The problem with death is what comes next. Someone you love dies, the cloth of life is ripped, and it takes time and tears and others and time, so much of it, to gather the resources and begin the stitch again: different now, but happening. The self-story you are always projecting is joined by a fellow traveler, a symbiote, which is the finished story of that other’s life. This is also the root of fiction: a contained narrative cut off but still in some phantom way attached to the running, messy, enduring present out of which it is written and read. The other’s life is refracted through the stories worth telling; we frame it in ways to inject the feeling of what was into a stranger. We give it form and tone. One answer to the problem, then, is telling the story of what is no more to keep it around, somehow. To make death an object, a tombstone, an art, and thereby carry it with us during whatever comes next.
But the speaker in Srikanth Reddy’s Underworld Lit (Wave Books, 2020), a professor shuttling between disillusion and depression, faces another side of this problem: what comes next when it is your death at hand, not some other’s? Trickier still, what happens when that death doesn’t happen? What happens after the end that is not the end, in the moment of a return to normalcy that you did not expect to make?
In this sardonic (until it’s tender), funny (until it’s sad), and surreal (yet strikingly real) prose poetry collection/fantasy tale/auto-eulogy, such questions are asked again and again, corkscrewing around the same points at different altitudes. Deeply personal confession gives way to ironized academia, which in turn gives way to dreamscape narrative, accumulating course planning materials, texts, translations, and myths, often even in the same individual section. One early example moves from a dreaded call to the speaker’s doctor (more on that in a moment) to a barely intentional dialing of 1-800-inferno to mystical poetry (“Oh creature, gracious and good…traversing the dusky element to visit us / who stained the world with blood”) before undercutting the experience via a do-not-call list, all while, “Outside, the honey locusts sprinkled their pale spinning leaves in real time.” These moments of true poetry, operating with an almost Homer-like surprise (and quasi-religious rhetoric), break through the professor’s mundane actions, the fireworks of the dream narratives, and the humorous intertextuality. This is, after all, a book of poetry, and the fragments of glass that catch the light in the writing undercut the professor’s weariness and dread, reminding of a beauty still capable of being expressed. A reader is tempted to trace over the lines to feel more closely their mechanics, how we move from the laughably overwrought “dusky element” and “us / who stained the world with blood” to the heart-stopping honey locust trees sprinkling their spinning leaves.
I’m writing additively to highlight the extraordinary diversity of this braided piece whose most astonishing feat may be how wholly these elements cohere while remaining distinct. The scaffolding of a course—Underworld Lit follows an academic year, its chapters beginning with the Fall Term and ending with Summer—is largely responsible for this cohesion and is never overplayed. Mock exams, frustrated student interactions, portraits of the baffled professor, these are humorous types that toe but do not cross into cliché, kept restrained by a style and speaker with something else always on the mind.
That something else is a melanoma: the diagnosis, operation, and aftermath of which accompany the speaker as he translates the tale of Chen, a Qing dynasty magistrate condemned for crimes he committed in a past life. In his translation, the speaker follows Chen through different underworlds as he is accompanied in turn by a number of partners, co-travelers, and guides—including his Virgil-like motorized airport staircase (this entity conjured by a mistranslation). Though the melanoma proves to be an obviated danger, its scar leads the professor into a kind of stasis, a living-after-death, an afterlife stripped of its religious majesty and instead filled with the prosaic greyness of experience and experiencing. The story seemed to have an ending—the ending, the great final punctuation mark to close the third act—but then the ending opens into more happening, continuing.
Reddy stages the anxiety of this unspectacular next by weaving the speaker’s life as a father and professor with his translation project that is suddenly imbued with narrative life. As the professor struggles to return to the straightforward meanings of baby talk and Halloween—rather than finding a condemnation for simply existing when perhaps he shouldn’t be—he turns to Chen’s journey, academic distraction as self-counsel. These latter sections take on a style akin to Tlooth-era Harry Mathews: an understated and accepting nod to the absurdity (and violence) occurring around the protagonist. They whirl around plot and action, filling Underworld Lit with the events that seem absent in the speaker’s everyday life.
In the tale of Chen, what happens next is an actual journey, literally incorporating each of the myths that build the various worlds Chen passes through. Meaning is in the hands and under the feet, something that takes the shape of a person or a demon or a motorized airport staircase. That is, meaning is object, not word, and as such it is faced down and forced upon you. Meaning is, also, violence: Chen’s passage through different underworlds brims with threat and disaster, with a brutality that crosses from amusingly exuberant to uncomfortably excessive. Next to the speaker’s professional struggles and uncertainties, his brush with and avoidance of illness, his sadness that he cannot find a compelling name for (“postpartum depression” doesn’t seem to fit, “catabasis” comes close), this mythical violence is loud, too loud.
The speaker senses this. There is, after all, another thread incorporated into the book’s weave, which are the lists and fragments and subtexts of American imperialism that encroach upon the speaker’s mundane moments: he is interrupted watching a special on the Antigones of Afghanistan, a mistaken voice command pulls up information on the Uyghur people and a migrant leatherworker who became imprisoned at Guantanamo, he reads lists of “the day’s dead” from unnamed Middle Eastern nations. The world is brutal and haphazard, random and absurd as Chen’s journey, just not in the immediate vicinity of the speaker’s life as much as beyond his borders, outsourced and mostly unseen.
The reader understands, now, the obsession with Chen, a magistrate accused of ordering a massacre in his past life, and the “generalized pain” the speaker complains of that has no physical diagnosis. The death that is important is not the subject’s, as one has been led to believe. What is at stake is rather the victims’ death, so often framed as massacres, that are tied, yet only tenuously, yet for that still really, to the subject’s life and existence as a harmless magistrate, as an “Associate Professor of Global English.” Reddy hints at how his and similar academic roles support imperial violence while remaining more or less impotent and disconnected from this violence throughout the text. The lists of “the day’s dead,” for example, are given a literary reading to uncover anapests in the names or question the relations: “Bassam, cousin of Maha al-Khoury. Where was Maha al-Khoury herself on that day? Maybe she’d skipped the evening service to purchase vegetables for the coming week.” This perceptive, trained reading leads to more darkly comedic turns as the speaker begins a job search and is reminded of the expansion of American universities across the world, advice the speaker turns into a list of war-torn places: “1. AMERICAN U OF ARMENIA… 3. AMERICAN U OF PHNOM PENH… 7. AMERICAN U OF AFGHANISTAN IN AFGHANISTAN.” Underworld Lit becomes a study not of how to live after the death of a loved one, nor even of how to live after one’s own death, but of what life is as a complicit killer. The problem with death is what comes next after you—your past self, your nation, the ideology you support even in a classroom—are guilty of murder. There is a difference, after all, between an Afterlife and an Underworld: the latter requires judgment. This can be a fear. It can also be a hope.