Wilder Enchantments: On Caryl Pagel’s "Out of Nowhere Into Nothing"

Caryl Pagel | Out of Nowhere Into Nothing | Fiction Collective 2 | September 2020 | 164 Pages

The ten essays in Caryl Pagel’s recent collection cycle through memory and place and art and hearsay and ghosts, adumbrating a worldview oceanic in its openness and deeply compassionate in its lavish attention. The view from here is mesmerizing: un- and enfolding, keen, strange, lithe, always surprising and often very funny. Nowhere? Nothing? I could not at first reconcile a title so vast and hand-wavey to a collection of essays flush with worldly particulars. But the title Out of Nowhere Into Nothing—not unlike the wandering essays inside—harbors a secret precision. Exactly the geographer’s consternation, the ontologist’s chagrin. How can an essay get at the nowhere of specific modes of dislocation, the nothing of distinct senses of absence? It is precisely this impossibility, what cannot be apprehended, that this collection is after.

What’s astonishing is how the essays manage to pull off so much at once. They tell and retell stories, the absorbing currency of someone good at parties. But also they revel in piercing self-reflection plus pervasive existential terror. They adroitly thread pop culture, conceptual art, and the life and times of 19th century notables. They are rife with immoderate delights at the sentence level, alliteration, odd syntax, gorgeous flights of description. (A friend’s earrings glinting: “two unripe royal suns in permanent tremor.”) Trick is in how, through all this, Pagel retains a kind of lightness, what might with less skill come off as overdetermined or overwrought. The structures built in and between these essays, however full, remain loosely bound, totally okay with and inviting their dissolution.

Take for example “Paul Revere’s”, in which Pagel spirals out from describing an installation/peformance piece she just witnessed: 

Once, in art school, my professor impressed upon the class Sir Thomas Browne’s observation (appearing first in Urn Burial and later repeated by Sebald) that “a man may carry his own pyre.” I can’t recall the context. Too, a human body might hollow out their own grave, excavate a friend’s skull, or pledge to someday appear beneath a reader’s boot soles. Clouds blustered toward me from the distance in the image. I admired the colors, the concept, the plot. I touched my phone for any new texts.

The essays here are not marked by formal experimentation or boundary-pushing, alternating squarely between unbroken prose blocks and similarly-sized sections loosely strung. Besides an image or two, mostly they shunt attention away from form. The experiment is instead internalized, is in the fabric of the logic that holds the essays together. W.G. Sebald comes up more than once, and I read an interview in which Pagel refers to him as a hero. Makes sense the way each essay slyly begins in situated anecdote—a Chicago highrise one summer, a memorable soprano at a Copenhagen bar, that bathtub in a Prague apartment—what might in Sebald be recounted over tea in the garden (or here, on the patio of a midwestern dive). 

So begins “A Pickle for the Knowing Ones”:

On a Saturday morning in early November of 1993 the Libertyville Wildcats, a crew of orange-and-black-clad teenagers amassed themselves—sweaty, excited, perched awkwardly on slick-backed plastic chairs—in the high school cafeteria for a pregame pep talk by Dale Christensen, their beloved leader and the school’s football coach of twenty-one years.

And from this anecdote, dropped like a stone, the essay radiates out in nesting circles, recalling Emerson’s odd essay that, too, makes a cameo or two. Autobiographical details turn to encounters with contemporary art, to clickbait news stories, to 19th century paranormal research, to half-remembered friends’ accounts of what exactly. The pleasure is in the resulting chain of association, in the attempt to get and to keep the story straight.

A preoccupation of this collection might be: What can a list do? What can’t it? Pagel delights in accumulation. Arrayed throughout is her bowerbird collection of anecdotes, her own and others’. She exults in inventorying, whether a paragraph of titles to games extant and devised she played at one time or an extended description of over-the-top kitsch displays at a Wisconsin tourist trap. Even the sensitive reading of the Danish poet Inger Christensen’s alphabet, a book-length poem and abecedary from 1981, becomes a meditation on accrual. alphabet, she writes, “never escapes itself or fully concludes and grows to serve as a metaphor for memory’s erasure by accretion.” And. And. And. The essays obsess over the limits of seriality. When do a pile of events compile into a narrative, when do they dissolve into atomic, lonely experiences? When does the mere and magical act of enumeration generate meaning? When does the violence of naming, of curating, delude or efface or bury? Pagel quotes Derrida here: “every case of naming involves announcing a death to come in the surviving of a ghost.” One of the chief pleasures of this book is the precariousness on display. On closer inspection, each essay has this character, whether narrativizing or reflecting or describing, the sentences build however obliquely towards something remarkable—and at the same time, threaten to blow away.

Despite the titular nowhere, the essays collected here resolutely take up space. They circle the cities of Pagel’s past—Chicago, Iowa City, Cleveland, stints in Prague, Copenhagen. Locations in time, exquisitely rendered, supported by off-kilter regional news items or historical interludes, are at the core of how most of these essays proceed. But there is a creeping fungibility to these otherwise highly specific scenes. As Pagel recounts at some remove the trajectory of her life, alongside the trajectories of her friends, of lives gleaned from research, we get not coherence but thrownness, the weathers of circumstance. The result is less a rendition of a sense of place than intimation of a more fundamental question: Why are we anywhere? A question that becomes curiously more pressing with more detail, more specificity, rather than vice versa.

This sense of displacement, of dislocation, emerges alongside compulsive encounters with nothing, that which resists predicates or attributes. Take “Lost in Thought,” the first essay. The author as flaneur walks around and thinks thoughts, and in so doing, she looks back at the flaneur looking. Through a close reading of Harry Callahan’s candid photos of women walking in Chicago, we glimpse a face perceived as being unperceived, the self uninhabited, emptied. Or take “Wild America,” in which we are entranced by a meditation on repetition via the spirit of Wild America’s Marty Stouffer via a video piece by artist Steve Snell. Through the video’s endless loop and meticulous description of that looping we experience erasure, how saying a name over and over loses shape and how we lose shape. “[T]he sudden possibility, though difficult to express, that one might learn to leave the structure of time behind, to unmoor the self from the singular present in order to exist in an associative multiplane,” she writes. We get this urge to nothing most directly in “Sinkhole Suite,” an essay that generatively spirals through senses of absence, from reports of sudden sinkholes to quotes from Cage, Niedecker, Shakespeare (arguably king of nothing), from womb sonicscapes to rustbelt urban abandonment. The very acts of writing and reading are a kind of doing nothing, being nowhere, and as such “[b]oth occupations suggest a trance state, a white heat, the overwhelming presence of the overmind.” It is precisely here, at the corner of nowhere/nothing, that we can exceed the boundaries of ourselves.

“To love is to mesmerize and be mesmerized by—to pay attention—and requires maybe more than anything an enchanting narrative,” Pagel tells us. To enchant is to invite disenchantment, in which case is love here legerdemain we are meant to debunk? Much later in the collection we read a story about Dr. Franz Mesmer and a brief history of hypnotism. Turns out things are historically situated, problematic, products of misogyny. Yet context here does not dispel illusion. Pagel’s memory and research, insight and digression, do not break any spells so much as cast more, to enfold and refract through further story. The invitation here is to give ourselves over, eyes wide open, to the essay’s wilder enchantments.