By Jonathan Veitch

MAY 4, 1998: 

A: A NOVEL, by Andy Warhol. Grove Press, 458 pages, $14.

Now that I think back on it, I guess it was all the mechanical action that was the big thing for me at the Factory at the end of the sixties. . . . Everyone, absolutely everyone, was tape-recording everyone else. Machinery had already taken over people's sex lives -- dildos and all kinds of vibrators -- and now it was taking over their social lives too, with tape recorders and Polaroids.

-- Andy Warhol, Popism

Ondine was a self-described "A-head," an amphetamine freak, who was so high during much of the taping that listening to him is like putting your ear up to a radio and scanning the stations with the volume cranked up full blast. The confusion is compounded by misspellings, missing words, and mistaken attributions that make a nearly impossible to read -- the fruit of teenage typists (some of whom were barely literate) hired by Warhol to transcribe the tapes. As if this were not enough, Warhol "edited" the manuscript during a succession of performances by the Velvet Underground. (According to Ondine, it was a "madhouse with a trampoline and the Velvets and people dancing off balconies and going absolutely be-zoo. Andy would sit way up in the back where some of the spotlights were . . . reading proof-sheets to the book in the dark with a flashlight . . . saying 'Oh! This is good! This is the best book ever! This is really going to do it!'") Warhol loved the mistakes. He thought it made the book better -- which is to say worse, and hence more Pop, and he insisted that all the errata be left in the final draft.

The generous have been inclined to describe a as a "work of genius," a Pop Finnegans Wake. But there is really no justification for such accolades. The book is pure nonsense. Utterly without literary value. A waste of time. And I mean that as the highest form of praise. As Warhol himself says of a in Popism (perhaps his most illuminating and underread book), "I wanted to do a 'bad book' just the way I'd done 'bad movies' and 'bad art,' because when you do something exactly wrong, you always turn up something." But what is it exactly that Warhol has turned up? The novel's particular form of badness can be found in, among other things, its refusal to filter out the background noise, which prevents the reader from following (or even imagining) a narrative thread. This leaves the reader in an awkward position. Or (to be more accurate), after 458 pages, it leaves the reader downright bored. Boredom is, of course, one of Warhol's favorite words, and it is central to his aesthetic. "I like boring things," Warhol observes in Popism.

Of course what I think is boring must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they're essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different. But I'm just the opposite: if I'm going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don't want it to be essentially the same -- I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.

Warhol used to say that talking about his movies was more interesting than watching them. Something similar might be said of a. The experience of reading it is finally less illuminating than what it represents. And, like so much of his work, what it represents is a wholesale attack on art. By making a novel out of tape recordings, Warhol challenges the novel itself and the pride that is traditionally taken in its capacity to report reality accurately (much the way photography usurped painting's privileged position in the 19th century). But that triumph is more apparent than actual. Although the tape recorder's technology holds out the promise that it will capture everything (teenage errata notwithstanding), the results, paradoxically enough, do not enhance our access to reality; they cast that access into doubt. The cacophony of voices, street noise, music, and jangling telephones on Warhol's tapes is so overwhelming that the world we thought we knew becomes incomprehensible and, hence, unavailable to us. Warhol refused to edit the tapes not just because he preferred to take the easy way out (a strategy he frequently recommends), but because the logic of Pop eschews discrimination altogether. As Pope John Paul II once said in response to questions by reporters who asked him what he liked best about New York, "Tutto buoni" -- everything is good. That, an enamored Warhol insisted, "is the Pop philosophy exactly." If everything is good, then why choose? Why not remain passive -- like the tape recorder -- and let it all in?

Eventually, after he was shot by Valerie Solanis, Warhol would come to see the limits of that "philosophy":

The shooting put a whole new perspective on my memories of all the nutty people I'd spent so much time with. I thought about when the girl came up to the 47th St. Factory and shot through the Marilyn canvases, and about the guy doing Russian roulette there. . . . But I'd always thought it was unreal -- or else that it was just a joke. . . . I realized that it was just timing that nothing terrible had ever happened to any of us before now. Crazy people had always fascinated me because they were so creative -- they were incapable of doing things normally. Usually they would never hurt anybody, they were just disturbed themselves; but how would I ever know again which was which? (Popism)

a is a look back at a world that Warhol disowned because it finally proved too dangerous for him. It carried Pop to its logical extreme -- much further than his paintings did. The result was not the air-conditioned Pop culture that most of us, who are honest enough to admit it, have learned to love. a is, if you will forgive the expression, the B side of Pop: its manic, destructive side. Indeed, one might say that in the drug-addled world of a, the transparency of Pop culture -- its ease and accessibility, its promise of the good life -- turns out to be far more dark and discomforting than one might have imagined from looking at Warhol's Marilyns and Jackies, his cow wallpaper and his glorious silver clouds.

Jonathan Veitch is chairman of the humanities program at the New School for Social Research in New York City.

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