Scorpions

This novel belongs on the shelf right next to Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49. Although in my opinion it is the product of a more pure and directed vision than Pynchon's now-canonized work, and a less shallowly ego-maniacal enterprise than any of Delillo's comparable fictional essays on American twentieth century paranoia and power. Kelly takes up satirically (but in a serious way, this satire is as serious as Petronius) just about every major literary and cinematic trope from the decades after the second World War, at least all the ones to do with white masculinity--the road novel (and film), the psychiatrist-as-priest-of-culture, the rebel without a cause, the endurance of fascism in American culture and the hilariously overwrought anxiety it provoked, the elevation of total erotic self-expression to the level of cure-all (shades of Wilhelm Reich, for sure), and indeed the "difficult" modernist novel itself, with all the self-conscious interleaving of texts and diagetic levels, the refusal of the power of narration to remain unconscious and, in fact, its perennial aggressive insistence on making itself known not just as a factor of an author's personal narcissism (which is, of course, partly the case in Woolf and Faulkner and Joyce and Mann, and much more so with Nabokov) but as a now-canonical rhetoric feature of Literary Writing, which had become as exciting and vulgar as any of the old cliches from, say, crime fiction. The Scorpions is the perfect expression of the transformation of literary modernism from avant-garde to kitsch, and is working from some of the same destructive energy as animates Andy Warhol's best work. It is, in short, a very loony book indeed. None of Kelly's poetry that I've read comes even close to it. Read it; it will dazzle and delight, and you will not want to put it down.

Besides being abundantly poetic and mysterious, Robert Kelly's Scorpions is an engrossing adventure. A psychiatrist's patient, Mrs.Prentergest, believes that she is seeing strange scantily clad men (visible only under ultra violet light) who she believes belong to the gangster-cult called the Scorpions. The Scorpions appear to be sinister, and enjoy sending her and the psychiatrist little snippets of surreal poetry in the mail. Mrs.Prentergest receives and invitation from the Scorpions to join them in Florida, and when she runs off her doctor pursues her in his Rolls sedan, which he likes to call Kelvin. What follows is a road trip filled with suspenseful twists and turns as the doctor drinks coffee, smokes cigarettes, eats lots of food, makes love, performs ritual magic, encounters strange cultists, hunts down vandals and sifts through clues. But don't mistake this for psychedelic pulp fiction. Kelly takes many risks, especially in the novel's form. Do not expect a narrative that goes from point a to point b. Truly, the heart of this story lies in the journey and not in any easy, logical resolution. You will not know the answers to the mysteries in this book, you will feel them.

Even thirty years after its first publication,the world is not ready for Robert Kelly's Scorpions, but of course that's the whole point. In his first novel, Kelly, one of our most accomplished poets, knocks his hero, his readers, and the whole novel form out of their respective boxes and sends them all somewhere that they've never been before, creating, like any truth revealed in the midst of accepted falsehood and delusion, outrage, groping bewilderment, and fear. No one is ever ready for that.Kelly is concerned with what's new, with what else the world has to offer, and is troubled by those who turn back upon themselves for security, denying the new and unknown, the exciting, for the safety of the old, the thing done before. Kelly's protagonist is a successful New York psychiatrist, a man whose chosen profession returns explorers of the unknown to accepted patterns of human normality. The doctor is himself a lover of patterns, beyond the demands of his practice. His private life is encased in rituals, his every action is scheduled and accompanied by appropriate incantations, the nature of ritual being, of course, the maintenance of patterns, the status quo, or a return to some previous safe condition of human experience. In The Scorpions ritual shuts out the new, confines rather than expands, and thereby leaves those who depend upon it vulnerable when the ritual goes unobserved, either by reality or by the dependent.Kelly sees to it that the doctor's patterned existence is disturbed -- he sends him on a quest for the Scorpions, a mysterious cult whose members are visible to humans only under ultraviolet light. In the course of the drive south in his lavishly equipped Rolls Royce, a rolling fortress of enclosure, the doctor encounters a number of unexplainable and unconnected circumstances, his ritual pattern cannot compensate for the strangeness of events, breaks down, and we watch him transformed from a mildly obnoxious paranoid into a savage maniac. His whole way of life, the turning of reality into concept, categorizing it, and capturing it under his own terms, fails him when he is faced with something entirely new, something that will simply not fit his predetermined patterns. The novel places the same difficult demands upon its readers as it does the doctor, and for the same reasons. Our conceptualization of the novel as a literary form has become as patterned, structured, and ritualized as the doctor's concept of life. We read a novel by means of predetermined critical standards -- we look for symbols, for meaningful repetition of forms, continuity, a unity of action toward a single goal, something to grasp and hold in order to jump in. Kelly challenges us by rejecting these devices -- they've all been used before and to repeat them would be to deny the new and bow before pattern, to bring us ultimately no farther than we were when we began. Progress, newness, denotes linear movement, not circular mov