Guest Post: Blake Butler on the story ‘Dread’ from Brian Evenson’s ‘Fugue State’

We are excited to be sharing a guest post from Blake Butler. He is reviewing all of the stories from Brian Evenson’s ‘Fugue State’ and we are very proud to be hosting one of the reviews. We are proud and excited like we imagine our parents would be if we had turned out the way they’d imagined we would.

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Story by Story: Brian Evenson’s Fugue State (6) ‘Dread’

Fifth in the order of stories in Brian Evenson’s Fugue State (forthcoming July 1 from Coffee House Press) is ‘Dread,’ which originally appeared in Caketrain unillustrated, and illustrated in Mome.

‘Dread’ is immediately different than any of the other stories thus far in this book, in that it is fully illustrated, the text and narration used to direct a black and white cartoon, drawn by artist Zak Sally, whose art also accompanies each of Fugue State’s other stories in small head plates depicting minor cavities from each text.

The art adds a wonderful deepening to what is essentially a simple, if quite dreadful reckoning, much more in the mode of Edward Gorey or Poe, in contrast to the more conceptual and language-fixed terrains we have been through in the text so far.

The thing about ‘Dread’ that most struck me, beyond its art, was the reflection of the matter of the story onto the act of the reading of the book itself. The piece begins, writ on pure black drop, inlaid with the story’s title and a small depiction of an open book, “I’d read once, in what book I no longer recall, a phrase that for no apparent reason came to haunt me.”

We are shown the phrase on the next page, amid more abstract images of textures and webs, which as the story continues to wind from there, building as with the earlier ‘Mudder Tongue’ in a series of medical escalations, mirrored in Sally’s imagery by more and more direct images of the narrator’s surroundings, and his body.

The result, as might be expected, is quite haunting for its own direct propulsion, the narrator’s inward spiral, spiraling out, but also, again, for that introductory claim that puts the reader in the mind of reading, as if from a book within a book. The rest of the story’s execution, then, takes places within the confines of that embedding, which, when applied to the reader’s own act of reading, in some way replicates that strain inflicted on the narrator as a potential fate also in Fugue State’s reader, you.

As you too do read that sentence, do you not? And it is there, stuck in you doubly, given its textual terrain.

Smartly, Evenson, even in his giving of the sacred sentence for the purpose of storytelling, comments: “Its original context, what I could recall of it, as nothing to incite any particular feeling whatsoever.”

The benign made volatile, and eating, then, so that even in your understanding of the injection, you are left with a kind of residue that insists itself, however far along.

In some hands, such a perhaps “meta” device could be overworked or done wrong, but here it is only something taken away if you ask it: a hidden door.

Ah, yes. Another door in all these doors here.

This Fugue State is becoming quite a little nasty box, if quite delicious, and infecting.

More.

(Blake Butler is the author of EVER (Calamari Press 09) and Scorch Atlas (forthcoming from Featherproof Books). His work has been published in Ninth Letter, Fence, Unsaid, New York Tyrant, Willow Springs, etc. He lives in Atlanta.

To read his other reviews of each story in Fugue State, visit his blog: http://www.gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com/search/label/fugue%20state)

A Prick is a Prick: Still Hating on Jonathan Franzen After All These Years

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NO, IT’S NOT OK TO LIKE JONATHAN FRANZEN

I know the Ben Marcus V. Jonathan Franzen thing is an old debate, but I’ve been recently reminded of it so thought to weigh in. I’m not responding directly to Marcus V. Franzen, though I’d obviously come down on Marcus’s side. I am instead responding to the argument that it is silly to dislike Franzen- that he’s fine, that’s he’s a good writer just doing something different than Marcus and we should be happy they both write, that instead of engaging in polemics we should just appreciate them both.

So:

I tried to make an argument for Mr. Franzen. Let us assume that we enjoy reading his work, that we find it touching, that we don’t find his very essence to be of smugness and pedantry. We could say: Jonathan Franzen is a competent chronicler of the condition of people of a certain class and period. He uses the conventions of ‘literature’ to produce finely wrought craft items. He is sensitive to and thus helps make sense of the human condition in his era, and in so doing he entertains and enlightens his readership.

At the very most, he is a member of a rather large class of very talented writers. Quite frankly, I don’t see how this is a laudable position. This kind of literature is not, at the level of its construction and goals, in relation to or in conversation with its moment. It is stale by design, a decadent expression of nostalgia, an analgesic comfort food for a self-satisfied middle brow.

I firmly believe that Ben Marcus’s work is of greater worth and greater artistic value than Franzen’s. I believe there is a place for a polemics that stresses the value of innovation, ambition, and serious grappling with the material and ontological condition of text as a medium.

Still, I am well aware that, as much as I dress it up with theory, any opinion I may have on Mr. Franzen and his work is only a matter of taste. However, laying aside general questions of the literary value of innovative vs. traditional writing, I think there is still a strong case to be made against Franzen. It ought not be controversial to say that there are more very well written conventional novels published every year than any person could possibly read. Many of these books are written by people with humility and a simple desire to tell a good story; by people who don’t take lack of artistic ambition and market-based aesthetics as badges of honor.

Which is to say: No, I don’t think that A) -it’s ok for people to like what they like- correlates to B)- it’s ok for people to like Jonathan Franzen. Given the volume of equivalent writers of erudite middle-brow fiction, it is unethical to support a huge fucking asshole who contributes nothing new to literature.

From a short fiction/picture project I am working on:

Picture by Ian McDonald

Removing the organs from his first hunting kill, William K_____ of Los Angeles was shocked to find the wolf pelt held together nothing but a mass of ticking clocks, loudly spinning hard drives, and other humming, desperately clicking machines. Connecting a hard drive later at home, he found an archive of all his misdeeds in chronological order. He threw it away.

Kenneth Goldsmith (Thesis Draft Excerpt)

Thesis excerpt (draft) from section on Kenneth Goldsmith:

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The popularity of so-called ‘conceptual writing’, to the extent that ‘popularity’ is an appropriate term to characterize such a marginal field, is largely owed to the work of Kenneth Goldsmith. Originally trained as a sculptor at the Rhode Island School of Design, Goldsmith became increasingly interested in Duchampian word-play (for example making a 300 pound sculpture of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book) and eventually devoted himself to solely text-based work. Later, as the founder of UBU web and a Senior Editor at PennSound, Goldsmith established himself as the preeminent champion and archivist of conceptual writing.

In much of his more recent work, Goldsmith has produced enormous volumes of text that are almost the literary equivalents of Andy Warhol films. For example, in ‘Day’, Goldsmith retypes the text of the daily NY Times newspaper from left to right, making no distinction between different columns, stories, or advertisements. The result is a document that estranges its source text while remaining entirely faithful. Hidden within the mass of text are strange and totally unexpected conjunctions and abutments of language, many of the most exciting of which only the most dedicated reader would both slogging his way into. Still, these moments of chance beauty exist, they may and must, and so are tantalizing. The pleasure of this text comes from the adventure of the search and from the thought of the text not-yet-read as much as the reading experience itself.

Texts like ‘Day’ also provide excellent examples of the fruitful combination of aleatoric and constraint practices. Another example of such combination is Goldsmith’s book ‘The Weather,’ a text entirely composed of the transcriptions of one minute weather reports given over the course of a year. ‘The Weather’ uses the aleatory to highlight the structure and repetition of received language, thereby using the aleatory to perform an analogous critique to Queneau’s of surrealism, despite the fact that Queneau saw his critique as precisely a critique of the aleatory. Of course, the kind of aleatorics by way of chosen source text that we see in ‘Day’ and ‘The Weather’ are reminiscent of, albeit not identical to, the N+7 method. That is, insofar as they are variations on selection and copying as a means to produce text, these texts can be seen as descendants of N+7. However, Goldsmith does not manipulate his source texts, he simply re-frames or re-situates them, an act very much in the Duchampian line of Oulipian practice.

Goldsmith terms his acts of copying-writing acts of ‘uncreativitity’- a response in part to the sheer volume of creative work being constantly produced. This naturally resonates with our earlier discuss of copyists, Bartlebys, refusals; of potential writing as also always potential non-writing. Such a reading is appropriate to the work and even asked for. However, it is not a total reading, as Goldsmith’s ‘uncreative’ projects still possess interest as texts, even if, as noted earlier, they are not always constructed in such a way as to invite a thorough reading-through in the manner of a conventional work.

Take ‘The Weather’. By all rights, a simple transcription of weather reports ought to be a dull, unenjoyable, and uninformative read. However, as the literary theorist and critic Marjorie Perloff argues in her essay “Moving Inspiration” On Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘The Weather’, the text is neither so simple nor so boring as it seems at face value. For one thing, the book is structured in 4 parts, each section conforming to a season, in such a way as to produce a “classical narrative” arc.(Moving Inspritation) Another important choice that Goldsmith makes is to copy the weather reports at his whim rather than keep to a strict schedule of transcription. This choice, in combination with his decision not to date the entries, serves to abstract the text and keep it from reading as purely historical record. Perloff notes an almost science fiction-like quality in the decontextualized, strangely personal, stammering and semi-scientific reports. That is to say, as Goldsmith has framed them, these transcriptions possess a genuinely literary quality.

Perloff makes her point about the evocative value of the text by citing a “passage [that] nicely exemplifies the powers of “mere” transcription, mere copying, to produce new meanings. From the perspective of the weather forecaster, Iraq is experiencing some “good good weather”-good visibility, no doubt, for bombing those targeted sites, and not too much wind. The risk of “blowing sand” is slight. After the reference to “a little rain in Baghdad,” the “we” shifts back to the New York area, as if the Baghdad rain or wind were merely a brief diversion from everyday life in the Tri-State area where it’s a nice average day with temperature in the forties and a chance of rain.” (Marjorie Perloff, from “Moving Inspiration”: On Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘The Weather’)

As the above passage indicates, ‘The Weather’, though sourced from New York, is invaded by the narrative thread of invasion. By a purely fortuitous chance, Goldsmith’s ‘Weather’-copying period coincided with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. As were weather-bulletin listeners during that year, ‘The Weather”s readers are given a weirdly sterile and weather-centric account of the war. This intrusion of a war narrative adds a compelling and powerful layer to the text. Perloff utilizes a staple of Oulipian theory, the clinamen, to explain how ‘The Weather’ draws much of its force from the instrusion of the Iraq War narrative. She write that, “[i]n the wake of such “consumer minimalism,” as Goldsmith calls the mode of these one-minute weather reports, those sound bytes that “take our most complex, life-sustaining environment, and simplify it in a way that either aids or abets your commute” (email 14 July), the poet need provide no moralizing on the horrors of war; the actual discourse of the day says it all. The Baghdad thread is thus the clinamen that gives the “classical narrative” of The Weather its piquancy.” (Moving Inspiration)

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‘The Weather’ is available online HERE.