Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String.

Abstract

This article aims to show that Ben Marcus's first novel The Age of Wire and String is a formal experiment in language. The relationship with the outside world is changed in a radical way and the text can be seen as a book of instructions for life: a grammar of emotion, instinct, and pain. The lyrical prose makes extreme demands on the reader to perform a decoding exercise, but he is blocked by the constant redefinitions of concepts, relationships, and places. In creating the world of an imaginary American society, Marcus perceives everything outside as animate, and gives a voice to its loss.

First published in America in 1995 (Knopf) and reissued in England by Flamingo in 1997, The Age of Wire and String is one of the most extraordinary texts to have emerged from America in the last twenty years. For once one can agree with a jacket blurb, where we find Robert Coover writing that this text 'marks the arrival of a unique new talent in American letters'.

At University Marcus studied philosophy, particularly that of Wittgenstein, though he now teaches creative writing at Brown University and an interest in both philosophy and innovation are apparent in the text. One cannot avoid the word 'text' in speaking of Marcus's work since this is certainly not a novel in the usual sense of the word. The dust-jacket, but not the title-page, describes the work as 'Fictions' which might lead the reader to expect something along the lines of Borges, and there are certainly elements of Borges's writing in the hermeneutic work imposed on the reader and determined by the text. 'There is no larger task than that of cataloging a culture, particularly when that culture has remained willfully hidden to the routine in-gazing practiced by professional disclosers' (p. 3). However, finally I do not feel that Marcus's experiments are of the same nature as Borges's; the 'Fictions' are disconcerting, not in a metafictional sense, but rather because the reality, the space, time, family characters, and objects are all recontextualized as other. It is as though Marcus refuses a metaphorical approach and insists on the metonymic -- the images, one feels, all have a solid attribution in reality, though that reality is one of terrible pain and loss. The tone is in some ways that of a child trying to come to terms with the outside world, defining that world for the first time, and at the same time discovering pain.

At times one is tempted to connect the writing to the ambitions of the Surrealists or the Martian Poets. For example, Marcus writes: 'Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household's walls by stalling its flow to the outlets' (p. 7). Or, again, 'Snoring, language disturbance caused by accidental sleeping, in which a person speaks in compressed syllables and bulleted syntax, often stacking several words over one another in a distemporal deliverance of a sentence' (p. 8). In these early, and quite simple examples one can easily find connections with some of Francis Ponge's poems, for example, 'The Candle':

   Night sometimes brings to life an unusual plant whose gleam
   Decomposes furnished rooms into clumps of shadow.

   Its gold leaf, held by a very black pedicel, stands unmoved in the
   Hollow of a slender alabaster column.[1]

In both Ponge and Marcus one finds dislocations in the usual order of logic; cause and effect seem reversed. However valid this connection may be, I think that finally Marcus is cutting deeper than Ponge, and in fact, at times, he is closer to Rilke. James Hall makes a very good point about Rilke and the child's relationship with things, which I believe can be applied pertinently to Marcus's work. 'For Rilke', Hall writes, 'adults are alienated from things. We live in an age "which possesses no things, no houses, no external objects". By "things" Rilke means objects such as childhood possessions -- small pieces of wood, vessels and utensils -- to which the child has extraordinarily close and deep attachment'.[2] This seems to give a key insight into what Marcus is doing in The Age of Wire and String. But before I continue with an analysis of the text it will be as well to spend some time in describing this strange, new piece of writing.

The text is a kind of 'Book of Instructions' for life, particularly life in contemporary America. The title leads us to ideas of connections, including nerve connections (wires), and tying, measuring, holding together (string), in short a sort of bricolage of life. The dust-jacket and title-page have crude, but charming illustrations of various everyday items such as tools, pipes for plumbing, envelopes, showers, suits, and so on, each illustration being surrounded by a square, broken line and, on the broken line, a drawing of a pair of scissors. The same is true of the picture of the author: Ben Marcus, one more item to cut and paste into the scrapbook of life. Our initial contract, then, is with the quotidian images of work, communication, clothing, and washing. The book is dedicated 'for Father' and has an epigraph from Michael Marcus (on internal evidence Ben's father: 'Patriarchal systems and figures, including Michael Marcuses', p. 135); the epigraph reads: 'Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.' The other epigraph is from Emerson: 'Every word was once an animal.' Here one finds two directions for reflection: first an atavistic, child's view of language to which I referred earlier; and, second an idea of the autonomy of language possibly derived from Wittgenstein and Heidegger where language speaks, or more accurately, language 'dances'.[3]

The book of 'Fictions' is constructed with an 'Argument' (to which I shall return), and eight sections entitled 'Sleep', 'God', 'Food', 'The House', 'Animal', 'Weather', 'Persons', 'The Society'. Each section having five titled sub-sections (except for 'The House' and 'The Society' which both have six), all sections are followed by a list of terms which do not so much define what has gone before, as lead the reader in new directions and further confuse him. Only at the end of the work, for example, do we find a definition of the title: 'AGE OF WIRE AND STRING, THE Period in which English science devised abstract parlance system based on the flutter pattern of string and wire structures placed over the mouth during speech' (p. 135). This might lead one to think of communications at distance, such as microphones, telephones, radios, but just as well could refer to impediments to communications such as anaesthetic masks. In short this is a book that blocks interpretation by a constant series of definitions that are then constantly redefined.

It is a book that demands decoding -- a point that has already been made by Jerry Bass, who writes that he was struck (one could have wished that he had argued) by the fact that Ben Marcus 'has fashioned a style with which to write about the unthinkable'.[4] In writing about the unthinkable (actually this seems to me a misnomer, for Marcus has clearly thought very deeply), he uses a style that is abstract, cold, and unemotional -- that 'Book of Instructions' style I referred to earlier, a style that places Marcus in a schizophrenic situation: 'We are just myself' (pp. 105, 109). But, at the same time, he feels himself chosen to write: 'I am the one my father said is supposed to scratch down on this bundle. [. . .] I will always be his carrier, his animal assistant' (p. 104), and here he sounds not unlike Aeneas. Often the text of The Age of Wire and String is abstract, in a Platonic, essential sense: 'They collaborate on the dream of the house, with each participant imagining perfectly his own room' (p. 139). But sometimes, and I have to mention this as a counter-balance, Marcus can be wonderfully lyrical; in this case the subject is communication itself: 'All messages and imperatives, such as they are, shall be drawn from a private translation of the sun's tones. The member shall design his house so that it shall mitten these syllables that ripple forth from the bright orb. He may place his faith in the walls, which it is his duty to shine, that they receive the vivid law within them and transfer it silently upon every blessed member who sits and waits inside the home' (p. 138). These paradisal, Blakean images gather strength from the repetitions and redefinitions, of houses, wall, members, mittens, and so on that echo throughout the book. In fact it should by now be evident that whatever tone Marcus is using, whether the abstract, cold, intellectual mode, or the less frequent lyric mode, he is nevertheless working in poetry. The repetition of images and phrases connect in a non-logical, non-ratiocinative manner and it is precisely here that I take issue with Marc Chenetier. This excellent critic of contemporary American fiction seems for once to have missed the point when he writes: 'If one term hardly seems to apply for a description of Ben Marcus's first book, it is "stories". Where the mere size of the component parts, the fact that some were published independently and the necessity for a commercial publisher to give a recognizable handle to the batch he markets are the only reasons working in favour of that denomination.'[5] The point missed, is that Chenetier is arguing structurally, and looking for narrative connections whereas, it seems to me, the connections within the 'Fictions' are poetic and not structural nor narrative. The stories combine together because of the constant repetitions and redefinitions of terms and family names, particularly those of 'father' and Jason. They further combine because of the buried theme of the painful loss of these characters.

The 'Argument' to The Age of Wire and String seems to me essential for it is here that Marcus announces his project:

This book is a catalog of the life project as prosecuted in the Age of Wire And String and beyond, into the arrangements of states, sites, and cities and, further, within the small houses that have been granted erection or temporary placement on the perimeters of districts and river colonies. The settlement, in clusters and dispersed, has long required a document of secret motion and instruction -- a collection of studies that might serve to clarify the terms obscured within every facet of the living program. (p. 3)

What Marcus announces here is a redefinition of life -- 'the living program' at a particular time, the 'Age of Wire and String', which could be interpreted as the history of America for the past two hundred years or so, beginning with 1807, 'Death in the water as a new erosion by Carolina' (p. 11), and 'the grass wars of the 1820s' (p. 53). Time and events in time often seem to be dislocated, whereas locations in space are named in terms of the familiar and there are frequent references to Illinois, Utah, Arkansas, Ohio, Denver, and so on (though this does not resolve the problem of whether 'Carolina' is a place or a character, nor whether Arkansas actually relates to a place on a map or to an imaginary Arkansas). In the named places people build their houses and their lives. The reader notes that some authority would seem to be needed for the erection of the houses, but that authority is anonymous -- an invisible agency. Later in the text this invisible agency might be called 'Thompson', a kind of God seen in a burning bush: 'GOD-BURNING SYSTEM Method of Thompsonian self-immolation. For each Thompson, there exist flammable outcrops or limbs which rub onto the larger body of Thompson (Perkins) rendering morning fires and emberage that lights the sky and advances the time of a given society or culture' (p. 25). 'Perkins' to whom the reader is now driven, is defined as an incarnate deity: '1. Term given to the body of Thompson, in order that his physical form never desecrate His own name. 2. The God of territory' (p. 26). Finally, Marcus's programme would seem to be ethical and pedagogical; the 'life program' (the building of shelters and lives) needs a 'document of secret motion and instruction'. The document, the collection of studies, The Book of Wire and String is thus an attempt to see into the life of the contemporary culture and redefine it. In this experiment Marcus's perception is not that of an external analyst looking with an outer gaze (p. 3). Rather he is someone looking from within: 'Outer gaze alters the inner thing, that by looking at an object we destroy it with our desire, that for accurate vision to occur the thing must be trained to see itself, or otherwise perish in the blindness, flawed' (pp. 3-4).

Marcus, then, would seem to be writing a grammar of emotion, instinct, and pain. His grammar is also a taxonomy, a series of definitions of the relationship of the individual to the outside world (or, more significantly, the relationship of the outer world to the individual), which seems to me similar to that held by Rilke's view of the child's vision, to which I referred earlier. The object perceived by Marcus in the natural world is always perceived as animate, it has a life of its own and thus it cannot rightly be perceived from the surface of the outside. Marcus's immense task is to give this external world its own voice and volition: in short to define the voice of the other. It is a task which demands enormous empathy and imagination in the creation of a new language whereby the author does not so much give voice to the inanimate, but allows the inanimate to write itself, which has the effect of altering all our expectations of referentiality.

Sometimes, as I have mentioned, Marcus achieves a wonderful lyricism. In the section entitled 'The House' we find something approaching the transcendental: 'When the SUN'S wires are measured, we discover the coordinates for a place or places that shall hereafter be known as perfect or final or miraculous. The house shall be built here using soft blocks of wood and certain solidified emotions, such as tungsten' (p. 56). Or, another example: 'YARD, THE Locality in which wind is buried and houses are discussed. Fine grains line the banks. Water curves outside the pastures. Members settle into position' (p. 65). However, this lyricism, like Celan's, expresses an almost inexpressible sense of loss and pain. Celan wrote that his poems were like messages left in bottles in the ocean, uninterpretable, unless someone, somewhere, sometime managed to find the bottle and read the message. It seems to me that Marcus's prose-poetry works in the same way, and at times Marcus directly deals with the holocaust: 'The days were cold and hot and the sun did both things. A man had two names. When a dog punched through a wall, it was devoured. Fur came from anywhere, and even a person's hair could be stolen. In the tower a man kept watch' (p. 81).

One of the longest definitions is 'BEN MARCUS, THE' and here we discover something that looks like a blue-print for writing and reading: 'It can be large, although often it is tiny and illegible. Members wring it dry. It is a fitful chart in darkness. When properly decoded (an act in which the rule of opposite perception applies), it indicates only that we should destroy it and look elsewhere for instruction' (p. 76). In this operation of decoding, where 'the rule of opposite perception applies', Marcus would seem to be attempting the almost impossible task of giving voice to the pain of another, to make the stones speak: not so much insight into the object in the normal way of looking, but rather outsight from within the object, to give it its own autonomy, voice, and emotion.

Throughout the text there are references to loss, possibly due to the loss of a leg ('Leg of Brother Who Died Early', pp. 117-18), of his brother Jason Marcus, sometimes known as 'the original brother' or 'my Jason'. In 'Food Storms of the Original Brother' we are told that the brother 'is built from food' (p. 37). However, in the 'Terms' to this section we find, under 'Eating', definition number three, that Eating is 'Dying. Since the first act of the body is to produce its own demise, eating can be considered an acceleration of this process' (p. 42). Death, prison imagery, and graves are ubiquitous in The Age of Wire and String and another way of decoding the book might be to say that Marcus is attempting to give the dead a voice: 'Note: If the child goes to the garden to absolve him, he should bring a burlap bag. This reduces the necessity of covering the grave with blankets or other insulation at night, when the one underground is shivering too much to speak' (p. 23). In this context the one in the grave is the father, but the point refers to both Jason and the father: both wish to communicate, and both are given their voice from beyond the grave. Indeed the reference to Jason as 'my older under' (p. 108), could refer directly to his elder brother being in the grave. From 'The Food Costumes of Montana' (pp. 31-32) to 'Leg of Brother Who Died Early' (pp. 117-18) there is a terrible sense of violence and loss which is made bearable only by the matter-of-fact tone and the dislocation of sign and signifier. In 'The Food Costumes of Montana', for example, Marcus takes us from 'the morning' to 7.30 in the evening; in the morning 'the leg was bound from the ankle to the knee with bacon or hair' (p. 31), by evening the 'women began applying the fudge girdle, a one-piece garment that spread from waist to feet' (p. 32). However this is interpreted -- possibly the increase of gangrene -- some event of terrible suffering has evidently occurred. In contrast 'Leg of Brother Who Died Early' presents the leg as a synechdoche for the dead brother, though 'initiates are instructed never to reveal the brother's speech that flows from the leg as the leg is whirled in the field, [. . .] its sound is a private message (croonal) meant to offer the living brother the leg songs of the pasture' (pp. 117-18). In the 'Terms' which follow, 'Leg Songs 4' are the 'Device through which one brother, living, may communicate with another brother, dead' (p. 122).

Marcus utilizes Greek mythology (there are frequent references to Nessus), but more often he uses biblical myth (the Creation myth, p. 33; the Passover, p. 84, for example) to reinterpret the contemporary world of his family and house. Sometimes this is seen theatrically: 'The acts of doing and watching are interchangeable here. It is the genius of the perpetrator of the monica to shift volition onto his audience. The spectacle is arranged to emanate from whoever watches it, where seeing is the first form of doing' (p. 48). Sometimes a punning, playful tone creeps in, for example 'Godpiece' is known as 'a wallet, satchel, or bag that assigns value to the objects inside it' (p. 25). Sometimes the joke continues over several pages as items, characters, or functions -- often interchangeable -- are redefined. For example, 'Blain' is defined as 'cloth chewed to frequent raggedness by a boy' (p. 41), whereas Arthur Blainsmith is discovered later in the book to have been one of the first to invent a practical method for detecting distant objects by 'craning or stuffing the mouth with cloth' (p. 74). Sometimes, rarely, the tone can be taken quite straight. Marcus may code the pain felt at the loss of father and brother Jason, but in writing about 'MOTHER' he seems to write directly from the heart: 'The softest location in the house. It smells of foods that are fine and sweet. Often it moves through rooms on its own, cooing the name of the person. When it is tired, it sits, and members vie for position in its arms' (p. 64). There is obviously no coded message here, and no necessity to decode the stereotype of the mother's role in the family.

Ezra Pound argued that language should be made new and finally Marcus's achievement lies in making language new. At almost every point he blocks the reader's expectations of logical discourse but, simultaneously, he enables the reader by opening up emotional lines of discourse which interconnect throughout this extraordinary book. In his definition of rhetoric Marcus writes: 'The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms -- the dash gives the reader a clear signal that they are coming' (p. 78). The reiterated dash as both sign and word says it all: Marcus is a supremely assured writer who, I am convinced, will become known as one of the most significant voices in contemporary American Literature.

[1] Francis Ponge, Selected Poems, ed. by Margaret Guiton, trans. by C. K. Williams (London: Faber, 1998), p. 19.

[2] 'Touching on Child's Play', review article of ABRACADABRA, Tate Gallery, TLS, 30 July 1999, p. 17.

[3] '"It is language that first brings man about, brings him into existence". Understood in this way, man would be bespoken by language', Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1975), p. 192.

[4] 'A Book Review of The Age of Wire and String, The Richmond Review online, http://www.buss.co.uk/ review/books/ageofwir.html.

[5] '"Ostranenye Goes Gevortsing", or, "the Dethompsoning of Quiddity": An Eyewitness Report', Revue Francaise d'Etudes Americaines, 73 (1997), 78-90 (p. 80).