My operating premise here is that writing/producing texts and being an author are two different, though interrelated, things. The decade of the seventies saw Bernadette Mayer at a height of experimental text production. Beginning with the "performance" piece reproduced in its textual form as Memory (July 1971; published 1975), Mayer set herself an extraordinary set of writing situations, in this instance shooting one roll of color photos every day for a month and producing an accompanying eight-hour tape of voice narration. By the time she writes Midwinter Day on December 22, 1978 (published 1982), she has established her "Bernadette" persona, able to range across the personal and the poetic, the lofty and the mundane, with an apparent ease and confidence that belies her earlier, most hesitant or disjointed descriptions. Much as William S. Burroughs produced the mass of manuscript pages out of which Allen Ginsberg and others were able to assemble Naked Lunch (1959), Bernadette's frenetic textual production reveals a split between writing and authorship (even more strongly evident in the difference between the "Studying Hunger Journals" and the published Studying Hunger, 1975). Burroughs' "I GOT THE FEAR!" finds its echo in Mayer's famous injunction, "Work your ass off to change the language & dont ever get famous" ("Experiments," L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, 83). What I mean to explore here is how certain kinds of experimental writing exploit the ambivalence surrounding the very notion of authorship, simultaneously revealing an ineluctable drive to text production while resisting the social authority of the culturally-assigned place of the author.
--William S. Burroughs
My operating premise here is that writing/producing texts and being an author are two different, though interrelated, things. The decade of the seventies saw Bernadette Mayer at a height of experimental text production. Beginning with the performance piece reproduced in its textual form as Memory (July 1971; published 1975), Mayer set herself an extraordinary set of writing situations, in this instance shooting one roll of color photos every day for a month and producing an accompanying eight-hour tape of voice narration. By the time she writes Midwinter Day on December 22, 1978 (published 1982), she has established her Bernadette persona, able to range across the personal and the poetic, the lofty and the mundane, with an apparent ease and confidence that belies her earlier, more hesitant or disjointed descriptions. Much as William S. Burroughs produced the mass of manuscript pages out of which Allen Ginsberg and others were able to assemble Naked Lunch (1959), Bernadettes frenetic textual production reveals a split between writing and authorship (even more strongly evident in the difference between the Studying Hunger Journals and the published Studying Hunger, 1975). Burroughs I GOT THE FEAR! finds its echo in Mayers famous injunction, Work your ass off to change the language & dont ever get famous (Experiments, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, 83). What I mean to explore here is how certain kinds of experimental writing exploit the ambivalence surrounding the very notion of authorship, simultaneously revealing an ineluctable drive to text production while resisting the social authority of the culturally-assigned place of the author.
Without wishing to rehearse a theoretical framework already well-known, even notorious, we may recall that Michel Foucault in his What is an Author? wants to claim there is an author-function, as when he says, In this sense the function of an author is to characterize the existence, evaluation, and operation of certain discourses within a society (Foucault: 142). I remember Norman Mailer lamenting somewhere (it might have been during an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show) that writers in America lost their central position in the culture when the literary censorship laws were thrown out. Its worth remembering that the last determinative court ruling, in Boston in 1968, concerned Naked Lunch. The scandal provoked by Foucaults work was of a somewhat different order, hysterical authors proclaiming vehemently that they were not dead, that they were very much alive, etc. This pathetic response to Foucault's ontological/epistemelogical position may show one side of what I am here referring to as the ambivalence of authorship.
There is a letter to or interview with Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino (forthcoming in Aerial 10) wherein Scalapino asks Hejinian how she feels about her published works when they come out and Hejinian says her reaction to each of her published works is that she is invariably disappointed. In what I have always felt was an odd statement or exchange, Bernadette Mayer, in her 1989 Naropa Lecture, says about her book Poetry (1975): I resent the book in a way (Disembodied Poetics 100). Certainly in the way both terms, disappointment and resentment, resonate we may remark or instance a certain ambivalence a writer may feel toward a work; though whereas I think I understand disappointment (cf. Samuel Becketts phrase, Try again. Fail again. Fail better. from Wesward Ho!), resentment would seem to be a stronger response and perhaps in this instance situationally-determined. (Mayer mentions being under pressure to produce a book and writing that second section in a period of two weeks.) I think Hejinian says somewhere in the Aerial that there is even an ambivalence toward ambivalence, which Im not sure I quite understand, but then I acknowledge that she is probably just smarter than I am. (Is that an ambivalent statement?)
Reflecting on this issue of ambivalence, Maggie Nelson remarks a tendency of Mayer to ask questions in Midwinter Day on the order of: Can I say what I saw? Can I say that here? Must I go on? (Nelson 113). Nelsons attitude toward Mayer in this work, Women, New York School and Other True Abstractions (2007), is heavily imbued with a critical and even a personal ambivalence toward Mayer, but that is probably the topic of a different discussion. The phrase can I say that? is even more common in Memory and Studying Hunger (1975). My favorite formulation along these lines occurs in the untitled poem, I must admit I love a man who is not living (ONWARD 25-26), where Bernadette asks: You cant hate me for writing this down can you? / I could say anything I wanted couldnt I? (26). Nelson rightly points to the ambiguity of the addressee for questions such as these; is she asking these questions of herself? of the reader? a beloved? an analyst? (Nelson 113). Without having to go too far into the psychoanalytic realm, since this dimension is foregrounded in all the texts from Memory to Midwinter Day (we recall that her psychoanalyst of the time wrote the preface to Memory), we would have to add her dead parents to this list of possibilities, since they are repeatedly invoked as addressees of a range of utterances. It is in questions, or what I am calling hesitancies, of this sort that the ambivalence toward authorship becomes an explicit theme in the works.
I want to propose provisionally here that Mayers hesistancies operate in a Burroughs-ian manner. In other words, the lack of any formal or legal censorship (what Mailer lamented) means that something like the super-ego function is transferred from an external mechanism (in Foucaults sense) to an internalized or immanent level in the text itself. Of course, Burroughs term for the oppressive social edifice that is both historical and intrapsychic (or Real, and hence not metaphorical) is Control, leading to his later model of language as a virus. Here again Burroughs at least believes himself to be describing an actual phenomenon rather than a metaphorical or merely literary representation. And if we recall Lacans description of the Real as a traumatic kernel which orients the Subjects desire, then the connection between Burroughs and Mayer may also be seen at a deeper psycho-somatic or psychoanalytic level.
We are returned then to one of the root meanings of Experiment: that of peril or danger. Inherent in any Experimental Work (cf. Mayers piece that relies heavily on quotes from Burroughs The Job [1974], Experimental Writing, or, Writing the Long Work, in ONWARD 6-8) is what I like to call a giving up of individual or authorial control, the potential consequences of which are always marked by some kind of psychic danger. For Burroughs, one method that emerges as a key to his early writings is the routine, initially produced orally (typically for an audience of drunks in a café in Tangiers or Mexico City), then rehearsed in letters (primarily to Allen Ginsberg), and finally reproduced in texts in which their placement and ordering are in many ways highly contingentthe product of chance or accident or outside agency. We might compare this to the journals and tapes that Mayer used as the basis for composing the text of Memory or the rehearsals of her dream recordings that she practiced for writing Midwinter Day (Lecture at Naropa Institute, Disembodied Poetics 100; cf. Nelson 113).
As with Burroughs, one of Mayers devices that sustains an ongoing movement throughout each of her, and to use her term, unrepeatable works (Peter Baker, Bernadette Mayer, Dictionary of Literary Biography 165: 167) is the development of her Bernadette persona. (The best account Ive read with respect to Burroughs is Oliver Harriss William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. My discussion of Burroughs thoughout is indebted to this book, which on a number of levels may be the best book on Burroughs we are likely to get.) The last poem in Poetry (one of those composed in a period of two weeks), The Way to Keep Going to Antarctica, begins: Be strong Bernadette (Poetry 128). The poem itself poses a scene of existential anxiety, e.g., Do not be afraid of your own heart beating, over against the networks of social being and her felt need for other people. Perhaps the most important rehearsal for composing Midwinter Day (I think I wrote about this before somewhere) is her poem from The Golden Book of Words (1978), now widely available in The Bernadette Mayer Reader (1992), Eve of Easter. As everyone here no doubt remembers, this poem, a meditation on Milton and Mayers literary forebears Hawthorne and Melville, ends with the lines:
I return a look to all the daughters and I wink
Eve of Easter, Ive inherited this
Peaceful sleep of the children of men
Rachel, Sophia, Marie and again me
Bernadette, all heart I live, all head, all eye, all ear
I lost the prejudice of paradise
And wound up caring for the babies of these guys.
(BMR 48)
As compared with the anxiety expressed in Be strong Bernadette, these lines are very deliberate, utilizing rhyme and elevated diction, features that likewise mark the lyric sections of Midwinter Day.
I've written elsewhere of my admiration for this work (esp. Obdurate Brilliance 158-161), so maybe here Ill limit myself to a short citation where Mayer utilizes a kind of meta-commentary on the project, writing: like in a story to show and possess everything we know because having it all at once is performing a magical service for survival by the use of the mind like memory (Midwinter Day 89). What is appealing to many of us, I am assuming, is the level of attention this text displays, partly through the use of the Bernadette persona as someone for whom this matters. In Richard Rortys fine reading of Nabokov, he claims that the one thing Nabokov could not abide was human cruelty and, citing Rorty: the particular form of cruelty about which Nabokov worried most, incuriosity (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 158) Indeed, if one were to try to find a maxim that would be expressive of Nabokovs ethics, it would be: Pay attention. This I find is also a useful heuristic device in teaching Nabokovand Mayer. Or, as Russell Banks has one of his characters in The Sweet Hereafter (actually the character of Abbott Driscoll, a stroke survivor) say: Biggest . . . difference . . . between . . . people . . . is . . . quality . . . of . . . attention (26). Memory and attention, writing and survival.
Survival is an interesting thematic to emerge from the textual experiments of Memory and Midwinter Day, linked I would urge by the part of the Bernadette persona that is also a part of Bernadette as a person, and as an author. (These are three associations for the proper name Bernadette, though Im sure they are many others, friend, perhaps, or failed experimentalist.) A more recent poem from Scarlet Tanager casts these interlocking features in a decidedly more somber tone:
bernadette mayer, in a rush to put down her
weird thoughts, like everybody tells her to,
writes down too much, only a fraction of which is
even ever read because she is so disorganized,
plus she has had a brain hemorrhage, rendering her
even more mixed up in her constant thinking
(68)
So, what is the role of criticism when reading Experimental Writings that display the ambivalence of authorship? Samuel Weber, in his recent work on Walter Benjamin, Benjamins abilities, discusses Benjamins early dissertation, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism. Weber, following Benjamin, says: The value of the work can thus be measured by the degree to which it allows this processthat is, criticismto take place; by the degree, that is, to which it is criticizable. Such criticism, Benjamin insists, [quoting Benjamin] "is not bent primarily on judging the individual work, but rather on exposing its relations to all other works and finally to the idea of art (Weber 26).
Or, as Bernadette says at the end of her poem, Thoughts on a course (ONWARD 11):
what is unavoidable, the audience, the proliferation
Peter Baker, Towson University