{"id":88327,"date":"2015-07-29T11:30:55","date_gmt":"2015-07-29T15:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=88327"},"modified":"2015-07-30T16:16:14","modified_gmt":"2015-07-30T20:16:14","slug":"on-paul-metcalfs-genoa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/07\/29\/on-paul-metcalfs-genoa\/","title":{"rendered":"On Paul Metcalf\u2019s Genoa<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Metcalf\u2019s \u201cpoeticized collage\u201d reckons with his great-grandfather, Herman Melville.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Paul Metcalf<\/p><\/div>\n

It is extremely rare, these days, to encounter something\u00a0that feels completely new. That is, most literary artifacts are pretty\u00a0easy to slot into one format or the other.What a gift then, what a\u00a0rare, beautiful turn of events when you stumble on a book that\u00a0seems to come from some spot entirely its own. What a gift, the\u00a0moment in which you must summon all your readerly resources to\u00a0grasp the enormity of what you are encountering, to see the pages as\u00a0they are. I can count these reading experiences on one hand, and in\u00a0each case I was somehow improved,made better as a reader (Nightwood,\u00a0<\/i>by Djuna Barnes; Sanitorium under the Sign of the Hourglass,\u00a0<\/i>by Bruno Schulz; The Recognitions, <\/i>by William Gaddis; The Rings of\u00a0<\/i>Saturn, <\/i>by W. G. Sebald; The Beetle Leg, <\/i>by John Hawkes). Often\u00a0the reason we read is in the hope of having these experiences of the\u00a0truly, unmistakably original.<\/p>\n

Paul Metcalf is one of these\u00a0original writers. A writer who had to follow his own path, at significant\u00a0cost to himself, over many decades, without a large following.\u00a0A writer who took the forms that were at hand and shook them up,\u00a0recast them, repurposed them, so that a traditional approach, after\u00a0beholding his model, seems almost ludicrously simplistic. A writer\u00a0of the new, the surprising, the arresting. <\/p>\n

\"genoafirsted\"<\/a>

First edition cover<\/p><\/div>\n

Genoa<\/a> <\/i>was first published in 1965 by the Jargon Society, a small press\u00a0associated with the Black Mountain school of American poetics. Its\u00a0story, to the extent that it has one, is not hard to relate: a certain\u00a0clubfooted, nonpracticing MD, Michael Mills, ponders his relationship\u00a0with his murderous and broken sibling, Carl. In the\u00a0process, he burnishes their lives and upbringing in a field of\u00a0exploratory quotation, not limited to extensive quotation from the\u00a0complete works of Herman Melville, a mulch of Christopher\u00a0Columbus\u2019s diaries, and even a brief stopover in the literary confines\u00a0of L. Ron Hubbard\u2019s Dianetics<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Michael Mills, it seems, is operating upon the action of memory in\u00a0such a way that memory is indistinguishable from textuality, from the\u00a0sense of history as a bricolage <\/i>of prior texts. Not only does this action\u00a0have relevance for what self is (brother Carl Mills, for example, may\u00a0or may not have read <\/i>the texts from which he quotes so voluminously),\u00a0but also for how the self supposes its own character. Dr. Mills, for\u00a0example, is heavily preoccupied with literature that exactly describes\u00a0how a human ovum is fertilized and becomes an embryo. His medical\u00a0practice exists entirely in quotation. So the question becomes:\u00a0does identity occur in the fleshy part of us, or in the textual part of us?<\/p>\n

The alert reader of Paul Metcalf will want to notice that he was\u00a0related to Melville, was in fact his great-grandson, and this linkage\u00a0has been somewhat fictionalized and retextualized by every major\u00a0writer who has written about Genoa\u2014<\/i>see, for example, Guy Davenport\u2019s\u00a0ravishing and passionate introduction to the Collected Works\u00a0<\/i>of Paul Metcalf <\/i>(Coffee House Press, 1996):<\/p>\n

\n

The boy Paul Metcalf remembers the discovery (by Raymond M.\u00a0Weaver) of the manuscript of Billy Budd <\/i>in the family attic. The\u00a0Metcalfs were reluctant to allow scholars to inspect Melville\u2019s\u00a0papers, and Paul\u2019s grandmother wouldn\u2019t have the name mentioned.\u00a0Melville had died forgotten as an author, and considered by his family\u00a0to have been a failure and a black sheep.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I am not as preoccupied with Metcalf as autobiographical generator\u00a0of the text as I am interested in Metcalf as effect <\/i>of quotation, as\u00a0Genoa <\/i>retroactively implies a Metcalf by first implying a Michael\u00a0Mills, and making this Michael Mills ex nihilo <\/i>from a palimpsestic\u00a0surface of explorations that first requires Columbus to venture into\u00a0the West Indies, and then requires Melville to set out on his own\u00a0youthful maritime adventures. The American expedition, according\u00a0to this braid of intertexts, is always additionally an adventure in language\u00a0and reading\u2014never the topographical exploration without\u00a0the ship\u2019s log. And as with the alchemists, this need for exploration,\u00a0while appearing outward, <\/i>shipboard, always ends as an interior\u00a0exploration of who we are.<\/p>\n

Like the strands of genetic material contained in the embryonic\u00a0human animal, this exploration, too, is always in the form of the\u00a0helix; it always involves revolutions and convolutions in which material\u00a0is reexplored and reexamined, and that is the action of Genoa\u00a0<\/i>itself. Over and over again, it returns to the later Columbus\u2014restless,\u00a0itching for more than he had already accomplished, and without\u00a0the imperial support he had earlier\u2014as well as the later Melville,\u00a0the writer after the novel\u00a0Moby Dick, <\/i>\u201cso much trash belonging to the\u00a0worst school of bedlam literature.\u201d That later Melville, writing epic\u00a0poetry in disrepute and then falling almost entirely silent, is like his\u00a0great-grandson, Paul Metcalf, the writer turned real-estate agent\u00a0(among his other jobs), the artist and adventurer adrift in the consideration\u00a0of consciousness and literature.<\/p>\n

Just when it appears impossible that Genoa <\/i>can go further in this\u00a0helixing of quotation and consciousness, with its multiple fonts and\u00a0its open-ended grammatical structures, sentences that are sometimes\u00a0picked up later and sometimes not; with its present action\u00a0(Mills upstairs in the attic, while the children watch television and\u00a0quarrel a floor beneath him); and its huge, unquenchable obsessions\u00a0with the past, it turns, in the last third, into something approaching\u00a0an old-fashioned narrative when settling, at last, upon the grim fate\u00a0of brother Carl. The prose in this portion of the novel is electrifying,\u00a0exceedingly painful, full of revelation, full of incident, in a kind\u00a0of storytelling that Metcalf would mostly expunge from the work\u00a0that followed Genoa. <\/i>But for this reader, this narrative passage roots\u00a0the ethereal intertextuality of Genoa <\/i>in a welcome dramatic crisis.\u00a0Guy Davenport is right to refer to it as a recasting of the Bobby\u00a0Greenlease kidnapping of 1953, and he is further correct to see it as\u00a0the inevitably violent end of the American narrative of exploration\u00a0and adventure. Michael Mills describes the crisis with his typically\u00a0lovely, plainspoken free verse:<\/p>\n

\n

We thought that, because of his mental record, he would\u00a0plead insanity, and all of us\u2014Mother, Linda, and I\u2014tried to\u00a0persuade him to it, and such a please was never made …\u00a0instead, he took a rigorous psychiatric examination, and\u00a0conned his way through it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There\u00a0are echoes in this fraternal dramatic crisis of the America that\u00a0we know well from Cormac McCarthy, the America of Blood Meridian,\u00a0<\/i>and thereby we recall the bloody reconstruction of Faulkner, but\u00a0for me the most potent pretext for the savage conclusion of Genoa <\/i>is\u00a0William Carlos Williams\u2019s epic of quotation and historical imagination\u00a0In the American Grain, <\/i>where the exploration of our continent,\u00a0and its founding as a nation, is never without bloodlust. That work\u00a0begins like this, with Erik the Red, settler of Greenland:<\/p>\n

\n

Rather the ice than their way: to take what is mine by single\u00a0strength, theirs by the crookedness of their law. But they have\u00a0marked me\u2014even to myself. Because I am not like them, I am evil.\u00a0I cannot get my hands on it: I, murderer, outlaw, outcast even from\u00a0Iceland. Because their way is the just way and my way\u2014the way of\u00a0kings and my father\u2014crosses them: weaklings holding together to\u00a0appear strong. But I am alone, though in Greenland.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Genoa\"<\/a>Where\u00a0does it come from, this Metcalf work of poeticized collage?\u00a0The William Carlos Williams of In the American Grain <\/i>and Paterson\u00a0<\/i>is certainly there, and the poetical points of reference are certainly\u00a0easier to come by: Pound\u2019s Cantos, <\/i>with its rich substratum of\u00a0Chinese poetry and untranslated lines from the Romance languages,\u00a0Louis Zukovsky\u2019s experimental later work, Charles\u00a0Reznikoff\u2019s Holocaust, <\/i>and of course Charles Olson\u2019s Maximus\u00a0<\/i>Poems.<\/i>Olson was known to Metcalf, and appears briefly therein.<\/p>\n

But to think of Metcalf only in a poetical context, which he himself\u00a0certainly did later in his career, understates the novelistic pleasures of Genoa, <\/i>and makes it seem more like a slightly acrid literary syrup\u00a0that is \u201cgood for you<\/i>,\u201d rather than a narrative of two brothers and the\u00a0way the literature of this continent shapes their lives. The question\u00a0of what this book is\u2014<\/i>whether it\u2019s even a book or something more\u00a0intimate, like an act of whispering, or one of those late nights when\u00a0a friend tells you everything <\/i>until the early hours of the morning\u2014is an open question. But let us not forbear to report that the act of\u00a0reading these pages is exceedingly pleasurable and full of event, full\u00a0of the kinds of insights into the real <\/i>of consciousness, if in fact there\u00a0is a real that is not an effect of literature itself. This book is not\u00a0work, but it is a work of joy.<\/p>\n

How do you read it then? Like all the books that have changed me\u00a0as a reader and made me think otherwise about the book as a vessel\u00a0for language, Genoa <\/i>can be read in ways that are like unto the novel,\u00a0in which you start at the beginning and move page by page to the\u00a0end. But you can also read Genoa <\/i>as a particularly rich act of Melvillean\u00a0scholarship by a person with abundant feeling for the work of\u00a0his great-grandfather. You can read it, too, as a work of scholarship\u00a0about American exploration narratives, a kind of Anatomy of Melancholy\u00a0<\/i>in which all is the lesson of the classics. And you can read it as\u00a0a work of repetition compulsion about what lineage is.\u00a0<\/i>Each of these\u00a0readings is coincident with the others, and each is available at any\u00a0time. In a way, Genoa <\/i>requires that you don\u2019t <\/i>start at the beginning\u00a0on one of your perusals of its chapters, but rather that you start in\u00a0the middle and let the languorous semiosis of compulsive quotation\u00a0be your guide.And it also requires that you read only for Columbus,\u00a0and that you skip the quotations entirely. It permits you license as a\u00a0reader, and judges you not at all.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0so Genoa <\/i>is also a work about <\/i>the act of reading. As the beginning,\u00a0the transition, into Metcalf \u2019s subsequent vanishing into quotation\u00a0and poetry, this makes sense, that the work should be about\u00a0reading, that it should locate the old debunked theory that ontogeny\u00a0<\/i>recapitulates phylogeny <\/i>in the stratum of citation, in which all novels\u00a0consist of a history of literature, each with its influence.<\/p>\n

So much happening in such an abbreviated space, a mere couple\u00a0hundred pages! More the length of a poem than the length of a\u00a0novel. And happening well before the period in which fiction this\u00a0innovative (I\u2019m thinking of the period between, for instance, Snow\u00a0White<\/i>, by Donald Barthelme, and The Age of Wire and String<\/i>, by Ben\u00a0Marcus) would have found a success d\u2019estime <\/i>simply for being new\u00a0and unpredictable. But that is exactly why this reissue gives us a\u00a0chance for an overdue reevaluation, and gives you the opportunity\u00a0to have the experience with this book that I was so happy to have,\u00a0the experience in which the history of literature, again, seems populated\u00a0by eruptions of a kind you never knew to expect, eruptions of\u00a0the unpredictable and new.<\/p>\n

This excerpt is from\u00a0<\/em>Genoa<\/a>\u00a0(Coffee House Press, 2015). Reprinted by permission. Copyright \u00a9 2015 Rick Moody.<\/em><\/p>\n

Rick Moody\u2019s novel <\/em>Hotels of North America is out this fall.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Metcalf\u2019s \u201cpoeticized collage\u201d reckons with his great-grandfather, Herman Melville. It is extremely rare, these days, to encounter something\u00a0that feels completely new. That is, most literary artifacts are pretty\u00a0easy to slot into one format or the other.What a gift then, what a\u00a0rare, beautiful turn of events when you stumble on a book that\u00a0seems to come from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":860,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[18951,3454,18952,18947,2051,1427,13828,18946,7278,4083,18950,18948,952,747,18945,18949,15537,3217,18953,13512,14508],"class_list":["post-88327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-billy-budd","tag-charles-olson","tag-charles-reznikoff","tag-coffee-house-press","tag-collage","tag-donald-barthelme","tag-experimental-fiction","tag-genoa","tag-guy-davenport","tag-herman-melville","tag-interiority","tag-introductions","tag-moby-dick","tag-novels","tag-paul-metcalf","tag-quotation","tag-reissues","tag-rick-moody","tag-the-jargon-society","tag-the-sixties","tag-whaling"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRick Moody on Paul Metcalf\u2019s Innovative Novel \u201cGenoa\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"So much happening in such an abbreviated space, a mere couple hundred pages!\" \/>\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\/07\/29\/on-paul-metcalfs-genoa\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On Paul Metcalf\u2019s Genoa by Rick Moody\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"July 29, 2015 \u2013 Metcalf\u2019s \u201cpoeticized collage\u201d reckons with his great-grandfather, Herman Melville. 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