MR WHITE’S CONFESSION: A Review
Now I’ve read the second of Robert Clark’s books that I have on hand. “Mr. White’s Confession” is a disturbing book. I watch a lot of murder mystery vids because of the investigations, the clues and amazing techniques of finding subtle — sometimes literal — threads, but they don’t talk very much about motivations and character. One assumes the victims are good and the perps are bad. I was not prepared for this mixed examination of human frailty. It was troubling.
This linked interview is an excellent explainer that eased my understanding. https://imagejournal.org/article/conversation-robert-clark/ I was looking for critiques of the book, but found here an eloquent account of a writer’s inner life. I am NOT looking for an MFA program, partly because it seems to me they’re about as much a racket as the “Famous Writer’s” mail course that I got pulled into in the Sixties. That is, I’ve come to believe that they’re just a phenomenon of “credentialing” for people who can’t figure out what’s worthy. But if I did want to enroll, I’d try for Robert Clark’s courses. He has the same mix of curiosity, vigor, and particularity as the short workshop I took with Peter Matthiessen decades ago. I’m not sorry I signed up for that.
This novel, towards the beginning, has a nearly unbearable scene of bad cops hassling a homeless camp with a mix of violence and invasive sex. The worst of the cops is a man named Welshinger who is not caught, convicted, and sentenced, but rather sort of ambiguously implodes, flying to death like Satan falling out of heaven.
But Clark, startlingly, says: “I’m very fond of Welshinger, who’s the bad cop in it, who’s almost borderline Satanic. But I have a kind of tender sorrow for him. One of the things he does in the book is complain in a very heartfelt way about how draining it is to go around being evil, how it’s not as much fun as it used to be.“
This is not about a loser puffing himself up by being “bad” but rather someone who is wired to hurt and destroy. Our upper-middle-class near-political devotion to therapy leaves us paralyzed in the face of evil. (Yeah, Democrats in the face of Trump.)
Clark says, “I don’t want things fixed or healed or saved. I just want things in themselves — and especially persons — given their full due in terms of their complexity and ambiguity and fallenness. Phenomenological philosophy — which I’m very drawn to — maintains that we don’t get to know in any absolute way the “why” or “what” of things, only the “how” of our experience. So I’m interested in rendering that as well as can be done.”
At this point I have to go look for an explanation of “phenomenological philosophy” and luckily Google is prepared to explain. “Phenomenology is the philosophical study of observed unusual people or events as they appear without any further study or explanation.”
In seminary this is what I kept getting called down for. They waved the names of thinkers around and said that it was a dead end. Where was my “faith”, my systematics, the supernatural? Whose church was “phenomenological”?
And yet I think that what Clark is talking about is very much of the moment, this post-post-modernism that says it’s all situational, personal, and we can only take notes. This is what Mr. White does, though without paper he has to write on his white plaster cell wall. Luckily, he’s a kind of Victorian character well-suited for an ascetic contemplative life. He is more sane when locked up.
The other story line, about the detective, features a character that Clark also used in “Lives of the Artists:” a teen girl who proves salvific, precisely because she is a natural phenomenologist, taking things as they appear. The story is full of surprises, reversals and ironies in spite of being “just the facts,” and the biggest one is this girl raised by a grandmother. Of course, the modern reader will want to know who that is in Clark’s real life because we read everything with a near-prurient interest in the creator. But I accept her as a figure, near iconic.
Phenomenology is far different now than it was for a Victorian. On the one hand, this was published today:
“The Acting Secretary of Homeland Security has issued a National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin due to a heightened threat environment across the United States, which DHS believes will persist in the weeks following the successful Presidential Inauguration. Information suggests that some ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence.”
In contrast to this, technological augmentation and participation in phenomena — only partly related to our viral pandemic — is a vivid consciousness of the molecular nature of living creatures (replicas of which can be printed out by computers), vast cosmos, the conditions of our various histories and how they control our understanding, the unending time of existence and the constant curiousity about we know anything. What IS a phenomena? Can we share them? Or Kenner’s Question — what does it mean? Quantum mechanics and the co-extention of DNA through all life-forms, means that simple observation changes everything if we look at it.
Simple materialism only asks “will it sell?” But I’m reminded of Carl Sandburg’s existential little poem about the GI. As nearly as I can remember, the GI “only needs to know how to say three things: Gimme a plate of bacon and eggs, how much, and “do you love me, kid?”
Food, cash, and love. That about sums it up. Communion, value, and inclusion?
“Mr. White’s Confession” is almost transparently schematic once this linked conversation is read, but when following the plot and characters it is ambiguous and shaded. Very “noir.” Because the puzzle of evil is how it emerges from the ordinary.
