The fiction of Ansgar Allen could be called "academic" in an almost literal sense, except that it seems designed to provide an alternative of sorts to academic writing per se--an opportunity to engage with abstract ideas and to contemplate the role of education and the intellect while leaving behind the prescribed forms of expression required by academic writing. This fiction is somewhat reminiscent of the work of Lars Iyer, although while Iyer's novels take the form of quasi-Platonic dialogues in which the characters talk about philosophical ideas, Allen's seem more like parables or fables, in which the narrator-protagonist does directly invoke specific books and ideas but which also themselves embody or dramatize the implications of ideas and ways of thinking.
Allen has published three short novels and a novella since 2020 (a fourth novel is due to be published at the end of 2022). The first, Wretch, is the most purely fabular, and could very loosely be called a post-apocalyptic narrative, although no specifications of time, place, or context are ever given. The narrator relates his experiences as a prisoner of sorts, locked in a small room and instructed to make copies of documents that are slipped to him under the door. The documents seem to be reports submitted by teams of explorers who venture to the outskirts of the "known city" and beyond, investigating what is out there--the "dark regions," although the copyist also at times alters the documents, "providing some measure of clarification, a degree of reordering in order to render what is heard, or what was written, into fresh print." Still, the job takes its toll, as we find the narrator at the beginning of the narrative recovering from a "derangement," an incident in which he destroyed the "machine" with which he carries out the copying: "The full medical report was described, briefly. The machine bore the imprint of chaos, they said. It demanded rehabilitation."
That he now be regarded as an "ordered mind" is obviously of great importance to the narrator, and this imperative seems to reflect an overriding need for order and fear of disorder in the world he inhabits. Whether this outlook accounts for the narrator's situation to begin with is unclear--the narrator finds himself confined as a threat to established order--but the incursions into the unknown regions seem motivated both by a perception the existing order must be extended due to inadequate resources and an absolute terror of what lies beyond the limits of the known. The circumstances described by the narrator (as filtered through the reports he copies) bespeak a society reduced to a kind of subsistence level and attempting to, in effect, start over, but finally nothing about those circumstances can really be certain for the reader, since the narrator's rendition is inherently unreliable. Certainly the entire narrative could be a projection of the narrator's precarious mental state.
Or perhaps the text we are reading is an assemblage of the documents he has copied--if in fact copying is what he actually does. The strength of Wretch partially consists in its open-endedness, its spareness giving the narrative an allegorical structure that might be read in multiple ways, or that may have no emblematic significance at all. Allen's second novel, The Sick List, is less purely metaphorical in its narrative manner, more discursive. Its philosophical ideas are brandished outright, although again whatever specifiable meaning it might all "add up" to is equally indeterminate. Its narrator, a graduate student or instructor at a generic university, tells us of his obsession with the ideas and reading habits of a fellow academic named Gordon. Gordon has a scathing, skeptical attitude toward academe itself, an attitude he has instilled in his acolyte--except that the narrator is never portrayed meeting or actually talking to Gordon. Instead, the narrator closely tracks the books Gordon checks out from the university library, inspecting them for underlines and comments Gordon has made in the margins as well as reading the books carefully himself in order to illuminate the worldview he attributes to Gordon and that the narrator earnestly shares.
In addition to the narrator's chronicle of Gordon's activities and of his own inspection of Gordon's books, he also tells us of a strange condition that overcomes faculty across multiple university campuses. At his own university, two researchers in the education department are discovered sitting in a stupor at their desks. "One had been sitting there from Thursday to the following Monday until she was found. The other had been sitting at her desk from Wednesday to Friday. Both were dehydrated. . .Reports were coming in from other institutions of similar goings on. Sociology departments in neighboring cities seem to have been first affected. . .In the hard sciences it was hardest to detect, since there was very little difference between the slack-jawed behaviour and the usual behaviour that goes by the name of hard science." The primary occupant of "the sick list" is the University itself, which is both the object of Gordon's obloquies ("It is impossible to think at work, in the university, Gordon would say. Its offices are not places of thought") and is now apparently the generator of some literal intellectual malaise.
The author to whom Gordon increasingly turns as the narrative progresses is Thomas Bernhard, whose blunt hostility to the modern world naturally enough would appeal to Gordon, who seems to direct a similar antipathy specifically to academe and its enervation of the intellect. Given the novel's own formal and stylistic resemblance to Bernhard (a single extended paragraph using the same sort of long and discursive sentences), we have to conclude that Ansgar Allen also identifies with the Bernhardian outlook, although perhaps we might say that the author's sympathies with the narrator's allegiance to both Gordon and Bernhard meets its limits at the novel's conclusion, when the narrator literally begins to stalk Gordon in fear that no more wisdom from Gordon's second-hand books will be forthcoming. If the university is sick, the narrator himself joins the sick list with a sickness brought about by a certain kind of analytical learning.
Both Wretch and The Sick List could be called metafictional, since they so directly concern themselves with acts of reading and writing (Wretch could plausibly be taken as an allegorical rendering of the status of the bedraggled modern writer). Plague Theatre continues this strategy, if anything even more conspicuously, as the decoding of text and the process of notation become the story told: an again unnamed narrator (probably an academic, although the university itself does not play a role in the narrative) is given an old, water-logged manuscript that has been discovered during a digging project in the cellar of a hotel (a swimming pool is to be installed). The owner of the property believes it might be valuable (giving the hotel a little extra cachet as an historical site) and asks the narrator "to make some sense of the thing." This proves to be challenging indeed, as the manuscript disintegrates even as the narrator turns its pages, so that he must copy out the manuscript--or what survives of it--by hand.
What emerges is a version of the manuscript, which tells the story of a plague that hit the English coastal city of Scarborough in 1720, but which does not simply present a cleaned-up (so to speak) narrative of those events. In the process of deciphering the manuscript, the narrator expands the text with interpolated reflections on two writers whose work helps illuminate the concept of "plague." The novel begins, in fact with a quotation from Antonin Artaud's "Theatre and the Plague" (later the narrator tells us he decided to do this after beginning to read the manuscript, becoming convinced that the essay was "the key to understanding the manuscript") and, perhaps inescapably, Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year also comes to seem related to the Scarborough plague. Artaud's assertion that plague is finally "a feature of mind, and is passed on by way of the mind" not only provides the events in Scarborough with a larger, more figurative significance, but also affects the interpretation of those events the narrator offers, lending them an air of menace and mystery that perhaps the manuscript's narrative doesn't altogether corroborate.
But this is the advantage of treating what could be an abstract subject--the metaphysical implications of "plague"--through fiction, which doesn't abandon the intellect but operates by a different kind of logic, one of association and particularity. Becoming concrete, the implications of plague are both less grandiose and more disturbing than when grasped only in their intellectual formulation. The narrator regards museums--where the manuscript might otherwise be placed--as an institution where intellect can only be destroyed, something that The Sick List maintains is also true of the university. Yet the protagonists of both The Sick List and Plague Theatre are largely preoccupied with the intellect, which is also shown to be hazardous: at the end of each novel the narrators have been driven toward something like madness. In all of his fiction so far, Allen incorporates ideas by subjecting them to the transformations induced by literary invention, which works to illuminate the hazard.
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