Can’t Keep a Dead Man Down

I haven’t yet encountered an understanding of “character” as compelling as the one William H. Gass develops in his 1970 essay “The Concept of Character in Fiction.” Contra those theories in which “characters are clearly conceived as living outside language,” Gass locates characters within language (and only there), interprets them linguistically (“a character, first of all, is the noise of his name, and all the sounds and rhythms that proceed from him”), and distinguishes them by their relationship to the other words that comprise a work of fiction. “Characters,” Gass writes,

are those primary substances to which everything else is attached. Hotels, dresses, conversations, sausage, feelings, gestures, snowy evenings, faces—each may fade as fast as we read of them. Yet the language of the novel will eddy about a certain incident or name, as Melville’s always circles back to Ahab and his wedding with the white whale.

Even more provocatively, Gass adds: “In a perfectly organized novel, every word would ultimately qualify one thing, like the God of the metaphysician, at once the subject and body of the whole.” (He later clarifies that he means this descriptively, not prescriptively; this “perfectly organized novel” would perfect the form in a technical sense, but is not something to which all novels ought to aspire.) In a 1978 conversation with John Gardner, a novelist who exemplifies the views of character that Gass opposes, Gass elaborates: “Now the ideal book”—presumably he’s speaking in the same theoretical, rather than evaluative, sense—“would have only one character; it would be like an absolute, idealist system.”

We could think of Marvin Bell’s Incarnate: The Collected Dead Man Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) as such a book—though not exactly. For one thing, Gass has in mind a novel; Bell’s book is a collection of poems. For another, there are characters in the poems other than the titular dead man (the name is always lowercase in the poems, but capitalized in Bell’s prefaces). Or at least there are proper names, belonging to historical persons: poets (Whitman, Neruda, Keats), philosophers (Socrates, Diogenes, Aristotle), statesmen (Kennedy, Lincoln, Mussolini), and figures from mythology (Orpheus, Ulysses, Sisyphus). But these persons are present more as icons, allusions, or ghosts than, per Gass’s interpretation, linguistic loci that exert a firm force of reference. Nowhere is their subordination to the dead man in question. Neither, for that matter, is God’s. In “The Book of the Dead Man (The Pause),” the speaker says, “The dead man has invented God.”

Bell has published these dead man poems over the last 25 years. He began to write them at age 53; their preoccupation with mortality—already obvious from the dead man’s name—is fitting for a form conceived in middle age. This collection gathers The Book of the Dead Man (1994), Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Volume 2 (1997), and Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems (2011), as well as five poems from Mars Being Red (2007) and 26 more new and uncollected poems. Even this doesn’t exhaust the reservoir of extant dead man poems; in the preface to Incarnate, Bell notes that he omitted 20 poems from Whiteout (2011), a collection responding to photographs by Nathan Lyons.

What these poems have in common, principally, is the dead man’s presence, or omnipresence, which is matched by his seeming omniscience. In a couplet from “The Book of the Dead Man (#32)” that could be read as a statement about the dead man’s role in the world of the poems, the speaker tells us, “The dead man is perspective itself, the universal focused to a pinpoint, the microcosmic magnified to the power of uninsurable Acts of God. / The dead man is not the materialist but the material!” This grand talk is fitting for a figure as enigmatic as the dead man, but he’s something simpler, too: good company. The dead man emerges throughout Bell’s poems as serious yet sardonic, engaged yet aloof. He’s a shapeshifter—furtive, ungraspable—whose elusiveness is central to the poems’ charms.

The dead man’s slipperiness stands in contrast to the poems’ formal solidity. Readers will have already gathered the form’s defining features by the time they encounter “The Book of the Dead Man (Writing the Dead Man Poem),” a playful ars poetica, midway through the book. It begins: “When the dead man writes a poem, he immediately writes another one. / He writes another because two follows one. / So well does part two shadow part one that they cannot help but argue and marry.” Later in the poem, the speaker says: “Whosoever shall write a dead man poem must know in his bones that his lifetime is an event that splits another event in two. / That is why a dead man poem must have two parts.” Indeed, each dead man poem is a dyad. This raises a question: which, strictly speaking, is the poem—the part or the pair? (For sanity’s sake, I’ll speak of the pair as the poem, composed of two parts.)

That same poem also references the other central feature of the dead man poems:

A dead man poem knows that the sentence is the key.
The sentence, sans enjambments, has redefined free verse.
Yet it is not the sentencing on the page alone but the sentence of time.
The dead man serves the sentence, he fluctuates between the long and short of it,
    between the finite and the infinite, between the millisecond and eternity.

This is no hyperbole: there is not a single enjambment in any of the dead man poems. Each line is end-stopped and punctuated. Some of the lines might seem enjambed because they’re broken by the spatial constraints of the page, but in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Bell makes clear his intentions when he notes that “the line becomes a complete sentence” in the dead man poems. Just as the dead man transcends physical limits (he is “perspective itself”), the true form of the dead man poems exceeds the space of the pages on which they’re printed. Most lines are single, grammatical sentences (I count one two-sentence line), though fragments do occasionally appear. The sentence supplants the line by becoming coextensive with it, fulfilling it. In the aforementioned interview, Bell also explains that this “introduces a more elastic music” into the poems. Enjambment is displaced to the break between the poems’ two parts, a split that conjures anticipation and a sense of forward motion similar to the effect of a line break interrupting a sentence. This approach leaves the sentence to do its own strange rhythmic work at the level of the line. The accrual of sentences as a structural technique gives the poems a philosophical quality, not unlike a treatise: they read like a procession of propositions.

Bell’s titles underscore this iterative accumulation. The book’s first 70 poems are titled “The Book of the Dead Man,” followed by a number in parentheses; the rest are titled “The Book of the Dead Man,” followed by a word or a phrase in parentheses. Most of the first parts of each poem take this form: “About the Dead Man and Everpresence,” “About the Dead Man and Desire,” “About the Dead Man and the Box,” while the second parts are titled “More About the Dead Man and Everpresence,” “More About the Dead Man and Desire,” “More About the Dead Man and the Box,” et cetera. This contributes to the experience of constant elaboration and accretion, as if there is only a single dead man poem, infinitely expanding.

Despite this acquisitive, cumulative quality, the reader feels—at the end of each poem, of each book, and finally of Incarnate itself—that they somehow know less about the dead man than when they began. This is fitting for a figure who is more a cipher than a character, more a specter than a protagonist. Bell doesn’t accomplish this diminishing determinacy through negation, as one might expect, but through playful contradiction. Incarnate’s epigraph, attributed to Bertrand Russell, presages the poems’ investment in paradox: “The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.” In “The Book of the Dead Man (#49), we read: “The dead man has not and, having not, has.” In “The Book of the Dead Man (#57),” the first part of which is titled “He is not Kafka and yet he is Kafka,” this mode is rampant: “Like the hero of The Trial, the dead man is and is not”; “The dead man is and is not mortal or immortal, is and is not menial or maximal, he has and hasn’t, he says and doesn’t”; “The dead man is and is not an insect and a dog.”

Most of the positive, non-paradoxical claims the poems make about the dead man are, in one way or another, opaque. There’s the opacity of aphoristic metaphysics, as in “The Book of the Dead Man”: “The dead man is the future, was always the future, can never be the past. / Like God, the dead man existed before the beginning, a time marked by galactic static.” There’s the opacity of strange pairings, as in “The Book of the Dead Man (#26)”: “The dead man lives on Socratic dialogue and fungi.” (A reader who’s surprised to find that the dead man lives on anything can consult Bell’s preface to the collection, which notes—again embracing contradiction—that the dead man “is alive and dead at once, defeating time,” or the preface to Ardor, in which Bell explains that the dead man “is more alive for being alive and dead at the same time.”) And then there’s the opacity of obscurity and abstraction, as in “The Book of the Dead Man (#42)”: “The dead man is the one to ask when there is asking.”

Yet for all their deliberate conceptual muddledness, the dead man poems are often deeply and vividly sensual, in a way that weds the material to the philosophical. “Who more than the dead man savors the soft interior of an enigma?” the speaker asks in “The Book of the Dead Man (#41),” in a line that typifies this approach. In his preface to Ardor, Bell elaborates: “The Book of the Dead Man embraces life. It was written for whoever believes in the power of ideas to transcend the discrete, which is to say, those who hazard philosophy, and who believe also that an idea should have a little dirt on its shoes.”

In “The Book of the Dead Man (Dead Man’s Float),” Bell writes, “The dead man poems are for those who know they are living in the pre-posthumous.” The “humus” of “pre-posthumous,” of course, is dirt, as in the kind that covers a corpse, or even sticks to its shoes. This wonderful neologism, which appears in one other dead man poem, points back to the line, cited as a “Zen admonition,” that serves as an epigraph (and epitaph) for both The Book of the Dead Man and Vertigo: “Live as if you were already dead.” (Here again, a paradox.) This is referenced in only one of the poems—“The Book of the Dead Man (The Numbers),” from the latter collection:

For example, the dead man restores the poet’s ambition to plumb the nature
          of existence.
Sometimes he, sometimes she, asks the dead man what it is to live as if one
          were already dead.
It’s the feel of an impression in the earth, a volume in space, an airy drift
          upward.
It’s downwind and upwind at the same time.
It’s a resonance to wrap one’s mind around, like a bandage beneath which
          the healing may happen.
It’s the idea of turf beyond the neighborhood.
It’s a cold flame in a hot season.
It’s what you do facing the guns.

That is: to live as if you’re already dead means many things—all of which the dead man poems are trying to teach us.

***

Rarely does a dead man poem announce itself as having an obvious subject, in the sense of a single something it’s transparently “about,” apart from the dead man himself. One of the few, and finest, examples is “The Book of the Dead Man (#58).” The first part, “About the Dead Man Outside,” is worth quoting in full:

They came to the door because he was small or went to some church
          or other or was seen in the company of girls or boys.
Well, he was small and went to synagogue and didn’t know what to make of it.
They said he was from some tribe, but he didn’t understand it.
They acted as if they knew what they were doing.
They were the executioners of brown eyes and brown hair, and he happened
          to have both.
Well, he said, and they went away before he awoke.
They were a dream he was having before he became the dead man.
Today the dead man lives where others died.
He passes the crematoriums without breathing.
He enters the pit graves and emerges ashen or lime-laced.
He shreds the beautiful tapestries of history and hangs in their place the
          rough shirts and dank pants forsaken at the showers, and the tiny
          work caps.
He mounts the hewn chips of shoesoles, the twisted spectacles, the tortured
          belts and suspenders, the stained handkerchiefs.
Here, he says, is history, maternity, inheritance.

This dark prehistory of the dead man “before he became the dead man” stands in tension with the claim, made in “The Book of the Dead Man (#3),” that he “existed before the beginning.” It seems the dead man can begin again and again, just as each dead man poem reincarnates him in turn. But “The Book of the Dead Man (#58)” contains a rare case of anchoring his origin to a specific moment: the historical horror of the Shoah. Later, in “The Book of the Dead Man (Memory),” we learn: “If there had never been a post-World War, there would have been no second dead man poem.” The dead man may have existed before the beginning, but he comes to us only in the wake of the camps. Understanding the dead man as fixed to the Holocaust allows us to read the shadowy self-contradictions of this fragmented figure in a new light. What might have been read as inscrutability, hermetic self-reference, or even frivolous play come to seem, instead, like attempts to rescue meaning from the ruins of modernity.

It is not only in “The Book of the Dead Man (#58)” that the dead man is framed as a Jew. (Bell, too, is Jewish, though we’d do well to honor his caution in the preface to Incarnate: “I have been asked if I am the Dead Man. No, but he knows a lot about me. Are the poems chock-full of autobiography? Yes, but it is not presented as such and asks no credit.”) In “The Book of the Dead Man (His Hats),” for instance, we read that the dead man “was bar mitzvahed in a yarmulke.” But the most common allusion to Jewishness, though oblique, is the association of the dead man with diaspora. From “The Book of the Dead Man (#32)”: “The dead man is the living Diaspora”; from “The Book of the Dead Man (#67)”: “The dead man’s refusal to mourn is notorious, gladly has he traveled in stateless realms: child of a universal Diaspora”; from “The Book of the Dead Man (Peacetime)”: “The dead man has made peace with temporary residence and the eternal Diaspora.”

Beyond these references, there’s something diasporic in the dead man’s evasion of fixity, in his unsettled self, in his wandering from one poem to the next, leaving behind mysteries that are never solved, only multiplied amid unceasing description. In “The Book of the Dead Man (The Metaphysician),” we’re told: “In the studies of the dead man there can be no conclusions.” This is true, too, of the poems that concern him, and of the collection that compiles them, which in the end amounts not to a coherent edifice of understanding but to an archive of multifarious unknowing. In this way, Incarnate is quite different than Gass’s imagined “ideal book” with its “absolute, idealist system.” Gass envisions such a work’s single character as bringing it to a kind of formal perfection. Bell’s dead man does the opposite.

Perhaps it is best not to think of Incarnate as a single work at all. Bell, for his part, gives us permission to question the monism of anything related to the dead man. In the preface to Ardor, he writes, “The Book of the Dead Man is but a basic work, fundamental. Let those who can make use of it excerpt and reshape it. Let those who can stand it, stand on it. As commentary, it welcomes more commentary.” How unprecious; how midrashic. Here the works concerning the dead man are conceived of as penetrable, transmutable. Bell also has some more direct, concrete advice about how to approach them. In the preface to Incarnate, Bell suggests that we “think of it as a lifetime book, not of the lifetime of the writer but of the reader, hence a book to be read over time, to dip in and out of.” The book is something to dwell amid—or, to speak diasporically, to wander through—rather than something to behold or consume in sequence, to read and be done with. This view of the project sanctifies the end of Incarnate, which is fittingly unsatisfying in its lack of finality. For the dead man, ever undying, how could the end be otherwise?