The Colossus of New York: A City in 13 Parts
by
Gravity
A review by Wyatt Mason
Is there a style in which the truth cannot be told? Two
sentences that appeared in a brief article by the celebrated
young novelist Colson Whitehead prompt the question. Titled "The
Image," the piece appeared in the September 23, 2001 issue of
The New York Times Magazine. Whitehead described the
morning of September 11 in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. In the
company of his wife and surrounded by strangers, he was staring
at the burning World Trade Center towers. Whitehead reports that
he suggested his wife take a photograph:
Because it was a very nice shot, well composed. The three men in the
foreground were obviously strangers, standing together, but not so close as
to violate any rules about personal space. They were of different races; one
had a dog that looked away from the scene at a bird or something, one had abandoned
a bicycle on the ground. The bicycle was a nice touch — couldn't have placed
it better myself. In the sky before the men, the towers burned. The right part
of the frame was unblemished blue sky, the left a great wash of brown and black
smoke. The dynamic event, the small human figures. It was a nice shot. Call
it "The Watchers" or "The Spectators."
Whitehead's account of his impulse to seize the image of the
horror is not without self-mockery ("The bicycle was a nice
touch — couldn't have placed it better myself"). For by the time
he has come to set these lines down, he has become killingly
aware that the very last thing he and his wife had before them
was a "nice shot." How could he have thought it had been a nice
shot at all? "[I]t had been easier to shape the horror into an
aesthetic experience and deny the human reality. There was
safety in that distance." Whitehead realized that however
readily those idyllic foreground "touches" leaped into the
frame, they ultimately distracted from the background horror
that was unfolding. The pastoral image that Whitehead thought to
freeze — all blue skies and bicycles, racial harmony and
distracted dogs — was grotesquely misleading: it masked the truth
that the image should have been unveiling.
Whitehead is careful and clear in his acknowledgment of this
failure, this risk of aesthetic distance. But it is precisely
this clarity and comprehension that make all the more unsettling
the two lines that Whitehead pens to describe the very collapse
that he holds responsible for his realization: "And then Tower 2
sighed. The top floors buckled out, spraying tiny white shards,
and the building sank down into itself, crouching beneath the
trees and out of frame." A sigh, that gentlest and most trivial
of exhalations, reserved for moments when we are placidly tired
or mildly disappointed, turns the collapse of one hundred
thousand tons of steel and glass — which made a cloud visible
from space and a sound audible forty miles away — into a mild
human wind.
As a "nice touch," however idyllic, Whitehead's use of the
word "sighed" is as clear an instance as I have encountered of a
stylistic choice, an aesthetic shaping, that distracts us from
the thing described and attracts us instead to the description.
Not, of course, that "crouching" is any better. It is a
hopelessly weak word, for no one ever died of a crouch; but
Whitehead here has folded the death of thousands by the most
ghastly means — dismemberment, immolation, suffocation, impact —
into a metaphorical bending of knees. One might argue, given
that readers already understood the weight of the event that
Whitehead was describing, that his responsibility was not
reportorial. Perhaps Whitehead was merely trying to alleviate
our distress by transforming a thing of great ugliness into a
thing of some beauty. Yet this verbal image is no less
graphically misleading than the photographic image that
Whitehead upbraided himself for considering. Death has been
aesthetized entirely out of view, horror hidden in the
background by a foreground of writerly effects. Whitehead's two
sentences provide not an image of what was happening — people
dying — but a picture of a man writing. A moment of the greatest
weight — physical, emotional, spiritual — is rendered in language
that denies every kind of gravity. With objectivity, call this
writing false.
Such falseness is disappointing in a writer of talent.
Whitehead's two novels, The Intuitionist (1998) and
John Henry Days (2001), exhibit a metaphorical reach and
a structural sophistication that distinguish him among less
ambitious peers. Under the umbrella of large organizing
metaphors — elevators in The Intuitionist, the mythical
steel-driving man in John Henry Days — he has explored the
dynamics of race and modern life. The language of his novels is
frequently memorable and distinctive, and the depth of his
reading is apparent in that prose. It brims with echoes of
techniques and tones drawn from predecessors both American and
continental, whether elders (Joyce, Woolf, Gaddis) or nearer
contemporaries (Barthelme, Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace,
Moody). He has been praised for "his willingness to take the
intellectual risks necessary to expand the boundaries of
contemporary writing."
And so, within that program of risk-taking, comes
Whitehead's new book about New York. Engendered by the terrorist
attacks on the city, the book is his first work of non-fiction,
a baker's dozen of short pieces devoted to different views of
the city. When Whitehead writes, "What follows is my city.
Making this a guide book, with handy color-coded maps and
minuscule fine print you should read very closely so you won't
be surprised," he is of course being ironic: the book, as you
might guess, has no such maps or print. His ambition is neither
to offer details that you could find in a guidebook nor to
provide sociological or historical perspective. His thirteen
sections — with titles ranging from "Broadway" to "Brooklyn
Bridge," from "Rush Hour" to "Rain" — are meant to be evocative,
not argumentative. Formally, the pieces are not essays at all.
They are prose poems, at times reminiscent in style of Rimbaud's
Illuminations. Whitehead frequently abandons conventions
of English grammar, focusing instead on the creation of mood and
the insinuation of tone. His method is impressionistic,
imagistic, for Whitehead is not presenting the city as it
stands, but as it sits within him.
The Colossus of New York must therefore be read as a
devotional text, written by a congregant from his pew. The first
section, "City Limits," begins: "I'm here because I was born
here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don't know about
you." If, at first blush, this might seem like the typical
arrogance of a New Yorker and therefore be dismissed out of hand
for its parochialism, upon reflection it is less an attitude
unique to New York than the ubiquitous chauvinism of natives
everywhere. As Gertrude Stein noted, in her version of the urban
ode, Paris, France:
Familiarity does not breed contempt. On the contrary the
more familiar it is the more rare and beautiful it is. Take the
quarter in which one lives, it is lovely, it is a place rare and
beautiful and to leave it is awful. I remember once hearing a
conversation on the street in Paris ... they had to leave the
quarter ... they had to leave the most wonderful place in the
world, wonderful because it was there where they had always
lived.
Whitehead finds New York similarly familiar, and therefore
similarly wonderful. And so it is easy to become infected by
Whitehead's sense of wonder, by his love for the city, when he
writes:
I never got a chance to say good-bye to some of my old
buildings. Some I lived in, others were part of a skyline I
thought would always be there. And they never got a chance to
say good-bye to me. I think they would have liked to — I refuse
to believe in their indifference.... Our old buildings still
stand because we saw them, moved in and out of their long
shadows, were lucky enough to know them for a time. They are a
part of the city we carry around.
In this way the loss of the twin towers has been gently
absorbed into the city's history of losses. A facet of being a
New Yorker, Whitehead offers, is to be aware of those sudden
voids, to be as aware of them as of the actual presences before
us. That observation is something of a commonplace. It is called
memory. It happens everywhere: "The Meyersons' barn used to be
over there and the old oak tree with the rope swing was by the
creek until it got hit by lighting." The difference in New York,
if one must insist upon a difference, might be the speed with
which such changes take place, the destabilizing nature of urban
change.
Whitehead richly and simply evokes the melancholy of such a
condition:
We can never make the proper goodbyes. It was your last ride
in a Checker cab and you had no warning.... There are unheralded
tipping points, a certain number of times that we will unlock
the front door of an apartment. At some point you were closer to
the last time than you were to the first time, and you didn't
even know it. You didn't know that each time you passed the
threshold you were saying good-bye.
He is at his most moving at the moments of restraint and
directness visible in these final sentences. The elegiac tone
that insinuates a sorrow into our least daily movements, that
implicates us all in this process of forgetting, is convincing.
Whitehead's shifts from the first-person plural "we" to the
second-person singular "you" inject a soft solidarity into the
prose that drops our defenses. I wish, though, that Whitehead
were similarly attentive to his affection for Checker cabs. They
are a telling detail, richly evocative of New York in the 1970s,
but surely the reference is lost on anyone who did not live in
the city before the decommissioning of these monsters in the
early 1980s. It would be more generous and useful were Whitehead
to pinpoint something specific about a Checker cab that one
would miss. New Yorkers of Whitehead's generation recall the joy
of stepping into the enormous, limousine-like passenger
compartment. Children in particular were fond of the fold-down,
backward-facing seats, some of which swiveled magically into
place. To present these cabs so blankly, omitting the
particulars that make them memorable, is a small missed
opportunity.
But it is a revealing one. Early in his book Whitehead lays
out his ground rules: his concern is not with particulars.
"Never listen to what people tell you about old New York," he
writes, "because if you didn't witness it, it is not a part of
your New York." Whitehead is not telling us about "New York." He
is telling us about how New York has made him feel. Tone and
image are his preoccupation, not historical detail. The
technique that he puts in service of that impressionism is rapid-
fire imagery. Often he cuts like a documentary film from one
shot to the next, as in this picture of Central Park:
It's a little-known fact that people are buried here but
only the murderers know the exact locations. Invisible wet stuff
on the ground and here's a dead squirrel. So much for the
picnic. Cross-legged summits. Welcome to the Riviera. Mistakes
have been made in the area of shorts. This guy's nuts hang out
as he sits Indian-style and she should really consider waxing if
she's going to leave the house like that. Bushes, hedges, dark
thickets. Don't go too far, kids, there are areas used for
anonymous sex. Let's have anonymous sex, what do you say. Don't
touch it, you'll get rabies. Prod it with a stick instead.
An ear hears words of parental caution; an eye picks up
nuts; a mind processes a view of sunbathers on towels into a wry
Riviera. Whitehead sets a woman who has "left the house like
that" next to "bushes" so that the word applies equally to the
woman's inner thighs and the landscape. It is a risky but, in
this instance, successful stylistic compression. It creates a
vivid, bustling mood.
The problem is that throughout the book, Whitehead's
technique is wildly hit or miss. When he tells us that "from the
river you can see the clouds haunch over the adjacent boroughs,"
we have no choice but to stop and think about Whitehead's
"haunch." It might be that he means "hunch" here, but it might
be also that he is taking a technical architectural term — a
"haunch" is the upper curving part of an arch — and coining it as
a verb that would mean the clouds are arching over the boroughs.
In either case, we begin to be distracted by Whitehead's clouds
of language.
And the clouds gather as we read deeper. "Fetuses fret about
what zip code they'll end up in, tapping against membrane in
morse code: renting is for suckers. Too young to know that the
womb schools the dimensions of a studio apartment." All that
fancy footwork — prenatal kicks as code, wombs as big or small as
studios — cannot hide Whitehead's cliché. And then there
is his Coney Island postcard:
All tomorrow's sunburns gather in wait. Heads dart to and
fro as they seek the right spot. Homestead and land grab. This
must be the place. Try to remember your personal formula for
comfort on a beach, the whole towel thing. Sizzle on the
griddle. How to serve man. Gritty evidence of the last visit to
the beach clings to the neck of the bottle of suntan
lotion.
While the detail in the last line, the "gritty evidence"
clinging to the neck of the bottle of lotion, is tactile and
true, the rest is just clever noise, hip references to
unilluminating things. "All tomorrow's sunburns" signals us to
Whitehead's appreciation of the Velvet Underground; "How to
serve man" lets us know Whitehead has watched "The Twilight
Zone"; neither illuminates their presumptive subject, Coney
Island: both call attention to Whitehead. This alternation
between "gritty evidence" and grating cleverness becomes
immensely frustrating. When, in John Henry Days,
Whitehead wrote that "tone is the means, not the purpose," he
could have been talking about the failed dynamic that begins to
figure on too many pages of The Colossus of New York. For
it cannot be Whitehead's purpose to have his readers leave his
Coney Island believing that it is no different from any beach in
the world.
But on that beach we are at least in a recognizably human
world. Too often, Whitehead's urban portraiture begins in vivid
description that devolves into false wise-man
pronouncements:
The gust gains the upper hand as he waits for the light to
change and the umbrella is ripped inverse. Many are lost. The
wounded, the fallen in this struggle, poke out of trash cans,
abandoned, black fabric rippling against split chrome ribs. This
is their lot. Either in the trash can or forgotten in the
restaurant, the movie theater, the friend's foyer, spreading
their slow puddles across floors. Forming an attachment to an
umbrella is the shortest route to heartbreak in this town. Any
true accounting would reveal that there are only twenty
umbrellas in this city, in constant movement from palm to palm.
Bunch of Lotharios. So do we learn loss from umbrellas.
Yes, we lose umbrellas. But no, we do not learn loss from
them. Whitehead knows this, surely, but he has retained the line
because he has been seduced by its surface appeal: it sounds
good. Of course, an umbrella is the very thing from which you do
not learn loss. Once gone, it is never thought of again. "Loss,"
by contrast, is unforgettable, something one learns sitting with
one's father after bypass surgery or entering a bathroom to find
one's friend in a tub of his own blood. And when Whitehead does
mention suicide, it is as bloodless as a sigh: "His conspicuous
long sleeves hide hesitation marks, souvenirs of that bad
summer." Scars on a suicide's wrists are souvenirs of summer.
How nice to alliterate over a human wreck: dance on that
grave.
Whitehead seems to resort to the language of death only when
there is something genuinely pretty to look at. "Check the
window to discover yourself in a morgue, a white sheet covering
your unfortunate acquaintance. So it snowed last night."
Whitehead is wise to tell us that it snowed last night:
otherwise, one might think someone actually died.
Conspicuous effects like these alternate maddeningly with
writing absent any effect at all. Take the section called "JFK,"
presented here in its entirety:
It's time to go.
Everything's packed. All the necessary
documentation is secure in pockets and pouches. The time passed
so quickly. Take a moment to look back and regret all the things
you didn't get to do, the places you didn't get to visit. What
you did not see. Promise yourself, Maybe next time.
Assuming it will still be here when you finally
return.
Sometimes things disappear.
The airport is one of many conveniently located exits. In
the beautiful terminals you can get to anywhere in the world.
The names of carriers sort them by destination. Shuffle along
and do as you're told. Just a matter of time until you are home.
Take your seat.
When you talk about this trip, and you will, because it was
quite a journey and you witnessed many things, there were ups
and downs, sudden reversals of fortune and last-minute escapes,
it was really something, you will see your friends nod in
recognition. They will say, That reminds me of, and they will
say, I know exactly what you mean. They know what you are
talking about before the words are out of your mouth.
Talking about New York is a way of talking about the
world.
Wake up. With a shudder finally kicked out of the dream.
Impossibly this gigantic creature has taken off. This unlikely
gargoyle with impossible wings. How we flutter sometimes. Settle
in for the journey and forget. Please forget. Try to forget bit
by bit, it will be easier on you. Leave it behind. Then the
plane tilts in its escape and over the gray wing the city
explodes into view with all its miles and spires and inscrutable
hustle and as you try to comprehend this sight you realize that
you were never really there at all.
Talking about New York may be a way of talking about the
world, but if this is an example of talking about New York, I
cannot find a single detail of any specificity that would let me
know where the hell I am. We could be in any airport in the
world. Terminals are "beautiful," planes are "gargoyles," New
York was "quite a journey." A better title for this section, one
more evocative and accurate, would be "Cliché." There is
nothing unfamiliar here, other than the idea that JFK is
conveniently located.
This is all a pity, for Whitehead in the past has written
marvelously. He can produce aesthetic transformations as true
and rich as those in The Colossus of New York are empty and
false. In The Intuitionist he described a black man's
fraught relationship to his own blackness: "No caramel soda, no
prune juice, and definitely no coffee: Pompey won't drink
anything darker than his skin, for fear of becoming darker than
he already is. As if his skin were a stain that could worsen,
steep and saturate into Hell's Black." He noted details of city
life, describing an urban traffic jam with great originality,
using personification to excellent effect: "The traffic lights
are unforgiving at this time of night, mysterious and
capricious, as if appalled by this latest indignity of citizens
and their vehicles." He had an eye for the odd disjunctions
present in urban architecture: "As if to distract from the
minuscule and cramped philosophy of what would transpire on the
floors above, the city offered visitors the special bounty of
the lobby." And in the world of John Henry Days, he
painted austere, vivid landscapes in simple strokes: "The shale
resisted hammers, steel and blasting but it gave to rain and
wind. Water from Heaven melted the rock of the mountain and the
rainwater was red on the ground." The bloodsucking nature of a
publicist was softly insinuated by a description of him eating
ice cream as though licking at a wound: "He unbandages the
bottom of the cone and sucks out the melted ice cream through
the hole."
Whitehead's verbal transformations can produce the welcome
effect of reinvention that he describes in The Colossus of
New York as a hallmark of successful art: "It was right in
front of you all along but now you see it for the first time."
But great writing must do more than refresh and reveal. It must
move us as well, and Whitehead has managed this, too, in the
past. In the earliest pages of John Henry Days, we learn
that an event to which the story tends — a festival celebrating
the release of a commemorative stamp in honor of folk hero John
Henry — will involve a shooting that will take the lives of four
people. Over the next three hundred fifty pages, Whitehead
introduces us to a dozen principal characters heading inexorably
for that fateful moment, any of whom may be the shooter or one
of his victims. In scores of brief unnumbered chapters that
follow, we move forward and backward in time, meeting many
people whose stories in some way intersect that of John Henry.
Despite this collage, Whitehead is careful to keep our attention
focused on his protagonist, a modern stand-in for John Henry, a
young, disaffected, road-worn, junketeering black journalist
called J. Sutter. As John Henry fought his contest against the
steam engine, Sutter is fighting his own, less song-worthy
battle: he is trying to break the record for the longest
uninterrupted run of junkets without a break. With the fact of a
postal bloodbath looming over Sutter's empty striving, as well
as the myth of John Henry's death by contest, Whitehead
successfully causes readers to worry over Sutter's welfare, to
root for his well-being. By the time we reach the book's end,
readers are rewarded with the likelihood that Sutter has escaped
death and found a meaningful path back to life. It is a moving
moment of release.
What is troubling in Whitehead's handling of the violence in
John Henry Days is how unaffecting the deaths of those
who are not as lucky end up being. Although Whitehead has
invested a great many pages, roughly one-third of the book, in
scenes involving the men who eventually are slain — Sutter's
journalistic colleagues — there is nothing moving about their
passing. This is largely a product of Whitehead's writerly
hubris. He elects to have us learn of the nature of the deaths
in a scene that departs from prose and enters into a technical
pastiche of Joyce's "Nighttown" sequence in Ulysses, with
dialogue overheard and formatted as a playscript, complete with
pointless dramaturgical directions: "(sipping),"
"(nodding)," etc.:
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
We peer into the inexplicable.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
And every day are confronted with the unknowable.
It is a style egregiously incompatible with tragedy. I
suspect that Whitehead has done this deliberately, to avoid
sentimentality; but it has the effect of annulling feeling
altogether, and turns a great many pages in the company of
characters we should have cared about into empty exercises.
Rather than presenting a moment that could move the reader,
Whitehead calls our attention away from death and toward our
awareness that he is a clever writer. Whitehead has again
skirted the issue of pain to focus on the pleasures of form,
shaping pain into an unsatisfying aesthetic experience that
shuffles human suffering weightlessly into the
background.
And yet pain and loss and human gravity of some unbearable
kind are in the foreground of every classic work of literature.
Hamlet unpacking his heart with words; the Invisible Man walking
lonely streets unseen; Dante losing his way in the dark; Gabriel
Conroy learning his wife loves another; Oedipus blinding himself
for his blindness; Molloy crawling forward with beautiful
futility; Edna Pontellier drowning in an ocean of sorrow — pain
and loss are the forces that find their expression and form in
all writing that endures. Pain at the loss of fathers, of
friendships, of loves, of life, of self. This reckoning with
loss, this bold confrontation with what is taken from us, is why
writing is written, why it is read.
Whitehead's earlier work exhibited his awareness of these
truths. From book to book, he took inspiring leaps forward as a
novelist, reaching toward, and beginning to attain, his own
means of addressing and dramatizing our losses. But Whitehead's
weakness for empty effect that neglects affect — equally a
feature of his novels — has been given full flower in The
Colossus of New York, a book that indulges Whitehead's worst
instincts. It allows him to be swaggering where he should be
controlled, vague where he should be specific, homiletic where
he should be secular. It is dripping with empty pyrotechnic
effect, it is provincial and strangely coldhearted. My hope is
that it is quickly forgotten, but my worry is that it will be
embraced, in this period of New Yorkophilia, as the classic that
it is not. The book is much as Whitehead himself describes Times
Square: "Simmer the idea of metropolis until it is reduced to a
few blocks, sprinkle in a dash of hype and a tablespoon of woe.
Add hubris to taste. Serving size: a lot." For the sake of his
soul as a serious writer, may he come to distrust this little
book for how far it has taken him from how far he had come.
 Try
four weeks of the New Republic Digital absolutely free
For nearly 90 years, the New
Republic has provided its readers with an intelligent and rigorous
examination of American politics, foreign policy, and culture. Today,
we're proud to offer a faster, easier, and more economical way to enjoy
the magazine — TNR Digital. Subscribe today and we'll give
you 4 weeks absolutely free. That's less than 36 cents/week for every
word of content available in the print version, a downloadable replica
of the print magazine, and an array of special online-only features!
Click here
to sign up. |
|
|
Don't Miss
