The Deaths of the Author

Not long after I arrived at Harvard, in 2006, Jane Gallop gave a mesmerizing talk that revisited Roland Barthes' famous essay, "The Death of the Author." (Though it was a Comp Lit event, I remember thinking "where are all the English faculty?" Maybe they, too, had died ...)

That talk -- expanded now -- forms the first chapter of her elegant and powerful new book, The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time. Gallop turns the poststructuralist move of decentering the author to fresh account here, going beyond the necessary evacuation of subjective privilege to a moving engagement with the afterlife of the author as a haunting presence whose shadow still fills us with desire.

This is a book about the author as ghost -- a specter who continues to speak to and inspire us. It thinks the gap between the theoretical concept of the author's dethronement and the personal experience of losing writers we hold dear. In the tradition of the best theory, it insists that we cannot consider these things apart, but must always "think them together."

My notes on the lecture took the form of a poem. As I think back on it, perhaps one of the reasons I found her talk so stirring was that I had just lost my mother. The perverse idea of desiring the dead, not in a necrophiliac sense, but in the melancholy register of keeping their departure open, struck a deep chord. As Sebald writes (and as my notes on Solaris take up): "And so they are always returning to us the dead."

Everything hinges on that "and."

The Death of the Author
for Jane Gallop

If I were a writer, and dead, then how bright the sky at evening when evening is a word for making other words.

And how I would love to be dispersed across the sky, ashes thrown to the wind and someone’s beautiful eyes reducing me to a few precious details. Travelling outside whatever my life had been, joining me to a future that cannot know me, except as a toy that resurrects the destroyed.

If I were a writer and no longer a part of my story, but given over unseen to the birds at evensong, returning to the same life, the very same and yet different. Speaking warmly with strangers at the gate, skirting the paths through the park, spying on the couples who are kissing in their sleep, a part of the larger night where everything has already happened without me.

If I were a writer, and dead, I would enter the room of sudden desires. The one with salty snacks and glasses of whiskey. The book there where I had left it. Your eyes, your voice.

Whatever pierces me. Speeches me. Even now, dead, writes me.

Jacket Review of Michael Palmer's "Thread"

My review of Michael Palmer's Thread can now be read at at Jacket 2. Many thanks to Michelle Taransky for doing such a beautiful job with it.

Scott Wannberg, 1953-2011

Scott Wannberg was the first poet I ever knew. We met in a dorm room in Mary Ward Hall on the San Francisco State campus, both of us high, no doubt, and giddy with the energy of having appointed ourselves young acolytes of the Word. It was the fall of 1975. Though I was only a freshman and he was in the MFA program studying with Stan Rice, he treated me like an equal. I knew almost nothing about poetry. My idea of it was pretty much confined to the whimsicalities of e.e. cummings. It’s safe to say that meeting Scott changed my life, dramatically.

It’s rare, I think, when one can point to a single event, a instant that defines one for good. When Scott stood up – he was an imposing figure: tall, fleshy, stoop-shouldered, with a shaggy mop of hair, sweating no matter what the temperature was – and began declaiming in his soft, rapid, slightly monotone but urgent cadence, the libretto to Pound’s “Canto LXXXI,” some basic code mutated at the root level. It’s no exaggeration to say that nearly everything I’ve done since has proceeded out of that moment.

Yet
Ere the season died a-cold
Borne upon a zephyr's shoulder
I rose through the aureate sky

I had no idea, of course, what any of it meant. Who Waller and Dowland were I would soon discover, combing through the library, while ABC of Reading propounded Pound’s argument that after Chaucer English poetry had drifted into a doldrums that only Golding's translations of Ovid finally rescued it from. (This kind of heretical counter-canon making was head-spinning stuff for the uninitiated). I didn’t even recognize that Pound’s deliberate archaisms were archaic. Which plagued my earliest efforts at poetry, a fact Kathleen Fraser kindly drew attention to in her workshop. But it was the music that drew me in, its huge sweeping tides washing over me.

Pound was not the only poet Scott introduced me to. Williams, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas, were part of the cascade. Each searing, each pivotal, in revealing the possibilities of poetry. But it was Scott’s boundless joy in them, his sensitive, passionate reading and engagement with them, and his own example of wildly fecund permission, of letting words fly where they may, that blew the doors off the hinges for me. Not that anything I wrote then was remotely good. It was only a beginning.

Each week, like a pied-piper of bohemian culture, Scott led a small merry band of us to the art houses in the city to see Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, Carne, or Kubrick’s anesthetized epic, Barry Lyndon. Along the way, he was a non-stop compendium of high-low cultural citationality. Strother Martin was as important a figure to him as Pound or Williams. (I regret we never saw The Wild Bunch together; it wasn't until years later I finally viewed it). Being with Scott was expansive, blistering, tornadic, and finally, exhausting. Yet, in the middle of the whirlwind was an incredible kindness and a compassion for the least, the lowly and the suffering.

After that heady year, Scott returned to LA and Venice. We lost touch and I didn’t see him again till the early 90s when I ran across him at the legendary Dutton’s Books in Brentwood. (Ironically, I’d worked at its sister store on Laurel Canyon, run by Dave Dutton, a few years earlier without ever getting wind of this). By that time I was working in the movie business and had begun shifting from the poetry of Charles Wright and Mark Strand to Susan Howe and Michael Palmer. Scott, it seemed to me, had stayed true to his neo-beat origins, continuing to mine that vein even more deeply. It was entertaining, energetic work, long on comic schtick and short on the more lyrical and cerebral qualities I’d come to prize. After all those years we had little to say to one another, but it made me happy to see him spinning dervish-like in the flux of citational associations. He was still a galvanic spirit, ebullient and enfevered for the life of the Word.

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage

Michael Palmer's "Thread"

Note: here are the first three paragraphs of my 4000 word review-essay of Palmer's newest book, Thread. The entire piece will appear sometime in September or October at Jacket 2's website. Thanks to Julia Bloch, Michelle Taransky, Al Filreis, and everyone who is part of the new J2 team for making it happen.

Against Elegy: Michael Palmer’s Book of the Dead

“Thread—Stanzas in Counterlight” is Michael Palmer’s Book of the Dead. The title series of his 9th full-length collection, these eighteen interlinked poems are not elegies in the traditional sense. Neither songs of lament, nor, strictly speaking, commemorations for the departed, they reconfigure the genre. In these extraordinary poems, among the most moving and powerful of his career, the dead appear as companions on the way, intimately joined to the enterprise of living. “Thread” transforms elegy into crystalline paleography – a writing before writing that is also beyond it. Here, the customary polarity between innocence and experience is reversed. Innocence is not what is lost; it can only be gained. It does not precede experience, but is produced by it. For innocence is not a category of purity outside the travails of experience, but a condition that is achieved only by passing through the sorrows of an arduous contingency. The poems in Thread amply testify to this. In “Transit,” for instance, the sight of Creeley’s final book, On Earth, spurs a mournful, yet consoling, recognition.

We’ve come

to the old
echoes again,
swallowed songs,
tongues of cloud and wind.

The delicious image of a “swallowed song” rides on a cascade of vowels. The old echoes go with us, through us, speak out of us, again. So many of these poems feel like fragments of an overheard conversation. Nearly every one of them trails a ghostly double, beckoning us, in their uncanny incompleteness, to listen for further, unheard melodies. In “Fragment After Dante,” the first of a three-part series, the poet finds himself stranded in the realm of shadows: “And I saw myself in the afterlife of rivers and fields/among the wandering souls and light-flecked paths” (34). Amid the suffering of the dead, the greatest torment is to hear them speak, “chatting about nothing,” yet failing to understand them. The second Dante fragment resonates with muted pain.

And she clasped my arm and said,
You, my son, who have lingered

too long among the dead, go
and return to the lighted shore

for those brief moments you have left (35).

In a haunting image, the speaker’s face transforms “from old to young” as she vanishes. Memory’s dream of what-was mingles promiscuously with its hope for the Not-Yet. Throughout, Thread generously acknowledges that its every word is merely on loan from “the thief’s journal,” Palmer’s phrase, by way of Genet, for the floating para-text of unowned language. This is elegy against elegy: not a quixotic defiance of mortality, but a deepening awareness of it; a way to write into and out of finitude.

Thinking of the dead this way enables Palmer to do away with appeals to the cult of the personal and its fetish for the unique. “The dead” in these poems name an experience in which loss is only another form of continuity. They are always near and yet irreparably distant. In this way, the poem occupies a Rilkean angelic topos: it circulates freely between the living and the dead without making any distinctions between them. To speak the dead this way is to place them in an order of belonging beyond sentimental coercion. They remain strange and vivid; sheltered within memory, but also outside it; irrefragably singular.

“Thread” inhabits the melancholy landscape familiar to Palmer’s readers, a place where language ratifies itself by signifying its own failure. Written under the agonizing sign of Saturn’s slowness, they are harrowing in their humility and directness. Simplicity here is neither a reduction nor a retreat, but the earned complexity of a late style in a late hour. To call “Threads” a tour de force would only defame it. These “threads” are addresses, colloquies, homages – unanswered questions that concentrate Palmer’s concerns for his art as a site for making counter-meanings, those micro-resistances that push back against the crushing sense of moral fatigue born of loss, suffering, and slaughter.

Poetry in Time of War

Note: this was originally written for a reading at Left Hand Books in Boulder, in March 2003, after the US invasion of Iraq.

“I have something incomprehensible to say, like birdsong during war.”
— Odysseas Elytis

People are fond of asking “How relevant is poetry in times of war?” As if war were somehow so radically different from other times of crisis when we naturally turn to poetry. Or as if poetry could only exist in some rare, hothouse environment that dissipates on contact with the so-called “real world.” As if the first great poem of the West wasn’t The Iliad.

The fact remains, however: poetry is never relevant. It is never relevant because whatever is relevant can be quickly made irrelevant. Poetry has not persisted on the basis of its relevancy, but rather, because it aims at the impossible task of saying itself outside of utilitarian ideology. The task it performs, if it performs anything, is an essentially utopian one. It takes place in a “nowhere” – a space that contests ideological inscription – and thereby affirms a scale of values in which Eros will always supersede history. That is why the best argument, indeed the only argument, that poets can make on behalf of poetry and against injustice is to continue to write poems, to continue to find a way to utter Dasein, as Heidegger might put it, in the time of the world’s night. A lyric on birdsong is every bit as powerful as Akhmatova’s “Requiem.”

This is not to say that the overtly “political” poem of protest or witnessing is somehow no longer needed. On the contrary, such poems of denunciation belong to an ancient tradition of articulating a committed disavowal of power and its machinations. The protest poem is simply a more pointed example of what poetry in general does: it opens up the possibility for a discourse of resistance; it permits us to speak out against the tyrannical on behalf of the human.

To say that poetry is not useful in a time of war, or at any time for that matter, is to say that language itself has no use. It is to measure the earth with a very mean scale and to judge human beings with all the nicety of the slaughterhouse. No matter how deranged the condition we afflict on one another, poetry will always be capable of forming a response. Because the poem is not a passive artifact for entombing bourgeois sentiment, but a prosthetic device for extending the range of the human, enabling it to tap into and register a wider dimension of experience and feeling than we are capable of unaided.

When language is treated as nothing but a tool for point-to-point communication, then words become instruments of domination. But when language unfolds the complex constellation of relationships that joins each of us to something greater than ourselves, then poetry may act as an ethical force that expands the possibilities for what we can say –that grows the limits of the real.

What can we say in a time when the abuse of power has become the status quo? Never enough — we can never say enough. And that is why we are compelled to keep saying it. That is why we enter language with humility – so that the poem might say something dangerous, something unsettling, something radically other.

The Waterworks

The dog days are in full ascent here in Amherst. I feel overcome by a sweet inanition. Likewise, the blog is succumbing to drift. Behind the drift, I'm counting down the days till the semester shudders to life. So much to do! Class prep, that essay on Palmer. The MSA talk on Pound & Sobin. Etc. Still, this has been a very productive summer, and at the same time, a deeply relaxing one, the first in a long time.

Below is my review of E.L.Doctorow's The Waterworks. It originally ran in the now defunct LA View, in 1992, though I first read it in mss., with ELD's hand-written annotations in the margins, for Interscope Films. I fell in love with it and have taught it several times.

THE WATERWORKS

Like the moon, New York City holds one face to the light, the other in a perpetual umbra. In E. L. Doctorow’s eighth novel, The Waterworks, the hidden side of the city, its luna incognita, serves as both figure and ground in a dark moral fable about mortality, identity, hubris, and decay. Whether as a brooding meditation on the liquescent nature of history, with its endless shiftings and concealments, or as a modern valentine to New York City in the 1870s, The Waterworks complements Edith Wharton’s vision of the city in the same way that Blake’s Songs of Experience form a bitter refrain to his Songs of Innocence. This is the New York Garcia Lorca wrote about in 1929, a city in which the dawn has “four columns of mire and a hurricane of black pigeons,” where “furious swarming coins ...devour abandoned children.” Unleavened by Dickensian whimsy, it’s a harrowing trip through the sewers of Hell, lit by gas lamp.

Like Heinrich Schliemann excavating the successive layers of Troy’s ruins in search of Homer’s Ilium, Doctorow, beginning with Ragtime and continuing through World’s Fair and Billy Bathgate, has dug into the psychic strata of New York City to create a holographic portrait of American society that covers nearly 70 years. Only Gore Vidal has had the ambition to exceed that span of time in his series of novels chronicling the transition from Republic to Empire. But even Vidal, for all his prickly apostasy and intellectual acuity, can’t match Doctorow’s sheer lyrical largesse, which he lifts like a valedictory flare to illumine the names and faces of the past.

In his 1988 Paris Review interview, Doctorow described history not as “Newton’s perfect mechanical universe,” but as “constant sub-atomic chaos.” In such a state of turbulence causality breaks down. History is no longer a neatly condensed, monolithic tome, but a palimpsest scribbled over with innumerable, vying narratives, each underwritten by the protean stirrings of the unconscious self. The overweening assumption of modernity that is every civilization’s most “necessary illusion,” as Doctorow writes, melts down under such conditions, revealing “the skull beneath the skin.”

Early on in his career, Doctorow explored the use of the Western and science fiction genres in Welcome to Hard Times and Big As Life. Here he casts his story as a mystery, written in the ripping good-yarn style of Wilkie Collins and Robert Louis Stevenson. The effectiveness of this deliberately slight approach swiftly becomes apparent. Only a mystery could unravel the secret soul of the city. That soul, “roiling, twisting, turning over on itself, forming and reforming... like a blown cloud,” is the subject of the novel’s narrator-protagonist, a world-weary newspaper editor named Mcllvaine.

Six years after Appomattox, New York City is in the thrall of Boss Tweed and his venal ring of politicians, cops, and cronies. It’s an era, pointedly not unlike our own, of extraordinary avarice and brutality, of orphans and outcasts, ragpickers and street gangs, gamblers, grifters and bloodsuckers. Not a detail of this ghastly carnival goes unobserved by McIlvaine, who somehow retains an unsullied core of romantic idealism. The newsman’s all-inclusive eye is not as jocular, though, as that of Walt Whitman. In this New York, the Song of Myself has been drowned out by the infernal lament of the masses. In a twilit world where, “the air, in cinders, sifts through the filigree of fire escapes and telegraph wires,” the lonesome McIlvaine develops a paternal affection for one of his young, free-lance book critics, the moody and melodramatic Martin Pemberton.

Martin, who sees himself as a one-man bulwark against the swollen tide of Philistines overrunning the city, is the bitterly estranged son of the powerful Augustus Pemberton, a merchant who made his fortune in the illicit Caribbean slave trade. Not long after his father’s death, Martin bursts in on McIlvaine with the news that he has seen Augustus alive, being ferried about the city in a mysterious white coach. A week later, Martin disappears.

The hunt for his missing protégé leads McIlvaine from Martin’s self-possessed fiancé, Emily Tisdale, whose fetching combination of virtue and voluptuousness leave the veteran newsman smitten, to the more worldly sophistication of Augustus’s young widow, Sarah. But it’s finally with the help of Martin’s best friend, the quixotic painter Harry Wheelwright, whose Goyaesque portraits of mutilated Civil War veterans depict the dismemberment of the age, that McIlvaine and police detective Edmund Donne conduct a midnight exhumation of the older Pemberton’s grave. Its contents reveal the outlines of a monstrous conspiracy by which Augustus and his brilliant and amoral physician, Dr. Sartorius, have ensnared both Martin and the homeless children of the city.

Yet the psychic duel between the prodigal son and his sinister father occupies only the tale’s margins. At the center of the book’s superlative tension stands the conflict between Donne and Sartorius. Donne is the ratiocinative sleuth par excellence, a brother to Poe’s Auguste Dupin and a paragon of integrity; Sartorius, an arrogant and imposing medical genius after the manner of a Jules Verne villain, a man whose heinous scientific experiments foreshadow the Faustian acts of the Nazi death-camp doctors.

For McIlvaine, the scribe and witness, the pursuit is embodied in a haunting image out of a dream — a boy’s blue-skinned corpse, floating in the Croton Holding Reservoir at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, the future site of the New York Central Library. In this drowned “ceremony of innocence” our cherished mantras about progress and civilization founder until we feel, like McIlvaine, “the oppression of a universe of water, inside and out, over the dead and the living.” The cultural foundations of our society, Doctorow seems to imply, are written on water. More than that, though, our mechanistic conception of the world, as espoused by Sartorius, has set into motion an irreconcilable duality that can only end only with our destruction.

Walter Benjamin once observed, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Doctorow’s triumph is that he embraces both of these themes without abandoning the hope for transcendence, however slight it may be. At once a chilling morality play and a rhapsodic elegy to a moribund culture, The Waterworks displays all the flux and panoply of 1870’s New York, in the words of its ardent narrator, “forever encased and frozen, aglitter and God-stunned.”

Way Out West Part 4-The Wild Bunch

Like The Professionals, The Wild Bunch is driven by questions of loyalty, honor, the integrity of identity (both group and individual), and the ways in which the past mediates the present. The film revolves around an aging gang of outlaws who, after the fiasco of their latest robbery, attempt one last job before “retiring.” In the course of events, the Bunch aligns itself with a Mexican warlord, who forces them to choose between their own survival, or the betrayal of one of their own. Without any other organizing principle except the pact that binds them together, the Bunch choose to keep faith, a decision that sets in motion an apocalyptic shoot out as they take down a small army of corrupt Federales with them.

When the Wild Bunch first appear, they do so disguised as Army soldiers. The disguise acts as a sign of inverted identity, through which the prevailing cultural discourse of law and order is repudiated for the Bunch’s own internal code, as well as undermined for personal profit. Unlike the professionals, or Ben Trane, the Bunch do not see themselves belonging in any way to the larger discourse, nor are they concerned with re-affirming their identity by revisiting the sites of memory. As outlaws living on the margins, they have formed their own discourse, thriving on what their culture has excluded. More than Trane or Rico and Dolworth, the Bunch’s leader, the fiercely determined, yet melancholy, Pike Bishop (played by William Holden), registers the anxiety of this anchorless position when he remarks on the need to “think beyond our guns” since the days of the frontier are “closing fast.” This recognition carries an anxiety for him which no re-connection with the past can renew, as evidenced by this pointed exchange early on between Pike and his second, Dutch (Ernest Borgnine, who also appears in Vera Cruz):

Pike: “I just want to make one good score, then back off.”
Dutch: “Back off to what?”

The predicament of the Wild Bunch is that they are men without a past, outlaws whose lives have denied them even the de-ritualized sites of memory to which Pierre Nora refers. All they really share in common is the expansive anodyne of their laughter, which as a marker of the absurd hopelessness of their lives temporarily immunizes them from despair, permitting them to embrace their rootless situation. Laughter – crude, raucous, celebratory – as in the scene where the aging desperado Sykes mocks the Bunch after the loot from the payroll robbery turns out to be nothing but sacks full of metal washers – “here you are, with a handful of holes, a thumb up your ass, and a big grin to pass the time of day with” – laughter erupts as a singular gesture of defiance that is also the recognition of a life saturated by the melancholy of violence; a life that is nasty, brutish, and short, demanding a transgressive response that is a-historical. Laughter is the true site of memory for the exiled Bunch and while it is not enough to provide them with an enduring hedge against oblivion, it nevertheless stubbornly marks the boundary of the body inside a history that will not remember them.

Unlike the Professionals, the Bunch’s crossing the border carries no promise of hope, but rather is done disconsolately, after their disastrous shoot out in Starbuck. Surveying Mexico from the banks of the Rio Grande, Tector Gorch remarks that it “just looks like more of Texas.” To which Angel, the passionate idealist for whom Mexico is home (and thus, more than a site of memory, but a real, living place), retorts, “You have no eyes.” Later, when the pursuing bounty hunters, led by Pike’s betrayed companion, Deke (Robert Ryan, again intertextually cast as the hapless man of action), arrive at the river crossing, Deke asks, “What’s in Agua Verde?” (the nearest town), one of them derisively replies, “Mexicans. What else?” In The Wild Bunch, Mexico represents neither a site of memory for the central characters, Pike and Dutch, as it does in The Professionals, nor an opportunity for renewal as in Vera Cruz. Initially, it is merely a place for the Bunch to lay low, a region not of rebirth, but of derision and defeat.

This changes in the scene in which Angel takes the weary Bunch to his village. Here, they are feted in gala style by the friendly villagers. Even the fearsome Gorch Brothers frolic like children with a village maid who is the very picture of innocence. No longer a dusty watering hole, Agua Verde takes on the idyllic aspect of Paradise regained. As one of the village elders remarks to a bemused Pike, over the languid sounds of a guitar: “We all dream of being a child again, even the worst of us. Perhaps the worst most of all.” Fittingly, the dispossessed Bunch, who have nothing to “back off” to, find solace, however fleetingly, through a family of foreign strangers. This unabashed romanticism forms one strand for the film’s critique of the Western genre. Its brutal nihilism forms the other. By juxtaposing these strands, The Wild Bunch delivers a more complex and ambiguous reading of the possibility of renewal that is taken for granted in both Vera Cruz and The Professionals.

When Pike agrees to steal a shipment of Army rifles for the corrupt local tyrant Mapache, in exchange for the freedom of Angel, who has killed Mapache’s woman (Angel’s former lover), a chain of events is set into motion that irrevocably compromises the Bunch’s amoral spirit of anarchy with the idealism and honor of the impoverished rebel Mexicans. Though never explicitly suggested, the subtext of this arrangement seems to signify the formation and recognition of a familial bond between the dispossessed rebels and the equally dispossessed Bunch.

The story of the Bunch’s doom is in effect the story of their politicization. Dutch and Pike both state on several occasions their extreme dislike of Mapache’s bloodthirsty avarice and corruption, expressing a desire for a general uprising of the populace. When Pike initially suggests that Mapache’s simply another crook like themselves, operating on a larger scale, Dutch vociferously objects: “we don’t hang nobody!” Here, in its brutal kernel, is all we need to know about the code that bonds the Bunch together. Their politicizing – which is nothing more, really, than an uneasy, ad hoc alliance with the pueblo villagers (and by association, Pancho Villa, a distantly glimpsed presence in the background) who oppose Huerta and Mapache – remains in the end a deeply personal affair, one defined and motivated by their sense of loyalty (to Angel) and to their own honor.

Led by this code, then, the Bunch’s choice to join the cause of liberation is as close as the movie comes to attempting a resolution to the “crisis of memory” – the utter lack of any family or roots to which the Bunch can back off to. While little more than a pact for mutual survival, this code contains a kind of nascent social contract, one most forcefully expressed by Pike after the disastrous payroll heist in Starbuck, when the Bunch threatens to unravel. “When you side with a man you stay with him. If you can’t do that you’re like some animal. You’re finished. We’re finished. All of us.” Later on, Pike tells Angel, “If you ride with us, you don’t have a village.” These two statements form the moral underpinning of the film, and give rise to the final crisis for the Bunch.

In effect, the Bunch are their own village, and Pike’s struggle to give them some sense of identity, despite their inability to share in a site of memory, however debased, is one he cannot maintain for very long. In siding with Angel, the Bunch unknowingly take on Angel’s own fierce commitment, his deep sense of belonging, to the land and to his people. Without quite fully realizing it, they slide down the slippery slope of communal identity simply because it is the only thing, perhaps, that has ever resembled something in their lives to which they could “back off.” This is confirmed in the film’s final image of the border: the bridge over the Rio Grande which the Bunch destroy by dynamite after escaping over it with the stolen guns. The act of demolition, which symbolically bars them from returning to the United States, foreshadows the film’s bloody climax – a line which, once crossed over, permits no return.

The Wild Bunch, then, offers perhaps the ultimate expression of the logic of “regeneration through violence.” It is regeneration by violence carried to its final and lethally all-consuming endgame: apotheosis by apocalypse. More than that, though, the film demonstrates how the anxiety over the closing of the frontier – essentially, the foreclosure of the future – can collude with issues of collective memory, or its threatened erasure, in such a way as to create not redemption, as in the first two films, but nihilism and self-destruction. Ironically, it is The Bunch’s inability to ground themselves in a truly viable symbolic, as opposed to actual, past, as represented by sites of memory, that denies them access to an achievable future. For it is not only the frontier that is closing. It is memory itself – the localized, personally felt bond with a group or a region – that is being eradicated by the looming specter of history.

History, “analytical, critical, and secular,” is replacing the unstable text of memory, which Nora characterizes as existing in a state of “permanent evolution.” Like a new kind of cultural technology, history, which Nora observes is “perpetually suspicious of memory,” institutes a new mode of meaning production with which memory cannot compete. The Bunch’s separation from culture, then, is permanent and so, too, is their regression. Genuine regeneration, at least in the terms offered by the culture they have rejected, cannot occur. Engaged in what Richard Terdiman describes as “the intense struggle between repetition and innovation, between past and future,”the Bunch are destroyed because they do not possess a sufficient link to a past larger than themselves and therefore capable of funding a viable future.

Thus, the flashback montages of the Bunch’s raucous, life-affirming laughter, which director Peckinpah inserts at key moments in the narrative, do much more than serve as simple sentimental touchstones designed to cue a certain response from the viewer. They stand as pointed occasions for the force of living presence to spontaneously assert itself, reminding us that the fate of the Bunch is not simply that of outlaws living beyond the pale, but of humans who could not successfully negotiate the future because of their vexed relationship to the past. Nora notes that “memory is blind to all but the group it binds.” Simply put, the Wild Bunch are destroyed because they choose memory over history. In this sense, we are invited to compare their end to the tragic fate of similar marginalized groups, like the Mexicans peasants and native Americans who resisted assimilation into the cultural hegemony.

It is from out of this poignant framing of loss, I would suggest, that the film is able to generate such a tremendous attitude of warmth toward these savage and wayward men, paradoxically humanizing them at the point where, in another film, they would seem to be least human, namely, in the climactic bloodbath. As Pike says, “when you side with a man, you stay with him. If you can’t do that you’re like some animal.” It is precisely because this form of the social contract draws its power from memory, rather than history, that marks it as doomed.

Unlike the examples of psychological rebirth displayed in Vera Cruz and The Professionals, The Wild Bunch depicts a world in which Mexico can no longer function effectively as a trope for renewal. Instead, it offers a picture of the land south of the border as the place where the restorative powers of memory are chimerical, or bankrupt; where the past no longer has the power to mediate the present; and where anxiety for the future assumes its ultimate form: the last horizon, the final border, which is the crossing from life to death.

Though often referred to as both an elegy for the American West and for a certain style of more genteel filmmaking (after Peckinpah, the deluge), The Wild Bunch may also be read as a powerful elegy for memory itself. Its Götterdammerung-like staging of one last fatal border crossing sounds the knell not only for the frontier’s closing and the diminishment of local memory by absolutist history, but also for the kind of naive Western mythmaking by which Americans were able to reconcile themselves to the barbaric price they paid for their empire. With the eclipse of memory, the totalizing force of history becomes inescapable. More than that, though, the eclipse of memory marks a sea-change for the inner frontier where re-invention takes place, foreclosing the possibilities set in motion by desire, which is always exceeding itself, always yearning for what lies beyond its borders.

As Vera Cruz and The Professionals suggest, and The Wild Bunch powerfully enacts, the unstable logic of American nation-building, sutured together in the name of a dream of belonging, binds the drive to limitless expansion and aggrandizement on the one hand to the conserving movement toward stabilizing community on the other, only to fissure and split apart when followed to its inevitable and violent end.