Murmur

by Laura Mullen

Poetry. Cross-Genre."Wildly absorbing, MURMUR is a gorgeous detective novel, film noir and memoir (and autopsy of all three), tricked out with bloody mirrors, blue murder, mutable coffins, loopy interrogations and a dead bombshell's shoes. This is one fabulous book!"—Rikki Ducornet

"Laura Mullen floods the confines of the 'detective novel' with all possible events, all murderers and all murdered so that, at any point in the narrative, everything has happened and everyone has done it. MURMUR is a further-fiction of displacement and testimony that calls us to the task of deciding not only whether we would or would not do a thing but also whether we even know the difference between the two. A gripping exploration into the brutality of our time that you will not soon forget."—Renee Gladman

"MURMUR collects an astonishing array of sorties into language as a terra incognita occasioning the uncanny and always troubled confluence of the subject, the bodies it inhabits and the linguistic remainder. Mullen animates narrative at the level of its basic semantic pulse. You'll meet a talking corpse, a severed head, a heart drawn on an open palm and the gradual destruction of a face. Mullen is as much an expert in the comic and grotesque, as in the restless and anonymous. With a majestically controlled impatience she constructs a textual space both unnerving and familiar. These are splendid texts of the nameless ones (a 'messenger,' the 'caller,' the 'reader') who interrupt and witness the murmur of the linked deictic shadows of a recurring 'she' and 'he.' Never since Beckett has the unnamed been so chilling precisely because it is unnameable."—Steve McCaffery

"Laura Mullen's MURMUR finds the crime in the moments between actions, in language overheard, doubling back, in a style both unnerving and comforting; always midsentence we feel death never dying, 'real despite or because of the staging,' and in the background, Duras, Hitchcock—the passions of mundane horrors always ready for our pleasure, discovery. MURMUR stays the mind like an unforgettable dream."—Thalia Field

Genres: Poetry

176 pages, Paperback

First published August 18, 2006

About the author

Laura Mullen is the author of nine books: EtC (Solid Objects 2023), Complicated Grief, Enduring Freedom: A Little Book of Mechanical Brides, The Surface, After I Was Dead, Subject and Dark Archive, The Tales of Horror, and Murmur. Recognitions for her poetry include Ironwood’s Stanford Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. Her work has been widely anthologized and is included in American Hybrid (Norton), and I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues). She is the Kenan Chair in the Humanities at Wake Forest University.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the mid-Eighties, Laura Mullen wrote "The Holmes Poems," published in her 1990 National Poetry Series-winning ms., The Surface, a sonnet sequence that interpolated passages from Doyle's text sufficient to offer readers a kind of contour representation of that text's ambiguous -- just so: playful -- deixis. The immediate consequences of that work included, as well, Mullen's parody of late 19th century prose hypotaxis, using the typological and deictic psychologizing typical of gothic romance, The Tales of Horror (not published until 1999), a verse novel in mixed format. If, in these monstrous narrations, Mullen seemed to ask, picking up on a line of inquiry then viral in American graduate schools, the narrator is all too identifiable in "its" narrative action, won't that identification make the reader over into the slow play of signifiers that constitutes the narrative's plot? In Murmur, the narrators, no longer boxed in by stylistic pastiche, write in a prose style that owes something to the hard-boiled idiom, but are not limited by those conventions: one of these narrators looks back on the work from the late Eighties: "I removed the plot. I wanted to hear what they were saying. It is not a Silent World, at all, but --we are so distant -- we come to think of it like that. I lifted away everything necessary for an identification, the rest decayed into the unsteady landscape, and indeed the wild animals did, as he'd promised, helped erase what was left. 'The entire world is nothing but a memoranda. . . .' I let go of character, working with some uneasy combination of roles, gestures, discourses. I faked a broken arm. Tried pretending I was a cop. Pulled out of context I waited to see how long they would try to maintain the fiction".

Psychological identification floats through the narratorial levels of Mullen's mixed format pastiches from genre fake books . Murmur concerns itself with that peculiar inquiry through which a reader identifies, in the detective novel, self-pleasure as positing the novel's "object" -- to solve a mystery. Mullen's warrant seems to be that "we have not fully faced the ways our desire necessitates the installation and maintenance of a way of seeing." Her narrators project this itch the scratch of which is not a self-forgetting. The proem, "The Audience," looks back on one such Raymond Carver-esque "installation": "he's known for what he didn't say: he lent a pressurized-by-its-reticence tragic glamour to a measured combination of spiritual impotence and physical violence." It is rather a kind of vigilance to attend to these popular genres that, far from "pop culture" animate the cultural order of readerly cooperation Mullen finds in drawing into the representational plane an ideal reader (as had Stein and Robert Duncan) whose prior modality is a self-care expressive of literary -- or readerly -- compulsion.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book to read at the beach

if you like to read about bodies washing up on the beach

if bodies like to wash your beach

if you like to wash bodies at the beach

if all the bodies are sleeping and the moon is full

[A.B. Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

All opinions about mass culture prove Adorno right, inasmuch as all evaluations of mass culture are insufferable--including Adorno's. I was annoyed as often as I was thrilled by this virtuosic exploration of the sometimes discomfiting psychosexual and spatial textures of the mass-market "thriller," an erotic subgenre of detective fiction often explicitly marketed to women. But I feel that, in this case, my annoyance owes more to the nature of the poetry's inquiry than it does to any defects in Mullen's writing. Maybe that's a generational problem--I am part of a cohort of poets torn uneasily between the legacies of the Gen X poptimists and the countercultural pessimists that preceded them. People my age tend to approach beach reads as they do every other product of late capitalism: with nauseous ambivalence, which nausea is at least as annoying as despair. And I would characterize Murmur as a despairing rummage through the culture industry's prop basement, ultimately. Looking for the real bodies buried there.

Well, what can you do, if all affective relationships to mass culture are doomed to aggravate? Maybe nothing, except patiently train poetry's lens on the glittering, stupid leviathan, to see what results. This is an attempt to mediate experiences of fictive immediacy (Charles Bernstein might say "absorption,") which is always instructive. Mullen artfully puts the strangeness of grocery-store thrills on display. Why do so many white women get murdered on the beach, in these stories? Why do they so like to take their shoes off, first? Isn't all the would-be realist detritus of everyday life kind of great? Or is it all horrible, since it's meant to beautify another corpse? Why do cops even exist? I suffer as much as anyone from the disease called postmodernism, and so I sometimes felt myself wondering which poor dupe these luscious and painful and sometimes morbidly funny demystifications were intended for. I'm not sure that anybody sits down to Gillian Flynn and thinks "yes, this is fine, and my desires are fine." I think most people probably think the way that Mullen herself seems to: "my desires are gross and seem to exist almost apart from me, who thinks they are gross. Ah, well, what can you do?"

Well? What can you? I struggled to "rate" this book because I wasn't sure what I wanted from it--or I began to suspect that, much like mass culture itself, it couldn't give me the elusive whatever-it-was that I wanted from it. I was unsatisfied, but I don't think Mullen set out to satisfy anybody. This is a critique of satisfaction. Isn't that enough?

But I don't know. Is it?

[Becky Robison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here’s the thing about grad school: you simply cannot read all the material that you’re assigned. There isn’t time. Instead, you have to develop strong skimming skills so that you can participate in class discussion without having absorbed the text. Murmur is a book of poetry that I was assigned in grad school, but didn’t find the time to read. And now I sort of regret it, because I liked it a lot. The book creates the atmosphere of a murder mystery without actually containing a murder mystery. It asks the question: what if a murder mystery were a book of poetry instead? There aren’t named characters, but there is a murdered woman in a green dress, a husband-suspect, a detective. There’s a crime scene at a lonely beach. Murmur manages to strip the murder mystery genre down to its parts, to poke and prod at them until the genre itself confesses.

Please note that I originally published this review on my blog.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

My copy of "Murmur" has become a dog-eared friend in the short time that I've known it. A rare, fascinating little book containing a most unusual tide of words blending prose and poetry... fragments of elusive clues, corpses and detectives; homicide or suicide; investigation and confessions; musical and beautiful; brutal and chilling...a mash up of Poe at his most macabre and Virginia Woolf at her most impressionistic...

Quoting from page 108

"You can't afford to doubt yourself, right and wrong must stand for you at two distinct poles, clearly differentiated: you cannot afford to wander in that twilight country where the nuances of good and evil cast their perplexing shadows. You must be kind without being sentimental and meticulous without losing sight of the whole. It's mostly a matter of observation and the laborious checking of a current of departing water furrows the surface of the bay, darker lines of undulating blue in another blue."

I applaud the author, Laura Mullen for writing "Murmur"...following her bliss to make it happen, these things [the writing of books] are never easy to do, I said "Wow" starting with the first page because I understand where she traveled to make this...'tis a trip not for the faint of heart, 'tis a rare bravery that creates such things.

I love this mysterious little book. I'll read it again.

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where suspenseful murder meets the bedraggled, poetic line--this book of poetry moving through the stutter or the cry, or poetic prose echoing Poe and Henry James tantilizes the tongue with its wonderful mouth feel. It's a pleasure to read aloud, to sound out, to hear, as the lines break off in a sort of double suspense--at once linguistic and narrative. Is there a victim? Who? Who killed who, where is the body, how to get back to the beginning of the story and/or to find the end? In the tradition of Crime-poetry books from Stein, through Charles Borkhuis' 'After-Image' or 'Memnoir' by Joan Retallack, this book by Mullen is also for those who read mostly prose but like an added "challenge" and are lovers of fantastic langauge usage.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

is it poetry or prose? this is a new invention that sloughs off genre for just good writing. flirts with narrative in the sense of attraction, malice and protection. the narrative is the genre that the book is about. the character is the genre, too. once you take a look at things like that, the story writes itself. and the story is really language and what it makes us "see".

[Dzina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite frankly, the best read since....not sure when to begin, but if 2009 is the beginning, I have read 18.75 books, & this certainly outshines them all. There are page after page new passageways in, possibly to infinite layers/trajectories. If you want to get smart about where we're headed with writing, start with this book by Laura Mullen, & try to put yr finger on it!

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so good- I'm not sure why it didn't get more press or attention, but I couldn't put it down.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"a text which changed at every instance, which never ceased moving, held open as if"