Nothing Full of Everything

Page 20 American Book Review liTerAry resiDUAls Laird hunt POste restante Derek White Calamari Press http://www.calamaripress.com 122 pages; paper, $12.00 One encounters with such regularity experimental works in which text and image, prose and poetry, song lyric and essay, English and other languages have been more or less felicitously conjoined that to employ the phrase “literary hybrid” these days is to commit a tautology. Which isn’t to say that ten years after W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants appeared in English, twenty-five years after Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, and thirty-seven years after Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid that it is time to hang up our hybrid hats. Rather, that if the combinatorial eccentricity of the endeavor is to be more than merely apparent, if form is going to continue to pull substantive weight as content, or at least help a little more content to shine through, then it’s time again for something new. Derek White’s Poste Restante is a solid step in the right direction. Harking back to Gérard de Nerval’s great proto-surrealist Aurélia (1855) in its exploration of the casually obsessive quality of dreams, while vigorously attending to the energetic but ad hoc textures of late-twentieth-century fiction à la Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son (1993) or Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965), Poste Restante presents itself as a kind of dreamed daybook, a chronicle of travels “transcribed in the dark.” The pieces are short, the situations they evoke often terrifyingly complex.The claustrophobia of dreaming is present, but so is the promise of farflung places. There is something of William Blake’s infinity in this: the eye that frames heaven and gets crushed by it. We were disappointed to discover that the lagoon was not really deep enough to swim in. So we waded around in the knee-deep water viewing the marine life just beneath the surface. Sea snails meandered over the brain coral. The colorful flesh enfolding their shells was thin and delicate. I knew if I touched it, the fleshy shield over the hard shell would retract, but I couldn’t help myself. When I reached down to finger it, I discovered that what I was looking at was actually some sort of postage stamp. I wiped it off, revealing text and pictures of other stamps from the far away Cook Islands that were embedded into it. Accompanying the text are White’s own collages , made from postcards, star charts, pictures of sea anemones and bits and pieces of insects, blurred photographs of vaguely foreign locales, which manage simultaneously to evoke Joseph Cornell’s boxes and Max Ernst’s The Hundred-Headless Woman (1929). The collages—“exhibits” and “postes” that deepen rather than mitigate the mystery at hand—are as intriguingly titled as the works they find themselves part of. Thus, “Exhibit H. Arm Y Dirigible Force” is housed in “AnAccumulation of Virgin Powder” and “Poste N. Bol-9 Stem-Cell Pin-Setting” in “HoeingA -Row, My Blood-Clot Brother.” The humor evoked here is intentional—the visual component of Poste Restante is often very funny. Passport pages sprout arms and are drawn forward by flies, and the author grins out at us from under an umbrella. But there is also, frequently, a strong element of vivisection to the images that turn the eye away and directs attention toward other, darker concerns. Poste Restante presents itself as a kind of dreamed daybook, a chronicle of travels “transcribed in the dark.” More standard short works might have buckled under the pressure of being set alongside these troubling beauties, but White’s subtle fictions, which triangulate tale, travelogue, and dream narrative, are up to the job. At moments, it is the banal tedium of remembered experience that concerns him: This was in Nice, and I didn’t speak a lick of French. I had directions to the studio but didn’t trust the driver. Besides, the taxi was so small I didn’t see how anybody could take it seriously. We were stuck bumper-to-bumper, and it seemed that the cars on all the other streets...