The Mind of the Millennial (Poet)
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If this mixture of fear, intelligence, and maturity were Bernstein’s alone, it would not have the power that it does, but as he states: “the hipster discourse is the new master discourse.” Bernstein is fluent in the “hyper-alert, giddy, composite voice of well-read contemporary Brooklyn.” It is the voice of the Millennials who simultaneously want to shock and to please, to live up to an impossible standard and to avoid any standard, to be childlike and sophisticated all at once. “444 Mutual Friends” gives his program for personal advancement on the writing scene. You should “bat your eyes at all the queer theory professors you meet, occasionally challenging one or two professors for their enclosed canon but don’t do anything to get yourself off the invite list, attempt to remain removed and alienated from the cliques that form around you, but don’t do anything to be taken off the invite list, slowly mount your critique, and let bits and pieces out into the world, but don’t do anything to be taken off the invite list.” What is important is to keep on the invite list, assuming of course that you’re already on it.

What unites these two passages is the obsessive concern for what other people think. Invisibility is worse than death to Bernstein because the dead, like his sister, can be remembered and reimagined. And yet intimacy is fearful, perhaps because it means playing to a limited audience. Bernstein’s poetry derives from a culture of ceaseless contact, but tenuous closeness. It is filled with psychoanalytic lingo and sexual explicitness—we are told several times about his reverse Oedipal desires—but it rarely finds ways to register deep emotion.

The impasse that affects so many poets of Bernstein’s generation is that they give themselves so little room for expression. They suffer from a poetics that has robbed them of any number of tones, effects, and emotions. Bernstein does not want to be “creepy” or “corny,” to entertain “pure escapist homo-confessional-sincerity,” or to allow anything to “get in the way of my hazy discontent with life.” He rejects “a need for argumentation and debate and dialectic” or “radical oppositionality.” He doesn’t care if people think his work is “intentional,” even though he’d rather they think it was “unintentional … diaristic”; yet he admits that “everything is writerly and artificial.” The worst source of shame is to appear happy, as he tells one character: “I admire how you do not show happiness.” For a whole generation, depression has become a virtue.

It’s not that Bernstein wants to avoid emotion—to the contrary, he plunges over and over again into the heartfelt—but there doesn’t seem to be an untainted way of getting to that experience or that language. The book is divided into three sections centered on people whose names are crossed out, what Derrida calls “under erasure.” The first bears the name of his sister, Emma Bee Bernstein, whose initials form the word ebb and match those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Emma committed suicide. How can anyone write about such an event and avoid the corny, sentimental, or confessional? How can we speak honestly of our feelings when honesty itself is so easily deconstructed? “Sabby” is one attempt to deal with the death of a loved one. In its entirety:
I buried Sabby
Near a little glowworm
I never buried anyone before
But did take pictures of tree shadows
While I was still young enough to care
That was when I let my back rot
Gave up on the girlish daybreak
Of singing
Maybe I was never meant to be a
Pretty mist
Just a hard-edged prick
The tone is entirely unstable in part because we don’t know whether Sabby is a dog, a gerbil, or a human being. At first the poem entertains romantic imagery. Sabby is buried near a glowworm under the shadow of trees. But Sabby’s burial occurred when the speaker was young enough to care about such natural images. Now he has given up on such “girlish” ways, including the hopefulness of lyric expression. He has “let [his]back rot,” whatever that means. He thinks that such lyric romanticism is just “pretty mist” that was not meant for him because the “real” speaker is a “hard-edged prick,” an accusation belied by his care for Sabby. The romantic nature images are delivered with just the right note of campiness. Since glowworms move, there’s no way to be buried near one. By calling the daybreak “girlish,” Bernstein returns us to Greek mythology in which Dawn, Eos, is an eternally young maiden. The poem suggests the grand, the stylized, the lyric at the same time as it tries to deflate them. Only by breaking through the emptiness of past styles does he hope to find the genuine. Again and again Bernstein employs the strategy of camp to arrive at something that points toward an emotion that cannot be uttered, because any expression already renders it false.

The apotheosis of Bernstein’s camp æsthetic is the script to his performance piece, the masque-like “Adonais or Bieber Bathos Elegy,” which he performed at the Guggenheim. I must admit that Bernstein put me at a disadvantage. Until I started to write this review, I couldn’t pick Justin Bieber out of a lineup and had never knowingly listened to any of his music. What surprised me—after watching an hour of his videos—was not that the range of hairstyles exceeded the range of his voice, but that he generated so little celebrity aura. Bernstein is completely aware of the distance between Bieber the person and Bieber the idol. Indeed, the “bathos” of the title is defined as a “failure to achieve pathos.” Bieber is a figure no one could feel for, and thus all the emotion projected onto him is empty, unrealizable, and shameful. Ridiculing Bieber is an easy enough task; achieving sympathy is more difficult, and Bernstein achieves a strange sort of pathos at the end by highlighting the mutual destructiveness of fandom. The last lines are: “I’m not a thing/ Not anything/ Nothing/ For you.” The fan empties out the adored object by making the person an object of adoration, a thing that is nothing. And the adoring fan is humiliated by unreciprocated adoration.

In the last section, Eva (as crossed out), Bernstein takes up the issue of Eva Ionesco, who sued her mother Irina Ionesco, a photographer, for taking “pornographic” pictures of her as a child. Her argument is that her mother stole her childhood when she most needed protection. It’s the old problem of the child star (Bieber?) whose parents make a bundle off their kid instead of protecting her. This has particular resonance in Bernstein’s case, since he’s the child of two artists, Charles Bernstein, the noted poet, and the painter Susan Bee. In what sense is the child of artistic parents kept from expressing him- or herself? To what extent are we asked to see Emma Bernstein’s suicide as parallel to the theft of Eva Ionesco’s childhood or the emptying out of Justin Bieber? The camp tone makes it impossible to answer any of these questions. It keeps all issues suspended in irony and ambiguity, silence and hyperbole. But one thing is clear: Felix Bernstein is not going to be dropped from the guest list even if, as in Don Giovanni, he is seated next to the Commendatore.

David Bergman, poetry editor of this magazine, teaches English literature at Towson University in Baltimore.