A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre

        I’ve been continuing my journey of reading the books nominated for the International Booker Prize, which has brought me to the deceptively-covered A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre. Despite the whimsy of the cover, the book is absolutely crushing. It’s essentially a book-length character study of Fanny, the Narrator’s friend, as he recounts their lifelong friendship, cut short by her death at forty-three years old.

In terms of events, there is not really much to tell. The book is primarily snapshots of their friendship, which are dripping in melancholic beauty. In one scene, the Narrator and Fanny are sitting on a hill and she is talking a mile a minute and the Narrator reflects on feeling exasperated but in retrospect misses her intense excitement. Later in life, the Narrator is on a trip with Fanny and her father and recalls being left out of their card game, which is both tragic to him but it’s also a moment when Fanny’s connection to the world is restored.

There are two main reasons that the book is so devastating to me. The first is that early on in the book you can infer that Fanny takes her own life, so every moment revealed in flashback is imbued with the sorrowful knowledge that the signs of depression are overlooked and the moments of joy are fleeting. The second reason the book is so devastating is because, despite the fact that we get to know Fanny so intimately, there is always a distance from her.

The Narrator opens the book with the notion that we are separated from one another and from ourselves. There’s a version of Fanny that stole a whimsical leopard-skin hat and has a fun personality, but that version of Fanny is inaccessible most of the time. Instead, the Narrator talks about it being like there’s a rock inside her. In talking to her, he does not know whether talk to Fanny A (the fun Fanny hidden behind the eyes of the other, the person that could be there) or Fanny B (the Fanny actually there, the stone). Serre’s depiction of the doubleness rings true and relatable. It’s deeply personal and profoundly moving.

It is also deeply philosophical. Essentially, Serre provides a narrative dramatization of a posthuman argument that none of us is singular. She provides some explicit discussion of that in the early pages of the book. The Narrator (or rather the Narrator of the Narrator) explains,

From a faint wavering, now and then, in Fanny’s gaze, or in one of her intonations. At moments like these, Fanny would be slightly off-balance for a second---and happily so. Slowly she would stare up in surprise at the Narrator puffing on his pipe like Maigret. So there were three of them now: the Narrator, Fanny the old friend with the crippling existence, and this other woman, the one in the hat, the jovial ringleted one hiding behind her curtain, whom it would have been unthinkable to mention, to simply set down at the table—that was strictly forbidden—but whom it was neither prohibited nor authorized to throw a lifeline to. (10)

The description provides an account of Fanny’s duality and it identifies that there are three of them: the Narrator, Fanny, and fun Fanny. There’s a bit of an oversight here, though. There are hints that even the Narrator is not singular. He narrates about himself in third person, as though from outside himself. On the following page, he admits, “No doubt we all have someone else inside us, thought the Narrator, though, to tell the truth, I’ve never felt this with anyone but Fanny” (11). There’s a shift from third to first person within the unit of the sentence. The blend of the Narrator’s description and inner narration points to the fact that there is a different person inside him, too. As a narratological experiment, similar to Beckett for instance, the Narrator recognizes himself as not himself. The Narrator continues, “And if I examine my conscience [...] I know that I myself am that character, the writer’s secret twin, the one writing this story and the stranger within” (11). The Narrator is both a third person observer, a first person participant, and a fabrication of the author—the writer’s “secret twin.” The fact that the Narrator is different from Anne Serre in, if not in other things, at least in gender contributes to the sense of multiplicity for each identity. At the same time, the Narrator recognizes that what compels his actions is beyond him: “When my master cries out to me for a story, even if I’m accustomed to not answering him at once, playing hard to get because I’m not servile, I always respond in the end because I would get bored otherwise and because it’s my role in life” (11). The fatalism of the Narrator’s position adds that tinge of darkness; yes we are plural, no we are not in control of our multiple selves. 

Much later in the text, the Narrator questions his own significance. Fanny takes her life, and the Narrator wonders how he could have acted differently to prevent it. He starts to justify himself, too, by saying that surely he is not the only friend who had an impact on her. Then, yet another voice—a Narrator’s narrator—steps in with a direct address to the audience: “The idea he might be serving a fictitious writer had often occurred to him” (109). The fact that the writer is fictitious is another matter entirely, but then the text continues, “Still, we shouldn’t be too hard on him: to be a narrator is tricky enough to begin with, you’re in a very awkward spot really, for you are a stranger to someone you live inside” (109). Suddenly, the reader is implicated in the narration itself and the use of the pronoun “you” gets swapped in for the narrator where it would really make more sense to say “he is in a very awkward spot.” We are alienated to ourselves. There is a duality to our position. Serre writes, “In some ways it’s quite pleasant: you’re hidden, no one can get at you, you’re often idle, you have a good life” (109). Yet, “You take down what’s dictated to you by this person who perhaps imagines he’s a writer because he’s pretentious, and living in cloud cuckoo land, is out of his mind. In short, when you’re a Narrator you don’t really know exactly who you are working for” (109). Further, “this other character is there, with his ideas and his energy and his insufferable—almost dictatorial—authority, forcing you to string together sentences that, with your native genius as a Narrator, you lend a certain elegance to” (110). 

The motif of writing and narratological practices serve as an effective vehicle for a discussion of depression. Fanny embodies the plurality of being a character, a narrator, a writer, but is not able to control her own life: “what she would like no doubt is to live, to climb over the railing, cross to the other side of the screen; but how can she possibly do this when Fanny has placed her under ‘house arrest’” (11). She lacks the capacity to control her own whims—and we do not have the capacity to understand her.

The Narrator demonstrates how, when everyone is multiple, we almost never see the person for who they are in the moment and how we can only understand (or project) their true feelings retroactively. There’s a heartbreaking description of their friendship when Fanny is in a dark space:

“when your great friend whom you love dearly and with whom you get along so beautifully and laugh so much and share so many memories with, starts doing or saying strange or inappropriate things—not senseless things, just things that are slightly off base—the word ‘mad’ never occurs to you. You can’t find a word for it in fact—you who know a thing or two about words. You rack your brains and come up against a conundrum: someone with no suitable word to describe them.” (100)

At every turn, we encounter barriers. Barriers of knowing others. Barriers of language. We run into the inarticulable sorrow at the heart of it all. Really, this whole book is an attempt to articulate the inarticulable. The narrator continues on to say how Fanny herself cannot be described in language. If someone uses the word “schizophrenic,” for example, “she stiffens slightly,  and the moment the word is behind her [she] falls silent. She herself never utters the word [...] You find a way round the word; Fanny does, too. It’s a rock. She has that same image in her mind of a mad person, a madwoman” (100). It’s painful to not be able to articulate ourselves.

The book is profoundly sad and I loved it. Fanny’s suicidal depression is dark enough, but in addition, it’s sad that you never really get to know things about other people. We’re all at least doubled and the fact that we might be the joyful person stealing leopard-print hats or the person trapping and being trapped by the darkness we cannot overcome is haunting. In the final passages, the Narrator projects onto Fanny an account of her death. She feels a piece of eternity hanging off of her and only feels free of it in death, feeling liberated while everyone left behind on Earth imagines a way that they could possibly keep living.

A Leopard Skin Hat is its own piece of eternity; one I’ll likely hang onto myself.

Happy reading is the wrong phrase, but maybe keep reading.

The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher

       Mark Fisher is a force. I have to admire the broad range of his interests and approaches, and in The Weird and the Eerie, Fisher latches onto something more literary than his work about politics or music. The text begins with establishing the distinction between the weird and the eerie, with a large difference being that the “weird” is strange but ultimately explicable whereas the “eerie” has an unusual effect because there is an ontological or epistemic gap. There is some kind of missing knowledge that prevents its comprehensibility. Later, Fisher comments on the grotesque, as well, suggesting that it inspires both laughter and revulsion—the laughable and that which cannot be laughed at as a subset of the weird. The definitions are somewhat useful, somewhat flexible. 

To make the distinction clear, Fisher summarizes and analyzes a range of texts, ranging from H.P. Lovecraft to H.G. Wells to Daphne DuMaurier to Margaret Atwood to the British serial Quatermass, the films of David Lynch, the novel and film Under the Skin and the work of Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan. The book is a wonderfully considered primer for weirdness and eerieness as a concept and, given its refreshing brevity, I can’t help but feel it could have gone even further—in fact, when I finished reading it, I went off to explore some of the media Fisher references, and then I immediately re-read his book and still feel like there’s more to say, especially with respect to posthumanism. For instance, if we are alien to ourselves, if our intentionality is ambiguous, how does that impact our conceptions of agency in any number of realms of our lives?

If you’re interested in discussions of horror, eeriness, alienation, the uncanny, identity, time, and capitalism (capital is eerie in that it does not exist in any substantial way but can produce any number of effects), there’s a lot to discuss here. Fisher is consistently insightful regarding his media selections. From here, I’ll comment on some individual sections and share a few insights. 

I have very limited exposure to H.P. Lovecraft. I’ve read a story or two, but they never really resonated with me. As I have mentioned before, a great critic gives me a fresh perspective or new appreciation for works, and Fisher does just that with Lovecraft. In particular, I really appreciated his commentary on how Lovecraft incorporates actual history and simulated scholarship into his work to create “ontological anomalies.” Fisher notes, for instance, how there are many people who have sought out The Necronomicon in libraries, despite it being a fictional text. Fisher notes that “by treating really existing phenomenon as if they had the same ontological status as his own creations, Lovecraft de-realizes the factual and real-izes the fictional.” I find that such an interesting phenomenon, especially in seeing how it developed into works like House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, for example. He also comments on the fragmentary quality of Lovecraft’s references to The Necronomicon as being the core factor in being seen as real, as though the incompleteness gives it its reality effect. It is more real by seeing only the citations, rather than providing a full text. I am fascinated by this reality-effect and “ontological displacement” that gives text their own autonomy from their author. 

Fisher’s characterization of texts often makes me want to read them; for example, Daphne Du Maurier’s story “Don’t Look Now” and H.G. Wells’ “The Door in the Wall” are newly enticing. The latter is compelling since the notion of portals and passageways to other places frequently holds its own power, but Fisher’s remarks about the man who continually sees the door but does not go through it give the story an entrancing quality that encourages me to read it. In a similar vein, Fisher comments on doors and curtains in the work of David Lynch, with particular reference to Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire. I have memorable experiences of watching both works, and Inland Empire was a particularly visceral viewing experience, given how sick I already was at the time. When Fisher remarks that Inland Empire is an “ontological rabbit warren,” it re-ignited an interest in the film for me and much of it started to click into place. Is it a coincidence that the climax of the film involves watching rabbits in miniature and weeping to a silent sitcom?

On the topic of Inland Empire, Fisher suggests that people are defined by their spaces. Our identities are unstable because when we enter new places we have new identities, new roles to fulfil. When we go down rabbit holes and become new people, the implications are deeply important, philosophically. This could also be connected to Fisher’s commentary on Freud: the psyche is failures of presence (the unconscious) and failures of absence (the drives “that intercede where our free will should be.”

This discussion of something where there should be nothing and nothing where there should be something gets linked to some compelling readings of Daphne Du Maurier’s “The Birds” and Christopher Priests novels, with which I am unfamiliar. The discussion of the collapse of time in Daphne Du Maurier’s work gives me another angle from which to analyze her work, which is convenient, given that I have another one of her collections ready on my shelf. I appreciate the doublings (indeed, I’ve read Du Maurier’s double novel The Scapegoat) and the agency that seems to exist beyond our perception where it ought not be. I also appreciate the discussion of echoes in Venice as an eerie effect in Du Maurier.

From a literary standpoint, Fisher also has a knack for pulling texts to the fore that often go unnoticed or that seem, in my mind, to be underappreciated in the academy. For instance, his chapter on Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay and its film adaptation is very intriguing, despite my never having heard of it before. Similarly, the novel and film adaptation Under the Skin get their own chapter. After reading The Weird and the Eerie, I immediately the film version directed by Jonathan Glazer and I thought it was a masterpiece. I’m surprised it is not discussed more often. Fisher gave some angles for considering the film, and going into the film with his views in mind enhanced by viewing without overshadowing the thoughts that came to mind throughout. I was inspired by the eeriness of the film and had a wealth of ideas for essays to come.

When Fisher comments on Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Under the Skin, he offers an astute and engaging observation: the adaptation adds gaps, for instance by removing the interiority of Scarlet Johannson’s character that would need to be integral to the novel. The idea of an addition being an omission is very interesting to me, of course, because a negative becomes a positive in a strange ontological switch. It’s a shame that Mark Fisher is no longer with us; from what I understand about Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, Fisher would have found it fascinating and well-worth commentary.

All of this and I didn’t even get to mention the commentary on The Shining as a kind of alien eerie film or Interstellar as being eerie in its deployment of love as a scientific force, despite its risk of seeming facile. The discussion of both films is somewhat against the grain of how  I normally hear the films talked about, which enriches my experience of both what I have seen and what I have not.

In brief, Mark Fisher is insightful and inspires me to read more, view more, and think more. Reading the book twice didn’t even feel like a chore—I felt enriched each time and the book successfully maintained my deep interest in Mark Fisher himself as a thinker. I’ll likely need to report some more on his work very soon.

All the best and happy reading!

Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac

  Pola Oloixarac’s book Dark Constellations is not so much a novel as a concept. Spanning three narratives over 142 years and condensed into a tight 202 pages, its cover review from AV Club touts that the book is “galactic in the stretch of its narrative ambitions.” The size of these ambitions, though, prevents the novel from feeling like any kind of story. It’s a speculative work that tries to combine so many underdeveloped concepts, which meant that by the time I had fifty pages left, I was dying for Oloixarac to just get on with it and bring the separate storylines together.

Sometimes a passing allusion gives a significant clue to a text. In this case, a passing reference to William Gibson’s Neuromancer hints at the aesthetic of the book, and, in my opinion, both books have a similarly alienating approach. There’s a kind of rapidity to the works, flashes of technological innovations that readers are immersed in without context, and producing a kind of whiplash of world-building. Admittedly, I’m betraying a lack of willingness to engage in challenging reading. Not that I want to have everything explained through exposition dumps, but the sheer number of concepts, characters, and decades is so alienating that the whole project of the book leaves me feeling cold and indifferent.

I’ll provide a brief summary here. I may have a number of details wrong.

Oloixarac presents three narratives. The first takes place in 1882 with a group of researchers (botanists? entomologists? evolutionary biologists?). From what I can tell, it involves a discovery of a kind of drug-like transcendence produced by licking flowers? It also seems to involve a kind of gross creature that burrows into peoples’ skins and then alters their minds. There is also maybe some kind of supernatural being or alien in an underground cave—is it a metaphor or literal? The second stage of the book takes place in 1983 and is focused around Cassio, the most developed of the endless train of characters. He is a budding hacker who works his way through systems and implants viruses. As his career continues, it seems that he has an idea of combining technology and living beings and later seems to be the human key to initiating a computer virus that crashes the economy briefly—that part takes place in 2024 and focuses on Piera, sort of, I guess. There’s some stuff about rats disguising themselves in human bodies, tracking the “dark constellations” of negative space in rat-movement patterns, a mass-surveillance system that seems to rely on olfactory knowledge of DNA. Everyone is always trackable at all times, despite the fact that humans are never single entities (the book notes that there is more bacteria in humans than whatever we consider as an identity).

I think the book is marred by several central flaws. First, there are too many characters and they come across as empty husks. Even at the climax of the book, Cassio’s betrayal of his company by unleashing a virus days before they sell the company is so obscure in its motivations that it fails to address the second of the central flaws (namely: it feels like there are no events.) I wouldn’t expect myself to align with Stephen King very often, but I recall he once gave writing advice that nobody cares about characters: people care about events. If the characters don’t do anything, there’s no reason to care about them. Oloixarac seems to ignore this advice, or rather I was so bewildered by everything happening in the book that it felt like nothing happened. These two issues contribute to the absolute core one: the novel lacks cohesion. The timeframe jumps around with very little overlap (with one exception being that Cassio and Piera work with one another)—and in fact, even the Cassio section span several years, so the timeframe is not clearly demarcated. The connection between licking plants and human viruses and olfactory surveillance systems is never explicitly addressed; it’s a sketch; it’s nodes of ideas—oh darn, it’s a constellation, isn’t it?

What makes the book interesting is its sociological bent. While again not feeling fully cohesive in the book, there are flashes of sexual politics inserted throughout that are engaging in their own right, if not fully explored in its implications for a posthumanist project. The posthumanist plurality of identity is worth exploring. The idea that none of us is singular, that we are influenced by other beings inside us, is a compelling premise that finds home in Dark Constellations. As I mentioned, I’m not entirely clear on whether aliens are real in the context of the novel. The way Oloixarac describes characters suggests alien inhabitation of their bodies, though reading it as a kind of techno-Marxist metaphor would be equally appropriate. Actually, referring back to the sexual politics of the book, I would say this alienation produces some of the grossest descriptions of sex I’ve read in a book: it’s a dissociated alien-like depiction that seems both medical and completely disgusting.

Overall, I have to say Dark Constellations has an interesting premise in exploring the morphing nature of symbiosis between humans and other entities, including technology as the next frontier, but ultimately leaves me scratching my head. Dark Constellations are the gaps between stellar configurations, a darkness the technophiles of the book are mapping (and thus erasing?) at the same time. The style of the book emulates those dark constellations: it feels like everything important about the book is happening between what is actually written. I started to read some reviews to see what other kinds of summary details would supplement my review, but even starting to read reviews I couldn’t help but feel: this isn’t worth my time. There isn’t enough there there.

Over and out.

The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism Edited by Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum, and Nikolaus Hirsch

    The title and authorship of this book is a difficult to explain. The title on the cover is Art and Subjecthood with the subtitle The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism. The editors of the book are listed above, and the book is a collection of essays presented at an academic conference. Following each of the essays is a response from one of the other conference attendees. One of the things I really loved about this book is that it felt authentic to academic conferences and it gave me that secondary inspiration of wanting to go be an academic again.

    As a brief precursor to this review, I want to mention that Harneet got this book for me while on a trip to Vancouver, so I had no frame of reference going in—and I routinely find myself inspired when she gives me random things. That said, I have very little knowledge of the nuances of this book. I’ll attempt to characterize the essays faithfully and identify some of the arguments I found most compelling. Apologies if these comments are not accurate and failures of the arguments below should be attributed to me.

    The introduction by Isabelle Graw was illuminating and had me thinking about connections to literature almost immediately. While I’m not familiar with the specific philosophical and artistic references in many situations, I was nonetheless drawn in with some of the applicability for the arguments. Seemingly fundamental to all the work in this collection is the philosophy of Michael Fried. Graw comments on Fried’s praise of “presentness” in artwork and she notes that he describes the artwork as one describes spontaneously falling in love: “a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced about it” (12). I’m intrigued by the notion; on the one hand it seems unrealistic, both in life and in art—the richness of both only presents itself over time, but I still find the comment illuminating. Graw notes that “the analogy to the romantic notion of the coup de foudre is quite obvious here—the moment you fall in love with the other person you will get a sense of knowing everything about her (an illusion, as we all know)---an illusion that I would claim that lies at the heart of the modernist ideal of presentness as well” (12). Graw points out this challenge in a way that I view as charitable, and then she uses this objection to consider the minimalist impulse of art: “Fried intuited how Minimalist works with their emphasis on the non-relational, the unitary, and the holistic were modeled after the ideal of other persons” (12). I find this curious. While Minimalism is reductive in the form, it is through that reduction that Fried seems to see the artworks like people. What this implies for subjectivity is somewhat alarming when viewed through a certain lens, and is illuminating in a different way when considering the works of someone like Samuel Beckett, who seems to pare down humanity to fundamentals and thereby creates an even more sympathetic view of mankind. 

    Graw continues on to consider the effect of artwork on its viewers. She refers to “Warburg’s famous dictum about the picture: ‘you are alive and you don’t hurt me’” (13). In the first place I find that notion at odds with some of what the best artworks do. Remember Kafka’s notion that we ought to read only the kinds of books that hurt and wound us, the axe for the frozen sea inside us, and such. The considerations of what an artwork does necessarily entail considerations of what an artwork is. Graw posits a few ideas about artwork’s agency. She posits the idea that artworks and images have a desire of their own, separate from the desire of its audience. She notes some of the benefits of such an approach, even though I get the sense that she’s ultimately dismissive of such a notion. In her words, “loading external interpretations onto artworks [...] seeks to do justice to the works’ own intrinsic dynamic” (13). It reminds me of the New Critics of the literary world, who suggest that the art work speaks for itself. It seems to me an immediately evident connection, but the implications for subjectivity outside of artwork are compelling. Graw states that “once you treat an image like a given and clearly delineated entity, you ignore the fact that the borders between its inside and outside have long [...] become unstable” (13). She argues that artworks require viewers: “for pictures to act autonomously there needs to be a viewer who ascribes actions to them” (13). It’s a simple idea, but grounds the conversation in material reality. By suggesting that artworks are incomplete on their own, in some ways it seems to demand considerations of producer and audience.

    Graw elaborates on the idea of an artwork’s agency as follows: “There is a fine line between visual theory’s assumptions that pictures are alive and a belief that we, as art historians, as critics, and artists, are very attached to: I am referring to the wide-spread belief that artworks have agency. There is a problem with this belief: once we claim that artworks are able to do something, we have presupposed that they are alive” (14). This was the first claim in the text that I took issue with, and Graw seems to, as well.. I think it’s philosophically unsound to suggest that just because they are able to do something it means that they must be alive. There are non-living things that do things all the time. It recalls to me an essay of literary theory (title and authors escape me right now, sorry folks) that considers whether you would analyze text written when the tide comes in and out. The authors of that paper suggest you would not because it is done without intention. I think an analogous approach applies here: simply because the tide does something, it does not mean it’s alive. Same with the artwork here. That said, Graw and I agree that “we need to believe that artworks can or even do change something, otherwise we wouldn’t be interested in them. But it is also necessary to remember that they don’t have the capacities of a subject, they only occasionally present themselves as objects that turn into quasi-subjects, thereby pushing their flirtation with subjecthood to the extreme” (14).

    Essentially, the uniting principle of this book is considerations of what it means to be a subject and what it means to be an object and how art negotiates those relationships. Graw claims that works “try to appear like quasi-subjects” and therefore “possess a certain degree of subjectivity” (14). What was fascinating about the line of argumentation is that she notes how the Formalist approach of analyzing art without the artist displaces agency into the artwork itself. I find that so very interesting. She paraphrases Adorno in that regard: “Adorno’s artwork-as-better (or universal)-subject is not to be confused with the artist-subject. He repeatedly emphasized how art is not a reflection of the artist-subject. It must go through the subject, but it is actually able to transcend it” (15). She notes that the artwork is elevated in proportion to the limitation on the importance of the author’s intentions and proceeds to hypothesize that “the less the artist was considered the primary source of her work in the course of the author-critique of the 1960s, the more one tended to compensate for the disempowerment of the author by ascribing author-like powers to the artwork. That which was formerly attributed to the author had become an attribute of her work. Works of art were regarded as subject-like once the power of the author-subject was radically questioned” (15). This, to me, is the most interesting claim that is made here. It illuminates an element of literary theory that I’ve never considered before and the implications for what works of art do is amazing. A distinction begins to emerge; Graw says, “I believe that it still makes a difference whether an artist opts for ways of eradicating traces of subjectivity or whether she encourages them” (14). As a result, different strata seem to emerge—subjects, quasi-subjects, and so on. Even when artists erase themselves in the process or mechanization of art, their subjectivity remains.

    I’ve spent a great deal of time on the introduction to the book because it seems most broadly applicable. The other sections of the text are more narrowed and focused. The central essays are as follows:

1. “Philosophical Toys and Psychoanalytic Travesties: Anthropomorphic Avatars in Dada and at the Bauhaus” by Hal Foster

2. “Body Doubles” by Caroline Busta

3. “Contemporary Art, Daily” by Michael Sanchez

4. “Media Animism: Rachel Harrison’s Living Images” by Ina Blom

5. “Mad Garland” by Jutta Koether

I’ll treat each of them in some detail in due course, but before I get there I want to reference how great the format is one more time. Each essay is followed by a brief response that generally considers a particular premise in the work. The responses felt authentic and sincere—and also more critical than people tend to be at academic conferences I’ve attended. Their questions and critiques are more pointed and actually would lead to better discussion than cursory or surface-level engagement.

    Anyway, the Hal Foster essay deals primarily with documenting a trend of dolls and automatons. Though this essay starts the collection, I found it actually one of the less compelling pieces. The argument is unclear, and as a result it reads more like a list of under-documented works that centre dolls.

    Caroline Busta’s “Body Doubles” was an interesting essay—likely one of my favourites in the collection. The artworks she describes seem compelling, though I’m not at all familiar with what they actually look like.

    “Contemporary Art, Daily” by Michael Sanchez was an interesting essay, less for its subject matter than its implications. It’s an essay about a curated site that highlights exhibitions from around the world. What is interesting is the idea of networks as they emerge in the artwork and digital age. Following from a weak premise (that all art serves as an avatar for connection), the argument redefines subjectivity. By considering the nodes of a network as “actors”, Sanchez is able to bracket considerations of human versus non-human or animate versus inanimate. It’s a great way of rendering some of questions surrounding subjectivity and agency moot. “No node in the network,” he writes, “is inactive, strictly speaking” (55). In turn, we might also consider ourselves all as part of a network. Since we’re all connected, we are all actors of varying subjectivity and agency—and yet we are all actors making things happen. This conception allows the non-conscious participation of various entities of artwork. I’m not convinced by Sanchez’ claim that the primary purpose of art is to network, but I do find the consideration valuable. Drawing from Michel Serres, Sanchez notes that “Paintins and sculptures become less like the inert currency of brands or tokens or signatures that they used to be, and more like [...] a quasi-object. For Serres, a quasi-object is not an object at all, but an activator of subjects” (60). The idea of being an activator implies, it seems to me by necessity, reciprocity and I really appreciate that.

    Ina Blom’s essay “Media Animism: Rachel Harrison’s Living Images” is, perhaps, the one that most inspires me to engage with additional art. Her discussion of the exhibit is compelling in its own right, which is the sign of a good art critic. In the exhibit, there are colourful columns that, if I’m picturing it correctly, partly conceal found and repurposed portraits that seem to be in conversation with one another. Blom deconstructs the idea mentioned a little earlier about the desire of artwork: “To place images in the position of want or desire is notably a way of acknowledging that the mystical power ascribed to them is basically of our own doing, part of our systematic construction of prejudices” (71-72). Essentially, it means that we posit ourselves into artworks in a firmly humanist tradition, rather than a posthumanist framework that might place us on equal footing to the artwork. As an alternative, Blom imagines: “it is a way of imagining the possibility that images may in fact have agendas that are genuinely and positively foreign to whatever desires we project onto them. Running through this line of reasoning is the idea that images constitute independent life forms, if not in the strictest biological sense of the word: it is not for nothing that for thousands of years human cultures have associated images with life and aliveness, and not just a mimetic replication of life” (72). It’s a compelling thesis, but extraordinarily difficult to articulate outside of our typical assumptions about art.

    The final “essay” in the collection is a piece called “Mad Garland” by Jutta Koether. I get the impression that this was an artwork / performance / poetry reading of sorts. I can’t help but feel I’ve missed out on something by not bearing witness to it in person. There are some photos, but it was left to my imagination how the words paired with the performance. As such, the overall thesis is somewhat untranslateable here, but one element that lingered with me was the line that “Mad Garland takes us away from being subject into being becoming-subject” (87). I find that articulation illuminating.

    To fully explain the idea of artwork taking us from subject to becoming-subject, I’ll draw on some knowledge of Deleuze and Guattari. In A Thousand Plateaus, they suggest that we are all in various states of becoming. Metaphors do not exist. We are actually always becoming other things, often simultaneously. We are ‘becoming animal’ in various respects, for instance. Why I find this so compelling is because it suggests an unfinished, procedural approach to existence rather than an essentializing fixed identity. The idea of an artwork returning us to a state of becoming-subject implies the destabilization that I find in the most compelling artworks. I feel myself shaken by great literature, for instance, but at the same time the artwork contributes to my reformulation. I can’t speak to “Mad Garland” itself, but as a framework for conceptualizing the role of art in transforming us into ‘becoming-subjects’ feels true and feels valuable.

    Thus, despite the fact that I’m not familiar with much of the source material (either artistically or philosophically) that undergirds the essays of the book, I nonetheless found it engaging and enriching. I found myself often thinking of the thin suggestion of narrative in Beckett’s novels as a posthumanist approach and how these articulations of the effect of art might parallel such an approach. Oh, to be an academic again!

    Anyway, happy reading, folks!

C by Tom McCarthy

    The world is comprised of resonances. In one scene from Tom McCarthy’s novel C, characters discuss a theory that sound is never truly lost. The theory suggests that, like atoms, sounds never truly disappear but are simply reconfigured or dispersed beyond detection. They believe that, given advanced enough technology, we’d be able to hear every sound that ever transpired: every bomb in every war, the original performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, every whisper between lovers. All of human history could be decoded.

    Oddly enough, I’d set aside a partially finished C for months before picking it up and then within a day or two, a non-fiction audiobook I’m reading referenced that same theory. The resonance transcended texts. The resonances, though, don’t end there. It occurrs to me that the precocious children of the novel who invent a kind of life-sized chess-like game on their school-for-the-deaf-slash-home have a very similar dynamic to Nabokovian characters like Ada and Van. More than anything, though, C reads as a reminder of Remainder, McCarthy’s first novel.

    Even the most diligent of devotees will be unlikely to remember the premise of Remainder outlined in a review from 2021, so it is, in brief, this: a man wins a huge settlement following an accident that left him permanently disabled. He spends that wealth recreating moments he bore witness to with an increasingly insidious bent, “recreating” moments that hadn’t actually happened and leading towards a horrific conclusion of people and matter being disintegrated into nothingness.

    C takes a different approach, largely focusing on auditory replication. Each phase of the novel, in some ways approaches the question from a slightly different angle. In the first section, for instance, the central characters, Serge and Sophia, live with their father, who runs a school for deaf children. He teaches the students to emulate sounds, well enough to perform plays that have some amusing misinterpretations and malapropisms. In the second part, Serge goes to war and works underground digging and following tunnels, many of which carry messages via wire to between locales. Eventually, Serge goes to a few seances where the medium interprets the spectral and speaks as someone deceased (well, sort of—more on that later) and ultimately works in Egypt as a dignitary of sorts amid spies acting like average people tracing etchings off of ancient monuments. At every stage, the novel explores the idea of replication and resonance.

    

    In that respect, the novel is incredibly consistent and it is those existential, posthumanist simulacra and threads in McCarthy’s work that I find compelling. In terms of the narrative structure, I found the pacing to be much less consistent. At times, the novel seemed to drag on (like the war sections—yawn!) while others accelerated, sometimes straight past their most compelling elements. To draw an example from the less compelling war scenes, what does stand out is this idea of Serge not as an individual human but as something more transcendental—particularly becomes it seems to emerge concordantly with violence. In one scene, Serge is making love with a woman and he imagines himself being shot, “imagines the bullet piercing the jacket’s leather and travelling onwards through both the observer and Cecile, then, broken, down into a million particles, lodging in him not only harmlessly but also beneficially, as though he were both its and the other two’s final destinations, the natural conclusion of a process whose trajectory conjoined them all” (165). It’s moments like that I find so uncomfortable in McCarthy’s work; there’s a sense of bliss in being joined with everything else in the world, but it seems to come at the expense of visceral destruction—it would be worth revisiting Remainder in that respect, but the ending of C has a similar ethos: Serge becomes a container for all the threads of the world, a kind of convergence point between all the different lines and shapes and figures in his life. The tragedy, if it can be called that, is that Serge only feels that sense of unity as he succumbs to a fever that a medical professional deems unrecoverable. These passages are often compelling in their descriptive nature and their existential considerations. In another passage, Serge imagines his plane going down and the pleasure of burning to death and having his skin melt into the metal. McCarthy does not shy away from the potential of posthumanism to replace an unsatisfactory existence with an assemblage more mechanistic. McCarthy recounts the “hollow” men of war who are all “terrified of becoming carboneezay, flamers. [...] the ‘orange death’ that stalks them in the sky to catch up with them even on the ground: paraffin lamps have been replaced by electric bulbs inside the mess; even sparking up cigarettes causes the men to shudder as they flip the lighter’s lid shut with a kind of angry vehemence” (164). This terror impacts all the pilots, so prone to fiery deaths in World War I, but “Serge alone remains unharmed by the prospect of a fiery airborne end. He’s not unaware of it: just unbothered. The idea that his flesh could melt and fuse with the machine parts pleases him. When they sing their song about taking cylinders out of kidneys, he imagines the whole process playing itself out backwards, brain and connecting rod merging to form one, ultra-intelligent organ, his back quivering in pleasure as pumps and pistons plunge into it, heat and liver being spliced with valve and filter to create a whole new, streamlined mechanism” (164). The sense of transcendence is obvious and “Sometimes he dreams he’s growing wings and, waking up, prods at his breastbone, trying to discern an outward swelling in it; each rib feels like a strut. He shakes after flights just like the others, but he doesn’t mind: the vibrations make him feel alive” (164). There’s a gruesomeness to the posthumanizing process. The visuals in the passage are viscerally revolting, despite their existential potential of having an “ultra-intelligent organ” that is both man and machine.

    There are at least two important caveats that I should acknowledge lest ye dismiss wholesale the idea of assemblage for fear of its destructive implications. One moment feels particularly resonant with the fantasy of fusing with the destroyed airplane but is played much differently. Serge picks up a woman and brings her back to his place. The narrator recounts that “during sex, her gasps have the same high and squeaky pitch as her voice during conversation, as though arousal, for her, were a heightened form of indignation. Kneeling behind her, he watches the flushes move from her neck down her spine and along her rib-lines” (262). While not without its painful tinge (her indignation), the change to the body is given a more positive spin. While earlier Serge described his spine and ribs being melded with burning steel, here the evocation of bones being filled with an animated flush emerge alongside sexual pleasure. At the same time, the flush is personified as though spreading through her body like an infection, as though her body is not fixed to her own identity or experience.

    Earlier, the assemblage takes a more collective form. Serge finds himself fascinated by a jazz band because “they look like machine parts too, extensions of their instruments, the stoppers, valves and tubes. Their bodies twitch and quiver with eclectic agitation. So do the bodies of the dancers. One girl, gyrating with another, lets a shriek out: it’s a shriek of joy that manages to carry on its underside a note of anxiety, a distress signal. The music carries signals too: Serge’s eyes glaze over as he tunes into them. There are several, gathering within the noise only to lose their shape again and slip away” (212). Each individual is reduced to its component parts—but notably not destroyed. Instead, there is an overtone of joyful celebration—and yet, “its underside a note of anxiety, a distress signal”, as though even pleasure and suffering are inseparable experience. I’d also like to briefly identify that music carries signals, but only in the sense that I’ll return to the idea of signals and codes later.

    As a character, Serge is less compelling as the novel progresses. The highlight was seeing his friendship develop with his sister and their tenuous alliances amidst a strain of secrets. The pair humanized one another—in the way that we might consider humanizing—in a way that gets lost over time as Serge becomes a kind of ‘central character figure’ drifting through the novel. Thematically, the move is consistent with the idea of his diffusion into space and function. When Serge develops an addiction to morphine, the drugs take over his body and he spends afternoons watching the setting merge together: “Airfields, tennis courts and cityscapes merge into and out of one another across contours of rock and hill. Gore curls around his forearms; lichen stains his clothes: the landscape seems to penetrate his skin and grow inside him, replacing viscera and brain with heather, lavender and fern, as though he really were no more than a stuffed dummy” (185). The emptiness at the core of Serge is a double-edged sword. It enhances the cerebral experience of the novel to see what unity between entities can look like: lichen in our lungs and whatnot. The downside is that, narratively speaking, I found it difficult to really find myself rooting for Serge as a character. His goals and passions recede so thoroughly into the landscape it’s almost as though he is a stuffed dummy out in the field. In the narrator’s own words, Serge lets the echo of words “echo from him as though he were some kind of sounding box, hollow and resonant” (189). It continues on to say that “The question of who ‘me’ is, or what time the ‘still’ refers to, is no longer irksome: the dispersed, exterior mi previously held captive by the air, carried within its grain and texture, has joined with the interior one, their union then expanding to become a general condition, until “me” is every name in history; all times have fused into a now” (189). The passage goes on with increasing elaborate strangeness, but ultimately it is a passage about the diffusion of the individual into a universal and the necessary erasure that involves. The moments that stand out for Serge are rooted in moments of choice or personal loss. His discovery of Sophia’s death is as shocking to us as it is to him. Another moment of significant choice and intrigue is the seance that I alluded to earlier. In brief, Serge discovers that the medium and her team are faking receiving messages from beyond the grave (as with Remainder — the simulacra is never completely satisfactory). They are using a secret set-up involving a radio transmitter and Serge decides to take over the method to expose their fraud, resulting in the distress of his girlfriend, who relied on the hope she received from receiving vague messages. I loved the tension of the scene, which came across as both comic and tragic. Seeing Serge make decisions was a reminder that he was more than just a vehicle for the plot, but also a character.

    The novel, though, is most engaging in its broad conceptual strokes. I find it to be such a compelling puzzle to figure out McCarthy’s overall vision. His style fosters a sense of paranoia. In my Master’s, I looked at paranoid reading and, briefly, reparative reading. McCarthy is definitely rooted in the former camp. Remember earlier that the music seemed to be carrying secret signals. The novel fosters promotes and proliferates a sense of paranoid reading as Serge seeks out his drugs. He “learns other passwords too [....] by announcing himself favourable to liquorice, then purchasing either a flask of perfume or a box of sweetmeats. Serge is able to procure much more than he ostensibly requests; at an antique dealer’s out in Kensington, the code works the other way, one or other (sometimes both) of two Oriental objets d’art, calligraphic watercolours bearing (originally, at least, quite accidentally, Serge imagines) the likenesses of the Wester letters C and H, appearing in the window to indicate the availability of various stock. He starts seeing all of London’s surfaces and happenings as potentially encrypted: street signage, chalk-marks scrawled on walls, phrases on newspaper vendors’ stalls and sandwich boards, snatches of conversations heard in passing, the arrangements of flowers on windowsills or clothes on washing lines” (211). Through Serge, McCarthy initiates us into a world of secret connections. It’s difficult to resist the allure of an interconnected web of secrets and codes. Moreover, Serge being able to recognize the symbols draws him into relationship with others: “he also comes to realise just how many of his fellow citizens are subject to the same vices as him. He picks up the tell-tale signals all over town [...] Sometimes a look passes between him and a chance companion on the bus, or in a queue, or someone brushed past in a doorway, a look of mutual recognition of the type that members of a secret sect might give each other” (211). McCarthy illuminates how the structure of a secret relies on its exclusivity and yet it has a force that draws people together. In this case, there’s also a parallel that the landscape bleeds into human behaviours and vice versa. Later on in the novel, one of Serge’s associates explains how half of the people in the region are spies and if they’re not spies they’re suspected of being spies, effectively making them part of the “whole maddening caboodle as if they had been” (265). The idea of authenticity is no longer relevant. People are cast into a post-factual role, which adds another layer to simulacra: one need not be the Thing in order to be the thing.

    The process involves simultaneous creation and erasure, which McCarthy highlights in an Egyptian tomb. Serge gets excited at the number of scarabs with words and sequences of words carved into their undersides. Laura explains that the scarabs are “the deceased’s unreported deeds, clandestine history and guilty conscience” (290). She continues that “what’s engraved on them are spells to censor all these secrets, so they won’t come out at judgment and weigh down the heart” and Serge is amazed: “So the scarab withholds the vital information even as it records it? Even as it prints?” (290). It’s reminiscent of Derrida’s discussion of Plato’s pharmakon: writing is both the poison and the antidote, both memory and forgetting. We write to remember what we could otherwise forget. Carlisle, earlier in the novel, says that “Painting’s painting, writing writing. Never the twain. It’s all wrong, aesthetically speaking: all the depth and texture of a summer countryside steam-rollered into a flat page” (147). In typically strange fashion, Serge responds, “That’s what I like about it” (147). To return to the topic of spying, the cycle means that “if we appear to take something seriously, well, they take it seriously too” (265). After a specifically auditory-based malapropism, the character corrects the term for this effect from ‘feedback’ to ‘bleedback.’ (265). The messages come back “mutated but still recognisable” (265). To me, the statement reads as a statement on McCarthy’s work itself. C is a mutated but still recognisable Remainder. The same kinds of themes emerge in this strange pursuit of that which is more-than-authentic. This inversion is what makes the novel so compelling. Stylistically, I think writing in the present tense really works to McCarthy’s advantage: it gives a purported immediacy and truth to a narrative that is replete with insincerity. The whole thing reads as backwards, like in a scene where people are digging and “it occurs to Serge that, far from removing earth between them and the outside world, they’re adding it around them: digging themselves in, not out” (183). In that same scene, Serge reflects that he likes being in the tunnels because it’s the only chance for him to masturbate. There’s a kind of hedonism in solitude, which we can hold up against the destruction of interconnectedness.elsewhere in the book. Certainly, rereading Freud’s work on the death drive and Beyond the Pleasure Principle—-even Civilization and its Discontents—could certainly prove illuminating here.

    

    There’s also a Kafkaesque resonance. In particular, Kafka’s story “The Burrow” stands out in that respect. In Kafka’s story, a burrowing animal feels itself safe in its burrow, but feels increasingly paranoid about being attacked. In turn, it digs more tunnels to increase its escape routes, but as it proliferates its exits, so too its entrances—and hence the number of potential trackers. McCarthy has a similar scene wherein Serge is fascinated by the tunnellers and moles listening to “netherer moles undermining their undermining. If they did hear them doing this, he tells himself, then they could dig an even lower tunnel, undermining the under-undermining: on and on forever, or at least for as long as the volume and mass of the globe allowed it—until earth gave over to a molten core, or bypassing this, they emerged in Australia to find there was no war there and, unable to return in time for action, sat around aimlessly blinking in the daylight” (167?).

    The ending of the novel was also oddly resonant, as if a collage of moments. It could have been lifted from a version of Heart of Darkness from Kurtz’ perspective, but with a feverish “the horror! the horror!” twisted into “the ecstasy! the ecstasy!” In Serge’s descent, everything merges into a singularity. Meanwhile, the final passage of the book refers to the wake “etched out across the water’s surface; then it fades as well, although no one is there to see it go” (310). It’s hard not to see a parallel to The Great Gatsby where “we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Here we have no boat, just the wake, the residue of an imitation, a mere suggestion of a boat. Moreover, there’s nobody even to see it. There’s a melancholic absence, partially mitigated by Serge’s sense of wholeness with the world.

    Ultimately, C did not produce the same emotional impact on me as Remainder. I actually took a significant break from the book and struggled to pick it up again. Remainder made me feel much more personally invested because it tapped in so effectively to my sense of jouissance as well as visceral disgust at my lack of thoughtfulness. C explored similar ideas in all kinds of fun-house-mirror-ways, orbiting around ideas of interconnectedness and the transcendent. Yet, it felt less human, perhaps because it was less individualistic in nature.

    This is a book that will linger with me. If nothing else, it’s certainly provocative.

    Happy reading!