preface

 

 

 

The theme of The Magnificent Wurlitzer is that of the ‘guilty Faust’ (more Berlioz than Goethe), Faust guilty from the start, who seeks on a fantastic, grotesque journey his truth, his Mephistopheles. As a modern epic, not anchored too firmly in time or place or shape, the hero Mr James (or Jay or Jayman, even the hopping Hopper) treads in the traces of epics from East and West, comes with a happier, more successful end. Gilgamesh, the Ramayana, Götterdämmerung; from jazzman to shaman, the hero slides from music and religion to seeking order where there can be none, to politicking on a continental scale and finally to leadership of the virtual and the voiceless.

In the end he fails to see and grasp the passage of those epic ephemeral adventurers, the Scythians, who leave him with no more than the great king’s horse’s tail.

 

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Wurlitzer is the machine that plays all music in its own sweet way, is creation, innovation, improvisation – whatever tickles you, a farrago-medley of beauty and bad taste inextricable. And the Wurlitzer too is the nickname of the CIA – Intelligence, politicking, stabs in the dark, secret things and codified meanings.

The book, the four parts, plays off the crisis of modernism, its slippage into postmodernism, where anything goes and nothing moves, against its critique of the heartland, of Modernity. Modernity – with its contradictions of nation and nationalities, disinterested leadership and public will, all that is solid melting into air and also – reason, science, project. Modernisation brings the four horsemen of the apocalypse, drinkable tapwater, the Russian Revolution, the internet and the Crash. Hence the significance of the ‘history globe’, a kind of astrolabe that enables one to fast-forward and -back, into tradition or surreal innovation. Modernity is both sharp as an axe and malleable as clay.

So, we distinguish between authorial interests and the narrative thrusts of poor Jayman, ex jazz trumpeter, the Kafkian J, the Je of ‘je suis un autre’, and heir of Jay and Kai, jazz trombonists. There flit through too: Rimbaud, with his ‘I have hung garlands from window to window, golden ropes from star to star. And I dance’, echoing the book’s last words, ‘I laugh, I laugh’. Malcolm Lowry and the consul in Under the Volcano, with the idea of the false quest (seeking death on the day of the dead – like seeking a Moby Dick). And Wyndham Lewis’s grotesque, The Human Age.

In part one we see the progression from musician to impresario, executant to controller – where the relation between art and divine falls in the mud of the false crucifixion. In part two, Jayman having failed to save mankind (with culture of his own invention), becomes the judge-policeman – the embodiment of reason-as-punishment. And is broken by the indifference of his fellow cops and the resistance of other ‘orders’. By part three, Jayman’s in decline – forced into commerce, selling hunting gear to desert sheikhs, become prey himself. His Master is Sinclair, manichean wizard, not knowing and not fearing Death, though still fearful and still Slave. They are entwined with the three Annas (an echo of the Brecht-Weill two Annas, one naughty and daring, the other calm and forgiving, and their building ‘our little house in Louisiana’). They employ and are employed by Cass, asexual and bisexed, and their banker. Jayman flees, and in part four comes up against authority. His companions are the experts finding a use for ‘voices’, a great anonymous mass, or a computer blip, that may become a vast new movement, substituting for the sedentaries and the nomads. He is persecuted by the US powers, and by his colleagues. So distracted, he does not see the Scythians moving through leaving him only as, in words, their great king. King on a mule, however, and at the last forced to tell the ‘shaman's lie’. To induct an apprentice into the shaman's mysteries, the descent to the world of the dead to bring back their messages, they’re both filled with coke or magic mushrooms, then the lad is tied down, charcoalgrilled, reduced to a skeleton. Then he is reanimated as sign of the shaman’s powers. Or not.

As in the Faust legend, where Faust goes down to hell, not to return, Jay as a modern Faust must seek his Mephistopheles, atone his guilt (murder and bank robbery), assume all shapes and then – live in his tale...

 

G.C.