Phillips/Perec/Dahmer

Today I read the next fifty pages of Jayne Anne Phillips’ Quiet Dell. Phillips makes the interesting decision in this section of the novel to reproduce some photos of Powers’ victims, in addition to quotes from contemporaneous newspaper coverage of the case. The inclusion of the photographs (especially as they come about halfway through the book) suggests a surface similarity between this novel and true crime books, which also often come with a section of photos in the middle. The meaning of the photos, however, is different. In true crime books, the photographs heighten the journalistic flavor of the true crime approach (even if only superficially), thus making the photographs a guarantor of verisimilitude. Perhaps the same effect is intended in Phillips’ novel; in fact, the inclusion of the photographs in this case only heightens the gap between the actual people represented in the photos and Phillips’ recreation of them. For example, when the spirit version of Annabel reappears after the reader has seen the photos, still flying above the events while observing them, we feel Phillips’ strained contrivance even more than we did before. One can imagine a situation where this readerly self-consciousness about the inventions of fiction would work to the benefit of the book. This isn’t one of them.

I also read the next fifty pages of Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. This consists of short pieces originally published under the title Penser/Classer in 1985, including “Notes on What I’m Looking For” and “Think/Classify.” Unlike the previous section taken from Je Suis Né, these selections are less obviously autobiographical (thought this dimension is never entirely absent from Perec’s work). Instead, what comes to the fore here is what we might describe as the most Barthesian aspects of Perec’s work, as in “Twelve Sidelong Glances,” in which Perec studies fashion as a signifying system. Unlike Barthes, however, Perec never lets go of a taste for absurdity (for example, in imagining the possibilities for generating new types of fashionable trends) that gives his attempts at (critiquing) taxonomic enterprises a quality I don’t find in Barthes. Perhaps the best way of describing that quality comes from the fact that Perec is both obsessed with taxonomies and at the same time realizes that they inevitably fail. As he says in “Think/Classify,” “Taxonomy can make your head spin” and consequently the best one can do is “muddle along.” Perec the structuralist may yearn for a complete and workable system, but Perec the post-strucuralist enjoys the fact that such systems are always arbitrary, incomplete, and overwhelmed by the inexhaustible complexity of reality.

I also watched Chris James Thomson’s 2012 documentary The Jeffrey Dahmer Files. Having written about the Dahmer case extensively, I can’t say that I learned much that was new from this film, and I really disliked the sections of the film featuring a Jeffrey Dahmer lookalike in recreations of everyday episodes in Dahmer’s life, because I didn’t feel those sections added anything at all to the film. On the plus side, I liked how the rest of the film was organized around interviews with three individuals who all provided different perspectives: one of Dahmer’s neighbors from the Oxford Apartments, the coroner who autopsied all the victims, and the lead detective on the case. There are moments that jump out from each of these interviews. The Coroner at one point describes the experience of taking the lid off the large plastic barrel found in Dahmer’s apartment, saying that it was “quite unsettling,” which I presume is very strong language for a Coroner. The detective explains that the clothes that Dahmer wore during his first court appearance actually belonged to the detective’s teenaged son, which gives one a new perspective on the iconic photo of Dahmer on the cover of People magazine. Finally, the neighbor mentions that as news of the case spread, she had people offering her $50 just to come inside her apartment and sit on a couch that Dahmer had given her—a mundane but symptomatic example of the celebrity culture that springs up around serial killers. And if you have a taste for black humor, you will love the brief clip from a home movie featuring Dahmer in which he says that he has been eating too much at McDonald’s recently and that he will “have to start eating more at home.” Indeed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7WHSmhx0OQ