Russell Persson, The Way of Florida, Little Island Press, 2017
excerpt
www.russellpersson.com
There is a beyond madness I believe we have in us. A deep yellow like a metal stone who turns and as an ember it heats with the wind up against it. The madness lugged in and out of the rooms of us through doors of us we hide it from the wind the lightest duff which up against the madness it fans the ember into that hottest stone who puts a body along some odd path and writes a script for each man differently and strange this hottest babel is unheard the notions peculiar to each man come alive and now freed enact a rite wholly fucked and bright to only that man and none other. This solitary trip at once outside the man and truly within. A beyond madness who somehow does not ride with us floated here aloud but instead the madness though fanned I do not know how it remains inside these men. It seems for some the lightest alter can throw him into the gut of it. It could be that our hunger has a taller role or the water we have needed and without these deep wants it would avail the stone to become odd within us. But instead we ride floated here and our madness is small for now though I can not believe for good.
Faith is therefore no aesthetic emotion, but something far higher, exactly because it presupposes resignation; it is not the immediate inclination of the heart but the paradox of existence – Fear and Trembling – Soren Kierkegaard
The best novels are never confined. They avoid simple reductionism or definition, they’re as amorphous as history itself. They can never really be known, although of course obscurantism for obscurantism’s sake is a loathsome goal and we must be wary. Criticism tries but is only ever a terse gesture towards themes or subjective readings, a celebration mostly, the proverbial bigging up. The best novels are about everything.
The Way of Florida is one of those novels. It elevates itself above its context, although it doesn’t use its context, it doesn’t simply rohypnol it and go for a quick fumble, and it never feels like a crutch or burden, there’s a respect and duty paid, it never loses sight or tries too hard to break away and be something more, this something more is achieved through Persson’s keen moral eye and spiritual concern and his assiduous handling of an now almost alien time in human history.
It’s as such we sail or drift us in this sea who calls our path. The maize in its own lessening. How could the sky in day see fit to spend us like it does? This in turn is answered. The gathered clouds. The wind who moves a bird against its usual wing into a tumble. The wave who begins to have a tip crested turned over into a brief witness the lip of what’s coming. A still wind over the tips enough to move the smell of what’s coming on to us and then a wind rises gusted at times and risen into the unwelcome.
The language is neither anachronistic or pastiche, maybe it’s a weird blend between the two I’m not sure, but it doesn’t feel like either, wholly the author’s own, a brilliant run-on hybrid that just when you feel Persson has lost it he snaps it back to his command like a ringmaster does his whip. There’s a delirium to the prose but also a sanity, a thoroughness and rich sincerity. It doesn’t sound like it’s from the past, in fact the total opposite, it’s a voice from the future and is all the better for it – the sort of prose Vollmann has occasionally managed but never sustained for a whole novel the way Persson does here.
But is it each his own read of what’s above?
The sections are hypnotic at times and it can be easy to overlook much of the novel’s deeper and more profound ideas as they come nestled within each euphonious burst, stuff like “Men at arms do they come ready in this life for moving a fast arm against another man?” It raises the old questions of man’s inhumanity to man, the ideas of violence begetting violence, trust vs suspicion within the nature of man, whether consequence justifies certain amoral actions, but there’s a spiritual muscle at work, this is a conversation with God, with faith, with one’s own sins, with one’s own humanity “I find myself a marvel that I proceed at all though I marvel again at the enormity I carry and at the lands inside me yet to fold out”.
At the start of the novel we’re introduced to this ship with 400 men and 80 horses and this is cut down throughout the book until we’re left with no horses and less than half a dozen men. This kind of weakening is important when considering the novel’s stance on human potentiality and when coupled with Heidegger’s view on potentiality. Heidegger’s reading of Paul embraces a weakness in the human condition, that what we move towards to become we cannot actually become, much in the same way that what the narrator and crew chase is not attained, importantly this arc occurs under the guise of faith – for me what you have then in this Heideggerian predicament is a powerlessness that becomes a kind of triumph or at least a revelation that helps us better understand our potentiality, the last sentence is crucially dealt callously as a way to question our intentions over a power we do possess and that we must confront.
There is a challenge within this book both for and against someone like John Gray’s naturalised and Darwinian re-description of original sin, the idea that we’re all just essentially killer apes, homo-rapiens as Gray calls us. But as this book demonstrates, we might be apes and capable of inhumanity for inhumanities sake given a certain context or none at all, but, crucially, we have a strong metaphysical longing, a suspicion about us of a deeper spiritual connection to what we call world – this novel is about a literal journey and period of discovery and colonisation but this serves as metaphor for the wider and more profound journey and discovery this book tackles, the journey of faith and the epiphanies there in.
Are we not the sons of trees? . . . Are we not the sons of almond and the sons of our home trees the nut elm and the leg oak we look back on to the trees of our home and they are bark and knee and bowl and canopy and we fasten us to them here to so live throughout the blow.
Just as a kind of addendum to this point and linking to the quote above, the idea of the Earth and “mother nature” and our place in the ecosystem is also interwoven within the narrative, it’s impossible to escape I guess in a novel featuring treacherous seas and burning sand but it’s an interesting aspect of the novel and again provides a deeper layer to the themes presented.
As the narrator and his crew and the Indians suffer from every type of exhaustion imaginable the malnutrition comes through in the voice, and coupled with the inexorable evocations of God, you might think he’s speaking in tongues at some points, the whole body of the text is warped and vexed under the brutal conditions of narrator and crew as the text begins to resemble their makeshift rafts on those dubious seas.
So more ready to continue as if the weather and the sea waves had a mind and that mind was set to go on and its eyes were open and direct upon you unblinking almost in savour of the turmoil it hands out. Us gullied out on the worn maps of Him sunken down into the grooves cut deep by all who came before and augured into the sand of their own claim.
Do you believe that everything is random, do you believe like Bast in Gaddis’s JR that order is simply a thin perilous condition we impose on the true nature of chaos, that determinism itself is chaos and that chaos is deterministic, that we are all just matter and tiny particles (that’s basically pulsing light continually coming and going into and out of existence taken at the most minute level, some Planck scale) and that we’re all just this stuff playing itself out like pool balls flung across a table, seemingly chaotic but ultimately predictable and our paths defined – and if indeed it is all paved, our sins and all, do you believe that there is some meaning to it all at the end and what exactly is meaning given such a predicament?
The final sentence rocked me and helped refine much of what I’d read to that point. I won’t go into too much detail as I don’t want to muddy other people’s opinions or readings but I will say that there is suffering we can do little about and all we have is God and speculation for that, and mercy and sorrow and regret, but the true horror is horror we can do something about but condone or participate in anyway.
“Endings, instead, possess me . . .” – William Frederick Kohler
https://hearusfalling.wordpress.com/2017/09/24/the-way-of-florida-russell-persson/
Neil Armstrong hoped that someone, some day, would erase the footprints he had left on the moon. It is in this spirit that American author Russell Persson revisits the ill-fated Narváez expedition, covering the explorers’ tracks before loosing his characters into lostness. The Way of Florida, his outlandish debut, begins in medias res like an epic poem: ‘And waiting another day to enter port, a south wind took us and drove us away from land.’ The colonial enterprise – blown off course after grinding to a halt – has already failed, and will keep on failing better as if The Odyssey had been redrafted by Beckett. Trapped in a ‘maze of unhaving’, increasingly ‘abundant in [their] lack’, the Spaniards soon want nothing more than ‘to not want’. For most of them, the voyage – ‘long for the things [they] do not come upon’ – will be a one-way ticket to ‘[h]igh nowhere of the utmost.’ ‘I know there is no return,’ the narrator laments, ‘and I know there is no thing toward of which all of us sail.’ Cut adrift from any destination, the journey loses its telos, becoming an end in itself. ‘I must be a man who walks,’ he acknowledges, likening life to an excursion we go on awhile until ‘the world moves on without us’.
With no backstory to speak of, or veritable narrative arc, The Way of Florida is a historical novel from which history has been all but excised. Were it not for the publisher’s blurb, I would have ignored that this quixotic attempt to establish Spanish settlements along the Gulf Coast was first chronicled by Cabeza de Vaca, one of only four survivors, or that his 1542 account had provided Persson with a general direction of travel. The erasure of most period markers (the first occurrence of the explorer’s name that I spotted was on page 175) allows a deep immersion in the here and now of lives conducted in extremis. A whole year elapses in the course of a four-line paragraph, while a single, unpunctuated sentence – reflecting the flow of real time – winds its way through an entire ten-page chapter. Significantly, the narrator comes to see his existence as a solitary long take, ‘the string of days entire from one until the end’: ‘Inside this now I live with my body underneath the sky.’
The beleaguered colonisers seek refuge in their corporeal abodes, envisioned with doors leading to closets where ‘olden acts’ are ‘ungone forever’. A counter-movement sees the self projected on to the hallucinatory landscape. The protagonist evokes ‘the lands inside [him] yet to fold out’ as though conjuring up the very ground on which he treads. This projection, imperialist as it may sound, inaugurates a fugue state; a desperate drive to leave oneself behind. Striding forth, he explains, is ‘our only path our only way toward some otherwhere some place we were not.’ The narrative feeds off itself, like those stranded Christians who survive by partaking of the deceased – until there is only one cannibal left and nobody else ‘to enfooden him’.
It is through writing, however, that Cabeza de Vaca achieves an ecstatic, out-of-body experience. The true ‘otherwhere’ is the book in which he records his misadventures, ‘to bring me to the outside of this [situation] where I can look down to me and witness my own sentence’. Whether he is the author of his own sentence – his work, as well as his plight – remains a moot point. The narrator believes that he and his compatriots are doing penance for their sins, and that what appears like aimless drifting is all part of a grand design. He also claims to have been chosen as the recipient of divine messages, thereby establishing a direct link between ‘Our Lord our mapmaker’ and the figure of the writer.
The Way of Florida is thus a journey into fiction. The survivors – four unwitting horsemen of the Apocalypse – enter Indian lore as ‘holy men from the sky’. In the final part, there is a sudden switch from first to third-person narration, perhaps signalling that Cabeza de Vaca has absented himself through his work, reemerging as a godlike, omniscient voice. A subtle parallel is drawn between colonialism and the realist novel’s linguistic imperialism, exemplified by the narrator’s frustration at not being able to describe certain gestures or the sound the sun makes on the sand. The jarring notes provided by the regular intrusion of expletives – ‘the deep fuck we found ourselves in’ – advertise the underlying tension between contingency and necessity. The neat little blocks of text stranded in an ocean of blank space recall the breath clouds of the storytelling explorers (‘it is air in the shape of our sound in the shape of tales’) and the soothing blowing therapy of the faith healers. These typographical havens stand in stark contrast to the wildly poetic, often challenging, run-on sentences that compose them, stamping their hypnotic rhythm upon the reader.
This is English, but not as we know it. The novelist seems to have taken it back to the dawn of language, producing a newly-minted idiom that feels both antiquated and timeless. It is this Adamic English that makes The Way of Florida sui generis, despite being based on a pre-existing text. As Maurice Blanchot put it: ‘What is important is not to tell, but to tell once again and, in this retelling, to tell again each time a first time.’ - Andrew Gallix
http://review31.co.uk/article/view/543/the-deep-fuck-we-found-ourselves-in
On the recommendation of a friend, I’ve been playing Dialect during quarantine. It’s a game about language. According to the game’s creators, “Language tells a story. Woven into the way we speak, we reveal what we care about, where we come from, and who we are.” Players choose from a handful of post-apocalyptic scenarios: colonizing a new planet, speaking in code under authoritarian rule, and developing a barricaded utopia are some of the “Backdrops” offered. When I make decisions about the role I will play and study the etymology of the words I choose to fabricate, I learn the game’s thesis to be true. Dialect has not only served as an excellent bit of escapism, but for me it’s brought into focus the decisions some of my favorite writers have made regarding language in their own speculative worlds.
When I speculate on speculation, meta-speculate, my mind goes to Florida. My home state is overrun with speculators: that enterprising folk who impose their fantasies on a place, package it, and attempt to sell it to others. Speculators have perpetuated the construction and destruction of Florida for thousands of years on an incomparable scale. Hurricanes wipe out whole communities, rockets explode on platforms, hectares of farmland are inundated by flood, yet they always rebuild. As such, Florida is in a constant state of post-apocalypse. Authors are not immune to this speculative affliction either, though when they set their fantasies in Florida, it’s a much less capitalist fabrication.
Russell Persson’s 2017 novel The Way of Florida isn’t the creation of an entirely new world but instead is a reimagining of the world drawn by the conquistador Àlvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in his narrative of the failed Narváez expedition. Florida in the 16th century is so far outside of our field of vision today. All we know of it then was that it was a tough land populated by indigenous tribes who defended it tooth and nail and that its interior was a nearly impenetrable fortress of overgrowth. To reimagine this vintage of the state is akin to building it anew. Instead of choosing to recreate the physical landscape though, Persson chooses to rebuild the language of the conquistadores who came unto it.
The narrator, presumed to be Cabeza de Vaca though it’s never stated, thinks to himself, “Unlike any other sound there are certain sounds only your own hand can make. Or what I can not hope to describe but you must believe in the silence the note is beauty the note is clear to me.” The narrator is self-referential, makes direct address to the reader, and ruminates on the nature of communication itself. This is all in the context of the death and suffering his crew encounters and creates in La Florida. It’s a post-modern manner of speech and a departure from the traditional narrative voice one would expect from a 16th-century conquistador. It is also a sign from the writer that things are not what they might seem. I’ve learned that when a storyteller admits clearly their opacity, this is when a book becomes a game of linguistics first, and a narrative second. It’s a technique reminiscent of Poe short stories in which the unreliable narrator brags about their clarity of vision—an invitation for the reader into a linguistic scrum. It should come as no surprise then, when the narrator says, “I doubt the shape of this world.”
Death is the key to unlocking the secret language of The Way of Florida. It’s the only challenge to the Spanish conquistador’s unflinching faith in God, and in the moments near death Persson’s creation is laid bare. Take a section of the book called “We Builded Boats and Died.” In this chapter, the remaining crew attempt to leave Florida and find Spanish territory, but they end up adrift in the Gulf of Mexico until their provisions are gone. One after the other, they die. The narrator says, “To recall this now is a double knife at once in service and then also turned inward. I revisit this in full and clear sight. My sins have got me here and so I left them here in night when awake among them all I turned my body and sent them all downward and aside.” The irony in the narrator’s near-death recollection lies in a statement he’s made earlier in the book. He says, “I have never put much study on the final words of a man dying.” So, are we to believe anything that he’s observed in these moments near his death? His clarity is contradicted by statements made under better health. Also notable is Persson’s writing style in this passage. The shirking of grammar rules, a run-on-sentence-stream-of-consciousness style used in the rest of the book, indicates the narrator is giving himself over to another power.
These questions of reliability and stylistic risks are the weapons the writer chooses to employ in a playful battle with the reader. Reading The Way of Florida, I’m left contemplating how I recall memories set against this landscape. My near-death scrapes with subtropical rainstorms, the jaws of alligators, and sports cars may not be today what they were in the moment. It’s a provocative approach the reader must open themselves up to. Still adrift in the Gulf, the narrator ruminates on this. “In night we capture ourselves inside us,” Persson writes, “and go visit those ensaddened rooms where the moments so darkly drawn and brought back again with new light and new edges like a hand who disturbs the tapestry inside the fresco so this visit repaints a life already been, untrusted and believed at once for the visit is what he calls the visit alone is the matter.” This passage is acknowledgment of the game by the author and a beautiful ars poetica wrapped up in one.
Importantly, there is no creation of language, just reinvention. Even the first communicators reflected the language of the animals and stars. This is the case for Denis Johnson’s 1985 novel Fiskadoro. Whereas Persson reimagines pre-Florida, Johnson takes the more traditional speculative approach of imagining a post-Florida world. The book is set in the Florida Keys after a vaguely described nuclear war. Regarding the inhabitants of this world, Johnson writes, “They didn’t even know, most of them, that Twicetown had been called Key West in the other age. But dud missiles had fallen there not once, but twice, giving the town a new name. The missiles still lay where they’d fallen. Many of his fellow citizens didn’t even know what they were.” The survivors have been spared by two dud missiles and often give thanks and praise to their various mythical Gods—an Allah they know very little of and Bob Marley, to name two.
Knowledge is limited in the world of Fiskadoro, only arriving to Twicetown on waves: the ocean and the radio. Many of the residents survive by fishing, hence the title of the book. “Fiskadoro,” the eponymous protagonist of the book, is a hybridism, defined in the book as potentially meaning “Fisherman” or “Harpoonist.” The word’s closest proxy in our world is “pescador,” the Spanish word for fisherman. It makes sense. The language of Twicetown is a creole of Spanish, Patois, French, and English. News and music arrive to them by Cubaradio, the national broadcast of Cuba, which has somehow survived as a nation. Aside from its isolation, it’s not dissimilar to the Florida Keys of today.
In the course of fishing, the men bring back tales of other villages and souvenirs like “a half-pint bottle of Kikkoman Soy Sauce.” The most valuable of all things in this world, though, is knowledge, because with knowledge comes the expanded lexicon to express hope. Fiskadoro’s ill-fated bildungsroman is the novel’s thrust. He sets out on a journey of seeking that what he does not know: a thirst laid out early in the book. He takes music lessons from a father figure, Mr. Cheung. “Fiskadoro,” Johnson writes, “carried with him his clarinet in the briefcase called Samsonite.” The briefcase, once a symbol of corporate import, is now a vessel of creation. Where language and industry meet are where the conflict of the book exists. The character known as Cassius Clay Sugar Ray must trade a book about Nagasaki for a boat. In justifying his actions, he tells fellow Twicetowners: “But I took the book and I readed part of the page one to him, so he can me as a schooled aficionado of words.”
Waves, and thus information, come in fragmented sets to the isolated Twicetown, an actuality reflected in the names of characters. Billy Chicago, Bobby Calvino, Harvard Sanchez, and Beer Wilson are Twicetowners whose names carry remnants of the past. Given the severe circumstances under which the characters in Johnson’s book live, it’s inevitable they too will suffer their own apocalypse. Will their names be vessels of memory carried out by the tide into the sea to a land of survivors, distilled down to their essence? Names, I can’t help but think today, are containers of history. By repeating the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, David McAtee, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tony McDade, and Trayvon Martin, protesters are ensuring their place in history.
Fiskadoro is timeless in its inclusion of pop culture, but also in the way a culture in isolation is drawn. I wonder how close we are to isolation right now. If we ever lost our ability to connect digitally, what would our dreams and creations be like? Mr. Cheung has a little knowledge of the past. His mother is one of the oldest Twicetowners and she can recall time before the nuclear wars, though she doesn’t communicate much anymore. He carries her knowledge and thus, hope. “Someday the Quarantine will end,” he says. “We won’t be poisonous forever.” - Jason Katz https://blog.pshares.org/lexicon-land/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh4BCNehJ5Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po4yvvQNrew
Read an interview with Russell Persson about the writing of The Way of Florida:
UNSAID: What role does research play in your treatment of what appear to be historical events? In what ways is research either a help or a hindrance?
RP: Research has provided the factual armature that my narrative is built on. Throwing clay on that armature and pushing it around and forming the contours that I find engaging or musical or surprising or terrifying is the real joy. I do end up at times going back to the facts to give a rough form to where the story is going, but I try not to get too deep into the research because if I feel like I am guiding or anticipating the story too strictly then I’ll lose that sense of play and abandon which is required for me to get at least that first draft down.
UNSAID: Your treatment of mapping and chronology, combined with your description of jungle landscape, create a strong sense of anxiety, the feeling that a creeping reality will invade and engulf all, unless the world is constantly rationalized. Is this feeling merely an effect within your story, or is it expressive of your own understanding of human experience?
RP: In the Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca, it’s a disaster from the start. The ships are blown by a storm, the navigator doesn’t know where they are, the competency of the commander Narvaez is questioned. After they reach land and decide to explore inland, they are walking through a place unknown, unmapped, populated by an unknown, possibly hostile people. When I was reading the Narrative, it made me anxious to imagine what it must have been like in those circumstances. I wanted to try to convey some of that anxiety, and to bring some of that anxiety to the idiom.
The sense of anxiety and that creeping reality you mention might also have to do with the process of writing. When I am writing well, I feel like I’m an actor playing the role of some overwhelmed scribe trying to keep up with the story. It’s a fugue state that is wonderful to be in and it produces its own kind of anxiety, but like any ideal state it’s not always easy to access. That creeping reality is daily life, just outside the gates, constantly reminding me that I need to go back to my job, pay the bills, mow the lawn. So that anxiety might have more to do with not so much my understanding of the human experience but instead my understanding of the experience of writing.
UNSAID: It was hard for me to read The Way of Florida without thinking of Orlando, the title of two literary landmarks, and also the home of one of the world’s great theme parks. For me, your story connotes a wide variety of texts, historical and contemporary, aesthetic and vulgar, heroic and absurd – all of which add to the richness of the experience of reading. To what extent did writing proceed and work with an awareness of your production arising within an intertextual field?
RP: I wonder sometimes if it’s possible to start over with a word. In the original Narrative, “the way of Florida” simply refers to a direction of travel. But a contemporary reader can find so many different meanings for the word Florida. We all seem to have an emotion or an opinion about Florida. When I decided on the title “The Way of Florida,” I loved how ambiguous and loaded it was, how it could be filled up and decorated before you read a line of the text. And at the same time, I loved how it might be possible to rebuild the word itself.
Maybe it’s not possible to start over with a word, but I like the idea of trying. Jack Gilbert resurrected the word heart for me, which I believed had been lost for good. So I think there is still the possibility to take words to which we have assigned almost inseparable meaning and to present them for reevaluation.
UNSAID: The sudden appearance of complex run-on sentences in your story catches the reader off guard, demanding great feats of cognition or respiration if the movement of the story is not to be interrupted. To what extent do you find writing and reading to be not pleasures so much as mental and physical ordeals?
RP: I feel those longer sentences are a natural product of the story, told at pace and rhythm and length at which certain passages should be told to reflect the subject. Writing those sentences is a pleasure and I hope that pleasure is felt by the reader as well. But I do understand that those wandering sentences require a form of attention that we’re not used to working with. So in that way I can understand that it might take some persuasion or some kind of instruction to get the reader to that place where that form of attention lives. These lines might serve to, indirectly, instruct the reader on what might be an appropriate form of attention to bring to the pages.
UNSAID: I’m fascinated by what I might call infixes or intrusions in the course of your narrative. I see these principally in the form of sudden expletives, conjectures, and proclamations. Each of these seems to figure as a moment of shock, a repetition of an unsaid trauma driving the underpinning of the narrative. Can you say anything about the origin or function of exclamation in your work?
RP: The first expletive came about as a way to speak to the muted nature of the original Narrative, in which almost all emotion is removed to make room for place names, directions, distances traveled, measurements of time, descriptions of the native people. In my retelling of the narrative, I wanted to inhabit more of the reactionary and the felt. But once I started using these expletives I realized they were assigning themselves a different role, like a crash that breaks into an expected rhythm of sounds. I often listen to music that has elements of dissonance, and I realized these expletives were like those notes you don’t expect to hear, notes whose function is to intentionally bend away from the expected note to give you something odd and unexpected. This can be unsettling, or shocking, but you’ll see that bend in the path and by following the path you might get to see or hear something differently than if the path was straight.
- unsaidmagazine.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/a-disaster-from-the-start-an-interview-with-russell-persson/
Bagatelles and Bell's Exit (Unsaid)
On Horses and on Sea and on the Island of Malhado (3AM)
From The Way of Florida (Unsaid)
The Bed Orange of Egon (Unsaid)
The Moon a Low Dish (Unsaid)
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