Here is some text
composed for a lecture for my current class on
“Denatured Reading.” I’m making a transtition between Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness by Paul Farley and
Michael Symmons Roberts (2011) and Hugh Howey’s novel Wool (2012).
Because of its subject
matter and its project, Edgelands is
a book its collaborative authors are unable to finish. The last of its
seemingly ad hoc jumble of
twenty-eight segments—“chapters” feels like too tidy a word for the various
unruly trajectories Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts trace through
England’s inter-urban spaces—begins by disavowing closure as something
fundamentally at odds with these transitional and unfixed terrains: “So where
do the edgelands end? How far can the idea take us?” (261). They offer, in
place of any conclusion, only another contingent figure, the abandoned and
collapsing pier. Humanity marks the limits of its fraught and absurdly
enervated dominion over place by extending its spindly architectures off-shore,
although, as Roberts and Farley resignedly note, you still can’t tether the
tide (262). As a kind of enactment of this futility, they describe the
thrill-seeking art of “tombstoning . . . jumping from height into the sea” as a
way of testing our human, mortal and English limits:
Piers
are among the most inviting of springboards for a jump, but also the most
dangerous, as tides can pull the jumper out to sea quickly, or smash them
against the iron legs and supports. It’s common for tombstoners to scream as
they fall, as if their captive souls have been reintroduced to the wild, albeit
only for a second or two, before they hit the water. (263)
Some jumpers, they
tell us, “punch themselves in the face, very hard,” a bleakly comedic reminder
of the consequences of anthropocentric hubris. The indifference of the inhuman world—uninhabitable
all but briefly—manifests itself in the recalcitrant decrepitude and feral
reclamation of whatever people try to make or do. Piers represent a last land-bound
effort to rationalize and to master the inhuman world and also offer stages on
which to enact our temporary, imaginary release from our mortal limits into
wild, animal being. The last passage of the book emerges from a description of
their visit to the West Pier at Brighton “just months before it suffers a fatal
collapse and a series of fires and is closed,” hinting at the fatal finish in
burnt-out rubbish—the deferred but inevitable closure—to which all human
endeavor in the edgelands seems to come: but that small apocalypse lies in the
future, outside the bounds of their writing. Instead, they focus on the gloomy,
birdshit spattered remains of the “Laughterland” arcade in the deserted
pavilion at the outer end of the pier; connecting the interloping birds,
starlings, etymologically with the “sterling” admission prices “still painted
on the wall,” they “notice for the first time,” in the book’s last sentence,
that the walls had once been painted “a very watery blue, the colour, in fact,
of a starling’s egg” (264). Against the lugubrious and moribund image of
decaying carcasses (both birds and architecture), they offer an attentive
glimpse of oceanic albumen and of these remains as a promise of rebirth, as
hybrid human-animal gestation, as egg. The work of noticing that their prose
undertakes, even in passing, wants both to describe and to enact—in the verbal
textures of their conversation—what I want to think of as an edgelands poetics.
That work of noticing seems primarily
visual throughout the book, but I want to make a case that it’s as much aural
as it is ocular, a honed form of listening both to other human voices and to
that world’s often incomprehensible soundscape. In “Wire,” they imagine bundles
of taken-down chain-link fence as decommissioned memory coils, holding
“recordings” of ambient sounds from the past. In “Masts,” they meditate on the
“multiple text messages, wireless e-mails and mobile phone calls cutting
through” our bodies if we stand anywhere near transmission towers—which have
been located in the edgelands as far as possible from “schools and homes” for fear
of the dire, mortal effect all that electromagnetic energy can have on us
(133). Still, Farley and Roberts nudge us: “Listen to them whisper as they pass
through you. Take on the cares of the world.” They seem to want an impossible
acuity, a noticing beyond human capacities; but really, what we’re invited to
listen for is exactly that—the limits of our attentiveness, of our ability to
care and to feel ourselves implicated in these contact zones, these
all-too-inhuman spaces. Finally, it turns out, it’s the starlings who come to
provide a tenuously viable model for this poetics of listening. In the book’s
penultimate section, “Weather,” Farley and Roberts remark on starlings’ ability
to be “keen mimics” of whatever they hear: “They’re the samplers among our
avifauna, able to incorporate all manner of human, animal and mechanical sounds
into their repertoire, and urban starlings are well know copyists of telephones
and doorbells, even dial-up modems” (258-9). In their terms, these starling
imitations are moments of absurd comedy, audio witness of a feral reabsorption
of human technocracy, but they are also instances, they suggest, of the
mutating, fractured archive of human presence, an organic version of the
chin-link memory coils that still retains vestigial potential to be decoded,
heard, observed, noticed:
Starlings
have been observed at abandoned human settlements recreating the noises of
former human or mechanical activity: a squeaky water-pump, even though the pump
is long seized up, or the rasp of a bandsaw, even though the woodshed is long
deserted. Could it be that the starlings that gather here sing a song made from
bits of the area’s former soundscape? . . . The area has always been a kind of
edgelands, but could it be possible that starlings still carry within their
complicated songs some of the sound elements of that former industrial world?
Thought of this way, the birds themselves are a kind of information storage
system, a winged databank. (259)
The watery blue paint
on the walls of the West Pier’s pavilion gestures metaphorically and materially
at the starling’s re-populating of waste space not only with their own living
murmurations but also with the re-created echoes of human habitation. It’s this
sort of lyric performative archive that Farley and Roberts want to sound in
their sentences, in their verbal desire paths, their lines.
We’re making a transition today,
according to the syllabus, from reading Edgelands
to Hugh Howey’s speculative fiction in Wool.
While we’re shifting genres and, arguably, prose styles as we move from one
book to the other, I want to note in Howey’s opening story a few key
connections and articulated joints, chiefly around this poetics of noticing.
The world of the silo—or of the siloes, as we’ll find out—juxtaposes a
panopticon-like architecture (recall Farley and Roberts’s repeated invocations
of panoptic surveillance) that governs and sustains human survival by
maintaining clear boundaries between the technologically managed interior of
the human space and the poisoned and deadly world of the post-natural outside;
the hill we glimpse in the images of the exterior world—through illusions of
transparent windows that are actually faulty projections made by data
projectors on opaque, curved subterranean walls—marks the physiographic mortal
limit of human life, as far as those who have been sent out to clean the lenses
of the electronic cameras can possibly walk before their bodies give out. Those
boundaries are marked by not only by technological illusion—and everyone in the
silo appears to recognize that, while presumably accurate depictions of the
outer world, those images are also artificial and contrived, signaled by the
wear and breakdown of the image into “dead pixels” here and there—but also
false consciousness:
a
handful of dead pixels . . . stood stark white against all the brown and gray
hues. Shining with ferocious intensity, each pixel . . . was like a square
window to some brighter place, a hole the width of a human hair that seemed to
beckon toward some better reality. (9)
Sherriff Holston’s
wife Allison, digging into corrupted, overwritten, archaic and deleted
electronic databases, thinks she has uncovered a conspiracy, on the part of the
silo’s IT directorate, to manipulate those images (“Nothing you see is real”
[26]), and both she and Holston come to believe they understand why those
exiled to their deaths through the silo airlock turn back to clean the lenses—because
they want the others to see the outside world as they are certain they now see it:
cartoonishly pastoral, a world of natural beauty kept hidden from the silo’s
inhabitants in order to keep them inside, their bodies docile, law-abiding and
well-governed. This is, of course, a fatal mistake—the visuals of a perfect
spring landscape are projected on their helmets’ viewscreens to trick them into
cleaning, to fool them into walking out of their own volition. The edge or
verge into which they walk is a virtual landscape, an overlay of visual
membrane masking the decimation of outlying space – think of their proximity to
and distance from the destroyed city on the horizon—with an illusion of
manicured garden, a space in which nature never did betray the heart that loved
her. Once that membrane—screen or suit—becomes porous or breached, the realization
that the planet has become an inherently inhuman twilight zone dawns on Holston
as a question both of seeing and being seen: “What would they see, anyone who
had chosen to watch?” (39). Reality and illusion collapse into each other.
“Holston could see,” but what he sees
is exactly what he thought he didn’t.
Notably, too, what initiates this
collapse—which is both a realization or groundtruthing and a reinscription of
false consciousness—is a speech-act and a moment of public listening. In this
world, you break the law and condemn yourself by asking, publically, to go
outside: “I want to go out” (23). This demand is both perlocution and
illocution, a command that enacts, as it’s pronounced, its own sentencing. When
Allison speaks the fatal words, Holston tries to quiet her, but also knows “it
was too late. The others had heard. Everyone had heard. His wife had signed her
own death certificate” (24). Noticing, in this space, offers only a warrant for
execution. But, as the four posthumous sequels emerge from each other as the
novel unfolds, we discover that moments of noticing—hearing voices from the
other siloes, decoding messages, understanding what the fragment of computer
code Allison uncovered actually does mean—are also key to the unveiling and
debunking of the coercive governance of siloed humanity, a vital
disillusionment that, unfortunately, both Allison and Holston don’t have enough
information to comprehend or to challenge. What their speech-acts do
accomplish, however, is to open a crack, to prize apart the fatal flaw in their
worn, decrepit hegemony. They begin to make the instability audible, like the
small skew we’ll hear in Juliette’s well-oiled and carefully-repaired generator.
