In the Mirror of the Eighth King

Abstract

Christopher Middleton. In the Mirror of the Eighth King. Kobenhavn & Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999. In his essay Introduction an Unpublished Anthology of Short Prose ( 1992), which appears in another recent collection,' Christopher Middleton adopts from German the long-recognized term Kurzprosa for genre he calls a changeling in the extended family of literary ( 179). He identifies some characteristics: brevity and density, an ambiguous relation narrative, the enablement of sudden epiphany of the inconspicuous, and general instability. Further, he writes, [t]he animular miniaturism of short prose...secretes subversive force, as well as ludic force (178). These designations all may seem peculiarly appropriate Robert Walser, the earlytwentieth-century Swiss writer whose critical reception Middleton inaugurated in the 1950s both as Germanist and as translator. Yet Middleton traces long genealogy for the form, from Apuleius and Attar, through Thomas Traherne, Pascal, and Johann Peter Hebel, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Benjamin, Shuntaro Tanikawa, Slawomir Mrozek, and Rosmarie Waldrop. (An even more updated list of references would no doubt include Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus, and Yoko Tawada, among others.) And he catalogues multitude of its narrative and non-narrative manifestations: parable, fable, anecdote, dream report, meditation, aphorism, pensee, Groteske, journal entry, etc. Middleton points the etymology of the word prose as an indication of the genre's structure; it derives from proversus, meaning to turn forward. In an earlier review of the subject, he claims that long prose forms involve sustained unfolding of ratio toward mystery which the unspeakable end of fiction, whereas short imaginative prose is made of language that attuned the notion that truth cannot be beheld, only glimpsed.2 But in this more recent essay he less explicit about the distinction, and it would appear that the species-being of short prose can be most securely identified by the difference it enacts in its modulation of this forward-turning-the absence or, more frequently, the intensification of itand by the attention it calls the tropism itself, the fact that it prose at all. While Middleton far better known as lyric poet and translator, it clear that short prose has long commanded his creative and critical attention. In the Mirror of the Eighth King, his third full book in the genre, (appropriately packaged in an attractive Green Integer octodecimo), consists of eighteen pieces, ranging in brevity from under two hundred words over five thousand, and all bristling with an intelligence that precipitately cons its own hairpin turns of syntax, while carrying in its hold the gravity that it would seem countermand. Unlike the demure inventions included in Our Flowers & Nice Bones (1969), the rambunctious, brocaded grotesques of Pataxanadu (1977), or the unpunctuated freshets and whirlpools of Serpentine (1985), these essays, as the jacket blurb would have it,4 are more reflective and self-consciously philosophical, staged at the vanishing points of inquiry and imagination, and continue his exploration of the genre as an instrument of perception. In way, each crucible in which collisions of consciousness and its limits are discharged at tremendously high velocities, as if by doing so invisible universes on just the other side from this one might finally disclose themselves, measure be won, the author find my in this place (50). Dream, memory, and metaphor (as poetic thinking) are the locations be inhabited. But while language dispatched them on reconnaissance, it comes back each time too late have staked claim: phenomenon similar what Laplanche, following Freud, translates as afterwardsness-though here the enigma not only the barely recalled communication, but what communicated in recall itself. …