The New Old World

Abstract

Steel Is Made Flesh Matt Samet A Gesture Through Time Elizabeth Block Spuyten Duyvil Press http://www.spuytenduyvil.net 280 pages; paper, $14.00 Ronald Sukenick once told a group of writing students that the written word and the page it's printed on comprise a physical medium. You must start here if you are truly to appreciate writing. What a delight, then, to read Elizabeth Block's deft A Gesture Through Time, a novel of love—and love lost—that not only exerts its own physicality through the use of two "flip books" punctuating the prose, but also through various treatises on earthly media like steel, light, film, x-ray, porcelain, the Bay Bridge, Bolex cameras, the body, etc. These lift the words out of the two-dimensional page-trap and into the fertile, three-dimensional sculpture garden of the reader-mind. As a narrative framework, we have a starry-eyed youngster, Elizabeth, seduced as a teenager by Magnitude Hortense Zappa, a worker in a Detroit steel mill owned by Elizabeth's father. Imprinted by this experience, she obsesses over recapturing her first love/sexual blooming. Zappa, meanwhile, has become a successful filmmaker in San Francisco, where the narrator lives, and has taken the name Sarah Ona Broome. Only the cryptic Dr. Ratio, therapist to each woman individually, knows that they now share the same city, a place of magical, near-Mediterranean light (and shadow), as imagined in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), that may or may not be the world they inhabit. Thus, when the role of narrator flip-flops from Elizabeth to Magnitude midway through the novel, we, too, reel with vertigo as we struggle to reconcile our notion of story with the disjunctive, but ultimately cohesive, gesture of Gesture. But plot is ancillary to Block's first novel. Block, an accomplished filmmaker and poet who has done graduate work in cultural anthropology, presents a verbal pastiche: traditional narrative; the stark, black-and-white flip books consisting of 16mm film scans; "found footage frames ofearly film technology (zoetropes)"; MRI and x-ray scans and drawings by the artist Evri Kwong; interviews between the narrator and the author; dramaturgical dialogues between such characters as HUMILIATION and PLEASURE or FILMMAKER and WOMAN; and scientific asides on substances, gizmos, and properties. So wherein lies the unity? In a post-millennial novel like Gesture, it finds a home in the marriage of man and machine, much as the director David Cronenberg proposed in such prescient films as Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983). (James Cameron's work comes to mind here, too.) In 2005, we stroll about with bluetooth technology, loudly, sometimes toxically , broadcasting ourpersonalities through headsets as we receive remote messages through near-invisible earpieces—or, at the other end of the spectrum, jamming one thousand songs onto iPod nanos so we can enter the agora and shirk human contact. However, whereas Cronenberg hypothesized mortification —and only mortification—as a result of the union of metal and flesh, Block, who might harbor some Cronenbergian sympathies, keeps her observations circumspect. Take, for example, Block's description of the x-ray: Paradoxical technology or thanotography, the x-ray represents "death on the body it penetrates." We imagine literal death and other traumatic associations and denials of trauma. The x-ray cannot record the human feeling that precedes the need for the x-ray. No, it certainly cannot. Analogously, can the written word truly convey the human feeling it strives to represent? In the enduring materiality ofits presence and its playful formal invention, Gesture sets itselfapart as an enduring piece ofmetafiction. Contrast that with Block's evocative description of an earthly delight: You move down my body, and I try to keep my hands in the air so the shampoo does not wash away—all this with my eyes closed because I am so mad at you I can not possibly look at you while you are turning me on—and you startto move your mouth right there on the most precious part of my body.... Flesh, here, is revered, even in the face ofanger, but it remains covered by shampoo—a manmade product. Meanwhile, spanning the interstice, we have: "How about technology as an...