Kirpal Gordon: Reading the "Shoals" and "Petroglyphs" section of Barbarous Radiates caused me to reflect on the Kirkus Review description: "A poetry of celestial mechanics, mysteries that are still, and forever, unfolding." This sense of co-participating with unfolding mystery might also be said of your fiction, yes?
Eric Basso: Also my plays and even, to a certain extent, my literary and art criticism. My work, in general, avoids the timely in favor of the timeless. For me, it's an exploration of both the possible and the impossible. The language of my poetry is fairly simple. There's also the dark side, which is very dark with me, a theme that runs — or, rather, zigzags — through most of my work: the sense that a story, novel, poem or play is completed by the very thing that destroys it. So, that "unfolding mystery" ultimately perishes before it can be solved or explained. A short, concrete illustration of this would be the climax of my drama trilogy, The Golem Triptych. The Creature, as the Golem is called, demands its own death because its existence as a living (but not human) being is a blasphemy of sacred law. The trilogy ends with the fall of Prague, a tragic dissolution, a desolation.
KG: There's also a sense that you are "inventing" your predecessors. In a 1971 lecture Borges gave in London, just published by Obscure Publications, he states that a writer of importance creates his own forerunners. For example, he sees Kafka in Hawthorne's "Wakefield," the story of a man who goes into voluntary loneliness, and in Melville's "Bartleby," a tale Borges argues is "far more Kafka than Kafka perhaps."
EB: Ah, Bartleby. One of my American lit professors didn't agree with me that the more alarming figure in the story is Bartleby's employer, who seems paralyzed to take action by simply firing him. And it was Kafka's The Castle that brought me to this conclusion. The Castle officials are terrified of the so-called land surveyor, K., who, far from being a passive "victim" is the aggressor, in much the same way Bartleby was before him.
KG: I'm reminded of Mike Begnall's review of your book of essays, Decompositions, in which he wrote, "Basso occasionally verges into the philosophical, as in his discussion of Mallarmé's courting of 'Void': 'Thus we have the conscious mind, always at one remove from its core of being, able to conceive an idea of — but unable to know — itself, and, by such ignorance, reducing all notions of personal identity (which implies consistency) to a nebulous comedy of ever-changing masks.' But it is not always this . . . rarefied, and of course it was Mallarmél who became obsessed with nullity before his descendant Basso." As if to further a response to the Begnall review (which had not yet been written), Marie-José Fortis in 1994 wrote in Collages & Bricolages, "Is The Golem Triptych confusing? Not if you let yourself in on the phantasmal world of reality, or into the reality of dreams/nightmares; not if you defy time conventions and decide to travel forward into the past, trying to grasp . . . 'the memory of the future.'"
EB: I'd call my proposition "anti-philosophical." I prefer that term because some have called the essays "existential." Maybe they were thinking of Sartre's incomprehensible Being and Nothingness. But, in The Golem Triptych, we do travel forward from the 20th century to the turn of the 17th century, and enter "the memory of the future." And in my play, The Sabattier Effect, the memory of a past the characters can no longer control threatens to engulf and annihilate an already-ambiguous present. I like presenting ambiguous situations. It seems to me a great part of our inner and outer lives are ambiguous, if were honest about it. Maybe I'm a realist, in that respect.
KG: Do you think some would find your essays incomprehensible?
EB: I'm certain of that. But they're really studies of the incomprehensible. Mike Begnall's terminology might differ a little from mine, but he gets it, as does Marie-José Fortis by focusing on "the memory of the future," where conventional notions of time and space can fall like a veil from our eyes. Did I just use a simile or a metaphor?
KG: Bettina L. Knapp, author of Theatre and Alchemy, wrote: ". . . the atemporal time scheme used by Basso serves to integrate past modalities into contemporary actualities. Gone is the world of pseudo certainties relied upon by many today to keep body and soul afloat. Gone as well is the dividing line between life and death; conscious and unconscious; dream and reality. Instead, presides the infinite unknown with all of its wondrous and terrifying possibilities — both human and divine." There's an invocational quality running through The Golem Triptych as well. There's the golem, for sure, with a four-letter Hebraic word emet (truth) marked on his forehead, but erase the first letter and it's met (death). The gaining or erasing a letter is fascinatingly paralleled in the human characters as they "undie" by embodying new roles and names throughout the trilogy. One thinks of William Butler Yeats' grand scheme in A Vision with its widening gyres and ever-turning phases. There are other echoes and threads: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," a story in which a mesmerist hypnotizes a dying man at the instant of his death and keeps him in a trance, Borges' elliptical "The Circular Ruins," the flavor of Marlowe's Dr Faustus in your blank verse, Carl Jung's Red Book of psychic visitations from mytho-historic personae and Nietzsche's Cycle of Eternal Return mixed up with historical events like the Black Death that plagued Prague under Emperor Rudolf II. While enfleshing a non-Christian identity of self, one outside the wrathful reach of a jealous theocrat, you've woven in a web of rarified Renaissance elements charged with Faustian energy: necromancy, astronomy, alchemy, sexual bewitchment, magic and mirrors to make a trilogy scary and hilarious at the same time.
EB: When Stephen-Paul Martin wrote about the Tryptych in his piece, "Bashing the Mainstream," he pointed out that, as the characters change in identity from play to play, their previous identities lend a strange, unexpected depth of complexity to the later identities they assume. In the third play [The Fall of Prague], the mob boss, Canamine, of the second play [Joseph in the Underground], becomes the flamboyant astronomer, Tycho Brahe. The historical Brahe is known to have been a man of violent temper, gargantuan scientific ambition and gross appetites. Martin understands that Tycho, who often behaves like a thug or a mob boss, carries his previous incarnation within him. And this enhances the ambiguity of identity that runs through the three plays. Is this really Tycho? Or are we in some parallel universe as we plunge into that "memory of the future," and 20th-Century characters suddenly find themselves in Prague at the turn of the 17th Century — the historical past, ambiguous at best, having become their future? The only character who remains constant is the old man, Joseph Golem, but he ages backward from play to play! And, in the final play, he is forced, by a bizarre turn of events, to assume the identity of the missing Rabbi Loew, the fabled creator of a golem, with both hilarious, and ultimately tragic, consequences.
KG: Another discovery is the music you composed.
EB: I was classically trained for six years, as a child. The Golem Triptych was the first of my dramatic works for which I composed and orchestrated incidental music. I never dreamed that early training would someday come in handy. Music runs on my father's side of the family. It practically gallops.
KG: The incidental music is essential to the overall effect of The Golem Triptych.
EB: Absolutely.
KG: You've written the whole thing in British English and the last play, The Fall of Prague, in Elizabethan English. Were there reasons?
EB: A number of reasons led me to write the last ten of my twenty-one plays in British English. It began with the Triptych. I realized that a dramatic work of such large dimensions would require the forces of the Royal Shakespeare Company or the National Theatre, and actors trained to perform Elizabethan drama. So, I learned a foreign language, British. It's a lot more complicated than some would think. There are both subtle, and dramatic, differences between British and American English, to say nothing of British regional idioms and slang. I immersed myself in it. My novel, Bartholomew Fair, was set in London, and entirely written in British, both high and low British. It was written between the second and third plays of The Golem Triptych.
KG: The last act is in Elizabethan English.
EB: Each day, before writing, I read parts of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays at random for around twenty minutes, to get myself into the rhythm, the music, of the language. I used mainly Marlowe and Shakespeare. The Fall of Prague gradually eases itself into the language. It begins with prose. The plan was to ease it into full-blown blank verse, which I was dreading. I figured that would be really difficult. It turned out that the verse meter made it easier to reproduce the idiom, as if it were built in. You mentioned Doctor Faustus. Quite a few people have told me that my Elizabethan reminded them more of Marlowe than Shakespeare.
KG: It ties in with what Marie-José Fortis has written. Fortis wrote: "There is deep mysticism in atheism. With Basso . . . this translates into a poetic absurdism, a feast for the lyric intellect. . . . The Golem Triptych makes madness and civilization, being and nothingness cohabit, be one." For the Veda, Advaita, Buddha, Tantra, Jain, Tao, Zen and Shinto lineages, mysticism is the act of erasing the separation between being and nothingness, madness and civilization, perceiver and perceived. In these atheistic/non-theistic traditions, cohering opposites and returning to an original integrity is what art-literature-meditation-moksha-enlightenment-satori-samadhi is all about: a standing-under/under-standing often expressed in deep laughter and re-cognition. Your eye to human identity as a trick of the mind has much resonance with these non-theological liberation methodologies. Like protagonist Joseph Golem, the way out starts with the question, who is the self?
EB: Marlowe was a professed atheist who exhibited a staggering gift for the epic image. In spite of his personal convictions, he depicts Mephistophilis' inconsolable sorrow at the loss of heaven in a moving, and entirely convincing, way. He does the same with Faustus' despairing panic toward the climax of the play. And, of course, Marlowe was no stranger to mysticism and the occult. As to questions of "the self," I've always thought you can learn a great deal more about what people are through immediate experience and a close reading of historical biography than any speculations philosophy can come up with. And it's not a pretty picture. It's complicated and disordered. Why look for order where none exists?
KG: Stepping into a fuller rapport with the mysteries of existence is the outcome of the play. It makes the search for an abstract salvation from a sinful human nature through an invisible mediator seem like a sad charade. What could reveal a sinful nature more than out-hustling other sinners for entrance into a select paradise filled with the most selfish?
EB: True. The Golem Triptych is a work of tragic loss on an epic scale. In the end, it's more about the forest than the trees. Everything falls to ruins. The very act that completes the drama as a structured whole is also its annihilation. Everything is lost. There has been betrayal, murder and mayhem, dissolution, the Holy Roman Emperor has gone insane, and Joseph — whose identity has become hopelessy confused with Rabbi Loew's and the golem's — is destroyed at the very moment he complies with the golem's wish to be destroyed. They go out in a blaze together because Joseph Golem and the Rabbi's creature are mirror images of each other. Which is why, when the creature tells Joseph to look deeply into its eyes, instead of his own distorted reflection, he sees the creature's!
KG: Continuing on with this notion of identity as fraud, masquerade or social construct, Rosette Lamont wrote regarding Enigmas, your trilogy of one-acts, "Taken together, the plays in this handsome volume raise the question of a person's identity, the manner in which the Other sees the One, and even questions as to the nature of the One."
EB: What we call "civilization" — the social contract— stands on dangerously thin ice, and is easily undermined by the legion of intangibles, and tangibles, that come at it from every direction. The frightening thing is that, on the much smaller scale of the individual, it doesn't take all that much for the comfortable, delusional conventions in which we live to break down. And this, too, can set off a chain reaction that can cause mayhem, and destroy more than one's sense of identity. I'm saying it's all up for grabs, that order is nothing more than an agreed-upon fiction, a social contract that can be torn to shreds at any time.
Eric Basso was born in Baltimore in 1947. His work has appeared in Bakunin, the Chicago Review, Central Park, Collages & Bricolages, Fiction International, Exquisite Corpse, and many other publications. His novel, Bartholomew Fair, is available from Asylum Arts. He is the author of twenty-one plays. His critically-acclaimed drama trilogy, The Golem Triptych; the complete short plays, Enigmas; his play, The Sabattier Effect; a book of short fiction, The Beak Doctor; and five collections of poetry, Accidental Monsters, Umbra, The Catwalk Watch, The Smoking Mirror, Catafalques and Ghost Light, are available from Asylum Arts, along with Decompositions: Essays on Art & Literature 1973–1989 and Revagaions: 1966–1974, the first volume of his book of dreams.
Basso’s seventh collection of poems, Earthworks, was published by Six Gallery Press in 2008.
New York writer & reviewer Kirpal Gordon is a former music editor for Unlikely 2.0. His latest book of fiction, is Ghost & Ganga, A Jazz Odyssey, out from Leaping Dog Press. For more on his other titles, see KirpalG.com.
Comments (closed)
David Stone
2011-02-01 09:24:41
A very comprehensive interview,critically descriptive of Basso's work.