The Elephant of Silence: Essays on Poetics and Cinema
by John Wall Barger
(LSU Press, 2024, 190 pp., $24.95)
“Club Silencio,” one of my favorite essays in The Elephant of Silence, starts with a gentle void: “After a good day of writing, it’s like I’ve emerged out of a dream. I can’t remember where I’ve been or what I’ve written. As if rain had washed away my footprints.” Something similar happened when I finished the book. Although I remembered a few details, I still had a sense of being washed by rain in a place both familiar and new.
I share much with Barger: first of all, a conviction that Nick Cave, Louise Glück, Andrei Tarkovsky, Nikolai Gogol, David Lynch, Francis Bacon, and William James all have a place at the table (whatever that table might be). Second, we both yearn for silence not only in life, but in literary criticism: we resist overexplaining our most beloved works but seek to open them up to readers so that they (both the works and the readers) will speak for themselves. Third, we have both learned that personal struggles and joys have a role in thought; we do not have to hide our own lives behind obfuscatory phrases. We do not have to be “professional” in the dreary sense of the term.
Beyond this, my interests converge with Barger’s in surprising ways. I wrote my dissertation on Gogol, minored in Spanish literature in graduate school (with an emphasis on Lorca and the cante jondo), have been drawn to Glück’s poetry for some time now—and to Nick Cave’s music; have watched David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. at least five times; have watched every Buñuel film I could access; and the list goes on.
But what about the unfamiliar? That is what I love most about the book: not what I recognize, certainly not any takeaways (the book’s allusive arguments leave those far behind), but a curiosity threaded with hush, a gentle break with what has been (even a paragraph earlier), an invitation to the readers to seek new things, cross thresholds, part ways with faulty assumptions.
Back to “Club Silencio”: what is it about, if not thresholds and breaking? The title refers to a pivotal scene—in a club by that name—in Mulholland Drive, where, in Barger’s vivid description,
A goateed magician, in front of tall crimson curtains, pulls sound out of the air while telling the audience, “It’s all recorded.” A woman sings Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in Spanish, heartbreakingly; she faints, her singing continues. We don’t believe it’s been a recording. It isn’t! It emanates from nowhere; from the air, which is film. Betty and Rita recoil, weep.
The scene not only represents a threshold, limen, but is one, between what Barger calls the room (“the realm of language, articulation, performance, time”) and inner room ( “a space of secrets, reverie, deep song, trance”). In this scene, Betty, soon to transform into a much unhappier Diane, sobs, it seems, for a memory that has just surfaced involving her friend and lover, Rita, both alive (holding her hand) and dead (by her hand). The moment they are living is not only forever lost, but perhaps lost long ago; this paradox of time becomes the blue key and the box, the “silencio.” The repetition of “silencio” at the end of the film leaves us, according to Barger, in the inner room itself. Since the “Club Silencio” scene takes place in an auditorium, we too (the viewers of the film) take part in the shock; the illusion reveals reality, the things we dimly know.
The essay expands far beyond Mulholland Drive; it becomes a meditation on poetry as threshold, with a Sappho epigraph and excursions into (Jack) Gilbert, Dante, Rilke, Simic, and others, a partial refutation of Derrida, and a poem or fragment by Barger at the end, whose last line (“Philadelphia. Not glimmering. Crumbling, ash.”) renders “silencio” itself.
Barger’s illumination of the threshold helps me overcome my reservations about an earlier chapter, “In the Cold Theater of the Poem.” Here Barger distinguishes (subtly, with qualifications) between “warm” and “cold” poetry, showing a distinct preference for the latter. To me, he is perhaps being too tactful; what he calls “warm” poetry I would call, uh, bland. More about that in a moment.
Barger himself seems uneasy with the distinction. “Most art is too slippery—,” he writes, “shifting under our feet, chimeric—to categorize in such a binary way. Even a short poem, even a line, oscillates between cold and warm. A deft poem can evoke warmth just to shock us with coldness, or the other way around.”
Nonetheless, he offers the following distinction: “Where cold art makes me shiver with the possibility of death, warm art makes me giggle with the possibility of pizza.” He explains further: “Cold art looks you square in the eye, speaks their truth,” whereas “warm art reaches too quickly for sentiment.” Later he gives examples of the “warm”: “I enjoy many poets whose work I’d call warm. I love Billy Collins and Mary Oliver, for example, but I would not depend on them to tell me their whole truth. They prefer, perhaps, to please me, to wish me well, to enable me.”
I think I differ from Barger here: I do not love the poems of Billy Collins or Mary Oliver (yet)—precisely because, in my perception, they offer something cozy and quotable instead of the threshold. Nonetheless, while seeking to substantiate this, I came upon a few Oliver poems that gave me a chill here and there, a few Collins poems with shades of warmth, subtle difficulties. What I dislike about both poets’ oeuvre is what tends to get quoted: the feel-good snippets that leave me “cold.” The quotations are not the whole; so in considering this question, I have approached a threshold and a silence.
As for poets in the realm of the cold, Barger writes, “One poet whose voice sounds, to me, as if it emerges directly out of that icy forest is Louise Glück.” Here I agree heartily—but her poetry too, has its warmths. If “cold art” is that which “looks you square in the eye,” then it is the more reliable friend; that in itself is an oddly warm thing. That is, I find something comforting in art that refuses to comfort; this includes Glück. Take “The Melancholy Assistant” in Faithful and Virtuous Night, where an exchange with a melancholy assistant seems “both deeply fraudulent / and profoundly true,” an observation both cold and warm at once (but which part is which)? And is the snow at the end warm or cold?[1]
I do not have to seal these questions with answers; Barger’s essay invites me to consider the distinction, not to heave my books out of the shelves and drop them in labeled boxes. I use the “consider” with Jeremy Bendik-Keymer’s reflections in mind: “Consideration seems to me to be different than simply thinking about things, because it delimits an intimate connection to the cosmos. The word has the word for a star in it (-sider). I see it as a way in which we take in our entire relation to something as from the void, thereby letting it delimit itself within the void as a star within the blackness of the cosmos.”[2] This kind of consideration, a kind with infinitely high stakes, fills the cold-warm essay and the book.
The end of the essay bursts with craving: “I want my cage rattled. I want to be triggered. To lurch out of my realm. I want to be reminded. That something has gone gravely wrong with the human race. That people are trapped in huge, indifferent machines, fated to die alone, without any clear meaning or hope.” I do too; and like Barger, I suspect, I want it done in a way that I will later sing or recite to myself. I want at least a twinkle of play.
That leads me to “Paradise Ludic,” which abounds with thoughts on Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, a book whose presence in our bookshelves intrigued me since childhood, and whose first chapter I have read many times. Here Barger testifies to the fun and play of poetry, taking us not only into Huizinga, but into Bunuel’s Simón of the Desert, into Nietzsche, Blake, Milton, Pasolini, and others, not sequentially, but playing back and forth, having fun.
The book as a whole abounds with play: themes rising up, disappearing, and reappearing; statements jousting with their opposites; the fun of the essay itself. Throughout the book, language strolls, leaps, and dives, attempting to go beyond words. The book uses the word “should” rarely; it prefers questions to maxims. A temporary and fascinating exception can be found in “The Amnesiac at Dusk,” which tells, among other things, of Barger’s emergence from a mental breakdown. The essay contains five instances of “should” (two of them quoted); the word changes subtly in sense over the course of the essay.
At first, “should” appears limiting, even accusatory: the narrator finds himself wondering, “What should I do?” “What should I be looking for?,” questions that have no answers until they come serendipitously. Yet another kind of “should” emerges from the chapter: that of his mother telling him that he ‘should” do what he enjoys (a “should” that opens up possibilities and leads to a daily walk at dusk), and the mysterious “should” in James Tate’s poem “It Happens Like This,” which Barger’s description prompted me to reread multiple times.[3]
In the poem, the speaker comes upon a goat in his town and walks away, only to have the goat follow him and become joined to his life. A police officer approaches and asks if he may pet the goat; the speaker responds, “Touching this goat will change your life.” The officer asks the goat’s name; upon learning that it is “The Prince of Peace,” he exclaims, “God! This town / is like a fairy tale. Everywhere you turn there’s mystery / and wonder. And I’m just a child playing cops and robbers / forever. Please forgive me if I cry.” The speaker forgives the officer, adding, “And we understand why you, more than / anybody, should never touch the Prince.” Barger comments, “The goat has transformed, before our eyes, into something sacred, Christ-like. But how?” Instead of answering this, Barger quotes Simic: “To write a poem out of nothing at all is Tate’s genius.” Part of the genius, I would add, is this magical apprehension: the knowledge, which comes out of nowhere, that the officer should not touch the goat. The “should” here, as I understand it, springs from an apprehension of the sacred; it opposes the “should” of coercion, the kind that induces despair, the kind that arises when we compare the seeming void of our inner room to the seeming vivacity of the room. In contrast, the “should” of Tate’s poem hints at awe; in The Elephant of Silence, awe holds freedom.
“Awe is not denial,” writes Barger at the end of the essay. Yet awe, he suggests, cannot be forced by “shoulds”; for two years, every day, he tried to be open to awe, but found himself instead “on the cold islands of zemblanity” (a word coined by William Boyd in his 1998 novel Armadillo). Awe comes gently (but shockingly) from within despair itself. From here a different kind of “should” rustles forth: the kind that “asks a little of us here” (Frost)[4] and tells us what we may and may not touch.
The Elephant of Silence takes care not to touch too much or tie too many knots; in the epilogue, Barger writes, “I’ve tried, in every case, not to disturb the depths and silence with noisy explication. If Goya was right that ‘fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters,’ then we curious bystanders best keep a respectful distance. … I’ve tried, as Fellini does at the end of La dolce vita, to leave each mostro in peace, without poking it with my critical stick.” I have tried to do likewise here, albeit verbosely. I first read the book during a visit to the U.S. During quiet moments, I would run off to read more; it had started following me, or I it, and together we stumbled upon a ravine and gazed at the steepness, the silence, the surprise.
Footnotes