Endurance split into seven parts

by Penelope Ioannou

 

“Seven Short Stories about drones” by Teju Cole:

1. 1. 1. 1. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist’s.
         2. Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.
         3. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather. A bomb whistled in. Blood on the walls. Fire from heaven.
         4. I am an invisible man. My name is unknown. My loves are a mystery. But an unmanned aerial vehicle from a secret location has come for me.
         5. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.
         6. Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His torso was found, not his head.
         7. Mother died today. The program saves American lives.

 

A drone attack happens in about half the time it takes for us to read one of Teju Cole’s tweets. Lionel Trilling famously condemned Edith Wharton’s impossibly tragic novel “Ethan Frome” by claiming that the mind can do nothing with it, it can only endure it. It is his own words that are condemnable. Tragedy, not in the Aristotelian sense of the word, does everything to the mind. Tragedy, in a strange and frenzied manipulation of this order, begets, proselytizes, restructures, and forces endurance. Simply, for tragedy to exist in the first place, endurance must precede it in order to succeed it. The mind has no choice but to endure it; subconsciously, with feeble autonomy, or throbbing sentience, it just does so. What comes after endurance is also what defines our existence; it is violent the way in which it disturbs it, it writhes, whether poetically or with a lack of it, and only because of that does it reconfigure it. What Trilling got wrong, what Trilling seems to be missing, is that tragedy in literature affects the way in which we endure it. Indeed, a drone attack happens in about half the time it takes for us to read one of Teju Cole’s tweets. That is a fact. What we can do with that fact is merely endure it. What Teju Cole does with his Seven short stories about drones is force us through a kind of tragedy like a haunting epigram, wherein endurance is not only pithy and exhaustingly stunning, but demanding of us to fumble for ways to receive the pain of recognition and realization it brings with it. 

 

Laconically shattering, Cole’s series of tweets create a literary genre of their own. The word itself, “tweet,” suggests both its diminutive size and the rapidity with which it appears and then disappears from sight and perception. His choice of medium is obviously unconventional; it is his structuring of it that I find particularly exhilarating. Cole doesn’t thread his tweets. They are given the freedom to roam Twitter feeds with all the random synchronicity they can assume from the algorithm. His publication through Twitter gives an odd contemporary spin to Roland Barthes’ claim that once a text is created, once it is put down on paper, the author dies. The piece is dependent on this very untethering, for Cole knows these short stories can only assume the agency they set out to yield once they detach, not just from him, but from his imperial authorship and, eventually, from themselves. The medium of Twitter physicalizes Barthes’ claim: it quite literally disperses his miniature stories, splintering across hundreds of threads, positions them under and above gossip sites, news reports, pop culture references, with so much vitality and velocity that to tether their virtual geography back to its original place of conception, as well as assemble them back to their original anatomy, becomes an almost impossible task. 

Another feature of this medium would arouse a satisfied chuckle from Barthes: retweeting. Each short story cradled by one individual tweet is retweeted numerous times by Cole’s followers, which are then retweeted by followers of those followers and then by followers of those followers of those followers. The short stories embark on a path of dissemination; they utterly surrender themselves to the intricate messiness of the platform. Gone but not exactly lost. Cole numbers his tweets and his decision to do so seems to me to resist the possible claim that it was an aesthetic choice. It’s indisputably an artistic one but it is also one that organizes his chaos. The order in which the short stories are read appears to be artistically irrelevant to Cole, for the medium he chose for their publication indulges in its own disorder and yet the numbers resting at the beginning of each tweet bear a sliver of Cole’s command. He is informing his readers that what they have just read has a sequel, that what they have just read has a prequel and that what they have just read is a brief moment in time that has occurred because of the occurrence of another. 

Seven short stories about drones, preoccupied with the warfare of drones against civilians, borrows from a pool of opening lines that belong to heavily authorized and canonized literary texts. “1. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist’s.” The first sentence, lifted right out of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, is marvelously chosen. The line, having become famous irrespective of the rest of the book, is ringing with confidence and unfaltering clarity of diction. The simplicity of the domestic errand suggests the world we are about to comprehend. The possibilities of that world are flung right across the room with the impact of the next word: “Pity.” The world crumbles. The matter-of-fact tone in the previous sentence plunges into a grim and shattering nonchalance. It interrupts the prose like a lethal hiccup. What happens next happens with high speed and it’s almost impossible to comprehend: “A signature strike leveled the florist’s.” The choice of the word “leveled” yields so sharply that it utterly controls the result of the drone’s attack. The verb is shockingly quiet. It is airtight; nothing is fertile anymore, nothing is blooming nor budding, nothing is breathing. It’s a marvelous choice for we are left having to endure the witnessing of a murder; we are left having to endure a voice inside of us frantically repeating “but Mrs. Dalloway was just going out to buy some flowers.”

“2. Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.” We are thrust into the next short story with five syllables this time. Famously taken from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the first line finds placidity in its imperativeness. The religious intonations of the name stir a subtle comfort in the reader. Then, the first-person singular past, “was,” slashes through the page, and we are sent into a kind of frantic search for what this narrator is about to say. The three words “I was immolated…” collocating with each other is deafening. How do we endure a young boy speaking to us from the dead? Cole is masterful in his choice of verbs. “Immolated” almost usurps the mouth. It demands the use of both lips and tongue for its delivery and does so with such emphatic force that it almost suspends itself amongst the sentence. It hovers just above the page as if thrust from its impact with itself. We are speechless because our mouth is full and a drone just hit the page and we are speechless because that drone killed a young boy and that boy is both a random boy called Ishmael and Melville’s Ishmael and we are speechless because he was sacrificed and how do we endure a sacrifice for something hollow. The final statement impales the very silence it creates. Words are scarce, rendered to nullity, for it exterminates any previous possibility of noise, especially the sort that reeks consolation.

“3. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather. A bomb whistled in. Blood on the walls. Fire from heaven.” The first line is lifted out of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Buck Mulligan walks down the stairs with the air of a priest and his plumpness promises and suggests Joyce’s playful parody of the mass that we are going to encounter. We never get there, however. Cole never allows us to get there. Obliterated by a bomb, Buck Mulligan falls apart like the very foam he’s carrying. Masterfully, Cole places a face we know so well, anticipating performing an action we know so well, alongside a bomb. How can a thing as light and benign as shaving cream exist alongside a thing as malignant as a bomb? Cole allows for them to occupy equal real estate on the page and that’s horrifying. The frothy white of the shaving cream is replaced by the thick redness of blood and the intent for a quotidian act is replaced by the burning of it. 

“4. I am an invisible man. My name is unknown. My loves are a mystery. But an unmanned aerial vehicle from a secret location has come for me.” Cole poignantly anticipates the line from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which follows moments after the first: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me”. Cole crafts this short story with harrowing ingeniousness: Ellison’s absent line is the epicenter of his seven stories. These are people we are choosing not to see, people who have been reduced to pixelated targets. The line exists in literature but not here and Cole is content with that. The line hangs and occupies the negative space above the text like a knowing threat and its eerie lingering is scathing in its adamancy. The rhythm of this short story moves like an oddity and its alternative tenor lies in the ever so quiet slant rhyme created by “mystery” and “me.” The story’s ending echoes the concluding rhyming couplets of a sonnet. The effect of it is terrifying: the dreadful expectation of the drone as it heads for the invisible man is a sonorous rift. The man we cannot see crafts a poetically regal eulogy for himself. He does so because he knows no one else will do it for him. And what happens to us? We stand still, reaching for the echo of that rhyme as it is muffled by the rumble of the approaching drone and wish we had written a eulogy for him.

“5. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.” This one-line short story deviates from Franz Kafka’s line in The Trial by five words. Where Kafka’s Josef K. is arrested, Cole’s Josef K. is murdered by another drone attack. Short story number five is a perfect example of Cole’s larger treatment of the famous literary texts he appropriates: he interrupts our tedious and incessant scrolling just as he interrupts these texts and he interrupts these texts just as these drones interrupt the lives of innocent civilians. He tempers us with the comfort of words we’ve revisited before but unnerves us with words that cannot possibly sit comfortably, both in us and the virtual page. His famous references aren’t placed like stones at the rim of a billowing tent, they detonate it completely. We are faced with the task of enduring two losses: the loss of the famous faces we’ve come to know too well and the loss of those we’ve just met but never got the chance to know. 

“6. Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His torso was found, not his head.” This short story sorrowfully resounds the title of the book from which the first line is taken: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. In Cole’s story, however, it is not things that fall apart, it is bodies. The story has subtle yet stunning poetic symmetry: where the man’s name is present, in contrast to the invisible man, his head is absent. The man falls apart in agreement with the title of the book. Engulfed by its resonance, he is left scattered into things: mere body parts. The syntax of the last line is odd, and its idiosyncratic placing renders its effect even more chilling. Its syntax instills formality, as if the occurrence is uttered more like an announcement rather than a tragic happening. It is reported not felt and that angers the reader. But anger is a feeling more insufferable than any other when reading this piece. It’s intolerable precisely because it’s long overdue. It is unbearably late and Cole is commanding us to endure an anger that cannot be placed precisely where and when we wish to do so because the opportunity for that is long gone. 

“7. Mother died today. The program saves American lives.” With the final short story, we come to encounter the first and only use of the word “death.” As if a distorted mirror exists between the two sentences, Cole, once again, introduces two words that create palpable and painful friction when placed within close proximity to each other: “die” and “save.” How can those two words exist in the same line? The distorted mirror also plays with the reflections of “mother” and “American lives.” It pulls the very personal image of a mother and recasts it into the colossal image of the American people. Cole compresses the physical space between “die” and “save” and “mother” and “American lives,” for he is very much aware that their conflicting etymologies send them into war with each other. The Twitter audience might not know an Ishmael, they might not know Melville’s Ishmael either, they might know Kafka’s K. but have no Josef in their lives, and yet they all have a mother. The mother belongs to Albert Camus’ The Stranger but she doesn’t actually belong to him. The final story is also the most personal one. The image of the death of a mother operates precisely like grief: it is so excruciating that it demands to be felt. The reader suffocates due to the pressure of these juxtaposing phrases. Dread and anger are webbed into one indigestible sensation. Cole is not sympathetic with us. He knows the lump in our throat is like concrete and he is apathetic towards us, for it’s up to us to masticate it into comprehensible parts. 

Cole’s seven short stories exist like small impenetrable vacuums. He barricades us from the naïve luxury or privilege of shoving our hand in them to add hope, to add exit routes, to warn the protagonists before they become victims. There is no room for change because it’s too late and the realization of that is devastating. We are left with the rubbles of well-known narratives just as much as we are left with a heap of human bodies. He urgently writes that nothing is exempt from the horror of these drone attacks; their lethality is so great that venerated literary texts, thought to be timelessly indestructible, are annihilated faster than their first sentences can be skimmed or read. Cole demands that we witness intricate tissues of life ripped by these drones and in doing so he asks with vigor: how are you going to endure this?