5.0 out of 5 stars
Eros / Minefield, December 3, 2000
In his "Letter to the Shade of Hemingway Regarding the Current
State of Fiction," Harold Jaffe, of _Fiction International_ fame,
admits, "[T]he dominant culture's condom sheathes us all from
head to foot and folds inwards to coat our brain stem, vulva, cock and
balls and viscera." _Eros: Anti-Eros_ is an innovative book of
fictions where Jaffe effectively contests "the society of the
spectacle"(Debord), its penetration into our culture's most
intimate reaches.
In "Eros / Calvin Klein," Jaffe turns an
otherwise familiar scene into something previously unseen. The very
rhythm of the opening passage transports the listener lickety-split
"high above the moiling city," to the
"museum-corp-penthouse," where the distant air-raids are
further muffled by Meret Oppenheim's fur and deodorized by Christian
Dior's perfume. The setting and the props lend the encounter their
framed-art features, while the pauses in the dialogue create a
trance-lucent screen around the speakers. These pauses are very loaded
with diversions of all sorts, which allow the "guerrilla
writer" to smuggle some explosive ingredients: state terrorism,
European condescension (Euros / Lesser-Euros) and anti-communism,
American corporate expansion, and social sores.
While the diversions
carry the reader around, the woman and the man behind the
trance-lucent screen are moving in and out of focus. Their bodily
intercourse denied, the couple end up secretly
interchanging... commodities--the triumph of an empty fibrous form
over the live and vibrant content--the triumph of the
absurd.
"Eros / Medical Waste" is a pastiche of a
B-movie-like romantic love story, but this one looks freshly cut--like
Sandi/Santos after the radical surgery. The author effectively uses
the narrative space; how much he manages to communicate to his readers
while following the young men around Manhattan. The world, as
presented by Jaffe, seems to have undergone some radical surgery, and
its body cannot recover from this mutilation; rockefellers have
castrated the Third World cultures and exhibit the cut-outs from their
private collections in museums; hypodermic needles have replaced
coniferous ones under the trees in parks--everything is in different
stages of denaturing.
When Sandi/Santos meets Jean-Marc in New York
City, s/he is a pre-op transsexual; a few months later, it is she whom
Jean-Marc rushes to meet at Paris International Airport. The author
offers a few pastiche endings of the story: if the nature is
dismembered so radically, it doesn't really matter how one will
re-assemble the pieces.
The theme of the rape of nature, including
human, continues in "Eros / Xerox." In fact, nothing seems
alive in this story's landscape, even the wilderness. Everything is a
copy of a copy, colourised or not: the billboards, the scenes of
institutional brutality, the human figures outside the motel window,
the road signs that lead nowhere--everything is a simulacrum, so the
couple finally colourise their lives in that void, too--they colour
them red; such world is more than static--it is metastatic, and the
author points at the malignant source with the calm confidence of a
veteran forensic: "Whose government?" he
shrugs.
Arguably, one of Harold Jaffe's signature techniques is the
so-called unsituated dialogue. This strategy is utilized in the
tripartite piece "Eros / Exxon." In the first section,
"Catechism," one of the speakers proposes delirium as an
alternative to the limitations of "real response." The other
speaker, however, counters delirious withdrawal with op[tim/
portun]istic rhetoric in an attempt to convert his "not-exactly
pal" to social transformation, which makes his addressee look
like a pre-op trans-social; Jaffe shows explicitly human body as a
commodity of successful social mimicry.
In the other two sections,
"Texas" and "Safe Sex," Jaffe acts so real-like as
if his mentor in the method studies was Stanislavsky himself. Using
the subversive homeopathic strategy, Jaffe ridicules Texamerican
chauvinism from within.
An engaging mixture of extrapolation,
pastiche, and unsituated dialogue serve the author to mock a
conspiracy-theory discourse that traditionally blames masons or
techno- or pluto- or democrats for all kinds of social dysfunction and
for concealment of certain knowledge from which all humankind would
have otherwise benefited: "The biblical Essenes. I guess they
were, like, proto-hippies during the time of Jesus. They'd made the
discovery... Only they were real secretive about it, so the
information never really got public." The absurdity of this
palaver is obvious; what public announcement does one need to discover
in his/her anatomy a hole big enough to smuggle a Havana? The
narrator of "Eros / Talk Dirty" possesses a litmus quality;
when she contacts an acid, she turns red, while a touch of an alkali
makes her blue; otherwise, she is a white thirty-three-year-old. In
the acid sixties, "before AIDS, before herpes simplex, before
chlamydia," she was red-hot. Recently, she's got the blues
because the trend wind under the stars-and-stripes has dramatically
changed. In fact, the political barometer shows "Fair." She
remembers a one-night stand with a Rob, from the same Republican
milieu. Prior to their lovemaking, they attend a wedding anniversary
of the Doles, who are not even present; their participation is
mediated via a videotape. What startles our hippie-turned-yuppie is:
"while we were making love, he was really talking to me, asking
me things: 'Does this get you hot?'" She ends up regarding his
desire as obscene: "[M]y apparent shyness whetted his
pornographic appetite." It is amazing that she does not consider
her orgies and sexually kinky escapades as anything out of the
ordinary, but passion communicated to her through her partner's words
appalls her as utterly perverted. In the final lines of her story she
concludes, "If I were to 'talk dirty' with anyone--and I'm not
saying I would or could under any circumstances--it would certainly
not be with a casual lover, but with Brad, my husband and closest
friend."
Jaffe published Eros, Anti-Eros the same year as his
"Guerrilla Writing": "The ... institutional network is
not seamless. Guerrilla art finds a seam, plants a mine, slips
away." _Eros, Anti-Eros_ is a minefield with a sign at its gates:
"Hey, babe, take a walk on a wild side."
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