Carla Harryman, Gardener of Stars, Atelos, 2001
Carla Harryman describes GARDENER OF STARS as "an experimental novel that explores the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire." The book offers a mythic history of a post-historical city situated in a garden landscape whose inhabitants are engaged in perpetual tending, limitless generation. Their generatings and tendings take place in speculation and dream, practical and impractical invention, desire and copious sex - all facets of a politicized eros and an erotic politics. The utopia in question ("the unruly utopia of the senses that is not in conflict with the world's current") must be understood first not in terms of place but in terms of personage. M, Serena, Gardener (the eponymous heroine of the novel) are themselves utopias (as distinct from utopians) surviving in a painfully fraught (though sometimes beautiful) milieu. Negotiating this milieu, the various characters come into contact (or, more precisely, throw themselves into contact) with events that are in a ceaseless process
In the world of this putative novel, far more fantasmagoric poem than fictional narrative, the first thoughts of a child and the dying thoughts of a post-nuclear race blithely coexist; it is a land where erotic impulses, social hierarchies, alternative cultivation and "a death god's radar" mix with a moral ambivalence that recalls Lewis Carroll and a violence and artistry that recalls Lautre amont and Samuel R. Delany. Purporting to track "the paradise and wasteland of utopian desire," two characters, Gardner and M, coax us into their mental adventures with a slipstream of avatars and misfit angels, and with each other. Both are gendered female and live in a city where women normally "do not sleep piled up on themselves as male captives in sloughs of despond," but who do engage in a variety of bodily trials and tribulations designed to gauge the limits of their world (i.e., of our ruined dreams of the ideal). M comes upon a man who gets separated from a group of dirt bikers mindlessly jumping a ditch; Gardner, "on the shore of her own giganticness," gives birth to Caesar and leaves him to M and a variety of others. A lot of the action is bleak in its characterological affect, uncompromising in its brutality (and ecstasy) and difficult to figure out. "Frankly, women want to own men for the sake of revenge." This book will convince readers of all sexes to surrender as many as possible. (Dec.) Forecast: Harryman was an integral part of the 1970s Bay Area Language poetry scene, and now teaches at creative writing at Wayne State University in Detroit. There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn, published by City Lights, is her best known and most assigned book, but her many smaller press publications are ripe for selection. Fans of Mac Wellman or Sam Shepherd's experimental theater, or of Alice Notley's recent work, will find this book similarly accomplished and engaging. - Publishers Weekly
Carla Harryman, The Words: after Carl
Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul
Sartre, O Books, 1999
In THE WORDS, Harryman playfully examines the family, the suburbs, daily life, the position of woman, while boldly undermining notions about character and plot. There's a ferocity to her wit, a cunning to her deconstructions -- and always a devotion to language, its elasticity and limits. I admire Harryman's rare mind, its gleeful feminism, broad intelligence and anarchic inventiveness! -- Lynne Tillman
At last, children's literature has been liberated, liberated into fiction! Carla Harryman's WORDS is a fiction in which the mischief is perpetually unnaming names in an ongoing discursive cross-wind beneficial to hybridizing texts. Bold and subversive! -- Marjorie Welish
The Words is not one novel, but many. Its economics are libidinal, luxuriant, and layered: part roman fleuve, in which the first generation born in the “artificial jungles” of the Cold War comes of age “on the border that separates the absurd from the socially constructed reality,” part roman à clef, in which every word will instantly recognize itself and every fly allusion find its author in eternity, and part philosophical romance in the mode of the later Wittgenstein, who proposed that “the double cross and the duck-rabbit might be among the spots [on] a wall covered with spots.” And, because “shadows dream in their niches,” this is finally a utopian novel, everywhere transforming “defeat into rapture.” In (and with) The Words, Carla Harryman has written a postmodern classic. It’s the book to take along to that proverbially deserted island.— Ted Pearson
Winesburg, Ohio through a convex eye. Dismissing romanticization and exposé, Harryman opts for the multidimensional properties…— Sarah Schulman
Appreciative readers will call Harryman's book a prose poem or an feminist anti-novel, a experiment in life-writing or an abstract autobiography. Harsher perusers will say it falls between two stools. Indebted to Gertrude Stein, to French feminist theory, and to the French nouveau roman, and written (as Harryman says) "after" Sartre's Les Mots and Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories, the book is a radically scrambled fictive memoir: narrator Woemess moves through a place named Watch Out, encountering entities or characters called the Stranded, All Done, the Keeper of the Spool Babies and Interpretation. Moments of lucidity are interspersed with wrench-in-the-machinery doggerel that makes reading the book sometimes fun, sometimes challenging, and occasionally disheartening-especially as Harryman's brands of disjunction adhere to modernist models (like Mina Loy's) nearly a century old. Sometimes Harryman (Memory Play) limns a provocatively aggressive feminine consciousness, at once her own and a model for others: "After childhood, for many days running I studied people's asses with the slowness of one who has discovered the crucial element in a universal tragedy." Woemess (whose name conflates womanhood and menstruation) fades in and out of the narratives, "as unreal as a discovery made elsewhere," then erupts in oracular outbursts: "If I wanted to, right now, I could paint the picture of the picture, show you the cryptic world, the song, and the wampum. Or a dreary series of irregular rectangles, a repetitious dirge, and money. But if I take you there, we will be gone." If Harryman's book fails to deliver the ideological or formal innovations it promises, it remains an inspiring take on gender politics-not to mention a pretty good read. - Publishers Weekly
Carla Harryman, Baby, Zephyr Press, 2005
Carla Harryman is the author of 11 books of poetry, prose plays and essays. Her two experimental novels, Gardener of Stars (2001) and The Words: after Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre (1999) are “explorations of the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire.” Baby continues this exploration through the convolutions of Baby, who enters the book as “fire in the womb with a skirt.” Harryman, a native Californian, now lives in Detroit where she teaches women’s studies, creative writing and literature at Wayne State University. She has also written a number of essays on innovative writing by women. Her most recent essay, “Residues or Revolutions of the Language of Acker and Artaud,” is forthcoming Devouring Institutions (SDSU Press).
Carla Harryman, Adorno's Noise, Essay Press,
2008
ADORNO'S NOISE is a collection of experimental, poetic, and conceptual essays that "once again proves how necessary an encounter with [Harryman's] writing has become for us today" (Avital Ronell). ADORNO'S NOISE takes a stunning plunge into a kaleidoscopic world of globalization, female sexuality, the place of art and artist, and the looming power of the state. Phrases from Theodor Adorno's aphoristic philosophical text, Minima Moralia, serve as catalysts for an explosion of thought and language that quickly breaks Adorno's orbit. As Rob Halpern puts it: "ADORNO'S NOISE reinvents the 'essay as form,' but it doesn't stop short of reinventing thinking." Other Carla Harryman titles available from SPD include OPEN BOX (IMPROVISATIONS), BABY, and ANIMAL INSTINCTS.
This work by Carla Harryman, startlingly astute, once again proves how necessary an encounter with her writing has become for us today. Her grasp of theoretical and poetic exigencies is unbypassable, and she moves lightly, lifting the prose poem into the amplitude of a new articulation. --Avital Ronell
Adornos noise may be nothing more than the consonance of late modern capital talking to itself, but Carla Harryman listens to Adorno listening, and what she hears is a very different sort of dissonance, something Adorno himself may have been deaf to. Listening for a noise that can t be heard, Harryman attends to the disruption of signal the aesthetic artifact called a corpse at the limit of Adorno s magisterial eloquence, where thought steps over the body. Atonally faithful to his negativity the afterglow of torment passing through figures of speech while refusing the authority of a masterful dialectic, Harryman makes our unthought horizon normality is death audible, presencing a body that cant be redeemed by aesthetics the body wants to be art and fails at it. From Gender The Status of Dogs to works by Sun Ra, Anais Nin, Robert Smithson, and Kenzaburo Oe, This radically asynthetic writing moves thru polyphonic configuration of word, image and concept. Synthesia? Emotional truth? The intersection between abstraction and narration? Practicing a militant ethic of non-mastery as every one of its sentences sounds like a sensory organ in the process of becoming its own theoretician. Adornos Noise reinvents the essay as form but it doesnt stop short of reinventing thinking. --Rob Halpern
Delicate sinews of thought and revelation manage to hold together Carla Harryman’s stargazing, mind-teasing, and genre-defying essays in her latest collection, Adorno’s Noise. Taking phrases from Theodor Adorno’s aphoristic text, Minima Moralia, as starting points for searching investigations inward and outward, Harryman presses language and dialectics into her service as she probes, explores, and lobs sticks of philosophical dynamite across the imaginative borders of art, sex, self, memory, politics, poetry, and, ultimately, Adorno. As the title essay declares: “Even as languages disappear the headspace made in the damage converts to tongue.” Likewise, in the clamor of Adorno’s Noise, new meanings come to life and resonate. Take, for example, the essay “Just Noise,” appearing under the heading “imagination is inflamed by women who lack imagination.” Lucky for “imagination,” Harryman is the woman wielding the torch as she assembles, disassembles, and reworks sexually freighted quotations from authors like Elizabeth Grosz, Anais Nin, Jocelyn Saidenberg, and Kathy Acker. Harryman quickly takes apart her first assemblage of footnoted quotes, and the explications she included in the footnotes become detached from, and ultimately blend into, the quotations to which they initially adhered. The result is a literary fugue that both toys with and brings to the fore the pleasure inherent in appropriating and manipulating others thoughts and language. In other essays, Harryman covers the surface and structure of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’s notorious document titled “A Clean Break” or explores and analyzes reflections that have arisen from her fertile readings of texts by writers like Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe and conceptual artist Robert Smithson, among others. Moments of exceeding clarity erupt in the midst of imagined dreamscapes, such as when she describes her near decapitation while sticking her head out of an open casement window. Like many moments in this collection, the experience “never happened although it does correspond to a perception, if not a feeling, that [she] could not communicate in any other way.” For those not familiar with Harryman’s oeuvre, her essays are often difficult, dense, or phantasmagorical—or, to quote from one of the essays, “reminiscent of Ovid and acid trips.” But from these challenging passages emerge sumptuous turns of phrase and images that bring light to the darkest recesses of thought. As Harryman notes, “A blank and therefore barely existing feature of the world, once illuminated, fills out and extends the world.” Her essays will take you to many of those newly extended territories. - Jonathan Wegner
https://www.makemag.com/review-adornos-noise/
I first read Carla Harryman’s new book, Adorno’s Noise, on a plane. Flying home from Detroit, aided by the laser focus of jet travel discomfort, I turned page after page in rapt attention. Along with five other poets, Carla and I had just presented a live performance from a serial work in progress, The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, 1976-1980 (Mode A/This Press), the product of a longstanding community of writers whose manifold relationships span critical dialog, collaboration, rivalry, and friendship. The individual accounts of times past are strikingly various and say as much about now as they do about back in the day. Despite our long familiarity, as authors we remain in many ways mutually mysterious. In fact, the appeal of the unknown, a different way of perceiving and responding to the world, was what first attracted us to one another in the first place.
Energized by my in-flight encounter with Adorno’s Noise, I resolved to write about it. Back on land, however, I found that to be easier said than done, and not only due to the capaciousness of Harryman’s rapidly shifting frames of reference. I also discovered that to understand the place of this book in contemporary praxis as thoroughly as I’d hoped, I’d need to tackle another work: Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (Verso Books, 2005).
An attractive and difficult work, Adorno’s Noise doesn’t fit neatly into any preconceived categories; it straddles the boundaries of essay, journal, performance, poem, and play. Even the book itself is a curious object. For example, there is something strange about the chapter titles. On the Contents page they appear at first glance in two distinctly gendered fonts, an archaic feminine script and a modern sans serif in all caps. On further inspection, one realizes that one font represents section headers, the other, chapter titles. Yet some sections lack chapters. Then there is the disconcerting appearance of the section dividers, white drop-out type on dark pages with dim images like blurry x-rays, sometimes beginning on the right-hand page with words cut off at the edge, only to repeat in full when you turn the page. These tricks of the eye are the work of designer Jeff Clark, whose contribution to the book is that of a collaborator fully engaged with the author’s thinking.
Harryman’s thought stretches out in so many directions it hard to know where to start. Indeed, Adorno’s Noise seems to perform a kind of essayistic yoga, creating new spaces inside the body that knows. Since the known is always bordered by the unknown, the work has a kind of erotic charge, as desire vies with security for the attention of the mortal. New spaces are continuously opened up then occupied, leading to a series of encounters. Hence, the exercise of thought leads inevitably to play, but it is an unrelentingly and often hilariously thoughtful play, peopled by incongruous characters with wills of their own. The play, Harryman seems to say, trumps thought, because it realizes the interplay of the known and the unknown. As Adorno put it in Minima Moralia:
Only at a remove from life can the mental life exist, and truly engage the empirical. While thought relates to facts and moves by criticizing them, its movement depends no less on the maintenance of distance. Essential to it is an element of exaggeration, of over-shooting the object, of self-detachment from the weight of the factual, so that instead of merely reproducing being it can, at once rigorous and free, determine it. Thus every thought resembles play, with which Hegel and Nietzsche compared the work of the mind. The unbarbaric side of philosophy is its tacit awareness of the element of irresponsibility, of blitheness springing from the volatility of thought, which forever escapes what it judges.
We read Adorno today with mixed emotions; he was a Cassandra who, in addition to assessing the implications of the Holocaust for art in his time, also foresaw what our world was to become and recoiled in horror. Our admiration of his prescience is unqualified by the fact of his enclosure in history. Still, scandalized as he rightly was by the commodification of everything, his trepidations fall short of the relentless replication of empty signs that has become our global environment. “Relax,” we want to tell him, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Against Adorno’s grumpy old man, Harryman proposes an altogether lighter yet still obdurate figure: the radical sylph. Unlike the spleen and vanity displayed by the sylphs of Pope’s satiric Rape of the Lock, Harryman’s figure injects lightness and air into every argument, causing bones of contention to slip their moorings and float free into the medium of creative action.
She walks to the window and flings it wide remembering a similar gesture made by Elizabeth Taylor and Alice B. Toklas… Air intoxicates better than a drink after a day’s work. [13]
The injection of air into closed spaces containing multiple objects is reflected everywhere in Harryman’s prose. This notion of injected space may offer a clue to how Harryman’s insouciance may emerge from the caustic irritability of Adorno, who noted “Beauty of the American landscape: that even the smallest of its segments is inscribed, as its expression, with the immensity of the whole country.” Harryman’s sense of space is rooted in her childhood in Southern California, the apotheosis of American landscape, a coastal paradise peopled by settlers from the vast continental interior. Perhaps her sense of light and open space is derived from the physical environment in which she grew up; in the chapter “The End of Nationalism,” she give us an intimate portrait of her family life in 1960.
Subject matter in Adorno’s Noise is a moving target; themes of sexuality, death, normality, repression, power, desire, and art flow freely and intermingle throughout. A passage on Anais Nin reflects on the action of the essay itself, proposing publication as a mechanical harnessing of sexuality. After love, “Anais thrusts ink back and forth… across sheets of paper until the record of every maneuver, including the forceful thrusts, is consigned to the immortal life of circulation.” [14]
The politics of Adorno’s Noise offers a visceral response to the policies of the recent Bush administration. In a wittily violent scenario, Harryman’s sylph is physically pinned to the floor by “the president,” a sadistic tyrant, and abjectly offers to work in his library. “A Privitization Document” is an abstract description of a found document that exposes the actual machinations of a Bush administration think tank that included Iraq-war architect Richard Perle and other inside-the-beltway, right-wing career intellectuals. The document is described clinically in terms of its form—headers, bulleted sentences, paragraphs, etc. – with only occasional snippets of content that gradually reveal its subject, concluding with “Israel will not only contain its foes; it will transcend them.” Thus is performed an unmasking of brutal authority.
In “Just Noise,” we are presented with several paragraphs of sentences quoted from philosopher Hannah Arendt, critic Elizabeth Grosz, novelist Kenzaburo Oe, poet Jocelyn Saidenberg, anthropologist Michael Taussig, performance artist Karen Finley, poet Etel Adnan, novelist Kathy Acker, and poet/performance artist Jackson Mac Low. These sources are cited in a thicket of footnotes, which are then reprised as the next page of text. As with the mercurial headers and titles that cue the book’s action, the push-pull of interchangeable foreground and background stands in metonymically for larger questions of language and truth.
“Beware of Seeking Out the Mighty” begins, “in writing a poem she is not writing a novel in writing a novel she is not writing an essay in writing an essay she is not writing a diatribe…” and continues for 23 pages, a tour de force. It’s worth noting that a less engaged, more conceptual approach might seek to automate the process, replicating the formula ad nauseum, but that is not the case here. Harryman rings small changes on the variations, keeping the interplay of thought and gesture alive all the way through.
In the final chapter, “Orgasms,” Harryman writes:
With the flick of the switch aggression exposes erotic drives to blindness. On the other side of this blindness is an orgasm in the public void.
An orgasm is an elegy in which there is no consolation. Machines, like orgasms, are inconsolable things.
Adorno metamorphosed from an instrument to a machine to the unnameable, a figure in the Beckett he had admired. Text is the electricity that moves the body from one thing to the next even as it cannot break out of its instrumental rationality. [180]
Harryman’s essay, an argument overheard, starts at A. The first sentence reads: “A might be an abbreviation for something inside itself, inside A.” Is A a letter? Or a person? Is the essay about persons? Or is it about the means by which persons understand one another to be persons—that is, the symbolic? Does A stand for Adorno? Or is it only the first letter in a sequence of textuality through whose generative unfoldings we might yet realize our liberation? “People thinking in the forms of free, detached, disinterested appraisal were unable to accommodate within those forms the experience of violence in which reality annuls such thinking,” Adorno wrote. “The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.” - Kit Robinson
http://cw.emuenglish.org/?page_id=205
Carla Harryman’s work always seems to reward repeated readings and her 2008 collection of essays, Adorno’s Noise, is no exception. Her book is remarkable not only for the many threads it ties together but also for the ends that are left loose. It shuttles across generations and cultures: from Theodor Adorno and Anais Nin to Kenzaburo Oe and Robert Smithson, from William Blake to contemporary noise artists. Each essay is effective on its own, but when read together the reader is able to appreciate the intricacy of Harryman’s arguments.
Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951) serves as both the springboard and organizing framework for Harryman’s book. Adorno’s book of short essays attempted, in his words, “the teaching of the good life” in as much as that was possible in an era of increasing dehumanization. As he states, one “who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form.” But for Harryman’s purposes, Adorno is both an inspiration and a foil. While each section heading is clipped directly from Minima Moralia, she chose the phrases that sounded the least like Adorno--her attempt to liberate his project from its linguistic heaviness and fatalism.
Harryman uses a variety of strategies to prod and confront Adorno’s framework. Perhaps the most overtly philosophical section is titled “Regard for the Object Rather than Communication is Suspect.” After considering the types of world in which this statement can be considered correct, Harryman proceeds to show that suspicion of “the Object” is not nearly as important as suspicion of the process of Objectification. This objectification is personified by a young Robert Creeley, whose introduction to The Gold Diggers (1954) she cites in the book. “The story has no time finally. Its shape, if form can be so thought of, is a sphere, an egg of obdurate kind.” This conception of story represents for Harryman how enclosed and static structures become suffocating: “Once I dreamed of an obdurate egg. It was strangled in twine.”(167). - Pat Clifford
Read more here: http://www.kaurab.com/english/books/adornos-noise.html
But the idea of the vengeful dedication fascinates me.
We stay where we are in order to get where we’re going.
We stay where we are in order to be where we’re going.
In a way this writing is a spin-off from spin / a sort-of-outside to spin’s frenetic interior – it’s the mould that makes the void possible that makes the next object (of thought) possible. In this way copy after copy of each spin can be produced / and (don’t you kid yourself) each copy redefines the mould (a lot) – each copy is the effect of this mould that surrounds it and in that way it might come to not be.
The sentence in whole or part remarks on this from a long way off while it concurrently pours out of the frame. The sentence imitates bodily fluids pouring out of inflicted wounds before it becomes an abstract line.
Carla controls the pulse of the moment with words / so that its even flow (rarely (really) interrupted) tells the mind of the reader where to go. Prose is (always) about things that probably (probably) happened (that probably happened). Prose paces our way through life / making it happen / as if (as if) anything could happen (that way).
In a way though prose is a bodily thing. It can sing.
If normality is death then regard for the object rather than communication is suspect.
…
I wonder if it would be the case that if normality were not death, regard for the object would be purely an entailment of belief and communication would in turn become the object of thought.
Carla displays more wonderment in the face of the word (in the face of the actual word) and what happens to it when another is added to it / than anyone I can think of (and this goes even more so for sentences). This wonderment is grace / this wonderment is a (the) form of grace. What she says about Anaïs Nin could be said about her own work –
She has set about the task of explaining women to men using a language men can understand, one that is persuasive but not frightening.
But the writing does not define itself in relation to (only) that project / or to any project other than itself. But again / that doesn’t mean that it is at all solipsistic – that simply means that it is here (here (that it is here)).
We know that Carla is telling us stuff about living / about how to go on living / about what living is like / about what living-together is like / about what to expect from living / about the problems and pit-falls of living / and so on – but she tells us this stuff kind-of-obliquely (or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she does so directly-but-from-one-vantage-at-a-time-and-then-very-quickly-from-another-vantage). Very often this kind of oblique-rendition-of-ideas has been brought to us via the novel (eg H G Wells / J G Ballard) – but here it is the essay form (replete with plenty of narrative elements) that is called into service. The obliqueness comes not from a general or all-over obscurantism or vagueness – (quite the contrary) / each sentence is remarkably simple in a declarative-sort-of-way. But the sentences exist in relation to one-another as equals / normal (or common) progressions are pretty-much-eschewed in favor of the building-up block-by-block (sentence-by-sentence) in such a way that the overall effect is somewhat more like music (linear and additive but with significant resonances and recalls) than prose usually is – so in this way it is wonderful prose and it instructs us by its mean(s) as well as by its meaning(s).
For a moment it is unclear whether this is a piece of music or something else, then for a little while things seem to proceed in a narrative fashion.
And another thing that keeps the language kind-of-floating (and not too much too-much-to-the-point) is that (here) everything (everything) is under consideration / nothing is fixed (decided-upon) / everything is still being worked into the fabric of possibility (such that everything is (is) possible (everything is possible)).
In Carla’s world there is really no difference between the lived-daily and the politically-imposed world(s). This is brought home by the way the language examines itself-as-language / and by the way it examines other-languages(-as-not-other-languages). It’s frightening – I mean the impact is frightening / clarifying and frightening.
in writing a poem she is not writing a novel in writing a novel she is not writing an essay in writing an essay she is not writing a diatribe in writing a diatribe she is not putting her body on the line in putting her body on the line she is not going to jail in going to jail she is not getting a job she is not protesting in protesting she is not elucidating her point of view in elucidating her point of view she is not writing a poem
Everywhere she is writing thought. Everywhere she is thinking writing.
What does it mean to describe anything? – how do words bring a thing into space in a way that a painting of it does not? / a photograph of it does not? / that it itself does not? This question begins to get a lot of exercise in the text called HEADLESS HEADS – I don’t say that the question is answered (it is not) but that it is taken out and put through multitudes of its possible paces. What does it mean to analyze? – what does it mean to analyze such an image? / or a text (of whatever sort)? / or a text with such an image in it? These questions (too) are given the space-of-pages in which to roam. - Alan Davies
Read more here: http://jacketmagazine.com/39/r-davies-5soundminds.shtml
Carla Harryman’s Adorno’s Noise is a self structured work which reaches out towards worlds of language, dialectics, art, sexuality, memory, politics, poetry, writing, the self, the object, space and Adorno. Carla Harryman plunges us into her minds eye- into her world which is a complex object fighting for its place in the world. Adorno’s Noise is a complex work, which aims to challenge. Like the Harryman work which has gone before it, this new example of her writing does not shy away from complexity of thought or process. This complexity makes this work initially daunting to engage with; this feeling of daunting is not a negative one, but one which spurs the reader on to uncover the meaning of the text. The text is a noise; a hybrid of hisses and spits from across genres. Harryman plunges us directly into this noise; a noise we are unfamiliar with, a noise which is forcing us to listen, a noise which is asking for change.
There is a need to uncover what this noise means; you must be willing to translate it. Carla Harryman demands that you listen and listen with intent. This text demands that you listen and listen throughout. Yet what are the implications of this intent listening and is it possible? Has Harryman constructed a dense enough text to be physically deconstructing itself?
I must firstly turn our attention to the title: “Adorno’s Noise”. There are instant connotations of thought here and from the beginning Harryman has set up a very open dialogue with Adorno’s work. Yet will this book be just that; noise from Adorno? I must admit that this text is noise, but it is certainly not purely Adorno, it is very much saturated with the voice of Harryman. - Becky Cremin
Read more here: http://perform-a-text.blogspot.com/2009/11/examining-carla-harrymans-adornos-noise.html
The first of two major new works collected in Carla
Harryman's new book of "literary nonfiction," Adorno's
Noise, begins by eliding two otherwise remote passages
from Minima Moralia: "If normality is death then regard
for the object rather than communication is suspect"
(Harryman 21). Equally spirited by Adorno's negative
dialectics--a Hegelian counter-pointillism meant to
ameliorate the devaluation of subjective experience in
Marxist and Freudian categories--and the aphoristic,
indeed noisily lyric, style of Adorno's prose, Harryman
entertains the most dissolute promise of the opposite
in "Regard for the Object Rather Than Communication Is
Suspect":
I wonder if it would be the case that if normality were
not death, regard for the object would be purely an
entailment of belief and communication would in turn
become the object of thought. This may seem a bit mad as
well as inappropriate content for a meaty essay. Bear
with me for a little while. You and I will go on an
excursion together and discover something along the way
if we're lucky. If we are not lucky, neither you nor I
will be worse off than when we started. I can't guarantee
this but it is something I believe with enough confidence
to proceed to the next sentence. The next sentence is not
a death sentence. (Adorno's Noise 21)
The kind of improvisatory churning of antitheses that
Adorno's most radical utopian dictates--in particular his
initially liberatory extension of Fourier's critique of the
commodification of gender norms--and the syllogistic force
of dialectical thought are pitched as an aesthetic problem
unresolved and yet still legible in the language of critical
theory, the same problem that famously worried the question
of writing poetry "after Auschwitz." Modernity's most rank
expressions of positivist enlightenment genius pose the
historical problem of "normality" in the wake of "defeated
Germany," to which, in Adorno's assessment, only "a thoroughly
unsatisfactory, contradictory answer, one that makes a mockery
of both principle and practice" is available; is it not then
barbarism to entertain the thought that "the fault lies in
the question and not only in me" (56)?
With her alternative formulation, Harryman provides amply the
"rigor and purity" of which Adorno speaks in his section on
"Morality and style":
A writer will find that the more precisely, conscientiously,
appropriately he expresses himself, the more obscure the
literary result . . . . people know what they want because
they know what other people want. Regard for the object,
rather than for communication, is suspect in any expression:
anything specific, not taken from pre-existent patterns,
appears inconsiderate, a symptom of eccentricity, almost of
confusion. . . . Few things contribute so much to the
demoralization of intellectuals. Those who would escape it
must recognize the advocates of communicability as traitors
to what they communicate. (Adorno 101)
Quite literally appropriating the question of what remains an
appropriate response to modernity's twilight produces an
"essay" form that matches, in our time, the beleaguered
"rigor" Adorno's friend Thomas Mann spoke of when he wrote,
"in order to read you, one should not be tired" (qtd in JŠger
128). It's not enough to say that Adorno's Noise is citational,
and not exactly accurate to say Harryman writes like Adorno.
While these observations may be "true," it's only because they
are tautological, logical coincidences that define normative
forms of exposition and "rigor." Harryman's writing is full of
wry humor and critical attentiveness, by turns lapidary and
bombastic, sometimes maddeningly self-conscious, but in a
thoroughly motivated, astonishingly informed manner. When
Harryman cites Adorno, it is transformative. She renders him
elliptical. Adorno himself worried about this nascent quality
which, in postmodern American poetics, becomes a virtue; the
apology that forms a substantial amount of his dedicatory
preface to Minima Moralia posits the aphoristic texture of what
follows as a revision of Hegel's proto-Fascistic denial of the
"for-itself," the defining trait of the aphorism's pithy
concision. Harryman's book begins with a tiny treatise on the
"cell of meaning," the "in-itself" of language: "A might be an
abbreviation for something inside itself, inside A," which,
"[o]nce exposed, [grows] out of proportion to the language that
[has] ushered it into the brain of someone else and now it is
mushrooming" (Adorno's Noise 5). - Patrick F. Durgin
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.509/19.3durgin.txt
Jill Darling: The Content of Essay Form: On Reading Carla Harryman's Adorno's Noise
Carla Harryman, There Never Was a Rose
Without a Thorn, City Lights Publishers, 2001
These hybrid writings, staged as they are between fiction and theory, the domestic and history, abstractions and androgeny, the rational and the nonrational, the creator and her artifact, organize themselves against normative ideas while using whatever tolls of novelistic, philosophic, autobiographical, or poetic discourse present themselves to advance their tellings. Concepts such as narrative, character, and binary thinking are manipulated and scrutinized but not adhered to methodically. The writing is also a response to literature and the things of the world: it does not separate one off from the other. Marquis de Sade, rocks, Balzac, war, Lautremont, amazons, Jane Austen, news, Jan Bowles, utopias, Ludwig Wittgenstein, child's play, Saint Augustine, censorship are probable points on its strange map. in the world of this work, words themselves may become characters and instincts are regarded as if they were books. Complex ideas and simple rheetorics mingle, yielding impure theories, precarious stories, and fabulist games. —Carla Harryman, 1995, Preface
"Carla Harryman is a great wide-awake visionary–reading her is like playing Olympic ping-ping in eight dimensions! In her work we encounter the libido's fierce games: the willful sense and non-sense, the endless reversibility. Rampant story and rhetoric (our culture's self-descriptions) are raised up, then promptly guillotined for crimes against honesty. Through this florescence of creation and destruction, Harryman wages one of contemporary writing's most radical critiques." —Robert Glück
"There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn is a work of magical intelligence and wit, opening up words and ideas in ways that are both startling and moving. Carla Harryman folds out ideas revealing more meanings and connections than seem possible, yet each new image settles irrevocably inside us, no experience, either literary or personal, remains the same once you've traveled through the worlds she creates. Her newest work is an alchemical gem that sparkles." —Jewell Gomez
Carla Harryman, Sue in Berlin, Presses
Universitaires de Rouen, 2018
read it at Google Books
Carla Harryman's SUE IN BERLIN is a collection of six genre blending pieces of poetry and performance that are informed in varying degree by musical, verbal, and physical improvisation. Composed between 2001 and 2015, each of the works are written for both the page and for live performance and are, what Harryman calls "recalcitrant texts," meant to perform their own object status "as both linked to and separate from the live performance of its language." Deeply collaborative, the pieces in SUE IN BERLIN are born from Harryman's improvisational work with both performers and musicians, while they touch on topics that span from childhood and gender, to race and the social construction of space, to Detroit Techno and noise music. Works in the collection have been performed nationally and internationally: in San Francisco, Detroit, New York, Chicago, Austria, Germany, France, and the Czech Republic. Never settling between poetry and theater, Sue In Berlin resists genre to create a material sense of constant motion and morphing identities, heightening our attentions and sensitivities as readers to that of listeners: to the chorus that emerges -- ruptures, rather -- as text, as process, as narrative insistently folding back into itself.
"The realism of Harryman's work lies not in a normative reenactment of past events but rather in its existence as a thought experiment through which the past and its connection to the present moment are reconfigured. It is characterized by the ability to hold contradictions in interplay and by a willingness to see the overlay of conflicting realities."--Heidi Bean, Associate Professor in performance studies, Bridgewater State University
It is an absolute delight to read SUE IN BERLIN, the text hovers magically between the poetic line and narrative continuation, opening all sorts of doors in the process. If there is an in-between in new writing by women--this is it!"--Gail Scott
"What SUE IN BERLIN puts to the fore: The paramount importance of theater or some aspects of theater within poetry--Within any poem. Harryman's poetry is theater, at once."--Chrisophe Lamiot Enos, Editor, "To Series," PURH
Carla Harryman, Open Box, Belladonna Books,
2007
OPEN BOX (IMPROVISATIONS) is the newest book from prolific poet Carla Harryman. "GRNN alert just in--Joseph Cornell is doing the can-can over the delicious debris organization in Harryman's OPEN BOX. This dance of demi-characters--half half, semiquaver, three hooks quarter--places (a State) under an obligation not to maintain armed forces. Next up: removing oneself to another place; migration"--Tina Darragh. Carla Harryman's recent books include BABY and THE WORDS AFTER CARL SANDBURG'S ROOTABAGA STORIES AND JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, both currently available from SPD.
Carla Harryman, A Voice to Perform: One Opera
/ Two Plays, SplitLevel Texts, 2020
HANNAH CUT IN: Assembled in time-bound segments, each derived from the idea of interruption in the writings of Hannah Arendt, this play was created for a Poets Theater event at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, 2017.
MEMORY PLAY: A two-act, multifaceted conceptualization of memory-as-performance proffered by personified creature and instructions, a child, and a Miltonic Humiliator toy.
GARDENER OF STARS, AN OPERA: A duo, a trio, a quartet, an ensemble, this work adapts Harryman's experimental novel, GARDENER OF STARS "paradise and wastelands of utopian desire."
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