“Derrida’s figure of the trace…offers further ways of looking at consumption: a perennial, future leftover inviting contingent readings of the past, the present, and of haunting figure presences that cannot be digested.”
– Ruth Cruickshank, “Humans, Eating and Thinking
Animals? Structuralism’s Leftovers”
“The paper as the body of my friend,
And every word in it a gaping wound,
Issuing life blood.”
– William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
“Traditional art invites a look. Art that’s silent engenders a stare.”
– Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence”
The open-mouthed, glassy-eyed stare demands that the viewer stares back. The facial flesh mottled with crimson could be contusions, blood, skin disease, a birthmark or a trick of the light. The Manics’ use of Jenny Saville’s Stare for the cover art for Journal for Plague Lovers not only signals a direct visual correspondence with The Holy Bible, but it also serves as a comment on the ambiguity of the album that only uses the lyrics left behind in Richey Edwards’ notebook. It is a record that demands hermeneutics; so far, so much like The Holy Bible. But Journal for Plague Lovers adds a layer of obfuscation that comes with the silence and absence of Richey and the complications of temporality. The process of making the album becomes a combination of mourning and translation, which requires engagement with how one interiorizes and separates from the other. Though Richey’s lyrics infer that “journal for plague lovers” is his name for the Bible, there remain important differences between Journal for Plague Lovers and The Holy Bible. At the time that the Manics were touring Everything Must Go, James told Stuart Maconie, “I really enjoyed how The Holy Bible confronts the audience. But that album confronts us too” (qtd in “We Shall Overcome” 90). With Journal for Plague Lovers, the Manics confront the difficult knowledge of their own past and archive.
A New Mourning, A New Translation: Making Journal for Plague Lovers
It is fitting that Journal for Plague Lovers begins with a sample from The Machinist, a film about the hallucinatory questioning of memory and reality induced by insomnia and starvation. Christian Bale’s character says, “You don’t even know me. What if I turn into a werewolf or somethin’?” This inability to know another or even one’s self, and the accompanying dread and trepidation that comes with exploring it, is writ large in the Manics’ process of creating Journal for Plague Lovers. In the 2009 documentary Shadows & Words, which focuses on the making of the album, James says that after the success of Send Away the Tigers, the band “didn’t want to compete with [themselves],” and decided that it might finally be the time to attempt setting Richey’s remaining lyrics to music. Presumably, a record returning to Richey’s words would be a return to a version of the band that stands apart from the incarnation that created Send Away the Tigers. The decision did not come without more than a decade of thought. James relates his struggle with Richey’s journal of lyrics:
I kept getting it out over the years and then putting it back in the drawer because it was too scary. Like that scene in Friends, putting a copy of The Shining in the freezer because it’s too scary. And I could feel the drawer going (mimes violent shaking) “Bam-bambam… Let me out! Let me be!” (qtd in Mackay, “Richey’s” 26)
The journal in the drawer represents the exteriority of the archive, which though suppressed, keeps returning.
Emily Mackay describes Journal for Plague Lovers as “bringing a strange sort of, if not resolution, conversation between past and present” (“Richey’s” 25); perhaps even a dialectic image in Benjamin’s terms. Journal, as an archive, can also be read as a belated promise, never really present, but existing in some premature time that remains out of joint. This temporal dislocation became evident in the ways the band deliberately made Journal appear as a successor to The Holy Bible in terms of cover art, typeface, and number of tracks, but also in the ways the band set the album apart from all of their others: by not releasing any singles from it; by producing a deluxe hardback book edition; by choosing to play Journal in full for three nights at The Roundhouse in London; and by deciding to take the tour for the album to North America (the last time they toured North America was in 1996). As an archive, Journal remains a Derridean injunction for an unrealized future, or a belated future, but also a self-repetition and a self-confirmation (Archive Fever 79). The death drive or pre-emptive strike that has been inherent in all of the Manics’ work is present again in Journal; by recording Journal, the band is establishing an end of sorts, knowing that there are now no further potentialities for making another record with Richey’s lyrical content. Moreover, Journal can be seen as a more visible way of consigning through remembrance, and the act of memorialization completed can serve as an archive to allow for some forgetting.
Though Journal is arguably an attempt at putting the band back together and reincorporating that which they consigned to the archive, the experience of this significant shift can be compared with Sass’ understanding of a schizoidal break, “an experience in which the familiar has turned strange and the unfamiliar familiar, often giving the person the sense of déjà vu and jamais vu, either in quick succession or even simultaneously” (44). Sass’ description of this psychic break bears a valuable resemblance to Gerhard Richter’s analysis of the workings of memory in general:
While memory requires time to become what it is […] time also hinders memory, veiling its specificities, blurring its details, accentuating too selectively and, in doing so, uncannily rendering the familiar strange while, at the same time, causing the estranged gradually to appear more and more familiar. (150–151)
These vicissitudes of memory, and the uncanniness they produce, are emphasized in the lyrics used and the music produced for Journal. There are many moments in which it recalls The Holy Bible, but there is also a strangeness to some of the familiarity, and a familiarity to the strange; what exactly is strange and what is familiar depends on which version of the band a listener is looking for. Journal and The Holy Bible enact on each other, linked by difficult knowledge and the traces it can produce. There is an oscillation between the two records that allows each to illuminate and complicate the other.
Additionally, this interaction and tension between one and “the other,” is found in the work of mourning, which Derrida describes as “[m]emory and interiorization”; mourning “entails a movement in which an interiorizing idealization takes in itself or upon itself the body and voice of the other, the other’s visage and person, ideally and quasi-literally devouring them” (Memoires 34). Derrida warns against this kind of consumption and assimilation of the other, but also acknowledges it as one of the impossibilities of mourning. Part of the problem with interiorization of the other being mourned stems from “the dangers involved in speaking of the dead in the wake of their death, the dangers of using the dead, and perhaps despite one’s own best intentions, for one’s own ends or purposes” (Brault and Naas 6). Though Richey’s fate remains uncertain, his long absence, as well as the loss of the band’s earlier identity, make Journal a work of mourning. In fact, the Manics also demonstrate what Freud would term melancholia, in addition to mourning, because of the sense of emptiness felt in their own identity as a band. Freud describes the difference between the two by writing: “in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia, it is the ego itself” (254). Furthermore, this melancholia without a direct object can relate to the ambiguity around the supposed object of their mourning, in other words, the unresolved doubt surrounding Richey’s disappearance. The instability of truth, which permeates the Manics’ two preceding records, Lifeblood and Send Away the Tigers, begins this mourning process by acknowledging and accepting the uncertainty. Derrida maintains that mourning is a tendency to accept this inability to understand and make space for it (Memoires 31). He goes on to argue that the traces that deny any sense of truth are “of a past that has never been present, traces which themselves never occupy the form of presence and always remain, as it were, to come” (58). As with most of the work by the Manics, Journal is of an absent past, a time that always anticipated and imagined the future, or the potential future of their past, rather than dwelled in the present. The crucial difference between Journal and the work of the preceding decade is the use of Richey’s words and the responsibility of mourning and bearing witness that accompanies it.
In his discussion of Derrida’s conception of memory, Richter asserts that “[l]eaving the word to someone else […] letting the other speak instead of oneself, and yet continuing to think and write with and for that other is the act of memory and mourning par excellence” (155). In these terms, Journal for Plague Lovers qualifies as such an act. The band’s process of creating and curating the album is made more apparent in the deluxe CD version, in which pages from Richey’s journal are reproduced in the liner notes. It is in these facsimiles of his typewritten lyrics that you see his own emendments registered by a series of typed “x”’s and can compare the original lyrics with what the band selected to use and revise on the actual record. Numerous traces of Richey’s actual hand remain amongst these lyrics, including in the handwritten note that prefaces the journal (“these songs are in no particular order of preference although some lyrics are obviously better than others”), as well as additional handwritten notes, collages and drawings from other pages. The responsibility of mourning sometimes made the band’s “archive fever” — the desire to return to the “archive of pure language” that was The Holy Bible — more apparent and restrained it. Nicky spoke of his initial aspiration to make Journal more like The Holy Bible:
I always get carried away with an idea and I think I did push James too much. I was saying, y’know, we really need to follow through on that claustrophobic singing-in-a-telephone-box idea but I think it became pretty apparent with “This Joke Sport Severed” and stuff like that that it was gonna be much more a broad rock album. I’m glad he didn’t listen to me cos I was almost trying to contrive a situation.
(qtd in Doherty 22)
The recognition of the falseness in attempting to repeat an unrepeatable moment of artistic creation underscores both the temptation to the familiar and the estrangement embedded in the current temporal position. In light of allowing the other to speak, James’ comments regarding the recording of Journal are fitting:
We just had this rule to “let the words guide you,” because Richey wasn’t that involved in the musical part of being in the studio. You know, obviously he did have a general aesthetic in his mind or what he wanted things to sound like or what he liked. Obviously we didn’t have that, not that he directed much in the studio, but, still, we all contributed in some kind of way in terms of direction in the studio and because he wasn’t here for this, we just had to let the lyrics guide us. And, if you read a lyric like “Facing Page Top Left,” if you don’t have an air of resignation to it, if you don’t kind of recognize the slightly sarcastic gentle soul that’s writing these words, then you’re just betraying the lyrics so that’s why it’s dealing with the fallout of ‘The Holy Bible,’ rather than being a follow-up.
(qtd in Doherty 22)
This surrendering of the process to the other, as well as the respect and the knowing again — both meanings inherent in the word recognize — needed to be part of the responsibility in creating Journal. James’ reading of this album as part of the effect that The Holy Bible had on the band instead of a sequel reiterates the unrepeatability that Nicky speaks about. The words become a stand-in for Richey himself, his corpus as body.
Despite these careful, thoughtful processes, the band continued to wrestle with the implications of this act of mourning. In Shadows & Words, Nicky admits the doubt that he experienced after recording Journal, describing the moment as one in which he went “Bill Drummond mad” and suggested that they either burn or bury the Journal recordings in true KLF fashion. Discussing his concerns over how to write the music for Journal, James said,
Deep down I was thinking, I couldn’t have changed that much, I couldn’t have forgotten that much about Richey that I can’t do this. If we couldn’t reconnect with what Richey wrote, even at the apex of what was happening with him… […] if we couldn’t do that then we would have lost a part of ourselves that we hadn’t even realised we had lost.
(qtd in Petridis)
These anxieties reveal the significance of the meaning behind this record and ongoing negotiation of the band’s identity in relation to their archive. Nicky’s suggestion of burning or burying Journal could be read as an attempt to rectify the missing time of grieving a certain death, again substituting Richey’s words for his body; moreover, this admission points to the fact that this record is not just an act of mourning, but a translation. Felman and Laub explain that the “task of the translator […] is to read the textuality of the original event without disposing of the body, without reducing the original event to a false transparency of sense” (158). In translating the remaining lyrics, the Manics undertook a complex arbitration between the sense of the original and their current interpretation, which includes a belated witnessing. Though Felman and Laub describe translation as reading the original event without disposing of it, they acknowledge that the “original is killed because there is no possible witnessing of the original event; and this impossibility of witnessing is, paradoxically, inherent in the very position of the translator, whose task is nonetheless to try to render — to bear witness to — the original” (159). This paradoxical demand to bear witness within the act of translation happens not through imitation but by creating something new that testifies to the original’s afterlife (Felman and Laub 160). As James said, Journal becomes a representation of the aftermath of The Holy Bible rather than a sequel, and Nicky’s realization that trying to repeat the latter would only be false displays the difficulty in producing a “true” translation.
Furthermore, the Manics had not only translated Richey’s remaining texts, but curated them, or in other words, cared for them. Part of caring for them was courageously revealing the process of making Journal, including the original pages of Richey’s lyrics, which testify to the verses not used in the final album. These unused verses are not only an invitation to a multiplicity of hermeneutics and eschatology, but also destabilize the meaning of the recorded versions of the songs. These remainders of lyrics become apocryphal, whilst at the same time demonstrating a lack of assimilability, a refusal to be consumed and digested by an interiorizing action of those who mourn and those who can never understand. Any potential interpretation of the album is and remains inherently fraught; however, in allowing these meanings to remain unresolved and even contradictory, the Manics showed the respect and care required for mourning and translating their friend and archive.
Repetition with Difference: Palimpsest and the Exhaustion of Language
On The Holy Bible, the track “Of Walking Abortion” begins with a soundbite from author Hubert Selby Jr: “I knew that someday I was gonna die. And I knew that before I died, two things would happen to me, that number one: I would regret my entire life; and number two: I would want to live my life over again.” This citation is an apt description of the kind of life The Holy Bible lives through Journal for Plague Lovers. Though the impossibility of actual repetition stands, Journal bears traces, often difficult ones, of The Holy Bible in aspects of its content, whilst establishing differences that follow The Holy Bible like its aftermath or its logical conclusion. The music of Journal is markedly more metallic and post-punk than the Manics’ previous five records; as Nicky explains in Shadows & Words, Richey’s words bring out a different side to James’ music composition that Nicky doesn’t feel he can reach with his own lyrics. “Jackie Collins Existential Question Time” and “Me and Stephen Hawking” recall the sarcastic playfulness of “Ifwhiteamerica,” as well as the comedic pauses of Buzzcocks’ “Boredom,” and “Doors Closing Slowly” shares its limping beat with “The Intense Humming of Evil.” There are also flashes of Everything Must Go in “Facing Page: Top Left,” which bears some of the gentle sadness of “Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky,” and in “She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach,” which lumbers with the same grunge as “Removables.” Though much of Journal returns to the sharper post-punk of The Holy Bible, the bonus track “Bag Lady” is its true musical heir with its sub-aquatic, dubby bass and serrated guitar, and perhaps this is the reason it is kept apart from the record proper. Overall, the most marked musical difference between Journal and The Holy Bible is the pace; in Journal, there is less frenzy and the extreme discipline has relaxed. It dissolves rather than implodes. The final track on the album proper, “William’s Last Words” stands out with particular poignancy, with Nicky taking over the lead vocals and the music becoming more oneiric and acoustic. After the intensity of the previous twelve tracks, there is a slow drift into oblivion. The musical repetitions and recitations with distinct differences speak to the strange temporal situation of the album.
Sitting somewhere between The Holy Bible and Everything Must Go, but in actuality created roughly thirteen years later, Journal has odd continuities and distances. The “riderless horses on Chomsky’s Camelot” in Journal opener “Peeled Apples” carry on from “Zapruder the first to masturbate” from “Ifwhiteamerica”; together they seem to allude to Noam Chomsky’s 1992 article “Vain Hopes, False Dreams,” an explanation of the then current revival of interest in John F. Kennedy, including the need for a messianic saviour figure and the unfulfilled futures he represented at a time of social disruption and anomie. In another temporal slip, “All is Vanity” and “Doors Closing Slowly” have their shadow text in “Picturesque,” a track from the God Save the Manics EP from 2005. “Picturesque,” which embodies the musical style used on Lifeblood, features lyrics from both songs unbeknownst to listeners until 2009. Listening to it after Journal is an uncanny experience, especially since the band has never addressed this earlier use of Richey’s remaining lyrics. “Picturesque” is a foreshadowing, but remains a haunting, unstable source for these lyrics, which find their canonical place in separate tracks on Journal. In essence, Journal becomes a palimpsest that traces back and forth through time.
The palimpsestic nature of Journal can be read as part of the allegorical inheritance from The Holy Bible. Whilst the latter was an allegory of the impossibility of assimilating difficult knowledge, the former is an allegory of the first allegory. As Craig Owens asserts, in allegory “one text is read through another, however fragmentary, intermittent, or chaotic their relationship may be; the paradigm for the allegorical work is thus the palimpsest” (69). The nature of the palimpsest can also be regarded as temporally fluid in its dependence on memory. Referring to Hegel’s concept of Gedächtnis as well as Derrida’s thoughts on memory and anteriority, Gerhard Richter argues that memory is not mere restoration of the past, but instead it is a process of constant repetition and return, re-establishing its relationship to the thought process of remembering as well as to the future, “between the ‘after’ of something that never was present and a futurity that has not yet been thought” (158). In other words, memory as related to thinking and re-thinking does not assimilate and incorporate; rather, it anticipates and precedes itself, in addition to reflecting on itself in perpetuity. This form of memory is a constant oscillation in a dialectic at a standstill. As sung in “All is Vanity,” “Haven’t shaved for days / Gives me the appearance of delay.” Or as articulated in “Die in the Summertime,” “I have crawled so far sideways ∙ I recognize dim traces of creation.” These lateral movements of temporal dislocation are written on the body.
Like The Holy Bible, Journal uses the body and skin as texts of difficult knowledge and abjection. Throughout the album bodies are crucified, bruised, beautified, bleached, stitched, whipped and torn. In “Pretension/Repulsion,” Richey writes, “shards […] oh the androgyny fails / Odalisque by Ingres, extra bones for sale,” echoing the preoccupation with bodily flesh found on The Holy Bible. The references to crucifixion that appear in “Of Walking Abortion” and “Ifwhiteamerica” proliferate on Journal: “bruises on my hand from digging my nails out” (“Peeled Apples”); “bruised and nailed and quit” (“This Joke Sport Severed”); and “that shadow is a cross okay […] crucifixion is the easy life” (“Doors Closing Slowly”). In Journal, bodies are also rendered impotent, echoing “4st 7lb,” “Die in the Summertime,” and “P.C.P.”; the purity preached on The Holy Bible has metastasized into sterility. Moreover, the eugenic sterilization practiced at the Virginia State Epileptic Colony, the subject of the song of the same name, becomes not only about preventing reproduction, but also implies extreme cleanliness and asceticism. The mind-over-body discipline of The Holy Bible ultimately does away with the material body altogether. “Peeled Apples” and “She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach” imply a complete loss of the skin barrier between the inside and outside; the psychic envelope has fallen apart and dissolved. The visceral bodily feeling of The Holy Bible turns into a floating, out-of-body experience in Journal, and the distance between subject and difficult knowledge turns into a distance from the self that harbours its own difficult knowledge. In one of the unused lyrics from “Doors Closing Slowly,” Richey uses the term heautoscopy, also known as autoscopy, which is defined as having “rare illusory visual experiences during which the subject has the impression of seeing a second own body in extrapersonal space” (Blanke and Mohr 184), or simply an “out-of-body experience.” The disconnection between signifiers and the signified seem like the natural conclusion of walking in the snow and not leaving a footprint. The journal from which Journal was made becomes Richey’s bodily signifier, a shed cocoon.
Nevertheless, the difficult knowledge of human atrocities does still circumscribe Journal’s content in the form of a Beckettian preoccupation with Dante and The Divine Comedy. Dante’s circles of hell from The Divine Comedy appear in The Holy Bible in the form of “purgatory’s circle” in “Yes,” and they return in Journal explicitly and more obliquely. One of the reproduced pages from Richey’s journal features four cut-out images of Dante’s allegorical circles covered in Richey’s doodles and handwritten notes referencing Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “A Box for Black Paul.”4 Also, one of the photos of Richey appended to the liner notes shows him at his typewriter, his left arm tattooed with the ninth circle, the circle of treachery. The track “Virginia State Epileptic Colony” includes the lyrics: “Draw a perfect circle, sleep foetus-like.” These lines echo “my heart shrinks to barely a pulse ∙ a tiny animal curled into a quarter circle” from “Die in the Summertime.” These foetal images are disturbing evocations of retreating into a time before birth, or “dim traces of creation,” but, furthermore, the concentricity suggests the hellishness of imprisonment. The audio clip sampled in “Virginia State Epileptic Colony” is from Alexander Sokurov’s 1998 documentary The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn and describes the author’s fate from the gulag to exile: “The obtuse regime, his fatal disease, the silence of millions of witnesses, the envy of the guild, his exile, his perseverance. The photo for the other world in a suit, lent by the prison. […] Just think over these words: ‘For eternal residence.’” This citation draws parallels between the incarceration of pathologized individuals for reasons of mental and political Difference. Felman and Laub discuss Camus’ The Fall, including its symbolism of hell in Amsterdam’s circular canals, in relation to his conflict with Sartre over the resemblance between Russian totalitarianism and Nazi fascism. They argue that
[i]n addition to its geometrical or geographical significance, (as well as to the literary, allegorical allusion to the circularity of hell in Dante), “concentric” in effect is pregnant with another meaning which derives its resonance from the debate with Sartre, and, referring quite specifically to the political context and to the history evoked by the debate, connotes Camus’ allusion to — and insistence on — the historically indubitable fait concentrationnaire, the fact of a concentration-camp universe. (187)
This concentration-camp universe attempts to reach a centre that doesn’t exist; there is no closure, no cure, no meaning.
The round bullet points dividing lyrics in The Holy Bible are replaced with the full-stop of periods in Richey’s source material for Journal. The concentration of black dots appears to be faltering into a stuttering, slowly disintegrating language. For example, in “Facing Page: Top Left,” the lyrics are a series of sentence fragments: “Skin care tones. Clean. Sharp fashion lines sharpened. Monopolised. Tinted UV protection. Unnaturalised antiseptic white. Nutrition. Moisture content. Meaning. Focusing.” In “Pretension/Repulsion,” language is broken down even further with the absences provided by asyndeton and contracted adjectives: “Sicken’d, howl’d, streak’d, spurn’d / Pluck’d, liv’d, compell’d, call’d / Clos’d, swallow’d, form’d, regain’d / Lock’d, curs’d, glow’d, discern’d.” It is through this fragmentation and obscurity that the lyrics also recall Beckett’s paratactical prose, undoing, disconnecting and deconstructing language in an ultimately frustrated obligation towards witnessing and alterity (Ziarek). On the other hand, the polysyndeton in “This Joke Sport Severed” overwhelms meaning whilst sounding biblical in its rhythm: “Loose and guilty and whipped / Sterility persecutes and I have plenty / Bruised and nailed and quit / Merciful and mourned and meek.” Though The Holy Bible utilized parataxis, odd breakages and excess in its lyrics, Journal’s language appears less concentrated, as though struggling against a slow stifling, or a descent into silence. In “Doors Closing Slowly,” “silence is not sacrifice”; the martyr figure of “Marlon J.D.” stands like a statue “as he was beaten across the face”; “Virginia State Epileptic Colony” renders its patients silent (“tomorrow the necks split, there is no voice”); and “Peeled Apples” states, “the more I see, the less I scream.” The wish in “All is Vanity,” “I would prefer no choice / One bread one milk one food that’s all / I’m confused I only want one truth / I really don’t mind if I’m being lied to,” can be interpreted as the necessity of rhetoric to create borders and delineate meaning in the face of an overwhelming glut of possible meaning and representation.
The extreme deconstruction of Nietzschean nihilism, a philosophy that the Manics have referenced in their music since Generation Terrorists, reaches its logical conclusion of silence and meaninglessness in Journal. The eventual falling into silence perhaps parallels a similar descent made by Nietzsche. “Judge Yr’self,” a song recorded in 1995 for the Judge Dredd film soundtrack but which didn’t see release until it was included on the Lipstick Traces compilation from 2003, features the Nietzsche-referencing lines, “Blessed be the blades / Blessed be the sighs / Dionysus against The Crucified.” The music video, comprised largely of old video clips of the Manics, begins with a Nietzsche quote: “The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger and play dice for death.” The chorus, with its commands of “Heal yr’self / Hurt yr’self / Judge yr’self,” is Übermenschian, but also finds its refraction in the titular track of Journal: “Only a god can bruise / Only a god can soothe / Only a god reserves the right to forgive those who revile him.” There is a possibility here of the conflation of the Übermensch and a traditional sense of a deity; if you yourself have become god, you must contend with the implications of your own meaninglessness. “Judge Yr’self” and “Journal for Plague Lovers” taken together imply an ultimate failure of nihilism: its own self-negation. The confusion and madness produced by this fatal flaw perhaps led to Nietzsche signing his last delusional letters as both “Dionysus” and “The Crucified” (Wolin 29). “This Joke Sport Severed” seems to express a similar loss of mooring in the lines “I endeavoured / To find the place where I became untethered.” The incommensurability in both nihilism and the Judeo-Christian religions produces a vacuum, especially in the face of human cruelty and loss, and the difficult knowledge that defies witnessing and testimony. The confining concentricity of Journal’s universe and the full stops and ellipses permeating its language converge in a black hole as the silent scream of Munch, or Jenny Saville’s Stare. The ultimate fall into silence of Richey Edwards produces yet another gap in Journal for Plague Lovers, but as Sean Gaston says of the impossible mourning for Derrida, you must begin with the gaps and “gaps move.”
“This Joke Sport Severed”: Journal for Plague Lovers as Missing Punchline
Though Journal for Plague Lovers contains dark material, it differs from The Holy Bible in its periods of levity, and even humour. Tracks such as “Jackie Collins Existential Question Time” and “Me and Stephen Hawking” play with the absurd, the former using an old badge slogan “Oh mummy, what’s a sex pistol?” as a taunt, and the latter describing the sharing of a laugh with the famous physicist and even ending with “hahahaha (Joke)” in Richey’s original journal. The idea of the joke can be related to the productive ambiguity of the archive. Jaimie Baron argues that
the affinity between the historical archive and the joke has to do with the fundamental ambiguity of the meaning of the archival fragment as both figurative (it stands for something else as a sign of history) and literal (it gains its evidentiary power from its specificity and particularity), which lends itself not only to factual assertion but also to “misuse” and play. (112)
The resulting “glut of signification” prevents any certainty of meaning (Baron 115), even as the gaps produced by archival fragments reinforce the sense of loss (121). Works of art can be made to reproduce this ambiguity. Referencing Lacan, Darian Leader explains the relationship between jokes, language, and art:
To speak, we have to use codes imposed on us by our care-givers and their language. In this process, part of what we “mean” to say is always lost, and jokes involve a privileging of this dimension of meaning “in between the lines” that is actually sanctioned, recognized by the code itself. The code scrambles our message, but at the same time gives a place to this scrambling in the form of jokes. A joke, in this sense, is a message about the code. In the context of […] art, what a joke and a work of art have in common here lies in this fact of a system housing a special place for the presentation of what the effects of the system are. Civilization sanctions art as a kind of message about itself, about the loss that makes it all possible. And hence, as Martin Kippenberger once pointed out, art is like a running joke. (85–86)
The losses of meaning built into language itself are thus addressed by the ambiguity of jokes. Leader’s reference to Kippenberger is apposite as his work appears in the singles of The Holy Bible, and as the style of his work is largely built around indecipherable jokes. Gregory Williams observes that “[m]any of his works possess an aesthetic residue left behind by verbal jokes that were partially recorded within the space of the image and in the appended title” (39). Furthermore, Williams could be describing Journal in his account of Kippenberger’s artistic milieu and its effect on the audience:
Kippenberger is the member of the group who most thoroughly pursued the alienating effects of a work of art that provides us with an abundance of clues but no clear answers. The negativity at the heart of much of his work is partially mitigated by the initial sense of freedom granted by his open narratives. One can enjoy getting lost in the cross-references of coming up with possible thematic threads. Yet for many members of his general audience, especially those not privy to his particular sense of humour or fluent in German, the groups of paintings and drawings can represent an excess of options, a total lack of guidance that can finally seem overwhelming. The sense of freedom is short-lived; Kippenberger’s observer is subsequently struck by the lack of a coherent conceptual framework, like a joke without a punch line. (41)
The extreme intertextuality provides both an excess and a dearth of meaning, a joke without a punchline, or in Peter Lunenfeld’s terms “an aesthetic of unfinish,” which is more often applied to the digital world. This lack of definitive meanings has been exacerbated by Kippenberger’s premature death. The problematic negotiation of meaning also speaks to the aesthetic of an artist who saw the joke as flawed in its ambiguity, yet useful to “work through his issues of failure, compromised authenticity, secondorder status, etc.” (Williams 47). Issues of forgone failure and the impossibility of finding truth and authenticity can be seen within the incomplete jokes and punchlines, and the ambiguous gaps of Journal.
In “Doors Closing Slowly,” the Manics acknowledge the fraught gaps in their understanding of both Journal’s lyrics and their absent friend himself by using a sample from the film The Virgin Suicides, in which the narrator-observer voiced by Giovanni Ribisi, says, “In the end we had pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name.” As with most of the audio samples that the Manics use in their albums, this one was precisely fitting. It evokes the plight of helpless voyeurs and perpetually stymied searchers for an undiscoverable truth, or the lay of the land, as it were. There can be no closure and no mastery, just fragments curated into an archive that forgets as much as it remembers. Derrida refers to these gaps as aporia in relation to mourning and contends that those who mourn actually bear the one who is mourned within them “like an unborn child, like a future”; however, mourners must also engage in a respectful separation from and rejection of the other, keeping the object of mourning at a distance (Memoires 35). As mentioned earlier, Derrida’s conception of mourning maintains an impossible position of both interiorization of and separation from the other. The Manics’ schizoidal consignment of their older identity could be read in the terms of a “tender rejection” even as they do bear their losses inside their later identity and work. The ongoing struggle between the different versions of themselves can be encapsulated by Gaston’s impossible mourning of Derrida: “This tracing of gaps (ecarts) is a preface to an impossible mourning, a mourning that one must at once avoid and affirm” (vii). The un-bridgeable gap created by belated witnessing and difficult knowledge is made even more prominent in the unfinish of Journal.
Notably, the table of contents page for Richey’s journal is reproduced in the liner notes, but with eighteen of the twenty-eight listings excised with black felt-tip. Furthermore, there are a limited number of pages from the journal replicated in the liner notes, leaving everyone outside of the Manics with even more gaps in their knowledge. At the same time, the aporia can also be described as openings, through which yet more connections and interpretations can be made. There is a positive quality to emptiness, especially in art, where often what is missing is just as important as what is present, and where absence interrogates the feeling of loss and otherwise hidden meaning. The Manics have been making productive use of the gaps in their history throughout their career. To some extent, the apertures of intertextuality and cross-references have always been a part of the band’s art, encouraging listeners to make their own creative and generative links between the pieces of politics, history, culture and philosophy strewn liberally throughout the Manics’ work. Jeremy Deller’s work involving the Manics, including The Uses of Literacy, which included fans’ artistic responses to the band, and Unconvention, which imagined the artistic tastes of fans of the band and curated accordingly, has aptly demonstrated this creative work of intertexts and proliferation of meanings, the possible misuse and play embodied in the joke, emerging from the gaps. In many ways, these kinds of missed punchlines produce moments ripe for a Greil Marcus Lipstick Traces-like odyssey of intertextuality and recurrence within disparate times and spaces.
Speaking at the time of Journal’s release, Nicky said, “The only thing I think we’ve just managed to do for all our ups and downs since Richey disappeared is never appear to be trying to be like we were when he was in the band. We might have fucked up, but we never did that” (qtd in Petridis). This comment points to the same anxiety about authenticity and contriving situations that emerged as part of the process of making Journal. The inability of returning to an origin within the archive is underlined. Journal does overwhelm hermeneutics just as The Holy Bible overwhelmed understanding. They both ask the listener to be immersed but apart from them, taking distances and gaps as interventions into her/his comfortable, habitual perspective. And as Pitt and Britzman say, “interpretation makes narrative, but there is also something within narrative that resists its own interpretation” (759).
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4 Interestingly, “A Box for Black Paul” could also be an inspiration for “Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky,” as Cave’s lyrics use the same trope of black flowers.