SPECIAL FEATURE:
AN EXCERPT FROM
MEN AND APPARITIONS
BY LYNNE TILLMAN
The Rusty Toque | Special Feature | Novel Excerpt | August 3, 2018
Excerpt from Men and Apparitions
FAMILY VALUES: DOMESTIC DIS-INCLINATIONS
To a kid like me, everything promised freedom, later.
BUT Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: deluded white people. Father roved freely at night, and fully invaded on weekends. Mother was inner sanctum, the domain, to which Little Sister carried a genetic free pass, always, in every way. When she had something to say, even without knocking, she could walk right into Mother’s office. I was pissed off then, I’m still a little pissed off, about her getting special treatment. Little Sister’s “selective mutism” had a critical place, established a critical wall, in our house; if she felt moved to open up—total license. She had super-added privileges. Then a child grows up envying the sick and admiring illnesses’ dispensations, benefits, not their disadvantages. SELECTIVE MUTISM
The Parents researched the syndrome. It’s an anxiety disorder. Later, I researched it, and Hart, because he copies me. Selectively talking, a selective talker, otherwise mute at school, in groups. Websites promote a concept: “Ridding the silence.”
For a person with selective mutism, it’s anguishing, and I get it. But I learned to love her the way she was. I love silence, I mean it. Little Sister’s being, or image of being, and being there, pleased me, and so did her discretionary silence, which was evidence of a pathology; but I didn’t care then, and I’m not sure I care now, my lack of worry doesn’t hurt her or anyone, except me, maybe. One, I need quiet time, space. Two, lust for a self-possessed, long-distance-running woman. Three, lean toward peculiar love-troubles. And, because there’s no strict separation between “us” and “them,” that’s how I came naturally—haha—to observing my posse and me, guys late twenties to forty, and our attitudes toward women, ourselves “as men,” etc. THE CONTEMPORARY IS TEMPORARY
Ethnography isn’t predictive, but explanatory (theoretical).
Story-telling IS an ethnographer’s delight. We/they are greedy listeners collecting narratives. Ethnography and fiction both employ narratives, ethnographers hang their hats on lived lives. Fiction lets imagination happen. We who are not the story-tellers but listeners/readers are taught to restrain our fantasies, and hear what’s said, but part of the attack on cultural anthropology derives from the impossibility of turning off psychic processes. Since what’s before you isn’t stable, an observer can’t be, either, in his/her interpretations. Life is a relationship with other life. Humans are entirely dependent upon other humans, right? But you, I, must account for, and expect, disruptions, too. The observer is a temporary entity in relation to other temporary and ultimately inconsistent objects. One object might achieve balance with another, but generally that relationship won’t last. Is inconsistency a symptom or result? It doesn’t explain anything, even though it persists. Obviously, it’s a paradox, and there’s no para-doctor. Just kidding. Can life feel more temporary? On the verge of disappearing. Still, there are more and more ways to record it. Nothing stays the same, right. Change isn’t good or bad, mostly indifferent, because “life” doesn’t care about you living. A fact on the ground—an observable event, like a battle—is one agreed to have happened, though many interpretations of it follow, say, the massive fire-bombing of Dresden. (See Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.) A photograph is similar. Cameras don’t create pictures. They don’t assemble anything; a person places or manipulates objects for it. No wonder an image can’t reveal anything: there’s no under-image, no substratum, no palimpsest to be erased, no “buried stuff.” I’m digging in the forest for treasure. Feel me? Now, why shoot what’s already there, when a scene can be created, equally true and false, one that’s never existed. The mind can decide it’s there. In my mind-lab, here’s the motto: make what you want to believe. It’s my consciousness, even if it’s in the public culture. Because of the camera and photographs, consciousness changed. Or, put it this way: there could be a consciousness industry, because of photography. There could be pop culture. I am imaged, I can image, and I do not need to be literate about what a photograph is, or about the camera. Everyone can take pictures. Big deal. And, everyone can be made to believe we all see the same way, which we do not. What does a photograph do for human consciousness? What has photography done? With photography, is one more conscious of the world? Or, only, more self-conscious? We can be shown to others, shown others, other places; but can anyone avoid the projecting of self onto other images? Not mapping, but projecting. How does subjectivity distort viewing? The “self” changed with photography, or a new self emerged. That’s what some say. Yes, no, I don’t totally buy it, but it can’t have retarded its growth. FAMILY VALUES A BODY BEAUTIFUL
My parents were enlightened, relatively.
But the world happened in me, not them. KEEP OUT OF MY ROOM. I shared it with transformers. Bedazzling realities. We three kids were dragged to museums in Boston, New York, and other “significant cultural institutions.” Our pompous-art father deployed that vocabulary. They didn’t really have to drag me, more Bro Hart, who skulked around the vast rooms, not disguising his disdain, welling in his puny secrets. Little Sister drank in art like a wino at a bar, the perfect museum-goer—silent. In front of a Degas dancer, she resembled one; a pre-Raphaelite near a Rossetti, or an innocent child in a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph. In museums, noisy streets, Little Sister’s muteness added depth—her silence amended the need for speech, so I discerned vulgarity in talking just to talk, mouths mouthing sounds, because near this unique creature with her fount of quiet solitude, my mind expanded, and I heard what wasn’t being said, since Little Sister communicated beyond language’s capacity, and she could always reach something in me. I believed that. The portraits of beatific passivity wounded Mother; she’d stamp one foot, usually her right, and vanish, gone to another picture, unnoticed by me or Little Sister. Little Sister loved them, though, maybe because of their demanding femininity. I can’t know. I tried to look at them the way she or Mother might, because I sometimes wanted to be her, a strange envy that caused more family concern. Mother wasn’t masculine in obvious ways—short hair, short nails, mannish suits, not her style; though in the eighties she wore long jackets with boxy shoulders, all the women did. She was pretty, and is, and affected men, heads turned fast, and I saw it as a kid, her potent effect on them. Then I watched her watching them watching her. Way later, learning about the cinematic gaze in a film course that segued into cultural anthro courses, about “fixing” women with the camera’s male eye—Father’s, basically—I imagined butterflies pinned to a dorm bulletin board. Worse, pinned there, Mr. Petey, an endangered species. Back then, my parents worried about my normality, because little Zeke felt drawn to age-inappropriate weirdos. And wanted to be a weirdo. But I watched TV. I was captive to the game world, also conforming to trends, D&D and other stuff; I still did my schoolwork, because I’m compulsive and it was easy. Conforming is the operative concept—talking ’bout my gen-gen-generation; in the end my parents conceded “normal enough.” I tested everyone’s limits, that’s what they told me; I saw myself as a race car, and they were my track. I don’t have tracks, I never did that. I tested them, and me. I still test people, and they always fail. OK, I have my laughs. Yeah. I do whatever, whenever. But also I’m not spontaneous. Highly overrated, anyway, usually just a case of impulsivity or drugging. An adult or grown-up is an adaptation, a living set of learned behaviors for specific social settings, other contexts. I was coached, verbally, and shown displays of adulthood. I was verbally warned, harshly: Once you’re an adult, you will have to . . . If you don’t do this . . . It’s a natural process, developmental, maturation, the inevitable, natural unfolding of a species, but there’s a harshness, savagery, in its execution, its executives. What about the executive function, parenting? They say: When you’re an adult, you’ll see. You’ll be sorry. Just wait until you’re a father or a mother. I had to keep up appearances, so that when I outgrew my child-self or, colloquially, grew up, I acted like a grown-up. Some young mammals get dumped in the jungle to fend for themselves. Our species isn’t meant to but it does that also. Does the world happen in them, too? PICTURE PEOPLE PICTURE VALUES
Photography developed the way photographs first developed—over time. Many characters influenced its attenuated birth; given its emphasis on reproducibility (see Walter Benjamin), that seems appropriate. Depending upon which historian you read, one innovator will get more play than another: Henry Fox Talbot (“the art of fixing a shadow,” he wrote), England; Hippolyte Bayard, France; and John Herschel, who invented the word “photography” as well as the terms “negative” and “positive” for the new medium.
Now, it’s a cool medium. Thus would have spake 1960s visionary Marshall McLuhan, if he weren’t dead. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, if you failed at drawing, wanted to produce art, which meant imitating Nature or “capturing” it, the camera machine could do it. Henry Fox Talbot’s book of his salt print photographs, his invention of the calotype (talbotype), The Pencil of Nature, had a run of seventy copies, but those copies got into the right hands, let’s say. A camera was a bigger pencil, drawing Nature without a human hand. The machine displaced the hand, an art in and for the Industrial Revolution. The Pencil of Nature foresaw the coming of Walter Benjamin. Not a felix culpa, like Adam’s fall that necessitated Christ’s coming. Or maybe it was, if the development of the picture machine actually doomed us. But this we cannot know—Picture People can only surmise about the future, enmeshed in hope or despair about it. Capturing a scene, face, with the photographic apparatus, frosted an already gooey narcissistic cake. Humanity’s birthday cake, say. Pursuit of that capture, the urgency with which scientists and artists sought to stop time, proverbially, or keep it, a snapshot of a moment or scene, is not unlike any adventure or journey, the seeking of spices in India or tea from China. Human beings often get what they want, as a species, even if not as individuals; they strive, invent it. Failures are many, and history records species’ successes; these are rewarded. People wanted to fly, they did; reach the Moon; have babies outside the uterus. To some extent, people construct their realities, but unlike other mammals they/individual members are regularly dissatisfied or, worse, miserable, and so humans invented abstract tools—religion, say—to persuade themselves that they might be, will be, or can be happy, if not now, tomorrow. Later, in the invention of an after-life. FAMILY DEVALUES
Sad people become artists, mostly sad ones, Aunt Clarissa says, because they can’t forget, and they make up worlds to suit their sad memories, but they can’t get it right, so they keep creating. That’s her version of creativity.
Writers worry about losing what people said, and how it happened; photographers worry about losing how it looked, I tell her. Clarissa knows it all (she’s Mother’s only sib, plus older): If you have a happy childhood, you don’t become an artist. But what if it’s too happy, I ask, so you always want to go back there; and that makes you unhappy, too, because it’s totally gone. That’s when you start to write, she says, without a glance, but you start a little late and that creates depression. In my humblie, artists’ explanations are often self-serving, displaying a “self-satisfying sadness” (my term). Aunt Clarissa is a passivist, takes life lying down, never been on a march, would never go near one, not even a parade, couldn’t find the heart or the right shoes. “Public spectacles,” Clarissa says, “are hell to us sensitive people.” So, Mother’s ancestors were constitutive of her self-image. She inclines toward them, as in anaclisis, or choice of a love or erotic object “on the basis of a resemblance to early childhood protective and parental figures,” which might lead you to suspect my mother favored her actual parents, but no. Mother chose her image or constructed it, and “loved” on the basis of dead people. I don’t know how Father fit as a love object. Maybe as a disinclination, or recidivist throwback. My father’s genealogy was sketchy, his people wandering to America from different parts of Europe: his mother, English, Scotch; father, Russian-Jewish, Spanish; his grandparents had scattered among nations and religions: Catholics, Protestants, converts from Judaism, arriving in the mid to late 1800s. Weekdays, my father returned home from Boston, where he performed his corporate lawyering, poured himself a shot of Johnny Walker Black, no rocks, took the newspaper off the coffee table (Noguchi, right), and would walk to one of the plate-glass picture windows. Did the big view enlarge our sense of the world or just our sense of ourselves? If nice out, he’d continue to the patio, the adult sector of the backyard, and sit or lie down, start at the lead column, drink, and read every page but the women’s page. Bad weather, too cold or hot, he’d lie down indoors, overwhelming the Corbusier lounge chair. You couldn’t bother him, so I’d watch his head moving up and down, side to side, then it’d wobble. Slug, wobble, slug. He pretty much held his liquor, pretty much, but when he read, his cheeks flamed and darkened, and sometimes he fell asleep. I could look at him then, stare. He looked dead, and it made me feel peaceful. Mother thinks she is America. Her family was distantly related to those who arrived on the Mayflower. With the criminals, religious crackpots, I say. You know, Mother, we inherited their problems. Wow, she gets pissed. We were poets, she says. Feminists, abolitionists, politicians, she says. Her people knew or met the Henry James crowd, etc. When she came of age, Mother let family privilege go, which was part of her privilege. The way I’d put it, she practiced a type of ancestor worship, and it’s as if, from birth, she knew herself as an image; her relatives’ images suffused her own. Her family’s house was decorated with ancestral portraits by respectable English and American painters and, later on, nineteenth-century photographers. Mother was constant, with her bad days, sure, but mostly solid like a pet rock (kidding), plus, she was the Stark family photographer until I weighed in, sort of. She gave me a cool little camera for my eighth birthday. In 1982, Kodak launched disc photography, the easy to use, “decision-free” cameras built around a rotating disc of film. She bought me one from that line. It was unfussy, she said. Primitive now but I loved my little guy. I was more interested in bugs and rockets then. Mother owned a Zeiss Ikon, and my father, when he was young, bought himself one of the first Polaroid 100 series cameras. Don’t you forget it. Most of the family portraits hung on the walls at Aunt Clarissa’s house—we had fewer walls—and they got fixed in my mind. The ancestors were sometimes mentioned as though hanging out with us. One looked down, when we ate, Henry Adams shot by his wife, Clover, a reproduction of one of her prints. Even Clarissa didn’t have any originals by Clover. Mother’s reverence for the dead was manifested in their faces on our walls. These characters couldn’t be known, but they were our familiars, their images sacred. So they became models, idols, icons. The dead have a real presence in my life. I could say, and will, I was driven INTO pictures. Bro Hart got steered into cutting up dead people, looking for diseased tissue. Father had inherited few family photographs, so he suffered from major “image-envy.” There is a compelling one, though, of his father, my grandfather, Edward (never met him). He married late; in his forties had Father. Grandfather Stark is pictured with an unknown woman. He’s not smiling at but challenging the photographer; his stance rakish, an arm around the woman as if she were a possession. He’s claiming ownership. His other hand rests on his hip, which juts out, and suggests arrogance, cockiness, or indifference. Maybe impatience. The woman, whoever she is, looks pleased. 
This is my father’s father. I admit: my curiosity about others must be partly protective. Sometimes even paranoid. If I know your habits and turn of mind, let’s say, I know what to expect, and what might happen, to me. If I can recognize myself in others, I can believe I am safe; if I don’t see myself in them, I have less predictive capability, less power, and more vulnerability. I filter my narrative, along with and through others. I know when to talk the talk, and not. Our species is adaptable. Mostly, I know when I’m blowing smoke. Some, like me, use self-denigration as a way to rise up. But when your story goes passive, I mean, when it’s changed ON you, that’s a whole different condition: then you’re not the agent of your story. You may be enslaved to another, and, definitely, not in control. But if you change your bio, you invent another character. Cool. Then you have to remember what’s been added or deleted. Keep those changes in mind all the time, including the consequences—new dates and years for every incident in life—that occur from the switches. (Never do this if you’re bad at simple math.) There’s a reason great liars are sociopaths, they believe their lies, lie smoothly, lies and truths don’t have borders. You have to be rational about your irrational choices, have second sight, which pertains also to photography. Call the frustrating effort to document, or “just the facts,” “de-fictionalizing.” |
Men and Apparitions
by Lynne Tillman
Soft Skull Press, 2018
Description from Soft Skull Press
The time is now, and Ezekiel Hooper Stark is thirty-eight. He’s a cultural anthropologist, an ethnographer of family photographs, a wry speculator about images. From childhood, his own family’s idiosyncrasies, perversities, and pathologies propel Zeke, until love lost sends him spiraling out of control in Europe. Back in the U.S.A., he finds unexpected solace in the image of a notable nineteenth-century relative, Clover Hooper Adams. Zeke embarks on a project, MEN IN QUOTES, focusing his anthropological lens on his own kind: the “New Man,” born under the sign of feminism. All the old models of masculinity are broken. How are you different from your father? Zeke asks his male subjects. What do you expect from women? What does Zeke expect from himself? And what will the reader expect of Zeke—is he a Don Quixote, Holden Caulfield, Underground Man, or Stranger?
Kaleidoscopic and encyclopedic, comic, tragic, and philosophical, Men and Apparitions showcases Lynne Tillman not only as a brilliantly original novelist but also as one of our most prominent contemporary thinkers on art, culture, and society.
by Lynne Tillman
Soft Skull Press, 2018
Description from Soft Skull Press
The time is now, and Ezekiel Hooper Stark is thirty-eight. He’s a cultural anthropologist, an ethnographer of family photographs, a wry speculator about images. From childhood, his own family’s idiosyncrasies, perversities, and pathologies propel Zeke, until love lost sends him spiraling out of control in Europe. Back in the U.S.A., he finds unexpected solace in the image of a notable nineteenth-century relative, Clover Hooper Adams. Zeke embarks on a project, MEN IN QUOTES, focusing his anthropological lens on his own kind: the “New Man,” born under the sign of feminism. All the old models of masculinity are broken. How are you different from your father? Zeke asks his male subjects. What do you expect from women? What does Zeke expect from himself? And what will the reader expect of Zeke—is he a Don Quixote, Holden Caulfield, Underground Man, or Stranger?
Kaleidoscopic and encyclopedic, comic, tragic, and philosophical, Men and Apparitions showcases Lynne Tillman not only as a brilliantly original novelist but also as one of our most prominent contemporary thinkers on art, culture, and society.
Excerpted from Men and Apparitions, copyright © 2018 by Lynne Tillman
Reproduced with permission from Soft Skull Press.
Reproduced with permission from Soft Skull Press.
LYNNE TILLMAN writes novels, short stories, and nonfiction. Her novel No Lease on Life was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, and her essay collection What Would Lynne Tillman Do? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Tillman’s writing appears often in artists’ books and museum catalogs, including, most recently, those of Raymond Pettibon, Joan Jonas, Cindy Sherman, and Carroll Dunham. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation grant for arts writing, and is a Professor/Writer-in-Residence at the University of Albany. She also teaches in New York City’s School of Visual Arts, in its Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program. She lives in Manhattan with bass player David Hofstra.
