theme

Yesterday, the postal service blessed me with a Red Pyramid, a collection of stories by Vladimir Sorokin, as translated by the indefatigable Max Lawton. Will Self’s irresistible introduction, an ode in the key of sumptuousness that chronicles the importance of linguistic profanation in Sorokin’s work, sucked me into the book immediately. As Sorokin is notorious for his textual subversions of temporality, I was intrigued by a technique Sorokin employs in “Horse Soup,” namely, the use of a list form to stage a scene.

The story is dated from the year 2000, a decade after the end of Russia’s self-styled communism. What communism meant at the point of its alleged dissolution remains a secret more closely-guarded than the location of the Arc of the Convenant. Nevertheless, it is not speculative to say that the elite was composed of a very large class of Party apparatchiks, most of whom went on to become the powerful capitalists and the oligarch class of the present. When Sorokin wrote “Horse Soup”, the era of cowboy capitalism was taking shape— a shape that owes much to the Harvard academics who quickly became hedge-fund owners and investors, Larry Summers and Jeffrey Sachs, among them. (One could argue that Harvard’s “international development policy” cotillion in the early 2000’s also shaped the role that business schools would play in higher education, but I leave that to my superiors with a grimace.)

The absence of that particular present isn’t explicit in Sorokin’s telling. Instead, he situates the characters and events in the aura of the 2000’s, an aura distinguished by its indeterminacy and hesitation: a time in which the past is not quite past and nothing is finished and revolution feels like a hue of nostalgia in the margins. This is how it begins, or why beginning isn’t entirely possible.

Facing this challenge, Sorokin opens with a temporal question which he answers (somewhat satirically) before launching immediately into the first inventory:

A single line, a question and answer, constitute the first paragraph. Followed by an inventory composed from a cluster of clauses, phrases, and fragments. The syntax of listing lacks integument; the objects are connected by spatial proximity. Nostalgic potential is invested in these objects as the story proceeds and reality is destabilized by Sorokin’s narrative techniques.

variation

The story is interrupted by several dream sequences, set apart by italics, as seen below:

The dream sequence also brings forwards objects as texts, or spaces where a moment has been written. The “endless'“ dogs lie “in wait”; a monorail is juxtaposed against the sudden presence of a particular “country sand, fine white sand.”

Even in dialogues, the characters recognize one another by recollecting objects and relying on material in order to reconvene in the present as those who related to things that existed in the past:

The cornet of cherries— this is what Olga uses to meet herself in the past which lays a claim to the present.

[interlude]

Sorokin’s objects are laid out before the eye for study, and normally, such a move would locate the speaker in time by establishing a distinct material reality. In some ways, the list calls to mind the still-life as a form that focuses on close study of a material reality (i.e. the fruits and the table, as supplemented by various ornaments and details).

As forms, the still-life and the musical etude serves as training exercises, a study of a particular scene or chord or scale that develops capacity vis a vis larger works, like the symphony or the portrait.

Can a film still be read as a “still life”?

Variations on this question preoccupy a project that is due on Friday. I’m interested in the film still as a screenshot—an attempt to stop motion and halt the progression of instants, an effort to formulate an instance.

The image above is a screen shot from Sloth [Portrait d'une Paresseuse], a 1968 film by by Chantal Akerman, a piece of her “Seven Women, Seven Sins” anthology.

Did I turn a scene into a still-life, or is the still-life part of sequence that doesn’t require separation from continguous events? How still is it? What is being kept or preserved in the screen shot that resembles a still life?

variation

The “Horse Soup” is saturated with Proust in the way the mind makes sense of the present by interpreting it in relation to various objects. Maybe this compressive energy is what reminds me of stills from cinema, or at least offers a cinematic texture to the deployment of “instances” from the instant.

Olga recollects each moment as it happens, playing into the retrospective immediacy of Proustian narration. The inclusion of material evidence for this cherry jam, is I think, rather delicious in its transformation of the madeleine-styled object:

Despite the listing of chronological events, this excerpt instantiates a single powerful image. I cannot stop staring at it, and licking the fresh cherry jam from the Sorokian spoon.