MASSEY UNIVERSITY PRESS 2021
Reviewed by Michael Steven for PhotoForum
There is a rich tradition of interdisciplinary collaboration in the arts of Aotearoa New Zealand, particularly between poets and visual artists. Some notable and favourite examples of this kind of working relationship include Colin McCahon and John Caselberg; Ralph Hotere and his mates Hone Tuwhare and Ian Wedde; Andrew Drummond and Bill Manhire; Peter Madden and Sam Sampson; Greg Kan and Kim Pieters. Usually these collaborations are response-based: ekphrastic creative texts; catalogue essays; single works or series that incorporate lines from or poems in their entirety.
Massey University Press’s kōrero series of ‘picture books’ for adult readers have a different edge or approach. Edited by Lloyd Jones, the series aims ‘to showcase leading New Zealand writers and artists working together in a collaborative way.’ Wellington poet Chris Price and photographer Bruce Foster have together authored The Lobster’s Tale, the third and latest release in the series.
Firstly, a comment on the design and production values of these books. They feel good to hold. They have weight. The heavy board covers are given texture with cloth-bound spines and embossed titling. Both the text and photos are printed on high quality stocks. Nothing about the typesetting or layout seems misplaced or obtrusive. This is the standard all university presses and publishers of literary works, artists’ monographs and photobooks should aspire to.
In the Media Preview notes that accompany the book, Price writes, “I think of the writing in this book as painting with facts. . .this book is what happens when poets write prose.’ For some poets who leap into prose, it signifies the end of their versification. They go on to write books that challenge and dismantle conventions of genre-works that are often classified with silly and pointless labels like autofiction, or my personal pet hate: creative nonfiction.
I’m thinking here of writers such as Paul Auster, J.M Coetzee, Iain Sinclair, W.G. Sebald, Martin Edmond and Maggie Nelson. Often their books have the same scale and sweep of feeling, the sustained thought and perception a reader encounters in epic poetry. For these writers, the poetic act becomes a dance of arrangement: of finding the right step and form for the facts and the anecdotal associations, connections, and meditations they conjure and attract.
One of the lesser known (and to my mind, perhaps more interesting) literary anecdotes involving the lobster, also involves Max Ernst and Jean Paul Sartre. The story goes something like this: after discovering for himself the vision-inducing, telepathic properties of mescaline, Ernst was effusive in sharing his findings. He encouraged his mate to try the drug.
Sartre, who was a prodigious daily user of stimulants, including caffeine and amphetamine tablets - favouring 20mg doses of Ritalin and Benzedrine - is reputed to have found the experience disturbing. He was indeed left with a vision - one that would pursue him around the Paris streets for the rest of his days. Sartre’s pursuer: an apparition of a lobster named Thibault, the pet of 19th Century Romantic poet, Gérard de Nerval.
The Lobster’s Tale begins with Thibault (can one think of a more famous lobster?) This is the first of many iterative lobster figures that move through the elegant and inclusive blocks of Price’s braided text. Along the way, we learn of the lobster’s singularity, its habits, peculiarities, and vulnerabilities. We learn also of its representation in art, mythology, literature.
Here are some of the famous people we encounter in the text whose lives, in some irreversible way, have been influenced or affected or by the gastropod: there is the lobster painted by Cook’s navigator, Taupaia; the Grecian king Sisyphus, and the reading of his myth by Albert Camus; there is Jonathan Franzen’s journey to the South Pacific to spread the ashes of his suicided friend, David Foster Wallace.
There are three separate narratives in The Lobster’s Tale: Foster’s images; the braided essay of floating blocks or stanzas, and the mysterious and continuous line of lyric poetry moving ‘below the waterline of text and image,’ in what might be a typographical mirroring/imitating of the lobster’s bizarre and beautiful migration practices.
Foster’s images are like stills uplifted from the mind of a dreamer. They are visual koans, where enlightenment or nirvana occurs in the duration of an unmediated and unmeasurable instant, and always eluding those pesky censors: reason and logic. I’m reminded of the psychic juxtapositions and absurd symbol arrangements found in the paintings of Rene Magritte. To look at any of these pictures, is to again be reminded of how all forms must ultimately give way or return to the state of formlessness.
This is achieved without defaulting to melancholia and its sombre dirge. Foster is singing here the rapture and poetic mysteries of impermanence. We see patterns, shadows and shades, textures and colours inverting themselves in streams, rippling pools, horizons, streetscapes, cells, aquariums. What these photos ask of us (as all good photographs do) is our presence. By that, I mean attention. They call out to us, asking that we slow ourselves down. They hold us in the business of what is before - not beyond, or behind us.
What is it about the lobster that made it have such a profound and, dare I hazard to say, traumatising effect on Sartre, Taupaia, and David Foster Wallace? One way to read the lobster is to see it as an analogous figure to the artist-in-the-world. Among many other things, Price’s essay meditates on and gently cautions about dangerous notions of heroicism, implacable dissatisfaction, self-directed failing and their dubious relationship to the practice of artmaking. What, then, does the lobster come to signify? Maybe the artist should be more like the lobster, acting from a place of awareness that, ‘Linear time is tunnel vision, but Earth time’s a looper, a spiral of eternal consequence’.(1) How these three brilliant narratives fit together and whatever meaning they intend to impart is entirely the providence of the reader. All you need do is follow the lobster.
Michael Steven is the author of poetry collections ‘Walking to Jutland Street’ ( Otago University Press 2018) and ‘The Lifers’ (Otago University Press, 2021)