PICTURE THE SCENE: three men riding a Buick LeSabre south-southwest on Interstate Highway 15, returning to Los Angeles after a weekend playing the tables in Las Vegas. One of them, riding shotgun, has been trying for some time to write a novel, without much success. A second, the driver, has for some reason brought his typewriter along; lying on the leather banquette beside him, it seems to goad his passenger. Eventually, the passenger can take no more: as they race across the hottest and most barren stretch of California desert, he grabs the thing and hurls it through the open window. The car screeches to a halt; the three men, disembarking, traipse back to examine the machine’s wreckage, strewn over a hundred yards of tarmac, dirt and bush. The backseat passenger whips out his camera and starts photographing the smashed parts, like a road-accident investigator; the other two, warming to the forensic aesthetic, join in the role-play, standing beside and pointing soberly at shards of line space lever assembly, holding shift balance springs up for examination, noting the flung arc of the un-spooled ribbon. Back in LA, the driver, one Ed Ruscha, collates the developed snaps and (one year later, in 1967) publishes them in limited-run book form under the title Royal Road Test.
Did it actually happen like this? Who knows. Numerous, often contradictory versions of the story are in circulation. Some of these suggest that the throwing and photographing were planned in advance. One, apparently approved by Ruscha himself, hints that the plan was even typed out on the typewriter, which would thus have scripted its own destruction. The confusion seems fitting: all these story fragments popping up years later, like so many twisted, chipped machine-parts that, no matter how hard anyone tries, can never quite be re-assembled or restored into a functional or “prelapsarian” whole. Yet despite its hazy origins, and through its very narrative mutations, the episode, for me, enacts, or reenacts, something of the nature of what, elsewhere, I’ve tried to describe as a “primal scene” of modern writing. Like all primal scenes, it is both catastrophic and constitutive. Catastrophic for obvious reasons: violent, destructive, everything that comes under the Yeatsian rubric of things falling apart, centers not holding, anarchy being loosed upon the world. The branding seems significant: rather than (say) an Olivetti, it’s a Royal typewriter getting trashed here. Within the schema of political allegory, what we’re witnessing is less defenestration than beheading, the monarch’s execution by the blade, le sabre. Within a vaguer or more general schema, what we’re seeing is sovereignty being shattered: the sovereignty of the subject, that is, of the autonomous, autarchic self who masters chance, seizes his destiny—and by extension, of this self in the form of the artist who masters his craft, works its machinery with delicacy and precision so as to both express himself and turn the world into a set of works that reel off his roller; and the sovereignty, I’d suggest as well, of writing, whose blood and guts, whose font and lettering, the very mechanism of whose possibility we encounter threshing and dying at the roadside. And (at the same time and by contrast) constitutive: because this Orphic scattering seems to fertilize the space around it, seeding it with lettered possibility. Writing, almost miraculously, starts to sprout on bushes; the landscape, both physical and cultural, seems magically altered or regenerated. The passenger’s novel may never come to be written, and it’s a safe bet to say that no progeny of any type will issue from that Royal—and yet, despite, indeed as a result of this disastrous event, a book of sorts, of a new or nascent order, will appear.
Three years later, in 1970, Ruscha publishes another example of what (in part thanks to him) we now all-too-easily place within the genre of “artist’s book.” Real Estate Opportunities, consisting of twenty-five photographs of empty lots, features no broken typewriter—yet there’s a continuity in the very title. The etymology of the term “real estate” is disputed: some say the “real” derives from res, things; others that it comes from rex, king, like the Spanish real; while “estate” can designate one’s stuff, one’s sovereign domain or one’s condition. These photographs, like those of Royal Road Test, feature typographic degradation; in “Between 6033 and 6043 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood,” we see the letters of the sign announcing the Continental Sound Recording Studios car park rejigged, through decay, into
CONTI E T
SOU D
RECORD R
035 P KING
For Ruscha, space and language belong to the same category. He talks, in interviews, of his appreciation for the way that both words and landscape “happen to be horizontal, that letters follow one another with spaces and pauses and then more letters.” “Streets,” he tells us (as though recalling his road test’s unwound spool), “are like ribbons”—which is what, in his self-titled “ribbon-word” works, words (like The World, Satin and—yes—Royal) turn into too. The expanses and horizons of his large-scale landscape paintings, from the red skies filled with the STANDARD signs that punctuate America right through to the alps with “BLISS BUCKET,” “HISTORY KIDS” or simply “THE” plastered in front of them, he describes as no more than “anonymous backdrops for the drama of words.” And this drama’s plot, time and again, consists of words being damaged; indeed, one of his paintings, “Damage,” shows the A and G of that word set on fire; another, “Hurting The Word Radio,” depicts the letters R-A-D-I-O being clamped and pinched. His early “phrase paintings,” such as “Faster Than A Speeding Beanstalk” and “Guacamole Airlines,” see partial or mis-heard speech fragments dislodged (as the critic Mary Richards points out in her monograph on Ruscha) from their context and hung up to dry (Ruscha himself describes the amputated half-phrases as “titles for imaginary books”); the later ones, such as “Uncertain Frontier” and “Name, Address, Phone,” set again to the backdrop of landscape, see the words erased entirely.
Ruscha locates his own Eureka moment in 1965, when he made a large-scale work called “Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western.” At the top, the word “NOISE” towers in Hollywood-style letters; falling off the bottom is a cowboy comic; on the far left, an intact pencil; on the far right, a broken one (such that read in the normal way, from left to right, the painting, like Royal Road Test, would narrate the writing implement’s destruction); in the middle, taking up most of the canvas, empty space. “The idea of a broken pencil,” Ruscha says, “reminded me of a stage set, or an aerial photograph of some trivial occurrence. I mean, there are two simple, stupid objects that seemed to beg to be captured, or recorded. And the idea was doing that—capturing them and recording them, fitting them into this picture in such a way that they almost look as if they’re leaving the picture. They’re on the outside edges, scrambling to get away from the center of this domain that is the picture.” It may be fanciful, but reading this account, I can’t help hearing echoes of Auden’s take, in his poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” on Breughel’s Landscape With The Fall of Icarus—a painting whose main surface area, like that of Ruscha’s, is given over to an empty, blue expanse. Musing that human dramas take place “While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along,” picturing children “skating/on a pond at the edge of the wood” while “the miraculous birth” unfolds, or “the dreadful martyrdom” running its course “in a corner, some untidy spot,” Auden observes:
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Icarus’s fall, the event that gives rise to the picture in the first place, may be monumental—but it is also, within the picture, a kind of non-event. Auden famously states, in his “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” that “poetry makes nothing happen”—a line usually misunderstood to mean “poetry doesn’t make anything happen.” But Auden’s construct is an active, positive one that casts “nothing” as an occurrence that takes place. Nothing in Latin is nihil, as in “annihilation”; in German, Nichts, as in Vernichtung. During the Second World War, the British Secret Service broadcast lines of poetry into occupied France. Ninety-nine percent of these lines were meaningless; but one in every hundred signified, to the Resistance listeners who had the code-books, “Now blow up the bridge. Assassinate the general—now.” A man or woman reads a line of poetry into a microphone in London, and in France a bridge blows up—or not. For Auden, this would be the threat all poetry, wartime or not, poses: each line, in the very recesses of its negation, harbors that potentiality, that immanence (or imminence)—and poetry, in its eventlessness, becomes (to return to his Yeats elegy) “a way of happening, a mouth.”
Ruscha believes in happening as well. “The best thing about any creative urge, passion,” he writes in a telling notebook entry, “is that it happens.” He is also, as a second, equally telling notebook entry shows us, fully tuned into the dual nuances of “nothing.” On the recto page he’s transcribed Lear’s regal answer, as he abdicates his estate, to Cordelia’s “Nothing”: “Nothing will come of nothing.” On the verso, he’s written, beneath a nod to the gun-saturated work of Raymond Chandler: “The music from the balconies nearby was overlaid by the noise of sporadic acts of violence.” In a third diary entry Ruscha, self-confessed lover of “the violence of things” who likes to draw with gunpowder, inserts, by means of arrows, into a blank space framing the ribbon-word eye, a series of ultra-violent scenes (“killing of bank guard,” “fist fight,” “practically everyone getting killed”) playing on the TV while he draws. Effectively, the arrows work both ways, filling the space with and voiding it of all these episodes. By emptying out his stretches of pictorial real estate, he loads them with potential, with (to use his own term) opportunity. It’s the same in his series Thirtyfour Parking Lots. Resisting the temptation to unpack that single word lot (as fate or destiny, as portion that Cordelia’s “Nothing” vies for, as leitmotif of literary modernity, from the “vacant lots” of Eliot to Pynchon’s Lot 49) since it would take up this whole essay, let’s limit ourselves to quoting Ruscha’s own take on those famous photographs: “Architects write to me about the parking lots book, because they are interested in seeing parking lot patterns and things like that. But those patterns and their abstract design quality mean nothing to me. I’ll tell you what is more interesting: the oil droppings on the ground.” What animates space is the trace of what has been excluded from it: the amputation-scar of an occurrence that, in its marked absence, seeps and stains and saturates an area’s surface all the more.
Michel de Certeau, in his landmark tome The Practice of Everyday Life, draws a distinction between “space” and “place.” Place, lieu, becomes espace, space, when it is “practiced”—that is, when unlocked through the agency or tactic of a user. Georges Perec, in his fascinating text An Attempt To Exhaust A Place In Paris, acts as such a “user”—sitting for three days in the Place Saint Sulpice, writing down all that he sees and hears and does. “Today I’m drinking a bottle of Vittel, while yesterday I drank a coffee (in what way does that transform the square?).” An Attempt is full of what Perec calls “micro-events”—people meeting, traffic passing and the like—several of which seem to contain the kernels of more conventional, expanded narratives. A woman pausing by a shop window to smoke a cigarette seems like the opening to a Hitchcock film; a Brinks truck rolling by implies the entire bank-heist genre; a screaming child dragged away by two adults signals a kidnap intrigue. There are also all the building blocks of a nineteenth-century novel: over the three days of his exercise, Perec witnesses a christening, a marriage and a funeral. Whose? Doesn’t matter. Neither the micro-nor the macro-blocks or kernels grow or blossom; rather, from very little, they revert—the book’s whole universe reverts, as “fatigue” (again, whose? Perec’s? the square’s?) sets in, space darkens and empties, the text peters out—to a narrative zero. That is An Attempt’s great achievement: to bring things down to this zero and to hold them there, both flatlining and pulsing. I would claim that Ruscha pulls off the same coup in a single shot, also from Parking Lots: “Dodgers Stadium, 1000 Elysian Park Ave.” Here, not only does he manage, by presenting one of the most charged event-spaces imaginable (a baseball field) utterly deserted, to implicitly inject it with each triumph and defeat, every 50,000-voiced roar of hope and fury and redemption from both past and future; but he also, in showing the surrounding urban transit infrastructure (the flyovers, the exit and approach roads servicing the stadium), allows this event-space to overspill its formal boundary, expanding into a whole cybernetic architecture of wider event-field, as simultaneously omnipresent and unquantifiable as that other Elysium of which Virgil writes: ‘In no fix’d place the happy souls reside . . . They wind the hill, and thro’ the blissful meadows go.”
Ruscha is not the only artist interested in sport. Francis Bacon, for example, reworks press photographs of tripping footballers to recast them as soldiers stepping on land mines, turns cricketers’ heads into exploding studies for his screaming pope, and so on. That sport is war by other means is a long-standing cliché; but what interests me is the third part of the triangle, poetry. Think of Virgil’s predecessor Homer: there’s a battle going on outside the gates of Troy, various actions, countermoves, trajectories; and this guy has to describe it. He’s a commentator. A few years ago, when the Serpentine Gallery was putting on a marathon of poetry, they asked me if I’d like to do a public dialogue with some Faber-and-Faber versifier or other. No, I responded, I want to talk to the great test match commentator Henry Blofeld. Blofeld, who received a top-drawer classical education at Eton and (until he failed his midterms “by an innings”) Cambridge, not only peppers his radio broadcasts with literary allusions (groundsmen sweeping sand from wickets between innings become maids from “The Walrus and the Carpenter”), but also (as he told me when the Serpentine granted my request) measures his speech in iambic pentameters timed to the bowler’s run-up. Test cricket (he reminded us) only came about in the nineteenth century because Dickens canceled a reading tour of Australia, so England sent their cricketers as cultural ambassadors instead: it’s a stand-in for writing from the off. Two facts, or episodes, from Blofeld’s personal history deserve a mention here. The first is that his father lent his name to Ian Fleming’s James Bond villain. The second is that he (Henry) was the most promising schoolboy cricketer of his generation until almost-fatally crushed by a bus; when, covering test matches, he lauds the majesty of players in their prime, it’s almost as though he were depicting his own past’s future, or his future’s past. What makes his commentary so good line by line, though, is the way he fills the long pauses between cricket’s short bursts of action with (utterly Perecian) pigeons, clouds, vapor trails and, indeed, passing busses, all of which he manages to weave into a descriptive tapestry at whose center, always, throbs the game—all the more so in its latency or suspension.
“He grew up in some Kentucky town when all the time and space he could imagine were equal to a playing field, some patch of striped earth bounded by plank seats.” This is how Don DeLillo introduces Blofeld’s American counterpart Russ Hodges, the commentator covering the National League pennant-clinching 1951 baseball game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, in his 1992 novella Pafko at the Wall (which he would later expand into the doorstopper of a novel Underworld). Hodges cut his teeth doing “ghost games”—in other words, commentating from a windowless room on a game he’s not at and can’t see, embellishing from data sent in on a telegraph ribbon and transcribed on a typewriter into “standard baseball cryptic.” “Someone hands you a piece of paper filled with letters and numbers and you have to make a ball game out of it. You create the weather, flesh out the players, you make them sweat and grouse and hitch up their pants. You construct the fiction of a distant city, making up everything but the stark facts of the evolving game.” No Elysium this, but a “half-hell of desperate invention.” Hodges is at the Giants–Dodgers game, but his commentary, of course, has the same effect of linking a space to what is outside or beyond it. “This game is everywhere. Dow Jones tickers”—those ribbons again—“are rapping out the score with the stock averages. . . . They’re smuggling radios into boardrooms. . . . They got it in jail. They got it in taxicabs and barbershops. . . . The game and its extensions. The woman cooking cabbage. The man who wishes he could be done with drink. These are the game’s remoter soul.” The novella begins with ticketless boys, drawn to what DeLillo (using a variation on a term we’ve met before) calls “the realm of event,” jumping the turnstiles, and ends with a ball being hit over the field’s boundary; like Ruscha’s arrows, Pafko’s trajectories hurl exterior things towards the inside and vice versa.
Watching the game from the stands are, among others, Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra and J. Edgar Hoover—seated together, the perennial unholy alliance of art, media and power. In the fifth innings, Hoover receives a private communiqué from the remote space lodged in his soul, Washington, informing him that the Soviet Union has just successfully conducted its first atomic bomb test. The news is bad, almost disastrous—but Hoover consoles himself with the thought that (thanks to his spies) Truman will announce the detonation before the Soviets do, so that “People will understand that we’ve maintained control of the news if not of the bomb.” Politics, too, is a matter of commentating; just as the exercise of domestic control is about information-relay, mediation, capture or retrieval of not just what’s on display but, even more, whatever has left the picture, doesn’t want to show itself: “your hidden life,” DeLillo tells his imaginary 1950s readers, “is in his” (Hoover’s) “private files, all the rumors collected and indexed, the lost facts emergent.” But most intriguing is the phrase DeLillo uses to summarize the message Hoover is relayed during this middle innings: “They have exploded a bomb in plain unpretending language.” As with Auden’s line, we need to listen to this carefully. Its apparent sense may be: “Put simply, not to beat about the bush, they have exploded a bomb”—but that’s not how it’s written; no, “They have exploded a bomb in [ . . . ] language.” Here, we’re back (at least figuratively) in the zone of British wartime poem-codes, words that make bridges blow up.
It’s a theme close to DeLillo’s heart. In his 1991 novel Mao II he has a novelist imagine typing out key-sequence detonators over phone lines: “You enter your code in Brussels and blow up a building in Madrid.” This character, Bill Gray (who spent his childhood announcing ball games to himself in which he played the roles of players, commentator, crowd, audience and even radio), holds to the credo that “There’s a danger in a sentence when it comes out right.” At the same time, he feels emasculated, feels that writing has lost its potential for annihilation, and hence its seat at the table of world-transformation. “In the West we become effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence . . . Years ago I used to think that it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of a culture. Now bomb makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.” Throughout Mao II, the figure of the terrorist acts as a counterpart to, in the dual sense of double of and replacement for, the writer. “There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists . . . novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game . . . What terrorists gain, novelists lose . . . The danger they” (terrorists) “represent equals our” (novelists’) “own failure to be dangerous.” Crediting Beckett with being “the last writer to shape the way we think and see” (which is ironic, since Beckett is the author of the work in which, as the critic Vivian Mercier famously put it, “nothing happens, twice”), Gray claims that “After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative.” If the novel used to be “the great secular transcendence,” the “mass of language, character, occasional new truth,” now “our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe . . . We don’t need the novel.”
But Gray goes further: “We don’t even need catastrophes, necessarily,” he continues. “We only need the reports and predictions and warnings.” The commentary is enough; the event itself is almost an afterthought; it doesn’t need to actually happen for its field or realm to govern and survive. This is a fundamental shake-up of the zero-sum equation: at the final tally, neither novelists nor terrorists win the game. Media does. The arc or trajectory along which, like a plumb-struck baseball, Trojan spear or Ruscha arrow-line, all experience finds itself cast is that of its own being mediated, its becoming-media: “Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film,” Gray claims. “Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie?”
Here again, my maybe-fanciful ear heard a loud, clear echo—this time of a figure I’ve of late become obsessed with: Mallarmé. In his 1895 essay “The Book, Spiritual Instrument,” Mallarmé issues his celebrated declaration that “everything that exists does so in order to end up in a book.” Unlike DeLillo’s Gray, though, Mallarmé is not just thinking of a book, of some book or other. He is picturing (as he puts it in a letter to Verlaine) “the book, convinced as I am that in the final analysis there’s only one”—the über-book, the final, comprehensive volume, “architectural and premeditated,” “the Orphic explanation of the earth.” This book would be a “book” for which the very term “book” no longer sufficed, since its creation would demand the escalation and expansion—or, better put, the evisceration and reconfiguring-otherwise—of all our current notions of what books are. In the Ruscha-like notebooks in which, for the remainder of his life, he monomaniacally attempts to open approach routes to this expanded, escalated (or, to use the terminology of the century that would follow Mallarmé, many of whose artists would take up his challenge, “multi-media” or “multi-platform”) book-to-come, Mallarmé imagines it being realized or enacted at a level far beyond that of the page—in (for example) performances and cult-like rituals. Yet at the same time he remains preoccupied with text, and type, and print, with the potentialities these harbor. Even in newspapers, he claims, their font and layout, we see the “miracle” of words being “led back to their origin, the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, so gifted with infinity that they will finally consecrate language; thus typography becomes a rite.” The book, then, “total expansion of the letter,” would harness the letter’s “mobility,” and in its “spaciousness” establish “some nameless system of relationships.”
These ambitions and concerns run through and shape, at every level, Mallarmé’s most remarkable work, Un Coup de Des. With eleven different type-faces and sizes that suggest the coexisting fonts of newsprint, a non-linear spread or deconstructed layout that forces the eye to run and jump from one side of the page, one isolated word or cluster to another, and vast expanses of blank space through (and perhaps out of ) which its action falls, the text recounts, in present tense, an event whose circumstances are “eternal”—that is, an episode that is both happening now and not-now-but-always. What is this episode? A naufrage, or shipwreck. Amid spume and surge, reef and timbers, we are shown a sinking man lifting his arm aloft to cast dice. This man, named in block capitals as “THE MASTER,” would in a plot-sense be the captain of the floundering ship; in a more general sense, he embodies the general character-type of the hero, and thus, in a grander symbolic framework, of all sovereign self-or world-mastery. “Formerly,” we are told, “he would grasp the helm”; but now, having drifted “beyond ancient reckonings,” he finds “the manoeuvre forgotten with the age.” Since the most cursory of glances through Mallarmé’s previous poems uncovers numerous allusions to seafaring and seamanship, which are repeatedly set up as analogues for poetry, with Mallarmé casting himself in the role of the master (“Nothing, this foam, virgin verse . . . We navigate, O my diverse/Friends, myself already on the poop,/ You the sumptuous prow to cut/Through the winter wave and lightning burst,” etc), it is all but impossible to resist the urge to read Un Coup de Des, in part, as a gesture of abdication on the poet’s part. This abdication would take the form not of a smooth handing-down of his crown, but rather of a violent destruction in which all the syntactical and metrical control, all the meticulously-wrought systems of image and allusion and conceit built up over decades, that have elevated him and his work to the masterful position they occupy, get splintered on the reef of time, modernity, and, of course, one of the poem’s central motifs, chance, in its dual sense of randomness and destiny (lot). And yet, according to a paradoxical logic we should recognize by now, this catastrophic downfall breaches open and sets up, in its abyss or gouffre, the vanguard territory in and out of which literary modernity will take root and sprout.
Where Ruscha’s buddy heaves a Royal through the window, Mallarmé’s drowning master raises his hand aloft to cast dice. This, the poem suggests, would be the great tragic-heroic act, a gesture that, even from the depths of the catastrophe, would institute some kind of grasping of one’s fate, a repairing or redress of falling-apartness, a suture of the whole disintegrating mechanism (the ship, literature, the age), and even a transcendence of the situation. This putative dice-cast, Mallarmé tells us, would allow the Master “to fold back division and pass proudly on.” And yet the Master doesn’t cast them. Instead, his hand remains unopened; a plume solitaire éperdue—lonely distraught feather or solitary overwhelmed pen (that broken pencil’s cousin)—lodges in his hair; and, interspersed with lower-case snatches declaring “the event . . . null,” “the act empty,” upper-case letters shout out: “NOTHING WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE EXCEPT THE PLACE.” For this line, the poem undergoes a tense-shift, from the present to the future-perfect: nothing will have taken place except the place. We also, a few lines earlier, get a shift into the conditional: even if the master had cast the dice, thereby producing a definitive outcome or “number,” it still would be chance, and this fact would nullify the act and symbolism of the casting just as much as the not-doing of it does. In short, and simplifying a text of almost quantum levels of semantic and syntactical complexity, what we encounter, again and again, in various modes and temporalities, is the event undoing itself, disintegrating or dissolving back into the negative or neutral of its own event-space. This process plays itself out with an ineluctability that would make it seem pre-ordained, if all deity and metaphysics hadn’t also melted down into the secular abyss of their spatial substructure. “An ordinary elevation pours out [verse or verses] absence”: in this poem, and as poetry, un-transcendent (non-Elysian) source-fields fill all connected or contingent surfaces with emptiness; space becomes, comes into being as, its own voiding.
Pafko, in its own way, stages this situation too. At the ball-game, we are in a world of spatial relationships and kinetic mobility, of “airstreams . . . coefficients . . . trailing vortices.” At this world’s center, as the vanishing point around which it builds itself and in which it also disappears, is “that one-thousandth of a second when the bat and the baseball are in contact”—an unrecoverable, and hence abyssal, moment. “And the crowd,” DeLillo writes, “is also in this lost space”: they persist, the event occurs, the space itself takes place only in and as their conjoined lostness. There’s also a preoccupation with chance and destiny, the vagaries (or inevitability) of how a ball will bounce and ricochet off seats as crowds fight for it (the boy who wins this micro-battle “takes a guess, he anticipates, it’s the way you feel something will happen and then you watch it uncannily come to pass”). There’s also, of course, a pervasive atmosphere of violence, from the smashing of a small leather sphere to the (counterpoised or corresponding) splitting of a plutonium one that causes Hoover to contemplate the ranked spectators “sitting in the furrow of destruction.” As he does this, in a gesture that perfectly reprises Mallarmé’s typographic sensibility, his tendency to juxtapose and collage print-blocks, a deluge of deconstructed print—of torn up magazines, thrown by the fans in the upper stands—pours down across his (Hoover’s) shoulders: ads and news items and photos (“how the dazzle of a Packard car is repeated in the feature story about the art treasures of the Prado. It is all part of the same thing.”). Hoover folds one of these pages up and slips it in his pocket: it’s the reproduction of a Breughel, The Triumph Of Death, which, centered round a funnel-trap that swallows up the scene (“an oddly modern construction that could be a subway tunnel or office corridor”), depicts all space’s final ruination.
Mao II also seems plugged into these Mallarméan concerns. There is not only the impetus-of-all-things-to-become-book I’ve already mentioned, but also, in Gray’s reclusiveness and endless writer’s block, his failure to put the long-awaited manuscript out in the world, the perpetually-deferred temporality of Mallarmé’s to-come. There’s also the intuitive link between writing and catastrophe, writing and shipwreck (or its modern counterpart, airplane-disintegration), writing and violence (in this context, the obsessive attention paid by Gray’s assistant to the cogs and hammers of his typewriter makes this a good moment to mention that the Royal Typewriter Company, during World War II, also made machine guns). Reading Mao II, you get the sense that DeLillo is simultaneously skirting his way round a conjunction that is somehow right, which makes the book compelling, and not quite getting it right, not quite bringing the pieces into the right alignment, which makes it frustrating.
Not so Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno in the work I want to turn to as a coda. For their 2006 film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait they have seventeen cameras track the eponymous, preternaturally gifted midfielder for the course of a football game, irrespective of whether or not he is on the ball. The game is a regular season one, in the Spanish Liga; Zidane’s team is Real Madrid. Gordon and Parreno’s title is ambiguous: on first glance, we might read it as “Zidane: A Portrait of a Subject in the 21st Century.” But there’s a subtler and perhaps truer grammar to be parsed here, one that would spell: “Zidane: a Portrait of the 21st Century, a Portrait whose subject is not really Zidane but in fact the age.” And the form or manifestation that the age takes can be summed up in a single word: Media. The fundamental situation of being mediated, being-in-media, is impressed upon the viewer right from the opening sequence as, seconds into the film, the turf ’s green pixelates; it’s reiterated in the frequent cuts to camera-feeds, the shots of edit booths, of viewing frames on monitors; it’s hammered home by the way the sound drops in and out, a blatant product of technological manipulation, and by the deliberately tinny, lo-res quality of the reproduced commentary. Everything “first-hand” or “pure” is de-naturalized; even Zidane’s most intimate gesture, his personal tic of scraping his foot against the grass, plays out as a kind of glitch on a CD or buffer on a livestream; it catches any fluid motion, makes it stutter, stops it happening even as it’s happening. “As a child,” Zidane’s text-over tells us in a near-perfect paraphrase of Gray’s, “I had a running commentary in my head, when I was playing. It wasn’t really my own voice; it was the voice of Pierre Cangioni, a television anchor from the 1970s. Every time I heard his voice I would run towards the TV, as close as I could get, for as long as I could. It wasn’t that his words were so important; but the tone, the accent, the atmosphere, was everything.” For him, media is not experience’s goal or endpoint, but rather its precondition, where it all begins. From that base or given, you construct your own “story” by channel-mixing inputs. Describing the crowd’s sounds—general noise, the shifting of a chair, a cough, a whisper—Zidane surmises: “you can almost decide for yourself what you want to hear.” Agency is editing.
The film’s own editing is deconstructed: any notion that a football game might at any level entail some kind of organic wholeness or even machinic efficiency is constantly unraveled, as the syntax of passing, linking and sequence-formation breaks down into a set of disconnected fragments; and the human drama gives over to what we actually, at a basic perceptual level, encounter at big football games—namely, words and ciphers moving, around various centrifuges and along various vectors, through space: players’ names and numbers; the team logo; or the text that, like some Jenny Holzer installation, runs in an endless horizontal ribbon along the advertisers’ hoardings. (Paradoxically, the telegraph-machine in Hodges’s cell was actually furnishing the truer commentary.) One of this game’s main sponsors is the company Fortuna—or, in English, fate. “Sometimes,” Zidane says, “when you arrive in the stadium you feel that everything has already been decided. The script has already been written.” He recalls playing “in another place, at another time, when something amazing happened. Someone passed the ball to me, and before even touching it, I knew exactly what was going to happen. I knew I was going to score.” What plays out on the field, (again) under the grammar of the future perfect, is replay, reenactment. Zidane’s beautifully vague phrasing of “another place, another time” is apt, since the artists, like DeLillo, link their stadium’s area to what’s outside it. During the half-time break, they show us what is happening round the world during the game: homes destroyed by floods in Serbia-Montenegro; a spaceship recording plasmawave sounds at the solar wind termination shock boundary; a twenty-four hour marathon reading of Don Quixote (that seminal Renaissance study of mediation and reenactment); and, inevitably, a car-bomb exploding in Iraq. We see a still of the wounded, one of whom wears a Zidane t-shirt . . .
There is another fusing (to borrow Mallarmé’s formulation near the end of Un Coup) of a place (and time) with its beyond in Zidane—one its authors couldn’t have anticipated. The Liga game takes place in April 2005; the film receives its general release in September 2006. Between those two dates, Zidane is sent off in the World Cup final—as, indeed, he is in the game Gordon and Parreno have memorialized. The novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint, who was at the fateful France-Italy encounter (and, like everyone else in Berlin’s Olympiastadion, didn’t see the incident, since it took place off the ball, only becoming aware of it when it was replayed on the stadium’s giant screens), characterizes Zidane’s general moves as “calligraphic.” Calligraphy may be a good choice of allusion—yet the landmark, the epochal head-butt he performed on Materazzi was typographic. Take the faces, contexts, “personalities” away (a move that’s hardly necessary, since Zidane’s acephalic surrender of his head, its burial in Materazzi’s chest, performs this function already); take these away and read the episode at a strict nomenclatural level, and what do you see? You see the two Zs, separated by seven spacing letters (which themselves contain a repetition, ine-d-ine), of Zinedine Zidane, crashing into the two compressed Zs that await them near the end of Materazzi, like a train hitting the buffers; themselves compressing, ZZ tight against ZZ, then springing back and spacing out again. It is perhaps the most decisive rite typography has been accorded in our era.
The alphabet’s last letters, fourfolded: this, in his final game, would be Zidane’s last, wordless word, his abnegation or abdication of his craft, laying-down or breaking of his pencil. His way of saying Nothing. Its utterance effects a sudden (and, for the hundreds of millions watching, for the game itself, catastrophic) withdrawal from the event-space that very craft has animated or brought to life in the first place. The space remains, traumatized, amputated, drawing its entire reserve (or deficit) of meaning from the presence that has just vacated it (who cares about the penalty shootout that followed? will anyone even remember who won the match in ten years time?). We see the script being typed out in the Liga game, as Zidane disappears, like Breughel’s crowd, into the field-voiding or evacuating tunnel with three minutes left on the clock. Cordelia’s “Nothing” starts a chain-reaction that will lead to war, mayhem, general armageddon. In a way, her saying of it (a speech-act that, breaking the game-rules laid down by the king, brings about her immediate withdrawal from the game) is the ultimate act of terror. After the Berlin final, some press reports suggested Materazzi had, in a racist manner, provoked Zidane into head-butting him by calling him a “terrorist”—a claim that seems to be untrue. But Zidane’s Arabic heritage could be linked to the incident in a more subtle way: “The perfect act of writing,” writes Giorgio Agamben, “comes not from a power to write, but from an impotence that turns back on itself and in this way comes to itself as a pure act (which Aristotle calls agent intellect). This is why in the Arab tradition agent intellect has the form of an angel whose name is Qualam, Pen, and its place is an unfathomable potentiality. Bartleby, a scribe who does not simply cease writing but ‘prefers not to,’ is the extreme image of this angel that writes nothing but its potentiality to write.” If, as Gray’s assistant muses as he cleans his master’s abandoned typewriter, “the withheld work of art is the only eloquence left,” then space, most truly understood, would be nothing but its own potentiality, and literature its own negation. This is the two-way alchemy, the reverse-metaphysics, through which a small, dumb leather globe quite devoid of its own energy is able to at once both cancel and amass what Hoover calls “the sun’s own heat that swallows cities.” Or, as Zidane himself puts it (with his habitual slight stutter and repeat): “Magic is sometimes very close to nothing at all. Nothing at all.”
2015