Daniel Morris
Gaps in the Machine: On Andrei Codrescu’s Unarchival Poetics
The term “archive” originated in the late 16th Century, combining a Greek word for “public office” with the suffix for “place.” The word’s origin signifies its association with historical documentation that magistrates have deemed significant to the preservation of the official story – the public memory – of the state. The word’s suffix implies that such documentation can be contained within a tangible location where information can be stored, compressed, and preserved with a sense of permanence for future reference. In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1996), Jacques Derrida, however, notes the split root of the word “archive.” He points out that the term refers to a process of commencement, implying sequence, and a judicial meaning, implying commandment, law, order, authority, and place. The judicial meaning, Derrida continues, accrues what he calls “archontic power” through “the functions of unification, of identification, of classification, [which] must be paired with what we will call the power of consignation” (3). By “consignation,” Derrida refers to the coordination of disparate materials into a “unity of an ideal configuration” (3). “In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate (secernere), or partition, in an absolute manner.”
Like Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever, Andrei Codrescu (b. 1946) – the noted Romanian-American poet, memoirist, novelist, founding editor (in 1983) of the influential cultural journal Exquisite Corpse and long time NPR commentator on “All Things Considered” chafes against the judicial or “consignation” version of the archive. In Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life In Footnotes) [2012] and in the poems I will be discussing in detail in this essay such as “bridge work” – indebted to his reading of Ivo Andric’s Nobel Prize winning novel The Bridge on the Drina--, “as tears go by,” “the mold song,” “history,” “did something miss new orleans?,” and “the revolution and the poet” from So Recently A World (2012), Codrescu regards lyric as a forum to write counter history to demolish archival certainties. By establishing in “history” what he refers to in Bibliodeath as “the act of hiding as an alternative to history” (39), Codrescu leans in the direction of establishing an archival poetics that regards absences, fissures, gaps, and amnesiac forgetfulness as aspects of the lyric recollection of trauma that he would pursue for the next three decade. Here is Codrescu’s “history” (1971)
in 1946 there was my mother inside whom
i was still hiding.
in 1953 i was small enough to curl behind a tire
until the man with the knife passed.
in 1953 i also felt comfortable under the table
while everyone cried because stalin was dead.
in 1965 i hid inside my head
and the colors were formidable.
and just now at the end of 1971
i could have hidden inside the comfy hollow
in the phone
but i couldn’t find the entrance.
“It’s a list poem and thus archival, but it’s actively archival,” Codrescu writes of “history.” He continues: “it is an archival machine that moves through time in time to the imperative of the poet, which is to counter history by demolishing, or at least misdirecting, its archival certainties (Bibliodeath, 41). Because Codrescu regards archives as sites that exist in history -- not removed from world events in a splendid isolation – he interprets archives as dwellings of catastrophic events. And because he does not distinguish representation from history (and thus from catastrophe), Codrescu does not consider the archive as available to containment. Resonant with Walter Benjamin’s historical materialist perception of the “barbarism” of “cultural treasures” in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Codrescu perceives each historical inscription within the archive as a potential erasure of a prior historical conception of an event’s significance.[1]
The Post Hurricane Katrina City of New Orleans remains the displaced Romanian’s adopted hometown, but also it is an unarchive that embodies and resists amnesiac forgetting in the sonnet “did something miss new orleans?”. The sonnet form is oddly appropriate. The poem is a vexed love lyric to the city Codrescu described in the title of an essay collection -- with a nod to the Marguerite Duras screenplay for the classic Alain Resnais film concerning a French woman’s affair with a Japanese man in the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima -- as New Orleans, Mon Amour. The city in “this catastrophe sonnet” is described in line two as a vanished space – “used to be called n’awrleans” –, but in its absence it has been renamed as “the greatest engineering disaster in u.s. history” (line 3). Codrescu acknowledges concern with archiving remnants of a devastated civic environment, but this is so not only because the area had become submerged in the deluge that broke through the faultily engineered banks of Lake Pontchartrain in late August 2005. The archival problem is that Codrescu’s poem adheres to Benjamin’s assertion that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The poet maintains any definition, nomination, or archival representation of New Orleans – including the rechristening of the city as an engineering disaster – will, in transforming the metropolis into a site of a nation’s failure to protect an urban treasure, erase, or, as in a palimpsest, overwrite (and thus conceal) prior layers of a distressed urban archaeology. Codrescu’s poem and his other essays about New Orleans make clear that engineering problems are the tip of an iceberg of catastrophe that includes the slave trade, environmental degradation of the Mississippi River by chemical companies and Big Oil so that “[s]pills, poisons, and floating garbage have choked its constrained flows” (124, New Orleans, Mon Amour), police brutality and corruption, the distinction of being in 1994 dubbed as the “murder capital of the United States, with 425 killings” so that “[b]ookies were taking bets on the numbers,” as Codrescu reports in an essay “My City, My Wilderness” (152), as well as site of the political rise of David Duke, a Neo Nazi elected in 1990 to the state legislature as representative of Metairie, and subject of Codrescu’s essay “Letter Home.”
New Orleans, for Codrescu, is not merely a repository of an archival history of disaster. Because “New Orleans” embodies disaster, Codrescu argues in his poem as well as in the “Introduction” to his poetry collection Jealous Witness, what happened during Katrina cannot be contained in media reports that assert “coverage” of the storm’s aftermath:
One third of its poorest inhabitants never returned. I went back to the city two days after the flood, allowed past he National Guard and army
checkpoints to report for NPR. Those days, which now stank like "time outide of time," an island of inexpressible memory, were now much written
about and reported on but like some of the most powerful experiences of the sixties, they cannot be captured in any media translation. (383)
Codrescu notes in “did something miss new Orleans?” that the “engineering disaster” version of “n’awrleans” deletes the city as archival repository of “the greatest human disaster/in pre-civil war history.” He is referring, of course, to events that happened at places such as the New Orleans Slave Exchange, which, he notes in an essay “Mammie Dolls,” has become a quite literal site of bad taste: “a little restaurant on the site of what used to be a real slave exchange in the old days” (92, New Orleans, Mon Amour). In the poem Codrescu adds: “and before that/the greatest rum sugar and human warehouse/in north america” and “before that it was just the greatest swamp a drunk/Frenchman ever dedicated to his sun king.” His unarchive lyric on New Orleans enacts Codrescu’s experience of witness to what he calls the “archives of amnesia.” The phrase refers to the “history of the vanquished, written out of the Official Archives,” that exists only in its erasure, or should it be recast into text might do more harm than good in terms of traumatic recollection that brings with it the “inevitable anger, horror, and helplessness that follows the restoration” (21).
Along with “this catastrophe sonnet” entitled “did something miss new orleans?”, Jealous Witness includes another unarchive lyric, “the mold song,” in which archival material is itself unavailable to salvage, except in the poetic space as a trace reflecting what is no longer a tangible artifact. In an essay entitled “Se Habla Dreams,” Codrescu has described New Orleans as “an intoxicating brew of rotting and generating, a feeling of death and life simultaneously occurring and inextricably linked” (60, New Orleans, Mon Amour). An irreverent, Bluesy verse, written for performance by the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars and recorded on a CD that accompanies the Coffee House Press book Jealous Witness in 2008, Codrescu’s “the mold song” incorporates things and persons of New Orleans into a (dis)organized whole that simultaneously rots and generates what it archives:
it was one of a kind
the earliest map of the united states
it was hanging right here on the wall
the mold ate it all
and these books the only copies
of newton franklin galileo
and this shakespeare folio
the mold ate them like they was candy
look at the satisfied grinning mold
not to speak of that stack of cash
I never shoulda kept around
not a zero left in the whole stack
look at me I’m growing old
I’m giving myself to the mold (386-387)
Like “tears” in “as tears go by” and “snow” in “the revolution and the poet,” other unarchive poems I will read in this essay, “mold” is the organic depository in “the mold song.” Given New Orleans’ humid climate, is it surprising that mold would have infested the city after Katrina’s deluge of moisture? It is also not a surprise that fungus would represent to Codrescu a health hazard to citizens in the hurricane’s aftermath:[2] “it’s some kind of lesson/I knew that one day I’d be sorry/I’m not wearing a mask/I’m not wearing any gloves/I feel stupid I feel cold/I’m giving myself to the mold”. What is peculiar from an archival perspective is that Codrescu as curator treats “mold” as conceptual depository for the ravaged city and the fate of self. “My world is made of water, a fact that makes me feel both transitory and humble,” he writes in the essay “Roll On, Big River!” in which he quotes the Keats epitaph” “’Here lies one whose name was writ on water’” (New Orleans, Mon Amour, 117). In “the mold song” he interprets rot that biodegrades rare books, maps, money, wallpaper – as well as the authorial self (“I’m giving myself to the mold”) -- as a transformational entity. Mold reconfigures a human speaker and valuable human-made artifacts into an amorphous form, a natural entity with an insatiable appetite. The mold reminds readers that archival data is inscribed on biodegradable resources subject to deterioration from natural forces simultaneously too small (cellular) and too large (Katrina) for human beings to contain in a traditional depository for storage of cultural memory. Further, the mold that nourishes itself on deposited archives (maps, folios, rare books, cash, paper things) cannot be separated out from the catastrophe it commemorates. I say this because mold is a biological organism that flourished because of Katrina. The “mold” is thus product and inhabitant of the city it consumes. Mold coordinates a self-inflicted annihilation (suicide) and the ghoulish performance of carnivalesque exuberance for which New Orleans is widely celebrated (Halloween): “halloween and suicide rolled in one/I shoulda sold I shoulda sold/only in new orleans only in new Orleans”. The bittersweet reading of mold’s transformational power – suicide/Halloween – matches Codrescu’s perception in “Roll On, Big River!” that catastrophes such as Katrina are sublime events that teach the limits of human control over self and world:
What we share with the world is an unbroken lament. But it isn’t all sorrowful. Catastrophes make us feel insignificant: We are in awe of great forces
like raging rivers and quaking earth, events that show us just how puny we are in the scheme of things. Such swift lessons in humility are joyful
occasions, actually, despite or, perhaps, because of the pain. (121 New Orleans Mon Amour)
Regarding an archive as a metamorphic site, Codrescu interprets the waterlogged city as dwelling of catastrophic events. New Orleans can never be adequately interpreted as a completed archival space because each historical inscription of it erases a prior historical conception of its significance.
Following Whitman in Leaves of Grass, Codrescu in “bridge work” favors the list as taxonomy for organizing a vast historical canvas. Like an archaeologist digging through sedimentary layers of rock and soil, the poet sifts through history to chronicle a contested site. A meta-critical reflection on the relation of catastrophe, history, monuments, narrative, poetry, and the archive, “bridge work” is a historiography self-consciously indebted to The Bridge Over the Drina, the Ivo Andric’s novel from 1945 that garnered its author the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. In both novel and poem, the bridge over the Drina becomes a symbolic main character. Built in 1516 and partially destroyed in 1914, both authors imagine the bridge, set at the small Bosnian town of Visegard near the Serbian border, as eyewitness to Balkan history through a series of fictional vignettes.
Like Andric’s 300-plus page novel, Codrescu’s 20-line poem asks the question: Can a bridge be an archive? The answer is yes, no, and it depends on how you define archives and whether or not you can imagine a bridge with eyes and memory banks. What is certain is that Codrescu understands “bridge work” as an ongoing activity with no end in site. It is like a highway project. It involves construction and deconstruction, deterioration, delay, and hope for a safer, more stable pathway between one point and another, even as motorists know that a new construction project will inevitably crop up, causing further confusion and delay, somewhere else down the pot holed-path. As in the term for a dreaded dental procedure, “bridge work” can be a painful process that does not encourage one to speak.[3]
In strophe one Codrescu regards “the bridge over the drina” as an architectural monument, a placid site for amusement and aesthetic appreciation. At first, readers perceive the bridge from the surface, as “a UNESCO tourist attraction” and “the title of a marvelous novel by ivo andric.” In the second strophe, by contrast, Codrescu imagines the bridge as a live archive open to ongoing catastrophic rupture. As was the case in his poems about Post-Katrina New Orleans, Codrescu selects the list as method for organizing information that occurred across a wide swath of time. Handling history with a minimal degree of chronological organization, he regards in a short lyric the sweeping, six hundred year multi-ethnic history that included imperial conflict as well as the multicultural understanding that Andric treated in over 20 chapters in his major novel. In Andric’s novel, the bridge was constructed by a Serbian, who, as a boy, had been removed from his mother only to come to power as a Muslim working for the Turkish Empire. At around age 60, he built the bridge to signify his estrangement from home and as a belated expression of his desire for a symbolic route of return. The bridge is thus a sign of multinational unification and religious toleration, as well as (primarily) a site of grotesque violation of the human body and of international conflict:
“joined christendom and islam for six centuries
witnessed and withstood
impalements
hangings
the assassination of archduke ferdinand
the first world war
dynamiting by austrians
the nobel prize for literature to ivo andric
This second strophe is, in essence, an indexical gloss on Andric’s emotionally complex novel. It also serves as a nod to Andric’s biographical involvement in the Balkan revolt against the Austro-Hungarian Empire that led to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a revolutionary colleague of Andric’s. The political murder occasioned Andric’s incarceration (during which time he read Russian novels and began to refashion himself as an author), as well as World War One. For it is in Andric’s novel that a notorious act of impalement is featured early on in the novel and Codrescu’s reference to “the assassination of archduke Ferdinand” directly relates to Andric’s biography.[4]
To view Andric’s celebrated novel as an airtight archive that encapsulates the bridge’s history of violence as well as reconciliation, the remainder of Codrescu’s poem argues, is to assume an end to history coterminous with Andric’s conclusion of his novel, when the bridge is damaged in World War One. One reviewer describes Andric’s novel as telling the “vibrant, but often turbulent, history of life at the cross roads of Turkish and Austrian history. The Bridge over the Drina seems to have seen a lot of horrific things, but it is worth remembering it was nothing compared to what happened on its ramparts during the recent Bosnian war.”[5] Codrescu notes that Andric’s practice of writing his novel illustrates how futile it would be to regard the bridge as historiographical site with a conclusion attached to it. As Fiona Sampson reports, Andric wrote:
during the Second World War, when the author was under house arrest in Belgrade, this is a novel of longing for his Bosnian home, "the little oriental
town of Visegard and all its surroundings, with hamlets nestling in the folds of hills, covered with meadows, pastures and plum-orchards.” [6]
Codrescu notices that even when Andric was drafting his novel, the archival domicile (the novel) was already becoming a part of history, and thus only a partial accounting of an ongoing site of rupture. In the third strophe, Codrescu revises the interpretation of the bridge in strophe one as entertainment site (novel, tourism), and in strophe two as closed archival representation in which Andric’s Nobel Prize novel reinscribes the bridge as the technology of historic witness and receptacle of cultural memory.
“and looked like the bridge might make it out of history
into the 21st century
but the 20th century wasn’t done with it
yet to come were
the visogard genocide
the mass rape of Bosnian women by serbs
and a new bridge of corpses over the drina
parentheses not closed
andric’s book a pregnant pause (35)
If the bridge is for Andric the repository for what happened over 500 years of the region’s contested history, Codrescu’s lyric riposte is that the archive is itself a site of rupture during its composition. For Codrescu, the archive has no place to set itself outside history.
Concerned with a far milder catastrophic history than were the cases in “history,” “bridge work,” “did something miss new orleans?,” and “the mold song,” Codrescu’s “how it happened” is nonetheless an archival lamentation over the erasure of times and disappearance of places he associates with the social pleasures and gastronomic delights of eating comforting meals at unique and hybrid ethnic restaurants in Manhattan (Greek/Jewish) and Baton Rouge (African-American, Creole). Like “the mold song,” it is an archive in which eating plays a key part in the regurgitation of historical site into memorial.
how it happened
Eaters Of The World, Unite!
america came over
chained to frozen food
and politically pretentious slaughter
and asked of me:
if you were a restaurant
which restaurant would you be?
a Greek diner in midtown Manhattan
huge menu liver and onions mashed potatoes
dumplings matzo ball soup roast beef mousaka
coffee pie a-la-mode everything incredibly fast
steamy inside middle of winter ten degrees outside!
window seat.
and Laura said: The Half Moon Café in Baton Rouge
beans and greens and ham hocks everything
starting up from beans again next day gumbo
stewed chicken dumplings after a late-night drunk!
communal table.
less than a year after we answered america
the half moon café in Baton Rouge closed
and there were no more greek diners in manhattan (33)
What is the “it” that “happened” in the title? As in the “something” that “doesn’t love a wall” in Frost’s “Mending Wall,” “it” signifies the entropic nature of things. “It” consumes a site associated with sensual pleasures including warmth, place, and community into an eccentric version of a living archive. The vanished remains of the original moment, however, are in the poem turned into a spectral reflection. “It” is a quintessential form of archive for Codrescu for two reasons. First, archival knowledge is embodied knowledge. Born in nature and by its nature quixotic, archival material will morph, and, eventually, disappear. Liver and onions are enjoyed on the spot in that steamy New York diner when it is freezing outside; liver and onions don’t translate into joy when refrozen and reheated; “everything incredibly fast” says Codrescu of the Manhattan Greek Jewish place. Second, the archival significance of ethnic restaurants as repository for authenticity and sensual pleasure is related to international tastes associated with Codrescu’s history as a Wandering Jew. In the poem, America has denied (imprisoned?) its multicultural celebration of immigrant roots by transforming an aspect of U.S. culture that Codrescu admires into a tasteless imperialism associated with commodification (“frozen food”) and state-sponsored terrorism (“politically pretentious slaughter”). The poet’s conservation of the diner and café – which we learn at the end of the poem have shut their doors – only exists in the taste buds and affiliated memories of consumption possessed by Codrescu and his wife Laura. Poetic imagination is thus likened to “mold” that quite literally eats away at the precious materials it simultaneously inhabits, preserves, and erodes. An example of Codrescu’s perception of New Orleans as essentially a dream-like, above-ground cemetery of ghosts stories that “grow in abundance here, like the “flowering vines and the myrtles, the bananas and the figs,” as he states in the essay “The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans” (63, New Orleans, Mon Amour), archival space in “how it happened” is hidden, preserved only in stories loquacious gourmands such as Andrei and Laura can tell about pleasures once shared at the now moribund “communal table.”
As was the case with “how it happened,” “as tears go by” reimagines archival knowledge. Codrescu envisions the place where archives are held as, paradoxically, embodied and ephemeral, and as an emotional human reaction to remembered intimate encounters mediated through prior cultural occurrences (eating memorable meals in ethnic restaurants, listening to a classic 1960s baroque pop ballad). As in “did something miss new orleans?,” “History,” and “bridge work,” he follows Whitman in recalling memories associated with “tears” by cataloguing them as a list. The poem’s title refers to a baroque pop ballad co-written by members of the Rolling Stones in 1964.[7] The Stones recorded the song and even performed it onThe Ed Sullivan Show, but it is to rehearing, as a self-described aging poet, the breakout version recorded by then-17-year old Marianne Faithfull that is the affective sensory incident that triggers Codrescu’s meditation on how tears relate to memory. He thinks about tears as an archival repository of personal upset and cultural experiences of grief.
In the Stones lyric, released two years before Codrescu immigrated to the United States from Romania by way of Italy, the speaker (remember, Faithfull was seventeen when she sang the version Codrescu addresses in his poem) is already a languorous figure of ennui. Though still young, Faithfull sings as if detached from the unselfconscious pleasures of children at play. Where the children are innocents, the speaker perceives their enjoyment as a painful reminder of her alienation from an occurrence that she regards as merely repeating unoriginal experiences. The speaker’s self-knowledge disables her from sharing their unselfconscious purity. Rain is interpreted as ephemeral tears (the tears are quite literally moving, they are “going by”). Attending to her tears, which she watches and hears fall, cancels the sound of children singing. The speaker’s basic relation to the atmosphere and to time is disoriented. Day becomes evening.
In the Stones lyric, tears split, rather than collapse, the relation of speaker to her environment and to other people who occupy it. Faithfull does “want” to watch the children play, but tears disconnect her from their world. By contrast to the truncated relation between “tears” and world outside the self in the Stones number from 1964-65, Codrescu’s “as tears go by” enacts his archival resourcefulness with full force. Where the Faithfull version detaches speaker, world, and other young persons, Codrescu’s rehearsal of hearing the British teenager sing of alienation from the children, paradoxically, connects him to a desire to cry, but by no means are his tears strictly rooted in detachment from childhood. Quite the opposite of the Stones – one must acknowledge Jagger and Richards penned the tune in their early 20s, not a time associated with empathetic imagination –, Codrescu does not read childhood as an idyllic time protected from tears and loss. Instead, he identifies childhood with disenchantment: “she’s watching children play and children always make me cry because I think that it’s a big bad world that’s mean to children.” In Bloomian fashion, one might say Codrescu “misreads” Jagger and Richards (and thus distorts the source text for his meditation) in order, ironically, to transform the pop tune into a prompt towards a reflection on how tears, however quixotic, are liquids and thus seamlessly mix with those shed by others. Where the Stones detach speaker and children, Codrescu’s reception of Faithfull’s rendition connects his speaker to children who serve as whole/part (rather than part/whole) synecdoche for episodes in his traumatic childhood. He treats his early years in a brief litany in “as tears go by,” but draws upon comparable material in narrative detail in several memoirs. The poem, in other words, becomes, like “bridge work” in relation to Andric’s novel, an index for the author’s robust archival prose repositories such as Involuntary Genius, Bibliodeath, and A Hole in the Flag.
The poem is not about Codrescu’s tears, as is the case for Faithfull and her tears. Rather, it is about his absence of tears. He fears that if he started to cry he would never stop. His inability to cry illustrates what he elsewhere calls an “archives of amnesia.”[8] His inability to cry symbolizes the extremity of his traumatic past, but tears also function as a conduit to connect his troubles to a transhistorical horizon of misfortune. The speaker’s tears merge with his mother’s tears; implying tears become a mother tongue. Tears also connect the speaker to his grandmother and to the ancient (and now extinct) ritualistic grieving process known as keening. His poem moves from the speaker’s reflection of another speaker’s (Faithfull’s) reflection on children playing to a growing awareness that he, the Codrescu speaker, is, in effect, one of the children Faithfull is singing about. The “big bad world” was “mean to me, certainly, when I was a child.” An unfaithful reading of Faithfull’s lament, the poet transforms the original “As Tears Go By” to address his abandonment by parents, and by the death of the Romanian child’s symbolic father, the Iron man, Stalin. He links his litany of personal dirge to a deep transhistorical folk tradition of mourning rituals known as keening:
They were generic when she cried because life and the world were unendurable. And sometimes she cried neither specifically nor generically but deeper
like an animal. And those were not her tears, they were part of a river of tears that runs through our kind since the beginning of time. This river sweeps
us all in its swell and we stand in it keening, wailing, and arguing with something invisible in the language of lamentations. My mother’s two aunts, my
grandmother’s sisters, who died at Auschwitz, were swept away by this river.
The poem is itself an archival repository for tropes found in prior American poems. The phrase “our kind” recalls Ann Sexton’s “her kind.” Like Codrescu’s speaker, who fashions maternal lineage as a sorrow singer via the ancient tradition of keening, Sexton aligns her position as ostracized confessionalist Boston housewife in the 1950s with a transhistorical archival folk mythology including the scapegoating of Salem women as witches.[9] The poem also echoes a classic archival lyric written almost one century earlier before Codrescu’s – Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” In Hughes’ iconic early poem, the speaker becomes, in the tradition of Whitman and Emerson, a representative man. His knowledge extends in time and space far beyond the scope of an individual self. The speaker’s awareness expands to an epistemological association, via rivers, with oppression, enslavement, and creative endurance of maligned communities preceding recorded history and even prior to human existence. Codrescu connects his history of traumatic dislocation from his birth country to the silent maternal language of lamentation – tears – and then, via his mother’s tears, to a primordial pre-human history of suffering beings through the language of depth and rivers that recall Hughes’s first great poem of association with Sorrow Songs. Where Codrescu writes that his mother’s tears were “deeper like an animal. And those were not her tears, they were part of a river of tears that runs through our kind since the beginning of time,” Hughes wrote that “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” [10]
“the revolution and the poet” offers a complex analysis on the relation between art, ephemeral nature as repository of suffering undertaken in the cause of social change, and memorialization. I say “complex analysis” because Codrescu suggests events related to the poet’s life, especially the overthrow of Ceausescu’s regime in 1989, were blood-drenched manifestations on the natural ground and national landscape – “There is still blood on the snow in Bucharest”– that Codrescu interprets as the frozen remnant (“still blood”) of two centuries of art that idealized revolutionary movements in France and Russia. Rather than imagining archives, history, and memory as the aftermath to lived events such as the Romanian revolution, he regards such actions as revolutionaries striking a pose atop tanks in Bucharest as itself a theatrical gesture, a performance that re-presents what Codrescu refers to as the “tableaux vivants of years of Marxist schooling.”[11] Codrescu’s implicit comparison of Bucharest revolutionaries in 1989-1990 with contemporary performance artists such as Cindy Sherman staging cheesy movie stills is richly ironic. As much as the flag waving revolutionaries on tanks in Bucharest reenact images of Soviet Era social realist sculptures, the 1990 version reverses the ideological meaning of the image. Romanians atop tanks signifies rebellion against the regime that instilled “Marxist schooling” that resulted in the “transfusion” of fervor against the Neo-Marxist regime. Codrescu suggests a postmodern intertextual loop between French revolutionary paintings, Marxist social realism, and Romania’s overthrow of Ceausescu. He also connects himself as poet with the mythic image of Vlad the Impaler as Dracula. He asserts at the start of the poem that the primary significance of the “still blood” on the snow in Bucharest -- we must recall that “snow” is traditionally understood by poets such as Dickinson and Stevens as a figure for poetry -- may be for “the poet” a “transfusion” of material to infuse his imagination with enhanced value: “The poet needs revolution every decade/like the wounded need transfusions.”
“the revolution and the poet”
Bucharest January 1, 1990
The poet needs revolution every decade
Like the wounded need transfusions.
There is still blood on the snow in Bucharest.
The people with flags unfurled atop tanks
strike the perfect revolutionary poses
the tableaux vivants of years of Marxist
schooling. The French fall in love with them.
This is the snow sprung live from every
painting between 1846-1965 and sculpture, too:
the bronze train atop of which Lenin arrives
at the Finland station
where two lovers have found a dark place for love.
Only now Lenin is down and the lovers are on top.
This is the new decade in Bucharest, snowy New Year
by the blazing candles of the martyrs’ shrine
drunk with the millennium
schooling complete at last (371)
As in Yeats’s paradoxical formulation of the birth of “terrible beauty” at the moment of cataclysmic transformation at the end of “The Second Coming,” Codrescu’s bitter note at the end of “the revolution and the poet” reflects his awareness that real world revolutions cost blood in ways “tableaux vivants” never do. Codrescu’s chilling conclusion is that the drunken exuberance characteristic of a romantic conception of millennial change may soon enough morph into the bracing realism of the hangover. Real revolution involves blood on snow, martyrdom, and an education in what Philip Roth refers to as the “human stain.” The uncertain, even jaundiced, conclusion to “the revolution and the poet” reflects Codrescu’s similarly pessimistic remarks in The Hole in the Flag that Ceausescu’s overthrow has not displaced Romania’s sad history of oppression as well as its Orwellian association of grand sounding abstract words with a culture of violence and state control:
Words like ‘democratization,’ ‘privatization,’ and ‘human rights’ have been taking on the hollow sound of the ‘wooden language’ of their Communist
predecessors. The glow of optimism that infused everyone for several weeks after December 1989 faded quickly under the nightsticks of the miners of Jiul
Valie. (Hole in the Flag, 11)
In, The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution, Codrescu goes on to note that CNN reported 60,000 to 80,000 Romanians were killed in the bloodiest revolution among the Eastern European states in the concluding period of the Cold War. Just as Codrescu’s “the bridge over the drina” reads as if it were a gloss on Andric’s Nobel Prize novel, “ the poet and the revolution” may be read as a lyrical synecdoche of the broadly drawn narrative reflection on revolution and representation in Codrescu’s The Hole in the Flag.
As noted, “the revolution and the poet” foregrounds a media loop. A history of French painting and Soviet image making and a Romanian education promoting revolution manifest in a living archive – a “tableaux vivant.” History, social change, and a litany of representation coalesce in images of blood on snow as well as revolutionaries atop tanks. Just so, The Hole in the Flag takes on a decidedly postmodern turn as it presents the peculiar relation between media and social change: “To the people, overtaken by events and astounded by the flight of the dictator, it seemed that the provisional government was born on television” (37). He continues:
The historic scenes of the war for Romania were shown live by Romanian television, using both the studio inside the Central Committee and the studios
at the television station. One of the fiercest battles to be telecast was that for the television station itself, which reported its own situation in dramatic
bulletins. (37) The Romanian tricolor, red, blue, and gold, with the Communist emblem cut out of the middle was mounted on top of tanks. The same
flag, emblem cut out, was draped over the wall of the TV studio, and the words “FREE ROMANIAN TELEVISION” were handwritten on a banner
that became the new logo of Romanian TV. (37-38)
Contrary to late Proto Rap poet and funk singer Gil Scott Herron’s 1970 Black Power anthem “The Revolution Will Not be Televised,” Codrescu in The Hole in the Flag locates Ground Zero of Romania’s Revolution as occurring in the battle for control of the television news studio in Bucharest. As Gil Scott Herron had predicted “the revolution will be live, “ but Herron did not foresee the situation that cultural critic Richard Dienst refers to as “still life in real time.” Telemediation of the Battle for Bucharest occurs in the TV studio. Revolutionaries and communist party officials realize that the real time representation of the fight for the studio is the quintessential battleground for the revolution. The revolution amounts to a contest over how to project – how to narrate and how to name -- the meaning of the blood-stained performances occurring simultaneously on the tank-laden streets and inside the gun-shot pelted studio of Bucharest TV:
The historic scenes of the war for Romania were shown live by Romanian television, using both the studio inside the Central Committee and the studios
at the television station. One of the fiercest battles to be telecast was that for the television station itself, which reported its own situation in dramatic
bulletins. (37)
As in “the revolution and the poet,” the tableaux vivant of revolutionaries on tanks recurs, this time in the context of the title of Codrescu’s memoir. A hole in the Romanian flag represents a negation of the Ceausescu regime, but also an absence, or fissure, in the nation’s cultural imaginary. Through the hole, Codrescu can reenter the Romanian narrative that he had escaped in 1966:
The Romanian tricolor, red, blue, and gold, with the Communist emblem cut out of the middle was mounted on top of tanks. The same flag, emblem cut out, was draped over the wall of the TV studio, and the words “FREE ROMANIAN TELEVISION” were handwritten on a banner that became the new logo of Romanian TV. (37-38)
As is typical of Codrescu’s archival imagination, the hole in the flag signifies his understanding that historical meaning occurs under the sign of negation. By that I mean the most prominent signifier of revolutionary change in Romania in 1989 and the author’s figurative way in to re-visit, as patriot and reporter, that historical space takes place through the part of the flag that has been “cut out of the middle.” What is missing, what is invisible, what cannot be preserved in the archive becomes for Codrescu the significant repository of historical change.
Codrescu poems convey an archival theme, but his conception of an archive is so iconoclastic that it even defies categorization among what Wikipedia calls the “2.7% of archivists [who] were employed in institutions that defied categorization.” Codrescu’s (un)archival poetics, I have suggested, is an exceptional exception when it comes to imagining what an archive looks like, where it is located, when and how it can be consulted, of what it is made, and of how it may be interpreted. Archival lyrics from So Recently Rent A World bear out my point that Codrescu’s definition of what constitutes an archive defies easy categorization. In Codrescu’s poetry -- influenced as it is by his Romanian modernist forebear, the “daddy of Dadas” Tristan Tzara -- swamps, molds, New Orleans, the bridge over the Drina River, human tears, snow, and eating all are imagined as simultaneously serving and upsetting archival purposes. That is, Codrescu regards his representations of the eccentric items listed above as unstable, damaged, and often ephemeral repositories – what he calls an “Unarchive” of “exceptions” (128) -- for the conservation and transmission of history. A kind of meta-archival practice, his writings retrace and, for a time, store as residual elements, the personal record and public history of the author’s time and place that had previously been subject to amnesiac forgetting.
[1] Benjamin writes: “They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another”(Benjamin, 256).
[2] Even a brief survey of online information about molds – “fungus that grows in the form of multicellular filaments called hyphae” (Wikipedia) – confirms why molds would appeal to Codrescu’s idea of a living archive that consumes and destroys the historical materials it absorbs into its rhizomatic development. Molds, Wikipedia reminds us, “play a major role in causing decomposition of organic material, enabling the recycling of nutrients throughoutecosystems.”
[3] “Dental bridges literally bridge the gap created by one or more missing teeth. A bridge is made up of two crowns for the teeth on either side of the gap -- these two anchoring teeth are called abutment teeth -- and a false tooth/teeth in between. These false teeth are called pontics and can be made from gold, alloys, porcelain, or a combination of these materials. Dental bridges are supported by natural teeth or implants.” (Web MD). “
[4] As Bojana Simeunovic reports: “Beginning Andric ’s own story is one of tension and reconciliation with complex cultural origins: Born in Bosnia of Croatian parents, he was part of a radical “Young Bosnians” movement, active in terrorist plots against the Austrian government. When one of their group, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Andrić was imprisoned as a co-conspirator. There he read Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard and began to write. “
[5] Giordano Bruno writes:
Ivo Andric's stately architectonic prose spans the five-century history of Visegrad, in Bosnia, as imperturbably as the Ottoman stone bridge that centered
the economic, political, and social life of the town. The bridge, as told with thorough historicity, was built as a 'gift' to the region by Mohammed Söküllü, a
janissary taken from a Serbian peasant family who rose by natural ability to become the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire in the mid 16th Century.
Life in Visegrad, with its uneasy blend of Muslims, Christians and Jews, flows under the bridge as steadily as time, now a turbid torrent now a turgid trickle
but like Time itself always toward the sea of forgetfulness. Incidents of passion, violence, cruelty, and comedy occur and recur on the 'kapia' - the broad
center of the bridge - leaving their imprint in folk songs and lurking fears. Andric writes: ""So, on the kapia, between the skies, the river and the hills,
generation after generation learnt not to mourn overmuch what the troubled waters had borne away. They entered there into the unconscious philosophy
of the town; that life was an incomprehensible marvel, since it was incessantly wasted and spent, yet none the less it endured 'like the bridge on the Drina'.""
That enduring phlegmatic balance, that provincial tranquillity, would last even through the decadence of Ottoman authority and the incorporation of Bosnia
into another multi-cultural empire - Austria-Hungary - but it would meet its destruction with the intrusion of modernity, nationalism, and World War 1.
The bridge itself would be mined and demolished in the War. Though Ivo Andric depicts the exploitation and tyranny of the Ottomans, then the crass
invasive bureaucracy of the Austrians, with caustic realism, it's plain that he pines for the old days and old ways, that his vision of history is utterly
conservative and nostalgic.”
[6] As one reviewer reports, “Written in Belgrade, during the worst of the Nazi bombing, demolishing the city as the author wrote, Andric looks back across the histories that have been written across his home-land.”
[7] "As Tears Go By"
[8] As in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Codrescu’s “Unarchive” calls attention to the “barbarism” of historiography by imagining archival inscription itself as a catastrophic site. Influenced by his experience of Ceaușescu’s Romanian Stalinist state from 1946 to 1966, his stated goal is to “sabotage the narratives of Archives in ways that would allow the Archives of Amnesia to pour through into the present.”
[9] See http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15297#sthash.BX7VqAC0.dpuf
[10] See http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15722#sthash.DFcWxGjm.dpuf
[11] On “tableaux vivants,” The Chicago School of Media reports: The Oxford English Dictionary defines the phrase “tableau vivant” as, “a representation of a personage, character, scene, incident, etc., or of a well-known painting or statue, by one person or a group of persons in suitable costumes and attitudes, silent and motionless.” [1] Historically, “tableaux vivants denoted figures posed, silent and immobile, for twenty or thirty seconds, in imitation of well-known works of art or dramatic scenes from history and literature.”[3] In 1760, the Italian actor, Carlo Bertinazzi staged the Greuze’s painting The Village Betrothal in Les Noces d’Arlequin In 1781, at the Royal Palace in Versailles, the court appointed governess to the sons of the Duke of Orleans, Madame de Genlis, was known to stage tableau vivants in her tutelage utilizing paintings of Jacque Louis-David and Eugene Louis Isabey. [11] Not only were these playful costumed stagings but they were also used to dramatize important moments of history and literature in order to educate and inform.
Gaps in the Machine: On Andrei Codrescu’s Unarchival Poetics
The term “archive” originated in the late 16th Century, combining a Greek word for “public office” with the suffix for “place.” The word’s origin signifies its association with historical documentation that magistrates have deemed significant to the preservation of the official story – the public memory – of the state. The word’s suffix implies that such documentation can be contained within a tangible location where information can be stored, compressed, and preserved with a sense of permanence for future reference. In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1996), Jacques Derrida, however, notes the split root of the word “archive.” He points out that the term refers to a process of commencement, implying sequence, and a judicial meaning, implying commandment, law, order, authority, and place. The judicial meaning, Derrida continues, accrues what he calls “archontic power” through “the functions of unification, of identification, of classification, [which] must be paired with what we will call the power of consignation” (3). By “consignation,” Derrida refers to the coordination of disparate materials into a “unity of an ideal configuration” (3). “In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate (secernere), or partition, in an absolute manner.”
Like Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever, Andrei Codrescu (b. 1946) – the noted Romanian-American poet, memoirist, novelist, founding editor (in 1983) of the influential cultural journal Exquisite Corpse and long time NPR commentator on “All Things Considered” chafes against the judicial or “consignation” version of the archive. In Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life In Footnotes) [2012] and in the poems I will be discussing in detail in this essay such as “bridge work” – indebted to his reading of Ivo Andric’s Nobel Prize winning novel The Bridge on the Drina--, “as tears go by,” “the mold song,” “history,” “did something miss new orleans?,” and “the revolution and the poet” from So Recently A World (2012), Codrescu regards lyric as a forum to write counter history to demolish archival certainties. By establishing in “history” what he refers to in Bibliodeath as “the act of hiding as an alternative to history” (39), Codrescu leans in the direction of establishing an archival poetics that regards absences, fissures, gaps, and amnesiac forgetfulness as aspects of the lyric recollection of trauma that he would pursue for the next three decade. Here is Codrescu’s “history” (1971)
in 1946 there was my mother inside whom
i was still hiding.
in 1953 i was small enough to curl behind a tire
until the man with the knife passed.
in 1953 i also felt comfortable under the table
while everyone cried because stalin was dead.
in 1965 i hid inside my head
and the colors were formidable.
and just now at the end of 1971
i could have hidden inside the comfy hollow
in the phone
but i couldn’t find the entrance.
“It’s a list poem and thus archival, but it’s actively archival,” Codrescu writes of “history.” He continues: “it is an archival machine that moves through time in time to the imperative of the poet, which is to counter history by demolishing, or at least misdirecting, its archival certainties (Bibliodeath, 41). Because Codrescu regards archives as sites that exist in history -- not removed from world events in a splendid isolation – he interprets archives as dwellings of catastrophic events. And because he does not distinguish representation from history (and thus from catastrophe), Codrescu does not consider the archive as available to containment. Resonant with Walter Benjamin’s historical materialist perception of the “barbarism” of “cultural treasures” in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Codrescu perceives each historical inscription within the archive as a potential erasure of a prior historical conception of an event’s significance.[1]
The Post Hurricane Katrina City of New Orleans remains the displaced Romanian’s adopted hometown, but also it is an unarchive that embodies and resists amnesiac forgetting in the sonnet “did something miss new orleans?”. The sonnet form is oddly appropriate. The poem is a vexed love lyric to the city Codrescu described in the title of an essay collection -- with a nod to the Marguerite Duras screenplay for the classic Alain Resnais film concerning a French woman’s affair with a Japanese man in the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima -- as New Orleans, Mon Amour. The city in “this catastrophe sonnet” is described in line two as a vanished space – “used to be called n’awrleans” –, but in its absence it has been renamed as “the greatest engineering disaster in u.s. history” (line 3). Codrescu acknowledges concern with archiving remnants of a devastated civic environment, but this is so not only because the area had become submerged in the deluge that broke through the faultily engineered banks of Lake Pontchartrain in late August 2005. The archival problem is that Codrescu’s poem adheres to Benjamin’s assertion that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The poet maintains any definition, nomination, or archival representation of New Orleans – including the rechristening of the city as an engineering disaster – will, in transforming the metropolis into a site of a nation’s failure to protect an urban treasure, erase, or, as in a palimpsest, overwrite (and thus conceal) prior layers of a distressed urban archaeology. Codrescu’s poem and his other essays about New Orleans make clear that engineering problems are the tip of an iceberg of catastrophe that includes the slave trade, environmental degradation of the Mississippi River by chemical companies and Big Oil so that “[s]pills, poisons, and floating garbage have choked its constrained flows” (124, New Orleans, Mon Amour), police brutality and corruption, the distinction of being in 1994 dubbed as the “murder capital of the United States, with 425 killings” so that “[b]ookies were taking bets on the numbers,” as Codrescu reports in an essay “My City, My Wilderness” (152), as well as site of the political rise of David Duke, a Neo Nazi elected in 1990 to the state legislature as representative of Metairie, and subject of Codrescu’s essay “Letter Home.”
New Orleans, for Codrescu, is not merely a repository of an archival history of disaster. Because “New Orleans” embodies disaster, Codrescu argues in his poem as well as in the “Introduction” to his poetry collection Jealous Witness, what happened during Katrina cannot be contained in media reports that assert “coverage” of the storm’s aftermath:
One third of its poorest inhabitants never returned. I went back to the city two days after the flood, allowed past he National Guard and army
checkpoints to report for NPR. Those days, which now stank like "time outide of time," an island of inexpressible memory, were now much written
about and reported on but like some of the most powerful experiences of the sixties, they cannot be captured in any media translation. (383)
Codrescu notes in “did something miss new Orleans?” that the “engineering disaster” version of “n’awrleans” deletes the city as archival repository of “the greatest human disaster/in pre-civil war history.” He is referring, of course, to events that happened at places such as the New Orleans Slave Exchange, which, he notes in an essay “Mammie Dolls,” has become a quite literal site of bad taste: “a little restaurant on the site of what used to be a real slave exchange in the old days” (92, New Orleans, Mon Amour). In the poem Codrescu adds: “and before that/the greatest rum sugar and human warehouse/in north america” and “before that it was just the greatest swamp a drunk/Frenchman ever dedicated to his sun king.” His unarchive lyric on New Orleans enacts Codrescu’s experience of witness to what he calls the “archives of amnesia.” The phrase refers to the “history of the vanquished, written out of the Official Archives,” that exists only in its erasure, or should it be recast into text might do more harm than good in terms of traumatic recollection that brings with it the “inevitable anger, horror, and helplessness that follows the restoration” (21).
Along with “this catastrophe sonnet” entitled “did something miss new orleans?”, Jealous Witness includes another unarchive lyric, “the mold song,” in which archival material is itself unavailable to salvage, except in the poetic space as a trace reflecting what is no longer a tangible artifact. In an essay entitled “Se Habla Dreams,” Codrescu has described New Orleans as “an intoxicating brew of rotting and generating, a feeling of death and life simultaneously occurring and inextricably linked” (60, New Orleans, Mon Amour). An irreverent, Bluesy verse, written for performance by the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars and recorded on a CD that accompanies the Coffee House Press book Jealous Witness in 2008, Codrescu’s “the mold song” incorporates things and persons of New Orleans into a (dis)organized whole that simultaneously rots and generates what it archives:
it was one of a kind
the earliest map of the united states
it was hanging right here on the wall
the mold ate it all
and these books the only copies
of newton franklin galileo
and this shakespeare folio
the mold ate them like they was candy
look at the satisfied grinning mold
not to speak of that stack of cash
I never shoulda kept around
not a zero left in the whole stack
look at me I’m growing old
I’m giving myself to the mold (386-387)
Like “tears” in “as tears go by” and “snow” in “the revolution and the poet,” other unarchive poems I will read in this essay, “mold” is the organic depository in “the mold song.” Given New Orleans’ humid climate, is it surprising that mold would have infested the city after Katrina’s deluge of moisture? It is also not a surprise that fungus would represent to Codrescu a health hazard to citizens in the hurricane’s aftermath:[2] “it’s some kind of lesson/I knew that one day I’d be sorry/I’m not wearing a mask/I’m not wearing any gloves/I feel stupid I feel cold/I’m giving myself to the mold”. What is peculiar from an archival perspective is that Codrescu as curator treats “mold” as conceptual depository for the ravaged city and the fate of self. “My world is made of water, a fact that makes me feel both transitory and humble,” he writes in the essay “Roll On, Big River!” in which he quotes the Keats epitaph” “’Here lies one whose name was writ on water’” (New Orleans, Mon Amour, 117). In “the mold song” he interprets rot that biodegrades rare books, maps, money, wallpaper – as well as the authorial self (“I’m giving myself to the mold”) -- as a transformational entity. Mold reconfigures a human speaker and valuable human-made artifacts into an amorphous form, a natural entity with an insatiable appetite. The mold reminds readers that archival data is inscribed on biodegradable resources subject to deterioration from natural forces simultaneously too small (cellular) and too large (Katrina) for human beings to contain in a traditional depository for storage of cultural memory. Further, the mold that nourishes itself on deposited archives (maps, folios, rare books, cash, paper things) cannot be separated out from the catastrophe it commemorates. I say this because mold is a biological organism that flourished because of Katrina. The “mold” is thus product and inhabitant of the city it consumes. Mold coordinates a self-inflicted annihilation (suicide) and the ghoulish performance of carnivalesque exuberance for which New Orleans is widely celebrated (Halloween): “halloween and suicide rolled in one/I shoulda sold I shoulda sold/only in new orleans only in new Orleans”. The bittersweet reading of mold’s transformational power – suicide/Halloween – matches Codrescu’s perception in “Roll On, Big River!” that catastrophes such as Katrina are sublime events that teach the limits of human control over self and world:
What we share with the world is an unbroken lament. But it isn’t all sorrowful. Catastrophes make us feel insignificant: We are in awe of great forces
like raging rivers and quaking earth, events that show us just how puny we are in the scheme of things. Such swift lessons in humility are joyful
occasions, actually, despite or, perhaps, because of the pain. (121 New Orleans Mon Amour)
Regarding an archive as a metamorphic site, Codrescu interprets the waterlogged city as dwelling of catastrophic events. New Orleans can never be adequately interpreted as a completed archival space because each historical inscription of it erases a prior historical conception of its significance.
Following Whitman in Leaves of Grass, Codrescu in “bridge work” favors the list as taxonomy for organizing a vast historical canvas. Like an archaeologist digging through sedimentary layers of rock and soil, the poet sifts through history to chronicle a contested site. A meta-critical reflection on the relation of catastrophe, history, monuments, narrative, poetry, and the archive, “bridge work” is a historiography self-consciously indebted to The Bridge Over the Drina, the Ivo Andric’s novel from 1945 that garnered its author the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. In both novel and poem, the bridge over the Drina becomes a symbolic main character. Built in 1516 and partially destroyed in 1914, both authors imagine the bridge, set at the small Bosnian town of Visegard near the Serbian border, as eyewitness to Balkan history through a series of fictional vignettes.
Like Andric’s 300-plus page novel, Codrescu’s 20-line poem asks the question: Can a bridge be an archive? The answer is yes, no, and it depends on how you define archives and whether or not you can imagine a bridge with eyes and memory banks. What is certain is that Codrescu understands “bridge work” as an ongoing activity with no end in site. It is like a highway project. It involves construction and deconstruction, deterioration, delay, and hope for a safer, more stable pathway between one point and another, even as motorists know that a new construction project will inevitably crop up, causing further confusion and delay, somewhere else down the pot holed-path. As in the term for a dreaded dental procedure, “bridge work” can be a painful process that does not encourage one to speak.[3]
In strophe one Codrescu regards “the bridge over the drina” as an architectural monument, a placid site for amusement and aesthetic appreciation. At first, readers perceive the bridge from the surface, as “a UNESCO tourist attraction” and “the title of a marvelous novel by ivo andric.” In the second strophe, by contrast, Codrescu imagines the bridge as a live archive open to ongoing catastrophic rupture. As was the case in his poems about Post-Katrina New Orleans, Codrescu selects the list as method for organizing information that occurred across a wide swath of time. Handling history with a minimal degree of chronological organization, he regards in a short lyric the sweeping, six hundred year multi-ethnic history that included imperial conflict as well as the multicultural understanding that Andric treated in over 20 chapters in his major novel. In Andric’s novel, the bridge was constructed by a Serbian, who, as a boy, had been removed from his mother only to come to power as a Muslim working for the Turkish Empire. At around age 60, he built the bridge to signify his estrangement from home and as a belated expression of his desire for a symbolic route of return. The bridge is thus a sign of multinational unification and religious toleration, as well as (primarily) a site of grotesque violation of the human body and of international conflict:
“joined christendom and islam for six centuries
witnessed and withstood
impalements
hangings
the assassination of archduke ferdinand
the first world war
dynamiting by austrians
the nobel prize for literature to ivo andric
This second strophe is, in essence, an indexical gloss on Andric’s emotionally complex novel. It also serves as a nod to Andric’s biographical involvement in the Balkan revolt against the Austro-Hungarian Empire that led to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a revolutionary colleague of Andric’s. The political murder occasioned Andric’s incarceration (during which time he read Russian novels and began to refashion himself as an author), as well as World War One. For it is in Andric’s novel that a notorious act of impalement is featured early on in the novel and Codrescu’s reference to “the assassination of archduke Ferdinand” directly relates to Andric’s biography.[4]
To view Andric’s celebrated novel as an airtight archive that encapsulates the bridge’s history of violence as well as reconciliation, the remainder of Codrescu’s poem argues, is to assume an end to history coterminous with Andric’s conclusion of his novel, when the bridge is damaged in World War One. One reviewer describes Andric’s novel as telling the “vibrant, but often turbulent, history of life at the cross roads of Turkish and Austrian history. The Bridge over the Drina seems to have seen a lot of horrific things, but it is worth remembering it was nothing compared to what happened on its ramparts during the recent Bosnian war.”[5] Codrescu notes that Andric’s practice of writing his novel illustrates how futile it would be to regard the bridge as historiographical site with a conclusion attached to it. As Fiona Sampson reports, Andric wrote:
during the Second World War, when the author was under house arrest in Belgrade, this is a novel of longing for his Bosnian home, "the little oriental
town of Visegard and all its surroundings, with hamlets nestling in the folds of hills, covered with meadows, pastures and plum-orchards.” [6]
Codrescu notices that even when Andric was drafting his novel, the archival domicile (the novel) was already becoming a part of history, and thus only a partial accounting of an ongoing site of rupture. In the third strophe, Codrescu revises the interpretation of the bridge in strophe one as entertainment site (novel, tourism), and in strophe two as closed archival representation in which Andric’s Nobel Prize novel reinscribes the bridge as the technology of historic witness and receptacle of cultural memory.
“and looked like the bridge might make it out of history
into the 21st century
but the 20th century wasn’t done with it
yet to come were
the visogard genocide
the mass rape of Bosnian women by serbs
and a new bridge of corpses over the drina
parentheses not closed
andric’s book a pregnant pause (35)
If the bridge is for Andric the repository for what happened over 500 years of the region’s contested history, Codrescu’s lyric riposte is that the archive is itself a site of rupture during its composition. For Codrescu, the archive has no place to set itself outside history.
Concerned with a far milder catastrophic history than were the cases in “history,” “bridge work,” “did something miss new orleans?,” and “the mold song,” Codrescu’s “how it happened” is nonetheless an archival lamentation over the erasure of times and disappearance of places he associates with the social pleasures and gastronomic delights of eating comforting meals at unique and hybrid ethnic restaurants in Manhattan (Greek/Jewish) and Baton Rouge (African-American, Creole). Like “the mold song,” it is an archive in which eating plays a key part in the regurgitation of historical site into memorial.
how it happened
Eaters Of The World, Unite!
america came over
chained to frozen food
and politically pretentious slaughter
and asked of me:
if you were a restaurant
which restaurant would you be?
a Greek diner in midtown Manhattan
huge menu liver and onions mashed potatoes
dumplings matzo ball soup roast beef mousaka
coffee pie a-la-mode everything incredibly fast
steamy inside middle of winter ten degrees outside!
window seat.
and Laura said: The Half Moon Café in Baton Rouge
beans and greens and ham hocks everything
starting up from beans again next day gumbo
stewed chicken dumplings after a late-night drunk!
communal table.
less than a year after we answered america
the half moon café in Baton Rouge closed
and there were no more greek diners in manhattan (33)
What is the “it” that “happened” in the title? As in the “something” that “doesn’t love a wall” in Frost’s “Mending Wall,” “it” signifies the entropic nature of things. “It” consumes a site associated with sensual pleasures including warmth, place, and community into an eccentric version of a living archive. The vanished remains of the original moment, however, are in the poem turned into a spectral reflection. “It” is a quintessential form of archive for Codrescu for two reasons. First, archival knowledge is embodied knowledge. Born in nature and by its nature quixotic, archival material will morph, and, eventually, disappear. Liver and onions are enjoyed on the spot in that steamy New York diner when it is freezing outside; liver and onions don’t translate into joy when refrozen and reheated; “everything incredibly fast” says Codrescu of the Manhattan Greek Jewish place. Second, the archival significance of ethnic restaurants as repository for authenticity and sensual pleasure is related to international tastes associated with Codrescu’s history as a Wandering Jew. In the poem, America has denied (imprisoned?) its multicultural celebration of immigrant roots by transforming an aspect of U.S. culture that Codrescu admires into a tasteless imperialism associated with commodification (“frozen food”) and state-sponsored terrorism (“politically pretentious slaughter”). The poet’s conservation of the diner and café – which we learn at the end of the poem have shut their doors – only exists in the taste buds and affiliated memories of consumption possessed by Codrescu and his wife Laura. Poetic imagination is thus likened to “mold” that quite literally eats away at the precious materials it simultaneously inhabits, preserves, and erodes. An example of Codrescu’s perception of New Orleans as essentially a dream-like, above-ground cemetery of ghosts stories that “grow in abundance here, like the “flowering vines and the myrtles, the bananas and the figs,” as he states in the essay “The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans” (63, New Orleans, Mon Amour), archival space in “how it happened” is hidden, preserved only in stories loquacious gourmands such as Andrei and Laura can tell about pleasures once shared at the now moribund “communal table.”
As was the case with “how it happened,” “as tears go by” reimagines archival knowledge. Codrescu envisions the place where archives are held as, paradoxically, embodied and ephemeral, and as an emotional human reaction to remembered intimate encounters mediated through prior cultural occurrences (eating memorable meals in ethnic restaurants, listening to a classic 1960s baroque pop ballad). As in “did something miss new orleans?,” “History,” and “bridge work,” he follows Whitman in recalling memories associated with “tears” by cataloguing them as a list. The poem’s title refers to a baroque pop ballad co-written by members of the Rolling Stones in 1964.[7] The Stones recorded the song and even performed it onThe Ed Sullivan Show, but it is to rehearing, as a self-described aging poet, the breakout version recorded by then-17-year old Marianne Faithfull that is the affective sensory incident that triggers Codrescu’s meditation on how tears relate to memory. He thinks about tears as an archival repository of personal upset and cultural experiences of grief.
In the Stones lyric, released two years before Codrescu immigrated to the United States from Romania by way of Italy, the speaker (remember, Faithfull was seventeen when she sang the version Codrescu addresses in his poem) is already a languorous figure of ennui. Though still young, Faithfull sings as if detached from the unselfconscious pleasures of children at play. Where the children are innocents, the speaker perceives their enjoyment as a painful reminder of her alienation from an occurrence that she regards as merely repeating unoriginal experiences. The speaker’s self-knowledge disables her from sharing their unselfconscious purity. Rain is interpreted as ephemeral tears (the tears are quite literally moving, they are “going by”). Attending to her tears, which she watches and hears fall, cancels the sound of children singing. The speaker’s basic relation to the atmosphere and to time is disoriented. Day becomes evening.
In the Stones lyric, tears split, rather than collapse, the relation of speaker to her environment and to other people who occupy it. Faithfull does “want” to watch the children play, but tears disconnect her from their world. By contrast to the truncated relation between “tears” and world outside the self in the Stones number from 1964-65, Codrescu’s “as tears go by” enacts his archival resourcefulness with full force. Where the Faithfull version detaches speaker, world, and other young persons, Codrescu’s rehearsal of hearing the British teenager sing of alienation from the children, paradoxically, connects him to a desire to cry, but by no means are his tears strictly rooted in detachment from childhood. Quite the opposite of the Stones – one must acknowledge Jagger and Richards penned the tune in their early 20s, not a time associated with empathetic imagination –, Codrescu does not read childhood as an idyllic time protected from tears and loss. Instead, he identifies childhood with disenchantment: “she’s watching children play and children always make me cry because I think that it’s a big bad world that’s mean to children.” In Bloomian fashion, one might say Codrescu “misreads” Jagger and Richards (and thus distorts the source text for his meditation) in order, ironically, to transform the pop tune into a prompt towards a reflection on how tears, however quixotic, are liquids and thus seamlessly mix with those shed by others. Where the Stones detach speaker and children, Codrescu’s reception of Faithfull’s rendition connects his speaker to children who serve as whole/part (rather than part/whole) synecdoche for episodes in his traumatic childhood. He treats his early years in a brief litany in “as tears go by,” but draws upon comparable material in narrative detail in several memoirs. The poem, in other words, becomes, like “bridge work” in relation to Andric’s novel, an index for the author’s robust archival prose repositories such as Involuntary Genius, Bibliodeath, and A Hole in the Flag.
The poem is not about Codrescu’s tears, as is the case for Faithfull and her tears. Rather, it is about his absence of tears. He fears that if he started to cry he would never stop. His inability to cry illustrates what he elsewhere calls an “archives of amnesia.”[8] His inability to cry symbolizes the extremity of his traumatic past, but tears also function as a conduit to connect his troubles to a transhistorical horizon of misfortune. The speaker’s tears merge with his mother’s tears; implying tears become a mother tongue. Tears also connect the speaker to his grandmother and to the ancient (and now extinct) ritualistic grieving process known as keening. His poem moves from the speaker’s reflection of another speaker’s (Faithfull’s) reflection on children playing to a growing awareness that he, the Codrescu speaker, is, in effect, one of the children Faithfull is singing about. The “big bad world” was “mean to me, certainly, when I was a child.” An unfaithful reading of Faithfull’s lament, the poet transforms the original “As Tears Go By” to address his abandonment by parents, and by the death of the Romanian child’s symbolic father, the Iron man, Stalin. He links his litany of personal dirge to a deep transhistorical folk tradition of mourning rituals known as keening:
They were generic when she cried because life and the world were unendurable. And sometimes she cried neither specifically nor generically but deeper
like an animal. And those were not her tears, they were part of a river of tears that runs through our kind since the beginning of time. This river sweeps
us all in its swell and we stand in it keening, wailing, and arguing with something invisible in the language of lamentations. My mother’s two aunts, my
grandmother’s sisters, who died at Auschwitz, were swept away by this river.
The poem is itself an archival repository for tropes found in prior American poems. The phrase “our kind” recalls Ann Sexton’s “her kind.” Like Codrescu’s speaker, who fashions maternal lineage as a sorrow singer via the ancient tradition of keening, Sexton aligns her position as ostracized confessionalist Boston housewife in the 1950s with a transhistorical archival folk mythology including the scapegoating of Salem women as witches.[9] The poem also echoes a classic archival lyric written almost one century earlier before Codrescu’s – Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” In Hughes’ iconic early poem, the speaker becomes, in the tradition of Whitman and Emerson, a representative man. His knowledge extends in time and space far beyond the scope of an individual self. The speaker’s awareness expands to an epistemological association, via rivers, with oppression, enslavement, and creative endurance of maligned communities preceding recorded history and even prior to human existence. Codrescu connects his history of traumatic dislocation from his birth country to the silent maternal language of lamentation – tears – and then, via his mother’s tears, to a primordial pre-human history of suffering beings through the language of depth and rivers that recall Hughes’s first great poem of association with Sorrow Songs. Where Codrescu writes that his mother’s tears were “deeper like an animal. And those were not her tears, they were part of a river of tears that runs through our kind since the beginning of time,” Hughes wrote that “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” [10]
“the revolution and the poet” offers a complex analysis on the relation between art, ephemeral nature as repository of suffering undertaken in the cause of social change, and memorialization. I say “complex analysis” because Codrescu suggests events related to the poet’s life, especially the overthrow of Ceausescu’s regime in 1989, were blood-drenched manifestations on the natural ground and national landscape – “There is still blood on the snow in Bucharest”– that Codrescu interprets as the frozen remnant (“still blood”) of two centuries of art that idealized revolutionary movements in France and Russia. Rather than imagining archives, history, and memory as the aftermath to lived events such as the Romanian revolution, he regards such actions as revolutionaries striking a pose atop tanks in Bucharest as itself a theatrical gesture, a performance that re-presents what Codrescu refers to as the “tableaux vivants of years of Marxist schooling.”[11] Codrescu’s implicit comparison of Bucharest revolutionaries in 1989-1990 with contemporary performance artists such as Cindy Sherman staging cheesy movie stills is richly ironic. As much as the flag waving revolutionaries on tanks in Bucharest reenact images of Soviet Era social realist sculptures, the 1990 version reverses the ideological meaning of the image. Romanians atop tanks signifies rebellion against the regime that instilled “Marxist schooling” that resulted in the “transfusion” of fervor against the Neo-Marxist regime. Codrescu suggests a postmodern intertextual loop between French revolutionary paintings, Marxist social realism, and Romania’s overthrow of Ceausescu. He also connects himself as poet with the mythic image of Vlad the Impaler as Dracula. He asserts at the start of the poem that the primary significance of the “still blood” on the snow in Bucharest -- we must recall that “snow” is traditionally understood by poets such as Dickinson and Stevens as a figure for poetry -- may be for “the poet” a “transfusion” of material to infuse his imagination with enhanced value: “The poet needs revolution every decade/like the wounded need transfusions.”
“the revolution and the poet”
Bucharest January 1, 1990
The poet needs revolution every decade
Like the wounded need transfusions.
There is still blood on the snow in Bucharest.
The people with flags unfurled atop tanks
strike the perfect revolutionary poses
the tableaux vivants of years of Marxist
schooling. The French fall in love with them.
This is the snow sprung live from every
painting between 1846-1965 and sculpture, too:
the bronze train atop of which Lenin arrives
at the Finland station
where two lovers have found a dark place for love.
Only now Lenin is down and the lovers are on top.
This is the new decade in Bucharest, snowy New Year
by the blazing candles of the martyrs’ shrine
drunk with the millennium
schooling complete at last (371)
As in Yeats’s paradoxical formulation of the birth of “terrible beauty” at the moment of cataclysmic transformation at the end of “The Second Coming,” Codrescu’s bitter note at the end of “the revolution and the poet” reflects his awareness that real world revolutions cost blood in ways “tableaux vivants” never do. Codrescu’s chilling conclusion is that the drunken exuberance characteristic of a romantic conception of millennial change may soon enough morph into the bracing realism of the hangover. Real revolution involves blood on snow, martyrdom, and an education in what Philip Roth refers to as the “human stain.” The uncertain, even jaundiced, conclusion to “the revolution and the poet” reflects Codrescu’s similarly pessimistic remarks in The Hole in the Flag that Ceausescu’s overthrow has not displaced Romania’s sad history of oppression as well as its Orwellian association of grand sounding abstract words with a culture of violence and state control:
Words like ‘democratization,’ ‘privatization,’ and ‘human rights’ have been taking on the hollow sound of the ‘wooden language’ of their Communist
predecessors. The glow of optimism that infused everyone for several weeks after December 1989 faded quickly under the nightsticks of the miners of Jiul
Valie. (Hole in the Flag, 11)
In, The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution, Codrescu goes on to note that CNN reported 60,000 to 80,000 Romanians were killed in the bloodiest revolution among the Eastern European states in the concluding period of the Cold War. Just as Codrescu’s “the bridge over the drina” reads as if it were a gloss on Andric’s Nobel Prize novel, “ the poet and the revolution” may be read as a lyrical synecdoche of the broadly drawn narrative reflection on revolution and representation in Codrescu’s The Hole in the Flag.
As noted, “the revolution and the poet” foregrounds a media loop. A history of French painting and Soviet image making and a Romanian education promoting revolution manifest in a living archive – a “tableaux vivant.” History, social change, and a litany of representation coalesce in images of blood on snow as well as revolutionaries atop tanks. Just so, The Hole in the Flag takes on a decidedly postmodern turn as it presents the peculiar relation between media and social change: “To the people, overtaken by events and astounded by the flight of the dictator, it seemed that the provisional government was born on television” (37). He continues:
The historic scenes of the war for Romania were shown live by Romanian television, using both the studio inside the Central Committee and the studios
at the television station. One of the fiercest battles to be telecast was that for the television station itself, which reported its own situation in dramatic
bulletins. (37) The Romanian tricolor, red, blue, and gold, with the Communist emblem cut out of the middle was mounted on top of tanks. The same
flag, emblem cut out, was draped over the wall of the TV studio, and the words “FREE ROMANIAN TELEVISION” were handwritten on a banner
that became the new logo of Romanian TV. (37-38)
Contrary to late Proto Rap poet and funk singer Gil Scott Herron’s 1970 Black Power anthem “The Revolution Will Not be Televised,” Codrescu in The Hole in the Flag locates Ground Zero of Romania’s Revolution as occurring in the battle for control of the television news studio in Bucharest. As Gil Scott Herron had predicted “the revolution will be live, “ but Herron did not foresee the situation that cultural critic Richard Dienst refers to as “still life in real time.” Telemediation of the Battle for Bucharest occurs in the TV studio. Revolutionaries and communist party officials realize that the real time representation of the fight for the studio is the quintessential battleground for the revolution. The revolution amounts to a contest over how to project – how to narrate and how to name -- the meaning of the blood-stained performances occurring simultaneously on the tank-laden streets and inside the gun-shot pelted studio of Bucharest TV:
The historic scenes of the war for Romania were shown live by Romanian television, using both the studio inside the Central Committee and the studios
at the television station. One of the fiercest battles to be telecast was that for the television station itself, which reported its own situation in dramatic
bulletins. (37)
As in “the revolution and the poet,” the tableaux vivant of revolutionaries on tanks recurs, this time in the context of the title of Codrescu’s memoir. A hole in the Romanian flag represents a negation of the Ceausescu regime, but also an absence, or fissure, in the nation’s cultural imaginary. Through the hole, Codrescu can reenter the Romanian narrative that he had escaped in 1966:
The Romanian tricolor, red, blue, and gold, with the Communist emblem cut out of the middle was mounted on top of tanks. The same flag, emblem cut out, was draped over the wall of the TV studio, and the words “FREE ROMANIAN TELEVISION” were handwritten on a banner that became the new logo of Romanian TV. (37-38)
As is typical of Codrescu’s archival imagination, the hole in the flag signifies his understanding that historical meaning occurs under the sign of negation. By that I mean the most prominent signifier of revolutionary change in Romania in 1989 and the author’s figurative way in to re-visit, as patriot and reporter, that historical space takes place through the part of the flag that has been “cut out of the middle.” What is missing, what is invisible, what cannot be preserved in the archive becomes for Codrescu the significant repository of historical change.
Codrescu poems convey an archival theme, but his conception of an archive is so iconoclastic that it even defies categorization among what Wikipedia calls the “2.7% of archivists [who] were employed in institutions that defied categorization.” Codrescu’s (un)archival poetics, I have suggested, is an exceptional exception when it comes to imagining what an archive looks like, where it is located, when and how it can be consulted, of what it is made, and of how it may be interpreted. Archival lyrics from So Recently Rent A World bear out my point that Codrescu’s definition of what constitutes an archive defies easy categorization. In Codrescu’s poetry -- influenced as it is by his Romanian modernist forebear, the “daddy of Dadas” Tristan Tzara -- swamps, molds, New Orleans, the bridge over the Drina River, human tears, snow, and eating all are imagined as simultaneously serving and upsetting archival purposes. That is, Codrescu regards his representations of the eccentric items listed above as unstable, damaged, and often ephemeral repositories – what he calls an “Unarchive” of “exceptions” (128) -- for the conservation and transmission of history. A kind of meta-archival practice, his writings retrace and, for a time, store as residual elements, the personal record and public history of the author’s time and place that had previously been subject to amnesiac forgetting.
[1] Benjamin writes: “They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another”(Benjamin, 256).
[2] Even a brief survey of online information about molds – “fungus that grows in the form of multicellular filaments called hyphae” (Wikipedia) – confirms why molds would appeal to Codrescu’s idea of a living archive that consumes and destroys the historical materials it absorbs into its rhizomatic development. Molds, Wikipedia reminds us, “play a major role in causing decomposition of organic material, enabling the recycling of nutrients throughoutecosystems.”
[3] “Dental bridges literally bridge the gap created by one or more missing teeth. A bridge is made up of two crowns for the teeth on either side of the gap -- these two anchoring teeth are called abutment teeth -- and a false tooth/teeth in between. These false teeth are called pontics and can be made from gold, alloys, porcelain, or a combination of these materials. Dental bridges are supported by natural teeth or implants.” (Web MD). “
[4] As Bojana Simeunovic reports: “Beginning Andric ’s own story is one of tension and reconciliation with complex cultural origins: Born in Bosnia of Croatian parents, he was part of a radical “Young Bosnians” movement, active in terrorist plots against the Austrian government. When one of their group, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Andrić was imprisoned as a co-conspirator. There he read Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard and began to write. “
[5] Giordano Bruno writes:
Ivo Andric's stately architectonic prose spans the five-century history of Visegrad, in Bosnia, as imperturbably as the Ottoman stone bridge that centered
the economic, political, and social life of the town. The bridge, as told with thorough historicity, was built as a 'gift' to the region by Mohammed Söküllü, a
janissary taken from a Serbian peasant family who rose by natural ability to become the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire in the mid 16th Century.
Life in Visegrad, with its uneasy blend of Muslims, Christians and Jews, flows under the bridge as steadily as time, now a turbid torrent now a turgid trickle
but like Time itself always toward the sea of forgetfulness. Incidents of passion, violence, cruelty, and comedy occur and recur on the 'kapia' - the broad
center of the bridge - leaving their imprint in folk songs and lurking fears. Andric writes: ""So, on the kapia, between the skies, the river and the hills,
generation after generation learnt not to mourn overmuch what the troubled waters had borne away. They entered there into the unconscious philosophy
of the town; that life was an incomprehensible marvel, since it was incessantly wasted and spent, yet none the less it endured 'like the bridge on the Drina'.""
That enduring phlegmatic balance, that provincial tranquillity, would last even through the decadence of Ottoman authority and the incorporation of Bosnia
into another multi-cultural empire - Austria-Hungary - but it would meet its destruction with the intrusion of modernity, nationalism, and World War 1.
The bridge itself would be mined and demolished in the War. Though Ivo Andric depicts the exploitation and tyranny of the Ottomans, then the crass
invasive bureaucracy of the Austrians, with caustic realism, it's plain that he pines for the old days and old ways, that his vision of history is utterly
conservative and nostalgic.”
[6] As one reviewer reports, “Written in Belgrade, during the worst of the Nazi bombing, demolishing the city as the author wrote, Andric looks back across the histories that have been written across his home-land.”
[7] "As Tears Go By"
[8] As in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Codrescu’s “Unarchive” calls attention to the “barbarism” of historiography by imagining archival inscription itself as a catastrophic site. Influenced by his experience of Ceaușescu’s Romanian Stalinist state from 1946 to 1966, his stated goal is to “sabotage the narratives of Archives in ways that would allow the Archives of Amnesia to pour through into the present.”
[9] See http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15297#sthash.BX7VqAC0.dpuf
[10] See http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15722#sthash.DFcWxGjm.dpuf
[11] On “tableaux vivants,” The Chicago School of Media reports: The Oxford English Dictionary defines the phrase “tableau vivant” as, “a representation of a personage, character, scene, incident, etc., or of a well-known painting or statue, by one person or a group of persons in suitable costumes and attitudes, silent and motionless.” [1] Historically, “tableaux vivants denoted figures posed, silent and immobile, for twenty or thirty seconds, in imitation of well-known works of art or dramatic scenes from history and literature.”[3] In 1760, the Italian actor, Carlo Bertinazzi staged the Greuze’s painting The Village Betrothal in Les Noces d’Arlequin In 1781, at the Royal Palace in Versailles, the court appointed governess to the sons of the Duke of Orleans, Madame de Genlis, was known to stage tableau vivants in her tutelage utilizing paintings of Jacque Louis-David and Eugene Louis Isabey. [11] Not only were these playful costumed stagings but they were also used to dramatize important moments of history and literature in order to educate and inform.