Steve Tomasula
Steve Tomasula superficially shares with Mark Danielewski 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 Danielewski does not seem inclined 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 these boundaries, 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.
In many ways Tomasula’s Once Human (FC2) is a very good introduction to the work of this conspicuously unconventional writer for those who are either unfamiliar with his previous work or have shied away from it because it promised to depart too radically from the conventions of “normal” fiction. Venturesome readers with find that this book 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. However, encountering these devices through a selection of stories allows the reader to contemplate Tomasula’s strategies in shorter samples, while the selection also provides some variety, perhaps encouraging readers to appreciate that these strategies are both purposeful and ultimately accessible.
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 may be attracted to her not despite the fact she has a prosthetic limb but because of it and his pornographic obsession with disfigured female bodies 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 text. Thus, in “The Color of Flesh” the illustrations impress as more than ornamental, a drawing of prosthetic limbs “dangling from the ceiling” of a “shop that sold such things” in particular adding a spooky (if stylized) palpability that isn’t quite achieved by the prose description alone, not even the comparison to “Gepetto’s workshop.”
It might be tempting to call Tomasula’s approach “multi-media,” especially since he has produced one “book,” TOC, that can only really be described as multi-media, as it is 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 Master’s Lonesome Wife) really included pictorial elements. Tomasula’s own work is thus perhaps best understood as extending their experiments, proceeding under the fundamental assumption that the page (and 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 sole 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 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.
Although the drawings and photographs in Once Human—some of which are quite complex and detailed—are the most conspicuous illusion-suspending elements, 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. The pages of some of the stories often 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 for 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, which presumably we are to consider important to the story’s explication, even as the story appears to develop the situation in other, tangential directions (the protagonist’s romantic involvement with his coworker, 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 first 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 finally 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, 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 failed pregnancies (resulting 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, 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 on its realization on pages, and its effects would be almost totally lost on, say, a Kindle.
Tomasula employs his effects in part 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 the 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.
Remaking reality is of course the ambition of fiction as well, and Tomasula’s work can also 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 themselves 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 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 the other subjects of the painting, standing at his easel and apparently staring outside the painting at the viewer. 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, but one that 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 either on the scientific and technological manipulation of nature as VAS or the implications of representation as The Book of Portraiture. The most explicitly metafictional story in the book is probably “Farewell to Kilimanjaro,” which is finally more conventional parody than metafictional self-reflection in its “what if” story of an elderly Ernest Hemingway (in the story simply called “E”) experiencing degradation in an old folks home. Among the remaining stories in the book, “Medieval Times” has a family resemblance to one of George Saunders’s theme-park stories (“CivilWarLand in Bad Decline”), although it ultimately satirizes current events through analogy 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. If ultimately Once Human could be described as something of a miscellany collecting Tomasula’s shorter fiction, that very quality nevertheless gives readers a valuable sampling of the work of a compelling and genuinely experimental writer.
Lance Olsen
In a career that now includes 14 novels and 4 collections of short fiction (as well as 7 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 the reader’s attention to the page itself, to the graphic embodiment of language, rather 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. Thus 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 thus 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 thus 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 at the same time it also offers to renew the conceptual resources upon which fiction might draw to engage the reader 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.
Zachary Thomas Dodson
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.
Shelley Jackson
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 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.
Michael Joyce
Since Michael Joyce is not only the author of what many consider the foundational work of hypertext fiction, afternoon, a love story (1987), but also probably the most important theoretician of hypertext as a literary medium (especially in the essays collected in Of Two Minds: Hypertext, Pedagogy, and Poetics, published in 1995), it is of course tempting to approach his print novels—and most of his fiction in the last 20 years has been conventionally published in print—as somehow continuous with, or at least strongly influenced by, the hypertext works. But while it is certainly possible to seek parallels between the influential hypertext fiction and a novel such as Remedia, his most recent, perhaps it is more useful to see all of the work, hypertext and print-only, as part of a continuum, united not necessarily by the multiplicity and contingency of hypertext per se, but attention to craft in the most precise sense: the adroit shaping and ordering of “story” so that the reader’s interest is not solely directed at the particulars of the narrative but also toward the means of its unfolding.
It is not inapt to say that Joyce’s fiction is concerned with “ordering,” even though it would seem to be the case that hypertext subverts formal order in leaving it up to the reader to determine the way in which the story will develop (at least according to the options provided by the author), as well as exactly what plot elements will comprise the narrative in the first place. But in making these choices available to the reader, of course, the hypertext author is unavoidably confronting the role of order and form in fiction, and this acute awareness of form is inevitably communicated to the reader. Joyce’s 2007 novel, was (FC2), manifests this structural reflexivity perhaps most radically of the print works through its extreme fragmentation and decentered narrative content: presented in a prose that more closely resembles lines of verse (some as short as a word or two), the novel has no real characters, no setting (or, rather, the setting is the entire world), and no story beyond the perpetual circulation of information and human activity. was is probably the print novel that most strongly evokes Joyce’s hypertext works in that it is essentially a network of connected if shifting episodes in which ultimately the principle of connection itself, its comprehensive achievement, is more to the point than the simple forward movement of plot. (Joyce underscores the importance of connection in his novel by subtitling it “a novel of internet.”)
It might also seem that Remedia (Steerage Press) belies the notion of “shaping,” given that its subtitle identifies it as “a picaresque.” Of the various permutations of narrative, the picaresque would seem to be the loosest, the most deliberately unshaped. It could be said that a picaresque narrative even refuses the shape imposed by a conventional plot (of the sort outline in Freytag’s Triangle), instead focusing on mere succession, one point in a narrative progression after another. But of course the impression of one thing following another in a picaresque narrative (at least a good one) is a constructed illusion, as much shaped by the writer’s sense of the effect to be created as any “well-made” story. The requirements of a picaresque story would only be even more subject to a self-conscious act of shaping when the picaresque is strategically used as a kind of deliberately anachronistic formal device, as surely Michael Joyce is doing in Remedia. Joyce doesn’t just set his narrator-protagonist on a journey he chronicles as a serial account of his “adventures,” but asks us to consider how the notion of “picaresque” itself affects our perception of the narrator’s state of mind as he is reciting adventures that are indeed unpredictable and uncommon.
Remedia’s protagonist remains nameless throughout the novel, although he is far from an Everyman figure. We are introduced to him as he is recalling the first time he had the visionary experience—destined to reoccur over the course of his life—in which reality seems out of phase, intruded upon by a phantasmal door:
. . .What I remember is not the door itself but the man who emerged, smiling as he touched a long index finger to his lips as if to signal that our encounter was a secret between us, his face inexpressibly kind, long as a horse’s, his ice blue eyes gleaming.
These visions, featuring a door or portal or some other kind of opening (including “random appearances of vertiginous geometric space”) would seem to mark the protagonist as an unreliable narrator, at the very least susceptible to a slippage in his hold on reality. It’s not that we might doubt the veracity of the account he gives us, but the incidents and experiences he relates, as well as the other characters he encounters, are surely out of the ordinary, making it possible to wonder whether Remedia scrupulously recounts the odd, frequently extreme, but ultimately “real” events the narrator witnesses, or these events are partly the product of his mind-altered perception.
The story essentially takes us through the narrator’s relationships with two women, Magika, with whom the narrator is involved as the novel begins, and Medb, an Irish woman he meets quite randomly on a bus when he has ventured to Ireland after his relationship with Magika goes on hiatus (she is touring Europe with an experimental theater company). The narrator and Medb relocate to the United States, and eventually make their way to Utah, where they meet up with a Mormon woman, Sariah, and her Native American consort, Tokoa. The narrator’s initial encounter with Tokoa, when the car he and Medb are driving breaks down, at first might seem one of the narrator’s portal visions: “a figure brown as a twist of tobacco stood in loincloth leggings, his long hair held back by a headband, neck garlanded with three necklaces, leather bands around the wrist of his beckoning upright arm as he stood before the oblong entrance of what looked to be a shaded cave.” When his attention is drawn to Tokoa himself approaching from behind and offering assistance (wearing “a broad-brimmed camo Aussie hat that someone had spray-painted neon orange”), the narrator is apparently brought back to reality—while the brown figure “lowered his arm and was descending into the cave”—but thus we have only more reason to suspect that a radically subjective perspective may be distorting the account he gives of his sojourn in the desert that (with a side trip to Iowa) will occupy much of the subsequent narrative related in Remedia.
While in Utah, the narrator is visited by Magika, and soon she, Medb, and Sariah have banded together to create a feminist monastery of sorts (although apparently most directly devoted to seeking out “silence”), but the exact nature of this desert compound continues to be rather murky throughout the novel, as the women allow no men to enter, which, to say the least, pleases neither the narrator nor Tokoa. Equally mysterious are the circumstances through which the narrator finds himself in Iowa. Here the narrator refers directly to a “door” he entered—although his fugue might also be the consequence of “a sacred herb thought to be a hallucinogen” he has ingested—and subsequently “emerged from that door six days later on a Beachy Amish farm just outside of Kalona, Iowa, and with little sense how I had gotten there or what I had done in the interim.” The patriarch of the Amish family with whom he finds himself, Jacob, then accompanies the narrator and Tokoa on their trip back west, ostensibly to visit the gravesite of his great-grandmother in Colorado but also, it would seem, in flight from his family and his Amish identity. When the three men reach the “Skull Valley” monastery, the women decide to admit Jacob among their number, just before the compound is itself laid siege by the U.S. military, during the course of which operation many of the members are killed (including Jacob). Both Magika and Medb survive.
The narrative thus ultimately culminates in a dramatic, large-scale event, toward which a conventional picaresque novel might be expected to “build.” But Joyce mutes even this means of providing “drama” in a picaresque story by in fact deviating from a strictly successive rendering of events. The narrator skips ahead and moves back in his narration of his experience, and his blackouts and general habits of thought provide substantial narrative lacunae that never really fully get filled. We can’t really be sure exactly what happened between the narrator’s sip of Moon Lily tea and his arrival in Kalone, Iowa; the creation of the Skull Valley monastery, as well as its subsequent activities, are never described in any detail, leaving the creator’s motives and intentions hazy at best; the siege is not related as a continuous episode but instead in alluded to by the narrator at various points (including as the subject of a play that Magika writes in its aftermath). Although the narrative does proceed more or less chronologically, starting in 1987 and ending in 1998 (with entries in the final two chapters that skip ahead to 2001, presumably the date of the entire retrospective narrative’s composition), its status as “picaresque” finally seems more the product of the narrator’s wandering recall than it does the intrepid observations of a nomadic hero.
Indeed, for a picaro, the protagonist of Remedia seems remarkably passive. Even though he is closely involved in all of the situations depicted in the novel, things mostly happen to him, not through deliberate agency, and most of the other characters emerge from the novel as both more dynamic and more self-possessed. For all the doorways and entrances the narrator believes are beckoning him forward, he doesn’t seem a very adventurous man, a strange enough state of affairs for a picaresque hero. The novel’s conclusion only reinforces the impression of impassivity: Sariah visits the narrator several years after the siege and urges him to seek out Medb, with whom he has lost contact. “I’ll think about it,” he says. “Thinking’s not doing,” Sariah replies. It might be going too far to say that Remedia is more a novel about thinking than doing, but finally Joyce in deemphasizing the ostensible hero’s deeds, instead uses the character’s processing of his often random experiences to create a picaresque narrative that reflects the protagonist’s peripatetic life, but at the same time proceeds forward by following along the narrator’s channel of thought—almost as if the portals he so frequently glimpses are the hyperlinks of consciousness
Mark Danielewski
Even fans of Mark Danielewski and his typographically adventurous novels House of Leaves and Only Revolutions should be disappointed with The Fifty Year Sword. Previously published only in the Netherlands in 2005, this novella adds almost nothing to a consideration of the aesthetic possibilities of manipulating the physical features of a printed book not already present in the two novels, and if anything the underlying narrative to which these manipulations are meant to contribute is even less compelling than those we encounter in House of Leaves and Only Revolutions. If the former manages to bring some life to what is finally an overly familiar narrative (perhaps two interlocking but overly familiar narratives) through its challenges to the protocols of the printed page, and the latter partially substitutes, at least for a while, the sheer audacity of its defiance of these protocols for an even more lackluster narrative, The Fifty Year Sword does neither of these things. Its textual provocations are tepid, mere flourishes, its story, such as it is, little more than a convenience and difficult to take seriously.
The Fifty Year Sword does little more to depart from the typographical conventions of fiction than to give the appearance of printed verse, or verse dialogue. (That the lines of dialogue are color-coded as a way of identifying the speakers seems simply a repetition of the same sort of device used in the two novels, and altogether it is not a particularly interesting device, anyway.) At one point the text is printed vertically rather than horizontally, requiring us to rotate the book in our hands, but again this move is the sort of thing we have come to expect from House of Leaves and Only Revolutions, and once it has been established that our assumptions about how to properly read a book are to an extent arbitrary, to simply keep issuing this reminder without offering compelling demonstration of how literature might continue to be enhanced by reading differently makes the effort seem mostly gimmickry. (Fortunately, in The Fifty Year Sword use of the device is limited, so we aren’t really forced to dwell on its apparent lack of purpose.) Otherwise, the unconventional or “innovative” elements of The Fifty Year Sword are restricted to the use of graphic illustrations (many of them) and various misspellings and neologisms, neither of which are in fact innovative at all. The wordplay seems particularly derivative of Joyce in Finnegans Wake — “pricksticking,” “indacitation” — while the illustrations are generally unremarkable, albeit not terribly intrusive.
Danielewski gave a reading of The Fifty Year Sword in 2010, when it was still unavailable in the United States as a printed text. Perhaps this “theatrical performance,” as it was described, managed to make the novella’s story seem more substantive, or at least more dramatic, but shorn of the whizz-bang and stagy spectacle it doesn’t make for very captivating reading as a book. It is more or less a children’s story in which a group of orphans listen to a figure identified as “the Story Teller” relate a story about magical swords. A touch of “adult” interest is added in the conflict between the seamstress Chintana and Belinda Kite, who has had an affair with Chintana’s husband. The novella ends with Belinda Kite literally being cut to pieces (in a delayed response to one of the swords) and falling apart “even as slices of joints and nails/scattered apart on the frosty stone/followed /by the slow tumbling/slivers of the rest/of Belinda Kite’s/hand.” Again this scene might have greater effect when reproduced in a “theatrical performance,” but then perhaps it might have been written directly for such a performance rather than as a work of fiction, where the artificial arrangements of the words in this description can neither substitute for the visual immediacy of the scene as performed nor finally elevate it beyond the rather ordinary fairy tale-ish story it concludes.
The most useful service the publication The Fifty Year Sword might offer is to confirm the initial achievement of House of Leaves, but also to illustrate the limitations of that achievement, at least as Danielewski has so far shown in his attempts to follow up on the accomplishments of his first novel. House of Leaves established the basic principle underlying his alternative practice as a fiction writer, that “the book” as traditionally conceived and formatted is an object whose properties we have come to consider fixed but are in fact entirely contingent and thus open to reconception. House of Leaves is a prodigious attempt at such revision, including experiments with typeface, print placement (in the traditional column, multiple columns, in areas cordoned off in various ways, rightside-up, upside-down, sideways, in brief snippets at the top, bottom, and middle of the page), the insertion of visual/graphic aids, the “proper” function of the page in general. Danielewski wants the reader’s eye to roam around the page, to suspend the expectation that a literary text must adhere to the conventions of reading associated with the European codex (left-to-right, top-to-bottom) that now define what “reading a book” signifies. This is certainly a perfectly valid strategy, based on a valuable insight that could continue to inspire writers of innovative fiction. However, Danielewksi and his admirers have attempted to promote his work as if this insight is unique to him and his fiction sui generis, when in fact writers such as Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Fedeman investigated the possibility of taking the printed page as malleable 40 years ago. Federman’s Double or Nothing (1971) and Take It or Leave It (1976), in fact, are at least as radical as Danielewski’s novels in their textual disruptions, and, in my opinion, more aesthetically satisfying.
House of Leaves provides its share of aesthetic satisfaction, but even it is marred by a wellworn and formulaic story, the story of an “outsider” existing on the margins of society (in this case an outcast with a scholarly bent and a mental illness) the conventionality of which isn’t really enlivened much by its intersection with a secondary narrative that doesn’t rise much above the level of an ordinary horror story, nor can either of these stories really sustain interest to the end of a 700-page novel. This has in turn the unfortunate effect of more heavily burdening the novel’s textual play with even more of the responsibility for maintaining the reader’s attention, a burden it cannot quite fully shoulder at such length. The formal experiments of House of Leaves thus threaten to seem grafted onto a narrative that is really only an excuse for the exercise of these experiments. The fiction by Sukenick and Federman engaging in similar, and antecedent, experiments, never left such an impression. Their experiments were integral to the story being created through the formal effects, the “content” not distinguishable from the “form” that gives the story its singular expression. These works are also self-reflexively aware of themselves as stories in process, so that the literal act of inscription, of arranging words, sentences, and paragraphs on the page becomes part of the narrative content. Although House of Leaves does depict its protagonist as a writer of sorts, at least as the “editor” of the manuscript that brings the twin narratives together, this activity finally seems as much a fortuitous justification of the novel’s typographical pyrotechnics as an effort to explore the implications of this inscriptive free-for-all in a reconsideration of the aesthetic ordering of fiction.
This limitation is even more pronounced in Only Revolutions and The Fifty Year Sword. In Only Revolutions the pyrotechnics finally seem the novel’s only real source of interest, since once the reader is able to discern its narrative line (and this isn’t easy), it proves to be yet again formulaic and dull, essentially a version of a “road novel” in which its two peripatetic outsider characters travel across the country, with the additional twist that they drive across time as well. This science fiction element parallels the horror element in House of Leaves, intended to provide the otherwise perfunctory story with some additional appeal, but if anything it falls even flatter. The story of the two young lovers and their adventures across time and space has almost no drama, not even of the episodic kind found in most picaresque narratives, and its characters are entirely colorless. Thus while the pyrotechnics might be even more flamboyant — competing accounts meeting in the middle of the book, requiring us to flip the book over and read from both “front” and “back” — eventually the tedium induced by the narrative makes it increasingly difficult to continue the attempt to assimilate them. Ultimately it is hard to deny that Only Revolutions is indeed a very experimental novel, but it is a decidedly failed experiment, albeit of a sort that might still be adapted successfully in another context — something briefer, or at least with a more effective fusion of matter and manner.
Unfortunately we cannot conclude from The Fifty Year Sword that Only Revolutions might be just an understandable misstep after the audacious debut of Danielewski’s iconoclastic project in House of Leaves, its flaws the product of unfocused or misdirected ambition. It does not show us a writer exercising much ambition at all but merely repeating the same moves his first book prepares us to expect, repetition Only Revolutions continues at exhausting length. Certainly The Fifty Year Sword is a very slight work, and a first-time reader of Danielewski who starts here is most likely to conclude it is superficially unusual, but hardly in a way that is likely to change the course of literary history. Such a reader might in fact find it simply boring. Still, the disappointment of this book should not altogether rule out the chance Danielewski will discover a new and surprising strategy in a future work exploiting his essential insight into the plasticity of the literary text, one that allows neither our notions of “text” nor of “story” to go unexamined. Only Revolutions was not that work, but perhaps the “serial novel” Danielewski is soon to be publishing will be. (Simply that he has chosen to publish it in serial form is not, of course, itself a particularly venturesome or innovative move.) For now, House of Leaves remains as an admirable literary performance that unfortunately threatens to become merely a curiosity.
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