Note: To read “Lamentation,” to which the below is a critical response, click here.
Seth Siegel’s “Lamentation” seeps a sticky substance that demands of the reader an extended, erotic attention. Certain sentences, certain phrases, certain images, stick with you and reappear to you later on, surprising, delighting, even arousing you. Not just a collection of instances, the piece has a viscous, coagulating movement all to its own. It also contains a story. And yet, the narrative is at times exceeded by certain of its moments. Taking “Lamentation” as a whole—that is, a totality in progress, a polished creation in the works—one is repeatedly jabbed with the nagging, childish question, “what sense can be made of this?” An analysis seems called for.
I believe there is sense to be made of “Lamentation,” and this by way of several interpretive avenues, several points of entry. Here I will journey down a few such interpretive avenues, beginning with that which naturally offers itself first of all: the first sentence.
“I lived in Chinatown before the event.” This, the first sentence, introduces to the reader that carrot that dangles throughout: the event. What event? We are told immediately that something, at least one thing, will happen. But when? And what? “[B]efore the event”: the time-setting is established. What follows is prologue, we are told, those events leading up to. Here is sparked in the reader expectation, longing, magnetism, a certain want of release and culmination. And, in the end, Siegel does not leave the reader wanting. The climax satisfies all pent-up desire. Absolutely. We know, having finished “Lamentation,” but without having it spelled out to us, that what is described at the end, the fruit born of the whole exercise, is the “event” we’ve been waiting for.
But, just as in real life, it is the meanderings that take us to the prize, the object of our desire, that are in a way most interesting. Enjoyment, Siegel ably demonstrates, resides in tension, in magnetic propulsion. It is this tension-towards-release that forms the bedrock of the story. Everything else is laid like bricks upon it.
There are numerous places where Siegel’s gift for novelties of expression shows through. By describing coffee grounds as “the crushed and roasted bean sand,” he enacts an unexpected reversal and laying bare of the everyday (1). For indeed, coffee grounds are sand-like in a phenomenal, immediate sense. By qualifying the Blue Bottle coffee house (in fact, the magnetic locus of the story) as “the Switzerland or the leather, of coffee houses,” he constructs an association as revealing as it is unheard of (4). “…the leather, of coffee houses”: a jarring sensuality, and yet, wholly appropriate.
All this attests to Siegel’s careful, subtly apparent prose technique. There is a purposive rhythm to the varying length of his sentences. His paragraphs obey a certain pulsating push-and-pull. Take the following two paragraph enders, a page apart and yet in definite relation to one another:
“The tiny lines fitting together, just touching, an impossibility for any zipper, like an abstract zipper” (5).
“Clean walls though, a beautiful space. Space” (6).
One feels the propriety of that last “Space” because the sentence involving the zipper had earlier tossed a ball which it is the duty of this sentence-set to catch. One naively wishes the clause, “like an abstract zipper” were given its own sentence, if only to make this relation more explicit.
Siegel’s prose is shot through with moments of curious symmetry, a balance at times clearly deliberate, at others shrouded, seemingly accidental. There are passages that could straddle the head of a pin, so distributed is their weight. This is the case two paragraphs into the story’s second section. A paragraph of just over six lines begins, “At the public restroom closest to the BB I found an unoccupied toilet and locked the door behind me…” There follows a pointed description of the narrator’s undressing, punctuated and interrupted by this brief and biting line, made a paragraph of its own: “I don’t wear underwear.” Then a second paragraph of just over five lines, beginning, “I folded my herringbone suit…” followed by another dart of a sentence-paragraph: “I drew three deep breaths” (all 9). The effect on the page is striking. The 1, 2, 1, 2 of these passages functions like the two-barreled cocking of a shotgun—a heightened baseline out of which the climactic action will, in the next line, explode.
Before tackling what I take to be the dominant draw, the central motion, of “Lamentation,” one further preliminary aspect ought to be mentioned. This is the question of finitude. Coffee is something like the universal variable of the piece. It is coffee—the experience of coffee, the affect and bearing of coffee—that stands in essential relation with every possible coefficient. Coffee signifies and multiplies everything in Siegel’s carefully marked-out universe. At a basic, philosophical level, coffee is to the narrator, the protagonist, as infinity (the eternal, the divine) is to we self-knowing mortals. Coffee promises everything, and its absence signals finitude in its most felt and bodily form.
Early on, the narrator discovers he has neglected or forgotten to replenish his coffee supply, finding in his canister “Only enough for one modest scoop…” In response to this fact, a second clause: “…which reminded me that we are finite” (1). Indeed. A thesis made manifest with further clarity as the narrative unfolds: coffee = infinity. A thesis that is expounded once more, when the narrator recalls his thoughts after a bird had smashed itself into his office-window. He explains,
The bird reminded me: If I didn’t drink this, then my feet would melt into the carpet under my white desk. I would tire. I would be caught unaware. I would need to stop because I was not prepared. I would rub my eyes; I’d wish I had a door to close. I’d curl up under my thick desk where it’s dark and quiet. I would wake up to the legs of humans dressed formally walking past, judging me silently. I would be plainly finite. (4)
This passage is one of several keys scattered throughout the piece that make penetration of its overall “meaning” (its sense to made) a (delightful yet challenging) task of interpretation.
The formulation of finitude presented above segues into and complements nicely the greater theme of the piece overall. This is desire. In particular, erotic desire. It is a contagion already induced in the reader with the introduction and just-as-quick deferral of the “event” at the story’s beginning. A compulsion forward. A magnetic draw. The sway of finite man towards the breast of infinity, the teat of Minerva divine. For the narrator, the pull of coffee (and especially the exotic, fetishized coffee kept behind the counter at Blue Bottle) is like the pull to the lover’s boudoir. It is only with this theme of erotic compulsion in mind that the climax of the story, and therein the story as a whole, can be comprehended as a meaningful movement to crescendo.
Traces of the explicitly erotic can be found throughout “Lamentation.” Perhaps the most telling early example appears in the narrator’s description of savoring the last particles of “bean sand” residing at the bottom of his empty coffee can. “When I take off the disposable lid, there is always one more swallow one more finger of coffee, hidden. Heavier sediment to be savored in silence. I can hear myself drink it. After this I smell my fingers as if from a lover’s nethers. These right hand fingers make me shake with tremens” (4). The erotic, pseudo-sexual dimension of the narrator’s relation to his coffee is plain to see.
As if lusting after a lover—obsessing and thirsting after the pleasure to be had in sexual consummation—the narrator is fixated in the story’s first half upon a cup of coffee. The coffee-desire is sublimated into a concrete location: Blue Bottle coffee house. Blue Bottle beckons, teases the “I” from afar. It becomes singular and elevated; it floats like a saint, an enticing Dulcinea hovering just over the narrator’s horizon.
And then it begins, the culmination of “Lamentation’s” first act. A coffee break, the first of the day, still very early. We get to experience Blue Bottle from the inside. It is a technical and populated space. “Humans,” as Siegel calls them, line up to be serviced, and the narrator lines up too. Finally, the cup, his cup (by now also our cup) is poured. Siegel writes at this very moment, “Blue Bottle radiated sex that had nothing to do with penis or vagina. I watched my cup fill slowly with filtered coffee, drop by drop from a clean small kettle” (7). End paragraph. The second sentence is scandalized, perverted by the first. Each drop from this “clean small kettle” is felt as the drizzling of some primordial sexual-ooze.
At this point, having followed things along until now, the reader suspects that the narrator’s drinking of this cup, his enjoyment of it, might be the “event” hinted at in the beginning. Although this is a climax of sorts, it proves, in Siegel’s hands, to be only the setup for the event proper, for what is to follow.
Siegel employs a deviously effective device in this instance, taking the reader’s expectations, condensing them to a point and deferring them along. The pseudo-climax represented by the narrator’s consuming of this hyped-up cup of coffee is denied to the reader, removed from view. We only receive an outline of the drinking itself, a description in negative. Siegel writes,
I won’t write about the cup I had, how it was served in an all white cup, or how it warmed me, how the earthereal (sic) liquid ran through me the way Hemmingway describes the first drink of liquor, or the way a child first suckles upon her mother’s breast for the first time to taste its life giving qualities; I won’t explain how it’s comfort is something the child would die without. (8)
By packaging all this positive descriptive content within an “I won’t,” Siegel only frustrates and teases the reader. We don’t get what we’ve been wanting and waiting for. But then, we surmise, neither does the narrator. What had appeared as the erotic-object par excellence, this cup of coffee, now becomes but the portal to an object of a second, higher order. The narrator’s desire is shifted to a higher gear, and with it our own.
Our sense that this shift has occurred is confirmed in the last line of the first section. The narrator describes quickly grooming himself in the office bathroom, the cup of coffee still fresh in his memory. Then, he says, “I looked into my own eyes and breathed. This calmed me down and somehow I knew” (8). Of course, this last line resonates with the very first. We sense that this “I knew” refers to the “event” already in question. But what does he now know? We are intrigued, and read on.
The second section crystallizes every trace of erotic investment planted in the first and lunges this inertia-laden amalgam forward in the manner of a catapult. A string of nearly unbroken narrative description commences. We are told how the narrator strode with determination past “the same panorama of people who were different everyday” (8). We learn the destination is Blue Bottle and suddenly all these descriptions of other people as strange, alien beings (simply called “humans”) ring true. For the narrator has placed himself on a level entirely distinct from every other “human” in the universe. His only other meaningful “other” is Blue Bottle, and the coffee contained within. His universe becomes one populated only by himself and this, his erotic object. All else is immaterial, static detail. And indeed, is this not an apt representation of the erotic relation as such? The erotic bind, which excludes every element outside itself—outside its dualism of tension-strung terms—to a realm of insignificance, of flatness and inconsequence.
We are told of the narrator’s aforementioned undressing in the public restroom closest to Blue Bottle. Of the methodical folding and placement of his shed clothing. And then of his run, his madman’s sprint. And, since his nakedness is not in itself enough to signal the full-blown erotic nature of his possessed endeavor, we are told that he is erect as he hurries his way through the crowd (10).
He arrives, leaps behind the frightened and swiftly-vacated counter. An ecstatic fury: “With the scissors I found on a shelf, I tore open the reflective sacks of coffee beans (their aroma sublime around my naked body). I threw handfuls of beans into my mouth, into the air, and the gawking crowd” (11). The ensuing destruction of Blue Bottle’s behind-the-counter space is positively Dionysian, charged with an erotic energy like the eruption of a volcano in pagan times.
This release, however, is relatively brief, eclipsed in but a few moments. Mirroring the human orgasm in its form, this spree of ecstatic, daemonic expenditure plays out as a fountain-like ejaculation into the garden variety space-time of 21st century bourgeois Americana. Here, in the space of narrative climax, we glimpse, more than anywhere, Siegel’s brilliance as a story-teller. And perhaps his madness as well.
The narrator’s energies spent, his erotic propulsion found an endpoint, he sinks once again to the commonplace level of mortality, of finitude. “I only began to feel mortal again when I was maced by the officers and tackled,” the story resumes (12). Infinity had been attained, if only briefly, in the span of the destructive, erotic climax. Indeed, such is the nature of erotic attachment, that the fulfillment of its object lasts but a second, whereas its drawing-nearer may last a lifetime.
Curiously, recognition of oneself as an individual, particulated unit can only take place on the level of finitude—often, crushingly, in the return to finitude. Such is the case in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, but also in “Lamentation,” where the narrator catches his “reflection on a froth pitcher” in the moments just after release, while pinned on the ground (12). “It was strange to see myself in a kind of fish eye view,” he explains, “my face, my forehead was so large, and yet the rest of the world was wasting in the background. I looked away and concentrated on the multidimensional texture of a coffee cozy until they’d cuffed me” (12). During the act of release, the “I” had not been distinct from his eroticized surroundings. He had been, as it were, “one” with them. Tossing around, flailing his limbs, grabbing and throwing all within reach, he had been intoxicated and entranced by the coffee beans (“their aroma sublime around my naked body”). Now he finds himself as himself—a foreign, yet human, face at home in the world of everyday objects.
The narrative ends with the “I” alone and exhausted in the back of a police car. Quite the opposite of an uncomfortable place, however, the backseat welcomes the narrator, cushioning and embracing him. He seems in the throws of post-coital relaxation, that slovenly rejoice after the deed is done. Siegel describes: “I did hear the police car door shut, and for several moments I was left alone in the dark backseat, protected. On an oil derivative, thick plastic, I laid down and it felt like a warm bed of down feathers” (12). Such is the relief of the reader, as well, coming down to rest from such an obscene height.
Story-arch fulfilled, we arrive at the distant end of the rainbow. The view from here is occluded, yet painfully sharp. We feel hung over, love-spent. If the dominant movement of “Lamentation” is that of a certain erotic propulsion, we feel we have been swept up by the necessity of this motion. The narrative carries the reader along, inciting his desires along with those of the protagonist, heightening them to a fever-pitch and finally depositing them in the backseat of this police car.
Our interpretation can be capped off by enacting a brief but telling comparison of Siegel’s piece with what is, in my opinion, its most plausible literary antecedent. This is Kafka’s famous story of 1912: “The Judgment.” The comparison would be groundless if not for the element of erotic propulsion identified above. For, in both stories, the action, the movement, is guided along by a sort of behind-the-scenes necessity, especially at the climax. To be sure, the objection will quickly be raised that since Kafka’s narrative ends with its protagonist’s death, it cannot be compared with Siegel’s story except in some superficial, weakly analogical way. To this it should be responded that, in truth, the erotic- and death-drives (eros and thanatos in both the Freudian and Grecian lexicons) amount to the same thing.
In “The Judgment,” Georg Bendemann is introduced alone in his room facing the river, having just finished a letter to an estranged friend in St. Petersburg. The first half of the story is taken up with Georg’s second thoughts about this letter. Was he correct to inform his friend, a wretched soul ostensibly perched on suicide’s edge, that he had become engaged? Would this happy news be too upsetting for his friend to hear? An obsession seemingly most mundane, as with the coffee-lust in “Lamentation’s” first half, that balloons into something sinister and explosive come tale’s-end.
The only details from “The Judgment” we need focus on here involve the way this bit of the everyday (the sense of the letter) becomes charged and projectile-like in the story’s second half. How this first-order object is curtained to reveal an ero-thanotic object of a second-order lurking behind. Georg’s relation to his father, as manifested in the uncontrollable movements in Georg himself, becomes this second charged object. And, as with Sigel’s protagonist’s reaction to Blue Bottle, it is Georg’s reaction to his father’s vitriolic outbursts—a reaction totally out of his hands, virtually chemical—that governs the escalation to narrative climax.
Georg’s father manages to spark, though not yet fully incite, the reaction by stating, unexpectedly: “You have no friend in St. Petersburg. You’ve always been a leg-puller and you haven’t even shrunk from pulling my leg. How could you have a friend out there! I can’t believe it.”[1] The dialogue that ensues between Georg and his father is marked by an awkward, yet deliberate strangeness. Georg is drawn deeper and deeper under the influence of his father’s senile accusations.
Finally, the titular “judgment” makes its appearance, as Georg’s father exclaims, “So now you know what else there was in the world besides yourself, till now you’ve known only about yourself! An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being!—And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning!”[2] The death-sentence delivered in all its arbitrary pugnaciousness, Georg is quite literally “urged from the room,” through the staircase, out the front door and into the river just across the roadway.[3] The urgency, the necessity, of this dash-toward-death is palpable in Kafka’s language. Kafka writes, “Already he was grasping at the railings [of the riverbank on his descent] as a starving man clutches food.”[4] He drops into the water, his life extinguished in the time it takes to call a friend on the phone.
Then, the final line: “At this moment an unending stream of traffic was just going over the bridge.”[5] Here, as in the passages that preceded it, we detect a definite semblance with the erotic doom-trajectory Siegel describes. There is the same torpedoed necessity, the same forward-propulsion, the same sense of relief and return to finitude. It is as if there were some fundamental truth about the modern subject finding expression in these two narratives, albeit from different angles. Perhaps it is that both reflect the fact that we are, at some deep and intractable level, wholly and without remainder, subject to the tragicomic puppetry of our desires.
[1] Franz Kafka, “The Judgment,” in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 83.
[2] Ibid, 87.
[3] Ibid, 87-88.
[4] Ibid, 88.
[5] Ibid.
Posted April 10th, 2010
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