Gotham Book Mart In Memoriam - Eric Packer's Day in Cosmopolis

The Gotham Book Mart is the bookstore Eric goes into to look at poetry books and sees an apparition of a woman that he follows. He finally catches up with her and it is Elise sitting on the stairs reading a book of poetry. Just as Gradiva sits on the stairs in the antiquities shop that used to be the Pompeiian poet's residence. In both cases Gradiva/Elise are taken to lunch by Hansen and Packer -  rather lovely I think.

DeLillo has lovingly included the famous and excellent historical Gotham Book Mart in his story. It was forced to close in 2007. The real estate the store rented was obscenely expensive, and a bookstore that was cherished and obviously loved by DeLillo bit the dust to greed. It's huge inventory of priceless rare autographed books and photographs went up for auction and were donated to The University of Pennsylvania's Library. A happier ending than might have been.

NYTimes or paste in browser http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/gotham-book-mart-holdings-are-given-to-penn/ article

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/01/keeping-the-got.html lovely article reminiscing about GBM

The Gotham Book Mart was famous for its literary eminences. A December 1948 party for Osbert and Edith Sitwell (seated, center) drew a roomful of bright lights to the Gotham Book Mart: clockwise from W. H. Auden, on the ladder at top right, were Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Charles Henri Ford (cross-legged, on the floor), William Rose Benét, Stephen Spender, Marya Zaturenska, Horace Gregory, Tennessee Williams, Richard Eberhart, Gore Vidal and José Garcia Villa. (Photo: Gotham Book Mart)

Andreas Brown, the last owner of the Gotham Book Mart, readied vintage photos of Arthur Miller and James Joyce in 2004 in preparation for a move to a new location. (Photo: Frances Roberts for The New York Times)

Updated, 4:50 p.m. | About 200,000 items from the Gotham Book Mart, which closed in 2007 after 87 years as a New York literary haven of international stature, have been donated to the University of Pennsylvania.

January 2, 2009, 12:51 pm

Gotham Book Mart Holdings Are Given to Penn

By SEWELL CHAN

Reading Elise Through "Gradiva"

Gradiva from Pompeii

Jensen's Gradiva 1903 Google Books PDF

The Grid of Eric Packer's Journey April 2000

Had not Freud interpreted Gradiva it probably would have sunk into oblivion. It is didactic in style and yet a lovely fantasy. The bas-relief comes from the ruins of Pompeii on that day in 79 AD when the volcano Vesuvius erupted and buried the city and all its people.

Freud's Interpretation of Jensen's Gradiva-Summary of Gradiva at Wiki

Norbert Hanold is following Gradiva in Pompeii. He is convinced she is an apparition of his imagination  . She keeps disappearing before his eyes and he traces her to the House of Meleager, a Greek poet who lived 2000 years ago, where now antiquities are being sold. He keeps getting glimpses of her in the labyrinth of rooms and finds her sitting on the stairs with a papyrus in her lap. It is lunchtime. He is convinced she is a figment of his imagination, a hallucination. She "plays" with him telling him not to speak Latin that he must speak German. She promises to meet him the next day. He is obsessively consumed.

Eric follows Elise through the maze of rooms in The Gotham Book Mart where he goes to peruse poetry books. He catches glimpses of an unknown woman that he follows through the labyrinth of rooms. He finds Elise sitting on the stairs with a book in her lap. Eric talks to her and then takes her to lunch.

Eric Packer is paying attention to what Elise is wearing. Her shoes. A cashmere sweater. Gradiva wears a cashmere shawl. Gradiva - Zoe holds her head high and slightly forward on her slender neck. Elise is described in the same way. They both  walk lightly away, as they disappear.

Elise is Eric Packer's wife of 22 days. The moon is in the 22nd day of its cycle. Eric and Elise have had sex. Elise's seduction of Eric Packer begins after the consummation. Eric is seducing Elise with his constant talk of sex, with wanting her immediately, with suggesting they do it in the bathroom, in the alley indicating his lust for her, not a perfunctory conjugal embrace.

Gradiva (Zoe) is seducing Norbert with her elusiveness and he has been seducing her with his amazing fantasy that she is Gradiva, whom he has sought after a dream of her, when she is really the neighbor Zoe whom he never notices, but  has known since childhood when they were inseparable playmates. With the death of his parents the wealthy Norbert Hanold has been so completely consumed with his research (Eric with his nightly studies and fabulous financial empire) in classical archeology that Zoe stopped existing for him. He has displaced his affection for her with his obsession for Gradiva, which greatly intensified with his dream of her. They both have the same way of walking very lightly, the foot pointed toe down perpendicular to the ground.

Norbert Hanold and Eric Packer are shadowing Zoe and Elise. Norbert is convinced Gradiva-Zoe is not real and Eric is never sure that it is Elise until he catches up with her. They both have only glimpses to follow. And there are many similarities as DeLillo creates a dream scene in a dying metropolis doomed to ruin resonating with the excavated relic of the catastrophically destroyed Pompeii.

The resonances continue. To be continued.

Elise Shifrin: Reading Elise Through the Little Prince

The Little Prince-Katherine Woods Translation

Elise has been described by Rob Pattinson fans as cold, frigid, aloof, asexual, and, well, you get the idea. I am following The Little Prince in reading her. She appears out of nowhere it seems all day long. If you go to the blog that has the map on it you will see that she is always ahead of Eric Packer, her husband of 22 days. In other words, he is her shadow, he is following her all day long. She appears and disappears and this occurs in a sharp cut in continuity, connected with breakfast, lunch and dinner and then..... It is non-linear, non progressive, non historical. In other words, discontinuous.

The Little Prince also appears out of nowhere. The pilot has landed in the desert with engine trouble. His airplane will not start and if he can't fix it he will die in the desert.  The Little Prince begins to ask questions and make his demands. And he tells the pilot about the tiny planet he lives on. On sad days he can keep moving his chair and see the sunset over and over all day long.

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."


Another always-to-be-remembered example of a passage from Woods' translation dealing with the interaction of the little prince and the fox. When the little prince has to say goodbye to the fox, the fox says, "Ah, I shall cry."

"It's your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you..."
"Yes, that is so," said the fox.
"But now you are going to cry!" said the little prince.
"Yes, that is so," said the fox.
"Then it has done you no good at all!"
"It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat fields."

Before the little prince tamed the fox, the wheat field had "nothing to say to" the fox. "But," he had said to the little prince, "you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat..." 

Finding her in the bookstore Eric takes her to lunch.


Eric: You were one of those silent wistful children. Glued to the shadows.


Elise: And you?


Eric: I don't know. I don't think about it.


Elise: Think about one thing and tell me what it was.


Eric: All right. One thing. When I was four, I figured out how much I'd weigh on each of the planets in the solar system.


Elise: That's nice. Oh I like that. And she laughed lingeringly.


And then Eric Packer returns to matters of consequence: sex. The circulating rats come in here for the first time.

At dinner Eric talks about wanting sex and what she is wearing and noticing her mood.

Elise: I'll tell you what the problem is. I don't know how to be indifferent. I can't master this. And it makes me susceptible to pain. In other words, it hurts.

And, "Look. I married you for your beauty but you don't have to be beautiful................."

 I just have to be indifferent.

He smells of sex. And she cannot be indifferent.

And after they have had sex and he has told her he lost all her money,

Elise: What do poets know about money? Love the world and trace it in a line of verse. Nothing but this. And this. And she begins to kiss him passionately. And then he knows he loves her and at that instant she slides down his body and disappears.

And another time I will read Elise through Gradiva.

Gradiva

Reading Eric Packer As Baudrillardian Seer

Available at Amazon.com

Yes I said Packer is a seer. He is not a loser, nor a nihilist as Rob Pattinson has called him. And it is important to make his character crystal clear. Why? Because De Lillo has emerged as a great American writer  of his generation and has written clairvoyantly of our time.  His novels have predicted similar singular events that occur soon after their publication. The characters in his novels are now the subject of extensive academic writing, dissertations, theses, and numerous papers and books within the academic world. Eric Packer is consistently described in terms of his downfall: that is, losing all his billions betting on the yen. Not to mention his sexual exploits, all lumped together, undifferentiated, the same meaning attributed to each one, carbon copies of the same experience, as if he is a paid prostitute. Elise Shifrin is given short shrift as the estranged wife, one of his fucks for the day by academics, men and women, and cold and frigid by Pattinson girlfans. None of them are anywhere close.


My problem with this is not unlike my problem with Nietzsche, who is tagged with being a nihilist when he so emphatically counters this label in his The Genealogy of Morals in the last pages of this essay, one written near the end of his life. But Nihilist is pasted on him forever and anyone speaking or writing about him must continue to deal with the erroneous labeling.


I see this is going to happen with Eric Packer. Decades from now someone may think otherwise and present convincing evidence, but it will drop into the fold of the prevailing Discourse and be lost until another Foucault comes out of the intellectual woodwork to say and write otherwise.  All these writers, Schuster  in his book Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum  and http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=schuster+%2B+de+lillo&x=0&y=0


John N. Duvall's The Cambridge Companion to Don De Lillo  (composed of a different author on a wide variety of topics in each DeLillo novel) without exception do not acknowledge Eric Packer's great game playing heroism in the face of evil and ruinous, global cyber-capital speculation. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=+duvall+%2B+the+cambridge+companion+to+don+delillo&x=11&y=14


I am not saying he acts heroically, but instead acts within a game. He is in it to win it. And I see that I am going to have to go against heavy hitters to stake my claim on the character of Eric Packer. I think I have Cronenberg as a possible ally. One can read Cosmopolis through Baudrillard, but  one can also read it through eXistenZ, which is what I think Cronenberg will do in his upcoming film. And eXistenZ and Baudrillard can each be read through the other, illuminating both in a singular way, and taking the character of Eric Packer out of the psychological and interpretive dead end. After all DeLillo says through Packer that Freud is dead.

Available at Amazon.com

Available at Amazon.com

All these writers are incredibly intelligent, well acquainted with Lacan, Baudrillard, Virilio, Lyotard, and others. They all write within the interpretive, hermeneutic mode put to bed for good by Foucault. I am beginning to realize that if you come to Baudrillard without being first steeped in Foucault and his genealogical tool chest, as Baudrillard himself once was, then it is likely that Baudrillard's refusal to engage in the interpretive method, so completely a part of western thinking and writing since the Biblical commentaries, will not impact you enough to toss it as Baudrillard did in Forget Foucault.  It is painful to let it go as that is the mode in which we have all been educated. It is enchanting and seductive and allows us to feel how very intelligent we are as we read it and understand it. 


Here is Nietzsche on it:


We knowers are unknown to ourselves, and for a good reason: how can we ever hope to find what we have never looked for? There is a sound adage which runs:"Where a man's treasure lies, there lies his heart." Our treasure lies in the beehives of our knowledge. We are perpetually on our way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind. The only thing that lies close to our heart is the desire to bring something home to the hive. (preface The Genealogy of Morals)