The Brooklyn Rail

I’m reading We the Parasites (Sublunary Editions, 2023) on a Boeing 747 airplane, hovering somewhere between Queens, New York and Athens, Greece, the absorbent zone of commute, of interval, which seems like the ideal setting to parse the voluminous scope of A.V. Marraccini’s debut book of nonfiction, committed, as Marraccini is, to the contingencies of reading and the mobile composition of the text.

When Roland Barthes asked, in his 1970 essay “Writing Reading,” whether readers had ever happened to read while looking up from their books, what he was also asking for was the permission to engage in a criticism divested of conventional (philological, autobiographical, historical, psychological, et cetera) analysis, which is to say another way of reading. Or, as Marraccini writes toward the very end of We the Parasites’s first movement:

Criticism isn’t theft, in Genet’s way or any way really, but then again neither is parasitism. The wasp burrows into the unspent flower of the fig tree with the imperative to live. The fish louse takes the place of the tongue of the fish to survive. The tapeworm attaches to the wall of the gut for the same reason. Taste can be cultivated, a sort of eros of wanting certain things, but behind taste is the throbbing want that is perhaps closest to the parasitic, Darwinian imperative. … but if we’re critics, we feed on art not to live, but to feel the heady rush at the apex of the senses. This not-exactly-nice thing, this assignation of sorts; I read and look, greedy for it.

This “eros of wanting” orients the throughline for the book’s sprawling five sections, each of which advance through itemized appendages of their own, and if the titular parasite offers Marraccini a discursive model for elaborating her theories of reading, the act of desire, its excesses and absences, is what draws the book together as a hybrid species of its own—analytical, lyrical, annotative, diaristic—recalling Michel de Certeau’s tabulations of a procedure that eludes discipline without being outside the fields in which it is exercised; both belonging to and subverting the realm and registers of criticism. Flashes of Marraccini’s aspirations to infiltrate the gentleman’s club of criticism—having honed her voice years before in the care of another parasite, a mentor she refers to as “Chiron”—are juxtaposed by her dedication to transform, like a parasite, the conditions of her environment in order to accommodate another mode of thinking and feeling: queer, feminist, self-conscious, stochastic, introspective, anxious, metaphorical, granular, ruminative, nimble. “I’m the Achilles who dresses up as a dancing girl, gets hidden by his mother, avoids the war entirely,” Marraccini writes.

I’m her, too, and the tapeworm, and the wasp, and the fish louse, sucking blood and figs and gobbling up lines of oil paint and prose like sweat, like air, like water. Eau Des Sens. Water of the senses. Diptyque is just French for diptych, an altar-piece which is like a triptych, like the Hamburger-Banhof’s Thyrsis of Etna, but with only two panels. It can be closed like a book. Odyssey, not Iliad this time, book 19, Penelope’s Dream: …

Marraccini’s veering consciousness has the tendency to dazzle, crystallizing in passages, like the one quoted above, which threaten to disintegrate on the page, dispersing like hyperlinked sources that do not cancel one another out but rather pile up, redirecting our gaze, like Walter Benjamin’s angel (belonging as much to Paul Klee, who painted it, as it did to Benjamin, who, thoroughly infected by the forlorn eyes of the Angelus Novus (1920), bought it in 1921) upon the trash heap of history; dispersing like the flight, too, between proximity and approximation that feels so intrinsic to the operation of reading in order to write, the way translation, in its own way, nears by way of irremediable distance. The textual upshot of Marraccini’s paratactic habits is a seductive expansiveness; likewise, the book’s looping narration rarely strays from the impulses of desire: between Marraccini and her first crush (christened the Nike of Samothrace), between Thyrsis and Daphnis, between Twombly and Nicola Del Roscio, between Genet and lice, between Alexander and Hephaestion, between Orpheus and Eurydice, between Rilke and Orpheus, between “Chiron” and “Patroclus,” between Achilles and Patroclus, between Auden and Achilles’s shield, between art and their readers—the ways in which we are addressed and altered by art and, moreover, the alterations we, too, impress upon any artwork that offers itself to us. What is criticism but that seminal residue, “generative,” as Marraccini writes, “outside the two-gendered model, outside the matrimonial light of day way of reproducing people, wasps, figs, or knowledge.” What we are talking about is the act of companionship, of making a work present for one’s self, without any degree of ownership—the ekphrastic urge to show, and thus share, what cannot be seen; what must be conjured in order to once again be considered. We learn to be a parasite, as with any form of mimicry, only by looking, despite or maybe because of the remove between the objects upon which we cast our gaze and their makers’ itches and etchings. The miracle of reading is to turn this gaze into touch, touch into feeling—the haptic glance that permits imaginative trespass: to put ourselves in the whorls of the hand that writes.

The work of criticism, the work of reading, happens, then, not only during moments of deep focus but especially of involuntary distraction; moments in which one’s attention hooks to a single detail of a painting or a passage in a book, art that is now being played back (but differently) in the viewer/reader’s thoughts, to be recast into something else. It’s this “something else” that criticism indexes; the way a reader might learn to read the world through their study of art and not only the reverse, a practice which demands both an ethics of responsibility and the erotics of linguistic and identity slippage, vulnerability and surrender, penetration and discharge. The way that Marraccini, as she navigates the Centauromachy of Learning and Criticism, where the first lesson is that women are invited only for the parties, instead lays bare a novel proposal: the critical education of “mapping and re-mapping … the self onto the others of art.” Marraccini’s intellectual rigor, her tenacity and her ambivalence, occasion shades of Susan Sontag’s incisive and indiscriminate “notebook-thinking,” although it is Nancy K. Miller’s vision of a personal criticism, parsed out in the 1991 study Getting Personal, that informs Marraccini’s own interventions to explicate a mode of reading—“Whatever this is, I’ve now called them off. I can say anything …”—that is nevertheless uncategorizable.

I read We the Parasites in the same state of susceptibility with which I tend to my life when I am not reading, when I am not writing, spare moments in which I am not looking up from my book. The titular “we” of Marraccini’s biographematic debut is a call to reading but also a call to readers: an invitation to be the wasp, “to burrow into sweet, dark places of fecundity,” but also: to be infected—with the fantasy of a criticism constructed purely by moments: moments of connection but also detour, moments of pathos, of impurity, grossness, and disagreement, of erotic encounters, of affective response more generally, a reading that demonstrates the indeterminant borders between theory and practice—as well as its ritual reproduction—of thinking and making, making and remarking upon.

It is no coincidence that Barthes, in order to articulate another kind of reading, had to use the vocabularies of painting and the cinema. Marraccini, too, knows that reading is an exercise that is nothing if not cerebral, bodily, dissoluble; the deceit of a good book is that no mediation ever occurs between one voice and another; the slippage of one experience as another’s. A work of art exists for us so it may exist within us, and Marraccini’s employment of the parasite to serve a text that itself is hungry, burrowing, as it must, in order to decompose and alter, recalls not just Barthes’s attention to the text as a tissue—a woven and interweaving skin—and Benjamin’s affinities for erstwhile arcades and consumption’s flotsam, but Severo Sarduy’s dual compulsions to multiply and disintegrate, especially evident in “El Texto Devorado,” in which the Cuban writer describes the rich complexity of another novel by imagining that in order to produce such a text its author must have devoured all the texts that preceded it, including the author’s own, thereby surpassing the act of writing, which is to say the act of reading, or perhaps calling into question what it means to read.

Like Marraccini, Barthes also allowed Cy Twombly to infect him; in an untranslated essay titled “Cy Twombly ou ‘Non Multa Sed Multum,’” Barthes describes the distinction between imitation and tracing, between copying the product (Twombly’s artwork) and copying the production. Even as she nimbly negotiates her erudite rolodex, Marraccini’s version of criticism seeks refuge from the lingua franca of specialism, authority, objectivity, less interested in rehearsing the obligatory Oxbridge script than hypothesizing the charge of the preparatory and processual. “Sometimes,” Marraccini writes, “the study is better than the finished thing as it is here, suffused with longing. The provisionality of the study leaves room for it to be free.” For Marraccini, reading while writing is about writing near, writing alongside rather than over. Criticism, thus, implicates the reader in the collective “we” of art, which is to say the irreducible versions by which we re-member a single work of art in diverse moments. This is why every reading, which is to say, every text, is conditional; this is why every act of love for a work of art is unconditional. “When I love someone, a person, my Nike of Samothrace, I am a jealous creature,” Marraccini reminds her readers, returning to her opening analogy of the fig and the wasp. “I want no one else to have her, to be loved in a singular and only return. This is not how I love that about which I write, the things with which I want to infect others, to make them also love, or lust, a review bursting like a cloud of psenes from a gall.”

What is essential? What is elective? In the time of pandemic, which is also the time of Marraccini’s text, longing and desire intensify as bodies isolate and the city becomes a landscape of measured and coordinated movements. For jury duty, where I am rereading We the Parasites, I relocate to the zone of holding and of being held. The time of waiting; stolen time, an interrupted time, latent time, gestational time, perhaps Benjamin’s now-time, the Jetztzeit that asked us to consider relieving the discharge of the past, present, and future for the event of speech. Marraccini frequently invokes the undertow of a cultural belatedness, a temporal-spatial estrangement that characterizes our everyday condition and conditioning within post internet capitalism. The pandemic, a setting that unavoidably uproots We the Parasites, provokes both epiphany and forewarning: “Delineations of before and after do not exist yet. It is always just becoming evening … Is it the duty of the critic,” Marraccini asks, “like the historian, to always be looking back?” And later, during quarantine, while juxtaposing the generative possibilities of aporia and the eventuality of extinction: “It’s a dead end that is also a ruin, that is also productive in that strange way ruins are. … Tomorrow is yesterday is last week again. I skim everything and latch on to nothing. A parasite that fails to feel or feed will die.” The lesson, or one lesson, is the dangers of the habitual urge to graft one’s life onto literature and art, “reading back,” as Marraccini says, “in order to read forward into the world,” diffusing, for me, Jacques Derrida’s own precautions in “The Purveyor of Truth” that psychoanalysis finds only what it has set out to look for. And yet true intimacy is not possible without vulnerability, and vulnerability inaccessible without risk. Nowhere is We the Parasite’s discursive narration more exhilarating than in the book’s final turn, when, having acknowledged these possible pitfalls, Marraccini nevertheless calls for a reading that is promiscuous, immersive, copresent, displacing, reciprocal and reciprocating:

The thing is here … is that Auden’s wasps are not my wasps. His rage is not my rage. His shield is not my shield. I have climbed inside his voice like a well-worn blue cloak so many times now it is hard to say where he ends and I begin, but I can feel my human feet now where his hooves would be in this poem. I take his world but I take mine too, running in quantum parallel.

In Marraccini’s probing examinations, in her relentless prolixity and receptiveness and her ambition to infect us, We the Parasites reconfigures reading as both ethics and erotics, asking whether the economy of literature and art isn’t also a Necropolis, city of the abandoned and disappeared; asking whether it isn’t readers, too, who have to descend, become something else—that third thing; neither subject nor object but parasite—in order to reanimate the dead.