(Cross-posted from Infinite Zombies.)

“A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.”

Gustav Mahler.

Daryl asked, “Are the extracts required reading?” I say absolutely. In fact, I think they’re so important that I want to add another one to them: the Mahler quotation I opened with. Think of it as a kind of meta-extract, describing what strikes me as Moby-Dick‘s overriding goal and illustrating the way the extracts condense and expose that goal.

What goal is that, you ask, and what way? (I’m so glad you asked.) Moby-Dick is the earliest novel I know of that tries to be about everything. Daniel touches on this in his contribution to the conversation about how the book is modern, and Matt K. takes it as literally the base of his project. For one thing, this is a broadly contextualized and extensively allusive book. Even when it isn’t about, say, the fortress of Quebec (ch. 8) or the assassination of Thomas à Becket (ch. 16), it assumes you know those various subjects well enough that they can be dropped in as figurative language without any explanation. (This is why I appreciate my Norton Critical Edition, even if it does also footnote the very most obvious things in all the world.) Moby-Dick, to paraphrase another writer of the period, is large, it contains multitudes.

That’s essentially a question of style; but the book’s inclusiveness stretches also to the level of content. The opening of the book—this whole first week’s reading, in fact—is awfully leisurely. We’re officially about a fifth of the way in, and Ishmael still isn’t even on the boat. Plot is obviously not the primary concern. I mean, there’s a whole chapter about chowder. The editor of any “normal” novel would have chopped that out right quick. And Queequeg’s “Ramadan” doesn’t appear to have any plot justification, since we get no explanation for it and, at least through chapter 39, no further mention of it. (Where that vigil does come into play is in the book’s critique of domineering Christianity.) While I am excited for the chase after the white whale, I’ve always felt like the plot is more in the line of a vehicle that Melville uses to carry out his other concerns—and in that respect, the most apt vehicle to compare it to may well be a clown car.

To return to the extracts, with a quick detour about their putative compiler, the “painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub”: Daryl wondered why he even exists. I hadn’t considered the question before; I just knew he was about my favorite of literary supernumeraries. But I think Matt B. hit on it with his talk of empathy. That bracketed benediction to the Sub-Sub is so lovely, so affectionate—even if it is a bit condescending for comedy’s sake—that it really helps set the stage for what’s coming. Personally, I find it makes me more receptive to taking in the extracts, after seeing what care went into their assembly.

And there’s quite a lot to take in, by design. The scope of the extracts is intimidating. They’re international: Without researching, it looks to me like there are sources biblical, Greek, Roman, Viking, French, English, Dutch, Scottish, Spanish, Swedish, U.S. American, and German. They include biblical history, folk tales, wisdom, and prophecy; classical science and history; medical lore; poetry; political philosophy; satire; expository prose on slaughter; voyage chronicles; legal commentary; physiology; songs; natural history; fiction; demography; and economic analysis. At least one is invented, smuggled in with the same authority as Pliny. This is a deliberately bewildering mass of information, speculation, commentary, and rhapsody that, if you let it, tells you what you’re in for over the course of the book. It’s like a hologram, containing in one small bit the whole of the completed work.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. There is one thing it leaves for the body of the text to surprise you with: humor. Except for the attribution “Edmund Burke. (somewhere.),” the extracts are significantly less funny than the novel proper. I’ll close with an observation about Melville that never ceases to amuse me. Joan’s got a whole post on the beauty and majesty and suppleness of Melville’s remarkable writing; what I love is that, couched amid all that thoughtful eloquence, he regularly makes time for penis jokes. Ishmael’s nervousness about sharing a bed with a harpooneer (“And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply”) cracks me up every time, and it’s not the only joke of its kind. The incongruity of such silly jokes in such an impressive book makes it all the more enjoyable.

On Saturday, Eric and I plucked up our courage, braved the police, and actually visited Long Beach. We had tickets, you see—tickets I’d been waiting 12 years for.

Flashback!
When I was in high school, I commuted into Berkeley twice a week for a class at Cal on Chinese history. I would occasionally delay my trip home with a sidetrack to the gorgeous old Berkeley Public Library, where I found the first CD section of any library in my experience. It was like skooB dlO srednaeroC darnoC lraC for me in there, dusty, golden-dim, and magical (or at least my memory re-creates it that way). One day I found a box set of something called Nixon in China, and I figured it was the serendipity that often strikes in places chock-full of books: I was taking a Chinese-history class, this was at least partly about China, why not check it out and give it a try?

As it turned out, the opera itself—for it was indeed the sole recording (at the time) of John Adams’s first opera—on the subject of Richard Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972, wasn’t all that relevant to the class. But I did have background information on the Cultural Revolution, and on Mao Zedong, Jiang Qing, and Zhou Enlai, so in that respect it was a great help. No, instead those three discs introduced me to the man I consider the greatest American composer of “classical” music (we can get into what those quotation marks mean if you really want to). From the day after I first heard the mysterious, solemn opening lines of the opera, I scoured local press and the Internet for mention of a live performance.

For 11 and a half years I checked every opera company in whatever area I lived in, hoping to find Nixon in China listed for their season. (In the meantime, I ended up buying that box set and practically memorizing most of Act I.) I had a close call about two years ago, with an announcement that the opera would receive its Northern California premiere, but that collapsed under suggestive circumstances. Then, one day last fall, out of the mailbag and into my mailbox dropped a promotional card advertising Long Beach Opera‘s brand-new production—the opera’s first performances in the LA area since the first Bush presidency. I got tickets as soon as I could, and then I had to wait another six months for the night. But finally it came.

I had seen most of the original Peter Sellars production on video, and given how much the opera is really about re-presentation (for a capital-T Theory exploration of this, see Peggy Kamuf’s “The Replay’s the Thing”; the short version is that it’s about a self-consciously produced media event, and addresses that with techniques like musical vamps during news-photo tableaux), I was curious how it would be re-presented in a new production. The answer is: successfully, in two opposite ways.

As with any opera, some of the action in Nixon in China is dictated by the score. Adams is justly proud, for example, of the onstage arrival of the Spirit of ’76 (Air Force One), and there is a ballet in the middle of the opera. The stage director has to choose whether to present these moments “literally” or to stylize them. (If I were a stage director, I’d certainly be unable to resist putting an airplane on the stage.) In this production, Peter Pawlik takes a sort of magically realist approach to most of the scenes; a quadrant of the airplane pulls forward out of the backdrop, and there’s a miniature proscenium arch on the stage-within-a-stage for the ballet, and a banquet-hall set. They’re slightly abstracted, but generally realistic and easily understandable. In fact, as the LA Times‘s Chris Pasles points out, Pawlik sets Act III back in the banquet hall rather than in Sellars’s floating-theater-space barracks—a definite improvement on the original. This approach, which I’ll call the literal one, is accomplished very well in the production. The opening, particularly, is beautiful, with blue dawnlight silhouetting the chorus against a scrim to reproduce the misty February morning.

Then in two scenes—Nixon and Kissinger’s meeting with Mao and Zhou, and Pat Nixon’s sightseeing trip—the literal approach goes out the window and a more stylized aesthetic takes over. Compare the new production and the original: This is from LBO’s version of this scene. (There are four of those big red chairs, and please ignore the woeful caption from the OC Register, who might be expected to know a little more about their hometown president than that.) When Mao’s triune secretary deadpans to Pat Nixon in three-part harmony “Here are some children having fun,” a row of wooden children is rolled out with their upraised right arms all attached to one pole, so that a chorister can flick them back and forth in a synchronized flag-waving. The pig whose ear Pat scratches is a cutout side of pork hanging on a rack. It’s quirky, and funny.

And here’s where I get to take the critic’s step back and be judicious yet opinionated. I am usually quite open to abstract stagings; I enjoy the intellectual effort they spark, and personally I find the Verfremdungseffekt enormously productive, when well used. In the scene with Nixon and Mao, for instance, while I didn’t particularly appreciate the way the giant chairs turned the principals into children, I thought the maneuvering of the chairs around the stage (they’re on wheels, pushed around by chorus members) made an exciting counterpoint to and expansion of the political and philosophical sparring in the magnificent libretto, and gave Mao an excellent opportunity to menace and harangue Nixon at one point. The trouble, however, comes in the unevenness that results from alternating between literal and stylized presentations. This production uses a fundamentally inconsistent staging, and because the literal first scene was so thrilling (airplane! On stage!), the stylized second scene was disappointing. But taken separately on their own merits, the stylized thread and the literal thread are equally successful. I’d love to see either one woven through the whole opera, but that’s not so much a complaint as a plea to be embarrassed with riches. When we took our seats, I leaned over to Eric and told him, “This could basically be terrible and I’d probably still love it.” It was great; and I loved it.

Break out your wigs and ball tape: Season two of RuPaul’s Drag Race starts tonight! I was turned onto the show during season one by Tom and Lorenzo, may the most flattering light shine upon their cheekbones forever, and it may well be one of the most fantastic things ever made in the history of television.

You should imagine me typing that with entirely straight-faced fingers, depending on how you think I mean “fantastic” (read: fabulous). The show is outright ridiculous, in very many ways; take the premise, for instance: Nine drag queens compete to be “America’s next drag superstar,” which title they must earn through a series of Project Runway– and America’s Next Top Model–style challenges. (Isn’t that how everyone becomes one of America’s drag superstars?) RuPaul, in male and female drag, is both mentor and host (respectively), shot with the most lovingly Vaseline-slathered lens you’ve ever encountered in a nonmedical context. In each episode, after he gives the girls (even in interviews, out of drag, they refer to each other by their drag names and female pronouns; it’s delightfully disorienting) their challenge, he reminds them of the scoring rubric. They are judged on:

• Charisma;
• Uniqueness;
• Nerve; and
• Talent.

Then he tells them not to fuck it up. (I’m quoting.) At each judging, the bottom two are required to lip-sync for their lives, and then one receives Ru’s benediction (“Shantay, you stay”) while the other has to “sashay away.” The guests and guest judges are amazing—Bob Mackie, Michelle Williams (who cried watching drag queens lip-sync her song “We Break the Dawn,” and not in the bad way), Jenny Shimizu, Lucy Lawless, Charo.

To me, the show is plainly wonderful. But when I tried to describe it to a friend of mine, he nearly had an allergic reaction. (He can’t handle Beyoncé either, who is, let’s face it, a female drag queen.) And that’s when I remembered Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’”

By my lights, Sontag’s essay is not a triumph. It’s generally conclusory throughout (“Life is not stylish.” Well, says you), and where it attempts to reason, it is often either offensive or wrong. Or both. What’s most frustrating for me about the essay, then, is its quicksilver flashes of brilliance, the bits where Sontag succeeds in “getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility.” When she talks about camp’s attention to “the degree of artifice, of stylization,” that rings a bell. “The great stylists of temperament and mannerism” sounds exactly right. And most of all, camp “understand[s] Being-as-Playing-a-Role.” These notes I recognize from my own experience; and taken out of context like I’m doing here, they could be from a magazine profile of a drag queen. These truths about camp exactly describe drag (which must be, I suppose, the ultimate enactment of camp—even though Sontag seems to suggest that intentional camp can’t be good, before she contradicts herself). So if she understands it so well, at least in some parts, how does Sontag miss the point so badly in others?

If you watch the first season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, you’ll see just how wrong Sontag is when she calls camp “disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical.” You’ll see her error in basing camp in a “psychopathology of affluence.” You’ll understand the deep misprision in her bare assertion that camp is a “solvent of morality,” propounded by gays to make us more acceptable in a consequently less-moral world. This will all be clear to you because you’ll see actual drag queens doing drag.

The contestants cover a wide variety of approaches to drag. Porkchop and Tammy, for example, are comics; Ongina is a genderqueer warrior; Shannel is a showgirl; Rebecca is a tired little Latin boy in dress; and Bebe and Nina are creatures not of this world. Bebe and Nina give the lie to Sontag’s disparagements through their approach to drag, which is dignified and powerful. They cast a remarkable spell, and I think I’ve worked out how they do it. I don’t mean the makeup-and-artifice part—you can look that stuff up—but the way they hold their audiences in thrall. It’s a combination of glamour and guts.

The widespread gender norms we are mostly all embedded in make a man in a dress a figure of mockery. He is a ridiculous person, suitable for laughing at. Bebe and Nina know this, but through the force of their wills they are able to persuade the audience to forget. They wear their vulnerability like couture, and radiate such an honest refusal to be afraid, such a “state of continual incandescence” (Sontag again), that it doesn’t occur to the audience to take them as anything other than what they present themselves as. Which, importantly, is never real women. They do not seek to be mistaken for actual women, though it is of course a compliment to their technique if someone is fooled. Instead, they present themselves as men creating the illusion of female personae, an illusion that requires the audience’s collaboration if it is to stand up. Their special power is inducing the audience to collaborate in this way, and that power comes from the strength of will involved in unreservedly exposing themselves to ridicule. The show of vulnerability demonstrates a strength that the audience can’t help but respect.

Which is why I thought it was so outrageous that Rebecca made it to the final three with Bebe and Nina. Those two are true gender-performance artists, whereas Rebecca couldn’t even be bothered to blend her blush. Her goal was to be girl-sexy, which is a fine thing, and an impressive accomplishment for a man, but it doesn’t hold up to the amazing projection of the other two. Girl was outclassed, and she knew it the whole time.

Posts are always percolating, but for the next little while, action here will probably be slim to nil. I’ve been invited to blog the 2666 group reading at Infinite Zombies, so that’s where most of my blogging energy will be directed. See you over there!

(I do have one last Infinite Summer post in the works, even though we’re almost into next year now, but it’s held things up long enough. When it happens, it’ll happen. Meanwhile!)

I can’t say with complete confidence that The Best of Gene Wolfe is the best of Gene Wolfe (although Clute says yes), but it is astoundingly good, and remarkably consistent. If I’m putting together a team of books that can hold their own in a short-fiction cage match before Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories ultimately delivers the death blow, I’m torn between this volume and its sibling, Endangered Species. On the one hand, “The Death of Doctor Island,” “Seven American Nights,” “Petting Zoo,” “The Tree Is My Hat” (which I’ve always had a special affinity for because it was the first Wolfe story I felt I had truly understood), and particularly “The Eyeflash Miracles”; on the other, “The Last Thrilling Wonder Story,” “When I Was Ming the Merciless,” “The HORARS of War,” and “Silhouette.” (I haven’t yet got my hands on The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, so for all I know it’s got a shot at the roster too.)

My point is, while I might quibble over the exact contents of a short-fiction collection called The Best of Gene Wolfe, it will inevitably be among the most gripping, exciting books of stories and novellas I have read. And it is.

I’m not really interested in writing a story-by-story review, though, or a subjective defense of Wolfe’s writing. Instead, I thought I might pay some analytical attention to Wolfe’s technique. Let me draw another circle around myself, even smaller: I’m going to look at one particular kind of technique Wolfe often uses, a species of unreliable narration.

Much of Wolfe’s work is written in the first person. He has said, “It always seems to me that if you have a narrator, if the narration is not by an all-knowing, all-seeing author, . . . then the narrator is damn well going to be unreliable. Real people really are unreliable narrators all the time, even if they try to be reliable narrators.” One interesting thing about Wolfe’s versions of the unreliable narrator is the ways in which they are unreliable. He often presents an in-story explanation for their possible unreliability. One narrator may at some point eat a hallucinogenic candy without knowing it; one is unconsciously in denial about his identity; a couple excise pages from their journals (which are the text) because they expect those journals to come into police custody. (In another example, which I will address again, it’s not the narrator who is unreliable—the work is in the third person—but the central character, who often serves as a kind of interpreter of events. He may have been contacted by a deity, or he may have a brain lesion.)

In keeping with that quote, Wolfe’s narrators are often not (wholly) deliberately unreliable. They tend simply to not know as much as they suppose—or as much as you might ordinarily want your narrator to know. This ignorance of the limits of their knowledge can lead to narratorial assertions that to the reader plainly cannot be true, but to the narrator obviously must be. Alternatively, the narrators are often mystified or confused by events in the story. Sometimes they merely report the cause of their confusion then throw up their hands; sometimes, though, they try to explain what has happened. In these cases, they are frequently wrong: They may accurately note the facts that have occurred while missing the meaning of those facts, or they may strenuously attempt to divine an ultimately unconvincing interpretation of the facts. Wolfe plays some of these miscues for comedy, but some of them are crucially dramatic, and one at least is the engine for an entire series of books.

The in-story narrators are not the only avenues Wolfe uses to introduce uncertainty; even in his third-person work, the narration often tracks close to one or more characters, without the kind of distance between narrator and narrated that is necessary for an omniscient perspective. Indeed, at explanatory or interpretive moments, Wolfe often exercises the third-person narrative prerogative of diving into a character’s thoughts; the narrating voice in fact doesn’t explain at all, ceding its authority instead to that character and temporarily adopting a first-person point of view—with all the same reliability risks outlined before.

But none of this has yet touched on the subject I want to wrestle with, which is the technique (the writerly craft, that is, not the specific operations) of this unreliable narration. Brace yourselves for the simile I’m about to lay on you:

It’s as if the substance of one of these unreliably narrated works—the characters, the setting, the plot, etc.—is a magnificent cubic sculpture, baroquely burrowed through, complex with caverns and crystalline with combs. The narration is then a polished brass facing affixed to the surfaces of the cube. When you first see the sculpture, the brass is all you observe. It’s aesthetically self-consistent, pleasing, perforated here and there with curious gaps, but a finely made thing. Thanks to the spaces inside, the sculpture is only a little heavier than it looks. It makes satisfactory sense as an aesthetic object, but something about those punchouts haunts you. You keep coming back to the sculpture, turning it over in your hands, looking at it from different angles. Then one day you notice that, at this new angle, you can see through one of the perforations into the cube’s cathedral interior, and suddenly the whole sculpture makes a deeper and more awesome sense. Now that you know what angle to look from, the gaps in the surface all show chambers and structures in the heart of the cube that reveal an organization you only suspected before. You see details that were wholly concealed, and echoes you couldn’t have matched to each other; what seemed merely decorative now stands in prominent dialogue with other areas, and some region that occupied your attention now melts into a fuller pattern.

The trick here—and I use the word not to demean Wolfe’s accomplishment, but to emphasize its intentionality and createdness—is the writing of a narration that seems like a complete piece of art and yet still, perhaps almost subliminally, hints at a fuller conception that supersedes and frequently contradicts it. This isn’t quite unreliable narration, and it isn’t quite obfuscation; given the religious bent of much of Wolfe’s fiction (or, more properly, the religious interpretations that much of Wolfe’s fiction permits and sometimes encourages), it probably makes more sense to see in this tactic a palimpsest of the Book of Nature: careful observation and contemplation of the “natural” (that which is presented directly to the senses) leads to the revelation of what was hidden.

And I wish I came up with these interpretations earlier in the process of writing these posts, because it feels like there’s a lot more to say in that direction—but if I’m going to say it, it’s going to be in a different post. For now, Seacrest out. (Spooky: it’s like EROCK and Matt Roe know who I am…)