Aaron Kunin, Grace Period: Notebooks, 1998-2007, Letter Machine Editions, 2013.
excerpt
According to Frances Burney, 'Awkwardness is, perhaps, more interesting than grace.' Forfeiting the opportunity to be graceful, Grace Period: Notebooks, 1998-2007 would like to be something more interesting.
Full of curious knowledge, the book collects aphorisms, sketches, and fragments from ten years of life. Notes on various subjects, written hastily, using the first words that suggested themselves. Diagrams of relationships, denuded of situation, and infused with richness and depth of feeling and mental tentacle. Portraits of unidentified people by way of their handwriting, characteristic thought patterns, and tones of voice. Definitions of colloquial expressions, what they mean and how they are used. Detailed descriptions of people eating, with enough tea to float away on. Advice on love. Prayers, curses, dreams. Moral maxims. Occasional rhymes. - www.lettermachine.org/
The special beauty of incomplete form depends on unachieved potential: because they are imperfect, fragments suggest a variety of perfections. They retain traces of their original context, as well as the charm of having escaped it.
Kunin s grace period started in 1998, when he moved to Baltimore; in 2007, he was in California, where he lives now. During that time, in these little notebooks, he was learning how to write.
Here you will find at least two worlds, and then some. In an interview conducted by Tom Fleischmann in Seneca Review, Aaron Kunin said: “Is my interest in the gesture of withdrawal from the world compromised by the worldliness of the speaker positions in my writing? That is a real problem. The solution is dualism. Where in the world can I go that isn’t in the world? I can’t. To get out of the world, I need at least two worlds. That is the paradox of misanthropy: in rejecting society, you project another one.”
Fair warning: Aaron Kunin’s notes are totally addictive. - Jen Hofer
Grace Periodcomprises a decade of notebooks from quasi-conceptualist Aaron Kunin, whose previous works have become known for their ability to re-approach old forms in ways that make them seem entirely different. Here, over the course of 19 different journals spanning periods of often somewhere around six months, Kunin opens up his personal sets of individually numbered inquisitions, aphorisms, lyrics, dialogues, cryptic fragments, dreams, commands, and all other sorts of jotted ideas. It’s interesting to watch Kunin’s mind switch through modes over the course of the book, developing preoccupations, ways of thinking, and passing ideas, which slowly accumulate into an image of the development of a highly provocative vision. “Some people have the right to touch you,” says a note from an early notebook, in 1998; then, in 2002, “I get annoyed at art that asks me to participate, which is just to say that I don’t like being told how to participate,” and in 2005, simply, “The bed breathing under your back.” In total, these complied ideas are a strange museum, somehow comforting to peel through, fall around in, eat from, poke, and roll. - Blake Butler
The title of Aaron Kunin’s Grace Period: Notebooks, 1998-2007 (Letter Machine Editions, 2013) provides a more or less straightforward explanation of what readers will encounter between the covers of this book: the contents of a writer’s notebooks over the course of a decade.
Early in the collection, in what can be read as a meta-critical observation of his work, Kunin writes:
My teachers were indulgent of the chaos of my thoughts. (Luckily?)And it would appear that Grace Period does just that: it preserves the “original chaos” of the author’s thoughts as they move from one fragment to the next, documenting the patterns of a mind at work.
Would it have been better if they had held me to a standard that I could not recognize (or value)?
—Better to preserve your thoughts in their original chaos. (49)
Stated differently, the form of Kunin’s notebooks, and thus his mind, are “bits and pieces of useless information” which he collects: “touches of knowledge” that he isolates “from the impurities” of the “environment” surrounding them (79).
Of course the “uselessness” of these touches of knowledge that Kunin collects is relative. On the one hand, they are “Ancient emotional material for [his] poems” (260) and, therefore, quite useful; on the other hand, while “His method makes it easy to collect material for poems,” it does not make it any easier “to assemble them” (274), calling into question their efficacy.
Kunin’s meditations, though, are more than meta-critical observations. He attends to subject matter as diverse as awkwardness, food, conversation, dreams, love, community, and poetry. Yet one of the more fascinating objects of contemplation is the author’s handwriting. Throughout the book, he creates “graphological portraits” that focus on the nature of his penmanship. For instance:
He often went over letters to add feature that hadn’t come out clearly on the first pass. This tended to give the letters a worried aspect; there were lines all around them, pouring out of them, and deep creases in the places where the lines joined, as though they had been losing sleep.While this portrait offers a psychological self-analysis of and via his handwriting, it also emphasizes the materiality of Grace Period and the absence of the original artifacts. Which begs the question: how do the material circumstances of one’s composition dictate what one composes? And, what do we gain and what do we lose from a printed version of his notebooks? Later, Kunin emphasizes this point when he writes:
The halo of uncertainty around each of your letters.
The mantle of shyness that your writing wears. (8)
Try to look like you’re working.Focusing on his material conditions yet again, Kunin laments the fact that the notebooks are not of a “larger format.” This constraint forces him to write in a “little” hand, which, no doubt, contributes to the fact that he composes primarily in the aforementioned “bits and pieces.”
Seated in odd positions, or standing and pacing.
Ah, he’s writing; this looks like work.
If only the notebook were in larger format.
What can he be working on. Such tiny pages, etc.
Nothing that could be shown easily since no one could read his little writing. (218)
But just as compelling as the material considerations, Kunin wants to “look like [he’s] working,” which highlights the performative nature of his writing. To this extent, Grace Period is a public display of the writer’s private thoughts for the sake of intellectual and creative showmanship, wherein materiality becomes performance, and composition (or form) an actor. - vouchedbooks.com/tag/aaron-kunin/
Andy Fitch with Aaron Kunin
AARON KUNIN’S NOTEBOOKS (by Anna Moschovakis)
Aaron Kunin, The Sore Throat & Other Poems, Fence Books, 2010.
How about someone from another planet?—Peter Gizzi
This would make a great chorus for “Nosferatu.” - Marjorie Welish
It’s the real thing.—Keith Waldrop
Aaron Kunin believes that the part of yourself that you’re most ashamed of is interesting and can be used as material for art. The poems of The Sore Throat, his second collection, come out of self-imposed semiotic limitation, yet manifest a fully inhabited psychological environment. Within a limited vocabulary, Kunin finds hymn, epigram, ode, elegy, ballad, conversation, invective, confession, epitaph, inability, protest, love poem (praise, valentine, aubade, seduction, defense of inconstancy), riddle, cosmogony, theodicy, vanity, and misplaced concreteness. Combining formal procedure with a kind of automatic writing, The Sore Throat produces poems of unlikely, and heightened, sensitivity to nuances of feeling.
Here is perhaps the most disturbing, initially unpleasant collection in years; it’s also among the most original. All the poems in Kunin’s second book confine themselves (like The Cat in the Hat) to a small set of words, 170 to 200 in all, including I, you, know, somebody, but also moron, rat, dick, laughter, machine. The poems in one section use syntactic or formal patterns from Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.” The poems in another “translate” (i.e., rephrase parts of) a play by Maurice Maeterlinck; some adopt visual or metrical schemes from other, older poems. Yet none seem old-fashioned. They seem bizarre, as befits their derivations (explained in Kunin’s preface and conclusion) from the poet’s nearly lifelong habit of “transcribing everything I say, hear, read or think… into a kind of sign-language,” a set of hand movements unintelligible to anyone else.
These “binary hand-alphabets,” mimicked by the verbal repetitions within the poems, suggest (though Kunin never says so) the fidgets and tics of compulsive disorders such as Tourette’s syndrome and OCD: “How hard it is to change your habits,” Kunin writes. “Or not to have habits.” He seems compelled to shock us with four-letter words: “Your dick in my ass, / music, and I don’t like it, but I desire it… At last I’m sore down there, and I must // have it again.” Pseudo-Tourettic coprolalia, the poem as fidget or tic? Or Catullus in loose translation (odi et amo), revealing the contradictions of the soul?
How close are involuntary tics to the idiosyncratic verbal behaviors of poetry? Closer than we might think, Kunin suggests, and both come closer than we might think to the everyday repetitions of conversation. Malfunctioning people repeat themselves, like robots; but so do the all-too-normal people who spend their lives chasing instinctual gratification. “For the moron, what’s good is a hard-on,” Kunin writes in “What’s Your Pleasure, Brother?” If you are not a moron, you must desire “more than pleasure, more than talking… But what you desire is not on the earth.”
Some of these poems sound as if nobody speaks them, as if they are the product of mere procedures, or programs. More often, they conjure speakers upset about how procedure-bound they sound, how little they can reconcile themselves to their predictable existence, how little (as if they all had one “sore throat”) they can say: “‘The god of the sore throat is not a just god,’ she complained.” Kunin sees—as Samuel Beckett saw—the thin line between a wisely cultivated indifference to the world’s repetitions and an emetic, instinctive disgust: “Pleasure is but a can / Of earth, and the soul / No more than / A great bladder.” A bladder: for urine, but also for air, wind, voice.
“I hear your voice as if it were my own,” The Sore Throat ends, meaning not that Kunin’s I finally understands his evasive beloved, his sexually unavailable you, but that your and my, I and you, have lost their meanings. Through poems in dialogue, essays, and lyric stanzas, the book presents not characters, exactly, but “a complete system of bad habits,” language-games that might be nothing more than “a machine / for concealing my desire.” And yet this book does not feel mechanical, and most of the time it does not feel predictable. It feels sad, repellent, fascinating, paradoxical, the work of a human being dismayed to see how much like other machines (badly programmed ones, too) our brains and behaviors can be.—Stephen Burt
Aaron Kunin, The Mandarin, Fence Books, 2008.
excerpt
The Mandarin does at least pretend to be an ordinary novel. It is set in places that no longer exist in Minneapolis--houses and apartments where one of the characters used to live, businesses and restaurants that have closed or moved elsewhere. Its narrator, Willy, writes boring novels that put everyone to sleep. The plot develops recursively rather than progressively, as a kind of theme-and-variations; usually one of the characters is in a house or a room, and the others are outside trying to get in. The Mandarin is written almost entirely in dialogue; as a result, actions and events tend to occur within a nimbus of uncertainty. Consciousness tends to be communal rather than personal. The Mandarin preserves the conventions of the novel: the speakers are individualized characters speaking in an identifiable situation. This means that, at any moment, the characters might stop talking and start doing something. Of course, they won't, but this option is always available to them.
Unheimlich children of Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde, the Modernist Novel and a decadent despairing of it, Aaron Kunin’s characters are embodied by speech—witty, philosophical, narratological. They speak and they think, occasionally, about problems of the novel, but just as often about slights, real or imagined; originary issues of form and content; things to eat and drink. They are “walking mind-body problems.” The volume of psychological realism and emotional force they acquire as they go along in fraught relation to one another comes therefore as a surprise boon, a delirious trick, a happy byproduct of their unimaginable contextualization in a Minneapolis they do not quite inhabit.
“The many minds of this novel perform thought with the hilarity and impertinence of a b-movie choir: their robes don’t match, they’re too busy talking to sing the songs, and their audience is asleep. However, where in most cases this would be a recipe for disaster, in The Mandarin, it proves the perfect combination for creating a new kind of iteration, one where knowledge is less something individually won than something collectively made. Aaron Kunin’s The Mandarin is a much-needed contribution to the future of fiction, and an absolute delight to read.”—Renee Gladman
The prospect of writing an innovative novel could be a contemporary poet's nightmare, for who wants to be confined by mainstream devices of the conventional narrative, and how does a poet turned novelist avoid the blunders of monotony (or as Kunin writes on pg. 28, “a lifetime of needless repetitions”)? At best, how does this novel pursue a previously overlooked approach? Aaron Kunin's first novel The Mandarin is hardly coy in dissecting the heavy sentiments associated with such a pursuit. The lines between the writer and the novel's panoply of characters, between the reader and the read and among the novel's personalities (both human and their inanimate counterparts -- e.g. a TV set, toenail clippings, umbrella, telephone, ad nauseam) are brimming with pointed opinions, intellect and desire -- they are infinitely built, demolished, rebuilt and tinkered with. The Mandarin requires the strictest attention; its pace is quick, odd and askew but careful not to exhaust. One could almost declare that Kunin's book, along with being a disappointed jester of our current political and spiritual state, is a questionably harmless enemy of the predictable and linear.
There are topophilic undertones, considering the presence of Minneapolis as a nostalgic harbinger of memory, regret and expirations. This city fills the shoes of both friend and foe, similar to an ex-wife who holds the key to certain forgotten experiences that one has spent years trying to erase. The characters don't quite fit in the now Minneapolis they once roamed -- restaurants they enjoyed are no longer, previous jobs have desisted, houses they once occupied are unwelcome. Chapters are punctuated by a set of off-kilter illustrations by David Scher -- several provide uncanny, metaphorical expressions for one's interaction with the novel in question. For instance, three childlike sketches of staplers coupled with the caption, It all happens on a molecular level. Another: Is the snake immune to its own poison? Or an image of an abandoned phone booth, phone dangling, neglected, with the words, You don't know me well enough to make fun of me.
It is true. After reading The Mandarin, I don't know the novel's intentions well enough to make fun of them -- much less sully them. This work will not provide most with quaint answers to boring questions, and if one finds that it does, no Q&A goes undeserved. One might find the answer to a previous question pages later, forced to reformulate an inquiry all together. Kunin provides the reader with his own awkward code to reformulate the page; he chooses to problematize literature, and The Mandarin is no exception. The novel dismantles rhetorical tricks, criticizes and provokes art making, laughs at itself -- similar to an only child forced to play within the confines of a cornered imagination because he hasn't discovered how to play with others (in this case, others equal previously published horrors). The Mandarin is a lonely, insecure experiment, but it simultaneously enforces that there is hope for a novel that dissects its own pursuit of novelty or popularity, thereby becoming humorous and infectious.
Almost entirely filled with dialogue (omit a few chapters) highlighting fraternal-sororal affiliations of Willy and Natasha and Hallamore and Mercy, they are eerily connected in dreams yet disjointed in reality. As Kunin explain in his own reflective synopsis, “actions and events tend to occur within a nimbus of uncertainty,” one can accept the narrative illogic or new logic that Kunin has constructed -- this acceptance should not be equated with truth, for The Mandarin is no blind advocate of dogmatism. Instead, it emphasizes a divide and conundrum between the doers and thinkers of our world, between readers and non-readers, between “softies” and the hardened, unpleasant souls we sometimes find ourselves to be. The poet in the novelist illustrates a dire placelessness of the masses, where some shadowbox one way, others another way, and some: not at all. The world of The Mandarin is littered with failed jokers, yet Hallamore comments, “We are all comedians. Every comedian is wrong about something. There's a place for those of us who don't belong.” Despite placelessness as a primary theme, it is recommended that Kunin and his existential archaeologists find a home in yours. - Jacquelyn Davis
1) Language is a form of disobedience.
2) Or: words have no loyalty. Or: language facilitates perversity. Or: to speak is to be reminded of language’s inescapable techné. Or: to employ language is to court malfunction. Or: to write is to run the risk of making more sense than you ever intended. Or: language is always on the cusp of being carried away. Or: talking is almost always talking back. Or: language was designed in emulation of water, a force, a flow without shape but the rare ability to hunt direction down and wear it out. Or: nothing could be more nonsensical than if our every utterance were understood literally. Or: you teach a child to say “no” at your own peril; those early “no“‘s are no ventriloquism act. Or: the so-called precise word is precisely that, so-called, a chimera. Or: to speak is to confuse irrevocably the matter of whether one is announcing something before it happens, or whether one is announcing something as a way of compelling its presence to coincide with its occurrence.
3) Aaron Kunin’s novel The Mandarin is a self-conscious (perhaps even sentient) construction of language, some phenomena I wish to differentiate from the notion of a linguistic construction… For I want the suggest that The Mandarin is more like a self-organizing discourse than it is a “work” composed-slash-authored. The Mandarin is thus less a novel as commonly defined in terms of “long story” than it is an exercise in novel-ese, or the novel as style. This is not to say that either text or author fail in any way to fully realize whatever metaphysical potential is latent in the novel-as-form. Rather, what I want to claim for this book is that it is a brilliant, occasionally scathing, yet ultimately poignant tribute to the inherent limitations of an imagination whose eide and eidola alike are utterly—dimensionally—verbal.
4) Or: The Mandarin is an exceptionally manneristic “novel of manners.”
5) Or: if you squint at it in the proper way, this is a conceptual novel. Kunin supplies a 3-page synopsis that you need not read past, excepting you wish to satisfy your curiosity regarding the novel’s execution. Quoted in full, however, I find that this explanation is just a scheme for disclosing a question that, in order to be dramatic, cannot remain undisclosed; that is, must be secret, only formerly. Is this synopsis a lie?
6) In a sense, the book is naming itself every time one look at its cover or spine, insisting that it has to remind you that it is a novel, a book that has to be taken “seriously.” And, as much as this title’s prodding is about a kind of salesmanship, the relationship between word and world is more suspect than that. Most “things” can’t speak the way a book can, nor do they suffer the arc of the Lomans. (The main character and narrator upon whom Kunin depends is a Willy.)
7) And what is a mandarin anyway? A living etymology, thus a kind of fossil, a word that survives despite going largely unused; a museum exhibit that does not have to be put on wheels because it installs itself everywhere around you the moment you decide to judge it into being. (And every time you recall Henry James.). Mandarin: it’s a pejorative, and what makes our mandarins so worthy of disdain—and so funny—is the complete un-self-consciousness (rather: blind narcissism) of the pose. Such is pedantry, this trying-so-hard-all-you-do-is-drown-flailing-in-gelatinous-effort. Even if taken as an adjective, “mandarin” is a point-of-view compact in its three syllables. An evaluation, and a coping with something which looks familiar but which we, uttering, would like to believe has naught to do with us or our position. But the use of a term like this is a power-play: it elevates us, uttering, to some superior vantage from which we can describe a sham noble. And phoniness makes of such rare essence the cheapest cardboard: what a noun like “elitism” names, just as that The here qualifies and specifies. So I think.
8) As one reads, one discovers that The Mandarin is a novel-in-conversation, but it could not be more different in tone and (apparent) intent than similar “experiments” such as Duras’ The Square or Gaddis’ JR, to take but two examples. For the exchanges here do not move toward revelation via vaguely Socratic gestures; unlike The Square, very little is asked in The Mandarin. Instead, much is pronounced. But neither does the narrator evince an obsessive’s commitment to “how people really talk”, the kind of photorealistic prose that, in Gaddis, turns everything into plastic and a kind of dense, you’ll-knock-your-knee-or-elbow-against-it nausea.
9) Rather, Kunin, through careful application of a few linguistic effects, seems to be after a parody of novelistic prosody. Example: here are “characters” who speak without relying on contractions.
“I have written a play for Natasha,” said Hallamore. (9) “Without our burnt offerings,” said Mercy, “St. Peter would have to eat in the kitchen.” “St. Peter must love abandoned restaurants, because he made so many of them,” said Hallamore. (13)
Perhaps it is not so much that contractions are absent here, absence in this instance implying a forgetting, or a negligence: a grammar active, but only in the form of exiting / having left the stage. Rather, the contractions feel avoided. They have been deliberately excluded, so long as the characters retain control of their emotions or do slip from the perch of their poses.
And there’s softness for you: shit. [Mercy speaking] (5)
10) Grammar is being acted upon. All of which reinforces or superimposes again, needlessly, the presence of authors, narrators and characters (the narrator, Willy, writes novels that may also be soporifics), the last two of which are authors manqué anyway.11) So, The Mandarin invents, over and over again, realms of conversation which are not “conversational” as that expectation has been created by the majority rule of contemporary American literary fiction. Instead, they are words in a novel, have the pretense of being “real”, vocal, but belong to no voice, only to the text itself. They are neither interior nor exterior to anyone involved here: characters, narrator, author, readers. They have hollowed out some third space which they then must occupy. And how they do sprawl all over the elapsed Minneapolis of The Mandarin in setting up residence where they once lived.
12) Chekhov, quoting De Maupassant in The Seagull: “And it goes without saying that it is as dangerous for society people to pamper and encourage writers of novels, as it is for corn merchants to breed rats in their granaries.” What Maupassant means, I think, is that nothing uttered in a novelist’s presence, no matter how inane, innocuous or intended to be impermanent, is ever innocent. Almost as if the novelist him-/herself, in his/her compulsion to transform every experience into “material” (and, in The Seagull, it is Trigorin, the writer but also perhaps the least aesthetic of the play’s characters, who gives eloquent expression to how dissatisfying existence in that minor circle of Hell—The Realm Of The Once-Removed—is), destroys the order that ensures the social, and precisely by recording that order. Preserving it. Rendering it perceptible. In other words, much of what is “said” in novels is the normally-unsaid posing as the enunciated. Call it subtext, or circumlocution, or the dictates of repression. Perhaps this explains why Kunin’s various voices all aim for a narrational authority—to speak in the voice of the book—to escape the quotation marks between which they are condemned to appear. Or: the quotations marks which are the basic condition of their appearance.
13) The only way out of the prison of voice for these characters is via another kind of constraint, a volunteered-for deafness to themselves, and themselves only. This is quite different, I think, from a phenomenon we often note in “bad” novels: that all the characters baldly ventriloquize for the author and the author’s agenda. The authenticity of any given literary voice is always fraught with artifice. Is Kunin’s point—or one of his points—that the real, in its dreams of power, always aspires to be ideal? That seems awfully heavy for a book filled with voices that have a certain frothiness to them.
14) But do the subjects of The Mandarin actually qualify as people, much less constitute a family (brothers and sisters), i.e., a miniature society? Hard to know in a novel such as this, in which setting is so ghostly, and “society” is constantly in a state of dysfunction. I.e., unstable, all positions contested if out of grasp.
15) On page 162 of The Mandarin, it occurred to me to write: “If it is true of most novels that one need not read every word, then how much more true in this novel. A novel, from a certain poetic perspective, is a tremendous waste of language. And breath. The novel as a rubber dinghy that can never be inflated, hand to mouth.” This is not to say that The Mandarin‘s language is not painstaking. But one feels this meticulousness most whenever Willy (also known as Aaron and Flavio), Hallamore, Mercy and Natasha (who only speaks in one chapter) become participants in dialogue… as conducted by the Marx Brothers on barbiturates. So, where does this waste accumulate? In the novelistic convention of “he said,” “she said,” and “I said,” of course. This constant marking or accounting (I originally wrote “flag-planting”) punctuates every vocalization, and in only one of two ways. A) Fermata: “Spoken falsely,” said Mercy, “like a true novelist.” (66); B) Decrescendo: “There’s not enough room for truth in the novel!” I said. (66).
16) I suspect Kunin wants to direct our attention to this clutter, this clatter, the busy hands of identification. And I will confess that there are times when it is easier and more enjoyable to read this novel as a rhythmically supple weave of interruptions and underminings. To hear it as a subtly modulating drone of “I / he / she said”‘s rather than a play of pretend voices.
17) But what happens as your attention penetrates further and further into a drone, which is, from one vantage, just silence in an excited state? Individual particles (or is it valences?) begin to emerge and command or at least magnetize the attention. I would say The Mandarin is quite comparable to a filed of coded information, the dimensions of which make it impossible to “take in” in any perceiving’s present. As any novel is… further, I think of the first time I experienced Robert Altman’s Nashville and its multi-tracked, “natural” (an authenticity artificially crafted) sound. I knew I was hearing many different voices speaking simultaneously, over-lapping, at times canceling each other out—sensibly, and at the level of frequency and wavelength—even as I could not actually perceive all those voices in all their difference all at once. And, were I to try and puzzle each voice out (to “read every word”, truly), I would miss the more crucial if hazier effect.
18) Since this novel is not about elaborating any sort of plot, why are these attributions necessary at all? If no one is actually going to be affected or incited to change by what anyone else says—and saying is all that occurs here—why is it important to keep one voice sorted from another? As Kunin notes in his prefatory synopsis, only when these characters agree on what is happening in their world—read: are all playing the same game, each equally a contestant—does the story achieve any propulsion. In fact, this possibility haunts the book, this suspicion that The Mandarin is actually one of Willy’s novels. What difference is there, if any, between this narrator Willy and the author, Willy, of such unread (within The Mandarin) titles as Sick of Irony, a novel?
19) But what is one of the cardinal rules of narrative? “Agreement makes for poor stories.” And, true, the agreement to which Kunin refers scratches out a space in which these these voices jockey most fully for co-existence. Agreement for the sake of a differentiating disagreement, or, conflict for the sake of conflict. Perforce, imitation—a weapon most cruelly and expertly wielded by children and idiots—injects protecting coloring into what would otherwise be a dispiriting or spiritless sameness, making that sameness rational… just as all warfare is.
“I’m making fun of you, Willy!” said Mercy. “I’m imitating you!” “You don’t know me well enough to make fun of me,” I said. “In fact, I love it when you make fun of me, because it only shows how little you understand me.” “I know you well enough to telephone you,” said Mercy. “So I can make fun of you even if I don’t understand you.” (124)
20) Or: Kunin (better: The Mandarin) likes to repeat phrases and certain syntactical formulae, and have them pass from character to character, too, like a benign parasite. This wandering anaphora confuses consciousness, of course, but it also creates a certain continuity, and it certainly gives the prose here a distinctive cadence. Because metaphor does not seem to work or be terrible relevant in this fallen Midwestern metropolis, parroting serves as a characteristic trope here. The emphasis remains, again, not so much on the personalities behind or responsible for the words, but the words’ as wearable, discardable characters… the sheets these ghosts are donning as they float up and down these corridors that are actually closed to their haunting (so they keep bumping into things, maybe because, Schulz-style, they forgot to cut eye-holes in those sheets.)
“You’ve become a Board of Welfare for me,” I said. “You control my thoughts by making it impossible for me to think of anything else.” “I must learn to content myself with proximity,” said Mercy. “To become indispensable… until there’s no difference between the contents of our heads, yours and mine.” “Being inside a person’s head is not the same as knowing a person,” said Hallamore. “It’s not even a way of knowing.” (125)
21) And, as I read more and more, I feel this is becoming a “bigger deal”: are these characters jockeying for the power to narrate, to write their own novel? Or is to be a narrator to put in a kind of straitjacket, forced by form to repeat the obvious, to be redundant, with every action?22) Oh, and objects speak in The Mandarin. They deliver dialogue. They offer commentary. They hail and farewell. They name. And these objects speak more like recognizable human beings than the novel’s ostensibly human actors. Maybe because the objects are given some rather funny lines. “Great wine, Flavio,” said the Christmas cactus. “Yeah, not from concentrate,” said the dust-ruffle.” (150). Yes, these toenail clippings, T.V. sets and so forth are comic characters in a rather traditional novelistic sense. They are Forster-flat, and are possessed of more exaggerated linguistic capabilities than the ostensibly creative, adaptive, “fleshy” characters here. Really, Shakespeare is being invoked… the depth of shallowness when it comes to relief. A fool will say anything, thank god. And, always, always, Kunin’s characters are talking without saying-qua-materializing. They are always talking about speaking, as if speaking begins and ends with explaining.
23)
What is certain is that the characters are speaking—and the speaker is always clearly identified—but it’s never certain that their speech accurately describes the situation in which they are speaking. They may be talking about what they’re actually doing in the place where they’re really standing [read: narrating], or they may be remembering or imagining something they did or would like to be doing in another place [read: acting]. (ii)
24) I have just finished reading The Mandarin. It is a much more tragic book than I could have allowed myself to imagine.25) Do we really know what we’re volunteering for when we say, so blithely, that novels are capable of a “greater truth”, of materializing it? Or: language is a machine, perhaps even the primal machine. And novels are particularly complex instances of heavy industry, constructed out of many intricate, minuscule parts that have been wrought out of some obdurate, graceless material. A contraption powered by steam, poised in its reproductions between the noxious and the efficient. Novels manufacture consciousness, and this novel is somehow no different. Except The Mandarin is very different in the way it runs its assembly line. So long as one reads The Mandarin, one remains in the same predicament as The Mandarin‘s characters, trapped, coerced, a servant and a mouthpiece. Yet, reading or not, as creatures never apart from the levering power of language, this is our common predicament. Our realization of this dependency may or may not be cathartic, but surely it counts as anagnorisis, and a most ennobling brand of irony.
- Joe Milazzo
http://www.octopusmagazine.com/Issue04/html/features/poets/aaron_kunin.htm
http://jacketmagazine.com/37/iv-kunin-ivb-lerner.shtml
Aaron Kunin, Secret Architecture, Braincase, 2006.
Human value propositions. This feels high stakes, like rehearsals for a lover's argument. Also a prospectus for the small cruelties of cohabitation. I like that the first word, "although," can begin either a concession or a refusal to compromise. And the final resolution, the accommodation of taint, something like Moore's proposition that "it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing, but you can't stand in the middle of this." - Andrew Maxwell
Aaron Kunin, Folding Ruler Star, Fence Books, 2005.
With alarmed intelligence, Folding Ruler Star exposes the violence of an expectant look and synthesizes the organic and the robotic, then unzips them just as machines unzip/concrete dividers/on the highway. May Aaron Kunin make all the rules, and may our capacity for facial communication finally collapse within his tremendous Dionysian orderliness.—Jacqueline Waters
If the measure is that which disfigures, then Aaron Kunin’s hinged ruler needs to be placed alongside Duchamp’s standard stoppage as an equally ingenious corrective. In Folding Ruler Star, the security zone of the book is breached without shame, so that to live becomes reason again—Miles Champion
In 1986, Noam Chomsky published a book called Barriers, elaborating a theory of what kinds of grammatical elements can combine, what kinds can’t and how it happens. Kunin’s debut treats language in precisely that way, and also sees it as in a completely synecdochic relationship with its users: language’s parts stand for our wholes and are every bit as mechanical, modelable, automatic, desirous, thwarted, blocked and explosive as people are when they try to approach one another. And there are major constraints here: the entire book is composed in five syllable lines comprising three-line stanzas; every poem is “mirrored by another poem with the same title,” as Kunin notes in a preface. The dual-poem format, coupled with violent, sexualized content (deft but definitely disturbing) gives the impression of very fraught attachments indeed. The book is certainly about having feelings like shame, disgust and grief, but it is also about how they get produced—and registered within a system that may be human in seat, but not in origin: it may be divine. To that end, there are references to Paradise Lost and to Renaissance body part love poetry (the senses here represented by “Five Security Zones”). This is beautiful, complicated poetry from a poet exploring “the device in the/ assumed direction/ of its mouth.” - Publishers Weekly
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2005/07/aaron-kunin-first-caught-my-attention.html
http://jacketmagazine.com/28/gordon-r-kunin.html
https://jacket2.org/commentary/conversation-aaron-kunin
Interview by Tom Fleischmann (pdf)
http://studioonereadingseries.blogspot.com/2009/07/sarah-rothberg-interviews-aaron-kunin.html
http://badutopian.com/aaron-kunins-notebooks/
http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2010/01/on-reviewing-aaron-kunin.html
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