Some Thoughts on the Essays of William Bronk

 

I’ve loved for many years the poems in William Bronk’s Collected Poems from North Point Press, and I’ve long wanted to read the companion Vectors and Smoothable Curves: Collected Essays (1983). I somehow never found the right time although I’ve carried the book around for about three decades. The prose is beautiful and precise and also requires a lot of close attention, something I rarely have time for but finally found (let’s say “made”) over this last summer.

It’s really as remarkable a book as I hoped it would be, made up of three sets of essays. And worth the wait. These are essays with a long shelf life of relevance.

The book’s first set of essays, from the 1970s and collected under the subtitle “The New World,” reflects on Bronk’s travels to Palenque, Trikal, Machu Picchu, and Copan, and discusses Mayan and Incan culture and artifacts. Different cultures have created different concepts of time and space, Bronk shows in lucid detail, and those concepts change or vanish over time and can be hard to recover.

And it’s crucial to understand that they are in fact concepts, not realities. Bronk is a cultural deconstructionist (is there a better way to put that?). For humans, the so-called “realities” of the world are themselves only graspable through the concepts we have available to us, and we understand ourselves and the world from inside those concepts, but those concepts never represent any kind of metaphysical truth. They are just approaches we develop for experiencing a world that cannot be described except through cultural fictions, all of which are limited and subject to change. Bronk never says that the world doesn’t exist, since it clearly does, although in what way it does is another issue. However, all human descriptions of it are fictions, even when we tell ourselves that they are grounded in physical conditions. And our fictions not only can change, they do change.

The second set of essays in the book, “A Partial Glossary,” consists of two short pieces discussing costume and desire. And again, Bronk shows how human use and descriptions of things and ideas that we tell ourselves are fundamental reveal changing human cultural values, not ideas grounded in transcendent truth.

Whereas some writers would use the limitations Bronk recognizes as focal points for cultural comparison, or ideas about cultural relativity or intersectionality, and Bronk nods in the direction of such approaches, Bronk instead focuses mainly on the limitations of all human knowledge whatever its cultural context. We never know anything from outside our fictions of it. The world and experience of it remain unknowable. That fact brings a kind of intellectual vertigo (even reading this book can bring that on) yet also an awe that has nearly spiritual dimensions. Existence is a mystery, and while humans often hide from acknowledging that mystery, again and again we find ourselves facing it. And ultimately, disappearing into it.

The final set of essays, "The Brother in Elysium: Ideas of Friendship and Society in the United States," is a collection of essays originally written in 1946, about 30 years earlier than the other essays in the book. This final section contains several essays each on Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville, all of which are fascinating, and all which show Bronk’s own developing philosophical perspective.

The essays on Thoreau made Thoreau seem, in some ways, definitively pre-modern, in that he never seems to have been quite able to imagine that the structure of a society might shape the actions of individuals irrevocably. For Thoreau, individual thought and action, whether his or that of others, were the essential components of human experience. The realities of huge interconnected human societies were ones he could see only from the perspective of an individuality that had to struggle for its independence but could do it, even if most people didn’t find it in their interest to try.

Whitman’s engagement with the concept of the oceanic, on the other hand, as Bronk explores it, points to a perspective more like that of Bronk’s of the 1970s. In the ocean, Whitman finds himself in touch with all that is larger than the human and the social, all that is unknowable and mysterious, something that one can encounter but never really understand. It’s possible, Whitman imagines, to meld with that mystery, but it’s not possible to understand it.

Melville’s paradoxes around the subject of justice form a fitting conclusion to the book. Melville understood that the law and any social contract, and human use of those things, are filled with corruption, oppression, and delusion. On the other hand, especially as he got older, Melville did not seem to have believed that there was any absolute system of truth against which those human failings could be accurately measured. Our cultural concepts of morality are all we have. Bronk shows Melville, in his short novel Billy Budd, acknowledging both that justice is often a fantasy and that humans still need a concept of it to live by, even when that concept fails them. And crucially for Melville, they need it even when they know it’s failing them.

Sentence after careful sentence, the essays in Vectors and Smoothable Curves show Bronk’s development as an essayist in something close to reverse order, with the most recently written essays coming first in the book. After all, linearity and chronology are themselves no more than fictions. Bronk shows that meaning resides in the individual, or in the culture, or both, but that ultimately it’s meaning itself that is the limitation that we have to live with and fail with, since mostly all we know are the ramifications of that limitation.

Still, awe, mystery, and the unknowable are what we also have to live with, no matter how hard we might try to avoid their presence in our lives or call on them only when we think we need them. If Bronk is not really a religious or even a spiritual writer, that’s only because the power (or the presence, or the absence, choose whatever word best fails you) he is trying to acknowledge is much larger than anything we can possibly say about it.

Brief Review: The Holy Book of the Beard (1996) by Duff Brenna

 

Although it’s set significantly in the Clairemont Mesa area, reading The Holy Book of the Beard I came to feel that it was the closest representation I’d seen in fiction of the culture of the East County San Diego that people in San Diego have often told me about. Published in 1996, the book feels like it could equally be describing the 70s and the 80s and forward. It’s a culture that may be changed by now, but don’t ask me because I wouldn’t know.

It’s a very white culture, one that’s an odd and in many ways unique combination of post-60s-revolution hippie looseness with the reality that these southern Californians are only a few years away from their escape from small U.S. towns in the midwest and south. The book is a reminder that Beat generation freedom-at-all-costs was often a white cultural phenomenon only, one that wasn’t necessarily leftist politically, since an “I’m doing it it my way” attitude doesn’t contain in it a whole lot of concern for others.

But the remnants of Beat Generation behaviors in these characters isn’t that of East Coast intellectual Ginsberg or West Coast adventurers Snyder and Kerouac (the west coast portion of Kerouac). This book portrays something that’s more Bukowski-style beat behavior, men with shitty jobs and behavior problems that start with drunkenness and go from there, and the women they take it out on. Here, freedom includes your right to be constantly bombed and punch out anyone, especially if she’s smaller than you. One of the characters is literary, and wow does he especially spout a lot of nonsense about how the world has mistreated him. For this one character, if few of the others, it seemed clear that Brenna’s intentions were satirical.

The women characters in the book are pretty tough-minded and tough-acting. They’d have to be to put up with the kind of behavior they have to put up with. The more sympathetic characters, usually women and at least one of the men, are the people who remain upset that the others behave as badly as they do. Everybody in the book is insular and full of themselves, but at least a few of them recognize that behaving that way is a problem.

The cultural environment of this book was for me its main fascination. But I could never quite tell whether Brenna realized that he was describing a deeply odd cultural context or whether he saw the depiction of sleazy half-tough drunkards with delusions of grandeur as a semi-hardboiled description of life as it is. The conclusion of the book, not entirely convincing, traipses into being southwestern Gothic. It made me think that the book was partly an Erskine Caldwell-like half-mocking, half-horrified exposé of some strange ignorant weirdos who think of themselves as wise. But I have to admit I’m not sure.

I had mixed feelings about the writing. The sentences and paragraphs have great energy and kept me involved, but every chapter is about twice or more as long as it needs to be. There’s a lot of writing in this novel that could have been cut back, and some characterizations are slammed home well past the point of tedium. Still, whenever I wasn’t bored, I was fascinated.

Ultimately I felt like the padding in the writing was in keeping, usually for worse rather than for better, with the self-indulgent rambling of the characters themselves. But the fact that they, and it, aren’t as interesting as they present themselves to be made me wonder. Maybe this undeniably talented writer absorbed a bit more than he ought to have of the heady combination of pot, sea air, fumes of gasoline and oil, and gallons of whiskey and Budwiser in which these sad, mostly unredeemable, and finally grotesque characters are drowning themselves and anyone unlucky enough to come in contact with them.

Brief Review: The Salt Line (2017) by Holly Goddard Jones

 

The Salt Line by Holly Goddard Jones is an interesting example of the contemporary cross-genre novel sometimes referred to as “slipstream” (though the term hasn’t entirely caught on): it’s a combination of the conventions of sci-fi and of literary realism. Its energetic near-future plot about a U.S. suffering under a long-term contagion of deadly ticks that has altered all large scale social structures is joined to a sophisticated literary style and an interest in developing complex characters.

The tightly plotted narrative is filled with surprising turns, and the dystopian future it pictures feels especially possible post-COVID pandemic, although the book was published in 2017. The sentences are various degrees of elegant, energetic, and brutally raw. And the panorama of characters includes a compelling social, gender, and racial cross-section of the people living in this unpleasant new world.

For me though, the book wasn’t as compelling in the characterizations. The characters seem like they could come from any big futurescape-made-for-the-screen sci-fi epic novel, although one with a prominent and convincing feminist and anti-racist bent. But none of the characters, or the conflicts that motivated them, stood out as especially memorable, and the sometimes long sections that developed them as characters didn’t always seem worth following through. The emotional stakes were convincing enough, and took some startling turns, but none of the people ever jumped that far out of being sci-fi movie-of-the-week action figures.

Of course that points to one of the difficulties with slipstream fiction: making the literary elements as successful as the genre ones, or the other way around. The Salt Line doesn’t quite have what it takes to make it as Ursula K. Le Guin-style crossover literature. It might have been more effective if it had done a bit less with long-winded sections of character development. Sometimes a sci-fi novel should really be just a sci-fi novel.

Still, The Salt Line is unquestionably daring in many ways, and numerous surprises keep the action well worth following.

One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How A Poem Made Us Modern by R. Howard Bloch

 

I had been anticipating reading One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How A Poem Made Us Modern (2017) by R. Howard Bloch for quite awhile, but kept putting it off for reasons not worth discussing. And now I’ve finally had a chance to read it.

And my feelings? Disappointed!

Much of the book is a surprisingly tepid and cursory biography. It makes Stéphan Mallarmé and his environment feel by turns boring and pompous, maybe because the tone of this book is too often that way. There are a lot of quick and no more than semi-necessary tangents into larger historical situations that fill out the pages. The prose is often dull in its phrasing even as it tries to be dramatic. The name-dropping details are not particularly revealing regarding any of the people whose names get dropped.

I did appreciate the implication that Mallarmé, like many artists, led a relatively ordinary, often tedious life engaged with many banalities of his time, though with its fair share of illness, pain, and economic privation (though hardly more than that of many people in 19th century France). And Mallarmé’s work in women’s fashion was a fascinating element of his often difficult work life. But Bloch’s urge to make the story of Mallarmé’s daily life into the dramatic, special case of an artist often felt at odds with the ho-hum prose and facts of the narrative.

There are a few good chapters or sections of chapters. Some of the historical context of war and other upheavals of the 1870s is made fascinating, and the time right before and when Mallarmé’s famous poem “One Toss of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance” is finally published (1897) has some genuine excitement. Those were for me the highlights of the book.

The close-reading chapters that follow the presentation of Mallarmé’s poem in French and a new English translation are pretty mind-numbing and overblown both, although I was surprised to learn that Mallarmé thought English, not French, was the language of the future. And the concluding chapter, which spends a lot of time quickly and boringly summarizing a lot of Modernist and even later works and says “Mallarmé came before it all!” feels in those summary paragraphs like an overwrought Wikipedia entry that isn’t very convincing. The details about his death and the tributes to him are presented with some shock and poignance, but there’s nothing especially memorable about the book’s analysis of them.

I did learn some things about Mallarmé and his poetry from this book, but on the whole it felt like a worthwhile 100-150 pages padded into nearly 300 pages. The goal of a major publishing house book like this is obviously, at least in part, to make Mallarmé’s essential Modernist poem fascinating to a larger mainstream audience. Unfortunately, I finished Bloch's One Toss of the Dice feeling that it was just as likely to turn readers away as it was to convince them that they’ve discovered the fountainhead of Modernism.