Dale Enggass on Vibrancy in Pamela Lu, Moby Dick, & Jane Bennett

Poet and writer Dale Enggass considers themes of salvation, materialism, and transcendence in Melville’s Moby-Dick and Pamela Lu's Ambient Parking Lot (Kenning Editions, 2011) alongside a "review" of Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter (Duke, 2010) for electronic book review. Sold! Enggass also invokes Joyelle McSweeney's definition of the "necropastoral": "In our present moment, Violence is ambient…Violence and art are simultaneous to each other, shove into the same spaces, split open, devour each other and pour each other out," he quotes.  Furthermore:

Invoking Jasbir Puar’s theory of the suicide bomber as a kind of artist, McSweeney contends that “Art has the same distribution channels as Violence,” thus, she “does not recognize a border between Art’s Violence and life’s” (182-3). Rather, Art is a kind of mimicry of violence that “alter[s] and denature[s] Violence”; art creates “assemblages and voids, links and holes” (ibid.). The overlap of violence and art is apparent near the end of Lu’s text when the dancer returns in the form of a Terry Gross-style radio interview that the Parkers happen to hear. Titled “Death of an Automotive Dancer,” the interview recounts her performance in the wrecked car and reveals the Parkers to be not quite as detached from the proceedings as their narration would suggest. The dancer recalls how during her performance the Parkers “began feeding me directions cautiously,” but soon “they began to operate from a rush of violent passion…They would command me to brush up against shards of glass or razor-sharp edges of plastic, pushing us all dangerously close to the exposed materials” (160). The Parkers’ increasingly bold prompts for the dancer are a reminder that the word “wreck” derives from the Old Norse verb reka, “to drive” (OED). The automobile-obsessed Parkers compel the dancer trapped in the wrecked car to the brink of real injury, and unwittingly reveal how both art and violence share a drive toward deterritorialization. Such a “drive” is no longer the romance of the open road but a death drive toward claustrophobic immobility, a melding of flesh and steel that explodes the illusion of a boundary between human and nature, nature and art.

Find the full piece at electronic book review.