Ghosts in the Mirror

[Technique] in literature refers to writing which exhibits [particular tendency under discussion]. [Technique], demonstrated extensively in [Author]’s work [Title], published in [year], was a major element of [literary movement]. Critics often refer to [technique] using the term “[term].” Other figures associated with [literary movement] known for exercises in [technique] are the novelist [Novelist], the poet [Poet], and the late dramatist [Playwright]. Common trademarks of [term]al [technique] include [narrative framework], [stylistic device], and [linguistic construction]. Practitioners of [term] often used [technique] in works of [movement] literature to demonstrate [theoretical concept], [aspect of culture unique to historical period], or [universal human theme].

Oulipian objects often offer obscure orders of observation. Originators of Oulipo opposed ordinary opinions, obtruding obligatory oddity, or otherwise offbeat operatives. Observing obstinate orders—omission, organization, orders of operations—Oulipo outstrips outmoded ordinances. Oulipian orthography occludes or obstructs, obviating old or outdated orchestrations. Oulipian output, occasionally oblique or opaque, outlines outlandish or original options. Oulipo’s overall objective? Obvious: obliterate obsolescence.

The 1950s and early 1960s—especially by writer William—aleatory literary technique in—been used in a wide variety—cut-up is performed by taking—which a written text is cut—new text such as in poems—the closely associated fold-in—of contexts the cut-up and—a new text the concept can—découpé in French is an—are the two main techniques—Burroughs it has since—developed and popularized in—be traced to the Dadaists of—text and cutting it in pieces—the 1920s but it was—his short text TO MAKE A—up and rearranged to create—by Tristan Tzara described in—with a few or single words on—each piece the resulting piece—are then rearranged into a—the cut-up technique or—DADAIST POEM—a finished and fully linear—

Cut-up, Oulipo, metatextuality: three of the techniques developed in the aftermath of World War II by writers intent on dismantling and reimagining the form of the literary novel. At the time—roughly the 1960s to the 1980s—this reimagining and dismantling was an effort to challenge accepted modes of meaning-making and thinking via language. Movements in most of the major global literary cultures took up the challenge of liberating the novel from its atavistic bourgeois trappings: American metafiction, the Nouveau Roman, postcolonial literature, etc. At least in aesthetic terms, revolution was in the air.

What’s left of this revolution now, in the aftermath of a prolonged culture war in which bourgeois sensibility has more or less emerged victorious, is only history and memory. The project of reinventing the novel was merely one stage in the history of the novel; its agitations have been reintegrated into the mainstream definition of the form. Self-reference, constraint, nonlinearity, and other stylistic trademarks of this moment are commonplace in mass-market fiction. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine a new novel.

Despite this historical context, or maybe in open defiance of it, two recent novels by major contemporary writers formally honor the interrogations of the novel’s last avant-garde. Blake Butler’s UXA.GOV is described by its publisher as “an unhinged occupation of the cinematic mechanism of Robbe-Grillet’s novels of the 70s,” referring to French novelist and theorist Alain Robbe-Grillet’s experiments with narrative nonclosure and cinematic pastiche. Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Herscht 07769 is a maximalist black comedy in the form of a single uninterrupted sentence (and Ottilie Mulzet’s translation from the Hungarian is a feat), reminiscent of postwar novels from Eastern Europe like Bohumil Hrabal’s Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. Both novels represent an attempt to resuscitate a bygone era of literary history, but in this post-historical era, the future is itself an antique concept.

Blake Butler’s UXA.GOV takes place in “the Complex,” a shadowy, vaguely corporate edifice where at least one narrator, at least one narratee, and a virtually endless cast of largely ephemeral characters convene around what seems by turns like a movie, a web-based display, or an immersive simulation. The novel is made up almost entirely of imagery, most of which evokes mass violence and torture of unclear origin or intent. Very few of the characters play a more than anonymous role in the succession of gore and terror, and those who do bear runic appellations like “the man with one gold pupil” or “The Woman With Language All Over Her Body.”

In Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels of the 1970s—namely Project for a Revolution in New York and La Belle Captive—through to 1986’s Recollections of The Golden Triangle, tropes of cinema and genre fiction are playfully misappropriated as vehicles for Robbe-Grillet’s perverse preoccupations: at least one young girl is kidnapped and subject to eroticized humiliation at some secret club for powerful men while a narrator—simultaneously implicated in the crime—is tasked with solving the the kidnapping. Robbe-Grillet, like Butler in UXA.GOV, attempts to achieve a nearly photorealistic level of physical description within a deliberately irresolvable narrative.

If Butler’s novel updates Robbe-Grillet’s approach, it’s only in the service of discontinuity. The following sentence is typical:

Time lapse photography of the sun exploding into an unimaginable number of fragments of waves composed of embossed compositions of the pyramidal emblem conforming itself over exponential incisions and revisions of all local dimensional surface area capable of transducting natural energy, eventually swallowed up into the head of a pin holding up a poster of the Woman with Language All Over Her Body hung on a cross made out of a complete set of pins recognizing the archetypical conceptual possibilities capable for the transduction of pain.

It’s possible to parse and follow the language of UXA.GOV on the scale of a single sentence. Once pages accumulate, its non-sequiturs and internal contradictions emerge. This is by design. Like Robbe-Grillet’s novels, Butler’s is made possible by the premise of a secret compound where atrocities are committed without prohibition; in the context of a novel it reads as structural justification for unlimited invention and speech without restraint.

This total permissiveness on Butler’s part leads to some weaknesses in terms of style and form. The reader is periodically invited to imagine “a grinning human skull with aging lights for eyes, as large as everything at once,” “the sound of the same note played on every instrument in all creation all at once,” or “everybody in the history of the world ejaculating together at once.” Butler’s freedom both allows for repetition and robs his provocations of their potency. If an author can say whatever he wants and none of it refers to anything real, does any of it really mean anything? As an homage to Robbe-Grillet’s middle period, UXA.GOV brings into focus—for better and for worse—how careful a writer must be in order to really disturb.

Writing about La Belle Captive in 1995, translator Ben Stoltzfus says of Robbe-Grillet’s kidnapped girls, “For the most part these captives survive precisely because they are not real people: they are metaphors for the body of the text. This text is forced to submit to figurative mutilations in order to reveal the ‘secrets’ or ‘mysteries’ of language, cultural myths, and social codes.” This reading is generous to Robbe-Grillet. But are the mutilations in UXA.GOV figurative? Butler does exercise self-reference in his fiction, but just as often his violent imagery is just that, a reproduction of some sliver of thought or dream fragment.  Or, more likely, something seen on the internet. This is not to invalidate the imagery, particularly as homage to Robbe-Grillet, whose sadistic proclivities in his private life are well-documented.

Stoltzfus comments elsewhere that “An ‘open work’ such as La Belle Captive is, in Umberto Eco’s terms, ultramodern because all the ‘openings’ in the text have been placed there deliberately.” Speaking in an interview with Chelsea Hodson after the publication of his novel Alice Knott, Butler said something similar: “The universe of a book is more interesting than the book itself, and I like trying to bring the book itself up to the language of the universe by letting the universe have all these holes and edges that don’t necessarily lend themselves to the story that’s being told.” UXA.GOV is as close as a book can get to being all universe. If the purpose of this textual openness is to figuratively reflect the indeterminacy of language, then the question for the reader becomes: Does the universe of this novel reflect our own?

Butler’s prose is not nearly as focused and precise as Robbe-Grillet’s. For one thing, his fixations do not hold his attention as well. Where Butler’s work is grotesque, Robbe-Grillet’s is perverse. Robbe-Grillet will carefully torture a single woman for hours; Butler would rather just murder a million babies. However, the difference between Robbe-Grillet’s vocabulary and Butler’s is telling. Language was subject to all kinds of vulgar appropriations in the 1970s. Print journalism, radio advertising, and syndicated TV created new contexts and points of view in which the word as we knew it found all kinds of new permutations. But compared to the internet’s influence on language, these new contexts were nothing. As an analogy for the violence television has done to language as opposed to that of the internet, one brutalized girl versus a million murdered babies is pretty apt.

Butler’s narrative frameworks are convoluted, his imagery can be absurd and obscene, and his syntax lofty and overwrought. He also comes closer than any other writer to faithfully depicting the most unthinkable forces at work in our world today. As he tells it, Butler started writing his novel 300,000,000 because he found Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, with its epic catalog of the Ciudad Juárez femicides, disappointing, and wanted to write the book he had imagined it to be. 2666 is the better book, but the claim brings up a vital question: Can the novel contain the enormity of the mass violence we witness today via the media? And can it do so without recourse to the methodology developed by authors asking the same question twenty or fifty years ago?

If any novelist has successfully captured what happens to the human condition in the wake of world-historical cataclysm, that novelist is Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Although Krasznahorkai didn’t start publishing novels until forty years after the end of World War II, each is haunted by a distinct twentieth-century anxiety about apocalypse. Whether in a small Hungarian village, as in his debut Sátántangó, or across continents and millennia, as in his 2008 epic Seiobo There Below, Krasznahorkai continually grapples with the fleeting, futile nature of life on Earth and the power of time to dwarf all human endeavor. To call Herscht 07769 Krasznahorkai’s magnum opus would be inaccurate; everything he writes is a magnum opus.

Herscht 07769 revolves around Florian Herscht, an uncommonly large, trusting, and simpleminded young man from a small town in the German state of Thuringia who divides his time between his work for the leader of a local neo-Nazi gang and his studies with a theoretical physicist. Florian’s boss (known as “the Boss”) runs a local orchestra performing Bach repertoire and pays his henchmen to drive around town cleaning up anti-Bach graffiti that the Boss may or may not be writing himself to convince locals of rising anti-German sentiment. Meanwhile, physics professor Adrian Köhler tries and fails to explain the paradoxes of relativity and antimatter to Florian, who, in his naivete, comes to believe that the world is ending and its only hope is for him to get a letter of warning to Chancellor Angela Merkel before it does.

Florian, like every paranoid, imagines an illusory apocalypse, just like neo-Nazis presuppose a race war of biblical proportions and experimental writers anticipate the death of literature. This hurrying to catastrophic conclusions is at odds with the methodical tabulation of contributing factors and inclement outcomes on which Angela Merkel built her reputation. Merkel has no use for cosmic visions; as her critics and proponents contend, she barely thinks ahead twenty-four hours. During the Eurozone crisis of the late 2000s, Merkel was the one major player who refused to heed warnings of the European continent’s imminent economic collapse, holding out against a bailout plan for Greece until the last moment. It takes Florian over four hundred pages to process a calculation Merkel would perform in a split second.

What makes Merkel relevant as a focus for the novel is her public perception as protector of the historical legacy of the German state. According to her 2014 New Yorker profile, Merkel’s conception of German identity echoes Thomas Mann’s, as articulated in his pro-authoritarian Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. A predisposition for deference is evident in Florian, who treats people in positions of authority, from Herr Kohler and the Boss to Merkel, with obsequious reverence. When the Boss subjects Florian to one of his crazy rants, Krasznahorkai doesn’t say “The Boss told him” but that “he learned from The Boss.” For Florian, Merkel is the ultimate authority because she represents the anachronistic but persistent fiction of a German national soul.

Krasznahorkai’s novels have always been composed of unusually long sentences and paragraphs that trap their characters in a forward narrative motion they are unable to influence or interrupt. Herscht 07769 takes this formal tendency to its logical extreme. Plot points fade in and out, announcing themselves first as distant potentialities before gradually permeating the text like samples in a DJ set. As oppressive as it may be to reader and character alike, Herscht 07769’s form suits its subjects: particle physics, baroque music, and totalitarian fascism, three lodestars of a long modernism of which postwar literature was the last gasp. The thesis that history is divided into distinct eras—with distinct beginnings and endings, and each producing works of art with unique stylistic characteristics—meets its antithesis in the sustained temporal flow of Krasznahorkai’s prose.

This eternal recurrence reverberates in Herscht 07769 on every scale. When a forest ranger has an uneventful run-in with a Nazis upstart, he remembers remarking to his wife, “Why is everyone so amazed these Nazis are back again, history repeats itself, didn’t Marx say that?” The reference is to Marx’s “first as tragedy, then as farce” rejoinder to Hegel, but here it recalls the concept of “hauntology,” a term Jacques Derrida introduced to describe the never-original, always-reanimated nature of philosophical concepts. Krasznahorkai is more than aware that his novel enacts a revival of a form that has only ever been reborn.

In the middle of Herscht 07769, Herr Kohler goes missing, leaving Florian even more unmoored. When he miraculously returns, Krasznahorkai writes, “Florian just stared at him, turned to stone like someone who’d seen a ghost, what’s wrong, my friend, you’re looking at me as if you’d seen a ghost.” In describing Florian’s recognition of his disappeared mentor, Krasznahorkai repeats his own sentence, as if the hauntology of language is happening in real time. The book is haunted by itself. Other instances of doubling, like an extended riff on the number eighty-eight as a neo-Nazi shibboleth, abound. In Herscht 07769, even the apocalypse never happens for the first time. Like the final seconds of a record fixed to make the needle jump to the beginning of its last groove, the novel ends over and over again.

Writing about Satantango and Krasznahorkai’s second novel The Melancholy of Resistance in 2011, James Wood described the author’s maximalist approach as “augmentation”:

Augmentation takes the form of an intensification of the sentence rather than an intensification of the things that many people habitually associate with the novel—plots, characters, objects. A lot has already disappeared from this fictional world, and the writer concentrates on filling the sentence, using it to notate and reproduce the tiniest qualifications, hesitations, intermittences, affirmations and negations of being alive.

In Herscht 07769, Krasznahorkai intensifies the sentence until it encompasses the book, like a gas expands to fill the space containing it. He does this to maximize the “qualifications, hesitations, intermittences, affirmations and negations” to which Wood refers, but also to prove that the novel of “plots, characters, and objects” is a simulation of something that never really existed in the first place. But as long as there has been something called the novel, there has been something called the sentence.

In his 1966 collection of critical essays, For A New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet writes, “But we, on the contrary, who are accused of being theoreticians, we do not know what a novel, a true novel, should be; we know only that the novel today will be what we make it, today, and that it is not our job to cultivate a resemblance to what it was yesterday, but to advance beyond.” These were radical theories in midcentury France, but it is hard to imagine that projections of the novel’s final form would be entertained today. Every novel is written in conscious imitation of another model, be it half a century old or two and a half. Nor are novels, as far as readers know, mere hypothetical entities independent of the established market.

This is not to say that contemporary experimental writing doesn’t exist. Experimental novels, on the contrary, are everywhere. Writers as various as Joshua Cohen, Mark Doten, Eugene Lim, Missouri Williams, and Esther Yi—to name only a few with major publisher support—continue to circumvent linear narrative, diffuse and problematize the nature of character, and force literary prose into contentious conversation with writing that originates beyond the page. What makes these novels different than the “new” novel Robbe-Grillet proposed is they are not controlled demolitions, but exercises made possible by the fissures and ruptures left behind by past insurrections. The damage is done.

UXA.GOV and Herscht 07769 are works of writers who know that in this literary-historical era their innovations will only ever be lateral. But that’s no reason not to broaden their vocabulary and expand their craft. In the case of UXA.GOV, the accomplishment is personal; Butler may not have improved on Robbe-Grillet, but he has extended the Butler canon with a funhouse mirror that reflects a new reality, even if the design is old-world. Herscht 07769 also looks to the past for a reflection of the present, but does so with more flair and art than Butler’s novel. You can’t see the future in a mirror; but if you look closely enough, you can see the ghosts of the past.