Plot
Claudia Rankine
publisher: Grove Press, 2000
isbn: 0-802137-92-X
price: $13
Plot is a book-length poem/fiction sequence concerned with the issues of meaning, writing and being, utilizing autobiography but also clearly bizarre naming-conventions (á la Zarathustra and De Chirico's Hebdomeros) to create an atmosphere of moderate crisis, philosophical overdetermination and, out of the stuff of domestic and personal drama, super-real dimensions.
It immediately appears at the nexus of several different avant-garde projects, from the nouveau roman of Monique Wittig to the scholarly mind-blasts of Christine Brooke-Rose, from the deconstructed spaces of Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino right on to last year's The Words by Carla Harryman (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee also lurks in the background).
Plot, which more or less spirals around the story of Liv and Erland and their future child Ersatz, is embedded in the sensations and anxieties of child-birth and -rearing:
Long after she grows tired in the night she hears only the child's cries. His cries, already recalling, and silence,
the dumbness she wedges herself into. Cowardly, and additionally compromised, she hears each cry, punctuating every space of exception, running through her, meaning to break, to interrupt each moment attempted. She hears and calls it silence.
[20]
The main issue seems to be whether this birth is wanted for an escape from self, and whether this second-self is indeed an "other"; Rankine writes: "Liv, answer me this: Is the female anatomically in need of a child as a life preserver, a hand, a hand up? And now, pap smeared, do you want harder the family you fear in fear of all those answers?"
This question of self-othering, of viewing the child as "ersatz" meaning, is tied in with Rankine's sense of herself, and one of the more striking moments is when the three main figures conjoin to render this situation clear:
That same night Erland pressed his ear to Liv's belly.
What do you hear? Liv asked.
Not you, Erland answered. Not you.
[78]
Unfortunately, unlike Rankine's last book The End of Alphabet -- which had very little "prose poetry" and rarely strayed from an imagistic core even in its more "indeterminate" passages -- Plot is particularly prone to run-on, obfuscated formulations and indulgent -- one presumes "experimental" and yet finally unnecessary -- grammatical constructions: "the damaged image absorbed to appear, the exemplar seen and felt as one, having grown thick in the interior, opens on to surface and is the surface reflecting its source." [39]
The Ashberian "taking out" -- a mark, one supposes, of the "ellipticist" school of writing -- and the "postmodern" urge for recursive syntax (which few have succeeded in making as fun and resonant as Stein), while occasionally quite beautiful and engaging, is often colorless and makes one self-conscious about wishing an end to all deconstructive tactics in poetry:
The interest is not with the dissolved, and yet dissolution surrounds, is a feeling in its duration. It observes its own density and is the constituted dissolved toward solidity. To this refuse,
casting its shadow from flesh to canvas, she says, no. But see, the debris is the self within the trace, then the tide is the general condition implicated. She is afraid of herself.
[67]
As opposed to the writing of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in her Dictee, to which Plot seems somewhat indebted, these moments do not seem linked to any real intensity of vision, any thwarted desire to reveal, but come off as stylistic devices.
Plot is interesting in that it contains moments of normative fiction (such as the "Interlude") and a series of odd graphically charted pages, an effort, perhaps, to provide occasional anchors to this often inchoate mass of issues and language, but even these moments are unexciting -- the dialogue seems off-the-rack, and the graphics don't reflect a sincere interest in visual poetics.
As her previous books show, Rankine has tremendous talent as a poet, but one wonders if a better way of expressing the dilemmas of a fluid, ontologically flustered self would be a more concentrated, formally precise, poetry, one that presented the precious rocks that one grasps at for stability rather than simply the grasping.
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