This is Where Your Life Went Wrong
By Heidi James.
C. Bard Cole, This is Where My Life Went Wrong, BLATT Books, 2008
While linear narrative remains the bastion that maintains the prestige of the author - of commodification, of the promulgation of a capitalist ideology (does it?) then the fragmented novel, or novel collected in fragments, (reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project), representing the steady pooling then flow of thoughts rather than a false stream of consciousness, perhaps might reflect with silvered clarity the labour of being human.
This novel, fragmented – decentred – uses twisted, further broken imagery, the shards of the language exceed the penetration of direct meaning, the works tangled in a trans-historicism (we land in 1789 before being shifted to 1987, in a leap of 2 pages), not to mention, the not quite, but almost science fiction or maybe better to say slipstream in its shirking of a required acquisition of a ‘novel’ vernacular.
Better yet, rather trans-modern, is its lack of a protagonist or author controlling the material, the submerged subjective, non-particular. It mines a seam, picked at by Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons, its salty word play, peppered with neologisms and conjunction of opposing images, not quite conceits, but devices that conjecture at image.
Bard Cole butts the material with a biographical declaration (itself contra the lack of singular subject of the text/s) - That he ‘witnessed the two great urban disasters of twenty-first century America in New York City and New Orleans’ This parenthesis of prologue and biography, the lips that join and enclose the work to come, that then intervenes, in breathy eruptions, (as Levinas writes ‘the significance of the ‘real’ world is exhausted in its appearances… and in which one must be ‘realistic’), speaks, and in exhaustion cannot exonerate the ‘real’… A post-trauma text, a post-coital text that in its ragged breath speaks in short bursts, in order to regain unity and cohesion.
High Post-Modernism? Who can answer? Isn’t that the point?
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Heidi James is co-editor of 3:AM. Her novella The Mesmerist’s Daughter (published by Apis Books) was published in July 2007 and her novel Carbon is forthcoming. She has a column in Dazed and Confused and is a regular contributor to Another Level. Her essays and short stories are published in a variety of anthologies and magazines. She is the proprietor of Social Disease and a recipient of the Sophie Warne fellowship.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Tuesday, March 17th, 2009.
