On Experimental Fiction
The Limits of Coherence
It is hard to imagine that many readers of John Trefry’s massive novel, Massive, would attempt to read every word in the book (There really are neither sentences nor paragraphs to “read” in the conventional sense, so it finally is a question of registering each word before moving to the next, assuming some sort of sequential relationship between them.) It doesn’t take long to realize that the deviations and discontinuities we encounter in negotiating the text of Massive will make arriving at the “sense” of the words in any linear order both time-consuming and ultimately fruitless. One might continue to scan the pages for the occasional burst of syntactic coherence or the repetition of certain names and subjects (as I did), but finally even the notion that we are “reading” the text doesn’t seem quite an accurate description of the experience.
But nor is it entirely clear that Trefry expects us to read his book in the usual way. The text is nor formatted as conventional prose but is presented in columns (three per page) and, while there is associational overlap among the three columns by which we are invited to read across them, each column essentially develops on its own, although such development is fitful and often interrupted. Occasionally the text is merely strings of names and other words that, absent any consistent narrative or discursive context, convey no meaning beyond their manifestation on the page. These deliberate subversions of the continuity of thought and expression we usually expect the writer’s prose to exhibit might be taken as a direct challenge to conventional reading habits, implying a call for a different kind of reading, but Massive seems rather to erect a barricade to the normal act of reading altogether as part of its formal/rhetorical design.
Amidst the work’s seeming structural chaos, more coherent references to characters and situations intermittently emerge, apparently related to the circumstances and fate of the modern Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, whose persecution at the hands of Stalin is evoked in irregularly appearing passages drawing on his experiences (as well as those of his wife, Nadia, and fellow poet Anna Akhmatova), substituting for the Soviet Union a fictional state identified as the ADA. These passages could hardly be said to constitute a “story,” but they do allow for a minimal representation of what the book is “about,” further allowing us to speculate that other of the book’s ostensible subjects might be connected to this larger one, even if such connections remain oblique. We might be further led to perceive a more palpable aesthetic order in Trefry’s additional manipulation of the text’s typography through alteration of font types, so that the different font types might be aligned with a particular perspective or character (Mandelstam, Akhmatova), but this device is not really carried through clearly and consistently, or at least in a way that readers less familiar with the lives of the Russian writers and other cultural figures whose lives are invoked could fully appreciate.
Readers at all familiar with John Trefry would know that he is an architect by profession and is also the publisher of Inside the Castle press, which publishes both his own books and other formally challenging literary works. Applying principles related to architecture seems to be a central strategy in Trefry’s previous novels, Plats and Apparitions of the Living, especially the former, the text of which is “built” on the verbal plats laid out in balanced proportions on each page. The word structures assembled on these plats are both self-sufficient, not paragraphs so much as prose poems, each of which develops a set of images or perceptions, and cumulative, serving together as a more unified impression of a consciousness (perhaps more than one) registering the external environment in which it is situated. The environment is urban Los Angeles, but while we are offered a kind of representation of this urban scene, it is an obsessively subjective one, marked by the disturbance that seems to afflict this perceiving consciousness. We are presented with an architecture not of material structures but of feelings and mental awareness.
Apparitions of the Living is less overtly designed through an association with architecture, although our attention is still conspicuously drawn to page layout–some sections of the book are printed in narrow columns with wide margins, while others are expanded to the usual left/right margins but with bigger margins at the top and bottom (taking on more of the appearance of a square) and extra spacing between the lines of the text (which alternate italicized and unitalicized type.) The latter device is employed to draw a distinction between perspectives and sometimes to highlight speech, but otherwise the typographical arrangements don’t seem to serve any particular formal function except to attract attention to space–and the novel does feature in its settings a notable divergence of space. Parts of it takes place in the Western desert, while the other main setting is a multilevel hotel. (Some of the desert scenes move into a motel room, providing yet another contrast with the greater dimensions of the hotel.) Perhaps we could say that the novel seeks to offer an alternative to the inherent linearity of most narrative prose by accentuating the space of the pages as available aesthetic territory for the novelist to explore (although Trefry is not the first writer to attempt this.)
Nevertheless, Apparitions of the Living does offer the reader a discernible narrative, more so than either Plats or Massive, although the events of the story often remain indistinct and the characters involved in the story enigmatic. We are introduced first to the desert landscape, where the body of a young boy lies buried in the sand. The remainder of the book essentially relates how the boy got there–apparently the victim of a kidnapping, aided and abetted by the boy’s own mother, Connie. The other participants are two men, Jack and Gyre, the former of whom we meet first and whose sections of the narrative predominate most of the novel. The purpose of the kidnapping is never exactly revealed, but it is not really the point of the narrative, anyway. Most attention is given to the circumstances in and around the motel room in which the boy is held. Although surely the boy suffers, rendering that suffering is also not really the ambition of the novel. Trefry is greatly influenced by the writers associated with the French nouveau roman, and he has cited Michel Butor as the primary inspiration for Plats, while Apparitions of the Living attempts the sort of detached objectivity we find in the fiction of Alain Robbe-Grillet. If the characters in Apparitions seem distant to us, their emotions concealed, it is because, while the objects of their perception are often intently scrutinized, the emotional content of those perceptions are inaccessible to us.
Still, Trefry’s tentative appeal to a discernible story and at least some degree of recognizable character creation doesn’t really prepare us for the radical rejection of such conventional methods (however unorthodox in their application) in Massive. Apparitions of the Living suggested that Trefry might be making an accommodation of sorts with the traditional elements of fiction that aren’t really present in Plats, retaining a clear enough distance from mainstream literary fiction while making room for readers with the expectation that character creation and narrative (as well as setting) will be important features of a work of prose fiction, but Massive makes no such concessions to conventional reading habits and goes even farther than Plats in challenging the authority of these practices as the default mode of writing fiction. It is an audacious effort, to be sure, but if it has produced a work that is effectively unreadable for other than the most devoted enthusiasts of Trefry’s kind of experimental text-building (few of whom are likely to read the entire book cover to cover, either), one could ask whether attempting to extend the underlying thematic and formal ideas on such a monumental scale serves those ideas most fruitfully. There are, of course, many long, dense novels that succeed through the “art of excess,” but Trefry doesn’t really seem to be trying to be “artful.” Massive becomes massive through the invariable accretion of its textual shards. It grows, but doesn’t develop.
However, this is the case only if you expect the text to develop in some perceptible way, either through linear narrative or some other suitable formal arrangement. Trefry deliberately frustrates the reader’s expectation of some kind of orderly progression, so perhaps a different sort of approach to such an intimidating text as this would result in a more satisfying experience with it. Perhaps my approach, a kind of unhurried browsing, is what is called for (ultimately I did not think I had failed to read the book carefully because the book doesn’t want to be read with the usual sort of care). Or perhaps one could abandon altogether the notion that such a text can be read consecutively and instead choose passages and pages at random, or seek out passages that seem to have associative resonance, leaving the rest. One might repeat such a strategy as often as is necessary to comprehend how the text works, or, indeed, essentially repeat it endlessly. It seems pointless to ask whether either approach leads to a thorough enough reading of Massive, since a thorough reading hardly seems possible–even reading every word in the sequence in which they are presented would ultimately leave behind a maelstrom of verbal noise.
Of course, one could attempt to confront the edifice of words that is Massive through any of these means, but is any such effort more than an improvised expedient to negotiate this one particularly imposing, idiosyncratic work, to avoid being defeated by its apparent determination to remain unfathomable? Perhaps it does challenge us to be less complacent in our assumptions about what it means to “read” a work of fiction, although this is the challenge set by all truly innovative works of experimental fiction, and it might be said that Massive merely poses the challenge in an especially unequivocal way. Perhaps then Trefry wants to persuade us that genuinely “experimental” fiction pushes against the boundaries of what is considered acceptable practice in ways that might be confounding, that should be confounding. The question becomes whether what initially confounds can ultimately be more fully recognized, the boundaries reconfigured.
Not everything about Massive is difficult to assimilate. The typographical rearrangements are not really an innovation and could certainly be further adapted and extended as an aesthetically effective device. (Other novelists have done so.) What is unique to the novel is the way they have been allowed to fragment and divide its verbal substance into discursively incompatible pieces. An intrepid reader can develop strategies for sorting through these pieces, but while such dynamic reading provides a welcome challenge to the indolent reading habits encouraged by much literary fiction, the inclination to devote most of one’s attention to a work as extreme in its call for such readerly fortitude as Massive must be restricted to a select few. Massive isn’t quite just a curiosity, but it is hard to envisage a book that more resolutely tests the limits of creative incoherence without becoming altogether incoherent.
It might be tempting to dismiss a work like Massive as an experimental fiction so anarchic in spirit that it simply defies ordinary reading. Yet perhaps it might be most compelling as an effort to contest our ordinary conception of what it means to “read a book.” If Massive can’t really be read as a single unified experience, it may in fact be a book that can only be reread: after attempting Massive for the first time, by whatever method, we try it again, adopting a different method, but of course this will result, in effect, in reading a different version, even a different book. Who knows how many different books we could find in it. I’m not sure I find the subjects treated in Massive sufficiently engaging that would want to this, but it seems an intriguing conceit for an adventurous writer to pursue–many books in one.
It has been 60 years and more since the first writers we have now come to identify as postmodernists began to make their presence known in American literary culture. The term, “postmodern,” has been applied narrowly, to classify this particular group of writers, and more broadly, to name an entire “era” that is said to entail a distinctive political and philosophical orientation to knowledge and perception separating it from the “modern” assumptions that preceded it. Over the last 10 to 20 years, its application to literature has been very loose indeed, as a way of characterizing any work of fiction that breaks from convention or seems at all “experimental.” In the process, the term, and more generally the concept of innovative fiction, has become less tied to the original set of writers whose work prompted the coining of the term–Coover, Barth, Barthelme, etc.– and used more simply to separate non-realist works of fiction from mainstream “literary fiction.”
This broader assimilation of the postmodern as a discernible tendency in contemporary fiction has, however, entailed, perhaps paradoxically, a diminished awareness of the specific practices and identifiable achievements of the original postmodernists and their immediate successors–a loss of historical context. Thus work by writers of otherwise conventional fiction that departs even modestly from the most conservative expectations of the form is reflexively applauded for its daring and originality, even though whatever strategy or device has prompted such praise is actually at best a modification of a an already existing approach, at times just plain derivative of a move made more persuasively by an earlier, genuinely experimental writer. The notion that unconventional approaches to form or style deserve critical respect (when done well) presently seems to be a common enough assumption in most literary commentary, but this apparently is not accompanied by a recognition of the development of such strategies through the efforts of adventurous writers of the relatively recent past.
Even when some writers are ostensibly challenging conventional forms and language more radically, beyond the enhancements of realism for which many putatively experimental devices tend to be employed, these writers themselves often simply recapitulate strategies devised by writers in the previous generation of postmodernists, or, indeed, essentially reiterate an existing form created by an earlier writer. Frequently enough we can surmise that such borrowing is to some degree a tribute to the precursor, an acknowledgment that the formal strategy invoked is a compelling substitute for conventional strategies. It is not per se an invalid approach, since arguably one of the objectives of experimental fiction might be to make available alternatives to conventional storytelling that other writers might additionally develop, but again such alert distinctions are not likely to be made in a literary-media culture that discounts historical perspective and is impatient with nuanced judgments–if more adventurous fiction manages to attract any attention at all.
Although occasionally I come across a review of a new work of adventurous fiction that draws my interest, most of the time I become aware of potentially interesting adventurous/experimental books when I am offered review copies by authors, author’s agent, publicist, or publisher. This is how I came to read Ben Segal’s Tunnels (published by Scism Press), a work whose experimental intentions are immediately revealed when first looking inside, where we find on each page a grid of squares (nine, in rows of 3), each containing a snippet of prose, rather than a continuous prose text. A second book by an author with whom I was previously unfamiliar, Fictions, by Ashley Honeysett, did in fact become known to me through a review, in an online journal known for its focus on independent presses. This work announces in its title that it is likely to be unconventional, but one has to read it for a while before recognizing the sort of alternative strategy it is pursuing. If it announces its “experimental” intent less obviously than Tunnels, it serves just as readily to illustrate a dilemma adventurous writers can face when attempting to escape the constraints imposed by the accepted formal conventions of literary fiction.
Segal’s formal device locates his book among those works generally categorized as prose fiction but that attempt to redirect the reader’s attention away from “prose” as traditionally defined and toward a more expansive conception of “text” as something that exploits the material features “book” and “printed page.” This approach can be seen in such works as William Gass’s Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife (1971), as well as, most audaciously, Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It (both 1976), but the most direct expression of the goals animating the approach can be found in Federman’s essay, “Surfiction–Four Propositions in the Form of an Introduction,” the first entry in Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, which Federman edited and published in 1975. The future of fiction, Federman maintains, will reject “the traditional, conventional, fixed, and boring method of reading a book” linearly and consecutively in favor of “innovations in the writing itself–in the typography and topology of [the] writing.” These innovations should replace “grammatical syntax with ‘paginal’ syntax that grants to the reader a new “freedom” that will “give the reader an element of choice (active choice) in the ordering of the discourse and the discovery of its meaning.”
Although this is not the only kind of innovation inwhat Federman calls “surfiction”–which covers writers such as Beckett, Borges, and Calvino, as well as American postmodernists such as Barth, Barthelme, and Sukenick–it is most conspicuous in the experiments of Federman’s own early fiction (as anyone who has even dipped into Double or Nothing or Take It or Leave It, their “texts” roaming the page in endless configurations and unruly fonts, knows) and is arguably the most radical of his four “propositions.” The implicit appeal to visual effects in the notion of “paginal syntax” was exploited further by such successors as Steve Tomasula and Mark Danielewski (Tomasula more effectively), and various other “illuminated” novels incorporate visual elements as well. Tunnels could be said to feature a prominent visual device in its use of the grid whose divisions govern the page, although its uniform appearance on each page eventually becomes less noticeable in and of itself as a purely visual object of attention. Instead, this novel follows Federman’s proposal by giving the reader a role in assembling the text, literally a “choice in the ordering of the discourse.”
The novel does not offer a single narrative but rather a succession of narratives, often using the same character names but occurring at different times, although all of them have a common setting, in, or around, or associated with a complex of tunnels somewhere in the California desert. The grids thus themselves represent a metaphorical version of the tunnels, which the reader is invited to navigate according to his/her own inclination: “There is no ‘correct’ order of reading,” we are told in a brief preface, and we are advised to approach the text in a way that “treats the space of the book as something to be explored rather than exhaustively or systematically read.” The reader’s discovery of the work’s “topology,” to again invoke Federman, finds the “space” of reading to be as meandering as the tunnels the characters inhabit, the intent being, presumably, to collapse the distinction between the “content” the novel presents and its form as thoroughly as possible, but also to assert the space of the page itself as the medium of fiction, not the organization of language into compelling prose per se.
The strategy animating Tunnels is probably closer to the method employed by Julio Cortazar in his novel Hopscotch than to the experiments in typography and illustration in Federman or Tomasula. It asserts a certain aleatoric procedure into the discursive organization of the novel, so that the reader is allowed to create a narrative structure of his/her own. For such a strategy to work, the narrative (in this case, multiple interlocking narratives) should, it would seem, have some intrinsic interest (if not necessarily the sort of interest usually attributed to traditional stories). Unfortunately the truncated narratives in Tunnels, no matter how one might order them, are not long enough to be compelling in themselves, nor are the characters given the sort of development that might make them a consistent source of the reader’s concern, while the language in most of the narrative fragments distributed in the squares is predominately functional and expository, advancing the briefly unfolding and often crisscrossing storylines without much stylistic embellishment. This leaves the governing formal mechanism and its appeal to active reading as the dominant object of the reader’s attention, and the novel struggles to sustain that attention.
Eventually this narrowing of the reading experience threatens to make the novel’s structural device seem too much like a gimmick rather than an attempt to adapt and extend an experimental approach to freshly conceived purposes. I believe that Segal’s ambition is indeed to extend and not merely to repeat already existing strategies for challenging conventional thinking about fiction, but the realization of the strategy in Tunnels, given the length and the constricted focus of the novel does leave the reader (this reader, at least) with the impression that the “freedom” granted to order the discourse leads mostly to a repetition of a formal conceit carried out more audaciously and propounded more cogently by various predecessors. Certainly, even an effort to break convention that comes up short on originality but is clearly enough sincere is a welcome alternative to the usual run of literary fiction that settles for the currently approved practices or sacrifices aesthetic complexity in the name of “saying something.” Still, if an objective of adventurous, experimental fiction is to extend the formal potential of fiction itself beyond its current confines into yet unmapped spaces of aesthetic possibility, Tunnels unfortunately doesn’t quite venture that far.
Something similar could be said of Honeysett’s Fictions. In this case, the writer offers a version of metafiction, literally fiction about a writer writing fiction–as it turns out, writing the book we are reading. It is tempting to regard the book also as a memoir of sorts, since the narrator does indeed seem to be the author, not a separately named “character” who is a thinly disguised version of her, but the narrative so insistently focuses on the effort to write stories that the author’s identity as living person collapses into her role as writer and the distinction between life and work becomes irrelevant as well. However much we learn about the various issues in the author’s life (especially the problems experienced by her sister), the emphasis is finally on the process of storytelling, understood as the struggle of one writer to produce stories that can be published and meet with the approval of readers. While most of those stories about which we are told or allowed to sample do not seem particularly experimental, the chronicle of her progress in becoming a successful writer does finally result in a book that evokes one of the most identifiable experimental strategies in American fiction of the 1960s and 70s.
But Fictions is no Lost in the Funhouse or Universal Baseball Association. The book echoes the approach modeled in such classic works of metafiction, but its ambitions are much more modest. It isn’t attempting to challenge preconceptions of the required transparency of fictional narrative–but it couldn’t, since that challenge was issued decades ago and has been regularly renewed in the interim–but is appropriating the gestures associated with that challenge in order to suggest the metafictional, while also endeavoring to smooth the edges of self-reflexivity as an unconventional device so it might blend into something closer to autofiction. This latter mode could actually be taken as the offspring of metafiction, but at the core of most autofiction is a mistaken assumption about the intention behind the work of such writers as Barth or Coover, or at least about the presumed message readers should take from their work.
The self-reflexivity of metafiction deliberately disrupted the inherent presumption that in approaching a work of fiction the reader will suspend disbelief and accept the artificial reality invoked by the work for the duration of the reading experience. It made the reader aware of the artifice, as well as the implicit presence of the writer in creating it. The autofictionists for the most part seem to have interpreted this acknowledgment of the writer behind the text not as the first step in granting fiction a greater freedom in formal arrangement beyond the requirements of traditional narrative, but as a move made to focus more attention on the writer as the ultimate subject of the work. Thus autofiction’s emphasis on the author’s life as source of interest, often examined in great detail. While this approach often does call into question the distinction between fiction and life, it does this by playing coy with details that may indeed be untransformed autobiography but presenting them in a work still labeled “fiction.” It has become memoir for writers who would rather forego the stricter conventions of that form.
I would still call Fictions metafiction rather than autofiction, but, while the book is not without interest and does not lack craft, the craft is applied to help forge an alternate path to realism, with just enough roaming into the discursive underbrush along the way to complicate the journey. The book reminds us occasionally of the more adventurous route once followed by its more experimental forerunners, but ultimately doesn’t really want to go there. In this way, the innovations of metafiction really have become more established, available to a writer like Honeysett to achieve goals different from those that motivated the original innovators. Fictions is a lively enough account of one writer’s perseverance in achieving artistic success, but its rebellion against conventional narrative is muted, evoking an avant-garde practice only as a way of being more punctilious in depicting the protagonist’s concrete circumstances. Similarly, Tunnels enlists a disruptive strategy because, paradoxically, it helps to bring a kind of mimetic authenticity to the depiction of both character and setting.
As someone who tries to keep up with the the publication of new experimental fiction, I would observe that a majority of the works that appear are something like these two books, adapting existing techniques and approaches associated with postmodern or experimental fiction either for purposes that turn out to be surprisingly conventional or that simply repeat what has come before. There are certainly writers who authentically try to extend the boundaries limiting what “experimental” might mean, writers like Gabriel Blackwell, Christian TeBordo, or Evan Dara, whose formal and stylistic challenges to both conventional and pseudo-adventurous fiction are both credible and refreshing. But while these writers have their fervent admirers (me, for one), they are also writers without a high profile in mainstream literary culture. Perhaps this is the way it should be, but previous innovative writers such as John Barth and Donald Barthelme did arguably change literary culture, for however fleeting a time. Literary culture at present may just be impermeable to this kind of change. Literature itself may have to cling to the margins, if it survives at all.
Sheila Heti is known as a writer who seems to blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in the three novels that brought her to prominence: How Should a Person Be? (2012), Motherhood (2018), and Pure Colour (2022). This strategy underpins the mode that has commonly come to be known “autofiction,” and of the writers associated with it, Heti is arguably the exemplary figure. Yet while the term itself is now pervasive in discussions of fiction that at one time might simply have been called “autobiographical,” Heti’s novels don’t altogether seem autobiographical if we expect such fiction to not merely borrow various details from the author’s life but to provide a credible depiction of a character’s actions and circumstances that we could imagine also derives from the author’s life–in other words, we expect an autobiographical fiction to be essentially realistic. Heti’s novels don’t really meet this expectation.
The first two certainly seem to meet the initial criterion, as the characters are preoccupied with issues that Heti has verified were also her own concerns. (In How Should a Person Be?, the character is even named “Sheila,” although we still could (and should) question how absolute is the connection between author and character). In both novels, form is loosened up considerably in an apparent effort to accommodate the protagonists’ ruminative way of thinking, and emphasize the drift of their experiences as they ponder the ramifications of the questions they are asking and the answers they seek. But in each novel there is a kind of willful naivete or a kind of deliberate ingenuousness shared by the protagonists that makes these characters more caricature than lifelike representation–not quite surreal, but exaggerated versions of a woman seeking to discover the key to becoming an authentic self or sort through the benefits and risks of motherhood. This seems deliberate, not a deficiency of craft.
If anything, Pure Colour departs even more obviously from the protocols of realism, veering into outright fantasy–at one point in the novel both the protagonist and her deceased father find themselves trapped inside the leaves of a tree! This novel may draw on the author’s youthful experiences–in particular Heti’s relationship with her own father–but they are thoroughly transformed into fiction, indeed a patently artificial kind of fiction. But if Pure Colour is more overt in its divergence from reality, all three of these novels strike me as pretty unmistakably fictions, however much the critical response to them emphasized the “auto” qualities, thus establishing them as among the integral works in the category of autofiction, a category that has grown to encompass practically any work of fiction that leaves the impression it originates in the author’s life circumstances. At some point it becomes difficult to see how any work of ostensible fiction doesn’t somehow derive from the writer’s experiences in some way, but since no other trend or movement in current fiction has arisen to capture critics’ fancy, “autofiction” has expanded sufficiently to become the defining literary mode of the early twenty-first century.
Alphabetical Diaries (2024) would seem to take autofiction away from fiction altogether into pure personal confession. Literally a selection from Heti’s diaries over a ten-year period, the book actually turns out to be less directly personal in its effect and more artificial in its form than the three previous novels. It seems to present more personal revelations than the novels, but these revelations ultimately seem instead attached to a fictional character the diaries have created rather than to Sheila Heti, the putative author of the book, whose method of constructing the book has rendered her youthful self in a discontinuous, fragmented way that decreases identification of that self with the autobiographical Heti and refocuses our attention on those patterns, repetitions, and mannerisms we more commonly track in our apprehension of invented characters. One suspects that Heti herself experiences a certain distance from this version of herself recorded in the diaries, and the randomly ordered method with which the diary entries have been assembled contributes to a kind of distance between reader and protagonist that most memoir writers likely would not seek to create.
Instead of presenting the diary in the normally expected chronological order (or perhaps some thematic adaptation of chronology or narrative), Heti has arranged them alphabetically according to the first letter of each sentence. This eliminates ordinary coherence, but the technique provides an alternative sort of coherence based, again, on repetition and the appearance of patterns that might not be as readily perceptible in a conventionally published journal. Some words are lengthily repeated–the sentences beginning with “I” and “We,” for example, occur for multiple pages in a row–and certain names as well are not only repeated serially but reoccur frequently throughout the book. (“Lars” seems to reoccur the most.) At other times the juxtaposed entries are humorous in their unexpected resonances, either through some unintentional connection or in some cases what seems to be directly contradictory statements. (“The book feels arid and empty to me now, like a shriveled arm that can’t raise itself to shake your hand, a withered arm and hand. The book is beautiful and practically perfect.”) As a whole, the entries don’t always seem to express a unified personality: partly this is the effect of mixing and matching utterances composed at different times (at a relatively formative stage of developing a personality), but such variety in sensibility surely also means to suggest that a human identify isn’t so easily integrated.
Thus while the choice to reconfigure the diary according to a pre-set scheme initially does seem random, the experience of reading Alphabetical Diaries conveys the strong impression of deliberation and design. Where How Should a Person Be or Motherhood seem casually organized, without overarching structure, Alphabetical Diaries is all structure Form in those two novels threatens to undermine the feel of “life”; this book really only exists because of its form. Not only is it doubtful we would have that much interest in Heti’s diaries if they were published “straight” (she has herself said in an interview that she would have never considered publishing them this way), aside from the salacious details provided about her sex life, the “content” of Alphabetical Diaries really has minimal interest. Witnessing a writer anguishing over her romantic relationships or worrying about the progress of her work neither contributes much to our understanding of the progress of love, nor are we given enough detail about what worries her about the work (what she is working on is always just referred to as “the book”) for our appreciation of Heti’s literary achievement to be enhanced. The significance of Alphabetical Diaries lies entirely in its status as an unorthodox (and arguably innovative) exercise in form.
Heti previously enlisted chance as a compositional method in Motherhood, in which the narrator/protagonist flips a coin in a form of divination to get answers about the pressing questions she is asking about herself and her life. But here the strategy doesn’t provide the novel itself with its organizing principle but assists the protagonist in her process of self-examination, otherwise offered as a more or less conventional first-person account. It acts to reinforce the protagonist’s uncertainties and ambivalence, contributing in this case to the unity of characterization–the protagonist is defined by her doubts and her prolonged inability to finally resolve the dilemma she believes she faces. The question-and-answer sessions with the coins (or whatever metaphysical presence it is that speaks through the coins) make concrete the novel’s questioning of the expectations society places on women (and often enough women place on themselves, as the protagonist increasingly discovers) that is the ultimate unifying element in Motherhood, although this larger thematic exploration requires a plausibly consistent–in this case consistent in regarding her questions as important–protagonist character exploring her conflicted feelings.
It is surely not the accuracy of the answers she gets in response to the coin flips (which are only “yes” or “no”), but the salience of the questions she poses that help this protagonist (and us) to judge the wisdom of her ultimate decision. Nevertheless, one suspects that Heti wasn’t entirely confined to actual coin flips in determining the answers, that she massaged the results somewhat for the occasional surprise or other dramatic effect. Likewise, it seems more than likely that some entries in Alphabetical Diaries were trimmed away or alphabetical order fudged a bit in arranging the contents of the diaries for extra continuity or for humor’s sake. Both books involve artifice, even though Motherhood (as well as How Should a Person Be?) ostensibly tries to conceal it while Alphabetical Diaries announces it. Moreover, although Motherhood presents without equivocation as a novel, it pretty clearly mirrors Heti’s own experience struggling with the question of motherhood, and for all practical purposes could pass for autobiography. Superficially, at least, Alphabetical Diaries presents as nonfiction, but in its aesthetic order (“aesthetic” partly be design and partly contingent) finally it fulfills the expectations we have of works of fiction as much as, or even more than those of memoir or autobiography, or, indeed, those now associated with autofiction.
In this way, I myself found Alphabetical Diaries more satisfying than any of her previous books, even if in general I don’t much care for memoir and don’t read writers’ diaries. The book refurbishes the concept of “creative non-fiction,” although it is almost certainly not what the creators of that label had in mind. I am tempted to say it is not nonfiction at all but in fact a novel, if we understand the distinction between a novel and a work of nonfiction to be less the presence of a made-up story vs. the recording of literal truth and more a question of the attention paid to form and prose style, not just as the means for addressing a subject but for making the reader aware of language as the writer’s medium, the ultimate subject of any writing we want to call “literary.” However, I recognize that there is nothing inherent to nonfiction that precludes this approach to literary language, so perhaps Alphabetical Diaries could be regarded as that “hybrid” of fiction and nonfiction that does manage to inhabit a space precisely in-between the two modes, justified in claiming admittance to both.
If this is the direction in which “autofiction” has taken Sheila Heti, toward a genuine contestation of the separate domains assigned to fiction and nonfiction, and Alphabetical Diaries stands as its current, albeit provisional, expression (more to come), then I think it is legitimate to consider her an “experimental” writer. “Autofiction,” given the presently broad applications of the term, would seem to be at the limits of its utility as a critical tool in explicating a practice in contemporary fiction. It has become so conflated simply with “fiction that draws on the author’s real-life experiences” that it is essentially meaningless–the concept has become so capacious that it potentially includes everything that isn’t avowedly fantastic. The relative popularity of autofiction (to the extent “literary fiction” can be popular) is no doubt attributable mainly to its exploitation by publishers as a publishing gimmick, as well as its compatibility with the congruent rise in popularity of creative nonfiction and social media. (These may not be mutually exclusive explanations.) Still, the idea of autofiction might have developed into a weightier endeavor if it had explicitly sought to undermine long-established beliefs about the connections between “life” and literary “art”: Isn’t fiction always already a reflection of “life?” To what extent is life governed by fictions in the first place? How much does form itself always distort life? Such questions are perhaps implicit in the early works to be designated “autofiction,” but most critical discourse about it, at least, has stopped asking them.
Alphabetical Diaries makes me think that Sheila Heti had them in mind when she wrote How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood and wants to renew them with this latest book. Her interest in employing nonconventional literary devices is clear enough in all of her books, and if she no longer has much interest in producing “autofiction” (if she ever had any), it would be surprising if her subsequent work reverted to workshop narrative strategies or a regressive realism. In a literary culture that has otherwise lost interest in experimental fiction, that would be worth something.
Mircea Cartarescu’s Solenoid is a work of antirealist fiction whose very departures from verisimilar representation are really strategies for getting closer to reality through the devices available to the literary imagination. In Solenoid, these strategies contribute most of all to an hallucinatory yet undoubtedly truthful portrait of the city of Bucharest, home both to the novel’s protagonist and to the author, each in their representations of the city (the protagonist through the journal that is the vehicle of Cartarescu’s narrative) seemingly appalled by its degradation during the Ceausescu years but also in a kind of awe at its ancient, dilapidated grandeur. The former is frequently evoked in straightforwardly realistic descriptions of the ruinous state of Bucharest’s exterior facades, but the latter is a cumulative impression emerging from the protracted reveries into which the narrator just as often falls.
During these episodes, the narrator recounts events from his own past as well as current experiences, related in obsessive detail, that can quickly veer into distorted dreamscapes. The recounted moments from the past are themselves often dreams, or at least waking visions, that the narrator is transcribing from old journals in which these visions are recorded into a new and all-encompassing journal the completion of which the narrator regards as a kind of culminating act in his own failed career as a writer. (Current happenings are also chronicled in this journal, which serves as the novel’s structural conceit, an omnibus memoir of sorts. Among the most prominent of these dream episodes are those that report on spectral visits by mysterious figures who hover around the narrator in the night. They are related as real-life hauntings by apparitions, but they nevertheless reinforce the blurring of the real and the imagined that ultimately characterizes the novel as a whole, although they also more explicitly locate the source of this drift from reality to the perceptions of the narrator himself.
We might then say that the “realism” of a novel like Solenoid is really a version of psychological realism, except that this concept wouldn’t really do justice to Cartarescu’s full-scale literary rejection of a boundary between what’s real and what’s imagined. This is apparent as well in the other two books by Cartarescu available in English translations, Nostalgia and Blinding (Book One). These books also freely blend straightforwardly realistic narratives with blatantly surreal and fantastic scenes, both approaches as with Solenoid in the service of experiences that seem autobiographical, although the autobiographical elements are themselves not the center of interest. Cartarescu seems to be using the circumstances of his own like as the means for executing a literary method that is faithful to those circumstances (just as in the depiction of Bucharest) by amplifying their routine qualities into fully fantastic scenes of grotesque fancy.
Of the three books, Solenoid is the most formally integrated. The translated edition of Blinding is only the first part of a trilogy, while Nostalgia may be more a collection of novellas (united by an authorial presence and their setting in Bucharest) with disparate characters and stories. Although Nostalgia achieves it own kind of aesthetic unity-through-disjunction, Solenoid retains the episodic, digressive impulses animating both Nostalgia and Blinding while its unity is made visible rather than merely imminent, the novel’s form a function of its point of view but for that reason more immediately present in the reader’s perception of its aesthetic order. If Solenoid is less formally open-ended that the two previously translated works (and thus arguably less audacious), it is also less diffuse in its effect.
Solenoid is also more purposefully focused on character development, partly again a function of its use of the protagonist’s journal as narrative vehicle, but however much the novel offers a dynamic portrayal of Bucharest, it also gives us a psychologically dense account of the narrator, still temperamentally the career writer he deliberately refused to become after experiencing initial hostility to an apprentice poem he wrote for a writing workshop during his student days. (“I have never recovered from the trauma,” he tells us in introducing the incident.) Instead, he is a Romanian teacher at a run-down Bucharest high school, the drudgery of the job also depicted in the novel with an unforgiving realism that ultimately seems almost preternatural in its desolation. If Cartarescu’s practice can be called “magical realism,” it is a kind of magic that has his characters literally bewitched, forced to live in a kind of benumbed trance. Such conditions force the narrator into the recesses of his own mind, but “during the endless series of evenings when, as my silent room darkens, my mind rises like the moon and glows brighter and brighter” and “I see palaces and hidden worlds on its surface, things never revealed to those running inside the maze.”
Although Solenoid is set during the reign of Ceausescu in Romania (as are Nostalgia and Blinding), there are explicitly only fleeting references to the political dispensation in place at the time. Readers innocent of Cold War-era Romanian history (perhaps a sizable enough group) could read Solenoid without fully registering the oppressive reach of the Ceausescu regime, which is nevertheless tacit in the near-ruins of the urban landscape the narrator confronts and the abject resignation palpable in most of the city’s residents. The oblique depiction of the specific political circumstances in which the narrator of Solenoid must operate might persuade us to think that Cartarescu intends his novel to be read as a parable of sorts, something akin to Kafka although more firmly embodied in the particularities of place, its politics only nominally suggested, not fully apparent. But Solenoid‘s narrative structure does not seem allegorical: Cartarescu’s narrator is really interested in social and political circumstances only as backdrop to his epic-length self-interrogation.
Solenoid‘s protagonist is obsessed with his own life not out of narcissism or self-satisfaction but because he finds his own life as grotesque and unaccountable as the city of Bucharest itself. He conceives his journal–the book we are reading–as “a report of my anomalies,” which requires the discontinuous, hallucinogenic treatment we encounter in the novel, although the narrator insists he is sticking to the facts of his life, even if these facts are but “vague flashes over the banal surface of the most banal of lives, little fissures, vague discrepancies.” One could ask, however, whether the flashes the narrator provides are all that vague, the little fissures he exposes very little. In its juxtaposition of the banal and the incredible, Solenoid casts doubt on our rigid separation of the palpably real and the presumably fantastic, insinuating that each in itself is only a partial measure of the truth, which occupies the permeable border between the two. The narrator directly suggests that our perceptions of reality are inherently limited when he contemplates at length theories of a possible fourth dimension that human beings are unable–yet–to access. Signs of these limitations recur throughout the novel in the hidden spaces and labyrinthine passageways the narrator frequently encounters (including in his own home).
Finally the narrator of Solenoid is more concerned with ultimate questions such as the nature of reality and the meaning behind its surfaces, rather than more temporal cultural and political matters, and he finds a preoccupation with such larger perplexities in a semi-organized group called the Picketists, who hold demonstrations outside places like the morgue. But these are not political protests. Instead the Picketists carry signs that say such things as “Down with Death,” “Shame on Epilepsy,” and “NO to Agony!” At the first rally the narrator attends, the group’s ostensible leader demands to know
Why do we live?. . .How can we exist? Who allowed this scandal, this injustice? This horror, this abomination? What monstrous imagination wrapped consciousness in flesh? What sadistic and saturnine spirit permitted consciousness to suffer like this, permitted the spirit to scream in torture? Why did we climb down into this swamp. this jungle, into these flames full of hate and anger?
It is perhaps tempting to think that the ingenuous Picketists are ultimately an object of satire or parody, but in Cartartescu’s fictional world it would be more accurate to say that the usual forms of social protest, demands for sublunary justice, are the real expressions of credulity and naivete. The narrator doesn’t exactly become a Picketist, but their insistence that the real world of ordinary existence is utterly senseless closely aligns with his own preoccupation with his “anomalous” life and his perception that true meaning is to be found beyond mundane reality.
Still, Solenoid nevertheless often lingers on the details of its protagonist’s mundane reality. We frequently return to his far from anomalous vocation as a high school teacher, with its tedious and unsatisfying routines. The narrator is romantically involved with a fellow teacher, Irina, and their trysts are chronicled at various points in the novel. (Later we get the narrator’s account of his previous failed marriage, an experience which clearly still puzzles him as another “anomaly.”) These trysts are enhanced by a phenomenon whose source gives the novel its title: beneath his “boat-shaped house,” he has discovered, is buried a massive solenoid, the electromagnetic effects of which create a force field of some sort that allows him and Irina to literally float above his bed during their episodes of lovemaking. There are other solenoids buried in various places around Bucharest, so that some of the extravagant, surreal goings-on related in Solenoid could be taken as the influence of these amplified solenoids, acting on a metaphorical level as a kind of fanciful conceit. The conceit is able to encompass both the novel’s unsparing realism and its detours into the eerie and absurd, allowing it at once to be a visionary work of sustained surrealism and a rigorous exercise in verisimilitude.
This achievement is, of course most immediately attributable to Solenoid‘s narrator, who is, after all, summoning this blend of veracity and fantasy in organizing and completing his journal. Although the narrator presents himself as a failed writer, and one whose failure was provoked by his work as a poet and not a writer of fiction, the novel nonetheless unavoidably acknowledges its fictional world as artifice, the calculated manifestation of writing. But if Solenoid could be called a large-scale work of metafiction, it is not of the unabashedly self-reflexive kind that is sometimes characterized as “fiction about fiction.” Instead, the metafictional elements act as an enabling device making the novel’s merging of the representational and the surreal more seamless, not simply an amalgam of realism and fantasy. Ultimately Solenoid–and Cartarescu’s fiction in general–makes no significant distinction between the ostensibly factual and the blatantly fictional, but this is more than an exercise in reality-bending: it is an implicit assertion of fiction’s truth-telling potential beyond the prescriptions favoring narrative plausibility and literal representation.
At the end of Solenoid, the narrator begins to burn his now-completed manuscript–the last scenes describe an apocalyptic during which the city of Bucharest rises into the sky, revealing a Lovecraftian horror lying beneath–and prepares to seek a new home with Irina and their unborn child where “we will grow old together.” This clearly implies a happy ending beyond the nightmarish vision the narrator’s writing had evoked, but of course the narrator’s action introduces a narrative dilemma: if indeed the manuscript has been destroyed, how then have we been able to read it? We could regard the text’s self-immolation as the narrator’s sleight-of-hand, a way of providing his story with a narrative closure that resolves his conflicted feelings about writing with an especially emphatic renunciation. Or we could accept the device as the final confirmation of the novel’s metafictional presuppositions, an acknowledgement that the narrator and his baroque journal are the author’s fabrication, the vehicle for an elaborate counterfactual tale depicting the author’s life had he not in fact become a successful writer.
Even so, Solenoid‘s protagonist certainly does not exhibit diminished skills in his abilities as a writer. Indeed, we could say that the narrator of Solenoid, free of the distractions that might have come with literary success, is able to exercise his poetic gifts in their purest state, untainted by worldly concerns, especially if he knows that what he writes is destined to have no readers. His prose, as translated by Sean Cotter, is characterized by a scrupulous attention to detail, even when the objects of his attention seem unearthly, related in rhythmically propulsive sentences. (One assumes these are qualities of Cartarescu’s writing that Cotter has accurately rendered in his translation–at any rate, this English version of the novel is altogether compelling in its style.) However much the narrator of Solenoid wants to affirm the value of life over writing, as the embodiment of Mircea Cartarescu’s value as a writer, he is among the most dedicated of writers
Rick Harsch’s The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas is a large-scale, digressive novel that is also quite formally meticulous. It could be called a historical saga, and it has some of the more leisurely pace we might expect of such a narrative, although the novel doesn’t allow us to settle in for an “immersive” reading, since it doesn’t develop through the forward momentum of a linear story. Still, once we grasp that the various characters are part of a unified narrative, being related to us in a disunified manner, the novel still has the appeal of a family saga that reflects the movement of history, although in this case that movement probably can’t be called “progress”.
But if Eddie Vegas is in part a historical novel, it is of the sort closer to Pynchon’s V or Coover’s The Public Burning, not a realistic narrative that attempts first of all to invoke “what it was like” at some point in history. to “recreate” history. Instead it defamiliarizes and dislocates the historical, making it sufficiently strange that we might recognize it as essentially alien territory rather than simply reflecting a fixed and already known order. In the work of these writers, history becomes a fictional world that is itself “real,” not the attempted facsimile–with a few added flourishes of fancy–of the real world as it was once. Paradoxically, we wind up learning a great deal about history from such fiction–its carefully concealed secrets, not its acknowledged facts–even though achieving accuracy of historical detail is not an essential goal, as it seems to be in much conventional historical fiction,
The novel tells the multigenerational story of the Gravel family–although the original scion of the family is an early 19th century “mountain man” and fur trapper, Hector Robitaille, and the title character is also a Gravel, who has changed his name for reasons the novel eventually gets to. In the novel’s initial chapters we meet Eddie Vegas (real name, Tom Gravel) and his son, Donnie. Soon enough, we are returned to the first episode in the family chronicle, Hector’s encounter with a bear. It takes a while for the story focused on Donnie, who becomes friendly with a wealthy young man named Drake, to clarify its direction, but the story of Hector being mauled by the bear (“Old Ephraim”), surviving the attack, and crawling his way back to civilization (literally) compels attention on its own, simultaneously a riveting adventure narrative and a hilarious sendup of the American frontier ethos. This sets the tone for the rest of the novel, which often renders scenes of brutality and horror in a manner that is also caustically funny.
As we move back and forth from the exploits of Donnie and Drake to the development of the family line initiated by Hector and a Native American woman after he has recovered from his traumatic odyssey in the woods, both the structural and the thematic connections become more apparent, although the parallels and echoes that emerge are subtle and suggestive rather than insistent (Hector making his way through the wilds of the western American mountains vs. the story of Drake’s father traversing the jungles of Vietnam, the father himself, a corrupt security specialist paired with Fitzpacker, the lawless frontier lawman and gold hunter who menaces both Hector and the first Tom Gravel). Card playing and gambling pervade the novel (Donnie and Drake meet during a game of poker), and it seems likely that the deck of cards plays a role in the the arrangement and development of episodes (the author, who makes appearances throughout the novel, dealing the cards). The author’s presence, through the third-person narrator attempting to relate this unwieldy narrative, is also palpable in the novel’s unconstrained, idiosyncratic language.
Perhaps what holds together the various episodes of the narrative most firmly is the continuity of its setting in the intermountain region of the western United States, especially Nevada but also including parts of California, Oregon, and Idaho. This is the general area in which we find Hector Robitaille at the commencement of the family saga, and the novel concludes with the last Tom Gravel and Donnie fleeing from Las Vegas through Death Valley. Throughout the novel the region is implacably present, the characters attempting to accommodate themselves to its extremes of topography and climate, when they aren’t participating in the depletion of its resources. The latter is most directly evoked in the episodes taking place during the Gold Rush, including one depicting the mining of a canyon in Nevada, in which Fitzpacker and the first Tom Gravel have a showdown of sorts. Fitzpacker is surely the precursor to those interests that will later exploit the West for its minerals and other natural assets, the exploitation of nature having an even more horrific culmination in the development of the atomic bomb (with which a later Gravel is involved). The Gravel story’s culminating scenes in Las Vegas show us the final tawdry embodiment of the values and attitudes underlying the “settlement” of the West: the casual corruption, the lurking violence, the aimless sprawl.
There are portions of the novel that break away from the predominant regional setting, episodes that introduce us to and track the activities of Donnie and Drake and Donnie’s father. (Donnie knows himself as Donnie Garvin, as his father, who is in fact the last Tom Gravel, had changed his named to Garvin after a term spent in prison as a younger man.) Donnie and Drake are initially presented to us as rather aimless young men, but Drake, whose father we learn is the shady owner of Blackguard, a private security company currently involved in the Iraq War, invites Donnie to accompany him on a trip to Belgium, where the two of them more or less continue their aimless ways, but also meet a barkeeper named Setif. They refer to her by the derogatory name “Picasso Tits,” but eventually both young men fall in love with Setif. Their idyll in Belgium ends when Drake learns that both of his parents have been assassinated, and he and Donnie fly to Las Vegas (without Setif, who nevertheless joins them later).
Donnie has become estranged from his father, who has managed to establish himself as, of all things, a creative writing professor, married to a celebrity poet whom Tom Garvin/Gravel/Eddie Vegas has come to despise. This situation allows Harsch to interject into the novel some fairly broad academic satire–Tom gets into some trouble, abetted by the wife, for reputed acts of insensitivity toward his students–before Gravel leaves for Las Vegas in search of his son, who he has learned is there with Drake. While The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas might loosely be called satirical, the episodes devoted to the politics and personalities of academe seem more narrowly targeted (no doubt reflecting Harsch’s time at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop) than the mordantly dark humor of the rest of the novel. Among other thinks, it makes Gravel’s wife (named “Languideia”) a more cartoonish figure–we see little of her other than through Gravel’s unfavorable ruminations about her–than Setif, who turns out to be one of the novel’s most self-possessed characters and wisely frees herself from entanglement in Drake and Donnie’s increasingly turbid affairs by story’s end.
The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas has appeal as a demythologized comedy of American degradation, but ultimately this is a novel that makes its greatest impression through its verbal virtuosity. Harsch is a stylist, although in Eddie Vegas, it is a style based in verbal invention rather than through shapely sentences or figurative decoration. Sometimes it is as if Harsch’s sentences can’t be contained:
How horrible to report the return of Hector to the likely mortambulatories of the knuckle walker, a re-descent of a man who, upon determining to descend straight to the river he knew was there and would both nourish hum and lead him to westward succor, stepped north at too brisk a pace, gaining a false sense of strength of mine as well as speed, moving from step to stride to lope to leap to running loping leap from mound to rock to mound to rock to root to stone to mound to depression up root over ditch to mound, all in a a dementium of glee as if the river were but a ghostflight off and not perhaps two dozen miles. . . .
If at times the neologisms and runaway syntax threaten to overwhelm sense, the novel’s prose has the effect of carrying the reader along on a dynamic current of language for which literal sense is less important than a certain breathless rhythm (although the story gets told, nevertheless). The reader’s immersion in language is further sustained by the frequent use of long lists that conspicuously call attention to the artifice of the novel’s narration, also further reinforcing its essentially carnivalesque comic vision (reviews refer to these lists as “Rabelaisian,” but Gilbert Sorrentino seems to me a more immediate inspiration).
Perhaps we might find a convergence between Harsch’s accentuation of language as medium and the historical material with which he is working in Eddie Vegas in the vernacular argot spoken by the frontier characters–“Drop the char erall drop ya raht thar, ya English fartpig mother of devilswine!”–which includes an Indian character who is able to communicate with a white man like Hector Robitaille in a polyglot Native/English/French/Spanish he has ingeniously put together from various encounters with the white interlopers: “Moi no belle sauvage, pero damn real grande. One tongue, many way. Ass felt. Beaverspelt,” Such strategies mark The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas as a novel of farcical fantasy and ironic invention that nevertheless speaks something that seems like the truth about America.
If we identify as an “experimental” literary work one that avoids almost all of the customary markers of established form in works of fiction, Michael Winkler’s Grimmish would indisputable qualify as experimental. In the mock review of the book we are about to read that acts as a preface–the first sign that this will not be literary business as usual–the anonymous reviewer notes that it has “no narrative arc, close to zero love interest, skittish occasional action, incident rather than plot, and a narrator who is intermittently compelling but prevaricates and self-deludes like a broody prince at Elsinore,” but such observations don’t really begin to encompass the unorthodox qualities of Grimmish, which actually do begin in determining exactly what literary genre should claim it.
The book’s publicity copy calls it a work of “experimental non-fiction,” while the introductory faked review refers to it as “fictionalized history” (in a metafictional excursion in the middle of the book, the narrator identifies it as an “exploded non-fiction novel”). Reviewers have referred to it variously as fiction and nonfiction, and in an interview Winkler himself called it a “hybrid of fiction and non-fiction, memoir and whatever else is in there.” It seems to me that a “hybrid” of fiction and nonfiction is perforce fiction (a little bit of fiction goes a long way), although to be sure it is indeed its gallimaufry-like assemblage of a verifiable historical record (as far as it goes) and a clearly fictionalized frame-tale both reconstructing and transmuting it that works to make Grimmish such a distinctive sort of work.
Thus if Joe Grim, an immigrant Italian-American boxer on tour in Australia during the early years of the 20th century, is the ostensible protagonist of this novel, it could be argued that the actual protagonist is the narrator’s Uncle Michael, a sherry-guzzling old man holed up in a book and paper-filled room who as a young man knew Grim and who relates Grim’s story to the narrator over the course of several drink-fueled sessions. Uncle Michael’s story is–to say the least–unreliable, featuring, among other dubious details, a talking goat and a Joe Grim who often sounds more like a professor than a rough-and-tumble prizefighter. The narrator himself, a barely disguised double for the author (or is “Uncle Michael” a version of Michael Winkler?), holds the text together as the inquisitive examiner hoping to compile a full portrait of the somewhat mysterious Grim, but ends up providing an even fuller picture of his uncle (who’s probably not actually his uncle) and of his own authorial effort to redeem the years sitting “in a room alone writing words no-one wants or will ever read” with this unorthodox amalgam of history and audacious fancy.
The fanciful conceits, however, do not muffle the impact of the book’s depictions of hypermasculinity and its attendant violence, which are the necessary corollaries of its more direct meditation on the experience of pain. Joe Grim is not much of a boxer, except for his apparent ability to endure pain, to the point that no other boxer, not even the great Jack Johnson, has been able to take him out: Grim always gets back up, even if he rarely wins. Not only are we witness to the punishment Grim takes in several of his bouts, but while traveling with him and the young Uncle Michael across Australia we are also treated to an extended and quite brutal scene in a bar depicting a head butting contest (which Grim wants to join but is refused) that on the one hand would seem to encapsulate a certain sort of Australian macho culture that fetishizes pain, but on the other also renders most forcefully the social and cultural degradations more generally prompting human beings to inflict pain (and enjoy seeing it inflicted). Ultimately Joe Grim himself is less a martyr to these degradations than someone determined to exploit them to his own advantage, even as he remains their victim.
Such a perspective on Grim is of course an impression created by his portrayal in this book, not a verifiable fact about him that can be gleaned from the historical record. Grimmish does incorporate information about Joe Grim derived from secondary sources (primarily newspapers), and this is supplemented with citations to other sources (historical and otherwise) that do reinforce the book’s tentative identity as nonfiction, but the episodes arising from Uncle Michael’s narrative are plainly fictional (it is unlikely the historical record documents a visit by Grim to the “Ladies’ Lounge,” where he observed a head-butting contest). Perhaps we could still regard Grimmish as a nonfictional work of historical recreation if the fictional flourishes were simply attempts to fill in lacunae with a sort of speculation, but this book clearly goes beyond such minor manipulations: the attributable history is really just the foundation for a work of imaginative fiction whose value is not directly determined by questions about its historical authenticity or fidelity to fact.
But it is precisely this melding of the historically situated and the freely invented that is itself the most compelling achievement of the book, more so than the evocation of the character Grim (who emerges as an appealing comic grotesque but who doesn’t seem to have much to do with the “real” Joe Grim) or the ruminations on the human capacity for pain (which, in my reading, at least, eventually become somewhat routine). If “exploded non-fiction novel” doesn’t finally seem a particularly meaningful label for a work like Grimmish, in its very inadequacy as a genre marker it signals what is most impressive about the book as a literary provocation.
Readers encountering David Ohle’s work for the first time through his most recent novel, The Death of a Character (2021), will indeed find the depiction promised in its title, but those familiar with Ohle’s previous books, especially his first and eventual cult favorite, Motorman (1972), will know that the character whose dying the narrative chronicles is the protagonist of that novel as well. Called simply Moldenke, he makes additional appearances in the long-delayed follow-up to Motorman, The Age of Sinatra (2004), as well as its successors, The Pisstown Chaos (2008) and The Old Reactor (2013). (In The Pisstown Chaos, Moldenke turns up as a minor character in a story focusing on others, but The Death of a Character marks the fourth time his picaresque existence has been the focus of an Ohle novel.) Moldenke has been the principal conduit to the singularly bizarre and often grotesque world Ohle invokes in his fiction, and thus his demise seems more a consummation of that world’s creation, its full achievement perhaps, than merely the portrayal of a fictional character’s death.
To some extent, however, Moldenke in this novel is not exactly the same Moldenke featured in Motorman (or each of the sequels, for that matter), which makes The Death of a Character comprehensible enough to the uninitiated reader, but also potentially conveys an incomplete impression not just of Moldenke as a character (or characters), but of the nature of what became a multi-book project expressing a vision of an alternative reality that incorporates enough fractured and rearranged pieces of our already wrecked world that it seems intelligible, if freakishly distorted. Like Moldenke himself, this reality is never quite the same from book to book, although its oddities are generally of a similar sort and the discontinuities seem part of the process of decay and instability its inhabitants experience: At some point in the future (how far or near is never quite specified), America has degenerated—perhaps with the help of an external catastrophe—into a conglomeration of what people remain, concentrated in a few scattered places in what might be the Midwest (the names of these places vary) and reduced to a fairly primitive state of existence, although some vestiges of the old technology linger (a decrepit nuclear reactor, a barely functioning mechanical “pedway”). The novels centering on Moldenke generally portray him attempting simply to survive the circumstances in which he finds himself, to evade or elude the capricious forces arrayed against him. The Pisstown Chaos is a departure from this pattern only in that these same conditions afflict the Ball family rather than Moldenke.
These forces include, in addition to the entropy besetting the remnants of a degraded culture, the explicit dictates of what passes for authority in this ramshackle civilization. This authority is at times invested in a government of sorts (mostly dominated by a single autocratic figure), but essentially it is claimed by whoever can seize it and maintained through nonsensical and arbitrary edicts and directives that ensure obedience by keeping the people as confused and unsettled as possible. (Literally unsettled: often the population is compelled to relocate or individuals are consigned to detention facilities on the flimsiest, often quite absurd, pretenses—at one point in the The Old Reactor, Moldenke is shuffled off to a prison camp for defecating in a graveyard.) Control is further reinforced in The Age of Sinatra and The Pisstown Chaos (and now in The Death of a Character as well) by the imposition of a “great forgetting,” whereby history is erased, keeping everyone in a perpetual present haunted by vestiges of the past, which are vaguely known but about which most people ultimately know nothing. In The Blast (2014), a non-Moldenke novella, nevertheless quite clearly in the same fictional milieu, the protagonist, a boy named Wencel, a student at “the only school still open,” is taught the version of history that remains available, a scrambled-up construction anchored in figures from popular culture (“the age of Sinatra,” “the age of Nerds”) and fourth-hand distortions of events surrounding the Kennedy administration. (In another class, Wencel studies “Emoticonics,” an emoticon script underlying Emo, “the language of our ancestors.”)
The Blast also comes as close to an explanation of the source of the prevailing conditions in Ohle’s fictional world as we find in his published work, or at least the conditions specifically depicted in this short novel. As its title betokens, at some point in the recent past, a terrible explosion, referred to simply as “the blast,” occurred—recently enough that some people, including Wencel’s father, have some recollection of it. It is of course tempting to conclude that this was a nuclear blast, but Ohle merely leaves this as an implication. Neither The Blast nor any of the other books could really be adequately described as post-Apocalyptic narratives. They don’t seem to depict a future world to which our own present is possibly heading so much as create a facsimile of a future that figures elements of present reality into an absurdly sorry excuse for a social order. If they are science fiction, it is a reverse-image rendition of science fiction that inverts the standard association of SF with futuristic advanced knowledge and technologies into an entropic civilization reduced to crank radios and pedal cars. One of Wencel’s teachers presents the class with a drawing representing what she believes a motor may have looked like, prompting Wencel to inquire about “flying motors”: “Like the one you drew, except in the sky?”
Although it introduces us to Moldenke, as well as other characters who will appear in subsequent books, and establishes the signature impassive tone with which Ohle’s narratives are related, Motorman offers a different, while still profoundly aberrant, sort of invented world. Here the future has become more synthetic than dilapidated, although Moldenke still encounters plenty of ruination. This world has telephones, motorcars, and electricity—Moldenke throughout the first part of the novel is menaced over the phone by a man named Bunce, whose identity and authority remain nebulous but whom Moldenke fears, nonetheless—but when Moldenke decides to leave the apartment in which he has concealed himself and to meet up with Dr. Burnheart (a beneficent counterpart to Bunce, although just as shadowy), he and we have a more sustained encounter with the deformed environment he inhabits, as a picaresque journey ensues.
Soon after he begins his journey, Moldenke contemplates his surroundings:
He sat on the seawall, chewing stonepicks, and watched the first artificial sun break apart and burn out. A slow, dry rain of white ash persisted through summerfall. By winter, a second was up, blinding to look at and almost warm enough.
It turns out that in Moldenke’s world there are a number of additional suns and moons (perhaps up to seven of the latter), which appear at irregular intervals (a steady stream of weather reports attempts to keep track, although apparently Bunce is able to manufacture the weather he wants, instructing the “weatherman” to send out the appropriate forecast.) This augmentation of climate conditions is attributed to government scientists, although its purpose—for either the government or the scientists—is never made exactly clear, but then the purpose of the government itself is not at all evident, either. As in all of the subsequent novels as well, government is something effected through whim. In Motorman, it would seem, technology has not regressed to a derelict state, but it does seem to be deployed in an indiscriminate, uncontrolled way that seems as senseless as it does sinister.
The essential absurdity of Moldenke’s reality is further manifested in his own personal circumstances. Apparently the victim of heart disease (in other of the novels he is afflicted with various digestive problems), Moldenke is the recipient of a transplant, but he has been given not one heart but four, and they are animal hearts, not human, the operations performed by the same Dr. Burnheart. Again the motivation behind this procedure remains murky—Moldenke may just be the victim of human experimentation, although he is grateful enough to Dr. Burnheart for the service. Moldenke is also a veteran of a “Mock War,” a war in name only in which one might play one’s part by “volunteering for injury,” as Moldenke does,
writing his name down on a piece of paper and dropping it into a metal box outside the semi-Colonel’s office. At morning meal the day’s injury list was read. . .When they read his name he reported to Building D, stood in line at the door. Every minute or so the line shortened by one. The mock soldier in front of Moldenke turned and said, “I’m proud that I gave for my country. He opened the fly of his trench pants and showed Moldenke a headless crank.
Fortunately for Moldenke, he is able to do his part for the cause by enduring only a fractured kneecap.
Such madness is native to Ohle’s fictive world, conveyed through the sort of deadpan expository prose characterizing a passage such as this. Ohle’s fiction accentuates narrative—description is evocative and acute, but generally concise, without forced lyricism—although formally Motorman, as well as the subsequent novels, can also be fragmented and discursive. Motorman, for example, incorporates numerous letters, both from and to Moldenke (his interlocutors tend to refer to him as “Dink” or “Dinky”), but they work either to fill in gaps in the ongoing narrative of Moldenke’s adventures or to provide suitable context. What happens (or what has happened) remains the focus of attention, even if what happens is goofy or preposterous. Ohle’s narrative manner seems most influenced by Kafka, except that where Kafka’s impassive narrator leaves an impression of foreboding and inscrutability, Ohle’s produces something closer to farce. Moldenke seems finally a type of antihero: an almost hapless figure whose senseless circumstances make us want to sympathize with his plight, while those very circumstances make it virtually impossible to conceive he might be able to overcome them.
While in the following novels featuring him as protagonist Moldenke is still a comic character (made comic by the lunacy of his surroundings), he is less purely the victim of a system uniquely subjecting him to its insanity. In The Age of Sinatra, Moldenke must again negotiate the lunacies, but their source is somewhat more identifiable in the reigning political system, headed up by one Michael Ratt, the President of what remains of the U. S. Moldenke, in fact, rather involuntarily becomes involved in a plot to assassinate Ratt, for which Moldenke is assigned complete blame by the powers that be when the plan actually succeeds. (Moldenke almost avoids punishment but comes up one “waiver” short—waivers are granted arbitrarily by the government and exempt perpetrators of crime from responsibility for their actions—when he goes before the judge, who sentences him to a prison camp, after all.) This wider focus on the visible social and political structure in which Moldenke abides perhaps removes from the follow-ups to Motorman the mixture of hilarity and disquiet that emerges in the tone of the novel as an effect of the opacity of motive and causality, but it also makes the follow-ups more than simply sequels to the first novel, attempts to re-create a “cult classic” thirty years later.
The Age of Sinatra leaves Moldenke in essentially the same position in which he found himself in Motorman, however—that is, in ambiguous circumstances and still in a state of radical uncertainty about his future well-being. The same is true of The Old Reactor, which has Moldenke sent to a prison camp that inverts our customary conception of a prison. The facility is actually an entire town, Altobello, and the prisoners are sentenced to be “free”: There is no confinement, no oversight by prison authorities, no institutional structure at all. Prisoners are literally condemned to be free—a telling comment, perhaps, on the highly regulated society outside the prison, one that would conceive of life inside such a prison as its opposite and therefore punishment. Most of the inhabitants of Altobello seem better off then they would have back in Bunkerville, the locus of the social order outside, but they have been conditioned thoroughly enough by the irrationality of that order that they can’t quite appreciate it. (The slop they have for food seems delicious to them.) Moldenke, in fact, seems to appreciate it, more than the others, but even he is concerned to get back to the house in Bunkerville he has inherited from his aunt, where he finds, after Bunkerville itself has been “liberated,” that the situation is very far from liberating.
The Death of a Character literally brings Moldenke to the end of his journey, and, to the extent we are to perceive continuity in Moldenke’s portrayal across the Moldenke saga, clearly he has found neither reward nor enlightenment. The very first paragraph succinctly evokes Moldenke’s predicament as he approaches what will be the terminal phase of his life, as well as the sort of world he now faces:
On a scorching winter afternoon, Moldenke stopped at the Dew Drop Inn for a Chinese whiskey. He’d been limping along China Way, a newly named street, wondering what to do with the remainder of his life. The sound of distant riots rattled his half-deaf ears and the air smelled of sulfur. He’d been homeless now for months, sleeping in the park with other jobless, hungry souls, spending his days in the library reading and using the toilet when it was working.
The details here give us a vivid impression of the scene and situation Moldenke confronts, but they also reiterate for readers not as familiar with either the Moldenke novels or Davie Ohle’s work as a whole some of the more predominant motifs and conceits to be found in Ohle’s fiction. We are immediately made aware of the fundamentally absurd conditions that prevail in Moldenke’s world—“a scorching winter afternoon,” one of many manifestations of arbitrary weather phenomena that plague Ohle’s characters—and the sound of the distant riots further signals the ubiquitous threat of instability that seems always present and serves for the characters as a constant source of reference (the “Pisstown Chaos”). Food and drink (usually of some very bizarre and/or repulsive variety) are a special focus of attention in Ohles’s fiction—a dissertation could be written about Ohle’s use of food in these novels as an objective correlative of cultural devolution—and some such establishment as the “Dew Drop Inn” is a focal point of communal experience. The source of authority is usually undefined and precarious, so that now when Moldenke finds himself drinking “Chinese whiskey” and traveling on “China Way,” it would seem that a more determinate sort of regime has come to be in charge.
This is indeed the case, as we discover when Moldenke enters the Dew Drop, encountering a “Chinese official lost in her own thoughts, jotting notes in a daybook.” Moldenke’s zone in dystopic quasi-America has been occupied by the Chinese—who claim it has been ceded to them voluntarily—although very little that is culturally or politically “Chinese” (not even the food) is attributed to the representatives of the Chinese administration, mostly soldiers, who interact with Moldenke and his companions. They are mostly the latest representatives of preemptory and indiscriminate power that operates in Ohle’s fiction, ultimately working to inflict gratuitous hardship. Perhaps the domination by China in this latest rendering of Ohle’s fictional landscape is inevitably a commentary on the dynamics of current geopolitical arrangements, but as with Ohle’s larger fictional project as a whole, neither forecasting the future nor critiquing the present seem the likely motivation for the details of setting or the cast of characters. The Chinese play the same role as Bunce or President Ratt or the mad religious leader, and their presence contributes to the effort to defamiliarize the iconography of an America that has mutated into a funhouse world of the writer’s own invention.
The Death of a Character also resembles Ohle’s other books in that it is a variation on the road novel. Moldenke determines to avoid the local turmoil and travel “south,” to a cabin he believes he has inherited. The bartender in the Dew Drop suggests that Moldenke take with him a “neutrodyne” named Wheaton. Neutrodynes are humanoid beings (perhaps alien, although again Ohle retains a degree of ambiguity by leaving their origins murky) that alternate in their roles in Ohle’s fiction with other similarly quasi human creatures: jellyheads, Stinkers, and necronauts. All of these groups live among the human characters, generally looked on by humans as “other” and treated accordingly (although the necronauts are also considered somewhat spooky—dead people still alive). It, too, is tempting to take such creatures as the product of human manipulation (or at least as a way of representing human tampering), the exact disaster or technology gone awry long erased through a “forgetting,” but Ohle maintains a consistent weirdness in his work by withholding explanation, here leaving the neutrodynes and jellyheads to be just weird.
Wheaton is probably the most individuated neutrodyne in Ohle’s fiction, although paradoxically he becomes a persuasive character by devoting himself to Moldenke’s service: Wheaton is “programmed” to serve human beings (the source of the programming again mysterious), and he does indeed vigilantly attend to Moldenke’s needs, from providing food to assisting with Moldenke’s less than efficient toilet habits. Wheaton appears to be without emotions, although after he and Moldenke arrive at the family cabin Wheaton meets a female neutrodyne, Darleen, who shortly after moves in with them and, in the parlance most often used in Ohle’s world, they “mate.” However, their mating also has a utilitarian purpose: it seems that neut women give birth almost immediately after becoming pregnant, and she and Wheaton begin to make babies continually, Darleen selling them to the Chinese. They do this in part to raise the money they need to keep the household functioning, but they are able to carry out this rather mercenary task because they are less subject to emotional attachment than humans.
Nevertheless, Darleen and Wheaton do manage to keep the household functioning, although, being neutrodynes, they don’t require the gratitude of either Moldenke or Bertie (a woman Wheaton and Moldenke encounter on their trip south and invite to live with them), who, being human, don’t offer it. While it certainly could not be said that neutrodynes such as Wheaton or Darleen are exemplary moral beings (as defined by human standards to be sure, and perhaps Ohle’s depiction of neutrodynes and the other non-human beings in his fiction alongside human beings and the wreckage they have made of their world has the ultimate effect of travestying those standards), they surely do emerge from The Death of a Character as more resolute and self-possessed than the human characters. As the Chinese gradually become less and less tolerant of the household’s presence on the property—they do not acknowledge Moldenke’s claim on it, but for a while allow Moldenke and company to remain in the cabin—Wheaton and Darleen, with the help of a local hunter, Ernie, who has long sustained the property in the absence of other residents, continue to provide themselves, Moldenke, and Bertie with the means of subsistence.
Bertie is a character first introduced in Motorman, where she is known as “Cock Roberta” and is nominally Moldenke’s girlfriend, even though they are rarely in each other’s company. While in The Death of a Character she does help to maintain Moldenke’s spirits enough for him to persevere for a while, Bertie doesn’t really play a memorable role in the novel, although her abrupt and entirely coincidental encounter with Moldenke as he and Wheaton are on their pedal bus trip south is one of the more absurdly amusing moments in the story:
“It’s me. You haven’t forgotten, have you? We were sweethearts? So odd to run into you after all this time.”
Moldenke turned further despite the pain in his neck. “Roberta. I remember.”
“I go by Bertie now. You don’t look well, Moldenke.”
There are strong women characters in Ohle’s fiction (Moldenke’s mother, Agnes, Ophelia Balls), but Bertie/Roberta mostly just declines along with Moldenke.
That decline structures the novel’s episodic plot. Eventually, the Chinese decide that the four occupants must leave, the cabin itself to be demolished. What’s left of Moldenke’s health begins to ebb. (“I don’t feel good,” Moldenke tells Bertie. “You’ve never felt good,” she replies. “I feel bad, then.”) In accordance with Moldenke’s wishes, before he finally succumbs the others take him to a tree and leave him in its branches. There is little dignity in Moldenke’s death—on the way to the cart for the trip to the tree, Wheaton drops Moldenke into the mud—but being placed in the tree while alive does allow him to avoid the final indignity of Wheaton’s posthumous hatred: neuts despise the dead, and are known to assault dead bodies. “Goodbye, all,” Moldenke calls out weakly, as his own funeral procession walks back to the cabin.
If Moldenke’s death seems to be in some measure an ignominious one, we must remind ourselves that what is depicted in this novel is the death of a character, a character whose fictional life has indeed been extended now over multiple installments over a wide expanse of time, thus perhaps indeed bestowing on him (for both readers and the author) more “life” than a typical protagonist. Readers of all four of the Moldenke books likely would find his death especially meaningful—although that it verges on the farcical will likely not come as a shock or surprise. In this way, at least, The Death of a Character leaves an impression of Moldenke and his world entirely consistent with and representative of their importance in Ohle’s fiction as a whole. Still, the Moldenke books play their part in the formation of that larger work, and thus it would be worth readers’ time to read not only Motorman as well as its direct spin-offs featuring Moldenke, but all of Ohle’s published work—including City Moon (2018), ostensibly a compilation of the issues of a satirical newspaper published for a number of years in Lawrence, Kansas that Ohle co-edited, but that in its remodeled, collage-like form still integrates well with the more conventionally composed novels and novellas to help evoke his surpassingly strange fictional world. Fifty years after the appearance of Motorman, the strangeness only seems all the more believable.
No doubt the most pressing questions concerning the fiction of William Melvin Kelley are not about its merits, which are considerable and readily enough apparent, but have to be those related to the circumstances of its “rediscovery”: Why did Kelley publish nothing after 1970? (His first novel appeared in 1962, and Kelley died in 2017.) What accounts for the long period of neglect his work endured until recently, when all of his books were brought back into print?
For thirty years, only Kelley’s first novel, A Different Drummer, remained in print, but in 2020 the other books, the story collection Dancers on the Shore (1964) and the subsequent three novels, A Drop of Patience (1965), dem (1967), and Dunfords Travels Everywheres, again became available (all published by Anchor Books). The two most recently published (September) perhaps fortuitously give us salient clues in solving the mystery of Kelley’s disappearance from the literary scene. The stories in Dancers on the Shore are realistic and conventional, and while most of them could stand alone as short stories, they really work together in a dual-stranded portrayal of mid-century African-American experience, one strand focusing on the middle class Dunfords and the other on the working class Bedlows (particularly the brothers Carlyle and Mance). “Chig” Dunford and Carlyle Bedlow reappear in Kelley’s subsequent novels (and one story in the book, “The Servant Problem,” along with its white protagonist, reappears as the core focus of dem, which also features Carlyle), although they play much different roles, less clearly acting as illustrative types.
Indeed, although Chig and Carlyle are also the twinned protagonists of Dunfords Travels Everywheres (also published in September), they have largely been in this book separated from the context in which they are introduced in Dancers on the Shore and employed as the performers in a drama of narrative mutation and linguistic experiment. Chig is presented as a student traveling with others in an unnamed European country, notable for practicing a kind of voluntary apartheid whereby citizens divide themselves according to the color of their clothing (and thus it is possible to switch sides). We also become familiar with the other members of Chig’s group, including a white woman named Wendy, with whom Chig is in love. A second part of Chig’s story depicts his return to the United States on board a ship, one of whose other passengers turns out to be Wendy. Carlyle is a streetwise resident of Harlem who is enlisted in a scheme concocted by his dentist to trap the dentist’s wife in the appearance of adultery, so that the dentist might marry his mistress. Carlyle also helps a friend escape the clutches of a figure the friend claims is the devil (but who turns out to be a conman).
As unrelated as these narratives might seem to be, Kelley brings them together through the novel’s most conspicuous feature, a dream language reminiscent of that employed in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, into which both Chig and Carlyle fall, as if they have merged into a collective unconscious evoked by an amalgam of distorted discourse and vernacular African-American speech:
The questjung reminds still. Why, when those off us that gowhine that way, run up Hattanhand, waving aisde Malma-Mae to buy boy bye the bearettes—why do skiers flie and fists flight? How do the tampors at Camp Tiwayo get out the shatgrins and flupipointed hats? When do the balls gangle over the palmbreaker’s bedpost? Why such constarenation?
The novel alternates between the two characters, with intermediate episodes related in this dream language, which ultimately invokes a hallucinatory vision of “New Afriquerque” that seems finally to unite Chig and Carlyle in a transformed racial (un)consciousness.
Readers expecting this novel to further develop the story of the Dunford family as initiated in Dancers on the Shore, or even to similarly expand Carlyle Bedlow’s character as introduced in Kelley’s immediately preceding novel, dem, surely found it puzzling at the least, perhaps literally incomprehensible. Although dem had shown Kelley departing from the conventional realism characterizing his first three books, few were likely prepared for the Joycean extravagance of Dunfords Travels Everywheres (the parallels with and allusions to Finnegans Wake are numerous and explicit). For some critics, while this novel engages with the realities of black life in America just as profoundly as Kelley’s previous work, it evokes its themes with such modernist “difficulty” that the themes threaten to be lost. In these ways Dunfords Travels Everywheres seems to abandon the kind of social analysis to which Dancers on the Shore might be reduced and that arguably represents the approach readers and critics assign by default to the African-American writer. That Kelley spurns this approach could certainly help explain the neglect into which his work fell after the publication of what turned out to be his final novel, as no follow-up book ever appeared.
Yet Kelley’s fiction was never, in fact, either straightforwardly realistic or obviously rhetorical. Not even A Distant Drummer, no doubt his best-known book, could really be described as social realism, despite the fact it is the most direct treatment of racial conflict. The conflict is, at least at first, expressed in the absence of confrontation between blacks and white, in a situation that could be considered fanciful: One of the novel’s main characters, Tucker Caliban, suddenly leaves town (located in an imaginary Southern state squeezed between Mississippi and Alabama) after burning down his farm, prompting most of the rest of black population in the area to exit as well, although their motives remain obscure—at least to the white population—and their destination equally uncertain. Thus the novel’s white characters are left to ponder the ramifications of their own future existence without black people, a prospect that throws them into a kind of confusion that ultimately does prove deadly (in the most provocative twist Kelley performs on the “race novel” as many readers would have known it), but the exodus of the novel’s black characters necessarily makes it a story about the behavior of whites, to whom the behavior of Tucker Caliban, the narrative’s ostensible protagonist, looms mysterious, his “protest” undeclared.
If Kelley’s emphasis on the race consciousness of white people was a daring enough move in the midst of the civil rights era, his second novel, A Drop of Patience, seems to deliberately reject the temptation to follow up A Different Drummer with a more unqualified protest novel. It could be described as a character-driven novel largely restricted to the consciousness of its protagonist, a blind jazz musician named Ludlow Washington. Indeed, so confined is it to Ludlow’s circumscribed verbal awareness that although Ludlow becomes an acclaimed practitioner of the “new music” (presumably bebop), we get very little sense of the actual music he plays—no extended descriptions of its sound and texture, little effort made by Ludlow himself to explicate his own music. Much of the novel, rather, is taken up by accounts of Ludlow’s failures with women—several women enter with him into long-term relationships that all go wrong. Ludlow is essentially portrayed as a radical innocent whose affliction is in some sense a source of his talent but also, given his earliest experiences as a child abandoned to the custody of a group home, has made him ill-equipped to negotiate the expectations of a world where the motives of those he encounters are just as veiled to him as their physical visages.
Ludlow is far from a saint in his own behavior toward the women with whom he becomes involved, but the cumulative distress he suffers when every one of his romantic relationships falls apart is real enough (at one point a breakup actually drives him insane), and the prevailing atmosphere of A Drop of Patience could be called melancholic. In this it differs from A Different Drummer, which, if anything, at times verges on the comic in its tone—it would not be altogether a mischaracterization to say that this novel has a satirical edge to it, except that both the characters (the white characters) and the situation project a kind of absurdism more than they suggest the corrective impulse of satire. Certainly Tucker Caliban seems to have abandoned any expectation that the white people among whom he finds himself are likely to alter their attitudes or behavior in any meaningful way, such that simply leaving his life there behind him is the most sensible action. Aside from Tucker, the black character who has the most substantive role in the novel, Reverend Bradshaw, a civil rights leader from the North who picks exactly the wrong time to arrive in town in an effort to better understand his black compatriots in the South, is also portrayed somewhat satirically, although arguably this only underscores the unequivocal horror of his lynching at the novel’s conclusion.
If all of Kelley’s fiction provides a palpably off-kilter perspective on the narratives they present, dem is the work that could most accurately be called absurdist comedy, although the absurdism is tinged as well with something closer to surrealism, and at times the effect is less comical that just strange. That the wife of the protagonist, a white man named Mitchell Pierce, would give birth to twins, one black and one white, purportedly from different fathers, is certainly sufficiently bizarre, but that Mitchell’s response is to try and track down the father of the black child and persuade him to adopt it only compounds an initially preposterous situation. (Few other people seem to regard Mitchell’s plight as incredible, nor does Mitchell seem to consider his wife’s apparent infidelity with alarm or anger, while the wife believes Mitchell’s indifference toward her only encouraged her to be unfaithful in the first place.) The complications Mitchell encounters when on his quest hardly bring him serenity: at one point Mitchell injures himself and must spend several weeks in bed, during which time he becomes addicted to a daytime soap; later he sees a woman in an Automat (she turns out to be a prostitute) whom he insists is actually a character from the show, and he proceeds to follow her around the city.
This episode, like a previous one in which a man from Mitchell’s office turns out to be a killer, is related and then dropped, with no subsequent references to the events and no indication they have affected the characters in any fundamental way, as if these are lives of disconnected moments, the characters unprepared to think about the consequences of their behavior since their experience consists of random and impulsive acts without continuity or purpose beyond their immediate occurrence. Mitchell Pierce makes strenuous efforts to locate Cooley, the supposed father of the mismatched son, but there is little sense that he understands his own motivations (his marriage is surely over, anyway), nor that he even believes that success in his efforts will solve his problem—he doesn’t really have a coherent conception of what his problem might be. In his portrayal of Mitchell Pierce, Kelley shows white racism to be less the expression of considered beliefs and more the product of disordered impulses, along with a need to dwell in a fantasy version of reality.
We could regard dem as Kelley’s attempt to align his fiction more closely with the increasingly adventurous practices introduced by American writers in the 1970s—from “black humor” to the surrealism of Donald Barthelme to the metafiction of John Barth—practices that would later be loosely affiliated as “postmodern,” although both dem and Dunfords Travels Eveywheres might be more precisely described as “neo-modernist” than postmodern. Indeed, even if a reader might consider dem to be primarily satirical , its satirical message is not so easy to pinpoint, and what lingers most from reading both this novel and Dunfords Travels Everywheres are the unconventional formal and verbal devices Kelley employs, not really any specifiable themes. This is especially true of Dunfords Travels Everywheres, which is clearly an experimental work, albeit the experiment—the novel’s linguistic transformations—is recognizable as variations on the similar dream language of Finnegans Wake. If the expectation of an African-American writer in 1970 was that his work would inevitably foreground “content” (implicitly becoming some variety of protest novel), then certainly it would have been difficult to maintain that dem and Dunfords Travels Everywheres clearly meets such an expectation.
Writers such as Ishmael Reed, of course, also during this time wrote formally and stylistically unconventional novels, but Reed’s books as well exhibited a kind of thematic militancy that few readers could miss, and thus he was able to maintain a published presence in contemporary American fiction, although even Reed has suffered a relative lack of attention, given the level of his achievement. The same could be said now of Percival Everett, whose audacious and outrageously satirical novels do receive their share of critical praise but lamentably remain undiscovered by most readers. Kelley’s final two published books (he did not stop writing, but no further fiction has been posthumously published) show a writer moving increasingly toward artifice and experimentation, and we can only conclude that publishers’ reluctance to accept any subsequent work indicates he was continuing in that direction. Until and unless Kelley’s unpublished work is made available, of course, we can’t be sure, but the impatience with the difficulty of Dunfords Travels Everywheres expressed by reviewers at the time seems a telling sign of the response he would likely have continued to receive.
Fiction that is considered difficult or dissonant is generally deplored (when not simply ignored) by the preponderance of American readers, but it would seem that such fiction is regarded as especially problematic when indulged by an African-American writer. Perhaps this is merely the corollary of the notion that experimental fiction itself is a derogation of the writer’s duty to directly engage with social realities and to be “accessible” in doing so, and thus any writer is subject to this judgment. But surely not all readers and critics who might have found Dunfords Travels Everywheres puzzling or frustrating harbored this sort of intolerance of all norm-defying literary works. It’s just that in Kelley’s case the norm defied goes beyond the craft-based norms associated with the conventional novel. Instead, Kelley violated the cultural norm—held mostly by white readers—attached to African-American writers, the requirement that they be, if not strictly social realists, then writers of aesthetically transparent fiction, the value of which is above all sociological and political. Kelley’s work has such value, to be sure, but none of his fiction, going back to A Different Drummer, has as its purpose to reinforce this requirement: these are novels and stories whose achievement rises first of all from aesthetic invention and surprise, and have a thematic complexity to match their narrative dexterity.
At the moment, literary culture is permeated with calls for the inclusion of multifarious “voices,” voices that have previously not been heard (or not heard enough). If in referring to these voices we mean that more writers who are not white males should be published, these calls are certainly appropriate. By this measure William Melvin Kelley is a “voice” from the recent past to which more readers should attend. But the most common use of the term literally evokes voice as the opportunity to “say something,” often implying that the saying itself is even more important than the “something,” the declaration made or message delivered. Kelley is not a writer inclined either to “speak” in this immediately expressive way or to “make a statement” through the more indirect agency of fiction. He is more interested in the surprising things fiction might be made to do than the platitudinous things it is usually made to say. In addition to a voice, we should grant an African-American writer like Kelley his preoccupation with the medium in which he works, even when this makes some readers and publishers uncomfortable
To even the most well-informed readers of fiction and poetry who reached their age of literary maturity after, say, 1970, Gil Orlovitz is no doubt a mostly obscure, if not totally unknown figure. Orlovitz died in 1973—although he had achieved sufficient obscurity even by then that his body was not actually identified until several months following his passing—after a nearly 30-year career as poet, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist, and while some effort was made in the years just after his death to appreciate and preserve his achievement, in particular through a 1978 special issue of American Poetry Review, in the years since then his books disappeared from sight and his name dropped out from most discussions of postwar American literature.
In addition to pathos there is some irony in Orlovitz’s fading from view, since he became something of a ubiquitous presence in American literary magazines in the 1950s and 60s, although he never really found a place in the most prominent publications, his work generally regarded as overly “difficult” for mainstream tastes. His novels Milkbottle H (1967) and Ice Never F (1970) certainly did little to connect him more firmly to those tastes, as both were conspicuous failures, both commercially and critically, although the critical response was decidedly more positive in the U.K. and Europe, where Orlovitz established a favorable reputation as an innovative successor to the great modernists. Whether these failures significantly contributed to what appears to be a subsequent downward spiral (he had especially invested some hope in the mammoth and ambitious Milkbottle) is somewhat uncertain 50 years later, but by 1973 he was more or less down and out, when he died in what remain rather murky circumstances.
As I look at the whole of Orlovitz’s available work (Tough Poets Press has commendably republished most of the fiction, including the novels, as well as some of the poetry, although much of the latter is still essentially inaccessible after a half century of neglect), it seems to me that the contemporary writer he most closely resembles is Gilbert Sorrentino. Both writers fundamentally were poets, both loosely associated with the poetry of Pound and Williams through the Beats, and both went on to write radically iconoclastic and disruptive fiction, Sorrentino on a more sustained basis and successful enough to maintain a relatively long and productive career. Sorrentino’s fiction is more uninhibitedly comic, ultimately more unruly, than Orlovitz’s, but both Milkbottle H and Ice Never F, like Sorrentino’s novels, are full-on aesthetic deconstructions of novel form, although where Sorrentino reconfigures the form with his own skewed versions, Orlovitz comes in these two works as close to formlessness in fiction as may be possible while still maintaining a connection to the genre.
Both Sorrentino and Orlovitz in their different ways expose “form” in fiction as at best a transitory convenience, a provisional invention always subject to modification and metamorphosis, insisting that the only constant in literary art is the imaginative play of language. Thus it is indeed that fiction has its origin in the poetic impulse, although in Orlovitz’s case this means that his two novels are as idiosyncratic in their verbal manner as his poetry. A newcomer to Orlovitz’s poetry is no doubt likely to identify it as hermetic, or perhaps surreal, but further reading reveals it to be less surreal than radically informal and heterogeneous in its imagery, less self-enclosed than veiled in its personal references, invoking characters and scenes at times parallel with or abstracted from the poet’s direct experience, at others more fully displaced, closer to Orlovitz’s practices as a writer of fiction. While some of Orlovitz’s poetry could appropriately be called “lyrical,” it is a lyricism of strange juxtapositions, colloquial diction, and punning wordplay, not the usual sort of figurative expression.
The most illuminating analysis of Orlovitz’s poetic practice is an essay by Gerald Stern, part of the special section on Orlovitz in the 1978 issue of American Poetry Review. (“Miss Pink at Last: An Appreciation of Gil Orlovitz.”) Stern groups Orlovitz’s poems into three categories—lyrics, sonnets, and satires. To the extent Orlovitz is still remembered as a poet, it is probably first of all for the sonnets, although his most striking use of language is arguably in the satires. (Sterne’s use of this term may be a little too capacious to really encompass all of Orlovitz’s poems outside the lyrics and the sonnets, two categories that themselves have a good deal of overlap.) As Stern himself says, the matter of Orlovitz’s satirical poems arises not from a motivating “idea” but grows “inevitably out of the language”:
As such, there was no satirical “mask”; there was instead the haunted satire-riddled face, or voice, of Gil Orlovitz himself, nothing now standing between him and his subject. I mean myths, yes, “poetic” masks, metaphors, echoes, ditties—because he was a poet—between him and his reader, or among him and his readers, but nothing between him and his subject, no apology or cuteness.
This seems an apt characterization of Orlovitz’s writing (poetry and fiction) in general, not just the explicitly satirical poetry. The poems are indeed strongly engaged with their subjects—often framed as seemingly direct personal experiences, but even those poems employing a persona seem like pretty thinly displaced vehicles for the poet’s experience as well. However, the treatment of those subjects depends not on their inherent lyrical connections but on the verbal connections (or disconnections) the poem leaves in its unpredictable turns of language. The poem “Hymn” begins, “fivethirty a.m./the electricgenerator/started off like an immortal scream,” presenting us with a coherent if clamorous aural image, only to abruptly mix it with a discordant and somewhat grotesque visual one: “whelped in low key and smothered in thin snot/and exploded into a sickbelly throwup of fiery/eels. . . .” After a pause (the first of several caesuras in the poem), as if preparing the reader for the change in orientation and focus about to occur, the poet’s own perspective is suddenly altered: “and there was my woman/my love/outside my window. . . .” But before we can adjust to this strange development, mid-line our attention is again disrupted as the speaker avows that “god in the alleyway/went infinitely upstairs in a striped prisonsuit/of irondrunken firescapesteps. . . .”
Although we return to “my woman/my love” (who beseeches the speaker, “don’t let me die”), by the time we reach the end of this relatively short poem our contemplation of its imagery has become so thoroughly unsettled that it is indeed tempting to declare it a piece of surrealism that deliberately resists our full assimilation—or even to consider it simply incomprehensible. Perhaps we could interpret it as a species of dream—although the poem’s title seems oddly inappropriate for this sort of exercise—or, somewhat more fruitfully, that it represents the movements of the poet’s consciousness at a particularly fraught moment. But while either of these perspectives might afford a kind of cursory coherence to a poem like “Hymn,” since many of Orlovitz’s poems unfold according to similar sort of discontinuous logic (or nonlogic), it seems more applicable to say simply that his poetry consists more in self-contained flares of veiled expression than in the subordination of such expression to the broader development of a poetic “thought,” a more visible unified aesthetic construct.
Probably the most conspicuously indulged display of verbal excess in Orlovitz’s poetry is the frequent use of puns, most often in the satires, as in the very first stanza of “The Rooster”:
the rooster crows in my belly
an old hangout for the billiard cues of the morning
and table-hopping hail hail the ganglias all here
after sunset like a mouthwash last yesterlight
and the white tails of the gorillas on television
and that liberal politician stumping for twilight supremacy
down by that old
shill
stream
As I buttonholed the Ancient Auctioneer
how goes America going
going
But Orlovitz just seems to ignore any strictures against punning as a disruptive or self-indulgent gesture. His poems cultivate the disruption as another turn of language, the introduction of disparate elements to form another brief image—the politician both creating and standing beside the “shill stream”—that reinforces the poem’s reliance on adjacent figurative and imagistic verbal devices rather than continuous elaboration of thought.
The insistent punning in Orloviz’s poetry seems most reminiscent of Finnegans Wake (it and Ulysses continue to be a dominant influence on Orlovitz’s fiction as well), and perhaps the dream language of a work like this could itself be taken as a further analogue to Orlovitz’s practice as both poet and writer of fiction. Certainly the perpetual juxtaposition of disconnected images in the poems creates a background of distortion comparable to dreams, but it seems to me that Orlovitz is less interested in mimicking the unconscious mind that in reorienting the conscious mind—the reader’s. The poems ask us to not presume that the poet’s language is a representation of a recognizable reality, nor even an attempt to cloak that reality in a misrepresentation that might still be reclaimed for interpretation, but is instead a transformation of the poem into a source of reality itself, which the reader experiences through the multiplicity and incongruity of its images.
The discontinuities of Orlovitz’s writing not only undermine whatever expectation we might have that it will resolve itself into a completed thought (a thought about something outside the poem, not a concrete experience of the poem) but makes interpreting a poem’s images as potential symbols mostly fruitless and beside the point as well. Indeed, Orlovitz himself, in an essay entitled “The Ubiquitous Symbol” (What are They All Waiting For?. Tough Poets Press) tells us that “my intent is quite simple: to transmit through images the paradoxes of experienced phenomena.” However, the image “will contain the paradox of the experienced phenomenon, but it will go further: it will try to convert the experienced phenomenon into an experience itself. For me, symbols in poetry do not simply connote reality: my intent is to make the symbols pieces of reality themselves.” Orlovitz may seem to be conflating “symbol” and “image,” but what he is really doing is attempting to explicate the way in which his poems are enclosed in the poet’s digressive language, which seeks to realize the “paradox” that only the verbal turns themselves can signify.
Few writers are as radical in their determination to make language itself both the form and content of the literary work as Gil Orlovitz, in his poetry and his fiction alike. For this reason alone it is perplexing that both the poems—or at least the best of them—and a novel like Milkbottle H have so thoroughly fallen out of the collective literary memory. The latter especially remains a prodigious achievement, as notable a product of the late modern/postmodern sensibility as any written by an American novelist, even Sorrentino, Gaddis, or Pynchon. Perhaps, however, what those writers provide in addition to their formal audacity is something that Orlovitz’s work may be lacking: Each of them substitutes for the more conventional pleasures of traditional narrative fiction—familiar plot devices, recognizable types of characters—alternative formal and stylistic strategies that work to offer not “entertainment” in the most reductive sense of the term, but certainly an experience of aesthetic delight that ultimately redeems whatever “difficulty” the work at first seems to present the reader. Both Orlovitz’s poetry and his fiction may seem to some readers to cultivate difficulty for its own sake.
This impression is no doubt especially strong for the reader who takes up Milkbottle H. It was certainly the impression left with contemporaneous American reviewers, one of whom declared that “it is written in a pseudo-Joycean manner that is relentlessly monotonous, persistently garbled, unendingly devious, a manner that lacks the humor of Joyce’s that unlike Joyce’s obfuscates rather than reveals” (Carleton Miscellany, Spring 1968). This reviewer likely means by the Joyce comparison no more than that Milkbottle H is an unconventional work that lacks the usual markers of a proper novel, markers of plot and character that allow the critic to assess the work according to the usual formulas, without needing to more closely examine the actual strategies the writer might be using, or consider the effect those strategies may be designed to produce. If the critic were in fact interested in pursuing the connection to Joyce, he might have noted that the “manner” of Milkbottle H only superficially resembles the conceit structuring Finnegans Wake: Milkbottle H may indeed depart freely from the constraints of time, space, and consistency of character, but not because Orlovitz is casting his narrative as a dream. Instead, Milkbottle H treats reality as if it already possesses the mutability of dreams.
Thus the reader is given a few ostensibly stable features consistent with most novels’ narrative trajectory—a protagonist, named Lee Emanuel, a setting, in the city of Philadelphia, certain recurring images such as the street sign that gives the novel its title—but those features do not reinforce expectations of conventional development. The novel does loosely follow the life experiences of Lee Emanuel (who is a not very heavily disguised version of Gil Orlovitz), especially focusing on his love affairs and marriages, yet the chronological displacement in the novel’s rendering of his experiences is so thoroughgoing and extreme (in a novel of over 500 pages) that even his identity at times wavers, while the other characters so frequently transmogrify into each other that ultimately it is questionable whether we should finally even identify them as specific characters at all. Given the novel’s disarticulated structure, with its seemingly random fluctuations of scene, we might regard Milkbottle H as a synoptic view of Lee Emanuel’s life all at once, blurring the distinctions of story and character that normally a work of fictions seeks to clarify.
Although the novel can seem largely formless, ultimately we could say that this formlessness contributes to a more encyclopedic kind of form. This promise of an ultimate unity of sorts, however, doesn’t quite provide a plot. Indeed, the novel’s amorphous formal quality serves it best if it deflects the reader’s interest away from the prospect of formal or narrative resolution and draws it to the execution of the discrete episodes in their acts of metamorphosis and displacement. Many of these episodes are in fact very funny, although it is true that Orlovitz is not necessarily trying to be a comic writer. (Sometimes anger seems a primary motivation.) He is instead attempting to be all-encompassing in his accounting of Lee Emanuel’s life (an effort which is supplemented by Orlovitz’s other published novel, Ice Never F, also featuring Lee as protagonist), and this necessarily involves the more embarrassing moments in Lee’s life—such as his cuckoldry, brought about by his unfaithful first wife, or an extended scene (extended in fact throughout the novel) in which Lee attempts to take a bath without letting any of the dirt that he washes off touch him again.
Lee Emanuel is not really portrayed as a foolish or hapless figure, but it would also be difficult to describe him as a “sympathetic” character, either. So fragmented and so subject to shifts in time and perspective is Lee Emanuel as presented in the novel that we can’t finally get close enough to him to really judge him at all. He is not a coherent character of the traditional sort (“flat” and “round” seem beside the point) but is mostly an artifact of the author’s insistently discontinuous method of composition. He is neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic but acts as the novel’s discursive point of attraction around which its narrative transfigurations swirl. To an extent, these transfigurations do serve in their very distortions to illuminate Lee Emanuel’s experience and evoke his personality, although they are not designed first and foremost as an alternate means of creating character. Something like the opposite seems predominantly the case: Lee Emanuel, his perceptions and experiences, is the vehicle for the work’s formal and verbal variations.
Certainly Lee’s experiences include the sort that most readers would expect to find in a more conventional chronicle of the ordinary circumstances of its characters’ lives—which is essentially the focus of concern in Milkbottle H, however much that focus is prolonged beyond the scenic confines of most realistic fiction. Perhaps the most prominent of these would be Lee’s interactions with his family, especially with his parents, as well as his efforts specifically to reckon with the relatively recent death of his father. The glimpses of the parents at various stages of Lee’s life do actually provide a kind of summative account of family influence, although as with all of the other episodes depicted in the novel, it is an elliptical account that asks the reader to hold immediate meaning in abeyance, to allow that a literary work can accrue meaning through juxtaposition and contiguity rather than asserting it through linear progression. Perhaps it is here where Orlovitz’s fiction shows the greatest affinity with his poetry: It is not so much that the language of the novels is conspicuously “poetic” (although neither is the poetry itself poetic in any conventional way), but that image in the poetry and narrative time and space in the fiction are set loose from the imperative to unfold according to a sequential logic that essentially renders literary language invisible. In Orlovitz’s work, language is indeed “real.”
This attribute is also on display in Ice Never F, published after but actually written before Milkbottle H, although its structural dislocations are somewhat less radical, and thus at its briefer length Ice Never F is arguably more accessible. It also involves Lee Emanuel, as well as most of the cast of Milkbottle H. (The two extant novels seem to have been at Orlovitz’s death part of at least a trilogy set in Philadelphia and centered on the life of Lee Emanuel, but the existence of third unpublished novel in the series, while the object of rumors in the years since, currently seems uncertain.) While no conventional work of narrative fiction, Ice Never F nonetheless ventures less into the mixing of identity, and its scenes are often more fully sustained, although still sharing with Milkbottle H a paradoxical kind of narrative scheme, offering a constant flow of narration subject to incessant and unannounced time shifts covering all phases of Lee’s life (including a good deal about his childhood). Also as with Milkbottle H, the actions and events depicted in individual episodes work less as pieces of an ongoing narrative than as the parts of a larger verbal and discursive mosaic registering Lee’s presence in the world that has made him.
Perhaps Ice Never F might serve as a less intimidating introduction to Orlovitz’s fiction (in something like the way Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 has been a more compact alternative to the meganovels), but it is Milkbottle H that will be the center of attention in any widespread reconsideration of Gil Orlovitz’s achievement as a writer (if such a thing could plausibly happen). The poems certainly reward the effort to understand the aesthetic principles motivating their discordant imagery and seemingly capricious wordplay, but it seems unlikely that Orlovitz’s variety of “difficult” poetry sufficiently stands out against, say, the work of John Ashbery or the Language poets to find a place among their company. Milkbottle H, although surely an experimental novel by any definition of the term, is not exactly “postmodern”; it does not interrogate the authority of fiction as a mode of representation but seems more like an extension of the modernist aspiration to represent reality at a more fundamental level than surface realism. In this case, Orlovitz’s novel seeks to eliminate all constraints of narrative and place in the name of a more comprehensive rendition of experience. There really is nothing else in American fiction, that I can think of, at all like it.
Among all writers whose work might be cited as experiments in “hybrid” writing, Thalia Field is arguably the most deserving. Her first book, Point and Line (2000), is a more or less indeterminate synthesis of fiction, essay, poetry, and drama, a fusion of genre that becomes only more pronounced in subsequent books, which also add photos and graphic illustration. Her work still seems classifiable as fiction, but to call individual pieces in her collections “stories” or her full-length work Experimental Animals (subtitled “A Reality Fiction”) a “novel” also seems inexact, if not misleading.
Without question Field’s work can also justifiably be described as “experimental,” if we understand “experiment” in fiction to be the testing of limits: How far can the effort to find alternatives to conventional practice while still retaining a place within a form’s ostensible boundaries be taken? Not only does Field challenge conceptions of conventional literary elements such as plot, character, or setting, but as well the linguistic and notational presumptions of writing itself and the customary logic of reading. In Point and Line we find arrangements of words in almost every possible configuration except sentences organized into traditional paragraphs (including one piece presented horizontally across its pages rather than vertically). Incarnate is perhaps the book that most fully crosses over into poetry (many of the reviews discussed it as “prose poetry”), while Ululu (Clown Shrapnel) most explicitly invokes theater — a performance piece that can’t really be performed.
If in these early works the author seems primarily engaged with the exploration of forms, beginning with Bird Lovers, Backyard (2010), Field’s formal variations are more directly put into the service of a single subject, treated with a fairly obvious polemical purpose. However, while all of the pieces in Bird Lover, Backyard evoke the human relationship with animals (especially birds) and often destructive interactions with the natural world, the focus on animal welfare in this book is more restrained and unobtrusive than it would become later, in some cases secondary to other, more portentous concerns, such as the legacy of American nuclear testing in the Pacific Islands in “Crossroads” or the inflated reputation of the naturalist Konrad Lorenz in “A Weedy Sonata,” which focuses on the implications in his scientific work of his documented Nazi sympathies, which have largely been ignored.
Experimental Animals (2016), an examination of the controversies surrounding vivisection in 19th century France, of course makes animal welfare the explicit subject, but the ingenuity with which this work is constructed allows it to avoid becoming too heavy-handed, although its sympathies with the anti-vivisectionists are clear enough. Moreover, the novel does not treat its ostensible antagonist, the celebrated French anatomist Claude Bernard, as a cartoon villain. While he is certainly haughty and self-absorbed and seems callous in his treatment of his wife (although we must keep in mind that this impression is created from his wife’s point of view, as her narration is the one completely fictionalized element of the novel’s discourse, the rest being an arranged collocation of historical documents), Bernard is not a wanton torturer of animals but a committed scientist who sincerely believes in the scientific importance of his work. His defense of experimentation on live animals is not the rationalization of a singularly cruel man but represents the collective ethical mindset of scientists (at least 19th century scientists), which Field subjects to an exacting critique without sentimentality or rhetorical manipulation.
Field’s latest book, Personhood, like Bird Lovers, Backyard a collection of shorter pieces (but like Experimental Animals with some graphical embellishment), is her most accessible, but also most transparently didactic, the two qualities undoubtedly related. The first four stories in the book especially make the thematic emphasis on animal rights unmistakable. Perhaps if we could say that in this book Field has adjusted her hybrid approach more to the formal procedures of the essay, then the polemical weight of these pieces might seem less heavy. But this is not really the case. While three of the selections (“Unseen,” “Liberty/Trees.” and “Glancing Backward”) might be described as poems, the rest, although as anchored in “reality” as Experimental Animals (one piece is an arrangement of transcripts in a legal proceeding), in their artifice and deployment of point of view are best regarded as fiction. The formal dexterity displayed does provide some welcome variation in a book with an otherwise monochrome thematic character, but it is less formally adventurous than either Point and Line or Bird Lover, Backyard.
The didactic tone of the book is set in the first story, “Hi Adam,” a second-person narrative that follows a visitor to an exotic bird sanctuary around the menagerie. Individual birds (such as Adam, who turns out to be female) become the characters in the story, as we are provided with the parrots’ direct speech and much of their backstories (how they came to be in the sanctuary). The appeals to sentiment are quite strong in this piece: we learn of parrots’ complex emotional lives and the damage done to them by living in captivity as a companion to humans — even when they are ostensibly “well-treated.” The second story, “Happy/That You Have the Body (The Mirror Test)” restages the court case concerning Happy the Elephant, whom an animal rights organization has tried to free from captivity in the Bronx Zoo by having her legally declared a person because she is self-aware, having passed the titular mirror test, and is entitled to release via a writ of habeas corpus. The narrator directly declares outright, abstracting from the legal briefs:
Yet doesn’t the very will to autonomous life grant a right not to be deprived of it? Or suffering at the hand of another confer a right to be relieved of it? Don’t inflicted damages give standing, and once standing, doesn’t a form of law evolve along with every animal who stands in the shadow of those laws?
“Turns Before the Curtain” and “True Crime/Nature Fakirs” shift the focus somewhat from animal rights to the insidious influence of human activity on the equilibrium of the natural environment more generally. The former is a kind of meditation on the phenomenon of “invasive species” cast in the form of a theatrical entertainment, although gradually this conceit recedes in favor of a serial recitation of the history of such invasions: tumbleweed, fungi, feral pigs, rabbits. In all of these cases human intervention is the ultimate source of disharmony, making humans the truly “invasive” species. “True Crime/Nature Fakirs” is a variation of sorts on this same theme, in this case taking the form of an absurdist crime story — complete with invitations to the reader to fill in some of the details — about home invasions by wild animals. “Is it possible they still thought they lived here” asks the narrator at one point, highlighting the artificial conception of “home” employed by the human species, one imposed on all other animals to constrict their own natural rights.
Both of these stories surely employ lively and innovative forms, which again gives them an aesthetic interest that could stand apart from the appeal of the subject, but if anything the uniformity of theme we continue to find in Personhood almost makes the aesthetic invention Fields genuinely displays start to pall, as it seems to be employed as a kind of ornamental contrivance meant to serve the theme but otherwise superfluous. The remaining pieces in the book to a degree modify the prevailing subject — although environmental degradation and its malign effect on animals is still the abiding concern — and ultimately Personhood really does little to detract from Thalia Field’s achievements as an innovative writer. But in this book the unorthodox formal devices seem less adventurous, made more “readable” by subordinating them more obviously to the communication of “message.” Certainly writers can find their way to innovative forms because a subject has in effect compelled unconventional treatment. However, here Field’s already well-established formal virtuosity at times seems imposed on a favored topic.
Which is not to deny that some of the pieces in the book work considerably, even powerfully, well within the more limited play of form and content Field has allowed in Personhood. “Liberty/Trees” is a hybrid Whitmanesque poem/reality fiction organized around the image of the famous Boston “liberty tree,” but it also ranges more widely to relate the story of liberty trees more generally (several other revolutionary-era communities planted trees in commemoration of the Boston tree), and riff on the fate of trees over the course of American history. Most notably, we are given the details behind the spread of the Dutch Elm Disease, which wiped out so many elm trees across the world, as well as the longer-term effects on the environment this blight helped to produce. Neither is the association of trees with liberty dropped from the story, and it concludes in bitter irony with a consideration of a lynching tree:
Men surround, again, a tree, to lose their wits
to drink their brains, to lean against the trunk
to drag a boy over, and beat a man [two names, to cross
out, to map]
a mob enjoys a picnic on the designated day
yelling, lemme see! at others
laughing. . . .
Perhaps “The Health of My Stream or The Most Pathetic Fallacy” best represents both the strengths and weaknesses of Personhood — strengths if you think that works of literature can bring descriptive and narrative specificity to a cause in a way that advances that cause beyond sloganeering, weaknesses if you note that in this piece Field’s formal idiosyncrasies have been smoothed out almost entirely, leaving only a fairly ordinary mode of fragmented narrative. The narrator of the story owns a property through which a stream flows. The narrator uses the stream for irrigation during the dry season, creating a luxurious, plant-strewn riverbank. Soon enough the narrator begins to observe the fish in the stream, deciding to intervene in the water current to create a more flourishing environment for them. This does not work out well, and the narrator learns about the well-being of streams and the dangers of human meddling with nature. The depiction of the ecology of river environments is vivid and engrossing, but, especially in a collection that takes up the same theme more or less repetitively, “The Health of My Stream” is also entirely predictable.
Experimental fiction (or poetry) ought to be predictable only in being unpredictable. Most of Thalia Field’s books have indeed been characterized by their aesthetic ingenuity and variety. She is, in fact a writer about whom it is justified to say that her work so blurs the distinction between forms and genres that it could be regarded simply as an integrated practice of “writing.” But Personhood suggests that her audacious verbal imagination has started to become merely the available instrument for promulgating an increasingly familiar message.
Whether through “stream-of-consciousness” or the less strict adherence to continuous thought of psychological realism, it has become an almost reflexive assumption among many writers and readers that the job of serious fiction is to penetrate the veil of speech and action and reveal the human mind at work. It is often said, in fact (think James Wood), that what separates the art of fiction from all other modern narrative practices is precisely that it is able to “go deep” beneath the surface of ordinary reality and to capture the role of consciousness in processing and shaping that reality, thus enhancing the ostensible story a work of fiction relates with, in effect, an additional story (even the “real” story): an account of the mind attempting to make sense of the world it confronts. But is it really the case that this is therefore the presumed goal that writers of fiction should pursue if they want to fulfill fiction’s artistic mission? Is stream-of-consciousness literary fiction’s consummate achievement?
Reviewers of Mauro Javier Cardenas’s first novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again (2016), as well as his most recent, Aphasia, have referred to his narrative strategy in both as stream-of-consciousness, and it seems an accurate enough characterization. While the term is often used very loosely in describing almost any attempt to suggest “what’s happening” inside the mind of a fictional character, in Cardenas’s case the effort is not just a routine exercise in “free indirect discourse” or the creation of an especially introspective first-person narrator. Each of the novels, most emphatically Aphasia, with its focus on the consciousness of a single character, offers propulsive but meticulous renditions of subjective states of rumination and perception, not always reflecting a habit of strictly linear thinking—indeed, Aphasia really does seem to evoke the “flow” of mental awareness.
The notion that narrative discourse in fiction might be shaped to mimic the human thought process is of course most familiar from the work of the early modernists (perhaps also encompassing Henry James’s emphasis on a “central consciousness”). In its historical context, this strategy can be regarded as part of the broader modernist search for alternatives to the reigning assumptions of realist fiction: Stream-of-consciousness implicitly proposes that reality is to be discovered in its most essential manifestation in the phenomenon of perception, while at the same time in enacts a radical experiment in point of view, effectually inverting the synoptic vision of the third-person omniscient perspective employed by many 19th century novelists, in favor of the subjective outlook of the created character’s understanding. This paradigmatic version of the stream-of-consciousness technique, if not the technique itself, has been profoundly influential in the widespread appeal to what is more broadly called “psychological realism” in the years following on high modernism.
Missing from most criticism considering the devices that produce psychological depth is the acknowledgement that the impression of such depth is indeed an illusion created by the writer successfully exploiting artificial devices. It seems highly unlikely that most—if any—emulations of Mind in fiction actually resemble the phenomena of consciousness as understood by psychologists and neuroscientists. What the best psychological realism brings to the treatment of human thinking in fiction is art, the verbal artistry we should expect from novelists and poets, not some special insight into the way the brain works. Unfortunately, the moves required to invoke the illusion of a perceiving mind have become sufficiently routine through repetition that they have come to function more as shorthand than as expressions of literary art, although for this very reason writers who do manifestly bring literary art to the portrayal of a character’s internal state are perhaps all the more noteworthy. Happily, this is precisely what Mauro Javier Cardenas brings to his account of the experience of Aphasia’s harried protagonist, Antonio.
Antonio is a Colombian-American immigrant writer and database manager attempting to manage several ongoing and overlapping dilemmas in his own life. He is a divorced father of two daughters attempting to preserve a relationship with them by living in an apartment in the same building in which they and Antonio’s former wife live. Although he is trying to maintain a civil relationship with the former wife, he is also seeing a number of (mostly younger) women through a “dating service” called Your Sugar Arrangements but hoping to keep this hidden from the wife. Most stressfully, he is doing his best to avoid thinking about his mentally ill sister, who has fled the institution to which Antonio and his mother have confined her and is currently subject to arrest.
These strands, as well as others related to them—scenes of Antonio speaking to other characters, passages in which he considers other literary works he is reading—braid through and around Antonio’s consciousness, combining seamlessly together in continuous passages of unbroken paragraphs consisting of multiple phrases and clauses fused into a single sentence.
God will punish you, my mother would say, the lord said that what you inflict on your mother and father will return to you fivefold, so now you know what awaits you in life, my god what’s going to happen to me, I would say, what will I have to endure later in life, everything magnified through a child’s imagination, of course, if I’d said to my mother, for instance, I am running away from this house because I can’t stand it here anymore because my parents are unjust, and my mother would reply your words will be punished by god because a son or a daughter can’t say this to her parents, and later the night mares I would have my god what’s going to happen to happen to me, what will I have to endure. . . .
The audacity of this strategy is admirable, but more so is the way in which Cardenas is able to achieve a kind of dramatic momentum while also maintaining clarity and recognition for the reader through syntactical linkages and variations. Readers must slow down while negotiating Cardenas’s prose in Aphasia, but this serves the illusionist goal of mimicking the “flow” of Antonio’s active awareness.
Although the effect the story gains could be called realist, the effort to simulate this awareness seems almost as much a kind of convenient camouflage for an exhibition of the prose style in and for itself. The meandering sentences, approaching a conventional end point but refusing it in favor of the next turn of thought or expository element, might seem reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, or the Garcia Marquez of The Autumn of the Patriarch, or Mathias Enard’s Zone, although Aphasia is more concentrated in its scope, less rhetorical than a Bernhardian “rant” and less dependent on narrative than Garcia Marquez and Enard (even the nested, retrospective narrative of Zone). Discursive as they are, Cardenas’s long sentences in a sense seem more crafted, more deliberately composed to signify the presence of consciousness. If writers such as Marquez and Bernhard are among the writers who first challenged not just conventional narrative form or the protocols of realism but the structural and syntactical expectations of fictional discourse itself, Cardenas is able to adapt their practice to a self-sufficient verbal strategy that uses this disrupted discourse as an available aesthetic resource.
What is most admirable about Aphasia is the way in which he does in fact execute this strategy not just for the purpose of depicting his protagonist’s stream of consciousness but to realize what turns out to be a fully developed and conventionally recognizable crisis narrative in which the protagonist faces the various causes of his crisis and in the end manages, if not a solution to all of his problems, at least a reprieve. Along the way, much is revealed about Antonio and his past, contributing to the creation of a “well-rounded” character, as at the same time we are provided an account of his present actions (principally his interactions with his former wife and daughters, but also his “arrangements” with the women from the dating app) and his ultimate reunion with his sister, who is again being treated for her mental illness. In addition to these channels of Antonio’s direct experience, the separate chapters focused on Antonio’s reading of various works of fiction (presumably as a substitute for his own current inability to write much himself) are integrated into the novel’s narrative structure, incorporated into Antonio’s ongoing reckoning with his circumstances.
Cardenas’s endeavor to create the appearance of stream-of-consciousness, then, is not simply carrying out the imperative to provide psychological depth (to “get inside” for its own sake) but is another means of accommodating the breadth of Antonio’s experience, through something other than usual formal and stylistic conventions. In short, Cardenas uses stream-of-consciousness as an aesthetic device, not as a revelation of the human mind at work. The former, I would argue, is what makes Aphasia most worth the reader’s attention, what signals to us an author taking his medium seriously as literary art, not the novelist’s putative authority to probe the human mind. Indeed, to the extent that the impression of Antonio’s mind at work is largely created by the writer’s loosely joined, onrushing sentences, Aphasia could be called an exercise in style, albeit one absent the standard sort of decorative lyricism that often passes for style in American ficIt is through style that we come to know Antonio, even though the novel is not a first-person narrative. Being a writer, not his routinized job as a data analyst, clearly seems an essential ingredient in his sense of identity, and it is more likely that the novel’s prose is a reflection of Antonio’s own writing than a facsimile of his thought process. Such a presumption is only reinforced by those parts of the book that are not in fact representations of thought but include Antonio’s transcriptions of tapes of his mother speaking, his conversations with former girlfriends, and his reunion with his sister. These sections employ the same elongated sentences as those depicting Antonio’s solitary deliberations, indicating that Aphasia’s focus on the protagonist’s internal state provides a suitable context for Cardenas to effect the sort of prose style he favors, not the subject in service of which a prose style has been fashioned.
Rendering the internal perspective is not finally the most serious task that a work of fiction might undertake. At best it can fool us into believing we have access to a character’s inner self (and by analogy to human inwardness in general). This is not an inconsequential feat, if not the form’s raison d’etre. Even if you think that pulling off such a feat is the preeminent achievement of fiction, however, Aphasia would surely be judged a success in satisfying this goal. But in this case it would hardly suffice in acknowledging either the novel’s ambition or its value to say it is a successful work of psychological realism. Yes, we might say we are provided with a vivid portrayal of Antonio’s state of mind, but that is not really the point. What Cardenas has really done is in a sense to merge style and form so that style actually produces form, a move that is seriously impressive.
Elisabeth Sheffield’s novels feature women who are “difficult” “unruly,” at times resolutely unpleasant–at least to readers who expect a fictional protagonist (especially if it is a woman) to be at heart “likable.” They are otherwise dynamic characters who just don’t observe the rules of propriety or decorum. Stella, one of the protagonists of Sheffield’s first novel, Gone (2003), is a disaffected and dissolute adjunct community college English instructor who goes on a fruitless quest, accompanied by her ex-student lover, to track down what she believes is her inheritance, a valuable Winslow Homer painting. Along the way we read from letters written by Stella’s deceased aunt, Juju, who in her own, different way, is as incorrigible as Stella. The protagonist of Fort Da (2009), a 38 year-old neurologist, relates (in a dissociated and displaced way) an account of her reverse-Lolita obsession with an 11 year-old boy. One of the dual protagonists of 2014’s Helen Keller Really Lived (the other protagonist is a ghost) is a quasi-grifter (she dispenses “healing”) who ultimately becomes involved in a theft of embryos from a fertility clinic.
It is likely that these portrayals against the grain of conventional assumptions about appropriately feminine behavior help account for the dearth of critical attention given to Sheffield’s work in the mainstream literary press (or even what was once called the blogosphere), although the adventurous formal structures of the novels also no doubt bother less adventurous readers and critics as well: it would seem that difficult women require more unorthodox, more ostensibly difficult methods of aesthetic representation to adequately render their experiences. If in Fort Da the main character offers her version of events through a misleading, pseudo-scientific “report” and much of Helen Keller Really Lived comes to us as a ghost’s communications to the protagonist (his ex-wife) through her computer, in Sheffield’s 2021 novel, Ire Land (a Faery Tale), the narrative consists of a sequence of emails written by the protagonist, Sandra Dorn–although they actually come packaged as an edited and annotated manuscript sent to the now deceased Sandra’s daughter.
The status of the text has–or should have–an immediate effect on our perception of the narrative it relates, making it, of course, an inherently unreliable source of truth or accuracy, especially since the story that emerges from Sandra Dorn’s email chronicles (sent as responses to the unknown recipient “madmaeve17”) involves the intercession of Gaelic faeries and Sandra’s transformation into a hare. That story is essentially a picaresque recital of Sandra’s fortunes after losing her home in Denver, where she is a professor of gender studies whose disorderly behavior has left her an older woman without friends or defenders among her colleagues, a wretched outcast. She first finds refuge with a younger sister, and when that ends up badly, she lives for a time with a brother and his girlfriend, but that too comes a cropper. Finally she is granted a reprieve of sorts with an offer of a temporary teaching position in Belfast (where she had lived previously in a relationship that ended badly), and the novel concludes–after a bizarre interlude in the classroom–with the intimation that Sandra has been taken away by the faeries (“[we can] fix ye up and kit you out” the mysterious editor–or some other shadowy figure usurping his role–declares in one of the editorial insertions).
While it is somewhat hard to know how seriously to take all of the particulars of Sandra Dorn’s account (or at least the version we are presented), finally the plot details are less pivotal for an appreciation of the novel than our response to Sandra Dorn and her recital of her life experiences. It would be very easy to recoil from her, given some of the bad behavior to which she confesses (abandoning her first-born son) or we witness her perform (hurling invective at a child), but it’s also hard to not admire the unapologetic candor of her admissions, her acceptance (not without an implicit sneer) of her dismal circumstances after a lifetime spent insisting on personal autonomy and disregarding convention. If Sandra Dorn were the male protagonist (Sandy Dorn, say) of a male-authored novel, he would surely be considered a “rogue,” defiant of norms but to a degree laudable for that. Perhaps such a roguish personality is still regarded as objectionable in a female character, but at this stage in her life, while it might be salubrious for Sandra to be with the faeries in their mounds, that Sheffield affirms as her protagonist such a morally unkempt character as Sandra Dorn in the first place is arguably the novel’s most praiseworthy achievement.
Sheffield would be high on my list of unjustly overlooked writers in current American fiction, but fortunately she is still able to attract publishers to her work. Ire Land would certainly be a good place to start with that work for the uninitiated, but really all of her books are equally worthwhile.
Gabriel Blackwell’s novels could be regarded as exercises in creative collaboration–collaboration with known works and writers, the latter generally dead. Shadow Man evokes the the tropes and the manner of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men appropriates both the work and the life of H.P. Lovecraft, while Madeleine E attempts a kind of synthesis of the criticism relating to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The stories included in Babel (Splice, 2020) are less exclusively devoted to this particular method of metafictional rewriting–although one of them does center around a nonexistent book by Borges that nevertheless shows up on Google Preview–more surreal or absurdist than metafictional, more focused on character and incident (however askew).
Perhaps this difference in tactics is itself a function of the book’s thematic focus on family conflict and especially on the relationship between fathers and sons. Particularly in the first half of the book, the stories depict this relationship as fragile and a source of anguish for both fathers and sons. In the story called “Fathers and Sons,” as well as the one immediately preceding it, “The Invention of an Island,” the situations are especially fraught, as the narrators’ young sons appear to suffer from developmental afflictions with which the fathers clearly have trouble coping even if their distress is displaced, expressed through curious plot devices: In the latter, the narrator’s wife has taken the son and gone, but not before installing mirrors everywhere, leaving the narrator essentially immobilized. The narrator of the former investigates the disappearance of his grandfather, Rudolph Fentz, as related in a curious letter his own father has sent him. “How was I like Rudolph Fentz,” the narrator asks at the story’s conclusion, waiting outside his son’s school. “Was there time to change? Was there really the will to?”
The incongruities in these two stories are only amplified in some of the other stories that are less focused on a father’s anxieties, although images and tropes related to family still predominate. One of the more disturbing stories is “A Field in Winter,” in which a young narrator worries about the status of his “brother,” who appears to be some amalgam of vegetable, alcohol, and “pickled” human. His father is depicted growing (making? siring?) other brothers whom the narrator (otherwise an only child) once found buried in the field of the title. Additionally, the narrator may be a ghost, or his father may be, although at the story’s conclusion they both may be, as they wait in “Mr. Strick’s pavilion,” where the narrator anticipates that “soon something dark will rise up out of Mr. Strick’s pond.” The temptation is to try and make this story make some kind of conventional sense, to interpret the grotesque images and strange goings-on as perhaps allegorical, but it is a surreal sort of symbolism that subverts its own figuration, implying meaning that remains just beyond our grasp.
This impression is left as well in stories such as “Leson” and “The Before Unapprehended,” In the former, the title character, an ex-soldier now living in a “colony,” is feeling “stuck,” stagnant. When doctors are unable to help him (aside from being told that “what is wrong must be inside”) he begins to take a regimen of pills and other “medicaments” that soon start to work: he literally begins to grow from the inside out, his bodily fluids breaking through the skin, depositing “bits that had once been Leson, leavings, outpourings of his slow flood.” Eventually he empties out completely, reduced to the flow of his bodily substances. The story teases us with unexplained details–what is this colony? what are these “passage wo/rms” the characters keep seeing?–but again seem to promise more meaning than they deliver. The same is true of the latter story, narrated by a man marching and reciting verses with a procession of other men (their destination and purpose unexplained), who has noticed that one of their “brothers” has disappeared (although he doesn’t actually know which brother it might be). Thus an element of mystery is set up at the very beginning of the story, but the narrator doesn’t so much solve it as dissolve it in quasi-metaphysical speculation, surmising that the missing brother escaped through a hole in language:
There must be a reality that does not obtain, but does exist, and it seems to me that brother must have found it. What if he found a way to follow the steps given by these subverses instead of the steps the rest of us were taking, the steps given by the verses being recited? Where would such a path lead? Wouldn’t it take him into regions that exist in the same way undreamt daydreams exist?
Blackwell’s stories are elusive enough that perhaps it is unwise to extrapolate from any specific passage to a broader generalization about his assumptions, but perhaps this narrator’s speculation concerning the whereabouts of his missing companion does provide a perspective that can help orient us to the particular (but satisfying) kind of strangeness we find in Babel. Reading these stories, the world they invoke does start to seem like “a reality that does not obtain, but does exist”–at least here, in this reading experience of them. And it is as if the stories as a whole have indeed exited, if not language itself, then through a hole in the conventional representation of “reality” in literary language, emerging into “undreamt daydreams” (or nightmares) that Blackwell has obligingly gone ahead and dreamt for us.
It is probably accurate to call Blake Butler a “stylist,” although what his fiction offers is not “style” of the kind usually signified in discussions of literary writing: we find little evocative sensory description, few flourishes of figurative language, not much careful balancing of sentence types and lengths to achieve a “poetic” rhythm. Although his new novel, Alice Knott, at first seems somewhat more straightforwardly expository, soon enough we begin to get the kind of serpentine prose we have come to expect in a Butler novel, as when Alice seems to overhear her own thoughts in a synesthetic rush:
And when I looked in search of any world that might remain, I saw the sound of all time become broken, open everywhere around, the glass of endless windows, mirrors sight on sight, which through its rupture of my perspective I could then begin to hear another kind of speaking, the loudest, thickest voice I’d ever felt, comprised from all the people I’d ever known, each of them speaking at the same time, their choir brutal and unrehearsed, spreading through me with its sick yearning. . . .
As the novel progresses and Alice seems to lose control of her perceptions altogether, this sort of overflowing discourse becomes even more pronounced. (Readers of Blake’s previous novel, The 300,000,000, will surely find it familiar.) Such a sentence as this might be called “meandering,” but it is not so much that the language rambles — indeed, Butler’s prose conveys the impression that each turn of thought is syntactically appropriate and exact in meaning — than that it is actively engaged in an earnest effort to attain precise expression, although in Butler’s case precision does not involve specificity of detail but the proper level of abstraction. This does not in itself make his prose style less effective, but it does signal a different conception of “style” and requires a different kind of response from the reader.
The more abstract language arises in part from the emphasis Butler gives to depicting his characters’ states of mind, their processing of experience, rather than external activities rendered from outside or in addition to subjective awareness. This strategy has become even more acute in its stylistic ramifications in his most recent work, as both The 300,000,000 and now Alice Knott focus on characters whose mental status is questionable to begin with and who are to one extent or another portrayed as increasingly unstable as the narratives in each novel proceed. In effect, the reality of their uncertain cognitive states is evoked realistically — not by artificial devices meant to suggest mental breakdown, but by translating it into language that approximates it as accurately as possible. Thus even though The 300,000,000 presents the “thoughts” of both of its protagonists as already expressed in writing — in the case of Gretch Gravey, the putative serial killer whose actions are the foundation of the novel’s psychedelic narrative, in a notebook found at the scene of his crimes, whereas Flood, the police detective, leaves behind a heavily annotated case file — it is writing clearly meant to reflect these characters’ disordered way of comprehending the world.
Butler’s style seemed to embody a different sort of ambition in his earliest work. Although still often accumulative and elaborate, the sentences in books like Ever (2009) and Scorch Atlas (2010) seemed more crafted for their sonic effects in the “consecution” mode of writers like Gordon Lish and Gary Lutz, as in this passage from Ever, Butler’s first published book:
Meanwhile, in the outside during certain weeks the air would fold. The light comprising certain sections of certain rooms would burst or bubble. Strings of night might gleam of glass. The dirt would swarm with foam. . . .
These early works (including the novels There is No Year (2011) and Sky Saw (2012)) are somewhat more plot-oriented, at least in the sense of focusing on things that happen, although the “things” are often bizarre and irreal. They do introduce images and motifs that will continue to be central to The 300,000,000 and Alice Knott, in particular dysfunctional families and creepy houses. But the emphasis over the course of Butler’s published fiction has shifted from an imagistic sort of surrealism to, paradoxically, perhaps, a form of psychological realism by which the often hallucinatory images and phantasmagorical actions are presumably accurate renditions of the characters’ mental states.
However, it might be said that in The 300,000,000, at least, such a description of the novel’s method is complicated by the extreme unreliability of its narration. Not only are there two different sources of plot and perspective, Flood and Gravey, but we have Gravey’s account only as a part of Flood’s “report,” and within the case file itself there are annotations appended, additional information purportedly given by a number of the boys living in Gravey’s house, his acolytes or accomplices, as well as brief notes added by Flood’s colleagues. Thus the point of view is dispersed among a variety of characters, and finally there is no way to definitively determine either that Flood is actually Gravey’s creation, a part of his presumed psychosis, or perhaps that Gravey is in fact a figment of Flood’s imagination, a product of his own psychological breakdown. That this dense (stylistically and structurally), 450-page novel might finally be just an elaborate fever dream (although whose fever is unclear) is actually one of its most oddly compelling features.
Alice Knott isn’t, it seems to me, as formally elastic in this way as The 300,000,000. It is more directly a representation of mental instability, and for that reason is less engaging than the previous novel. Although there are hints — sometimes more than hints, as when Alice is whisked away by a mysterious man who tells her, “At this point, non-vital visibility is all but locked down, at least until the system has regained stability” — that Alice is a subject in some sort of cognitive behavioral study or experiment, they are vague enough that they might be manifestations of the noise roiling around in her head. When, at the novel’s conclusion, we are shown a video in which an aged Alice Knott is seen lying on a table, wires connecting her head to a video monitor relaying images of her life, the scene seems less a revelation that the novel we have read may be a video projection of the confusions swirling around in Alice Knott’s mind (or maybe one that creates such confusions), or a confirmation that video/digital technology has come to control our very powers of cognition, than simply a continuation of the novel’s dramatization of the turmoil within, of the dislocations of memory and perception that seem to define Alice Knott as a character, now perpetually on display.
There is even some ambiguity about the character’s exact identity. Is she in fact “Alice Knott,” the apparent wealthy heiress whose priceless paintings are being stolen and destroyed, the act of destruction being circulated in a viral video that begins to cast suspicion on Alice herself as the possible perpetrator? Or is she really “Alice Novak,” an artist whom, we are told, Alice Knott closely resembles, and who seems to the sort of artist who might undertake a video incineration of a de Kooning painting as a form of performance art? (Alice Knott watches a news broadcast reporting Alice Novak’s suicide, at the scene of which “several dozen” of her own artworks are discovered “burned on site.”) The same uncertainty holds true for Alice Knott’s memories of her own family: Does she really have a brother named Richard who is a convicted serial killer? If so, why can she not at first summon a memory of his presence, and why in the subsequent memories she does finally recall is he such a blurry and fluctuating figure? Did Alice in fact have two fathers, one who disappeared and became her “unfather,” and one who suddenly shows up at some point after, but whom Alice never really accepts as genuine?
Yet finally these unanswered questions only mark the novel more firmly as a portrayal of psychological disturbance. The discontinuities and the ultimate disunity of Alice Knott’s consciousness may make her seem fractured and adrift, but that may indeed be her condition, however removed from ordinary conceptions of character that might make her. More broadly, to the extent the novel subverts expectations of unified character, the radical displacement of Alice Knott’s personality allows Butler ultimately to present a sort of synoptic vision of consciousness at large, even though there are of course peculiarities in Alice Knott’s life story and circumstances that provide the vision with specificity. But it is here, at the intersection of Butler’s style and the heterodox psychological realism he invokes, where the most severe problem with both The 300,000,000 and Alice Knott. Butler’s treatment so strenuously seeks to evoke the erratic awareness of the characters with its sinuously articulate language that, at the length at which such episodes of streaming memories and distorted perceptions are presented, Butler’s prose simply becomes wearisome.
This problem is less acute in The 300,000,000, its extended length notwithstanding, because Gretch Gravey is such a creepily compelling character, although Flood’s manifold excursions into a phantasmic netherworld in the novel’s second half do indeed eventually begin to pall. In Alice Knott, however, the practice does not adapt well to the novel’s protagonist, who is not exactly an uninteresting character but such a nebulous one that neither her family drama nor her status as a wealthy art patron (if that is indeed her status) really rise above the generic, however much the discontinuities of memory and the ambiguities of her present circumstances render her story inscrutable. The story itself is not interesting enough to be a satisfactory substitute for a protagonist who consistently stimulates the reader’s attention, particularities of plot notwithstanding. This is not to say that Alice Knott holds no interest as a character, just that such interest is not especially well-served by Butler’s stylistically elaborate form of psychological realism.
Alice Knott begins in a much more restrained style that more or less directly relates the robbery of Alice’s art collection and the ensuing video showing the destruction of de Kooning’s Woman III. The art heist/media frenzy plot continues as a kind of side show feature for a while (leading to fears of an art-despoiling “plague” that eventually draws in a concerned President of the United States), but by the novel’s end this subplot has largely faded away in favor of almost exclusive focus on Alice Knott’s deteriorating state. In this way the novel is similar to The 300,000,000, where by the narrative’s close Gretch Gravey’s alleged serial killings are clearly no longer part of the story and attention is likewise given over to Flood’s descent into a maelstrom of delusions. Still, the specter of Gravey’s deeds and his mysterious muse, “Darrel,” take possession of Flood’s being thoroughly enough that Gravey continues to be a presence in the novel, while whatever initial salience cultural attitudes toward art is meant to exhibit in the story of Alice Knott finally seems obscure.
In both novels, a central conceit that does help to bring additional unity and thematic implication to each is the interaction between the main characters and their homes, which manifest themselves to the characters in a physical way that might recall the emblematic setting of the venerable “old dark house.” A preoccupation with homes and houses is evident in almost all of Butler’s fiction, and almost always an uncanny and at times even sinister atmosphere pervades these houses, sometimes going beyond atmosphere to, indeed, supernatural transfigurations that appear to corporeally embody the psychological conditions of its inhabitants. Flood finds himself trapped in the soulless underworld concealed beneath Gravey’s death house, encountering only phantoms conjured by his own mind. Alice Knott has never felt entirely comfortable in her house — even though (perhaps because) it is her childhood home — and finally the geometry of the house seems to shift around her as if in response to her own shifting memories.
This focus on Americans’ precarious relationship to “home” may be the most singular element in Blake Butler’s work so far. The effect produced in The 300,000,000 is frightening, if ultimately exhausting. In Alice Knott, the motif helps add resonance to the novel, but as well the limitations of Butler’s now habitual formal and stylistic maneuvers are beginning to seem more apparent.
Enacting the Problems of Language
Since the mid-1990s, after the waning of postmodernism, as well as the minimalist neo-realism that succeeded it, no comparable practice has really emerged that aims to revise and reconfigure wholesale the formal and stylistic moves with which writers have been working. There has certainly been increasing emphasis on diversity and inclusion in recent American fiction, but generally this is a diversity of themes or perspective that does not privilege formal or stylistic variation, at least not for their own sake.
Still, there continue to be writers who challenge expectations and deviate from established norms, writers who risk confounding readers by seeking out less familiar methods and unaccustomed arrangements, whether of language or form. If there has been an approach that more than any other identifies such writers, without quite acquiring a particular nomenclature to unite a fairly disparate group of writers, it is a broad tendency to fantasia or surrealism, although in some cases the writer indeed favors outright fantasy through something close to fairy tales, as in, say, some of the stories of Aimee Bender, while in others the ultimate effect might more accurately called surrealist, or perhaps absurdist, more reminiscent of the fiction of George Saunders.
These two writers might in fact be cited as the most recent progenitors of this mode of non-realist fiction, presaged in their early books The Girl in The Flammable Skirt (Bender) and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (Saunders), although they were of course not the first modern writers to depart from the canons of realism, nor are they necessarily the primary influences on all of the later writers who have worked in this mode. Some of these writers seem to be influenced by fantasy and science fiction, producing work that is more a hybrid of genre fiction and literary fiction, with some of the tropes and imagery of the former but the attention to language and broader thematic focus of the latter. But while the work of both Saunders and Bender signaled a shift among non-genre writers to something like fantasy, and even if their fiction as well as the subsequent fiction they influenced clearly enough has something “surreal” about it, finally neither of these terms quite adequately names the practice that has come to characterize much of the more adventurous American fiction in the first part of the 21st century.
This problem of fully accounting, at least in critical terms, for the strategies at work in certain works of otherwise indisputably unconventional fiction seems to me particularly acute when considering the work of Christian TeBordo, a writer well enough known to dedicated followers of small presses, but whose name is probably less familiar to readers who tend more strictly to the mainstream. Since 2005, he has published four novels and two collections, the latter of which includes his newest book, Ghost Engine (Bridge Eight Press). A survey of his published books would suggest an evolution of sorts from the first three (The Conviction and Subsequent Life of Savior Neck [2005], Better Ways of Being Dead [2007], and We Go Liquid [2007]), all novels), to the most recent (in addition to Ghost Engine, the novel Toughlahoma, published in 2015, and the collection The Awful Possibilities, from 2010). The early novels conjoin elements of black humor and a kind of farcical absurdism: much about the actions, behaviors, and situations in these novels is strange and at times disturbing, but there is also in all three of them an underlying spirit of slapstick comedy that in a sense still grounds the characters and events in a recognizable reality–the reality encompassed by the act of comic exaggeration.
The most disturbing of these might be We Go Liquid, and the strangest Better Ways of Being Dead (which finally seems like a puzzle without an obvious solution), but it may be Savior Neck that enacts this non-realist realism most deftly. Resembling a portrait of a decayed town in upstate New York akin, perhaps, to an early Richard Russo or Russell Banks novel but as if written by Terry Southern or Thomas Pynchon, the novel depicts the inhabitants of Discord, New York, specifically the denizens of the Thirteenth Step tavern, which includes Savior Neck, who also lives in a room above the tavern. Savior Neck is introduced to us first as a young boy, as he wakes up one morning to “the smell of his own death,” and when we flash forward to the much older Savior with his “wrinkled gray face and thin white hair,” he does indeed look “except for the puddle of drool that had slipped from his mouth, like a dead man.” In fact, he’s “been a dead man for years.”
Soon after, Savior Neck has a run-in with the local policeman, “Officer Longarm,” with whom Savior continues to clash throughout the novel, leading to various encounters with characters such as Harold Esquire, Esq., Penny Dreadful, Richie Repetition, and Grace X. Machina. The plot, such as it is, is as preposterous as the character names, involving mistaken identities, a murder for hire gone wrong, and a search for the owner of a pair of pumps, culminating in the demise of the Thirteenth Step in a conflagration. We are always seemingly on the verge of a revelation that will conjure sense out of the contorted narrative, but it never arrives. This is of course deliberate, as the novel is essentially an extended exercise in controlled absurdity. Inevitably we do feel some sympathy for the sad sack Savior Neck, but his misadventures are not of the sort to be resolved into a final retrospective concordance. They are to be appreciated for their very absurdity, acknowledged as misadventures with their own kind of outlandish integrity.
Something similar can be seen in Better Ways of Being Dead, although if anything the incongruities here are even more emphatic, even more directly enlisted as a structural principle. The novel begins conventionally enough as the story of a college student taking a class he knows little about in order to maintain eligibility for insurance (he suffers from severe dermatitis that makes him break out in terrible skin lesions). But it doesn’t take long for him (and the reader) to discover that both the students in the class and the professor behave oddly indeed, and the story itself soon becomes just as odd. However, again it is an oddness that, perhaps because it is allied with a mystery plot of sorts, seems to promise the telling details that will provide the key to the characters’ puzzling behavior and the story’s contradictions and discrepancies, yet even when the contents of a mysterious box (which must surely hold the key) are revealed, they really only intensify the confusion–unless of course the solution to the mystery is simply that there is no mystery.
We Go Liquid is a more accessible story that like Better Ways of Being Dead begins with a recognizable situation: a boy coping with the death of his mother, as well as his father’s own inability to cope with it. But the situation only deteriorates after the boy receives a spam email appropriating his mother’s name as the sender and responds to it as if he is communicating with his dead mother. Further emails arrive offering various products which the boy purchases, in particular a penis enhancer called Cocksure. Meanwhile he also develops a crush on a girl who lives across the street, whose later departure from town seems to finally take the boy across a line into outright delusion–as opposed to the almost willed naivete with which he has previously warded off the latent desperation of his circumstances. This novel leans less on the absurdist or the surreal than the first two (although it is surely strange enough), but while this perhaps makes We Go Liquid the least “weird” of TeBordo’s books–it actually winds up being a rather poignant account of adolescent trauma–it doesn’t really presage the direction his subsequent writing would take.
The only novel TeBordo has published since We Go Liquid has been 2015’s Toughlahoma, and if the former is among the writer’s books the most explicable as a work of fiction enlisting the traditional elements of fiction in a more or less customary way (although we may conclude that the protagonist is somewhat of an unreliable narrator), the latter might be the most wholly subversive of traditional practice. There are characters in Toughlahoma, but they are mostly deliberately cartoonish figures whose actions work to fulfill the book’s primary ambition, which is to imagine the land of Toughlahoma itself, a primordial realm situated among its rival states, Roughlahoma and Ughlahoma (Toughlahoma is the land-locked of the three). The story of Toughlahoma begins with its origins in the “Time of Truth,” when “a man could kill a man and that man be killed, and the killer be a killer in truth, in Truth” and loosely (very loosely) chronicles the attempt by Jesus Cristal (later also called Jesus Crystal and Jesus Chrysler) to fulfill the prophecy of the Toughlahoman holy book, Toughlahoma: You Are There!. The quest mostly fails, although Jesus Cristal manages to liberate himself after a fashion, while the Toughlahomans are more or less left to their primitive ways (which they mostly enjoy, anyway).
Such a synopsis hardly captures the demented spirit of the novel, however, which combines mythological fable and anachronistic social satire: While the guardians of the lair of the Great Teen Spirits, monstrous teenagers to whom unlucky Toughlahomans are fed, are busy at the local community center, Jesus Cristal enters their lair and slays a Spirit. A consultant (named Nicky) lays out an elaborate plan to conquer Toughlahoma, not through military action but through “I. Capitol Expansion (CE) II. Horizontal Exegration (HE) III. Strategic Disinformation (SD).” (Nicky advises against building more condominiums, since they won’t help procure “exponentially more cheddar biscuits and crabcakes.”) Near the end of the novel, the Toughlahomans win a decisive battle against the Ughlahomans by burning down a brand new Applebees. (“We didn’t know much about Applebees, but we knew it was an Ugly thing”).
Among the incongruities characteristic of this novel are the frequent references to “the problem of language,” especially as formulated by the philosopher Mediocrates. Dispensing wisdom at the community center, he declares that “The problem of language. . .cannot be expressed, much less solved, in language, any more than a broken bone can be mended by the breaking of more bones.” Asked how it can be expressed, Mediocrates takes the questioner to the roof of the community center “and shoved him over the edge. I have splattered your brains on the pavement. . .My saying this is an enactment of the problem of language.” Language inherently distorts the reality it is meant to be representing, so that a project to enlist language for the purposes of “realism” is a hopeless task (although Mediocrates concedes that the expression of the problem perhaps “could be hinted at with language”). With Toughlahoma, TeBordo presumably is in part affirming an aesthetic philosophy in which material reality remains a necessary predicate that nevertheless cannot be delineated in itself, making reality instead a source for imaginative transformations enacted in language.
Such transformations are arguably most impressively achieved in TeBordo’s two collections of short fiction, The Awful Possibilities and his most recent book, Ghost Engine. These stories are in general just as committed to imagination and invention as responses to the “problem of language,” but they are also more sober in subject than the burlesque myth and legend of Toughlahoma allows. “SS Attacks,” the very first story in the book, depicts a frustrated teenager (from Brooklyn, Iowa) fighting the impulse to carry out a school shooting, while “The Champion of Forgetting” is the young narrator’s account of his kidnapping and coerced participation in an organ harvesting operation. Other stories involve car accidents, the fashioning of a pair of gloves out of human skin, and various forms of anomie and social isolation. Many of the stories hover in an uncomfortable zone somewhere between absurdity and pathos so that, although none of them depart from ordinary reality as arrantly as Toughlahoma, the dominant tone throughout the book is one of lurking menace, disorder and chaos barely held at bay.
This effect arises less from what the characters do or say, from what explicitly happens, than from what remains latent but unknown: the awful possibilities. The situation described by the narrator of “The Champion of Forgetting” seems almost inexplicable until we suddenly realize the horror that is occurring as if in slow motion, a horror the narrator cannot directly articulate. Something similar is achieved by “Moldering,” in which the narrator’s account of his trip (at midnight) to the tanner’s for a new pair of gloves seems weirdly genteel until he finally encounters the tanner and ultimately commits a casually savage act. In this story the narrative manner acts as a distancing device that reinforces the shock value, and the adventurous formal variety in many of the other stories (e.g., the second-person narration of “SS Attacks”) also create distance–or at least a kind of dynamic uncertainty–that heightens the unease they gradually induce.
Ghost Engine more closely resembles Toughlahoma in its use of non-realist strategies, but it does seem like a more miscellaneous collection than The Awful Possibilities, not as unified in theme and approach. On the other hand, the balance between consequential subject and humorous treatment lends more to the latter in this book, even if the humor can be bleak. In “Hard Times at Galt’s Gulch,” the humor is in part ostensibly at the author’s own expense, the story being in the form of an email sent by an old girlfriend to “TeBordo.” Before taking up the real subject of her email, the girlfriend observes: “You were going to go to college, move to the city, become the voice of your generation. How’d that work out, TeBordo? I’ve seen the Amazon rankings, read the reviews.” The email relates the story of the girlfriend’s brother and his unfortunate infatuation with Ayn Rand, which leads to serial failure and eventual residency in the sister’s basement. Conceding her brother is a loser, she nevertheless exhorts Tebordo to draw attention to his fate: “Copy and paste this motherfucker into one of your books, a mediocrity within a mediocrity.” A brief epilogue from Tebordo explaining why he has done so extends the story into something like autofiction (most likely pseudo-autofiction).
A darker, finally almost maniacal story is “Bear Country,” in which a chronically depressed father determines he will not teach his young son a children’s book version of reality but will illustrate the truth about life early, before he can disillusioned about it. The effort–the father puts on a panda suit and menaces the child–traumatizes his son, but the father is only further resolved: “I love my son with such a deep, dark, ghastly love, that when I die, hopefully when he is much older than I am now, for his sake, not mine, I will haunt him like some specimen from the deepest, most gorgeous pit of hell.” A more purely comic story is “Whose Bridesmaid?,” a mock scholarly article examining the place of a band called Bridesmaid in the annals of black metal. Ostensibly a Christian rock band, Bridesmaid becomes an icon of black metal when a famous metal musician, “Gaahl” of the band “Gorgoroth,” is sent into a frenzy by a Bridesmaid song, viciously attacks a man, then “drained his blood into a chalice and sipped it contemplatively.” The story seems both a fan’s tribute to black metal as a youthful enthusiasm and a send-up of the genre’s ultimate silliness.
This story as well shares with several of the other stories in the book, and in TeBordo’s fiction as a whole, an immersion in American popular culture, frequently satirical (and caustically so) although not just in mockery of its shallowness or absurdity but in recognition of the way it accurately gauges the shallowness and absurdity of American life. Such attention to popular culture now perhaps seems a commonplace in contemporary fiction, but as recently as the 1970s writers such as Ann Beattie and Bobbie Ann Mason were still criticized for too blatantly referring to “brand names” and other supposedly trivial features of ordinary life, and a story such as Donald Barthelme’s “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph” could seem an audacious crossing of boundaries in its appropriation of comic book characters. Tebordo’s invocation of pop culture iconography does not at all seem exploitative–the author’s interest in black metal and the logistics of fame whoring as cultural barometers seems authentic enough–but one could still wonder whether the humor of recognition in stories about The Ultimate Warrior and characters from The Cosby Show will remain as compelling for future readers as it might be now.
Arguably the most interesting stories in Ghost Engine are those that continue to develop the irrealism employed in Toughlahoma. “The Wrong Mother” is narrated by a mother who watches her twin sons try to launch a flying machine, and when they succeed, rather calmly settles on a plan to get them back down (which she won’t carry out until the next morning). This story could perhaps be called whimsical, although its humor comes from the annoyance the mother feels at having to deal with such recalcitrant children. But especially notable are the four connected stories (interspersed throughout the book) featuring two characters named Frag and Watt and their ongoing work on the titular ghost engine. Mostly the two (who may be robots) engage in abstract discussions about semantics or existentialism (at one point discussing Christian TeBordo), while periodically pausing to inflict violence on each other. Only occasionally do they refer to the ghost machine they are trying to build, so that it remains a mysterious entity the nature of which is left unclear. What is ghostly about it? (It seems quite material, its “bolts tightened” and its “surfaces sparkling.”) By the end of the final story, Watt has been eviscerated (although he has no internal organs, it turns out), and Frag is dismembered and tossed into the ghost engine in an effort to see if that will animate it. Watt jumps in after, but apparently to no avail.
It is difficult to put a critical name to the strategy at work in these stories that would altogether capture the aesthetic effect created. Neither “surreal” nor “absurd” will suffice, since both of those terms more precisely identify previous literary movements with definitive assumptions and distinguishing features Christian TeBordo’s work doesn’t necessarily share. Simply to declare that this fiction uses “non-realist” devices leaves important underlying motives obscure. Is this an attempt to repudiate realism? To mock it? To achieve a kind of realism by other means? Perhaps it is a strength of TeBordo’s fiction that it does all of these things, in different instances or simultaneously, but criticism still needs to catch up to the variety of non-realist practices found in adventurous fiction in the early 21st century, especially as offered by independent presses.
Although the term “postmodern” is still used often enough by critics as a convenient label for certain works of fiction that are considered out of the “mainstream” of current literary fiction, and descriptions of new books ladled with adjectives such as “unconventional,” “original,” or “innovative” are quite common, the era of “experimental” postmodern American fiction—when experimental fiction could be said to have any kind of real cultural salience—was in fact relatively short-lived: 10-15 years, from the mid-1960s to about 1980. This is not to say there were no formally or stylistically adventurous writers of fiction before this period, nor necessarily that no comparably adventurous writers at all have appeared in the years since. But writers willing to jettison all assumptions about the formal properties of novels and attempt building something entirely new in their place have been relatively few and far between in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first two of the twenty-first.
One such writer, however, is Evan Dara. (Or at least the writer presenting his work under that name, since so little is known about him beyond the work—he makes the elusiveness of Thomas Pynchon seem like a craving for celebrity in comparison—we can’t be sure this is other than a pseudonym.) Dara’s first novel, The Lost Scrapbook, was published in 1995, and has been followed by two other novels, The Easy Chain (2007) and Flee (2013), as well as a play, Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins (2018), all of them published by Aurora, a press apparently owned and administered by Dara himself. All three of the novels challenge the expectations of readers accustomed to fiction that observes the post-postmodern consensus that novels need not scrupulously follow entrenched conventions of linear narrative and the kind of expository prose associated with it, but should otherwise still offer readers some recognizable variant of the form historically tied to works of fiction: an invoked world in which created characters engage in observable human activities (even if they might be subject to various departures from strict realism), activities that follow some version of narrative logic. Dara’s novels, especially the first two, instead present us with disembodied voices in place of characters and events that seem to arise arbitrarily and to bleed into each other without warning—or any immediately apparent purpose.
If nothing else, it is obvious once one begins reading these novels that the author wants to subvert any presumptions we might have that the novel we are reading will bear enough family resemblance to those we have read before that it will be explicable according to the “rules” we believe we have learned about how novels should proceed. Clearly it intends to replace those rules with others applicable only to this work (although any one of Dara’s novels certainly does then provide direction in reading the others), rules that we will have to learn as we read. In this way, Dara’s novels work like all of their predecessors in the lineage of “experimental” fiction, presenting the reader with a heterodox formal arrangement the reader must learn to assimilate by attending closely to the new patterns the work establishes as alternatives to those patterns more conventional fiction has predisposed us to expect. Indeed, in the challenge they pose to the assumption that the conventional patterns define the novel as a form, Dara’s novels are arguably the most radically disruptive books in American fiction since, say, Gilbert Sorrentino in a work like Mulligan Stew (1979).
The most formally radical of the novels is The Lost Scrapbook. The initial readers of this book might understandably have thought it is in fact essentially formless, although eventually the formal logic of the novel does become more discernible. The first half or so of what is a very long book (a little under 500 pages) seems to consist of a series of disconnected episodes (some longer than others) leaning heavily on interior monologue and introducing “characters” whose relationships to each other are not immediately apparent. Moreover, these self-standing scenes don’t merely succeed each other but at times appear to merge, one dissolving into the other, as if the novel’s discourse represents a radio set whose dial is being tuned, bringing in one station before moving on to another. Ultimately we reach a program to which presumably the search has been dedicated: most of the remaining part of the novel focuses on the plight of Isaura, a town in Missouri on which an ecological catastrophe has been inflicted by a chemical company that has exploited the forbearance of the community for many years (as the narrative reveals).
This relatively extended narrative focusing on the depredations of the Ozark Chemical Company and their effect on the citizens of Isaura—by no means related in straightforward expository prose but narratively coherent nevertheless—of course inevitably prompts the reader to ponder the structural connections between it and the concatenation of voices and episodes preceding it. In the only contemporaneous review of The Lost Scrapbook (really the only review of Dara’s work to appear in a “major” American publication—the Washington Post—at all), Tom LeClair suggests that all of the prior voices are displaced victims, “literal and figurative,” from the calamity at Isaura. Perhaps this is a fruitful way of considering the structural integrity of The Lost Scrapbook, although too much emphasis on the “literal” connections among the characters and events threatens to impute a more seamless structure to the novel than it actually contains: to an extent, its most radically adventurous quality is the absence of an ultimate integration of its parts, the possibility that a novel might still achieve authentic thematic and aesthetic coherence even when connections are left unmade and conventional unity disregarded, even deliberately undermined.
This sort of comprehensive fragmentation makes The Lost Scrapbook more audacious than most of the other works over the past twenty-five years received as “experimental, which in comparison still seem more faithful to the norms of current literary culture. (Perhaps books like David Markson’s Readers Block and This is Not a Novel might rival Dara’s novel in its claim to be “something new”—certainly the more flamboyantly experimental novels of a writer such as Mark Danielewski are just gimmicky when judged next to either The Lost Scrapbook or The Easy Chain.) Dara appears to trust the reader’s ability to infer connections and notice implicit patterns of situation and reference, to tolerate the ambiguities and uncertainties in which the novel persists without necessarily expecting the writer to remove them through any contrived devices. The rhetorical irresolution created by the novel’s extreme fragmentation is reinforced within the discrete narrative fragments (and most of them do relate a story or scene) by the emphasis on speech—both in monologue and dialogue—rather than expository prose, which further requires the reader to discern continuity in the various episodes by carefully registering what the voices are talking about absent direct description. Luckily Dara proves himself exceptionally adept at rendering contemporary American speech, making the task enjoyable in itself, and the enactment of this strategy in the rendition of Isaura’s ordeal is especially impressive.
Unfortunately, this concluding story also works to produce what is ultimately the most significant weakness of The Lost Scrapbook. It is not inaccurate to call this final section of the novel an expose of entities like the Ozark Chemical Company, companies that in carrying out the prescribed mission of American capitalism are in the process of degrading and despoiling the natural environment, apparently without compunction. When we recall the scenes that have come before, we can see that the depiction of the ruin of Isaura is the culmination of a portrayal of America in all its social, cultural, and economic dysfunction—an America in which the atomizing effects of capitalism have spread to all features of ordinary life. In this way, it seems to me, The Lost Scrapbook in effect neutralizes its own formal audacity by making it too easy for the reader to resolve (at least in retrospect) the interpretive dilemma posed by the seemingly dissociated episodes that have brought us to the Isaura narrative, to integrate all of the novel’s parts in what turns out to be an unorthodox but finally structurally harmonious story about the baneful influences of late twentieth century American capitalism, its elevation of profit to preeminent value and disregard for the common good determining the shape of human interaction and inhibiting even our ability to communicate (a motif to which Dara returns in his most recent work). However accurate this vision of the degeneracy of current reality might be (and I for one accept its accuracy), ultimately it comes close to undercutting the novel’s integrity as experimental fiction, arguably converting it to a work of realism by other means.
Although The Lost Scrapbook is often quite funny, it would not really be appropriate to call it satire. The humor is not of the regenerative kind that implies the offenses portrayed might be ameliorated. It does indeed provoke the more corrosive kind of laughter associated with postmodern writers such as DeLillo, Pynchon, and Gaddis, or even the “black humor” of Vonnegut or Heller. But finally the humor seems part of the larger effort to critique, to “say something” about the dismal state of American culture and the dangers of unchecked capitalism. Dara’s critique is perhaps more vehement than most, and offers no false hope that the conditions imposed by advanced capitalism will be overcome any time soon, but in its substance it hardly differs much from similar critiques increasingly to be found in mainstream literary fiction. What makes The Lost Scrapbook distinctive, of course, is its formal innovation, the quality that presumably has also caused readers to balk at the “difficulty” such a work is presumed to pose. While these readers would find The Lost Scrapbook in fact to be an invigorating reading experience that rewards the effort to meet its challenge, they might also finally be disappointed that the ingenuity the novel exhibits seems to be employed in support of a conventionally polemical purpose.
Still, if a writer’s commitment to a theme or idea (political or otherwise) inspires a genuinely adventurous approach to form or style—that is, serves the ultimate purpose of experimental fiction to revitalize the form itself—probably we ought to grant that writer his subject. Some might say that the novel’s length does not justify the thematic payoff, but I would contend that such length is required for the formal effect to be adequately felt: if The Lost Scrapbook could be regarded as a version of a picaresque narrative, the journey taken is by the reader in the experience of reading, and as with all picaresque narratives, much of the interest lies in the journey itself, not the destination. However, both Dara’s aesthetic approach and his political critique are more effectively realized in his second novel, The Easy Chain. In some ways it is surprising that this novel did not win Dara a somewhat larger audience and more attention from critics (again only one review, again by LeClair, in Bookforum), since, while it is hardly a conventional narrative, something like a recognizable story “arc” can be perceived behind the multiple registers of talk and shifts of setting. It even has a kind of mystery plot (actually several mysteries), even if those mysteries never quite get resolved.
Perhaps the most significant departure in The Easy Chain from the strategies employed in The Lost Scrapbook is that it features a protagonist—albeit one who is present only fleetingly (most directly at the novel’s beginning) and is depicted in a mosaic-like fashion, from a multitude of perspectives, so that we cannot really say we have a very firm grasp on his personal qualities or his motivations. In this novel, Dara takes the method introduced in The Lost Scrapbook, its emphasis on speech and soliloquy, and applies it to the development of the main character. We know Lincoln Selwyn mostly from what others say about him—although we often don’t know who these others are beyond their disembodied voices. The outline, if not all the details, of Lincoln’s story is clear enough: The son of English parents but raised in the Netherlands, Lincoln emigrates to the United States to attend college (the University of Chicago), but instead finds himself, through mechanisms that often remain shrouded from our direct observation, a wildly successful entrepreneur and man about town, steadily accruing admirers and gaining influence. Then, apparently Selwyn disappears. (Later we learn he probably gained much of his success through shady means, although the investigators from whom we get this information are themselves not altogether reliable.) After a break in the narrative (represented in the text by a series of blank pages), we encounter Lincoln back in Holland, where he seems to be trying to fill in lacunae in his own knowledge about his family, including his mother and an aunt who had emigrated to the United States before him and whose whereabouts he has unsuccessfully tried to uncover. Next we discover that Lincoln has returned to the U.S., where at the novel’s conclusion we are shocked to find him preparing to blow up the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and, when the attempt fails, to shoot the private investigator he had tasked with finding the aunt.
The story, of course, does not come as an uninterrupted linear narrative. Not only are we sometimes not aware of Lincoln’s specific activities, but the interruptions in the story of Lincoln Selwyn are often filled with other, seemingly unrelated stories featuring independent characters, such as the story about a Boulder, Colorado restaurant forced out of business when the rent on their building is arbitrarily raised. As with The Lost Scrapbook, these set-pieces are thematically related to Lincoln’s story: the restaurant’s plight turns into an apocalyptic narrative about the collapse of civilization itself and the reversion of the land to nature. The Easy Chain is ultimately centered around the same concern animating the previous novel, the ravages of advanced capitalism, but Lincoln Selwyn’s life provides a more consistent, and more compelling, unity in the novel’s aesthetic design. Indeed, it seems more fitting to speak about “design” in The Easy Chain than in The Lost Scrapbook (which does not mean the latter is simply chaotic). We see in The Easy Chain similar disruptions of narrative continuity and conventional prose (variations in textual arrangement, graphical effects such as those in the novel’s final section, with its seemingly random divergences in capitalization, punctuation, and spelling), yet here they more readily seem part of the novel’s unified portrayal of Lincoln Selwy, his elusiveness, his contradictory impulses, his lack of a core identity we can easily recognize.
This does not mean that The Easy Chain abandons experiment for convention or too comfortably courts facile accessibility. Readers not familiar with The Lost Scrapbook are unlikely to think it too conspicuously conforms to expectations of conventional literary fiction. Its achievement consists not simply of the application of “craft,” but from a successful attempt to bring artistic coherence to a work that doesn’t settle for familiar means of character development or rely on a stable point of view. “Experimental” is not synonymous with “anarchic” when applied to formal innovations in fiction, and The Easy Chain adeptly achieves a totality of vision in a way that is perhaps more acutely visible than in The Lost Scrapbook. The balance between invention and design in The Easy Chain is the most finely measured among Dara’s novels.
If that balance skews somewhat to the former in The Lost Scrapbook, it skews more decidedly to the latter in Dara’s third novel, Flee. Certainly to readers for whom it might be their introduction to Dara (especially because it is the briefest of the three), this novel again would hardly seem a mainstream literary novel, but its more unconventional strategies—which are largely the same ones introduced in the first two novels—are employed to limited enough effect that it is more apparent they are designed to support the novel’s quasi-absurdist story. In Flee it is the story that is emphasized through the novel’s strategies of indirection and omission much as the character of Lincoln Selwyn is evoked in The Easy Chain. However, a story about the gradual abandonment of a good-sized city (most likely based on Burlington, Vermont) after its university shuts down due to it its own malfeasance is inherently improbable and incongruous, and these qualities are only heightened through Dara’s by now signature methods—sudden discontinuities, multiple voices, etc. So compatible are form and content in Flee, in fact, that this novel can indeed be accurately described as satire, allowing Dara’s recurrent focus on capitalist values acting to impede human flourishing to be rendered more distinctly as satirical judgment.
In its more compact form, Flee demonstrates that Dara’s invocation of multiple voices and perspectives can operate to relate a story that doesn’t flash the usual narrative signals and create characters that are shorn of information beyond the clues offered in their talk—a local couple attempting to profit from the emptying out of their town are tracked throughout the novel and act, if not as protagonists, as narrative anchors, individual representatives of the broader dilemma facing the town whose particular experiences the reader can follow for continuity—but for the first time in Dara’s fiction the strategy seems overly familiar, too derivative of the work of William Gaddis, whose voice- and dialogue-centered novels provide the primary touchstone for Dara’s fiction. Ironically, Flee seems a bit too much like Gaddis’s JR in miniature, even though it is The Easy Chain that is more reminiscent of Gaddis’s novel in its subject and featured protagonist.
Perhaps it is a realization that this method has become somewhat perfunctory that led Dara to offer as his most recent work not a novel, but a play, the Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins, available as a download on the Aurora website. Here, of course, human speech is the form’s natural medium, and the play is stripped down to just characters and talk, the stage “As bare as you can stand it.” (It has something of the feel of a Greek drama, individual characters set off against a chorus-like group called “the Swirl.”) Mose Eakins is (as described by one of the Swirl) “an American field-risk analyst working for Concord Oil.” He is introduced to us speaking to various co-workers—none of them actually present on stage—in a briskly efficient but largely supercilious manner. Not long afterward, Mose begins to notice that people are beginning to react strangely in his presence: they seem not to hear what he is saying and instead speak about themselves in ways that strike Mose as wholly inappropriate, as if he is overhearing them reveal their unguarded thoughts. Eventually, Mose is informed he suffers from “imparlance,” a disorder that causes people to “lose the capacity to infuse their words with intelligible significance.” As a side effect, those to whom the sufferer speaks “often give voice to thoughts they usually keep hidden.” Mose’s life steadily deteriorates, and even though he comes to recognize that he himself has participated in the degradation of language, its reduction to utilitarian exchange and self-advancement, his ultimate fate is not a happy one.
Although Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins focuses on a theme central to much postmodern fiction, the failures of language to “communicate” reliably, that failure is tied to the debasement of language inflicted by society under capitalism, situating the play squarely among the three novels as cultural critique. (There may also be a sly dig at the incomprehension with which the literary establishment has greeted Dara’s novels, as many readers and critics profess that such works lack “the capacity to infuse their words with intelligible significance.”) The novels as well concern themselves, both implicitly and explicitly, with the obstacles language must overcome in order to be intelligible, but they do achieve their own kind of cogency. As does Mose Eakins, suggesting that finally Evan Dara belongs with the original generation of postmodernists in the audacity of his invention but doesn’t really seem to share the postmodernist skepticism about language as a representational medium. In Mose Eakins, he memorably represents the corruption of language by forces that have emptied it of all but the most crudely functional signifying potential, the destruction of literary power it would otherwise possess. Ultimately Dara is a moralist, not an aesthete.
Reading James Cox’s Dodge Rose, I was most immediately reminded of the work of Evan Dara, although the scale on which the writers work is (for now, at least) much different. Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook and The Easy Chain are meganovels, employing an episodic, loosely picaresque formal strategy—even if neither could exactly be called narratives of any kind—while Dodge Rose is much more compact and intricately constructed. Still, each writer doesn’t merely introduce some innovative formal variation but in effect ignores fictional form as it is conventionally rendered and puts in its place something that can seem like formal anarchy, but only because the novels convey the impression they are building form as they go, out of the materials at hand.
This is, of course, an illusion, as in each case it turns out that form is carefully calibrated with the material, allowing the latter the expression that customary novel form would only inhibit. Of the two, Dara seems most willing to encourage the perception his novels are formless, not just with their length but also in their sudden and unexplained shifts in setting and perspective, but Dodge Rose as well might suggest a kind of anarchy, both on the broader, formal level and also in its sentences and paragraphs, which indeed at times seem almost out of control. Ultimately, however, the reader is tempted not to conclude that the novel’s effects are random, but to suspect that in fact it hangs together through connections that remain tantalizingly partial, left to inference and telling silence.
These are novels that are frequently labeled “difficult,” but finally this difficulty usually just means they are books that require the reader to pay attention in a particularly diligent way. If, say, The Lost Scrapbook asks the reader to assimilate many voices and tolerate many ambiguous juxtapositions, Dodge Rose requires close attention to the details provided by its two narrators, even when what they say otherwise seems obscure or even nonsensical. Because of the novel’s structure, two separate narratives belonging to two (apparently) separate narrators, the reader needs to notice echoes and allusions across the two stories. Even then, the connections can be tenuous, and their significance mysterious. Eventually Dodge Rose is the sort of novel that invites the careful reader to find connections and to venture interpretations that may or may not be consistent with whatever “meaning” the author himself might endorse.
Dodge Rose initially presents itself as a first-person narrative relating the arrival of Eliza Rose into Sydney, Australia, presumably to take possession of the apartment owned by the title character, Eliza’s now deceased aunt. However, the first few pages introduce, at least retrospectively, some puzzling ambiguity: Eliza’s train trip is narrated as if it is in the third-person, giving us access to her thoughts and perceptions, but when Eliza reaches her destination, the narrator announces the “I” that reveals the narrator is Max, awaiting Eliza’s arrival—although the name initially obscures her identity, as she is actually Maxine, apparently a tenant in Dodge Rose’s apartment. But Maxine’s presence in the apartment remains at first somewhat inexplicable: Is she Dodge Rose’s daughter? An adopted orphan? Perhaps simply a squatter? Maxine herself expresses uncertainty about her relationship to Dodge Rose when she tells Eliza that in explaining Maxine’s parentage Dodge had provided only “[t]he usual garbage at first, until I couldn’t be bothered asking anymore.” The likely circumstances become clearer (sort of) in the second half of the book, but Maxine’s identity is never really fully confirmed.
Eliza soon discovers that her putative claim to the apartment is not at all certain, so she and Maxine decide to sell the apartment’s contents—a very large number of items, it turns out—and much of Maxine’s narrative relates their generally shambolic attempts to assess the value of Dodge Rose’s possessions and to find a suitable antique dealer to buy them. However, Maxine’s account is by no means the transparently told story of their exploits. Maxine is prone to rhetorical flourishes and digressions into seemingly extraneous information, and at one point she gives over the narration to a lawyer who offers a multi-page, single paragraph disquisition on property law. While the question of “property” in Australia is at the center of the novel’s concerns, the effect of this convoluted passage, as well as the other discursive slippages that regularly occur in the narration of Eliza’s visit (at more or less regular intervals, Maxine’s discourse devolves into a species of gibberish), is surely puzzlement on the reader’s part. The moves Cox makes are themselves not so unfamiliar in works of adventurous fiction, but their purpose here at first seems elusive, so the temptation is to expect that the novel’s second half will make the strategy at work less opaque.
But beginning to read this section, the transition marked only by a blank page, is even more disconcerting than the lingering uncertainties of the first half. We have clearly changed time and character (but not, as it turns out, place), although quickly enough we can surmise that the new narrator is Dodge Rose. However, we do not know, and never really do know, the provenance of this narration. Have we simply moved back in time to allow Dodge Rose to speak of her experiences as a young girl? Could it perhaps be Maxine ventriloquizing Dodge Rose? Perhaps the most likely explanation is that what we are now reading is from a journal that Maxine and Eliza have discovered while surveying Dodge’s possessions. Still, we don’t know if the journal entries were composed during her growing up in the apartment she continued to inhabit after her parents’ death, or if they are Dodge’s recollections at a later date.
In either case, if the reader is looking for Dodge Rose’s recitation to neatly merge with Maxine’s as the story of the life and death of the novel’s title character, it soon enough becomes clear that this won’t happen. Presented in an uncapitalized prose with uncertain sentence and paragraph boundaries, Dodge’s chronicle of a relatively brief period in her childhood at first seems to offer random experiences involving her, her parents, and numerous other people they encounter or visit. It does evoke the same themes of possession and property found in the novel’s first half, as well as a focus on Australian history as manifested in the geography and architecture of Sydney. And in addition to Dodge and her family, Dodge introduces a somewhat enigmatic figure whom she refers to only as “x.” X apparently enters the Rose family orbit as a servant, but she becomes a companion of sorts for Dodge as well.
Dodge’s narrative also features a multipage digression in another character’s voice, similar to the lecture on property law that slips into Maxine’s narration. Here, when Dodge visits her father’s office with her mother and x, we are treated to a jargon-clogged exposition of banking practices in Australia delivered by an employee. If anything, this passage is even more disruptive than the previous blast of discursive excess, since the notion that the pre-adolescent Dodge Rose could have successfully recorded it (or the older Dodge remember it) is patently absurd. (Throughout the novel there are suggestions that Dodge Rose was “slow” in her thinking.) At this point, the use of this device must prompt some consideration of its implications for the novel’s aesthetic integrity.
If we don’t accept that these passages can plausibly in the narrating characters’ own verbal and cognitive awareness, we can first of all seek alternative explanations. Perhaps Maxine, who in her narrative has exhibited something of a mischievous spirit, is also the author of Dodge Rose’s and is pulling some kind of rhetorical prank. This would give the novel coherence as Maxine’s own literary creation, but it also seems a needlessly byzantine way of developing her character, especially if the circumstances of her birth and her current status are to be made explicable. Perhaps these intrusions are indeed the intrusions of the author himself, engaged in a metafictional exercise of the sort we have come to recognize since at least the heyday of the original postmodernists. But such an exercise is by now indeed very familiar, so settling for this interpretation would make Dodge Rose disappointingly derivative and uninspired, its other formal and stylistic machinations notwithstanding. But this explanation would account for the some of the novel’s other idiosyncrasies, its sudden digressions and linguistic slippages.
These features are more interesting if we allow them their own incongruity rather than attempt to create some kind of conventional unity, even of the established “postmodern” kind. Still, while the novel certainly offers an unusual but also active reading experience, none of the devices used in Dodge Rose could really be called innovative in themselves. We could take it as a kind of inventory of modernist/postmodernist attitudes toward the plasticity of the literary text, its capacity to be shaped and reshaped in ways that the conception of fiction simply as narrative cannot fully accommodate, but that doesn’t adequately encompass the novel’s ambitions, particularly its clear intention to take on Australian history as its true subject. The only way we can reconcile this effort to “say something” about the effects of that history with the novel’s radical formal displacement is to conclude that the form the novel has taken is neither random nor capricious.
If Dodge Rose was a work whose formal innovations were the most immediate, but also the most enduring, source of interest, then perhaps seeking a resolution to these interpretive conundrums would be a less pressing concern, but pretty clearly Cox ultimately wants primary attention paid to the theme that the novel so persistently emphasizes. In this case, perhaps taking account of theme first of all allows us to discern more exactly the full ramifications of form: What does the novel’s relentless focus on the relics and the palpable features of the landscape of Sydney finally add up to, and how is this preoccupation to be understood as it impinges on the lives of Dodge Rose, Maxine, and Eliza? Why are the convolutions of the novel’s formal scheme the most aesthetically appropriate means for representing the underlying subject
One way of answering these questions might be to follow on from the insights into the more ineffable qualities of the novel provided by Terry Pitts in an analysis on his blog, Vertigo (Feb 8-Mar 4, 2016). Pitts contends that Cox’s achievement is “to have written a book that is essentially about the indigenous peoples of Australia while keeping these aspects of the book utterly and almost invisibly submerged beneath the narrative of the Rose family and the other ancestors of Australian white immigrant settlers.” Pitts suggests we pay careful attention to the novel’s “gaps,” between which we will see “an entirely unseen narrative tucked discreetly,” a narrative that centers on x, the Rose family servant. Examining carefully the clues left in the details of Dodge Rose’s narration, Pitts establishes that x is an indigenous woman “abducted by the state and placed into servitude” through a boarding school designed for that purpose. Pitts suggests that the pairing of x and Dodge Rose is meant to mirror Maxine and Eliza, but Alys Moody (in the Sydney Review of Books, May 3, 2106) goes farther and argues that x is, in fact, most likely Maxine’s mother.This is almost impossible to establish definitively—the evidence Moody cites is equivocal at best—but keeping such a shadow narrative as nebulous as possible would presumably be crucial to Cox’s purposes, otherwise the novel’s unorthodox design would be superfluous: if the “real” subject of Dodge Rose is the exploitation and dispossession of the aboriginal people of Australia, to hint at it too strongly might make the formal difficulties of the novel seem seemly an impediment to grasping the intended meaning. At some point the reader is likely to ask why the author doesn’t simply concentrate attention on the theme itself rather than dilute it through the gratuitous formal and linguistic games. Paradoxically, we could say that the lack of attention to the theme Pitts has discovered serves finally to focus more attention on it, resulting in a moment of heightened recognition that may in effect redeem the novel’s difficulty.
If we accept Moody’s contention that x is the crucial connection between the two sections of the book, an even more provocative linkage might be made, one that further helps us to appreciate the novel’s formal qualities. Clearly enough Maxine does not recall x as her mother, suggesting that she was left with Dodge Rose for reasons we cannot fully know, since Dodge’s narrative does not extend beyond those recollections of her childhood we are given. But might x also be a continued presence in Maxine’s narrative, a ghost, literal or figurative, who intrudes on Maxine’s stream of thought, a ghost haunting the home to which she was forcibly brought and where, presumably, she died?
Admittedly it is difficult to find much textual evidence for this interpretation, beyond what we can deduce from what is said and not said, from those portentous elisions to which Terry Pitts refers. But Dodge Rose is the sort of text that in its radical indirection practically demands such speculation. Indeed, almost any attempt to reckon with the novel’s indeterminacy will finally need to settle for some degree of conjecture. For me, however, a perspective on the novel such as the one I have proposed recognizes an aesthetic consistency in Dodge Rose that might otherwise escape us. (Dodge’s journal entries might be equally possessed by the spirit of x, for example.) Of course, I can’t know for sure whether this kind of unity was actually part of the author’s design, although it seems doubtful, at least to me, that in his pairing of the two parts of the novel Cox intended them to remain mostly separate, aside from the more obvious juxtapositions signaling the preoccupation with property and ownership. Moreover, Dodge Rose is surely a sufficiently self-enclosed work that the reader is often compelled to walk out on the interpretive limb in this way.
Finally it seems to me that Dodge Rose provokes reflection on two different conceptions of “experimental fiction.” One focuses primarily on the subversion of familiar form for its own sake, without necessarily emphasizing the reconfiguration of form anew. The other is also concerned to challenge pre-existing form, but as well is still occupied with creating form, however unwonted. If we simply acknowledge the formal eccentricities of a novel like Dodge Rose but don’t much ask that they transcend mere eccentricity or caprice to achieve some sort of aesthetic continuity, I, for one, would find the work ultimately disappointing. The quirks of Dodge Rose threaten to become just quirks on their way to an unorthodox but ultimately intelligible political critique unless its aesthetic effects are at least as fully realized as its message.
Carole Maso has never tried to avoid the label, “experimental writer.” Indeed, in interviews and essays she has often advocated on behalf of experimental fiction, lamenting the lack of critical attention it receives and excoriating big publishers for their commercial fixations at the expense of the literary. In her essay, “Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose,” she critiques the conditions that prevail in contemporary writing:
Together, many novelists, now commodity makers, have agreed on a recognizable reality, which they are all too happy to impart as if it were true. Filled with hackneyed ways of perceiving, cliched, old sensibilities, they and the publishing houses create traditions which have gradually been locked into place. They take for granted: the line, the paragraph, the chapter, the story, the storyteller, character.
Here, Maso presumably gives us not only a general description of the ambitions to which experimental fiction ought to aspire (or, more precisely, of those it ought to reject), but also an explicit signal of what we might expect to find in her own work. And indeed, we do find in Maso’s novels and stories an exploration of the possibilities of unorthodox structural and stylistic devices beyond those associated with conventional narratives. Still, it can’t really be said that Maso’s fiction ultimately abandons either “story” or “character.” While her novels are sufficiently different from each other that their formal qualities can be described only in reference to their specific effect in the work at hand, each of them could be said to elicit these effects as an alternative means — alternative to the “traditions” that most literary fiction continues to unreflectively reproduce — of presenting characters, specifically the narrator-protagonists whose efforts to relate their experiences (and sometimes to imagine the experiences of others) serve as a substitute for “narrative” in the conventional sense, but each certainly does finally offer a story encompassing, in most cases, the character’s whole life.
Some of the novels, such as The Art Lover (1990), employ a collage-like method, in this case exemplified by a dual-stranded sequence of events (the narrator’s own past and the version of it presented in the novel she is writing) and supplemented by a variety of graphic and pictorial elements. Defiance (1998), perhaps Maso’s most well-known novel, also uses the collage method, except here the fragmentation arises from the narrator’s fragmented consciousness, as she records her experiences in a journal (while awaiting execution for double murder, no less). Of the two, The Art Lover seems the most purely motivated simply by a desire to experiment with form, while the extremity of form in Defiance seems determined by the extremity of the subject and situation, all working not really to solve a mystery — why did the narrator murder her young students? — but to depict a woman exploring the peripheries of her own psychic trauma. Something like this is also featured in Ava (1993), although in this novel the situation is even more extreme: literally from her deathbed, suffering the final stage of cancer and in a coma, the protagonist cycles through her life experiences in a series of mostly brief images and recalled moments.
These novels admirably maintain an alternative practice outside the conventions “locked into place” that have turned writers into “commodity makers,” but that is not to say they are inaccessible for readers open to unorthodox strategies that nevertheless lead to fulfilling familiar goals grounding fiction in character (as well as narrative in the broadest sense). Indeed, novels like The Art Lover and Defiance surely do at the least eventually cohere as stories of women’s lives of the sort feminist criticism especially helps us in reading, and Defiance in particular seems a deliberate attempt to shock through its content, its fragmented form actually serving to create a kind of traditional dramatic tension through ellipsis, understatement, and delay. Even Ava is not quite the radical experiment in discontinuous, even random, expression it might at first appear to be. Once we have adjusted to the situation and sampled enough of the at times near-musical flow of language as it cycles through Ava’s not-quite-consciousness, we can more readily accept the novel’s apparent formal and discursive disorder as a radical invocation of the stream-of-consciousness strategy, taken, perhaps, to its plausible limit, but surely a recognizable method with an established history.
Maso’s most thoroughly adventurous work may be the short story collection, Aureole (1996). In her preface to the book, Maso says she is attempting to discover “ways in language to express the extreme, the fleeting, the fugitive states that hover at the outermost boundaries of speech.” In this case, the “fugitive” state explored is sexual desire, the ineffability of which is represented in the “sexual energy” Maso has attempted to infuse into her sentences. Few of the stories are explicit (at least in their language, which instead is metaphorical and suggestive), and in fact description of the particulars of a sexual encounter is not at all the Aureole’s, ambition but rather the invocation of the exigencies of desire in both the stylistic and formal features of the stories. Thus they are shaped less by concerns of narrative than of tracking the unpredictable, shifting movements of desire as might be registered in language.
If Aureole most directly forwards an approach attempting to fuse style and form (in a way that again most approximates music), this sort of motive seems to inform most of Maso’s fiction, including the novels, which, if not so removed from conventional practices as to be forbidding, nevertheless succeed in exploring “ways of perceiving” — both experience and fiction itself as literary art — that are not hackneyed and that resist being themselves perceived as commodities. That Maso was a writer likely to be engaged in such a project was clear enough in her debut novel, Ghost Dance (1986), now offered in a reprint edition by Counterpoint Press. Perhaps the first challenge posed to the reader in this novel is to appropriately perceive its protagonist: We are initially presented with the image of a woman “standing under the great clock in Grand Central Station,” who is, the narrator tells us, “waiting for me.” The woman is revealed as the narrator’s mother, and the first scene introduces us to this character whose enigmatic absence (except in the narrator’s memories of her) paradoxically makes her the novel’s most vivid presence. Even so, she retains the element of mystery established by the narrator’s account in this first, extended memory of a woman on the edge of madness — although, as we discover throughout the novel, whether her madness is the source of her gift — she is a renowned poet, as it turns out — or whether the gift itself impels her disordered habits is never made definitively clear.
The narrator, Vanessa, does not seem quite sure about this herself, although what follows our first acquaintance with her mother, Christine is essentially Vanessa’s attempt to reckon with the loss of the mother, as well as the overwhelming effect Christine has had on her, which arises as much from the mother’s persistent absences as her direct acts of parenting. This Vanessa does obliquely, however, through a kaleidoscope of memories (of her father, brother, and grandparents as well as Christine) and fragmented narratives about her own experiences separate from her mother. But Vanessa appears to be in a state of mental displacement, and so we cannot be entirely confident in her reliability as narrator. She seems unable to accept the fact of her mother’s death, suggesting to us that Christine has simply disappeared (as has Vanessa’s father). If Ghost Dance portrays Vanessa finally as capable of coming to terms with her family history, this novel could be taken as Vanessa’s progress toward acceptance of reality, but this means that much of what she tells us, her rendering of events and characters, must be subject to doubt. Thus the more startling episodes from her own past and present, from her affair with a mentally disturbed fellow college student who ultimately commits suicide, to a sexual encounter with Christine’s lesbian lover, Sabine, to a relationship with a giant man (“an enormous man, a man so large he might blot out the sun”) named Jack each must be doubted as a literal representation of “real” events.
Perhaps the same is true of Vanessa’s account of her grandparents, one of whom becomes deeply immersed in Native American spirituality, while another exiles himself to Armenia, although we might think her hold on family history would be more secure than on her own present experiences. None of this makes such interludes less effective in evoking Vanessa’s troubled state of mind, however. And to the extent that we might read Ghost Dance as the revelation of her confused consciousness, we would probably conclude that it is Vanessa’s story that is the novel’s primary focus of concern. In a sense this evocation of a consciousness in extremis governs the novel’s formal structure: fragmented, prone to repetition and revision, scattered in time and place, but ultimately holding together in its task of suggesting a more nebulous reality beneath the “recognizable reality” that form in conventional fiction reliably summons. We could say that latter reality does finally come into more apparent view by the end of the novel, when the actual circumstances of Christine’s death are revealed. Vanessa relates Christine’s death in an automobile accident, as well as its immediate aftermath, straightforwardly enough at this point, but the accident would seem to be the central trauma animating the novel, to which Vanessa’s fractured narrative figuratively bears witness, circling around it but finally not able to evade its heavy gravity.
Still, if Vanessa’s internal conflict motivates the novel’s formal structure, her hesitations and evasions inevitably work to make Christine an even more enigmatic figure, and thus arguably make her character its most memorable feature. Although Christine is a dynamic character in her own way — part free-spirited artist, part incipient madwoman, the two halves perhaps indivisible — she is also the first of what will become a recognizable kind of character in Maso’s fiction, an unruly woman of sorts, a trait she shares with Ava Klein and Defiance’s Bernadette O’Brien. The title of Defiance, of course, captures the spirit both of these women characters, whose behavior defies the constrictions of what is considered to be proper behavior for women, and of the work of Carole Maso herself. Maso’s fiction does consistently defy those “hackneyed” conventions that in most contemporary fiction are assumed to be “locked into place.” In employing non-hackneyed stylistic and formal strategies, Maso creates distinctive characters not usually to be found in other fiction, even other fiction written by women. Neither Maso nor her characters are afraid to transgress presumed boundaries.
Maso’s most recent novel was Mother and Child, an atypical exercise in surreal whimsy, published in 2012. By then, it had been 14 years since Defiance, although Maso had published three works of nonfiction in the interim. Presumably through much of this time (and since) she was working on the reportedly mammoth Bay of Angels, excerpts of which have appeared in various journals. These excerpts, as well as Maso’s own descriptions, suggest the novel will draw on the sort of collage and juxtaposition we find in the previous work (and it appears to involve Ava Klein), so it will indeed be interesting to see how Maso is able to realize her iconoclastic ambitions in meeting the large-scale demands of the meganovel.
In a career that now includes 14 novels and four collections of short fiction (as well as seven works of nonfiction), Lance Olsen has produced an admirable variety of experimental fictions, no one of which seems merely a repetition of any of the others. There are identifiable tendencies and gestures in his work, to be sure, all of which are designed to redirect our attention to the page itself, to the graphic embodiment of language, rather than to the “story” or “content” to which language is presumed to be pointing by many (if not most) readers of fiction, even so-called literary fiction. But the strategies by which Olsen accomplishes this larger goal are multifarious, especially in the context of such an abundant and still-accumulating body of work.
Of course, such variety is almost certain to result in some books that are less successful than others, a phenomenon unsurprising in what is after all “experimental” fiction. If not all experiments succeed, books as resolutely unconventional as Olsen’s, dedicated to sounding out alternatives to those practices that presume “form” in fiction to be synonymous with narrative, should be valued simply for their efforts to provide such alternatives to “exhausted” presumptions, as John Barth might put it. Still, the reading experiences afforded by Olsen’s novels and story collections themselves vary in the degree to which they manage to both effect an inventive formal strategy and to make that strategy an engrossing substitute for conventional narrative. Achieving this sort of synthesis of sheer technique and aesthetic gratification (not an easy task, to be sure) seems to me the fundamental accomplishment of the best experimental fiction, since a work that merely signals a break with traditional practices but doesn’t use such a rupture as an opportunity to then offer the reader a fulfilling reading experience, one that renews the aesthetic possibilities of fiction as more than “a story,” will surely not survive as much more than a literary curiosity. An honorable effort, perhaps, but ultimately indeed a failure.
Olsen actually began his career as an academic critic; most prominently, perhaps, as the author of Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision, but also books on “postmodern fantasy” and the science fiction writer William Gibson. His earliest novels are themselves most categorizable as fantasy and science fiction, although they could also be described simply as punkish provocation (with titles like Tonguing the Zeitgeist and Freaknest). These books rely more on extreme situations than on formal experiment per se, and, given the genre, are also more dependent on narrative than Olsen’s later novels would be. They are not without a certain kind of cheeky interest, but they aren’t likely to retain much future interest apart from their place in Lance Olsen’s development as a writer of unorthodox fiction.
With Girl Imagined by Chance (2002) and 10:01 (2005), Olsen began writing more straightforwardly experimental fiction, although each of these novels in their own way retain more connections to established narrative practices than will his subsequent even more adventurous work. Girl Imagined by Chance, while incorporating photographs as a structural device, tells an unusual story—a married couple pretend to have a baby in order to satisfy friends and family pressuring them to have children—but it relates the story in a relatively linear way, and the novel would probably remain accessible to readers not otherwise accustomed to experimental fiction. 10:01 is a highly fragmented novel that is held together by the conceit provided by its setting—a movie theater in the Mall of America. We are given a montage of sorts tracing the passing thoughts of a large group of people waiting in line for the next show. The result is essentially an exercise in “psychological realism,” a shifting set of vignettes that evoke the Mall of America as a metaphorical container of consciousness.
Nietzsche’s Kisses (2006) really marks the emergence of motifs, situations, and procedures that together have now come to seem Lance Olsen’s signature approach. Here and in the following books, Olsen takes historical figures, primarily writers and artists, as subjects, thereby making writing (language more generally) and artistic creation a central focus of attention. By and large, the depiction of such figures—Nietzsche, Kafka, Vincent Van Gogh—is accurate to the historical reality in most particulars, but Olsen fills in gaps, speculates about states of mind, uses these figures as quasi-allegorical characters illustrating the precarious position of art and intellect in the world at large. He does not employ these characters merely as subjects of historical or biographical re-creation: they are in a sense the vehicle for Olsen’s formal transformations and typographical pyrotechnics, which almost unavoidably become the point of interest, although at their best in these later novels character and event are revealed through form, and vice versa. The primary structural device in most of these novels is collage, but this relatively familiar method is itself further disrupted by the frequent unfastening of the text’s language from its accustomed place in the linear flow of the printed page through spacing or the unusual placement of words.
While experiment in Olsen’s fiction is quite apparent in the liberties taken with the traditional protocols of reading, a significant element in his audacious challenge to narrative-as-usual is less conspicuous although just as important in its effect. Olsen’s attention to form goes beyond merely devising some altered species of narrative, but involves replacing narrative with formal arrangements that are often more spatial than chronological. Collage itself in Olsen’s novels work spatially through juxtaposition and suggestion, frequently moving freely back and forth in time, as in Nietzsche’ Kisses and 2009’s Head in Flames (the latter moving from passages about Van Gogh to episodes concerning Theo Van Gogh, great-grandson of Vincent’s brother, and the man who ultimately assassinates him). Calendar of Regrets (2010) seems to invoke a chronological structure, but it too moves both forward and backward—its separate strands, set in disparate times and places, moves first forward through the calendar year and then back again—and Olsen has said that at the most general level he was trying to closely echo the layout of an Hieronymus Bosch painting. (Bosch is the subject of one of the narrative strands.) Theories of Forgetting (2014) similarly echoes Robert Smithson’s earthwork sculpture Spiral Jetty, about which one of the novel’s characters is attempting (or was attempting, since we discover she is now dead) to make a film. Designs of Debris (2017), a surrealist retelling of the Minotaur myth, uses the monster’s labyrinth as its underlying architectural principle, again an attempt to bring form and subject into a kind of aesthetic equilibrium.
My Red Heaven is the most intricately formalist, and also most successful, of Olsen’s novels to date. A kind of panoramic tour of Berlin, Germany in 1927, its fixed time and place creates more unity among its episodes and perspectives than in, say, Calendar of Regrets, where the variety of narrative strands (and the novel’s length) can at times make the text seem overly diffuse. If the audacious manipulation of the printed page is somewhat less insistent than in Theories of Forgetting, My Red Heaven nevertheless displays the sort of verbal and discursive heterogeneity (including the use of photos) we would expect in a Lance Olsen novel. In this case, however, Olsen has fully enlisted his graphical variations as a kind of representational device as well, working to evoke the historical and cultural degeneration that this moment in the life of Belin (at least retrospectively) portends.
As we might expect from the previous novels, many (not all) of the characters in My Red Heaven are artists, writers, and other intellectual figures prominent in Germany in 1927 (as well as one deceased famous figure—Rosa Luxemburg—now reincarnated as a butterfly). The novel weaves portrayals of these characters and their actions throughout the 24-hour period it records, usually through transitional markers that put one character in the proximity of the next or that otherwise associate the two. The gallery of characters shows Berlin in the 1920s to be a culturally dynamic place (characters include the artist Otto Dix, émigré writers Robert Musil and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the physicist Werner Heisenberg), although the novel also features the underside of Berlin life, the drug addiction, violence, and poverty that made this “modern” German society so vulnerable to the predations of the Nazis, who also make their appearance, including Hitler himself.
While the primary structural device in My Red Heaven again appears to be collage, this surface feature is actually secondary to the novel’s controlling formal scheme. The novel’s title echoes that of the painting by the abstractionist painter Otto Freundlich. The painting is designed as irregular blocks of color (black, white, shades of gray, blue, green, and red), all of which are used as section names in Olsen’s novel, presumably linking in some way the episodes included to the color’s corresponding contribution to the painting’s overall aesthetic effect. Further, the painting’s colors are assembled in a grid-like assortment of rectilinear cells. The novel’s collage method, then, ultimately seems to be a progressive filling-in of these cells as rendered into literary form. This procedure is never intrusive, but it gives the novel an implicit shape that again governs “content.” The verbal mosaic that emerges in the depiction of 1927 Berlin is the product of form’s inherent artifice, but the depiction is no less vivid and no less faithful to the historical circumstances obtaining in Germany (and by extension European culture in general) during this between-wars interregnum.
In what is in part clearly an homage to 20th century modernism (including brief interchapters very close to the “newsreel” sections of Dos Passos’s USA trilogy), My Red Heaven both provides an historical panorama capturing the tenor of the period, while also embodying in its own departures from convention an extension of the modernist exploration of alternative styles and strategies. Although it might be tempting to think of a text such as My Red Heaven as a pastiche of modernism, and arguably more appropriately categorized as postmodern, neither this novel nor most of Olsen’s previous work seem accurately described as postmodern, except in the sense that Olsen is now about a century removed from the era of high modernism. Indeed, in Circus of the Mind in Motion, Olsen himself posits that postmodernism—which Olsen closely associates with a type of iconoclastic humor—was relatively short-lived and began to be replaced with a less radical kind of fiction after 1980. The radicalism of Olsen’s fiction might then be seen less as an attempt to revive postmodernism and more to validate the original experimental impulse animating modernism, which was also the inspiration, after all, for the postmodernists themselves.
Regardless of the label we might want to assign it, My Red Heaven fulfills the promise of experimental fiction: it challenges complacent reading habits, and at the same time it also offers to renew the conceptual resources upon which fiction might draw, to engage us in new and myriad ways. Although Nietzsche’s Kisses and Head in Flames also employ an unorthodox approach to effectively integrate method and matter, My Red Heaven might be the sort of book that convinces skeptical readers experimental fiction can be compelling reading even if it does not complacently fall back on the most comfortable modes of storytelling.
Reckoning With the Dead: Shelley Jackson’s Riddance
For all of her experiments with divergent media that are ultimately impalpable (her e-lit hypertext, Patchwork Girl, which is also essentially inaccessible unless you have the equipment to play a CD-ROM, on which the novel is now exclusively available), hypothetical (Skin, a “story” inscribed on human skin a letter at a time and that ultimately can never be read), or ephemeral (“Snow,” a story written on fallen snow — although it is being presented more permanently through photography), her conventionally printed novels are quite corporeal and amply realized. Half Life (2006) and her most recent novel, Riddance, are both long and comprehensively developed novels that allow the reader to settle in for a comfortable enough read, although in each case the story must be pieced together, and is not merely offered to us from a unified narrative perspective.
It might be most appropriate to describe both books as epistolary novels, albeit of the modern sort that extends beyond simply the exchange of letters as a narrative device to include other kinds of interpolated documents as well (additionally integrating visual effects, especially in Riddance), resulting in a form of collage as presumably Jackson’s preferred method of composing traditional prose fiction. (Likewise, her 2002 book, The Melancholy of Anatomy, is ostensibly a collection of short stories, but the stories are associated in a collage-like fashion, a series of vignettes organized by grouping them into sections representing the four humors and their respective origins in parts of the human body.) Thus these books are by no means regressively conventional in either form or subject — their subjects are in fact distinctly unusual — but they do adapt a formal strategy frequently enough employed previously by modern writers, in various permutations, that its use in both Half Life and Riddance is not disruptive of an “immersive” reading experience but really only adds a kind of mystery element to the novels’ quasi-horror plots: in addition to questions about how the extraordinary circumstances portrayed will develop and be resolved, questions pertaining to the exposition of those circumstances — how do the pieces fit together, how are they working to conceal as much as reveal? — become central to the narratives as well.
To describe these narratives as horror plots is not to classify them as genre fiction nor to denigrate horror elements as somehow unworthy in a properly experimental fiction. Jackson uses the tropes and trappings of horror lightly, adopting them not for atmosphere or specific plot devices but because the horror narrative prominently focuses attention on the human body, its traits and transformations, which has also proven to be Shelley Jackson’s most abiding preoccupation as a writer of fiction. Half Life borrows the imagery from a “mutation” film (“the incredible two-headed woman!”), but Jackson is not interested in exploiting this imagery for shock effects. Instead, she takes the potentially grotesque situation the novel depicts — an alternate reality in which atomic testing has created a substantial spike in the birthrate of conjoined twins — all essentially born with two heads on one body — as an opportunity to provoke reflection on our facile concepts of identity. In resolving to surgically remove the head of her sister, Blanche, who (she believes) has long been in a kind of coma, a prolonged state of uninterrupted slumber, is the novel’s protagonist, Nora, really proposing to murder another person, who, after all, shares one body with Nora, or is it merely the equivalent of amputation? Are Blanche and Nora actually two people? If so, which one gets to claim rights to their in-common body? For that matter, is it really “Nora” who speaks to us as the protagonist of Half Life, or is she at least as much Blanche, even before we learn that the latter has probably been more active all along than we realized?
Many readers of Half Life probably suspect all along that Blanche is likely not merely “dead weight.” Luckily, the novel doesn’t really depend on a surprise or trick ending. The narrative itself is insidiously humorous, despite the nature of the subject, and at times seems outright a satire of the rigid protocols of identity politics. (“Twofers” have become militant in defense of their rights, and demand observance of the proprieties in speech and behavior that uphold their status.) If it is relevant to the accomplishments of Half Life to call it an “experimental” novel, it is not because of its formal design but its creation of a “character” who complicates the very notion of unitary character in fiction — although its formal strategies certainly work effectively to help produce this effect. If printed fiction cannot attain the same degree of contingency and nonlinearity as hypertext, in Half Life Jackson nevertheless creates a character whose “true” identity may be whatever we decide it to be, and ultimately turns the narrative back on itself, encouraging us to perhaps reconsider everything we have read.
Riddance has its share of slippages and ambiguities, but while the story it tells is even more gothic than Half Life — set in a school for stuttering children in the early part of the 20th century, the school, we are told by the initial narrator, the “editor” of a scholarly compendium about it (the book we are about to read), “may have appeared on county maps in the vicinity of Cheesehill, Massachusetts, [but] its real address was in the crepuscular zone” — it is also more recognizable in its formal structure, a novel masquerading as another kind of text (Nabokov’s Pale Fire being just one example of this sort of fabrication, although the use of supposedly pre-existing documents as a formal device is a common enough strategy in horror fiction more generally). The editor, who at least fancies himself a scholar, offers us a collection of documents related to the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost-Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children, located in Cheesehill, the hometown of Sybil Joines, the founder and proprietor (although later directors of the school apparently also assume the founder’s name). It is called a school for “ghost-speakers” because Sybil Joines, herself a stutterer, believes that the dead make their presence known to the living in the speech — or non-speech — of those who stutter.
Although numerous kinds of found texts (as well as many photos and other graphic illustrations) are included in the editor’s collection, the two most important are undoubtedly the series entitled “The Final Dispatch,” which purports to be Sybil Joines’s own last communique, sent from the land of the dead, and “The Stenographer’s Story,” which tells us of the experiences of Sybil Joines’s assistant, an African-American student at the school named Jane Grandison, who transcribes the dispatch. (Jane Grandison eventually becomes the second Sybil Joines, although her status as an African-American at first leads her to express some skepticism about some of the assumptions at the school — how thoroughly white “the dead” seem to be, for example.) The circumstances surrounding Sybil Joines’s journey to the “land of the dead” eventually emerge — she claims in the dispatch to be pursuing a recalcitrant student she wants to bring back to the school — but the central interest of the novel surely lies in the exposition of Sybil Joines’s final encounter with this nebulous realm of paranormal existence she has spent her life — which the other entries in the collection work to elaborate — seeking to understand. The editor remarks in his introduction that through its layered organization, “this book can be entered at any point” (marking the printed text’s closest potential resemblance to a hypertext, although “The Final Dispatch” itself evokes hypertext in Sybil Joines’s descriptions of the fluidity of her surroundings), but this possibility is itself mostly virtual, since to approach Riddance in this way would really rob it of a forward momentum that clearly seems to be intentional.
Sybil Joines’s dispatch is the main attraction in Riddance as well because it features much of the novel’s best and most imaginative writing. “White everywhere,” she writes (or speaks, while Jane Grandison writes it down), in describing what she sees while pursuing Eve Finster, the errant student,
complicating into color, into form, fading again to white. White sky. White plains onto which white cataracts thunder down from an impossible height: souls pouring without surcease into death and roaring as they fall. The cataracts — the one stable landmark, the one feature on which all travelers report — one in such incessant motion that they seem immobile: one immense hoary figure, frozen in place, head bowed. Sometimes a bridge travels down the length of it: a fire in a shirtwaist factory, great ship sinking in icy waters. . . .
For all the apparent predisposition for the visual evidenced in her hypertext and alternative-media works (as well as the visual orientation of the passage above), both Half Life and Riddance show Shelley Jackson to be a poised and evocative stylist, one of the reasons both of these quite long books remain pleasurable to read.
A little later Sybil Joines tells us:
Now I shall have to start all over again, trumping up a world to catch her in! Only a moment ago, as it seems, I was hurrying down a familiar road. For all its spectral dogs and rabbits, it was, as near as I could make it, the way home. The girl was in my sights! And then my heart flared up white inside me, and road and ravine and crowding hills all blanched and raveled into filaments like the thread-thin hyphae of a fungus. The girl is gone. I am alone on a blank page.
The “white” that confronts Sybil Joines so implacably, we discover, is the white of the page on which she is composing the reality of the land of the dead as she speaks. Riddance, it turns out, is not simply (or even primarily) a gothic fantasy about communing with the dead but an allegory about writing, or, more precisely about language. Indeed, making a metaphorical connection between the human body and writing has been a preoccupation of Jackson’s in all of her work. (The Melancholy of Anatomy, she has said, was conceived as “a kind of body” to be “read.”) However, Riddance arguably works out the metafictional implications of this trope most abundantly. It is Sybil Joines’s belief that the presence of the dead is a manifestation of language — specifically human speech — but they are most sensitive to the silences and hesitations of stutterers, through which the dead might speak and into which the stutterer might be able to enter and encounter the dead (thus some students actually disappear into their own mouths).
Many of the students at the Joines Vocational School also produce “mouth objects,” ectoplasmic emanations in various shapes that are then intensively studied for their possible meaning. An illustrated collection of these objects is offered in the book’s appendices where, lined up side-by-side, they look conspicuously like letters in an alphabet. To be alive, it would seem, means having access to language, and thus the ghostly presences of the dead make themselves known not through apparitions but through the palpable medium of language. If Riddance is truly a book about the paranormal (“necrophysics,” as Sybil Joines would have it), we could say it implicitly portrays the way language is haunted by its own ghostly origins and the now-spectral uses to which it has been put in the past. The same is true, of course, of literature itself, which continues to embody a living force only after the writer’s reckoning with all of the dead forms it has assumed in the past.
However much Jackson has experimented with hypertext and other unorthodox media, both Half Life and now Riddance show that her work is firmly situated in established literary history — perhaps we could say it, too, emerges from the silences and gaps lurking in that history.
Events, of a Sort: The Fiction of Rudolph Wurlitzer
While the first three novels of Rudolph Wurlitzer certainly express the sensibility of the 1960s–specifically the late 60s, when the more insouciant rebelliousness characterizing much of the initial cultural ferment of the period began to curdle, congealing into less equivocal forms of disaffection and alienation–it is not as clear that his fiction should be identified as “postmodern,” along with the first wave of postmodernists that include Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and Robert Coover. Surely Nog, Flats, and Quake are “experimental” by anyone’s definition of the term as it applies to adventurous fiction, but where there is a kind of exuberance, and obvious delight in the sheer possibilities of the imagination in the work of these writers, in Wurlitzer’s books energy has been dissipated, the abundance and vitality of language we find in the earlier writers reduced to a kind of exhaustion even Barth, in his influential essay, “The Literature of Exhaustion, could not have anticipated, one that doesn’t merely acknowledge the “used-upness” of fictional form but seems to question the capability of language itself to adequately communicate human experience.
Although human experience as depicted in these three novels has also been reduced to the point that there may not be much to communicate. The narrators struggle to account for their own inertia and diminished sense of identity–one could say that in both Nog and Flats we never quite know for sure who our protagonist, the “character” ostensibly attached to the first-person narrative voice, actually is (and finally neither does he)–ultimately offering us a narrative of their own psychological displacement in the guise of “events” they purport to relate. “Experience” consists of the immediate objects of the narrator’s consciousness–or at least the verbal articulation of his nominal awareness–which the narrator presents to us as if attempting to stave off the complete dissolution of self, represented at least by a lingering stream of words. By the end of Nog, this is barely working:
I’m out of the bed. I put one foot in front of the other until I reached the door. I touched the knob. But I still have the bag. What I should have done was get rid of the black bag, what I am beginning to remember was that I did get rid of the black bag. I put it under the bunk. I remember something like that. There was a black bag, although I know too that nothing happened and I haven’t traveled around with a black bag. I touched the knob again. There was a quickness, certainly, as if I were about to be sure of something. But it’s out of my depth to know what has happened, to touch a doorknob and make a report. I’m not up to that. There have been events, of a sort, and they have occurred quickly, one after the other. . . .
The narrator’s halting recital and damaged, near-catatonic condition invokes comparison to Beckett, and indeed Wurlitzer’s novels, Nog and Flats especially, may be the most conspicuously influenced by Beckett in all of postwar American literature. Like Beckett, Wurlitzer places his character in situations of extremity, both physical and metaphysical, and depicts their actions in a way that, from their perspective at least, could be regarded as “realistic,” once we have conceded the incongruity of the circumstances. If we are less likely to consider the world Wurlitzer evokes as “absurd,” it is because the setting, specifically the American West, retains some of its externally recognizable reality, giving Wurlitzer’s fiction something of an allegorical overtone: Wurlitzer seems to be portraying not only the existential degradation of his protagonist but the historical and cultural legacy that has made this degradation not just possible but inevitable. The allegorical content is not dramatized explicitly (at least not until Wurlitzer’s later novels Slow Fade and The Drop Edge of Yonder), but produced as a kind of background noise, of which the characters themselves are only faintly aware, if at all.
The wide-open spaces (and all they signal to us about the American mythos of freedom and opportunity) have for the characters in Wurlitzer’s fiction become a debilitating obstacle, simply negotiating any space a source of pain and horror. The narrator of Flats makes his initial appearance by informing us of his journey (“I walked a fair piece”) to the place we find him, at the end of the road, the last few miles of which he has crawled. “After this space has been crawled through,” he tells us, “the fear of inhabiting an area massaged, the promise of an event removed or established. . .There is no telling. I have no intentions.” Of course, in one sense, there is nothing but “telling,” as this is only the first paragraph and the narrator occupies the rest of the novel relating his various attempts to “massage” his fear of venturing into unknown spaces. Nog is a more fully picaresque novel than Flats, and its protagonist therefore moves more freely from place to place (although pretty clearly prior to finding himself “in the flats, west of the city,” the narrator of Flats too was mostly a wanderer), but there remains throughout his itinerant movements as well an undercurrent of menace in the landscapes he traverses, as if the promise of natural freedom implicit in the prospect of the pristine American wilderness become a nightmare of depletion and degeneration.
This nightmarish quality is impressed more distinctly on the readers of Nog and Flats than on the characters themselves, however. Both narrators process and communicate their experiences with a radical lack of affect, even though the conditions in which they subsist are plainly aberrant and profoundly disturbing. Their response to the situation they confront is in this way analogous to Kafka, whose characters similarly act in the face of perilous and abnormal circumstances as if their strange predicament is quite normal after all, requiring the kind of earnestly rational actions those characters take. If the actions of Wurlitzer’s protagonists couldn’t exactly be called rational, they are nevertheless undertaken with the assumption such actions will be successful in getting them from point A to point B, at least. These characters have little sense of normal; they merely seek to survive, although they don’t really stop to consider why that might be desirable to begin with. That they do survive–or at least persist–despite the apparent pointlessness of the effort, finally does confer on them a kind of admirable tenacity–perhaps they will simply outlast their trouble, for whatever that is worth.
If we can imagine both of them echoing the narrator of Beckett’s The Unnamable in his declaration “I can’t go on/I’ll go on,” the narrator of Flats is probably the most thoroughly estranged from his surroundings, most profoundly alienated from the recognition of “self” as a coherent concept. And precisely because of Wurlitzer’s uncompromising evocation of the character’s dissociation in the literal division of personality (the narrator claims multiple identities in the course of the narrative) and the almost complete absence of forward movement in the plot, Nog is likely instead to be the novel for which Wurlitzer will be most immediately remembered, even though it could hardly be said that this novel is a more obviously conventional reading experience, its protagonist more “likeable” (in fact, both characters might be considered “sympathetic,” due to the extremity of their plights). But Nog does feature a more familiar kind of narrative structure, and the character engages in more recognizable sorts of human activities–even if the motivation for many of them often enough remain obscure (to themselves especially).
Nog could be described as a picaresque road novel, although to the extent Kerouac’s On the Road might be a touchstone for Wurlitzer’s novel, it is as the earlier work’s complete antithesis. If On the Road is spontaneous and ebullient, in Nog the travels undertaken are finally just chaotic and the character’s attitude largely apathetic, as if being on the move is literally a matter of going through the motions. If the goal in On the Road is to seek enlightenment, in Nog, to the extent there is a goal it is for most of these characters one of simple self-preservation. And if we can regard Nog as a reflection of the souring of the 60s, in a larger view it could be taken as the final negation of the whole postwar countercultural ethos for which Kerouac’s picaresque novel stands as the initiator and arguably most characteristic expression. Nog rejects the heady atmosphere of freedom accompanying Kerouac’s loosely structured narrative, which continues to appeal to readers of On the Road, but finally there is something equally compelling in the relentless questioning of the assumptions about freedom and its possibilities in mid-twentieth century America implicit in Wurlitzer’s revisionist alternative.
Yet there remains a certain kind of freedom intrinsic to Wurlitzer’s use of the iconography of the road novel–and more particularly the literary/film genre of the American Western–although it is not the sort of freedom that commends itself to easy celebration. Wurlitzer has identified Louis L’Amour as a significant influence on his thinking about narrative, despite the actual quality of L’Amour’s own stories (which are hackneyed and cliché-ridden). L’Amour prompted Wurlitzer to conceive of narrative as a kind of “space” that itself determines event or incident. Thus, like L’Amour’s heroes, who in Wurlitzer’s characterization, usually appear at the beginning of a story in a state of maximum freedom, traversing empty space, generally aimless and radically engrossed in their own immediacy, so too do the characters in Nog and Wurlitzer’s other works attempt to negotiate the emptiness of their immediate space, except that, unlike in L’Amour’s plots, there are no formulas or shopworn conventions to rescue the characters from the totality of that emptiness. They are instead subjected to an ineluctable contingency and the outbreak of random violence, those forces that define reality at the most fundamental level but from which we are usually able to shield ourselves with our illusions of continuity.
Certainly Wurlitzer’s protagonists do not entirely welcome their freedom to confront existence at its most elemental. Nog‘s protagonist (who may or may not be named “Nog”) simply drifts through the space into which his life has arrived, without much remaining volition, although he keeps moving, anyway. The narrator of Flats is more aware of the space he occupies as space, although he perceives it not as something through which to move but within which to place himself:
Halifax sits in an open space in an open land. He accepts neither what has come before nor what will come next. This must be my voice. The voice of Halifax. Behind me there are probably two men. We’ll form a company or group and go from there. Halifax is not stagnating. He will keep the chill from his bones. He will gather together an occasion. I want to keep it open. Something always happens even if nothing happens. . . .
The narrative of Flats thus consists of the repetition of such motion through multiple episodes themselves representing the narrator’s progressive detachment from a distinct sense of “self” that in other circumstances might actually indicate an attainment of something like enlightenment. At the novel’s conclusion the narrator has shed his last identity (“Mobile”), but does not assume a new one: “I want to say the same words over and over. I want just the sound. I want to fill up what space I am with one note. I want to follow the note beyond my own conclusion. I want a sound that is not involved with beginning or ending. I want to release my own attention to let in the light.” The narrator has reached an awareness of “space” as the ground of being and the possibility of its own transcendence, but unfortunately it is likely his last conscious moment, his literal enlightenment coming only after being impelled to it by the direst circumstances imaginable.
Both Nog and Flats evoke a vaguely post-apocalyptic setting, although what makes each of them eerily powerful is that the source of the catastrophic conditions portrayed is finally not divulged. Quake, on the other hand, is an unambiguously post-apocalyptic novel, although even here the novel’s effect depends to an extent on our finding the actions and characters on which it focuses to be unexplained and motiveless. Certainly the central action, which initiates the narrative–“I was thrown out of bed,” the narrator announces–is comprehensible enough: a massive earthquake strikes Los Angeles, causing near-total destruction and sending most people into the streets. What issues is not so much chaos but an outbreak of ruthlessness and indifference to human suffering in attempts by armed and organized marauders to seize on catastrophe as an opportunity to assert control. Almost immediately, or so it seems, these militias begin to appear and to terrorize the quake victims, who are themselves quickly reduced to their impulses for survival.
The victims include the narrator, another of Wurlitzer’s drifters, who at the novel’s opening is the resident of a shabby motel and who introduces himself as someone who “had fallen in three months ago from New York and was waiting for my money to run out. Then I would either borrow more or cop some and take a ride somewhere else.” Although this narrator is not as separated from the vestiges of civilization as the narrators of Nog and Flats (at least not at first), he nevertheless subsists on its margins, but in this case his wandering in the novel is involuntary, and he is joined by many others becoming aware of just how thin is the veneer of that civilization: “Thank god I no longer dream no more,” he overhears someone say near the end of the novel. “I’m afraid to think on the kinks I seen today.” So quickly do the streets of Los Angeles devolve into a war of all against all (with momentary alliances formed for immediate self-defense) that it would seem only a sufficiently serious disruption of fixed routine is required for the social inhibitions we are accustomed to observing to break down entirely.
The sheer abandon with which so many people shed these inhibitions and exchange them for acts of barbarism is rendered quite powerfully in Quake, but eventually the point gets overextended through its repetition, the narrative’s unsparing assessment of human nature too overtly communicating an apparent polemical intent. In fact, the novel could be regarded as even more narrowly satirical, the duly elaborated illustration of the declaration a woman makes to the narrator near the beginning of the story (the scale of the devastation not yet fully clear): “This is the worst goddamn shithole place I’ve ever seen. You don’t see it at first because of all the palm trees and orange juice bars but let something happen and then see what they do.” See what they do indeed. The narrator of Quake ultimately finds himself in the same condition as the protagonists of the first two novels–reduced nearly to catatonia, barely able to crawl–but here the cause of his distress is all too obvious and loses in productive allusion and intimation what it perhaps gains in dramatic immediacy.
While both Nog and Flats clearly enough reflect an interest in the Western landscape–at least in its more primal features–Quake signals a more specific preoccupation with California, both in its geographical and its cultural character. Undoubtedly, this is partly attributable to Wurlitzer’s work as a Hollywood screenwriter (most notably on the independent production Two-Lane Blacktop and on Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), an influence which manifests itself directly in Wurlitzer’s next novel, Slow Fade, which did not appear until more than a decade after Quake. If Quake is somewhat disappointing in that finally it is too close to being a conventional post-apocalyptic narrative (although when Wurlitzer wrote the novel, the prevailing tropes of post-apocalyptic fiction hand certainly not become as familiar as they have now become, and to a significant degree Quake might be seen as one of the works that gave these stories of civilization’s demise an imprimatur of experimentalism), Slow Fade, centered around an aging film director (who bears much resemblance to Peckinpah) disappoints because it is entirely recognizable as an entry in the “Hollywood novel” genre, which presents a disabused account ot Hollywood as a place where human nature is displayed at its most obnoxious, unleashed by the very forces of ambition and success that make Hollywood’s “dream factory” such a potent symbol of American aspiration.
Thus if Quake verges on satire (albeit of a particularly savage sort), Slow Fade certainly is satire, and while it reveals Wurlitzer’s jaundiced view of his experience working in a fairly removed corner of the dream factory, it doesn’t much tell us anything new or even that shocking about the movie business or the people who maneuver their way through it, nor does it expand the art of satire to any discernible degree. Anyone who reads Slow Fade without having read the earlier trilogy would no doubt judge Wurlitzer a trenchant observer of Hollywood moviemaking culture, which he treats in an episodic but not especially discontinuous narrative form that ultimately serves as the functional vehicle for the novel’s caustic chronicle of Hollywood degradation and excess. The novel’s portrayal of the likely end of filmmaker Wesley Hardin’s career is not without a grudging respect for Hardin’s stubborn commitment to his artistic vision, but his final retreat to his native Newfoundland at the novel’s conclusion seems a less effective, if more explicit, representation of this character’s release from self-deception than we find in the earlier protagonists’ less voluntary self-renunciations in Nog, Flats, and Quake.
One might have given up, following Slow Fade, on Rudy Wurlitzer returning to fiction as a preferred mode of writing, as almost 25 years elapsed between Slow Fade and the publication of The Drop Edge of Yonder (2007). Moreover, since this novel is described as a “novelization” of sorts of an unpublished screenplay, readers might have expected it to be essentially a continuation of Wurlitzer’s screenwriting career by other means, as was Slow Fade in its own way. But while Drop Edge of Yonder might have originated as a script (in which form it apparently acquired a semi-legendary status even in its unproduced state), the novel Wurlitzer fashioned from it shows no signs of being reassembled from another, visually-oriented, medium but firmly claims its own integrity as a work of fiction. A third-person narrative, it is perhaps the most fully rendered in setting, character, and “authentic” dialogue of Wurlitzer’s novels, yet the story it tells reaffirms the episodic picaresque strategy of Nog as the most suitable representation of American experience, and, indeed, The Drop Edge of Yonder might be regarded as Wurlitzer’s ultimate synthesis (although we could hope this is not necessarily his final novel) both of the literary/aesthetic assumptions he has brought to his fiction and of his depictions of the American landscape and the human behaviors it has inspired (or impaired).
The story concerns the adventures of Zebulon Shook, born in the Western mountains but in the novel wandering through most of the American West (with side trips to Mexico and Central America as well). His trek is foretold by a Shoshone Indian woman, who places a curse on him: “From now on, you will drift like a blind man between the worlds, not knowing if you’re dead or alive, or if the unseen world exists, or if you’re dreaming.” Thus the “in-between” world Zebulon traverses is both hallucinatory and intensely corporeal (especially in its seediness and frequent mayhem). The Drop Edge of Yonder is to an extent an inverted Western in the mode of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (or Robert Coover’s more recent Huck Out West), but most of all it is a compelling illustration of Wurlitzer’s conception of “space” as on the one hand inescapably physical, but on the other inherently metaphysical in its implications. Zebulon Shook encounters quite tangible obstacles to his freedom to roam (at one point being incarcerated on a prison ship for his efforts), ultimately declared an outlaw and pursued through material spaces often hostile to his presence; at the same time, Zebulon comes to even more acutely undergo a kind of disembodied expansion of presence, perhaps indeed extending to the “drop edge of yonder,” over which Zebulon himself may disappear at the novel’s conclusion, when he seems simply to vanish.
In considering Wurlitzer’s novels collectively, it is tempting to think of them not as “postmodern” but “posthuman.” They depict a world in which conventional human values seem no longer to apply, although also question the extent to which such values, originating in a belief in rationality, coherence, and ultimate purpose, ever applied in the first place. But perhaps it is more accurate to describe the sensibility at work in Wurlitzer’s fiction as “postillusory,” manifesting in a depiction of human society undone by its own indifference to these values, set in a boundless material environment that barely registers its presence (except to literally destroy it in Quake). The Drop Edge of Yonder contributes to this larger vision of disenchantment by adding specificity to the act of dispelling illusion in its invocation of the mythos and imagery of the American frontier. America’s historical reality, as well as the inherited representations of that reality, are themselves rooted in contingency and aimless fluctuation, which Zebulon Shook experiences in the novel’s authoritatively rendered particulars. As Zebulon learns (as all of Wurlitzer’s protagonists learn), these conditions abide; any effort to acknowledge their dominion requires first of all facing down the terror they bring.
Robert Coover has been a presence on the American literary scene for over 50 years now. In many ways, the critical response to each new book he publishes continues to register the perception that he remains an adventurous writer who repeatedly offers challenges to convention, a perception in which Coover himself must take considerable satisfaction, as he is indeed one of the most consistently audacious and inventive of the first generation postmodernists his work partly represents. Coover’s novels and stories subvert both the abiding myths and shibboleths—sometimes outright lies—that animate American history, and the formal assumptions of literary storytelling, often by adopting the ostensible conventions of such storytelling but subjecting them to a kind of straight-faced parody. In his new novel, Huck Out West, Coover turns to such a strategy, in this case not simply mimicking the patterns or manner of an inherited narrative form, but creating a new and extended version of a specific, already existing work—a sequel, but one intended to provoke reflection on the earlier work’s cultural implications and its literary authority.
Coover has drawn on the elemental power of stories and storytelling going back to his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, as well as the story collection Pricksongs and Descants, the latter including such stories as “The Door,” “The Gingerbread House,” and “The Magic Poker,” all of which invoke fairy tales and fables as both form and subject. Coover is one of the central figures in the rise of what came to be called “metafiction,” but where, say, John Barth wrote in books like Lost in the Funhouse a blatantly self-reflexive kind of story that proclaims its own fabrication, Coover dramatized the conditions of fiction-making allegorically, making storytelling itself the story. This is perhaps best illustrated in his novel The Universal Baseball Association, still arguably his best book and the most revealing of his fundamental preoccupations as a writer. The novel’s protagonist, J. Henry Waugh (JH Waugh), is the God-like creator of a fictional world that is ostensibly a make-believe baseball league but that de facto represents an alternative reality in which Henry can emotionally and intellectually invest apart from his unsatisfying and humdrum job as an accountant. Indeed, his investment in this reality becomes so all-encompassing that at the novel’s conclusion it would seem he has disappeared into it—albeit as the now withdrawn and omniscient deity who contemplates his creation without intervention.
Although a book like The Public Burning, probably Coover’s best-known and most controversial work, would not at first seem to feature the same sort of concerns informing The Universal Baseball Association—it is, after all, a novel about weighty issues related to politics and history, not about an obscure accountant dreaming his life away—but in fact The Public Burning is not really about politics and history—not directly, at least—but politics as representation, and the distorting effects the sensationalized and distorted forms of representation in America have on American history and culture. In both UBA and The Public Burning, we are shown how easily, even eagerly, human beings shape reality into fictions and subsequently insist on taking those fictions as reality, with predictably disastrous consequences. J. Henry Waugh exemplifies individually what American culture at large evidences more generally: the desire to refashion a recalcitrant reality into a simple, more manageable creation, in which we must force ourselves to believe or that repressed reality will disagreeably return.
A novel like The Public Burning eludes designation as a strictly “political” novel—and thus avoids seeming a dated artifact of a fading Cold War controversy—because it is not finally a representation of the Rosenberg case per se but a representation of the representations to which the Rosenberg case and its legacy have been submitted, an evocation of American depravity through the discursive forms—exemplified by the New York Times and Time magazine—and manufactured imagery—embodied in “Uncle Sam”—that shape and circulate the specific content of that depravity. If J. Henry Waugh retreats into his private invented reality to fill his own inner (and outer) void, in The Public Burning the emptiness is felt as a social loss, an absence of meaning, to be counteracted through the invented reality provided by Media myths and fantasies, myths that at their most destructive must be reinforced through the ritualized spectacle into which the Rosenbergs’ death is organized.
Since The Public Burning, Coover has published numerous, consistently lively works of fiction of various length (8 novels, including the mammoth sequel to The Origin of the Brunists, The Brunist Day of Wrath, 7 novellas, and 3 collections of short fiction). While these books never seem repetitive, they do return to a few obviously fruitful subjects—sports, fairy tales, movies—and can certainly be taken as continued variations on the self-reflexive strategies introduced in Pricksongs and Descants, Universal Baseball Association, and The Public Burning. At times this strategy is more muted, as in Gerald’s Party, which seems more purely an exercise in surrealism, while in other books the artifice is unconcealed, directly integrated into plot and setting, as in The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, one of Coover’s most underrated books that dramatizes the plight of a character caught in an ongoing fiction from which he cannot seem to escape, a fictional character aware of his own fictionality.
Coover has also produced a series of novel and novellas that foreground their own fictionality by presenting themselves as versions of a particular mode or genre of fiction. Dr. Chen’s Amazing Adventure is Coover’s take on science fiction. Ghost Town is a western, while Noir evokes the hard-boiled detective novel (as filtered through film noir). Such works could not exactly be categorized as pastiche, since they are not so much imitations as efforts to distill the genre to its most fundamental assumptions and most revealing practices. Nor could they really be called parodies, since the goal is not so much to spoof or ridicule the genre but to in a sense turn it inside out, make it disclose the specific ways a particular mode of storytelling lends its conventions toward motifs and typologies that in turn have worked to substitute themselves for the actualities those conventions were created to depict, preventing anything resembling a clear perception of historical and cultural actualities apart from these archetypal representations. In novels such as Pinocchio in Venice and now Huck Out West, Coover takes this strategy of metafictional mimicry a step farther by seizing upon a specific iconic text and reworking it, both as a kind of homage to the prior work but also to create a parallel text that echoes the original while it also sounds out the work’s tacit if partly concealed assumptions and elaborates on its latent if unspoken implications.
Huck Out West picks up Huckleberry Finn’s adventures after he has indeed headed out to the territories and taken up a life as an itinerant in the American West. Essentially a drifter, Huck in this way fulfills the destiny inherent to his character as depicted in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where he is content to float his way down the Great River to no particular destination beyond a loosely defined “freedom.” If the objective in Huckleberry Finn for both Huck and his friend Jim (who seeks literal freedom from bondage) is obstructed through the auspices of Tom Sawyer, likewise in Huck Out West Tom causes his supposed best friend (“pards,” they call each other) mostly trouble for their friendship—in fact, in Huck Out West Tom threatens to hang Huck, an act only the most naïve reader would believe he does not intend to carry out. Tom, who literally rides back into Huck’s life (a little over halfway into the novel) on a white horse, again proves unreliable and self-serving, although in Huck Out West these character traits, which Coover has keenly abstracted from the portrayal of Tom in Twain’s novel, are much more deadly in their potential consequences (not only to Huck) than when expressed by Tom Sawyer the 12-year-old boy.
Before Tom makes his reappearance and ultimately sends Huck off on the same kind of open-ended adventure that concludes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck brings us up to date on his life since his journey down the river, which includes riding along with Tom for the Pony Express. After Tom decides to head back east, nothing really captures Huck’s interest long enough for him stay in any one place, so when the novel’s present action begins he has settled into the life of a wanderer:
When [Tom] left, I carried on like before, hiring myself out to whosoever, because I didn’t know what else to do, but I was dreadful lonely. I wrangled horses, rode shotgun on coaches and wagon trains, murdered some buffaloes, worked with one or t’other army, fought some Indian wars, shooting and getting shot at, and didn’t think too much about any of it. I reckoned if I could earn some money, I could try to buy Jim’s freedom back, but I warn’t never nothing but stone broke.
Huck must decide whether to buy Jim’s freedom because shortly after heading west, Tom Sawyer consigned Jim back to slavery by selling him to a band of Cherokee Indians. Huck is regretful about this decision, but does not look for Jim after all. Eventually Huck does serendipitously encounter Jim, who has indeed attained his freedom and is now traveling with a wagon train of settlers that Huck is hired to guide. He has become a devout Christian and forgives Huck for apparently abandoning him, but this is the last we see of Jim in Huck Out West. It is on the one hand disappointing that Coover chooses not to engage with the specific racial issues raised by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (as John Keene does in his updating of the novel in his book Counternarratives), but on the other hand, he does in effect transfer the theme of white American treatment of racial and ethnic minorities to the eliminationist campaign against Native Americans during the post-Civil War migration to the western “territories.” This campaign is represented most directly in the character of Custer (“General Hard Ass,” as Huck refers to him), but the historical forces portrayed in all of the novel’s actions converge around a broad account of a rapacious, mercenary America determined to extend its sovereignty over all the land it can exploit, with little regard for the devastation and suffering this expansion leaves in its wake.
Ultimately Huck Out West does mirror the Huck/Jim relationship of Huckleberry Finn in Huck’s pairing with a Lakota tribesman, Eeteh, who shares with Huck a general disinclination to bear down and work hard, preferring his own kind of independence, but who is nevertheless an adept storyteller in the Lakota tradition and regales Huck with tales about the trickster figure, Coyote. It is Eeteh who directs Huck to the Black Hills in order to elude General Hard Ass, whom Huck fears wants him imprisoned, or worse, for refusing an order, even though Huck was serving only as a civilian scout. Thus Huck finds himself living in a teepee in Deadwood Gulch, a pristine creek valley when Huck arrives but soon transformed into a muddy slough overrun with prospectors, their hangers-on, and all the hastily constructed buildings erected when gold is discovered. It is into this suddenly chaotic place that Tom Sawyer arrives as well, allegedly deputized by the federal government to bring order. What Tom really seeks to do in Deadwood Gulch is seize the main chance, to use it as the opportunity for the same sort of self-aggrandizement that is always Tom Sawyer’s ultimate motivation.
Huck can never quite accept this, even after Tom has threatened to hang him for defying Tom’s wishes. Rescued from Tom’s bluster by Eeteh (who brings along a few Lakota warriors for good measure), Huck replies to Tom’s predictable apology: “You’re my pard, Tom, always was. But it ain’t tolerable here for me no more. If you want to ride together again, come along with us now.” Tom demurs, and Huck rides off with Eeteh, but in this case lighting out for a territory more informed by Eeteh’s spontaneous, generally elastic storytelling than by the “stretchers” told by Tom, lies he tries to believe are true—or tries to convince others they should believe. Huck himself has earlier indicated he already understands the difference between Tom’s stories that hide reality and the kind of story that might be truer to Huck’s sense of reality: “Tom is always living in a story he read in a book so he knows what happens next, and sometimes it does. For me it ain’t like that. Something happens and then something else happens, and I’m in trouble again.”
Huck Out West is not as purely a picaresque narrative as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but Coover has certainly captured the nomadic state of Huck Finn’s soul. He has cannily discerned the essential nonconformity manifest in the character created by Mark Twain, and memorably transformed the adolescent’s lack of ambition into a more self-aware skepticism toward social expectations and cultural practices—while still preserving in Huck an ingenuous outlook that acknowledges what the world is like but remains free of malice or resentment. This quality is reflected in the colloquial eloquence of Huck’s narrative voice, which again Coover has adapted from the same quality found in Twain’s novel but has further developed into what may be the most impressive accomplishment in Huck Out West. Huck doesn’t merely sound “authentic”; his idiomatic expressiveness is sustained throughout the novel less to provide “color” than to establish Huck as a character able to render his circumstances persuasively through the integrity of his verbal presence.
If I did develop one reservation about Huck Out West while reading it, it was from the invocation of Custer as Huck’s bete noire and scourge of the West. This move threatens to make the novel too reminiscent of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, whose narrator also relates his peripatetic adventures in the Old West in a vernacular-laden voice. Perhaps this only indicates how much Berger himself may have been influenced by Huckleberry Finn, and the work of Mark Twain in general, but Berger’s Jack Crabb is primarily the means by which the novel effects its darkly comic burlesque of American myth-making. Huck Out West engages in its fair share of this sort of lampoonery as well, but ultimately it goes farther. Robert Coover provides a new version of the twice-told tale offering a radical representational strategy that still allows for dynamic storytelling, even as it interrogates its own process of representation.
The Landscape of Bitterness and Recrimination
Readers mostly unfamiliar with the work of Jonathan Baumbach (perhaps aware that he is vaguely identified as an “experimental” writer and that his son is a film director whose most famous film portrays a character loosely based on him) would find his latest selection of stories, The Pavilion of Former Wives, to be on the whole usefully representative of Baumbach’s work in its prevailing subject, but not so revealing of the more adventurous formal strategies Baumbach has employed in his best fiction. As with most of Baumbach’s work in the second half of his career—a career that overall has now spanned more than 50 years—the stories in The Pavilion of Former Wives track the erratic course of love and marriage (the latter often interfering with the former), usually from the perspective of a relationship-battered male protagonist. Two of the most frequent versions of this protagonist figure appearing in Baumbach’s stories and novels are the writers “B” and “Josh,” both of whom do indeed make appearances in Pavilion, along with other, similar characters named “Jay” or “Jacob,” whose often fumbling attempts to adequately comport themselves in the company of women are featured in the book.
Since the stories unfold from the protagonist’s point of view (although not always in the first person), we are usually influenced to, if not exactly wish him well in his efforts to cope with the consequences of his romantic follies, at least then to view him as somewhat less that completely clueless in his dealings with women. Still, most of Baumbach’s “heroes” (it is hard not to take them as partially stand-ins for the author) seem both deeply wounded by their failures in love and marriage and unable to really alter the attitudes and actions that clearly contribute to these failures. Collectively, these fictions depict a pattern of male behavior that ultimately exhausts the patience of wives and lovers, causing them to rebel in both implicit and explicit ways (most obviously, divorce), although the culpability of Baumbach’s male characters is most often a function of befuddlement and incomprehension rather than deliberate insensitivity–however little the difference ultimately matters.
B is featured in the book’s first story, the title story, a quasi-fantasy narrative in which B is able to revisit former relationships at a kind of carnival sideshow attraction, while the second story, “Acting Out,” features Jay, whose sessions in marriage counseling the story relates. “Seattle” concerns Josh Quartz and his wife, Genevieve, who have appeared in Baumbach’s books periodically since his 1979 novel, Chez Charlotte and Emily. These three stories immediately situate us in familiar Baumbach fictional space, inhabited by characters preoccupied with their domestic and romantic travails (the women as well as the men), sometimes choosing to relive them in their seeming inability to “move on.” This is dramatized most forcefully in “The Pavilion of Former Wives,” in which B literally cannot resist the invitation, discovered through a personal ad in an “intellectual journal,” to “revisit past relationships and, by rediscovering where they had hit the skids, possibly make right what had once gone terribly wrong.” B risks even more “going wrong” when he asks the woman portraying his wives in the pavilion’s reenactments out on a date, and at the story’s conclusion, already “filled with intimations of regret,” he clearly intends to pursue the relationship even farther.
This story actually gets the book off to an auspicious start, as its lightly surreal qualities introduce a compelling variation on Baumbach’s typical sort of domestic farce, while also evoking the dream-like atmosphere he sought to produce in much of his earlier work. “Seattle” enhances the portrayal of his dysfunctional relationships by providing a glimpse of such a relationship additionally navigating the onset of old age and the failures of memory that accompany it, as both Josh and Genevieve struggle to maintain their bearings in the present and their recall of the past—particularly their past grievances with one another. But most of the remaining stories are formally unadventurous, relating more of the same sort of tale of love and conflict on which Baumbach has almost obsessively focused since at least his novel Separate Hours (1990). “The Story” and “The Night Writer” are brief metafictional vignettes that remind us that Baumbach has since the 1970s been identified as a postmodernist interested in interrogating the representational and storytelling assumptions of fiction, and “The New York Review of Love” is related through the exchange of letters between a man and a woman that are prompted by the latter’s placement of a personal ad in, presumably, another “intellectual journal,” but each of these stories is rather slight and would hardly impress new readers as the work of an intrepid innovator of literary form or a keen observer of the interactions between the sexes.
Baumbach has never exactly been the most resolute exponent of formal experiment in fiction (although he has in reviews, essays, and interviews frequently enough spoken up on behalf of unconventional, “difficult” fiction, and he served as the founding editor of the Fiction Collective (now FC2), arguably the first important American independent literary press devoted exclusively to experimental fiction), but in the 1970s (and intermittently thereafter) he did produce some noteworthy books that could in no way be called conventional or “mainstream” and that still hold up as inventive works of literary art. The first of these books, Reruns, was published in 1974, following on his first two novels of mostly conventional postwar realism. Reruns draws inspiration from Baumbach’s lifelong fascination with movies, as well as his interest in dreaming and dream states (the two perhaps in fact closely related), an interest clearly announced in the title of his first book, the 1965 critical study, The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in the American Novel. In this book, Baumbach the critic discusses the ways in which selected American writers in the immediate postwar period metaphorically invoke an imagery of “nightmare,” create a nightmarish atmosphere to capture the terrifying qualities of American life that confront the characters in their novels and stories. But where the narratives in this fiction otherwise remain within the recognizable boundaries of realism, Reruns literalizes the nightmare, depending not on cumulative imagery or atmosphere to work figuratively, but substituting for the discreet effects of language a narrative structure that mimics dreams.
Since all fiction is ultimately an illusion conjured by words, Baumbach’s dream narratives, like all narratives, are of course unavoidably metaphorical. But beginning with Reruns, Baumbach employs the device as a conceit in the same sense that a story is itself a conceit, a extended structural trope that lends to the work of fiction its manifestation of form. These books dispense both with “plot” as the source of narrative coherence, as well as with “coherence” itself understood as the expectation that image and episodic action will make immediate “sense” of the sort we assume will prevail in our normal waking moments. Thus Reruns depicts a man’s life as literally a series of dreamed reenactments. The “reruns” freely indulge in the kind of distortion and incongruous juxtapositions we associate with dreams, often incorporating the narrative devices and the iconography of movies (as well as actual movie stars: “One day (it was raining as I recall), Walter Brennan dropped in,” one dream chapter begins.) If the novel provides an intelligible account of its protagonist’s life after all, its failures and follies, it’s not because it sets out to present one but because the integrity of the dream vision (or series of visions) inevitably distills the essential moments, the indelible impressions, that continue to linger with the character’s putatively dreaming self.
While the degree of calamity the narrator of Reruns seems to have experienced is nightmarish enough, the overarching tone of the novel is broadly comic, a characteristic shared with Baumbach’s subsequent fiction as well and one that clearly indicates how he adapted the bleak outlook examined in his critical study, and to an extent embodied in his own first two novels, into a blackly comic view of men and women struggling to understand each other in a landscape of bitterness and recrimination. Such a shift does indeed align Baumbach’s work more closely with the predominant spirit of American postmodern fiction of the 1960s and 1970s (and shows him to be a naturally funny writer as well), although his next novel, Babble (1976), while obviously retaining the surrealism of its predecessor, is lighter in tone, its humor less discernibly an alternative expression of terror and dread of the kind postmodern comedy so often represents. The hero of Babble is a baby who has the power of articulate (at times very articulate) speech and is very thoughtful about the various dilemmas he faces as a human infant. Once we have accepted this fanciful premise, the book is essentially a collection of picaresque adventures, as the baby takes on the role of superhero, detective, and soldier, and in one episode he “is admitted with what his parents consider unseemly haste to a private California university”—where he is immediately asked, “Do you want to teach a section of composition?”
Chez Charlotte and Emily (1979) is the culmination of Baumbach’s efforts to reconstitute his work as part of the efflorescence of experimental fiction in postwar American literature. It is his best book, and the one most likely to attract future readers and to possibly influence more adventurous writers. In it Baumbach applies the episodic dreamscape strategy employed in Reruns even more rigorously and more vigorously, opening up the “story” to a larger cast of characters from whose alternating perspective Baumbach evokes an array of hallucinatory scenes, ostensibly originating in a novel being written by Joshua Quartz, who relates these scenes to his wife Genevieve, although Joshua tells us at the beginning that the main characters are—Joshua Quartz and his wife Genevieve. Joshua and Genevieve, however, cohabit the novel (both Joshua’s novel and the novel we are reading) with Francis and his wife Nora. Francis initiates the novel’s enabling action when he is pulled away by the tide while swimming and washes up in an isolated cove, where he is discovered by two sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Francis chooses to leave his old life behind and stay with the sisters.
Francis’s rather ethereal experiences with Charlotte and Emily, and his eventual return, intermix with episodes focusing on Nora, who takes the opportunity of her husband’s disappearance and presumed death to assert her independence, and on Joshua and Genevieve, who have some pretty extreme experiences of their own. Eventually, however, the various stories participate in a kind of phantasmagoria, their more absurdly fanciful qualities (Genevieve’s affair with “Bobby Mitchum,” for example) presumably attributed to Joshua’s literary imagination, as is their ultimate refusal to consolidate into a recognizable, naturalistic depiction of the novel’s characters and their “true” circumstances. Finally the truest subject of Chez Charlotte and Emily is the marriage of Joshua and Genevieve, but unlike Baumbach’s other, later examinations of marital discord and romantic incompetence, this novel is able to realize the subject with the kind of formal ingenuity that fully confirms Baumbach’s reputation as an experimental writer whose efforts contributed to an enlargement of the conceptual possibilities available to adventurous writers.
Regrettably, Baumbach failed to really follow up on the achievement of Chez Charlotte and Emily, first of all in the most literal way possible: over the next decade he would publish only one novel, My Father More or Less (1982), and one thin volume of short fiction, The Life and Times of Major Fiction (1987). The former is perhaps Baumbach’s weakest novel (although potentially of interest to fans of Baumbach’s son, film director Noah Baumbach, presumably the model for the young son portrayed in the novel), and while the latter contains stories of interest (particularly the title story), it is altogether a rather modest volume. Since Separate Hours in 1990, Baumbach has published more or less regularly, although mostly with small, independent presses (including one that ceased operation shortly after publishing Baumbach’s novel You, forcing Baumbach to buy the remaining copies and attempt to have the book republished). Readers coming to Baumbach’s work for the first time through these books would certainly find them a departure from the practices of mainstream “literary fiction,” but at best they employ the strategies originating in Reruns and Chez Charlotte and Emily—Dreams of Molly (2011) is in fact a direct sequel to Reruns—without advancing beyond the attainments of those earlier novels.
Of the later books, perhaps B (2004) offers the greatest interest as an exemplar of Baumbach’s most persistent preoccupations. Again conflict between the sexes provides the thematic focus, manifested in diverse ways through a series of miscellaneous episodes involving the title figure, a writer who begins the book by telling us he had decided upon turning 50 “it was time to tell my own story unmediated by metaphorical disguise.” B is the Baumbach protagonist most transparently a stand-in for the author, so we should of course respect the metafictional distance B’s lowering of the “metaphorical disguise” paradoxically imposes, but B is finally such a familiar figure in Baumbach’s work, resembling so many of the other apparent surrogates in behavior and attitude, while the circumstances and events recounted in B so often echo the particulars found across Baumbach’s fiction, that the self-reflexive references to the protagonist’s vocation become more the essentially realistic details underpinning a work that itself never strays too far from its own kind of episodic realism.
Still, the book’s form, not quite a novel, certainly not a set of slickly polished stories, gives it an aesthetic edge and an agreeably ragged unity that make B a better introduction to Jonathan Baumbach’s work than The Pavilion of Lost Wives. Unfortunately, neither of them reveal Baumbach to be an important if unjustly neglected experimental writer but rather a minor participant in the “classic” phase of American postmodernism who never quite managed to validate his initial (although nevertheless very real) accomplishments challenging traditional practice.
Reading the Past and the Future: John Keene’s Counternarratives
John Keene’s Counternarratives is neither a collection of short stories, nor the sort of linked novel-by-proxy series that has become increasingly common in the past decade or so. This extraordinary book is instead unified by the conceit invoked in its title: its stories all counter, challenge, or subvert established narratives about race and slavery in the history of the Americas. Together their effect is to disrupt and disorient our settled notions about the agency of the enslaved and exploited, and about the intelligibility of history itself.
The first story in the book, “Manhatta,” briefly tells of the original landing on Manhattan Island of Juan Rodriguez, the first non-indigenous inhabitant of what is now New York City, establishing the iconoclastic spirit of Counternarratives by reminding us that the first “settler” in what became the largest city in the United States was in fact a man of African descent. “Manhatta” is followed by “On Brazil, or Dénouement: The Londônias-Figueriras,” which moves the setting to Brazil, whose development as a slaveholding Portuguese colony is traced alongside that of the US through the book’s first section. This story reminds us that slavery was a phenomenon endemic to the European colonization of the Western hemisphere (as does “Gloss, or the Strange History of Our Lady of Sorrows”), while “An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” makes us remember that in the American colonies slavery was accepted in the North as well as the South.
But these stories do not simply represent enslaved Africans as the oppressed victims of European colonial cupidity. The black protagonists in stories such as “Gloss,” “An Outtake,” and “A Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon” are strong-willed and dauntless in their desire for freedom, and they possess a distinctive power of their own. In “Gloss” and “Lisbon,” this power is expressed in the characters’ moral stature and palpable accomplishments, but also through a spiritual force that at times manifests as essentially supernatural. The latter story is narrated (as we discover at its conclusion) by a slave known to the whites as Joao Baptista, but who informs the ostensible protagonist, the provost of a Catholic mission, that he wants to be called by his African name, Burunbara. Burunbara, it turns out, “can read the past and the future. I can speak to the living, as now, and to the dead. I can feel the weather before it turns and the night before it falls. Every creature that walks this earth converses with me.” “Gloss, or the Strange History of Our Lady of Sorrow” features an enslaved woman named Carmel, who, after the family she serves is killed during the Haitian revolution, accompanies the only surviving daughter to a convent in Kentucky. Carmel’s powers of divination allow her to speak with the dead and give her access to a world beyond sensory experience that she renders in visionary works of art.
Burunbara and Carmel share this oracular insight with James Alton Rivers, formerly known as Huckleberry Finn’s raft companion Jim Watson in Mark Twain’s novel. In “Rivers,” Jim has attained his freedom, and the story begins with an encounter Jim has with both Huck and Tom Sawyer in St. Louis. Tom has predictably enough become a garden-variety white supremacist:
You’d better watch yourself, Jim, you hear me? Good thing we know you but walking these streets like they belong to you, and they don’t to no nigger, no matter what some of you might think these days, so watch it, cause the time’ll come when even the good people like me and Huck here have had enough.
Nobody who has read either Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer carefully can really be surprised that the adult Tom holds these views, nor that Huck, in contrast, shows signs of retaining his respect for Jim. Tom Sawyer’s “adventures” are possible because he is a young white boy whose freedom is predicated on the unfreedom of others, and his “mischief” is more often callous and self-involved than innocent. Huck’s adventures, on the other hand, force him to confront the realities of the culture that has shaped him, and in the process, he also must acknowledge his common humanity with the “runaway slave” who has shared his journey. If in “Rivers” Huck doesn’t exactly sound like the dissenting voice that, at the conclusion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, announces the intent to “light out for the territory,” he does try to restrain Tom in his racist taunting. Keene doesn’t counter Twain’s portrayal of Huck and Tom so much as extend that portrayal to its probable outcome in their maturity.
What Keene does counter is the popular perception of Tom Sawyer as the prototypical American boy, offering instead a glimpse at what American “innocence” can seamlessly become. Certainly Keene also contests the perception of Jim as simply Huck’s amiable and superstitious companion, assisting in Huck’s education in the ways of the world and acting as the catalyst in his possible moral enlightenment. Here Jim tells us his own story, and his superstition has become an ability to read “omens” that is valuable when he joins the First Missouri Colored Troops during the Civil War. The most unsettling moment in “Rivers” is undoubtedly the conclusion, in which Jim’s company is confronted by a Confederate brigade:
. . . I usually kept to the reader as I was ordered to, but Anderson urged several of us to crawl out to the edge of the field, near the river, where there was a stand of Montezuma cypresses, which I did and when I rounded them flat on my stomach, creeping forward like a panther I saw it, that face I could have identified if blind in both eyes, him, in profile, the agate eyes in a squint, that sandy ring of beard collaring the gaunt cheeks the soiled gray jacket half open and hanging around the sun-reddened throat, him crouching reloading his gun, quickly glancing up and around him so as not to miss anything.
This scene disturbs not because it undercuts a plausible narrative about the likely fates of Huck and Jim, but because it is that narrative. If we are to take these fictional characters and imagine them real, with subsequent life stories true to historical circumstances, the scenario Keene presents is entirely believable. The influence of the slave culture in which Twain depicts both Huck and Tom being raised is not easily eluded; the vow to “go to hell” rather than betray a friend cannot easily negate the overwhelming social pressure to show solidarity with one’s own and help defeat the Union invaders. The final encounter between Jim and Huck that Keene provides prompts us to reconsider any notion we might have that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, however much its protagonist might experience individual moral progression, tells us much about the social progression necessary to make Huck’s story more than a pleasing fiction.
If the myth of Huckleberry Finn cannot be sustained in the light of historical reality, Jim endures with his dignity and self-respect intact, at least through the compelling reimagining undertaken by Keene. “The Aeronauts” shares with “Rivers” a Civil War–era setting and concerns the narrator’s experience as an employee of the “Balloon Corps” near the beginning of the war. “The Aeronauts” is perhaps the lightest, most humorous story in the book, although it also provides a vivid sense of black life in Philadelphia, as well as a portrait of wartime Washington. The bleakest story is no doubt the last, “The Lions” (given a separate final section, identified simply as a “Counternarrative”). Where most of the other stories are very specific in details of setting and historical period, this story is generalized and abstract, existing in “un-time,” as one of the two characters puts it, presented as an extended dialogue between a deposed ruler and his successor, who has presumably staged a coup, but who is also a longtime comrade in arms. Their conversation reveals a violent and ruthless past of the kind we unfortunately associate with many postcolonial regimes: “All those car crashes, overdoses, bodies found at the bottom of drained swimming pools, riverbeds, earthen dams, sudden bathroom electrocutions, sharp, heavy projectiles flying through windows while people were eating their morning meals. . . .” Keene depicts these two characters as quite obviously unscrupulous and brutal, but they did not become so in a moral or historical vacuum:
Did you not learn anything from the brazen creatures who seized our mothers and fathers, who bought and sold them here and across the sea, who fought them here and over there and did not back down? The ones to whom you signed over so much of our matrimony and patrimony? Their puny bodies that melt in the sun, all their sicknesses of the flesh and mind and soul, yet they keep arriving. Their words, their ideas, their abstractions, the ones you love so much, gave them an armor of fearlessness. . . .
If “The Lions” is a “counternarrative,” we might interpret it first of all as counter to the previous stories that have portrayed their protagonists exercising special powers in productive and responsible ways to resist their oppressive circumstances. The two dictators in “The Lions” abuse power, wield it in a way that degrades rather than transforms. At the same time, a sense of disillusion and betrayal pervade the dialogue, suggesting that power was initially pursued with better intentions but those intentions were corrupted—as if the life the two men actually lived was the counternarrative to the life they sought. The story adds an element of tragic complexity to the book; the figures portrayed are free enough from the subjection of those “brazen creatures” with their “armor of fearlessness” to claim a kind of autonomy, but not so free that their autonomy can’t be undermined by the weaknesses of human nature.
The term “Counternarratives” takes on at least one more meaning if we consider Keene’s formal strategies. Keene’s Counternarratives is a heftier book than Keene’s 1995 novella Annotations, his only other published work of fiction. Annotations is a bildungsroman of sorts, although as the title suggests, it is closer to being a commentary on a possible coming-of-age story, notes toward such a work. The novella blends autobiographical narrative with terse allusions and abstract reflection, even literary criticism. If in Annotations Keene attempts to use his own life experience as the medium for a more detached exegesis and elaboration, in Counternarratives he does something similar with history itself, subjecting it to complication, revision, and reassessment.
Although almost every story in the book offers a tangible narrative, few if any are related in a conventional narrative mode, which is, after all, precisely the kind of storytelling that for so long has failed to acknowledge a central role for the black experience. “A Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon” is in the form of a letter. “Gloss, or the Strange History of Our Lady of Sorrows” is literally a gloss, an extended footnote or commentary on what begins as a work of history of Catholicism in early America. “Persons and Places” is a double-columned story simultaneously describing a fleeting encounter between George Santayana and W.E.B. DuBois from the perspective of each man, while “Blues,” about a tryst between Langston Hughes and a visiting Mexican poet, is told through what seems a series of notations rather than narrative exposition. In its engaging, often exhilarating use of alternative or unorthodox forms, Counternarratives abundantly demonstrates what “innovative” fiction at its best can accomplish: sometimes narrative content that challenges longstanding presumptions can be adequately expressed only through equally challenging extensions of form.
New Ways of Composing a Novel: On Dumitru Tsepeneag
Romanian novelist Dumitru Tsepeneag would seem to be among those post-communist East European writers whose fiction, as if in leaving the legacy of socialist realism as far behind as possible embraces its perceived opposite, could be described as “postmodern.” Along with such other writers as Magdalena Tulli (Poland) and Georgi Gospidinov (Bulgaria). Tsepeneag, at least in those works of his that have been translated into English, foregrounds the artifice of fiction in a particularly explicit way that is reminiscent of such American metafictionists as John Barth, Robert Coover, and Gilbert Sorrentino. Books like Tulli’s Flaw and Gospidinov’s Natural Novel, and the latest of Tsepeneag’s novels to be translated, The Bulgarian Truck, are overtly self-reflexive works, stories centered on their own creation, unabashedly leaving traditional conceptions of narrative realism far behind.
These Eastern European writers also bypass realism in their relative lack of interest in the specificity of setting. Their fictions are not obviously marked “Polish” or “Bulgarian” in the details of its depicted milieu, and are only just “European” enough to be attached to a particular place at all. Gospidinov’s Natural Novel contains numerous references to American literature and culture, while much of Tsepeneag’s The Bulgarian Truck takes place through email messages, which locates the narrative in a vaguely “global” realm of mass electronic communication. Paradoxically, the postmodernist techniques in the work of these writers make them more accessible to international readers (in the U.S. postmodern fiction is frequently accused of indifference to the needs of readers), even as the texts have a deracinating effect, emptying out the local cultural characteristics that would otherwise make this fiction distinctive for readers drawn to translated fiction precisely to “experience” another culture.
The case of Tsepeneag specifically is a little more complicated, however, as his career began before postmodernism could be called a transnational phenomenon (when, in fact, it was almost exclusively a phenomenon of American fiction), and he was part of an anti-realist group, the Onirists, which was essentially an extension of late modernism. The Onirists were inspired by the Surrealists, but they rejected its Freudian content in favor of pure dreamlike imagery. Tsepeneag has said that his fiction does not imitate or mirror dreams, but creates them, using the dream as a structural principle. His best-known work of this type is no doubt Vain Art of the Fugue, originally appearing in 1973 and published in translation by Dalkey Archive Press in 2007. This novel united Tsepeneag’s interest in dreams as a literary device with his interest in music, both of which as arts of “succession” provide the novel with its metaphorical, rather than narrative, formal scheme.
Vain Art of the Fugue proceeds through repetition and transformation, an initial mundane episode (a man catching a bus) repeated in slightly altered versions, akin to the way a musical fugue repeats and varies an introductory theme. The novel does thus evoke a dreamlike state (a “fugue state”), and the musical analogy gives it coherence while also serving to demonstrate that “telling a story” is not the only way to give fiction coherence—or perhaps that it is possible to tell a story without appearing to do so. One might say that the “story” in Vain Art of the Fugue is the story of the novel’s potentially infinite iterations of image and scene that the act of repetition and variation produces. It might be taken as a novel about its own creation, but not because it directly calls attention to the process of its own fabrication: rather, that process is innovative enough that readers must comprehensively reconsider their assumptions about what the “creation” of a work of fiction entails. Speaking for myself, it is also the most singular and most compelling translated novel I have read in the last decade.
After making Tsepeneag available in English for the first time with Vain Art of the Fugue, Dalkey Archive published more of his works, both among those written in French after Tsepeneag was denounced by the Romanian government and established himself as an exile in Paris (The Necessary Marriage, Pigeon Post) and those written in Romanian (Waiting, Hotel Europa). Waiting and The Necessary Marriage are from Tsepeneag’s earlier, oniric-derived period, while Pigeon Post and Hotel Europa are more straightforwardly metafictional and can be regarded as the most immediate points of departure for The Bulgarian Truck. All three of these novels feature writer protagonists who are literally composing a novel—in each case, the novel we are reading—inventing his characters and their stories as he goes, taking us along with him. The oniric dream-structure isn’t abandoned but instead is re-situated in the circumstances of the novelist “dreaming” his fiction.
The structural assumptions governing The Bulgarian Truck are immediately indicated in the novel’s subtitle, which announces it as “A Building Site Beneath the Open Sky.” Certainly an unorthodox conception of form, this trope explicitly identifies the novel as a construction, the process of which (“beneath the open sky”) will be the focus of the reader’s attention. The strategy allows Tsepeneag to spin off several subplots to accompany the picaresque “main” story of a Bulgarian truck driver (subplots involving the narrator himself), even while presenting them all as parts of the fiction under construction. Every time the reader starts to take one of the narratives as the “real” story or begins to wonder how firm the connections between the episodes related and the author’s own life might be, metafictional reminders that all of these accounts are components of the novel being assembled necessarily intrude.
The narrator transparently declares himself to be Dumitru Tsepeneag, although of course we can’t be sure if this is actually the author or, for the purposes of this novel, just another character. (Ultimately, if we are to accept that The Bulgarian Truck is a novel, we must further accept that the narrator is indeed a character.) In some instances, it seems clear enough that the novel autobiographically alludes to the circumstances of Tsepeneag’s life—e.g., exile in France, his close relationship with the Romanian poet Leonid Dimov—as well as people associated with Tsepeneag—his translators, for example. But we would certainly be misreading The Bulgarian Truck if we regarded its self-reflexive premise as the pretext for tantalizing us with the intimate detail, some potentially scandalous, of the author’s personal life. Similar to the way John Barth uses his own situation as writer and the particularities of his domestic life (suitably disguised) to anchor his own stories about storytelling, Tsepeneag invokes an autobiographical context as the most effective way to develop his vision of novel-writing as dream.
The Bulgarian Truck begins by introducing us to the narrator’s wife, Marianne, who is visiting a friend in New York City and about whom the narrator tells us: “she gets angry quickly, because she loses her temper over about anything. Of course, her temper tantrums are a pose. She’s spoiled and knows she can get her own way. You might even say I’m the one to blame for always having let her get her own way.” When finally we do begin to hear from Marianne herself—the narrator writes her to describe “the new way of composing a novel that I have in mind”—she certainly confirms this description of her, but eventually it becomes clear that Marianne is a device, the means by which the narrator begins to call his novel into being and through which he can consider and refine his “new way of composing a novel,” as she serves as the narrator’s critic—a harsh one indeed.
Your poor unfortunate reader. He’ll get the impression that he’s always reading the same text. That he’s going round in circles… . . .He’ll think that you’ve forgotten what you’ve already written and that’s why you have written it again. Or that you were in a hurry and bungled the job. The reader isn’t going to think of music. . .He bought a novel. He paid money for a book because he likes literature, not music. Understand? Why put him out? If he wants music, he’ll listen to music. . . .
As the narrator’s effort to write his novel expands to include Tsvetan, the Bulgarian truck driver, a stripper named Beatrice who is destined to cross paths with Tsvetan, and Milena, a Slovakian writer with whom the narrator begins an affair, Marianne’s role begins to fade. We are told she has gone to the hospital—possibly a recurrence of a strange chronic disease which causes her to both grow and shrink—and we hear from her no more. At one point, before Marianne’s presence is no longer required, during a phone conversation she reports running into the narrator’s translator, who reminds her of her appearance in a previous book he translated. The narrator further reminds her: “You are in Hotel Europa, I yell into the receiver. He translated that one too.” Marianne is not a character Tsepeneag has drawn from life (certainly not directly) but has recycled from a previous fiction as a foil in the current fiction, with whose assistance the narrator can reinforce his “building site beneath the open sky.”
So too are Tsvetan and Beatrice recycled from other of Tsepeneag’s works, as we are informed by the translator of The Bulgarian Truck in his preface. “Milena” is a not so cryptic allusion to Franz Kafka’s lover of the same name (although the narrator’s “letters to Milena” are delivered via the internet in emails rather than by post). That Milena is also an invented character is further signified when the narrator begins calling her “Mailena,” as if he has forgotten the name he has assigned her. However much Tsepeneag invites us to read his life into his work, he is reading (and writing) his other work into the work, in a way that is again reminiscent of Barth in his novel Letters, an epistolary novel featuring correspondence between “John Barth” and characters from his preceding books. Perhaps it could be said that Barth’s self-reflexive strategy is to “bare the device” in order to rebuild an aesthetic whole from the structural elements thus exposed, while Tsepeneag is satisfied to leave his “building site” incomplete, visible under the “open sky” for the reader’s contemplation. Still, for readers familiar with Barth’s novel, the notion of a kind of self-reflexive intertextuality cannot seem a particularly radical innovation.
Tsepeneag’s metafictional strategy is additionally focused on translation as an always-looming concern for the Eastern European writer, in a way it likely is not for writers in English or one of the more globally-dominant West European languages. Such a writer is less likely to be translated in the first place, making it probable that his work will remain obscure in an otherwise increasingly internationalized literary culture. Even if the work is translated, the unfamiliar cultural context that produced it might be puzzling to some international readers. Tsepeneag surely became even more acutely aware of this dilemma as a Romanian writer who, after being exiled from his country, began writing in French, and then, after the revolution deposing the Ceausescu regime, returned to writing in Romanian. This dilemma is perhaps most poignantly expressed in The Bulgarian Truck in the subplot devoted to the narrator’s French translator, Alain, who is dying from cancer. The narrator witnesses Alain wasting away, as if he is watching his lifeline to readers and publishers wither as well
If postmodernism has become a universally-available alternative to realism (socialist or otherwise), it is not surprising that writers from countries and cultures more removed from the centers of literary culture would find it a strategic literary technique more likely to give them access to that culture (even as a Parisian, the narrator of The Bulgarian Truck feels isolated, excluded from more widespread success). But its postmodern affinities also paradoxically lend a novel like The Bulgarian Truck a somewhat belated quality, potentially prompting the judgment from Western readers, at least, that the “new way of composing a novel” isn’t really so new. While a very good book, although also oddly conventional, it is a skillful assembly of metafictional materials that once were among the most advanced, but which have now have become rather familiar and a little worn.
Just What’s Happening Right Now: Fabulation and Joanna Ruocco’s Dan
In 1979, Robert Scholes published Fabulation and Metafiction, in retrospect perhaps the work of literary criticism most influential in shaping our perspective on “postmodern” or “experimental” fiction from the 1960s and ’70s. The fiction of this period, according to Scholes, systematically swerves away from realism toward the more elemental mode of fabulation, inspired literally by the fable rather than by modern realism and intent on “telling such truths as fiction may legitimately tell in ways which are appropriately fictional,” unafraid of imaginative distortion or outright fantasy. Although Scholes saw fabulation and metafiction as linked, twin sides of the same experimental coin (indeed he defines “metafiction” as “experimental fabulation”), the experimental impulse in American fiction has subsequently found expression separately in these two modes.
“Metafiction” as practiced by such writers as John Barth and Gilbert Sorrentino highlights the artificiality of traditional narrative, implicitly appealing to the “ingenuity of the fabulation” (as Scholes puts it) in substituting its own artifice for the traditional artifice of “story” (in Barth’s case attempting to renew narrative by exploiting its “exhaustion”). While this sort of self-reflexivity has continued to be common and appears even in more mainstream fiction, in the past fifteen to twenty years there has been among many avowedly experimental writers a conspicuous turn instead to a purer kind of fabulation. Whether we consider the surrealistic fairy tales of Aimee Bender, the satirical parables of George Saunders, or the science fiction–tinged magical realism of Kelly Link—to name just three of the more prominent such writers—this sort of narrative, non-realist work that still leans on plot, has most consistently claimed the legacy of the kind of experimental fiction Scholes identified.
Clearly Joanna Ruocco would have to be included among those writers devoting themselves to the fabulative mode. Her most recent novel, Dan, is set in the fictional village named in the title, which itself seems to exist somewhere aslant reality as we know it, occupying a place on the border between the almost plausible and the mostly dreamlike. The characters in the novel likewise are at once both recognizably human and figures from the simplified world of the fable, including the protagonist, Melba Zuzzo, who on the one hand resembles the innocent maiden of a fairy tale, but on the other reacts to the dangers she encounters with a kind of incomprehension not so much expressing fear as a kind of confusion, as if she thinks her own inability to understand is to blame: her apprehensions arise not from the perception that her world is menacing, but from the possibility that it might be meaningless.
The novel follows Melba over the course of a day in Dan. While this day certainly proves to be an eventful one for Melba, those events are framed less as Melba’s story than as its dissolution, the ultimate denial of further development in her “character arc.” Melba’s experience bitterly answers the question posed at the novel’s beginning: “Melba Zuzzo stood in the yard chewing tiredly on several pieces of gum. The day had barely started, and, as soon as it was over, another day was bound to begin. When would it end?”
The novel’s conclusion suggests that it ends, both literally and figuratively, with Dan’s final words, and not just for the reader. As the narrative of Melba’s day proceeds, it quickly comes to seem that Melba has a fragile sense of herself and her place in Dan, indeed a very shaky grasp on the concept of existence itself—as reflected in a recalled conversation with her teacher Mr. Sack, to whom she declares, “I have a problem . . . I just can’t figure out what time is made of.”
If it feels to Melba that time “must be like a kind of jelly,” as she further suggests, that is because Dan is in part the sort of provincial, backwater town in which life does indeed move slowly and in established patterns. But those patterns, while routinized, are off-kilter, seemingly normal to Melba and the inhabitants of Dan but odd and arbitrary from the reader’s perspective. Details of this skewed world emerge with deadpan regularity:
Melba had looked around her mother’s kitchen. For years, snails had been wearing runnels in the floorboards, and in these runnels, Melba could see several dozen snails in transit. . . .
Mr. Sack, the history and phrenology teacher, did not believe in textbooks. Instead, he distributed modeling clay, which the students used to shape the noses of nineteenth century naval heroes. . . .
“You’re not like the other children, Melba,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “You react poorly to elastics. Whenever you are given a piece of elastic your nose begins to bleed. I blame factors from your birth. Namely, your abnormally long umbilical cord.”
Melba herself simply accepts the weirdness of her world, but she is nevertheless dissatisfied with what she perceives as the underlying uniformity of her existence. “You’re right,” she says in a conversation with one of the inhabitants of Dan:
I’m always waiting. It’s because I’m confused about what’s happening. Life can’t possibly be just what’s happening right now. Then you’d be right, it would be just the two of us in the cold street, talking. This would be the whole thing. It’s only waiting that makes it more than that. I’d say remembering too, but you can’t trust memories.
Despite Melba’s reservations about the reliability of memory, the story of her day is structured precisely as a narrative of “waiting,” her experience of Dan’s all-too-familiar presence alternating with moments in which she is seized by an episode of “remembering,” usually prompted by something she observes. Like Melba, we readers wait to see what she will encounter next, what we will come to understand about this peculiar place in which she lives, although never does it really seem that we are in the midst of a conventionally developing “plot.”
Melba’s plaint that “Life can’t possibly be just what’s happening right now” certainly puts her in conflict with the prevailing attitude in Dan, where people do indeed seem wholly oriented to the present. They are so much so that the past seems swathed in the sort of cloudiness that hovers over the mountains surrounding the town, most disturbingly illustrated in the case of those people Melba recalls simply vanishing—a phenomenon the citizens of Dan have apparently taken in stride, provoking little curiosity or concern among them. Indeed, Melba’s references to these events and her clear resistance to the general complacency otherwise characteristic of Dan make her an object of suspicion. This suspicion and impatience is filtered mostly through the men she meets in the course of her activities (although she is castigated for her shortcomings most vociferously by her own mother), introducing the possibility that Melba’s status in Dan is especially precarious because she’s a woman.
Certainly it is tempting to regard Dan as a novel employing the allegorical or symbolic mode and thus to take it as a kind of feminist fable. Not only does the narrative conjure the atmosphere and attributes of a clearly make-believe world, a large part of this effect is achieved by Ruocco’s deliberately artless prose, its simple, straightforward diction and emphasis on declarative sentences without much figurative ornamentation. It is language that mimics the manner of a fairy tale, as if the primary effect of Melba’s experience of Dan has been to infantilize her, as evoked by the ingenuousness with which the third-person narrator conveys Melba’s awareness. Yet Dan has infantilized everyone who lives there, or at least lulled them into accepting existing conditions, however puzzling or arbitrary, as essentially inescapable. (Indeed, “the only way to leave is to go nowhere,” Melba is told.) At the novel’s end, we find Melba laid out on an examining table, exposed perhaps to some final degradation at the behest of Dan’s male authority. Yet the details of this final scene are typically enigmatic, and the scene might just as easily be interpreted as a kind of metafictional apotheosis: “The paper on this table is just like the paper I used for my drawing,” Melba declares. In the last view we have of her, “she felt the paper moving beneath her, and she lay very still on top of it, not saying anything, not moving at all,” as if Melba is being imprinted on the paper, returning her to the domain of artistic creation from which she came.
It is difficult to say that by the novel’s conclusion Melba has found the “meaning” she desires. The meaning of Joanna Ruocco’s fabulist novel is elusive, dispersed and deflected through its surreal imagery and motifs. A story with all the markings of an allegorical fable, it is closer to the kind of fabulation Scholes identifies in the work of Donald Barthelme, in which an apparent symbol really “symbolizes symbolism, reducing it to absurdity.” If Ruocco’s fiction doesn’t quite exhibit the formal or stylistic audacity of Barthelme’s, it does similarly compel us to register its motifs and images in their immediate and literal manifestation (in, as it were, their denotative state), without subordinating them to an external representational or symbolic order where they find their true significance. Ultimately Dan fails to deliver the kind of clear-cut moral traditionally associated with a fable, but this failure is actually a measure of its success.
The four books of short fiction that John Barth has published (all now reprinted by Dalkey Archive as Collected Stories) offer a usefully synoptic view of Barth’s signature moves as a writer of fiction—or at least those moves with which he is likely to remain most identified. Although Barth advises the reader in his brief introduction to Collected Stories that his “authorial inclination” has always been “toward books rather than discreet, stand-alone short stories,” the very ways in which he endeavors in each of these collected books to unify the series of “discreet” stories are revealing of Barth’s fundamental assumptions and ambitions. Thus, while it may be true that “short fiction is not my long suit,” as Barth puts it, these collected stories do illuminate the ultimate purposes of Barth’s literary art.
Clarity about Barth’s artistic principles is necessary because his fiction is often mischaracterized, sometimes deliberately caricatured, and readers are still likely to be familiar with his reputation as a “difficult” writer given to “playing games,” obsessed with his own narrative tricks rather than telling a story about “life.” Certainly books like Lost in the Funhouse and On With the Story, both appearing here in full, are among the most comprehensively self-reflexive works of fiction published by an American writer (or any writer). Both as individual stories and as a whole, such books readily acknowledge the artifice of their own making, but if this is to be regarded as playing a “game” with the reader, it is a game that transcends frivolity, serving aesthetically serious and thematically consequential goals. If the prevailing tone in these books is playfulness, this should not be mistaken for whimsicality, for arbitrary (or even contemptuous) humor to no justifiable artistic effect.
Barth’s earliest novels, The Floating Opera and End of the Road, offer a certain conviviality of tone (if more muted), but they are also fundamentally serious books. Both take on the weightiest of topics—the nature of human values, the meaning of existence itself—in a mode that critics at the time associated with the then-notorious existentialist philosophy proclaimed by Jean-Paul Sartre. Indeed, Barth himself has referred to the novels as explorations of nihilism, hardly a subject to be taken lightly, which Barth treats with all due sobriety and without resort to narrative “trickery” (although neither could really be called works of conventional realism of the kind that had come to dominate American fiction in the immediate postwar period).
The Sot-Weed Factor was intended to be the final installment of a “nihilist trilogy,” as Barth himself has called it, but while this novel does have some thematic affinities with The Floating Opera and End of the Road, it instead became the first of Barth’s truly “experimental” works, arguably the first recognizably “postmodern” novel by an American writer. (Barth would later duly cite the importance of such predecessors as Borges and Beckett in pushing him in this new direction.) A “self-conscious” novel, it doesn’t so much call attention to the process of its own creation as make the reader aware of its status as an anachronistic work, a pastiche of an 18th-century novel in the mold of Fielding and Smollett. It is as if Barth is attempting to move the novel as a form forward by taking it backward, reminding us of its roots. The 18th-century English novel is indeed notable for a high degree of authorial self-consciousness (Tristram Shandy being the most radical example), an additional sign that Barth is working toward a complete break with the conventional realist novel and its transparent narrative in favor of a kind of storytelling (Barth never abandons story) that is unafraid to acknowledge its inherent artifice.
Barth’s follow-up to The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, similarly foregrounds its artifice, but in this case it is not the artifice of storytelling that is most emphasized, although there is some metafictional maneuvering in the story’s setup. Barth creates an artificial, alternative reality, a fictional world depicted as a University Campus that marks the limit of the characters’ awareness. In this world, it is possible for a boy to grow up with goats only to discover he is a boy, then go on a heroic quest to free his world from an autocratic computer that rules the Campus and to achieve spiritual enlightenment. The novel’s allegory—essentially a restaging of the Cold War as a contest between “East Campus” and “West Campus”—is not subtle, and much of the novel’s humor comes from the overstated parallels between conditions on Campus and the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, juxtaposed with the modes and conventions of the mythic quest as described by Joseph Campbell and others.
Barth has judged Giles Goat-Boy his least favorite among his novels “because the overstatement is overdone—the novel itself is too long, the subject is inevitably dated, the setting borders on the jejune.” Whether or not Barth had reservations at the time about his turn, in both The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, to this large-canvas, Rabelaisian satire (what at the time was called “black humor”), his next book would nevertheless be very different, conspicuously reduced in size. Lost in the Funhouse distills the essential elements in Barth’s shift to more experimental work—heightened awareness of fiction as a literary form, preoccupation with the process of writing, an interest in the source and structure of storytelling—and refashions them as shorter, more concentrated stories that challenge the conventions of the short story as much as Sot-Weed and Giles challenge those of the novel. The result is a book that, more than any other, defines “metafiction” as a distinctive variant of literary postmodernism, a book that is certainly one of the most important of the 1960s, arguably one of the most important produced by a postwar American writer.
While numerous works prior to Lost in the Funhouse clearly enough now seem classifiable as postmodern (including Barth’s own previous two novels), it also now seems clear that this book is most responsible for clarifying (and raising) the stakes involved in what by the time it appeared was obviously among younger, more adventurous writers a rejection of the reigning practices of the immediate postwar years in favor of a more formally audacious kind of fiction. Barth, along with such generational colleagues as Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and William Gass, no longer took for granted a definition of fiction that ties it to traditional conceptions of narrative and its fixed elements (“character development,” “point of view,” etc.). Of course, most readers still take such a definition for granted, and so, although Giles Goat-Boy had achieved surprising popularity for a book of its heft and eccentricities, Barth’s reputation as a difficult writer whose work disrupts our customary reading habits would only expand after the publication of Lost in the Funhouse.
Here Barth challenges the reader to accept that ultimately fiction is something made, a construction of language. A “story” is just that, an ordered contrivance that is not a direct reflection of “reality” but an alteration of it, its transformation by art. By calling attention to his narrators narrating, to the “storyness” of stories, or to seemingly more straightforward narratives as allegories of storytelling (“Night-Sea Journey,” “Lost in the Funhouse”), Barth implicitly asks readers to reconsider their expectations of a work of fiction, to acknowledge that the writer might use the form in a different way, might in fact abandon the form in its traditional guise altogether. Does fiction as literary art consist only of the skill with which the writer carries out the familiar narrative strategies, or can the writer achieve other kinds of aesthetic effects, arising from alternative arrangements of form and language?
Lost in the Funhouse is anchored by three stories (including the title story) that feature the character named Ambrose Mensch, narratives that are actually somewhat conventional in that they tell discernible stories about a recognizable type of fictional character (a young boy on the verge of maturity), related more or less transparently from an unbroken point of view. Taken together, they make the book’s preoccupation with the nature of literary creation visible in the most accessible way, by making it the “theme” of the stories’ depiction of Ambrose’s realization that authoring fictions will be his ambition (“he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator”). On the other hand, stories like “Echo,” “Title,” “Life-Story,” and “Menelaiad” are the most explicitly self-reflexive, and can stand as the archetypal works of metafiction, a term first used in 1970 by William Gass (who mentions Barth specifically as an example). Although this term has come to designate any work of fiction that even vaguely calls attention to itself or the situation of the writer writing, Gass used it to draw an analogy between “meta” procedures in other disciplines, such as mathematics and ethics (as Gass puts it, “lingos to converse about lingos”), and the rise of self-aware, formally intricate fiction. In such fiction, “the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed” (“Philosophy and the Form of Fiction”).
The self-reflexivity of metafiction, in Gass’s conception, mirrors a previous act of reflection on the writer’s part, reflection about “the forms of fiction” and their suitability to the needs of the modern writer. Metafiction is not mere gesture, the superficial kind of game-playing for which too many works of pseudo-metafiction are indeed blameworthy. John Barth’s form of game-playing is more ambitious, and its ambition is ultimately quite considerable: to give fiction the same sort of grounding as these other disciplines. If abstraction in painting and serialism in music had freed those arts from rigid canons of practice, metafiction attempts the same sort of liberation for narrative practice, at once both exposing all fiction as the artificial ordering of language and making possible the further advancement of fiction through embracing this fact. Metafiction helps us see works of fiction not as a means of accessing reality, but, in Gass’s words as “additions to it.”
In his essay “The Literature of Exhaustion,” Barth himself explains the motive of metafiction as the attempt to confront “the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities” by turning this exhaustion “into material and means for [the writer’s] work.” As the narrator of “Title” puts it:
Plot and theme: notions vitiated by this hour of the world but as yet not successfully succeeded. Conflict, complication, no climax. The worst is to come. Everything leads to nothing: future tense, past tense, present tense. Perfect. The final question is, Can nothing be made meaningful?. . . .
The answer to the narrator’s question, which he asks as he is trying to write a story after realizing “everything’s been said already over and over,” is actually “yes,” if we accept that indeed “Everything leads to nothing.” A story doesn’t “lead” to anything beyond itself. To think otherwise is to believe that a work of fiction has value only in the external meaning to which it points us. The work itself—the work as embodied language—disappears, something that metafiction does not allow to happen. Nothing can indeed be made meaningful if what fiction does lead to—its own verbal texture, the formal structures language builds—is the “meaning.” As Barth puts it in the later Chimera, “the key to the treasure is the treasure.”
Not all of the stories in Lost in the Funhouse are as purely metafictional as “Title” or “Life-Story” but are more generally “experimental.” “Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction” is a process-oriented story that narrates its own coming-into-being; it is most noteworthy for appropriating the tape recorder as a literary stratagem, presenting itself as the transcription of an audio recording. The story thus cleverly foregrounds the role of “voice” in fiction. “Glossolalia” is also meant to be heard aloud—only in this way can the underlying rhythms of the Lord’s Prayer that unite the six otherwise unrelated spoken fragments, including one literally spoken in tongues, really be detected. Perhaps the most infamous experimental “story” in the book (experimental in asking for the reader’s active participation and attempting to expand our conception of what properly constitutes “writing”) is the first one, “Frame-Tale,” in which the reader is instructed to take a pair of scissors to the page: “Cut on the dotted line. Twist end once and fasten AB to ab, CD to cd.” The result is a Mobius strip forming an endless loop of “Once upon a time there was a story that began.”
Barth would not return to the short story (at least in book form) until 1996’s On With the Story. In the meantime, he had written several very long novels demonstrating that, however much he calls into question many axiomatic storytelling conventions, Barth had by no means abandoned storytelling. These books are stuffed full of story, although they also concern themselves directly with the purpose and effects of stories, continuing in the metafictional mode introduced by Lost in the Funhouse but in a more fully elaborated, structurally consistent way. If Lost in the Funhouse is more purely experimental, the novels that follow it both further explore the use to which self-reflexivity might be put in replenishing the resources of narrative and establish a signature type of narrative practice that can be seen as identifiably “Barthian.”
This signature is fully evident in On With the Story, even if the book doesn’t have the heft of the novels preceding it. It most immediately differs from Lost in the Funhouse in being not merely a series of stories but an integrated series, a book in which the whole is meant to be more than the sum of its parts. On With the Story is unified in several ways, both formally and thematically, beginning with the frame-tale Barth has interpolated throughout the text: an unnamed man and woman, the former the teller of the tales, the latter their audience and critic, discuss the quality and implications of the tales, providing the book its self-reflexive commentary. Although the writer figure in these scenes is pretty clearly a version of John Barth (as are the protagonists of many of Barth’s later novels), he is presented as a character in the larger fiction that incorporates the individual fictions the character relates. We could call this larger fiction the story of a storyteller.
The narrative structure is metaphorically reinforced by a motif that recurs throughout the book, a motif drawn from quantum physics. It is made most explicit at the beginning of the story, “Waves, by Amien Richard,” one of whose characters asks, “Are we particles . . . or waves?” At first the preoccupation with the “particle wave duality”—whereby a particle of matter sometimes manifests as a wave, depending on how it is observed—might seem curious, but ultimately we can see it is a conceit that reflects the book’s own status: We could regard each story individually, as if it were a particle, or we can consider the book in its entirety, as a wave proceeding with its own forward momentum.
Barth further extends this metaphor to apply as well to another theme expressed in several of the stories, the relationship of “story” to “life,” a question, embodied in the title, first raised by “Life-Story,” one of the central stories in Lost in the Funhouse. If life is a wave, then a story is particle, momentarily anchoring the life in a “fixed position,” altering it in the process. The hyphen in the title “Life-Story” enforces a separation between the two, and in On With the Story Barth reaffirms that this separation is necessary if we are to properly take the measure of each. “Our lives are not our stories,” concludes one of the tales. “Life” may ultimately and inevitably retain dominion over “story,” but stories allow us to put life on pause, to arrest time in its onward course:
The middle of the story nears its end, but has not reached it, not yet. There’s time still, still world enough and time. There are narrative possibilities still unforeclosed. If our lives are stories, and if this story is three-fourths told, it is not yet four-fifths told; if four-fifths, not yet five-sixths, et cetera, et cetera. . . .
Indeed, the story in which this passage appears, “Ad Infinitum: A Short Story,” doesn’t quite come to narrative closure itself; its twin characters remain suspended between the wife’s task of informing the husband about a phone call that has clearly related bad news and its actual completion, the wife grimly advancing toward the husband blithely tending his garden, unaware of the probably life-changing information he’s about to receive. We may be tempted to conclude that we nevertheless “know” that the news will be delivered and the couple will endure their hour of suffering, except that this would be the case only if we were witnessing such a scene in life, or, as the narrator has it, “non-narrated life.” In a story, the dreaded moment doesn’t have to arrive. The narrative moment can be deferred, in effect, forever.
The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004), like On With the Story, also acts as a kind of anatomy of storytelling, although in this case the self-reflexive gestures are more circumscribed, on display most prominently in the framing story with which Barth has again surrounded a collection of otherwise unconnected stories. Although the use of this device in both books is of course in homage to One Thousand and One Nights (one of Barth’s persistent influences), The Book of Ten Nights signals the allusion most explicitly. Barth’s frame tale reverses the situation we find in the narrative of Scheherazade regaling the King with stories: Barth (lightly fictionalized as “Graybard”) relates his stories to a nymph-like Muse with whom Graybard has “congress” during the interludes between the tales. All in all, the conceit is very similar to that used in the meta-narrative of On With the Story, and, by this stage in Barth’s career, the reiteration of his debt to the metafictional strategies of One Thousand and One Nights has perhaps begun to wear thin.
Not only is the device repetitious, but the interactions between writer and muse are extended (one might say labored) enough that they overwhelm what are finally rather marginal stories. Only “Click,” Barth’s first attempt to reckon with the online medium as competitor with print, could be considered a significant addition to Barth’s larger body of work. The author has further burdened Book of Ten Nights and a Night with the weight of topicality. A book that began as a more “sportive” affair, Graybard informs us in the “Invocation,” was altered when he realized that “for him to re-render now, in these so radically altered circumstances, Author’s eleven mostly Autumnal and impossibly innocent stories, strikes him as bizarre, to put it mildly indeed—as if Nine Eleven O One hadn’t changed the neighborhood.”
Barth seems to have bought into the notion, perpetrated by some after the events of 9/11/01 that this day entailed a loss of credibility for the sort of postmodern fiction Barth’s work prominently exemplified. But the charge made against postmodern irony was certainly not that it was “innocent”; rather, it was all too knowing, too detached and clever by half in its preference for stylistic and formal displays over engagement with reality. The call for writers to awaken from their postmodern-induced slumber and acknowledge that reality is itself actually a bid to return fiction to a state of literary innocence, to the belief that reality can be directly represented in a work of fiction that sticks to the narrative basics. Book of Ten Nights and a Night winds up mildly reaffirming the value of “irrelevant” stories in the face of real-world trouble, but a better way to assert that value may have been to present these stories according to the original, less fretfully earnest plan, the state of the “real world” outside the text notwithstanding.
The Development (2008) as well suggests a retreat from the most overt displays of postmodern artifice and metafictional trickery. The book can be read as a more or less conventional series of linked stories about a retirement community, Heron Bay Estates, that houses its share of “autumnal resignation and quiet turmoil,” although Heron Bay’s ultimate demise is far from quiet, as it is ravaged by a tornado spun off from a late-season tropical storm moving up Barth’s cherished Chesapeake Bay. While the stories are not completely free of passages meditating on the act of storytelling (it is still Barth, after all), The Development is otherwise entirely accessible to most readers as a kind of slice-of-life realism depicting American life as lived by those nearing its conclusion. Even the at times fustian mannerisms of Barth’s late style, which particularly encumber Book of Ten Nights and a Night, is here toned down to something closer to a conventional expository style.
The Development succeeds relatively well in what it sets out to do, although it is inevitably disappointing that it sets out to do so little. It is of course not surprising that a writer now in his mid-80s would turn to themes of aging and taking stock, but one might wish that Barth had done so without defaulting to such conventional methods of presenting these themes. (Barth’s follow-up to The Development, the novel Every Third Thought, is a return to the fustian style, but unfortunately it also doesn’t show him discovering freshly innovative strategies for realizing the themes.) Collected Stories thus allows us to see the arc of Barth’s career, from vanguard experimental writer to one less-inspired but still dedicated to his ideal of storytelling. Collected Stories provides valuable testimony to the shape of this career, but finally it will be most valuable if it brings new readers to Lost in the Funhouse and On With the Story.
The Materiality of the Medium: On Steve Tomasula
In many ways, Steve Tomasula’s fifth book, Once Human, is a very good introduction to the work of this conspicuously unconventional writer. Venturesome readers will find that this collection indeed exhibits Tomasula’s trademark assimilation of visual elements—photos, illustrations, graphs and charts, drawings—into the verbal “text,” as well as the inveterate manipulation of typography and page design. But encountering these devices through a selection of stories allows the reader to contemplate Tomasula’s strategies in shorter samples, perhaps encouraging readers to appreciate that these strategies are both purposeful and ultimately accessible. Tomasula’s unorthodox methods provocatively reinforce the themes he usually addresses, and although Once Human is somewhat varied in content, it nevertheless introduces several of those themes that are developed more intensively in his novels.
Tomasula’s approach is evident in the book’s first story, “The Color of Flesh.” The story of protagonist Yumi’s discovery that her boyfriend has a pornographic obsession with disfigured female bodies, and may be attracted to her not despite the fact that she has a prosthetic limb but because of it, is enhanced by drawings that give the story most immediately the look of a graphic novel. But the story actually contains plenty of text, and the drawings are not themselves the medium through which the narrative is presented. Neither are they merely decorative, although they are certainly well-rendered. So striking are they, in fact, that it soon enough becomes clear we are meant to do more than just glance at the drawings as a kind of accompaniment to the written text, but to consider them a constituent part of a reconceived “text” that integrates writing and visual devices, with each contributing its own effect to the new, hybrid work. Thus, in “The Color of Flesh,” the illustrations impress as more than ornamental, with a drawing of prosthetic limbs “dangling from the ceiling” of a “shop that sold such things” adding a spooky (if stylized) palpability that isn’t quite achieved by the prose description alone, not even the comparison to “Geppetto’s workshop.”
It might be tempting to call Tomasula’s approach “multi-media”—especially since he has produced one “book,” TOC (2009), that was not published as a book at all but on DVD and predominantly takes visual form—but the goal does not seem to be to blend prose fiction and visual media as much as to extend our conception of what prose fiction might be. Is it the case, a story like “The Color of Flesh” asks us, that when visual art is added to literary art a work of fiction becomes something else, no longer fiction but precisely a hybrid, something separate that should be judged by standards other than those traditionally applied to fiction, or does it remain within the boundaries of that form as historically established, albeit questioning where those boundaries should lie? Readers could come to different conclusions about this, but arguably Tomasula’s fiction is most consequential if we think of it as still belonging to literature, as an attempt to reckon with the status of fiction at a time when visual representations are more pervasive than ever.
Tomasula has cited the influence on his work of such writers as Raymond Federman, Gilbert Sorrentino, and William Gass, all of whom similarly unsettle our usual way of reading—on pages with blocks of text, read sequentially from top to bottom—although none of these writers (aside from Gass in his novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife) includes pictorial elements. Tomasula’s own work is thus perhaps best understood as extending their experiments, proceeding under the fundamental assumption that the page—all of his books aside from TOC do take the printed page as fiction’s native medium—is infinitely pliable, a site where the literary artist might create aesthetic effects not confined to the usual felicities of prose style, and might also contribute to a reconception of form that includes but goes beyond reliance on traditional verbal narrative. If we judge much conventional fiction by the degree to which it encourages us to transcend the page, to give ourselves over to the illusion of “world” the author is creating, that good writing is supposed to cast, Tomasula’s stories and novels keep us firmly rooted to the page, refusing to let us forget the materiality of the medium.
The drawings and photographs in Once Human—some of which are quite complex and detailed—are the most conspicuous of the elements used to suspend illusion, but Tomasula’s attention to the dynamics of the page is also manifest in typography and typeface. No two stories come in the same font size, and the page layouts follow no rules of prose composition other than those the author has invented. Pages shift in appearance, in some cases multiple times. The text of “The Color of Flesh” begins in a single column, switches to double columns, and in the second half of the story kaleidoscopically changes fonts, page color (black on white to white on black), and page design (the text presented in something resembling thought balloons). “Self-Portrait” at first seems a more or less conventionally printed story, free of both visual aids and typographical oddities, except that a closer look reveals a column of words running down each of the inner margins, one column repeating the work “stroke,” the other “snap,” the two actions performed by the story’s protagonist, a lab technician responsible for euthanizing mice used in testing.
If at first this might seem a random, even frivolous gesture, ultimately it does have the effect of continually reminding us of the “work” the technician carries out, even as the story appears to develop the situation in other, tangential directions (the protagonist’s romantic involvement with his co-worker, for example). This sort of literalization of motif or image can perhaps be seen most clearly in stories such as “The Atlas of Man” and “The Risk-Taking Gene as Expressed by Some Asian Subjects.” The narrator of the former is a researcher who collects data on human body shape. He falls in love with a fellow researcher (unhappily). The text of this story includes several illustrations of bodies and body types, as well as various graphs representing the work the narrator has done in studying the human body. Together, these visual elements reinforce the contrast between the narrator’s usual impassive approach to the world as filtered through his work and his growing self-awareness of the implications of that work in relation to himself, a contrast that ultimately works to create some sympathy for the man’s emotional confusion.
“The Risk-Taking Gene” again focuses on a researcher, in this case studying the purported “risk-taking gene,” the “genetic propensity discovered by Cloninger, Adolfsson, and Svrakic for some people to put themselves at risk in order to feel the level of arousal most of us get from the petty concerns of our day.” The narrator in this story is conducting interviews in an Asian-American neighborhood (or trying to), and winds up being surprised by the identity of the “subject” who is indeed most willing to take risks. The story relies less on pictorial devices and more on page design and typography for its effects. Reflecting the narrator’s line of work, some of the pages are printed on a facsimile of a questionnaire, others on what appears to be a representation of a DNA gel. Both of these stories employ a non-conventional fusion of text and visuals, each playing off of the other, that typifies Tomasula’s literary method. Since his fiction does not at all abandon narrative—some of these stories have rather dramatic plots—it offers not an alternative to “story” but an alternative way of telling a story still anchored to the printed page.
Both “The Atlas of Man” and “The Risk-Taking Gene” are also obviously related in their focus on a character doing “research” on the human body. In this they share a dominant theme of Tomasula’s work, exemplified most notably in VAS (2004), his best-known novel and probably greatest achievement to date. Subtitled “An Opera in Flatland,” the novel is first of all a kind of pastiche of a previous novel, Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, a geometry-based science-fiction “romance” published in 1885. Tomasula takes over the premise of “people” living in a two-dimensional “flatland,” people who are themselves geometrical figures. Thus the main characters of VAS are “Square” and his wife, “Circle.” The plot of this novel is minimal but, narratively speaking, straightforward. After a series of pregnancies terminating in miscarriage or abortion, Circle has asked Square to get a vasectomy, to which he has agreed, although as the novel begins he has not yet signed the consent form required. Most of the rest of the novel follows Square as he ponders the implications of his decision and the state of his relationships both with Circle and his daughter, Oval.
VAS becomes “operatic” in the way it illustrates and embodies the story of Square reckoning with his situation by depicting it through very elaborate drawings, photographs, and other visual elements comprising a large portion of the text, with these elements becoming something like the music that transforms a play into an opera. The novel is an “opera in Flatland,” of course, because it takes place not in the three-dimensional space of theatrical operas, or even the simulated space of film, video, or cyberspace, but on the page, through the “flat” surfaces of text and graphic image. Thus VAS is still dedicated to literary experiment, to testing the limits of the page as literature’s traditional medium. Online publication has obviously challenged the seemingly necessary connection between literary works and the printed page, but Tomasula continues to take the page as his focus, aside from TOC. Indeed, most of his published fiction depends for its realization on pages, and its effects would be almost totally lost on, say, a Kindle.
Tomasula employs his effects to fulfill one of the most traditional of literary goals, developing “theme.” If anything, Tomasula’s fiction is even more devoted to communicating theme than most mainstream literary fiction. The researchers and scientists in his fiction are engaged in work ultimately intended to help overcome the supposed limitations of human biology and genetics, to remake our physical existence. VAS is probably the work in which Tomasula most intensively explores the implications of scientific intervention into nature as represented by the human body (one thinks of Hawthorne’s stories about human beings “playing God”) and the creation of a “postbiological” future. Square familiarizes himself with the history of eugenics, human experimentation, genetic engineering, and various other “advances” in medical science, his contemplation of these subjects accompanied by an almost dizzying variety of visual and typographical devices that make the motives behind and ultimate consequences of the rise of the “postbiological” even more disturbing. Square confronts the possibility that the human body may become its own kind of “hybrid,” as the novel’s content comes to mirror its form—and vice-versa.
Remaking reality is of course the ambition of fiction as well as science, and Tomasula’s work can be taken as variant of metafiction, subjecting fiction to the same scrutiny as these other efforts to reshape and reorder the world. The representations of the body offered by the scientific methods of mapping and measuring it are represented literally in Tomasula’s pictorial imagery, provoking us to reflect on the extent to which literature aspires to the pictorial even while doing so through the descriptive and figural powers of language. Similarly, his typographical variations insistently remind us that the arrangement of print on the page has also always reinforced a particular, narrow way of organizing literary representation, one that is assumed to be the “natural” form that reading takes but that Tomasula’s work proceeds to show can be altered. “Representation” is itself the subject of his 2006 novel The Book of Portraiture, the title of which is taken from the supposed journal of the painter Velasquez, which among other things chronicles the creation of Velasquez’s “The Maids of Honor,” a notoriously self-reflexive painting that depicts the painter himself among his other subjects, standing at his easel and apparently staring at the viewer outside the painting. The other sections of the book (including a reworked version of “Self-Portrait”) also invoke the human urge to re-present reality, to both productive and destructive effect, making The Book of Portraiture the most avowedly metafictional of Tomasula’s books. The Book of Portraiture doesn’t just expose the inherent artifice of narrative, but reveals the transformative effects, potentially liberating but also potentially dangerous, of human beings’ capacity to reimagine themselves.
Once Human is not as intently focused as VAS on the scientific and technological manipulation of nature, nor is it as concerned with the implications of representation as The Book of Portraiture. The most explicitly metafictional story in the book is probably “Farewell to Kilimanjaro,” which is more conventional parody than metafictional self-reflection. This “what if” story portrays an elderly Ernest Hemingway (the character is named “E”) experiencing degradation in an old folks’ home. “Medieval Times” has a family resemblance to one of George Saunders’s theme-park stories (“CivilWarLand in Bad Decline”), although it satirizes current events more directly than Saunders does. “The Color of Pain and Suffering” is of a piece with “Self-Portrait” and “The Atlas of Man” in its focus on the romantic travails of a medical illustrator. Once Human may be something of a miscellany collecting Tomasula’s shorter fiction, but that very quality gives readers a valuable sampling of the work of a compelling and genuinely experimental writer.
There are at least three ways by which we might classify Zachary Thomas Dodson’s Bats of the Republic in order to characterize it adequately and evaluate it fairly: as a postapocalyptic narrative, as an example of the “steampunk” subgenre of science fiction, and as a so-called “illuminated” novel. Viewing it from one of these perspectives does not preclude regarding it as a creative joining of these forms (and it is one of the novel’s strengths that it does blend them more or less seamlessly), but they each need to be considered carefully before coming to any conclusions about the merits of the novel as a whole.
As a postapocalyptic story it is entirely familiar and conventional. A “Collapse” has occurred, leaving the United States divided into a handful of “city-states,” with most of the country reduced to a presumable wasteland the inhabitants of the city-state refer to as “the rot.” The city-state in which the story is set is the “Texas Republic,” which is characterized by a 1984-ish sort of authoritarian power structure. The protagonist of this story, Zeke Thomas, is in line to become a “Senator” in this power structure, but the story mostly chronicles Zeke’s disillusionment with his life in the city-state and his attempt to escape it. There’s the usual sort of hyper-surveillance, threatened violence, and underground resistance (in this case literally underground), making for an entirely run-of-the-mill dystopian narrative, just another offering in a genre that itself has become overworked and underinspired.
But Bats of the Republic is not simply a postapocalyptic narrative. It also features many of the conventions and motifs of steampunk, most of them quite explicitly employed. Zeke’s story is paired with another set in Victorian America, focused on Zeke’s presumed ancestor, Zadock Thomas (the purity of Zeke’s “bloodline” is part of the conflict animating his story), who undertakes a mission to deliver a mysterious letter to an equally mysterious general just prior to the Mexican-American War. Zadock works for the Museum of Flying, operated by Joseph Gray (who sends him on the mission), and is courting Gray’s daughter, Elswyth. Elswyth’s deceased mother, we learn, wrote a novel called The City-State, excerpts from which, it eventually becomes clear, we are reading as the story of Zeke Thomas. It is a futuristic narrative projecting a 19th century vision of what a dystopic future might be like, complete with “advanced” steam-powered technology such as “steamsabres” possessed by law enforcement and a “steammoat” surrounding the city-state to prevent escape.
Probably fans of steampunk would appreciate Dodson’s handling of its elements more than I am able to, given my limited familiarity, although the context this provides for the apocalyptic tale makes its pedestrian qualities somewhat easier to accept (and perhaps giving it some interest as a kind of literary anachronism, a version of what Orwell might have produced had he been writing a hundred years earlier). But the narrative type and genre variations offered by Bats of the Republic are further complemented by the textual embellishments that make it an “illuminated” novel. In addition to a multitude of typefaces and considerable variety in its page design, the text includes drawings, maps, diagrams, transcripts, facsimiles of letters, old newspapers, and other documents, as well as a novel-within-the-novel (a lightly fictionalized account of the Gray family), presented as a series of photocopies.
Dodson’s approach is similar to that of Mark Danielewski, who similarly enhances his not otherwise very compelling narratives with various visual insertions and typographical manipulations. Bats of the Republic has more narrative substance than the generally insipid “story” underlying the textual machinations of, say, Only Revolution, but in both cases fiction as a literary form and object of aesthetic experience is replaced with an aestheticization of the book itself as object, the material construction of the book replacing our more intangible interaction solely with the written text as the focus of experience. In few cases do the visual embellishments in Bats of Republic really contribute anything that adds to or mediates the written text, most often merely reinforcing the text with literal illustrations, graphic aids, sometimes acting simply as ornaments. The visual elements are certainly well-rendered and the book as whole impressively presented (Dodson is apparently a book designer by trade, in addition to running a small press), but I for one ended up admiring the author’s skill at design more than his vision of what a work of innovative fiction might accomplish.
Bats of the Republic or Only Revolution could be usefully contrasted with the work of Steve Tomasula, a writer who superficially seems to share an interest in adding visual devices to written text. But Tomasula’s devices are truly integrated with his prose, adding shades of meaning, exploring the limits of the printed page, and extending the scope of prose fiction in ways that neither Danielewski nor Dodson, at least on the evidence of his first novel, seem inclineded to pursue. Tomasula’s fiction expands our awareness of the boundaries fiction might challenge and still be true to the form. It makes readers consider how rigidly they should adhere to inherited assumptions about the boundaries of the form while also providing a satisfying reading experience. Tomasula tells stories, but they are narratives with intrinsic interest in and of themselves, not rehearsals of familiar plots.The experience of reading Bats of the Republic is more like witnessing a writer attempting to compensate for an otherwise lackluster story with a flashy display of extraneous decoration.
Incorporating visual elements and unsettling our “normal” access to the words on the page are justifiably “experimental” moves for an adventurous writer to make, especially since so much fiction so thoroughly aspires to a kind of visual acuity through its imagery and its tropes. Such a project highlights that aspiration and its limits, and might even encourage an exploration of the possibilities of language that don’t rely on the invocation of visual imagery, which can indeed often devolve into flourishes of “fine writing.” This is one of the effects of Steve Tomasula’s fiction, but a novel like Bats of the Republic at best repeats the experiments of Tomasula, as well as such previous writers as William Gass, Ronald Sukenick, and Raymond Federman, without really sharing their commitment to questioning deep-seated assumptions about the aesthetic purposes of fiction. It adopts those experiments to create a pleasingly designed book that some readers might enjoy but that doesn’t really work to enlarge our understanding of how fiction might continue to reinvent itself.
All the World’s a Docufiction: On Harold Jaffe
If any writer deliberately proceeded throughout his career to almost ensure his work would be ignored by critics and publishers, it would have to be Harold Jaffe. Jaffe has steadfastly continued to write fiction that is formally and conceptually adventurous while at the same time advancing a radical sociopolitical critique that portrays US culture in the most starkly unfavorable light. From his first novel, Mole’s Pity (1979), to his newest collection of “docufictions,” Induced Coma, Jaffe has challenged assumptions about fiction as a literary form and enlisted his work in the effort to resist the maleficent influences of America’s “official culture,” a culture that undermines human well-being and despises real human freedom. Since inevitably many readers are uncertain how to respond to these objections, at worst confused about, if not actively hostile toward, the purposes behind them, it is not surprising that Jaffe’s books are seldom reviewed and are usually published by small, even marginal, independent presses.
Even so, Jaffe has a dedicated if small following among proponents of experimental fiction, and his most recent works of fiction, Anti-Twitter (2010), OD (2012) and Induced Coma (a sequel of sorts to Anti-Twitter), are arguably among his most accessible, once the reader has accepted the motive that has produced these hybrid fictions and the principle by which they have been composed. These books present us with “docufictions,” stories that blend fact and fiction in such a way that the factual seems fictional and the fiction is related as if fact. Most of the pieces in these books originate in news reports from disparate sources that Jaffe “treats,” a technique he has described as “inserting a line or two, or rearranging the format, or simply setting the original text in a different context, not altering the figure but the ground.” While the subjects of the news stories vary widely, from the prurient and sensational to the alarming and ominous, they are all, through Jaffe’s treatment, made to reveal another instance of the narcoticization of American culture, a condition imposed not least by the very forms of communication meant to keep us informed. Jaffe’s docufictions show how, through twenty-four hour news coverage and the ubiquity of social media, we have become inured to the grotesquerie our culture is becoming.
Despite its title, Anti-Twitter is not so much a critique of that particular form of social media as it is an appropriation of the rhetorical constraint inherent in that medium for Jaffe’s own structural purposes. He does not limit himself to 140 characters, as users of Twitter must do, but instead composes a series of “150 fifty-word stories,” as the book’s subtitle proclaims. By necessity, these fifty-word stories relate their subjects in an especially blunt, pared-back style:
The Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoes at former US President Bush had his sentence reduced from three years to one.
His lawyer argued that the charge be changed from assault to insulting a foreign leader.
The magistrate concurred.
Shoe hurling is considered a grave insult in Iraqi culture.
Even if the compression of this “tale” is extreme, we might conclude we have after all been told everything we need to know about this episode, except that, of course, all the context is missing, especially the context that could help us better judge the significance of the information we are given in the final sentence. Is shoe hurling really a grave insult? (Apparently it is, and not something Jaffe has invented.) If so, is it an even graver insult to former President Bush that the magistrate reduced the journalist’s sentence? What does this tell us about the legacy of the US invasion of Iraq?
Jaffe surely wants us to ask these questions. Indeed, such a story as this is likely to seem a mere trifle, a curious mimicry of robotic media conventions, unless we do pause to consider what might lie between (and around) the lines. Considered by itself, this piece might not seem to call for such close scrutiny, but collected with other, similarly deadpan but also oddly enigmatic “fifty-word stories,” the effect is cumulative, the underlying strategy more palpable. In the way these stories present some of the strangest and most disturbing “real-life” developments as bite-sized “reports,” they represent Jaffe’s attempt to take the severely reduced mode of discourse associated with Twitter and substitute for its usual vapidity a serious, if implicit, scrutiny of the dominant culture (American, but as the stories reveal, with an increasingly global reach) spawning those developments. This scrutiny requires participation on the reader’s part, who in the process becomes more aware both of the degradation of contemporary culture and the means by which that degradation is perpetuated and reinforced through our prevailing methods of communication.
Or at least this the ideal outcome for Jaffe, who has said in an interview that “I want my reader to walk away pent not purged” so that the reader “ruminates with interest and fretfulness about what he/she has read.” Thus, while the pieces in both Anti-Twitter and Induced Coma incorporate often grave and at times even grotesque subjects, they are designed not to “purge” by depicting these subjects as woeful or shocking but to quicken the reader’s attention through an essentially comic portrayal that leaves the reader dissatisfied with laughter as the primary response. In the first few pages of Induced Coma, we are given a report about a woman “detained after hitting a male in the face with raw steak” (as punishment for his preferring a bread roll over sliced bread), followed by a story of a man confronted with the choice of saving either his son or his wife as they are both drowning. If the contrast between these two pieces is jarring, the immediately following stories themselves yoke together the absurd and the appalling in a way that might indeed make us “fretful.” “Silicon” tells of a Korean couple whose real child starved to death while they were creating a virtual child in an online game. “Freeze-Dry” informs us that
Doctors are attempting to freeze-dry a severely disabled girl, nine years old, to keep her child-size at her parent’s request.
Born with static encephalopathy, she cannot walk or talk and has the mental capacity of a month-old infant.
Watch the child twist her mouth grotesquely and emit animal noises.
[Video]
These slices of postbiological, techno-enthralled modern life might seem so bizarre and unsettling that we could wonder how thoroughly Jaffe has “treated” his sources, but finally they aren’t so implausible that we can’t imagine coming across them in an actual news report.
In Induced Coma, Jaffe expands his formal scope somewhat, as the book includes stories of up to 100 words, but otherwise still features docufictions drawn from a variety of media sources, including the BBC, Al Jazeera, the New York Daily News, and the Huffington Post. (Jaffe provides a list of his sources at the end of both Anti-Twitter and Induced Coma, although he does not identify the source of individual stories.) The effect of reading Induced Coma is less of receiving a series of twisted tweets than an episodic, highly variegated report on the discouraging state of the world we currently inhabit. Although these are stories that obviously exhibit few if any of the characteristics traditionally associated with narrative fiction, taken together they do provide a kind of realism, albeit a realism that exposes the corruption behind the increasingly digitalized façade of global culture, the inauthenticity of a thoroughly mediated “ordinary life.” While some of the “tales,” such as “Silicon” are more sickening than enjoyable, others could be called entertaining in their status as “found” silliness, whatever additional thematic force they might still potentially retain: “The Pope’s Cologne” mimics an ad for “this historically elite cologne” worn by Pope Pius IX (“we obtained the formula from descendants of Pius’s Papal Guard commander and lifelong companion General Didier Le Grande”), “Hitler’s Fart” informs us that an SS officer preserved some of the flatulent Adolph Hitler’s farts in bottles, one of which is now available on eBay, and in “Coke $$” we learn that “91 percent of dollar bills contain traces of cocaine,” which “points to the increasingly widespread use of cocaine in the US.” The highest number of such bills was found in Washington DC, the lowest in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Perhaps the stories included in Anti-Twitter and Induced Coma could be classified as “flash fiction,” although the only thing they really have in common with most flash fiction—which usually features character, setting, or even a rudimentary version of plot, something that marks it as the product of “invention”—is their brevity. “Docufiction” is a term Jaffe has used since at least False Positive (2002), and encompasses such other collections of longer docufictions as 15 Serial Killers (2003) and OD. Jaffe’s 2009 novel Jesus Coyote, a very thinly disguised portrayal of the Manson Family (Charlie Manson becoming “Jesus Coyote”) also qualifies as a docufiction, so that a work like Induced Coma is best seen as a kind of ultimate refinement of the approach developed in these books, an approach incipient, perhaps, in Jaffe’s early work, but brought to its most salient focus in the more recent books’ representation of media itself as the site where the “real” is determined. Jaffe has been from the beginning of his career a formally adventurous writer, contributing belatedly to the rise of “experimental fiction” as something like an avant-garde in postwar American fiction, but his experiments with the concept of the docufiction arguably now constitute his most distinctive achievement.
Jaffe’s work from the beginning clearly enough has been politically motivated, an attempt to create an iconoclastic fiction that in disrupting conventional discourse (in this case the conventions associated with “normal” fiction) also disrupts the political assumptions and practices that discourse helps to support by implicitly suggesting that the currently “normal” is naturally so. But where the earliest fiction—in addition to Mole’s Pity, such books as Mourning Crazy Horse (1982), Dos Indios (1983), and Beasts (1986)—appears to take somewhat more interest in formal innovation for its own sake (Beasts, for example, comprises a set of stories that parallel the medieval bestiary), Induced Coma and its immediate predecessors are politically “engaged” in a more direct and purposeful way. The aesthetic interest in the fifty and 100 words stories of Anti-Twitter and Induced Coma is mostly conceptual, their success mostly dependent on the reader’s willingness to look “outside the text” to affirm the author’s intent. These stories challenge literary convention, but this is done less in the name of redirecting or refreshing literary practices than of calling attention to the cultural and political depredations of the world we live in, forcing our awareness that they are depredations, so that, presumably, we might do something about them.
This is not to say that the conceptualism of Induced Coma has no aesthetic interest, nor that Jaffe shows no additional concern for aesthetic effect or value. The very first piece in the book, the title story, introduces what will be the underlying metaphorical representation of the book’s portrayal of our wired and networked world as “Coma-land,” a “degraded version of Nirvana” that lulls us into its “sweet spice” of irreality. The pieces are not arranged in a random or a rigidly imposed order but in an effectively understated way, using sequential repetition of subjects and motifs and alternating the stories of outright horror with the stories of absurdity so that the book’s tone remains uneasily (but provocatively) suspended between the two. However, these signs of the writer taking the aesthetic demands of fiction seriously do not displace the overriding ambition of this book, as well as Harold Jaffe’s fiction more generally, to be politically effective, to encourage the reader’s recognition of the oppressive forces shaping (or misshaping) his/her experience of current “reality.”
This is a perfectly fine ambition if you think innovation in fiction is “subversive” only if it subverts not just literary convention but also existing political structures. To the extent that Jaffe himself seems to believe this, perhaps it is ungenerous to say that the ambition is likely to remain unfulfilled, the political structures in question to remain untouched by his literary iconoclasm, and not only because that very iconoclasm helps to account for his small audience and lack of critical attention. Still, it also accounts for the liveliness and originality of his dissident fiction, even if Jaffe himself might not consider his work wholly successful if the readers he does attract find this by itself sufficient reward.
Arguably what has over the past 50 years been called “experimental” fiction is inherently a “conceptual” fiction. The efforts among such postwar American writers as John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Raymond Federman to question established norms and to extend the formal possibilities of fiction challenged readers to put aside the assumption that a work of fiction is identical with its “story,” which in turn enlists “character,” “setting” and “theme” to give it substance. Not all readers would necessarily describe their expectations in this way, nor cling rigidly to them, but even the innovations of modernism (which arguably only altered perceptions of how plots could be organized and characters presented) did not finally overturn assumptions about the centrality of narrative as the default structural principle of fiction.
Writers like Sorrentino and Federman contest these assumptions by disrupting complacent reading habits and substituting for the formal structure provided by narrative (a structure that pretends to be no structure at all but instead the embodiment of fiction in its natural state) an alternative form created for this particular work, whose “concept” the reader must ultimately grasp in order to affirm the work’s aesthetic integrity. Inveterate experimental writers such as these essentially attempt to reinvent “form” with each new work, requiring that readers regard literary form (at least in fiction, although the stakes are the same in poetry as well) as perpetually unsettled, always subject to revision and re-creation. Most readers of fiction, of course, remain unwilling to relinquish their inherited conception of form as something already known, an established paradigm by which to judge the work’s “success,” and so experimental or adventurous writers must still attempt to break through ingrained reading habits by, if necessary, rudely interrupting them.
Perhaps it is the persistence of these passive reading habits, despite the efforts of various outlaws, absurdists, metafictionists, and other assorted postmodernists, that accounts for the appearance of a more direct form of conceptualism in Davis Schneiderman’s [SIC], as well as his previous novel, Blank. (INK, the third book in a conceptualist trilogy, is scheduled for publication in 2014.) Both books bring to fiction the programmatic conceptualism that has featured prominently in Amerian art since Joseph Kosuth’s 1969 manifest, “Art After Philosophy,” and that more recently has been rather flamboyantly adapted to poetry by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith. Blank is a series of pages that are, well, blank except for a few pages with chapter titles on which the blank pages refuse to elaborate. Schneiderman has said of the book that it “takes as its starting point that there is no starting point. . .this is literature that exceeds its frame and grows to encompass and then process its own discussions” and that it is “a conceptual work that allows you an entry point into a world beyond realist and experimental/innovative literature. This is conceptual work that responds to the at-times alienating character of contemporary art” (The Nervous Breakdown, April 26, 2011)
While such remarks surely do manifest a kind of postironic glibness that warns us not to take them altogether seriously, finally we have to accept that the provocation of Blank is indeed directed toward the purposes Schneiderman describes here, or the book threatens to become merely a joke (although we should not underestimate the extent to which it is indeed intended partly as a joke). No doubt Schneiderman does want us to think of his book as going “beyond” both “realist and experimental/innovative literature” and to regard its “content” as radically indeterminate (if it can be said to have content). That the book is meant as a response “to the at-times alienating character of contemporary art” is somewhat vague—What kind of response? To what feature of contemporary art that makes it “alienating”?—but more generally this notion that art is fundamentally a response to the nature of art is one of the controlling ideas behind conceptual art going back at least to Kosuth (who himself argues it goes back to Duchamp). Presumably Schneiderman wants us in particular to have in mind the “character” of contemporary fiction (especially in its “literary” version), but the moves he makes in describing his “conceptual book” are recognizably those associated with conceptualism.
Blank certainly follows the central principle associated with conceptual art: once we have identified its motivating concept, we have appreciated its “art,” which has almost nothing to do with execution, with the way the writer works with the “materials” at hand. We do not judge this book by its artful disposition of words, since it contains none (aside from the chapter headings, which more call attention to the absence of words than furnish us with a few scarce specimens). [SIC] is equally conceptual, although in this case the text is full of words, except that none of them have been written by the author. (He does conspicuously lay claim to them, nonetheless.) Part 1 of the book consists of a series of appropriated canonical literary works, proceeding in a more or less chronological sequence, form “Caedmon’s Hymn” to Joyce’s Ulysses, each work presented as “by Davis Schneiderman.” Part 2 is a “translation” of Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” although it is actually a transformation of the text through several different languages as produced by an online translation program. Part 3 consists of a miscellany of documents produced since 1923 (the cutoff date for determining the “public domain”), including Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address, a recipe for a “1943 Victory Cake,” the source code for the Melissa virus, and the first 30 Tweets—all again putatively “by Davis Schneiderman.”
Thus while [SIC] unlike Blank seems to provide a text we might read (a text composed of other texts), it turns out to be one we don’t need to read. Again once we have assimilated the underlying concept bringing the texts together, unless we would like, say, to re-read Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” for its own sake, we have little reason to do more than skim through the book’s pages to get its “point.” [SIC] is an implicit critique of copyright, of the “ownership” of writing and the taboo of plagiarism. Conversely, one might see it as the celebration of the possibilities of appropriation, a kind of literary remixing. Finding this critique satisfying must finally depend on the extent to which the reader also finds him/herself in sympathy with the philosophy of artistic appropriation and considers the product of such appropriation compelling as a work of art, since there are otherwise no aesthetic standards against which a book like this can be measured. Certainly there are many readers who would find this sort of thing simply irrelevant to art, perhaps its very antithesis. Others would just as surely defend it as a necessary tonic against bloated claims on behalf of “originality” and a challenge to us to think seriously about what we do expect of art.
I myself do not find originality an altogether empty term, at least if we concede that originality in art or literature is always a relative claim, a perception that a specific work or writer has exploited a formal possibility not previously so fully realized or produced effects with language so well-rendered, not an assertion that something wholly new, unconstrained by convention or uninfluenced by other artists and the history of the form, has been created or is even possible. Davis Schneiderman would likely deny that in its way his book aspires to originality, but it seems to me that it asks to be taken as original in the most radical sense, a book so utterly removed from the ordinary practices of “literary fiction” that it is a work of art on its own terms, not on those tied to existing formal requirements or to literary history. It seeks to be regarded as sui generis, a book that can be judged only by the criteria its sets up for itself. However, if there are few, if any, touchstones in previous fiction by which to assess it, [SIC] is recognizable enough as a fellow traveler with conceptualism in contemporary art, as well as with the escapades of Goldsmith. In this context, [SIC] can’t really be called original (save perhaps in bringing conceptualism to fiction), but, more importantly, it’s really not that interesting, either.
Finally it is rather hard to know why we shouldn’t prefer a straightforward nonfiction polemic against the ill effects of copyright (including its perpetuation of the myth of “ownership,” of “intellectual property”) over the more indirect version of this critique as found in [SIC]. In some ways a writer like Davis Schneiderman performs a worthwhile enough service in reminding even those of us who favor experimental writing that we can still impose too many formal requirements on a work of fiction, and “The Borges Transformations” is a provocative demonstration of the inherent instability of meaning in any text. But in essentially reducing the scope of his iconoclasm to a secondary role that primarily reinforces what the book wants to “say” about the subject it indirectly raises, [SIC] almost negates whatever adventurous impulse might seem to animate a work ostensibly so unconventional. Such didacticism only makes experimental fiction a means of achieving the sort of conventional goal—in this case, communicating a “theme”—emphasized by the “realist” fiction to which it is supposed to be an alternative.
Partisans of “experimental” fiction (I am one) frequently make unequivocal distinctions between a properly experimental and a “conventional” work: The experimental work is formally or stylistically unlike anything that has come before–satisfying Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new”–while the conventional work merely recapitulates, perhaps with modest variation, an already existing form or style.
If the goal is to identify the truly original, this distinction makes sense, however much it seems to some readers an overly rigid standard or just unnecessary–if a work of literature provides some kind of aesthetic satisfaction (if it’s merely “a good read”), what difference does it make if it can be called original or not? In my opinion formal and stylistic innovation is important in maintaining the aesthetic potential of fiction. Without it, fiction becomes just a routinized “entertainment” medium that at best appeals to readers willing to settle for routine entertainment but that at worst itself implicitly denies that fiction has any potential to be “art” except through the skill required to master the moves involved in joining together the familiar elements–plot, character, setting–associated with it as an inherited form. I would not deny that this can be done more or less skillfully (and that the result can be more or less entertaining), but surely it is artistic originality that at the very least introduces a fresh perspective on what might be possible in a particular aesthetic form, and surely this is as true of fiction as of any other of the arts.
Perhaps, however, those of us who would defend experimental fiction against its frequent enough detractors (who usually either do prefer the familiar over the fresh or conveniently judge all literary experiments to be failed experiments) do, wittingly or unwittingly, too quickly discount the value of a work’s capacity to “entertain,” at least if “entertaining” is defined as that quality of the work that sustains attention, makes the reader feel the reading experience is worth the time spent. I have always thought the greatest experimental fiction precisely manages to both find original means of expression and make that expression entertaining, even traditionally “enjoyable.” The fiction of Gilbert Sorrentino, for example, has always seemed to me wildly entertaining, even if it is dedicated first of all to discarding all the conventional ways of providing entertainment through narrative fiction. The same is true of the fiction (and the plays) of Samuel Beckett, if the reader can reconcile the at times farcical premises and occurrences with the bleak view of human existence Beckett presents.
There is also perhaps a middle ground between “experimental” and “conventional” in fiction where writers are able to follow up on (in a sense further experiment with) strategies and techniques first introduced by previous innovative writers, in some cases precisely employing those techniques in a more obvious attempt to turn them to the purposes of familiar literary pleasures. Although some practices that were at one time more daring–fragmented narrative or the move toward “psychological realism” among modernist writers such as Joyce and Woolf, for example–have inevitably become so assimilated as to no longer seem exceptional, others can still be used to credible effect by skillful writers seeking to avoid the most conventionalized assumptions about writing novels or stories. While the results couldn’t be called experimental other than in this second-order sense, such works are certainly more adventurous than the great majority of what gets called literary fiction, and might even help convince some readers that more adventurous approaches to both the writing and reading of fiction could have their merits.
One such work is Arthur Phillips’s The Tragedy of Arthur. Describable as parody or pastiche, or a combination of the two, the novel actually avoids taking on a structure readers immediately recognize as that of a novel, instead assuming the form of an “introduction” to a putatively newly-discovered play by Shakespeare, along with the text of the play. The introduction hardly exhibits the characteristics of an ordinary scholarly introduction, itself proceeding more as the memoir of “Arthur Phillips,” in whose possession the play resides, and as such often satirizes the now-ubiquitous memoir form. The structure is highly reminiscent of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which Phillips has himself acknowledged, although most of the “story” occurs in the memoir itself rather than in the footnotes to the play (which do, however, add another layer of commentary on both the text and its origins.) Whereas Pale Fire works by forcing the reader to read carefully both the poem Nabokov has written and attributed to “John Shade” and the scholarly apparatus that purports to explicate it in order to extract the “real” story its narrator/editor wants to tell (which turns out to be quite an entertaining if outlandish one), The Tragedy of Arthur puts fewer burdens on the reader (at least explicitly); the fictional memoir, humorously tangential as a critical preface to Shakespeare, offers a narrative complete in itself, while the fabricated play could ostensibly also be read separately.
However lightly Phillips executes the formal manipulation, The Tragedy of Arthur is not an ordinary reading experience. It holds in balance several sources of aesthetic tension the reader must still reckon with, tensions left deliberately unresolved. Besides the obvious unresolved question (unresolved within the fictional framework) of whether “The Tragedy of Arthur” is real or fraudulent Shakespeare, we are left to contemplate how much of the story of “Arthur Phillips” is autobiographical and how much invented, which Arthur’s life story–pere, fils, or protagonist of the play–is characterized as “tragedy,” and whether we are to consider “The Tragedy of Arthur” as “good” Shakespeare, even if it is forged.
It may finally be the aesthetic triumph of this novel that all of these questions remain unanswered, or that they must be answered by individual readers. Although it seems most likely that the con man Arthur Sr. did indeed forge the play, the possibility it is genuine (again, within the fictional framework of the novel) is not foreclosed, as it is not beyond possibility that a “lost” Shakespeare play could one day be found. (At least two plays attributed to Shakespeare are known to be lost.) Moreover, even if it is forged, what does it say about Phillips Sr., something close to a common criminal as portrayed in the novel, that he could nevertheless channel Shakespeare’s spirit well enough to produce a plausible simulation? (What does it say about Shakespeare?) (What does it say about Shakespeare that the novelist Arthur Phillips could produce such a simulation? About Arthur Phillips?) That it probably is forged additionally allows us to appreciate Phillips’s satire of the “expertise” we assume Shakespeareans possess: their “authentication” of the play is clearly enough part wishful thinking, part craven service to a publisher interested in the project only for the money that might be made.
Phillips invites us to consider his “memoir” authentic as well (much of the information provided seems verifiably true), but ultimately it has to be taken as at least as much a fabrication as “The Tragedy of Arthur,” however much Phillips uses real names and seemingly draws on the particulars of his own life and upbringing. Like the play, the introductory memoir has a surface plausibility as “the real thing,” but we would be ill-advised to accept it as more than that. It works to reinforce formally what Sam Sacks in his excellent review of the novel called its theme of “the ambiguity of fraud” and in the process reminds us that all memoir is subject to this ambiguity, when it isn’t manifestly fraudulent. Fiction, of course, is by definition a “fraud,” but it explicitly announces itself as such, and one could say that The Tragedy of Arthur is as much as anything else a playful challenge to our tendencies to read fiction as disguised memoir and to the recent turn to memoir as a more reliable narrative source of literal truth. Readers of fiction will have to be content with the “ambiguity” that accompanies the fraud of fiction.
Such ambiguity (and playfulness) is carried through in the juxtaposition of Arthurs: Arthur the narrator, Arthur his father, Arthur the protagonist of the putative Shakespeare play, and Arthur Phillips, the author of The Tragedy of Arthur. Arthur the younger suffers the tragedy of a broken relationship with his father, Arthur the elder a similar tragedy in his loss of family, but also in the foreshortening of his own life’s possibilities through his own mistakes, while King Arthur undergoes the tragedy that often befalls the royal heroes of Shakespeare’s tragedies. The “tragedy” of the title perhaps then belongs equally to each, although one might ask whether Arthur Sr.’s forgery might actually represent a final triumph, a successful effort to breathe the same air as his hero Shakespeare, an effort strong enough it has fooled some into regarding it as genuine. The Tragedy of Arthur must represent a triumph for Arthur Phillips as well, a triumph of literary creation that, if it doesn’t equal that of Shakespeare, or of Nabokov, is impressive enough and in its ingenuity subtly mocks any sense of “tragedy” involved in the novel’s ostensible subject.
Thus finally the question of whether “The Tragedy of Arthur” as forged by either “Arthur Phillips” or Arthur Phillips is credible as Shakespeare is mostly beside the point. Certainly it is credible enough to pass as a claimant to authorship by Shakespeare, and that it be good enough to provoke the controversy depicted is as good as it needs to be. Phillips has undeniably immersed himself in Elizabethan language and culture as rendered by Shakespeare, and part of the fun in reading the play is coming upon those kinds of constructions one always finds puzzling in Shakespeare skillfully approximated. (“When they would have your guts to stuff their pudding-bags.”) In my view, what Phillips has done most adeptly with the play is to fully integrate it within the concerns and the structure of the novel as a whole, and critics who have emphasized the mere fact of its presence or who suggest it is in itself the focal point of the novel have conveyed a distorted impression of its actual achievement.
Because The Tragedy of Arthur so emphatically foregrounds form, readers are not as likely to appreciate through it what in Phillips’s previous novels seemed to me his strongest talent as a novelist, his facility as a prose stylist. This is on display most conspicuously in Prague, his first novel, and The Song Is You, the novel immediately preceding The Tragedy of Arthur. Although both of these novels feature (for American fiction) somewhat unconventional situations–a group of American expatriates in central Europe, an aging director of television commercials becoming obsessed with a young pop singer–neither of them could be said to be plot-driven. Both appeal through fluency of style. This is especially true of The Song is You (although ultimately Prague is probably the better novel because it seems less hermetically caught in the consciousness of a single protagonist), which intrepidly if eloquently articulates the increasingly rejuvenated mental life of its protagonist as he both surveys his life and pursues his new interest in a beguiling singer and in music in general.
The Irish girl performed that night. The crowd was larger, challenging the bar’s legal capacity, and Julian thought she had changed in the last weeks, maybe even developed. She was slightly more coherent as a performer, as a projector of an idea and an image. The previous gig, something had distracted and dislocated her, as when color newsprint is misaligned and an unholy yellow aura floats a fractioned inch above the bright red body of a funny-pages dog. It had been perhaps the bass player’s mistakes, or, if the hipster snob was to be credited, the seductively whispering approach of success. No matter: she was clearer tonight, even if he could still see her strive, from one song to the next, for an array of effects: the casually ironic urban girl, the junkie on the make, the desperate Irish lass whose love was lost to the Troubles, the degenerate schoolgirl, the lover by the fire with skin as velvet succulent as rose-petal flesh. . . .
With The Tragedy of Arthur, Arthur Phillips shows that as a novelist he has formidable control of both form and language. This was to an extent evident as well in The Egyptologist and in the Jamesian manipulations of point of view in Angelica, but Arthur confirms he is not an ordinary novelist rehearsing the same workshop-imposed conventions. I do not necessarily expect a new Arthur Phillips novel to revitalize the avant-garde, but I have come to expect it will exist outside the mold to which too many novels reflexively conform, formally and stylistically. His novels may lag behind Nabokov or Beckett or Sorrentino in adventurousness, but they do perhaps make some readers aware that more adventurous approaches are possible, and can even bring pleasure.
In Barry Alpert’s 1974 interview with him, Gilbert Sorrentino declares that he is “an episodic and synthetic writer. . .I don’t like to take a subject and break it down into parts, I like to take disparate parts and put them all together and see what happens.” In his late works Little Casino, Lunar Follies, and A Strange Commonplace, Sorrentino demonstrates that he continues to pursue this “synthetic” approach to the writing of fiction, if anything to even more deliberate and concentrated effect. So dedicated are these books to the juxtaposing of “disparate parts,” they seem to have brought Sorrentino to a point where all conventional expectations of continuity and development in character or story are simply irrelevant, vestiges of a prior of conception of fiction that no longer has much force.
Readers whose assumptions about the novel still depend on notions of plot and character development are likely to have trouble identifying A Strange Commonplace as a novel at all. Some might think of it as a collection of sketches and short tales, but even if we were to take the “episodic” nature of the book as far as this, we would, of course, be privileging the “disparate parts” over the effort “to put them all together” and would be missing the aesthetic point altogether. This is a unified work of fiction, however much Sorrentino makes us participate in the act of synthesizing its elements so that, along with the author, we readers can “see what happens.”
The contents page of A Strange Commonplace signals immediately that the reader should be alert to the novel’s structural patterns, to whatever relationships might be revealed through the arrangement of its parts. “Book One” and “Book Two” each consist of twenty-six sections, the titles of which are identical across both books, although presented in a different order. Thus, we can read a pair of “chapters” called “In the Bedroom,” “Success,” “Born Again,” etc., although, as we discover, in the second set of episodes the cast of characters changes and the stories related are different—except insofar as all of the separate tales depict a post-World War II America of faded dreams, dysfunctional families, adultery-ridden marriages, and often wanton cruelty. Inevitably, this device tempts us actively to seek out correspondences between these episodes; perhaps such correspondences can indeed be found, but one suspects that Sorrentino himself would be less interested in leading his readers to the “meaning” that might be gleaned from this approach than in the process—unconventional and unorthodox—by which they are led there.
This process is intensified by Sorrentino’s use of a few recurring names for his characters and recurring images and motifs. Two stories are called “Claire,” but the characters involved are, for all we can tell, not the same Claire, and other characters in other stories also bear the name. The same is true of stories whose characters are named “Warren,” “Ray,” “Janet,” and “Inez.” A pearl gray homburg hat appears in numerous stories, frequently we find ourselves at Rockefeller Center, and Meryl Streep is the subject of several conversations. Surely at least here we might regard the homburg as a symbol of the recognizable sort, the other repeated elements similarly placed to provoke us into reflecting on the deeper meaning to which they point? Experienced readers of Sorrentino’s fiction know that such symbol-hunting leads us down a blind alley, that this approach to reading fiction is relentlessly mocked in many of his books, the very notion of “deeper meaning” made the subject of some of his best jokes.
So what does A Strange Commonplace have to offer the reader willing to allow it its strangeness, its determination to render the commonplace actions of its interchangeable characters in an uncommon way? Partly the same pleasures to be found in all of Sorrentino’s work: mordant humor (although rather less broad in this case), a delight in exploring formal conceits as far as they will go, a prose style that, although entirely free of affectation and ornamental flourishes, is both energetic and inventive, recognizably Sorrentinoesque. Here in its entirety is the first of the two sections called “Snow”:
The tunnel in the snow leads to a warm kitchen, vinegary salad, ham and baloney and American cheese, white bread from Bohack’s and tomato-rice soup and bottles of ketchup and Worcestershire sauce, coffee. It leads to heaven. Who is the strange and beautiful man at the far end of the tunnel he has just dug from the black Packard sedan to the white door of the little frame house? And who is the woman, who smells of winter and wool and perfume, of spearmint and whiskey and love? He gets out of the car and the woman holds his arm as he starts down the thrilling tunnel, through the snow banked above him on both sides, to the man in the navy blue overcoat and pearl gray homburg who waits, down on one knee, his arms held out to him. This will never happen again, nothing like it will ever happen again. The child begins to laugh joyously in the crepuscular gray light of the magical tunnel, laughing in the middle of the knifing cold of the January day, laughing since he does not know, nor do his mother and father, in their youth and beauty and strength, that this will never happen again, and that the family is almost finished and done. His father wears a white silk scarf with blue polka dots.
Even this brief passage exhibits some of Sorrentino’s signature stylistic traits: the first sentence with its list, the exposition-through-questions, the mock lyricism, in this instance leading us to the sudden reckoning with reality: “. . .the family is almost finished and done with. His father wears a white silk scarf with blue polka dots.”
As playful, even extravagant, as Sorrentino’s fiction can sometimes seem, his best work always represents a reckoning with reality. Books like Steelwork and Red the Fiend perhaps address hard-bitten realities somewhat more directly (but only somewhat) than books like Mulligan Stew and Blue Pastoral, but ultimately all of his books are aesthetically provocative efforts to get at the prevailing features of postwar American life, at what the title of one of his best books calls the “imaginative qualities of actual things.” A Strange Commonplace indeed. This book will probably strike readers less familiar with Sorrentino’s work (for whom it would make a perfectly good introduction) as especially concerned with depicting these prevailing features, most of them disturbing if not actively repugnant, as well as the ways in which its characters attempt to cope with their circumstances. If the novel seems unfamiliar in its method of portraying these characters, their mostly unsuccessful strategies will undoubtedly seem very familiar, the kaleidoscopic picture of ourselves that emerges all too recognizable.
In his last works of fiction, beginning with Little Casino (2002), Gilbert Sorrentino began composing slim, fragmented texts that he continued to identify with the designation “novel,” but that more or less dispensed completely with the elements usually associated with novels, especially narrative continuity and extended character development. Each of these works presents instead a series of episodes, anecdotes, memories, or observations—in Lunar Follies (2005) pieces of critical discourse about art—that are tenuously connected as narrative, although Little Casino ultimately does a provide a kaleidoscopic portrayal of a Brooklyn neighborhood and Lunar Follies unites its parodic discourse in a scathing satire of the “art world.” (A Strange Commonplace makes an ostensibly more direct effort to unite its narrative fragments through a Oulipian repetition of chapter headings and character names, but the connection is still more suggestive than definitive.) “Character” is equally, and literally, in name only, as individual figures, often anonymous, make brief appearances but refuse to “jump off the page,” as Sorrentino has previously and mockingly described the hallmark of “believable” characters in fiction.
In his posthumously released (and presumably final) novel, The Abyss of Human Illusion, Sorrentino again offers a relatively brief work (150 pages) built out of narrative fragments. As Christopher Sorrentino points out in his introductory note, the most obvious features of the novel’s formal structure are its division into fifty numbered sections that gradually increase in length, from sections comprised of only a paragraph or so to the final sections extending to three or four pages. The Abyss of Human Illusion also echoes Little Casino in its inclusion of textual notes, in this case labeled “commentaries” and appended to the “main” text.
Given Sorrentino’s longstanding predilection to formal experiment and manipulation, already it is tempting to look for clues to the novel’s formal patterning, which might ultimately provide the key to interpreting it, in these immediate characteristics of the text. Why fifty sections? Do the sections increase in length according to some identifiable principle governing the “rules and procedures” that Christopher Sorrentino reminds us have always been partly determinative of the formal qualities of his father’s fiction? If in Little Casino the notes discretely follow each section while in The Abyss of Human Illusion they are listed together at the end of the text, does this mean we should read the two novels differently, in the latter case first reading the main entries and then moving on to the commentaries as a whole? Would this make for a significantly different reading experience, adding or altering meaning in the process?
One is almost compelled to read each of the fifty sections looking for apparent correspondences between them, whether of character, setting, action, or image. And there are indeed correspondences—an orange glow in the first few sections, the perspective through a window in many of them, references to the Milano restaurant, characters who move to St. Louis, an aging writer figure who keeps writing because it’s all he can do. Most of these correspondences are probably either trivial or accidental, while others are simply consequences of the setting of many of the episodes in Brooklyn and of characters no doubt in one way or another created from the experiences of the author. Perhaps these motifs were conjured by Sorrentino to help him develop the book’s structure organically, from episode to episode, but one can also imagine Sorrentino taking delight in the possibility they would lead some readers on a hunt for “meaning” that would ultimately prove fruitless. Even so, following along through his formal and stylistic turns, even when they entangle us in their convolutions, has always been one of the pleasures of reading Gilbert Sorrentino’s fiction, and so it is also in this novel.
The most consistently maintained correspondence linking the condensed stories related in The Abyss of Human Illusion is thematic. Each of the stories tells of characters caught in the “abyss” named in the book’s title. Some of the characters realize the depth of their illusions, while others remain possessed by them. Some are elderly, most often male, facing what now seems to them the emptiness of their lives, while others are still in the midst of carrying out their illusions. Infidelity, divorce, and general domestic unhappiness play prominent roles, resentment, envy, and an emotional numbness often the accompanying states of being. The overall tone conveyed by the stories is a fairly brutal frankness about the disappointments and futility that frequently enough define human existence.
While such a disabused portrayal of his characters’ motives and behavior is common in Sorrentino’s fiction, rarely is it made quite so relentlessly the focus of interest as it is in The Abyss of Human Illusion. Sorrentino’s view of the role of “theme” in fiction has always been that it undercuts the aesthetic integrity of the work when conceived as the act of “saying something” through the work rather than as simply “something said,” thematic implications that arise from the work as it pursues its own aesthetic logic. It is entirely possible that Sorrentino began this work with the brief image described in the first section—a young boy sitting at a kitchen table on top of which are placed a bottle of French dressing, a bowl of salad, and a bottle of Worcestershire sauce—and that all of the succeeding sections developed from this base and in imaginative interaction with each other, but the ultimate effect of the central conceit is to leave the impression the novel is a “commentary” of sorts on our capacity for self-delusion.
The coherence this conceit provides could make The Abyss of Human Illusion perhaps a more accessible work than some of Sorrentino’s other fiction, in which complexity is built out of simplicity. This last novel more nearly reverses that process, producing apparent simplicity from a deceptive complexity. Whether this inversion of his normal practice is a structural device Sorrentino intended us to notice probably cannot now be known, but it does draw our attention to structure in a way that is consistent with his distinctive brand of metafiction more generally and especially with the three novels preceding The Abyss of Human Illusion. Together, this quartet concludes Gilbert Sorrentino’s career by reinforcing that career’s implicit insistence that “fiction” identifies not a specifiable form but an opportunity for the resourceful writer to further specify through example its yet unexplored forms.
Often enough a good way to get a quick introduction to an author’s work is to start with one or another collection of that writer’s short fiction. Frequently the short stories will provide a helpful if preliminary sense of the writer’s preoccupations, strategies, preferred subjects, stylistic tendencies, etc. If this writer is also a novelist, one can then decide whether to devote the greater time and commitment needed to tackle the longer works. Unfortunately, this does not really prove to be the case with Gilbert Sorrentino. Although Sorrentino is in my opinion among the most accomplished (and will, I believe, in the long run be among the most influential) post-WWII American novelists, The Moon and Its Flight, a more or less omnibus collection of his short fiction, does not present Sorrentino either at his best or his most representative.
The book does manage to hang together thematically as a portrait of American life in the twenty or so years following on the end of the second world war, or at least of a certain segment of American society characterized by its aspirations to a pseudo-bohemian way of life vaguely associated with art or writing or the academy. The portrait that emerges of this class of intellectual pretenders is a decidedly sour one, their lives notable mostly for their casual betrayals, petty spite, their lassitude and spiritual drift. Indeed, the overall view of human endeavor that seems to pervade The Moon in Its Flight is overwhelmingly pessimistic, even misanthropic. The narrator of “Decades” writes: “The fashionably grubby artistic circles in New York are filled with people like me, people who are kind enough to lie about one’s chances in the unmentioned certitude that one will lie to them about theirs. Indeed, if everyone told the truth, for just one day, in all these bars and lofts, at all these parties and openings, almost all of downtown Manhattan would disappear in a terrifying flash of hatred, revulsion, and self-loathing.” The narrator of “In Loveland” remarks on his own writing ambitions that “The desire to add some more stupid clutter to the clutter of the vacuous world is virtually unquenchable.”
Of course, one ought to hesitate in associating the comments of these first-person narrators with Sorrentino himself, but the world-weariness and sense of futility these characters express are reinforced in many of the other stories as well. The impression conveyed in such retrospective stories as the title story, “Facts and Their Manifestations,” “Life and Letters,” “Gorgias,” and “Things That Have Stopped Moving” is of failure, lost opportunities, not just regret for squandered lives but a feeling that such lives were always doomed to be squandered. This is one of the ways in which The Moon in Its Flight seems a departure from most of Sorrentino’s other work, which is marked, even when treating similarly disturbing material, by a sense of creative playfulness and an all-encompassing kind of comedy that is missing from most of these stories. But perhaps they are simply the flip-side of such comedy, the more sober depictions of the stupidity and folly that also fuels the comic novels.
Not all of the stories depart from the mode of all-out experimentation one expects from Sorrentino’s novels, however. “A Beehive Arranged on Humane Principles,” written entirely in interrogative sentences, is the obvious precursor to the later Gold Fools (and, it must be said, the technique works better in the shorter form); of “Times Without Numbers” we are told in a concluding note that “the story comprises 177 sentences, 59 of which are taken from 59 separate works by 59 different authors. The remaining 118 sentences are from one of my own earlier stories.” “The Sea, Caught in Roses” seems to be built on some principle of repetition or accretion, taking the initial image named in the title and working it through a series of emendations and authorial comments. Or it may just be a spoof of romantic imagery and “picturesque” subjects.
Although most of the stories are metafictional in various fairly minimal ways—Sorrentino always reminds us that such stories have been subject to imaginative re-creation, are at least “twice-told” even when they seem to be sliced from life—few of them are as outrageously and systematically self-reflexive as his better-known novels. “Sample Writing Sample” is a story about making up stories, while several others are directly about writers, and examine the consequences and ramifications of what they’ve written. “It’s Time to Call It a Day” is a fairly thinly-disguised attack on the banalities of conventional fiction as well as current publishing practices, but a rather entertaining attack (and implicit statement of Sorrentino’s own principles) nevertheless:
This latest novel, created to satisfy the desires of an audience, as Clifford’s editor had characterized it, “too hip to actually read a lot,” educated, so to say, and busy, so, so busy, was, he hoped, the very thing to interest those readers among the favored “target group” who had progressed from slop-and-ramshackle best-sellers to the sort of fiction admired by professional reviewers—well-written, with fully developed character, a nicely turned plot, and something important to say. It was, that is to say, designed for a particular kind of success, a “literary” success, and one that was, God knows, long deserved. So Clifford thought in righteous irritation. His first three novels should have been better received than they were—as he often complained to his wife. She thought of him as “neglected,” not, as he was, ignored. The books had been painstakingly constructed, modern in their “sensibility,” whatever he meant by that, accessible and possessed of accessible, contemporary motifs, dialogue, and sex scenes. They were, to be blunt, absolute failures, and each got a handful of mostly snide, semi-literate reviews, featuring the self-satisfaction of the ignorant. These were, of course, the usual, but Clifford was astonished by their blithe savagery.
(Although not astonished enough that he would want to stop trying to please them.)
The two concluding stories in this volume, “In Loveland” and “Things That Have Stopped Moving,” in some ways sum up both the strategies and the themes of The Moon in Its Flight. “In Loveland” begins, “I have attempted to tell this story many times over the past years, the past decades, for that matter. I’ve not been able to bring it off, for I’ve never been able to invent—inhabit, perhaps—the proper narrational attitude. I begin to invent plausible situations that soon enough falsify everything, or unlikely situations that, just as soon, parody everything. I have even, at times, tried to tell the undecorated truth. . .” and goes on to tell a story of marital failure and self-disgust similar to a few of the earlier stories, but it is more amply told, with some compelling details. It concludes with these reflections, which add in a satisfying way to the story’s dramatic resonance and aesthetic implications: “Reality, or, if you will, that which we constrain ourselves to believe is, beyond all philosophies, also that which we make of what happened. Unexpected connections do, of course, sometimes make for unexpected forms. For instance, I see that this story is, essentially, about a set of disappearances. I had not intended that to be its burden, although any further attempt to say what I meant to say is out of the question.”
“Things That Have Stopped Moving” at first seems a retelling of the earlier story “Decades” (Ben and Clara Stern are the principals in the latter story, Ben and Clara Stein in the former), but manages to leaven its narrator’s account of the empty and adulterous sexual encounters between himself and Clara with some rather heart-felt reminiscences of his parents. It, too, comes with a metafictional conclusion:
This story is dotted with flaws and contradictions and riddled with inconsistencies, some of which even the inattentive reader will discover. Some of these gaffes may well be considered felicities of uncertainty and indeterminacy: such is prose. The tale also, it will have been clear, occasionally flaunts its triumphs, small though they may be. I am afraid that the final word about the gluey, tortuous, somehow glamorously perverse relationship that Ben and Clara and I constructed and sent shuffling into the world hasn’t been arrived at, but perhaps the unspeakable has had created some sad analogue of itself, if such is possible. Something has been spoken of, surely, but I can’t determine what or where it is.
Both of these stories are successful demonstrations of the way in which self-reflexivity can actually contribute to the emotional impact of a work of fiction, while continuing to draw the reader’s attention to the artificial devices by which, unavoidably, aesthetically cogent fiction must be created.
The Moon in Its Flight is a book that fans of Sorrentino’s fiction will want to read, but it is more interesting as a minor side attraction amid the greater pleasures of Sorrentino’s carnivalesque novels. Curious readers would be better off to start with Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, a provocative but also compelling work of metafiction, perhaps then going on to what is in my view Sorrentino’s masterwork, the sui generis Mulligan Stew. Those interested in Sorrentino’s fictional depictions of Brooklyn (in which several of the stories in The Moon in Its Flight are set) might also try Steelwork or Crystal Vision. The biggest problem with The Moon in Its Flight is that unwary readers might take some of the more tepid and unfocused stories in this book as representative of Gilbert Sorrentino’s achievements as a writer of fiction and might pass on the more important novels. If they did so, they would be missing out on the opportunity to read one of the most invigorating and audacious bodies of work in 20th century American fiction.
Raymond Federman was generally associated with those American writers who in the 1960s and 70s began writing what is now called “metafiction,” but there was always something about Federman’s work that seemed different, its self-reflexivity even more radical and enacted in a more aggressive way. Where Barth and Coover laid bare the devices of fiction allegorically (J. Henry Waugh as “author” of his fictional baseball world) or through the occasional narrative disruption (the “author” making his presence known, as in Barth’s “Life-Story”), Federman’s fiction was more direct and unremitting in its undermining of narrative illusion. With its prose freed from the constraints of typographical bondage, climbing up, down, across, and around the page, and its “stories” of writers attempting to tell a story without quite succeeding, Federman’s fiction as represented in Double or Nothing (1971) and Take It or Leave It (1976), still his most important books, challenged not only reader’s preconceptions about fiction but also basic assumptions about reading itself.
Federman rejected both “metafiction” and “experimental fiction” more broadly as labels accurately describing his work, instead coining the term “surfiction” to sum up what he–as well as other innovative writers, such as Ronald Sukenick–was after. In his essay, “Surfiction–Four Propositions in Form of an Introduction,” Federman defines the term:
. . .the only fiction that still means something today is that kind of fiction that tries to explore the possibilities of fiction; the kind of fiction that challenges the tradition that governs it: the kind of fiction that constantly renews our faith in man’s imagination and not in man’s distorted vision of reality–that reveals man’s irrationality rather than man’s rationality. This I call SURFICTION. However, not because it imitates reality, but becuase it exposes the fictionality of reality. Just as the Surrealists called that level of man’s experience that functions in the subconscious SURREALITY, I call that level of man’s activity that reveals life as a fiction SURFICTION.
I never really did quite get the last part of this formulation, that surfiction “reveals life as fiction.” In the next paragraph, Federman adds: “fiction can no longer be reality or a representation of reality, or an imitation, or even a recreation of reality; it can only be A REALITY–an autonomous reality whose only relation to the real world is to improve that world. To create fiction is, in fact, a way to abolish reality, and especially to abolish the notion that reality is truth.” To “abolish the notion that reality is truth” is not, it seems to me, the same thing as revealing “life as a fiction.” Denying that reality is the arbiter of “truth” does help to preserve the “autonomous reality” of fiction, but for fiction to be “a” reality, it would seem necessary that “reality” itself exist, to which fiction provides an alternative or a complement. If fiction is reality and life a fiction, then Federman is paradoxically valorizing realism after all, though not for “recreating” reality. Fiction is its own arbiter of truth, the realm where “life” is really to be found. This all seems a rather byzantine way to arrive at the conclusion that fiction is a creation, not a recreation of anything.
Indeed, if fiction is an act that “renews our faith in man’s imagination,” then it largely undermines the appeal to imagination to burden it with the task of rendering itself reality–unless you simply want to defend imagination as a process that’s as real as any other human activity, and perhaps as revelatory of “life” as documentary-style realism. Certainly neither Double or Nothing nor Take It or Leave It themselves do very much to expose life as fiction, or, for that matter, “abolish reality.” But they both do display the literarary imagination at its most adventurous through exploring “the possibilities of fiction” and by challenging ” the tradition that governs it.” It seems to me that these are impressive enough accomplishments that asking them further to disclose “man’s irrationality” or to abolish reality only threatens to saddle them with extra philosophical weight they don’t really need to bear.
The reader encountering Double or Nothing for the first time surely becomes most immediately aware of its inherent playfulness. Riffling through the book, one finds pages arranged in multiple shapes and irregular spacings, its words cascading here and there, printed in various fonts and shadings. Some pages don’t so much contain writing as words arranged into images and pictographs. It is apparent right from the start that this is a work that challenges our assumption that when we pick up a novel we will be reading “prose” that unfolds through the usual, orderly blocks of print that define the reading experience in its most fundamental form. Both Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It, which is also typographically adventurous, can be read as prose narratives of a sort–albeit narratives preoccupied with their own narration–but they at a minimum require the reader to consider his/her expectations of reading and to forsake dependence on the usual and the ordinary.
If the reader begins with the impression that Double or Nothing will be a mischievous, thoroughoing challenge to the conventions that dominate the writing and reading of fiction, this impression should only be reinforced by the experience of the text itself, although that experience will surely exceed in its realization the pallid generalization of this description. The challenge of the novel is such that attentive readers will find it invigorating, an invitation to revise their notion of the reading experience as an essentially passive activity but also to find the kind of active reading it encourages a rewarding alternative. Above all, Double or Nothing is an entertaining novel, enjoyable to read in its very refusal to play by the rules.
The “plot” of Double or Nothing is announced–and more or less completed–in its opening lines:
Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lack himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facililities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York city, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person–a shy young man of about 19 years old–who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities, from France under the sponsorship of his uncle–a journalist, fluent in five languages–who had himself come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established, sometime during the war after a series of gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man–a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school–that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned. . . .
Immediately we are introduced in this passage to the structure and strategies that will be further elaborated throughout the text that is Double or Nothing. Though initially less radical than the typographical play still to come, the use of boldtype and italics here still seems disruptive, even arbitrary, although, as with all the other graphic devices in this novel, they actually work in part to substitute for more conventional grammatical and syntactical markers. The first boldfacing–“two or three weeks ago”–is clearly employed for humorous effect, but in general these interruptions provide a kind of rhythm and a different sort of visual orientation for a prose that otherwise abandons the traditional mechanics of prose.
The discursive situation set up here–a narrator relating the story of a writer preparing to write a story–is by now a recognizable move in postmodern writing, but in both Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It Federman uses this trope more thoroughly than almost any other postmodern writer, and in addition integrates it more seamlessly with the theme motivating his narrative maneuvers. Each of these novels takes as its secondary subject–the primary subject being writing itself–episodes in the life of a French immigrant to America whose biography in most ways mirrors Raymond Federman’s. In Double or Nothing, this character’s story is being told, or being attempted, by a second character, the “rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man” who is also a seeming facsimile of Raymond Federman in his later incarnation as writer. The difficulty of “getting it right” in recounting the experiences of the “shy young man” becomes the novel’s central conflict, memory and fiction unavoidably merging as the middle-aged author struggles to get the story told. The story of the story is not just self-reflexive sport (although it is that) but also the most honest opportunity to get at something close to “truth.”
This is perhaps the truth that fiction can provide, but ulimately what a work like Double or Nothing dramatizes is that the “truth” of fiction lies not in its fidelity to external events but to its own necessities. Federman uses his own “life experiences” as material on which to perform the imaginative turns fiction always performs, but in Federman’s case the performance is made “concrete,” conducted on the page without disguise. Double or Nothing is the epitome of that modern/postmodern text that, in Jerzy Kutnik’s words, “not so much says something about reality but, by its occurence and presence, does something as a reality in its own right.” I would add to this that it is a literary text that is allowed to “be something” as well. In both its emphasis on “performance” and its ultimate status as an object of aesthetic perception, Double or Nothing is less a rendering of experience (at least as a realistic representation of “life”) than it is an experience “in its own right.” In its very refusal to accept the established practices determining where the “art” of fiction is to be found, Double or Nothing establishes itself as art in the most compelling way possible, by providing the reader with a unique aesthetic experience.
Although Take It or Leave It continues to experiment with the dynamics of the printed page in an approach similar to Double or Nothing, it is both more and less radical than its predecessor. It contains fewer word-pictures and other extreme acrobatic notational flourishes, but it also takes the self-reflexive portrayal of the fiction-writing process even farther. Kutnik begins to get at this feature of Take It or Leave It when he notes of the twentieth century novel in general that often “the question ‘What does ficton say (mean)?’ was replaced by the question ‘How is fiction constituted?’ as the focus of the writer’s attention” (37). Take It or Leave It moves ahead in the life of the “shy young man” to a period in which he is serving in the U.S. military and focuses on a single episode in which he drives from North Carolina to upstate New York to collect his misdirected pay and from which he intends to drive across the country for further deployment. Although he does finally make it to the first destination, the relation of the second leg of the journey is permanently deferred as the narrative is punctuated by various digressions and a kind of internal drama carried out by multiple versions of the author, in this case split into three roles, as well as the implied reader.
In addition to the fictionalized Federman (for the purposes of this novel named “Frenchy”) whose story is the ostensible subject of the novel, we are confronted with two different “tellers” of the story, one presumably an older Federman/Frenchy, who conveys the younger Frenchy’s adventures to a second teller, who takes on the job of official narrator and who is the stand-in for Raymond Federman, author of Take It or Leave It. Later, the second teller leaves the narrative for a while, so that Federman/Frenchy must temporarily tell the story himself, and at another point the novels implied readers (residing in the future) intrude on the narrative by sending a proxy to see for himself what the young Frenchy is really up to.
In this way the actual reader of Take It or Leave It is exposed to a representation of “how fiction is constituted,” or, as Kutnik puts it, to “the novel’s internal space as the place where the text gets written, where it performs its own self” (202). Yet, this evocation of the “inner space” is also wildly funny, making Take It or Leave It in its way one of the most entertaining novels of its time. To me, it stands with Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew as a great “postmodern” novel that is great because, while rejecting the elements of fiction writing most familiar to most readers, it manages to substitute for those elements a strategy that such readers could still enjoy if they gave themselves over to its alternative logic. Like Mulligan Stew, Take It or Leave It provides readers with a “good read” that is “good” both because it makes for a pleasurable reading experience and because in the process it stimulates the reader to reflect on the conventions of reading–conventions that might otherwise exclude novels like these as simply curiousities.
At the same time that Take It or Leave It attempts to undermine the authority of conventional approaches to the writing and reading of fiction, it also evokes one of the first great novels in the tradition, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Both are narratives about the impossiblity of producing a narrative that doesn’t leave out everything that’s important. Both illustrate this dilemma by hilariously interrupting the narrative in progress through seemingly endless diversions and divagations. Sterne’s novel at the very beginning of the modern history of fiction questioned the adequacy of “telling a story” as the justification of the form, and Take It Or Leave It renews that effort as provocatively as any work of fiction since.
One hesitates to “review” a book like Che Elias’s West Virginia (Six Gallery Press), since the conventions of reviewing require a focus on what a book is “about,” where fiction is concerned on recapitulating the “story” (which, unfortunately, most newspaper book reviews emphasize most directly and at greatest length), as well as summing up the characters and situation motivating the story. Such reviews assume a shared, stable definition of “fiction” or “novel” in which these elements predominate, and to give an account of a particular novel using them is to position this novel–as well as the reviewer–in the recognizable, respectable space devoted to “literary fiction.”
When confronted with a work that doesn’t itself assume the stability of definition used by book reviewers, that is manifestly unconventional or “experimental,” the temptation is to either label it so and let readers reach their own (usually unfavorable) conclusion about whether it’s a book they’ll want to read or to find a way to describe the work in such a way that it to some degree does incorporate the conventional elements–“the setting is indefinite and shifting, but nevertheless evokes a world of dreamlike dimensions,” etc. I myself generally adopt the latter strategy when attempting a review of an unconventional work, although I don’t so much try to make the work fit the existing categories as to explicate what it seems to me to be doing that effectively replaces or substitutues for those categories.
Even so, a descriptive review of this sort can still impose an appearance of normative coherence that the work doesn’t really express, sometimes actively resists. This kind of review also risks misleading the reader, who might give the book a chance, hoping to find enough of the conventional pleasures to make it worthwhile in those terms only to find it remains alien and “difficult.” Such a review does a disservice both to the reader and to the work in question, the latter of which ought somehow to be given the opportunity to be approached on its own terms. The effort to “dumb down” fiction so that it appeals to the widest possible audience is in general misguided and counterproductive, and even an unwitting distortion of a challenging novel’s discernible features also does the cause of experimental fiction no favors at all, if anything drives the “ordinary” reader even farther away.
Thus I will not attempt to recover West Virginia for the casual reader who knows he/she will not find enjoyable a novel–albeit a relatively brief one–whose prose style might be captured in a passage such as this:
Now I can only listen to the smile that killed me before, to the time that ran away and the days where they say they’ve all left me. And the time now, the room indefinite, and the room now, the place where you were next to me, and the room said, well, you got some things you can think of being the only ones that exist, and the days being the only men you can say were human. And the people, down to the point in Wheeling, they will all say yes, we’re those people, and the men, too, the ones who killed us, and the ones who only held one thing against us in Wheeling, there was just a time when we knew they were all through. And I had to walk down steps in Wheeling too, think I crossed halls and fields as well, guess these are the worst people I know, guess that I should get used to them.
I enjoyed West Virginia–in fact, read it twice–but I can’t finally say what the book is “about,” although the above-quoted passage does invoke several of the motifs and images that recur throughout the text: a room, “the people,” an incident in Wheeling, which may have involved a rape, a killing, child abuse, a fire. There are several named characters, Andy Reed, Amber Reed (the latter of whom may have betrayed the former), Lynda Cleary, but they are hardly “characters” of the sort most readers expect to find in novels. They are essentially the locus around which the motifs and images swirl in a montage of repetition and variation. The effect is often hypnotic and sometimes dramatic–a revelation of sorts seems on the verge of materializing only to become lost again in the swirl–and the reader willing to suspend expectations of character continuity, of narrative “arc” and resolution, of style as a source of information, with the occasional rhetorical flourish, might well find the pull of language itself an adequate subsitute for the narrative devices most writers still cling to, as did I.
But I don’t think many readers will be willing to suspend these expectations, especially not as radically as a work like West Virginia solicits us to do. Those who consider the usual narrative devices to be the essence of fiction would surely put the book aside in confusion after a page or two. To some extent one might say that West Virginia is a “novel” that takes “psychological realism” to its most insular extreme: We are trapped inside the memories and/or perceptions of the narrator, who is unable to exteriorize these perceptions into what most readers of fiction would consider appropriate discourse. If you want access to “mind” in its rawest precincts, this is it. I don’t think too many readers, even readers ostensibly committed to realism, would find much solace in this, either. Nor would it suffice to call this text “poetry” rather than fiction (a hybrid, perhaps), as most readers already avoid poetry because it’s “just language,” arranged in ways these readers don’t “get.” To urge urge such readers to try West Virginia because it’s in some deep sense “poetic” might get us over the obstacle posed by “difficulty” in fiction but doesn’t get us over the remaining obstacle that poses the poetic as difficult in the first place.
Thus, if you think you might like a book that requires a different kind of reading from you, reading that asks you to avoid the paths of comprehension you’ve always trod, by all means read West Virginia. If you’re comfortable on those paths, and think a book like this would just get you lost, you probably should avoid it.
Many of the posts on this blog are concerned with what is loosely called “experimental” fiction. Some people object to this term, finding it either overly general or awkwardly clinical, conjuring up images of the novelist in a lab coat. I find the term problematic only in that I think all fiction should be experimental: no fiction writer should rest satisfied that prose fiction has settled into its final and most appropriate form such that only reiterations of the form with fresh “content” is needed. However, to the extent that “experimental fiction” denotes the effort explicitly to push at the limits previous practice has seemingly imposed on the possibilities of fiction as a literary form, I am comfortable enough with the label and see no reason to abandon it altogether.
At the same time, “experimental” does cover a very broad range of strategies and effects, and some distinctions between different kinds of literary experiment and between works manifesting experiment to different degrees could certainly be made. Just to consider “experiment” in fiction at the most general level of adherence to convention–convention understood as a definable feature that has come to make fiction recognizable to most readers as fiction–it is possible to distinguish between works that set out to transform our conceptions of the nature of fiction in toto, and those that focus in a more limited way on producing innovative changes on specific conventions. The former might be called “transgressive” experiments that overrun the extant boundaries observed by most readers, critics, and other writers, while the latter might be regarded as “local” experiments that challenge “normal” practice but do so from within the boundary that otherwise marks off the still-familiar from the disconcertingly new.
Novels like Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable or Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew would be good examples of the former, while Jeffrey DeShell’s The Trouble With Being Born (FC2) is more appropriately considered as a local experiment. Readers of The Trouble With Being Born would probably find it accessible enough, a family chronicle that traces the lives of a husband and wife from their youth to their extreme old age. Its autobiographical roots are explicitly exposed, as the family is the DeShell family and the couple’s only child is named Jeff, but the book’s most provocative feature is undoubtedly the way in which the couple’s story is related. The husband and wife tell their own stories in alternating first-person narratives, but while Mrs. DeShell’s story is presented in reverse order, beginning with her affliction by dementia in old age and proceeding backwards into her childhood, Mr. DeShell’s story proceeds in the opposite direction, from childhood to lonely old age. The two stories meet at numerous junctures, and the overall effect is to provide a convincing account of a mostly dysfunctional marriage.
The novel’s twinned first-person narration spares us the kind of tedious psychologizing to which we would potentially be subjected through the use of a third-person narrator “going inside” the characters’s heads in order to understand them, but it does pose a problem shared by other first-person narratives that do not make clear their source in a plausible narrative situation–the narrator committing his/her story to the page directly (albeit in any number of possible forms of notation), or speaking it directly to some identifiable audience. Both Mr. and Mrs. DeShell tell their stories in seemingly disembodied voices that represent neither their attempts to reckon directly through writing with the direction their lives have taken nor the recitation of their experiences before at least a potential audience. It is understandable that the author wished to explore these characters’ sense of themselves through ventriloquizing their voices, but such an unmotivated mode of narration occasionally calls attention to itself in a way DeShell probably doesn’t intend:
My fiftieth birthday. I don’t look fifty. I’m driving Jewell’s Firebird with her to meet Tommy the Rock at Mr. Z’s, a nightclub in the Springs. Tommy the Rock will be sure to have some broads with him. Too bad Dominic is sick. I told Frances that I was going down to the Knights of Columbus, but I don’t think she believed me. Screw her. She doesn’t know fun. If she hadn’t gotten so fat, maybe I’d be with her more often. She can watch the fireworks at home with Jeff. The two of them deserve each other. My wedding ring is in my pocket.
In a passage like this, DeShell is forced to use his narrator to present information so transparently and so implausibly (no one really says such things to oneself) that narrative continuity is broken. Since it seems to me that DeShell is ultimately attempting to maintain the illusion of realism in character and narrative voice, and is not indulging in postmodern tricks by calling attention to narrative artifice, this storytelling strategy can make suspension of disbelief difficult to grant.
Perhaps it was necessary to employ this style of narration in order to allow the characters’ voices their necessary role both in the unfolding of their separate stories and in the larger story those stories together create. Both perspectives must be provided. And despite the awkwardness occasioned by the choice of point of view (and by the consistency of its application), the novel’s aesthetic strategy essentially does succeed in making The Trouble With Being Born a compelling read and in chronicling the fortunes of what is probably an all-too-common American family. It succeeds in turning our notions of chronology and contiguity against themselves to create a locally satisfying narrative experiment, even if in the final analysis narrative itself as the central focus of interest in fiction is not challenged and the protocols of point of view are actually reinforced. Such a book won’t revolutionize the art of fiction, but its does perhaps help remind readers that the requirements for creating this art are not fixed in place.
In his review of Stephen Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea (Riverhead Books), Brian Evenson asserts that too many of the selections in the fictionalized anthology that gives this book its form have “too few of the satisfactions we’ve come to expect from fiction.”
On the one hand, Marche would probably be disappointed that this reviewer at least found his book to some degree unsatisfying, but on the other, that this dissatisfaction comes from finding too few of the pleasures “we’ve come to expect from fiction” doesn’t necessarily mean the book has failed. Indeed, if Shining at the Bottom of the Sea provoked the reader into reflecting on the “satisfactions” fiction ought to provide, it probably could be called successful in fulfilling one of the implicit goals of experimental fiction: to remind readers there is no one form fiction has to take, that what is “expected” from fiction isn’t necessarily what it always needs to provide.
Shining at the Bottom of the Sea is, it seems to me, an experimental novel in the purest sense of the term. It bypasses almost entirely the conventional elements of the novel–plot, character, point of view–and offers in their place an historical narrative of sorts that unfolds between the lines of the anthologized documents substituting for the “expected” narrative of incident, character revelation, etc. Edited by “Stephan Marche,” the documents are primarily a selection of short fictions representing the literary heritage of “Sanjania,” a fictional North Atlantic island whose original inhabitants were brought there on Spanish slave ships but which came to be a British colony. The stories are arranged chronologically, thus giving us both a survey of Sanjanian literary history and an exploration of Sanjanian history and culture more broadly (at least as the latter can be inferred through the stories–not necessarily a straightforward process, since they are, after all, fictions and not historical narratives per se.) There is also a section at the end of the volume devoted to “Criticism,” which is less literary criticism in the strict sense than a series of nonfiction pieces, including an interview with a living Sanjanian writer, that act to tie together the stories by focusing on important themes and historical motifs. One of the conventional elements of fiction that remains in effect is setting, and it is the way in which Sanjania itself acts as the focus of attention, becomes a kind of character in itself, that leads me to call Shining at the Bottom of the Sea a novel. It’s a novel that asks us to expand existing definitions of what a novel might be.
Since this is literally a text highlighting writing as writing, it would have to be categorized as “metafiction,” but one of the accomplishments of this book is the way in which it demonstrates how metafiction can be not a symptom of literary narcissism but a perfectly serviceable means to other literary ends. In this case, a text about writing also turns out to be a text about something else, a something else that probably couldn’t be evoked in some other manner without sacrificing its unity of effect and a certain kind of efficiency. A sprawling saga about the colonial and post-colonial history of Sanjania is not the sort of thing I would rush to read, but the metafictional ingenuity of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea does appeal; in fact, I am more likely to note the postcoloniast themes inherent in the story of Sanjania as they emerge through the juxtapositions of story and the gradual accumulations of reference than through the more obvious effects of “drama.” In my view, readers are more likely to return to a text like Shining at the Bottom of the Sea to try to piece together even more coherently the underlying story of Sanjania and Western colonialism, to align the selections that make up this faux-anthology into an even more comprehensible whole. It’s a novel that invites re-reading in a way more conventional narratives do not.
Which does not mean that Evenson is entirely incorrect in suggesting that not all of the individual entries in Marche’s anthology-as-novel are equally interesting. Some make for better reading than others. Some play a stronger role in depicting the history of Sanjania than others. In his review of the book at the Toronto Star, Philip Marchand calls it a “pastiche” and comments that in such a work “The reader’s assumption is always that the author of a poem or story is doing his best to make it a good poem or story – but this assumption falters when the story or poem is put inside of quotation marks, as it were,” asking further: “If the reader finds the story or poem dull, is it because the (real) author has failed or because the reader has missed some part of the joke?” I’m not sure it’s necessary we think the author was “doing his best” to make each selection an equally “good poem or story.” The contents of the anthology need to reflect the development of Sanjanian literature, but this doesn’t mean every story has to be “good” in some universally acceptable sense of the term. It isn’t a “joke” if the writer is trying to evoke a particular style that doesn’t exactly fulfill expectations of “good” writing. It’s possible to achieve “good” writing,” to write well, by summoning up a prose style with its own limitations, even that is deliberately wretched (see many of the novels of Gilbert Sorrentino).
Still, some readers might find parts of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea slow-going, not necessarily because they’re inattentive readers but because of hazards inherent to the kind of work this is. It may be that Marche has pulled this experiment off about as well as it can be done, or someone inspired by Marche’s example might try something similar and avoid its longueurs. (And I don’t want to exaggerate their effect. Most of the conjured-up stories are well-done, and the occasional dense patch doesn’t obscure the overall realization of the novel’s design.) But I would hope that all readers would finally judge it using criteria that are fair to the sort of novel it is rather than those appropriate to other novels using conventions “we’ve come to expect from fiction” that this novel rejects.
A Retroactive Historical Trajectory
It’s good that Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss print at the end of the book an interview with themselves about Interfictions, an “anthology of interstitial writing” they’ve edited and published through the Interstitial Arts Foundation. Otherwise I, for one, would have finished the book, including its nominal “Introduction,” without having much of an idea what either “interfiction” or “interstitial” are supposed to mean.
Heinz Insu Fenkl’s introduction tells us that a book of his was published as a novel, even though it was really a memoir. Later, a publisher wanted to “repackage” the book as a memoir. Presumably, then, the book is neither a novel nor a memoir, but something “in-between,” even though Fenkl’s account makes it perfectly clear that it is a memoir, its “tropes, its collaging of time and character” notwithstanding. Using what Fenkl thinks of as “novelistic” devices not make the book a novel. Not wishing to have it understood as a memoir does not make it other than a memoir.
After this thoroughly confusing initial illustration (confusing in terms of what an “interfiction” might be), Fenkl goes on to tell us in jargon-clogged prose such things as “The liminal state in a rite of passage precedes the final phase, which is reintegration, but an interstitial work does not require reintegration–it already has its own being in a willfully transgressive or noncategorical way”; “Interstitial works have a special relationship with the reader because they have a higher degree of indeterminacy (or one could say a greater range of potentialities) than a typical work”; “Once it manifests itself, regardless of the conditions of its creation, the interstitial work has the potential to create a retroactive historical trajectory”; “An interstitial work provides a wider range of possibilities for the reader’s engagement and transformation. It is more faceted than a typical literary work, though it also operates under its own internal logic.”
This is all well and good, but I finished Fenkl’s essay still wondering what an “interfiction” is. How does it differ from other literary works that also manifest a high degree of “indeterminacy” but no one ever thought to call “interstitial.”? (In my opinion, all great works of literature are indeterminate in this way. It’s what makes them literature in the first place. And Fenkl’s invocation of “a retroactive historical trajectory,” by which literary works of the past are transformed by new works, seems to me just a restatement of T.S. Eliot’s notion that “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them,” which applies to all new works, interstitial or otherwise.) Does it merely have to be “transgressive” of genre boundaries? Where do we mark those boundaries, anyway? And what exactly is a “typical literary work”? I always get the sense that when intense partisans of genre fiction, SF especially, get wound up about “literary fiction” and its discontents, they usually associate such fiction with “realism,” against which all genre fiction transgresses in one way or another. But is Finnegans Wake realism? The Unnameable? Catch-22? Infinite Jest? If not, do they also qualify as interstitial or as interfictions? Are or they just not “typical” literary fiction? (In which case the whole notion of “transgression” becomes just a convenient buzz word. It only applies to the most rigidly conventional or the most really boring literary fiction.)
Sherman and Goss clear things up a little bit in their interview. “An interstitial story does not hew closely to any one set of recognizable genre conventions,” says Sherman. This makes it sound like an “interfiction” blurs the lines between genres, although from my reading of the stories collected in the book it seems that most of them mostly revolve around a fantasy/science fiction/horror axis that, as an only occasional reader of these genres, I often have trouble seeing as radically opposed forms that need bridging or boundary-smashing. But then Sherman says of one of the stories (“Climbing Redemption Mountain,” a kind of cross-breeding of John Bunyan and Erskine Caldwell) that “If I tried to read it as realism, I ran up against the fact that the writer had made up this world out of whole cloth. If I tried to read it as a fantasy, I ran up against the story’s lack of recognizable genre markers.” This suggests that the real “boundary” the book wants to question is again that between “realism” (literary fiction) and genre fiction with its identifiable “markers.”
Reading the book as a collection of stories that are “willfully transgressive in a noncategorical way” did me no good at all. Notwithstanding that most of them were “transgressive,” when at all, in rather tepid and formally uninteresting ways, I simply was unable to understand what they shared in common that made them “interfictions.” The editors’ narrowing of focus to the contest between “realism” and genre fiction did allow me to reexamine the stories in this more concentrated light. (Although not all of them. Apparently some of them are “interstitial” because they portray characters who feel “in-between” or because their authors themselves feel this way, as revealed in the author’s comments appended to each story.) But ultimately I am still puzzled by Sherman’s explanation of how it is that interstitial fiction avoids “any one set of recognizable genre conventions.” She continues:
An interstitial story does interesting things with narrative and style. An interstitial story takes artistic chances. . .[E]very interstitial story defines itself as unlike any other. . .The best interstitial work. . .demands that you read it on its own terms, but it also gives you the tools to do so.
I am hard-pressed to understand how these characteristics of “interfiction” distinguish it from other, non-genre, “experimental” fiction that also “does interesting things with narrative and style” and “takes artistic chances.” Experimental fiction (which ultimately I would have to say is a part of “literary fiction,” representing its vanguard in exploring the edges of the literary) precisely “demands that you read it on its own terms” rather than according to pre-established conventions. If interfictions are just versions of experimental fiction, why coin this additional term to describe them? If there is some significant difference between interstitial and experimental fiction, something that has to do with genre, why not be more specific and delineate exactly what that is rather than fall back on the usual language about taking artistic chances, etc.? Or is the purported conflict between realism and genre really meant to blur the fact that plenty of writers, writers who are otherwise thought of as “literary,” have already deconstructed this opposition and created work demanding “you read it on its own terms”?
On the other hand, if the stories in this anthology were to be presented as simply “experimental,” without the accompanying claims that they alone challenge the “typical literary work,” it’s not likely they could stand up to scrutiny. Adrienne Martini’s review of the book in the Baltimore City Paper asserts that the first story, Christopher Barzak’s “What We Know About the Lost Families of ——– House,” “feels wholly unique, as if it is rewriting our expectations about what kind of story it is even as we’re reading it,” but it’s really just a haunted-house variation on Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” The second story, Leslie What’s “Post Hoc,” about a woman who tries to mail herself to her estranged boyfriend, strikes me as standard-issue surrealism, with perhaps a chick-lit chaser. (I guess this might itself be “interstitial,” but it’s not very interesting.) “Climbing Redemption Mountain” doesn’t really go anywhere with its blending of allegory and rural Gothic except to a mountaintop rendezvous with banality.
Of the rest of the stories, Matthew Cheney’s “A Map of the Everywhere” is pleasantly odd and Colin Greenland’s “Timothy” has an amusing premise (a woman’s cat is transformed into a man) that unfortunately doesn’t go anywhere. Most of the rest are forgettable exercises conducted on what seem (to me) familiar science fiction/fantasy terrain. Some of them, such as Anna Tambour’s “The Shoe in SHOES’ Window” and Catherynne M. Valente’s “A Dirge for Prester John” are essentially unreadable, full of pretentious declamations substituting for narrative: “Truly, where chaos reigns, even at night, nonsense and evasion shine where people look for straightforwardness, but where they look for inspiration, something beyond the realm of daily existence, they are then shown only things, and who can feed his soul with that?” Too many of the stories, in fact, are like this, straining after Meaning where some “merely literary” formal and stylistic pleasures would go a long way toward deflating the pomposity.
Karen Jordan Allen’s “Alternate Anxieties” is the best story in the book, but it also only highlights the book’s overriding weakness. The story’s protagonist is a writer attempting to write a book about “mortal anxiety,” which also appears to be the defining condition of the writer’s own life. The story is presented mostly as a series of notes and brief episodes to be incorporated into the book. In the course of accumulating these notes, the protagonist latches on to the “alternate universe theory,” according to which “events may have more than one outcome, with each outcome spinning off its own universe, so that millions of universes are generated each day. . . .” This notion then leads the author-protagonist to further reflection on the events in her own life (are there other universes in which her actions led to different outcomes?) as well as on the capacity of fiction to embody such alternate universes. It’s a compelling enough metafiction, but again I can’t see what calling it an “interfiction” instead of a metafiction accomplishes. Nor is it that clear why it would even be categorized as science fiction, despite the toying with the theory of alternate universes. It’s a pretty good story, and trying to espy its “interstitial” qualities adds nothing to its appeal.
In her review, Martini asserts that “The stories in Interfictions operate. . .by existing in the spaces between what we want our genres to be.” Speaking for myself, I don’t what my genres to be anything but sources of interesting fiction. When it comes down to it, I don’t even want genres, just worthwhile stories and novels. Whether you want to call them “interstitial” or “metafictional” or “postmodern” doesn’t really matter much, and I suppose by that principle calling a group of stories “interfictions” isn’t finally that objectionable, although in this case it is a needlessly byzantine way of arriving at the conclusion that a good piece of fiction “does interesting things with narrative and style” and, unfortunately, turns out not to be the most efficacious way of finding good fiction.
The Reading Experience 