{"id":85193,"date":"2015-04-27T14:14:39","date_gmt":"2015-04-27T18:14:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=85193"},"modified":"2015-04-27T14:14:39","modified_gmt":"2015-04-27T18:14:39","slug":"6-a-craving-for-silence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/27\/6-a-craving-for-silence\/","title":{"rendered":"6: \u201cA Craving for Silence\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

From \u201cKang\u201d through \u201cMusic,\u201d pp. 116\u2013140<\/em><\/p>\n

\"mating\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the sixth entry in our\u00a0<\/em>Mating\u00a0Book Club<\/em><\/a>. (Sorry for the wait!) <\/em>Read along.<\/em><\/p>\n

This latest portion might be dubbed \u201cThe Critique of Pure Boredom,\u201d<\/i> especially given that our narrator name-drops Kant in the midst of it. Early on, she declares, \u201cOne attractive thing about me is that I\u2019m never bored, because during any caesura my personal automatic pastime of questioning my own motives is there for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lest we doubt her, she goes on to wonder whether the journey she intends to undertake to Tsau is the byproduct of certain deep unconscious maternal longings, or something else. She dismisses any neo-Darwinian and Freudian interpretation of her behavior, wrangles with the question of that behavior in relation to Denoon\u2019s childlessness (interesting, she notes), and the overpopulation problem, plus her sympathy for abandoned children globally. And she winds up wanting her decisions in the realm of relationships to be not only deliberate, but \u201cdeliberative,\u201d which is where Kant enters into it. Slow and steady.<\/p>\n

Yet in the world outside her head, she\u2019s on a flatbed truck that\u2019s flying at hair-raising speeds for 250 miles, with cornmeal, mail, and a \u201cfiendish shavenheaded adolescent at the wheel.\u201d <\/p>\n

Indeed, \u201cThe idea is to go … so fast that you\u2019re touching only the tops of the ruts, in effect making them a continuous surface. Your intense speed is supposed to carry you through the intermittent tracts of pure sand.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think here of the early pages of Rachel Kushner\u2019s The Flamethrowers, <\/i>where she describes skiing:<\/p>\n

\n

You wanted to be traceless. The ruts that cut around and under the bamboo gates, deep trenches if the snow was soft, were to be avoided by going high, by picking a high and graceful line, with no sudden swerves or shuddering edges …<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Kushner\u2019s Reno goes on to say that \u201cthe two things I loved were drawing and speed, and in skiing I combined them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mating<\/i>\u2019s narrator, of course, is no partisan of speed; rather she is, if anything, a\u00a0connoisseur\u00a0of slowness, a World Heavyweight Champion\u00a0of Lingering. Reading Rush is so often a celebration of the experience of time slowed down, such that even when we are physically moving at a pell-mell pace, full throttle, as we do here through the outer landscape, we\u2019re constantly mired in the sand of thought\u2014rarely do we elide the ruts by riding atop them. But it is precisely these ruts that are the wellsprings of so much of the pleasure of the journey, whether it is in the meditations on repetition compulsion or the failure of pets and infants to speak, or a delicious coinage like postlion<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This notion of introspection as a sort of insurance against boredom feels downright alluring in a 2015 wherein we are veritably bombarded with stimuli, where search terms and algorithms offer themselves up as viable, monetizable alternatives to memory and decision making, where distraction feels like the default state and contemplation a bit like a museum piece that we might indulge on Sundays if we can still get tickets. If anything, though, rather than feeling quaint, Rush\u2019s preoccupation with boredom connects him to us. The boredom in question is not markedly different from that which David Foster Wallace was exploring in The Pale King<\/i>: a profound, existential boredom, at once characteristic of our age and, furthermore, perhaps of the human condition. Wallace stalks his prey everywhere, from detailing the parking problems at an IRS branch office to wondering whether test-taking anxiety isn\u2019t linked to a fear of silence and stillness above all. He describes \u201cnegotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mating<\/i>\u2019s narrator, though, seduces us by example, being the living, breathing proof that boredom isn\u2019t<\/i> inevitable. Part of Mating\u2019s<\/i>\u00a0own negotiation is the question of what happens when two people who are preternaturally antiboring come together\u2014can they remain dynamic to one another? Will they destroy each other, either by combusting or neutralizing one another? The narrator refers to the \u201c1001 Nights\u201d of their relationship\u2014Scheherazade\u00a0is perhaps the example par excellence of never boring your listener, though here we have two of them. And while sheer narrative and cliff-hanger are Scheherazade\u2019s tools-in-trade, Denoon\u2019s and the narrator\u2019s are aside, observation,\u00a0aper\u00e7us, wordplay, and neologism, theory, and the like (there are\u00a0veritable manuals contained in this section\u2014Games to Play on Long Road Trips (And How to Win!), How to Prepare for a Trip Through the Desert, How to Cope with Lions). Of course, relationships in their nascent moments are notorious for adding a certain gloss to the beloved\u2019s most petty or irksome qualities, making them seem somehow not only forgivable but endearing. Would Denoon\u2019s stories about how he\u2019d keep tricking his brother in a game where they\u2019d choose the lowliest, shabbiest house for each other to live in seem as charming\u00a0and resonant as they do here if one was subjected to them for twenty years? Or would they seem like picked over scraps, leftovers too oft-reheated?<\/p>\n

Boredom and silence: Look upon their works, Ye mighty relationship, and despair!<\/p>\n

But all of that will arrive later. For now, we are still on the journey to Tsau, by way of Lobatse and Kang. En route, we are drawn into various ruts. It is worth noting that Rush has already rehearsed the driving scene here, with the fear of getting stuck and stranded in the sand, in his brilliant story \u201cNear Pala,\u201d which can be found in his collection Whites<\/i>. I use this story to teach dialogue, which, along with physical description of the landscape and four characters, is about all the story consists of. It is stripped of not only the digressive, churning mental acrobatics of Mating<\/i>, but bereft of any internal point of view whatsoever. It\u2019s a story that a behaviorist might approve\u00a0of. We get, simply, two couples driving from point A to point B. The men are in the front, including, of course, the driver\u2019s seat, and the women are in back. In a marvel of compression, Rush not only reveals the fissures and fractures between these particular husbands and wives but manages to distill power relations between expatriates and natives, particularly the Baswara, along with relations between men and women in general. (If you read \u201cNear Pala,\u201d from\u00a0Whites<\/em>, after reading Mating<\/i>,\u00a0you\u2019ll be shocked that this, too, is Rush.)<\/p>\n

In Mating<\/i>, the car does get stopped at one point\u2014\u201cThe breakdown kit, when it was extricated, surprised us by containing only a spare carburetor\u2014no shovel, no sand mat of the absolutely reliable and time tested kind they use all over the Sahel, no first aid kit.\u201d They are reassured by their drivers that they will \u201cget … out through sheer experience,\u201d and indeed they do, eventually, but not before the passengers are asked to retrieve the bars of soap that have become \u201cdistributed down the road behind us in a large array.\u201d This is a surreal moment\u2014the drivers looking on like bosses overseeing manual labor\u2014made all the more so by its context, shortly after we\u2019ve heard Denoon\u2019s critique of both socialism and capitalism in one fell swoop.<\/p>\n

Kang itself becomes a sort of a rut; like Odysseus on Calypso\u2019s island, the narrator becomes too comfortable here. She manages to bore the nuns, the Sisters of St. Mary, by declaring herself an anthropologist. She finds the silences here \u201calmost lyrical,\u201d the music of \u201cthe susurrus of wind in the thorn trees … highly occasional, not predictable.\u201d Silence, rather than precipitating boredom, is here rich and full, Cagean.\u00a0Fortunately the water is wretched enough that she is impelled onward.<\/p>\n

At some point in here the narrator vows to \u201cbe more synoptic,\u201d and so should I. In the last part of this section, she travels with a couple of donkeys that she refers to as \u201cthe guys,\u201d braving lions and the desert\u2019s increased risk for brain-melt: hallucination, murky thinking, and outright derangement. Here she remarks that \u201canyone who thinks crossing the Kalahari by yourself is boring is deluded,\u201d explaining that \u201cit\u2019s like being self-employed in a marginal enterprise: there\u2019s always something you\u00a0should\u00a0be\u00a0doing[.]\u201d There are snakes, and lions, and the desert as an \u201corganism or totality\u201d that is \u201ctrying to make [one] \u2026 become part of it, as in surrender to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

And this, finally, is one of Mating\u2019<\/i>s great undertakings, I\u2019d argue: where Wallace attempts to confront boredom by mimicking it, entering fully into its flesh and its couture, charting its anatomy and its antinomies, Mating<\/i> assiduously refuses to surrender. If boredom sings a siren song, Mating <\/i>itself\u00a0holds out hope that we can transcend it, maybe sing right back to it, harmonize or modulate its key or tone, trick it into becoming something else. Indeed, this section ends with our narrator singing\u2014to her \u201cguys,\u201d to herself, to us. And next up is \u201cSerious Trouble.\u201d I mean, who in their right mind could possibly be bored?<\/p>\n

Tim Horvath<\/a> is the author of <\/em>Understories and <\/em>Circulation. He teaches creative writing at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and currently he is working on a novel about contemporary composers.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From \u201cKang\u201d through \u201cMusic,\u201d pp. 116\u2013140 This is the sixth entry in our\u00a0Mating\u00a0Book Club. (Sorry for the wait!) Read along. This latest portion might be dubbed \u201cThe Critique of Pure Boredom,\u201d especially given that our narrator name-drops Kant in the midst of it. Early on, she declares, \u201cOne attractive thing about me is that I\u2019m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":823,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17319],"tags":[8758,14631,154,17649,2111,6260,17321,17320,813,17439,9330,17322,7988,13153,123],"class_list":["post-85193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mating-book-club","tag-book-club","tag-boredom","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-intellectual-love","tag-love","tag-mating","tag-mating-book-club","tag-nelson-denoon","tag-norman-rush","tag-perspective","tag-rachel-kushner","tag-reading-group","tag-sade","tag-silence","tag-travel"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cMating\u201d Book Club, Part 6: The Sounds of Silence<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Tim Horvath on our narrator\u2019s excursion into the desert.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/27\/6-a-craving-for-silence\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"6: \u201cA Craving for Silence\u201d by Tim Horvath\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 27, 2015 \u2013 From \u201cKang\u201d through \u201cMusic,\u201d pp. 116\u2013140 This is the sixth entry in our\u00a0Mating\u00a0Book Club. 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