At some point between Jeff Session’s and Rex Tillerson’s confirmation charades and the preliminary votes to gut the ACA (we finally got our death panel!), after a night of informal group therapy/ranting with some beloved friends, I found myself lying on their kitchen floor, asking sincerely and hopelessly the question so many of us have been asking lately: what the fuck do we do? We’re powerless in so many ways now. Innocent people are going to die just from the ACA repeal alone.
I’m still committed to pragmatic action (keep calling your reps! sign up for Wall of Us!), but I am also overwhelmed. This is of course the intention of the GOP; you don’t rush confirmation hearings and push to dismantle protective legislation like this unless you’re trying to suppress dissent by opening all these fronts at once. Knowing this doesn’t make it easier to cope.
My kitchen floor breakdown happened in Boston. I also spent a lot of time in bookstores there, and I realized at some point while packing a suitcase to go back to the Midwest that I have been building my own protective wall out of books, as I’ve always been wont to do.
These are my recent purchases:
In the immediate aftermath I wanted the planning books, the ones with clues about effective organization. But I’m in a crying-on-the-kitchen-floor phase right now, and I want the ones that remind me of how many times authoritarianism has won, and how people kept living anyway (when they weren’t murdered). The ones that acknowledge how many losses we’re going to have to deal with. The ones that remind us that we’re not exceptional and our country has in fact created this same situation in other countries time and again. The Sympathizer is one of these books; it wrecked me in so many ways. I don’t know how to talk about it coherently yet. I haven’t finished Going to the Dogs (about life in Weimar Germany), but it’s giving me an odd sort of comfort, especially in the author’s preface to the 1950 edition, where Kästner describes the rise of the Nazi party:
“People ran to follow the Pied Pipers, following them right into the abyss in which we now find ourselves, more dead than alive, and in which we try to make ourselves comfortable, as if nothing had happened.
The present book … is no poetic photo album, but a satire. It does not describe what things were like; it exaggerates them. The moralist holds up not a mirror, but a distorting mirror to his age. Caricature, a legitimate artistic mode, is the furthest he can go. If that doesn’t help nothing will. It is not unusual that nothing should help, nor was it then. But it would be unusual if the moralist were to be discouraged by this fact. His traditional task is the defense of lost causes. He fulfills it as best he may. His motto today is as it has always been: to fight on not withstanding!”
The Sympathizer ends in a somewhat similar place, actually:
“We remain that most hopeful of creatures, a revolutionary in search of a revolution, although we will not dispute being called a dreamer doped by an illusion. . . . We cannot be alone! Thousands more must be staring into darkness like us, gripped by scandalous thoughts, extravagant hopes and forbidden plots. We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.”
I feel hopeless about the immediate future but I still believe in fighting on notwithstanding for our scandalous thoughts and extravagant hopes. A way out of this mess doesn’t exist if we can’t imagine it into existence.
But we also can’t live through this without mourning what we’ve already lost and what we’re going to lose. I find myself circling back again and again lately to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel’s cult classic album, in my ongoing attempt to reconcile loss and hope. In the Aeroplane is a concept album, a sort of palimpsestic narrative about an adolescent boy in the late nineties falling in love with Anne Frank (as much as it’s about anything – the lyrics are famously opaque and the narrative logic isn’t exactly linear). The songs seem to be about young love, sex, family trauma, and the Holocaust. They’re also about art’s ability to reanimate the dead and to help the living keep living. (In all of these themes it reminds me quite a bit of H.D.’s epic World War II poem Trilogy, another useful piece for coping with the persistence of human cruelty and our seeming inability to remember the lessons of the past.)
I think part of what I find comforting about this album is the way it insists on the presence of the past, both as inescapable burden and as an incitement to ethical action and imaginative creation. Historical traumas aren’t described at a remove – they’re part of the fabric of life in the present. “Two Headed Boy,” for instance, overlays an erotic encounter (Anne and Peter in their hiding place? the contemporary adolescent boy and an imagined Anne? the boy and one of his contemporaries?) with bodies in the Nazi death camps:
We will take off our clothes
And they’ll be placing fingers through the notches in your spine
And when all is breaking
Everything that you could keep inside
Now your eyes ain’t moving
Now they just lay there in their climb
The eroticism of these lyrics – taking off our clothes, exploring the shape of a body, the flickering image of eyes rolling back in an orgasmic moment – is inseparable from the absolute horror of the past – the starving body that makes notches in a spine visible, the struggle to hold on to something internally while being slowly murdered, the eyes that can no longer move, the inevitability of becoming another body cast aside. It’s a grotesque pairing, but it’s also beautiful in its desire to breathe life back into the lost and in its will to look fully at historical suffering and to count it part of our present experience.
This is also an album that understands the complications of giving voice to the dead in a particularly nuanced way. Apostrophe is the technical term for speaking directly to a dead person; Barbara Johnson describes apostrophe as “a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness” (30). In the Aeroplane flirts with and thematizes but never exactly uses apostrophe in a sustained way. The title track, for instance, describes the voice of a dead girl but does not throw words into her mouth; she is left present and absent, inescapable but untouchable. The desire to reanimate her makes the song, but the song stops short of presuming it can speak for her:
What a curious life we have found here tonight
There is music that sounds from the street
There are lights in the clouds
Anna’s ghost all around
Hear her voice as it’s rolling and ringing through me
Soft and sweet
How the notes all bend and reach above the trees
The usual direction of apostrophe is reversed – Anna’s/Anne’s ghost voice moves through the living speaker, making him into the ventriloquist’s dummy. And yet we don’t hear what she says through him, just that it sounds “soft and sweet.” It’s a dream of contact that can’t exist; the words we want to hear are left just out of reach. Leaving the content of Anna’s words a mystery is a beautiful solution to a literary problem: even if we imagine Anne Frank’s actual words here, some of which we have access to, being channeled through the living speaker, it is still the living speaker’s mouth that frames the words. We can’t hear Anne speak any longer, no matter how closely we listen. The next verse takes up this problem:
Now how I remember you
How I would push my fingers through
Your mouth to make those muscles move
That made your voice so smooth and sweet
This verse foregrounds the necessary violence in speaking for an absent other. It makes the figure of apostrophe fleshy and grotesque, describing the speaker as the ventriloquist who forces a corpse’s muscles to move through physical manipulation. It notes the fiction of speech at work here – the muscles in the corpse once made its voice smooth and sweet, but they don’t now. Now it is impossible for that murdered voice to be heard except through a brutal and clumsy approximation of what it once was.
In the Aeroplane’s simultaneous desire for and distrust of sustained apostrophe links it to Diana Fuss’s discussion of what she calls “historical corpse poems.” Fuss argues that twentieth-century literature is filled with poems in which corpses speak, but that,
the Holocaust appears to mark the historical limit beyond which the corpse poem hesitates to venture. The point is clear: after the unthinkable event of genocide, no fiction of the living dead can possibly be sustained. … The few Holocaust poets who do employ the voice of the dead tend to adopt neither an individual nor a collective persona but a unique voice that is both at once. “‘I am I’ – /thousands of slaughtered I’s,” Jacob Glatstein declares in a poem that reveals not the poet’s desire to revive the dead but rather his own profound identification with the dead. Recent trauma theory reminds us that one might survive an unthinkable atrocity like the Holocaust and yet still not feel alive. (Fuss 64-65)
Anne Frank becomes Anna in “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” doubling her presence, making us think of a specific individual and of the mass of individuals simultaneously (how many individual Anne’s and Anna’s died in the camps collectively?). The song participates in the necessarily confused subjectivity of the Holocaust corpse poem. It also speaks to a belated survivor’s guilt – the guilt of one who wasn’t alive in 1945 but who recognizes that this is due to the simple accident of birth; the final line of the song is “Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all.” Why is the speaker here to imagine Anne’s voice? How can he do that, and how can he not?
Fuss argues that a poet who attempts to write corpse poems about the Holocaust “tentatively seeks to reverse the depersonalization of mass murder by lending to the unmourned victims of genocide his own individual voice. These singular poems do not presume to resurrect the dead, only to memorialize them from the respectful position of writers confronting the enigma of their own uncertain survivals” (65). This is the delicate project at work in “Two Headed Boy Pt. 2,” where the speaker acknowledges the need and the impossibility of giving voice, and the way this act is and is not for the dead:
And in my dreams you’re alive and you’re crying
As your mouth moves in mine, soft and sweet
Rings of flowers ‘round your eyes
And I’ll love you for the rest of your life when you’re ready
The necrophiliac insistence on eroticizing the ventriloquism of apostrophe – now it’s not just words that move through the dead girl’s mouth, but also the male speaker’s body – is both disturbing and yet part of the impossible project of memorialization. Fuss distinguishes “political corpse poems” from “historical corpse poems,” but these are in many ways one and the same. Fuss notes that,
[i]n political killings, the corpse is intended to function as a sign – a message (and most often a warning) to the living. … Political corpses are killed simply to make a point; deprived of subjective voice, these corpses do not so much convey a political message as become the message. The violent reduction of a person to a sign literally kills the messenger, stripping the body that remains of any meaning of its own. By giving voice to the cadaver, political corpse poems belatedly seek to undo this semiotic violence by multiplying the ways in which the dead body might signify and by complicating the terms of both its utterance and its address. These poems ventriloquize corpses not to perpetrate upon the dead another kind of profanation but to make manifest the violence of turning any physical body into a form of political speech. (61)
Anne Frank has of course become one of the most overdetermined symbols of the Holocaust. The potentially profane act of imagining an erotic encounter with her in this song becomes a way to work against the “violent reduction of a person to a sign”; Anne Frank the symbol becomes Anne Frank the individual, engaged in a radically singular and personal experience. It’s an invasive imaginative act, but it’s also a way to de-signify her death and to return her to an imagined personhood that exists apart from or in spite of state violence. Like so many of the images in these songs, it’s awful and gorgeous, heartbreaking and stomach-turning. It succeeds and it fails in its desire to reanimate the dead and to somehow make individual deaths both less symbolic and even more meaningful.
Fuss argues that “[h]istorical corpse poems offset the cultural process of forgetting with the literary work of remembering” and “invent[t] paradoxical new grammars to articulate the terrifying new realities of modern death” (66-67). As part of this tradition, the songs of In the Aeroplane invite us to remember as part of a way to resist future acts of violence. In “Holland, 1945,” Jeff Mangum sings,
And here’s where your mother sleeps
And here is the room where your brothers were born
Indentions in the sheets
Where their bodies once moved but don’t move anymore
And it’s so sad to see the world agree
That they’d rather see their faces fill with flies
All when I’d want to keep white roses in their eyes
We are not currently facing anything like the scale of death we faced at midcentury. But it’s hard not to think of that moment now, as our elected officials look their constituents in the face and tell them they would rather let those constituents die than support the ACA. I don’t know how to deal with people who’d “rather see their faces fill with flies.” I only know how to keep the dream of white roses alive, however fleetingly and imperfectly. And so I put In the Aeroplane on one more time and get ready to march and protest and call and write…
Works Cited
Diana Fuss. Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy. Duke University Press, 2013.
Barbara Johnson. “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion.” Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 28-47. JSTOR.