selections

Hitting the Moving Target (W.S. Merwin)

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In her essay, “Theorizing the Postmodern: Toward a Poetics” (1988), Linda Hutcheon describes how postmodernism challenges the traditional notions of perspective. “The perceiving subject is no longer assumed to be a coherent, meaning-generating entity.” Narrators become “disconcertingly multiple and hard to locate or resolutely provisional and limited, often undermining their own seeming omniscience.”

In “Sire,” Merwin takes an inventory of his dissociation. The result is almost comical, like how one might pat their body after a car accident to ensure everything is intact.

Here comes the shadow not looking where it is going …
Here comes my ignorance shuffling after
Asking them what they are doing.
Standing still, I can hear my footsteps
Come up behind me and go on
Ahead of me and come up behind me…”
“Sire”

Another figure emerges: “here comes a white-haired thistle seed stumbling … I believe it is the lost wisdom of my grandfather…” to whom he confesses, “Your indirections are as strange to me / As my own. I know so little that anything / You might tell would be a revelation.”

Merwin goes on to imagine the details of his grandfather’s life, this man that died before he was born: “the good woman presenting you with children,” “flinging after you little endearments”… “Which one of my incomprehensions did you bequeath me?”

As if to produce a satisfying answer to this last question, there is a shift from components of himself to versions:

The one with the assortment of smiles
the one jailed in himself like a forest, the one who comes
Back at evening drunk with despair and turns
Into the wrong night as though he owned it?…”
-“Sire”

He cannot seem to literally compose himself, to band all of these attributes, tendencies, and generational habits together into a coherent person. Even the simple and obvious evidence that he has a body—his shadow and his footsteps—are seemingly unpredictable. He can only watch as they exercise their own weird autonomy.
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Walker Percy’s Fallout Novel

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Despite the duck and cover drills, the advertisements for fallout shelters, the horrific drama of McCarthy’s inquisition, millions of Americans made this absurd choice every day: to get up and go to work in the morning, to do the dishes, to kiss the foreheads of their children before bed. The continuing threat of nuclear annihilation elevated the significance of daily living to something like a derivative of heroism. The Moviegoer may lack narrative thrust, but any study of a character like Binx would rightly have none. He does very little, and does not even see a film, as the title might suggest. Rather, Binx documents humanity’s death drive with his preoccupation with driving fast and his cousin Kate’s smoking and self-harm. He catalogs the nervousness of his family, and the way his own emotional intelligence has devolved into a crude physicality.

Binx chooses to occupy a dead world wherever possible. Like an emergency responder, he is a detective of aftermath, of the meaningless left-behind traces of human life. He is a stick in the mud, observing what the tide deposits on the beach of his life. The novel is replete with images of ruin, of a world emptied of humanity but still thick with our waste. The local movie-house on Freret Street, where Binx once saw The Oxbow Incident, has “old seats, their plywood split, their bottoms slashed, but enduring nonetheless.” (p. 69) When he visits his cousin Kate, she is “sitting at her ease in a litter of summers past, broken wicker, split croquet balls, rotting hammocks.” On a trip with his secretary Sharon, they take a boat to the Civil War era fort on Ship Island. Binx finds nothing edifying about the visit; “it is the soul of dreariness, littered with ten summers of yellow Kodak boxes and ticket stubs and bottle caps.” (p. 114). When Kate and Binx return to Canal Street after Mardi Gras, they find the “street cleaners sweeping confetti and finery into soggy heaps in the gutters.”

When it is suggested by an associate that Binx step outside his comfort zone and secure some contracts in Chicago, Binx reveals that “for some time now, the impression has been growing upon that everyone is dead.” (p. 86). The specter of death and radiation is reinforced throughout the novel with Binx’s x-ray vision. In many scenes, he seems to look past the skin and into the body in a disconcerting way. As Kate balances a coke bottle on her knee, he laments the “structure of it, tendon and bone, facet and swell, gold all over.” (83). His uncle massages him, “feeling the bones of my shoulder like a surgeon.” When his mother suggests that he find a more fulfilling line of work, like cancer research (her suggestion), he says simply, “Oh.” A nearby egret takes flight, “so close that I can hear the gristle creak in his wings.” The elegant motion of the egret is subverted by this focus not on its musculature, but the gristle which is employed like some anatomical slur.
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