Forwarded from Adrian Clarke

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UPTON'S MUZZLE

A review of _huming/queuing_ by Lawrence Upton, Writers Forum, 11/99. £3.

_huming_ and a section of _queuing_ have previously been published on-line
by Peter Ganick, but I should like to draw attention to some extraordinary
writing as it now becomes available to hard-line materialists.

The first seven paragraphs of _huming_, ascribed to Narrator, in one reading
slip into reverse from "Easy auto" through scrambled anathemas and Edenic
idyll back to Creation and out again on a reduced, more "huming" scale,
before linguistic elements begin to recombine and develop: "spreading" and
"multiplying ... from any point to any other point", as Upton puts it in the
here republished Preface to the on-line version. His concern with humming -
"Not speaking, not singing, but near both of them" - is as much to the point
as the radiating thematic developments in these pieces "written firstly
rather than more for the sound of their words". They were certainly not
written less for the sound in my reading; as I attend to them I am
repeatedly reminded of the section on "writing aloud" in Roland Barthes'
"The Pleasure of the Text" which posits a text in which "we can hear the
grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels
... the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence
of the human muzzle". For Barthes it was necessary to speak of such a
writing "as though it existed"; to my satisfaction, it manifests here:

"None proof-readers guard co-sign rune. None opining corn tarnish wax
cashes. Cosmogeny cover soon viceroy flies screwing toughens. Traces science
fiction cunt idyllic fit. None knifes depend damson. None denies sin dim
diminutive daisy is continuities. None deplores dovecote so chefs rope down
avionic duvet. Man eleison lift tiff cash humanity. Rex merger. Pate pious
story plastic node go et et cetera."

But the pleasures of luxuriating in a subvocal reading of the text are
problematised almost as soon as they have established themselves by the
arrival of various personae, including Upton who speaks next. When he was a
near-neighbour, Steven Berkoff, urging me to follow his example, claimed to
be a poet who divided up the lines of his poems between characters, and one
wonders if, albeit in terms of a more sophisticated poetic, something of the
sort is going on here. Upton's impressively fluent, but in Barthes' terms,
as geno-text, appropriately undramatic reading when he launched this edition
at the Writers Forum Workshop gave nothing away. His note to _queuing_
provides suggestions for performers from "measures of pausing" down to
stage-Welsh and stage-French accents, and the dramatic is certainly not
absent in that piece, as the absurdist cameo involving Cro-Magnon and
Neanderthal on p 23 witnesses. Against this one must weigh his permission
for performers to read paragraphs attached to different names in
non-dramatic combinations, along with the lack, for the most part, of any
obvious matching of vocabulary with character or accent. Whether the
introduction of characters is a brilliant ruse to disrupt a flow that might
otherwise overwhelm all but the most resolute or the development of an
operative dramatic dimension remains, I think, undecidable for the work as a
whole. I suspect for most of what is here published - and there is more to
come - the movement between speakers is an integral part of the writing
process, and Upton's statement that "the names of the characters are to be
considered part of the text" does not disallow that view; the extent to
which it is inadequate can only be revealed by further readings - and I
shall not begrudge the effort. There are generous returns to be had from
these pieces even for the literal-minded if they recognise letters may spell
the body of the text that is Barthes' "body of bliss". Such have we here.

Adrian Clarke





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