Rewiring the Culture

Brian Evenson

Department of English
Oklahoma State University
evenson@osuunx.ucc.okstate.edu

 

 

Marcus, Ben. The Age of Wire and String. New York: Knopf, 1995.

 

Pierre Klossowski, in Sade, My Neighbor, offers two statements that might serve to introduce the startling, and often transgressive, vignettes of Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String. The first is the assertion that “it is not by arguments that [he] can obtain the assent of his interlocutor but by complicity” (27). The second is the realization that “reason itself . . . is but a form of passion” (67-8).

 

The Age of Wire and String thrusts into the forms of reasonable thought a great deal of passion, revivifying dead ways of speaking by short-circuiting them. The formal genres of both the hard and social sciences are manipulated by eccentric but nearly invisible narrators who, having emptied objective forms of their original content, fill them with highly original visions of the world. By applying extreme subjective pressure to the objective world, Marcus warps and splays the forms of capture we have come to expect. Where Marcus differs from less successful experimenters is that rather than merely allowing science to turn inward, revealing the subjectivity innate to any apparently objective process, he forces the subjective pressure to deflect again outward — thus revealing an objectivity that can only be reached through the subjective. In pursuing a line of flight that cleaves through a progression of selves and then flees outward, Marcus offers an array of voices to lay bare the whole of contemporary culture.

 

The Age of Wire and String is a non-system masquerading as a system. It is referred to, in the mock-argument at the book’s beginning, as a device for “cataloging a culture.” The book consists of eight divisions of stories which parse the culture into eight broad interrelated topics — Sleep, God, Food, The House, Animal, Weather, Persons, The Society. Each section is supplemented by a list of terms which sets out to define words that may or may not be relevant to the fictions of a particular section. These include objects as promising as:

 

FUDGE GIRDLE, THE Crumpets of cooked or flattened chocolage, bound or fastened by wire. This garment is spreadable. . . . (43)

 

MATH GUN, THE 1. Mouth of the Father, equipped with a red freckle, glistening. It is shined by foods, dulled with water, left alone by all else. 2. His pencil. . . . (26)

 

ARKANSAS 9 SERIES Organization of musical patterns or tropes that disrupt the flesh of the listener. (122)

 

The arrangement of the book and the definition of terms seem formal and orderly enough, and on the surface The Age of Wire and String seems to offer a fictional world holding the same sort of relation to the real world as does Borges’ Uqbar. However, the orderliness of the surface is quickly disrupted, and it becomes clear that what Marcus offers is not a single world but elements of several similar, but not completely compatible, worlds. Though the pieces all have some relation, they cannot be thought of as generating a single alternate reality; instead, the space they create is heterotopic, bringing together disparate elements whose connection cannot be adequately mapped, but which are joined nonetheless. How is one to bring together , for instance, the introduction (in Montana) of clothing made from food products, the song’s capacity for mutilating the body of a man on horseback, sleep’s ability to forestall the destruction of the house, a string’s tendency to fall in the shape of the next animal to be slain, and the more passionate and worldly spectacle of the mad invader who ties up everyone in the house and forces them to watch as he commits suicide? The impact of the book can be found less in the individual pieces than in the connections which spread from text to text, which make a rhizome of the different pieces and which allow one to travel from one disparate locale to another.

 

Within the text, the author’s name, as an administrative function by which to gather the book into a whole, falls under suspicion, for one discovers multiple definitions for “BEN MARCUS, THE,” including:

 

1. False map, scroll caul, or parchment . . . a fitful chart of darkness. When properly decoded, it indicates only that we should destroy it and look elsewhere for instruction. . . . 2. The garment that is too heavy to allow movement. . . . 3. Figure from which the antiperson is derived; or, simply, the antiperson. It must refer uselessly and endlessly and always to weather, food, birds, or cloth. . . . (77)

 

The Ben Marcus becomes three functions, all of which mock the way in which we think through significance and proprietorship in fiction, the different functions far from compatible.

 

Throughout the stories, Marcus performs the theft and adaptation of a variety of speech genres. He is able to treat certain styles and manners of speaking — certain forms of expression that give in their rightful or common context the seductions of convincingness (scientific discourse, prayer, technical writing, historical lecture, encyclopedia entries) — in ways that expose the strategies and seductions of the forms, opening them to new types of content. By bringing together accepted forms of discourse with unexpected content (in the attempt, for instance, to scientifically define a dog as a mode of heat transference, or in the offering of a prayer meant to preserve the wires of the house) the devices that allow for a form’s power of seduction ar e revealed and neutralized. But, by passing into new contexts, these forms are given a new power. They persist as walking frames over which a transient mythology begins to spread, vying to establish itself as the new truth.

 

The whole world rewires itself, connections being established where none were believed to exist before. What might have once begun as the simple act of branching a plug into a wall socket becomes a transgressive and sublime ritual, as an almost imperceptible character tries to piece together a collapsed life, perhaps believing that what has gone wrong on a human level must be corrected or else natural laws will collapse. What results is a technical explanation of the oddest kind:

 

Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new. (7)

 

Here the narrator reveals himself only in the definition of intercourse as a superstitious act, in the formal, technical framing of necrophilia, and in his attempt to thrust the experience on the reader by using the second person. The result is a transgressive act framed in measured terms and careful language, at once more beautiful and more disturbing than the usual approach to such acts can be.

 

The nature of transgression itself as an artistic project is defined in another piece, “The Golden Monica,” which takes for its utterance the mode of academic discourse. Here it becomes clear that for Marcus, as for Klossowski’s Sade, the aesthetic purpose is not so much to convince the reader as to establish complicity. As Marcus suggests elsewhere, “members alternate performing and watching, until there is no difference” (137). “The Golden Monica” serves to extrapolate this statement, speaking of “the phenomenon of the intruder or mad invader, who enters the American house in order to extinguish himself” in the presence of the inhabitants of the house (47). He binds the inhabitants in such a way that they must watch him, and then settles in the middle of them as he conducts a self-made ritual which will culminate in his demise. After the suicide, the narrator postulates, one of the members of the family will somehow manage to get free of the restraints and flee the house. Once outside, startled and moved by what he has just experienced, he will falsely confess to having murdered the suicided intruder, taking the blame upon himself. “The act of doing and watching are interchangeable here,” the narrator suggests. “[The] spectacle is arranged to emanate from whoever watches it, where seeing is the first form of doing,” the viewer thus taking the actor’s actions as his own (48). Such purpose seems to be behind several of Marcus’s stories, in that he often attempts to place the reader in a position from which it is difficult to gain a safe distance from the transgressions depicted. Though the forms of the language at times allow a narrow respite, the movement through the language and the rearrangement of the world of each story by the necessarily active reader give him or her a much more consciously role than is usually the case. Such a sense of one’s own participation in and creation of a text potentially ends in the recognition that there is more affinity than we would care to admit between seeing and doing.

 

Wordplay has often been a mainstay of experimental writers, but Marcus’s linguistic extravangances here work in a way they seldom can in the merely experimental. Marcus’s verbal manipulation is successful because it is not overused and does not exist for its own sake. Indeed, there are no idle experiments here, no manipulations for the sake of trying to prove the author’s cleverness. There is, however, a proliferation of new definitions and redefinitions, and in this we have what seems to be a movement to increased distinction. On the other hand, these definitions often sabotage themselves, and we can find a word so purposefully burdened with meanings that it becomes meaningless. In some of the fictional pieces, this burdening shifts into a destruction of distinction between signifiers. Thus, in “Arm, In Biology,” we find the term arm used in a number of ways — as a physical part of the body, as a percussion instrument, as an element of a machine, and as a medical device — with the definition sliding imperceptibly from one area to another, at once all of them yet none. What is under threat, then, are the rational distinctions made at the base of language — our ability to separate things off from one another through our words. What is gained is a revelatory short-circuiting of language that, in making the connections that rational thought would find invalid, understands the shaping of language to be a passionate affair, vibrant and alive. Moving from satires of scientific classification to the simultaneous lampooning of the fashion industry and historical truth, The Age of Wire and String is an alarming and exacting book which reveals American culture in ways that will always remain hidden to the more conventional “professional disclosers” (3) of the culture.