That the White House Press Corps, CNN, all the networks and other statist media organs should be so shocked by the Bush campaign’s subliminal suggestion that liberal bureaucrats are actually RATS in a now canceled televison ad, is curious indeed. It demonstrates that it is the media, not the candidates, that occasionally get “off message;” for unless the whole world is clamoring to avenge the alleged injustices of racism, sexism, and homophobia, the media have no idea which way is up.
But then the press is the last to see that the world is replete with hidden narratives. They are to the rhythms of logic as recursion to the patterns of scattered stones. A visionary new work, thinly disguised as a job posting in the New York Times classified section, takes up the narratological puzzle of hidden texts with the kind of élan one usually associates with the highly controversial modernist classifieds of the New York Post and almost never with the help-wanted vagaries of the Village Voice. Withal, it is a work of singular force and urgency:
Publishing/Reception
Front Desk Position Are you… cheerful friendly articulate helpful dependable Could you… handle messengers welcome guests redirect phone calls take accurate messages interact well with others Would you like to work… Full-time M-F 8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. in a pleasant office with a friendly staff at a book development co. If your answer is yes… come to our front desk and fill out an application Applications available at Kirchoff/Wohlberg, Inc. 866 United Nations Plaza #525 (at E. 48th St. & First Ave) New York, New York 10017
It begins simply enough with the truncated question, Are you…
This formal strategy is, at once, spare and complex. Recalling as it does Eliot’s own plaintive, “What is it?” from Prufrock, but here moving to larger provocations by displacing the parochial question mark with the obdurately proletarian ellipsis (…), it becomes a wry and affectionate nod to Kant’s famously cryptic use of dashes in his treatise on transcendental logic from the work he often called in private correspondence, the Critique…Reason, and which Samuel Johnson is rumored to have further abbreviated as “CR” during his scandalous cabaret eating tour of 1777.
However, Front Desk Position’s real triumph is its brusque parody of James Whitcomb Riley’s turgid naturalism, particularly that of his rhyming animal catalogue. The fireworks build in its variously textured iambs: “cheerful/friendly/articulate/helpful/dependable,” then shift darkly to “handle messengers/welcome guests/redirect phone calls/take accurate messages/interact well with others. Massive accretions of stentorian declaration cascade over the line breaks, snaking as dactylic brocades through our subconscious tapestry. These materials are, thus, organized and executed with the virtuosic rigor of middle Blake but without the forced lyricism of late Wordsworth who, for all his gifts, could never reconcile his command of the 19th century bucolic mode with the malaise of a shrinking British empire or the growing prominence of Emerson whose oeuvre contained, despite the vicious slander of New Critical propagandists, fewer trees and virtually no illicit dashes.
When the inevitable specter of “work” appears in the third sextet, it is as a question: "Would you like to,” thus formulating our author’s decisive break with the humanist phenomenology of “Could you” and opening Front Desk Position’s Marxist critique. There follows a solemn documentation of “work” as reductive social construct: “full-time,” “friendly staff,” and, horribly, “book development.” It is a grim portrait of the world conceived in ecstatic consecration, but destroyed in grotesque execration and, yet, seems to resolve Henri Lefebvre’s inquiry into the problematics of a spider’s relationship to its web: is it really work? Certainly, but only with a mandated increase in the minimum wage over a two year period.
Front Desk Position represents a fundamental transmutation of contemporary poetics in that its strictly Imagistic deployment of authorial voice in an anonymous context does not conceal its radical urbanity or change the fact that Fernando Vargas remains a long shot in his title bout against Felix Trinidad. Still, I have money on both. And when wise Iago says,”Whip me such honest knaves,” none should wonder whether he means Republican Rodentia or the DemocRATS themselves. They are all bringing the plague.
September 14, 2000
Scott Wilkerson is curator of the Ward Library at the Mises Institute.
