupid analogy: some of Beckett’s later prose pieces resist classification. They’re all philosophical and maybe they even have more in common with philosophy than they do fiction, but to edit them as philosophy would be a waste of time. Essentially, if I couldn’t figure out exactly what kind of genre a work falls into, I’d ask myself what kind of editing process is least likely to commit a horrible rape against the text. And that’s where I’d classify it. (Granted, I haven’t thought this through, but it seems like a good place to start.)

 

So most of what follows is my argument as to why Fragments is a novel.

 

I don’t think it’s necessary to go into what constitutes a novel, so I’ll list some of the ways in which it seems to differ from one.

 

1. There’s no real story. Obviously. But, just as obviously, I don’t think that’s a huge problem, because the novel has been moving away from stories for going on a hundred years now. Fragments is, however, about something (how language defines and affects our relationships, etc).

 

2. Most novels can be graphed horizontally, moving from point A to point B, with jumps at points of crisis, drops in lulls, and so on. You can’t really do that here. The way I see it, it tends to move vertically. History books move vertically. (“Consider this a history of something that is happening right now.”) History books are never as clean as novels: they have to circle in upon themselves. The threads of narrative never connect cleanly. One can either try to impose a straight narrative on history (running the risk of grave omissions), follow separate threads (this is how the plague came to Europe, this is how it affected medicine, this is how it affected daily life, this is how the governments dealt with it, this is how the Jews were affected by it, etc.), or combine all of those threads simultaneously. Fragments takes the third route. Luckily, most history books don’t.

 

3. Where most novels have a clear narrator (or number of narrators),Fragments has something more in line with Joyce’s “arranger.” That is, there are a number of voices speaking here, and rather than gather them all under a single narrative voice, Carl has let the voices speak for themselves and arranged them on the page. Some of it is what She is thinking, some of it is what He is thinking, some of it is what She is saying, some of it is what He is saying, some of it is what She has written, some of it is what He has written, some of it is what they have read, etc. That said, you don’t have to love or agree with every turn of phrase and idiom, but should you see them as things a character has written (and they spend a lot of time writing), they cease to be self-indulgent filler and actually serve to provide some insight as to what is going on in a particular’s character head.

 

Best,

Nick

Notes on the release of Fragments

Fragments was published in late spring, 2008. What follows are some notes taken from the release party.

“In summer, the song sings itself.

“The perfect man of action, is the suicide.

“But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain, it presents.

“By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.”

- William Carlos Williams

We got together in Chicago this last Friday night for a reading/release party of “Fragments,” by David Carl. Reading on his behalf, Moshe Zvi Marvit introduced himself thus: “I have been working as a biographer of late, and, after reading Fragments a few months ago, I decided to write a biography about him. When I asked David for permission to do so, he said that instead of answering any personal questions, he would send me on missions in his place. I am reading for him tonight on that account. Later on, I am supposed to meet a girl he used to know.”
Moshe read for about twenty minutes, focusing on a previously selected series of lines that pertained directly to the male and female protagonists in the text. While the characters are somewhat obscured throughout the book by ideas and observations, they nevertheless exist, and, (I’d argue,) ground the book as a whole, lending it a linear course as their relationship with one another develops. By isolating the passages that involve this nameless he and she, Marvit carved out a public place for them; a place in which they might be discussed. He read under a yellow light, the Bitters signage on his left, the audience sitting in a crescent around him on borrowed folding church chairs.

He began at with the first line of the book, “There was no desire for arrival,” and skipping over other lines, his reading traveled through, “…What she calls poetry is certainly an inability to see the world./ over “…Waiting for faces to appear in the window./” and into “…She accuses him of pursuing the accumulation of knowledge. / Outside in the rain taxis sulked in isotropic spirals of isolation. / The ants were winding their way up the leg of the kitchen table. / He dried his tears on the sleeve of his camelhair jacket and fumbled for his hat in the dark as she slumped back against the light. / All one need learn from the past is that it existed. / Capable of infinite subdivisions. / To write down that storm. / If he must bear the burden of location then why not slip between the sheets of an epistemological space? / The toppling mind. / No ambition outstrips the poet’s folly. / His various forms of failure his most marked success. / Whether she should weigh more heavily single words or their combined effect. / What did she know of prisons, other than what the mirrors suggested? / It was the accumulation of layers that accounted for their distortion effect. / Alien genres of familiar forms. / Shared but mutually exclusive disappointments. / ‘Of course, there is something very permanent about death,’ she says. / Half mad from the absence of lists. / Dido’s pyre. / Deranged by virtue of her former cruelties and not to be found among the hungry. / Tumescent words cowering under her typewriter. / The skeletal structure that frames a diverse set of impulses. / The ravenous flow of time. / He wanted to give equal weight to every sentence, to make each one the beginning of what he had to say. / He perfected the art of appearing lost in thought.” And over the course of other passages, Moshe ended on page 30 with “Every word comes grudgingly.”

Afterwards:
“Can you answer questions about the book?” someone asked. There were about fifteen of us in the room at that time, the chairs sitting a little more casually now as they had been rearranged in a sneaky succession of shifting weights over the course of the reading. The train of course, our favorite and intermittent guest, came and went over the course of the humming fans and summer heat.
“I can’t answer questions about the book, but I can answer questions about the author,” answered Moshe.
“Are you speaking on David Carl’s behalf?”
“Yes.”
“Are you impersonating David Carl?”
“Yes.”
“I have a question,” a poet said. Having once been a resident of the Green Lantern, she’s born witness to its various stages of development. “There is a quote from William Carlos Williams where he says that the poetry is sensual and consequently, that the subject of poetry has to be in the Objects. Not ideas. That the resonances come from the feeling of objects described. It strikes me that this book starts with the ideas. Do you think that’s true?”
“The passages that I chose to read are all about people. I chose to read about the tangible relationships. If people are ideas, then I suppose I’ve been reading about ideas, but I’ve always thought of people as sensual, and physical things.”
“I nevertheless got the feeling that, for the most part, the characters were hidden from view, in a way. That if you hadn’t, in this case, isolated those particular sections, the characters would have been disguised at first,” said another member of the audience. This one standing, one arm crossed over the other. A lurker in the back, I was surprised she’d say anything.
The voice of the poet was carried by another, a young woman with black hair. “It felt to me like each sentence of the book was trying to resonate. I am used to linear narratives, and often prefer them, where there is a stream of short, even awkward sentences, feeble things, that then rise up to a peak—that’s when something clandestine happens.” She shrugged. “In this case each sentence feels like it’s made to be very important in its own right. Each one can stand on its own.”
Another guest, leaning on the wall, a fellow in a plaid shirt smiled wry, “The passages feel like crab grass to me, instead of a tree that is growing straight up, in this book the lines extend outwards, covering a lot of ground. If you try to read it like a tree, you’ll be disappointed, because each sentence is given its own special significance. The individual lines are treated democratically, almost, with equal weight.”
The Lurker: “But I think that the people are important. More important than the ideas, they provide the vehicle for the ideas. I get the sense that there is a real tenderness in the book: a desire to say without saying. i.e. to tell about this couple, but in such a way that not everyone will notice them.”
The poet again: “Yes that’s exactly it. I’m frustrated when something isn’t plane. I like concrete poetry about concrete things.”
Another one: “But what about Joyce? There are many levels in Joyce, and most of them are not immediately plain.”
The dark haired girl, bright eyes confessed, “Joyce didn’t make sense to me until I read him drunk. Then it was simple.”
I said: “What’s funny is that I don’t think we’d have this conversation if David Carl was here. It’s so odd.”
“It’s a shame,” Moshe answered, speaking, no doubt, the sentiments of David Carl himself.
The poet in love with objects: “Joyce is still writing about a man walking around. A man doing concrete things.”
Moshe: “But you could say that it was based on an idea. The whole book was based on a myth. The objects followed.”

That other, The Joycean, still standing, but this time tilted a little at the hips, “Or Steinbeck, say. He writes, I think, on two levels. Only I feel he’s often passed over because his story is so cinematic and simple—people don’t often read into anything.” “Do you think Steinbeck could write today and be as successful as he was?” Moshe asked.
Another again, and having shifted, tilted the other way, “I don’t think so. I think that’s one of the issues in Fragments: this kind of self-awareness about trying to do something in an obsolete genre.”
Another young man who occasionally sports bloomers and plaid socks shook his head. “Once people said that the novel was dead, it became difficult for everybody.”
Moshe: “You can’t write simple stories anymore. Depending on what you want to accomplish, I guess.”
The Poet: “I think you can. I think Steinbeck could still be the same sort of famous writer today as he was then. He writes good stories. He’s writing myths. Simple, concrete stories. The ideas resonate out of them. We still love the Greek myths for instance.”
Bloomers: “What about Raymond Carver? He writes simple stories.”

It went on, pretty much this way, for a few more minutes and my favorite remark came out towards the end of the night, before we celebrated one last hurrah for the peg-leg pirate bbq. I went downstairs to lock the front door and pull in the sign, just as my dear friend and fellow accomplice at the space came at me, his hands waving in the air, in such a way I couldn’t tell if he was excited or horrified “There are so many Writers in there!”

Fragments

An extended meditation on the sentence, an inquiry into how we make use of language to express our selves, and an investigation of how language helps shape and determine who and what those selves are.

An imaginary conversation between Falstaff and Chuang Tzu, Veronica Lake and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

A love story told through grammatical miscalculations, syntactical anomalies, and the fortuitous discoveries of vocabulary.

Intelligence is manifest in the ability to get what one wants, wisdom in the ability to properly determine what that is.

For months he lived on Altoids, coffee, vitamin C, and the hope that she would call.

There is no present like the one you imagined in the past.

Skepticism as a kind of tourism.

An economy all their own in which his vocabulary is not even legal tender.