“I’m boringly good,” A. V. Marraccini confesses. “Except when I write critique, I guess.” I am also boringly good, even when I write critique—or so I thought before I read We the Parasites. Now, I’m not so sure.
What I will admit, off the top, is that I have been staring at this hot pink volume waiting patiently on one of my overcrowded bookshelves for the better part of this year. As someone who has written and edited critical essays without any of the prerequisite training many of my literary friends seem to have, I was afraid that a book about criticism would be thick with the names of all those critical theorists I have not read and likely never will, and page after page I would be smiling and nodding politely, off in the corner, with no idea what was going on. I needn’t have worried though; for the most part, none of those folk were invited to this party. However, I was still concerned that, given what I’d heard about this book, I might yet be stranded outside my comfort zone.
You see, Marraccini puts her cards on the table right at the beginning. After describing the mechanics of the relationship between the fig and the fig wasp that burrows deep into the fruit flesh in a somewhat haphazard partnership that enables the reproduction of both fruit and insect, she finds a distinct affinity, as a critic, with the latter:
The critical gaze is tearing apart, clawing into the soft, central flesh of the tree bud.
The critical gaze is also erotic; we want things, we are by a degree of separation pollinating figs with other figs by means of our wasp bodies, rubbing two novels together like children who make two dolls “have sex”, except that we’ll die inside the fruit and someone else will read it and eat it, rich with the juice of my corpse.
And although the wasp/fig process involves, to unequal ends, male and female wasps and figs, there is an element that is, for our parasitic critic, inherently queer and, thus:
Criticism, too, is queer in this way, generative outside the two-gendered model, outside the matrimonial light of day way of reproducing people, wasps, figs, or knowledge.
Okay, I think. I will need to be convinced. The idea of digging into a work appeals quite naturally. That is what I do when I write about a book, whether in a literary journal or, at least most of the time, here on this site. I inhabit the words of others in order to write, but try to stay out of my own way in my writing so that my reading experience seasons but does not obviously alter the flavour of someone else’s. And erotic? Well, that is not something that comes naturally to me, nor does queer even though I’m hard-pressed to know what I am if not queer. I have a fraught relationship with matters of sexuality and identity. It’s complicated. Yet, I am intrigued. And, as We the Parasites demonstrates, reading—or viewing, since Marraccini is an art historian—with the body can be a messy endeavour. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Deciding to give this much-praised work the benefit of the doubt, I held my anxieties to the side, burrowed into the flesh of this curious text (I know, I know) and, my god, what an excellent read! (Please excuse the abandonment of all the niceties of proper critical reviewing and even accept an errant exclamation mark, because this book is one that invites you into the critic’s heart, mind and bed in a way that is completely, even joyously unexpected.) It is wise and funny and, best of all, it draws its references from the most unlikely places. My limited acquaintance with the stalwarts of the Western canon was no barrier to my enjoyment and, much to surprise, the two years of Classics that preceded my eventual academic journey through Biological Anthropology and Philosophy, was finally of some use. I not only have The Illiad (who doesn’t?), but I also could pull long untouched copies of Xenophon’s The Persian Expedition and Arrian’s Anabasis off my shelf and feel so clever. Not to worry, though, there’s always Google which you will need to see Twombly’s The Age of Alexander for this particular discussion, unless you have a photographic memory. But my point is, really, that you don’t need any special background to enjoy the musings that arise in this book; Marraccini writes with such enthusiasm, even about work that she views with some skepticism, that anything that is not offered within the text itself will have you happily popping online for a quick refresher.
The parasite analogy, if at first odd, sparks the author’s playful love of the dark and yet speaks with striking accuracy to the nature of the critic’s task—burrowing into and feeding off of the work of (mostly dead) writers and artists, to produce a reading or a response that brings light to the spaces darkened by time. However, if the wasp burrows into the fig, the tape worm finds it way into its animal or human host, consider the fish-louse that swims into the gills of its victim, severs the roots at the base of the tongue and eats away at the flesh until it becomes the tongue itself. This offers Marraccini an image, graphically detailed, that corresponds to the way that she has, when appropriate, stolen the tongue of Homer, or John Updike, or whomever. Strange? Maybe, but it aligns with the experience I’m often referring to when I say that I write about books to “open up” a potential reading (or readings). It’s even more relevant when one has the runway (that is, the venue and necessary word count) for an in-depth critical essay. If not stealing, we are perhaps echoing a voice, while our “I” self remains in the shadows.
In this extended essay in which the subject is criticism itself, Marracinni draws on a wide range of sources and images from classical history and mythology, to poetry, prose and, of course, art. Cy Twombly is her main man on that last front. One can move from Updike, to Centaurs, to Genet and Rilke, but it seems there’s a Twombly painting or series for almost every season and, in her explorations, she manages to carry us right down into the layers of crayon and paint. This affinity between artist and critic is so vividly rendered I wish I could have read this before my only direct encounter with his work at MOMA in San Francisco, but that would require bending time.
Our parasite, in inhabiting the works of the artists she consumes, also develops a strange relationship with the notions that arise out of that connection—a who-did-that-idea-come-fromness—that emerges in unlikely settings. Like dreams. Like when a nocturnal lecturer pontificating about the attributes of a strange painting-carpet he insists is a Twombly says No one wants queer art to be queer any more, Marraccini acknowledges, “to be clear, (that) is my brain saying that, and yet me in the dream is somehow intimidated by his prognostic authority” and she wakes up in a puddle of sweat. This is, for me, the kind of uncanny thing that only occurs when one is so deeply engaged with an idea or a book or an artwork or an artist, that the boundary between the ruminations of the sleeping self and the waking self is breeched. Blurred.
The question then is one of embodiment. Is the reader/viewer/critic inhabiting the work, or is it the other way round? Is this a risk of reading/viewing with the body? Marraccini writes about longing and desire, how they can be awoken or perhaps interfere with the engagement. Yet desire is not necessarily realized (at least not without breaking a law). And she does write about the body, her body, but typically in the most clinically frank way about the myriad way the body and its discontents can betray one. To be a parasite it one thing, to host one is something one would rather not entertain, thank you. Yet there are illnesses, physical and mental, that many of us live with and to pretend that they never mediate the way we read a poem of look at a piece of art would be an act of denial.
Finally, Marraccini is writing all of this against the backdrop of the early months of the pandemic, when London was eerily quiet and she could wander at will under the cover of darkness. (We are both naturally nocturnal creatures, it seems.) She captures the eerie otherness or suspended unknown of that period of time so well:
The whole world is so new now, there will surely be a spate of essays like this one, about The Before and After, or there will be no After and there will still be essays anyway.
I love this sentence. There surely was a spate of essays—as nonfiction editor for 3:AM Magazine, my inbox saw four or five new pandemic inspired essays arrive nearly every day. Meanwhile, a temporary medication change made it increasingly difficult for me to make my way through them as 2020 wore on, and by the end of the year I was no longer editing or entertaining the idea of pitching or writing any more essays myself. Whether there actually has been an After, as year four of Covid dawns, there are still essays, but I’m not writing them. However, reluctant queer, recalcitrant parasite that I am, perhaps I should be, duly inspired by this idiosyncratic, astute and undeniably queer essay. This is an original and very entertaining book.
We the Parasites by A. V. Marraccini is published by Sublunary Editions.
roughghosts 