Those who look for
meaning in Obsidian Flowers may think in terms of Obsidian glass, the
sharper than cut diamond material used in the manufacture of surgical
instruments that is derived from emissions from the volcano. They could argue
that Obsidian Flowers is the sharpened essence of a flawed tradition
that has suffered its Shivaistic fate, the birth of a literature
built on the embers of one overtaken by events. Derek Attridge, referencing
Jacques Derrida, in Jacques Derrida Acts of Literature, argues that
‘literary criticism has operated…within the bounds established by classical
Greek thought, taking for granted the rules of syllogistic reason, the ultimate
priority of meaning over its mode of articulation, and such fundamental and
absolute oppositions as the intelligible and the sensible, form and matter,
subject and object, nature and culture, presence and absence’ [Derrida 3]. If
literary criticism for the most part is still beholden to the Platonic and Aristotelean approach, and
one can argue, in the light of Historicist and Post-Colonial theory, it is,
then Michael Mc Aloran’s Selected will be to it as quantum physics would
have been to our Palaeolithic ancestors.
Mc Aloran, rather than critique or quarrel with notions such as representation,
meaning or the oppositions that so exercised Derrida’s thinking, gets on with
the task that drives him, the creation of a masterful work of art that shows,
rather than tells where literature now resides.
Mc Aloran confronts, not the
failure to represent, in language, our perceptions [ often misinterpreted,
especially in Beckett studies, by literary theory know-alls as the failure of language]
but the failure to perceive. If words are ‘all words, there’s nothing else’
[Beckett 407], words cannot fail. Meaning
and the impossible task set by philosophers of trying to apply words that mean,
that represent perceptions, will inevitably fail. Words without meaning, freed
of the context of subject and object, nature and culture, presence and absence will
continue in the omnipresent where they are ‘all’. Cognisant of the situation in
which the artist now finds him/herself, Mc Aloran, like Mondrian, disavowing futile
attempts to re-present perceptions, presents. He presents unmediated,
unrepresentative, form without content language. Language lies through its
teeth ‘till din of the non-received’ non receivable perceptions awakens the
narrative voice to the lying project that is exposed as such by the ‘surrogate
of no purpose.’ His is a voice that proclaims itself in a world that is non- beginning,
non-ending:
‘what word there was it
is said in the beginning there was
nothing lying through the
teeth…till din of the non-received in
the pissoir tide asking
of the non-beginning the non-
ending.
Like Samuel Beckett ‘words
are all’ to Mc Aloran. Yet his work justifies the claim to be post-Beckett. Let’s
look at this passage from Mc Aloran:
‘flesh/ spun silk of the
night in the nothingness of having actualised the
sky/ and yet still/
absent/ wandering far from the here or there/ never
returning yet never
having left it behind/ in a pageantry of silent
discourse’.
Like Beckett’s it can
appear, on a shallow reading, to over-dwell on the nihilistic in e.g. the
affirmation of nothingness in
‘flesh/spun silk of the night in the nothingness
of having actualised the sky/’,
but like Beckett he negates the affirmation in
‘never having left it behind’ only to invalidate the negation in
‘and yet still…never returning’.
So far so Beckett. Where
Beckett’s texts are underscored through a rigorous logic that argues for the
permanence of the word, in spite of his insistence
that the permanent cannot be presented
by the transient i.e. the body - ‘I
can’t go on, I’ll go on’ - even if that logic
challenges basic tenets of grammar by reinventing the definite article and the
neuter pronoun as nouns; removing the
implication of question in where, who and when, importantly, in the opening
lines of The Unnamable, Mc Aloran ‘goes on’ from Beckett to defy logic itself
through texts that in structure and syntax exceed Beckett’s. In his
literature words are elevated to a state where they are all in their stress-free
state of absolute equality:
‘the purity of none eye’s […] dark what dark
what light.’ that often dismiss the distinction between the abstract and the
concrete noun:
‘shadowless all spun in
the absence of the word to grace the emptily of the meat’s futility’.
When Mc Aloran insists on
the absoluteness of nothingness he turns his wrath on the illusion of the
material world with an Aristotelian precision that excoriates all apologies for the horrors of existence in
grim detail. A ‘vein [is]
a voice collapsed a tryst a-bleed sunk eye incapable of/ sense ‘The
‘nothing [is] invisible [where] sense
commenced from lack origin’, pure nothing is even ‘absent dark’ and ‘none’ is abandoned.
Mc Aloran’s works are not
for Mills and Boon readers. Obsidian Flowers is for the mind that could
spend hours divining short passages like
‘endless ever as if to detrace/ trace/
retrace following on from gathered onward/ eye lights it is un-skied to hilt
drop sheen reflect non-speech vocal as collapse stillness,’
to marvel at an approach
that goes beyond the Derridean trace, the ephemeral ‘skied’ world of the
perceiver, and the staple diet that has sustained literature for two thousand
years, to reflect non-speech in the endless ever, the absoluteness of
nothingness..
Bibliography
Beckett, Samuel, Samuel
Beckett, The Grove Centenary Edition, vol IV, New York, Grove Press, 2006.
Derrida, Jacques, Acts
of literature, ed Derek Attridge, New York and London, Routledge, 1992.
The book itself is available from Amazon.co.uk & Amazon.com
a great review and any correlation with either Frankfurter Schule, Poststructuralism and Michael himself, is rather astute.
ReplyDelete