Disappearance of the Outside

by Andrei Codrescu

This cultural-literary-social critique examines why, when a society moves from a repressive system of government wrought with censorship and oppression to a free state representing unlimited possibilities, the art once created and treasured by that population is taken for granted. Taking into account his own exile from Stalinist Romania, as well as the plights of such greats as Garcia Marquez, Breton, the Dadaists, Kundera, and Milosz, Codrescu issues a call for those living in a free society to reach beyond a benign reality founded in technology and commercialism by tapping into their imaginations and striving for a better, evolutionary existence. ";One day I had a revelation. There had been hints for some time that certain books had better not be discussed. Our next-door neighbor had a German Bible hidden at the bottom of an old sea chest. Her son Peter, who was a year older than me, showed it to me in secret one afternoon after making me swear that I would never reveal its existence to anyone. . . . It emitted a dark, pungent odor of darkness, monks, time, Gutenberg, sea journeys, incense, and last rites. Peter told me there were other books like this, some old, some new, all of them containing secrets so awesome we would be put in prison for merely mentioning them."; From this point in his Romanian childhood, Codrescu became acutely attuned to the meaning of literature in the progress and movement of societies, both free and oppressed. ";The police have arrived in [Eastern Europe] they are uniformed police. In the West they are the invisible police of image manipulation." Andrei Codrescu , an essayist, poet, All Things Considered commentator, and MSNBC columnist, has published numerous books, including Road Scholar and The Devil Never Sleeps . Born in Romania, he came to the U.S. in 1966, and currently teaches at Louisana State University.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Romania, Essays, Philosophy, Politics, Poetry

236 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Andrei Codrescu is a poet, novelist, essayist, and NPR commentator. His many books include Whatever Gets You through the Night, The Postmodern Dada Guide, and The Poetry Lesson. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009.

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

How can we be in
When there is no outside?
—Peter Gabriel, "Not One of Us"

The Disappearance of the Outside wasn't at all what I expected. I thought it would be a jeremiad about our increasing addiction to screens, to being indoors, possibly coupled with some eloquently-expressed dismay about our ongoing destruction of the natural world. You know, the usual. Andrei Codrescu has long been a voice crying in the wilderness, after all—oh, and what a voice... if you've ever listened to Andrei Codrescu's rich, gravelly Romanian accent (perhaps during his appearances on NPR, or in the obscure yet fascinating film Road Scholar), it's impossible to read these sonorous, rolling paragraphs in anything other than that voice.

But as it turned out, our collective retreat from the outdoors, distressing as it is, wasn't Codrescu's point at all. In this prescient book (published back in 1990), Codrescu diagnoses—perceptively, lyrically and allegorically—the rusting away of the Iron Curtain, and the implications of that particular disappearance for the great powers of West and East which for so long had defined themselves in opposition to the Other. His subtitle is "A Manifesto for Escape"—and that errs only in its use of the singular. The Disappearance of the Outside presents multiple manifestos, a whole series of exhortations and imperatives, telling us how to remain in (in what? Well, that's up to us), despite the disappearance of the Outside.

The overthrow of the real is the chief product of the citizens of Exile.
—p.58

Another Outside which disappeared—for very little has but a single meaning in Codrescu's work—was his own status as a citizen of Exile. As he became more assimilated into American culture, he realized that he was becoming less able to observe and report as an outsider. Fortunately, this process was still incomplete at the time he was writing The Disappearance of the Outside.

*

The Disappearance of the Outside does slow down quite a bit in its middle sections, while Codrescu considers several other authors he admires, and a number of books (the most well-known of which is Gabriel García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude) which fit his themes of exile and dissidence. In general, The Disappearance of the Outside places the book—not just itself, but any codex—in opposition to television. Or, to put it another way, Codrescu contraposes the Word and the Image, in McLuhanesque analysis. (There is, of course, no doubt about which side Codrescu's on.)

The pace accelerates again with Part V, "In the Eye of the Ghost," which issues this new manifesto:

Speed and fury are the creative necessities of our time for responding adequately to the speed and force of technological interiorization, including the ever-growing self-referentiality of contemporary writing.
—pp.104-105

Codrescu's command of the gnomic indicative is well-nigh perfect:

Vindicated prophets are not happy people. The hells-to-come they once described arrive at last and swallow them.
—p.131

and

Recorded dreams became a bore but dreams remain interesting to the dreamer. The object is to become not involuntary analysts or recorders but active dreamers.
—p.142

Codrescu on surrealism:

If we should keep the surrealist spirit fresh, we must overthrow the surrealists as resolutely as if they were the enemy.
—p.154

See also China Miéville's The Last Days of New Paris, which I read earlier this year. Codrescu claims not to be a surrealist (pp.158-159), but he's definitely aligned with them.

On immortality:

If cancer knew where to stop we would live forever, like vampires, but we would become cancer itself, a malevolent force that would do to the universe what cancer now does to the body.
—p.189

Or, for a longer example, try unpacking the number and range of concepts in this one paragraph:

Small utopian communities functioned in America since its founding. The utopian enterprise of the 1960s was in the suppressed tradition of countless utopian experiments of the nineteenth century. These communities were pressured out of existence but not before giving America the forms of its future. Their ecological concerns, their belief in crafts, in human-scale industry, became the legacy on which the antitechnological revolt of our time is founded. There are those who argue, like Jackson Lears in No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920, that what began as an antimodern revolt ended up revitalizing the modern. This is true but only in a formal sense: the contentless images changed the "look," just as the hippie "look" fed yuppie commerce and surrealism feeds MTV. Forms are forever migrating out of that which has created them to become used against it. Aren't the rebellious anthems of the 1960s now used to sell soap on TV?
—pp.140-141

The Disappearance of the Outside ultimately seems to extend its tentacles, a veritable monster of synchronicity, into everything else I've read. About the then-recent Challenger space shuttle explosion (also a part of Edward Tufte's narrative in Visual Explanations, another book I also recently read), Codrescu observes that it

was caused by badly baked O-rings supplied by a polygamist manufacturer in Utah. Our most advanced technology was unraveled by a baked zero sent into space by jealous polygamists wrapped in an earthbound battle for power.
—p.190

This definitely resonated with me as well:

Mishearing is the true aristocrat of hearing. By extension, so are mistakes. How far into a new truth can one be taken by mistakes? "Never let a typo go," Ted Berrigan advised me, "it may be the threshold of the new, the door into the unexpected." Mishearing. Mistakes. Misunderstandings. Misgivings. Miscasting. All the pretty misses of discovery.
—p.148

And this sentence reminded me strongly of Connie Willis' novel Crosstalk, which I also just read:

There is hardly a need for intention in order to become many in America. Rimbaud's "one makes oneself a seer by the complete derangement of the senses," is status-quo-activated, radio blaring, all channels open.
—p.147

Forceful and intelligent as Codrescu is, he sometimes does make mistakes—which he graciously acknowledges, such as his former belief in the "end of history" (p.54). History—human history—can only end when there are no more humans to carry it forward—and maybe, just maybe, not even then.

And, even though this observation is no longer quite correct, it still says quite a lot about cool-hunting and culture-mining:

Use gives things the character that makes them desirable: it is the only force that cannot be imitated by machines. Used clothing, for instance, bears the unique signature of its wearer, a being incapable of exact repetitions.{...}
The necessities of collage have transformed the end of the twentieth century into a frenetic garbage hunt.
—p.150

*

I shouldn't have said that Codrescu wasn't writing about that literal disappearance of the outside, the one I mentioned at the beginning of this review. He eventually covers that too—in his concluding chapter, entitled "The Disappearance of the Outside," Codrescu intones,

The computer screen completes the last turn to the interior.
—p.194

and

One can no longer simply walk away anywhere but only into proscribed zones, wastelands between freeways, culs-de-sac under floodlights. Even science fiction is distressed by our premature arrival unto its territory: it has become nostalgia fiction, a gleam off the tail fins of Edsels and Sputniks.
—p.194

You may also notice, as I did (I see what you did there, Andrei!), that the page headings on the right-hand side of this final chapter begin... disappearing, from the end backward.

*

The Disappearance of the Outside contains a mountain of meanings, sometimes too steep to climb. I will admit I did not always understand what Codrescu was driving at, but what I did get was rich, multifaceted and evocative.

He does, perhaps, overstate the importance of Vlad Dracul to history, just a bit.

All of which is to say, you can find a lot of food for thought—nutritious, tasty and eclectic—packed into this one slender book.

[Laurie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but not my genre.

[Robert Corbett]

Not a review, but a conversation tonight reminded me of this book by Romanian ex-pat Codrescu, who fled one of the most awful Eastern European regimes, so who would blame him for hating Communism. But instead he wrote this book which worries about Western democracy without an opponent. And while it seemed premature then--remember the Clinton years?--seems kinda true now. So many alternate paths are seen as conspiracies or cults now, or are simply forgotten. It would be good to remember.

[Wiljago Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the mind-boggling absence of women and the bizarre exclusion of any culture with non-European roots, this is actually a really, really good book. I say "mind-boggling" and "bizarre" because the absence becomes so hard to ignore as to be distracting. Still, you should read it for sure.

[Inggita · Rating 2 out of 5]

adventure in eastern europe history

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Codrescu talks of exile, Eastern Europe and its history, art (Dadaism and Surrealism), literature (esp Eastern European and American), and an American culture sunk in consumption and technology.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last 50 to 70 pages of this book were stellar. The rest, meh.....

[Matt Proctor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Totally fucking brilliant

[Travis Ammons · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book has my soul trapped in it