Aufgabe 7 Brian Whitener

Danielle Dutton’s Attempts at a Life Brian Whitener Attempts at a Life Tarpaulin Sky 2007 isbn: 978-0-9779019-3-7 $14 us

Danielle Dutton’s first book Attempts at a Life, just out from Tarpaulin Sky, is a fascinating debut, one that signals a writer whose work is worth following (apparently a second book, Sprawl, is forthcoming from Clear Cut). The book is comprised of 17 short pieces – concentrated, disarming novelettes – that frequently take classic literary works and/or their language as a starting or jumping off point, such as in “Portrait of a Lady” where Isabel Archer becomes: “I stood on the battlefield with what I thought was a gun in my hand, but it turned out to be a bright green bird. Thankfully, an opportunity arose to chart well-charted republics. I sailed east in front of viewers.” It’s neither Acker or Barthelme, rather these pieces inhabit their sources, and, in opening them up, chart a narrative territory triangulated between New Narrative, prose poetry, and the postmodern novel – without every fully becoming any of these. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book’s narrative strategy is the degree to which it embraces the 19th-century novel’s relationship to the reader as a body to be affected; for the majority of these pieces exhibit a concern with producing effects in the reader, using different narrative speeds and tonalities to turn the reading experience into a physical one. Felt, in the following, as a kind of dizzying pleasure at the final line’s narrative closure, however false: Incidentally, when I mention Spinoza, she is here with me, but when I mention broccoli, broccoli is here instead. In this way, the movement of this story reminds me of what it was like to be read to as a child, especially when falling asleep, how there would seem to be beside me first a new blue jacket, then a wayward rabbit, an angry gardener, a pot of tea, one by one taking shape on the pillow beside me. Two years passed (after Russia), and quite unexpectedly, I ran into Mikhail again. (53)

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These pieces encourage the identification of the reader with the speaking I and the immersion of the reader in the flow of the text, and do so to great effect. However, it is the manner in which the pieces take up their examination of subjectivity that is the most fantastic part of this book. That is to say, this book is not an exploration of identity but rather of subjectivity, which can be seen in its emphasis on sex instead of on gender. Moreover, it concerns potentiality, not possibility; these are not cartographies of possible worlds, rather they depict beings of anarchic lushness, subjectivities that overflow with complications (which, absurdly, brings the writing close to Flarf and its exploration of similar territory). While constructions of subjectivity in current popular culture frequently take the form of false collectivity (“I am Africa,” We Are Marshall), Dutton does not subsume difference, she multiplies it, turning it weird, wonderful: Now I’m a horse, a gun, an ebb. I’m listening for clues to their code. My research indicates that nearly every thinking person can come up with a slogan. What Has Been Done to Death Will Be Done Again. With my zillions of statistics I could attract the eye of any modern scholar, but I discard their paradise like chewing gum. I could have sworn there was something to this fight, something to do with the openness of the field. I walked many miles to get here, the dead middle of a summer afternoon. (17) In it, I encounter myself on every page, but the me I meet is never the me I remember. It’s me but me a misanthropic barber, me a German, a werewolf; or it’s me but me advancing, me in slippers, me alone under a great grey sky. (54) It is also a strange book, as the piece “Two Strange Stories” would suggest. But is it estranging or making strange? My sense is that Attempts at a Life is neither; and while the book does have a complicated relationship to modernism, and to the devices and desires of modernist writing, I think the strange it posits is us. To ask, now, Who are we? – it’s a question whose only response is the strange, which is itself no answer, we are in between, multiple, ahistorical, post-historical, and always-already historicized. One writes then, just planting “things until there’s no time to be afraid” (9).

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