Andrew Gallix<\/a>\u2019s debut novel, observes.<\/p>\nGallix\u2019s novel explores a nothing-something analogous to the one Ophelia\u2019s utterings become, asking in its first chapter, \u201cwhat is lost when nothing<\/em> is lost? When it becomes something<\/em>?\u201d The question here, posed by the novelist Sost\u00e8ne Zanzibar, refers to a note that reads \u201cNOTHING IS LOST\u201d and is found on the corpse of the murdered, we learn later, \u201cSolange de la Turlute, the controversial boss of one of France\u2019s largest family-owned publishing houses,\u201d the first in a series of murders, mostly of authors. But the question resonates beyond this context and seems to serve as the grounding question of the entire novel, \u201cthe book you are currently reading, which . . . is not the book I wanted to write,\u201d the author, Adam Wandle \u2014 whom Ipsum is in Paris researching for a book and whose works provide slogans for the group behind the murders \u2014 asserts, but in such a way as to make \u201dthe porous borders\u201d between character \u2014 here Wandle \u2014 and author \u2014Gallix (4) \u2014 \u201calmost indistinguishable,\u201d to appropriate phrases of a passage from Loren Ipsum<\/em> that blurs, in a different manner, the distinction between fictional and nonfictional worlds.<\/p>\nThe book he wanted to write was to \u201ccontain not only multitudes but everything,\u201d a description of his desire that suggests \u201cthe book you are currently reading\u201d is associated with a nothing-something in a classical sense, for Plato equated a term meaning \u201call\u201d or \u201ceverything\u201d with cosmos, as T. McAlindon notes in Shakespeare\u2019s Tragic Cosmos<\/em>, so that its opposite, \u201cthe word \u2018nothing\u2019 or \u2018nought\u2019 became another word for \u2018chaos,\u2019\u201d the primordial nothing-something from which the cosmos was created and the liminal state in the metamorphic process in the post-creation world, or, as Gallix describes it in reference to a site of logical contradiction the \u201cnegation of the world that leads to the rise of a new one,\u201d an end that is aligned with the figure of Zanzibar, who emerges as a supplement to Ipsum, another character who seems to blur into Gallix, for example, when Ipsum, on page 289, ends an interruption of a discussion about her debut novel and returns to her conversation with \u201c\u2018Where were we? Ah yes, that passage on page 289\u2026,\u2019\u201d a joke that seems to assume that the pagination won\u2019t be changed in future printings. The number, of course, could be altered to match any page on which the passage appears, a maneuver that would provide a fitting element of instability to the text and perhaps oblige the original to supplement the repetition (and vice versa) to tease out its significance (5).<\/p>\nThe dynamic I am here positing between the original and its supplemental repetition finds clearer expression when Ipsum attends the exhibit titled L’appel du vide<\/em> (The Call of the Void<\/em>), an exhibit in which Zanzibar participates, falling asleep and dreaming Ipsum, the dream version of whom dreams him. Gallix here provides a set of framing devices, one inside the other: the critic\u2019s dream of the novelist is framed by the novelist\u2019s dream of the critic, which is framed by the exhibit watched by the critic within the novel, Loren Ipsum. Author and critic even merge within the episode, for Ipsum briefly assumes the perception of an omniscient narrator \u2014 an authorial doppelg\u00e4nger, if ever there were one \u2014 who, as she watches Zanzibar dream, thinks, \u201cthere is nothing more tiresome than other people\u2019s dreams, especially in bloody books. I mean, how much pointless made-up pseudo-surreal slash absurdist shit can you stomach, for fuck\u2019s sake?\u201d<\/p>\nThe concerns over the significance of the dream are wrong, serving rather as an anticipatory misreading that is meant to deter the reader from regarding the episode as a repetition of a tired trope, tired repetition being among the novel\u2019s anxieties, the one that compels it to strive to situate itself in the liminal state of nothing-somethingness. The issue is played out in the trajectory that Zanzibar\u2019s career takes, his successful debut, Je suis la Femme Bigorneau<\/em> (1986) having been followed with four novels that \u201cresembled an increasingly faded photocopy of the original blueprint [that is, Bigorneau<\/em>], giving rise to …\u2018a sense of perpetual d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu<\/em> on a dimmer switch,\u2019\u201d a sign of stagnation that Zanzibar seeks to escape through writing a \u201cprequel to Genesis,\u201d literally the story of primordial nothingness \u2014 something that can only be described by way of negation. The project comes to nothing, all drafts being destroyed.<\/p>\nInterestingly, the stagnation Zanzibar experiences has its analogue in a more ideal version of the creative process, the one that Wandle finds himself following, that is, writing stories \u201cwhile looking for the<\/em> story\u201d (emphasis added<\/em>), the profound tale that came to him one night \u2014 making him feel as if he \u201chad been singled out, in the grand tradition of Plato\u2019s Ion\u201d \u2014 but that he had forgotten. \u201cThis may be the very source of all literature,\u201d he muses. Zanzibar, in the absence of the \u201cepiphany\u201d that visited Wandle and intent on producing something like his Genesis prequel, arrives at \u201cthe concept of a novel printed in disappearing ink. Once read, each word would vanish forever, the full text living on in people\u2019s minds \u2014 retold, reinterpreted, reinvented\u201d in the tradition, perhaps, of Ophelia and those hearing her. This concept would situate the reader in the position of Wandle\u2019s idea of a writer trying to find the perfect story, the details of which have been forgotten. The idea of a novel printed with disappearing ink is, of course, abandoned due to its impracticality but is published as a facsimile of a novel that had been written in longhand with such ink. The object, commercially successful, comes to serve as a \u201chandy memo pad,\u201d the imagined retelling, reinterpreting, reinventing being replaced by text that records the momentarily needed but discardable ephemera of people\u2019s days, the creative dialogue between text and its readers being abandoned in the name of commercial necessity.<\/p>\nZanzibar\u2019s creative difficulty is one that Loren Ipsum<\/em>, the novel, overcomes by pushing its apparent stories \u2014 the one about terrorists\u2019 murdering writers and the one about the attempt to \u201cmake it to the mythical Blue Island,\u201d both of which are described on the back cover of the paperback \u2014 into the background. The reader, it is true, is provided with firsthand accounts of some of the murders, one of which is narrated in the second person, and may catch a glimpse of the Blue Island, but the experience of the murder plot and the quest plot remains secondhand, comparable to the story of a serial killer in another country or of a vaguely interesting voyage of discovery that one half attends to in media accounts while going about one\u2019s daily life. The novel, for example, never lingers on the scenes of the murders so that a narrative related to them can emerge. A negative stand-in for Horatio, in fact, shows up in the guise of Horatia, the apparent daughter of Jonathan Titterington-Jones, the writer whose murder is narrated in the second person. She remains disinterested, and her father is left to wonder, \u201cAt what point, if any, would [she] look up from her mobile and interrupt Cosimo\u2019s [her brother\u2019s] video game to enquire where you are?\u201d Her focus is not \u201cyou,\u201d so she can\u2019t be relied on to fashion a story analogous to the one Hamlet asks Horatio to tell.<\/p>\nLoren Ipsum<\/em> is a-not-quite lorem ipsum, a dummy text used to design pages. The novel\u2019s pages have comprehensible text, but the story it purports to be about remains in a liminal state, waiting to be \u201cretold, reinterpreted, reinvented.\u201d Readers are to become, in short, Lorens, that is, critics whom the novelist dreams and who in turn dream the novelist.<\/p>\nNotes<\/strong><\/p>\n(1) I am alluding here to Laertes\u2019 warning to Ophelia to be careful about getting involved with Hamlet:
\nHe may not, as unvalued persons do,
\nCarve for himself, for on his choice depends
\nThe safety and the health of this whole state.
\nAnd therefore must his choice be circumscribed
\nUnto the voice and yielding of that body
\nWhereof he is the head. <\/p>\n
(2) Shakespeare, it is believed, played the ghost of Hamlet\u2019s father, the figure who gives birth to the plot and who serves, in Bloom\u2019s reading, as Shakespeare\u2019s spirit. Bloom\u2019s assertion that \u201cHamlet<\/em> has become the center of a secular scripture\u201d \u2014 a text related to the secular world as the Bible, for example, is related to Christendom \u2014 thereby suggests that Hamlet<\/em> and its spirit gave birth to our secular world, inventing us so to say.<\/p>\n(3) For example, in the Novum Organum<\/em>, Francis Bacon explains, \u201cthere is a great difference between the idols of the human mind and the ideas of the divine mind; that is to say, between certain empty opinions and the genuine signatures and marks impressed on created things.\u201d Bacon\u2019s development of the scientific method, this observation suggests, was an effort to fill the gap that separated the hermeneutics and semiology of the sixteenth-century episteme<\/em>, the purpose, as Foucault describes it in The Order of Things<\/em>, of learning during the age we have come to call early modern.<\/p>\n(4) Gallix has a novel in his past that he wanted to write but did not. His last book, Unwords<\/em>, is described on the publisher\u2019s website as \u201cessays and reviews haunted by a phantom book the author never completed when he was in his twenties.\u201d<\/p>\n(5) If, for example, the chapter appeared as the last excerpt in an anthology of twenty-first century fiction with text that read \u201con page 956\u201d to match the page on which the passage appears in the anthology, the text would almost certainly be accompanied by a supplemental note that observed \u201cin the original printing of the novel, the text read \u2018on page 289,\u2019 the page number on which it appeared in that text.\u201d<\/p>\n
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\nAlbert Rolls<\/strong> is a writer and editor whose interests range from William Shakespeare to Thomas Pynchon and beyond. His most recent book is Thomas Pynchon: The Demon in the Text<\/em>, which was described by one reviewer as “unusual and highly original”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gallix\u2019s novel explores a nothing-something analogous to the one Ophelia\u2019s utterings become, asking in its first chapter, \u201cwhat is lost when nothing<\/em> is lost? When it becomes something<\/em>?\u201d The question here, posed by the novelist Sost\u00e8ne Zanzibar, refers to a note that reads \u201cNOTHING IS LOST\u201d and is found on the corpse of the murdered, we learn later, \u201cSolange de la Turlute, the controversial boss of one of France\u2019s largest family-owned publishing houses,\u201d the first in series of murders, mostly of authors. But the question resonates beyond this context and seems to serve as the grounding question of the entire novel, \u201cthe book you are currently reading, which . . . is not the book I wanted to write,\u201d the author, Adam Wandle \u2014 whom Ipsum is in Paris researching for a book and whose works provide slogans for the group behind the murders \u2014 asserts, but in such a way as to make \u201dthe porous borders\u201d between character \u2014 here Wandle \u2014 and author \u2014Gallix \u2014 \u201calmost indistinguishable,\u201d to appropriate phrases of a passage from Loren Ipsum that blurs, in a different manner, the distinction between fictional and nonfictional worlds.<\/p>\nAlbert Rolls<\/strong> reviews Loren Ipsum<\/em> by Andrew Gallix<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116776,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116771","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\/116771","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116771"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116787,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116771\/revisions\/116787"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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