Re: Quin
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Book preview
Re - Robert Buckeye
SELECTED OTHER WORKS BY ROBERT BUCKEYE
Covering Ground
Pressure Drop
Setting a Table
The Munch Case
Still Lives
Re: Quin
Robert Buckeye
DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS
CHAMPAIGN / LONDON / DUBLIN
For Peter Anastas
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. The Life
3. Search
4. Sex
5. Silence
6. Death
Works Cited
. . . how each of us manages to make more evident his own resistance. For that is the way a man comes to core. By way of, the discovery of, his own resistance.
—Charles Olson
INTRODUCTION
"There was no beginning . . . We’d stopped living. The beginning did not, would not, exist prior to the end . . . Hallucinations within the hallucinations that was already speech. The body of a dead princess as a metaphor for literature."
—Stewart Home
IN THE FALL of 1964, I heard Malcolm X speak at Wayne State University in Detroit. Several months before Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney had been murdered. The murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy the year before had set off something, a premonition that was chilling, as if we had awakened to a world we did not believe, but no one, except perhaps Malcolm, anticipated what was to follow. Malcolm himself gunned down. Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit housewife, murdered by the Klu Klux Klan in Selma, Alabama. Martin Luther King shot. Robert Kennedy picked off. Riots in the cities, including Detroit three years later.
Malcolm was electric. Had there been anyone as charismatic, as challenging? Anyone whose mind as sharp as a knife? I still do not think so. Democracy had been a lie, Malcolm said, matter-of-factly, as if, of course, we all knew that, equality a myth, freedom for those with nothing left to lose.
If we did not do something.
Malcolm paused, and the question hung in the air.
Well.
There was a storm coming.
§
What followed is by now an old story. For others, a story they don’t want to hear. One that does not go away. Assassinations and turmoil worldwide. Protests against racial, gender and class inequality. Outrage against the Vietnam War (Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam,
Michael Herr writes, we’ve all been there.
) Rioting in Watts, Detroit, Newark, Chicago. Student protests in Warsaw, Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, across America after Kent State. Bloody Sunday in Derry, the Prague Spring, Solidarity, Che Guevara shot in Bolivia, Israel’s Six-Day War, a military takeover in Greece, Rudi Dutschke shot in Berlin. Its quasars were, J. G. Ballard was to tell us in Love & Napalm:Export U.S.A., Malcolm X, beautiful as the trembling hands in tabes dorsalis; Claude Eatherly, migrant angel of the Pre-Third; Lee Harvey Oswald, rider of the scorpion.
Things could not go on as they had before. The entire world was on the verge of radical transformation,
Eliot Weinberger writes in Written Reaction, from the structure of society and state to the details of body ornament.
The Stones and bellbottoms. Free love and free spirits. Equality as never before, possibility unthought of. Resistance and revolution. In the streets of Paris in May, 1968, French students took for their cry a Situationist International slogan, Under the Paving Stones, the Beach,
to emphasize the need to discard the old ways of doing business to find a way to live that was free, fulfilling, just.
Some writers felt that their writing had not only to reflect the times, but also, in some way, lead them. The business of literature could not be conducted as it had been before. These writers dismissed traditional methods and ignored mainstream venues for new ways in which to write and alternative sites in which to situate their writing—bars were not uncommon. Little mags far from New York, London or Paris proliferated. If it was poetry that brought the unsettled debts of history back into play,
Greil Marcus writes in Lipstick Traces, the unsettled debts of history brought forth poetry.
What they wrote, Weinberger adds, appeared, like oracles.
Ann Quin’s four novels bracket the Sixties. If establishment Anglo novels continued to dominate critical attention, there were writers like Quin whose books escaped, challenged or ignored tradition. Novels by Amis, Bellow, Davies, Fowles, Graham Greene, Mary McCarthy, Murdoch, Naipaul, Philip Roth, and Updike were contested formally from one side by John Berger, Gass, Hawkes, Aidan Higgins, Paul Metcalf, Pynchon and Wurlitzer, among others, and culturally from the other side by novels that resisted the imperatives of a middle class, increasingly petit bourgeois, reading public, including Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), Trocchi’s