{"id":111322,"date":"2022-08-02T23:00:10","date_gmt":"2022-08-02T22:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=111322"},"modified":"2022-08-13T16:13:37","modified_gmt":"2022-08-13T15:13:37","slug":"name-of-authors-title-reviewed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/name-of-authors-title-reviewed\/","title":{"rendered":"[name of author]’s [title], Reviewed"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Anthony Ballas.<\/p>\n

\"\"
[name of author], [title] (Sublunary Editions<\/a>, 2021)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

[title] <\/em>is both more and less than a novella; but mostly more. Caustic, biting, brutal, puzzling and punishing. Riddled with lapses, pockmarked with gaps and schisms, though overdetermined with nearly any and every clich\u00e9 and esoteric allusion imaginable, [title]<\/em> is too much and too little, a surplus of negativity, an excess of void. [title] <\/em>refuses to stand still, its pages quivering restlessly between its covers, its scope unbounded despite only 87 pages.<\/p>\n

And yet, [title] <\/em>is a surprisingly lucid experimental satire. Of all the references, jokes, allusions, nods, jabs, and alike, the book\u2019s anonymous author mostly targets prestige fiction, and the insular, self-enclosed universe of high-literary culture more generally: literary prizes, top-tier lit mags, the turnstyle of MFA mentors and mentees in and out of creative writing programs, prestigious imprints from publishing houses both large and small. [name of author] is hyper aware of the low-stakes, character-driven, first-person solipsism, and plotless narratives common to prestige fiction, narratives which generally limp along in a mumblecore-like stupor before stumbling upon some final, pathos-laden and sigh-inducing epiphany. The prestige industry specializes in digestible, inconsequential vignettes in which the bourgeois individual is safely camouflaged against a homogenous narrative backdrop. It\u2019s an industry where we might expect the word \u201claureate\u201d to most likely appear today.<\/p>\n

[title]<\/em>\u2019s title page signals to the reader that they hold a nuclear missile trained on the prestige-industrial-complex in their hands: published by an \u201c[Independent \u201cPrestige\u201d Press]\u201d from a \u201c[Second-Tier Metropolis],\u201d its cover design, layout and printing \u201c[outsourced],\u201d and copyedited by an \u201c[overworked intern]\u201d in a \u201c[nation in the late stages of empire].\u201d [title] <\/em>casts prestige\u2019s tropes and tendencies in the negative, exposing its pretensions with critical and philosophical boldness.<\/p>\n

[name of author] renders [title]<\/em>\u2019s central character in silhouette, offering the reader only a partial view while taunting us though a second-person address: \u201cYou\u2019ll want his hair, eyes and skin colored in, informing a visage of tone and contour. You\u2019ll want his build built (will want his body). You\u2019ll want a measure of \u201cflesh\u201d and won\u2019t be satisfied until you get it.\u201d The reader is never satisfied, never can be, and probably never has been. But the satisfaction of reading [title]<\/em> is precisely the way our readerly desires are self-consciously withheld: we want what we don\u2019t have (nothing), and [title] <\/em>gives us precisely this nothing<\/em> in return.<\/p>\n

Although the book\u2019s central character, aptly named Protagonist, is devoid of attributes, [name of author] plays on our readerly prejudices, turning our attention to \u201cpronominal evidence\u201d which suggests that our generic Protagonist is most likely an English-speaking male. Protagonist, an apparently amorphous \u201cman of mystery,\u201d hidden behind a clever literary veil, is rather ironically coded as just another white boy. The book makes us hesitate about our readerly pretensions, predispositions and expectations, all in service of shaking us from our dogmatic commitments to the saturated whiteness and anglophonic centricity of high literary culture. [title]<\/em>\u2019s satire is potent.<\/p>\n

The narrative (if it indeed is a narrative) takes the reader through cryptic moments from Protagonist\u2019s life. Episodes are often offered asynchronously, with Protagonist inhabiting a spatially and temporally discontinuous, almost incomplete universe. Entire chapters have vanished, dialogue has been redacted, and conflict, \u201cthe novel\u2019s sine qua non<\/em>\u201d as [name of author] puts it, has been evacuated. Diegetic reality is broken, reduced to a ruin.<\/p>\n

Protagonist is confined between the four walls of his \u201cwell-lighted room,\u201d trapped in a literal prisonhouse of language, with its literature-lined walls and papered-over windows (\u201cyellow wallpaper\u201d is mentioned at one point) resembling a Borgesian library, a labyrinth of literary and linguistic infinity. The room simultaneously symbolizes fiction as panoptic, a monastic cell, and\/or a Leibnizean monad \u2014 it is windowless<\/em> after all. \u201cWell-lighted room,\u201d [name of author] writes, is also \u201can implied microcosm of that [volatile transatlantic region\/urban battleground\/Late Capitalist den of thieves] where [antipathy of opposing factions\/homicidal bigotry\/Mammon worship] has resulted in so much human suffering.\u201d In other words, pick your allegory like you pick your poison.<\/p>\n

Most of the book\u2019s action (if we can call it action) takes place (if it even takes place at all) in this well-lighted room. Here, Protagonist rises from his chair and sometimes paces back and forth \u2014 or at least we imagine these things in our \u201cmind\u2019s eye.\u201d \u201cThe scene feels a bit staged,\u201d [name of author] openly admits, and since \u201c(there\u2019s no there <\/em>there)\u201d it\u2019s entirely possible that Protagonist \u201chas been strutting and fretting in a theatrical void.\u201d Character and setting alike are equally unorientable.<\/p>\n

Protagonist visits his Progenitors, has a tryst with Significant Other (though we\u2019ll later find out \u2014 in the form of a Lacanian aphorism \u2014 \u201cthere is no Significant Other\u201d), and runs an errand of some kind (though we\u2019re never told where or what). He also has a redacted dialogue with an acquaintance at a grocery store while looking over \u201ctrompe l’oeil <\/em>(faux meat) hamburger patties.\u201d Everything is given the patina of unknowability while also paradoxically, perhaps parasitically, attached to a surplus of meaning (there\u2019s an \u201corange \u2018orange,\u2019\u201d an \u201cavant garde<\/em> treadmill,\u201d and so on). Are these episodes flashbacks, fantasies, \u201callusion, illusion, memory or dream?\u201d [name of author] either doesn\u2019t give an inch or maybe doesn\u2019t give a shit. Either way, I found myself fully invested in finding out.<\/p>\n

It may be tempting to read Protagonist\u2019s four-walled prison\/cell\/monad\/cosmos as a commentary on the isolation experienced during COVID-19 lockdowns, and the trauma of being trapped alone, like Protagonist, with the covers of our unread personal libraries menacing us from their bookshelf perches. This lure is part of the book\u2019s sophistication. We can speculate all we want, though each time we do so we risk falling into [name of author]\u2019s trap: every trail runs dry, nearly every line in the book points to something other than itself, as, sentence by sentence, objects and allusions, actions and inactions, transform themselves into so many cul-de-sacs<\/em> of meaning \u2014 grooves of negativity proliferating as \u201cnots <\/em>[sic] in the narrative thread prove Gordian.\u201d Each ladder rung snaps underfoot. Every foothold, quicksand. \u201cThis novel is riddled with writing,\u201d [title] <\/em>warns us. Whoever [name of author] is, at least they\u2019re an honest liar.<\/p>\n

[title]<\/em> is also a tidal wave of allusions. A Brownian motion of reference sealed inside of a vacuum chamber, with everything falling at the same rate and velocity be it literary, cinematic, photographic, philosophical, religious, or otherwise. Here, a Proustian anamnesis, and there a Cassevetes\u2019 film. Hegel\u2019s landlord. Dickens. Francis Bacon (but which one?). Henry James. Rembrandt. Poe. W.C. Williams. A buried allusion to Shylock\u2019s pound of flesh, Othello\u2019s handkerchief, Macbeth\u2019s phantom daggers, the creeping and petty pace of time, Confederacy of Dunces<\/em>, Gogol\u2019s \u201cOvercoat,\u201d Benedict Anderson\u2019s Imagined Community<\/em>, 70s gritty realism, The Wizard of Oz<\/em>, T.S. Eliot, Magritte, and so on. These last few, from Macbeth on, only account for a mere two pages. (Not to mention [title]<\/em>\u2019s central stylistic device, its use of brackets, which appear on nearly every page \u2014 a perfectly sane use of the Husserlian epoch\u00e9<\/em>).<\/p>\n

By way of allusion, [title] <\/em>has something for everyone; from Frieda Kahlo to Henry Darger, the most recognizable to the most arcane. The book is an \u201cexo-textual caf\u00e9\u201d \u2014 there is nothing outside of the text because everything has already been brought into [title]<\/em>\u2019s voracious orbit. By inundating the reader with allusions, [name of author] may be giving a nod to one of the ways prestige fiction invents its prestige: importing its meaning from elsewhere with the tenor of an overzealous undergraduate, indiscriminately name-dropping to get the grade.<\/p>\n

Some of [title]<\/em>\u2019s more comical allusions appear as skillfully crafted polysemic clusters. Protagonist\u2019s \u201cThe Ottoman,\u201d we\u2019re told, resembles \u201cthough [does] not represent\u201d Suleyman the Magnificent, his simulacrum stitched into fabric as though it were fit for a postmodern museum exhibition. The Ottoman is also a self-consciously heavy-handed allusion to Fitzgerald; its beaming gaze keeping watch over Protagonist like the all-seeing eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg. And [name of author] even folds the Author into the mix , \u201cwho, in turn, may be confused with the Ottoman\u2019s imposing image.\u201d Ottoman teeters on the verge of clich\u00e9 and esoteric, profound and glib all at once; a marriage\/mirage of Said\u2019s Orientalism and Baudrillard\u2019s \u201cstucco angel.\u201d [name of author] virtuosically cinches its forms together into a clatter of low- and high-brow hybrids and stylistic monstrosities. It\u2019s a wonder to behold.<\/p>\n

[title] <\/em>not only takes aim at prestige fiction but also what we might call \u201cprestige theory,” namely the trendy object-oriented philosophies and neovitalisms of the last decade or so, which allege to have found a way beyond the \u201cdiscursive cage\u201d of language and subjectivity, preferring a privileged, immediate access to things-in-themselves. The so-called \u201cobject turn\u201d is not unlike prestige fiction, insofar as both have become safe havens for bourgeois perspectives to huddle together in a land of impersonal affect, political impotence, and general vapidity.<\/p>\n

Composed as a list of Protagonist\u2019s possessions, Chapter 62 reads as a commentary on this trend; a \u201cWunderkammer\u201d teeming with literary heirlooms seemingly plucked at random from literary history:<\/p>\n

handcrafted little goldfish, dental cufflinks,<\/p>\n

lemon soap, coffee spoons, lobster leash,<\/p>\n

caged songbird, nymphalidae blue butterfly,<\/p>\n

real toads, jaws of a she shark, wooden leg,<\/p>\n

Japanese pillow, cartographer\u2019s desert journal,<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

flask of mescal, cask of Amontillado,<\/p>\n

empty grail, petals on a wet black bough, cold<\/p>\n

plums, gooseberries, sundried raisin, moly,<\/p>\n

madeleine, ouija board, the winter garden<\/p>\n

photograph, vile of hemlock, length of rope,<\/p>\n

razor blade, shotgun, generous dose of mor-<\/p>\n

phine and a pocketful of stones fished from<\/p>\n

the River Ouse<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This list repeats the same stylistic device often employed by object theorists, who naively think that lists of objects demonstrate the spontaneous, horizontal relations between heterogenous objects without the stain of subjectivity marring their otherwise pristine ontological statuses. [name of author] smuggles in a trenchant critique of these philosophical fads. What agency other than a human subject would be capable of assembling such a list on the page in the first place? Who puts objects into a sequence, an order, a syntax? What vehicles other than language and writing make lists possible? The vitalists and object theorists will have a hell of a time unpainting themselves from this corner.<\/p>\n

What is fiction anyway but a collective fantasy, one that retains its familiarity across time and space through subjective constitution, perpetrated and perpetuated by authors, critics, readers, and so on? [title]<\/em>\u2019s Wunderkammer puts the profound hubris of this brand of philosophy on full display. Ironically, it takes an apparently authorless text like [title] <\/em>to avenge the human subject against these contemporary posthuman impulses. In under a page and a half, [name of author] does more to dismantle the blogospheric idols of latter-day Heideggarian \u201crealism\u201d than perhaps any other source, driving a stake through the heart of the object-oriented ontology for good (let\u2019s hope!).<\/p>\n

I found the experience of reading [title] <\/em>similar to that of reading Urs Allemann\u2019s Babyficker<\/em>. Both are single-room dramas, isolation narratives, equipped with a critical eye toward certain capitalistic entrapments (though certainly [name of author] doesn\u2019t employ quite the same disturbing extended metaphor as Allemann). [title] <\/em>is also part Perec, part Beckett, part Barth and Barthes, among others. There is also a shared satirical and experimental kinship between [title] <\/em>and the late works of David Markson, This is Not a Novel <\/em>and The Last Novel<\/em>. Markson composed these works out of biographical materials and references from all over literary history. [title]<\/em> is organized through a similar inter- and extra-textual weaving; a novella from one angle and a literary index from another, neither classification capable of containing it. [title]<\/em> presents itself as something more like \u201cconversation cum <\/em>literary criticism,\u201d as it\u2019s put in a late chapter. This fiction\/criticism hybrid alone is enough to set Northrop Frye\u2019s head spinning in violent disagreement.<\/p>\n

If we think [title] <\/em>is a \u201cpostmodern\u201d gimmick for these reasons or others, we\u2019ve again fallen into its trap. The brilliance of this novel is indeed the way [name of author] risks gimmick<\/em>; unburdened from (auto)biography and unmoored from convention and expectation, [title] <\/em>is the fictional equivalent to a Rube Goldberg machine with most of its connections and pathways severed, making its perpetual motion appear impossible and therefore sublime. Eppur si muove<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n

The machine culminates in a wonderfully bathetic final\u00e9 where Protagonist \u201ctonsures his styrofoam skull,\u201d revealing himself to be some kind of artificial holy man or hermetic mannequin alone in his \u201cmake-believe monastery.\u201d We\u2019re told that Protagonist has tonsured his skull \u201cin solidarity with Author who\u2019s en route to an involuntary tonsure,\u201d and so something tells me this revelation doubles as a confessional, as though [name of author] were giving us a glimpse inside of their own private Golgotha. Is this parallel a strange sort of self-castration or crucifixion? An acknowledgment of [name of author]\u2019s self-effacement? If so, [title]<\/em> seems to stage the \u201cdeath of the author\u201d as more of a zombification than a funeral. [title]<\/em> is a Krzhizhanovskyan autobiography, its author hungry and hunting for more like \u201cthe still growing fingernails of a corpse\u2026scrap[ing] a figurative barrel bottom in search of significant images for what seems like (will have been) a lifetime finally, until finding himself at a loss.\u201d [title] <\/em>transforms the death of the author into the death drive of the author<\/em>; [name of author], after all, bears an uncanny resonance to Lacan\u2019s \u201cName of the Father,\u201d lingering in a state of symbolic immortality after physical death. Sure, the author is dead, but do they know that they\u2019re dead? Does the book know that it has come to a close?<\/p>\n

[name of author]\u2019s rumination on death reminds me of Saramago\u2019s own, that \u201cdeath has this strange beauty of being as lucid as a mathematical demonstration, as straightforward as drawing a line between two points, so long as it does not exceed the length of the ruler.\u201d [name of author] eschews this metric, refusing to align with the typical parameters of the book form, with authorship, character, genre, and nearly everything else. Is [title] <\/em>an audacious debut? Or is it a posthumous masterpiece, meticulously edited by a team of scholars and archivists? Brimming with wit and intrigue, [title] <\/em>provokes the kinds of questions only a literary hoax of this sophistication and magnitude is capable of.<\/p>\n

Sublunary Editions\u2019 book design for [title]<\/em> is also worth noting. Its matte black cover and minimalist, nondescript white typeface jut out like a miniature headstone. Any title whatsoever might grace its cover, and any author can be substituted for another \u2014 a bit like a template for the prestige industry. [title] <\/em>performs obsequies for the everchanging same of prestige fiction: HERE LIES LIES, it seems to suggest, superimposing epigraph and epitaph onto its blank surface.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t conclude without commenting on the presence of Hegel in [title]<\/em>. [name of author] condenses Hegel and Dickens\u2019s Christmas ghosts, looming over the protagonist in a state of stubborn omnipresence. Prestige fiction is given a similar treatment by [name of author] as Hegel gives religious thinking: a barren skeleton with little scraps of paper stuck to it. The prestige industry is a little self-enclosed religious community with blurbs and write-ups stuck on its body. Its rituals, its icons and altars commented on and passed down through a spiritual lineage of MFA alumni, canonized and beatified in so many sacred journals, magazines, and presses, as [title]<\/em>\u2019s back cover testifies: \u201cPerfunctory mentor blurb,\u201d \u201cPrestige by association blurb,\u201d \u201cConceptual buzz words blurb.\u201d Just as Protagonist strikes his fist through the \u201cpapal portrait\u201d papered over his window, [name of author] punches a hole through this ritual, delivering a blow to the glossy sheen of the New Yorker<\/em>, the catholic church of prestige publishing.<\/p>\n

You can read an excerpt of<\/em> [title] here<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\n<\/b><\/p>\n

Anthony Ballas\u00a0<\/b>is a researcher and critic exploring race, class politics, and internationalism in literature, film, music, architecture, and philosophy. His writing has appeared in\u00a0Philosophy of World Democracy,\u00a0<\/em>Journal of Visual Art Practice, Middle West Review, Canadian Review of American Studies,\u00a0<\/em>and elsewhere. He teaches philosophy and humanities at Northern New Mexico College.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[name of author]\u2019s rumination on death reminds me of Saramago\u2019s own, that \u201cdeath has this strange beauty of being as lucid as a mathematical demonstration, as straightforward as drawing a line between two points, so long as it does not exceed the length of the ruler.\u201d [name of author] eschews this metric, refusing to align with the typical parameters of the book form, with authorship, character, genre, and nearly everything else. Is [title] an audacious debut? Or is it a posthumous masterpiece, meticulously edited by a team of scholars and archivists? Brimming with wit and intrigue, [title] provokes the kinds of questions only a literary hoax of this sophistication and magnitude is capable of.<\/p>\n

Anthony Ballas<\/strong> reviews [name of author]<\/strong>‘s book [title]<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":110294,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-criticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111322"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":111389,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111322\/revisions\/111389"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}